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For as long as Chibita had known him, Matsuno Karamatsu had been sickly. He was thin and pale, with color high on his cheeks, and he had a tendency to wilt in the sun, limpid like those romantic consumptives in old books. Even as a child, Chibita had known it had something to do with flowers. They dropped from his mouth as he talked, their form changing with the seasons but their volume steady throughout the year.
He remembered asking his teacher once, with a child's innocence, what it meant when someone spat up flowers, when petals fell from their lips as well as words and the sickly sweet smells of nausea and perfume followed them wherever they went. She'd looked at him strangely, had told him about something called Hanahaki Disease. It was a very serious illness, she'd told him, and very rare. A person could get it when they loved someone, and that person didn't love them back. And that, that made sense in a weird sort of way. Because Karamatsu, that silly little idiot, loved everyone he met. He leaned in close with a sappy smile and shining eyes. As far as Chibita knew, though, everyone else just leaned right back, then went away. His teacher told him about 'unrequited love', and he wondered if you could have unrequited love for people you hadn't met yet, if you could have unrequited love for the entire world.
Did Chibita know an adult with Hanahaki Disease? his teacher had asked him. If he was worried about them, she had some books if he wanted to read them, though they were a little advanced for his age. After a little bit of thought, he'd accepted the offer. He didn't know any adults with Hanahaki Disease, so he felt a little bad about lying. But not bad enough to refuse the books.
He sat down with them in one foster family's living room, in the next family's kitchen, and later, in a dingy old pipe in the dump. It took him a long time, poring over those books. They were hard to understand. The words were big, and the concepts were unfamiliar. They talked about making incisions and cutting the flowers away. They talked about cutting the love away as well. They said that there was no other cure, not other than the object of the person's affections returning their love. But love, shadowy and unknown as the concept was to him at that time, didn't seem so easy to get rid of. What did it mean, to cut away love? Would the person still like the other person? Could they still be friends? Was that love, too, in a way?
Chibita tried to imagine Karamatsu without all that love, without the stars in his eyes and the painful little downturn of his mouth. But he couldn't manage it. Who would Karamatsu be without that sweetness? Chibita thought about the way those stupid brothers would chase him, would fight him, would leave bruises on his skin and the tang of blood against his lips. He thought about the way that Karamatsu would join in, no questions asked, as in love with his brothers as he was everyone else. He thought about the way that Karamatsu would see those bruises later and wince. He thought about who Karamatsu would be without all that love. How he would probably just smile and laugh to see the bandages the way all his brothers did.
Eventually, Chibita gave the books back to his teacher. He didn't like to think about any cure for Karamatsu's illness. His symptoms didn't quite match what the books said, anyway. They talked about a painful, lingering illness that would only get worse and worse over time. They said that the sufferer would cough harder and harder, until the petals would come out in wet clumps, damp with blood. They said the sufferer would eventually, if left untreated, die. But Karamatsu had been sick as long as he'd known him, and he wasn't getting any worse. And he coughed sometimes, pitiful little hacks, but not the heaving expulsions that the books described. It was low level, and it was constant. Just flower petals, white, pink, blue, violet, falling from his lips as he lived and breathed.
Chibita got older, and he became more familiar with ideas about chronic and terminal diseases. He knew that Hanahaki Disease was supposed to be the latter, but that Karamatsu had somehow managed the former. He was too stupid to catch a cold, Chibita supposed, and maybe too stupid to die from flowers as well. Karamatsu changed as he grew, too. It wasn't just Chibita growing tougher and quieter and a little more wary. Karamatsu's personality changed as he got older, diverged in much the same way that all of those stupid sextuplets had. He'd joined the drama club, Chibita heard, long after Chibita had been forced to drop out. Maybe that's why he was so melodramatic now, clutching his breast and sighing, turning bedroom eyes on anything that moved, reciting lines that seemed more at home in a bodice ripper than on a busy street. This new Karamatsu, this dramatic, painful Karamatsu, almost seemed to enjoy being sick. He'd cough pitifully, but make sure to do it downwind so his petals would flutter away on the breeze. He'd wear sunglasses to hide the dark circles under his eyes, but tilt them downward just so, just enough to peek and wink. He'd sit at the counter of Chibita's oden cart and bemoan the pain, the violence of the love in his heart, and ramble about how love, true love, could only hurt.
