Chapter Text
It truly is the most wonderful time of the year. That is, if you liked having every single molecule in your body flash frozen like the glazed-eyed fish at the supermarket.
You wondered why you even had that damned pale blue mark tattooed on your wrist. It was not like you despised the winter (its longer nights and your beloved stars were an advantage) but its obvious inconvenience sets it back on your own personal list of favourite seasons. Firstly, you can’t wear any of your flowy skirts you thrifted back in your hometown unless you fancied the appearance of a barrel, stiff and completely indestructible. Secondly, despite consuming tons of cold beverages and ice creams all year round, it admittedly numbs your taste buds when coming into contact with the cold outside atmosphere.
And finally, it's because no one is ever around in the wintertime.
Your classmates and friends are back home for the holidays, leaving you roaming your university’s huge and oh so desolate city alone. Your parents and younger siblings—literally—teleported to a country somewhere along the equator for a much warmer vacation than yours. “Are you sure you’re alright alone for the holidays?” your mother’s voice asks through the muffled telephone and you always respond—through your gritted teeth—with an enthusiastic ‘yes’ not because you are a strong, independent woman but because you are their eldest daughter. Their eldest daughter who insists on getting her Astronomy education in another prefecture by herself because she can not be restricted to the confinements of her small hometown.
But the truth is, you missed your home just as much as the next witch.
“I’m so proud of you,” she marvels, “Don’t forget to finish the pickled ginger I made! It will go bad in a week. Don’t forget that you’re always welcome to give us a call!” And the usual beep. Heaving a sigh, you make your way out of the telephone booth.
The streets are just as deserted, lit with only the dim lamps and glimpses of flickering candles coming from the ice-etched windows. They are talking and laughing and eating heartily, whilst you’re outside woefully watching the delicate snowflakes fall on the pavement. Even the ramen and gyoza shop you frequent on the other side of the road has a ‘closed’ sign on its door, despite the loud booming of the elderly owner’s karaoke machine.
Everyone is happy and you hate it.
You allow yourself to think that you can be rightfully bitter about the situation. After all, it is supposed to be your destined season of love. Everyone else’s varies from the soft pigment of spring cherry blossoms to the crimson of autumn leaves, whilst you are stuck with that damned pale blue mark tattooed on your wrist. You know too many childhood friends and secondary school classmates who have already met their soulmates in their designated seasons to be selflessly happy about it.
The universe had a funny way of telling you that your hopeless romantic ass would die a celibate. Because who else is stupid enough to be outside, socialising in a season that is so unforgiving in its frost that it strips every branch bare and leaves you with covered in goosebumps?
(Ding ding! The answer is correct: yourself—as always.)
You don’t know why you keep coming back to immerse yourself in the cold either. You think of the implications. On one hand, you could get hypothermia. On the other, a significant other—a soulmate—with the same indication on their skin would walk you home so that you don’t get hypothermia.
Rummaging through your backpack, you quickly come to realise that your wand—your only solution to summon a stable heat source—is missing. You were an Astronomy major for god’s sake. It’s not like the planetary collisions and supernovas that you adore can save you at this moment. Sure you knew a few survival spells from secondary and your other electives, but you could only perform them if you did not leave the stick (that’s supposedly deemed as most essential to any witches lifeline) at home. You should have listened to your peers when they referred to your department as too ‘mundane’—too scientific and not enough magic to get by. But you loved every moment of it. Your expertise were with telescopes and meteor chippings, not hexes and curses.
No wonder you tend to forget your wand way too often. Now you’re truly and utterly fucked.
Your footsteps echoed loudly as you dashed across the sidewalk, frantically looking around for shelter. You try to optimistically thank your body for generating heat and carrying you this far, despite never being all that athletic. The satin rose sheen on your lips has probably dried down because of the air or is completely wiped off by the lick of your tongue. You were out of luck.
Well, almost.
