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Charlie St. George’s life wasn’t complicated. Not really.
Sure, there were instances of grief and stress and exhaustion that were all too typical of being alive and being human, but nothing that his—darling, dearest, departed—mother would have consider ‘difficult’. For that, he was lucky. And grateful.
Nobody knew how or why it happened. All they knew was that it did. Historians and scholars have poured over texts and scoured through different cultures and traditions across millennia and there was no point in history where it didn’t happen, or indication of when it started.
This was what they knew: Everyone comes into this world with black script magically inked into their wrists. The words declare the first words you will hear from your soulmate.
Charlie came into the world with the words “Holy shit my soulmate’s a furry” on the delicate skin on the inside of his wrist.
The words did cause some complications growing up. First of all, he probably found out about the fascinating subculture of furries earlier than most of his peers. Which, naturally, led to an early identity crisis: Was he a furry? He doubted it, but no matter how he tried to look at it he had no idea why his soulmate would say that to him. Was his soulmate a furry? Was this a proclamation of excitement? Disappointment?
These questions were too much for a ten year old over the course of one afternoon.
Still, like most people, he learned to live with it. It was a weird thing to have written on your wrist, sure, but nothing that deserved to be put in the archives. His aunt had been born with the words “Man I can’t believe Dumbledore died” and spent years stressing about the fate of this mysterious Dumbledore before finding out that he was a fictional character at the age of twelve. His friend Diego had “Welcome to Chili’s” on his wrist and agonised about having to visit every Chili’s in every town he visited. Luke had the words "Heyyyy Macarena”.
So he went to school and kept up his grades. He learned how to bake for his mother and held his father’s hand when they laid her to rest. He made friends, joined the football team, was made quarterback and then captain in his sophomore year.
It was a good life. Really.
Having “Wait slow down those aren’t normal cookies” on your wrist wasn’t great. Having them on your wrist when your dad was a cop was a nightmare.
First off, because of those words his parents had an early heads up on any future cannabis-related endeavour he might have taken an interest to. The random drug testing had started early. Secondly, he hadn’t even met his soulmate yet and Alex was already pissed at them for being a narc.
At least he wasn’t alone.
Zach had the words “Your place or mine”. It just so happened that it was what a tipsy Chloe Rice had said it to him on a dare. She had promptly burst into tears when he replied with “Oh my god you’re not an old creep” and held out her wrist to him where the words were echoed.
Jessica’s wrist had the words “Sure Christopher Nolan’s great but he didn’t direct Shrek” and Alex really couldn’t wait to see who the hell that person was going to be.
So, Alex kept his head down and went on with his life. Sometimes he’d find himself staring at the words on his wrist, tracing a thumb over it mindlessly in moments of anxiety and restlessness. Of course he was curious, but he’d wait. He’d heard stories of people who met their soulmates at the end of their days and of people who had been forced to reject their soulmates on the basis of religion or gender. These never ended well. Interfering with soulmate bonds never worked well for anyone.
His parents had reassured him from a young age that they would accept whoever his soulmate would be. His dad seemed more concerned about the recreational drug use. So he waited. At least he could speculate that he’s not one of those tragic tales of people who meet their soulmate when either of them was dying.
It didn’t make the waiting any easier.
Charlie was having a bad day. It’s not a bad life, he reminded himself, just a very bad day. Actually, scratch that. A bad three days. But who’s counting?
It had all started when the jocks—and of course, a lot of things started with the jocks—decided that they wanted to throw a Halloween party. Charlie hadn’t offered, but it was all too easy to talk him into bringing some trays of cookies for the party. So yeah, he agreed.
Things went wrong almost immediately when the oven at his place had started smoking even before the cookies went in. So there he was, with a bowl of cookie dough batter, no oven, and smoke in the air stinging his eyes and causing him to gag. He ended up having to go to Diego’s house to use his oven, and had to playfully chase off Diego’s little brother from eating the weed-infused batter at least four times.
Then of course, because things had to go wrong: Diego’s oven straight up caught on fire once the cookies were inside.
