Work Text:
the first thing that sabito wakes up to is the beeping of his alarm in the morning from across the bedroom on his drawer. he’s not on his bed because he’s just spent the past, well, god knows how long bent over the toilet, and fallen asleep there because really, dignity is lost when you have a disease that makes you choke up flowers and blood whenever you feel sad, or realize that the person you’ve dedicated your life to won’t even notice you.
he expects himself to stand up with no hesitation but he realizes quickly that his legs have gone to jelly and he’s fucking shaking as he tries to get up.
“fuck.” his voice comes out raw and it hurts to speak. there must still be a goddamn flower inside his throat because he can feel it, so he spends the next fifteen minutes trying to cough up another whole lily before he gives up and goes to the kitchen to gulp down water mixed with honey and lime. he takes lozenges to numb his throat so that he doesn’t feel the pain and keeps the packet inside his pocket, preparing himself for one hell of a day ahead of him.
the next hour is spent very, well, efficiently. his parents are still asleep so he doesn’t have to worry about anything except waking them up, and he tiptoes around the house getting ready to go to school so that his parents don’t get suspicious.
if they see the blood on the floor again he’ll just tell them he’s been having nosebleeds. again.
he should probably come up with a better excuse or more options because that one’s been used twice already and if his parents get worried and take him to the doctor to get checked up on they’ll find the flowers growing in his chest and then, well, the questions don’t stop after that, and eventually they’ll find out that their only son, supposed head of the family, is gay. a homosexual. a faggot.
no, that can’t happen. he absolutely must keep this secret from his parents or else he’ll get disowned, and then he’ll end up on the streets, still choking on flowers and in love with giyuu and who knows where you end up when you’re homeless and have a disease like this. one that no one believes you have until you’re dying or if you’re pretty.
he knows that he’s neither, so whatever happens, happens. well, he might be dying, but who really cares because he’s just sabito. it’s more important to survive outside if you’re pretty, so he already knows that he doesn’t have a chance with the scar that slices down the side of his face. it impairs what would normally be a decent, or semi attractive face, and makes him look so much worse than he already does. he knows it could be worse but it really could also be better.
sabito goes over to the wine cabinet and very carefully pours out a bit of vodka into his water bottle, knowing that he’s going to need it throughout the day. he slides the alcohol back inside the drawer and puts the bottle in his school bag, and pours a fuckton of honey into the vodka and mixes it with a little bit of water so that he won’t be absolutely piss drunk during school.
at least he won’t be fully sober when he chokes on the flowers again, he thinks.
three hours later, he realizes how wrong he is.
oh, how incredibly wrong he is.
*
giyuu is very pretty. gorgeous. whatever adjective you like to use to describe someone attractive.
at least, that’s what the majority of the students at hashira university thinks. sabito and sanemi aren’t alone in their thoughts and every year during valentine’s day giyuu receives letter after letter and bouquets of flowers that both boys and girls give to him because, well, he’s just. that pretty.
ironic of sabito to speak of flowers in bouquets, though, because right now he’s keeled over the toilet, choking up daffodils and carnations and fucking blood and while the mess may look pretty, sabito feels like he’s going to pass out and his chest is killing him oh so very slowly, like smoking so many packs of cigarettes until your stomach turns and you don’t feel like eating anything anymore. sabito heaves another deep breath but instantly regrets his decision because fuck, he knows he’s also got roses growing in his lungs (after coughing up a whole ass flower yesterday, with much difficulty and feeling of thorns stabbing into his chest).
he doesn’t need to go to the doctor to know what disease he has because he knows and while he’s always thought hanahaki was a myth it apparently isn’t because now he’s stuck in the school bathroom at lunch time after seeing sanemi kiss giyuu on the soccer field. it smells like someone had died in there and it might as well be so, with how much his heart hurts both physically and emotionally. the back of his throat and tongue tastes like blood and rose petals and he chuckles to himself before gagging and feeling another petal poke at the cavern of his mouth.
funny how romantic this is, sabito thinks to himself. i’m coughing up flowers for someone who doesn’t even love me.
he hasn’t said anything to anyone but shinobu probably already knows, with the amount that he’s been ‘sick and wearing a mask’ and coughing in the middle of class just to run off to the bathroom. there’s matted blood in his hair and fingers from him gripping at messy peach locks when the tears stream down his face because he knows that giyuu will never want him the way he wants him.
a metallic-tasting drop of blood from his mouth lands on the floor and he wipes it away using a wadded bit of tissue that he’s ripped from the paper dispenser that stains quickly when more blood drips down. he curses and moves his mouth back over the toilet, pulling out his phone to check the time. he can still taste the honey-vodka in his mouth and he’s not completely sure that bringing alcohol to school this morning was a good idea.
there’s only three more minutes until he’s supposed to get back to class, and he’s still on the first floor, choking on flowers and drowning in his own blood, and the last thing he wants to do is to go to last period on fourth floor.
if only he wasn’t stupid enough to fall in love with someone who didn’t even know him.
*
shinobu knows, but she knows sabito well enough not to say anything about it.
she knows herself well enough to know that if she’s not careful enough to not catch feelings for her she’ll be going through the exact same thing, that if she’s not careful enough to keep a distance from mitsuri that she’ll also be coughing up bloody rhododendrons or some shit like that. fuck, she knows, but she can’t help but let her eyes linger on mitsuri’s beautiful eyes a little bit longer than usual. mitsuri doesn’t know but perhaps shinobu could live with this.
admire from a distance and never say anything. this is okay, she says, as she feels her chest harden and then release, careful and controlled.
