Chapter Text
“It’s just so romantic, Rafi! A love story through books!”
He resists the urge to roll his eyes, even though the rack of books he’s looking through block him from the front counter’s line of sight.
“It’s not a love story, Tía Claudia. It’s only my soulmate.” He thinks that whoever it is must be working on a final project of some kind, with the school year coming to an end, because his arms have been covered in long maroon lines and notes for about a week now. Rafael hopes that either the book is really interesting or they get a good grade, considering the amount of work that has shown up on his skin.
“Only your soulmate? What sort of nonsense is that?”
“Oh, come on, tía. Whoever she is has been writing on Rafi’s arms for six years now, and he’s never once written back. She probably doesn’t even know she has a soulmate,” Eddie says from his spot leaning against the counter. He doesn’t read much, but he’s always willing to come down to Claudia’s little store with Rafael.
“I don’t write in books,” Rafael says.
It’s been a convenient excuse for the past few years, since he had figured out that the soul words showing up on his skin were coming from his soulmate underlining passages and taking notes in the margins while they read. He’d paid good money for his books and it felt disrespectful to mark them up, and it wasn’t his fault that his soulmate didn’t feel the same way. It’s something he can tell people about why he’s never tried writing back, and avoid talking about anything else.
“Plenty of people who never meet their soulmates lead happy and fulfilling lives.” And plenty of people who do find them are unhappy, he adds in his mind.
“So you’re just going to keep writing your initials on the inside of front covers and leave your poor soulmate wondering like that?”
“Yes. And see, she knows more about me than I do about her, and she’s never tried to say anything. Maybe she doesn’t care either.”
“Or maybe the front cover doesn’t actually count as the book,” Claudia says, giving him a look as he sets the two books he’s picked out on the counter.
“Which probably means that she has no idea she even has a soulmate,” he replies, even though he doesn’t technically know that. But no writing has ever shown up on any other part of his body, so as far as he knows they’re connected only through their arms and their books.
“You’ve got no romance in your soul, Rafael Barba.”
“Oh, he’s got plenty of romance,” Eddie says, grinning, “Just ask Yelina.”
Rafael glares at him as he hands over his money and tucks his new books under his arm, but Eddie just laughs and throws his arm around his shoulders, waving to Claudia as he pulls him out into the sunshine. It’s a nice day, warm and bright, and he’s got two new books, and he can almost ignore the faint feeling of his soulmate’s looping handwriting ringing its way around his left elbow.
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Olivia likes the days when she gets an entire collection of RBs, five or six at a time. She can’t help herself, not when whoever her soulmate is clearly loves the books he so carefully initials, even if he never uses them to talk to her.
She’d grown up in a house full of books, all marked up and sticky-noted by her mother, so she hadn’t thought anything of it when she had started to write in her own, first in the ones she was assigned for school and then the ones she read for fun. It was a habit, putting her thoughts into words in the margins, underlining passages she liked or ones that seemed important, and she can’t blame her soulmate for not having those same habits. After all, it’s not like she’s made any attempts to talk to him either, so it would be a little unfair to be that upset about the fact that all she gets in return is little green RBs along her arms, usually two or three a month, with enough time in between that the last marks have almost completely faded by the time the next ones write themselves onto her skin.
Plenty of people don’t have soulmates, or don’t know they have them because they never stumble across whatever it is that allows them to write back and forth to each other. At least she knows for sure that there’s someone out there, connected to her, even if all she ever gets from him are neat sets of his initials.
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Yelina traces one finger along some of the marks on the arm resting across his stomach. He isn’t sure why she hasn’t left, why both of them are still lying here on his bed, but letting go of her is completely unthinkable. So they lie there, together, a soft breeze and the noise of the neighborhood drifting in through the open window. His mother will be home soon.
“It’s not- you know it’s not because of those, right?”
“I know,” she says, not looking up at him.
