[drabble] Beautiful Dreamer, Wake unto Me
Title: Beautiful Dreamer, Wake unto Me
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Inoobu
Genre: Tragedy
Rating: G
Summary: AU. At twelve, he begins making preparations for his death.
Notes: jsyk I kind of wrote this on a whim so this is far from koala tea |D and it's kinda weird and ehehe.
~
They’ve known each other for as long as Kota can remember. The pale boy only moved into the room opposite Kota’s five years ago but to the young boy it feels like forever.
Kei is an extremely pale boy with painfully thin limbs and large dewy eyes that make Kota think of a baby deer named Bambi in a movie he’d once watched in the building’s musty old movie room. The first time they meet, he whispers his name and a shy greeting in a tiny voice.
“Why’d they put you here?” Kota had asked with all the brash curiosity of a seven-year-old.
“Problem with my immune system,” Kei had blithely replied, seemingly unconcerned about whether this condition had a huge impact on his life or not. “Apparently I don’t have enough of one kind of blood cell or something like that. You?”
Scrunching up his nose, Kota had tried to recall the long word he’d heard the doctors use when they talked about his condition, but try as he might he had no idea what it was.
“Something’s wrong with my blood,” he said at last. “And I have a hole in my heart wall or something.”
Kei had nodded, again seemingly not very concerned about the severity of the condition.
“Well, starting from today I’m going to be living opposite the corridor from you, so let’s be friends!”
~
Now they are twelve, and no longer the wide-eyed innocent little boys they once were. Twelve is still young, the nurses tell him, but Kota knows that he doesn’t have much of a chance of surviving past the age of twenty so he is technically already middle-aged or so.
Kei’s eyes sparkle mischievously when Kota spills this to him. They sneak into the kitchens when Chef is out buying groceries and steal a couple of meal bars. They only get to eat the crunchy, salty bar on weekends, usually, so it is quite a treat for them. Up in Kei’s room, they arrange the two small rectangular bars clumsily - ‘artistically’, Kei calls it, gesturing to the bars with aplomb - and have a little party.
“We’re middle-aged!” Kei says, grabbing a bar and chewing it. “I heard people get to do all sorts of fun stuff when they stop being kids and start being middle-aged. They get to do anything they want and people don’t stop them.”
Kota is amazed by this revelation.
“Really?”
“Yeah!” Kei nods, words slightly muffled by the half-chewed bits of meal bar stuffed into his mouth. “What do you want to do most?”
After a long pause, Kota decides that he wants to prank the short penguin kid from down the corridor by pouring milk into his shoes.
“His name is Daiki,” Kei chides gently, “Also, Chef is probably back in the kitchens by now and I’m pretty sure she won’t let us steal any milk.”
“…Damn.”
~
It’s only a few days later that Kota realizes Kei hasn’t mentioned what he wants to do most.
He brings this up when they’re sitting in a corner of the small library, Kei poring over a book about skyscrapers. Kei looks surprised when Kota poses the question, and mulls over it for a while.
“I want to die a beautiful death,” he says at last, smiling.
Kota chokes.
“You want to what?”
“What?” Kei shrugs. “You and I both know we’re going to die anyway, so why not go out with a bang? Being remembered for a beautiful death would be much better than being remembered for an unglamorous one, or worse, not being remembered at all.”
Only understanding half of it, Kota asks the question that’s popped up in his mind ever since Kei mentioned the word ‘beautiful’.
“So after you die you want them to put that makeup thing on you and stuff? Like that creepy nurse with the freaky eyelashes? Where’d you get these ideas from, those girly manga you’ve been borrowing from the library?”
“No! And not like that!” Kei says in a horrified voice, having had past traumatic experiences involving said nurse who had a habit of wearing golden fake eyelashes all the time. “Just…I want to die in a beautiful way, but I’m not sure what I want to do yet.”
Kei stays silent after that, and Kota drops the matter.
~
Fourteen-year-old Kota rolls off the bed sleepily, having awoken to an insistent hammering on his door.
“What.”
Kei, standing outside his door, does not look perturbed in the least by Kota’s grumpy scowl at being woken up before nine in the morning. On the floor in front of him is a fat old book that reads JAPANESE MYTHOLOGY on the spine in peeling gold letters.
“I found something that would give me a beautiful death,” he says, a tinge of excitement in his voice.
Kota does not recall the conversation from two years ago until Kei has kicked the heavy book into his room and pushed the door shut. By the time he knows what exactly Kei is talking about the smaller boy is already flipping the yellowed pages, searching for something.
