one day we will be remembered

[notapaladin]

Soulmate AU? Soulmate AU.

-

Everyone in the Fifth World has a soulmate. Some people are born with another’s day sign seared into the thin flesh of their inner wrists; others only find it igniting their skin as they linger on Mictlan’s threshold. Children dream about meeting their tonalli’s other half, though most in time settle for people their families know and trust. There are many infants born each day, after all, and you would sooner have your Eight Death be the girl next door instead of the flat-faced, knock-kneed spinster across the canal. (Then your girl runs off with a lover, you marry the spinster anyway because she’s good with your children, and you find she makes you smile as the beautiful one never did. Fate has a way of working these things out.)

Acatl is twelve years old when he wakes with a strangled scream in the middle of the night to discover why it is that soulmarks, which don’t look much like burns, are always described as lighting up your veins. When it’s over, he blinks back tears, swallows the blood in his mouth—he’s bitten the inside of his cheek, and now it will swell and he’ll probably keep biting it for the next three days—and holds up his wrist to the moonlight. There is a number. There is a glyph.

“Ten Rabbit, huh?”

Cuixtli, the boy who always takes the mat next to him. He’d given Acatl a good kick for waking him up, but now he’s watching with fascination. He was one of the lucky ones—his soulmark came a few days after birth, and he’s accordingly been betrothed to the most likely local girl almost since then. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make him any less interested in others’ matches, and he grins as he looks Acatl over. “You’ll have some waiting to do. At least you can still play around ‘till you meet your girl, huh?”

He takes a slow breath. His skin still feels raw all over, too sensitive in the night air. The students of the calmecac are meant to be dignified, which is the only reason he doesn’t punch Cuixtli for that. He has no intention of playing around. He’ll meet her or he won’t, but either way he’ll live a good, temperate life. After all, he might be a priest if he completes his schooling. Priests have no soulmates. “We can’t all be like you.”

(She’ll be much younger than him. If they ever meet, they’ll be strangers. The soulmate bond guarantees a heart he’ll find pleasing, but that’s no substitute for knowing what she’s like. She might be arrogant, or cruel, or too stubborn for him to stand.)

(If the gods made a soulmate for him, he’s starting to think it might not be a girl at all, which is not comforting in the least.)

Cuixtli pats his shoulder, ignoring his flinch. “Cheer up, I’m sure you’ll meet her eventually.”

“Hm.” He looks down at his soulmark again. Fresh, it’s a healthy crimson with each line of the glyph picked out as precisely as any scribe’s pen. Carefully, he runs his thumb over it and is relieved when the touch doesn’t bring more pain, even though it’s still glowing faintly. He knows it will burn again and turn white when he meets her—if he meets her. He thinks she’ll probably be disappointed.

“Can you get me a bandage?”

There are other things to worry about, after all.

And so Acatl grows, and learns, and devotes himself first to the service of the gods and then to his fellow men, and as time passes he finds that he rarely, if ever, looks past the traditional white wristwraps of a priest of the Dead to see if the mark of his soulmate remains. Whoever they are, they’ll just have to be alone. Perhaps they’ll be happy anyway.

(He is not lonely. He is not. Even when his parents, furious at his decision, throw the mark in his face—Your soulmate is alive out there, Acatl, how can you forsake her?—he does not waver.)

(And if he cries, it is only the dust.)

& &

Teomitl is born with his soulmark, but it takes a day or two for anyone to notice. There is the lady Huitzilxochtin’s funeral to plan, after all. She, a great lady of the court with her husband’s day sign on her wrist as proof that they were destined for one another, lived just long enough to kiss her son’s forehead and whisper his name before walking into the Sun’s heaven, and with all that to deal with it is some time before anyone checks the boy for a mark.

It’s his nursemaid who finds it; she immediately tells her superiors, who tell his father Tezozomoc, who rushes into the women’s quarters to exclaim over his son’s good fortune at already having the other half of his heart in the world. Six Reed is an auspicious enough date; true, the number itself is unlucky, but those born on Reed days are great lovers of justice which will hopefully balance it out. The only snag is that she might be much older than him; there is no greater sorrow for an imperial youth then to have a soulmate who cannot bear him children.

They start parading girls in front of him immediately, of course. By the time he is old enough to enter calmecac, he’s met every noble maiden in the Triple Alliance—even the ones who aren’t the right day sign. You never know where your next marriage alliance will come from, after all. They’re...nice enough, he supposes. Most of them are pretty, and some of them have more interests than weaving and music to talk about. But they don’t set the mark on his wrist afire, and so he does not encourage friendship.

