Chapter Text
It was finally here. Gavin’s eighteenth birthday. The day everyone in the known world looked forward to: the day you learn who your soulmate is. And he couldn’t be more excited or nervous at the same time.
No one really understood the rhyme or reason behind the phenomenon. The old legends told by generations say that names just randomly appeared on people’s bodies, as if
they had gotten a tattoo they didn’t remember. One by one, everyone figured out that these names were the same of those they had fallen for. Most find each other, get married, and live their lives happily. There, of course, were others that weren’t so lucky. Sometimes they found their soulmate had a different name, others found theirs had long passed before they finally found them. No one could explain it, not scientists, not scholars. It was just an accepted truth to society, and Gavin waited so long for his name to appear wherever it will.
Gavin walked into work at the supermarket he worked part time at, eyes bloodshot and hair disheveled. He spent the entire night awake, checking himself over and over again for the name, only to find his body a blank slate every time.
"Gav, looking a bit rough this morning. Have a bit of fun for your birthday?" His coworker joked.
"I stayed up all night looking for the name." He mumbled. "Never bloody showed. Of course I would be the broken one and not get one."
All his coworker did was laugh, pointing at Gavin’s left hand.
"You don’t see it? It’s right there, you mong."
Surprised, Gavin looked to his lefthand, where in the small space between his thumb and index finger, on the back of his hand, a script not unlike very fine handwriting read “Michael Vincent Jones”.
Gavin’s first instinct: reaching for the disinfectant wipes behind the counter, believing his brother had snuck in at the small window oftime he had any sleep and wrote it in with a sharpie. There was no way, he thought, when he stayed up nearly all the night before, that the name just randomly showed up.
He scrubbed and scrubbed at the skin of his hand, the name not budging in the slightest. Then itfinally sank in: it was real. Whoever Michael Vincent Jones was, wherever he was, that was the man he was destined to be with.
And of course, now that it had sunken in, Gavin became sensitized to the name Michael, constantly craning his head around when he heard it. He’d approach random men, hearing the name Michael mentioned, asking their whole name, and would always be disappointed. His mother assured him that it’ll likely take time, that no one found their soulmate right after the name appeared. But Gavin was never one for patience, and kept abruptly interrupting strangers to find their names, never giving up hope, never losing faith in finding Michael Vincent Jones.