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He wakes up from a dead sleep suddenly, finding himself in a pool of sweat. “Dammit,” he mutters, shuddering. The dream had been vivid, and familiar. Smoke, charred flesh, and that other, elusive scent he’d never been able to really place. And the screaming. It still rings in his ears, even now that he’s wide awake.
Blinking the sweat from his eyes, he shudders again, a chill overtaking him. Maybe he’s getting sick. Fan-fucking-tastic.
He’s itching, too, especially his left arm, which is par for the course these days. It’s been itching and spasming for weeks now, though he hasn’t said anything to anyone about it; doesn’t want to sound like a pussy. Idly he scratches it, pulling himself up out of bed, intent on getting some water; his mouth and throat are bone dry, as if he’d been inhaling the smoke from his dream.
Eddie’s up, for whatever godforsaken reason; up, and nursing some of his beloved coffee, while doing what looks like a crossword. Seth checks the clock on the microwave; one in the morning. He shakes his head, grabbing a glass and getting his water from the sink.
“You good, kid?” Eddie doesn’t look up from his crossword, but Seth hears it anyway; that odd note of concern he still can’t get used to, even after three years.
“Yeah, I - “
And suddenly no, no he isn’t good; his left arm spasms, and he drops the glass; it shatters all over the linoleum, and his bare feet. His arm’s not itching anymore; it’s burning, it’s on fucking fire, and he doubles over it, gasping.
“Kid?” Eddie throws down his newspaper, hauling himself up from the table. “Seth, what the hell?”
Seth makes a noise in his throat, almost a sob. Eddie stops at the edge of the circle of shattered glass. “Dammit.” He holds out a hand, and Seth makes a grab for it with his right hand, and Eddie helps him step over the mess, all the while he’s trying not to drop to the floor and curl up in a ball. It’s excruciating, this pain in his forearm. He stumbles over to the table, and falls down into a chair, putting his head on the tabletop, moaning.
“Hey, son, lemme see. You cut yourself or somethin’?”
“No. No, it’s not…” Seth can barely get the words out. He shudders, clutching at himself. “It’s fucking burning, Eddie, it fucking hurts.”
“Let me see, okay?”
Slowly Seth lets go of his arm, extending it towards Eddie, not bothering to raise his head from the table.
Eddie pauses, and goes very still. The silence is the loudest thing Seth has ever heard.
He finally lifts his head up, eyes watering. “What is it, what’s wr - “
And he sees what Eddie’s seeing, and feels bile crawling up his throat. Oh. Oh, fuck.
It’s faint, but there, residing just beneath the surface of his skin. In the half-light of the kitchen he can’t quite make it out, but it’s something long, beginning at the crook in his elbow and extending down his forearm.
Eddie lurches up and goes to hit the overhead light. Blinking in the sudden brightness, Seth squints down at his arm.
Words. They’re words. As yet illegible, but coming more into focus with every staggered breath he takes.
He stands up so forcefully the chair topples backwards, crashing on the kitchen floor. He barely hears it. “Seth,” Eddie whispers, but Seth ignores him, staggering back a step and running into the chair, nearly toppling backwards over it. He hardly bothers to look where he’s going; his eyes are glued to his outstretched forearm. He spins around, feels something crunch beneath his feet, feels a sharp stinging pain in his heel, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting to the bathroom and the bright fluorescent light, so he can see more clearly.
“Jesus, Seth, wait!” Eddie clambers up from the table, following him, and the trail of blood in his footsteps. Seth doesn’t hear him. There’s a dull roaring in his ears, temples throbbing. His throat feels like there’s a fist around it; he remembers the feeling all too well, and tries very hard not to panic.
He reaches the bathroom, slapping the light on. Stopping in front of the mirror, his eyes never leave his left arm.
They’re more prominent now; he can tell that there’s four words. Four innocuous, damning words. His stomach twists violently, and he tastes acid at the back of his throat.
Eddie catches up to him, breathing hard, eyes on Seth’s arm as well. “Kid, just calm down, okay? This is normal. It’s nothing to get your panties in a bunch.”
Seth loves Uncle Eddie. He took them on after their father died, and was nothing like that asshole. Seth hadn’t known a family could be anything remotely like this, could be loving and gentle and caring. It’s a far cry from his previous life. All thanks to Eddie.
But right now, Eddie’s dead fucking wrong. Because he’s fifteen fucking years old, and his mark is just now manifesting. What the hell kind of person does that make him? What kind of person has a soulmate fifteen years younger than him? Does that, what, automatically make him some kind of pedo?
