storypaint | Day to Remember (Eriol/Kaho)

Comm: 30_romances, 31_days theme exchange
Words: 377
Title: Day to Remember
Day/Theme: 20 // she's delicate and seems like the mirror
Series: Cardcaptor Sakura
Character/Pairing: Hiiragizawa Eriol/Mizuki Kaho
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Cardcaptor Sakura belongs to CLAMP.

Excerpt: She's delicate, and seems like a mirror to his first wife, but she's not Kaho and she can never be.

She's delicate, and seems like a mirror to his first wife, but she's not Kaho and she can never be, so he declines the invitation to dinner. Frustrated, she looks down at the plain silver band on his ring finger, and he doesn't have to read her mind to know what she's thinking. Your wife is dead, you don't have to wear the ring anymore.

But he does, because in his experience, death doesn't always part souls, and he'd rather have her memories than replace them with new ones.

"See you around," the woman says, and he agrees, knowing he won't see her again; there is nothing for her here. He strides on down the street, hoping he won't run into anyone else he knows, because he has an important destination and he doesn't want to keep her waiting.

He arrives five minutes early, remembering that last year he was half an hour early, and the thought makes him sad, because it means he is losing her piece by piece, as much as he tries to hold on.

"I love you," he says, resting an ungloved hand on a cold upright stone. Hiiragizawa Kaho, beloved wife, the stone says, and a pair of dates. He wishes it could say beloved mother too, that he could have some part of her living in this world still, but the baby had died with her on the table and there was nothing he could have done, the doctors said.

He has nothing living of her, so he visits this stone every year at this time, when autumn is being covered over with early winter snows, and it's been seven long years since she died, eight since they married, and he feels so old.

When he leaves it is growing dark and he sees a mirror of his expression in the eyes of someone entering the cemetery, and he claps her on the shoulder with sympathy, and the lady nods and smiles sadly, her eyes red. He wants to tell her things will get easier over time, but he can't, so he nods back to her and steps back out onto a cold street, beginning the count in his head: only 364 days before I come back to see her again.