A Dance with Death
The old woman, lying in her deathbed, closed her tried, rheumy eyes...
...and opened them to an ethereal world. She stood on still water in a simple white dress made of some iridescent material akin to silk. She was young again. Mist weaved its way around her in a ghostly dance, almost as if it was alive. Cattails and reeds swayed gently in a breeze that she could not feel, to a beat from melody she could not hear.
A soft breeze tickled her ear, and she turned to look into the eyes of the man who had died for her so long ago.
"Sorata?"
He smiled at her and extended a large hand that seemed to fade into the thick, white mist at the outer edges. Her dark eyes met his hazel ones, and he smiled. "Don't be afraid."
Afraid? But didn't he know that it was not fear that drove her actions? Well, it was fear of a sort, but it wasn't a kind of fear that made her shiver in the night. It was a fear that if she touched him, that he would break, and she didn't want to loose this moment.
Seeing he hesitation, he reached out and took her hand in his own. Despite his appearance, his hands were strong and warm, like they had been when he was still alive.
"...but what is life to us?" he murmured in her ear as he slowly drew her into his warm embrace. A single flute, which had the same fragile quality as the rest of the world, began to play in the distance, in its lowest register. The music snaked around them, and slowly they began to dance on the water.
He stalked softly so her, whispered in her ear words that weren't quite sweet nothings, but information she had never thought he would know. He ended his little babbling of information with his point. "In 1903 Jean Sibelius wrote a piece to accompany Arvid Järnefelt's play, 'Kuolema'. The piece was called 'Valse Triste',"
She looked at him in question.
"Ah, yes, I know I digress. To get to my point, 'Kuolema' translates to 'death,' and 'Valse Triste' means 'sad waltz'. It is, essentially, a woman's dance with the grim reaper. It is the woman's dance with death."
She narrowed her eyes even more as they moved in slowly in an achingly beautiful dance of the strange world. "I still don't..."
He laughed heartily, the way he used to laugh when they were together, before the darkness defined as destiny consumed both their lives and their souls. "Arashi, my dear, this is our 'Valse Triste.' This is your dance with death, and I am your grim reaper. That's not relevant, is it? Right now, let's just be together, it has been a long time."
He was right, it had. It had been sixty-some years since that tragic night where he had fallen to the ground, dead and covered in blood, for her sake, to save her life. Oh, how she had despised herself for it, for living when he died. How she had hated and grown bitter, unable to die but not truly living. Unable to die because to die would make his death in vain. Unable to live because she did not feel alive without him. Funny how things worked like that.
"It must have been terribly lonely," he said with a smile.
She laughed, now all of the weight of life and the past gone from her slender shoulders. "It was horrid."
"You've grown more mature," he observed as their feet moved above the water making ever-so-slight ripples in the pond.
"And you've grown more elegant."
They fell into silence, needing nothing but the company of one another. They danced a dance that they would remember for the rest of eternity, throughout the endless cycle of rebirth. They danced a dance of incomprehensible beauty, and it was enough. It was their reconciliation with Fate and the terrible hand She had dealt them both.
Arashi remembered the nights she would wake up crying, no, sobbing as she had never sobbed before (for she was not a woman who often cried) screaming out for him. She remembered has that hateful sword wielded by that hateful man had pieced Sorata's chest and then exploded out of his back, bringing bloody entrails in it's wake. She had thought of thousands of things she could have done differently to save him, but in her heart of hearts she knew the truth: it was foreordained, and nothing could change it. Still, she remembered raging and raving at Destiny and Fate for taking away the single thing that made her life worth living.
Sorata remembered the misty depths of limbo and the sense of hopelessness as he waited for day in and day out, until days blended into weeks blended into months blended into years...and then the single years became decades and then he had waited half a century, alone in this misty world, and then, after sixty years, when he had almost given up, when he had almost left and moved on, she had finally come, when the loneliness had almost devoured him.
He held her close to him again and whispered his last words in her ear. "I love you."
She smiled, "And I love you as well"
And then, for the first, and last time, they shared a kiss, in the ethereal limbo between this world and the next. They stayed together even as their bodies faded into the living mist. Finally, their souls were free the fly unfettered through the currents of mist, together for as long as Destiny would permit, with the ghostly echo of I love you hanging in the air like crystal chimes.
The solitary flute ceased its melancholy playing. Their dance with death was complete.
Note: A short one shot with no continuation. This is from a fan fiction contest on a forum.