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“Pick a colour, Bam.”
“For me? Are you sure? I won’t be able to wear this anyway, my hair is too short.”
“You could always grow it out someday. For now, I’ll just teach you how to tie it into a bow.”
“Wow, really?”
“Yeah, I promise. Since you asked me so nicely. But you’ll have to wait until after we pass this stupid test. The store should’ve delivered it by then.”
“After the test. Okay.”
“Don’t look so disappointed. Think about it as something to look forward to.”
—✧—
There’s a tree in the Inner Tower that represents death. It can be found at any cemetery, the single place that remains relatively unchanged from floor to floor, even as everything else is different—the architecture, the landscape, the colour of the sky.
It flowers all year round, seemingly frozen in time. It’s known to be surrounded by a bed of soft white silver—the unfortunate ones that fell from the branches. They call it the stardust tree, for the way the petals shimmer in the moonlight. For the way they all turn to dust no matter how brightly and strongly and beautifully they bloomed.
It seems like the sort of sentiment Maria would have loved.
“They all look the same,” Khun mutters. His lighthouse lifts him up high enough to examine them at eye level. Each flower is almost identical, not a single one of them particularly special to anybody.
He stares at the yellow bandana in his hand. Bam would have loved to see these white-silver blossoms. Khun imagines the small boy going quiet at the sight of the rows upon rows of graves in the cemetery, but those golden eyes would’ve sparkled at the tree in the middle of it, quietly watching over the dead. Khun would’ve been the one to show it to him.
He loops the bandana over a branch of the tree. Deft fingers shape the fabric into a pretty bow, the motions still familiar to Khun even though he doesn’t wear his own bandana in his hair anymore.
The sound of crushed grass below alerts him to someone’s presence.
“So this is where you go,” says Ran.
Khun hums, not bothering to lift his gaze from the bandana twisted in his fingers. “Why did you follow me?”
Ran shrugs. “Was bored.”
A familiar silence stretches between them as Khun finishes smoothing out the knot. He hops down from his lighthouse to examine his handiwork from the ground.
“This is what you do here every time?” Ran asks.
“Just my way of fulfilling a promise,” Khun says. Ran’s eyes flick to him, question in his gaze.
Khun offers him an inch more, because Ran’s been doing well with the team and Khun is feeling generous today. “Did you know that Bam doesn’t even have a grave? They never found a body to bury.”
“Oh,” Ran says. He looks up at the stardust tree, contemplating. “Can we get chicken for dinner?”
Khun smiles faintly. Ran’s nonchalant acceptance is, in his own words, one of the ‘only slightly bothersome’ things about him
Khun isn’t sure himself why he keeps coming back to the stardust tree, buying a new bandana every time just to tie it to the branches. It’s almost like leaving a trail for a ghost to follow. He’s aware that he can’t exactly call it a practical interest.
The yellow of the bandana stands out, bright among the blossoms of white-silver. The way it catches his eye is almost comforting, and restlessness in his soul settles for a short moment. Khun is far from a superstitious person, but maybe there's a bit of value in small rituals like these.
“Sure, why not,” Khun says, and turns back to the exit. “Let’s go. Novick owes me a favour, so I’ll get him to treat us.”
—✧—
Jinsung catches him by the arm when he stumbles out of the 10th floor’s test area.
“You okay, kid?” he asks. Bam leans into his steady grip. “Good job, you passed.”
“...And FUG?” Bam asks, because he knows the floor’s test isn’t the real one that he needs to pass.
“Yeah, you did well on that too,” Jinsung murmurs. His voice has been muted around the edges lately, when he talks to Bam. It’s accompanied with the slight pinch in his eyebrows. Bam knows it has something to do with how often he’s been collapsing from exhaustion in his training. He hopes it isn’t a bad sign.
“You’re let off training for today, but we should head back soon,” his master tells him, eyes scanning him carefully. “Go wash your face, I’ll buy you a drink meanwhile.”
The restrooms in this particular test building don’t seem to be as meticulously maintained as they usually are. There are crudely-drawn marker doodles and words on the wall, a mess of colours overlapping each other.
Bam wonders if his friends have passed through this same test area, stood in this spot in the restroom using this same tap. Perhaps stared at themselves in the mirror, and maybe had a fleeting thought about the boy who sunk to the bottom of the bowl years ago.
