Archive of Our Own

The road to the village was, for most of the year, kind. 

Packed firm with sunbaked dust that smelled of grain and frothy horsehide in summer, softened come autumn to a slick mire where rainwater collected like coins in the wheel ruts. It bustled, buxom women bending with baskets of market vegetables on one hip, bright-eyed, muddy-cheeked children on the other; men at the forges bellowed louder than the bellows themselves, hammers ringing and steam sizzling from water troughs. 

You were, at one time, one of them. You once spun through the market with a wicker basket on your arm, fetching fresh spices and an indulgent bushel of carrots for the fine mare you kept at home. You always lingered at the pens, appraising the sow with piglets suckling at her teat, and always found yourself tempted by the clucking hens. One more for the coop wouldn’t hurt—but your hand stayed, meager pennies pinched by the imagined disapproving tsk of your husband out to field, already tending to your own modest crop. 

No more animals, he would scold you. Or you’ll drive me to an early grave come Winter.

But come home you would with groceries in tow, and a fresh clutch of bargained-for chicks stashed snug in your skirts; a spritely smile all it would take to curb the curmudgeonly faux frustration on your husband's face. Neighbors clucked their tongues, as neighbors are known to do, calling you a witch of mischief when the hen had a name by week’s end, and the roosters—the ones that misbehaved, anyhow—found themselves on Sunday plates; a fine roast for a man who liked to cook his own meals. Lucky you were, too, to have found a man who liked to cook.

It would not be a stretch to measure the entirety of your life in these strokes of luck; all beginning and all ending with Nanami Kento.

They said Nanami Kento had been serious from the day he was born, as rigid as the fence posts he built and staked. Somehow, it was you who smuggled laughter out of him, you who, allegedly, it could not be confirmed, coaxed out his smile. They gossiped fondly that you were some manner of sorceress with a good man as your thrall, that he was softened by marriage, and that he let you get away with too much. 

That, the town liked to say, was your magic. You would call it luck. And it was all truer when the door was shut, the curtains were drawn, and the light was low.

A farmhouse kitchen made for a fine ballroom for two, where Nanami Kento’s hand would clasp your own while the other nipped at your waist, whisking you from the table in a flurry of skirts and flour dust. He was no great dancer—he’d be the first to tell you that—but he’d grin and bear the sore stepped-on toes as he regaled you with the memory of the first time you’d danced…his feet no less trodden upon, but your laughter much freer now than it had been then.

It was a reliable routine, the humble, blessed life you lived. The shopping, the cooking, the dancing, and a warm bed to lose yourselves in at each day's end. You could not boast much material—you wore no jewelry beyond the simple band on your finger, your dresses had holes in the hems and dust in the seams—but the richness of love was one that you had in excess. 

But it was the disappearance of your prized goat that shifted the course of your routine, and had your husband up in arms after supper when it should’ve been you in his arms instead; lantern already lit and your reliable steed saddled before you could protest. You worried and you fretted—those woods were a gnarly tangle after dark, treacherous even to seasoned woodsmen by daylight—but Nanami only smiled, pressed a rough-gloved thumb to your cheek, and kissed your forehead. 

Keep the bed warm for me, he’d said. I won’t be an hour, he promised.

You had laughed—the bed was always cold without him in it—and the truth was you could hardly sleep until you felt the mattress dip beneath his weight and his arm rope tight around your ribs. His shoes, as always, would be left by the door and angled toward the road. 

Because your husband was, for all the things, predictable. And of all the things he was not: a liar. So you settled yourself in bed in your warmest night-clothes, and hoped the tea you brewed would ease you to slumber just enough until his return.

The roads were kinder, back in those days. So few was your population that everyone knew everyone by name, and—for better or for worse—knew their business as intimately as if they in fact shared a bed.

The hunter found him at pre-dawn; a broken neck, the demise of your horse and husband both. A rotten, wretched root grasping for stray limbs had found a hoof, leaving the wayward pair broken at the bottom of a peaty gully. 

The news got around before the sun. You were a widow made before noon. 

