The sound of water falling down from the roof on to the ground in front of me, the feel of burning smoke in my lungs, and taste of tobacco in my mouth, it all brings back memories, memories of a time I looked out at a rainstorm and wondered why it was so heavy.

I heard a story once, that rain is when the Heavens cry for mortals doomed to die and be reborn.

Not sure I believe that story, but then, I'm not really sure I'm the best to ask about the heavens. A bushi, a warrior, a coward and a fraud, that's me, not really someone to talk about Fortunes and spirits.

The days like this, when the rain comes crashing down in sheets of silver-white, drowning anything not smart enough to get under cover? They're the days when I miss her the most.

No, that's not right, it's not that I miss her, the hell of it is that she's maybe half a building away.

I miss what we had. Which is more selfish, but also more accurate.

The start of all this came from me, I was foolish enough to believe that I could say something with my writing. I wasn't making pillow books or anything, but trying to make actual works of literature...plays, anthologies, that sort of thing.

I never really showed them to anyone but they got out all the same. People said they were good, said that they were worth doing, so I did more of them.

There was a sort of comfortable mediocrity there, my writing occasionally brushed something good, but most of the time it was just alright. The talent of the family was my elder brother, so it made perfect sense for him to go to winter court to represent our family.

Then he came down with the fever, the healers didn't think it was serious but it was enough that he'd be snowed in and unable to go to court. So...they sent the next best thing, me. I was to represent us and show off my writing, maybe convince some fancy upper class Samurai that we were worth giving patronage too.

I was never supposed to go to court. Sure, I listened when sensei beat in the rules of the game and everything, but I knew that most of my life would be spent being a simple bushi. It wasn't that I didn't want more, it was that I knew my limits.

Naturally, I was terrified of going to Court, but duty is duty, and so I went.

Disaster is too strong a term for my entrance, but my comfortable mediocrity betrayed me. I couldn't keep up, couldn't move with the court's changing tastes quickly enough. By the time they announced me I was old news. Competing in the challenges didn't help, I did alright but not enough to overshadow the darlings of the court, it was during the Challenge of Words that I was supposed to make my move.

I was nervous, and so to write, I penned a few stories, and left them around anonymously, to see what people thought.

Some thought it was alright, most thought it was purely pedestrian tripe, laid out to lower expectations. Which is a tactic I kind of wished i had thought of at the time.

That cinched it, I was going to doom our family, I wanted to run, to break my fingers, to not write.
But, that's not what happened. Instead I met Her, I never really knew her name, she just told me to call her Monogotari-san, or Story-san. That was all we both needed. She looked over my scribbled writing as I tried to come up with something anything that would make things right.

She spoke to me, gentled me, pulled out ability I didn't know I had, made my writing better...I didn't realize how much it hurt to have that done. It wasn't that she didn't care, she did, it was that she had no mercy to making a work perfect. Every line, every stroke of the calligraphy pen had to be just so.

But she gave me hope, made me feel like I had a shot of actually being considered good at my art. I never could figure out what she saw in me, but she said that I was too innocent to not like.
Whenever I pushed, she just hushed me with a finger.

It was a day before the Game of Letters was to begin, that we made love for the first and last time. I was so nervous, so pent up, that I blurted out my feelings in a river of words. I was happy to see her, I was unsure what else I could do, I was grateful that she was with me. I needed her.

To this day, I wonder if the last words I said were what set us to break apart.

'I love you.'

Three words, words of power and subtlety that break the greatest of daimyo and save the weakest of peasants. They did both for me.

I spoke them to her, and meant them. She hushed me again, this time with her lips. We spent the day together, and as she curled into my side during the cold night I wrote. Wrote possibly the greatest work I could ever make, and undoubtedly my downfall.

Sleep kept me from realizing I put that piece for the judging instead of the one I had intended to, the one that Monogotari-san had worked so hard with me, to make. Instead I handed in the one I wrote while still intoxicated by the sensation of being loved and loving back.

I was found to be the best writer, and my work was distributed throughout the court. A patron approached me, an older man. He was semi-retired, letting his son handle much of the duties, but he wanted to give back, and he had never been much of an artist himself.

I agreed to the sponsorship and ran to my Monogotari-san, my beloved.

A proper story would say that I came upon nothing, that she had only been a dream I conjured from stress, a muse. Or perhaps that she had died, giving me inspiration for my work...but that wasn't what happened. She knew what had happened and was happy for me.

Yet as her perfectly crimson lips spoke the words. "Now that you've grown...you can soar," -
foreboding filled my stomach.

We still courted as couples do, but things changed slightly, as I continued to write frantically for my patron and for her.

Yet, the old smile, the old soft sound of delight, that was gone. In its place were disappointed eyes, and frowns. Finally, Monogotari-san asked why I wasn't giving it my all, my best as I should.

I said I was and she slapped me, saying that I had done better, that if I was truly dedicated to the art, truly dedicated to her, I would make another masterpiece.

I wish that the slap had knocked something loose, had made me a brilliant writer yet again. But that wasn't the case. Instead, I did worse, as I tried to force the words onto the page, to force them into something that was good.

With each failure, light dimmed from Monogotari's eyes, with each failure, my own spirit ebbed.
No matter how she kept pulling, prodding, urging me to greater heights, I couldn't do it. Worse in her eyes I began to resist, I loved her, but nothing was good enough for her. Resentment that I didn't realize built in my heart.

Finally, as the Winter Court closed, I erupted in a storm of anger at her. At how all she did was break and break, how she didn't want me, she just wanted a puppet who would do what she wanted. How I was nothing more than a distraction and she should just move on.

"As you wish," were the last words she said to me.

The sound in her voice, like a precious crystal slowly crumbling, will haunt me for the rest of my days.

As soon as she left, I regretted it, I chased after her...but she was gone.

So I packed up my things and went to my patron telling him I would join him in two months.
Then, I went home and explained I had found a patron, and asked for my family's blessing. They gave it, of course.

With that, I left my place of birth, and tried to make a go of it being the pet playwright for my patron. Some of my works were okay, some were good...but none had that brilliance of before.
My patron asked why I couldn't...and I could only answer that I killed the love between Monogotari and myself.

I looked for her to try to explain that it wasn't her really it was me. She wanted me to be great, but I wasn't like a temple that could build and build until it was the most magnificent thing in the world. I was a brief candle, and she hadn't understood that...but I never explained either. Letting my feelings build up until I hurt her as much as she hurt me in a petty, unrewarding vengeance.

Yet when I found her, all those words just floated away. She was another artist given patronage, and she looked at me, with those eyes of...not hate. Hate would mean that she acknowledged my existence that I was worth hating. No those eyes were well empty, no hate, no love, not even mild acceptance that I was there. Just empty eyes, that blinked at me as I tried to speak.

She had only wanted to help, only wanted to reach out one last time to make things better...but I had thrown it away. She still makes stories, but I've never read them, I can't bring myself to.

So as the rain comes down, and I put tobacco into my pipe and inhale, I miss her, miss what we had. Wishing I had another chance to explain.

To be with her under the sheets of rain again and feel like I was a great man, even if I was only ever a mediocre man.

Maybe in the next life, we'll make it work.