Chapter Text
“Holy shit,” Hizashi, never the most subtle of people, nearly shouted while they were standing in the locker room. Shouta pulled his shirt down faster, quickly throwing the jacket of the tracksuit over it, glaring at Hizashi.
“You saw nothing,” he warned, still holding self-consciously to the edge of his shirt. It was honestly a miracle it had taken this long for Hizashi to see it, with how much time the two of them spent together.
“Wait, Shouta,” Hizashi reached out to grab his arm and Shouta sighed, lowering his hands and turning toward his friend. “How long have you had it?”
“Almost a year,” Shouta answered, looking around the mostly empty locker room and sighing. “Can we please talk about this somewhere else, Hizashi?” he muttered.
“Right, sorry,” Hizashi at least seemed genuinely apologetic, grabbing his water bottle and bag and rushing out of the locker room toward their class. “But is it as big as it looked?”
“I don’t know how much you saw,” Shouta reminded his loud friend, narrowing his eyes as the continued the conversation they had just agreed to stop. “But it’s probably bigger.”
It was Shouta’s soulmark. A bright purple patch of skin that marred nearly his entire left side. After a long time of sneaking looks at books about flowers, he was able to figure out that it was an iris. It was obnoxiously big, and he wondered what could be so important about his soulmate’s entire left side of his chest that made that where his soulmark had to appear.
As far as scholars knew, it was random when soulmarks appeared. It was usually when you were a teenager, whether or not that place was important to your soulmate yet. A flower would begin to bloom somewhere on your body that would later become an important place to your soulmate. A lot of people had them around their ring fingers or hearts, romantic soulmates. Soulmarks that showed that they were very much taken. Hands, hips, faces were also common places. Shouta’s was at least easy to hide, despite its size.
After the first bloom, they expanded into a full flower. Some stayed very small, some took up greater spaces. His was the biggest he’d seen, which was infuriatingly annoying. He really, really had no interest in a universe-mandated love interest. It just wasn’t logical to love someone because they made an impossible to remove tattoo appear on your skin.
Some people, like Hizashi, found the concept of soulmates incredibly exciting. Hizashi himself had a simple soulmark of some flower Shouta didn’t know wrapped around his ring finger. When it started appearing their first year, he had shown it off with pride.
Shouta knew that the moment Hizashi saw his soulmark, he’d be all over it.
As they slid into the group of students for class, Hizashi grabbed onto his wrist, fixing him with a look that Shouta knew better than to try and deny whatever he was about to say. “Come over after school today?”
“It’s really not that big a deal, Hizashi,” Shouta sighed, but he nodded his head, crossing his arms over his chest to listen to their teacher. Hizashi nodded, pleased to end the conversation there since he had the clear promise of more once the school day was out.
At the end of the day, Hizashi came up to him and walked with him to his house. “Shouta’s over!” he called out to his parents as he walked into the kitchen. Shouta went straight to Hizashi’s room, setting his backpack next to his bed and climbing up, pulling his homework out to start on it. Just because they were going to talk about Shouta’s soulmark didn’t mean that Shouta was going to allow Hizashi to get away without doing any of his homework while he was over. At the very least, some help getting through the English homework would be appreciated. He could stay as long as he wanted; Hizashi’s mom would probably insist on feeding him since his parents were out of town again.
Hizashi walked back into the room and tossed Shouta a snack and some juice before climbing onto the bed next to him. He made a face at the homework on Shouta’s lap. “We can do homework later. Lemme see it!”
Shouta sighed, unbuttoning his uniform shirt and pulling it off. He lifted the undershirt until his giant soulmark was displayed for Hizashi to see again.
“It’s so cool,” Hizashi murmured, looking at the mark on Shouta’s skin. “Why do you think it’s your side?”
Shouta shrugged. “I don’t know why it’s so big. Unless my soulmate has some sort of tattoo or injury or something, it’s ridiculous.” It was ridiculously big no matter what his soulmate’s side meant to them, but he’d like to have some idea of it.
“I’ve never seen a mark so big. I can’t believe you’ve hidden it for so long. Is it fully bloomed?” Hizashi’s eyes were wide. His own soulmark had started nearly unnoticeable, just like freckles around his finger. As the flowers bloomed, though, they took up more of his finger, some of the petals drifting onto his palm and the back of his hand.
“It better be,” Shouta said in exasperation. “I don’t think it can get much bigger unless it decides to take up my entire chest.”
