Chapter Text
Baek Saheon is born without a soulmark.
It isn’t anything special, or particularly extraordinary, per se. His cousin from the city tells him there are plenty of people who are born without one. But, in his village, that’s uncommon. And if it’s uncommon, then it is wrong wrong wrong wrong worrying.
His mother doesn’t stop checking him over every morning, looking over each patch of skin, and doesn’t stop frowning when it’s clean of it. After his initial years, she stops hiding the disappointment that takes over her face everytime there is emptiness,where there should be none.
In his village, the lack of a mark is uncommon. But, then, why not in the outside?
“What are you looking for?” he asks, once, when his mother has completed her customary search. Her disappointment unhidden and mouth twisted in a frown, Saheon is sure it’s how she always is, nowadays.
“A soulmark,” she answers, as she makes him pull on his shirt.
“Soulmark?”
She sighs. “Yes, a soulmark.”
Hesitating a bit, she leans back and carefully tugs down the collar of her dress, exposing a name written on her collarbone in…white? It looks muddied, as if mixed with a darker colour.
“This is your father’s name,” she says, impatient. She flinches a bit, not staying still as Baek Saheon curiously traces his fingers over the letters. She shoves him away.
“Most people are born with the name of their soulmate written somewhere on their body. For us— the followers of ■■-nim, it may show up a bit later, but it will never take more than five years.”
’■■-nim..’
He’s turning five soon.
Won’t he be graced by ■■■■?
“What’s a soulmate?”
His mother hums contemplatively as she tugs her collar back up and stands, holding her hand out for Baek Saheon to clean. He’s surprised she’s answering him, and not leaving him be.
“A soulmate is a perfect match,” she says eventually, as they walk down the hall towards the dining room to meet with noona. Their parents won’t let her stay with him for long, and especially not during this whole soulmark checking, for some reason.
“It’s someone that will match you for everything that you do; someone that will fit with you like a puzzle piece, or be so similar to you that it’s like looking into a mirror that refuses to let you ignore your own flaws.” In his young ears, that thought feels akin to a fantasy.
“But above all,” she continues, quickening her pace, “It’s someone you can trust with your life, someone who will love you for everything you are. Someone you know will be on your side, when it feels like the rest of the world is against you. ■■-nim has labelled them companions.”
“So, like noona?”
She looks disgusted.
“No. ■■-nim has graced us all with the perfect pair,” she says. He still hasn’t gotten his perfect pair.
”I see..”
“Having a soulmark is sacred. It means ■■-nim has gained knowledge of us, who are measly in the great presence. Praise be unto ■■■■.”
She stops, joining her hands, and bows. Saheon follows suit, and they mutter a prayer. Soon, they are back on track.
“Is it bad,” he asks in the stone-cold silence, “not to have one?”
She doesn’t respond. She looks angered. Fed up by Saheon. “Yes, but you have time. We need you to have one. Someone who you could entrust with the entirety of yourself. Someone who isn’t your noona.”
He frowns, and feels an unknown terror grip him. He doesn’t like the way her voice turned sickly sweet towards the end. In his little mind, he knows she is lying. Knows that her reasoning is untrue, but he’s not sure why that is so.
His mother looks down at him with a cruel sneer, harsh and a little manic.
“I won’t be here forever,” she says, and Saheon squeezes his hand tightly to suppress the glee surging in his heart. He’s disgusting, feeling happy over such a thing. They step forward together as they near the doors to the dining room.
“But you’ll be here for a while,” he says confidently. He doesn’t intend it to be bitter. She doesn’t answer.
A few months later, she’s dead. Noona found her corpse, apparently with hands joined in a prayer.
Saheon’s father looks at him like he’s some disease. They say, she was hiding a deadly illness, and passed away peacefully in her sleep. They say ■■-nim took her away. But Saheon does not believe them. He believes his aunt who tells him its his fault. He thinks it is, and is startled he’s not feeling as bad as he should.
