I just watched Timer (2009) yesterday and like all things I must make a Hatchetfield au
Simple premise of the movie: there is now a timer that people can get implanted that counts down to the day you meet your soulmate. People can get them implanted into their wrist as soon as they enter their teens and when they meet their soulmate, it plays a loud little song to signal to the two people that they’re meant to be together forever. If your soulmate doesn’t have a timer, yours is blank until they get one. Cool, now you’re caught up for Hatchetfield shenanigans
Paul has had his as long as he knew it was safe and available. He hates not knowing what his life will turn out like, so he thought this would be very helpful in planning his life… Except it’s blank. Whoever his soulmate is apparently doesn’t have the same need to plan out everything like he does. Emma doesn’t care much for the timers, she thinks if she’s going to meet her soulmate, she doesn’t need a little watch to tell her she’ll want to spend her life with them, she should just know. She notices the cute guy Paul that keeps visiting Beanies has one though, and it’s blank. She tries to bring it up, ask him why he decided to get one, what he’s hoping for, and for once someone gives her a good reason to consider grabbing one: it was supposed to help me plan for the future. Seems pretty reasonable, actually, none of that lovey dovey bullcrap she tells herself she’s not in want of. Emma doesn’t know anyone who planned for their future more than her sister, and Jane was the most put together person she’d ever met. Maybe it was time to start putting her life back together and making strides towards a life plan her sister would be proud of. She goes and she gets the stupid timer, just to help her factor in when her supposed soulmate is entering her life. She’s informed it could also be a platonic soulmate, which is nice, but she kinda wants dick too, so there’s that. The timer starts immediately which means her soulmate already has one. Great, no uncertainty. Except one thing… It’s only counting down 3 days. Paul starts freaking out as soon as his timer starts counting down. When he got this thing, he was expecting a nice five years, not three days. He had to work in three days, was he going to see them walking down the street? Was there going to be a new hire?? Was he going to have such a bad day that he went to the bar and met them while trying to drown his sorrows? Whatever, he can go about his day like normal on Monday. This definitely wasn’t exactly what he got the device forever ago to avoid! On Monday, Emma is waiting for this timer in her wrist to do its thing- it’s been zeroed out since she woke up- and she sees that Paul guy walking down the street through the window, headed towards Beanies. Sweet, it would be so cool to get to thank him for inspiring her to get this thing, now she was going to meet her soulmate today, but a small part of her worries that he might be upset that she just got one and it’s already her day, and his has been blank for years. She knows he got it purely out of practicality, but what if a small part of him gets jealous, or super fucking depressed or something! When he enters the coffee shop, he’s prepared for Emma’s usual cool greeting of “Hey, Paul, large black coffee?” It might soothe his nerves to get to talk to her, which is ironic because he always feels off-kilter talking to her, but today something about it just feels right. He starts to hear her greet him, he looks up, and just as their eyes meet, their timers play the same little tune in sync.
Lex and Ethan can’t afford to waste money on shit like the timers, and even if they could, they don’t need them to confirm what they already know: they’re each other’s One. There’s no doubt in their minds that they were meant to be together, and even if by some stupid twist of fate they weren’t, they’d ignore those stupid fucking things and stay together. They refuse to give up on each other no matter what, and to them, that is what being a soulmate really is.
Deb got hers around sixteen and it’s blank, but her girlfriend Alice refuses to get one too. Her mom getting one and it already counting down when Bill didn’t have a timer already tore apart their marriage, so Alice is terrified Deb will leave her if theirs don’t match. As long as it stays blank, though, her peace of mind can still be slightly maintained. Deb is regretfully a romantic, though, and really wants the proof that she and Alice are meant to be together, so it can be a huge point of conflict when she refuses to get a timer and won’t tell Deb why. Even if they don’t match, in such an unlikely case, Deb swears up and down that she’d never, ever leave her based on what some stupid device on her arm says. They get into a huge fight, because Alice doesn’t believe her, and when she leaves, she goes to get one as some kind of self-punishment, proof that Deb doesn’t know what she’s talking about and when they don’t match she’s going to leave. Deb suddenly starts freaking out when her timer says she only has a few hours until the day she meets her soulmate, TOMORROW. She doesn’t leave the house at all the next day until Alice visits her, and once she opens the door for her girlfriend and they see eachother for the first time since yesterday’s fight, their timers start chiming. (Alternatively, Deb could get her device removed- which is permanent- to prove to Alice that she only wanted it for concrete proof of what she knew, but doesn’t need it to know she wants to be with Alice forever. This one’s so much sweeter to me but that doubt in Alice’s mind that they’re not soulmates could still linger, ya know?)
