Shin-Kai- 31. You will receive the same injuries as your soulmate (unless deadly).
Kaito, in general, had nothing to complain about his soulmate. In childhood years, he'd woken up with the expected cuts, scrapes, and bruises of his soulmate and thought nothing of it. Everyone shared injuries with their soulmate, and all children were accident prone to some extent. If anything, he felt kind of bad for his soulmate because Kaito tended to be rougher on his body than not between his acrobatics and trying to learn more and more difficult illusions.
He broke his arm at one point and it was the guilty knowledge that somewhere someone was feeling the same pain and injury that kept him from doing anything quite so stupid again. So really, he was the lucky one in most cases. His soulmate tended to get bruises on his feet and legs a lot, so he could guess that they were probably in a sport after some point. The thing with soulmate injuries, though, was that they were reflections of the real thing. Not quite so bad. This was important for a few reasons, not the least because sometimes injuries could be fatal. For example, his parents were soulmates and his father had died horribly. His mother'd lived through it, ended up scarred and in a coma for a week, but she'd lived.
Kaito had thought everything through very carefully when he picked up Kid's mantle before deciding he would risk his life and his soulmate's heath. That was the thing—it was never just your own body on the line. But there were things that were more important than someone he'd never met, even if that someone was his soulmate. Besides, the older they got, the weirder the reflected injuries started to be. Kaito woke up one morning with bruises ringing his neck and could conclude that someone had tried to strangle his soulmate at some point in the night. Another time, he'd gotten a reflected stab wound, so clearly his soulmate wasn't living a terribly safe life either. He'd do his best not to get injured of die, and he could only hope that would be enough for his other half, wherever they were.
So he did feel kind of bad the time he broke his leg. Or the bruise-and-cut from the gem in his pocket blocking a bullet. Or—you know he got injured a lot, and the bumps on his head and minor bruising from tussles with Aoko were honestly the least of it so he couldn't be too angry when his soulmate ran into more trouble than he could handle.
Kaito kind of felt like he was dying, like his body was boiling from the inside out, and if it hurt that bad to him, he could only imagine how bad it had to be first-hand. Shit, soulmate, who'd you piss off? Were they being broiled alive? Poisoned? Exposed to some horrific radiation, what? It felt like he was having a heart attack on top of that and Kaito's one saving grace was that this was happening when he was at home, not out on a heist or hanging out with Aoko. It was likely this wouldn't kill him, but oh did it feel like it was going to. What was the problem with bonds? Going into shock? The pain went on and on and Kaito could almost swear he was steaming, but if he was having a high enough body temperature to do that then he'd be dead from brain damage so that was probably just a pain-based hallucination.
By the time it finally stopped—oh hey it could stop, and not with the kind of horrible abruptness of a soulmate dying, holy shit the person lived through this—his head was aching with a minor concussion (he knew what those felt like intimately, thanks) and the tingling ache of having had every nerve ending on fire.
Kaito groaned, tried to do a body check. He had all his limbs? He wasn't bleeding out? No, there hadn't been any bleeding wounds except maybe a cut on his head from whatever blunt-force trauma started that shit show. His fingers clenched in his bedroom carpet (because he'd collapsed to the floor before he could get to the bed) and his head spun a little as he sat up.
Everything felt a bit off but it took a minute to figure out why.
Kaito looked down at his body. His younger, child body. "What the fuck."
A glance in the mirror showed that he looked like he was somewhere between ten and twelve again, which made absolutely no sense, and he'd been spelled by a witch once. What the hell?
Somewhere, his soulmate had to be even younger. Because this was only a reflected amount of damage.
Kaito took back every moment of guilt he ever felt about any injury ever. His soulmate took the cake on this one. How the heck was he going to manage like this?!
Just a note, bc I'm sure some people are wondering where the heck all this fic is coming from that I keep posting, it's a collection of things from the last six months that I poked at whenever I had writer's block for my longfic. Posting it now in December because I want to end the year feeling productive since It's been a year of hitting writer's block with a stick.