And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
By Gabi-hime
(pinkfluffynet@yahoo.com)
Spoilers: Chobits Volume 7, I believe. Any deep back story on Minoru, more or less.
Pairing: Minoru/Yuzuki is a a hard one to call.
Rating: PG – Unless you're offended by snow, or something.
Synopsis: Minoru and Yuzuki stop by the woods on a snowy evening somewhere around the beginning of the Chobits manga.
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In the hills of the Kantou Prefecture the snow always fell deeply, a soft purifying blanket – chill and smothering at the same time – but to him, very comforting. He had very fond memories of this selfsame wood filled with gentle laughter and not so gentle snowball fights that the depth of the snow could do nothing to quiet. Now, in the silence, he could not help but catch the soft outlines of childish phantoms sporting about in the snow. The snow was falling so thickly that it was not difficult to see whatever phantasms in the flurry that one chose to see, especially when they eased a troubled heart.
He would always remember her that way, hip deep in snow, her joyful cries caught by the high wind and carried away, perhaps to heaven, and perhaps that had been the cause of her death. Not an auto-immune failure. Not at all. The angels in their heaven had been jealous of the joy and laughter that the two of them had shared and thus sent a chill and killed her. What other explanation was there? Nothing but a heaven sent chill could do anything against them in this soft mother-warm snow. They'd known this snow. It was their own and it loved them and cared for them. It had not known to protect her from a heaven sent chill, since they were commonly so comfortable in their fleece coats. Absently he wondered if the wood, the snow, the hills had forgiven themselves for her death. He'd come here scant few days after her funeral and and knew that the land had grieved for her, this land that they'd both loved.
Now the land seemed so welcoming, the depth of the snow quiet and mindful of his passing absence. He made his home in Tokyo now, on the grounds of the familial estate which he shared with ghostlings of his past and very pretty dolls. The hills did not seem to mind his lack of visitation. They knew very well the yearly right that led him to this hill to reflect in silence of Christmases long past and solstices long ago. He made a pilgrimage every year to pay homage to the wind sylph that had been his sister here in the hills where they'd kept their ice palaces and spun their dreamy air castles. Every year the land called to him and he answered back and every year it became more difficult for him to distinguish his voice from the low beckoning of the hills.
If he had had his way she'd have been interred here, in their sacred fairy ring but he had been but a child when she had been struck down and had had no say in her sacraments so she was buried far from here in a clean little plot where he knew another kept a monthly vigil, torn between two graves of equal importance to her. It was not his place to mourn in an area where so many people could watch him so he paid no more than token presence at the cemetery and then went yearly into the hills to remember, half-shroud in deep, solemn snow.
Many times a year he yearned for this place, for the comfort of the full, wide snow, to rest where they had so often rested, sharing baked apples stored in pockets to keep hands warm, toasting the long life of her own child, the soft heaven-sent angel in white that he could hold in one hand, even as a child. When they had buried her in town he'd taken Blanche out into the snowfields and given her a proper burial where she belonged and he knew that in his doing he'd laid her to rest here as well. Her body may have laid some place else, but it was here in the grove of their dreamspinning that her soul lingered with a mother's comfort and balm, to one such as he.
The twilight had settled as gentle companion to the silence and the snow, and in that ephemeral lavender he sank to his knees without a murmur and closed his eyes, breathing in the memory of this place. In this long, pregnant moment he debated staying in the soft comfort of the snow, staying with his sister, staying with Blanche, staying here, his soul-home. She could find her way back. She who was not her, but was her at the same time. The snow wouldn't bother her, just as it hadn't bothered his own original snow fairy. If he turned her lose then she'd find her way home, like an untethered horse will go to its stable.
In contemplating her and . . . the other her, he wept without meaning to, soundlessly without taking comfort in it. He wept not for her, but for himself, left behind and ragged with waiting, ragged with mourning, ragged with living in memory. If there had been no other sound in the glade, he would have likely stayed as he was, numbed and curled into himself, cocooned in the snow.
But the silence would not keep.
"Minoru-sama?"
Yuzuki was so soft, like the snow. When he looked at her like this, he could forget that she was the sturdy pony who would find her way back to stable, riderless or no. When he looked at her like this, with a crown of snow unmelting in her hair, with depth of eyes he could fall into and wander aimlessly for days, when he looked at her with eyes half glazed, rose colored glasses or even perhaps snow colored glasses. When he looked at her it was easy to forget that she was not . . .
"Kaede."
"Minoru-sama," she repeated softly as she rested a hand in his hair, benevolent and yielding. She would have gently tugged, not softly caressed.
"Yuzuki."
It was a correction he often had to make, to correct the timepiece of his mind's eye. Those days were come and gone and he could not live on the ethereal trailers of her essence as his only sustenance.
"Minoru-sama, it's time."
He nodded quietly to himself and rose to his feet, putting hands into pockets where they would find no baked apples to warm them. He stared long and blankly at the darkened wood, a hollow man with hollow eyes and then she did something that he could not rightly recall offering to her as sister data because it was such a sacred ritual between them.
From somewhere on her own person she offered him a slightly charred baked apple.
He accepted it silently and held it reverently as if it were a spirit focus.
"You have promises to keep," her voice was always so delicate, but there was the barest nuance of steel in her tone.
"But I have promises to keep," he murmured after her, absently, turning his treasure gently over in his hands.
She did not finish the quotation but simply turned and walked away, ostensibly back to the stable. With one touch of her and yet not her in this blackened baked apple, he could do nothing but follow her.