#creativeclary

Alec’s soulmate had been present almost since he was born, though he didn’t notice until he was seven, and a big, greyish bruise had appeared on his chest out of nowhere. Jace had gotten one on his elbow not much long after. But Isabelle’s body remained silent. She didn’t freak out. Not at first, at least. “Some soulmates show up later in life,” her father’s voice chased her every time she started worrying. But then she turned eleven. Fifteen. And all the marks on her body still belonged completely to her.

By the time she was sixteen, she started dating people, even if, at first, it felt weird. But she’d started seeing the fun side of it, and actually started enjoying it.

The insecurities didn’t go away that quick, though. Actually, they never went away. And that had caused her to, one night, sneak out of her bedroom in the Institute. Her footsteps barely made a sound while she moved through the wide and cold corridors. She got to Alec’s bedroom door, just like many other nights before this one, and knocked. The wood made a deep sound and, a moment later, she heard her brother’s voice. “Come in.” And so she did.

She had clearly woke her brother up. If he was annoyed by that, he didn’t show it. He sat on his bed and patted the mattress slightly, to tell her to come near him. She did. She stared at his brother in silence, not knowing exactly how to put all the mess in her head on words. “Does it hurt?” she said at last.

“Does what hurt?” Her brother’s eyebrows went up almost instantly.

“When your soulmate gets a scar. And it appears on your skin. Does it hurt?”

Alec tilted his head, as if pondering his answer. “No, it… it kind of burns.”

She had so many other things to say, to ask (why is this happening to me, why does everyone have a soulmate but me, I didn’t do anything wrong, or at least not wrong enough to deserve this, why, why, why), but she kept them all to herself. Later, she thought it had been a good decision.

She went to sleep, and woke up less than one hour later. At first, she didn’t realize what was going on. Then, her neck started burning. But it wasn’t how she had pictured it when her brother had described it to her before. It was, well, actual burning. As if fire were eating away her skin; she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know what to do, but as a reflex, she placed a hand on her neck. She closed her eyes, and before she could do anything else, it was over. She let out a big sigh of something she couldn’t quite conceive; perhaps it was relief, but she didn’t feel… well, relieved. She was glad the first part was already over, and that it had lasted just a few seconds. But at the same time, her heart had started to race with fear and nervousness. She had gotten used to the idea that her soulmate, whoever that was, wasn’t going to make not even a brief appearance in her life, and the fact that after all these years of nothingness he (or she, she reminded herself; it could be a she) had finally shown up felt out of place. And there was something else. What if it really wasn’t her soulmate? What if she was just getting her hopes up for nothing? It could have easily been the aftertaste of a dream, or a rash.

She debated herself in her mind between turning on the lights and looking at herself in the mirror, or going back to sleep. It was a brief fight, and she got up. The doubts wouldn’t have let her sleep anyway. She walked towards the big mirror in her room and stared at her neck. Four big, greyish scratches had appeared there. That could only mean one thing: her soulmate was a werewolf. They’d been turned just a minute ago.

The next morning, she glamourized the new marks on her body. For the first time in her life she thought, this is something I must keep to myself. It was such an unusual thought she wasn’t sure it had been her voice the one that had pronounced it in her mind. She had never, ever, kept something away from her brothers.

 The next morning wasn’t exactly a morning. When Maia woke up, the light filtering through her curtains made her guess that it was somewhere near noon. There was not a single inch of her body that didn’t hurt. She opened her eyes and immediately shut them again, trying her best to stop the memories from the previous night to come up in her mind. (Her best wasn’t good enough.)

Tears streamed down her face when she remembered that it had been Jordan. She had expected him to be just a bad experience. But no. He couldn’t be just a bad experience. He had to ruin her life. She hugged herself and expected to magically stop herself from going over those things again, and again, and again. But she didn’t. She thought of that so-called Luke, of how he’d offered help, of how he’d told her he cared about her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see him again; doing so would mean that it had all been real, and she didn’t want it to be.

She got out of her bed at last, and cursed whoever decided that putting mirrors in bathrooms was a good idea. There they were, big, red, pulsing, the four scratches that would ruin her life forever. But there was something new, too. A little, greyish and weird-looking drawing near those scratches. She got near the mirror, but she didn’t recognize the shape at all. She smiled with bitterness and irony. She had had the worst night of her life, but hey, look at the positives! At least, her soulmate had gotten a cool tattoo.

That afternoon, she grabbed a pair of scissors and cut her hair. (Long hair was uncomfortable anyway.)

 Years passed. Isabelle remembered feeling quite disappointed. For some reason, she’d thought that way of finding out that she had a soulmate had been a sort of message. She didn’t expect to meet them the next day, but perhaps that same week. Month? That same year? But that hadn’t been how things quite went.

Isabelle was sure she was being a bit overdramatic. She knew, as her father had once told her, “you can’t force these things.” But knowing and doing are two different things. She had even run out of family members she could talk to about soulmates. Her father had stated that, Jace had said something similar and along the lines of “just stop worrying”, and Alec’s brain was already saturated with Isabelle’s problems. Max was way too little to understand anything she was going through and her mother was simply out of reach. She still covered the scratches and every new injury that may appear after the full moon, out of habit and not wanting to be questioned.

On the other hand, Maia’s blood boiled every time she thought about meeting her soulmate. She was sure she was better off when she didn’t know she had one, because, without having meeting them, she knew they weren’t the right one. She knew they wouldn’t understand her, because her soulmate was a shadowhunter. With time and a little of Luke’s guidance, she’d found that out. She had to admit the runes were cool and looked good on her, but a part of her still hated them. She felt they’d ruined her body simply because she hadn’t chosen them to be there. At first she’d covered them (and her scratches) with makeup, but then they’d started increasing in number so much that they’d ended up covering almost her whole body. And she was fucking lazy. The only positive thing she could find was that, at least, it wasn’t Jordan.

