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Veritas Ratio is born with a soulmark in a language he cannot read.
Surprisingly enough, this is not that uncommon. His mothers have soulmarks in different languages, for example—after all, given how many languages are part of the vast cosmos humanity calls home, it’s not unheard of for people to have had the synesthesia beacon turned off the moment when they fell in love with their soulmate, leading to the soulmark being conveyed in their native tongue. Soulmarks in a language other than the common one are unique, certainly, but not a cause for concern.
But Ratio—he decides he likes going by Ratio when he’s six years old, much to his parents’ chagrin—has a soulmark that is not in a language, per se. It’s not until he’s about six years old, right around the time he settles on Ratio as a nickname, that he even starts looking into it. He has a conversation about it with his mother, and she narrows her eyes and says, “I think I’ve seen that alphabet recently, in a colleague’s work paper,” and by the next day they’ve worked out that little Ratio’s soulmark is written in the Interastral Phonetic Alphabet.
He learns to say it, of course, works tirelessly at it with his mother and the infinite wealth of knowledge she has at her disposal, working for an IPC-affiliated university. Even so, not one of the members of their family of geniuses (including now seven-year-old Ratio, of course) is able to piece together what language it hails from.
Kamé hi šukar ene londo latxo. It is the closest they can get to writing it down, even though the pronunciation Ratio has been given matches no language on record. Some are close—his mother proposes that it could be a distinct dialect—but even then, why would it be in IAPA when it could just be written in that language?
It’s his mom who eventually floats the idea, as she’s cooking dinner while a young Ratio and his mother pore over texts at the dinner table. “What if it’s not a written language?” she suggests, and his mother slumps against the table, muttering something about not figuring that out sooner.
Even though that’s all he’s really able to discern about his soulmark in his early childhood, that’s fine. Ratio enjoys his unique soulmark, in all honesty, because it makes him stand out. Even though he’s not very popular, the other kids still think it’s interesting, the ones with Galactic Common, the language of the IPC, scrawled across their arms. As they get older, though, the other kids in Ratio’s classes begin to use it as a weapon. They insult Ratio plenty—Ratio’s used to that, he’s been insulted for being weird practically his whole life—but some of them deign to be rude about his soulmate, a person who has presumably done quite literally nothing to them. When he’s around 13 years old, following an impassioned explanation of what the symbols on his arm actually mean, one particular classmate mumbles that Ratio’s soulmate is probably illiterate, then, how primitive. Ratio gets sent to the principal’s office for going on a long tirade about how functional illiteracy is not a sign of unintelligence, and then punching the kid in the face.
His mom takes him to get ice cream first, before his mother can lecture him about that one. Ratio, even when he’s eventually grounded for six weeks, cannot quite bring himself to regret it.
The older he gets, the more he wonders who his soulmate could possibly be, especially when he finds himself so wholly uninterested in the people around him. When he’s 16, he becomes obsessed with getting into the Genius Society—what person’s opinions could possibly matter, when he’s competing for the gaze of an Aeon? For all he’s concerned, his soulmate is THEIR gaze, THEIR approval, his golden ticket into the upper echelon. He begins meeting with a college professor towards the end of high school who encourages this desire—what better advertisement than to say you tutored the next Genius Society member?
Ratio is 17 years of age when he proves an equation that his esteemed tutor, a prestigious professor, was unable to prove. He doesn’t understand what Nous needs from him.
He enrolls in university a year early, encouraged somewhat by his parents, who do always seem to care more about his well being than his academic pursuits for some strange reason. Ratio starts off with majors in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and when he breezes through those, adds one in engineering.
His mother encourages him to try linguistics, but he brushes her off. She points out that his soulmark is still a mystery, and he snaps at her that he doesn’t care about that anymore. He can’t figure out why that makes her so sad.
When he’s 19, he stops answering his mothers’ text messages. They don’t get it, they don’t understand, how could he possibly be content with what he has? Ratio needs Nous’s gaze, on a deep, primal level, because what better way to make sure the world remembers him? What better way to leave his mark on the world than to be member #84 (the Madam Herta has recently been added, not to mention been made an Emanator, what an honor—maybe Ratio can do that too?) of Genius Society?
He starts answering them again two years later, and is promptly grounded again, this time for six months. When he actually shows up at home, his mom breaks out in laughter and says she only said that to see if he’d come home. He acts like he’s grounded anyway, just because he feels bad for not speaking to them for two full years.