Seth’s full-on panicking now, trying not to fall apart. He’s shaking so badly he feels like he might fly to pieces from the force of it. His stomach lurches again; it’s all he can do to keep his dinner down. The words are growing sharper before his disbelieving eyes.
Then they’re there, the deed is done. He’s got a soulmate somewhere out there now, fifteen years younger than him. What the actual fuck.
Then he actually reads his words, and something in him dies a little.
Because you’re a monster.
Seth makes a noise he isn’t aware of, knees giving way. Eddie grabs his elbows before he can hit the floor, guiding him to the toilet. “Easy, son, easy,” he’s murmuring, but Seth doesn’t hear him. His chest is so tight he can’t breathe. He can’t fucking breathe.
He collapses onto the commode lid, legs feeling like jelly. Gently, Eddie takes his left arm, carefully extending it again so he can read it. “Oh, kid,” he says sadly. He makes as if to touch the words, but pulls away. The mark is still raw and angry-looking, and it hurts like a bitch. He’s got his other arm propped on a knee, face cradled in his hand. It’s all he can do to remember how to breathe through the fucking gauntlet his body’s currently putting him through.
Because you’re a monster.
The first sob is the most painful, dredged up from the very center of him. His eyes prick painfully, the words blurring in front of him, and he can’t look any more; he yanks his arm away from Eddie, curling both arms around himself, doubling over. Finally, finally the tears come, and they taste so fucking bitter.
“The fuck is happening.” As if through a long tunnel he hears his brother’s voice, thick with sleep. He barely spares him a glance before tucking back in on himself, tears dripping silently down onto the tile beneath him.
“Jesus, what? What’s going on.” Richie sounds more awake now; he’s staring down at the floor, where Seth’s bloody footprints stand out lividly against the white tile. Then he looks back up at Seth, and comes further into the bathroom, crowding in beside Eddie. Together they stare down at the other boy, Eddie’s face full of a kind of sad commiseration, Richie’s a mask of confusion.
“Bro, what the hell.” Then Richie looks over at Eddie; at fourteen he’s still growing, and stands nearly level with the man.
With a long, heavy sigh, Eddie gestures rather helplessly at Seth. “He got his words.”
Richie stares, first at Eddie, then back down at Seth. “Fuck, seriously? Now?”
Eddie shoots the boy a look of consternation. “Yes, now. I don’t want you giving him too much shit for it, y’hear me?” Because no shit at all is out of the question; these two rag on each other so much it should be an Olympic sport.
The younger boy had been born with his, and hadn’t had to deal with this kind of bullshit. It isn’t the same. Not like his. They’re odd, for sure, but they aren’t - it’s just not the same.
His soulmate is going to think he’s a monster. Story of his life, isn’t it. First his old man, calling him a waste of space and a moron and useless, and his mother that hadn’t wanted him in the first place -
He’s close to hyperventilating now. Eddie, eyes wide, kneels in front of him on the cold tile, gripping his shoulders hard. “Seth, you need to breathe, alright, son? C’mon. In and out, nice ‘n’ slow.”
Seth shakes his head wildly, eyes screwed shut, unable to stand looking at either of them anymore.
Eddie huffs. “Kid, we don’t even know what this means, alright? It’s all in the context - ”
Beside him, Richie tilts his head, trying to get a better look. Then he reaches out, tugging firmly at his brother’s wrist, and Seth goes unresisting, still too busy shaking and trying not to puke.
Richie stares at his arm for a long, tense moment. Then, quietly, he says, “she sounds like a real bitch.”
Despite himself, despite everything happening to him in that moment, Seth chokes out a laugh.
“Well, bro, here’s hoping you don’t meet her until you’re at least thirty. Otherwise, things’ll get real awkward real quick.”
Seth presses his face against his knees, shoulders shaking now. He’s hysterical, a part of him knows, but he doesn’t care. Anything to get rid of those other thoughts, the ones that echo his father far too much for his liking.
He calms down, eventually, enough to let Eddie take care of his foot, still bleeding a little. The glass comes out easily enough. He wishes that the same could be said for the mark on his arm.
Eddie offers him one final piece of wisdom: “it never means what you think. Y’know? We’ll get it figured out.”
Later, alone in his room, Richie and Eddie back in theirs, Seth sits on the very edge of his bed. Runs his thumb up and down the fresh mark. Presses down just a little. Just enough to make it sting.
Then, harder. Harder still.
It’s not until the blood wells up that he thinks maybe he can sleep. Carefully he washes his free hand, the one with blood beneath the nails. Then, slowly, deliberately, he takes up the roll of gauze Eddie had wrapped his foot in, and winds it down his forearm, watching as the words disappear little by little beneath the clean white strips. The last word to go is monster.
