Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It begins with a Marigold.

Far from bloom, the seed nestles at the centre of his hand—peeling at the tip to reveal a flushed, yellow frond that crumples in on itself like it’s ready to burst. There’s something endearing about how small it feels against the stretch of his palm, bearing a gravity ill-suited to its demureness. A pinprick singularity, weightless and impossibly heavy all at once.

Akira sees flowers nearly every day. He works as a florist in the bowels of Shibuya station, organising bouquets, watering plants, and sticking labels onto flowerpots. He remembers explicitly lining one onto a glass vase barely an hour ago, straightening the edges, smoothing it down, and reading it over.

‘French marigolds flower in spring,’ it said, ‘although their blooms last until the first sign of frost.’

Funnily enough, it’s spring now. The last few days of March are still too acquainted with winter to temper the freezing chill in the air, so the breeze has a bite to it, nipping his skin where it brushes past. He shivers a little, pulls his coat in to cover more of his chest, and plucks the seed between his fingers to bring it closer to his face.

What does one do in a situation like this? He’s a couple of streets from home. If only he’d coughed it up while he was still in Shibuya, he could have gone straight to the hospital. Now he’s a metro ticket down and twenty minutes wasted. What a poorly timed wake-up call.

Maybe he can wait until Monday. Or better yet, he can go after work on Wednesday and the surgery will give him an early weekend.

Ha.

Or maybe not. Maybe he needs to stop joking and get his shit together.

What are you talking about? He thinks. This thing is death. Look at it and see the bright yellow of its warning colours. ‘You’re in danger,’ it says. Are you thinking straight?

Except it doesn’t feel like death. In fact, he can barely feel it against his palm. If he wasn’t staring it in the face, he could easily pretend it didn’t exist in the first place, just like every other symptom of this one-sided attachment he swept under the carpet, under the flushed skin of his shy smiles when you flashed yours in his direction, under the burning blaze of envy when you fiddled with the engagement ring on your finger and he imagined your hands intertwining (not with his own), under, under, under.

Suddenly, there’s a bad taste in his mouth that’s not just a result of the seeds in his throat.

He knows what coughing up flowers means.

Akira fancies himself too practical to die at the hands of something preventable, but he knows it’s not entirely about that, either. Even if the best course of action seems clear (make a stop at the nearest emergency clinic and get the damn things out of his body), it leaves loose ends that cut it just short of being a satisfying conclusion.

Namely, there’s an incident starring a little girl in his class from years and years ago, unlucky enough to have been afflicted at seven and a half. The right choice becomes muddier when he remembers what she looked like the day after surgery—when his class arrived at her ward with balloons and ‘get-well-soon’ cards. (But no flowers. Probably for the best.)

“She seems sad,” Akira said because, at the time, he didn’t know words great enough to encompass her misery. Bone-weary and irreparably distraught. She looked like a hollow shell, devoid of everything which once made her human. A dreadful weight to see on a young child.

For a while, Akira could pretend nothing had changed. More or less. She was a patched puppet holding itself together at the seams, perhaps. but one that could retrace old steps. Because she still liked her friends. She liked playing ken ken pa in the field when it was sunny, and she liked the new cell phone she got on her eighth birthday. Only over time did he realise there was some key component missing—a supporting chain with a missing link. Akira watched the whole thing from the sidelines like a wallflower seeing a car crash in slow motion.

Talking to her classmates became a chore. Every time she was left alone for too long, her fingers tangled together like the flowers she lost, and she became infamous among the school for her sudden, violent outbursts—a sharp contrast to her demureness pre-surgery. For the worst of it, she started screaming mid-class, dug sharpened pencils into the classroom teddy bear, and tore up her exercise book, all because the English teacher put on some American film about two high school kids falling in love. Because love isn’t real! Love isn’t real! They’re lying!

When her mother came home to pick her up (early, as was becoming the norm) the poor woman looked completely at her wit’s end. It struck Akira that even platonic love had been torn out of his classmate, which was why her mother didn’t look surprised when her own child looked her in the eyes and told her that she hated her. Because what’s ‘like’ to a disagreement? It’s easy to destroy a relationship that’s based entirely on how much one person finds the other agreeable.

