"Thank you."
Gokudera Hayato smiled at his best friend and boss as the brunet took the cup of tea he had offered him.
And as always, Hayato found his gaze invariably drawn to the beautiful wolf sat perched on the back of his boss's right hand, its fur a bright storm flame red, its intelligent green eyes looking watchfully out at the world, as if it were forever standing guard.
Hayato knew this mark as well as he'd know one of his own; he'd watched it fade into existence on his friend's skin that day his life had been saved by him, and even now, ten years later, he still didn't know how it had happened.
Sure, he knew the biological process of it. He'd made a point of researching it when he was a child.
When something happened that left a deep impression on a person, something life-changing, the brain coped by releasing chemicals into the blood that affected the pigmentation of one's skin, causing coherent images to appear. There were many theories as to why this happened, the most popular of them being that the brain catalogued important information onto a person's skin in the form of meaningful images so that the person would never forget whatever had caused the marks in the first place.
Hayato could tell you the exact chemicals involved in the making of marks.
He could tell you exactly how emotionally stunted you needed to be or what kind of deformity you needed to have to not get marks (because even if it was rare, there were cases of people with mark free skin).
He could even tell you how to tell the difference between genuine marks and tattoos made to look like marks so that a person could fit in easier.
But he could not, for the life of him, tell you why his precious Decimo had gotten such a beautiful mark on the day he'd nearly been killed by Hayato's ignorance, the day he'd saved Hayato from his own clumsiness. Marks made by near-death experiences weren't usually so pleasant to look at (Hayato would know, having so many of them himself).
And as Sawada Tsunayoshi took a sip of his tea, he too found his gaze transfixed by the wolf staring up at him from the skin of his right hand.
Tsuna had noticed Hayato staring at it before, and he knew that the other male often wondered at the reasoning behind it.
Hiding his smile behind his cup, Tsuna tried not to burst out laughing as he imagined his best friend's reaction to finding out what the wolf meant.
To Tsuna, wolves had always meant strength and loyalty and protectiveness, all traits that Hayato had.
But they also meant loneliness, something Hayato and he had shared back then.
This mark signified the beginning of a beautiful friendship.