✔ || Ticking (Namjoon x Reader Soulmate AU)

Part 1 - Ticking

1 - Your POV

This is just your luck. Seriously. This is supposed to be the greatest day of your life. You have memories of your big sister telling you bedtime stories about what the timer tattooed since birth on your wrist meant. She filled your head with visions of falling into the arms of a beautiful human and then spending the rest of your life happily in their arms.

So why did this have to be the day that the universe decided to make your life hell? Today, when the day slot on the timer finally turned to 0:23:59:59.

Well, technically speaking, that happened the day before. You were with your two best friends when it happened, excitedly whispering about what you could have in store. You managed to smile a bit remembering how they took it upon themselves to make you as glamorous as possible the night before. They had drawn a warm bath and threw in a Lush bath bomb - the one specifically for romance, complete with rose petals inside - and, for some reason, insisted on sitting in the bathroom giggling and chatting and making sure you didn't miss any spots when shaving your legs, even though guys, I know what I'm doing. I'm an adult, seriously, you can leave.

They had informed you that they wouldn't dare leave until you were as beautiful as possible. Not that it would matter because you'd end up going to bed and ruining all of their work.

Well, you didn't end up going to bed. You had tried, you really had, because you didn't want your soulmate's first impression of you to be a disheveled insomniac. But your brain wouldn't shut off and you kept finding yourself glancing at your wrist, watching the numbers calmly change even as your heart hammered out of your chest. The inky blackness suffocated you, and you finally had to throw yourself out of bed and shuffle to your apartment's small lounge, turning on the light and wrapping a blanket firmly around yourself to try and calm yourself down. It would be fine, right? It was just a soulmate. Just the person who would change your life forever. Just the person everyone waits to meet, and sometimes people don't get to meet them, and sometimes their timers stop before ever reaching 0:00:00:00. Sometimes they stopped at 0:00:00:03, which was what happened to that one girl a few years back when her soulmate got too excited and tried to cross the street too early and -

Okay. Time to stop. You flipped through channels on the TV, trying to distract yourself. Everything would be fine. You would be okay, he - or she, you weren't picky - would be okay. You would find each other and live happily ever after, just like those stories your sister told you when you were little.

Except life wasn't a fairytale, and you had terrible luck. Remember that man you saw whose timer had only been at 0:00:00:00 for a few minutes before -

Good lord, why can't you sleep?

But you can remember it clear as day. That poor man, whose tattooed timer hadn't even faded away completely before his soulmate was ripped from him.

Okay, okay, breathe. You'd be fine. You'd be okay. And he - or she, but something in your soul told you it was a "he" - would be fine, and okay, and perfect in absolutely every way.

You decided to call your sister. And as soon as an exhausted, familiar voice muttered "Hello? Ugh, [Y/N], do you even know what time it is?" on the other side, you broke down into tears.