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Before the spring came, there was a lonely god.
The god lived in a teahouse, twice as wide as he was tall, with a small, marble table in the center that had places set for two. He occupied one, and at the start of each day, would pour two steaming cups of tea and set out two hot plates of food. At the end of each day he washed one set of plates and threw out the cold meal on the other.
The teahouse was built for him to leave. The days passed and with them came the unending cold he was meant to bring. In these days, there was nothing but Winter.
Winter was not his real name. (They say he was born “Mitsuhide,” but there was hardly a soul around to call him any name at all.) One could find him in his teahouse only in the morning and in the evening— and in the day, he disappeared to sprinkle snow onto fields and dust frost onto crops.
There was nothing but him, and people starved for it.
“Mitsuhide,” said his Creator, observing mortals as they died of hunger. “Why must you bring so much famine?”
“I know nothing else, my lord,” replied the god. “And so I do all that I can do. If it is too much, then send me a solution.”
His Creator, if good for anything, is good for keeping his word. He decrees that Mitsuhide is to split his time with a being called Spring.
His Creator, if bad for anything, is bad for being punctual. It is another six months before this “Spring” shows up in Mitsuhide’s life.
She comes with the snowflakes-that-aren’t-really-snowflakes. (She gives them a name later: cherry blossoms.)
He can see her silhouette through the rice paper walls, and his brows lift in a moment of surprise. Unsure for a moment, he sets his sake upon the table, waiting for her to move. He has had his fair share of women, but none in this sacred, secret place. He slides the rice paper door open.
A flying branch nails him in the forehead.
“Dirty creep!”
She was naked, apparently, and that’s one hell of a way to make an entrance. Despite his seething rage at her perfect aim right for his face, he averts his eyes, wordlessly dropping the outermost layer of his clothing onto the ground where a snow-colored hand snatches it up and wraps it around a tiny body.
They’re seated later and she grouchily nibbles on the meal he’s set out for her, grumbling about how he could have had some sense of decency to figure out that she was bound to be naked after blowing into this world on a petal. He doesn’t know what their Creator expects of her.
The way he brings snow, she’s supposed to bring something into this world as well . . . he doesn’t know what it is, but so far, she’s brought a major source of entertainment.
“How do I know what I’m supposed to be here for?”
“Just do what you feel like doing,” he advises honestly, “and you’ll know. I came into this world and as I wandered it, ice followed. As you wander it, something else will.”
“What will?”
“I don’t know. A swarm of wasps, perhaps?”
He dodges the chunk of beef she catapults off her chopstick. Maybe this setup won’t be so bad, after all.
Their Creator insists that now that there are two of them, they take turns.
For six months, the spring reigns, and for another six, Mitsuhide does. She finds her calling in pink-petal rivers and the smell of waking grass and dewdrops. He continues on as usual, killing everything she births once the time comes, and shrouds the world in bony white.
He never gets to see the life she breathes into his wasteland, because their Creator insists that whoever’s turn it is to mould the earth stays outside of their teahouse, and whoever’s it isn’t remains inside their lonely tearoom.
They disguise themselves as beggars and royals and workers and thieves when they drift along— she rewards the kindhearted with flourishing gardens and fertile livestock, and he punishes the cruel with fires extinguished by melting icicles and dirt too cold to plant on.
He makes her tea in the springtime. She presses rice balls into his plate when winter comes. No matter the season, they talk deep into the night when one of them comes home . . . and Mitsuhide no longer washes one set of dishes, but two.
The tearoom has a window through which he experiences her world, because really, isn’t that what it is? His world, and hers?
He experiences his winter through the sound and smell and feeling, but her spring he can only watch in the form of the tree that stands proud outside. For six months each year, she explores the world and comes home in the darkest hours of the evening, and for the other six, he does the same. They are only observers to the other’s season, and Mitsuhide always pushes down the curiosity he feels to experience hers in full.
But for now, his days consist of making tea for her to warm herself with when she comes home, and to wait by the window for her graceful form up the stone path so that he can entertain himself with her again.
No matter the season, when they are finished talking and drinking and he’s had his fill of tormenting her (her reactions are always priceless), he cleans their dishes, and she goes straight to the room they share in the back of the teahouse and falls asleep in her bed. By the time he is finished dusting and polishing every teacup and retreats to his own bed adjacent to hers, she’s always asleep, face soft and illuminated by the moonlight.
And if she wakes up in the morning screaming his name in rage because her sheets are somehow frozen solid to her futon, that’s just as pretty of a picture.
