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The first time Tommy ever heard the term ‘soulmates’ was when he was four years old at a family barbeque and his older cousin had gone around asking all the married adults in their family if they were soulmates or not.
Tommy had overheard his mother tell her no, and his four-year-old curiosity had prompted him to ask “What are soulmates?”
He couldn’t remember what she told him at the time - if she even gave him a real answer, but he must have been satisfied, for he didn’t ask about them again until the next time he heard anything about soulmates, when he was in second grade and a girl in his class had come in yelling that her older sister had met her soulmate the day before.
When he had gone home later that day, Tommy again asked his mother “What are soulmates?”
That time she gave him an answer that explained a lot more.
Soulmates were each person’s perfect match. Wherever one was injured, bruises, broken bones, scrapes, a bruise would appear on the other person’s skin. That’s how you would know you met your soulmate, when you had matching bruises and injuries.
Tommy thought over her explanation for a few days before he came up with another question. “Why haven’t I seen any bruises yet?”
It was a long time before Tommy noticed any bruises from his soulmate, long enough that he had long since stopped looking for them or expecting them to come. Until one day, changing in the locker room after gym class, he heard someone ask, “Tommy, what happened to your back?”
He looked behind him, confused. “What are you talking about?”
One of the boys in his class pointed at his back. “You got some weird bruises on your back there, look at them.”
Tommy furrowed his eyebrows as he went to look at his back in one of the mirrors, twisting his body until he was able to see exactly what the other preteen boys were talking about. There were two bruises, one right above his left hip, the other on above the other hip, but a little closer to his spine. He tried wracking his mind and recent memories on what could cause bruises in those locations, but couldn’t think of anything.
“Could it be from your soulmate?” one boy asked.
“Soulmate?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah, you know, your soulmate’s injuries,” the boy rolled his eyes. “You have seen soulmarks come across your body before, right?”
Tommy didn’t want to tell his classmates that he hadn’t, he couldn’t imagine the amount of teasing they would give him for being thirteen and still not have any soulmarks yet. (‘At that point, do you even have a soulmate Tommy?’ they’d probably ask.) So he just nodded. “Yeah, it’s probably that,” he said.
The other boys remaining in the locker room then rushed to start talking about the recent bruises they’ve seen on their body, trying to guess if they were from their soulmate or some other bruise they got from gym class and sports practices.
When Tommy was sixteen he went onto one of the computers in the school library and searched ‘can 2 guys be soulmates.’ At that point in time the internet wasn’t nearly as advanced to provide him with any meaningful answers though. He left when the school librarian came around reminding everyone that the computers are to be used for school assignments only.
It was another couple of years before he saw anything that could be something from his soulmate, and in that time, he was extremely hypervigilant, but that hypervigilance could only last so long, and by the time he graduated high school, he had figured those two weird bruises on his back four years ago were just a weird once-off and stopped expecting anything.
Six months after graduating he enlisted in the Army. And six months after that he ran into a guy in the gym who convinced him to join the base’s boxing club.
With all the new and random bruises he was getting from boxing and training out in the field, he totally missed the ones that weren’t really his.
“Damn Kinard, did you trip or something?” one of his squadmates asked when he knelt down to tie his shoes one day at PT.
“What?” Tommy asked, looking up at the man from his position kneeling down, completely confused.
“Your knee,” The man pointed at a dark purple bruise on his right knee, one Tommy had completely missed until that point. “I thought you said you didn’t do kickboxing?”
“I don’t,” Tommy said, slightly dazed. He thought over what could have possibly caused a bruise like the one on his knee right now. He did trip on that one ruck a month ago, but the bruise that came from that was on his other knee, and it had been completely gone by last week. He pressed a finger into it, but no pain came out. The only other possibility it could be was-
But that was impossible, right? He didn’t have a soulmate.
Over the next couple of years, it became apparent that he did, in fact, have a soulmate. One that apparently went almost nineteen years without getting a single bruise or other injury, but they must have decided to make up for all the lost time from the past now.
If it wasn’t a bruise on his knee, it was one on his elbow or his palm. Some were smaller straight lines, indicating scratches or cuts of some sort. Some were larger, indicating scrapes or bruises.
