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L didn't like his soul mark. He felt like it had too much control over his life. Surely that wasn't how soul marks were supposed to work.

こんばんは名探偵

Good evening great detective

Such simple words to carry his whole life. Well, not his whole life- his birth certificate had no description of his soul mark, but he had it at least since before he entered Wammy's orphanage. Since the mark was on his back as well, L didn't know precisely when it appeared, but estimated that his soulmate was anywhere between one and four years younger than him.

Whoever they were, their words had been manipulating his life ever since he translated it.

It wasn't as though being a detective wasn't fun, but L never really had the opportunity to try anything else. That wasn't right, Wammy gave him every opportunity imaginable. It was just that everything else that was suggested for him didn't have the same allure 'detective' did. L himself turned away from all other options, and he knew it was entirely because of the words of someone he had yet to meet.

When he thought about it like that, he actually hated his soul mark. What right did his soulmate have to dictate his life anyway? Even if he couldn't imagine anything else being more enjoyable than detective work.

He hoped his soulmate was equally manipulated by his words, whatever those were.

He supposed this was the bonds of soulmates- that they could affect each other even before meeting. Because detective work really was the best thing for him. It engaged his mind like nothing else did, challenged him like nothing else did. It was fun in a way that nothing else ever could be, and he might never have known if not for his soulmate.

He wondered sometimes what his first words to his soulmate would be. Which of them would speak first was hard to say, as it often was with soul marks that had a greeting like 'good morning' or 'good evening' in it. Would he be the one who spoke first, or would he merely respond to his soulmate's greeting?

L couldn't see himself giving any similar greeting like 'good evening' or any such politeness at all.

It was so unoriginal after all, to follow such boring etiquette with a soulmate meeting. His soulmate must be the polite type, and L was absolutely not. He wasn't sure what that meant for their compatibility, but he was curious to find out.

However it went though, L liked to imagine that first meeting with his soulmate. It was perhaps the one thing he had in common with anyone else in the world.

In his mind, he often greeted his soulmate as 'Officer' or 'Underling' depending on his mood. Sometimes 'Baker-san' if he was in a very good mood. Sometimes 'Criminal-san' if he was in a bad one. Without knowing the circumstances of their meeting, it was hard to guess what he would actually say beyond that.

It certainly wouldn't be 'good evening' though- that he was certain of.

L never shared these vague fantasies out loud however, it was one thing he kept private even from his guardian. Wammy, for his part, was always pleased to wonder aloud with L about his soulmate. L knew it was partly because the man liked the thought of someone with more social skills being there for him when Wammy was… well, when Wammy would no longer be by his side.

But he also knew the man worried about him because L never responded to such discussions. L felt too foolish fantasizing over something he had no information on to ever admit to it, so Wammy didn't know how much L actually obsessed over his soulmate.

It was so pointless though. He didn't know anything about his soulmate and he wouldn't know what he wanted to say until he met them. All he knew was that he wanted it to be as impactful for them as their words were for him. But this was something he could never plan for, so any ideas he came up with were always eventually discarded.

He hated that his whole life had ended up revolving around one simple phrase, and it was only a basic greeting, not even anything interesting. Because he knew nothing else about the person, L could never think of anything better than calling his soulmate names. How could L admit such a stupid thing to Wammy?

If his soulmate had somehow chosen his life's path, then he should be able to choose theirs.

It wouldn't be fair if he couldn't control them at least as much as he was controlled, right?

After a few years, he really hated even thinking about his soul mark, nevermind discussing it or his potential soulmate. Wammy thought he simply didn't want a soulmate, and stopped bringing it up at all. He often gave L sorrowful glances after that and L never tried to correct his impression.

He never wanted to admit to the man that what he hated most of all was that, even after more than a decade, he was still waiting for those words every time he met anyone. He only told Wammy that he hated meeting people.

Then, when he was nineteen, he regretted that he hadn't been honest. Maybe if he had he would have been able to go out searching for his soulmate. If he had never hidden himself away and pretended indifference, he would definitely have found his soulmate before the worst happened.

One night in late spring, his mark started to burn.

The pain of it flashed over his whole body so fast, that at first he didn't understand what was happening. Then the burning ache came again, right where the mark was on his back.

That night was the only time L could remember ever panicking, and the only time he ever woke Wammy up in the middle of the night. Yet, the hot sensations were already fading by the time Wammy got out of bed and lifted L's shirt to check.

"It hasn't faded, my boy," Wammy told him that night. "It's still here, as clear as ever."

"It absolutely did burn," L insisted. "I wouldn't make that up."

