Chapter Text
Artemisia absinthium
Also known as common wormwood, it's an ornamental plant used as an ingredient for absinth. This plant often symbolizes bitterness, absence or deep sorrow. It can also be linked to feelings of loss or regret, or abandonnement.
[He coughs. Yellow flowers, stained with his blood, lie all around him, spreading like a colourful carpet across the dark room. He can feel more coming down his throat, a multitude of sore spots running up his body to bloom in his mouth, staining it with a bitterness that he knows will never go away even if he washes it a hundred times. Unless it's been there forever. He half-opens his mouth again to let it slide out, but it doesn't work].
Sometimes, Ivan feels like he was born grieving.
As if he had been chosen before his birth to carry this grief on his shoulders and look after it. Grieve for what? He himself was never quite sure. That's what he wonders once again, as he wakes up in his very clean room, with no flowers and no petals on the floor, with his very non-dying body, looking at the leaves falling outside. It's autumn. This time of year always makes him a little numb. Of course, it's nothing new. He never really knew where this grief came from. Maybe it was born with him, hiding in his bones, or maybe it was the silence of the big house that penetrated his brain, he's not sure. He could ask Sua what they were both mourning, he guessed. After all, her purple eyes were always a little veiled like his. But it would feel wrong. They had made a silent pact never to talk about it. (Do they ever talk about anything important? Or did they never learn how to speak at all?) All he knows is that it's been there for as long as he can remember. Maybe he's wrong, maybe he doesn't remember very well. Maybe there was a time before the grief, before the numbness, before being a blank slate, but he doubts it. All he can remember is being held by the shoulders and being told that he had to exist, and the frowns on his father's face when he understood his inability to do it well. The rest is grey and cold. A bit like walking through an old monochrome picture, everything there is dead, everything there is gone. All that remains is the illusion that it was there. What was there? What was going on? No one can remember exactly, only look at the picture and smile melancholically. Nostalgia stains it and it stains him, too. Life isn't black or white, it's grey.
A flash of colour: two teal eyes looking at him curiously in their primary school playground. The first colour to exist in the world, the first time he feels something inside him awaken. He follows the boy. He follows him, in class, outside, he watches him closely. He stays close, even when the boy - Till, he learns, he tastes the name carefully on his tongue - gets annoyed and shouts at him. Ivan doesn't understand. How can someone be so wild? So bright? He watches as the boy gets into fights with people who annoy him, comes back bruised and scolded by the teachers. There's something in him, like a fire, that Ivan doesn't understand, but it fascinates him. He could never be as alive as this grey-haired boy. But his mere presence makes him different, he can feel it. When Till looks at him, something inside him comes back to life. So he stays with the boy, seeks his gaze. He pushes him, annoys him and sometimes fights with him, but it doesn't matter because Ivan is the most present he's ever been. So, despite the other's annoyance, he continues to bother him. He doesn't know how to tell him how he feels, so he tries to be the brightest he can be. It's unconventional and strange, the way he does it, he’s clingy and annoying, Ivan knows it, but it's his only way of expressing what he was never taught to say. Eventually Till stops pushing him away and gets used to him. It's just that Ivan always comes back, so it's pointless, at least that's what Till says, but he hits those who accuse Ivan of being weird, and he lets Ivan sit next to him without protesting too much.
"So, Ivan."
Ivan internally sighs as the voice interrupts his thoughts, and he focus his gaze back on the woman in front of him who is currently writing on her notebook while watching and listening to him carefully. He listens to the clock tick as he tears his eyes away from the white walls with reluctance. His father bought him therapy sessions since childhood, as soon as he understood that Ivan would never live his expectations. As soon as he understood that Ivan was considered weird and bringing shame to his name. Not that he really believed in therapy, but he probably hoped that it would somehow fix Ivan. It didn't, but the black-haired boy guesses that it helps sounding a bit more human, sometimes. Not too much. He cannot reveal her too much. She could run away or lock him up. It's strange, though. Ivan was always good at picking up on détails, remembering the weirdest things, but he can never completely recall her name, despite the fact it is written on her door. Maybe it is not important, he never call her by her name anyway.
"How about you elaborate on what you mentioned last time? The kind of...illness idealisation? Linked to flowers, is that it?"
Ivan almost sighs again. He shouldn't have brought up his delire, he knows she won't understand the sick pleasure he gets from it. She'll say he needs to find better coping mecanisms, and she'll be right, but Ivan wants to hold to it for a second.
"When did this start again ?" She asks, and Ivan takes time to consider it. Since when did the morbid obsession settled in his mind, filling his dreams with suffocations and blood-tasting petals ?
