Work Text:
X-23’s soulmarks fade in at seven years old, under intense radiation meant to activate her mutant genes. She doesn’t know what they are, what they mean. Objectively, she knows what they say, but she does not understand their significance. She ignores them.
Dr. Kinney notices them first, still pale like old ink. She panics, knowing in her gut that the other doctors will hate this new development. All that time spent trying to turn the girl into a weapon, an inhuman, unfeeling thing. Time, wasted, as her daughter has a soulmate—two! It proved the girl was capable of love, of emotion, of caring. All things that are unnecessary in a weapon. Dr. Kinney knows that when the other doctors see the marks, they will re-double their efforts to dehumanize her (especially now her claws have matured and her healing factor kick-started). And Dr. Kinney is scared they will succeed, that somehow the marks will fade away and her daughter will be robbed of happiness.
(She wonders about the marks, sometimes. Two names are unusual. Rare, but not unheard of. Perhaps something went wrong in the cloning? In splicing her DNA to Weapon X’s? At least neither of the marks are her or Weapon X’s mark, who is noted as having Japanese characters marching down his neck. Dr. Kinney supposes this proves that clones are more than their genetic source. Her daughter is her own person, and not simply a distorted reflection of Weapon X.)
She tries and fails to explain soulmates to the girl. (Laura, she thinks, testing the name in her head. The girl will need a name, a proper one, so that there is something to be written on her soulmates’ skin.) Laura is deathly silent as Dr. Kinney trips over her words and finally stops trying altogether. Later. She will have time to explain it properly later, when Laura is older.
“You must keep your marks hidden,” Dr. Kinney says instead. She tries to convey all her hope and worry and concern into her words. “It is important. They are yours.” Laura just stares silently back.
It doesn’t take long for Dr. Rice to notice. When he does, he is furious. Hate bubbles up and it takes a moment for him to reign it in enough so that he can actually speak. Weapons do not have soulmates. A gun does not have a soulmark. He informs Dr. Sutter of the development and lays the groundwork for accelerated training. (He starts a mental list: empathy removal, emotion blockers, getting rid of that idiot Japanese sensei.)
It’s during the procedure he gets the idea. Dr. Rice takes great pleasure in denying anesthesia, in slowly pulling each of X-23’s finally-grown bone claws out. He sharpens them, shapes them into weapons. Coats them in their precious store of adamantium. Then he uses one of the claws to carve into her skin, perhaps going deeper than necessary, but he’s confidant her healing factor will negate the issue. He cuts out the marks and tosses the black-stained skin aside. Then he just as slowly puts the claws back, sliding between metacarpals and metatarsals.
By the next day, X-23 is fully healed. The claws reintegrated into her body, connected again by muscle and sinew. Working as intended. Dr. Rice takes a moment to bask in this sense of pride, of accomplishment, before going to the cell to check the marks.
The skin healed perfectly, as he thought it would. He shouts in frustration—the marks grew back, too. Black scours on her skin, as if taunting him.
He tries so many different ways to remove them. Fire. Acid. Scalpel. Again and again. But X-23 heals, she always heals, and the names return in due time, as dark and bold as ever.
Kimura is introduced to X-23 as her handler. She is briefed on X-23’s development and progress to date, handed over a thick file. She grins when she sees the picture attached to the file, a snapshot of X-23’s soulmarks with the annotation that they have not found a way to remove them. Kimura commits the names to memory, the shape of them. She thinks the information will be useful, someday.
Laura is fourteen and it takes her twenty-two days of observation to knock on the Kinneys’ door. Megan knows this because Laura told her in that clipped, detached way she had. Megan is fourteen, too, and her soulmark appeared only recently. Laura is the first person she shows it to. (Laura is her first friend, her only friend since the kidnapping and the nightmares.) She lets Laura touch the name gently, a ghostly trace that makes Megan’s hair stand on end.
“What about your soulmark?” Megan asks, excitedly. She wants to know more about her cousin, especially the good things. She knows there is so much darkness in Laura’s past than she hasn’t shared, but a soulmark means a brighter future. Megan wants that for Laura.
“Soulmark?” Laura says, tilting her head to the side like she does when she doesn’t understand a pop culture reference Megan uses.
“Your soulmark,” Megan says again. “You know. The name of your soulmate etched into your skin?” She brandishes her mark again.
Laura twists around and lifts her shirt. There, along her flank, are two names. They’re separated from each other, curving around different angles of the same muscle. But definitely soulmarks. Megan laughs.