She’d been there that day in third grade, when he’d looked down at the flutter of sensation against his arm in time to watch three maroon lines ink themselves across his skin. And she’d been there almost every day since, as his friend and as something more, for almost a decade of his insistence that finding his soulmate wasn’t important to him, that he wasn’t interested in making any connection beyond the writing on his arms, which he had no control over, and he’s pretty sure Yelina has even figured out exactly why he’s so insistent that his soulmate is better off without him. He believes her when she says she knows that the soul marks aren’t why he can’t marry her.
Rafael wonders if he’s supposed to ask if she’ll come with him, if what she’s waiting for is for him to mention that there are plenty of colleges in Boston, that they don’t have to stay here to stay together. But he knows Yelina loves the Bronx, is planning on spending her whole life here, that she’s vaguely baffled about why he wants to go away to Harvard and everything it represents in the first place. So he’ll keep his mouth shut, and she’ll stay and he’ll go away, and it will only have been him who made a choice between a place and a person, chose Harvard over a life with her. He’ll be the one that chose, and that will be his burden, and everything will be fine.
At some point, his mother comes home and they can hear her in the kitchen, starting dinner. Yelina pushes up from where she’s been laying against his shoulder and looks at him for a long time before she leans down to kiss him-- soft and slow and already half gone. Neither of them say anything, and when he starts to sit up so he can walk her to the door, she shakes her head.
He spends the rest of the evening lying in bed, watching his soulmate conjugate Italian verbs across his bicep.
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She jumps the first time her soulmate writes more across her arms than his initials.
“What happened? Is there a bug?” Julia asks, looking up from her books. When she sees Olivia studying the green writing along her arms, she pushes herself across the room. They’ve been rooming together since freshman year, and she knows all about Olivia’s soulmate and his initials. “Holy shit. Is he writing to you finally?”
“You know we don’t write to each other,” she says, but she’s not actually paying that much attention to her roommate, too busy twisting her arms around so she can watch the writing work its way up the inside of her upper arm. His handwriting is messy, so different from the carefully inscribed RBs, and she can’t help smiling at this small detail she now knows about her soulmate.
“If he hasn’t decided to write to you, why the sudden enthusiasm?” Julia says, brushing her fingers against a couple of lines that extend from her forearm up onto the back of her left hand, and there’s the familiar sound of fluttering pages close to Olivia’s ear, like someone is running their thumb over their edges. “Wait, maybe he writes in his textbooks like Mike does.”
She holds up her own arms, covered in thick smears of dark yellow where her boyfriend has highlighted passages in his econ textbooks. I love you is written in blocky letters across the knuckles of her right hand, like he’d written it absentmindedly in a margin while he was studying, not bothering to switch to something with a finer point, a spontaneous reflex of a gesture to his soulmate more than a conscious act, and Olivia fights a ridiculous moment of jealousy.
It’s just as much her fault as it is his that they’ve never directly spoken to each other. There’s a copy of Wuthering Heights sitting on her desk, half full of notes already, and it would be easy enough to grab it and scrawl Hi, my name’s Olivia in one of the margins, or even something faux casual like I just figured it was time we introduced ourselves. Maybe he’s just never realized that it’s books that connect them, or that wherever he’s writing his initials still means that they show up on her arms, or that textbooks even count in the same way that novels do; maybe her soulmate is the one who has really been waiting almost a decade for her to give some clue to her identity or their connection in among all the soul writing she is sure she’s left on his arms all these years.
It would be easy, especially now that she knows he has something he’s willing to write in.
Instead, she just traces each new line or word as it shows up on her skin, enjoying the little flashes of warmth against her fingertips.
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“You and Rita have a grocery list around here somewhere?” Devine asks, and Rafael looks up from his textbook.
“Try the fridge. Why do you need our grocery list?”
He holds up a sheet of paper, covered in his neat, cramped handwriting running in every direction around a short list. “Ran out of room on mine.”
“Can’t you just make another one?”
“The universe gets all tetchy if I haven’t bought the stuff on the one I’ve got. No idea how it knows that, but it won’t let anything through until I actually have all the groceries from the last one. Ah-ha!” he says, pulling the list off of the refrigerator and returning to his place across from Rafael, sitting cross-legged in his chair so he can see the lilac writing across the dark skin of his feet. “I knew a guy in high school who could just keep using the same list over and over again if he wanted to, but the marks only showed up on the backs of his shoulders, so he had to use a mirror or get someone to help him out any time he wanted to actually know what his soulmate was saying back. I’ll take my setup any day.”
