Chapter Text
MacCready knew the universe was just a big stupid dumbass the day he met his soulmate.
She was little, wearing a dirty potato sack as a dress and hugging a small doll made of the same scratchy looking stuff. Her round, brown eyes looked too big as she shuffled up to the gates in duct-tape shoes, wearing road dust like paint all over. There was nothing else, just her and her doll and the fear screaming off of her as she approached.
MacCready had climbed up the inside of the wall, excited to get a look of the newcomer. As soon as he sat eyes on her, as soon as he felt that scared, that sad… he knew.
It was her. It was his soulmate. Finally after six whole years of wondering when he was gonna meet her, she was there!
He ran out to her - ahead of the mayor - with his arms outstretched, searching her bare arms and legs for the handprints he knew would be there. They had to be there. The palms of his hands were darkened with his soulmark, had been for forever, so her mark would be handprints. Had to be.
She took a step back as he approached, her face moving into a small pool of sunlight to illuminate the gleam in her eye and the dirt on her cheek and-!
…and the dot of darkened skin on the tip of her nose. A soulmark, too small and dainty and nice to match up with his two-handed push of a destiny.
"Welcome to Little Lamplight!" said the mayor, strolling up behind him. The girl's eyes were still glued to MacCready, though, as he stalled in front of her.
Not his soulmate.
"Uhm," she said, gripping her doll tight and twisting her toe on the stone beneath them. Her eyes dropped from his. "Uh… uhm," she said again.
The mayor stepped up closer. "It's ok, you're family now!"
The girl nodded quietly, still not looking up. "Okay…"
She was so sad.
MacCready wanted to hug her. Everything in his thoughts was telling him to hug her.
And that's what it was supposed to feel like, right? That's what the big kids had said when they'd talked to him about his soulmark. They said that when you saw your soulmate, you would know it right away, and that you would want to hug them and stay with them forever after that.
Her soulmate wasn't going to hug her, though. They were going to boop her on the nose. That's a thing he knew about soulmarks. They lined up with each other, with the first place you and your soulmate would ever touch.
"What's your name, little sister?" asked one of the bigger kids.
The girl squeezed her doll. "Lucy."
Lucy.
MacCready's eyes started to hurt. Throat, too.
"Lucy's home!" Called the mayor, like he always did when there was a newcomer.
"Welcome home, Lucy!" someone called from the gate.
"Yay, Lucy!" someone else shouted.
The crowd around the gate cheered with greeting for their new sister, and she shrank under it all, eyes darting. He could feel her scared, her sad, her nervous.
He could. He could feel it!
That meant… she was his! The universe just messed up and gave them the wrong soulmarks! That's why his hadn't worked 'til now. The other kids said that people with soulmarks could feel their soulmates in their heads, that they always knew what they were feeling.
MacCready had never felt anything.
But it wasn't because his soulmate was broken or dead or something else like he was scared of, it was because the universe was a big dumbass and had messed up their marks!
It all made sense now.
MacCready stepped up to her and lifted his pointer finger to bop her nose. Lucy trembled as he did, squeaking like a little molerat pup as her eyes crossed to follow his hand. When he dropped it again, she studied him, confused.
"Welcome home, Luce!" He stuffed his soul- stained hands in his pockets, saying "I'm your soulmate, RJ MacCready."
***
Lucy wasn't his soulmate.
At least, that's what the big kids tried to tell him when they'd pulled him aside later that night. And also when he tried to keep her from going deeper into spelunkers without him the next day, dropping dramatically to one knee and clutching at his chest as if it physically pained him to be away from her. And then again many months later when he'd punched one of the other boys in the face for trying to give her a hug…
"Your soulmate doesn't have a boop on her nose, MacCready!"
One of the oldest girls, Lena, pulled him aside to give him a stern talking to for the violence. She only had a couple weeks left of being a kid before they kicked her out, but her words reeked of mungo.
She'd gripped his wrists, forcing him to look at his darkened palms. "This is what it'll be. This is what your soulmate has, somewhere on them, ok?"
MacCready ripped his arms away from her. "But the universe fucked up, Lena!"
"Language, Mac!"
"Ass, Shit, Crap!" he retorted, waving his hands at her as she rolled her eyes. "Lucy's my soulmate! I feel her!! I never could before but I look at her now and I know what she feels! I love her!"
