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Qi Yan had never wanted a soulmate.
She hated the words written on her skin, a swirling font that she kept hidden under her long sleeves. The marks appeared constantly as if her soulmate couldn’t bare a second without writing another message on their own skin. She didn’t have time for a soulmate, not when she had a family to avenge.
This feeling didn’t go away even as the years passed, as she grew closer and closer to the revenge she’d always dreamed of obtaining, and her heart was drawn more and more to the woman she should never love. It wasn’t long after she named the feeling continually pricking at her that she realised Nangong Jingnu was her soulmate too. One drunken night, and her wife angrily scrawling across her own skin, was all that it took.
She kept it to herself. Did it really matter that they were fated to be, when Qi Yan already knew there was no one else for her, soulmate or not?
It wasn’t until after she had gotten her revenge, until the time they spent together was stolen and Qi Yan had to be hidden away, that Nangong Jingnu brought up the topic.
“My soulmate never wrote to me,” Nangong Jingnu said, pressed up against Qi Yan’s chest and wrapped up in her arms. She let out a soft sigh, filled with a weariness that came from working all day and night. “I stopped writing too, when I met you. There was no point yearning when I was married.”
“Do you regret it?” Qi Yan asked, lips curving up in a smile at the belligerent look Nangong Jingnu shot her.
“Of course not! Why would you even ask that, Yuanjun?”
“It might have been easier for you, then.”
“I don’t want easier,” Nangong Jingnu snorted, lowering her head again and snuggling into the crook of Qi Yan’s shoulder. “I just want you.”
“Me too, your highness.”
Nangong Jingnu let out a happy hum at that, and Qi Yan let out the breath that she’d held in. It was better this way. She’d never liked the idea of soulmates, of having to love someone because you were connected before even knowing them. She’d rather just love them for who they are, now that she had discovered it was a feeling she was capable of again.
She’d rather just love Nangong Jingnu for who she was.
“What about you?”
“Hmm?” Qi Yan tilted her head, looking down towards Nangong Jingnu.
“What about your soulmate?”
“Oh, them? I was covered in writing when I was young but they stopped as I grew older.”
“Do you think they're dead? Our soulmates?”
“What does it matter?” Qi Yan raised an eyebrow. She felt like she was back with Nangong Jingnu of the old, her inquisitive eyes brimmed with an innocence that had long since faded. It had been so long since she had been questioned like this. “Whether they are or not won’t change a thing.”
“You’re right,” Nangong Jingnu sighed. “It would be better that way.”
Qi Yan remained silent, answering with a slow kiss to Nangong Jingnu’s plush lips. It served to end the topic and move them onto other things, as they fell into the gentle rhythm of their bodies against each other.
Perhaps one day, Qi Yan would tell Nangong Jingnu.
But today was not that day.