When he thinks about how high and how far away his friends are, sometimes the distance feels almost palpable. A hollowness that spreads to the tip of his fingers, the tip of his head. It’s a familiar feeling, and Bam is grateful that his long hair blocks his view of his own expression in the mirror.
He tucks his bangs behind his ears, bending over the sink to scrub away at his face with wet hands. The blood that washes away with the water isn’t his own.
Cleaning up after a floor test is one of the rituals he likes taking his time to do. There’s something reliable about the restrooms in the test areas—the tint of the ceiling lights, the smell of the water.
Two other Regulars pass by, absorbed in conversation as Bam idles at the sink, picking at the dirt under his fingernails.
“...it’s tied to the stardust tree in the cemetery though, I think that’s a much more interesting detail,” one of them says.
“But why a yellow bandana? You can buy that one at any general store.”
“None of your business, obviously.” Bam doesn’t need to look up to hear the eyeroll in the speaker’s voice.
“I’m a journalist. I just want to know the whole story,” the other voice grumbles.
Bam hears the sound of squeaky hinges, and the outside air rushing in from the open door.
“You’re too idealistic. For all you know, it could be…” The voices fade away as the door swings shut.
Bam shakes himself out of his stupor, realizing he’s been staring at his unmoving hands for more than a minute. “A yellow bandana,” he murmurs under his breath. “Could it be?”
When he exits the restroom, Jinsung is waiting for him with his drink—the red one with Quant’s face on it that Bam likes, for reasons that don’t have much to do with the taste itself.
Since there’s no training today, Bam asks if it’s okay for him to make a visit to somewhere for a bit. Jinsung lets him go without much fuss, but Bam knows better than to think FUG doesn’t have an eye on his whereabouts at all times, even if they know he’s not going to run.
“It’s okay to take your time,” Jinsung tells him. “Enjoy your day off, kid.”
—✧—
Bam has only ever been to the cemetery on the Floor of Tests, so it’s fortunate that the one on this floor is laid out in a similar manner. He finds the stardust tree easily.
Connected by a single dark trunk, the bed and the canopy mirror each other, ethereal in its glow, covered with flowers the colour of moonlight dancing on melted snow. It’s like something straight out of one of the fairytales Rachel used to tell him in the cave.
The spot of bright yellow is noticeable from a distance, like a single point of light calling to him in a fog. The closer he gets, the more it looks like the shape of the neat bow that Khun sported in his hair from time to time. The exact same shade of yellow in one of the memories Bam holds close to him at night. The bandana cloth is tied to one of the branches, low enough to be obvious but high enough to be out of reach unless you jumped.
There’s a man already standing at the base of the tree when Bam arrives. He introduces himself as keeper of the cemetery, keys jangling on his belt loop with every movement he makes.
“Have you heard the story?” the man asks, and Bam shakes his head.
“We heard it first from the newer Regulars climbing up here,” he says, rubbing at his chin and glancing up at the tree. “There’s a yellow bandana just like this one, tied to the branch of every stardust tree on the lower floors starting from the 3rd.”
Bam sucks in a sharp breath. Since the 3rd floor? Would there be another one of these waiting for him on the next one? On every floor going upwards, like a trail of bright yellow beacon lights beckoning him into the sky.
“People die on every floor of the Tower, and the rest move on upwards,” the man tells him, with the kind of wan smile you would expect from someone all too familiar with senseless death.
“So it’s nice,” he continues. “To know that someone remembers.”
Something in Bam’s chest starts to tremble. Not in that awful way it does every day after FUG training, but something much much warmer, and kinder.
“I’m sure other people thought so too,” the man says, gesturing to the other branches of the tree. “The yellow bandana started a trend, you see.”
Bam looks around in wonder, noticing for the first time that the yellow bandana wasn’t the only thing attached to the tree. Assorted trinkets hang from the lower branches—pendants, necklaces, colourful decorative knots, strips of paper with messages on them.
All these people, perhaps they recognized the hidden promise in the petals of the yellow bow. Perhaps it resonated with them, and drove them to attach their own sentiments to it. Bam wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing was happening to the stardust trees on the other floors.
“Khun…” he whispers. His bangs fall over his face. His throat feels tight.
