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Cody/Jacob - soulmates au

ohhh buddy u have no idea how much i’ve mused on this exact thing

(this got so fucking long i am so sorry and yet i am not)

- - -

For the few months that Jacob Seed actually remembers his family owning a TV, he notices a few things. 

He’s about six years old, leaning up against his mother’s legs while she patches the elbow on one of his father’s work jackets (she’s always, always patching things; they never buy anything new). Joseph is sitting on the floor beside the TV set, playing with a worn down wooden horse toy that they bought at a garage sale, and he babbles to it in his own language that is half English and half two-going-on-three year old chatter. Their father is out working late again, which means they have a few hours to watch whatever they want, rather than the loud televangelists that he likes.

On the screen, in shivering monochrome, a greaser bobs his way into a diner, smirking at a young lady in a poodle skirt leaning up against a jukebox. He says, “Hey, sweetcheeks. You got a name to go with that pretty face?” 

The girl rolls her eyes and the audience laughs. Jacob doesn’t get it.

“Martha,” the girl finally drawls.

“What a coinky-dink!” says the greaser. He shoulders off his leather jacket and rolls up a shirt sleeve, revealing an entire list of names on his right arm. Soulmarks, Jacob knows. He knows them from TV and from what Pastor Jim talks about at church sometimes. He doesn’t really know what they are, except some way to find out who you’re going to marry. But he does know that they show up different on everyone. Names are common. His mother has a name on her ankle, and it isn’t his father’s.

On the screen, the greaser runs a finger over his arm before he settles on a name. “Gee, Martha! Guess you n’ me are just meant to be together!” he exclaims, all but shoving his arm in her face.

Martha looks at him with thinly-veiled disgust before reaching over and dumping a glass bottle of Coke on his arm. Then, she reaches up while the greaser is stunned and the audience is howling in laughter, and she uses her shirt sleeve to wipe the names off his arm until they’re just an inky mess. 

“Nice try,” she says levelly before turning on heel and walking out the door to the audience whooping and laughing. 

Jacob sits in slack-jawed awe while Joseph chirps out something that sounds like, “Pecan!” which Jacob thinks is the name of the horse. Then, Jacob leans back against his mother’s legs, tilting his head up so she looks upside-down in his vision. “Mama, can you wipe soulmarks off?” he asks.

His mother gives him an upside-down smile and shakes her head. “No, baby. They don’t come off. He was just bein’ silly.”

“Oh.” Jacob tilts his head back down as a commercial comes on for Oscar Mayer bologna. He looks to his right, seeing the last few letters of his mother’s soulmate’s name peeking up above her sock. All he sees is -EY in weird writing. He looks down at himself, at his shorts and bare knees and tube socks with two neat red lines near the top. Then, he looks down at his hands, his wrists, and even his elbows. “How come I don’t have one?” he finally asks.

His mother laughs, and Jacob’s too young to realize that it’s one of the rarest sounds in the world. She reaches down and runs a hand over his hair, red like his dad’s. “You will soon, baby. Sometimes it takes a little while.”

He’s also too young to realize that some people never get them.

- - -

They switch churches when Jacob’s just shy of ten years old. His skin is still bare of anything like a soulmark, although he has enough freckles, scars, and bruises to last him a lifetime. 

His dad doesn’t like Pastor Jim’s preaching anymore, and Jacob’s aware that they had some kind of argument about the way his dad treats his mom. His dad swears that it’s because God isn’t in Pastor Jim’s preaching, so they end up going to a Baptist church that’s built so close to the Coosa River that it looks like it’s going to fall right in. It’s the kind of church that has something called a revival every few weekends, where they set up a big white tent near the river and dunk people in the water while yelling about Jesus for a few hours. Jacob was baptized awhile ago, but he still watches in stunned silence when their new pastor, Pastor Richard, hollers and waves his arm like a ghost in a madhouse before dunking old ladies and young guys and a whole gaggle of little kids.

And Pastor Richard has a lot to say about soulmarks.

He smacks the Bible a lot when he talks, and goes on for ages about how only a man and a woman can marry over soulmarks, or how soulmarks were made on Adam’s skin from the dirt he slept in while God took his rib to make Eve. During one sermon, someone says something about having multiple marks, and Pastor Richard goes on such a screaming tangent that Joseph starts to whimper in his mother’s arms. There’s no such thing as multiple, he snarls. That’s not how God’s love works.

