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The demon had been strong, yes, but fairly easy to dispatch between two Hashira. In the end, given the time and energy needed to track it down and slay it, Sanemi rather thought it should have just taken one of them.
If just one of them had been sent, they probably wouldn’t have been getting into each other’s way, and Giyuu likely wouldn’t have been as injured as he had been. Sanemi knows all of the wounds are from the demon itself, but he isn’t sure which are from him getting too close to the demon and which from him getting in between the demon and Sanemi when Sanemi had been knocked down and couldn’t find his feet, as though Sanemi had needed defending.
Which, looking back on it, though he’ll never say it out loud, he probably had. He already has scars on scars on scars, and there isn’t much more of his skin that can afford to get carved up. It isn’t as though he fights to keep his life or his skin intact: he fights to kill demons. Simple as that. If he happens to come out alive on the other side of it and the demon dead, then it happens.
Not that he would ever admit to needing defending out loud. Especially not to Giyuu, the insufferable asshole. He’s the Wind Hashira; he’s supposed to be able to handle demons, no matter how strong, on his own, consequence to his body be damned.
And yet somehow, he escaped the last fight he was in with only a thin scratch on the back of his hand. The Water Hashira, however, is barely conscious and more of a heavy weight under his arm as Sanemi drags him to the shelter of the nearest tree, clouds in the sky promising rain soon.
The good news is, whoever had packed his field kit had sent him with medical supplies despite him saying, “Fuck you, I won’t need that.” The middling news is, Sanemi hasn’t really put a med kit to much use in his life, rather preferring to let his wounds heal with little to no medical intervention. But he knows the basics, at the very least, and he’s not about to let the idiot Water Hashira die on his watch.
When they reach the shelter of the tree, Giyuu under his arm but somehow still a half a step behind him, Sanemi tries to be gentle while lowering him to the ground. Giyuu, however, is not in a state to be cooperative, and ends up half-slipping, half-falling out of Sanemi’s grasp and landing on his side in the grass on an exposed root with a thud and a barely-concealed moan of pain.
Sanemi sinks to his knees next to him, drawing the med kit out of his pack, surveying the damage done to Giyuu. Most of the wounds are on his torso, deep cuts he can see through his Corps uniform, and Sanemi halfway wishes Giyuu had been wearing that dumb half and half monstrosity that he called a haori, just so Sanemi would never have to see it again. But no, Giyuu had been smart this time and had stored it in his pack just before the fight began, so it hadn’t been ruined.
With gentle hands he tries to hide most of the time, Sanemi reaches out and moves Giyuu so that the half-conscious Hashira is on his back. Then he realizes that Giyuu is still lying on the exposed tree root, and it takes quite a bit of maneuvering to get the other Hashira, who still isn’t up for cooperation, off of it.
Then he sets to work, clinically stripping the upper half of the other man. He mops up quickly-drying blood from clammy skin so he can assess the damage better, careful not to dip past the jagged ends of open wounds.
He pauses to assess his work once he’s managed to mop up most of the excess blood.
Leans in closer to properly look, because—
The scars are faint, but they’re there. Exact matches to the scars that mark up Sanemi’s own body, just lighter, fainter versions of them. White in some places, like they’ve been there for a long time, and pink in others, like they were recently gained, but they’re there.
Sanemi’s brain goes quiet for a moment, and then it goes loud with one very big thought: he knows that soulmates exist. Everyone that has one, it’s said, is marked up with the wounds and scars from their soulmate. Some receive the marks brighter and more vibrant than others, as though the wounds are their own, and others receive the marks as though they’re just a ghost of a touch, a quiet echo of the pain their soulmate went through, but the bond is still there, all the same.
His brain feels fuzzy as he picks up Giyuu’s right hand, cradling it in his own and, sure as shit, there’s a very faint pink line bisecting the back of it, mirroring the one that Sanemi just earned for himself. There’s no guarantee that it will scar, of course, and it may fade from Sanemi’s skin as well as Giyuu’s but the fact of the matter is: it’s there.
It’s theirs.
A fact that Sanemi will tell anyone who asks him is this: he believes in the soulmate shit, yes, but the thing is, he’s never believed in it for himself. Never believed that there could be someone out there, someone just for him.
Never believed it because he doesn’t think he deserved it.
There’s more facets to this, he thinks, rooted to the spot. The first is that if Giyuu has his scars, then of course he has Giyuu’s—he just hasn’t noticed, given the plethora of his own that litter his body. The way he picks them up like half-remembered souvenirs. It’s no wonder, then, that his thoughts never led him to believe that there was someone out there for him, as—if the scars on his body from Giyuu are as light as the scars on Giyuu’s body from him—he never noticed. His own scars likely cover up a good chunk of whatever belong to Giyuu. And given their line of work, new scars showing up every other day isn’t an uncommon occurrence.
The second is that there’s no way Giyuu doesn’t know. Sanemi wears his scars with pride, doesn’t go to any lengths to hide them, goes so far as to flaunt them.
He looks up at Giyuu’s face. He’s watching Sanemi with half-lidded eyes, barely clinging to consciousness; Sanemi isn’t quite sure if he’s fully aware of just what’s going on.
So he says, “You’re an asshole,” and drops Giyuu’s hand, setting back to work.
Giyuu musters up the ghost of what Sanemi thinks might be a smile before falling unconscious.