Chapter Text
Music is the thin but unbreakable thread that links you to your soulmate.
It weaves and arcs to find its way across towns, cities, countries, to find you, to share the beauty of rhythm and melody. With music, you feel what they are feeling, letting their emotions become yours. This is the merit of our society, the invisible strings that stretch and tangle through mountains and forests to bring you and your soulmate together.
Namjoon frowned at his psych textbook, the generic-looking black font staring blankly back at him. The flowery language sounded overly cliché, like the textbook was trying to sell him tickets to a C-list romantic comedy, and it made this whole system sound like something straight out of a fantasy novel, something that brought two people together in a flurry of cherry blossom petals, chaste kisses, and whispered lyrics.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
Especially when his soulmate wouldn’t stop singing Les Mis at 3 a.m.
Namjoon had never listened to Les Mis in his life, but even now, as he stared drearily at his textbook, he wanted to burst out in song, punch through a window, and scream “cannons!” at whoever happened to be lucky enough to pass by. He let out a groan, leaning back in his chair, trying to push his headphones deeper inside of his ears. The rickety blue lamp at his right was standing on its last legs of life, its bulb flickering irregularly. The stupid paragraph describing exactly why the rumbling of “Do You Hear the People Sing” was echoing around in his skull was sitting motionless on the page, a lump of black text that no longer had any meaning to him.
With a dejected sigh, his head fell onto the textbook with a soft thump, his arms hanging limply at his sides. In the background, he could hear Jimin’s gentle snores, long, dragging rumbles that served only to accent the fuzziness inside his head that was now growing around the lyrics of whatever song it was his soulmate was listening to now.
You should be better at this. You should be studying. You have an exam tomorrow worth twenty percent of your final grade.
Namjoon had always heard music whenever it was completely silent, whether it was a twinkling sonata or bright, bass-heavy pop anthems, but it never really did anything. There was no way he could communicate with whoever it was, no way he could tell who they were, he didn’t even know their gender. He’d spent his nights, a fierce rap song or a gentle ballad playing in the background, thinking about his soulmate, who they were, their eyes, their lips, if he would ever even get to meet them.
He frowned.
Why did these things have to be so damn hard?
The song changed, playing a bit louder now, the drumbeats ringing rhythmically to a listener that wasn’t there. The slow crescendos made him quite oblivious to the fact that the piercing high notes were shrill and almost painful. Namjoon, in a fit of frustration, tore his headphones from his ears, wincing as he felt them pull violently. He buried his head between his elbows, which only made the singing louder.
He was getting sick of this.
Whoever his soulmate was, Namjoon decided that once they met, they would need to have a very long talk.
Despite the nearly deafening music, he managed to continue to read down the paragraph, tracing a shaking finger down the line of text. “One Day More” thundered in his ears as he took a shuddering breath.
Finding your soulmate is not something that can happen by you forcing it to. You must let harmony bring the two of you together. The ambiguity of the system proves effective in fostering genuine relationships rather than forced ones. The one guidance method in place can be found in the volume of the music. Generally, the closer the soulmate, the louder the music, but of course there are exceptions. The most prevalent deviation of this principle is, of course, the--
Namjoon tore his eyes away from the page and froze, acutely aware of the bordering-on-ear-splitting melodies currently reverberating around the walls of his head. It grew louder still, to the point where Namjoon could only hear a steady stream of sound rather than lyrics.
Where are they?
He leapt out of his chair, stopping to steady it when it teetered on its back legs, peering out of his window. Behind him, Jimin shifted in his bed, swathed in a generic blue duvet, mumbling something about Namjoon needing to ‘shut the hell up’ or else he would ‘go Yoongi on his ass’. Without much regard for Jimin’s sleep-filled comment, Namjoon shoved the blinds upwards, searching for anything, anything that resembled a person.
The orange streetlights swept across the empty parking lot, highlighting nothing but a telephone pole. Namjoon clutched his hands to his ears, trying to preserve the now crucial sound of a musical clash at a barricade, rushing downstairs, grabbing his coffee-stained hoodie on the way.