A wardrobe of pale winter-wool and knitted hats was swapped for black and a mourning veil, and in black you stayed as neighbor after neighbor paraded their condolences in pies you wouldn’t eat. 

The streets, to you, did not seem so friendly as they once did now paved in pity. You ventured out less with fewer mouths to feed, and shied from the sympathetic charities of the village folk like a skittish filly. 

You never did remarry. It would always be too soon after the loss of him. You would die before ever entertaining the thought.

So you learned the work of grain and flock with hands that hardened where once they had been soft. You tended the fields yourself, took the husbandry of your animals upon your own shoulders—short one horse and one goat—and made do. 

Loneliness moved into the bed he had left, and stayed. That new bedfellow cradled you year round… or, almost year round, anyway.

It was expected for a widow to grieve the anniversary of her husband's passing… though none of the village folk could quite pinpoint when the peculiarity of your celebration began instead. Perhaps, they concluded, it was around the time the rest of them began to bar their doors and board their windows.

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The market’s quieter than it ought to be for a fair-weather afternoon such as this one. The pale beam of autumnal sun drapes the stall awnings in frosty gold, and those it bothers to touch at all, it does not touch kindly. Where there is typically chatter—gossip traded with herbs and butters—there is only the shrill clang of hammer to anvil, and the hasty rasp of saw teeth through cedar planks. 

Nails and timber change hands swifter than bread or apples come Fall. Men bear timber across their shoulders like pallbearers, iron nails clamped between their teeth, and their wives trade salt by the pound. 

There’s an outraged ruckus—there usually is—when the blacksmith informs his clamoring crowd that he, too, must hurry home for this early evening, before they’ve all received their hardware.

One might think the poor man sells diamonds, not common iron.

Every threshold will gleam white by dusk. Every window will bear its wooden cross. Every door will close and be bolted tight, sealing the living in and anything else out.

It’s a cursed night, they all say. But you call it superstition. 

You alone move against the tide, like you always do. The same basket looped over your arm, a bright smile offered to any who hazard a look upon you as you pass.

Your high spirits are a rare sight, shining only for the neighborly folk on this one peculiar night each year—and far be it from them to tell you how you must grieve. Grief, like love, has its own rituals. Yours just happens to be one the village does not understand, and far be it from you to make them.

There is no salt in your basket. No timber. No hammer.

The grocer’s boy blinks at your parchment list as though reading it wrong. Sugar, you tell him, and a bottle of warm brandy, if there’s any left from last month’s shipment. A whole goose, too, if it hasn’t been promised. He gawks but fetches it, as he always does, muttering that your lunacy would see you in dire straits someday. 

They’ve grown used to your eccentricities, in their way. The widow who buys sweetmeats and spirits when everyone else is hoarding nails and screws, who hums to herself while the village boards its windows. There’s always one basket in the market that smells of spice instead of sawdust.

It pleases you, this small rebellion—the yearly reveling in a secret only you know. You pay the boy with a month’s worth of coins, your purse lighter, your heart lighter still. By the time the last door slams shut, you’re already halfway home; skirts caught in your fists, sprinting down the lane, all flyaway hairs and brilliant smiles.

You have much to do, and so little time.

You nearly trip over the threshold when you burst through the door, skirts tangled in your haste. “Oh, hush—hush!” you scold the hinges as they squeal, smiling so wide your cheeks ache. You set down your basket with a clatter and are moving before it settles: apples, chestnuts, herbs—you’ve kept them hanging to dry above the hearth all year for this. The goose must be plucked, the bread kneaded, the brandy shined and gleaming. The house must be ready.

You whirl through the rooms like a girl again, flour dusting your wrists; that naive, forbidden joy of youth stirring in your belly, red strings tied from your heart to your navel. You take your broom to hand and pull it into a reckless waltz. You spin, skirt hems catching on chair legs, heels drumming against the floorboards while the room tips and rights itself around your lively promenade. You sway and twirl and dip to the music only you can hear from deep within memory, hair unpinning, cheeks flushed and breath coming in fast little bursts. For a dizzy moment, you feel as though someone else is holding you, turning you through the lamplight.

