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Hanako-san, Hanako-san, comes a drifting voice, Hanako-san, I want to make a wish.
The words tug at something in his chest, even as he doesn’t understand why. Each utterance of the name yanks at him with greater strength. His eyes are forced open.
Flower child, Amane thinks with some bitterness, clutching one stalk in between his hands too tightly. Is that supposed to be referring to him?
Amane has never been particularly fond of flowers. Amane likes the stars, the moon, all the things far beyond his reach.
Between the two of them, it is Tsukasa who likes—liked—flowers. Liked their velvet-soft petals. Liked their blood-red colouring. Liked the way they withered. Liked their poisonous smells that settled in the back of their mouths. Liked the way the sap would seep through the spaces between his fingers when he crushed them in his hands.
Tsukasa would like this place, is what Amane thinks, lying in the centre of this seemingly endless expanse of darkness and water and stalks of red, red higanbana.
There is a field of higanbana in Saitama, Amane remembers vaguely. Tsukasa has—had—always wanted to visit it, to see a red sea on land and sit amongst its fragrance and softness. But Saitama is far enough that they would need to take a train, and that was just something they could not afford to do. So it was rare that Tsukasa actually had the opportunity to marvel over his favourite flower.
The opportunity came annually, in the cemetery just on the outskirts of Tokyo. It was two bus rides away and more change than they could normally spare, but Amane thought that they could eat store-bought anpan for dinner once a year if it meant that he could read his parents’ names off their family grave that same day.
“They only flower after their guardians die,” Tsukasa told him once, rust-encrusted fingers flicking the thin petals of the higanbana sprouting to the side of the incense sticks.
“Stop that,” Amane had said weakly in reply. Their parents were watching them. He wondered if they were despairing, wherever they were, that Tsukasa and he turned out the way they did.
Of course, Tsukasa ignored him. No one was watching anyway, he would insist. It was what he said when Amane told him he needed to bow and to pray. The cemetery was empty around them, dim and muted and cold.
Amane remembers shivering, remembers digging his fingers into the worn fabric of his clothes. He remembers staring at the ways Tsukasa made him mark him, the ways Tsukasa marked him, and the ways Tsukasa marked himself.
He doesn’t shiver, now, where he is. Wherever he is.
The water he lies in is still, only barely rippling with his breaths. It doesn’t seep into his clothes, this uniform of the nice, thick fabric, decorated with shiny buttons, that Amane could never afford. Attached to it is a cape of the same material, draped over his back and sides like a blanket. But he isn’t cold, and it doesn’t keep him warm.
There is even a cap, but Amane doesn’t wear it. It feels strange on his head.
An arm’s reach away is a knife, large and sharpened, with its blade stained the same deep red that decorates the skin of Amane’s hands to his elbows. (He awoke with it in his hand; it burnt him.) He ignores that.
Everything is still.
Something within him, the same part, he imagines, that reacts to the echoing call of Hanako-san, Hanako-san, Hanako-san, I want to make a wish, tells him to move. Move where? There is nowhere to go.
There is only a void where the sky should be and clusters of spidery petals lining the horizon. There is nothing else before or after that.
Is this his Sanzu-no-kawa? Amane always thought there would be snakes, in his Sanzu-no-kawa. Tsukasa said that the worst people had snakes when they died. He liked to look through books in the library and guess which venomous ones would appear when he passed.
“This one’s yours, Amane,” he said, once, pointing at a black mamba. From Tsukasa’s ramblings, Amane knew it was one of the deadliest species of ophidian in the world. He hummed, considering, and moved his finger to another page. “And this one’s mine.”
He was referring to a sketch of a saw-scaled viper. The passage read, small, unpredictable, aggressive, with a lethal venom.
“It’s so cute!” Tsukasa said. And Amane smiled.
Whenever Amane dreamt about dying after that, it was always with him wading through a river, serpents moving through the water around his ankles, the afterlife in the distance, and Tsukasa an arm’s reach away.
But Amane knows better than that. He isn’t dying after all. This isn’t his Sanzu-no-kawa. Tsukasa isn’t here.
He has died. Is dead. This is his Far Shore.
The answer comes, one day, through a bodiless voice.
Perhaps voice is a misnomer. Amane doesn’t exactly hear anything, but the knowledge reaches him anyway.
This void, it tells him, is his Boundary, and he is a Mystery.
They seem, to him, like fancy words for prison and dead.
It also informs him that he has responsibilities, although he will come to know them in time.
Amane almost laughs at that. A huff escapes his lips, interrupting the steady rhythm of his breaths for the first time since he opened his eyes in this world of darkness. Time does not exist, here. It does not move, not in any way he can parse; if it does, he does not feel it.
For a long while, Amane’s only company is his reflection in the water.
(If he smiles just right, it is as though Tsukasa is there with him.)
Amane was never alone, not really. Amane came into the world with a brother following right behind. And sometimes Tsukasa would lead the way, and Amane would be left to play catch-up, but that was the way things were.
There was nothing they did without the other.
“We’ll die together, too,” Tsukasa announced, once, when they were children and staring at the uneven mound of earth, beneath which they had buried their goldfish.
They won them in a festival booth—rather, Amane did. Tsukasa was bad at the games, he had little patience for anything that wasn’t katanuki. But he wanted the goldfish, said he adored the way they shone like polished copper and how they were so very round. The man at the booth said goldfish brought good fortune to their owners.
So Amane played the game until he won them a plump goldfish each. Tsukasa was ecstatic. “I’ll love them forever!” he’d exclaimed.
