Title: Lapidary
Summary: "Nothing's ever clear, even when it's written on your skin." / AU Juliette x Nick x Monroe
Word Count: 1188
Disclaimer: Don't own!
Author's Note: Written for the Grimm-Challenge LJ community challenge #06, 'what gets you through?' The challenge actually never concluded, but being as the story was originally published 3 years ago, I wanted to be able to be able to finally share it with you all. This is a pre-canon/Pilot episode AU inspired by a prompt from the comment-fic LJ community ("a world in which the name of your soulmate is written on your wrist"). Quote at the beginning is from Grimm's The Glass Coffin, from the translation here. A lapidary is a cutter or engraver of gemstones. This will probably be the final story posted in this collection and I will be marking the story as 'complete.' I hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading!

"My long-desired deliverer, kind heaven has guided you to me, and put an end to my sorrows. On the self-same day when they end, shall your happiness begin."

Lapidary

He woke up to Juliette tucked against his body, her head resting on his shoulder, one arm sprawled across his chest. Her wrist faced him.

It brought a slow, sad smile to his face. He reached out to grasp her hand, moving it closer to kiss the spot where his name stood out in neat script, dark against her pale skin.

"Hey." She was still half-asleep, her voice groggy. "That kind-of tickles." Still, she reached out to him with such love in her eyes that when she took his own arm to kiss the spot marred by a black tattoed bar, he didn't pull away.

"You know, you can tell me about it—"

His words dried up in his throat. It had only been a few months; he couldn't say it. That was hardly enough time. He was starting to wonder if it would ever be enough. "Not today. I'm sorry."

And she nodded, and curled her fingers around his own.

She wore jackets with high-cropped sleeves, a fashionable style that put the name of their beloved on display like a piece of jewelry, proclaiming to the world that he is hers and she is his. He watched other couples, and saw right before his eyes just how important a name could be.

"You know," Hank told him one day, "it's my second wife's name on my wrist. A lot of people don't care about that sort of thing." There'd been a case, a homicide, where a man had shot his ex-girlfriend. With all of the publicizing, another man had come out of the woodworks, that woman's supposed soulmate, and the battle in the courts had only gotten worse. The newspapers loved that sort of thing.

Hank never asked about his tattoo directly. Nick's wrist itched, so he scratched at it absently. "I know." Nick much preferred to think about their current case, a series of murders and disappearances that looked to have been committed by an animal, but with odd traces of unmistakably human involvement. Animals didn't wear size eleven boots. "Nothing's ever clear, even when it's written on your skin."

Hank laughed at that. "How very true."

Later the next day he pulled his chair around the table to sit beside Juliette, but waited until the food was gone from their plates before speaking.

"Even when I was young, there were so many people who had already found the one. And for the ones who hadn't…" He paused, and wished his glass wasn't empty, so he could take a sip and delay his words, buy himself a little more time. His throat was too dry, too tight. He still wasn't sure he could tell her even the safest version of the truth. "Well, it wasn't easy. We were mocked, we were ostracized, we were lonely. So many people had already found their soulmates, and I was starting to think I'd never find them. So one day, I walked into a tattoo parlor, and had them cover it up. I hated seeing that name every day and feeling like I'd been abandoned. So when I met you…"

Juliette leaned forward and took his hands in hers. "I found you," she said, "and it doesn't matter to me what's here." She touched the ugly bar of ink on his left wrist. "What matters to me…is here." And she placed both their hands on his chest, above his heart. "This is why I love you. Not for your name, or mine, or this, or that…" And she grabbed a cloth dinner napkin, tying it around her arm to obscure the name written there.

He decided then that he would do anything for her. If it would make her happy, he'd hand her the stars, give her his ring to wear on her fourth finger, even forget about the tattoo that he tried so hard to ignore yet could not avoid when he looked at it every single day.

They all lied, he thought. He could cover it up, but the imprint still burned through his skin, a daily reminder of what he had and what he didn't. Anyone who said it didn't matter was a liar. He supposed he was the worst one of them all.

Nick had gone back to investigate the man he'd seen earlier, the one whose face had seemed to blur and change right before his eyes. He almost could not believe it, but one thought of Marie and her books and weapons and suddenly it was real again. Grimms, she'd called them. He could not think of a better word to describe his feelings.

The house was quiet and dark, and as he crept up to a window it shattered above his head and he was tackled to the ground. Nick kicked at the assailant, rolling away and finally getting a good look at teeth claws fur—

"You shouldn't have come back," he said with a snarl.

Nick rolled a shoulder back, preparing for the next strike. "Yeah, well you just attacked a cop."

"And a Grimm." He growled, as if one mitigated the other.

"Did you kill that little girl?"

The man's face changed, suddenly, fangs shrinking and fur receding, the features realigning into something human and recognizable. "No." He sounded offended that Nick had even suggested it. "Of course not. I'm…different. I'm not like the others."

Nick's look of skepticism earned him a laugh.

"So, a Grimm and a cop." He waved Nick over. "You look confused. Come on in for a beer. We'll talk. You got a name?"

Nick followed him around to the front of the house. "It's Nick. Nick Burkhardt." He climbed the steps, but stopped when the other man froze. "And you?"

When he spoke again, his voice was oddly upbeat. "Call me Monroe."

"I don't care what you want me to call you. I asked for your name."

"And you'll get it. But you might have a little trouble with the German pronunciation." Monroe sighed, and held the door open for him. "Come on inside. We've got a lot to talk about."

"German?" Nick thought of the books in Marie's trailer, full of the language that seemed to stick to his tongue instead of rolling off it so the words sounded as unnatural as the drawings of creatures beside them. Names were different; he had more practice with names.

The itching in his wrist subsided. "Try me," he said. Without a second thought, Nick followed him inside.