Disclaimer: Shin Kimagure Orange Road © Matsumoto Izumi/ Terada Kenji/ Shueisha. Not intended for commercial gain or to challenge the status of these copyrights.

A Shin Kimagure Orange Road Ghost Story

I sit here, in front of the piano she often plays, and look outside. A blustery wind and pouring rain—unusual for what has been a hot and dry July. I wait here for someone dear to my heart, indeed someone who is now as much a part of me as I myself. My dearest Madoka. Saffron of blooms, as beautiful as Helen of Troy, as changeable as this weather, as mysterious as a worn stone idol in a dry, sandy desert. Light one moment and darkness the next—it is she who I am waiting for.

She has filled most of my waking thoughts these past years, and I am glad that Fate has thrown me her way—or rather, has enabled this Hikiboshi to cross over the divide and be with his Orihime, and for far longer than a mere day in the year. But this star worries about the sour sky and wishes her journey home to be a safe one.

Madoka was—and is—equally at home under sun and wind, rain and cloud. I have seen her on the summit of Mount Fuji at sunrise, her long black hair blowing in the breeze, her face towards the east, eyes closed, receiving the sunlight like a benediction, like a plant thirsting after a cold, dark night. I have also seen her at home, when it rains, throw open the windows of the living room, sit in this very seat, and play a gentle largo of response to the pattering on the roof, the pouring from the gutters, the gurgling in the sluices, making the music of Mendelssohn or Chopin mingle with and embellish the sounds of the world around us. Then, afterwards, she would face me and throw her arms wide open, in a gesture worthy of a mighty queen, inviting me—summoning me—to her embrace. Later that evening, she and I would lie entwined in bed, drifting into and out of such a harbor as was made known to man and woman since time immemorial, until, faintly shuddering, we were brought forth to ground along its sands. Then after a moment of silent, sightless repose, the world would return, with the sound of the rain, with the sight of the overcast sky outside, and the feel of the languid warmth beside me.

Whence come the tears, then? I am not sure myself. It could be that I am merely tired, and that this part of my memory of her is a travesty, something given distorted life by my weariness. Or perhaps it is the reaction of the frightened traveler, upon learning himself transported to a realm where he normally does not reside, a kingdom where abide only angels and demons, and they have just begun to notice his small, feeble presence soiling their very existence…

Madoka, my beloved, how strange that being with you for over eight years has not robbed my existence of the loneliness that strikes me when you are not present, that makes me want to have you beside me, now, if only to selfishly assuage my own solitude. Just now I fancied I heard the pitter-patter of footsteps outside the door. Heart leaping into my mouth, I rushed to the window expecting to see you. Instead, all I saw was a piece of cardboard skittering along the pavement, blown by the strange July wind, an oddly rhythmic sound I listened to until it faded into the hissing distance in the rain. I thought it was you, come back to me like a bird, come here once more to seek rest and grace this forlorn wanderer with your presence and music. Yet it was not to be. You are still here and yet… I cannot explain it. I will wait for you, but somehow… in the damp chill of this alien weather, I know I've lost you.

------oOo------

There he sits, in front of the piano I used to play every day. My dearest Kyousuke, the sole owner of my heart. And yet he doesn't even know I'm here, in the same room as he is, wanting to touch and feel him as much as he does me. I want to go to him, I want to see him mark my presence and cry out my name, to run my fingers through his short black hair, to cup his cheeks in my hands as I kiss his lips. But every time I do, an invisible wind forces me to keep my distance, and I can only watch him as he walks alone in this empty house of mine.

I have seen him before, waiting like that for me to finish playing whatever piece I felt like playing at the piano, afterwards to hold me in his arms and make love to me, shutting out the inconsequential outside world, creating a timeless one of our own. It is one that is renewed each day, and one that I will treasure forever, mine alone, precious as a grain of sand in an empty universe. He has been the one constant in my life as the years have flown by, a steady anchor of security in the ever-changing world. We have had our ups and downs, our own problems to deal with, like any other couple; but I find that time has not diminished the love I feel for him in my heart. But now it looks like he will never know that, and I will never have the opportunity to tell him. How foolish we are, when we schedule our lives thinking we know how each and every hour will turn out, when in truth our existence can stop the next moment with the merest severing of a thread!

