No matter how much older she gets, he always sees her as she was. In a way. The dirty baseball cap and shorts are gone, and for a while she let her hair grow. He complimented her on it, of course, but in the end it seemed to make her self-conscious and he was horrified one day to come home home and find three inches of it in clumps on the bathroom floor. She only looked at him and shrugged, but the red in her eyes told it all. She had wanted to be someone different.
And failed.
He did not acknowledge the tears that were for the most part long gone. He merely touched what was left of the hair he considered lovely simply because it was on her head, looked at her. It doesn't matter, he willed her to know. You are still you.
And he is still himself. She is the only female in whose presence he has ever felt awkward. On their second official date he tripped over his own ankles. The day he proposed he dropped the ring and spent a good five minutes on the floor, under tables, looking for it while she laughed, telling him he didn't need it, didn't need to even ask, and what the hell took him so long? When he stood up with the slightly dirty ring in his hand, he strode back to her, aware that his hand was shaking, and ended up frozen before her. She took the ring from his shaking hand and put it on her finger, then stood up on her chair, so they were eye to eye. No, actually she was standing over him and had her knees bent, somewhat. When she kissed him she tasted like iced tea, and until the day he dies he'll think of sugar and lemon every time he remembers tasting her lips.
Even now, he feels he must be careful with her. He doesn't think her delicate. He thinks himself too strong, and if he tries to hold onto her too tight she may very well break. But he thinks that about everything. Their garbage can is a graveyard of items he'd held onto too tightly. Glasses, dolls, his failed attempt to build a ship in a bottle. He is clumsy. This is the price he paid for the strength with which he would protect her, their home, their family.
The baby he would not hold until she was three days old, terrified he would drop her. But then her mother refused to be put off any longer and shoved her into her father's arms while he sat tensely in the living room chair reading a tattered copy of Dr. Spock. "You have to learn," she said coldly. "I won't do it alone." And he looked down at the sleepy infant, marveling at her smooth brown skin and the milky scent of her breath and fell in love again. Then he looked at her mother and knew, by the look in her eyes, that she was falling, too. They both fell so hard that they made three more babies in five years. That creature he does not think of as delicate had a pelvis made of whalebone. Or so her brother said, before she hurled a vase at his head from her hospital bed after child number four. And she did not miss. Even in her fury, Karin is beautiful.
This is it, he knows. Forty years of the kind of love that they can't recreate in Hollywood movies. The kind that is rooted in comfortable silence and the occasional knockdown, drag-out fight that results in makeup sex that can go on until sunrise. He recalls the last fight had something to do with their elder son and a drum set, but can't remember what side of the battle he was on. It didn't matter, really, because he always managed to find a compromise, and that time it was the drum set being in the garage. And Karin spent six months with cotton in her ears, her face a cross between rueful capitulation and radiant pride. That's ours out there, her smile told him. And she was beautiful.
She still is, even now, lying next to him, tiny laugh lines framing her mouth, and her hair streaked with a brilliant gray. When she nestles close to him, he pulls the blankets to her chin and sometimes she'll whisper his name. "Yastora." And she is eleven again, the first time he remembers seeing her. But back then he only thought she was cute, in a best-friend's-little-sister kind of way.
Now she is something entirely different. The years have passed and the children are gone, leading their own lives and letting their own reiatsu radiate in the world. The only evidence he'll leave behind of himself and the woman he married. And he knows for fact when he leaves this world, he will go with no regrets. He'll only miss the little girl who kicked him hard, and bide his time until he can see her again.
A/N: My blood sugar's through the roof after that one, but damn. Chad is the kindest, sweetest guy ever. I can't imagine the romantic angst with him for some reason and I don't think he gets the affection he so richly deserves. As for Karin, I know she's the type to let him know his worth.