You lay out the fine table cloth—the expensive one from your wedding, still white after all this time. Your hands linger where you don’t mean them to, fingertips tracing the embroidered filigree, absorbing the memories woven into each stitch.

Sorrowfully at first, you smile. A fragile expression that, any other day, would send you slinking to your bed to weep. But not tonight. Tonight, your smile grows, firms, nails itself upon your face as a permanent fixture. 

Then you light the hearth and every candle sconce along every wall. You dust the high shelves, wobbling on a rickety overturned bucket to beat webs from your worn and weathered rafters. By the time the sun tucks itself behind the trees, your house gleams, and every room smells of roast goose and sweet spice. 

You feel it’s only right, at least for tonight, that you should shine just as stunningly.

You arm yourself with the old corset from the wardrobe, the pearl comb with the missing tooth, and the perfume bottle still half-full from your wedding chest. Your hands tremble as you work, scarcely ceasing their shaking long enough to complete the task. You pin your wild hair back into place, trace a touch of color onto your cheeks with the pad of your thumb, and laugh at your reflection. You look ridiculous. You look radiant. 

Then, and only then, for the first time since you awoke at dawn… you sit.

Straight-backed at the breakfast table, window cracked, wind howling through the curtains. The candles tremble, baby flames lean toward the draught. But you do not feel the chill; adrenaline has replaced your blood with liquid fire.

This is always the worst of it: the waiting. The minutes tick, tick, tick away, and with it erodes what little good sense you’ve managed to keep. Each passing minute sloughs another layer of reason from your bones. You try to think of anything else—the fowl roast cooling on its tray, the brandy still corked—but the mind is a treacherous thing when left to ferment. It circles the same grave, buzzard-like.

What if it’s all for naught? What if this is the year that’s different? What if you’ve gone mad, been mad all along? What if this is the year that—

A shrill whinny cleaves the night clean down its spine.

The sound is violent, rapturous, unlike the horses that abut your property. It tears through the very walls like lighting through water. Your chair scrapes backward, your heart punches your ribs, you are already on your feet before you remember to breathe, and before you can chew your nails down to their quicks.

You nearly trip over the table in your sprint for the door. You hold the handle like you mean to kill it. Your vision goes spotty; your breath snags. You stand. You tremble. You wait. And wait. And wait. 

The old clock tuned by years-dead hands tick, tick, ticks—

The fire behind you gutters and sputters, flickering in the hearth; blown by a howling gale that does not stir the curtains but stirs the painful want inside you all the same.

The clatter of hooves comes wild and uneven down the cobblestone thoroughfare, metal shoes striking sparks that bloom and die in the dark. It’s reckless riding; harder than any sensible rider would push their horse in the dark. The sort only a rider certain of his mount would dare. And no one rode with such faith but him. Even now. Especially now, when he finds himself so very impatient to come home.

Your pulse rises to meet that sound. The hammering in your chest echoes cleanly the rhythm of hooves on stone, until you can no longer tell which is whose.

Then the hoofbeats slow. Gravel shifts in the yard, a low snort blows through the sudden stillness, and silence floods black in like blood rushing to fill a wound.

You’re faint with the violence of waiting, swaying where you stand. Your breath wheezes, rattling as hollow and reedy as a windchime, your throat raw. You taste dust and iron on your tongue when you gulp for air.

You press a shaking hand to your sternum as though you might hold your galloping heart still.

The reins jingle. That familiar creak of leather follows—the old saddle that always tilted just a smidge to the left. You whimper.

Boots hit the packed dirt outside your door. 

Your arm jolts forward beside the first on the door latch, knees knocking beneath your skirts; legs usually so strong from labor threaten to give out from under you entirely. But you wait. You wait, even when every instinct screams to throw open the door and yourself into the arms of he who stands just beyond it. 

You force yourself to wait. You behave, as though this is any other evening, like your very soul isn’t clawing at your skin to reach through the wood. 

Then—three firm knocks.

You gasp a shuddery breath, and the air freezes somewhere below your diaphragm and your vision curdles black at the edges.

Your blood itches and your lip wobbles. You feel the red string around your finger tighten, tighter and tighter, holding you at your door. You count to three, you always do, then let the weight of your hand carry the handle down.

