"Yikes, that was nasty. You okay?"
Two sentences. Six words. In the darkness of her room, it's Blanc's entire world.
"You okay?"
The genuine concern in those words is so strange to her, almost alien in it's simplicity.
"You okay?"
Once more she touches the curved line of radiant purple on her right ankle, and hears the first words her soulmate will say to her, like she has done a dozen times today. Like she has done hundreds of times since the mark appeared 2 years ago.
"Yikes, that was nasty. You okay?"
She has fantasized about that voice, about those words. About how it would come to pass that her soulmate would speak them. Maybe she would live through some terrible danger with her. Maybe she would save her from a monster.
Maybe she'll save me from my family.
Blanc has always had a powerful imagination, and ever since she realized that her home was a cage, she has fantasized about being rescued from it. About a charming prince coming to her, taking her away from her father, who only cares about the fame he gets from raising a Candidate. From her mother, who reveres protocol and politeness and has forgotten about the people behind the masks. Someone who will come and genuinely love her, like it is described in the books Financier lets her read.
When she was 10, those stories she told herself changed focus. The prince became a princess, who would save Blanc from some great monster, or stand beside her against terrible danger, and afterwards she would turn around with a carefree grin on her lips and speak those six magic words. The princess doesn't have a face. Blanc has tried imagining what her soulmate will look like, but she just can't. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot picture a face that will fit the person who will speak these genuine words of care and cameraderie to her one day. She has no face, but she does have a voice.
"Yikes, that was nasty. You okay?"
She heard the voice for the first time in a dream, when she was ten years old. She heard them after spending two full days being uncharacteristically happy, bouncy, full of energy. She hopped around her room, she stole pudding from the kitchen and ran through the halls, she mocked her mother when she chastised her for it. Even when she was locked in her room as punishment, she did not lay down to read, as was her preferred method of spending her precious time alone, instead opting to play video games on the console Vert had given her for her birthday (one of the few presents she truly valued, because it was given with nothing but the recipient's happiness in mind). When she awoke the next day, she was her usual grumpy, lonely and disillusioned self. It had taken her a few days to notice the curved line of purple skin that drew itself up around her ankle, but the moment she had touched it, and heard the voice again, she knew what it had all meant.
I have a soulmate. Someone, who will one day mean the world to me. Someone who will love me, wholly and truly. Someone who is happy, and carefree, and loves to run and play games and eat pudding. Someone who is free.
Sometimes, Blanc envies her soulmate. Sometimes she hates her for being free, for being happy, for being able to express herself so easily and fearing no repercussions for it.
But every evening she still touches the mark, and hears her voice, and tries to imagine what she might be like.
By the time she is 15 she covers the Soulmark up with a silk band, because she doesn't want to talk about it. At least not to people who only ask about it because they hope to use it against her, to gain information that can be sold, or otherwise used to profit. She is young, but she has had to grow up fast in the world of the wealthy, a world of parties and dinners and false smiles. She has learned to smile, and nod, and never give anything away, and her father is so proud of her. She always has to keep from retching when he says that, because she knows it isn't true. Not in the way he says it. He is only proud of being responsible for a girl who will one day grow up to defend humanity. That is all he sees in her. Just his Candidate.
She covers up the mark, but sometimes, when no one's looking, she reaches down and touches it, just to hear the voice, and imagine what it would feel like to be genuinely loved.
