HELLO????

Yuuta, watching Megumi and Toge fight: Are you sure they should be fighting? What if they get hurt? Maki, not bothered by the chaos: It’s fine. They’re too evenly matched to hurt each other. Yuuta: Then... who’s the strongest out of you three? Megumi: Maki. Toge: Maki. Maki: Me.

Pain Shared Ch1

Also on AO3 under same author and title.

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

For as long as she could remember, Ami had experienced the phantom sensations of scraped palms and skinned knees.  Logically, she must have been confused by this at some point, but she’d also known the explanation for as long as she could remember: her soulmate was an active boy, the complement to her own quiet, studious nature.  In time, she’d come to simply accept it.

\_/

When she was six years old, the sensations changed; sharp impacts, followed by dull stinging, on her knuckles, her shins, the heels of her hands.  Every so often, she’d feel a blow to her torso that almost knocked the breath out of her.  And always, always at the same time every day.  She dwelled in confusion and concern, until she chanced upon her school’s karate club in session.

\_/

Starting when she was seven, she was abruptly introduced to the feeling of a slipped knife scoring her fingers, a slight chemical burn in the nonexistent cut, the pinprick, scattergun burn of hot particles splattering her arms.  As she watched her mother cooking on one of her rare days off, it clicked.

\_/

When she was ten, there was a disruption: the now familiar impacts occurred at the wrong time, in the wrong sequence, and were sharper, harder, aimed more cruelly.  She rubbed her jaw as she felt her teeth jar from a blow she herself hadn’t taken.  The disruptions, while infrequent, and irregular, were nevertheless recurring.  Every instance was accompanied by both relief and dread, for while they served as proof her soulmate yet lived, they might also herald his death.

\_/

When she was eleven, two things happened that made her doubt her assumptions as to her soulmate’s identity.  The first was that she caught herself looking at an older girl the way her female classmates looked at older boys.  The second was that she felt a short, sharp shock from her earlobes, the kind her classmates had described after getting their ears pierced.  It was now distinctly plausible that she’d been considering the wrong demographic.

\_/

When she was thirteen, she felt the single most wrong sensation she thought she’d ever experience.  She’d had warning, of course – in the form of intermittent bites – but she hadn’t known it for what it was.  As the (tearing, stinging, ohgodstop) feeling between her legs started to fade, as she started to uncurl, she consoled herself with the thought that at least she knew which half of the species to look at, now.  The next day, her knuckles stung, once.

\_/

When she was fourteen, she made her first friend.  Things got weird after that.  Several months later, that first friend introduced her to…

…

…

…

… Oh. Oh dear God in heaven.  Introduced her to the loveliest, most graceful, most unabashedly genuine creature she’d ever seen.

Her name was Makoto.