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"So that’s what he always called me after that. Whenever he saw me, he’d holler, ‘Hello, Blue Roses!”
- The Glass Menagerie.
i.
Forget-me-nots
(Remembrance)
He worries his lip and waits, while the florist arranges the bouquet. It’s the first time he’s leaving this small, quiet piece of the earth that’s been his whole world ever since he woke up in his mother’s arms, wailing and tiny. His parents won’t come to see him off. That’s okay. There are bits of them that will follow him for as long as he lives. The lines at the corners of his eyes that his mother gave him. The violets his father planted to grow behind his eyelids, over the white of his pupils.
He already knows he’s never going to come back here again.
.
.
.
He tries not to see the tears in his mother’s eyes when the blue bouquet is placed into her arms. It’s difficult because Mother’s tears have been something he always had to keep an eye out for. Crying when she realized that the things he saw underneath his bed were real. Clawed and hideous and biting. Crying more when he swallowed one of these, his first curse, like an apple with a rotten core.
Crying because he was her beautiful boy and everything was not as beautiful about him as she had dreamt of, maybe.
Disentangling himself from her arms is not hard. Suguru’s always been strong for his age and no one ever seems to want to put a serious effort into holding on anyway. There are no creases in his shirt at the arms. No tear stains, no matter how she cries.
He pulls away. She lets him.
“Be good, Suguru. Be safe.”
Father says nothing at all.
His eyes, Suguru’s eyes, stay fixed on the flowers. A first and last gift.
ii.
Daffodils
(New Beginnings)
It’s very warm, despite the grey, sombre sky outside. He moves another one of the heavy cardboard boxes to the corner of the room, and it joins its kin, surrounding what is supposed to be his dorm room but is, right now, a cramped, sparsely-furnished space with a narrow bed and a single table. He looks around and tentative warmth begins to blossom in his chest, new and hopeful. It’s the first time he’s moved into a new home, even if it is only a dorm room. This time, he feels like there’s a new promise. Maybe he doesn’t have to keep running anymore.
.
.
.
He’s arranging what little cutlery he’s got with himself, carefully cushioned with old newspapers, in the common kitchen when they catch his eye. They’re sitting in a chipped ceramic vase – at once strangely out of place and yet startlingly lovely – and glinting in the sun. Despite the fierce heat, they haven’t wilted even a little, staring proudly at him when he looks at them. Their bright faces are turned towards the small window, as if they hear the distant promise of rain. As if they ache.
He doesn’t know who kept them there. Maybe that other first year? The one with eyes carved from diamonds and summer skies?
Huh.
He doesn’t seem like the type for flowers but…
He really knows nothing about the boy, does he? Being judgmental is not something that comes well to him, not even towards someone who behaved as obnoxiously as that boy did with him.
Suguru stands at the sink, plates forgotten, fingertips absently stroking the daffodils.
iii.
Mimosas
(True friendship)
The ruffled petals are scattered around him. Some lie at his feet and some are sticking to hair, as he bends over them, brow furrowed in concentration. There are bunches of them. Some are a pale white. Some are a pale pink, while others are the colour of the sunlight that falls on them, their almost transparent petals shining like little mirrors. A last couple nestle on his palm, delicate things.
The sun burns bright and the cool, green water of the little stream, more drainage canal than stream in this busy city, sparkles with stars on its surface. He never takes his eyes away from the flowers, holding the needle carefully to the opened heart of the flower.
.
.
.
With careful fingers, he places the small circlet of mimosas onto Satoru’s soft, white hair. He looks lovely, like some sort of otherworldly creature, blinking with surprise in the sluggish, honeyed heat of the day.
Then, Shoko – whose brilliant idea this was and because of whom Suguru spent ages weaving the flower crown – snaps a picture, laughs out loud and the spell is broken. Satoru swats at him, swearing, and Suguru falls back laughing himself. Satoru pulls the flowers off of the top of his head, grumbling darkly.
Shame, Suguru thinks. He looked very pretty with them.
A Special-Grade curse could not draw out this confession from him.
A week later, he’s rummaging through Satoru’s desk drawer for his lighter, which the bastard keeps stealing inspite of never having smoked once in his life, when his hand finds something soft among the strange, fascinating and faintly alarming collection of things that Satoru keeps in there.
