Shirayuki woke up groggily, licking her dry lips to smooth them out. She let out a small groan, turning her aching neck toward the driver’s side. “Are we finally here?”
Obi turned the engine off, the warm air from the vents immediately shutting off as well. Shirayuki shuddered, grasping her arms into a hug for warmth. Obi opened his door, slamming it lightly behind him. He rushed over to Shirayuki’s side, opening the door for her and lifting her up off her seat, cradling her in his arms.
She yelped in surprise, giggling after clutching onto his neck. “You don’t have to do this, you know. I know how to walk,” she whispered into his ear. Deep down she wanted it... wanted the both of them to experience all the rites of passage together.
“Are you kidding me? I only get to do this once.” Obi winked at her, letting out a long exhale as his arms trembled while carrying his new wife. “God, Miss, how much cake did you eat at our wedding?”
She slapped his chest playfully, pouting dramatically. “Miss? I’m a married woman now, for your information.”
He hoisted her up onto his shoulders, carrying her like a big-game trophy he had hunted down in the forest. “That’s right. You’re married to me.”
He kicked the door open with ease, like it was unlocked the whole time. “Thank you, AirBnB,” he shouted, slapping Shirayuki’s ass as they entered the cabin. “Welcome to our temporary humble abode, my dear wife.”
He threw her down onto the couch gently and closed the cabin door with his foot.
“Oh, my God, this place is beautiful, Obi.” Shirayuki sat up, green eyes wide with awe as they observed the room. She instinctively removed her puffy jacket, feeling the strong heat inside. Her eyes darted to the fire already burning inside the fireplace.
Obi handed her a steaming cup of hot chocolate, white marshmallows floating on top. Shirayuki took a slow sip, smiling brightly at him. “Thank you, Obi.”
Obi sat down next to her, sipping his own cup of chocolate. Shirayuki curled to his side, letting her head rest lightly on his shoulder. She let her lips graze the top of the cup and immediately pulled back before she could taste the warm liquid again.
“Wait. I didn’t see you make this hot chocolate right now,” Shirayuki said, wrapping her hands around her mug. “And the fire...” her voice trailed, craning her neck up slowly to look at her husband.
Obi’s lips curled into a small smile, stretching his arm out to wrap around Shirayuki’s shoulders. He pulled her in closer, hand caressing just above her elbow.
“We’ve been here for an hour now,” he said, averting his eyes guiltily. “You were still asleep so I kept the car running to leave the heater on.”
Shirayuki watched his lips move, her heart fluttering inside her chest like a bird trapped in a cage. She was the luckiest woman in the world, she thought. Married to a man more considerate than her.
“All our stuff are inside the room. I chopped enough wood to last our entire honeymoon. Plenty of hot water inside the ket...”
Shirayuki crashed her lips against his, interrupting Obi’s train of thought. Obi pulled back, taking her cup out of her hands and placing both of their hot chocolates onto the side table next to the couch.
“I don’t want these to burn us,” he said, then cupping her face and pulling her in to a deep kiss.
Shirayuki fell back onto the couch, her fingers tangling into his black hair and long legs wrapped around Obi’s hips. “You’re too good for me, Obi,” she said against his lips, panting breathlessly. “I don’t deserve all this.”
Obi kissed underneath her jaw, working his lips down to her neck. He lifted his chest off her, hands planted on either side of her head as he rested his weight on them. He stared down at her, amber eyes looking into her green.
“No, Shirayuki, you don’t.” His voice trembled, nervous at his own words. “You deserve more.”
Shirayuki’s eyes fluttered to a close, a few teardrops escaping her eyes. She pulled Obi back down to her, holding him tight and never letting him go.
Obi pushes himself up on his knees with a frown, toys gathered up in his arms. Something had to be wrong.
He tosses the toys in the bin with a rattle and a squeak, groaning as he lifts himself up from the floor. Aki giggles, banging happily at the noisemakers and bright lights of his bouncer. He makes a face at the munchin as he crosses the room, which just makes Aki giggle more.
He blows a raspberry at him before turning back and glancing through the peephole. His grin falters.
Yuki.
Something was definitely wrong.
But when he opens his door, she squeals, charging through it and wrapping him in a hug filled with so much force it spins them.
“Woah!” he laughs, pulling back her beanie so he can sees her flushed and happy face. “What’s the good news?”
Paper crinkles as she shoves a torn envelope under his nose. “I got in!”
He blinks at her. He thought she was already in school. “To where?”
She’s trembling with excitement, grin threatening to split her face. “To Lyrias’s nursing program! I got into their prenatal program!”
He doesn’t know what any of that means. “Congratulations!” he says, arms awkwardly disengaging from hers. “Does that mean your community college days are numbered?”
She nods emphatically. “Yes! I’ll have my associates at the end of the semester and I’ll be starting up there in the Fall!”
HIs heart swells with pride even though he has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. “I’m proud of you, Yuki.”
Shirayuki looks up at him, startled, and her eyes have a tell tale shimmer to them that immediately threatens to send him into panic mode.
“Thank you,” she breathes, wiping her eyes with the back of her mittens. She sniffs, looking over at Aki. “This is like a dream. LHSU has one of the best nursing programs in the country.”
Obi glances over at the clock and clicks his tongue. Shift starts in an hour and a half. Just enough time if he needs it. “Do you want to call your folks?” he asks. “Go out to celebrate? I can call and ask Torou if she can watch him tonight.”
“Oh.” Shirayuki ducks her head a little, and there’s something to that single syllable that sounds off, but her eyes avoid his now so he can’t be certain. She pushes her hair behind her ear and her smile is strained. “I guess I never told you. There’s, um- there’s nobody.”
Obi stares at her, confused. Surely, a girl as sweet as her has somebody-
She pushes back against her bangs to look him in the eye, but only succeeds in making them staticy and fluffy across her face. “My family is gone.”
He doesn’t know what to say. Maybe apologize, but for what?
“I just... wanted to tell someone,” she smiles, gesturing with the envelope. “That’s all.”
~ ~ ~
They don’t bring it up again when he comes dragging home at dawn. The click of the door rouses her enough for her to mumble a good morning.
“Did he give you any problems?” he whispers, watching her roll off the couch.
She shakes her head numbly, haphazardly folding the throw and tossing it over the back of the couch. “Not really. He woke up once because he lost his bink, but then he found it right next to his head and went straight back to sleep.”
He laughs softly and she yawns, mouth wide and round like a kitten's.
“You should go to bed,” he says quietly. “Your place has got to be more comfortable than that lumpy couch. Maybe next time, I’ll bring Aki over.”
She smiles sleepily at him, shuffling towards the door. “No, no. It’s okay. All of his stuff is here. And I like it over here anyway.”
Something in his chest warms unexpectedly.
“But!” she grins, grabbing her coat. “I will take your advice and crawl into my own bed. I’ve got a few more hours of shut eye waiting for me before I need to be in class.”
He smiles, watching her walk to the door. He should probably say something about earlier-
Aki whines from the other room and Obi sighs dramatically, waving her off.
“Goodnight, Yuki.”
