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The sting of his mark appearing was barely felt in the aftermath of the shock. He can’t think, doesn’t understand.
There’s only the icy dawning fear pooling in his stomach as cold sweat drips down his back. His heart is a pit in his stomach, bile rushing up his throat. He gags, coughing, and his throat burns with acidic disbelief.
Keiji shuts his eyes and nothing changes. Everything is there as he’s left it. As he’s made it. A gruesome twisted face, hateful eyes. He’s condemned, cursed, made into a liar, an oathbreaker.
This is hell.
He chokes and drops his gun, his damnable weapon. It clatters to the ground, and he laughs in disbelief and bites his tongue and the salt of blood spills into his mouth. The rust of it already wafts heavily through the air, a body drained along the street. He swallows, once, twice, bitter ichor rising up his gullet despite his best efforts, and begins to gulp down air, like a man drowning. He can’t breathe.
Megumi slaps him once, and then again, and he jerks out of his panic. He follows her instructions like a dog and doesn’t think, lingering in a fog. A story set in place, a man dead by his hands.
Scrub himself raw in the police box’s sink all he likes; there’s no erasing his guilt.
Seeing the smooth white patch of skin against his forearm is a mistake. Discoloring his flesh like a skin graft, the mark taunts him. A pale square to mark the death of the man he was, a mark that asks what he was expecting.
An unforgivable event. A choice he can’t take back. A soulmate in exchange for a murder.
---
He’d always wondered when his mark would appear.
As a child he was merely curious about it, some small lingering loneliness that made him vaguely jealous and irritated if he thought about it too much. His mother never talked about the person whose mark matched hers. And even then, he couldn’t ask, couldn’t bear to bring it up. Not to his mother who wore a tired smile and a blank mark on her right calf. Not to his mother who had a mark but never wrote on it, who was never written to.
Middle school and onward, his classmates began to show up with marks, one by one. When more people received their marks, he laughed away the alienation with his other unmarked companions. Gently ribbing his buddies for their infatuated behavior, Keiji teased and prodded with the rest of his group.
One friend complained about his prominent mark on his face, but Keiji spotted him grinning secretly to himself in the men’s room at school, angling his face to better take in the curly hearts dotting his jawline.
Some people read, erased, and passed messages swiftly, giddily searching for information on their other half. Others left their soulmate’s messages to stain their skin, relishing the brand of it. The soulmate effect had an inherent mania to it.
It drove people crazy if they let it.
---
Keiji Shinogi waits for the other shoe to drop, for the orders to take responsibility for his actions, and face his due punishment. His hands tremble when he thinks too much about his hero in the mud; they only stop when his wrists ache with the weight of phantom handcuffs.
But it never comes. No condemnation, no reprisal, no fated karma bringing down the hammer of justice onto him.
He looks back, and it’s all been erased. When he gathers his nerve to read the report, it’s been wiped clean, clean, clean. Megumi’s signature is stark and heavy against the writeup.
He’s a free man, but at what cost?
---
In the quiet uneasy nights as a young adult, it sometimes occurred to Keiji that he’d beat the odds and never have a soulmate. It was rare to never receive a soul mark, but it was far from impossible; it had happened to others. It seemed reasonable he won the wrong lottery of life, becoming one of the few people who didn’t fit the unspoken ineffable requirements—never to be pulled along in that rush of euphoria of matching souls to someone.
A disquieting thought to think that there was nobody in the world matched for him. It’d be an empty existence, surely.
Later, he simply figured that his soulmate was still immature, that they still had some growing up to do before they realized who they were as a person. Not everyone found themselves in highschool, after all. Children, teenagers, adults, elders… there wasn’t anything set about when you’d get a soulmark.
But as Keiji thought about his mother, her quiet life along with her sheet white mark, he had wondered if it wouldn’t be for the best if he never got a soulmate after all. To have that much power over another person, to be able to exert your presence on them even if you were long gone…
You leave a specter behind with a soulmate. You haunt them in body and soul til the end.
---
After everything, Keiji returns to the police department as if nothing happened. His supervisor assigns him to menial tasks, easing him back into the workplace.
