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Everyone has a red string.
It's fate, or at least that's what they say. If you follow it to the end, your soulmate will be waiting for you.
Enjin didn't really place too much faith in that idea. Plenty of people didn't bother with their strings, and he wasn't the type to miss a night out tangled up in the sheets with some hot chick who's name he didn't ask because he wouldn't remember. On the Ground, caring about something as trifling as a soulmate was laughably unnecessary. When half of the kids around were sold off behind closed doors and all people wanted to come home to after a day of hard labor was any warm body, just the thought alone was a luxury.
Still, that didn't make the curiosity go away. Everybody has a red string, but most don't develop the ability to see them until around the age they reach adulthood.
Enjin still remembers the day he could see them. He was twenty and he was collapsed drunkenly on a bench in the middle of some bumfuck nowhere town in the dead of night with the taste of puke in his mouth and he'd thought he was hallucinating when he noticed the red threads spilling out from his chest like ribbons of blood dripping steadily from his heart. He'd gotten kicked out of some babe's apartment and was left sitting there all alone wondering what the point of it all was; why did everything have to be so complicated?
He'd told himself that day he didn't give a fuck about his soulmate and he'd never try to find her.
Why he went back on that, he didn't really know. He could come up with all kinds of excuses for it, which he mostly used on himself. It was just more convenient to search when Cleaners have to travel so much, he would say. He wasn't even looking really, he was just open to the opportunity to get a glimpse of her if she happened to cross his path. The self-justifications were stupid because they didn't matter. At the end of the day, they were just evidence he actually did give a damn.
It led him to a well.
An unused one, outside of the Academy grounds in the Kamuatari district, lined with stones and reaching so deep into the earth that Enjin wondered how the hell his soulmate had gotten down there and was forced to ask himself if he was prepared for her to be a corpse upon arrival. But when he got closer, he could hear it.
Crying.
Someone at the bottom of the well was crying.
Right away, he ran through the mental list of things he was prepared to deal with in a soulmate. Emotionality? Not really his thing. Neither was commitment, and the closer he got, the more he wanted to run in the other direction and not look back.
There were two things that Enjin noticed first: the person on the other end of his red string was a boy. Not a man, a boy. An academy student. He couldn't have been older than fourteen. Enjin was twenty-five.
He didn't even want to consider the implications of his soulmate not being a woman.
Enjin had heard of people experience disappointment and even grief when their soulmate ended up not being what they expected, but he'd always been fine with any woman that had some curves to her. He didn't really expect soulmate disappointment to wash over him when he hadn't even intended to actually find his soulmate to begin with.
Still, he did his best to give advice to the struggling kid as though he was nothing more than a passing stranger, and luckily for him, Zanka was too young to see the strings. He wouldn't know the difference for years to come, if ever.
With any luck, Enjin would be long gone from his life by the time Zanka grew up.
What was he supposed to do? Cozy up to a teenager? He couldn't do that. Not after the things he experienced in the orphanage when he was younger. He didn't fucking sign up to babysit his fated lover.
But he promised to come back. He said it was for the manju.
In reality, he wasn't ready to let go of the stupid dream that somebody could ever love him just yet.
Things didn't really go to plan. Call it a fluke, don't call it intention. Enjin couldn't help his habit of picking up neurotic teenage strays. Zanka just happened to be one of them. Soulmate or no had nothing to do with it.
The real problem came the first time Zanka's siblings saw him, with an obvious thread connecting him to their baby brother.
Predictably, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with this, and they did their best to convince Zanka to return home, even going as far as to threaten him if he dared return to the Cleaners with the man who had spirited him away from them. But Zanka was an exceptionally stubborn kid, and every unfiltered command for him to turn his back on Enjin just compelled him to dig his heels deeper in the dirt. He wasn't budging.
The worst thing was that Kyouka and Goka could see the strings just as clearly as Enjin could, but they had to skirt around revealing the facts to Zanka. If they attempted to tell him, the kid would probably be over the moon. His crush on Enjin had already become obvious after only a couple weeks of working together. At best, he could try to assure the siblings that he had absolutely no intentions like that with Zanka, but they weren't likely to believe him.
