#i chainsmoked the left hand of darkness and the lathe of heaven before finishing this so uh

[skadventuretime]

forever and a day

Happy New Year @starship--phoenix! I was your @noragamisecretsanta2018 Secret Santa, so here is your gift! You said soulmate and time travel aus were your jam, so given the otp, that just screamed reincarnation to me. I hope you enjoy, and had a warm and happy holiday! 

She is lost in a sea of sterile white sheets.

Yato tucks in a corner of her comforter, snugs it against skin now puffy and wrinkled with age. The tightness in his throat has only gotten worse.

"Is that you, dear?" she whispers, breath whistling on each exhale.

He takes her hand and rubs gentle circles along the back of it, a hand he's held in grief and joy and the quiet moments that aren't notable at all until times like this. "Yes, it's me."

"Tell me again how we met,” she says, but is interrupted by a coughing fit that sends spasms through her body. Yato knows there is not much time, but he sets the thought aside.

He can feel Yukine’s tension from the other room where he’s keeping vigil with their Far Shore friends, face not a day over fourteen. They have all known this hour would come. No one is ready for it.

He waits for her coughing fit to pass, and then begins. “You saw me on the sidewalk when no human should have seen me...”

Yato tells the story until the very end, no matter that Hiyori’s breathing grows ragged and stills, no matter that tears obscure his vision. He’s still holding her hand and it takes Yukine, hours later, to get him to release it.

As a god, he knows this was all he could ever hope for; a human life’s worth of time in which to condense an eternity of devotion. It was never going to be enough.

Read the rest below the cut, or on AO3!

And so he spends the next two decades finding lost cats and reuniting lovers and doing all the things a former errand god turned god of fortune might do. Yukine remains by his side, and every year on the anniversary of Hiyori’s death they gather round Kofuku’s table to laugh and drink and cry to her memory.

He feels the first tug on the twenty-eighth anniversary of her death.

It’s a small thing at first, barely noticeable beneath the hafuri bond. Something more akin to a muscle twinge or a sour stomach. But as time goes on it becomes more insistent, a slow and steady pull that becomes impossible to ignore.

So one night once Yukine is asleep, Yato winks out of Tokyo and appears in the middle of a warm city where the sun has just set, boots set down on balmy pavement. The tug has a new urgency, like bloodhound who’s caught the scent.

Having come all this way for it, he follows the strange, gut-deep feeling across the usual city trappings, noting palm trees and a large, sluggish river as he bounded from building to building. The air is cloying and so, so hot; he must be somewhere tropical, or at least in summer.

He reaches a giant high rise in what looks to be the financial district. His gut is churning now, almost doubling him over in the pain of it, but it’s bittersweet, like the kind of pain you ask for.

From the feel of it, whatever he’s being led to is in this building. So up he goes, scanning the windows at each level and moving on when the pull contracts again, telling him no, no, not yet.

When he reaches the top floor, the pain vanishes. Inside is a lavish office, dark wood paneling with bright splashes of color. Two people are talking, one a stern looking man behind the desk, the other a young woman, no more than thirty, briefcase in hand and tailored suit like a sheath around her. A lawyer, perhaps. They are arguing; the woman’s gestures become more and more violent until she whirls around and begins to storm out of the room.

Past the window where he hovers, and improbably, impossibly, glances at him.

Deep brown eyes and bold cheekbones, skin black and shining like she houses the heavens themselves.

He has never met her. He could never forget her.

“Hiyori?” he whispers, and then remembers himself.

She scrubs at her eyes and he’s gone before she reopens them, hovering from a new vantage behind the stern man’s desk. A head shake or two and she’s off to the elevator, leaving Yato with a decision to make.

It was definitely Hiyori. Though her flesh may look different, the soul that burned inside was one that he had only just been getting to know, had loved for one precious human lifetime. But did that make it right for him to barge in on her a second time?

Part of him is tracking how long it would take the elevator to reach the bottom floor, where she’ll leave the building and become one of a teeming mass of city goers. It was never a decision at all. When he judges she should be walking onto the street, he teleports into the lobby to watch her go.

She moves differently, stops to talk to someone in a language he has never heard, but it’s really, truly her.

He follows before he can think.

