"Welcome home, Keiㅡ oh. I thought Y/N-chan will have dinner with us today."
Tsukishima paused from removing his shoes for a moment by his mother's greeting.
"She won't be coming."
He straightened up after placing his shoes on the shoe rack and trailed right away to his room without saying another word.
He's too exhausted. Not that they were pushed to their limits during practice but he feels exhausted for some reason.
Like he run a marathon or swim the other side of an ocean.
The day seems longer than before and he just want to end it right after so he took a quick bath. Thinking maybe that'll lessen his exhaustion.
But it didn't. That unsettling feeling is still in his chest that he can't even concentrate on the homework he's working on.
He can just sigh while flipping the pages of his notebook back and forth, hoping that by doing so, the answers will pop out all of a sudden.
But again, they didn't.
What caught his eyes is a little sketch on one of the back pages of his notebook.
It was a poorly drawn sketch of 2 Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs facing each other.
One is smaller than the other but a little heart was drawned on top of its head. The bigger one has eyeglasses on it and on its tiny hand is a bunch of little flowers.
A note is pointed at where the dinosaur is holding the flowers. Jasmine.
-----
"Y/N-chan?"
Concern is written all over the little freckled boy as he approach the younger girl crouching down in front of a plant box with her soft sobs.
Someone ruined the flowers she planted and took care of even though she's not on garden duties.
She always admire flowers that she wanted to grow one on her own.
The pink hues of flowers are slowly budding the other day, and now everything is ruined. All her precious flowers are ruined.
At the age of 11, this is the first time she felt her heart broken.
"They will not be growing back if you just keep crying there. Tears are too salty for them to grow."
Another familiar voice came from behind her as she continue to wipe her tears with her small arms.
"Tsukki~"
Yamaguchi wanted to scold his friend but he wasn't able to do so when his tall friend held out his hand when Y/N stood up and turned to them.
"Just grow another."
In his hand is a bundle of white little flowers he picked on one of the plant boxes, totally ignoring the sign that it's not allowed to pick any flowers.
-----
Opening her old diary, the page landed right away on where the bookmark is.
The entry was dated almost 4 years ago and she can clearly remember that day even without reading it.
The pressed flower is also a way to refresh her memory of the day when he gave her those flowers.
Her fingers delicately run over the pressed flower with a small smile on her lips until the ring of the doorbell brought her back to the present.
Y/N closed the diary and place it down on her bed to attend to the door right away with the constant ringing of the doorbell.
She's already in her pajamas that mostly consist of an oversized shirt and sweatpants given that it's still in the middle of winter.
She opened the door to reveal the person she didn't expect to be standing on her front porch.
The cold breeze brushed on her warmed up cheeks by seeing the tall yellow haired man standing before her, with a bunch of small white flowers in his hand and almost half of his face buried in his red scarf.
His eyeglasses were a bit foggy due to the cold so he removed it with his free hand.
"Y/N..."
Through his blurry vision, Tsukishima stared at the short girl standing before him.
He didn't care about the cold weather that night. All he wanted is to feel her warmth again.
"I'm sorry..."
-----
Chapter's song:
Dear My Boo
( Mirei Touyama )
xx