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HANAHAKI: a deadly disease developed from unrequited love, causing flowers to grow inside of the afflicted person’s chest.
Claude coughs small flowers of white and finds the blood on their petals sickening. The red stains taint the innocence of such delicate flowers and he hates it. He hates the stain, the contamination, the disturbance of fragile peace. He knows that while the flowers are because of her, the blood is because of him and it makes him hate the messy, smeared red stains even more.
Who is he to dare to taint such innocence?
He is king. A god amongst men. More powerful than many of his predecessors. But she is the sun, the moon, the stars, and the very sky that holds it all.
Who is he to dare to compare to something as wholly encompassing as that? So he doesn’t.
He coughs up flower petals and chokes down flower buds and pretends that these dainty, delicate white flowers of innocence aren’t killing him.
Claude pretends that the love blooming in his chest isn’t there. Even as it hugs his heart and suffocates his lungs, he continues to deny its existence. Even as his hands fall from his face, clutching handfuls of bloodied petals, Claude rejects it all.
Because she doesn’t deserve such a tainted love. And he, most importantly, does not deserve any love at all. Whether it comes from someone else or from within. The blood on the petals tell him so.
Diana chokes on pink rose petals and thinks of herself as conceited and narcissistic. How dare she grow gardens for him in her chest but in the color of her eyes rather than his?
It is so utterly selfish that every cough and every petal brings tears of shame to her eyes. She blinks them away and buries them in her heart but she realizes too late that they water the flowers in the end.
So the roses grow. Tall and proud and full and prickly with thorns. They fill her chest and bury her lungs so thoroughly that every time she sees him she can’t breathe.
But she does not blame the god for whom she grows pink rose gardens. She faults herself, for her body traitorously believing that it had any right to dare to love a man above men.
The shame deepens when Diana makes a habit of washing the blood off the pink petals and then places them in between pages for safekeeping.
She doesn’t know why she saves them. Nor where she finds the courage to do so.
But she does.
Her heart continues to grow rose gardens for a king leagues above her stature and her tears continue to nurture them to full blooms of pink and thorns.
Diana quietly tends to them and hopes that in the silence, no one will know of her treachery.
Athy covers her mouth and when the coughing fit fades, she pulls her hand away to find golden petals pooled in her palm.
The blood on their edges should scare her. But the shimmer of gold warms her chest the way the sun warms her skin.
She finds not fear in her heart but love in her chest.
It takes root in her bones and grows on vines threaded through her ribs. It sprouts with golden buds that spill from her lips late at night when she’s alone. It sheds petals that fall from her cupped fingers when she’s sad.
And it takes her far longer than it should to realize that her love for him keeps her warm when he’s not around. That her love for him keeps her company when he cannot.
She thinks that growing gilded flowers inside of her body should kill her. They fill her chest until her lungs can no longer house them and force them up her throat.
Much like him, they steal her breath away.
But if she had to choose between cold, crisp air and the glowing warmth of golden flower petals, Athy would choose to suffocate every day.
Lucas hates how the red rose petals catch in his throat and get caught in his teeth. He hates that their presence draws hesitation in his every action.
He’s loathes that whenever he does something even potentially detrimental to his well being, the petals pour from his mouth in quantities that rival full bouquets. He despises how even the mere contemplation of something mischievous brings about a tickle in his throat, a telltale sign that the red roses are growing in his chest and will soon hit full bloom.
But sometimes he thinks it feels better to get it off his chest, or at the very least out of it. So he does something reckless just to see the red petals fall into his hands.
He’s glad that they’re red. Thankful even, that they chose to be a deep crimson because it blends with the blood that accompanies every handful.
The presence of flower buds and rose petals in his body tells him vividly that he’s fallen in love.
And he’s terrified.
Not of the hacking coughs that brings the petals to life. Not of the blood the flowers drag along with them. Not of the pain his ribcage feels as it tries to accommodate the bouquets his heart is growing.
Instead, he fears the very notion of love. Love had evaded him for so long and had always slipped through his fingers whenever he’d gotten close to it.
Who’s to say that it won’t happen again?
So he coughs up bloodied rose petals and dumps them by the handfuls in bushes and lakes. He litters the world with the most tangible sign of his love and hopes that once the world has seen enough, it’ll tell him how to stop the red roses from growing.
Ezekiel develops a cough sprinkled with tiny blue flowers. Their edges are tinted pink with his blood and darkened with his longing. But they are small flowers with smaller petals and he finds it easier to cough into curled fists and pretend that his coughs aren’t accompanied by little blue things.
He wears white too often to easily hide petals of blue tinged with wet trails of pink. Tiny as they are, he still has to develop a habit out of a need to keep his secret a secret.
So he begins to eat them.
With a careful hand covering sealed lips, he coughs blue petals up only to chew them into finer pieces and swallow them down before they can see the light. Before the world can see them.
Like with the very love causing such flowers to bloom in his heart, he must hide it all. He swallows the flowers and with every mouthful, he buries his love for an angel.
He knows that it was his fault for falling for a girl in feathers. But he thinks that he’ll be alright, that he’ll be fine. The flowers are small and the petals tiny. Perhaps this love of his for a feathered miss was not all that great.
Perhaps, one day, these tiny petals will become so small that they disappear completely. Then he’ll never cough up miniature bouquets again.
It never occurs to him that the petals he calls tiny and small were actually pieces of much larger petals caught in his chest, that they belonged to endlessly large blue roses full and bursting.
It never occurs to him that such full blooms have no chance of ever ceasing and that he is doomed to love an angel.