These stories are just a "series" of pieces I wrote as part of a challenge I set myself…the challenge was to write some drabbles based on the titles and partly on the lyrics of songs by the band Garbage. I've done two before – when i grow up and deadwood – but I wanted to do some more. The stories that follow are some of what resulted from this challenge. There are numerous characters starring in these pieces as the narrators, and a couple are actual pairings.

so like a rose, rated pg. nemuro/mamiya suggested (garbage challenge). pre-series. 455 words.

(sleeping with ghosts: it's such a lonely experience)

"Do you think it's scientifically possible for ghosts to exist, professor?"

He looked up from his tea, frowned. It had not tasted bitter until now, but then he hadn't stopped liking bitter tea until he had met Tokiko and her younger brother. "What makes you ask, Mamiya?"

"Curiosity," he replied quietly, his own tea growing cold as he left it untouched. The pot sitting by his left hand, made of terracotta and filled with a miniature rose bush with a single red bloom, trembled slightly as Mamiya accidentally pushed against the table while shifting in his chair. "I respect your opinion, Professor Nemuro. I'd like to know what you think."

"Scientifically, it is impossible." His reply was bland, carefully spoken. "Ghosts do not exist."

"But eternity does?"

Nemuro set his tea aside, fixed his gaze totally on the pale young boy sitting opposite him in the cool conservatory filled with dead and dried flowers in perpetual bloom. "We can make it exist, Mamiya. I believe that. Your sister believes that. Therefore, you should believe it too."

"I believe in ghosts," Mamiya said quietly, and Nemuro noticed again that the potted rose sitting before him is red, blooming, alive. "But that doesn't make you believe in them, does it?"

"That rose must have been expensive to buy, this time of the year."

Mamiya did not react to the change in topic. "I wanted something alive in this garden, professor. Sometimes the cost is never too much, not when you want something to be alive for you."

Mamiya so often says what he wants to say wrapped up in metaphor and simile; the words made Nemuro look away, sigh. "Better alive than a ghost, after all."

"I wouldn't want to be a ghost," he says, and his voice was very troubled, "because you don't believe in ghosts, do you professor?"

"You're so like a rose," and the words fell out of his mouth before he could take them back. "Like that rose, blooming even in the winter, bright as blood against the snow."

Mamiya smiled, the gesture oddly sad and wistful. "As a scientist, professor, you should know that no rose blooms forever. This rose won't survive the winter." He looked up then, titled his head. "That's my sister's car."

Nemuro usually looked forward to Tokiko's arrival home when he spent time with her brother. As he was left staring at the already-wilting rose in its pot of earth, Mamiya going to greet his sister, that day he wished that he could have Mamiya to himself for just a little while longer. He was so like a rose; he only bloomed for so long, and Nemuro was only beginning to realise how short that long really was.