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ezlebe · 2 years

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i would love to see your take on a soulmate au

Disclaimer: this is a prologue/part one to a fic that will be on Ao3 in like a week or so, and I do have like four soulmate AUs, but this is the oldest WIP; I've been writing it since Dec 21 according to the timestamp, so I have to get it done first. I'm forcing myself.

“Is that your mark?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom says, flushing some and peeking down at the veritable smudge on his arm. It’s not exactly his best feature – other people have little charming stripes or an animal, lines from a poem, and he’s got… none of that. Hell, Shiv herself has that cute blade at her ankle.

Shiv stares for longer than is strictly comfortable.

“It’s not really any sort of shape,” Tom laughs, a little awkward, thinking she might be trying to figure it out. “It’s a Rorschach, I guess. Or, well, that’s what one doctor said.”

Shiv raises a brow and touches just lightly around it. “Like the ink blots?”

“Yeah, just like,” Tom says, then he turns his arm a little to look at the inside of his bicep, tapping at the mark in some urge to cover it up – to make her stop looking at it. “I guess whoever my soulmate is, they’re a little different depending on who’s looking at them.”

Shiv hums lowly, then finally looks up from it, as a sharp grin slips across her mouth. “And you, too, huh?”

“Sure, honey,” Tom laughs, then spreads his arms across the cushions of Shiv Roy’s big sofa. “What do you think?”

“I didn’t know you had a cousin,” Tom says, looking at Cousin Greg-not-Craig across the field. He waves with a curl of his fingers when Greg looks over, getting a wave back, and there’s something at the back of his head insisting he walk over there right now, but he manages to stay planted beside Shiv and sips his coffee. “He’s kind of… freakishly tall, honey.”

Shiv exhales a snort, tipping her head, and noticeably doesn’t look over in his direction.

“What’s his story?”

“…Why?” Shiv says, markedly stiff and chewing at the inside of her cheek.

“He’s your cousin?” Tom suggests, then smiles and nudges a bit sideways in an attempt to gentle rib, not actually making contact with his elbow, still clutched around the watch box, but keeping the sentiment of it. “I don’t want to get on his bad side.”

“He doesn’t matter,” Shiv says, taking a drink of her coffee. The response isn’t exactly a shock, since she’d said the same about Kendall and Roman, but Tom had thought they were past that point with her family. “He’s the black lamb of the black sheep of the family. He’s probably here for a job.”

“Oh,” Tom intones, finding his interest inexplicably piqued, as he looks over again in time to watch Greg fumble a test throw. He feels a smile briefly flickering across his face, before he can control it, and looks back to Shiv with a raised brow. “What’s his degree in?”

“I don’t think he has one,” Shiv says, peeking in the same direction of Greg, then shaking her head in a pair of jerks. “You should really just forget him, Tom.”

“There’s not enough people here to forget him,” Tom says, pretending to count all the heads with his coffee cup, then pausing on Greg with a tip of it forward and a shuffling step. “I’m going to introduce myself better.”

Shiv exhales a harsh, irked breath. “Tom.”

Tom looks back with a start, something tightening at the base of his throat at her unhappy tone. “Shiv?”

Shiv is quiet for a few tense seconds, then lifts her coffee to down the rest in one surely scalding gulp. “I think… my dad wanted to talk to me – you should give him that. If you have to talk to Greg, do it after the game.”

“Oh, alright,” Tom says, falling back on his heel and making to follow Shiv, trying not to look nervous when she leads him straight to her father.

~10~

“What do you think would happen if you –” Shiv clears her throat, tucking a stray lock of her hair over her ear. “Ever met your soulmate?”

“Huh?” Tom looks up, thinking he must have heard wrong, as he pockets his phone and decides just to concentrate on the day – his first day onboarding at Brightstar Adventure, a softball – rather than any that might come after it.

“Your soulmate?” Shiv repeats, walking a little quick through the lobby, as they make their way to the scan queue to get up the building. “What would you do? If you met – ” She hesitates, oddly, eyes darting to the side. “Her?”

