Hello this is Nem, with another soulmate AU. I got inspired by the synopsis of Burn and Breathe by PitViperOfDoom, which can be found on AO4. Rated T for some swearing and the whole idea of this AU. It would be so easy to make this into a nightmarish story.
One might think that in a world like theirs, intentional violence would be sparse. That in a world filled with so much pain, which half the time isn't even yours, to begin with, people would have a remorse for inflicting it.
The painless, the ones without a soulmate, will call you lucky. They don't know what you need to live a whole life with, they are jealous of the prospect, but do not take into account the consequences. They read the stories of soulmates in sappy romance books, that were full of happy endings at the ends of thorny paths.
The ones who share, the people doomed, blessed with a soulmate, often wish to not have been born into the life like this. I would have rather be forever alone, skips through their thoughts at least once in their life.
Scientists call it a perk of evolution, a survival instinct, a pack instinct to protect your mate. The ability to know when your other half is getting hurt, so you can rush to their aid. If nature intended it that way, then it used itself when molding humans, because only them can have this twisted humour.
There are stories, shared behind closed doors and between four ears, about people who died because their soulmate died too. No one knows if it's a truth or not. It's the type of public knowledge that no one wants to admit to believe in, because the implications aren't just fatal, but also imply how wicked and twisted humanity is. Kill two birds with one stone. Children are told it's about accomplishing goals. The truth is more close to the real meaning of the saying.
Some keep a diary of those phantom pains, obsessively cataloguing every hurt their soulmate inflicted on them. And then it depends entirely on their personality what the writer does with the information. Some stare long nights at the lists of what their yet unmet soulmate went through, guessing at the causes, dangling on the thread of hope that they will meet them soon, so maybe they will put stop to this hurt. Some take obsession over their diaries to entirely another side of things, blaming their soulmate for the pain they gave them, for the pain they unknowingly shared with them, turning it into hate. Some are jealous of how their soulmate never seems to experience any wrongs.
Not all people seemed to be born into this world ready to deal with the consequences of having a soulbond.
x
Whoever is Alex's soulmate, the person doesn't stay away from dangerous happenings in life. It starts with small, innocent phantoms the moment he turns three.
Little aches in his muscles, like when he was learning to walk, small shocks of pain in his foot pinky, like when he was careless and he stubbed his toe against the chair. He ignores them, thinks they are normal, never cries because they are sudden and immediately forgotten. The first one to notice is one of his nannies.
He is playing with toy blocks in his room, his auntie sitting on his bed reading a book. He carefully stacks the blue block on top of the small tower, which wiggles a bit as it becomes a bit unstable. Little Alex proudly admires his creation, but then as he goes to call for his nanny, his vision whitens and the next thing he sees is the tower scattered on the ground and the girl sitting in front of him with concern written all over her face. There are tears dried on his face and he can't remember crying and there is a pain in his left knee like when he was crawling too much on the dry carpet, but so much worse.
Alex is a privy child, who likes to stick his little chubby fingers into things that are not meant to concern him. It is not really an accident then when in two weeks when his uncle finally comes home, he catches his nanny telling Ian what happened. He sees the way his uncle's face scrunches up in an emotion, that is too hard for little Alex to decipher.
It all starts to blend with his normal way of life. Little pain there and there, nothing that would make Alex stop in his current action, nothing that would make him wake up screaming. It's almost like his soulmate is being extra careful to not hurt themselves. Like a guardian angel in human form with an unknown face.
The child in Alex can't wait to meet them.
The pains seem to amplify in severity and occurrence somewhere in the middle of Alex's last year of primary school. There wouldn't be a day when his muscles don't hurt in the familiar buzz of too much exercise. Some days he has trouble taking his notes as if his hands were used to holding something else like his nonexistent callouses were in the way of his Stabilo pen. He wonders what changed, what made his soulmate to suddenly start to exercise that much.
His uncle notices after few days (and only because the first days he wasn't even in the country) and promptly tries to pry from his nephew what is wrong. Is someone hurting you at school? he asks, offering Alex to sign him up for another martial arts class.
Alex thinks about the way his muscles burn recently and tells Ian that secondary lessons aren't needed. Maybe this is why that person is my soulmate? Because we have similar hobbies?
It doesn't take long for the first wound to show up. Alex is playing football, just about to intercept the ball from Tom who is moving to attack, when a sudden pain in his right arm makes Alex stop and instinctively cradle it with his left. His left palm feels all sticky and when he brings it closer to his face to investigate it, the blood is already drying and caking on his skin. Alex observes it with something akin to morbid fascination as the blood slowly disappears like it was never there, to begin with.