Chibita poured him a beer those nights, bit back a sigh, and didn't ask him about why he never seemed to consider surgery, if love was so painful. They both knew the answer to that. Chibita had read the studies online, the personal accounts of people who had been 'cured' of their flowers. How dead they were inside. How wholly different they were. How love wasn't something that could be isolated so easily, how it colored the sun and the rain and every thought a person had, how it was bound up inextricably in all the internal connections that made a person who they were. How when it was cut away, those connections were severed as well, and flapped uselessly in the breeze.
He thought about Karamatsu, whose love, whose idiotic, painful love, underlined every thought he had. Whose painful, throbbing heart provided the background music to his entire life. There would be nothing left, and they both knew it.
Things went like this for a long time, as pointless and frustrating as unchanging as those NEETs always were, always had been, until the shift in the Matsuno household. Honestly, Chibita had known it was coming. It had seemed inevitable to him; two aging parents could only take care of six children for so long. Those six children were growing more disparate every day, and their shitty personalities were chafing against each other. They were like plants growing too close to one another in a tiny plot, roots rubbing against each other and tangling and clamoring for the same resources until all of them, every last one, turned to rot. Chibita had known that things couldn't continue on the way they had been forever. So when Choromatsu got his job and moved out, when Todomatsu found a shitty little apartment, when Jyushimatsu found a new crew to assault with his happiness, Chibita wasn't surprised. A little relieved, maybe, but not surprised.
The only thing that surprised him was Karamatsu showing up at his door. It made sense, in retrospect, he thought as he stared down at Karamatsu's bowed head. Karamatsu had so few friends in his unrequited world. Chibita had hurt Karamatsu just like Karamatsu had hurt him, but Chibita also knew him. He'd listened to his rambled thoughts on warm summer nights, and had rolled his eyes but allowed the caterwauling of new 'songs'. He'd seen Karamatsu at his lowest, at his most painful but also at his most vulnerable, and he hadn't looked away. So maybe it made sense that Karamatsu would show up on his doorstep like some kind of stray dog begging for scraps. Maybe it made sense that Chibita let him in, that he rolled out two futon instead of one and started buying twice as much food at the supermarket. Maybe it made sense that Chibita quickly grew used to sweeping flower petals from the tatami.
What didn't make sense, though, was the way that Karamatsu got worse. Chibita caught him one morning vomiting plum blossoms into their toilet, and hadn't known what to do other than rubbing his back to ease their passing.
"Is it because you left your family, d'you think?" he asked over breakfast. Clear broth to settle a churning stomach.
"No, I don't think so," Karamatsu said. "Though I miss the scampering of a dozen little feet, the depth of my love for my brothers, and theirs for me, remains unchanged."
So an ocean versus a puddle, then. Great. There were days when Chibita wanted to throttle Karamatsu's shitty brothers. But that was an old problem, scarred but not festering, and the vomiting was new. "Is your body just readjusting to a new place? It isn't the job search is it? It's not too stressful?" Because that would be just fucking like him, to be too "stressed" to find gainful employment.
He thought back, though, to Karamatsu's nose on his floor and tears in his eyes, and amended that thought. Maybe it wasn't very much like him at all.
Karamatsu shrugged, and there was something a little uneasy to the movement. "That doesn't make sense, either. Isn't the only thing that can make it worse love?" he asked, and the question was rhetorical. They both read the same goddamn books when they were children. They both knew the answer to that question.
The next question, the logical one, was on the tip of Chibita's tongue, and he almost asked it. 'Are you in love, Karaboy?' But the question made him uneasy, too. The potential answers even moreso. So Chibita just took a bite of his toast, and didn't say anything.
* * *
When Karamatsu had first moved in, they'd built up a sort of routine. Karamatsu would leave in the morning to go pound the pavement, and Chibita would see him off. Later that evening, Karamatsu would usually show up at the cart, buzzing with potential success or dim with obvious failure. And Chibita would just fix him a plate, pour him a beer, and talk with him. Sometimes it was casual chatter, if there were other customers. Or sometimes it would be quieter conversation, soft and intimate in the lamplight. Karamatsu would drink a little too much, and so would Chibita. The words would become a little too soft and a little too solid. Sometimes he learned things about Karamatsu that he sort of wished he could forget, things that clutched at his heart and made him look at that painful idiot a little more gently. Things like the times he'd been brutally turned down in middle school, and the way he'd coughed on the way home until his throat felt slit with roses and razor blades. Things like how he'd been abandoned so many times in so many ways when they'd been children, and how he'd slowly learned to smile through it. Things like how he thought about their childhoods a lot nowadays, and how he could remember the way Chibita's flesh had felt against his fists, the way Chibita had made his own impressions in Karamatsu's skin. Things like how he was sorry for how things had been. For who he was now. How he was always so goddamn sorry just to be him. Because he had to be doing something wrong, right?