Which was bad for two reasons: 1) The oven was on fire and 2) There was no way to salvage that batch of cookies. Diego had stared despondently into the ashy remains and lamented the ‘tragic loss’, and Charlie was too exhausted to debate with him about fire hazard as opposed to some burnt cookies.
Day two wasn’t bad per se. After gathering more supplies and hunkering down in Luke’s kitchen, Charlie managed to bake several perfect batches of cookies. He might have gone overboard with the variety, throwing in chocolate chips, marble swirls, M&M’s and even crushed Oreos across the different mixes. The result was several plates of warm, mouth-watering cookies that Diego and Luke wasted no time descending upon once they returned from… whatever it was they were doing.
That was when things started going bad on Day #2.
‘Whatever it is they were doing’ happened to be costume shopping. They had agreed to get a somewhat ridiculous group costume, but because Charlie had spent the day in the kitchen he didn’t get to be part of that discussion. Which was how Charlie found out right there that he was going to the party dressed as Scooby Doo.
“You have this big dog energy that Luke and I can’t pull off,” said Diego, comfortably seated at the kitchen counter and happily munching on a some chocolate chip cookies.
“In what world do you give off Shaggy energy?!” Charlie demanded.
“Hey,” Luke pointed at him with a finger that was slicked with crumbs, “Is it cause he’s not white? Didn’t take you for a racist.”
“Yeah, you think you know a guy,” Diego added, hopping off his seat with a laugh to sample from the plate that Luke was currently digging into.
Charlie let out a long suffering sigh, dabbing at his sweaty forehead with a cloth. It wasn’t that he was opposed to the idea of going to the party dressed as Scooby Doo. He had nothing but fond memories of the character and had spent many sunlit days pretending that his little wagon was the Mystery Machine and he was off solving crimes in the neighbourhood.
No, he didn’t want to go because the costume was ugly. It was weirdly proportioned, the hips and butt shaped in ways that Charlie knew his own body didn’t fill up. The colour was off—in fact he’d go as far as to say that this looked nothing like Scooby fucking Doo—so he did, “Guys, this looks nothing like Scooby fucking Doo.”
Diego shrugged, “This was the best we could find. Do you know how hard it was to find a good dog costume that doesn’t cost thousands? Why do proper fursuits cost so much?”
“It’s the demand, dude,” Luke replied. “You’re paying for someone’s skill and labour. The materials are expensive too.”
Charlie wondered if he had accidentally given them a tray of edibles. Or that he had somehow inhaled some while baking, “How do you know fursuits are expensive? Why were you looking up fursuits??”
Diego arched an eyebrow at him, looking almost surprised and way too handsomely so, “Cause of you, duh. We had to look up potential birthday presents since for some reason your soulmate will think you’re a furry when they meet you.”
“It might be at a furry convention or something, love is love, bro,” Luke quipped.
Charlie wondered if this was what an out of body experience felt like. “What… I mean… I could maybe meet them at, like, I don’t know, improv class or something?”
Diego chuckled, reaching for another cookie and splitting it in half before taking a bite, “You’d rather meet your soulmate at fucking improv class? Damn dude, get some taste.”
Alex hated parties. He hated the crowds. He hated the rowdy drunks. He hated the weird pressure to have fun in a situation clearly stacked against him. He hated it.
Unfortunately for him, he loved his friends a lot. So when Jessica and Zach wanted to go to the stupid Halloween party, he came along too, sans costume.
Unfortunately for him, Zach was a model boyfriend. So when Chloe called saying that she was feeling sick, Zach practically mowed over some already drunk partygoers in his haste to get out of the front door.
Unfortunately for him, Jessica was popular and had a swarm of other people coming around her to chat, which brings us back to a point previously mentioned: Alex hated crowds.
So there he was, sitting on the couch, nursing a single red plastic cup where he had been sipping at for the better part of half an hour. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t repulsive either, so it would have to do. He had seen a girl dressed as Harley Quinn holding a bottle of ginger ale and had asked her where she had gotten it from, but she had instead taken a huge gulp, burped in his face and announced, “It’s vodka.”
