Dai-Sato- 4. You have your soulmate's name somewhere on your body.

Soulmate marks showed up young. Soul Scientists theorized that it took about two years within both soulmates being born for it to solidify into a recognizable shape, and six months after that to become legible. For some people there might be nothing for years, though it was rare for soulmates to be more than five or six years apart in age.

For Daisuke, his mark started to form at a year and a half old. It was just a smudge of black ink on the inside of his right knee at first and his mother had been delighted when she first saw it. It meant his soulmate was almost the same age as him and that was always good to know. It gave a range of time to look for in finding the matching name, granted if it was a common name then it was significantly harder to find a match. The name came in fully, precise brush strokes of a handwriting that didn't exist yet, almost a week before his second birthday.

Emiko almost dropped Daisuke when she saw it, and as it was, she ended up splashing him with lukewarm bath water when she set him down a bit too quickly. "Dai-chan…"

"Splash!" Daisuke said gleefully, not knowing to care about the mark back then.

"Dad!" Emiko yelled, and Daisuke's glee dissolved, picking up that something was wrong.

At the time he didn't know what was wrong, but he did get that it had to do with the mark. In the years that followed, Daisuke would cover the mark because every time his mother caught a glimpse of it something in her face went cold and wrong. And so, while most of his classmates in elementary school gleefully shared their names in hopes of finding their other half, Daisuke told no one at all, not even his best friend Takeshi, about the name on his leg. Whoever Hikari Satoshi was, he was someone his family didn't like. And no matter how Daisuke had the feeling that they didn't want him to like whoever that name belonged to either, he couldn't help but wonder who that person was and if they would be someone to be afraid of or someone to be happy about the way everyone else felt about their soulmates.

*0

Hikari Satoshi had his soul mark come in at two and a half. As a child prodigy, even at that young he knew that the hastily-written characters spelled bad things. Niwa was the name of the people his family didn't like. The why wasn't clear yet, but he knew it wasn't a name a Hikari should have on them, let alone scrawled on the back a hand. Hands were sources of creation. He'd see that name every time he used them.

There wasn't any hiding it though. Satoshi was too young to be independent and hands were too noticeable to be ignored. He let his mother catch his hand and hold his wrist to read the words.

"Niwa Daisuke," she said, toneless. "A Niwa."

She dropped his hand like it burned and Satoshi stumbled back a step on unsteady, baby feet. Her lips pressed together and she looked tired. From her hair she pulled a ribbon and wound it around Satoshi's hand. "Keep that covered," she said.

Over the next few years it would be stained over with ink and paint and covered with cloth and bandages and gloves once his hands got big enough.

Satoshi didn't have any good thoughts toward his soulmate. The Niwa were thieves that took his family's creations for themselves, hoarding them. They had Dark, and because they had Dark, the Hikari had Krad. It was the Niwa's fault that they were cursed. He learned young that his soulmate was why he would die young.

It was hard to feel anything good about someone like that. Satoshi didn't doubt that whoever Niwa Daisuke turned out to be, he wouldn't be a disappointment only because Satoshi had no positive expectations at all.

*0*0*

Satoshi knew Daisuke the moment he set eyes on him. He'd seen the class list; there weren't an abundance of Niwa in the world.

From what he knew of the Niwa, he'd expected someone brash. Someone flashy. Someone confident and who moved like the thief they were. Daisuke was nothing like his expectations. Meek and hesitant and shy. Clumsy in unexpected ways and seemed to have his head in the clouds instead of a calculating mind. He wasn't the threatening figure that had dogged Satoshi for years, the shadow of his soulmate cast over his life.

His soulmate had caused him a good deal of unpleasantness in life already just by existing and Satoshi had been fully prepared to hate him for it. After all, soulmates didn't necessarily mean love. And yet…

The more Satoshi watched, the more they interacted, bit by bit by terrible bit, he couldn't hate him. He couldn't hate him at all. He didn't want to be enemies with this person but their fate was tragically set.

It was ironic, he thought to himself as he felt Krad wake within him, that his soulmate would be his downfall.

Daisuke, holding out a hand of friendship to his enemy yet again, didn't even know Satoshi was his soulmate.

Well. That wouldn't last long.