Written In The Stars

Chapter 1: Luck

Park Chaeyoung is a lucky girl.

She knows this to be true for a lot of reasons. She's lucky to have her chaotic, embarrassing, and utterly devoted family, who tease her and support her and give her a place to belong. When she's in tenth grade there's a fire in the kitchen of their house that her parents manage to escape unharmed, so she has no illusions about exactly how lucky she is to have an aunt that takes them in.

She is fortunate to have (at least so she's been told) 'pleasing features and sharp eyes', and combined with her natural body shape this helps her make it through high school relatively unscathed by the cruelties some of the other kids suffer at the hands of their peers.

She's been blessed with a deep passion for music and learns easily, which means she ends up graduating somewhere near the top of her class. She's too much of an introvert to be considered for valedictorian but she's popular enough that she's never lonely, her dance club providing a natural pool of friendship that she dips into when she feels the need. At a dance in her final year she screws up her courage and gives her first kiss to a sweet girl named Suzy. Luckily, she kisses back.

She works hard to try and deserve all her good fortune. She never misses dance practice, always studies for tests, and brings Suzy a stuffed bunny for her birthday. She leaves for college in the fall, watching Suzy through her rear-view mirror as she waves goodbye, bright autumn leaves whirling around her. She'd been accepted to a different institution, so they'd agreed, amicably, to part. Their hearts are both a little bruised, but not broken by any means, and it's very mutual and low-drama. A lot of Chaeyoung's friends are dealing with painful break-ups or the prospect of unfulfilling long-distance relationships. Not so, for Chaeyoung. She thinks again about how lucky she is as she drives down the freeway, leaving Gwacheon City behind as she speeds into her future.

In college she double majors in Surgical Medicine and Fine Art, because she can also draw.

Like, really, really draw.
(She's such a fucking lucky girl.)

Every spare minute not spent on a practice room or watching netflix is spent curled up with her sketchbook and a pencil or some charcoal, spilling the thoughts and feelings that her teenage self still struggles to articulate out onto paper, giving them form and texture and life. It's her catharsis.

Her roommate, a 'cute and sexy' girl called Lisa who brings home a different girl every week, laughs at her for being a surly, tortured artist, and Chaeyoung rolls her eyes and laughs along, although it couldn't be further from the truth.

She's not surly; she's selective.

She's not tortured; she's waiting.

She waits because there's someone out there who's right and perfect and hers, and she doesn't want to settle for less.

She knows this because she's among the small percentage of the population born with a soul mark. Her family knows, but she doesn't tell her friends, preferring to cradle the knowledge close to her chest, protecting it, cherishing it. She wants it to be something just she and the person with the matching mark share; something purely theirs.

So she studies and draws and watches tv and reads, and occasionally goes for coffee or drinks with perfectly nice people, but all the while, she waits.

The odds of meeting her soul-match aren't all that great, she knows. A blessed minority of people have marks, so finding the one person out there that's destined just for you... It seems like it should be impossible. But Chaeyoung just has this feeling. And besides, she's always been so lucky.

She's even lucky to have a mark this beautiful, she thinks. It's become her habit to smooth her fingers over it when she has a moment of privacy, letting herself imagine, after a shower or while she lies in bed at night, how it might feel under the trailing, tender fingertips of her soul-match. The mark has been part of her since birth, a scrunched-up collection of speckles and dots that has unfurled as she's grown and now stretches over the flare of her thigh, right under the juncture where it meets her hip.