#faveshipweek

An average teens AU here (specifically THIS AU)

Indiana Jones AU

Adventures in Babysitting (ft Ole from NDU)

Centaur & Satyr

Sweethearts Sandmen

Dreamland

Speak Oil Into my Ear

Blood Red Sandman

North vs 8000/DreamEater & FearSpinner

Written in Red Ink

Dumb Bird Husbands

Crimelord Husbands

The Doors of Perception

Harpy & Mermaid

Missing Pitches

Movie

Steampunk Old Men

Dream Forrest

Harvesting AU

Pitch Gold & Sandmann

Book

Movie

A Draught of Light

Oldmen

He finally spotted his phone, vibrating itself merrily toward the corner of his bed.

He pounced on it and quickly unlocked it to find out what he had been disturbed for. It was the wrong time of year for taxes; it was the wrong time of year for elections, unless there was a special election he hadn’t heard about, always possible; he didn’t know any reason why he would be summoned to court, unless this was for jury duty, and if it was for jury duty he was going to be so pissed; and the only other thing that was made this impossible to ignore was the…the Marks Festival.

Shit. It was summer, wasn’t it?

And, sure enough, when Pitch looked at his phone, the screen displayed an animation of people walking up to each other, comparing the marks on their arms, happily embracing when they matched, and then going on to do all sorts of conventionally romantic activities. Presumably the sequence ended with a mass marriage, but Pitch was distracted by something else on the center of the screen. It was his face, wearing a sleep-disheveled expression of disgust.

“Those bastards!” They’d somehow gotten permission to activate his phone camera for this. Surely that had to have been illegal at some point. Maybe he should have been paying more attention to the elections. Well, the time was far past for that. The instructions underneath his face told him couldn’t turn off his alert until he submitted a picture of his mark.

The buzzing was starting to give him a headache. He seriously considered flipping the camera the bird and submitting that, but he knew that there was probably some poor sap checking every picture to make sure it was of the right thing. No petty response would give any problems to the people he wanted to give them to. He reluctantly got out of bed to get somewhere with good enough light to make it clear that the picture he took was actually of his mark.

Pitch’s soul mark was just like any other mark, a circular pattern about three inches across, intricate and beautiful and organic, the blackest black there ever was, stark against his skin. Pitch had seen plenty of other soul marks before, and he privately thought the starburst pattern of his was better looking than most. But, most people felt that way about their soul marks, and Pitch knew this. Anyway, within the past several years, he had stopped thinking of the mark as beautiful, and tried to stop thinking about it at all.

But he couldn’t ignore it completely, because he still wasn’t married to the person with the matching mark.

Pitch snapped a picture and the buzzing mercifully stopped. He yawned and headed into the kitchen to make coffee. It would take him too long to go back to sleep, now, and ultimately he had only woken up a couple hours early.

He slowly started to think of practicalities as he sipped his black coffee, equally slowly. A schedule for the Marks Festival had been downloaded into his priority folder as soon as he had sent the picture. It started tomorrow, and while he should have thought of it ahead of time, he just hadn’t. His mark wasn’t relevant to his everyday life. But that hadn’t prevented it from becoming fantastically inconvenient, now.

Tomorrow he planned to make most of his money for the year, selling wine at the Lunanoff Auction. It would do him no good to have the noise and bustle of the Marks Festival taking up his mind when he went to the auction house.

After all, he couldn’t let the wines speak for themselves. They were all fakes. Pitch smiled to himself. And as long as he didn’t mess up by offering something impossible, no one would ever know. Especially as all the wines he did sell tasted so good.

Was it more likely that the people who bought it, when they opened it, would have gotten a bottle of one hundred and fifty year old wine that somehow retained all its flavor, or that they had been scammed? Every year the number of scammers in the world increased, and the bottles of rare wine decreased, but Pitch knew how to make his buyers feel like they were part of the lucky few that had found the latter rather than the former.

Pitch just knew he had to be careful not to start thinking like them, especially after the auction had filled his bank accounts. He had to prepare for every contingency, every emergency, every unknown. So it wasn’t really a good sign that he had started off this year’s auction weekend by completely forgetting a known annual event that conflicted with it.

