Ikebana by Rena Redhead (For RobStar Week 2021)
For @robxstar 's RobStar Week 2021. This one is based on Day 1's prompt "Floral Arrangements". Been in the midst of a move, so I feel my brain has been foggy, but I did my best. Hope to have more coming this week based on other prompts. Below is the first part of the story. Read the full story at the link below. Enjoy and do spread all of the RobXStar goodness!
Later,
~Rena
-RxS-
Ikebana
The quick crack of the branch as the clippers in her hands snapped together made her wince. It reminded her of another loud crack. Opening her eyes and blinking, Starfire looked at her work. It… maybe it had been better off had she left the branch on? She groaned and brought her head down into the bases of her palms.
She wasn’t very good at this.
This was supposed to be an exercise in patience and tolerance. But she found herself having very little tolerance not for the arrangement in front of her, but for herself.
It was about ‘graceful lines’ and ‘minimalism’ and ‘hanakotoba’ or ‘flower words’. She’d watched dozens of videos and read articles about how to do this ancient art, but clearly there was no ‘one-size fits all’ method and the foriegn idea of the art form was strange to her. Less was more, unless it wasn’t. It was about finding the “perfect stems” unless it wasn’t and the imperfection instead was what made it perfect.
Starfire couldn’t help but not like these contradictions as she felt like sulking into her hands. Why couldn’t things be straight forward? That was the way she preferred it; she was not one for passive aggression. She just wanted directness….
But perhaps it was her own indirectness that frustrated her most and so she was taking it out on the poor flowers in front of her. Controlling her strength with them for some odd reason had proved difficult even when it wasn’t all that hard in other circumstances. Yes, most definitely, she was more frustrated with herself and the floral pieces before her were her poor victims, which upset her more as she’d rather take out her anger out on a villain causing harm to others rather than something so defenseless.
Her eyes caught sight of the branch she had just cut off. It was unremarkable starting from the base up, until it clearly had a broken end near the top. That’s why she had felt it had to go as there was no way it could be fixed…
Fixed.
She wondered how many times she had entered his room and not noticed. It must have also seemed unremarkable to her. Besides, she’d always been far more engrossed in being, well… with him. That was far more remarkable than anything else, should she be honest. Just his presence could make it difficult for her to not float off the ground even a little bit. But then… just like that little unremarkable branch… there was a crack, and a gasp…
She remembered the feeling of a tightness in her gut coming to her immediately, a kind of worry and fear… and his… non-chalantness, which she felt while honest, must have also been half feigned to ease her worry. Slowly, her mind drifted off back to what had happened that evening. Clippers in hand, she sighed and looked back up at her creation’s base, the thing that had brought her to this point.
-RxS-
Read the full story here:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13918734/1/Ikebana
(Also, yes, this is Rena Redhead’s tumblr, even though it’s called Skywing Knights. Skywing Knights is my cosplay name, while my writer name is Rena Redhead) ;)