A/N: Welcome, welcome! This mini fic will be my muse in between updates for Dreamwalker. There won't be a consistent upload schedule for it, but I don't expect it to be more than 5-6 chapters (or even less)!

So, hope you enjoy :)

Additional notes: This is a slice of life rom/com with a hint of crack, a bit of mutual pining but not unrequited (even though they're already soulmates—they're just dumb)

Entangled: Chapter 1

"Quantum entanglement: the theory that particles of the same origin, which were once connected, always stay connected."

Every human at birth is gifted with a counter etched to the inside of their wrist. It glowed a few shades lighter than the person's skin tone, frozen at—

30:00. Was it in minutes? Seconds?

"Stop picking at it, Mai," her mom scolded from over by the sink.

Eight-year old Mai pouted from her place at the kotatsu, rubbing out the scratches she made on her wrist. Maybe moms really did have eyes behind their heads. How else would she have known what Mai was doing while washing the dishes?

Mai frowned down at the numbers one more time before returning to her homework. No matter how much she glared at them, tried to making them disappear, they glowed brightly against her skin.

"Why is it frozen, 'Kaa-san?"

"Because you haven't met your soulmate yet. When it's time, it'll glow really bright and start counting down."

"What if it never happens?"

"I don't know. I've never heard of anyone not meeting theirs." Mai's mom purposely left out,"Unless the soulmate already died."

"What if I put a tattoo over it? Will it still glow?"

"Sweetie, just do your homework."

"What happens to the numbers after you meet your soulmate?"

Mai's mom sighed. "The zeros blink for a bit and then disappear. Now, do your homework."

"Why can't I do it later?"

"Because I said so."

About a decade later and there was still no soulmate in sight.

Mai almost found herself a little disappointed given all the hoopla surrounding it, especially when her friends had already found theirs. Michiru met hers in high school, and Keiko met hers during their first year of college. Meanwhile, Mai spent her days as a ghost cat-lady.

Fortunately, her disappointment didn't last long. Granted, it wasn't like she was ever that preoccupied by the idea of a soulmate, unlike other people. It was more of a fascination with the soulmate system itself. Instead of discovering new medical science or something to help the public… the higher powers thought it'd be a brilliant idea to force a predesignated soulmate on everyone.

And all that resulted in was a bunch of anxious people restricting themselves from living because of some dumb counter.

With the turbulence of life distracting her, Mai gradually forgot about the counter, deeming it the least of her concerns. Her mother eventually passed away during middle school and she was forced to the take the reins on her life. Besides, she was only 21 years old. She wasn't going to shrivel into a prune anytime soon… even if she felt like it sometimes.

"Akira's next business trip is in Hawaii. I'm ditching work of to go with him," Michiru shared with the group as she repeatedly dug her straw into her shaved iced coffee. She pulled up a picture of something resembling a bathing suit on her phone and slid it to the middle of the table. "What do you think?"

Mai lifted a brow, noting the free real estate around the model's hips. The floss for straps hardly counted as coverage. "You sure that's a bathing suit and not lingerie?"

"Yeah, it's gonna be more than Akira-kun eating at that rate," Keiko teased.

Michiru blushed. "Okay, scrap that. I'll go with my 'plan b.'"

"'Plan B?' Isn't that the American 'shot astray' pill?" Keiko mumbled offhandedly. "Cover the stump before you hump, kids."

Mai nearly spit out her drink.

Michiru flushed red, glaring at them. "Enough about me! How are things going for you, Mai? Met anyone new?" She glanced at Mai's wrist briefly, noting the intact counter.

Mai patted her mouth with a napkin, shaking her head. "Nope, no soulmate yet. Unless he has a large bank account, I'm okay not meeting him for a long time."

"How lame! I kind of feel bad for the guy," said Keiko. "What if he's the nicest guy ever but dirt poor? Are you just gonna ditch him? Or what if he's super ugly with a bad personality but a trust fund kid?"

Mai shrugged. "Hey, I'm not saying hehasto be loaded. If he conveniently is, it'd be great if he very conveniently showed up and fell so head over heels in love with me that he'd pay all my bills."

"Someone's a gold digger~"

"A conditional gold digger."

"Speaking of bills, are you still doing those odd jobs? Ghost hunting or whatever?" asked Michiru.

Keiko nodded, leaning her arms on the table. "Yeah, how is that going?"

Mai mixed the boba in her bubble tea and took a long sip before answering. "It's pretty good. You'd be surprised by the amount of people who have ghost problems. I just helped this old lady with a ghost in her bathroom."