"They don't get it!" the young boy bemoaned, huddling his arms around himself on Enjin's desk chair.
Enjin tried to keep a healthy distance between them even when the kid was upset. He did the same with Riyo, but she didn't need as much support as Zanka did anyway.
"They're just trying to keep you safe," Enjin told him, "In the ways that they know how."
"That's stupid. They're stupid. All they care about is our family honor. Not me."
Enjin held his tongue. He didn't know the first thing about family. On the one hand, Zanka's family clearly made a horrible impact on the boy's life, bad enough he'd tried to kill himself over the first real failure he encountered. On the other, Enjin wasn't sure he could promise he'd be any better after recruiting Zanka into a job where he'd be risking his life on the daily.
The red thread spooled from his heart onto the floor and wound small loops before uniting with Zanka at the other end. He chose to ignore it.
It got harder to sideline the truth the longer that Zanka stuck around. Miraculously, not a soul had let it slip to Zanka that his own team lead was on the other end of the string he couldn't see.
Enjin tried his usual methods of forgetting. He drank himself blackout. He danced with hot chicks until his legs could give out. He took them to bed and all he could think when he woke up the next morning was how much he wished he didn't have to get kicked out of their homes in the morning because he couldn't take them to his own bed when his fated pair slept just down the hall from his room.
There were many days this thread felt more like a chain, a shackle binding him to somebody he was learning to love but simultaneously couldn't have.
And therein lied the problem. Zanka was fifteen now and he'd started to grow into his role of a Cleaner excellently. He was one of the most dedicated kids that Enjin had ever met. He woke up early every morning to train with his staff and he never complained about being given more work to do. He pushed himself endlessly towards improvement.
Enjin was proud of him, but the feelings it sparked in him were nothing short of nasty. He had no choice but to supervise Zanka's training regiments and he found himself so intoxicated by Zanka's fluidity and grace that he almost couldn't focus. There were times Enjin felt like he was handling something fragile, even though the boy was hardly delicate. Even with the musculature of a developing soldier, every time Enjin sparred with him he couldn't help but think of Zanka's lithe and pretty body and how terrified he was to break those little bird bones.
When he pinned the boy underneath him with a hearty laugh and a playful smile, he was just trying his best to look away from the mere inches of string that spanned the short space between them. It'd be so easy to close that gap, though he wasn't sure if he wanted to seal it with a kiss or rip Zanka's ribcage open to tear that damned thread out of him.
The northernmost safe zones were up in the mountains and always powdered with thick layers of sordid snow. The vast tundra was a mess of trash and debris that was unnavigable to anyone but the locals who frequented these inhospitable lands in search of necessities when supply runs and traveling merchants were few and far between.
It was a dangerous place, full of ferocious trash beasts adapted for the harsh environment.
And Zanka had the audacity to get fucking lost.
"I don't kn-know where I am," the boy stammered through his choker, obviously trying his best to keep himself together. "I slipped on the ice. I- I think I broke ‘m leg."
Enjin exhaled heavily, but the panic had seized him the moment he realized Zanka was separated from the squad, and he couldn't hear the Supporters calling his name. "Just hang tight, kid," he replied, gripping his jinki tightly and following the red thread where it was buried in the dirty, grey snow. "We're on our way."
"Can you—" Zanka started to ask, but cut himself off.
"Can I what?"
The boy hesitated, then weakly asked, "Can you st-stay on the line?"
Even with frostbite nipping at his nose, Enjin's heart thawed just a little bit, warmth creeping into his bones in spite of the cold as he ran to find the other end of the string. "Yeah, kid. I'm right here."
Zanka was a strong kid. He didn't complain, even when he was stranded in a frozen tundra. He talked quietly to Enjin through the choker while the rest of the team followed Enjin's lead. They finally unearthed him, having fallen down a slope, cradling his broken leg and looking up at Enjin like his savior when he was finally found.
Enjin picked the boy up in his arms and princess carried him back to the settlement. Nobody else tried to take his soulmate away. He stayed by Zanka's side while the healer tended to his leg and stuck around after everyone else had left them alone in the medic's cabin.
It was only now that he could admit to himself the terror he'd felt at the thought of losing Zanka was painfully real. He did everything that he could do to see Zanka as everything beyond his relationship to Enjin, and he had to admit to himself, he might be falling in love.
