In this world in which we live, there is life. There is the normal, everyday drama and routine, the nine-to-five work shifts and pretty much everything else you can imagine. There is rape, murder, theft, lies, deceit, trickery and every bad thing imaginable. There is love, hope, kindness, charity, and many good things as well. But there is yet another thing, in this life, one that you may never expect. One that we as humans still don't understand. We have been wondering about it and researching it for thousands of years, but we still are asking questions that we simply don't have the answers to.

What is it? Someone may ask. Well, put simply, birthmarks.

Only they are not your average birthmark, no. They always start out black but change into these beautiful, multicolored shapes on our skin. They are handprints, fingerprints, odd-looking shapes, impressions of lips, almost like lipstick. They are like black spots on your knuckles as if you've punched someone who wore black ink on their face and now you can't get it off of you. But they've been there since birth.

And now comes the part that we still don't understand the hows of it, or really the exact why of it.

You see, these marks change color when you touch someone, or when someone touches you in the same exact way that the mark appears, swiftly fading from black to a multitude of colors, like a rainbow with every gradient of every beautiful color. But it's not just any person that changes your mark to that beautiful bright mark.

It's your soulmate. The left to your right, the light to your dark, the sun to your moon. You are each your own person, there's no "better half" or "other half" to it. There's Yin and Yang to it. Peanut butter and jelly. Two separate entities, but better when together. Do you understand what I mean? This person is your "fated mate" as some say. Your Significant Other. Everyone has a mark.

Like the guy with the black hand-print over his heart, somewhere out there is someone with a black palm. Some unfortunate soul has a black hand-print on their cheek, poor sap. Everyone has a mark.

Everyone except me.

I don't have a single black mark on me. The only black thing about me is my hair, but that's natural, and it's a recessive gene I inherited from my grandmother. I got teased and bullied for it a lot. People would tell me that it must mean that I'm a freak, that I am destined to be forever alone. It hurts, I tell you, and I try to give them a blank face but goddamn it, it hurts.

My parents always told me that they were sure I'd find someone, someday, and that I was indeed very much loved, and I did my best to believe them. But I would come home crying because it was just so bad at school, especially since it was a small town and practically everybody knew who you were so there was no escaping the torment.

I didn't have any friends, except for maybe my next-door neighbor, Jax, but she moved during our sophomore year of high school, and despite promising to be in touch, she just stopped talking to me. She eventually said she had never had a better friend than me, but that she was starting to lose her family and other friends because she was hanging out with "a freak of nature." Her family's words, not mine. I understood that when you have no one else, and family is all that you've got, well, you cling to it, so I just let her go.

And I clung to my family. I clung to my mom and dad, my grandmother like a lifeline because that's what they were to me.

But when they all died in a car accident, I didn't have anything left to cling to and I felt so lonely, living in the house by myself, seeing all of our pictures on the wall, having to plan the funeral completely on my own. Having to deal with the half sincere condolences on my behalf at the triple funeral, having to hear the barely concealed comments about being a freak and how it was probably better that I was all by myself so that nothing bad would happen to anyone else. Like it was my fault my family was killed by a stupid fucking drunk driver and his dumbass fucking friends who were all drunk and didn't have the sense to call a fucking taxi. That because I did not have a single black birthmark, it was my fault my family died. Like it was somehow my fault I wasn't like them.

I couldn't handle it anymore.

I packed my things, took some mementos from each of my family member's room, stored the rest and moved. I moved all the way to London, England where nobody knew me, and where nobody knew that I didn't have a mark.

It was easy for me to find a job, as graphic designers were in high demand, and I worked freelance. I already had a pretty decent reputation in my area of expertise, so making connections wasn't too hard. Finding a place to live was proving a bit more challenging, so I'd been staying at a hotel for a few days. The second day being in London, I got offered a job by a nearby hospital called St. Bartholomew's but everyone just referred to it as St. Bart's. They said they needed an update to their graphics, such as their posters and information boards, etc. Basically, anything that could be altered to be more aesthetically pleasing, but more precisely, they wanted new wall murals, particularly in the children's wing.

So I, of course, said yes, went there to get the details sorted out, got the badge that allowed me to walk around unfettered and began to wander around to get a feeling of what needed updating and refreshing. I wandered all the way down to the morgue, much to my surprise, but shrugged it off. I opened the door to see four people already in one of the medical labs and tilted my head. Now, I'm not a detective, but years of closing myself off to others so that I could read them better and hurt them emotionally before they could do it to me had taught me a thing or two about observation.

There were three men and one woman. The woman was in a white lab coat with a ponytail and a soft face. She was a quiet woman, sort of shy, awkward, seemed to have a crush on one of the men whom she glanced to every few seconds that she wasn't staring at me. There was a pudgy man, sort of short, a professor of some sort, an old college friend of the man who stood next to him.

The other man, at least four or five inches taller than the pudgy one had dirty blonde hair that was almost silvery brown in certain light carried himself like a soldier; straight shouldered, posture straight, gaze pointed and assessing, if not a bit weary but also curious. He had hardly any callouses on his hands, but they looked to be sort of comforting and skillful, so perhaps a military doctor or nurse, though my guess was he'd be a doctor. He didn't look the type to take orders unless the orders were from someone much higher up. He carried a cane, probably limped a bit, but he didn't appear to be in any pain so maybe it was an old habit, or maybe he was going through physical therapy. I don't know, I am mostly guessing, to be honest with you. I could be wrong, I could be right.

Now the other man, the taller one. Curly dark hair, piercing eyes that didn't quite seem green or blue but had a mostly blue tint to them, a bright spark of intelligence behind them. I felt like maybe he was trying to assess me the way I was trying to assess him and the others. Tall, maybe six feet, incredible cheekbones, pale pink lips, a striking face that held slight curiosity but mostly boredom. Long dark trenchcoat, perhaps dark blue or black, that scarf was definitely blue, well dressed, judging by the slacks peeking out from underneath said trenchcoat as well as the well worn brown shoes he wore. The air around him seemed to call to me. Perhaps his intelligence, and I didn't doubt for one second that he was most likely a genius of some sort, was something that made others single him out and shun him the way others shunned me when they learned I had no birthmark to speak of.

I took in a deep breath.

"Well, hello," I exhaled.