Chapter Text
Bede is five when words first appear on his skin.
He can read it. Of course he can read it; he is well ahead of his class in primary school, and he is proud to take after his mother whose love of words is half his world. It just doesn’t make any sense. In dark green marker and big, uneven, awkward letters, right where the blue of his veins starts to disappear on his wrist, is halò, which he knows immediately is not correct.
He stares at it with a bored curiosity, testing this invader’s ink. It looks freshly wet, but it doesn’t rub away under the pad of his thumb. He’s mostly sure it wasn’t there before; doubts he missed someone getting close enough to write on him while he wasn’t paying attention. He has never liked strangers. He is acutely aware when he is being touched.
“You need to hold still, love,” the nurse says, wielding a pair of tweezers with the delicacy of a watchmaker. She drops another sliver of wet red glass onto a tray; it clinks like a coin against the dozens that have already come out of his cheek, his jaw, his scalp. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He doesn’t tell her that he stopped feeling the pain much about an hour ago, that he’s more bothered by the oppressive smell of latex and her awful rose perfume. He just asks, “What’s this?” and points to the word on his wrist.
The nurse glances down, and for a long moment all she says is ah, hm. Adults all get the same look on their face when they get asked a question they don’t really want to answer, he’s noticed. He tends to ask a lot of them.
“That,” she finally says, after she can’t delay a response any longer, “is something that your parents can talk to you about, when they’re feeling better.”
“Alright.” He shrugs imperceptibly and lets his eyes unfocus on the wall.
It doesn’t really matter to him one way or another.
His parents are dead, anyway.
The misspelled word disappears somewhere between the hospital and the emergency foster home, but he’s already forgotten about it by the time he walks numbly up the sidewalk and doesn’t even think to check.
When he is eight -- three years, a dozen failed placements, a hundred mandatory counseling sessions later -- it shows up again.
He knows what it is now. It’s impossible to escape, a fact of life; it’s in every movie, in every cartoon, in every book. He watches other children scribble on themselves at lunch, check each other for marks on the playground, laugh at the kids who don’t have them yet. Having a soulmate makes you a grown-up; makes you better, and better than.
( Someone cares about me. Who even cares about you? Bede had grabbed the girl by the hair then and pushed her down the stairs. Failed placement number twelve.)
The writing is not nearly as practiced as his: first halò, then cò thusa?, then is mise Glòraidh in messy rows on the inside of his left arm. He notices it as he’s sitting down with a bowl of cereal, the high contrast of bold green ink impossible to miss.
Others look so happy when they wake up to messages. Bede feels only a vague itch and quiet rage. It’s grotesque, to get marked like this by someone he’s never met. It’s unfair.
Words he can’t read, a language he can’t speak, and a person hundreds of miles away all have one thing in common:
They are absolutely useless to him.
This time, when the words fade, he doesn’t get a three year break.
They come back the next day, and the next, and the next.
He resolves then: He will not respond. They don’t know him; they shouldn’t get to own him, either.
“They’re quite talkative, aren’t they?”
Bede’s ten now (twenty failed placements, two hundred sessions). He sinks into his chair, tugs his sleeve down and his collar up. “It’s just gibberish anyway. I don’t pay attention to it.”
“You certainly go through a lot of effort not to pay attention to it. It’s July and you’re wearing long sleeves, Bede.” His counselor smiles. He doesn’t hate her much anymore, but sometimes the lines around her eyes crinkle in a matronly way, like they’re supposed to be close and familiar, and it makes him want to rethink his position. “Could I take a look?”
He huffs, staring her down. She doesn’t budge.
“Fine,” he concedes. “Only if you tell me what language it is.”
He peels back his sleeve, revealing blue ink from the heel of his palm to the juncture of his elbow: daydream doodles of flowers and deinos, sentences stacked on sentences, some charts that look like school notes.
“Aha. That’s Crownish.” She gives his arm a long look, but to her credit, does not touch him.
“From the tundra? The middle of nowhere?”
