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In a world like this one, you would think trying to find your soulmate would be your top priority. A specific phrase that they'd someday say to you etched somewhere into your skin like a permanent tattoo, always making you stop and wonder just who would be the one to finally say it. For many people, it is a high priority. For some, they try to challenge it, to ignore "fate" and be with the person they choose. But for Leon? No, it’s not something he thinks about. He's the Champion now, he has other things to worry about. A lot of people do pry, however. They always ask— just who is the Champion of Galar’s soulmate? What words mark his skin?
They are written across his collarbone in neat, practiced penmanship that seems so familiar, somehow. You're totally fucking lost, aren't you?
Every time Leon takes a moment to look at it in the mirror he can't help but think: Anyone could say that to me!
Well, there’s no getting rid of it until he finds his soulmate, and then the words will gradually begin to fade. So, for now, he does his best to ignore it, to politely turn down the subject if it happens to come up in interviews, to focus on his career and his life outside of it ( though sometimes it feels like he doesn’t have a life outside of it ).
The annoying thing is, though, is that there is someone he likes. A lot. The issue is that he’s sure it isn’t “meant to be”, that fate has nothing in store for them beyond friendship, that he needs to get over his silly little crush sooner rather than later. No, he should not be thinking about how Raihan’s pretty blue eyes sparkle when they battle, glowing through sandstorms, or how shiny and big his happy grin is, or how when Raihan touches his arm or shoulder or grabs his hand to lead him in the right direction it feels like an electric shock.
Rivals. Best friends. That’s all they are, all they’ll ever be. Of course.
Raihan never told him what his mark said because Leon never asked, and Raihan has never asked him because Raihan is always so polite and considerate. All he knows is that it’s written across Raihan’s hipbone, hidden beneath the waistband of his trousers at all times and carefully edited out of any photos where there might be a glimpse.
That isn’t to say he isn’t curious sometimes, but he figures it’s none of this business.
—
When Raihan starts seeing someone, Leon has to force down his irrational jealousy and smile, because why wouldn’t he be happy for his friend? It’s some cute guy who had just moved from Unova, with a smile as bright as Raihan’s. They look good together, Leon has to admit, but that awful part of his brain keeps telling him that he and Raihan would look so much better.
The only thing giving him some comfort is that Raihan had promised him once that when he found his soulmate, he would tell Leon. So far, Raihan hasn’t said anything about it. It’s horrible of Leon, he knows, because he wants Raihan to be happy and to find the one for him, but he can’t deny just how much he wants to be the one. All he can do is sit and wait and see.
Sonia’s even been trying to convince him to get out and meet someone, which is easy for her to say since she found her soulmate in Nessa when she was only sixteen, but he’s just too busy. Being the Champion is hard work, soulmates and romance aren’t at the forefront of his brain at all times. He likes books, he likes hats, and he likes Pokémon. Also Raihan. Anyway.
Most people don’t really want to date Leon for Leon anyway. They just want him because he’s the Champion. They want bragging rights. They want to show him off like some prized Ponyta. Doesn’t matter if they think they could be his soulmate or not. There have been a few dates, just a few, but no relationship that ever lasted more than a few weeks. It’s a little lonely sometimes—still, he has friends, he has his Pokémon, and that’s what matters most to him.
So why does he feel a flicker of relief when five months later Raihan tells him he broke things off with his boyfriend?
Ugly, awful feelings. Soulmates don’t act like that.
—
“Hey, Leon,” Raihan asks one night while Leon is visiting his place. They’re both a couple of beers in, hazy and warm, not really thinking straight, Leon definitely on the verge of saying something stupid.
“Mm, yeah?” Leon lifts his head up, the room spinning a bit. Raihan is stretched across the couch, his legs slung over Leon’s lap. Leon lightly touches his knee, trying not to imagine what his skin might feel like under the fabric of his joggers. He keeps his hand there.
Nothing he could have done would have prepared him, drunk or sober, for what Raihan says next: “You ever been in love?”