Lena dropped to his level and he crossed his arms, backing up against the cave wall as if to escape her, though she had him pretty well cornered as she gripped his elbows. "MacCready, I-" she looked at him weird for a minute. Then she frowned. "I really don't want you to be sad later if she meets her soulmate - her real soulmate - and then you're just… you're setting yourself up to be really really sad later, Mac."
"I'm sad right now! Because I finally met my soulmate, I finally feel her feelings like I'm supposed to and everyone won't stop telling me I'm wrong! That I don't feel her! That she isn't my girl, but she is! She's mine!"
Lena's eyes went pointy on him and she squeezed his arms enough that it hurt a little. "RJ MacCready, you are stubborn as a bull but if there's one thing you have to understand it's that your soulmate-" she moved her hands to grip closer to his hands, "Whoever they are, they are not your property. They aren't a toy you get to play with and no one else does. They are their own person and if they say don't do that then you don't do that, and if they say go away then you go away, and if they want to hug their friend then you cannot. Punch. Them… Understood?"
Mac pulled his hand from her. "That's not what Franco said. Franco said my soulmate would be mine forever and ever."
"Okay well Franco's a fucking idiot."
"Language, Lena," he mocked snottily.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and snorted air out of her nostrils - like she was the bull. "Okay, Mr. Sassypants, what about this. What if you and Lucy love each other for a long long time and then one day you… push someone out of the way of a speeding Brahmin or something and then bam, you've got a new soulmate." She gave him a mean look. "How do you think Lucy would feel then?"
Lucy's sad face. She had been less sad since she got there, since she'd spent time with her new family and it made him feel happy to see that. It made him feel really really bad that he might make her make that face again…
He wouldn't let her make that face again. Ever.
"That wouldn't happen. It's just that the universe fucked up, Lena, that's all."
"You gotta get a handle on that mouth of yours, kid."
"Ass, no."
Lena lifted her hands like she was giving up. Yes! "Can I go play with Lucy again?? Please please please please-"
"Oh, Atom ok. Uhm… ok so here's the deal. Two things you have to do before you can go play with Lucy, alright?"
"What if I don't do them?" he challenged, crossing his arms.
"If you don't then me and the other big kids are gonna have to find some way to keep you away from her, ok? You want that?"
He shook his head hard.
"Ok so. First, you gotta apologize to Zip."
"But he touched her."
"A lot of people are gonna touch her. Get used to it."
MacCready made a show of rolling his eyes.
"After you apologize to Zip and make sure he's ok, you're gonna apologize to Lucy… I think you scare her a little, Mac…"
Mac felt himself frowning. That wasn't good… "I scare Lucy?"
Lena's eyes went wide at his quieter words and she nodded. "Yeah kiddo, imagine if every time you tried to play with someone, someone else came up and punched them? And said you were only allowed to play with them, huh? Wouldn't that be kinda scary?"
MacCready didn't want to look at Lena all of a sudden. He looked at his shoe as he kicked the gravel. "I guess."
"So you're gonna apologize. And you're gonna tell her you don't want to scare her. And then, every time from now on that you want to play with her, you're gonna ask. You're gonna say Can I play with you, Lucy? and Can I eat lunch with you, Lucy? and-"
Impossible. "For how long?"
Lena looked him right in the eye, letting him know she was really really serious. "For the rest of forever."
***
Lucy never ended up saying no to him. He always got to play with her and eat with her and snuggle next to her at night. She didn't even make him ask a lot of the time. A lot of the time, she would just go to him. Like she wanted to. Like she liked him.
When they got older, they stopped sleeping with the other little kids and inherited their own little part of the cave from the mungos they'd kicked out. They slept there every night, wrapped up in each other like they actually were soulmates, even though the time came about eight years in where they found out for sure that they really really weren't.
They were fourteen, sleeping on their own for almost half a year when he woke up to her tossing in his arms, breathing heavy, whimpering softly. Nightmare. She had them sometimes. Usually she was asleep. Other times it would come to her in the middle of the day. One second she'd be fine, trading for medical supplies or sweeping the meal chamber or talking with the other kids, the next she'd be anxious. Then panicked. Sometimes, she would hurt.
This time around, it hadn't taken her long to get to panic. Like, really fucking bad panic.
