For your trope prompt: soulmate AU? (any kind you want to talk about - first words tattooed, countdown, matching marks, first touch, etc)
Oh I loove soulmate AUs of all kinds.
My favourite one for them is the kind of soulmate AU where you feel echoes of the other person's pain and/or emotions.
Mel is born with a soulmate, she's used to the echoes of skimmed knees and big feelings in her heart. As a baby, she gets upset easily because she's connected to a life that's much more active than hers. Frank is a small boy when his soulmate is born and his parents can pretty much pinpoint when it happens, because he's just verbal enough to describe what he's feeling, so they're fairly sure okay he's feeling the birth. It's not like the full whammy, but like a 10-20% echo of what's happening to your soulmate.
Neither of them gets injured too much, but every once in a while it'll happen. Both of them have big emotions though, so they really know what each other is going through.
In a universe like that, there's probably hundreds of platforms where people log what they've experienced that day in an effort to find their soulmate, but it's very hard to narrow things down.
Mel feels all the first love and heartbreak when it ends, Frank feels all the grief of her dad and then her mom dying.
And Mel freezes in her kitchen, clutching her back and nearly throwing up when Frank hurts his back. The pinch of it never quite goes away, it's not disabling to her, but she actually sees a soulmate pain expert about it to help her separate the sensation of her own healthy back from the sensation of the chronic pain that now is just an ever-present buzz in her spine. She half expects her soulmate to be in a wheelchair after that initial pain, because that had to be a catastrophic injury, maybe a car crash, but nothing else hurt, so maybe not? She's at a loss, all she knows is that her soulmate is permanently in pain and anxious now, and that her soulmate's body is really struggling. And she feels when it stops. Periodically. When the anxiety and pain go away and then return when the meds wear off.
She realises with a sinking feeling, that her soulmate might have a problem, because even though she just feels a fraction of it, she can extrapolate from it, the fear of getting caught, the pain, the desperate need for relief, the shame.
It's the closest they come to finding each other online, when Mel writes a post about what she's feeling and tells her soulmate that she's still on their side and rooting for them, and please if you can seek help do, because she needs them to live long enough to meet her. The post resonates with thousands of people though, and by the time Frank reads it, he's convinced it's not for him. In fact, it makes him think of his poor soulmate and what he's putting them through, and it makes him feel like a monster. He knows Abby isn't his soulmate. They had one moment in time where they thought maybe they were, but he felt none of her big moments and she was really unhappy that he had no idea how much childbirth hurt and how much she missed him while he was on rotation in the ED and couldn't go home because of COVID. When they got together, and when they decided they'd get married, they made the decision that their soulmates didn't matter, that the odds of finding them were too slim, and to build a life just the two of them. The reality of it is tearing them apart though.
And then Mel starts her second year of residency at the Pitt, and the moment she starts talking to him, her excitement catches in his chest, and he can't even make sense of why this woman tickles his brain so good, but the more excited he gets, the more excited she gets, and within ten minutes of first talking they're in a feedback loop of delight, amplifying each other's glee. "STEMI with me, Mel," he tells her, his heart already soaring because he gets to show her how they hold the national record for door to balloon time. He pulls her on every case he can, because it's just to fun with her. He feels the second her mood tips, he doesn't even have to fully look at her, he feels when she needs a break, and for a good few hours he doesn't even think much of it, he just found a great new person he gets on with, she's easy to read.
It's not until hours later, when he tells her "I need you" and feels the relief in his own chest that he thinks... wait, hold on.
He means to talk to her after the shift, but then Robby finds out about the benzos and his life turns upside down.
Frank is already panicking about his own life, when he feels a moment of absolute shock and devastation that isn't his own. And for a moment he thinks that it's an echo of Mel finding out about what he did. And then he hears about Pittfest on the radio (because he's still in his car, he couldn't go home), and he knows he has to go back there and help.
"You're here!" - The pure relief that floods his own body in response to what she's feeling is addictive. "In the flesh," he tells her, and she smiles at him. He means to be brave, he means to find her after, to come clean, but when Robby tells him he let everybody down, he knows it's true. He let everyone down, especially his soulmate who has had to feel all this for so long.
After he goes home that night, and after his marriage ends at his kitchen table, he finds that one r/soulmatemessages post again that he read weeks ago, and wonders if Mel could forgive him like that.
"You never let me down," she tells him 10 months later, but he feels sick because he knows he has. He's convinced she's his soulmate, and Mel doesn't know it yet. How can he tell her? How can he confess when he knows his own anxiety about the 4th of July fucked up her day even more? When he's left her alone to deal with all the stresses for 10 more months? When he knows she probably feels how much his back hurts every day, and he made it worse again that very day.
If ever he needed more confirmation that she's it, it's when he sees Mel clutching her back after he picked Luca up, after the emergency is over.
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