He loved the way Zanka laughed. He loved the way Zanka curled up to read books. He loved the way Zanka nitpicked and painstakingly organized the records room. He loved the way Zanka cared for Lovely Assistaff with more gentleness than he gave to himself. He loved the way that Zanka took on the role of a big brother to Riyo and Eishia despite barely being older than them. He loved the discipline and he loved the soft edges. He'd never felt more at peace than watching Zanka meditate.
The thought of losing this boy hurt his heart in a way that he wouldn't have the words to express if he tried.
When Zanka asked if he could stay the night, he agreed. And when Zanka mentioned he was freezing and there weren't enough blankets to stay warm, Enjin crawled under the covers and held the boy's body against his own. If he would only ever have one excuse to sleep this close to Zanka's beating heart, unfortunately, he would take it. He wasn't a selfless enough man.
Maybe the thread was less of a shackle than he thought.
Long car rides were both a blessing and a curse of the job. Traveling was nice, even when it came with the expectation of work, and as much as Enjin liked to complain about always being the one behind the wheel, he enjoyed driving. It could get pretty mind-numbing, but there was something freeing about barreling down unpaved stretches of wasteland at pedal-to-the-metal speeds. It was one of the best ways he knew to chase away the thoughts that plagued him so ceaselessly, by literally outrunning them, leaving them on the wayside and burying them under the dust kicked up by his tires.
The car was usually loud with chatter during the drive, but things were fairly quiet today, with the team split up between two cars and almost everybody in his vehicle asleep after the latest mission. Zanka was the only one awake, bandaged and bruised from the last mission, brows creased in concentration while he pulled dirty wrappings off of Lovely Assistaff and set about the task of polishing her up with some stupid expensive wax that left the whole car smelling like turpentine.
"Hey, Zanka," he spoke up, the boredom of the long travel starting to wear him down.
"Yeah?"
"You ever think about the future?"
Zanka's hands moved gracefully over the wooden body of his staff while he thought about the question. "What do ya mean?"
"The future," Enjin mused, "When you're all grown. Think you'll ever love someone as much as Assistaff?"
A small blush crept up Zanka's face, and the teenager fumbled over his words, sputtering, "Ya mean, like my soulmate?"
"Your soulmate isn't the only person you're allowed to love, you know. You can pick anybody."
"Yeah… I know," the kid mumbled, curling up in his seat. "Did ya ever try to find yers?"
"Nope," Enjin lied smoothly. "Not important to me."
"Oh."
When Enjin glanced over, Zanka had stopped working on his instrument, now simply holding her. He couldn't quite tell how the boy was feeling about that answer. He reached over and ruffled Zanka's hair with a lazy grin, prominently ignoring the way their thread spilled across the cupholders between them. "Relax, kid. Soulmates aren't the end-all be-all. What matters is that you're happy."
"So it's… okay if I like someone who's not my soulmate?"
Enjin feigned surprise, elbowing Zanka lightly in the side. "Oh? Who's the lucky guy?"
Zanka froze, looking over at Enjin in apparent shock. "What—" he stammered, scandalized, "What makes ya think I like a guy?"
Whoops. Enjin cringed at himself. "I've never seen you express much interest in women," he forced himself to chuckle, flashing a humored grin at Zanka. "But I'm just teasing you."
Zanka mumbled something unintelligible and hunched over on himself, his face completely red. He didn't speak for a while, leaving Enjin to bask in the sheer awkwardness of his slip-up. Just because it was painfully obvious didn't mean Zanka was ready to share that information.
"I'm not gay," Zanka spoke up, though even he didn't sound entirely convinced.
"It's okay if you—"
"I'm not," the boy reiterated. "I'm not."
It was a neon lights kind of night, the air thick with tobacco smoke and pounding with music, throats burning with whiskey and heavy boots thudding on the dance floor. Exhilarating celebrations often waited at the end of long deployments, loud like they needed the Sphere itself to hear that they made it home safe and sound in spite of the odds. Enjin missed the alcohol almost as much as he missed his damn bed, but there was one person he missed more than the rest.
