Springtime

For those who don’t know or didn’t see my live-tweet sessions while I was watching the anime Darling in the FranxX, one of the running gags was a character I made up whose job was to clean up the mechas after every battle (because good lord those things got filthy). He never had an actual name or anything; he was simply “the mech-cleaning guy.” But whenever the show got too stupid or frustrating, I would pull him out as a joke and he helped me get through it.

Kinda dumb, but the ending gave me the idea for this story. It’s my first public piece of writing in ages, and it was nice to finally put something out there again. Just goes to show that even dumb shows like Darling can provide a spark of inspiration.

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Springtime comes onto the world softly. It awakens with the same grogginess of a man coming out of a deep sleep; somewhat stubborn, not always willingly, but little by little it brushes the sleep from its eyes and begins to go about its day. The snow melts away, the grass springs up, the flowers sprout and bloom with life. The air warms, but not completely; it’s that mix of hot and cold that is just right, just perfect.

Before long the air becomes filled with the petals of the cherry blossoms brightening up the skies like an explosion, and the fragrance of the daffodils and lilies carries with the wind over the hills and into the field below. Now spring was here, full and awake, and on the hill under the large sakura tree he sat in his chair, canvas on its easel in front of him, painting the scene in the field below him full of men, women and children laughing and playing amongst themselves in bliss.

It had become a hobby for him since the end of the war, entirely self-taught with some books he had found in the ruins of the former cities of the old world. He found that he had a lot of free time now, with nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. He considered this his retirement; although he didn’t look a day older than he had back then, he felt older. So why not retire, and paint, and bask in the warm sunlight and not worry about a thing? It felt well earned.

Not so long ago (and yet a lifetime ago, he thought, as he added some more blue to the canvas; so long and yet not long at all), this valley had been a barren wasteland of broken rocks and deep craters. Not so long ago you couldn’t grow so much as a weed, much less the gardens of vegetables that they had now. Then the lands had been splashed with waves of blue blood, and the bodies of Klaxosaurs and Franxx units littered the landscape like so much discarded trash. Years of warfare and abuse of magma energy had devastated almost everything, and the idea that one day it would turn into this paradise was one no one had entertained, not even in the best of their dreams.

Certainly never would have expected this, he thought, as he leaned to examine the scene. Not enough white for the clothes. He wondered briefly if he could get away with just leaving the canvas color as is. Few if anyone would probably see this; it wasn’t like he put the art on display for them all to see, this was purely for himself. Let a real artist be the one to paint the official portrait of their civilization.

Back in those days, his job had been to clean up. Mostly to clean up all the blood, which was a hassle, because it was messy and it stuck to just about everything and sometimes he had to scrub for well over an hour at a particularly rough patch just to make some kind of leeway on it. Every mission the Franxx would come back coated in thick blue blood, and he would just sigh and grab his equipment and direct what little crew he had. Sometimes he wished he could retire and live in the city with the other adults and leave this crap for someone else. Sometimes he felt like beating his head bloody against the wall at the monotony of it all, the never ending well of blood and mops and good ‘ol Mr. Clean.

But there were some days…some days where his job had been to climb into the cockpits of the disarmed disabled Franxx and remove the corpses of the pistils and stamens that had been trapped in there at the end. Those days had been the worst; going into those dark spaces and removing the pale, cooling bodies (always assuming, of course, that the bodies hadn’t been grinded into paste due to the head being impacted), and pull them out. Imagining, or trying to, that he was carrying out a large sack of potatoes or laundry, and not the body of a child he had known, even if only vaguely.

He dipped his brush into the yellow paste and began drawing the sun onto his sky. No clouds in the sky today, which was good for him. Solved his white problem easily.

There were nights still, even now, where he jolted upright in bed in a cold sweat at the nightmares, the memories of the past. The ghosts that even now were not completely at rest, shambling towards him with a determination towards a goal unknown to him. Not as many nightmares as before- back then it felt he couldn’t go a night without having one- but they were still there.

Still there.

Though it was better now, little by little. And now, looking upon this crowd, of the children running around chasing each other with their knees and elbows scabbed from too many falls onto the ground, and with their parents nearby engaged in idle conversation and only casually keeping an eye on their little ones, he couldn’t contain the smile that stretched across his face.

And it was all because of his kids. His kids. The ones from his plantation. And wasn’t that something to be proud of?

He wasn’t even sure if anyone was aware of what he had done, and really, what a small role he had played in comparison to those who had given their lives to the conflict. No one threw a parade for him, no one had memorialized his name in stone like some of the others. He was no leader in bringing about the new world. He was just another Joe Somebody, among the ever growing population of the same.

Yet people waved and nodded to him when they passed him, and the children would bring him gifts and books and ask him to tell them stories of conquering heroes and evil monsters, and he would regale them with the tales that he drew from the things he had seen. And suppose that was his place, in the grand scheme, to make sure those stories were always told, that those that were no longer around would never be forgotten. Suppose that was the reason why he was still here, why he was still alive when so many others were not. So that he, the mere observer, could keep those stories alive.

And if that were the case, why, that would be enough.

He looked up for a moment and saw a small group of people heading off away from the crowd; a familiar group, older now, but he’d recognize those heads anywhere. They had grown up, started families, turned their lives around. They had taken the horrific circumstances of their growing up and moved past it, forward to a positive future. He doubted he had ever told them in person- when they were all together he doubted he passed more than a dozen words to them, and all of them in regards to the status of their Franxx- but if he ever did, he would tell them how proud he was of them. How happy he was that they turned out okay.

“It’s enough,” he whispered to himself, and as he did a tear fell down his eye. “It’s enough.”

Wiping the tear from his eye and taking a deep, happy breath of fresh spring air, the former mech-cleaning guy of Plantation 13 returned to his canvas and resumed his painting.