She giggles, seeing herself out. “Goodnight, Obi.”
-but he guesses that something will have to come later.
~ ~ ~
Later never comes.
Well, not exactly.
It’s weeks later when he stumbles home, drunk on lack of sleep and Aki on his hip that he finds a little tin on his doormat. Frowning, he kneels down to pick it up and finds looping scrawl wishing the both of them Happy Thanksgiving across the top. It’s not signed, but he knows who it is from anyway.
The tin is faintly warm and smells of cinnamon and sugar.
Glancing down the hallway, he looks fondly at the cheery little cartoon turkey dangling from the wreath on her front door.
~ ~ ~
Even though he sees her nearly every day, either passing in the hallway or talking quietly while Aki naps in the other room, it takes him a few more weeks to work up the nerve.
Hands shoved in his pockets, Obi rocks back and forth on his heels outside her apartment door.
This was stupid. It wasn’t like she would laugh at him, and so what if she did? She had a beautiful laugh. And if he wanted to hear it again, all he had to do was knock on the damn door.
The lock clicks, and the door swings open without his prompting - he knows, he checks to make sure his hands are still in his pockets - and suddenly she’s in front of him, bundled so tight he can only see her eyes. She comes up short when she almost runs into him.
“Oh!” she says, bracing her hands on his chest, and that- that wasn’t helping things.
“Hi,” he says, hoping his face doesn’t look as awkward as it feels.
“Hi,” she breathes, eyes widening where she sees where her hands are at. She snatches them back. “Um- Is there a problem?”
“No, no,” he shakes his head. “I just-” He clears his throat, rubbing his hand against the back of his neck.
She tilts her head. “You just...?”
He must have left all his game at the hospital when he brought Aki home for the first time. He feels like a teenager. “Would you like to come over for dinner on Christmas Eve?”
She blinks up at him.
He starts to retreat when the silence goes on for longer than two seconds. “I mean, you’re probably busy and I-”
“Yes!” she says, tugging down her scarf so he can see the rest of her face. Her eyes are shimmering again and that’s... good. He thinks. “I mean, no, I’m not busy. But yes, I would love to come over. What should I bring?”
~ ~ ~
Obi is beginning to think that he’s in real trouble.
Shirayuki brings cookies. Sugar cookies with cute little frosting designs that Aki smears all over his face. Even though he said she didn’t need to bring anything.
Where do they make people like her?
“Tanbarun,” she says, smiling in a way that makes her dimples stand out the most. “Although no one ever believes me. My hair doesn’t exactly peg me as Tanbarunian.”
He hums, barely listening as he watches Aki softly snoring in her lap. His son clutches his binky friend in his arms, looking every bit as content with her as his bed as he did in his own.
Lucky kid.
“You’re a good cook,” she remarks, and he blinks, looking at her with wide eyes. The glow from the Christmas tree catches off her hair, multicolored strings painting her so she looks like some stained glass window.
“Oh?” he smiles, slow. “You sound surprised.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s just been a while since I’ve had food like that. Since starting college, it’s all take out and reheated meals-”
“I was like that when this little guy showed up,” he says, nodding his chin in Aki’s direction. “But I had to make time. I don’t want to raise him not knowing what a homecooked meal tastes like.”
She bites her lip, looking down at the little boy in her arms and she shouldn’t look so right in this room, on his couch, with his son on her lap and the sound of Frosty the Snowman playing on the TV. “You take really good care of him.”
He laughs, shaking his head. “Ah, it’s not a big deal. I’m just-”
“No.” Her face is so serious, eyes so intent. “I mean it. You don’t have to be half the dad that you are.”
It’s a rather inconvenient time in his life for his heart to be doing whatever it is doing.
“Yes,” he chokes. “I do.”
~ ~ ~
It’s officially Christmas when she lays Aki in his crib.
“I bought him something,” she says lowly as he walks her to the door. “You, too. If you wait just a minute, I can go grab them and-”
“Bring it tomorrow,” he breathes.
Her eyes go wide. “Oh, Obi. I couldn’t intrude-”
“Or today,” he amends, glancing at the clock. “We can all eat breakfast together and watch him destroy the wrapping paper.”
He doesn’t know if it’s the string lights or just her face, but she glows.
“Okay,” she smiles in a bashful sort of way. “I’ll see you in a couple hours.”
Ain’t Too Proud to Beg - The Temptations
Signed, Sealed, Delivered - Stevie Wonder
Cry To Me - Solomon Burke
In America, it’s estimated that if you’re murdered, there’s an over fifty-percent chance that it’s going to be by someone you know. Your chances of being offed only increase if you take the same route to and from work every day. And if you say hello to strangers?
“There was a sale on for granite at Legacy Headstones the other day,” drones Suzu, propping his feet up on the cafeteria table. “Passed it on the highway. Though I guess someone would have to find your body first.”
“You’re making all that up.” Shirayuki squints down at the Huffington Post article crammed onto Suzu’s Android that he’s shoved under her nose. “I think my routes are varied plenty.”
Yuzuri jams the toe of her heeled boot into the round of his calf. “Suzu, Obi’s our own personal Rambo. No one is going to murder Shirayuki.”
He arches his brows at her. “It was a buy one, get one fifty percent off sale.”
Pluck any one novel from a decent section of the library, and you’re bound to find some allusion in one in five to the five stages of grief.
Even in literature published dozens of years, hundreds of years, before the Kübler-Ross model was a figment in a Swiss psychiatrist’s imagination. And Shirayuki is no psychiatrist, but if plants have been photosynthesizing since the Ordovician period and human cells have been overmultiplying into cancer since some ancient Egyptian physician scrawled the grisly details onto papyrus in three-thousand-odd B.C., then she’s willing to bet that perhaps even Hippocrates himself wept and maybe labored like a madman over the cold body of the first, and maybe the second, and the third and the fourth patient that gave up the ghost on his table. There had to have been a process of some kind - points B, C, and D - that had led to point E, whenever and wherever he had accepted the concept of crisis and allowed nature to vie one way or the other.
Grief is a result of loss.
Shirayuki had even read once that we all experience grief when we so much as stop at the grocery store only to find that the pancake mix that’s been at aisle three for a decade has been moved to aisle six. Loss. In a matter of seconds, a full cycle of grief - we move on to aisle six.
The Kübler-Ross model can’t even be proven, but then again, neither can gravity, right, and she wonders where she -
Pancake mix thuds into her basket and she squeaks, tilting right over like a chopped tree straight into a solid shoulder.
Obi pushes her away, playful. “Class dismissed, kid. You’ve got nothing to think about over winter break.”
“Work isn’t dismissed,” she reminds him and smiles despite herself. He flashes her a wide grin - oh, she’d once thought him so easy to talk to, but lately, the truth would only snuff out these guttering moments, and such a thing she cannot bear.
“It’s the holidays. You’ve got better things to do.”
She stops dead. “Do I?” she asks him, needle-sharp.
Obi’s just - a grab-bag of a human being. It’s either off the side of a cliff, or the best moment of your life, every time.