There was once or twice he thought it possible his soulmate could be facing some sort of physical abuse of some sort, but eventually thought otherwise. While they were common, they weren’t common enough to be considered abuse. They were also always in fairly visible spots that would be hard to cover up, and from what he read, abuse usually had on non-visible body parts. They were also always in places that could be clearly explained by trips or falls or… any regular injury.
As the years went on, the bruises continued to come, although Tommy began to notice somewhat of a pattern with them. They tended to pick up more in the summer as if it was like a kid on summer break. But he brushed off that realization, he was a man in his twenties, there was no way his soulmate was still in school.
Tommy did the standard four years in the Army, and after that, since he had no real idea what he wanted to do with his life still, extended for another 24 months. After those two years, Tommy decided to leave, and ended up joining the LA Fire Department.
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
For as long as Buck could remember, he would get random bruises, or ‘soulmarks’ as Maddie called them on random body parts at random times.
Maddie was always excited about them, which made him want to show her every new one he found on his body, and in turn she showed him every one she found on hers.
It wasn’t until he was around four or five when he realized what soulmarks actually were, and the first thing he did was ask his father if he and his mother were soulmates. When the man said “Yes, we are,” Buck nodded to himself, and made it his goal to one day find his soulmate. And for the rest of that school year, he would try to compare every bruise on his body with every other student in his class. When he didn’t find his soulmate by the start of first grade, Buck realized this ‘finding his soulmate’ thing would be harder than he originally thought.
Buck’s first girlfriend (If you could call her that) was Alexandra Baker, who in the fifth grade, when she noticed both she and Buck had matching bruises on their shins, had declared Buck (still going by Evan at the time) her boyfriend. Two weeks later however, after Buck broke his arm in a skateboarding accident and her arm had no visible markings whatsoever, it became clear they weren’t soulmates, and that was the end of their fifth-grade romance.
After that, he never really thought about soulmates for a long time, other than the passing thought every time he saw a random bruise or cut line here or there on an arm or leg.
It wasn’t until that one Thanksgiving break when Maddie brought home a new boyfriend from her college that he noticed “he isn’t your soulmate.”
“What do you mean?” she asked him when he spoke that thought out loud.
“I saw that bruise you have on your arm,” Buck said. “Doug doesn’t have anything there.”
Maddie simply rolled her eyes. “You’re only eleven so you probably haven’t realized this yet, but not everyone gets married to their soulmate. Most people never even meet theirs.”
“Are you saying you’re going to marry him?” Buck asked, he didn’t know why but that thought disgusted him.
Maddie was silent for a moment. “Evan, you’re getting ahead of yourself. I only just met him in September.”
“That’s not a no,” Buck pointed out. But Maddie decided to drop the subject, for once, avoiding answering his questions.
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
It was one morning when Tommy was twenty five that he woke up to a deep dark bruise extending over most of his forearm that he thought to himself, “My soulmate broke their arm.”
Chimney and a lot of the other guys made a big fuss when he went into his next shift, and it took him multiple conversations to explain that it wasn’t his injury, it was his soulmate’s and he didn’t feel any pain and could still work just fine. And no, he hadn’t met them yet.
The bruising on the arm must have looked worse than Tommy thought, for even Gerrard looked at it with visible concern, and that was saying something.
Then a guy at Tommy’s boxing gym convinced him to try out Muay Thai, surprisingly Tommy found out he enjoyed it better. After training in it for a couple months, he decided to enter a competition, needless to say… it didn’t go so well.
“Damn Kinard, what happened to your face?” he heard Johnson ask when he walked into the Firehouse on his next shift.
“Is that from your soulmate?” Chimney asked. After the broken arm fiasco, the entire team pretty much knew about his soulmate’s habit of getting injured.
“No,” Tommy said simply. “The black eye’s mine.”
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
“Evan, what did you do to your face?” Maddie asked once he walked downstairs that morning.
“It wasn’t me this time, I swear,” he said.
“Language, Evan,” their mother hissed from where she was eating breakfast at the kitchen table.