After he’d almost fallen six times on his trip down four flights of stairs, the drumbeats had faded to nothing more than a patter that might pass as rain on a spring day. Namjoon almost collapsed at the foot of the stairs, his hands on his knees, as he tried to steady himself after his (quite literally) trip down the stairs.
“What…” he breathed, pushing his hair out of his eyes. His heart was hammering in his ribcage, rapid exhalations rushing between his lips. “No.”
They were now even farther than they’d been before.
“No, no, no, no,” Namjoon said and scrambled to his feet, catching himself on the door handle before glaring at the door and the barren stretch of pavement beyond it. “Why is… this isn’t fair!” He knew he sounded like a child, but it had been twenty-two fucking years that he’d had to listen to teasing melodies, rising and falling with every step his soulmate took, and it wasn’t fair. It felt like nearly everyone on campus walked with their hands linked with someone else’s, finally being able to hear silence.
All Namjoon got was another round of angry French revolutionaries.
He trudged back up the rubber-smelling staircase, his head hanging and shoulders slumped. Even the drunken parties had calmed down at this hour, and everything would be silent if it weren’t for whoever his soulmate was.
Namjoon thought about this as he made his way down the hallway, chewing resentfully on his bottom lip, hands resting on the back of his neck. He was so tired, so, so tired, and he was so, so frustrated, in more than one way, and God, if anything, he just wanted to go and punch his soulmate in the face.
He opened the door to the dorm room, the stench of week-old cafeteria coffee and chicken-flavored ramen hitting him like a truck. He took one last look at his desk, waving all thoughts of the exam out of his mind.
My GPA’s good enough to take one C. I hope.
Without caring enough to change out of his worn dark jeans and his heavy black boots, Namjoon stuck out a hand to try and shut off his lamp and fainted onto his bed, laying on top of his duvet, face smashed into the pillow.
His psych book lay open on his desk, one last paragraph left unread.
--
Namjoon awoke, for once, to the twinkling of his pointless alarm rather than to whatever godforsaken song his soulmate decided to play at 8:12 a.m.
It was strange.
Namjoon took a moment to revel in the silence, to listen to the sound of Jimin making cup noodles in their microwave and the rustle of the wind through the leaves. His alarm had long since stopped, his phone blinking emptily at the ceiling as Namjoon sat quietly on his bed, turning the concept of silence over in his head.
He got up rather mechanically, rubbing at what might have been dried drool on his chin, trying to shake the grogginess from his head. His limbs felt like they were made of lead, and Namjoon would have been questioning whether he’d even gone downstairs last night (this morning?) if it weren’t for the balled up hoodie on his chair and the boots that had tracked dust onto his sheets.
He paused for a second, eyes inadvertently sliding over to the window and down to the parking lot, where people were gathered, talking in small groups. He tried to listen for something, anything, but all he got was cold silence. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself.
“Language, hyung,” Jimin called brightly as he stooped down to grab the noodles from the microwave.
Namjoon’s mouth was full of the stale taste of morning breath, and his eyes were crusted with he didn’t even know what. “You told me to ‘shut the hell up’ last night,” Namjoon said back as he rummaged for a clean sweatshirt in the (admittedly ridiculously disorganized) closet. “It hurts sometimes.” He grinned triumphantly as he found a less wrinkled and less stained (albeit still not clean) sweatshirt at the back of the closet, trying not to topple the enormous pile of clothes that had built up since the start of the semester.
Jimin waved his comment off, instead opting to try and eat his instant noodles without utensils, taking sips out of the bright foam cup and occasionally letting out a pained yelp as the MSG-laden broth burned his upper lip. Namjoon finally pulled the sweatshirt from the mountain of clothes (surprisingly) without knocking it over.
After inhaling a cup of mac and cheese, he swiped his book off of his desk, hoping to cram a little more information into his head. He strode down the stairs to get to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, longing for the jolt of hyperactivity that ran through him whenever the acrid bitterness of dollar-store java hit his tongue.
As he passed through the parking lot to get to the central building, looking resentfully at the dark pavement, the low thrum of whatever the hell his soulmate was listening slowly grew louder in his head, though not deafening like it had been last night. It was almost pleasant, the crisp breeze sweeping across the trees, the bright sound of trumpets in the background.