Keiko made a face. "I worry you're gonna run into a creep one of these days under the guise of a 'haunting.'"

"The opposite actually! I met this really handsome guy recently who's a medium. He's been showing me all these pointers and helping me find cases to do."

Her friends' face immediately lit up, both of them leaning forward on the table in interest. "You should have said that first! Do you have a picture? Is he taken?"

Mai rolled her eyes, leaning away from them. "I just met the guy a month ago, geez. I don't really know much about him other than he's super good-looking, nice, and is a medium. He's here for overseas work or something."

Michiru sighed. "And he's not your soulmate," she said, apparently more disappointed than Mai at the fact.

"Knowing my luck, there's no way I could score someone that good-looking."

"We pray for you everyday," said both Keiko and Michiru in unison, assuming prayer formation with their hands on their foreheads and their eyes squeezed shut.

Mai rolled her eyes, finding it ludicrous that they felt the need to pray for something like that. It was like society revolved around finding one's soulmate. Other people would take one glance at her wrist and say something along the lines of, "You'll meet them soon, don't worry," or they would divulge into some unsolicited story of how they met their soulmate.

Why couldn't she just exist and enjoy her life without worrying when some random person would show up? She barely had the time for a relationship right now—between classes, working for the university to pay her tuition, and now working these odd ghost hunting jobs to pay her rent.

Not to mention, whoever her soulmate was would need to have a strong backbone for the paranormal. While some people thought the idea of ghosts were cool, others preferred not to breach on the topic at all. And others outright refused to believe in them.

Whoever her soulmate was, he would have to accept that she had a knack for finding spirits wherever she went. Heck, she had three ghost cats that hung around her house!

Shaking her head, she cleared her throat and changed the subject to Keiko's recent mishap at her boyfriend's family's home.

What compelled her to go ghost hunting on a Friday night, she would never know.

Instead of meeting up with friends or even just relaxing, here she was at some decrepit building in Asagaya. Her new friend, Gene, had briefly mentioned the building in passing the last time they met up a week ago. He'd been whining about wanting to poke around in it for his Wetube channel but couldn't because he had business in Osaka for the next two weeks.

Allegedly, the property was known to be very haunted and bad luck to the locals. Because of these rumors, people grew increasingly wary of the building, no one wanting to come to the nearby shops out of fear—strange moaning sounds, figures in the windows, things falling on their own. Basically, a run of the mill urban legend.

A business owner reached out to Gene to see if he'd be able to come and take a look. Due to his Osaka trip, he casually pitched the idea to Mai.

"If you're free, do you mind giving it a whiff to see if it's actually haunted?"

"A whiff?" she questioned, her brow raised to high heaven. "You sure you can trust my abilities?"

Gene pretended to tap his chin in thought. "What if I do? It'll be good training for following your intuition," he said. He then paused before adding, "Go during the day, though. I wouldn't want some creep following you in."

And true to herself, here she was inside the building. Alone. At night. Go figure.

The building was a large house with two stories. There were several storage rooms with miscellaneous household products and canned food strewn about, leading Mai to believe it used to be a store of some kind. The building appeared to be from around the second world war, featuring antiquated tatami mats and rotting wood. Buildings weren't as structurally sound back then, so it was no surprise that this house couldn't stand up to test of time.

One earthquake and this place was done for.

Shining her flashlight around, she scoured the rooms on the bottom floor. Different market items littered the floor, their expiration dates being from around the time of the Cold War. It was amazing that no one had entered the building since. Some of the cans were from the 1950s!

Maybe she could sell some online as antiques to history aficionados.

The sound of footsteps upstairs startled her. She froze in place to listen for other activity. When nothing else happened, her curiosity piqued. Could it be a ghost? What if it was a person?

After much debate, she decided to quickly investigate and then run away if it was a real person. She was small and nimble enough to out run a hobo. Maybe.

To think she was more scared of a living person than of ghosts.

Mai made her way up the stairs slowly, trying to create the least amount of noise. She checked each room down the long hallway until she reached the very end. There was not a person in sight.

She let out a loud sigh.

Then, the sound of an item falling caught her attention. Having heard it from the furthest most room, she inched inside. It appeared to be a bedroom with a closet, a wardrobe, and a floor-level vanity. The store owners must've lived above the business. Moving further inside, she found the item that had fallen. It was a set of oddly well-kept Russian stacking dolls. There wasn't a speck of dust on the outer doll as if it was freshly added to the building.