“Here!” he says triumphantly, pointing at a page labeled Sakura on the top.
“If you bury a dead body under a sakura tree, it is said that the blood will make the sakura blossoms more beautiful,” Kota reads, before turning to Kei.
“You want to be buried under a sakura tree?”
Kei nods fervently. Kota still doesn’t understand why his friend is so fixated on this, but he nods anyway and promises to bury Kei under the sakura tree in the backyard.
“It doesn’t bloom though,” he warns. “I’ve never seen a single flower on it in my life.”
“Then I’ll make it bloom,” Kei replies firmly. “Even better!”
Kota forgets to ask what happens if he ends up dying before Kei instead.
~
They are sixteen, and now death is no longer just some event they know will come to them soon. It looms, and for the first time in his sixteen years Kota feels a tiny bit of fear at the thought of death claiming his best friend - his only friend - and leaving him all alone in the world.
Kei catches pneumonia one day, and suddenly the nurses have him locked away in a pristine room that smells of Clorox.
“His immune system is weak,” they tell Kota. “He catches bugs easily so he needs to be in as clean an environment as possible before his condition worsens.”
Despite their best efforts, though, worsen it does. Soon Kota is banned from even entering the room, and he can only stare through the tiny glass panel in the door as his friend lies on the other side of it, pale and unresponsive with all sorts of machines hooked up to him.
They are still allowed to talk, but only using the intercom system built into the wall of the room that makes Kei’s voice sound extremely fuzzy and unclear.
“I’m going to die,” Kei tells him, voice full of quiet resignation.
“Mm,” Kota says, not knowing what other response would be appropriate.
“Remember our promise.”
Kota chews his lip.
“…Yeah.”
~
They celebrate Kei’s seventeenth birthday in a quiet fashion. Kota holds up a meal bar outside and Kei stares at it through the glass panel. He sings a birthday song, while Kei laughs quietly over the intercom.
“Eat it,” Kei tells him, nodding at the meal bar. “It’ll go to waste otherwise.”
Smiling wryly, Kota takes a bite out of it.
“Remember when we were twelve and held a party to celebrate being middle-aged?”
Kei snorts, which sounds more like a strangled elephant trumpeting over the intercom.
“The good old days.”
“Yeah,” agrees Kota. “The good old days…”
~
Kei dies in his sleep two days after his birthday.
Kota stages an argument with the Head Nurse and in the end gets their grudging approval to bury his best friend at the base of the twisted old sakura tree in the backyard. Some nurses offer to help, so within half an hour a decently-sized hole three feet deep has been dug in the soft earth.
As gently as he can, Kota dumps Kei’s frail body into the hole before starting to shove dirt back into the hole.
When that job is done, he carefully carves Kei’s name into the bark of the sakura tree. He feels like crying, but his eyes are already all red and swollen and it seems that he’s used up all of his tears already.
~
The rest of summer passes by, and the leaves on the sakura tree turn from green to brown and then fall off as winter approaches. He stays outside all day reading by the sakura tree, imagining Kei is still next to him.
When it gets too cold to stay outside he retreats inside, not talking unless he is talked to.
The nurses try to get him to interact with other boys around his age, but while Hikaru and Yuya are very nice and polite and Daiki is funny, they are not Kei and it does not fill up the gaping hole in his life left by his best friend.
Kota spends his winter sitting in a corner and reading every single book he can lay his hands on, desperate for something that will allow him to pass the time quickly. He goes through more than half of the library in three months, and by the time winter is about to end his vision has become much worse.
He finds a pair of glasses in Kei’s room and wears those, refusing the ones the nurses offer him. They are uncomfortable, but they remind him of Kei and for Kota that is more than enough.
~
He resumes his reading outside when spring starts, returning to his old perch on a particularly gnarled root of the tree. Finding that reading is easier with the cumbersome glasses off, it soon becomes a daily routine to attach the pair of glasses to the tree by sticking them into a particularly large hole in the trunk before he starts to read.
One day, as he is reading he happens to look up and see a vague pink blur slowly float down.
Bewildered, he scrabbles for Kei’s glasses and jams them on with one hand while reaching for the pink thing with the other, only to realise that the pink thing is in fact a flower. Curious, Kota slowly tilts his head up to look at the foliage of the tree.
For the first time he can remember, the tree is swathed in pastel pink, and even as he watches a slight breeze dislodges another flower, leaving it to slowly float down to the grass.
Suddenly, Kei’s voice resonates in his head.
I’ll make it bloom.