Mitsuhide believes that at this point, she was born to be teased. If she wasn’t, why would she look so lovely fuming at him from across the room, angry blush staining her cheeks and delicate hands curled into fists?
He found out long ago that nothing, nothing works her up more than unexpected spring snow.
Sometimes when it’s the beginning of spring and she spends almost every hour of six months outside making flowers bloom, he summons a stray winter wind to wherever he pleases. Blossoms frost over and babbling creeks freeze in their tracks and she comes home, fuming, as he sips at his tea and watches her world through his window.
“Mitsuhide, you ass!”
“A strong choice of words, don’t you think?”
“Cut that out! I’m serious, I can’t get any work done because you keep bringing winter to the most chance places and by the time I get there, it’s too cold to bring spring.”
“That sounds like a 'you’ problem . . . have you considered arriving at your assigned locations sooner so you have a chance to thaw them?”
And he already knows her answer, because they have this conversation at least once every few weeks.
He knows that when he pours her a cup of tea and pats the spot across from him, she’ll sit down with a glare and a huff, because it’s not like she’ll be able to do much else anyway until the ice melts.
And he certainly knows that, as she takes her anger out on the onigiri she makes for the two of them for dinner, it’ll always turn out all right.
(“You know,” she whispers into the moonlight one evening in their shared room, and he starts when he realizes she’s actually awake for once. “I bet if you saw all the beauty I bring into the world, you’d quit trying to cover it all in snow.”)
“Mitsuhide. Come outside and see what I’ve created.”
One hundred years pass.
“The springtime that I brought this year is warm and bright. Come and see.”
Two hundred more, and despite the loneliness of a winter day, he lives for the winter nights where he can come home and see her radiant face.
“It’s my turn now . . . won’t you come outside at least once, even though it’s not your season?”
Three hundred more, and he’s sure that the world she paints green is as beautiful as herself. (Not that he would ever say that to that ever-persistent face of hers.)
The life of a goddess is one fit for her as humans begin to realize that the reason their soil becomes dark and rich every six months is because of her. She finds herself written in mythology books as the Queen of Mortality, a fearsome yet kind lifebringer who strikes down the God of Winter to bring prosperity into the fields once more.
Yet when she snarks at him every night from across the teatable and greedily stuffs seafood hotpots into that pretty little mouth, he thinks that she might not be quite so poetic as they think.
(He’s more than okay with that.)
But she is beautiful one night— that is, moreso than usual.
He notices it in one of his favorite times of the year: the unearthly, ethereal moment where winter fades into spring. They get to spend more time together on the rare nights that are cool enough for snow to stay on the ground, but warm enough for her to begin melting it.
A six-hundred year friendship (or, as she calls it, a tormenter/sufferer-ship) has led to a five-hundred year long attempt of her trying to get him to come outside during her season.
“I mean it,” she says whenever he refuses her. “Not to blow my own horn or anything, but the world I create in the springtime really is something. You’d probably stop being such a slinky evil jerk if you took just one look at it. Just one.”
There’s something tonight in the lights across her face, the way her cheekbones catch the stars in the small space of the tearoom, that makes his curiosity begin to cave. Their Creator was adamant— is adamant— that he doesn’t leave their teahouse in the spring, and that she doesn’t in the winter. But the night is perfect, and he wants to know what her world feels like, and when she senses his consideration and smiles hopefully at him— well, he never stood a chance in the first place, did he?
He walks out the way she comes in, but for the first time, they walk together outside, arm-in-arm as she leads the way down the stone path. It’s a path he’s walked many times on his way to bring winter to the world, but this is his first time walking it with thin clothes on his back instead of bundled in thousands of layers.
The soft hands of his friend pull at his strong ones and drag him around the world like she is a child and he is her puppy. Her eyes glow with the triumph and excitement and happiness of finally convincing Mitsuhide to experience her spring.
The night is warm. So is she. She shines beneath the starlight, even more beautifully than she shined in the tearoom, her lips smiling and full like the petals that swirl around the warm spring breeze. He wonders if they’re just as soft.
He’s been waiting six, nearly seven-hundred years to experience her world— yet now he’s wondering if that all-encompassing desire was not for her world, but for her and her alone. And despite the beauty of a world in bloom, Mitsuhide can’t take his eyes from her the entire night as he finally begins to see.
With the speed of two gods at their disposal, they are around the world and back again within the hour, and she beams at him.
“I told you that it was beautiful.”