“That’s right. Isn’t that lucky? Of all the people in the world, your soulmate’s in the same country.”
He sucks on his teeth, twists his mouth up into a bitter scowl. “Why would that be lucky? I don’t want to be attached to some...some backwater rube from the freezing ass-end of Galar. I don’t want to meet them.” He waves his arm around for emphasis and doesn’t even try to swallow down the rising anger. Words taste more powerful when he’s mad. “Nobody asked me. Why doesn’t it matter what I want?”
She smiles again, this one sadder, and he hates that one the most of all.
The writing gets neater, knifelike, more relentless. He wears long sleeves all the time now, even when the summer humidity starts to swell, and long pants when he finds a bored abstraction of a beartic drawn on his shin.
He is thirteen when a boy -- already well into puberty, his frame stretching up and up and up -- grabs him by the wrist and laughs at the miles of foreign words blanketing his arm. It’s no longer enough to have one because they all do now, mostly; it has to be a good one.
There are lost kids here pledged to souls born to money and station and privilege. His is a nobody from the hinterlands. His doesn’t even speak a proper language.
“But really,” the boy says, grin like a skinning knife, “I feel sorriest for yours, even if they are a dirt farmer. Who’d want to be stuck with you?”
Bede bares his teeth like a rabid stray and snarls, crouches on his heels and explodes into a tackle. Limbs thrash. A solid hit connects with his jaw and he tastes a bright bloom of salt and copper; he feels blood on his knuckles when he slams his fist into a nose. Bede gets a handful of hair and holds the boy’s head down in a mud puddle until a caretaker manages to pull him off.
The boy goes to the hospital, face bloodied and misshapen, coughing up lungfuls of water and silt.
(Failed placement number thirty-three; overtly confrontational antisocial behaviors; assaultive; marked inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships. )
They’re going to send him to another group home for this, one of the strict ones where they’ll shepherd his schedule and lock his bedroom, and he decides that there’s no point in waiting for a better placement that will never come.
He has never had many choices, but he will make the ones he can.
He leaves in the night with the only things he owns: his hatenna, his clothes, his handful of books, and three long paragraphs of what he thinks are poetry curling awkwardly around the circumference of his forearm.
Distance fixes some things. There are other things he can’t get distance from.
Bede’s voice breaks and his bones stretch too quickly for his skin and whatever persistent little monster on the other end of their shared connection wastes no time making the extra inches part of their canvas. Words quest around the thin bones of his wrist like hungry vines, up into the cradle of his palm, sweeping down into hollow of his elbow. Shaky non-dominant practice writing and small doodles start to show up on his right arm.
He spends nights waiting for everyone else in this shared apartment to sleep so it’s finally safe for him to sleep, and out of fatal boredom he studies his skin by streetlight and catalogues details he doesn’t want to know. He gives them credit: they know how to kill time.
For ages he’d thought boy -- a masculine quality to the shape of the letters, a preference for ugly, strong pokémon in their drawings -- but from August to February of his fourteenth year, they start dotting their i’s with hearts, inexplicably. Girl, then. Right-handed. Likes dragons, song lyrics, poetry -- probably thinks it’s romantic. Clearly has no other hobbies living out in the middle of nowhere. Can afford the frankly absurd amount of pens and markers she must go through--
“That looks pretty. Do you speak it?”
There is a girl he tolerates sometimes who doesn’t pick fights, small and dark and calm. She splits her sweets with him and always makes him a tea when she has one herself; he lets her borrow his books and talk to him without telling her to leave.
She sits next to him by the window, handing him a mug and looking at his arm just a little too closely.
“No.” He doesn’t snap, but he pulls his sleeve down and holds the hot drink close to his chest. “You should mind your own business.”
“Do they speak Galarian, then?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never asked.”
Her mouth tucks into a tiny frown. Her sleeves are rolled up, arms exposed, a poorly-done homemade tattoo of a name clearly visible on her wrist. Just the sight of it makes him wince. Washable ink is bad enough; he has nightmares about waking up one day with a permanent mark scraped over his veins.
