Disclaimer: I don't own Elsword.


touch and go

(baby, you're asking all the wrong questions)


After his fourth final, Chung trips out the door feeling so hazy and lightheaded he half considers giving up on life and his next final that starts in two hours. He doesn't, instead settling on making his way to the nearest Starbucks for one (or five) much needed coffees and a power nap. Chung's telling himself weakly to power through when he feels it, what nearly everyone longs to feel, the cool, tingling press of a soulmate mark inking itself into his skin. If he didn't feel like the walking dead, maybe Chung would have some shame, but he does feel like shit, so he yanks up his shirt, and there it is, a bluish crown right under his ribs.

"Hey," he reaches out to the girl who he'd just brushed past. "I think we're soulmates."

She turns around, glances at his face, then his exposed mark, then back at his face. She pulls down the collar of her blouse to reveal an identical one. "...We are. And?" The way she looks at him is what he imagines he looks like when watching ads.

Then she says something else and leaves, but the ringing in his head is too loud for him to hear, and he currently doesn't have the mental capacity to do anything but blink sluggishly at her retreating back. Or remember the way to Starbucks.

When he's appropriately armed with coffee and another hour of sleep, Chung pats himself on the back and grinds through the last test for the day with a highly debatable degree of success, then somehow makes it back to his dorm and presses a hand to his mark, briefly recalling what was supposed to be the most significant moment of his life, before his knees hit the bed and he promptly knocks out.


He wakes up not much later, because Elsword is suddenly there, smacking Chung's bare, cold stomach with an excitement that he absolutely can't relate to.

"What the fu-"

"Who is it?" Elsword yells into his face, poking at the mark.

"Fuck. Off." Chung ducks under the blankets, making sure to kick Elsword viciously in the crotch when the other boy continues to pester him about his unknown soulmate. It shuts him up very effectively.


Elsword thinks it's a good idea to attend Ciel's (which basically means Lu set him up for it) party after finals are over, and he thinks it's an even better idea to drag Chung along with him. To loosen up, he says, but Chung knows better. Elsword has a code he follows, the only fault being that he needs Chung's help to stick with it. He's just there as a safety device, to make sure Elsword doesn't drown in a puddle of alcohol or in Aisha's face. Though as he slumps into the couch two hours in with another styrofoam cup of suspiciously blue liquid, the music plays so loud Chung feels it rumbling through his feet, not helping his headache at all, and he sincerely regrets running into Elsword that fateful day at freshman orientation.

Aisha's hopped onto a table and is giving her best, pretty decent, shot at pole dancing with the pole stuck in the center while the crowd explodes into catcalls and compliments about her ass, but she's really only looking at Elsword, tongue slipping out and eyes smoldering. Except for that brief second where she glares at Chung and telepathically communicates her willingness to murder if he cockblocks once again. He honestly doesn't want to. Chung thinks about Elsword and letting the two go at it in a closet, just to finally get rid of the oppressive amount of unresolved sexual tension they have, but as the best friend, Chung's the one that Elsword will come wailing and blaming to when he starts regretting. Which would turn into an even messier mess that he won't have the patience to deal with.

Elsword is standing slack jawed and silent a little closer to the center of the action, and when Chung gets up to drag him away, he startles, spilling his drink in his haste to wipe away the drool.

Chung raises an eyebrow. "...Want to go back? She's being extra aggressive today."

Elsword nods stiffly, wiping his hands on his clothes and subtly adjusting his pants-

"I can't believe y-"

"Bathroom first," he grunts, speed walking away. Chung sighs incurably at how useless Elsword is at dealing with his more serious personal issues, following slowly, so tired of everything. He really should be used to this already.


As he waits for his best friend (sadly) and roommate to take care of his business, Chung scans the crowd for Aisha's purple hair, if she finds them they're dead, but instead the crowd shifts and he sees orange eyes and silver; his soulmate returning his gaze. She's standing awkwardly, weight tilted to one side and arms tightly crossed, though out of place, still pretty and delicate looking under the neon lights. Neither of them make a move to approach the other and Chung lets the moment pass easily when she disappears from view behind the other shadowy figures.

Chung silently watches the spot even after she's gone, until Elsword emerges from the bathroom looking much more relieved and much more guilty than before.

Chung expresses his judgement facially, and Elsword flips him off.

"Let's go before Aisha hunts us down and murders me," he says, though the surroundings are too loud for words. He down the rest of his drink and tossing the cup into a nearby bin, Elsword cackling when it bounces off the rim. He doesn't make it either when he tries, so Chung snickers away and patches his pride up.


Chung takes Elsword home under a cloud of brooding quiet and sleeps for a solid sixteen hours, dreaming of unscrewing a flawless blue gem from his soulmate's forehead.

("Won't you regret this?" he asks.

"Won't you?" she fires back. )

Eve, the dream him realizes, is her name.


So he wakes up the next day sometime in the afternoon desperately wanting to go back to before, when he was just Chung without a mark and didn't have to deal with whatever freaky shit comes along with being someone else's other half, because he knows that the dream is just the start.

He's right; from that point on, he'll occasionally get flashes of her feelings, and he's sure it's vice versa too. Though not as frequent as he'd expected, only occurring when either of them are particularly emotional, which in Eve's case essentially never happens, but whenever it does, it unsettles him for a long while. Like the time when a few months into the next term, he's startled awake at four in the morning by a spike of horrified panic, and for a few seconds the early morning is overwhelmingly dark, save for the glints of phantom metal. And then there's nothing and Chung rolls over and falls back asleep. The dreams, however, are too common. He doesn't remember most of them, but each time he wakes up he feels like he somehow knows Eve a little better, has moved a little closer no matter how he tries not second one he recalls takes place in a junkyard, impossibly high towers of cars stacked against a yellow-gray sky. Steam billows from the tops of some of the piles of metal and broken things, and everything smells vaguely of grease and sulfur and a mellow sort of sadness. Eve is sitting on a scratched up refrigerator with a handful of shining nuts and bolts, tossing them into the distance one by one, waiting for him. She says nothing, but he knows. Even though there's plenty of space to sit beside her, Chung only stands and stands, listening to things creaking, crashing in the backdrop, each metal bit clink as they land. Eventually, Eve runs out of them and she rolls the last bolt between her fingers, back and forth, before she closes her hand around it and decides to keep it.


