A soul mate AU in which your soul mate's name is written on your left wrist if she's female and your right wrist if he's male.

The soul mates are Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen.

:::

1 : We Were Not Born With Ankle Weights but Crowns of Fate

:::

In one of the houses of pine and coal dust, under the waning moon, a newborn screams. As the mother leans back, tired eyes lifting to her daughter, her saint, her Katniss, the midwife nods at the rise and fall of the baby's chest. She notes the pink in her skin, listens for the rapid heartbeat, tickles her foot to gage the response. The baby's arm flails in the air, and the midwife smiles at the recent parents, nods her head. The father bows his head to the mattress, squeezes his wife's hand in relief.

But the air clots, resting heavily on his shoulders, and he glances up again, where the midwife is frowning over his daughter, holding his child's wrists in her hands and flipping them front to back, front to back.

"What is it?" the mother asks, arms shaking as she lifts herself from the bed.

The midwife shakes her head, takes a step back from the baby. "She has no marks. She has none."

As the midwife rummages for her belongings, the father steps forward, cradling his daughter, his floret, his Katniss in his arms. He rejoins his wife, balancing on the edge of the bed, and watches her grab hold of the baby's wrists and search. When she cries, the night scurries away into dawn.

:::

Peeta Mellark was born with the sun gleaming overhead and the name of a girl on their left wrist, the way it always is. Each night, before they tuck away into bed, they trace it with their finger, delicately, as if each letter were its own treasure. Katniss Everdeen it spells, and they have never heard anything so beautiful.

:::

Though summer is still nigh, Katniss tugs her sleeves until they droop past her fingers. Before her rests a slice of bread folded around an array of squashes. A handful of berries are held together in a tied cloth beside it. Across the table, Madge nibbles on strawberries and sighs at the black mark across her left wrist, words long enough that it almost completely wraps around.

"I wonder who she is," Madge sighs, again, as she does every lunch with Katniss after failing to find her soul mate in the days between.

Katniss unwraps her berries, nodding absentmindedly as usual, as if she had important things to say on such a topic. As Madge sighs again, she wonders when her father will let her practice with his bow again, when she can roll up her sleeves in the safety of the forest, sit in the shallows of the lake. She wonders, very briefly, if she would want to have a soul mate such as Madge's to show her forest to, to teach to hunt and climb trees as she can.

Instead, her lips purse and she wraps her remaining berries up again, finishes her sandwich, and tugs her sleeves back down again.

:::

This is clockwork. Children in schoolyards sit cross-legged together, clapping hands to rhymes, sharing answers in the shade of the oak. Older kids share chores and paths home and kisses, sometimes, but other times secrets intermingled with laughs because a soul mate is anything. It's Peeta's brother and his boyfriend, kneading dough under clasped hands well through dawn. Or they're father and bookshop's owner, who reads them poems every Thursday at breakfast and laughs on the porch with their father when they head off to school.

So when Peeta tries to fathom why Katniss has never smiled at him or said hello, their head hurts, and they sit down, finger brushing across her name over and over, as if maybe they could change it, as if maybe they could breathe life into the mark.

But it doesn't change. But it stays six feet under.

:::

On a stage, muscles stiff but her head high, Katniss leans forward, blue sleeve baring the bottom of her palm, arm extended. Opposite, her fellow tribute, the one boy she owes everything, Peeta Mellark meets her halfway.

A blur of pink, the escort smiles, waves at the crowd, and ushers them apart the second after Katniss recoils, hands tucked above her waist. Her fingers pull frantically at her sleeves, but they're already taught.

Behind the cameras, as they're being pulled apart, she snatches at his wrist, lifts it to her eyes to be certain of what she believed she glimpsed.

"How did you get this?" she demands, stepping closer, his face grimacing as his wrist bends too far.

He almost answers, his lips parted, but the escort tsks and nudges them each aside, and with a twist of the door handle, shuts Katniss in.

:::

"I was born with it," they explain.

She's standing in Peeta's room, eyes switching from watching the carpet to glaring back at them. With a new glance to the wall, Katniss begins fumbling with the buttons on her sleeves, rolling them up, walking up to them and holding her palms toward their face.

"I wasn't born with any," she says. "No girls. No boys."

She lowers her left hand, flicking it to the side, with her words, but keeps her right up accusatorily, as if the blank wrist should offend them.

"Oh," Peeta whispers, thoughts branching like stars forming constellations. "Oh, I'm not either."

:::

In a different house, of white banisters and carpet, sits a girl weeping on the floor, the arms of her soul mate consoling her. There are things in the world and many of them are dark. Rain clouds and ashes and black boots and funerals and the fragile letters on Peeta's wrist. The blank canvas on hers.

So when it's bright inside, and the demons haven't any shadows to hide in, Peeta lays out their paints in the room of paper walls and easels, and creates stories over the veins in her wrists. A sunset to drive away the nightmares. A forest to remind her of home. An array of arrows pointed down her left arm, outcast from her heart.

The arrows pierce Peeta instead, as their brush breathes them life, and they've never been happier to belong so wholly to another.

Sometimes, they paint up her arms, too. Swirls of wind and leaves and colors.

Katniss confesses, once, how she hates washing it off at the end of the day, hates seeing the essences of Peeta flush down the drain. Because the art becomes her marks now, more vivid than anyone else's, stronger.

The terrors in the night can't take them from her anymore.

:::

fin

:::

a/n [Written for Caesar's Palace's LGBT event. If anyone's wondering why I've given Peeta they/them pronouns, it's because I've made them agender for this fic and chosen those pronouns for them. If anyone is wondering why I refer to Peeta as he/him in one section, it's because that's Katniss' blurb, and she doesn't know about Peeta's pronouns.]