For a moment, Namjoon forgot that this was the song that was pounding angrily in his skull give hours ago and just enjoyed the feeling of the wind brushing gently against his skin, the rhythmic drumbeats pulsing cheerily. He took a breath, shoved his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, and kept walking, unknowingly matching his steps to the sound of music.
The cafeteria was a hub of movement and chatter, seas of confused and likely hungover freshmen crowding around the round tables lining the large room. Trying to hide the angry purple bags hashed out under his eyes, he rubbed at them with one hand while picking up a foam cup with the other, filling it with a dark brown liquid that was called “coffee” by the placard next to it.
Despite the fact that it almost smelled like gasoline, it was a familiar taste, one that reminded him of rainy afternoons and late nights spent hunched over a book. These things were familiar, definable, expected.
Not like the blank face that appeared whenever Namjoon tried to picture his soulmate.
He’d gone through various phases, trying to analyze their song choice, but it varied, from classical to pop to metal. He’d pictured them as a slight girl with rolled up sweatpants and Converse, a soft-cheeked boy with sharp eyes and a paint-stained t-shirt.
He might as well just have thrown darts at a board to determine their characteristics. He’d tried that once, actually, but his soulmate ended up looking like something from a low-budget sci-fi film, so he never did that again.
He took a small sip of the coffee, suppressing the urge to cringe and drop the cup to the ground, and made his way across campus to his psych class. On his way, he shoved past people, flipping through his textbook frantically to get a futile last moment of studying in. He ignored the slight crescendo in the melody in his ear.
Of course he did.
He burst into the hall with a loud crash, taking a seat silently when he felt a few eyes, full of disinterest and tiredness, on him. The hardcover textbook fell loudly to the floor as he scrambled for a number two pencil and his well-used white eraser. The back of the chair pressed angrily against his spine, feeling like a punishment, trying to keep him awake.
The exam started smoothly. Namjoon scribbled out his answers, refusing to second-guess himself, telling himself that he knew this stuff, that these were the things he was best at. Memorization, logic. These things came so easily to him.
Why couldn’t his soulmate?
Speaking of his insufferable soulmate, he couldn’t help but notice that certain points of the song were beginning to worry him. Harsh notes of cello and violin were punching into his temples, getting scarily loud, bringing back memories of the last night, of empty parking lots and fluorescent orange street lights.
It was starting to hurt.
It had never gotten this loud, and Namjoon fidgeted in his seat a little, trying in vain to lean away from wherever his soulmate was. He was itching to get up, to find whoever it was that was listening to Les Mis on repeat, to finally finish the puzzle that had occupied most of his mind for his whole life.
But he couldn’t.
The music grew louder still, to the point where he was in physical pain, to the point where he wanted to claw out his ears, but he still wrote about soulmates, wrote about the things he could never have, trying his best to fend off the advancing lyrics.
It was getting unbearable. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead, and he clutched his pencil, pressing the tip into the desk.
Get it together, get it together. You have a couple questions left. Come on. You’ve waited for twenty-two years. You can wait for another thirty minutes.
As he kept putting answers into his paper, albeit slower than he had been before, he couldn’t help but notice the growing urge in him to start to sing. He had to actually choke down a melody once or twice, disguised as a cough.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Panic began to rise in Namjoon as he pushed himself to write faster, faster. One more question, one more question.
There was nothing more he wanted to do than to dash out of the lecture hall.
But he couldn’t. He had an exam to finish, soulmate or not.
But of course, his body had a different plan. It always did, didn’t it? He couldn’t control it, there was nothing he could do, but he pushed himself out of the uncomfortable chair, the lyrics he’d never heard before rising in his throat.
“And if they fall, as Lucifer fell, the flame, the sword!”
His voice was rough and deep, stone against stone, a slight accent on his words. His pronunciation was articulated and dramatic, as Les Mis was, and horror dawned on him, his mouth still half open.
Eyes turned to him, narrowed in annoyance and confusion and hints of amusement. He felt redness flowing to his cheeks, and he bit his inner cheek to keep more of the song from spilling out of his lips. He tried to sink deeper into his desk, burying his head in his elbows to disappear.
