Ruin Me, I Dare You | BTS Reverse Harem (21+) - HIATUS

4. April Fools?

Everything went to shit.

The month following Jane's first switch was the most - Scratch that.

It was the second most memorable month of her life. The first being the month she spent in hospital after she broke her legs.

It had nothing to do with the phone call she was waiting for from Fiona.

No.

It was the pain. The human body never forgets pain.

Happy memories. Those faded away with time. People remember them of course. Or more like they remember the root of the happiness from which the memory stems.

The smell of the meal their mother made on their birthday as they pass a restaurant. The music coming from some teenagers' bedroom window as they walk past the house and it reminds them of that school dance when the boy they liked asked her to dance.

Those come back like a fog. They're hazy at first, but they can still picture it. The vague outline of a figure or the sight of the place they got their first kiss sends endorphins to their brain.

That tingling feeling over comes them. They smile. And their body tells them this is happy, this is a good place to be.

Pain is different.

Pain is the reason why the image of a departed loved one fades away, but the agony of having to learn to walk again, to wake and find oneself in a ditch with two broken legs and having to crawl their body from death's door because the Grim Reaper got the wrong date clearer than their own name.

That pain leaves an imprint, a branding in the skin that scars over, a tattoo never wanted but forever unable to be removed.

The pain wasn't immediate for Jane this time.

It started exactly a week after her first switch. The days following Hoseok's birthday message. The message she sent because she thought she had nothing to lose.

The Red String System was set up so that every match could communicate with the other, even if there were three or four. But Jane had 6. The event was so uncommon that the moderator sent her a personal query to ask if there had been a mistake. It took Jane two days to reply.

"It's not a mistake. Thank you for your concern."

She stared at the message board all day as her phone lit up.

A bombardment of messages filled her inbox. Each one asking her relatively the same questions. What was her name, where did she live, what language did she speak, how old was she. Heck they asked if she knew she might have more than one soulmate.

The day after Hoseok's Birthday she received a call from the Moirai Clinic.

"One of your Soulmates has granted you permission to contact them directly, would you like me to send you their information?"

Jane couldn't answer.

Someone wanted to know who she was. After that message who could blame them. Logging into the forum was a bad idea. They all now knew when she was online. Her inbox said 23. They'd sent her 23 messages in 24 hours.

"No. Thank you for telling me, but no. Don't send the details."

Jane wasn't ready for that yet. Of course she was curious to know which of them it was. Who had gone out of their way to get the Moirai Clinic to ask her directly if she would contact them. She tried desperately not to think of who it might be.

Were they older then her, were they younger? Those thoughts drove her mad. She couldn't let her mind go there.

If she had waited one more day. Just one. She would have gotten the phone call and then she could have waited to send that message. She could have paced herself, tried to come to terms with her multi-tethered status. She could have devised some plan, a method on how best to deal with this situation. She'd even woken up the morning of the phone call with a plan to read every article published on Multi-tethers. There were trio's and quads all over the world, a Quintet was announced just 6 months ago in America with a blog on YouTube documenting their life together, she'd planned to watch that, though they had two women and three men – not exactly the same.