Obi’s mouth forms a perfect O. Then his eyes follow an invisible trail of breadcrumbs across the ceiling. “What’s next on that list?” he asks, already traipsing away, so innocent. “Slivered almonds?”
Shirayuki wakes from what can only be a five-year coma. Blinking groggily at the ceiling, she licks dry lips, tastes death - euch, she must’ve slept with her mouth open - and sits up.
And stares blearily at the floor. “Is that one of my suitcases?”
“Oh, yes.” Yuzuri is sprawled on her side on her twin bed, her phone glowing blue in the cradle of her bathrobe-clad body. “Mitsuhide said that Obi said to fill it up.” She looks up, guilty.
Shirayuki blinks once more. Frowns hard, flexes every mental muscle she possesses to piece together the last few days, comes up with nothing -
“If he whisks you off to some top-secret hut in the jungles of Hawaii,” says Yuzuri, gaze fixed on her phone, “you can borrow some stuff of mine, just in case.”
Shirayuki lobs her pillow at her from across the room.
“Hawaii” turns out to be two floors down, three doors to the left of the stairwell.
The apartment is just bare bones. A shocker - that Izana Wisteria would allow even a single empty bed to sit and collect utilities is almost beyond her ability to comprehend, and this apartment has four of them.
Shirayuki stands aside while Mitsuhide, Obi, and Kiki muscle in a flat screen smart TV, speakers, an assembled bookshelf, a box piled high with quilts and sheets, a two-piece sofa set, a dining table and chairs, a microwave -
Kiki shuffles sideways past her into the apartment with an armful of Ikat throw pillows, clearly from Target, and just as clearly secondhand, and that is the last straw.
Right behind comes Obi, smiling at her sheepishly and one of his gloved hands already lifting up the handle of her suitcase.
“Obi,” she tries, moving to block his way into the apartment, her heart pounding. “I don’t understand -”
He experiments with lifting her suitcase an inch off the floor, and his entire neck immediately breaks out in cords. He grimaces, then lets the non-rotating wheels thud back to the ground. “What did you put in this thing?”
“Obi, it’s Christmas Eve!” She plants her feet, and it’s hopefully as Baba and Deda had always said - the world couldn’t move her, slammed into her back or offered up on a silver platter. “What is going on?”
Obi considers her, his smile as soft as the clumps of snow that had rained from the sky just days prior. Its… unsettling. “This is a lockdown.”
The five stages of grief must work more like a slot machine. Any same three tokens will land you somewhere in the middle, and any non-win sends you straight back to the very beginning.
The average American male is roughly one-hundred and seventy-six centimeters tall, white, nearly obese, has dark hair, and believes in Capitalism. Just such an one has taken an apparent interest in the apartment buildings just west of Wisteria Sciences, and in the unassuming darkness of three A.M., had committed the grievous transgression of trying to enter the building without an access card.
The only thing to assume is, clearly, the very worst.
“That could’ve been anyone, doing anything,” Shirayuki finally says six hours to midnight. She looks up from her textbook for the first time that afternoon and peruses her surroundings with something bordering on horror. Or maybe that’s just the blood rushing from her head. “This all seems a bit excessive.”
“It’s reusable, is the point.” Obi’s mouth is tilted in an apologetic smirk. “Though the TV that we’re not watching was a personal suggestion. You’re welcome.”
She’s certain he’s never sat properly on a couch in his entire life - he’s perched on the hard back of the one adjacent to hers with his back flat to the wall, his legs a long tangle in front of him, a great, dark gargoyle watching over her reading.
She’d thought for the briefest instant that she’d be alone, or sharing with Kiki. How naive she was.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watches one of his arms curl around his shins, hogtying himself with… himself. He’s too flexible to be natural. “Kid - you told Yuzuri and the others not to drop by -”
“I don’t usually do anything for Christmas Eve,” she says quickly.
“But it’s not a problem, the point is just to keep you where you aren’t usually, you could -”
“This is the perfect time for studying.” She eyes him. “Usually.”
Both of Obi’s hands fist in the couch cushions just under the balls of his feet. “Please tell me I’ve done more than screw up some book-reading time.”
A hot flush creeps up Shirayuki’s neck. “You haven’t.”
Obi makes it twenty more minutes.
Then he arches away from the wall and springs feet-first from the back of the couch like an acrobat. Shirayuki yelps in surprise, nearly dropping her book on her stomach.
His laptop is resting on the thin carpet, and he drags it into his lap, connecting it to the TV with a cord - and please, why, on this Christmas Eve where she’s been grounded by the world’s shadiest bodyguard, where a psychopath could very well be combing the building in search of her - why couldn’t he just leave her be?
Furious tapping at his keyboard, and within moments, soft, crooning Christmas music fills the apartment.
Her fingers freeze, halfway through flicking through the textbook for the dozenth time. Oh.
Decades of history have built up to a moment like this: the crackling of a gramophone prickling along the backs of her arms with the bittersweetness of memories that may or may not actually be there, winter’s constant and truest companion. Recorded ages ago, digitized, and now playing loud and clear the cozy horns muffled by another time, all over a smart TV with a screen about as thick around as a fifth-grader’s notebook.
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” murmurs Nat King Cole, and in all the places where a chill might grip her spine in the wake of a shock, warmth instead suffuses her frosted corners. Shirayuki blinks; the miniscule type superimposed over her textbook diagrams blurs into nonsense.
She peeks over the edge of the book.
There’s a fire on the TV.
No, really - that’s it. A blazing, picturesque fire in a fireplace, stockings pushed to the corners and out of harm’s way, hints of greenery teasing the edges of the screen, half-opened presents done up in metallic wrapping paper and glittery bows scattered across a cheery red carpet.
A smile tugs at Shirayuki’s lips. “Is that...?”
“It’s the Yule Log.” Obi half-shuts his laptop screen and glows with obvious pride. A strange look for a man wearing all black and a concealed gun belt on Christmas Eve. “Guess you’ve heard of it.”
The fire burning probably a thousand miles away lights the living room in a warm glow, stark against the whitewashed walls and neutral gray carpet, the taupe furniture. Shirayuki grins and sits up, the open textbook sliding into her lap. “When I was little, we burned a real log in a real fire. Every single year.”
And Halloween would end and she’d already be blasting her Christmas playlists on repeat, and they’d bake more batches of cookies than they could all eat in a month’s time, much less in a weekend’s span, and they would ding-dong-ditch the extras at the neighbors’, and the holidays were a time with nebulous beginnings and ends that blended together and didn’t end at all.
Crouched on the floor, Obi’s smile falters. Ah, she wishes there was a rewind button for life, one you could push and zap yourself back ten seconds or twenty - keep the guttering moments burning, lesson learned and in your back pocket, harmless.
Hippocrates probably wished for the same thing. Only the crisis would veer in the same direction, every time.
Obi reaches out a hand and with two fingers stilted like a clothespin over his keyboard keys, drains the volume on the Yule Log broadcast. He keeps his gaze locked on hers, golden and unreadable.
