Derek Hale was born without any soulmate marks. It’s not unusual for some people to have soulmates younger than they are, but as soon as Derek was aware of the existence of Soulmarks he woke up every day to check if something had appeared on his skin.
He was 5 years old when it happened. He woke up in the middle of the night, his left wrist burning as if a million tiny needles were piercing his skin. Derek watched with awe as the lines appeared on his skin, it looked like a small constellation. If he’d seen it in the sky, he would’ve guessed there was a story behind it.
He called for his mother when the pain didn’t stop immediately. Was it supposed to hurt like that? Maybe magic was being done on him.
“In a way, it’s a kind of magic,” she explained when he calmed down. “You will understand it when you meet your soulmate.”
From that day onward, every time he got a glimpse of someone’s Soulmark he wondered if they had the twin to his own, even when his mother told him his soulmate was still a baby.
A little over a year later, a second Mark appeared on his left wrist. When he told his mother, she smiled at him.
“Some people are fortunate enough to have more than one soulmate,” she said. “Sometimes another person comes into your life and they become important enough to make themselves at home under your skin.”
Derek didn’t question it, after all, his mother always had the answers.
Time passed while Derek became less interested about Soulmarks, but it was as if everyone else was obsessed with finding their soulmate as soon as possible. It was exhausting, enough to make him avoid people at all costs.
By the time he was out of high school, he was convinced his Soulmarks were a mistake. After all, the woman who plagued his nightmares had supposedly had the same Mark Derek had on his left wrist. Derek didn’t question it, even when he knew she was older than him and by all the rules he was taught, that couldn’t be possible. But Kate was beautiful and he thought she was smart and mysterious, so he believed her. Kate had obviously lied to him and it led to most of his family being killed.
He would always blame his Soulmark for that.
Lydia Martin was born with a Soulmark, but before she turned two years old, she had a beautiful second Mark forming on her left wrist.
Once she was old enough to understand what Soulmarks mean, she spent entire afternoons reading her dad’s books trying to find examples of multiple soulmates but there were none. Her curiosity only grew as she did, and by the time Lydia was sixteen she had amassed a lot of knowledge in Soulbonds and how they might relate to her.
She found that there was a lot of Soul magic that could be performed to find her soulmates, but it was generally frowned upon. If it was meant to be, it was meant to be, right?
It was after her high school graduation party that she decided to take her chances and try to locate her soulmates. They had to be around her age anyway, so she would love to meet them before she left for Stanford and they left for wherever they would be going without her.
She got her supplies ready, sat down under the moonlight and made a cut just above her Marks. A cold breeze blew through her when she bled on the pattern she drew on the floor making the hair at the back of her arms stand up. Suddenly, she felt a tug in her left wrist and images flooded her mind: a house on fire, a blonde woman who looked older than her, a child crying as his father embraced him, a blue, tattered jeep she recognized from school, then pain, pain and more pain.
Lydia screamed.
Stiles Stilinski was born with two Soulmarks. His parents never made a big deal about it, instead, they told him it was possible he’d find a soulmate first and then, later in life, he’d find someone else. For them, it had been easy: they each only had one Mark and they found each other when they were very young, young enough that it was all they knew.
At first, Stiles thought his best friend Scott would be one of his soulmates. It made sense, they’d been best friends since second grade and Scott’s Mark looked similar to one of Stiles’ own. However, shortly after Scott turned sixteen, a new Mark appeared on both of their wrists; two lines joined by small dot in the center that were mirrors of each other.
Scott’s boss, a veterinarian who had a special interest in Soulbonds, told them they had these because their lives had become so intertwined with each other that they had essentially chosen each other as soulmates.
For Stiles, this was news. He didn’t know you could choose a soulmate. Stiles thought the whole point of it all was not having to choose, but apparently everyone could do it. It wasn’t common because most people were wired to develop a romantic relationship and never fed platonic relationships that could be just as rich.
The summer after his high school graduation was the first time he felt a tug from his left wrist. In his restless research about Soulbonds he had discovered that some people could call on their soulmates in moments of need but he always thought it was a load of bullshit. He and Scott had tried multiple times to see if it would work, yet they never got it to work.