It was an unrequited world.
Chibita told Karamatsu things, too, shrouded in oden steam. He murmured things in a voice too quiet for daily use, too weak to break down the walls that were constantly springing up in front of him. The two of them would walk home together in the darkness. Stout and strong. Pale and sickly. Their plodding footsteps didn't match, but they stepped in time all the same.
That routine changed after Karamatsu started to get worse. He stopped applying for jobs; it didn't exactly look good to start hacking up cherry blossoms in the middle of an interview. He started spending a lot more time at the clinic next to their apartment, having tests done and being monitored. For what, Chibita didn't know. Honestly, he was a little afraid to ask.
He thought about the difference between chronic and terminal that he'd learned so well as he'd grown, and he shuddered. Because Karamatsu, whose painful, limpid eyes and painful, meandering monologues and painfully bruised skin, had become a part of his life in a way he never had been before. The two of them had been on a wobbly parallel since they were children, with lines and lives that only grazed each other, and only in the worst ways. But their paths had changed at some point, and their trajectories had collided. Their lives were at a solid intersection now, and Chibita didn't like to think about what would happen when they eventually diverged again. There were only two alternatives to that, though. Their lives would either need to merge or, what was becoming more and more likely every day, one line would stop where it was and go out. As terrifying as the former option was, it was nothing compared to the latter.
Because Chibita was finding blood on the sheets when he hung up their laundry, like a spray of wilted rose petals against white cloth, and his fingers shook as he clipped them to the line. Karamatsu was avoiding his questions when he asked about the appointments, the cause of all the problems. Or maybe he was just avoiding the answers.
Chibita wasn't stupid, though. He may not have had the educational opportunities that Karamatsu had, may not have spent his teenage years with his nose stuck in any books except ones full of recipes, but he wasn't stupid.
"You're in love, aren't you?" he asked one night. His voice split the silence in their apartment that hung heavy in the darkness.
On the other side of the room, he could hear Karamatsu's slightly labored breathing. He could hear the rattle of blooms on his breath. And finally, in the smallest voice he'd ever heard out of the man, "Yeah."
It was like fireworks in his brain, in his chest, loud and cacophonous and with stinging little sparks that burned the inside of his skin. "Who is it?" he asked, and he tried not to sound too urgent. "Is it someone I know?" Can I help you? God, can I help you?
Karamatsu breathed in the darkness, in, out, in. And then Chibita heard the rustle of sheets as he rolled over in his futon, his back to where Chibita lay.
If Karamatsu was this sick, then he knew that the person he loved didn't love him back. Maybe talking about that, giving voice to what they both knew was true, hurt even more than the flowers growing up his throat, or their thorns.
* * *
The day it happened, Chibita had been running late. He was still waiting on his toast to finish cooking, was standing in the kitchen with one foot jiggling impatiently, when he heard the thump from behind him.
The coughing he was used to; he'd almost learned to tune it out by then. But this, god, this was new. He turned and saw Karamatsu, his Karamatsu, on the floor. The idiot, the goddamn idiot hadn't even managed to land on the futon.
"Shit!" Chibita said, and ran to the living room, toast forgotten. "Karamatsu? Are you okay? Shit, shit."
Because Karamatsu wasn't answering him, was just panting hard, the yellow of chrysanthemums on each breath. Chibita could see it then, the clammy gray pallor of his skin, the way his veins were so visible beneath that. The way they seemed almost green, like the snaky tendrils of plants wending their way underneath his skin. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Chibita pushed him back into his futon as best he could, and tucked the comforter around him. Then he sat back on his heels, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and called Karamatsu's doctor.
"Help, please, Karamatsu collapsed--" he sputtered into the phone as soon as she answered, and she made a soft tutting noise, like that would calm him.
