Chapter Text
Newt was age six when his mark appeared, large and bold across his collarbone. The vine-like pattern of it crept up his right shoulder and clung downwards to his breast. It tingled under his shirt and he scratched at it ferociously until his mother took notice and ceased his picking.
“It itches, Mum,” he insisted. “What is it?”
“Newton, darling, your soulmate’s been born,” she said excitedly. Theseus had gotten his mark when he was age three. It looked a bit like a spider and Newt always thought it was neat. His was flowery, though, and he didn’t know what to make of it when he finally got to study it in the mirror.
Plus, his Mum began warning him to tread cautiously, that his partner, wherever they were in the grand, wide world, could feel what he felt. The magnitude of that could not be fully appreciated by a child, normally, but Newt always had a tendency to hyper focus on things.
He built an attachment to the idea of his soulmate, wondering what they might be like. If he scraped a knee or stubbed a thumb, he fretted over the small pains, apologizing under his breath to a person who obviously couldn’t hear him. When the bumps and bruises were occasionally reversed, he’d hold the ache close, bringing it to his lips if possible to kiss it better, hoping the gesture would translate through his bond.
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Credence no longer remembered what the mark looked like. He knew that it had been beautiful. He knew that it had covered the back of his left hand, playing delicately over the tendons and webbing between his knuckles.
He knew that Ma had hated it, that it marked him as the bastard son of a witch. It had accentuated that his dominant hand was an affront to all things moral and good. He remembered the switch across his skin, tearing into the mark, when he took a pencil into that hand. He remembered Ma all but crippling his fingers so he’d be forced to write with his other hand, hard as it was.
He remembered tucking his hand out of sight whenever Ma was near, trying to hide his mark, trying to protect it before she defaced it more. He remembered the night he made her angry, though he didn’t remember his offense. He remembered the iron, smoldering hot, and the words, pleading for forgiveness, catching in his throat as she burned his mark away.
He no longer remembered the details of it, but he still mourned it.
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Newt’s left hand never worked quite right after all the phantom abuse it suffered. He felt immense pity for his poor soulmate, having first had their fingers smashed and then getting a nasty burn. He often wondered, feeling hot streaks cutting across his arms, if perhaps his soulmate was an animal enthusiast as he was. Newt regularly suffered from cuts and scratches from his little pets and from his Mum’s hippogriffs. He had several scars cutting across his own arms, in fact.
Aside from the ordeal with his left hand, Newt had never received a terribly painful feedback and for that he was grateful. He also hadn’t sent anything too traumatic to his soulmate. At the start of his fourth year, though, he took a tumble from a broom—Merlin, he hated flying non-sentient objects, anyway—and snapped clean through the radius and ulna of his right arm. He was quick to find a healer, begging to have the bone repaired. His soulmate, after all, already had a handicap in their left hand, and he worried that they’d be terribly put out with the opposite arm out of commission.
With it freshly healed, Newt sat awake that night, breathing soothingly over the top of his right hand. “I’m so, so sorry. I’ll be more careful next time.”
He was awakened by searing lines slicing into his palms. Newt bolted upright in bed, choking down a cry so as not to wake his bunkmates.
It was then, at age fourteen, Newt realized that something was very wrong.