Warnings:
-Celebrity soulmate AU
-Violence
-Suicidal thoughts
-Mentioned suicide
-Emotional abuse
-Mentioned domestic violence
-Dystopian themes
-Dysfunctional relationships
-Arguing... lots of arguing
-Smut
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It began, as most shitty B-list movies begin, with a mutation.
Some weird combination of genes and chemistry and test tubes and women and men in lab coats poking at fucking petri dishes, and never for ten seconds did anyone ever stop to think that some things just weren't meant to be messed with.
People's lives, for example, their futures and their choices, were not things that could be boiled down to test tubes and chemical reactions.
None of that particularly mattered to anyone. No one ever imagined how anything could ever, ever possibly go wrong. People thought you know...wouldn't it be super fucking tubular if we actually had soulmates? Like in the moving pictures? Golly!
Bills were passed, signed off on, with the vast majority of people seeing absolutely nothing problematic with the proceedings. Because, what could be wrong with love, right? What could be wrong with making sure that every human to be born on earth would be granted the permission to give and receive love?
Like they say, 'the greatest thing you'll ever know is just to love and be loved in return.' Right?
Everything was flowers and hearts and goo-goo eyes; people weren't thinking right. Anyone who actually stepped up, back then, to suggest that maybe there was something weird about messing around with people's DNA to force them to belong with another person, was ignored. Any complaints whatsoever were ignored altogether.
So, it happened. People were voluntarily injected with the serum, and within days people were finding their soulmates. Their other halves, as they said. It was a mistake. It was a horrible, awful, mistake, and everything went to shit within a week. Just a single week and it was like the zombie fucking apocalypse hit. Because what the serum actually did wasn't just like some love potion, it didn't just make you feel a little bit sad if you went without your mate for a couple of days, it made people fucking obsessed.
It made people, for lack of a better word, deranged.
They didn't test it enough. They didn't take all the precautions they should have taken, and everyone was too blinded by that fleeting idea of true love that they thought the pros far outweighed the possible cons.
Some people reacted fine. Some people found their soulmate, searched the entire world over for them, fell in love, and had a happily ever after. It was the perfect vision that everyone had come to pass.
The problem was that these people were in the vast minority.
For every one perfectly matched couple, there were, give or take, a hundred others who...didn't have the right response.
People didn't always react right. Not everyone could possibly have the same reaction, they should've known, but the extent to which it all backfired was unprecedented. No one could've predicted that shit.
People died. A lot of people died because of this; because the serum turned them borderline feral.
It made them insane with jealousy, with possessiveness, to the point of actually
killing their own soulmates to get the feeling to go away. To get it out of them. A week. One single week, and over half the people who chose to receive the injection were dead.
The same scientists holed up in an underground lab somewhere and worked tirelessly to find an antidote, to find something to flush it out of the bloodstream, so any children conceived by the well adjusted soulmates, anyone who was actually left, wouldn't have the mutation.
It worked, more or less. Antidotes, not elective this time, were distributed out to everyone who
signed up for the initial injection and it was weird. Everyone always says, when they came out of the stupor, and looked at the person who had been their soulmate only twenty minutes earlier, blinked, and felt nothing for them anymore.
Everything that they liked about that person, from their looks to their personality; it meant nothing. Like the serum didn't just find someone who you would actually wind up with anyway, someone you actually cared about.
It just shoved you and someone together, and forced you to love them. Forced them to love you back. It didn't matter, anyway, it was a dark mark for the history books, everyone thought. Bury the dead, hold the incident up as a reminder and a warning for future generations, move on.
But some people. Some people didn't get the gene washed out well enough. The serum was still running through their veins, however undetected; getting passed down to the next generation.
This was rare; this was incredibly rare.
The statistics back then were something like you have a billion to five chance of being born with the mutation, and a two billion to five chance of having a match for you born with the same mutation.
But they existed. No one was really sure how it was going to present itself in the next generation; would it be the same? Would there be just as much chaos as the first time around? should the couple dozen or so kids growing up with a soulmate forced upon them be allowed to walk around in society like normal people, like ticking time bombs waiting to explode the second they met their soulmate?
People were concerned that they were going to be worse, more out of control, because the antidote wouldn't work on them. Like it was just a part of them that couldn't be removed. Like trying to get rid of someone's heart. But, it was tamer, the second time around. Whatever the antidote did the first time around, however much it diluted the initial serum, it made the mutation less...aggressive. A handful of them found their soulmates, wound up on the news, wound up as huge celebrities, and both pairs were happy and healthy and assured the cameras and the public at large that they had absolutely no urges to ever kill each other, and they were in love, and as soon as they met their match after eighteen years of wandering around feeling empty and lost, they felt complete again.
Everything was...okay, for the most part.
None of the mated-born particularly liked being sideshow attractions for the public to gobble up, and it created weird prejudices against them, being in the limelight like that; some people were still afraid of them, afraid that one day the serum would make them go insane.
The only negative physical side effect of being born that way was that it left strange red markings on the skin.
Shallow cuts in a strange pattern; for some of them, it looked like nothing but a mess of tangled webs, for others it did sort of look like a picture (like criss crosses and zig zags and veins), but the one unifying factor was that, if you were mated, your soulmate would have the exact same markings on their own person, somewhere. That's how you would know.
It didn't work like it used to; it wasn't an undying need to tear the world apart searching for the other half. It was more like a dull ache in the back of the head, sometimes. Late at night.
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