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The phenomenon which is scientifically referred to as the Transference of Peripheral Nervous Affliction Between Affinitive Pairs has in recent decades been the subject of increasing attention from academic scholars. Despite this new scholarly attention, its origins are surely far older than the terminology that is currently employed to describe it. Early medical accounts from as early as the late eighteenth century note instances of "sympathetic bruising" or "mirrored wounds" which occur between individuals who are otherwise—by all measurable criteria—in sound health of mind and body.

Academics originally relegated reports of this nature only to the periphery of psychosomatic studies. However, the persistence and physical validation of such marks rendered a purely hysterical explanation entirely insufficient.

The prevailing mid-century interpretation situates this phenomenon within the larger framework of affective resonance. Scholars have since posited that certain pairs of individuals—officially termed affinitive dyads, although today’s popular phrase would call them soulmates—exhibit unusually permeable boundaries between their neural and endocrine responses. Under certain conditions of acute bodily stress in one individual within the dyad, there may arise a corresponding dermal or muscular manifestation in the other affected individual.

Notably, these manifestations do not constitute a literal replication of tissue damage, but a physiologically genuine echo of capillary rupture, localized inflammation, and transient pain responses. Clinicians have observed or documented these in controlled settings.

Investigators at the 1937 Vienna Symposium on Sympathetic Medicine advanced a theory that such dyads operate using what they termed a "paired constitutional frequency"—a metaphor borrowed from radio science—to describe these bio-electrical patterns operating in a synchronized manner. While the mechanism that drives these sympathies remains elusive to scientific study, electroencephalographic studies have demonstrated significant irregularities in pairs subjected to controlled stimuli, even when subjects remain separated by a considerable physical distance.

One must emphasize that transference displays selective characteristics. Lethal trauma does not duplicate in full, nor are the effects of most chronic illnesses. The effect appears to be at its most pronounced in relation to acute external injuries, such as contusions, lacerations, or blunt-force impact. This suggests a linkage to the body's immediate alarm and response systems.

Investigators have proposed that the affinitive signal travels through the autonomic nervous system, producing localized inflammation and pain by stimulating mast cells near peripheral nerve endings. Such a mechanism may account for the bruising, tenderness, and often delayed appearance of injuries in the paired subject.

Several authors with a focus on anthropology have speculated that this phenomenon represents an evolutionary vestige of social bonding mechanisms—exaggerated in rare pairings to a medically observable and verifiable degree. Such a response could have conferred an evolutionary advantage by alerting one member of a dyad to injuries sustained by the other, aiding in mutual protection and cooperative survival.

Though contemporary discourse in popular media indulges in romantic or metaphysical language to describe such bonds, a responsible clinician ought to refrain from undue mysticism and maintain a healthy scientific boundary. The evidence suggests only a measurable, if not yet fully explicable, paired neurological correspondence between certain individuals. That the public has elected to endow this correspondence with sentimental meaning does not negate its legitimacy as an object of scientific inquiry for the discerning investigator. Indeed, as with many such matters at the frontier of medical knowledge, today's superstition may very well deserve a chapter in the medical textbooks of tomorrow.

Wilkerson, Harold R., M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Constitutional Psychiatry
Harrington Institute of Medical Sciences, New Haven

"Observations on the Sympathetic Transference of Bodily Injury in Affinitive Dyads".
The Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine and Social Biology, 12(3), 1954, 201-219.

***

By the early twenty-first century, the language had changed more than the medicine had. What Wilkerson had called affinitive dyads, every morning talk show would call a soulmate. What journals once described as paired insular correspondence, any nurse worth her salt would label as a borrowed bruise. The whole thing remained clinically inconvenient, emotionally burdensome, and—within the context of professional sports—uniquely difficult to distinguish from ordinary wear and tear.

The league, naturally, had found a way to turn even something like soulmatesinto paperwork and another set of conversations with Human Resources.

Which is exactly why, during his first mandatory pre-season physical after joining the Metros, Shane hadn't been all that surprised to have a few pamphlets awkwardly thrust into his sweating hands by a team doctor who assured him that sharing the information with him was just regular practice and was more for his soulmate's sake than his own.

