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Minho stares at the purple daisy lying in his hand, stem bent and the petals smattered with blood.
“Minho? Everything alright?”
He quickly crushes the flower and dumps it in the trashcan, turning around to smile at Chan as he enters the kitchen, clearing his throat. “Yeah, just fine, swallowed something down the wrong pipe.”
Chan’s eyes crinkle with a smile and concern. “You’re sure?”
Minho nods. “Positive.”
He lets Chan fuss over him for another few minutes before they go back into the living room to finish the movie that they had started. Another tickle never reaches Minho’s throat until he gets back home and coughs up another purple daisy, less bloody than the first but somehow more painful. The dreaded searching of the internet ensues, and soon Minho is leaning against the wall of the bathroom, phone screen black, and his world tilting on its axis.
A doctor would have to confirm it. But…
Surely not. Only one in every five-hundred people contracted it each year. It wasn’t even one percent.
But Minho…
Minho was in that small percentage.
It’s not until after he meets Changbin that he starts getting worried. Really, truly worried. But not anxious enough to schedule an appointment with a doctor.
Columbine flowers and daisies in hand, he flushes them down the toilet quickly before someone begins to worry that he’s been gone too long. Washing his hands and making sure there’s no blood anywhere, he walks back out to see Changbin with his arm around Chaeryeong’s shoulders, Ryujin perched in the corner, and Chan steadily turning red the longer he sits next to Sana and tries to not be awkward.
The dork.
Minho’s not stupid. He had dug deeper that first night and found out that the disease can be both platonic and romantic, depending on the situation. The only thing he’s ever felt for his friends has been strictly platonic, familial bonds in his own way, but if he’s coughing up flowers…
Well. Dwelling too closely on those thoughts would ruin the night. Being with people that are thus far trustworthy and haven’t betrayed him or tossed him out the door and enjoying the moments while they last is on the top of his priorities list.
Enjoy the little things.
Even if he feels like he can hear petals and leaves beginning to rustle in his lungs, their whispers mingling with his breath.
After Changbin comes Felix and Jisung, two best friends joined at the hip almost since birth that meld easily into their chaos. Minho wants to cry at the bleeding hearts he spits out one morning a few weeks after he’s met them and laugh at the dwarven sunflowers he chokes out not a minute later, the rest of the flowers coming soon after.
He’s got a regular bouquet growing in his lungs now. Still no doctor or anything in his medical records that he has it.
Damaged. Broken. Dirty.
Minho clutches his head and tries to curl up on the bed as tight as possible, the voices in his head murmuring darkly at him. He loved too easily, ran into open arms and laughter that was fake and just a front. No one really wanted him around. Clearly, if the flowers growing in his lungs weren’t a clear point, then Minho was a fool.
Foolish little boy. You’ll always be alone.
He doesn’t call Chan, even when the number is right there at his fingertips, the offer of comfort at any time in a moment of crisis echoing faintly behind the sour words pounding through his head.
But Minho had known someone like that, once. Like Chan. Who the first and last time Minho had called in an emergency had told him to back off and never call again unless it was important.
Trust wasn’t something Minho gave easily, neither was friendship. Earned it, sure. Far too many people trusted him, if you asked what he thought about it. Fewer people befriended him for clear reasons.
“Why are you so prickly?”
Minho keeps up the act. Glares at Hyunjin from across the table they’re both studying at. Ignores the clawing of leaves and petals at his throat. Pretends he didn’t giggle hysterically at the bright pink azaleas he coughed up this morning with everything else once he discovered they were, in normal circumstances not pertaining to that of which growing in one’s lungs, they were a very poisonous flower.
“Don’t worry, that’s just Minho,” Jisung says cheerily, plopping down next to Minho with a thermos that’s scooted his direction. “Our Minho.”
Tch.
The thermos contains hot lemon water with a bit of honey. Minho raises a curious eyebrow in Jisung’s direction, the younger merely shrugging.
“Your voice sounded scratchy yesterday and you haven’t looked like you’re doing well, and since someone doesn’t like asking for help, I decided to help anyways. Or try to.”
Minho gets torn between wanting to slap himself for every doubting Jisung but also remaining cautious.
You never know.
