Jinyoung was four when he learned about soul-puzzles and two people completing each other.

“What’s that?” Jinyoung’s tiny fingers left chocolate stains on the black lines marring the white skin of his mother’s wrist.

The woman sighed and grabbed a tissue, ready for another episode of the never-ending task of cleaning her little boy’s hands and everything he had touched since he had miraculously managed to spread the small piece of chocolate all over his fingers and his face. “It’s your daddy’s name, Jinyoungie”, she said with a gentle smile. “It means he belongs to me, and I belong to him.”

Jinyoung thought that over, with all the seriousness a four-year-old could muster, not resisting when his mother rubbed the chocolate off his hands. “Why?” he asked, finally.

“Because I’m incomplete without him. We’re like your puzzles. We only make sense when we’re together.”

Jinyoung nodded seriously at that. Who needed one part of a puzzle without the other pieces? “Do I belong to your puzzle, too?”

His mother laughed, a sound so infectious that Jinyoung had to smile and giggle as well. “No, we’re a two-piece-puzzle. You’re going to have to find your own puzzle-partner. They will belong to you, and you will belong to them.”

“So when I find them, they will play with me? They will be my friend?” That sounded wonderful to Jinyoung. He loved getting new friends.

“The best friend you’ve ever had.”

The smile on Jinyoung’s face spread and he stretched his arm to tug at his mother’s beautiful, dark hair. “Where can I find them?”

“That’s going to take some time, Jinyoungie.” His mother caught his left arm and turned it over, resting the tips of her fingers on his wrist, blank and white. “You see this? There is no name there yet.”

It was true, Jinyoung noted. There were no strange black lines on his wrist. Did that mean there was a piece missing of his puzzle? His lower lip began quivering, his eyes glazing over with tears. “Why not? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” she soothed, gently brushing soft, black hair from his forehead. “You will get a mark like this. At first, it will tell you little things about your puzzle-partner, and when you two meet, it will tell you their name.”

Jinyoung’s full, pink lip didn’t stop trembling. “But I want to find them.”

“You will,” his mother promised. “One day. And you’ll make each other very happy.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jinyoung was eighteen when he found his missing puzzle piece. But it did not happen the way he had expected. At all.

Jinyoung just knew when he ran into the boy with the snapback on his head. He knew. He didn’t even have to glance down on his tingling wrist to know that the swirling, black lines under his skin that had been spelling out random words for the last two and a half years of his life had frozen into one word, one word that would be on his wrist for the rest of his life. He did, anyway, eager to see the name of the boy who was his soul mate. JACKSON. Jackson. Jackson. Jinyoung instinctively loved the shape of it, the way it looked on his pale skin, the way it felt on his tongue, the sound of it when he whispered it for the first time.

Jackson was staring at him with wide, dark, almond-shaped eyes, drinking in his features, and Jinyoung knew exactly what he was feeling right now, because Jinyoung felt the same. He watched his soul mate throw a glance at his own wrist, hidden by multiple leather bracelets, and a smile tugged at his lips. He’d had to wear bracelets, too, because his teachers had become annoyed with the way he’d been looking at his wrist and daydreaming in class instead of focusing.

Jackson lifted his hand, shaking the bracelets until they slid down further on his arm so that he could see the word imprinted on the inside of his wrist. Jinyoung knew what it said. It was his name.

“Jinyoung,” Jackson read out loud, and his voice, deep and a bit husky, made a shiver run down Jinyoung’s spine. He loved it already, and he felt a giddy happiness bubbling up inside him at the slow, bright smile that spread on Jackson’s face.

Jinyoung almost couldn’t believe the coincidence, running into his soul mate in a supermarket in Hong Kong, of all places, where he was only spending a week of vacation that his grandparents had given him as a graduation present. He would have preferred to go to the US or Europe or somewhere actually cool, but now he was unbelievably grateful he had ended up in Hong Kong. And then he remembered, it was not a coincidence. It was fate.

Because that was the way it worked in their world. You met your soul mate, you fell in love. You spent your life together. And yeah, Jinyoung, for all his cynicism, was a hopeless romantic at heart.

“Hey,” Jinyoung said, his voice a little squeaky, but he didn’t really mind. Jackson was meant to love him, and he would love him with all his quirks and flaws, even if his voice turned squeaky when he was excited. Even if he was bad with expressing his feelings, even if he got jealous easily and lashed out when he was hurt.

He’d seen it, seen it with his parents, with a few of his high school friends, with couples of strangers all around him, that complete happiness and sense of belonging. It’s was what he had grown up wanting for himself, and for the one he was destined to be with, and what parents, and later his grandparents, had promised him he would have, someday.