After all, if anyone found themselves unlucky enough to share borrowed bruises with a professional hockey player, they would be subject to many of the same dangers and risks faced by the players themselves.

He'd slipped the pamphlets into the pocket of his bag, refusing to look at them in depth while in such a cold and clinical space. It was only after he'd returned home and started unwinding from his first real practice as a Metro that he had remembered they were even there and decided that they deserved at least a cursory glance.

Staring down at the slick, overproduced pamphlet, Shane could feel his nose curl automatically. The couple staring back at him from the glossy page made him feel sick. A man in a jersey—skin a little too smooth to be an actual hockey player—smiled at him with two black eyes. A pretty blonde with matching shiners leaned against his arm, a wide grin and a hand with bruised knuckles splayed across his chest.

He flipped through the glossy pages of the pamphlet, ire rising as he read.

Useless. Absolutely fucking useless.

Except for a few cursory mentions of the fact that SIT isreciprocal transference, the entire write-up seemed more focused on the fact that his game might suffer than the fact that his chosen career might have a measurable impact on someone else's quality of life.

The thought that out there is a man who spends more than half of the year with sore ribs and aching muscles he can't explain felt deeply, fundamentally unfair.

The league wasn't concerned about the impact his game could have on his partner—it was only concerned about the impact a partner he had never even met might have on his game. It wasn't the first time that the league had made him feel like a token or a commodity more than a person, and unfortunately, it likely wouldn't be the last.

Disgusted, Shane tossed the pamphlet onto his coffee table, unable to stand the sight of the stupid, smug faces of the couple on the cover any longer.

He’d stick to his routine and the rules he’d already made for himself. He wouldn't—couldn't—sacrifice his ice time or weaken his play. But he could and would make sure that he was playing as intelligently as possible so that whoever his partner was, he didn't suffer needlessly because Shane wanted to play sports for a living.

Shane could only hope that his partner—whoever he was—would have the same concerns about his own well-being. It wasn't a new worry, exactly. Shane had already been building his game around someone else's pain long before the league had ever thought to hand him a glossy, printed pamphlet about it.

He was used to stomping off the ice with new aches, bruises, and pains—injuries he'd been able to skate off when his adrenaline was high would sometimes leave him wincing for days after a game. Even back in peewee leagues, he expected injuries. The reality of it was this: he knew what he was signing up for, and none of it mattered all that much to him when he was young and dumb and still trying to figure out his place on the ice and in the world.

Before he'd turned eighteen.

Before he was fully an adult in the eyes of the law, and before whichever parts of his brain that governed the bond finally switched on and he fell to the mercy of his body and the body of someone he didn't even know.

His parents had warned him about it—of course they had. He'd received the Birds, the Bees, and the Bruises talk for the first time when he was twelve. They'd debunked all the schoolyard rumors that he'd heard at recess, encouraged him to be as careful as a kid who intended to play contact sports could be, and explained that no—none of his little childhood injuries would matter until both he and his partner were both adults. His mom used the full, technical definition—an affinitive partner—but his dad was always prone to using the more cultural, sentimental name for it—his soulmate.

So he'd accommodated. He'd developed a play style that focused on speed, accuracy, shooting, and results instead of enforcement and defense. He'd tried to avoid the chaotic melee of a scrum, didn't fling his gloves off every time someone chirped him, and he learned to stay ahead of other players to evade most checks aimed his way.

And mostly, it worked. He still sent a silent apology into the world every time he worked himself a little too hard in the gym, every time his ice time dragged on longer than usual, and every time he gave himself so much as a paper cut.

And at first, he thought he'd been lucky. He assumed his soulmate was someone quiet and nondescript. Someone with a boring and inoffensive desk job, like a bank teller or accountant. Maybe a gym rat based on the dull aches in some of his muscles over the summer, although those easily could have been because of his own intense pre-season training. But then, as he was navigating the increased strain on his body as rookie season began, he realized that there was no way he could have been further from the truth.

