Archive of Our Own ^beta

Brady’s eighteen when he packs his bags. Fresh-faced, straight out of high school, everything lines up all wrong.

He shouldn’t. He’s laid in bed late at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking: not yet, not yet, not yet.

The farthest he’s ever been without his family before this was hockey trips. Up north, usually. To Michigan, New York, Canada, a few several miles and that was with texts back and forth. Little messages of support here and there, something from his mother telling him she loves him.

Still.

He comes out to his family and he just leaves.

Brady lives in a small town tucked away in Missouri. He lived there, at least.

It was simple getting away. A couple minutes north and he was already far past the town’s border, then a few more and he was out of the state. It was too easy the first bit of the way

Then, his phone goes off once. Twice. Both texts are from Matt and Brady doesn’t even look at them before deleting them off his lock screen.

It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He isn’t going to deal with Matt, or his mom, or his dad—and god, he loves his baby sister, but.

It’s better this way.

Josh calls him. Asks him, “You’re coming back, right? You can’t just. Leave. You don’t get to do that.”

It’s all voicemail. Brady doesn’t delete the message in hopes that his voicemail box fills up.

don’t call - 2h ago
please pick up the phone

don’t call - 45m ago
i just wanna know if you're okay

don’t call - 34m ago
brady. please.

For the most part, leaving Quinn makes the biggest dent in his life. It feels like a fist clenched tight around his heart. It feels merciless and scary and Brady can‘t stand to think about the shit he’s putting the guy he’s had the nerve to call his best friend through.

He thinks about that a lot. When he’s on the road underneath a blanket of dark black sky. He thinks about Quinn.

He fills his car up with gas, buys a candy bar, and he still isn’t sure exactly where he’s headed, but he keeps driving. He keeps going, keeps at it until his stomach churns with guilt and at that point, he doesn’t have the courage to turn back.

On the fifth day, he takes the tape over his wrist off.

Brady doesn’t read the lettering for the next couple of stops, he avoids looking at it entirely, actually.

The first time his eyes latch onto it, the frail Quintin Hughes inked into the pale skin of his wrist, his stomach drops. As if he was hoping it would’ve disappeared by now, like he could possibly get rid of it.

Quinn still hasn’t gotten his. He turns eighteen in less than a month and Brady has no idea where he’ll be by then, but he won’t be anywhere near Missouri. And it’ll be fine. They don’t have to do this. They don’t.

Brady doesn’t think he knows how.

His parents are soulmates, sure. But Brady’s heard of people who have gone completely against the grain. People who have refused to be with their soulmate for whatever reason. He knows of people that have blacked out the ink with a tattoo, people who permanently wear bandages and tape over their mark.

They are all stories, but stories are all Brady has.

He lays awake in a motel room at night and his wrist burns like he’s holding it over an open flame.

The walls are yellow and the lamp light is the exact same shade. It washes his wrist in gold and every time Brady looks at it, it hurts.

“I don’t get it. If you need to talk, talk to me. I’m right here, Brady. I care about you.”

It’s another voicemail. Quinn sounds cracked open and broken, it’s laced into the way his voice falls the second the message starts. Brady chews at the corner of his lip and breathes.

“Call me when you can, please.”

He pulls his phone away from his ear and tells the cashier his gas pump’s number.

He ends up going East. Far east. New England.

It takes forever. Long enough that by the time Brady pulls up to a motel in Boston, his legs ache and he feels uneasy on his feet. He’s been on road trips before, he’s loved road trips, but this was different. This didn’t feel like something to be proud of.

The journey nor the destination.

Boston is lovely. It’s amazing and wonderful and so much about it is brand new. Brady just doesn’t know enough to be able to navigate it.

He’ll learn, he hopes. He can do that much. He’ll figure this out.

Brady stops getting voicemails half a month into Boston. When he’s managed to scrape together the money for a shoebox apartment and he’s waiting tables at a quaint restaurant by the water.

It’s tradition to keep your soul mark covered in public before you’ve found your soulmate, but Brady always keeps a bandage on his wrist anyways. Nobody asks about it, nobody has any business to. This isn’t small town Missouri where everyone knows everyone and nobody gets a lick of privacy.

But part of Brady misses that aspect of it. The community. He misses biking down the craggy sidewalk to friendly greetings from the neighbours. He misses how closely intertwined everything was. He misses the quiet and the simplicity.

Brady hasn’t gotten to know too many people, but he’s close with two of his coworkers. Close enough to have their numbers in his phone and earn a smile from them whenever he sees them each morning.

There’s Colin, a born and bred Massachusetts kid, complete with his rough edges and sharp smiles. He lives in Hanover with his buddy, Thomas, arguably his more approachable half.