“I don’t know, honey,” Tom answers, holding out his badge when it’s his turn at the stile. “I can’t imagine loving anyone more than you. I guess they’d be out of luck.”

“Tom!” A voice calls from behind him, vaguely familiar, and he turns around to see Greg at the guest entrance. He’s wearing that awful coat again, but there’s a peek of a suit under the zipper, so at least he’s halfway to respectable.

“Hey!” Tom waves back, then gestures toward the elevators, watching Greg flail, and almost laughs as he turns back to Shiv. “Why do you ask?”

“Curious, I guess,” Shiv says, pressing a bit hard on the up arrow for the elevator. She glances back out toward the lobby, then up at the descending numbers, lifting a shoulder in a tight shrug. “I read an article.”

Tom hums a high pitch, legitimately surprised, even a bit shocked; he thought Shiv couldn’t care less about that sort of thing. “Oh, was it very interesting?”

“Uh,” Shiv intones, making a sideways sort of smile. “Sort of? I just… It seems so fake, you know, like shit just for movies. But people do meet.”

“Yeah,” Tom says, as he nods, stepping into the elevator behind her at the ding. “My aunt and uncle are soulmates.”

“Are they?” Shiv says, plainly surprised, peeking up at him through her pale lashes with a narrow look.

The reaction isn’t entirely unwarranted – hardly anyone meets a soulmate, unless they’ve uploaded to a match site, and Tom’s aunt and uncle are too old for that’s sort of thing. Tom debated the idea of it himself, once or twice or many times in low moments, but in the end he found them too terribly unromantic and not worth the background check. He’s met Shiv, anyway – they just work and he’s happier with her than he could be with anyone else.

“Their marks are Canis Major,” Tom says, then laughs, thinking about the last time he saw them, only to feel his mood dip a bit when he realizes it’s been years since he even last checked up. “Kind of a downer, though – they’re cosmically perfect for each other, but my aunt’s left my uncle about three times, because he won’t stop cheating on her with ol’ Mary Jane.”

“Why does she keep going back?”

Tom tilts his head with a pointed raise his brow. “Uh, well, she loves him, honey. And most of what he does when he’s high isn’t all that bad – except burning down a gazebo.”

Shiv is quiet a beat, then huffs, a smile glancing across her mouth. “Ah. That Mary Jane.”

~9~

“You were out with Greg?” Shiv asks, after Greg has bundled out of the apartment with a warm, dryer-fresh blazer in his hands. She’s holding on to her elbows, pacing, and it’s nice for her to ask after his night, despite being clearly more distracted with Kendall. “All night?”

“Yeah,” Tom says, clearing off the table with a glance backward, then hastily sneaking a last lick of peanut butter. “I had the reservations already and he deserves something, you know. After the thing.”

“Did you – ?” Shiv pauses, then makes a noise similar to the one she made finding out Kendall sunk his ship. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah, actually,” Tom says, looking up and feeling a smirk at the corner of his mouth. “I made him eat ortolan.”

“Oh jeez,” Shiv says, then laughs, but it sounds oddly forced.

“Yeah, you should’ve heard him,” Tom says, feeling his smirk spread to a full smile, a fond pressure building behind his sternum. It’s been a while since he really clicked with a friend. “Um, Tom, uh – do I like have to? He’s so susceptible to peer pressure, honey. He’s like an extra in a DARE campaign.”

Shiv stares for a pair of beats, then raises her brows with an unreadable look across her face. “So I guess you’re not going to fire him?”

“No, no,” Tom says, halfway rushing the words, a little unsure where she’s gotten that from – he hasn’t suggested it. “He’s great. I told you, he’s my guy – my R2. Or, well. Tarkin? Unless, I’m the emperor, then he’s Vader… but your father is probably the Emperor. I think I called Ken Vader? Although, I guess… now he’s Luke?”

“Whatever.” Shiv scoffs under her breath, expression souring while a pinch rapidly forms at the corner of her mouth. “Are you sure we’re still talking about Cousin Greg, though?”

