October.
"You know, there's this app that tracks sharks."
It takes Lydia a moment to realize that the stranger who's plopped himself into the seat next to her has broken the cardinal rule of travelling on public transportation by speaking to her. She takes a moment to place her bright pink highlighter between the pages of her Advanced Physics book before she turns to look at him directly. He's fairly attractive, with whiskey-colored eyes framed by dark eyelashes set above a wide, upturned nose. Dark spikes of hair shoot out from underneath his dull orange bomber cap, almost hidden by the gray wool. He wears a navy peacoat, his hands shoved deep inside of the pockets. A small smile plays across his lips as he stares at her from the small expanse of space between them.
"Why would I want to track fish?" She asks, crossing her legs at the knee primly and pushing her strawberry-blonde hair over her shoulder.
"Well, you wouldn't," He responds immediately. "But sharks aren't fish, see, they're in the Chondrichthyes class, not the Osteichthyes class. Sharks have skeletons made of cartilage instead of bones."
Lydia narrows her eyes at his correction.
"Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes are both fish. Sharks are cartilaginous fish instead of bony fish like Osteichthyes but they're still fish."
His eyes widen and he opens his mouth to respond before he clamps it down, pursing his lips.
"Well, someone obviously lied to me when they told me about sharks," He says, a sheepish smile spreading across his face.
Lydia thinks about turning back to her book and ignoring this guy and his sharks, but his stupid smile is contagious and she finds herself smiling back despite herself.
"Okay," She laughs. "So I'll ask again: why would I want to track fish?"
"They give them names," The stranger responds with a loose shrug. "You get to see when Katherine swims from Florida to New York or when Phillip breaks away from a big group to swim around South America for no reason. You get attached. It's like a soap opera, but with sharks."
Lydia breathes out a laugh as his eyes leisurely scan her face.
"So, what made you want to tell me about your crazy Chondrichthyes soap opera?" She asks after a moment of comfortable silence. The train begins to slow down with a squeal of brakes, jostling the two together. As their shoulders knock into each other, Lydia feels a sudden burst of heat spread across the space directly underneath the crest of her right cheekbone.
"Do you believe in fate?" The stranger asks, getting to his feet as the train comes to a halt. Lydia has lifted a hand to her face, the pads of her fingers tracing the pattern of warmth across her face. She looks up at him, confused, as his pulls his hand out of his pocket to show her the pattern of a glowing golden cog set in the center of his palm—the same cog that Lydia has painted across her cheek. Her jaw drops open in realization as her soulmate walks backwards out of the train, his smile wide across his face.
"Wait!" Lydia manages to shout as she stands, her book thumping to the ground as she lurches for the closing doors. She arrives too late; the doors slide shut in her face. She stands dumbly at the door as she looks out at the man with the challenge in his eyes on the other side of the glass. The train jerks forward. Her soulmate winks at her. The train gains speed and takes off. She watches him standing on the platform, his hands in his pockets and that damn crooked smile plastered on his face, until the train rounds a corner and she loses sight of him. She turns back to her seat and retrieves her book from the floor. With a frown, she realizes her highlighter has gotten lost somewhere in the dirty, sticky space underneath the plastic seats. Lydia wrinkles her nose and decides to cut her loss. She wouldn't have been able to focus on physics anyway.
- - -
"You did what?"
"I asked her if she believed in fate and moonwalked out of the train. Jeez, Scotty, weren't you listening?"
Stiles digs out a substantial spoonful of ice cream from the carton in front of him and puts the whole thing in his mouth at once, staring across the kitchen island at his roommate with what he's hoping is an innocent look across his face.
"So," Scott sighs, an edge of frustration creeping into his voice. "To recap: you meet your soulmate—the person who you are literally destined to spend the rest of your life with—and you just let her go without even giving her your name or anything?"
Stiles grins around the spoon in his mouth and nods proudly. Scott frowns and pulls the carton of ice cream out of Stiles's grasp, eliciting a muffled cry of surprise. Stiles wrenches the utensil from between his lips with a soft pop.
"I wasn't done with that!" He whines while Scott puts the carton back into their crowded freezer.
"You don't deserve ice cream," Scott replies. "I can't believe you did that except I can because you're an idiot."
"C'mon, man, think about it: it's better my way. Now we'll know for sure that it's fate."
"Because the Marks aren't proof enough that it's fate?"
Scott crosses his arms over his chest with a raised eyebrow and leans backwards against the fridge. Stiles shrugs noncommittally, mirroring Scott's position from the stool he's seated in. Scott just shakes his head, his dark brown curls bouncing across his forehead.