He looked over his shoulder, about to get another drink, and found himself already captured in a longing blue-eyed stare from across the room. Zanka was standing stiffly with his back to the wall, arms crossed and not bothering to join in on the festivities. His uniform jacket was tied around his waist, black undershirt hugging tightly against his lean frame and exposing his shoulders, his skin shiny with sweat and his jinki strapped to his back. He was too damn built to be sixteen, gymnast musculature like a sweet temptation being dangled under Enjin's nose. The thread spilled down from the center of his chest, snaking through the dance floor until it landed at Enjin's boot.
Enjin extracted himself from the dance floor, telling himself that he wasn't waiting on Zanka to show up, pretending that he hadn't been counting the hours while he was stationed down at the South branch until he could see the boy again. If he was that impatient, he would've gone straight to Zanka's door when they got back, and he'd refrained from doing so.
"Glad to see ya back in one piece," Zanka told him, a small smile forming on the corner of his lip.
"Glad to be back. Had some damn close calls out there," Enjin whistled. "What am I supposed to do without you, Zan-zan?"
Zanka laughed lightly, like he was expelling a month's worth of tension, and leaned back against the wall. "Don't be such a big baby, Enjin."
They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, until Zanka mentioned he was too exhausted from training to be around so many people and had just dropped by the party to say hello. Rather than let him go, Enjin led him outside, settling them down on a bench that looked out over the balcony.
Zanka looked much more relaxed out here, and he didn't even glare when Enjin lit a cig. He just sighed fondly, the tension easing from his shoulders when he got a breath of second-hand smoke.
"Ya ever gonna take me on one of yer deployments?" he asked.
Enjin hummed in thought. Getting deployed for any longer than a couple of weeks was already a relatively uncommon ordeal, and they usually stuck to sending full-grown adults on those journeys. Someone's ability to see the red threads was not a perfect metric of ascertaining someone's maturity or readiness for that kind of travel, but it was the most common method of determining adulthood on the Ground nonetheless, and that's what the Cleaners tended to stick by.
The realization that meant Zanka would be able to see their string by the time he was old enough to qualify was admittedly startling. He didn't really like being reminded that Zanka wouldn't be unaware of their bond forever.
Fuck, he was getting closer to the age that the truth would be revealed to him, whether Enjin was ready or not. His cig wasn't going to be able to fix that.
He ruffled Zanka's hair until the teen fussed at him and swatted his hand away. "When you're older, yeah, probably. If I survive long enough to take you."
Zanka's eyes narrowed, lip tugging down when he said, "Not at the rate ya consume those cigarettes."
"Hey now," he laughed, "Anything's better than being ripped apart by a trash beast, but I don't plan on letting a cig get the best of me anytime soon."
"You'd better not," Zanka warned, nudging him with an elbow. "You've got too many people countin’ on ya."
"Oh yeah? You count on me, Zan-zan?"
"I didn't say that!" the boy objected, his face tinting with a too-sweet shade of pink. "But ya aren't allowed to die until I've proven myself to you."
Enjin sobered up slightly at that, looking away from the raw earnesty in Zanka's eyes. "You've already proven yourself to me. I know you're a strong kid."
"That's not what I mean. That's not enough."
"Zanka," he sighed, exhaling a cloud of smoke, "You're more than enough to me."
Everyone has a red string.
It's fate, or at least that's what they say. Fate means different things to different people. Can following a thread make anybody happy?
Enjin's thought many times throughout his life about soulmates, and most of it was proven to be dead wrong the moment he met Zanka. Many people cling to idealized versions of soulmates, dreaming of an uncomplicated and fulfilling bond with somebody who makes the horrors of life in their toxic wasteland feel like a paradise. The truth, he found, is a lot messier than that.
There's no such thing as a love that doesn't hurt.
And a soulmate is nothing more than a person you learn to understand in due time.
That string has always been there, an entangling shroud that could rend skin and bone into dust and ash with the unforgiving finality of a hanged man's noose. It's a taunting lure, baiting shattered hearts with promises of eternal and undying love waiting on the other side.
If only following the string was the end of it.
For Enjin, that was only the beginning.