While he files documents and does research and handles small disputes, all he can think about is the aching desire to leave. He wants nothing to do with the police, wants Megumi to take back her false pity and damned debts. He wants to go back to when the badge on his chest was a symbol of justice and not a lie that’s locked him up.
He can’t bear to stay with the force anymore.
The clap of friendly hands on his shoulders make him feel filthy, and he can’t trust them. He looks at the smiling faces around him and wonders who was in on the cover-up, who his captain made her deals with, who wants to laugh with him despite knowing he murdered a man and got off scott-free. Garbage. Disgusting.
And him the worst of all.
He pauses in his typing, corrects a sentence and finishes the email off before sending it out. Pushing his hair back, Keiji rubs at the bags under his eyes. A corpse breathes wetly from the back of the room, blood pooling at his feet, and he ignores it, gripping the back of his neck as if to massage some feeling into it. A cheerless raspy voice reminds him to drink his coffee, and he drains his cold cup down to the gritty dregs.
A faint sensation passes over him, like a brush of phantom fingers. He glances down reflexively. Acknowledging the ghost lingering overhead only makes the visions more real, more viscously terrible, and Keiji recognizes his mistake instantly. He’s unsettled and exhausted and still doesn’t know better.
What he sees is even worse. Instead of a blood-red hand in death’s rictus, the flat plain mark on his own forearm glistens with thin strokes of ink. An unseen hand on the other side of his soul writes to him for the first time.
Keiji barely catches the letters of 「Hello-」begin to form, before he rips his gaze away. He rolls his sleeve down, covering the word with trembling fingers.
Knowing the visions are fake is one thing, but he can’t deny his soulmate away. He can’t and shouldn’t.
It’s a futile effort. Keiji pretends that it isn’t and listens to a dead man breathe.
---
All his old transparent desires are almost humorous in the light of day. Keiji has a soulmate now and mourns it. He’d do anything to turn back time.
His belief that it was his soulmate who needed to find themself was a faulty assumption. All along, they were waiting for him instead.
Keiji’s soul, dangling from a thin noose, is suspended the moment his fingers pull the trigger. The moment his eyes seared the scene into his waking nightmares, some unspeakable destiny descended upon him as if to say: This is who you are now, and this is who you will be.
He wished it never happened, would give up a thousand soulmates just to erase what made the mark. He’s marked by a murder, and he’s dragged whoever was chained to him down with him.
In a way, he resents them. Nonsensically, he knows, but yet...
He wonders what kind of person would find their match in a killer.
---
So his soulmate doesn’t exist. Whatever shows up on the mark is all background noise and static. They’re very persistent for something that Keiji’s not paying attention to, though, and he’s woken by their writing more times than he can count.
It’s almost a blessing considering the nightmares. His waking visions are more endurable somehow, one way or another. Keiji doesn’t sleep very much these days. He could even say he’s grateful.
Yet he leaves their messages to moulder away on his arm.
---
Two weeks pass by, and Keiji pretends nothing has changed.
He quits the force.
At the last minute, he’s roped into setting up unemployment benefits, the higher-ups’ way of telling him to keep quiet.
Ah, Shinogi, sad to see you go. Here’s an extra check or two, and you can be sure there’ll be more where that came from. Let’s just leave the past in the past where it belongs, understand…?
He signs his forms just to escape and lets the blood money flow into his savings, never looking back.
---
Dripping water onto the tile, Keiji stares into his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The pale fluorescent glow of the lights washes him out with antiseptic tones, turning the white of his knuckles cold and stiff. Deep bruises shadow his eyes.
In this place, the only real spot of color is the gold of his hair, bleached beyond recognition. An image change made on a whim to stop himself from flinching at his own image—to give the vaguest illusion that he was someone else.
He looks dead. Like all the life has been drained from him.
But he’s not the corpse in his dreams. That might have been better: to have been the one shot out and left to bleed through, face contorting in that horrible rictis of agony.
His hero’s face haunts his waking hours, gurgling sighs echoing the plaster walls day in and out. A lone figure that drags himself onto Keiji’s shoulders, icy hands gripping him in a vice grip. Asking him why, why, why...
The facts of the situation. He can’t trust himself. He can’t move on.
… He can't bring himself to end it.
---
Keiji drinks himself stupid.
It’s not a solution. It’s barely a stopgap.