There he stands, whole, unbroken, wind-tossed and dirt-streaked, a miracle cut out against the firelight. You could’ve found him knee-deep in the pigsty and still would’ve flung yourself at him, filth and all.

Your throat bobs, your lips parting on a sharp inhale that never finds its way back out, and you see the way his eyes drop to the fast flick of your tongue as you wet your lips. Something stirs in the tick of his jaw. He doesn’t move—he scarcely breathes—but his shoulders swell and his hands curl into fists at his sides to hold himself steady against the pull of you.

“Kento—”

There’s a sweet nicker from the dark behind Nanami’s back, greetings from another departed soul gone far too soon. Your laugh breaks halfway to a sob, catching in your throat like a splinter. You always loved that horse.

He was always a big man—intimidating, by anyone else's reckoning—but to you he’d never seemed so large as now, filling the doorway as though he or it had been carved to fit. Those mountainous shoulders could bear the weight of hay bales or the world or you with equal ease; and his hands—God, his hands—had once plunged unflinching into red coals to snag a lost horseshoe. You remember the sting of heat on his palm, the hiss of breath between his teeth while you scolded and slapped them with salve, and the way those same hands later touched you, tender as butterfly wings. Those hands are filthy now, clay and mire caked under his nails, and calluses blackened with earth. His hair hangs wild and wind-flayed, the pale linen at his throat stained with sweat.

And still, he is beautiful. Dressed in the same blue linen and riding breeches as the night he left, he looks like a memory made flesh.

“I told you,” he says in that rich baritone, rougher than you remember. “I wouldn’t be long.”

The cry that finally tears from you is agony turned sound. You collide with him, desperate, the breath leaving you both as you crash into his chest. He catches you as though you might vanish, arms banding tight around your back until your ribs creak. You feel his body shake.

“Oh, darling—” he murmurs into your hair, already loose from its pins. “I know. I’m sorry. I know.” His hand, trembling no less than your own, cradles the back of your head while you weep.

You hiccup, and sob. The ugly sort, where any pretense of prettiness abandons you in the wash of teartracks and snot and saliva dripping down your chin. But there, beneath your heaving ear, is a heartbeat. As strong as it used to be, pounding hard and fast beneath ribs that are no longer broken, warm as the days he held you before. 

He is warm. He is breathing. He is alive. 

Tonight, and only tonight, Nanami Kento is alive.

And he is filthy.

When at last you can bear to part from him—not far at all, only enough to drink him in all over again—you laugh through the wetness and thumb a smear of mud on his cheek like he were nothing but a boy caught misbehaving.

“Kento,” you say, the words trembling against a smile, “you are making a dreadful mess of my floors.”

He regards you down the strong bridge of his nose with glassy eyes, lips wobbling into a fragile smile that should not—cannot—look so sweet upon a dead man's face. He reaches to touch your cheek, to wipe the tears he’d always loathed to see there, but halts when he sees how truly grimy those hands are. He never would’ve dared to touch you with dirty hands before.

“...Forgive me, ma’am,” he says at last, voice gone rough and low, softened by the suggestion of laughter. 

You turn into that soiled palm anyway, nuzzling until your cheek bears the same stains as his. The heat of him sears through the grime, so long have you gone without the touch of another. You can almost pretend that it’s summer again.

“Go on then,” you croak, smiling despite how it makes everything ache. “Wash up. Supper’s ready.”

There’s a goose to be carved and drinks to be poured, but as Nanami crosses the threshold into your home you are powerless to stop your legs from following. Like a shadow, you cling to his back, watching as he bends at the washstand and scrubs his hands. Your heart hammers, your hand still poised at your throat to feel the frantic fluttering of your pulse; you dare not let him out of sight, not even for a moment.

Not while he washes, not while he takes a long, quiet look about the room that hasn’t changed a bit in his absence, not while he changes his clothes—especially not then—where he lays out his favorite shirts, still hung in your closet, you haven’t the heart to pack them away. He smiles at you over his bare shoulder.

“Which would you like?” He asks gently, coaxing you from the doorway.

