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Even when everyone else in the entire world loves Harry Potter and asks each other which house they’re sorted in as if it were their zodiac sign, Donghyuck can’t find it within himself to enjoy the series at all.
Like every other reasonable human being, Donghyuck doesn’t like J.K Rowling — his disdain for her is not the direct causation for his dislike of the popular fantasy franchise.
Donghyuck Lee’s soulmate is an asshole.
That’s why Donghyuck doesn’t like the Harry Potter franchise.
Donghyuck hasn’t always hated his soulmate. There was a brief time where he only disliked him — but Donghyuck doesn't really hate him. Just mild dislike.
Okay.
Okay, he admits it.
He actively does not like his soulmate either.
Donghyuck is five-years old when he first learns about the concept of soulmates. He’s sitting in the middle of a large plastic play mat with a print of giant giraffes and lions dancing all along it’s bright yellow expanse, the occasional zebra in the middle to provide some color break — it doesn’t satisfy Donghyuck, but it will have to do for now.
In the eyes of a boy wearing an oversized white piece of clothing that seemingly gave him the confidence to become someone as great and magnificent as Vermeer; the ochre yellow play-mat is categorized as a heinous creation that could only be mass produced by the likes of the store with the red target sign Donghyuck sometimes spots while trying to count the little birds perched on the power lines from the window of his dad’s car, on his way back from school.
Once Donghyuck captures the visage of his teacher grading their homework, and is assured that he attention isn't diverting from it anytime soon, he begins scribbling on the play mat with robin blue in an attempt at making it bearable to look at.
Sitting next to him is Renjun, who’s busy counting the hours left until school is over, on the red cat shaped clock. He’s too focused; his eyes gravitate to the red cat shaped clock, not the pink instructions scribbled on the old chalk-board.
His teacher was a nice lady, Donghyuck remembers.
But there were times she arrived late because her car was an old beater from her college days and she still hadn’t made a dent big enough into her student loans to afford a much nicer one.
“Renjun please. Please share your cookies with me,” Donghyuck pleads, pouting in an effort to make the older boy succumb to his wishes. He’s seen Renjun pull this move on Sicheng, the boy from the first grade playground during recess when he
wanted Sicheng to let him borrow his brand-new soccer ball and the latter wouldn’t relent on the first try.
“Share with me.”
His voice comes out honeyed and a tad bit nasal, trying to exaggerate his pout even more almost like a little golden retriever puppy escaping being punished for digging a hole in its owner’s rose garden. Donghyuck’s eyes begin gleaming as if Renjun owned the only corn dog in the entire world — and they continue flickering with hope. Hope that today, Renjun won’t be greedy and share his cookies.
Perhaps for the very first time, Donghyuck will finally be able to discern how delicious Renjun’s famous animal cookies are after their sweet pink and white frost melts on his tongue.
But Donghyuck can hear Park Hyoshin’s Snow Flower begin playing in the background and the heavens send down tiny pink-dusted cherubs to wipe the tears off his cheeks as the zip-lock bag evades his grasp. Renjun handed his coolie bag to Yukhei, a new transfer student from the caterpillar room who he had barely known for five minutes.
As Renjun’s arm slightly brushes against Donghyuck, the five-year old feels his arm start burning and instantly bursts into tears. Donghyuck doesn’t know how else to express the immense pain he feels on his right arm, and more tears and more snot keep pouring out, staining his shirt.
“Donghyuck?” His teacher immediately rushes to his side, trying to have him face her. “Donghyuck sweetie, can you tell me why you’re crying?” She hands him a Kleenex but the five-year-old keeps blowing into his shirt again instead, latching onto the familiar for the warm comfort it provides him.
“Why are there words on my arm,” he says as he shoves his newly marked arm in her line of sight. “Why does it say, ‘Man I can’t believe Dumbledore died?’ Who’s Dumbledore and why is he dying? Why does Dumbledore have to die?” Donghyuck crinkles his nose to prevent more snot from coming out.
Donghyuck cries all the way home.
His mom comes and picks him up early, but he still doesn’t know what the mark on his arm means.
So he starts hating his soulmate for making him cry in front of everyone.
