Disclaimer:The characters in this work of fiction are not mine. The first few paragraphs of this story, which are taken directly from the manga, are not mine and are being borrowed for the sake of setting up the story. This pounding headache, however, is mine, and I'm pretty sure no one wants it.
Crimson
Long, long ago, during the age of myths, dark god Yamata no Orochi, evil incarnate, appeared in this land. His coming brought disaster to the world. Many people and gods perished by his hand.
The skies grieved. The earth suffered. Blackness shrouded the world, blocking out the sun and moon.
But God had not forgotten humanity. He gave unto them the holy blade Ame no Murakumo to use against the dark god. Yet Yamata no Orochi, having absorbed humanity's hatred and despair, was formidable.
Thus Ame no Murakumo was placed in the hands of the two purest people in the world—the Solar Priestess and the Lunar Priestess. For 30 days and 30 nights the priestesses fought Yamata no Orochi, defeating him and sending him into a long slumber…
Yamata no Orochi's slumber was not an eternal one. He woke again many times, spreading his evil across the land, and even when the priestesses fought him the world was often left in darkness and despair. That kind of world was not fit for human life, not at all. Not for anyone.
So it was decided.
The task of choosing the new world—of which reality would be born after the defeat of the dark god—always fell to the priestess who was slain. It was a kindness, perhaps, one last act of mercy for a life so cruelly cut short, for one who had to live and die again and again.
In the life before the last, it had been the Solar Priestess who had fallen—killed by the hand of her beloved. But even as the Lunar Priestess wept her lover sought to comfort her, assuring they would be all right, for she had chosen a world where they would inevitably meet again. Perhaps not with the same names, not with the same faces, but they would meet again.
And then she had died. In the end, her words had been small comfort to the Lunar Priestess.
In the last life, it was the Lunar Priestess who died. When the time had come for the world to be reborn and for her to choose, she had chosen a world where she would not be reborn again; a world where her beloved would live and breathe, and have a normal life without the threat of the eight Orochi Necks.
But the Lunar Priestess would not. She had chosen to be sealed away in the shrine upon the moon, until the next cycle when they were needed once more to defeat Yamata no Orochi.
The Lunar Priestess had chosen this believing it was fair. After all the pain she had caused her beloved sun, all of the suffering, this was the only punishment that was worthy of her. An indefinite time of darkness and silence until she was needed again—that seemed fair.
That was the world the Lunar Priestess chose.
The Lunar Priestess chose… poorly.
She was born for a second time with the name she'd had in her last life—Kurusugawa Himeko. She had, of course, no way of knowing this; her memories of her time as the Solar Priestess had been wiped clean from her mind, in an attempt to allow her to live as normally as possible in this one lifetime when the Orochi Necks weren't a threat.
And for the first five years of her life, Himeko was indeed a happy, normal little girl. She was deeply loved by her parents and she loved them in return, and they often spent their evenings out by the beach during the warmer months, playing in the sand and waves and watching the sun set.
On their last trip to the beach together, Himeko found a small pink shell in the sand and immediately fell in love with it, snatching it up before the waves could wash it away. She brought it to her parents and showed it to them. Her father, seeing how charmed she was by the beauty of the shell, promised to make it into a pendant for her to wear.
He kept his promise. The shell became her pendant, something she always wore, and Himeko treasured it from that day onwards.
It was the last gift she would ever receive from her father. He and her mother both died only days after her sixth birthday.
She would still know happiness after their deaths, of course. But those moments of happiness and peace would, from this point on in her life, be much fewer and far between compared to her first five years.
She always did keep her pendant, though. It was, after all, her treasure.
Her aunt and uncle had never wanted children.
In truth, Himeko didn't know them very well. She was too young to understand the consequences and complexities of falling outs between families; all she had known was her father and his brother had never much liked each other, and it all had something to do with her mother. In fact, the death of her parents had been the first time she'd even met them.
Having a niece thrust upon them when they had not wanted children was bad enough, but most people would have endured it. The fact that the child was the product of a union they had never approved of only added fuel to the fire.
She had started living with them when she was six years old, in a house just outside the village of her birth. The decision to move so soon after the death of her parents had rattled the girl deeply, and her aunt and uncle were incredibly demanding of her time, expecting her to not only manage school but to look after herself. The house was slightly bigger than the one she'd grown up in, often empty and a bit too cold.