He frowns and draws it out.
It’s the circlet from last week, now wilted and dead. He winces at the feeling of the petals, crisped and browned from the stifling heat and time. Their scent is gone, replaced by the faint smell of wood and decay.
Then, because his lighter is not in Satoru’s drawer, Suguru has to resort to do what he does best. He goes to find his annoying, infuriating best friend.
On his way out, he takes the decayed mimosas with himself. He throws it away because Satoru won’t ever do it. The idiot always forgets to get rid of things when they’ve gone bad.
iv.
Sunflowers
(Loyalty, adoration)
It’s late summer. The sun is a dying fire, melting pinks and yellows and oranges. He sits on the patio, underneath an ivy-laden alcove. The stone bench is cool to touch. He leans his head against the vines and looks at the fading light. Birds, hidden among the trees, sing him one last song. Then they too, sleep. Before him, fields of sunflowers, massive and swaying, stretch for as far as the eye can follow, becoming one with the vivid horizon.
.
.
.
They’re sitting, shoulder to shoulder, ankles knocking together, when Satoru makes a nervous, restless sound and pushes against his forearm. It’s unnerving. Satoru is never nervous.
“Wanna go and sit there?”
“The flowers will get crushed.”
“They won’t.”
Satoru’s already drawing him away by the hand.
They settle among the flowers, lowering themselves to sit cross-legged on the stubbled grass. The sunflowers tower over them, almost coming up to their shoulders. Some, like the hands of children, tickle him behind the ears. It’s nice, being hidden away like this. He would like to remain like this, waiting for the light of the first stars with Satoru beside him.
Satoru, who takes up so much space wherever he goes and who still struggles to make room for himself in the nook between Suguru’s shoulder and neck.
Fool, Suguru thinks, fondly. That space was made for Satoru. He moves sideways till their pinkies touch; till the bluebell shades in Satoru’s eyes are hovering like stars in his peripheral vision.
The sunflowers whisper and murmur amongst each other, yellow-orange heads bent close together.
Satoru’s saying something. Suguru leans in, trying to listen to him over the talking of the flowers.
“Suguru–”
Another dusk, gone.
v.
Blue Roses
(To reach for the impossible)
He’s only seventeen and terrified beyond words. Beyond belief. Looking back, that’s what he remembers the most. The fear. He had been afraid. So, so afraid. There had been solace in that, too. To feel something after so long of feeling nothing at all.
Now, the pain is a stone lodged tight in his throat and his heart is pounding so loud he’s sure it can be heard in the chaos of the street. He closes his eyes, trying to remember lips pressed to his neck, over his heart, slender fingers drumming on his hips. He breathes in but smells no flowers. There’s no room left in him for them to grow.
And besides, would flowers even grow, choking in all the blood?
Only gasoline and fumes and the sweat from his clothes and from the thousands of bodies mindlessly passing by, oblivious to how the world comes to an end here on a crowded street.
He waits, hands in his pockets, for the familiar flash of white and blue to arrive, the only colour remaining in a world painted grey and red. The crowd does not bother him. He doesn’t have to keep his eyes open. He would know Satoru’s presence blind. In sleep. In death.
At world’s end.
.
.
.
Mimiko is asleep on his shoulder, her arms around his neck. Her skin is warm, warm, from the last of her fever. She won’t sleep if he puts her down. He’s tried thrice and she woke up sobbing each time. Satoru too, had fallen sick, once. Back when they were first years and barely spoke to each other beyond snarky remarks thrown out when they sparred.
And yet when Satoru had stayed up through the night, delirious and nauseated, he had also refused to let go of Suguru's hand. When he’d opened his eyes in the morning, Suguru was still sitting by his bedside, and sleeping in the little space between them, was friendship.
Newborn. Fragile.
In his arms, Mimiko suddenly goes rigid. She’s having another nightmare. They happen a lot. Suguru’s hand falls into the familiar rhythm of stroking the tense line of her back till she relaxes.
The uprooted garden inside his chest once housed roses. Each blue. Each fragrant with the scent of dreams.