"Chibita-san? Is that you?"
"Yeah, Matsuno Karamatsu's roommate," he said, like that mattered, like anything mattered except the fact that Karamatsu had gone so still in his futon. The idiot always rolled around in his sleep. He shouldn't have been so goddamn still. "He's not moving."
He could hear the sound of papers fluttering on the other side of the phone, of files being opened. "So soon? He shouldn't be--well, this happens sometimes, in cases like his. You know how to make him comfortable, don't you?" she asked, and what? What the hell? The words, horrible as they sounded in his ears, didn't seem to make any sense whatsoever.
"What?" he asked, voice gone tiny, and he heard her movements pause.
"Chibita-san? Did Matsuno-san not discuss this with you?"
Chibita looked down at Karamatsu, so still, so gray against the white of his blankets, and sort of felt like throttling him. Instead, he leaned forward and brushed a stray flower petal from his lips. "Discuss what?"
"Oh, for--" He heard it, the sharp burst of frustration, maybe a little bit of anger. Then he heard her suck in a sigh, breathe it out slowly. "Chibita-san, Matsuno-san is entering the last stages of his disease. He told me that you knew, and that you were ready."
"Ready?" he asked. "Ready for what?"
But he knew. Of course he knew. Karamatsu had been so quiet, so cagey, had barely strung five words together at a time, much less the hour long rambles he'd used to annoy Chibita with. He had been lying. God. Of course he'd been lying. Wasn't that just like Karamatsu, to take the coward's way out. Because that was what this was. He was on the way out.
"Chibita-san..."
He cleared his throat. He wouldn't make her say it. "What do I do?" he asked, and he had a feeling that she could hear the lump in his throat. "How do I fix this?"
Her sigh was stronger now, enough so that he could hear the line crackle. "Matsuno-san has declined all treatment for his disease," she said, and he could hear a frustrated tightness in her voice. Karamatsu tended to have that effect on people. "At this point, all you can do is keep him company."
"But I--I can come in, if I have to, if there's some kind of medicine that would help--"
"Chibita-san. I can email you some materials if you like, but I recommend that you stay with your roommate."
"Oh," he said, and reached down to clutch at the small lump in the blankets that was Karamatsu's hand. "Oh."
* * *
It was a few hours before Karamatsu woke up again. But around mid-afternoon, his eyes slitted open for just a second before they squeezed tight again as he started coughing.
"Shh," Chibita said, brushing the blooms, yellow speckled with red, away from his lips. "Shh."
But Karamatsu, bullheaded moron that he was, had never been good at following orders. "Chibita..."
Chibita huffed a little, and tried to quell the trembling in his fingers. "I said to hush, idjit," he said. "Your doctor said you shouldn't be talking much. Your lungs are under enough strain."
Karamatsu drew his lower lip into his mouth to wet it, and when he released it, Chibita could feel it against his fingertips, damp like a kiss. "Sorry."
A sound came out of him then, some bizarre little sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "You should be sorry, you asshole. You didn't tell me it was this bad." He'd had no fucking idea that he should have been thinking about goodbyes rather than grocery lists.
Karamatsu shrugged, more a shifting of weight beneath his blankets than anything. "Wouldn't have mattered."
"No," Chibita said, and his eyes were definitely stinging now. "You don't get to say that. We could have--we could have tried something. I would have helped you."
Karamatsu just shut his eyes again. "Doesn't matter. Doesn't love me."
"Yet!" Chibita would have shaken him if he didn't look so goddamn pale. "Did you even try?" He never did, he never tried anything. He just--he gave up when things got too hard, or too scary. Chibita had thought that maybe he was starting to get better at that. But Karamatsu would always be Karamatsu. A painful, tender-hearted coward.
Karamatsu just gave him another half-hearted little shrug. "He could do better."
And that, any other day, that 'he' might have been a bombshell. But now it didn't mean anything, not anything at all. Not with Karamatsu lying there in the futon with no promise that he'd ever get out of it. "You goddamn idjit. What'd I tell you about guts? No guts, no glory," he said, and he knew his voice was shaking. But goddamn it, Karamatsu. God fucking damn it.
"I don't have guts," Karamatsu said, and he just--he sounded exhausted. Physically and emotionally exhausted.
