If you're unfamiliar with common soulmate AUs, this is one of those ones where the first words your soulmate will say to you take the form of a tattoo you have from birth. In this AU, just because someone is your soulmate doesn't necessarily mean that they are yours. Enjoy!

From as early as he can remember, Tsuna has dreaded meeting his soulmate.

It's something most people long for - to meet the one person they will love more than any other, the person for whom their soul was made. Most people were lucky enough to be the soulmate of their soulmate, and to receive that same burning, overwhelming love and devotion in turn.

Tsuna knew that wouldn't happen from the first time his mother had called him useless. She always said it gently, almost affectionately, but the word still hurt a million times worse coming from her mouth than anyone else's. The disappointment in her eyes every time he brought home a failed test or failed to respond when she asked if he had made any new friends that day hurt even worse. After all, if his own mother was ashamed of him, there was no way his soulmate would love him back.

In fact, Tsuna knew that he was no one's soulmate. It was nothing that his classmates hadn't told him before, after all. He just desperately (selfishly) hoped that his soulmate was as self-sacrificing as his mother and would tolerate his presence. If not - Tsuna doesn't like to think about what he'll do if not.

At night, when his mother thinks he's asleep, he hears her crying. He knows that, even if his papa was her soulmate, she probably wasn't his. Sometimes it makes him rethink trying to find his soulmate at all, because he hates his father for never loving his mother the way she loves him, hates hearing her cry over the life sentence etched in her skin. But then he'll stare at his own words, his own brand curling around one hipbone, and finds he understands. After all, neither of them ever had a choice about who their soul belonged to.

He wonders what his soulmate is like, sometimes, if they'll be as pretty and kind as that cute girl Sasagawa Kyoko-chan, who smiles at him even though he's useless and stupid. He hopes so. In any case, he knows that they'll be the single best thing to happen to him, even if the words are a little silly. Tsuna's existence is silly. He has no right to judge.

So he stocks up on what he thinks are cool pencils and hopes and hopes and hopes.

Middle school is shaping up to be just like elementary school. People still call him Dame-Tsuna, he's still one of the shortest in his class, he's still bad in both sports and academics, and he still gets bullied. Tsuna knew he shouldn't have gotten his hopes up, but Nana had been so optimistic that he couldn't help it. After all, the problem was with him, not his school or his peers.

He's in the same class as Kyoko-chan this year, which makes his days considerably brighter. Even if he still can't work up the courage to talk to her, she always shoots him a smile whenever their eyes meet or when Tsuna is too slow to hastily turn his gaze away. She'll even greet him sometimes. It's probably to deter Tsuna from hoping that she's his soulmate, but Tsuna is grateful, all the same.

The words etched on popular people's skin, people like Kyoko-chan, are usually common knowledge. Kids wear it like a badge of honor, eager to show off and brag about how amazing their soulmates probably are. (Kyoko's, oddly enough, isn't a word at all - just "hahi!") No one bothers to ask what Tsuna's are, and sometimes people loudly speculate that he probably doesn't have any. Tsuna tries not to let it bother him.

Oddly enough, the only other person whose words no one knows is the other class idol, Yamamoto Takeshi. Whenever his friends ask he laughs it off, saying that it's private. The boys, playing at being adults, joke that it's probably something dirty or somewhere embarrassing. Whenever they do, he'll laugh along and fiddle with the sweatband on his wrist. In these moments especially, Tsuna notices that his amber eyes are much colder than the rest of him.

Tsuna had spent so long bracing for the moment that when it finally comes, it blindsides him. Most people don't talk to him at all, other than to tease him, so it was completely out of the blue.

Yamamoto passes his desk, pausing from laughing with his friends, and grabs Tsuna's least weird pencil, the one with little sushis printed on it. "Cool pencil, Dame-Tsuna, can I borrow it?"

Tsuna's world comes crashing down around his ears. He gapes like a fish, automatically opening his mouth to respond - and he can't.

Even though he knows he isn't Yamamoto's soulmate, that whatever comes out of his mouth will be wrong -

He isn't prepared to face that reality.

Tsuna's mouth snaps shut.

Yamamoto, already long gone, doesn't notice.

He never returns the pencil.

When he gets home that afternoon, his face must look even worse than usual, because his mother notices.

"Welcome home, Tsu-kun!" Nana says, smiling. When Tsuna doesn't respond, still pale and silent, her brows furrow with concern. "Ara? Is something wrong?"

For a moment, Tsuna thinks about confessing. Thinks about saying, "I met my soulmate," and watch her fit the pieces together. Thinks about her eyes filling with tears, not wholly on his behalf, and giving him a comforting hug like when he was really small and she still thought his uselessness was an endearing quirk rather than his entire personality.

In the end, he isn't brave enough. He never is, especially when it comes to upsetting his mother.

"No," Tsuna whispers, smiling tremulously, "I'm just tired."

Nana doesn't believe him. She lets the matter lie, and makes his favorite food for dinner. Tsuna eats it all, trying to take it as the comfort it's meant to be, but guilt makes it sit heavy in his stomach.