I know he feels something; I can sense it. But like a traveler through a darkened wood, he clings stubbornly to the path which he finds familiar and refuses to wander through the darkness for a new truth, to acknowledge the strange feelings that flit through his mind like bats in a night sky. I cannot make myself more present, for I fear I will frighten him into leaving, and I don't want to be alone just now. I am caught between Scylla and Charbydis; if I don't do anything, that loathsome being that used to be me will come walking through the front door, and he will kiss it and greet it Okaeri, and if I try to reach out to him, I am afraid he will yell and scream and push me away, or do something to me with those powers of his that will render me helpless and separate from this world for eternity.

Kyousuke, I know you weep. I feel its stab in my heart, as the sky feels the burn of a meteor passing through it. It hurts me to see the confused, uncomprehending look of a little boy in your eyes, to know that you are at the mercy of the spirit inhabiting my body. I would comfort you, if I could; but I cannot, and my impotence both angers and terrifies me. I cannot bear to think of you making love to that creature. You are mine, and mine alone; we promised each other fidelity for as long as we lived. Don't such vows extend further than the land of the living and protect us from the things that come from beyond it? This Galatea would be lost without her Pygmalion. I want to tear my hair out at the thought of her fooling you. I want to cry, please, darling, open your eyes and see her for what she really is. You can sense something is not right, but your vision is only half in place and you cannot see the little details that should tell you the obvious: the sound of her footstep, the flash of her glance, the heave of her chest—all should tell you that the one you are facing is not me. Kyousuke, please wake up! For if you don't, I will be condemned to this horrible existence for eternity, a wandering presence without voice or substance, searching for you, long after you have gone to that rest that awaits all of us. And yet… when I think of you with her, when I think of what will most certainly happen later this evening, I feel I would rather have it so. Kyousuke, my beloved, hear me!

------oOo------

I hear someone walk up the steps to the door. Ever like the expectant lover, I rise from the hard white piano seat to greet her when she steps through, the thought of seeing her again banishing my melancholy to the four winds. Her arrival makes me feel that the world will soon be set to rights, whole and complete.

The heavy slab of oakwood opens, and she stands for a moment framed in the middle of the doorway, light and wind pouring in around her as she closes her umbrella.

"Welcome home," I say, and for a moment the sound of my own voice, unsure and creaking after hours of disuse, seems foreign to me.

A peculiar bending of the light makes her shimmer and waver in my sight, like the disturbed reflection of one's self in a small pool, backlit by bright clouds. She looks at me, and her eyes are flat and dull, two pools of nothingness that suck my soul into an everlasting dark, instead of being the hard, bright, lustrous marbles I usually see them to be.

She places her umbrella in its stand, walks up to me and kisses me on the cheek. "Why are you crying?" she asks, and her smooth, low voice sends chills running up my spine. I feel myself helpless before her, and her hands on my chest and forearm burn me with their very touch.

"It is nothing," I reply, shaking my head. I had forgotten to wipe my eyes, and as my fingers come up to my face, I feel the tracks of my tears wet on my cheeks.

She interposes her own digits beneath mine, and gently smoothes away the dampness. "Courage," she says. "I am here now. You don't have to wait for much longer." The words come from her mouth, past those lips I had longed for when I was younger, now often kissed, and which have time and again reassured me in my troubles. But now her speech brings no comfort to my heart.

She places her bag on the low, spartanly functional living room table and takes my hand. She starts to lead me, and I know where she intends to go. Our footsteps make no sound to be heard above the patter of the gray rain as we walk up the stairs to her bedroom.

------oOo------

I watch them go, and like a sinner being punished for her countless sins, I am compelled to follow them. Up the stairs, up to the corridor that connects the different rooms, I pause just outside the sanctity of my own. I cannot—will not—cross the door. My mind recoils at the thought of what I will see once I enter. I have turned into a jealous shrew, one ghost afraid of another, Arachne caught in the web of a more masterful schemer. I fear my heart will break when I see him in the arms of that monster. But I must enter, because I do not know what she intends, and I must see to his safety, even at the price of my heart.

I pass the closed door. It is not a feat to one made of nothing, as ephemeral as a thought, as vague as a shadow in the night. They are kissing. His hands are pulling her blouse off, and she is unbuttoning his shirt. My heart falls and my absent body stumbles itself into a corner by the bedside cabinet. The yellowish light of the table lamp passes through me, and I sit there with my ethereal arms wrapped around my insubstantial legs, hiding my face from the sight of them. I want to weep. Kyousuke, it is not your fault. I know that. You could not distinguish between spirits even if your life depended on it. So here I am forced to stay, to listen to you whispering to her the things you whisper to me, and by rights should be mine alone to hear, to have my spirit battered by each moan that comes from her throat, in my voice. I hear her call out your name, a paean in the cool stillness of the room, and it makes me look up, to see her run her hand—my hand that she stole—through your hair. It is not your fault.