The timers were relatively new back in the early 2000’s, unlike now, and Teddy and Jenny refuse to get them. They say they’re skeptical, they’re not gonna let someone put a weird device in their arm, they’re “not romantics like that”, but in reality, while the idea of finding someone to distract from the feelings they have for their best friend sounds good, the worry that this thing could accidentally out them for being in love with the other is a risk they’re not willing to take. Besides, Teddy won’t get one if Jenny doesn’t, and vice versa, mostly because they’re scared that the other will go on to find their soulmate and they’ll still be there in love with their best friend. Jenny died married Andy and moved away before she could ever get a timer, so they’ll never know for sure if the other could have been their One. Ted still hasn’t gotten one because if he does have a soulmate out there, he doesn’t want to be in a position that forces him to be emotionally vulnerable.
Duke Keane had one since he was twenty or so and it’s always been blank, and Miss Holloway got a timer mostly to humor the customers at Miss Retro’s that kept asking her to get one, “Maybe we’re soulmates” is a common joke she hears from her customers and she just smiles and laughs each time. Eventually she gets one just to be like “har har yeah I got it you guys can stop joking about it now.” When she gets it implanted, the timer starts for a moment before the screen shorts out and breaks entirely, never to work again. The next time she sees Duke, his is removed because it had mysteriously broken shortly after it started counting down, but he thought for a second he saw the display screen say it was going to go off today.
Stephanie went out at fifteen and got her timer behind her dad’s back. She was hoping her soulmate would be found quickly and he’d be rich and able to whisk her away from her dad, but after three years of it being blank, she’s getting a little frustrated that her soulmate doesn’t want to meet her, even though she knows it doesn’t work like that, so maybe she fools around with a couple other guys to have an outlet for that frustration. So what? Apparently her dad is the only one that cares cause according to him it makes him look bad when she’s being a slut- he never used that word but she thinks he meant it. Ted takes Pete to go get one over the summer for his eighteenth birthday, which Pete finds kinda odd because his brother doesn’t even have a timer, so why does he care?? That confusion (and the terror of wondering how much this’ll hurt) all goes away when he sees he has a little under a month before he meets The One. He can never take his eyes off it once he has it, continuously winding down. The school year will have started by then, so maybe they were a classmate. Steph is elated when her’s finally starts counting down. Only a month? Well, a month and three years. Certainly took them long enough, damn. Stephanie is so excited for the school year to begin that she almost forgets she fucking hates school, aside from seeing Brenda and Stacy and not seeing her father. So she’s struggling, just a little bit… Okay quite a lot. She completely forgets that it’s her zero day when she wakes up on just an average Thursday, and Miss Mulberry announced a pop quiz that she was wholly underprepared for. Quick, quick, she needs to think of something. She turns to the nerd that sits next to her that she’s never spoken to in her fucking life and hasn’t even made eye contact with to beg him to let her bum some answers off of him, and once she gets his attention they lock eyes, and the chiming on their wrists break through the silence in the room. Everyone looks up to see Stephanie Lauter and Micropeter are soulmates, and they were cheating on the pop quiz. Miss Mulberry sends them to the principal’s office for cheating, and Steph encourages him to take the scenic route (going through every fucking building and courtyard they possibly can) so they can get to know each other. Pete doesn’t think that’s a good idea, they could get in even more trouble, but come on his soulmate is Stephanie fucking Lauter! Who in their right mind isn’t gonna take that opportunity?? Pete gets the first detention of his life, which would be terrifying to him if Steph (she makes him call her Steph now) didn’t promise to spend the whole thing with him and fucking winked at him. Stephanie has decided resolutely that the whole “rich guy takes me away from my dad forever” thing was childish anyways because this guy is smart, funny, and cute??? She’s gonna be a-okay with this turn of events.
