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one.
They say that grief comes in five stages.
And when Ochako coughs up a rose petal, white speckled with red, she completely bypasses denial and skips straight into anger. There is a desperation in the way her fingers claw into her throat, as if to stop her body from decaying - because decaying she is, slowly corroding from the inside. It’s just one stupid little petal, the first of many she suspects, but there is no hesitation in her acceptance of it.
There is no hesitation in her anger either.
It’s day one and Uraraka Ochako crumples on the bathroom floor, tears melting on hot cheeks as her fingers tear a small innocent flower petal apart.
There’s no such thing as a happy ending.
six.
“What’s wrong with your face roundcheeks?” His voice comes to her during a hot afternoon in class, after she’s excused herself to the bathroom. Once more they came in the shape of white roses. Ochako would laugh at the irony of it; the white rose in her hair; the roses woven into the fabric of his suit. Back then she had thought it was fate, romantic.
Now she thinks it’s a mockery. A cruel twist, real life in favour of a cheap imitation.
At least the imitation had let her dream.
“Nothing!” She says, her voice tetchy. She worries, briefly, if she’s left a trace of it somewhere. Bizarrely, if her breath smells of flowers. Or even if he, as he had at the dance back then, is in sync with her; experiencing the same pain.
But she knows that to be impossible.
After all; hanahaki is one-sided love.
It’s a love meant to die.
“You seem fucking weird anyway.” His eyes narrow and Ochako sticks her chest out, drawing her up to a height she knows doesn’t even come up to his chest. “Hey!”
He laughs and her heart flutters. And for one sickening moment she’s scared she’s going to spill the evidence right then and there as her body constricts and shakes. Then it is the anger which surges through her and she hates how it’s twisted not only her health but her brief reprieve too. Every laugh and smile shared, every flutter of her damned treacherous heart, is now cause for worry and anxiety. She can’t enjoy it as she used to; Bakugo is killing her.
Bakugo places a hand on top of her head, voice gruff as he says. “Don’t get sick on me angelface.”
And as he walks, the long powerful strides she’s become accustomed to, her own strength wails when a flower cuts off her air.
thirty three.
There had been a time when she used to believe. Arrogantly, giddily, had she believed that Bakugo’s kindness had been hinting at feelings buried beneath the surface.
At the time, right at the start of it, she had been building up the courage to ask him out and her confidence grew with every gruff acknowledgement he tossed her way. There was an arrogance in assuming that, because Bakugo didn't treat everyone with kindness, she may finally prove to be the exception.
Until a small bud had grown outside her heart and sprung out her lungs with all the love she’d held inside of her.
And as life grew inside her body, wilting in the air, her courage made it into its graveyard.
Though, she reflects, she had never meant to fall in love with Bakugo either. There was no start, no memorable entry. Just the fire in her bones as she’d touched stone after stone in an exhaustion of her power in a fight against him, under the watchful gaze of thousands of viewers shouting her name undeservedly. For the first time a person had not treated her as a fragility, but as a competitor.
She’d admired that strength, long after the bruises had faded from her body, long after they’d started class.
Long before Bakugo acknowledged her in turn.
eight.
She counts seventeen flowers to her name when she visits the physician. They’re as inconsistent in days as her own moods; denial has finally caught up to anger and at times despair makes itself known through the wail that overtakes all other senses. The waiting hall is a collection of young, old. Babies gurgle in their mother’s arms and teens sulk on their phones.
It’s disquieting.
It’s unlike her to think it’s disquieting.
Ochako wonders whether the disease is addling her mind as much as it alters her body.
She takes a seat in a prim white chair, while a youth gives her a look that she wants to return with equal heat.
Unbidden, it is Bakugo’s voice she hears.
‘Tell him to fuck off.’
It forces her to giggle, but the giggle turns into a cough, and she soon rushes into the bathroom. The youth’s look transforms into one of horror when he sees the blood on her hands.
Eighteen.
forty.
She hadn’t meant to tell Deku.
They were meeting up after school, that was all. She hadn’t seen him and Iida in a while, that’s all.
She’d only seen Bakugo clap Kirishima on the back.
That’s all. That’s all, that’s all she can ever tell him, all she can allow herself to say before her body heaves and petals slip between the gaps of her fingers.
“It’s okay!” she hastens to say as the petals lay between them, pristine and beautiful, while Deku looks on in horror. I’m just dying, that’s all.
sixty seven.
She hasn’t told anyone. Neither disease nor the object of her affection.
The cause of her death.
It’s been over three months since the first rose dug itself through her throat and out her mouth. Deku is the only one who knows of the former but she has refused any questions on the latter.
It’s not as if he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s easier to pretend. After all, her condition is only getting worse.
