Archive of Our Own ^beta

(Readers might be wondering, why not take the stairs? To which you would answer, “I live on the ninth fucking floor. I don’t have a death wish, thank you very much.”)

The light pinging sound announcing the elevator’s arrival has you grinning like a madwoman. Looking down to adjust your shoulder bag, you miss noticing the person exiting until you’re bumping straight into their chest.

The ripe, pungent scent of week-old-unwashed-clothes hits your nose. And only one man in the entire building smells like that.

“Heading out, Pidge?” A deep, husky voice reminding you of the jagged walls of a canyon carved by years and years of river water rumbles in your eardrums, temporarily silencing your racing thoughts. 

You look up, seeing Dieter standing there in his favorite raggedly bathrobe with too many stains to count, one arm braced against the elevator door preventing its closing. 

“Tramp,” you greet with a smirk, though your fluttering heartbeat betrays your exterior calmness.

Dieter Bravo is beautiful. Sure, his wardrobe leaves much to be desired and he doesn’t always stay on top of his personal hygiene and he wanders the halls high on marijuana edibles from time to time. But still. One look at his luscious brown curls and matching piercing eyes–there’s no arguing. He’s so beautiful to look at, it's almost cruel he’s your neighbor.

You’re not the only one who thinks he’s attractive either.

In an apartment building full of odd and unique residents, Dieter’s flirtatious and charming personality combined with his handsome, scruffy looks deservedly earned him his Disney character nickname.

“Where are you flying off to?” Dieter asks, shifting to lean against his braced arm despite the warning sound from the pissed off elevator forced to remain stagnant. Given his red-rimmed eyes, you think Dieter’s too high to even care.

You fiddle with the strap of your bag, a distraction so your fingers don’t succumb to the urge of attempting to tame his crown of tangled curls. “The bookstore down the street.”

He nods as if he had expected that response. “The new Constellation Chaser book came out today.” He says it so matter-of-factly you can’t help but gape at him, unable to conceal your surprise.

“How did you…?”

Dieter leans forward, warm breath fanning across your face, and there’s a dopey, dimpled smile playing on his lips. “I always remember your favorite things, Pigeon.”

Your heart lodges somewhere inside your throat. Eyes flicking between the open elevator and his brown eyes threatening to ensnare your soul, you force your feet to move, squeezing yourself through the narrow gap between the wall and Dieter’s broad frame. 

Within the safety of the interior, you make the most of the few precious seconds you have before Dieter turns around to inhale several gulps of desperately needed air. 

So, yeah, okay, you’ll admit you maybe have a tiny, little, infinitesimal crush on Dieter. It’s not a big deal. Everybody probably has a crush on their neighbors from time to time. You’ll get over it. 

You have to get over it.

And the reason why is right there on the inside of Dieter’s left forearm–a triangle outlined in thick black lines. His soulmark.

“Have a good night,” Dieter says softly, arm returning back to his side as he steps back, those hideous crocs of his squeaking against the wood floor. There’s something about the sight of him standing there until the elevator doors smoothly slide shut, not quite frowning, but not overly happy to see you go either, that makes your chest hurt.

“He’s with Kate,” you mutter to yourself, words tasting like bitter poison. “He’s not yours to match with.”

~~

Soulmarks are a rarity in the same sense that green eyes are a rarity. Only a small percentage of the global population is born with them. They resemble tattoos, except there’s a special shininess to the mark, a pulsing warmth like it’s alive beneath the skin. There’s also no method for removing soulmarks–not even via surgery. It’ll just show up elsewhere.

Yours is a solid black triangle imprinted in the middle of your left palm. It itches sometimes when you shake hands with people or pick stuff up, but for the most part it doesn’t linger in your thoughts all too often. You’re not in any hurry to meet whoever destiny has declared your other half, the one who shares an identical mark.

There are websites out there for those with soulmarks trying to find their match if you become truly desperate. But you’re a hopeless romantic at heart and have grown up fantasizing about meeting your soulmate on your way to work, or at a coffee shop, maybe even reaching for the same box of cereal at the grocery store. An ordinary day suddenly becoming remarkable and memorable. An anniversary to be celebrated for years to come. 

A day you thought had finally arrived when you first met Dieter.

Just a few weeks after you had first moved into the building, you’d attended a resident meeting the landlord–an English man named Gavin, also referred to by your fellow apartment inhabitants as Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins due to his uptight and strict nature–insisted on having once a month to address any concerns or new rules and regulations. 

Being new, you hadn’t known until you arrived that the meeting resembled a cocktail party, complete with a long fancy table and mood lighting. Shyly wading into the room, uncomfortably aware of your faded Star Wars t-shirt and ripped jeans when faced with the sight of your fancily dressed neighbors, you’d initially attempted to keep to the corners of the room. Except once Sean locked eyes with you and introduced himself, in the span of ten seconds the other residents were drawn in like magnets to his cheerful personality and your newness.

