Disclaimer: Ruroken isn't mine.
Anata
I watch him now and then. Just to be sure he's alright. I tell myself that I am his wife. That this is acceptable. But still in some small ways, it feels as though I am betraying my first love in this way, by lending comfort to his killer. At those times, I wish my first love were here to know him. To understand the gentle beauty hidden so deep within this hitokiri.
I've watched him for awhile now. Comforted him when I could. But he only feels me when he wants to. When he seems to pull past his guilt, his self hatred… his disgust… to become the person he must have been years ago.
He only feels my comfort when he sleeps.
I've wondered so much about his past. Who he was. Who he could have been. And I've been learning, little by little, the answers to my questions. I've been understanding him better with our close distance, magnified by the passage of time. I am understanding that what we had was not love. It was need. Understanding. Acceptance. It was trust. Once or twice, it became deeper. But at the time, it was nothing more than a last, desperate attempt to survive and to matter made by two battered and war-torn souls.
It wasn't love until I left. For me, it came when I finally understood him. When I saw him fighting, near death, struggling to win, not for his own sake, but for mine… after I had inadvertently completed the betrayal I had meant to stop.
For him… it seems that for him it came quietly the night he proposed. Came after the proposal, as we slept peacefully together. It dug its roots so deeply into his heart that betrayal no longer mattered. I can read that much in his eyes when he sits, quietly reading and rereading my journals.
I watch him sometimes, because he needs me to. Until he realizes that he needs to live. Until he realizes that just making an oath not to die by the sword will not save him. I watch to see when he will drop the armor from his heart, and save himself.
Because only then will his oath matter. Until then, he will not succeed. The sword has already killed him. He needs to let himself be reborn.
So I watch him, my anata. My forbidden love. Waiting for the day he will live again.
Author's Note: My response to my own challenge (write a Tomoe fic with her in character from her POV…) from Shenyu's "Rurouni Kenshin Dream" forum. I hope you like!
Thanks for reading. Please review!
Dewa mata!