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There is a vase sitting on Jackie’s desk.
There is a vase sitting on Jackie’s desk, and there is a sprig of bluebells in it. Jackie does not look at the vase, because he fears if he does, he will have to get up and go over to his desk and pick it up and hurl it as hard as he can against the wall and watch the glass shatter and the water drip down, down, down and the flowers fall onto the floor in a puddle. He does not particularly want to get out of bed. So instead he pulls the blanket up over his head, ignores the throbbing in his bandaged hand, and squints his eyes shut tight, like he has any hope of falling asleep, like he could trick himself into being asleep, if only so he could stop thinking about the vase.
The flowers. The fucking flowers, and the dance, and the kiss—the sight of Ran’s face in the moonlight, green-tinged and surprised, comes swirling back into Jackie’s mind and wavers like the illusions that dance above Subbin’s streets in the summer. It makes Jackie nauseous. He’s going to throw up, or cry. He’s already done both of those things today, though, so he burrows deeper into the bed, pulls his extra pillow firmer around his head, and listens to the dumb song that’s dancing around in the back of his mind. His very soul aches.
And the worst part is, Jackie is stupid. Jackie has not been made to feel stupid in a long time, not since he took up his knife. It is a burrowing, sinking sick that settles in his gut, rolling and hot and uncomfortable, humid and prickling. It is like one of Subbin’s cactus-trees, sautéed in salty water, improperly prepared, overcooked in his throat. He tries to swallow it but it doesn’t go down because its spikes are dug deep into his neck. It’s hard to breathe around, and Jackie should have known. He should have fucking known. He did know, and he didn’t do a damn thing about it, because he was still stuck on the idea that maybe Ran actually cared. Maybe Jackie wasn’t making feelings up, maybe Ran wasn’t using him, maybe Ran understood, maybe they could be okay. His hand throbs as he chokes out a dry sob.
“I’m such an idiot,” he mutters to himself, voice cracking. His chest is crumbling in on itself. His brain is torturing him. Ran’s voice, Ran’s half-pressed down smile, Ran’s stupid red suit. Ran’s icy cold hands, spindly fingers, one glinting gold and the other a soft, ashy black. Ran’s face as they sparred in the training yard, his spines flared, fluttering in the wind, sharp, glinting focus settled deep in his eyes.
His eyes. Fuck, his eyes. Soft and beautiful, rolling with unfamiliar panic, as metallic as the knife Jackie watched him slip back into his sleeve. A glinting green, the richest, boldest emerald Jackie had ever seen, greener than the desert brush and the cacti and the dyed curtains that used to hang over the window at the inn’s front desk.
It matches your eyes . Jackie, standing in the hall, half-overdressed, cradling the stem he’d just been handed in careful hands, had almost smiled. Ran’s fingers had been cold against his when he handed them off. Jackie’s skin was still tingling, and as Ran walked off, he had looked down at the little desert flowers. They were pretty, he thought.
He’s thinking about the vase again. He doesn’t want to get glass in his foot. His hand already hurts enough. He tugs on the blanket harshly as if it will achieve anything beyond uprooting its end from where it’s tucked under the mattress. Tears are prickling at his eyes again. He does not want to cry. His head already aches. He closes his eyes. Breathes in. Out. When he opens them again, he’s still stupid, foolish. Still gullible and idiotic. Still in fucking love. He wants to go outside and yell hatred into the sky so that maybe Ran will hear him. Or maybe he wants to yell love. But he already did both of those things today, too. So he buries his face deeper into his pillow, presses down as hard as he can like he could pick his head back up and leave his damn face behind. Leave this damn life behind. He doesn't want to be living in this body. He doesn’t want to think about desert bluebells, and he doesn’t want to get out of bed. So instead, he lies there until he feels the first of the millionth chapter of tears seep across the pillow’s fabric.
There’s another, and another, and they don’t stop. And soon this side of the pillow is as sticky and damp as the other, and Jackie still feels like ripping out his own guts.
Ran and Watson don’t come back to the palace that night. If, in the morning, Jackie happens to notice, he does not care.
There is a vase on Jackie’s desk, and it is empty. Outside the window, on the ground, a single sprig of desert bluebells withers under the scathing, eternal sun.