His play style demanded avoidance and care—yet despite that, he was always aware of a stinging soreness in his knuckles. A tightness, sometimes a dull grinding when he flexed his fists in an impulse to counter the stiffness that settled into his joints. Fading bruises almost always tinged the skin surrounding his eyes a faint yellow, reappearing like clockwork every week or two. His nose frequently twinged across the bridge, as if someone had just socked him in it.

He was still young, but he knew enough about himself by the time the bruises had emerged that he had a few fairly good guesses about the person who was actually receiving the matching injuries.

It might not have been something he talked about, something he shared, or even something he particularly thought about, but he was somewhere near ninety percent sure that whoever bore the actual injuries was probably a man. A man who had an awful and inconveniently consistent habit of both giving and receiving punches on the regular.

Unlike his own injuries, which rose and fell with the rhythm of the hockey season, whoever this person was, he seemed to find himself in scrape after scrape—regardless of the time of year. He didn't even take time off for holidays or summers. He had a few working pet theories, including amateur boxer, someone horrifyingly clumsy or with a short temper (he prayed to a god he probably didn't believe in that his soulmate wasn't a Tyler or a Kyle), or maybe a bouncer at a club with a rowdy clientele.

It was only with the smallest shred of comfort that Shane acknowledged that, whoever this was, he seemed to bloody his own knuckles much more frequently than his face. But even when he was grateful that his own injuries would taper off in the spring, allowing them—him—a slight reprieve, he remained all too aware of the phantom injuries that revealed that his partner didn't get the same luxury of rest.

***

No matter how many times he heard someone call it "soulmates", Ilya still preferred the way he'd grown up hearing it—rodstvennaya dusha.

He preferred the sound of most things in Russian, as English usually felt woefully inadequate to describe such cosmically powerful forces, such as another person made just for him out of atoms and stardust and the red string of fate.

Soulmates. The mate of your soul.

Unlike the English soul, which seemed to be limited to a vague, abstract, more or less religious concept, the Russian soul—the dusha—permeated every aspect of life, of identity, of being.

Dusha encapsulated the innermost spirit, as it did in English, but it was so much more than that. It was warmth, sincerity, and generosity. It even included the cultural depth and emotion of what it exactly meant to be Russian. For Ilya, his dusha was not just his—not just that of whoever it was he belonged to—but it was that of every Russian who had come before him and would ever come after.

He had suspected for some time that not every ache he carried belonged entirely to himself.

He noticed the first real bruise while dressing for a game during his rookie season. He was used to being knocked around until he was black and blue, and he couldn't remember anything that would have explained that one. The large, dark mark bloomed across his ribs and completely caught his attention as he stared down at himself in the locker room. He'd been wearing bruises as a second skin for most of his life—it had never once occurred to him before that any of them might not have been ones he'd earned for himself.

He prodded it once experimentally. It was tender. Clearly still recent.

It was not his.

At least he was pretty sure it wasn't. He replayed morning skate in his head, trying to remember any hole in his physical inventory. The last few days had been fairly typical—drills, a battle or two along the boards. There had been one decent hit earlier in the week, but it had been on his left side, not the right. He couldn't account for anything that should have left him with a mark this dark.

When meant that it must have belonged to them.

It was usually nothing but minor curiosity that crossed his mind whenever he thought of them. There were frequent, dull aches and small maladies that were impossible to avoid while making one's way through the world. He was used to being intrigued by whoever this was. But, staring down at the bruise on his ribs, Ilya wouldn't have categorized what he felt in that moment as intrigue.

He remained somewhat aware of another bruise he discovered earlier in the week, located low and partially concealed by his shirt. The week earlier, it had been his shoulder, dull and achy, as if someone had grabbed his arm and twisted it in the socket. Before that, a strain in his hip so deep that he'd actually sucked in a panicked gasp while warming up on the ice.

They were always placed where they could be concealed, in places that wouldn’t be injured repeatedly by accident unless someone was very unlucky or would need to be dishonest about the reasons for them.

Ilya had played hockey his entire life. His chosen sport riddled him with bruises, and he was used to injuries. He had lived them. He had earned them. They came to him wrapped up in memories, both good and bad, and he always knew which moments of his life had left him with evidence. They were honest injuries, and they were his.

