Chapter Text
Here Isak was, on the night of his eighteenth birthday.
His friends were all here to celebrate with him, they brought food and drinks and presents. His mom had let them organize everything at her house and was watching them dance and laugh from the corner of the living room, a soft, loving smile on her lips. She was calm, stable, and mere fact of seeing her surrounded by his friends was already the most beautiful gift Isak could have received.
Even his father had come over earlier with a gift for Isak and some flowers for Marianne. They had coffee, just the three of them, sitting around the small kitchen table where they used to have breakfast when they were still a family. It was still a bit awkward between them, but a lot less electric than before. They talked about nothing and everything. About Isak mostly, his graduation from high school that was happening soon, his plans to go to med school in the fall. He was the most comfortable topic of discussion, the safest. The only thing Terje and Marianne still had in common.
Then Terje left before the party began, promising Isak they would meet again very soon. Isak smiled and accepted his father’s hug, knowing that it was nothing but wishful a lie. Isak and Marianne waived Terje goodbye as he backed out of the driveway, and Isak felt his mother’s hand slightly trembling in his own.
*
Now, Isak was trying to focus on the party happening around him, but he couldn’t help staring at the clock on the wall, excitement and dread making his stomach swirl as he watched the clock hands slowly approaching the exact moment he was waiting for.
21:18
…
21:19
…
21:20
…
Only a minute left, sixty seconds and Isak would know.
He would see a name appear on his skin and know there was someone, somewhere in this world that was waiting for him.
Someone who would understand and accept him, with all his fears and doubts, someone who would love him no matter all of that.
His soulmate.
Of course, the reality was often a lot more complicated and a lot less romantic than that. Having a soulmate meant sharing a unique bond with someone but it was not necessarily a fairy tale. Having a relationship and building a life with your soulmate still required work and commitment, it didn’t just happen like by magic. Some people couldn’t bare the strength of a soul bond, sometimes sharing your deepest thoughts and feeling just got too much.
Like it did for his parents. Terje wasn’t strong enough to love and support Marianne after her illness got worse. And so he left her, and Isak.
So maybe Isak closest model when it came to soulmate relationship wasn’t a happy and successful one, and maybe his own “romantic” record so to speak, wasn’t something he looked back on very fondly - between girls he used when he didn’t want people to know he was gay, and meaningless hookups with guys he barely remembered - but still, deep down, Isak had always held on to the hope that he would find his soulmate and that everything would be okay.
*
Tic. Tac.
Tic. Tac.
Tic. Tac.
21:21
For a second, Isak felt like everything froze around him. He couldn’t hear the racket of the party anymore, everything disappeared in a kind of blur. All he could see was the clock pointing to the exact time of his birth.
*
Isak was suddenly startled by someone grabbing his hand.
“Happy birthday sweety.”
“Thanks Mamma.” he smiled but he knew that she could see the turmoil in his head, and that she understood what it was about. Even when he thought he had mastered the art of lying and deceit, she had always been able to read him like an open book.
“Do you feel anything?”
“Um… I’m not sure, not yet, no…” Isak stuttered. But the truth was, he didn’t even know what he was supposed to feel when the mark would appear.
“It will come soon don’t worry.”
She held him a moment and kissed him on the cheek and this time, Isak could feel it was his own hand that trembling in Marianne’s.
*
Minutes passed, then an hour, and another.
Isak tried to enjoy the party with his friends but the only thing he could think about was the lack of any sensation that something had changed in him, that a mark had appeared anywhere and that a bond had formed with someone.
He wanted nothing but to lock himself in the bathroom, stand on front of the mirror and inspect every inch of his body for a mark, a name. Because as he looked at the bare skin of his arms and his neck, all the parts of his body that were not covered with clothes, he still didn’t see anything.
“Heeey birthday boy! Why the long face?”
A very tipsy Eva crashed against him,on the couch and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Hi Eva…”
“What’s wrong Issy? You don’t like your party?” she pouted.
“Yeah I do! Of course I do!! You guys are awesome…”
“But there’s something on your mind I can see…”
“Yeah…”
Isak trailed off, hesitant. He really was so grateful to his friends for doing all that for him and he didn’t want to kill the mood of the night, but then Eva could see right through him and he knew she wouldn’t let him just shrug it off and pretend everything was fine.
“Eva um… What did it feel like, when your mark appeared?”
“Mmh?” she frowned, taking a sip of wine, “oh, you mean my soul mark?”
Isak nodded when she tilted her head up to look at him.
“Well, it’s hard to explain, I guess like a sort of tingle at first… to me it felt like the first rays of sunshine on your skin at the beginning of spring… you know that warmth you’ve been desperately craving for months… it was both exciting and comforting.”