Classy.
Alex hated parties.
Charlie was hot in his costume. Three people had stepped on his tail, he had stepped into a puddle of what he hoped was beer in the corridor by the bathroom, and he could barely see out of the small eye holes. The inside of the costume had also smelt musty when he had stepped into it, but now somehow the smell of alcohol and sweat was overpowering it.
Lovely.
At least his cookies were a hit. Diego and Luke had laid them out on the dining room table and the partygoers had already worked through two trays of it.
Luke and Diego had gotten themselves tangled into an intense game of ‘Liquor Twister’, where each time they failed to get into position someone would have to hold up a plastic cup to help them take a sip. That person was Charlie, and his paws (hands, those are your hands, St George) were already drenched.
Charlie looked around, surveying the party and the crowd in the living room. It was considered rude to look at a stranger’s soulmark, and he tried to avert his gaze whenever someone waved their hands too close to him. He was looking sharply away from a girl who was sticking her hand straight up when his eyes landed on the most beautiful boy he’s ever seen in his life, despondently sitting in one corner of the couch as if trying to make himself as small as possible beside a couple who was, rather obnoxiously, making out beside him.
He must’ve been staring, because the next thing he heard was an indignant “CHARLIE WHAT THE HELL” from Luke, blond hair drenched and sticking to his forehead, liquor dripping down his chin and wetting the orange ascot he had tied around his neck. Charlie looked down at his pa-hands and saw that he had tipped the contents of the cup over him in his distraction.
Diego hollered, sliding out from underneath Luke, “I won!”
“No, you didn’t asshole Charlie just- Charlie?” Luke realised that the spot where Charlie had been a few seconds ago was empty, a single red cup on the ground in his place.
“The hell?” Diego muttered, looking around them and seeing Charlie (or well, someone in a dog costume who he assumed was Charlie, surely there wasn’t anyone else dressed like that?) making their way across the room towards the kitchen.
Alex was bored, hungry, and sick of the obnoxious couple making out beside him.
He never drank enough to get wasted, but the lack of dinner and general exhaustion was definitely getting to him. He had seen people exit the kitchen munching on cookies, so he followed his gut—quite literally—and wandered into the kitchen. The floor was a mess of spilled drinks and Alex side stepped a single glittery sandal that seemed to have been glued down. Weirdos.
It was hard to miss the array of cookies on the table, even if half of them were gone.
Now, what Alex had missed was the memo going around that the cookies were not all made equal. For example, the two empty trays on his right previously contained chocolate chip and gooey centred cookies. The tray with a single half eaten piece left in it were M&M cookies.
The one Alex had reached for, set out in a plastic container as opposed to a tray and made in a smaller batch, were not normal cookies.
He was halfway through his third cookie, munching and happy for the first time throughout this whole goddamned night when he looked up to see someone in a fucking dog costume rushing towards him. Knowing his luck, this furry was probably trying to steal his food right out of his hand so Alex’s first instinct was to crush the rest of the cookie into his mouth.
He was still chewing when the other person yanked the top part of his costume off, revealing someone who seemed sweaty, panicked, yet somehow still hot enough to make Alex regret that their first meeting was him basically looking like a demented squirrel. Even if he did happen to be a furry.
“Wait, slow down, those aren’t normal cookies,” the guy panted.
Alex stared at him, a piece of cookie falling from his open mouth.
Furry dude seemed flustered, gesticulating wildly with his ha-paws, no, hands, as he talked, “Oh my god how many did you eat? They’re really strong.”
As if things couldn’t get even weirder, two other guys dressed as Fred and Shaggy came barging in. Fred seemed drenched. Shaggy was buff. Great, maybe his brain really was short-circuiting.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he shifted his gaze back towards the guy in the dog costume. His eyes raked over him, from the costume’s shapely hips up to his broad, strong shoulders, then to that gorgeous face and finally those soft, concerned blue eyes peering at him.
