the trick is to keep breathing, rated pg-13. nemuro-centric (garbage challenge). post-series. 589 words.
(maybe you'll get what you want this time around?)
The third time he comes to lay flowers upon the grave, he meets her. He doesn't know why he should be so surprised; after all, the basic laws of chance suggest that this would surely have happened sooner or later. He also knew perfectly well when he began coming here that she also visits the grave on a regular basis to lay her own flowers over the ground that in turns lies over her brother.
Still, he has to admit that he is surprised all the same.
His surprise is not as great as hers, however. The roses almost slip from her grasp as she stares at him, her face – still lovely despite all the passed years that still show upon it – pale and drawn. He might have smiled to see the expression, for it is comical in a macabre way, but he seems to have forgotten how.
"Hello, Tokiko," he says quietly, and he knows that his voice is like the rest of him – unchanged down to the most minute of details. Nature has taken its course with Tokiko, but his years in Ohtori left him outside such natural processes. Still, he wonders that if it were possible to carbon-date his brain and all its impossible memories, if that would show his true age all the same.
She is recovering some of her poise, for she always was elegant and refined. She knows how to hold herself, and only the slightest tremor mars her movement as she comes up beside him, briefly bends to lay the flowers down. "Hello, Nemuro-san." Her voice is quiet, only slightly blunted by her encroaching age. "I never thought I'd see you here."
"I never thought I would see me here, either." His voice is quiet as he continues to kneel beside the grave, looking up at her through violet-tinted glasses. Her still-trim figure is silhouetted against the sun, like a shadow against the wall waiting to tell him some truth he's not ready to hear. "I didn't know he was dead, after all. Not until I graduated from this school."
Her voice is as quiet as a clock that has not only stopped, but never ran forward in the first place. "He's been dead for a very long time, Nemuro-san."
"How do you do it, Tokiko?"
She looks down at him from that greater height for only a moment, then surprises him by kneeling down to his level, her ageing joints only protesting slightly at the movement. "How do I do what, Nemuro-san?" she asks, her voice still as sweet and as fair as he once remembered it to be.
"Live."
She looks down at the roses for a moment, touches a petal briefly. It's bright and soft now, of course, but it will wither and turn to dust soon enough without its roots in the earth. She straightens up again, smoothing her pencil-thin skirt over her thighs, and he expects her to turn and walk away without another word.
Still, she turns back to him, one hand holding her hat against her elegant head as if she expects the growing breeze to whisk it away. "The trick, Nemuro-san," she says quietly, "is to keep breathing."
She turns and walks away then, but Nemuro does not follow her progress away from him, away from all that is left of the real Mamiya. He instead looks at the roses, and smiles. She brings live roses now, like he does. Somehow that gives him more hope than anything she could have said ever would have.