Harry and Maya One-Shots

The Countdown - Part One

I know, I can't believe I'm updating again either. But, alas, here I am updating. I found this idea from a tumblr post that you might've seen where the prompt is "if you had a timer on your wrist that counts down to when you're going to meet your soulmate, would you want to know?" I thought it was super interesting and there were a lot of comments of little writing prompts people had made based off of it and I wanted to write my own, with my own characters (Harry and Maya). I hope you guys like it, this part was fun to write. :)

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HARRY'S P.O.V.

I preferred to keep the countdown clock on my wrist covered so that when I finally did end up meeting the one, I wasn't expecting it. Almost all my friends had met theirs already, apart from me and my friend Niall. He always complained that his countdown was going to take forever; he still had about a year or so before he met his soulmate.

I'd heard so many stories about how people met their soulmate on the train or while grocery shopping. I wasn't too worried about when I was going to meet mine, whether it was a he or a she, and until then I was just trying to enjoy my twenties before the feeling of commitment finally dawned on me.

No one knew why we were born with this countdown clock on our wrists. It was something everyone just knew was fact and when the timer read "00y:00d:00h:00m:00s", the first person you locked eyes with was who you'd end up with for the rest of your life. It fascinated me when I was little. I would like to watch the numbers move down, ever so slowly. Sometimes watching it would help me fall asleep.

I feel like having this constant countdown really made it harder to just casually date people because they could potentially be the one, but this ingrained clock decided differently. Of course, most people in college didn't care about when they were going to meet their soulmate so I was able to meet girls regardless, but in the back of my mind I kept wondering when it was going to happen for me. When I was going to lock eyes with a girl, or a boy, and just know that they were going to be the person I spent the rest of my life with.

Most people watched their clock incessantly, especially as it got closer to their day. That's what everyone called it, their day. In a way, I wanted my day to come and in another, I didn't. To be completely honest, I was afraid. I began second guessing everywhere I went, every person I interacted with. Sometimes I wanted to check my clock so badly, just to see how much time I had left. I wanted to just be Harry. I wanted to be myself when I met my soulmate and not make myself all done up for a complete stranger.

I'd heard of stories of people's timers stopping minutes, even seconds before the timer ran out. Generally when that happened, it meant that something happened to your soulmate, and in most of the stories I'd heard, it meant they'd died. After that happened, one of two things happened; the timer either reset itself or it didn't. If it reset itself, then the person had a second chance to find their soulmate, and if not then the person would almost certainly be alone for the rest of their life. Obviously, that was a huge fear of mine. I didn't want to be alone.

For all I knew, my timer may have run out ages ago and I had no idea. What if I never found them? What if I spent my whole life searching for someone who was already long gone?

It was depressing to think about, and it kept me up at night sometimes.

"Harry, you should really just check it," my mum told me one morning as I walked downstairs, getting ready to run some errands.

"Mum, I've been over this before. I want it to be a surprise." I walked around the island in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, pulling out the carton of orange juice.