Brady doesn’t know either of them very well, but they’re kind. Thomas, especially, but Colin says it’s just because he’s constantly stuck in his customer service setting. That, or he’s never cracked through the Good Canadian Boy shell.

When Brady flicks on his phone to text Colin about covering his shift, he sees texts he should’ve opened a long time ago. He sees too high of a number next to his missed calls. He sees remorse, regret, and shame.

can we get drunk tonight, he texts Colin uselessly.

are u turning 21 tonight??

Brady stares down his phone critically. He’s aiming to type out a snarky reply when three dots fade on and off of Colin’s side of the screen.

haha im pulling ur leg, come over after work, Colin sends. chabby says bring snacks!

Brady isn’t thinking straight when he clicks onto Quinn’s contact.

don’t call, he’d renamed it, and Brady knows it’s a warning to himself, but he shoves that to the back of his head.

What he does think about is how Quinn’s turning eighteen in a week. He thinks about how, if this isn’t a mistake, Quinn’s going to see Brady’s name on his wrist. He thinks about how worried Quinn might be. He thinks about his family.

For the first time in a long time, Brady stops and registers everything.

Thomas is talking loudly about something over the crinkle of a bag of potato chips and all three of them have been ignoring the frustrated knocks on the other side of the apartment wall all night.

“Bathroom,” Brady excuses himself lazily. He stumbles out of the room and by the time he’s in the bathroom, he’s got his phone pressed to his ear.

He can’t stand to look at himself in the mirror. Instead, choosing to slump down at the foot of the door and bringing his knees to his chest. His phone continues to ring and ring and ring.

“Brady?” Quinn’s voice is tinny and small, but it’s undoubtedly Quinn. Brady can feel his heart clenching. “Hey, hey, oh my god. I didn’t think I was ever going to hear from you again, where—“

“I miss you,” Brady interrupts. The vulnerability in his voice strips him of any shields he could put up. It makes him feel suffocatingly open, too honest.

He puts his head in his free hand and he hopes he’s imagining the subtle sway of the floor underneath him.

“Brady,” Quinn repeats.

Brady loves the sound of his name on his tongue, even from miles apart it makes his pulse jump. Somewhere in Missouri, late at night, Quinn is sitting in his room, saying Brady’s name, and there’s something so awfully personal about it all.

Brady looks at his wrist, at the bandage plastered over thin veins. He has Quinn’s name on him, too.

“Where are you?” He asks. “Where—why did you go?”

“Boston,” Brady says. “And I thought Missouri was miserable.”

“You don’t have to try and make me laugh.”

Brady lets his tongue dart over the chapped edge of his lip, revelling in the way it stings. “Sorry.”

“You are so, so much, you know that? Boston, Brady. Boston. Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?” When Quinn laughs, it’s merely a puff of his breath, empty and hollowed out. “Does Matt know? God, do your parents even know?”

“I haven’t even—I haven’t talked to any of them. They don’t wanna hear from me.”

“They miss you,” he says. “They miss you, everyone misses you. Did you stop to think about that?”

“I thought about you,” Brady admits. “That’s why I called you. To hear about you, to stop thinking about you.”

Quinn makes a strangled sound halfway between anguish and defeat. It sounds like a sob. “Come back. Please, just come back.”

There’s a knock at the door, hard enough that Brady feels it jolt his spine. He sputters out, “I need to go, I’m sorry,” and ends the call before Quinn can get anything else out.

Quinn texts him, when Brady wakes up with a hangover thick in his head.

i told ur mom. matt doesn’t know because i don’t want him to kick ur ass. i just need u to get that this isn’t going to work forever

On the 14th of October, Brady sits on a table in the break room staring daggers at his phone. He can feel his breaths catching in his throat with every pull of an inhale.

Every other year, Brady made it a tradition to bring Quinn his favourite kind of hot drink with a pastry on his birthday. They’d spend the day together, letting the world’s woes fall to their feet.

This year, Brady can feel panic rising in his chest each time he looks at his phone, waiting for a text, waiting for a text.

It’s too early in the morning for Quinn to be up, he’s never been much of a morning person, but Brady can’t avoid this forever.

“One more minute, Bray,” Thomas calls, and he rushes to scarf down his granola bar. If Brady didn’t know any better, he’d think he swallowed it whole. “Eugene is out there and I am not taking his table.”

Brady pockets his phone and tries to steel himself.

why did u leave?, Quinn texts him. It comes late in the afternoon, Brady’s just getting off his shift.

He’s sitting idly in the employee parking lot, the music in his car thrumming lightly. Brady doesn’t get a chance to type back a response before his phone lights up, harsh and loud.

“Fuck you,” Quinn spits immediately after Brady puts it to his ear. “Is this why you left? Was it the soul mark? You’re so fucking ashamed of me that you ran across the goddamn country and—“ he chokes on his words, freezing up mid-sentence.

Brady squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t say anything in response.

