Stribor hadn't been here very long, but he was already willing to start joining the fight. There was plenty to learn about Earth, but he knew it would all come in time. Besides, he already had enough of the shape of things to start doing patrols—or, at least, to sit in the park and wait until he felt something.
In the meantime, he had a banjo that had been stored in his subspace for too long. After a little tuneup, it still sounded beautiful. He strummed the chords, a song that would never be heard by his lover again. She hadn't been his lover, exactly, but... they both had wanted it. He'd written the song for her. Played it the last time they were together before they decided duties had to come first.
It made him finally begin to cry over what he'd lost. He'd lost so, so much. His heart ached and his playing wavered as his hands shook with the grief that swelled within.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2023 9:33 pm
It was a beautiful autumn night. The dying months of the year, with leaves still painted in reds and oranges and yellows, but bare branches beginning to be more prominent. Izanami wandered it, content ot seek out whatever she might find.
Her fires came easily to her fingers, these days. No more fighting her own magic, no more struggling, no more outbursts. She was as one with it as she could be, and she loved how it felt to fight, to call it to hand. But a fight wasn't necessarily what she was seeking, and it was not what she found.
At first, she wasn't sure she was hearing it. It had been months since the Star Festival, since that little melody that had wrapped its notes around her heart and squeezed, but there it was--on the wind, coming from the park, strummed on the instrument she wasn't quite able to identify.
She ran towards it, heart racing. It couldn't be--it would be far too much of a coincidence, for there to be someone else playing that song. Except the closer she got, the more sure she was of it, and the more it broke her heart to hear.
She wished she had a shamisen. Wished she could play one. Instead, as she approached the sound, ducked onto a trail to see the person playing--a fellow Senshi, of some sort, with what looked like bunny ears and a banjo (oh, that was the instrument she couldn't identify--how silly of her) in his lap, all she could do was hum what she remembered of the shamisen's sad melody. The other half of this strange song that she only knew from a moment of magic on the wind.
Stribor slowly came to a stop, sniffling, and wiped at his eyes. He let out a throaty sigh as he tilted his head back to stare at the overcast, gloomy sky. He ached. Every part of him. Not just his heart from the grief, not just his face from the crying. All of him. He missed her so much.
His ears drooped briefly as he lifted his head back up, ready to leave, but then the sensation of another aura washed over him. Snapping back up, his ears canted around, trying to hear where they were, maybe.
But that was an ally's aura, he was certain. "Hello," he called out. "It's alright, you don't have to hide. I'm alone out here."
Too late, he thought of bait and traps. He'd have to see how this went, now.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 2:35 am
The song ended. The stranger seemed lost in thought--or perhaps just lost, Izanami wasn't sure. Certainly he had to be far from home, because those ears did not look fake and Izanami was not aware of the existence of Earthlings with bunny ears.
She took a breath. Rude, to lurk just out of his sight, and so she stepped out, ashy footprints left in her wake as she approached the strange Senshi.
"I heard your song. I....know your song," she said, softly. It almost seemed fake, a piece of near-folkloric coincidence, but she knew that song, and it tore at her chest all over again to hear it, played by mortal fingers and missing its second half.
"Sorry, that must sound very strange. I'm Izanami. I...." She smiled, a little ruefully. "I didn't mean to disturb you, and I'm sorry if I did."
Quote:
Powered Passive: Ashes to Ashes -- Izanami trails sandalwood-scented smoke and ash wherever she goes. Embers fly off her body and clothes, and she leaves footprints marked in ash. These effects are somewhat subject to the weather, and can be dissipated by wind or rain, but if left alone, the ashy footprints will last for approximately ten minutes before vanishing. The embers, however, fizzle out very quickly and cannot cause any fires or catch on anything.
Stribor smiled back at her. "No, no, you didn't disturb me at all. I'm just missing... my other half to the song," he said quietly, tilting his head slightly.
He knew her. He must have. If she knew his song, their song, then he'd certainly known who she'd been before the Big Sleep, as he kept calling it rather stubbornly.
He glanced down at her feet—ashes clung to the footprints she left behind, and the embers... She smelled like...
His eyes widened suddenly as his brain finally caught up from making nice with her. She'd said her name already, but he'd missed it while thinking about how she looked, the ashes, the name—
"Izanami?" he asked, voice wobbling. "Iza... You're..."
He swallowed. "M Stribor, but I guess you wouldn't remember me." His stomach dropped out at the realization.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 3:19 am
The way he reacted to her name--it made Izanami's heart clench. Here, before her, was a piece of the Izanami Who Was, the lovely woman in her quiet manor who tended the dead and seemed so quietly content with her role.
She tracked her memory, searching for any hint of this face in her past, but....nothing.
"I'm sorry, I don't. I've only seen...bits and pieces," she confessed, "of my past life. I suppose....we knew each other then?"
So this was one of those Senshi she'd only heard of, the ones that were from a thousand years ago. She'd not yet met one, but it was the sort of thing people talked about.
His breathing became shaky, as shaky as his voice, and he held back a fresh round of tears. So he'd been right. She wasn't... not anymore... But she...
