I tightly clutch the support overhead as the train clatters to the side and the passengers crammed into the car lightly press against each other. I can barely keep my eyes open. My surroundings are a blur of red, fine strings streaming into the distance, coiling and creeping and flowing inside and out, reaching for the partners that fate has chosen for the people they come from.

 Only I can see them—these threads of fate clinging to the fifty or so passengers travelling with me, swarming my vision with a fiery red. Some stretch and glow and pulse with life, as if to say your soulmate is only a heartbeat away, while others fall loosely around the bodies of those around me, limp and dull, but still leading somewhere, someplace far away, where their soulmates wait for them.

The brightest of them all is the person standing beside me, squeezing my palm and bobbing her head along to the music pouring from the speakers. She's like the heart of this train, and the threads branching away from her, into the rest of the world, like the veins connecting her to the rest of her parts.

"Rubi! Are you with me? You look kinda out of it," she observes, the permanent smile in her warm honey-brown eyes flickering. Kurumi Kai, my once-high school senior and very important friend

I pull my hand away from hers and silently stretch my palm. It looks so empty. So plain. The absence of red around my fingers painfully stands out. "I'm just thinking about some stuff," I mutter, smiling up at her, but she's not convinced.

She brings our hands together again, and the strings curled around her fingers spill onto my hand. I fool myself into thinking that some of that red is mine. That fate hasn't cut all my strings and left me with nothing but these eyes These eyes that let me see into people's hearts, that show me red wherever I go. These eyes, that I'm not sure I want,

"Rubi is not good with crowds," Irina says, peeling her inky black eyes from the window. "She always gets like this around too many people." Irina. My more-than-classmate-less-than-friend. She went to middle school with me, and we sort of took the same train nearly every day for almost three years. I say less-than-friend because we haven't vocally established a friendship yet. I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that she sees me as a real friend until she says so herself.

Irina doesn't particularly dislike me; I know this because if she did, she would say it straight to my face. She's painfully honest that way. We're always stuck together, be it on the train or as the last remaining unpaired girls for a group project. At some point, having her by my side became the norm.

"Really?" Kurumi-senpai muses, tugging at Irina's dark, Rapunzel-like twin braids. Irina curtly swats her hand away. "Why do you know more about Rubi than I do?" Senpai demands jokingly, getting in her face on purpose. Irina cuts an annoyed glance at me.

I resist a smile. I've got one rule in life: don't get attached. I can't say when fate might suddenly steer her onto a different path, one I can't follow her down. Kurumi-senpai is what I've allowed myself. She's the only one who's ever approached me first, and deep down, I'm hoping that if she can accommodate a dozen soulmates in her heart, maybe she can spare a small place for me too.

My life is a routine. So much so that when Kurumi-senpai abruptly stops bouncing and laughing, I'm not taken by surprise. It means that Mega-Jerk has shown his face again.

He's standing a few feet away, his back facing us, hunched against a window, hands hiding in his pockets. It might have been impossible to tell in this crowd, with bursts and flurries of red from all directions clouding my vision, but I've counted his strings in class before. A total of five. Five soulmates. Five possibilities.

And one of them stretches towards us, coiling around Kurumi-senpai's ring finger, thrumming with life.

Choppy black hair, a permanent frown, rowdy piercings—Ren Jerkass Ichijo is the last person I will allow near Kurumi-senpai, soulmate or not. They have a history, parts of which I will never understand, but what I do understand is that he's the reason she's not swaying anymore. The reason she's hugging herself so hard it looks like she's freezing.

He keeps throwing glances at us, his eyes brimming with an emotion I don't recognise. It makes me sick to my stomach. So I force myself to look at Senpai instead and smile, hoping it's contagious. Hoping she'll catch it. My smiles are not that powerful.

I try anyway.

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As we get off the train, the threads slowly unwind and untangle before scattering completely, and I loosen my breath as my vision clears. Kurumi-senpai is smiling again, and I'm relieved, because when she's not, I can't help but think it's my fault for not being able to cheer her up. For not being able to be a good friend.

A Kurumi-senpai without a smile on her face is as strange as a Ren Ichijou without a frown.

Ren Ichijou...

My breath catches in my throat as I spot him looking straight at us, his face tight.

"G-Guys," I start, trying not to panic when I see him pushing towards us. "I need to make a call; go on ahead without me."

Senpai looks doubtful, but Irina is already walking ahead, so she follows, right after dropping an energetic "See you later!"

Her words barely register as I quickly turn away, desperate to keep her from seeing Ren. I don't want the un-smiling Kurumi-senpai to come back. Ever. Not if I can help it.

Ren doesn't see me at all, and for a second, I'm scared that he might run right past me, so I throw myself before him and spread my arms. "Don't."
He still doesn't acknowledge me. I move again, completely obstructing his path and forcing him to look down at me. His frown deepens.

"Who the fuck are you!?"

Rubi Amari. I want to yell. We're in the same class. But I don't, because he probably doesn't even care.

"Just leave her alone."

Only then does he really look at me. "I need to speak to her, so fucking move—"

"No."

"Fuck, you don't understand—"

"No."