Tom feels off balance at the sudden scorn on her face and the honest insult in her tone. “…Is he not great?”

Shiv rolls her eyes, “No, Tom. He’s not. Like, come on, he – He can… barely talk.”

Tom feels his own expression gradually drop to a frown, strangely feeling sharply offended. “He can talk just fine, Shiv. He just gets nervous.”

~8~

Tom squeezes his eyes shut, then winds his hands into fists and drops them to his knees. He has to get it together – he can’t… It’s his wedding day.

“Good run, honey?” Shiv asks, slipping into the room with her hair a mess of pins. She stares at Tom for a beat, then her voice drops, “Or not?”

“I’m not supposed to see you,” Tom says, trying to keep his voice light and managing to give her a smile.

“Oh, I’m not in a dress, yet,” Shiv says, dismissive, reaching into the closet and sweeping hangers back and forth, clearly unable to find something inside it. “Seriously, though – who pissed in your Cheerios?”

“I got in a… bit of a tiff with Greg,” Tom admits, taking a deep breath, then reluctantly starting to pull at the sleeves of his workout jacket. He’s a little glad Shiv is here, even if he doesn’t want to really look at her – it makes him feel a little more real, like what he did wasn’t just an overreaction; like what he did was justified.

Shiv glances over her shoulder, hands going still inside the closet. “Oh?”

“He tried to tell me something,” Tom says, throwing the jacket onto the bed next to him with a hard shake of his head. “I didn’t want to hear it. You know?”

“Oh, yeah?” Shiv says, suddenly beaming, in a way that he almost isn’t sure he’s ever seen; it’s beautiful, if a little off-putting so sudden, and he can’t help but smile back when she approaches him to actually grab at his shoulders. He can’t remember the last time she got so handsy. “You shouldn’t be thinking about anyone but me today, anyway.”

Tom laughs, tightly, then nods with a short drop of his head. “Sure.”

“Just don’t think about it,” Shiv says, letting go after another squeeze, then throwing her hands up and going back to the closet. “Apologize after the ceremony, if you have to.” She scoffs, “Or don’t, maybe. I don’t even know why you put up with his crap.”

Tom furrows his brow, as he looks up to watch her pull a little box from the closet. “Why do you hate him so much, anyway?”

“I don’t hate him,” Shiv says, not particularly convincing in her tight voice, opening the box to reveal a set of earrings from within it. “He’d have to matter for that, Tom. I just don’t think he’s worth anyone’s time.”

~7~

“She knows who your soulmate is,” Nate says, voice tight and vindictive, as he pours his wine back in the bottle. “So this? Isn’t going to last. You shouldn’t expect it to last.”

“Wh-What?” Tom sputters, watching Nate fumbling the bottle, almost snatching it back out of his snickering fuckhead hands. “Why would you even say something like that?”

“Because it’s true,” Nate says, looking up at Tom and setting his empty glass on a table with a heavy thunk. “She knows who it is.”

“No, she – ” Tom rolls his eyes, affecting a harsher sneer. “Sure. Who, then, BJ Ballsack?”

Nate has the gall to laugh, clearly aware he’s gotten through to Tom. “I don’t know, man. She didn’t tell me. But it sounds to me like she’s known a long time. The whole time.”

Tom shakes his head. “She wouldn’t –”

“She did let slip it was a guy,” Nate adds, wetting his lips with a pointed raise of his brows, a not-so slick glance up and down Tom from his oxfords to his open collar.

Tom feels his words die and swallows hard.

Nate barks a mean laugh. “That’s what I thought.”

~6~

“Wait, what the hell is that?” Shiv asks, glancing over her shoulder with a wide turn of her head down the hall, where a simple man is making some fool of himself shoving a desk into different corners of a very small space with the glee of a child on Christmas morning. “Why is Greg getting a real office?”

“Oh, just a – a reward as part of some restructuring, honey,” Tom says, scratching just under his tie while refusing to glance in the same direction. “He’s figured out a way to lay off a lot of dead weight. Did you know ATN isn’t completely digital?”

