Chapter Text
At twelve, Clarke Griffin discovered she had a soulmate.
At sixteen, she decided to never speak to them.
She wasn't even sure when the words, white and faint against her fair complexion, first settled on her skin. Voxnota—a name inherited from dead Romans translating deader Greeks—appeared too rarely and too randomly for anyone to anxiously await their arrival, let alone little girls with more important matters to consider. Like memorizing her multiplication tables or wondering when her Hogwarts letter would arrive. That Clarke's words ran along the nape of her neck, under a heavy curtain of curls, didn’t help matters. It was like she wasn't supposed to find them.
To be fair, she didn't. Wells did. He’d been guilted into braiding her hair after trying to copy one of Princess Leia’s hairstyles from Empire Strikes Back herself had reduced Clarke nearly to tears.
When he’d finished the crown, his fingers brushed against the back of her neck, sending Clarke cringing and wiggling away in breathless giggles.
“That tickles!” she’d protested as Wells continued to run his fingers over the spot.
“I’m trying to read! Stop squirming!”
Clarke went still, heart stuttering behind her sternum. Wells couldn't mean the tag on her shirt. “Read?”
“Yeah. You never told me you had Voxnota.” The Latin fell heavy from his mouth, unwieldy and strange. His voice was reproachful, a little hurt, and if Clarke’s world weren’t suddenly tilting on its axis, she would feel more sympathy for her best friend. She would say something reassuring and watch the doubt fade from his face.
As it was, Clarke suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the universe in all its infinities was suddenly split wide open for her to peer into. Complete understanding seemed just a hairsbreadth away.
All because she had a soulmate.
Immediately, Clarke began reading everything she could get her hands on. Because that was how she had been taught to confront things she didn't understand. And Clarke certainly did not understand Voxnota or the soulmates they represented.
She felt strangely guilty not asking her parents for help, but it was hard to believe two people without soulmates could offer advice about hers. Initially, Clarke asked her school librarian for reading material, but all she got in return were sappy romance novels and picture books. That wasn't going to cut it. So, she got up after midnight to search the internet for scientific studies on the phenomenon. Slogging her way through dense jargon and dry reports like Geographic Dispersion as it Effects the Manifestation of Voxnota or Variations in Voxnotae as a Function of Age did not confer the thrill of discovery that she'd wanted. So, Clarke quickly moved on to chatrooms and message boards to ask the questions she hadn't yet found answers for.
At twelve, soulmates still sounded like a wild, romantic adventure. (And Clarke would never allow herself to be less than 100% prepared for an adventure.)
That didn’t mean that they were.
The first thing she really learned in those chatrooms: Having a soulmate doesn’t guarantee anything.
(Every one of those chatrooms was full of people hoping. Hoping that someone was out there waiting. Hoping to be one of the lucky few, and if they weren't, well then maybe they could sigh over the romance of other people's lives. But for every happy ending, it was like there were four that ended in disaster. Heartbreak of all shapes and sizes spilled over the internet and into an impressionable girl's subconscious. It was easy to brush off those stories as she read, but harder to forget them.)
Her words didn’t mean she was meant to meet the person to say them or ride off into the sunset for her fairy tale happy ending. No, they just meant that someone was out there in the world who could understand her better than anyone else. Someone who was made to do so.
(And that was less comforting than it was daunting. At twelve, Clarke hardly knew herself. The way her opinions and interests changed from day to day was enough to give her whiplash. The thought that someone might know her better than she did felt intrusive and terrifying, worse than those videos they had to watch in Sex Ed.)
And anyway, just because she had the words didn’t mean she would ever meet the person to say them. No one had discovered the why behind Vox, let alone the timing of them. Some people were born with them, a tiny tattoo to carry around forever, while others grew them late in life, just a day or even hours before they were to be spoken. Theories suggested that Voxnota manifested when it became a near certainty that soulmates would cross paths. There were even urban legends about marks disappearing in the wake of bad behavior. But what were myths and theories to a girl who wanted answers?
Honestly, the definite uncertainty was somehow more comforting. Clarke could, grudgingly, accept the fact that she might never hear her words. It was harder to swallow that she was supposed to, but might not anyway.