“Two!” she says excitedly. It’s a bit weird. Megan’s never seen more than one name on a person before, although she knows it can happen. But then she thinks that Laura deserves two soulmates. She needs a little extra love for all that she’s been through.
After Kimura, when Megan has to say goodbye to Laura and leave her alone, again, Megan presses the choker with her and Aunt Sarah’s photos into Laura’s hand.
“You find them,” Megan says through gritted teeth. She’s afraid she’s going to cry, and she needs Laura to understand her without blubbing her words. She holds Laura’s side where they both know her soulmarks are. “You find them, and you don’t let them go.”
Cessily Kincaid’s soulmark is odd, but she kind of likes it. It’s two names, one right on top of the other on her scapula. Like a list. She thinks that one is her soulmate’s real name, written in some kind of Arabic language Cessily can’t identify, much less read. The other written in plain English. She thanks the universe for giving her a translation so she can find her soulmate easier.
Her soulmark heralds her mutant power. The black scrawl is just darkening as her skin turns metallic and sloughs off uncontrollably. (At Xavier’s Institute, she learns that mutants often get their marks around the same time as their X-gene kicks in—they’re intrinsically tied.)
She screams for her dad, frantically trying to pull herself together from the thick puddle she’s melted into. Her hand partially forms as she tries to reach for the nearest hard surface to haul herself up.
Her parents panic and call anyone they can think of.
It takes days, but Cessily manages to mold herself into something resembling a human. It becomes easier after that, until her body slips back into its shape naturally. Her parents confront her, shoving a pamphlet for Xavier’s Institute into her hands and saying words like mutant and inhuman.
“We saw your soulmark,” her mother says, using the same tone as she used for mutant. Her father’s eyes are hard, and Cessily thinks she should have expected this, that there was a reason she didn’t show them the name right away.
Female and foreign. An Arab.
She packs and leaves for the Institute.
Cessily loves the Institute. She makes friends with Julian and slots right in with the other mutants. There’s so much going on all the time, and she’s learning how to control her powers and use them to fight, to protect herself. People are open where Cessily’s old life had been very closed. They talk and joke and they have a community.
On one of their many movie nights, they’re discussing soulmates and soulmarks. It’s started by Laurie, who’s recently found her soulmate in Josh, and the two are being disgustingly cute. Julian smugly shows everyone the name crawling over his calf. Brian talks about what he’s gonna say when he first meets his. Noriko rolls her eyes and calls him a hopeless romantic.
“Laura Kinney,” Cessily says proudly. Her parents might not approve, but she’s Cessily’s soulmate, not theirs. She thinks she’d love Laura even if the girl looked like Wolverine. (She hopes Laura’s not that ugly.)
Decimation.
The morning after is chaos. Emma Frost slowly reigns in the Institute, establishes order. She dismisses staff and students who are no longer mutants and tightens her hold on the remaining few. Bodies are sent back to their families. Room assignments, schedules, and classes are shuffled around. Sentinels guard the grounds. There are so few of them left.
Sometimes, Cessily wonders how they got chosen, the leftovers. She looks at her still-metal hands and feels distinctly unlucky.
She hopes her soulmate is normal. She hopes her soulmate is human, didn’t have to live through the hell of M-Day. She hopes her soulmate won’t care that she’s one of the leftovers.
God, but she hopes.
Logan hauls Laura into the Institute with as much ceremony as anyone can expect of the Wolverine. (He doesn’t even bother to tell Frost. He’ll let Scott handle that.)
“My daughter,” he says, his hand hovering above Laura’s shoulder but not actually touching. “Don’t make her want to kill you.”
He leaves her with the kids and thinks, that’s that.
Laura’s story circulates the remaining students. It’s not like they have much else to talk about, besides who’s leaving. A new student is a distinct change. Laura Kinney, Wolverine’s clone.
“So, Laura Kinney,” Noriko says, sidling up to Cessily in the dining hall. With such a big room and so few students, there’s a lot of empty space.
“Oh, god,” Cessily drops her head into her hands.
The moment Wolverine had brought Laura in, Cessily knew. And from the not-so-discrete poke in the side from Victor, so did some of the others. When Wolverine had left, Cessily tripped over the back of the couch to introduce herself properly.
Her soulmate. Her soulmate was here. Cessily thinks it’s karma trying to give her one good thing when everything else is going to shit (decimated).
“I’m Cessily. Kincaid,” she knows she’s stumbling over her words but she’s too excited. She waits eagerly for the realization to break over Laura’s face. It doesn’t.
Laura nods shortly. “Laura Kinney, designation X-23.” Her voice is low, deliberate, flat.
