Kintsugi

The soft, musical sound of her laughter, no matter how brief, brought a grin to his lips and somehow settled the last of his lingering nerves. It reaffirmed that maybe he could actually do this. Maybe he could make the right decisions and be a good mate, husband, and soul mate for Ikigai. Sure, brushing her fur and making sure she ate were pretty small things in the grand scheme of life, but as she turned toward him and lifted his paw out of the way to press herself into his chest as she expressed her gratitude those things felt bigger than they really were. “You don’t need to thank me,” he insisted softly as he placed the comb on the table and wrapped his forelegs around her, leaning down to kiss the top of her head affectionately.

“There is something I wanted to talk to you about… and a question I wanted to ask.” he told her after a moment of just holding her and gently rubbing her back. He tipped his gaze down to meet hers, his claws absently combing through her ink smudged fur as he tried to gather his thoughts and form them into words. He had run through this so many times over the past few days and yet some how all of that preparation escaped him as he looked down into those beautiful and tired mercury eyes.

“I told you before that in my family we have children with only one wolf. That is certainly true, but it can… run deeper than that.” He watched her face as he spoke, trying to gauge her reactions and see how she was taking what he was saying as he went. “It's a bit... fanciful, but our beliefs all center around the idea that our souls come from the Ancients—our ancestors—and that when our souls are chosen the Ancients also pick someone that is meant to be our other half, someone that is given a piece of an Ancient soul as well that we have to seek out and find and bring into our family. Our soul mate.”

A small, shy smirk touched his lips as he glanced away for a moment. “Admittedly, I… I thought all of the stuff about a soul mate was just a dumb fairy tale when I was growing up. Manea always believed it, but I never did. But… I still searched. I still looked all across the world for years for someone that I could maybe bring back to my family and be proud to call my mate. I had given up hope, grown bitter and cynical, and then… and then I found you.” His gaze returned to hers, but when it did it was softer and somehow more uncertain and hopeful at the same time. “I don’t know why, I just knew as soon as I saw you that I had to have you. That you were what I had been searching for. You make me want to believe that all that shit about soul mates is real.”

He paused, knowing that he was saying and revealing a lot at once and probably talking more than he had in a very long time, but he had to explain the meaning and significance of it all before he could get to what he really wanted. Marriages don't really work the same way in our family as I think they do in other families or cultures. If I give you my last name, that means that I've chosen you as my soul mate and I want to bind your soul to mine so that when we pass we'll rejoin the Ancients together. It means that we will take no other mate for as long as we live." A brief, grim certainty crossed his expression as he softly added, "I... I know this means there could be a stretch of your life that you would live without someone after I pass and I'm... I'm sorry for that. I wish our lives had matched more closely."

With a sigh he gave a slight shake of his head to brush off the thought, refocusing his gaze on her once again. Loosening his hold around her, his paws slid from around her back to find her delicate paws instead, holding them between them with a gentle squeeze. "I wanted to do something big and grand for you and make a special trinket to commemorate this for us, but with everything that's happened I felt like we needed something to look forward to... I just needed you to know how much I love you." He swallowed past a lump in his throat, his ears folding back with an uncharacteristic, heavy wave of emotion as he realized this was truly it. Finally, after years and years of searching, trial and error, hoping and failing, he was finally going to reach this point that all Mendaciums hoped to reach one day. "Ikigai... I love you. Will you take my name? Will you be my soul mate?"

"Deimos & Ikigai"