“You mean you’ve never...?”
“What part of ‘mind your own business’ are you having difficulties with?”
“That’s sad.” She drinks her tea, unfazed by his brusqueness. He’s routine to her by now. She probably thinks they’re friends. “I talk with mine all the time. I don’t know where I’d be without her, really.”
Bede snorts without the barest hint of humor and takes a sip of his tea. Mint and sugar and milk; she makes it too sweet, but he’s never been one to waste. “Probably the same place you are now. It’s not as though they solve anything. What exactly has she done for you?”
“She’s kept me company. And she’s promised to get money together to--”
“To what? Help you? Save you? I thought you were smarter than that.” He looks at her placidly, the glass surface of calm water. She’s starting to bristle. “You won’t last long out here if you keep believing every little promise a stranger tries to sell you.”
“She’s not a stranger. I know her.” It’s the closest she’s ever come to raising her voice at him and it’s still a barely-there whisper, hands white-knuckle around the chipped porcelain handle of her mug.
“You know what she tells you. You’re delusional if you think she can’t lie to you just because you’re stuck together.”
She shakes her head and for a moment, all she can manage is a soft huff of disbelief. “This is why nobody wants to be friends with you. If you want to be a miserable tosser with trust issues for the rest of your life, fine, but don’t bring the rest of us down with you.”
“I don’t have trust issues. I’m just being realistic. You think it makes someone a good person, simply being someone else’s soulmate?” He takes another lazy drink of tea, turning his back to her. “Everyone who’s ever hurt you has a soulmate, too. Remember that.”
She leaves, and the apartment is quiet, and his arms itch with a girl who is nothing more to him than the minutiae she leaves behind.
Bede is sixteen when Rose plucks him up and promises the world.
New clothes, a new pokémon, a year’s tuition at a private trainer school, everything a whirlwind of expensive fabrics and precious metals -- he forgets all about words that don’t come from a Macro Cosmos hand or mouth. The speed and efficiency with which they reconstruct his life would be terrifying if it wasn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Being chosen by a great man makes everything worth it.
Oleana takes an afternoon out of her schedule and marshals him into an academic bookstore, thrusting a list into his hand with a look that would be one of annoyance on a more expressive face. “You’ll need all of these for your classes. The Chairman has also given you permission to buy whatever you might like for your personal collection.” She looks down at her own watch. “We’re leaving in forty-five minutes.”
He doesn’t need more than twenty to load his basket with his schoolbooks and the few volumes on strategy he’s had his eye on for months. More seems like excess; Rose is the richest man in Galar, but good will isn’t kept in a bank account, and he doesn’t want to give the impression that he’s wasteful and impulsive.
Oleana compliments his efficiency at the register, and compliments are foreign enough that he turns his head away when he smiles. He sees it then: a thick dark green dictionary, Crownish <-> Galarian, tucked into an endcap with other travel-related volumes.
The cashier is almost done ringing up his books when he makes the last-second decision to grab it.
“Language studies,” he explains, even though Oleana didn’t ask for a reason, and gives him a familiar look that says she doesn’t particularly care as she pulls out her expense card.
The dictionary sits on his desk in its plastic wrap through midterms and holidays and finals, gathering a thin mantle of dust. Crownish won’t write his essays and irrational, misplaced sentiment certainly won’t win him any battles, so what’s the point?
It’s only out of guilt that it makes the cut at all when he’s packing to leave school as the challenge season starts: the prospect of wasting the Chairman’s money is the only thing worse than whatever lapse in judgment made him buy it in the first place.
He’s on the train from Wyndon to Motostoke for the opening ceremony and his arms are a nightmare.
Rushed, sweat-smudged cheater’s notes. There are little charts and arrows and underlines and circles and big, sloppy sentences careening into each other, half illegible. Some words cluster in triangles with arrows leading to each other; others sit alone with a spray of arrows shooting outward to three or four more. Hurried, confused equations, tiolam = dorcha??? followed by angry faces.
