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I love you so much that it is killing me.
Imagine this: you meet someone for the first time and they are bigger than you, stronger. And you feel nothing for them besides anger and envy, and you vow to yourself that day this: I will never stop competing with you.
Imagine this: it is one year later and you are so in love with this person that flowers suffocate you, spill from your mouth, grow in your lungs; and you are so in love that as you cough up lilac petals you think: I would rather die than give this up
I love you so much that it is killing me and I would rather die than live a life without loving you . This is what you would think. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe you’d think something far less poetic; maybe you’d think oh my god or maybe you’d think flowers don’t normally come out of people’s lungs.
But Hinata Shouyou thought that very thought as his cupped hands held flower petals sticky with saliva. And then, with a shaky breath, he took note of the texture in his hands and exhaled: “Yuck.”
The bathroom light seemed a little bit brighter; it always flickers a little initially, but his senses are otherwise heightened like they usually are when he is stressed or overwhelmed, and as he’d flicked the petals from his hand into the bowl of the toilet he tried to shield his sight from the light overhead.
Shouyou attempted to focus his mind on the running of the water as he carefully twisted the faucet, tried to focus on the way the soap poured into his palms, the way the water swirled slowly down the drain. But the back of Hinata Shouyou’s mind was swimming with thoughts of Kageyama Tobio, thoughts of unrequited love, the very proof of this flushed down the toilet bowl.
( The very proof of this: flowers growing in his chest, petals tickling his throat, vines inevitably waiting to pierce his lungs. )
It was reminiscent of the scene of an emotionless murderer washing the blood from his hands. But he was not a murderer, and his hands were not full of blood, and he was not emotionless.
( The very proof of this : tear tracks staining his face when he’d settled into bed, lights shut out, shaking body curled into a ball. )
There are many things you do not know about Hanahaki disease. Many things Hinata Shouyou hadn’t known. Topics like this - rare and painful diseases - were deemed unnecessary to explore in great detail, especially because Hanahaki was so rare to experience.
Here is something you might not know: Hanahaki is genetic. There are probably studies out there on the origins, the first survivor of Hanahaki, the first person to realize just why certain people began coughing up flower petals until they died. Those didn’t matter. What did matter was that the reason this disease was so uncommon was because, even in the cases of the most heart-wrenching unrequited love, some people just didn’t have the genes to hone such an illness. Even in certain cases where you did contain the genes to have this disease, it remained dormant throughout an entire life.
Hinata Shouyou wished he was so lucky.
Here is something else you might not know: The flowers which you cough up show you your view on the person that you are in love with. Not who they truly are, not who they will be, not where your love will end up - it shows you, plain and simple, your active perception of this love and the person you are in love with.
( Here is something you might not know: Hinata Shouyou had coughed up a handful of purple lilac petals. Something else: Purple lilacs symbolize first love. )
When Hinata Shouyou was young, he always dreamed about love. At the time he hadn’t processed that boys were an option, hardly even processed what love was, what it meant; but he did imagine that it would fill his heart with a fuzzy, floating feeling. He imagined that love would take shape in him at the perfect time, that his heart would sync with someone else’s.
And yet his first time experiencing love — real love, romantic love, the kind that makes your fingertips numb and your head spin — it was smooth petals pouring from his throat.
It would only get worse. He stayed up late that night on his laptop in the dark before he’d mustered up the courage to fall asleep, because he assumed his nightmares would be plagued with the same pain that his waking life would now be. He’d read article upon article on Hanahaki: things that told him of aching chests and sour stomachs and vines suffocating you.
Articles that told him of how the flower petals would become flower heads, and the saliva which covered them became blood. Articles that told him about the death, seemingly inevitable — if you do not get the vines removed surgically, therefore removing your love, the vines and the flowers and the thorns puncture your lungs and you suffocate.
One particular article told him something that made his hands shake: in rare cases, even rarer than the disease itself, the surgery would remove any care for this person at all — even platonic — simply making you permanently look at them as nothing but a stranger. In even rarer cases: it would remove your memories of this person entirely.
Hinata Shouyou shut his laptop after that, and he’d burrowed beneath the covers, and he’d cried.
There was something terrifying about seeing Kageyama Tobio for the first time since he’d discovered the disease that lived inside of him. They walked together to school slowly; somehow the races and the competition had fizzled into peaceful walks over the months they had known each other. Shouyou could hardly look at Kageyama the entire time they’d walked that day.