But he remembers going out to drink with Megumi and the absolute nothingness that took him over those nights he overdid it, and it’s an inviting idea.
Forget the accusing stare of his hero, staining red puddles into the crevices of the kitchen linoleum tiles.
Forget the claustrophobic walls of his apartment, his self-made prison.
Forget his soulmate, too stubbornly stupid to give up on a lost cause.
---
Half-heartedly, Keiji tallies the days by draining packs of beer. He feeds himself when he remembers to, which is seldomly. It’s a good day when he’s too far gone to remember.
Invariably, though, his eyes are drawn down to his arm, traitorous curiosity and that inexplicable pull. His soulmate hasn’t stopped attempting to contact him, their curious greetings fading into empty calls into the void, sending questions to someone who won’t answer.
With a pang, he remembers his mother.
… He’s glad she died before she had to learn her son was a killer.
Catching glimpses of words being erased and rewritten again and again, he can't force himself to turn away. His poor soulmate trying to catch his attention, unknowing that they have it.
Keiji feels like a goddamn voyeur, watching them reach out desperately, again and again.
He doesn't deserve it. He wishes they'd give up already.
---
Two months pass. Keiji rots away in his apartment, a corpse just waiting to die.
He locks himself in, bars the door, and drowns himself in alcohol until he blacks out. He wakes, splashes water on his face, showers, the remnants of his previously strict routines strongarming his mornings. Works out till his body burns up and he can’t move another inch. Swallows leftover takeout despite his lack of appetite.
And then he pours more liquor down his esophagus again.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Rinse.
Repeat.
He watches the words change on his arm as he stays stagnant, unmoving.
---
Carelessly, he brushes his fingers against the mark one night, accidentally erasing part of a word before his soulmate could resignedly wipe the slate clean and give up on him for the day.
The word immediately gets scrawled over and their writing takes an indistinct form in their excitement. It then cuts off mid-scribble with a sharp jolt.
A belated realization that he’d been ignoring them on purpose. An affronted half-written word left to stain his skin. They don’t bother to erase the fragment and he can practically feel the outrage and heated shame radiating off the cold silence that follows.
The guilt of his cowardly avoidance grows, but he’s already guilty of too many things. His sins eat away at him enough that this is just a drop in the ocean.
No apology would ever be enough, and so he doesn’t bother to try.
---
Nowadays with medical advancements and modern innovation, people were more aware of how soulmates worked, their effects and results.
Soulmarks matched up people who fulfilled some necessary role in the other person’s life. They weren’t just placebo or fantasy. Not wishful thinking or a mass societal delusion.
With the years that passed, soulmates were always a popular subject of research. There were human chemicals involved, dopamine, endorphins. The ins and outs of soulmates, categorized and slotted into daily life.
Something in your biology gave incentives to pursue contact, to engage and interact and love.
And why wouldn’t you? Who’d give up on the other half of their soul?
---
After the revelation, Keiji genuinely thought they’d cast him aside as a lost cause, but his soulmate keeps writing.
Troublesome. Almost vindictively stubborn about it. He thinks he rather admires them, but all his emotions are dulled and worn down. Difficult to feel much of anything these days.
The devouring guilt settles into a low constant thrum, and against his back, a corpse smacks its lips. Rotten fingers play with a bullet hole wound, leaving grotesque sloppy sounds lingering in the air. He lets the noise go in one ear and out the other. It’s fake, it’s fake.
From his previous observations, Keiji had guessed that his soulmate was following a student schedule of some kind, conservatively avoiding writing during class time. A diligent sort, he wryly considers.
Now, they change their schedule up, writing to him any chance they get.
Insistently forcing him to pay attention to them, they use their mark like scrap paper, jotting down quick notes and questions, hammering out to-do-lists and assignments, their daily happenings. Too much dignity to make a pretense of writing in a diary, but not enough to keep from doodling some very incomprehensible items in between lectures.
Squinting at his arm, Keiji thinks that the most recent addition to the corner is a cat? It seems to have four legs. A tail. Whiskers. Or maybe those were all legs.
That was about as good as his guesses went, to be honest, and he’s not sure they’d be all that better if he was sober.
