Author's note: Just a little one-shot I was inspired to write one night - hope you enjoy it!

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Tanyuu hissed slightly as her movement caused pain to shoot up her leg.

She had been sitting in the same position for too long, simply watching the snow fall and allowing it to muffle the sound of any distractions.

When she was a child she had loved the snow, excitement making her forget her pain for once and run out to play like any ordinary child. But she wasn't ordinary and that became clearer with every year she lived.

Now the snow brought with it a kind of melancholy followed by a dread that it should last too long. The snow kept travellers from reaching them in their remote holding. No travellers meant no stories so she had to resort to other methods to keep her mushi under control... none of which were pleasant. She looked up at the dark sky, silently praying for the snow to fall more slowly.

Tanyuu glanced at the calendar, counting back the days and months since the last time her most faithful storyteller had visited.

It had been summer then, the evenings just beginning to darken and cool into autumn.

A flash of silver at the gate, a familiar tread on the step and the smell of rain and tobacco had wound itself around her, as surely as Ginko's voice had held her in a thrall until long into the night. Her mushi reacted to him too, simultaneously reaching out towards something that fascinated them yet poised like a startled animal, ready to flee at any second. They could always tell when he was close.

His presence both excited and calmed her as it did her mushi, his stories arousing a fierce ache at the fact that she would never see the world he described. He alone seemed to understand her craving to explore outside the four walls of her home and her prison. He described his travels lovingly, lingering over the smallest detail of texture and colour and scent, knowing that Tanyuu was hanging on his every word hungrily, storing his tales away as half-forgotten memories of her own. She tried to keep him for as long as possible, asking him to retell her favourite parts and he would do so, the cadence of his voice never changing with impatience or boredom.

They would sit close together in the darkness long after he stopped speaking, the silence between them full of all the things they could never say aloud. The line of warmth where their knees almost touched, an unconscious movement that stopped a breath away from being a caress; something delicate that they could never acknowledge.

Ginko always left without saying goodbye.

He understood how much control it took everytime for Tanyuu to let him walk away without calling out and he knew that he would not be able to resist her plea if she did call after him. Tanyuu watched until he was out of sight and he never looked back when he left, not once. Everytime he avoided farewells and continued when he came back as if he had never left...even if he couldn't stay he could at least make sure that he never said goodbye.

And that was as good as a promise that he would always come back.

She reached for the lantern as the light faded, her movements unconsciously graceful, weaving an illusion of a forgotten princess, banished from her kingdom...the illusion shattered abruptly as Tanyuu was forced to her feet to get a match. Her face twisted ruefully; not even she could make that lurching movement graceful. The lantern lit she settled back down again and pulled the blanket tightly around her so that she could delay closing the screen doors a little longer.

The falling snow was so beautiful, muting sound and changing the world into something out of the fairytales she adored. It was still beautiful, even though she knew that each flake that fell made it more likely that the mountain passes would become impassable.

Her breath caught in her throat as she felt it; the slight vibration of the mushi beneath her skin that had become so achingly familiar. Her heart sped up...she hardly dared to hope. Was that a shadow by the gate? A flash of silver...or was it just her fevered imagination showing her what she wanted to see? Surely she wasn't imagining the crunch of a booted foot on fresh-fallen snow...or the tell-tale cloud of white around the traveller's head...she leaned forward, holding the lantern up high.

There, definitely a flash of silver...a gleam of teeth through the darkness. Tanyuu's lips turned up as she returned the grin with a radiant smile of her own.

She no longer cared just how heavily the snow fell.

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Author's note: Thank you all for reading and please let me know what you thought of it! All feedback is very much appreciated! I was inspired to write this after watching the live action movie of Mushishi when I was in Japan...and listening to the soundtrack from the anime recently reminded me about it. The character of Tanyuu really caught my imagination.

Thanks again for reading and hope to see you all again soon!

^_^

Chrikaru