Chapter Text
The lecture hall is so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Only five minutes ago, it was filled to the brim with nervous murmuring, students slowly shifting their belongings back into their bags, checking and double-checking their university mail account and various chat apps.
Professor Gadlen, as a rule, is not late for class. Most of the time, he is in fact rather overpunctual, making it a point to be available for questions and advice at least ten minutes before and after each lesson, idly fiddling with his notes or presentation, or leafing through a book, until someone approaches him.
But today, quarter past came and went, and still not hide nor hair of their professor. The most disinterested of the students have already slipped out of the hall, giving the lecture up for a lost cause anyway - though most enjoy Gadlen's lessons enough (or are in dire need of a respectable grade, which he has a reputation of giving out to students who show they're committed to improving themselves) to wait at least a little longer.
Though, most certainly, not a single one of them expected this sort of reward for their patience.
Prof. Gadlen rushed into the room five minutes late with his hair in disarray and his shirt rumpled, and is now busy at work hastily unpacking his materials and babbling apologies none of the students are truly listening to.
“I really, truly, am ever so sorry,” Gadlen fumbles with the HDMI cable, presses buttons on the projector control, “I could tell you I had an eventful day and night, but really, that’s no excuse, and I can only promise you that it shan’t happen again…”
Not a one of them is paying attention, not even when the projector finally whirs to life and Prof. Gadlen exclaims triumphantly at the sight of his PowerPoint at last filling the wall above him.
No; every eye in the room is fixed, unblinkingly, as it has been since he stumbled down the lecture hall steps, on the professor himself - or, more precisely, on his left arm.
“Okay then!” Gadlen claps his hands together. “Without further ado, to compensate for the late start, let’s jump right into the 18th century and…”
He stalls. Frowns.
“And…”
His eyes narrow in confusion, passing over the hall full of students staring openmouthed at him with a confused-shocked sort of horror, like fish in an aquarium seeing a shark approach.
From one second to the next, something almost imperceptibly shifts in him; a sudden wariness creeping into his stance, a tension that seems strange on a face made for easy grins, a pinched quality to the skin around his eyes that makes him appear older than he is - than he can possibly be.
“...what?” A nervous, tight smile. “Something the matter?”
A laugh, but the sort of thing that seems to belong in an alleyway shortly before the beginning of a brawl, rather than a lecture hall.
“Is this the day my recurring nightmare finally came true and I walked in here without my pants on? Do I have a large and noticeable stain on my shirt?” Prof. Gadlen glances down at himself briefly, finding himself both fully pantsed and stainless. “Grew a second head when I wasn’t looking? Give me a hint, if you will, please, I’m getting rather concerned over here.”
A long, heavy silence. Nobody dares to speak, not about this. It’s not the sort of thing you speak about.
“Well. Um.” The TA in the first row finally scrapes together enough bravery to put them all out of their misery. “You’ve got- you’re not wearing… your…”
An awkward gesture at her own arm - and the penny drops.
“Oh!” Prof. Gadlen’s wary tension dissipates instantly, a broad, delighted smile breaking like the dawn over his face as he glances down at his arm, where the sleeve is rolled up to reveal an uncommonly large and altogether strange mark. “Oh, Christ, yes. Forgot about that.”
He does not at all display the mortified awkwardness one would expect from someone who usually wears a cuff accidentally baring their soulmark to the world. If anything, he seems almost dazed with joy, brushing the very edge of the mark with his fingertips with an air of infinite tenderness.
“Should I. Uh.” The TA continues, brave enough to deserve a medal. “Do you have a spare cover in y-your office…? I could run get it, if-”
“That’s not necessary.” Gadlen interrupts, kindly but firmly. “Thank you for the offer, but you better get used to the sight of this-” he holds up his arm, almost proudly “-because I’ll not be wearing cuffs again.”
A softening of his features, a palm pressed to the very centre of that strange mark.
“My soulmate is rather against them, it turns out.”
A chorus of gasps ripples through the lecture hall.
“But we thought-” someone in the back rows blurts out, and promptly shuts their mouth again with an audible click of teeth. There’s no polite way to say we thought the other half of your soul was dead. That they abandoned you. That you abandoned them. That your bond is broken and that what remains of it must always be concealed under a cuff, as is the custom when the mere reminder of a soulmate’s existence pains you terribly.
We thought that there was no hope for you at all.
“So did I for a while, admittedly.” Professor Gadlen answers the half-unspoken question with a shrug - and though he is the very picture of a happy man without a care in the world, the perceptive observer might notice the bitter-stale afterimage of old pain still hovering faintly about the edges of his slightly-brittle smile. “Easy mistake to make, under the circumstances - luckily, it’s all cleared up. Now, at least.”
He closes his eyes for a brief moment, the smile growing firmer, calmer.
“I’m here to teach you history, not general life lessons; but if there’s one thing you young folk should know…” Professor Gadlen smirks then, and winks most charmingly. Something about the expression makes him look boyish, and yet more ancient than ever. “Life is rich, and full of possibilities. Be patient, and never give up hope - and your dreams might just come true.”
The students smile and titter, relieved and more than happy for their professor’s good fortune; and the lesson starts without further soulmark distractions.
(“You know, back when I had my soulmark Read,” Hob had mentioned, conversationally, later on that very first day they spent together, in the 21st century and with their soulmateship acknowledged, as the sun was just beginning to set and The New Inn’s evening crowd started pouring in, “the Reader - this aged crone with a face like an old apple, me and my best mate and our sisters walked days to see her - told me I was a man of good fortune.”
Their arms had still lain tangled on the table between them, on top of half-corrected exams, His Dream’s fingers always in contact with Hob’s mark, and Hob in turn stroking along a pale palm, wrapping his hand around a wrist whose bare skin mattered not one whit to him. He loved The Stranger, and was loved in return - to Hell with marks or the absence of them!
“For many centuries, I was dead certain she’d been making a joke at my expense with that.”
“And now?” His Dream had smiled at Hob more often in those scant hours of conversation than in all their six previous centuries taken together; and Hob was ever so pleased to see less and less of the faint shadow of desperation and thinly-veiled exhaustion in his eyes, as the evening progressed.
There had still been so much to discuss, to settle. How often they would meet, how much of this arrangement they should tell others of, what each of them hoped for from this relationship, and what they in turn could give - but Hob was hopeful, overall.
“Now…” Hob had returned the smile, and covered His Soulmate’s hand atop his mark with his own. He would invite Dream up to his flat, later. He would kiss him in the moonlight filtering in through the windows, and he would whisper tender promises into the pale skin of His One’s neck; and perhaps, he’d thought, if Dream were willing, they would share Hob’s bed for hopefully the first night of many. “Now, I think ‘fortunate’ is rather underselling it.”)
And at the very back of a lecture hall, a Stranger smiles, fond and amused and very, very much in love.
He was planning on leaving soon, slipping out quietly, discreetly - but perhaps this love is enough to keep him lingering. Enough to make him stay for a little while longer.
Enough to bind his vast and ungraspable not-quite-soul to another, and tether him in existence with steadfast affection.
Yes; perhaps, love will be enough.