Am I incredibly late in updating everything else? Yeah. Should I write this to get my creative juices flowing?

I guess so.

Roses

Eva Rosalene wasn't exactly fond of her last name.

Sure, it was a pretty one, but she couldn't have told you exactly how many times people asked her for her last name, she replied "Rosalene", and then they replied, "Alright, Rosalene, may I have your last name please?"

She sometimes thought their reaction when she replied that this was her last name was funny, though.

She was in her office doing writing up the report of their last job- the client had wanted simply to speak to her husband again before she died and express how she cared about them, and it had gone surprisingly well, finishing the job with plenty of time to spare- when Neil poked his head into the office, giving a very mischievous smile.

The smile Neil was giving her, to be quite honest, was one that somewhat put her out, especially knowing his personality and everything about him.

"Hey, Eva."

"Hi, Neil. Did you finish your report?" she asked, barely glancing up from her computer screen before lowering her eyes and tapping out a few words on the keyboard sharply, knowing the answer before she even finished asking the question.

"Nope." He leaned on the doorframe slightly, adjusting the rims of his glasses. They were so reflective she couldn't see the green tint of his eyes.

Shame. They were a nice shade of green.

She sighed, lifting dark brown eyes to give him a deadpan stare. "It's due at the end of the week. You'd better get on it if you don't want Rob to get on your case about it."

Neil's mischievous smile didn't even quirk slightly at the mention of Rob, which made her even more apprehensive. What prank was he going to pull on her this time? The last time he'd pulled a prank on her, he'd made her hair turn bright green for a week.

She still had no idea how he even did it. Most hair dyes didn't even work on her black hair with how dark it was, unless she bleached it and she wasn't about to try that.

"Yeah, I'll get on it."

She finally stopped looking at her computer to frown at him sightly. "Neil, what are you-?"

"Happy Valentine's Day, Eva!" Before she could finish, he was holding up a bouquet of blue, yellow, and red roses, the stems somewhat roughly cut and tied together with some sort of colored string.

"Valentine's Day was two weeks ago," was her automatic response even as she took the bouquet of roses from him and regarded it.

There were at least six colorful in the bouquet, two of each color, but still arranged in such a way that it didn't look childish or weird. They were beautiful roses, fully blossomed and practically glowing in the fluorescent lights of Eva's office.

There were two sort of hair-ties keeping the roses together. One was a green one with little cucumber clips dangling from it, clicking whenever Eva even shifted halfway to her left, and the other was a little pink one with a smiling jellyfish on it.

Neil was grinning. "I got some weird looks for asking if they had cucumber and jellyfish hair-ties at the store," he said, almost in a bragging way. "I, of course, told them it was for my beautiful head of hair and that I wished to use it to adorn my head."

Eva was still looking at the roses. Blue and yellow. Two of her favorite colors.

But there was something niggling the back of her head, waiting patiently for Eva to gather the thought and pluck it up.

Neil liked to give secret messages, whether it was something scrawled in a notebook and written in lemon juice to be seen any other time, or a code, or some sort of backward thing on a paper that everyone could read if they so much as turned the paper over. She knew he did. He just liked to be secretive and pretend no one understood.

So it wasn't just because she liked those colors. It couldn't be.

Plus, there were the red roses; if they were just for her favorite colors, he would've just given blue and yellow.

(Or maybe she was just putting too much thought into this, but he liked his secret messages.)

Yellow meant friendship.

Red meant love.

What did blue roses mean?

She must've been frowning, because Neil's big, beaming grin faded slightly. "Uh... I just found the nicest roses I could... maybe I should've brought you a basket of vegetables, instead..."

The remark snapped her out of her thoughtful stupor, and she rolled her eyes at him. "Cucumbers, Neil, don't worry. I think they're very pretty."

He puffed up slightly. "Of course! I, Neil Watts, would only pick the loveliest of roses for my colleague, Dr. Rose-alene!"

All thoughts of secret messages slipped her mind as she rolled her eyes at the pun and set the bouquet on her desk carefully. No wonder he bought her roses, then. "Alright, Dr. Watts, get on your report then, before your colleague has to do all the work herself."

Neil gave her a teasing pout, lips curling up at the ends in a way that she'd memorized from years of friendship. "Aw. No thank you for the flowers?"

She sighed and gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Yes, yes. Thank you for the flowers, Neil. They're lovely."

"Of course, my beautiful colleague!"

"Stop being all complimentary to get out of writing your report, Neil..."

Neil was asleep.

He'd slipped into sleep a few times recently, the heart monitor a consistent, quiet undertone that he'd complained drove him up the wall but had been the one thing to lull him into sleep as well. His glasses were off (of course), and instead of wearing his lab coat, like always, he was just wearing the scrubs the nurses had given him.

He was slightly disappointed to hear that Eva wasn't in the room.

It was easy to tell when she was in the room- she'd be quietly moving around, making sure he was comfortable, or her arm would be resting on the edge of the bed, or he'd simply be able to hear her breathe.

He was glad he'd been able to give the flowers to her before he wound up here.

It was perhaps the last gift he'd be able to get her.

(He probably should've given her the other hair ties, too, but he wasn't sure where they'd ended up, and he didn't know if she'd particularly want a strawberry hair tie.)

He grumbled, eking green eyes open. The fluorescent lights of the hospital blinded him momentarily, almost taking him back to the one time he'd conked out on his desk and had been shaken awake by Eva, the light above his head making him squint into her dark brown eyes.

Like his coffee, with no cream or sugar added to it.

He loved his coffee.

(He loved Eva.)

He shook the thought off to squint around his room, a blurry smear in front of his eyes. As he'd thought, there was currently nobody in the room.

But there was a new thing on his bedside table.

He scrabbled about, finding one arm of his glasses and awkwardly pulling it onto his face so that he could blink the sleep out of his eyes, staring at the spot on his bedside table.

When the sleep managed to leave his eyes, he realized he was looking at a rose.

It wasn't the one he'd given Eva; it was just beginning to bloom and was a deeper blue, the petals barely beginning to open, a message pinned to the stem with a small, plain clothespin.

He blinked at the rose again, then reached out slightly trembling fingers to pull it closer.

He'd known she might guess.

The second she'd started frowning, he realized how very code-y it seemed and how very much she knew about codes. How very, very scarily close she'd get if she realized the meaning of the roses in Victorian flower language because he thought that code was neat.

So he'd made the pun, and she'd forgotten all about it as she rolled her eyes at him and gently pushed him out of her office so she could finish her work.

But he couldn't bring himself to care as he peered at the message.

It was longer than a few lines- more like a short letter than anything else.

Blue roses.

Secret love.

He read the first line.

"I figured it out, Neil."