A/N: Alright, first Raven Cycle fic! (First published fic in a while, actually). It had to be Pynch of course. Also, my first time writing a Soulmate AU. This is one I found particularly interesting; where everyone is born with a tattoo of a closed flower bud and it only blooms when you're emotionally ready to fall in love. I'm trying out a bit of a different style here so I hope you guys like this and a big thanks to those who read this over and gave me the confidence to publish it!
Ronan remembers when he was little his mother showed him the tattooed flowers blossoming across her wrist, growing in entangled masses of bright color down her arm.
She would place him in her lap and hold her arm, decorated with the foliage of a heart bigger than most, next to his nearly bare one. Children's arms normally had little more than a few closed petals, neat lines of black without any indication of what they might one day grown to be, if they ever did.
"Yours will look like this too someday," she had always told him and his brothers, even though Matthew had been born with his fully grown.
It makes sense now, looking back; his mother and his younger brother had been creatures created with their hearts uncluttered and exposed, where to love your soulmate was the same thing as to love to be alive.
The flowers are supposed to bloom when you're ready to fall in love, so he waits every day to watch them wither on his wrist, decaying into the dead thing he's become.
He wonders what his soulmate sees: petals tightly closed, the jolted first line of a promise by the universe that will never be kept, or rich and blooming, not knowing that they wait for someone too broken to love. It's a special kind of resentment, to know you're depriving someone of their happy ending before you've even met.
Gansey's and Adam's are closed too—Ronan can understand Adam, who has been broken more deeply than even him, but it's easy to forget that Gansey, who loves like it costs him nothing, has also been scarred in ways they can't see.
"Why is it different?" Ronan asks him eventually. It's 3 am and Gansey lays across the floor of Monmouth Manufacturing, squinting through his wireframes as he carefully paints the railings of a cardboard house for his sprawling delicate expanse of a city.
It's not a question Ronan would have asked if he hadn't just woken up from being chased by night horrors and watching the flowers on his wrist writhe unnaturally before they bled out into a pain he can almost feel even now and it's not one Gansey would have answered if he wasn't weakened by a need for sleep that wouldn't come.
"I think it's that… I don't like the idea of leaving behind a soulmate when I die."
"You're 17," says Ronan dryly, "don't get ahead of yourself" and Gansey doesn't respond, putting the finishing touches on the house before super gluing it into position.
Noah's have already bloomed, a simple chain of daisies in a cold memoriam, and no one's sure which truth they don't speak of is more painful to remember: that it never got to mean anything, or that they had never even noticed until after they learned he was dead.
"Don't you think it's kind of weird?" Noah says to him, appearing as he does in the doorway of his room, not quite stepping into the threshold, "that Adam and Blue have been dating for months and their tattoos are still the same?"
"No," Ronan says curtly, removing a single earbud out of a vague respect for the conversation. "Because I'm not a nosy fuck who can't keep out of other people's business."
"But you've noticed it, haven't you?" Noah looks more smug than Ronan feels is justified.
"Plenty of people don't date their soulmate." He puts the earbud back in and closes his eyes. "Especially in fucking high school."
"So who you think they are then? Their soulmates?"
"Don't make me throw you out the window again."
After Adam and Blue break up, the next time the five of them are all together hints of violet and forget-me-not blue have begun to blossom on Gansey's and Blue's wrists in perfect time, a fact which everyone choses to politely ignore.
"It's only you," Orphan Girl whispers to him as the night horror descends in a hellish flurry. "Why do you hate you?"
Ronan has kept a lot of secrets in his life and he can see them all in the soulless eyes of the monster. Maybe there's something about that, about seeing his greatest shames in culmination before him that makes him understand his biggest secret:
"I don't."
It's not until the next day, when everything is over, that Ronan notices the blossoms, mirroring the tattooed foliage on his back, that have begun to make their way down his arm.
"When was it exactly? For you?"
It's the last thing Ronan expects to be asked, especially by Adam.
"Nice to know you've been keeping such close notice."
For a moment, Adam's cheeks seem to color but he quickly shoots back, "It's not like you've exactly been talking about it and there's a lot going on. I don't really have a way of knowing if they showed up the day I first noticed or a week before."
Adam's flowers still haven't grown, delicate black lines making their eloquent imprint on his rough dark skin.
"A few months ago," he says and then opens his mouth again for moment, to say what, he's not sure. He quickly shuts it and kicks at an unoffending mound of grass. He's always been a creature of unrestrained and unapologetic action. Words don't suit him and he's always found subtly and nuance to fail him when he needs them most.
Adam is still looking at his own wrists, in the absentminded way of someone who has stepped out of time for a prolonged moment of unaware contemplation.
"You'll—" Ronan stops himself again. He thinks he was about to say "You'll get them eventually" but Ronan doesn't lie and he's still not sure whether that's the truth. He doesn't mind really, because he's willing to wait to find out, to see where this goes.
When your moment of self love is realizing your love for another, why ever settle for anything less? And anyways, he wonders aimlessly, isn't that love? Patience and knowing you can take them, scars and damaged souls and barren loveless arms and all, even if you have to wait for the time to be right.
He sits down next to him and for an unrestrained moment Adam's hand brushes against Ronan's, running elegant fingers along the explosion of color across his wrist. "Do you know who it is?" he says a little desperately.
"Yeah," Ronan says and Adam doesn't ask for more.
It doesn't always take an important moment, a changing moment for them to burst into bloom. In the coming months Ronan watches a petal slowly curl out on Adam's deeply tanned skin.
By the time he kisses him, they've become a little bouquet, just small bursts of color. But that's okay, because times like these are the beginnings and Adam has always done things sensibly, so it only makes sense that love for him would be the same way, simple and unyielding but read to burst with that pure promise of potential.
Still, tattoos and all, that kiss is only a question; Ronan doesn't take things for granted, he never has, so even after that first kiss, though he watches Adam closely for another burst of color, he still waits for a purposeful answer.
The next time, it's Adam who kisses him, and it's sudden and hungry and open in ways Ronan has never even allowed himself to be in his own mind. But, he realizes, it's not entirely unexpected.
Adam kisses him and it's in those moments of relief from breathless ecstasy he can see a forest to rival Cabeswater down the length of Adam's arm.