Chapter Text
Kate turns sixteen when it happens.
It's midnight and she's the only one awake in her house and it's her birthday. She's in her teenager phase where everything in her room has been stripped of anything plush and childish from when she was seven and decided things needed to be pink like cotton candy and fluffy. Her nails are painted a dark red color that her dad dislikes and maybe she wears her skirts scandalously short sometimes (by Bethel's standards, at least-- i.e. not short at all). There's books lining the shelves in her room and her bible is neatly placed on the small table besides her bed, but it goes unopened tonight-- because tonight-- she's finally made it to sixteen and she's finally going to get her soulmark.
Sixteen is the average age that people get theirs, although that data can still vary and her brother Scott is living proof of this. He got his soul mark when he turned eleven and she had been so jealous; so much anger had filled her tiny body at her brother-- for something that he really had no control of. She had apologized for being mean to him about it and he had forgiven her. She's learned to live with the waiting: had hope and prayed every night for her soulmark to arrive, because she couldn't bear the thought of not having a soulmate.
She's sitting in her room on the floor near the window. The air that flows in is cool and caresses her bare skin and silver moonlight glows down at her as Kate waits, and waits, and waits, and the seconds and minutes tick by until her excitement waters down to a disappointment that weighs heavily in her belly.
She's just about to start crying into her blue pillow when she feels it-- the telltale sign that her soulmark is arriving. She's read all about this moment and asked almost everyone she knows about what she should expect. Some say they didn't even feel their soulmarks, and some say their soulmarks felt as if they were merely a pinch against the skin.
But her's-- god, her's is none of those. Her's is a sharp feeling against her left wrist and she almost cries out in pain. It's lightning striking her: quick and fast and painful and it's over as soon as it starts, but it still hurts like a bitch. She looks at her left wrist, noting that the pain has already begun to dull, and she presses her right hand to her mouth in shock.
Her soulmark is a black flame on the inside of her left wrist. It looks like it's almost threatening to spread up her skinny arm and her mouth parts open as she runs her right hand over the dark marks against her pale skin.
She was not expecting something like this.
--
Seth is twenty five and living in a cheap motel when something wakes him up in the middle of the night.
There's taco wrappers and empty beer bottles littering the table by the front window and there's more guns in the small room than necessary, really, but Seth has always been a little too cautious and too suspicious of everything and everyone so his small armory stays.
He's asleep and still kind of drunk when his eyes fly open at the feeling of something touching him. He immediately sits up. Turns on the light on the bedside table and tugs his shirt off, thinking that there must be a spider crawling on him somewhere. But that whispery feeling still lingers on his chest and he half walks, half stumbles to the bathroom. Practically struggles with just flicking the light switch on, and he finally gets it right, only for him to stop cold in front of the mirror.
When he was sixteen, a soulmark never came for him. Even Richard had gotten his soulmark at sixteen. A fucking snake on his shoulder. Seth had sneered at it when he first saw it.
Serh tried not to care-- always reassured himself that it was fine if he didn't have a soulmate somewhere out there in the world because it was one less person that he had to worry about and had to keep safe. And he tried and tried to continue not caring, but something always nagged at him in the back of his mind that he was undeserving of having a soulmate-- of having someone out there for someone like him.
And now he's twenty five, waking up in the middle of the night to a soulmark of a goddamn cross on his chest.
The irony of it all.