Cessily’s heart sinks. Laura doesn’t know who I am, she thinks. I have her name but she doesn’t have mine.
“Yes. Right,” Cessily’s having trouble forming words. “I’ll, uh. Right.” She pushes past Laura and out into the hall. She tries to ignore the burning feeling on her arm where it made contact with Laura’s shoulder.
She needs to find an empty room and cry.
“She doesn’t have my name,” Cessily tells Noriko from between her hands.
“Cess,” Noriko’s voice goes soft and Cessily promises herself that she’s done with crying. She’s spent too much of this week strung out and barely holding it together. (They all have. But the others haven’t had to deal with immediate rejection of their soulmate on top of the rest.)
“It’s not unusual. There are lots of stories of people not having the same names as their soulmates.” Cessily knows she’s trying to fabricate excuses, to try and convince herself that it doesn’t hurt as much as it does.
“Do you think—” Noriko starts. “I mean, Laura was grown in a lab. She’s a clone. Do you think that maybe she doesn’t have any soulmark?” Cessily looks up to see Noriko’s attempt at a comforting smile. “She might still be your soulmate. Maybe she just doesn’t know what they are.”
They continue to talk, and by the end of their conversation, Cessily does feel a little better. It still hurts, but Cessily decides to shelve the feeling for now. She will try her best at being Laura’s friend and hopefully, maybe, eventually, she can ask about Laura’s soulmark (or lack thereof).
“Thank you, Noriko,” she says with a genuine smile. She leaves the dining hall to find her soulmate.
Emma Frost does not trust X-23, no matter what Scott says. She, like the rest of the school, knows what Cessily’s soulmark says, and she’s determined to make sure that doesn’t happen. She’s thrown herself into making sure her remaining students are safe, and X-23 is a glaring threat. She pokes around in Logan’s head, but if X-23 has a soulmark, he doesn’t know about it. She pokes around in X-23’s, but can’t find anything except a vague memory of a blond girl, showing X-23 a mark that does not say her name.
Just in case, she assigns X-23 to room with Dust, far away from Mercury. She thinks this arraignment will help deter anything from happening. That, and Dust’s powers mean she will be able to take down X-23 if need be.
She sends X-23 a vision and a warning.
Emma Frost will protect her students at all costs.
Sooraya’s soulmarks appear around the same time as her mutant powers, while she is still in slavery. One name for each arm, twinging down like elegant vines. She looks at them and her heart swells.
Two soulmates.
The Quran has many things to say on the subject of soulmarks, both singular and plural, but so, too, do the slavers. Sooraya hides her marks and cherishes them, tracing their letters and finding joy in their curves. She believes that, one day, she will find her way to the ones with her name on their skin. She patiently waits for that day.
The Xavier Institute is both more and less than Sooraya was expecting. It is always changing—getting attacked, being destroyed, arguments among and between the X-Men and their associates. She thinks it’s no wonder the students act out as they do. There is less stability here in the Institute than in the desert. At least the desert is predictable. She enjoys the school, though. The learning, the training, the sense of camaraderie with the other mutants, even if some of the other students shy away from her clothing and her culture. She thinks she can find herself here, a place to grow into the person she wants to be for her soulmates.
Sooraya overhears other students talking about the new student, Cessily Kincaid. She is instantly nervous and excited. Only a few months in New York and she’s already found one of her soulmates. She goes looking for the one they’re calling Mercury and finds her unpacking in Sofia’s room.
“Welcome to Xavier’s Institute,” Sooraya says. She wants to do this right. Polite. Formal. (She wants to pull Cessily into a hug the moment she sees the beautiful, silvered skin.) “My name is Sooraya Qadir.” She extends her hand and hopes that Cessily sees it as an invitation to hug her instead.
Only, Cessily doesn’t react past a friendly smile, shaking Sooraya’s offered hand. Sooraya briefly wonders if she’s got the wrong girl when—
“Thanks. Cessily Kincaid.” She drops Sooraya’s hand. “It’s a big place.”
“I—yes,” Sooraya says, off-footed. Perhaps this is an American thing she does not understand, people not acknowledging their soulmates. “It has to be, I suppose, to hold everyone.”
They exchange more pleasantries, Cessily never inquiring any deeper than to politely ask about her class schedule. Sooraya leaves feeling dizzy and oddly hollow.
Emma Frost takes over the school in Pr. Xavier’s absence and the Institute changes yet again.
