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Kaoru was just not a morning person.
Every single morning was the same: he would take a while to get out of bed aided by an hour and a bit of intermittent alarms that would wake him up enough so he could drag himself out of bed and force a cup of coffee into his system. He would sit there in a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness, listening to Carla catching him up to the morning’s news and waiting for caffeine to kick in. Once he was awake enough to drag himself to the shower, he could begin to face the day.
The combination of coffee waking him up from the inside and a lukewarm shower doing the same job from outside was usually enough to push him into an acceptable level of sentience by the time he left the shower and got ready to dress himself.
Due to his decision to wear pretty much exclusively only traditional clothing, getting dressed in the morning was more of an ordeal than it would be if he had a regular wardrobe. He enjoyed it as his first actually sentient task of the day, taking the slow and almost therapeutic flow of getting dressed in stride and making it his favourite part of his morning routine.
It was once he was dressed and ready to start his day that he finally turned his attention to the soulmark that sprawled from his left wrist up towards his forearm. He traced the soft strokes of light pink, soft green and pale blue that splotched all over his delicate skin in soft swirls that danced around one another in abstract patterns before wrapping a cotton bandage around his wrist; sure, the long sleeves of his kimono would keep his mark from showing, but he needed to make sure that in the unlikely event his sleeves ever rode up while at work he could still maintain basic decency. The last thing he wanted was to be seen as desperate and indecent, showing his mark to anyone that would look his way in a sorry attempt to have his fated soulmate lay eyes on him and feel something. Showing something as intimate and precious as one’s soulmark in public had no place in polite society, so there was absolutely no way he would let himself accidentally slip while working for the best businesses and the most powerful people in Japan.
Kaoru didn’t usually think of his soulmark at all, at least not as anything other than a nuisance that made him wear long sleeves, even in the horrible heat of an Okinawan summer. At the very least, it had him wrapping up most of his lower arm if he ever dared to wear anything with short sleeves. In a way, his knack for dressing modestly was a blessing; sure, he wasn't one of those lucky people with soulmarks on a part of their bodies that would never be visible to the public, but his wasn’t that bad.
The mark had always been there, exactly like it was, and Kaoru barely ever put much thought on it anymore, so it felt odd to him that he was all of a sudden thinking about it - was this what getting old and soft felt like? He would be lying to himself if he said that he hadn’t spent countless tearful nights longing to find his soulmate when he was younger, wishing to see his mark change and blossom to let him know that he had already met his one true soulmate, or to start leading him away to foreign lands to find them.
He had never stopped to think who his soulmate was or what he hoped them to be like - the whole premise of soulmates was that they were perfect for each other, after all, so he assumed this mythical creature the universe had linked to him would be absolutely perfect in ways he couldn’t even imagine - he just wanted to find them, but as the years went by with no sign coming his way, he had come to terms with the fact that it might never happen.
He could very well not have a soulmate, or have one that lived halfway around the planet in a place where he would be unable to find them, or have a soulmate that had already settled for someone else. Whatever the case was, he no longer paid much mind to the fact that he had a soulmark in a rather annoying place upon his body. After all, he was settling into his thirties now. Dreaming of a soulmate swooping in and changing his whole world in an instant was beginning to sound ridiculous for a man his age.
Most people he knew had found their soulmate at some point in their twenties, so the fact that he was alone still was starting to sting - even the most unpleasant people he had met in school and university were nicely paired up and perfectly happy (if social media was to be trusted). The only other person his age he knew was single was none other than Kojiro, but the man seemed to have absolutely no problem sleeping his way through a sea of people and increasing his odds of finding his soulmate.
Despite how long his morning routine and musings over yet another cup of coffee took him, Kaoru managed to leave home exactly on time to avoid being late for his first appointment of the day, focusing hard on his work and keeping his mind engaged in what he was meant to be doing - he knew better than anyone that he was extremely lucky to have somehow landed in a position in which he could be paid extortionate rates for his elegant calligraphy, so he better keep himself focused, professional and able to keep raking in that money.
It was hard to keep his mind from wandering off to ‘S’ and the beef he had scheduled for that night, but that would need to wait until he was done writing thought-inducing proverbs for his most recent client.