 Being a shadowhunter and entering Jade Wolf was a weird situation. The werewolves looked back at Isabelle as she was crossing the doorstep with a clear “you don’t belong here” in their eyes. She looked around, but the person she was looking for clearly wasn’t there. She let out a deep sigh and was about to turn and leave, when a girl she’d never seen before stepped in front of her. She was brown-skinned and had beautiful dark curls. She had greyish runes all over her body and her face had a weird comfort to it, as if they’d known each other all their lives. “What do you want?” she asked bitterly before Isabelle could say anything. “Luke’s not here.”

“I know, I was… looking for Simon, actually.”

“Well, he’s not here either.”

“Yeah, I can very much notice,” she murmured. “Thanks anyway.” She pulled out an uncomfortable smile and went away.

That night, when the glamour over her soulmate’s marks had faded, she noticed something with the corner of her eye. She stared at the marks of her neck and she could almost swear her heart had stopped for a second when she realized she’d seen those exact marks on someone else’s neck. She grabbed her phone and cursed the fact that this had to happen when Alec was at Magnus’s. She waited, pacing around her dimly lit room. “Alec,” she said when he picked up; she didn’t have the energy to wait for him to speak. “I think… I think I met her.”

When he did speak, he sounded confused. “Met… who, exactly?”

“My soulmate,” she whispered with excitement. “I went to Jade Wolf looking for Simon, and… she was there. I think. I mean, I think she’s my soulmate, but I’m not sure. You know, she’s black, has curly, short hair… She was wearing a shirt of a rock band, or a superhero?”

“Maia?”

 It turned out, Alec hadn’t given her a lot of ideas on how to proceed. Isabelle wasn’t really surprised, considering she was the one that usually gave him relationship advice. What she was really surprised about was, Jace was actually really good giving advice. Following his words, she went to the Hunter’s Moon one night, with the difference that her soulmate’s marks were showing. As her brother had said, “if she recognizes them, you’ll know it’s her.” She became self-conscious about the scratches on her neck, wondering how Maia could go through life with them out in the open. She figured it had taken her a long time to be able to do that.

There she was, standing behind the bar and talking to some people Isabelle didn’t pay attention to. She sat near her and, when Maia faced her, she asked, “Uh, can I get a martini?” Maia stared at her for a long while. Their eyes met, and Maia’s examined Isabelle’s face, and stayed for a long while on the greyish marks on her neck. Her lips parted, she took breath to say something—but then she thought better. She took a cup on her hands, her fingers slowly caressing its cold surface. She lifted it from the table, and when she was about to pour liquid in it, because of nervousness or maybe pure distraction, her fingers slipped and the cup smashed the table, breaking into a million pieces. She bit her lower lip and let out a loud, “Fuck!” She started picking up the glass pieces, and letting little groans out of her mouth when she cut her hands. Isabelle stood up her seat and said, “Do you want me to help--?” and then she noticed the burning on her hands.

She stared at them while little, grey marks appeared on her skin. Maia was staring, too, and even some clients had turned around to see what was going on. Isabelle just pronounced a tiny, “Oh.”

 “Look, just so you don’t get your hopes up, I don’t believe in all that soulmate stuff,” Maia was telling Isabelle. They were in the alley at the back of the Hunter’s Moon. It was nighttime, everything was dark and quiet. She’d had her suspects, since they’d met that day at Jade Wolf. That girl had runes exactly where Maia had hers, but she didn’t have the scratch marks… Or at least, Maia’d thought so. A glamour. Because that was exactly what she needed, a soulmate that was ashamed of her.

“It’s fine,” and she meant it. She didn’t look annoyed, in fact, she was wearing a reassuring smile. “I just… I mean, only if you don’t mind, I’d like to get to know you anyway.”

“Why would you want to get to know me if I’m not interested in being in a relationship with you?”

Isabelle stayed quiet for a while. Then she spoke again, “You’re trying to get rid of me.” She wasn’t asking. “You did the same thing at Jade Wolf, the other day. Someone broke your heart and that’s why you don’t want anything to do with me.”

“You know nothing about me.” Her eyes shined with anger and a little bit of indignation while she spoke those words.

“No. But I want to. That’s why I came here in the first place.”

Maia couldn’t say no. But, looking in retrospection, she wasn’t sure she’d even wanted to. There was a strange force that, she knew, would’ve led her to Isabelle anyway.

 “Maia.” Isabelle placed her hand on her shoulder and shook her lightly. “Maia, it’s ten in the morning.”

It was the first time Maia had stayed the night at the Institute. Isabelle had let her sleep while she got ready, but she didn’t want her to wake up to an empty bed.

“Since when is ten in the morning too late?” sleep made her drawl.

“Since Shadowhunters get up super early, I guess?” Isabelle smiled and sat near her girlfriend on the bed as she tied up her hair in a bun.

They stayed in silence, and Maia put her arms around her. Isabelle remembered feeling reluctant about this, about them, after the night they had agreed to have at least a proper conversation. There were cases in which things just didn’t work out. With the luck she’d been having, that was the most possible turnout. And she didn’t want them to not work out, she hadn’t been looking for her soulmate almost all her life for them not to work out.

But when Maia’s lips touched the base of her neck, her mind shut down. She bit her lower lip lightly as she felt her skin burning; it wasn’t the same painful fire she’d felt the night when Maia was turned. It was like a chimney, like having a hot bath in an especially cold morning. A soft moan came out of her mind as Maia’s lips as they kissed her jawline. “I need to go.”  Maia let out a laugh; it was barely a breath that tickled her skin. “I’ll call you later, okay?”