(He’s spent a lot of time wondering what she’d be like, this woman with his sign of Ten Rabbit on her wrist. He imagines she’d be much more interesting than any average court lady.)

Calmecac brings its own challenges. His friends there encourage him to branch out, to seek his soulmate or at least a few nights’ pleasure in a market girl or a sacred courtesan, and he finds himself shutting them down with a snarl before he can even think why. When they ask, he doesn’t know what to say.

So he tells them the truth, and they laugh in his face. That’s another few hours of punishment for starting a brawl, but it’s honestly worth it. (His soulmate will be the sun in his sky, a beauty beyond compare. He will never want anyone else.) They don’t laugh at him after that. Soon he begins weapons training in earnest, learning the ways of spear and sword and bow, and they don’t laugh at all.

He goes to war, takes a prisoner, shaves his head. By this time he knows himself well enough—knows the kind of person he is, the way his heart turns—to walk through the lines of captive men too, waiting for heat at his wrist that never comes. It would be a relief, except that it means his soulmate is still out there somewhere waiting.

(He hopes they’re waiting. He hopes they’re healthy, happy, not as lonely as he is—but he hopes that they look at their wrist and wonder.)

He has been freshly made a Leading Youth, the bright dye of his new cloak still a surprise each morning, when Guardian Ceyaxochitl summons him. Her voice is firm, eyes stern, as she tells him, “Mictlantecuhtli’s High Priest needs an extra pair of hands to deal with the matter of Priestess Elueia’s disappearance. You’ll do.”

He’s heard of the new High Priest. Acatl-tzin is supposed to be young for his position, just thirty, and the Guardian was very keen on his appointment even though he’s the son of peasants from the Atempan calpulli. More importantly, he remembers beautiful, terrified Elueia, and his heart aches.

Of course he says yes, and of course he runs up the steps of Lord Death’s temple as quickly as he can. Now is his chance to prove himself, to do more than take a single prisoner for the Sun’s nourishment. He’d be a fool to do otherwise.

Then he sees the man he came for, and the world goes still around him.

He’s not what Teomitl expected for his soulmate—not beautiful or wealthy or tall, not a strong warrior or a noble maiden dressed in gold. He’s only a bit taller than Teomitl himself, slender as a deer, with an expression that says he spends more time frowning than smiling. (Teomitl is almost glad for that. He’s sure that Acatl-tzin would be devastating if he smiled, and he doesn’t know if he can handle that just yet.) His hair is a glory, spilling down his back in waves, and he is not wearing a cloak. Teomitl finds himself grateful for the sizzling ache coursing up his left arm from the soulmark, because it’s a welcome distraction from the way an escaping lock of hair tumbles over bare skin.

He takes a breath. And another. Part of him wants to sob, wants to scream at the gods that it’s not fair—he’s finally found the other half of his soul, and he won’t even get to keep him. There will be no destined marriage such as his parents had; he’ll be lucky to so much as hold his hand. The rest of him remembers his pride and swallows down the pain.

He meets his soulmate’s eyes for the first time. They are darker than his own, narrowed with stress and tiredness and what he’s sure is pain. “You would be...Acatl-tzin?”

Your soulmate’s name on your lips resounds like a bell in their heart; Teomitl is impressed when Acatl doesn’t even flinch. Instead he nods, briefly averts his eyes, and says, “If it’s for a wake—“

A diligent, dutiful man. Teomitl would smile, if hearing his low voice didn’t serve as a reminder that they have a priestess to find. As for being his soulmate...well. He can bring that up later.

&

He’d had plans for that ‘later.’ They’d involved moonlight, flowers, a spread of delicate dishes from the palace kitchens. Things to tempt and flatter, things that would make Acatl smile and laugh and relax. (Maybe, just maybe, things that would turn Acatl’s heart towards him like a flower to the sun.)

They had not involved this.

Truthfully, he’s not sure he could have made a plan that included this. They’re on one of the Floating Garden’s thousands of islands, there is a dead and stinking beast of shadow practically right next to his ear, his leg is screaming in a way that suggests its claws did some serious muscle damage, and Acatl is bleeding horribly and liberally covered in mud.

Oh, and Acatl’s thrown a knife at him. Aiming for the beast, yes, but still in his direction. In the dark. At a moving target.

He’s angrily binding up Acatl’s wounds, muttering direly to himself about infection, when it slips out.

