Rurouni Kenshin: Misao/Aoshi, forgetting the past
She walked with him every year to visit their graves, and every year that she paced by his side, keeping him occupied--sometimes even succeeding in a display of faint amusement--with an endless stream of chatter, she thought the shadows lifted just a little more from his face.
Some years passed before they shared inn rooms on the trip, where she lay at night curled against his side, his hand usually curved over her breast to feel her heartbeat, sweat drying on lean bare bodies. She'd been the one to kiss him the first time and she was the one to initiate it on each of these trips, pulling him closer until he roused to hold her against him and lose himself in the heat of her skin, the sharpness of her cries and the thunder of her pulse.
Misao knew some wounds don't ever quite fade and she knew she had a few--she shared some of those that each of these journeys reminded him of--but she was determined to keep him with her, and here, at least, he seemed no less focused on keeping her close.
She kissed him as hard as she knew how, pulling him deep inside her, moving against him in their rented beds, and in the dark heat of his eyes and the way his lips moved against her skin, fingers trailing languidly through her hair when she unbraided and re-plaited it at night, she knew--she was determined--that even the most shadowed pieces of his heart were mending.
They made the journey in spring, each time. She insisted.