this emotional lil babe of course he’d have the empathetic soulmate au
JinJin wasn’t sure when it started, but he’d always been a little more sensitive than his peers. He got angry more easily, got happy out of nowhere, and sometimes cried with no cause. His parents thought at first that he was just more empathetic than usual for his age, but at a check up at around age thirteen, the doctor diagnosed his emotional nature as part of his soulmate link. It explained so much, the sudden mood swings and mixed bag of feelings was because he’d been sharing emotions with his soulmate since they were babies.
Ever since JinJin found out, he made it his mission to never, ever let you have a bad day, not on his watch. Whenever he felt a spur of sadness or pain from you, he would always do something to change it, turning on nice music, or going for a walk, or even sometimes just physically smiling helped him to ease your pain. He knew your teenage years must not have been easy, and he did everything he could to help you through them.
Little did he know that by helping so much, he actually made you cry more. You were so touched that your soulmate kept sending you positive emotions, it brought you to tears on more than one occasion, which made you spiral into feeling bad for ruining his hard work, etc. But whenever you could, if you ever felt him slipping for just a second and he started to feel glum, you sent him all the love you could, from the bottom of your heart.
It was that love that helped him to recognize you when you two eventually met. You were at a puppy cafe, one of your favorites to visit, when you noticed one of the dogs by your feet was whimpering. You picked it up carefully, cuddling it and kissing it’s head, showing it a little extra love. JinJin saw you from across the room, and in an instant he was there at your side.
“I... you’re the one, aren’t you? I could feel it.”
To be perfectly honest, MJ was heartbroken when he found out what linked him and his soulmate together. He thought the person in his dreams was an imaginary friend from his childhood, but it turned out you were much, much more than that. It pained him to know you were so close, but yet so far away...
Once he put two and two together, he made sure to adapt his dreams with you accordingly. He built a huge rose garden in his dreams, with topiaries and fountains, and golden light hitting everything just so. He wanted it to look like something out of a fairytale, and he succeeded.
That night, his dream self donned an outfit fit for a prince, hoping that he could capture your heart. When you arrived in the dream garden, he presented you with a rose, and confessed his feelings for you, along with his discovery that you were his soulmate. Much to his surprise, you’d figured out a long while ago that he was your soulmate, but wanted to get to know him without that pressure, so you hadn’t brought it up.
He laughed when he found out you knew, and your consideration (and well-intentioned deception) endeared him all the more to you. You two shared your first kiss that night, and though the link prevented you from talking about your location in the waking world, he vowed that night to find you, and to visit you every night until he could hold you in his arms, both asleep and awake.
“Until we meet again, my love...”
Eunwoo had a good sense of time, even from when he was young. The little numbers lit up on his wrist ensured that he was the first in his grade to learn how to tell time, both digital and analog. The boy even learned military time before his peers. Anything that he hoped would give him a better idea of when he would meet you.
But the numbers stayed stubbornly the same, still years and years away... he could practically see them in his head, even after he’d closed his eyes to go to sleep. He knew how many hours and minutes it would be before he laid eyes on you for the first time, his soulmate. He knew it better than the back of his hand. And as the years passed, he couldn’t break the habit of watching the numbers tick down, even though he knew it wouldn’t bring him to you any faster.
As his twenty-first birthday approached, he started to get nervous. The numbers that had become a comfort to him over the years were now dwindling, and they started to give him anxiety. What would he say when he finally met you? Could he live up to your expectations? Were you as nervous as he was?
All these questions became obsolete when the final minute ticked down and he ran into you. When the last minute left his wrist with a 00:00, he decided to flee. It was a desperate attempt for his anxious heart to delay the inevitable meeting, the possibility of disappointing you was just too great to him. But fate had other plans, and the moment he bumped into you, his rapid heartbeat steadied to a pleasant thrumming. You were... perfect. He didn’t have to overthink what to do or say. The puzzle pieces clicked together, and a smile spread across his face.
