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"You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from blooming." — Pablo Neruda
Sakuya was alive. But only in the small way that matters least.
He woke up every morning at the same time. He rode the same train. He sat in the same chair at work and answered the same kinds of questions. In the evening he came home to a clean, quiet apartment, and he smiled when smiling was expected of him, and that was all. That was the whole shape of his day, over and over, like a coin spinning in place instead of rolling anywhere new.
He had a kind girlfriend. Her name was Hina, and she was gentle and patient, and she laughed at his jokes even when they weren't very funny. Everyone said they made a good pair. His mother liked her. His coworkers liked her. Sakuya liked her too, in the quiet, careful way you like a warm sweater: comfortable, familiar, safe.
But deep down, buried under many years of dirt, there was a little seed that Sakuya had planted a long, long time ago. And no matter how many times he tried to dig it out, it always grew back, small and green and stubborn, right when he least expected it.
The first time the seed bloomed, they were seventeen.
It was summer, thick and warm, and the whole world smelled like cut grass and rain that hadn't fallen yet. Ryo lay flat on his back in the field behind the school, his tie loosened, his eyes closed against the sun. Sakuya sat beside him with his knees pulled up, watching the way Ryo's chest rose and fell, slow and easy, like the tide.
"You're staring," Ryo said, without even opening his eyes.
"I'm just resting my eyes on you. There's a difference."
Ryo cracked one eye open and grinned. "Is there?"
Sakuya flicked a blade of grass at him. Ryo swatted it away and laughed, and the sound of it landed somewhere warm in Sakuya's chest, like sunlight falling through a window onto a cold floor.
They had known each other since they were six years old. Back then, Ryo had taught Sakuya how to ride a bike in the parking lot behind their building, running alongside him with both hands on the seat, shouting "I've got you, I've got you!" even after he had quietly let go. They had scraped their knees on the same patch of gravel and worn matching bandages to school the next day, proud of them like medals.
When it rained, they shared one umbrella, always tipped slightly toward Ryo, because Sakuya said his hair took longer to dry and Ryo never argued, even though his own shoulder always ended up soaked.
When Sakuya's father left one winter and never came back, it was Ryo who sat beside him on the stairwell every day after school for a month, not saying anything important, just sitting close enough that their arms touched, until the cold, empty feeling in Sakuya's chest slowly turned warm again.
Ryo was like that. Steady. Always there, the way the sky is always there, so much a part of the world that you forget to notice it, until one day, you look up, and you cannot look away.
"We're going to the same cram school next year," Ryo said, sitting up, bits of grass caught in his hair. "I checked."
"You checked my schedule?"
"I checked our schedule. There's a difference." He grinned, easy and bright. "Guess you're stuck with me a while longer."
Sakuya looked at him then, really looked, in the way you are not supposed to look at your best friend, and something inside his chest shifted, quiet and enormous, like a floorboard settling under new weight.
"I think you're kind of beautiful," Sakuya said, before he could stop the words from spilling out.
Ryo blinked. His smile faltered, not into anything unkind, just into something soft and surprised. His cheeks went pink, the way they did in winter when the wind bit at his face.
"Only kind of?" he asked, quiet.
Sakuya didn't answer. He didn't know how. That was the first flower, and it bloomed right there in the summer grass, small and secret, and neither of them knew yet what to do with something so new.
That night, Ryo walked him home the long way, past the shop that sold cold barley tea and the little shrine with the crooked gate. Neither of them talked much. But when they reached Sakuya's door, Ryo reached out and squeezed his hand once, quick, the way you might squeeze someone's hand to say I'm still here, before running off toward his own house, laughing at nothing.
Sakuya stood on his doorstep for a long time after that, holding the warmth of that squeeze in his palm like a coin he didn't want to spend.
•••
Autumn came, and with it, a strange new shyness that had never existed between them before. They still walked to school together. They still shared lunch, still argued about which vending machine had the better drinks, still fell asleep on each other's shoulders on the train ride home from cram school, heads knocking gently together with every turn.
But now, when their hands brushed by accident, Sakuya's whole arm went warm and strange, like static caught under his skin. Now, when Ryo laughed at something and turned to share the joke, Sakuya sometimes forgot, for just a second, what they had even been talking about.
He told himself it was nothing. Best friends feel close sometimes. That was all this was: a season, a phase, a flower blooming a little too early before the frost came and reminded it of its place.
Winter arrived, and one cold evening, the heater in Ryo's apartment broke. His parents were away, and it was too late to call a repairman, so Sakuya came over with two blankets and a thermos of hot tea, and they sat together on the floor, wrapped in the same blanket, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the tea from one cup because Ryo had forgotten to bring out a second.
