Chapter Text
Izumo’s heart has no room for soul mates.
This, she decides the moment her mother throws her away like unwanted trash, spitting venomous words meant to kill. They fester and boil beneath Izumo’s skin if she so much as thinks--but, Izumo is a survivor. She goes on. She pulls her decaying heart together. Wraps it in duty and love for her sister and ignores the edges that don’t quite fit together anymore. Then Tsukumo is gone, disappeared, and duty and love are not enough when there’s no one to prop it on. Her heart crumbles. Just like the hope shoaled carefully within her when Maria dies, tortured, before Izumo’s eyes.
Izumo goes on. She gathers from the ashes something small and barely beating. She stiches the bitter thing together with determined spite and burning hatred that seeps into her bones. Calls it a heart.
The pathetic thing barely has room for Tsukumo, for her goal, and for all the nasty, dirty secrets of the past that cling to her like pond scum.
There is no room in Izumo’s heart for soulmates.
(She cannot be broken apart into so many pieces and scattered across the winds again. Some pieces lost and never to be found. The pieces remaining so full of jagged edges that they will not fit or smooth together again but grind and tear like shrapnel in her soul.
She refuses.)
She supposes that’s why the gods deign to mark her. Why they taint the curve of her hips with two dainty, flowery marks that are bright blue and difficult to ignore at the best of times.
Her life remains consistent in its unfairness, at least.