The only thing he can feel, for a while, is a serene contentment. It shifts inside his stomach, heavy and light all the same. The only thing that occupies his mind is the thought that she’d left him alone in this village, with his noona, where there is no one that knows him as wholly as she had; there is no one he can be fully himself around, anymore, because there is no one who knows all of him. All parts of him, evil and ugly and scorned.
Every time he is with his sister, it is like a breath of fresh air in the moist caves and the hot forest; it is a small reprieve from the glares shot down at him, slowly crushing his lungs with every day he is forced to worship and worship and worship and prepare the part of someone he is not.
For a few years after his mother’s death, he longs for a soulmark—he longs for someone he can share his miseries to, for someone that can stay by his side and make him feel less like he is living in the skin of something archaic and divine.
As he grows, he understands things his child mind did not. He's sick of it. He wants to leave. The truth about his village makes him hurl. If his soulmate really does exist, why won't she come for him? Why won't she take him away from his pain?
It usually doesn’t take more than five years for one to appear, he remembers, but—maybe it’s just taking a bit longer for him. He isn't forfeited, now that he understands, like his mother thought him to be. Is he?
It takes him five more years to stop hoping for something that won’t happen. He stops looking for it, and in the impossibility of finding his half—he already hates her. What point does it have for her to show up now? He's already become a part of something insane and suffocating.
It’s fine. He's learnt to not rely on anyone, anyway. Now more so, when his noona has left him. To be with her own other half. Time blurs.
Shes dead, he's fifteen.
For the first time in a long while, he feels grief.
Grief isn't something he's intimate with, although it follows him each step of his journey. Saheon and grief run parallel to eachother, so close and so far all the same. There's never really a time when they touch. Even now, he just feels hollow. Like grief extended its hands towards him and he followed— but in the end he only experienced the shadow of it.
He doesn't feel grief, like he's supposed to. Whatever was left of him to feel it, it died along with the fickle hope of his soulmark appearing.
He directs the hollowness into something he's more familiar with, like anger. Like hatred. If he wasn't angry enough about the whole ordeal already, the universe really just rubbed salt in his wounds.
He vows to flame the fires of his ire, ready to leave crimson in its wake. Burn his village and the evil residing in it.
He's suffering, has suffered, and will suffer because his perfect half doesn't exist and he is incomplete. Will forever be.
He's eighteen when he first leaves the forsaken village behind. His cousin guides him into a dorm and an university, gives him a tape recorder, and then leaves him to fend for himself.
As he relearns how to live, and learns how to survive, he sees there are plenty of people who don’t have a name imprinted on their skin like a brand.
So, it’s not like he’ll stand out. He realizes one night that the reason everyone in his village has it is because they are all insane and devout and senseless. In thier worship to the cult, they have all gone mad. Perfect for eachother. In a way, it’s probably better for him to not have one. It’s fine, to not have one. In fact, it’s a good thing.
(He ignores the envy that lives, cold and uninvited, on his tongue, when he sees black ink curled around a boy’s neck like a noose, when he sees a flash of purple peeking out from behind a woman's ear. He has nothing to be jealous about. He pushes down the nausea waiting for him, pushing down on him, something that still lingers in his heart. And he desperately wishes to destroy it.)
In university, he finds that there are plenty of people who want to spend their lives with someone, without needing that to tell them who. He learns that everyone has meaningful relationships, regardless of the universe's will.
It reinforces the fact that he doens't need some soulmark. Like Saheon didn't know already. He continues to survive, and after graduating, he seeks a job. He wants to be freed from his village. He is tired and the unease in his gut is only coiling around him, akin to a viper coiling itself into his neck.
From word of mouth, he hears of Daydream Inc., and from there he knows his goal. Saheon signs up for it, and on the night before his life inevitably changes— he looks in the mirror and sees himself nameless, markless, as always.
That is, until he wakes up that morning to strange shapes scrawled across his left wrist in a dark red, as if it was rubbed raw and stretched, with a name sitting inbetween it. As if that name was sacred. As if it was fate.
Baek Saheon is going to be sick.
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