Your fingers quiver when you brush over the fabric, tracing the seams and the patches sewn in by your own hands, holes clumsily mended but made all the dearer for it, or so he’d always said.

You land upon a simple cotton shirt and offer it up. “This’ll do,” you breathe. It will smell like him when day breaks. It will keep your head straight through winter—it must.

When Nanami died, some finer part of you had gone with him. He had carried away your smile, your laughter, your warmth, the very pulse of your womanhood. You’d thought yourself hollowed, left barren of all want; no man before or after had ever stirred you. Nanami had planted that seed inside you, and tended to it through all the seasons of your life. Desire, you’d decided, had died in his grave.

But now, as he stretches to pull the shirt over his head, the candlelight slides over the planes of his back. The shifting of muscle beneath sun-browned, freckled skin, malleable clay that once accepted your nails so perfectly, you feel that long-buried ache flare to life again. It startles you, how quickly it returns: that girlish flutter, that dizzy thrill that once made you blush to your ears. You lift a hand from your collar to your mouth, biting your knuckle to stifle the unseemly noise brewing in your throat.

No, you are not a broken woman. Not one bit.

He catches you staring, and you don’t bother to look away. Your admiration is as apparent now as it had always been, only now, your husband does not tease you for your ogling. Instead, he simply smiles his understanding.

“For as much as I would like to eat with my wife, if her appetites lie elsewhere, I am more than willing to oblige.”

You gulp, and this time blood roars to your ears. It dizzies you. 

You swat at his arm and catch the fabric of his long sleeve, stabilizing yourself before whisking toward the door, now hand in hand. “Come along,” you say, forcing a steadiness that fools neither of you, least of all those stirred appetites of yours. “The goose will turn to leather if you dawdle.”

Nanami chuckles, softened with fondness while you drag him down the hall like you might a naughty boy by the ear. The house, to you, feels smaller now for having to hold the both of you in it. And in that shrinking there is a new warmth that comes from sharing space—joy at filling a vacancy that should never have been made at all.

He takes his seat at the table, watching patiently as you pour the brandy with unsteady hands. The hearth spits, the old clock ticks, and for a while there is only the small, domestic intrusions of cutlery and crackling fire. 

It always surprises you, these evenings, the lack of surprise with which you sink into them. Because Nanami was never a guest at your table, but a fixture, and it’s only right that he be duly returned to you. You eat companionably, sip your spirits comfortably, but drink him in like he’s the very air you breathe—his eyes never leave you, either.

“Tell me about your day,” he coaxes after dabbing his mouth with a cloth. “Leave nothing out.”

So you do. Not only today, but all days since his last visit. You speak of the nothings and the everythings—of the hens that still refuse to lay where you tell them, of the neighbor’s new fence gone crooked after the last rain, of the other neighbor’s mare with a foal on her side you’d been eyeing for months, of how wretchedly long the winters feel now.

He listens, and smiles, and clucks his tongue as he always did—because your Kento had always been a notorious gossip behind your door. “He never did know how to stake a fence,” he hummed “Not like ours.” And “A horse would do you some good. But I’d rather you with something more sturdy than the neighbor’s nag.”

Time at your table felt as though it hadn’t passed at all; like the world had not kept spinning after the death of a good man, but paused and held itself still. It waited, hung in perpetuity, for these evenings where it would right itself again.

You pour him another cup though his is only half drunk, only for the excuse to lean close, watching the faint tremor in his hands as he reaches to take it. His eyes never stray from yours—revered and guilty in equal measure—the corner of his mouth twitches like he might speak or confess or weep or apologize. 

The fire pops; you both glance at it. It is better to let that impulse die.

When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “You’ve kept the house just the same.” 

You feel warmth blossom through you, pride and longing both, at the sincere longing behind Kento’s words.

“Well, it wouldn’t be home otherwise, now would it?” You smile, deflecting, at least in part. You don’t speak of the despair that grips you day in and out when you dust around his coat hung on the door, or the anguish that breaks you to tears when you have no choice but to wash his clothing because you’ve worn them to rags.

