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Soulmates.
A term that’s an absolute paradox.
The general meaning of a soulmate is an ideally suited person – whether platonically or romantically. A soulmate is an ideal person.
While many adored the concept and romanticized it to every degree, others found the concept stupid.
But no one can deny that the symbolistic marks twisting and bending and bleeding around their body have to mean something at least.
Bachira, for example, took comfort in the small flowers running along his arms. Unlike Rin, who abhorred the spiky pink flowers coiling around his collarbone.
Reo took pride in the delicate stream of white flowers running along his spine and ending elegantly on the back of his neck. Nagi didn’t pay much mind to his, but more often than not, he gazed at the lovely purple flowers strung around his fingers and up his arm with barely concealed fondness.
Isagi doesn’t have much of an opinion on his mark. It’s kind of just… there. However, he does like the idea of a soulmate. A person who was created just for him, a person meant to be his own. Sometimes Isagi indulged in the idea, how would his life be with this lovely stranger?
Or perhaps, this person hates him? Abhors the idea of soulmates like Rin does? Regards their mark as an eyesore, regards their shared mark as an eyesore?
There’s a large number of people in this day and age who tattoo over their soul mark to rid of the traces. But like injured skin, almost like a black hole, the soul mark will seemingly swallow anything stuck above it and ghost over the skin again.
Like blood shared between people, a soul mark is impossible to rid of.
Isagi’s soul mark begins on his solar plexus, it’s an elegant crown that made his mother gasp when she first saw it. It follows up with thin, thorny vines which trail towards his front and back and up his spine. Attached to the vines are blue roses which climb up with the vines. It ends on his neck with a large blue rose, it’s so large that it’s difficult to even cover up with a turtleneck.
Isagi has spent more time than he’d like to admit on analyzing his mark.
Blue roses, a kind of flower that does not exist, something that symbolizes unrequited love. It also symbolizes mystery and to attain the impossible.
Isagi decided that the second meaning made more sense to him.
Isagi always imagined he’d meet his soulmate in a romantic setting of some sort.
Perhaps he’d walk into a cafe and order a coffee, a latte maybe, and his wrist would brush against the barista’s and they’d realize that they’ve been longing after each other.
Or maybe, they’d meet in a library. He’d grab a book and look for a place to sit, and his eyes would be drawn to a particular table with one occupant. He’d sit down and then they’d lock gazes.
But no, none of that happens.
Isagi meets his soulmate in possibly one of the most frustrating settings ever.
His soulmate manifests in the form of a man with choppy blond hair and tacky blue highlights. He walks, no, runs, kicks (?) into Isagi’s life with unfamiliar words and a sabotaged goal.
“I’m Kaiser. The one who reveals what’s ‘impossible’!”
The moment their eyes meet, it’s so unfamiliarly familiar. Something in Isagi’s chest twists and bends and cries and begs him to go closer. Something magnetizing immediately begins to pull his feet towards Kaiser.
His mouth longs to pronounce Kaiser’s name, his hands long to grab Kaiser’s hands, his body longs to be engulfed in the warmth of Kaiser’s embrace.
Before his mind can even recognize who this unfamiliar man is, Isagi’s instinct takes him closer. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine—
He stops abruptly when a hand snakes around his neck, Isagi immediately nuzzles into the touch.
“Endlich treffen wir uns, Yoichi Isagi.”
Isagi doesn’t understand what the man is saying, he has no clue whether what he said was a greeting or an insult or a compliment. But he said Isagi’s name, Yoichi. Isagi feels like something of his that’s been lost for a very long time has finally returned home.
Michael Kaiser is a frustrating man.
As soon as he got the translating earbuds, he began talking Isagi’s ear off about how he first noticed the blue rose peeking out of Isagi’s uniform during the U-20 game that was broadcast live.
He talked about how, before he saw the mark on Isagi, he always despised the idea of soulmates because he was sure that no one was worthy to stand beside him.
Kaiser taunts Isagi at every chance he gets.
Says his football skills are trash, that he’s a fucking clown, that he’ll lose interest in Isagi if he’s not a proper obstacle in his life.
They rough it out on the field – never physical, but through games. They’ll kick around a ball for hours and see how many times they manage to score.
Isagi feels like he never sits still when he’s with Kaiser. They’re always arguing or insulting each other or training or on the field together. They haven’t had a proper conversation since they’ve met.
