Disclaimer: I do not own Chihayafuru.
Chapter 5 - Flowers
Taichi snuck a peek at Arata.
His friend sat in a chair, gazing blankly out the window. In his hand was a deck of karuta cards, which he slowly shuffled one card at a time. His hand would sometimes stop to hover over a particular one. He would stare at it, silently mouthing the words of the poem, gently running his fingers over its surface.
Arata's moods alternated between cheerful and serene on better days, to melancholic and detached on worse. No matter what though, if Chihaya wasn't with them, it was hard to hold a proper conversation with him. But Taichi reckoned the fault for the awkward silences didn't lay solely on Arata.
He remembered the days when it was comfortable to sit together with not a word exchanged between them for hours - Arata reading his books, him engrossed in his crosswords and Chihaya listening intently to Hyakunin Isshu CDs.
He looked around the room, trying to distract himself from the onslaught of memories and the wave of nostalgia that was sure to follow. Thanks to Chihaya's efforts, Arata's room didn't look like a typical dreary hospital room. But Taichi thought it could always use more colors, thus he had been bringing the most colorful bouquets of flowers he could buy, replacing them whenever they started to wilt.
He now stood to the side trying to arrange said flowers in a vase.
"Did you…"
Taichi glanced over at Arata.
"Did you ever play karuta over there, Taichi?"
He turned back to the vase, jabbing a few white flowers between all the red ones.
"People have no interest in karuta over there, so no…not really."
"Hmm…" Arata hummed to himself. Taichi took a step back to evaluate his nonexistent flower arranging skills. He figured he had to be bad at something. For a good measure he took out the white flowers again and stabbed them between the orange ones.
Happy with the final result he took another peek at Arata. This time his friend caught him staring and grinned, eyes sliding towards the colorful flowers.
"Creep."
Taichi sighed.
"I'm not doing this for you."
"Yes, you are…" Arata went back to shuffling through the cards. A moment later he quietly added as an afterthought, his tone taking on an undeniably wistful quality, "We need to play a game together. The three of us."
Before Taichi could say anything, Arata lifted up a particular card. He read it out loud in a clear, practiced tone:
Tachiwakare/ Inaba no yama no/ Mine ni ōru
He looked expectantly at Taichi, but receiving no reaction, he shook his head - maybe in slight disappointment.
"It really is your poem, isn't Taichi?" Arata said setting the card down on his lap.
Taichi looked away, his eyes landing on the colorful flowers. He didn't have anything to say back.
A/N: In one of the manga extras Suetsugu-sensei included character profiles for Chihaya, Arata, and Taichi, which included things like birthdays, blood types, favorite food and favorite poems. Taichi's was Poem 16 (Tachiwakare).
Even if I depart
and go to Inaba Mountain,
on whose peak grow
pines, if I hear you pine for me,
I will return straightaway to you.
Ariwara no Yukihira (Mostow's translation)
I thought it would be interesting for Arata to know that piece of information and to actually point out/acknowledge the parallel between the poem and the fact that Taichi returned after Chihaya had called him. I'm toying with the idea of including as many poems as I can in the following chapters. See my profile for more info.
And oh shucks, guys. Thank you for your kind words, follows and favorites.