But these echoes, painting his skin with no context behind them, settled on him with a different sort of weight. Trying to make sense of them felt like waking up after a blackout with a phone full of text messages that some other version of himself had sent.

As he stared down at his own body, his mouth thinned into a flat, unamused line.

He flexed his fist involuntarily, letting the pain in his knuckles ground him for just a moment. The faint, yellowed marks there from the game three nights earlier were what he was prepared for. Cause and effect, just how he preferred things. If he was hurt, Ilya Rozanov always wanted to know why. If someone hit him, he was going to fucking hit them back. The world made sense like that.

At first, he had imagined a series of excuses. Some dangerous hobby, an idiot who crashed bicycles for pleasure. A stunt double, maybe. But jobs ended, hobbies paused, and even the clumsiest person alive ought to have hit the floor with a bit more variety.

But the injuries of his rodstvennaya dusha didn't behave the same way his hockey injuries did. They behaved like something that reminded him of his home and the way he'd grown up, rubbing against memories he didn't really want to think about in the middle of the locker room. They looked like something that happened with open palms and closed fists in quiet moments, and in spaces where there was no one to count the hits, keep score, or push someone into a sin bin.

His dusha was apparently someone who got grabbed, shoved into solid objects. Someone who probably had to learn how to hide it. Someone who ended up riddled in the same black and yellow as his jersey but hardly ever had a defensive wound on their hands to show even the slightest attempt to protect themselves.

The idea sat just behind his ribs like a stone.

He had grown up around enough sharp edges to recognize the outline of a dangerous situation with no need to see the entire picture. People didn't talk about things like this. They would minimize them, excuse them as clumsiness, or laugh them off.

He'd seen all of that, too.

He froze, his jersey stilling in his hands where he pushed his arms through the sleeves. If that were all true, then Ilya was likely the only person who knew the truth of what they were going through. The only person who would feel it with them.

The only person they couldn't lie to.

The thought didn't feel romantic. It felt like a responsibility. A secret shared between them—between him, them, and whichever cowardly fuck did this to them.

He exhaled slowly through his nose, his jaw grinding at the thought of this poor person out there in the world, forced to bear the weight alone without knowing they had someone they could talk to.

Fine.

And when he tugged his jersey over his head, he pulled it on carefully and gingerly—just in case he could save them from feeling the resulting twinges in their own muscles, too.

***

"Fucking hell, Roz," Marlow hissed, cringing with sympathy as Ilya yanked his compression shirt over his head after a game against Tampa. "When did you take a hit like that? Did you get fucking slashed, dude?"

Ilya couldn't see his own back, but he had some very strong suspicions about what it must look like. He'd felt the marks bloom across his skin during the second period of the game. It had certainly felt like he'd been slashed when he'd felt the long line of pain shoot across his back.

He'd been knocked around enough at home and on the ice of Russian training camps that probably violated the Geneva Convention to know exactly what it felt like to take a hockey stick across the back, and if he hadn't been sitting alone in the sin bin when it happened, he would've made the same assumption as Marlow.

He turned to put his back to the mirror and found his suspicions confirmed. He could see the bruising already beginning to spread— a dark red against the paleness of his skin. The breadth and depth of the discoloration told him how hard the hit must have been. Some object, something long and blunt—a cane? a bat? a broom?—had to have caused an injury like this.

It was already dark and deep, and he could easily read the intention behind the hit.

"No, Marly—do not be stupid. Refs did not call high stick—was not a slash."

Marlow stared at him blankly, and—for not the first time—Ilya wondered whether Marlow was actually a complete fucking idiot.

"Then what the hell happened, man? That's a wicked nasty hit. You owe somebody money or something?"

Ilya sighed, rolling his shoulders to test his range of motion. He knew he should probably report this to medical staff—he'd received some stupid bullshit pamphlet before his first game that his English was unfortunately good enough to soldier through—but the thought of giving medical staff any reason to question his ability to play the next several games wasn't appealing.

Besides, he still wasn't all that keen to create a paper trail cataloguing someone else's marks if they were still in a situation they couldn't leave that led to them taking hits like these.

Unless his paper trail could later potentially help them get out of the situation.

