Buttons
A very short story by amazing greengirlblue
based on Natsuki Takaya-sensei's Fruits Basket series.
Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
- "Paper Moon"
Yuki had never paid much attention to the second button on his school jacket until said button dropped off said jacket with no apparent probable cause. At age eight, when choosing the shade of crayon to color the sky meant life and death, a missing button could cause any child to panic, and Yuki chased his button down a flight of stairs as it pinged and bounced down the steps with this one thought: I have to get it back. That thought was drawn from a particularly strong mental image in his mind, and that was of the button straying into some unknown corner of the school that Yuki couldn't reach, where the button would be lost forever and alone and eventually get buried under layer upon layer of thick black dust. Entirely forgotten, but still existing, its only thoughts confined to the corner in which it fell and if it would ever be found again.
(Later, at age seventeen, Yuki would have, in fact, forgotten all of this. If he did remember, though, he would be embarrassed, because he is that sort of person.)
It wasn't until Yuki found the button resting quietly and anticlimactically at the foot of the stairs that he began to understand the other implications of a missing button. At age eight, Yuki was aware of something many other eight-year-olds do not -- it does not matter what shade of crayon you use to make a 9x12-inch sky. What matters is whether or your mother says, "Oh, what a beautiful picture! Did you do that yourself?" or if she barely glances at it at all.
Yuki knew that a missing button does not feel loneliness or contemplate its own existence. A missing button only means you can't keep your clothes straight, you can't take care of yourself, you're such a nuisance and you can't do anything right on your own. It means you're useless, useless, useless.
And between the time Yuki stood there at the bottom of the stairs and the teacher realized she had one less student in her class than there should be, he closed his hand and pressed the button against his fingertips and palm. He felt that it was cold and flat and round and plastic, and even if he never had paid much attention to it before, he still remembered it was brown and it had two holes arranged side-by-side in the middle.
-----
That was the first button.
The second button Yuki found on the floor of the main house just outside his room. It was three weeks later, and his mother had come by earlier but left before Yuki knew.
The button Yuki found was small and white and shaped like a small dome, and there was a half ring on the flat end where the thread must go through. Yuki picked it up to observe this and set it down on the floor again. Because it was round and because the floor must have been at a tilt, the button rolled in a semicircle, the half ring anchoring the spin.
Maybe the owner will come back looking for it, Yuki thought. He left it there just in case, but his mind wouldn't let it alone. He stood inside his room, pulling off his sweater and dropping it onto the floor, stared at the books on the table, the empty space between the walls. Finally, after a full minute, Yuki opened the door and snatched the dome button from the floor and put it on the bookshelf with his workbooks and the company of the brown button.
Yuki knew the truth. The owner had abandoned it, and she wasn't coming back.
-----
Hatsuharu was the first person to take interest in the mysterious red Kleenex box filled with buttons on Yuki's bookshelf. Yuki was in middle school by now, but he wasn't able to go to class again that day because of his asthma, and Rin was sitting outside the room with her chin on her knees. Hatsuharu had a butterfly clamp on his forehead from some fight he'd been in with someone from his school. Yuki understood the fight had something to do with the color of Hatsuharu's hair and the word 'stupid' being carelessly tossed in Hatsuharu's general direction, but that was about it.
"Why do you collect buttons?" Hatsuharu asked, taking the box from the shelf and dropping himself on the floor next to Yuki's chair. Because he was sick, Yuki had been assigned to a stiff chair to take pressure off from his abdomen. Heedless of this, Hatsuharu leaned his back into Yuki's leg, and if Yuki had more energy, he would have been forced to address the decision to either let Hatsuharu lean against him like that or push Hatsuharu away. As it were, though, he took advantage of being too tired and let the matter drop.
"I don't collect them," Yuki said instead, "I just…"
But Yuki paused, realizing, as Hatsuharu upturned the box unceremoniously over the floor, and buttons jumped and skittered across the wood, that he did have an awful lot of buttons for somebody who didn't collect them. He also knew every story of every button – where he found it, when he found it, why he added it with the others.
"… pick them up when I find them," Yuki finished, and closed his eyes. Hatsuharu may have nodded, but Yuki wouldn't have seen.
Still, even with his eyes closed, he could hear Hatsuharu playing with the buttons. The plastic clicked and rattled against each other; the sound, small as it was, sending subtle vibrations through the hardwood floor under Yuki's bare feet. Yuki could picture Hatsuharu mindlessly arranging buttons by size, or into outlines of shape, or into complicated mosaics.
Yuki fell asleep like that.
Later that day, after Hatsuharu and Rin left without a word, Yuki stared at the pile of buttons Hatsuharu had thoughtfully replaced into the box. There, a navy blue button shaped like a heart rested at the top. (Two years ago, Yuki had found it where the sidewalk curb sloped into road. It was raining, and the button was floating rapidly downhill like a small boat lost in the ocean.) Next to the heart, there was a clear, unremarkable round button with two holes. (It had been sealed in a plastic bag attached to the price tag as a potential replacement for the other buttons on his shirt.) Somewhere in the pile, there was a similar button that was slightly larger. (Yuki had accidentally pulled it off the sleeve of his brother's jacket; Ayame hadn't noticed at all and continued to move away even as Yuki's hand was still outstretched.)
It's pitiful, Yuki thought.
Before he could give it a second thought, Yuki picked the box up and dumped it into the trash bin by the door, the buttons clattering and clicking together like rain for only a second before they settled at the bottom.
---
Yuki thought about taking them out of the trash bin, but he didn't. Eventually, the trash bin was taken away and replaced by Yuki's door, empty. When Hatsuharu came back the next week, he searched the room a bit before asking Yuki what happened to the box.
"They were only buttons," Yuki said mildly, not looking up from his make-up homework that involved a lot of multiplication and division. Rin was sitting outside the room again; she was humming off-key a tune Yuki knew from a movie. Why did she bother coming if she only ever sat outside alone?
Hatsuharu continued to stand in front of the bookshelf as if the box would magically reappear where he had left it during his last visit.
"But they were important to you?" Hatsuharu asked. It was a statement made into a question through some slight variation in tone. Yuki worked through the numbers on his homework, scratching out answers in wobbly, tiny print.
"They were only buttons," Yuki repeated, "And they weren't important to anyone."