Isak watched Eva as she recalled that moment, a soft smile spreading across her cheeks that were colored by a blush caused both by the alcohol and the memories of that moment. She instinctively brought her hand to the side of her chest, right where Isak knew her mark was.
He hummed pensively before asking, “Did it appear right away?”
“Yeah, like the second of my time of birth… But then, as you may remember, my soulmate had his tongue in my mouth at that very moment so I guess it must have helped” she laughed.
“Yeah, that’s right…” Isak chuckled.
Just a few weeks ago, Eva celebrated her own eighteenth birthday and to absolutely nobody’s surprise, Jonas’ name appeared on her skin that day. Eva and Jonas had been together on and off for years. What was just a teenage fling in the beginning very soon became something a lot stronger, a lot deeper. And even when they fought, even when they broke up and Jonas hooked up with random girls while Eva had more or less of a thing with P.Chris, somehow they knew they would end up together again. Everyone thought so. So when they got seriously back together again a few months before Eva’s birthday, it became evident for everyone that his name would appear on her skin.
Isak was happy that day, he really was. These were the two people he loved most, well with his mom of course, and they would be together and love each other forever. But tonight, he couldn't help feeling like a pang of jealousy as Eva talked about her soulmate. He wasn’t jealous of Eva, not anymore. His crush for Jonas was very long forgotten, but he envied what they had, their bond. And for now, there was still no sign of any soul bond of his own.
“Hey… it’s different for everyone. It will come don’t worry. Maybe your soulmate is a little shy.” Eva winked, then squeezed him in her arms, almost spilling the rest of her glass of wine on his shirt.
“Come on!” she exclaimed, getting up from the couch, “let’s go have a drink!”
They joined their friends who had moved the party outside in the garden and Isak drank and smoked until his body began to feel so numb, if a mark had appeared he would probably not even have felt it.
*
The next morning, Isak tried to hide his massive hangover, smiling as he said goodbye to Marianne before heading back to the kollektive.
“Thanks again for having all of us here Mamma”, he said as he hugged her on the doorstep.
“Well it's not everyday your baby turns 18. Oh, but maybe I can't call you that anymore now…” she chuckled.
“It's alright… you can.”
They stood there a moment longer, just smiling at each other. Marianne looked so happy, peaceful but still, her eyes seemed to be glistening with tears.
“Your friends are very nice, all of them. I am so happy to know that you have these people in your life. I am so grateful for them to have taken such good care of you when I couldn't.” she said, fixing Isak’s collar to deflect attention from her visible emotion.
“Mamma…”
“Don't mind me, I'm being silly.” she waved off, “Go home sweetie and give Eskild a kiss for me, I love that boy.”
“I will, goodbye Mamma.”
Isak gave Marianne a last long hug before he walked away to the nearest tram station.
*
When he got back to the kollektive, Isak immediately crashed on his bed. He was still exhausted from the night before but every time he tried to close his eyes to try and get a little bit more sleep, his mind started whirling back to the the worries he desperately tried to forget the night before. Now that he was somewhat sober, they didn’t let him have a moment of rest.
After tossing and turning in his bed for a while, he eventually got up and stepped in the shower. He stood there for what felt like an hour. The water was certainly way too hot but he just wanted to feel any kind of sensation on his skin, anything, even if it wasn’t what he was desperately craving.
Isak only got out of the shower when his skin had turned red from the warmth of the water and the entire bathroom was so full of steam he could barely see. He wrapped a towel around his waist and wiped his hand across the misty mirror. As he looked at his reflexion, his eyes settled upon the inside of his left forearm, caught by some peculiar lines. At first, Isak thought it was only the glistening of water droplets rolling along his arm, but now that he was looking more closely, he could clearly see a few silvery lines traced on his skin. He looked away from the mirror and down at his arm, running the fingers of his right hand ever so lightly on the lines. At the simple touch, he felt a tingling sensation running along his left arm all the way to his fingertips. It was very soft, nothing like what Eva had described or like the stories he had read about, but it was there.
The name was still unreadable, but Isak was willing to be patient. Soon, he would know.
Soon.
*
But hours passed and Isak still couldn’t decipher the lines on his arm. He spent the entire day staring at the thin silvery lines, looking for any change but only grew more and more frustrated.
His roommates tiptoed around him all day, asking him if there was anything new at first, then just trying to change his mind when they saw how irritable he’d get, but at the end of the day, they just threw each other questioning and worried looks, not knowing what to do to help him anymore.
“Hey baby Jesus, me and Linn are gonna watch a movie, do you wanna…?”
“No thanks” Isak cut Eskild off, “I’m just gonna go to bed, I’m kinda tired.”
“Okay, good night then…” Eskild and Linn watched him head to his bedroom from were they were snuggled up in a blanket on the couch, a bowl of popcorn on their lap.
Isak didn’t lie, he was tired. He felt physically and emotionally drained.
