Squish. Jean lifts his hand from his table, where he had been diligently painting for a good three hours now. Sadly his focus bad been broken by a waste of paint. He blinks tawny eyes slowly, then moves his hand to the canvas, applying the dark green to the background with an added texture that sends a lulling satisfaction through his color drowned mind. He pulls his hand back from the painting to see the boy he had been depicting for years. Warm brown eyes, thick brown hair. His features are soft, and almost plain. What takes this boy beyond is his large amount of freckles. Freckles that more often than not spread a scowl over Jean's face while he painted them.
Jean leaned back in his chair, straightening his spine with a series of pops and a grimace. He looks down at his paint splotched shirt and sighs to himself. He stands and walks to his bathroom, pulling off his shirt as he goes. Dumping his clothes in his dirty clothes hamper, he steps into the shower and jumps at the icy stream. Lathering his hair with shampoo as the water warms, the dark ink on his forearm catches his attention. Since birth, he'd had the word "Marco" tattooed onto his skin. His mother was alarmed, insisting that soulmate tattoos didn't show up until the child was eighteen. Normally, that's how they worked. When a person turns eighteen their soulmate tattoo appeared. Sometimes it was the first words said to them, other times it was a drawing representing their soulmate. Jean had even heard of some with a fingerprint on their bodies, fingerprints that didn't belong to them. His friend of sorts, Eren Jaeger, had a particularly hard time with his tattoo, as he was born with the word "Heishicho" on his shoulder. Eren managed to find his soulmate when a short man with ink black hair caught him taking flowers from his garden. One short date to the cemetery later, the man, Levi Ackerman, had met Eren's mother.
Jean runs his hand over the name, his fingertips tracing the looping handwriting, as familiar as his own sloppy scrawl. Rinsing off, he steps out of the shower, fingers grasping for his towel. Drying off with the rough cloth, he pads to his bedroom. The room is bland, lacking the fiery personality that his friends had come to expect. He rolls over to stare at the one piece of decoration, finding it hard to swallow through the lump of emotion in his throat. Tanned arms wrap around his stomach as he gulps back tears, looking at the face he always paints. The face from his dreams, his past life. The face of the person who tagged Jean with his very existence. The face that had not been reborn into this life. The face that had left Jean alone for centuries.
Jean rolls back over to look at a blank wall, the emptiness inside him consuming him as he falls asleep, dreaming of the boy with the freckles and the smile that lights up the world.