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Mitsutomoe: Part 2 - A Mirror Pearled with Mist

by wombat

At first, all Tomoe felt was the ragged curtain of Kenshin's hair against her face, his mouth hovering barely above hers. When she tipped her head up to close the gap, his kiss stayed as soft and weightless as falling petals until she parted her lips beneath his.

As when she'd seen him in battle, his reactions were too fast to comprehend, except in aftermath. His arms tightened around her body, his sweet, warm breath drowning her in the taste of starlight and snowfall and sunfire. But when her soft moan burst against his tongue, he sprang back.

Still dazed, she saw him staring at her with an expression burned into her memory from the Kyoto inn, when she startled him from his sleep and he stopped himself only just in time from slicing his katana through her throat. His eyes were wide, glazed with golden flame, and his voice was the same low, husky growl she remembered. "I'm sorry. I promised to protect you. But how can I protect you from myself?"

She reached out in reassurance. "You do not have to."

"But I hurt you. You made a noise--" He did not finish the sentence, but suddenly she knew what he meant, for when else in his lonely assassin's life would he have heard something like that? A dying breath on a dark street, rippling in a pool of blood. How many times must he have heard that sound, like the last echo of thunder struck from the lightning of his swords?

And yet for all that bloodshed, he was still so innocent in many ways. He had never asked her about her family because it might have hurt her, he'd said. Did he think now that she was trying to touch her fiance's ghost through his own flesh? Did he think she couldn't love him for himself? She remembered his prickly shyness when Iizuka had tried to joke with him about her, back in Kyoto. Had he never known this sort of love at all?

As young as he was, his cheek still had a faint roughness to it, like a cat's tongue against her fingertips. The shadow of his pulse beat fast, just below his throat, and when she leaned to kiss him there, it leapt up against her lips. Her hair was tumbling down inside the loosened overlap of his robe again and she slid her hands in after it, pressing it delicately all against his skin in the space above his sash as if she were washing a fine silk scarf. His breath heaved faster, her loose handfuls of hair catching against warm nubs on his chest as he gasped.

He was sitting upright with feet tucked neatly under him, but not for long. Helplessly, he pitched back against his elbows, arching up against the live warm flow of her hands. But still he did not reach back up toward her, whether because he was still afraid to hurt her or because he needed both arms to keep himself from falling.

Of course, she thought. He sleeps sitting upright in a corner with a sword in his hands. For years, he has never lain flat on his back unless an enemy flung him onto it, leaving him defenseless. But I am not his enemy. I am not his enemy. I am not.

She eased back, then, slowing her touch until his short, sharp gasps faded away and his body no longer seemed tense enough to shatter itself. Slowly, slowly, she drew her hair and her hands from his robe and smoothed it back closed again, straightening the edges as if dressing a child. Kenshin opened his eyes with a long shudder, still breathing fast. "Oh, Tomoe," he whispered. Withdrawing one hand from behind him, he half-collapsed onto the other elbow as he reached toward her. He really did look as if he would fall, so she moved behind him on her knees and leaned her weight forward, tilting him back over his center of balance as she folded him in her arms.

After a time, he brought their joined hands up to his heart, shivering a little at her wrists' faint pressure through his robe. It was impossible for Tomoe to guess what he was thinking. He had never asked her about her family because it might have caused her pain, he'd said, but surely he must have wondered. So, too, had he never asked about how she had survived in Kyoto until they met, a "lost cat" stumbling through the streets late at night, unsteady with sake and daubed with the disreputable scent of white plum. Whatever he might think, it was better than his knowing the truth.

The back of his neck was warm, fringed with loose strands of hair that had escaped his topknot, and damp with a faint natural scent like cinnamon and bitter almonds. She laid her cheek against it. "Did I hurt you?" she asked.

His grip on her hands tightened. "No."

"Did you think I would?"

Half-turning toward her, he shook his head. "No, of course not. I trust you." He looked as wounded by her suggestion as she felt by his answer, which struck deep into her heart. But as always, her face remained blank paper, unwritten with the words she might have spoken. Her true tongue was a writing brush in her hand, her true voice the whisper of flowing ink.

Still, there were things that needed to be said now, here, not set down in secret and folded away in a drawer. "Do you really trust me more than you trust yourself?" she asked.

Even as close together as they were, his voice was so low it was difficult to hear him. "You know what I can do-- what I nearly did at the inn. This life here with you has changed me from what I was, but...."

"Perhaps you can trust my own faith in you," she said. He made no response, only staring at her with those wide, flame-glazed eyes. When she drew away, he did not stop her, despite the yearning on his face.

She crossed the short distance to the cupboard and unfolded the futon for the night. As always, she left enough space from the wall that he could sit asleep against the corner, braced upright against his katana. He had never used the pillow she laid out beside hers, nor been enveloped by the warmth of the coverlet she shook out.. She felt as if snow were falling within her soul: cold, soft flakes of despair drifting and clinging together, burying the outlines of whatever might have been.

Kenshin had finally risen from the fireside, moving with an assassin's silent grace to his usual corner, where his swords leaned in wait. Instead of immediately taking up the katana, he laid both swords down against the wall, but then took up his usual half- crouched position, one leg curled beneath him and the other bent upright to rest an elbow against the knee. He seemed at a loss, his hands empty and nervous without the katana's sheath as he watched her.

Just as she knelt to slip into the coverlet's folds alone, he finally spoke. "Tomoe, I-- would you sit up with me for a while?"

She would. The wooden boards of the wall were cold against her back, but his body was tense and warm at her side. The arm he laid around her shoulders seemed to flicker like a flame, unless it was only her own heartbeat making her tremble. She thought of the obligation she had accepted to soothe the nightmare his life had become, drowning in all the blood he had spilled in hopes of saving others from suffering. A lacquered sheath to restrain the wild madness of his sword, a silk umbrella to fend off the bloody rain-- and in return, without knowing it, he too had eased her pain.

Once, she had been a happy, laughing child. Her mother's death had been like spring sleet that captured plum blossoms in clear, ringing bells, frozen to the heart. Tomoe had never been given the time to mourn, only the responsibility of stepping into her mother's place, a young girl running her father's household and raising her infant brother. The only tears she could allow herself to shed were ground from inkstone and laid down in stylized loops, their formal patterns hiding a child's unspoken grief.

Sometimes she had looked outside to see Kiyosato Akira in front of his own house, still playing games which she no longer had the luxury of joining. The small gifts he left at her doorstep had always made her brother jealous: a polished stone, a flowering branch, a rice-cake filled with sweet bean paste. Her engagement to him had brought the shadow of happiness back to her life, an echo of carefree childhood too precious for her to endanger by speaking of it. Before her brother's birth, she had spent too much time talking with her mother about how much less lonely the house would be with two children instead of just one. But her silence had driven Akira away to his death, and his last love-letter to her was constantly beside her now, the scar his sword had written on Kenshin's face.

And yet Kenshin had become so dear to her, the first man to see her not as a mother or a child, but simply as herself. His cold assassin's rage had been nothing at all like Enishi's reckless tantrums, or Akira's smiling cheer. And now that the rage was fading from him, all that was left beside her was this boy with cool, intense eyes, determined to protect her despite herself.

She leaned her head against his body, nestling close inside his embrace. His lips touched her forehead, the firelit fringes of his hair shadowing both their faces. His words were a flow of warmth through the winter chill. "I don't know what to do," he whispered. "But we'll find out together."