Pain Sharing Soulmate AU Part 5
(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)
Little Simon Riley isn’t even six years old when he learns how to take a backhand to the face and keep going. When he learns that pain doesn’t stop when you cry, and that sometimes there are bad people in the world and no one stops them.
He learns that the world is unfair, and sometimes you can’t help the ones you love.
He learns that the ones who are supposed to love you can hurt you worse than anyone, and that somehow you’ll still love them anyway.
He learns that people will look away, when you’re hurting, especially when the ones that are doing it are family.
He learns that no one will protect him, and that there is no point in trying to protect himself: it just makes the hurt worse.
He learns that pain is a part of life, and there is no escape.
What Little Simon Riley *doesn’t* learn, is that he has a soulmate.
Not until he is nearly eleven years old, and his father has been out on a rager for most of two weeks, away from home; deep in the parties and clubs he’d once been such a fixture at.
Reliving his glory years in booze and drugs and women.
‘Away from home’ is the important part as far as Simon is concerned.
Away from Simon.
The bruises he carries like permanent tattoos against his skin are starting to fade, the scab of a cigarette burn falling away, the aches everywhere are easing, quieting, taking up less of his attention, the longer his father stays gone.
He is sitting quietly, doing his homework while Tommy colors and his mum cooks dinner, and just… soaking in the fragile quiet while they have it.
Soon dinner will be ready, or Tommy will get bored and decide tormenting Simon is more fun than coloring, or Nigel will get home and the nightmare will start again.
But for now, for the moment, things are calm.
Which is why the sudden, stinging pain across his palms takes him so suddenly by surprise that it startles a gasp out of him. He wrenches his hands up to look at them.
Unmarked, unblemished, but stinging like he’d skinned them, like they should be raw and painful.
“Simon?” His mum asks, sticking her head out of the kitchen. Nigel isn’t home: it is safe enough to investigate pained sounds from her children. “Everything alright?”
“Paper cut,” Simon says on instinct, the lie falling practiced from his lips, even though he’s never before had to lie to his mum: she knows where his various marks and bruises come from. It comes easily anyway, as unconscious as flipping his hands down to press his palms protectively against his work, even though there is no outward sign of the cause of the stinging pain. “Just surprised me, mum. I’m fine.”
Simon’s mother hums, retreating back into the kitchen. Tommy had also been drawn by Simon’s sounds, but when Simon sticks his tongue out at him he returns it and goes back to his coloring with a huff.
Simon goes back to his homework, like his entire world hasn’t just changed in the space of a heartbeat, like his own heart isn’t pounding, pounding, pounding in his chest, shivers running down his spine like drips of ice water.
It isn’t until late that evening, when he finally gets some privacy in the shower, that he lets himself look again. Lets himself take in the completely undamaged skin of his palms, investigate the way the occasional stinging pain in his knees doesn’t match up with his own lingering bruises. Instead, it extends a short way down his legs, like the time he’d fallen while running, and scraped everything from his kneecaps to halfway down his shins.
This pain he is feeling isn’t his.
He is well old enough, at eleven, to understand what that means. Even babies like Tommy can understand what that means.
It means that Simon has a soulmate. It means that Simon’s pain, the constant in his life, isn’t only his.
It means that every time Simon’s dad has hit him, hurt him, Simon has been letting him hurt the other half of his soul.
It means Simon has been failing to protect his soulmate, and he *didn’t even know.*
~~~
The next time Nigel hits him – only a day after he finally comes home, a week after Simon *realizes* – Simon fights back. He’d thought – he was used to the pain.
It was just what happened.
If Nigel was in a bad mood, or Simon didn’t get out of his way fast enough, or he’d run out of money before he’d had his last drink, or they were being too loud, or they weren’t happy enough to see him, or they didn’t show enough appreciation for the most recent terrible animal he’d brought home, or –
But if every time Nigel hits Simon he is also hitting his soulmate, and that’s not –
It’s not fair.
He can’t know it’s coming, can’t judge the mood, or brace himself the way Simon can.
He can’t know what set Nigel off this time, and if it’s likely to be more words or more fists, or if the boots are likely to come into it this time, or the belt. He can’t dodge, even if Simon has mostly given up on that for the way it makes his father madder.
All he can do is feel it when the pain comes, helpless to stop it, and hurt.
Simon can’t let that keep happening.
*He* has to stop it.
So he fights back.
Or he tries to at least.
He kicks and bites and punches.
He yells.
He shouts at his father that he can’t do this, that he has to stop.
He doesn’t know what he was expecting.
He already knows his father hates being talked back to.