Wammy lowered his shirt and patted his shoulder. "I didn't say you did.'

He led L over to the chair by his desk and sat him down. L shuddered when Wammy's warm hands left him, and a terrible cold settled over him. He brought his legs up to cover his toes with the hem of his flannel pajama bottoms and huddled. It would have been better to go to a mirror and check for himself than to bother Mr. Wammy.

But because he hadn't thought at all, now Wammy believed he was being foolish, and L didn't feel satisfied that his mark was still there without being able to see it with his own eyes.

Wammy brought a blanket back from his closet and draped it around L's shoulders. That didn't make him feel any warmer, but at least the weight pushed away that empty feeling on his back. The mark was still there. Wammy wouldn't lie.

"Perhaps something happened," Wammy said, and L lifted his head to regard the man. "To your soulmate, I mean."

"They died and came back to life?" L scoffed internally while his face remained blank.

"Possibly."

L blinked and frowned. Wammy couldn't be suggesting something that impossible.

"There are recorded cases where a soul mark reacts like that to a soulmate who has a heart attack and gets resuscitated," Wammy said calmly.

"Someone younger than me had a heart attack?" L let his eyes fall into a flat, unimpressed droop and hoped Wammy could see it in the dim light.

"If they have a weak heart, or perhaps a murmur," Wammy said encouragingly. Then he winced. "Or well, they could have been in surgery under anesthesia. The burning didn't last longer than a few minutes, I take it, if you raced here right away- so whatever happened they must have been given medical care within that time."

L looked down as he turned the theory over in his head. He felt even more foolish for not being able to think of such a possibility on his own. He'd never heard of such a phenomenon before, but he could easily have researched it online. Mr. Wammy hadn't needed to direct his reasoning since he was ten. What must he think of L now?

"It's perfectly normal to be flustered by something like this," Wammy told him gently. L clutched his legs closer and didn't look up. "I don't think there's anyone in this world who wouldn't be at least a little unbalanced after feeling their soul mark burn. It's one of the most painful sensations humans can feel."

"So…my soulmate is in a hospital then." L still didn't look up, concentrating instead on the feeling of the blanket bunched up by the chair back and pressed against his back.

Wammy hummed. "It is the most plausible reason for your mark to burn and then be fine."

"Hn."

If he'd found this mysterious soulmate by now, L would have known what was happening to them and wouldn't have behaved so foolishly.

But at least it was one more clue to their whereabouts. Japanese, between eighteen and fourteen years old, and currently hospitalized for something which may have stopped their heart for a period of about two minutes.

Most people found their soulmates with far less to go on.

"Thank you, Mr. Wammy," L said finally. He got up and folded the blanket over the chair arm before he turned to the door. "I'm sorry to bother you so late."

"My boy," Wammy stood and reached out for him, brushing his arm enough to make him stop. "It is no bother at all. You know you can always wake me if you need anything, and your soul mark burning is certainly a good enough reason for you to bother me at any time."

"Hn." L nodded since it seemed like Wammy expected something more, then left when the man sighed and suggested a warm drink to take to bed. He could get it on his own, Wammy needed his sleep more than L did.

He still hadn't decided what he would say to his soulmate when they met. It had been at least three years since he made himself stop wondering about it, but now he found the thought circling again and again in his head the way it had when he was still a child.

That imagined first meeting haunted him for days after that night. When he checked the mark with a mirror in the bathroom each morning, when he wrapped himself in a blanket and leaned back in his chair over breakfast, when he bid goodnight to Wammy, and went to the bathroom to check the mark again. Over and over he thought about it- Good evening, great detective… and then what?

Perhaps when they finally met, he would say only だいじょうぶか.

Are you okay?

Harry didn't know he had a soul mark until he was seven. Why would the Dursley's tell him anything that important after all? But seven was when he got undressed in front of strangers for the first time, when his class got to visit a pool for the day.

It was sort of embarrassing, to have everyone crowd around him the way they did without knowing why. But his was the only foreign soul mark in the entire school, so for just that day he became a minor celebrity. He enjoyed it as much as he could and Dudley couldn't do a thing.

At least, not until they went home, and Dudley told his parents all about the weird, unnatural mark Harry showed off at school that everyone ogled. He ended up locked in his cupboard for two whole weeks for showing off his freakishness, and was ordered to never, ever show the mark to anyone ever again.

There wasn't anyone he wanted to share it with anyway. After two weeks by himself, hearing the Dursley's talk about how disturbing it would be to have a soul mark that was just gibberish, he was very much over the excitement of having a foreigner for a soulmate.