The Marks Festival. Pitch had gone from his infancy until the summer he was twenty-two, when he had just started getting into the wine business. He knew how it went. The first morning would open with the official legal marriages of all the adults who had found their soulmates at previous festivals (most of them would have gotten married in their personal traditions over the course of the previous year), and then a breakfast banquet would be held, free for them and all marked singles. The married couples could leave, then. Then there would be the children’s portion of the festival, where everyone under eighteen got a chance to see if they could find someone within that group that had a matching mark. This was the most casual part of the festival, though many people took it very seriously. Still, no one under eighteen was required to be part of the festival, and few children traveled to any other city’s festival, so it wasn’t likely for children to find their soulmates.

While the children mingled, marked single adults could enjoy live music, shop for wedding clothes and wedding gifts, or attend language classes, communication classes, and sex ed classes. Pitch had taken advantage of those. The goal of the Marks Festival was to get every single person there married to their soulmate, and as such, it was one of the few places where comprehensive sex ed wasn’t objected to on morality grounds.

After the classes ended, lunch was provided. Then the children got to go home and the serious business of the festival began. All the single adults were gathered in whatever space would hold them all. The lights would be dimmed, and large screens illuminated around the room. Moderators would disperse themselves throughout the room, and the Master of Ceremonies would mount a platform set in the center of the crowd. On top of that platform was a light and a camera that would be used to send images of soulmarks to the other screens in the room. The Master of Ceremonies would make a brief speech that no one paid any attention to, except for the end, where they asked for volunteers.

Sometimes it was quiet, sometimes it was noisy, but it was never more than ten seconds before someone was standing in front of the camera, having their soul mark projected all over the room. And everyone else there would look at their soul marks. For a few seconds, all would be shuffling and breathless anticipation. And then, if the person on the platform was lucky, someone would shout out that they had a match. A moderator would go up to them and take a picture with their camera, and the two marks would be shown next to each other on the screens. The images would slide over each other, and if they overlapped completely, everyone would erupt in cheers. The couple would be brought to each other and guided to the exit together.

If the person on the platform wasn’t lucky, no one would shout that they had a match, and they’d be sent home alone with a voucher for a flight to any other Marks Festival next year.

Pitch had never been lucky, not in any of the five festivals he’d been to as an adult.

The year he had been twenty-three, he’d had the flu and been medically excused from the Marks Festival. While channel-surfing for anything that wasn’t coverage of the festival, he’d found highlights of the Lunanoff Auction. When he realized that it took place in his city, he knew he had to get in on that scene. He spent the next year researching wine obsessively, seeking out information on the rarest wines, the most desired wines. How many barrels had been made? How many barrels had been accounted for? What had other people written on the taste of those wines? What did the bottles look like? What did the labels look like? How would those labels have been attached? And was he really going to do this?

That first year, when he was twenty-four, Pitch had been a perfectionist. He’d come to the auction with barely twenty bottles, none of them too ambitious or improbable.

He’d left with more money than he made in a year at the security guard job he’d managed to wrangle after graduation, more than enough money to justify all the time and effort he’d spent on the project in the first place.

He also got a summons in the mail two weeks later asking him to provide his medical waiver for the Marks Festival. Fortunately, he’d sold one bottle to a wealthy surgeon, and he’d been daring enough to apprise him of his tricky situation. The surgeon had sent him a medical waiver with no questions at all, just a promise that if he showed up at the auction every year, he’d always have that waiver.

Well well well. Of course he would.

He quit his security guard job and started researching wines again.

That had been eight years ago. He’d been to other auctions, sold wine in private transactions, but the Lunanoff event was always the big one, because he guaranteed that he would be there, and the people at the Lunanoff Auction tended to bid a little more wildly and treat the event as cause for more debauchery than any other auction throughout the year.

Pitch had seen more than one $50,000 bottle of wine opened after the buyer was too far gone to have distinguished Cold Duck from Moet & Chandon. And more than once he’d had to look at his bank balance on his mobile to keep himself from being too insulted.

The reason the Lunanoff Auction was like this was the same one that meant that to sell at it, he’d always have to get a waiver for the Marks Festival. The original Lunanoffs had been a famous unmarked couple, and they had wanted to provide some amusement for the other unmarked of their social class during the Festival. And they had settled on the auction. Though Pitch had never said this to anyone, he thought that they had decided on an auction as the entertainment since, to a cynical eye, the Festival looked rather like an auction of the person up on the platform. Regardless, the Lunanoff Auction was, in its distant and blue-blooded way, a thumb of the nose at the Marks Festival. And though not everyone at the auction was unmarked, there were many, many more unmarked there than in a randomly chosen group. At the auction, then, the unmarked felt much more free to vent their frustrations with the remaining 95% of the population, and to take actions that were in some way taking fate into their own hands, and in some way daring fate to do with them what it would, since it had never given them any other notice.