And now the redness surrounded him, unwound coils that pooled around his collapsed body in the dirt, darkened by blood. He'd never felt so tangled by them in his life, but it left him breathless, sharp inhales perforated by agonizing coughs.
Zanka was there beside him, pressing a cloth against his abdomen, his tears interrupted by foul curse words like he was trying to scream Enjin into full consciousness.
All he cared was that Zanka was alive. When he saw a beast shoot from the darkness at Zanka's back, he didn't even stop to think. He'd always been a pretty selfish man, all things considered, but he wouldn't have any regrets if he died here, just like this.
…
No, he did have one.
It was well past midnight when he woke up. Cold, body draped in light bedsheets that let the air through, IV line tapped into his arm, red string forming lazy little ringlets over the dingy fabric. The infirmary was quiet aside from the unsteady pulse of his heart, and in the early morning hours, that wasn't unexpected. There were some trinkets on the table beside him; a couple bottles, a pack of cigs, and a get-well card propped up against Umbreaker where she rested within reach.
But most prominently, a lone boy had pulled up chair and was now hunched halfway over, quietly dozing at Enjin's bedside with his staff clutched in his arms.
Maybe Enjin was a fool all along. He'd never felt more stupid for regretting his soulmate.
He'd been so preoccupied imagining the worst possible outcomes and preparing for the inevitable day that Zanka learned the truth, and he'd never stopped to realize something crucial.
He was one lucky fucking bastard.
Zanka didn't deserve the regret, and he certainly didn't deserve being lied to his face for so many years. He didn't deserve a stupid, dead soulmate. Zanka gave Enjin all of the care he could ever want and didn't ask anything in return. He deserved so much better.
The weight of it hit Enjin all at once, the near-death experience and the years of repression. It was all a tangled web inside of his ribcage, spinning twine between his bones in a game of cat's cradle. The heartache had never been so shattering.
"Zan," he rasped, reaching out until he could wrap two of his fingers around Zanka's hand and slowly shake him awake, "Surely that wasn't the best chair available."
Zanka's eyes flew wide when he sat up, always such a light sleeper. "You're awake," he whispered, a small smile daring to break out across his face. "You fuckin’ scared me, asshole."
"Yeah, well. I'd rather you be scared than dead."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"It was my fault," Zanka hung his head, dejected, "I thought you were gonna die."
"I couldn't die before I tell you something."
Zanka looked up, big azure eyes shining with unspilled tears in the dark. He was seventeen now and prided himself on being too mature to cry, but he was still a kid, and that only made this harder. "Yeah?"
"I…" Enjin, for one of the few times in his life, found himself at a loss for words. He tried to ignore the beeps of his heart monitor getting steadily faster, tried to ignore the string sprawling over the bedsheets. "I've been keeping a secret from you. A big one."
The boy seemed hesitant, but he cautiously nodded.
"Your red string," he winced, "Your soulmate."
Zanka perked up, eyes wide, and asked, "You know who it is?!"
"Of course I do. It's me."
All of the air disappeared from the room in an instant. Zanka stared, expression indiscernible, and whispered, "This isn't the time for ya to joke around."
"I wouldn't joke about this. Give me your hand," he assured, holding his out.
When Zanka obliged, he picked up the string, laying it carefully on Zanka's palm. It had very little weight to it, since it didn't really interact with the physical world in the same way as a real object, but they were known to exude a certain warmth when they were touched, the only known way for someone who couldn't see the strings yet to interact with them. More importantly, the only people who could touch a string were the ones connected by it.
"Can you feel it?"
"It's warm," Zanka muttered, shocked, "This is what they feel like?"
"Yeah, kid. It's ours."
"Why didn't ya tell me?"
"I couldn't. You were fourteen when we met. I was waiting."
"Do you regret it?" the boy asked. He clenched his hand around the string, holding it close to his heart. "Do you regret that it was me?"
Enjin sat up, cupping Zanka's cheek and brushing a thumb beneath his eye. It was still dry, though barely. "My only regret is how wrong I felt for wanting you. I didn't realize how lucky I was."
Zanka cracked a weak smile at that. "I'm glad yer not dead."
"I've got three years with my soulmate to catch up on," Enjin told him, "And I wouldn't miss it for the world."