He did, though. He'd had the guts to come to Chibita and try to make his life better. He'd had the guts to keep applying to job after job, even after he'd had enough refusals to make a book. He'd had the guts to lie to Chibita about his illness even though Chibita would have killed him himself if he'd known.
"But--" Chibita grappled around for something, for any one of the increasingly unlikely solutions he'd thought about while Karamatsu had been lying asleep in his bed. "But what about the surgery? It's not--it's not good, but it'd save you."
Karamatsu's eyes cracked open then, and he looked--jesus, what right did he have to look disappointed in Chibita? "No. No surgery," he said.
"But you'll die," Chibita said, and god, those were the words. They were out. They were true. Karamatsu was going to die, and there was nothing Chibita could do about it. Chibita could feel the tears building up in his eyes, could feel them fall. He didn't bother to try and wipe them away.
Karamatsu frowned at him, no, at the tears, and his hand twitched beneath the blanket like he was going to do something about them. But Chibita just covered that hand with his own and shook his head. Karamatsu was leaving him. The least he could do was put up with a few tears.
"It's good," Karamatsu said suddenly, randomly, and Chibita frowned down at him. Nothing was good about this. Nothing. "The feelings I have--they're good, Chibita. They hurt, but... Love is a beautiful gift, and though my heart is swollen with pain, it is a painful joy." Painful, painful to the last. What an idiot. What a sweet little idiot. And then Karamatsu turned away, cheek to his pillow, as he continued. "I don't want to lose that, Chibita. Not even if I die."
And really, what could Chibita say to that? It was so, so Karamatsu. It was sweet and idealistic and painful, and the utter foundation of everything that he was. Karamatsu had turned away from effort, had turned away from risk. But he'd never turned away from pain. He'd walked to school with his brothers in his little hat and backpack, a sakura-filled handkerchief pressed against his mouth. He'd weathered the teasing in middle school as people asked him, again and again, just which girl had turned him down. He'd left his brothers, and felt them like phantom limbs.
"Your brothers," Chibita said dully. "Should I call them?"
"Please."
* * *
Karamatsu had drifted off to sleep again, eventually, and Chibita had been left with nothing but his own thoughts and a phone. He should pick it up, he knew, and call the Matsuno residence before it was too late. But there was a peculiar kind of quiet in their apartment, broken only by Karamatsu's rough breathing and the occasional hiccup that Chibita's crying jag had left as a memento. Chibita couldn't bear to pick up the phone and talk to anyone, not in that one, last quiet moment.
Instead, he watched Karamatsu sleep. He didn't look peaceful like this. He never did when he slept. Usually he flopped around in his sleep, and his lips mumbled around the scripts of dreams. Now he was still, laid out flat like the dead, and his sleep was broken only by those wracking coughs. The time for words, whether awake or in sleep, had passed.
Chibita was still, too. He sat there and watched Karamatsu's shaking chest with a sort of numbness that sat heavy on his skin. He wasn't ready. It didn't matter if he was ready. He wasn't happy. It didn't matter if he was happy. Nothing mattered, especially not the efforts of one small man. There was one person now who could help Karamatsu, and Chibita didn't even know who he was. Only Karamatsu did, and he wasn't telling.
And fuck, fuck, wasn't it just like Karamatsu to die for love? Wasn't it just like him to clutch secrets like flowers to his chest, and to prepare himself for burial? Did he think this was some kind of game? Some kind of drama on tv? Did he think a graceful exit would make his absence any less unbearable?
Chibita sat there dully, and if there were any tears left, he would have cried them. His heart beat painfully in his chest, and all he could think about was what would happen when those labored breaths finally ceased. When Karamatsu ceased, too. About how empty his apartment would seem without him in it, how empty the cart would be, how empty a life. He wouldn't have his bad jokes or his painful speeches. He wouldn't have his frustrating mistakes or his heartfelt apologies. He wouldn't have those long, quiet, perfectly painful conversations that he'd come to rely on like he did breath. He wouldn't have Karamatsu, was the long and short of it, and that was something too horrible for his mind to wrap itself around.
This, this right here, was why Chibita had stopped angling for love. This was why he'd never find himself a sufferer of Hanahaki Disease. His heart had grown hard years ago, and he'd grown wary enough to protect it. He'd lost parents and friends and everyone he'd ever loved, and every time it got a little bit harder to believe that real love even existed in their world. In a world that couldn't even give Karamatsu, the neediest person he knew, a scrap of affection. If Karamatsu weren't dying for lack of it, Chibita would have thought that love was an impossibility.