Somehow, Kaoru managed to get himself through a whole exhibition and yet another meeting with a client that had no clear idea of what he wanted but seemed to have very strong opinions regarding what he did not.
He was exhausted after a long day of work, but the mere thought of skating against Adam was enough to give him a second wind and help him rush through dinner and the cumbersome process of taking off his delicate kimono and changing into his (slightly hardier yet still delicate-looking) Cherry Blossom outfit.
Knowing that he would soon be speeding down the track against his former closest friend was making Kaoru’s stomach bubble with a mixture of anxiety and nostalgia. He had not skated against Adam ever since they were a couple of teenagers, so having a redo at racing could offer a new point of re-entry to the friendship they had once shared, hopefully allowing them to restart things at a better point for them.
They were adults now; they could talk about what happened with much more eloquence than a bunch of immature teens ever could, so this beef was just a foot in the door kind of thing, hopefully leading them to reconnecting after all those years.
He had not been expecting to be proven wrong as thoroughly and violently as he was.
Sure, he should have guessed things getting tense and perhaps not working out immediately was going to be the case, but never in his wildest anxiety dreams he had imagined he’d end up in the hospital after being full-on smashed by Adam’s skateboard.
All in all, the injuries weren’t as bad as everyone had expected them to be when Kojiro scraped him off the track and drove him to the emergency room: nothing was broken and he still had all his teeth, but he had a few heavily sprained limbs (now bandaged up), a bunch of pulled muscles, an obvious concussion and he needed to get a good handful of stitches along the hairline between his ear and temple, where something in the skateboard had managed to break the skin on impact.
This wasn’t exactly how he had been expecting to spend his Friday night, but all in all it could have been way worse.
Kaoru breathed out a sigh of relief when he was finally left alone in his little hospital room, taking the time to collect himself and try to recover from the never-ending prodding and poking the doctors had made while trying to not so subtly pressure him into explaining how exactly he had gotten injured and let him know that he should press charges if any given person had caused him to have this accident. He wouldn’t talk - what Adam needed was companionship and not the potential of legal trouble.
Due to a mixture of anxiety, stubbornness and an aversion to feeling discomfort - or as Kojiro would put it, being a massive wimp - Kaoru was terrible as a patient and he could hardly wait to leave the hospital despite the fact that he could quite obviously not take care of himself for the time being.
“Please don’t tell me you’re trying to make a run for it.” a voice called from the doorway, prompting Kaoru to huff to himself - he had a pounding headache and felt as though he could throw up if he moved his head too quickly, so pushing himself to a sitting position had taken him ages, and having all that work shot down with a glance and a few words was painful.
“This bed is killing my back. I’m going to be way worse in the morning if I sleep here.” he complained, but didn’t put up a fight as Kojiro came in to carefully help him back to bed.
“Come on, it's a perfectly normal bed. We can’t expect every hospital in Japan to have fancy cushions and goose-feather beds in case a wimpy old man gets injured.”
“We’re the same age, idiot.”
“Nope. Four months is a long time. You spent all of our childhood bossing me around with that argument, so you can have it: you are older than me. Way older.” Kojiro said with a smirk that made Kaoru wish he was physically able to throw something at him without hurting himself.
“Are you going to help me up or not?” Kaoru asked, glossing over their teasing and hoping that he could catch a doctor that was tired enough to let him discharge himself against medical advice without putting up too much of a fight.
Kojiro sighed and moved to the bedside.
“You’re gonna do it whether I help you or not, aren’t you?” he said even if he already knew the answer “Wait, let me get a wheelchair. Don’t wanna have to scrape you off the floor again.”
Kaoru hummed in vague acknowledgement of his words, watching his life-long friend step out of the room and come back a few minutes later with a bundle of clothes and a wheelchair to avoid putting pressure on his horrifically swollen ankle.
“What are those?” Kaoru asked, immediately aware that the garments weren’t his.
“My gym clothes. They’re clean, and I’m not fiddling with hakama when you cannot really stand. Besides, your clothes are covered in dirt and blood.” he told him before Kaoru even had the chance to complain.
