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Seung Gil opened his eyes and looked around. He’d expected to be on a Thai beach with Phichit. Instead, he was at an ice rink, and it was crowded. Very crowded. One part of Seung Gil’s brain complained that this was over ISU regulations for warmup groups, even without him. Another part was just grateful that there weren’t any actual children. Everyone was within five years of his age.
He tried to remember what Phichit had said about his dream, about the need to quickly prioritize and plot out who to talk to first. Despite several high-priority targets, Phichit had said he’d talked to Yuuri first to deal with his freaking out. Seung Gil wasn’t freaking out, exactly. There was just a lot to process, and talking to Phichit would help him work through it. On the other hand, he did need to talk to his younger soulmates as quickly as possible to minimize the chances of waking up without important knowledge. At least there weren’t any people he needed a straight answer from. The closest to that was Takeshi, who was married already, but he didn’t expect Takeshi would lie to him in the real world.
Seung Gil decided to start with the youngest of his soulmates. After all, Yuri Plisetsky was going to be the most complicated. “Yuri?”
Yuri came off the ice to sit with him on the bleachers. “Did not see this one coming. Have we even said five words to each other?”
Seung Gil tried to remember having an actual conversation with Yuri, and couldn’t. “I don’t know that I’ve ever spoken to you, but you’ve said quite a lot to me. Mostly about tigers.”
Yuri snorted. “Okay, sounds about right. So we’re soulmates, huh? And I’m sharing you with Phichit?”
“Among others, yes. Which complicates things a lot, since you don’t want to know anything until you’re sixteen.”
Yuri scowled, glaring at the ice. “How many others are we talking here?”
“Total of seven, including you and Phichit. Some of which I know have other soulmates, some I don’t know because, like you, they’re younger than me.”
“It makes sense for Phichit to have a ridiculous number of soulmates. You? How does this make sense?”
Question of the year. Unfortunately, not one to which Seung Gil had any kind of answer. “No one ever said soulmates have to make sense. What do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t wanna know until I’m sixteen, but you can tell whoever here you trust to keep quiet about it that I’m gonna be in there later, I guess,” Yuri said. He looked around the rink, and then turned to Seung Gil. “Anyone here I might actually want to be my soulmate?”
“Emil, maybe. I don’t think you’d want any of the others.” It’s not like Seung Gil paid attention to who Yuri was friends with, so he had no idea what Yuri thought of the others. Except one. “Unless you’d have made the same deal with Phichit, don’t say anything until sixteen?” Not that they were soulmates, or Yuri would have mentioned being able to see Phichit, but he might have wanted to.
“Ugh, no, nothing against Phichit but I don’t want to share a soulmate with Yuuri. He’s not here, is he?”
“No. Neither is Viktor. No one from your rink other than you.”
“Okay. Good. All of Phichit’s have another soulmate, right? So I probably do?”
“Yes.”
“All right. See you in three years. Good luck with everyone else.” Yuri headed back to the ice.
Emil was the next youngest, so Seung Gil waved him off the ice next. It was something of a surprise when Michele came over too. “Michele?”
“What? Emil’s my soulmate too, why not talk to us together?” Michele turned to Emil. “You didn’t want me to come until you were sixteen, and I’m probably not going to come until Sara talks to hers. If that doesn’t go well, I may not come.”
Emil rolled his eyes. “You do know Sara can take care of herself, right?”
Michele ignored him. “Same thing with you, Seung Gil. You said not to come until we were going to go to Emil.”
“That sounds right. Did you have any other soulmates?”
Michele shook his head. “Isn’t two enough?”
“Apparently not, for me. I have seven.” Seung Gil looked around, and then stared Michele down. “Including Sara.”
Michele stared back, mouth hanging open and face going purple, but no words came out. Emil burst into laughter. “That’s not gonna make for awkward soulmate orgies, is it. You know, I know I said sixteen, but I’ll be sixteen next month and I don’t want to miss a second of this. Seung Gil, you can tell me whenever you want to, and please let me be there when you tell Mickey and Sara that you’re both of their soulmate so I can capture their faces for posterity.”
“Phichit did a group chat. That’s probably how I’m going to do it, too, since they’re kind of scattered.”
“Awwww. Oh well. I guess that makes sense.” Emil started laughing. “You don’t have your coach, do you?”
“No.” Seung Gil shuddered at the thought. Once he’d gotten his head around it, Phichit was thrilled to have his coach as one of his soulmates, but they’d had a much different relationship than Seung Gil and Min So to begin with. “You’re fine with finding out tomorrow?”
“Yeah, close enough. This is gonna be fun!” Emil hugged Seung Gil.
It was tempting to go to Sara next, but Sara was older than him and already knew to expect Seung Gil. He still had one more younger soulmate to talk to. He barely knew Jean-Jacques LeRoy, and what little he did know was that Jean-Jacques and Yuri were going to be a nightmare to deal with together. “Hi.”
“Seung Gil? Wow. This is a surprise! Do you know how to get in contact with me?”
“I don’t, but I bet Phichit will. I’m starting a group chat tomorrow morning. Do you want to be added to that right away, or wait for your dream?”