"Look, dude, you were lucky enough to find your soulmate," Scott says, the edge of his thumb brushing the faded arrowhead-shaped Mark on his tan bicep set right below the two bars he'd gotten tattooed around his arm on his 18th birthday. "Not everyone gets that."
Stiles deflates ever-so-slightly. Scott had always loved his Mark ever since they were kids. He would talk to Stiles for hours about his soulmate as they played video games in Stiles's messy room: what kind of person he thought they must be, when and how they would finally meet, how their lives would be when they finally met each other. Scott knew with absolute certainly that he wouldn't be truly happy until he found his match. It was a Saturday afternoon in November when the mark suddenly drained itself of its black color, fading into a raw pink that would fade further over the years into a dull scar. Whoever Scott's soulmate had been, Scott would never know what happened.
"Look," Stiles puffs out, hunching forward and focusing his gaze on the spoon he's turning over in his hands. "I know the legends and I know that when we find the person who we're 'meant' to be with the Marks will tell us—"
"Which yours did by the way, or did you not notice that it had turned gold?"
"—but I just can't buy it, man. Life isn't one of those stupid movie scenes where two people see each other from across a crowded room and they've got the same Mark and bam they're together forever after that. If I'm really meant to be with this girl like you say, we'll find each other again and we'll figure it out from there."
Stiles finally looks up at Scott from underneath the fringe of his lashes and leans back in his chair. Scott is still for a moment as he considers what Stiles has said. After a pause, he audibly sighs and drops his hands to his sides.
"I still think you're an idiot," Scott says, shaking his head with a lopsided grin. "I bet you pissed her off so badly by not giving her your name that she won't talk to you again, even if she does find you."
Stiles smiles wide, relaxing.
"Hey, if we're meant for each other, she'll find some way past it."
Scott crosses through the kitchen into the attached living room, grabbing his coat from the back of the couch and throwing Stiles his bomber cap. Stiles tries to catch it, but miscalculates and watches it soar right past his outstretched fingers with a swear.
"Whatever, dude," Scott laughs as Stiles hops down from the stool to collect his hat. "Grab your stuff, we've got practice in an hour and I don't want to have to explain to Derek why we're late."
Stiles rolls his eyes, but quickly jams his hat onto his head and follows Scott through the front door. He didn't feel like being on the receiving end of a Derek Hale Death Glaretoday.
"By the way, sharks are totally fish," Stiles says to Scott as he closes the door behind him.
- - -
Lydia hated having her Mark on her face. Her entire life, strangers in the street with golden Marks would give her pitying looks as they passed, some even stopping her to assure her that she would meet her soulmate one day if she just kept her chin up and held onto hope.
Lydia thought it was stupid.
She didn't believe in this concept of true love that had taken over the thoughts of everyone around her. The girls in her classes used to sigh about how their lives would not really start until their soulmates came into their lives and finally made them whole. Lydia would have no part of that. She was not an incomplete person who needed the love of another to become "whole"—she was already a whole person. Besides, it wasn't like everyone got to meet their soulmate. Her parents hadn't been soulmates (though, to be fair, their relationship was tumultuous at best and had ended during Lydia's freshman year of high school) and more and more people were being born without Marks.
By middle school, she had resorted to using concealer to cover it up to prevent the sympathetic looks and unwanted supportive hands that insisted on touching her shoulders or forearms every time she left the house. But then Allison Argent transferred to Lydia's high school their sophomore year and everything changed. Allison's Mark was a small arrowhead set above her right eyebrow, the black stark against her white skin. Allison did not cover it up or let people try to make a big deal about the fact that she hadn't found her soulmate.
"The way I see it," She'd whispered to Lydia one night as the two were going to bed, their foreheads pressed together in the darkness of Lydia's bedroom. "I have to grow into the person that I'm meant to be before I meet whoever this guy—"
"Or girl," Lydia had interjected pointedly.
"—this guy or girl who is supposed to compliment me. One day I'll be ready for this person, but I have to finish…finish cooking first."
Allison had giggled then and Lydia loved that she said compliment instead of complete and she loved Allison's laugh and the way the moonlight made her skin glow. She stopped covering up her Mark and started holding hands with Allison in the hallway, trading smiles over the looks they'd get with their fierce eyes and mismatched Marks.
But Allison never got to meet her compliment.
She died on a hunting trip with her father when she and Lydia were juniors in high school. Lydia still woke up in the night sometimes with her breath caught somewhere in her throat, swearing that she could hear Allison's voice in her ear.
Today, with her Mark glowing gold on her cheek, Lydia is getting a different kind of attention than she is used to. Instead of the condescending, consoling stares she had grown accustomed to, Lydia is receiving knowing smiles and sly looks. Some point to their own golden Marks with a wink as she passes. Other people with Marks black on their skin stare at her with jealousy or bitterness. Lydia has the distinct feeling that she had been unwillingly admitted into a secret club where everyone flaunts their apparent happiness—something Lydia found pretentious at best.