He touched her face, soothing over her cheeks with the palms of his marked hands. "Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy" he chanted and her eyes popped open at the sound.
"Robbie," she whimpered. "Robbie, I'm so-" she gasped in a breath. "I-I'm so-"
"You're safe."
She shook her head, the panic in her eye as real as her fingers twisted in his shirt, as the soft ring of discolored skin on the tip of her nose. He hated when she went through this. He didn't know if it was a relic from what she went through, from when her parents died, or if… if nothing. Nevermind.
"I'm- I'm- I'm-" she stuttered, her little, fast breaths cutting off the words.
"You're ok," he finished for her. "I've got you."
Lucy screamed.
Mac nearly jolted out of his skin, pulling back as she keeled forward suddenly. "Luce?"
She didn't answer, just wailed into his chest, clutching at a spot above her stomach with both hands.
He pushed up onto an elbow as Watch, an eight year old explosive enthusiast who had only been with them a couple years, came running into their cavern.
"What the hell?" he asked. "What's wrong with Lucy??"
Somebody else tumbled in after him but he couldn't focus on who it was. Lucy was dying. It felt like she was dying. She was in agony, and he couldn't fix it. "I dunno! She just woke up like this! I can't-"
"Robbie it hurts."
MacCready leapt to his feet, suddenly electrified with purpose as she whispered help, help, help… He grabbed for his pants. "I'm gonna get you help, love, it'll be ok…"
Watch went to Luce's side, going to his knees next to where she was curled into herself. "How the hell are you gonna do that?"
I'll fucking flap my arms and fly her there, kid. Fuckin watch. Here I go! Wooo…
MacCready snatched his gloves from where they kept them at the bedside, next to her doctor's bag; ready to go at a moment's notice.
"I'll carry her to… to Arefu, I guess. I dunno… I dunno what's happening but-"
Lucy suddenly went quiet, her breaths halting in the air around them.
Mac's heart threatened to crack in half right then and there with one hand half gloved, the other bare as his gaze snapped to her prone form… she was moving, though. Shaking. There was no way this was the end.
Watch shook her shoulder. "Lucy…?"
"Gone," she whimpered.
MacCready sank down next to her as she drew in a deep breath. The light was low, the angle obscuring but it… it looked like...
He pushed the hair off of her face, cupping her chin and turning it up to face him. "Gone," she whispered again, big brown eyes wet with tears. "Gone. Gone. Gone. They're gone, Robbie. They're… they're…"
Her soulmark.
It was gone.
***
Lucy was bad for a while… though she had always been a little off.
She was a chronic people-pleaser and spent most of her time either helping someone, healing someone, or with her nose in one of the medical textbooks they'd traded for over the years; eyes dialed in on the page, working.
Sometimes, though… sometimes she'd have her nose in her book or her hands on a patient but her eyes would be sort of fuzzy, her mind somewhere else. Then she'd reach up with a dainty hand… and she'd touch the tip of her nose.
When Mac caught her like that, that green sort of color would wash over him, his hands balling into fists as the dead air that had always sat on the other side of his soul taunted him. He could never tell quite what she was thinking then, what she was feeling, who was pulling the strings on her heart.
He always figured it didn't matter though. They may have been puppeteering that marionette, but he'd had his bare fucking hands all over her soul from day one. He was winning.
After that night, though - the night her soulmate died - she was. She was different.
When your soulmate dies, they leave a different kind of mark. A deathmark. Where soulmarks were usually just a shade or two off, one way or another, than the rest of your skin, deathmarks were silvery-white, like a scar. He'd met a trader once whose whole hand was a deathmark, the appendage glinting radically in the laternw that illuminated the front gate of Little Lamplight. Said it had felt like he was being ripped up by a deathclaw when it happened. He hadn't known his soulmate either. Could be that that was what had actually happened to them…
Lucy's was three marks, each about three inches long and thin like glass. Stabbed, he assumed. There was one perfectly between her ribs, too, and MacCready had caught enough looks at her big fat books while she was reading them to know it probably got their lung.
She never said anything about it, though.
She didn't say much of anything for a long time.
After her soulmark went away, she quieted even more than before. She still helped people, still kept everyone up and running and healthy, but her light was dimmer - her eyes always distant.