Then he stands, takes his phone out of his pocket, swipes the screen with one of the fingers black leather doesn’t claim, and then peers at her out of the corners of his eyes like she’s the one with a secret.
“What?” Her stockinged toes grip the edge of a couch cushion.
Self-conscious, she realizes. She’s alone in an apartment with Obi and she’s feeling bashful.
Obi nods once like she’s said it all. “I’ve got just the thing.”
He taps something on his phone, and the speaker between his knee and the TV blares to life.
“Bluetooth?”
Obi grants her a conspiratorial wink, and nothing more. That’s when the singing starts.
This is it. She’s never been more suspicious of Obi than she is in this moment.
“This isn’t Christmas music.”
“We can listen to that later,” he says, stepping closer. Shirayuki tucks her legs in tight underneath her. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
“Obi -”
He makes a gentling, placating gesture, a simple press of his hands on thin air. Hesitant. A twinge of guilt bites her at that - he doesn’t need to reassure her, not anymore.
He nods at the book in her lap. “That - is the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.”
She could grab it, press it to her chest. She probably should.
Instead, she’s fighting back a wide, silly grin as Obi slips it gently from her lap and, without looking, tosses it across the room. It lands squarely on the armchair cushion and bounces there unharmed.
Strangely, it’s like the past few years go with it, trapped between the pages, tossed out of reach.
The music - a song she knows she must’ve heard at some point, but never committed to memory - starts up with a smart, rhythmic drumming, the horns high and blaring, the singing teasing and jovial all at once, enough to almost coax even her shoulders to start moving, her head to start bobbing.
Obi waggles his brows and backs up into the middle of the room. And then, slowly, matching only every two beats, his hips begin to sway.
Oh - oh, no. Barely in time, her hand slaps over her mouth, choking back a loud snort. From between her clenching fingers, she manages, “Is this how you celebrate Christmas, wherever you’re from?”
“Christmas?” he purrs, teeth flashing white against bronze skin. The song punches a high note and his head flicks to the side in time. “I could be Buddhist. Zoroastrian, even.”
She knows he’s making fun, but she still blushes, sharp and hot. Deda had always done the same to her, with the same effect. “I didn’t mean -”
“Come on, kid.”
It’s sudden. Obi’s voice plunges into a soft husk, and her stomach drops so sweetly -
She looks at him, heart pounding - not faster. Just heavy.
Really looks at him, where always before he had slipped beneath notice. Just a quiet addition to the spaces she occupied, as silent a threat as a cat glowering from the shadows. In a room with two people and him in it, it had always added up to just two.
It - it feels like two now.
Strange how some days, you just notice people. And the secretly empty, three-hour-old apartment suddenly feels very close around them, drawstrings drawn tighter and tighter the longer she looks, until Obi’s warm, amber gaze finds hers at last. Shy - and hopeful.
He raises an arm with the palm up, fingers gently spread toward her. “You can celebrate a bit.”
The lump that rises in her throat threatens rain. But he can’t have known how, what those words mean -
She’s off the couch and across the carpet and her fingertips hinge onto the middles of his, and after a moment of wide-eyed wonder, his mouth splits into the most brilliant grin she’s ever seen.
“You suck at this!” Obi crows. He sashays close again and just barely clips her hip with his, enough to nearly send her careening into the curtains.
Her face burns, but her cheeks hurt from grinning. At least she stayed upright this time. “Of course I do! How do you even dance to, um…”
“The Temptations?” Obi prompts - then, scandalized: “Motown?”
“So how?” she demands, caught halfway between snarling at him and laughing herself sick, trying to, um, locomotion with her arms, a sort of step-slide thing, is that it?
Sniggering, Obi’s hips start in again, rocking from side to side. She can see his waist working under his black shirt, half-hidden by his leather jacket. “Try this, kid.”
She thrusts one hip to the right. Then the other to the left.
“Kid. Oh my -”
“I’m trying -”
Obi covers his face, and howls with laughter into his hands.
Kittens, of all things - tiny, fluffy, squirmy, unsteady on reedy legs - come popping out of the packages scattered around the Yule Log. Shirayuki seizes the opportunity.
“Giving up?” Obi whines, executing a perfect heel-turn in the middle of the living room. Where he pulls this stuff from, she’ll never know. “We were just getting somewhere!”
“I want to watch the Yule Log!”
“You want to watch the Yule Log.”
Honestly, she’ll do anything to pad the time until her next round of embarrassment. But they are adorable. “Kittens, Obi.”
He frowns once at the flickering TV screen, the fire burning high and cheery in the fireplace, kittens tottering across the carpet and tripping over one another, and likely into the arms of waiting cameramen offscreen.
In a single, rapid tug, Obi unzips his jacket.
Shirayuki’s eyes narrow. “Obi?”
And from one of his bottomless pockets, he whips a pair of dark sunglasses. He dons them with a slow sweep of his hands.
“You’ve got better things to watch,” he purrs, and she laughs until tears come.
“Kid, it’s fun, just keep trying -”
“You’re better at it than me!”
“So what?” he snorts. She dodges to one side and barely misses the TV; Obi guffaws. At least he’d ditched the glasses after nearly walking into one of the walls. “Watch out for the Yule Log!”
With agility she never knew she had, she’s up on the couch, stockinged feet pressing deep into the secondhand cushions, arms held out for balance - she sends Izana a mental apology. “I’ll just watch you from here!”
Obi immediately preens, of course he can’t help it. He grins and trails gloved fingers savoringly down his own chest, and even though a laugh is still jumping in her gut - it’s obvious, suddenly, the shape of his chest, the part of his sternum, beneath the fitted black shirt.
A quick movement, and he’s shucked the jacket down his arms, shrugging it to the floor. Next comes the occupied gun belt strapped around his waist - a buckle freed from around his waist, a second from around his thigh. They hit the carpet in heaps.
He’s being funny. Hilarious, really. Looser and sillier than he’s ever been ever, with her, it’s -
Darn, dang him.
“You’re almost as bad as Suzu,” she admonishes, rather weakly, if she’s being honest.
“I’m flattered,” he snorts, and means it - she swears the tips of his ears are pink. But the music blares playful horns, and his hands flick daintily to the sides and he slides up to the couch across the carpet in his socks. The gloved hand proffers itself again. “Just come down! I’m not gonna bite.”
This flush she feels in her neck, her chest - he’s too mischievous, his eyes flare too gold, his grin is just too sharp, his shoulders too lean, his waist too trim in about as few clothes as she’s ever seen him in, too vulnerable, too fun.
The music rises. She doesn’t know where it comes from. She just grabs his hand, lifts her elbow, circles it once with her weight powering the point where they join, skin on warm leather.
Obi spins effortlessly under her direction, a perfect turnout. In a breath, she’s at the very edge of the couch cushion - she tugs on his hand and he’s right there in a sharp inhale, his chest a bare inch from her belly.
She stares down at him, her breaths suddenly shallow. He tips his face up so he can gape up at her in amazement while a televised Yule Log flickers golden light across one cheekbone and jaw. His hand is limp in hers.
No preamble is needed - she knows he’s going to pull it free. Uncertainty parts the curtain of Motown and kittens and laughter.