He left her. I'm the one who's been by her side this whole time. I'm the one who stayed. I'm the one who made her laugh again when she cried because of him. She's my friend now. And just being her soulmate doesn't give him the right to come waltzing in as and when he likes.

Kurumi-senpai won't forgive him just because he's her soulmate. She won't leave me.

"Look, just move; this doesn't have anything to do with you."

"She doesn't need to see you right now."

"You're fucking wrong."

She won't leave me.

Will she?

"You..." I can't even look him in the eye. "Haven't you hurt her enough?" He falls silent at that, clenching his teeth in frustration. "Just back off, Ren."

She won't.

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Despite the run-in with Ren, I make it to school before the first bell. A little bundle of red is waiting for me at the gates, and it's strange to see her standing before my high school dressed for college. She gets on her toes and frantically starts waving her arms when she spots me. I laugh, and this time it's for real. She has no idea how easy it is to spot her in a crowd with all those strings.

"Did you make your call? Who did you call?" Kurumi-senpai asks, grabbing my arm when I approach her.

"Yup, Mom," I lie, my heart squeezing. "Why are you here?"

She blinks up at me. "Ah, right." She pulls out a jingling pair of keys from her pocket, handing them to me. "Akito forgot—"

"Again?" I say and instantly regret it.

Her face falls. No, no, no. "He won't ask me for them," she mumbles quietly. "He never asks me for anything." She's slowly breaking again. And it's my fault.

"Maybe he just needs some space." I trail off. I want to be helpful. But I don't know anything about brothers.

"Space...no, you don't get it." She's shaking a little. "He does everything by himself. I don't think he's got any friends, Rubi; he's always alone. I don't want him to always be alone."

He won't always be alone. As long as he's got his soulmates, he won't. I try not to look at my empty hands.

"He's my little brother, and I can't even—"

Enough.

"I can look out for him; we're in the same class," I say. She just shakes her head. I know I can't really be his friend. Someone like me, who was isolated by fate, can't save anyone from their loneliness. But any of Akito's soulmates would be able to, and I will know who his soulmates are. I can bring them together, like I've done so many times before.

This is my purpose, isn't it? It has to be. Why else would I be born this way? I'm meant to watch over all these people and make sure they have no trouble finding each other. I can help her. I try to take comfort in that thought. I can help my dearest friend.

I smile. "He won't be alone anymore." And when I say those words, I sound surer than I ever have.

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Akito is already in the classroom. And he's really alone at this time of the day before classes begin, when groups of friends huddle together at their desks. Akito's seat is in the farthest corner of the class, by a window, and he's studying. All by himself. I'm wondering why he doesn't have any friends. No one willingly wants to be alone, right?

I breathe uneasily as I approach him. He doesn't react. Either he thinks I'm going to walk right past or he's ignoring me. His hair is in his eyes, so I can't tell if they're the same colour as Kurumi-senpai's. He's wearing a loosely fitted, faded blue sweater that doesn't sit right with our uniform, and now I know that he's certainly not trying to blend in.

What's his deal?

It takes me a while to take in the absence of red around him. I go still. No strings. I can't see any strings at all, and...could it be?

I'm at his side before I know it. Is he like me too? I grip his shoulder as a rush takes over my body, and I'm suddenly smiling. "Hey—"

He jerks away so quickly that I don't have time to react. He's slapping my hand away, eyes flashing with surprise or...irritation? And only then does it come into my line of sight, swishing in the air as Akito instantly lowers his hand and opens his mouth. A line of red.

"Sorry, I didn't..." he's muttering, but all I can do is stare at the solitary red string knotted to his left pinky, growing until it finally merges into the flood of red disappearing out the door. Only one. One soulmate. Tied down to one person.

It's a shock to me; I've never seen anyone with just one string, and it's enough to zap me back to reality, the reason I'm here in the first place. Akito's looking at me like he wants me to leave, but I can't yet. My mind is racing. I'm doing this for my friend; I can't back down because of something like this.

This must be Akito's fate; his destiny is to be with this one person.

I'll make it happen.

It's meant to happen.

"If you're here for my notes, then I'm sorry, I don't want to..."

He stops talking just as I feel his string grow warm and stretch, glowing faintly and pulsing. He seems to feel it too. Feel his person. His one soulmate, his only—

I'm whirling, my eyes scanning the classroom, but I can't see who's at the other end of his thread. There are too many people here, and red is everywhere, so I can't really tell which strings belong to whom. My head hurts a little. And then it happens. Just as Akito looks up at it, lips in a tight line, the door flies open so hard that the resultant clang draws a string of curses from the class.

And it's him. My head really hurts. It's the one person no one should be unfortunate enough to have as a soulmate.

The person at the end of Akito's solitary string is...

It's Ren Jerkass Ichijou.

END OF CHAPTER

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A/N:

I wrote this story over a very long span of time, and I've grown a lot as a writer since I wrote this first chapter. I'm super proud of how most of the later chapters have turned out, so I'd really appreciate it if you decide to stick it out through some of the clunky bits in the first few chapters of this book. I will come back and fix them when I'm able to.

And hey, thank you for giving RRT a chance <3