Chapter Text
In this world, most people get their soulmate colour on their 13th birthday. A random clump of strands in your hair, or a small marking on your chest or wrist will naturally appear as your colour. It is more common to have your colour appear in your hair than on your body. In addition, just because your colour appeared in your hair does not mean your soulmate has their colour in their hair as well. Unfortunately, not everybody received a colour, because not everyone had a soulmate they were destined to love. When you turn 21, you can choose to erase your soulmate colour. After removing it, your soulmate will also lose their colour, because soulmates can’t be one-sided. Neither of you will get a new colour, nor can you reverse it. When it’s done, it’s done. You can only have one soulmate, and the system doesn’t make mistakes.
When Yoichi Isagi turned 13, his colour appeared in his hair. It dragged from the top of half of his cowlick all the way down to the tip of his hair just on his right side. It was thick, and pretty noticeable from any distance. Around 1.5 inches wide. A light ocean blue. Those few strands in his hair would glow the same way the water in an outdoor pool would on a hot summer day when the sun hit it just right, or how the water looked like it shone in those aesthetic ocean and beach photos you see on pinterest.
Everybody complimented Isagi on how pretty his soulmate colour was. They would always tell him cheesy things like:
“I bet your soulmate will be just as pretty as that shade of blue, Isagi-kun!”
If he was being totally honest, he didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean. Sure, he did agree that his soulmate colour was a pretty shade of light blue. In fact, it had grown to be his favourite colour. But he never really understood how people could describe a colour like it was the most pretty and beautiful thing they had ever laid their eyes upon.
Yoichi wasn’t the happiest when he realised how noticeable his colour was against his dark hair. Now don’t get him wrong, Yoichi Isagi did want a soulmate colour, and a soulmate of course, but he was just hoping for his colour to maybe turn out a bit darker and not something that dazzled every time he stepped into the sunlight. He didn’t want the first thing people noticed about him to be the few light blue strands of his hair that he supposedly shared with his soulmate.
The day after he got his colour, he told himself he would try to be nonchalant about it at school, but nevertheless, the first thing 13 year old Yoichi did as soon as he got to school the next day, was try and find that girl he had liked. Her 13th birthday had already passed, so Yoichi already knew she had some kind of blue.
In the end, they did not have the same shade of blue, and the girl laughed in his face after he asked.
When he got home that same day, he locked himself in his room and cried for the rest of the night.
For the rest of his time in junior high, Isagi tried comparing his shade of blue to a bunch of different girls, any girl he saw in public with any form of light blue for that matter. If he thought for even a second that their colours could possibly be the same, he’d run up to her and ask to compare.
They never were the same shade.
His friends always teased him for it.
“You look so desperate when you do that, Yo-kun!” they would say
He would always ignore them. He told himself he does this simply out of curiosity and not desperation. Out of the fact he didn’t want to miss the chance to meet his soulmate.
One time, he saw this girl walking past the field he was playing on. He was so sure that their colours were the same that he ran off the pitch in the middle of the match to go check, but after he looked closer, he realised that they were barely off.
Just barely.
Everyone on his team and the opposing team laughed and he got a lecture from his coach.
After about two years of going after random girls, he finally stopped. Not because he gave up looking for his soulmate, but because he had finally realised how stupid it was and desperate it made him seem. His friends' teasing seemed to finally get to him. He thought that if soulmates were really meant to be, then they’d meet naturally and not from him running up to them randomly.
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When Yoichi Isagi first got into Blue Lock, he didn’t see anyone with the same colour as him either. There were some blues, of course, but none that shone like his shade. This wasn't surprising, he was fairly certain he liked girls anyway.
When Isagi met Bachira, he noticed the yellow bleeding into the back of his hair. Isagi quickly realised that the yellow couldn’t possibly be Bachira’s colour because colours could only come up as few strands, and not all the hair covering the back of ur neck, like Bachira’s did. When Isagi asked him about his soulmate colour, Bachira rolled up his sleeve to reveal a smudge of dark lavender about the size of a loonie. “I know it looks like a bruise,” he chuckled, “but this is the colour I got!”
Isagi wasn’t surprised when Bachira told him he hadn’t found his soulmate yet either, people don’t usually find theirs until their mid 20’s to late 30’s.
Just like he was at school, Isagi was teased for his radiant colour
“You’ll certainly get noticed by other teams with that, Isagi!”
Mhm..
“Careful Isagi, the camera flashes just might end up bouncing back and blinding the fans!”
What?
“Y’know Isagi, I don’t really know how your soulmate hasn’t found you yet! That light blue of yours stands out way too much.
I know.
It was so infuriating! They were so over exaggerating it too! Those kinds of things will NEVER happen. He swore his colour only looked so bright because the rest of his hair was so dark. This pissed him off so much that he had considered dying his strand black, until he remembered that covering up your colour with dye was illegal. Sometimes he wished his colour had come up as a mark of his body and not in his hair.
It was mostly Chigiri, Hiori, Yukimiya and Otoya who were the ones doing the teasing. The only person who didn’t make fun of him for it was Aryu. He always said that he thought his colour was very “glam.”
Chigiri’s Colour was a bright yellow that fell down the back of his head along with his other strands of long pink hair. Hiori’s was a stripe of minty green that curved around his wrist. Yukimiya’s was an orange that weaved beautifully into his brown hair. And oddly enough, Otoya’s colour was the swoop of green that rested at the front of his hair. He had told Isagi that he had colour matched it to dye the back of his hair green as well. He said he thought it would add more swag to his look. Which it sort of did.
As for the rest of his acquaintances, Isagi either didn’t know their colour, or just didn’t really care all that much. The only other three he could remember off the top of his head was Kurona, who had a swirl of maroon mixed into his one braid, Kunigami, whose mark hovered just under his collar bone, was covered with a bandage, and finally Rin, who surprisingly had a soulmate colour. Rin’s strands of hair were hidden on the back of his neck. The dark gray stripe was barely visible underneath the rest of this dark teal hair. Isagi was kinda jealous, if his colour had to be this bright, then it could at least be a bit more hidden away. Not completely, but hidden enough that it wasn’t so noticeable.
When Isagi asked Rin about his colour, Rin had simply just called soulmates “lukewarm” and said he planned to get it removed when he turned 21 because it was too much of a distraction. Classic Rin. He thought.
Isagi found out a few days after the U-20 match that Ryusei Shidou and Sae Itoshi had the same colour. He wasn’t sure if it was entirely true, (it was just a rumor after all) and he never had the opportunity to ask Shidou himself. If it was true, he was happy for them.
As Isagi progressed through Blue Lock, his mind slowly started to slip away from the whole soulmate colour thing and focused on refining his soccer game, mentally and physically. He had given up on finding his soulmate for the time being, finally realising soccer was way more important than his future love interest right now.
That was until he met Michael Kaiser, and was overwhelmed with the sight of the same light ocean blue seeping into the ends of someone else's hair.
A guy
And his future biggest rival.