There is a name on his wrist, stark against his skin.
The black characters are clear and unmistakable: Choi Yeonjun.
Soobin swears.
All idols wear soulbands around their wrists to hide their soulmate's name: as idols there's an expectation to be sin...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Inside his room, Soobin leans back against the door, eyes closed, trying to will his heart to stop racing.
Fuck. So much for trying to avoid Yeonjun, the promise he'd made to himself yesterday after their Live. It's like the soulbond is drawing them together, and the moment he's there, Soobin loses any sort of rational common sense.
He goes back to the internet.
He can't exactly type into the search bar what to do when you're an idol and get a soulmark or what to do if my soulmate is a member of my idol group — and he definitely can't type help I think I want to kiss my soulmate???
Soobin presses the edge of his phone against his forehead, trying to think. There's got to be something. Having a soulmate can't work out for everyone, it's just not statistically possible. He can't be the only person falling for a soulmate when it's an absolutely terrible idea.
Soulmate, he types, Unrequited.
He discovers threads started by people who finally got their soulmark only to find out their soulmate was already in love with someone else. He finds people who were already in love and in serious, committed relationships, who suddenly got a soulmark one day with a name that wasn't their partner's. Situations where it wasn't just happily ever after.
How long does it take for a bond to fade? he types, biting the side of his thumb as he waits for the results to load.
Yeonjun doesn't have his name - Yeonjun can't have his name - so the bond has to be one-sided, which means surely Soobin's soulmark will fade. It has to.
He scrolls through the results as they appear, scanning the posts for the timings. There's absolutely no consistency, the shortest time being just over a year and the longest being — forever, still there all the way up to the person died. Fuck.
The idea of living the rest of his life with Yeonjun's name on his wrist, knowing that he can't have him, opens up an ache in Soobin's chest that feels cavernous.
He needs a distraction, he decides. Something to take his mind off Yeonjun being his soulmate and what happened - or didn't happen - in the kitchen.
+x+
He boots up a game of League and loses so spectacularly he seriously considers uninstalling it forever.
+x+
He takes up running for the ten minutes it takes him to remember why he absolutely hates running and gives it up again.
+x+
When he gets back to the dorms, he runs into Taehyun putting his shoes on in the hall.
"Hyung!" Taehyun does a double-take. "Were you... going to the gym?"
Soobin supposes it's a good assumption to make, what with him in trainers, basketball shorts, compression leggings and an oversized t-shirt, with headphones around his neck. He can't exactly tell Taehyun he'd gone out for a run that had lasted approximately ten minutes though, so he decides to just roll with it. "Yeah."
