Chapter Text
The day Shinichi was supposed to talk to his soulmate for the first time was roughly a month before his eighth birthday, or so the ever-decreasing number on his shoulder blade indicated. But the day came and went, and in the end none of the people he’d encountered had fitting numbers. Naturally, the confusion was understandably big when, without warning, the counter displayed ‘-1’ the next day and continued decreasing with every passing twenty-four hours. As far as his parents were aware, an abnormality like this hadn’t occurred before.
Sure, there were cases where a person died before they could meet their soulmate. In which case the universe decided, cruel as it was, to permanently burn the number onto the person’s skin, a living reminder for an encounter that would never happen. Then, there were people who didn’t have a soulmate in the first place, and consecutively weren’t born with any mark at all, and the people who had more than one soulmate and were thus born with several marks.
This all didn’t explain why Shinichi’s counter suddenly decided to go berserk and run backwards. It didn’t make any sense to him no matter how much he, or his parents for that matter, researched the topic. Meeting your soulmate was, of course, a matter of fate, a constant in the in universe. Even if you’d decide to stay at home the day your counter runs out, you’d meet your soulmate that day, one way or another. So, what kind of negative karma Shinichi had collected in his very short life to have ticked off the universe in such a disastrous way, he couldn’t tell. Instead of leading him, he was marked with an ever-ongoing reminder of a day where he should have gotten what was promised to him. Really, all he’d gotten was a keepsake that he had fucked up gloriously. It was worse than having your soulmate die before you could have the chance the meet them, for all Shinichi could care, as he got the notion that this was solely his fault.
That was, naturally, the first time the whole soulmate business had left him in dismay. He didn’t quite understand it at that point, being too young for the whole ordeal, but everybody around him seemed to be visibly upset, even if they didn’t necessarily show it to him. He was smart enough to figure it out, anyway.
Years went by, and the feeling of dismay turned into absolute frustration. His counter had already crossed much below -2000, making it extremely obvious that there was absolutely nothing he could do about the whole matter. That, however, didn’t change the fact how he felt every time he looked at Ran, followed by a pang of disappointment. Because, obviously with his rotten luck, Ran had a counter, one that counted towards a summer day right after her 19th birthday.
Shinichi hated the soulmate business. He absolutely did. It was genuinely easy to do. Dealing with it might have been easier if he didn’t have a soulmate in the first place, but knowing that he had the chance and then it was taken from him was making it indefinitely worse. He was bitter about it, not that he’d ever let anyone know. So, naturally, he did the next best thing he could do. He pretended he didn’t care.
But the mark wasn’t the only thing he hated. He hated the universe, and very frankly, the universe hated him back. It wasn’t just the mark. No, by now he seemed to have turned into a walking grim reaper, and in some ridiculous twist of fate he had been forced to live in the body of a seven-year-old for the better part of the last year.
In one way or another it made it easier, but honestly, Shinichi had stopped caring at this point. Over the years the people around him knew not to mention their soul marks at all if they could help it. He hadn’t actually told people to stop, but Ran went out of her way to make sure about it, likely very much aware how he actually felt about the whole misery.
After he shrunk, people were curious. Too curious for his taste, really, but he knew it was only natural. But however much he hated the situation he’d found himself in, it did provide him with a new opportunity. So, he told them he wasn’t born with any mark at all. Sure enough, the asking lessened and he was once again left in sweet denial.
The months went by, and one morning while he was getting ready to go to school, he drastically fucked up.
“Oh, Conan-kun, you do have a soulmark!” Ran mentioned, while leaning against the door frame. She was ready earlier than usual, and Shinichi didn’t hear her move over towards their room.
Every morning he’d put in extra effort to make sure she didn’t see his mark. Maybe it was the lack of sleep that had haunted him in recent months and that had finally caught up to him; maybe it was the negligence that came with repeating the same action too many times. But whatever the cause, it didn’t change what he was about to face.
When did he get so careless? Months had gone by and with painstaking effort he had been trying to keep Ran from finding out that he was indeed Kudou Shinichi, all for it to crumble in a blink of an eye. She must have seen it, that he had in fact the same soul mark position as Shinichi, and what was undoubtedly worse, that his counter was running backwards. He frantically covered his shoulders with his shirt.
“Ah, Ran-neechan, it’s not what you think!”
It was a poor attempt, really, but the evidence against him was so crushing there wasn’t much left to do.
