lawofgravity | this is the fate you've carved on me. the law of gravity.

prompt; takiko/uruki
summary; and he remembers her.
--

When the wind is particularly warm he remembers her. It carries her soft scent, and in a way, pieces of her, to him.

She was nothing like he had ever seen, even if she was quite ordinary compared to most women he’d seen. Her chest wasn’t anything to marvel at, that’s for sure. But there was a purity in her brown eyes, in her smile. Even if it all was heavily coated with loneliness.

On the first night after they become ‘Rimudo’ and ‘Takiko’, he quietly leads her away from the group. Above them is a canopy of trees and stars. They talk for hours, he and Soruen, herself and her Mother, but never of first loves. Because first love is something that is first for a reason, you move on to greater, deeper things. And Rimudo brings out a love so much deeper than any she's known before him.

And Takiko doesn’t know everything about Hokkan, but if someone like Rimudo is in it, needing her, needing just her smile then she will do everything she can.

Rimudo grows sleepy after the fourth hour. She places his head in her lap, bends down, and gently presses her lips to each eyelid, like a prayer. In a few hours we’ll be Uruki and Priestess again. Until then, please just be Rimudo.

Please just be hers.

Rimudo falls asleep to something wet falling onto his face.

As they are passing through a field, Takiko, not being particularly tall, finds herself dwarfed in the tall grass.

Being the esteemed Priestess, she finds that even she has an ounce of pride when it comes to these things, and ‘Uruki’ can’t help but snort as suddenly she is gone in the grass.

It’s only when he realizes he can’t see her that the fear sets in. It’s pointless really, she’s right in front of him, where he can protect and watch over her---and at night, love her until the morning comes.

When she finds a rock to stand on, hands on her face, pointing her naginata at him in mock-seriousness she demands shrilly, “Uruki how was that funny?! You try walking in this grass!”

It’s funny how she chases away his fears and is the cause of them at the same time. He starts laughing. She starts fuming. The party shakes their heads, but smiles. Everyone has a role to play.

(He carries her on his back until the grass gets short. But he is reluctant to let go. Her soft scent is carried on the wind. But her smile, her hands, are held over his heart. This piece of her belongs to him and no one else. )

He questions her once on whether or not she truly loves him even as a woman. As he stands in front of her, breasted and slight, she smiles, and he is relieved to see the adoration in her eyes has not changed.

He is surprised that she suddenly grabs her face in her hands and kisses her, cheeks flushed, as she says, “Uruki is Uruki. Although..” Uruki looks down.

They are breast to breast. Takiko is as red as a farmer’s tomato.

“..It is a little strange!”

He laughs. He hasn’t laughed in so long. With her there is everything to laugh about.
The wind carries her acceptance. It buries itself in his mind.

When he learns the truth behind the summoning, there is a chill in his heart that doesn’t go away. Because if she stays, there will be a moment when he stops seeing her. But if she doesn’t, then she will be seen by other people for a long while.

He just won’t see her.

But imagining the god devouring her whole, her with her clumsy footing and her slight frame and her big, trusting brown eyes and her sweet, sweet smile for him—

Uruki is willing to become cruel.

--When she believes him, the weight in his chest drops into his stomach, and doesn’t come back up again. He thinks it might be his heart.

He turns his back on her until he can no longer smell her scent, her trace, or any piece of her anything.

(He cries.)

The wind carries her screaming his name. It carries and locks itself deep in his heart. It fills up his stomach and his appetite and leaves no room for anything else.

And this is how they find him.

As she returns to him in the snow, stumbling, almost too weak to stand, he doesn’t think. He runs. He wants to say how stupid of her it was to come back, but he realizes he is incomplete without her. He is half a man.

When Takiko beams up into his face, her eyes wet with frosting tears, he realizes that the same look on his face is on hers.

The look of two people becoming whole.

As they lay together, naked bodies closely intertwined, he asks into her shoulder why she came back.

“For you.”

She says simply.

And a pause.

“And for them.”

Her hand lifts and makes a wide circle around them, and he realizes she’s talking about not just the others, but the entire world.

“Because I was needed. “ He scoffs into her hair. She’s always needed. He thinks she was meant to be in this world instead of that one, and he can say he’s glad she is here now.

Just don’t think about what she’s needed for.

The first time he sees her coughing up blood, he leans in, and kisses it off her mouth. Takiko starts crying. He does too.

Sometimes when things get hard, or when Takiko has an episode, she thinks of that one perfect night when they were dancing, no priestess, no guardian, simply a pair of lovers. How in that instant she was enough.

She goes over the times she’s heard Rimudo say he loves her, and when she sees a handkerchief and two concerned hazel eyes staring at her, she is inexplicably happy somehow. (But then there’s the pain, too, isn’t it?)

Takiko knows she needs no miracles. Her wish was granted when she met him.

“You are my miracle, this has been whatever god’s, greatest gift to me..“ She says to him simply, and she wipes her mouth, using the handkerchief instead to wipe his tears, and not her own blood.

He calls her an idiot.

And while she still has strength, she slaps him in the face.

It feels good, somehow. He enfolds her in his embrace, stinging cheek in her hair, and the action is desperate. She can feel him trying to take her whole, and that too, makes her happy.

She'd rather be devoured by him than Genbu.

