Chapter Text
Lucas falls head first into love one day. He’s told it was different for everyone when it happens. For him, it was a feeling of insurmountable pain. A touch of love that had his heart forming cracks, spidery fissures opening up and breaking to the sound of laughter that struck him at the core when he heard it; not for the first time— but for the first time like this .
A sound that has Lucas wanting to keel over; wanting to touch his forehead to the ground to catch the feeling of a fading cool. It has him punch drunk from the assault on his heart and delirious with happiness as he clutches at the open wound hidden underneath his shirt and out of view.
He is scared. He is scarred.
Lucas wants badly to run the moment it happens if only to nurse his wound in the confines of his tiny bathroom, away from prying eyes and nosy mothers or worried friends. Half because this moment was his to hold onto, the other half because how does he explain that Eliott’s laughter has him seeing light break through clouds and wishing for more of it while it slowly drains him as he looks on.
How does he explain the way his chest breaks open and the contents that spill out are beautiful flowers— petals of golden hues and stems of the greenest patches of grass, dipped in the blood and tangled with his insides.
He can’t. He doesn’t know it himself—why roots puncture his lungs and break skin, curling for thorns to lay intimate love on his ribs until they fracture.
He doesn’t miss the fact he wasn’t the one that made Eliott laugh like that. Lucas chooses to ignore it. All of it. Bites down on his lips until they bleed—rather than allow himself that comfort of grasping at stems, vines of all different kinds, and pulling them out and up through his mouth.
His throat, it hurts. He coughs up baby's breath, little bleeding hearts, sunflowers of the brightest colors, little blue forget-me-nots that lay forgotten, and hyacinths of the sturdiest purple— he holds them at night. Places every little piece of him in a vase as he thinks of Eliott and his soft smile.
His kindness and warmth that water the roots inside him.
Lucas doesn't understand why he sheds blooms and blossoms like he is leaving a trail for Eliott to find. And every day it gets worse until his bedroom floor has become a little garden that he nurtures.
And still Eliott has yet to notice.
Not with the way Lucas sews himself back up, pulling his ripped skin close like a blanket to hide those broken and bruised ribs, using thorns to hold himself together until evidence that he is broken disappears. Fades when he sleeps and reappears when he wakes.
Lucas feels like he is withering, changing and he grows quiet. This is normal, he tells himself. Because love can break a person in the best ways. It is beautiful. From the way those gardenias grow from his eyes, blinding him at night as he tries to sleep but dreams of Eliott, to the way those dandelions that pop up on his shoulders where Eliott touches, only to transfer to the air at the slightest gust of wind.
Yann catches him crying from the ache inside his chest, palms cupped and catching the dead leaves that forcefully tear their way out of his face in a rush to leave his body before his skin mends itself.
"Please tell him, Lucas. This is killing you."
Lucas lets the leaves fall to the floor and he is right as rain hitting grass. He smiles and says,
"Yann, it hurts."
But Lucas finds himself unable to hold it together as he coughs up full and yellow petaled daffodils and innocent white daisies. He shakes his hands to rid the flowers of the redness that latched on, as the stems and leaves tore up his throat.
When he holds the bouquet out for the other boy to take, Eliott accepts with a smile, and Lucas is lost on the pure happiness he sees on that face.
He smiles back, gums aching from how hard he tried to erase the blood in his mouth.
"I got those from my garden. They're for you." Only for you , he wants to say.
He hates how big Eliott's heart is. Hates how much he cares. Because Lucas continues to grow Eliott flowers while Eliott gives them all away.
He wishes the flowers came with a message. Written out plainly so Eliott could see.
I love you. But they don't. Eliott doesn't see any of it.