Chapter Text
Kurama looks ridiculous with a small patch of bright orange fur. It clashes with his crimson pelt instead of blending in, stands out proudly, draws the eye. His own fist dyed Naruto’s red the day they became allies in full.
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Sasuke’s lips are obnoxiously, permanently, vividly orange. The color is so opaque that no flesh is visible beneath it.
Naruto’s are an electric blue-white.
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Naruto has sunshine yellow handprints, disproportionately huge, on his neck and shoulder, his left thigh. His father held him gently but tight, frantic to keep him safe, when he was a day old and the marks have only grown with him.
A deep gold handprint has always been visible on the side of his face. A thumb across his cheek, his ear and neck covered, the meat of someone’s palm brushing his jaw. The same color is a patch on his temple on the other side of his face.
(The first time his mother touched him, she cradled his face to hers so that their foreheads touched; held him close like he was precious.)
-
Gaara has the exact same marks, in the color of wet-sand.
(Two frantic mothers weakly cradling newborn sons, desperately trying to protect them in their first hours of life; no mother wants to make a sacrifice of their child).
Gaara will never see the mark he left on her; he still carves the kanji into his forehead.
It’s his only mark. Even if someone wanted to touch him instead of run in fear, his sand armor is not skin. No one breaks through it.
Until Naruto does, slamming his forehead into Gaara’s and cracking the armor. A starburst of orange appears, between the cracks like broken glass, giving him the oddest soulmark of anyone he knows.
How odd it is for the first touch he shares with a soulmate to be on his face. Who touches someone for the first time on their face? What ninja lets anyone get so close?
-
Naruto’s face is a Technicolor masterpiece by the time he is 17.
A mint-green fist-print crosses his cheekbone from the first time Sakura punches him in the academy. (Sunset, vibrant and bold, had painted itself across her first three proximal phalanges).
Once an old lady flicked him across the forehead with the strength of a hundred men. She said something about him fainting—it was a hard hit; he probably would have been knocked out if not for Kurama. It took days for the bruising to fade; nearly a week for him to realize that the circular purpling at the bottom of Gaara’s red, jagged starburst wasn’t going to heal no matter how much chakra his tenant shoved at it.
His first kiss left his lips stained with lightning, oil to the watercolor of less influential, translucent soulmarks. Almost all of Naruto’s soulmarks are like that.
-
Sarutobi left a smudged thumb print from his nose to his cheek, a shaky but absentminded brushing motion to remove his parent’s blood from his face, about two minutes after he was orphaned. The hokage didn’t expect to pull his hand away and see a leaf-green, faintly-pigmented soulmark left behind.
It was just another way, he thought grimly, that his carelessness would affect the boy’s life.
That same day—that same hour, as loathe as he was-- Sarutobi had to give the infant to Jiraiya. Sick with grief, sick with the necessity, they checked the seal before anything else.
Jiraiya had to live with the deep red handprint on his godson’s abdomen, right over the seal; he had to leave Minato’s son to anonymity, a dark burgundy mark with no name or loved one attached to it, and hoped the color didn’t signify that his absence from Naruto’s life would have the most (worst) impact on him.
Minato and Kushina’s marks were both vibrant, after all; they were significant in his life despite knowing him only a day, because their deaths would brand him as an orphan, their choices leave him a jinchuriki. Soulmarks reflect in boldness the leaver’s influence on the life of the recipient.
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Sasuke has bloodred fingerprints around his neck from where Itachi first held him, the color the second-brightest mark he has.
His clan members leave strangely bold marks, as well. Cousins handing him things, adults that catch him before he falls, aunts leading him home by the wrist and fingers.
Non-immediate family, even clan members, usually leave faint but distinct markings. They matter, of course, but don’t really affect or influence the lives of children not their own. Sasuke’s hands are covered and layered in watercolor rust-red-brown Uchiha touches, a beloved second-son of the clan head, adored and spoiled and touched often.
Itachi has the same marks in the same places. (His clan’s blood was on his hands his entire life; he just didn’t know it yet.)
Neither of them can get it off, no matter how hard they scrub.
-
Hinata made the seal of reconciliation with her crush after a dismal taijutsu match at the Academy, the first week of their year together. Her fingers come away orange. His are lavender and he exclaims in surprise. She tries not to be disappointed that the pastel color on his skin is several degrees more transparent than the solid neon she received.
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After Haku’s parents died, no one had his mark and no one wanted it. Until Zabuza rescued him and their first touch left his master with ice-blue palms. Haku received a dark-blue mark to match. To his ceaseless awe, both marks were alike in boldness. He had someone precious once more.