That wasn’t an invitation. He hadn’t noticed any growth in the pattern in a few weeks, even though it seemed to have only gotten bigger and bigger for the past few months. If this was its final size, Shouta would be more than happy. It was still easy enough to hide under most shirts, and no one who wasn’t looking would notice it.
“Have you looked up what flower it is, Shou?” Hizashi asked, leaning back away from Shouta’s soulmark finally. Shouta breathed out once he had the additional space, tugging his shirt back over the massive mark. He let the edge stay untucked, but he didn’t want the soulmark out in the open. Not that anyone other than Hizashi’s family was here, but it still felt weird to show it to anyone other than Hizashi. He wasn’t exactly great friends with… well, much of anyone. Hizashi had forced his way into his life. Whoever his soulmate ended up being was… well, they had quite a barrier to get over before Shouta paid attention to them.
Hopefully, they were a little less… loud than Hizashi. One loud person was more than enough.
God, it was infectious. Hizashi’s enthusiasm about Shouta’s soulmate was infecting him into thinking the same irrational thoughts. He didn’t care who his soulmate was.
“Doesn’t matter,” he muttered, finally answering Hizashi’s question. Hizashi didn’t need to know about Shouta’s little indulgence of sneaking to the library week after week to look through books on flowers and figure out exactly what his soulmark was. If he knew, he’d think that Shouta for some reason changed his opinion and actually liked the idea of his soulmate.
If he happened to like his soulmate, that was fine. He wasn’t going to automatically hate them just because they were his soulmate. But he also wasn’t going to be in love with them just because his body told him that he was.
“Shouta! C’mon, you can’t tell me you haven’t been at least a little curious about it!” Hizashi pressed. “I think Mom has a book of flowers downstairs, I can go ask her for it and we can find out!”
Shouta reached out to grab Hizashi’s arm and groaned, leaning his head back against the wall. Hizashi getting someone else involved in this conversation was the last thing that he needed.
“Stop, we don’t need it,” Shouta said, releasing Hizashi’s arm when he looked back at him.
“You don’t want to know that bad?” Hizashi sighed, sitting back down nonetheless.
Shouta could let him believe that. He could let him believe it really easily. It would be… it could end the entire conversation and let Hizashi never mention his soulmate again. But Shouta couldn’t help it, the soft blush that came over his cheeks. He looked down to his lap and shrugged. “I already looked it up.”
“Seriously?” Hizashi exclaimed, voice too loud. Shouta looked up, his quirk flashing for a second. Hizashi laughed before raising his hands in innocence. “Sorry! What is it?”
“An iris.” Shouta set his hand against his side where he knew that the mark was. “It means some shit like loyalty or good news. It’s cheesy.”
“I can’t believe you looked it up,” Hizashi squealed. Shouta tiredly shut his eyes, leaning his head against his wall.
“Well, I did. Can we do our homework now?” Shouta was more than done with this conversation, and he was pretty sure that Hizashi had more than enough information about his soulmark to last a lifetime. Or at least a conversation, because he knew that Hizashi wouldn’t be pleased until Shouta knew everything about his soulmark and his soulmate, but he was tired, and they had a lot of homework.
“Okay, okay,” Hizashi said before jumping off of the bed. He walked over to his backpack to grab the books and Shouta turned to the right page, squinting at the letters. Why English was Hizashi’s favorite subject would eternally be a mystery to Shouta. The letters made no sense and the words made even less sense. He grabbed his pencil to start to work on it before bed shifted, Hizashi climbing back up.
“Shouta,” Hizashi said, and the tone of his voice told Shouta that he definitely wasn’t talking about his English homework. Shouta looked up at Hizashi with a soft sigh of breath. “Where do you think your soulmate’s mark is?”
“Probably somewhere obnoxious,” Shouta answered, staring down at the English homework and trying desperately to piece together the letters there. “Like their eyes.”
“His eyes?” Hizashi blinked, looking at him. “How would that even work?”
Shouta shrugged. “My quirk is from my eyes, though, my whole life is. Being an underground hero and fighting hand to hand as much as I am won’t be great for a wedding ring, so that cliche is out of the question. Soulmarks on hearts are stupid. My life relies on my eyes, so if my soulmate’s mark is somewhere that matters, is there anywhere else?”
“Maybe by their eyes,” Hizashi said. “Like… by their eyebrows, or underneath their eyes? It could be so cool! Especially if they’re little flowers or something.”
“Stop thinking about it and help me with my homework, please, Hizashi?” Shouta finally asked. Hizashi leaned forward, his pencil hanging out of his mouth as he looked at the words on the page.