He’s thrown a hundred solutions at her. There’s everything from medication to dating sites to breaking the heart of a person she knows doesn’t reciprocate. How could she devastate one who has devastated her? It’s love that she needs to survive, not hatred.
They’re teenagers no longer but not quite adults yet. They’re on the cusp where adolescence meets adulthood. They giggle over boys, yet worry about the public’s decreasing favour. They have sleepovers in the dorms at night and fight villainy by day. They try so so hard. They fall so so hard.
No one ever said their jobs would be easy.
Sometimes, their faces are streaked with tears. Lost love, lost opportunities, lost lives.
Hers are streaked with flowers. It feels unfair.
It seems silly to worry about their prospective jobs when it’s a boy two floors over who kills her inside.
And in spite of Deku’s many warnings, Ochako has her own solution.
One evening, as Bakugo’s fingers linger on her shoulder and she catches his flushed face looking at her. She’s not stupid enough not to see it for what it is: the flush of alcohol in his system. None of them are old enough to drink and isn’t that the beauty of it? The ghost of Aizawa whispers over them and the sheer anticipation is enough to grab another beer.
“Come outside with me, angelface.” The insult is so odd, in any other context she’d be pleased with being called angel but for Bakugo. And although it’s an insult, there’s an affection in every taunt. She knows that. Her heart flutters and there’s one terrifying heartbeat where she’s scared of flowers.
There’s a pleasant buzz inside her limbs when she gets up. She hears Mina’s encouraging hoot but it’s drowned out by the pounding of her own heart. There is no handholding so she wonders if she’ll ever feel the assurance of Bakugo’s fingers in hers. The airy-soft quirk of hers meeting brazen confidence in his.
She catches Deku’s gaze. It’s soft, and sad, and it frustrates her to look at. She turns away from him and is already confronted with Bakugo’s retreating back. It’s always been like this.
She will always rush after him.
But when she comes outside in the cool night air, the wind pulls at her dress and moonlight lights the silver in Bakugo’s hair and the dark smooths out the harsh lines of his face. He has never looked more beautiful.
What he wants from her is lost in her thoughts. She doesn’t care. Alcohol provides her with courage and she presses him up against the wall, her lips meeting his.
It doesn’t surprise her when he kisses her back. None of it gentle, hands pulling at her shoulders and fingers snagging on her hair. His lips are rough and chapped and there is too much spit and tongue. She giggles and it only spurs him on.
But her heart sings beneath the weight of it; mournful and ruined.
It can’t bear the strain.
It could only last a minute.
There’s blood on Bakugo’s lips as he pulls away, coughing, “what the hell-”
Roses lie at their feet.
Ochako smiles, hands behind her back, and she doesn’t look at them. Only ever looks at him.
“What the fuck.”
He takes one step toward her, then stops as if it’s contagious. His courage fails him and the alcohol clears from his system at the same time the colour drains from his face. One of the flowers is crushed beneath his heel and he jumps back as if scorched.
“What the fuck?!”
He carefully sidesteps the remainder of the flowers and crowds her space, one hand crushing her shoulder and she can feel his hands shaking.
“Why did you do that?!” Hands fly about her face in a frenzy. The question remains ambiguous. He could be gesturing to anything; The flowers. The kiss. Her. “Why the fuck did you do that?! Why didn’t you tell me!”
Because I was meant to break my own heart.
Instead, she heaves and two more roses join the crumpled mess at their feet.
They’re in bloom this time.
eighty one.
The decision comes easy to her. She hadn’t been persuaded by either Deku’s tears or Iida’s loud voice in her ear or hell even the doctor who had informed her of her impending doom. Bakugo had clearly and irrevocably told her that there was no way that he could reciprocate.
And she’d looked him dead in the eye, smiled and said; “Who said I needed you to?”
Ochako does not want to die. She needn’t anyone’s persuasion but her own. If these flowers do not cease to be, and they haven’t because she counted number ninety-five yesterday evening; heaving over a toilet bowl, then she will get rid of them another way.
hundred.
It’s strange, she thinks. When she is recovered enough to flutter amongst the hallways, how she high-fives Deku who sobs with relief (though he had visited her in the hospital many times before), how Mina throws a careless arm around her shoulder though her fingers tremble... Ochako feels not much at all.
When she meets Bakugo, it’s as if she feels even less.
Before her heart had been beautiful; a song that had been weaved especially for him. A white rose, as delicate as it had been deadly - a neat combination of both of their personalities. Yet when she sees him now, her heart has been hollowed out. There is no more space for him.
Dumbly, she blinks at him.
“Did they fix you?”
He doesn’t say it. He says it as if there is something wrong with her.
Laughter, unbidden, bubbles up in her throat. “They fixed me.” Then smiles when she says, “Because falling for you was killing me.”
Falling for you was wrong.
Falling for you was painful.
Yet, as her heart aches with the absence of it, falling for him was also beautiful.