Baby, I Got Your Number (BTS OT7 Soulmate AU)

Chapter One: Missing Numbers

If you are born in a hospital, when the nurses clean the baby up, they give each one a special elixir in the form of a shot in their wrist. Then, the day that you turn 24, you get a tattoo. It shows up completely white, almost like a scar, and it feels like the Devil himself is burning the markings into your skin. Men get a phone number, and women get a country. They are supposed to lead you to your soul mate. Since most people change their phone numbers every few years, this doesn't always work. Not too mention that so many people are into those home births, so not everyone receives the elixir. There's a good chance, that on your 24th birthday, even if you were given it, nothing will happen.

When Mairette turned 24, she got the painful tattoo, which was weird, because she wasn't even completely sure up to that point that she had been given the elixir. It woke her up from a dead sleep at 6:36 in the morning, the exact time that she had been born. "South Korea' is what hers said. Two minutes later, the burning returned, and it said 'South Korea' a second time, right below the first.

What the hell did that even mean? Why did she get the tattoo twice? Was it some sort of glitch?

And South Korea? Really?

Lovely.

Could her soul mate possibly be farther away? South Korea? Was this some kind of cruel joke? They universe hadn't thrown her enough curve balls, it had to send her one more?

She knew that she would never meet her soul mate. She would have to fly to South Korea for that. And she did not fly. Ever. Her parents had been killed in a plane crash, three days before her 18th birthday, and she had barely looked at another airplane since then. If she heard one overhead, she made a point of staring at her feet until it passed.

So she would never meet her soul mate. It just wasn't an option. She had given up on meeting him about five minutes after getting her mark, more than nine years ago.

That is...until she got an e-mail from an old college friend, asking her if she would like to teach on a semester at sea cruise ship. When she saw that they would stop at several ports around South Korea, she signed up immediately. She could drive or take a train to get to the ship when it docked in New York, then she would be on board and, eventually, she'd end up in South Korea.

Plus, living on a cruise ship sounded like fun. She loved the ocean and seeing new places, experiencing new cultures. This seemed like an awesome way to make that happen. And if she met her soul mate along the way, that would be all the better. If he was still waiting, that is. She had never gotten a phone call or anything, so maybe she really was glitched.

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This was starting to get ridiculous. He had gotten the number on his arm more than three years ago, and it was still missing a digit. Or two. Or three. Depending on what country the number was from. He had done so much research, trying to fill in the blanks himself. He had called so many wrong numbers. But it was all a waste of time. Nobody could help him. No scientist or doctor had ever heard of this happening before. They wanted to study him, to find out if the elixir had mutated in some way, but he refused. The last thing that he wanted was to become someone's science experiment.

Where was she? His soul mate. What was she like? What was she doing? Was she waiting for him the way that he was waiting for her? Or had she given up and married some random guy?

The thoughts that ran through his head always terrified him. But it wasn't like he could just come out and tell the world. Not with who he is. Not with what he does. People would go crazy.

He was Jung Hoseok, better known as J-Hope from BTS. And the fact that he couldn't find his soul mate was slowly eating him alive.

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