Chapter Text
You celebrated your eighteenth birthday party in the usual fashion: your mother throwing you an ostentatious and over-the-top party. She took you out on the town to do some of the things you could now legally do- she bought you a pack of cigarettes, took you to a casino, found some random stupid political thing for you to both vote on, all culminating in a couple of long hours spent in the one (crappy) alcohol-free strip joint she could find in a fifty-mile radius. She’d been taking sips from a flask she kept in her bra the entire time, refilling it as needed from the limo’s mini bar.
Now that you’re home though, she’s sent you into the bathroom with the simple repeated instruction, “go look!”
You leave your purse on the counter and shed your dress easily. You check all the obvious places for some scrawling words.You’re not sure what to expect, maybe it will be just some mundane “hello,” but you are a bit excited, in spite of yourself. There’s nothing there. You take off your bra, than your underwear. You check over every inch of your body, even turning in front of the mirror and twisting your neck around so you can see your back.
Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you’re starting to think that there must be something gravely wrong.
“Hey Mom, what time was I born?” you call out.
“Um… some time around seven I think? Or was it eight?”
You retrieve your phone from your discarded purse. 12:26, if it was going to appear, it should have by now. You double check. Nothing.
You suppose you shouldn’t really be all that surprised, after all, it wasn’t as though everyone could get to have someone to love and cherish them forever. Probably for the best anyways, you don’t know of anyone who could handle being in a romantic relationship with you. You’re no expert, but you somehow doubt that verbose, sarcastic girls who speak like every sentence is a move in a long game of chess and psychoanalyze every response are considered big catches really. It doesn’t hurt that, of the fifty percent of the population you could potentially find attractive, only about eighteen percent is going to find you attractive. You don’t always have to get bullied for being gay for it to make your life harder.
Well you know what? What the fuck does it matter? You don’t need anyone anyways! You’ll just be an aromantic cat lady, who writes, and maybe does psychiatry as her day job.
You get dressed, resolved to not feel sorry for yourself, not even a little bit.
Your mother waits expectantly. “Well…? What does it say? What does it say?” She bounces up and down on her toes, like she’s the one who just turned eighteen instead of you.
You sigh. You don’t want her pity, her "oh, my poor baby!"'s. “It says ‘Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the library?’ It could be anyone.”
“Well… when you meet her, you’ll certainly know how to answer her question!”
“Not if I’m in a place I’ve never been before.”
“Oh, but then you can be lost in the city together! That’s totes romantic!”
“Mom-” You stop yourself. “I’m tired. I think I’m just going to go to bed, okay?”
* * *
Over the next few weeks, you make frequent trips to the public library, which gets you no small amount of teasing from your mother. Unbeknownst to her, you’re researching other instances of Soul-Mate Scrawls turning up blank.
You’d always known that the system wasn’t perfect. Scrawls might fail to appear, for example, if your soul-mate was also your childhood friend, and they’d said their first words to you long before the scrawl appeared. The other, sadder option was if the person who was supposed to be your soul-mate died before you met them.
You, personally, never fully subscribed to the whole “soul-mate” thing anyways. Just one person, destined to be the single person you would love for the rest of your life? That was just naive and stupid, some archaic idea for people with some weird romantic nostalgia for contrived rom-com plots.
You can’t spend whole days doing research anymore though, because you're about to start college. In fact, you're on your way home with several recently checked-out assigned preparatory readings for starting your classes, nose already buried in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, when someone collides with you.
The girl had been going at some speed, and hit you with enough force to knock the book out of your hands, and send you both sprawling on the ground. You yelp in an undignified way that you would certainly deny having done, were anyone to ask.
The girl, about your age, with short dark hair that flips up stylishly, scrambles on the ground for scattered books and papers, hers and yours indecipherable in the jumble.
“I’m so, extremely sorry,” you say in your most ingratiating tone. “Here, let me help you with that.”
She ignores you, and hands you your books. When you help her gather her papers, she smiles gratefully. Your eyes finally meet, and suddenly it’s as if something’s knocked the air out of your lungs. She’s gorgeous. Her skin is porcelain, and her face is regal, but kind. She looks like the kind of queen who really could rule a kingdom through sheer love and loyalty alone. Her unfairly curvaceous hourglass form doesn’t hurt. Her eyes are a deep forest green, like nothing you’ve ever seen.
“With eyes like yours, one would think you would be able to see where you were going.” The words are out of your mouth before you have a chance to think them through. Damn!
She blushes, which -who would have thought it possible?- makes her even prettier, and makes an apologetic hand gesture that looks like you ought to recognize it. She’s mouthing ‘sorry.’
Then, before you can really appreciate her, she’s gone, back to dashing off to wherever it was she’d been rushing towards in the first place. You start to pick yourself up off the ground, when you notice an iPod that isn’t yours. She must have dropped it!
“Hey, wait! You dropped your iPod! Hey!!!” you shout, standing and waving.
Either she doesn’t hear you, or she's in too much of a hurry to care. She keeps running, turning the next corner and dashing out of sight.
You suppose you ought to have turned the iPod in to the library’s lost and found, or maybe the police, but you didn’t. You kick yourself for this a bit as you lay stomach down on your bed and examine it for clues. You finally turn it on, hoping to find at least some sort of hint for how to find her again. Not that you're interested in her, of course, dating someone who couldn’t be your soul-mate is kind of a social taboo, just that you need to return this iPod. Appleware is expensive, after all!
You put in the ear-buds, and scroll through her music. Experimentally, you play a song at random and- WHOA!
Whatever you’d expected when you plugged yourself into the fashion-sensible girl’s flower-cased music player, getting your ears blasted off by heavy metal rock was not one of them. Clicking the volume WAY down, you browse around a little more. It’s not all metal, but it’s definitely all loud, with strong drum sections heavily featured. Funny, she looked like such a classical kind of girl. Just goes to show, you suppose.
You go to the library frequently, trying different routes sometimes, but if she’s there then you’re simply not finding her. You move in to your college dorm (you’d decided not to go to an out-of-state college after all, choosing one pretty close by), and meet some interesting new people at orientation week, but it’s not until classes actually start that you finally spot your illusive mystery woman in the least expected place.