SOULMATES [My Hero Academia]

Rise and Shine - Koji Koda

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"There you are... Let's get this over with."

I frowned at my blind date, who appeared out of nowhere. With a heavy sigh, he dumped himself into the empty seat at our reserved table, looking anywhere else except at me. The guy had shaggy black hair, pristine teeth, little gold hoops in his ears, and a boring tie that screamed "someone else made me wear this''. He showed up fifteen minutes late and was already winking flirtatiously at the passing waitresses.

All in all, he seemed done with our blind date already. He thrust his scarred hand toward me, hovering over the fake candle on our romantic little table. "Sero," he grunted, "Hanta Sero. Mina calls me 'Han'."

No apology. No explanation for arriving late. No pretext.

Straight to the point, this guy. I dressed up for him?

Trying to be civil and aloof, I took a steadying breath, erased my RBF, and clasped his hand in mine. "Mina calls me 'fart face', so I don't think–"

The floor fell out from between us. Mental manifestations of our bodies floated in an endless twilit void of stars and wind... the Connection Room. Our furniture—at least in this metaphysical plane—wove itself into thrones of flowers: hollyhock, alyssum, blackthorn, and daffodil.

Back at that overpriced restaurant, where I knew our bodies waited for us with paper white eyes, a waitress passed us in silence, watching as Sero's hair floated in the air as if he were underwater. I felt her presence as she slipped a piece of receipt paper into his other hand, her number written on it in red ink.

Breathless, I gaped at the cosmic surroundings of our minds, trying and failing to take it all in. I hadn't tried a Soulmate Connection in so long that I forgot what it was like... the weightlessness, the jumbled nerves, the telltale smell of honey from the flowers.

"You have done this before, right?"

For a second, I forgot Sero was even there. Our hands still clasped between us. I blushed furiously once I realized what he was insinuating, and said, "Yeah, I've made a Connection before. It's just... it's been a while."

He grimaced and I swore he rolled his eyes. "Fate's a bitch, you know?" he said.

Did he mean that as an insult? Or was that supposed to comfort me?

Either way, I didn't have time to worry about it. A temporal ribbon burst from our joined hands, twisting and writhing in the void around us until it formed a Mobius strip around Sero and I, each in a separate end of the symbol; our hands clasped in the center, right at the nexus. Our potential fate began to play on the ribbon around us like a reel of film, the most likely scenarios from our optional combined future.

At first, everything seemed great; I moved past the weird start to our date and Sero was effortlessly charming. I saw us on dates: adventuring around the world and trying new foods I couldn't name, playing games in airports to pass the time on long layovers, collapsed on the couch in my apartment as we watched The Big Lebowski and Napoleon Dynamite and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, telling our worst jokes while we made chocolate chip pancakes at midnight, sitting on the fire escape while we watched the sun rise...

We saved the day together, teaming up for missions and launching my hero ranking into the stratosphere. Everyone suddenly knew my name. We rescued hundreds of children from quirk trafficking rings, dismantled crime syndicates, cleaned up the beach and the forests and the streets. Our hero names were plastered on the front covers of every major publication, singing our praises and calling us the Couple of the Century. We never stopped signing autographs.