But she wasn’t angry, nor did she have that look she always got when she was certain she’d figured out Conan and Shinichi were in fact the same person. She just smiled at him.
“I know you’ve been telling everyone that you don’t have a mark. But having a soulmate isn’t a bad thing at all, I am for one really looking forward to when I meet mine. But I see that maybe something bad has happened when you met? I’m always here for you if you want to talk, you know that, right?”
He blinked at her. He couldn’t even bring himself to feel hurt at the mention of Ran’s soulmate, because in some fit of sheer luck, she didn’t seem to have noticed the negative number displayed along his back. That was probably Shinichi’s luck used up for the next century.
“Thank you, Ran-neechan,” he stammered, because he couldn’t make sense of half the words she just said. What was that about her telling him he’d already met his soulmate? Did she mistake the counter for an actual mark?
When she was gone, he lowered his shirt enough to risk a sideways glance into the mirror and-
What the ever-loving hell.
Shinichi closed his eyes, wondering if he was in fact still asleep or by now so sleep-deprived he had finally lost it. But when he opened them again, the mark was still there.
What he had been seeing across his back, a number running negatively into the thousands, was replaced by something else entirely. Nested on the bottom of his right shoulder blade was a small four-leaved clover. His timer had run out and with Shinichi’s utter streak of bad luck he’d missed it. Which was just absolutely splendid. But there was no time to succumb to self-pity with Ran just out of the room, so instead he covered his shoulder back up and went out.
Before he got to bed that evening, however, he locked himself into the bathroom. Opening the buttons of his shirt he slowly lowered the sleeve, not sure if he was ready to see what his back had to show. There was still a small chance he’d made the whole thing up this morning. When the ink became visible, he blinked at the small mark several times. It was still there, the small clover in black ink against his skin. But when did it change, and why did it change now and not the first time around when he had met his soulmate? Were the circumstances not right? Was he too young? Was this a different person he was supposed to meet altogether? It made so little sense. He stared at it for several long moments. How absolutely ironic was it that he was marked with a clover when he was attracting bad luck like moths to a flame?
When the clover continued to stay on his shoulder for several days, however, Shinichi decided he may as well try to come to a conclusion about what had happened that made his timer run out and change.
He hadn’t figured out why his first number didn’t lead to the encounter that he had been looking forward to for the longest time, nor why the second one started counting backwards. He had never heard of a counter appearing halfway through a person’s life, usually, when people were granted more than one soulmate, the counters were all present with birth, so it really made no sense that his decided to jump around at random and then decided to just run out on him.
Thus, he found himself on the sofa in the professor’s house.
“You said you needed advice?” Haibara said, lounged on the sofa opposite from him, a book laying open on her lap.
“Yes, basically. It’s about my soulmark.”
She looked up from her lap and eyed him with one raised eyebrow.
“Oh? I thought somebody is vehemently denying actually having one?”
Shinichi rolled his eyes.
“Come on, I know you know. You’ve never bothered to actually ask for mine, and you always give me that look whenever somebody brings up marks.”
“Well, of course I don’t bother asking for yours. I don’t have one, after all, so the whole business isn’t really one for me to put much effort in. But okay, go on, what did you want to talk about.”
Shinichi took a deep breath. It had been over a decade that he purposely sought out to mention his mark, and old habits definitely died hard.
“The reason I’ve been telling people that I don’t have a mark is because mine is… behaving oddly.
“I was born with a normal timer that ran out in April just before my eighth birthday, just that I… I didn’t talk to anyone that day that had a matching counter. Frankly, that shouldn’t be possible, and my parents tried to figure out if they missed anything. Until the next day, when the counter started going backwards. So, for the last decade or so I have been having a negative decreasing number on my back.”
Haibara blinked at him, a frown on her face.
“That is certainly uncommon. And understandable why you avoid the topic so much. Besides the obvious frustration that it brings, it would be a dead giveaway to your identity. So, what happened that you come to talk about it now?”
“It changed. The counter ran out and I know have a small clover on my back instead.”
“When did it change?”
Shinichi had no answer to that, despite trying to figure out a solution to that exact problem for the last couple of days.
“I am not sure. Sometime between I’d say half a year ago and last week. It might have been longer than that, even, maybe a year? I don’t like being reminded about the issue, so I never check it. With the way it had been running backwards without any hope of stopping, there was frankly also no need to check it.”
“I see. What made you check it this time?”
