Archive of Our Own ^beta

Notes:

Survive: to continue to live or exist in spite of (danger or hardship); to remain alive after the death of.

If you look up mulberry symbolism, you’ll get a blog post from “thymewilltell” called “Munificent Mulberry.” Is this post accurate? I’m unsure - but I got ideas from it anyway. Briefly:
Black mulberry - morus nigra, from latin mora meaning “delay” - mulberry trees do not bloom until the winter frost is over. They wait through hardship to bear fruit.
The flower language meaning could be drawn from the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, in which the berries are stained red by the lovers’ blood.

Things I liked about this prompt: the ability to use wordplay and subvert the meaning of “survive” (rather than “you’ll be the death of me,” interpret it as “I won’t be here once you’re gone”); the fun habit mulberry trees have when they grow really old (ancient?); the fact that the juice looks like blood and the leaves look like (love)hearts; the “delaying through hardship” secondary symbolism.

As with last year, I worked really hard to blend the two teams and then realized that I might have misunderstood the assignment. I broke and used text this year because I’m not clever enough to come up with a way of conveying this otherwise. It’s intentionally vague what “that choice” entailed in this AU, or who made it, but I sprinkled in some implications that it was similar to canon Kurogane’s wish in Tokyo (oops, how did last year’s theme get in?)