a/n: i seriously need to learn to stop going off on long tangents when writing my introductions i'm sorry if this chapter is a little dull, i'm not too pleased with it but w/e

also i actually finished this over a month ago before even starting steps to your heart and it was meant to be a quick one-shot... until it turned into over 10,000 words that i got too lazy to edit lol my b

to make it easier for both you guys and myself i split it into three parts and will just edit it at my own pace that way, so i hope y'all enjoy

For as long as Rosé can remember, she has always had an interest in skin markings.

And by skin markings, she doesn't mean things like beauty marks or freckles that for usually no reason at all you come into the world already bearing, nor does she mean the type of scars that mar the surface of your skin as a result of some sort of trauma. Those are too long-lasting, too permanent, and what she means is much, much more temporary than that.

They come in all sorts of forms and colors — from sloppy shapes to intricate drawings, from small words to long paragraphs, from the first color on the spectrum wheel to the very last. If you're lucky, they can last for over a week. If you're not, they can be gone by the next morning. If you're like the average of the population, they usually begin to fade after about three days.

Truthfully, there hasn't even been a day in Rosé's life that she didn't see them on the skin of fleeting strangers at least once. It's because they're everywhere, literally always. For example, she sees them on the arms and legs of people mostly in the summertime when it's too hot to wear jeans and sweaters. She sees them as she peruses the aisles at the market when the sleeves of another grocer happens to slip far enough down their wrist in their stretch to reach for something on a higher shelf. She even sees them every week when she goes to church. It's become somewhat like a game of I Spy, but by herself.

And it's thanks to her parents that Rosé had ever discovered these marks, of course (some human science thing about how children learn basic things such as talking or walking from their parents by just having watched them). And what she had seen ever since she was young ranged from simple hearts drawn on her mother's wrist to both her parent's names swirled in cursive on the palm of each other's hands, or to odd characters resembling weirdly-shaped stick figures (to which she later found out was Hangul and not a game of Hangman) dotted across the space above their knees. Whether it be just that one small heart only half a centimeter wide on their skin or more shapes and writing than Rosé could even count on all the fingers of both of her hands combined, these marks were always there. And each time she found a new one, it never ceased to amaze her.

But despite her five-year old self's quickly growing fascination with them, she can't seem to recall ever directly asking about them. In her defense, it was something that she had already grew up recognizing, just not knowing. She kept her questions to herself because it did not really ever seem like something that little Rosé should be asking about for the fear of asking a possibly obvious question. These marks were simply something had always been normal to her, something she had always seen and never a day that she had not. She knew what they looked like, how they felt, and how long they lasted, but she never knew how they got there or why they even existed. But still after that all, she still never allowed herself to do more than admire it quietly with only touch and sight, and never voice.

Of course, she was curious about it. More than that, even. So much that eventually, she sort of just began to figure it out herself — piece by piece.

And she's pretty proud to admit that it was mostly through observation.

Rosé remembers that when her mother would hold her in her arms as a toddler, she would just gently trace each one with her small fingers, silently committing the exact shape and location of the mark to memory before running over to her father and looking for the same mark. This was the way how she had learned that whatever was written on her mother always, always seemed to match what was written on her father.

That doesn't mean she wasn't ever curious, though. And because she never dared to speak these curiosities aloud, it eventually had bled into some sort of petty envy.

Rosé remembers how she would sit and stare at her own flawless skin, pressing the tips of her fingernails into it with just enough pressure so that when she lifted her hand, crescents would have formed beneath it. She learned that the longer she kept her nails there, the longer the mark would embed itself in her flesh and last, so she would keep at it for as long as she could. But then, just like that, ranging from a few seconds to