His ears folded down and he wiped briefly at his eyes as he shuddered from the intense wave of emotion crashing into him.
"More than knew each other," he said in a strangled voice. He didn't want to talk about it, not really, but she deserved to know who he was, before making any decisions about befriending him. It was possible she'd want nothing to do with a man she'd loved once, a very, very long time ago. For all he knew, she'd already found someone in this life. Attached to someone no longer himself.
"We, um. Duty, came first," he said, eyes dropping from her beautiful, perfect face to the ground. "We decided not to pursue the matter of... each other. After a while. But we were... that song was..." He swallowed heavily, eyes sliding shut. He couldn't do this. He wasn't ready.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 4:36 am
Oh.
Oh, no.
Just seeing the way he reacted...it broke Izanami's heart. She'd never much considered herself a romantic when it came to reality, rather than the lovely fantasy of her otome games, but there was something heartwrenching about this entire situation.
"I....I see," she said, a little weakly. "I'm sorry. That the two of you weren't....able to be what you wanted." Or, at least, that it seemed like they weren't.
She was also a little sorry that she wasn't Irihime, but, well. That couldn't be helped.
He inhaled deeply, pulling himself together. "I've had to live with it for a long while," he said slowly as he opened his eyes again.
But he still had yet to fully process that she was gone, his Irihime. Not until he saw the new Izanami standing before him, beautiful as ever.
"But thank you. She was... everything, for a time. I don't mean to, uh... I mean, um. You're not her. I don't want to treat you like you are her. But would you like to be friends, anyway? I could tell you a few stories about her." He smiled a bit, ears slowly raising back up from the depressed flop they'd been in.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 5:42 am
It was sweet, how hard Stribor was working to reassure her, even if Izanami knew that to some degree, he had to be looking at her and seeing his Izanami. But, well--perhaps this was good fortune, in the end, for both of them.
"I'd like that," she said, genuinely. "I know what I've seen, but that's not the same as hearing from someone who knew her."
And besides, she wanted to get to know him. Even if it was sort of a weird situation, it was one she couldn't help but be intrigued about. Plus, he seemed sweet, and frankly Izanami would never turn down more Senshi friends and allies. She'd be a fool to turn someone away just because he might have weird feelings about her past self.
"How long have you been on Earth?" She asked. "Are you settling in alright?"
Stribor inhaled slowly, relaxing more as they moved from the topic of Irihime. He'd need—tonight would be—he'd be crying tonight, for certain.
"I've been here for a couple of weeks. And settling in okay," he answered, smiling slightly. "There's a lot to learn, about Earth. It's beautiful."
Noir Songbird
Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2024 12:21 pm
It was...sort of miserable to think about the whole situation, with Stribor and Irihime, and how he'd lived for a thousand years and she just....hadn't. Something had killed her, and Izamani had no idea what, and she wasn't sure if she'd ever know.
All that was left were ashes, interred with the rest of the Izanamis, stretching back over the centuries. And a man who had loved her, and remembered.
"Is it like your world?" She found herself asking. Perhaps that wasn't a fair question, but she was curious. "Izanami...is very different than anything I knew. The perpetual twilight alone, but everything there is so....strange. beautiful, but strange."
He hummed at that, ears sinking slightly over his face as he thought that out. "I rarely got to actually visit Izanami—I was forbidden from leaving my planet, you see. I, um."
He blushed a bit, shrugging and not really wanting to elaborate at the moment. "That's a story for another time. But we never quite had night. Or, well, long nights, like here on Earth. Even our longest night was shorter than a summer night here in Destiny City. Our shortest summer night was only two hours and celebrated with fireworks."
Noir Songbirdx
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 4:36 pm
Izanami wanted ot press, because she wanted to learn so much more about this person who had come into her life, who had...found her, a second time, it seemed, across multiple lifetimes--wasn't that the sort of thing people dreamed about? Wrote songs about, books, movies?
It was almost enamoring on its own.
"That's fascinating. What was it like, having so much sun all the time? How did you sleep? I suppose you'd have adapted to that quite differently."
"Well, it's not as though the sun was at its perfect strongest most of the time—just as we rarely had perfect night, we rarely had perfect day, either. The whole 'high noon' thing here on Earth that happens every day was part of the shortest night solstice celebrations. Shortest night, longest 'high noon'. Longest night, shortest 'high noon'. And so it was more like, uhh... 9AM or 4PM most of the time? I guess, at least, on this location of the planet, I hear if you're much further up north you only get three hours of daylight and obviously the sun doesn't fully go around the sky the way it does here... The sun never fully crested the sky in the same way, but it took longer for Stribor to, uhh, rotate, I guess? I've learned a lot more about that kind of spacey stuff on Earth than I did on Stribor, honestly," he admitted at the end of his long ramble, cheeks flushing red. "It didn't occur to me to care, before, until I really had to explain the difference. I mean, of course I explained it before, before the big, um, you know, but I was less smart about it.... You know what, I'm going to just shut up now before I keep embarrassing myself."