At practice it wasn’t hard for the other members of Karasuno’s Volleyball club to tell that there was something off with Hinata. He’d been slower than usual that day, and thick bags settled under his eyes that indicated a lack of sleep. He avoided looking at Kageyama nearly the entire time, and had only jumped to spike one of his friend’s tosses during the practice match.
At a certain point Hinata had rasped out that he had to head to the bathroom real quick, followed by worried expressions from each member of the team, and then Noya had sighed in resignation and decided to follow Hinata into the bathroom
( If there was anyone that could comfort Hinata and yet still get the truth out of him, oddly enough, it was Nishinoya Yuu. )
What Noya did not expect to see was Hinata Shouyou in the bathroom in front of the mirror, hands clenching the side of the sink until his knuckles went white, heaving up a throatful of purple lilac petals. “Holy shit,” He’d mumbled, then, and Shouyou looked up at him, wiped his wet mouth with the sleeve of his shirt which was tugged over his hand.
Hinata opened his mouth to speak, but Noya beat him to it; “Who is it?” He asked, staring at the sink, stepping forward slowly. It felt sort of like approaching an injured animal, trying not to scare them into running and yet still getting close enough to help.
Shouyou licked his lips, glanced behind Noya like he was making sure the coast was clear before he spilled something so secretive. “I’m the only one that came,” Noya gently told him, and Shouyou leaned into the wall and felt the ceramic against his back. It was cold even through the fabric of his shirt.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Shouyou whispered, staring at the ceiling, “Kageyama is the only person it could be.”
Noya blinks. Looks at the petals in the sink and then back to Hinata. The petals aren’t just the purple lilacs but white lilac petals now, too. “I never thought…” Noya trails off, mumbling mostly to himself.
Shouyou stares at him with wide eyes, and there are tears there, and Shouyou can hardly tell if they’re watery because of the fear or because of the pain in his throat. “You didn’t think I’d loved him?” His voice is a hopeful whisper in the bathroom, and it bounces off of the tiles like an echo.
From there, in the bathroom ( which smells a little like hand sanitizer and bleach ) Noya meets his younger friend’s eye and tells him, “I never thought for a second that Kageyama wouldn’t love you back.”
Shouyou stares at him then, for a moment that lapses in time, and he closes his eyes so tight that tears squeeze out and tremble down the curve of his rosy cheeks. He lets out a desperate little sob, covering his face behind his hands.
Time is unsteady and blurred as Noya pulls his friend into a hug and tries not to cry, too.
( One more thing you might not know about Hanahaki disease: you can still be infected by the disease if your object of affection has romantic feelings developing for you, so long as those feelings have not yet become love. )
Keeping a secret like this is draining. Especially so when this secret threatens to spill out at the most inconvenient times — in the middle of class while the teacher is talking about trigonometry, at the dinner table with his mother and Natsu, during a practice match against Nekoma.
Shouyou manages to hide it, but he cannot say that his annoyingly frequent coughing has not managed to raise a few eyebrows. Tsukishima had even walked in on him with tearfilled eyes in the bathroom right before lunch period, and their eyes had sort of met, and Hinata was almost confident that Kei knew.
Tsukishima could be described as a lot of bad things, Shouyou had a list, but he knew that his tall teammate was a keen observer. While this was a good case on the court, and assisted many wins ( — would continue to assist many more, ) Shouyou found himself cursing it as he fought crying while he walked past Kei quickly to scurry to where he and Kageyama met during lunch.
Tsukishima was an asshole, but he wasn’t a completely awful person: Hinata knew that he wasn’t cruel enough to spill a secret like this. That didn’t shift the guilt stirring in his stomach at the very thought of a secret like this being held in Tsukishima’s hands, though.
He’d been sidelined during volleyball practice more times than he could count, including Suga approaching him while the others practiced receives and serves. Suga was a gentle sort of person, with calm eyes and soft tones, but something about him still made Hinata nervous.
Maybe it was just the fact that Hinata was afraid of ever disappointing someone like that: he sort of idolized Suga, looked up to him, learned from him. They all did, even the second years.
Maybe this is why, instead of opening up to Suga or agreeing to go to the nurse, he brushed it off as a cold and told his upperclassman that he already went to the doctor for it anyway. Something in the wistful glint in Suga’s eye told Shouyou that he might not entirely believe him. If he hadn’t, though, he didn’t say anything about it.
