A Love That Is Mine 8

Strike Witches-fanfic. Yoshika almost lost her chance for love because she was young and stupid.
Eight part in a series of short stories.
(Yoshika/Mio)

Read A Love That Is Mine 8

Disclaimer: All things Strike Witches belong to Gonzo and a bunch of others, though I’m sure I’m not hurting anything by borrowing them for a bit.

This is the eight part in the “A Love That Is Mine”-series.
A small note: In writing this part I discovered that I simply cannot write Yoshika. If you can, try to imagine this being a slightly older and more mature version of her?




A Love That Is Mine 8
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by Carola “Ryûchan” Eriksson





Teenage stupidity nearly cost me my one chance at love.

It was a confusing time overall for me, when everything I thought I knew had to be re-evaluated and the world around me suddenly became a much larger, darker and scarier place. Add to this that I was a healer and confirmed pacifist doing my best to become a valuable soldier in a war against an enemy I found I could not hate. All in all it was not a good time for my hormones to awaken and make me discover the wonders of the female form.

My timing was poor indeed.

From the first moment we met you fascinated me, and before too long I came to desperately want to please you in whatever way I could. It was a childish crush for most part, the first of a number of similar ones I went through back at our base, but there was always a kernel of something more, something deeper, hidden underneath that where you were concerned.

I think I finally laid my childish crushes aside the day I watched you get shot out of the sky because of me. I don’t like to think back on the pain, horror and fear of losing you, but I know that ever since then there has been room for no one else in my heart.

Of course I did not all of a sudden become smarter, and so it took me a while still to truly understand what to make of my feelings for you. By then we were on the boat back to Fuso, and while we were given immense amounts of respect from the ship’s crew we were still left alone a lot. I had not realised how I had missed that kind of togetherness with you since our last long boat trip together, how I had missed it being just the two of us until that point.

Did you know that you become a softer, gentler person when we are alone? Not that you are all that harsh otherwise, but it is as if you lay down some of that warrior’s mask when it is just the two of us and relax. As if you don’t have to be the war hero and officer quite so much, and can just be the person, the woman underneath it more and more.

This was the person I fell in love with. Yes, I love every aspect of you, including the stoic warrior that is hard on her students and all the more hard on herself, but the woman whose eyes sparkled with almost childlike glee when we were alone and that would blush slightly at odd times, she was the one that charmed me first.

You came home with me, having no particular place in Fuso to return to and no one that waited for your return. I was overjoyed that you would stay with me, that it had been arranged that you would live with my family and even work at my school. You told me from the start that our dismissal from the joint forces was temporary, that you expected that we would be called back into service soon enough and that it just made more sense that we stay together until then. I didn’t care what your reasons were, as long as I got to be a part of your life still.

Coming back home was much harder on me than I would have expected. It was wonderful to be able to hug my mother and grandmother again, to see my friends and my house after having been away for what felt like so long, and both they and I thought I would just pick my life back up from where I had left it. It wasn’t that easy.

I hadn’t noticed it myself, but my time with the squadron had changed me. I wasn’t quite the same little girl anymore; I had fought, I had flown, I had been to war. Try though they did, my family and friends couldn’t fully understand those things about me. Only you did.

Everyone else told me that I had grown up. You were the only one that looked at me and still saw a child.

We trained together, you and I, as hard as we used to at the base. People shook their heads at us, not at all understanding why we did not just relax and rest up now that we could, but I relished this chance. Since target practice and flight manoeuvres were things we could not simulate with what we had at hand, the physical training instead focused on stamina and swordsmanship, with some measure of hand-to-hand thrown in for my benefit. You also began giving me lessons in battle strategy, sharing with me some of your vast experience so that I would no longer have to fly by my guts and dumb luck alone.

I loved every moment of it.

We spent several months at home before we were recalled to duty, and my mother and grandmother both came to adore you. It made me happy to see how well you fit into my family, and even more how you would show a little more of that gentleness I loved so much each day, yes by now I was well aware that I was irreversibly head over heels in love with you. Once I worked up the courage to I had a talk with my mother, whom after some consideration gave me her approval of you.

It wasn’t quite that easy, catching your attention.