Jacob looks down at his own skin again, peeking out under the sweat-soaked white button-up shirt his dad makes him wear every Sunday. He sees freckles on his wrists and not much else.

He almost wants to ask about people who don’t have marks, but he’s afraid of Pastor Richard shouting at him, too. 

- - -

The next few years make it hard to think about soulmarks or much of anything except how to keep himself and his brothers alive. Lots of things happen in a blur; his dad getting taken away in a patrol car, his mom taken in the other direction in an ambulance while she stares at nothing, and then the ugly black Cadillac that comes to take them away in a third direction. There are stark white offices, bunk beds in rooms that smell like fresh paint and sawdust, stacks of papers that Jacob has to sign sometimes, and what feels like hundreds of people with faces that Jacob is never going to remember, all pretending to be sad on his behalf.

He holds John through most of it, trying not to think too hard about his parents or the life they left behind. Sometimes he thinks about the name on his mom’s ankle, or the tattoo-like splotch on the back of his dad’s left wrist, or how the two of them were never meant to be together. 

Sometimes, he thinks if he doesn’t have a mark, then–

He stops himself there, because otherwise, he just gets himself upset. He can’t do that in front of his brothers when they need him the most.

Then, they get adopted by the farmer couple in Rome, and before Jacob knows it, he doesn’t have time to think about soulmates and marks at all. 

- - - 

He’s in juvie when he gets something like a mark. Maybe. 

It’s one of the younger kids, Toby or Tony or something, with the long Italian last name who was born with two fingers on his right hand fused together. He follows Jacob around like a lost puppy, along with a few other kids who quickly learn that Jacob Seed punches like a fucking boxer when one of the older kids picks on one of the younger. Toby-or-Tony was one of those kids, after one of the older guys (colloquially known as Forevers, since everyone knows that once they’re out of juvie, they’ll just boomerang right back into prison) gets a few of his buddies started on calling him Lobster Boy. He shoves Toby-or-Tony up against the chain-link fence at the courtyard and makes a big show of seemingly trying to peel his fingers apart, when Jacob (known for his soft voice, massive height, and the fact that he stares people down like a goddamn wolf on the prowl) hauls up behind him and socks the shit out of the guy. Once the guy’s on the ground, bleeding out of the mouth and mewling like a kitten, Jacob saunters away without a word and Toby-or-Tony follows him like he’s magnetized.

And he notices the weird mark on Jacob’s hand first. It’s a splotch of blue-black in near the tip of his left middle finger, and he points at out at lunch one afternoon while Jacob prods at a Salisbury steak which would probably be better suited as a hockey puck then an edible item. Toby-or-Tony watches his hand move before he clears his throat.

“Uh. Jake. You got a little somethin’ on yer…” He makes a throwaway motion towards his hand.

Jacob curls his hand inward enough to see, and furrows his brow at the weird little mark, not quite a quarter of an inch long. It looks like an ink stain, but the last time he touched a pen was in the social worker’s office almost five weeks ago. They only let the kids have pencils in school.

“Huh,” is all he says. He takes the moist towelette they give out with the lunches and tries to wipe it off. It stays in place, not blurred or faded in the least. He blinks at it, then down at the towelette which is as clean as it was when he took it out of the package.

Toby-or-Tony gives him a lopsided grin. “You get a tattoo from Kev or what?” he asks, referring to Kevin-in-the-bathroom, who gives kids tattoos using ink from a broken pen and a fork he stole from lunch ages ago. 

“Fuck no,” Jacob replies gruffly, shoving the towelette aside. “I’m not that stupid.” And it’s forgotten in the course of him trying to saw the steak in half, failing, and then flipping it onto Toby-or-Tony’s plate, who retches a little at the sight of the alarmingly gray gravy trail it leaves behind.

It’s forgotten, for a little while, until Jacob stands in the showers and looks down at it again. It might be a trick of the waxy light in the bathroom, but he swears it’s gotten bigger. 

- - -

When he starts BCT at Fort Benning, Jacob sees the marks on his knees. They’re the size of half dollars, plastered in blue-black on his skin like he just slid through a puddle of ink. They’re nearly identical, too, and he stares at them in confusion and something like awe in that split second of time he has before he has to get back in uniform. 

It’s on his mind for only an hour or so before the drill sergeant is screaming in his ear through drills.

