Disclaimer: Gundam Wing not mine. Heero not mine. Not even the puppy is mine, sigh.
Scilla
I saw the guy standing there by the monument as I was crossing the street. It's not really much of a monument—just a hunk of concrete from the building that collapsed here when an explosion at the mobile suit factory on the other side of the fence dropped a mobile suit on it during the war. But there's a bronze plaque on it now that lists the names of the people who died in the apartment building. There were a lot of them. One hundred and forty-six, to be exact.
It was raining, so there wasn't anyone else around. It wasn't too uncommon to see a handful of people there on a nice day, maybe a few tourists taking rubbings of the plaque or taking pictures. But today, everybody was sticking to the cafés or the movie theaters, or staying home reading a book. That's what I intended to do, once I was done here.
I crossed the street and came up the gravel path to the site. I tried to be quiet, but it wasn't really easy, walking on gravel. He didn't look up, though. Actually he looked kind of grim. I figured he wanted his privacy, so I didn't say anything, just laid my bouquet of lilies on the concrete and stepped back to say my little prayer, just in my head. When I was done, I started to move away, taking just one last glance toward the guy. He hadn't moved since I'd first seen him.
Of course, as soon as that thought went through my head, he moved, and I jumped. He just stepped forward and laid his own bunch of flowers on the concrete. When I saw them, I had to bite my tongue hard to keep from laughing. They were a bright pinky-purple, really big flowers made up of lots of smaller blossoms. I mean, you put roses and lilies and that kind of thing on graves—these were pretty, but they seemed a little weird to me.
Still, I wasn't going to say that to him. When I looked at him again, he was looking right at me, and he was glaring fit to skewer me through the eyes. I wondered if he'd heard me laugh, and I felt bad. I know I wouldn't like it if somebody laughed at me while I was visiting somebody's grave. I gave him this sort of sheepish smile. It probably looked really stupid. It felt stupid on my face.
"They're hyacinths," he said.
If he hadn't heard me laughing, he'd probably seen me looking at the flowers funny. "They're pretty," I said truthfully. "Did you know someone who died here?"
He looked back at the stone and nodded.
"Me, too," I said. "My parents and my big brother." I eyed him sidelong, but he didn't look likely to bite me, so I leaned forward and pointed to three names on the plaque. "Gerard and Annelise Donalbain. And Rene Donalbain."
Mama, with her braid of blonde hair, she used to sing me awake in the morning. Papa's moustache tickled my face, and he tucked me in and told me stories about the dances he went to with Mama. And Rene, he always used to pick me up and swing me around, and let me jump on his bed.
I felt tears in my eyes, but the guy didn't seem to notice, and I blinked fast to get rid of them. He didn't point out any names on the plaque, just stared at it. The look on his face was funny; he looked like somebody had just hit him. Sad, angry, and kind of confused.
"Who did you know?" I asked him.
I thought he wasn't going to answer, at first. "I only met her once," he said. "She was just a little girl."
I didn't understand why, but I felt funny when he said that. He sounded almost angry, like he was yelling at somebody, but I didn't think it was me. "Oh," I said.
There was a silence for a little bit, kind of awkward. I didn't really know what to say. "I come here every year to visit them," I said, finally. "They don't have graves. They were dead and burned up before the fire trucks could come."
He didn't say anything. I looked at his face, and it was like somebody'd hit him again. He probably didn't need to remember how the little girl died, too. It was definitely time for me to shut up and make myself scarce.
But before I moved, he turned around and started to walk down the gravel path back to the road. "I come here every year, too," he said without looking back.
I watched him walk down the road and around the curve, out of sight. I took another look at those big purple flowers. They were nice. Funny-looking, but still nice.
---
I still remember the dream I had that night. I was outside with Pippi again, but I wasn't walking her—I had her in my arms, and it was night, and I was standing outside my building. I could see the fence a few hundred feet away, and on the other side of it was that big boy, the one with the messy hair that I'd seen that afternoon while I was walking Pippi, that I gave my flower to.
He was shouting something, but I couldn't understand him, and I was trying to run as fast as I could toward him. But Pippi was heavy, and I had that awful dragging feeling you get in dreams where you try to run and all you can do is sink down on the ground and wait for whatever's chasing you to catch up. And it was hot, like middle-of-summer hot, even though it was spring.
I woke up from that dream so scared that I thought it was real. I thought the house was on fire. I jumped out of bed and ran out of my room and out of the apartment, out the back, to our meeting place for when there was a fire, so we would stay together, just like Papa taught us.
That was the reason I wasn't killed when the building was destroyed. A piece of debris from the building hit me, and it knocked me out. When I came to, I was in a hospital—the only survivor of the war's largest civilian disaster in the city—and Mama, Papa, and Rene (and Pippi) were gone.
---
I looked up the flowers when I woke up later that night after visiting the monument. Purple hyacinths. They mean "sorrow; please forgive me."
---
I saw him on the news a few weeks later, and I recognized him. The boy with my flower. The man at the monument. The terrorist that blew up the mobile suit factory.
It's been a year now, or almost. It was a little annoying; I found that there are flowers to say almost everything else you could possibly think of—"Your purity equals your loveliness" (orange blossoms), "Your qualities surpass your charms" (mignonette), "Thy frown will kill me" (currants—that one just cracked me up), but it took forever for me to find what I was looking for. But it's all done now. I hope he appreciates all the work I went to, to get those flowers planted; I practically had to lie in the mud in front of them this spring to keep the stupid mowers from shredding the sprouts.
He'll be here in a few days. I'm not sure what I'm going to say to him, really. For a long time, I was thinking of every possible thing I could say to hurt him. But I watched him every time he showed up on the news, and I remembered how he looked and how he sounded at the monument, and it finally sort of dawned on me that he was doing a better job of hurting himself for what he did than I could ever do.
And then there was the dream I had, that makes me feel, in a funny kind of way, like I owe him for still being alive.
I'm going to be watching for him. I'll give him a flower, and tell him who I am. And if I have to, I'll tell him what I found out, that blue scilla means "forgive and forget".
But maybe he'll already know.
The End
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A/N:
Webshots has some nice pictures of blue scilla and purple hyacinths if (like me before I began the story) you have no idea what they look like.
I don't recall the puppy ever being named, so I gave it a silly fluffy-sounding name. For the girl, no name was necessary.