A/N: This was posted as a oneshot, but I'm breaking it into slightly smaller chunks for AFF so that it's easier to read and pause at certain spots where I would've intended to release the chs if it weren't a fest fic. <3 One chapter will be posted every few days. (Total word count is 19.8k, will be spread across 4 chapters)

Jongin is five years old the first time it happens.

He’s playing outside, digging for worms, when a pattern in dull black spreads across the inside of his left wrist. His eyes widen as the markings fan out, captivating him. There’s no fear, only curiosity. A cool, tingling sensation accompanies the thin dark lines, slowly revealing a small, uneven flower with five petals, a simple stem, and one lopsided leaf. “Wow, pretty,” Jongin whispers to himself. He traces over it with a mud-caked finger and realizes it’s flat, inked into his skin and unsmeared by the gooey mud. Huh. When it shows no sign of changing, neither growing nor shrinking after the pattern is complete, Jongin loses interest. He returns to the task of wrangling a third worm.

Once his mother calls him inside for dinner, she takes one look at her grinning, sun-kissed boy caked with dirt and shoos him into the bathroom to wash up. When they sit down to eat, she notices the flower on the inside his wrist.

“Jonginnie, markers and pens are for paper only, dear,” she says with a scolding cluck of her tongue.

“I know, mommy. I didn’t draw on myself,” he answers around a mouthful of rice.

She gives him a pointed stare under disbelieving eyebrows but lets it go, reminding him to clean more thoroughly during bath time. His dad says to “let him be a kid” and sends his son a conspiratorial wink. Jongin grins his toothy smile back and then watches as his parents communicate silently through a series of meaningful looks, mouthed words, and gentle touches, ending with his father announcing he’ll do the dishes and planting a loud smooch on his mom’s cheek as she blushes. Parents are so weird sometimes.

Later in the bath, he stares at his wrist, resting it on the outer rim of the tub away from the water because… he doesn’t want to scrub the black markings off. Jongin can’t really explain why, but he likes it. It feels nice. He wants to keep it. Gingerly, he dribbles a few drops of the warm water over the pattern, bracing for it to change.

But it stays.

Feeling braver, he splashes more water over the flower.

Still there.

Giggling, Jongin submerges his whole arm into the bathtub and smiles as the dull black ink remains. He even tries soaping it up with his Pororo body wash and witnesses no change. So it is permanent! He finishes his bath and bounces off to bed, inexplicably happy over his newly acquired tattoo. He’ll just tell his mom in the morning that it wouldn’t wash off.

But when he awakens, the flower is gone, leaving no trace behind. Jongin frowns, checking his sheets to see if it rubbed off during his sleep, but see no smudgy signs of it. Disappointed, he flops out of bed and distracts himself with a few rousing episodes of his favorite cartoons.

Another one shows up a few days later. Jongin spies it out of the corner of his eye while racing his remote control car around the living room. The sable-colored flower blooms onto his skin in roughly the same spot, the inside of his left wrist. It’s almost identical to the previous one, but has two leaves this time, not just one. The lines are a little straighter, too.

Beaming at the pattern with pride, Jongin drops his controller and scurries to his room. Since the last one disappeared, Jongin wants to jot this one down. His parents had just bought him a work desk with new pencils, sketchpads, and a leather-bound journal. Maybe it’s like a scavenger hunt made just for him, to find this special flower somewhere. Who knows? He tries to copy it faithfully into his journal, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth in concentration while he tries to make his little five-year-old hand cooperate.

His version is markedly less pretty. But at least it’s there, documented. He searches for flowers that match his wrist in his yard, but comes up empty. Oh well; he’ll keep searching.

This flower also fades away overnight. Jongin pouts at his wrist, whispering a soft, “Come back…” and squeezing his eyes shut, trying to conjure it back like magic. When he cracks an eye open, though, his wrist remains bare. He sighs and hopes it’ll return again in a few days.