Pitch guessed that most of them thought he was unmarked. Most clothing didn’t show the mark, after all, since it was directly over his sternum.

Pitch finished his coffee and realized he had absently been resting his free hand on his mark. He quickly brought it away and frowned. He thought he’d long outgrown that sort of thing. The mark was nothing to him and his life. He had no time to think about it. He had to review his notes on the origins of the wines he had to sell tomorrow.

 *

 Pitch had reached his monetary goals for the evening before the auction was half over, and he still had a dozen or so of his best pieces in later lots. Still, he worried that he was off his game, about to give some tell that would bring his whole operation down around his ears. He just couldn’t focus on the auction like he usually did; he couldn’t work the crowd like he usually did. And all because of that awful new picture requirement.

He glanced at himself in a mirror in the hallway between the sellers’ rooms and the main auction hall, just to check if he still looked at all composed. In many ways, he did. His black-on-black suit was absolutely immaculate and up-to-the-minute (this was the one year he had wished to be unfashionable, as the low necklines for men almost put his mark on display), his silver-gray skin dye was even, and not a hair was out of place. One might be able to notice something amiss about his eyes, though. Always striking, with a ring of gold around his pupils spreading to gray in the rest of his irises, his eyes were no longer the eyes of someone who approached even the rowdiest bidding or careful questioning with utmost sangfroid. Instead, they seemed to broadcast to anyone who cared to look that his inner space was roiling with doubt, fear, and even the most infinitesimal fragment of hope.

He looked like he was desperate for something. It was a terrible look to wear at an auction. If he had known he would be like this, he would have let his eyebrows grow back in to serve as a distraction. But maybe if anyone looked at him, they would only notice the suit and the skin dye. He’d always appeared so, in order to make sure people could recognize him without looking at his face.

He grimaced at himself. This was all the fault of that picture he’d been forced to take yesterday. While symbol comparisons could only be approved live, with two official moderators present, it was blindingly easy to see what the picture of the mark was for. Apparently, fate wasn’t getting as many people married as quickly as the people in charge thought it should. And since technology had advanced to the point where image comparison could be done of all the millions of marks submitted, why not use it to improve the foundation of society? It was more likely than not that he would be contacted soon with information on the best matches that had been found for him. And then what?

Pitch’s hand twitched toward his chest. Oh, he didn’t want to think about this. He liked his life. But it was a criminal life, and that was nothing to bring to a soulmate. And yet, and yet…despite his cynicism and general repulsion towards the Marks Festival, there was still some part of him that longed to meet his soulmate, if only just to know what they looked like. No, that was a lie. Deep down, where he had long buried it, there was a desire in Pitch to find someone to share his life with. But after so many years, it only hurt to think about it. Even this briefest touch upon those old thoughts brought back all the happy soulmate couples he had seen, the smiling families, the ecstatic meetings at the airport, the anniversary celebrations that would continue all this week—and other rumors, too: a mark over the chest is supposed to be the most romantic, don’t you hope your soulmate has their mark on their chest, too, so you can press them together while making love? Scientists don’t know why, but the best sex only happens when soul marks are touching….

Pitch’s hands tightened into fists and he shook his head. Sex was likely to be a problem, too, if he met his soulmate. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt sexually attracted to anyone since he stopped going to the Marks Festival.

“Oh, this is stupid,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing is going to happen tonight except that I make money. I’ll deal with anything else tomorrow.”

He forced himself to return to the auction hall, to be seen and perhaps to broker a few non-auction sales.

When he entered the hall, however, he found his attention drawn to the auction itself. The auctioneer was in the midst of explaining the provenance of the painting coming up for sale. “As many of you know, Mx. Sanderson’s recovery work has allowed many paintings by nearly every famous surrealist to be freed from exile in total obscurity to take their rightful places in your homes and galleries. Now, thanks to the Mermaid Grant from Ellison University, they have been able to further their art-historical research to such a degree that they have made a tremendous discovery, sure to rock the art world for years to come. Honored guests, Mx. Sanderson has found the paintings of a nearly lost surrealist! Mx. Sanderson, if you would.” The auctioneer handed over the microphone.

