Chapter Text
Katsuki is nineteen when his soulmark stops counting down.
One day, he wakes up, and the number on his hipbone is the same as it was yesterday. 1,532. That’s how many days he had left until he finally met them.
But it doesn’t change anymore, which means now, he won’t.
Soulmarks can freeze for a number of reasons. It can happen when a person’s soulmate dies in a freak accident, something that even fate can’t plan for. Rarely, it happens when a person has two soulmates, and they meet the other one first.
But most commonly, and what Katsuki figures is the most likely explanation in his case, is that his soulmate got their mark removed. By choice.
It happens, sometimes. It’s a fairly new procedure, something that had been gaining some traction over the past few years. There are people who want to take their fate into their own hands, so they get their marks removed and live their lives the way they want to, rather than living their lives waiting for someone to complete them.
Or whatever. Katsuki’s never particularly felt that way about it - he never thought he was waiting for anything. He knew he’d meet his soulmate, and then he’d figure it out from there. His soulmate didn’t even have to be the love of his life, necessarily. Some people had platonic soulmates.
Plus, in about three months, his number would change. That’s what happened to the people whose soulmates opted out. They got another one. One day he’d wake up with a completely new number and a completely different soulmate. Another person left behind by their original soulmate.
His parents were soulmates, and when his dad was fifteen, his mark froze. He got a new one, and when he was twenty-two, he met Katsuki’s mom, whose mark had frozen as a child. She jokes that her original soulmate must have been an eighty year old who died before she was old enough to even know what a soulmate was.
The thought made Katsuki a little sad, though he’d never admit it. That meant that his mother’s original soulmate probably lived a lonely life. He thinks about his neighbor, a woman in her sixties named Sanae, who still has thirteen years left before she’s supposed to meet her soulmate. Katsuki knows that by that time, she’ll only have a few years with them before it’s over. And he knows it’s stupid to get mad at the idea of soulmates when he finds out, because it’s not like it happened to Sanae on purpose. It’s just how life is sometimes.
Katsuki is 19 when his soulmark freezes.
He thinks he’ll get a new one. A new number. A new soulmate.
He never does.
“1,532” stays, unmoving, on his hipbone. And it never changes.
-x-
Katsuki is 23, and he’s sitting on Sanae’s front porch. They’re talking, like they do every Wednesday, when Katsuki brings home katsudon from the restaurant he works in.
Her soulmark froze a year ago. She cried when she told Katsuki.
“I spent my life waiting for them,” she’d said through quiet tears. “I miss someone I never even met.”
Katsuki’s mark had been frozen for three years by then. He found out about a year after it froze that it’s rare for a person not to get a new one, that it means they had only one soulmate.
Katsuki remembers being angry when he found out. When Sanae said she misses someone she never met, Katsuki thought of how much he hated someone he never met.
And it’s not the same thing, he knows. But they’d both been left behind.
Sanae got another mark three months later, and she’s got another year and a half to wait for that one. “I’ve never heard of anyone who had to wait this long,” she said, “except maybe you.” And Katsuki had scoffed and pushed her katsudon out of her reach and told her that bitchy old women don’t get free food.
“I bet your soulmate is just like you,” she grins. “Rude.”
“Was,” he corrects her, scowling. “I don’t have a soulmate anymore.”
It’s custom to cover soulmarks, but Katsuki doesn’t know why. He’s glad for it, because it means no one can see that his never changes. He never has to explain it. When people ask, he just says he’s got a long time left, and people usually leave it at that, because almost everyone knows someone like Sanae, who was born with a soulmark of a number of almost 30,000. Most people don’t ask about them at all for that reason.
When two soulmates meet, their soulmarks tick down to zero, and the zero changes color from black to white. Most people stop covering them then. Or, at least, they stop making the extra effort to cover them. Soulmarks are positioned over a person’s hipbone, so it’s not like they’re on full display all the time anyway. Katsuki wears a small piece of black tape over his when he’s in a situation where someone might see it.
Katsuki leans back in the chair and crosses his arms. He looks over at Sanae, who’s staring at him with an unreadable expression on her face.
“Was supposed to be this year,” he says, and he blinks four times in quick succession.
“You’ll still meet them. Do you think you’ll know?” She’s stopped looking at him now, choosing instead to lay her head back on her chair and close her eyes.
Katsuki hasn’t thought about it. He’d just assumed that once the soulmark froze, it meant the bond did, too, so fate had no control over his soulmate’s life. They had freed themselves.
It sounded stupid once he really considered it. What was fate but a messenger? Obviously he would still meet his soulmate. Everything he’d read about people who’d gotten stuck forever with one frozen mark had just found someone else. They’d all gotten their marks removed eventually.
As to whether or not he’d know, though - maybe?
“Would you want to know?”
Easy.
“No.”
Sanae gets a look on her face that immediately pisses Katsuki off, and she cocks an eyebrow at him when she notices his jaw clench.
“Some people think they have good reasons for removing their marks, Katsuki.” She sighs and takes a sip of her tea. She puts one of her weathered hands on her lap, thumb resting over the spot where Katsuki knows her mark sits. “Some people are scared.”
Obviously , Katsuki thinks. His soulmate was weak and scared and honestly, fucking mean. He couldn’t understand why his soulmate didn’t have the decency to at least say to his face hey, I decided a long time ago that I didn’t want you .
Sanae sighs again, because when she starts thinking about her decades of life experience, she gets tired. “Katsuki,” a long pause, “you’re going to know your soulmate. You don’t have a choice. You can cut down every flower, but spring happens anyway.”