I had an idea but I’m not sure I’m going to write it so I’ll throw it out into the void for y’all: PULLEYVERSE SOULMATE AU IN WHICH YOU GET A SYMBOL FOR YOUR SOULMATE (POSSIBLY APPEARS AT THE YOUNGEST’S BIRTH OR GAIN COLOUR WHEN YOU FIRST MEET) (SPOILERS FOR pretty much ALL PULLEYVERSE NOVELS) (feel free to use and write/draw/etcetera but please tell/link me because I WANT TO SEE)
Thaniel Steepleton who’s born with a mark spanning from shoulder to calf, a mess of gears and clocks and octopus legs (???) and lemons and random objects (that suddenly become clear the more time he spends with Mori because they relate to his clairvoyance) (his mark takes up so much of his skin because isn’t he just an ordinary man, isn’t Mori his everything?) (he gains a little lightbulb for Six once they “adopt” (cough kidnap cough) her and it moves around wherever she wants; even Mori’s mark makes way for hers because isn’t he the man who would do anything for those he loves?)
Keita Mori who doesn’t get his mark until decades after his birth but who isn’t bothered by it because he knows his soulmate already, and when it comes it’s morse code and piano keys and a single pocketwatch on a chain over his heart (his mark is only over his heart (and small in comparison to Thaniel’s) because hasn’t he held the memories of Thaniel close to his chest ever since he’s been alive, isn’t he the reason he loves and the reason he still lives? His beating heart personified?) (His mark for Six is also a little lightbulb that usually hangs behind his ear on a chain until she decides to make a game of it when she’s bored and rolls a die to decide where it will move next)
Merrick Tremayne who thinks he’s soulmate-less for the first several years of his life before he realises that there’s a spot of grey on the bottom of one of his feet; as he ages it grows up his leg and darkens in colour. He thinks it’s a coincdence that it’s the leg that gets crippled (even if twelve-year-old Keita couldn’t bear looking at it) until decades later Mori confesses that it was the only way to stop him from running after Clem. The last day he ever spends with Raphael it is indistinguishable from true stone; he dies with a rosary held in grey hands.
Raphael who is bonded with the whole Tremayne bloodline; he has a mark for Harry and then one for Merrick’s father (whose name I forgot) and then one for Merrick himself (the marks disappear when the person dies, so sometimes they overlap when father and son are both alive, but how much of it does Raphael really witness, because of his “sleep paralysis”?); he ends with all of them carved into his skin when he fully becomes a markayuq and they all form one big picture (insects and spiders for Harry, tree bark Merrick’s dad (relating to the storybook and the sketch of Raphael in the tree), the leaves of whitewood trees for Merrick)
Missouri Kite with the mark of a lighthouse and two pillars that bursts into colour when he meets Jem Castlereagh, that instantly loses colour and recolours when Jem turns into Joe Tournier, and loses colour again when Joe leaves. Until he finds Joe Zhang, and he never loses colour again.
Joe Tournier with the mark of a lighthouse and two pillars but is confused as to why it’s coloured (he figures that he met them when he was young or something, or tries to reason with himself that it’s Alice’s); Jem Castlereagh knowing immediately once he meets Kite; and Joe Zhang, who learns he has the words Dearest Joe, Come home, if you remember. M branded into his mind, and finally decides that he can’t leave Kite again
Konstantin Shenkov with rusty streaks the backs of his hands, tinged with frostbite, and tiny text wrapping around his wrists that he can only read with a magnifying glass (it’s some stuff about nuclear things that he thinks came straight out of a textbook and doesn’t fully understand until he meets Valery)
Valery Kolkhanov with all of his veins and arteries lined in black; they all end on his back in an untangleable knot (he traces them and retraces them with his fingers and it’s what gets him through prison, the small joy of knowing that his soulmate is coded into his blood, even if he’ll only be a burden to them) (he doesn’t notice until Shenkov notices but in the knot on his back are the names of Shenkov’s children)