Would he still care about Sojiro? About his parents, who sent him to Yongen-Jaya so he could start anew in a place where whispers and false allegations didn’t trail his every step? Would he know they did it out of love? If he forgot what love felt like, could he be sure?

Akira shivers and looks around. He’s been standing in the middle of the road for long enough that people have begun staring. Throwing the seed away feels too decisive, so he curls his fist around it and stows it in the pocket of his blazer.

He needs to start moving, he thinks. He needs to move on.

Shit.

Akira doesn’t go to the hospital that night.

He flips open his laptop as soon as he gets home, in such a hurry to assess the situation that he barely remembers to greet Sojiro, which is probably the reason he follows him upstairs after a few minutes and asks if everything is alright.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Akira asks. He thinks he’ll tell him in due time (not that he has much of a choice if he wants to live) but that doesn’t mean he’s ready quite yet. Sojiro wouldn’t rest until the flowers were excised, which wouldn’t be a bad course of action, but giving up so fast would make the whole thing feel kind of underwhelming.

“No reason,” Sojiro says, but his concern rings bright and clear until Akira appeases him with small talk about work stress (which is only a lie by omission; you are his manager), and Sojiro jokingly asks what he finds stressful about rearranging plant pots.

If only you knew, old man.

As soon as he leaves, Akira bulldozes through his open tabs and makes a few new ones immediately. He likes knowing the facts before making decisions, and right now, he knows next to nothing. Which option has the greatest chance of success? Giving up? Telling you? Or ghosting you with the hope his attachment will fizzle out in time?

In the very least, a bit more information might give him some semblance of control, which is perhaps the most pertinent factor in deciding whether he’s going to face this whole thing head-on or spend the next month and a half moping about.

A month and a half.

Admittedly, it’s not a brilliant deadline. As described in several studies, marigolds are at the top of the list for fast germination, which is bad news if he wants to survive this. Seven to eight weeks is all it takes for the flowers to bloom from seed and rupture enough alveoli that his lungs fill with blood. It’s a scary thought, honestly, and he can’t help but feel concerned with its ambiguity.

Around a month and a half, is the exact quote from the website. Nothing stopping it from taking much less.

He supposes it makes sense that the conditions of the disease differ depending on the flower. Plants vary from one to the other after all, some grow slowly and are relatively harmless for months, while others are poisonous enough to kill as soon as they reach the throat. Winding roots make surgery less likely to be successful (read: non-lethal), though a flower that has roosted for long enough will be hard to remove regardless of its qualities.

The worst-case scenario appears to be a heliotrope: a pretty, purple plant that’s poisonous enough to kill and inconspicuous enough with its poison that no symptoms appear until it’s too late. Even more dire than that, its behaviour in Hanahaki has given it a terrifying etymology: it means ‘eternal love,’ which is a cute sentiment given as a gift, but a death sentence coughed up. It describes a love that is inescapable and obsessive, like the pull of a black hole long past the point of no return. Its roots wind so deep that they infect all avenues of the body like cancer, leaving no chance in hell of successful extraction. Terminal.

The only other plant with quite the same gravity is hemlock, which comes part in parcel with a dishonest confession, and isn’t so much a death sentence as a symptom of death itself. If the victim lasts long enough to cough one out, their body is already mere minutes from respiratory failure. Just enough time to realise whatever relief you felt was a result of misdirection. The world's most back-handed blessing.

Akira’s situation isn’t ideal. Marigolds grow quickly, meaning whatever time he has left is probably not enough for his feelings to fizzle into nothing. But it could be worse.

Marigolds are common in Hanahaki. Predictable. In both a bouquet and a pair of lungs they mean a love borne out of jealousy. At two weeks they’re little sprouts and after a month they’re a bushel of divided leaflets. Marked points along a line of progress. If he keeps an eye on his symptoms and avoids you, he has a shot of walking out of this without the need for surgery. And if he’s not so lucky… Well, he can hedge his bets. Late-stage marigolds are easy to extract.

