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“Jogo?”
“Yes, Hanami?”
“You know how you believe us to be the true humans of this earth?”
Jogo turned his attention from smoking over to Hanami, who’d been holding one of their many decaying flowers from their garden. Hanami appeared to be despairing over the health of their flora, their shoulders slouched and their head lowered.
“Well, of course,” Jogo spoke questioningly. “Why do you ask?”
“... I don’t know how I feel about that idea. The humans… they ruin their own home. So much wildlife, so much nature… all gone because of those things. All they do is ruin everything.” Hanami crushed the deceased flower in their palm as they spoke, grimacing as if doing this physically hurt them.
Jogo wasn’t too sure how to respond, but he reached over to Hanami’s hand with the crumpled petals while blowing a puff of smoke to the side. He used his free hand to shoo away any of the smoke, preventing it from reaching Hanami. While doing this, he slowly unraveled Hanami’s fingers from the dead plant, taking a petal and examining it with his one eye.
“So, do you see it?”
“The issue? Yeah, it’s dead.”
“No… the state of it shows disease. The rest of the field is the same.” Hanami’s head turned to Jogo, waiting for his response. It took a moment, but Jogo nodded.
“I see. Hm…” Jogo stood from his former sitting position in the grass, looking upon the diseased patch of plant life before the two of them. “I can help, but you’ll have to trust me on this.”
“What do you plan on doing?”
“Trust me, Hanami.” Jogo peeked back to his fellow curse before they’d given a positive yet pessimistic nod, entrusting Jogo with whatever he had planned on doing to help. Once the permission was given, the volcano-headed curse used his lava to set the petal in his hand ablaze. He then dropped the petal into the field of decaying flowers. It didn’t do much at all at first, and he got impatient, wanting results sooner. He allowed his lava to spill into one of his hands. With the molten lava in his hand, he began to walk through the garden with his hand lowered to the plants, each lighting with fire and burning to a char within minutes.
Hanami watched this in worry, afraid of this action despite being performed by somebody who handled flames so well. However, Jogo soon returned to Hanami’s side and took the remaining flower from their hand and let it burn in his palm, sprinkling the ashes over the rest of the burning flora.
“What will this do in favor of the very plants that are meant to grow here?” Hanami spoke to Jogo, standing up tall.
Jogo stretched his arms over his head with a yawn before taking a puff from his pipe with tobacco and blowing the smoke away. “So… by burning the diseased plants, the ashes will give the soil nutrients so that the next plants you grow will be healthier. At least… that’s what I know.”
The two listened as the fires crackled down and finished burning the plants. Hanami turned their head to Jogo before grabbing his hand and squeezing.
“Thank you, Jogo. This… this makes me so happy.” Hanami made sounds which mimicked the sound of a human’s sobs.
“So why are you crying?”
Hanami pulled Jogo against their chest in a hug, leaning their head against Jogo’s. “Because I feel… happy. I feel loved. I feel tended for, like a rose bush.”
Jogo froze, gazing up and staring at Hanami. He had then wrapped his arms around Hanami while holding his pipe away from their body, leaning into the plant-obsessed curse’s touch. This gave him a sense of comfort, and he then closed his eye.
“I’m glad.”
Five years would go by, and in spring, the first bloom in the patch came to the sunlight. It bathed in the brightness of morning, the sunrise beautiful as a painting. It’d been five years since the field was burned. It’d been four years since the incident in Shibuya. Nobody tended to this garden; not anymore. Though, as Hanami strived for, nature did as it always had. Life went on. The first bloom of the patch was red. Hanami had a red flower on their shoulder as well. It was proof of nature. It was life at work.