Work Text:
This is motherhood, Tamayo thinks. Doing anything for your children even when you feel like death.
And she does feel like death. Her muscles feel like they’re wasting away from her stretches of being bed ridden, lungs painful each time she breathes in, cautious and aware that each breath could cause another debilitating round of coughing that leaves her breathless and spent.
She’s close. Close to death, but also close to answers. To a cure, even. Though she does not trust the man she has been corresponding with, he says what she has is treatable. That he might know a cure, that if he doesn’t know it they can work together towards it. A common goal.
She is desperate; she’ll try anything to live just a little longer, to watch her children grow and thrive, to maybe reach twenty, then thirty, and be thankful for any years she lives to see after that. Time is what she needs, time to raise her children and be a mother and a wife. Time for her is short now, but it might draw out soon. She would not mind time stretching out for eternity, even if she is in agony, if it means she lives.
This is motherhood, she thinks: to sacrifice and offer and tithe her life to her children. To see them through thick and thin: protect them until they can protect themselves, and to keep protecting them even when they’re more than capable.
She sends a letter via courier to the man who said he could help, this Kibutsuji Muzan; tells him she is ready to meet with him. Ready for treatment. Ready for the rest of her life to begin, sickness or not.
This is motherhood, and she is not ready to say farewell.