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Inosuke is six years old and he knows how it works. Your eyes don’t see colour until you look at your soulmate for the first time. At least, that’s what his mom told him. He’s not entirely sure what soulmate means, but his older sister (who saw colours when she was only four, as she wouldn’t stop reminding Inosuke) says it’s a person who makes you smile. Inosuke doesn’t think that’s true at all - in fact, he thinks that makes her a big fat liar, because his dog makes him smile, and he can’t have a dog for a soulmate, right?
But Inosuke doesn’t care because he’s six and he has better things to be doing than worrying about whether he’s supposed to marry his dog or not.
(Zenitsu is six years old and he sees a boy with restless fingers and floppy hair and bandaids on both knees. The sky turns blue but the grass is still grey.)
Inosuke is seven years old and he decides that the second grade is really dumb. His teacher is an absolute meanie head, but after two months of telling Inosuke to stop talking to his partner (‘cause they have desks in partners , and Inosuke’s partner is weird but Inosuke needs someone to talk to), Mrs. Paige gives him a new partner and tells him to talk to the boy, to make him feel welcome in their classroom.
The new kid comes with a sharp tongue and an explosion of colour, and Inosuke smiles.
(Zenitsu is seven years old and the shirt on the boy with black hair - his partner, apparently - changes colour right in front of his eyes, and finally, he knows what the grass is supposed to look like.)
Inosuke is eight years old and Zenitsu is his best friend in the whole world.
(Zenitsu is eight years old and he thinks he’s starting to understand what his mum said about colours.)
Inosuke is ten years old and he’s starting to realize that what he sees isn’t quite everything he’s supposed to see. His world is yellows and blues, things dull and drab when he knows (somewhere deep in him, he knows) brightness should make its home. Trees are wrong. The grass is wrong. His mom’s favourite lipstick is wrong.
Inosuke is wrong. He knows it, he knows something is definitely wrong with him. He should be able to see all the colours, but he can’t. He has no clue what it means (Is his soulmate dead? Did he only see half of them? Is his soulmate blind, is that why he can’t see all the colours?)
He keeps his mouth shut.
(Zenitsu is ten years old and red is his most favourite colour of them all.)
Inosuke is thirteen years old and he’s screwed. He knew his mom had been suspicious, but he hadn’t thought it was this bad. It’s a saturday morning and he’s sitting in the waiting room of an optometrist’s office. He feels bad - really bad, like acid churning holes through his stomach bad - for countless reasons. Besides her knowing , knowing that her son is basically a half-colourblind freak of nature with no soulmate, there’s the money. The only reason Inosuke could’ve kept this a secret so long was that his family couldn’t afford to do yearly checks with the optometrist. But this, clearly, was a special circumstance.
He blames the apples. Why would they make the same fruit two different colours, anyway? Don’t they all taste the same? Anyway, it was the apples. Inosuke’s mom asked him, ever so calmly, to bring her a green apple. He had a fifty-fifty chance, but he chose the wrong fifty that morning.
So, there they are, at the optometrist, waiting for confirmation of what Inosuke already knows to be true. He knows he’ll have to fess up about only seeing some colours, that he’s a freak.
But the one who painted his sky blue? That, Inosuke could never tell. Would never tell. He resolves to keep his mouth shut tight, forever.
(Zenitsu is thirteen years old and they ask him if he has a soulmate. It’s a short, bitter exhalation, a humourless laugh. Yes. )
Inosuke is fourteen years old and he’s living in secrecy. After his diagnosis (partial completion syndrome; either he wasn’t his soulmate’s soulmate or he hadn’t met all of his soulmates yet, whatever that meant) he and his mom decided not to tell anyone, not even his big sister. It was easier that way, and telling people that he just hadn’t met his soulmate yet was better than telling them he wasn’t good enough for the one he’d already found.
Zenitsu is Inosuke’s sun. He’s warmth, he’s home, and he’s there . But he’s also incredibly painful to look at for too long. It’s like a constant paradox, being friends with Zenitsu - Inosuke is so, so deeply in love with the blond boy that it feels like flying every second he’s with him, but then falling every time he remembers that he’ll never be enough for him.
Inosuke remembers much too often.
(Zenitsu is fourteen years old and he hopes, god does he hope.)
Inosuke is fifteen years old and it’s eating him up inside, so he tells Zenitsu. Not everything, of course, but enough. Zenitsu exhales for a long time then pats Inosuke on the shoulder, telling him that soulmates are stupid anyway (hey, he’d seen in full colour for years and he still had no idea who his was) and that he didn’t need one to complete or whatever the bloody hell everyone thought soulmates did. Inosuke smiles.
(Zenitsu is fifteen years old and his heart shatters. He picks up the pieces and tucks them away, hoping to never have to see them again.)
Inosuke is sixteen years old and he fucking hates Christmas. Everything is red and green, obviously, he just can’t see it. Which is annoying, really, because everything is the colour of wheat and he’s sick of it. He’s sick of being half colourblind, he’s sick of knowing that Zenitsu will never love him back, and he’s fucking sick of fucking Christmas.
It not just the festive non-colours, either. It’s the sickening sentimentality of the whole thing, a constant reminder of everything he’d never have.
As if his sight wasn’t enough to keep him constantly aware of that.
Anyway, it’s shitty and Inosuke hates it all. He sits in biology (directly across from Zenitsu, the arrangement generating daily staring contests with ease) and stares at the snowflakes falling behind him instead. Inosuke thinks that if people were snowflakes, he’d be the meltwater sliding down into the sewers - ages past fallen and not a hope in the world of being the joy caught on someone’s tongue.
(Zenitsu is sixteen years old and he doesn’t understand a single thing.)
Inosuke is seventeen years old and everything changes.
It’s lunch and it’s him and Zenitsu (it’s always him and Zenitsu, always) and it’s a foreign face tripping into their world.
He brings colour with him, handing it to Inosuke’s eyes with a gaping mouth and darting eyes, back and forth between Inosuke and Zenitsu. He stutters a quiet holy shit and Inosuke gasps, because the guy’s lips and earrings are red and his jacket is green and he’s absolutely breathtaking.
(Zenitsu is seventeen years old and he remembers. He remembers and every single thing makes sense.)
Inosuke is eighteen years old and finally, everything is the way it should be.