Elsword and Chung make sure they eat fancy at least once a week, even if they cut down on their budget for other days, once a week, they make sure to not feel like the pitiful, broke college students that they are. It's also a good time to bring up certain topics that they're sure the other won't like, since this is usually when they're most agreeable toward unagreeable things.

"You never did tell me who they were," Elsword blurts out, trying to get Chung to stop talking about Aisha, "your soulmate."

Chung sighs deeply, slumping in his seat and stress drinking more soda. "If you figure things out with Aisha I'll tell you who it is."

"That's not fair! You know why I can't."

"Correction, won't." Elsword has known his soulmate, Ain, since he was in elementary school, when Ain, also his neighbor, came over for the first time to babysit. Ain later had to move away, and in his absence, Elsword met Aisha, fell in like (Chung would argue love), etc, etc, and now the current him can't make a choice. It's always been like that; Elsword tears his own path without regard, but when it comes to choosing what or who to keep he staggers and become fixated on ways to keep everything, even if there is none.

Elsword rocks his cup around, letting the ice rattle around the stray lime wedge, face carefully blank, Chung's cue to drop it once again. He does. No amount of convincing could move the other, he knows, so he saves it to bring up again another day for another attempt, like always. Elsword looks relieved after confirming his temporary silence on the topic, and starts blankly chattering about his new English professor.

Chung likes to say he's persisting in pushing ElsAi together because he's anticipating the wedding, not because he wants to be a good friend. Aisha would plan one for books, Elsword too soft to stop her, a wedding of legend that Chung doesn't want to miss out on just because Elsword's currently a stupid, selfish kid. And Ain? Chung's never met the man but Aisha usually makes him out to be a real stick in the mud.

"He'd make all of you wear…..white or some shit. One color. Gotta be unified on their happy unification day," she'd slurred into his ear. "Make you say 'broccoli' instead of cheese when the fancy photographer comes. You'd have to pose." She emphasizes the last word, spitting it out with as much hate as a loose, drunk her can manage. It's not much at all, so it results in her sounding childish instead.

"You won't go?" Chung asked, yawning.

"You really think I could watch that?" Aisha asked, rhetorical, then doubled over laughing so hard tears crinkled at the corners of her eyes. (Or it could've been vice versa; you never could tell exactly with Aisha.)

Chung wouldn't want to go to that wedding either.


"Mr. Chung Seiker." Eve reads off a pack of papers on a clipboard, a ridiculously large crown smothered in smiley face stickers resting perfectly on her head. "What do you think makes you qualified to be my soulmate?"

Chung blinks in surprise. They're in a perfectly square, off-white room, and Eve sits behind a blockish table, chair tilted back and balanced on two legs. It seems somehow out of character, but the way she appraises him dully isn't.

"I don't know." He shrugs. "I'm nice, I guess."

"You're not nice to me." She drops the clipboard on the table, like she's trying to give off the feeling of being pissed. It makes a big, clean noise but lacks in a lot in the force department.

He shrugs again. "I'm not really anything to you." It's true. Besides the time he saw her at Ciel's and the dreams, he hasn't run into her again, and he never went looking, either. He doesn't know if she has.

"That's right." Eve adjusts her crown. " So then why is it you? Why are you my soulmate?"

"I'm not the one you should be asking," he mumbles as Eve sighs loudly, insufferably, and a click, almost like a camera shutter, resounds throughout the room. When Chung blinks, he finds that their roles are reversed; he's the one behind the table, elbows propped up and fingers laced under his chin, a clipboard with papers laid out in front of him. Eve is sitting in his previous seat with her arms crossed over her chest and legs crossed at the knee. She's leaning against the back of the chair, so even though her vantage point is lower, it still seems like she's looking down at him. But the silly crown is on his head now.

"Ms. Eve Nasod. Why did…..." Chung starts, fighting the urge to flip through the packet filled with pages and pages of information about Eve in it. "What are…...," he trails off, unsure of what he wants to ask. The room is fading along with his string of thought, getting dimmer with every second he hesitates, and only Eve's eyes don't lose their shine, glossy bright and fierce, almost angry when she gives him her answer for a question he has yet to voice.

"I don't know, I'm not the one you should be asking." She throws his words right back at him so coolly, yet twice as mocking.


He blinks back into consciousness, cheek pressed into the textured surface of his own desk in the dorm. The rising sun casts citrusy shadows through the window and the prospect of having to go to class and deal with work makes him exhausted. Right now he half wants to see Eve again and. And something. And talk. Anything. Which scares him all the more because he doesn't understand why, doesn't want to meet her, doesn't want to know her as easily as he does. Doesn't even want a soulmate. That's not his decision, however, but everything else, the feelings and urges, the time spent with each other, in those, at least he has a choice.


A/N: Right now I'm just remembering when I first started writing fanfiction and I thought it'd be easy to finish a fic. haha. And then I remember when I thought to myself over to summer that I should never write a chaptered fic ever again. Well. Here I am...
I know I've said this before but hopefully I finish this this time, because I really like soulmate aus. Honestly this is kind of terrible and I didn't plan it at all but yeah. On a more positive note I can't believe this got to over 2k!

Thanks for reading!