As you are about to turn your heels back home to your apartment, you catch the first whiffs of a faint floral scent. Jasmine. Then followed with the conventional tsubaki, or camellias. And ironically the most prominent of all: the mild, subtle perfume of sakura blossoms. A gentle breeze ushered a small cluster of pink petals to dance along the streets, reminiscent of spring. As if the cruelty of winter has finally subsided and you can bask yourself in the sun to go about your day again.
‘That’s odd,’ you think to yourself. Curious, you make a hard turn right and almost bumped into the sturdy tree bark in front of you. Sure enough, in all its glory: a giant cherry blossom tree in full bloom, scattering its petals in the snow. You could not even believe how proudly it stood against the icy white, proving itself as if it is the sole evidence of any form of life in the stark vacancy of this season.
In the corner of your eye, you notice a flower shop right next to the tree just as lively and spring-like, with vines blooming wildly in all directions, even covering the large window next to the doorway. Nonetheless, you attempt to peer inside, only making out the wooden shelves and the array of coloured blobs, which you assumed were the other flowers. There is an almost overpowering fragrance floating in the air yet it still draws you closer.
Most importantly, heat radiates from the interior and it almost invites you to make yourself at home. You make a mental note to yourself to get out more instead of lounging around in your apartment fiddling with your romance novels so that you might run into other discoveries as interesting as this one.
Written neatly on the blackboard at the entrance of the shop, it reads ‘Hanakotoba’—language of flowers.
Taking a deep breath, you opened the door into the new space. A white Maneki-neko figurine gestures at you repeatedly at the counter and a (real) tabby cat meows sleepily at your arrival. It’s much more spacious than you imagined, considering the assortment of coloured blobs—flowers, you corrected yourself—observed from the window.
There is a soft murmuring from behind one of the shelves, but you couldn’t really decipher what the words were. Not because it is too quiet, but rather because it was in a completely different language. You tiptoe over the petunias and hydrangeas and roses and you see him.
A dark haired man, who is awkwardly squatting on his knees due to his long physique, whispering endearingly at a… sunflower? You rub your eyes to confirm what you were seeing.
It felt intrusive to see how passionately he speaks to his (how should you call it exactly?) companion. He seems so immersed in the conversation (seriously, how should you refer to this phenomenon) that he didn’t even notice you when you first emerged in the shop.
Maybe this is a common trait in florists. Maybe they all have a weird fetish of sorts for flowers. Maybe that’s why they’re so good at what they do.
You let it happen for a few more minutes until you decide to inform him of your presence. Though you were not born and raised in a city, it did not mean that you lacked any manners.
“Excuse me,” you begin lightheartedly—as politely as you can, “Apologies for barging into your store. May I stay warm here for just a moment? I promise it won’t take—”
“Shut up,” the man finally turns around to face you, hazel eyes piercing into yours. Unfortunately, he is rather handsome, minus the fact that his expression is twisted into an annoyance that basically regards you as the lowest form of life on the planet. For once in your life, you desperately want to punch a face as condescendingly pretty as his.
His head snaps back to the sunflower, which starts to wilt and dry up. You watched as he dramatically picked up the pot in his arms, solemnly stroking the petals to bring it back to life.
“Oh no,” Kuroo Tetsurou—you read the characters neatly etched on his apron—heaves in pain, “My Helianthus annuus!” You think to yourself that even the ending of Titanic was not as tragic as this man and his flower named after the opening in one’s ass. The tabby cat at the counter purrs angrily at the commotion disturbing its beauty nap.
And now the blame is on you. “Look what you did,” Kuroo stands up almost dead calm, pointing a long finger at you and using his towering height to his advantage. A jarring contrast to whatever just happened five seconds ago when he was mourning the death of the anus sunflower.
“I’m sorry, it was an accident!” You reasoned back, “Who knew you were trying to coax Helio-anus into growing? I thought you were just some weirdo that likes to compliment his plants!”
“I’m practising my Herbology incantation mind you. It’s actually a field of study if you did not know,” He does not miss a single beat to argue, especially taking offence at the name of his dearest flower, “And for your information, it’s Helianthus annuus.” Kuroo drags out each syllable of that foreign word as if you were too slow to comprehend it. Which is partly true, but who casually integrates the scientific name of a species in a conversation?