“Good evening, honored guests,” Mx. Sanderson said in a low, melodious voice. “I know you’re here to bid, so I won’t bore you with the academic tale of my research. Suffice to say, the painter I found was mentioned in only a few letters by name, but, by code, in many other surrealist writings. I believe his cohort considered him something of a mad genius—yes, even madder and more genius than the rest of them. So far, I have found only five paintings of the artist known only as Mansnoozie, and I have brought only two to the Lunanoff Auction. I am able to do this because of Mansnoozie’s current obscurity—no academic knows what to do with him yet. But, I know that you do. And I will ask that anyone who bids be prepared to face many research requests in the future. Now, as to the painting—personally, I find it stunning, gorgeous, and a touch unsettling. I think it would be a grand addition to any art-lover’s collection.” Sanderson bowed and removed the cloth from the painting.

Pitch couldn’t see it from where he stood, but from the babble and the way the bidding started, it was clear the bidders agreed with Sanderson’s description.

The bidding rose by jaw-dropping leaps and bounds, and Pitch was so engrossed in watching it that he didn’t notice that Sanderson had approached him until they spoke.

“Hello, Pitch,” they said. “I’ve heard so much talk of your wines that I’ve been simply dying to meet you.”

Pitch nearly jumped. Their voice was even more beautiful in person, and up close, well…he thought they could be described in the same terms as the painting. Stunning, gorgeous, and a touch unsettling. They had tightly curling blond hair that floated down to their mid-back, gold skin-dye with even more shimmer than his own, and a flowing pale gold coat that fell to their ankles, worn over an ivory tunic ensemble. The clothes must have been tailored by someone enormously skilled, as despite their simplicity they emphasized the curves of Sanderson’s short, plump figure in a way that made Pitch’s mouth go dry.

“And I’d heard you were such a talker,” Sanderson said dryly, though if Pitch had been composed, he would have noticed that Sanderson wasn’t.

“I talk the most when I’m selling,” Pitch said. “Is there anything you saw in the catalog that you want? After this sale ends, I think you’ll be able to.”

Sanderson shrugged. “I haven’t got the palate of the bidders,” they said. “A solid twenty-dollar bottle is the most I care to fuss with.”

A solid twenty-dollar bottle was usually the most expensive wine that went into any of Pitch’s blends. “Wise,” Pitch said. “I prefer prints to originals.”

“Also wise,” Sanderson said with a slow smile. “Call me Sandy.”

“Sandy,” Pitch said. “I’m Pitch to both my friends and enemies.”

The bidding kept going.

“Well,” Sandy said. “If they’re not allowed to back down from what’s already been said, I don’t think I need to pay attention to this anymore, though it is rather flattering.”

“Clearly they appreciate your work in the field.”

Sandy glanced sidelong at Pitch. “As they do you in yours.”

Pitch tilted his head. “We can’t see the painting from here. Can you lead me to where we can?”

 *

 It was an alien, flowing landscape in gold and black, and Pitch found more pleasure in looking at it than most of the new paintings he had seen recently. But it also didn’t look quite like any other surrealist paintings, either. He looked from the painting, to Sandy, to the painting, and to Sandy again. No. It couldn’t be. It was his guilty conscience that suggested it. He took a breath.

“I won’t hesitate to kick you in the balls, ‘help’ you out to my car, and keep you a tied up prisoner until the payments have cleared and I’m off the plane in the Seychelles,” Sandy said softly.

Pitch stared at them, blushing harder than he ever had in his life. “Please,” he said, then paused long enough for Sandy to give him an amused, curious look. “I mean,” Pitch said, “please come with me to my seller’s room. I think we should discuss a few things over an 1844 Lost Oaks.” He swallowed. “I promise it will be just as good as any twenty-dollar wine.”

Sandy nodded slowly. “I think I see.” They smiled slowly. “Yes, I’ll come back with you.”

 *

 “Now, with what you do, at least you actually get to see that they like your work,” Pitch said, gesturing with a very old-looking bottle. “Me, I can only copy things.”

“No, no, you could make up wine, too,” Sandy insisted. “You could make your own. Lots of people do. I mean not for your purposes, but…”

“That’s just the thing! It’s so rare that they actually drink it, and that they actually drink it when the taste matters to them! At least they can look at a painting in all kinds of moods.” Pitch leaned over, and his shirt moved to partially expose his mark.

“That’s only if the person with the winning bid actually likes art! And with how high it was going, the only kind of person that could even be bidding is doing it just to have the rare thing! I mean, I won’t care once I’m in the Seychelles, but—” Sandy broke off and ran around the table, a little unsteadily. They reached out to Pitch and pulled his shirt down, fully uncovering his mark.