After that, he grabs up a flannel over-shirt, carefully buttoning it down at the wrists. Then he curls up on his side, left arm outstretched in front of him. The ache hasn’t gone away completely. There’s only one clear thought he can pick out of the white noise in his brain.
If she wants me to be a monster…maybe I will be.
He does not sleep.
No one mentions the scars after the first two or three attempts.
He tells Richie to keep his fucking mouth shut, trying to ignore the stricken look on his face; Eddie, after cussing him out and bandaging him up, much like he’d done that first night, sends him off to bed with a dammit, Seth.
The wounds disappear as they begin to intersect with the words, the mark somehow absorbing them as if they’d never been there. So he’s got a modest collection of jagged, crosshatched lines surrounding the words, as if highlighting them, framing them.
In New Orleans he tries to place his tattoo over the mark. The first two tattoo artists refuse to even try. The third shrugs and mutters, “Your money, man.” And lays down several curls of flame before the mark, before both their eyes, soaks up the ink like it was never there in the first place.
Seth stares. The artist just sits back, shrugging. “Told you. Why’d you think I made you pay up-front?”
He keeps his sleeves long and his temper short. No need to reign it in, he thinks. Shit’s inevitable. Why bother?
So he doesn’t, because he’s a monster and monsters don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else.
He gives it a half-assed try, with Vanessa. She’s in the right place, at the wrong time. It never would have worked out, regardless if she’d said the words or not, he tells himself after the divorce. He still cares, after a fashion, but it isn’t enough to make him try. Nothing and no one is, except maybe Richie. His brother is and always has been the exception to the rule.
In all honesty, he stops trying after New Orleans.
Not because he’s made peace with it. Because there’s no point. The knife didn’t work. The needle didn’t work. The girl didn’t work.
The words stay. Nothing else does, except his brother.
He learns to button his sleeves without looking. Learns which fabrics don’t cling. Learns how to move so no one grabs his left arm.
It’s twinged several times since it first appeared; once, about six years in, for no apparent reason; then again, after uttering the words ‘I do;’ once as the gavel came down; and the last time, a full seventeen years later, mere months before Richie breaks him out of prison.
He doesn’t look at it much anymore. Doesn’t trace it, doesn’t press on it, doesn’t test how deep the skin will give. He’s moved on, he tells himself. He doesn't even wonder about what flowers will bloom when it happens.
It never means what you think.
Fine. Maybe it means nothing at all. He is what he is, and to hell with the rest of it.
He lives like he’s not running on a timer. Like the clock’s not ticking down to that final, inevitable moment when the truth’s spoken aloud for everyone to hear. He knows, somewhere deep down he refuses to acknowledge, that he’s running full tilt at it.
Some people never meet their soulmate, he knows. He’s heard the stories. So that’s what he pictures: a life devoid of meaning, of an end game. Just one foot in front of the other, like clockwork, living job to job. Dying in the arms of a beautiful woman. They’re just words, too, and they mean about as much. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t. Because you're a -
By the time he’s in that little motel room, holding a gun on a girl half his age, the clock’s already run out. He just doesn’t know it yet.
She’s a graceless child, Kate Fuller.
It seems no one informed her what being born on a Tuesday means. She’s cranky and colicky throughout the majority of her first year, and stubborn and almost churlish through her toddler years. “You’d never guess she’s a preacher’s daughter,” her uncle dryly states as he beholds yet another screaming fit. “Mean little thing, ain’t she?”
“She’s teething,” is her mama’s defense.
By some small miracle, she evens out at six or seven. Her parents get a few months of respite - and then Scott arrives.
Scott, skinny and small for his age - only five - and renamed because Kate demanded it so. Kate, still young, still a little graceless, determined that things go her way no matter what. So he becomes her brother, now with a name her inexperienced tongue can pronounce. Maybe she’s done him a favor, maybe not. The following years will tell.
The first time she says his name, Scott, not the one she can’t say, the mark on her wrist throbs once. Just the once. It’s there and gone again. She forgets it happens just as quickly.
The change is difficult, but she is young, and Scott is integrated in such a way in her core memories that soon it’s as if he’s always been there, much like the words on her arm.
She doesn’t think much of them, these marks on her wrist. She doesn’t even know they have a meaning until she learns to read. They’re just there, like the color of her eyes, or her freckles.
Mama likes to tell her and Daddy’s first meeting as a bedtime story, sometimes. How they knew they’d met their match when their words quickened and blossomed into something beautiful. It’s one of Kate’s favorite stories, the soulmate marks. It makes her wonder what her flowers will be, when they finally bloom.
“God gives some people a little hint,” her mother says softly. “Just the first words. So you’ll recognize each other when it matters.”
