Chapter Text
The first time it happened, Shiro was eight.
He’d heard all sorts of stories, of course, about soulmates and their marks. He’d latched onto them with a sense of wonder, enthralled that someone, somewhere, would see anything that stained his skin. His own parents had met because his mother had gotten a tattoo on her shoulder and his father, though the mark had long since faded by the time he saw her, recognized it at a glance. A friend of his had broken her arm on the playground in kindergarten and one of the other girls nearby had started screaming and crying, and no it wasn’t the nicest way to find out, but they thought it was almost funny in the aftermath in the way only children can.
The first time it happened, it was a mosaic of bruises that bloomed along his side. It ached a little, but it was his first sign that he had a soulmate , his first sign that his soulmate and he were definitely connected. He was excited. A little irrationally so; he ran to everyone he knew and lifted his shirt to show them, proud that he now had irrefutable proof that somewhere out there, there was a person just for him. He hadn’t noticed the concerned looks he’d gotten from his parents or his auntie.
The next time it happened was a few days after that. The marks that had shown up on his side had nearly faded away when he felt a sudden, blunt pain across his stomach. He’d been walking upstairs to his room and the force of the phantom injury sent him staggering into the handrail. He’d been the only one home, and he scrambled up the stairs, wincing when he felt another mark blossom across his jaw. He went straight for the bathroom and looked in the mirror, frowning as he examined the dark purple mark on his stomach and the oddly-shaped red one on his cheek.
He was only eight, but a certain sense of foreboding ran through him.
Two weeks stood between that incident and the next, and suddenly he was scared. He didn’t like this anymore, he didn’t want to feel these awful bruises that were shaped far too similarly to hands around his arms, didn’t want to see the mottled skin across his ribs. He was scared for his skin, scared for his parents because they started to get strange looks from people that saw Shiro’s injuries, scared of his parents because they seemed scared. More than that, though, he was scared for his soulmate. His soulmate, who was being hurt by some faceless person that Shiro already hated.
It happened twice more after that; obviously intentional marks that made Shiro crawl into bed with his parents and cry. Then for a while there was nothing.
The next time it happened, Shiro was twelve.
He’d almost forgotten the horrible feeling of being hurt without being hurt . Of course he still worried, on occasion, but most of the time he elected to remain optimistic. There were still good stories, still people who had found their happiness with others because of their connection. Maybe one day, when he met his soulmate, he could fix them. Whatever and whoever had hurt them, Shiro thought that maybe he could wipe that sadness from their memory. Replace it with good things, all the good things that Shiro could possibly shower them with.
The next time it happened, Shiro was ripped screaming from his sleep by a burning agony in his chest. His parents had burst into his room, mother holding a metal bat and father looking ready to kill someone with his bare hands. When they found only Shiro, curled on his bed and clutching at his shirt as he cried, they didn’t know what to do. His mother dropped her weapon and they both went to him. It took a while, but they finally coaxed him to lift his shirt to reveal dark and violent bruising.
Shiro started crying all over again when he saw it. It took his mother over an hour of soft, comforting words to calm him down, to tell him that they probably just had some kind of accident. They were fine.
But he heard her speaking with his father outside his door when they thought he’d fallen asleep. Whispers, hisses that it wasn’t right, that there had to be some way to find Shiro’s soulmate sooner, some way to help them before...before it was too late. Shiro didn’t like the way they said it. He may have been young, but he was hardly naive. At his junior high school, a girl had sometimes shown up with strange bruises. Shiro might not have noticed them because she always wore pants and a jacket, but there were those lingering memories of his soulmate’s wounds, and when he saw the way the girl clutched her jacket more tightly to her even in early summer, he couldn’t help his suspicions. He kept meaning to talk to her, but just...never did. She still came to class every day, still talked to her friends, so he figured he had plenty of time to figure out how.
Until he didn’t. One day, the girl didn’t come to school. He noticed the teachers talking when they didn’t think the students were paying attention, recognized the look in their homeroom teacher’s eyes as the same look his parents had when his soulmate’s bruises inked his skin.
She never came back.
He didn’t want that for his soulmate.
So, for the next year and a half, he grit his teeth and bore it. Told himself that the pain he was feeling wasn’t his, that the marks were good because at least it meant his soulmate, whoever they were, was holding on. But they paid for it, both of them, in marks that barely had time to fade before new ones came. Sometimes there were sensations that Shiro couldn’t accurately name or identify, but he could guess, and they would leave him feeling especially sick. He asked the girl from kindergarten how it had felt when her soulmate broke her arm, and his world spun away when she described a pain that shouldn’t have sounded so familiar to him.
His parents were frantic, horrified as much for him as they were for the nameless stranger. They promised Shiro that they would do anything and everything they could to help, but in the end he knew that was pointless. There was nothing they could do. Nothing he could do.
Admitting his own uselessness hurt more than any injury. He didn’t know how often he cried anymore, how many times he would shut himself in his room or hide in a bathroom stall at school. He hated this. Hated feeling so useless, so hopeless, so utterly helpless. This was his soulmate , and they were hurting. Hurting so much and hurting so often, and he wanted to help them. He needed to help them! Yet he could do nothing but share their pain.
Halfway through his last year in junior high, his skin became clean again. Far from feeling reassured, he was terrified by the implications. Only his mother shushing him in his room after a week without bruising, telling him that he would feel it if...if the worst happened, could console him. After this, Shiro’s skin remained unmarked for six months.
