Chapter Text
Jim has always been glad that his mother’s soul-mark didn’t change after his father died. Some people’s do, when they’re widowed and they remarry. But he doesn’t think he could have stood it, knowing that his mother was somehow meant to be with Frank. Her real mark just disappears, and she gets the image of it tattooed onto her hand in defiance.
He likes his mark, as a kid. It’s on the back of his neck just at his hairline, and it’s a wavy kind of black octogram and it has all kinds of religious significances to different cultures that he claims whenever a particular one suits him. He likes to think whoever out there matches him is going to be a real badass, someone else worthy of a mark like that—that they’ll go out and wreak havoc on the galaxy. Sometimes when Frank is drunk, he says that Jim’s mark is the mark of the devil and speculates darkly about what kind of disgusting alien would match a mark like that.
Then, when Jim steals Frank’s car and drives it off a cliff, he gets sent to Tarsus IV—and after Tarsus, his mark changes.
The doctors told him that it wasn't unusual, when he was recovering in the hospital. Major changes in the course of a person’s life can trigger a change. Now the mark is an only empty circle, bisected by a thin vertical line. He doesn’t know when, exactly, it happened—when he first arrived on Tarsus? Did the universe know what was going to happen? When Kodos issued the first kill order? Sometime while he was on the run with the other kids? The first time he killed one of Kodos’s men and then threw up nothing because his stomach was empty? No one was looking at it, seeing all the depth drain out of it, all the edges being ground down. What was the last straw, when he stopped being meant for that other person?
When his mother sees it, she gets very quiet and then tells him she’s going to be staying planetside with him. She stays for nearly two months, coaxing him back into eating, into speaking more, into a little less persistent hypervigilance. Jim wants her not to worry, so he pretends, bags up his stash of emergency food and keeps it in the barn instead of the house, lies in bed with his eyes closed, counting the minutes, instead of roaming around at night. Eventually she hugs him hard and says, “Will you be all right if I head back out?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “Go keep the galaxy safe.” He thinks that if she’d been on Tarsus, she would’ve seen what Kodos was planning and killed him before he could do it. He wishes she would stay, but Starfleet is offering her a ship, and he knows she can only put them off for so long before they give it to someone else.
“If you need anything—”
“I’ll let you know.” She’s already looking skyward, he knows.
She’s gone the next day, and he looks across the dinner table at Frank and says, “How much longer are we gonna keep doing this?” He used to be afraid of Frank, but he thinks Frank is kind of afraid of him now.
“I told your mom I’d keep track of you,” Frank says, which is very different than take care of you and they both know it. Sam is at parrises squares practice, or they wouldn’t be so open about it. “You’ve got a bed, you’ve got three meals a day if you don’t just hide them”—Frank caught Jim hiding food a couple days ago and only shook his head—“and we don’t need to step on each other any more than that.”
“Yeah,” Jim says. “Fine.” Frank mostly leaves him alone after that.
He doesn’t stop hoarding food—just nonperishable stuff, emergency rations, that kind of thing, just in case. He’s hungry, he’s always hungry, but not so much for food anymore. His mark emptied out and it feels like maybe there’s something emptied out of him. He never knows quite how to fix it—Sam is always willing to give him a bewildered kind of hug, but that’s not it either. When he touches that empty circle on the back of his neck, he thinks, what kind of person has this and when did it happen to me.
The funny thing is, his real life doesn’t change that much. He likes people, with the exception of Frank, and most people like him. When he gets a little older, the cops arrest him for all kinds of things—stealing and smoking cigarettes, getting into fights, going for joyrides—but they always let him go when he smiles and ducks his head a little and says, “Sorry, Officer, won’t happen again.” His teachers are frustrated by his lack of effort, but they pass him anyway because he smiles and they know he’s smart. The bartenders know he isn’t old enough, but he smiles and they sell him a beer or two if the manager isn’t looking. Everyone is charmed in spite of themselves and Jim accepts it, this ease the universe has given him with people, in trade for whatever else was lost.
And other people—oh, they like his smile, they like his mouth and his body and everything he likes to do (and he likes to do almost everything). Frank calls him a slut one night, when Frank is drunk and Jim comes in late with a ladder of hickeys marching up one side of his neck, and Jim doesn’t know how he feels about that but he knows that soon he’ll move out and be free of Frank forever. He dates—well, fucks—a lot of people. They all have a good time. None of them have matching marks.
