Lumity Oneshots

An Imprint of Love

Luz had always dreamed of having a soulmate, ever since she was a little kid. One of her favourite stories—other than The Good Witch Azura, of course—was how her parents had figured out that they were soulmates. She would eagerly drink up their words as they outlined how they had accidentally bumped shoulders, and stopped to apologize long enough to realize that their marks had turned from a dull black to a mosaic of colour.

After they had told her the story, her mama would rub her thumb over Luz's soulmate mark, a black hand-shaped mark on her left cheek, and tell her about how the dark shape there represented the place her soulmate would touch her for the first time. She would explain how, when her soulmate touched that place, it would light up with bright colours to show that they had found each other.

Her dad would then intervene, ruffling her hair and telling her that whoever her soulmate was was very lucky to have Luz as a soulmate, and she'd giggle at his words, excited and impatient to meet them.

It was only when she was in middle school that she began to question why her mark was on her cheek. She would come home from school with a wounded ego from kids laughing at her, telling her that her soulmate must hate her if the first way they touched was them slapping her. She would stare at herself in the mirror, wondering why she was so unlikeable that the person who she was meant to be with decided to hit her as soon as they met. She would stare at her cheek, at the spot that was supposed to be a reminder that someone loved her; the spot that became uglier to her each day. Eventually, she started to cover it up with makeup to avoid getting teased about it every day.

She wasn't expecting anything to change when she moved schools. Well, maybe she wanted them to, but she was sixteen already and still didn't have an inkling about who her soulmate was. She saw it everywhere: couples with rainbow staining their intertwined hands, their shoulders, their arms. Smiling at each other lovingly, leaning against each other, listening to each other talk with hearts in their eyes. Luz wanted to have someone, friend or more, to do that with too.

Her first day of school went better than she expected it to. She made two friends, Willow and Gus, who were just as funny and odd as she was. It was refreshing and so, so nice to finally have people to talk to who understood her. The concept that people actually wanted to be around her was strange at first, so much so that she half-expected them to decide one day that they didn't want to be her friends after all. But they didn't. They stayed, and they laughed, and talked, and hugged her as if she was just as special to them as they were to her. Maybe she was.

Approximately two weeks after they met, the three of them were talking at lunch when the topic moved to soulmates. Willow showed Luz her mark, which covered her right palm and the front of her fingers. It glowed radiantly, showing off its colours. Gus, in turn, revealed his own rainbow soulmate mark, a hand shape near the back of his left shoulder. The two talked about how they had met when they were ten and twelve respectively, and discovered they were soulmates soon after.

Luz glanced back and forth between them, surprised at this information. "Oh, are you two together?"

Willow and Gus exchanged a glance before turning back to her, grinning. "Nope," Willow said, giggling.

"We're friend soulmates," Gus added, shrugging as he gave his friend a fond smile.

"Oh. Cool," Luz replied. "I didn't know that was a thing."

"Yeah. It was kinda hard to figure out at first, cause we thought we were gonna fall in love at some point or something," Gus said.

"But after a while we realized that platonic soulmates exist too, and after that it was much more comfortable for both of us," Willow finished.