It was the summer before Buck’s last year of middle school, and Maddie had completed her nursing school a couple of months prior. She and Doug were apparently getting ‘serious’ (whatever that meant) and she was moving into his place across town next weekend. Buck wasn’t exactly happy with this arrangement. Sure, across town was a hell of a lot closer than her school up in Boston, but Buck still didn’t feel right about her boyfriend, or soon-to-be husband, apparently.
But all that didn’t matter right this second. What was more pressing was the giant black eye he woke up to see in the bathroom mirror this morning. It wasn’t like his soulmate never got any injuries, for Buck did see the odd bruise here and there, and some were pretty large a lot of the time. But none were ever this visible, this noticeable, this painted on his face.
“This time?” Maddie asked.
“Oh it's not that bad,” Buck tried to waive off. “But I did break my arm in fifth grade, and sprained my ankle really bad snow tubing last January, it was only a matter of time before my soulmate did something.”
“Why did I not hear about all of this?” Maddie asked.
“I can’t tell you about every injury,” he replied, sheepishly. “You’d worry too much.”
…
“Evan, what happened to your face?” his father asked when Buck came back inside for lunch later that day.
“I already told everyone, it's not mine,” Buck said.
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
When Tommy woke up one morning at thirty-one years old with another deep and dark bruise on his arm, marks all over his face in the form of scrapes, and bruises all over his body, he didn’t know what to think.
Sure yesterday they finished a long shift that had a lot of crazy and dangerous calls, but he figured he would have remembered if any of this happened to him. So what did this mean for his soulmate?
Were they attacked? Get into some sort of car wreck? Please tell him they got to a hospital and weren’t lying on the side of a road somewhere, because these injuries definitely needed a hospital.
When they eventually meet, unless his soulmate gets things under control, Tommy won’t be able to let them out of his sight - for their protection, of course.
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
When Buck started to see a lot of small hairline scratches on his arms, he had no idea where they were from. They first appeared about six months after he moved out (ran away?) from his parents' house.
They appeared in groups of three or four, going in random directions all along his forearms. He was still baffled by them, two months later when he started working on the Montana ranch and had to help the owner’s daughter with clearing out the cats out of one of the barns.
“Did Molly and Muttons cause those scratches on your arms?” she asked when they had finished, Buck holding the said Muttons precariously in his arms.
“Huh, what?” he asked.
“Those scratches on your arms there. They look like cat scratches. Did you get them this afternoon?” she asked again.
“Oh, no,” Buck shook his head. “They’re not mine, they’re- they’re my soulmates. They showed up for the first time a couple of months ago.”
“A couple months ago?” she asked as she walked up and got a closer look at Buck’s arms. “Does your soulmate have cats?”
“I don’t know,” Buck said as he passed Muttons to the girl’s arms. “I’ve never met her.”
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
Tommy had honestly thought that his soulmate had gotten his wild side under control until the day a giant bruise formed on the top of his head, honestly, it looked like a bowling ball hit it, followed a couple of weeks later with a giant bruise across his throat (What did someone take a knife to it?) Tommy had started to become a tad bit scared for his soulmate.
But at least compared to when they were younger, the injuries did seem to slow down a lot.
Tommy was never really one to follow the news, he mostly just heard about big events from word of mouth. Or if it was big enough or important enough, someone, whether a coworker or his parents, would send him a link to an article or video.
So, when he saw his leg covered in bruises, he realized his soulmate must have gotten injured again. It hadn’t happened in a while, but he knew it was bound to happen at some point again. And when he walked into the harbor station later that morning, he hadn’t been expecting the questioning and worried glances being thrown his way.
After about five minutes of people covertly staring at him, Tommy started growing annoyed. “Alright guys, what’s up?” he asked the group of people milling about the station’s kitchen.
They were all silent for a second, before Miller spoke up. “We’re just surprised you still came in after everything. Figured you might have called out.”
“Called out?” Tommy asked, confusion laced in his voice. “Called out for what?”
Miller shared a look with some of the others. “Well you were at the 118 until last year right? You heard what happened to them last night?”
“Yeah?” Tommy said, still confused.