Rafael glances down at the maroon writing on his own arms. There’s been a lot less of it the past few years, and ridiculously enough he finds that he misses it, a feeling which he has no right to. When he looks up again, Devine is watching him, thumb pressed against his instep.
“What?”
“I don’t think your soulmate hates you.”
“I-What?”
“You’ve got that look on your face like you’re thinking about how your soulmate probably hates you because you’ve never gotten in touch with them after all these years. It’s a look I know well.”
“You have a lot of friends in this situation?”
“Mostly just you. But you make the face a lot.”
“What face?” Devine shifts to balance his arms on his crossed legs, looking down at them with an exaggeratedly morose expression. “I don’t look like that.”
“Look like what?” Rita asks, emerging from her room, and Devine repeats his pose. “Barba having another existential crisis about his soulmate?”
“I don’t do that.”
“It’s pretty much all you do. You read, you study, you have existential crises about the fact that the universe so unfairly saw fit to give you a soulmate.”
Rita, as far as she knows, does not have a soulmate. She seems far less bothered by that than the fact that Rafael won’t talk to the one he has. As she crosses to sit on the opposite side of the couch from Rafael, she flicks at his ear, and he jerks his head away from the sting.
“What was that for?” he asks, but Rita just gives him a look, “How come you never give my soulmate this much grief, in absentia? It’s not like they’ve ever written to me either.”
“Oh, someday. If you ever end up meeting them and aren’t too wrapped up in yourself to figure out who it is, I’m going to have words. But until then, there’s only you, because he-” She jerks a thumb in Devine’s direction- “at least talks to Danny.”
And Danny talks back, he almost responds. But if he says that, or anything else, the conversation will continue but won’t go anywhere, and besides, all three people in the room know the fear that his soulmate won’t be interested in writing back to him isn’t the main reason he’s never said anything to them. He doesn’t want to talk about any of it, so he keeps his mouth shut.
Rita looks like she’s considering bringing it up anyway, one way or another, but then she just turns on the couch so she can shove her toes under his thigh, cracking open her book on her lap. After waiting for a few seconds to see if she’s just trying to lure him into a false sense of security, he turns back to his own work, telling himself that he’s tucking his right hand into his left elbow because it’s the most comfortable way to hold his book, that it has nothing to do with the soft, slow pulses of warmth across his skin where his pinkie rests against a few faded maroon lines.
-------------
Olivia shifts in her chair again, and Patrick looks up from his work.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“Yeah, fine. Probably shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee, that’s all.”
Too much caffeine is a good excuse, considering how long they’ve been at their desks catching up on paperwork, but she doesn’t actually feel all that twitchy. It’s just that all afternoon there’s been the ghost of sensation all across her hips, like someone is just barely tracing the tips of their fingers over her skin. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that-
She stands abruptly, and Patrick looks up from his desk again, both eyebrows raised.
“It’s nothing,” she says, waving off anything he might say, “I just- I’ll be right back.”
The bathroom is empty, which she’s thankful for, but she still ducks into the last stall as she pulls her shirt out of her waistband. And there, all over the skin of her hips and lower stomach, is the deep green handwriting that she knows almost as well as her own. Olivia laughs in disbelief, dropping her head back against the wall.
She’s just started to get used to only having his initials again. It’s easier than it might have been because she’d assumed from the start that it would happen someday, and she’d gotten seven years where she’d been expecting four, but it still feels like her soulmate is more distant from her than ever before. Or at least it had felt like that, she thinks, watching another line write its way across her skin.
It’s impossible to see what is being written from this angle, and when she presses her fingers there all she gets is the faintest sound of pen against paper. She wonders if her soulmate has been dealing with this for years without her ever knowing, and, God, she’s never been more aware of exactly how sensitive the skin across her hips is.
