It's been a while since their last truly heartfelt conversation. She just wishes they were discussing a different topic.
"What's going to happen to you when I die?"
Wan wasn't one for being blunt, but it's only been a week since Mula's funeral and he's been unnaturally pessimistic since they'd moved on from the valley.
Raava mulls the question over, trying not to allow her apprehension to leak through into his thoughts. "… I don't know," she eventually admits, coiling nervously around the core of his soul, hoping to get a read on his reaction.
She'd been hoping to avoid this conversation for as long as possible, but it seemed losing one friend had been quite enough for him.
"You don't know," he repeats slowly, sitting back against the tree he'd decided to rest under. Travel was far more taxing on foot, especially when the body was full of weary bones and creaking joints, but they'd made good progress today.
His tone of voice isn't angry or exasperated as it would have been in his youth, thinking she was dodging the question – they've been bonded long enough for him to know when she's stalling – he sounds more anguished than anything.
"We are the first fusion of human in spirit in the history of the world," she murmured, reciting the words she knew so well after repeating them for decades, "I told you before, there's no way to know what could happen. You're not immortal, I am; humans reincarnate, spirits are purified, recreated, and reappear in the Spirit World with little memory of what happened before we 'died'. For once, I am just as in the dark as you are on the subject."
He doesn't respond right away. She stares morosely through his eyes at the patchwork of stars above their head, glittering in the darkness of a new moon night.
Her vision is suddenly impeded by a wavering effect she unfortunately recognizes; his eyes are filling with tears. "I don't want to lose you," he rasps, unable or unwilling to force the tears away. They run down his wrinkled cheeks; she wishes, not for the first time, that she had hands that could wipe them away gently.
"I do not wish to lose you, either," she says, her voice uncharacteristically emotional.
In a perfect world, the two of them would be together, one eternally young, the other in a real, human body, and they would spend the rest of eternity with each other.
But in this world, they can do nothing but be there to talk to and comfort the other as their time together slowly runs out.
A/N: The angst in their relationship is overwhelming.
~Persephone