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[annon008]

Ooooooo your fic was so good and I want more. I love your concept for the soulmate marks. Havent seen that one explained like that before. Even if you don't end up writing more for it, it was good!

Thank you!! I’d like to write more, just need to make the jumble make sense

[annon008]

soulbound

First time fic! Did I proof read this? Barely. Am I confident on anything medical? Of course not.

Brendon Park x Fem!Reader

He remembers the day he first saw the blue marks on his skin. He was 9 years old, and it wasn’t something he had really thought about before. He cared more about baseball and school. Brendon wasn’t even sure he was going to have a soulmate, not everyone did, but he knew enough not to celebrate it - this did not promise a future of love or companionship. He may not be able to find them. The soulmarks were a light blue, and he rarely felt them, telling him that his soulmate wasn’t close to him. The soul bond was not governed by proximity, but the marks were. The colder the marks felt and the deeper blue they were meant that your soulbound was close, and people would drop everything, questioning strangers, just to find them once a dark blue mark appeared on their skin. 

His parents, particularly his mother, were thrilled. Her serious, cerebral son had someone out there in the universe who was meant to be his match, meant to help him carry the heavy load of life, and of course they were destined to meet. Over the years, she would survey the marks that would randomly blossom, clicking her tongue when she realized that his soulmate was not living an easy life. These marks only appeared when someone was hurt, and this person was hurt often. Marks along his right arm indicated a break when he was 13, rough lines across his back appeared when he was 14 - was his soulmate being whipped or beaten? And she didn’t know if the marks stopped, only that her son stopped showing her during high school and always kept a shirt on. Sometimes she’d watch him rub his shoulder, or run his fingers along his ribs, and she knew that the hurt wasn’t gone. She took some comfort in the amount of visible marks decreasing, but it was an uneasy feeling. 

Once she asked him if he thought of his soulmate, if he wanted to take a gap year to travel the world and find her. Maybe her timing wasn’t the best, she asked him while he was recovering from his ACL injury, his dreams of playing football in college stopped in their tracks. He looked at her blankly. 

He didn’t open his mouth and give voice to his fears, that he didn’t even know himself anymore, want to be himself anymore, so why would his soulmate want him? That he needed to get stronger for this person who had been so hurt so often. That his big body needed to be good for something, and he thought it was football and now he was reevaluating everything. That he was sorry to have painted his soulmate blue because he never wanted them to carry a mark from him. 

He kept his mouth shut, and his mother knew to drop it. She hoped he would learn to dream again in time. She hoped he would learn that his soulmate was seeing these marks and hurting for him, and that being him was enough. 

———————————————————————

Some people take a knife to their skin to communicate with their soulmate, and sometimes he fantasized about it, letting his person know where to find him. Hi, I’m a premed student at John’s Hopkins. My name is Brendon. Because he felt the empty gnawing in his stomach that kept him up at night, telling him that she (over the years he became certain it was a woman, but stopped himself from daydreaming what you looked like. The real you would be better than any dream) was missing in his life. Where are you I need you let me take care of you where are you where are you where are you - 

Once, when he was in his second year of residency, the marks faded completely. He woke up one morning completely bare and the room began to spin. How could he lose her when he never had her? He could breathe again when, three weeks later, he saw a small, light blue dot on his shin. Maybe she ran into something, it was probably a bruise. He rubbed his fingers over it and smiled. She was out there and she was okay. He counted his bare skin as a blessing, but still looked for marks every morning and night. They became rarer and rarer, but would pop up every so often. Life is not gentle but he couldn’t help but hope that she wasn’t being hurt anymore.

He told himself that once he was an attending he could go and find her. The marks were fluctuating in saturation, he knew she was closer than before. Based on the color, he was fairly confident she was in Pittsburgh. He made himself promise that he’d get out of the hospital and go to one of those cringey speed dating events or put out a personal ad.

Maybe she was searching for him too. 

And when that time came he still didn’t feel ready for her. He knew his path to surgery had hardened him. That his quest for his old man’s approval had left an invisible mark. He knew he worked long hours and was essentially married to his OR. And he knew what they called him, an asshole, an apex predator, a shark. Someone with a dead mother and family he barely spoke to. He wasn’t warm, not someone this person, who could use softness, could love. And so he never submitted that ad, never went to events designed to find ‘the one’. Casually dated because he was human, but never committed. Couldn’t.

When he thinks about it, he would have continued that way, maybe forever. Until during a routine tib fib repair he feels like he’s doused in ice cold water, and he stills. Lets the resident take over and is thankful that they were wrapping up anyway. He feels like he’s hyperventilating while he scrubs out. He tries to control his shaking as he goes to the locker room to strip off his scrub top. The marks are barely blue, they look like ink and stretch across his chest and back, snaking up his arms and down to his hips. 

She’s close, probably in the hospital. And she’s hurt. 

She’s hurt.

And for once maybe he can help her.

For a moment, he’s stunned. And then he’s moving, yanking his shirt back on. He’s not going to let her slip through his fingers, not when she might be only doors away. Even if he has to tear the hospital apart with his bare hands. 

His attention sharpens as scenarios fly through his head. Where could you be? 

The charge nurse, Sarah, is holding a phone to her ear as he rounds the corner. 

“ED ortho consult. Do you want me to send Jake-“

He barely spares her a glance. “No, I’ll take it. I’m on my way.”

He’ll start there. Where else do the hurt go?