She knows she should be annoyed, that this is only going to make concentrating on paperwork harder, not to mention any number of other things for the foreseeable future until she gets used to the sensation, but she can’t resist a small smile. There’s what seems like pages and pages of notes now written across her skin, and even if it’s only a one time thing, even if it all fades in a month and there’s never anymore, she knows now that there is something else out there that connects her to her soulmate.
Olivia presses the tips of her fingers against the writing again, just to feel the new and familiar warmth for a few seconds, eyes catching on the faded RB at her wrist. Then she takes a deep breath, pushes away from the wall, and neatly retucks her shirt into her waistband. There’s paperwork to finish, and she doesn’t need to see the soul words to know that they’re there.
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He can feel a migraine building behind his temples, and he probably should have let Rita bully him into leaving an hour ago when she’d tried it, but he can’t get his opening statement for the trial starting tomorrow to flow like he wants it to and he knows he’ll work better alone in the almost empty courthouse than he would at home.
Well, almost alone. About an hour and a half ago his soulmate had picked up a book, but after 25 years there are few things less distracting. He breathes, his heart beats, his soulmate makes abbreviated literary observations all over his arms. He doesn’t even bother looking up from his notes until he feels the odd tug that means they’re erasing something, and even then it’s only a glance.
Hi. My name is O-
It’s a few seconds until his brain catches up with his eyes and he realizes what he’s just read. By the time he looks up again, everything but Hi is gone, and then that disappears too, leaving just a long smear of maroon down his forearm.
O. It’s just the one letter, but it’s the most he’s ever known about his soulmate. And the Hi means that it was intentional, the first time in two and a half decades that either of them have reached out to the other, and he can’t tell if the dull pain in his gut is because they’d reached out or because they’d so clearly regretted it so quickly. He forces himself to close his eyes and concentrate on his breathing, except that after a few deep inhales and long exhales he realizes that what he’s actually concentrating on is trying to recall the shape of the words against his skin. Shaking his arms out like that will dislodge the idea, he stands and takes two steps before realizing that there’s nowhere he can go to get away from this.
He should go home. He should go home and sleep, or drink and then sleep, except he’s got a trial starting tomorrow morning so he can’t do that. So he should go home and sleep and not think about his soulmate. Except of course that if he stops working and goes home and doesn’t think about his soulmate, he’s going to think about his father, whose health is failing.
His health is failing, and Rafael’s mother has called him four times this week, asking him to visit before it’s too late. It’s already too late, Mami. It’s been too late for years, he’d finally snapped the last time they’d spoken, thinking of bruises underneath dark ink. He knows he needs to apologize, but the last thing he wants is to call to say he’s sorry and end up in a fight with his mother about his father. So he needs to stay here and work, so that he doesn’t think about his father or his mother or his soulmate.
When he sits back down though, his eyes focus not on his notes but on the smudged maroon line on his arm. He’s not sure what he’s expecting when he rests his fingertips there, but there’s something comforting about the fact that there’s only the familiar ruffling of pages and the spreading warmth, the one indulgence he occasionally allows himself in regards to his soulmate. Nothing has changed except for the one small thing he now knows about his soulmate.
Rafael wonders what had happened that had inspired them to reach out. Wonders, not for the first time, if their reasons for not reaching out before this are similar to his own or entirely different. Wonders if he’d feel less guilty about it if he explained himself just once, pulled down one of his books and scribbled out the best explanation he could manage. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
He wonders if his soulmate likes poetry.
The errant thought brings a smile to his face, a sudden bright spot. My soulmate O, who writes in their books and may or may not like poetry. That somehow makes them seem both more and less daunting, and he finds himself glancing towards the bookshelf behind his desk before he shakes his head, grabbing his notebook instead.
Someday, maybe. When his guilt and his hope and his father, dying but not yet gone, weren’t sitting quite so heavily in his gut. For now there was work, and not thinking about any of it.
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“I don’t get why you don’t just talk to the guy.”
Olivia glances over at him. “The perp?”