After all, this kiss of favor from the universe bloomed across the skin of less than half of the world. Everyone else had to make do with intuition and the advice of over-involved friends when making their romantic choices. There was nothing to say that she couldn't be perfectly happy with someone other than her soulmate if she chose. Plenty of people created rich, fulfilling lives without a cosmically appointed partner. Clarke could definitely be one of them.
So, no. A soulmate was no guarantee. After all, that kind of immediate, mysterious intimacy could lead to either dizzying heights or traumatic depths. Why risk the highs with such a very long way to fall?
Which is exactly what Clarke asked herself at sixteen, with the safe world she'd always known razed to the ground.
In the end, it was an easy decision. At the time, it made sense, it was even right. She wasn't going to give anyone else the power to break her heart again. If there was even a heart left to break.
(Well, it was a long story, and one she didn't like thinking about, let alone discussing. The short of it: Abby Griffin sold Jake Griffin up the river for threatening to turn whistleblower. He turned up dead in what the police deemed a mugging gone wrong, but Clarke knew better. She knew what her father had discovered and that her mother wanted him to keep it to himself. Abby got a promotion and Clarke got sent to boarding school.)
That was why she decided to never speak to her soulmate.
It was a logical conclusion, she'd tell herself in the coming years. If she ever met them and said the words on their skin, she would be well and truly trapped; it was one thing to have the words and another to actually hear them. If her soulmate never heard their Voxnota, Clarke wouldn’t be bound by a promise the universe had made on her behalf. She wouldn't spend the rest of her life resenting a connection she'd never asked for in the first place. Clarke didn't think she could take being connected to just one more person who could hurt her in the worst way possible.
After all, her mother didn’t need to be her father’s soulmate to betray him. She ruined his life just fine on her own.
Being Clarke Griffin, she wasn't about to leave something so important up to chance. Bad enough that fate had saddled her with this unknown quantity, she couldn't trust that fate would then leave her to her own devices. In the end, she did what she did best and made a game plan.
Ideally, she would never even meet the person to say her words. She could accept that her soulmate existed, as long as they weren't existing anywhere near her. Of course, Clarke couldn't control everything, much as she tried, and so contingencies had to be put in place. All that research as an excited twelve-year-old finally paid off. Inadvertently, Clarke had learned all the ways not to greet a potential soulmate from cautionary tales, warnings to help people avoid unnecessary heartache. And she would be following the spirit, if not the letter, of those guidelines.
- Never initiate conversations with strangers. When absolutely necessary, stick to generic greetings.
- Never include her name in an introduction. No amount of argument is going to convince someone with "Hi, my name is Clarke" etched in their skin that she is not their soulmate.
- When possible, ask someone else for an introduction or direct comments through another person. In some weird quirk of destiny,Voxnota were always the first thing that a soulmate said directly to their other half. At least destiny had the decency to value specificity.
- Stick to written communication. Outside of people with hearing or speech impediments, Voxnota were always spoken.
- Avoid situations in which any of these rules would be put to use.
It made for a pretty lonely existence, but in those first few years after her father's death, Clarke wanted to be lonely. It was better than the alternative.
She was generally cordial with the girls at boarding school, and learned to coast by on reserved acquaintances until graduation. It wasn't as if she didn't know everyone called her "Ice Queen" behind her back. As far as insults went, it was deeply unimaginative but hurtful all the same, only widening the distance between Clarke and her classmates. It certainly didn't make her all that eager to play nice and make friends.
Thankfully, things started to change when she graduated and left for college.
No woman is an island, and while Clarke Griffin was often the exception to a rule, this was not one of those cases. Gradually, she learned how to make friends, (More accurately, she had friendship forced upon her until she finally gave in, but: semantics.) relaxing her strict standards for total social insulation. Where was the harm when she knew they weren’t her soulmate?
More importantly, how could she possibly regret befriending the likes of Monty Green or Raven Reyes? Or Harper or Lincoln or Jasper?
She couldn't.
Still, every time Clarke entertained thoughts about meeting her soul mate and maybe not running, maybe sealing whatever deal fate had set them, something sent her reeling. Wells and Finn and Lexa all proved that she'd had more than enough heartbreak to last her a lifetime. She wouldn't be inviting any more in. At twenty, she was as firm in her desire to never even meet her soulmate as she had been at sixteen. She’d been burned enough to be wary of regular romance, leave off supernaturally preordained ones.
Which, of course, meant it was high time for her soulmate to drop in and ruin everything.