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Player had always hated the idea of soulmates. You got one person tied to your soul for your whole life, and you felt every injury they got, from a paper cut to a stab wound. People didn’t get their soulmates’ injuries; if one got stabbed, the other wouldn’t bleed, but the pain itself was shared. And Player hated every little bit of the idea. He couldn’t even keep a friend for more than a few months, how would he deal with a soulmate?
For years, Player thought he was safe, that he would be the only person on the planet without a soulmate, and he was happy with that. He wanted friends, but he knew it was only a matter of time after making a new friend for them to turn on him. They hated him for being weird, for staying in front of a computer, for liking geography, for hacking, for being himself. And he didn’t want anything bigger than a friendship, he was repulsed by the idea of being in a proper relationship. All of this added up to making him hate the idea of soulmates with all of his being.
It was when he had turned ten that he started to realize he had one. He felt more pain than most people did from their soulmates, which did worry him, but he just brushed it off. Whoever he was paired with probably just got into a lot of fights, which wasn’t ideal, but he just had to push through it. He hoped that soon he would be able to figure out who his soulmate was, tell them to stop getting hurt, and that would be that. But it would be difficult. Some people met their soulmates soon after feeling the bond, some took decades, and others were on their deathbeds when they met.
…
Two years had passed since Player started feeling the pain from the soulmate bond, and it had only gotten worse. His soulmate seemed to get into more and more fights, and Player had to keep an ice pack in his mini fridge because of it. He had started doing cybersecurity work, hacking into security systems and reporting the weak points he found. He liked making the world a safer place, and it was a way for him to do that.
Player had found probably one of the most secure systems he had ever hacked into. It was impressive, honestly, and he had found a frequency to contact. So, he did what he usually did and sent his default message, “Better beef up your security. I got in.” The person on the other side seemed rather confused, responding, “‘Got in’? Where? Here?” so he figured he would call them, it was a standard procedure. The phone’s ringing ended, and he was on the line.
“Hello?” he greeted, checking the connection. The response was a nervous “Hello?” back at him. The voice was quiet and secretive, like the girl on the other end wasn’t meant to be calling. She sounded older than Player, but didn’t sound quite like an adult, which he thought was rather odd. The voice sounded oddly familiar, the same feeling one might have listening to one's mother’s voice. He was sure he had never met this person before, but something in him felt like he had to keep in touch. They made some small talk to each other and introduced themselves to each other by their pseudonyms. He knew the girl as Black Sheep, and she knew him as Player.
They kept in contact, and Player still couldn’t shake the familial feeling from her voice. Black Sheep didn’t talk about herself much, but she seemed to be at some kind of very sheltered boarding school, even over the summer. She sounded like she didn’t exactly have parents but was instead raised by a group. By the faint background noises Player could hear from the rustling palm trees and croaking frogs, she was on some kind of island. She did often say some weird things, like having a class on “infiltration”, which set off some alarms in Player’s head, but he had been homeschooled for years, so part of him wanted to guess it was just a silly name for something else.
Player’s soulmate seemed to keep getting hurt regularly, and always the same kinds of injuries on the same time and day of the week. He had to start taking medication for all the pain, and he felt lucky not to be into sports or any other activity that would make him even more sore, let alone put his soulmate in more pain.
At some point, Black Sheep’s phone was suddenly open. Its location was no longer hidden, heading for Morocco, and the encryption was lighter. He called, and she seemed panicked and rushed, hanging up. Black Sheep soon took a selfie with her phone with a city in the background, and Player was able to see it. It was the first time he had seen her face, and it felt so close to him, as if he was staring at a family member. He had heard of the idea of love at first sight, but that wasn’t what it was. It was more akin to finding your mom after losing her in a grocery store. He had heard that some people felt like the sight of their soulmates for the first time was familiar, but there was no such thing as a platonic soulmate, was there?
No, it felt wrong. If Black Sheep was his soulmate, the pain he felt would have made sense with her weird classes. And those weird feelings he got from talking to and seeing Black Sheep? It all lined up.
Player had a platonic soulmate, and her name was Black Sheep.