Shiv is quiet for a few beats, rolling her lips together. “Sure. And what does – ? Cousin Greg figured a way out of that?”

“Yeah, for sure,” Tom says, giving in and looking over his shoulder, incidentally catching Greg when he pokes out of his office with an overly eager grin and a… slinky? He shakes his head hard, throwing out a dismissive wave, as he turns Shiv in the other direction. “So you know… new office, new title, make him feel a little special, so he doesn’t jump ship.”

“You don’t need to make him feel anything, honey,” Shiv says,reaching up and oddly clutching at Tom’s upper arm, then all but tugs him into the door of his own office. “He’s got nowhere else – if he jumped ship, he’d drown.”

“He could be headhunted,” Tom says, swallowing hard while glancing down at her grip across his arm, too purposefully digging into the patched soulmark under his shirt. He looks around, wondering who she might’ve seen – not that he cares about, or believes, what Nate Sofrelli said in some obvious moment of jealousy, but… it sticks in his craw a bit, the way she’s been asking around and showing up on the floor since he’s started at ATN. It’s great to see her, but it almost feels like she’s waiting to catch him at something here. “Lucky we didn’t bring him to the Pierce country asylum, huh? He would’ve integrated with those poindexters in a half second.”

“You know…” Shiv releases her grip with a bland smirk. “Dad once spread a pretty nasty rumor that Nan was Marianne’s real mom.”

Tom barks out a laugh, trying to imagine how that might even work. “Really? That is funny.”

~5~

Shiv’s eyes linger over the railing, with a crooked edge growing at the corner of her mouth. “But Nia Bayton, huh? I never would’ve took her for your type.”

“I – I really wasn’t going to close the deal, honey,” Tom says, a little wary that she might be trying to find some similarity in a woman that he was mostly just schmoozing to pass time, or… worse, wondering why he wasn’t chatting up someone leaning more masculine. What he’s really been doing, though, is just waiting while Greg wanders around doing Greg things, like eavesdropping, typically, before settling down into a booth to hear the resulting dispatch. “Light flirting.”

“Uh-huh,” Shiv says, as the crook switches to the opposite side of her mouth, then her eyes focus directly at Tom while a brow goes up her forehead. “I heard you came here with Greg, anyway?”

Tom blinks and stares for a beat, then glances down the floor to see if Greg might be down there, but he’s… not, so it seems, and he’s difficult to hide. “I did, but I think he went to get a drink? You don’t need to talk – ?”

“No,” Shiv interrupts, a bit forcefully and smiling through flat lips. “Just wondering… You know, you don’t have to hang out with him outside work. If he’s dragging you down.”

“Dragging? He doesn’t have the stomach for that kind of direct action,” Tom says, laughing a bit too loud, maybe, and thinking of Greg’s recent foray into blackmail. He probably should feel less eager to share his company, but… it’s just Greg. “Roman’s around somewhere, you know; I’d be more concerned with him throwing off the groove.”

“Sure, okay, but maybe what I’m really saying – ” Shiv smirks and leans into his side with a playful jab of her elbow against his side. “Is I’m here, right, so you don’t need to worry about anyone else tonight. Huh?”

Tom offers a laugh, then a nod, feeling the night slip through his fingers. He had been almost looking forward to hanging out with Greg later tonight; the actual day was a bit shitty, but it had felt like they’d been in sync, too, bracing each other against the hordes of Arc’teryx and Berghaus.

He peeks sidelong and incidentally catches the man himself across from them on the other platform, only a few feet from Nia’s table. He watches as Greg glances at Shiv, then winces, somewhat theatrically, and Tom ultimately bobs his own chin to the side in a subtle dismissal slash goodbye.

Greg offers a drop of his head, answering with a wan smile and a sendoff in the lift of his hand.

“Tom.”

“Yeah, honey?” Tom looks back to Shiv with a smile, but it fades when he sees a brief flicker of upset. “You okay?”