No talk about any romantic involvements even though they’re soulmates, but Isagi doesn’t mind. He can’t really imagine doing anything romantic with Kaiser.
There’s something so static about Kaiser. The way he can do absolutely nothing and Isagi will still be drawn to him.
Does Kaiser feel the same way towards Isagi? Does something within Kaiser always itch to be near Isagi?
As often as it is that Isagi wants to punch Kaiser’s face in, he enjoys his presence (taunts and all) more than he’d like to admit.
Something in Isagi will always find its way back to Kaiser, and Isagi will choose to follow this instinct.
Soulmates are strange.
When Isagi collapsed after the game between Manshine City and Bastard Munchen, he felt an unfamiliar panic settle in his gut.
Something so foreign, but felt like it’d been there forever. It made his chest ache.
The last thing Isagi saw before everything went pitch black was a dash of blue and strong hands barely catching him by the waist.
When Isagi awakes, he’s in a stark white room. So white that it doesn't even look real.
There’s a weight on his stomach, he looks down and sees Kaiser asleep with his head facing down. It’s such an absurd scene that it makes Isagi overflow with fondness, he can’t help the first laugh that breathlessly escapes through his mouth.
Kaiser perks up and looks at him with wide eyes.
“Yoichi!” He grabs his hands. “You’re awake!”
Isagi resists the urge to laugh even harder.
“Why the hell are you laughing? Do you have any idea how much you’ve troubled me?” Kaiser runs a hand through his hair with a huff. “Soul bonds are so painful, whenever you’re upset or in pain, I feel it too.”
“I can feel your arrogance in my chest too, thanks for that, I guess.” Isagi says, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Kaiser rolls his eyes and flicks his gaze towards the rose clinging to Isagi’s neck. It’s much easier to see now that Isagi is wearing a tank top.
“Does that… have a crown with it?” He nods his head towards the rose.
Isagi, rather than saying so, lifts up his shirt to show Kaiser.
Sitting above his stomach is an empress crown. Rather than the dome shaped emperor crown on Kaiser’s left hand, Isagi’s crown ends outwards.
They truly are well matched. Isagi is Kaiser’s equal in every sense of the word.
They’re even more well matched in football. Even though they fight like cat and dog on the field, the chemistry between the two is stronger than anyone else’s.
The two move around each other like they’ve created separate paths for themselves, traced over with their own steps, a trail only they shall follow.
Isagi and Kaiser are a compound of two people bound together through their own self made chemical reaction. Through their rivalry and ego and soul bond, Isagi and Kaiser are one as a whole.
Like the middle of a number axis, whether irrational or rational, Isagi and Kaiser overlap each other. That chosen point is where they always look for each other, where they co-exist as one.
Kaiser’s hair is messy and choppy because it was haphazardly cut by his younger sister, and in an attempt to save it, Ness haphazardly cut him a mullet.
Kaiser’s eyes are a cold blue like his mother’s eyes – sharp and calculating. But when he smiles, a line of aegyo-sal appears and those cold blue eyes melt into something warm. His red eyeliner is also due to his mother who drew it on his eyes for the first time when he was 10 for a halloween party, and Kaiser liked it so much that he kept drawing it on.
Kaiser uses a specific lip balm by Burt’s Bees in the flavor wild cherry because it tastes better than the others and because it’s more moisturizing than the others.
His blue highlights were an impulsive decision after he graduated high school. He pulled Ness to the nearest drug store after the graduation ceremony had ended and bought a box of blue dye and managed Ness to follow by buying a box of purple dye. They sat on the floor of his bedroom and painstakingly applied the dye and washed it out.
He hated the way it looked at first. But he gradually noticed how it complimented the rose on his neck and thought that it wasn’t so bad.
Kaiser’s soul mark first manifested when he was 14. His first thought upon seeing it was… how grand. He then googled the meaning of blue roses. To attain the impossible, as it was stated on google.
He was excited by his mark at first and couldn’t stop thinking about who the person on the receiving end of it was, but after a while, the idea began to bore him once he heard a few too many stories about soulmates not wanting anything to do with each other.
Though, that didn’t stop Kaiser from rubbing a hand over his mark whenever he could. Even if blindly, Kaiser longed for his soulmate, longed for someone who would understand him.