Now, Stiles thought that maybe it only worked when soulmates were apart, or maybe the distress had to be so big that they couldn’t help sending a signal through the Soulbond.
Without having a way to prove his hypothesis, that night he went to bed thinking of his soulmates and where they could be. Stiles tossed and turned in his bed but it was impossible for him to actually sleep, he couldn’t stop thinking about them and how they were doing.
Eventually, he drifted off to a restless sleep, plagued by images of a fire and a woman screaming.
Derek was working on a beautiful camaro that looked a lot like Laura’s, except it was a more recent make, when the redhead woman entered the shop.
“Hi, I got a flat tire and this was the closest shop I could get towed to,” she started.
He did a double take when he saw her. She felt familiar but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “Sure, I’ll be right over.”
He took a rag from his back pocket and cleaned the oil from his hands before following her outside, where the tow was lowering the car to the ground.
“I can do this now if you want to,” he offered.
“Really? I thought you’d be busy with something else,” she replied.
“I was, but this won’t take long.”
“God, thank you so much! I haven’t been home in a year and the last thing I want to hear is my mother complaining that I don’t take good care of my car. She’s insufferable like all mothers are.”
Derek smiled at her. “I wouldn’t know, my mother was lovely.”
“I’m sorry I—”
“It’s okay. I forget that not everyone knows about the Hale fire.”
“Oh. Now I feel bad for bringing it up.”
Derek huffed a laugh in a way he hadn’t done in years. “You’re okay.”
He went to work on Lydia’s tire replacement, while she asked all kinds of questions like if he liked to work as a mechanic or whether or not he was single. When he answered yes to the last one, she paused for a moment. Then, without any warning, she said “I think we might be soulmates.”
Derek’s whole world stopped for a second.
Absentmindedly, his eyes went to his left wrist, where the two constellation marks sat. He hadn’t thought about them in years, convinced that there was something wrong with him, that either his soulmates had died or they never existed to begin with.
Slowly, he stood up from his crouch and looked at the woman once again. “How do you know?”
“I may have done some Soul Searching magic, but I promise I never got inside your head or anyone else’s.”
“I didn’t think Soul Searching was a thing.”
“It took me a couple of years to master,” she admitted.
Derek’s wrist felt hot, making him distractedly touch his Marks with the other hand but his skin wasn’t burning up. He looked directly at the woman when he asked, “how long have you been trying?”
“Five years.” Derek shook his head, disbelieving. “If I had known you were in Beacon Hills this whole time I wouldn’t have moved to the Bay Area.”
“So the flat tire was a con to get to talk to me or something?”
“You make it sound so childish… but no, I really got a flat tire and I thought I might as well reach out.” She paused for a moment, her green eyes evaluating. “Can I see it? Your Mark?”
Derek extended his arm and she took it without hesitation. Her brows furrowed when she saw the dark lines that marked his skin. “You have two Marks.”
“My mother used to say it’s unusual but it happens. Someone could have another soulmate later in life or a friend might become one after knowing each other long enough. I don’t know, I’ve forgotten a lot of the stories she used to tell.”
“No, you don’t get it,” she shook her head, then looked at him with amazement. “We have the same two Marks.”
Derek’s eyes went to their wrists. True to her word, the same two patterns stood out in black ink.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“That there’s someone else we have to meet and I know exactly where to go.”
After Derek finished changing her tire, he called Laura to tell her he was closing the shop to get lunch with his soulmate. Laura screeched on the other side of the line and started babbling about meeting them, but Derek hung up on her before she started the wedding planning.
Lydia found out from her best friend Allison that Stiles was in town visiting his father. Ever since that botched Soul Searching spell she did after her graduation, she had known one of the people she was Soulbound to was Stiles. She didn’t seek him out then because a tiny part of her hoped she was wrong, that her real soulmate was someone living in a big city far away from where she grew up.
Stiles wasn’t the problem, the problem was that it was statistically improbable that her soulmates were in the same town she had lived her whole life and it didn’t sit right with her. She continued searching, kept looking for that someone else who would bring them all together, but it was an exercise in futility. It was almost as if that third didn’t want to be found.
