Soulmate Stories

I was always bruised be it from him or me I don’t know but I was always bruised. The stark dark purples and yellows standing out against my sun starved skin. I don’t know what his life was like before I came along. I think it must have been fairly horrible considering how often he got injured. When I was born I was screaming big wet sounds that filled the hospital room. My soulmark sprawled across half my back like some crawling thing. I had to stay in the hospitable intensive care unit for a month not because I was born unhealthy or premature. Those problems would come later but because my soulmate had been nicked on his right hip with something sharp and cutting. The doctors told my parents later it was a knife wound not even dangerous for an adult but for a newly born infant. That's an entirely different story. 

My father told me that my mother worried herself most nights staying by my side clutching her hands together. Neither of my parents were each other's soulbond so the idea that I could die because of my own was infuriating to them. Neither of them was soulbound. After my birth for my early life my soulmate seemed to become more careful. I thought later it was because he was aware now that he had an infant tied to his life and his life tied to the infant. 

He had to be older by how much I couldn’t say, maybe he was five years and playing with kitchen knives maybe twenty five I didn’t know no one did. All it was now was a wait and see. 

When I was five I was rushed to the hospital again, my soulbound having been stabbed in the shoulder, a wound that was bad on an adult but much worse on a child. I stayed there for three months and my mothers face just got paler. My father was angry. I could see it in the tight line of his face and the fact he was in his study more often than before.

For the next two years my soulbound seemed to get less careful or at least injured more. Nothing serious, a nick here, a cut there, the gaze of a bullet here.  It used to occupy all my time waiting to wake up at twelve and be rushed to the hospital once again. My mothers pacing is the only thing accomplishing my late nights. When I was seven my father introduced me to the family art then that occupied my time.

I don’t remember much of it, just blood on my hands and the screams of women in my head and shaking hands. A knife glinting under a swinging bulb. We used to live in this big house, nice, furnished and expensive where no one could hear the screams. 

On a Tuesday my mother took me into the city. It was August and I was going into secondary school in two weeks. It was the first time I was supposed to go into school proper and I was delighted, excited even bandaged as I usually was those days. That's the unfair thing about soulmates sometimes when one is tough or larger than the other the same wound doesn't appear evenly. My soulmate might be nicked by something but because he is unusually tough it wouldn’t hurt him but me because I was soft and a child the same wound might be a sprawling cut across my hip. It was one of the reasons that those with soulbounds could get so possessive. 

I suppose I should be glad he never found me as a child. Sometimes I think about it if he had what my life would have been like. Probably worse, I would have never known any freedom even in the limited capacity given to me. 

I didn’t know why we were in the city. I thought we were going shopping. I don’t think she saw the truck coming. Her eyes had this hazy quality to them. It took me a long time to remember what happened. I think I might not have but then he came along and his very being brought up memories best left forgotten. When I woke up in the hospital after thinking for a moment there was a flash of joy in this vindictive little thing in my chest for how I must have hurt my soulmate, not the other way around. 

Then things were moving. My father was coming and then well then my mother was throwing me off a building. That vindictive little streaked flared hard for just a moment and then the other desperation to make my mother love me overtook the memoirs of before being far far down.

When I woke up next I couldn’t see out of one and it was hard to breathe. My father was there pale and tight lipped, tired too. I think he was more tired than I had ever seen him before. 

Things after that seemed to happen quickly and shortly at the same time. My soulbound had the courtesy to not get injured for a whole year. I thought it was because they too were stuck in a hospitable room lying helpless. I would later learn that the fall that took my eye and forced me to put metal pins in my joints barely bruised him. That more than anything else was most frustrating when I found out who he was. 

He said that he started hunting me after that, truly hunting me not just sending out feelers but actually taking time himself to find me. 

I helped my father dispose of a body a month after I was out of the hospital. Things after that never really slowed down. First there were the deaths, the lying and the hatred I had for my father. Then the wounds started up again as nothing ever too damaging but painful as if my soulmate was trying to punish me for what had happened to me. Burns and rashes, brushes. 

He was. 

It took him ten years to find me. Soulmate marks are supposed to be private but I ended up in the hospital because Beau Park kicked me a few to many times too hard. One of the doctors that attended to me noticed I had a soulmark and sometimes on rare occasions that information can be valuable. One of the butlers noticed a picture of it in a pile they had purchased and sent it up the chain. He told me that later as he weaved long thin fingers through my hair holding me gently on his chest as I tried not to move. 

His voice made his chest rumble and tickled me every time it brushed against my skin.