Jacob usually only ever has two things on his mind at that point. He still thinks about his brothers, about how the last time he saw them, Joseph was a wiry-looking preteen with owlish eyes and a healing broken nose, and John was crying, clinging onto Joseph’s hand with his big blue eyes so full of tears that he had to blink a dozen times just to see Jacob clearly as the police pulled them apart. He remembers how John kept one of his shirts like a security blanket, keeping the black fabric draped over one arm or clasped against his chest while he slept. Then, Jacob realizes that the more he thinks about that, the more it hurts. But it hurts more to try to forget them at all.

The other thing he thinks about is his future, which rocks back and forth precariously between promising and doomed. Linda, his social worker back in Macon, bluntly told him that his outlook was either prison or the army, but cited his fantastic test scores as a potential for college. He remembers her manicured nails, painfully pink against the black desk, and how she clicked them, one-two-three-four against the surface.

“You get into the army, then college is pretty well paid for,” she had said with a shrug, glancing at the paper with his GPA from the center. He knew it without having to see it, staring with a three and ending with a high number that nearly tips the scale into 4.0. “You ever think about getting a degree?”

He hadn’t. He said as much, followed by, “If I did, could I get custody of my brothers?”

She had shrugged, and it made his heart sink. “Maybe. Maybe not. Most likely not,” she said. “They might be adopted out by now, and even if you did get a degree, there are a lot of other factors that the state would consider.”

And that’s what kicked off his second dwelling point, where he wavered between optimistically thinking about his years of service, a college degree, and the potential of not only seeing his brothers again, but having custody, and then ending up in a gutter somewhere, or possibly prison.

But a third point hardly occurred to him until the stains appeared on his knees, as stark as tattoos. 

He sees them again when he goes in to shower after drills, and all he can think of is that TV show and the names on the greaser’s arms, followed by his mother saying sometimes it takes a little while.

And sometimes not to people like him, with no future and no prospects, he had thought.

His mind keeps playing the show and his mother’s words, but the rational part of him, the one that speaks in a voice an awful lot like Linda, says that they’re just bruises. 

It’s harder to forget this time, though.

- - -

Once again, things are a blur. A big one, kicked off mercifully by huge doses of pain medication given through syringes in hep-locks and intravenous tubes. 

Jacob’s only vaguely aware of what’s going on, trying to piece it all together as he rolls in and out of consciousness like a ship on the waves. He remembers a black expanse of desert in the darkness, then shouting, then a high whistle of something airborne and travelling at high speeds, and then– 

Pain. 

White-hot and cracking and oozing. 

All over his body.

He sees flashes of white, and people behind masks. He sees someone he knows is a surgeon, and then they’re gone. He feels things touching him, more poking and prodding, the smell of something so antiseptic that it stings to breathe it in, and the endless drone of voices in multiple languages, mixing together so it sounds like Joseph’s made-up language from childhood.

Shit, he hasn’t thought about Joseph in awhile. 

He doesn’t have time to think much of anything else before he dips under again, and his head is full of strange dreams of little kids sleeping on bales of hay, but then the bales turn to sawdust-smelling bunk beds, and then they’re shoved up against chain-link fences. He dreams of blue-black bruises on his knees, and as he comes back up for a second, smelling sickly-sweet medicine and hearing the distinct beep of an EKG, he has one rogue thought that breaks rank and hauls ass in another direction.

Sorry, he thinks, directing at someone far away. Someone he’s never seen, but in this twilight-phase of sleep and waking, he knows is there. You don’t need this on you. You don’t need to see this.

It doesn’t make sense, and, hell, he isn’t even sure what it means. All he knows is that at some point, his entire body feels like it’s bandaged, and he’s sure he looks like an old Hollywood mummy plastered to a stretcher. 

At some point, he thinks he hears someone say, “Second and third degree burns over sixty percent–”, but he might also dream that.

And yet, all he can think still is, Sorry, sorry, sorry.

- - -

He tastes something charred in his mouth as he walks, and his head feels unscrewed from his body, like the bulb of a flashlight not quite screwed in all the way. Here and there, it flickers– He flickers, not quite here, not quite gone. He staggers through the desert on a leg that’s not right, with a ghost trailing behind him, and his head is just–

He’s laughing. He’s fucking laughing, and the sound carries loud and clear over the mountains and the sand and the thin ground cover that promises water that isn’t there. He’s choking on the sound, and when he looks down at his left arm, sleeve torn away to make a bandage for 

(for Miller, but God knows he doesn’t need it now)

someone, he sees a long lance of ink-blue trailing down his arm in a dark stripe. he about loses it then, the laughter breaking like glass in his throat.