'Hi, I’d like to discuss something important. Would it be possible to meet face-to-face?' is the sufficiently professional-sounding message he sends once he has drafted his resignation notice. It’s important to do this properly, after all. Despite how close you’ve become, you are his manager, and he wants to meet in person to discuss the fine print; the customary ‘two weeks’ notice,’ might not be appropriate given his life is on the line, and that’s not an urgency that translates well across 12px Times New Roman.

'Ok. Tomorrow over whiskey and soda? Also, why do you sound so formal lol? Is everything alright?' is your response, and he wonders why he’s trying so hard. Acting like he has a stick up his ass will do nothing to dissipate his flowers and the real reason he’s doing this is so he has some semblance of closure, anyway.

'Yeah, sorry. Sounds good.'

And with that, he figures the hard part is over and done with. He’s up to his arms in resolve and he’s run the whole conversation through his head a million times, if not more. He’ll be ready for every possibility. The Demiurge himself could point a gun in his face and he would have a ten-step plan on how to deflect the bullet.

Except when tomorrow afternoon rolls around, there’s one thing Akira is unprepared for.

You’re not wearing your engagement ring.

Which is fine. Akira doesn’t think about the fact you’ve never taken it off. Nor does he wonder why you wouldn’t wear it on a day you have a matching set of earrings. Under no circumstance does he consider any explanation other than misplacing the ring, dropping it in the ocean, losing it in a plant pot. Yada. Yada.

At least until you tell him you broke up with your fiancé.

“So, anyway, what was that important thing you wanted to discuss?”

Such a peculiar happenstance that his tongue slips in just the right way for him to say the exact opposite of what he came here to say. Miracles do happen.

“I’m broke. Could you give me more hours?”

“Pfft. That’s it? From the way you worded that message, I thought someone had died.”

Ha, he thinks, give it a month and a half.

Chapter Text

Hanahaki is often counter-intuitive.

According to the internet, the lucky minority whose recovery entails reciprocation will be afflicted with a violent coughing fit before any notable improvement occurs. Thick mucus will gather in their throat almost to the point of suffocation, and with it: large clumps of petals (coiled with blood clots and leaves) will pass through their windpipe as a dark, congested mass that looks, more or less, like chunks of an organ—or at least something that would send most reasonable people to the hospital faster than they could think twice.

However, if one were to disregard their propensity for self-preservation and take time to sift through their blood, they might be lucky enough to find a few brown seeds of a very specific appearance: a bullet-like body crowned with a few, small thorns around the circumference and one large spoke as the bullseye, all tapering upwards, away from the seed.

As is often the case with flowers and Hanahaki, the seeds have enjoyed symbolism born from their role within the disease. Traditionally, survivors would plant them in their gardens and organise the blooms into a confession bouquet before giving them to their loved ones in a gesture that eventually gave them their meaning.

Ambrosia: love returned.

The seeds are easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but most educated individuals will always be sifting through their mucus in hope of finding them. It just so happens that figuratively (and in some dramatic instances, not figuratively) coughing your lungs out is both a symptom of recovery, and a symptom of getting much, much worse, so they’re quite literally the difference between life and death.

However, coughing up flowers is not the only symptom of Hanahaki.

Carrying bags of soil, Akira has found, is a lot more difficult than it used to be. He’s running out of breath more often (most significantly when you’re walking alongside him and he regulates his wheezing to keep up appearances). Most of today’s shift has involved holding his breath and pretending that nothing is wrong and looking at you doesn’t make things a hundred times worse.

What’s more, he hasn’t thought of a decent way to breach the subject of your breakup. He should have chased the details as soon as you brought it up last weekend, but you glossed over it so quickly it didn’t even register until the conversation had moved on. And now? Well, you haven’t mentioned it once, and a bustling crowd of people is not a great audience for a serious conversation. Maybe that just means it doesn’t bother you, but with your track record, Akira can’t be sure. If it did, you probably wouldn’t bring it up either.

