Chapter Text
Everyone checks when they meet someone new. Even if it’s impolite -- the briefest flicker of eyes darting downwards after shaking a person’s hand -- everyone does.
Though, Jessica thinks as soon as names started appearing on people’s wrists, the general public started wearing more watches, cuffs, bracelets and the like. No one knows why the names show up when they do, but most of the time, it’s a cause for celebration.
Unless, of course, their soulmate happens to be poor. Or unfortunate looking. People don’t like to admit how fickle they are, Jessica figures, but as luck would have it, love -- predestined, metaphorically written in the stars and literally on their skin -- usually eroded those shallow thoughts over time. These were easy fixes.
Every morning, Jessica slips on the thick band of her father’s old watch to hide the name on her wrist.
Choi Sooyoung would’ve been twenty six to match Jessica’s twenty seven years of age today.
Choi Sooyoung died when she was fifteen in a car accident, but she was Jessica’s soulmate all the same.
“Does it hurt?” an oppa asks her once over after work drinks, endearingly alarmed. Jessica nearly laughs in his face.
“I didn’t lose anyone, oppa,” she tells him, cheeks flushed with wine and slight indignation, “We never met. When she died, I was studying overseas in America.” She hadn’t even known at the time anyway -- it wouldn’t be until five years later, on her twenty first birthday, that Sooyoung’s name appeared on her wrist.
“I think it’s possible,” a voice from her left speaks, and Jessica glances toward their newest hire, dark eyes locking immediately on her bare wrist. She licks her lips. “To lose someone you never met. In the world we live in now, anyway.”
Jessica lifts her glass to her mouth. “Yeah, sure,” she smirks, but she can’t stop the unsettling feeling that comes with the woman’s stare. She feels warm against her collar, but chases it down with another drink.
---
It’s another three months until Kim Taeyeon approaches her again at an office party. She corners her in between the Christmas tree and a table stacked with gingerbread cookies. Jessica raises her half-empty glass toward her in a nod. She remembers Kim Taeyeon, or more accurately, she remembers what being looked at by her felt like.
It’s the way she’s looking at Jessica right now, coincidentally, and Jessica can’t decide if she likes or dislikes it.
“Last time... “
“I get it.” Jessica waves her off, gaze pointedly looking down to Taeyeon’s wrist and flickering back up toward amber colored eyes. “People who haven’t gotten theirs yet -- they think all kinds of things.” She shrugs -- she doesn’t mean to sound condescending, but it is true.
Early twenties seemed to be the average for people to get their mark. Taeyeon’s around her age, so at this point, her soulmate is running late; she wonders if it bothers her.
“I didn’t say it because I believe in them,” Taeyeon starts, and Jessica stills, thinking she’s heard wrong.
“What did you say?”
Taeyeon takes a breath and steps forward. She can smell the alcohol off her breath, and she doesn’t stop her when she wraps a hand around Jessica’s glass and sets it aside. Not when she can’t look anywhere else but the way she’s being looked at now.
“I don’t believe in soulmates in the way other people do.” Taeyeon’s eyes are defiant, liquid pools of -- determination, and anger too, maybe? She can’t tell. She can’t tell who Kim Taeyeon is and Jessica thinks she knows what the other woman’s doing, but she can’t figure out why. So she falls silent, looks at Taeyeon back with wonder and suspicion and a little bit of awe in her eyes that spell out things like --
Who are you?
What are you doing to me?
Do you know you can’t unstart a fire?
“So you lost yours early. You’re still here. You’re still capable of feeling, of...“ Taeyeon trails off, words scratching at her like flint against steel.
“Of?” Jessica swallows, throat bobbing.
There’s no other way to describe it -- Taeyeon’s eyes are burning.
“Let me show you.”
---
They don’t talk about it.
Taeyeon meets her in empty cubicles after hours after everyone has gone home, chasing exhaustion from the day’s work with an expert mouth and tongue. She ties her hair up in a high ponytail that has Jessica tugging on it too hard sometimes, rewarded with a hiss and teeth meant to be punishing in return. Taeyeon likes to leave marks, hot and open mouthed -- at the bottom of Jessica’s collarbone, on the insides of her thighs; sometimes Jessica pokes at them in the shower, watches the kaleidoscope of purples and reds along pale flesh that never seem to fully fade. Taeyeon always makes new ones before they ever really disappear.
She wonders if it’s on purpose, if it means anything.
There are times where Taeyeon follows her home, pins her up against her own walldeskfloorbed until Jessica is boneless and spent. She hardly ever stays the night, and Jessica never asks her to, though there is something to be said about how her apartment feels a little more cold when Taeyeon closes the door behind her. Even the morning light of sun coming in through the window, turning her skin warm as the day starts anew again, feels less somehow.
There’s a coffee waiting on her desk by the time she gets to work. It’s too bitter for her taste, but Jessica gulps it down anyway, not even caring that the boiling liquid stings on its way down.
She’ll have to thank Taeyeon later.
---
It’s one of those rare nights that Taeyeon doesn’t slip back into her clothes and out into the late night (or early morning, really) right away. As often as they sleep together, neither of them are particularly affectionate, but Taeyeon brushes her bangs away from her eyes and gives her more of the blanket to share and it feels like a different kind of caress than she’s used to.
Jessica reaches out on a whim, touching the soft skin of Taeyeon’s wrist, still clear of a name. She can feel the ticking of a pulse underneath her thumb, see the blue of veins underneath white skin.
Not for the first time, she wonders why it is that soulmates’ names show up at random. It would make sense, in a way, if they appeared the moment two soulmates fell in love together, but there are too many common instances where names show up one day on someone’s wrist and the person has no idea who they are.
