SoulMates // 5sos

a.i. part one

This was the night. Well, it was supposed to be the night if all the research Maia had done was correct. And if it had any relevance to the SoulMates system at all. And if she hadn’t misunderstood it all. Come to think of it, there were a lot of flaws in Maia Stevens’ plan.

Maia hoped this was the night.

Sometimes (virtually always) she wished that this whole thing worked more like it did in the books that she’d read. She wished that the tattoo would be the person’s name, or the first words they’d speak to each other. Or even better, she wished it was like that one story she read where there was a countdown timer embedded in your arm and when it got to zero then boom soul mate.

Instead, what they had was a flawed system that made next to no sense. First of all no one but the government seemed to know how it had started (although Maia wasn’t the only person who thought that they were just as oblivious as everyone else). Then on top of that there was no way to make sense of how the tattoos appeared on a person’s skin; all the testing could confirm was that it wasn’t actual ink and that it was something that came from within the hosts’ body. Add to that the fact that there was no way to know for certain who’s tattoo matched yours (unless you’ve got half a picture of course, those were fairly hard to argue with), and you’ve got the recipe for a really bad movie.

Only this wasn’t a movie, this was their life and it kind of sucked.

Maia thought that it was unfair that a person could only ever be with their designated soul mate, especially when there was so much uncertainty about whether that person was actually your soul mate or not.

It was probably safe to say that the reason she felt this way was because her parents had actually gone against the system. There were only a select few people who really knew the truth about the two of them and Maia kind of wished that she wasn’t one of them.

Her parents had met while on vacation in some tropical paradise that Maia had never bothered to remember the name of and the two of them hit it off almost immediately. A day after they’d met they’d shown each other their tattoos and they’d thought that they were supposed to be together. They’d slept together, exchanged numbers and agreed to meet up when they got back home.

Almost a year after they’d met Maia was born and then things began to fall apart. Not too long after her first birthday, Maia’s mother had started having an affair with another man, one that had a wife and a tattoo that didn’t match hers even in the slightest. This went on until Maia was four and her Dad found out.

As Maia had gotten older she’d had some questions that her Dad was pretty reluctant to answer, but after she turned fifteen he gave in and told her everything. Maia had asked to meet up with her mother (she hated what she’d done but that didn’t change the fact that she was her mother and Maia had questions) and after that meeting was when she’d first started doubting the system.

The only thing Maia was able to recall from that conversation was what her Mum had said about why she had the affair. She had said that even though her tattoo had matched Maia’s father's she felt this pull towards the other man that she couldn’t ignore. She said that at first she tried to ignore it and went about life as normal, but as time went on she’d find herself running into him in random places and that feeling of connectedness just never went away.

And that whole debacle was the reason why Maia didn’t care much for the SoulMates system.

But even despite that she kind of hoped that it would work out for her. She wanted to find something that mirrored what she’d read about, and she knew it was possible because it had happened to her friends. Maybe her parents were one mistake, the exception to the rule that they now lived by. Maia wanted to find someone who would eventually know her better than she knew herself, among other things, which is why she was currently sitting in one of the only good clubs in their town.