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There’d been a point once, when Andrew was a boy, that he’d been told stories of soulmates and had had grand visions of finding his own. Sharing a soul with one person who could feel your pain and whose pain you felt in return- now that felt like true love. And a soulmate had to love you; that was their entire reason for existing. Not like his mom or his dad, whoever they were, nor any number of the foster parents he’d gone through, nor any of the “brothers” and “sisters” he’d had throughout his few years in the system. No, none of them had ever loved him, but there was someone out there, someone who did even though they didn’t even know him yet.
That feeling had quickly faded when the pain began searing through his torso and leaving him writing in agony on the floor. How many homes had he gone through up until he was nine or so? How many times had he been admitted to the hospital and left behind because foster families couldn’t handle a crazy kid. And that was surely what it must have been, because no matter how many times Andrew screamed that someone was slicing into his flesh, there was no mark on his skin, no sign of injury and of course no one thought it possible that a child’s child soulmate could be going through such torture.
Andrew knew he wasn’t crazy, though. He could feel the slices, from throat to collarbone, from shoulder to navel. Once it’d felt like he had gotten shot in the chest and it had terrified him so deeply that he’d curled up into a sobbing ball and no one had been able to coax him out of it, not until they’d gotten him to the hospital and given him a sedative, anyway.
And that was when he’d begun to hate his soulmate. It was unreasonable for him to blame his soulmate for that invisible pain, but his child’s mind couldn’t comprehend that fact. People thought he was crazy, and he began to believe it. That was easier, anyway, than trying to understand that the person who held the other half of his soul was being hurt.
But then he reached a certain age, Andrew did, and an abuse of a different sort began to happen to him. No matter how much he begged please,please,please, it didn’t stop and he began to wonder if his soulmate had ever used that word as well and if they had grown to hate it as much as he had. And suddenly he was old enough to understand, and suddenly he hated himself just as much as he hated his soulmate because he was too w e a k to get away and spare them the pain that he was dealing with now himself.
It was like they traded, eventually. The pain from his soulmate lessened, coming and going now and then, but Andrew’s got worse. Then he found a foster home he loved, was given the promise to be adopted, but there was too much hurt there. Too much abuse, both from another and self-inflicted, and with the first cut, he whispered I’m sorry into the air. Then he began to hate those two words, too, because he whispered it every single time he dragged the knife across his skin, begging for silence, begging for release, begging for someone to love him.
That pain faded, too, eventually. Because suddenly he had a brother. A twin. The sharer of his own DNA and that should have meant he was loved, but it didn’t. It brought on a new kind of pain but this time Andrew accepted it and rolled with it and he made the giver pay for what she’d done. And that made it even more impossible for his brother to love him, but that was okay. Because at least he’d finally protected one person in his life from the pain.
Years passed and Andrew was almost able to forget about soulmates and pain. He lived without pain for a while and that was something new. That was something to behold and he’d almost begun to feel like normal again, less like the crazy boy that everyone had accused him of being for so long. Until Nicky got hurt and Andrew had to protect him and suddenly it was official: Andrew Joseph Minyard was actually insane. But the medicine helped that.
Right?
At least he didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t even think about pain. And that was a pleasant change.
Until one day he slammed a striker’s racquet into a pretty boy striker with a bunch of issues of his own and Andrew dropped to his knees, gasping for air as stars danced across his vision. That wasn’t right. He’d hit the new kid.
So why the hell did he feel the pain of it?