“Tomorrow’s fine. Group chat?”
“Yes. I have seven soulmates. Only six will be in the chat tomorrow, but still, much more efficient than trying to contact everyone individually and explain.” If only there were a good way to do that in the dream so he only had to explain twice. “It’s likely you have another soulmate, too. I’m not sure about two of the others, but at least four of mine do, and all of Phichit’s. Does that change anything?”
“No, I still want to know. You weren’t planning on using the group chat to plan a wedding, were you?”
“No.” Seven soulmates was one thing. Six husbands and a wife? No, thank you. He might, at some point, marry one or more of them, but he wasn’t planning on marrying all of them. “Am I going to need to convince you somehow?”
“Nah. Everyone knows you don’t joke, and you wouldn’t pick something as serious as soulmates to start. My parents are going to want you to come out to Canada at some point so you can meet my family, but if you don’t want to, I don’t blame you. You’ve already got a lot on your plate.”
“That’s something I can figure out tomorrow, or in the next few weeks.” Phichit was still out on his ‘visit the soulmates’ tour, spending the week in Switzerland with Chris and Masumi. “How many siblings do you have now? I can’t remember.”
“Ten. The twins were just born a couple months ago.” JJ grinned at the look of panic Seung Gil was sure must show on his face. “Don’t worry. Unless my other soulmate wants a big family, I’m not planning on it. If she does, then I wouldn’t expect you to try to be their dad. Seven soulmates, you’re probably gonna end up with enough kids running around that there’s no way you could reasonably be all of their dad.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’d better get going. Do you want me to try to come back?”
It took a minute, but JJ shook his head. “That’s one I think I’d prefer to wait for my dream on, just to be sure I know the whole story. We’re soulmates, but I’d prefer to wait.”
Even though he knew perfectly well that soulmates didn’t have to make sense, Seung Gil still didn’t understand how he’d ended up with Sara as one of his. His first assumption, that it was because of Michele, didn’t hold up now that he knew that Michele and Emil were soulmates and Emil and Sara weren’t. “Hi. Do you have another soulmate?”
“Yes. Mila Babicheva. Yes, she’s old enough to go to, but I haven’t found a way to go without tipping off Mickey yet. I don’t want him hassling you or her. Are you mad at me for not telling you yet?”
“No. I can distract Michele for you, if you like. He’s my soulmate, too.”
Sara scrunched up her nose. “That’s… disturbing. Not your fault, but disturbing.”
“If you say so. Anything else we need to talk about tonight?”
“You’re the one who’s going to remember this. You tell me.”
“Okay. I’m going to go talk to someone else then.”
Phichit was going to be uncomplicated and they could probably just skip straight to the sex, so Seung Gil went to Takeshi first. “Does Yuuko know about me?”
“Of course. She offered to call off our wedding, but you’d said not to in my dream. When you’re ready to come to Hasetsu, she’ll make sure that the girls stay out of our way so we can do whatever we want to do.”
Right. Takeshi had three kids. “Do you even want me to come? You have your family, you’d have to explain me to your kids, is it worth it? I have other soulmates I can go to.”
“You won’t be hard to explain to the kids. They already know that multiple soulmates are a thing, thanks to Phichit’s giant mess including Mari and Yuuri, so it’s just explaining why you didn’t come out before, and that’s easy. I want you to come out.”
“Okay. I’m going to be starting a group chat tomorrow. I can’t guarantee that I’ll remember when I wake up, but I can try. Give me your contact information.”
Phichit was the final stop, and Seung Gil was glad to get there. “Hi.”
“Hey!” Phichit hugged him. “So? Was I right? You got another soulmate and they’re amazing?”
“Well. Technically, yes.” Seung Gil glanced over at the rink. “I have six other soulmates, and at least some of them should prove to be amazing.”
Phichit winced in sympathy. “Group chat is your friend. Diagrams and maps will be very useful. No overlap with me, but any connections?”
“You got Katsuki, I got Plisetsky. Takeshi’s in Hasetsu with Mari. Jean-Jacques used to be your rinkmate under Celestino. I don’t know of any connections between the Crispinos and Emil and any of yours, beyond they’re skaters.”
“Crispinos? You got both of them?”
“Yes. Any advice?”
“Their relationship is so different from Yuuri and Mari’s that I don’t know what to tell you beyond don’t ask them to have sex with you at the same time. Which I really hope I don’t actually need to say.”
“You don’t.”
“Plisetsky, huh? Good luck there, he’s kind of bitter about soulmates.”
“Worse than me?”
“Different. You were just afraid of not having one, he’s angry at what his parents had and scared he’ll get into something just as bad.” Phichit hugged Seung Gil. “If you turn out to be his only soulmate, be good to him, okay?”
“Of course. Any other advice for surviving until I can get the group chat set up, or can we get to the sex part now?”
“Sex part’s good. You might want to skip Yuri on that one.”
“Another thing I don’t need to be told. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to have sex with Sara or not.”
“You might want to in here, so that if you decide you want to out there, you know what you’re doing.”
Seung Gil shrugged. “I’ll think about it. Although not much, I’m not planning on thinking much the rest of the night.”