That wasn't to say he didn't want one, but if he couldn't even talk to them, how would he know when they met?

So when he was finally able to go back to school, Harry didn't bring up his soul mark to anyone. He went straight to the library, and found every language book he could with writing like "wormy scribbles" and tried to check them against the messy, backwards copy he made by looking over his shoulder in the bathroom.

It definitely wasn't anything like English, but he thought it might be Chinese. There were lots of curvy, flowing bits, as well as some straight lines like stars in that language- definitely similar to his mark!

The school only had one language book with Chinese in it, and that was the closest to what his soulmark looked like. The school book wasn't easy to read, but Harry borrowed it anyway. He wouldn't be able to take it home without risking Dudley destroying it, but he could hide it in his desk at school and study it between classes.

It took Harry three years to carefully gather enough Chinese language books the Dursley's couldn't find and destroy to teach himself, and by then he finally realized… his soul mark wasn't Chinese. So he had to start all over again.

He never got the chance though, because the library wouldn't let him borrow anymore books. Dudley figured out where he was hiding them, and none could be returned. He spent a year trying to figure out how he was going to get ahold of the right books to translate his mark and never came up with anything the Dursley's couldn't ruin.

He thought, if nothing else, when summer came he might be able to hitch a ride to the next town over. He could borrow from that library with a fake name, and he would find somewhere in the park to hide the books, and hide out there to study.

Of course his plan didn't work out the way he hoped.

He was able to get to the other library and check out two books, one Korean and one Japanese primer. He was even able to hide them where he knew Dudley and his gang would never find them- up a tree. But that didn't stop other children from finding them, and the books disappeared only a couple weeks after Harry checked them out.

His last hope was the new school he'd be going to in the fall. Dudders would be off to boarding school while Harry stayed here, and without him around to destroy his stuff, he might be able to keep books in either the school or the house. Either way, he would find out what his soulmate would say to him, no matter what.

Then his birthday came, and he met Hagrid and found out he would be going to Hogwarts- much farther away from the Dursleys. Best of all, he had enough money to just buy whatever books he needed, so that's what he did. Hagrid was happy to take him back out into muggle London, and they got language books for every Asian language Harry could find, even a couple in Chinese again, because it turned out there were different kinds of Chinese instead of just one like he thought.

The books barely fit in his trunk on top of his school supplies, and it was horribly heavy when he had to lug it upstairs at the Dursley's house.

It was so worth it. Harry would finally get to leave the Dursley's, he could get a photo of his soul mark, and he had so many language books that the right one had to be among them. He would finally find out what his soul mark said!

Of course, once he finally did, Harry had plenty of other things to worry about. He might not even live long enough to meet his soulmate after all.

He might not even want to….

もう逃げない

Japanese, and the third language Harry learned by the time he was twelve.

You won't get away

Why would his soulmate say that to him? The first time they met… maybe they hated him already. Maybe he'd done something wrong before they even knew who the other was. It certainly made an already terrible year much, much worse.

At least he had friends now who understood soulmates didn't always make the best first impression. Ron and Hermione went through plenty of spats where they wished they'd never met at all- until fourth year when they figured out having Victor around as their third made interactions much easier. They were lucky to have such an easy answer as being a trio of soulmates that only balanced out all together.

But what was he supposed to do? What had been the point of learning Japanese, if all it got him was knowing when he was being threatened! He would rather have never known what his soul mark said in that case.

Harry resolved then and there that the only thing he would say in return was 絶対に逃げます!

I absolutely will get away!

Because, soulmate or not, Harry wasn't going to let some stranger tell him what to do. He almost looked forward to the day he would get to throw those words back in his soulmate's smug face.

Then he died.

Harry didn't regret it. He didn't.

Everything went much better than he ever could have hoped after all. Voldemort was dead, his friends were alive, and all the death eaters were either on the run or already caught.

Life was finally looking up for him, and his soulmate would never, ever have to know how close Harry came to not having the chance to meet them. Because he would- he could go to Japan right now if he wanted, and he could actually start meeting people until he found his rude, possibly dangerous soulmate.

A whole world of possibilities lay before Harry for maybe the first time in his life.

He hardly knew what to do with himself. He couldn't actually just pop over to another country, even for his soulmate. What would his friends say? He'd already vanished on them once….

He spent three years trying to fit the wizarding world's expectations. He took his N.E.W.T.S. after a summer studying with his friends. He joined the Aurors with Ron after he got enough EEs and Os. He ate dinner with the Weasleys, joined Hermione for a few classes when she wanted to attend muggle uni, trained every day with Ron and other Auror cadets.