When he woke up a young shinobi in the forest, he did so with the barest brush of fingers to the boy’s shoulder.
The ice-mark he left behind shocked his eyes wide open. The orange staining the tips of his fingers made him hesitate when they fought.
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Naruto and Sasuke have wrists covered in matching handprints, white fingerprints from a brief, tight grip that immediately hurled them away from each other. Kakashi stopped them from connecting chidori to rasengan, excused them for the violence with only extreme disappointment in light of the ordeals they’d both been through with the clusterfuck that was the chunin exams.
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Orochimaru leaves bite marks on a handful of victims, marking them personally with both the curse seal and a soulmark. His teeth rarely carry any color back with him; if they do, it is easily replaced by the next experiment’s.
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Karin has tooth impressions all over her arms, some with colors, and some without. It is the first and last time so many touch her.
Sasuke grabs her wrist—which, wow, rude; Orochimaru ordered a full physical—and leaves a bracelet of wreathed lightning behind, bright and electric.
He looks at her in mild surprise. Apparently this won’t be the last they see of each other. His hand comes away faintly orchid.
-
It’s so hard to get rid of his bonds when he wears them on his skin. It’s impossible to forget that the first time he touched the idiot, they kissed, because his lips glow neon in any amount of light. He sees them in the mirror and is forced to accept that it’s as bright a soulmark as his traitor brother’s.
It doesn’t have to mean anything.
-
Neither Naruto nor B touched knuckles to seal the deal of jinchuriki friendship. B didn’t want to cover even a little of Gyuuki’s pink-brown soulmark and likewise wanted to leave Naruto’s unmarked flesh for Kurama. Instead they exchanged a fist-bump with the sides of their hands, vertically, and came away with cobalt and orange, neither too dark nor too light.
-
Kakashi’s palms have marks of lightning and sunrise from his idiot students, but they are not nearly the first he receives. His mask covers the white droplets and lip imprints that his father left the first time he held his infant son, pressing a kiss to new skin even as he wept for the loss of his wife.
Guy left a dark green knuckle-smudge on his bare arms the first time he (nearly) got a hit in during a spar.
Rin left vivid, violet hand prints on his left side-- healed his ribs on the first away mission; he’d taken a kunai for Obito.
Obito himself never left a mark. Kakashi is sure that if he had, it would have been bright green, the blood of the leaf and the color of his loyalty, the village that he died for, and it would be as bold and influential as Rin’s mark, as Sakumo’s, as the yellow handprint Minato left on his shoulder, beaming with pride when he made chunin.
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He’s fighting in an entirely different war when the lime green mark appears on his wrist, a punch that slid instead of connecting. He leaves his own white smudge on the enemy in the orange mask; the enemy with one sharingan eye shining through.
Kakashi has seen his mangekyo sharingan in the mirror, uncovered it just long enough to denote the pinwheel details for the records. The one looking back at him as the masked ninja snarls is identical.
Each mangekyo is unique.
Kakashi kamuis his dead best friend into the dimension accessible only to them a full minute before Naruto would have come up with that plan. The fight turns out only a little differently; he hauls a formerly-brainwashed Uchiha home after the war is fought.
They make him Hokage and there’s only one reason why he takes the hat. Pardoning Uchiha Obito for his war crimes on the grounds of being POW for a year (and half mind-wrenched, half body-possessed by a sentient and insane plant creature for over a decade).
-
The first time Karin’s temper overflows and she slaps Suigetsu, she’s startled to leave an intense, purple handprint that takes up half his face. Her hand looks like she dipped it in the ocean and took the color away with her.
They are both of them shocked, horrified and indignant. It changes the tone of their relationship by only a few degrees; the change is enough to set them on an entirely different course.
-
Orochimaru’s parents left soulmarks bright enough to be statistically unlikely. It did not prepare him for the loss of them.
His teammates nearly did the same on numerous occasions when they were young.
Jiraiya, uncouth and bumbling, nearly left a burgundy half-mark every time he attempted to drag Orochimaru--by a loose grip on his hand--to see something or another. Orochimaru had barely dodged out of the way the first few times, to Jiraiya's hurt confusion, tanned fingers brushing past kimono sleeve rather than skin.
Nor did he ever comprehend, and each rude and frankly insulting (unwitting?) attempt prompted days of bewilderment at Orochimaru's lingering displeasure, his chill, careful distance. Orochimaru took to wearing a nude, snake-skin facsimile on his forearms, wrists and hands. The convenience proved itself again and again, a micro-thin layer of protection designed by his father, as a gift for his mother, for cosmetic disguise on the sort of missions kunoichi and feminine-passing others frequented.
