AN: Warning for mentions of self-harm, torture, and period typical homophobia. Yes, in a soulmate AU. My love of angst apparently ignores the conventions of genre.
Charlie is eleven when the first mark appears, fading slowly in over his right wrist's pulse point, starting on the orange end of the red colour spectrum, and working its way to a dusty rose pink before slowly curling into a name. It is the first time Charlie has ever seen the name Lucien.
The mark elicits no particular reaction from Charlie's family, neither in its lateness nor in its maleness. Five of the adults in Charlie's family have marks, including both his father's parents, and known of them have ever so much as glimpsed their other half. It didn't stop them from living productive lives, offspring or marriage wise at least, and that seems to be all people much care about in 1930s Melbourne.
So Charlie quietly accepts the matte black wrist cuff from his mother over breakfast, drinks his juice, and goes to school. When he comes home that evening, the cuff is on his wrist, and everyone goes back to pretending Charlie doesn't exist. It is a system that works nicely for all parties involved, half-brothers, step-father, and even Charlie himself most days. His receipt of a supposedly divinely blessed mark such as a soul point does nothing to change that.
Charlie, for his part, gamely pretends to forget the name exists as much as everyone else does. And even though it's hard to do some days, he manages to largely ignore the fact the name exists for most of his adolescence.
It gets significantly harder to ignore when his second mark appears.
00
By Charlie's sixteenth birthday, his step-father has graduated to fists over silences, and Charlie has graduated to a clenched jaw and a straight back over silently slipping in and out of rooms obligingly.
Then little Billy Manners from down the street bumps into Freddie Wright on the school stairs, and suddenly Charlie knows why pink flowers have always seemed so very bright and beautiful to his eyes.
Watching two soul marks touch for the first time is a privileged event, or so the stories go. This one just seems to involve a lot of blood and tears and screaming.
Charlie doesn't help. He doesn't do anything, either way. He just stands at the top of the steps, frozen in the moment, his left hand closed protectively over his wrist cuff, his pulse pounding through the joint with a painful intensity.
Nobody is killed, so the incident is never mentioned again, for all the blood never quite washes out of the steps, not for all the rest of Charlie's years at the school.
He wakes up the next morning to a tear stained face and a left wrist that is twined over with shades of forest green that eventually smooth over into a stormy sea blue. Matthew is almost a disappointment to Charlie's young brain, particularly after the slightly exotic lilt of Lucien.
And while Charlie develops a sudden taste for long sleeves and hydrangeas, no one every says anything about his second name. Especially not Charlie.
Charlie watches little Billy Manners limp his way through their last year of school, watches him marry the first girl who winks at him, and equally quickly have a couple of little Manners.
He watches Fred Wright switch schools, join the wrong crowd, bash in faces before they can bash him.
But when he makes his first arrest as a newly minted copper, slapping the cuffs over wrists thick with scars that don't quite manage to cover the sickly grey William painted across Fred's pulse point, Charlie can't quite stop the bile of guilt that burns against his throat.
And that night, curled up around his little brothers for warmth because his step-father drank the rent money again, Charlie's wrists ache more fiercely than they have in years.
00
Charlie meets his first Matthew when he is nineteen, and somehow, he is just hopeful enough and just naïve enough to rush forward eagerly with a hand outstretched in invitation. He's lucky enough to escape the experience with only one black eye and one busted arm, but it's a lesson he will never allow himself to forget again.
It is the first time in his life his wrist cuff has felt exactly like the shackle he now sees it has always been and will apparently always be.
00
Matthew Lawson is Charlie's fourteenth Matthew, and he has long since learned his lesson, his face carefully blank, his cuff almost invisible under his uniform jacket.
But this is his new boss, so Charlie grits his teeth and holds out his hand for an obligatory shake.
Apparently almost invisible is not invisible enough for this particular copper though, if the sneered lip and the actual, literal step back he takes at Charlie's gesture are anything to go by.
Almost as if to ensure Charlie gets the point, Lawson orders him to slap the cuffs on the two men they arrest for gross indecency his first week in Ballarat. Mercifully, the cold steel obscures the names written in identical colours across the men's pulse points before Charlie's brain can memorise them. He doesn't need another Fred and Billy in his nightmares.