------oOo------

I have learned many things about her these passing years, things I could not have known by being just her acquaintance, and one of them is that she expresses her innermost feelings through love-making, just as she does through her music. But whereas the music she plays follows a form long set by someone in the past, her bed play is far more elastic, far more freeform, following her whims as a drop of water will follow all the folds of skin in a hand. Jazz in the boudoir—I described it to her like that once, and it set her laughing. But it ranges more than that—sometimes it feels like an elegy, almost, and I feel like crying in the midst of my happiness, weeping as I thrust into and out of her, sorrowing for the passing of each moment whose beauty can never be recaptured, even in memory. She does so, as I have seen in the past. I have asked her why she cries, but she never gives me an answer. "You may as well ask the rain why it falls, or the flowers why they bloom," she told me once, and I have never had the heart to penetrate her darkness and ask her again since then.

This is one of those times. I have undressed her and she has lain on the bed, waiting for me, her pale flesh shining honey-colored in the lamplight, promising yet also forbidding, as a sanctuary one is afraid to violate with his human and all-too-fallible presence. She seems quietly sad, as I have sometimes seen her when looking out the window at the rain and the empty world.

I lie down beside her, and for a moment we look into each other's eyes. What does she, I wonder, see in mine? I have no time to think further on the matter, as she gently encourages me with a nod and a smile. Thus bidden, I take her in my arms, to kiss her thoroughly, before we begin that dance that has existed between men and women ever since the dawn of humanity itself.

She draws back from the kiss, and I sense her freeing herself, letting down the guard of her soul, so that she may be more intimate with me, and feel every tingle in her body, every message from it. With that done, she then looks at me, and I have the momentary sensation that something is not quite right, and that I am looking at a stranger, someone far older than I am, and not my beloved.

The feeling must have manifested itself on my face, because she asks, "Kyousuke, what's wrong?" and frowns as well.

"Nothing," I lie. "It's nothing."

She smiles shyly, but the strange sorrow remains in her eyes. "Come on," she urges. "Make love to me." Her arms put themselves around me and pull me on top of her shadow-dappled body. She does not have to do anything; I am ready. I rest my weight on my arms, enter her, and begin.

------oOo------

That bastard! That bitch! And here I am, seeing every bit of it, every lurid second, every disgusting moment. I watch as my dearest lies between her legs and makes love to her, the way he did to me. Kyousuke! I want to cry. Don't do this. Please! I hear their moans, their sweet nothings, and mark the creaking of the bedsprings—my bedsprings, mind you. It tears into me. I hurt. Dearest, I am going to find a way to reach you, even if it costs me the remainder of my existence. Only I should share your bed. Only you should lie in mine. No other. Especially not that abomination that has seduced you in my name, and broken my heart.

------oOo------

I journey away with her, into an imagined sunfall, on another world, in a place where time itself has become cuckolded and meaningless. I rain my kisses over every part of her body I can reach, and in my imagination, it becomes a whole world to explore: the hollow of her throat teems with mysteries whose depths I could never fully plumb, not in a thousand years; her lips tantalize me with their promise of sharing the sweet nectar of her existence, something no other man on earth could claim to possess. And her secret valley—not secret to me—alternately rising and plunging beneath me, teases me with more riddles hidden in its folds, saying it knows things about her I will never understand in this life, or the next.

She cries out and shudders, convulsively pressing me against her. I soon follow her lead, losing myself in her rippling length, crying out her name into the still air of her room, into the secretive amber light. And then, as I drift down from that ecstatic height, as I forsake that temporary heaven and reemerge into the existence that is the real world, I happen to look down at her, and the realization strikes me.

This is not Madoka.

This is not her, whom I have loved and cherished these past few years. I am sure of it. Whoever she is, she is not an imitation, nor a perversion; it is her… and yet it is not. I stake my life on it. And I already have, I am sure.

As if sensing my revelation, the woman beneath me opens her eyes and looks out at me from their formless aquamarine depths.

"You know, don't you?" Her voice is Madoka's, but infinitely sadder than I have ever heard her speak. "Who I am?"

I brush her ebony hair away from her face. "You are not to be named. You have many names."

"And yet you love me?"