“I don’t even. I can’t even hate you. I feel so stupid because I care about you. I actually thought that went both ways.” Quinn says, sounding betrayed. “Like, at the very least, I thought we were friends.”

“I do care about you, you can’t just say that.”

“Stop lying to me. I’m so sick of being lied to.”

“Quinn.” Brady feels powerless. Too far away to do anything about it, too exhausted to argue. He can feel his agony sink down to his bones, paralyzing him. “Soulmates is—being soulmates is huge, it’s. The gap between friends and soulmates is giant, you get that, right?”

“I don’t know, man. All I really get is that my best friend, who is apparently my fucking soulmate, ran away to Boston because he didn’t want anything to do with me,” Quinn laments, his voice tight.

Brady feels a persistent itch on his wrist and it takes everything in him to keep from scratching at the ink until his skin turns red and blotchy.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” is all Brady manages to say. He sounds pathetic, the words tremulous as they fall from his lips.

“Some birthday, huh?”

Unsurprisingly, Quinn hangs up first.

Brady rips off the bandage on his wrist the second he gets home.

It’s barely a home. It’s a small apartment he’s hardly broken in, crowded into the mellow part of Boston, a city he barely knows and still hasn’t quite come to love.

He drags his fingers over the ink on his wrist, where the letters neatly spell out Quintin Hughes and watches his skin flare red.

The way his chest clenches doesn’t feel unfamiliar, but Brady won’t ever be used to it.

He doesn’t wear the bandage to work the next day. Or the next, Or the next. His tips are still the same, the shimmer in the eyes of happy customers never changes, nothing shifts.

And Brady thinks about having this and getting to go home to Quinn. He thinks about living a perfectly normal life, each piece fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, and getting to live it with Quinn.

“Quintin,” Thomas reads, raising his eyebrows at him. Brady jerks his wrist back to his chest.

He can feel heat wash over his face. Hearing it out loud makes it all the more real.

“Do we ever get to meet him?” He asks.

“He’s not—we’re not actually.” Brady waves his hand, as if that’ll explain anything. Thomas narrows his eyes at him, but Brady doesn’t have to wait much longer to see the very moment it clicks.

“Oh. Oh, shit, what happened?”

Brady says, “I left him in Missouri,” like he has no comprehension of a filter. “I was afraid. We were just friends and then I got this mark and, you know the rest.”

Thomas’ eyebrows draw in close. He looks over his shoulder and when Brady follows his gaze, he sees Colin laughing with one of the chefs.

“So you don’t understand how severe this is,” Thomas says when he glances back. His voice remains gentle.

“Don’t parent me, Chabby.”

“No, seriously, look. You’re making yourself miserable. You can’t—you‘re not helping anyone in this situation.”

Brady doesn’t get a chance to respond, not when Thomas rushes off into the opposite direction to grab a plate. He spares him a short glance before he goes and it makes his heart ache.

He takes his first sick day in November. He hasn’t talked to Quinn in 21 days and the weight of it has settled firmly on his shoulders. The uneasy feeling in his stomach could be the flu, but Brady doesn’t fully believe it.

He calls his mother. Half the battle is goading himself reach out, the rest of it is listening to her worried voice over the line. Listening to her tell him she loves him, that she misses him, that, if not Thanksgiving, she wants to see him for Christmas.

Afterwards, he calls Josh, and Brady doesn’t think he’s ever heard him cry like he does. Frantically covering it up with, “No, no, I think I just got something in my eye.”

Brady smiles and says, “This is over the phone, I can’t see you.”

Josh laughs wetly and says, “Okay, well, at least you don’t gotta see me not looking pretty.”

Late at night, Brady calls Quinn. He doesn’t pick up.

Quinn texts him, not a good time.

Brady doesn’t call back again.

Brady’s alarm goes off in the morning and for a second, he forgets where he is. Before he sees the brick walls of his apartment, the window with the small crack between the curtains, the St. Louis Blues pennant he keeps stuck to the wall.

As long as it’s been, he still feels cold when he wakes up alone.

Hopefully, he checks his phone for texts. Texts from Quinn. The pain when he sees none hasn’t dulled, but that doesn’t mean it’s a surprise.

Sometimes, Brady will just stare at the ink on his wrist.

Sometimes, he’ll see Thomas watching him. Thomas with his soft, sad eyes. He’ll touch Colin’s arm and say something, hushed words between the two of them, and Brady can never pick them up.

“I think love is beautiful,” Thomas says, his eyes glazed over as he stares at the ceiling. “It takes a while. It takes nourishing and care and it doesn’t happen overnight, but when you meet The One? Love is. Wow.”

He’d shown Brady his wrist tonight. It’s the first time Brady’s seen his ink.