Jim has never quite been sure what to make of the marks, anyway. It was cool to think that there was someone else out there, made for him, someone he was fated to be with. Cooler when he was young and not quite such a screwup. It seemed kind of special, that his parents had matched all those years ago. But now—what kind of person would the universe have designated for him, anyway? And how can the marks be so important, when they can change? What about the person who matched him before—does that person not have a soulmate anymore? Does Jim now match someone who didn’t have a soulmate before, or is there someone out there whose mark changed when his did—and did that cause some kind of cascading effect?
He's not going to stay here in Iowa forever, but he hasn’t quite fixed on the right escape plan yet. He drops out of school—well, stops going mostly, he doesn’t officially withdraw because what’s the point—because it’s excruciatingly slow, painfully boring. He has genius-level aptitude, what are they going to teach him in this public school in this hick town? Sometimes he works eighteen-hour shifts at the shipyards just to give himself something to do, reads a lot of books to keep his mind distracted and smokes a lot of cigarettes and bartends at a couple of the local bars until his shift ends and he can start (keep) drinking. Pushes his luck with the cops until he gets in one too many fights and they finally do arrest him, and he spends six months in county jail. His roommates are a rotating cast of town drunks and fuckups, and he mostly spends a lot more time reading and talking to Nancy, the jail agent, who’s a couple years older than him and has a lot of boyfriend problems (they don’t fuck until he’s out of jail, to his regret). He has an apartment, but he doesn’t spend a lot of time in his own bed. You don’t have to be someone’s soulmate to have fun.
Jim is coming off a twelve-hour shift at the shipyard and six hours on at the bar, and he’s who-knows-how-many-drinks deep, when he decides that it’s a good idea to aggressively hit on a few of the dozens of good-looking Starfleet cadets flocking the bar. He’s used to this too, the waves of them who show up for a last night of fun every few months before shipping out. It’s a good routine for him—one or two always want a one-night stand with a townie, whether he plays a dumb one or a smart one, and everyone enjoys themselves.
Tonight, he’s had maybe a few too many and he’s sloppy, too aggressive. Uhura puts him off well, kinder than he deserves after the “talented tongue” innuendo. And then the other cadets decide to intervene and he realizes, this is what he was after all along—a fight, the dizzy adrenaline, the clean pain, the rapid approach of darkness. And they give it to him—oh, they give it to him, beating him into near-unconsciousness, with broad telegraphed punches that he blocks half-heartedly until he’s too incapacitated to do more than flail ineffectually—
Pike comes in to stop them with a ridiculous little whistle. When Jim is cleaned up enough to sit upright, still bleeding sluggishly on his filthy shirt, Pike says all the words that you would expect—all the words designed to inspire Jim to do better. And Jim—he thinks, what the hell, Riverside is getting smaller by the day, god forbid he should wake up some morning and discover that his mark has changed again to match someone here. If the shuttle weren’t leaving in four hours, maybe there would be time for him to change his mind, but instead he shows up for the shuttle in that unpleasant transition time between drunk and hungover, meets Bones, and accepts the flask from him.
Jim tries to glance surreptitiously at Bones as they disembark the shuttle, looks a little more openly when they’re sent to a changing room to put on the hideous red uniforms. “Looking for a mark?” Bones asks. “Let me know if one shows up. Disappeared when I got married—should’ve taken that as a sign.”
“My mom’s disappeared, after my father died.” He must still be a little drunk if he’s walking around saying things like that. “It didn’t change when she remarried.”
“Lucky her.” Bones grimaces. “It disappears, sometimes, if you ignore what it tells you for long enough.” Jim wonders if that means his mom was never that committed to Frank. He should let her know that he joined Starfleet, one of these days. “Mine should be showing back up any day now, what with the divorce being final.”
“It doesn’t look like it has,” Jim says. “Not that I can see, anyway.” He’s only known Bones for a drunken hour or so, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing if they happened to match, he thinks.
Bones extends his own bare forearms and frowns at them for a minute before pulling on the uniform shirt. “What about you?”
Jim’s hand goes to the back of his neck, where that empty circle lurks. “Right here,” he says, and taps it. He wore his hair longer, for a while, to cover it, but it’s shorn short now—the mark will be visible. “It changed,” he says roughly, and tugs his own shirt over his head. “When I was a kid.”
“They do that.” Bones’s voice is gentler, like he knows what that means, and Jim regrets mentioning it.
“It used to be a lot cooler,” he says.