Ratio’s studies begin to tend away from the natural sciences and towards the social ones. He picks up a book on linguistics again, and finds that he still knows how to pronounce his soulmark. Kamé hi šukar ene londo latxo. He wonders if his soulmate will like that he’s going to get into the Genius Society, someday. If they’ll respect him for it. If they’ll love him.
He writes treatises and theorems, solves unsolvable equations, turns 25. He’s still never heard anything even remotely close to what the symbols on his arm represent. He’s still never been gazed upon by Nous.
Stephen Lloyd becomes member #84 of the Genius Society for his invention of the Frequency Catcher. Ratio is fine with being #85. It’s a better number anyway. He gets his doctorates—eight of them—and is awarded a First Class Honors Degree from the university that shares his name. Nous does not look his way.
Ratio finds he enjoys teaching, which shouldn’t be quite as surprising as it is to him, given that he’s the son of two teachers. His mother may be a professor, but his mom is a grade school teacher too, and maybe that’s why he ends up spending most of his time working as a professor at the University of Veritas Prime. He publishes three more papers, several research projects, and is invited to sit at the head of a new project with the Intelligentsia Guild.
One day, as he’s getting ready for work, he stares down at his arm and thinks, oh. I haven’t even listened for my words.
No matter. There are hundreds of students who fancy themselves in love with Dr. Veritas Ratio. His soulmark, now covered by his ostentatious outfit, is a hotly contested topic. The prevailing theory, last he checked, is actually that he doesn’t even have one, or that Dr. Veritas Ratio’s soulmate is Nous THEMSELF.
Ratio is only 27 years of age when he creates an anti-planetary weapon, which is tested on a supposedly abandoned moon. The lingering fear that the moon was not abandoned will never leave him, nor will the fact that the IPC offers him a permanent spot as one of the top researchers of the Intelligentsia Guild, with plenty of benefits to go along with it. Nous does not acknowledge him in the slightest.
Is this what I was meant to do? he thinks, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror in the men’s restroom closest to his office. Is this worth it? Am I going to be happy with myself, when this is all over?
Ratio glances down at his soulmark and sighs. Who could possibly love someone like him? Now, more so than ever, the string of symbols feels like a cruel practical joke.
He locks himself in his office and does not come out for three days.
Thankfully, his contract with the IPC allows him to keep teaching at the university, and he throws himself into that full-force. Ratio tries to remind himself to eat dinner with his mothers every once in a while, to take a break from his work, but he—if he’s not going to be accepted into the Genius Society, he’s going to have to work twice as hard to make his impact on the world the way he wants to. He continues to teach on Veritas Prime, continues to research with the Intelligentsia Guild, and manages to make a positive name for himself amongst it all. He’s no Genius Society member, but he’s certainly someone, and that’s going to have to be enough for now.
Ratio hasn’t quite come to terms with it, but he thinks he might get there, someday.
Then, when Dr. Veritas Ratio, who has liked to be called “Ratio” since he was a small child, is 29 years old, the first field assignment crosses his desk. He has a partner for this one, a small planned extraction on a backwater planet in the Carcine System named Cancri-II with someone from the Strategic Investments Department.
It’s only when he arrives on said planet, prepared to deal with a lower-level grunt or middle manager, that he finds himself faced with Aventurine of Stratagems, rank P45 Stoneheart.
Now, Ratio knows who Aventurine is, it’s hard not to. He’s risen through the company at almost an alarming rate, coming from a deeply sketchy background, with a sharp black brand on his neck and a penchant for risking his own life to complete his missions. He’s the last of the Avgins, a race practically designed to manipulate and enthrall people. (Ratio does not believe this, because while Aventurine is a very pretty man, he is only a man. He is not any more manipulative than the rest of the people in the IPC). Ratio does not like him, nor does he particularly enjoy the idea of them being forced to team up.
That feeling is only exacerbated when Aventurine presses a gun to his own chest, slots a thigh between Ratio’s legs, and says, Seems like I'll need to get you up to speed on how I do things. It’s about when he declares himself the final victor, and Ratio nearly comes in his pants, that he decides, no, he actually really fucking hates Aventurine.
(He doesn’t. But he doesn’t want to process that feeling yet, so hate it is for now.)
Despite his vehement protests against the idea, the IPC has somehow gotten it in their heads that Ratio and Aventurine work quite well together—and begrudgingly, he can admit that despite their differences they do make an effective team. They’re not friends, they rarely even use each others’ names, and yet—
By the time Dr. Veritas Ratio is 32 years of age, he thinks he might be irrevocably, completely, irreversibly in love with Aventurine of Stratagems.