Instead a silence approached slowly between them, and Shouyou allowed his eyes to drift towards their friends where they practiced in front of them, and Shouyou tried not to stare too hard at Kageyama. For a steady second Kageyama had turned to Shouyou, and their eyes met, and Hinata’s hands shook where they pressed into the bench on either side of himself.
Shortly after the conversation with Suga, he heads off to the bathroom to cough up a stream of purple and white, and he feels so lucky as to not have to see a liquid red in the mix.
He understands now what they mean in poetry when they describe love as pain, as broken hearts and open wounds, and yet they yearn for more. He understands that this is what people are made of: loving and hurting and yet still wanting that pain as a reminder that you are alive and that you are capable of experiencing life like everyone else.
He understands now why all the people in the stories cry and shatter over heartache, and he thinks this pain is not the addictive part, but instead it is the shock on the surface of his skin when they touch or the pounding of his heart when their eyes meet.
( He knows well that it’s only time until something awful becomes of what has already begun inside of him. )
It’s a week into Hinata being affected by Hanahaki disease when Kageyama finds out. There hasn’t been much development on the type of flowers which fall from his lips, except that the lilac petals have upgraded to full flowers. Not that this is a particularly scary thing either way: the flowers are hardly bigger than a quarter, and Hinata hadn’t noticed the difference until he looked in his trash bin one night and caught sight of a pile of full lilacs.
A new flower had joined the mix, then: a yellow one shaped sort of like a ball, maybe just as tiny as the lilacs. The mix of flowers wasn’t particularly beautiful, not like they try to tell you: the petals were torn by teeth and sticky with saliva and unattractive as they spun down the toilet bowl.
Shouyou had tried to figure out the flower in hopes that he could figure what the symbolization might be; not that he needed it, because he was well aware of the subject of his desire. The only result he could find were Craspedias, but those were too large and the petals were far too thick.
( And they symbolize good health, which was both ironic and simply inaccurate. )
It was a Friday when he’d decided to swing by the school library to look for some book that would help him interpret the flowers and their meanings, and the only one he could find was one with a big label that read this: the flowers of HANAHAKI.
When he pushed it across the desk towards the librarian, he’d blushed and ducked his head and mumbled: “It's for a friend. A project. A friend’s project.”
The librarian clearly couldn’t care less.
It was that same Friday when he’d asked Kageyama to retrieve his knee pads from his bag without thinking, and he’d turned just in time to see Tobio’s eyes settle on the label and his mouth shape the word Hanahaki, like a whisper.
It felt sort of like a wave had washed over Shouyou, pushed him under the water, and he held his breath inadvertently. When Kageyama met his eyes, then, with something akin to sadness glittering in his irises, Shouyou began to cough.
There was usually more of a warning before the flowers rose to his throat, but he could tell that he wasn’t so lucky this time. He tried to ignore the fact that this was proof of the Hanahaki advancing. Tried to ignore the voice in the back of his head telling him that this will end one way.
He’d covered his mouth with two cupped hands like he had learned to do subconsciously, and he felt the flowers fight their way to the forefront of his throat, shooting to fall into his palms. Kageyama stood up, and then hesitated, like he didn’t know if he should come closer to calm Hinata or to keep his distance.
With one last weak heave, he pulled his hands away, letting out a shaky breath: and this exhale synced with Kageyama’s inhale, and they met in the air there. The silence between them was unsteady and trembling with uncertainty. “You…” Kageyama whispered, trailing off, eyes studying Hinata’s face.
Hinata’s chest puffed with the next inhale, and he felt he could hardly breathe, but he knew that this lack of breath was not a result of the disease but of his own fear. “Yeah,” He whispered back, because he understood that a moment like this felt like a secret; like if you speak any louder than a whisper the scene would crash down on your shoulders and leave you stumbling to the floor.
Kageyama opened his mouth to say something, stopped, and then turned and walked off. Hinata sighed deflated, until Kageyama had turned around with the small trash bin in his hands. “Oh,” Hinata let out, flicking the mess into the bin, “Thanks.”
And with that, they continued preparing for practice as usual. From there other members had trickled in, began getting changed too, and when Kageyama had moved to leave the room after a lingering stare, Shouyou had tugged his sleeve gently and whispered, “Please don’t tell anyone.”
From there, the secret was kept.