“Would you like to add something of your own?” the man asks curiously. “Don’t worry about weighing the tree down, it’s sturdier than you think.”
Bam pauses, the hands in his pockets clenching around emptiness. His fingernails dig into his skin.
He shakes his head.
“Thank you, but not yet.”
—✧—
A fearsome slayer candidate of FUG shouldn’t fit so well into a scene as gentle as this, Wangnan thinks. A battlefield, maybe, but not a cemetery. Yet there is something different about the way Viole holds himself in this place, among the stardust flowers on the ground and the swaying branches above. A softness in the slant of his shoulders and the shape of his posture.
“He’s loitering suspiciously,” Yihwa hisses.
“Um, I think he’s just meditating,” Miseng says.
“We’re the ones who look like we’re loitering suspiciously,” Wangnan points out. Yihwa ignores him and continues spying from her place behind the wall of the cemetery gate.
“Let’s just head back already. He’s just been sitting there this whole time,” Wangnan says. He only tagged along because Viole is always so quiet and Wangnan wants to know a little more about his own teammate, slayer candidate or no. “Nothing is going to happen.”
Yihwa shushes him, lightly slapping his arm for good measure.
“Hey—”
“Wait, he’s getting up now,” Miseng whispers. They snap to attention, three heads peeking out from behind the stone wall.
Wangnan catches the movement of Viole’s arm, falling to his side from where it was before, reaching high among the branches. There’s a piece of bright yellow tied to the branch above him. Viole has his face tilted towards it, gravity pulling the curtain of his bangs to the side. Wangnan wonders if that face—so rarely open to the sky what with all that hair in the way—still holds the same stoic expression.
—✧—
It’s not until much later when Wangnan realizes what was so different about Viole under the stardust tree.
As the Workshop Battle fast approaches, Wangnan is collapsed in a pile of sweat and aching muscles, the bodies of his team scattered around him in similar states. He happens to glance over at Khun, hovering close by on his lighthouse, preoccupied with a message on his Pocket. Something catches his eye—a familiar shade of yellow peeking out from the pocket of Khun’s shirt. It nags at Wangnan’s mind. He’s never seen Khun wear or own anything yellow, much less something in that bright shade.
Wangnan doesn’t recognize it for what it is until Khun tugs the cloth out of his shirt to store it in his lighthouse. Then he remembers Viole, taking trips to the cemetery to meditate before every floor test. Staring up at the yellow bandana that always seems to be there, on every floor, in the branches of the stardust tree.
The revelation jolts through his veins and he scrambles upright with a determined yell.
“Come on, guys! We’re not done training yet!” he urges. “We have to get Viole back!” He receives nothing but weak groans in response, but at least his team is pushing themselves to their feet again.
Back on the 20th floor, the restaurant that made the sweet and sour pork he loved so much had bright lights lining the walls on the inside. Wangnan would walk to that restaurant the day before another test attempt, a good luck tradition of sorts, and he would stand on the curb, looking through the window to the kitchen, watching the chef pour tangy sauce over plates of deep fried pork that he can’t afford.
Wangnan still isn’t sure what the story behind the bandana is, but the Viole he saw under the stardust tree felt like hunger and memories of sweet and sour pork, felt like watching bright lights from behind a window.
—✧—
Viole with Khun is also different from Viole under the stardust tree, Wangnan thinks. He’s been learning so many new things about his friend. Like how different he looks with his hair short. How wide his grin (his grin!) can really stretch. How his eyes can shine with such warmth, almost like golden sunshine.
Khun is different too. When Khun looks at Viole, he smiles like he’s coming home.
They leave behind a few crumbs of the past. On the 30th floor, there are rumours of the well-known yellow bandana tied to the stardust tree, now intertwined with a Khun-blue bandana. It’s the last floor where you can catch a glimpse of the fancy yellow bow. Some say the owner of the bandana is now lying with their dead lover. Others spin a more hopeful story about two people who found each other again after being separated by the tower. Long lost siblings, lovers, friends, soulmates, whatever it may be.
Either way, people don’t stop hanging things on the stardust branches, and there is now a tree in the Inner Tower known as a symbol of remembrance, a lighthouse in the fog of memory.
“Khun, will you show me what you promised me? It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.”
(There is death everywhere in the tower, yes, but we must remember that there is also love.)