Chapter Text
“I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do, and at such a moment one feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep, dark well, utterly helpless.”
- Vincent Van Gogh
~0~
Nobody ever remembers their first soulmate mark.
It was always the parents who saw the first, and the second, and the third, and all the rest until their child was three or four years of age, and could begin to understand the meaning of the blue and gray markings that dotted or striped their skin. The soulmate marks appeared and disappeared like the true wounds that triggered them: deep electric blue when they were fresh, conspicuous on any skin, and then lightening as they faded, from paling blue, to gray, to finally white on the day they fade away.
Well, save for the scars. The scars would always remain, in shimmering silver. Many said that matching the scars to the silver was the most reliable way of finding one’s soulmate. In the age of the Internet, there were countless forums dedicated to posting photos of the silver, gray, and blue marks, to try and track down wherever a user’s destined soulmate might be in the world. There were plenty of those forums and websites marketed to parents, encouraging them to post pictures of their children so they could connect them with their soulmate early on in life. There was currently no scientific proof that meeting a soulmate earlier or later in life helped or hindered a couple’s compatibility, but such sites still heavily advertised whatever they had to as fact, in order to maximize their traffic.
Todoroki Rei and Midoriya Inko had skimmed such sites, when their children were infants. But they had never actually posted to any of them. Enji would never consent to Rei’s “giving away his children” to anyone else, and Inko had never felt comfortable sharing pictures of her son on the Internet, even if it was for an ostensibly good cause. So, as such, they never knew who was on the other side of their children’s soul marks.
There was literature directed at parents as well, similar to those textbooks for dealing with the emergence of their children’s Quirks. All popular opinion-based rather than research-based, but they sold millions nonetheless. But there were just as many parents like Inko and Rei, who looked at their growing babies and touched nothing meant to push them in one direction or another, only wondered.
~0~
For the first few years, provided the partners were of close enough age, soulmate marks were usually minor. Bright bumps on the head, from babies stumbling into the crib bars while learning to walk, the same shade of stripes and patches on elbows and knees, from scrapes earned after a hard day’s play outside. Parents were repeatedly instructed not to be alarmed, that children sustaining minor injuries was normal and that soulmarks themselves did not hurt.
Inko was never one to fret over the appearing and disappearing marks on her son’s soft, fragile skin. In fact, Izuku had panicked more over them than she ever had. Some parents dabbed rouge or washable marker on their baby’s face to see if they would stop at the mirror and pat at it in wonder, showing that they could now recognize their own reflection. Inko, on the other hand, hadn’t needed to do anything herself: Izuku at a year and a half old had happily climbed up on her lap as she did her makeup in her vanity mirror, spotted the bluish spot up at the top of his forehead and screeched with terror at it. She had felt bad giggling uncontrollably as he’d first patted at it, then wrenched his little body around to burrow into her chest in tears.
“It’s okay, Izuku,” she had cooed, petting his newly growing shock of hair. “It’s not bad, it won’t hurt you. You have a soulmate out there, they just got a little ouchie, that’s all.”
She had been able to laugh at that, for maybe two more years. Then...the marks started to look less harmless. Less...accidental.
She had barely been able to restrain herself from flinching when Izuku reached for her to be picked up, and the short sleeve of his All Might T-shirt had fallen back to reveal long, dark lines encircling his upper arm: fingers much thicker and stronger than hers. Giving Izuku baths at night, she would see more and more of the huge blue blotches over his torso -- just the size of an adult’s fist -- and feel nauseous. She didn’t know how to answer Izuku’s questions about what was happening to the soulmate he now understood he had: after all, he had never had such an injury before.
“Why do they get that big, Mommy? Is he sick?”
Inko swallowed, running the lathery washcloth over the blue and silver dappled skin, painfully aware of how soft and delicate her little boy’s body was. She couldn’t imagine seeing anything seriously damage it, let alone inflict that damage with her own hands.
“He might be. I don’t know.”
Her mind drifted to the mate-locate sites. If she could find her boy’s soulmate, maybe she could get the poor child some help...But how would she do that? His soulmate could be on the other side of the world, like hers, and she had only met Hisashi by chance; he on a business trip, she on vacation, and a cup of overheated coffee spilling on his hand and turning hers a splash of bright blue. There were police reports, child protective services, but none made or equipped specifically for this situation. Even despite how prevalent it must be...
“Where is he? Is he sad? I think he gets hurt too much,” Izuku said plaintively as she toweled him off from the bath and started bundling him into his bunny pajamas.
“I think so too. I...”
Inko bit her lip. Izuku had the biggest heart in the world, she knew, and would never hurt a fly...But still, he knew what villains were. He knew that the marks on his soulmate’s body weren’t supposed to be there, even if he didn’t quite have the words to describe what they were.
