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He watches Worlds from a hospital bed.
At least one of his nurses must know who he is because without fail, every match day, the screen in front of him is open, the soft babble of the casters murmuring away while the remote lies right beside his hand.
He could change away from it, he knows. But he doesn’t.
The ward, all white plaster and opaque privacy curtains, is sterile and lifeless—loveless, even—and it doesn’t leave much for him to look at.
It’s an intentional choice, he knows, no splash of color that could be mistaken for flowers, but it grates.
So he watches the screen instead.
Unlike the hospital, Worlds is dark, all fire and energy, igniting sparks reflected in burnished gold and silver.
It practically bleeds color—bleeds emotion, but he prefers that and the sound of roaring and cheering to the ever-present coughing and wheezing of the other patients in his ward, all hidden behind their own curtains.
He’s not much better than they are, not with the roots winding around his lungs and heart—practically anchored to his lungs now, with how long they’ve grown there—and not with the way every breath of his is filled with the press of rough leaves and silky petals.
Idly, he runs a knuckle down his neck, feeling the bump of growing thorns beneath the skin of his throat, the still budding flowers and unfurling leaves. There’s one spot, just below his jaw, that sends a jolt of pain through his nerves when he lightly rubs across it and sure enough, when he presses down on it, he feels his skin tear, something warm sliding over his finger.
Drawing back, he watches that bead of blood sink into the lines of his knuckle.
Now with the thorn free, his thumb catches on the sharp point of it when he tentatively pokes at it again and he spares a moment to wonder if he could tear it off before someone noticed, snap the thorn at its base or tug the winding stem out of his body by the roots, but in the end, he leaves it.
It’s not as if it’s the first growth to break out anyway. It’s worse beneath the fabric of his hospital gown.
He turns to the side, reaching for the button he knows will call a nurse over, and hesitates.
The screech of the curtain along its rod stops him, and he looks up to see Jeonghyeon step into the privacy of his little section.
He must spot the new thorn immediately, because he sighs. “Seongwoong…”
He sits down, pulling a wipe out of the box hanging off the side of the bed, gently touching Seongwoong’s chin. Seongwoong obliges, tilting his head, feeling Jeonghyeon clean off the area before tossing the wipe into the nearby trash can. He sighs again. “You have to stop doing that,” he chides.
Seongwoong flips open the notebook in his lap and Jeonghyeon waits patiently as he jots down his reply.
[sorry]
The corner of Jeonghyeon’s mouth twists down, nearly a frown, but he lets the topic go. “How do you feel?”
He makes a so-so motion and Jeonghyeon hums, visibly wincing when he glances down into the trash can and the pile of bloodied petals and leaves inside.
[trying not to cough too much]
“Thorns getting worse?”
He nods, resisting the urge to duck his head and hide when Jeonghyeon peers at the small growth still protruding out from under his jaw.
“Gwangjin and Eonyoung should be here in a few minutes and Junsik said he might swing on by later with Jeesun after the game, depending on how it goes,” Jeonghyeon says after a pause. “Jaewan’s got streaming duties.”
Earlier, maybe, he might have protested so many people coming in and seeing him like this, with thorns and stems breaking through his skin, flower petals clogging his throat and threatening to spill uncontrollably from his lips, but now he just nods.
Then, as if insistent on reminding him—and as if he could ever forget—the ever present itch in the back of his throat worsens.
He closes his eyes, covering his mouth with a hand, trying to tamp down on the urge to cough, to jostle the thorns bristling in his lungs, but the feeling wells up, quick and unstoppable.
“Oh, shit—”
Seongwoong doubles over, feeling himself choke as the flowers push up insistently, forcing their way up through a throat already half blocked by thorns, staining his tongue with the taste of iron as he practically vomits petals onto the bed sheets, violently red.
He must make some kind of soft noise, a pained whine, when he feels a full flowering rose press up against his teeth, thorns scraping along the inside of his mouth, because Jeonghyeon touches his shoulder lightly, his voice achingly soft and careful when he asks, “Do you need me to get someone?”
