This time of year, the sakura blossoms would cover a nameless grave. She would leave her sister's house and all their well-meant attempts to reintegrate her into society behind. When the sakura blossoms covered his grave, that was where she could be found.

The time together had been short for them. Despite ceaselessly trying, she had never quite succeeded in convincing the world of his right to another chance; nobody believed in a man like him. It had taken years before he let her into his lonely heart, only to have him torn from her side too early.

Some would say justice had been served; the dead had been avenged with his passing. Anyone who saw her praying, night and day, by his grave, would reconsider this interpretation of justice. No one watching the sakura blossoms fall around her, settling in her dark hair and on her dark uniform could think that it was a wholly good thing to have lost someone so very loved.

It had been a stroke of fate, that they had met at all… and another, that he had been weak enough to allow her the glimpse of his soul that would spark her interest.

All this, and more, could be considered important, but fate and justice were only dust in the wind when the sakura fell.

"Here." There was only one among the living who would visit her at the grave, "I've brought some food."

For eight years she had mourned the passing of a man, mourned otherwise by none now living.

For eight years, another man came to her side by the grave with food and drink. Always the same phrase. Never a word of condolence. He would stay by her side, still and silent as the rock, until the sun shrunk and died behind a glowing horizon.

He would lay a blanket around her shoulders, wordlessly, and disappear into the night.

He would watch her from the shadows, though she never knew.

No matter the passing time, love could not deny love. No matter how much time was yet to pass before her soul healed and she could gaze forward, looking for a future again… love would stay by her side as the sakura fell, saving his tears.

There was time, yet.

To heal.