[hanakotoba] White Camellia
Title: White Camellia
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx )
Pairing: Daikei
Genre: Tragedy
Notes: Part of the Hanakotoba collection.
Request for Mai (crescentharpe ).
Inspired by my original story, The Girl with the Yellow Umbrella.
The white camellia represents waiting.
~
The day Inoo breaks the news to him is in midwinter, as they stand outside the shop where both of them work part-time.
The snowflakes flutter around the two of them in a soft white flurry, landing gently on Inoo’s dark curls and his dark blue scarf.
“I’m going to China for an immersion programme,” Inoo says quietly, breath billowing white in the cold winter air. “I have no idea how long it’s going to take, but it could be anywhere from six months to more than a year.”
“I’m gonna miss you, you know that.”
Inoo smiles.
“Don’t wait for me. Continue with high school, and try for university too, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Daiki pouts.
“It’s just not the same, going home without the knowledge that I’ll have something to look forward to at work the next day.”
“Just bear with it, okay?” Inoo asks sadly, “It’s a chance I can’t pass up.”
“All right,” sighs Daiki at last, “but no matter how you try to stop me I’ll still be waiting for you.”
~
Inoo leaves a week before Christmas, with a small suitcase packed full of essentials.
“Guess I’ll see you soon,” he says to Daiki, waving one last time before disappearing into the rush of people at the train station, to catch the Shinkansen to Narita.
Daiki stands alone in the snow for a while, before slowly turning away and beginning the long, lonely walk home.
~
Every day, after work ends, he carries his white umbrella to protect himself from the snow, and stands outside the station, waiting for a head of familiar curly hair.
He knows it’s pointless, because there is no way an immersion programme would end so soon, but he finds that it’s nicer to waste away his days fruitlessly outside the station than go home to his quarreling parents.
Spring comes in due time, and brings with it Daiki’s graduation from high school.
University fees are expensive, and he decides against applying for one. Instead, he begins to work full-time at the flower shop, and spends his free time outside the station.
He still carries the same white umbrella, and waits under the same tree every day, eyes desperately searching.
But he never spots Inoo.
~
Six months after Inoo’s departure, Daiki’s parents officially split.
He’s seen it coming for a long while, long before Inoo announced his trip to China.
He’s loath to live with either one of them, but it’s not like he has a choice. Finally, he decides to move in with his alcoholic mother.
It’s a good choice, he rationalizes, compared to his violent father. She won’t hit him, and most of the time she’ll be too drunk to notice when he’s not home.
Every day, Daiki finds himself lingering outside the station later and later, until well past when the last train has left. Then he’ll slowly walk home, and sleep before waking up early, eager to leave his house-that-is-not-a-home.
The tree - or as he has christened it, the ‘waiting tree’ - has become more like home than his thin and hard bed in his cold, tiny room in the apartment he shares with his mother. When he gets tired of standing, he sits on the soft cool grass at the base of the trunk, and leans back against the rough bark, eyes tirelessly scanning the crowds.
He’s watched them enough to recognize the ones who take the train daily. He knows which train they take, and what time they return. He’s seen all kinds of people, young and old.
But he never sees Inoo.
~
When he comes back home to find his mother dead, with bleeding slits on both wrists and several scattered broken alcohol bottles, he doesn’t cry.
She died of depression and alcohol overdose.
When he finishes hauling her body away and burying it in the tiny garden outside the apartment, he leans against the front door frame and surveys the empty flat.
It seems cold and unwelcoming, and somewhere inside his heart he knows he doesn’t want to stay there any more.
He’ll wait for Inoo to return, he decides, and ask if he can room in the older boy’s flat.
~
He sleeps outside the station now.
Winter’s fast approaching, but he knows he can’t afford to buy a new coat, so he has no choice but to make do with his threadbare, fraying one.
People have long stopped giving him strange looks, or asking him if he has a place to stay. They’ve learned, gradually, to ignore the scrawny boy in the beige coat two sizes too small, who sits outside the station all day and watches the last leaves of autumn fall.
The curling dry leaves float gently down onto the white canopy of his umbrella, now fixed permanently above him. Finally, as the big clock outside the station strikes 9, he stands up, stretching cramped muscles and shaking off brown leaves, and trudges to work.
~
More than a year has passed, since that midwinter.
The flower shop has closed for the season, and Daiki is left free to wait outside the station the whole day, every day.
He sits there, waiting tirelessly as the cold bites through his coat. He’s been surviving off food from the convenience store, with the meager pay he has saved from working at the flower shop. It shows, because his face is pale and his arms bonier than ever.
He doesn’t care - he just wants to see his best friend again.
It seems to be the only prospect getting him through the day, the only reason why he endures the cold and the hunger instead of holing up in his flat - which is admittedly not much warmer - the chance to see the happy smile of his best friend is what makes him look forward to each cold morning.
~
He feels his eyelids close as the last crowd of the day disperses.
It’s two days before New Year, and he’s beginning to harbor some doubt in his heart. But he also knows that Inoo always keeps his promises.
“Once I make a promise, I’ll never break it,” is what he always says.
It’s been over a year though, and Daiki’s getting worried.
He must have been worrying too much, because that night Daiki dreams of Inoo coming home.
His best friend hasn’t changed in the slightest. He’s still the same pale-skinned girly-looking skinny boy with the long slim piano fingers any girl would die for.
Daiki smiles in his dream, as he waves energetically to Inoo.
Inoo smiles back, and runs to him, and they walk to Inoo’s flat hand in hand, just like the old times.
~
The next day, Inoo’s mother runs to the train station in a big rush, disregarding anything else around her.
If she had looked around, she would have seen Daiki huddled under his umbrella, eyes still closed with a smile on his face.
But she doesn’t, because she’s focused on getting onto the Shinkansen to Narita, the very same one her son took more than a year ago.
She’s going there after a call the previous night, from the airline company of the plane he’d taken.
She comes back a couple of hours later, holding nothing but a small wooden box.
Standing outside the station, she does her best not to cry any more than she already has, and opens it slowly to take one last look at the ashes of her son before she scatters them outside the family house.
He’d died when his plane home crashed, just before it landed.
The wind changes direction, and sweeps a few grains of ash out of the box, swirling and dancing with the snow.
One lands on the pale skin of Daiki’s face, still slumped beneath the tree with his eyes closed.
His eyes don’t even twitch as the ash tickles his nose, and his breath doesn’t billow like white smoke in the clear cold air.
In fact, his still body is as cold as the snow he’s sleeping on.
Nobody notices him until the day after New Year, when the sweeper comes by to rake away the snow, and discovers the lifeless, limp body.
The wind blows stronger, and Daiki’s umbrella skitters away, bumping the ground as it comes to rest on its side, as if it were a white camellia gently dislodged from its branch by the breeze.
And somewhere among the stars in the sky, both of their souls find each other at last.
The wait is finally over.