Seongwoong manages to shake his head, even as he forces his mouth open, skin shifting strangely around that new thorn protruding out of the bottom of his jaw, and his fingers close around the terrifyingly large head of the rose.
At first, these full flowers had come out easily—easier than this, at least—their thorns small and petals closed tightly so that if he wanted to see a rose anything like those in pictures, he’d have to manually unfurl them. Now, they catch, sharp points digging into his skin, trying to take root right there with his tongue as an anchor.
He can feel the thorns score shallow lines up his throat as he tugs, the stem bending and twisting down his throat in a way typical roses couldn’t, and centimeter by centimeter, he drags it out of his mouth, blinking away the tears pricking at his eyes.
The itch dies back down to something manageable, but he stays there, curled over the pile of petals, red like the blood covering them, to the point he doesn’t know which is which. The rose sits in his hands, hot and sticky and when he looks down at the flower, in full bloom and the size of his palm, he finds that he feels…numb.
Blood trickles down his throat, and carefully, he swallows.
It’s not actually numbness, no. Acceptance, maybe.
It’s not a new feeling.
He’s been dying for years.
He can hear himself wheezing faintly, chest aching when the rise and fall of his lungs pushes against the roots wound around his ribs and the thorns embedded in his skin. Jeonghyeon’s hand is warm when he rests it on Seongwoong’s back, a steady weight, even with his fingers splayed awkwardly to avoid the errant thorns and leaves caught between the fabric of his hospital gown and his skin.
If he looks up, he knows he’ll see that same mix of worry and guilt—as if he could have done anything about these choking roses that have been growing for the last eight years—so he keeps his gaze cast down as he fumbles for his notebook and pen, shifting the rose into one hand.
He ignores the way he smears his own blood across the pages.
[bet you’re tired of roses now]
Jeonghyeon doesn’t reply, his mouth pressed into a thin line when Seongwoong sneaks a glance at his face. He just pulls the trash can closer, scooping up a handful of bloodied petals and dumping them in.
Seongwoong grabs his wrist before he can do it again, shaking his head.
[gloves]
At that, Jeonghyeon sighs. “Okay, fine.” He straightens, looking down at his hands, streaked red, and his face twitches, almost a grimace. “I’ll be back.”
Seongwoong glances at the trash can, right beside his bed now, then down at the rose still in his hands, his fingers fitted neatly between sharp thorns.
He doesn’t drop it in.
The curtain screeches again. “Hey! We made—oh, shit.”
He looks up to see Gwangjin, his scarf wrapped loosely around his neck, and Eonyoung step in.
The former takes a step forward, hand twitching upward as if in an aborted motion to reach out, before he stops. “Where’s…?”
Right on time, Jeonghyeon pushes through, pausing for a moment to blink at Gwangjin and Eonyoung in surprise. “You’re here.”
Eonyoung shrugs. “We said we’d be here on time, didn’t we?” He glances at the screen—half forgotten—to see the National Geographic ad switch to a live stream of a van, black and shiny in the sunlight and stamped all over with the Worlds logo, as it pulls up. The door slides open slowly, revealing Sanghyeok, who ducks under the frame of the car with his mousepad in one hand as he starts to step out.
Immediately, Seongwoong looks away, feeling the roses in his lungs surge, roots wrapping around his bones tighter, tighter, until he swears he can hear them crack, thorns scratching up his throat.
Jeonghyeon’s silent as he bends down, gloves over his hands now, and sweeps the blood-flecked petals into the trash can, Eonyoung moving around to settle into a chair. Gwangjin hesitates, and after a beat, he asks, “Need any help?”
Jeonghyeon shakes his head, straightening and peeling his gloves off with twin snaps of latex. “No, I’m fine.” He settles into his own chair, tugging a third closer for Gwangjin, who takes off his coat, draping it and the scarf over the back before he sits. “How’ve you two been?”
Eonyoung raises an eyebrow. “Since, like, yesterday?” He shrugs. “Not much. I just went back to my hotel. Made a bet with Yongin though.” He points at the screen where Ruler’s moving out of frame. “JDG versus T1.”
