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Amity was walking home from Hexside when she coughed up the first flower. One minute she was walking the familiar path to Blight Manor, the next she was blinking in shock at a handful of pale purple petals, the product of a seemingly innocent cough. It didn’t take her long to realize what had happened, and who for-- hanahaki disease was uncommon but not unheard of on the Isles. Above all else, Amity had one thought: Don’t tell Luz. Luz was too kind and too righteous; if she found out she would be wracked with guilt and probably get herself killed attempting some harebrained rescue scheme. Amity knew better than to let her bother. The only known cure for hanahaki was to have one’s love requited, and that would never happen. Luz was… incandescent, and Amity was just Amity. So she resolved to keep it to herself for as long as possible, and to never, ever let Luz find out that the flowers were for her. That night, Amity wrote it in her diary over and over: Don’t tell Luz. Don’t tell Luz. Don’t tell Luz.
It got worse after Grom. Amity was able to keep from coughing all through their dance/fight, but moments after they were crowned she had to slip away to cough up petals behind the massive tree they’d just created.
“Amity?” Luz called, “Are you alright? Where’d you go? Gus wants a picture of us as Grom Queens for the Hexside Free Press.”
“J-just a second!” Amity called back, wiping the back of her hand over her mouth. Luckily, there was no blood yet, as the flowers were still small. She’d identified them by now as mallow flowers, or malva. Amity could feel them beginning to take root in her lungs by the faint tightness in her chest, and figured it was only a matter of weeks before the blooms began coming out bloodied. Don’t tell Luz, she reminded herself. “I’m fine! Coming!” Crushing the small mound of petals with her heel, she turned and went to rejoin Luz and the others.
“There you are!” Luz exclaimed, beaming, when Amity emerged from behind the tree. “What’d you run off for?”
“Oh, just needed a moment to myself. You know how it is.” Amity laughed it off.
Luz accepted her answer with a grin. “Come on, fellow Queen,” she said in a silly, affected voice, “let’s go have our Royal Portraits taken.” As Luz towed her away toward the crowd of other students, Amity repeated her mantra to herself. Don’t tell Luz. Don’t tell Luz.
A week after the grudgby incident, Amity joined Luz, Willow, and Gus at the lunch table only to hear Luz exclaiming in outrage.
“But that’s terrible!” Luz cried, “And there’s no way to break the curse?”
“What’s got Luz so upset?” Amity asked.
Willow sighed. “We just learned about hanahaki disease in plant-track classes today.” Amity stiffened, staring down at her lunch tray to avoid glancing over at Luz. “And it’s not exactly a curse,” Willow explained, turning to face Luz, “so it doesn’t have a magical cure. Unless the sufferer’s love is returned, it’s fatal.”
“That’s so awful,” Luz murmured, horrified. “How long do people usually have before…?”
Willow grimaced. “Anywhere from weeks to months. It depends on the intensity of the person’s feelings, but the longest case I’ve ever heard of survived just under six months.”
Amity stood up abruptly. “Uh, you know what, I just remembered I have a meeting with Principal Bump, I have to go.”
As she fled the lunchroom, fighting down a torrent of petals and bile, she heard Luz’s voice behind her saying, “Guess Amity doesn’t like the sound of that any more than I do.”
If only she knew. Don’t tell Luz, Amity thought fiercely, Don’t tell Luz.
By the day Luz showed up at the library looking for an old diary, Amity had gotten used to coughing up bloodstained mallow flowers, and even better at hiding it. The flowers were the size of her fists by now, and her throat and chest were constantly burning from the weight of their roots and stems. Amity had looked up their meaning in the stacks one afternoon; one old book had defined them as consumed by love.
As they made their way through the forbidden stacks, Amity found herself choking down petals so that Luz wouldn’t see. When they curled up together on the floor to hide from the head librarian the sight of Luz’s blushing face had Amity turning away to discreetly cough a small flood of petals into her hand which she hastily hid in her pocket, licking the blood from her lips before turning back to Luz with a strained smile. Don’t tell Luz. Don’t tell Luz.
Ed and Em knew by then, and met their sister with faces of pity and sadness when Amity returned home that day with pockets full of bloodied flowers. They sat with her that evening while she heaved and retched into the toilet basin, Edric messing with his face in the mirror while Emira carefully ran a comb through Amity’s hair, both trying their best to feign normalcy.
“Ed, don’t pick, you’ll make it worse,” Em admonished.
“Too late,” Ed sighed, grabbing a tissue and wiping at the tiny spot of blood on his cheek. Wordlessly, he offered the tissue box to Amity, who took it gratefully and began wiping the considerably greater amount of blood from her own face.
Emira sighed. “Hey, your roots are growing out,” she said quietly, gently ruffling the growing patch of brown at the base of Amity’s scalp. “Do you want to dye your hair again?”
Amity only had to consider for a moment before replying. “Yeah. But not green this time.”
“Really? What color do you want, then?”
Amity chose the same lilac shade as her flowers, uncaring of whether it might seem morbid to others. It was a beautiful color, symbolic of her love for Luz, and anyway she didn’t intend to let anyone else find out, at least not until the very end.