“I’ve waited to meet you for so long... darling.”
When he started high school, Moonbin found out he was linked because he’d written a reminder for himself on his arm to study for an upcoming test. A while later, he was shocked when he saw another message beneath it, in much nicer handwriting that said “study hard!”
Since that day, Bin had been writing you messages on his arms, getting to know you. He fell in love with you through your writing, able to feel your laugh and your smile in the little loops and curls that your words left on his skin. It didn’t take long for him to admit that he loved you, utterly and completely, and it frustrated him to no end that the link prohibited you two from exchanging contact information.
As it turns out, he had actually known you for ages before he found out you were his soulmate. You two shared a class once he got to college, but he had no idea that you two were linked together. It was only after you passed him a note in class one day that he recognized the tiny scrawl from the messages left on his own skin.
He did a double take to be sure, and compared the sample with the words on his arm. After class, he asked you to roll up your sleeve, and that confirmed it. He laughed and spun you around, hugging you close to him to make up for lost time. He asked you out immediately, and was too shy to kiss you just then. But eventually you got him to read between the lines. <3
“You have the nicest handwriting I’ve ever seen.”
The words marked on Rocky’s arm from birth were... troubling to him. “I can’t believe you did that!” He worried, as he got older, that he would somehow insult or offend his soulmate upon first meeting them. It was constantly lingering in his mind, and as a result, he became incredibly shy whenever he made new friends or met new people. He figured that by keeping quiet and only smiling, he didn’t run the risk of being rude to anyone.
Meanwhile you grew up with a frustrating tattoo of your soulmate’s first words to you. “Thanks.” That’s all. It was impossible to try and speculate with such a common expression. Your soulmate could be the cashier at a grocery store, or a cab driver, or any other manner of things... everyone says “thanks”, probably on the daily. So how were you supposed to figure out who your link was?
So you decided, after many years of hesitance, to simply let it go. Hopefully your soulmate had something more distinctive written on their arm, and they’d be able to tell when the two of you met. The fated day arrived sooner than you expected, when one day you were meeting up with your friend after her dance practice, and Rocky happened to be there at the studio, practicing his spins.
He nailed five whirls, right in a row, before jumping back to maintain his balance and then dropping into a split, popping up to his feet like it was nothing. You were shocked. You’d never, ever seen someone move so precisely. “I can’t believe you did that!” You shouted, unable to help yourself from expressing your amazement. “Like, wow! That was incredible!” It took Rocky a moment to register your words, but when he did, he smiled brightly. “Thanks.” He said, and came right over to you, showing you his arm.
“I didn’t think it would turn out like this... but I’m really glad it did.”
When you were young, you were a good child. You listened to your parents when they asked you to clean your room, or walk the dog, or eat all your vegetables. They very rarely let you have candy or junk food, but you didn’t complain, because you had a secret. You were able to taste them all the time.
You weren’t sure how, but fairly often, you’d be going about your day, and you’d taste potato chips or candy bars so vividly, it felt like they were in your mouth. As it turns out, your soulmate was the cause of this, but you didn’t realize that until your teenage years, when you heard from a friend about the different kind of soulmate links.
Sanha was not so lucky as you. Sure he could eat junk food and candy, but the one thing he couldn’t stand was vegetables - and you loved them. He tried veggies himself when he was young, and spat them out. Since then, he’d been haunted by them, able to taste leafy greens even when he had nothing in his mouth. He thought it was some sort of divine punishment for refusing to eat them.
You two had become friends in middle school, and your friendship followed you to high school. But you only found out you were linked when the two of you went out to eat together. You ordered a side salad with your food and Sanha asked for fries. When you two began to eat, you had a comical moment of realization as you each discovered that you could taste the other one’s food. Sanha laughed and blushed, finally feeling some closure now that he knew the culprit of his veggie-haunting was none other than you, his crush - and now, his soulmate, as it turns out.
“You need to stop eating so many vegetables... I almost died.”