If she ever saw her soulmate again, she was going to kill him.
She walks up to the library to meet Malia (an uncharacteristically ten minutes late, she might add) and finds her roommate standing next to the entrance, her face practically glued to her phone. She's wearing Lydia's warmest winter coat (no doubt stolen from Lydia's closet after Lydia had left for class) paired with her signature short shorts and thigh-high boots despite the biting cold. Lydia rolls her eyes, but smiles despite herself.
"Sorry I'm late," She says, coming to a halt in front of Malia. She glances down at Malia's screen and smiles. "Bejeweled? Really?"
"Don't laugh, I've almost beat my high sc—holy shit!"
Malia cuts herself off as she looks up and sees Lydia's Mark, still warm against her face.
"You met your match!" Malia exclaims, hopping up and down excitedly as she shoves her phone into the depths of her coat. Her dark hair, recently cut, bounces around her excited face.
"Well, that's a way to put it," Lydia says with an eye roll. She takes Malia by the wrist and pulls the girl into the library's atrium to get out of the cold.
"So tell me the story, girl!" Malia shouts as they cross into the library proper, her voice echoing among the stacks. Lydia winces as several people turn to look at them disapprovingly.
"Keep your voice down," She hisses, releasing her hold on Malia and heading towards one of the private study rooms in the back of the building. "I'll tell you in a second."
"I can't believe it!" Malia laughs, her voice only slightly lower than before. "This should be good."
Lydia reaches a free room and ducks into it, throwing her bag on the table while Malia closes the door behind them.
"Spill," Malia says, slumping down into one of the uncomfortable chairs while shedding off her coat. Lydia doesn't sit yet. Instead she rips her scarf off and deposits it on the table, starting to pace angrily.
"It was this guy on the train," She grumbled. "He told me about this app where you can track sharks."
"I heard about that! Don't they give them names?"
"Yeah, it's like a shark soap opera."
Lydia almost wants to smack herself for saying it. Malia giggles, drawing her long legs up next to her in the chair.
"So, what's he like? What's his name? Is he hot?" Malia asks, brown eyes wide and looking up at Lydia earnestly.
"I don't know!" Lydia exclaims, throwing her hands up and then setting them on her hips. "I mean, yes he's attractive, I guess, but he didn't tell me his name or anything."
"…What?"
"He told me about the stupid shark app, then asked me if I believe in fate, then he just fucking left and stood there on the platform smiling at me while the train left."
Malia tries to stifle a laugh and fails miserably, the sound grating out of her nose. Lydia spins and glares.
"Oh, don't glare at me Lydia Martin," Malia says, smile still stretched across her face. "You know just as well as I do that only your match would do something as stupid as that."
Lydia makes a sound between a groan and a sigh, dropping down into an available chair.
"Well, because he's an idiot, I'll probably never see him again," Lydia says, fishing her worn copy of The Riverside Shakespeare out of her bag. Malia growls in front of her, laying her head down on the table between them.
"No, put that away," She begs, her voice muffled by the laminate wood.
"You're the one that chose Shakespeare over Chaucer," Lydia quips back. She opens the book up to Much Ado About Nothing, the page already marked with a green pen.
"They're both terrible, dead old men," Malia responds, picking her head up with a frown.
Lydia shrugs and shakes her head, smiling slightly.
"At least you've got me to help translate it for you."
She winks and Malia rolls her eyes, but laughs anyway. She reaches into her bag and drags out her own Riverside, slamming it down on the desk. As she does, Lydia sees the thin black plus sign on the inside of Malia's wrist. Briefly, Lydia misses when her own Mark was black against her cheek, but she quickly pushes the thought out of her head. There's nothing she can change about it now.
"If it prove so, then loving goes by haps:/Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps."
Three hours later, Lydia stops by the main library counter to check out a few of late books while Malia runs outside to answer a phone call. The girl behind the counter is around her age with a glowing golden octagon on her forearm. As she catches sight of Lydia's Mark, she smiles wide.
"How long since you met your soulmate?" The girl asks, taking the books and Lydia's debit card from Lydia's outstretched hands.
"I met Stephen last month," The girl continues without waiting for Lydia to answer, processing the books quickly and handing Lydia's card back to her. "We're planning for a wedding in May. Can you believe it?"
"That's…great," Lydia manages, smiling awkwardly. Who marries someone after only knowing them for a month? The girl looks confused for a moment, but Lydia takes her cards and leaves before the girl can say anything else.
She's definitely going to kill her soulmate if she sees him again.