Chapter Text
The mark never asked for permission.
It came the way no one ever chooses change to come: quietly and inevitably.
People said it was a physiological phenomenon, something similar to puberty — a body learning how to carry the weight of fate. On the night someone turned sixteen, the skin began to change. Melanin appeared in excess, gathering in a single place, as if the body itself knew exactly where to leave its mark.
There was pain.
Burning.
Fever.
Sometimes, the body gave in before the mind could understand.
That was why so many slept through it. Not out of fear, but out of hope — the hope that, when they woke up, destiny would already be decided.
In the first few days, nothing could be clearly seen. Swelling distorted the shape, hiding the truth beneath redness and inflammation. Only with time did the mark reveal itself fully: defined, permanent.
There was no way to erase it.
There never had been.
At eighteen, the process repeated itself. But black was no longer enough. Color emerged — vivid and alive, capable of changing over time. Along with it came the initials of the destined other.
No one knew why.
They only knew that it was so.
And that it had always been.
The origin of the mark came from an old myth, passed down in whispers.
Long before flowers bloomed on skin, there lived a woman named Flora. She begged the gods to guide her to love. She begged for years. She begged until her youth faded and solitude became her only companion.
Still, she did not give up.
Eros, god of impulsive love, and Anteros, god of mutual love, heard her plea. They touched her skin and gave her a mark — the first soulmark. A sign. A path.
After her, others began to receive marks of their own. Flowers drawn on the body, meant to guide each person toward what they were missing. The flower became a silent tribute to Flora, a recognition of faith that never broke.
Shoyo grew up believing that destiny was kind.
The idea that someone, somewhere in the world, could accept him completely warmed him from the inside out. He was raised surrounded by love — calm, steady love that never demanded proof.
Every night, his mother told him the story of Flora before bed. He listened with bright eyes, even though he knew every word by heart.
She carried heliotropes on her shoulder, lilac and white — flowers of devotion and eternal love. His father bore peach blossoms along his fingers, symbols of purity and loyalty.
To Shoyo, that was happiness.
He imagined his own flower the way one imagines the future.
Carefully.
Hopefully.
He thought of soft colors, of something beautiful enough to justify the wait. He believed that when his skin was finally marked, everything would make sense. That he would not be alone. That destiny, in the end, always knew what it was doing.
Atsumu learned early that destiny was not so gentle.
He saw that even soulmates were not protected from disappointment. His parents were bound by a mark that did not know how to love. His father tried, day after day, to reach someone who remained distant, hidden behind a wall no one dared to cross.
One day, Atsumu saw his father’s mark by accident.
Yellow carnations.
Rejection.
The word stayed with him long before he fully understood it. Confused, he asked why his father kept trying.
His father answered with a tired smile.
“Your mother protects herself behind a wall. She’s afraid of getting hurt. I don’t want to tear it down. I just want to leave a mark deep enough that one day she’ll step out on her own… and choose to stay.”
Atsumu believed those words.
He kept them like a promise.
Until the night his father disappeared.
No warnings.
No goodbyes.
Only forgotten cookbooks left on a shelf — and a certainty broken beyond repair.
Destiny was wrong.
And it failed badly.
Atsumu grew up hard, too intense to fit inside other people. Osamu learned how to adapt. Atsumu did not.
He was excess.
Noise.
Fury tangled with passion.
People drifted away, and he pretended not to care. Eventually, he stopped trying.
Volleyball became everything.
It was simple. It demanded total commitment. It promised no eternal love and no happy endings — only effort, sweat, and truth.
Still, deep down, there was fear.
When he turned sixteen, the mark appeared beneath his bicep, stretching down to the back of his hand. An entire rosebush bloomed across his skin — alive, detailed, cruelly beautiful.
But there was no joy.
Only the suffocating weight of expectation.
The fear of disappointing even the one destiny had chosen for him.
The fear of being rejected once again.