Asuna lay awake, completely unable to sleep. She had easily enough mentioned that they would rest in front of the fire after they had eaten, but when she had finished cleaning their dinner mess, Kirito had already brought out the sole surviving down mattress in the house and placed it in front of the now-roaring fire and piled it high with thick fur pelts to stave away the winter cold.
She'd slipped under the covers without second thought, grateful that she had far more separation between her and the icy ground than the rough pine boughs they'd had to use for the past few days. The warmth of the fire and the plushness of the pelts were all that she could think of for a moment until Kirito had cleared his throat.
"You had mentioned feeling safe when I was close by," he'd said quietly, staring at the floorboards from where he stood.
She'd blinked up at him. "Indeed. What about it?"
"...me?" he'd mumbled.
"What did you say?"
"How close would you like me?"
The reality of the situation fell on her like a ton of bricks. Heat began to rise from the base of her stomach to her face, but she took a steadying breath.
"I have come to feel most safe with you at my back," she replied.
She had said that, but the quiet measured breath coming from behind her was enough to make her nearly frantic. She wanted to turn around to face him nearly as much as she wanted to jump up and run for the Goddess' Throat.
He hadn't moved a fraction of an inch since she had felt his weight settle down on the opposite side of the mattress. He hadn't said a word either.
Asuna screwed her eyes shut and began to mentally recite a prayer for patience and peace to the Goddess when a faint sound made her open her eyes. For a moment, the only sounds were the snapping and cracking of the fire and Kirito's breathing, but then she heard it again; a faint ringing, an almost crystalline pinging. She slowly sat up and looked around, her eyes scanning over the darkened interior of the house, but saw nothing.
"Kirito, do you hear that?" she whispered. No response came. "Kiri-" She looked over and her voice died in her throat.
Kirito lay there on his back, his eyes closed, his breath coming in gentle puffs. His face was relaxed, his brow unfurrowed. He looked almost completely at ease, as if enjoying a perfectly natural sleep. What shocked Asuna to her core more than seeing him apparently asleep, however, were the small motes of light that seemed to be rising from him. As she watched, she saw a small patch of skin near the corner of his eye crack like porcelain, then begin to rise and float away from him on an unseen current, taking on a golden glow as it began to drift away, leaving a fractured patch of pure black in its place.
Panicked, Asuna reached out towards the light, grabbing it in desperation, and everything went black.
When she could see again, everything around her was completely different. The first thing that hit her was the warm, humid air. The change was so abrupt that it scrambled her senses as she tried to evaluate just what was going on. She tried to blink and focus her vision, but what was before her was nothing but a blurry golden light. Darker shapes moved within the light, but they were hard to see. Suddenly her surroundings shifted into focus, and if she was confused before, she was even more so when she saw the scene before her.
She stood in the shadow of a dense copse of the blade leafed trees that she recognized as native to the south of Aincrad. A brief pang of homesickness stung at her heart. Her legs carried her unbidden between the trunks of the trees. The late afternoon sun bathed everything in a shimmering wash of warm light.
Where am I? she thought. I was just with Kirito and-
"Come along, Asuna, do not dally," a patronly male voice called. Asuna's throat began to close up as memory and emotion began to swallow her. Her vision panned to the side and she tried to grapple with what was before her.
A shining column of knights in the gilded armor of the Aincrad Royal Guard proudly paraded past her position beneath the shadow of the trees. At the center, she could see her father, the late king, sitting proudly astride his horse as he looked back over his shoulder. Perhaps the only thing more confusing than seeing her dead father was following his eyes to what he was looking at. She saw a younger version of herself struggling to settle her mare as it reared up, whinnying loudly. "C-coming, Father!" she heard herself call out.
I remember this… Asuna thought. I had just gotten that horse a few days prior to this. It was still skittish around me, but Father insisted on proceeding as fast as possible to the next diplomatic meeting. But who-
Her train of thought was interrupted as she heard the mare give a shrill scream and rear higher than it had ever before, throwing her younger counterpart into empty air. Suddenly, a slow chill rolled up her spine as she heard a voice come from where she was standing.
"Move with the swiftness of dusk: Twilight Step."
Kirito?
Her vision changed, turning grayscale and murky, then warped forward at blinding speed towards the column of knights. Not one turned toward her advance as time seemed to slow and blur as she weaved her way through the elite royal guard like they were statues in a hedge maze. In the span of a few heartbeats, she was standing behind her younger self, watching as she fell back , her head hurtling toward the hard packed earth beneath their feet. She felt herself tuck into a slide and the thud of impact as her younger body slammed into her outstretched arms, turning her younger self's dangerous headfirst hurtle into a mere teeth chattering tumble. A part of her that was observing recalled feeling the odd warmth she'd felt upon taking the very fall she was witnessing, while another part felt relieved at how almost insignificant the weight of her body felt in the arms of her shared body. Before she had more than a few heartbeats to process what had happened, her vision streaked forward again as the body she was watching these events through exited the scene just as quickly as it had arrived, fading back into the shadows of the trees.