Nanami bites his tongue, thinking of these things anyway. Because every year he visits, your home is unchanged but you have been ravaged by the seasons of his absence. Your hair has grown long, your hands rougher and calloused by work that should never have been yours. None of it is unbecoming—he loves you for the steel you’ve become—but you’ve hung up your softness in favor of a sickle, and he can’t help but to mourn the gentleness that hardship has stripped from you.

He was meant, as your husband, to guard you from this life of labor. Not condemn you to it.

His thumb drags along the grain of the table, finding the little notch his knife left there years ago. A careless slip, one of the many small marks he left behind in this house, and on you. Same marks, though, are not so easily ignored. His jaw tightens. He draws a slow breath to quiet the discontent twining through his ribs.

“My love…” he begins. You’re already shaking your head, denying the plea you already know is coming, sure as the sun will rise.

“Kento, no—”

“It would be no great betrayal if you sought company—”

“No! And I won’t hear of it again.” 

Sat facing each other at the table, Kento abandons his plate. He rises, the chair legs scraping against the worn floorboards. You firm your own resolve, meeting his stare, just as obstinate.

He towers over you now, the lamplight gilding the veins that tense beneath his strained forearms as he braces both hands on the table. The old timber slab groans under his palms. You can feel the tremor of his desperation run through it and into you. And when your neck cranes back to look at him, you can see the abject despair at this injustice painted clearly across his face.

“Why? Why must I let you refuse to live?”

“Because you are enough for me!”

“I am not here!”

You choke, laid bare beneath the man who had always stripped you of your layers, but how could you ever allow yourself to be stripped by the hands and words of another? 

“Do you not think I consider myself blessed to have even this?” You challenge him, eyes blazing where they meet over the carcass of dinner. “That this…” your hands wave frantically between the two of you, “...is more than I dared dream for? You are not gone. And I will wait for you until the day I join you, or so help me!”

Your shoulders tremble, and you lean towards him with lovesick eyes—incensed and in love—your hand shakes as it slides over the table to grasp his own. Hard. No, you could never remarry. No gentleman would ever hang his coat in your closet, or leave his shoes by your door. Not when Kento was merely away and his ragged breath passes so sweetly over your cheek.

“You’ve made a mausoleum of us, and I—” He stops himself. The air between you is sticky with that which he won’t say: and I am the one who asks you to keep it. And I am a hypocrite who would do just the same.

He exhales through his nose, buffeting your face with a beleaguered laugh. “God help me, I wanted you to live. I fear I’ve broken our vows. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health—”

You reach for him, and all that righteous grief collapses. He bows his head, presses his creased brow to your fingers and breathes in the life of you as though it might absolve him of his transgressions against you. As if he ever intended to leave.

“Well…” you whisper, your fingers brushing back the hairs from his forehead, marveling at the enormity of such a small thing as warm skin beneath your touch. “I do believe that ‘til death do us part’ grants you clemency—”

He laughs outright at that, startled by the abrupt address of that which neither of you try to acknowledge on these nights.

“You are a stubborn woman,” he murmurs, defeated but utterly besotted by you that he cannot for a moment longer fan the flame of anger or frustration. He will surrender…for this year.

You hazard a smile. “Only a fool would marry such a woman, when his money would be better spent on a mule.” 

Kento chuckles again, and you feel a quiver of relief loosen your spine. “If only I had been a wise enough man to marry that woman twice.” 

Reminiscing and regretting is a perilous line, and he loathes how clumsily he walks it with drink inspiring his sentiment. 

Kento rounds the table, never relinquishing your hand until he’s close enough to haul you upright. You squeak, made handleable by the brandy, but all the more intoxicated by the collision with his chest. You make no attempt to hide the greedy way in which you inhale deep from the linen. “If my stubborn wife would like to argue…” he murmurs, and you shiver to feel his breath so warm over your ear. “I would rather do so with her in my arms.”

Neither of you dance very well, you never did, but that hardly matters—it’s hardly the point and it never was. You allow yourself to be spun beneath his arm and whisked from the table, narrowly avoiding a clumsy trip over the legs that seek to acquaint your nose with the floorboards. 