“I’m not wearing that.”
“Fine. I bet the hospital will let you keep the little robe thing that lets your ass hang out if you want it.”
Kaoru glared like an angry child, eying up the stupidly colourful gym clothes and letting out a huff as he came to terms with the realisation that wearing gorilla-sized clothes was better than leaving the hospital in that paper-thin little robe he was currently wearing.
“Fine. Get out so I can get dressed.” he conceded, glaring at the clothes.
“You have an arm on a sling, Kaoru. I doubt you’ll be able to dress yourself. Let me.”
“No. I’ll call a nurse if I must.”
Kojiro sighed.
“Good luck with that, you stubborn fucker.” he told him before placing the clothes next to his injured friend and letting him figure himself out before stepping out of the room.
Kaoru knew he was being stubborn for no particularly good reason and that chances were he would end up actually needing help (or worse, hurting himself while trying to dress himself), but he was not going to go down without a fight.
It was embarrassing enough that he had not been able to move out of the way of the comically over-emphasized swing that anyone with eyes would have seen coming from a mile away. On top of that, he hated the fact that one single tumble off his skateboard had been enough to land him in the hospital and clearly out of commission for a good couple of weeks - a sore reminder that he was no longer a spry teenager that could bounce back from anything.
He was a prideful man, after all, so he couldn't allow himself to just accept defeat. Kaoru was determined to at least get himself a bit dressed before he inevitably called for help.
In the end, it turned out that he was decent at dressing himself with just one hand: he got the basketball shorts up as far as they could go without having to lift his bottom from the bed and managed to get out of the hospital robe and into Kojiro’s massive t-shirt, letting it drape over his body and not bothering to try and get his arm out of the sling and into the allocated hole. He could not bring himself to face the idea of moving his arm too much and making it hurt again.
Kojiro did not comment on his current state, simply helped his friend onto the wheelchair and pulled the shorts all the way up in the process before wheeling him out of the hospital as soon as they could leave. He was his lifelong friend and he had always been there, by his side, so it made perfect sense that if anyone was bound to see him in this stupid predicament he had landed himself on it would be him.
“Come stay with me until you feel better,” Kojiro said as soon as he pulled the car out of the carpark and started driving them home. “It will be easier for you to get in and out of my bed rather than get down onto your futon, and my bathtub actually does work, so you can soak your everything when you get sore.”
“It sounds as though I’m getting kidnapped if I refuse.” Kaoru said.
“Absolutely. I don’t trust you on your own when you’re ill. Not after the tonsillitis disaster of 2015.” he said, a fond smile toying on his lips.
“You’re exaggerating.” Kaoru said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes just in case it made him feel dizzy due to the concussion.
“You didn’t eat for three days, Kaoru. How am I exaggerating?”
“It hurt to eat, and I forgot! People fast, it’s not that big a deal.”
“Sick people do not fast. And whatever the case, you are coming with me just so I can make sure you don’t wilt like the sentient houseplant you are.”
Of all the things Kojiro had called him in their long history together, he had never been compared to a potted plant before, so he didn’t have a snappy retort ready - perhaps the concussion was affecting his ability to be witty. He simply scowled his way for a moment and leaned his body toward the passenger window, looking outside into the night that slowly threatened to break into dawn as a small reminder of the fact that they had been up all night due to his stupid injuries.
The rest of the car ride went by in relative silence: it had been an incredibly long night, so it made sense for the both of them to be incredibly tired and wanting nothing but to rest and hopefully feel better whenever he woke up (although Kaoru did know that, realistically, everything would hurt like hell when whatever traces of adrenaline he had left disappeared for good).
Kaoru had been to Kojiro’s flat more times than he could care to count in his life, though he did have to say that this was his very first time getting fireman-carried up all the way to the bed like some sort of newly wed bride. He decided it was best to not comment on that, pushing through the awkwardness of it and focusing on the task at hand: getting comfortable enough to try and sleep.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that Kaoru fell asleep as soon as his body touched the bed, drifting off into deep sleep aided by painkillers and the sheer exhaustion of an incredibly long day plus the injuries his body was beginning to try and heal from.
