Larry fics

What To Expect When You Meet Your Soulmate

Harry read What to Expect When You Meet Your Soul Mate front to back every night since he received it at ten, wide eyed and in too much of a hurry to grow up.

He stayed up until five in the morning that very night he received it, particularly entranced by the first hand accounts of the very first millisecond the people interviewed had seen their soul mate. Some described it as looking into the face of God (dramatic, Harry thought) but each story had a central theme: instant understanding and connection. They described it as a sudden click throughout their body—like they had finally found the exact thing they hadn’t realized they had been looking for, almost like stumbling unexpectedly upon the perfect Christmas present.

Harry was mesmerized, and had gone out the very next day to buy the second and third part of the series. It was rare and difficult to find, since it was banned shortly after its release for describing the way Soul Meetings work too closely, so he returned home empty-handed. It wasn’t until two years later, by a random stroke of luck, that he finally managed to purchase a decently priced ending to the trilogy.

The second book was more technical than the first, describing the way the hospital nurses determine which soul belongs with which. It explained how the same unique chemical manifesting itself in the frontal lobe of the brain formed soul mates. No two pairs of soul mates had the same chemical composition, and the book said research was still being done to determine why only two people in the world at a time matched up chemically, and why it brought them together in the way it did. It blew his mind, and again he stayed up until the sun rose, only passing out once he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

The next night he read on briefly about how they determine if someone is an omega, alpha, or beta. He wished the book listed a way to self-diagnose, but the writers were ahead of him, only telling him to wait and see if he wasn’t sure yet. It was frustrating not knowing for so long, because Harry didn’t have his first rut until he was 15.

Harry liked the second book much less than the first, because it talked about soul mates like they were a chemical reaction or a school science experiment, instead of something beautiful. Harry didn’t believe something as important as love could be compared to the composition of a body. That was physical, and he knew a soul bond ran deeper than that; a soul bond was a result of fate.

The third book actually scared Harry, and left him with an inexplicable worry in the back of his mind. It talked about the history of soul mates, and the things that could go wrong with their mating. It left Harry so anxious and worried for the future that he pulled out half of his eyelashes in five minutes flat the first time he read it. It described how sometimes, if someone suffered from concussions as a child, it messed up their chemical composition, and they wouldn’t feel the strong attraction to their partner they were supposed to. It contained stories of widows and widowers and how they spent their whole life feeling like half of their heart was missing. Even worse were the stories of people who never met their soul mate, because they had died before their meeting date. Harry was a firm believer that it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, so his heart broke for them.

Most importantly, the third book taught him that Australia was an actual, real place. He had always thought his sister had made up the stories about people who flat out rejected their soul mate and were sent to a continent so secluded from the rest of the world, it was almost impossible to make contact with anyone ever again. The section on Australia was brief, a warning, almost a PSA to the reader that the Hall of Meetings was infallible, and their word was law. It refused to go into much detail about who was sent away, or why, or how many.

He couldn’t help but feel there was more than what he saw on TV going on behind the scenes. The book left him with a bitter taste in his mouth, and he wasn’t sure whether he was more afraid or more excited to receive his Soul Meeting date after reading it.