“Hey,” Jackson replied and held out a hand for Jinyoung to shake which the latter took more out of reflex and a sense of propriety than because of a conscious choice, too busy trying to take in every tiny moment. “I’m so happy to finally meet you!”

Yeah, me too, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, Jinyoung thought, and wanted to say out loud.  The words were already on his tongue, but Jackson was still talking.

“It’s just that, sorry, man, I’m actually on my way to my boyfriend’s and I’m already running late, but we should definitely meet up to talk and get to know each other. Tomorrow, for breakfast? There’s a café right around the corner, do you know it?”

His words ripped Jinyoung right out of his happy daze like he had been hit with a wall of ice-cold water, and for a moment, he could do nothing more than blink and nod, stunned.

“Great.”

With another smile that could have lit up a whole room and a quick “See you at nine, then” Jackson was gone, and Jinyoung was left in the middle of the supermarket, staring at nothing, his thoughts filled with only one word, over and over.

Boyfriend?

Why did Jackson have a boyfriend? He felt jealousy well up inside him, hot and sharp, burning in his throat, and tried to calm down, tried to rationalize it. He was good at rationalizing things, he always had been. It wasn’t that unusual, he told himself, people getting together before they found their soul mate, their other half, because no one knew how long it would take before they found the other piece of their puzzle. For some people it took years, decades even. Just because Jinyoung had never had any interest in a distraction like that didn’t mean that everyone else had to feel that way.

It was okay, he convinced himself, and Jackson was probably on his way to break up with him right now. It was the honorable, the right thing to do, to not string him along any longer than necessary, and Jackson probably only wanted to make sure that there was nothing standing in between him and Jinyoung when they got to know each other. He had said he wanted to meet up and talk, he had invited Jinyoung for breakfast. It was okay.

Jinyoung spent the evening lying on his bed in his hotel room while Jaebum and the others were out partying, celebrating the end of their school life and the start of their college years. It had taken Jaebum only one look at his face and another at his wrist to leave him alone, all attempts to get him to join them abandoned.

He was staring at the black letters on his wrist and remembering the time since his sixteenth birthday, every minute he had spent watching words flicker over his skin, meaningless to him but somehow making up everything that was important to his soul mate. Some words he had only seen once in his life, some returning again and again, SNAPBACKS, was one of them, MOM, 852, again and again, CHEESE, FENCING, and one word that had always puzzled Jinyoung, MARK. What kind of a mark? Was his soul mate into archery? Or were they talking about actual marks, something on his soul mate’s body, visible and there to stay? Or, Jinyoung’s favorite theory, was it about the mark on his wrist, did it mean that the black lines and the words they spelled, telling pieces of Jinyoung, were so important to his soul mate that it regularly showed up on Jinyoung’s wrist?

He wouldn’t mind either way, he had thought, no matter if it was decorative or something that other people would see as a flaw, because it belonged to his soul mate, and that meant it was perfect.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jinyoung was eight when someone explained to him that he had to move to his grandparents’ house because his parents were now in heaven and, even though they were watching over him, they couldn’t take care of him from up there.

Jinyoung resented the lie. He wasn’t stupid, his parents were dead. Gone. There was no one watching over him from heaven.

He wished he had already found his soul mate, because he felt more incomplete and empty than he had ever felt before, and his soul mate was supposed to fix that, right? To complete his puzzle, so that anything and everything would make sense again?

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jinyoung found out exactly what kind of mark the next morning when he was sitting in the café Jackson had mentioned, a cup of coffee warming his cold, nervous fingers, and he looked up to see Jackson push open the door with one hand, the fingers of his other hand laced with those of a boy. A gorgeous boy, a bit taller than Jackson, with hair dyed a mix of a rusty red and antique pink, but Jinyoung didn’t notice much apart from their interlaced hands, a possessive jealousy rolling through his veins.

That was his soul mate. His. He wasn’t supposed to hold hands with some other guy, no matter how handsome.

Jinyoung felt himself straightening rigidly, his fingers clenching around the cup and his stomach twisting with dreadful anticipation when Jackson spotted him, a smile spreading on his face, and made his way over through the cozy café between the other tables, pulling the other guy along with him.

“Hey!” Jackson greeted him enthusiastically when they finally reached the table. The smile, bright like the sun, was still on his face and his eyes were sparkling. “I’m sorry, are we late? I didn’t expect that much traffic on a Sunday, the bus was way late.”

Jinyoung didn’t answer, speechless. He was just staring, staring up at his handsome soul mate who brought another guy to their first real meeting.