The real trial came in the late morning, as Kaoru woke up stiff, achy and more grumpy than he normally did.
“Morning, sunshine~” came Kojiro’s voice from the doorway as soon as Kaoru made enough noise to signal that he was awake and trying to get out of bed “Please don’t faceplant on my floor, that carpet is a bitch to clean.”
“Help me up then.” Kaoru said. As embarrassing as it was to have Kojiro help him out of bed, it would have been much worse for him to fall over and end up in the hospital again just while trying to to get himself to the toilet in the morning.
Kaoru did his best to let his mind float far away as Kojiro wrapped an arm around him and helped him up in order to limp towards the bathroom before leaving him to his own devices and then bringing him back to the bedroom when he was ready. It had only been a handful of hours and he already hated the helplessness of his current state, but he was well aware of the fact that doing anything other than wait it out would just make his current injuries worse and prolong the healing process. The more careful he was for the time being, the sooner it would all be over.
They ate breakfast together without much of note happening, with Kaoru struggling to eat one-handed but doing so in the most dignified way he possibly could. He could see Kojiro was itching to lean over and help him pick food up and feed himself, so he spent all of breakfast having to remind himself that he needed to be at his best behaviour as a patient even if his friend was overbearing and seemed to think he was now made of chipped porcelain and could crumble without a warning.
“I want to have a bath.” Kaoru announced after breakfast. He had been brought to that flat with promises of soaking his sore muscles, after all, so it was only fair for him to cash it in.
“Okay, I’ll go start running the bath and then come unwrap you?” Kojiro offered before disappearing.
It was then when Kaoru realised that he couldn’t bathe covered in bandages, so they would all have to come out. And he couldn't take them out himself due to his very stiff right wrist (and he could not allow himself to risk it healing wrong due to his profession), which in turn meant that Kojiro would have to undress him and put him in the bath as if he were a child or an invalid.
He sighed. He had already been carried to the toilet that morning, letting go of whatever dignity and decorum was left should not be that difficult.
Kojiro came back after a little while, helping Kaoru to bed as the tub filled up and focusing on tending to his friend. He was careful as he took to the tedious task of unwrapping all of Kaoru’s limbs from the bandages he had over them, quietly wincing at the sight of bruises sprawling through alarmingly big patches of porcelain skin and being as careful as humanly possible to avoid causing Kaoru any more pain than absolutely necessary to help him out of his clothes and bandages enough to bathe.
It took a while, but eventually his ankle was free of bandages and so was his arm, leaving Kaoru pretty much ready to try and enjoy a bath that would hopefully ease the constant throbbing of his joints.
“I’ll help you wash your hair, I guess, so I’ll be careful with the stitches here… but you are all set.” Kojiro said, as he turned his attention to the only remaining bandages on Kaoru’s body: the ones covering the soulmark on his left wrist. “Well… apart from this one. Let me just-”
“No. I’ll just bathe with that on.” Kaoru said, pulling his arm up against his chest to protect his soulmark and keep it private.
On a rational level, he was aware that there was no need to be so cagey about it given that Kojiro knew what hid under those bandages even if he had never seen his soulmark before, but the idea of just having it out in the open felt weird to him.
“Leaving soapy, wet bandages against your skin will make you get a rash or something. Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not trying to peek at you, I won’t touch it and I won’t look.”
Kaoru knew it made sense and that exposing skin as sensitive as the one along his soulmark to a potential eczema flare up brought on by irritating it like that sounded like a nightmare, but he couldn’t get past the embarrassment of letting someone else - especially someone he was as close to as Kojiro - look at his mark.
“I’ll take it off on my own.” Kaoru insisted.
“I don’t think you can move your wrist enough to do it yourself.” Kojiro pointed out, right again. “Just let me…”
Despite how much of a fight he was putting up, Kaoru had to slowly recognise the fact that he could not keep his wrist bandaged for a week or however long it took him to recover enough mobility to take care of himself. It would be embarrassing and an experience he would rather not have, but the fact was that he couldn’t keep his mark covered for that long. Kojiro was going to be seeing him naked as a whole if he planned to take a bath, so he forced himself to push past the mental block around the idea of his soulmark being seen. Yes, it was a special part of his body and all of that, but at the end of the day it was just a body part and they didn’t have to necessarily make it weird.