She travels to a more modest part of town, where she enters a small and tidy apartment full of a life spent without him.

Yato wants to soak it all up, the pictures on her side table, the books on her shelf, but he knows he doesn’t have the time before she notices she’s not alone. He clears his throat.

She spins and is on him faster than a starving ayakashi. “Who are you and what do you want with me?” she says, terse but in control. His brain automatically translates the rich, rhythmic language into one he can understand, and allows him to respond in kind. Godhood has some perks.

“I wanted to see you again.” He can’t stop staring at her, drinking her in like a starving man.

She squints, and takes away her forearm from his neck. “Do I know you?”

“Yes,” Yato says, tears welling in his eyes. “You did.”

From there life becomes hectic, stressful, and so full of joy he’s fit to burst. At first Adaolisa, her name now, doesn’t believe him, but as time goes on and she meets Yukine and Kofuku and all their Far Shore friends, she does.

They spend decades together, and he gets another chance to worship the beauty of her skin and the fire of her soul.

And then, as all humans do, she dies, and it hurts more than the first time because now he has lost her twice. What a curse it is, to live forever.

But again, a few short decades later, that pull in his gut is back, and he rejoices. This time he follows it to a dingy part of a cold American city, and Yato finds Hiyori with close cropped bleached hair, slouched against a grimy alley wall with broken glass about her feet, inserting a needle into pockmarked skin.

Yato’s world begins and ends in that moment.

Hiyori’s name in this life is Paul, and he has been using for years after a rotten home life and a society that preaches meritocracy but operates more like a caste system. As in the last two lives, they come together suddenly, like a car crash, and Yato’s understanding of love expands. Her flesh is different yet again, but that determined spirit is the same, and he soon revels in the coarseness of Paul’s stubble against his lips and the assertive insistence of his affection, the night air and cigarette smoke scent of his skin. He does what he can to help her lead a better life, and gets to enjoy the company of her soul once more.

And so it goes. Yato finds her when her name is Marwa and her skin is like the desert at dusk, her voice sweeter than honey; when she’s called Pia and she bends like willow trees when she dances; when her name is Cheng and she only shaves her face once a week so he can feel the grit of her when they kiss. On and on, so many different outsides but always that same bright core, that same essence that he would recognize in any life.

Just as often, she doesn’t make it. He has held her broken body as a teenager, as an infant, body ravaged by men’s tools of war or their more insidious open palms of neglect. There are times he feels the tug too late, when she has a wife or a husband and a happy life, and he simply watches from the window, heart full to bursting; times he feels the tug too soon and must watch her, step by step, walk away from him, unable or unwilling to believe.

But each loss and each joy and each moment he has with her carves him deeper, expands the size of his heart until he understands why Bishamon has so many shinki and marvels at the gift of kindness. Is this what it is to be human? he wonders. So much feeling condensed into a few decades, a nuclear bomb squeezed into a form far too small to contain it.

The world changes around them, new troubles arise, new sorrows blossom, but always he finds her.

He could take a million human lifetimes, strung together until none are alive to believe in him or until the universe stretches so far as to disintegrate, to implode into a single speck of matter that will birth a new universe, and still never understand her the same way twice. Eternity is not long enough to know a human soul.

It is, however, long enough to keep learning. Every life they spend together augments his understanding of humanity and the fragile, defiant way they love. Yato no longer thinks of godhood as a curse; what is there to curse about loss, when it’s only ever temporary? The pain that had seized him the first handful of times she passed begins to lessen as he learns to find joy in endings, those heralds of beginnings. He begins to look forward to relearning her every time, what she’ll look like, what her mannerisms might be, how her laugh will sound; strong, deep, and rich like so many times before, or lighter, with a raucous snort, like her last one?

He lives his immortal life richly, sucking the marrow from the bones of his adopted humanity, humbled again and again at how many forms love takes, how different but ever the same it tastes on her (his, their) tongue. Not every life is easy, or happy, but such is the human way: they struggle, and fight, and cry, and when the dust settles and their needs are met, they love.

And love they do, until the heavens fall and the stars burn up, until all that ever is or was prepares to become something else entirely. In those moments before Time stills, their souls find each other and, like coming home, merge into the newness.