I can’t quite stop thinking about Chiori.
Her agonizing over every detail of your wedding dress—she knows you best, and she wants everything to be absolutely seamless. She’s hard-pressed to settle for anything less than perfection normally, but this is your wedding dress; it’s the garment you’ve been picturing in your head since sun-dappled childhood. It’s a sanctioned honor (though she wouldn’t phrase it like that) to be its creator, its tortured designer.
Tortured. The infamous designer of all know-how Fontainian couture is tortured. Your story will be punctuated by the fairytale wedding of your dreams, and hers will stretch on for eons inside of her fabled boutique. But she cannot complain. She is the one who left you, after all.
Chiori packed up and fled Inazuma right before the borders closed, chasing her aspirations like a real Ishmael—and thus leaving you behind. It was the hardest and most controversial decision she’s ever made, and now the consequences of the past are here to needle away at her, bit by bit.
Your fiance is Fontainian. A merchant, you’d said—a nice man. He’d been making his rounds through Inazuma after the borders reopened, was rightfully and predictably attracted to your bright smile and beautiful soul, and then the deal was sealed. You are to marry him, and he is to marry you; that is why you’re here, to meet his family, to get fitted for a dress, to oversee wedding preparations.
Chiori finds that the process hurts. It stings like citric acid, like salt in a fleshy wound. But she’ll maim her fingertips over and over to get everything right. The designing and dressmaking itself is not hard. How could it, when she knows your preferences down to a science?
Maybe it was your mercy that made you come in here without a vision in mind—a peace offering, an olive branch, a dove of closure. You let her design your dress so no one else gets the chance to, and she’ll maybe feel a little less shackled to the regrets of the past.
(She’ll maybe feel a little less shackled, a little less resigned, to the idea of letting you go completely.)
Both of you talk like old friends, which you are. But what once was so natural and hotblooded is now nostalgic and toned down, verbal distance stretching kilometers. Chiori has no one to blame but herself. Although she would choose to chase her dreams, over and over again, perhaps she was blind in noticing how integral you were to those dreams.
You never wanted a kimono on your special day, even as a kid. Even when the traditional Inazuman expectations weighed heavily on the minds of the youth. You used to ramble to Chiori about bedazzled trains, ball gown skirts, all things gorgeous and foreign that wouldn’t fly in the old-fashioned climate of your shared homeland. But that was okay. Because you dreamt, and you challenged the status quo.
Looking back on it, you’re probably what drove her to pull herself together and stop wishing.
However, she never stopped wishing for you. Chiori would do showcases upon showcases, give interviews if she felt like it, reap the fruits of her labor however she pleased, but she never stopped wishing you’d fatefully stroll through the door one day.
(But when you finally did, it was with a gut-wrenching ring around your finger.)
Tortured. The infamous designer of all know-how Fontainian couture is tortured. She bites her tongue and continues her work in silence.
lovely. i'm not sure who you're talking about though, me and my wife himeko are happily married and are skipping and frolicking through a field as we speak!