Grace got her timer pretty quick because her parents said that the person God made her to be with will be whoever this device says, and hers is blank for a loooooong long time. Max doesn’t have one and tries to convince her to sleep with him because “we’re totally meant to be together and I just don’t wanna get a timer I swearrrr like if I went and got one yours would start counting down obviouslyyyyy.” One of the many times he tries to convince her, hers finally starts counting down and she watches him pull up his sleeve and try to slyly stick a fake one on his arm. It’s not the fact that hers would have started counting down sooner if he got it actually implanted OR that it would’ve gone off already that tells her he’s full of baloney, it’s the fact that the numbers don’t match. She might smack him tbh
Stacy got her timer at fourteen because she was starting to get a little boy-crazy and wanted to start dating, so her parents got her the timer sort of to discourage her from excessively dating but still to support her wanting to find her soulmate. One thing to know about Stacy is that she tries very hard to seem as normal as possible- popularity is a tightrope that she can’t afford to fall off of because she can see everything underneath that she’d be harassed for like the rest of her classmates- hell, Stephanie just zeroed out and her soulmate is some geek, so Stacy was waiting for the other shoe to drop and see how disastrous that was going to turn out for her social life. Richie only got his recently because Peter found his soulmate in one of the coolest girls in school, and that gave him a little bit of hope. He had about a week before the two of them would meet, which was fine. He wasn’t freaking out at all. Plenty of things were in a week, like the next cheer practice he had to be a part of because the cheerleaders like forcing him to learn dances he’s not coordinated enough to pull off, especially in that mascot costume. Stacy is pulling up to practice on her zero day, still hasn’t met her soulmate yet, but she still has hope. Maybe her mom will need to go to the store later and she’ll go with her to try to meet her soulmate, but for now she’s just excited to focus on cheer. She notices Steph and her soulmate on the bleachers talking to Zeke the Fighting Nighthawk, and while she doesn’t feel any particular interest in talking to the boy or the bird, she knows her duffle bag and her backpack are safe with Steph, so she might as well go toss them with her. Steph turns to introduce Stacy to her boyfriend (since this was pretty new, they’d yet to meet), but Stacy gets distracted by the mascot taking off his head to get a drink of water, and when the two of them make eye contact, their timers interrupt Steph, going off so suddenly that all four of them get startled by it. Richie trips over the huge bird feet somehow even though he was standing in place, and Stacy immediately tries to help him up. She tries to smile and think something romantic about her soulmate, maybe that he’s really cute when he’s clumsy or that he has such strikingly blue eyes, but all that’s coming to mind is the fact that this is not going to help her beat the furry allegations.
Ruth got her timer on her 13th birthday. This was like going to a bar on your 21st to her. She always had grand dreams of finding her soulmate and riding off into the sunset with them, metaphorically speaking because she doubted there’d be a horse anywhere nearby and she usually imagined it happening in the middle of the day, kind of like how Pete and Richie’s did. Rosary doesn’t really believe that the timers are ethical- it’s not the job of a stupid machine to tell people matters of the heart if you ask her, but she’s never allowed herself to be much of a romantic anyways- her parents are one of those couples that swears they can make it work even if they aren’t soulmates and can’t accept they’re failing miserably. When she meets Ruth, they give each other new perspective on the timers as they get to know each other for longer: Ruth sort of learns to de-value the opinion of some hypothetical person and actually live her life for herself not lying in wait for The One (and learns to value herself because her One wouldn’t fucking hate her like she’s for some reason convinced hers would) while Rose learns she’s allowed to wear her heart on her sleeve and allow herself to want to find love and be vulnerable. Their new lessons come to a head when Rose goes to get a timer of her own, and Ruth, at a different location in town for getting timers, is about to get hers removed before it lights up and shows she’s already at zero. That’s not fair, the day was almost over- the sun was about to go down soon for fuck’s sake, what if she already met her soulmate today and they were too late to getting their timer and they’d never see each other again??? The employees don’t know what is going on, maybe it’s shorted out, and try to continue the removal before Ruth yanks her arm away and decides she’s not going to get it removed anymore. There’s still a few more hours in the day and she’s determined to stay out until 11:59:59 p-fucking-m to find this asshole that is goddamn lucky they have good timing. Rose is very shocked to see hers is already done, and she already had the plan to see Ruth after getting it to show her what her presence in her life means to her (and hopefully to have her suspicions that they’re meant to be together proven) so she tracks Ruth’s shared location on her moped (cause tbh she’s just a little too lame to have a motorcycle), seeing Ruth just aimlessly walking the streets of Hatchetfield at this point. When she finally catches up to her, they see each other and their timers both chiming that little soulmate song for when you’ve laid eyes on your One. One heartfelt conversation and a kiss later, the two of them are riding off into the sunset, just like Ruth always hoped for :)
