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CJ is nearly thirty, too old for histrionics about not having met her soulmate yet but not old enough to have given up on finding him entirely, when she meets Toby Ziegler at a bar. They fight about politics first, and compare soul marks later.
They date, for a while, because they’re soulmates and that’s how it works, right?
They learn fairly quickly that that isn’t how it works for them.
“How does it work, then?” Toby asks, staring at the writing on the back of his hand, and CJ doesn’t have an answer to give him.
_
Sam and Mallory both have soul marks, and they don’t belong to each other. Still, he wants to believe they can make it work- needs to believe they can make it work.
Sam falls in love easily, fiercely- he’s not afraid of a little fight.
You’ll find her, Mallory will tell him one day, years later. It will be scribbled on a scrap of paper, tucked into a wedding invitation- Mallory’s name right next to the other one, the one that Sam spent so many nights tracing on her side.
Don’t worry.
_
Danny doesn’t have a soulmate. He has a toothbrush in CJ’s bathroom, and a couple of shirts in her drawer, and has had it up to here with people’s fake sympathy about it.
They make it work. There’s no rule book for this, but they make it work.
_
“Donna Moss,” she says, and Josh’s heart skips a couple beats. But then, she knows who he is, has said his name a couple times already, and she doesn’t look at him like it means any different.
How cruel does the universe have to be, he wonders, to give you a soulmate whose soulmate isn’t you?
_
Donna goes through a lot of concealer, and pretends she doesn’t notice the way Josh looks at her when no one else is around.
Not here, she thinks. Not now.
_
Andy has two names, not one. For her it’s long since faded into a banality, but it’s an oddity to everyone else. Unheard of. Toby sometimes traces over the names with his thumb and looks thoughtful. He doesn’t ask questions, though, besides “Are you sure?” over and over again, right up to the morning of their wedding. He’s afraid he’ll make her miss out on something.
In the delivery room, they hand her two tiny bundles, one pink and one blue. She looks at them, their perfectly formed fingers, their beautiful little noses, their eyes, and she thinks,
Oh.
_
Andy says, “I know what I have to call them.”
Toby understands.