“Holy shit, my soulmate’s a furry,” Alex breathed, held captive by the other boy’s gaze.
A beat of silence, the sounds from the party filling the space where it seemed like the air had been sucked out.
Then dog-guy let out a strangled laugh, doubling over to brace his p-hands hands hands on his knees.
Fred erupted in a loud cheer, shaking Shaggy so hard that the other boy’s wig went flying off, “DIEGO IT’S FUCKING HAPPENING.”
Alex swallowed the last mouthful. “My soulmate’s a furry,” he repeated.
“I’m not!” He shook his head. “My name is Charlie. Holy shit. It’s you,” it sounded like he was crying.
Alex’s mouth felt dry, his head felt like an ocean of clouds that his thoughts had to swim through to surface. This had to be an out of body experience. “I’m… Alex.”
Fred and Shaggy were both yelling.
Do- Charlie peered at him, wiping away his tears, “How many cookies did you eat? Oh my god, we need to get you somewhere safe. Holy shit I overdosed my soulmate on edibles.”
Fred and Shaggy were still yelling.
Alex’s head still felt foggy. Charlie sprinted towards the fridge and brought out a bottle of water, fumbling clumsily with his paws. Fred seemed to snap out of his euphoria and ran over to help Charlie with the bottle, Shaggy coming around to yank the paws off to let him use his hands. Fred uncapped the bottle and passed it back to Charlie who gently held it up towards Alex’s face, “Drink this, please. Diego, get some food from the fridge.”
Alex obliged, still staring at him. He had worked his way through the bottle before realising it. Shaggy, or Diego probably, appeared on his other side holding up half a shawarma.
Alex must have eaten it, because suddenly it was gone. Jessica must have wandered into the room to find him at some point during the commotion, because her face swam into his vision, although he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He must have gotten to his feet, because his soulmate had an arm around his waist, and Alex could feel his strong body even underneath that ridiculous outfit.
He must have passed out, because he doesn’t remember much beyond that.
Having your soulmate pass out in your arms during your first meeting wasn’t uncommon, per se. Granted, it wasn’t the story that Charlie wanted to share with his grandchildren, but it is what it is.
Look at him, already daydreaming about grandchildren while his soulmate was still knocked out.
Their host had been more than willing to let Alex have the spare bedroom when Luke had gone barrelling out of the kitchen to find him. So, Charlie and Diego had helped him into bed, Jessica hovering around her friend protectively as if making sure no funny business went down. It had taken a lot of convincing to get her to go home, but eventually after taking down all their phone numbers and making Charlie promise to text her the moment Alex woke up or else, she finally gave in.
Which brings us to the morning after, soft sunlight filtering in through the shutters and the muted sounds of birds chirping just outside the window. It was peaceful, serene. Charlie wished he could spend it cuddling Alex in bed instead of sitting in the armchair beside him.
Hopefully, there would be time for that later.
Charlie had slept fitfully throughout the night, waking up every few hours to check up on Alex. It had been an eventful night and he assumed that Alex would be confused about waking up in a stranger’s bed in an unfamiliar room, so he wanted to be by his side when he woke up.
Scratch that, he wanted to be by his side always.
His mother had told him that the day you meet your soulmate wouldn’t feel any different than any other day. There wouldn’t be a change in the air, or any signs from the universe, or God, whatever you believed in. But when you meet your soulmate it would feel like a part of you, that restless part that had been waiting all your life for this moment, would exhale a breath that even you hadn’t known you were holding.
Charlie felt like he was inhaling peace for the first time in years since his mother died.
Alex had slept like a rock through the night, breathing deep and steady. Charlie had scoured the kitchen for snacks and several bottles of water which were on the dressing table beside him, hazarding a guess that Alex would probably appreciate a drink when he gets up.
He had been awake for nearly two hours when Alex stirred, groaning slightly. His eyes opened slowly, still doused with sleep. Charlie could see the confusion settling even through his haze, and Charlie cleared his throat, leaning forwards slowly as to not startle him, “Hey, Alex?”