A small frown flitted over Jackson’s face at Jinyoung’s utter lack of response until the other guy gave his hand a small tug and Jinyoung’s eyes fluttered down to their joined hands and then back up to Jackson’s face, and a tiny bit of understanding seemed to dawn in those dark eyes.

“Sorry,” Jackson said with another smile, letting go of the hand in his to start tugging off the scarf wrapped around his neck. “I forgot my manners. Jinyoung, this is Mark, my boyfriend.”

It was Mark, not mark. A boy, not a scar or tattoo. And Jackson obviously wasn’t into archery, he was just into Mark.

This was not how he had expected this to go, at all.

“Nice to meet you,” Mark said smoothly. He had a pleasant voice, velvety, and deeper than what you’d expect from his slender frame. While there was no smile on his face, he was friendly enough, in this bizarre situation.

Jinyoung didn’t care. “What is he doing here?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady and cool but unable help the slight tremor betraying his jealousy and hurt.

He could watch Jackson tense at the rejection in Jinyoung’s voice, his open expression shutting down a bit. “He’s my boyfriend,” he repeated, carefully. “He wanted to meet you, and I thought it was a good idea if we were going to figure this whole thing out.” He shrugged out of his light jacket, slipping into the cushioned bench across from where Jinyoung was sitting, and pulling Mark down next to him.

“Figure it out?” Jinyoung echoed, almost inaudibly, sounding more upset than he would like. A biting edge entered his voice as he got louder, hiding his vulnerability. “Figure it out? You’re my soul mate, we’re meant to be together, what is there to figure out?”

Jackson winced, an almost guilty expression paired with a trace of insecurity flitting across his face that made Jinyoung instinctively want to reach out and comfort him. He didn’t, though, because Mark did before the situation had even fully formed.

Jinyoung watched the other boy brush his fingers along Jackson’s arm before his hand disappeared under the table again and Jinyoung just knew that it was settling on his soul mate’s thigh. He noticed the way Jackson automatically relaxed into the touch and it was like a knife digging through his guts. He wanted to throw up.

“I’m sorry,” Jackson said quietly, fiddling with his fingers on the table, looking down on them instead of at Jinyoung. “I want you in my life, I do, but I can’t… I can’t give you that. I should have told you that yesterday instead of tricking you into meeting me again. I’m with Mark, and I won’t let some word on my wrist tell me that what I feel for him is not real. I’m sorry, I know that’s not what you expected to hear.” His voice had gotten quieter with each sentence, and there was a slight tremble, a vulnerability in his last words, that seemed so out of place considering what his words meant for Jinyoung.

Jinyoung felt his breath leave him in a rush. That’s not how it works, he wanted to say. You don’t get to do that, you don’t get to run away with some other guy and leave me all alone. You’re mine. You belong to me.

But there was no air in his lungs, and he didn’t seem to be able to any in, so he didn’t say anything, instead trying to deal with the impossibility of what Jackson was telling him. They were made for each other. That was what everyone had been telling him his whole life, soul mates belonged together. It was Jinyoung’s universal truth. He’d been waiting for the day he would meet his from the moment his parents had explained to him what the weird symbols on their arms meant and why Jinyoung didn’t have one yet.

He had never heard of anyone meeting their soul mate and walking away from that. It was absurd.

He couldn’t bear to look at Jackson any longer, at the almost white strands of hair falling into his face, his dark lashes that hid his even darker eyes, so he let his gaze fall onto the table, onto Jackson’s hands.

What he saw made an involuntary, protesting noise escape his throat, destroyed the rest of faith he had that it would all work out, that the system wouldn’t fail him.

That was impossible. It couldn’t be. He’d never heard of someone with two marks. Everybody only had one soul mate, and their name was marked onto their left wrist the moment the two of them met for the first time after their sixteenth birthday.

But there it was, clear as day. There was Jinyoung’s name on Jackson’s left wrist – and Mark’s on his right.

Jinyoung felt like someone had punched him in the gut with the force of a bullet-train. His gaze immediately jumped over to Mark, running over his arms, trying to see if there was Jackson’s name on his left wrist, but Mark’s left hand was still under the table, on Jackson’s thigh, and he was tracing patterns on the wood of the table with his right hand, so Jinyoung couldn’t see the inside of his wrist.

He probably noticed Jinyoung’s gaze, though, because he turned his hand, and there it was, black on white skin, Jackson’s name.

Jinyoung didn’t know what to think anymore. He didn’t know how to think anymore. How was it possible that his soul mate also belonged to another person? That had never been seen before, it was an impossibility, absolutely unthinkable.

He felt the ridiculous urge to laugh, hysterically, but he would probably end up crying if he gave in even to a small chuckle.

