A/N: I recommend listening to the song in the media for this chapter! I think it fits perfectly with this fic.
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After they clean up, it takes close to an hour to talk Oli into leaving his apartment with his mark showing.
Kellin has to physically lunge at him, jump onto his lap and feebly attempt to hold his naked body down; which is no easy feat, considering the taller man is built like a fucking eighteen wheeler, and tries to scrub at the make-up Oli was using to cover it up. Even then, Oli yells at him and tries to run back into the bathroom to get his concealer and foundation out again.
The small boy winds up throwing the bottles over the edge of the balcony of his soulmate's fourth floor apartment, and Oli looks at him like he's reconsidering the whole not killing Kellin bit.
"Do you want this to be believable?" Kellin demands with his hands on his hips as he leans against Oliver's bedroom door frame, while the older man tries to find a turtleneck in his drawers, growling under his breath. "People are going to scrutinize every single thing we do, Oliver!"
Oli sighs and shakes his head, "I don't get the fucking point," He pulls out a black, loose fitting, graphic tank top, slamming his dresser drawer closed so hard it shakes the wall. "It's not like we're pretending to be mated. We're just –"
"...Pretending to like it?" The bright-eyed boy supplies quietly; he's unsure of the terminology of exactly what they're doing himself. He knows beyond any shadow of a doubt that while they might share the same mark, they're not exactly like Jenna McDougall and Tay Jardine, who were the last couple that came forward about being soulmates about five years ago.
Jenna is cold and prim, and Kellin has always found the way her eyes scan crowds with a detached expression, while sitting in the middle of an interview or at a book signing a little bit more than unnerving, like she doesn't actually have any discernible emotions other than the ones she displays for Tay, like the entire world is this thing that she endures and suffers through rather than actively participates in.
For her part, Tay is friendly and full of smiles, always willing to stop and happily sign autographs for fans, while Jenna tugs impatiently at her arm and scowls at anyone who dares to approach her with a camera.
Kellin wonders what they'll write about him and Oli, now. What descriptors will be used in the first magazine articles, what fairytale they're going to concoct in their heads about how the two of them finally came to meet after so many years of wondering.
The hazel-eyed man pulls the tank top on, and glares at himself in the mirror. Even with the high neckline, the mark is barely covered at all, still playing along his jaw and down his neck prominently.
"Don't you think it kind of looks like someone chewed on a red pen only to have it pop open all over them?" Kellin asks him with large doe-eyes, his head tilted to the side, wondering at how fascinating it is to see the mark on someone else. "I've always thought that. It looks -"
It looks like an accident, is what it looks like. Like something that was never meant to happen in the first place.
"I think it looks disgusting," Oliver says.
It's barely more than a murmur under the older man's breath, but Kellin hears it all the same. He gets this feeling in the pit of his stomach, one he used to get in elementary school when he didn't understand why his mother would hold him down every morning and rub cover up all over his neck and jaw, why he had to hide his mark, why no one else had one like he did.
"Because you're not like anyone else," She would say, as her son scrunched up his cute, little button nose and tried to squirm away from her hands as she worked to cover up his soulmark with makeup. "I think your mark is beautiful, Kells, but not everyone sees it that way."