“I’m going to keep going. “

She tells him one day, her brown eyes on his. He looks up, because he cannot compete with her will.

“And I’m going to go with you.” He responds, because he’ll find a way, he’ll save her.

Her smile is soft, and she opens her mouth to speak but he covers it, shaking his head.

“I won’t let you die.”

Takiko looks so tired then.

--

And suddenly they are kissing, hands in each others hair, tears, and pleads and gentle assurances, promises, melding together and breaking apart over and over---and then she pulls back, holds his face in her hands, and whispers: "I think it's time for spring here, don't you think?"

She pulls back, turns on her heel, and walks purposely ahead, hands out, chant on her tounge. Each word whispered is a nail in the coffin ---for both of them.

--

She is so weak now that she can barely move off the floor anymore. Propped up against a beam, she stares with misty brown eyes over the surrounding area.

“Be green soon..” It’s mumbled, almost sleepily, as she holds out her hand, expectingly. He squeezes it, it’s so cold, why can’t it hold her spirit a little bit longer. The cold god inside Takiko doesn’t care about her spirit, only her sacrifice. And the disease doesn’t care about Takiko either, only her strength and her lungs.

“Yeah. It’ll be a while since we’ve seen anything green around here. “ He says as positively as he can, because it’s Takiko and she’s been so strong for him all this time—so why can’t he keep the quiver out of his voice?

“..That’s good. I’m happy. You had a cold wind at your back for too long..—“ Takiko murmurs, smiling as her other hand goes to cup his face, and he knows the words mean far more than that..

“I had..something very warm with me to keep them away. “ It’s choked out, and as the tears prick his eyes he feels her gently rub them with a trembling thumb, pale face lit in a soft, sweet smile, tired, tired eyes set stubbornly on him.

The world will be green because of her. People will live their lives and be free because of her. The world still exists because of her, and she’s here, propped against a beam watching the world and herself trade places like it’s an acceptable exchange.

The world lives and she dies.

There is no perfect world.

“Mmm..smile for me?” It’s an innocent question, yet the thickness of her voice and the sleepy edge hasn’t left. Takiko is fighting her two demons, her unfaithful god and her faithful disease.

And he smiles, so bright that it hurts.

She lifts her head at that, and her eyes crinkle. Her mouth opens, and then she’s on the floor, spasming with pain as the coughs shake her back and forth.

A few months ago it was a few spots of blood, now it’s thick, hot, between her fingers, smearing her mouth. She doesn’t even have time to catch her breath and she’s coughing pale and helpless in her pain.

It’s so miserable and so unlike the tripping, animated girl he fell in love with. That lingers and fades in the dredges of light in her brown eyes.

Yet she chose to stay here, with him. Because he asked her. Because she was selfless enough to want to leave so he wouldn’t see this.

So instead, Rimudo pulls her to his chest, like cradling an infant, as her head props against his arm, head lolling, a line of blood trickling down the sides of her mouth as her eyes close, then flutter.

Her breath is raspy, faint, as she stubbornly opens her eyes again, blinking back tears as she offers him one of her gentle smiles.

And then it comes from her mouth, hoarse, cracked, faded. And so she sings their song.

“Ino..chi..miji..kashi..koi seyo otome..kurakami..no..iro--- …”

Stop, he says quietly, because she’s using up her life even faster this way, but instead, she keeps it up, as if she cannot stop. And he’s thinking back to when it started, on the boat and he heard her hopeful voice crying out like the maidens in the song, and he’s seeing her wide dark eyes as he confesses how lovely her voice was.

“Asenu ma..ni…kokoro..no..honoo…”

And now it’s a cracked, shadow of what was but still is so perfect—because she is perfect, even as she’s lying here, smeared in blood and as white as the snow she is dying to take away from this world. And it’s her, it’s Takiko and he loves her and why is this happening to her, to them, to him—and he wishes he could tell her that she saved him first before she saved any of these ungrateful, doubting people but she just smiles up at him, and there’s nothing but love and he’s starting to shake.

“kienu..ma..ni..kyou…wa futa…t…”

A weak, trembling breath, but she stubbornly squares her brown eyes on him, squinting up at him even as she keeps smiling. Even as the phlegm and the blood stops it’s flow down the side of her mouth, even as the tears streak past the edges of her eyelids, Takiko, always, always smiles for him.

“…t-tabi..no..konu …n..o…mo……..” Her hand drops from his face, the last, wavering note of her song, shivers and dies in the air. She doesn’t sing anymore. She won’t sing for him ever again.

He holds her body, rocking her back and forth, kissing her face, wiping the blood off her mouth and cheek, wiping her tears, and then sits completely still for a second before he shatters into harsh, uneven sobs.

The wind carries her away from him—forever.

He smoothes back her hair, closes her eyelids, and carries her towards the sunrise. He will lay her down in a land that will know the beauty of flowers and sunlight. (Because of her.) --

To those who will know no tomorrow

When the wind is particularly warm he remembers her. It carries it’s pieces of her, her smile, her song, her hands and her lips he’s touched a thousand times. These pieces of her are worth more than anything he could have had without them—because it was far better to have loved her---her---her. Then to live in a world where he had never heard her voice.

He sings her song in a cracked, trembling voice, until he can’t sing it anymore.