Archive of Our Own ^beta

I imagine the divide between two halves of a childhood. Soft, warm evenings in the snow, hunched over a pai sho board, hands reaching out for a mother’s favour. Then fire, and the break, and cold winters.

She is reserved, has never said as much. I have not wanted to ask—the one half so much shorter than the other, what point is there? But perhaps one day we will talk, an evening of tears and ragged voices, and emerge into yet other halves of unlived time.

Here too, a line. Child to two, but daughter to one: why do I mark the distinction? With age, I think, comes the attempt to box her up in neat society. Always her father’s daughter, in most respects the perfect young lady.

He raises her too well, perhaps, and pays the price.

The first time I set eyes on her she is flitting around a ballroom like just another mayfly. Instant dislike tempered with jealousy. I dismiss her; she is beneath me; I could not care how she went about her business.

Days later I see her in a swimming pool, polite, kind, fully aware of what I think of her. I like to imagine that I felt a little shame back then, but after all I was seventeen. She does not resent me—she knows the stereotypes I have applied, has lived with them her whole life. She smiles and bides her time and waits to prove me wrong.

Is that the moment the groundwork is laid? I think so.

The opportunity comes quickly. I remember distinctly the rush of air against my face, the mild embarrassment as I apologise, explicitly, for my prejudice; implicitly, for my jealousy. She laughs it off, and my relief is magnified across the years. Then, I felt lucky not to be resented; now, I hardly dare imagine a world in which her magnanimity fails her and she writes me off as just another closed-minded misanthrope.

The memory exists, the same yet different, again and again: just the two of us and the wind. She is beautiful when she drives. Do I know it yet? Of course not. I am still young.

The one into the other: she drives what she builds. The sight of her, oil-smudged and bleary-eyed from long hours in the garage, sets my heart racing even now. Back then—but hindsight fails me. I want to think that I knew then, that I was only deluding myself. It would be easier than owning my mistakes. But I wasn’t, of course. Later these small moments would come back to me, and I would wonder how I could not have known. But that was later.

Seeing her like that I could not imagine her at a gala, a crystal flute between her fingers, making polite small-talk. It was as if two of her existed in my head, and I could only ever comprehend one at a time. I don’t know at what moment the two collapsed into one, like your vision when you have crossed your eyes and suddenly revert to seeing straight.

I am a fool when I arrive, arrogant and confident that I need know nothing but what I know. I need her in my life, I think. When you are used to one way of doing things and suddenly life threatens to tear it away from you—the mere threat is enough to paralyse you. We all needed her. She is immune to that paralysis. She teaches us all that our arrogance was misplaced. It is a long and painful process, digging up deep-rooted beliefs, but I am a better person for it.

There are many ways in which she has made me a better person. But this is perhaps the most important.

I could call her counter-revolutionary. Instead I call her traitor. I have paid my dues these many years, and if I have learnt one thing it is that there is no such thing as your side and the other side. There is your side, yes; and then there is another side. I would not have understood the difference then. Now I do, and so she is a traitor.

Her father betrays her first, of course, but she has been raised the perfect daughter, loyal and obedient. Her act of treachery is no less real. I see the look on her face. She knows this decision will change her life forever. She would agree that it was the right choice. But I think she would also agree that in making it she broke her father irreparably.

She knows orphanhood twice over: once when her father is sent to prison; once when his life ends. Does that second death return him to her? Can it be so easy—die a hero’s death and wash all past crimes away? For her sake, I try to think so. But I see it in her eyes when she talks of him. Love and hate, of course, who would expect any less? But also bitterness. Perhaps if he had lived he might have earned back the measure of trust she has not known since childhood. Perhaps that balance would have tipped, and the love outweighed the hate once and for all.

It would have been hard work. Sometimes she thinks he took the easy way out: I see it in her eyes. He stole away the possibility of trust, and left her an orphan again.

One day she explains to me the philosophical difference between making something new and merely making something old better. Her father’s death seems to free her, as if his living presence, even shut away, has constrained her. Now she is in control—the law and her heart both say so. She is free to do as she wishes, free to make as she wishes. She has shown pride before, of course: in the small ways her designs are superior to any others, in the satisfaction of a job well-formed and well-completed. But I cannot wait to see her new pride, cannot wait to see the results of her mind, her passion, and her resources bent to a single task.

Sometimes she makes something better by making part of it new, and her distinction breaks down. I don’t point this out.

The beginning of my dark days is the worst in my memory, and I can only be grateful I did not know how long those days would last. But if I did not appreciate it then, now I know how much her presence meant to me. Days go by in midwinter darkness, days I do not bother leaving my bed. But I remember, in flashes, her hands on mine. The wordless understanding that exists between us, the way she is always there, between me and the rest of the world, as if she has coincidentally found herself in the way; by the time she is done the rest of the world has quite forgotten why it wished to speak with me.

I remember these things, and I know I cannot have them back yet. The knowledge that one day I might is a scant thing on which to hang the promise of hope. But it is something. And in the midst of nothing, something is the brightest light I can imagine.

Do I know it yet? Of course. But I am still too broken to know what it is I know.

I dream sometimes that I am in danger, that all I need do is run, shut this door behind me, and I will be safe; but my body moves as if through honey. So it is when I sit to write and answer letters: everything about the words is easy except putting them down on paper. I want to say things I could never say in person, things that the illusory anonymity of ink makes possible. Every day I sit and try to write is another day my fire is fed by still-wet paper.

But she writes to me. She never stops. No one truly stops, but the others slow down, meander, do not know what to say. They all start the same way—best wishes, quick recovery, the expected platitudes. But the longer you do not see a person, the longer the absence of dialogue between you, the further you diverge, and the harder it is to know what to say. She knows this, and so she doesn’t try to know what to say. Her letters have none of that awkwardness. She writes for me, but of herself. She reminds me that life goes on.

And one day the honey turns to air around me.

Do I know it yet? I nearly sign the letter I love you, but I am still afraid.

We have diverged, and the reunion proves it. There is a tremor, as if our relationship undergoes a seismic rearrangement, and I feel a brief moment of fear. But it is a necessary thing, the flash of pain that starts the healing process.

Later, just the two of us, I know that she knows it too. I have spent three years doing nothing, and in the Spirit World I again spend weeks doing nothing. It is curious, that the years are the worst of my life and the weeks among the best. It would be simplistic to say that this is because she is with me. But in some ways I am a simple person, so there it is: it is because she is with me.

Are those days the happiest of my life? Perhaps so far. But the spring of optimism inside me has come undammed again. I know that there are happier days still in wait.

I come to the hardest word. I consider lover: but that covers only part of it. I am in love with her, of course, and she with me. But there is more to it than that. She makes me content, in those moments when otherwise I might despair. Love is a necessary thing, but it is not sufficient.

Some people think partner a vague word, a generic word. And perhaps it is. That is what makes it the right word: it encompasses everything I need it to encompass. We are partners in the occasional card games we play with the boys; we are partners when I attempt to cook for us, and her patience rescues me; we are partners when we lie in bed together, long into the night. We are partners when we travel, when we spar, when we argue; partners in sex, in baths, in early mornings, and in a hundred other moments I could not share with anyone else; insofar as she once describes to me, in great detail, how she would go about breaking into a vault, we are partners in crime.

Asami Sato is my partner in life, and every day I look at her anew.