And there was this thing that would happen sometimes: Kageyama coming home alongside Hinata, making him soup sometimes to soothe his throat, and bringing him the bin and some baby wipes when he would cough. And they would sit on their belly and flip through the book together. There were certain times where it was too close for Shouyou, too much, and at the brush of an arm or a particular look in Tobio’s eyes his throat would rasp.
When Kageyama would grab the trash bin and rub Hinata’s back with a caring glint in his eye before bashfully trying to hide it, Hinata’s heart would clench. Sometimes he’d think this is it, this is where it ends, because the feeling of pained love and the feeling of vines squeezing his lungs were indiscernible at this point.
His mother, at a certain point, discovered that he was sick and told him to stay home until he was better. Hinata told her it was likely just a sinus infection, and she believed him, but he knew better. So he spent his hours in his bedroom coughing flowers into the bin and then covering them with tissues.
Although he wanted to argue, because he desperately wanted to attend practice with the others, part of him was relieved that he wouldn’t have to risk coughing up a pile of flowers in the middle of the gymnasium.
Shouyou and Kageyama had discovered that the yellow flowers were acacias, which meant secret love and friendship , and Tobio had given him this odd sort of glance that made Hinata feel open and exposed. There were some moments where it felt like Hinata was beneath a spotlight.
What frustrated him the most was not the unrequited love, he would come to realize. Because as he laid on his bed with his friend naively pressed against his side, helping him in the most domestic ways even despite his demeanor, Shouyou could admit to himself that he was face to face with one of the most selfless friendships he’d taken part in thus far.
And as they’d part each night, the looming truth that Kageyama would return again after Volleyball the next day to update his friend of school ongoings and keep him company, Shouyou knew that something as miniscule as a crush wouldn’t do anything to damage this.
But even if he wanted to, it felt sort of like high electric fences were gating him in: because saying I like you, Kageyama would now sound a lot like I am in love with you and I am dying and it’s your fault.
Shouyou wasn’t cruel enough to dump this guilt and unwarranted responsibility on Kageyama’s shoulders. So instead he would wave goodbye each night and watch Kageyama go and ignore the lingering question in each stare that showed Tobio was getting more curious by the day — Just who was Hinata Shouyou in love with?
Hinata knew his mother would figure out that it wasn’t a common cold soon enough. After two days of the illness only growing worse, she’d told him that they would have to go to the hospital if he didn’t get better by Monday. He’d felt a sinking feeling inside of his chest, like an anchor dropping to the pit of his stomach to settle there heavily.
That night he’d coughed up a new flower, thin but long petals which were white as his pillows. They’d forced themselves from his throat with much more force than the previous flowers - much larger than he was used to. This was how Hanahaki worked, in most cases. Smaller flowers fading into larger ones, petals turning to entire flower heads.
It was only time until he would be forced to taste the metallic flavor of his own blood in his mouth. Maybe only a few more days before it would become harder to breathe due to the growth in his chest. Maybe only a month before he would not breathe at all. Shouyou curled himself into a ball then, face tucked tightly against his knees, trembling from head to toe.
He could already feel the ghost of vines tightening around his lungs where they shuddered in each breath. It felt sort of like each inhale had more importance than the last, and that he was saving his breath to live just a moment longer.
It was that morning that he was too distracted coughing flower petals into the bin to see his mother had opened the door to take his temperature and bring him some medicine for the pain. Shouyou had only registered her presence when she’d made a surprised noise, one that sort of reminded him of himself. When he met her eyes, which were wide and the same shade of brown as his own, she’d rushed over to rub his back as he emptied the mouthful of colorful flowers into the bin.
And then, as the last of the flowers fell from his mouth, he’d started to cry, falling into her shoulder weakly.
“How long, baby?” She’d asked him, holding his shaking body tight as he sobbed, rubbing a hand through his messy hair. With a shaky breath, he’d whispered out that it had been two weeks, not saying how he couldn’t be sure exactly how long it had been because ever since the day his hands were first full of lilac petals a soft shade of purple life had been blurred around every edge.
He didn’t tell her that it felt like a thousand years since that moment, and that every second felt suspended in time.
Shouyou just allowed his mother’s arms to be a temporary safe haven for him, away from flowers and love and other things that were once beautiful and admirable and now only bring him pain. He quietly hopes that, after this, there will be a day that he can look at a collection of lilacs and not feel the bile rising in his throat.