It must be an American thing, she thinks. Hopes, really. Or perhaps Cessily is ashamed of her as a soulmate. That thought hurts. For whatever Cessily’s reasons, Sooraya plays along. She doesn’t mention that Cessily’s name spirals down her arm and carefully keeps their relationship to friends. They’re even assigned to the same team, the Hellions, because they work so well together. The other students don’t bring it up to her, avoiding the subject of soulmates with her like they avoid talking about her religion. Her arms are always covered, anyway, and no one has seen them.
On a movie night, the other students talk about their soulmarks and when Cessily speaks up, Sooraya stops breathing.
“Laura Kinney,” she says, and Sooraya can hear her own heartbeat thudding double-time.
She doesn’t have my name, she thinks at the same time as, she has Laura’s name. She has to force herself to breathe normally.
Why does Cessily have Laura’s name and not Sooraya’s? Why are both their names twining down Sooraya’s arms? It’s not unheard of to have unrequited soulmarks, but a double-mark and an unrequited mark?
She can only hope that Laura, whoever she is, has both their names etched into her skin. But if Laura only has Cessily’s . . .
Sooraya realizes she would bow out. If Cessily and Laura would be happy without her, she would gladly keep her unrequited marks to herself and support their love as a friend.
It’s a bittersweet thought, but she can’t imagine herself doing anything else.
Sooraya hears the news when Laura arrives. She also hears about Cessily’s stumbling introduction, and Laura’s non-reaction. Sooraya’s heart bleeds at the news, wondering how much stranger their triangle of soulmarks can get.
Then Scott escorts Laura into Sooraya’s room and informs them both that they’re roommates. Sooraya blinks up at Scott, wondering if he knows, despite her having never told anyone. But he just waves and leaves and Sooraya thinks it’s simple serendipity.
“You are Sunni,” Laura says before Sooraya can get out an introduction.
“I—yes,” she’s thrown off. “Are you familiar with my home?”
“I have killed in Afghanistan,” Laura says. Sooraya does not know how to answer that.
“Sooraya Qadir,” she eventually says into the silence. She guards her heart, just in case.
“Laura Kinney, designation X-23.” She says it like she’s said everything else so far. A simple statement of fact.
Yes, Sooraya thinks. Their triangle is very strange.
Sooraya watches as Laura fails to react to anything. She talks with Laura, in their room, about simple things, and things not so simple. Laura asks about her beliefs, and although her tone does not seem to carry interest, she is polite and much more understanding then the other students have been. Sometimes they speak in Arabic, and Laura knows a little Pashto—Sooraya is delighted to be able to speak it again with someone. Sooraya avoids the topic of soulmarks, and Laura never brings it up. She’s diligent to keep her arms covered around Laura, even in the privacy of their room. She will not pressure Laura into a relationship she might not want.
Laura doesn’t seem to react to Cessily either, despite the other girl’s bad attempts at flirting. Sooraya watches from across the room as Cessily tries and fails to get more than a few words out of Laura before Laura inevitably leaves. Sooraya watches Cessily’s face fall in confusion and anxiety and she looks up, meets Sooraya’s eyes as if they were drawn there. Sooraya offers a consolatory smile that Cessily can’t see anyway and her heart aches for her two soulmates.
Does being a clone mean that Laura doesn’t have a mark? Is she somehow broken?
Then why do both Cessily and Sooraya have her name?
They’ve just gotten their new uniforms. Mercury, Dust, Hellion, Rockslide, Surge, Elixir, and X-23. They are going to be the next generation of X-Men, picked from the ashes of the few left.
They’ve just gotten their new uniforms and now they’re dirty, smudged with soot and dirt and blood.
Laura hears the rockets, but she isn’t quick enough. The explosion bursts her eardrums, but they heal in time for her to pick out the pop-sizzle of flesh. The smells are overpowering.
She sees Sooraya and Cessily leap into action, straining against the wreckage of the bus to try and save someone. Anyone. Laura knows there will be no one to save, but she joins in anyway. Her claws easily tear through the steel warped with heat. She ignores the way her skin melts and burns and pulls bodies away before they can be disfigured further.
They will be closed-casket funerals, she thinks idly.
She is glad both Sooraya and Cessily survived M-Day, that neither were on the bus.
She does not know what she would have done if they were, and the thought unsettles her.
There are fourteen new graves. Forty-two dead, but fourteen had no one to claim their bodies for private funerals. The service for the fourteen lasts well over two hours.
Cessily does not try to hold back tears as hollow anger rolls in her gut.
Sooraya whispers prayers under her breath along with Mr. Wagner’s and hopes the myriad of faiths will help bring peace to the forty-two.