*
mitsuri knows.
mitsuri definitely notices, but also knows that shinobu’s too good for her.
her chest tightens but she forces the feelings down, because she knows that it’ll hurt more to care than to not.
besides, she can’t bring herself to love shinobu when she knows that shinobu deserves so much better, deserves someone smarter and prettier and nicer.
someone unlike her.
a tear slips down her cheek, but it goes unnoticed. she prays that someday shinobu will find someone better.
*
sabito is so, so fucked.
he’s sitting in fourth period and knows that the teacher’s noticing something wrong with him, and thank god the mask he’s wearing is black otherwise the blood would be seeping through the thin fabric at this point.
he feels like he’s suffocating underneath the layer of cloth that covers the bottom half of his face but he knows that it’s not that bad and that he’ll survive. no matter how strong the urge to rip it off and start hacking up blood stained carnations in the middle of math class is, he doesn’t bother because then sanemi will find out and then start making fun of him for it. or the whole ass grade, might as well go big or go home, right?
as sabito walks out of the classroom when school ends he hears a conversation just around the corner, and he notices giyuu’s name.
“...aren’t they so cute together? oh my god, you should’ve seen them at the soccer field!”
“you mean giyuu and sanemi? yeah, i saw them. i mean, i kinda wanted to puke because i can’t with pda but i guess they’re just adorable together.”
and sabito doesn’t realize that there’s blood dripping down his mask until he tastes it in his mouth and kids are starting to stare.
when he gets to the bathroom he coughs up three whole flowers: a single black lily, one carnation and a daffodil. again. he’s starting to hate the sight of those yellow little fuckers; they hurt like a bitch to cough up because for some fucking reason they’re spicy to get out of his throat and god knows that he doesn’t have any tolerance for spicy food.
he coughs up a black lily, a carnation, and a daffodil, and more importantly, he coughs up a good amount of blood to stain the toilet bowl water a dark red.
when he flushes the toilet and goes home, he coughs up another happy yellow blossom and enough blood to donate to the blood center.
*
giyuu thinks that he loves sanemi, and he’s only realized it this lunch at twelve forty two because sanemi had pulled him ever so uncharacteristically gently into his arms and then kissed him.
giyuu thinks that he loves sanemi, because sanemi’s everything he’s ever looked for. his heart feels like a zoo, for fuck’s sake, from the kiss and from the realization that the person he had fallen in love with was in love with him too. giyuu loves sanemi, and for the first time in a very, very long time he feels content with life and everything it has to give him.
he loves it.
and he knows that something’s wrong, but he can’t bring himself to care when he’s fucking in love and when he has someone who knows him, who cares for him, and puts him first and most importantly sanemi loves him too.
giyuu knows something’s wrong when he begins to hear several rumours about students beginning to cough up flower petals in the middle of class. he goes to the library and reads a book called “Fictional Diseases of the Mind and Heart”, and flips to the section where the diseases start with ‘h’ and then finds this:
Hanahaki Disease (n.): a fictional disease where you cough up flowers because the person you love doesn’t return your feelings.
and giyuu knows he’s done fucked up because there had been what, at least twenty three love letters and 6 flower bouquets in his locker this year? and there are definitely students that don’t have the gall to give him anything, so that’s at least thirty students that are suffering from this stupid so-called ‘fictional’ disease that, when he tells the librarian it turns out to be real, she looks at him with an unreadable expression and merely purses her lips.
“miss, this book should be removed - one of the diseases in here is real.”
“well, the rest is accurate and therefore fictional, so i’m not removing that book. it cost too much money for me to simply take from the library.”
“miss - this book is misinforming people, people who legitimately have hanahaki disease. they must be hurting.”
“if you don’t have anymore business other than to confront me about a fictional disease then please put the book back where it was and leave the library.”
“miss -”
“leave, please.”
*
sabito doesn’t think that coffee is going to help his situation - especially iced espresso, because cold fucks up your throat more than it should - but he sips on a cup of some anyways, shaking the cup around so that the ice rattles around, which is more satisfying than it should be. it’s three in the morning on a tuesday and he wants to go to sleep but his throat is hurting him so badly that he can’t lie down without his entire neck and head aching like a bitch.
the coffee tastes bitter but sabito drinks it anyway, hoping that the caffeine will wash away some of the effects of being so exhausted from constantly coughing up flowers and blood and crying.
(he knows that it won’t.)
sabito takes out his laptop from his backpack next to him and opens it up, and starts a new document.
empty and clean.
he begins searching the flowers that he’s been coughing up and tries his best to figure out what some of them are (even if they’re covered in a thick layer of blood and saliva) and writes down the following list:
black lilies - death
carnations - fascination, love
daffodils - unrequited love, death
red roses - love
hibiscus - delicate beauty
rhododendrons - positivity
he laughs coldly at the symbolism for each flower, and he goes ahead to figure that he’s probably fucked if he’s growing six different flowers in his chest. he’s even recently gained weight from it, and he can feel the heaviness in his chest grow slowly each day, knowing that the flowers have taken root in his lungs and probably even in his stomach, for fuck’s sake, because sometimes he can see the outline of stems on his abdomen and on his chest. and that just fucks him up mentally - before he was just coughing up the flowers and he could pretend that it wasn’t real, that it was just a nightmare but now that there’s actual signs of plants growing inside his body he doesn’t think he can put off thinking about it anymore.