She bids him good night with a peck on the cheek and leaves him in the tearoom while she snuggles into her futon in the bedroom.
Mitsuhide’s face remains stoic as he stares at the curtain she disappears behind. He stares long enough for the candlelight to flicker and burn out, and far after that until he follows her and takes a seat on the edge of his own futon.
Perhaps this was why her Creator didn’t want them outside together in her beautiful spring. Perhaps he knew that Mitsuhide would fall for her this relentlessly. Perhaps Mitsuhide shouldn’t be surprised at all— though the only surprise to him is how long it took to realize it.
This, the God of Winter thinks as he stares calmly at her sleeping form, will be a problem.
He goes outside with her more often then, much to her delight. He uses the winter winds to freeze the stems of the ripest plums so they fall into her waiting hands, and he bastes the fish they have for dinner and sweetens their tea with the juice. And he watches her, steals kisses on her cheek whenever he can catch her off-guard to do it— on his bolder days, he pulls her near and catches the hollow of her throat in his teeth.
She’s always embarrassed and becomes even redder than when he teases her with snow in spring.
“What’s gotten into you recently?” She rasps after he releases her with a smirk that hides a deeper longing. (Although her spoken “recently” is more like a hundred years or so since his revelation. Time moves differently for gods like them.)
Love, the back of his mind whispers, is what’s gotten into me.
He squashes that thought everytime it arrives.
She was born for the light and he for the shadow; he has no business thinking this way. But he aches— aches terribly with the knowledge that no matter how many times he sneaks into the warm night with her to rain those soft, lifebringing hands with kisses, he will never be able to touch that light. Not the way he wants to.
It doesn’t stop him from kneeling by her bedside as she falls asleep, pushing cold winter winds away from the window to warm her in the only way he knows how.
Their Creator calls him one day. Mitsuhide knows by the look in their Creator’s eyes that he knows.
Their Creator is benevolent; not one to punish excessively, but not one to let this go, either. There is a disappointed glaze in his all-knowing eyes that unsettles Mitsuhide, and their Creator simply sighs.
“You fell in love with her, too?”
So Mitsuhide isn’t the first, it seems; other gods have as well, though Mitsuhide’s been the only one fortunate enough to spend this much time with her. Their Creator recounts the many gods she’s encountered in her time in this world— the god of war, apparently, was rather fond of her; the god of romance had been trying to woo her for the past three-hundred years; and the god of reason, who still apparently didn’t even realize it himself. They were only a few who’d fallen for her, and Mitsuhide was sure there were hundreds more under her spell.
Their Creator understands— he’d half been expecting Mitsuhide to disobey him, anyway. That doesn’t mean he goes unpunished.
And Mitsuhide won’t ever tell their Creator that she’s the one who wanted him to go outside in the first place. He couldn’t do that to her.
His punishment, though, becomes her punishment anyway simply by association— their Creator separates their rooms and Mitsuhide can no longer watch her as he lies in a separate bed facing her, pretending their futons were conjoined and he had the right to hold her.
The window in their tearoom is bricked shut one day, much to her chagrin as she doesn’t understand why their Creator cut her off so thoroughly (though Mitsuhide doesn’t have the heart to tell her their Creator is cutting him off, not vice versa).
But last of all, and worst of all, springtime gets more hours.
It is the last punishment that hurts the most. She no longer has time to come sit and have tea with him as she barely even has time to sleep. Without the window, he can no longer see her walking up the path, much less experience her world. And without their shared room, he can’t even listen to her steady breathing.
Mitsuhide is effectively deprived of her.
He misses that snark of hers, that raised brow as she quips at him, that lovely scowl as she lightly hits his arm. He barely catches fleeting glimpses of her when she crosses the floor to her own room, tired and dead off her feet and barely able to mutter a hello before she’s gone again. And in the winter, they swap, and he takes on so much time in the cold that he doesn’t get to see her either, since she’s long gone to bed, not having the stamina to wait hours for his arrival the way he did with hers. Anything just to see her, no matter how fleeting—
He misses her.
He misses her so much that one day, without his realization, it starts snowing.
And the next day, she’s there.
He’s so stunned at seeing her, in the flesh, skin like marble and eyes deep and swirling like the tea she’s drinking. He looks at the space across from her, and finds that there’s another cup set out.
“Isn’t it springtime?” He asks, taking the seat and daring to touch her cheekbone with the same gentleness as the petal she blew in on.
“Yes,” she responds and gestures to where the window used to be. “But it’s snowing.”
“Is it?”