Laura stands off to the side. She did not know these students, and she has been the cause of more funerals than this. She looks at the pain on Cessily and Sooraya’s face and something twists uncomfortably in her chest.
She leaves halfway through, unable to keep watching other peoples’ sadness.
The lines her claws leave on her arms heal quickly, but the blood remains, and the pain is a welcome sting.
She tries very hard not to think about the names burning into her side.
Sooraya opens the door to find Jay. He’s delirious, and blood is already seeping through his bandages. She can see red spots blooming on his shirt, a macabre Rorschach test stretched across his upper back.
Laura leaves when he asks, looking at Sooraya strangely as she passes. Sooraya’s heart does a funny flip, but her focus now needs to be on Jay.
His words don’t make much sense and Sooraya tries to get him to see Elixir. Jay drops a crumpled paper into Sooraya’s hands and leaves, stumbling out past Laura, who seemed to have been standing guard outside the door.
“Don’t trust him,” Laura says. “He smells of death.”
“He’s dying,” Sooraya says, and once she says it, she realizes it’s true. Jay Guthrie is dying, and not from his wings. She smooths out the paper and reads the address. “He’s asking for my help.” She looks up at Laura and hopes her friend, her soulmate, can read what she cannot say through her eyes. “I can’t let any more of us die.”
Sooraya wakes up in the ensuite bathroom, covered in a blanket but her clothes are gone. It’s loud outside and her head hurts.
Did Laura hit her?
(Did Laura see her soulmarks?)
She draws the blanket around herself and opens her door to investigate the noise. Cessily is stretched down the hall, pummeling men in strange robes holding guns. Sooraya stares, can’t help noticing how beautiful Cessily looks even in the middle of a life-threatening fight.
“Sooraya!” Cessily shouts when she sees her. “Get out of here!”
“You’re supposed to be dead!” one of the men says, pointing at Sooraya. “You were dead!” Through her headache, Sooraya has an inkling of what Laura might have done.
Laura can’t be dead, Sooraya thinks. She’s Wolverine’s clone. She heals.
But Sooraya’s heart burns and suddenly she’s everywhere, a roaring wave of sand, deadly as storms in the desert.
“Damn,” Cessily says when Sooraya returns to herself, clutching the blanket around her, desperate to keep her marks hidden. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.” Sooraya smiles and she wants to hug Cessily, her soulmate, but she can’t. So she settles for ducking into her room to change into clothes properly before heading out with Cessily and Santo to help find the others.
They find Laura as she finishes with a small group of the men. She’s covered in blood, unscathed. Sooraya has to stop herself for the second time in ten minutes from initiating a hug she cannot have.
“It was a trap,” Laura says, looking directly at Sooraya.
“Why did you take my place?” Sooraya asks, and she hopes Laura will say what she has been waiting to hear.
“I do not think Allah wants you to die.”
Sooraya thinks that this will have to be enough.
There are more bodies to be buried in the wake of the Purifier attack.
Cessily is sick to death of funerals. Of crying.
She feels tired and empty and can’t bring herself to mourn properly. Josh lost his soulmate, turned black because of it, and all Cessily can think of is that hers won’t acknowledge her existence.
Fuck.
They go after Nimrod to save Forge and, hopefully, stop more mutants from dying.
It’s what they do now. X-Men in training, doing the X-Men’s job because no one will listen to them.
The battle is hard, but everyone is working together in a way they hadn’t, before. Noriko steps up to be the leader, and Julian doesn’t fight it.
Santo is pulverized, literally, into pebbles.
Laura takes a death-beam full-on as she digs her claws into Nimrod’s hull. Her body is flung across the space to land away from the immediate fighting. Cessily uses Laura’s opening to flow up Nimrod’s back. She forms massive talons that rip into the hole Laura started, prying it wider. Nimrod’s hull vibrates with his defensive shockwave, and Cessily can feel her body losing form as the pain tears though her. The pain doubles as Noriko jumps in, delivering her own shocks to overload the time device.
Nimrod explodes.
There’s a breath as everyone realizes that they’ve won. Cessily’s body still won’t form properly, limbs too heavy and syrupy as she tries to collect Santo’s broken pieces until Julian pulls her limply away.
And then Santo starts talking, weak and quiet, and Cessily just about collapses as Julian weaves his hands like he’s performing a spell, green energy pulling the pebbles into a massive, hulking, upgraded Santo.
“Ow, thanks,” Santo says. His voice is deeper than it was before. Probably the added mass. “Hey, what happened to your soulmate? She doesn’t look so good.”