“God, I’m so fuckin’ sorry,” his voice cracks, riddled here and there with splits and crevasses. He grins in a rictus smile, muscles yanked back so that it feels like he has no control over his face. He smiles like

(like that corpse you left behind, you sick fuck)

a skeleton, and he shivers so hard that it’s a wonder his bones are holding together at all. 

He runs his hand down that mark, and up, and down. Over and over until his calloused hand feels as abrasive as sandpaper on his skin. He’s trying to wipe the mark away–

(“No, baby. They don’t come off. He was just bein’ silly.”)

It doesn’t come off. He rubs and rubs until his skin turns red around the blue. He laughs. He screams. He screams and screams and screams.

(Until the Humvee comes after a report from a lookout at a mountain outpost, drawing full alert to the fact that there’s a man in US Army fatigues staggering like a drunk across the desert. And then they pick him up, delirious to the point that he’s laughing in dry heaves of sound, clearly malnourished, vomiting the second they give him water, and chattering madly about ghosts and brothers and someone that he can’t stop apologizing to.)

- - -

Whoever said, ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ needs a solid kick in the jewels, no matter how long they’ve been dead. (He knows it’s from the Golden Milestone. He’s read it, among five hundred other things to occupy his time in the dingy little apartment the Army saw fit to gift him with after an honorable discharge. Fuck them.)

The road’s led him from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport to a miserable walk-up on Beecher Street to hitchhiking across half of Georgia to avoid Rome, and finally from I-16 to I-75 to 411 and straight back into that goddamn hornet’s nest of memory that Rome is.

In the end, the road back to Rome has taken him to the optimistically-named Hope Rebuilding shelter where he sleeps on an Army cot (God, he can’t even get away from that) while listening to the droning buzz of fluorescent lights above his head and the insistent cough of a woman dying of emphysema on the other side of the room. There are plenty of other wayward veterans here, all with glassy eyes and too-long beards (at least his is still red and not ash-gray or bone-white) and the occasional pension check that floats in to provide for cigarettes or the contraband bottle of Wild Turkey. 

Jacob resigns himself to his cot, to the olive drab duffel bag that he lives out of with the handful of books he kept from the Beecher Street apartment and a few essentials. The rest, he doesn’t care about. He’s sure he’s going to die here, the same way people do all the time. One day, one of the sweet old ladies of Hope Rebuilding will come over to wake him and find him stone-cold and grinning like he did in the desert, and then maybe they’ll weep a little before calling the ambulance company and funeral home that they have on speed dial. He’s oddly content with that now.

The only other thing keeping him afloat is the person on the other side of those blue marks that ripple onto his skin sometimes. He knows that they’re soulmarks, but he also knows that he’s never going to meet that person, and that it’s for the better that he doesn’t. He’s left them scarred, he’s sure, if the marks are what he imagines. Every time one of them gets hurt, the mark appears on the other person. It’s somehow suitable, in the way that the marks are supposed to be. He knows his soulmate is accident prone but not in any real danger. They get scrapes or bruises all the time, and when he allows himself to let his mind wander, he imagines that they might play some kind of high contact sport, especially when he gets a blue mark on his right shin in the shape of a leg guard.

Sometimes, when his head is unscrewed again and he’s seeing corpses smiling at him when he closes his eyes, he brings his left forearm up to his face and presses his lips against the skin. There’s a thin sky-blue line there, a scar left over from the day when it was a cobalt-colored stripe. After he kisses it, he apologizes again.

He’s sorry that he did this to them, probably making them look like they’ve been drenched in ink.

He’s sorry that they had to watch that happen, and it’s only a little comforting to think that someone out there worried about him.

He’s sorry that they’ll never meet, and he’s sorry that he’s alright with that.

“I wish you could wipe them off,” he says to the scar one night when Sharon-with-emphysema hacks and wheezes and one of the old Vietnam guys groans and yells in his sleep. “I wish you didn’t get stuck with me. I’m sorry.”

His isn’t one of the soulbonds where he feels the things his soulmate feels. But for a moment, he thinks he feels them respond.

It’s okay. We’re okay.

