Death's Bond | Alastor x reader |

~A Stories Start~

The perfect world:

In a perfect world, real life would match the stories every child is told to dream of. The stories of true love, special kisses, the princes who devote themselves to the princess... In a perfect world, children wouldn't cry tears of sadness or be hungry.

The world of a child is unique, pure, and difficult to disrupt, but not completely.

A child looks at adults in a cafe, and sees them laughing, their love, their lives etched on by fate itself. A destined two meant for one another. They are told they will find a special person. Even if that person is not their prince or their princess. They could be their knight too. Fate works in mystery, some have more destined people than others.

Soulmates, the simpler term would be soulmates, but such a word is reserved for the fiction of a perfect world where things become simple. Your fated one sounds more whimsical, but more accurately describes the role of this person. This person could come into your life and then leave or stay. They simply are people destined to change the course of a life.

In that perfect world, soulmates who end up in love are forever happy. There's nothing to harm or break apart the perfect love.

But people are still people. So, as that little girl sits holding a stuffed animal close, listening to the screaming voices of her parents, she can only disregard the stories.

Every night another argument.

Even though she's young, she can still understand why. A cheat... her father is unloyal on the virtual landscape of the internet. Struggling with money in secret, running up debts... and the fighting...

It seemed every little misstep would get the child into trouble. A spilled glass of milk? Yelling, scolded...

That was reality. It's messy, it's not whimsical, it's not fun. Still, to cope, the child went deep into studies.

Special, gifted... lucky.

The arguments and yelling never got better. The father's voice never got softer, only thunderous. The mother began to be defeated. Then things were alright... then right back to fighting. Years went by without realizing it. School got messy as the kids got meaner. Life seemed less and less important. While the girls whispered about crushes she studied. Feelings never seemed to spark about anyone. Feeling wrong, left out, and judged, she began to act. The kindest boy became a figure in her play that she'd play along with. This teen would tell her friends she was crushing despite a lack of fundamental stability in what was called love and affection.

No, she was never hit, but they yelled, hit other things, said awful things about their own child, pressured that child to burn out, took away the things she used to feel alive, never listened, and never checked in on her. Never asked if she had started looking into her soulmate, if she had one. No, her father was content to leave the child alone, relying on the mother to feed the child. The mother's constant stress always ended up firing off at the child...

Never hit, but the floor beneath her feet was made of thin glass. One wrong move, and things would have come crashing down...

It was no figure that the child became a "failure". Because pursuing an unstable career was a failure. Wanting to perform on stage was for those who lacked her intelligence. But this child was so done with school... aching to feel something, to find that fated person.

But they never would... not in life. At 18, when those signs were supposed to show, she never received any. No special mark, no marks on the skin except what she'd put there... and no string.

While it was rare, a 1 in every 500 million people chance, not having a fated person wasn't unheard of.

So instead, the new adult dove into music, into performing...