"Your Highness!" the guards surrounding her younger self cried out, pulling their steeds to a sharp stop as they quickly dismounted and rushed to her aid. She could hear herself sniffling and telling everyone that she was okay, that she hadn't been harmed in the fall. From afar, her entire world was shifting beneath her feet.
Abruptly, she snapped back to the interior of the cabin in the frigid north, her breath coming in ragged gasps as she braced herself over Kirito's still form. As her heart raced alongside her mind, another mote of light flaked off of Kirito and began to drift away in front of her very eyes. Not knowing what else to do, she reached out and grabbed the mote of light again.
Once the darkness had faded away again, she found herself atop what appeared to be a textured slate roof several hundred feet in the air. The night sky was stretched above her, a spangled tapestry of shimmering stars that twinkled delicately alongside the brilliant full moon. Her vision tilted down and she immediately recognized the royal castle in Aincrad's capital of Selmburg. Her eyes traced the familiar outline of its spires with longing. By the Goddess, how she craved to be home.
Suddenly, her shared sense of smell picked up on an acrid odor that wafted along the evening breeze and she felt a growl rise in her throat. Her nose picked out the slippery metallic scent of blood and her stomach began to turn in fear. She watched as Kirito dashed along the narrow ledges and balconies of the castle with surefooted speed and panther-like grace until he closed in on the tower she recognized as the one that she had occupied while she was still the princess.
With a superhuman leap, Kirito pounced up into the air at least thirty feet high and landed on the balcony ledge with no more sound than a slight flutter of wind. The smell of blood was stronger now; much stronger. Asuna felt his eyes sweep over the exterior sitting room that had lain just beyond her bedroom in the tower. There, she saw the guards that had been always posted by her doorside cut down like lambs for the slaughter, their bodies lying beneath three twisted figures who loomed over them with crooked daggers painted with their scarlet blood. They turned their hooded heads slowly to look at the balcony.
Wordlessly, Kirito summoned his blade and leapt at the three assassins. They immediately fanned out, two of them flowing through the air like water to flank him. The third rushed to meet his advance; dagger held low to sweep up into a killing strike. Asuna wanted to cry out, to do anything, but she was merely forced to watch as Kirito fought alone.
Reaching out with his free hand, Kirito grabbed the wrist of the assassin charging him and simply crushed it in his fist like a bundle of twigs. Rather than crying out in pain like a human might, the figure merely let out a bone-dry rasp. It reminded Asuna of a knife being sharpened on a stone and set her hackles rising. Without so much as a grunt in exertion, Kirito tightened his grip on the assassin's arm and swung him like a sack of potatoes into the path of the knife of the assassin to his left. Their bodies collided with a muffled whump! and both toppled to the floor in a tangled mess of limbs. Without looking, he swung his blade in a sharp arc behind his own head, intercepting the knife aimed towards the nape of his neck. The third assassin rasped in surprise and hate, but before it could put any distance between the two of them, Kirito had already whirled around to face him, and Asuna could feel the tingle of power coming up from deep inside him as he began to channel.
"Martial Stance: Shadow's Touch," he murmured, then launched his free hand forward into his opponent's chest.
His movement was so fast, all Asuna could make out was a brief blur of motion that reminded her of a jouster's lance; then the next sensation she felt was of a hot wetness coating her fingers as something dark shrouded her vision. She felt Kirito shake his head violently and found that she could see again. Her skin crawled as she saw the assassin impaled by Kirito's arm all the way up to the elbow once her vision had cleared.
"Leech," Kirito commanded. What followed that word was the single most revolting sensation that Asuna had ever experienced in her life. It was as if she could feel every ounce of life from the enemy before her being soaked up through Kirito's extended arm like water scattered onto dry desert sand. She watched in horror as the seemingly alien looking assailant seemed to wither and contort even further until all that was left was a wizened husk that simply turned into ash before her very eyes.
Kirito heaved a satisfied breath, then turned on his heel and contemptuously flung his blade with an impossible amount of strength at the remaining two enemies just as they were managing to extricate themselves from one another. The blade slammed home into the back of the topmost assassin and pierced through his chest into his ally beneath them, pinning hem both to the stone floor as the hilt slid home all the way into the first's spine. More of that weak rasping rose up from the pierced pair as black colored blood began to pour out from them and onto the flagstones of the floor.