Gwangjin makes a noise of surprise. “He hasn’t flown back home yet? Didn’t Team Liquid get out twenty-ish days ago?”
Seongwoong finds himself huffing slightly at that, quickly scribbling out a response. He lets go of the rose in his hand—and he’d nearly forgotten that he was still holding it—to scribble out a response.
[text]
Gwangjin leans forward to read, then rolls his eyes as Jeonghyeon’s mouth quirks up into a smile. It’s delayed slightly, since Seongwoong has to twist around to show Eonyoung the page too, but Eonyoung laughs.
“Technology,” he says, nodding sagely. “You should try it.”
“Shut up.”
“He’s right though, you know,” and Gwangjin’s mouth drops open in exaggerated shock when he whips around to stare at Jeonghyeon.
“You would betray me? Hyung, I trusted you!”
Jeonghyeon shrugs casually and Gwangjin makes an offended noise as Eonyoung bursts into laughter again.
Like this, Seongwoong nearly thinks he could forget.
But he can’t join in without the risk of shredding his own throat on countless thorns, this is the closest the four of them have been in years—old withered connections reforged only because of the looming threat of his own death hanging above them—and there is still a bloody rose in his hand.
For the most part, he manages to keep it under control, even when Sanghyeok reappears back on the screen.
And for a moment, while he watches Sanghyeok wave to Caster Jun’s call and the roar of the Busan audience with that slight curl to his lips as if he were fighting a smile, Seongwoong thinks he could almost hate him for once—for the way the roots wound around his lungs and ribs would constrict, for the way the thorns would dig into the inside of his chest as they threatened to crawl up into his mouth, and for the way petals pressed up in his throat, soft and silky and so very deadly—but those very flowers are what reminds Seongwoong that he can’t hate Sanghyeok, no matter what happens.
The fact he’s chosen to live for so long, with this strangling plant sitting in his lungs and feeding off of the way it keeps the broken pieces of his heart together, is proof enough.
So instead, he sits here, ignores the way it’s getting harder to breathe, and he watches the game.
He stays quiet, for most of it, letting the other three chatter on about plays and builds and giving general commentary, their voices filling the cold silence of the hospital ward.
It isn’t that they try to leave him out—no, every few minutes one of them at the very least will glance at him to try and include him—he just doesn’t bother writing anything out.
When the Nexus finally falls at the end of the fourth game, the casters screaming T1, T1 over and over, he lets himself slump back against his bed, uncaring of the way it crushes the leaves and thorns sprouting from his skin.
Eonyoung looks up from his phone—winning his bet with CoreJJ, no doubt—and there’s concern on his face. It’s concealed, but even over the years and the once growing distance between them, Seongwoong can still read him.
“T1 versus Weibo, then,” he says. “If T1 wins, what’ll you do?”
Gwangjin makes a face like he wants to say something about the upcoming match, but time hasn’t spared him from change either, and he keeps his tongue in check.
Seongwoong shrugs, grip tightening around his pen. Opening his notebook, he flips backward through the pages, and Jeonghyeon winces, looking away when Seongwoong finally reaches the section he’d used up for that conversation.
“Wait, hold on.” Gwangjin stands, hurrying around so that he and Eonyoung can lean in to read his scribbled words on the page.
[I’m not telling him if they win]
Eonyoung’s brows furrow as he reads and over his shoulder, Gwangjin jerks backward. “What? What are you—are you going to tell him if he loses then?" He huffs, a sharp sound, and frowns. "How is that any better?”
Seongwoong turns the notebook back around, striking out a part of the sentence with a single harsh stroke.
[I’m not telling him]
Gwangjin stares at him, but it’s Eonyoung who speaks up after a beat. “So you’re…?”
He flips through the notebook again, staring at his previous attempts to try and make Jeonghyeon understand—all the scribbled characters and frantically crossed out lines—and he looks up at Jeonghyeon. He holds up the rose, laying flat in his palm.
Jeonghyeon sighs, but he doesn’t move to take the flower. “Depending on who wins,” he says quietly, saying the words Seongwoong couldn't, “he’s going to either go through with it, or he’s going to fully enter end of life care.”
