Work Text:
January was born with his soulmate's first words to him marked along the soft inner lining of his left wrist. When he was old enough to be curious about it, his mother would tell him that she hadn’t been able to translate it until the next day when they got home from the hospital, and even then, she had remarked how astonishingly mundane it was. At the very least, it was in Mandarin, so unless he was going to get up and move to China one day, he wouldn’t have the same trouble most people marked with normal phrases had when it came to greeting strangers.
That same day, 140 million miles away, River, twelve years old and already resigned to the fact that they'll never have a soulmate alongside Aubrey, had been in the middle of the best game of jianzi they had ever played. They had kicked the feathered shuttlecock so high above the ground that when it came back down, its tail unfurled behind it like a shooting star. Their eyes were so fixated on that dull-ended meteorite that they collided with Aubrey in a head-bonking impact.
The shuttlecock landed with a soft thud in the middle of their tangled limbs. River laughed, breathless from the collision, while Aubrey cursed that they were certain they could’ve kicked it higher than they did. Aubrey made to untangle themselves as they rubbed their own forehead but then paused, wide-eyed as the moons, and grabbed River’s arm in a rush.
River staggered helplessly. “What is it?”
Aubrey didn’t reply. River saw what they saw and time suddenly seemed to sift through slowly like the seconds were petering through a clogged drain. They had never done something so idiotic as entertain the idea that one day words will scrawl down their arm, but watching it write itself down the skin of their left wrist, River would have thought they would have felt something. Pain needling through their pores, or a ticklish pleasure; anything, really.
River delicately brushed their thumb along the words when it stopped, as if they could have smudged it away like fresh ink. Aubrey would scribble silly faces and messages in that same area between Anansi’s lessons.
Children of the Great Houses were picked because they weren’t stained with a soulmate’s words from birth. Of course, for it to come later in life was not unheard of, but it didn’t matter. Odds were, if you weren’t already born with one, the possibility that you’ll ever meet your soulmate and be able to live happily ever after with them was dismal. Their relationships, their friendships, marriages—all of it was going to be arranged for the good of the House.
“So, you have a soulmate,” Aubrey said.
“I suppose so,” River said gradually, still calculating the feeling they should have been appropriately exhibiting. Joy? Dismay? Fury? But it was all so abrupt they couldn’t decide on what feeling to show.
“Good for you.” River couldn’t make out how Aubrey was feeling. Once upon a time, Aubrey had said neither of them needed any of that, that they weren’t built for those sorts of things anyway. They’ll always have each other, and wasn’t that enough? “Make sure Kali doesn’t find out about that. They might throw a fit.”
River pulled their sleeve over their hand and stumbled on their own two feet. “Wait, Aubrey—”
Aubrey stood up from the floor, picked up the shuttlecock, and kicked it in the air. “Now, are we going to get back to playing or what?”
By eight years old, January had curated a list of all the things he wanted to share with his soulmate. How he might have been the best student in his dance class—definitely not overheard from his instructor whispering to his mother when she went to pick him up; how sweet the grapes grew on the vineyard when his sneaking hands went to reach for those ambling vines; how an older cousin gifted him glow-in-the-dark stickers for his last birthday and he dressed his walls and ceiling with them.
How he was going to tell his soulmate all of this if they possibly didn’t speak English, well, he’ll figure it out one day. What he heard from other pairs of soulmates is that the two of them will understand each other better than anybody else, like a secret waltz only they knew the steps to. For now, his soulmate will just have to settle for the one phrase he memorized better than his standing positions: Hello, I’m January, lovely to meet you. Mirrored from his soulmark, and repeated after translations he sought online, it seemed fitting to respond back with a polite introduction of his own. Chinese seemed too daunting. He’ll have the time later to learn more.
His soulmark cradled a bright curiosity within him and some days he couldn’t help letting his overthinking mind run rampant with all the possibilities of his own future. If somebody asked about his mark, he'd share it, but otherwise there was no reason for him to show it off for the world to see, however much he wanted to. His mother told him how lucky he was to have a connection at all, because sometimes people went their whole lives without it; or they grow up with a soulmark but it disappeared long before they reached their adult years. Nothing was promised.
In his own winding imagination, he didn’t consider that his own mark could disappear and he would never meet his own soulmate, after already having imagined what it was like to have them in his life.
One day, after his mother had a particularly bad row with his father, where his father’s yelling rattled the dressers in January’s room, January had hidden himself under his comforters, absentmindedly tracing the characters on his wrist as he stared at the ceiling.
His father never hit either of them, but his voice was an earthquake all on his own, shaking their family until there were cracks in the foundations. January didn’t remember what the argument was about this time, maybe about problems out in the vineyard or the ballet school in Moscow or whatever. The fighting would end quickly, the house would go quiet again, and then they would all move on and forget about the fissures etching deeper and deeper into the earth.
Afterward, his mother had knocked on his door gently. She stood beside his bed wordlessly, stroking his hair like her touch could apologize for all the yelling. He knew what she looked like when she finished crying, though she tried to hide it.
January snuggled his head against his pillow, his hand clasping his own wrist close to his chest under the blankets, and asked his mother with a tiny and hopeful voice, “What do you think my soulmate would be like?” She hadn’t expected him to ask that and she paused, briefly. She laid down next to him on his tiny bed, her legs hanging over the edge.