"Enough," Kirito rumbled. He raised his free hand again, then reached up into the air, as if grasping something unseen. A phantom skeletal hand arose from the floor, mirroring his movements, completely unhampered by the surroundings and clasped onto the assassins in an iron grip. In one fluid motion, it crushed them like bugs, spraying the corner they were stuck in with their dark blood before the hand sank back through the floor, dragging their remains with them, leaving nothing but the bodies of the fallen guards and obsidian pools of unnatural blood.
Asuna felt an almost imperceptible extension of will from Kirito towards his sword and it simply vanished in that flash of arcane light she had grown accustomed to seeing. She continued to watch as he quietly strode over to the door to her chambers and- without an ounce of care for the locked door in his path- simply strode through the thick reinforced oak planks as if they were nothing more than a curtain.
On the other side, she saw herself, sleeping peacefully in the gilded four poster bed that lay in the center of her apartments. She felt his eyes intensely sweep the room, searching every patch of shadow and observing every iota of movement for a threat, listening intently to the sound of her breathing and the rustle of fabric as she stirred in her sleep before concluding that the threat was past and she was indeed okay. His eyes settled on her for a long moment, as if memorizing her peaceful face before he casually reached out and tipped over a vase full of flowers that had been standing by the doorway. The glass vase hit the stone floor and shattered loudly; waking her from her slumber, but before it had even made contact, Kirito had already joined himself to the shadows and was retreating away.
As her shared vision darkened and the memory began to slip away, Asuna remembered what had followed when she had awoken- the discovery of the guards and the blood. The ceremony honoring them as they had given their lives in service to the crown. The subsequent weeks of restlessness knowing death had visited so close to her door.
Her vision returned and she found herself with either hand beside Kirito's head, her arms propping herself just a short distance above his face. He still lay dormant beneath the furs atop the mattress.
"Why…" she whispered, her throat thick with emotion. "Why are you doing this? Why have you done this? For someone who didn't even know you existed…?" Her eyes stung. Hot tears began to well up and spill down her cheeks before falling down and landing on his black robes. "Why are you destroying yourself to help me…?" Her hands balled into fists; the thick and soft furs unable to stop the sharp tips of her nails from digging into her palms as she screwed her eyes shut.
She heard that sound again, an almost inaudible crystalline chiming; a ringing so faint she almost thought she imagined it. She opened her eyes as another mote of golden light rose from Kirito and landed right in the center of her forehead, sending her vision careening into blackness again.
What differed this time, however, was a lack of permanence. As the previous memories had seemed to be more powerful in a sense, what Asuna was witnessing now was almost a mirage of several different memories that seemed to bleed into and overlap one another.
She watched as she saw Kirito lazing about the rafters of Selmburg's towering throne room, watching an argument play out between her and her father. The words were warped and warbled, but she could see him point a stiff finger to the corridor behind him to the royal apartments and she watched herself storm out of the room. She couldn't recall what the spat had even been about, but she remembered being positively beside herself with emotion and locking herself in her rooms for the next few days, refusing her servants and any summons that her father sent her. She continued to look on as Kirito swung down from the rafters and ghosted through the castle, silent as a wraith.
The memory turned murky for a brief moment, but when it cleared, she saw the doorway leading to her chambers from Kirito's perspective. Her shared vision tilted downwards, and she saw in his hand a slice of her favorite cake from the castle's chef. The plate was set at the threshold, followed by a quick knock, and then he vanished into shadow again. Asuna recalled finding the cake, assuming it had been from her favorite maid, whom she had vented her frustrations to.
Another memory swam before her eyes. She saw herself reading a book beneath a tree in the royal garden, the sunshine streaming idly down on a seemingly lazy summer's day. She appeared to be looking down on herself from the branches of the tree she was resting against. Time passed in a rush, and she watched herself begin to nod off and fall asleep in the shade of the tree. The sun continued its journey across the sky, shifting the shadow she was resting in.
She heard a soft snort. "So carefree sometimes, honestly," Kirito whispered to himself. She felt the smallest shift of will come from deep within him and she watched as the shadow of the tree snapped back to where it had been hours before, protecting her from the bright light of the afternoon sun. She heard him give a satisfied hum and seem to settle in the branches of the tree, content to continue providing her with more shade.
More and more memories flashed before her eyes, similar in theme. Eventually the memories faded and she found her vision to be her own again, though blurry from tears that had streamed down her face. Blearily, she realized she was curled up against Kirito's chest; the slow thrumming of his heart providing a small comfort that helped to quell the crashing waves of chaos within her.
She looked up at him, her heart rioting. Whatever seemed to be affecting him and causing his skin to flake away and turn into those golden motes of light seemed to have stopped for the time being and his rest seemed to be undisturbed. Another hot tear ran from her eye, unbidden.
"Please Kirito….hold on just a little longer."