MacCready had only ever taken his gloves off while he was sleeping. It'd been a habit for nearly as long as he'd had Lucy, covering his hands so he wouldn't have to see them, have to think about them. As far as he was concerned, Lucy was his soulmate… and once hers had died, he doubled down on that. No, he couldn't feel what she was feeling like he was supposed to, but he couldn't feel his soulmate either. Never had. His soulmark didn't match up with her body, but so what? It was covered all the time anyways. So who cares?
When they left the cave, though, with Lucy doing… better than she was right after what she went through but still not totally ok, he basically never took them off. They were his hands, and if the universe sent a runaway brahmin after some rando and his gloves somehow magically had to be off in that moment… well, that fucking sucked for them. Nobody got to feel his hands. Nobody except Lucy.
Well, and Duncan.
Duncan got a free pass, for sure.
He'd always wondered what Lucy thought when she saw his hands on their son, when she saw someone else's mark soothing over his dry skin or patting his back to burp him or playing peek-a-boo with him. He'd told her from… well, not day one but from early on that he'd never felt anything on the other side of his mark, that they were basically dead.
They both knew his soulmate wasn't dead.
But what else could it be? Either they were dead, or they were completely even-keeled and emotionless… if that was what was on the other side of his link, then he didn't give a flying fuck. He didn't need that shit in his life.
Lucy suggested once that they may have been braindead. Technically still alive, but with a brain that didn't work anymore, their body still chugging along with the help of some sort of machine. Mac had never been sure what to make of that. Seemed out of this world. Fairy-tale shit.
No one knew how the soulmate stuff worked for sure anyways. The pre-war medical books Lucy always had her nose in had very little to say on the matter. There was a bit about which medications worked best to suppress the emotions being felt on the other side of the link - only to be used in the case where the other side is considered to be severely mentally ill, and another portion about what can be done to help someone suffering severe withdrawals from their bonded mate. The answer to that one was basically: nothing. Keep them comfortable until they eventually wither away, their soul dying. Once you're bonded, it's for life.
No one had anything to say about it, like, anecdotally, either. He never asked people about it but Lucy always did. Anytime she saw a soulmark she'd ask them about their experience, about when they first felt their soulmate.
The answer was always the same. Uhm, what do you mean? I've always felt them, for as long as I've had the mark.
After Duncan was born he'd asked her to stop doing that shit. "You are my whole fuckin life, Lucy. You and Dunc. I don't want to know about who's on the other side of this…" he'd waved a hand in the air at her, the one that wasn't cradling a newborn to his chest as he bounced. "This shit, ok? Can we just pretend that I have weird hands or some shit and move on?"
"I need to know, though. It's so weird and there has got to be an explanation! Someone's gotta know something, Robbie!"
"I really wish you would just drop it."
"Ok well you asking me to drop this… this anomaly would be like me asking you to quit… cussing."
"Done."
Lucy's hands froze on the skillet she'd been working. "Done?"
"Done. No more swearing. Ever again. But you have to drop the fuckin soulmate thing."
"Robbie…"
"It's fuckin done, Luce! No takesies backsies. You stop asking people about their soulmarks and I'll-"
"You already said fuck. Twice."
He paused his bouncing for as long as he dared, thinking back over what he'd said. "No I didn't."
"You did."
"Well… fine so it'll take some getting used to. I'm f- I'm doing it though, and so are you."
Lucy looked back to their dinner, a mischievous smile creeping onto her lips. "Will you quit smoking too, then?"
Mac turned from her, bouncing Duncan as he began to fuss again. "Don't press your luck, woman."
She'd dropped it. Even though he still cussed sometimes - 17 years of conditioning was hard to undo! - he'd never heard her ask anyone about their soulmarks again, not for the entire eight months after that that she stayed alive.
He didn't feel her go, of course. He wished he had. He wished he had felt her fear, her panic in the split moment before she began screaming, before the sound of her being torn limb from limb filled his ears and lodged itself in his brain to echo there for the rest of forever. At least if he'd felt that, then maybe he would have been able to get back to her in time. Get his gun up. Maybe she'd still be alive…
Because she was his life. She was his… his soulmate... and she was gone, just like that. One minute he was taking their crying baby out to the mouth of the tunnel they were sleeping in so Luce could have a chance to get some real rest, the next he was a traumatized, homeless, single dad with a big fuckin void next to him where his wife was supposed to be.
