AN: Soulmate AU where the distance between you and your soulmate is written on your wrist. (In meters for lance because the US is idiotic for not adopting the metric system and whatever the equivalent is on Altea for Allura). If your soulmate isn't born yet, it's the distance from where they will be born and if they're dead, it's the distance from where they died.

Allura is a little girl and she dreams about soulmates. She knows that hers is far away but her young mind doesn't quite grasp just how far they truly are. In one of her earliest memories, she is trying to find out. She asks Father how much Alteans have discovered. He tells her the answer in terms of planets and sectors, which she finds quite vexing. She wants numbers, not names. His answer tells her nothing about where her soulmate may be, and that is what she really wants to know.

As time passes, Allura begins to comprehend just how far away her soulmate is. Some of her classmates have short numbers, others have fairly long ones, but her's puts them all to shame. It starts at her wrist and wraps around a few times; a bracelet of numbers. Sometimes, she sits absolutely still and stares at the numbers, waiting to see if they will change. They never do.

(At first, she thinks it's because her soulmate is just someone who doesn't like to move. After she grows old enough to dismiss this foolish theory, she decides that he must not have been born yet; Alteans live a long time, it isn't uncommon for there to be quite a gap.)

Once, when she is on the tail end of girlhood and she is out shopping with some of her friends and ignoring the guards who follow her everywhere, she finds a tent that looks somewhat sketchy. The sign on the door promises to find anyone's soulmate. Her friends laugh, but Allura is curious and enters. Inside is an old woman with gray hair that borders on white hunched in front of a computer screen. She looks bored as Allura cautiously ventures in, leaving her friends and guards outside.

The woman asks for a fee, which Allura pays without hesitation, and gestures for her to sit down on an overstuffed chair. She asks for the number and raises her eyebrow when Allura reads off the twenty-seventh digit, the eyebrow just keeps getting higher the closer Allura gets to the end. After much poking around on the screen, she tells Allura that her soulmate is too far away to tell. They're not anywhere that's been discovered. She returns some of Allura's money out of pity as she says that.

Now, she is a grown woman(or so she thinks, really she is on the cusp of womanhood, not quite a woman, but not quite a girl.) She has more important things to worry about. She's starting to realize that she won't be able to marry her soulmate. She'll marry for politics and hopefully, it'll turn into love. Like her parents, and how the numbers on their wrists are always larger than the distance between them, and how they have eyes only for each other nonetheless.

(And maybe, just maybe, though she isn't about to admit it to herself, she's starting to think that she won't ever meet her soulmate. The numbers still haven't changed. They haven't changed once in her entire life, not without her moving. Maybe her soulmate has been born. Maybe they've died. The optimistic part of her tries to banish these thoughts from her mind.)

Allura tells herself that it is time to grow up and she stops spending her time dreaming of soulmates and love and starts throwing all of her energy into learning how to rule so that she'll be a good queen when Father passes the crown on to her. It'll be a long time from now, but she wants to be prepared and besides, it gives her an excuse to spend time with him.

And then Father starts worrying about the Galra and she does too. She doesn't have time to worry about soulmates and she doesn't have time right up until the point that her home is destroyed before her eyes and she is forced to sleep, sleeping centuries and millennia away.

Lance has the longest soulmark you can imagine. He's only tried to read off all the digits once or twice and whenever he counts them, he gets lost somewhere in the mid-thirties. In his baby pictures, his number stretches down his arm in a way that makes it look unnaturally black. He used to think that his soulmate lived all the way on the other side of the world, like, in Australia or something. But when he looked it up, Australia was much closer than wherever his soulmate lived.

It's a mystery to him. How is he ever going to travel that far? He used to wonder if maybe this is the universe's cruel way of telling him that he didn't actually have a soulmate. He's heard of people who don't have a soulmark, but never anyone who had one as long as he did.

He never thought that it meant that he was doomed to live a loveless life though. There are people who never meet their soulmate but still find love. He'll just be one of them. And, girls are just too amazing to give up on because his soulmate apparently resides farther out in space than Pluto. He flirts his way through middle school and the first couple years of high school but doesn't really date anyone. Hey, he's waiting for the right person. (He also studies crazy hard because his ambition is to be admitted into the Galaxy Garrison. When he gets the acceptance letter in the mail, it's the happiest day of his life.)

At the Galaxy Garrison, he meets Hunk, who's probably the only other person on earth with a soulmate so far away that his mark looks more like a bracelet tattooed around his wrist than an actual number. That's part of the reason they become friends in the first place and they only find more in common from there.

One day in class, they talk about irrational numbers and Hunk jokes that the distance between him and his soulmate is one, just like π and √2. He even puts it down on his homework, before scribbling it out and writing a more serious answer.

Eventually, Lance is placed in a squad made up of him, Hunk, and this random dude name Pidge Gunderson. He and Hunk are absolutely bros with the whole long-distance soulmate thing, but pidge always wears long sleeves and there's a bandage around his wrist hiding it from sight. He never talks about his mark and Lance doesn't completely blame him. Some people prefer to keep them private.

One day, things go absolutely crazy, and he ends up in a cave in the middle of the desert with his squad, his arch-rival (according to him), and his hero. (Shiro's missing his arm, taken by some alien race from what he's heard. His soulmark is gone. Lance could never imagine that.)

They end up launched through a wormhole in space, taken there by a giant blue lion. It's so far away from earth, that when Lance and Hunk look at their wrists, it looks like most of their respective numbers have disappeared. They exchange a glance but don't say anything.

They come to castle on an alien planet with an atmosphere that they can somehow breathe without dying. In the very center of the castle is the most beautiful woman Lance has ever seen. It looks like she's in an escape pod from one of those cheesy sci-fi movies that Pidge always chooses when it's his turn at movie night. As he watches, it opens with a whoosh and she falls out. He runs to catch her.

"Where am I?" she asks slowly.

"You're in my arms," Lance replies, trying to sound cool. He's falling apart a little inside. (Actually, that's a lie. He's falling apart a lot.)

She jumps away but before she does, Lance notices that the number on his wrist was finally one that he could read at a glance: 0.

AN: So, I was thinking about soulmate AUs and this basically wrote itself. (I know planets move, but I realized that too late, and I'm just going to pretend that it doesn't factor in because I like the idea of the number not changing more than I like the idea of it changing really fast because their technically hurling through space.)