Looking back, he can remember laughters with Till, Mizi and Sua. (And he's never seen her so happy. It's a good thing, even if a part of him wonders if he failed to do it himself. He wonders if his cousin was ever happy in his presence. Was he too empty? It would have ruined the moment to ask, so he always held the bitterness on his tongue). Hyuna, Luka, and sometimes Hyu- Woo join them later, even though they're older, and it's...nice. He's still weird, but none of them seem to mind too much. And he's not the only one, because there's Luka, and meeting Luka alone is a strange experience in life. Ivan doesn't think that anyone can really get the blonde boy. Still, a part of him understands Luka better than anyone else, and a part of Luka understands him better than even Sua ever did. Maybe they're tied by something dark, inside them, gnawing at their insides, or a kind of incapacity to know how to be human. But once again, they never talked about it. For a while, though, it's not too bad.
Until his father's eyes get darker as the man probably realises that Ivan will never be less incapable of living than when he was a child. Ivan would like to hate him, but he's not really wrong. He is not good at existing. It's as if everyone was born with a book, that taught them how to behave in certain situations and not in others, how to smile at the right time, what to say when it's needed, and a million other things he's never really been able to understand.Above all, the book that someone forgot to give him must have told him how to feel. Because his emotions never seem to fit, like they're always wrong at the wrong time. Most of the time, he doesn't even know how to recognise them and classify them. His father's voice grows colder, and so does Ivan. The dark thing in him grows with him. Over time it becomes more insistent, struggling beneath his skin, and he's afraid that others may see it, so he learns how to look perfect, to smile politely, to be a good man, so that people won't get suspicious. Yet he knows something is wrong, when he looks in the mirror. It's like he's not here, not really. His body is there, but his mind is lost somewhere he doesn't even know where. He's absent. So absent that he sometimes doesn't recognise his own reflection. Or more like, he knows it's him, but something is wrong and he cannot place it. Are his eyes too dark? Or his face too off? ("Smile, Ivan" the memory of a cold and irritated voice echoes in his head) He closes his eyes and it's as if a multitude of insects have swarmed under his skin, gnawing at him from within, devouring him, and there's nothing he can do, no position that can soothe him. So he smiles faintly, not too much so as not to show his imperfect tooth, which his father hates, and hopes it will go away. (It doesn't.) That's probably when the idea of the disease first appears in his mind. It's stupid, really. He can't even really remember how he learns about the legend, maybe he heard it somewhere, or maybe it was in one of those books he read to fill the void, but he doubts it, since he mostly reads classics. But it doesn't matter. The fact is that Ivan discovers this legend.
Hanahaki, they call it. A disease born of unrequited love, in which the patient spits out flowers until death, or undergoes surgery at the cost of their feelings. He doesn't know why, but the idea strikes him, stays in the back of his mind wherever he goes. It fascinates him, and he doesn't really know why. Maybe it's because it's somehow poetic, maybe it's because he can relate to loving someone so intensely that it feels like dying. (Maybe it's because it's about unrequited love and he's understood for a long time that Till doesn't look at him the same way). No matter why, the idea sticks with him, and Ivan starts to unconsciously tie it to his own situation, and since he learned by heart flowers meaning by reading a fascinating book about it when he was younger, he easily starts linking them. At first it's not too much, he sees Till blushing at Mizi and wonders if he would spit out flowers if he was sick with Hanahaki. Then he asks himself the same question again and again. Then he starts to imagine the scene in his head, his lungs filled with petals, slowly choking him to death. He knows the disease is fictional, of course, but there's a morbid satisfaction in picturing the flowers in his throat, trying to feel them in his lungs. With time, it even extends to others situations than Till and Mizi, to pretty much everything that bother him. It's not normal. But he's never been normal.
He doesn't answer his therapist. She sighs, and Ivan distractly classify it as sigh number 4, the one she does when she is insatisfied by his lack of communication. He knows he should make an effort, he really does, he thinks as he leaves the room. But it's so tiring to put so much effort onto the mere fact of existing. Like being normal was a full-time job, and he didn't get any days off. He doesn't want to make an effort today. Today, the monster inside him is too persistent, trying to eat him alive while he curls up on his bed.
[Bitterness on his tongue again. The little yellow flowers roll to the ground. It hurts, his lungs hurt, his throat hurts, he's breathless as if he's been running for miles, but every breath he takes makes him feel alive. His pain proves he is here. Alive for now. He's tired of coughing. He knows these flowers, it's wormwood. Like the plant from which absinth is made. Would drinking absinth ease the pain? Or would it burn his already damaged throat?]
There's a strange satisfaction to dream about it. He gets up and paces around his room, because he can't stay too still when he's like that, not without feeling completely devoured, not without the guilt slidding in his stomach, guilt for what? His birth maybe, or some serious faults he must have committed and forgotten in a another life that condamned him to forever to pay their price now. Something hurts in his guts, there's a feeling that won't go away. He lays down and groans when his articulations cracks. For a second, he pictures his body breaking in porcelaine pieces and shattering on the floor. Oh the misery of human body, the misery of being trapped in a cell of flesh that cannot contain his soul alone, the monstruous entity that wants to stretch out of his skin. He can barely contain it.
He falls asleep. (When he wakes up, he tastes blood on his tongue and recalls the distant sound of rain, but he never remember anything more from those dreams.)