And that’s when Cessily notices Laura, cradled in Sooraya’s arms. Body burnt to near unrecognizable like the ones from the bus attack.
“She’s not healing,” Sooraya’s saying, as if she can’t believe her own words. “She’s supposed to be healing.”
Elixir, Cessily thinks, wildly. Julian can fly.
“Julian,” she rounds on him, and she knows her voice is choked with the tears streaming down her face. “Take her back to the Institute. Save her.”
Julian reacts immediately, bunding the still-smoking body into his arms as he floats and glows green.
(Julian thinks this is what being an X-Man means, giving his all to save even one person. He thinks this is friendship means, dying inside at the thought of another friend loosing their soulmate.)
Josh stumbles awake when Julian crashes though the infirmary wall, glowing bright green and carrying a body with injuries that look all too familiar.
He saves her, and as his powers return and the black is chased away with gold, he watches new skin grow under the shreds of burnt and wind-torn clothes. He sees the ghost of a soulmark begin to re-form and he smiles to himself, knowing Cessily isn’t alone after all.
Sooraya thinks that if is she is to be a hero, an X-Man, she will need to get used to seeing her soulmates in mortal danger. She thinks it helps that if she is their teammate, they will be able to protect each other.
Watching Cessily scream and melt under the intense electricity had nearly stopped her own heart.
Holding Laura, she couldn’t do anything but stare in frozen horror, listening to the rattling wheezes that said her soulmate wasn’t dead, not yet at least, but she fears it will be soon.
She moves close to Cessily, falling just short of a hug, as they trudge back to the Institute. Cessily leans right back into her. She tries to absorb comfort that at least one of her soulmates is okay, telling herself that the other isn’t dead. Not yet.
She does hug Laura in her room later that night. She cannot stop herself because Laura nearly died, and Sooraya cannot stand not being able to hold her. Laura stands stiffly, but lets the hug continue. When Laura’s hand awkwardly lands on her back, Sooraya chokes on the words she will not say.
Cessily is wandering the Institute looking for Laura. It’s been a week and a half since the Nimrod fight and Cessily still needs near-hourly reassurance that Laura is okay, that she isn’t dead.
She hears Emma Frost’s voice drifting from her office, sees Laura’s back standing rigid and tense.
“ . . . if you care for her, then you will leave,” Frost is saying, voice cold as ice. “Leave this school now, before it’s too late.”
“How can you say that?” Cessily is through the door before she can think it through properly. Anger bubbles in the hollow of her stomach. “She saved us! All of us!” She’s yelling at Emma Frost now, Emma Frost, who threatened to wipe every happy memory from Josh’s head. Emma Frost, who’s temper is drastically shorter after M-Day. She moves so that Laura can escape, and Laura takes the exit.
“There are things you don’t know, Cessily. I’m doing this to protect you.”
“Fuck you!” Cessily’s still building up, but now that Laura’s gone, she needs to leave quickly before Frost can do something. “She’s my soulmate,” she growls out before turning sharply to catch up to Laura.
“Laura!” Cessily calls after the back that’s running away from her. “Laura, hey! Wait!” She stretches to flow in front of Laura, blocking her escape. “Stop, please. Frost is a dick, okay? We don’t want you to leave.” I don’t want you to leave.
“It doesn’t matter. She’s right.”
“No! She’s not!” Cessily’s mind is racing, trying to think of the right words to make Laura stay. Laura looks like she is listening to Cessily, standing with fists clenched, but no longer trying to push past and to the door. “Let’s go get coffee. In town,” she says before she can stop herself. She decides then and there to tell Laura about her soulmark. For better or worse. “A date.”
Laura doesn’t say anything but lets herself be pulled away, hand securely held in Cessily’s.
Laura lets Cessily lead her to a coffee shop. She smells the anxiety under the sharp bite of mercury and wonders if dates require hot liquids neither of them drink and Cessily stumbling over her words.
Laura is simply existing in Cessily’s company even as Cessily fidgets in the plastic booth. Her claws itch into her arms, light enough not to draw more than beads of blood, but the sensation is still grounding.
She feels the rumble before she hears the heavy wheels and she knows.
“Get out,” she says as she stands, looking around for where the attack will come from. Cessily’s standing too, saying something but Laura’s not paying attention. Fear drips into her veins and she does not like it. “Get out of here, now!” She’s shoving Cessily roughly toward the door. She promised, she promised Megan that she would protect them. Protect the ones whose names are hers. She will buy Cessily time to run away. She needs Cessily to get away—
The explosion knocks them apart, and Laura has barely landed before fear and adrenalin drives her to her feet again, claws out. Her eardrums haven’t even healed yet by the time the first three men are dead.