They were all planted by one pair of hands, pruned by them, watered by them. In their absence, the roses had wilted and wilted and wilted, until Suguru had to pull them out by the roots. When the hands had come back to search for the blue roses, he’d had none left to give away except the one.
And Suguru had kept that for himself.
How could he not, when it was the only thing reminding him that he was once a person loved enough, loving enough, to sit by a bedside through the night, tending to an infant, budding friendship that would later grow up into a flowering garden full of impossibly blue roses?
He rocks Mimiko in his arms when she starts fidgeting again.
Blue roses are impossible things. Maybe that’s why the only one he still hoards, the single precious thing he dares call his anymore, is still alive and breathing in the bloody wreckage inside his ribs.
vi.
Yellow Camellias
(Longing)
The greenhouse is resplendent in the early afternoon sunshine, a solitary pocket of warmth and light in the freezing arms of December. For someone whose youth seemed poisoned with an innate inability to keep beautiful things whole, his hands never stopped being able to grow life in the most barren of places.
How ironic.
For as much as his insides are a festering, dark garden filled with howling, rotten fruit, this greenhouse thrives, tended to by hands that never forgot the days he spent crouched beside his father in their small backyard garden, digging for carrots and turnips.
This place mostly has flowers though, because flowers are what he mostly needs. Not for aestheticism. Just, practicality. Even if they are rather beautiful to look at and the girls adore spending time here, he grows them for one purpose and one purpose alone.
Nanako’s hands are careful with his hair in a way he’s unused to, even after all this time. She brushes it out with all the patience and love of a devoted child as Mimiko sits at his feet, absently turning her doll over and over in her hands. And they are. Both of them.
Enough years have passed that he no longer makes the mistake of thinking that the hands in his hair are suddenly larger, stronger. Ready to yank playfully on the dark strands if he refuses to sit still. Not enough years could pass to make him forget that feeling, that waiting, just to hear the sound of loud laughter from behind him.
Not enough lifetimes could pass to take away the longing to always turn around and see eyes bluer than his dreams can recreate.
He turns a page, eyes idly flicking to where the bouquet sits. He can feel the girls looking at the same thing. When they were smaller, they’d been equally fascinated by each bouquet, reaching for the flowers with curious hands till he gently lifted them out of reach with a quiet “You mustn’t. These are a gift. You can have all the others to play with from the greenhouse, okay?”
Now, nearly a decade later, their curiosity has barely waned. They don’t reach for the flowers anymore. And their questions are different now, ever-changing, just as the flowers in each bouquet have been. Bluebells, one year. Tulips, white, on the third. Daffodils, the next. Then, pink and white roses. Red ones, with sweet pea and sprigs of clove, on the eighth year.
And…
“Yellow camellias this year, huh?”
Nanako asks, taking the lead.
“They’re very nice, Getō-sama.”
Mimiko adds softly.
“Thank you, Mimiko.”
He can feel them exchanging looks, trying to decide who’s going to ask what he knows they’ve been itching to ask these last few years.
Nanako lowers the hairbrush. Skittish as a cat walking the edge of a hot tin roof, she asks:
“Uh…who are they for, Getō-sama?”
Mimiko shifts to look up at him from the ground.
“It’s okay if you don’t wanna tell us. It’s just…you make one every year so we thought–”
Suguru closes the book softly. He’s only been staring at the page for over an hour now. He thinks of how best to explain to them why he does this. For whom.
What does he do it for, anyway?
If he told them, maybe they’d think it was atonement. But it’s not. Not when Satoru would forgive him in a heartbeat if Suguru ever chose to apologize. So he doesn’t. That forgiveness is something he doesn’t see himself as worthy of, no matter Satoru’s self-destructive tendency to cling to dying, decayed things with both hands.
It’s a simple enough reason.
He does it because leaving was a choice he made inspite of knowing that he would never be able to stop loving. He does it because he’s going to be in love with this one person till the day he dies and if the only thing he can do now is leave flowers at their doorstep, he’s going to do it till the day when Satoru finally has to kill him.
He does it for love, for Satoru, who is the only one in the world by whose hands he would not mind dying.