the meaning for rhododendrons makes him laugh just a little bit less coldly because it’s just genuinely funny that there’s a flower in him that means positivity and what about this situation was any of this positive? he’s searched up how to get rid of the flowers and he can’t get surgery, because his parents would figure him out and then realize that he’s not fit to be the head of the family. he doesn’t think he can even think about getting over giyuu.
either way, he’d be losing giyuu, and he fucking hates that idea.
he doesn’t want to lose him, but he knows that if he wants to live, then he’ll have to cut him out of his life. probably permanently too, because from the articles that he’s read people that developed hanahaki and didn’t remove the people from their lives got the disease all over again. he doesn’t want to live in a world where he doesn’t love giyuu, but at the same time, he knows that he can’t continue living with this disease and that if he keeps going he’ll probably end up six feet under in a grave, arms crossed and eyes closed.
he hates that he’s still in love with giyuu, even if he doesn’t have a single fucking chance.
*
giyuu is in his bed when sanemi texts him and asks him to call. the phone then rings twice before he picks it up, and hears sanemi’s voice through the shitty receiver.
“hey, do you wanna come over to my house? rengoku’s here and we’re watching a movie right now.”
“sure, what are you guys watching?”
“it.”
giyuu sighs. “you know i’m shit at watching horror movies, ‘nemi.”
“you’ll be fine. besides, i’ll be here.”
“god, that’s kind of cringe. but i’ll be over in ten minutes.”
giyuu disconnects the phone call, and thinks to himself:
sometimes, life is kind.
*
for shinobu, sometimes life is kind. like when she first met mitsuri on a beautiful day outside - it wasn’t beautiful for regular people, because it had been raining heavily and there were worms wiggling around on the sidewalk, but to her, it was incredibly beautiful -
simply because she had seen the girl with pink and green locks tucked into braids.
for shinobu, sometimes life is strange. like the time she got drunk and woke up surrounded by expensive cheese wheels and wearing a pair of bright orange cargo pants.
and for shinobu, sometimes life is cruel, because she’s lying on her bed sobbing her eyes out at a text that mitsuri had sent her while she was probably drunk because mitsuri had said the following with plenty of spelling errors:
[mitsuri:] srrory i cnat return ur feelings
[mitsuri:] u desreve beter than me. im not thebest for you and uu know it.
sometimes, life is cruel because shinobu ends up with her eyes bloodshot and with her fingers smashing angrily across her phone’s keyboard telling mitsuri that she can’t, she can’t just do this and that she can’t just leave her like this.
[shinobu:] ur literally everything i want.
[shinobu:] i can’t believe you thought of yourself as undeserving of me, mitsuri. i love you for who you are and i would never be able to let go of you, whether you wanted me to or not.
[shinobu:] im in love with u, and i dont think i’ll ever stop loving you until the day i die. i hope you know this.
read, 3:28 am.
and sometimes, life is kind to shinobu because mitsuri replies with a i love you too the morning after, and sometimes, life is kind to shinobu because the next day they see each other they pull each other into a kiss.
one that tells each other:
i’ll never give up on you.
*
to sanemi, love didn’t exist until he met giyuu. love didn’t exist until he saw deep navy eyes that pierced through his very soul and terrorized his psyche to get even.
to sanemi, love didn’t exist until he kissed soft lips and wrapped his arms around a slim figure that seemed to never be able to bulk up, a body like a girl’s.
or rather, it stopped existing when his parents told him at age nine his little brother died because of a sickness that no one, no doctor could cure. but the moment he saw giyuu everything seemed to zone back into color, and now sanemi’s got the one person that he knows he loves and can put before himself.
sanemi’s got someone now, and this time, he’s not letting go of them first.
*
mitsuri loves shinobu. without a doubt. she loves her to the moon and back and when she’s drunk she sends texts, texts that she wouldn’t be able to take back.
but mitsuri’s drunken texting has gotten her the person that she’s in love with, and she realizes that she’s never felt this happy before.
i don’t deserve you. i’m not the best for you and you know it.
words that she knows are true, yet shinobu still loves her like it was the end of the world. still loves her like nothing else existed.
mitsuri loves shinobu, and this time she knows that shinobu feels the same way and would never hurt her the way other boys and girls did.
*
sabito is in class, staring blankly at the wall. he can feel the other students look strangely at him from the fiasco of blood dripping from his mask down to his shirt the other day, but he simply ignores them and continues to try to drill a hole into the wall with his eyes, until the bell rings and it’s lunch time.
now he hates lunch time because he always manages to be in the same area as giyuu and sanemi together so his throat and chest starts acting up, always hacking up petals and having to rush to the bathroom so that he didn’t blow his cover.
