They haven't even officially met in canon (yet), but somehow this pairing has wormed its way into my top Yuri on Ice ships, second only to Victuuri. I've also wanted to write a Soulmate AU for the longest time, and when this plot bunny arrived, I just had to write it. Hope you enjoy what I've written so far!
(I swear as I work through the plot of this story, there's legit nothing but fluff. Can be read as either romantic and platonic.)
Kenjirou had been drawing on his arms even before he found out about the existence of soulmates, delighting in covering his skin with multi-coloured squiggles and splotches of paint. When he started kindergarten at age 3, he found out that some of his friends would get patches of colour on their hands that they hadn't put there themselves or drawings on their arms, and for some there were written words that they would ask their teacher to read out to them. There was even one pair whose colours would appear on each other, and they would spend the day scribbling away, putting bright pictures on each other by drawing on their own skin.
When he asked his mother about it that night, she smiled and sat him on her lap. Those were soulmate marks, she told him. Soulmates, she said, have a very special bond. No one really knew how, but any kind of colour or ink on a person's skin would also appear on their soulmate's body, on the very same spot. It was a way for soulmates to find each other. A special message to remind them that they weren't alone, even before they meet. Soulmates completed each other, were destined to love each other very, very much.
"Like Tou-chan and Kaa-chan?"
His mother kissed him on the forehead. "Just like Tou-chan and Kaa-chan."
Kenjirou stared at his clean hands, and asked his mother why his soulmate hadn't given him any colour before. All the paint that he had gotten on his hands had always been just his own.
"They might not be born yet, or still be too little," his mother explained as she took his small hands in hers. There were words written on the back of her hand in black ink, decorated with a little heart. "Sometimes soulmates are not the same age, and one has to wait for a little bit. Your Tou-chan and I were like that – I was getting messages right from the moment I was born and only got to reply when I was bigger. Your Obaa-chan said that I was always so happy whenever the colours appeared, and I would stare at them all day. So I'm sure your soulmate is really happy when you send them pictures, Ken-chan, even though they can't reply yet."
And so he continued to draw on both of his arms, in the brightest colours he could find. He left the colours on as long as he could, smiling whenever he caught sight of them, hoping that his soulmate was just as happy seeing them as his mother said they would be.
He got his first reply when he was four, a bold patch of bright orange all over his right hand, as if he had dipped the whole thing in a pot of paint. At first he had stared at it in confusion, wondering how he had gotten the colour over his hand when he had just taken a bath less than an hour ago and hadn't touched any paints since then. When he rubbed at it and no residue came off, the way watercolours and crayons usually did, it hit him like a thunderbolt.
His soulmate! His soulmate had finally sent him something!
With a loud gasp, he dashed into his playroom to pull out his stash of multi-coloured pens. He grabbed the first one from the top, a felt marker in neon blue, and with great concentration to produce his neatest handwriting wrote out 'Hi I'm Kenjirou!' in lopsided hiragana.
The responding message came just a few seconds later, in blobs of finger-painted yellow. He waited for a little longer, but still no words came, just more dots in different colours. He cocked his head, staring at the increasing number of uneven colourful blobs and smears all over his arms. They were pretty, but didn't mean anything. It looked like his mum had been right, and his soulmate really was still little. They probably didn't know how to read and write yet.
Still, he'd finally gotten a reply! From his soulmate!
Grinning brightly, Kenjirou decided he could wait another few more years for his soulmate to grow up, and started doodling little smiley faces on the rainbow-coloured dots as they appeared.
When Kenjirou was six he got his first written message from his soulmate, but they weren't any type of letter that he had seen before. They'd appeared on his arm sometime during the night, and he found the words as he changed for school.
A couple of them looked like the English letters his teacher had been teaching them in class though, so he went up to his teacher and showed her the words.
Fumino-sensei studied the words on his arm with interest. "Oh my, that looks like Russian."
"Russian?" he parroted, unfamiliar with the term.
"It's the language spoken in a place called Russia, a big country to the West where it snows a lot."
"Like Hokkaido?" He'd been there with his parents before, and played in the snow. There was rarely much snow in Fukuoka, but there had been lots of it in Hokkaido. It'd been cold, but very pretty. Was Russia also cold and pretty?
His teacher hummed thoughtfully. "Yes, a little like Hokkaido, but further away."
"Ehh…" Kenjirou pouted. "So my soulmate is far away? How will I find them then?"
Fumino-sensei tapped him on the nose. "No matter how far away they are now, I'm sure you'll be able to meet someday. You have your soul marks to help you, don't you?"
"Right!" Encouraged again, Kenjirou stared at the strange words in his arm. The language of a big snowy country far away. "But what does it say, sensei?"
To his disappointment, Fumino-sensei couldn't read Russian and neither could any of the teachers in Kenjirou's school. But she helped him copy the words onto a piece of paper so that they could look them up in a dictionary later, and taught him how to write a self-introduction in English.
"Because it's unlikely that they will know how to read Japanese, but your soulmate's parents might be able to read English," she explained.
So he carefully copied out each letter as clearly as he could onto his arm next to his soulmate's words, and impatiently waited for a reply.
A few hours later, a new set of words appeared under the original, but this time they were in English letters just like the one he had written. In a scramble he dug out the English alphabet chart from his bag, scattering the rest of his worksheets everywhere. He ignored the mess, completely focused on deciphering the words.
The first part of the message was easy enough, being an exact mirror of his. It was the last word he was interested in. That had to be his soulmate's name, right!? So that was a Y, and a U… R…
"Yuri," Kenjirou read out loud. He stared at the word for a long time. "Yuri," he repeated. A huge smile burst across his face as it finally sank in, and he leapt to his feet to dart out of his room in a sprint.
"Tou-chan, Kaa-chan, it's Yuri! My soulmate's name is Yuri!"
HELLO, I'M KENJIRO
HELLO, I'M YURI
I would really love to know what you think of it, so do leave a review!
PS - Extra brownie points for anyone who caught which manga cameo I added into this chapter.