That night, Charlie sits in his boarding house and holds a lighter against his right wrist until the skin begins to singe, until tears are streaming down his face. He ends up throwing the lighter across the room, earning a banging on the wall from his neighbor for his troubles.
He doesn't let himself think about the what-ifs after that.
Even Charlie's self-esteem isn't low enough to continue to pine after a potential soulmate when the man in question is so clearly disgusted by the mere idea such a thing might be possible.
00
Lucien Blake strolls into their lives a scant three months later, and with him that pesky little emotion called hope. Charlie has always hated hope.
Trouble, Blake is so damn friendly from day one, and yet so damn careful not to touch Charlie's skin, that he lets that hope grow until it is practically his main reason for getting up in the morning.
Naturally, it dies an early and painful death when Blake comes into the kitchen to wash up for dinner one night with his sleeves already rolled up to his elbows.
From his position by the oven, all Charlie can do is gape at the man's wrists.
His completely blank wrists. Oh, there are scars, dozens of them. But nothing that remotely resembles a soulmate mark. Charlie stares so long that it isn't until Blake shuts off the water and abruptly barks, "Charlie!" that he realizes the potatoes are completely black.
He slams the oven with a frustrated clang, and wonders when the universe became so cruel.
00
The day they bury Dough Ashby beside his daughter, Blake reverently places a bouquet of marigolds on the coffin, tears streaming freely down his cheeks.
The flowers are out of season enough, and the colours vibrant enough, that Charlie doubts anyone could fail to understand the significance of the gesture being carried out by Caroline Blake's son.
That night, Charlie firmly locks the door to his bedroom, removes his wrist cuff, and cries into his pillow until musty goose down is all he can taste.
00
Charlie bangs his head against the cellar wall with a thump. Just perfect. Three weeks chasing this gang, and their first real lead ends with him chained up in the basement in his underthings. Just perfect.
"Careful there Charlie, you don't want to give yourself a concussion and deprive our charming hosts the honours." Oh, and did he mention that he was chained to his probably not soulmate, who was also in his underthings? Just perfect indeed. At least they had the decency to leave his wrist cuff alone. And it was too dark in here to see anything anyway.
Charlie's retort is cut off by their kidnappers return abruptly flooding the basement with light, and it is in that moment that Charlie sees it. His mouth falls open in shock, all thoughts of kidnappers forgotten.
There, on Blake's ankle, is a distinctive grey swirl, the top of a fancy M probably, and just like that, something in Charlie finally shrivels up and dies.
"You can have soulmate marks on your ankles Doc?" Kidnappers one, two, and three look baffled by his statement, while Blake looks torn between grief and incredulity.
Thug three seizes Charlie's shoulders, "Enough chatter you two!" And maybe the whole cuff thing had just been oversight and stupidity after all.
Naturally, that is the moment Hobart storms the basement.
Later, wrapped in several layers of concealing blankets, the dryness of the basement mercifully leaving the concealer cover his other soulmark unblemished, Charlie chances a glance in the direction of Blake's ankle.
The Doc follows his gaze with a sigh. "Her name was Mei-Linn, she was my wife." Charlie catches the past tense, his own eyes inexplicably wet.
There really is only one thing he can think to say, "What colour was it? Before?" For a moment, Blake actually smiles, and there is such love in that look it steals Charlie's breath away. "Red. It was red Charlie. Like a rhododendron."
And this may not be Charlie's Lucien, but sitting with their shoulders pressed together through the blankets, Charlie hopes the Doc gets even a sliver of the same comfort Charlie feels, simply from knowing that someone else is there with him.
00
It is ridiculous, how it all unravels in the end. Now Lawson leaving. There was nothing ridiculous about that.
But after that, when the guilt is eating Charlie alive and he still isn't allowing himself to ever contemplate the dreaded what-ifs, when his ribs are aching constantly and changing his bandages is a nightly event.
It is ridiculous because nothing special precipitates it. Nothing changes.
Charlie simply forgets to put his cuff on properly one morning, so that by the evening it has slipped down enough that when Blake is carefully raising Charlie's left arm to run the bandages under it, the edges of a name peak out.