They do work together quite well, and they spend a lot of time together. Over the years since their first meeting, Ratio has been allowed to glimpse more and more of Aventurine’s true personality, underneath all the scathing insults and general disregard for his well being, and he finds he quite likes it. Nobody matches his wits like Aventurine does, no one else can make him laugh with just an smile and a wiggle of his eyebrows (even if he covers it with his hand so no one can see), no one has quite the same energy as him, this inexplicable hatred-gone-resignation for the lot he’s been handed by the universe.
Ratio understands it. He doesn’t think it’s the same for him as it is for Aventurine, but it is similar. He knows what it’s like to feel so wholeheartedly rejected, as if every piece of you that you poured into something was just never going to be enough. When he voices this to him, Aventurine laughs and says he doesn’t have anything left to give the universe. Ratio disagrees. He thinks Aventurine has so much care and love to give, but it’s buried deep, deep down, and he’s just not found the person or thing to give it to yet.
And then there’s the sex, of course. The sex is amazing. It doesn’t feel right to bring it up in the midst of all of his reflection on their relationship, but it is very good. He thinks that’s the first way they learn to communicate, through sex, before they’ve even properly learned to use their words. Ratio learns every single one of Aventurine’s erogenous zones before he even considers that maybe, just maybe, he likes Aventurine for more than just the sex. That maybe their companionship is worth more to him than just a good working relationship.
When Aventurine goes to the Nihility, Ratio’s heart shatters. He doesn’t want to lose him, and he’s never really realized just how much Aventurine means to him up until this moment.
It’s that moment, that gut-wrenching terror, that makes Ratio truly take notice of just how deeply in love he is with Aventurine, and when Aventurine emerges from the hospital afterwards, battered and bruised but not too physically beat up, the first thing Ratio does when he sees him is wrap him in a hug, sigh, “Gambler,” and just hold him, for a moment. Aventurine is still alive. Aventurine will be okay.
Years continue to pass. Aventurine is less willing to gamble his life—Ratio likes to think that maybe he doesn’t want to leave him. He’s certain that’s not the case, but Aventurine has softened a little nonetheless. Their relationship, of which they have never put a name on, continues to flourish. They treat each other like a spouse—like a soulmate.
Ratio knows Aventurine has a soulmark. He doesn't know what it says, and he's never seen it—Aventurine covers it with a skin-tight bandage. There’s a part of him, now that Aventurine has finally given him the details of what happened to him when he was a child into his young adult years, that wonders if Aventurine’s soulmate is long dead and gone. Ratio finds himself constantly hoping that Aventurine will choose him anyway, because surely if Ratio is his soulmate, there’s been some indication by now? Ratio knows he’s in love with Aventurine, so he’s said something at some point to create the mark, if he has one from Ratio. The unfortunate thing about soulmarks is that there’s no way to tell if your soulmate is dead; all you can do is hope. Either or both of them may be hoping for a love that no longer exists, but maybe they can choose each other instead.
Ratio knows that, without any sliver of doubt, he would choose Aventurine, time and time and time again.
♤
One day, a few years following Penacony, Ratio gets a summons to Aventurine’s office. That in and of itself is strange, because when Aventurine wants him to come to his office, he usually just texts him. He can’t quite work out what the official summons is for.
His question is answered for him when he gets to Aventurine’s office and sees his phone and synesthesia beacon laying in a heap on his desk, with an irate Stoneheart glaring at them.
“The thing—not working,” Aventurine says, pointing at the beacon, and Ratio furrows his brow. This isn’t what Aventurine usually sounds like, though his characteristic lilt is still there. “Don’t remember how to say the word.”
“What happened?” he asks, and Aventurine frowns, searching around in his desk for a piece of paper to write on. He retrieves one, as well as a pen, and scribbles down ‘Synesthesia beacon broke. Can you fix it?’. His handwriting is messy, and Ratio gets the impression that Aventurine doesn’t actually write things down very often. All of the IPC’s paperwork is digitized nowadays anyway, so he supposes he really has no need to.
But that explains why Aventurine sounds different, since if the beacon is broken, it’s not translating his words into Galactic Common for Ratio’s ease of understanding, and it’s not modifying any of the sounds either. The way Aventurine sounds right now is what he actually sounds like. It’s… quite nice.
“Yes. I can talk a bit—speak a little common,” he says, his accent thick, shaping the consonants and vowels in a way Ratio’s never heard before. Ratio is addicted to the way Aventurine sounds when he’s not being translated by the synesthesia beacon. “It is hard. Better at listening. Writing. They are easier.”