Soulmates are supposed to be nice. But his soulmate made him cry. It’s incredibly petty to hate his soulmate without having met them yet. Yet in a universe as large as this one, Donghyuck prefers a soulmate that didn’t make him cry.
Donghyuck actively starts hating his soulmate in 1997:
He’s in LAX, waiting to board his flight to Seoul because his grandfather wanted Donghyuck to come visit and see his peach farm during the summer.
His eyes fill with mischief. A look that his mother was all too familiar with, like a little bear trying to steal honey from an unsuspecting family during a picnic. To curb an oncoming disaster, she hands him a book,“Read it.”
Donghyuck scrunches his nose and slumps in his seat, careful not to kick the old lady’s seat in front of him — not because he was well mannered, but because he feared that his mom would pull his ear again and he would never hear the end of her nagging until they reached Gimpo Airport.
A couple chapters in, Donghyuck starts hating his soulmate and starts hating the marks on his arms.
Nothing in the world, no matter how hot it got in LA and no matter how hard it started pouring because of the summer humidity, could make Donghyuck stop wearing long sleeved shirts.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Or at least that’s what Donghyuck tells himself so he can sleep peacefully for the next six years of his life.
When Sirius dies in Order of the Phoenix, Donghyuck starts believing the person meant for him must be a bastard.
He starts yearning for another person, literally anyone else. Soulmates are supposed to be the person meant to make you the happiest person on earth.
Yet his soulmate had the great idea of possibly spoiling what could have been his favorite book series of all time.
Donghyuck regrets not getting into the Lord of the Ring fandom instead — well he did anyways. Legolas gave Donghyuck his gay awakening. So perhaps he should thank his soulmate for that.
To deal with his soulmate mark and not get even more frustrated with the reality his soulmate might be one of the biggest assholes on earth, Donghyuck learns how to make a list of things he wants:
- His soulmate can’t be a Belieber.
- His soulmate can’t like Harry Potter. Call Donghyuck petty, but if he couldn’t enjoy the franchise, his soulmate couldn’t either. According to fate or whatever it was that made the author think this would be funny to write for a fic fest, it just wasn’t fair that Donghyuck lived with the biggest fucking spoiler on his arm since he was five-years old.
- His soulmate has to be cute at least if the first two things on the list of things he wants don’t happen.
University is everything that was and wasn’t promised by his older brother. Sure there’s a line of giant frat houses that hosted block parties every weekend, but Donghyuck didn’t expect for a good part of their members to be mechanical engineers and spend their weekends using projectile functions to calculate the force needed to win beer pong instead of just blacking out.
Even with all the years that have passed, Donghyuck still wears sleeves all of the time — at this moment Donghyuck would like to thank how slobbiness was normalized at every university and that it was okay to show up to class in your university gear and basketball shorts to class.
Okay.
It’s been years and so far Dumbledore hasn’t died yet, but one could never guess what would happen if she should not be named as the author.
If people ask him what’s written on his arm, Donghyuck always brushes them off. There was nothing to see on his arm.
Because:
- A Potterhead would attack him for spoiling the ending of Harry Potter in the case that it was indeed Dumbledore died.
- A Potterhead would still attack him just for making him believe that Dumbledore was going to die.
Everyday Donghyuck wakes up scared shitless that eventually one of the die-hard Potterheads will see his arm and try to yank it off for ruining the end of everyone’s favorite book.
He’s seen the news.
People’s lives ruined by the very mark that was supposed to bring them happiness. He finds it ridiculous that the universe gave people marks like “do you want to be my friend with benefits” or “Sorry I slept with your ex” so that people could find the person who completed them.
And Donghyuck really doesn’t want to continue feeling dislike for his soulmate.
Donghyuck simply places his supposed love for his soulmate on timeout. He just finds it weird that the universe made him destined to fall deeply in love with someone whose first words would be to him: I can’t believe Dumbledore died.
Dumbledore ends up dying to the surprise of everyone — everyone except Donghyuck of course because his dearly beloved soulmate had, with extreme courtesy, spoiled it for him ever since he was five years old.
But Donghyuck never hears the exact words: “Man I can’t believe Dumbledore died” when The Half-Blood Prince gets released.
It’s always: “Oh my fucking god she who should not be named fucking killed off Dumbledore” or “Did Dumbledore just die?”