He blinks a few times, the alcohol meddling with his ability to think, the words catching him off guard so much it makes it even harder to think. In love? Has he ever been in love? Of course he has! He’s in love right now, with the guy he’s been drinking with all night who’s halfway into his lap! Leon glances over, he sees where Raihan’s tank top is riding up and his joggers are slipping down a little. On his hip, he catches a glimpse of the soulmate mark, but the alcohol makes his vision a little blurred, he can’t make out what the tiny writing says. Raihan seems to take notice that he’s looking, using one hand to tug his joggers back up.
It makes Leon blink and look back up at Raihan’s face. His eyes are heavily lidded, but he can see them shining. Beautiful blue like the ocean, like the sky.
“I don’t know,” Leon responds, glancing away and picking up his half-empty beer bottle and taking a swig. It tastes like piss. All beer tastes like piss, but he’s gotten used to it. “Does it really matter?”
“Sure it does. I’ve just never seen you in a real relationship, so I’m curious.” Raihan reaches over and empties the rest of his beer into his mouth.
“You’re just drunk,” Leon grumbles.
“So are you,” Raihan shoots back.
A sigh slips past his lips. “It doesn’t matter, right? With the whole… soulmate thing. If I fell for someone who wasn’t my soulmate, isn’t it kind of doomed from the start?”
“I dunno,” Raihan replies, his tone thoughtful. He’s still looking at Leon while Leon is looking away; he can feel the weight of his gaze on him. “Plenty of people got with people that ended up not being their soulmate and are real happy together. I don’t think anyone should be tied down to the concept. Just be with the person you think is right.”
Leon finally looks at him again. Raihan’s eyes are soft, but otherwise, his gaze is inscrutable. They sit in silence for a few moments, then Raihan is pulling his legs back and sitting up. Blearily, Leon blinks again, and then Raihan is touching his face and leaning in. Their brows almost touch, the air between them feels palpable with its sudden tension.
“Then…” Leon takes a shuddering breath. “Sure, I’ve been in love.”
“Want to tell me who the lucky guy is?”
“I…” Leon feels Raihan’s breath ghosting over his lips. This is too much too fast, they’re too close, there are so many ways for this scenario to end and Leon thinks he needs to get out of there as soon as possible. And yet, he doesn’t pull away, he just leans in a little more. “No, I think that’ll be a secret for a little while longer.”
When Raihan kisses him it tastes like beer and curry and it’s definitely an unpleasant combination, but his lips are soft and gentle and it still sends a thrill through Leon who grabs his shoulders and kisses him back. The kiss is awkward, sloppy from their intoxication, and overall kind of sucks but Leon can’t really bring himself to care. All he knows is that he’s kissing Raihan, finally, and in the morning he’ll regret it but for now, it’s all that he wants.
It’s when Raihan’s lying back again with Leon in his lap and touching him, touching him, touching him that Leon’s drunken mind snaps out of it. Fingers brush over the scars on his chest, moving dangerously close to the words across his collarbone and Leon jerks back, eyes wide and lips parted as he lets out little pants. He moves out of Raihan’s lap and sits back on his heels, covering his face with his hands.
“I can’t do this. Sorry,” is all he says, getting off of the couch and grabbing his coat, managing to make his way to the door and pull on his shoes and coat despite his head swimming. Raihan isn’t given a chance to respond because Leon’s already out of the door, and he barely manages to get out of the castle on his own, but when he does he lets out Charizard so she can fly him home.
He feels stupid.
—
They don’t talk for a week. Mostly because Leon won’t respond to any of the messages Raihan sends, and eventually, Raihan evidently gives up. He shouldn’t have gone with the kiss, he shouldn’t have liked it, he can still remember how Raihan’s hands felt on his skin, beneath his shirt, against the sensitive scar tissue. If he had been sober… well, would that have even happened if either of them had been sober?
He touches himself a few times to the memory, always left a shaking, sweating mess with Raihan’s name on his lips, one hand reaching up to trace over the words etched into his skin, and afterward, he’s full of nothing but shame and anger at himself.
It’s during one of those moments of post-orgasm clarity that he reaches over with his clean hand and grabs his phone to finally send a message to Raihan.
To: Raihan
> Sorry
Almost immediately the bubble to show Raihan is typing pops up at the bottom. Leon bites his lip.
