Tsukimine challenge guidelines:

Freeze-frame moment; non-fluff; 1000 words or more; non-canon.

Pick one of three pictures given and write about it. It must simply be involved.

This fic became something jointly inspired by a picture and a poem. I rip off both shamelessly.

Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me. The picture does not belong to me. The poem does not belong to me. This piece only sort of belongs to me.

Patterns

I walk in the garden in the spring and wear the dress he loved. The flower-beds stretch out around me in miles and miles of daffodil and blue squills. They have been carefully arranged into a rare pattern of golden and of blue. The curves are words from another land, pictures from another world, creatures from another earth, an ecstatic explosion into a neatly laid pattern.

In my long pink kimono with a design of silver roses, I too am a pattern of flowers.

In the garden, there are trees. Under the trees, under the branches, I wait. The old seat welcomes me, for it remembers in me another woman of a lifetime ago. The tree is in flower, and a single delicate blossom floats down to rest on my shoulder. I weep. The blossoms fell upon his hair when he left a year ago, and now there is nothing remaining but a secret and a drawing hidden in my kimono.

There is another woman in my kimono, hiding under the stiff embroidery. Under the pattern of silver and pink there is a woman who came here before me, laughing and running from her lover on the paths. I want to be that woman, I want to free myself of this pattern. I want him to catch me, in the shadow of the trees. I want him to free me of my kimono, of my firm and gorgeous prison. But he will not come, for he is gone, and there is nothing but a secret and a drawing.

The drawing as I pull it out is stained and faded, but still I hold it close under the trees. A friend drew it for me, I do not remember when. It was a long, long time ago, a lifetime ago and more, that we were together under the trees, and a friend grabbed a few pencils and sketched this picture for us. It was a beautiful day, a day like today; I can see so much from the still clear pencil lines. But I cannot yet remember what or when. My thoughts will not yet turn to that time, the time before.

I wish to return to that time I refuse to recall. I wish to be once again the girl who ran along the paths to meet him. I wish to be again the girl whose hair ribbons got caught in a tree, and who could stand still in the knowledge that he would untangle them. I wish to be again the girl he kissed under the tree, the girl he touched, the girl he loved. If I were to become that girl, would he not perforce become that boy?

But no. He and his childhood are not here with me; I cannot, will not return alone and besmirch that happy time with another year's sorrow.

Within the drawing, within the memory, hides a secret I refuse to share. It is mine, he is mine, but he is mine no more. My secret is not of the pattern, and it calls, calls to me to join it. He is not here, and my secret I hold to myself to remember that he was himself and I was myself and we were together and will be together again. My secret I will keep, as no one could ever have hoped to keep him. Secrets are for holding, but he was for flying, and he was most himself when he was free.

He would have been my husband, a few brief months from now, in another far-off world, in a world where he returned. Together, under the trees, we would have broken our pattern of laughter and mock indifference; he for me, and I for him. We would have been married here, on this seat beneath this tree. He said, once, that the sunlight carried a blessing, and just that once, I agreed. We would have been married, with the sunlight's blessing shining from between the trees, and we would have had all the world to be ourselves and free. Now, the flowers are in bloom, and the pattern remains, unbroken.

I did not want to see the messenger, when he arrived at my home. I knew why he must have come, and I did not want to know. I did not want to open his message, did not want to read it. But I did, because it was better than not knowing and always wondering if, perhaps, it had been a lost love letter, not the other thing at all. I still keep the message, its terse lines so unlike those he ever wrote to me; "We regret to inform you…" He would never have said that. I want that letter to change, to become his letter, a love letter, or at least the letter he would have written in its place. I want him to tell me that he is gone; no other has the right, no other can ever make me understand.

I took the letter from the messenger's hand, I read it, and I came here again, to the garden. I walked up and down the blue and yellow pattern in my perfect, stiff kimono. The flowers held their heads up in pride, and how could I do less? I could not fall, could not collapse upon the flower-beds if I tried. The pattern of my kimono held me, as it holds me, to the pattern.

I will linger in the garden in the summer and the winter, as the rose-bushes bloom and die, as the asters laugh and cry, as the snow falls and wind calls. I will walk up and down the patterned garden paths in my gown of silk and silver, and my kimono will protect me so I do not break the pattern. I will never break the pattern.

For he who could break it is dead, fighting somewhere far away in a pattern called a war. What on earth are patterns for?

Ending

This piece was inspired by (read: unabashedly rips off) Amy Lowell's poem, 'Patterns'. The point of view character, as you probably did not guess unless you saw the pictures, is Chiharu.

Thank you for your time, and for telling me how you liked the story. I find I rather enjoyed writing it, and hope you find pleasure in reading it. Good day. wanders off to find cure for Formal Speech Disease