Chapter 1
Gael is only six, but he thinks he knows what kind of person his soulmate is.
"Again?" sighs his mother when she catches sight of the fresh scrapes on his knees that afternoon.
"Gael—"
"It wasn't me," he insists as he shuts the door behind him.
"They showed up while I was at school.
On my hands, too—look."
Obligingly kneeling before him, she takes his hands in her own and turns them over to examine his palms.
True to his word, they're pink and raw, a product of what could only be a nasty fall.
He felt it when it happened, the ghost of a stinging pain that shot through his hands and knees while he was in class, and he has the wounds to show for it.
Except it wasn't actually Gael who fell.
Sitting back on her heels, his mother shakes her head with a disapproving tut.
"Whoever your soulmate is," she says, "they ought to be more careful.
It's irresponsible of them, going around acting like no one else is sharing their marks."
Careful.
That's what Gael is.
It's what his mother taught him to be.
Be careful, Gael, you're not the only one who'll feel the bruises.
Don't draw on yourself, Gael, do you want your soulmate to go to school with marker all over their arms?
Yeah, he's careful.
Maybe a little too careful,
supplies the doubtful part of his mind.
Accidents are inevitable and Gael's added his own number of injuries to the ever-shifting blue-purple patchwork that sprawls across his shins and joints, but at this point, he doubts that his soulmate would even notice a new mark.
Not when they've already been making more than their fair share.
Perhaps they're just inconsiderate.
Or—and this is the doubt speaking again—perhaps they're simply not aware that they have a soulmate at all, because there have been cases like that; people with no soulmates, people with multiple soulmates.
"Why don't you try reaching out to them?" his mother suggests, as if reading his mind.
"It's common enough for soulmates to communicate through written messages.
That's how your father and I found a time and place to meet."
Gael is shaking his head before she's even finished speaking.
"It's fine, I don't really mind that much," he says.
Not exactly true, but he doesn't want to be the person who initiates interaction with their soulmate just to ask them if they can
be a little more careful, please, I'm getting tired of all the bruises.
No one wants to be that person.
His mother frowns.
"It doesn't have to be about the injuries if you don't want it to be.
You can just introduce yourself, remind them that you're here."
Remind them that you exist.
But Gael doesn't want to be that person, either.
Naïve as it may be to assume that everything will work out in the end, he has faith that fate will carry through, that he'll meet his soulmate when the time is right.
And though he is still young, he understands what it means to be clingy, how unattractive it looks to others, and
that
—more than the one who tells their soulmate to stop being so clumsy, more than the one who feels obligated to announce their presence to their soulmate in the most heavy-handed manner possible—is, above all, the person Gael does not want to be.
"Maybe later," he says, beginning his retreat toward the stairs with his backpack in tow.
He is only six, but he knows what kind of person he is.
Hello.
The characters appear on the back of his left arm sixteen months later, and Gael spends at least thirty minutes having an existential crisis over whether or not to reply.
Hello.
He reads it over for the umpteenth time, heart faster and hands sweatier than they rightfully ought to be.
Is his soulmate even addressing him?
What if they're the type to write on their arms for fun?
What if someone else wrote it on them?
In the end, he does not respond.
When it happens again and again—sometimes on his wrists and sometimes on his ankles, sometimes with question marks and sometimes with exclamation points—he pretends not to notice.
It isn't that he means to be rude or cold or standoffish, or that he doesn't want to talk to his soulmate and find out who they are.
It's just that, well.
He already ignored them the first time, and with every subsequent message that comes and goes, it gets harder and harder for him to respond without looking like a Grade A jerk.
A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
Besides, he isn't sure he has anything to say to them.
Years pass, and Gael grows up.
He goes through the motions of learning, splits his time during class between gazing out the window and doodling on his notes and attempting to pay attention to the teacher.
He goes through other things, too—clothes and binders and hobbies, phases that are too disgraceful to name.
A progression typical of children as they age; Gael is not an exception.
The bruises fade as he enters middle school, which he takes to mean that his soulmate is busy growing up, too, because no sooner does the last one ebb into marbled yellow-brown than the notes start appearing.
Notes
is an umbrella term for the chicken scratch that decorates his arms day in and day out, ranging from reminders
(pg. 284-290 #20-45, pick up Emma after school, meet Heath Sat.
@2:00)
to actual, literal notes.
Once, near the beginning of Gael's first year of high school, he spends an entire evening watching a severely condensed history of Caldria write itself out on the inside of his left forearm.
And just as he thinks it's finally over, it starts up again on his right forearm, this time—he hadn't realized it was possible, but it is—in considerably sloppier penmanship.
"Dude,"
Jonas breathes when he sees him at school the next day, half in horror and half in awe.
Gael remembers too late to tug his sleeves over his hands.
"Are you seriously planning to cheat on the physics test?"
"Not so loud," Gael hisses.
"And it wasn't me.
History, not physics, see?" He flashes Jonas a glimpse of his marked-up arms before covering them again with the fabric of his blazer.
"You look guilty as fuck, hiding it like that."
"Yeah, because I don't want people like
you
snooping around."
Jonas laughs.
"Point taken.
But man, your soulmate has
guts
.
I just hope they get away with it."
Abruptly, Gael swears he can feel the weight the ink on his skin.
Cheating on a test is no small offense, and if his soulmate gets caught, the consequences won't be pretty.
"Yeah," he says.
"I hope they do, too."
Gael grows accustomed to the phantom press of a pen tip to his skin, a tingling sensation that inevitably has him putting down whatever he's doing in order to watch.
His soulmate has given up writing
hello
and all its variations in favor of scribbling random tidbits about their day, and Gael finds that he doesn't mind it so much, even if he can never bring himself to reply.
Although, that's assuming the messages are intended for him in the first place.
He may have an idea of what his soulmate is like, but that doesn't give him any insight as to
why
they write what they do, and he isn't quite confident enough in himself to take the chance and respond.
For all he knows, his soulmate keeps a diary on their wrists for the hell of it; there's nothing to prove that they expect him to respond, or that they even want him to.
Gael doesn't think he could live with himself if he wrote something back one day only to be rejected.
So he stays quiet, even when it gets hard to keep his silence.
Case in point: it's the middle of the night and Gael is in the middle of cramming for a math test when a familiar prickle begins spreading down his arm.
Liam's new album is FIRE
He pulls up his sleeve and peers blearily down at the words.
He'd known what to expect when he set his pencil down to check, but he hadn't known to expect
that
.