Much to consider.

"Shut your idiot face, Marly. I know Russia is big scary place, but that does not make me corrupt thug with bad choices. No one hit me."

Marlow continued staring at him with the same dull, blank look on his face that was irritating Ilya more than the pain in his back.

"Okay…" he said, dragging the syllable out in how only an American could manage. "So if no one hit you… but you're like, black and fucking blue…"

Ilya sighed, trying to resist the urge to either shout or give Marlow a bruise to match his.

"Marly, you are dumb idiot who is dumb. I beg of you, please be quiet before you hurt my head, too."

"Oh, shit!" Marlow cried, clearly completely incapable of reading the look on Ilya's face. "Do you think it could be SIT?"

Ilya sighed again, sitting down in his stall and yanking at his pants so he could finally get under the hot steam of the shower.

"Yes, I think there is possibility that it is maybe that."

"Fuck," Marly hissed, dragging the vowel out and following Ilya toward the shower. The very last thing he wanted was for the conversation to continue or for Marly to keep staring at the evidence of someone else's suffering splayed across his skin.

"I bet it was a car accident," Marlow said. Ilya froze for a moment, hand still on the handle of the shower. Again, Ilya wondered about his intelligence, but figured that Marly had several years’ head start on accumulating brain damage. "That totally looks like it could be from a seatbelt, right?"

"Sure thing, Marly. Yes," he said, finally turning on the shower. "Now shut the fuck up."

He didn't bother telling Marly that it made no sense for a bruise from a seatbelt to be on his back instead of his chest. Let Marly think whatever he wanted to.

***

The first person to notice the black eyes was—unfortunately and of course—Hayden.

Shane had almost made it all the way through warmups, focusing deeply on stretching out the lingering ache in his shoulders, when Hayden skated up beside him, coasting slowly as he stared directly at Shane's face—eyes wide open.

"What the fuck happened to you?"

"Swear jar," Shane said reflexively. "Sorry. What are you talking about?"

Hayden gestured at his face with one gloved hand, looking at him as if he were an absolute idiot. "When the hell did you get that?"

Shane poked at his face, barely surprised to feel the familiar sting of yet another black eye. Normally, he woke up with these injuries. This one had definitely not been in the mirror when he'd checked in the morning and hadn't even been there a few moments earlier when he'd left the locker room. He could tell that it probably wasn't dark enough to attract everyone's attention—yet—but he could feel the swelling beneath his skin and suspected that it would bloom into something very impressive sometime soon.

"Oh," he mumbled. "It's uh—it's nothing."

Hayden squinted at him suspiciously, quirking one eyebrow. "My brother in Christ… that is just about as far from nothing as I've ever seen."

Luckily, a whistle shrieked from center ice, saving Shane from needing to answer. Coach called out something to them, and Shane received a beautiful forty-five minutes of peace.

Unfortunately, Hayden apparently possessed the attention span of a dog with a bone or a dedicated missionary, and the second practice ended, he materialized at Shane's side with a firm expression.

"Seriously," Hayden said, stripping off one glove with his teeth. "Who hit you?"

"No one hit me," Shane mumbled, stomping off down the tunnel and trying to get out of the conversation. For a long moment, Hayden just stared at him as they walked down the tunnel together.

"Okay…" Hayden said slowly, in the exact tone people usually used when they did not, under any circumstances, believe him. "Then why do you have a black eye?"

Because somewhere out there, my soulmate apparently keeps getting punched in his fucking face, Hayden.

He could hardly say that out loud, but he didn't know what would be any easier to say instead.

"Well?" Hayden asked, pressing the issue. Shane shrugged one shoulder, regretting it immediately when a familiar ache tugged through the joint. Not his, either. Probably.

"Could be SIT," he finally admitted. Despite his attempts to keep his voice low, the locker room fell quiet immediately as everyone else suddenly became very interested in their conversation. It didn't fall completely quiet—music still hummed faintly from a speaker and someone had already made it into the shower—but the surrounding conversations stopped when people immediately realized that there was something far more interesting happening in the room.

Shane hated it.