“It is. And both you and I know that I can’t get anything done when it’s snowing. It’s too cold to make anything bloom.”
She offers him an onigiri, the pristine shape of it clearly showing that she wasn’t angry enough to mash it into bits as she made it. In fact, she doesn’t seem angry at all as she sits calmly sipping tea the way they did long, long ago.
She’s rarely angry with him now when it snows in the spring. It gives them only two— if they’re lucky, three— precious hours in the early hours of the morning to stall her departure and sit in each other’s presence and snark and tease the way they did before. Sometimes, she begs for him not to make it snow in a certain region, and if he can help it, he doesn’t; but sometimes, it’s just been too long and he makes it snow there anyway.
It’s tricky and manipulative— just enough snow for them to quench their desire for each other’s companionship, but not so much that their Creator grows suspicious. They don’t dare to sneak out in the middle of the night the same way they used to. But for Mitsuhide, every moment he can spend with her now is enough.
She grows more beautiful by the day, and the longer they spend apart from each other, the more his entire body aches for her.
It is early one morning in their small teahouse. It is spring, and the world smells sweetly of roses and fresh grass.
“The spring misses you,” she says, gazing at the bricks where their window used to be. “I don’t know what happened to us.”
He knows what she means: why they were forced out of each other’s company so harshly, torn from each other so cleanly. She, of course, doesn’t realize that this separation, which at this point has been going on for three-hundred years, is all his fault. And he can’t bear her thinking it’s hers.
“I fell in love,” he murmurs against his better judgment— his eyes, though, recognize this statement as a fact and not a sentiment. Maybe luck will be on his side; maybe she’ll think he fell for a mortal and not for her.
She tilts her head, her eyes perceptive as always.
"I did too.”
Their first kiss is in the garden where she blew into the world on a petal. It’s a cold winter’s night six months after their silent confessions— the sky is dark and starry and almost purple with clarity, the moonlight reflecting on the small pools of melting snow. Her lips are cold, and he warms them with his own the same way he warms her body with his own. He doesn’t bother stirring the winds away from them, content in feeling the biting chill contrast with the back of her neck where he holds her close.
It lasts barely a few seconds— their Creator could see. But they pull away and he can see her reflection pooling on the tears in her eyes.
“I love you,” he states simply.
And maybe he’s riskier than she is, or maybe she simply has a better sense of self-preservation, because they both understand that those three words alone are enough to call their Creator’s attention like blood in the water. So she simply kisses him again— barely brushing her lips against his— and steps away, biting her lip as if to keep his taste in her mouth.
“I know.”
Unsurprisingly, their routine hardly changes besides the occasional brush of lips. Her wit is still there, though often followed up with her small hand taking his larger one as she presses it to her mouth, closing her eyes tight and longing as much as he seems to. They’d never realized how easy it was to miss someone right beside you.
The years roll on, and they continue as usual— though that’s to be expected, as they have been as constant in each other’s lives as the snow in the springtime.
They barely manage to escape their Creator’s all-seeing eye with hidden trysts and whispered words; it’s many centuries before they find a moment where they are far enough gone on their Creator’s mind that they can sneak back into the room they once shared, falling asleep in each other’s arms and waking before the dawn.
Mitsuhide fears the consequences if they are caught— they can’t afford to lose each other.
And so it goes that their romance moves through the days more slowly than they watch warlords rise and empires crumble. But they watch history together— and as castles turn to skyscrapers and dirt roads turn to paved ones, she always finds time to leave one blooming red rose alive for him in the winter, and he always finds time to freeze the stems of plums for her to pick more easily.
Their Creator begins to keep less of a watch on them, and they manage to meet discreetly more often, just happening to be at the same restaurant or library at the same time as one another.
(They find a book one day that tells the tale of the Lifebringer and her lover, the God of Winter. They smirk at each other and their fingers brush, and the bookstore owner blinks at the odd exchange before giving them the book for free— the owner finds later that the boy across the street who tormented her and her family happened to slip on some ice and break his ankle.)
No matter where or when it is, they always make time for each other— and no matter how much time it is, Mitsuhide always finds himself craving more. She does too; he can tell from the way she sweetly kisses his cheek before departing for the springtime.
Perhaps one day their Creator will forgive them for their enchantment, but for now, they accept the consequence and simply take each other’s company however they can get it; they are content with the hope that one day they will be allowed to love each other. They know this is a faraway hope— but sometimes, as Mitsuhide wanders the earth, he finds a cherry blossom petal sitting patiently in the snow— and he dares to dream.