If his own heart didn't feel as if it were being slowly ripped out of his chest, he would have thought it was a myth.
Because he knew this feeling. He knew it better than any other feeling in the world. He'd felt it too many times, and each time it had been inexorably burned into his psyche. It was the pain of losing a loved one, a precious person, the most important person he had. Karamatsu, idiot though he was, had bored his way past his carefully laid defenses. Through sheer force of painful perseverance, he'd pushed his way past Chibita's walls. And now he was there inside his heart, ready and waiting to burn it away from the inside out.
Chibita reached out to stroke trembling fingers down Karamatsu's cheek. He might have been hesitant before. But what was the point of hesitance now? Karamatsu's skin was clammy and cold beneath his touch. Despite that, Chibita leaned forward and pressed what he supposed was his first and last kiss to Karamatsu's temple. "Why couldn't you have just fallen in love with me, you goddamn idjit?" he asked, voice hoarse in his throat. "Don't you have any idea how much I would have loved you back?"
Karamatsu made a sound in the back of his throat, and Chibita pulled back. "Shit," he muttered. He hadn't meant to wake him. Karamatsu's arm twitched beneath the covers, and Chibita patted it gently. "It's okay, Karaboy. Go back to sleep," he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice.
But he didn't go back to sleep. He whimpered again, and then--well, a lot of things happened very quickly. Karamatsu sat bolt upright, like he hadn't been unable to so much as raise his head for hours, and reached out blindly for, for, for what? Chibita realized only just in time that he was reaching for the wastebasket, and he pressed it into his hands. Karamatsu vomited, and Chibita had seen him do that before. He'd seen him do it a lot lately. But it was different this time, violent in a way Chibita wasn't familiar with, and after a couple seconds he grew concerned. There were flowers, so many goddamn flowers, like Karamatsu was expelling everything he had inside him and then some, and Chibita's stomach went to ice. Was this it? Was this the last part of the disease?
But Karamatsu wasn't stopping, wasn't falling back again, limp against his bed. There were just flowers and flowers and flowers, and he was choking on them there were so many. Chibita rubbed his back at first--and then pounded it. With one more hard cough, Karamatsu voided the last of those little yellow petals, and then he just sat there, hands holding tight to the wastebasket.
"Karamatsu?" Chibita finally ventured, quiet so as not to spook him. "You okay?"
Karamatsu looked at him, and his eyes were--well, they looked very confused, but they also looked clear in a way that they hadn't for ages. "Yes," he said, and sounded half wondering. "I am."
Chibita frowned. "What?" He'd meant it more in a relative way. Like, an 'are you about to die in my living room?' kind of way. But Karamatsu's eyes were clear, and his cheeks were flushed, and he was setting aside the wastebasket like the weight of it was nothing.
Karamatsu looked at him, and those ridiculous eyebrows of his fluttered up and down like he was trying to make sense of something, a far off idea or memory. "Did you kiss me?" he asked, and his voice sounded raw, but steady.
"I--" Chibita's heart beat quick, almost double time, and fuck that hurt. "Maybe?"
And maybe he'd thought that Karamatsu would laugh, or that his lips would screw up in disgust, but his eyes only widened. Chibita could see his fingers fist in the blankets. "Why?"
"Because I--" And oh, oh, oh, oh god, Chibita was going to murder him. He was going to kiss him senseless and drag him to the doctor and then murder him with his bare hands. "You're in love with me?" he asked, and maybe he shouldn't have sounded quite so outraged about the fact, but oh my god.
Karamatsu didn't answer, but then again, maybe he couldn't. His eyes were wide, wide, too wide for his face, and Chibita definitely would have mocked him for it if this whole situation weren't so fucking--oh my god.
"You are! You fucking are! All this time, you're rotting from the inside out, and it was the guy you sleep with every night? What the hell?" he said, and his blood was on fire, was burning through his veins, and he didn't know whether it was anger or relief that had set him alight. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Karamatsu's eyes, wide as they were, were starting to soften around the edges with something a little like hope. "I didn't think--"
"No, you didn't! God, you never think! You idjit! You goddamn fucking idjit!" Chibita snapped. "You almost died!"
