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Killua lay on the bare, cool earth, looking up through a curtain of tear-shaped leaves and blossoms at the afternoon sky. It was no different than it had been every day of the past year, apart from the ones when it rained. Those were few and far-between though: just enough to keep the gardens watered, and even the rainy days had a serene monotony to them. He wouldn’t have been surprised if every raindrop was of precisely the same shape and volume.
Mostly, though, the sky was a perfect, cloudless, summer blue, and he despised it.
He also hated the bright blooms, just as flawless, untouched by bugs or blight. They budded and bloomed but he never saw them fade. The blown flowers simply disappeared when he wasn’t looking, replaced by new buds. Their scent was cloying, choking, particularly lying where he was in the very center of the garden. He wouldn’t move, though. This was where he belonged, on this of all days. It was a vigil of sorts. A penance.
It had been exactly one year since his brother had tried to take his inheritance, and cursed half the kingdom’s nobility when Killua had refused to turn it over to him. One year in which he’d wandered the hollow halls of his once-busting home, the paths of this graveyard of a garden, not knowing whether these people-turned-plants would ever regain their human forms even if he managed to break Illumi’s curse. One year that had touched him physically as little as it had these preternatural blossoms, time sliding over his skin like the softest of breaths.
Well. Not quite. He had not aged, but dark lines had appeared under the skin of his chest in the months following his doomed eighteenth birthday celebration. Then, this morning, his nightshirt had snagged on something when he pulled it off: a single thorn protruding from his skin like a hooked claw, right over his heart. The first, he suspected, of many.
Killua shut his eyes, breathed in slowly and deeply despite the dull ache that no doubt coincided with the eruption of the thorn. His exhale was the only discernible sound in the hush that hung over the castle and its grounds; he had asked the others to let him be today, and they had respected his wish. The warmth of the sun was soporific, the roses’ scent narcotic in its sweetness. The breeze through their foliage seemed to whisper to him: Shed no tears for us, Killua. Sleep, sleep, and dream of him…
Whom? he wondered drowsily, and someone laughed in answer. It wasn’t a laugh he recognized, yet it was one he knew as if it were a part of himself. It was like the pealing of the village churchbells, rising up from the valley on a clear springtime morning. A wave of longing washed over him, narrowing until it corkscrewed into his heart. He felt a presence nearby, and slowly, he opened his eyes.
The face above him was brighter than the sun it eclipsed. The young man’s features were symmetrical, his skin a smooth copper, his black hair a wild tangle. But it was his eyes that made Killua’s breath hitch. They were the color of wildflower honey and just as sweetly soft, gazing down at him with…love?
No; it couldn’t be that. Killua didn’t know this boy. More to the point, he was a boy. Before he could sink into that maelstrom of thought, however, the boy spoke: “Wake up, sleepyhead! There are things to do!”
“There’s nothing to do here,” Killua answered, dazed. “Nothing but wait.”
“Mmm, but waiting isn’t nothing. You still need to live. I’m coming, and you’d better be ready for me when I do.”
“You…coming? Here? I don’t think that’s possible.”
The boy smiled. “Have faith.”
“In what?”
“In me. In yourself. In the fact that curses can always be broken.”
“I don’t even know you!”
“No,” the boy said, his smile softening, eyes musing, “but you will. And you have to keep your heart alive until then.”
Killua found himself choking on a sob as he answered: “It’s so hard.”
“Yes,” the golden boy said gently, “but remember that I’m waiting for you, too.”
“I don’t understand!”
He smiled again. “There is nothing to understand but this.” He leaned down and touched his lips to Killua’s, and for a moment the world stopped. Everything stopped, except the soft press of their lips, their warm, joined breath. There was nothing but that petal-like brush of skin on skin and its infinite possibility.
At last the golden boy drew back, smiling at Killua’s dazed expression. “Happy birthday, my love,” he said, and then he was gone, and Killua was blinking his eyes open to a cornflower evening sky and the wrenching realization that it had been a dream.
Except.
He reached up to his lips where the touch of the kiss seemed to linger, and plucked off the lavender rose petal that rested there. He sat up and found that he was covered with them, though there was no lavender rosebush in this garden. As he held the heart-shaped petal in his palm, struggling to make sense of it all, a breeze swirled around him, lifting the petals, wrapping him in a spicy sweetness that was almost an embrace. Before they scattered, he was sure that he heard the whispered words:
Wait for me.