Ratio hums. “Yes, it’s typical for anyone who learns a second language to be better at listening, reading, and writing than they are at speaking it. That’s alright, you don’t need to speak. I can do my best to fix your beacon—did it just stop working randomly?” Aventurine nods, sitting back on the couch in the corner of his office. “Alright. Yes, I can take a look at it.”
Aventurine says something that Ratio can’t understand— it must be his native language, whatever language the Avgins spoke. The resonance between their beacons has been broken, after all, so Ratio’s beacon isn’t translating Aventurine’s words. They require a connection with another, nearby beacon to actually make the real-time translation process work. Still, Aventurine is smiling, so he thinks it’s alright, even if he can’t understand what he’s saying.
Ratio sits on the floor across from him, tinkering with Aventurine’s beacon, quietly narrating what he’s doing as he looks through the circuitry of the device. Aventurine doesn’t say much, but he nods and smiles as Ratio explains, and says something to get his attention if he needs it. Ratio wishes he would talk more. He likes hearing Aventurine’s native language, likes his accent when he tries to speak common. There’s something nagging at the back of his brain, though, that his accent and native tongue sound familiar. Like he’s registering some of the sounds, for some reason he can’t quite explain. There’s no reason for him to, he’s never heard the Avgin language before—he wasn’t even sure if the Avgins had a language specific to them, or if they spoke the same thing as the rest of the Sigonian natives had.
It’s only when he hears something—kamé, Ratio thinks—that he starts listening intently. He does recognize some of these sounds. He—
“Kamé hi, šukar ene londo latxo,” he mumbles before looking up when he realizes that Ratio has stopped messing with the beacon. “Why stop?” Aventurine asks, looking over at him with curiosity. “Fixed?”
“Can you repeat the last thing that you said?” he asks, feeling light-headed. “Before you started speaking Common.”
He flushes red, but he repeats it anyway. “Kamé hi, šukar ene londo latxo. My language. Cannot translate it—do not know how. Sorry.”
“Can you write it down?” Ratio thinks he must be going insane, because it sounds just like the IAPA that’s scrawled across the bicep hidden by his cape.
Aventurine shakes his head. “Not a—written? Written language. No writing.”
Ratio laughs, and Aventurine looks at him, puzzled. “My mom was right,” he murmurs, which only heightens his already visible confusion as Ratio shucks off the cape and holds out his arm to Aventurine. “This is my soulmark. It’s in something called the Interastral Phonetic Alphabet, so I know how to pronounce it, but there’s no written version of it. It’s pronounced kamé hi šukar ene londo latxo,” he says, and Aventurine’s eyes widen as he scrambles backwards on the couch, away from Ratio. “Is that what you just said?”
He nods, still staring at the words that wrap around Ratio’s arm. “That is—yours? Stupid. Did not know. Mine is gambler. On my—” he points to his chest, at the very top of his ribcage, right where Ratio knows the bandage that covers his mark is. “Here.”
“Did you know it was me?” Ratio asks, finally finishing his tinkering with Aventurine’s beacon and handing it back to him. “When I first started calling you that?”
Aventurine turns his beacon back on and sighs. “No, I didn’t know it was you. Are you crazy? Do you know how many people call me gambler?” Ratio mourns the loss of his accent.
“Did you want it to be me?”
He blushes, turning away from Ratio to stare out the window of his office. “I had hoped, maybe, that because you said it to me so often that you’d managed to fall in love with me one of those times.”
“When you got back from the hospital after falling into the Nihility,” Ratio says, reaching to put a hand on Aventurine’s shoulder, just to know that he’s real. Just to know that this isn’t an elaborate dream. “I hugged you, and called you gambler. It was then.”
Aventurine laughs, and it’s such a lovely sound. “Couldn’t you have picked a more unique thing to say when you realized you were in love with me? I’ve spent years wondering if it was you.”
“But you only—just now?” Ratio asks, genuinely curious. “What does it mean?”
He flushes again, and Ratio can’t help but take note of the way that it spreads down his neck, as if it can’t be contained within just his face. “It was something I’d been thinking about for a while,” Aventurine admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “About whether or not I was in love with you. I knew I felt something, but I think the fact that my mark was so ambiguous, that it could have been 20 different people I know, made me hesitant to even hope. What was the point in loving someone who couldn’t possibly love me back?”
“I thought my feelings for you were extremely obvious,” Ratio counters. “Aventurine, we practically live together.”