I ponder her words. A rush of emotions surge through me: I am shocked, repulsed, revolted by this abhorrent creature that has made her home in my beloved's body. Yet these and all the other feelings in my heart are engulfed by the sorrow emanating from her, palpable as a slimy morass, thick as stardust jelly. It is a pool of water that is beginning to fill the room, drowning us in it.

"No. I am sorry. I love another." I withdraw myself from her embrace, and as I do so, I feel my hand pressing a dagger home into her beating heart.

She turns her face aside, and a silent teardrop tracks down her cheek. "Forgive me," she whispers. "I have used you badly. And yet… there is no other way for me to leave."

"Why have you come back?" I ask her.

"To say goodbye, and be at peace." She covers her nakedness with the bedsheet, which is rumpled and stained. I would find it amusing, after what we have just shared, if the expression on her face wasn't so sad.

"Where is Madoka?"

"She is here, with us."

"I want her back."

"She will come back, in a little while. But there is a favor I must ask you." She shifts, and the light casts an unnatural sheen on her face as she stares past me at a point in space. "The both of you."

"What?"

"You have renounced me. I must leave, and now I can do so. But please allow me to complete what I came here to do. I beg that of you."

I look at her, this being wearing my sweetheart's shell, and I am consumed by my impatience and worry. A cold feeling brushes against my back, however, and causes me to bite back the words that threaten to erupt from my heart. "Do whatever it is you came to do. "

She rises from the bed, a Paphos-born Aphrodite behind gauzy cloth that highlights her feminine curves as the light shines from behind it. "Get dressed," she says, and moves to her—Madoka's—armoire and pulls on a pair of tan slacks and an orange sweater, one that I know Hikaru bought for her, mailed to her last Christmas, just before she came back to Japan.

I dress hastily in my own pants and shirt, creased as they are, and she steps into a pair of open-toed red pumps and reaches out for me with her hand. "Come with me, one last time." I cautiously place my hand in hers.

She opens the door, and we rush downstairs, she in her shoes, and I barefoot. I have time to retrieve my leathers from the genkan as she picks a different umbrella from the umbrella holder, a big gray one that is enough for us two, which used to belong to Madoka's father, employed by him during his infrequent games of golf while in Japan. I have the sense that she is now hurrying and pressed for time.

We run down to the garage and get into the Mini Cooper that has served her faithfully these past few years. She motions for me to get into the passenger seat, and on a whim I fold it forward. A draft of cool air brushes past my right arm, and I return the seat upright, and get in.

------oOo------

She takes us on a long ride, the only sound being that of the rain and the motor. I am shivering in the cramped back seat, watching myself driving my own car, tired from exerting so much of myself into that warning I sent into Kyousuke's mind. The streets are strangely free of traffic today, and like Bellopheron on Pegasus, we arrow towards our destination.

God, I am cold. I lean forward and touch Kyousuke's cheek, and to my surprise I hear his thoughts. He is worrying about me, and I also feel his fear at the companion seated beside him. There's no need to be anxious, I tell him, knowing somehow that he will hear me in his own fashion. I am here, and I will not let her harm you. For now I know her to be less evil than I thought she was, and less powerful than I thought she would be. I know my love will prevent her from doing any lasting damage to you. To me… that is another matter.

I watch as her orange-sleeved arm changes gears. The nerve of this woman, I think, to wear something given to me by Hikaru. I am galled; her gifts mean a lot to me, as I have had less and less contact with her as the years have gone by. Hikaru, my best friend, whom I still sorrow over.

Kyousuke and my doppelganger remain speechless throughout the drive, except for one moment when he asks her what has lured her to us and done this, driven me out of my body, in exchange for God knows what. Her reply is simple and straightforward: "Your love. Your love for each other drew me here. I have never felt one so strong, for a long time. It gave me the power to return to life, and I, being a woman, had to reside in a woman's body."

You could have asked my permission, I grumble to myself. Not that I would have given it, though. Certainly not to let you bed Kyousuke. If you were still alive, I'd have killed you for doing that. I still want to do so, now.

But the woman doesn't listen to my ravings. Instead, she says, "I am sorry to have done this. I know neither of you will forgive me, so I am hurrying now to get out of your way, before I incur further enmity from either of you." Her voice grows quiet, and I have the feeling she is talking to herself, and not us. "I have enough sins as it is."

At the end of the journey she pulls up outside a cemetery, and I know what this is all leading up to. She stops the car, sets the handbrake, and opens the door to go out, but Kyousuke stops her and exits first, the umbrella open over him. He goes to her side and does her the courtesy of shielding her from the rain. I wish he'd do the same for me, even though the drops of water pass right through me as I get out of the car.

