Ace of Hearts - Haikyuu || Short Stories || One Shots || Creative Rambles

Where You Should Be || Oikawa Tooru

[This is a soulmate AU where soulmates feel each other's physical pains and receive the same physical scars/markings.]

Oikawa Tooru always thought it was weird how the type of changes that happen over time always felt like they had arrived suddenly, when the sunlight called forth a new day. Like he went to bed thinking the world was one way and woke up looking at everything different. He went to sleep a dork and woke up a middle school idol. Volleyball was fun and overnight it became a crazed passion. His years-long friendship with Okano Marri had been pure and platonic but felt like it changed in one day. Things were simple and then, suddenly, they weren't.

The day that Oikawa punched Ushiwaka in the face in middle school was probably the best and worst day of his life. He hadn't really meant for their confrontation to go that far. For it to escalate beyond taunts over power and choices and promises of defeat, but after his fist connected with the soft tissue of Ushijima Wakatoshi's cheek, he truly believed none of that mattered anymore because he was invincible. (It was simple really.) It was a high the likes of which he'd never felt before. In that single moment, he was certain he could never, ever, regret taking down that monster — even if it was just a single peg. But when he walked back to his two childhood best friends, waiting for him in the hallway outside the arena, to regale them with his minor victory, the smile fell off his face. (And then suddenly it wasn't.)

Middle school had never felt awkward for Tooru. He'd joke sometimes, just to piss off his two best friends, that "God's favored child" just didn't have to face the hardships of puberty the way others did. Sure, it was easy for them to see the minute ways everyone around them were changing — the way others were growing and falling in love. But, for fourteen-year-olds, the trio was surprisingly uninterested in the ways of love. Who had time to worry about soulmates and the future when there was volleyball to be played — when there were seamless friendships to fall into? The world outside their group, filled with young people desperate to find their soulmates and fall into ever after, hardly existed to them.

Despite the willful ignorance of all things relating to love, Oikawa Tooru and Iwaizumi Hajime had, to some degree, always been vaguely aware of the marks visible on their female counterpart. (Though that awareness did seem to come to them suddenly. Somewhere between coming to know the ways of the world and realizing they weren't beyond the clutches of fate.) The bruises, the welts and the sore muscles made it all-too-clear that their best friend had a future with a soulmate waiting for her. It was a simple reminder of what was already written in the stars; on a red thread, measured, cut and spun to a predetermined will.

It was somewhere near the beginning of their third year of middle school that the two boys began to suspect, with shared looks each time she fell victim to the unintended cruelty of destiny. There was something in the pattern of pain that felt familiar.

They had started early and had been unforgiving — the bruises on her arms, the muscle pains all along her body, the tingling on the tips of her fingers. There were days when Okano Marri didn't want to get out of bed because of her soulmate's pain. And there were moments that watching her suffer made Oikawa and Iwaizumi almost feel bad for their own soulmates, out there in the world receiving the pains of their own training. (It was a complicated consciousness knowing that you're not only hurting yourself on your path toward greatness.)

But it was that day, outside the arena when the afterglow of physical victory had given way to a different monster, that cemented all the facts together and forced Oikawa to see that the worst possible plausibility was the reality they were living in: his best friend was Ushijima Wakatoshi's soulmate. The evidence was all over her face — literally — because as he returned triumphant, ready to tell his tale, Iwaizumi was standing over Okano, sprawled across the concrete, holding on to her face with fat tears in her eyes. And he was pretty certain, if he held his knuckles up to her cheek, the red marks would match the shape of his hand perfectly.