This is true—Aventurine had showed up at Ratio’s apartment one day following their experience in Penacony and had simply never left. They never spoke about it, but it just felt right, as if they were slotting into each other’s lives perfectly.
“Ratio, for the vast majority of my life, I have genuinely believed that I am completely unlovable,” he says, rather plainly. Ratio blinks, a little stunned, but mostly he’s just glad to see the therapy sessions Aventurine’s been strong-armed into attending since returning from the Nihility have been working out so well, if he's able to articulate his fears like this. “It wasn’t even necessarily that I didn’t think you loved me, it was that I didn’t think anyone could.” He sighs, not quite making eye contact. “And even when I did start to think that maybe I was worthy of it… well, you’re you. Being worthy of being loved and being worthy of being loved by you are two entirely different stories.”
Ratio thinks back to his young adulthood, gripping the counter in a dirty university bathroom and wondering, who could possibly love him like this? He thinks back to his desperation for Nous’s gaze, the horrible things he’d done for the IPC, even the way he’d ignored his mothers back when he was 19 and convinced they didn’t understand him, and says, “I don’t think I’m nearly as perfect as you think I am.”
“Aeons, no, you’re not perfect,” Aventurine says with another small laugh. “I’ve never thought you were perfect. You annoy me so much sometimes, you’re way too blunt in negotiations, and your kink for eating me out is getting out of hand. You’re mine, though. I don’t need you to be perfect.”
“You’re dodging one of my questions,” Ratio says, effectively avoiding having to respond to Aventurine’s sentiment. Two can play at that game. “What you said—Kamé hi, šukar ene londo latxo. What does it mean?”
“I—um. It’s in Avgin, my native language,” Aventurine says. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear someone speak it again, honestly. It didn't even occur to me that the stuff I saw on your arm could possibly be Avgin, written out differently. I thought it might have just been a cool tattoo.”
“You’re still dodging the question.”
“That’s because it’s embarrassing,” he grumbles. “It wasn’t very coherent, alright, I was very overcome with the fact that I’d just recently decided that I was very in love with you. I said, essentially, ‘I love you, my beautiful, soft, good’.”
Ratio nods. “So, is kamé hi ‘I love you’?” Aventurine nods. “Perfect. Kamé hi, Aventurine.”
Aventurine stares at him. “You know,” he says, seeming a little dazed, “I didn’t think I’d ever hear someone say that to me again.”
“Did I do it right?” he asks. “The pronunciation might not be perfect, but I spent a lot of time when I was younger researching the sounds so that I would be able to tell when someone said it to me, though I know that the vowels are ever so slightly—”
He is interrupted, of course, by a fierce kiss from Aventurine, who presses his lips to Ratio’s with such force it nearly sends the two of them toppling over. Ratio’s hands go to cup his face gently, returning the passionate kiss with something softer, a little sweeter, a little less hungry.
Aventurine is the first to pull away. “I wanted it to be you so badly,” he admits. “Soulmates were such a loose and finicky thing back on Sigonia, and when I had a soulmark that didn’t look like everyone else’s, I just assumed that maybe it was just another way for the Goddess to mark me as different. Special. But when I got to the IPC, and saw that most people’s soulmarks looked like mine, I had a little bit of hope again. That maybe there was still someone out there waiting for me.”
“I would have waited for you forever,” Ratio says, far too sincere, and Aventurine goes red again. His hands drop to Aventurine’s waist, pulling him closer. “You’re more important to me than the mark.”
“Don’t say that!” Aventurine says, laughing. “The marks are important to me.” He prods at Ratio’s arm. “I can’t believe you hear me speaking Common to you ninety-nine percent of the time and the one time I wasn’t was when I finally decided I was in love with you. How confusing that must have been for little Ratio.”
“Kamé hi,” Ratio says again, and Aventurine buries his face in his shoulder. “Am I saying it right?”
“It’s close enough,” Aventurine says, his voice muffled by the fabric of Ratio’s robe. “I love you too. So much.”
Ratio kisses the top of his head, and thinks he’s really quite lucky to have found someone like Aventurine. He’s been obsessed with leaving a mark on the world for so long—needed it unlike he’s ever needed anything else—but he thinks, maybe, if Aventurine knows he’s loved, that could be just as fulfilling. It’s a terrifying thing, to think that the idea of just one person being happy could substitute for the gaze of an Aeon for him, but Aventurine is everything, and then some.
Ratio never needed a mark to tell him that.