“Get out of here, Cessily!” It’s the only thing she can say between sprays of gunfire and blood. “Run!” More men fall dead under her claws and she ignores the gunshots tearing though her.
“Get out,” Laura repeats, even as Cessily moves to stand beside her.
“I’m not just going to leave you here,” Cessily says, a faint smile playing on her face. Laura does not understand. Cessily needs to run, she cannot protect her if she does not leave now—
“Hi, X. Miss me?”
Laura’s blood runs cold and she looks up to see Kimura, holding a gun she does not recognize and a belt of grenades. She feels Cessily, standing right beside her and not running away, and she has never been more afraid.
“Run, Cessily,” Laura says, without breaking eye contact with Kimura. Cessily doesn’t move and Laura’s ready to explode from Cessily not listening to her. “She has nothing to do with this, Kimura.”
“Oh, X,” Kimura says, her voice a simpering smile. “We didn’t come for you.” She fires the gun and Cessily lights up with electricity. Laura cannot stop herself from trying to tear at the strange bolt in Cessily’s torso, lightning arcing up her arms and sizzling around her claws. She needs to stop the screaming, she needs to stop Cessily’s pain—
There’s a sharp sting in Laura’s neck and she can’t breathe. Men drag Cessily away from her and Laura’s fighting against several more.
“Stupid girl,” Kimura says as her knee slams into Laura’s gut. “Your soulmate’s kinda pretty, in a weird, fetishy way. Bet she’s great in bed, huh?” Laura’s gasping for breath, her windpipe only just healed. Their tussle is short before she manages to pull a grenade pin and cause another explosion. It throws Laura across the destroyed café, but she’s hoping it’ll distract everyone enough so she can get to Cessily and get her out. She looks up to see Kimura make a flying leap to a van that’s already started up and rolling away.
No. Laura had misjudged how close she was to the grenades, her stomach a bloody ruin as she tries to stand. “Kimura!”
“Another time, X!” Kimura says as the van speeds away, and Laura knows that Kimura is taunting her, daring her. “See you soon!”
Sooraya is not in their room when Laura bursts in, already pulling off her ruined shirt and reaching for her uniform. She sucks in a breath and lets Sooraya’s scent settle in her lungs. For some reason, this makes her feel a little better.
“Laura? Sooraya?” Julian pokes his head into the room just as Laura’s tugging on her boots. “Laura, what happened? Where’s Cessily?”
“She’s gone,” Laura says. She cannot deal with Julian right now. She needs to gather supplies and leave before Kimura hurts Cessily. She is sure Kimura will kill her after the Facility is done with whatever they want to do, just because Cessily’s name is burned into her side.
Julian’s eyes glow as Laura explains in short sentences what happened and where she is going.
“I’m going with you,” he says and lifts Laura bodily, shooting through the roof of the Institute and into the night. “I’m not letting another friend die.”
(He thinks that this is how the clone shows her love, by sacrificing herself for others, and that he does not want to attend yet another funeral this year.)
Sooraya wants to swirl into dust and go solo when she hears that Laura, Cessily, and Julian have gone missing. Panic blooms in her chest and she’s itching to find them, to keep her soulmates safe. Noriko and Santo quickly agree to join her, and they are about to launch their own rescue ops when Kitty Pride pulls them inside. Pride says the X-Men already know about the missing students and promises information in return for them staying put.
Sooraya thinks there is a reason the students’ first reaction is to do things on their own and leave the adults behind. She wonders how long it will take for the adults to wonder why.
Julian watches Laura kill, how easy it is for her, and knows that he’ll never be able to do the same.
And he can’t. He can’t bring himself to kill Kimura even as the woman laughs and goads and boasts about the pain she’s caused Laura and Cessily. He can’t kill her, but he can send her far away, where she can’t threaten the soulmates again.
Julian will not let anyone else die.
“Please don’t let them take me back.” Cessily barely manages to whisper the words, but Laura can smell the acrid bite of fear and pain.
“I won’t.”
Laura will never let anyone hurt her again, even if it means she must leave.
“You were right,” Laura says to Frost when the X-Men arrive. “I should have left the school. Now Cessily will never be the same.”
Emma Frost wonders if she's made a mistake.
Sooraya cannot stand seeing Cessily in pain but knows that it is not her place to comfort her. So she sends Laura, who’s standing in the middle of their room as if she’s lost.
