prompt if you want!: check please soulmate au where the core smh all have different ppl within their group as their soulmates, but none of them are the endgame pairings. (e.g. bitty has ransom as his soulmate but still finds himself falling for jack)
There’s a thick blue cord that winds up Eric’s left arm and circles around his shoulder. It’s weighted and heavy in his nine year hands and it trails off in the distance, and he imagines that it goes on forever, even if he knows that it will pick up where it drops off with his soulmate. And when he’s shoved into a locker at fifteen, Eric holds the rope and sobs. He needs his soulmate, now more than ever, and they aren’t there. Instead, Coach finds him. Neither of them talk about the tears that run into his moustache, and Eric can only just wrap the thread around his hand and clench his hand tightly.He knows no one else can see the rope, or that it’s a lovely shade of navy, but he’s endlessly frustrated that it never seems to get any shorter.
Justin Oluransi has a surgeon’s knot anchoring a navy blue rope to his wrist and Adam Birkholtz is not his soulmate. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but Ransom is positive that he and Holster aren’t platonics anyway. He’s had the line since he was eleven, and he loves and hates the knots there on his arm. It feels like his soulmate wants the future that his parent’s have planned out for him, that they’ve already aligned with Ransom’s premedical future. And at the same time it keeps him grounded in reality when he’s stressed. It’s a quiet reassurance in the dark. I’m here for you.
Eric gives his rope a sharp tug and it causes Ransom to miss his shot at beer pong. He laughs at the petulant pout Ransom gives Lardo.
“Lardo, he’s cheating. He used our soul to cheat.” He clutches a little at his chest as he tearfully tells Lardo of Bitty’s misdeeds. She makes a tch noise, looking over her shutter shades and daring Holster to try the same as she sinks her shot. It only makes Eric laugh harder and he feels the radiating happiness from Ransom’s end. The rope tingles and pulls in a quick tug as Ransom slings his arm around Bitty’s shoulder. “You’re still my soulbro, even if you cheated.”
Nursey has a white string, dangling limply from his middle finger, and he learns quickly that he shouldn’t talk about it with other people. Many frown upon people like him, those with the the white strings. White strings, severed, cut, dangling from our middle fingers like a threat. That he will take all someone can give and leave nothing in return. That he will break them. That is not so, and Nursey knows it.
Love is not something to choose on a whim. It is something to build and he has built that here. In this temple, in himself. He has covered himself with tattoos, fleshed out his bones, and cracked open his heart to see who really lives there.
His white string has led him to this. It’s not emptiness, like red and blue might think. It is yourself. There is nothing that holds him to his past or even to the future. He’s allowed to that freedom and grace. His white string is a threat to the way he has thought of his world from past to present. It means that there’s a fairytale where the person who makes him happy is himself. That he can gnash his teeth and snarl at those that would feel pity. He learns more and more each day about who he is, who he was, and his hope for who he will be.
If this white string is a threat, then he is happy to rise to that challenge. There is no threat, there is no emptiness waiting to be filled now. He’s complete on his own.
He doesn’t ask what color Dex’s string is as they tangle hands, he doesn’t need to know. Even if this breaks his heart, at least he knows that it’s his choice.
Jack had technically died that one time, but he remembers the blue rope that linked his pinky to Kent’s.
He doesn’t talk about it, refuses to talk about the red rope that is slowly braiding itself around around his the fourth finger of his left hand because how is he going to explain that love me doesn’t always mean touch me.
When it travels across the hall, he wonders when Eric will be able to see the intricately braided thread that has only grown brighter to Jack every passing day.
As it turns out, Jack had technically died that one time, and he thought that Eric knew. The rope was wrapped just as tightly around Eric’s fourth finger, surely he should see it too?
Surely, he should see it too…
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