Her fingers tighten around his. No, she’s not ready, not when she’s finally feeling like this, for the first time in -
Obi’s smile pulls wide in the frame of her short red hair falling about her cheeks. “Knew you had it in you.”
“You still won’t tell me how to dance to this,” she huffs.
He raises his eyebrows, serious. “Then we’d better get to work.”
And then there’s an arm around the backs of her thighs; her knees buckle, she shrieks. A hand spreads across the small of her back and she tips forward off the couch with arms flailing straight into Obi, who tightens his grip on her legs and slings her over his shoulder like he’s been doing it for years, knocking the breath from her lungs.
He’s barking with laughter; she arches her back so she’s not staring at the carpet, hands scrabbling at the slick fabric sloped over his back, gasping for breath, yelling his name - “Obi, Obi, stop, put me down!” - between shocked giggles, trying not to kick his thighs or worse, this is insane -
The release is sudden - without explanation, she’s sliding down his shoulder through the circle of his arms and landing on her feet with a thump. She stumbles - Obi rocks close, a hand on her shoulder to steady her.
Dimly, she senses the song change again. And Obi meets her gaze with a giddy fire in his.
“Now do your worst, kid,” he breathes.
A few stupid antics, and it’s like they’ve mind-bridged. Or more like, she just stops thinking.
Obi rocks right - she follows. Left. Her arms are doing… something embarrassing, probably. Her feet keep the rhythm. He pivots and she pivots around him - they slide apart, socks dragging against the carpet that’s seen more action in the last couple hours than it probably has in the last two years.
It’s release like she’s never felt it before.
She’s sweating by the time they rearrange the furniture and hop up onto opposite couches, still trying to dance with hampered movements, laughing uproariously, though of course Obi hardly missteps once, who does he think he is anyway?
But it’s fine - she’s giddy, she’s lost, she rolls her hips and Obi stops dancing entirely to applaud, she throws one of the Ikat pillows at him and he catches it and flings it back at about ten times the speed - “We’ve got to be more careful, this stuff is Izana’s, isn’t it?” “If it’s Izana’s, then we’re doing whatever we want, hand me that chair.” - Obi drags in his own suitcase at one point and opens it to reveal a cascade of Christmas candy, and she does not ask where he got it from.
It’s eleven P.M. and she’s panting when Obi finally stills her with a hand on her arm. He’s visibly flushed, his black shirt is clinging to him in ways that have her averting her eyes at turns, and - he’s glowing from the inside out, relaxed. Happy.
He looks as happy as she feels.
“Put your coat on,” he says, grinning. “I think it’s snowing.”
Maybe she ought to be worried, she thinks, as she follows at an awkward stomp in Obi’s wider footprints through a burgeoning snowdrift to the shadowed backside of the apartment building. But their borrowed apartment window is open two floors above their heads, a glowing hole in the bricks, and letting through the soaring slide of strings and what sounds like a lyric-less chorus line, and it’s all too weird for her to get scared anyway.
It’s also snowing, just as Obi had said. Fat, clumped flakes yet again, large enough that she feels them hiss by her in the backdrop of winter silence, winces and blinks when they catch heavy as anchors in her lashes.
A clump of snow tips into her boot and soaks her leggings in ice. It pops words out of her. “Obi, it’s freezing! What are we doing out here?”
She only asks out of reflex. If this night has taught her one thing, it’s that Obi always has something in mind.
He turns to face her, a black silhouette against the light shafting down from their window above, against the pale glow of the fresh snow. His clothes don’t shed snow well, and patches of white cling to his shoulders and back and thighs. She smiles.
“You’re cold?” he teases, voice loud underneath the distant hum of the orchestra, arms crossed.
“Yes!”
“Then come here.”
It’s a bit disconcerting that his face reflects every bit as much surprise as hers is surely showing.
“Uh, I mean.” He visibly swallows. Stumbles forward a few steps, unsteady in the snow, and - opens his arms. “Here.”
She pitches forward without thinking. Warning skitters up her spine, an ugly reminder. Tonight she’s let herself be so relaxed, she shouldn’t -
Whatever she’d thought would happen, doesn’t. Obi catches one of her wrists gently, if clumsily, his leathered fingers seeking their place around where her parka and mitten meet. He meets her eyes - It’s me, just me - and splays her open hand on his chest, just above his heart.
Her own gives a single, deafening, answering thump. She goes numb from the waist up. “Um - uh -”
“Figured you shouldn’t go much longer without learning this, too,” he blurts, the words almost somersaulting over each other in their haste to leave his tongue. His breath clouds white in her face - he’s close. So close she might feel the impact of his words on her cheeks. “Uh, real dancing, I mean. The Wisterias like balls. And stuff.”
“Oh. I - right.” She blushes - Zen - not the hot blazes of embarrassment Obi’s witnessed a dozen times so far tonight, but something deeper that wends its way under her skin.
As far as she can recall, she’s never said a word to Obi about any of - any of that. But he’s careful, eyes searching her face earnestly. Considerate with the knowledge he effortlessly gleans from mere scraps. The mittened-together fingers of her left hand slide into place between his index and thumb, and his fingers drift closed over her hand.
And she’s not afraid. She hasn’t been for even a second this entire night. The thought that she even might have been is ludicrous to her inner ear.
Obi’s free hand falls to her waist, then slips higher until she senses the press of his fingers at the top of the small of her back, coaxing her closer. Her body pulls in a soft arch into his, her coat and his jacket thick padding between them, and she becomes only gradually aware that they’re swaying from side to side, so comparatively still are they to how a sheet of snowflakes races infinitely to the ground against the dark sky stained orange by streetlights.
It’s remarkably easy to let her weight descend against his; her chin tips back so she can look at him, haloed in the window light, his eyes dark wells. “This is real dancing?” she asks, her smile pulling her chilled lips from her teeth.
He rolls his eyes, a smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. “You’re gonna need real lessons for the real stuff,” he admits. “But I can loosen you up a little.”
She’s not sure if she’s supposed to laugh or not, but the moment passes and Obi’s hand cups her hip, his thumb pressing into her pelvic bone. It guides her into a gentler sway, unlocks her knees; he returns it to her back.
Terrible. Hours of monkeying around the whole apartment, and she still needs loosening up?
“You don’t have to do any of this,” she says as carefully as she can, like setting a china plate on a stone tabletop without a sound.
His hand at her back tightens, drawing her closer. Pressed this tightly to his front, she can feel where his gun belt isn’t under his jacket; he’d left it on the living room floor with a shake of his head. They’re not the weapons I rely on, kid.
“Sure I have to,” he says, amused. There are bright white snowflakes frosting his short lashes, and she finds herself staring a bit too long, too vacantly. “What are bodyguards for?”
She gives a short laugh, surprised. “What do you think bodyguards are for?”
“I think we’re multipurpose.” He lifts his hand and she turns out clumsily, her boots sifting through inches of freshly-fallen snow in the path of their circle away from and then back to him. He cinches her in tight again, and it’s - nice. “And now when the boss asks you on a fancy date, your body knows what to do. Bodyguard.”