"You're like a portable heater," Ryo said, leaning his head against Sakuya's shoulder. "Very useful. Ten out of ten friend."
"I'm not a heater, I'm a person."
"A person-shaped heater," Ryo said, and yawned, and did not move his head away, and Sakuya sat very still, hardly breathing, memorizing the exact warmth of it, because some part of him already knew this feeling would need remembering later.
They fell asleep like that, tangled in one blanket, and in the morning Ryo made them both rice with a fried egg on top, humming some song under his breath, and Sakuya watched him from the kitchen table and thought, quietly, I could stay in this moment forever and never once feel bored of it.
He did not let himself think past that, not yet.
•••
Sakuya buried the seed the way you bury anything you are ashamed of wanting: carefully, quietly, and without ever admitting that is what you are doing.
He told himself the feeling from the summer field was just a strange, confused kind of closeness, the sort of thing best friends sometimes feel and then grow out of, like a coat you wear one winter and never again. He told himself distance was healthy. He told himself many things that year, and believed most of them, because believing is easier than being honest, and he had never needed honesty with Ryo before. Only presence.
So he stopped being so present. He let calls go unanswered for a day longer than he used to. He found small, believable reasons not to visit: homework, tiredness, a headache that came and went conveniently whenever Ryo asked him over.
Ryo noticed, because Ryo always noticed everything about him. But Ryo did not push, not that year, and the two of them drifted apart slowly, the way boats drift when nobody is holding the rope, not because anyone let go on purpose, but because nobody thought to hold on tighter.
Cutting a flower does not kill its roots, though. The roots wait quietly under the floorboards of a heart, patient as winter snow, certain of their turn to come again.
•••
The second time the seed almost bloomed, they were twenty.
Sakuya visited Ryo's small apartment one evening, the one that always smelled like guitar strings and green tea and something faintly like rain. Ryo sat cross-legged on the floor with his guitar, picking out a slow, unfinished tune, not quite a song yet, just the beginning of one.
"You're doing the thing again," Ryo said, not looking up.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you come over and go quiet and stare at nothing, like someone stole your dog." He glanced up, one eyebrow raised. "You don't have a dog."
"I don't have a dog," Sakuya agreed, and didn't explain the rest: that he'd come straight from dinner with a girl his mother liked very much, and had spent the whole meal quietly counting the minutes until he could leave.
Ryo set the guitar down. The room went quiet except for the soft whir of the fan overhead. "You've been far away for months," he said, careful in a way Ryo rarely was. "Ever since the internship. Ever since..." He stopped himself.
"Ever since what?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
But it wasn't nothing, and they both knew it. The silence between them grew heavy, thick as fog.
"I've been seeing someone," Sakuya said finally. It wasn't really news, Ryo had met her twice already, but saying it here, in this small warm room full of half-finished songs, felt like drawing a line neither of them had asked for.
"I know," Ryo said. His voice didn't change, but something in his jaw tightened, just slightly, like a fist closing under the skin. "She seems nice."
"She is."
"Good. I'm glad." He didn't sound glad. Sakuya didn't call him on it, because calling him on it would mean opening a door that had stayed shut for three years, for reasons he had never once let himself examine in the daylight.
"I should get going," Sakuya said, standing too quickly.
Ryo didn't ask him to stay. And that, more than anything, was what made Sakuya's chest ache the whole way home, because Ryo, who had never once let him leave a room without an argument or a joke or at least a very long hug, simply let him go this time, quiet as falling snow.
They still saw each other after that, here and there, but something had changed, like a room where someone has quietly moved all the furniture an inch to the left. Familiar, but not quite right.
Once, at a mutual friend's birthday, Ryo caught a cold and Sakuya, out of old habit, pressed the back of his hand to Ryo's forehead the way he used to when they were children and Ryo's mother was busy.
"You're warm," Sakuya said.
"You always did that," Ryo murmured, eyes half closed, leaning very slightly into the touch before catching himself and pulling back. "Since we were kids."
"Old habit."
"Yeah," Ryo said softly. "Old habit." He didn't sound like he believed that was all it was, and neither, did Sakuya.
•••
More years slipped by, quiet as water running under a frozen river. Sakuya kept his girlfriend. He kept his careful, practiced smiles. He kept the seed buried deep, the way you might sink a stone to the bottom of a pond and try to forget the pond had ever held anything else.
But sometimes, at parties, he would watch Ryo laugh at something someone else said, and a small, sharp ache would bloom behind his ribs, something he refused, every single time, to call jealousy. He told himself it was nothing. He was very good, by then, at telling himself things.
Once, his girlfriend met Ryo for the first time at a wedding, and in the car afterward she said, quietly, "You went very still whenever he was talking to someone else tonight."
