touch » txt (COMPLETED)

prologue

Soulmates.

It was a lame excuse to say you needed someone to survive.

A disease. That's all it was. It started spreading 145 years ago, and ever since then, when people turn 18, they get a tiny mark on their chest, near their heart. It is a sign of your soulmate. Sometimes it's something that will link you two.

It is a mark that bounds you to someone else, and when you find them, you need to rely on them to live. If not, you start getting ill, and it can be deathly.

How to find your soulmate? A touch.

With a mere touch, you can feel it in your soul. The connection, the bond. You can start feeling your soulmate's feelings, and you can be heard in your soulmate's soul too.

For the first weeks, your heart will be weak, dependent on the other person's heart, so you need their touch so your souls can connect.

Scientists have ever since tried to find a cure. People had touched their soulmate by accident in the subway, or somewhere crowded, and then have lost track of them. They died in the first 24 hours since the touch.

So, since it was as deathly as a disease, and it had no other cure than touching your soulmate, people sometimes was afraid to find their own.

Other people, the dreamers, felt like the soulmates came from the same soul, that split on its way down to earth and fell on different bodies. In order for the soul to be complete, it needs to connect with the other piece.

But sometimes, some weird times, it can be split in more than two. There have been people who have reportedly had more than one soulmate, and that's okay. It just means that you have to rely on more people than one.

Lee Heejin used to not want to touch her soulmate ever. That way, she wouldn't get sick, she would depend on anyone else than herself. And it was okay, she could still find love, but she didn't long for her soulmate.

Her mark was also strange too. For some time she supposed it was an arrow. Then she believed it was a single letter. But lately, she had a feeling it was a number; a roman number: v.

Either ways she didn't want to think about it. She wanted to live a life freely, so she wanted to get rid of it, or to never ever touch her soulmate. She didn't want to, and she would escape it for as long as she could. So far, she'd been doing it fine: dodging her soulmate.

So it came as a shock when she stumbled upon an uprising Idol, and when she bowed to apologize, their heads bumped. And she felt it.

But then, something strange happened. Her tattoo turned from a five to a four.