They say that before you meet your soulmate, your mark is the only way to know them. It's their first words to you, their handwriting. What they say, how they say it, how they'd write it can say a lot about your soulmate. If you search hard enough, you can tell a lot about your soulmate from your mark.

Sawamura Daichi's soulmate must really like shrimp.

His mark appears when he's still a baby, just a few months old. The two words are cramped and tiny on his little body, not yet legible, but they're still comforting: Daichi has a soulmate. He has someone out there, someone who will love him and never stop. Someone waiting for him.

When Daichi is young, he thinks that his soulmate must be pretty cool. She's talking about shrimp, and that's kind of cool, right? Daichi's dismayed when he one day realizes that he does not, in fact, know anything about shrimp, aside from what they taste like. He's even more dismayed to find that of all the animals that the school library has books on, they don't have any on shrimp.

Excitement eventually turns into confusion as Daichi grows older and questions why exactly his soulmate is talking about shrimp. Does she have shrimp? What kind of person is she, this… shrimp enthusiast? Does she have pet shrimp? Are pet shrimp even a thing? Will she refuse to eat seafood because she loves shrimp so much? Daichi could stop eating shrimp for his soulmate, probably, he thinks. If she asked nicely. But wait, Daichi thinks in a moment of true panic, what if she likes shrimp better than she likes Daichi?

Michimiya Yui is the coolest girl that Daichi knows, other than his mom. She, of all people, would definitely know why his soulmate might want to talk to him about shrimp. And so he asks her what she thinks of shrimp.

"They're okay, I guess," she tells him. "I like it when my mom cooks them. But when they have the heads and everything..." Her nose scrunches. "It looks gross."

Daichi likes it when her mom cooks shrimp, too. Maybe someday his soulmate can try Michimiya-san's shrimp.

Daichi is fifteen when he realizes that, wait, what if his soulmate isn't a girl, after all? (He's not quite sure why a guy would be talking about shrimp, either, though.)

He knows that he's attracted to girls—it's always been something he's just known. He likes girls. This is not something new. He's always just assumed that his soulmate would be a girl. What is new, however, is the fact that lately he's come to reconsider whether or not his soulmate will be a girl, because, well.

He did not take the shorts into account when he signed up for Karasuno's volleyball club.

And he's kind of fucked, because they're short.

Somehow, Daichi manages to survive two entire years in the land of short-shorts. It's truly a feat, considering he's surrounded by very fit boys in short-shorts whenever he's playing volleyball, and then he goes to school and okay, so maybe Nishinoya is right, the Karasuno girls' uniform is really cute.

He only has one year left of short-shorts when Karasuno gains a freak duo, so full of energy that he's wondering when being team captain became so much like parenting. With the help of Takeda-sensei, they schedule a practice match against Seijou.

It's the Seijou captain's first time playing in a practice match since his injury, Takeda-sensei tells them, and he wouldn't have been able to play if their reserve setter hadn't noticed and made him take time off to heal. He's one of those types who wants so badly to play that he'd try to play right through an injury, Daichi guesses.

If this is Oikawa taking it easy, Daichi's not sure if he wants to know how powerful Seijou is when he's at his full strength. Seijou is already pummeling them as is. The only other time Daichi's ever been this tired in a match was the one against Date Tech, right after his upperclassmen had graduated. Maybe, he thinks, maybe if they'd been more together at that Datekou match, Asahi and Nishinoya would be playing with them right now, and they'd have a chance against Oikawa.

During a time-out, an ash-blond boy from the bench waves Oikawa over to talk to him, and briefly, his eyes meet Daichi's. The boy smiles, then, and Daichi is suddenly reminded that he is, in fact, very gay.

Daichi forces himself to not look over at the Seijou bench until after the match has ended.

Daichi spends the last few months of high school going through the motions. He and Asahi had retired from volleyball shortly after their loss in the tournament. It's not a big deal, he tells himself frequently, but really, it is. But he's getting older and he needs to just… rip off the band-aid, or else he'd probably never want to leave. Not that he ever wanted to in the first place. But the team just doesn't need him anymore, and that hurts more than Daichi thinks it probably should.

Shimizu had stuck it out for the rest of the year in order to help Yachi-kun learn the ropes; between her and Ennoshita, Daichi's certain that he's left the team in capable hands. Maybe Ennoshita will even be the one to take Karasuno to nationals.

