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Few things were as bitter as the first taste of losing something that was never yours to begin with.
In his case, Caesar’s bitterness came in the form of an odd floral taste cutting through the lingering flavor of whatever he had eaten for breakfast. It had taken everything he had to open up and finally say something to the man he'd been trying to win over for some time without success, but all that was for naught.
Joseph Joestar, with a small smile on his too genuine, too telling face, had simply thanked him for talking to him before saying “I prefer you as a friend, Caesarino.”
The blond had merely nodded and apologized quickly, walking past him at a steady, measured pace.
Five minutes later, while locked in the bathroom trying to wipe away his own tears, Caesar coughed up the first blood-covered petal.
--
If anyone noticed anything was wrong, no one was saying it. The aching, almost tearing sensation in his gut was most certainly a distraction at times, but it was still mostly manageable. The petals he'd occasionally heave up were tossed aside to be forgotten, even as they started appearing more often.
Of course, the first person to finally ask what was wrong was the cause itself.
“Hey, you feeling alright?”
Caesar was about to snap off some snark about how he was perfectly fine, but was rudely interrupted by a particularly bad coughing fit.
No...it was WORSE…
The blond turned away from Joseph as the tang of blood hit his tongue and he coughed even HARDER. Tears all but poured down his face from the sheer pain of it.
“Caesarino?”
He couldn't breathe, every inhale stinging as he FELT something coming from his lungs.
“Caesar?”
The concern rising in the brunet’s voice hit somewhere deep, and suddenly whatever he'd been coughing up came free, forcing its way out his mouth and into his waiting palm.
It was a single bloodied daffodil.
He ran off before Joseph could ask anything.
After the daffodil came the first of the roses.
It was a pretty thing, if not for Caesar’s blood tainting the soft pink petals. If only Joseph understood, COULD understand…
He tossed the bloom in the trash before storming out of the room.
--
The day they left for Switzerland, Caesar had to hide in an alley while his body forced out a full daffodil, stem and all, followed by a slew of rose and -a new addition- sunflower petals.
He hated it. He hated that even after he'd been turned down in the kindest way possible, he was still torn apart by now much he CRAVED Joseph, how much he wished that the universe could have been kinder and let him have this one thing.
Even as he tossed the flower away in a bin, and even as he pointedly avoided looking at where Joseph was giving his farewells to Suzie Q (they really were a cute couple…), he cursed himself for still loving the idiot Joestar.
--
Not even choking out a full long-stemmed pink rose (as he had only a night or two prior) could have hurt more than getting into that violent argument with Joseph. It felt like his entire chest was being torn in two. Joseph, the person he'd wanted more than anything, had openly INSULTED Caesar’s grandfather, had insulted his OWN grandfather. And of course he'd just stood and watched as he was interrupted by a wheezing, bloody coughing fit that tore free more petals. Caesar couldn't stand being there any longer.
So, he’d ran to go finish what they had come here to do. It was probably foolish, but he was already too far from their base to return, especially not with his dignity intact
The brutal tearing sensation in his chest and gut was making running harder and harder, like he was finally splitting apart from the flowers.
--
Maybe that would have been a better option in the end…
--
When Joseph and Lisa Lisa finally found their way to the crumbling building, the former nearly screaming at the top of his lungs for his best friend, they were greeted by a collection of broken, destroyed flowers and a gently drifting bubble. Panic nearly blinded the younger of the two as he continued inside, still frantically searching for Caesar while trying to ignore the silence that was returned. He wanted the blond to be okay, needed him to be. He couldn't live with himself if his Caesarino wasn't…
“Joseph…” The distant voice of his teacher drew his mind back to reality, to the slow drift of the discolored bubble that was seemingly drawn to him. The energy of the bubble was painfully familiar as it tingled across Joseph's palms.
Caesar’s hamon.
Tears stung at his eyes as the bubble popped, dropping it's cargo into his hands. The first two things he recognized immediately as Wamuu’s lip ring and Caesar’s headband. They hurt somewhere deep on their own, but Lisa Lisa’s calm voice is what did him in.
“A daffodil... Unrequited love…”
The scream that tore its way from his chest HURT and left him feeling raw and empty when it finally quieted.
--
Several weeks later, long after Joseph's return to his waiting family, Lisa Lisa finally told him that she'd known about Caesar’s condition long before they left for Switzerland, that he'd been suffering from it for several days by the time they did.
If the news was supposed to help, it only did the opposite.
It was his own fault. All of it. The fact that Caesar had been suffering at all, the fact he'd let the argument get out of hand, the fact that, for all his cleverness, he'd somehow missed the biggest sign that his best friend was HURTING…
He had a hard time living for a couple days after that.
If flowers could be born from regrets, Joseph would have been left drowning.
But the flowers never came
And Joseph was left with guilt and a single pressed daffodil in a carefully protected frame.