Kaoru decided that if anyone other than a medical professional had to see his mark, it might as well be him.
“Fine.” he eventually grumbled, lowering his wrist back down to allow the man in front of him to finally finish unwrapping him and let him bathe in peace.
Kojiro looked as though he was trying to make things as solemn and clinical as possible when he moved in to start loosening the bandage up and begin to unwrap it gently, doing a big show of looking at his own feet to try and give Kaoru some privacy.
“There.” he said when Kaoru was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around him to keep his sense of modesty as intact as possible given the circumstances. “Now come, the bath should be ready.”
Kaoru had never thought about how much physical effort came into limping to the bathroom while holding up a towel that seemed determined to fall off him, but it took them way longer than he thought it would to finally get the injured man situated in the bathtub for what was meant to be a relaxing bath.
He let Kojiro wash blood and grime out of his long hair before encouraging his slightly overbearing friend to leave him alone to soak his aching muscles for a while. It took a lot of convincing, as Kojiro seemed to think he would somehow injure himself while sitting still in a bathtub, but eventually he was able to kick the other man out and enjoy some peace and quiet on his own.
He soaked in the warm water for as long as he could before starting to feel uncomfortable as the water got colder and sitting alone with his thoughts and nothing to do started to lose its appeal.
Even without trying anything yet, Kaoru could already tell that getting out of the tub was going to be a frustratingly complicated procedure: he had limited use of one foot, an arm he should really not be moving and got dizzy if he moved too fast, so adding the fact that everything was now wet and slippery was really not doing him any favours. He wasn’t dumb enough to try to do it by himself and land right back in the hospital, so he swallowed his pride and called Kojiro to help him out.
To his credit, Kojiro was incredibly good at getting him out of the tub and wrapping him with a towel before setting him down on the bed. He didn’t comment on his pitiful state as he helped Kaoru into a new set of lounging clothes before rubbing his bruised limbs in medicated ointment and starting to bandage them up with the practiced ease of someone that had had many years of skating injuries to tend to. He wrapped his soulmark back up as well, careful around the area and doing his best to avoid looking.
“Right. I need to go prepare to open the restaurant for lunch. Will you be okay here?” Kojiro asked him, apparently in a rush to leave already.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be here when you close after lunch.” Kaoru said as he looked at his friend, trying to work out what exactly was wrong with him but unable to put his finger on it just yet.
He was left alone in Kojiro’s flat shortly after that, with nothing better to do than sit around on the sofa and let his mind grind to a halt by clogging it up with whatever trashy TV show flashed through the screen. He would rather die than let it be known that the no-nonsense calligrapher genius enjoyed reality TV as much as everyone else, but given that he was injured and had nothing else to do, he allowed himself to indulge on whatever the latest imported manufactured drama was.
He had not been expecting Kojiro to come back home until the lunch rush was over, so having him burst through the door just over an hour after he left and catch Kaoru red-handed with his televisuals of choice was a surprise.
“What are you doing here?” Kaoru asked, sitting up and turning to look at the man that was already making his way to the sofa.
“I live here.” Kojiro said, sitting across from him.
“So witty. Did you come up with that on your own?” he asked dryly “You know what I mean.”
“I closed up early.”
Kaoru couldn’t keep himself from huffing; yes, he was injured, but not to the point that he needed round-the-clock supervision, so the fact that Kojiro had decided to throw away the potential of earning good money for half of his day to come stare at him on the sofa was annoying him.
“I needed to talk to you.” Kojiro added before Kaoru had the chance to fly into a rant about how he was not completely useless just yet.
“About what?”
“I saw your soulmark and I think it’s mine.” Kojiro said, without any warning.
Kaoru had to remind himself to breathe after a moment, frozen in place and feeling words escape him as the weight of Kojiro’s explanation sunk in. It just couldn’t be; they had known each other forever, so how come they had never felt the alleged magnetic pull of intertwined souls calling for each other? It had to be a mistake, perhaps wishful thinking over the fact that they were both growing older and still unable to find a stable relationship.