“Okay whatever,” you fight the urge to roll your eyes, “I’m an Astronomy major. What more can I know about plants?”
You wait for him to say something about how useless your degree would be in the workfield or how mundane and magickless it is, but instead he scoffs something even more hurtful, “Not as cool as Herbology then.”
“Excuse me?” Astronomy is your whole life and there was no way you were going to let this nerd stomp over your passions, “As if the study of heavenly bodies and the universe can stoop down to spending your life meticulously measuring the amount of dirt your plant needs to live.”
“All you star nerds are the same,” Kuroo retaliates, “Always having your head in the clouds. Herbology quite literally cultivates life, which is much more substantial.”
“MEOWWW,” the cat yelps as if it agrees with his pointless arguments.
“Is this how you treat all your customers?”
“Didn’t you say you were just here because you couldn’t handle the cold outside?” Ah, so he was listening, he was just ignoring you on purpose.
“If you’re not going to give me any money then you’re not a customer,” Kuroo sneers, his pretty face developing into a smirk with every word intentionally provoking every patient bone in your body. His hazel eyes glint as he runs a hand through his dark hair, “just a freeloader.”
“Fine!” You throw your hands up in the air, “I’m taking my leave. Thank you for your kind service—”
You pretend to glance at the name on his apron as if he were so insignificant and forgettable. As if everything about him weren’t encrypted into your brain already. You give him the stink eye, to let him know that you will, in fact, infinitely despise him, “Kuroo-san.”
Kuroo chuckles in amusement, “Anytime Miss—”
You harshly dish out your name and it surprisingly rolls smoothly off his tongue when he repeats it. You hate how effortless it sounds. You hate him. You know you do.
“See you next time,” he states nonchalantly as he rolls up the sleeves of his white button up, revealing his forearms before putting the anus sunflower pot back in its original position, “When you have money to pay for my precious flowers, of course. Say bye to our freeloader Neko. It was short-lived, but well spent.” He scratches the cat (literally named Cat) behind its ears, before waving his hand in dismissal, revealing a blue mark sitting just below his palm.
A blue just like yours—same shade of pale periwinkle blue and everything. Your heart drops and your face reddens. You run out of the shop in a hurry, back into the exterior of the empty city. You look down at your feet, below scattered with the now-wilted sakuras.
It can’t be. Especially not him.
You didn’t even have space in your mind to think about the consequences of the below-zero-atmosphere and the hypothermia you dumbly alluded to just a few moments ago, when a hand-knitted scarf the same colour as the blossoms is wrapped snugly around your shoulders. The cherry on top—a beanie with protruding cat ears is tucked onto your own.
“It would be bad for business if word gets out that a pretty girl is frozen into a popsicle outside my store,” Kuroo bends down to your height with a mischievous quirk of his lips. He’s still in his work uniform without a warmer coat to cover up. You were too tired to snap back, saying that he will turn into one before you do.
You ignore the fact that he calls you pretty even though your heart is palpitating so fast that you have no doubt that you're defrosting it in the process. Most importantly, you try to ignore the periwinkle blue mark tattooed on his wrist, even though it seems as if it’s intensely staring at you.
“Don’t act like some saviour just yet Kuroo,” you mutter through chattering teeth, ditching the honorifics and all.
“You’re putting words in your own mouth Miss,” he says, “Consider this the Hanakotoba hospitality. A refuge in the spring.”
You manage to push out a mocking laugh as you faintly recall the tagline written underneath the Kanji characters of Hanakotoba, “A refuge in the spring, huh? Awfully cheesy of you.”
“I’m just a simple florist trying to promote his shop,” Kuroo shrugs.
'Fair enough,' you think to yourself as you pull down the sleeves of your coat in an attempt to conceal your own mark.
“Well,” you begin awkwardly, “It’s late and I’ve got to get back home.” You hold the end of the soft scarf, playing with the braided tassels, “Thanks for the scarf. And the hat.”
“Anytime Miss.”
The same notion occurs over and over and over again as you walk down the dimly lit streets of the city.
It can’t be. Especially not him.