Verse: 'Half-Canon'.
He remembered the day he'd first met her—a small dirt-streaked girl in tattered clothing with a swollen ankle lying sprawled on the forest floor, her eyelids shut.
Transient, had been his first observation. Even if he healed her ankle, she was not a creature made to last long.
Yet as he'd studied her, taking in the thick sooty lashes contrasting against the porcelain skin of her dirt-streaked face and the way her little hand had curled over a twig like a child, he'd healed her all the same.
And when she'd awoken, and he'd eventually gazed into iridescent violet pools that looked strikingly large on her small heart-shaped face, his second observation had begun to slowly take form.
Later, when he had gotten to know her more and more, and he'd watched quietly as she bustled around the dilapidated hut trying to play hostess for him—worrying about his suffering in the dismal conditions she lived in, bundling his windflower silk scarf gently around both of them, later passing his gifts to an old, suffering woman at her own expense—his second observation had become increasingly concrete.
He'd seen her sit up in her hut whilst cradling the cracked bento box he had given her to her chest, her ebony hair mussed, the side of her cheap robe dishevelled to reveal the tantalising creamy mound of her left breast, and a single tear had marked a crystalline trail down her flushed porcelain cheek. She'd resembled a shattered doll.
"I dropped it, and now it's b-b-broken…"
She would cry, and he would gently brush the lone tear away with a thumb, feeling its wetness against her satiny soft cheek.
She was so delicate, so emotional, and so exquisite.
He'd known then that he planned to have her, regardless of her origins, even if she upturned every one of the laws that governed his life.
She'd upturned him as well.
For all of her diffidence, her demureness, her class—refinement that was aberrant for a commoner—she felt so deeply, on such a vast spectrum. She would worry and fret for his suffering, for Akagi Kikyō's suffering, but barely enough for her own, not since she had left her infant sibling behind. She would cry because the first gift he'd ever given her had cracked apart, had cried when he'd held her in his arms in the hot springs, and cried when they had lost their child.
And when she cried, it felt more acute to him than a stab wound from a sword.
She loved as deeply too. She told him that she loved him so frequently, so freely in her soft, sweet voice, and without any expectations of it being verbally reciprocated.
He'd never needed to. He knew she knew.
She understood.
Yet she did not understand enough. His love for her was both a burden and a gift in her eyes—it was a source of guilt. He read her easily enough. She felt guilty for marrying into his prestige, for the immense wealth that came with it, and it was obvious from how she had never spent on luxuries or accessories outside of what he'd given her, from the reserved way she sat with other aristocrats, from the faint discomfiture in her doe eyes that told him she did not feel like she belonged.
She did not understand that she belonged; she was his wife—she belonged to him, and with him.
And what was his was to be respected as such by his peers and those below his station.
But she never understood it enough, and she would attempt incessantly to make up for it. She wanted to do the financial accounts; she wanted to perform the Celebration Dance; she wanted a concubine to bear his child.
He wanted none of those things.
All he'd simply wanted was her.
There was no one else in his bed that had ever remotely captured him the way she did him. He wanted to see her milky cheeks flush a rosy tint and her violet eyes glaze over from sexual pleasure; he wanted to disrobe her and caress the creamy, silken skin of her small, soft breasts with those lovely pink peaks that pebbled from her arousal, to kiss and gently apply suction to one of them until she was practically writhing and crying from the stimulation.
Her wanton cries in bed were a siren's—his aphrodisiac.
He wanted to stroke the flat of her soft belly, to touch her stunning petite curves, to thread his long fingers through the pretty curls down below, and to caress and taste the heat between her legs. Perhaps because of her predilection for desserts which had become a constant staple after her meals, she had grown to taste even sweeter than before.
He abhorred sweets.
Yet she was the only exception he could never get enough of.
And when she climaxed—when her breathless moans reached a feverish pitch and gave way into a high-pitched cry—her elfin face would always scrunch up in ecstasy, and her violet eyes would roll back slightly, cheeks apple-red.
It was a succulent view that he knew belonged only to him.
She was always so shy, so skittish, so anxious, that watching her delicate features melt into unbridled euphoria stirred his hunger like nothing else. And when he claimed her, when she clamped around him so tightly, so unapologetically, when she screamed and clawed at his back with her nails as he drove into her, his hunger only evolved into something deep-rooted, possessive and ravenous.
She was so demonstrative and tender with him as well, kissing every inch of him, touching her petal lips across his face, his lips, and his lashes and his chest.
There was little that was sweeter than she was.
But things changed. She was not a creature made to last long, as had been his initial observation, and it was a casual observation that transformed into a plague he'd icily warred against for the following years to come. As she grew increasingly ill over the years despite the meticulous care from the household at his command, she grew more beautiful, her skin milkier than ever and taking on an almost translucent, opaline hue, her violet eyes bigger on her thinner face, but it was a beauty he did not appreciate—and never would.
It signified her suffering.
Her stamina, never the best from the start, dwindled. She moved slower. She ate slower. She walked slower. She slept for longer periods of time that continued to grow longer everyday, until the mere act of staying awake exhausted her. Her love for sweets began to fade; her disinterest in all food grew.
The sense of loss of the woman he loved grew.
She tired in bed much faster, even though she would beg him to make love to her. He would make love to her slowly, so very gently, and quietly watch her beautiful thin, milky face scrunch up with pleasure as she attained release. While he could have lasted far longer, he put a swifter end to their lovemaking, observing that she was tiring and growing less and less responsive. She no longer screamed and clawed at his muscles, but instead lay there and gasped softly, her slight body too spent to react beyond that.
He would kiss every indention of her dainty curves, of the swells of her soft breasts that rose and fell weakly, inhale her lavender scent, and imprint every inch of her baby-soft skin into him.
Despite her illness, her sickness and her growing fragility, she remained as exquisite as the day he'd first met her, but as each subsequent day passed, she continued slipping away from him like water.
She had passed away on a morning at the start of spring—the same time she had first moved into the manor five years ago. He'd held her hand, and he had watched her for the last time, taking in the thick sooty lashes against the porcelain skin of her peaceful face and the way her little hand had curled over his like a child. This time, he could not heal her.
She had lain like that when she had first entered his life.
She had left him this way too.
And when she left, she took a piece of him with her that he would never get back.
:tbc: