Three Dots // Yoonmin Soulmate AU [angst]

Three dots. They were only three dots. Three dots that were meant to mean absolutely nothing, other than a pause or omission. They were supposed to mean nothing... right?

Wrong.

Three dots. Ellipsis, if I refer to them by their proper name. Just an ellipsis that was supposed to mean nothing to me... but in the end...

They meant everything.

"Park Jimin, just face it. You don't have a soulmate."

I whispered those words I knew so well to myself. By now, it was just part of my routine. To kill every small flicker of hope inside of myself. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My own face stared back at me, my eyes asking the question I was so used to hearing from everyone.

Why? Why do you do this to yourself?

My eyes flickered down to my wrist, where the three dots seemed to just bounce back in response.

Because I don't have a soulmate. This just proves it.

In a world where the first words your soulmate would say to you marked your body, I was forced to go through day after day without a single word on me.

Growing up, I questioned everything about it. Why me? Why did I have to be one of the 0.00000002% of people who didn't get a soulmate mark? The chance of that happening was so rare that it was even called a negative percentage chance. There hadn't been another recorded markless person in the last four decades. So why me?

I always thought I could find a way around it. That I could find a way that proved everything known about soulmates wrong. Maybe... my soulmate would be mute? No, not possible. In that case the words found marked on the skin would be presented in an alternative way, for example, sign language.

Maybe there was someone out there with three dots like me as well. Maybe the dots would serve as an identifying symbol? Yeah, that didn't work out either. After all, I was one of the "negative percentages." I was the last (and third) markless person born in the 20th century, and the only current living one in the 21st century. So my hope of the ellipsis being an identifying mark faded away into a forgotten part of my memory, never to be brought up in conversation again.

Was it possible that there was a chance that I could still have a soulmate, despite not having any words marked on my skin. Well, yes. There was always the chance. Researchers had been looking for the meaning of the ellipsis mark for centuries. But, sadly, no human without a word mark had lived longer than 55 years of age, and no recorded one had found their soulmate before they died. Cause of death? Something referred to as a death of a soul.

The words death of a soul haunted me every day. It was just a small reminder in the back of my brain. My soul would die because it would forever be alone. My soul could not survive knowing it does not have its perfect match.

Even if there was a small chance that the person did have a soulmate, either they never crossed paths or the soulmate never noticed... or if they did, didn't think the markless person could be their soulmate.

Either way, there was no record of a markless person finding their soulmate yet. Which is when the symptoms worsened, and boom. Death of a soul. Although a soul dying wasn't something that only happened to markless people, it was a different kind of horrible. People with soulmates could have their soul die if their soulmate died or rejected them, hurt them, in some way. But that death of their soul occurred 10 times slower than that of a markless person.

The youngest person ever recorded to die by death of their soul was a 17 year old woman. I was 22. I have lived longer than I honestly thought I would. I didn't know how long I could have. What worried me the most was despite everything...