“I think we might be soulmates, Kaoru.” Kojiro pushed after what might as well have been an eternity in awkward silence.
“I heard you.” Kaoru said after a moment, his words harsher than intended as he tried to avoid getting anyone’s hopes up.
He had read statistics about how most people felt the pull to find their soulmate in their twenties, and how going past age thirty-five without finding them made it very unlikely to come across them by change given the way that life and responsibilities no longer allowed for people to just pick up and leave to follow the compass in their hearts. They weren’t thirty-five quite yet, but they were getting there, so it was foolish to think that they would somehow beat the odds. It had to be wishful thinking.
“Do you want to look at mine and see if you feel it too?” Kojiro asked.
Kaoru knew full well that this was the best way to move forward and settle the mystery, but part of him couldn’t bring himself to do it. What if they happened to be soulmates? How would they move ahead with their decades-long history of friendship? Or even worse… what if they weren’t soulmates and they had just gotten their hopes up for no good reason at all?
Whatever the case, knowing was better than wondering for the rest of his life, so Kaoru nodded after a couple of moments.
Kojiro nodded back, standing up to undo the button of his trousers and dropping them. In any other situation, Kaoru would have taken this as his chance to loudly comment how he didn’t legally have to be half naked the whole time and poke fun at the fact that Kojiro took every chance he found to show off the fact that he worked out, but with the possibility of finding out who his soulmate was looming in the forefront of his mind, Kaoru could not bring himself to open his mouth as he watched him undress down to his underwear and then slide the left leg of his boxers up to show him.
As soon as he laid eyes on the swirling splotches of forest green, gold and red that sat on Kojiro’s thigh, Kaoru just knew.
He had always thought that being able to recognise your soulmate’s mark as your own on sight in what was to everyone else a simple mish-mash of colour sounded like a very convenient way to allow for plausible deniability of whether someone had really found their soulmate, and even question the whole concept of soulmarks and their function, but now that he was looking at his soulmark on his soulmate there simply was no way around it. He could feel it in every single cell of his body with a certainty that he had never felt before.
“Fuck.”
Kaoru never swore when sober, yet right then there was nothing else he could say to better reflect his emotions.
“Yeah, fuck.” Kojiro confirmed, looking at Kaoru with soft eyes and offering him a smile.
“How did we never know? Aren’t you meant to feel your soulmate or something?” Kaoru said, suddenly feeling very cheated by life: he had spent over two decades wondering about this mystery soulmate and getting increasingly sadder about not finding them, so realising that he had been there all along was infuriating. They could have shared so much more and saved each other so much heartbreak if only they had noticed earlier.
“We’ve known each other since we were very young, we wouldn’t have noticed any change as little kids. And even if we did, there’s no way we’d remember when we got older and became actual people.” Kojiro said.
It made a lot of sense to Kaoru: four-year-olds were not known for having rich inner worlds and a good grasp on complex emotions, so it was very possible that their younger selves had felt that change and draw towards each other, perhaps even using it as the base of their lifelong friendship, but were unable to understand it as what it really was.
“What now…?” Kaoru said, unsure of what this new development would mean for them.
“I guess we get together?” Kojiro offered.
“You guess?”
“Well, we don’t have to if you don’t want to. There’s platonic soulmates, right?”
Kaoru couldn’t help the silent disappointment that took over his heart at those words; it wasn’t like he had spent his whole life pining over his best friend or anything of the like, but facing the fact that his soulmate might not want anything more than a deep friendship with him was not something he ever thought would be the case for him.
“I’m not saying we have to be platonic, Kaoru. I’m just saying we can if you don’t want things to be that way.” Kojiro explained before he had the chance to object. “And even if we start a relationship we don’t have to jump right in. You’re injured after all.”
Kaoru nodded, looking at his lifelong friend and letting out a quiet sigh.
“I can’t believe I never thought it could be you.” Kaoru said, closing his eyes and leaning back into the sofa.
“I know. I guess we just… it’s sometimes hard to see what’s in front of you, huh, Four-eyes?” Kojiro said with a playful little smile.