And - she pauses. Kate doesn’t hear the pause for several years, not until she looks back one day and feels it, there, a couple of heartbeats where her mother hadn’t found the right words to say to her little girl. It’s so loud. Kate wonders why she’s never noticed it before.
Then Mama traces Kate’s words in the lamplight, the warm glow gilding her mother’s face in an ethereal way as she continues in a teasing tone, “‘time’s up, Princess.’ I wonder what you’re going to be late for, hmm?” Her eyes twinkle.
Kate peers down at her arm. She scowls , her little brow puckering. “He sounds bossy,” she says in her snottiest voice, which makes Mama throw her head back and laugh for a long time.
“Maybe. Maybe he just likes you and he’s teasing you,” and she reaches out a hand and wriggles her fingers into Kate’s side, making her giggle reluctantly. Her heart lightens, gloom receding.
But later, after Mama’s tucked her in and Daddy’s come to kiss her goodnight, Kate listens to the sounds around her, as the house settles and night closes in. Things always feel different, at night, alone in the dark. Moonlight streams in through narrow slats between her window blinds, falling softly across her bedspread. She pulls her arm out from under her pillow where she’d initially settled it, and holds it up in the light.
“Time’s up, Princess,” she whispers in her mother’s warm voice.
She does this several times, trying different intonations, different characters. Until finally, her voice deepens and she settles on a menacing tone. Time’s up, Princess.
Swallowing, she curls her arm up against her, tucking her fist beneath her chin. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like that at all. It sounds like something out of a cartoon. Like something the villain might say to the hero, right before the bomb ticks down to nothing. She can't think about flowers, then.
Her eyes catch on the red glow of her clock numbers. 8:28. 8:29. She stares at it unblinking, eyes watering, as it finally flickers to 8:30. Her stomach drops. Time’s up.
An awareness steals through her, then. Can’t be late. I can’t be late or it might happen to me.
Then…then I won’t be. I’ll be good from now on. I’ll always be where I’m supposed to be. I won’t let the clock run down.
Decision made, she stuffs her arm determinedly back underneath her pillow, and screws her eyes shut against the glow of her clock. But in her mind’s eye, she still sees the time, flickering, changing, forever marching forward.
And it it relentless. Time is a tyrant; it demands everything you have to give. Eventually, it takes her mother. It warps her father and brother into something almost unrecognizable.
Throughout it all, she stays steady. Her own form of relentless. She becomes the perfect preacher’s daughter in practice, not only theory, keeping her sleeves long and her watch always wound. Always right on time, sitting in the front row as expected of her. On her knees by her bed, same time every night. She holds Kyle’s hand in just the right way, at just the right time - he’s not the One, but for the time being, he’s enough. He’s sweet and caring and Godly, and fits in perfectly with her ordered little world.
She still remembers the moment she was told her mother was dead. 10:14 pm, on a Saturday. Her Daddy’s linked hands between his knees, sitting there in his hospital bed, as if he’s about to pray.
It’s the second time she’s ever felt the mark burn against her skin. A warning, she thinks. Time’s up, Mama. And it is. It is.
After that, it’s on her. She drags Scott to church while Daddy heals. Leads the prayers. Sets the table. Keeps her sleeves long and her watch wound. On time. On script. On her knees at nine o’clock sharp. For almost eleven years, she never breaks character.
It isn’t Mama’s death that undoes her. It’s when Daddy drags them off that the cracks begin to form. Little things at first. Then bigger. The bikini. Her daddy thoroughly disapproves of this purchase. But it isn’t like anyone from her parish is going to see her in it, after all. It’s perfectly innocent. Planning to abandon her family - no. Not abandon. She isn’t leaving them. They’ve left her behind, instead. Daddy’s gone off the deep end and Scott with him. She belongs back in Bethel, sitting in the front pew. So that’s what she plans for.
Planning. It’s all she’s ever done, it seems. Planning, and waiting for those plans to come into fruition. She sits, waiting on Kyle to come and rescue her, to bring her back to the real world, to Bethel.
And then Kyle does what he does and says what he says, shattering what’s left of her normalcy and a little bit of her heart in the process. Not a large part. She was never too invested. She has her words to thank for that.
Then - fast forward, as if she’s blinked - and there she is, standing, hands shaking, palms sweating, in a tiny motel bathroom, trying to get dressed while two men outside the door hold guns on her family.
She can’t plan. She can’t think.
All she can do is wait for the clock to run out. For some reason she can’t stop picturing her old bedroom clock as she lay there in the night, watching it tick down. Time’s up, Princess.
And it is. It is. She just doesn’t know it yet.