“What? Why?” Gwangjin looks between the two of them. “Why would you do that?”
Jeonghyeon shrugs helplessly, and Seongwoong has to look away from him. “It’s his choice.”
“Why won’t you try to tell him?” There’s a flash of something, almost like helplessness, on Eonyoung’s face. “He might…”
Seongwoong shakes his head. He has a ready response for this, at least.
[if he did, he would have said something already]
Gwangjin makes a frustrated noise, straightening. “You don’t know that! Maybe he hasn’t noticed or he’s waiting for you to say something! It’s worth a try, at least, isn’t it?”
He shakes his head again, flipping the page.
[it’s not fair to him. I can’t make him like me back. if he wins, he deserves to be happy. if he loses, I don’t want to make it worse]
“I tried to convince him,” Jeonghyeon says, and Seongwoong shrugs.
“So, what?” Gwangjin looks angry now, brow furrowed and arms crossed. “You just give up? Both of you?”
The plastic of the pen creaks under Seongwoong’s grip, and he looks down. They wait for him as he scribbles his response.
[I’m tired of dying]
He hands the notebook over, drawing his legs up to his chest, letting his chin rest on his knees, only for the flowers in his lungs to rebel, forcing him to uncurl as he chokes again.
There aren’t any stems this time, even as the thorns drag at his throat, but he throws up four perfect roses, blooming full and fast in his mouth and growing to be nearly too big for him to cough out.
Blood pools in his mouth, hot and heavy, and the metallic smell of it masks the sweet scent of the roses sitting in his lap. He knows better than to try and swallow all of this, letting it stain his teeth and drip down his chin as he leans over and spits the mouthful of petals into the trash can.
[if they lose, he’ll call, and I won’t say no]
He doesn’t toss the notebook at them, but it’s a near thing.
Do you understand? I’ll always keep coming back for him.
And Seongwoong wishes he could say that—beg, because maybe then they’d understand. He is a moth who learned to love the flame, a fish addicted to the gamble of the hook, a mouse dancing around the iron hinge of a trap.
That’s the cycle—insanity, by Einstein’s definition. Sanghyeok will call. He will answer. Nothing will change but the roses in his lungs.
But he can’t say anything. So he takes the notebook back, looks up at them, and he desperately hopes they’ll understand.
Gwangjin’s silent now, eyes cast to the side, his mouth pressed down into a flat line.
“Sorry,” Eonyoung says, voice nearly a whisper.
Seongwoong shrugs again, flipping to his earlier conversation with Jeonghyeon, scratching out part of the sentence and amending it.
[I’m tired of roses]
He picks up the flowers—all four, blooming wide and filling his section of the ward with the sweet smell of damask—and he drops them into the trash can, tossing the first rose in after them.
[it’s too late for me anyway]
All three of them look like they want to protest, when he turns the notebook around to show them, but they stay quiet as he keeps writing.
[even if it's because he never noticed and even if it is possible to make him love me back without pressuring him, it's too late now]
The roots are too long, too winding, and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe. He thinks he has a week, maybe, if he’s being optimistic, because he can feel it growing in his lungs, more rapidly than ever, straining against the confines of his rib cage and his skin. He pauses, considering.
[I’m sorry for giving up]
“No, it’s my bad,” Gwangjin mutters. He sighs, running a hand down his face and again, Seongwoong is reminded, strangely, that they are no longer nineteen, no longer SKT Piglet and SKT Bengi—they’re twenty nine, retired and teamless and one of them is dying.
He wonders if Gwangjin misses the way anger used to come to him, easily and freely, none of the exhaustion dragging him back. He wonders if any of them miss those old days, now a decade past. He might, he thinks, even if just for the way he'd been allowed to love from afar without the threat of coughing up petals and his own blood.
And maybe, if it were back then, he could have been better, could have convinced Sanghyeok to love him back. But no. Those times are long past now, what-ifs turning to bitter ash amidst the honey of nostalgia and he doesn’t know if he’d prefer choking on that or the roses crowding his lungs.
