Title: The Language of Flowers
Series: None
Description: Flowers, bus rides, cemetaries, and girls that fall from the sky. Lu Han sometimes wonders if she's crazy, or just lonely.
Rating: PG
Warning(s): AU
Pairing(s): Lu Han (EXO-M)/Taeyeon (SNSD)

❁ The Language of Flowers - Flora ❁

          It is any other weekday of any other week of any other month in his twenty-first year of life. As always, Lu Han sits down in the seat at the back corner of the dingy city bus, on his way back home from class. His fatigue is apparent and manifests in the faint lines that mar his otherwise unblemished features. He tugs on his scarf lightly, loosening its hold on his neck. The seasons are beginning to change, he notices, evidenced by splatters of bright carmine, orange, and titian amongst fading green, and he looks through the plane of glass wistfully. He sighs. The doors close with a creak and a thud, pulling his mind back inside the cramped bus space.

          And there she is, again.

          That strange girl.

          Strange and pretty, with shoulder length brown hair and glassy eyes, lips and cheeks brushed powder pink. Everything about her is pastel-soft and porcelain—like a colorful apparition sprung from watercolors or a cloud that dropped from the sky—and she seems perpetually lost.

          Lu Han continues to observe her, trying to maintain a certain level of discreteness as she s the old jacket she always seems to wear, revealing a polo—some type of uniform from some fast food restaurant she probably works at, he has since come to realize—over her usual skirt or dress.

          By now, he’s looking outside the window again, avoiding eye contact as she, as usual, as if they were friends, slips into the seat next to him, out of all the available seats in the near-vacant bus. And he thinks with offhand intrigue that “slips” really is the key word here, as her thin body seems to cut through the air and into his personal space like some spectral knife. He can feel her eyes on him, probably in expectance, and he forces himself not to meet her gaze this time. After a while, he falters and gives her a sideway glance.

          The contact is held for mere milliseconds before she swings her head the other way, as if having received some sort of reassurance in his reciprocate gaze. Lu Han squirms imperceptibly in his seat, the awkwardness in the silence between them felt by him alone. The rest of the bus ride is enveloped in much of the same way, with him feeling mildly disoriented and her in a comfortable world of her own.

          When he gets off the bus and sees the pale face of the girl passing by through misty windows as he waits to cross the street—a flash of almost-melancholy surfacing through misty eyes—he sometimes wonders if she’s crazy.

          No, that can’t be it. They wouldn’t let a crazy person work at a fast food restaurant, he reasons. Maybe she’s only crazy in the evening. Further research of possible medical conditions matching such hypothesis via internet had been inconclusive, but common sense prevailed and he’d given in enough to discard that theory. In the early days of their routine bus meetings, he had briefly entertained the absolutely absurd thought that she might be interested in him romantically. Of course, he’d quickly shot this thought down with a faint blush coloring his cheeks, berating himself begrudgingly for such embarrassingly egotistic notions. A minute part of him that he had much rather ignore—and did, for the most part—had still held onto that last theory, but was largely relinquished when he noticed the stalks of flowers she sometimes carried in her hands.

          He’d quickly taken to the all-knowing World Wide Web again, in search of the name and meaning of the purple-blue blooms. After several moments of explicit compare-and-contrast and internal debate, he’d settled with the China aster.

          Love of variety, he’d read, the screen of his old laptop flickering slightly, fidelity; “I will think of you.”

          At the start, he’d had reason enough, had the audacity enough to think that the flowers had been a way of communicating her feelings toward him in some peculiar, non-explicit way. Ambrosias, blue salvias, amaranth, rosemary, and forget-me-nots. The meaning of the flowers so far had been vague, dubious at best, and it didn’t help that different websites gave different meanings. And some just looked like weeds plucked off the side of the road. Then again, maybe she had received them from a doting boyfriend or a sentimental admirer and it’d be just as well. At least he would stop semi-hoping, although he’d never admit to even slightly hoping in the first place. The meanings of the flowers, however, changed.

          White periwinkle for pleasures of memory, mauve lilacs (do you still love me?), purple hyacinths for sorrow (I’m sorry, please forgive me), marigolds for pain and grief, and the common rue for regret. If he’d had an inkling of suspicion now, then the last two in the botanical succession had confirmed it. He almost had to bite back a wry, mirthless laugh at her cynicism when he’d looked them up: poppies for eternal sleep and his personal favorite, phlox, for the bestowment of sweet dreams.