- - -

Joseph is still owl-eyed, but his wide eyes are now hidden behind gold aviators which he only takes off to wipe at his face when he tears up too much. Everything else about him is different. He’s taller now, more muscular, with long dark hair like their mother’s pulled back into a ponytail tied low on his head. He smiles at Jacob like he can’t believe he’s real.

John is… different. Jacob doesn’t blame John for being wary, because they’re practically meeting as strangers. John’s full grown now, which is mind-boggling. He’s a good-looking twenty-something, with slicked back hair and a finely trimmed beard and clothes more expensive than anything Jacob’s ever owned. He’s a lawyer, Joseph explains, and he’s the one responsible for scenting Jacob’s trail. 

That’s not hard to do, Jacob says. He hasn’t showered in days.

Joseph doesn’t think that’s very funny, but when John smiles, Jacob knows for sure that it’s his little brother in there, rich boy bedamned. 

They catch up slowly, first in the shelter, then at a greasy diner downtown, then at a hotel room that John gets for Jacob so that he can reassemble himself into something almost human.

He learns that Joseph had a soulmate, but she’s dead now. John has a mark, but no one on the other end yet. They find out he has one, but no interest in meeting them.

He almost has to smile as Joseph frowns at this. The Seeds, just as discontent and dysfunctional as they’ve always been.

Then Joseph tells him about the Voice, about his mission, about all this godly crap and being led to convert people whether they want to be converted or not. Joseph says he understands that Jacob will be hesitant, after everything he’s been through.

No shit, says Jacob, and Joseph almost admonishes him for language. John laughs again. He laughs a lot, but it’s not always happy.

Oh, but it’s all true. How else would Joseph find his brothers again? And doesn’t Jacob remember when Joseph told him about the Voice when they were kids? 

Jacob stares at him, at his massive eyes that look like they’re pleading for him to believe his brother. Then, he looks at John, who shrugs.

John believes him. He’s even helped rent a space in an old meat-packing plant for this new church Joseph has started. They already have a congregation, and they have space for one more Herald, this thing Joseph says is necessary for them to save the world or whatever.

It’s not like Jacob’s life can get any weirder, honestly.

He looks down at that pale blue line on his left arm, and down at the torn knees of his jeans, where below the feathered white threads, he knows there are two identical silver dollar scars on his knees from what he now believes are a few saved up childhood falls. He almost mentally asks his soulmate if this is alright, if they’d be fine with him running off with one brother who might be just barely clinging to reality, and another who is rich, damaged, and happy to go along for the ride.

He doesn’t ask, because this feels like something they don’t need to know about.

“Sure,” he says. When Joseph looks at him, almost puzzled that he didn’t have to push his point harder, Jacob just shakes his head and shrugs. “Anything for you. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.”

Joseph hugs him again, so tight that it almost hurts. He thanks Jacob repeatedly, saying he won’t regret it. He’ll never regret it. Eden’s Gate is going to succeed, because they’re all together like God planned.

Jacob never tells him that he doesn’t really believe him, but it feels like the right decision all the same.

- - -

So the Lord God called out to Adam, “Where are you?”

“I heard Your voice in the garden,” he replied, “and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”

Jacob pretends he’s not hiding this. Not hiding the split in his mind and the things that he’s doing, when the Montana soil on his hands gets darker and damper until it runs dark red off his fingers. He pretends he’s not somehow ashamed of this, of the things they do. It’s for Joseph, after all. It’s what Joseph wants, what he says God commands, because God commands that all must convert, be it their decision or not. And God’s commanded Jacob to build Him an army, an army that carries Joseph’s word like a banner.

He pretends this is what he’s wanted all along, and he turns a blind eye to the silver and blue lines and splotches on his skin. They’ll never meet, he knows. They’ll never see this, this empire he builds on the bones of those that have failed. This is not Rome, not Babylon. This is designed to go on forever, beyond the end.

He’d like for them to be there when the world burns away like the impurities in a crucible. But that’s just not meant to be.

- - -

Over the radio, John sounds like he’s about to laugh himself into a fucking aneurysm. Jacob can hear him practically wheezing as he tells Jacob that the Deputy, this Oakley girl that he remembers from the arrest in the church is headed towards the Whitetails in a fury. At first, he thinks John’s laughing because Deputy Oakley thinks she can do something to stop Eden’s Gate, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s not the case.

“I baptized her. Or, tried to,” John attempts to explain, but he dissolves into laughter again until Jacob just turns off the radio out of frustration.