Every time she looked at Luz now, her chest hurt. It was bittersweet because Luz had always sort of made her chest hurt, only now it was for much more sinister reasons. They spent time together in the library and Amity pretended not to watch while Luz chewed on the end of her pens or ran her hands through her hair, making it stick up in wild cowlicks. Amity had to excuse herself more and more frequently to run to the bathroom, vomiting up wave after wave of purple flowers streaked with red. Even as the flowers tore up her throat on the way out, through the tears in her eyes she thought, Don’t tell Luz.
It was when Amity had to give up her job reading to the kids that Luz started to get suspicious. The day after she gave the library her notice, a flurry of knocks came on the door of Blight Manor. Amity went to get it reluctantly, already knowing who she would find on the other side.
“You just got your job back and you’re quitting?”
“I just need a break, Luz,” Amity offered unconvincingly, too tired to come up with a better story.
“But you love those kids! I don’t understand.” Luz looked at her with wide, pleading eyes, and Amity had to fight down a wave of flowers.
“Just forget it, Luz,” Amity said tightly, “Please, I--” and then it happened. She couldn’t hold it down any more, and the wracking coughs came, shaking her whole body until the flowers came pouring up and out, droves of purple petals cascading from her mouth onto the floor right in front of Luz where she couldn't hide it any more. For a long moment Amity just stared at the small mountain of mallow flowers at her feet, before she felt brave enough to look up and meet Luz’s eyes.
Luz’s face was the picture of horror, then sadness, and then, interestingly, anger. Her voice was hard when she spoke. “Who?”
“What?” Amity asked weakly, wiping the blood from her mouth.
Luz pointed viciously at the mallow flowers. “Who?” she asked again, “Who’s doing this to you?”
Amity was momentarily struck speechless. How could Luz think it was anyone but her? How could Amity love anyone else when Luz existed?
But, Amity realized, this was good. Because if Luz didn’t know then Luz didn’t know. And that meant that Amity could still do half of her job correctly. Don’t tell Luz.
“It doesn’t matter, Luz,” Amity said, looking away. “They don’t want me back. I’m used to it by now.”
Luz made a noise of outrage. “What are you talking about?! We have to talk to them! They could save you!”
“Let it go, Luz,” Amity pleaded, “It doesn’t matter any more. It’s too late.”
Luz’s face hardened. Amity knew that look. It meant trouble. “I’m going to find a way to fix this,” the human girl insisted. Amity sighed, knowing there was no use arguing with her. At least this way, if Luz was preoccupied searching for a nonexistent cure, she wouldn’t have time to watch Amity waste away.
Amity knew she was counting down in days, now, not weeks. She was mostly bound to her bed with a hacking cough, vomiting flowers and blood into a trash can every few minutes. Em held her hair while she retched and Ed disposed of the flowers, both of their faces pale and drawn but faking smiles for Amity’s sake. Amity would probably hate that if she had any more strength to care.
Luz popped in multiple times a day with her latest bit of research, looking more and more frantic each time she tried something new and it didn’t work. One afternoon they were both curled up in Amity’s big bed, Luz flicking rapidly through a healing coven tome while Amity rested her eyes, when Luz said for the thousandth time, “I wish you would just tell me who it is so I can go find them and get them to fall in love with you.”
Don’t tell Luz.
Amity sighed. “It doesn’t even work like that.”
“But it could! I bet I could convince just about anyone to fall in love with you. Who in their right mind wouldn’t like you back? You’re amazing!”
The irony of all this wasn’t lost on Amity. She almost had the hysterical urge to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but frankly she didn’t have the energy to spare these days.
“I don’t think so, Luz. She doesn’t want me.”
“She?”
Shit.
“Yeah, Luz, she.” Amity was too tired to come up with a cover. “She doesn’t want me.”
“Well, she’s an idiot,” Luz muttered.
Amity just sighed and closed her eyes again. When Luz spoke again, her voice was almost too quiet to be heard.
“Sometimes, I wish it were me.”
Amity’s eyes flew open. “What?” Surely she’d misheard.
Luz was frowning, a determined gleam in her eyes. “I said, I wish it were me.”
“You don’t really mean that.”
“Yes, I do. Because if it were me, I could fix this right here and now.”
Amity’s voice was shaking. “What are you saying?” She began to cough.
Luz took a deep breath. “I’m saying I love you, Amity Blight, and I’m pretty royally pissed off that you’re going to die before I can do anything about it.”
With all the strength she could possibly summon, Amity surged up from the bed and pressed her lips to Luz’s in a fierce and desperate kiss. She pressed everything she’d felt over the last few months into the kiss, every ounce of longing and adoration, every moment of fear and hope and all-consuming love. And Luz kissed back with equal passion, shifting forward on the bed to cradle Amity in her arms.
When they broke apart they were both gasping for air, and it struck Amity that she could feel each breath filling her lungs unobstructed. Breathing deeply for the first time in months, she raised a hand to her mouth and saw it come away blood-free. The flowers were gone. She looked up at Luz in wonder.
“I love you too,” Amity whispered.
Luz beamed. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
They leaned back in for a soft, tender kiss, unhurried and full of promise, and neither of them noticed the mallow flowers that lay between them.