A pang of jealousy sizzles through me as I see them huddle together under the umbrella, walking into the memorial park. Even now, even as things are being made clear, even though I exist as nothing more than an incorporeal soul, I still feel jealous. Is the afterlife truly like this, a place where spirits still feel these emotions, or is it because I exist now in some limbo between this life and the next? No telling.

And there will never be any telling. Not now. They pause in front of a headstone, weather-stained and overgrown with weeds, and she takes his hand in her own. She kisses his cheek and starts to talk.

------oOo------

"This is… was my husband. I lost him the day after we were married."

I look at her, and her face is graven, as stony as the marker we are looking at. I choose to listen to her, since I know that for every secret she decides to tell me, a hundred more will lie in the earth, to moulder away with time, unknown, unmarked, unremembered.

"How?"

"We were killed in an air raid." She closes her eyes. "I can still remember hiding in our shelter, holding his hand. Then… darkness."

For a moment I forget where I am, and who she is. I share the darkness with her, and feel her fear and loneliness.

"I… wandered so long… I wanted to say goodbye to him…" Her tears fall, and she looks up at me with Madoka's face. "I know you'll never forgive me, but I hope you can understand why this insane woman did something so evil to you and your girlfriend."

I nod. I understand too well the things the passions in our hearts can make us do.

She pauses and looks around, and her voice becomes frantic. "Oh, a flower! I didn't bring a flower! I wanted so much to leave one before I go!" More tears flow from her eyes. It is a simple desire and request, but an important one to her.

I contemplate borrowing one from the nearby graves, but decide against it. I find that dealing with one spirit is hard enough; fortifying myself against two will be beyond my strength. Then I remember something and cast around in my pockets.

"Wait! Maybe you can use this." I hold up a tiny keychain, decorated at the end with a blue metal circle enclosing a ceramic-inlaid red heart. Madoka gave it to me, some days after we had first made love. We were sitting in a café, and she leaned over and handed it to me, whispering, "The circle around the heart is me. I will keep your heart safe forever." I had smiled then, touched by her declaration, and, uncaring of the other people sitting around us, leaned forward and kissed her full on the lips, and was rewarded by the sight of a blush appearing on her normally imperturbable face.

I unfasten the keychain and give it to her. She takes it in her hand and looks more closely at it, as if examining it, reading its history. A smile grows on her tear-stained face, and she looks again my way, showing a grateful expression.

"Oh, thank you! This will do! This will do!" She steps forward to the marker and balances the heart on top of it. She stands there, silent, and I step as far away from her as I can, wanting to give her as much privacy as I could. The rain, I think, is a fitting background to her, the sky crying in sympathy, weeping as much as she is.

After a moment she turns around, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Thank you so much," she says. "We… we were the last of our family. There's no one left alive now to take care of this grave, so I appreciate what you've done for me very much. At least I was able to leave a remembrance before I left…" she adds, her voice faltering. "Come, Kyousuke. It won't be long now."

She takes my hand and starts to lead me away from the grave. Her shoes squish on the manicured grass, like my own, as we walk back through the rain towards the car. Partway, however, she suddenly releases me and turns around, running back to the marker, crying out words I cannot seem to understand. I run after her, shouting something meaningless, like how wet she'll get, and how she should get back under the umbrella. She stops in front of the grave and falls to her knees, and I stop as a frigid wind blasts past me in her direction and threatens to rip the umbrella from my hands. I shiver and clutch at it with two hands.

Her head is tilted downward, her long hair is plastered to her body, and I can see her hands folded up to her face, the tips of her fingers just covering her mouth. The sorrow that used to radiate from her is gone, its morass drained away into nothingness.

"Ayukawa?" My voice is hesitant.

She jerks like a puppet on a fouled string and turns toward me. Her eyes are wide with fright.

"Kyousuke." It is a whisper at first, then grows louder. "Kyousuke. Kyousuke!"

She leaps to her feet, and I behold a sight I thought I would never see in my life: the self-possessed, self-confident Madoka Ayukawa, with a half-crazed, half-desperate, wholly upset expression on her face, running the short distance towards me with outflung arms. She crashes into me with a force that quite literally unbalances me, and crushes me in her arms with a convulsive strength that squeezes the breath from my body. I reel backwards a moment from our impact, then, overcome with relief and joy, drop the umbrella and hug her back. I watch it tumble to the wet ground, upside-down, its point digging into the grass, its handle and panels sticking upwards like some shiny gray flower pointing up to the weeping sky.

