They said you'd know when you met your soulmate.

You were seventeen when the first ache bloomed in your ribs, sharp and sudden like you’d taken a fall. But you hadn’t. You were sitting in your bedroom, legs crossed, reading a book. There’d been no accident. No trauma. Just pain. Foreign. Distant. Shared.

You pressed your palm to your side, breath hitching. Somewhere, he’d been hurt.

And so it began.

The years passed in bruises and silence. You felt everything. Every sprain, every cracked knuckle, every stitch and scar etched into his skin. He lived hard. You could tell. A violent life. Military, maybe. You tried not to imagine it too much, afraid you'd romanticize a man who didn’t even know your name, but that turned out to be a lost cause.

Your world grew smaller with each burst of pain that wasn’t yours. You mapped his injuries like constellations. Wondered what his voice sounded like when he cried out. Wondered if he cried at all.

The first time you saw him, it hit you like a ton of bricks. You were fresh as one of the base’s new medics.

He was bleeding on a cot at a field hospital. His teeth were clenched, chest rising and falling like he was hanging on by a thread. You were completely unprepared to come face to face with the man who’d haunted your nervous system for years.

Simon “Ghost” Riley. His file had been redacted nearly to hell, but you found enough.

He didn’t look at you when you stitched him. Didn’t speak.

But you felt it. The static tension in the air. The pull beneath your ribs. The jolt beneath your skin when your fingers grazed his. Saw the same mark on his side you had. Soulmates.

After months of not saying a word, you had gathered your courage and told him. Told him you knew—had known for years. It sounded crazy, of course. But for you, there was no denying it. That you’d felt every wound he’d ever suffered. Every heartbreak. That you’d hoped he’d find you someday.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak for a long moment.

Then he met your gaze, eyes like grave dirt and fog, and said in that low, hollow voice, “That’s not real. You’ve built this up in your head. It’s not what you think it is.”

He said soulmates were a fantasy. A delusion for people who wanted to explain pain they didn’t deserve. Said the world didn’t work like that.

He denied you. Denied the very thing that had shaped your entire life.