#her codes are not visible to him when they're hugging

[noxdemonart]

Snippets of my longer video, they're happy i swear :')

[qlala]

okay imma need some more information about that coldwestallen canon-verse soulmates au because i am LOOKING 👀👀👀

aaa yes that one is inspired by a soulmate au I read for a different fandom years back, I can't remember which one? but the concept was when you and one of your soulmates touched, the first place your skin meets leaves an impression of the same color on both of you. multiple soulmates are fairly common; they're not inherently romantic.

tbh this is probably not one that i'll ever get around to finishing, so I'm happy to share a lot more than a few sentences! the first paragraph I have for this is:

The kid was covered up ankle to wrist, but he still had three soulmarks where Leonard could see them: a brush of purple over the back of his hand where it was curled around the bottle, two spots of green high on one side of his neck, and, when his lashes dipped as he picked idly at the beer’s label, a smudge of deep, burnt orange over his left eyelid. Three visible marks; Len didn’t usually play those odds, but he suspected he was going to make an exception for the long legs on the barstool next to him.

Barry's three existing marks in this scene come from Iris, Caitlin, and Cisco, respectively. From my notes:

Barry had Iris’s color over the back of his right hand, where she’d laid a comforting touch when they were just children, his world freshly upended. She left a deep, vivid purple, with the same color splashed up her fingers. They’d been shocked, then confused, then delighted. Iris had screamed for Joe, who’d rushed into the room with his gun drawn and ready at his side, and then Iris had shoved her hand up for his inspection and demanded Barry do the same. Joe had stared in shock, and then dropped his shoulders and told Iris never to scream like that again unless someone was getting murdered. He put his gun back in the safe and wrapped them both up in a hug, and knew he’d done the right thing by bringing Barry to live with them.

Caitlin and Cisco's were simultaneous; when Barry was first brought to STAR Labs after the accident, he'd coded suddenly, no time for anyone to put on gloves. Caitlin left two fingerprints of green on Barry's neck when she checked his pulse, and Cisco left an orange smudge on Barry's eyelid when he lifted it at Caitlin's instructions to check his pupils.

Iris only has one other one:

Iris was very guarded about her own skin; it wasn't that she didn't believe in soulmates, but she hated the culture around them. Everyone made assumptions when they saw the mark she and Barry shared, and it got exhausting telling them he was just her best friend, especially when they got older and it started feeling more and more like a lie. So she wore gloves, which wasn't uncommon, except when she was working and eating. Her second mark came from Eddie, when someone stole her laptop bag before she'd even had time to put her gloves back on. Eddie took off after the man, retrieved the bag like a knight in shining armor, and handed it back to her with a smile gone suddenly shy. Where their knuckles brushed, a splash of sweetheart pink bloomed on both of them.

Len has two marks:

Leonard got to fourteen without a single brush of color on him anywhere, so he assumed he was just one of those suckers who were too fucked up to have any soulmates. When Lisa was born, he assumed she'd be made of the same stuff. It turned out to be truer than he’d thought. He was at the hospital when she was born, and nudged aside her blankets to get a look at her face and declare her a tiny, alien-looking thing, mostly to piss off her mother. Lisa blinked blue eyes open at him—the nurse said plenty of babies were born with blue eyes and they’d probably change, but Len recognized the same shade from his own reflection, and knew hers were for keeps.

Then Lisa's tiny hand, impossibly small, wrapped around his first knuckle of his index finger, and he laughed and shook it delicately up and down and said, “Nice to meet you, too.” When Lisa let go, Len stared uncomprehending at the dark ring of color she’d left there, and caught a glimpse of the same color staining the delicate, brand-new skin of her tiny palm. Len felt a sharp surge of emotion, feeling for the first time, irrationally, that he wasn't alone, and the nurse cooed and said, “Oh, lucky little girl! Big brother’s gonna take care of you, huh?” She'd been wrong about Lisa's eyes, but she wasn't wrong about that.

and

Mick didn’t have a color until he clasped his hand around the non-existent bicep of a scrawny, bleeding fifteen-year-old in juvie, and a strong, true green had bloomed over the boney arm under his hand, and the kid had ripped away from him in shock, almost offended, like he couldn’t believe Mick had deigned to claim him as a soulmate. Then he’d punched Mick in the jaw. He refused to go anywhere near him for the rest of the stay, wore long sleeves day and night, but he didn't chase Mick off again when he tracked him down after they were both out.

And the rest I covered in my initial description! Barry and Len find out when Len takes Barry home from Saints (and Barry has not exactly been honest about who he is):

Len had gone through the same routine so many times, he didn’t bother to watch when Barry reached out and tested the soft, vulnerable skin of the inside of his wrist over Len’s. Len was still watching Barry’s face, amused, thinking about all the ways he could put those lips to good use, when Barry went ashen.

No.

No.

Len didn’t look down. The odds of it were impossible. Some kid, a random wide-eyed hookup in a bar Len never went to—

It was the wide eyes that tipped him off. An uncommon, pale, muted, familiar green, not the hazel he’d taken them for in the low light of the bar. Taken together with the familiar lips parted in surprise, and the familiar line of the body pressed back against the inside of his front door, Len understood.

and then Iris and Len, almost a year later:

Iris and Barry got together after the disastrous attempt at a hookup between Len and Barry, and they didn’t acknowledge the marks, or at least, Len rebuffed every attempt to do so. It was a fluke, and the deep scarlet brushed like a stroke of paint across his wrist didn’t control Len’s destiny, or give Barry any claim to him.

It wasn’t like Len to make the same mistake twice, but then Miss Iris West was shoved nearly to her death in front of him. Len cursed and shot his arm out without thinking, and he caught her by the wrist in the same instant she clasped his. He knew it had happened as soon as their skin touched; had known, deep down, it would happen before then, which was why he’d kept far, far away from her. When he finished pulling her to safety, navy lines in the shape of her neat, tapered fingers criss-crossed the red bend Barry had left over his same wrist. Iris’s opposite wrist bore Len’s handprint—separate, simultaneous marks, wasn’t that just a cherry on top—the color bright and saturated against her warm brown skin. Len met Iris’s shocked gaze with a resigned look of his own.

“That mark,” Iris said. “The red, is that—?”

“Unfortunately.”