Sakuya didn't answer. He drove the rest of the way home in silence, and that night he lay awake a long time, doing the math he had spent years avoiding: counting up all the small ways Ryo had always taken up more space in his chest than anyone else ever had, and wondering, with a kind of quiet dread, whether some flowers cannot be cut forever, no matter how sharp the shears.
•••
The third time the flower bloomed, really bloomed, all the way open, they were twenty-six.
It was raining hard that night, the kind of heavy rain that stops all the trains and makes the whole city sound like static. The power in Ryo's building had gone out, so he showed up at Sakuya's door soaked to the skin, hair dripping, shirt clinging to his shoulders.
"You could have called first," Sakuya said, handing him a towel.
"You would have told me not to come." Ryo grinned, water running down his nose. "Don't lie."
Sakuya didn't answer, because it was true.
The power flickered out in Sakuya's building too, not long after, so they lit one small candle and sat together on the floor of the living room, wrapped in the same blanket, shoulders pressed close, exactly the way they used to sit in Ryo's apartment on that long-ago winter night. Ryo's hair was still damp. Sakuya reached over, without quite meaning to, and gently pushed a wet strand off his forehead, the way you might tend to something fragile and important.
Ryo went very still under his hand. "You've been far away for years," he said quietly, watching the candle instead of Sakuya's face. "On and off. I've noticed. I never asked why, because I think some part of me already knew, and I wasn't sure I wanted to hear it out loud."
"What do you think the reason is?"
"I think," Ryo said slowly, "that you've spent a long time trying to convince yourself that a summer afternoon in a field was nothing. I think you've kept a girlfriend for years because it felt easier than the alternative." His voice caught, just slightly. "I think I might have done the exact same thing. So I don't really have room to judge you for it."
The rain kept hammering softly against the window. Sakuya's heart was doing something loud and unhelpful in his chest.
"I kept cutting it down," Sakuya admitted, voice barely above a whisper. "Every time I felt it, I told myself it wasn't real. I thought if I cut it enough times, it would finally stop growing back."
"Did it work?"
"No." The word cracked in his throat like a small branch snapping. "It never worked. It just kept coming back. Every single spring, whether I wanted it to or not."
Ryo reached over in the candlelight and took his hand, the same way he used to, guiding Sakuya safely across busy streets when they were small, except this time, neither of them let go once they had reached the other side.
"I think you're kind of beautiful," Sakuya said again, the very same words from that long-ago summer field, older now, steadier now, no longer startled out of him but chosen on purpose. "I never actually stopped thinking it. I just got very good at hiding it, even from myself."
Ryo's eyes shone in the candlelight, and his breath came out shaky. "Only kind of?" he asked, the same old joke, soft and trembling this time instead of light.
"More than kind of," Sakuya said. "I think it might be the truest thing I've said in years."
They sat like that a long while, foreheads finally leaning together, hands wrapped tight, saying nothing more because nothing more needed saying. Ryo rested his head against Sakuya's shoulder, the way he had a hundred times before as children, except this time it wasn't old habit, it was something new, chosen freely, finally allowed to mean exactly what it had always meant.
Outside, the rain kept falling, steady and soft, like the whole sky had been waiting a long time to finally let go of something it had been holding in.
After that night, Sakuya told Hina the truth, as gently and honestly as he knew how. It was hard, and it made them both sad for a while, but it was also the first completely true thing he had done in a very long time. She cried a little, and then, later, she told him she had wondered for a while, that some quiet part of her had always known something in him was pointed somewhere else, even before he knew it himself.
His mother did not understand right away. She asked about grandchildren. She asked what people would think. But little by little, the way frost slowly gives way to sunlight, she came around, and by spring, she had set an extra plate at dinner without anyone needing to ask her to, the way she always had for Ryo since they were small boys with scraped knees and one shared umbrella.
Ryo never once rushed him. He was patient the way seasons are patient, certain that spring always circles back eventually, no matter how long winter tries to hold on. He still kept a spare key on the same hook by his door. He still fell asleep against Sakuya's shoulder on late train rides home, except now there was nothing left to hide behind, and no reason left to pretend it meant anything less than it truly did.
Some evenings, they still sat wrapped in the very same blanket from that rainy night, sipping tea from one shared cup, saying very little, needing to say very little, because after twenty years, some kinds of closeness do not need any words at all.
You can cut down a whole field of flowers, every single season, and tell yourself each time that surely, this time, it is finally gone for good.
But the roots do not care how many times the shears come. They wait patiently beneath the floorboards, warm and quiet and endlessly stubborn, through every winter that tries to convince them otherwise, and when spring finally comes, it always, always finds its way back.