"What the…?"

The feeling of something standing behind her had Mai jumping. She shot her flashlight around the room frantically, nearly tripping over a fallen lamp. "Eek!" she shrieked, stepping away only to knock herself into the floor level vanity, tilting the built-in mirror down. When she shined her flashlight down, a pair of deathly pale feet stood right behind her in the mirror's reflection.

Yelping, she fell over as she tried to scurry for the door, only for it shut on her. She attempted to yank it open to no avail. She kicked at it, pulled, and knocked on it. Why were there western doors in such an old fashioned house?!

The sound of movement from downstairs alerted her to either more paranormal activity, or worse, someone following her into the house. If it was just a random person or the police, they could help her. If it was a squatter, druggie, or other degenerate, who knew what they would do. For that reason, she didn't want to call out until she was sure.

What was worse? Being stuck in here with a potentially violent ghost, or to chance it with whoever else was inside the house?

The footsteps grew louder as they travelled up the stairs and down the hall. With no time to make a choice, she grabbed a broken oil lamp and held it ready to strike.

Apparently, she nearly forgot about the pale feet in the room because when she heard movement by the closet, she let out a squeal in surprise. "Shit!"

And of course, the damn counter on her wrist decided to light up and begin its countdown.

She knew it. Death was her soulmate.

Just as the closet door slid open, a pair of what looked like eyes reflected the light of her flashlight through the crack.

"Oh hell no! I am not messing with that," she said, roughhousing the door. She'd rather tussle with a squatter. "Get me out of here!"

A male voice from the other side startled her. "Move away from the door."

Not questioning them, she did as they asked, keeping an eye on the figure in the closet as the sliding door slowly slid open.

The room door was then kicked down by the newcomer. Mai didn't waste anytime on pleasantries, rushing out of the room.

"Thanks and all, but we need to get out. Now." She didn't look at her savior, rather, she just grabbed his wrist and lead him away, completely unaware of the blinking "0:00" illuminated on his skin.

"Did you encounter a spirit?" he asked nonchalantly as they were halfway down the stairs.

Uh.

"Let's say I did. They're not friendly, so let's get the hell out!" she said, not bothering to turn around to address him. If he wanted to talk about it, it would be outside.

Once they were back under the Tokyo sky, she doubled over, breathing hard with her hands on her knees. "If you're some hooligan trying to find ghosts for shits and giggles, you've got another thing coming. They're not something to play with," she said in between gasps for breath.

"I could say the same for you."

Now that she wasn't in fear of dying, she scrunched her brows in recognition of the voice.

"Gene? I thought you were supposed to be in Osaka? Is this some kind of jok-" She froze mid- sentence when she straightened up to confront who she thought was Gene.

The same black hair and bright blue eyes coupled with an unfamiliar quizzical brow stared back at her. "So, you know my brother?"

Whoever this was looked identical to Gene but had much harsher edges to his face, almost with a flat affect. He was also dressed much more formally in a dark blue dress shirt and black pants. If Gene was handsome, his doppelgänger was drop dead gorgeous, like the brooding male leads in her otome games.

Mai's jaw dropped. "You're not Gene."

"That much is obvious," he said, brushing the dirt off his sleeves.

Her eyes immediately drew to the barely visible blinking numbers peeking out from under his sleeve.

0:00.

She held up her own wrist, eyes widening at the "0:00" that stared back at her. She recalled what everyone had always told her—"the blinking will last for about five minutes and then the numbers disappear."

"Uh…" Coherent words escaped her as she stared in bewilderment at their wrists.

Her alleged soulmate fixed the cuff of sleeves, rolling them back. "Quantum entanglement."

Her eyebrows rose. "Quantum what?" she asked, having completely forgotten about the haunted store behind her.

"According to quack scientists, this phenomenon is due to what they call 'quantum entanglement,'" he said bluntly.

Mai tilted her head in question. "You don't believe in it?"

"I find it hard to believe that the law of physics abides by human romance."

She tried to make sense of what he was saying. "Then, how do you explain this?" she asked, pointing to the blinking numbers on their wrists.

"This is merely the government's attempt to meddle in our affairs."

She blinked at him for a few seconds, wondering whether she should feel lucky or unlucky to have this guy as her supposed soulmate. He was Gene's twin, so it was natural that he was drop-dead gorgeous… but why did he also have to be such a smart ass? Pardon her for assuming, but he seemed way out of her league in intelligence.