The lemon water is good. It soothes Minho’s sore throat and the flowers dancing in his lungs still for a bit. Word apparently spreads (he blames Hyunjin, the dancer has proven to be quite poor at keeping secrets) and Minho finds himself checked in on periodically over the next few days. He ducks and weaves, admits to Chan he’s been feeling a bit under the weather but it’s fine, he gets like this with the changing of seasons.
When it’s cold enough to start wearing thicker coats and wrap scarves around throats, Minho meets Seungmin and starts coughing up crocuses in at least three different colours, because of course Kim Seungmin couldn’t be a basic flower like a dogwood or daffodil.
“Curse you,” Minho mutters under his breath without any real heat, sorting through blood-soaked flowers on the bathroom counter. He washes a few off, even if they’re a bit wilted by the time he’s done. It’s weird to think that in the few months he’s been struggling, he has gotten used to the constant rustling sound of leaves and petals and stems moving in his lungs, slowly choking off his air supply.
He still hasn’t seen a doctor. Even with his body beginning to weaken, something in Minho is determined to not hear The Word audibly. As if it would seal his fate, once and for all.
The flowers get tossed in the trash.
Winter comes in full force and with the first snow comes Jeongin and with Jeongin come the snowdrops.
Minho nearly misses the arrival of the new flower over winter break. All eight of them huddled together in the dorm, the extra heaters Changbin and Felix had brought to combat the cold cranked as high as they will go despite the bodies packed into the tight space. Hyunjin’s leeching off of Chan’s body heat and Seungmin is bundled up somewhere near Changbin. None of them had gone home for the winter break and Minho is regretting that slightly when he wakes up the next morning to Jeongin’s knee in his lower back, his own upper body somehow across Jisung’s, and the overwhelming urge that he is going to be sick and also can’t breathe making him panic.
He gets out of the dorm and into the bathroom.
Vomits everything.
Coughs a few more petals and leaves out.
And questions his own existence when a gentle knock on the door interrupts his rapid breathing of trying to get his own body under control and not cough (or throw up) any more flowers.
“Minho?”
It’s Seungmin.
His Seungmin.
“I’m almost done,” Minho manages to get out, relief almost palatable on his tongue when his voice doesn’t sound completely wrecked.
There’s a shuffling of slippers. As if Seungmin’s thinking.
Seungmin thinking is never a good thing.
“Okay,” Seungmin finally says.
Then the slippers shuffle off and Minho’s back with his head on his knees, eyes closed, and trying to feel like he is in control of something.
Break passes by, as does winter. Minho meets a few new people but doesn’t develop any more flowers. Caring for the seven others becomes his priority when midterms come all too fast and he manages to skate by easy while the others suffer through academic hell. The flowers are growing. Minho’s breathing gets weaker, as does his body. He does his best, tries his best. Avoids going to the doctor (because yes, he’s an idiot, as Jeongin so nicely put it when Chan inquired about his health and the perpetual cold he’s been nursing since November). The others try to care for him as their able but Minho just…
Doesn’t trust it.
He wishes he remembers the days when everything didn’t feel like a trap, when he wasn’t so paranoid, but sitting with the take-out food that had mysteriously been delivered to his doorstep late one night after studying for an exam with only a heart left in the order notes, he begins to wonder if maybe, just maybe, all of it is real and not fake.
Minho picks up a big, thick book from the second-hand store and begins to press some of less-damaged flowers he coughs and hacks up, after they’ve been carefully cleaned. It could be his twisted sense of humour, but part of him wants to memorialize the flowers. Keep a book of the suffering he has endured to believe in just a small sense of normalcy before his mind takes over and crushes it.
His body gives out on the last day of the spring semester. One second he’s walking with the others to celebrate finishing finals at a ramen place, the next he can’t get enough air and is falling to the ground, the others laughing unknowingly just ahead of him, flowers spilling out from between his lips.
Minho blacks out before he can see Chan’s concerned face hovering over him, a panicked Hyunjin calling for an ambulance, and Seungmin trying to clear the flowers from his mouth, Changbin attempting to keep Jisung, Felix, and Jeongin calm.
Waking up in the hospital to an oxygen mask over his face isn’t pleasant.
What comes to more of a shock though is the seven of his friends piled in chairs around his bed, waiting for him.
“You’re an idiot,” is the first thing Jeongin says through his tears. “Hanahaki. Why didn’t you tell us?”