“I just…it’ll cut out a piece of you that you can’t get back and I don’t know if I want that to happen to you.”
Seongwoong feels an ironic smile tug at his mouth, a morbid laugh bubbling up before it gets caught on the thorns crowding this throat.
[I could just die, if the DRX thing happens again]
“Don’t,” Eonyoung snaps, eyes serious, pushing the notebook down. “Don’t do that.”
The budding smile stops, and he scratches that sentence out.
[sorry]
“None of us want you to die,” Jeonghyeon says, hand coming up to rest on Seongwoong’s shoulder, and Seongwoong looks up at him at that, lips twitching back up sadly.
[I’m dying either way]
He knows it, and judging by their way their eyes flicker as they all look away from him, they do too.
Seongwoong also knows how he looks, a week later, when the three of them drop by for their final watch party, but none of them comment on the roses hanging out from his lips and the vine-like stems winding around to drape over his neck.
They’d given him a nasal cannula a few days ago, when it was clear that the petals blocking his throat were only going to get worse, but even so, his breathing is still scarcely more than labored wheezing that barely ruffles the petals blooming out of his mouth as he fights the flowers trying to strangle him.
The three of them sit down beside him, still joking and trying their best to be light-hearted, but he can feel the tension and worry hanging heavy over their shoulders.
This is his last day, one way or another.
None of them bring flowers, at least.
The smell of roses is cloying enough.
He tries to ignore the way Jeonghyeon squeezes his hand when the teaser starts to play on the screen mounted on the wall before him, the way Gwangjin chatters away as though he could distract all of them from the sound of Seongwoong’s pained breathing, and the way Eonyoung keeps shooting him worried looks from his chair pulled up close to Seongwoong’s side.
They watch the game.
And as the final Nexus falls, Sanghyeok breaking into a smile as he claps and pulls his headphones off, Seongwoong feels something in his chest—metaphorically, at least, because the flowers just start to push up even more insistently—unwind. The thorns scratch at his throat, at his lungs, and silky petals press down on his tongue as they fight to get free, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s over.
He’ll be free of them now, he realizes with an impossibly light heart, and he finds that the thought of leaving, of just stopping, comes easily now, with the evidence that Sanghyeok and T1 have never really needed him in the first place staring him right in the face.
He hits the button to call a nurse over.
“Seongwoong?” He glances to the side, meeting Eonyoung’s eyes. Gwangjin, sitting by his side, bites the inside of his cheek, but says nothing. “Are you…?”
Jeonghyeon reaches for his hand again. “Are you sure?”
Seongwoong nods, giving the three of them as reassuring a smile as he can, with the roses blooming from his mouth.
Eonyoung exhales, but says nothing more than, “Are you going to stick around for the MVP ceremony?”
He looks at the screen, T1 in a group hug, their heads bowed in towards each other, and he shakes his head in time for a nurse to poke her head in. She doesn't seem surprised by Jeonghyeon, Gwangjin, or Eonyoung. He'd informed the nurses last week about his decision, right after the three of them had left.
“Are you ready?” He nods again, and Jeonghyeon lets go of his hand, standing to let the nurse move closer. She unlocks the wheels, pulling him out and away from the wall. “We’ll take care of him,” she reassures.
Gwangjin still stays silent, though he does match Jeonghyeon with a pat on Seongwoong’s shoulder and Eonyoung shoots him a weak smile. “Stay safe,” he says.
Seongwoong smiles at them again before leaning back into the pillows.
The flowers growing from his lungs, up and out of his throat, almost seem to shiver with his next exhale, as if they know what is coming.
No more roses, he tells himself. He has no more obligations left, not to this dying garden now adorned with a fourth star that didn’t belong to him.
Seongwoong feels the nurse wheel him out of the room, focusing on just breathing as she takes them down hallways and around corners.
A pair of doors loom before him, all clean stainless steel, and there’s a sense of finality when he’s taken through them.
He closes his eyes and though he knows that maybe he shouldn’t, in the privacy of his mind, he whispers one final apology to a man hoisting a trophy just across the city.