So his soulmate must be a really big asshole if he thinks he could just spoil the entire Harry Potter franchise for him for years without even having the guts to finally meet him.
The only good thing that came out of the sucky soulmate mark was the fact that Donghyuck won his book club prediction contest for the Half-Blood Prince that year. He was a couple hundred dollars cheaper and was finally able to afford the Nintendo DS console he’s always wanted in coral pink and play Final Fantasy. Donghyuck was already extremely bored of the cheap Tamagotchi he had been playing with and wanted to pick up Final Fantasy again.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince finally comes out in theaters and Renjun has the wonderful idea of going to see the movie on a Wednesday (because neither one wanted to pay full price for a movie they already knew the ending to. Snape kills Dumbledore so Draco doesn’t have to. The end. Really that’s the end because the Deathly Hallows is so overly sentimental, Donghyuck respects himself enough to only want to see the part where Molly Weasley calls Bellatrix a bitch and kills her.)
And yet again, Donghyuck finds himself deeply frustrated by the Harry Potter franchise.
Why was the line so long?
Everyone by now should know that Dumbledore was killed by Snape at the end of the movie, the movie producers weren’t going to change anything because it would render the whole series meaningless. The last enemy to be vanquished was death and Harry was going to fucking vanquish it by learning that death was cyclical, it comes and goes — and no amount of plot armor could save Dumbledore.
Not even —
“Man I can’t believe Dumbledore died,” a guy walking right past Donghyuck says and he can feel his tattoo burning again, or maybe it was all of the years of pent up frustration Donghyuck had building up to this day.
He’s seething.
He’s absolutely fucking seething.
His soulmate didn’t even fucking read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and he still managed to spoil the fact that Dumbledore dies.
“You! You’re the one aren’t you!” Donghyuck runs off to the stranger and pulls him by the arm.
“That’s really not how I imagined you saying that,” the guy immediately confesses as he turns around and meets Donghyuck’s angry face.
Fuck why was he so hot? Donghyuck sighs to himself. Destiny really was a bitch wasn’t she?
Donghyuck’s soulmate is Mark Lee. Korean Canadian. 23 years old and a recent English literature graduate from University of British Columbia, currently on a gap year to figure things out because turning eighteen didn’t guarantee becoming an adult.
And it was only a matter of time Donghyuck would begin falling in love with Mark because he was the biggest sweetheart in the entire world. Immediately after realizing that he ruined Harry Potter franchise for him for over ten years now, Mark offered to pay for Donghyuck to get a cover-up tattoo so he wouldn’t have to live with the fact that the words, “Man I can’t believe Dumbledore died” would forever be etched on his arm.
Plus who takes their soulmate to a Hello Kitty Café for a first date and serenades him when he comes back from work? Only fucking Mark Lee.
Mark is just so cute and sweet, Donghyuck doesn’t even dare have a wet dream about him.
He’d be met with hellfire if he even dared imagine palming Mark’s dick – even when he’s absolutely certain Satan himself would dump him into a hellfire for ever thinking dirty of Mark or even dare touching him other than a quick peck on the lips.
“Do you still hate me?”
“Yes,” Donghyuck replies without another second passing. “Oh,” Mark says, voice becoming small. “Right I did —”
Donghyuck cups Mark’s face and kisses him before he can finish apologizing for the hundredth time for spoiling the end of Harry Potter.
“It’s hard hating you,” Donghyuck breathes. “It’s so hard to hate you anymore when I already love you so much.”
Destiny teaches Donghyuck a couple things:
- Mark didn’t mean to spoil Harry Potter for him.
- Mark is sadly a Belieber.
- If Mark wants to cuddle with you when he’s drunk let him. He only likes to be affectionate in private and sometimes when he’s jealous, Mark will kiss you in public — and only on very rare occasions like when his friend Jaehyun asked Donghyuck out on a date in front of him.
- Mark is fucking adorable and even more adorable when he “accidentally” dyed his hair blond so that he could match Donghyuck (Donghyuck messed up his box dye job and cried all evening because he didn’t read the label and didn’t get the purple hair he wanted.)
- She who should not be named wishes she could write a love story as good as his and Mark’s. They’re fucking adorable and no one not even destiny could deny them otherwise.
- Destiny clearly knew what she was doing.