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As Kaneki stands in the checkout line and realizes that the majority of the clothes he’d picked out were turtleneck sweaters, he can finally admit that he has a problem.
Said ‘problem’ had begun with a stain on his skin no bigger than his pinky.
‘Mon cher,’ it said in looped, elegant letters. Kaneki hardly knew French, but he grasped the implications.
He covered the writing with a band aid, too embarrassed to let Hide find it. He could already imagine the torture he’d be subjected to with his best friend going to town on the endearing phrase-- “Oh, your soulmate is French? Ravish me Kaneki Ken, oui oui omelette au fromage, Eiffel Tower, baguette! Hon hon!” The mere thought of those sentences ever becoming a reality was enough to convince Kaneki to hide it.
It faded from his skin after a day, and Kaneki thought nothing more about it.
Then his soulmate forced him to think about it.
He woke up and found curling black ink on his shoulder when he trudged to the bathroom to brush his teeth; spirals and loops that amalgamated into a single rose. There was no text beneath, but the intricacies and detailing was enough to send a nervous blush to Kaneki’s face. A concerning amount of time had been put into the drawing, and it only reinforced Kaneki’s suspicions from the day before.
He scurried to the desk in his room and wrapped his fingers around his favorite pen, uncapping it and holding it poised above his arm. But he couldn’t find it in himself to write his thoughts, one simple word.
Why?
Kaneki had rarely heard from his soulmate before. The literary classics of star-crossed lovers painstakingly describing themselves to each other through sentences on their skin, of the resulting beautifully-drawn portraits tucked onto hipbones and throats that were destined to fade in a day never happened to him. He’d only received the barest indication that he wasn’t alone, a mere scribbled line or two found on his arms from time to time. There were moments in the early hours of the morning where he considered writing his name on his arm, all while demanding his soulmate’s-- taboo be damned. But he’d never followed through, too disenchanted with how small the chance was that his soulmate would actually love him. ‘Soulmate’ was a name for the person who used your skin as a canvas, but that was all it was. A name.
There were enough solemn stories of unreturned feelings between soulmates that Kaneki knew compatibility didn’t always have room for compassion.
So he said nothing. And he did nothing. He didn’t need to search for love, and love certainly didn’t need to search for him.
But now here it was, knocking at his door. Or at least, it was some sort of emotion donning a mask that looked like romance.
All of which brought him back to his first question. Why had his soulmate experienced a change of heart? Were they attempting to woo him, or the concept of him that they’d strung together from their daydreams?
Frustrated, Kaneki crammed the cap back onto his pen and tugged on a proper shirt, thankful the sleeves thoroughly covered the drawing.
Kaneki knew very little about his soulmate, except that they were persistent.
The rose on his shoulder hadn’t faded; he was suspicious that it was being traced over every night. The old lines found company with new lines, and Kaneki no longer wondered whether there would be a new drawing on him when he blinked awake in the morning. He just had to wonder what it was a drawing of.
Amaranths, asters, balsams, carnations, and primroses decorated his collarbones, chest, neck, back, and arms after a week.
All of which had some sort of relevance to love, much to Kaneki’s discomfort.
He had taken to wearing turtlenecks, constantly fidgeting and checking to ensure no one could see the strokes plaguing his skin. He didn’t know why he hid the drawings with such vigor. On a superficial level he could blame it on the teasing he’d receive from his friends and colleagues for the sickeningly sweet art. But on a deeper level, he believed it might be obstinacy. He couldn’t believe it was a genuine sign of love-- it’d make the resulting blow from being unable to fulfill his soulmate’s expectations sting more. He had done nothing to deserve these confessions, and the guilt was slowly eating away at his edges.
And that’s why he’s here now, buying three more turtleneck sweaters alongside his original reason for shopping: a pair of pants. He avoids looking at the receipt, already ashamed at how he so easily sacrifices his money over this dilemma.
When he gets home, there’s a new line of next curling around the carnation over his heart.
‘Cuore mio’.
