A soulmate AU where everyone has a black mark on their skin that will only turn vibrant with colour when you make your first contact with your soulmate. Only a few in the glade have their marks coloured but almost everyone else has given up on it. Survival was more important than thinking about a soulmate.

——

The sound of grinding metal rattles across the Glade as the Box rises from the ground. Everyone crowds around, waiting for the next Greenie. After two years here, you’ve seen it dozens of times- the panic, the screaming, the way every new kid claws at the walls as if sheer will might pry them open.

This one is no different. The doors crank open and a boy staggers up into the sunlight, blinking, gasping. Mud-streaked, wild-eyed, already defiant. He stumbles forward before anyone can steady him, his words tumbling out rough and confused.

“My name’s… Thomas.”

The Gladers cheer and jeer, the usual chorus. Alby steps forward, Newt at his side, trying to calm the boy, explain the rules. But Thomas isn’t listening. His gaze keeps drifting toward the massive stone walls, the impossible doors that yawn open into the Maze. By nightfall, when the shadows lengthen, he’s already pushing to bolt straight through them.

The others shout, but Thomas doesn’t stop running.

That’s when Gally barrels into him from the side, slamming him into the dirt with all the force of a Keeper who’s had to wrangle too many Greenies before. You don’t think you just react, diving in to help hold Thomas down before he gets himself killed. Your arm locks around his waist just as he bucks against the ground-

And the world detonates in color.

Your black soulmate mark bursts alive, vivid streaks of light racing down your arm. At the same instant, Thomas gasps in shock, his own mark along his lower waist in a odd shaped line along his v-line igniting like fire, colors spilling across his skin where your touch burned into him.

He freezes. You freeze.

Thomas never knew how his soulmate mark would work because how would that be a first touch? But here you were proving it was possible without the usual half hearted sexual jokes people would make of it.

Gally doesn’t notice, still barking in Thomas’s face about “rules” and “no one survives a night in the Maze.” The rest of the Gladers laugh at the struggle. But all you can do is stare at your arm, at the riot of color you’d half-stopped believing you’d ever see. And Thomas- he’s staring right back at you, wide eyed, stunned, like fate just reached into the Glade and upended everything.

Soulmates. Here. Now. In the middle of the Maze.