The Soulmate Theory (Soulmate AU)
Request: Can you please do #2 and #3 with Jun? Thank you much :)
2) “I’m always tired…but never of you.” 3) “I’d be a terrible person if I let you do something stupid alone.”
Member: Seventeen’s Jun x Y/N
Type: Fluff
You tapped your pen against the metal spiral holding together your notebook and attempted not to scowl. You were unsure why you had signed up for this class, especially now that you were having to pay for an education. College wasn’t something you imagined as being such a series of hits or misses, but man, were you picking the wrong elective courses.
You looked up to your instructor, a bulbous man of around fifty. He had probably been balding since before you were born and judging by his lack of wedding ring, you assumed he had been divorced about as long.
Which was juuuust perfect.
When a man is teaching a class about soul mate lore, it was definitely best if he had divorced who you had assumed to be his soulmate. His first words tattoo stood out brightly on his exposed forearm, bits of it faded or scabbed from his apparent attempts in trying to remove it.
The irony was just too good.
“Today’s lesson,” his raspy voice croaked. “Will be focused on “Soulmate Identifying Marks.” Now I know you all received a brief overview of this in high school, but today we’ll be diving in depth to really explore soul marks and their use in our culture.”
You rolled your eyes and subconsciously glanced down at your knee. Through a small rip in your jeans, you could just barely see a snippet of the scrawled text that had appeared on your skin years ago. Looking up again, you noticed your classmates around you were doing the same.
You were all just trying to figure it out.
Admittedly, for awhile, you didn’t believe in soulmates. As your professor had mentioned, you had all gone through classes in middle and high school to explain the unique condition your species had been subjected to. The multifaceted world of soulmates was not an easily digestible one. Different cultures experienced different things, and if you didn’t have the same type of soul mark as the other people in your household, it only meant you were destined to travel, that your soulmate was in a completely different country than you were.
From the country you had come from, in general, you would be born with a birthmark that would be similar to your future soulmate’s birthmark. This difference in skin pigmentation could appear at any point of your young adult life, starting as soon as you hit puberty. You had waited and waited, but no such birthmark occurred.
Your mother had been entirely too stressed about your future love life, or lack there of. She took you to religious officials, doctors, and even once, a tattoo artist. No one had an answer for her, but you were at peace with that. Surely there were others out there like you who didn’t have a mark, and you would be okay. Someone would find you...someday.
Until you woke up one morning and noticed clouded gray marks dotting your kneecap. Scrubbing for nearly an hour in the bathroom only made it worse, the words becoming more clear than any ink smudge could.
And your mother had become happy again.
You didn’t not have a soulmark, just a different one, belonging to a different culture.
After a quick google search, you had discovered that your type of soul mark mostly appeared in East Asia. Once your mother found out, she had every college pamphlet from Hong Kong to Tokyo picked out for you. Before you were even capable of realizing the future you were launching yourself towards, you had your suitcase packed to begin your tour of countries you had never dreamed of visiting.
And that’s how you ended up here.
In Seoul, trying to figure out exactly why your bodies had become this way.
But this guy wouldn’t be giving you the answers.
“Soul marks are an identifying characteristic to help two individuals find each other, such as complimentary birthmarks, or as in our country, the first words you hear spoken by your soulmate. The mark may appear any time after puberty,” your professor continued, droning in monotone as he read verbatim from your textbook. “Of course in the following units, we’ll go over sense alterations and other signs seen in varying countries. When our body sciences began to include soul mate identifying capabilities, divorce rates...have dropped and life expectancies are still increasing.”
“If you were born in South Korea,” he continued blandly. You had a difficult time looking at him, his facial expressions becoming more and more disinterested in the actual words he was saying. “Or have a soul mate from an East Asian country, we have all become familiar with the words marking our skin. Very rarely does someone become a young adult without seeing words written on their flesh. Of course there are varying factors. Our culture seems to forget those who are deaf or have different disabilities. Most often, we’re left to our own worst thoughts that we don’t have soul mates, but realistically, that will only occur for under three percent of the population.”
“Is that around the world or just East Asia?” someone called out.
The professor chuckled before shaking his head. “East Asia, do you really think I care that far to search numbers around the world? I hardly care outside of Korea.”
You looked up uneasily and scanned the classroom, locking eyes with a handsome boy you had recognized during roll call. His name had seemed foreign in structure, so he was just as displaced in this new country as you were. He gave you a sad smile and lifted his brows before turning his face back to the instructor. You continued to look around at your fellow classmates, realizing that none of you looked similar. Every skin tone on the spectrum shone out underneath the florescent lights and you were proud. You had all enrolled here for the same reason.
All of you had been the outliers in your cultures. All of you had soulmates dwelling in the 4,600,000 square miles of East Asia. All of you were here in hopes of bringing yourself a little bit closer to your destiny.
You felt a rush of adrenaline flood your veins as you stuck your arm into the air, lifting it to be able to speak.
“Oh...uh, yes...Y/N, is it?” your teacher asked, lifting his brows in surprise.
“What happened to your soulmate?” you asked, incapable of biting your tongue any longer. “You’ve talking to us about soul marks in Korea, but you haven’t told us anything about yourself. Shouldn’t we hear your story?”
“Oh,” he chuckled, crossing his arms. He tilted his forearm deliberately so you could no longer see the marred words printed there. “Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily a story I owe you.”
