Chapter Text
“We should just close the shop on Fridays,” Tsukiyama announces one day.
“What?” Kaneki says. “Close up the entire shop? Why?”
“Because it’s boring,” Tsukiyama sniffs. “Hardly anyone comes by.”
“That’s not true! We — we get a couple people. Sometimes.” Kaneki coughs. “Anyway, spring is starting! I’m sure we’ll have plenty of customers then.”
But Tsukiyama doesn’t look convinced. He purses his lips at the calendar, taps a pen against his cheek.
“I can take Fridays,” Kaneki offers, and Tsukiyama frowns.
“You’ll die, you know. Of complete and utter boredom. I mean…wouldn’t you rather just spend the time hanging out somewhere? You...we could visit a cafe in the new building down the street.”
“It’s alright, I don’t need to do that. Besides,” Kaneki says cheerfully, “dying of boredom doesn’t sound like so horrible a fate.”
Tsukiyama sighs and he marks Kaneki’s name in.
“If that’s what you want.”
:::
It is what he wants.
Tsukiyama, though, is right. It’s boring.
It’s still so early in the spring that the weather is more cool than warm, and more rainy than bright. People race back and forth past the shop windows, not sparing a single glance. After watering and trimming the dead leaves from their inventory, Kaneki paces a bit, and then sits at the main counter and pulls out a book to read.
It’s not a new book, but it’s one of his favorites, as is made especially obvious by the fact that he has no idea a customer has entered the store until they are ringing the bell on the counter right beside him.
Kaneki jumps and claps the book shut.
“O-oh, I’m sorry — please excuse me —”
He looks up, red, and turns even redder when he sees the customer. They’re — they’re —
Beautiful.
Short hair beaded with droplets of rain. Slender fingers that tug back a dripping hood, and unhook a headphone from one ear. A quiet, firm voice.
“I need some daffodils,” she says, and Kaneki swallows.
“R-right. Right. This way.” He stands hastily and guides her to the fridges at the back, where the freshest flowers are stored.
“How many would you like?”
“Just three.”
“Three…in a bouquet?”
“No,” she says. “Just three daffodils.”
“Got it.” He sorts through for the largest ones as she waits.
“You’re lucky,” Kaneki remarks. “These guys all just came in today. I noticed they’re all especially fragrant, too.”
She frowns at him. “Daffodils have a smell?”
“Oh, yeah! It can be kind of subtle sometimes, but…” He trails, and then holds the flowers up. She glances up at him, and then leans forward, and closes her eyes, and inhales.
Her jacket slips, a little; the collar of her shirt droops, too.
Don’t look, he tells himself, but rather than flicking away, he finds his eyes focusing, with astonishment. Following the curve of her collarbone is a dab of bright pink.
Is it — a scar? No, it’s — almost a pastel color — and the colored skin is perfectly smooth.
And soft-looking.
She straightens.
“It smells lovely,” she says, looking up at him with surprise, and Kaneki is startled into smiling at her warmly.
“Haha, yeah, doesn’t it?”
Did she notice?
It doesn’t seem so. Thank goodness.
“Is that everything?”
“Yes,” she answers. He leads her back to the service counter, where he binds the flower stems together with plastic and rubber bands.
“Thank you very much,” he says, bowing, and she —
She gives him a smile. It’s a faint one, dimpled at one side, and tinged with just a little sadness.
:::
After she leaves, he wonders at how incredible it is that someone with that much beauty exists in this world. He was fortunate to meet someone like her even once, and he’s astonished the next week to jerk up from his book and find her fingers resting once more on the service bell.
“Hello,” she says, tucking a headphone into the collar of her shirt, and he stands up, so quickly that his stool falls over.
“H-hello! Um, I mean, welcome to the store!” He pushes the book away and bends down to stand the stool back up. By the time he’s straightened, he is almost perfectly composed.
“More daffodils?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “Just…something. I don’t know. A bouquet of some kind. A normal one.”
She says it with a grimace, and Kaneki laughs lightly.
“Is something the matter?”
“No,” she says.
“Well,” she says, “it’s just…”
“No,“ she decides, with a sigh. “It’s nothing. Whatever. I just need one.”
