Aaron has read his words only once, on the day they first appeared.

And he didn't think they were fitting or telling or revealing or really anything at all except perhaps, very distantly, that they're pretty much par for the fucking course.

What he feels, though, is a stomach-churning lurch of instinctive revulsion towards them, like the letters are something unnatural and already rotten that had wormed their way into his flesh as he slept. Something diseased that shouldn't be a part of him, and he wants it gone.

He tries to scratch them out, but after the blood has washed away and the wounds have healed, only his skin is scarred. The mark is unchanged, its words are still clear, and he knows he'll never be rid of it.

So he wraps a bandage around his arm and hides the mark away; out of sight and – by and large – out of mind.
-

-
He tells his mum and Paddy that he just wants to keep his mark private, and they seem to understand that; respect it. Lots of other people do the same, after all.

With Jackson and Ed, he uses the excuse that he wants to be sure that they mean the words, if they ever say them, and aren't just reciting them from memory. Neither of them had been convinced, and both of them had appeared a little stung by his refusal, because it's supposed to be a show of trust, letting someone else read your words; an expected step in any close relationship.

But, even more than a decade on, he still can't stand to look at them that closely himself. Whenever he showers or changes his bandage, he squints his eyes until his vision blurs and the letters bleed together into an undifferentiated black smudge.

The skin around the mark is a shade paler than the rest of his arm now, and permanently corrugated with embedded creases. It stings sometimes, and his left biceps ache dully all the time, but he never ties his bandage less tightly and he never leaves his words uncovered for a moment longer than he has to.
-

-
The letters that make up Robert's mark look as though they were drawn rather than written, copied by a hand unused to forming their shapes. Not one of them is the same size, not one of the lines is even, and the trailing tails of the g's all end in barbed hooks.

Aaron doesn't intend to read it at first, but there's a dare in Robert's eyes, and a warm note of encouragement in his voice as he says he's sure, that he wants it. And, although it goes against every ounce of better judgement he owns, Aaron finds he cannot long deny him in this, either.

I hate you, and nothing you can do is ever going to change that

He mouths the words, careful not to speak a single syllable of them aloud – because he doesn't need to know, and it doubtless wouldn't change anything between them, even if he did – and when he reaches their end, he has to run his hand across them just to reassure himself that they're real and they're there, because he's never seen a mark so much like his before; something ugly, and spiteful, and cruel.

That brief flash of kindred feeling almost tempts Aaron to reveal his own mark when Robert asks to see it too, but though his fingers twitch towards his bandage, he cannot force them to move any closer no matter how hard he tries.

The habit of concealment is too long-ingrained to overcome.
-

-
When Robert speaks Aaron's words, they don't feel any different to the ones that had come before them.

They hurt in just the same way, and it's only minutes later, after he's locked himself in the portacabin, tears pooling blood-hot against his lower eyelids and shivering so hard that his teeth rattle, that he recognises them for what they were at all.

Then, for a moment, there's relief, because it's over, it's done, and nothing has changed, but as his heart rate slows and his breathing evens out, the pain begins to seep in in anger's stead.

His mark burns as if it's had a fire set below it, and he shrugs of his jacket, rips off his T-shirt, half-expecting, half-fearing that his flesh will be blistered and bubbling, that blood will have soaked through his bandage, but there isn't anything to see. Nothing has changed there, either.

The heat spreads through his body, raising a prickling sweat in its wake at his palms, his top lip, along his hairline.

He tries telling himself it must just be shock, over and over with ever-increasing determination, even though his fever doesn't dull and it feels as though there are storm clouds gathering deep in his guts; heavy and roiling, and flickering with sudden, sharp electric sparks.

He keeps on lying to himself, though, because he doesn't want to believe his reaction is significant any more than he wanted to believe that his words were ever truly his own.
-

-
The lie crumbles in the same instant that a bullet rips through Aaron's sternum and he splays a hand protectively across his chest, only to discover that he's completely unharmed.

But then he doesn't have time to worry about marks or bonds or fucking soulmates, because there's a gun on the ground, his mum ashen-faced and shaking, and only one conclusion that seems inescapable, especially when he's so woozy from losing someone else's blood that he can't order his thoughts with anything resembling coherency.

And that blood bites down into his hands like acid when he presses down on Robert's wound as Dan directs him to, and Robert's heart beat pounds through them, along his arms and up his neck. Fills his head until his skull aches with it; arrhythmic, laborious, and gradually slowing.

It's the only thing he can hear.
-

-
The storm doesn't pass, and the lightning crackles through Aaron's body unceasingly now, pulsing in a regular, mind-numbingly repetitive pattern that he doesn't realise might mark out the peaks and troughs of an ECG until he enters Robert's hospital room and hears the machine beeping.

And this near to him, the—

(Aaron can't bring himself to call it a bond, because soulbonds are supposed to be warmth, comfort and fulfilment, but this just tears at him, and, more than that, he can't accept that Robert Sugden is the other half of his soul, because what sort of man would that make him?)

— thing inside Aaron begins spit and jolt so violently that it hurts.

He reaches out and rests the very tips of his fingers against the back of Robert's hand, not really thinking, but hoping that the contact might ground him; that the restless, hungry energy fizzing and popping through his veins might arc like electricity between them and pass harmlessly away.

But the tumult doesn't subside, and there's only Robert's cool skin beneath Aaron's and the clockwork tick-tock of his heart beating, echoing around Aaron's chest.

It feels even more alien that his mark ever did, and he desperately wishes it gone. He doesn't really care how.
-

-
One of Aaron's fellow inmates complains incessantly to anyone who gives even the faintest appearance of listening that it's a travesty that the UK doesn't allow conjugal visits for prisoners, because he has a soulmate on the outside and it's killing him – literally killing him – to be kept so far away from her all of the time.

"I'm so used to feeling her here," he says, pounding his fist against his breastbone, "that it's like my own heart's stopped, too. There's hardly anything there now. It's all just... fading away."

It's the same for Aaron, and he's glad of it. The lightning died down to static with distance, and with time, has weakened yet further to a low, droning buzz, one that he can quite easily push to the very back of his mind.

With enough determination, he thinks he might be able to ignore it entirely.