He was fourteen and a high school freshman when he felt it again. It was Friday night after his first week and he was lying in bed, flipping idly through one his new textbooks. The week had been uneventful--he’d met back up with a couple friends from junior high, been hit on a dozen or so times by girls that swore he had to have been a junior, and hadn’t been saddled with an impossible amount of homework. Not particularly astounding in any way, really.
Then he couldn’t breathe. He nearly fell out of bed in shock, in panic, and his hands sent his textbook flying as they flew to his neck, to tear at pressure that wasn’t there. At this point he’d learned how to separate himself from the sensations, to remind his body that it wasn’t under attack, but it was hard in his panic to remind himself that he could still breathe. That his throat wasn’t being constricted. It took several long, agonizing seconds of reminding his body how to breathe before he could even think of anything else.
His eyes were watering, and he still felt the pain but not as acutely as before. With shaking fingers he reached up to touch the affected area, and his chest ached and he didn’t know if it was his heart breaking for a stranger or that stranger’s lungs screaming in protest. The pressure lifted even as he wondered, but this was accompanied by a sharp, stinging sensation across his cheek. Closing his eyes briefly to collect himself, Shiro had quietly tip-toed to the bathroom, not wanting to alert his parents, and locked himself inside before turning to the mirror.
Finger-shaped bruises. A reddening hand print. The ache in the back of Shiro’s throat had nothing to do with the injury, and he fell hard against the counter, elbows smacking into the granite and face burying itself in his hands. What good was this? What good was he , if he couldn’t even help the person his soul was irrevocably bound to as they fought a battle he couldn’t begin to understand?
He was there for a long time that night, sobbing as quietly as he could in frustration and grief. He hated being helpless. He hated being useless. He hated knowing that someone out there was hurting so badly, and they were going through all of that pain alone. There was nothing he could do and it hurt worse than any bruise or any broken bone.
He wore a scarf the next day. It didn’t escape his parents’ notice, but really what difference did it make if they knew?
The bruises started coming again, and Shiro quickly realized that this time there was a sick sort of routine to it. The week would go by quietly. Friday night hurt. The marks faded before Monday. He guessed that his soulmate was going to school. That whoever was hurting them didn’t want proof of their transgressions lasting past the weekend. The bruises were also easy to hide after the initial assault; his stomach and ribs, hips, upper thighs. They were easily hidden under his own PE uniform.
In the winter they branched out again, because cold weather meant more layers. More skin to cover. Shiro was miserable. He’d never hated holiday breaks before, but at least when school was in session his soulmate had a few days of reprieve. During the holidays it was nearly unbearable.
Then, two days before Christmas that year, Shiro again found his skin unblemished. He no longer felt hope stir in his chest, though. He knew with a sad, bitter certainty that the pain would come back, and once again he’d be nothing but a powerless witness.
He didn’t speak at all on Christmas day.
Shiro got his driver’s license in his sophomore year the day he turned sixteen. He was excited, thrilled even. His parents let him ditch class to take the exam, they drove separate cars to said exam so that he could drive himself home when he inevitably passed, and they told him that however much money he saved for a car of his own, they would match. It was a wonderful day made even better because it was a day free of worry. Free of bruises.
It became routine for Shiro to take one of the cars to school. He drove himself to track practice, to the animal shelter where he volunteered, to his friends’ houses when they went out. It was nice. He liked driving on his own. Liked taking back roads and staying out late with the promise that of course he’d be back by curfew .
He’d been out late on one such night, just driving with nowhere urgent to be, when it happened. It wasn’t the first time he’d needed to pull over until it passed. Not by a long shot. But it was the first time it had ever hurt so intensely that he could remember, and he didn’t even realize that he had slammed on the gas instead of the break because God , his head hurt and his chest hurt and something absolutely wrong and sickening shot up his spine, cleaving him half. He screamed. He might have seen the tree before he jerked the steering wheel, but he was never sure. The world blinked out.
When Shiro came to, he was bleary and confused, surrounded by white. His mother was there, though, sitting by his bedside and looking like she hadn’t slept in years. When she realized he was awake, it took all of her self control not to fling herself on top of him. She tearfully explained that he had wrecked the car, that his condition had been touch-and-go for days, that he’d been in tears screaming when they brought him in.
He remembered, in the vague way one remembers a dream, the pain before the crash. Felt himself go cold. Felt like he was going to be ill. He meant to clap his hand to his mouth to stifle his nausea, but…
He was fitted with a temporary prosthetic and told to come back in a few days for a proper examination. He was numb to the entire affair. All he could think about was how losing a limb felt to someone who hadn’t yet lost one. He wondered if the gash across his nose would scar the other person, or if it would fade like bruises did.
The cybernetic arm was a complicated operation. He wondered what it felt like to his soulmate. What was he putting the other through? That person who had already suffered so much was being subjected to it without any pain medication, any buffer between them and the surgery.
It was strange. The arm felt like his by all accounts, and yet not. It responded a little slower than his flesh arm, but that was to be expected since it was brand new. It would take some adjusting to, but modern technology had come a long way in making the loss of a limb easier to compensate for. For goodness’ sake, he could still feel things with it, although his sense of touch had been muted somewhat. It felt like wearing gloves, almost.
It felt like experiencing touch through someone else. Not quite real, but far from imaginary.
The bruises didn’t stop blooming.