“Hey, that’s rude,” Pitch said, noticing they had very soft hands.

“Oh, my god. After all the trouble it took to shut my phone up….”  They stepped back, and with no hesitation, removed their tunic.

Pitch, confused, felt an unfamiliar rush of heat and wondered if it was possible that he was going to have sex with an almost total stranger on Marks Festival night. The thought was delightfully perverse.

Sandy turned around and pulled their hair to the side. Their soulmate mark was in the center of their upper back, and the first thing Pitch noticed was that it was a starburst pattern. A familiar starburst pattern. He’d never sobered up so quickly in his life. He flung off his coat and shirt and fumbled for his phone.

“I, I,” he stammered. “I need to see them side by side. I…this…what.” After several moments, his hands stopped shaking enough to let him take a few pictures that were clear enough to compare details in. Side by side, they showed what he and Sandy already knew there was no point denying.

Sandy sat down on the floor. “This is bullshit, but it’s also too good to be true. You understand my creative endeavors and you’re also really hot.”

“I could say the exact same thing,” Pitch said, joining them on the floor. “I never guessed you’d be…you, because…I associate soulmates with everything normal.”

Sandy laughed. “So, we’re going to accept this?”

“I really, really want to,” Pitch said, his voice suddenly full of fear.

“Hey, hey, this is my worries this is about,” Sandy said. “I know some people have issues when their mark matches a Mx.”

“Not me,” Pitch said. “I thought my interests pointed toward no one, but now I know they point towards you.”

“Interests, huh?” Sandy said, and scooted closer to Pitch.

Pitch smiled nervously, then more naturally, and laughed. “Do you know how they say it’s supposed to be romantic to have your marks touch during sex?”

Sandy looked surprised for a moment, then cackled. “So romantic! Well, now I really want to find out. Let’s go crash the Marks Festival and make the moderators verify us.”

“But I’m supposed to have the flu!”

“Me too. Let’s say we met buying orange juice and true love cured us.”

“Why would we have our shirts off in the grocery store?”

“We compared phones! Right, let’s go, let’s go, it doesn’t matter, they’ll be too happy, anyway. If we stay here much longer I’m going to try to seduce you here and it’s not that comfortable or private.”

“And I’d let myself be seduced,” Pitch said.

 *

 Speeding towards the city, Sandy glanced at Pitch. “That painting makes us set for life if we want to be. What do you think about a honeymoon in the Seychelles?”

“I love it. But perhaps we can take the idea of me being tied up a little more slowly than you suggested earlier.”

...

Cosmo catches himself staring in the middle of band practice, drumming away automatically as he watches Sandy's cheeks puff out with air and their fingers fly over the keys. He never would've thought that Sandy would pick trumpet as their instrument, but then, Sandy's always been full of surprises.

The mark on Sandy's neck is a beautiful mandala, a series of abstracted curves and whorls like an enormous fingerprint, a labyrinth that Cosmo could meditate on all afternoon if it weren't for the fact that he misses a major tempo change in the seventeenth bar and the whole band grinds to a halt in a series of squeaks and squawks.

"Is there something more important than pacing the entire band, Mr. Pitchiner?" Mr. Shalazar asks, and half the band turns around to stare. Ana stifles a giggle behind her hand, and Cosmo feels his ears burn.

He sneaks a look at his own, scribbly mark under the black-and-white-striped fingerless glove he's wearing over his left arm while Mr. Shalazar is busy trying to get the flutes in tune (and get Jack to stop shooting spitballs out of his flute at Aster). His mark is jagged, like teeth, like a reading of a heartbeat.

Nothing like Sandy's.

...

There's a crowd gathered around Sandy's table at lunch, Sandy proudly holding court as they tell everyone about soul marks in general and theirs in particular. Nick is at one of their elbows, interrupting every few minutes with what's either meant to be encouragement or a segue into one of Nick's own stories, Cosmo can't tell. Ana's sitting at Sandy's other elbow, Aster beside her with his feet on the table trying to look like he isn't interested. Jack looks a little too invested. He looks up once from staring at the mark on Sandy's neck and catches Cosmo's eye, before quickly looking away and pretending to be really interested in the carton of milk on his lunch tray.

Cosmo takes his bag lunch and heads for the library.

He finds the WebMD article Sandy was talking about and precious little else. There's several blogs by people who claim to have 'soul marks', some of whom sound more...rational than others, but no major medical institutions seem to have anything to say on the matter.