(spoiler alert: half the school already knew - they just felt extreme apathy towards his situation.)
sabito thinks it’s funny and ironic when he sees flowers growing on the side of the soccer field, and drags himself up to the top floor where there’s a school garden. there’s flowers everywhere, and it makes him feel sick. he’s seen the sight of petals and leaves coming from his own body for so long that seeing it any more than he already has makes him feel disgusted.
he stands there, and opens up his bag to fish out the can of hot coffee that he bought this morning. by now it’s lukewarm but it’s still better than cold, so he cracks it open and takes a slow sip. he’s read that drinking hot drinks and eating food that’s acidic helps kill the flowers a little bit and slow their growth, but he’s also read that coffee is incredibly good for plants to grow, so he’s not completely sure what’s going to happen.
maybe he should try drinking hot coffee to see what would happen.
he can hear people walking up the staircase and he doesn’t want to be seen like this, drinking coffee with his hoarse throat and fucked up shirt that’s still stained because of the blood getting all over it, so he goes and hides in the corner that no one goes to except to use as storage. he hears the voices and fuck, why does it always have to be sanemi and giyuu?
he hears their bubbling laughter bouncing throughout the stairwell and he can feel petals trying their goddamn hardest to crawl up his throat but he swallows them guiltily and listens, listens to what the couple in love have to say to each other.
“...and then he went boom! like that.”
“you’re so childish, nemi.”
“fuck off, i just like movies.”
“look at these flowers! they’re so pretty.”
“they’re just flowers, giyuu, i don’t understand the appeal.”
“they’re pretty and -”
“shut up, i’ve heard you go on a rant about how adorable flowers are. i love you, dumbass.”
“mm. love you too.”
and when those words are exchanged sabito can feel a piece of his heart break off and turn into a petal that he silently hacks up at the corner he’s hiding behind. he hears their conversation continue but it’s more like white noise as he coughs up blood and petals mixed together, a beautiful mess that’s killing him just like everything that’s happening with giyuu.
a beautiful mess that he knows he’ll die from because he can’t abandon his feelings for giyuu.
he wishes he was shinobu sometimes, because shinobu isn’t hurting.
*
shinobu hurts, and when she hurts, it’s not a tingle of pain in her chest - it’s a stab through her heart that slices her spine in half, because even though she’s got mitsuri with her now she still hurts knowing that mitsuri will never love her the same way back.
shinobu hurts because mitsuri’s hers but not hers; hurts because even though she should be happy she’s not; hurts because the world seems to want her to be as miserable as possible even when she has the girl that she loves the most; hurts when mitsuri tells her i love you because she knows that their definition of love is different for each other, and what shinobu has in mind must be so much further than what mitsuri wants. shinobu hurts because she knows that even when she ‘has’ mitsuri she’ll never truly be hers, and she hurts just because she fucking can.
shinobu hurts, and this time, she doesn’t do anything about it.
*
sabito doesn’t think that he’s supposed to be growing seven different flowers in his lungs but he realizes that the flowers don’t give a single flying fuck and do so anyway when he chokes up a stupid hyacinth for the first time. his head and heart doesn’t want to admit what’s happening but his lungs will show him first and the flowers just keep coming, just keep fucking growing and choking him and he knows that the longer this goes on that he’ll suffocate but his heart hurts at the idea of both losing and keeping giyuu in his life, so he doesn’t do anything about it.
the blood spills from his mouth in a steady drip, gurgling up from his mouth onto the tiled shower floor mixing with body wash and hot water. no one else can hear him sobbing and he takes comfort in that information, letting the petals flow down the drain along with all his tears. he cries as petals fall from his mouth, cries as he realizes that giyuu will always be in love with sanemi no matter what, and cries as he feels his chest become entangled by a mess of thorns and stems.
if only everything didn’t fucking hurt , he thinks to himself as another wave of flowers and blood and more fucking blood pours out of his mouth without warning.
he won’t stop choking up flowers until giyuu’s his,
and he knows that will be his downfall.
*
sabito decides to pick up smoking.
it’s a stupid idea but if it kills the flowers growing in his chest then he’ll take it, even if he’s killing himself at the same time.
(and then again, what’s new? loving giyuu has caused him to fall into this pit of petals and blood and petals and fucking blood every day.)
shinobu one day tells him, mitsuri took my heart away from me, sabito. what else will giyuu take from you?
and as he takes a long drag from his fourth cigarette within the past thirty minutes on his balcony, parents just downstairs eating dinner (he can still hear the tableware clinking softly and their loving giggles echo through the house), he replies to her in his head, nicotine buzz filling his head with emptiness -
at least you have mitsuri, shinobu. giyuu’s taken away my life from me, and i don’t even have his attention.
sabito spends more time in the bathroom than he does in bed these days, spends more time choking on shitty yellow and black and carnation petals and his own salty blood that, these days, tastes more like water at this point from how often he’s smelling and tasting it, than he does sleeping. it leaves his eyes red and the skin underneath dark and purple. he looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and while it isn’t true, he’s gotten about nine hours of sleep within the past seven days. not even consecutively, but nothing’s that blurry yet. yet.
when he’s convinced he can’t puke up any more blood and flowers than he already has he rinses out his mouth with warm water. he brushes his teeth with shaky hands that don’t want to get the mint anywhere near the injuries in his throat and accidentally cold-burn the delicate wounds, but when he spits out the toothpaste he feels a bit of it slide down his throat. he ends up on the floor choking his lungs out, coughing up pink toothpaste that slowly turns from a pastel pink to a bright neon pink that makes him feel nauseous enough to want to throw up into the toilet.
so he does, and this time no petals come up with the shower of blood that pukes out of his body like a shitty confetti surprise, one that’s only dark red mixed with streaks of white that eventually disappear and just leaves him with blood expelling itself from his mouth. he tries so hard to keep it down but it makes him feel like he’s drowning again, so he can’t do anything except to leave his mouth open and let the mess slide up his throat and out of his mouth into the water, tears streaming down his face and his body going numb as he throws up over and over again.
when the blood somewhat stops flowing, he stands back up and goes back over to the balcony, and goes to smoke his fifth cigarette of the evening.
he still hacks up the smoke mixed with bits of blood and phlegm occasionally because his body’s just a bitch like that but the high is worth it, and the floating of his head from one place to another is worth the screaming of his parents’ voices and their disappointment in him as they find him drunkenly crying and sitting on the kitchen floor drinking from the bottle of tequila at one in the morning.