He still wishes that he had been the one to lead them to victory.

The team is doing well, though; or, at least that's what he's heard from Shimizu and Asahi. The only person currently on the team he actually talks to regularly is Ennoshita, who honestly just looks more tired than usual. It's not like he's been distancing himself from the team. No, it's not that at all. He's just… busy. Thinking about university. Finding a roommate. But it's not like he's basically cut off contact with the team because he's afraid of how much he misses him, except that it totally is.

But he's trying to move on; that's what you're supposed to do when you're graduating, isn't it?

The team pounces on him after the graduation ceremony, and it becomes known that Sawamura Daichi is charmingly ugly when he cries. It occurs to him, as Ennoshita takes a picture of them, that this is the last time that he'd be standing with Asahi and Shimizu by his side. It's strange, how he can feel like that little first-year and a to-be university student at the same time. Everything has changed, he thinks, and everything is still changing. But at the same time, nothing has changed.

Daichi would be lying if he said that he wasn't disappointed when he graduated high school without any shrimp-related interactions. True, he didn't have it as bad as some people; he wasn't like Michimiya, with her Hi, I think I found your dog? (the Michimiyas don't even have a dog; Yui's mother is severely allergic), or Tanaka's Excuse me, which has him convinced that everybody and their mother is his soulmate.

But okay, sue him, he had really wanted to meet his soulmate. To have that… connection, like his parents have, like what the characters in all of Michimiya's cheesy romantic movies (that he totally does not cry at) have, like everyone's stories promise.

And okay—he's going to university really soon and sure, Shimizu's also Tokyo-bound, but he can't use her as a safety blanket forever, and Daichi had really just wanted something to be sure of when he took this huge step forward.

It takes two weeks and six days for Daichi to become so homesick that it physically hurts.

Living with Kuroo is fine—loud, but fine; he may be a handful but he's actually a pretty considerate roommate. They had both needed a roommate, and they'd gotten along pretty well after several practice matches and training camp. It's not bad at all, Daichi thinks, and he could get used to it. Kuroo's not far from home, and he spends so much time with the university team and his Nekoma friends that sometimes it almost seems like Daichi lives alone. Bokuto's on the university team, too; one more person who Kuroo is closer to than Daichi. At some point, Kuroo mentions that Oikawa ended up there, too, and that the only person who can get him to shut up about his beloved Iwa-chan is his roommate (also from Seijou, Kuroo tells him, though he doesn't play anymore).

It doesn't take long for Daichi to come to realize that even when moving into a new part of his life, Kuroo is surrounded by familiarity and friends and god, Daichi misses Miyagi, and god, he could really use someone to talk to.

But it's another night that Kuroo's practicing late with his team, and okay, Daichi doesn't usually get like this, but he really doesn't want to be alone at the apartment and he needs to buy more instant ramen, anyway, so he grabs his wallet and his keys and heads to the supermarket.

Daichi's at the grocery store, shopping basket filled with packages of instant noodles (he always eats shrimp flavor even though he really likes chicken flavor better; ever since he was little, Daichi thought that maybe, just maybe, he and his soulmate could bond over shrimp-flavored ramen) hanging from the crook of his arm, and trying to text his mother that yes mom, I'm eating, don't worry with his other hand. It's an awkward position, and his eyesight keeps flicking from his grocery list to his phone and back to the list, and he stops abruptly in the aisle so he can finish his text, only for someone to ram straight into him.

Something cold and heavy drops onto his flip flop-clad foot, and he winces, jerking his foot away, and almost missing the other person's alarmed, "My shrimp!"

Wait, what?

"Shrimp," Daichi echoes weakly, staring at the ash-blonde boy and standing there like an idiot.

The boy stares back.

"Well, soulmate," he quips, lips tugging into that damn smile, even more disarming than Daichi remembers from high school, "are you just going to stand there, or are you going to pick it up?"

Daichi crouches down to pick up the bag of frozen shrimp so quickly that his groceries fall out of his basket, and then he's lamenting how completely and utterly lame he is, but then they're both laughing, and then the other boy drops his own groceries, and they're laughing even harder. Daichi doesn't think he's ever laughed this hard, and he laughs even more, because suddenly things feel so light, and he doesn't feel so lonely anymore.