“Your soulmate,” Elliot says, nodding at where she’s got her right hand wrapped around her left arm, fingers spread a little to cover as many of the RB s on her arms as she can reach at once. It’s an old self-comfort gesture she settles into when there’s nothing to do but wait, and she hadn’t even noticed she was doing it. She doesn’t move though, despite the sudden urge to tug her sleeves back into place and hide her soulmate away from Elliot’s judgement. It’s the middle of summer and too hot in the car even in the middle of the night with the windows cracked for that anyway.
She shrugs instead. “I’ve told you, I just don’t feel like I need to. Not everyone’s relationship with their soulmate is the same as you and Kathy’s.”
The writing on Elliot’s arms is such a pale yellow it’s hard to see most of the time. The cheap notebook with the cardboard cover he uses to write to her is tucked between his seat and the center console where he’d stuck it when Kathy had told him she was going to bed.
“I know that, Liv. It’s just that you’ve known about this guy since you were a kid, and you’ve never wanted to talk to him? To meet him?”
“I’ve never said that,” Olivia says, thinking of the night a few years ago when she’d had a bad day on top of a worse week, and she’d had the sudden urge to know and be known, despite the consequences. She’d regretted it immediately and erased the message about three seconds after she’d finished writing it, but still. It certainly wasn’t the first time she’d thought about it, and it wasn’t the last. “If for whatever reason he doesn’t want to talk to me, I’m not going to force it. If the universe is so hellbent on us finding each other, it can do its part. You and Kathy had been writing back and forth for years before that frat party, but you didn’t plan to meet there. It just happened.”
“So you’re just going to wait and hope he shows up someday? What if the universe decides to just have him be the guy ahead of you in line for coffee one day and hope for the best?”
“Then the universe can bite me. Seriously, El, I don’t know how many ways I can say that if it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.” She shrugs. Her connection to her soulmate might be small, but it’s there, and she doesn’t want to risk that trying to force him into something he’s obviously uncomfortable with. The soul marks on her arms and even her hips have been the most stable and consistent part of her life for a long time now.
Elliot looks like he has more to say, and Olivia barely holds in a sigh, ready to explain the same things she does every time he or one of the few other people who have seen her marks and know about her relationship with her soulmate decide to have this discussion again. She’s saved by their perp emerging from the building they’ve been watching down the street, and Elliot immediately snaps to attention to start the car.
She fights a shiver in the stale, overheated July air of the car as she takes her hand away from her arm to put on her seatbelt.
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“Barth, you have to finish soon so we can go buy Barba an actual drink, because if I have to watch him morosely pine over his soulmate for much longer I’m going to throw something at him and that’s unprofessional.”
Rafael looks up from the second scotch he’s poured himself while they wait for Elana to finish her work so they can go out. “I’m not morose. Or pining.”
“So you’re just making the sad puppy dog eyes at your own arms for health reasons?”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You are,” says Elana without looking up from her papers.
“If you would just talk to them-” Rita starts, and Rafael drains his glass.
“Who’d want me as their soulmate?” he says, and immediately wants to take it back. Normally he’s much better at not reacting to their teasing about his soulmate, but he’s exhausted and a little drunk and there’s been some feeling between his shoulder blades all afternoon, like an itch but not quite, and some of his soulmate’s notes on whatever they were reading had spilled up his wrist and onto the back of his hand, and he’s spent all day catching glimpses of it as he writes.
“Smart, good-looking lawyer on the side of justice with a nice apartment stuffed full of books, the very vehicle of your soulmate connection?”
“Workaholic jackass who has spent decades ignoring them.”
He’s never drinking again. Or maybe he’ll just never speak to Elana and Rita again. He shifts in his seat, trying to relieve the feeling between his shoulder blades, but it’s no use.
“Jesus, Barba, your conviction that meeting your soulmate could only lead to some sort of tragedy and that you are solely responsible for preventing it is genuinely depressing. Look at Barth, she found her soulmate and they’re all happy and gross.”
“We are,” says Elana, still not looking up from her desk. Her arms are covered in the bright red love poems that her wife writes in newspaper margins.
“There’s no guarantee that’s how this turns out,” he says, gesturing at his own arms.