Hoping today, hoping once again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A cycle that continued until a random live video popped up on Youtube, a curious itch, the outline of a rose, and two expensive one way tickets to Japan.
“Would you ever go back to the person you were before you met your soulmate?”
Bachira’s voice echoed in the empty room.
A few of them sat in a circle to catch up right before the final game of the Neo Egoist league.
Nagi draped over Reo’s back, Kunigami with his arm around Chigiri’s shoulder, Bachira with his back leaned against Isagi’s side, Rin sitting in a corner with Hiori and Kurona, and Nanase and Niko sitting side by side.
A familiar scene, something Isagi missed. Platonic soul bonds are the loveliest of them all.
“Man, I don’t know. I was pretty damn surprised when I saw the ring of hyacinth around Kunigami’s finger.” Chigiri hummed.
“When I met Nagi, it felt like something fell into place. Like that one puzzle piece that just didn’t fit and suddenly it did.” Reo mused.
“I don’t think I’d go back,” Nagi nuzzled deeper into Reo’s shoulder. “I can’t remember anything before Reo. There was nothing and then there was Reo.”
Everyone ooe’d at the cheesy string of words. But no one can deny anything. Even Rin who hated Shidou had to admit, that yes, something within him will always chase after Shidou.
“I wouldn’t go back,” Isagi began quietly. “It felt like a greeting when I met him–”
“Of course it was a greeting, dumbass…” Chigiri laughed.
“Oh, shut up! It felt like – like… I felt him in my memory. It was like I knew him even though I didn’t. He was so familiar… It felt like I’d been aching for him. Like I found something I lost.”
Everyone stopped to look at Isagi, waiting for him to go on.
“It was such an irrational feeling that it felt rational, it was so sensible.”
“Why did you basically just confess…” Kunigami laughed. “Save those words for him instead.”
Isagi groaned and hid his head in his knees. His friends will be the death of him.
“Do you like me?” Kaiser pops the question one day before their final game, the two of them are trading passes in one of blue lock’s many training fields.
“Not sure, do you?” Isagi replies, completely honest because in truth, he really wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I do, but I’m not sure.” Kaiser swings his leg back and shoots into the net.
“Kaiser? It feels like I’ve known you forever.” Isagi says, shamelessly. “You’re so… familiar.”
Kaiser looks at him, wide eyed. “I feel the same way. All the time, I want to just… be next to you, talk to you, touch you, be with you. I don’t think it’s just because we’re soulmates anymore.”
“I don’t know what love means.” Isagi admits. “I don’t know if I like you, or anything at all. I can’t tell.”
Something like desperation crosses Kaiser’s face for a brief second.
“But I always want to be with you, that much I know.” Isagi looks him in the eyes. Both of them reflect something like desperation, want, need, a desire for each other.
“Why do you want to be with me?” Kaiser takes a step closer to Isagi.
“I don’t know.”
Another step.
“But why? What pulls you towards me?”
“Something tells me I should just be near you.”
Another step.
“What tells you that?”
“Something inside… huh?”
Another step, he’s standing directly in front of Isagi now.
Tall, Kaiser is so tall. At least a head taller than Isagi. He towers over him in a way. One of his hands rest against Isagi’s neck.
And like before, Isagi chases the touch. It feels so right in a way.
“Do you know what blue roses mean?” Kaiser asks, forehead touching Isagi’s.
“To… attain the impossible?” Isagi says, slowly. Eyes boring into Kaiser’s.
Kaiser’s hot breath fans over his face. “I want to attain the impossible all the time, even outside of football. After meeting you, I no longer want to live the way I did before.”
Their noses are touching now, close, so close. Have the training fields always been this hot? Isagi’s hand has found its way to Kaiser’s shoulder. With clammy, hesitant hands, he traces a finger over the rose.
“I made the choice to come and find you without doubt or hesitation. Even if everyone around me told me it was wrong, it’s right.”
That’s the last thing Kaiser said before Isagi pulled his face down to kiss him. Gentle, loving, but there was an animalistic desire hidden beneath it.
They’ve been waiting for a long time for this.
Farewell to the versions of themselves who hadn’t met yet, and hello to the them with.
Isagi Yoichi and Michael Kaiser are shells made up of everyone and everything around them, but perhaps, together they are flowing water. Never ending, always connected, always changing. The two will forever grow in each others presence.