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The first petal was a silent, floral trumpet blast heralding the end of his world—a silent, scented reveille for the dead.
Draco’s revelation would not come in a blaze of cursed light, but in a quiet, private garden of his own making, choked by the very thing that was supposed to be beautiful. The air in his lungs was no longer his own; it was thick with the ghost of rhododendrons, a fragrant, fatal warning. The thorns were not just in his throat; they were knitting a cage around his heart, and he was the only one who could hear its cruel, blooming song.
The eighth year at Hogwarts was meant to be a quiet one, a year of mending and muted tones. For Draco Malfoy, it was a purgatory of his own making, a sentence served in the same castle that had once been his birthright. Still, it now felt like a monument to his failures, punctuated by the wary glances of his peers and the pitying looks from the professors. He kept to the edges of corridors, spoke only when necessary, and avoided meeting anyone’s eyes, especially a certain pair of brilliant green ones as he tried to make his large frame as small as possible.
Potter, who was somehow both the same and entirely different. The brash, rule-breaking hero had been sanded down into something quieter, more thoughtful, but his presence still filled a room, pulling at Draco’s attention like a magnet. It was infuriating.
However, the end of his new start did not start in the midst of crowded hallways or in their shared common room—because, of course, they’d all been lumped together in a show of inter-house unity. No.
It had all begun in the Room of Requirement.
Not the feeling itself—no, that, he suspected, had been festering for far longer; a seed planted in years of rivalry and obsession. The moment it had truly unfurled was when the Fiendfyre licked at his heels, and panic had frozen him solid. He had been certain he was about to turn into ashes, another forgotten casualty in a room of lost things. Then, a hand had seized his wrist, yanking him with a brutal, desperate strength onto a borrowed broom.
Harry Potter. Saving him. Again.
The sheer, incomprehensible waste of it all if Potter had died for him. He was the Boy-Who-Lived; he couldn’t die. Not for a rival, not when the whole world depended on this one boy to save them all. Draco knew this, Potter knew this, everyone knew this. However, he should have known that the Gryffindor with the bleeding heart would have saved everyone he could—even if it was the very Slytherin that had been his rival since his first day in the Wizarding World. Yet, the image of his saviour was seared into Draco’s mind. From the determined set of Potter’s jaw, to his green eyes that were narrowed not in hatred, but in fierce concentration, the feel of his grip, sure and strong. The flight was a blur of searing heat and terror, but all Draco could focus on was the grip on his arm, the solid presence of Harry Potter as he clutched around the Gryffindor’s waist with the desperation of a man wanting to live, the ragged shout of “Hold on!” in his ear. It was the first time Potter had touched him without malice. It was the first time Draco had felt anything but cold dread in months.
And that was the problem.
After that moment, everything had started to shift. The dismissive scorn he had cultivated for Potter curdled into something complicated and aching. A casual brush of shoulders in the crowded Great Hall sent a jolt through Draco that was unfamiliar and entirely unwelcome. The sound of Potter’s laughter from across the common room made his chest feel tight. He found himself watching Potter—noting the way he pushed his glasses up his nose, the careless laugh he shared with Weasley and Granger, the faint scar on his cheekbone that was newer than the one on his forehead. A hot, tight coil of feeling would settle in Draco’s chest, a confusing mix of gratitude, shame, and a yearning so profound it left him breathless.
It was a sickness, he decided. It was a pathetic, secret obsession, and Draco despised himself for it. This was Potter. Potter. The bane of his existence, the symbol of everything he’d been taught to scorn, and now… and now the cause of a peculiar, persistent ache in his lungs. It was as if he was being punished for this… this weakness.
The cough began subtly, just a month into the term. It began as a dry, rasping thing, easily blamed on the damp Scottish air and a body still weakened from the day the Dark Lord entered his home and barely a moment of reprieve since. But it grew worse, accompanied by a peculiar, floral taste in the back of his throat and a persistent ache deep in his lungs, as if his very breath was thorned. The tickle became a rasp, and the rasp became a tightness, a feeling of something foreign taking root deep within his chest. It bloomed most painfully when Potter did something infuriatingly noble, like patiently helping Longbottom with a charm or defending a first-year from a particularly nasty portrait. He had sipped water, blaming the dust in the newly repaired castle.
One evening, Draco was in a secluded corner of the library, attempting to write an essay for Slughorn, who had taken him under his wing for a Potions Mastery since his Godfather had passed. His thoughts, as they so often did, strayed to Potter. Their world’s saviour was probably in the common room, laughing with Granger and Weasley, surrounded by light and friendship, things Draco could never be a part of. He thought of the chasm between them, of every cruel word he had ever spoken, of the Dark Mark on his arm that felt like it was burning in Potter’s presence.
The longing was a physical pain, a twisting vine around his heart, constricting his airways.