*
giyuu laughs at sanemi when he screams as giyuu jumps out of his hiding spot that he’s been sitting in for fifteen minutes, and giggles when sanemi pulls him into a hug mumbling things like god i fucking hate you, you dumbass and but i love you anyway. giyuu knows that everything’s wrong because he can’t help but ignore the tugging of his heartstrings whenever he hears a new rumour about how another kid has contracted hanahaki disease because of him.
one day sanemi drags him to the mall next to the school and they eat rose-shaped and rose-flavored ice cream that stains giyuu’s light blue jeans when he eats it too slow and it begins dripping down his hand and then onto his pants. the flower eventually melts into a pile that he needs to put into a cup because he eats so slowly and the ice cream melts so quickly, and he rolls his eyes when sanemi makes fun of him for being so clumsy.
“look at the stain, it looks like somebody nutted on your pants,” sanemi says inbetween laughing his ass off, knowing that giyuu’s going to hit him later for his inappropriate joke.
giyuu knows he’s in love, and yet, he feels something’s off.
*
mitsuri loves shinobu enough to live for her. dying for someone isn’t difficult enough - asking someone to live for you is harder. she knows that she’s a fool to keep on chasing after nothing great but she doesn’t know where she’s supposed to go or what she’s supposed to do so she wraps her arms tighter around shinobu and inhales sweet smelling shampoo and body wash.
mitsuri’s in fucking pain because what she wants from shinobu must be something that shinobu would never be willing to give to her - not her body, her virginity, nothing like that - but her heart, soul, and mind. she wants so much more than what she already has and she feels selfish for her desires. she knows that she can never have what she truly wants and feels like a fool for falling in love with deep purple eyes and purple strands of hair.
she loves shinobu so fucking much that it hurts, hurts more than when they weren’t together. hurts when she puts her head on her shoulder. mitsuri hurts because she knows that love isn’t supposed to be like this, isn’t supposed to be painful but it still does anyways because something’s wrong and she can’t figure out what it is that she needs to fix.
she’s losing her fucking mind and she knows it.
*
sabito wakes up in the afternoon with a massive headache and blood pooling on his sheets. his sheets are black so they don’t stain so easily but the smell, fuck, the smell makes him want to throw up except he can’t because if he goes to vomit again he’ll end up with more blood loss than he wants.
he steps outside his room and his parents are sitting in the dining room across the hallway. their eyes turn towards him when they hear his door open, and he can visibly see his father’s temple nearly bursting with a vein.
“sabito… we need to talk.”
everything that he’s ever done in his entire life flashes through his head and he prays to god that it’s only about being drunk in the kitchen last night, but he guesses that the world’s too cruel for that because his father starts asking him about a flower petal that he forgot to clean up, kicked underneath his bed carelessly.
apparently after they put him back in bed they searched his room for drugs and ended up finding flowers instead, thinking that he was part of a cult and instead they start asking questions about why they’re covered in dried blood and look so crinkled.
he doesn’t have the heart to tell them the truth so he tells them he’s been cutting himself and dripping it onto flowers that he bought for the girl he liked (which is close enough to the truth, he thinks). they don’t buy it but they don’t bother him anymore about it because they’d only found bloody flower petals and not cocaine in his room.
they don’t try to see if he’s actually been cutting himself, nor ask him about who the girl is and why he’s doing something so fucked up for her, and instead of relief at the dismissal he feels so much worse because he knows that they don’t care about his genuine wellbeing - as long as he isn’t messing up their reputation, they don’t care and when he reaches his bedroom he starts sobbing and choking up delicate bluish purple petals.
forget me nots.
ironic, sabito thinks to himself, as he heaves against the toilet bowl and vomits up the pretty little flowers, that leaves behind an itch that even using up all the air in his lungs to get rid of doesn’t help with. he swallows it down instead and makes a cup of boiling hot tea in his room, taking a sip to keep the flowers down.
black lilies - death
carnations - fascination, love
daffodils - unrequited love, death
red roses - love
hibiscus - delicate beauty
rhododendrons - positivity
he adds new flowers to the list:
hyacinth - sorrow
forget me not - what the fuck do you think it means, stupid
eight flowers.
he leaves the house, goes out to the middle of nowhere and screams eight times, eight times for each flower and twice because he’ll never have giyuu. when he screams his throat aches in pain and he wants to stop but at the same time he doesn’t, because he knows that when he stops there’s nothing to distract him from whatever the fuck is going on in his head and heart and nothing is okay.
nothing. is. okay.
when sabito goes home, his parents don’t look at him and just stare their dinner down.
he goes to his room, fills the bathtub to the brim when he finishes smoking three cigarettes and undresses, stepping inside. the hot water is a relief for his throbbing chest, and he traces a finger down a stem that hasn’t gone away since the first day.
he sits inside until he falls asleep, and when he wakes up the water’s freezing cold and tinged pink. petals float serenely around him as though they weren’t something he’d choked up while he was still sleeping, and the whole scene would look so beautiful and peaceful if it weren’t for the trail of dried blood that drips down his chin.
the water’s freezing cold and tinged pink, just like his feelings for giyuu.
the water’s freezing cold, just like giyuu’s feelings towards him.