Shiv presses her lips flat, then tilts her head with an affected beat of confusion. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

~4~

Tom stares out across the water; glittering and glimmering and beautiful on the surface, cold and deep and dangerous just underneath. He listens to Shiv turn a page on her book, smack her lips, and is unsure if she’s actually reading or just pretending to, but she had also dragged him out here on a nice little jaunt after volunteering him for prison, so what does he know. She maybe could just go back to a book after he tells her that he’s feeling pretty damned awful about their relationship. She even could be, probably is, hiding his soulmate from him, too, which might be some kind of messed up romantic, if she even cares about him that much; he really… He just can’t tell, anymore. The whole five year plan has gone to shit.

“Have you really never even thought about it?” Shiv asks, her voice tight, and a wrenching, evident stuffiness to her tone. “Not even with…” Another page turns, so pretending to, turns out. “I don’t know, Tom, maybe just someone at work?”

Tom feels his jaw clench until he could swear he hears a creak, squeezing his eyes shut against the glaring sun. Okay, fuck. “What? Who – who are you trying to… I don’t even know, foist upon me now?” He asks, turning to look, as he flicks his hand back and forth in a brief, tired gesture. “Or is it some other – no, Shiv. Did you really not… listen at all?”

Shiv shakes her head, palm against her forehead while she scratches further into her scalp. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then who?” Tom asks, voice pitching and wondering if she knows what he’s asking her; does she know that he knows, too? “Who do you mean?”

Shiv drops her hand down her shoulder, until it’s clutching at the back of her ankle curled up to her chest. “No one, Tom.”

Tom digs hard into the sand under his fingers, annoyed at an intrusive thought that she might mean Greg, somehow, as the only other person that Tom ever sees to entertain in any given free time. He’d even sulked yesterday evening away on weak mimosas beside Greg, despite their lingering Senate tension, who gambled on the life of his Nintendo and his tiny pixel farm from the hot tub. He also got mild heat stroke and swooned like a princess, so… maybe, it’s better that Tom was there to rescue all three of them.

Fate, and everything cliché, hah; too bad Greg always, always wears a patch, like a married man.

~3~

Shiv peeks into Tom’s office after a brief glance backward, leaning into the jamb. “Thanks again for handling that minion wrangling,” she says, a smile flashing, in a way that could only really be described as polite, across her mouth. “I guess Dad tried some talk earlier that just ended in Greg pulling a Greg with him.”

Tom rolls his lips against each other for a brief few seconds, then nods with a drop of his head. “He did imply that when I was down there, yes.”

“I knew you could do it,” Shiv says, brows raising sharply up in some facial version of a double thumbs-up. “You and him, you… you know. Speak the same language or whatever.”

Tom idly moves his mouse across the browser on-screen, as he swallows hard; he wonders if that makes him more or less part of the family. “Right. If you say so.”

“You didn’t promise him anything, right?” Shiv asks, voice dropping, as she shoulders her way a little further in the door, though she still doesn’t actually enter it. “It’s fine if you did, honey, but I kind of need to know what it was.”

Tom looks up and… realizes he didn’t, actually, he didn’t offer Greg a thing, which makes it even worse. It was purely pity. “No. Nope, your private jets are safe. We just had a talk about… where we were going, you could say.”

Shiv goes immediately, oddly cool at that, mouth pinching as she lifts her chin. “What do you mean – as in, together?”

Tom turns his hands across the desk with a croaking laugh, gesturing at the binders, the business cards, and the general disgusting miasma of his current existence. He thinks nonsensically about the mark on his arm and wonders despairingly if his soulmate on the floor, or upstairs, or whoever he is, also calls him terminal. “Me. Prison, Shiv.”

“Oh.” Shiv clicks her tongue, canting backward on a foot. She seems to think for a beat, then her eyebrows go straight up, refocusing on Tom with a tight smile. “No, honey. That’ll work out.”

~2~

Tom squints down at the city while riding out a throb between his temples, as the fuzzier details of last night filter through in achy bits and pieces. “Do I remember your brothers – all your brothers – getting into it a bit last night?”

