For the mash up prompt: Stoncy: Soulmate AU + Curse AU
Oh, this is an evil prompt! Soulmate and Curse? Okay, let’s give it a go.
From the time he was young, Jonathan knew he was cursed. When he was born, a fortune teller told his parents that when he met his soulmate, he would be responsible for their death. Jonathan grew up knowing that he would never get to have a soulmate, even if he found them, because they would be taken away shortly after. So, he decides to be solitary. He doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t touch anyone. He’s alone, and that’s the way it has to be.
Nancy finds out freshman year of high school that her soulmate is Steve Harrington. He brushed against her in the hall at school, trying to catch up with some of his friends, and a mark appeared on the inside of Nancy’s wrist: it was just three small moles, blurred together into a sort of heart shape, but she knew it hadn’t been there the moment before Steve touched her. The idea of finding her soulmate this early was a little appealing, but she wanted some time. Time to finish being a kid and figuring out who she was. She doesn’t tell Steve about the mark, and he never comes asking.
Steve honestly has so many moles already that he doesn’t notice the new ones on his wrist halfway through his sophomore year of high school. He’s cool with not finding his soulmate yet. Not when there’s so many pretty and interesting people that he wants to get to know.
Jonathan makes it to his sophomore year of high school without finding his soulmate. So far, so good. He gets more into photography, because it’s fulfilling, but still lets him be solitary most of the time. Maybe he notices some people at school, and maybe sometimes when he forgets not to, he wonders what it would be like to hug a friend, or kiss someone. But that’s all for other people. Not him.
Nancy spends more and more time thinking about Steve Harrington, and about the girls he’s been dating and the summer before sophomore year, she sees him in the grocery store, alone. She’s with her mom, but says she’ll be right back. She walks straight up to Steve, shows him her wrist, and asks to see his. He shrugs, because honestly Laurie Bell approached him the same way. Nancy’s different. The mark on her wrist looks exactly like the one on his. Steve grins and asks Nancy when she wants to go out.
That fall, Will Byers goes missing. Then Barb goes missing from a party at her best friend’s soulmate’s house. Jonathan couldn’t help but take pictures of the party, for once letting himself miss what it must be like to be normal, to not be cursed. Except when he develops the pictures, Steve’s friend Nicole sees them, and it ends with Jonathan’s camera destroyed and Nancy picking up the pieces of Barb’s photo.
Nancy convinces Jonathan to talk to her, she convinces him to help her hunt the monster. When they find the dying deer, Jonathan’s hand brushes hers as he takes the gun. For the two or three minutes that Nancy’s missing, Jonathan wonders if this is it. Did he just kill his soulmate? It can’t be, right? Everyone in school knows Nancy’s soulmate is Steve Harrington. She can’t be dead. She can’t be.
When Jonathan manages to pull Nancy back from the upside down, she’s not breathing. She was just holding onto him, calling for him, and now she’s not breathing, and when Jonathan puts his ear to her chest, he hears her heart stop.
Distraught, but also stubborn and desperate, he remembers the CPR lessons his mother made him take when he was twelve and she needed to leave Will alone with him after school so she could work. Jonathan pumps Nancy’s heart for her and breaths fresh air into her lungs, and it doesn’t take long at all before Nancy’s taking a deep breath, her heart beating wildly to catch up with all the oxygen her body needs.
Jonathan brings Nancy home and puts her in bed, and she smiles at him and turns his wrist over. There’s a new mark there, just like Nancy’s. He says he doesn’t understand. She already has a soulmate. Nancy doesn’t understand either, but she needs Jonathan to stay. Won’t he stay?
Steve is worried about Nancy. She’s been unusually hard to reach, and he knows she’s worried about her friend. He goes over to her house (without Tommy and Carol, because he’s planning on spending the night, like he has before), and sees Jonathan laying in bed with Nancy, holding her.
Steve has no idea what to think. Nancy’s his soulmate. Their marks match exactly. How could she do this to him? Is it because he went out with those other girls the year before? He didn’t wait for her? Doesn’t she love him? She’s supposed to love him. He knows his parents aren’t soulmates, and he always figured that’s why they didn’t seem to care too much about him, but he figured his own soulmate would be different. She was supposed to love him. She had to love him!
Without Tommy and Carol to egg him on, it takes Steve a little longer to come up with a plan of action. After mulling it over for most of the day, he decides he can’t confront Nancy. She’s too stubborn. She’ll leave him out of spite. No, he has to talk to Jonathan, get him to realize that Nancy’s not his and never will be.
Steve finds the only Byers in the Hawkins white pages and drives over to his house. It’s getting a little late in the evening. He should be home by now. That’s his car parked out front, right? Steve bangs on the door, begging Jonathan to make things right, to leave his soulmate alone.
Nancy opens the door. Her hand is bleeding, and Steve can’t hear anything over the thought that Jonathan hurt his soulmate! He pushes his way into the house, intent on punishing Jonathan, but that’s when all the lights start flashing. The lights flash and something comes out of the ceiling, and then Jonathan grabs his hand and tells him to jump.
The monster vanishes. Steve freaks out, and demands that Nancy come with him, but she’s insistent that it’s going to come back. He can’t leave without her. Even when Nancy points a gun at him and tries to get him to go, he says, “You’re going to have to shoot me. I’m not leaving my soulmate to deal with whatever that is without me.”
The monster comes back. It knocks down Jonathan and Nancy’s bullets don’t seem to be stopping it, so Steve picks up the only weapon he sees and hits the monster over and over again until it’s in the trap. He’s fairly certain it got a blow or two in on him, but he can’t think about that yet. Not when Jonathan is setting the monster on fire.
Steve only realizes that something is wrong when Nancy looks at him and says, “Steve! You’re bleeding!”
There’s a big gash in one of his legs and he’s falling to the floor, passing out.
Jonathan doesn’t even think about the curse. He tells Nancy to call an ambulance, and then he makes a tourniquet out of a belt and slows the bleeding. By the time the paramedics show up, Steve’s pulse is getting weak, and Jonathan notices the mark on his wrist.
He watches his other soulmate get loaded into the ambulance, and his blood is all over Jonathan’s hands, and this is how it happens, isn’t it? This is how the curse takes Jonathan’s soulmate away from him.
Nancy gets Jonathan cleaned up and she drives them to the hospital, even though she only has a learner’s permit, and they wait for word on how Steve is doing. The trauma surgeon wants to talk to Steve’s parents, but Nancy pulls the soulmate card and demands to know what’s going on. The surgeon says that Steve’s heart stopped while he was on the operating table, but they managed to get it going again when they got his blood pressure up. His leg is a mess, and he probably won’t be playing basketball anytime soon, but at least it’s repaired enough that it probably won’t kill him. In fact, whoever put the tourniquet on him probably saved his life.
Jonathan has to sit down and put his head between his knees. The curse killed both his soulmates. But he still managed to save both of them.
Oh, and now he has two soulmates, instead of none. Go figure.
Send me a ship + two tropes and I’ll tell you how I’d mash them together!
