Haunted 《🌸》
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I just don’t know when to stop, apparently.
Summary: Tachihara is back with the Hunting Dogs, not bloody Buzzfeed Unsolved. So why is he being haunted by the ghost he never summoned?
Note: I'll also be (reluctantly) posting the original draft because sOmEoNE decided to rip my heart out and f r i e n d z o n e them XD (I still love you for editing this fam @keo-to)
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A flurry of cherry blossom petals floated freely along streets on the ghost of a breeze. The trees along the streets seemed like ballgowns giving in to years of wind and dust and wear and tear, finally tearing apart and sending fabric drifting through the air.
Tachihara watched the petals.
Free.
Finally, he was free. Of the Mafia. Of his mission. How long had he been shackled down to it? Ah, no matter. It was nothing to him anyway.
Petals crunched like paper corpses beneath his feet as he walked. He sucked in a breath. Sweet. Slightly salty. Like the sakura dorayaki he’d had once. He shook out his sleeves, feeling light. No longer. No longer was he trapped.
The park was strangely quiet. He passed coffee-stalls, and tourists holding park maps and chattering in some foreign language. He nearly walked into a fat, sweaty American too busy with her phone to see him coming. From a shop somewhere an old man picked up his radio and began to play “Blue Light Yokohama.”
His footsteps faltered. He sank down onto a bench, listening. Castanets, beating to the thrum of pollen. To the slowly-increasing throb in his chest.
Ah, there it was again.
He greeted his memory with a bitter smile.
—————
The sunlight slanted through the trees, shattering against the bark and casting spots of golden onto the grass and the fallen petals.
“Ah, Kyouka-chan!” There was a cry from behind Tachihara. “You’re so cute when you’re happy.... Ah, keep smiling!”
“That, that bastard. Dazai... I hope he trips and impales himself on a steel rod. Bandage-wasting asshole!”
“What does that weretiger have that I don’t?” Akutagawa grumbled lowly, kicking bitterly at the sakura petals.
Tachihara attempted to block it out, instead choosing to hum along to the music
—“Blue Light Yokohama”—that a nearby vendor played. He could smell the dorayaki from here.
He turned to Gin, nudging her. “We should find another place to look at sakura. It’s no good when they’re here, yeah?”
Her eyes lifted only briefly to look at his cheek. Then she nodded and turned her head away.
“Hey, come on,” he frowned. “Don’t be like that. I’m getting food. You want any?”
She shook her head.
Whatever. He’d do it anyway. Piss her off a bit.
He walked off, petals crunching beneath his feet. Soon he was back with two sakura dorayaki in paper packets, paste dampening the material.
“Have one,” he said, thrusting it towards her.
Gin hesitated, pointing to her mask.
“Uh... take it off, then.”
She looked at him. Then at the dorayaki. Then she shrugged, deciding to take it. She pulled off her mask and took a bite of her dorayaki.
Towards him came wafting the scent of the cigarettes she smoked sometimes.
“What’s it taste like?”
She signed something he didn’t comprehend. Seeing his face, she sighed.
“Salty,” she said quietly.
Her voice was pretty. If a voice could be anything, hers would be a flower. Gentle, sweet.
He took a bite of his own. The outside was crunchy, and the interior soft. Typically dorayaki was sweet, but with the sakura petals, it had the perfect amount of saltiness.
“Ah, it’s good.”
She nodded. And smiled.
His heart pounded to the beat of the pollen.
That flower was the prettiest.
—————-
Goodness. Flowers really would be the death of him.
He smiled. A little bitterly. Then was then, and now was now. He couldn’t be so easily swayed.
Sometimes he felt a little like the boats he saw on the bay. Back and forth, rocked by the waters, tipping one way and another.
Of course he would value the friendship he’d formed with her. And he missed her.
But still, he had his job to get to. After all, she was a flower, and when spring ended, he couldn’t get her back anymore.
An old man passing by nodded at him. “It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it?”
“Ah, yes...”
This was his world.
