Persephone

This relationship is not working out: you are quiet and you are sad and you are patient, but you ultimately know that it’s not going to work out. Your lover - an older man, an army officer - dotes on you, gives you gaudy jewels that you quietly ignore, put into a jewelry box and never wear, just carry a simple, pretty fan with you, and drapes you in silks, dresses you like a doll, but that is all he is interested in, not you. He wants your beauty and your gentleness and his certain knowledge that you will always please him, always obey him, and never leave him. He’s jealous and possessive and keeps you close, and while he’s rich, it’s like you’re a songbird in a gilded cage. A doll. A possession.

You try, really you do, over the several months you spend with him, but it’s hard and it’s lonely: he doesn’t let you go out, really, or talk to anyone else unless he’s there, not even the servants. You try to do what he wants, at least at first, but it’s hard and you’re lonely, so behind his back you talk to people. Occasionally one of the servants, or one of his lieutenants, someone young and lively and handsome: you’re not flirting with them, only talking, but he doesn’t see it that way, he gets angry at you and restricts what you can do, where you can go, even more, fires the servants and replaces them and sends his lieutenants...somewhere else.

You were isolated before, and now are even more so, but you are patient. Waiting. It can’t last forever - and it doesn’t. He comes home drunk, and angry, and there’s an argument: usually he yells and you listen, you listen and you promise and maybe you cry, but this time, you speak. Trying to placate him, but there’s something beneath your soft words (something carefully calculated, you know), so the more you speak, even as you’re trying to appease him, something snaps.

He draws his sword: if he can’t have you - because he knows that you are going to leave him, no matter what you say with all your pretty words - then no one can but the Maiden of Endings. You can’t run in your kimono, at least not fast, and though you’re backing up, you can’t possibly get away from him, not when you’ve backed up against a wall -

But when he tries to stab you, you catch his sword in your fan, close it up on it, catching him off-balance - and twist it out of his hand, use his weight and height against him to pull him off his feet. And then you stab him with his own sword before he can recover and take it from you, watch him slump to the ground at your feet.

His lips move, as if to say something, before he dies. Maybe it’s your name. Maybe it’s not. You don’t know.


Minor detail note: in this memory, he's wearing his kimono wrong, right over left. Given everything else happening here it might escape notice, but it's definitely A Thing.