The reality of it is, it doesn’t matter what they write, all their words are hot against his soul. The most inane, insouciant letters brand into his brain matter.
His training kicks in, and he can’t help himself when he analyzes the handwriting. Unfortunately, the throb of the hangover does little to keep his brain from functioning.
Neat handwriting with letters a little tight, but spaced evenly apart. Dots and lines closely drawn, careful not to let their swoops and flourishes get too far away from them. Down to earth. Practical. Maybe a little introverted. They probably have a good head on their shoulders.
One of his hands traces the air as he unconsciously mimics the sweep and flourish of their hand. The information trickles in, whether he wants it to or not. As they write to him, words and habits spell out their silhouette.
A girl.
Young.
Determined.
His soulmate gets excited over having strawberry jam and toast for breakfast. Frequents a nearby cafe with her friend and is slowly working her way down the menu. An incurable sweet tooth.
His soulmate does well in school. Not just well-read and studious, but clever, able to make inferences and decisions. Her basic judgement seems pretty impeccable, but she’s biased toward her friends, or rather, her friend. She mentions one “Ryoko” a lot, and not many other names.
His soulmate. His soulmate. His soulmate.
He doesn’t want to know her, doesn’t want to know her well enough to feel sorry for her when he drinks himself dead, doesn’t want to feel anything beside the tepid stupor he’s clinging to. He wants to disappear.
She writes and the words form chains binding him down.
---
He’s completely trashed when he finally lets himself get dragged into the soulmate snare, the physical allure of interacting finally too great for him to contest.
Eight months in, early afternoon on a Sunday, opening his eighth Asahi Kuronama can in two hours, Keiji gives in. It’s far too early to be piss drunk, but the hiss of the tab releasing is sweet to his ears, and he sloshes the can absently.
He writes a large sloppy “8” onto the can in permanent marker just to count off as yet another fucked up semi-animal is being doodled on his arm.
Not the first time his soulmate had shown off her truly atrocious drawing skills, but he kept overestimating her somehow. The fog of alcohol confuses the issue rather effectively.
He taps his uncapped marker consideringly against his cheek. An awful whim to tease her surfaces in his mind and he acts on it before he can think better of it.「For all you seem to like drawing, you really suck at it, huh」
His handwriting, hurried and brisk at the best of times, is messier than ever. Still, it’s legible.
There’s a brief pause of shocked silence. Despite all the pouting about his lack of response, for all those petty little stretches of retaliatory silence, his soulmate has genuinely fallen into a routine of writing to a wall.
Nevertheless, she cleanly wipes away his scrawl with a single unwasted motion.
「You’re talking to me?」she writes, almost in disbelief. Then she immediately adds an affronted,「I’m average at art!」
Unconsciously, one of his eyebrows rises.「Hate to see what you’d call bad then.」
Erasing his message with furious prejudice, she scribbles several very wonky angry faces instead. He draws an even more wonky sad face back and an arrow pointing at his soulmate’s aproximized emoticons.
At least he has the excuse of alcohol. He’s never seen so many straight lines in a circle before.
It’s too easy to fall into a comfortable banter. His heart lightened with booze, carries him along the wave of conversation, unnaturally natural. It’s so easy, he wonders why he never talked to her before, wonders what he was such a bullheaded asshole about.
They pass notes back and forth and Keiji has the sinking feeling he’s doing a fine job of replicating high school’s furtive classroom messaging, but he can’t bring himself to stop.
They talk late into the night, before Keiji notices her lines becoming sloppy, the spaces between her messages growing as she fights not to doze off.
「Go to sleep」He tells her. The shadows under his eyes sting with hypocrisy.
「...No.」She replies, mulishly.「I won’t.」
Keiji massages his face with exasperation.「Don’t be stupid. Go to sleep」
She pauses for a long while, and he almost thinks that she’s followed his advice, but words slowly appear
「I… don’t want you to disappear.」Each letter shakily written, unsure and vulnerable.「If I go to sleep, what if this all turns into a dream?」
Some of the words blot, and Keiji jolts as he recognizes that the stains are tears.
「... You never spoke to me before. You’re my soulmate, right? Why didn’t you talk to me? 」She rubs away the words haltingly, hesitant. In tiny letters, his soulmate writes「Did I do something wrong…? 」
He doesn’t know what to say.