“There are people out there who just aren’t kind, Izuku. Even people who aren’t villains. When you find your soulmate” -- she knew that there were those who had no interest in any such thing, but Izuku would chatter so excitedly about finding this mystery person that she saw no problem saying when, for now -- “you treat him gentle, okay? People you love are especially precious, and you should always show them that.”
She punctuated the point by kissing Izuku’s forehead and making him giggle, but even after tucking him into bed and reading him stories of heroes until he fell asleep, she couldn’t bring herself to leave. She sat at her son’s bedside, stroking his hair and watching him, safe in adventurous dreams. The boy at the other end of Izuku’s red string, was he sleeping just as peacefully? Knowing that his parents would do anything to protect him from harm? Inko highly doubted it.
When she finally managed to pull herself away from Izuku’s side, Inko drifted back to the family computer once more. She skimmed over the websites about parents looking for their child’s soulmates, fingers hovering over the keys. What could she say? What could she do? The few searches she made (it gave her a chill to actually type my child’s soulmate is being abused into the search bar) had only scant results. If anyone had actually succeeded in...whatever this was she was trying to do, and told their story for others in need, she couldn’t find it.
She didn’t know how long she had been searching, before her eyes landed on the clock in the corner and she flinched on realizing that it was suddenly the middle of the night. She had to get Izuku to preschool in the morning; so she pulled herself up from the computer chair, rubbing her stinging eyes, and dragged herself to bed, to sleep far more restlessly than her son.
And so she hung in uneasy stasis, until Izuku was about five years old. She wouldn’t remember the date, exactly: only the piercing shriek of terror that had had her halfway across the house before she even knew she’d started running.
“Izuku! Izuku, what happened?!”
Izuku met her halfway, scrambling out of his room with his hands over his left eye. “Mom! It hurts! Mom!”
Inko’s heart leapt into her throat as she knelt down to investigate. She didn’t see any blood, but Izuku was covering her view of the eye itself. “Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay, let me see. Shh, just let me see...”
Izuku was sobbing and pressing his palms protectively to his face, but after a moment he allowed his mother to peel his hands away and look. Before she could stop herself, Inko gasped in horror at the stain covering the left half of Izuku’s face. The fresh blue was nauseatingly bright, and she was shocked to realize she recognized the pattern. The rippling and twisting of skin and flesh, the splash pattern of the mark...a scald burn. Boiling liquid, so much hotter than the coffee that had burned Hisashi’s hand. His hadn’t scarred, but this...Oh, gods...!
Izuku was still wailing. “Mom! He’s hurt, what happened?!”
“I...It’s okay, Izuku, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it looks,” she soothed, trying her very hardest to keep her voice level. She thought she did a fine enough job, but it still took a full hour to calm him down, quiet both his sobs and his pleas to find his soulmate and help him. He was quiet and sullen for the rest of the day, despite her attempts to cheer him up, sniffling all through the afternoon, dinner, and into bed. And once he was there and asleep once again, Inko went first for her phone camera and then for her computer with renewed determination.
There weren’t any forums or chats dedicated to her specific problem, but she didn’t care. She went to the sites she knew had the widest viewership instead, and posted the pictures she had taken of the marked half of Izuku’s face, and the marks on his arm and torso, to their chat logs.
This soul mark just appeared on my son’s face. Combined with the other soul marks on him, it’s clear his soulmate is being abused. How do I find him and get him help?
She shivered as she hit ‘send’ on all of them. She went to make herself a settling cup of tea, long and slow, before she want back to the computer to check her results. Plenty of shock and horror and how awful, someone should do something! But no solutions. No answers. She’d almost hoped for a message from someone who knew the child, but none of that either.
Give it time, she thought, something helpful would come up. But days, then weeks, then months went by, and nothing ever did.
Meanwhile, the facial stain faded into a silver scar, steely and bright. Not that anyone but Inko saw it anymore: Izuku had elected to keep it covered under a bandana tied around his left eye. Seeing it, Inko had asked carefully if Izuku was being teased for the mark.
“No, just for being Quirkless,” Izuku said, with a casualness that broke Inko’s heart all over again. “Kacchan covers his soul marks, because they’re between him and his soulmate and no one else. So I should too.”
Inko frowned, uncertain of whether the advice of Bakugou Mitsuki’s volatile son would be any good for her boy. “Are you sure about that?”
And Izuku smiled at her. “I’m sure, Mom. I’m going to find him myself someday. And I won’t let anyone hurt him again. That’s what a hero would do.”
With that, Izuku marched off to school with the confidence of a warrior, leaving Inko with a mix of pride and guilt that brought more of the endless tears to her eyes.