Chapter Text
Ash felt as if his entire life was one big oxymoron. The one person that ever truly loved him left, and the one that stayed despised his very being. He was a beautiful creature but an ugly lifeform. He was still a young, innocent boy but a filthy and disgusting toy. His soul mark was no different.
Max had two guns tattooed on his neck from birth, one now dull in color. Griffin had one of those guns. Dino never showed Ash his soul trait, although if Ash had anything guess with all the time he's seen him, Dino cut his horns off. Arthur even had his mark: one brown, one blue eye, with stargazer lilies flowing down his back.
What did Ash have? He had angel wings with devil horns. And the wings were as white as the horns were black. The horns weren't terrible at least; they fit him well, but the wings...gosh. He couldn't remove them, though. If he did, Ash would remove them from his love, and that's the last thing he wanted to do. Imagining the sheer anger of his love was enough to leave them alone. He hides them instead. He wears shirts that are too big and oversized jackets, which also help cover other secrets. He considered those things the banes of his existence.
He had no interest in finding his soulmate. As far as he was concerned, he couldn't have one, with such an oxymoron of an extension.
Arthur was afraid. His chosen is going to hate him if this hideous tattoo was anything to go by. He had it scratched so many times red lines ruined the picturesque art. Burns permanently stained the flowers, turning the soft pink into hard black marks. White scars flittered over the leaves and branches, like sunlight peeking through trees. He destroyed it, just as he destroyed everything else.
One of the five flowers went dull one night; Arthur went colorblind in his brown eye.
Ash was lucky. Ash is always the lucky one. All he has to worry about is some silly horns; meanwhile, Arthur can't decide whether he had one soulmate with a big heart or multiple, and they are slowly slipping away. He felt a different cold sweat every night from the stress pushed onto his body; his limbs turn up to be sore from time to time. Each dream was a new nightmare, most of which was his love's, plaguing him slowly. Red flashes, cold blades. He was about to lose the only thing he'll ever own.
His soulmate should stay far away from him. He destroys everything.
Max couldn't let go. He knew having two marks was too good to be true.
He scrubbed his hands as if he was trying to wash the callouses away. Blood dripped from his palm into the sink, but more still washed away. It just kept coming, and he couldn't remove it all, and the sink was tilting, and why couldn't he breathe.
Taking a few shaky breaths, Max washed his face and stepped out of the bathroom. He looked at his palms again, and they were clean. But they were never going to be.
He's long gone. And Max knows Griffin would tell him not to cry as he recited one of his poems softly. He would hold Max's hands in his soft, un-callouses palms and whisper songs from the moon, planets, and woodland creatures. Then he would get up and make them dance to some random old track from the '80s, very aware that Max has two left feet.
He missed the soft-spoken rhymes and gentle touches; he lived for the butterfly kisses and runaway nights under the stars. How could he function now?
Max almost gave up on love, but he still had his other tattoo left.
Yut-Lung sees it as peculiar. Why was everyone born with this special someone to love them forever?
Love is weak.
It's a hindrance to life, and to his freedom. This is funny considering his marking was tattooed demon wings. Not real ones, like his father's, or even artistically pleasing like his mother's butterfly wings tattoo. They're just black marks cross-stitched on his back. Nothing about them tell him about his soulmate; hell, there wasn't even a scratch on them. If his partner did really exist, they had to be the most careful person in the world.
Yut-Lung thinks they're romantic in a sense; they attempt to preserve the only connection between the two of them. Whatever, considering how much his family moves around for work, it's not like Yut-Lung will ever meet them. To think he will is redundant.
Love is stupid, Yut-Lung thinks. His soulmate can shove it down their throat.