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the thought of soulmates mystified jacob. he lived in a world where the night sky whenever your soulmate was born was visible when you closed your eyes and once you met your soulmate, the stars would change so that they’d show the sky at that moment, or at least that’s what they told kids as bedtime stories. soulmates were a thing from legends, fairytales. hardly anyone believed in them anymore. the world was busy, there was barely enough time to get from place to place, let alone to look for something that doesn’t exist. jacob never understood that mentality. if there was the slightest chance that there was someone out there that was perfect for you, someone that made you feel the happiest you’ve ever felt, surely you’d do everything you could to find them. the thought kept him awake at night, it kept him going when things got too much. maybe there was someone, somewhere, that would care for him as much as he cared for them.
he moved to korea when he as eighteen. he’d decided that toronto was too small for him. he’d been in canada for his whole life, if he wanted to find his soulmate he should travel further. if they were in canada, he would have found them by now.
when he was nineteen, he began to lose hope. there was always a voice in the back of his head, telling him that he was wasting his time. he wasn’t even certain that soulmates were a thing, but yet there he was, he had moved to a whole different country in hope of finding them. it was dumb. if jacob was to carry on with his mentality, he would have to visit every single country, meet every single person. just too look for someone that might not even exist.
he’d get those thoughts late at night. they’d invade his mind like a plague, it made him feel sick. the thought that the person he’d taken so long to find, the person that he’d dreamed about for years, might not exist. it was enough to make him want to pack his bags and just go back home. but he never did. whenever those thoughts found their way back into his mind, he’d close his eyes and admire the pattern of stars he saw. he’d memorised it. the way draco curved around the center, or how pegasus stood out more than the others. it was beautiful.
by the time he was twenty, he’d come to terms with the fact that he would probably never find his soulmate. he was just setting himself up for heartbreak. he put all of his energy into school, and as a distraction he’d spend most of his time in the library.
every day, he’d sit close to the same boy. he was an art student, judging by the flecks of paint that were constantly on his fingers. his bag was a bright yellow and was covered in pins, always heavy with all the books the boy checked out just before closing time. his dark hair hung over his eyes lightly, just long enough that he had to push it up to be able to see properly. jacob often found himself watching him, out of curiosity more than anything. the boy was peculiar, not odd. just... interesting. he’d sing little snippets of english songs under his breath when the library was particularly empty and he thought nobody could hear him. seeing him in the library every day made jacob happy, even though they’d never officially met. they just exchanged shy smiles when they sat down at their regular seats just by the library window.
jacob was sat closer than usual to the boy, they both worked in relative silence next to the window. the only noise was the rhythmic tapping of the boy’s pencil against the table. jacob noticed him take out an earphone, and smile apologetically at him and held up an adventure time pen.
“hey uh have you got a pen? mine’s run out”
jacob nodded and turned to grab an extra pen, but stopped when he heard the other boy laugh. confused, jacob blinked at him.
in the split second he took to blink, he noticed something was different. he closed his eyes again. the night sky he’d looked at for the last twenty years had changed. draco and pegasus were no longer in the center. they were replaced by orion.
jacob looked at the boy in disbelief, and the boy smiled, wider than he’d done before, and laughed slightly. if jacob was one of those people, he’d say it felt like his heart was getting crushed into a diamond. but jacob wasn’t one of those people, so he’d say that he felt pretty close to exploding.
“hi i’m kevin moon” the boy extended his hand “nice to meet you... soulmate”