[hanakotoba] Black Rose
Title: Black Rose (Alternative Title: The Darkly-clothed Stranger)
Author: Luna (dreamweavernyx )
Genre: Supernatural
Summary: From young, she has been able to see things. Things that others can't see.
Notes: The black rose represents death.
~
She does not know exactly when she began to have the ability to see that which others could not, but it must have been around the age of five.
One day, she walks into her kindergarten classroom to see a strange flower pinned onto the hair of her classmate. It is a pure black rose, and she thinks she can count fourteen petals.
However, when she brings it up nobody seems to see the mysterious flower like she does.
“There’s no flower there,” Lucy tells her scornfully, “there’s nothing on my head at all.”
But by the second day the flower is still there, although she is somehow very sure that it is short of one petal.
She pushes it to the back of her mind. Nobody else can see it, she tells herself, so she shouldn’t bother with it either.
But a week later half the petals have fallen off the rose, and it catches her attention once again. The very next day Lucy doesn’t come to school, and the teacher tells them that she has been in an accident.
The class dutifully writes cards with the same message printed painstakingly over and over again in different marker: Get Well Soon. Two days later, they all troop down to the hospital with their cards in hand, and place them on Lucy’s bedside table one by one before quietly walking away.
Lucy has not woken up since the accident, and when it is her turn to place her pink card on the table already overflowing with construction paper cards, her eyes glance up to the flower she sees in Lucy’s hair.
Only four slightly withered petals remain.
“Get better soon,” she whispers to the prone form on the bed, but she does not hold any belief in those words.
Her mother brings her to the hospital a couple of days later to see Lucy again. This time the young girl’s face is paler than ever, and when she dares to cast a stray glance at the flower she sees only two frail curling petals.
She places another card on the bedside table and exits the ward, casting one last sorrowful glance at her classmate.
Two days later their teacher walks in with an extremely grave face, and hesitates a little before steeling herself to break the news to her kindergarten class.
Lucy has died.
~
The second time she sees the black rose, it is neatly tucked behind the ear of a traffic warden.
The traffic warden is the one in charge of stopping the traffic to let the little children cross the road safely. One day when she is crossing the road, she happens to blink up at the traffic warden, and notices the painfully familiar black rose with seven petals fluttering gently in an invisible wind.
Each day when she crosses the road after school she notices the black flower has one petal less, and soon there is only one dried-up wrinkled petal hanging off the flower.
The next day, she has just crossed to the other side when she hears a screeching of brakes. Whipping around, she sees a red sports car attempting to come to a stop in front of the warden’s red stop sign.
She flinches and turns away as the warden flies up due to the sheer impact, before crashing back down to the ground like a broken, fallen butterfly.
Before the ambulance reaches the scene she has turned and fled home with her heart pounding.
~
The black rose, reads the encyclopedia, symbolizes death in the language of flowers.
Hands clench on the glossy pages, leaving the paper slightly crumpled as cogs turn in her mind.
The flower of death.
The pieces click in place. The strange appearance of the flowers. The disappearance of the petals. The deaths.
She can see death omens.
~
Her grandmother is hospitalized following a stroke when she is nine.
With the rest of her frantic family, she rushes to the hospital, heart pounding and fear grasping at her heart.
Her grandmother lies unconscious on the bed, and she feels a spark of worry that quickly grows into a roaring flame of anxiety.
Swallowing, she forces herself to remain calm, and discreetly searches her grandmother’s familiar face, silently letting out a breath of relief when she sees no black flower.
Grandmother will not die yet, she tells herself firmly, and the weight on her heart lessens.
Her grandmother, however, does not show any signs of improving, lying on the hospital bed day after day with her face milk-white, wrinkles more pronounced then ever, and eyes shut. The rest of the family takes turns to spend the day in the ward, keeping her grandmother company in hopes of her swift recovery.
Another Monday comes and it is yet again her turn to keep vigil by her grandmother’s bedside. She sits on a steel chair next to the bedside table, while her mother sits opposite her, facing the door.
Sudden bootsteps startle her, and she whirls around to look behind her to see who has come through the door.
“What is it that you are looking at?” she hears her mother ask curiously, “There’s nobody there.”
She ignores her mother’s bewildered voice, because there is somebody standing by the door of the ward that she is sure was not there a while ago.
She can see a figure cloaked all in black, with a peaked hood pulled down and leather toes of black boots peeking out from the bottom of the cloak.
The hood is suddenly shaken back, and a young woman stares at her with piercing ruby eyes. The stranger has auburn hair tied high in two curling ponytails and a half-smirk curling at her lips, and her skin is white - too white to be healthy.
She sees the cherry lips of the stranger move, but they make no audible sound. Instead, she hears a mocking, ghostly voice projected into the back of her mind.
So you can see me? Interesting.
Suddenly, she begins to panic. Who is this stranger and what is she doing here?