“God, Laura,” and now Cessily can’t stop the crying, even if she wanted to. “It hurts. It hurts so much.”
“I know.”
Cessily moves into their room. She spends most of her time curled up in Laura’s bed, and when Laura’s around she lets herself be cuddled, her body lying stiff in Cessily’s arms. Sooraya doesn’t mind, because Cessily is her soulmate too, no matter what Cessily has written on her skin. And when Laura disappears to find food or whatever else she does, Sooraya talks to Cessily to fill up the space and distract her from the memories.
It takes days, but Sooraya earns a weak, but genuine, smile and she thinks she can feel her heart break for all the love.
And when Cessily starts answering back, and short words become conversations, Sooraya knows that Cessily will heal, given enough time.
Holding Laura helps keep the nightmares at bay but talking to Sooraya makes Cessily feel close to human again. She lets herself hide in their room, away from the rest of the Institute, and she feels safer. The memories don’t hurt as much when she looks at Sooraya, and she can relax when Laura’s standing next to her. She realizes she might love them both.
She thinks about love and soulmates and her soulmark and she wonders.
“Hey, Sooraya.”
She looks up from her book to see Cessily hovering awkwardly beside her bed. She looks good, Sooraya thinks—better. Laura is gone on one of her many disappearances and Cessily had been laying quietly on her bed, hugging Laura’s pillow.
“What do you need?” Sooraya asks, ready to give the world to Cessily.
“I, um. Can I show you something?” Cessily is looking down at her feet, tugging the hem of Sooraya’s Institute sweatshirt she is wearing. Sooraya thinks Cessily looks cute when she’s flustered. “I mean. When I got my soulmark, I couldn’t exactly read half of it. And I just thought it was one name written twice, but thinking about it now that sounds dumb and I’m not so sure, and, uh.” The words tumble out of Cessily’s mouth in a rush and Sooraya has to stop herself from saying anything until Cessily’s said what she wants to say. She can’t stop herself from hoping.
“Can you—can you just read it for me?” Cessily says as she turns around and pulls up Sooraya’s sweatshirt.
And Sooraya’s fingers hover over the names printed on Cessily’s back, one on top of the other. She can’t speak, she’s nearly chokes on the threat of tears. She gently turns Cessily around as she rolls up her sleeves, showing off Cessily and Laura’s names, winding around each arm like a distorted mirror.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Cessily asks, carefully taking the arm with her name on, rotating it so she can follow the familiar shapes of the letters.
“I thought you only had Laura’s name,” Sooraya says, a simple truth, saying in those words more than she can manage at the moment.
“Well, I know now,” Cessily says, a shy smile breaking across her face. “C-“ she takes a breath. “Can I hug you?”
“Yes,” Sooraya says. “A thousand times, yes.”
Cessily’s hold is firm and warm and everything Sooraya wants.
“This still leaves the problem of Laura,” Cessily says into Sooraya’s shoulder.
“Maybe we just ask her and see,” Sooraya says, happiness soaring in her heart. Cessily is her soulmate and nothing can ruin this moment.
“Will I be allowed to kiss you?” Cessily asks quietly.
“Americans,” Sooraya says. Her veil is already off and she draws back enough to lean up and kiss Cessily. As far as first kisses go, Sooraya thinks it’s not bad. It’s cold, but soft and enjoyable, and she vaguely wonders if she’s in danger of mercury poisoning. She’s happy to do it again, though, as many times as Cessily will let her.
“We should find Laura,” Sooraya says against Cessily’s lips. Cessily hums in agreement, a slow smile transforming her face, and Sooraya knows she’s in love.
Cessily hesitates at the door. This is the first time she’ll be out of Laura and Sooraya’s room since she came back from the Facility. She’s freshly showered and wearing Sooraya’s sweater again and she feels better than she has in a while. Her lips still tingle from kissing Sooraya, and her heart feels light. But she’s scared, and her ears are picking up sounds from down the hall and twisting them into the footsteps of approaching doctors or the harsh echo of Kimura’s mocking laugh.
She clutches Sooraya’s hand, and Sooraya grips right back without complaint.
“We can wait,” Sooraya says in her quiet assurance.
“No. I can do this,” Cessily says, and although she goes for bold it comes out a whisper. “I want to find our soulmate.” She says it on purpose to make Sooraya smile, and she can see it worked in the crinkle of her eyes. Sooraya has smoothed her sleeves down again, but Cessily doesn’t mind. She knows what’s written under them, and that’s all that matters.