Who Needs Normal?

Chapter 1

~* Kuroo's dreams will be in Bold & Daichi's dreams will be Italics

Typically it happens around puberty, you and your soulmate have a specific mark appear on your skin, it could be anywhere on your body but only you and your soulmate have that specific pattern, shape, or image. It has been said (but never totally proven) that the soulmarks appear when you need your soulmate most. That usually happens around puberty because there is nothing more terrifying than middle school. But it isn't unheard of for soulmates to get their mark early in some cases if they have a particularly troubling childhood, or later in life if you have a particularly easy life without much hardship. But eventually everyone needs help and everyone needs someone they know is going to be there for them.

Sometime after the mark appears you begin to share dreams. Sometimes they're good happy dreams about summer vacation and cute animals, and sometimes you share the deepest darkest nightmares you hide within your subconscious. While you're young you mostly just see whatever it is that your soulmate is seeing in the dream. As you grow and learn more about your soulmate through each other's dreams you can begin to change things in the landscape of the dream, communicating through feelings you can push into the subconscious of your soulmate.. But you never see their face and you can never directly speak.

This is how the world has been for years now and while nobody can say why it started, divorce rates have never been lower and people in general seem happier. It isn't like it used to be where you have to date a bunch and hope that one day you find someone that will make you happy. You are born knowing someone out there will do that and all you have to do is find them. Sure there are some people that ignore their soulmate and date and marry other people but those are mostly the exception to the rule, people whose soulmates have died or rejected them.

Kuroo Tetsurou has had his mark for as long as he can remember. Two large dots, one orange and one red, connected by three smaller dots and a white line right through the middle that is placed on the top of his shoulder. His mark appeared before anyone else he has ever known, before he even knew what it was or what it meant. He was five and summer vacation had just started. His family was on vacation at the beach and when he took his shirt off to go into the ocean but when he did he noticed the design on his shoulder and went to ask his mom what it was. When she saw it he heard his mother gasp. Kuroo turned around to her to ask what was wrong and he saw tears in her eyes. He immediately got scared at the glistening of unshed tears in his mother's eyes. She pulled him aside and asked him a lot of questions about school and his friends and if he ever felt sad but he had a great life and was always a happy kid. She let him go play but told him they would talk about it more before bed.

After hours of fun on the beach and a nice dinner with his parents his mom helped him through his bedtime routine and tucked him into the bed then she laid down with him to talk about dreams. It must have been really hard for his mother at the time, trying to explain to a five year old that when he goes to sleep he might see dreams and nightmares that belong to someone else. It was hard for a five year old to grasp something so complicated but his mother knew that if her son's soulmark appeared at such a young age that his soulmate's life was not easy or fun or happy like the life Kuroo was blessed to live. She tried to explain this to her son as simply as she could and hope that he understood or even if he didn't understand, he was comfortable coming to her for help or if he had questions.

However he did not see anything strange or out of the ordinary in his dreams that night, or that week, not even that year. It was the day before his seventh birthday and because they talked about it in school he understood what a soulmate was and what the dreams meant. He kept his soulmark to himself, not wanting people to know about the mark and that his soulmate might be sad. It was hard enough dealing with that feeling by himself. The night before his seventh birthday was the first night he was pulled from his own pleasant dreams into something much more garish.