But festival goldfish could only live for so long, they learnt.
Tsukasa’s grip around his hand went tight. “You can’t leave me, Amane.”
“Don’t speak of things like that,” was what Amane should have said, because that was what their mother always told them, when Tsukasa got like this. But all he could force out was an honest, “I won’t.”
His fingers twitch around the phantom weight of a hand he can no longer hold.
Amane wonders if the goldfish swam through their own Sanzu-no-kawa. He wonders if there are any sins that goldfish could make that would lead them to navigating serpent-infested waters to the Far Shore. But they couldn’t walk across bridges either. Perhaps they didn’t cross to the Far Shore, then.
Perhaps they were like him, stuck somewhere, nowhere, unable to move forward or back. Waiting.
It is as he muses fatuously of things that do not matter that the hakujoudai appear before him. They do not come from anywhere; they spin into existence, twin bobbles of dark mist in this endless vacuum of nothing but water and flowers of the dead.
The knowledge of what they are comes to him also seemingly from nowhere. In one breath, they do not exist in his plane of reality. In the next, they are there, they are his, and he knows what they are, what they do, and what they are meant to be.
They hover about him idly. They require his will to act, but there is nothing Amane wants them to do.
There’s really only one thing Amane wants, now, but he knows asking the bodiless voice will only leave him with silence.
“Wait,” he tells the hakujoudai. He almost expects his voice to crackle with misuse; it doesn’t. He sighs and closes his eyes. “Wait.”
The last time Amane saw higanbana with Tsukasa was before they died, at their parents’ grave.
Tsukasa dropped to the ground as he always did, and he looked up to Amane. “I want one,” he said, smiling.
“Want what?” Amane asked. He’d placed a plate of donuts and Tsukasa’s attempt at a katanuki of the two of them from the festival on the grave. He knelt.
Tsukasa leant close. Evening had fallen with the snow, and Tsukasa’s warmth was welcome. The sleeves of their worn yukata brushed together. “A flower.”
“The higanbana?”
Tsukasa’s bared teeth gleamed in the moonlight; the embers of the incense reflected in his eyes. “Yes.”
He then proceeded to uproot a stalk of higanbana, wrapping both hands around the stem and yanking upwards. It split, its bottom half and its roots remained in the dirt. But Tsukasa was never one to be deterred.
He did it again, and again, and again, until Amane’s fingers were beginning to lose feeling.
He did it until the beautiful, if haunting, patch of higanbana by their family grave turned bare and he had a healthy and whole stalk of higanbana in his unforgiving grip, delicate umbels and bulbous root-thing and all.
Tsukasa flushed, from delight and the cold. The colour of his cheeks and nose could be compared to the flower he shoved into Amane’s face.
“I’m going to plant it,” he said and stood. Beneath his feet, the less fortunate flowers were crushed. “It’ll live forever.”
“Okay, Tsukasa,” Amane said, because there was nothing else for him to do. He blew into his hands, bowed to his parents, and then left the cemetery with one finger hooked in Tsukasa’s obi.
He remembers Tsukasa getting a canister they didn’t need and filling it with dirt he’d dug from the local park. He planted his precious higanbana there and cared for it almost religiously.
Amane doesn’t remember if it survived. He doesn’t know for certain if it retained that striking blood-red hue, or his memory of it was influenced by the otherworldly flowers amongst which he has found himself.
He doesn’t know how long it has been when it happens. It could be anywhere from a week to a year, or more, and he would be none the wiser.
Nothing changes, here. There is just him, his hakujoudai, the bodiless voices, the water, and the higanbana.
Or there were, until Amane sees, in the far ends of his Boundary, the way the flowers begin to change. He doesn’t understand it, at first, and sends his hakujoudai to investigate.
The higanbana are—shrinking. Their spider-leg petals converge and twist and shrivel until all that is left are little red bulbs resembling young strawberries. And it does not happen gradually.
It’s over within ten beats of his racing heart.
They are all buds, and Amane thinks, no, because this can’t be. The higanbana, they mean he’s dead. And they mean Tsukasa’s dead, too, because he doesn’t want to live this way unless Tsukasa’s—
Without thought, his fingers reach out for the stalk closest to him. Its bud is bright and round, and just before the tips of his fingers graze it, it unravels. Slowly, so very slowly, it unravels and Amane wants to heave.
Tsubaki.
They are no longer spindly, ominously beautiful higanbana, but plump, youthful tsubaki.
Amane’s mind scrambles. These are the only flowers Tsukasa loved more than the flower of the dead.
Unbidden, Amane’s hand snaps up and around his throat. Somewhere, the words Hanako-san, Hanako-san, Hanako-san, I want to make a wish reach him, and he feels that tug inside of himself that tells him he must go, that he must obey, that he must fulfil his roles—as a Mystery, as a wish granter, as the Leader of the Seven. But his eyes are on the tsubaki, on its delicate petals and the miniature sun nestled among them. He remembers the way they die.
He remembers Tsukasa, feels the grip of his knife in his hand, feels the warmth of his life spill down his chest.
The seal appears on his palm. Black and unassuming, yet riddled with power. He knows, instinctively, what this means for him.
He realises, then, that there is no such thing as eternal goodbyes, not for him and not for Tsukasa. In fact, he thinks, slipping the seal within his pocket, he’s doing his best to keep Tsukasa close to him.
He wonders if Tsukasa would, then, appreciate a flower. The tsubaki sprouting by his feet seem to be leaning up towards him.
Shutting his eyes, Amane lets himself be whisked away.