This is the first chapter of what will be a 10-11 chapter fic. This first chapter is posted today in honor of #sanversweek day 7: soulmates AU. It's also crossposted to my tumblr (same name) as well as my minific roundup "Mean Peach Mojito" AO3 so it can be friends with the other #sanversweek posts.
Enjoy, and please share what you think!
It's past Alex's bedtime, but she can't sleep. She's squirming under her covers, restless, more excited than she's ever been.
Tomorrow is her birthday, and birthdays are always amazing. She always gets cake and a party, and tomorrow she gets to spend the whole afternoon at the zoo with her mom and her dad and her two very best friends.
But tomorrow isn't just any birthday. Tomorrow is her fifth birthday.
And that means tomorrow is her first Revelation.
Tomorrow, when she wakes up, when she's finally five years old, she'll learn something about her soulmate for the very first time.
Her mom has said it's like Santa – he only comes after you finally go to sleep on Christmas Eve, and the Revelation will only come while you sleep.
So Alex tries to sleep, she really does, because she wants to know, she wants the Revelation, she wants to be grown up enough, big enough, to handle it. Littler kids don't get Revelations because they aren't mature enough, ready enough. (I am mature enough, Alex had whined on her fourth birthday, I am! And her parents had looked at each other with raised eyebrows because where did their preschooler learn the word mature and what the hell were they in for with this brilliant stubborn little child?)
But mature, big kids go to sleep the night before their Revelations, so Alex tries. And tries and tries and tries and, finally, succeeds.
She wakes up when her mom and dad come into the room in the morning. They sit on the side of her bed, her dad brushing her bangs out of her face. She blinks up at them blearily, wondering why they're both there.
"Good morning, birthday girl!" Her mom's singsong voice is soft and loving and happy, and Alex grins. It's her birthday!
She reaches up to push the blankets down to her waist, and then catches sight of something dark on her arms. She gasps and rockets to sit up, holding her arms out in front of her.
She can't believe she forgot.
Today is her birthday, and she is five years old, and so today is her first Revelation.
She knew what was coming. The first Revelation is favorite animal.
On her right arm is her own favorite animal, a representation of what her soulmate will see (had seen?) on his arm when he turns five (turned five?).
She had thought it would be small, simple, maybe a line drawing or a sketch, something like what she can draw herself with her small fingers. But she was wrong. All up and down her right arm, from wrist to armpit, is the most intricate, complex, and beautiful snake she's ever seen. It isn't in color, just in black, but it doesn't need to be. There are more shapes than she knows the name for making up its strong lithe body as it wraps and weaves around and around her arm. Diamonds and spots and splotches, a distinct head and tail. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.
"A boa constrictor," her father says, a little breathlessly.
Alex looks up at him, beaming. "Did you know that boa constrictors can swim? And they can get to be thirteen feet long, which is longer than two daddies on top of each other? And even though they're reptiles they give birth to live babies like mammals!?"
Eliza shakes her head a little, but she's happy. "My little scientist," she says, reaching over to tousle Alex's hair.
Alex finally tears her eyes away from her right arm and looks to her left. This is the real Revelation – while the drawing of her boa is cool, this is what she's been waiting for.
"Sharks," she breathes out, her little voice full of awe. "He loves sharks."
Her left arm doesn't have just one shark. Instead it's covered, from wrist to armpit, with all different types of sharks. Great whites and hammerheads and tiger sharks and blue sharks and whale sharks, and a ton she doesn't know the names of. They're stylized too, like her snake, beautiful and intricate and somehow both delicate and deadly strong.
She's a little relieved. She's glad her soulmate likes a cool animal, not something dumb like a poodle or a bunny rabbit or a kitten. She knows she's supposed to love him anyway, but it's gonna be way easier to love someone who likes sharks than poodles. And besides, snakes and sharks go great together.
She looks up at her parents, happiness radiating out of her entire self. "Can we go to the library and get a book on sharks?"
Alex is young for her class, so she was one of the last to get her first Revelation, and now she's one of the last to get her second. Lots of kids born in the spring got their second Revelation at the end of last year, but October baby Alex has to wait until the fall of second grade for hers. But it's not like the excitement has worn off. Sure, maybe, by the time of her last Revelation everyone will be more relaxed about it, but Alex is only six years old, and it's only her second ever Revelation, so she's completely and utterly hyped up.
She somehow manages to fall asleep on her last night of being six, but it isn't easy.
She wakes up on her own this time, remembering instantly that it's her birthday, that she's seven years old now, and that it's the day of her second Revelation.
She pulls her arms toward herself, not even bothering to sit up first. On her right forearm, just below her elbow, is an intricate letter A.
A, for Alex.
Because today is the second Revelation, which means she gets to know the first letter of his name.
She barely looks at the A before she turns to her left arm where, in the exact same spot, is the letter M.
The letter is beautiful. It's stylized like the snake and the sharks were. She remembers, because even though the mark will disappear after she goes to sleep tonight, she had her dad take about a million pictures of her arms during her first Revelation, and she'd put them right in her Revelations journal. She even got her mom to print out a couple and has them hung up in her room.
"Mmm," she says out loud. "Matt. Mark. Mike. Michael." There are two Michaels in her class, but she brushes off the idea immediately. They're both really annoying, and Michael G. smells terrible all the time. No way is either of them her soulmate.