"Damn Alex, are you okay?" And that is Tom's voice bringing him to reality, his friend rushing to him, the ball forgotten. He follows Alex's way of sight, but the blood is gone already. "What happened?", he asks again.
"My soulmate..", Alex ushers quietly, as he completely forgets that his friend doesn't know about his bond, shifting his eyes to his right arm. There is a thin, white scar standing out on his skin, looking like it was always there, like a wound long ago healed.
"Oh." Is Tom's answer and his eyes widen and Alex can't look into them, because that is certainly hurt in them there. His friend is jealous.
x
The night the police comes and knocks politely on their door, the world falls apart around Alex. A car accident, they say. He wasn't wearing his seatbelt, they say.
Lies.
He knows it' a lie not because of his uncle lectures on how to tell one - the policeman's eyes were shifting just a bit too the right - but because of the ones when they were getting into a car. Safety first, Alex. There are many ways you can die, so don't make stupidity one of them.
The next few days are a rush and he is suddenly sleeping in a bed that resembles more a cot than anything else, wakes up into the muddy weather of Wales, into pains in his muscles that he experienced already, but not through his own body.
Oh. His soulmate is a soldier then, or someone very similar. That would explain the phantoms he was getting the past four years, the way they slowly dimmed as not Alex but his bondmate body got more used to it. The constant stress of exercise he was unknowingly sharing with him.
He never really thought about what he makes his soulmate feel. About what kind of pains he unknowingly shared, if his bondmate ever tried to map them to find out who is the mysterious person at the end of the bond.
Alex is certainly giving them a lot to work with, considering the mess his life turned into. Getting constantly injured, attracting danger like honey flies.
He starts to wonder.
If his soulmate felt the way his skin turned cold, the way he choked on water when trying to escape that dreadful Man'o'war.
If his soulmate suddenly got inflicted with scratches all over their body as he crashed into the fence when trying to escape the Point Blank academy on an ironing board.
If his soulmate hair also got singed out, when Doctor Grief clone blew up the science wing of Brooklands and they both got caught in it.
If his soulmate also passed out when Alex was almost killed by the crushers in the sugar factory when dealing with General Sarov.
If his soulmate could recognize the tells of the training he was undergoing at Malagosto.
If his soulmate is alright after Alex got almost assassinated, if it somehow didn't transfer improperly, if they are still alive.
Alex gets more and more angrier at MI6, not because of the pain he needs to suffer because of them, but because of the pain he shares.
Alex doesn't have a remorse when inflicting pain, when dealing with his enemies, when causing accidents. Villans don't get soulmates, right? They don't have someone out there, sharing the pain they don't deserve. He forces himself to not think how someone might have felt the way Dr Grief went out of the living world with flames, as Alex crashed a snowmobile into the escaping helicopter. How someone might have felt a bullet entering their head as General Sarov commited suicide. He sure hopes no one felt the phantoms of getting crushed into small pieces by the engine of Air Force Once. People don't deserve villains as their soulmates.
x
The man recognizes him somehow, even though Alex wouldn't be able to see himself in his own reflection. It feels like such a long time since he saw a face belonging to someone who he could trust to some extent, even if it's just a soldier with whom he shared a cabin for two weeks. Alex is barely able to get a small breather when he is thrown into Indonesia's darkest secrets again.
He caught up Daniels looking at him weirdly several times, when showing him a fleeting look in the corner of his eye, when the agent thinks the teenager isn't looking. Scrunched up eyebrows, in puzzlement, in thought, in worry possibly. A shadow of something in his eyes.
He knows what the man sees. A broken boy, someone to worry about, a child soldier, a ticking bomb. A calamity, someone to stay away from. Alex tries to be friendly to him in the few moments they share together, but still can't help giving him the cold shoulder of stay away from me or you get burned. Alex doesn't feel like he deserves compassion and certainly not from someone who chosen this occupation of their own free will.
Alex would prefer to attack Yu's oil rig alone, without having anyone watching his back, but knows it's a foolish idea. They barely let him go with the strike force if it wasn't for his fingerprints encoded into the bomb failsafe system.
Ash is there. Standing next to Yu's side, his allegiances clear the moment Alex's eyes lay on him. The young spy gets lost in the despair, the madness that practically oozes out of his godfather and doesn't notice the gun pointed his way.