“I know that it’s scary,” She whispered to him, sunlight leaking through the window from between the curtains, “But, Shouyou, I don’t want anything bad to happen to you from this.”
He held tight. She held tighter. His lungs tightened, too, in his chest.
“I don’t want the surgery, Mama,” He told her, sniffling, face soaked with tears and snot, “I don’t want - I don’t -” He bursted into sobs again, listening to her whispers of I know I know I know, holding onto something miniscule within him that told him that this was not over and that he was not giving up until the very last moment that he inhaled, where he would feel the tightness in that breath.
Everyone knew that Hinata was the most headstrong, stubborn, hopeful person that they’d meet. This fact was good when it came to games, when it came to his determination to win alongside his team. But every virtue has its fault, and Shouyou knew that his own could be what brought his life to an end.
Kageyama came by that day, too, just like he had the days before. Shouyou had plucked a long, white petal from his garbage bin beside the bed and presented it to Kageyama, who flipped through the book to find its replica.
Shouyou had laid on his back, hands pushed up towards the ceiling so that he could feel the weight of his arms above him. Weakly, he dropped his arms back onto his chest, and they’d folded there where his hands could feel each inflation of his lungs beneath them. “Chrysthe— Um, Chrys-anthe-mum,” Kageyama said suddenly, reading from the book, “It means, uh, loyalty, trust, and — Um.” A pause. “Friendship.”
Shouyou looks at him. Really stares. Memorizes the curve of his jaw and the slow slope of his nose and the shadow of his hooded eyes. He can feel something stir within Kageyama, there, like he was something besides the stoic volleyball jerk Shouyou had grown to love.
( The word love was soured in his mind now. )
“I didn’t know you were friends with many girls,” Kageyama told him. He hadn’t looked at him, eyes too focused on the book in front of him.
“What?” Hinata asked, confused, “I’m not. That was random.” And then, in the silence, he processed the moment and realized the implication of Kageyama’s words: he thought it was a girl. His mouth formed the word, oh, like a whisper — like a secret.
And as he’d rolled his head to focus towards the ceiling again, he whispered ( like a whisper, like a secret ), “It’s not a girl.”
A silence. One that was as heavy as the anchor that now resided in his stomach, continuously growing heavier and heavier. He felt tired, eyelids just as heavy, fingers dancing around each other.
“Oh,” Kageyama tells him. “That’s okay, too.” Shouyou does not feel okay. He feels like not a single bit of this moment is okay. It wouldn’t be any more okay if it was a girl. “So… you’re gay?”
“I don’t know,” Shouyou confesses, because he hasn’t really thought of that. He knows he likes boys. He knows he really really really likes Kageyama Tobio. “I think girls are cute. I might date one. But I don’t know if I could marry a girl.”
He looks away, and allows himself to say, “But that just might be because I like a boy so much I can’t think of anyone but him.”
He doesn’t say love, but he knows the flowers in the bin can only mean one thing: Hinata Shouyou is in love with a boy. “You’re friends with a lot of boys,” Kageyama says, “Because of volleyball.” Shouyou thinks this might be a hint to tell Kageyama who he likes ( loves ) so much, but Shouyou pretends not to notice.
“Yeah,” Hinata says, instead, “I am.”
And then he coughs until he can taste the flavor of blood in his mouth, and a full white chrysanthemum falls from his mouth and lands into the garbage bin beside his bed, and he wheezes as blood drips from his mouth and as Kageyama frantically grabs him a tissue.
As he wipes the blood from his lips he thinks this: I don’t want to forget how he has made me feel. But I don’t think I want to die, either.
( Just love me instead, Kageyama begs, internally, as he stares at his best friend’s stricken face, I just want you to love me. )
( I’ll love you back, I promise, He thinks, and does not realize that this promise has already been broken . )
Shouyou’s throat aches, feels like sandpaper when he swallows, and his voice is scratchy when Noya comes to check up on him after school that Friday: brushes the red hair from his forehead and tells him he hopes everything works out somehow.
It’s weird, seeing everyone be so serious in a way that isn’t related to volleyball, especially because they’re being serious for him. Shouyou is the one who is making them so upset, so out of the ordinary, and he can’t help but feel a little guilty for this.
His mom makes him warm tea with honey every morning to soothe the ache, and peppermint tea at night to clear his airways, but they both know the latter won’t help much. Everyone is naively pretending that there will be some solution, including Shouyou himself, but holding out hope is getting harder.