From: Raihan
> dont worry about it
> just wish you answered my messages before
> instead of waiting a whole week
To: Raihan
> It’s all just a little complicated, I’m working it out
> We’re still friends though right
From: Raihan
> lol
> duh
> stupid
Leon lets out a breathless laugh.
—
They don’t bring up the kiss. It’s better that they don’t, Leon thinks, even though he has a feeling it’ll come up eventually. They shouldn’t be skirting around it, but here they are. Life goes on like it always did, but he notices how Raihan gives him strange looks sometimes. He notices how he himself has a habit of looking directly at Raihan’s lips when he talks.
“Did something happen with you two?” Sonia asks him one day when Leon swings by the lab for a visit on the rare occasion he has the time. “You and Raihan, I mean.”
“Huh?” Leon looks up from where he’s scratching Yamper beneath the chin. “What do you mean?”
Sonia gives him a look. “Raihan kept texting Nessa about how you weren’t responding to his messages. Nessa told me about it. And now you guys are… talking again? Like nothing happened?”
Leon scrunches his nose. “You’re clever, you can figure it out.”
“Leon.”
“What?” Leon huffs, affronted. “Fine, we were drunk, and he asked me if I’ve ever been in love. Then we got to talking about soulmates. And then he…” He trails off, biting his bottom lip. “Kissed me. It sucked. But it…”
“It what?”
“It’s something I’ve wanted for a while.” He plops down on the floor with legs crossed and Yamper climbs into his lap. “That’s all.”
Sonia rolls her eyes. “You’re both hopeless. So, did you confess?”
“No. I got up and left.”
“Oh, my gods.”
“Not all of us are as lucky as you,” Leon says, maybe a little too bitterly. “Finding the one when you were still a kid. Didn’t you and Nessa find out within ten minutes of meeting?”
“How’s that relevant? Do you want Raihan to be your soulmate?” Sonia walks over, her heels clicking against the tile. She crouches down next to him. “He doesn’t have to be for you to love him, you know.”
“It’d just feel wrong,” Leon mumbles. “Like I’m keeping him from who he’s meant to be with.”
“You’re just being stupid. You never know what’ll happen ‘til you try.” And she plucks the cap off of his head and proceeds to ruffle his hair, as she’d always do when they were kids. Leon scrunches his nose up.
“I’ll think about it,” he responds. “Don’t want to rush things, you know.”
Sonia just nods with a smile. “I know. Anyway, are you going to sit around and mope or are you going to help me move these textbooks?”
—
He’s late.
Leon had meant to meet Raihan at the café by two, but it’s already three and he’s found himself hopelessly lost in the streets of Hammerlocke. The early January air bites at his nose, making him pull his scarf further up his face, curling himself in his heavy coat tighter. He’s been to this city a million and one times, how does he still get lost? Maybe he should just let Charizard out and get her to navigate.
It’s when he’s passing by the entrance to the stadium for the umpteenth time, hopelessly trying to decipher the map on his phone, that he begins to feel a presence behind him. It’s large, familiar, and…
“You’re totally fucking lost, aren’t you?”
The words make him jerk his head around over his shoulder so quickly it almost gives him whiplash, his hair twirling about his head with the motion. Immediately, his gloved hand comes up to touch his collarbone through his layers of clothing. The words on his skin suddenly feel like they’re burning, burning, burning up. The words got his attention first, then he registered the voice, and now he sees the face of the one who said it.
Raihan? It was Raihan? Wait, this is…
“Sorry, Raihan, could you repeat that?”
There is a long stretch of silence. Raihan is staring at him with some weird look on his face, that quickly melts into shock, then realization, and then his face breaks out into a wide grin. Leon can see the slightest brush of his hand over his hip, where his mark is. And he’s still reeling, because Raihan really said that, and there’s no way Raihan could have known what was written on his skin because he never showed him, never told him, and Raihan would never be so cruel to pull a prank like this on him.
“I said, you’re totally fucking lost, aren’t you?” It’s said with a laugh at the edge of his voice. Leon feels warmth bubbling up deep within him.