It’s slow, how he draws you back into him and away from hazardous furnishings. And you, rather dumbly, still clutch your glass of brandy in a white knuckled grip while the other snakes up behind Nanami’s neck. “I hardly remember how to dance,” you confess, grinning into his shoulder.

“Remembering implies you ever had the knowledge to begin with—mmph!”

At that moment you step on his toes. 

He grunts above your head, and you dissolve into laughter.

For a while, you simply watch your feet. At some point Nanami pilfers your glass and returns it to the table without you noticing, your newly freed hand immediately winding up to join the first.

Then, confident enough you’ve remembered how to shuffle and spin in place, you lean against his shoulder and just watch your shadows.

You watch the shape of you and the shape of him flickering across the walls, black silhouettes dancing in a way that looks far more graceful than you feel. You sway together, no music necessary, guided by the beat of Nanami’s heart beneath your ear and the numbing buzz of alcohol in your brain, you spin beneath his arm, just to be caught back against his chest.

You breathe him in and the core of your chest turns molten. Your head is light, your heart a traitor; it trips over itself trying to keep time with his.

You have danced with him a hundred times before—by candlelight, stormlight, in the narrow glow of the hearth spearing through its grate—but never as though the world might split apart if you misstepped like you do now. You remember your first: your heel on his boot, your nervous laughter grating on your own jangled nerves. He’d called you a menace, but he’d smiled when he said it. It made you fall in love twice over.

And now you are older, lonelier, crueler to yourself in your pursuit of perfection that was never yours to achieve. Yet you still fit into him the same way, grief whittled you into the exact shape of his chest, and would never fit against another the same way. Your cheek presses there, the sound of him fills your ear, and your fingers tighten in the worn collar of his shirt.

Shadows spill and multiply across the walls, cut-outs of the lives you’ve lived together. You would paint those shadows upon the wall if you could. Take to the wood with a great black brush and print them there for eternity. You could reach out, catch them, tack them there. Paint this promenade in soot or wine or blood if you must. Maybe tomorrow you will. 

For a dizzy moment, you cannot tell which version of yourselves is the ghost. Perhaps both are. Perhaps not knowing is the mercy granted by this eve.

Maybe, as the shadow of Nanami dips to nuzzle behind your ear, warm sparks skittering beneath your skin, you would paint that silhouette instead.

Without warning, he takes you by the hand and spins you again. 

And then he’s kissing you.

His lips crash onto yours and suddenly you can’t keep your hands off him; it was a fool's errand to have even tried. His tongue is inside your mouth, and then on your neck, and your hands are buried in the wrinkles of the shirt you’d chosen and pulling at buttons like you’ve never seen them before.

Your feet are moving again. Not in a circle this time, where half of your attention is spent on not crushing your partners toes, but backward. His hands only leave your waist to catch your skull when it would have struck the wall, then return to you, guiding, urging, shepherding you down the hall, gentle and desperate all at once.

You taste salt, and brandy, and spice on his breath. He’s muttering your name between kisses, as though saying it will keep you here. As if you are the one at risk of leaving.

The world tips.

You stumble, but it’s backwards onto your bed, and he follows, the both of you laughing, breathless. His weight settles over you—solid, warm, and real enough to make tears spring to your eyes—and for the first night in a year, you hang up your black grief to dry.

---

For a while, he strokes your tangled hair, pressing soft kisses to your cheek, your eyelids, your nose. You stay buried in his chest, absorbing the beautiful sound of a beating heart beneath your ear, and the fresh smell of apple and woodsmoke.

He kisses you longer, and you can feel the longing in how his fingers tighten over your shoulders, clutching you to his chest like he’s jealous of the world that gets to keep you. 

“Are you asleep?” he whispers, felt more than heard through the vibrating in his throat, like the purring of some great housecat.

You smile, and for a good moment, you forego words completely and simply snuggle closer. “No,” you answer. “I think I’ll stay awake tonight.”

The fond skepticism in Nanami’s hum makes you snort, pinching a bit of skin on his hip and giving it a reprimanding tweak. “I mean it… if I sleep, wake me.”

“Oh, but how am I to be so cruel as to wake you when you look so peaceful?”