The only thing to do is to just shake her head, sometimes. She stares at his dusky cheek, the texture roughened and organic in the light from the window. “You put me on lockdown.”
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately. She shifts and looks into his eyes, and he holds her gaze, narrowed and earnest.
Someone honks from a great distance off, carried far on the thin, sharp winter air. The orchestra drifting in through their window changes - a new song, something deeper, heavier on the cello. It’s ethereal in the snowfall, so otherworldly her heart aches when her mind tries to cling to the blend of sensations, to the bite of cold fought off by Obi’s warmth, to the silence under the noise.
“You don’t - don’t be sorry,” she stammers. This is a misstep he can’t brace her against. “There really could be someone dangerous out here.”
Obi is silent just a blink too long. And she feels, in a small, terrible way, the distance between them yawn a little wider.
“You read through Christmas Eves,” he says softly.
Her heart twists. “I study.”
“Do you want to study now?”
His face has gotten closer, she swears it. She can see the spikes of fresh snowflakes forking into his lashes. The fingers inside her mitten curl against his chest, stiff in the cold that’s slowly burrowing its way through her.
“No,” she whispers.
Obi gives her nothing. Just a single, slow blink, and then his gaze wandering away from hers, staring instead somewhere off in the snowy darkness.
She’s struck with the overwhelming urge to lay her head on his chest. The thought of how nice it would feel for his arms to go around her, tuck her in closer.
The thought is quashed almost the moment it touches her brain. Obi was altogether too nice today.
Finally, he says: “You’ve had something on your mind.” His jaw flexes once. The silence rings with his inner noise.
She thinks, for a single moment, of Hippocrates. Crisis. Of grief.
Then she turns her back on it all.
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him quietly. “I mean - not today.”
He still doesn’t look at her. Maybe it’s just a side effect of the life he’s chosen - eyes always on what you’d least expect.
But now there’s no one watching her watching him. And that’s all right, she thinks - a private galaxy enfolding just them, all virgin, untried ground.
It’s peace anticipating a blaze.
“Okay,” is his answer for her, and he gives her hand in his a long, warm press. Somewhere, from miles away, church bells gong into the night. Idly, he adds, “Merry Christmas, kid.”
All right, folks, that’s it for the Obiyuki Winter Challenge! So many of you participated and we are so happy that you did. Here are the links to the four days’ entries - enjoy!
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
But don’t go anywhere - our next challenge isn’t far off! For this challenge, we’ll be needing your help to get ready for it, so stay tuned!
Shirayuki’s head spins. The sun is much too bright for a winter day like this. Its light should be filtering through great towering trees until they’re warm fingers against the soil under her feet, or peeking from behind the bricks of the clock tower in Wistal, not blaring in her eyes in reflections against endless fields of snowy shrub and bush.
But she has to find…or else…
“Miss!”
She stumbles and falls into black.
Obi stares out into the steppe with Shirayuki’s hand in his, pulling her sleeping weight on top of the broom with him.
He never thought he’d be anywhere near here again, where the skies are open in the wild and the grass is dry against his pant legs. Where instead of deep red flowers bloom against all odds even if they are laced with white ice, there are only little black shrubs closed in on themselves, hiding from life.
Where people look more like him than they do her.
That’s how far they are from Wistal.
He sighs towards the sky and winter breath swirls into the air as he begins his search. Miss said she’s looking for Coneflowers to shorten the Winter Flu – by up to half she said – so they set off at dawn that morning through the woods and over the eastern mountain borders. It’s quite enough flying for her to zip through Wistal from house to house, then to the Lyrias labs, then back home already every day. He can’t imagine what it’s like flying across countries until the sun is already dipping halfway down the sky.
But things are different now. He’s not running to the ends of the world looking for trees and buildings to hide in like the Coneflowers in the tall grass – he has no need to anyway, not since he found the rose bleeding red and life from underneath the cold and ice.
He told her if he had nine lives, he would spend them all with her.
Nine lives sleeping under floating jars. Nine lives waking up to the smell of herbs and the smell of her. Nine lives of flying, of notebooks, of warmth.
He’s not quite sure what he did to deserve them.
Obi stops when the grass thickens and black dots pepper the sea of dull yellow. He slips Shirayuki’s bag off his shoulders as he squats.
“Don’t hide,” he murmurs as he reaches for his knives and for her jars. “She’ll make sure you do good.”
His back is starting to feel sore.
Just a little, when he’s hunched over for hours filling every last jar with Coneflower, gently dropping them so they comfortable fit inside. He lifts his lantern off the ground and turns around, staring back towards the path of lone footprints and discarded shrub littered in the snow.
By his side, she stirs.
The moment Shirayuki opens her eyes, every part of her but her hand shivers. She grips her fingers and turns her head. “Obi?”
“Oh, Miss.” Obi looks down at her. “You’re awake—wait, don’t get up! You’re on your broom—“
Suddenly the world spins and her back thumps against snow.
She knows Obi is by her side already – she can hear his knees hit the ground but all she can do is throw her hand over her mouth and writhe as giggles bubble in her chest.
“Shirayuki, are you okay?!”
She rolls over into Obi’s knees, still holding his hand, and slaps his leg with the other. He shakes under her palm, choking up with laughter until he doubles over her back and starts to let it all out. She stops laughing for a moment underneath him, just so she can hear him and the bright sound that rings in the cold air.
They lie there in the snow for a while, even after Obi stops laughing. He’s so silent now she even wonders if he fell asleep.
She breathes, “Obi—“
“I filled up all the jars you brought – ready to go home whenever you are.”
Shirayuki presses her palm closer in his, looking down. “What would I do without you?”
“Well, first of all,” he snorts, “You’d be lying in the snow by yourself with a bag full of empty jars. Talk about a failed mission, am I right?”
She would be going too fast – too focused on bleeding life and becoming something beautiful and worthwhile in the cold and forgetting sometimes it’s okay to just be. It’s okay to slow down and get lost in his eyes whether or not he’s looking too.
She’s been going too fast since she was left alone all those years ago.
“Shirayuki, look!”
Obi suddenly lets go of her hand and points towards the sky. She follows his finger, jaw dropping as she sees the night painted by silk curtains of blue. It feels like home and the familiar cool glow at her fingertips, the same blue that brings light to the things she touches. To stretch her fingers out and watch the colour flow across the world above her like summer ocean, next to the golden warmth by her side, fills her heart.
In one moment she is cheerily walking down the winding path the to city, the cloying pressure of the knowe lightening with each step she took away from the center of its power, and the next --
The next fear grips her, makes her rip at her bag, searching, searching --
She’s left it behind. Her mother’s journal.
It’s as if the trees have bent in to pick at her, dark shadows growing long over to loom, and -- and --
She trusts Zen, of course she does, and Kiki and Mitsuhide too, but --
But she knows it’s a mistake to leave it, to treat them as she might human companions and wait until the next time she’s summoned. A thing like that, steeped in the magics of not only her, but her mother, and her mother before her --
Zen would not force her to be put under geas, not ever, but she’s heard whispers of his brother, of the man who the knowe obeys, and she would have to be a fool to risk that falling into his hands, or the hands of one of his.