“What are you thinking of?” Taeyeon asks her quietly, and Jessica counts to three in her head, decides honesty is more important than preservation of something that had an expiration date from the start.
“You could probably get on your soulmate’s case about being late for the rest of your lives together,” she answers simply, and she watches as something shutters off in Taeyeon’s eyes. Their coworkers call her hard to read, but Jessica finds it the exact opposite -- she doesn’t miss the spark in her gaze, brief but blazing.
She doesn’t ask, but Taeyeon answers anyway.
“Are your parents soulmates?” she starts suddenly, and at Jessica’s nod, a humorless little smile toys at her lips. Most parents are soulmates these days -- not always -- but most.
“My mother died of an illness when I was really young. My father… he was never the same after that,” explains Taeyeon, all soft heat that lingers in her tone like scorched earth from a wildfire. Her eyes are inky black, the color of soot, and for the life of her, Jessica doesn’t think she could bear looking away.
“He jumped off a twelve story building when I was ten. I was shuffled around in foster care until I was of age.”
Her jaw locks together, and she shakes her head from her spot against Jessica’s pillow. “I hated him for it. I still do,” she admits. “It’s bullshit, this soulmate thing. Why shouldn’t people have a say in who they love, in who they live fo -- ” Taeyeon’s voice cracks.
“Taeyeon.” Jessica’s voice is barely above a whisper, and Taeyeon makes a choked noise against her chest where she’s been pulled into a tight embrace. “Taeyeon, Taeyeon, Taeyeon.”
It sounds like a promise. It sounds like a question, too.
I would love you.
I would live for you.
Would you?
Would you?
---
Taeyeon stays the night more often, and Jessica should have really prepared for the moment her spoiled sister would come barging into her apartment one day (honestly, where did she even get a key, she wonders) and catch them together.
She leaves with a quirk of a smile and a polite bow, hair not even combed through as she disappears down the hall, and Jessica looks at the closed door behind her too fondly for Krystal not to notice.
Before she can yank her arm away, Krystal’s roughly pushing the sleeve of her shirt up to look at the name on her wrist, and, unchanged and not even the slightest bit lighter, says Choi Sooyoung.
“Yah,” Jessica takes her hand back and pulls her sleeve down, rubbing at her wrist as though she’s been injured. She scowls; Krystal is lucky she doesn’t get hit for that. “Jung Soojung, have you lost your mind?”
Krystal scowls back, but her expression falters and while she’s stubborn, she’s unable to mask the concern that melts away her instinctive defensiveness. “You just looked…. ” Krystal trails off, visibly uncomfortable. “I thought for a moment maybe some names could be replaced, or new ones could appear.”
Something like that would’ve surely made headline news if it ever happened, and Jessica pinches the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “You know that’s not possible, Soojung-ah.”
“People are reporting weird things with their soulmates all the time,” Krystal counters, unaware that she sounds so very young, and so very like the little girl Jessica knew that had come up to her at age sixteen, frustrated to the point of tears because It’s not supposed to be her, unnie.
Jessica glances at the promise ring on her sister’s hand and wonders briefly about the balance between such things as free will and fate.
“Hate to be the bearer of bad news, Soojung-ah, but I don’t think even soulmates can make the other rise out of their graves,” she responds flatly. Krystal bites her lower lip, hesitating.
“Have you… have you gone to see her yet, unnie?”
Jessica blinks, caught off guard by the question. “What?” she asks, uncertain if she likes where this conversation is going, “See who?”
“Sooyoung,” Krystal answers in a soft sigh, worry softening her features, “I think… it would be good for you to. Maybe talk to her old friends and family and learn what she was like.”
Jessica stares at her, disbelieving but not entirely surprised at the same time. Krystal had been there when Jessica had looked into a directory for a Choi Sooyoung and found the Gwangju girl on a city newspage written on the anniversary of her death.
She knows the she had been joyriding with friends early into the night and had been the only one in the crash to die, and that the drunk driver who had been responsible for the accident had gotten off with a sentence a thousand times lighter than he deserved.
“What good would it do, Soojung?” Jessica asks in turn, echoing the same thoughts she’d had when she was twenty one, when she learned the person meant for her in the world had already been taken from it -- taken from her. “What do I have to gain by getting to know a dead girl?”
To her credit, Krystal has an answer this time around.
“What do you have to lose?”
---
It would be a lie to say she doesn’t think about it sometimes.
Most of the time, though, Jessica’s too busy to think about who Choi Sooyoung was, too preoccupied with work and life amongst the living -- and Taeyeon.
Taeyeon, who lets a hand linger at the small of her back and tucks Jessica’s hair behind her ear in public now. Taeyeon, who has half her work wardrobe at her apartment since they’re usually rushing to get in together most of their mornings, anyway. Taeyeon, who still sucks bruises into her skin like they mean something in a world where marks mean everything.
Taeyeon, who snores softly while she sleeps, unconscious to everything outside her dreams in Jessica’s bed as she takes a marker from her bedside and pulls her wrist toward her and flips it over, palm up. Bare. She pretends her heartbeat doesn’t stutter just so, even though she should be used to the blank space on Taeyeon’s wrist by now.
It doesn’t take long for Taeyeon to wake, though, the gentle press of a felt tip marker against her skin not unlike a kiss. Jessica caps the marker and tosses it aside, and Taeyeon blinks a few times until her vision comes into focus and she looks down at her arm.
Jung Sooyeon.
And for all the years she’s wished, hoped, begged for otherwise -- she wants the mark to be real. She wants Jessica to be hers.
So Taeyeon slots her mouth over Jessica’s, warm like a low fire, and puts more stock in choice over fate and prays it’s enough.