[A Soulmate Meme for Pain I wrote for resolutepath from my old blog. Where I totally misuse haki and what it can do for the sake of The Meme. I need some IC on this blog while I try to catch up at work.]
They knew at the first spark of haki and the spiritual jolt that followed, the brilliance of their auras and the sense of one another that never quite went away after. Perhaps the saddest thing about their connection was that nothing could come of it--of them. That mutual, unspoken, 'it's too complicated' hung between them from then on. Marina shut her eyes every night with the red-black-blue fingers of his aura stretching toward hers as her silver-dark reached back, curling around his own.
-- and they went on, Marina with her clinic and her fruitless quest to cure Law, Corazón furiously seeking news of the Devil Fruit that would save him. They snatched guilty, silent moments together, sitting side by side on her stoop, picking at half-eaten slices of pie with their forks. Once they fought, her snatching the bottle of rotgut liquor from his hand and hurling it against the wall so that it shattered, his jaw hanging open and his big hands shaking with repressed anger as she snarled at him to stop punishing himself.
They 'talked' through their signboards, little notes passed back and forth like kids fooling around in school.
When it was time for Corazón and Law to board their schloop and leave, Marina wrapped scarlet thread around the sacred stone her mother gave her, murmuring the prayers of her people as she worked the cord into a bracelet with ten knots. For protection. For luck. For the could-have-been.
She caught him just before they could sneak away, dress flapping around her legs and her eyes wild as she raced toward their schloop, screaming 'wait!', arm outstretched as if to hand the talisman to him clear across the dock.
"I'm going to think of you," she vowed fiercely, knotting the bracelet around Corazón's wrist as Law gawked like the disgusted teenager he was, watching their faces flame red. "And I'm going to worry for both of you--" Her thumb traced along Corazón's painted cheek, skimming one corner of his wide mouth before she stepped back, pasting a smile on her face. "So, deal with it. Okay?"
She kept that grin in place, so they'd be sent off with joy instead of tears, channeling all her bittersweet well wishes and unspoken feelings into the bond between them: I'll pray. I'm glad I met you. I wish it were different--
Weeks later, Marina did the same as Corazón lay dying in the snow, her body sprawled on the clinic floor, mirroring his as she grinned blindly at the ceiling, lips working in a silent: 'not yet'.
(The sea in her mouth. A smile on her lips, in case he could feel it. This world was ending for him. Let him enter the World to Come without Marina's regrets chasing him over its threshhold.)
His aura flickered in time to his dying pulse.
('I'm gonna stay alive for just a little bit more...')
Yes. She funneled her will into him until it became a surge, forcing each agonized spasm of his lungs, every beat of his heart. One. Two. Three. Breathe in. Breathe out. Yes. 'Just a little bit more--'
They are dying, the Shema stuck in her throat so that she prayed in silence--
(Go farther and farther--'
('--nothing to bind you down anymore--') Breathe in. Breathe out. Not yet.
Not yet, she begged, but the world wasn't kind, and it wasn't fair, and grief didn't belong in this moment, so she would gather all the will left to her and give it to him so he could--
'Focus. Breathe, Rosinante--'
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in one last time, please, breathe--
Marina/Rosinante smiled, and then--
Tears, she--only her, Marina, one person--realized. The taste of salt was from tears. She was crying, deep and wretched and ugly as what remained of Donquixote Rosinante flickered and died.
kaledo-art
izzy806
dailybridgerton