“Hey, what do you think of this?” you ask, holding up a combination of ivy, thistles, white tulips, and orange peels: an arrangement he can most kindly describe as experimental.

“Am I having a stroke?”

You slump dramatically across the cash register. “The worst thing about leaving art school was finding out no one appreciates neo-dadaism as much as they should.”

He comes a little closer, leafs through the bouquet, and promptly realises all the stems have been stabbed through a single orange, like a mutated Christingle. Whatever the hell neo-dadaism is, it doesn't explain this monstrosity. “Maybe Bjork plans on getting hitched sometime soon.”

You sigh. “The orange peels wouldn’t last the trip to Iceland. It’s fine. I know my magnum opus is just ahead of its time.”

“Maybe hold off on the patent.”

Akira catches a glimpse of a smile you don’t hide fast enough—in a split second around which time seems to dilate. The tumult that zips through his spine closes in on him in a cold wash, and he launches into a coughing fit which rattles his lungs with the force of a drum.

“Shit, are you okay?” you ask.

He nods through the tears in his eyes and motions to the tap in the wall.

“Right, hold on.”

When he brings his hand away from his face, there are two little chunks in his palm: ugly, mucous-covered granules that don’t look anything like marigold seeds. With your back turned, he drops them into the bag of soil at his feet.

“Take it easy. I don’t have the means to pay for a settlement case if you croak on these premises,” you say, and hand him a glass of water.

“I’d haunt this place out of spite.”

You laugh. This time, he knows not to look.

Bit by bit, you begin picking apart your masterpiece. All the thistles are back in their paper bags just in time for the next customer of the day, who walks in and asks for a bouquet of twelve roses for his anniversary. Which is fortunate. Akira suspects the man’s traditional sensibilities might have been offended by the floral equivalent of shitposting, and he successfully bags his order before you crawl out of the woodworks with a sequel monstrosity even worse than the last: a mishmash of wilted flowers and dry holly leaves wrapped in toilet paper.

“This one is titled, Ophelia. It’s my gift to you.”

“Three years of formal education and this is the best you can do?”

“Oh," you gasp, feigning a shot through the chest, "I thought you liked the controversial ones."

“Just throw it away before I gag.”

It’s hard to gauge the passage of time in the sunless underground, but Akira starts counting the cash as the crowd in the subway thins to a trickle. With every customer he’s been feeling progressively more light-headed, so he lets himself lean on the till. At least until he notices you looking and abruptly straightens himself.

“Are you ill?” you ask, in an uncharacteristically serious tone.

“Yeah, your Frankenstein bouquet has given me an aneurysm. You're lucky there’s no flower equivalent for the RSPCA.”

“It’s Frankenstein’s monster, we’ve been over this. But don’t try to change the subject. Do you really think I haven’t noticed you’ve been running on fumes all day? If you’re feeling sick, please let me know. I’m not the kind of person who would dock it from your pay.”

“I know, I know. It’s nothing.” Akira says, though his breath seems to run from him the longer he listens to your voice. “But are you alright?”

“What do you mean?”

He looks around. There’s no one passing through the subway. If he’s ever going to mention the elephant in the room, now is the chance.

“Well, you just broke up with your fiancé last week. I know you were the one to pull the plug, and you’re not one to talk about these things, but… you were together for two years, right? That can’t be easy.”

“Oh, that. Yeah, I mean—” you suddenly become engrossed with a withered leaf. “I’m totally fine. I’ve been keeping busy. I think it’s something I should have done a long time ago.”

“You think? So, it’s over?”

You bark a laugh. “I hope so.”

Akira hesitates. “Can I ask what happened?”

You shrug. “Just... lots of little things. It’s complicated.”

He stays quiet. Mulls the next thing he wants to say. He’d like to know more, but it’s clearly a sore spot and you’re not eager to talk about it. “Would going for a drink after work help take it off your mind?”