“Love isn’t about guarantees, Rafael. It’s about trusting your connection to another person, whether they’re your soulmate or not. Trusting that it’s good and right, and that when it’s not, you’ll work together to fix it. It isn’t about some magical moment where you first meet your soulmate’s eyes and know this is the person you were meant for. It takes a lot more work and faith than that. And I know you know this,” she says when he opens his mouth, “And we both know that you know it’s both different and the same when it’s your soulmate. Which is why you’re sitting there making-” She turns to Rita.
“Sad puppy dog eyes.”
“-Sad puppy dog eyes at your soulmate’s writing instead of talking to them.” Rafael doesn’t know what to say to that, and Elana closes her folder with a sigh. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink to make up for lecturing you about your soulmate.”
“And you can buy me a drink for not following my excellent advice in regards to your soulmate for going on two decades now,” Rita says.
“Oh, is that what it’s been?” he responds, but he’s only half annoyed really. He knows that if he ever really asked Rita to stop she would, at least for a while, because she’s done it in the past. “I think you owe Elana a drink for backing you up so eloquently.”
Rita rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to wax poetic about your ridiculousness, Barba. That’s what you have her and Devine for. Who is also happily married to his soulmate, I’ll add.”
He wishes it were that easy. He wants it to be that easy, if he’s being honest. But it’s not.
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“Sorry we haven’t gotten around to this until now,” Rafael says, but Eddie just shrugs.
“It’s alright. Haven’t really had the time anyway. My mom’s helping out, but it’s still… José keeps asking when she’s coming back, you know? She calls him sometimes, and she keeps talking about him going down to spend a few weeks with her in the summer, but… I don’t really know how to explain it to him.”
It’s been a month since his wife had left for Miami and two weeks since she’d called to tell him she probably wasn’t coming back. Rafael and Alex had been trying to figure out a night to take Eddie out for drinks since they’d heard, but their combined schedules had meant that this was the first chance they’d gotten. And Alex needs to be back in Albany by early afternoon tomorrow, and Rafael has court in the morning, and Eddie has to get home to his boy and his mother, so it’s more likely to be drink than drinks . But they’re here, all three of them, and it’s good to be together again, even under the circumstances.
“Well, if you need anything...”
“I’ll let you know. Thanks, Rafi,” Eddie says, as Alex sets their drinks on the table.
“Yelina sends her best. She would have come, but somebody had to stay with the girls.”
Rafael can’t tell if he can’t see the marks on Alex’s neck because the pale pink doesn’t show up well in the dim lighting of the bar or because there aren’t any there right now. Their appearance is intermittent, but when Alex had first started to get serious about running for office, a lot of people had told him he would need to hide them when they were there, that while it was generally acceptable to be married to someone who wasn’t your soulmate, the fact that Yelina didn’t have marks to match could cost him votes.
Because he was Alex, he’d instead gotten very good at giving the speech about how he was sure that his soulmate, whoever she was, was perfectly nice, but Yelina was the only woman for him. She was his soulmate, with no offense meant to the universe, of course. Sometimes when Rafael hears him give it, he thinks of that last afternoon, Yelina’s finger tracing across his arm, the flutter of pages in his ears.
It takes him a second to realize that the sound isn’t just in his memory. Eddie is tapping at three long lines up near his elbow with his fingers.
“You ever going to do anything about these, hermano?”
“Like what? I can’t just ask my soulmate to stop. It’s not their fault that the universe decided on books.”
“I’m not talking about stopping. I’m talking about starting.”
“You think after all this time he’s just going to start writing back?” Alex says, grinning, “Rafi and his soulmate have been ignoring each other for decades.”
Ignoring pulls at something in his gut, but he doesn’t know how to counter it without talking about how sometimes when he can’t sleep, he’ll lie in bed studying his soulmate’s notes and trying to figure out what they’re reading. He doesn’t want to talk about any of it really, but he especially doesn’t want to talk about all the little ways his soulmate has become important in his life, and why he can’t risk that by actually speaking to them.
Rafael knows that Alex and Eddie, as well as they know him, as long as they’ve known him, wouldn’t understand that feeling.
He wonders if his soulmate does.