12 Roses

0 | Prologue

You may think that it is a beautiful thing for a child not to cry. The crueller version would be how lovely it would be for a child not to speak.

You would believe this to be true until you see the girl that did not speak nor cry, but observed and read your soul, as if there were a curious spirit within her, peering through her eyes and pressing its ear against her chest, listening.

Perhaps it is worse to be read by a child, whose eyes aren't blinded yet, whose heart wasn't shielded yet, because they didn't know words, they only knew what breath whispered, what hands shouted, what eyes demanded.

And perhaps it is worse that you can use no words with this child.

She listened not to voices but to souls because perhaps her ears didn't do what most others did but her eyes watched like a narrator who knew the thoughts of its characters and repeated them, hoping they knew how ridiculous they sounded.

The wind whispered to her words that the hearing would never perceive and she listened.

The leaves rustled advice that they craved for someone to hear and she leaned in, for they were wise.

How dangerous it was for a child to know the words that aren't said. To hear the shouts of hands, the demands of the eyes, but not the voice of the lips.

It was much worse for a child of prodigies to listen to the withered plants beneath their feet and the wind that tousled their hair more than their own words and voices, but what could they do? Their child couldn't hear.

•••

The flower shop was empty, save for a girl who couldn't hear the sound of the bell above the door singing to announce that someone had arrived.

You sat at the counter, your eyes fixed on your schoolwork when your phone chimed with a reminder to go to the grocery, then another reminding you to try yet again to teach Megumi how to heal himself.

You sighed, shutting off your phone and closing your book.

That was when you noticed the shadow looming over you and you looked up, seeing a man that wasn't quite a man, perhaps a teenager that was at the end of his time in high school. He was abnormally tall with eyes that resembled the sky hidden behind sunglasses and hair the colour of lilies on his head.

You peered around him, out the windows where curses lingered, and saw that they were all gone.

He leaned down to poke into your vision and he smiled, saying something that you couldn't understand.

You pointed to your ears, then at the door, where a sign posted above a small shelf with whiteboards read, "Deaf Child" in hauntingly large letters.

The man blinked and walked over, taking a moment to use the whiteboard markers to doodle on the blank surface. He showed it to you and you raised a brow, confused. Was he younger than you thought?

He erased it with the side of his hand and spent a long while scribbling down his message before reaching into his pocket slamming an absurd amount of 10000 yen bills onto the counter and showing you the whiteboard.

How do you say 'sorry I killed your dad' in flower?

•••

You shot up in bed, awakening the girl that slept next to you.

The one next to you groaned, running a hand through her long, dark brown hair, which was too tangled from her sleep for her to reach the ends. She sat up and turned to you, her eyes barely open. "Are you okay?"

You nodded.

She rubbed her eyes. "Nightmare?"

You shrugged. "There was a creepy white haired man."

"But you're fine?"

You nodded. "Sorry Tsumiki."

Note:
Everything in sign language is in italics within quotations "Like this!"
This is a fanfic that follows two storylines, one in the JJK universe, which is seen through dreams, and one in this curse-less parallel universe.