*
“mitsuri, i need to talk to you.”
“what’s up?”
“i don’t think this will work out. i mean, honestly, you deserve so much better than me and what i want from you is so selfish and i feel bad so you deserve to be happy with someone who doesn’t want to mess you up-”
“shinobu-”
“and i don’t think you should be with me anymore because i’ll never enough for you.”
“and here i thought i was stupid.”
“what do you mean, you thought you were stupid-”
“shinobu, i could never stop loving you, even if you wanted me to. i love you for who you are and all i want from you is your heart. i don’t want anything else, i just love you and want you.”
“...mitsuri, you’ve said everything i’ve wanted to say to you within the past two weeks.”
“we just needed to have a conversation, didn’t we?”
“yeah, honestly. hey, mitsuri?”
“yes?”
“i love you so, so much. i don’t care whether you feel the same way anymore - i fucking love you, and you can’t make me stop loving you.”
“i love you too.”
*
sometimes, life is kind, and shinobu has never been happier in her entire life.
(that day her and mitsuri go out for ice cream together and end up kissing sweetly and tenderly in the café. people give them dirty looks but she couldn’t fucking care less, because she has the girl she loves with her and now they know that they feel the same way towards each other.)
*
sabito’s finished with his first ever pack of cigarettes and right now, his parents are screaming at him wildly because they found a single stick that he forgot to kick off the fourteenth floor. you can’t do this to yourself. you’re ruining our reputation. keep going and you’re going to fucking die.
which is when sabito decides he’s finally had enough of their bullshit and spits in their face, either way i’m going to die. haven’t you heard me coughing in the middle of the night? mom, dad, there’s eight different types of flowers growing in my lungs because there’s a boy i love and it’s all fucked up but i’m so tired of hiding everything from you both. i don’t care if you disown me at this point, because i’ll die alone anyways and no one will fucking care.
his parents look stunned but the information slowly sinks in, and the look on his mother’s face slowly turns from shock into horrific realization of what she’s just learned about her son. his father’s face drops into one of shame, and then he says:
we’ll get you the surgery for the flowers. but after that, you’re no longer our son. you’re a fucking faggot, and we can’t have that stain on our family name.
sabito doesn’t think that they’re sugarcoating this time, and his heart and lungs ache because he knows that he’s fucked up, permanently.
look, i don’t want the fucking surgery. i’d rather die than not be in love anymore. this is the most i’ve ever felt and -
his father looks furious and starts cursing at him, saying you’re such a fucking teenager. god, i can’t believe i raised this pussy homosexual for a son. i can’t believe you’re my spawn, and i can’t believe that you’re willing to die for a boy. not even a girl, but a boy. you disgust me.
his heart breaks into even smaller pieces when his father calls him a faggot, a bitch, a bastard, but he prays that they won’t get him the surgery.
you’re getting the fucking surgery, sabito, and we don’t care what you think. we just need to get you out of this house.
then fucking kick me out, dad, i don’t care if you do.
i have enough dignity to not let my son, even if he’s a faggot, to die from a disease that doesn’t even exist.
sabito wants to argue, but he’s so exhausted at this point that he just turns his back on his mother and father and goes into his room.
this time when he throws up the daffodils and carnations and lilies and forget me nots he just sits there, staring at toilet water dyed red and petals and even a whole fucking daffodil that he’d wheezed out.
he knows there’s one more flower growing, one that’ll kill him if he doesn’t either get surgery or cut off his feelings for giyuu.
he knows that there’s one more flower growing, because he can feel the stem growing in his throat and he thinks that it’s a rose because whenever he inhales and exhales a breath he can feel thorns lightly scratching against soft tissue.
how romantic and poetic it is to die from flowers, sabito thinks to himself before he wobbles his way to the bed and collapses.
his last thought before everything goes dark is i’d rather die than wake up feeling nothing for giyuu, and then his head spins and the world disappears into nothing in front of his eyes.
*
the first thing that he wakes up to this time is beeping, but not from his alarm. he lies on white sheets and feels the tubes connected to his body and knows that this time, when he thinks about him he won’t feel anything and -
fuck, he wants to feel the rose thorns and itchiness in his throat again. he wants to feel something because now all he feels is numb and stupid because his parents had put him through the surgery while he was passed out. they’re not in the room, and most likely won’t ever be again, but a nurse bustles in and asks him questions about how he’s feeling.
sabito looks to the side and sees a bucket full of bloodied flowers, and one especially large rose with a thick stem and large thorns. he slowly realizes that that’s what’s been growing inside his chest, and in a panicked frenzy he feels around for the stems that normally poke out of his abdomen and.
nothing.
he thinks about giyuu, expecting the wave of emotions and copper to rise in his mouth but -
nothing.
and this time, he sits in his bed, screaming his throat hoarse until the doctor comes rushing in asking what the hell is wrong but what does he reply with when everything’s fucking wrong, when he can’t feel anything for someone he used to feel everything for, and he can feel tears streaming down his face even though he don’t want them to even be there in the first place? what the fuck does he reply with when the doctor asks him what’s wrong, sabito? why are you screaming? when all he can do is let out a broken sob as his heart feels numb even though in reality he should be hurting more than he has ever hurt in his entire life.