He knows he’ll recognize her. There’s only a handful of people out there who match her description. He’s got it all written down in his office, prepared for wanted posters and broadcasted alerts and commands. Deputy Oakley (Pratt won’t give up her first name), late 20s or early 30s, height between 5′6″ and 5′9″, auburn hair, hazel eyes, dark tan skin. In the church, she had been pretty steadfast and serious, full of nervous energy. Now Jacob knows better, learning that she’s been blazing trails up one mountain and down another. She’s done action movie leaps out of moving helicopters, run around with a pet cougar, and by his security footage, has done stupid shit like hand stands on a cliff edge and stunt rides on a rickety ATV that’s probably as old as she is.

And her stupid laugh is on loop in his head, for all the times he’s eavesdropped on her radio calls with his brother and sister. She has this low, dry laugh that comes close to a witch cackle, but the more honest it is, the richer it is, even though a veil of static.

Of course, she hits the Whitetails like a torpedo. Eli takes to her, as predicted, which jump starts Jacob’s idea. Once she takes the lumber mill and rescues Jess Black (damnit, she would have been a choice recruit, but oh well), he decides to put the plan into action. 

And when he captures her and gets her in the chair, he finds out exactly why John was laughing.

In the darkness and shuttered light of the projector, he can’t make out many details about her. He knows Pratt’s put her in the chair while Jacob was preparing, so he hasn’t seen her up close himself. And in the dim light, with casts of gray and green and red, there’s not much to see other than an expression of masked horror and awe. Then, the picture on the projector changes to one of his favorites; one of the white wolves gnawing off a deer leg. The light’s bright enough that he sees–

He sees something impossible.

For the first time in years, he fumbles in his presentation. He freezes, staring, watching her with wide eyes. He sees the light of the projector illuminating patches and spatters of blue that go from her forehead down her temples and cheeks, spilling onto her neck and disappearing under the hem of her black parka before reappearing on the backs of her hands.

And she’s looking at him with the same expression of frozen wonder. Maybe the horror isn’t directed towards what he’s doing so much as what he looks like.

And he thinks. He really thinks.

He doesn’t remember any of those marks in the church, but the waters of the baptism might have washed a layer of make-up away. 

“Oh, fuck,” says the Deputy in a whisper.

He echoes her sentiment, and for the first time in ages, he has no idea what to do.

His soulmate is strapped into one of his chairs, ready for a round of conditioning. His soulmate, the one he’s spoken to through scars, apologized to, begged forgiveness from when things got bad, and mentally hid things from, is sitting in front of him as his biggest potential enemy.

Sometimes it takes a little while, his mother had said. Give or take two decades or so.

They don’t wash off, she said. No, but you can hide them with make-up or scar them over so bad that they disappear.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, he had said. And suddenly, he wants to say it again.

Instead, he clears his throat as the projector clicks and shows a deer skull against a snowy background. “Pratt,” he says, and he hears the man grunt behind him. “Take Deputy Oakley to 3-A. We need to have a talk.”

He knows Pratt hesitates, and all it takes is one heavy step toward him to send the man scurrying over to his coworker, quickly undoing the straps. He helps her stand, and she does so on legs that don’t quite hold her up right. When she takes one step and nearly falls, Jacob feels himself lurch forward on the instinct to catch her. He only just stops himself when Pratt catches her and assures her that she’s going to be fine. 

Jacob should be the one doing that. He should be–

He stiffens. “Get moving,” he barks, and Pratt almost drags her out of the room.

The other two Whitetails in the room stare at him as the deer skull is projected over him. He breathes heavy, thinking. Always thinking.

And suddenly, he catches that crest of thought that he only felt in juvie, when he was young and still had some optimistic bone that hadn’t been shattered yet. He sees potential there, a future that doesn’t end with either of them dead, or Joseph’s vision ruined. He sees something like promise, like the possibility of having a right hand that can strike as quick and hard as he needs. Someone beside him, someone strong and as of yet unable to really be defeated. He sees his soulmate there, where soulmates should be, this balance on the other end of his scale that’s always been tilted and askew.

She’s seen his pain on her skin, and he’s seen hers. He can use this. He can bring them together and make a partnership and cull the weak in their pack with one of the strongest by his side.

And as he continues his presentation to the hapless Whitetails, who will eventually become the Deputy’s first test, he thinks about the girl in the other room with the ink-blue marks of his scars on her skin. He thinks of the future they can make.

He has no idea that she’s going to fight him every step of the way.