~
And Kota cries, a single wilting sakura clutched in his hands.
fin.
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx)
Pairing: Inoobu
Genre: Tragedy
Rating: G
Summary: AU. At twelve, he begins making preparations for his death.
Notes: jsyk I kind of wrote this on a whim so this is far from koala tea |D and it's kinda weird and ehehe.
~
They’ve known each other for as long as Kota can remember. The pale boy only moved into the room opposite Kota’s five years ago but to the young boy it feels like forever.
Kei is an extremely pale boy with painfully thin limbs and large dewy eyes that make Kota think of a baby deer named Bambi in a movie he’d once watched in the building’s musty old movie room. The first time they meet, he whispers his name and a shy greeting in a tiny voice.
“Why’d they put you here?” Kota had asked with all the brash curiosity of a seven-year-old.
“Problem with my immune system,” Kei had blithely replied, seemingly unconcerned about whether this condition had a huge impact on his life or not. “Apparently I don’t have enough of one kind of blood cell or something like that. You?”
Scrunching up his nose, Kota had tried to recall the long word he’d heard the doctors use when they talked about his condition, but try as he might he had no idea what it was.
“Something’s wrong with my blood,” he said at last. “And I have a hole in my heart wall or something.”
Kei had nodded, again seemingly not very concerned about the severity of the condition.
“Well, starting from today I’m going to be living opposite the corridor from you, so let’s be friends!”
~
Now they are twelve, and no longer the wide-eyed innocent little boys they once were. Twelve is still young, the nurses tell him, but Kota knows that he doesn’t have much of a chance of surviving past the age of twenty so he is technically already middle-aged or so.
Kei’s eyes sparkle mischievously when Kota spills this to him. They sneak into the kitchens when Chef is out buying groceries and steal a couple of meal bars. They only get to eat the crunchy, salty bar on weekends, usually, so it is quite a treat for them. Up in Kei’s room, they arrange the two small rectangular bars clumsily - ‘artistically’, Kei calls it, gesturing to the bars with aplomb - and have a little party.
“We’re middle-aged!” Kei says, grabbing a bar and chewing it. “I heard people get to do all sorts of fun stuff when they stop being kids and start being middle-aged. They get to do anything they want and people don’t stop them.”
Kota is amazed by this revelation.
“Really?”
“Yeah!” Kei nods, words slightly muffled by the half-chewed bits of meal bar stuffed into his mouth. “What do you want to do most?”
After a long pause, Kota decides that he wants to prank the short penguin kid from down the corridor by pouring milk into his shoes.
“His name is Daiki,” Kei chides gently, “Also, Chef is probably back in the kitchens by now and I’m pretty sure she won’t let us steal any milk.”
“…Damn.”
~
It’s only a few days later that Kota realizes Kei hasn’t mentioned what he wants to do most.
He brings this up when they’re sitting in a corner of the small library, Kei poring over a book about skyscrapers. Kei looks surprised when Kota poses the question, and mulls over it for a while.
“I want to die a beautiful death,” he says at last, smiling.
Kota chokes.
“You want to what?”
“What?” Kei shrugs. “You and I both know we’re going to die anyway, so why not go out with a bang? Being remembered for a beautiful death would be much better than being remembered for an unglamorous one, or worse, not being remembered at all.”
Only understanding half of it, Kota asks the question that’s popped up in his mind ever since Kei mentioned the word ‘beautiful’.
“So after you die you want them to put that makeup thing on you and stuff? Like that creepy nurse with the freaky eyelashes? Where’d you get these ideas from, those girly manga you’ve been borrowing from the library?”
“No! And not like that!” Kei says in a horrified voice, having had past traumatic experiences involving said nurse who had a habit of wearing golden fake eyelashes all the time. “Just…I want to die in a beautiful way, but I’m not sure what I want to do yet.”
Kei stays silent after that, and Kota drops the matter.
~
Fourteen-year-old Kota rolls off the bed sleepily, having awoken to an insistent hammering on his door.
“What.”
Kei, standing outside his door, does not look perturbed in the least by Kota’s grumpy scowl at being woken up before nine in the morning. On the floor in front of him is a fat old book that reads JAPANESE MYTHOLOGY on the spine in peeling gold letters.
“I found something that would give me a beautiful death,” he says, a tinge of excitement in his voice.
Kota does not recall the conversation from two years ago until Kei has kicked the heavy book into his room and pushed the door shut. By the time he knows what exactly Kei is talking about the smaller boy is already flipping the yellowed pages, searching for something.
