I just realized, she sighs a lot in this chapter lmao XD
Summer is winding down, and Rinko decides to make the most of the sunlight and her time before fall rolls around and things pick up again. This time, she's smart enough to ask Akihiko for some sort of map before blindly wandering off into the wilderness.
"There's a small trail behind the house," he told her, tracing a path on the paper with one thin finger, "which I think you already found, on your little New Year's excursion. The main part of it leads up, but if you make a left, you might find something else. The path is a little rough, but it's there."
To that, Rinko rolled her eyes and said, "I grew up as a country girl, you know."
About an hour along the barely existent trail, she is starting to very much have second thoughts.
While the path slopes downhill instead of uphill, the footing is poor, and her backpack feels heavier than it should with every awkward step. It's hot, she's sweaty, and her hair that she probably needs to trim sometime soon is sticking to and chafing against the base of her neck uncomfortably. She's not looking forward to going back uphill, but she's come all this way already—at least, that's what she tells herself every five or ten minutes when she starts to wonder if she should cut her losses and go back.
But then she'll have to tell him she gave up if he asks, and that's enough to make her keep going.
About two hours after she set out, it becomes more than worth it.
It's a small pond, but the surface is like a piece of a perfect glass mirror, smooth and unblemished. There's not a cloud in the sky, and Rinko can see her reflection crystal clear, along with every sweaty lock of hair plastered to her forehead.
It feels almost like a crime to disturb the perfectly smooth surface, but she can't resist the urge to splash some water on her face, humming happily at the soothing feeling. Shaking her hair out of her face, she shrugs off her backpack and takes off her shoes and socks, content to just sit there, letting her feet rest in the shallow water.
Nine months. It's been nine months.
She absently wipes her hand on the grass next to her, remembering another time when it would've been sand. The air smelled of salt, and she wasn't so alone.
How long has it been since that time? Four, going on five years?
With a long sigh, she leans back to lie in the grass; it tickles the back of her neck and arms, and she can see through half lidded eyes dragonflies flitting by overhead, erratic and free. They remind her of an even earlier time, when she was far younger, growing up in her parents' house on the edge of the woods. Long hours she spent in there, sharpening sticks, collecting acorns, talking to the forest spirits she made up in her head, backstories and mystical powers and all.
Come to think of it, she was a weird kid. Maybe he saw through to that.
Now she's homesick, and nostalgic, but there's no going home; this is home now, these mountains that her heart never leaves these days.
She tips her head to the side with another sigh, only to stiffen in surprise when she sees a pair of deer so close by in the treeline, poking around. Rinko is as captivated by them as they are by whatever they're investigating, and she watches them in silence for several minutes. One of them is playing with some sticks in the underbrush, and she tries to reach slowly for her backpack for her phone inside.
Thump. Her clumsy self knocks the backpack over onto its side, and the deer spook, darting away. Berating herself inwardly, she sits up, heaving yet another sigh and squinting up into the bright afternoon sky. It seems like a waste to go back right now; the days still stretch long in late summer, and she went through all the trouble to get here.
After drying off her feet as best she can, she wriggles them haphazardly into her shoes, stuffs her socks into her backpack, and wanders off to find a good reading spot.
That's how she finds herself suddenly building a stick fort on the edge of the treeline, as if she was five and not twenty-five years old, but the deer from before gave her the idea. Before she knows it, she has a pretty good lean-to thing going on, and it's the perfect little space for her to do some quality reading.
An amused—and slightly proud, if she does say so herself—smile tugs at her lips as she surveys her creation, her very own little castle, of which she is the chatelaine. Using her mostly empty backpack as a seat, she sits down in the shade, the ever constant knot in her chest loosened by the crisp smells of the forest air, and glances at the pond; its surface sparkles in the sunlight.
She wants to know when he stopped being able to see, truly see, and appreciate the small things. She wants to know when he stopped caring and let the mundane things, the backdrop for everything extraordinary, fade into grayscale in his pursuit of grander dreams.
