This drabble was originally posted to the utenadrabble community on livejournal, and answers no particular challenge. It is jut a brief look into the characters of Nemuro and the real Mamiya, both of whom obsess me. [sighs] Why must I always obsess over the characters least seen/obsessed over…?

deadwood, rated pg. nemuro/tokiko suggested (no challenge, just drabbling). pre-series. 618 words.

On one of the days he travelled to the Chida household to visit with Tokiko, he found her brother in the back garden, burying pot-pourri in the earth frozen under the snow.

It was not unusual for Nemuro to find Tokiko absent on some errand, nor was it unusual for him to stay with Mamiya for some time instead on such occasions. What made this day so odd was the way Mamiya was wrapped tightly in his dressing-gown, heavy slippers on his feet (but still shivering all the same) as he picked at the icy ground with a small garden trowel. Mamiya, as far as Nemuro was aware, rarely left the warmth of the house. If he did, he would only go as far as the enclosed conservatory and glasshouse; Mamiya was like a little bird in a cage, kept inside because the outside could only hurt him.

Nemuro had to wonder who had opened the door for Mamiya this snowy afternoon.

"What are you doing out here, Mamiya-kun?" he asked him in his almost clinical fashion, standing with his own jacket loose about his shoulders. The snow that was falling was sticking to his hair, but it didn't seem to want to melt. "Shouldn't you be inside?"

"Neesan changes the pot-pourri once a week," Mamiya had replied, not looking up from his task. His hands were faintly shaking as he worked the earth, and Nemuro wondered if it was the cold or his medication that was causing it. "Or rather, I change it for her." He paused, and then continued patting down the earth over the dead dry petals. "I usually do it while she's out. She wouldn't understand."

"Wouldn't understand?"

"Why I have to do this," Mamiya replied quietly, now beginning to pull the fallen snow back over the small patch of earth that had become something resembling a burial plot. "She likes dried flowers, you know. I've showed you them before – she makes the pot-pourri herself, the way she pickles the roses I grow for her in the conservatory." He still hadn't looked up to the professor at all, and his voice was very low and almost inaudible as he continued. "I just have to do this, Professor."

"Does it matter?" Professor Nemuro asked curiously, watching as Mamiya smoothed the snow over the small grave he had created. "It's only dead petals and wood."

Mamiya stood quietly, finally looked at him with too-bright eyes in a too-thin face. "Some people think it is beautiful," he said quietly, leaving the trowel standing up in the soil like a mock headstone, "beautiful to keep what has passed on in this place, because sometimes what is dead can still be beautiful." He looked again at the small mound, and shook his head. "I think it is more beautiful to let it have its peace."

Nemuro did not know what to say. So he said the only thing that came into his mind, looking at the pale and ailing child with a mind nearly as quick as his own, but tempered by far more empathy than a computer could ever hope to possess. "Is your sister not home, then?"

Mamiya was silent for perhaps a moment too long. "She's out with the Board, Professor. Would you like to have some tea with me instead?"

Nemuro paused for the barest of seconds before answering. "I would like that."

It was still snowing when they both went back inside, Mamiya carrying the empty glass bowl that had once held his sister's pot-pourri. He would fill it up again, if only for her. It left Nemuro wondering how many ways there really were for a person to show true love for another.