He stopped deftly avoiding Jiraiya's ham-fisted attempts to drag he, and (less often) Tsunade, around.
The first time he grabs for Orochimaru's wrist and succeeds, he doesn't stumble for a moment, just grins and goes on with what he planned. Orochimaru is both a tad pink in the face and completely overwhelmed-- no one has touched him since his parents passed, after all-- and has absolutely no room, he tells himself, for the bitter disappointment that blooms deep in his lungs that his teammate does not stop and look, stop and gawk, stop at all for what should be, so far as the idiot knows, their first skin-to-skin touch--
It does not hurt, he tells himself fiercely, and Jiraiya goes clumsily along looking so happy that Orochimaru can only follow, Tsunade trailing bemusedly behind, Sarutobi-sensei already apologizing to a vendor they've whirled by.
-
Tsunade left a purple slap across the pervert’s face that looked satisfyingly like a bruise their entire lives.
In a rather intimate moment, Tsunade left the same color over his eyes. She wiped his tears with her thumbs, forever branding him with purple crescent moons.
Her thumbs come away bloody; her knuckles are dyed maroon.
-
The day after the second bell test, Jiraiya breaks into his booby-trapped clan home and receives a vial-full of venom to the eyes. It's not corrosive to skin, and it is extremely fortunate he closes his eyes in time to avoid instant blindness, but Orochimaru is still quick to wipe the excess drops from his skin, instruct him to keep the eyes closed as tightly as possible, and shove his head into a hastily-prepared solution of antidote.
Only after a thorough tongue-lashing does he realize the bloody, red streaks he’s given his teammate’s face from the unwitting first contact.
(Well, Orochimaru reasons sourly, it was either that or allow the venom to drip into his mouth.
It was designed by his mother to protect his home. A single drop had enough neurotoxin to kill something like 300 men once it got in the bloodstream, and two of them had been halfway down the idiot’s face.
He never forgets the panic he felt that evening. His red-purple thumbs follow him through every change of vessel).
-
Jiraiya sees himself in the mirror full days later, the absolute moron, and really, they are grown now, jonin in full, having fought a war at each other's sides.
Surely he has outgrown this sort of behavior, or at the very least could do Orochimaru the favor of pretending to have the common sense the Sage awarded a lemming-- Orochimaru would settle for anything other than actively suicidal tendencies at this point, as he disables the traps mere instances before his teammate is impaled by senbon from all directions--
"Twice in one week!" He hisses, rage incarnate, but--
Jiraiya is undeterred, shock and something like anger on his face, but as he sweeps forward Orochimaru can see it melt into awe. He is twenty years and a full shinobi's life experience too old for blushing, he tells himself firmly, for all that it means nothing and the thought dissolves into so much nothing as his teammate takes his face into his calloused hands, softly.
His heart is beating at well-beyond resting rates and he hates himself for the lack of control, just as surely as he does nothing of the kind, too caught up in dark eyes and an expression like breaking dawn on a face that never hides it's colors, not even the ones accrued from recent years as a verging spy-master, water-color thumb-prints from whores and barmaids and showy frivolity--
What shinobi lets someone so close?--
Inches away, their breath mingles, Jiraiya's carrying the sweet mint of toothpaste.
Orochimaru can hardly breathe.
Jiraiya's eyes narrow, searching.
"I could have sworn we touched as kids, back when we were six and just starting out. Maa! Where the hell did I get that white mark on my shoulder, then?"
Usually so carefully restrained in times of great anger, Orochimaru's temper snaps before he can even register the urge to quell it. They level half his lab and then some, spilling out into the village proper. Clean up takes days and Orochimaru can't be bothered to care, he is so annoyed, he just needed to wring his fool teammate's neck.
Jiraiya yelps and dodges and screams like an infant, causing just as much property damage in his escape as Orochimaru does in pursuit.
He is not sorry.
-
When Mitsuki’s gestation begins, Orochimaru vows plans to very deliberately leave his mark as a parent. The idea of it being an accident or careless mishap is unacceptable.
Those plans go out the proverbial window when the amniotic tank malfunctions two weeks before the child is meant to be born.
His son begins to drown.
Orochimaru brings full force to bear shattering the glass womb-cum-prison. He catches the still infant without regard to where his hands end up, desperately breathing life into tiny lungs. So small a being cannot possibly survive without air for the length of time it will take to get the proper equipment.
He uses fingertips to delicately force a small heart to beat.
When Orochimaru’s son takes his first breath, it is weak and his throat is likely sore from the drowning.
But he breathes.
Later, half-exhausted with relief, Orochimaru sees he’s left double handprints like red wings on the babe’s shoulder blades.
He cannot bring himself to regret the necessity.