Silent scream locks up in his throat when he sees the friendly agent being hit by a bullet, when he feels the force as it slams into his own shoulder, when his nerves send signals that don't make any sense. Alex doubles over from the pain, his vision splits up as he blindly searches for the origin of the pain, for the wound, for the bullet, that is locked in entirely another body.
Oh.
His soulmate saved him from the fatal wound but not from the pain.
x
He knows that Mrs Jones knows and is very glad that she decides to not mention it at all. That she at least values some semblance of privacy. He knows Blunt wouldn't, but why would he annoy himself with something as trivial as additional pain inflicted on this fourteen-year-old body. There is something that shows through her stony facade when he asks about the status of Ben Daniels when she answers about the supposed length of his recovery.
He wouldn't be surprised if it was already written in their files and send to one of MI6 analysts. Agents with soulmates are a danger to their own mind. Agents who have as a soulmate another operative are a risk to security.
x
Whoever is Ben's soulmate, they must be quite younger than him. It was found out long ago that the pains don't transfer until all parties involved reached their third year of age. Scientists theorize it's because of the way the human neural network is formed, the mothers think it's so their babes wouldn't cry themselves into sleep. Growing up hurts. Ben is eleven when he is woken up in the middle of the night by the phantoms, by the way his teeth feel like they don't belong to him at all, like they are in places where they shouldn't be. He grabs a painkiller from their medicine cabinet in the bathroom and then goes to sleep and by the time he has to get up for school, it's all but a forgotten memory.
Ben is smart, just as his parents, his teachers often told him. It doesn't take him long to figure out his soulmate is eight years younger than him. That somewhere in the world there is a toddler who can feel everything bad that happens to Ben's body, that Ben is sending these painful impulses to a child. It makes him sick in the stomach.
Ben loves the gift he gets for his twelve birthday. The bike is fast and allows him freedom. Loves the way the wind feels in his hair, sounds in his ears, when he pedals quickly, away from the responsibilities a twelve-year-old might have. He is meeting a friend today, because they agreed in school to meet up in the park. He is lost in his thoughts when he swerves dangerously among the street, not noticing the way the pavement crumbles beneath his bike. He loses control, just barely managing to catch the bike so it doesn't fall on him but next to him. There is pain and blood and dust all over his left knee anyway and the first thing that comes through his mind isn't oh no I ruined the bike or oh no this stings and will need to be cleaned but oh no I hope the little kid he is bonded with haven't felt that.
It takes him months to force himself to sit on the bike again.
Ben is good at lying. He realises he has to be when two of his dreams don't connect. Ever since they started learning in school about the wars, how some people like to inflict pain on others, how last century brought humanity almost to a breaking point. Never again, he promises to himself and knows what he needs to go. He doesn't know that his mother cries that one night when he tells her he wants to join the army when he is of age, of how he wants to protect people from getting hurt more than necessary. I don't want my soulmate to live in the world my grandparents had to. He doesn't realise the irony in his decision, of how people would still get hurt, but by his hands.
It's not hard faking the information to the doctor when asked if he shares. He never showed the symptoms when he was a kid and people don't expect there to be such a big age gap, so there is no mention of his bond in his medical file. He is careful and he did his research beforehand and while it's not exactly public knowledge, people aren't allowed to join the army in Britain if they have a soulbond. Something about sending not one person to the battlefield but two, about leaving loved ones not only waiting at home for their soldier to return, but experiencing their injuries with them. Ben mumbles a barely audible I am sorry, when he leaves the doctor's office. There is no one in the hallway, but the person for whom the words are meant wouldn't be able to hear them anyway.
He stops counting the sorry's he mumbles over the days of his training. Sorry for the way his muscles hurt when he needs to wake up before dawn, sorry for the times he screws up on the obstacle course, then forced by the instructor to do a hundred push-ups as punishment. He hopes the kid - he should be around ten shouldn't be - the teenager doesn't hate him.
It doesn't take them long to notice how Ben never puts all the force behind his punches, how he tries to be extra careful in hand to hand combat training, how he focuses more on evading than acting. It almost costs him his place in the army. We don't have a place for little pussies here, the Sergeant screams in his face, interpreting Ben's reasons all wrong. It's almost like Ben forgot all the little pains he was getting since few years back, of the scrapes at his hands, in regular intervals, twice per week. Why would a kid need a martial training anyway?
x
Emotions barely and very rarely get transferred over the bonds, but then Ben's already restless sleep is interrupted by a wave of helplessnessand sorrow and loneliness. He starts crying out of his own accord and knows he won't be getting any sleep today, even though it's his last day in a real bed before the start of his SAS preliminary training. He has trouble catching his breath as he chokes on the feelings he now realises he never properly knew how they felt. Something very bad happened and Ben wants more than anything to know who he should be angry at, to know who caused a pain so strong it crossed the boundary of an emotion. He hates how he can't send anything back, how he can't tell the person he never met that they aren't alone.