He’d thought, for the longest time, that Thomas kept his wrist covered because he hadn’t met his soulmate just yet. But Thomas had said, “He was my best friend and, honestly, he still is. Nothing is going to change that.”

The way the ‘C’ in Colin’s name curves into the rest of the letters on Thomas’ wrist is gorgeous. Thomas looks at it like it’s greater than the sum of all the stars in the sky combined.

Brady finally understands.

i don’t wanna lose u, Brady texts Quinn frantically, sitting on the hardwood floor in his stupid apartment. Surrounded by walls with eyes that stare into his soul and windows revealing a city Brady wants to love.

i cant lose u, he says, because every single mistake he’s every made is swirling in his head. i miss u and i thought i’d be fine without u but i’m not. please call me

Five minutes pass and five more minutes fly by with read sitting excruciatingly beneath the text.

Then, “Hey,” Brady’s saying into his phone, to a boy hundreds of miles away from him, a boy he’s never stopped thinking about.

“Tell me about Boston,” Quinn says carefully, in lieu of anything else. “What’s the big city like?”

“Empty. You meet a lot of people, but nobody really knows you.” Brady tries to focus on his breaths, but he can’t help the way his voice shivers. He hasn’t spoken to Quinn in so long. “I see so many different people everyday, but it’s not like anyone of them are going to remember my name. It’s not like it used to be.”

“Like it used to be.” Quinn‘s echo is wobbly. “So, you’re never coming back.”

“I’m sorry, I’m—“

“No, no, stop. Stop apologizing.”

Brady clamps his nails into the thin skin on his palm, leaving small crescent shaped marks.

“I met these two guys here,” he says after a beat. “They’re my coworkers, actually, really friendly.”

Quinn hums.

“They’re soulmates,” Brady adds abruptly, and glides his teeth over his bottom lip. He waits, waits, waits, through the low buzz of phone static and Quinn’s slow breathing.

“Is that why you called me?”

“Because it sucks being so far away from you, yeah,” Brady says, his voice running thin. “Because I took you for granted. Because it took me this long to realize how much you mean to me. And I know this might sound stupid over the phone, but.”

“It’s not stupid,” Quinn protests. “You can be stupid, a lot, actually, but this isn’t stupid. Don’t say that.”

Brad catches himself before he apologizes again. Instead, he says, “You know, I wanna try this.” Because he is reckless and makes rash decisions and all he really wants to do right now is be with Quinn.

“Try—what?”

“Like, I wanna hold your hand and listen to your problems and trace my name on your skin.” His cheeks are hot, and he thanks whoever’s listening that Quinn can’t see just how pink they are. “You know what I mean?”

There’s a small laugh on the other end of the line. “I can’t believe you.” He pauses and takes a tiny breath. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

One morning before work, Brady texts Quinn, remind me a month from now that i owe u a birthday present

a month from now it would be a christmas present, Quinn replies.

ok fine, Brady writes. a birthday present: the holiday special

i hate u, pops up on his phone a second later, followed by a message loaded with heart emojis.

Late in December, Brady buys himself a plane ticket to Missouri the very first chance he gets. He saved and saved and when he finally sets it in stone, he can breathe a little easier.

The morning he touches down back home, the very first stop he makes is the coffee shop by Quinn’s house. He buys a cup of hot chocolate and a small bag of puff pastry, because he’s all too familiar with Quinn’s sweet tooth.

The bag crinkles underneath his fingertips the entire route to Quinn’s house. Even as he makes his way up his front steps, he can feel his heart thud in tune to its quiet rustling.

He rings the doorbell and reminds himself that this is okay. The chilled air is harsh against the bare skin of his wrist.

Quinn opens the door in a shirt with a crooked neckline and tousled hair. Brady can see the very moment the realization that this is real flashes over his face.

“Oh my god,” Quinn blurts, and the grin that splits his face is so, so bright. “I’m dreaming. Pinch me.”

“Happy birthday,” Brady says, and raises the cup and the paper bag towards him. “Um, belated birthday. A little late.”

“A little.” Quinn shakes his head, but the smile on his face is undeniably fond.

Brady nearly loses his balance when Quinn pulls him in for a hug instead of taking the food, looping his arms around him tight enough to suffocate.

Brady tucks his chin overtop of his head. “I missed you.”

“I missed you so much more,” Quinn mumbles, muffled by the skin of Brady’s neck. “What the fuck does Boston have that I don’t.”

“Boston wishes it had what you have.”

When Quinn pulls back to look at him, his expression is earnest. Something beautifully delicate falling into place across his face.

He says, “Hey,” and smiles. And.

Brady has to duck down to reach his lips when he kisses him. Out on the front steps of his house where absolutely anybody could see them, everything is exactly how it should be.

huggy bear🐻💞 - now
i have a crush on u :)

brady - now
bby i am literally in bed next to u idk what more u could possibly want