And he has not enough words to explain any of that to his girls without breaking their hearts. He’s broken one too many in this lifetime already. The most important one, really.
“They’re for my best friend. Today is his birthday and he’s always loved flowers.”
vii.
White Chrysanthemums
(Truth, grief)
Time passes very differently when you’re dead.
More precisely, it doesn’t pass at all when you’re dead but your subconscious is stuck in your own body. Now, he can’t even tell if the thing wearing his body like a glove can be called a parasite when Suguru’s the one who can’t leave.
And so he stays here, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, trapped within the confines of his own brain.
Not his. Not anymore.
There’s very little he remembers after this…this…whatever it is, took up living inside his head. Took up moving his body around like a puppet with no visible strings.
He knows its name. He knows its voice. It’s a droning he shuts out most days. He’s become used to listening to it this last year. He’s carefully shut out any emotion that it can feed off.
He doesn’t know how far it’s been effective.
Sleep, it commands and Suguru obeys, fading away into the blissful, dark void of his stolen mind. There, stuck in an emptiness devoid of action, thought or emotion, he watches this body, once his, act and think and feel.
Not his actions. Not his thoughts. Not his feelings.
The chains around him have grown stronger each day this last year. Every little movement that is his has been rejected by this robbed body; the parasitic mind sees everything Suguru’s eyes see, hears everything with Suguru’s ears, terrifying his two daughters into cooperation with a grimace that they know isn’t his. In this, his girls are just like Satoru.
Unable to bury the dead. Clinging to his corpse.
When he wants to scream, the urge to fade away into nothingness grows so, so overwhelming. He’s just so tired. Can’t he even die right?
The thief whispers to him, slimy and sly, coaxing him into fatigue.
Just sleep. That’s so much easier, hmm?
And Suguru, bone-tired and weary, obeys.
.
.
.
The florist’s is located in a quiet, empty corner at the end of the lane. The still morning buzzes with the song of cicadas and the road shimmers green and gold from the several dozens of trees bracketing one side of it.
The bell chimes musically when the door reopens and Satoru steps out, his figure a tall and imposing contrast to the soft mellow lines of the day. His scarf flutters in the February wind, the line of his mouth solemn in a way that seems out of place on that perpetually cheerful face. His eyes are shards of ice. He looks like he has not slept well in the last decade. He looks like every smile takes tremendous effort now.
In the crook of one arm, he carries a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. Suguru would’ve laughed, if he wasn’t horrified. He doesn’t even have a grave. What’s Satoru even going to do with these?
The thief, though, is delighted as he watches from behind the roughened truck of one of the maple trees.
“Ah, I see...”
See what, Suguru throws back immediately, trying to be nonchalant. If his heart were his now, it would have given him away. If his voice was his, even for one second, he would have...
“...this makes things so much easier, hm? Looks like I won’t have to try too hard after all!”
Don’t. Don’t.
The thief, uncaring, unperturbed, continues musing as he watches Satoru walking away cradling his flowers like he would an infant, scarf flowing behind him like a beacon, the shock of his white hair like a halo in the sunshine.
“It’s all very sweet, wouldn’t you say? The strongest jujutsu sorcerer. How mourning suits him...”
Imprisoned in his own mind, Suguru seethes.
viii.
Cherry Blossoms
(Rebirth, renewal)
In March, he’s sitting alone in the apartment, reading, when his phone beeps in his pocket. It goes off twice more before he sighs, sets down his book and reaches for it.
<Cherry blossom festival.>
<Ueno Park.>
<11pm.>
He smiles and types out a response.
<Weren’t you in Kyoto?>
His phone goes off almost as soon as he hits ‘Send’.
<Done early. I’ll come over after.>
He rolls his eyes at this.
<Satoru, please stop pretending that this isn’t your actual home where you live.>
He does that sometimes. Texting Suguru bizarre questions like <My place or yours, after dinner?>. It’s all very charming and absurdly cute – mostly because Suguru is a weak, weak man who finds every stupidity of his cute – but teasing Satoru to get a rise out of him has always been the greater temptation.
Sure enough, Satoru’s reply comes a few seconds later.
<Mean!>
And then,
<(; ﹏;)>
Suguru throws back his head and laughs.
.
.