Just like that, the awkward tension of their encounter eased just a bit as they defaulted back to their usual dynamics. It was undeniable that the newfound knowledge would make things change fast and in ways they had never expected before, but that didn’t mean they would have to flail aimlessly in freefall until they figured themselves out - they were still them, after all.
“You didn’t have to leave work for this, idiot.” Kaoru said, still bothered by the fact that Kojiro was missing the weekend lunch rush to come and have an awkward conversation.
“I couldn’t focus on anything else. We’ve waited long enough.”
“And we’re going to have to wait longer. I’m afraid I don’t feel up for finding love or whatever at the moment.” he said, motioning to his injured self. This was quite far from the magical, beautiful moment that finding one’s soulmate was made to be in movies.
“You know I don’t mind. I am not the impatient one here.” Kojiro jabbed playfully.
It took a whole week of bandages and painkillers before Kaoru felt a little more like himself, no longer aching with every small movement he made and finally getting rid of the pounding headache that had followed him around since the night he got injured.
In a way, his injuries became a blessing given the fact that they gave them something to focus on and avoid fixating on the way their relationship was meant to change now that they both knew they were soulmates. Yes, they were both excited to make things happen for them and explore the new depths of their fated relationship, but a few bandaged limbs were enough to remind them that they should pace themselves.
All in all, nothing much changed in the week immediately after their surprising discovery, but with Kaoru being finally mobile on his own and aching to head back home and have some semblance of normality once again, their ability to pretend nothing was different was coming to an end.
“You know you don’t need to leave just because you’re a bit better. You can stay.” Kojiro tried to dissuade him, but Kaoru would have none of it.
“There’s nothing to do in your house, and I’m on my own most of the time anyway.” he pointed out, aware that their current arrangement had run its course and was becoming impractical. “I can walk around and look after myself now, you don’t need to baby me.”
“I really don’t mind.”
“Of course you do. You’re far too big to sleep on your sofa without ruining it. I’m not going to let you break your back and a perfectly decent sofa just so you can continue to watch me undress.”
“Ah yes, you caught me. I never thought you’d catch on to my huge fetish for whiny men covered in bruises in bathtubs. It’s the one thing that gets me off.” Kojiro said with a chuckle, rolling his eyes.
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Really? I’m not going to kink shame you, but we both know that I am not the kinky one in this relationship…”
Kaoru could do nothing but glare and blush at the same time: the fact that they had been close friends all through their lives meant that Kojiro knew all about him, including past partners and unorthodox pleasures that he may or may not have admitted to in the midst of drinking games all the way back in their youth.
“I do not know what you’re talking about.” Kaoru defended, looking away and doing his best to look scandalised over whatever Kojiro was insinuating.
This, in turn, made Kojiro laugh loudly and openly.
“Oh, come on! No need to be embarrassed by a little bit of-”
Kaoru felt his body move before he could even think of what he was doing, using his healthy arm to grab Kojiro by the front of his shirt and pull him towards him, smashing their lips together and forcing the words to die in his mouth before they ever saw the light of day.
Despite the rushed nature of the encounter, the kiss evolved from a hasty face-smash into a slow and delicate exchange in a matter of seconds as they both relaxed into each other and let their minds shift away from their previous conversation.
A second kiss followed immediately after the first one, this time led by Kojiro and with a lot less of a sense of urgency to it, simply allowing themselves to enjoy the physical closeness of the act in a way that felt just right.
It wasn’t clear whether the kiss was simply mind blowing because they had decades of friendship and a deep connection to back them up or if it was simply because they were soulmates, but the fact was that the kiss felt like nothing Kaoru had ever experienced before and something he doubted he’d ever feel with anyone else. It really did feel like it was meant to be like that.
Eventually, the kiss came to an end and Kaoru ended up with his head against Kojiro’s shoulder, just basking in the afterglow of their first kiss regardless of how unconventional the timing of it had been, holding each other and looking forward to a future they could share with one another.
“Just so you know,” Kojiro said, a smirk audible in his voice as he ran his fingers through pink hair as they rested together “once you’re all healed up, I’m game.”