“I mean it!” You giggle. “I won’t waste a single moment. We will talk, and we will do more of that.”

Nanami only chuckles, his hand brushing up your spine to cradle the back of your neck and tuck you back down onto his chest where you belong. “Right…just rest a while, then.”

You don’t usually sleep nude, it’s far too cold in an empty bed, but tonight, it’s far too easy to forget every lonely night that came before this one and how it ever felt to be cold at all.

You certainly didn’t mean to fall asleep, succumbing to the security of Nanami’s arms. And Nanami, of course, cannot find it within himself to wake you.

---

The morning after usually is, at least to begin with, kind enough. Your face is warm, sunlight caressing the slumbering slope of your cheek, the way he does with a calloused thumb. Your body is wonderfully weighted, made heavy from the drink you do not typically indulge in and for a blissful moment, the world is just as it should be. The pillow beneath your cheek is cool, and smells of woodsmoke and roast goose and him.

Sighing, you reach blindly across the bed, fingers questing across the quilt, certain you’ll find the solid bend of his ribs, or the roughness of his hand, or the blessed rise and fall of his chest beneath your hand.

Your palm meets nothing but cold sheets.

The breath leaves you, your left lung deflates, and your shoulders curl inward. You keep your eyes shut, just a moment more, because if you don’t open them, the dream can’t end. One night can become a day, can become a week, can become twenty. Because it feels cruel, somehow, to tear the innocent morning open and find it wanting and empty again. 

But you do, because you’ve never been the sort of woman to shy from your absolute reality.

The other side of the bed is rumpled. Something Nanami would never abide by under less peculiar circumstances, but knows that you prefer it this way now—breadcrumbs for you to follow, and evidence for you to collect. His pillow beside your own bears a hollow where his head once lay. 

You pull the covers to your nose, and they smell of him, just as they always do, his scent renewed for the coming months, or for as long as it takes to fade again without a warm body to bolster it. You swallow hard, and make that pitiful wheezing sound you do, and allow yourself that time to grieve again.

He’s gone. Of course he’s gone. He hadn’t woken you…of course he hadn’t.

You allow yourself the time to weep; to wail and rage and rail against the injustice and cruelties of the world that saw fit to take your love from you, not once, but every year thereafter. How depraved must fate be, how vile a God to tease you from beyond the veil with that which you have lost? To swap your bedmate in the night, a lover traded in for loneliness?

You are a creature split in two, where only half is alive. These are the wretched mornings when grief feels older than you are, as though you were born for this: to love a man who belongs to another world, to hold him for a few pitifully clandestine hours before the sun devours him.

The room still hums with him; the air itself bruised by his absence and, if you did not know better after years, you may have believed he was only in the wash room. You lie there listening to the wood foundations settle under the weight of one less occupant, to the wind curl its wispy fingers around the curtains without a broader body to obstruct it. And for a dreadful heartbeat you think: I can’t do this again.

You cannot rise, put one foot in front of the other, every day of the year just to come alive for only one night. You cannot smile, or make pleasantries, or barter at the market when you are but a phantom yourself. 

But you will. You always do.

Because oh! How blessed you are, too, to have had that time at all!

Because there beneath your sorrow—deep, deep down where your ribs knit together to protect your aching heart—you feel the miracle of it. That he came back at all. That there is one night where the door opens, and his boots strike the floorboards, and he resurrects your body, and the world is whole again.

Perhaps that is the magic, or the superstition of it, anyway. You, though, would call it luck. To have loved and been loved by Nanami Kento, and to continue to be so.

And perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it is because it must be.

When finally you rise, because there are chickens to be fed and bones to be turned to broth and the world does not wait for you in its infinite cruelties and blessings, his glass still sits where he left it, the smudge of a thumbprint on the rim.

The white linen shirt lay folded upon the chair, returned to you as the gift it was always intended to be.

And though you move sluggishly, silence returns to the rafters and walls that for one night a year remember what it is to support a home, you find it in you to smile as you clear the table and fold the cloth. 

Because in a year's time, Nanami Kento will be back, and the road will feel kinder, and you will be ready to welcome him, just as you always are, until the day comes that it is he who greets you at the door.