Chapter Text
It's going to be a scorcher of a day.
Eric can tell that the second his eyes open, immediately alighting on the aureate splashes of gold-honey-mikado already dancing throughout his room, in spite of the early hour.
The air has a morning bite to it that, although refreshing, warns of the burn and fatigue he's sure to meet when he steps out at lunchtime - heat slamming into him as a torrid wall, evaporating the air from within his lungs, sunny suffocation.
The Summer season has evidently chosen today to make itself known, doing so with a fiery rancour.
Which suits Eric just fine. He's always liked the way his sunglasses make him look when the sun hits them just right. Gives him 'edge' Dylan once said... Whatever the fuck that means.
So Eric is hoping to have a good day, sunshine and heat for the first time since before winter hit kind of day; the kind you just sort of drift through, where everyone is in a great mood, and everything somehow goes right for once, and life feels a little less dark and oppressive.
That kind of a good day.
And it wasn't often Eric found reason to hope for, or have hope in, well... Anything.
*****
His hope manages to last all of the walk between his bed and the bathroom. Which is a journey comprising less than thirty paces: carpet, hardwood, carpet, bathroom tile.
A scratchy throat had plagued him the evening before, leading his Mom to prescribe a drink of hot honey & lemon water before bed, on the promise it would clear whatever was ailing him overnight. He'd downed the mixture in almost one gulp before realising this was not a mistake he would make a second time. The taste was vile.
To add insult to injury, not only is his throat much worse come morning, the feeling has dropped, shifting down to his lungs. Leaving Eric with an almost constrictive pain across his chest, throat now a consistent itch every time he breathes in and a whistling wheeze on the breath out.
Eric doesn't have long to dwell on what might be wrong with him, all too soon he finds himself clutching at the rim of the sink, wetly choking and hacking into the bowl of it. The episode goes on for several drawn-out minutes, the pain biting, shocking and immense.
When he looks down to see what has almost asphyxiated him in its effort to climb his oesophagus, he finds himself stricken, capable of only the simplest - yet most emotive, of utterances,
"Oh, fuck off," He rasps around the blood and bile still clogging the back of his throat; stringy effuse connecting his stained lower lip to the violet and crimson mass in the bowl.
It isn't that Eric is unaware what's plaguing him - rare though the condition may be, it's not unheard of. Especially somewhere the size of the United States of fucking America. It isn't even that he doesn't know what, or who, his affliction is in relation to.
Rather, it's the simple fact that his own worst fears and deeply buried shames are physically manifesting in order to claw themselves from the darkened cage of his ribs, and into the light. The exact opposite of what he wants for them.
He knows exactly who, he knows exactly why, Eric just isn't sure exactly what he's going to do about it.
Or if he even has the wherewithal to do so.
He eyes the physical symptom of his soon-to-be declining health where it glistens, a staining web of viscera minced flora webbing out infection across the porcelain. The mass winks and glints in the morning sun, mocking, pointed, Eric's forced to look away from the portent by the sheer weight of his own emotions.
And so Eric finds himself, head buried in his arms, leaning heavily on the sink and mind running a mile a minute about how to hide his ailment, and how long he may have before it runs its course.
Because that's the thing about Hanahaki... It is fatal.
The sun now seems almost insulting in its blinding intensity compared with the dark secret lurking in his lungs.
His summer hope already curdling into an oppressive dread.
*****
Clearing his throat merely made the itch worse.
Sipping water throughout breakfast, to prevent his Mom fussing, simply gave him the urge to cough.
Swallowing against either, the need to cough or the itch, only made him want to retch.
Essentially, by the time Eric had parked up at school, before even stepping through the entry doors, he was cursing his affliction for not holding off until summer break at the very least, or better yet, not having cursed him at all.
Then he spotted Dylan.
The world tilted sideways, school-standard sickly lino and fluorescents blurring into a watercolour-fractal-smudge amalgam, Eric's equilibrium lurched violently alongside everything around him with nothing more than a shoe-squeak of warning. Until all at once everything snapped itself back into expected position, whereupon he found himself folded at the waist losing his partially-masticated breakfast, plus a cup's worth of petals, and more of his own blood than he appreciated seeing at the current hour into a grimy toilet.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Eric spat, clearing the last of the viscera specked spittle from his mouth, a muffled groan hidden in his sleeve as he limply wiped at his face.
"Hey man... You good?" An unfamiliar voice called out, a background fuzz Eric hadn't paid any mind to while he had been preoccupied resolved itself into the sound of a running tap.
"Fuck off," Eric groused, wholly unwilling to explain the situation to anyone, least of all some random dickhead from his shithole of a high school. Now wouldn't that make great fodder for the rumour mill...
The tap turned off and after a tense beat of silence, the tell-tale protest of abused hinges signalled the bathroom door opening, Eric's unseen voyeur leaving on a muttered huff, "Asshole,"
As per usual, he'd agreed to meet Dylan at his locker, as they'd done many times over without second thought, yet now, peeling himself off the tacky floor, Eric couldn't stamp down the churning spasm of his guts. Rinsing his mouth at the sink, Eric double-checked his teeth were clean of blood, stared himself down in the mirror, and finally forced himself out of the bathroom.
Only to find the halls empty.
The day having long since started while he'd been losing his head in the cubicle.
Eric ground his teeth, scrubbed a tremoring hand across his forehead and started down the corridor. Quiet relief washed over him at not immediately having to deal with seeing Dylan again, though it warred with frustration at the mouthful he was about to be dealt for being late.