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“I’ll remember!” Denki whines, clutching the little plant closer to his chest as he puffs out his cheeks indignantly. “Seriously, I’m not gonna forget something as simple as watering a plant!”
Mina looks at him as if she doesn’t believe that. Which, ouch. Her eyebrow is raised and she’s got that squinty look people get when they think they know what you’re going to do next. In this situation that’s probably immediately killing the little guy he’s cradling in his arms.
“Are you sure, babes? This is a big responsibility you know, an entire living being you need to look after!” She really doesn’t look like she believes him.
“Yes, Mina!” Denki reassures her, absolutely one hundred percent certain that the cactus now in his possession will definitely survive the week it’s spending with him. “I’ve got the list of tasks on my whiteboard, and I’ve got like eight alarms set so I don’t forget!”
Making a weird ‘hmm’ noise, Mina gently grips the door handle. It takes Denki waving her off one-handedly for her to actually leave though, and he goes about finding a good spot for his new friend to sit.
It can’t be anywhere too hidden, since Denki will forget it exists if he can’t see it. Not anywhere too obvious either though, since then he’ll just end up ignoring it since he ‘obviously wouldn’t put it there’.
Too much sun is just as bad as too little, and with his track record of forgetting he has curtains over his window, it’s not unlikely that he’ll put the cactus on a windowsill and then never think about it again. Wow, there really are a lot of spots he can’t put things without forgetting about them, huh?
“Maybe...” he starts, holding the pot at arm's length as he tries to visualise where to put it. “Maybe I can put you here, little man?”
‘Little man’ ends up on the little desk in the middle of his room, with half a pack of sticky notes surrounding it so that his vision gets drawn to it easier. Now he can only hope that he listens to his alarms and doesn’t accidentally trip over the table and knock the plant over. The universe really does give its favourite humans the hardest battles.
The week is relatively uneventful.
Denki goes to his classes, hangs out with his friends, sort of does some of his homework a few times, the usual schedule. The only unusual addition is the daily misting of the cactus. Little Man seems to enjoy the attention of the daily misting.
He’s not the only one enjoying the almost ritualistic treatment either, since Denki finds that watering Little Man on such a strict schedule is actually helping some of his time-management issues. No longer does Denki run late for dinner or stay too long in the gym training, since the alarm on his phone for The Misting of The Man is always on time.
He’s actually started to expect it before it pops up! A quick peek outside a window to see where the sun is and Denki is swiftly pulling out his phone to check the time, usually within a few minutes of the alarm going off.
Kacchan even calls it a ‘miracle from fucking god’, which made Denki chuckle when he heard it the first time. His grumpy cat of a friend really does have a sense of humour under all those prickles and miniature (but still very dangerous) palm-grenades!
Speaking of his friends' reactions, Mina is incredibly giggly about something recently. It only started after she gifted him Little Man, and Denki swears the two things are connected somehow. No idea how, but there’s got to be a link somewhere.
Regardless of all that! The week goes great.
Well, it goes great up until the last day of Denki’s plant-sitting journey. The final day, a day meant for peace and quiet goodbyes under soft moonlight, maybe a few sparkly tears as he passes his beloved Little Man back over to his rightful owner.
When do things ever work out like that for Denki though?
Denki sits down in front of the cactus, cross-legged and holding the fallen-off flower tightly in one hand. He examines the top of the plant it fell off of, peering so closely he has to squint. There’s a dent in the cactus where the flower sat, with a barely visible string of some kind trailing off the side.
It’s so obvious looking at it now that Denki wonders how he ever missed it while watering Little Man all this time. Opening up his fist, he examines the flower closer.
More clear strings of plasticky stuff. Employing his top-tier detective skills, Denki decides the best way to proceed is to put the flower in his mouth and chew on it. One chew, two chews, and then the still intact — if kinda damp — flower gets spat out into his awaiting palm.
“Yeah, that’s plastic,” Denki says to himself confidently. He takes a sip of a random drink off to his side to get the taste out of his mouth. “But why would someone glue a fake flower to a cactus?”
Little Man, the cactus that just had a fake flower glued to his head, does not answer.
Taking a closer look at Little Man as a whole and ignoring the suspicious fake flower, of course, leads Denki to a horrifying discovery.
Shock fills his entire being, sending him falling to his knees. Distress, fear, and betrayal follow shortly after. A tear runs down his cheek as he sits there with his mouth agape, palms facing the ceiling as memories of this past week flash through his mind like lightning.
It’s suddenly colder in the room, but Denki feels closer to boiling with the red-hot shame pulsing through his veins like molten metal. Time stands still, and Little Man sits there innocently. Innocently, as if Denki hasn’t been making a total fool of himself this entire time, as if these past roughly one hundred and fifty hours of his life haven’t been spent toiling endlessly for the tiny plant's continued survival.
A bird outside screams, the clouds carry on moving. Denki is startled back to reality with a harsh gasp. Tears trailing down his face as he’s forced to confront the ugly truth.
“Oh. It’s not real.”