He watches you closely. You purse your lips to the side.

“The group will be glad to have you back,” he continues. “Yusuke has been on a Kanō art kick since last Tuesday but Shiho thinks it’s overrated graffiti for rich people. He’s been talking my ear off all week. ‘She doesn’t appreciate its blend of kanga and Yamato-e,’ is his new catchphrase. Like it means anything to me but the fact he needs to go outside and touch some grass.”

You roll your eyes. “Shiho should start reading art history past the bits with seventeenth-century Shunga. The Kanō school is literally the most influential family in Japanese art.”

“That's exactly what he said. Don’t let yourself fall for it. If you saw how angry he gets when she implies he only likes it because gold leaf gives him wet dreams, you’d probably join in.”

You laugh. “Maybe I should wait until it blows over. Sounds like a lot.”

“Please, your return is our only hope of distracting him until he finds something else to fixate on. We need you.”

He can tell you’re considering it because you don’t say anything for a little while, so to give you a little push, he elbows you gently and pretends his skin doesn’t flare in spatters of sparks where it grazes yours.

“Come on. I know you miss our karaoke nights.”

You sigh. “Okay, okay. Since you—”

Someone calls your name, and his carefully crafted atmosphere crumbles.

“Shit,” you whisper in clear disbelief, whipping your head around in the direction of the noise. “No way in hell is he—”

Strolling down the subway escalator is a man he recognises immediately, first by his loose, shaggy ponytail, then by his maroon, V-neck sweater. As the assailant rapidly encroaches on the flower shop, his well-shine shoes tap-tap against the steel steps. Clean and tidy even when unwelcome—Goro Akechi, your ex-fiancee.

“Sprint to the back room,” Akira suggests.

“He’d just sit and wait.”

“Then hide behind me.”

“No, that's okay. I’ll deal with it.”

Oh, you’ll deal with it. Which means Akira can’t do anything but stand there and feel outright invisible as your ex approaches the counter—a background set piece in a ridiculous theatre production that will inevitably make for uncomfortable viewing.

“Oh, I'm so grateful you’re here. I’ve been trying to get through to you all day. Could we please talk?” Akechi says in an easy, relieved tone. Akira feels the hairs on his neck stand on end when Akechi gently touches your forearm. The tangibility of the burning in his chest catches him off guard. His flowers are restless. They eat him alive from the inside. Do something, they say. Play the hero. Akira imagines himself crushing them in his fingers. 

“Akechi, I’ve already said everything I wanted to say. By coming here, you’re making me look bad in front of my employee. Could you please be more considerate?”

Oh? Did you just call him by his surname? How cold. Akira hides his smile behind his hand.

“Yes, of course; I’ll wait until your shift is done.”

This is so clearly not what you wanted that Akira wonders which possibility is more likely out of Akechi mishearing you or lacking some cognitive functions.

“I don’t think that’s—” he begins.

“No, it’s fine,” you interject, though you’re rubbing your temple like someone with an oncoming migraine. “You’re my employee, Akira, I can’t you standing up for me like this. We’ll close up shop and you can go home fifteen minutes early. I promise this won’t happen again.”

“That’s not what I’m concerned with.”

“I know. I just... I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to send you away.”

Akira doesn’t move. “I really think I should stay.”

“I'm afraid that's not up to you," Akechi says, without the smugness Akira knows lies beneath. He looks upon you for some sort of confirmation, only to hear you whisper, "sorry," under your breath. Which is brilliant. You’ve bricked him out, and now the only thing he can do is leave with his tail between his legs. He clamps his mouth shut as he throws his apron off and puts it on the hanger in the back room.

Even before he gets there, his breath runs short. It feels like a hundred tiny seeds are coagulating into an angry mass.