But still, he spent almost the entire night staring at the ceiling, headlights piercing through the darkness everytime a car drove up or down the street.
Why not me?
Why can’t I get a soulmate like everybody else?
Why must I be miserable again? Don’t I deserve love? Happiness?
What have I done to the universe for it to fucking hate me like that?
Isak has already had trouble sleeping for weeks. That night, his insomnia was punctuated by these questions and doubts, battling in his mind and not letting him close his eyes, until the sun rose in the morning.
*
Two weeks later, exhausted by his more and more frequent sleepless nights, and worried by his mark which hadn’t evolved much since it appeared on his arm, Isak decided to go see a doctor, hoping they would give him an explanation for his unreadable soul mark.
The doctor looked at his mark for what felt an hour, she manipulated Isak’s arms with rubber gloves, letting out little pensive hums every now and then. Her eyes were widened ten times behind the large magnifying glass she used to observe Isak’s skin. It made her look like a weird cartoonish character and Isak would have laughed if he wasn’t so terrified of her verdict.
She hummed one last time before pushing the arm of the magnifying glass away and looking straight at Isak with a serious frown on her face.
“Hum… so?” Isak asked, hearing how shaky his voice came out.
“Well, as you may or may not know, it can sometimes happen, even if it is quite rare, that the soul mark appears in a… truncated form, that prevent the bearer to find his soulmate. This can happen for various reasons, if the future soulmate is still too young to form the bond, if they refuse the bond for whatever reasons, or if they… well if they died before the bearer eighteenth birthday.”
Isak suddenly felt like a lump in his throat and tears filling up his eyes, “Do you think he’s…”
“No, Isak, I don’t think that’s the case here. You see when that happens, the lines look kind of... off, faded. See how yours are visibly silvery.”
Isak let out a deep shaky breath, nodding as he looked more closely at the lines on his skin.
“The bond does look alive, but it somehow can’t seem to be able to form on your skin and indicate, even only in parts, the identity of your soulmate. I must admit this is quite unusual.”
“What… what can I do?”
“For now, there is not much you can do, you’ll just have to be patient and hope the bond will grow on his own. But I suggest you come back and see me if the shape of your mark hasn’t changed at all in about a couple of weeks, okay?”
Before he left, she recommended he did some meditation exercises to try and welcome the bond. He nodded absentmindedly as she described the different routines he could adopt, knowing perfectly well there was no way in hell he would start to meditate in the kollektive. If Eskild caught him, he would never hear the end of it.
*
After a few days, he felt it again, that same slightly tingling sensation as the first time the traces appeared. He still couldn’t read the mark but the lines started to look a little less muddled. It seemed to be quite a long name and Isak thought he could distinguish three different parts. Like maybe two small words, and a third longer? It was still hard to tell.
It wasn’t much yet, but still, it filled Isak with hope.
So the day he finally discerned a capital letter, he burst into the kitchen of the kollektive and held out his arm in front of Eskild’s face, feeling his heart pounding in his chest.
“What do you see? There’s a letter right?”
“Um…” Eskild squinted as he looked at the curled line, “Oh yes I can see it! It’s an E, right?”
“Definitely an E.” Linn mumbled, shambling past them to access the fridge.
“Congrats Baby Jesus, I’m so happy for you!! That’s a good start yeah?”
“Yeah…” Isak sighed.
It was a start.
*
That night, Isak laid in his bed with a smile on his face. He couldn’t believe he had spent the last few hours obsessing over a single letter, but he was so happy.
E .
He had watched it for so long, unable to tear his eyes away from it as if he was afraid that it would disappear if he let it out of his sight. So now, even in the almost complete darkness of his bedroom, he could still see it perfectly clearly before his eyes.
His right hand was laying on the mark, and Isak softly stroked the place where he new the letter E . was, feeling himself slowly drifting off to sleep.
Who are you?
Why are you hiding from me?
Is that some kind of guessing game? Is that what you wanna do? Okay, I’ll play then…
E.
What does this E. stand for mmh?
Erik ?
Espen?
Emil?
Egil? Eskild ? Please tell me it’s not Eskild…
Eivind? Or maybe… Even?
Isak suddenly felt a shiver radiate through his entire body from the spot on his skin that he was still rubbing with his thumb. He was short of breath, his heart pounding and he sensed a warmth, almost a weight next to him as if there was someone else lying with him on the bed.
A presence.
His presence, he just knew it.
Even? he asked tentatively.
Another shiver.
Even? Is it really your name? I’m…
"Isak? Is that you?"
Isak opened his eyes and drew in a sharp gasp as he suddenly sat back up on the bed.
What…? How…?
“Even? Even are you here?” he whispered out of breath.
But Isak could feel the presence had disappeared as quickly as it had came.
“No no no… come back!” he pleaded.
“What’s happening? Where are you Even? Where are you?”