‘Great,’ Kaneki thinks as he tugs one of his new sweaters over his head, ‘they speak Italian too.’
Another week passes, and the lines still don’t fade. The flowers multiply, slowly starting to creep to his hipbones.
Kaneki can’t imagine the amount of time his soulmate must spend painstakingly tracing over their drawings each night.
He’s disturbed by the dedication his soulmate spends on their concept of their lover.
He wishes he could be the person his soulmate imagines him to be.
He continues to cover up the drawings instead.
The terms of endearment are popping up in English too, now.
Script sneaks its way between the flowers, always in the same mesmerizing handwriting.
Kaneki doesn’t bother trying to go online to translate what the words say anymore.
‘I love you.’
It’s resting across his throat, more effective in shutting Kaneki up than a chop to the trachea.
‘It’s waste of emotions,’ Kaneki thinks. It’s a waste of emotions on him.
And then he’s furious.
He storms into his room, to his desk, and finally finds the courage to write the question with his favorite pen.
‘Why?’ he writes by the rose.
‘Why?’ he writes by the carnation.
‘WHY?’ he writes under the ‘I love you.’
He scribbles the question over and over, right beside each and every drawing and word. The blue ink bleeds and blots but he doesn’t care, he just keeps writing the damn word until his hand hurts and his skin is stinging.
He can finally fall asleep without wearing long sleeves, absolved of the guilt he’d felt after every confession.
It’s one of the worst nights of sleep he’s ever had.
‘I was tired of being lonely,’ the new writing says, its loops smaller, its slanting less prominent. It runs down the length of his arm.
Kaneki feels like he’s receiving an apology he doesn’t deserve.
The drawings finally fade.
When Kaneki finally starts wearing short-sleeved shirts to class again, Hide shoots him a disappointed look, like he had known what was going on all along.
Kaneki’s skin is frustratingly plain. He doesn’t have any freckles or blemishes to replace the wide stretch of canvas the black ink used to occupy.
Going to bed feeling guilty was terrible, but going to bed feeling lonely is infinitely worse.
He thinks he understands his soulmate a little better.
Another week of silence inches by.
Kaneki can’t take it anymore.
Ripping the cap off of the pen that had committed the crime, he plunges the tip down, drawing with reckless abandon for the sake of his sanity, for the sake of an apology.
He draws a desert horizon lined with lonely mountains across his left arm, a crescent moon hanging above the scene, bouncing its light off the landscape. His pen’s strokes are rough and textured, giving his drawing the illusion of a swirling, starless night sky.
He only rests when his pen runs out of ink.
Kaneki finds a singular dot on his neck when he wakes up the next morning.
He puts on a turtleneck anyways.
The morning afterwards he finds a new flower scrawled around his throat again, the familiar black ink touched up with purple shading.
He scrambles to find what kind of flower it is, fingers thudding against his phone’s keyboard before he’s fully studied the drawing.
It’s a purple hyacinth, one website informs him. The meaning listed underneath makes his arms shake with relief, the tension of the silent weeks draining out of him in one sudden burst.
“Forgiveness.”
He finds him at a small coffee shop on campus, sipping his drink by the window with a book propped open in his free hand. His faded azure hair frames his face flawlessly, and his figure gives him the sort of elegance reminiscent of a model. But Kaneki can see the circles under his eyes from sleepless nights. He can see the mountains and moon he had drawn on the man’s left arm, bared for all the world to observe.
Kaneki is sitting a few tables away, surrounded by his ignored classwork with his gaze trained on the stranger.
Something causes the stranger to look up.
Their eyes meet.
Kaneki finds another moment of courage. He tugs down the collar of his turtleneck with a shy smile. The stranger’s eyes widen.
Jittery with excitement, Kaneki uses the pen resting by his arm to write a message on his hand-- if he hadn’t been practicing writing the word over and over countless times before on paper, he’d be afraid of messing up. But the letters come out perfect, blue and crisp.
‘Bonjour.’