beautiful one, sharer of my longing

38: The war effort

The estate was only a skeleton of what it used to be.

Where the kids and friends and soldiers and workers used to bustle around full of laughter and lingering smiles, it was now desolate. Every foreign noise, whether it be a creak in the flooring or the drop of a pan, was enough to scare you all into silence. It is dusty and gray without the hustle. The deadened trees outside and yellow grass added to the collective anxiety. With Geto leading his Hei to God knows where, he took your cousins, he took your children, and he took any speck of hope that you'd ever see Satoru again.

With the very sudden war announcement days ago, men and their guard (herding) dogs came to the estate to help serve you in protection. Yuta and Nanami swore that they were enough. But they could not protest the masses. And so, you sit with Utahime and Makoto in the rafters of the stables silently. Men were down below to keep watch.

Utahime notices that you are remarkably silent as she reads to Mako in her lap, but she doesn't comment on it. You both know she won't. It's been a week of silence from the outside world and you both know it's a matter of time before you fully break down, or the estate is attacked once again. Just a toss up of which.

"Three hundred years had passed, isn't that crazy?" Utahime asked him, and Mako nodded, absorbed in the words. "Urashimatarou returned to the beach carrying the box," she spoke, "only the view of the sea had not changed from before." Mako was fully invested, leaning against her chest and trying to piece together the characters on the old page. You thought of nothing except Satoru.

"He thought, if things are like this, I should not have come back," Mako said slowly, "you say the next line again."

Utahime chuckled slightly, then went on to read, "no matter how much he looked at the sea, the turtle that took him to the palace never appeared again."

He will never appear again.

Tears stung your eyes, but you did not cry. Not yet.

"Urashimatarou became sad. He broke his promise with the sea goddess and opened the lid of the box," Utahime paused for effect, "just then, a white smoke came out of the box, and Urashimatarou suddenly became an old man!"

"That's the end?!" the small boy whined.

"That's the end!" she confirmed.

"You know what the lesson of that tale is, Mako?" You had to set aside your grief for this one moment. He looked at the both of you with confusion.

"Don't listen to turtles?"

"No," you laughed, "that when you meet the most beautiful girl in the world, you stay with her and listen to her intently." He once again seemed confused.

"But I already listen to you and Utahime," he said. Both you and the other woman smiled at him with the look of an approving mother. But then he pointed a finger right at your nose. "I'm gonna marry you one day! I will!"

"You are?" you asked him with a poke on his own nose, "you'll have to fight your Gojo-sama for that spot."

"I can do it!" he says with defiance, "I'll have to fight all the other boys, too..."

"You don't have to fight anyone. You can marry Utahime!"

At this, he only shyly smiled before the older woman began to tickle him. Eventually, he pulled her down the ladder of the rafters and ran off somewhere to leave you alone, and you were thankful. Somehow, you felt it in your brain that Satoru was as good as dead. Buried in the snow, likely by the sword of a Zen'in man.

Your soul told you otherwise.

He's alive out there, but you could do nothing to find him.

You cried and cried in the straw of the stable, feeling like your heart got wrenched out of your body and feeling like half of you was gone forever. It was a conflicting feeling. You love him so much, he's half of you, he's half of your child, he saved you the way Urashimatarou's turtle did. And he's never coming back.