“Here!” he says triumphantly, pointing at a page labeled Sakura on the top.
“If you bury a dead body under a sakura tree, it is said that the blood will make the sakura blossoms more beautiful,” Kota reads, before turning to Kei.
“You want to be buried under a sakura tree?”
Kei nods fervently. Kota still doesn’t understand why his friend is so fixated on this, but he nods anyway and promises to bury Kei under the sakura tree in the backyard.
“It doesn’t bloom though,” he warns. “I’ve never seen a single flower on it in my life.”
“Then I’ll make it bloom,” Kei replies firmly. “Even better!”
Kota forgets to ask what happens if he ends up dying before Kei instead.
~
They are sixteen, and now death is no longer just some event they know will come to them soon. It looms, and for the first time in his sixteen years Kota feels a tiny bit of fear at the thought of death claiming his best friend - his only friend - and leaving him all alone in the world.
Kei catches pneumonia one day, and suddenly the nurses have him locked away in a pristine room that smells of Clorox.
“His immune system is weak,” they tell Kota. “He catches bugs easily so he needs to be in as clean an environment as possible before his condition worsens.”
Despite their best efforts, though, worsen it does. Soon Kota is banned from even entering the room, and he can only stare through the tiny glass panel in the door as his friend lies on the other side of it, pale and unresponsive with all sorts of machines hooked up to him.
They are still allowed to talk, but only using the intercom system built into the wall of the room that makes Kei’s voice sound extremely fuzzy and unclear.
“I’m going to die,” Kei tells him, voice full of quiet resignation.
“Mm,” Kota says, not knowing what other response would be appropriate.
“Remember our promise.”
Kota chews his lip.
“…Yeah.”
~
They celebrate Kei’s seventeenth birthday in a quiet fashion. Kota holds up a meal bar outside and Kei stares at it through the glass panel. He sings a birthday song, while Kei laughs quietly over the intercom.
“Eat it,” Kei tells him, nodding at the meal bar. “It’ll go to waste otherwise.”
Smiling wryly, Kota takes a bite out of it.
“Remember when we were twelve and held a party to celebrate being middle-aged?”
Kei snorts, which sounds more like a strangled elephant trumpeting over the intercom.
“The good old days.”
“Yeah,” agrees Kota. “The good old days…”
~
Kei dies in his sleep two days after his birthday.
Kota stages an argument with the Head Nurse and in the end gets their grudging approval to bury his best friend at the base of the twisted old sakura tree in the backyard. Some nurses offer to help, so within half an hour a decently-sized hole three feet deep has been dug in the soft earth.
As gently as he can, Kota dumps Kei’s frail body into the hole before starting to shove dirt back into the hole.
When that job is done, he carefully carves Kei’s name into the bark of the sakura tree. He feels like crying, but his eyes are already all red and swollen and it seems that he’s used up all of his tears already.
~
The rest of summer passes by, and the leaves on the sakura tree turn from green to brown and then fall off as winter approaches. He stays outside all day reading by the sakura tree, imagining Kei is still next to him.
When it gets too cold to stay outside he retreats inside, not talking unless he is talked to.
The nurses try to get him to interact with other boys around his age, but while Hikaru and Yuya are very nice and polite and Daiki is funny, they are not Kei and it does not fill up the gaping hole in his life left by his best friend.
Kota spends his winter sitting in a corner and reading every single book he can lay his hands on, desperate for something that will allow him to pass the time quickly. He goes through more than half of the library in three months, and by the time winter is about to end his vision has become much worse.
He finds a pair of glasses in Kei’s room and wears those, refusing the ones the nurses offer him. They are uncomfortable, but they remind him of Kei and for Kota that is more than enough.
~
He resumes his reading outside when spring starts, returning to his old perch on a particularly gnarled root of the tree. Finding that reading is easier with the cumbersome glasses off, it soon becomes a daily routine to attach the pair of glasses to the tree by sticking them into a particularly large hole in the trunk before he starts to read.
One day, as he is reading he happens to look up and see a vague pink blur slowly float down.
Bewildered, he scrabbles for Kei’s glasses and jams them on with one hand while reaching for the pink thing with the other, only to realise that the pink thing is in fact a flower. Curious, Kota slowly tilts his head up to look at the foliage of the tree.
For the first time he can remember, the tree is swathed in pastel pink, and even as he watches a slight breeze dislodges another flower, leaving it to slowly float down to the grass.
Suddenly, Kei’s voice resonates in his head.
I’ll make it bloom.
~
And Kota cries, a single wilting sakura clutched in his hands.
fin.