Chapter Text
For as long as humans have drawn breath, fate has drawn lines between them.
It begins in adolescence — a burn, brief and sudden, somewhere on the body. A mark. A single sentence pressed into skin like a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet. The first words your soulmate will ever say to you, and you alone. Not a declaration. Not a name. Just a sentence. Just words.
Just words that will, someday, change everything.
The philosophers debated its meaning for centuries. The poets called it beautiful. The scientists called it anomalous and have spent the better part of modern history trying to explain it, and are, as of the writing of any given research paper on the subject, still trying.
What they have managed to agree on, at least, is this:
Mutual pairs receive their marks on the same day.
Wherever they are. However far apart. On the same unremarkable morning, two people wake up changed. This is considered, by most accounts, the ideal. The love stories are full of it — I got mine on a Tuesday in March, and so did he, and we didn’t know it yet but— That kind of thing. The kind that gets told at weddings.
But fate, as it turns out, is not a guarantee. It is a variable.
Some people are born without marks entirely. Some carry more than one, which raises philosophical questions nobody has cleanly answered. And some — not rare enough to be remarkable, not common enough to be comfortable — receive their marks alone. Different days. Staggered. The universe, it seems, was less certain about them.
These are called unrequited pairs. Or, less gently: one-sided.
The marked person loves. The unmarked person lives their life. Whether they ever find each other, whether it matters, whether the marked person tells them — these are questions with no consensus. The researchers are working on it. The poets have already given up.
There is no way to know, when your mark appears, whether someone somewhere woke up with yours that same morning. There is no confirmation. No signal. Just the sentence on your skin and the voice you haven’t heard yet and the question you will spend the rest of your life either asking or refusing to.
Wifies receives his mark on a cold morning in November.
He reads it once. He already knows what it means. He rolls his sleeve up, reads it again to be sure, then rolls it back down and finishes his homework.
He does not tell anyone.
He has already decided it doesn’t matter.
Months later, a boy named Derapchu receives his.
He’s in the middle of a game when it happens. He yanks his sleeve up, reads it, sits with it for a long moment.
He does not tell anyone either.
He goes back to the game. Tells himself it’s inconclusive.
It is not inconclusive.
They do not know about each other yet.
They do not know that their marks appeared on different days — that there was no shared Tuesday morning, no simultaneous burn across whatever distance separated them, none of the things the love stories are made of.
They do not know what that means, or what it doesn’t.
What they know is only this: a sentence on skin. A voice not yet heard, or heard and not yet placed. The question the universe asked them both, separately, in the same language.
Neither of them has answered it.
Not yet.