“That was just – just typical Rome. No biggie.” Shiv says, flipping her hair across her shoulder. She briefly peeks up while peeling a yogurt, fingers fiddling with a spoon. “…How about you? Saw you slip into Kendall’s fucked up version of a – a tunnel of love with Greg. What was that about?”

“Yeah, hah. He… dragged me in there to brag that he’s got himself a real live woman to agree to date,” Tom says, uneasily remembering the… compliment tunnel, whatever the fuck Kendall thought that was except a scream for help, in woozy swoops of blue and green. He recalls most of all his head feeling thirty feet off his shoulders, unmoored and unreal, except when Greg’s big hands would intermittently tug him back to the floor. “…With a ponytail, I think. She works for Kendall.”

Shiv doesn’t respond for a few beats. “Oh,” she says, in a tonal hum markedly punched out around her spoon. “Huh. Good for him.”

Tom furrows his brow at the window, then briefly glances over his shoulder just to make sure it’s Shiv sitting behind him. “…You think so?”

“Yeah, Tom,” Shiv says, digging at the yogurt with a harsh scrape of the spoon against the glass cup. “He needs to talk to people outside you.”

“Sure, but,” Tom says, looking back out across the balcony with a few blinks, ignoring the twisty, queasy feeling in his gut. “He does, though, honey?”

“…And Kendall, I guess,” Shiv says, as the yogurt lands down onto the table with a series of clinks of spoon and cup. “Hey, maybe now you should try to get some breathing room without the whole legal fuckshow hanging over your head.”

Tom drops his eyes to the brazier that he failed to destroy all the papers in that night. He swallows hard, then glances again over his shoulder. “You think that’s a good direction?”

“Yeah,” Shiv says, shrugging with a smirk and a light furrow of her brow. “Why not?”

~1~

“Hey, yours is a little arrow? That’s cute,” Roman says, angled into the back of the lounge sofa. “I’ve got a cat nose or something.”

“I’ve seen, Roman,” Gerri hums, which is disturbing news on all fronts, since Roman’s is notoriously in a particularly private area.

“Not juicy enough?” Roman whines, exhaling a sing-songy breath. “Oh, hey, guess who has one of those ink stains for crazy people?”

Tom freezes in the archway, not all at once, but more a cold washing over him slow and painful. He glances across the hedges to Shiv badly hiding a sneer at her mother, sourness settling at the back of his throat.

“Cousin Greg,” Roman says, stage-whispering now with a lean over in front of Gerri, blocking her view of her table. “On his arm. You know how he always keeps it covered, even though he’s not married? It’s ‘cause it’s a total eyesore.”

Tom finds himself gawking in askance, bodily slanting into the arch, and feels something like horror, but more like epiphany, bait his breath. He glances toward the other side of the gardens, where Greg is awkwardly nodding at the nameless Contessa. No… No, what? That can’t be –

“Then how do you know?” Gerri asks, snide and unworried, peeking over her shoulder to settle a dubious look on Roman.

“When we were kids, we sort of almost drowned him,” Roman says, wry, but with a badly hidden note of what might actually be guilt at the back end of his trailing laugh. “Connor heimliched him.”

Gerri tuts lowly, annoyingly unworriedby this confession of near murder. “Roman.”

“We were like eleven!” Roman says, shaking his hands out in half-hearted defense. “Shiv was who saw it, first, after Connor pulled him out. Told him he’d never find his soulmate because it was just a big ugly mess like him.”

“Hardly anyone does, to be fair,” Gerri says, humming, then tilts her head to show Roman something on her screen that makes him shrug. “Though I’m sure that’s hard to understand for a child.”

“Oh yeah, for sure,” Roman says, leaning into the arm to perch while swiping at the screen. “He almost died, then Shiv told him he was unloveable, so… yeah. Shitty day for Greg the Egg.”

