Where the Cosmos Grows

✦ Where the Cosmos Grows ✦

A Seventeen Soulmate AU
Soulmates are supposed to feel like home.
For Han Areum, they only ever meant loss.

At sixteen, a flower bloomed on her skin. A soulmate mark she learned not to believe in. When her father found his soulmate and left without looking back, and her mother unraveled in the aftermath, Areum decided fate was nothing more than an excuse to abandon the people you loved.
Now a fashion and makeup student at Narae Arts University, Areum lives quietly. She pours her heart into sketchbooks, thrifted fabrics, and long shifts at a city cat café. She is warm, kind, and endlessly giving-but she keeps her heart carefully out of reach.
What she doesn't know is that her soulmates already exist.

Thirteen of them.
Already together.
Already whole.

When paths cross, Areum is faced with a truth she never wanted to confront: her flower completes an arrangement that has already bloomed. And the closer she gets, the more she fears that her presence will only ruin what they've built.
So she does what she's always done.

She stays kind.
She stays distant.
She stays safe.

But some flowers grow no matter how hard you try to ignore them.
And sometimes, love doesn't come to replace what's broken-it comes to grow alongside it.