You always do this. Play-pretend at being friends and relegate him to ‘employee’ at the last minute. Was he the employee when he was speaking ‘too formally’ over text? When he lost his first job a year ago and you rushed to his house with a bargain-bin DVD of Space Firebird and let him sleep on your shoulder? When you both got piss-drunk (not, I’m-going-to-regret-this-in-the-morning drunk, but, I’m-probably-never-going-to-remember-this-in-the-first-place drunk) and he asked nicely and you let him kiss you stupid in the toilet of a fucking karaoke parlour until your eyes glazed with want and he spent the rest of the night chugging water so he didn’t forget the way you looked at him? Why is it always friend when Akira needs favours and employee when an opportunity comes to return them? He coughs. There are at least three different seeds in the sink. He only recognises one of them.

Something, something. ‘Blocked number,’ rings the muffled sound of a raised voice while he wraps the seeds in toilet paper and stuffs them in his pocket. Something, something. ‘I need you. I’m sorry.’ He leans into the wall. ‘Okay. But Goro, I mean it. This is the last time.’

He crushes his cough into the palm of his hand.

By the time he comes out, he’s feeling so dizzy he can barely think straight. He sees the ring back on your finger as a nefarious shape on the edge of his vision. The ball-and-chain of your hand. That same wicked initiative comes over him, part-in-parcel with the fire in his chest. Akira runs his hand over your forearm.

“Call me when you get home, okay? And if you want to go out for that drink, let me know,” he whispers into your ear, giving Akechi a look from beneath his glasses that would be hard to decipher in any other circumstance.

You stare at him in astounded silence.

Am I the villain here? is the question that loops through his mind on his way home. He certainly overstepped some kind of boundary. But so did Akechi, right? Who shows up at someone’s work and begs them for forgiveness like that? What an awkward situation.

‘I’m sorry you had to deal with that,’ reads the first message he receives from you. ‘Akechi is going through a hard time at the moment, so we’re going to try to figure things out. I’ll do a better job keeping you away from our relationship bullshit next time. It must have looked really bad if you felt the need to stand up for me.’

Stand up for you? Is that what you thought it was? For a moment, Akira thinks he’s going to burst out laughing.

Instead, he lets the bitterness stave until he gets home and slams the door to his room with such unbridled anger that a poster falls on his head.

He takes it in his hand, stares at it, and slumps on the floor. Some French painting of a woman in a swing by an artist he can't remember the name of, significantly only for the memory of your voice at his ear.

"She's cheating on him," you whispered as he stared at it on a notebook in the gift shop of a local gallery. It was the only piece he had stopped to look at without being prompted to by Yusuke's nonconsensual guided tour, an unknown adage in the fine print of attending a gallery to support his exhibitions. 

"What?"

You pointed at a figure in the darkness he failed to notice. "There. That's her husband. And then here," you pointed, in turn, to a man lying on the grass, staring up at the woman's pink, fluttery dress, "is her lover."

"I can't do this. I stop for five minutes to look at something that isn't the wall and you crawl from the woodworks to give me a voiceover. I'm starting to think I like art even less than I did this morning."

You laughed at that but changed the subject nevertheless, only to give him a knowing grin when he snuck a rolled-up poster of the same artwork into his shoulder bag.

Akira throws his head back. Maybe it’s time to cut his losses. Something is clearly dragging you back to Akechi, and whatever that might be, he sincerely doubts another night of karaoke will wipe him from your mind and inspire more of those ‘too-drunk-to-care’ kisses in the way he hopes they will.

But then…

He thinks about later that night when you showed up at Leblanc unannounced. “I’m really sorry,” you started, bowing uncharacteristically deeply as the rain poured onto the awning over your head. Your wet hair and clothes were plastered to your skin. “I know it’s rude of me to show up so late without warning, but you’re the only person I can turn to. I need a place to stay.”

He takes the seeds out of his pocket. Against the backdrop of the toilet paper he wrapped them in, they’ve made little spots—charming haloes of mucus and blood. The seeds are too nondescript to identify, so he drops them into a glass jar on his windowsill, where two succulents currently reside. "I thought you liked the controversial ones," comes your voice as a murmur through his mind, quiet and all the more assured for it.

True enough, he thinks and sticks the poster back on the wall.