He feels like he sees a ghost when the Sergeant introduces them in the second week of their training to their fifth member. The boy is consumed by the military fatigues way too big for his body and Ben is consumed by the darkness that lurks in the boy's eyes. He is reminded of the nightmare he got the night before he left to Beacons. He has two weeks to strike up a conversation with the boy, but he keeps away from them, evades them with a skill that a prey knows on instinct. He tries to tame Wolf's jabs a bit, but he barely knows the man and he doesn't listen at all.
Somehow the boy leaves with leaving an impression on all of them, without even learning his name and reasons why he got send there. Ben forgets about Cub when he barely gets a breather when their stay at the camp turns more into survival than training.
Ben is sitting in the mess hall, enjoying the sludge that they call in Brecon Beacons food, but is probably the reason why they call this building messhall. The mess hall seems like the only place these days when he has a bit of time left for him to just think, to wonder what changed. The pains are getting stronger recently, not following any pattern. He is out of breath more often and feels like his stress levels are also getting way too high for his own liking. What the heck is his soulmate doing. What would force a teenager into situations that threaten his life so much? Why he felt a few weeks back like he was choking on the air like he had no way to breathe. Why does he get sometimes the occasional shots of utter helplessness? Why did burns appeared over his body just to disappear in few seconds?
Then Ben get's recommended to MI6 and reallocated to Indonesia out of all places. Here he meets a ghost in the form of an Afghani boy, whose eyes tell dark stories, and Daniels is reminded of certain Cub.
Impossible.
He follows him and can't believe his own eyes when everything suddenly starts to make sense.
There are no rumours surrounding that boy, everything kept very hush hush around one of darkest British secrets. But Ben is smart and the moment he met the boy in Indonesia a shadow of doubt slithers into his thoughts. The profile he collected from the phantoms fits. The age fits. When he demands answers from the Deputy Head herself he knows she feeds him half-truths when she tells him that the boy is only sent on missions that aren't dangerous, where there is no risk to his life.
Lies.
He doesn't have access to the boy medical file and knows he never will in his whole life, but he bets there is a mention of a bullet wound near his heart. That there is a note about extensive mental trauma. That all the wounds that got transferred, the remains of scars that Benjamin's body now bears, are on the teenager's body too.
The boy is considered missing for three days and with him important secrets. The clock is ticking and the agents stationed in Indonesia are getting reckless. When someone mentions Rider, it's only in talks about how the boy is laying somewhere dead in the jungle.
Ben knows the truth, but keeps his thoughts to himself. They would ask why and it's a secret which could cost him more than his career. Then the nausea hits, the now familiar feeling of water, suffocating, cannot breathe, a pressure in his ears. Somehow it makes Ben pass out, which never happened before. He wakes up to dread filling his entire body, to the knowledge that the boy is dead.
He only got his soulmate so he could die. What was destiny thinking when it bonded them together?
"They boy is alive!" He hears someone scream in the background. No, he isn't, he thinks. He drowned. The people I work for let drown an innocent school kid.
"We tracked the signal to a clearing next to a waterfall. There is going to be clear space of a helicopter." Something in that sentence makes Ben freeze. A waterfall. Did he interpret it all wrongly? Suddenly he is reminded of all the pains and wounds the boy shared with him. It would take more than drowning to take him down. His shared experience speaks for itself.
They bring him back and somehow the boy finds an excuse to be sent to the field again. He wants to protest, but he is not meant to care, so he just shoots the boy few careful looks on the helicopter.
x
He sees the way the gun is aimed, and just knows who the man has in his sights. There is no time to look behind him, to know if Alex noticed it too, if the boy has time to evade, and Ben acts.
He throws himself right in front of Alex, somehow knowing where exactly the bullet will hit, making himself a human shield. He doesn't need more to be sure, all uncertainty long ago gone.
He can't let him die.
He will gladly take the bullet for him, even if it means they both will feel the pain. It's so much better than one of them dead, risking the other would die too.