Some things that are meant to be never come to pass
As a small child, he'd known it. He could feel it in his bones, he'd known with the certainty of the gods in the sky and the certainty his mother had in his destiny. When he'd heard about her, he'd already known.
Maybe it was naivety, a flight of fancy, desperation, clinging to the only hope he'd been given of warmth and understanding that he'd never felt himself but seen toward others.
He'd been sure it wasn't.
When they'd met, he'd been surprised, skeptical and curious, but she hadn't taken long to prove to him that she was exactly as he'd thought she'd be. She was perfect in his eyes. All of her flaws and fears, all of her eccentricity and strangeness, all of the things she did that no one would dare and all of the sincerity in her eyes that he'd never seen.
Perhaps it was his own fault to believe that just because she was as he imagined, he would be as she imagined.
Perhaps it was his folly, falling into the same wicked pattern of his mother, to assume that simply because he wanted and expected a person to play to a certain destiny, that person would do it.
It frightened him to think of how his mother would have wanted to use her.
She'd guided him away from that danger without ever even knowing that it existed. That, too, made the child in him believe.
Eventually, every child needed to wake up and abandon their childhood fantasies. Every man had to accept the fate they were given, not the one they wanted.
Suzaku no Miko?
A woman who could shape legends could decide her own destiny, and neither man nor god would have any say over it. He admired her for her strength and freedom almost most of all.
Often, he envied her of it.
A girl from another world...
He was just a man bound by a destiny laid out for him by someone else. His life, his choices, his fate were all decided for him, set in immutable stone.
He'd thought that she would be a part of it.
A part of him, the empty and wounded part, still felt certain she should have been.
He should have expected her not to allow herself to be bound by any fate but the one she chose for herself.
Perhaps she can help me
He thought that he loved her more for it. In some small way, through the pain of the hole she'd carved out of his heart with her absence, she'd managed to alter his fate as well. He would never have a fate he chose for himself, could never in the life he'd been given, but at least a fate written by her was a fate better than one written by his mother.
It was alright in the end.
and I won't be
He'd never had any interest in how his story would end, anyway.
alone