Although you often acted rather possessively of me when there were those that appeared to express an interest in me, and that there were many times you would blush and suddenly become quite clumsy, like when you walked in on me changing or I joined you in the bath, you never seemed to get it when I tried to show interest in you. I felt that although, as I then believed, the chances of you returning my feelings were nonexistent I still wanted you to at least acknowledge me and my feelings for you. Instead it seemed to me that at every turn, every attempt, you treated me like a child.

Our recall orders came and I got desperate. It was just a random training day during our several weeks long wait for the ship that would take us to our new base, and we were fairly deep in the woods for one of our mock battles when a sudden and heavy rain took us by surprise.

It was a romantic cliché really, being forced to take shelter from the rain in a small cave together with the person you are so completely in love with. Between that and my irrational fear, the fear that if I did not get to confess my feelings to you before we left Fuso I never would, it was no wonder that everything came spilling out right then and there.

It was nothing like I had pictured it to be. It was clumsy and inelegant, and when I was finished you just stood there, pale and staring at me without saying anything. I embarrassed myself by bursting into tears.

Although it was embarrassing I should be grateful to those tears, because without them I wonder if you would have come to your senses. As it were you gathered me up and crushed me into your shoulder, awkwardly trying to offer comfort. Even when I had calmed down you made no move to let go, and I of course was only too eager to stay where I was.

Uncharacteristically you ended up with an outpouring of your own, and finally it was all laid out. It was humbling to know how very long you have had feelings for me, but also quite annoying that you had decided on your own to dismiss anything we could have together because of the age difference between us. Because of my youth if we were to get right to the point.

I was old enough to pick up a rifle and kill creatures taken right out of my childhood nightmares but I was not old enough for my love to be taken seriously? Well, I have ever been an impulsive person, and this time was no different; I followed an impulse.

For a moment it seemed as if you would push me away, but at the last moment you changed your grip and cupped my face instead, responding to my kiss. Our first kiss was accompanied by the sound or rain and carried a faint taste of tears, but it was still perfect.

We lingered in our embrace long after our kiss had ended, in fact we settled in like that until the rain stopped, sharing soft conversations about feelings and the future as well as comfortable silences.

We began dating then while still in Fuso, small but sweet moments of togetherness that made it feel a lot less like a dream that I might wake up from to me. The ship we were waiting for came, and while the journey to our new base was filled with unexpected little moments of fiercely blushing awkwardness on top of the need to act professional when not alone, I still enjoyed it. It was reaching our destination that I was worried about.

I don’t know just what I had expected. Our base was new but our team largely the same, save for a few new recruits, so we were surrounded by close friends mostly. The dynamics between all of us had shifted somewhat though, as you and I were not the only ones that had found the time to begin dating during our time away from the front, but it was alright. Somehow these new relationship concerns were worked into our daily routines until it caused no disturbance whatsoever to our performance.

I have never commented on it since I don’t know how you would take it, and I was always more than willing to wait for as long as you needed, but I know our relationship progressed at a pace by far slower than anyone else’s at the base. I suppose in some ways I felt I had to prove to you that I was in this for the long term, I the one that had been so flighty and fickle before, but I doubt you ever saw it that way.

Then for my sixteenth birthday you gave me a sword. Not just any sword, but the mate to your own blade, specially made for me and for the kind of combat I engage in. Some of our friends thought it was not a particularly romantic gift to give your girlfriend, but I knew at once what it really represented.

With this gift you told me that I was no longer a child but an adult, and your equal.

I felt much like I imagine a bride does at her wedding day after that, euphoric and giddily happy yet at the same time anxiously wanting the party and the day to be over. I was guiltily eager for the kind well-wishers to leave me alone with my love, whom I was finally allowed to love fully and without restrictions.

Today your own birthday is just around the corner, and the gift I have to give you, to give both of us, rests securely tucked away in a friend’s drawer. It is a box containing two identical plain gold rings, inscribed with a vow that I felt should be ours. I know that there is no country yet that will acknowledge a marriage between us, although there are ways to go around that if we want to eventually, so these are not really wedding bands but promise rings.

If you accept this, if you accept me, and you find you want ceremony we will have one. I am certain our friends will help out, and what matters is not what others have to say about us but the promises we make to one another for our future.

After all, in the end it is not rings, signed papers and blessings that matters, but heart. It is not tradition or meeting the expectations of strangers, but love, our love.

With this heart, I thee wed.