What in the actual fuck?
No matter who his soulmate was, no matter what they looked like, Namjoon was now seething with rage and embarrassment and ready to punch them across the face. The hellish song was still playing in his head, all pitchy violins and flourishing melodies, deafening blasts that were painful. His teeth were still digging into the inside of his cheek, the slight metallic taste of blood hitting his tongue, his whole body tense and a bead of sweat rolling down his neck.
Oh my God oh my God oh my God.
“Would you,” the exam proctor coughed to hide a laugh, “like a moment?” Mortified, Namjoon nodded and bolted out of his desk, leaving the still half-full Styrofoam cup at the foot of the table. As soon as he got out of the lecture hall, he took a deep breath, trying his best to shut the music off.
Not worth it not worth it not worth it.
“Ah, fuck,” he breathed, leaning against the pale yellow cinderblock walls. His cheeks were still burning. “My textbook.” He stared at the reddish brown doors leading into what he now knew as the Hall of Shame and decided against it. “Where in the hell are you?” His voice almost rose to a scream, but not quite. Not yet.
The music was still thundering in the back of his mind.
It took a long time for this fact to sink in, and when it did, Namjoon sprinted out of the hallway, greeted with a rush of cold air biting against his skin. He vowed he would find his soulmate today.
They’d already put him through this, good God, what else did he have to do?
He strode across the parking lot, following the sounds of plucked strings and smooth voices, the intense crescendos that he’d grown to despise. He was getting close, getting close, wasn’t he?
Wasn’t he?
He’d been walking for five minutes now, eyes only open so he could avoid crashing into things (but he ended up doing that anyway). He was now humming subconsciously under his breath, guided through the notes by a hazy silhouette, making abrupt turns like he’d been grabbed by an external force. His path was shaky, repositioning itself constantly, to the point where he looked slightly intoxicated, but that was okay. As long as he got to find his soulmate and have a long, most definitely peaceful chat with them, he would be happy.
The music was getting louder, and he was now singing audibly. He was drawing some strange looks, but it was okay, he kept telling himself. He’d walked all the way across campus, his shoulders moving slightly to the beat that no one else could hear.
While he was lost in thought, Namjoon’s chest was slammed by someone’s shoulder. He’d never been the most balanced person, and his legs just decided to give way, fluid and still following the music inside his head. The impact wasn’t painful, just jarring, and the thick fabric of his hoodie absorbed most of the shock from the whole “falling on the ground right after” thing.
In short, Namjoon’s body was hurt less than his pride. He was laying sprawled on the pavement, still following the arching harmonies in his head, looking up at the blue sky, taking a moment to register the fact that he was no longer standing up.
Someone was leaning over him.
Namjoon was about to keep singing (because he literally could not help it), but his breath was stolen from him, the lyrics caught in his throat. The person had dark, straight hair swept across his face, bright white headphone wires shaking in the gentle breeze. Glints of silver flashed from his left ear. And his lips, holy shit, his lips were full and almost obscenely pink, and Namjoon couldn’t speak, his eyes widened with awe.
He lay there for a few seconds, trying to find a way to speak, a way to justify himself. But he couldn’t. All he could do was keep singing, suddenly aware of how off-key he was.
As soon as Namjoon opened his mouth, the person smiled, his kind dark eyes lowered. With slow, hesitant motions, he took out one of his headphones, a curious look on his sculpted features.
He joined in, perfectly on time, still stooping over him, and Namjoon had to take a second to get over his shock. The person’s voice was sweet and delicate, made for ballads and romance, gentle and serene, filled with saccharine, enchanting tones.
“You can find me here…” The two finished the song together, trailing off as they stared at each other in quiet admiration. Everything seemed still.
It would have been romantic if Namjoon wasn’t on the pavement wearing a stained hoodie, his hair sticking up slightly.
The person stuck out a hand, and Namjoon took it, letting himself be pulled up, ignoring the jolts of electricity rocketing up his spine.
“I’m Kim Seokjin,” he said, putting a hand on the back of his neck. “I guess I’m your soulmate.”