「After all that time, you finally responded, but won’t you just disappear on me? I don’t know what I can do to make you stay...」The words are squished into themselves. The confidence of before, crushed into uncertainty.
His hand shakes.「... I won’t. I won’t disappear.」
Empty words. Keiji thinks he’ll regret it all tomorrow and cut off contact again. He thinks that he never should have spoken to her, that he made it worse for the both of them.
「... Promise?」
「... Promise. Talk to you tomorrow.」
He’s broken so many of his promises before. It won’t hurt much more to break another.
---
The next day comes. Keiji hasn’t slept.
A tentative 「... Good morning」shows up on his arm. The writing is weak. Cautious.「... Are you there...?」
For half an hour, Keiji stares at the ceiling, counting the dimples of the plaster. The bags under his eyes are heavy. He feels like he’s drowning.
On the bed stand next to his mattress, he’s exchanged the permanent marker for a pen.
Keiji writes back.「Suppose I am. … Good morning to you too.」
---
He gives in.
Her name is Sara. Spelled with “sa” from silk gauze, and ‘ra’ from good.
She’s in her second year of middle school. Unbearably young. He thought as much, but it was one thing to speculate and another thing to have it confirmed.
Keiji avoids all the personal questions she aims at him, but fills in his personal blanks and gaps of knowledge of his soulmate with wild abandon, capitulating to his own desires to understand her. Against what should be better judgement, Sara grumblingly acquiesces, searching for scraps of knowledge in his deflections.
It’s selfish; of course it is. Hypocrisy of the highest measure. Keiji takes advantage of her youth and warps their dialogue into something one-sided, inequal. He tells her he’s an adult, a man, that he’s in Japan along with her, and shuts down on anything else. He’ll let himself be distracted if she follows his lead.
The silent terms of the game. If Sara wants to talk, it won’t be about himself.
She’s too desperate not to play along, and Keiji hides his relief in nonchalance.
---
Every time he writes to Sara, Keiji feels like he’s on wires. He keeps his secrets close to heart, but with every stroke of a pen, he feels the pull, he wants to tell her everything, to answer all her questions from the ridiculous to the inconsequential to the ones that would strip him to the bone.
He’s regularly corresponding to her nowadays, returning to some form of a schedule and keeping time by her messages. He wakes up to her good mornings, and lets himself get bullied into accompanying her while she eats. Sara tells him that food tastes better with company, and then hastily erases her chiding instructions before her friend can tease her about being a mother hen.
Simple conversations. Comfortable chats.
It’s easy to talk to Sara. She wrings out every inch of studicial knowledge he has, intent on using all her potential resources to learn. She exclaims about passing cats in the street while going out, adorably excited about the cafe cat with pink paw pads she sees when she grabs bubble tea.
It’s easy. It’s easy. Everything’s unbearably easy, and Keiji waits for the other shoe to drop, knowing it would have to at some point. Knowing that he can’t expect things to keep going well.
It’s easy until it isn’t, and mid-conversation one day, he chokes as bleeding rot overpowers the air. A caustic incredulous chuckle starts ringing around the room, and a hand grasps for his neck, strangling him.
Enjoying yourself, Keiji? Think you deserve to be happy?
Killer.
Killer.
Killer.
You killed me!
Dizzied, he lurches to his feet and up and over. Shakily, he grabs for the trash can as bile rises up. He pukes his guts out into the bin, emptying the contents of his stomach into the plastic.
He can’t think straight, there’s only the awful stench of his digestive tract and overwhelming blood.
His head spins. His throat is on fire.
The nausea slowly leaves him, caressing goosebumps down his spine. His limbs are rubbery; Keiji rests his forehead against the white of the wall, too weak to move away.
Little worried comments have erupted on his arm, wondering if something happened.
He breathes, once, twice, and stands up. Washing his mouth out with the sink tap, Keiji pulls himself together, piece by piece.
Picking up his dropped pen, he settles into the beat up couch again and interrupts her concerned questioning.「Sorry to worry you. Something came up. I’m back now.」
「... Okay.」Disbelief etched into every doubtful letter.
