#lustershipping

   The ace student was just a normal person despite the alleged giftedness in Duelling and academics. Masumi was all bluster and no substance beyond her select skills and talents. She had her limits. She knew them well like the confines of a card, those thin streaks of silver framing on the border of a Duel monster card: like the one she had been turned into as she messed with things beyond her understanding.

   Like interdimensional war, for instance.

   Masumi stormed in, guns blazing but she faltered, more fragile than she had calculated despite having given her all. There was little she could do in the face of someone who lived and breathed survival when she had, all things considered, a pampered existence in a private school’s upper echelon.

   Oh well. There was no use dwelling on the past.

   Even if it did culminate to where she was now. With Yuzu. At sunset. In the gardens on the public penthouse level of the LDS Building. It felt like it was just them at this dizzying altitude.

   And with such a heartbreaking revelation between them.

   Masumi could not help. She wanted to but unlike with playing cards, there was an obvious refute to why she could not help Yuzu and it came down to the differences between them as people. Masumi was a normal human being. Yuzu was extradimensional and impossibly floral as a Florist. She needed someone with scissors and a proclivity towards eating flowers.

   Someone not like Masumi and yet…

   “I don’t mind,” Yuzu murmured, “you care so much about me, I can tell, even now…”

   Masumi’s hand twitched by her side, her fingers curling inside of her palm and tightening. That was true. It was so true, even, that it hurt her feelings.

   “You can still help me in other ways.” Yuzu told her.

   She looked so sick and hopeless, it disgusted Masumi but that was part and parcel with the constitution of a Florist. They were weak, insipid things which withered away on a dime, waxing and waning in health, sometimes in full bloom and sometimes so corpse-like. Sometimes both.

   Like Yuzu, right now.

   She was a garden that walked and talked.

   Her skin was pale, without hale or lustre, no roses to her cheek, except, well, the ones that she grew. Root systems seemed apparent just beneath her taut, gaunt skin like discoloured veins. Petals popped out on the angle of her face, underneath her collar on her throat. Some were full grown flowers, pink and sapping away her energy in order to exist and causing her pain when they did.

   Yuzu’s smile was feigned, it was clear she was putting on a show for Masumi to convince her that things weren’t all bad. That she wasn’t on some brink like a byronic heroine. Masumi, however, could see in absolute clarity that such strength was not true and that Yuzu pined for someone to help her the way she needed it as a Florist. 

   Traditionally, a Florist required the assistance of a Flower Eater. That was their whole thing. Symbiosis was the word, or so Masumi believed. They would treat the unique condition of a Florist better than any doctor, clipping away the flowers and the weeds, restoring a Florist to a better, heartier sight. 

   In turn, the Flower Eater would receive sustenance from these clippings. They might have used tools to cut away the vile flowers that grew off and from a Florist’s body but they consumed them afterwards. That sustenance would then better a Flower Eater’s health. Mentally, emotionally, physically. The whole works. 

   A normal human, like Masumi, could peel it all away, prune it back but the care and adoration of gardening further required to keep a Florist at peace would evade her. They needed kisses, bodily fluids exchanged, to “water” them and someone like Masumi wouldn’t be enough. She would fall short of what Yuzu needed.

   Even though Yuzu encouraged her, seemingly convinced on her lonesome that Masumi would suffice. She continued to try and coax her into an unconventional binding of a Boutonniere between a Florist and a normal person.  

   “Please.” Yuzu urged her, quiet as quiet could be.

   Yuzu swallowed and Masumi watched as her larynx bulged with it, how she bit her lips and drew up her hand. She removed a flower that was latched onto her. She failed to pull out the roots and gasped sharply as she plucked it from her collarbone.

   The flower in question was alien to Masumi’s idea of botany. Florists usually only ever produced one flower which was unquestionably from nature and that was the white rose. A flower infamous amongst the communities of Florists and Flower Eaters as being the ur-example of codependency, or true love if one was an optimistic romantic.

    This flower that Yuzu produced for Masumi was very much not a rose with lily-like petals and anthers, and frilly plumage on the inside and a gradient of white to pink to orange to white again. 

   “Here you go.” Yuzu whispered.

   Masumi allowed her to do as she pleased. She stood, stiff as a board, as Yuzu came closer and adorned her with this flower. She placed it on Masumi’s breast as though it were a pendant. Oddly, it suited her. Even if it clashed with the practical wear that Masumi chose for herself.

   Yuzu flattened it down. She was gentle with ever so slightly crooked fingers. Her nails had some gloss to them. It didn’t feel perverse as she touched Masumi’s chest and mostly the flower, making sure it was affixed to her like a corsage of some twisted kind.

   “It looks good on you.” Yuzu commented.

   Masumi shrugged as she looked down on herself. She didn’t necessarily disagree.

   Yuzu remained in front of her, close to her. Too close, perhaps, as she reached up from Masumi’s breast to her face. She caressed Masumi’s face, admired the hard cut of her cheekbones and smiled a small smile. 

   “Masumi,” she whispered longingly, “I truly do believe you can help me, even if you are an ordinary person because I believe you are extraordinary. You inspire me, I admire you, please.”

   Yuzu then pressed a kiss onto Masumi’s lips and she, too, allowed that. The kiss was desperate - on Yuzu’s behalf, however. Masumi tried not to react even though Yuzu was all encompassingly sweet and soft and chaste. Her feelings were true and burgeoning within her chest. Just like the bushels of the strange, fey flowers that she was beleaguered by. They even seemed to grow some more to prove the point that Masumi held: that she would be ineffectual to fulfil Yuzu’s needs despite the overwhelming urge to help.

   She wanted to help Yuzu and yet, she couldn’t even do so much and little as kiss her back.