“...and no, you will not be fine, people die of wounds half as bad as these if they go rotten, Acatl-tzin—Duality, honestly, how did you give me a soulmate who’s so damned reckless—“

Acatl freezes under his hands. “Your—what did you say?”

Oh, gods. He’d said that out loud. He drops his gaze and prays that Acatl does the same with the subject. “I...” The words in his heart are locked behind a dam built of a lifetime’s longing, and he can’t force them out.

“Teomitl.”

If Acatl sounded angry or judgemental, Teomitl would snarl in his face. But he’s patient, and that’s what gets his tongue to work again even though he can’t take his eyes from the strips of cloth he’s winding around Acatl’s injured arm. “...Your day sign. Six Reed, isn’t it?”

Acatl draws in a shaky breath. Slowly, he nods.

He turns his hand over, showing Acatl the underside of his wrist. The lines of his soulmark burn white. Please accept me. Please. I don’t know, yet, if I love you—but I think that I could.

Acatl is silent. Teomitl lifts his head to find that he has his eyes shut, as though the truth is too painful to contemplate—but then he’s undoing the wristwrap on his injured arm in quick, jerky motions, letting it fall into the mud at his side, and Teomitl can’t look away from the glyph of his own day sign bone-white on Acatl’s skin.

“Ten Rabbit, in the year Ten Reed.”

Teomitl swallows past a sudden lump in his throat. “If you expect me to apologize—“

Acatl shakes his head. He still hasn’t met Teomitl’s eyes. “No. I should apologize. I felt it that day on the temple steps, but I...” He pauses, takes a breath, continues. “You are strong and brave, a warrior to make your family and the Empire proud—you ought to marry a woman and have a dozen children. I am...none of those things. Even were I not sworn to the service of Lord Death, I could give you none of the things you deserve.” Another breath, and he blinks once. “I simply cannot see a way forward for us.”

There are many ways forward when you’re the brother of the Revered Speaker, he doesn’t say. Acatl doesn’t need that revelation now, on top of everything else. But he’ll be damned if he lets this moment pass without saying something, and so he covers Acatl’s good hand with his own. (Acatl said us. He can work with that.) “Then we’ll make one, if you want.”

And now Acatl is looking at him in something like awe, and there’s a twitch to his mouth that might be the start of a smile. “Let’s get through this night, first.”

& &

They make it through the night. They make it through one week, another week, a month. Years.

And they make a way forward.

Acatl discovers it is much, much easier when your soulmate is the Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan instead of merely the Master of the House of Darts under (the late, unlamented, unmourned) Tizoc. They still cannot marry, cannot live under the same roof—Teomitl offers, but rooms in the palace would suit Acatl ill and they both know it—but when you bear the Revered Speaker’s soulmark openly there is absolutely no one in the Empire who will bar you from his chambers. Officially Acatl will never have children, only a great many nieces and nephews, but Mihmatini places each of hers in her husband’s arms and tells her brother to give them their names. (Teomitl only once cries a little, out of sheer joy.)

Of course there are arguments and petty disagreements. Of course there are fights, hot and furious and leaving both of them shaken. (Just because they are each other’s souls divided doesn’t mean they are always in harmony, after all.) But they make up in the end, always, and go to their mat warm in each other’s arms. Acatl guards the boundaries, and his beloved guards the Empire. Neither of them are ever lonely again.

Only once, when they are old men, does Teomitl bring up the path they’ve made. “Acatl?”

“Hm?” He’s been trying to make it through a scribe’s report on pale-skinned strangers from the east for an hour, with little success. Teomitl’s offered to read it to him, but he declined—true, his vision is no longer what it once was and the glyphs are distressingly blurred, but he is not blind yet, thank you. He can still make out his soulmate’s face just fine, and can’t help but smile at the sight.

Teomitl tilts his head, frowning, and Acatl hopes he hasn’t forgotten what he was going to say already. Seventeen years ago a great flood swept the city, Chalchiuhtlicue’s rage battering down the walls; Teomitl, trapped under the debris, had been lucky to survive. In Acatl’s estimation, injuries that preclude him being able to fight alongside his army are a small price to pay for such a miracle. When he speaks, though, his voice is quiet and clear. “...Do you think we’ve done enough? For those who will come after us, I mean. I know we can’t be the only soulmates who...well.” He gestures between them, encompassing the decades they’ve spent living as the worst-kept secret in Tenochtitlan.

It’s a question worth thought, and he gives it its due. “I think...I think we can always do more.”

(Even at the very end, when they’re averting the destruction of their world hand in bloodied hand, he smiles and thinks We’ve made a very good start.)