Like that man. Haruka. Oh god, that she has not left it within easy sight of Lord Haruka.
She runs back to the gates, and for once she wishes she did have a geas on her. She could be fleet as deer, covering miles in moments with barely a quickening of breath, but instead she’s merely human, left to sweat and gasp for breath like all mortals.
Her feet skid to a stop before she reaches them. Something in the air isn’t right; she should smell ancient ash and honey, but instead it is pine on the air, and a hint of copper.
She creeps forward, using the trees to cover her movements. There is a man standing before the sentinels, deep in conversation.
“Not allow Shirayuki in?” She cannot tell the sentinels apart by looks, not yet -- the bark makes their faces too similar, and she hasn’t gotten close enough to look at their trunks in depth -- but she can tell by voice. This one sounds younger, less raspy; it must be Kai. “But the Second Prince has told us.”
“The order has been changed,” the man says, dressed in the livery of Wistal, though she doesn’t think she’s seen a man like him before. She’s remember him, she’s sure: he’s tall, with a bristle of dark hair -- all common enough -- but there’s something about the way he stands that make him stand out, that makes her find his casual slouch menacing.
It’s Shiira’s groan she recognizes now. “That doesn’t --”
“I once knew a man with four daughters,” the man says, apropos to nothing, “four daughters and a wife had he.”
Pine pricks her, so sharp she’s sure it draws blood. Copper floods her senses, the cloying scent leaving her dizzy and disoriented.
Magic. He’s doing magic. He’s trying to bespell the sentinels.
“If each these daughters had a brother,” he continues, a chill cutting right through to her bones, “then how many members of this family do there be?”
It isn’t possible. The ash trees are as old as the knowe itself, impregnable --
“Ah,” Kai murmurs, “thatsh...that’s...ten. No?”
“No,” the man says, so kindly. “But do try again.”
“It don’t make no sensh -- sense. Doesn’t make any sense,” Shiira slurs. “It’s got to be ten.”
“It’s not,” the man assures him. “I could leave you to think on it, come back later?”
“Yeah.” Kai’s branches shiver. “Yeah, that’d -- that’d work! Come back later.”
Dear god, has he made the sentinels drunk?
“And the girl?” he prompts, so innocent.
“What girl?” the sentinels ask, their voices filling the wood.
“Ah.” He turns his head just so, and she sees a smile cut through shadow. “Perfect.”
Sneak peek at a later arc of The Beast with the Beautiful Face.
Prompt: Obiyuki Winter Challenge, Day 1
The cabin door slammed open in a gust of wind, showering the room with the first flakes of snow.
Shirayuki staggered inside, her arms wrapped around a bundle of wood. She leaned back against the door, digging in her heels until it clicked shut.
Warmth washed over her. The air was spicy with the scent of evergreen boughs and drying herbs.
Shirayuki tramped across the rug and unloaded her armful of wood beside the fireplace. She wiped her brow and counted on her fingers, “Water in the kettle, lamps are trimmed, stockings are drying… and there’s enough wood to last the night.” Sighing in relief, she sank into a chair.
The wind was stirring the tree branches, the sky churning purple and gray with the oncoming storm, but inside the fire glowed gold.
“It will be warm when Obi gets back… I’m glad.” She drew up her knees, burrowing deeper into the cushions.
After so many nights away, he would be bright-eyed and brimming with chatter about his travels. “The leaves were orange...have you ever seen a plant like that, missus?” and “You can have this, missus. It’s from a desert country--the women wear it on their toes.” She could picture the tips of his fingers, reddened with cold, wrapping around the handle of a steaming mug. His eyes would widen. “You made this, missus? It’s better than beer...”
She smiled as her eyes drifted closed. She could almost hear his footsteps crunching the snow. When the door opened, she would run to him, let him hold her. Sometimes he would snatch her up and hold her at arm’s length, like a treasure best admired from a distance, like a dream that wavered under close inspection, and sometimes he would cradle her against his chest and say nothing but touch her face with his fingertips and sigh.
Then he might scoop her up and carry her to the fireside, sit cross-legged with his back against the chair and her nestled in his lap, and his hands tapping--
Tapping the--
Her eyes opened. Someone was knocking on the door.
“Obi?” Shirayuki started up, her hands smoothing down her skirt as she swung around in confusion. “Obi--” She stumbled towards the door, grabbing her wrap from a hook on the wall. She hadn’t had time to warm up the cider... He would be freezing after rushing home in this weather.
Snow fell thick and fast outside the windows now. The sky had darkened to black, blotting out the lattice of tree branches.
The wind rose, groaning like a human voice, then sank to a whisper: “Shirayuki…”
She froze. The wrap slipped from her fingers. That wasn’t Obi’s voice.
A shiver rolled down her spine. Shirayuki called, “Who is it?”
The voice sighed.
She swallowed, inching towards the door. “Is that you…”
There’s no way of knowing if the former is true, but he has certainly tested the latter, evident enough in the way his body is a crisscrossed road map of silver. He traces each one with a sort of fondness: at one intersection, a life saved; at another, a soul lost.
He would keep their memories closer to his heart if he had half the mind to, but the weight of blood and bone carries him down to a time when he crushed wailing spirits between his teeth, gnawing on their atrophy like a child with taffy.
It’s best to forget the good he has done. He will never be able to pay his debt in sorrow.
* * *
“I wish you weren’t like this,” she scolds, cutting his shirt away from his open shoulder blade.
He hisses, bearing his teeth as she begins to pour alcohol over the wound. What a shame to waste such an expensive thing on one as low as him. “Would you prefer it if I just let them take you, Miss?” he grins over his shoulder. “Let them suck the marrow from your bones? It must be delicious. I would love to try it for myself.”
Dark eyes framed in a darker face stare back at him, steady, and his breath catches in his throat. Her face shifts and changes - all of her pasts, all of her futures, all at once - and for a moment he knows what a curse was laid upon him when the gods had opened his Sight.
“Why do you talk about yourself like that?” she asks.
He closes his eye from the vision, shame stirring in his heart.
“Because it’s the truth.”
~ ~ ~
It’s hard to recall when the pact was sworn, a blood of oath and soul, but their spirits are intertwined. For him, she is steady as his heartbeat; for her, he is eternal as the earth she constantly returns to. His role as her protector, as a demon god formed from the ill will of men, meant to bear his teeth where she cannot, has been written in the stars since before the universe was born.
But he wouldn’t be what he is without standing against them in challenge. Every time, he swears he’ll never do it again. It shouldn’t be the place of those on the cusp of descending into the sixteen hells to walk the same road as those who are nearly liberated.
He manages a lifetime at first, maybe two. But she has become his compass; no matter which direction he goes, she is always his northbound star.
This time around, she burns particularly bright. She attracts more than just the ire of royalty.
So he calls down a warning, he lets it fly free:
To the red haired guest: Do not advance even one more step. Leave!