Alex’s eyes flickered towards him. His mouth opened, but instead of words what came out was a hoarse croak and Alex’s hand flew to his throat in concern.
Charlie grabbed onto a bottle of water and handed it to him, “You had a lot of edibles last night, just drink this.”
Alex slowly sat up, the blanket scrunching around his waist, and accepted the bottle. He finished it in the span of a few gulps, massaging his throat with his free hand.
“I have some granola bars too if you’re hungry,” said Charlie, gesturing to the array of snacks. “Both with and without nuts, I wasn’t sure if you’re, like, allergic to anything. And if you don’t like granola bars, I can order food. Or there’s some extra cookies from last night.”
“Uh…” Alex grimaced, “No more cookies.” His voice sounded hoarse, lower than it had been last night. To be honest it made Charlie feel a certain way but he’ll push that thought away for now. Alex cleared his throat, “Can I get more water, please?”
Charlie handed him another bottle. Alex took a few sips and swallowed, reaching out to put the bottle back right at the corner of the dressing table.
“How do you feel?” Charlie asked. He hesitated, then added, “I’m Charlie, in case you forgot.”
“I remember, yeah.” Alex licked his lips, “Sorta hungover? I don’t know how. What time is it?”
“It’s 10AM. Ah, that’s normal then,” Charlie nodded. “You had three of my cookies in a row. It should go away with food and rest.”
Alex was staring at him, hair moussed from sleep and it took all of Charlie’s self-control to not kiss him right there. Then his eyes widened, as if struck by a thought, “Holy shit my parents they’re gonna be so pi-”
“Jessica sorted it out last night,” Charlie placated him in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “She texted them with your phone and said that you were staying over at a friend’s place.”
Speaking of Jessica... he reached for his phone on the dresser, scrolling through it to find her name, “She also said that if I don’t text her the second you wake up she was going to do unspeakable things to my genitals, so I should probably do that.”
“You definitely should,” Alex nodded, then seemed to immediately regret moving his head and squeezed his eyes shut with a hiss of pain, “Fuck, my head.”
“Lay down, do you want coffee or tea? I can get some downstairs.”
“I’m fine.” Alex obliged, easing himself back onto the bed and opening his eyes, “Where’s Jess?”
“Diego sent her back.” At Alex’s blank stare, Charlie added, “Uh, the guy dressed as Shaggy?”
Alex hummed, “Oh, him.”
He hadn’t brought up the events of last night, and Charlie debated with himself on how to approach the elephant in the room. They were soulmates. Their first words to each other were etched into their skin.
Charlie didn’t know what to say other than he’s missed Alex his entire life, even when they hadn’t met, so he did, “I feel like I’ve missed you my whole life, even when we hadn’t met yet.”
Whatever worry he might have had eased away when Alex looked at him, his eyes warm with a sort of understanding Charlie had only ever read about in stories of people who had met their soulmates, “Me too. Can I ask you something, Charlie?”
The sound of his name falling from Alex’s lips was the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard. “Of course, anything,” Charlie squeezed his hands together in an effort to not reach out to the other boy, he didn’t want to overwhelm him.
“Would you rather I introduce you as a furry or as a stoner to my parents?” The corner of his lips quirked, but Charlie wasn’t entirely sure if he was teasing.
“Oh my god, I’m neither,” he groaned, mentally cursing Diego and Luke. Still, it was their idea that had brought Alex to him, so maybe he should be thanking them. “If you’re feeling better later maybe we can get some food? Maybe that would make up for you eating too many of my cookies?”
“Sure,” Alex shot him a smile that made butterflies erupt in his stomach. “Though I’d rather know why my soulmate was dressed up like a fursuit if he’s not a furry.”
“Okay so first of all, not a fursuit. And I was supposed to be Scooby Doo to their Fred and Shaggy.”
“Dude,” Alex snorted, “You looked nothing like Scooby fucking Doo.”
“That’s what I told them!!”