“I— yeah, I am. A bit. But, do you—” Leon’s hands are shaking, his voice has a little tremble in it, his heart is pounding wildly in his chest. People throw them a few looks as they pass but otherwise mind their own business. The Champion and the leader of Hammerlocke’s gym standing in the middle of the sidewalk would attract some attention. So Leon doesn’t try to attract any more attention by doing something like… jumping up and kissing Raihan. “Do you think we can skip the café and- and go back to yours?”
“Yeah,” Raihan replies without hesitation. “Yeah! Yeah. Of course. Let’s—” Is Raihan trembling a little, too? “Let’s go.”
—
The second they enter Raihan’s home Leon is practically hoisted off of the ground when their mouths fit together. He laughs into it, hands finding purchase in Raihan’s scarf and— wow, they should really talk about this first before they get right into kissing. That would be a good plan. Leon, straining on his toes while Raihan is hunched over him, manages to break the kiss and say, “Hold on, hold on, let’s… sit for a second.”
Raihan, albeit looking a little reluctant, nods in agreement. Leon falls back onto his heels and proceeds to step out of his shoes, then pulls his scarf and his coat off, dropping them onto a chair near the doorway. Normally, Raihan would get on him about not hanging them up properly, but right now he doesn’t seem to care. He just does the same.
They sit down on the couch, the same couch they had been drunkenly making out on barely three weeks prior, and stare at their laps, then up at each other.
“Raihan—” “Leon—”
They stop, blinking. Raihan rubs the back of his neck. “Okay, you go.”
“You know, I was thinking about asking you out today,” Leon says. “Soulmates or not. I wanted to see if it would work out. And then…”
He beams brightly. “And then, well, um…” Leon reaches to the collar of his shirt and pulls it down, to the side, revealing the writing on his collarbone. They say that when your soulmate is finally revealed that the mark will eventually fade, so he might as well show it while he still can. For proof. Raihan stares at it, then stares at Leon’s face.
“I said that,” Raihan says.
“Yeah, you did,” Leon can’t help but laugh.
“Your ma must’ve had a real shock seeing the word ‘fuck’ on your skin.”
“My nani had a bigger shock. I thought she’d keel over. I was seven when they appeared, you know.”
“I know. Late bloomer, right? And…” Raihan tugs the waistband of his trousers and briefs down a little bit to reveal the small writing on his hip. Sorry, Raihan, could you repeat that? “You said this.” Now that he can see it clearly, Leon can tell it’s written in… his handwriting, and now that he thinks about it, the reason the handwriting of his own mark seems so familiar is because it’s Raihan’s.
“I—” Leon swallows. “I sure did, didn’t I?”
Then they both dissolve into fits of laughter, tears pricking at their eyes, Leon falling forward against Raihan’s chest while Raihan laughs into his hair, arms encircling him, dragging him into his lap.
“I’ve been…” Leon says through his giggles, “pining over you for years. Didn’t think I’d have a real chance. I thought it was hopeless but you’re… you’re my…”
He’s having trouble getting the word out because suddenly there are real tears, a lump in his throat.
“Soulmate,” Raihan finishes for him, breathless. His hands come up to Leon’s face to wipe the sudden tears away with his thumbs. It’s pretty useless, plus Raihan is starting to cry, too. It feels like years’ worth of heartache is being lifted from his shoulders and now all he can feel is that pure love, that longing turning into this, blooming and warm. “You’re my soulmate, Leon.”
“I never thought…” Leon trails off.
“Don’t think too much about it right now,” Raihan says. “Just kiss me.”
And Leon does so, gladly. He kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him. At some point, he finds himself being pushed back against the couch cushions, Raihan hovering over him, his tongue in his mouth and hands gripping his waist. Leon lets out a little sound, a mix between a whimper and a sigh. Both of his arms wind tightly around Raihan’s neck, one hand cradling the back of his head as he kisses back to the best of his ability.
“Raihan,” he pants when Raihan breaks the kiss and peppers more down the column of Leon’s throat, when Raihan tugs his collar aside and traces those words on his skin with his lips, with his tongue. “Raihan, I love you.”
Raihan pauses, then lifts his head up to look down at Leon, right into his eyes. He beams brightly.
“I know,” he snickers. And then he kisses Leon again, breathing into it, “I love you, too.”