Hiei-Kurama- 29. You can see every color except the color of your soulmate's eyes until you meet them.

Ah, Kurama thought at a young age. I should have expected this. He was looking at a flower in his hands, one from his mother's garden, with the realization that a color was missing from the world. It hadn't been very noticeable until that point. He had thought that his human mother merely avoided that color, yet here he was. Holding a flower he knew should be a dark red and seeing nothing but a deep gray.

His mother a few meters away didn't notice her toddler son staring at a flower with more seriousness than a typical three-year-old could muster. His human mother who would think that it was perfectly normal that he was missing a chunk of his color vision since most humans were.

For Kurama, this realization was discomforting.

Humans had soulmates, people they were connected to at the deepest of levels and who were missing a chunk of color from their world that belonged to the other. For them, they couldn't see the color of their soulmate's eyes until they met them. This, in practice, meant that a wide array of browns were totally inaccessible to the human eye on average—and it did tend to be a chunk; eyes were rarely one solid color the whole way through the iris. In a human body, this was perfectly normal for Kurama to experience.

But most demons didn't have soulmates.

They had souls. They could forge connections. But unless they had a human soulmate, they didn't experience any more loss of color than was typically average for a species to have. Which could be a range in and of itself with so many different demon species, but that was beside the point. The point being that Kurama hadn't experienced this phenomenon as Yoko Kurama. As Yoko Kurama, he'd had a slightly restricted range of color in fox form, and a better range of color in his humanoid form than most humans had. Seeing this particular shade of red had never been a problem.

Kurama really should have expected that, as a human now, he'd have a soulmate. And by having a soulmate, his vision would be impacted. Hmm. How unfortunate.

Although… Kurama rolled the flower between pudgy, child fingers. Red was an unusual color for a human to lose. There weren't many humans with red eye color, and most of those likely had demon blood in them somewhere. That meant it was much more likely that his soulmate was a demon…

Well. No matter. It wasn't as if he had to do anything with this fact of life. If he ran into his supposed soulmate in the future, it wasn't a bond he had to pursue. Still, it would be interesting how a demon would take their color-blindness. Most wouldn't be pleased with the implication that they were connected to a human.

It was funny really. Here Kurama was, neither human nor demon anymore. Maybe the whole thing would go away when he returned to his true form and left this realm behind…

"Oh, did you find a flower?" his human mother said, appearing behind him.

Kurama looked at her blankly, not smiling as she smiled at him. Somehow she still seemed to love him even though he never gave any fondness back. Humans were such strange creatures.

"It's a very pretty flower," she said, scooping him up. It was undignified, but he was resigned to being carted around at the whim of others. It would stop soon enough once he was tall enough to actually keep up with an adult human being. "Let's put it in some water, hmm?"

He humored her. It would be an interesting reminder for as long as it lasted how taking this body had changed him more than he thought it would.

*0

When his mother caught him, shielding him from shards of broken porcelain at the cost of her own safety, something in Kurama froze at the way he couldn't see the red of her blood. He could smell it. He could see the injury and the streaks across the floor and the shaky way she moved as she tried to check that he was okay that showed it was a very bad injury for a human to have.

Kurama knew human blood was as red as a rose, red as a demon's eyes.

His mother had hurt herself for her uncaring, distant, changeling son.

Kurama wasn't sure, later when he examined his emotions, whether he was glad that the color was missing from that horrible tableau or not. Either way, it stamped itself in his memory. A debt he had to this woman who had never asked anything from him, gave him everything of herself with nothing in return. This foolish, loving human woman. …He felt guilty. Perhaps being in a human body had changed him in more way than one.

*0

The demon's eyes were red, red like blood, like wine, like roses. He was short, a sword on his back and a cold stare that looked through people instead of at them like they were already dead beneath his blade. But when he met Kurama's eyes, there was a flicker of emotion there that Kurama couldn't categorize. Anger? Relief? Fear? Anticipation? The demon was guarded and Kurama could appreciate and understand that. A lifetime ago, before he was strong, he'd been in the same place. One young demon climbing to the top of a pile and wary of anything that might try to drag him down. Numb to anyone's needs but his own. Kurama wasn't at the levels that he had achieved later in his first life but he was far from helpless. Clearly the demon knew that too because he held himself warily like a wild animal ready to flee at the sign of a threat. Or maybe more like a predator ready to retaliate, Kurama corrected, eyes sliding again to the sword. Hmm.

This was the person the faulty gods and their whims of fate had decided was his soulmate. Well. He'd just have to see what came out of this.