Kageyama helps just as much as his presence hurts. Because imagine this: you are dying and everything hurts and each day it is harder to breathe, and the one you love doesn’t love you in the ways that matter, but they still touch you so gently and bring you soup and help you discover pieces of yourself. And you are falling apart at their will but neither of you wants this, and you feel cared for beneath their hands, and you feel broken there too.
It’s getting late that same Friday and Kageyama is sitting too close and playing the Nintendo Switch that Kenma had let him borrow, because Kenma knew and he showed his care in minuscule, meaningful little ways like this.
Hinata was wheezing where he pressed into Kageyama’s side, and the audible breaths he would take worried the both of them but neither of them mentioned it. Kageyama was more than just the person Shouyou was in love with, he realized as he watched him play. Kageyama was a friend, and Kageyama was the type of person who wasn’t the best at saying emotions, showing how things made him feel.
But he was good at expressing himself in the little ways, and he was good at providing something else for Shouyou, something that wasn’t tears or support or comfort in all the other ways that people have brought to him. Kageyama just allowed him to exist there, and he knew that it was okay to not make these moments about the pain.
Shouyou loved the effort people like Suga and Noya and his Mama put in. But he also loved the gentle distraction in the company of a best friend.
His chest rattled with each breath he took, and he knew this pain would only develop over the next lapse of time. His eyes remained steady on the console in Kageyama’s hands. When the level was over Kageyama handed it off to Shouyou, who instead settled it on the mattress and pressed closer to his best friend.
For a moment, that’s all he was. A best friend.
“I’m glad it’s you,” Shouyou tells him softly, each inhale shaky and unhinged. He sounds sort of like an asthmatic during an asthma attack, wheezing quickly, but he wishes an inhaler would be able to unwind the roots from his lungs.
“What do you mean?” Kageyama asks, and Shouyou wants to press closer but he also wants to pull away, and he almost wants to cry — almost wants to shatter, a little, spill on the floor and lay there forever.
He wants Kageyama to pick him up and to make him better. He wants naive little things, cliche stories, an end to this disaster which is not death. He wants to tell Kageyama I love you and to feel the flowers unwind from his lungs.
But instead he pushes his leg a little closer and says, “I’m just happy you’re taking care of me,” And it’s intimate for them, not something they would say even a month ago, but they have changed now in this brief lapse of time.
Kageyama meets his stare, bumps their shoulders together. “Daichi asked if you were doing alright at practice,” Kageyama begins, and Shouyou listens to him speak, drifts away in it.
When he begins to cough Kageyama touches his back and it only makes him cough more, and blood drops from his lips and stains each petal red, and he drowns in it; everything hurts a little, but it is heightened where he presses into Kageyama’s warmth, and when he is done and pressing a tissue against the blood on his lips they pretend it never happened.
Hinata Shouyou is getting tired of pretending.
That night he lays on his back, feeling sort of wide awake and yet so exhausted he is trembling with it. The ceiling towers over him, and he stares at it like maybe with time it will open up or crack or share a secret, but instead it just remains a shade of off white. “‘Night, Kageyama,” He says, although he isn’t sure if his friend is even awake.
He figures it out when Kageyama whispers, “Goodnight Shouyou,” And with a swelling heart Shouyou turns to look at his friend in the dark, where the moonlight just kisses the highlights of his face, and he wants to press his lips there. To the bridge of his nose and the mass of his forehead where it peeks behind his hair and to the sharp edge of his cheekbone and his gentle cupid’s bow.
He watches as the eyes of his best friend fall closed, and how his face molds itself slack with sleep. There is a fire of yearning within him, making him shudder down to the bone, and when he can hear the steadiness of his breath and see the serenity on his tan face Shouyou allows his own fingers to spider across the covers and lay gently pressed against Kageyama’s own.
There is something so intimate in staring at your best friend beneath the moonlight and being in love and knowing what the word love means, not just to the world but to yourself. Love is Kageyama Tobio, serene with sleep, divine as the Gods that he was intended to worship.
He closes his eyes and drifts to sleep while imagining the flavor of grace and salvation on Kageyama’s lips; how it would taste, sweet as sugar and bitter as coffee and warm as a home.
It only can get worse before it gets better. The close proximity to Kageyama heightens the painful sensations; his throat aches a little more when Kageyama looks at him and his chest tightens when their hands brush. The disease itself doesn’t progress even with such physical and emotional intimacy, but the symptoms can individually strike harder.
