Work Text:
He never could understand the meaning of the different colour roses, his mother would have in the sunshine of the large window that dominated the lower floor of the house. Daehyun always offered to tend the flowers for her, especially as she got older and when dad left. But slowly he began to notice the darker saturation of the roses. Once they were bright and vibrant reds with stunning emerald leaves but now they dissipated into blacks with leaves the colour of the mud from which they stubbornly grew. He didn’t know why his mother had let the roses get to that stage until the night she grew her angel wings. His lack of understanding for the colours only deepened when he saw people putting red flowers at grave yards. The bright and youthful colours were a stark contrast to the monochrome graveyard they sat and wilted in.
Daehyun didn’t understand until he learnt, himself that regret was stronger than love. This fact was proven more and more everyday that he lived without being able to come home to his mother. His friends would say come out, they would whisper rhymes in his ears about having fun, and without fail Daehyun would go to his phone to ring his mother and say he would be late home, if he came home at all that night. That was when the sinking feeling would hit him, like a stone being dropped in a still pond. The sadness would ripple off him, creating a safety blanket, that he so often found himself relying on to get through the day. His regret was a hard stone wall with thousands of jagged edges, each pricking him with memories of his mother, the worst one was missing her cooking, her smiling face when he did eventually come home, and her hugs that would greet him on a cold winter’s night. But he got none of that anymore, all he had was the deadweight of regret tied to his ankle as he tried to swim on through life, but it only pulled him down. There were times when Daehyun barely thought he surfaced as he found himself thinking of so little else but his mother.
After the realisation that regret was stronger than love, he decided to look into the meanings of the different flowers his mother would present the street with. A red rose was for love, an orange rose simply meaning ‘i am proud of you’, and lastly a black rose meaning death and sorrow. Slowly, it all cleared in his mind. He found himself knowing why his mother would let the flower wilt and die; it was because she knew something was going to happen to her. She knew, she was going to leave. The last day before she died, the only flower on display was a single black rose. That was her good-bye present to Daehyun.
Daehyun now would rather leave black roses on graves as promise in a way, for him it meant good-bye for now. Though he also understood why his mother had hid it from him. He had gone through a period of hatred for the women, as to why she had hidden it all from him, the conclusion drawn was that she didn’t want him to worry for her. She would leave orange roses for him, whenever he completed something difficult or different. Which unsurprisingly lead to him getting a tattoo of two roses one black and one orange, with the date of her death underneath them. They were his own little way of thanking her. He was content for it to be that way.
At least Daehyun now understood the meaning of the flowers his mother bombarded him with. The tradition of displaying flowers didn’t die wit her, Daehyun continued it with his own young family. His husband Youngjae, was always supportive of him with the flowers, saying as long as it meant something to him then that is what they would continue to do. Yougnjae never really understood his adoration for the flowers but he didn’t need to; it never mattered much anyway when the smile on his beloved’s face when he came home with a bouquet of red roses was priceless. Youngjae vowed he would do anything with in his power to keep that smile on Daehyun’s face.