Seventeen One Shots

Certain Cravings

(A/N: Soulmates can taste what the other is eating or drinking. Sometimes what their partner tastes will mix with their own if they're eating at the same time.)

You knew one thing for sure - you'd likely never starve with your soulmate once you found them. But you really hated your soul mark sometimes. 

Ever since your taste-sharing soul mark awakened, they'd been doing practically nothing but chowing down on delicious food. Meat, snacks, desserts - just the taste of them made you hungry, but you couldn't even eat them.

Sometimes you'd be in the middle of enjoying your lunch or dinner when a strong meaty flavor would invade your tastebuds. It would ruin your appetite in comparison, as your own food wasn't that rich or delicious to eat.

 From morning to night, you'd often get random tastes of whatever they were eating. Sometimes first thing in the morning, you'd taste ice cream or fried rice, which only made you crave those foods. Sometimes you'd be in the middle of an important meeting when you'd suddenly taste chips and want nothing more than to have a bag. But since there was nothing to eat, your stomach would start growling in protest. You'd have to apologize on more than one occasion for interrupting the people speaking.

It was like some kind of torture, making you more determined to find your soulmate so that you could find out where they were getting all this good food. But the worst part? Even knowing what they ate wasn't really going to help you find them. All you had to go off was taste, so what were you expected to do? Eat everything at every restaurant in town until you found something that matched what you remembered them having?

Even professional food critics didn't have that kind of time. So you soldiered on, trying to ignore your cravings one day at a time.

Seungcheol, meanwhile, was having similar problems with his mark. He hated the way your sensations mixed with his own when he was eating. He'd be in the middle of enjoying some ramen and something spicy would envelop his tongue, making it impossible to keep eating.

He couldn't handle spicy or sour foods, so every time this happened, he'd sit in front of his food, waiting for it to go away.

The others had caught him like this several times one week. Jun had once suggested maybe he try water or tea to soothe his mouth so that he could continue eating.

That had done very little to help since his soulmate was the one chowing down on whatever the food was. But he had tried. Besides, he'd just make up for it later with a larger portion of meat or something during his next meal.

There was this fizzy soda that you drank that always made him grimace. It was too syrupy-sweet for his tastes, how could you even stand to drink it? He'd learned that if he tried to drink something to wash out the taste, you would simply drink more to drown him out. It was a losing battle for him on this one.

And then there was this gum that you chewed sometimes. He didn't know how but it was always when they were shooting, and his stomach would start growling because he could taste something but wasn't eating.

Those days were torture for him. He tried really hard to speed through shoots so that he could find a snack on those days.

It was a vicious cycle, the two of you constantly fighting over your food cravings and trying to enjoy your own meals. Every small victory you got, the other would immediately come back with a vengeance.

You didn't know how it had all started. And you had no idea when it would end. But you were determined that you were going to keep enjoying your meals, even though your soulmate seemed hellbent on trying to eat at all hours of the day. You couldn't understand what their problem was.