Standing in the silvery rain, I am getting drenched, but pay it no mind. I cling to her, she clings to me, and our existence has narrowed down to each other. We have become the only stars left in a dying universe, the last survivors of an eternal field of battle, meeting amidst the heaps of bodies littering the endless plain beneath our feet.

I remove my face from her hair and put a hand under her chin, then gently turn her countenance towards the light.

"Madoka?"

She blinks, and I see the gleam in her ever-changing eyes. They are jade-green now, rain-wet. If she is crying, I cannot see it, for she has found the perfect camouflage. "Yes, Kyousuke. It's me."

"How are you?"

"I'm fine, now."

"Where is she?"

"She's gone." She pulls my hand away and once more rests her head on my chest. Her embrace tightens. "I don't ever want to go through that again," she murmurs. "I think I'd rather die."

I cannot tell why, but I do not believe that we will encounter the supernatural again. My ghostly paramour has finished her task, gone her way, and will never return. I am sure of it, and I tell her this.

"I hope you're right."

I kiss her hair. "I know I'm right. I would forgive her of what she did, if I knew you were okay." I find tears starting to sting my eyes, and I am glad for the rain.

"Honestly, I'm fine, Kyousuke." Her breath is warm against the skin of my upper arm. "Maybe she's at peace now."

I look over her head at the leaden, green-stained stone standing all alone in the grass, remembering what she—the other Madoka—said to me, and I am thankful I have a warm, caring, and loving family waiting for me back home, even if its members are—I have to admit—somewhat crazy, and that I have more of the same warmth and love enfolded here in my arms. I feel the beating of her heart through our layers of wet fabric, and, staring at the tombstone, suddenly realize how close I was to losing her. If I hadn't chosen to reject our visitor…

"Ayukawa, don't you ever leave me again." The words come of their own volition from my mouth, and they echo my inmost thoughts. Just the thought of losing her makes me want to forget that I'm a man and weep in terror, a frightened child suddenly lost in an unearthly place.

"I didn't have a choice. She was stronger. But even if I did, do you think I'd want to?"

I have no words to reply to that. Once more, she has bared her soul to me, and that event is as frequent as rain in the desert, and as sweet as sugar on my tongue.

"I'll never forgive her for seducing you," I hear her say.

"I will," I reply, and the way she stiffens tells me I've said the wrong thing again, and that I'm in a lot of trouble.

She, slick-haired and water-beaded, looks up at me, and the fear has gone from her eyes, to be replaced by a smoldering resentment. "Oh, really? And I suppose that's because you found sex with her to be fantastic."

It is my turn to get angry. I hate the way she thinks so shallowly of me sometimes. "Yes," I admit. "The sex was awesome." Her eyes narrow some more. "Dammit, Madoka, I thought she was you. How could I not think it was good? But when I realized it wasn't you at all, and that I had a stranger in my arms…" I shudder at the memory. "I felt I was making love to a garden slug."

She hides her face from my view by looking around at the tombstone. "Perhaps I will forgive her, in time," comes her voice. She is petulant but thinking. "Perhaps. I have no need to worry about a ghost being my competition. The living are bad enough." She lets go of me and walks to the marker. I follow.

She adjusts the keychain, a little splash of color against the grayness, so it won't fall. We stand there for a little while, silent and wet, ensconced in the everlasting privacy of our own thoughts. Then she faces me and says, "Kyousuke?"

"What?"

"If you ever call me a garden slug again, I'll murder you." I look at her, startled, but her eyes shine with a reassuring mirth, to tell me who she is: Madoka the joyful spirit, sitting in a swing underneath a tree, and I alone can see her, soaring and falling happily from heaven to earth and back again.

We stare at each other, and after a heartbeat we start to laugh. I look fondly at my queen and fellow traveler through this life; she returns the gaze and puts her hand in mine, and soon we find ourselves prancing madly on the sward like impalas after a spring shower, jumping, dancing, laughing like loons under the gray sky.

------oOo------

We stop and hold each other—blessed hardness of his body whose touch I've been sorely missing lately—and his mouth descends on mine for a long, sweet kiss. It is good to feel the prickle of grass against my toes, the wetness of my soggy clothing, and the coldness of the rainwater against my now-wrinkly skin. Maybe I will forgive her, someday. I am back, here standing in the downpour with my beloved. My beloved Kyousuke. And that's all that really matters to me.

THE END