Hayden's expression immediately shifted from nosy to fascinated, and Shane wasn't sure which one was worse.

"Oh!" he cried, voice louder than it had any right to be. "You have a fucking soulmate, dude? And your soulmate punched somebody?"

"No, dipshit," someone—Comeau, probably—said from a few stalls down. "It's the other way around, isn't it? Someone must've punched her."

"Oh, fuck."

"That's even crazier," Hayden argued. Shane busied himself with untying his skates, refusing to look up. He could feel the bruise throbbing faintly in time with his pulse when he bent over.

"You know," J.J. said from somewhere nearby. "If it keeps happening around your face, maybe your soulmate's like… maybe she's like a boxer or something."

"That's what I said," Hayden added, nodding along.

"Hayden, you literally just found out about this whole thing," he sighed. "When the hell did you say that?”

"Well, I thought it, Shane."

"Could be MMA?"

"Or maybe she's just stupid."

"Hey—" Shane called out. "That's enough. Stop."

"Wait…" J.J. said, eyes narrowing as he looked at Shane's face. "This happens to you a lot? I just thought you bruised easily, or that the arena lights washed you out. But like… your face is always sort of yellow, dude."

"Dude," Mitty whispered, "I think that's racist."

"I don't know," Drapeau hissed back. "Can J.J. be racist?"

"That's not what I mean!" J.J. snapped. "Like he's always bruised. Yellow like a healing bruise, dumbass. If I were going to say something racist, I'd come up with something more creative than that."

"I don't think it's any less racist if it's creative, J.J.," Shane sighed, rolling his eyes and immediately regretting it when the headache registered.

"I'm not being racist! Crisse, Hollander. Again—does this happen to you a lot?"

“Racism? More often than I wish it did, yeah. You?”

“No, not—Hollander. The black eyes. Jesus Christ.”

Shane hesitated for what must have been just a half-second too long, because Hayden pointed towards him in a way that felt way too dramatic for the moment. "It does! It totally does!"

"It's not—"

"Oh my God," Andropov said slowly, dropping into his stall. "And the hand thing?"

Hayden's head whipped from Andropov back to Shane, still like a dog with a bone. "What hand thing? What's he mean?"

There was absolutely no reason Shane should have answered that. Absolutely none. Unfortunately, years of team environments had conditioned him to conversational self-destruction.

"My knuckles hurt sometimes," he admitted with a sigh. For a moment, the room fell silent around him again.

"Dude…" Hayden breathed.

Shane immediately regretted everything.

"It's probably sports-related," he blurted. "Maybe boxing. Or construction work? Or—"

"Construction work?" Comeau repeated flatly. “How many construction workers do you know who have recurring black eyes and aren’t yanked off of work sites for recurring CCOHS violations?”

"Well, I don't know any construction workers," Shane said, reaching up to rub the ache out of his shoulder.

"That is so not the point, mon ami," J.J. mumbled under his breath.

Instinctively Shane rubbed a hand down his face, hissing when he pressed on the bruise that he'd already forgotten was there, despite it being the trigger that kicked off this whole shitshow.

"Okay," Miitka said, dropping against his stall and watching Shane carefully. "Black eyes. Repeated trauma. Hand injuries."

"You sound insane," Shane shot at him, desperately wishing he could tap his heels together three times and whisk himself out of this situation entirely.

"I sound like a goalie. Skills of observation, my friend."

"You sound concussed," Shane hissed, tugging off his compression shirt.

"Maybe your soulmate is in a fight club," someone suggested from the showers. He didn't realize that their voices were loud enough to carry that far, but he couldn't say he was all that surprised, given how riled up most of the team had become.

"That would… actually maybe be less concerning than what I'm thinking," J.J. said quietly.

Shane looked up sharply, heart pounding a bit in his chest. "What were you thinking, then?"

J.J. crossed his arms, leaning back and observing him.

"You cannot tell me that this doesn't sound at least a little like the mob, non?"

The room dissolved immediately, half of the team talking at once.

"No, wait—"

"—I mean, come on—"

"Holy shit!"

"Hollzy's soulmate is not out here making people offers they can't refuse."

