Quick response a prompt going around on tumblr: "soulmate AU where you wake up on your 18th birthday with the first words your soulmate will say to you tattooed on your body so you'll know them when you meet them". A chapter from Red's POV will come at some point in the future.

Liz remembered her 18th birthday as if it were yesterday. By the time midnight rolled around, she had been almost sick with anticipation. She locked her bedroom door, made sure no light from the streetlights leaked around her curtains, and stripped down in front of the mirror to wait.

When the sickly yellow-green digits on her alarm clock switched from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM, her tattoo started to appear across the middle of her right forearm, just past the edge of her scar. Most people's tattoos were inked on their skin in simple black or blue, but hers was a bright, vivid red. She traced over the words, wondering at their significance, at the context they would be spoken in.

In the years that followed, there were days she loved the tattoo, not because of the promise of her soulmate, but because it meant she would make it through the trials she faced, that she would become the agent she had always dreamt of being. It was a comfort, a reassurance in her darkest hours.

There were days she hated it, too, because the surname it addressed wasn't hers, not yet, and the implications were clear enough for her: she would marry a man who wasn't her soulmate before she even got a chance to meet him.

For ages, she worried about why. Would she become impatient waiting for her soulmate to cross her path? Would she settle for something less than a real, true love out of necessity or convenience, or were there extenuating circumstances?

The day she met Tom, she tried to scrub the words from her body. The day she started falling for him, she resolved to have the tattoo removed. The day she married him, it slowly began to reappear, letter by letter.

He told her it was OK, that he gouged his own out in the weeks after his parents died because true love couldn't guarantee happiness and he wanted nothing to do with it. He even showed her the scar. It looked fresher than it should have, but she figured if her tattoo could come back after she had it removed, his scar might very well not heal properly.

No one knew very much about how the tattoos worked, after all. She refused to let those five short words influence her feelings for her husband or her opinion of him. They were nothing but an inconsequential string of letters as far as she was concerned. Her soulmate, whoever he was, had come too late.

So she settled into a comfortable life with Tom, complete with a dog and a house and dreams of starting a family. Every day that went by without anyone uttering those fateful words gave her more hope it would never happen, that this life she'd chosen for herself was the right one, soulmate or no. She was happy with Tom. She had to be.

That is until the day she was due to begin the job she worked so hard for, when her already hectic morning was interrupted by a helicopter and an FBI escort and the demands of an infamous criminal who refused to speak with anyone but her.

The lines of her tattoo burned as she walked towards the man, shackled to his chair. The words buzzed in her head in time with the blaring siren. Somehow—somehow—she knew before he even opened his mouth that it would be him. The suspense tightened her chest, each second he stared at her in transfixed silence making it more and more difficult to breathe. He was late, all right, but he sure knew how to make an entrance.

At long last, he opened his mouth and gave a soft, breathy laugh.

"Agent Keen, what a pleasure."