Multi-Fandom One-Shots Part 2

look up and you'll see (just how much you mean to me) - Rini

Soul marks show up in kindergarten; all the kids get the day off to be with their families, so that they can all learn about whatever new, fascinating addition has been made to the fabric of their lives.

Nina wakes her moms at the crack of dawn and begs them to look at her and tell her if they've noticed any changes in her- she's hoping for the same beautiful, looping cursive that spells out her moms' names on each of their wrists, but she'll take a timer, or a drawing, or some other text, or anything. She hasn't noticed anything different about herself yet; no changes in any of her senses, no strange dreams, no voices in her head. So, it can't be one of those. It has to be physical then, right? That's what she asks her moms, who just chuckle and tell her to go back to bed. Her soul mark will appear at some point in the day, they promise. Nina huffs but obeys; tiny feet carry a tiny girl back to a bedroom painted with pink skies and fluffy white clouds.

Nina is 6 years old; bright, inquisitive, and adorable with brown hair up in pigtails and a toothy grin with a gap or two in it. She doesn't know anything about love, or destiny, or fate, but she knows that her older cousin got his soul mark two years ago and Nina has been jealous ever since, especially since his soul mark resides in the colors of his eyes, which change to reflect the mood his soulmate is in. More than anything else, Nina knows that her moms love each other the most- after her, of course- and it's thanks to their soul marks. If love means sorbetes that Mama C buys her on Sundays and Mama D's kisses on the cheek every morning when she wakes her up for school, then Nina would very much like to have it.

At some point in between morning cartoons and lunch, a curious, gauzy thing appears above Nina's head. Dana is the first one to notice; she claps a hand over her mouth in a silent gasp and shakes her wife's shoulder, pointing to the thing floating above Nina's head. It almost looks like a screen- square-shaped, semi-transparent, tinged with gray, and just about the width of Nina's shoulders.

"Nina, sweetie?" Carol sits down next to her daughter, who had been busy assigning different soul marks to her dolls.

"Yes, Mama C?"

Dana comes to sit down on Nina's other side. Joyfully, she points upwards. "Look up, honey. You got your soul mark."

Nina shrieks and snaps her head up so hard that Carol momentarily wonders about whiplash, but then her daughter's excited babble about soul marks and Mamas, what do you think it means? drowns out everything else.

Nina keeps her eyes trained above her head for the rest of the day, but nothing changes in the square above her head. Her hand passes cleanly through it when she tries to touch it, and she almost wants to complain about how boring this is, after the initial excitement of finally getting her soulmark.

Right before bed, Nina gathers up all of her mental power (and physical- her little fists clench and her face screws up in utmost concentration) and yells in her head, as loud as she can, MY NAME IS NINA! After that, she falls into her bed, exhausted and ready to just forget this whole soulmate business until the next business day. Just as her eyes are beginning to grow heavy, MY NAME IS RICHARD! echoes through her head, and she bolts upright in bed, her gaze shooting straight up. There, in the square above her head, is a blue sky and a beaming yellow sun. Clouds dot the sky in strange shapes; Nina has to squint before she realizes that they're letters. HI NINI is written in the sky in the form of clouds; how did that happen? Nina concentrates very hard and tries to imagine what the sky looks like for her right now: velvety dark and sprinkled with stars. She tries to move around the stars to form the letters, HI RICHARD, but there aren't enough stars in her mental image of the sky, and she ends up going with HI RICKY and hopes that her soulmate is okay with the nickname. Perhaps he had even had a similar problem with shaping the clouds into words; after all, where else could "Nini" have come from?