Shane should have laughed. That was the normal thing when someone said something ridiculous. Roll his eyes, chirp them back, and end the fucking conversation.

Instead, against his better judgment, his brain supplied the memory of strange bruises scattered across his ribs the month before. The knife-sharp sting down his thigh a few months earlier that had almost felt like it might break skin before it eased off. The deep ache in his jaw that had lingered for almost a week.

There had been a whole series of injuries—practically too many to count—and every one of them had looked and felt deliberate. His silence stretched too long, and suddenly every person in the room was staring at him.

"Oh my God," Shane whispered despite himself.

"You think so too!" J.J. immediately accused.

"No, I do not. I just think it looks weird, not—"

"Shane," J.J. interrupted. “Your mysterious soulmate regularly gets punched in the face and her knuckles bruised, and you look like someone worked you over in the back room of a casino.”

"I didn't say—"

"Shane."

Shane opened his mouth. Closed it. A few times. Across the room, he heard someone muttering something about how this was the most interesting thing to happen to the team. Like it was something happening to any of them and not something happening only to him.

"Can everyone please stop being insane for literally five minutes?" he demanded, standing up and grabbing a towel off the stack. The sweat from practice was drying on his skin, and the tacky sensation of it was adding to the overall feeling of overstimulation.

"No," Hayden said immediately. "Not if your soulmate is in the mafia, Shane."

"My soulmate is not in the mafia," he bit out through clenched teeth, wanting the whole thing to be over.

"You don't sound very convinced," Miitka said, watching him with those eerie goalie eyes.

That was the entire problem, really. Shane wasn't really sure that he was all that convinced.

***

Ilya knew the pain wasn't his before it had even fully landed.

One moment he was digging along the board for the puck, shoulder-to-shoulder with a defenseman who smelled like he thought it was lucky to never wash his jock or his jersey. The next moment, something bloomed hot and crushing along his ribs, hard enough to rip the air from his lungs.

His vision flashed white for half a second, and he dropped to his knees on the ice in the middle of the pile of bodies crushing him along the boards.

"Roz!"

Someone was calling his name as he dragged himself clear of the fight for the puck, but he could barely hear it over the sound of his ears ringing. Instinct alone kept his skates beneath him as he dragged himself upward, even as the pain wrapped tightly around his side, deep and bruising and sudden in a way that made him bite back bile.

The mass of men had pressed him hard by his left shoulder, but the crushing pain felt focused on his right side.

Not mine.

Somewhere else, off the ice and out in the greater world, his dusha had just been slammed hard enough into something unforgiving that he could feel the echo of it bouncing around within his own chest. He dimly heard the whistle shriek and noted that the play had stopped around him.

He bent at the waist, one glove pressing hard against his ribs while he worked to force the air back into his lungs. Around him, players coasted apart from the scrum, shoving and chirping at each other in that ordinarily meaningless way they did when the adrenaline had nowhere to go.

"You good?" Connors asked, drifting over to a stop next to him.

"I am fine," Ilya snapped, the impulse automatic.

He straightened too quickly, the pain flaring again—broad, ugly, and low along his side. He could already tell that he would suffer from this for days, so he could only imagine what it felt like for the person who actually had the hit land on them.

Whoever you are, he thought furiously, what the fuck is happening to you?

This felt like someone had been picked up and thrown against something that was completely unyielding, and their body had given way before it had.

A linesman waved him toward the face-off circle, and he rolled his shoulders—jaw tight—and lined up opposite Buffalo's center, who was grinning at him in a way that meant he was likely about to say something profoundly irritating.

"You look grumpy tonight, Rozanov."

"Maybe is because I have headache from listening to you speak. Will have to ask your mother for aspirin."

The puck dropped, and the shift deteriorated almost immediately afterward.

It wasn't just because he was distracted—he was Ilya Rozanov, he was never too distracted to play—but because there was an undeniable irritation under his skin that felt like a hive of angry bees. Every fresh pulse of soreness along his ribs kept dragging his thoughts elsewhere, toward some faceless stranger he'd never met and could not protect.