.
“How was your trip?”
“Long. Lonely, without you.”
“You know my being there wouldn’t be well received.”
“I don’t see why that would be a problem.”
“A lot of people would disagree with that, I’m sure.”
“Good.” Satoru says fiercely, kissing him on the forehead. Right over the scar. “That’s all the more reason to go together. We scare people.”
In the heart of March, the cherry blossom trees are ablaze with fresh, lush growth; the little, shapely flowers seem to have coloured even the night skies a vivid shade of pink and each of the lakes, in the vicinity of these abundant trees, glimmers with a similar pale, fuchsia under the moonlight.
The sweet-scented air is alight with the singing of the suzumushi; their voices loud with a clear, bell-like trill that echoes beautifully in the slow, fragrant atmosphere.
Each of the dark, curving arms of the trees are heavy with thick, overabundant clusters of the flowers, pinks and whites and darker shades of soft crimson, with their spotted bosoms; as if to ease the burden of the laden branches, a breeze drifts carelessly through the full arms of the trees and the petals unfurl, falling to the softer, mildew grass by clusterfuls of pink rain.
One of the trees, largest among its kin here, sways happily under the playful, childlike wind, dropping its petals upon the dark and fair heads that are bent over, together – beneath its shades – bathing them in a snowfall of pinks and whites.
This place by the lake gives them the best view of the whole park. By midnight, Ueno Park is almost empty. Suguru watches the koi playing in the crystal clear lake, watches their orange and red stripes flicker in the light of the moon, fascinated.
They sit under the shade of this largest of the laden, bent trees, on grass dotted with fistful of blossom petals. It’s beautiful but nothing, living or dead, can replicate how beautiful Satoru is here. Everywhere else too, but especially here. Especially now.
Suguru holds up a single petal between his fingers, plucked from fluffy white hair as Satoru’s fingers trace absently over the stitches like they’re something lovely, and not the reason he almost died. He himself, cannot bear to look at them on most days but Satoru treats them like he treats each and every part of Suguru. With love. With devotion. Like he’s at prayer.
‘It’s a battle scar’, he likes to say whenever Suguru asks. ‘A sign that you and I are stronger than death. Together, there’s nothing we can’t do.’
Suguru still thinks his fascination with it is morbid. Satoru is always quick to correct him.
“It’s romantic, Suguru. Romantic.”
He holds Satoru’s face between his palms now, drawing those eyes to his own. Satoru looks at him readily, eyes slits of shocking blue, smiling wider than Suguru ever remembers seeing.
He never lied when he said that this world wasn’t a place where he could ever smile from the bottom of this heart. But Satoru’s always been someone not fully of this world. And his love has always been something not of any world known to men or gods alike. Something even death has no hold over.
Something capable of wondrous, impossible things.
Things like:
A rebirth.
He squishes Satoru’s cheeks between his hands. Satoru lets him, looking slightly like an affronted cat for all of the two seconds before he’s kissed.
Or this:
Retying the red thread of fate exactly at the place where Suguru had once cut it off. A perfect, stronger knot. Unbreakable.
Satoru’s hands gently cradle the back of his head, fingers threaded through dark hair as he tilts his head to deepen the kiss.
Or even this, the most wonderfully impossible of all impossible things, which he does as easily as drawing breath:
Making Suguru smile.
“...I like your Always, it looks
such a demanding pet. It looks like it kisses
nice and soft.
It looks like the bruise I found
flowering on my knee.
I fell down at your voice.
Not to worry, I got right back up, walked ten
more blocks
and by then I was halfway home.
I knock my knees blue
and scabbed crawling
toward you, wanting flowers,
and always, always, always
to slide against the cold vinyl of a car's seat,
your pale hands
on the bare backs of my legs,
that's one Always I want, and whoever knew
there were so many species
of Always? Your bare hands
on the pale backs
of my thighs, printing bruise,
and if you said Flowers, said Always and we
could erect a forever
of something like sheets
and breakfast and an ordinary
day, my eyes would
always slide across the table toward
you,
to warm their twin marbles in your palm,
my face would flower
for you daily, so that when we
die, roses might petal
themselves out our throats.”
- Cate Marvin.