Minho chokes on bitter laughter. And a flower petal. Watches the seven of them huddled close together, frowns, tears, concern, all scattered across their faces.
This is where it all ends. You’re going to lose it all.
“Who did this to you?” Felix whispers ferociously, venom not particular to his character colouring his voice black. “Because I will find them and−“
“It’s you,” Minho whispers. “All of you.”
All he can hear in the silence is the flowers swaying in his lungs, petals mingling and brushing against each other.
“I’ve never had friends like you guys,” Minho finally finds the strength to say, looking anywhere but at them. He doesn’t want to see the disappointment. The disgust. The hurt. “But, you know, hanahaki, unrequited love. Platonic love, in this case. Heh.”
“Philia,” Hyunjin says, ever the literature nerd that he is. “But−“
“Surely you don’t believe that we don’t…” Chan can’t seem to comprehend what Minho is implying.
“Oh, he does.”
Minho winces at the anger in Changbin’s tone.
The bed shifts as weight is added to it, Felix careful of wires and tubes as he curls around Minho like a cat. Minho knows it’s selfish of him, but he still wraps his arms around Felix and holds him as close as he can in his weakened state.
“But it’s not our fault,” Changbin continues, voice still angry. “Who hurt you? Who hurt you so bad that you can’t trust what you see? Believe us when we offer something freely?”
Minho takes a breath of mostly canned oxygen. Tries to steady himself. And takes a dive into the deep end of the pool called Trust.
~~~
He gets an official diagnosis, a schedule with a therapist for several weeks, and two drugs to take for pain relief and staving off the growth of the flowers. Apparently Minho was a very lucky young man. His hanahaki had been in the final stages and he should have been hospitalized long before spring. He thinks his doctor was caught between the professionalism of her job in scolding her patient and the impressive length of time Minho last for as long as he did with seven different varieties of flowers taking over his lungs.
“Most people only have one variety, with exceptions to cases similar to yours,” the doctor said. “But even then…either which way, you should make a full recovery, with time.”
Minho is let out of the hospital by the time final grades drop and everyone can breath easy over the summer until the autumn semester starts. Felix goes back home for the summer, but Chan decides to get a job and stay in the city along with Jisung. Hyunjin and Seungmin seem to have made it their check in on him almost daily, the others almost near as frequent, and as Minho works through the summer with the therapist, he finds the concern easier to believe, easier to accept.
Summer goes by. He hacks up leaves, petals, stems, but the number slowly dies down. The whispers and rustlings quiet down until Minho isn’t waking up to a violent intake of air in his sleep making everything shudder to the point of rousing him into awareness. He keeps the book of pressed flowers, adds to it.
Hyunjin gets his hands on it one day when he visits. The next time he comes over he has a handwritten list of what each of the flowers mean. Seungmin makes a meme out of the bleeding heart flowers that is a clear, well-meant jab at Jisung that once Minho feels safe with it being aired out in their group chat, is a hit with their friends (even if Jisung complains about it good-naturedly for all of fifteen seconds).
By the time the autumn semester rolls in with winter on her heels, Minho is off the medication and the flowers are almost clear from his lungs. Now it’s just down to the purple daisies, each variety seemingly to clear up in the reverse order of which they appeared. Minho doesn’t miss the flowers, but sometimes he feels like they were a public declaration of the affection he held for his friends, even if he was hiding it.
“April showers bring May flowers,” Jeongin recites cheerfully as he plows through a snowdrift that’s preventing them from getting from one side of the school to the other.
“It’s December,” Minho deadpans. “What on earth does this freezing nastiness give you the impression that it’s April?”
Jeongin turns around, grinning. “You! Flowers bloom as early as February, even through the snow. You’re blossoming right now compared to how you were wilting last year, right?”
“I hate the amount of puns in that sentence,” Minho grumbles without any heat, ignoring Jeongin’s peal of laughter. But, their youngest does have a point. Even if it is wrapped up in plays-on-words.
Life is better. Slowly growing better. It’s truly strange having to consciously rework and rebuild your worldview. But if it means that Minho can be sitting and enjoying his friends presence as they all pile into Chan’s dorm living room for movie night without doubting every single word said and not be trying to choke on flowers in the process? Then yeah, he’s willing to put up with that strangeness.