Chapter Text
Kaneki finally unloads the last of the boxes from his car, placing them down as soon as he gets into the doorway of the house that he is renting, more of a cottage really, he thinks. He sighs as he looks around at the various boxes filled with carefully packed plants. Kaneki had barely had space to pack the things he needed for himself with the amount of plants that had been pushed onto him.
Just because the protagonist of his newest book is a botanist doesn’t mean he needs to ‘get a feel for plants’ as his editor had insisted. He hadn’t had time to explain that caring for plants wasn’t really what botanists did before a whole collection of them had shown up at his apartment days before he was set to leave for his retreat, and darn it plants took up a lot of space when you were packing them.
He sighs again as he turns to look out the still open door. A lush green view greets him. He takes it all in, the door opens out to are a few steps down to a small dirt path. It leads from the doorway in which Kaneki stands to the end of the dirt road; which forms a parking spot of sorts, where Kaneki has parked his small car. The path cuts through very soft looking, very green grass.
Kaneki ponders whether he has ever seen anything so green in his life. Then again that’s not even counting the trees which ring the small meadow in which the cottage sits. The trees are somehow green too. And all of it together is more shades of green than Kaneki’s eyes even know what to do with.
It’s simultaneously overwhelming and beautiful at the same time.
Kaneki turns back into the house, deciding to leave the door open to let it air out. He isn’t normally one for the outdoors but if he is going to be out here he figures he might as well get used to it. Besides, the air out here seems to have a different, more welcoming quality, one that makes him want to breathe in deep and and stay in it for long periods of time.
He walks through the house he rented for the next few months, exploring its various rooms and opening up windows as he goes. The house is more traditional than Kaneki is used to from living in the city. Although it isn’t as old as he was worried it was going to be.
The small kitchen in the back has a second door which leads out into what Kaneki supposes you could call the backyard. Really it’s just the same meadow from the front surrounded by more forest. Although this section of the meadow looks more tended to. In it there is a small fenced in patch of dirt which the proprietor he had got the keys from had cheerily told him he was more than welcome to garden in. There are also some bushes lining the edge of the garden which looked planted; as well as some wooden chairs and a matching table.
Kaneki walks up to the table and runs his fingers along it as he looks out into the nearby forest, it might be nice to write out here when the weather holds.
Maybe being around all these plants was going to do him and his book good after all.
Kaneki heads back inside and begins unpacking. He first puts the perishable food away in the fridge and then moves his various bags and boxes into the pertinent rooms to be fully unpacked later. Once he finishes that he arrives back in front of the collection of plants which are still just inside the doorway. “Now, what on earth am I supposed to do with all of these?” he asks no one.
He starts carefully unwrapping from the plants from the various ways they had been protected during the long car ride and placing them around the house. He starts with the window sills, plants like sunlight right?
Quickly he runs out of viable window spots and starts having to use various tables around the small cottage. One of the plants is in a big pot which he figures is designed to just go on the floor so that’s where he lugs it, making sure it is in sight of one of the living room windows. A small trio of what Kaneki is pretty certain are kitchen herbs goes in the small kitchen window which overlooks the backyard from above the sink.
Placing the herbs meant he had finished up with getting all of the plants unpacked so he washes his hands and begins investigating the kitchen while he is there. Kaneki is happy to see that the promise that the kitchen comes equipped with all the necessary utensils and appliances was kept. Kaneki nods happily at the sight of the good quality coffee maker he had made sure the cottage had in advance.
On his way here he had driven through the closest town and been glad to see it wasn’t as far as he was expecting. It looked like they had a pretty large grocery store. He would take a trip down there soon to get stocked up.
Once all of his food is settled around the kitchen Kaneki begins making himself a quick stir fry for dinner. As it’s cooking Kaneki sits down with a huff at the small kitchen table, more tired from his long drive and unpacking than he realised.
Tomorrow , he thinks, I’ll give myself just the morning to unpack and settle in and then I need to start working . He nods firmly at himself and then dishes out his finished stir fry onto the waiting plate and sits down to eat it with the first sense of accomplishment he’s felt in a long, long time.
~ ~ ~
A couple days later Kaneki makes his way down the narrow dirt road that leads from the cottage to the nearby town. He had maybe not quite achieved his goal of getting started that very afternoon but after finishing unpacking he had at least looked at his various notes and outlines which he has written before now.
Which were kind of a disaster if he was being honest. But that was why he was out here, and at least now he had an idea of what he was working with.
As Kaneki drives into town he sees the grocery store he had spotted the other day and pulls into the parking lot. After parking he sits in the driver’s seat for a minute, gathering himself before he heads inside.