why the fuck did you remove the flowers from my chest, he screams at the doctor, and the doctor tries to explain herself but nothing’s helping.
sir, the flowers were literally about to cut through your lungs, we had to do it otherwise you would’ve died from suffocation -
and sabito says in a broken tone, i’d rather die than feel nothing for him at all.
sabito loses many things today - he loses the flowers in his chest, he loses his parents, he’s lost everything that he’s dedicated his entire existence to, and he loses himself as he cries until he can feel the ghost of something like pain in his heart, that quickly goes away the moment he tries to think about giyuu.
he loses everything that had been his and his only, and his heart aches because now he truly has nothing.
*
giyuu feels something in the back of his throat, but he swallows it down because he doesn’t want to believe what’s happening.
his head aches and his heart hurts, and all he wants is a fucking break.
*
sanemi cries this morning when he pukes up white gardenia petals, and he knows that it’s all gone to shit.
whatever he had with giyuu is gone.
*
when the hospital lets sabito out of the hospital he’s all fake smiles, fake laughs and fake happiness to finally be released from the clutches of a disease that he was truly about to die from when in reality he wishes he could go back. go back in time and fucking go straight to his room and throw away the single cigarette that had destroyed everything that he’d loved, kick it off his balcony, shove it into the toilet and flush it down, whatever the fuck he needed to do so that he wouldn’t be feeling so goddamn hollow right now.
he has nowhere to go except to go back to school so that’s what he does, no bag and no homework done for the past three days because that’s how long the surgery took to get the stupid flowers out of his lungs. three days of being asleep in a room while they slowly and carefully removed what defined him as a person, three days of being gone from school while he missed classes and missed work that he shouldn’t have missed, three days of being taken apart and put back together messily as though a toddler on fucking acid had done the job.
the first step he takes inside the building is a step that suddenly makes him realize how hopeless everything was in the first place. giyuu never would’ve seen him in the first place, so he’d wasted weeks vomiting up gorey flowers and bits of his heart that he knows he’ll never get back because even if the flowers are gone the soft petals have taken something with them.
sabito doesn’t know what the fuck to do so he climbs to the top floor where the school garden is, remembering how last time he was here he’d coughed up enough petals to make a pile for autumn to jump in, remembering how last time he was here he was drinking shitty lukewarm coffee that didn’t help the situation going on with his throat at all.
sabito doesn’t know what the fuck to do so he sits on the floor, and lets the breeze comb through his hair and inhales the smell of tulips and lilies and flowers that used to make him want to throw up when he smelled them but now the scent enters his nose and he feels nothing. he misses feeling the sharp ache of thorns wrapped around his lungs whenever he inhaled and he misses feeling the dull throb that drinking anything cold left in his chest and head and throat.
he thinks that he used to be a sunflower whose sun was giyuu. he’d faced the sun, his giyuu, constantly, but now that his sun’s been taken away where the hell does he face? where does he look, when he’s on the verge of being withered and his life feels like every bit of warmth has been removed from him?
he hears footsteps coming up the stairs and he realizes that there’s someone coming up here, and they sound like they’re out of breath from running.
when he turns around, he sees someone he should feel ecstatic to see, yet he feels nothing but apathy.
he doesn’t know what to say anymore when giyuu faces him, face flushed and a bead of sweat dripping down the side of his face.
*
giyuu’s hands are on his knees and he’s staring down at the ground. sabito’s face is blank and
shows no emotion when he looks up, and the blue suddenly seems to be so much more unsaturated than normal.
“sabito…”
sabito doesn’t reply. he just stares at him, head still turned at a painful looking angle as his eyes seem to dig into his soul and try to find words to say.
“sabito. i realized this yesterday, after i broke up with sanemi,” and he looks for a sign of anything other than emptiness in sabito’s eyes, “that i fell in love with you.”
lavender eyes don’t crinkle up in a smile. now that giyuu thinks about it, something’s strange. he’d figured out that sabito was suffering from the worst case of hanahaki at their school just a few days ago, yet he’s not wearing his mask. he’s not coughing. what had happened while he was gone?
“giyuu, i’m sorry.” his voice is still hoarse, but it doesn’t sound like he’s been choking up flowers and blood and more flowers for the past near month and a half.
“sabito - sabito, what do you mean, sorry?” giyuu’s voice shakes because he already knows the answer but he asks anyway, so that he doesn’t have to break his own heart.
“i had the surgery. i’m not sick anymore.” sabito’s voice holds nothing, no emotion in it, and giyuu doesn’t know what’s worse - to know that he no longer has a chance, or to know that sabito’s completely gone. that there’s nothing left for him.
and in that moment, giyuu feels an uncontrollable urge to let out a scream, to let out all the confusion that he’s been feeling even when with sanemi, to let out every single bit of pain that he’s been feeling but when he opens his mouth nothing comes out but a soft oh that leaves him involuntarily.
he feels a tear roll down his cheek, then another, then another. he smiles, eyes curving into pretty crescents that sanemi always made fun of because of how they shrunk into little slits whenever he smiled or laughed.
“you’re - you’re not lying to me, right?” giyuu hates that his voice comes out the way it does but he forces it out anyways, praying to god that it’s all just a joke and that he can still have sabito.
