Chapter Text
The mark is reasonably well hidden. It could be better, like on your inner thigh where no one could see it in expected situations, but it could be worse, like on your wrist, plain to see for everyone, everyday, no way to hide it unless you covered it regularly. It is reasonably small as well, a tiny spot, it’s form nothing unordinary or special, just below the front of your left rib cage.
Easily hidden and easily ignored.
Not that you mind about the whole soulmate thing to make a big effort to hide it, it’s something that exists, something everyone has to live with, just part of life, part of growing up, part of growing old. It’s insignificant for you, that’s what you’d like to make everyone believe. But in reality, it buggs you. If you were honest, you weren’t fond of the mark and its meaning. It supposedly decides who you’d spend the rest of your life with. Fate deciding a commitment that significant for you, with no opinion of your own, doesn’t sit right with you.
It feels forced, even if everyone around you, everyone you opened up to about your doubts, be it friends or family or occasional counselors specifically there to discuss such topics, assured you you have a choice, and that ‘when you meet that person, your soulmate, it’d feel reasonable that this person was your other half, that they’d feel like home.’
Running your fingers over the mark, glaring slightly at its reflection in your mirror, you consider the worst that could happen: it could be someone criminal, someone evil. It could be someone uncaring. It could be someone who’d destroy the tranquility and quiet of your life.
You hope it’s someone calm and collected, someone kind and caring you could lean on. But more than that, you hope you could choose yourself who to call your soulmate.
You don’t consider the fact that what you wish for could be combined with the destruction of your monotonous life, and neither do you consider the worst option of all: a soulmate the vessel of something evil, a soulmate scheduled to die.
-
Books of all sizes and widths are stacked on top of a library table below an open window, the soft spring breeze making the odd loose papers in between pages flutter lightly. Each stack is of one genre, the topics the same for all books;
‘true’ paranormal happenings, mysterious and/or unexplained crimes, silly guides to summon ghosts and demons, as well as guides to haunted places and objects, some concentrating on only Japan, others including the entire world.
You had them stacked up throughout the morning after a second-year girl asked you to find every book about anything relating to the occult the school library held. Admittedly, you didn’t expect to find any at all when you started your exploration, both because you weren’t too familiar with each shelf yet, what with being new to the library club, but also because of what to be expected to be found in them: books on various subjects to study, with the occasional classic and fantasy read among them.
The books you did find were an impressive amount, considering your initial presumption.
“I think this is about all there is here, at least all I could find for the time being. What did you say you need them for again?” You ask, looking curiously at the pair in front of you, head tilted slightly. They dont look much like members of anything occult related, just two simple students, a girl with short dark hair, her fingers twitching slightly while she looks excitedly at the books on the table, and a tall boy, eyes shining in equal excitement. For an essay, maybe? Not that it was any of your business, but this was an unusual request.
The girl grins at you as she answers with a simple “for our club!”
Ah, you think, the club that’s barely staying alive.
“Well, they’re all yours, as long as you bring them back in one piece.”
They both smile at you, offering a thanks, then move to pick them up and as you turn to head back into the back of the library, intrigued at the challenge of finding more books for the two of them, you hear the girl whisper: “we should let Itadori carry all of this.” before she calls to you a bit louder, “can we leave them here for a bit? We’ll send someone to pick them up!”
“Sure.”
-
Yuji Itadori was exactly what you did not want as a soulmate; as the person you’d spend the rest of your life with together. Not that he seemed unkind or uncaring, quite the opposite. He seemed like a very nice guy, and he definitely wasn’t a criminal.
What bothered you was his energy and soulfulness. It just wouldn’t fit with your lack of it.
You’re alone in the room, the other members having left earlier than usual, something about a book club meeting, you overheard. You didn’t mind spending the time alone, browsing through the shelves in the farthest corner from the door, arranging messily left books while also still searching for anything that could interest the occult research club. You’d be happy to offer them more, and you found yourself quite interested in the topic as well, although you’d have never looked into it without this prompt.
The sound of books sliding off each other and landing on the floor one after another makes you jump, your finger stopping its course of running down the spine of of a thick book, it’s golden lettering which captured your attention earlier now forgotten as you hold still, waiting.
A thump and a following chant of ‘no, no, no’ followed by a loud, defeated sigh make you give a sigh of yourself, albeit quietly enough for only you to hear, just a mildly stronger exhalation of air as you step away from the book, noting it I the back of your mind for later use, and walk past shelves and desks to the source of the curses and fallen books.
Crouching in front of the table, rubbing the spot on his head suspiciously right underneath the corner of the open window, the books scattered on the table and floor, some hanging on to the table desperately with an uneven amount of pages still on top, the other hanging over the edge, and loose papers all over the ground around him, sits who you assume to be the collector of the books for the occult club. He looks up up at you, big bright eyes and a sheepish grin, as you step closer, picking up a rather slim book off the floor, smoothing down its corners and put it back on the table.
“Sorry!,” he almost screams as he tears his gaze away from you, quickly picking up the books and papers, just to get up abruptly, just barely avoiding another clash of the window and his head.