“Alright! Sure! No problem.” They have some pre-made bouquets in the front of the store, but Kaneki leads her to the back instead, where flowers are arranged in a vaguely organized chaos.
“Do you have any color preference?”
She shrugs.
“I see. Well…” He looks around, thinking, and then, with a burst of inspiration, gathers a handful of small, trumpet-shaped blooms in pale pastels.
“Hyacinths,” she says, and he nods. He holds them up again, like last week, this time so high that she won’t need to bend to smell them. She shuts her eyes and breathes.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“…yes. It’s wonderful.”
There goes that faint, sad smile again.
He bundles them together for her, this time with waxed paper and ribbon. He gives her one more extra than she pays for, though he doesn’t mention it, and he isn’t sure if she notices. She raises her hand to take the bouquet from him, and he can’t help notice her sleeve draw back, just a little, revealing a streak of purple just beneath the cuff.
In an instant it’s covered once more, gone, and she is gone too.
Maybe she’ll come back again, Kaneki thinks, as he waves goodbye, and the next Friday, when the shop door opens, he looks up from his book. Their eyes meet, and she grimaces as she tugs out a headphone.
“Sorry to interrupt your reading time again,” she says, and he shakes his head.
“No, no, it’s not a problem. I’ve already read it.”
“You have? But you —” She cuts herself off, and then decides to finish anyway. “You always look so into it.”
“It’s one of my favorites. The Black Goat’s Egg,” he says, and lifts the book to show her the cover. She tilts her head.
“Looks scary.”
“It, um…I suppose it is, a little. Though it’s not so much scary as it is sad. Anyway,” he coughs, “what about you? You’re always listening to music. I’m sure you’re not listening to new music all the time.”
“I’m not,” she confirms. She looks down, and then pulls the loose headphone out from her shirt and holds it out to him. He blinks, and then takes it, and tucks it into his ear.
The player is mid-song; he closes his eyes, and bows his head down, and focuses. He can feel her watching him as the music rises and undulates and after some time begins to fade.
“It’s…wow. It’s good,” he says, handing the headphone back to her. “Though it’s sadder than I expected.”
“Tragedies are great, huh,” she says dryly, and Kaneki laughs.
“So long as they’re only in stories. Speaking of great things,” he says excitedly, “if you’re still interested in fragrant flowers, we finally received some of the best ones.”
She follows him into the back again, where there are several bunches of star-shaped flowers growing in plump spears.
“Lilacs,” she says, and Kaneki nods and hands her one. She presses her nose into it, and inhales.
“It’s sweet,” she realizes. “And a little spicy too.”
“Isn’t it? To me it’s a perfect scent, especially given what it stands for. In flower language, lilacs represent the beginning of —”
“Spring,” she finishes. “And the emotions of early love. I know.”
He…actually hadn’t known that second one. He feels his face warm self-consciously, and is glad that she is too busy burying her face into the blooms to notice.
“You must like flowers a lot,” he manages, finally, as she picks out half a dozen.
“Not really,” she says.
“W-what?”
“I kind of hate them,” she elaborates. She hands him the lilacs, and he is too shocked to say anything more until he’s ringing her up.
“W-why do you hate them?”
She looks down. She pinches off a browned blossom, and he sees a flash of emerald on her wrist.
“It’s because,” she sighs, “they’re always dying.”
:::
Well, that’s certainly a fact. But at least it means that she comes back every week for more.
They get to chatting, for longer and longer periods; sometimes there are other customers, and she lingers wordlessly, pressing her nose against the flowers until he’s free for conversation. He loans her The Black Goat’s Egg, and she makes him a CD that he plays on the shop speakers when he’s closing up.
One day, when he’s working a shift with Tsukiyama, Tsukiyama pauses his watering and stares.
“Kaneki-kun…are you…humming?”
“Oh, I guess I was. Sorry,” Kaneki coughs, “I’ll stop,” but he absently begins humming again no less than six more times that day, much to Tsukiyama’s confusion and suspicion.
“Where did you even hear a song like that?” he asks. Before Kaneki can answer, he continues: “Did…did someone show it to you?”