But Sara knows better than to ask now, knows that he won’t answer anything he doesn’t want to. That he’ll punish her for curiosity with silence.
Keiji wishes he was a better man.
「Really. I’m sorry.」
「I want one thousand apologies.」A petulant complaint born out of hidden worry.
「Fair enough. 」He’d apologize a million times, if it mattered.「Hope you’ll settle for installments, Sara.」
… He doesn’t deserve her in the least.
---
A year passes. His soulmate is as much part of his life as his ghosts, inextricably intertwined. He doesn’t know if he regrets it; he can barely remember his life before.
They write and write and write.
Suddenly, Sara stops talking mid-conversation and Keiji blinks.
A rambling rant about school examinations and applications interrupted with a long pause. Then, an abrupt change in subject.
「I’m still mad at you for ignoring me for all those months.」Her words are sharp and pointed.
To be honest, he figured as much. Who’d forget their soulmate ghosting them for months? Her anger is understandable. It’s righteous. Still, he plays dumb.「Huh. That so?」
Sara’s response is prompt.「Yes. So you better be prepared. I’m not going to just keep writing to you like this indefinitely.」
His chest throbs, and Keiji pauses, unsure of where this might be leading; it doesn’t take long for her to continue.
「 You can’t expect me to be a child forever. I’m entering highschool soon, and I’ll graduate before you know it and 」 She hesitates a fraction of a second before wiping the mark clear and continuing,「 I'll find you. You won’t be able to dodge my questions in person, and you won’t be able to ignore me then, either.」
His brain itches. As if something in him’s shifted a few feet left and he still hasn’t noticed what.「... We’ll see. Guess it won’t hurt for you to give it a try.」
「I won’t hold back」she said, and then very bluntly.「I’m going to yell at you a lot.」
The answer is so unbearably like her, and a warm wave of affection washes over him.「Looking forward to it then」
A reflexive answer, unthinkingly said.
Keiji stops cold, almost dropping his pen when he realizes. Looking forward- how did those words come to mind? After all he’s done, he still…? His hand shakes with the weight of his honesty. It’s all too sincere and all too suggestive. As much as he regrets writing it, there’s no taking it back.
Scrambling to cover it up, to regain some control, Keiji desperately changes the topic and swallows his internal turmoil back. He tries for insouciance, to tease her into the cute little hissy fits that leave her annoyed and petulant and completely unwilling to talk to him for the next few hours or so.
「Hope you’ll get better at art at that point, Sara.」Pushing onwards heedlessly, he continues with his heart stuck in his throat.「Middle school is one thing, but drawing like this as a highschooler? That’d just be tragic.」
He lets the words sink in before dropping in a last parting shot「Spare your new classmates, alright? I can’t run away, but you wanna make friends in high school, right?」
「Punishment」She sulkily replies, and starts doodling. Painfully abstract figures take form on his arm like a curse.
Gut still rolling in fear, Keiji eyes the badly-drawn spread of what must be flowers and starts laughing.
Powerlessly, witlessly. Every hoarse chuckle ruptures from his throat like stitches ripping loose. His voice lost into the emptiness like dandelion florets blown away into the wind.
He doesn’t know when they turn to tears, hot wet tracks dripping down his face. Helplessly, he buries his head into his hands, wetting his palms.
He gives up. He’s doomed. Drawn into her childish traps. She’s won, that soulmate of his. Somehow she’s tricked him into it, knocked his self-destructive path right around. Somehow, she’s gotten him to look forward again.
Ah, he’s been disappointing for far too long; it’s the least he could do for her if he at least does this much. His poor soulmate, chained to a murderer for the rest of her life...
A certain thing? Not at all.
...But for the first time in a long while, he wants to live.
He wants to meet her, get yelled at, turn her threats into reality. He wants to expose his soul and bare his throat for her judgement. If she condemns him, that’ll be up to her. Sara, bright-eyed, clever, and kind. Sara, who’s righteous, who has only a bright future ahead of her. Sara, his soulmate.
He’s been hesitating too long, unwilling and too cowardly to take a step in either direction. A fence-sitter wallowing in his own self-hate.
Words like silk gossamer wrap around him, her promises to him collaring him up, tying ribbons around his wrists.
That night, his sleep is blissfully dreamless.