“Uh, I just accidentally saw it in the mirror.”
Her expression immediately became disapproving. He should have known.
“You are the worst liar I have ever seen. Somebody has seen it, is that it? Was it Mouri-san?”
At his insufficiency to formulate a reply, she got up and paced around the couches.
“Kudou-kun, you can’t keep doing this. It’s been mere weeks since I’ve bailed you out of that hospital dilemma, have you forgotten about that? And yet here you are, letting the person that has been correctly assuming your identity on several occasions look at your mark like it’s no big deal. Do you know what the Organization will do when they find out who you are? Do you know what they will do to her?”
Haibara was properly yelling now.
“I know, I know, we’ve been over this. I am usually more careful, it’s just-“
“Well, ‘usually’ isn’t really cutting it now, is it? What good does it do when you are careful ninety-nine times out of a hundred but that one time you get found out? I cannot whip out antidotes for you every other week just because you decide you have one of your reckless streaks. What if you still had that negative timer on your back? You-“
Shinichi had enough, really. He knew he’d fucked up and he expected being scolded, but he definitely didn’t come here just to be yelled at.
“Well, I didn’t, okay? She didn’t see anything problematic, hell, she’d likely seen something that makes her believe that I cannot be Shinichi after all, shouldn’t that make you happy? But it’s done now, I can’t change it anymore, okay?”
Haibara stopped and glared at him but lowered herself back onto the couch after a moment, the look on her face telling Shinichi this wasn’t over yet.
“You are lucky that she saw the timer after it changed.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m usually bathing in good luck,” Shinichi muttered under his breath.
“It’s funny how you were marked with a clover, I enjoy the irony. But why are you coming to me of all people? You know I don’t have a mark.”
“See, I was wondering if this has anything to do with the shrinking. My parents did a lot of research when I didn’t meet my soulmate, and it doesn’t seem like there has ever been a recorded case like mine with a negative timer or a timer that ran out without a meeting. Because I was supposed to meet my soulmate when I was seven, but nothing happened, and now it changed at some point when I was technically seven, though not really, I suppose.”
Haibara studied him for a long moment before crossing her arms.
“That is actually surprisingly clever. Well done, Kudou-kun.”
“Oioi, what is that supposed to mean?”
“That means that you should watch your back better or the next time I won’t be that pleasant to deal with. However, I believe you might have a point. The science concerning soulmates is tricky and definitely not fully understood yet, but research has shown that the counter is somewhat anchored in the DNA. It makes sense really, how would your body know about the time and date and what to display on your skin, so what it shows instead is the biological age your body holds when you first meet your soulmate. As your encounter was supposed to happen when you were seven but alas, nothing happened you have met your soulmate in the last, what did you say? Half a year or longer? Congratulations.”
Shinichi let out a groan.
What was he supposed to do with that now? He had suspected as much, that was the sole reason he came to speak to Haibara in the first place, but to have it confirmed was another matter altogether.
So, he had a soulmate after all. And that one encounter he was supposed to have which he had beaten himself up over for the last decade-or-so wasn’t likely supposed to happen after all. Which was just absolutely freaking great. So now he was sitting here with absolutely no means of communication to the person he might or might not have met in the last year-or-so. He had no idea who it was, and from the lack of interaction he had with his potential soulmate, the person either didn’t notice, didn’t realize, or didn’t care. Maybe they were so scandalized by the fact that he was a child that they didn’t feel comfortable talking to him in the first place. Shinichi couldn’t blame them, he would be thoroughly confused if he was an adult and his soulmate ended up being an elementary school child and, oh god, what if his soulmate was one of his classmates? That would explain why he wasn’t able to meet his soulmate the first time around, they wouldn’t have been born yet. The thought sent him reeling. What was he about to do about that, did that mean he was supposed to stuck in this body forever? Did that mean that he’d just have to wait it out for however much time it takes until the age gap was somewhat manageable?
“Oi, Kudou-kun did your brain finally decided to combust, or?”
Shinichi blinked up at Haibara who waved a hand in front of his face. He narrowed his eyes.
“It isn’t you, is it?”
“You are as stupid as you look, really. Next time I insult your intelligence and you get all defensive, please remind me about this conversation, will you? I do not have a mark, and compared to someone I have no reason to hide it. We’d make a cute couple, though,” she flipped herself back onto the couch, book back open in her lap.
“Oi, that’s not what I meant,” Shinichi replied sheepishly.
“I know.”