But Himeko endured.
Out of some sense of obligation to an aunt and uncle who clearly didn't want her, the little girl tried her best to be as self-sufficient as possible. She woke up on her own for school, haphazardly made her own meals, and powered her way through homework without once asking for a single bit of help. She thought that would make things easier if she did what they wanted—if she wasn't a burden.
Maybe, just maybe, they'd actually come to want her. To love her even a little bit, if not as much as her parents had loved her.
Happiness wasn't an emotion Himeko felt much in those days, but she carried on. The light was somewhere beyond the darkness, she knew that much; had a driving force somewhere in the back of her mind, somewhere deep in her heart, to believe that she could endure. She could endure anything.
Yes. I can endure anything. If I do that… surely, someday…
Someday, I'll be truly happy.
Himeko had always been proud of her hair. Her strawberry blonde locks had been inherited from her mother, and she often spent hours with the older woman playing with it and brushing it, giggling softly as they whispered secrets to each other that they never shared with her father.
Her father had never quite understood the appeal of girl bonding while one's hair was brushed, but she knew in his own way he was fond of it; a light playful tug here, a pat on her head there, occasionally brushing out grass and leaves and little bits of dirt that got tangled into her hair when she played.
Yes, Himeko had always been proud of her hair. Her parents had loved it, and her father's playful tugs had always been gentle. There had never been any pain.
But her hair was the same color as her mother's.
The day her uncle grabbed her by one of her pigtails and yanked, there was no playfulness behind the gesture. There was only anger, and pain.
It wouldn't be the last time she felt that pain.
Still, even then she felt some happiness.
Sometime before her seventh birthday Himeko met Oogami Souma. He was a quiet boy from her class who had never spoken to her much before, but had seen her struggling to walk home one day and had offered her a ride on his bike. He hadn't asked when she'd flinched at his suggestion of adjusting her hat to better calm her hair.
He was her lifeline.
It became their routine, their excuse; he followed her path anyway on his way home to the shrine where he lived with his brother, and those times when she was on his bike watching the sunset made Himeko feel like she was with her parents again.
Sometimes they stopped the bike at the highest hill in the village and just watched. They didn't always speak, then; Souma would brace himself against his bike and Himeko would play with her pendant, and for them both it was enough.
Souma never asked about what happened at home; about the way her uncle would yell and pull her hair even when she cried, about how her aunt would sip her tea and ignore the sounds. He would have taken her on that bike all night if he could, and she knew it.
She loved him for it. He was the first person she really, truly loved after her parents; this innocent young boy who wanted her to smile, to laugh.
Who gave her, at least, a little ray of happiness. Taunting rays, like the sun peeking over the dark hill.
It wasn't until years later when they were both sixteen that she had it confirmed that he loved her too—if in a way that she had never considered.
Himeko's love for Souma was like that of family; she saw him as a brother, as someone who had picked her up after the deaths of her parents and had made the abuse at home a little easier to endure. For that she would always love him. It had never crossed her mind that at some point, Souma's feelings had crossed into the romantic when he thought of her.
It was the first large, shining beam of complete and utter happiness that had shown on Himeko in a good long while, and promised even more happiness to come—the kind of happiness she had once felt with her parents.
It was not, unfortunately, the kind of happiness she was constantly longing for.
"I like you, Kurusugawa. I want to protect you forever."
The words played over and over again in Himeko's head later that night as she gently turned her pendant over in her fingers, watching the rays of the moon reflect off of the pink shell. Other than the soft sound of Makoto's snoring, the room was entirely quiet.
If he'd said that to any other girl, she mused, her heart would have raced. Of that, Himeko had no doubt; Souma was considered the prince of the school, and even Makoto for all of her attempts to be above such things seemed to have a crush on the young man. The fact that he had noticed shy, quiet Kurusugawa Himeko that no one ever paid much mind to would have made his words all the more shocking to anyone who heard them.
Of course, no one in the school knew they had history to begin with. It had simply never been something that had come up.
"Will you go out with me?"
Himeko closed her eyes, resting her clasped pendant against her heart. Any other girl would have said yes. Why, in those romance movies she liked so much (and Makoto claimed to hate while conveniently being in the room every time something dramatic happened), that would have been the moment she'd leaped into his arms, kissed him, and proclaimed she'd come to love him as much as he said he loved her. That was how it usually went with childhood friends, after all.