No two cases of Hanahaki were the same, Shouyou had read. Of course there was the standard backbone for the disease, which was unrequited love and flowers spilling from mouths, but some cases went far quicker than others.
It was hard to say that this factor depended on anything at all, because the speeds varies so unnaturally that nobody could really define it. But, from what Hinata could tell with his own developments, he was reaching the end of the quickest period — the period where the flowers grew bigger and the vines grew tighter and these two factors worked to make his speech raspy and wheezing.
This meant that, give or take, it would be about a month before it would become fatal.
Shouyou had been coughing more now, since the first full chrysanthemum, and he’d had to stop during breakfast with Kageyama —( Mama went to work after taking a few days off, because Kageyama promised to take care of Shouyou, which only caused her son to tease his setter in response ), to run to the bathroom and cough into the toilet.
Every breath that he took sliced through any peaceful moment, reminding them both of his painful situation at hand, and of how hopeless it truly was.
( On one end, a boy forced to suffer for the love that had sparked for his teammate. On the other, a boy steadily subsiding his love to comfort his ill best friend without knowing that his self-acknowledgement was the only cure. )
And things were getting worse, because Shouyou had already had four coughing fits since he woke that morning and it wasn’t even lunch yet. Things were getting worse because every word he said lacked the usual upbeat tone.
He felt the vines of hopelessness wrap themselves around his ankles as he sunk into the bed next to Kageyama, trying not to allow his best friend to see the tears that had begun to spill hot down his face. Shouyou shuddered around an inhale, sharp in the warm air of his cluttered room, and met Kageyama’s eyes for a moment.
He felt like he was being pulled into the floorboards, like no matter what he tried or how much he attempted to fight back there was no way out of this. Hinata Shouyou was not one to lose hope, not one to stop fighting, but he could feel it.
He could sense something inside of him, something pinning him down, something shouting at him: This is not in your control.
Kageyama was staring at him, and part of him was visibly concerned, but a part of him looked almost afraid. There was a flush high on the tips of his cheeks and running down the bridge of his nose, and his eyes were wide, and his lips just slightly parted.
In that moment Shouyou had inhaled, and he could not hear the rattle of the air in his chest, and he could not feel the vines of the disease still suffocating him more and more. He felt like he could breathe, for the first time in a long time, like it had been a thousand years in space and he was just now coming back to Earth where oxygen was plentiful.
“Oh my god,” Shouyou whispered, and the expression was still ghosted on Kageyama’s face even as his eyebrows furrowed in worry for his friend, watching Shouyou place a hand over his chest. He could vaguely make out the Whats wrong? coming from Kageyama, but he was too busy taking note of the way his own words left his mouth, as clear cut as they had been before the day this all sparked.
Shouyou was cured.
His eyes met Kageyama’s concerned ones, a deep dilated blue, and Shouyou’s heart was seizing in his chest; he could feel the pressure of each heartbeat behind his ears, could feel the numb rush of an aching heart, and the tightness in his chest was no longer a result of something cruel but instead a result of love.
The kind of love that you will live for, and the kind of love that you will hope for and dream for and fight for.
As he stared at the expression on his best friend’s face he found the words in his throat to say, “You love me?” And he could taste the faithfulness and sheepishness on his own tongue, and all of the time that he had spent wishing that he could say those words and allow them to be true.
Kageyama’s face morphed into something like fear and confusion, as if he had no idea how Shouyou caught on to that, as if he was afraid that he’d projected these emotions in the expression of his face or maybe accidentally spoke them out loud. And then his blue eyes had trailed down to Shouyou’s hand, clasped over his beating heart, and he had whispered there: “ Hinata ,” And then, “I do.”
Hinata Shouyou had no idea how addicting the feeling of inhaling a breath of oxygen could feel until he had been suffocating for so long. And he had no idea how wonderful it would be to hear the confirmation of an I love you until he had been dying for it.
“Kageyama,” Hinata said, and then paused and said, “Tobio,” And he watched the weary stare of a best friend ( a best friend who loves you in more than a best friend kind of way ) and covered his face to hide the sudden crying that racked through his body. He tried to use this newcome darkness to distract him from the intense feeling of contentment in his chest, but the tears only came harder, and he soon felt the tentative touch of Tobio’s hand against his wrists.
