Chapter Text
Stiles doesn’t care.
Okay (false, he totally cares but only when he's in the company of Scott and Kira - and even then it's more like a ‘Hey, quit being so obnoxiously cute!’ and less of a ‘Why the fuck am I so abnormal?’) he doesn’t care much. Nothing's guaranteed, soulmates can be across the world for all anyone knows, marks only appear when soulmates are “in a place where they're ready to have a significant other”, you can (in theory) go your whole life without meeting them yada yada yada.
The point is that yeah, he's a worrier, but he just isn't capable of working up enough brain space to actively and continually care. It gets tiring, alright? He's had enough worrying and, by now, he knows the score. He's suspected what he is as early as high school: Scott and Kira, Isaac and Cora, Jackson and Lydia, then Erica and Boyd - within a three-month span. Nothing had happened for Stiles junior year. Or senior year. Or his nineteenth birthday. Or twentieth. Or twenty-first.
Stiles doesn’t have a soulmate.
His soulmate might have been one of the 5% of the population that was supernatural and got destroyed by their own power before Stiles could hit the tail-end of puberty - a werewolf who’d gone feral or a Banshee who’d lost themselves before mastering their power. Or he's someone’s second soulmate - sometimes, people lose their soulmates and Fate gifts them another. It's possible that somewhere out there is someone who's going to lose somebody to gain Stiles. For obvious reasons, he really really hopes that isn’t the case.
It's also just as likely that he has no soul mark because he has no living soulmate. He’d spent most of his senior year doing hours and hours of research - when the Nemeton had settled down and his lessons with Deaton had become regular. Hours of research have led him to the conclusion that he just doesn’t have one. And while that makes him a part of a small brotherhood (4.39% of the American population, actually) of rare human beings, it doesn’t make him any less.
He's just...different.
Soulmates work in lots of ways - it isn’t always romantic (there are a decent number of bestie soulmate duos at UC Berkeley) and it doesn’t always work out perfectly and the divorce rate has jumped from 3% to 6% in the last decade. There’s been a rise in prejudice in the last few years against those with magic - witches, warlocks, Druids, weres. Some of those stringent families are rejecting their soulmates. Not fun since you can live without a soulmate bond unfulfilled but your quality of life kind of takes a teensy eensy (read: drastic) dive. Anyway, again, he likes to keep all of this in mind, takes comfort in the statistics.
His chances of walking into someone in some random store, locking eyes, and being swept up into “knowing” are null. He'll never be part of one of those tell-tale coincidence stories, the “I usually take the 5:30 train but for some reason, I waited for the 6 pm” or the “honestly, I dunno what made me go into the coffee shop that day” stories. With no Marks burned unto his body, he's got irrefutable proof that he just doesn’t have one.
Still, he's fine.
He's still whole. It's taken him three entire years, an indefinable number of private pity parties and a shit ton of hard liquor to truly convince himself of that. Look, if Heart Theory spoke of souls halved only to meet again, then it stands to reason that he has all of his soul. He and the rest of the 4.39% have been born as close to perfectly complete as could be. That’s why he doesn’t have a life partner in crime. He doesn’t need one - and fuck all the other theories that say otherwise, thank you very much.
He has a small tribe of humans, shapeshifters, and Banshee scattered across the country. He's got a pretty awesome Dad to take care of. After this summer, he has a year and a half left to wrap up his Master’s in Anthropology. He can ward places, perform protection spells, has a thriving side-business, and gives kickass hugs. He’s twenty-two years old, renting his own (admittedly tiny) apartment up in Palo Alto, he never misses his every-other daily Skype calls Scott and Kira, has Thanksgiving with Lydia (and Jackson, the everlasting douche, God) at RPI to look forward to and-
-his life is full. Amazing, even.
So, really, he’s still whole.
And if Stiles finds himself wide awake in the dead of night with the weight of loneliness on his chest every now and then? That’s no-one else’s business but his.