Except, that hadn't been what had happened.
"I have a person I want to wait for. I don't know who, but it's someone in this world who's waiting just for me."
"But you don't know?"
"But I believe we can meet someday. That we will meet. So I want to wait for that person."
She pressed the pendant absently to her lips, smiling slightly. Really, when she'd worded it like that, she could understand Souma's confusion. It had been so vague, saying she felt she would meet someone in the future, and that she wanted to wait for that person. She didn't even know who the person was, what they would look like, or anything.
But she knew without a doubt, that person existed. When they did meet, Himeko knew she would be the happiest she'd ever been. Happier than she'd been even with her parents, when they'd been alive.
"You love me that much? Is that it? Himeko, I love you!"
She giggled, opening her eyes. At the very least, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Himeko knew Makoto would support her when she finally met that person.
She just had to patient. A little longer, and then she'd be happy.
The happiest she'd ever been.
University life, it turned out, suited Himeko far more than she could have ever expected. She'd been a bit nervous when the acceptance letter had first come in the mail; it would be her first time away from her home village, and her first time in a large city with a huge number of people. Even the assurances that Makoto and Souma would be accompanying her to the school hadn't soothed her.
She'd clutched her pendant so hard that day she'd left an imprint in her skin.
But despite her own fears and insecurities, she had adjusted well. The rush and dazzle of city life suited her, the constant hum and throb of life, and it filled her with an excitement, an energy, that she hadn't felt in years.
And here, in this place that was so full of people…
Maybe I'll finally meet that person.
Happiness, it seemed, was just around the corner.
Himeko absently adjusted the weight of her bag on her shoulder, watching patiently for the walking light to turn green. Today was her off day from classes, and Souma and Makoto were out on a date; now seemed to be the perfect time to get some shopping done.
The walking sign lit up brightly, a flashing green. Himeko followed the crowd out on the street, staying close to the center for the best walking space.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still.
Himeko lifted her eyes, and didn't know what she was looking for. She just had this sudden urge, this desire, to look up; this realization that if she looked up, now, right now, the person she'd been looking for, waiting for her whole life, would be standing there right in front of her.
Standing there, perhaps, with a pendant that matched the one that she'd worn since she was five.
Himeko looked up.
No one was there.
She blinked for a moment and went still, standing and completely unaware of people passing her by and stepping around her. She waited, but no one materialized in front of her. There was no flash of black hair, no gleam of blue eyes, no sign of a pendant that had ever matched her own.
No one was there.
She was alone.
A loud honk jolted Himeko out of her reverie; almost too late she saw the walking sign had turned red. With a yelp she sprinted across the street, barely avoiding the care that grazed dangerously close to her back as she reached the safety of the other side. She slumped against the pole for a moment, panting.
Her vision wavered and blurred; she felt a hot lump in her throat. She brought a hand up and pressed it to her mouth to cover the soft whimpers, the sobs, but could do nothing to stop the tears.
No one had been there. She had looked up, and she'd been all alone.
She didn't even know she was crying. She didn't know why she hurt. She didn't know what she'd expected to find.
But the fact that no one had been there when she'd looked up broke her heart.
She cried, and she ached, for a long time.
The End
Those who have read the manga will notice that the method I described to justify the new world is the exact opposite of what actually happens in that version! Mostly because I needed some way to justify why Chikane wouldn't be present in the new world, and I sincerely doubt Himeko would ever wish her to be trapped in the shrine on the moon. In a nice little twist, this also explains (at least in my mind) why Himeko's past life was trying to comfort Chikane's past life before she died. The anime never gives any clear answers, so it works as well as anything else.
Who takes Himeko in after the death of her parents, at least from what I could find, is usually pretty unclear. The answer seems to vary between a set of foster parents and her aunt and uncle, depending on who does the subs for the series. I ultimately chose to use an aunt and an uncle, since it seemed to better fit the flow of the story.
As I was discussing with DezoPenguin earlier, I intended to dip my toe back into the KnM writing waters hopefully with something nice, fluffy, and light. I then turned around and wrote seven pages of AU ending angst. I should actually listen to myself. I blame the headache.
Read and review, please!