A coughing fit seized him, violent and sudden. It bent him double over his parchment, his shoulders shaking. This was different from the previous ones; it was raw, tearing, and it felt like it was scraping the very lining of his throat. His eyes watered, and he fumbled for his handkerchief, pressing it to his mouth as his body convulsed. Trying his best to be quiet, not wanting anyone to notice him in his moment of weakness.
After a couple of minutes, the fit finally subsided, leaving him gasping and drained. He lowered the handkerchief, his breath catching for a wholly new reason.
Lying in the centre of the white linen, stark and impossibly delicate, was a single, blood-speckled flower petal. It was soft, a pale pinkish-white, and curled gently at the edges. He knew it instantly from his mother’s gardens. A Great Laurel flower, otherwise known as the Bay Rose Rhododendron; a flower symbolising caution, danger, and a warning to beware. The meaning of the flower immediately came to him; the Language of Flowers trained into him by his Godfather to the point of fluency. But… it was not the meaning of the flower that made his blood run cold—it was why the flower petal had appeared that made him start to mourn his short-lived life.
Hanahaki Disease.
He had heard of it, of course, in the context of tragic Pureblood romances and operatic tales of unrequited love. It was a rare, old magic; a sickness of the body and soul, a physical manifestation of repressed, hopeless affection. Of unrequited love. The flowers grew in your lungs, fed by your silent devotion, until they choked you from the inside out.
Draco had studied the magical disease obsessively in his youth, believing in how romantic it seemed. Hoping that, one day, his love would fester itself physically, in one of the world’s most beautiful gifts—flowers. Now… Draco didn’t realise how much he would come to regret it all. The research his past self had done in the name of romance was now the soundless, world-ending peal of the final trumpet.
There were only two cures: the reciprocation of the loved one’s feelings… or the removal of the flowers from his lungs, which would also remove every memory and emotion associated with the person who caused them. Choosing to ignore both cures was suicide.
Draco’s fingers trembled as he closed his fist around the petal, its delicate texture a cruel joke against his skin. He thought of green eyes and a lightning-bolt scar, of a saved life and a debt that could never be repaid. He thought of a hatred that had somehow, inexplicably, twisted into this—this fatal, flowering thing.
Draco could never tell him. The humiliation would be worse than death. To confess this to Harry Potter, the Saviour, who looked at him now with nothing but a weary, distant tolerance… it was unthinkable.
The petal—a perfect, terrible omen against the cloth—felt like a cruel joke by Fate. As though the stars his family was named after had chosen to forsake him, to align themselves in a way that would give him a death as beautiful as his mother’s name. He just… he had just gotten the chance to live. To live a life without the burden of the Dark Lord looming over them… he thought he was finally free.
Oh, how foolish he was to hope.
A shadow fell over his table. He jerked his head up, instinctively hiding the damning evidence under the table.
Harry Potter stood beside him, his brow furrowed with concern. “Malfoy? Are you alright? I heard you coughing from over by the restricted section. It sounded… bad.” Potter’s green eyes were wide with genuine worry, and that concern, directed at him, was a knife to Draco’s heart. It was the catalyst. The love, the despair, the hopelessness—it coalesced into a thorny knot in his throat.
He opened his mouth to snarl something, anything, to drive Potter away, to protect his secret. But no words came out. Instead, a fresh, wracking cough overtook him. He turned away, but not before he saw Potter’s expression shift from concern to shock as Draco, in what would be a foolish attempt at pushing the concerned boy away, staggered out of the library, his body wracked by a cough. It was when he had found the familiar tapestry his mother had mentioned to him in the past, one with an ironic piece of art with a woman walking through a field of flowers, that he managed to allow himself to double over.
The alcove was smaller than he remembered—just a curved crevice between two arched windows, barely wide enough for the old sofa someone had abandoned there generations ago, but deep enough that no one would know of the alcove when the tapestry was drawn shut. Draco bypassed the sofa and chose to lean against the open window, trying his best to dislodge the petal from within his throat when a hard thump hit his back, accompanied by the telltale voice of his best friend.
“My, my, Draco… When Potter told me to check up on you, panicking as though you had turned bald and your nose had turned into slits, I thought we were having the second resurrection, not you having a coughing fit. Are you alright—” Pansy’s voice was caught off by a gasp as another bloodied petal fluttered out of his lips. “Shit…”
Draco let the breeze catch the petal, watching as it spiralled down into the black waters of the Hogwarts lake. For a moment, silence hung between them, thick and heavy. Draco couldn’t look at her, his face pale with shame and terror as Pansy’s arms wrapped around him, trying to console him as she whispered promises of “visiting Poppy” and how “he wasn’t alone.” But it had all become an unintelligible string of words against his ears. He had just vomited a flower at the very thought of the boy who owned his heart, the boy who would never, ever feel the same.
The two of them stood there for a long time, the taste of flora and regret thick on his tongue, knowing with a sinking certainty that this was only the beginning of his end.