On the night of Dean’s seventeenth birthday, he feels a searing pain on his right wrist, spiraling out from the veins and building its way up to the crook of his elbow. There’s fire in his blood and metal in his saliva as he watches the inky tendrils make their way across his skin, fading into existence in an unearthly way.
As he watches the blue and ebony patterns brand themselves onto the sensitive skin below his palm, he feels his mouth go dry and all he can think is how unnerving it is, being permanently tied to love without getting a say.
It takes fourteen minutes and forty-eight seconds for it to finish, and by the end his knuckles are white and his eyes are scrunched so tightly that his cheeks ache when he finally begins to relax. His arm feels like it’s been set ablaze and he’s scared to look at it, fearing what he’ll find there. It feels like once he glimpses it, there’s no going back.
Unable to stop himself, he turns his wrist over- and feels his lips part in surprise, because oh, it’s beautiful.
He’s seen his fair share of soulmate bonding tattoos: his mother’s was yellow and black with rough edges but warm, happy insides; his father had a light aqua one, with swirls that radiated the impression of kindness, comfort. As a child, Dean spent hours studying them, noting the softness of John’s, the wavering loyalty but overall love and care in Mary’s, and belatedly realized that each tattoo captures the bare essence of one’s partner entirely.
Dean’s, though- his is unlike any tattoo he’s ever seen, even unlike the stylish and complicated ones promoted in the magazines, full of shimmering lines and curving edges. No, Dean’s is made up of the simplicity of humanity. Sky blue fades into navy, washes into purple and turns to black. White vines curl their way through the design, and blank blotches tuck into the corners. It looks like the night sky, the heavens, his skin a canvas yielding a masterpiece of falling stars and melting skies.
His fingers ghost along the tattoo as he stares at his arm in awe. The skin is raw, but it’ll heal quickly, he knows. For the time being, he has to take everything in, put names to the emotions swirling in his stomach and heart.
He presses the tips of his fingers against the foreign symbols at the bottom, where the ink stops at the midway point of his arm. His breath catches when he sees the name written in English under the elaborate language, the name of his soulmate, his other half, his better half:
Castiel.