“Yeah,” Kaneki says brightly.
Tsukiyama clutches his chest. He isn’t paying attention to the plants anymore; Kaneki rushes and shuts off the water before he can drown the ones he’s currently watering. Tsukiyama whips the nozzle around.
“Who is it?” he gasps.
“You know, it’s funny,” Kaneki says. “I still don’t know.”
“Kirishima Touka,” she answers, when Kaneki asks that Friday.
“Kirishima-san,” Kaneki says. “Well, it’s nice to, um, meet you properly. I’m —”
“Kaneki-san,” she says. “I know.”
She points at his name tag. Kaneki scratches his head and laughs nervously.
“Please…just ’Kaneki’ is fine.”
“Then,” she says, “please just call me ’Kirishima’ too.”
“Kirishima,” he echoes slowly. “Sure.”
She makes it to her third Takatsuki Sen novel, and he to his third CD. Every time she smiles her farewell at him — is it just his imagination? It seems that every time she smiles her farewell, her expression has just a little less sorrow, and is even more beautiful for it.
They are getting closer, or so he likes to think — and yet there’s still so much he doesn’t know about her, and is embarrassed to ask. The fact that she needs so many bouquets, for one — and for two, the sharp, bright hues that peek out at him whenever she leans in to smell the flowers he gives her, little vibrancies of pink and orange and grenadine on her collar and arms.
They’re tattoos, probably, he thinks. But of what? Every time he sees her, the question reaches the tip of his tongue before he panics about bad manners and swallows it down. His curiosity becomes something he indulges only in daydreams where he is hooking his fingers on the bottom of her blouse, and inverting it over her bare belly and crossed arms —
“Why are you blushing?” Tsukiyama demands, and Kaneki coughs.
“N-no reason.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it.”
Tsukiyama frowns. “You know, Kaneki-kun, you’ve had the Friday shifts for a long time now. Recently you’ve seemed tired and distracted. Do you want to…you know…take a break? Switch for a couple of weeks?”
“What? No, no, That’s not necessary. I love the Friday shifts,” Kaneki argues, and though Tsukiyama asks him six more times about it, Kaneki remains steadfast. His flower shop shifts are the only connection that he has to her. At least until he can manage to gather enough courage to ask her out on a proper date.
This is the week. This has to be the week.
Kirishima, he recites mentally as he selects roses for her. Do you want to get coffee with me sometime?
There. That simple. That easy. No need for his stomach to churn about it, or for his hands to shake so much that the flowers are scattering dew on the counter. Kirishima tilts her head.
“Kaneki, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he says hastily.
“It’s…it’s just…” he tries.
“Kirishima,” he blurts finally. “Um, would you — that is, would you be interested in —”
The bell at the door rings. Kaneki looks up, at the same time Kirishima does. The customer that comes in scans the shop with eyes that are frighteningly dark. They straighten when they see Kirishima.
“Hey,” they call, and Kirishima waves back.
“Uta,” she replies. “Hey. Do these look good?”
She raises the bouquet indicatively, and the person tilts their head.
“Oh, yeah, I think they look great,” he chuckles. “I’m sure they’ll look really good on the, um, table.”
Kirishima smiles at him, broadly. The piercing on Uta’s eyebrow glints, and he raises his arm to scratch his long hair, and as he does his sleeve drops down to his elbow and reveals a forearm completely covered in dark, interlocking geometries. Tattoos — like Kirishima.
He is, overall, completely different from the type of person Kaneki is.
“L-let me ring it up for you, then,” Kaneki says quickly, with what remains of the breath in his body. He doesn’t spare another glance at either of them, not even when Kirishima bends over a bit to try and catch his downward gaze.
“Kaneki,” she says. “I’ll see you next week?”
“Y-yeah!” He makes a wide smile, not quite looking at her, rubbing his chin. “You know where to find me.”
:::
That evening, the spring weather seems especially chilly. He puts on a jacket and his cold fingers slip as he’s watering the plants, and he splashes all over himself. He curses, and trudges home completely drenched.
When he gets there, he lies on his couch and stares at the ceiling. After a while, he calls Tsukiyama.