One day, though, after she had tired herself with a new, stronger spell, she got a glimpse of their third working in an auto shop. She didn’t immediately recognize the place, but when she told Allison about it, she’d said “I don’t know, Lyds. Could be the Hale place? There’s not many shops like that in Beacon Hills anyway.”
Lydia told Derek the truth, she didn’t get a flat tire on purpose, but she did tell the tow where to take her.
Once she saw Derek, she knew it was him. She would’ve preferred having convinced Stiles first, to have him at her back, but the moment she saw him something clicked into place inside of her. He felt familiar, as if they’d known each other in another life.
They went together for lunch, where she had to work on her self control to avoid asking the million questions she had.
It was easy, sitting down with him, talking to each other without a care in the world. She imagined this is what her mother had felt with her dad when they were together: warmth that spread from the center of her heart all over her body, a feeling of safety and joy that she couldn’t keep in check.
Lydia wondered what Stiles was doing while he was in town when his father was working. She hoped he wasn’t feeling alone.
Lydia spared a thought for the idea of calling Stiles and have him meet them here, wondering if he’d doubt that they’re all Soulbound together, but quickly let it go
Stiles woke up from his nap feeling like shit.
He stayed up late playing video games with Scott and now that he wasn’t in college he simply couldn’t go through the day after an all-nighter without taking a nap or two. However, naps were double-edged swords and just as he could wake up feeling refreshed, he could also wake up feeling like death warmed over. This was one of the second days.
Because there was no way he could cook in his state, he drove to a diner that his father loved with the intention of buying a couple of burgers and some curly fries. Once he arrived though, he almost fell on his face.
Lydia Martin and Derek Hale were sitting in a booth together, clearly immersed in deep conversation. It was an image out of his wildest dreams: the two people he’d had a crush on at some point in his life were looking at each other as if they couldn’t avoid it.
Stiles knew a Soulbound stare when he saw one; he’d seen it enough times with Scott and Allison, he could recognize it anywhere. He wondered if this was the first time they realized what they were to each other. If that were the case, Stiles would rather be anywhere than here.
He was about to leave, knowing he was staring, when Lydia’s eyes caught him. Feeling guilty, he exited the diner as swiftly as possible, double-timing it to his jeep.
“Stiles! Wait!” she called.
Stiles turned around to find them both coming up to him. Great. So he’d have to pretend to be normal about this.
“Lydia! Long time no see! Since high school if I recall correctly.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I was really into Soul Searching for a while. It kinda got away from me,” she said, glancing at Derek. “It turns out I was looking in the wrong places.”
Stiles’ stomach tightened. He was a grown man, damn it, he would not pine after his high school crush.
“I’m happy for you,” he said. Turning to Derek, he added, “I assume you’re the lucky guy.”
“Yeah, about that…” Derek trailed off looking at Lydia.
“Stiles, can I see your wrist?”
Stiles froze. You didn’t ask to see someone’s Soulmark for no reason. “Why?”
“Just ‘cause. Please?”
Stiles unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt, rolling it back so she could look at it.
“You have three Marks,” she sounded puzzled.
“Yeah, this one”—he touched the Mark he was talking about—“this is Scott. Apparently you can gain Marks when you make your own soulmates. It’s a whole thing, it’s not very interesting.”
“So, you got two other Marks.”
Stiles drew his hand away from Lydia’s grasp. “Yeah, I haven’t met them yet, so there’s not much to talk about.”
“Stiles. Give me your hand,” she commanded, taking Derek’s left hand too. “Look.”
If Stiles was in a cartoon, his jaw would’ve dropped to the floor. Identical Marks. The three of them had the exact same three lines crossing each other.
“What the—”
Stiles had heard about people with two soulmates but they usually weren’t all Soulbound to one another. This was rare even for people with multiple Marks.
“Do you wanna come in and have lunch with us?” Lydia asked.
Stiles looked up from their wrists then back at their hands, then he smiled. Lydia and Derek smiled back at him. Looking at him, Derek tilted his head toward the diner in invitation.
“Alright, let’s have lunch.”