Miscellaneous Anime/Manga One-Shots!

cravings (Mawaru Penguindrum)

Himari Takakura has always had a fondness for grapes.

Ever since her jaded childhood, Mother and Father had taken her giggling self to the supermarket and bought her a small bag of the plump, ripe fruit. On the way home, she would happily pop them into her mouth and close her eyes and twirl through the streets, blue skirt billowing like a circus tent around tiny frame, and revel in just how beautifuland thrilling life was.

Grapes were firm and crisp as a fall morning- but when her tiny teeth gently broke apart the skin, there would be a curve in what had once been a perfect violet oval and the tartness would explode in her mouth. She'd spit the brown seeds onto the pavement, before wiping her sticky hands onto her dress under the preocuppied noses of her parents.

Her obsession with grapes grew as she danced through life. Grape candy, grape juice, grape gum, grape ice pops...as she stopped by convenience stores and dainty shops on the way home, Hibari and Hikari never missed an opportunity to remind her that she was absolutely insane.

But she never minded it. She always gave a cheery smile in return, because, honestly, she wasn't Himari without a bit of crazy.

Grapes remind her of life. It's a bit of a rough start, peeling or biting through a persistent layer of skin, or being a peachy infant and being exposed to all of these wonderfully unfamiliar sensations and feeling lost in a sea of misery and not having a clue about the world. You cry, because you're too busy wallowing in your current state of nothingness to really appreciate everything that's around you. Then, you find out that grapes are sweet and just maybe life isn't all that terrible and there are certain things that love you and you can't help but love them back. But it gets even tartier and more delicious from there, and you're growing up and falling in love and breaking and pushing forward and just...living. But then, too soon, the fruit sours again and you find yourself in a daze because you're no longer young and everyone you've ever loved gone and you're alone and confused again. You cup the last sliver of sweetness in your wrinkled hands, and after finally working up a final starburst of courage, you fling it into your mouth and everything is over.

Yes, that's exactly it. That's her.

Except without the whole tartier and delicious and oh-so-romantic part with the falling in love and becoming an adult. All of that, all of the dreams she's had ever since adolescence- they mean nothing, right?

Himari is anything but foolish. She knows it's idealistic to believe in her future, because blind optimism won't get you anywhere in this cruelly beautiful world. Those fantasies she had had; being on the arm of a hunky celebrity, posing on the red carpet in an Oscar de la Renta gown- were they mere whims?

Before the additional eight letters had been added to her name (she often sat on the beach and traced them in the sand, T-A-K-A-K-U-R-A), her existence had been made of glass, almost ground-up and reduced to shattered oblivion. Then came a gentle touch, a boyish grin, a scarf wrapped hesitantly around her frozen shoulders, and she found herself saddled with two loving brothers and a semblance of ordinary, simple happiness. Was that too much to ask for?

But Himari Takakura has never been anything other than terminal.

It's like she's a deformed grape, with only a pinch of sweetness to teach an unfortunate child a lesson; the very definition short-lived happiness and a predetermined, immutable destiny.

Himari Takakura still indulges in her love for grapes. Propped up in a hospital bed and choking down bowls of hot mush, she manages to smile at her cartoon grape phone charm and the fruit that Kan always remembers to buy for her.

It's dawn, and the sun is barely kissing the pink horizon. She relishes these precious moments of early-morning tranquility, when it seems like she's the queen of the world again and every day is Himari Day. Like she's invincible and nothing restrains her from running outside and singing praises of the world to the buzzing silence of the sunrise.

She can still smile, and still laugh, and still love.

No matter what anyone tells her, she's alive. She ignores the whispers of the nurses, the resigned sigh of a cold man in a white suit, because...what do they understand about her? What do they understand about living and breathing and loving?

All grapes, even the unripe, deformed ones, are sweet.

And goddamnit if she wasn't going to appreciate that until the end.