“Did you hear what happened last night?” Nance asked from the other side of the kitchen.
“What happened last night?” Tommy asked, growing slightly irritated. Could someone just come out and say what happened?
Nance winced as he fished in his pocket for his phone. “It’s probably easier to just show you the video,” he said as he found it. “I heard it was A-shift on the call. Didn’t know if those were the guys you worked with or not.”
A-shift were the crew Tommy used to work with, but he didn’t have a chance to say that as he watched the video. And the video was nothing he expected.
Tommy didn’t recognize who was under the truck. He recognized Hen and Chimney helping the guy, and Nash doing something nearby. He had heard from Chimney that their shift had gotten a handful of new people since he had left, it must have been one of those guys underneath it.
Tommy was grateful it wasn’t someone he knew underneath there and hurting.
He called Chimney later that day, and was told that although their guy got hurt pretty badly - a broken leg, no one died, and a full recovery was possibly on the table. Tommy told Chimney if they needed anything, he could call him.
Years later he would realize that event and the bruises on his leg should have been a clue to finding his soulmate, but well… he’ll be embarrassed to say it had completely flown over his mind.
About six months later, the Great Tsunami of Los Angeles, as the news channels seem to have named it happened, and Tommy gets some marks indicating scrapes and scratches all over his body. He got the feeling his soulmate must have gotten them in the tsunami, which meant they probably lived in LA, and that they survived the tsunami, otherwise all the markings would have completely disappeared.
It made him feel slightly happy and more hopeful. They at least lived in the same city now, even if it was one of the largest cities population-wise on the planet. It would only be a matter of time before they met.
Xx🚒xXxXx🚒xX
Out of all the major injuries that Buck, and the handful of minor injuries that Tommy, sustained, Buck always guessed that it would be one of his that made them realize who his soulmate was.
Like really, he almost had his leg completely destroyed by a fire truck, he thought he might have met his soulmate when he saw someone with a giant bruise on their leg walk by. Or maybe seeing someone with lightning marks on their skin after he was struck.
Or maybe running into Tommy after he got another black eye or broken knuckle after one of his MMA fights.
Instead, they realized they were each other’s soulmates after the most mundane, anti-climatic, run of the mill injury ever.
They were making dinner in Buck’s kitchen, Tommy assigned to cutting vegetables, Buck doing everything else.
Buck was in the middle of telling a story about something Eddie and Chimney had gotten into on their last shift, when Tommy interrupted with a “Oh shit.”
“Tommy?” Buck said, looking over at the man who had just set the knife down that he was using to cut the carrots, now grasping onto his left hand with his right. Buck could see red drops of blood seeping through his thumb and pointer finger.
“Cut myself,” Tommy said, shruging.
Buck turned off the oven where he had started boiling a pot of water as he turned around and came closer. “How bad is it?” he asked, walking over to take a look. He brought Tommy’s hands closer to himself, and gently moved one of Tommy’s fingers to see the cut. “Oh, it doesn’t look too bad,” he said, seeing the small but deep cut on the knife made on the top of Tommy’s thumb. “It shouldn’t need stitches.”
When Buck looked up at Tommy’s face, he noticed the pinched eyebrows Tommy had. “Tommy?” Buck asked. “Is something wrong?”
“Your thumb,” Tommy said as he lifted a finger and tapped the tip of Buck’s thumb. Buck looked down and noticed what Tommy was referring to. His eyes widened as he saw the small dark red line going across the top of Buck’s thumb, very similar to the shape of the cut of Tommy’s thumb.
“Is that a-?” Buck started.
“A soulmark?” Tommy finished Buck’s question. Buck nodded. “I think it is.”
Later that night as they curled up in Buck’s bed, Buck let out a long and tired sigh. “Something wrong?” Tommy asked.
“I just thought…” Buck started as he moved his head up from Tommy’s chest so he could look the other man in the eye. “I just thought that finding my soulmate would be more… how do you say it? More surprising or rewarding.”
Tommy leaned over and pressed a kiss onto Buck’s forehead. “Well I’m sorry it was so anti-climatic. I’ll make it up to you next time.”