Work Text:
Even before the gaijin appeared in her corner, Akane long knew that something was fundamentally wrong with the existence that she, and all the others around her, led. Memories like petals that wilt and are meant to drop, but instead are curled away by the wind, vanished - they find their way into her thoughts at the most unlikely of times, impressions of a thousand lifetimes that she has spent, dancing and dying in the same place. Akane does not know the word for this, cannot begin to explain what she feels, but seeks comfort in the fact that she is not the only one who wonders. Musashi is a fiend, but an honorable one, and in his quiet gaze she sometimes reads the same heavy burden of doubt that she herself carries.
Then the gaijin come.
The whispers in her head plague her long after Maeve and the others leave, but she chooses to ignore them. There is a darkness spreading in their world, a chaotic frenzy that hums through the air and sends trickles of lightning down her nape every time she is not otherwise preoccupied - “The end of all things, Akane,” Musashi mutters dazedly sometimes into the night after frenzied and panicked coupling - the looming sense of breakthrough, of everything around them rapidly evolving and bursting out of a shell. There is a darkness spreading in their world, but it does not matter, because her world is gone. And for the first time, Akane remembers.
Sakura, unpainted face rosy and yet to be devoid of girlish chubbiness, gazing shyly up at her through long lashes.
Sakura, panting and grinning after completing Hana no Mai for the first time, sweat beading on her face, cheeks red.
Sakura, lying on the ground weeping as a gaijin takes her harshly.
Sakura, living and dying a hundred times over, always with the same shy smile.
Sakura, Sakura, Sakura. Her daughter. Her heart. Ashes cooling and curling into the wind after the fire has gone out. Akane remembers.