His mother raised her hand high and invited him to reach for the glowing star-studded ceiling as though he could grapple planets high above through their very home. With fingers spread, she lined her own arm, tanned and bare, alongside his, and showered him with all the possibilities of a love best suited to her little prince.
“The most important thing about your soulmate,” January’s mother said with such irrefutability that he kept her words closer to his heart than his own soulmate’s, “is that they’re going to be somebody who will never make you feel small.”
January held her pinky tiredly and as he slipped into sleep that night, he dreamed of shooting stars and dancing through a universe made for two.
At twenty, River did a good job of pretending their own left arm was just as empty as their right one. When Kali had found out the day it appeared all those years ago, River had expected a scolding, an outburst, maybe the immediate order to have it covered up. But Kali had bent down on one knee and grasped their wrist. With such a gentleness that River had never seen before and will never see again, Kali stroked the words with their thumb and looked at them with pity.
It was humiliation that River picked and chose to focus on when they looked down at their own mark, amid the clamoring of emotions that rushed through them. A punishment for a crime they had yet to make, for being forced to wear something they knew they were never going to be allowed to have.
When they had their haptics installed, they had put a filter on to hide it, the one any person of notable worth installed when they wanted their privacy respected. It helped, somewhat, but there was always an awful, nagging tear at the back of their mind telling them their soulmate was out there.
But beyond the humiliation and the pretending, deeper in their bones, was shame. A dark void of space seemed to swallow them whole when River allowed themselves the slightest indulgence to just imagine who was on the other side of their connection. They wanted to apologize to them, for being born into the life that they had.
Those sorts of indulgences led to three things that they were able to deduce: one, their soulmate had to have been a native English-speaker, otherwise the first words spoken to River would have been in Mandarin. From the way their soulmark sounded, it might have been an instinctual response.Two, they probably hailed from Americatown because of that (the chance that they could be Earthstronger was considered, but just too unlikely). And three—
“They kind of sound like a bitch,” Aubrey said. “I mean, no offense to your soulmate.”
River gave them a funny smile. “You’re one to talk.”
Aubrey threw a pillow at them and River artfully dodged it without turning towards them.
In the evenings, Aubrey would come into River’s room and do their homework, saying it just helped to have another presence in the room; the silence drove them nuts.
River sat in the spanning alcove of the window, reading and listening to stylus taps. The two of them shared most of their classes together down at the university, but River always had the annoying habit of finishing their work as soon as they got it, and Aubrey had the unfortunate tendency to always know somebody who wanted to get shitfaced on the weekends. They had never submitted an assignment late, but River had to respect how they managed to toe that line constantly.
Aubrey had been talking about their digital rhetoric theory paper, and somehow they had swiveled right into River’s soulmark. Only a handful of people at Songshu knew about it, and even then, nobody talked about it. River didn’t like to, anyway, because of their own internalized hatred of it, and Aubrey didn’t because River had the sense that sometimes they thought of it as betrayal that River were to have somebody and they couldn’t.
So when River momentarily put their book down and asked with a shyness unbecoming of them, “What do you think they’d be like?” they didn’t expect a response, or at least, nothing serious. They didn’t know why they asked, but curiosity had a funny way of making you feel less small about the world.
For just a flicker of a second, Aubrey stopped writing. On the far side of the room, they had their back turned to them, spotlighted by the dull wintry light that crept in. River glanced towards them, shackling their hand over their own wrist.
“If you’re lucky,” Aubrey said with a quiet finality, “they’ll be somebody you aren’t afraid of.”
It wouldn’t matter what River imagined. None of that was going to be promised to them in this life. Even as they thought that, stamping it to memory like mathematical equations, they wouldn’t let go of their own wrist. Outside, Tharsis twinkled weakly from a distance, like a star had shattered into infinitesimal pieces and dusted the valley.
River huddled their knees close to their chest, imagining all the impossibilities of a life had they not been themselves.
January thought about the hundred ways he could find a way to run away right now and the other hundred ways he could lead Senator Aubrey Gale to the biofuel tanks to turn them into goop.
Gale tipped their head to catch his eye. “Lovely to meet you,” they said, the words snagging in January's brain like absentmindedly picking at a scab. Most of the people who helped him get situated after the Crossing had said it to him to introduce themselves. Coming from Gale themselves, it was even less special.
January attempted not to roll his eyes. “It’s not,” he said, bleakly, “but nice of you to say anyway.”
From the corner of his eye, so miniscule he might have thought he was imagining it, Gale stiffened. Their lips parted like they were about to say something, but January saw them think it through. Instead, they smiled graciously, stood up straighter, and plastered on their perfect politician smile. Gale scanned the room, answering journalists with wit and charm, and looked everywhere but at January. He couldn’t help but notice that they glanced back at him every other minute however, like they were worried he would jump up and attack them.
January scooted a bit away from them. The look in their eyes might have been fear or something else, but he didn’t want to make the situation more uncomfortable than it already was. Gale was ice-still, serene as the infinite deep space above, but when they placed their hands behind their back, they rubbed rings around their wrists, the way one does when released from a pair of tight cuffs.