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As the television blared the news, Keith stayed curled into a ball, hands fisted in his hair, mouth open in a silent scream.
Pilot error. The words pounded through him, too large and loud for the tiny, cramped dorm room, the one where he and Shiro had used to sit as Keith worked on his homework, as Shiro planned lessons for the next class he had been tapped to TA, where they watched stupid old sci-fi and laughed and groaned at the terrible special effects.
Where tiny, dried, purple-blue petals had been unceremoniously shoveled underneath the bed in an attempt to hide their presence from their cause.
There would still be some there, Keith imagined, dry and crinkled and withered, if he looked. No need to hide it now.
Another sob forced its way up through his chest and into his mouth, and he tried to force it back. It didn’t work. It never did.
The choking scream ripped free into the stifled air underneath the blanket, a sobbing wail, and Keith choked on it, just as his love had choked him. He gasped raggedly, lungs so used to attempting to recover that they seized in his chest, a familiar agony gripping him, and he doubled over again in a hacking cough, raw and wet and ugly.
But even as he yearned for them, even as he had spent months of his life cursing the existence of wisteria, the empty space in front of him remained just that. Not a single petal to be found.
He wasn’t dying anymore. That was plain enough. And he would have given up anything, he would have given up the entire world to be dying again.
Hanahaki took years to kill; decades, even, sometimes. It was the sort of thing you could usually ride out rather than let kill you. Keith had understood that. Though he couldn’t ever imagine his feelings fading, he had accepted that he would at least have years more of his life—after all, surgery, which would leave him empty of emotions, wasn’t even the beginning of an option. And, practically, he had known that his feelings might fade to only friendship over time. Shiro would never need to know.
He had been granted a reprieve, but god, he had never wanted it this way. Never this way.
You couldn’t be in unrequited love with someone if they were dead.