~0~

“Why?” Tom repeats, exhaling a weak, creaking laugh and spreading his hands at his sides. “Why, you ask? Because you’ve spent the last four years of my life fucking jerking me around, Shiv.”

“Years?” Shiv repeats, incredulous, and it’s almost more painful that it seems like the timeline of the accusation is more she has an issue with, not the act.

“Cousin Greg has an ink stain,” Tom mocks, pitching his voice up high to match Roman’s nasal.

Shiv’s jaw drops slightly while her eyes go wide, markedly darting toward Tom’s arm, then back to his face with a lift of her chin. She looks like she might say something, for a beat, then presses her lips in a blanched line.

“Yeah,” Tom says, halfway choking, furrowing his brow tight over his eyes and refusing to let his burning eyes go further than discomfort. “Guess who has a big mouth.”

“So? This is it?” Shiv demands, arms wrapping tight at her middle and offering a jerking nod to the space between them. “My whole life crumbles in a fucking hour?”

“An hour, Shiv, you –? You know, I…” Tom says, weakly, feeling something awful tighten and shatter behind his ribs at how easily she is going to let this happen between them; he thinks about the lawyer he called months ago for a fucking timeline, and wonders if she’d be so shocked by it. “I could’ve lived with it, if you actually loved me, or never mentioned you don’t love me, or maybe even if you just… stuck to our original plan? But… what was it – just a big power trip, stringing me along an-and watching me ruin what I might have had with my soulmate?”

Shiv offers a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it instant of guilt through her pinched expression. “No, Tom – ”

“I hit him when he told me you were cheating, you know,” Tom interrupts, wetting his lips and forcing himself to look her in the eye, as he continues, though he doesn’t expect much more visible sympathy, or really any at all. “I had him incriminate himself for your father’s company; I threw him to the fucking government wolves; I – I made a fool of myself to him a number of times at your behest, quite recently. I sometimes think he hates me, Siobhan. I can tell when he looks at me sometimes that he wants me anywhere else on the planet.”

Shiv rolls her lips together, reaching up and rubbing at her brow with a harsh, shaky inhale.

“But I… I do love him. Almost since I met him,” Tom laughs, wetly, looking down at his hands and catching on the glitter of a largely meaningless symbol. “What is it about him, you know? What was it – I couldn’t fucking figure it out.

“And not an hour ago, I had to bribe him to stay with me on this,” he says, yanking the ring off, swallowing hard, then slamming it out onto the table between them. “With Waystar. Because otherwise, he would leave me, after everything that’s happened between us. Everything that wouldn’t have happened, if you had just… told me who he was. He was all but there when I fucking proposed to you, Shiv!”

“Why’d you do it, then?” Shiv asks, taking a horrible, loud sniff and attempting to disguise it with turn of her nose. “Propose to me; stay with me; try to have some kid, if you –”

“Because I got attracted to other people, too,” Tom says, throwing his hands out while shaking his head in a rapid movement. “But we’re not the same, Shiv! I hate what happened to our relationship – that I wonder if we… Were we ever even on the same wavelength? Because I thought we were, for a long while there, and I know you know that – everything we talked about… or did you just think it was alright because you weren’t my soulmate?”

Shiv takes a sharp breath, glancing away from Tom in a rapid blink. “Does he know?” She asks, tightly not answering him. “Did you tell him?”

“No,” Tom says, aching, looking down at the ring, then away toward the shadowed window. “You can, if you want.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think he’d even believe it.”

Shiv is quiet a few beats too long, then tightens the arms she has around her middle. “It’s not my business.”

“It used to mean a lot to me,” Tom says, voice hoarse and chest so tight that it feels like his heart must be bursting against ribs. He looks at Shiv, wrapped up around in herself, and he looks down at the ring, thinking about when he wouldn’t hesitate to reach for her, but… “Since I didn’t get it until later? I know that’s bullshit.” He drags his teeth hard across his lower lip. “Now I just get to wait until Kendall offers him a fucking Maserati and he hangs me.”

#tomgreg #the prequel part of the soulmate AU #or i guess a prologue #words hard

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