My father had just taken an interest in Kyun Yoon and I was trying to keep him away from her. When he first contacted me. At the Karaoke bar that wasn’t a Karaoke bar. I planted one in that man's face hard and fast but then there was movement and the man fist was coming at me and I was screwing my eyes shut prepared for the hit when I felt wind against my face and then nothing. No pain, nothing. I opened my eyes and before me stood a man in the strangest green shirt I had ever seen. It was almost a crop top with pins seeming to be inserted in the jacket and a white band around his stomach. Long green pants completing the look. 

He held the man's fist in his hand as the man struggled and strained against him. Going red in the face alcohol on his breath. The man swung his other fist and he simply moved out of the way. Leaning slightly back as if he wasn’t even worth his time. Within seconds the man was on the ground arm out behind his back straining against the green clothed man panting for breath as the other didn’t even look down at him as if he wasn’t even worth his attention.

He stared at me instead. 

A woman gasped behind us a second later. My brain caught up to what was happening and I realized it was the “old bitch” that Manny Kim referred to earlier. A man who I didn’t recognize with a scraggly beard was moving past me as if to try to interfere in the fight happening in front of him. I didn’t really think after that I was just moving. Grabbing Kyun Yoon and running. I never felt him take his eyes off me until I was out of the building and even then it still felt like I was being watched. 

For the next few days I am careful quiet as a mouse but even still I feel gazes dogging my heels and flashes of black, black hair. 

It only feels worse when I find out my father has Kyun Yoon phone and knows where she lives. I feel their gazes on my neck but I don’t care all I can think about is lying to my father. The feel of them watching me only gets worse as I sit there terrified. It gives me courage in the same way knowing your own the precipes of a cliff gives you courage. 

When I open the fridge the cans of pickled vegetables I survive on are gone and in their place is a neatly wrapped lunch box. In curiosity I can’t help but open it and inside sits a cute perfectly wrapped lunch. It sickens me. I throw it away without thought. 

My father is gone when I wake up as usual and there sits on the table a breakfast spread of pancake scallions poking through its golden flesh. I stare at it for a few seconds in something like shock. Stumbling to the table. I throw up over the food and am late for school because I have to clean up. 

I can’t help but curl my shoulders up, the eyes on me staring into my skin. 

I wake up in my sheets wet confused. The post I post online is deleted before a response is even sent answering it and my skin crawls. I try to post it again and again but it is deleted over and over again just as before. I feel the eyes looking down and judging me. Then there is Park and his anger. There is the gathering of freshmen and the eyes seem to be concrete gray statues perring down at me. I almost feel movement against my skin. As the girl brings the lighter closer to my face. Then Manny is there and the pressure seems to release. 

The girl who brought a lighter to my skin was found dead two days later. The skin of her right hand burned to a crisp and I felt chills down my back. 

I realized then that another devil wants a deal. 

When I threatened my father the eyes on my back started so intensely I could feel it burning my skin. Then I called my father and threatened to cut his hands off and the eyes only got worse. When I ended the call the green clothed man was suddenly next to me. I dropped my phone in surprise and tried to flinch but he caught my phone in one hand and my wrist in another black empty eyes staring into my own. I felt a pinch of pain in my neck and then there was nothing. 

When I woke up next we were in a hotel room of nice quality and expensive. 

The man with the black hair and soulless eyes was looming over me, seeming to examine me. I scrambled away from him frantically to just get away and he let me. The sheets tangled my limbs causing me to almost slip off the bed when faster than I could perceive cold hands had cradled my head and the man was suddenly almost right on top of me. I froze half leaning off the bed, the only thing preventing my tumble his support. 

He said his name is Illumi Zoldyck and there is a flicker of surprise on his face when I don’t recognize the name. His voice is like velvet smooth but uncaring and everything in me screams to get away. 

He doesn't give me that chance. He says that he is my soulmate and I don’t believe him until he turns his arm so I can see his forearm and my own mark lies underneath. He says that he has come to pick me up. He says that my father will be dead by midnight. I didn't believe him either. Until my fathers severed head is brought in on a silver platter by a woman in a butler's suit. 

After that, things happen quickly. Suddenly I am showering and then he is carrying me out to a car as I blush at the embarrassing position. Then we are going into a nice car shinny and black another man this time in a butlers suit in the driver's seat. Illumi doesn't let go of me cradling me to his chest and I am too tired to care.  

I ask what will happen to me and he simply replies that I will go to the Zoldyck’s home and be taken care of when he is away. I ask if I’ll be let out and he simply takes my chin in his hands, his calloused fingers cold against my face, looks me intensely in the eyes and says in that cold cold voice of his. That what I have requested will be unlikely to be approved. 

And I suppose he was right, it never was.