He beats him worse than he ever has before, for his defiance, until he finally gives up, gives in, curled up on the ground and waiting for it to stop.
His mother comes to him, in the aftermath, with ice wrapped in a towel, and more in a cup for him to suck on. Simon had been laying where his father had finally left him and staggered off to bed, collecting himself slowly. He sat up when she approached, to give her better access; propped himself up against the leg of a chair with a hissed breath as his body protested. “Let me see,” she says, her hands as gentle as her voice, and cool and comforting on his sore jaw, and Simon opens his mouth for her to look at the aching, fleshy gaps where two of his teeth had been.
“Baby teeth,” is her verdict, as she hands him the ice and a tissue to soak up the bloody saliva. “I bet they were already a little loose.”
Simon nods his head jerkily in agreement.
They weren’t.
Even that small motion hurts, pain signals lighting up down his spine as movement agitates a hundred other little aches that cascade across his nerves. He slips a few of the ice cubes into his mouth, lets them sit against the aching holes in his gums, lets the cool, blood water slip back out of his mouth to soak into the tissue.
He knows better than to swallow too much blood if he doesn’t want to be throwing up later.
He’s not sure he could swallow right now anyway, with how tight his throat and chest are.
There is guilt. He’s never been in this kind of pain all at once before, and he’s subjected his soulmate to every bit of it.
But he thinks the feeling that is choking him, that is stealing his words and his breath, isn’t the guilt.
It’s *grief.*
He won’t feel any more of his soulmate’s pains like this. Not through the aching, chiming agony of his own body, familiar enough that he’d stopped really listening to it a long time ago.
It had taken the sharp new pain of the – fall? To clue Simon into the existence of his soulmate, to the pain they shared. But once he was paying attention?
The last week has been a novel host of sensation: the fading scrapes on palms and knees, and the slight knock he’d gotten to his elbow from a few days later, the pinch in his feet he associated with new shoes, and the tiny sting at his cuticle he thinks is a hangnail.
Pain, yes, that familiar companion, but not like it always has been.
Every bit of this new pain is a ‘you are not alone! I’m here, I’m here’ singing out across his nerves.
To lose that soft chorus to the pervasive pain of his own battered body is a kind of grief he doesn’t have words for.
He’s never had something that was only his, before.
Clothes came to him second hand, and then went to Tommy. His school bag and books were the same. They shared a room in this small flat. The few games or toys they got were to be shared. Anything more either vanished or never materialized as his father pissed all their money away.
To have something so precious, that is only his, and then have it taken away, even temporarily… that is unforgivable.
He presses a hand to the sore, red blotch on his jaw he knows will be a livid bruise in a couple of days, and he thinks.
He thinks about pain, and fairness, and he thinks about his soulmate.
He thinks about failure, and forgiveness.
His mother crouches in front of him for a few minutes while he thinks, fretting as she inspects the split in his eyebrow, cleans it of blood and papers it over with a couple of small bandages to hold it together. He lets his mother fuss, moving with her as she cleans the splits in his knuckles, bandages down a fingernail he tore part way off while scrabbling at Nigel’s thick denim vest.
The silence stretches between them, as it usually does in moments like this, and Simon tips his head back against the chair and closes his eyes and just… breathes through the sting of antiseptic on where the skin had split at his elbow when he’d hit the worn linoleum.
He’ll have to wash the blood off the floor before it stains.
He listens as his mother puts away the supplies but doesn’t move away.
She takes both of his hands in her small, cool palms. He picks his head up to look at her, even though it hurts.
“...You can’t speak to your father that way,” is what she finally says, firm and just a little bit reproving.
Simon looks up at her, one eye already bruising shut, and fury tries to spark up his spine, tries to wrap around his throat and crawl onto his tongue and spit venom like one of Nigel’s snakes, but –
He pulls one hand away to spit another mouthful of blood and pooling saliva into the tissue he’d discarded on his lap.
Looks at the bloody mess in his hand and just… aches, tired.
He’s so tired.
He nods, squeezing her hand once to show he’s heard her, before he lets it go to grab the bundle of ice and press it to the swelling eye.
She’s right, after all.
He spoke up, he fought back.
He did it to protect someone who couldn’t protect themselves, but all he did was provoke Nigel and make it worse.
All he did was *hurt his soulmate worse.*
So, she’s right.
He can’t speak to his father like that, can’t fight back.
He also can’t just *let* himself be hurt, because if he gets hurt his soulmate hurts.
He’s not sure how to tread that line, but he is going to have to try. He hopes his soulmate will forgive him: for all the pain that has come before, and all the pain that is still before them.
Because his mother is right.
But she’s not going to be right forever.