As though reading her thoughts, the stranger’s grin widens and snide laughter echoes in her mind.
I’m just going about my business, brat. Don’t mind me.
From her pocket the stranger nonchalantly pulls out a flower, and she barely contains a gasp of shock as she recognizes it. It is a black rose, the flower of Death that the stranger holds loosely in her bony gloved hand.
The stranger crosses the room to reach her grandmother in several wide strides. Bending down, she gently holds out the black rose and tucks it into the grey hair, just behind the ear.
Cold dread floods her heart like a swollen river.
“No…”
A tiny whisper ghosts past her lips, and she ignores the strange look her mother gives her.
Her hand, clenched in her lap, itches to reach out and pluck the flower out in an effort to take away the timer ticking down to her grandmother’s death.
I wouldn’t touch that flower if I were you.
The stranger’s voice is laced with cold amusement.
Take out that flower and your precious grandmother will die instantly.
The curved black petals of the rose silently mock her helplessness to stop the whims of Death, and the stranger’s laugh reverberates in her head. A tendril of smoky black, and the stranger is gone.
The flower remains.
~
When the last petal falls away and her grandmother heaves a last shuddering breath, she is the only one with dry eyes.
The doctors had given them a sudden call at a quarter to midnight, informing them of her grandmother’s worsened condition.
Her family is all in tears at the sudden turn for the worse, but she does not cry, for she has seen this coming.
It might have been her imagination, but she thinks that just as her grandmother drew her final breath, she saw a red-eyed figure cloaked in black at the window.
~
The next time she sees the stranger with the black cloak and the crimson eyes is thirty years later.
At thirty-nine, she is an overseas correspondent for the BBC, working away from home in Baghdad. One night, as she is busy typing a report, an overseas call comes for her.
“Your mother has been hospitalized after falling down a flight of stairs,” an unfamiliar male voice on the other end tells her, “As her next of kin, you have the right to know. She hit her spine in the fall, and the injury is fatal.”
Right then and there, she can feel her heart plummet down to her toes.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she whispers hoarsely into the phone, fingers numb and heart pounding.
~
The heart rate monitor beeps as she sits by her mother’s bedside, holding the limp hand in her own warm ones. She can see, tucked in the slowly diminishing mass of silver-black hair, the dreaded rose with one fragile petal dangling from it.
“I’m here,” she whispers, “I love you, Mama.”
The petal sways in an unseen wind, and then dislodges itself, fluttering gently like a butterfly to the white hospital floor, where it disintegrates into ashes. At that exact moment, the line on the heart rate monitor goes flat.
The tears slide down her face, slow and sticky. Without turning, she can sense a vaguely familiar presence behind her.
I will have to take her with me now.
The stranger has not aged since thirty years ago, the same face solemn and grave. Silently, the stranger reaches out to touch her mother’s forehead, revealing a small orb of silver light that floats out the window towards the sky.
Her soul, the stranger says, reading her questioning look, She is with the stars now.
“You…are you Death?”
The stranger’s red eyes twinkle at that question.
I am.
With a swish of her black cloak, the stranger has disappeared, leaving her alone with the limp hand of her mother still clutched tightly in her own.
~
Time flies by like the pages of a book.
Her hair turns from black to silver-streaked brown-dyed hair, and when she can no longer dye her hair fast enough to cover the white strands, she eventually gains a head of silver hair.
She looks into her mirror one day, pinning up her long silver hair neatly into its usual bun and securing it with hairpins. At eighty-six, her movements have long begun to slow and her joints are already stiff, and even this daily routine takes her twenty painful minutes to complete.
She turns to give herself one more look-over, and suddenly notices something which gives her a jolt.
Contrasted neatly against her pale silver hair is a single black rose in full bloom, tucked securely behind her right ear.
~
She lives out her last two weeks of her life to their fullest. Every day is spent doing what she loves best: tending to her cat, knitting, and sitting in her rocking-chair watching the world go by.
One day she writes a letter to her children and grandchildren, folding it alongside her will. She tells them not to grieve too much for her, and to enjoy their lives to the best that they can.
For once the black rose appears, she knows now that there is no turning back.
On her last night, she stays awake, looking out of her window at the stars in the sky.
Are you ready?
She turns her head, and meets the red eyes of the stranger for what she knows is the last time.
“…Yes,” she whispers at last, voice steady.
The stranger - Death, she tells herself - reaches out a bony gloved hand from her cloak and stretches it out to her. Slowly, she places her own hand, wrinkled and frail and dotted with liver spots, into the pristine white cotton-covered one.
Let’s go.
Death’s hand tightens around her own, and they are suddenly among the stars.
Back in her house, a single last black petal falls from the stalk tucked behind the ear of her body, floating to the parquet.
It dissolves into grey ash that blows away in an invisible tendril of wind, just like a delicate butterfly.