“Don’t you though?” you prodded. “How can you be a subject matter expert when you don’t want to talk about how the subject applies to your life? I mean, you are quite literally telling us all that our society runs off of the idea of soulmates, granted, you don’t really care about those of us not from your own country, but we don’t even really know if you have one.”
“Of course I have one,” he croaked. “And I don’t appreciate this attack on my character.”
“It’s not an attack on your character,” you groaned. “If it’s to be considered an attack at all, it’s on your intelligence.”
You looked around to see your classmates stifle their giggles, trying to hide smiles as you voiced all of the words they had been thinking.
“Get out of my class,” the professor hissed. Your eyes grew wide as he stared at you. “And anyone else who shares the same opinion, you can feel free to leave as well.”
You took a deep breath as you shut your book with the all of the force you were capable of. Shoving it in your backpack, you glanced up at the professor and nodded. You slung your bag over your shoulder and breathed in sharply as you noticed movement in your peripherals. You looked over to see the same boy you had made eye contact with previously, now packing his things and standing.
“Anyone else?” the professor asked as you began down the steps of the auditorium style classroom. A buzz of conversation radiated around you as you moved, incapable of making eye contact with anyone else. You felt exhilarated as you walked, the first real time you had ever confronted anyone, let alone a teacher. You breezed out of the classroom and could only breath properly again once you reached one of the benches outside. You swung your book bag around and plopped it on the ground before exhaling.
You involuntarily flinched as a body appeared beside yours on the bench. The boy who had walked out of the classroom as you had turned and nodded at you.
“You didn’t agree with him either?” you chuckled, shaking your head.
He smiled, tilting his own as he looked at you. “I’d be a terrible person if I let you do something stupid alone.”
You stopped for a moment, almost numb to his words as he spoke them. You turned slowly to properly face him, dozens of questions attempting to assemble themselves in your brain and burst from your lips.
He nodded brightly, a large grin on his face. “Yep, it’s me. I’m the guy.”
You furrowed your brows for a moment, thinking back to the words decorating your skin. You had stared at them for years, wondering about the male or female who would utter that one simple sentence. You always wondered the context, wondered exactly what the “stupid something” was going to be. ...which made another thought spring to your lips.
“Do you really think what I did was stupid?”
“To some, maybe,” he chuckled. “But you stood up for yourself and called him out on some pretty problematic shit, so that’s neat.”
You smiled as you shook your head, attempting to recall the first words you had spoken in his presence. “Wait...what do you have-”
He pulled up his sleeve, his smile never fading as he read the words from his forearm. “What happened to your soulmate?”
“Oh man,” you chuckled. “Sorry...that had to be confusing.”
“Admittedly,” he nodded. “I was kind of bummed when it wasn’t something more romantic. Maybe ‘I’ve finally found my home.” Or ‘I’m always tired, but never of you.’”
You lifted a brow, trying to keep from giggling. “I never thought my soulmate would be so...”
“Handsome? Romantic? Adorable?” he grinned. “Cringy,” you snorted. “But for the record, the first thing you said to me wasn’t exactly Shakespearean.”
He rolled his eyes, but still looked amused. “This makes for a better story I think.”
“It would’ve made for a better story if we lead the charge and had the entire classroom walk out behind us,” you said with a wink.
“Don’t rule that out just yet,” he whispered, gently tapping your knee. You looked up to see your fellow students filing out of the classroom you had both just left. Your grin couldn’t grow any wider as student after student passed in rapid fire discussion about what had just happened.
“Hey,” you called out, noticing the girl you usually sat beside. “You all really left?”
“No, he cancelled class early,” she muttered, hardly looking up from her phone. “Something about how he has to reassess life choices or something.”
You heaved a sigh as you looked back to your legs and began to poke at the holes in the denim. You stretched the fabric to be able to see your skin in full. “I’d be a terrible person...”
As you were reading along silently to yourself, you felt the man beside you shift his position. Humming, he pulled at the hand you were using to shift your jeans, and wrapped it in his own instead.
“I’m Junhui by the way,” he nodded. “You were probably wondering.”
“I assumed I’d figure it out,” you smiled, nodding to him.
“So maybe our story didn’t start with a classroom revolution,” he chirped. “But it did start, so that’s something.”
“Relentlessly optimistic,” you laughed. “I like it.”
“You better,” he laughed as well. “Cause you’re kind of stuck with me now. The Soulmate theory says so.”
“Is that how it works?” you teased. “Divorce rates are down, not nonexistent.”
“Hey, hey,” he argued. “You can’t divorce me before we’ve even started dating.”
“Who makes these rules, Junnie?” you smiled.
“Me, I do,” he nodded. “And I say you’re stuck with me.”
“Hmph,” you sighed. “I guess I’ll just have to live with that then.”
“Try not to sound so enthusiastic,” he chuckled. He began to stand and tossed his bag over his arm. He reached down and tugged at your hand again. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” you asked.
“Well, obviously we have to FaceTime my mom and let her know what happened. Then we have to FaceTime your mom and-”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you gasped. “Can’t we just...slow down? Get some coffee first maybe? Try to digest everything that just happened?”
“Right. Coffee. Good idea,” he nodded. “Digesting. I can digest.”
You laughed, shaking your head as you shouldered your book bag. What an interesting glance into your forever.