She shows everyone at school, because this year her birthday is on a Monday, so she has school. Her friends immediately start calling her soulmate Marky, because before they had called him Sharky, and that just fits so easily.
"Alex and Marky, sitting in a tree," they tease at recess, dancing in a circle around her, "k-i-s-s-i-n-g!"
Alex blushes and laughs and grins. Revelations are so so so fun.
Her parents, and the world in general, try to make the even number birthdays exciting too, even though they never have Revelations on them. When she turns eight, Alex gets to have a slumber party birthday for the first time, where ten of her friends and their sleeping bags and pillows squish their way into her living room. And it's really fun – they play games and watch movies and make a couple prank phone calls and gorge themselves on pizza – but Alex misses the excitement of learning something new about Marky. She thinks about him, as she drifts off to sleep on her living room floor. She hopes he's happy tonight too.
She thinks about him a lot. She idly plans the tattoo she'll get when they meet – it's becoming a more and more common tradition to get a tattoo of the first Revelation after you find your soulmate. To make permanent the first thing that joined you together. Alex thinks that's hopelessly romantic and, sometimes, when her teacher is talking about something so boring, something she learned years ago, she'll doodle a little shark on her left arm, just under her elbow.
She can't wait to meet him.
"See you next year," she whispers to the ceiling.
The next year, Alex wakes up at six am. She started getting serious about surfing a couple of months ago, so even though she's only eight, she and her dad go out before school a couple days a week to catch the smaller, glassier waves that are easier for her to learn on.
And today is Wednesday, so it's surf day, so her alarm wakes her at six.
But this morning is her birthday, and she's nine years old, and she's in the fourth grade, and she's exceptionally grown up, and today is her third Revelation.
She clicks on her light and looks at her left arm, excitement drumming through her.
The third Revelation gives the biggest clue there is. She and her friends have talked about it at length, and they all agree. The third Revelation is the best one.
It tells you where he is.
On her left arm, in the same spot as the M but bigger, is a map. It isn't intricate this time – not at all stylized. Just a simple line drawing, no shading, no details. She has to squint at it for it to make any sense, but she realizes, tracing the bottom line carefully with her finger, that it's a map of the middle of the United States. There is an outline and a lot of states going up vertically, with what looks like Texas at the bottom. Each state has an outline, but they're pretty much all squares.
Alex is a California girl – she can barely recognize Texas – so she darts out of bed and over to her bookshelf to pull her huge atlas off the bottom shelf. She sits on the floor, cradling the enormous book in her lap, and flips through it. It takes what feels like forever to find the US pages. Looking between her arm and the page, her lip between her teeth, she names all the states quietly to herself, starting from the top.
"North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas." She says it over and over and over until she's memorized the list in a little song.
She reads the heading on the page softly. "The Midwest," she says softly. "My soulmate lives in the Midwest."
She barely spares a glance to the map on her right arm, showing what she knows to be California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, and Idaho, with little smaller disconnected pieces that are Alaska and Hawaii. She does look closely at California, at where she knows Midvale is, but there is nothing distinctive about it on the map. No clues for Marky.
After school, she goes to the public library and the librarian watches, bemused, as Alex makes a beeline for the travel section. She assumes that Alex has a school project, but the longer Alex sits right on the floor, between the shelves, paging slowly through books on Real Texas Chili and Hiking South Dakota and Hidden Gems of the Upper Midwest, the more her curiosity gets the better of her.
"What are you working on, Alex?" She asks, finally giving in and walking over to her.
Alex looks up at her. She holds out her arm, and the librarian understands. "Happy birthday," she murmurs. "Third Revelation, hmm?"
Alex nods, a little bashfully. She's started to learn that the Revelations are a weird combination of public and very very private.
"He lives in the Midwest," she says softly, like that explains it.
And it does, kind of. Except that no child has ever done this before. "You know," she says carefully, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone come in to do so much research after each of their Revelations as you do, Alex."
Alex looks up at her, eyes completely confused. "Really?"
The librarian nods.
"But…" Alex sputters, "how else will they learn what they need to know? Don't they care about their soulmates?"
And the librarian doesn't know how to tell Alex that not everyone demonstrates caring by learning every fact in the world. That not every child's first instinct was to spend their entire fifth year reading about sharks, just in case their soulmate still cared that much about them as an adult. That Alex was the only child who had ever checked out books of baby names and the mythology of every culture she could get her hands on to learn about M names from every culture in the world. That Alex is the only child who seems to think that a detailed knowledge of hiking trails in South Dakota will unlock some secret key to her soulmate's heart.
But she's come to expect that of Alex, and she loves that about Alex. All the librarians in this branch know Alex and love Alex and talk about Alex. She's their little Matilda, and they've all taken it as their full responsibility to give her the best books, the most diverse books, the hardest books and the sweetest youngest books, to expand her mind as far as they can. This particular librarian was the one who gave Alex the book Matilda, putting it on top of her towering stack one day when she was seven years old and whispering to her, "Trust me, you'll love it." Alex's father had laughed and her mother had made a little face, but she hadn't minded.
Alex had come back just days later, beaming and gushing. "I loved it," she said. "I read it twice already."
So she just nods, and pulls a couple of other books about the Midwest down from the top shelf that Alex couldn't reach on her own, and then gives Alex a hand to help her stand up. "Let's get you checked out, then, shall we?"