He gets out of the car and goes inside, pulling out the list he’d created on his phone of all the food he wanted to stock up on so that he didn’t have to come to town too regularly. Avoiding people, after all, was the whole idea of this trip. Grabbing a cart Kaneki weaves through the aisles slowly filling it with everything he needs.
As he is turning to the next aisle a display catches his eye.
It’s a display of seeds. Plant seeds. Some flowers, but mostly vegetable seeds. An image of that tilled, fenced in garden in the backyard springs to Kaneki’s mind and on impulse he grabs some packets of seeds. I’m here to learn about plants right? he thinks to himself. What better way than to grow some. And besides, maybe if I don’t fail miserably and kill all of these I can eat them later.
~ ~ ~
Kaneki doesn’t plant the seeds right away when he returns to the cottage, instead throwing himself into his work as he’s meant to. One day however, roughly a week later he is stopping to make himself a fresh pot of coffee and he spots the packets of seeds where he had left them on the kitchen counter.
After his coffee brews he gathers together the packets and carries them into the living room with his steaming mug. Ok, now how do you not fuck this up?
He picks up the first seed packet: ‘Napa Cabbage’ it reads. Kaneki is pleasantly surprised when he turns it over and he finds basic instructions on the back of the packet itself. Maybe this isn’t so hard after all, he thinks as he opens a new browser window and begins googling how to plant and care for cabbage plants.
An hour later he sits back, coffee long empty, and multiple pages in his notebook full with notes on how to plant and care for a garden and all the plants he had purchased. Everything had been both complicated and simplified by his searching but he feels now like he has a plan and that maybe by the end of the summer he would even be able to eat some food he grew himself.
Just wait till his editor heard that. ‘Feel the character’ indeed .
The next morning he brings his packets of seeds and his notebook outside to check out the small garden he has to work with. Kaneki comes to an abrupt stop as he realises that he has zero gardening tools to work with, or equipment to make a trellis out of for the plants that need one of those. He eyes the nearby forest warily, getting the feeling like he shouldn’t disturb it to collect materials for a trellis. Any hope he had managed to collect comes crashing out of him.
He sighs glumly and turns back to go back into the cottage, Well, it was a nice thought. Not sure why I thought someone like me would be able to do something like that and make all those plants grow . As Kaneki looks towards the doorway leading back into the kitchen he notices a box attached to the back of the house… a box which looked like it might house gardening supplies.
Kaneki blinks.
He approaches the box, quickly setting down everything he’s holding, he slides open the latch and opens the lid. Inside he finds everything he could imagine he needs and more. Gloves and a shovel and tiny shovels (Kaneki thinks he remembers those being called trowels) some twine. Even some simple bamboo trellises.
Kaneki sits back on his heels staring into the box for a moment. Before nodding firmly, and picking up his notebook from where he had set it down to look at his notes to figure out exactly what he needs to get started.
After that first long morning of gardening Kaneki only finds himself needing to tend to the garden for a couple minutes each day.
It’s rather boring if Kaneki is being honest, considering at this point his garden is just dirt but hopefully soon he would at least have something to look at.
One time about a week after planting, as he is crouching down to inspect for sprouts, he gets a feeling on the back of his neck, an urge to look out into the forest. Not a bad feeling necessarily, and it’s not unusual if Kaneki is being honest with himself for the forest to give him unusual feelings but this. But this is sharper than normal. More focused.
He scans the tree line.
Seeing nothing but green and more green, like always, he shakes himself mentally and stands up to go inside and start his work for the day.
~ ~ ~
Over the following weeks Kaneki settles into a routine in the little cottage. Every morning he gets up, waters the plants in the house which need it (someone had told him once that the way to check was to feel the soil and if it was dry it needed watering and none of them had died yet). Then he would make himself some coffee and settle in to his laptop until lunch.
Then after lunch he would go outside and tend to the garden. Watering it a bit as he was instructed, weeding when it was needed. Staring more than he would ever admit at the tiny plants as they began to sprout up through the soil.
Even crouching down with his phone and taking pictures of some of them in the sunlight. After doing that he would round off his day with more of the same; sometimes bringing his laptop outside and sitting at the wooden chairs and table to do his afternoon’s work. After dinner he would take a break from his own writing and read from one of the books which he had brought with him or something similarly relaxing.
It was as he was just standing back up from crouching down to inspect his growing plants one afternoon, about a month after he had first come out to the cottage, that something changed.
As Kaneki was standing back up again he very nearly fell back over again. Because there, leaning against the fencing surrounding the small garden, is a man.