          A honk sounds somewhere in the near distance, and he is abruptly shaken from his reverie. He sighs and shakes his head as if to physically dispel the thoughts from his brain, which works for the most part. Tugging his scarf tighter against the cool wind, he finally crosses the street to a slightly dilapidated building and ascends the stairs to his apartment on the fifth floor.

          The next day he is given the day of classes off for some national holiday or another, and he decides that he is curious enough and mostly bored out of his mind enough to go on an adventure of sorts. It’s not much of an adventure, of course, when one is on a dingy city bus for the majority of the time, but he diligently disregards this fact. He only has a vague idea of what he’s looking for, but there is always the chance that he could be totally wrong, as well as the ever-persistent reminder that he has virtually no idea which stop he should get off at unless they were to pass a cemetery on the way. He panics slightly, worrying about losing himself somewhere in the dark and lonely woods as the scenery around them becomes progressively less urban and the bus driver still hasn’t stopped yet. His mind briefly flits through fantastic schemes of staged murder, the old and slightly overweight bus driver hurling towards him while brandishing a sharp knife, the two of them alone and conveniently in the middle of nowhere, as the steel plunges right through his chest, piercing his heart, the nothingness around them drowning out his screams. His eyes dart toward the emergency escape windows and his mind begins to formulate plans of escape, when he realizes that the bus has stopped and that the bus driver had been patiently trying to tell him for some time now that they were at the end of the line.

          Lu Han gets off the bus, deciding that he can call Yunho-hyung or YiXing or Qian-jie—the only friends he has that have cars—to pick him up if he really does get lost. Well, probably not Qian because she’d ask too many questions and interrogate him until she eventually wrenches out some unforeseen truth from him. His best bet is probably YiXing, who is mild-mannered and unconfrontational. Anyway, he can always use his seniority against him if he were to press any unwanted questions. His mood brightens up considerably at the thought and he sets off aimlessly.

          Someone up there must be feeling generous, because he doesn’t have to walk far before he sees a cemetery on top of a hill in the distance. It’s probably not normal—scratch that, it’s not—but he treats the sight of cold slabs of engraved stone as if it were a lighthouse on the sea shore and he were a ship caught in a storm. It doesn’t take long either to find the exact grave, marked by the flowers given from some perpetually lost girl. The flowers stand out, the purple and maroon and gold calling out like a flag amongst the serene whites of lilies and deep reds of roses.

          The wind blows, chilly and impersonal, and the mangled boxwood and cypress trees appear to be creaking under the weight of air. The branches of the creeping willows sway and shudder as if passing through a ghost, and Lu Han finally reaches the purple-maroon-gold flag in the grass and peers tentatively at the carved name.

          Jang Wooyoung, it reads. A beloved son, brother, and friend.

          Doing the math in his head, the man had died at the age of twenty one, and the numerals indicate that he had died only a year and a half ago, making him too old to be her son and too young to be her father, grandfather, or uncle. He can’t discern any likely familial connection, since her devotion and frequent visits to the deceased man should have earned a mention on the headstone, in his mind. Additionially, the “brother” it refers to means “hyung,” which makes her the wrong gender for him to be her brother, and there is no mention of anything along the lines of “husband” or “boyfriend.” Thus, he can safely assume, he supposes, that they were merely friends—a platonic relationship at most.

          He isn’t quite sure what to think at this point, but he manages to supress any and all twisted—for it had to be twisted—feelings of happiness from rising within him at this prospect. He reprimands himself briefly before he remembers the decency to feel a customary, detached remorse and reverence for the deceased man. However, it isn’t long before he realizes uncomfortably that six feet under his black Converse shoes lay a garden of rotting, wood-encased shells of soul-departed human flesh. He sobers up immediately though, regaining composure just in time to hear the soft but unmistakable tread of footsteps upon fallen leaves and brushy grass coming from behind him. He turns around, an inexplicable sense of dread falling into the pit of his stomach even before he looks into glassy eyes, misty eyes, surprised eyes matched with cheeks and lips powder pink and parted in shock.

*****Author's Notes*****

Back for a little while, but unfortunately not for long. Second half of this two-shot will be posted when I get around to it, which hopefully will be faster than a small eternity, if I'm lucky and unprocrastinative (if that's even a word and if that's even possible -__-).

Any comments, feedback, and/or criticism are welcome and much appreciated.