It took 4 months for Lena to find him.
She was living on a little farm on the northern outskirts of the Capital Wasteland and he'd just happened upon her, like kismet. Destiny.
He sat at her kitchen table, feeding Duncan a bottle of milk fresh from her family's brahmin, and told her everything. Everything he could pour out of him. She'd left his life shortly after Lucy had come into it after all, so there was a lot to say about their love, about Lucy's soulmark dying, about being the damn mayor... and by the end of it, as the sun was going down and their dinner plates sat gathered and waiting to be washed in the sink, after he'd shed his tears for Lucy while watching the other kids play with his son, Lena finally asked.
"Really, MacCready? You seriously never even wanted to know?"
He replied simply with "I had Lucy."
Lena's mouth pressed into that same disapproving line he remembered from his childhood when he and the other kids would get caught in a food fight or trying to light their farts on fire. He knew what she was thinking. He shook his head at her. Don't you even go there, Lena.
She dropped his gaze, rolling her eyes gently. "Well… fine. You and Duncan can stay on the couch tonight. Peter will help you start building something tomorrow, after chores."
"Building something?"
"Yeah… Like a house. I love you, little brother, but you can't stay on my couch forever."
***
A while later, as if the universe hadn't fucked him completely raw already, Duncan got sick.
It started with him sleeping more; he'd go to bed early, sleep a little late. He even napped more.
Then he didn't want to play while he was up, just sit on their porch and watch the rad chickens pick at their seed as Mac worked their meager crops in the yard. He started trying to find a good doctor to come see him then, making short trips into the city only to come back alone and to a child more and more exhausted. Depressed. Deathly.
After a few weeks, the boils came.
"Blue-flu," a rickety old ghoul in Megaton had said. "Bad, bad plague. Killed hundreds of thousands before the bombs. Government had forced quarantines and isolations for people who had symptoms."
Mac's blood ran cold. Hundreds of thousands.
"There's a cure though… right? Right? Tell me there's a fuckin cure?"
The ghoul held up a steadying hand and Mac's gloves creaked as he fisted his own in response.
"They were working on something. MedTek. One of their labs… I think out of Boston?"
"Great. Where's that?"
Mac's heart had sunk when the old ghouls black eyes widened on him, his shuffling stance telling him that the answer wasn't good, but that was nothing compared to how he felt 6 weeks later when he stood hundreds of miles away from his sick kid, side by side with Sinclair - a man on the same mission - and watched feral after feral pour out of the place that held their cure. Sinclair hadn't made it to the end of that day, and MacCready had only escaped by the skin of his teeth.
2 months later, curled into himself on a sleeping bag on the floor of the Old State House attic, he still hadn't made it in. Every day he lived with the guilt of having failed Sinclair on top of failing Duncan, on top of having failed Lucy… but that night, guilt wasn't the only thing weighing on his heart.
It started like a scratch in his lungs, like he'd spent too much time out in the cold and had gotten sick. Great, he thought. Just what I need: a cold..
Then his fucking heart shattered.
It was like Lucy all over again, hearing her wail in agony as she was torn to shreds, watching her curl up in pain as she experienced the agony of her snubbed soulmate's traumatic death… His lungs felt like they'd been filled with cold steel, his hands… itched. They itched so bad they fucking stung.
He sat up, indifferent to the nosy eyes of the other drifters crashing in the room with him as he ripped off his gloves and studied his hands, expecting to find a swarm of angry hornets wrapped up in there. He found only his familiar darkened palms.
They burned. He'd never felt anything from his soulmark before, not even a fucking tingle but now they fucking burned with… with cold, like he'd licked his palms and stuck them on an old car frame in the middle of an ice storm.
MacCready's heart was pounding in his chest, the anguish he now felt where he had only ever known silence before overwhelming him. It was mourning. It was anger. It was fear, fear, fear...
His soulmate wasn't dead… but he'd always sort of known they weren't.
They weren't brain dead either. Lucy had always said if they were brain dead, then that would be it. They'd never come back.
His soulmate was out there… and they were cold and they were pissed and they were so… so fucking scared…
Anguish sat heavy on his heart, paralyzing him where he sat. It wasn't foreign, though, like the rest of it had been. It was his own, and it was nearly suffocating.
Because he had no idea how he could ever begin to help them.