“Maybe they should have asked you for help instead of sending you on your own,” your voice is quiet, always so quiet.
“Nah,” he replies with a grin, motioning to the book left on the table and you carefully add it to the stack in his arms, “’s fine.”
Maybe you tried to find fault in him because he made you feel something you’d never experienced. Maybe you didn’t want to admit he would be what you needed in your life.
-
Yuji Itadori is your soulmate and you’d hide your mark with more caution than ever until the day you’d leave this place.
This time the fault wasn’t put on him, no, this time you were fully aware that it is your own heart telling you with a slight pressure that you wish he wasn’t your soulmate so that you could get to know him as any other boy, befriend and maybe, just maybe, fall in love. You don’t want it to feel like it’s fate deciding for you.
You don’t learn of it in the magical way you often overheard other girls swoon about, or at least you like to think so. There’s no sense of belonging the first time you met, and there is no big confession of ‘we seem to match, and I knew there was something special about you the moment I met you.’ The way you learn of it is an accident, and you don’t mention it to him. You keep this little secret for yourself, even if you feel bad that in the end, this would mean he’d never find his soulmate.
Winter is close that fateful day, and a too early snow started falling at noon. Quietly cursing under your breath, you watch the soft flakes fall from a gray sky, just to dissolve as they hit the surface. You’re alone again. Solitary, quiet, peaceful. You didn’t expect it to turn so cold today, and much less for snow to start falling. It would be hell to leave the warmth of the school and walk home in just your uniform.
A knock on the door draws your attention away from the freezing world outside.
Walking in, a hand up in greeting, Yuji grins at you, then glances at the table you’re leaning on. He’s here to collect the so called treasures.
It’s a regular thing by now, him coming by on a mission to ask you for more books for the club, though most of the time you have nothing to offer him. Every time you meekly apologized, he’d simply salute you, telling you he’d be back for the treasure.
(Generally the two of you started seeing each other more and more at school, although most of the time it was him running past you with unnatural speed, shouting a greeting and goodbye at the same time.)
Today, however, you have something. Telling him to stay put, you walk into the back, seeking the big book with its golden letters and worn spine. It had been forgotten the past times, forgotten as your attention shifted to other books, as your thoughts got trapped on him while sitting in the quiet, the other club members seemingly always out for something else, only present if needed. (How the club survived that, you’d stopped asking yourself.)
Finger slipping into the space between the upper shelf division and the book, you pull it out carefully, holding it with your other hand. It’s heavy. It’s also very, very unsettling.
‘curses&souls’
What you found in it as you skimmed through the pages was not what you thought. Being scared and immediately hushing to another book, far, far from that one, was not something that regularly happened. It isn’t the whole explanation of beings born of negative emotions and their roles in the world of soulmates that makes you want to stay away from it, but the way it’s written. The way it pulled you in and made you feel as if it was all real.
Perfect for the occult research club.
Yuji is looking out the window, eyes following snowflake after snowflake. He turns to you as you clear your throat, standing next to him, holding the heavy book out. His smile is bright enough to bring back summer.
“What’d you say we leave together? My club’s done earlier and I still got some time to kill. Doesn’t look like there’s much going on in here either.”
“I-...yeah.”
-
The moment you step out of the building a shiver runs through you, the wind guiding snow in your direction and with clattering teeth you curse yourself for not having brought a coat. Your companion is already a bit ahead of you, seemingly no care in the world, at least not for the weather. He turns as he realizes there aren’t steps following him, eyeing you questioningly as you looks you up and down until a light seems to go on in his head as his eyes settle on your shivering arm.
You open your mouth to tell him you’re fine, setting one foot in front of the other to start following him, but he’s faster, of course he is, as he walks back to you, retracing his steps, fingers already buried beneath the hem of his hoodie. And then he lifts it up over his head.
There are too many things running through your head, too many things to concentrate on, things to avoid looking at and think altogether. But the moment you want to complain about him getting cold, to tell him in a quiet voice that it’s fine, really, just as you want to avert your gaze, you spot his skin as the shirt underneath his hoodie rides up along with his fingers, and you see it.
Right before the shirt falls back down, you glimpse a familiar mark beneath his rib-cage.
And then your world turns dark, and warm, and soft. So, so soft. Heart racing and head swimming as you’re surrounded by the scent of him, you vaguely realize he’s pulling his hoodie over your head, moving your arms into the sleeves as if you were a doll, and you’re glad. Because you just stand there, frozen not by the cold but the warmth spreading though your whole body.
And he just stands there, in front of you, smiling cheekily, hair tousled.
-
The day Yuji Itadori ceases to come to school you feel something not too different from heartbreak.
-
The hoodie is lost in the depths of your closet, not forgotten but hidden, occasionally pulled out, just to be put back in. It’s the only thing you have left of your soulmate. Refusing to give it back to him over the course of time, he seemed to have forgotten about it. And then he left.
You’d hold onto it until the day you could give it back to him.