Mirai and Satoru

the gifts that allowed us to meet under that bright shining moon in turn obscured the truths from ourselves

春

Satoru had glimpsed her in the night, incongruously red-colored amongst the silver mist clouds and velvet dark night. The girl had been flying, soaring in, flitting amongst the clouds and trailing wisps of misting quicksilver behind her. He reached upwards, mirroring with his hand, curled around her, and yanked. The petals fall with her, cascading in a flutter around them both. She crashed downwards towards him before slowing to a stop right above him. Odd, he hadn’t meant to have her end up there.
“Who are you?” he asked. She didn’t answer him, glaring down at him, silently with piercing eyes. She unfolded herself, sliding into a slouchy seat in the air, trailing her robe into a mess of folds instead. She arches upwards, haughtily as no girl has ever dared to be in front of him before.
She says something to him, odd and off. Something he’s not used to and can’t quite place.
He pouts at her, but she says nothing else. Weird.
He reaches out a hand, and after a moment, she takes it and settles down upon the ground next to him, her robes a haphazard trail gleaming upon the dark path. He starts towards the house, and she follows after him, hand in hand.

夏

It was a gradual thing, Mirai thought. Spring, clear with a chill still lingering in the air, had always been the weather she flew in, oft with petals to suit her name perfuming and floating in the air as she did. Those comforting days always gave way to summer, where the sun made the air too hot to suit her. They cooled off in a pond together then, two children with nothing better to do in an isolated estate warded from the modern world. Halcyon days together following their whims.
The beauty of the estate could not be denied, several thousand years of power and riches, all bound in name and in honor. They could explore a different garden each day of the month and not repeat one all summer in the vast grounds. It was lovely, but it too shared the perils of the mortal world. She had not thought it then when she had first arrived. At first, she had noted the endless food, far better than any she had before, the decadent clothing, worn once and never again, the ever-changing toys, the fascinating lessons, the groveling servitude, and her new friend.
What a foolish girl she was, to have been put so into debt.
It was a debt that she had hopes to repay in time, but she would be expected to pay all her life, with her body, with her choices, with her life. What a foolish girl, to have walked into a house like this and seen kindness when she had only been a convenient possibility for the future and cheap at the price.
What a foolish girl she was, to be so simple as to love the boy she had called her first friend. What a foolish girl she was, to know this all and yet let love outweigh all the rest.
She idly runs a hand feather-light through his hair as she thinks this. Soft, fluffy, slightly slicked with sweat in the summer heat, and meets those piercing eyes as they open, bluer and truer than the sky above. He smiles, and all else fades in comparison. This was her debt, where duty and love entwined too densely to separate the collateral from the interest.

秋

When Mirai left, as if she had simply become less than motes in the air, he should have realized. Satoru should have realized in that moment when Mirai had chosen to leave him. She had been the constant of his life for decades, present far longer than they had ever been apart. He had known her better than anyone else. She had known him better than anyone else. It was them, then the rest of the world.
He’d thought so. He kept thinking so, for the first day, for the first week, for the first month. As the leaves fell to bare branches, even at the main residence under millennium-old wards maintaining perfect seasonality, he realized something. None of their friends had been surprised Mirai had left. His family had been furious that she had left, but they too had not been surprised.
In some ways, that had been more upsetting than all the rest. He had treated his own wife, his mate, so poorly that no one who had known them was surprised she would want to leave. Satoru had been the only fool blind enough to expect her to stay and that was simply because he had never thought that she would choose other than them.
Satoru had never thought that Mirai could leave him. He thought she loved him too much to contemplate it, much less look at him as if he was less than nothing and then disappear. It had been perfect, there was nothing for him to track. There were no clues as to where she was. Everything he had given her had been untouched and remained so, even now. A few of their friends had not been particularly surprised that she could leave or would leave. It crucified him that they had better insight into his mate than he did. It only appeased him slightly none of them knew where she was either.
Nearly everyone else had never thought that Mirai could leave him, bound as she was in blood and by contract. They thought Mirai could not leave. His family was both furious and terrified. They had only been mollified when several other concubines of various ranks had tried similar stunts with only the expected result.
What Mirai did magically was unprecedented; what she did on a relationship level was quotidian. An unhappy wife had left her spouse, and Satoru was slowly floundering towards understanding the chasm that had opened between them without his cognizance.

冬

The compromise was to move into a new space all their own, freshly constructed to her specifications, portal-connected to several residences around to world to balance both their lives, and blood-locked in her best ward work. It had none of the weight of tradition and expectation the hereditary properties did. It still felt like stepping back into a pair of shoes from childhood, now ill-fitting and chaffing at unexpected moments, stumbling when the heel catches. Those slow changes she had never noticed when wearing them were now greater than the sum of the parts.
Satoru had been solicitous to a degree she’d have called delirious with joy. In some ways, she was not the Mirai who had left. In some ways, she was the same as before. Here she was, giving Satoru what he wanted of her, just as she had since the night they met. All those years away, creating a new life for herself, a new name, a new purpose, and she was back here, taking a chance on a boy she’d met under the moonlight and loving him regardless of the debts between them.
Perhaps those were the debts that shaped all their fates. Her account was cleared; lives were worth more than raising. Now debts ran red the other way in the ledger of life.
What a foolish girl, in love with an even more foolish boy, two romantic idealists with debts too muddied between them for ink to run clear even in the river of rebirth.