“It’s not the same,” Mark said in a quiet, calm voice. “Not what you two have. It’s a tattoo. A symbol, because for so many people in this world a relationship doesn’t mean anything unless you carry it on your wrist. We got them last year.”

Suddenly, it made sense, but Jinyoung didn’t feel better because of it. It was one thing to think that this was fate playing a cruel joke on him, telling him he had to share the one person that was supposed to be only his, but it wasn’t like that. This just meant that his soul mate didn’t want him.

“Why?” he croaked out, his voice heavy, his tongue too thick in his mouth, and he could feel the tears rise past his throat, hot and uncomfortable. This was supposed to be the happiest day of his life so far, and instead it had been turned into this. “You have your own soul mate.”

He could see Jackson jerk in surprise in his periphery, turning his head to throw Mark a concerned glance, but Mark stayed calm. There was a tiny, sad smile playing around the corners of his lips, when he said, “No, I don’t.” And then he lifted his hand from under the table and showed Jinyoung his wrist.

It was white. No black swirls, no words, no name, just smooth, pale skin.

Jinyoung in a breath. He knew what that meant, he’d seen it before. It had happened to his best friend, Jaebum, two weeks after his seventeenth birthday.

No mark meant their soul mate was gone. Dead, before they had had the opportunity to meet. It had been torture, watching Jaebum go through that. He hadn’t left his room for almost two months, stopped eating regularly until he had been thin as a stick, going nearly insane with grief, and there was nothing that Jinyoung could do against the pity welling up inside of him as he stared at Mark’s blank wrist.

But here he was, in danger of losing his own soul mate, not to death, but to another person, and there was panic gnawing at the edges of Jinyoung’s mind. He didn’t want to end up like that. He wanted to spend his life with his soul mate, grow old together, live together for as long as they got. He wanted that with Jackson. And that’s what made him utter the next words, destructive as they were. “That doesn’t give you the right to steal mine.”

Jackson sat up straighter at that, opening his mouth to answer something, but Mark didn’t let him. He reached over, lacing his fingers with Jackson’s that were still on the table, tracing the tips over his own name for a second in the process. “You’re right,” he replied, still calm. “It doesn’t. But I love Jackson, no matter if he is my soul mate or not, and as long as he wants to stay with me, I’m not going to push him away.”

Jinyoung tried not to notice the way Jackson’s fingers tightened around Mark’s slightly bigger hand, and he also tried to ignore the full, brilliant smile Jackson flashed at his boyfriend whose dark eyes were still trained on Jinyoung’s face.

It hurt. It hurt even more because he had never seen this coming, and because he was clearly the only one suffering here. Mark had Jackson, and since Mark was free to give his whole heart to Jinyoung’s soul mate, Jackson didn’t have any need for Jinyoung.

Suddenly, he hated them both. He hated them with an intensity that he had never felt before. This wasn’t fair, he didn’t deserve this. He hated the name on his wrist, the one undeniable sign that this should have been his shot at happiness, this should have been easy, this should have been his eternity, and Jackson was ruining that. He wished with all his heart that it wasn’t there, that instead, there were still swirling, black lines, words describing his soul mate, the person he had yet to meet, who was going to love him with all his heart.

He barely noticed it at first, too caught up in his own poisonous thoughts, but soon enough the burning on his wrist was too hot, too painful to ignore. He was in the process of raising his hand to look at his mark when he noticed Jackson slumping forward, clutching his own wrist, and Jinyoung caught a glimpse of something too red and too angry to belong there on the pale skin of Jackson’s arm.

He only realized a moment later that Jackson was shaking, eyes wide open but unfocused, and when the first tear escaped his eyes there were a lot more following right after.

The burning, blistering pain on Jinyoung’s own wrist got stronger every second, but Jinyoung found himself unable to look anywhere else but Jackson’s face, staring into nothing.

Mark, who had noticed what was happening much sooner than Jinyoung, was trying to get Jackson’s attention, calling his name over and over, more panicky with each passing moment. He was touching Jackson’s face, his cheek, his neck with fluttery fingers, but the other boy seemed caught in some kind of trance, oblivious to Mark’s panic.

The whole scene felt unreal to Jinyoung, like a déjà vu. He’d seen this before, though now forced into the position of a spectator where before, he’d been right at the center. But it couldn’t be the same, because Jinyoung was right here, and Jinyoung was okay.

Jinyoung barely noticed the rustling of the café stilling around them. He couldn’t remember when he had pressed the palm of his right hand against his wrist, the cool skin doing nothing to ease the burning, and he certainly couldn’t remember when he had started crying.

The next thing he registered was Jackson’s eyes fluttering closed for a long moment before they opened again, staring right back at Jinyoung. He felt as if Jackson him right into his tra