And it does! The markings always disappear in the darkness while he sleeps, but they bloom again and again, usually every couple days or so. Jongin copies each one down. They’re not always the same flower, now. Sometimes, they have wider, pointy petals. Sometimes, they appear as circlets or flower crowns. Eventually, more detailed bouquets are springing up on his wrist, and Jongin mostly laughs at his feeble attempts to replicate them in his journal.

This goes on for months, with Jongin purposefully choosing to wear long-sleeved sweaters to help hide them from prying eyes. Spring approaches, though, and warmer weather settles in, thick and humid in Seoul. One day, while Jongin is helping water the outdoor plants, his mother watches one appear in real time. When the dark lines start to snake onto his skin, she screams, thinking he’s gotten a horrid infection. In a flash, his mom is scooping him up to rush him to the hospital until Jongin pats her face gently to get her attention and explain it’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. It happens all the time, has been happening for a while, and he likes them. They make him feel special.

For some reason, this disclosure changes her demeanor from fear to elation in a heartbeat. She spins him around in circles and kisses his cheeks endlessly, leaving him totally bewildered. His mother leaves him alone about drawing on himself from then on, but occasionally Jongin catches her sneaking glances at his inner wrist during dinner and smiling broadly to herself. Jongin’s just glad he doesn’t have to hide them anymore.

Then one day, the patterns stop.

It’s hard to say exactly when they disappear, since there were always varying intervals of time between each one, but it was sometime around the accident. The one which Jongin’s father doesn’t survive. Jongin is only nine when he’s burying his father and being told by strangers that he’s now “the man of the house and needs to take care of his mother.” In the tumultuous days that follow, of mourning and visiting his father’s ancestral hometown out in Boseong, the markings aren’t really at the forefront of his mind.

When they return to Seoul and their all-too-quiet home the following week though, Jongin sees his journal on the corner of his desk and realizes the comforting presence on his wrist has been missing. He thumbs over the area cautiously. First his father is taken from him, and now this? Did he do something wrong? He kneels forlornly in the backyard, wrapping a hibiscus flower around his wrist, like he can make it bloom back into his skin if only he can get it to remember him. At dinner one night, he mentions the disappearance of the special patterns to his mom.

She bursts into tears and leaves the room. Jongin doesn’t bring it up again.

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Jongin is sixteen when he finds out about soulmates.

All the students in his grade level are ushered into the school’s auditorium and shown a video, titled Mandatory Soulmate Education: For the Emerging Adolescent. The room buzzes with laughter at first, the teens thinking it’s a hoax. Within a few minutes, though, a hush falls over the crowd as the narrator explains that soulmates are very much real and provides evidence via careful scientific study around the phenomena.

In humans, a soulmate sends out a signal, something that manifests in the form of their passions and talents, to their receptive mate when they cross paths. This occurs without the person’s awareness they are transmitting anything. The signal itself can take an array of forms, but is usually discernable by the receiver as something they are seeing, hearing, or feeling that is clearly coming from outside themselves.

This has been kept a secret from children, the video narrator explains, because of negative consequences in the past. Meddling parents used to try to set their children up with their soulmates, creating Tinder for Tots organizations to find their son or daughter’s mate as early as 4 years old. They were dedicated to organizing large scale ‘play dates’ and ‘speed play conventions’ in hopes of signals showing up early and allowing the adults to map out arranged marriages with the ‘right’ person. Apparently, this never ended well. Fate, it seems, doesn’t like being overly wrought. The soulmates found at this age had a startlingly low success rate, with more than 90% of relationships fizzling out before they reached college-age, and few pairs making it to the altar. (Or worse, getting married out of hope that the early signal was enough to ensure a happy partnership, but then divorcing within a few years.) As a result, a council of childhood development experts and relationship counselors recommended the government adopt a policy of silence on soulmates until mandatory Soulmate Education in high school.

“Which brings us to today. You’ll now disperse into groups to ask any questions you might have to your educational facilitator,” the video ends, with a collage of couples wrapped in warm embraces and beaming at their soulmate.

They’ve already been corralled into groups based on their last names, and the pleasant and plump Mrs. Lee smiles at Jongin’s group.

“I know that was a lot to take in at once,” she remarks sympat