By the middle of the period, he was hitting harder. Not consciously at first, but enough extra force behind a check that the other player rattled against the glass harder than he'd intended. Just enough aggression in the corners that one referee pointed at him warningly after the whistle.

"Easy, Eighty-One. Easy."

Ilya ignored him.

The next shift, somebody cross-checked him after the play. It wasn't particularly hard—barely worth noticing. Normally.

But tonight, with the phantom pain already simmering beneath his skin and the realization that someone else was going to be feeling another blow that night, and it was his fault—

He turned instantly, gloves hitting the ice before the other player even fully registered what was happening.

"Oh, fuck!" someone yelled from the bench.

The fight itself lasted maybe twenty seconds. Maybe.

Long enough for Ilya to drive two solid punches into the other player before he took one clean across the mouth himself. His knuckles split almost immediately beneath the impact, the pain bursting bright and familiar through his hand, reigniting his rage.

That one, at least, belonged to him. Or, mostly to him. And now to someone else, too.

Marlow and St-Simon dragged him away even as he strained forward uselessly, his skates carving hard into the ice.

"Rozanov, are you out of your fucking mind?" LeClaire barked when he returned to the bench after serving his penalty. He flexed his aching hand experimentally.

The soreness in his ribs remained, and so did his anger.

"No," he muttered. "Not out of my mind."

But he was thinking that maybe his soulmate was if they were still putting up with this week after week.

***

Three hundred miles away, Shane wiped a hand over his mouth while he listened to a journalist ask him a question he probably could've answered in his sleep, a sudden dull pain sparking across his mouth.

"Jesus Christ," he hissed under his breath, feeling himself blush a bit as he realized that he'd said the words directly into the microphone and they probably weren't the answer to whatever he'd been asked.

For one disorienting moment, he thought that maybe he'd bitten too hard on his lip where he usually worried it between his teeth during pressers, but then his right hand throbbed. He was used to a certain amount of cramping or stiffness from clenching his hand too tightly during stressful games, but this was a deep and raw ache of knuckles already beginning to swell.

He stared down blearily at his hand in the overly bright lights of the media room, feeling absolutely insane.

"Shane, do you want to elaborate on that?"

"Oh…" he said, suddenly snapping back into awareness as to where he was and trying to focus on the media room around him. "Sorry, I, uh… thought I had a split lip or something."

A few reporters laughed politely, one camera still whirring steadily at him.

"You do," one of them pointed out softly.

Shane blinked in confusion, staring at the reporter. "What?"

"The corner," she clarified, gesturing vaguely toward her own mouth.

Still a bit dazed, he reached up, carefully touching the edge of his lip. Tender, swollen, and his fingers came away faintly pink.

Fantastic.

A familiar sort of dread settled low in his stomach. Not mine. Definitely not mine.

"Occupational hazard?" he offered weakly. It earned him a few more chuckles, enough to smooth over the strangeness of the interruption, but his attention had already drifted elsewhere. Toward the deep ache in his knuckles, toward the soreness blooming along his jaw and the pain in his own ribs from ending up at the bottom of a dog pile after Carter Vaughn had slammed him into the boards and he'd been pancaked under him, Hunter, Hayden, and Comeau.

Across the room, one of the PR staff mercifully redirected the conversation back towards hockey, planting the seed of some question about defensive structure. He answered automatically, his media-training carrying him through even though it felt like his brain was lagging several steps behind.

Somewhere out there, his soulmate had apparently just gotten into another fight vicious enough to hurt them both.

Again.

Still, something unpleasant coiled tighter in his chest. But suddenly, the recurring bruised knuckles made a lot more sense.

This wasn't some guy who occasionally makes bad choices at bars. J.J. was right. This was apparently the sort of person whose life regularly required him to solve problems with his fists.

Shane sat back slightly, exhaling slowing through his nose and wincing at the pull in his ribs while another question washed over him unheard.

Somewhere out there, attached to him by the worst cosmic joke ever devised, was a man who regularly got into fights badly enough to hurt them both. And—judging from the lingering ache in his ribs from the hit he had taken himself that night—the idiot had probably started this fight already sore and smarting.

No wonder neither of them ever seemed to walk away from nights like these feeling like the victor.