piecewise | g/t snippets & drabbles

monochrome (f/?) | snippet #4

Nora kicked a pebble on her way home.

This was stupid. She was stupid. Why did she think telling her friends about her string was a good idea? Sure, everyone knew that they'd get one eventually, and most of her friends had gotten theirs on the onset of puberty, but this was ridiculous!

Strings, she remembered as her thoughts traveled back to that day. That week her 7th grade class had talked about the concept of soulmates. It was simple enough - when both partners were of age and within a 50-mile range, the strings would appear, pointing in each other's general direction until they met up. She remembered her friend Anna asking about how to make them more vibrant, how Seven questioned the validity of the world finally bleeding color when they wed, how Tanner had timidly brought up queerphobia as an obstacle. And Nora...

Well she had asked about missing the mark.

"Missed connections," her teacher had joked. Apparently the red string would dye cyan, seeking the nearest platonic relationship to latch on to. A relationship, Mrs. Clark had noted, that could still be maintained whether the friend was in a romantic relationship or not. 12-year-old Nora had thought of the idea as laughable, giggling with her friends at the idea of having to explain to a future significant other why the person had two strings.

22-year-old Nora, however, drew the thought tightly to her chest, afraid of even the softest winds blowing that chance away.

A lot had changed since she was younger. Sure, she'd graduated middle school, then high school, and was set to graduate university in less than a year, but those were expected. Nora could argue that her friendship changes were unexpected - with her losing some, gaining others, and even attempting to date a few, but even that hadn't been too jarring. No, the change that took her by surprise was that now everyone she knew had seen their strings.

It started with Kendra in 12th grade. She'd dated Abel back then, but it wasn't until Samantha transferred from a different state that she realized she even liked women. They had hit it off, and Kendra swore she was seeing a red rope that grew more opaque the more they hung out. Eventually they started dating, and the rest was history. The two got married fresh out of high school, and as the woman rambled to Nora about the magic of color Nora could feel a pit of worry forming in her stomach. "It's probably nothing," she had told herself then after hanging up the phone, "just a one-time thing."

She was wrong.

Next was Henry, her neighbor from down the street. He moved states for university and came back during Winter Break with a girlfriend. Soon after were the rest of Nora's crew - Seven eloped with Teanna, Anna married Grayson, Tanner surprisingly fell for some guy he hooked up with in their second year, and Aaron ended up in a polycule. All of her friends had found their red strings within four years of graduating, and with it Nora was left wondering when it would be her turn.

She'd known more about it now than she did before, but she still found herself wary. There were apparently many types of Soul Ties, but soulmates were the only visible ones. The more involved a relationship became, the more opaque the bonds were to their eyes - but those bonds also got longer. She'd heard of old lovers that traveled on different sides of the globe and could still see their string reaching across the horizon - longing for the other half. This knowledge did little to ease her worries, though.

The truth was, Nora wasn't worried about knowing. She'd majored in Sociology with a minor in Bonds because the college senior knew that she was knowledgeable enough to pass her classes. When Nora wasn't third-wheeling her friends, she'd been studying on and off campus - getting lost in Wikipedia articles and putting together dissertations in her head about the nature of those invisible strings. She'd worked an internship at a research facility, sometimes even filling in the gaps for her superiors!

Nora stopped at her front door, releasing a heavy sigh. Now wasn't the time to think about her work. The human groaned, testing the weight of the sphere in her hand. She absentmindedly jiggled it, wondering if whoever she was destined with was thinking the same thing. Nora refocused, opting to marinate on the thought in her apartment complex instead of outside.

Hopefully her friends wouldn't disrupt her thinking time.