He doesn't even notice it until Blake abruptly breaths out harshly, his "Oh Charlie" tinged with the infinite sadness of sudden understanding. And perhaps no small amount of recrimination.
Charlie glances up, his "Doc, what…" dying in his throat because Blake is rolling up his sleeves.
And suddenly his inability to breath has nothing to do with his broken ribs.
Blake holds his wrist up, both turned upwards to catch the light. At first, Charlie sees nothing, just as he's done countless times before.
And then, slowly, his eyes adjust and he finally sees it. Them. They aren't quite scars, aren't quite proper anything really, but on each forearm, there is an undeniable smattering of colour tendrils.
They almost look like veins, snaking away from his wrists, dusky purple on one side, green on the other. Charlie abruptly feels like he's going to be sick.
Bl-Lucien lowers his arms carefully to his sides. "They burned them off, in the camps. Ironically, it probably saved my life later on." When I was liberated, Charlie doesn't need to hear the words to get it. He's lived it, in his own ways.
Charlie doesn't know what to do with the look of despair on Lucien's face, anymore than he knew what to say last time they were in a situation remotely like this.
So he simply offers his right wrist for the Doc's inspection, lets gentle fingers brush over the burn scars surrounding the bold and strong Ma, and closes his eyes against the flashes of green-blue and purple-grey that Lucien later tells him flash around the room like muted fireworks.
Then Charlie carefully re-straighten his wrist cuff, and Lucien goes back to bandaging his ribs.
Looks like his mother was right after all. Fairytales don't happen in real life. Not to Charlie.
00
Lawson comes limping back into their lives one blazing Sunday afternoon, the sun beating down on Blake's back as he kneels over the flowerbed, Charlie standing at his shoulder watching him carefully pack earth around the freshly planted flowers.
Jean is inside, whistling happily as she bakes, the latest picture of her little granddaughter taking pride of place on the sill above the sink. The toddler is wearing her Sunday best, proudly waving her arms in the air, so the word written across her left wrist is hard to make out, but the absence of a cuff is prominent enough for the entire world to see it.
And for all Charlie knows the name on that little girl's wrist is a nice, safe John. For all he knows that Christopher Beasley was one of the lucky few who actually found his soulmate, his mother's disapproval not-withstanding, somehow, that little picture gives Charlie the first glimmer of something like hope for the future he's felt since he was sixteen and standing frozen on the steps of his high school.
That hopes is only made stronger by Matthew himself, of all unlikely people, when he stands in Blake's mother's studio, staring up at the gold-flecked ceiling while Charlie carefully counts Lucien's swallows of scotch.
It is strong enough to practically bloom in his chest when Lawson seems to find some hidden meaning in that ceiling, abruptly thrusting his bare hands out towards his companions, his gaze resolutely stuck upwards, away from their questioning, incredulous eyes.
Lucien answers first, so Charlie is treated with a burst of pink-green practically burning his retinas in its intensity.
He joins the hand-holding a moment later, the colours pulsing right through his cuff, reflecting off the gold-leaf embedded above their heads until the brightness forces their gazes away, towards each other.
Standing there in a loose semi-circle, his forehead resting against his soulmates', one on each side of him, Charlie knows without a doubt that no words are necessary.
But if he found them, they would sound strangely like home.
00
Nothing much changes after that. Not so you'd notice. Charlie doesn't stop wearing his wrist cuff. Matthew doesn't stop arresting people with the right name on their wrists but the wrong gender. Lucien doesn't stop placing marigolds on Doug Ashby's grave.
The world doesn't suddenly wake up and realize how stupid and narrowminded and so damn small it is. Nothing much changes, on the surface. Charlie doesn't have enough hope to think it ever will.
But Jean places a bouquet of flowers on the table at dinner, the first evening Matthew is back with them. And as they all sit there admiring the wild mingling of blue-green hydrangeas and purple violets and pale pink roses, Matthew slowly slides his hands out across the table, his left towards Charlie, his right towards Lucien.
And the world doesn't shift on its access, but Charlie reaches out to grasp the hand he is offered, sliding his free one across the table towards Lucien's answering one, and for a blissful moment, they simply sit and smile at nothing in particular.
And then they eat dinner, and nobody says a word. Because for once, none are needed.