Rurouni Kenshin (OAV), Kenshin/Tomoe, sensory deprivation, "in this silence I believe"
Himura burned the house in springtime, a year of his life in the soil. Tomoe died with the fall of winter snow, blood red on white, and he mourned her until the snow died too, then left with the velvet buds of sakura not yet opened on the trees.
During the first night of his wandering, his hair still smelled of smoke and endings. He wrapped a cloth across his face so that he smelled only clean linens, and allowed the fabric across his eyes to blot out the stars. The woods were silent, not yet awakened to the full cacophony of spring and cautious of the presence of a human.
So isolated, he didn’t need to close his eyes or sleep to imagine her with him. She too had smelled of clean linens at night, of open skies or the white petals of carnations. When he lay very still he could feel her, in phantom touches and imagined firings of nerves: brush of black hair against his inner thigh, whisper of breath across his ribs.
It was almost like their first nights together, still so unsure of each other and tentative to touch. It had been weeks before he’d woken to even the softest tips of her fingers tracing his eyebrow, and weeks still again to progress to open touches, the cautious weight of her head on his chest as his hands hovered above her arms, unsure of his welcome. In the absolute loneliness of the woods, his mind reimagined the firefly excitement of each early touch, the way her first kiss against his cheek had shocked like ice against his skin in the summer heat.
Recalling her was easiest like this. He’d done so during the time of mourning, while the house still stood, but now, lacking even architectural reminders of her presence, his body conjured sense memories more vividly than ever, as if determined to hold her fast against the slippage of seasons. Time would dull these reminders too -- water over stones -- but the thought brought little comfort when faint breezes revived the sensation of her body trembling over his after pleasure.
In the shallow space between his waking isolation and the differing isolation of sleep, he could almost feel the thin strength of her arms wrapped around him and her breath against his shoulder as she slept. In dreams, it was easy to believe that she was still with him, for she frolicked through his dreaming mind more carefree than she’d ever been in life. In the daytime, her absence was palpable and undeniable. But here, in a place of both and neither, he found himself leaning once more toward belief. Perhaps there were memories that time one day would weather down and smooth away, but sensations -- the fickle, half-imagined, half-real flicker of her lips against his own -- were more difficult to banish. As the whisper of her sighs pulled him finally into sleep, Himura wondered if it might not be a lifetime before Tomoe truly left him behind.