Le Petit Prince.
“Did you know, Hikaru?” Inoo folds an edge down on the origami paper in his hands. “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
Hikaru looks up from his phone, distracted. “That’s too deep for me, Inoo.”
The other boy smiles vaguely, tearing a strip of paper off. “It’s from The Little Prince. There was a fox that asked him to tame it.”
“Why would a fox ask someone to tame it?” Hikaru has gone back to his cell phone screen. Inoo watches the way he looks at it, his eyes a little brighter than before, and he knows whose message is on that screen, knows that it’s why he’ll spend tonight waiting for a phone call that will never come, waiting for the message in its place that apologizes, “i was busy 2nite, talk tmr?”.
Inoo has become very good at waiting.
“I don’t know,” he replies, smoothing out a crease. “Maybe it was curious.”
“Curiousity doesn’t only kill cats,” Hikaru tells him wisely, snapping his phone shut. “The fox should have known that.”
Inoo folds in a corner. “Maybe it just wanted to know how it was like to be loved.”
“Maybe, huh.” Inoo pretends he can’t see Hikaru fidgeting, opening and closing his phone over and over again. He knows he’s waiting too, but in his case it’s for something that will make him smile the way he doesn’t smile at anybody else; Inoo waits for something that makes his chest constrict and his fingers go numb. “So what about this prince?”
“The little prince?” Inoo keeps at his origami, so that he doesn’t have to see the restlessness in Hikaru’s posture. “He came from another planet.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit,” he says, catching a brief glance at Hikaru’s look of disbelief. He pauses for a while as he works on a particularly difficult fold. “There was a rose on that planet,” he says suddenly, as if it had just come to him. “The prince loved that rose.”
Hikaru snorts. “That prince is weird.”
Inoo looks up, eyes lingering on Hikaru for a little longer than he intended to. “He was okay,” he says finally. “He was a good prince.” They lapse into silence again, the dressing room quiet except for the sound of the paper rustling and Hikaru’s phone snap-snapping open and close.
“What happened with the fox?”
“The prince met him when he came to earth,” Inoo tells him, tucking in another corner. “He wanted to play with it, but the fox said no, cause it wasn’t tame. Then it went, ‘hey, you know if you tamed me, I’d have something to look forward to, cause we’d be unique to each other’, and asked the prince to tame it. And he did.”
“So it wasn’t just curiousity!” Hikaru concludes with a flourish, smacking his phone against his palm. “It brought it upon itself!”
Inoo smiles wanly at him. “I guess it did, huh.”
“Crazy fox.” Hikaru heaves a sigh, and slumps back in his chair, doesn’t really catch how Inoo winces at his statement. “Did the prince stay with it in the end?”
Inoo doesn’t answer immediately. “No. He left to find his rose.”
“That’s ridiculous. I thought you were forever responsible.”
“You are. It’s just that -” he stops, words forming in his head. “The rose had tamed him first, you know?”
Hikaru huffs a little. “Poor fox.” There is a pause as he traces the edge of his phone absentmindedly. “It must’ve been some rose though.”
“Yeah,” Inoo says, hiding the ache in his voice with the soft shuffling of the paper. “It was, wasn’t it.”
They both look up at the beep. Inoo tries not to notice how eager he is as he flips his phone open, a smile already beginning at the corners of his lips. He doesn’t have to ask to know that the meeting is over, that Yabu’s out of the office and ready to leave, that he’s going to walk to the station alone today and tomorrow because waiting never works if the person’s already gone.
“Time for me to go,” Hikaru announces, and Inoo averts his eyes from the spring in his step. “You coming, Inoo?”
“You go ahead, I -” he gestures vaguely at the empty room, as though it would explain everything for him. “I’m waiting. For someone.”
Hikaru cocks his eyebrow, but asks nothing. “Don’t go home too late,” he says, patting Inoo on the shoulder. “See you tomorrow.” Inoo can’t do anything else but smile and nod, ignoring how the heat on his shoulder evaporates into the air too soon, and he thinks (maybe, just maybe) that it hurts a little less when he concentrates on folding instead of Hikaru’s back as he leaves.
Under his hands, in the silence, he folds the last petal of his origami lily. It isn’t a rose, isn’t as perfect or as pretty and it hadn’t been there from the beginning - but he still curls the edges back to let it bloom, as if it had some sort of chance. He catches sight of himself in the mirror then, the papery white flower in his hands, and his own face, blinking back - neither quite enough.
“It is such a secret place,” he whispers to himself. “The land of tears.”
afterthought: I ravaged myself over this because writing heartbroken Inoo broke my heart in turn. struggled on posting also, because this may not be one of my best works and it's unacceptable to present a mediocre dedication. I did in the end though, because every time I read this I want to die, and so figured that I should get it over with. my apologies.
afterthought ii: what Inoo's lily might have looked like.
in case the fic wasn't enough. with love. <3