Ingenue || Bungou Stray Dogs × Fem!Reader

6

Once upon a dream, I felt happy.

Desperation was the result of happiness never granted to a lonely soul.

Happiness never complemented all the aspects of herself, and she could never discern happiness to make her forget the body she deemed hideous. All carmine-dripping, sangria-spotted, and with her fall into the river that took her breath away twice - the first before her fall and the second afterwards - she then looked at her own body as if she had never loathed better.

How odious everyone thought it must be to have that kind of perspective, but she supposed it was safer than to have none at all.

With her head as empty as the water spout was about to be, her eyes remained on the dire state of the flowers; they were no better than she had been. Although they had yet to bloom petals, they were already withering, and soon she came to wonder if her disposition had been affecting the status of her plants.

She had dreamt once of eternal bliss in the form of acceptance, but the pain was a lucid reminder of the dejection she carried as an outcasted member of the agency.

"(L/n)? Are you here?"

There came the cordial tone of the voice coming from outside her apartment. It took a few seconds for her to recollect herself, wiping away the tears that had fallen at the moment of her distant reverie. She made her way towards the front door, opening it to find Miyazawa Kenji with a smile she could compare to the sun.

"K-Kenji..?"

"Good afternoon!" Greeted the sunshine boy, his aura a great contrast to the one she instated.

He reminded her of the break of dawn in early spring; his smile was a sight she believed she didn’t deserve. There was a painful prominence on the synthesis of his lustrous orbs going against the trepidation of her dreary gaze, so she looked the other way, fearing the loss of his purity becoming her fault. 

"Will it be alright if I come in?"

"Not... not at all." She lied, feigning a welcoming smile.

She closed the door behind her as he stepped and walked farther inside. From there, he took immediate notice of the interior of her precinct - the walls a slate shade of lava white; the floor barren of unnecessary items, excluding the spout she had used only moments prior; bookshelves becoming the only furniture speaking loudly of the things she preferred - reading and solitude. At the very end of her apartment opened to a small veranda, where her much-appreciated camellias resided.

In the view of the finical flowers, both of his butterscotch eyes glossed in delight. "How charming!"

The girl allowed silence as the resonance of his last syllables, desiring nothing more than the vapid air of her own loneliness. Nonetheless, the he continued,

"Are you alright now?"

Truthfully, she knew not the answer to his question. It was the instigator for the faucet in her eyes to turn; for acid to leak on her bottom lids, threatening to corrupt her encrimsoned cheeks as delicate as glass in dreams.

"I am." The lie brought no baleful impact on her moral; anyway, the truth appeared to be uglier than her crestfallen marionette. Through hollow smiles, she spoke, "I'll return to work soon enough, worry not. I only need a little more time."

"You can take as much time as you want." Replied the boy. "Time waits for no one, but there is beauty in the process getting better, likewise with camellias as we wait for them to show their petals."

Her achingly obvious despondency was the cause of his statement. He found himself wanting nothing more but the disappearance of her lethargic effort of bearing happiness; the disappearance of the derision in her own words, as she needed more than a little time to pick up the remaining shreds of her weak mentality.

"I'm sure the agency won’t mind." He added a little later.

When he turned to look at her entirely, there were once again tears edging on the rim of her bottom lids like fragmented rhinestones on display for the ignorant crowd to fancy. She wiped them off with the sleeves of her blouse, and at the instant of pulling her arms away from her face, he basked in the sublimity of her beholden countenance.

"Thank you." She said in dulcet tone. "I'm alright. Perhaps that’s what I needed to hear after all."

"You look very beautiful when you smile." Kenji commented. "It won't hurt to keep it up, will it?"

She caught nostalgia in the definition of his words. A certain memory consisting of rosewood warmth, the smell of good coffee, and the radiance of Lucy's colors. Fleeting happiness in the form of her usual latte in mornings with Lucy's sanguine hues; at that moment, her regret of failing an attempted suicide faltered like the midnight sky in the break of dawn, but like the rise of the moon after sunset, she feared its return.

Delicately, she broke out the faintest, most genuine smile; the first and last he would ever get to see. "I'll smile as much as you want me to."