He has a tendency to see right through her, especially when she wants him to least, and perhaps that's why she herself couldn't see it clearly. But she does now. He was blinder than she ever thought he was if he couldn't recognize everything this world had to offer.
When did he lose that?
Who took it away from him?
o0o0o
The pond becomes a favorite haunt of hers in the next month or two. Shame that she found it with so little time left in the year to actually enjoy it before the weather will deteriorate once again.
It starts with the rains, turning the already hostile backwoods path almost unusable. By the time she can manage to safely make her way down again, she is dismayed to find that her little stick fort, fragile as it was, has been washed away.
Still, she can't help but smile when sees a few small birds picking around in the smaller remnants before they spot her and dart away in fright. At least someone was making good use of it.
As the first few weeks of fall begin, along with the academic year resuming, her free time diminishes rapidly along with the length of days. She can feel the cold beginning to creep up again. Fall has barely begun, but the mountains seem to be in no hurry to stall the arrival of winter. The warm season felt all too short, and she mourns its loss as she traces fingertips in the condensation misted on the kitchen window.
Soon October trudges in, and people are talking more and more about how it's been almost a year since the launch of SAO. They're starting to lose hope; it's palpable in the atmosphere. They lament the overall uselessness of the government, burn out their frustration and grief in slandering the game that has imprisoned so many of their loved ones.
Part of her agrees with them, hates the thing that she helped to make. Another part of her threatens to rise in rebellion, in defense of the world she and hundreds of others poured hours of tears and sweat into, the one that he loved so much (like he loved nothing and no one else) that he gave up on this one for it.
Each time, she bites her tongue and tries to drown it all out at work or while she's in town, fleeing home as soon as she can. Funny that the one place she feels safe from it all is here, with no one but him for company.
On one such day, she finds herself sitting at his bedside for no real reason; she simply didn't feel like working alone in her room tonight. To her surprise, numbed by drowsiness and an overall sense of resignation to the routine familiarity of this, she realizes it's three in the morning and sighs to herself, huddling further into her blanket cocoon.
She looks tired, she thinks to herself as she stares at her reflection in the window.
Also, it's snowing.
Rinko breathes, in and out, and closes her laptop, curling up tighter in her chair, watching the flakes fall, already beginning to blanket the world in white. Slowly, the world outside the window starts to transform before her tired eyes.
It makes her feel exhausted, but in a way that has nothing—well, maybe just a bit—to do with how little sleep she's been getting, so she closes her eyes.
Later, she wakes to a hand gently shaking her shoulder, and Akihiko's gentle admonishment of, "You know that's really not good for your back."
As if he's one to talk. Grumbling, still half asleep, she reluctantly unravels herself from the blanket she's swaddled herself in, wincing as her back protests. He huffs out a tiny chuckle.
"What am I going to do with you," he murmurs, brushing some loose strands of hair from her face.
While rubbing her eyes, she frowns at him. He's still wearing a short sleeved shirt, and she gives into the urge to sigh loudly.
"What am I going to do with you," she parrots at him, and promptly throws her blanket over his head.
After brushing her teeth, she checks back in to see that he's returned to Aincrad, her blanket layered haphazardly over his covers, and she bites back another sigh. In a few quick motions, she pulls the blanket to cover him a little more evenly, brushing her fingers along the stark ridge of his cheekbone.
She can't help but think that he always looks so peaceful when Diving, and she casts one more glance up at the swirling darkness outside.
Tomorrow, she'll venture back down the mountain on her way to work. The roads in town will be clear, and the sun will shine brightly past idle clouds.
Tonight, winter has arrived.
A bit of a timeskip, but I think it's probably still like September or October or something. I know the nice weather lasted like less than three out of ten chapters, and I don't actually know anything about mountain climates or when in the year it's supposed to start snowing, but uhhhhh I'm the author and it's snowing now XD As a friend told me, it's fun when I use the environment to make Rinko feel things :3