Chapter Fifty Five: Typical Household Conversations

Disclaimer: I do not own Eyeshield 21.

Song Playing: When You're An Addams from the Addams Family Musical

Inspiration: Crawley from Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett.

Theme 95: Disappear

Once the apartment started to remain free of decay a very strange thing began to happen. It started when she was walking home from the grocery store. There was a small shop just a few blocks away from their home that sold plants: household, yard, planters, and the such. She hesitated in front of the door long enough to gain several strange looks before gathering the courage to enter.

She was a black thumb gardener. She knew it. Her mother knew it. Her father was greatly amused by it.

Still she couldn't help but feel deep deep down this time would be different. Thus she found herself leaving the quiet shop with several plants that the shop owner had promised she wouldn't be able to kill with nothing less than a blowtorch.

Thus she left in much higher spirits than she had entered with.

XxX

It wasn't what he expected to come home to. Sure there were some adjustments that they both made when they moved in together. However none of their compromises had lead him to believe that he would walk through the door to find her facedown on the table with several dried crinkled things in pots by the top of her head. Well, he was never one to beat about the bush. "What are those things?"

"My plants." Came a muffled reply.

"Uh-huh." Wherever this was heading it wasn't going to end well. Carefully he sat down, making sure to keep arms distance from his long time girlfriend. "What killed your plants?"

She made a noise that he assumed was a word. It just wasn't any word that he could distinguish with her face buried so far into the crook of her arm. When she didn't make an effort to repeat herself, he replied with a very unintelligent: "What?"

This time she exploded.

"Me all right! Me!"

And, though he knew it wasn't a very good live in boyfriend thing to do, he laughed. A loud sharp bark of laughter that he just couldn't help even as he filed away this information for later. The glare that she was giving him and the fact that she looked ready to hurl one of her dead potted plants at his head didn't deter him in the slightest.

XxX

She was deeply confused. "Youichi?"

He gave a grumbled acknowledgement that he had heard but didn't particularly care if she kept conversing with him.

"What are all of these?"

Despite
the rumors in high school, he did not have eyes in the back of his head. Thus it was with great reluctance that he tore his eyes away from the glowing screen of his computer screen and turned around. Several feet away Mamori was standing in a corner touching the leaf of the hanging foliage that lived there. She appeared to be dumbfounded: like she knew it was there but she couldn't bring herself to believe what she was seeing. The dumbfounded was slowly turning to suspicion as she took in the homey leafy interior that their apartment had gained in her absence. "My plants."

Geez. Go away for a few days and suddenly the world stops making sense. "... They're yours?"

"Yah." At this point he apparently lost interest in the conversation, returning back to his work. "I find it soothing."

"Uh huh." There was no way she was just going to let this go. "I'm going to take a shower."

However she was willing to put it on hold until she had clean hair, a full belly, and a good night's sleep under her belt. Then they could discuss how unfair the universe was granting him a green thumb when all her gardening endeavors ended in dead sticks.

XxX

Rounding the corner, she sputtered to a stop before backtracking. Hands on her hips she glared mutinously down at a clean spot on her floor. She bit her lip. Then she pointed to a spot on the ground and looked up to where Hiruma was working at their small table. "Didn't there used to be a plant right here?"

"Hm." He looked over his shoulder. "No."

No. That wasn't right. She was positive there used to be plant right there. It was a big thing in a red pot that she whacked her shin against every time she turned that particular corner. "There was definitely a plant here before."

"Crazy talk."

She was not crazy. When she left to take Cerberus out for his morning walk there was definitely a giant potted something: fern, ivy, whatever it was. Now it wasn't there. She didn't know why and she didn't know how but he had gotten rid of it. It might take a while but she was determined to find out just what he was up to. After all, she was not the type to just let things go.

XxX

She had gotten home early than expected. It was a nice surprise that meant she'd be able to actually cook dinner instead of resigning herself to whatever take out Youichi decided to pick up. Really, she loved him to death but the man could not boil water. Which left take away the safest, if not more dull, option. Barely in the doorway she didn't even have time to call out in greeting when she heard a noise coming from deeper in the apartment. If she didn't know better she would have thought that Youichi was talking to himself.

"- a whole lot better than this if you don't want to end up like the fucking weeping willow in the red pot."

... Or to the plants.

"You have sun. You have water. Now if you want to keep having a dirt pot to live in your going to have to do better than this wilted leaf bull shit you've been giving me for the last week."

She had to admit, even if it was only to herself, that this was one of the weirder things she had witnessed her boyfriend doing. It was one thing to talk to plants to keep them happy and healthy. It was a whole other thing to scare them into being vibrant. There was something very creepy about knowing that the foliage scattered through her home were potentially terrified right down to the tips of their little roots.

"Fucking Fern, get ready to meet your new home in the furnace."

Carefully she closed the door and walked right back out the way she came.

XxX

A week later she managed to work past the strangeness of it all to discuss his threatening of the houseplants into lush green complacency.

Even though she had confronted him, told him that she saw him talking to the plants he still denied everything. Just kept telling her that he had a knack for nurturing. That he had to let things grow. It made her want to whack him in the head really really bad. But she was the mature one in their relationship so she stormed out the door, letting out a small shriek of frustration, and went to start her afternoon shift.

She didn't appreciate him playing dumb.

He wasn't good at it and it was kind of insulting on a very personal level that he tried at all.

She also didn't appreciate his sense of humor.

Especially when she found the little succulent cactus on her desk at the day care.