Cosmo finishes his sandwich, ignoring Ms. Goossen's sharp look, and logs off the computer. He spends the rest of lunch in the boys' room, furiously scrubbing at the inside of his wrist.

...

"Won't it be awesome to meet our soulmates?"

Cosmo manages a neutral grunt of acknowledgment. "Mmh."

"I wonder what they'll be like. Do you think they'll have personalities like ours, or do you think they'll be more complementary? I wonder what happens if your soulmate isn't a gender you're attracted to. Do you think they have to be romantic? Maybe they're just like the best friend you'll ever have. What if your soulmate was the same age as your dad?"

"Hnf."

"I don't know how we'd even find them in the first place. It's really rare for somebody to be marked. What if they don't have a mark? Does it have to appear in pairs? Can you have more than one soulmate? What if -"

It takes Cosmo, staring up at the trees that line the street leading away from the high school, a long moment to clock that Sandy's stopped talking and is staring at him. "Hm?"

Sandy's honey-brown eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly. "Why're you hiding it?"

Cosmo automatically tugs down the sleeves of his black hoodie, tucking his thumbs into the holes worn into the cuffs. "Hiding what?"

"Your soul mark, silly."

Cosmo makes a face. "I don't want to look at it. You said it yourself, they're really rare. We'll probably never even meet them."

Sandy lets out a long breath, and stuffs their hands in their pockets. 

"You don't have to be such a killjoy," they say, their voice suddenly muted, and Cosmo's chest snarls into a knot.

"Sorry. Guess you'll just have to hang out with all your shiny happy new best friends until your real soulmate comes along," he snaps. He doesn't wait for Sandy to answer, just peels away from them and out into the street, not bothering to look both ways before jogging across to the other side.

The turn for Cosmo's house isn't for another block. He walks the rest of it in time with Sandy, on the other side of the street, in glowering silence.

...

Sandy goes to the 7-Eleven with Jack and Ana for lunch the next day. Cosmo eats his cafeteria hot dog at the table in the corner by the window where the ants keep getting in, and tries not to sulk.

...

Cosmo wakes up at the sound of shattering. It's one AM and there's a rock lying on his bedroom carpet, right beside the stain from the nail polish remover, in the middle of a glittering circle of glass.

"What the fuck," he hisses out the window at Sandy, down in the backyard, who at least has the decency to look ashamed.

"They make throwing pebbles at windows to wake people up look so much easier in the movies," Sandy whisper-shouts back, hands cupped around their generous mouth.

"My parents are gonna take this out of my allowance!"

"Sorry!"

Cosmo pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "What're you doing here, anyway? I thought you weren't talking to me."

"I thought you weren't talking to me!"

"Well, here I am, talking to you!" Cosmo bites down on his tongue. "What are you doing here at one in the morning?"

Sandy takes a deep breath, lets it out in a sigh. "It's henna."

Cosmo blinks. It's too early for this. "What, your hair?"

In answer, Sandy twitches aside the collar of their animal-face hoodie (Cosmo still isn't sure what kind of animal it's meant to be, but the ears attached to the hood look very cute on Sandy). Their mark is hard to see from this angle, but Cosmo gets the point.

"What? Why?"

Sandy shrugs. "I know what you having one and me not having one means. I guess I was jealous? And maybe I wanted to make you jealous?" They shuffle their head down into the collar of their hoodie with another forlorn shrug. Their voice is muffled when they add, "I hope you'll be really happy with your soulmate."

Cosmo has to close his eyes for a second.

"Sandy," he says, "I don't have a soul mark."

Sandy's head whips up, pure, adorable confusion spilling across their face. "Wait, then what -"

"It scrubbed off. Not much, but some. Remember that sleepover we had last weekend? Where I fell asleep first and you tried to write all over me with Sharpie?"

Somewhere towards downtown, a police siren Dopplers through the night, a chorus of barking dogs marking its passage.

"Well, now I feel silly," Sandy says. Cosmo thinks they're about to say something more, but that's when the hall light clicks on, shining yellow all around his closed door.

"Cosmo? You've got class in the morning, go to bed!"

"See you tomorrow?" Cosmo calls down, and Sandy waves one hand up at his window before turning and running for the fence. They get stuck about halfway over, but only for a minute or two.

...

Sandy meets Cosmo at the corner the next morning, on their way to school. They don't say anything as they fall into step beside Cosmo, just smile. Cosmo smiles back.

"You know," he says, "when you turn eighteen, you should totally get that thing tattooed on your neck."

Sandy smiles a little wider.