You learned Sean was a personal trainer, restlessly moving and shifting as if electricity buzzed through his limbs; there was one married couple in the building: Dustin, a writer, and Lauren, a former professional tennis player, who lived on opposite sides of the hall on the third floor because they couldn’t stand each other, but they also couldn’t stand to be apart from each other; Carol was a wannabe actress by day and a waitress by night; Howie designed escape rooms with themes ranging from killer dinosaurs to creepy hotels; and then there was Krystal, a teenaged social media influencer who barely looked up from her phone long enough to make eye contact, and Darren, an eccentric filmmaker with a smile that stretched just a little too wide on his face and long stringy hair he kept not-so-subtly fixing by looking at his phone’s camera.

“Classic Gaston,” Sean said, shaking his head with a smile.

You’d also learned that day about the Disney designations everybody had. Nobody knew who started the whole thing exactly, but despite the ambiguous origins somehow the names had become a staple for the apartment community. Sean proudly proclaimed himself to be Thumper from Bambi before explaining Howie was Iago from Aladdin while Dustin was O’Malley from The Aristocats and Lauren was Georgette from Oliver & Company. 

“God knows they fight like cats and dogs,” Carol chimed in, and Sean had tapped his glass with hers in agreement. Her moniker was Ariel from The Little Mermaid due to her long red hair and penchant for taking long morning swims in the building’s pool.

“Then little Krystal’s Tinkerbell,” he’d finished with a nod towards the teenager across the room, still typing away on her phone, “except instead of Neverland she’s stuck in La-La Land.”

An unattractive snort of laughter had escaped you at that, but before you could wish for the ground to open up and swallow you, somebody in front of you exhaled a quiet, “Wow.”

There had been a long moment where you and Dieter simply stared at each other. Well, you stared while he peered at you over the thick frames of his sunglasses (yes, he was one of those assholes who wore sunglasses inside and at night). His tan-colored shirt with its quarter-rolled up sleeves had the top buttons undone, revealing an almost obscene amount of his tan chest, a couple of freckles spattered along his throat and collarbone. You thought of your favorite book series, wondered if those freckles could form constellations, if your lips could trace the lines…

Sean’s hand on your shoulder snapped you out of your reverie. “And this is Dieter Bravo. Our resident Tramp.”

“He’s a tramp, but we love him.” Carol leaned in on your other side, half-singing half-laughing. 

Even looking back in hindsight, you’re not sure why you decided to raise your hand and wave at him. You’d felt like an idiot as soon as you’d done so–probably looked like an idiot, too, when Dieter had reached out for a handshake at the exact same time. There had been another one of those silent pauses between you both. Then, ever so slowly he started to retract his arm, those pretty brown eyes lingering on your waving hand, some oddly intense emotion flickering in them but you’d ignored it in favor of trying to correct the awkward situation by hurriedly latching onto his withdrawing hand.

You overshot and grabbed his wrist instead, a static spark igniting from the point of contact causing you both to jolt. “Oh, uh, sorry,” you mumbled, embarrassment flooding your entire body. Clearing your throat, you attempted to force a smile on your face and were a little surprised at how easily it actually came, how genuine it felt. “Nice to meet you, Tramp.”

Dieter offered a crooked grin in return and turned his hand over, fingers encircling your own wrist in a gentle yet firm hold. “Pleasure’s mine, Pigeon.”

“Pigeon?” Sean sounded as baffled as you felt, forehead wrinkling. “Man, what the hell kind of nickname is that?”

Without looking away from you, Dieter answered, “One for a Lady.”

Somewhere beside you, Carol murmured a faint, “Geez, he’s smooth.”

You didn’t know it then, but Dieter had given you your second identity. From that day forward, you’d rarely be addressed by your given name, everybody preferring to call you Lady. 

Everybody except Dieter. To him and him alone you were Pigeon. 

(Readers might be wondering, why did nobody else call you Pigeon? To which Carol would answer, “In the movie, only Tramp calls Lady ‘Pigeon’, so it’s just one of those unspoken rules, you know? Like…don’t blare your music on the subway, or start drama at a funeral, or have sex with a soccer player in a diner supply closet before your manager’s gone home.”)

You’d thought his answer had been just as baffling as it was sweet, but regardless it was still the longest (and weirdest) handshake you’d ever shared with a stranger before. 

As you’d started to pull away, it was then you’d caught sight of his soulmark on his forearm.

His triangle soulmark. 

Hope had exploded like a solar flare in your chest, every nerve ending lighting up all at once with excitement and joy and astonishment, thoughts reduced to a chaotic string of ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod. 

A strangled noise clawed at your throat–a sob, maybe, or a hysterical laugh–because the day had finally come! The meeting you had been waiting for! Of all the people in the entire world, this man with his raspy voice and patchy stubbled jawline and uncombable curls was your soulma–

You glimpsed a second, longer look at his soulmark as his arm hung loosely at his side. And it…It didn’t…

Your heart stumbled to a halt.

It was a triangle, that much was true, but it wasn’t a solid colored one. It was merely an outline, his skin visible in the center where yours was not. It wasn’t a match. 

He wasn’t your soulmate. 

And almost instantaneously that solar flare in your chest transformed into a black hole, consuming every trace of happiness and warmth you’d previously been overflowing with, freezing you from the inside out. The back of your mind tried to tell you it shouldn’t have hurt so much to lose something that was never yours to start with. But it was impossible to hear when the front of your mind and every muscle and cell of your body was shouting it did hurt. 

It hurt like hell.