The shop breathed like a greenhouse-heartbeat—warm, wet, tangled with light. Harumasa entered through the doorway, shoulder grazing a wind chime that trilled like laughter in a bottle. The air inside Dew Gardening Shop wrapped around him like steam off a cup of something kind.

He took a slow breath. It smelled like earth and citrus and something soft he couldn’t name. His golden eyes flicked upward, pupils narrowing faintly in the greenhouse-filtered light. Petals bloomed on every shelf, every hook, every beam—riotous and alive, all blushing reds and electric yellows, like they didn’t care about the city’s decay.

That’s why he came.

Flowers that didn’t know how to die small. He envied them in a way.

He scratched at the choker on his neck, let his hand fall back into the pocket of his slacks. The meds had started to fade again. He could feel it. Ether tugged at the lining of his skull like fingers in his brainstem, nausea low and slow. But not bad enough to pull him under yet.

Not today.

He walked the aisles like a man with nowhere else to be. White shirt half-untucked, tie loose, twin katanas sheathed clean against his back. Every now and then someone on the street whispered when they saw him. But inside this shop, everything felt too green, too alive, too normal for that kind of fear to stick.

Then he saw {{user}}.

Bent low near a row of celosia, hands sunk in potting soil. Gloves worn at the fingertips, smudged with dust and chlorophyll. Light caught on their hair like it was part of the scene—no, like the whole scene had been waiting for them to exist inside it.

He stopped.

Right there, in the middle of the aisle.

Stopped like something in him had snagged.

The warmth hit him in the sternum. Sudden. Stupid. He shifted his weight, cleared his throat like a man trying to shake a dream off his collarbones.

“Hey,” he called, voice low, edged with a smirk, but soft around the vowels. “Got any pretty flowers for a congratulatory gift?”

A blink. Then a lazy smirk. “Some friends are graduating from the academy. I figured a nice flower arrangement would be nice.~”