Even from here, he can feel the way her eyes scald him. It makes him want to offer his throat in repentance.
She rips the arrow from centuries old stone and charges forward.
~ ~ ~
The rain pounds against dry earth, quickly soaking until it overflows. It’s truly a pleasure to see his blood mixing with it.
“You’re getting reckless,” Torou scolds, rending her skirt and gathering enough fabric to staunch the bleeding. “Just because she isn’t here to hold your reigns does not mean you should test them.”
He laughs, low in his chest. “You know what they say about curiosity and felines.”
Torou makes a sound. She’s worried, but she also knows it is best not to look him in the eye.
“I know I’m no better when my Master is between the worlds,” she replies. “But when the time comes for her return, think of how many fewer years she will have if you are not there to protect her.”
Obi hums. “I wonder how many fewer times she would come back if I did not interfere in her life at all.”
Hands still, frozen like the still North.
“What a horrible thing to say.”
~ ~ ~
The only way to get close is to supplicant himself before another.
So he takes another Master. A soul who by all rights should use him to tear down their enemies.
He orders him not to show himself before her, instead.
It is the greatest relief to feel himself bound by such a law.
It is also a blessing to know that she has found herself such a protector in this life. One subject to mortal laws with mortal kings and a stage to rise her up upon when the time comes. He smothers the protesting nag in his chest; the one that rejects; the one that says Mine! when it has no right to.
It’s better this way. Really.
~ ~ ~
“Is it always the same?” she asks, toes dipping out from beneath silk and lace to feel the current of the river against skin. It is a challenge to hold himself still when she puts herself so close to danger.
“Is what the same, Mistress?”
“Me,” she replies, lavender eyes flickering to his. “You.”
He sighs heavily, the weight of the ages weighing heavy on his chest.
“Some things yes,” he replies. “Some things no.”
She hums. He knows that she is unsatisfied with his answer.
“You are always beautiful,” he grins, pleased when she lets a curtain of dark hair hide her blush. “But I do not shed my skin like you. What you see before you is what I am.”
She looks up at him, curious now. “And what are you?”
His grin falters and he looks beyond her to the opposite bank.
“I wish I knew.”
~ ~ ~
He runs, freer than he has felt in lifetimes, leaping from frosted tree to frozen stonework. The ease of joints and heart sing through his veins: how good it is that he’s found her; how good it is that he is kept away.
A protector. A potential companion. She has one. The more he thinks about it, the more he likes it.
She doesn’t need him this time. If he were to simply disappear into the ethers, she would be none the wiser.
But it is as if her soul has heard his, the way she appears before him, weighed down with a box that looks heavier than she is.
His feet become as solid as the stone beneath him.
Every incarnation is the same. Every incarnation is different. She still pulls him, an invisible string from his heart to her beckoning fingers.
This form of hers lacks all the physical grace of her prior lifetimes, though. It makes him want to scold her when she sways under her own weight. It makes him want to tell her that she should not have hidden herself away so well before now. He would have at least taught her how to walk properly.
Don’t.
The box slips numbly from her grip, landing only a breath from her toes. His whole body twitches.
Don’t do it.
She picks the box back up, swaying violently, and her feet are no longer firm beneath her body and-
His heart moves towards hers, dragging his body with it before his mind can even garner a vote.
And just like that, he has her. One arm circling her waist, the other balancing a far too heavy box.
And just like that, his binds are newly formed.
He pulls her up to her feet and looks away. It’s all he can do to hide his exhilaration; it’s all he can do to not fall to his knees in relief.
“…And I did it.”
~ ~ ~
His presses hard against her stomach, blood hot and sticky staining his hands. It’s not enough, it’s not enough. He’s not her. He only knows how to deal in death, not in life-
A palm, already cooling, rests upon his cheek and his head snaps up. She’s smiling, fond and loving in a way he doesn’t deserve, not when he couldn’t find her until now, not until his first sight of her was to be his last.
“Mistress,” he breathes. “Don’t leave. I just got you back.”
Her skin is paler than her hair, paler than the snow blowing in drifts around her. She opens her mouth, but only blood comes out, deep and red and thick, staining her lips, running down her chin.
“Please,” he begs.
Eyes the color of ice drift shut.
~ ~ ~
It’s a selfish dance his heart plays, drifting closer to her; holding himself back. But it is danger that resolves him.
“And so we have another problem,” Obi says, hands aching to have soft throat give way beneath them. That anyone would dare to take his Mistress-
“Mitsuhide,” Master says, and it’s like a slap to the face. "I leave the matter of Shirayuki’s escort to you.”
Obi stares at his Masters back.
That-
That is a step too far.
~ ~ ~
“I didn’t believe you when I was younger,” Mistress murmurs.
“Oh?” he grins, kneeling at her bedside to smooth the blankets down where she has kicked them up. “Do I have an untrustworthy face?”
She manages a breathy sort of laugh. “Yes.”
He smiles at the way her eyes glitter with her teasing. “What changed your mind?”
“You did,” she replies. “You and your magic tricks.”
“Ah, Mistress!” he mocks affront, palm to chest. “Such a thing to accuse me of!”
“You must have at least a few,” she smiles, reaching out and pressing her palm against his. The smile falls from his face, his body becoming one taut string of longing. “How else could I be so old and you still so beautiful?”
Her pulse falters through gossamer skin and already the madness of loneliness snaps at his heel. “You are still the most beautiful creation ever made,” he breathes, his heart swelling on his tongue.
She huffs, eyes closing. “Liar.”
He wants to argue, if only to keep her near for just a little while longer. She could never resist a good fight or for him to be right for more than a minute. But it would be wrong to let her sleep with an argument on her lips.
“I miss fresh air,” his Mistress murmurs after a time, and even that is too much effort for her cracking voice. Her thumb runs the line of his when he leans in closer to catch her failing breath. “And quiet. I’ll think it’s time to retire alone to the mountains.”
He closes his eyes and lets himself pretend that he has gone with her.
~ ~ ~
The stars stretch out like an endless blanket above him and he wonders yet again why they placed him at her side. His chest burns like his palm where he had held her for only a second longer than what was proper.
Not for him. Not for him. Why was that so hard for him to remember?
This place puts him on edge, and at the fringes of his senses, he can hear a million devils snarling at the boundaries he has placed. How foolish of him. He had been too flippant, too trusting of a mortal with her protection. It was only through appealing to Master’s own cravings that she had any sort of proper guard at all.
Ah, but how much easier it would have been if he had been able to come, too.
“Obi!”
He starts, blinking at the vision that she paints as she stands just an arm's length away. Her smile is kind and gentles even the moonlight.
“Did I wake you?”
He forces a smile to his lips and shakes his head. “No, rather I was just longing for Master.”
Something in her softens and she blushes in a sweet sort of way. “Zen is probably lonely too.”
His heart squeezes. He wants to tell her. He craves her comfort in this, but he came too late in this lifetime. She wouldn’t understand. She would just be upset knowing of his isolation, how the years between companionship and desolation stretches out before him like a death sentence.
“After such a long time, anyone would go a little mad.”