Nothing was said in the air between them as Shouyou allowed his hands to be removed from his face, wide eyes staring at Tobio with uncertainty, and then he was pulled into Tobio gently. A hug.
He tried not to act so hopeless and touch starved as he allowed his thin fingers to clench into the fabric of Kageyama’s shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin bleed through his fabric, leave them both stained red with love.
( Shouyou was tired of being stained by love, but as he felt the feeling of domesticity plunge through him, hot and tingly on every inch of his skin, he thought this: This is not just to love. This is how it feels to be loved. )
“Never knew you were such a softy,” Shouyou teased into the shoulder of his shirt where he’d hid his own face, succumbing to the sound and the feeling of a heartbeat just as unsteady as his own.
“I’m,” Kageyama paused, “I’m not.”
Shouyou pulled away from the close proximity to look up at Tobio, an eyebrow raised in challenge. “Oh, you’re not?” He joked, glancing dramatically at the arms which still hung loosely around his torso, “Why are you hugging me, then?”
“‘S not a hug,” Tobio mumbled, clearly playing along with the teasing even if the expression on his face read annoyance. “I was … wrestling you. We’re fighting.”
Shouyou just rolled his eyes, and he felt a sudden urge in his chest to pull Tobio down to kiss him, because that’s what boyfriends do. And then he thought: Are we even boyfriends?! I’m getting ahead of myself…
“Are we boyfriends?” Hinata Shouyou asked at the same time Tobio started to say, “Can I kiss y—?” And then, at the same time, they’d both gone silent.
Shouyou blinked his eyes once, twice, and then allowed himself to break out into a laugh and duck back into the curve of Kageyama’s shoulder gently. Tobio looked a little embarrassed, eyes focused anywhere but on Shouyou, and when Shouyou had finally came back to his senses and only had the hint of a grin remaining on his lips, he’d gently tugged Kageyama down by the collar of his white T-shirt and pressed their lips together.
And he spoke love into his mouth, and it echoed back to him there, and he allowed this love to surge beneath his skin as he’d gently pulled his arms around the gentle curve of his shoulders.
People are always describing kisses by being good, or being objectively bad, but Shouyou thinks this kiss could be described as this: Love .
( To love, but also, to be loved in return. )
He hopes that this is how he could describe everything between them from now on: every time they walk home together, and everytime Tobio cares for him gently, and every time he feels the palm of his hand connect with the volleyball which Kageyama had led to him.
He can feel Tobio’s hands sear into his skin where they press on the bottom edge of his ribcage, and he can feel his own arms desperately attempt to pull Tobio closer. He thinks each touch he gives and receives is gravitational, desperate to give up time just for this moment.
Shouyou has spent so long feeling stuck in each moment, caught between seconds. He thinks now that something like this — something that will be gone far too fast no matter how long the moment drags on — shows that he has found something deserving to yearn for.
That he has found love, he has held it, and he does not plan on letting it go now that it is in his grasp.
He separates with firm hands pushing against Tobio’s shoulders, but only to ask this: “You’re my boyfriend now, right?”
And when he allows his eyes to freely roam the mass of Kageyama’s face, where the acne spatters at his right temple and where the gentle pink of his lips fades into the tan of his skin and where shiny curves of black hair fall across his forehead, he thinks this:
I love you so much, and I have never felt more alive.
+
Karasuno Volleyball Chat 🏐
[shouyou] hii i’m all better will be back to practice on monday <3
turns out there’s nothing a good sleepover with my best buddy can’t fix 😸😸
[kageyama] don’t call me “buddy.” it’s weird.
[noya] WHAT
WHAT
HINATA SHOUYOU YOU EXPLAIN RIGHT NOW WHATFO TOUEMEAN
[shouyou] nothing hehe 😽😽😽😽 tobio took good care of me while i was sick tho very helpful in my recovery
[noya] “TOBIO”?!?
DM
DM ME
DM ME SHOUYOU ANSWER
MY MESSAGE ANSWERMR MESSAGE
SHOUYIUU
[shouyou] sorry i‘m busy 🙀
4 MISSED CALLS FROM: noya
5 VOICEMAILS FROM: noya
10 UNREAD MESSAGES FROM: noya:
ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW
HEY
HEY SHOUYOU WHAT THE FUCK
SHOUYOU
ANSWERME FUKCCKFK
WTF HI HELLOOO
+ 4 more unread messages.