Chapter Text
Chu Wanning doesn’t have a soulmark.
The realization was kind of a surprise to him when he was younger.
Lots of people in the world have a special mark on their skin that means they’re fated to fall in love with someone is a strange enough concept for a person to live with.
But you’re not one of them is…a brutal follow-up lesson.
It was bitterly disappointing when he was young, watching his skin stay empty year after year, never developing any signs that he was meant for anyone else. It was disappointing in the way bad things feel supercharged when one is still young and naïve enough to expect anything different.
His home life wasn’t particularly terrible, but his adopted father could be inept when it came to showing his affections, and so Chu Wanning grew up always feeling that there was something missing. It was quite a few years before he would be willing to label that something love, and even then he felt ungrateful and selfish for demanding more of his adoptive father than Huaizui had already given him. A home and food and warm clothing. A place to sleep at night. Support in his schooling and financial security. It was all one could really ask for. Love? Why had he expected love? What was there about him that was so lovable anyway?
So of course he doesn’t have a soulmark. He is cold and awkward and unlikable, with a thin face that makes him terrified of showing any emotion. Soulmarks are fickle things, anyway. When he was younger and not quite so jaded, he went through a period where he would sneak out to the library so Huaizui wouldn’t know what he was researching, and he would read every academic paper, every book, every article he could find about soulmates. Science and magic coming together, marking people with pictures that matched the picture on one other person’s skin. A soulmate. A fated person. It was a beautiful concept, he thought.
Ancient cultures all over the world believed that it was inviolable, that the rules of the universe were never wrong. Soulmarks were used to bring people together, and they were used to cruelly keep people apart. There were as many horror stories tied to soulmarks as there were love stories.
Modern cultures were more practical about the whole thing, but still there was a kind of breathless quality to almost everything Chu Wanning read. Something that talked about love like it was a force rather than a choice. Like it was something you could never escape once it had its claws in you.
Chu Wanning doesn’t understand love to be like that at all, so it’s better for everyone that he didn’t have a soulmark. If he had a fated person, they could only be an object of pity, really. He and they would be like those stories he read on the internet of soulmates meeting and loathing each other, or trying for years to find a spark that just wasn’t there. Becoming disappointed and jaded. Having the soulmarks removed. Better to skip all of that.
(Sometimes, though, he can’t help it. Looking at his blank, unmarked skin and wishing that there was some sign, any sign, that he isn’t too broken to be loved.)
Not that having blank skin means that a person is never going to fall in love. There are advice columns that give saccharine advice about loving yourself and finding your own worth and not wasting your life looking for one other person to complete you. You are a complete person without a soulmark, peppy articles in lifestyle magazines claim, love for those of us without soulmarks is more complicated, but that just means it’s more real! Most of it feels like attempts to discredit soulmarks as a way to make the people without soulmarks feel better about themselves. Chu Wanning doesn’t like those articles. He doesn’t like it when people try to make soulmarks out to be unimportant or purely negative. He may be an entirely ascetic person by all appearances, and he may be too awkward and unpleasant and ugly to date, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want other people to be happy. Let other people have their soulmarks. Let other people fall in love. Chu Wanning thinks it’s nice for them. He wishes he could be one of them. He refuses to let his jealousy make him cruel.
Mo Ran doesn’t have a soulmark.
His parents were soulmates, apparently. Not that he remembers much about his father at all. He remembers a rich man in a fancy suit who would come over sometimes but never kept his promises. He remembers that his mother used to cry about it, though she’d never shed tears in front of the man who caused them. She’d tell baby Mo Ran all these love stories about soulmates, and even then, Mo Ran knew that they were bullshit. What was the point of soulmates if they brought nothing but false hope and sadness?
His mother died. He was sent to an orphanage run by a cruel woman named Madam Mo, whose soulmate abandoned her and then died. The flower on the inside of her wrist was grayed out, horrible to look at. She covered it with bracelets that jangled together whenever she swatted at the children that for some reason had been placed into her care.
He was finally taken in by the Xue family after the orphanage burned down. Xue Zhengyong and Madam Wang were kind, loving, and willing to give him anything. They gradually coaxed him out of his shell, gave him free rein, and though maybe other adoptive parents would have regretted it once Mo Ran turned out to be a bit of a problem child, the Xues never give him any indication that he’s anything other than part of the family. He is grateful to them, and to their annoying son, for showing him what a real family looks like.
And the key? Mo Ran is sure of it: Madam Wang has a soulmark on her neck. Xue Zhengyong doesn’t.
So what does he care if he doesn’t have a soulmark? He’s fucking relieved he doesn’t have a soulmark. Most people start getting them when they’re in their early teens, and Mo Ran holds his breath every morning for a whole year when he turns thirteen, checking every inch of his body, making sure that no traitorous marks have showed up overnight. He’d get it removed in a heartbeat.
But no soulmark appears, and he feels like he has escaped. Fate has so rarely been kind to him, and he doesn’t trust it for a while. Maybe he’s one of those rare people who don’t get them until they’re in their later teens, or their twenties, even. But with each year that passes without some cursed blotch on his skin, he grows more and more sure, and more and more giddy, and more and more secure in the knowledge that he is allowed to choose who he loves.
He meets Shi Mei when he’s seventeen, and Shi Mei doesn’t have a soulmark either. In a way, ironically, it feels like fate.