Tsuna stops talking in school altogether, terrified that he'll slip up and say something directly to Yamamoto. His grades, impossibly, suffer even more. The teachers eventually give up on him, except Nezu-sensei, who calls on him just to punish him when he refuses to answer. It makes the bullying worse, too, now that everyone knows he won't snitch. Tsuna grits his teeth and bears it, because nothing can hurt as much as a casual dismissal from Yamamoto, unaware that Tsuna's words ever had a special weight to them in the first place.

Instead, he takes to watching Yamamoto. It makes him feel like a creep, but it's not enough to curb his fascination with the boy to whom he owes his soul.

Yamamoto's smiles are like scars - they look like they hurt, and they never go away.

Yamamoto bats like the ball is a threat and pitches like it's a grenade. When he's on the field, the grin drops, but he looks much happier without it.

Yamamoto stays for much longer than the rest of his baseball team for practice, throwing pitches, swinging at nothing, and running the bases over and over and over again. Tsuna takes to leaving sports drinks in the locker room and watching the baseball field discreetly from the classroom window. His mother, endlessly carefree, doesn't question that he's suddenly coming home much later. He avoids more bullies this way, too.

Tsuna knows he's falling in love, as much as a kid his age can, and almost revels in the omnipresent ache in his chest. It's the second mark that Yamamoto gave him, even if it's internal instead of external, and it's likely the last gift from him that he'll ever receive.

For as long as Takeshi can remember, his words have made people uncomfortable.

The first time he asks his dad what they say, before he learns to read, his eyes darken and his voice catches when he tells him. Takeshi knows better than to ask what they mean.

Other kids are curious about them, too, but whenever an adult catches sight of them they give him these strange, pitying looks. His dad is even worse, because whenever he sees them he gets sad in the way that means he's thinking about Mom. Takeshi soon invests in a wristband. It's a little easier, after that.

Takeshi learns what they mean around the same time he learns how his mother had died. That's also when he learns that finding your soulmate is more likely to hurt you than make you happy.

Takeshi finds something to devote himself to that can never hurt him, so that the words on his wrist will never come to pass in the way he fears they might. Baseball isn't a soulmate, but that means that it can't leave him.

He finds himself pushing people away while maintaining the facade of friendship, distancing himself so he can't get hurt. It's probably not healthy, and he still feels like his dad worries, but it's the best way he can think of to protect himself.

After all, if he stops needing friends, eventually he'll stop wanting them. Takeshi supposes that the reverse applies, too, but he also supposes it doesn't matter.

Baseball can't hurt him, can't leave him, but that means that if he can't play, it's all because of his own shortcomings.

It's a cruel sort of irony that the one concrete thing his mother left him was the same way of killing himself.

Even so, Takeshi is weak, so a part of him is still listening for those words - the words that drove him to this in the first place.

But all they're talking about is fucking baseball.

Takeshi knows that his resentment is unfair. His devotion to baseball was the only substantial part of himself he let his classmates and teammates see - everything else was plastic. However, it's still unforgivably cruel to remind him of the one thing he let himself have, the thing he couldn't have any longer. He'd been slipping, even before the accident, had seen the contempt beginning to pool in their eyes and heard it in their voices. It's stupid to care about what they think, as he'd deceived them all in the first place, but it feels like they're the last thing he has left on this rooftop.

Takeshi looks at the ground below, his one good hand curled around the fence, and wonders if his mother had hurt this bad, too. If that's the case, he thinks he could forgive her, even though this is her fault.

And then he hears it.

A hoarse voice, scratchy from disuse, one he doesn't recognize.

"Please, Takeshi-san! Don't jump!"

The only one who calls him Takeshi is his father.

He whirls around, and his eyes meet terrified brown ones. His violent movement proves too much for the aged chain link, and he feels it give way under his fingers.

As Takeshi plunges down, he can't help but think that, of all the cruel jokes the universe has played on him, this one is by far the cruelest.

And then there's a gunshot and a shout and flames and heart-print boxers and he's alive, he's alive, he's alive.

Things get substantially weirder after that, with mafia games and angry delinquents with firecrackers and infants with guns, but Takeshi is the happiest he's ever been in his life. Tsuna talks to him and smiles at him and his dad knows about what happened but forgave him and Takeshi has found his soulmate.

Takeshi understands now why his father, even after all the heartbreak he had gone through, had never seemed to regret it. He can never regret meeting Tsuna, even though he knows that it will break him if anything happens to him. He's alive now, and that is much different from whatever he had been before, and his face hurts from smiling. Not the kind that came from forcing it, but the kind that came from not being able to stop.

He can't remember the first words he exchanged with Tsuna, and he doesn't know why he started to talk again, but the looks that Tsuna gives him make him think, Maybe. And for now, that's more than enough.

Why can I only write angst for things involving Yamamoto god help me this was much darker than I expected

I have companion oneshot set in this verse about Gokudera. Let me know if you're interested in seeing more!