Bede sees the word dràgon and thinks -- that can’t possibly be what it looks like, could it?
And before he can stop himself, he’s reaching into the bottom of his bag and finally, finally slicing into the plastic with a thumbnail.
As the weeks go by, Bede learns this:
Whoever this girl is, her language is a fucking mess.
He’d had luck with Kalosian academic journals during school -- some difficult patches here and there, sometimes an extra few minutes to chase down a table of conjugations, but its structure was familiar and the output was sensible. Shared roots. Word by word, sentence by sentence, he was smart enough to fumble his way through with some patience, some research, and some measure of intuition.
Crownish is hostile. Crownish does not want him to know what it’s saying; it’s guarding itself, still hiding high up in the mountains like it doesn’t realize it missed its homeland’s colonization by six hundred years. Fifty pages of spelling and pronunciation rules get tangled in his mouth. Reverse engineering produces unpredictable results: sometimes workable if odd, sometimes like the girl is speaking to him in a spymaster’s cipher.
He had assumed simplicity -- a simple language for a simple girl with simple wants and simple interests.
He snaps the dictionary shut in disgust.
This, he thinks, is the worst coincidence of all:
#227 directs her team in Crownish.
He’s not sure what it is at first, but the realization lands right as his solosis goes down. From a native, it sounds nothing like the way his mouth stumbles in the privacy of his hotel rooms; it has songbird notes, peaks and valleys and rolling hills. She’s rough, but her tongue is delicate, and she makes his feel heavy, awkward, graceless.
Gothita goes next and he is useless to stop it.
He had been proud of his ability to strategize in the moment, to hear another trainer’s commands and know where to move, how to react. Adaptive. School had rewarded him well for it. This has no counter in his repertoire; the hits are left field, she is left field, blows connecting before he even knows what they’re going to be.
He is not prepared for her; for how utterly crushed he feels when she walks off, her victorious, him laid low.
(Gloria does not sign her league cards. He calls her lazy for it when he really means please let me make sure. She only laughs and says, “Pure chokin’ for a farmgirl’s autograph now?” as he blinks slowly, feeling stupid for even bringing it up.)
There are gym badges gleaming; there are wishing stars vibrating in his pockets; there are cameras and crowds and requests for autographs he ignores. A journalist asks about his time in foster care and he shuts down the interview with a level of restraint that would’ve earned praise from his old therapist. No one even has to get hurt. You’re getting better.
He wins far more than he loses, and losses off the pitch don’t matter anyway. He makes it through Kabu’s crucible, on to the baking redrock canyons of Stow-on-Side and badge number four, shining gold and purple, type disadvantage be damned. He is bright and golden and clawing his way up.
Oleana gives him suggestions; encourages him to be clever, to think like like quicksilver, to earn his seat at the table. If she wants guile, he’ll give her guile. If she wants more wishing stars, he’ll give her that too.
This is purpose. This is what’s been missing. If he’s going to give every molecule of himself to someone else, it will be to them: they chose him, and he chose them. No bonds, he thinks, but the ones he forges himself.
Then the mural crumbles.
So does he.
(Failed placement thirty-four. He does not know why he’s crying now when he hasn’t for so long. After this many rejections, it should come as a surprise to no one -- least of all himself.)
Bede finds his way onto a train from Stow-on-Side to Hammerlocke, wedged into the corner of an empty compartment, legs drawn up to his chest on the seat. The ticket is crumpled and damp in his fist. His wrist flashes defiantly cheerful green ink and he thinks, bitterly, of course you’re fine, the world didn’t end for you.
She is still...in the Crown Tundra, probably. Still living her little life in her little house with her little family. Still finding the time to scribble notes and drawings, even if the volume has dropped over the months. She is nothing more to him than incorrect typing charts, a scattering of trivia, foreign phonemes that seat strangely in his mouth.
Worse: She is the only one left to talk to, and he doesn’t understand.