It was everything he always thought he wanted when he left Hogwarts and it was so boring!

When was he supposed to meet his soulmate in Japan at this rate? British Aurors never had any reason to travel that far away from home. If a dark wizard fled to another country, then the local aurors would catch them and have them sent back. He thought he might meet his soulmate in the university- there were lots of foreign students he could talk to, and Harry even did, perfecting the languages he already knew and picking up new ones.

But everyone he met always used English first when meeting him, which he couldn't fault them for. He always wanted to practice other languages he learned with anyone who knew them too.

He wanted to go already. Now that he knew for sure that he actually got to have a life, it felt like he was still on pause or something. It felt like he only had a purpose when he was afraid to die, and now that nothing was threatening him he was just...lost.

The longer he had to really think about it, the more he wondered if he even wanted to meet his soulmate. You won't get away…. The more he thought about it, the more he really started to hate his soul mark.

There was always so much going on for him, what with school, the Dursleys, Voldemort, and death eaters, that Harry never really thought he would get to meet whoever would say those words to him. But...now he might and he didn't know if he would like the one who would say them.

It really wasn't fair that someone he hadn't even met yet could give him this much stress, but they did.

After three years of trying, he finally admitted to his friends that it wasn't working. His life wasn't what he really wanted, his job didn't feel fulfilling and his soulmate...might be someone he didn't want anything to do with.

They didn't have any idea how to help him, but they promised to try. That was when something finally came that turned everything around for him.

On his twentieth birthday, he got the rest of what was left for him from Dumbledore's will. It was held back because, well...not even Dumbledore thought he would live this long.

It was a letter, explaining a request to find something his friend and mentor Nicolas Flamel had lost and couldn't remember enough about it to describe properly. It was one of his first experiments in creating the Philosopher's Stone. Incomplete and not nearly as miraculous as the real thing, but still powerful and dangerous in the wrong hands. The letter instructed that the search be kept absolutely secret from anyone in the wizarding world, even those he trusted. No one could resist the lure of endless wealth and youth after all.

The first thing Harry did was tell his friends. He'd found something to give him purpose and they promised to help him after all. They did exactly that, brainstorming with him for weeks on how to accomplish Dumbledore's request.

How do you recover a precious stone that could be any color, any shape, and might be in the possession of muggles, all without letting anyone know you were looking for it?

Magic was out of the question- that would only attract the wrong kind of attention, from both wizards and muggles. Trying to buy it was impossible as well- Flamel had long since forgotten what color the lost stone was, and Harry didn't have enough gold to buy even a fraction of all the precious stones in the world to make sure he got it.

It was a puzzle that Dumbledore never found an answer for and with Voldemort coming into power, it was pushed to the end of his priorities. The next generation could take care of it, he wrote in the missive delivered to Harry, and there was only one person he knew he could trust with such a task once he was gone.

Harry was touched, really, but he still had no better ideas either. Until Ron joked "Maybe we could just steal jewels and return them if they aren't the right one?"

Hermione thought that was preposterous, but Harry called it brilliant. They still couldn't use magic, they couldn't risk exposing the magical world to the muggles, and they couldn't risk any dark wizards learning of a lost stone belonging to Nicolas Flamel- anyone would guess it was a Philosopher's Stone or something close to it.

But maybe they could pretend to have magic. It would keep the magical world out of their business if they thought whatever they did was only muggle tricks, and if they really, really needed to escape the muggles, a little real magic mixed into a bag of tricks would definitely confuse them.

The more Harry and Ron talked it out, already planning and debating, the more interested Hermione became and soon...they even had a name, based on the one thing that would reveal Flamel's stone among all the others.

The Moonlight Magician- soon to be the best jewel thief in the world, but who never kept the treasures he stole. At least, he would return all but one, and then he would disappear forever. A thief that would stand out, until he needed to hide, who would confound all the muggles who saw him, but look perfectly innocent to all the wizards who caught word of him.

This was going to be incredible. The perfect distraction from a life he didn't know how to live and a soulmate he wasn't sure he wanted, and Ron and Hermione would be with him the whole way. Life really was looking up.

AN: NEW Story! These are just coming out of the woodwork... Of course, some of you might know I had a HP/DN/Kaito Kid idea kicking around in Bewitched- this is what grew out of that idea when I added the soulmate troupe to it! I hope you like it! (If you follow me on Ao3, you know this was supposed to be posted around christmas, so.. opps?) Let me know what you think, and there'll be more chapters very soon!