“i’m not.” the tone is careful but something sound strained. giyuu decides not to push it.
“ oh.” he knows he sounds absolutely shattered but he doesn’t care at this point -
was this how sabito had felt the entire time that he was infatuated with sanemi? is this how it feels to have his heart so thoroughly broken, that it feels like somebody lit paper on fire and then stomped on the ashes?
giyuu just turns and runs, too scared to face whatever he has to face.
*
sabito still feels nothing after the entire interaction with giyuu, and with that he realizes that his feelings are truly gone. that he has nothing left for dark blue eyes and silky black hair; he has nothing left to give. not even a fucking flower because he doesn’t cough them up anymore.
sabito doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore, so he just walks down the stairs and goes to the convenience store to buy another pack of cigarettes.
he has no home to go back to, and he has no one to give himself to, so he finishes the entire pack on a bench next to a non-smoking park and feels his stomach turn because he’s had way too many cigarettes within the past hour.
he doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want to sleep, and just wants to feel the ache of flowers growing inside him.
he doesn’t want anything to do with any of this anymore, so the first thing he does when he stands up (besides wobbling because he’s had too much nicotine) is use the rest of his money on a taxi to go to the beach.
the sound of the waves crashing against the sand is calming and there’s no one around because it’s still too early in the week for people to go around partying. he sits down in the yellowish white sand and stays there until the sun goes down, and he watches the sun set, skies dipping from a cornflower blue to a deep orangey reddish color and then fade to a purple.
it’s beautiful, and he wishes that giyuu was here and that he was still in love with him.
he wishes that he still was in love with giyuu, because that was the only time that he’d ever felt anything other than a heaviness that he could never get rid of.
he wishes that he was still in love with giyuu, because that was the only time he’d ever felt.
*
sanemi chokes and nearly drowns in his own blood. he can’t do anything, because he’d just fallen in love with giyuu like that and fallen so hard and fast that he sped through the first few stages of hanahaki disease.
now he’s lying on the ground, vision going dark and throat aching, in a puddle of his own blood and his eyes are closing slowly.
i wasn’t made for giyuu, and giyuu wasn’t made for me, sanemi thinks loudly inside his head when his eyes slip shut and the final flower pushes out of his mouth.
in three hours, obanai and shinobu find him in the unisex bathroom.
in four, he’s rushed to the hospital,
and in four and a half, sanemi shinazugawa is legally dead.
Name of Person(s): Sanemi Shinazugawa
Sex/Gender: Male/male
Age: 18
Cause of Death: Hanahaki Disease, suffocation
Date and Time of death: xx/xx/xxxx, 3:16 pm.
*
giyuu knows that it’s selfish, but he doesn’t cry when sanemi dies because sanemi had merely taken sabito away from him. giyuu doesn’t cry when sanemi dies because sanemi was just a waste of time.
or at least, that’s what the rumors say.
in reality, giyuu cries so much, that his voice goes dry for the next two days. he cries enough to fill the ocean over and over again. he cries until he has no tears left to let out. he cries because he knows that if he hadn’t doubted himself so much, sanemi would still be here. he cries because he knows that if he hadn’t fallen for sabito, sanemi would still be here laughing with him and -
he cries, because he knows that if he hadn’t fucked up, he wouldn’t have lost both of them.
he cries, because he knows that if he had been able to choose, then he wouldn’t have lost both sabito and sanemi.
*
sabito thinks that he’s a terrible person for not being properly sad when sanemi dies. sure, he feels the required oh shit he’s dead but he doesn’t feel sad, doesn’t feel something’s gone because he’s already been feeling so empty for the past week that nothing changes how he feels.
sabito feels nothing when sanemi dies, but he still hurts. he hurts because he’s lost a good amount of himself both physically and emotionally; hurts because he’s essentially being a parasite off his good friend obanai, who’s offering him a home to live in; hurts because he’s just been given up on and thrown to the side oh so easily.
sabito hurts because he knows that even if he doesn’t catch feelings for giyuu and doesn’t spit out flower petals for him anymore, that he’s never going to truly let go.
the surgery just removes all the physical parts that are required for you to love someone, but sabito had loved giyuu with so much of himself that even a surgery that should do the trick hadn’t fixed everything.
every now and then he wishes that he still properly loved giyuu, and he knows that if he overcomes a physical barrier that he can, but he doesn’t want to end up in the same place as sanemi, thank you very much, cremated because his family didn’t have land to bury him and thrown into the ocean at the very beach that sabito had watched the sun go down.
he tells himself it’s because he doesn’t want to die.
the real reason is that he’s selfish and doesn’t want to hurt more than he already does.
(so he carries on, with the pain inside his chest, with no choice but carry on.)
* epilogue *
two years later when sabito turns 20, he finally feels a petal crawl up his chest, when he sees giyuu with a woman he’s never seen before and he knows that he’s massively fucked up when he ends up in the same position as three years ago, keeled over the toilet bowl and throwing up flowers that don’t mean anything anymore because the doctor from when he was seventeen wasn’t careful enough to remove one of the roots still buried underneath his rib.
sabito throws up flowers, and he guess that it’s his fate to die young from heartbreak.
daffodils. and forget me nots. those are the flowers he throws up, and it starts all over again.
(because fuck being happy, when you can have your heart broken over and over again, right?)
fin.