malum ❥ one shots

Prompt #5 - soulmate au

Prompt AU:
• You remove your tattoo because you hate the idea of someone dictating who you can be with for the rest of your life and the person who's removing it happens to be your soulmate and they're torn between letting you know and just not bringing it up because you kind of went there because you didn't want a soulmate and vice versa

••••••••

Calum has always hated the thought of soulmates. How could somebody you don't even know fall in love with you on the spot? It was stupid and absurd and a fucking joke.

Every day of his life, the God damned tattoo drove Calum crazy. He hated the need that he felt to find his soulmate, didn't want some fucking thing called fate to tell him who he was supposed to love, who was supposed to love him.

He wanted to go slow; find a pretty girl or boy, and slowly work their way up to a relationship and whispered I love you's in the dark of their shared apartment, with no other ears but their own to hear.

Soulmates scared the utter shit out of him. His parents had told them, regularly, about how the met and a month later were planning their marriage and first child. Calum hated moving fast, always had been one to take his time - calculate his movements and actions. But this, this was something so foreign and strange and out of control that he absolutely despised the thought.

There were options, of course. You could get your soulmate tattoo removed, gone forever without a trace, but something always held Calum back. Sometimes, he saw his uncle, happily married with a woman that wasn't his soulmate: somebody that he had chosen for himself- not fate.

But, sometimes he would see people on the internet, sad and alone and regretting the fact that they had made the choice to remove their soulmate's matching mark off of their body. Because once a person removed their tattoo, their soulmates tattoos were also gone; disappeared and leaving them with a hole in their chest and a need for antidepressants.

Unless, of course, they felt the same way, glad for their condemning mark to be gone, free to love whoever they chose.

Calum wanted to be free of this, wanted a chance at love, but he knew deep down that the only way he would get true real love, is if he waited out the deadly storm: waited to see the rainbow that would surely appear.

The rainbow that had to appear.

But over the years his resolve broke. As the years without his apparent soulmate carried on without a hitch, Calum became more and more against the idea of letting 'fate' choose his match.

Multiple times he found himself with a hand on the fancy glass door to the big pretty building, 'Soulmate' in beautiful cursive letters across the glass paneling. Each time his resolve to remove the tattoo broke, and his hand whipped off the handle like he had been burned, before carrying on with his day.

It haunted him, forcing itself into his thoughts daily, hourly. Calum would find himself absentmindedly scrubbing at the cursed mark in the shower, as if he was trying to scrub away dirt. He wouldn't notice he was doing it until it hurt that much more, his fingertips coming away with smears of blood and flakes of skin.

He came to hate his soulmate. The spawn of the devil that had him feeling this way, that had them tied together in a way he couldn't control or escape.