"So, you don't believe in the concept of 'soulmates?" she challenged, crossing her arms.

"I don't fully believe it but I can't disprove it either." The way he looked at her made her uncomfortable, like he was staring right through her. She couldn't help but be distracted by the color of eyes. They were so clear and frighteningly similar to the color of azurite.

Averting her gaze awkwardly, she cleared her throat. "Can't really say I blame you-" All of a sudden, her phone vibrated, signaling an incoming call.

Gene?

She answered the call. Before she even had a chance to say hi, he was yelling for her to turn on the speakerphone.

"Is this real? Is Noll really with you right now?!" asked Gene loudly, making her shrink back from the phone.

Mai glanced at this "Noll" character. "Yeah? How did you know?"

There was silence before the twin beside her answered. "We spoke telepathically."

"What? No way!" Now it was her turn to yell.

"We can talk about that later. More importantly, he told me your counters are down to zero?!" Gene somehow got even louder. "And no one else was with you to mistake it?"

"No? I'm was in that creepy building you told me to check out. I got trapped in a room with the ghost when he conveniently saved me. Actually, why the hell were you there, uh, Naru-san?" she asked Gene's twin.

For some reason, he took amusement at her difficulty pronouncing his nickname. "Per Gene's request, I went to investigate."

Gene cackled like a madman from his end. "Hah! Are you saying that I was the driving force for your meeting? That I am Kami-sama himself driving your fates?"

Mai made a face and rolled her eyes, noting how "Naru" stared with a deadpan expression at the phone as if inwardly rolling his eyes. She couldn't help but break into a small laugh at the fact that they both thought Gene was ridiculous.

"Well, your brother here doesn't believe in soulmates."

"Of course he doesn't," said Gene as if that was an invitable fact. Somehow, she could imagine him rolling his eyes now. "He's an idiot scientist."

Some shuffling was heard on the other side. "Noll, since Mai-chan's my new friend, she'll be hanging out with us. You might as well get used to it."

His reply was an unenthused, "Hm."

"Anyways, I'll let you two get chummy. See ya' on Monday!" And then he hung up.

Mai shook her head before putting her phone back in her pocket. She looked up at this "Naru," noting his displeasure at the whole ordeal.

"Here's the thing, Naru-san. I'm not gonna force you into a relationship just because some timer said we're soulmates or whatever," she started. "We can always just be friends, or… not have anything to do with each other."

Sure, she was attracted to him—who wouldn't be—but she didn't feel it would be right to force him into anything. Did he even find her remotely attractive? She was nowhere near ugly but not drop-dead gorgeous either. People referred to her as "pretty." Someone of his hotness caliber seemed better suited with a doll-like girl like Hara Masako.

Aside from that, she was marginally disappointed that she wasn't overcome with an instant draw or connection like how other people described the reveal.

"To start, I'm Taniyama Mai. I'm 21 and have a knack for finding ghosts." She held out her hand in greeting, not realizing that she had extended her counter-arm.

He looked between her hand and face before reluctantly taking it into his strong grip. "Oliver. You may call me, 'Naru,'" he said, purposefully using her pronunciation.

As soon at their hands touched, Mai was pulled into a series of visions—like watching a movie of someone's life but without any specific details.

In shock, she ripped her hand away from his, blinking in bewilderment. "What was that?"

"Are you a clairvoyant?"

"Um, I guess? Only through intuition and dreams, though. I've never had something like that happen before."

Naru placed a hand on his chin, scrunching his brows slightly as he thought. When he looked like that, Mai had to give Gene some merit for his "idiot scientist" comment.

"This should be explored in further detail."

"Explore what?"

"What being 'soulmates' entails between those with psychic abilities."

Mai opened her mouth to refute the idea but froze midway. He actually made an interesting point. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't interested in the answer too. "Like an experiment?"

"Yes," he said, looking at her square in the face. "If you agree to participate in my study, I will compensate appropriately."

Mai's eyes lit up at the mention of compensation. People have mentioned making good cash from being a research participant!

What luck!

As she went to reply, a ghostly moan erupted from behind her.

"Shut up! I'm making a business deal here!" she yelled at the building.

And the moaning stopped.

A/N: Please let me know what you think!

I'm thinking of making a series of different "Soulmate AU" prompts in installments here and there (formally in a series on AO3). Not a guarantee I'll do it, but if there's enough idea noodles to go around, I'll give it a shot. So, if you have any requests, I'm open to hearing them :3

See ya' next time~!