"I know!" Karamatsu finally said, and Chibita was shocked into silence by the strength of his voice. Chibita hadn't heard his voice like that in far too long. "I know that! I tried!"
Chibita licked his lips, rearranged his legs, and did his best to quell the urge to shake him. "When?" he asked.
"So many times," Karamatsu said, and sat up a little straighter. "I tried so hard to get you to love me. I tried everything I could think of, but you just thought I was trying to make myself better for myself, or that I was flirting as a joke. It wasn't enough. I--I thought it wasn't enough."
And Chibita could see it now, could look back on their life together and see it with crystal clarity. He saw now all those quiet conversations at the cart, talking about love and devotion, and knew them for what they were. He remembered Karamatsu bringing home flowers, and the way he'd thought they were a particularly dark joke. He remembered Karamatsu bringing home an entire page of job listings and looking to Chibita, desperate for his approval. He remembered giving him the thumbs up, and thinking to himself how great it was that Karamatsu wanted to be better. God. What an idiot he'd been. What a pair they were!
Chibita hadn't understood Karamatsu nearly as well as he thought he did, and clearly hadn't understood the quiet language of love that Karamatsu didn't know how to speak outside the realm of books and low quality dramas. But he understood now. He understood everything.
He looked at Karamatsu now, looked at those bright, clear eyes that were full of wary hope, and finally understood what they were telling him. And he leaned forward, brought his arms more firmly around Karamatsu's shoulders, and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "It was enough," he said, low and rough, and pressed another kiss to his skin, to dark circles under his eye, to his sweat-slicked temple. "You were enough." He pulled him in, held him tight. "You were always enough."
Karamatsu's breath heaved out of him in a sudden sob, and he pressed his nose in against Chibita's collar. "I didn't want to die," he said, and even if Chibita hadn't been able to feel the tears dripping down his neck, he would have heard them muffled in his voice. "I didn't want to die! But I didn't want to lose you, either. You were the best thing I had."
What a lie. What a damn, dirty lie. Chibita wasn't the best thing in anyone's life, and he certainly wasn't worth dying over. But that was an argument for another day, when Karamatsu's shoulders weren't thin and bony and shaking beneath Chibita's fingers. When Chibita's fingers weren't shaking right back. So instead he just pressed his lips against Karamatsu's hair and stroked his back. "That you have. You still have me, Karaboy. You're not going anywhere." He swallowed against the thickness in his throat. "Neither am I."
Karamatsu's fists tightened in Chibita's shirt, and there was another tremulous sob. "I loved you," he said. "I loved you so much." And then he was shaking his head, minutely enough but Chibita could feel every movement he made. "I love you."
And love, put so baldly like that, had never been Chibita's style. Love was something he kept locked away deep inside where no one could see it, where even he couldn't be bothered too much by its pulsing. It was the safest place for it to be in a world like this. Where people went away. Where people didn't want you. Where people died.
But love was what Karamatsu needed. He needed that warmth in Chibita's chest, and the idiocy that numbed his brain. He needed his clumsy kisses and even clumsier words. He needed Chibita's heart, whole and beating just for him, and needed the honesty that went with it. There was only one cure for Hanahaki Disease, and Chibita held it in his hands. So he kissed Karamatu's hair again, nuzzled into the dark strands, and said, "I love you, too."
He kissed his hair, then eased Karamatsu up off his neck so he could kiss his cheek again, kiss the tear tracks and the flushed skin and the tip of his disgusting, runny nose. "I love you so much."
Karamatsu stared at him like he barely knew him, like he was looking at something too big, too good for him to understand. Karamatsu looked at him like he was an impossible dream come true. And Chibita's heart beat too hard, felt too warm, too large for his chest. He loved him so, so much. And he'd almost lost him because he'd been too repressed to notice it. He'd closed his own heart off to protect it from the elements, and Karamatsu had been the one to suffer for it.
So Chibita made the decision, then and there, to make up for it now. To give Karamatsu what he wanted, and to take what he needed. To feed love into his mouth every day, and pluck away any stray flower petals that he found there. He cupped Karamatsu's cheek, wet and flushed and full of so much more life than it had been even ten minutes before, and he pulled him in close for a kiss. It was sickly sweet, flower petals and acid, but he didn't pull away. He just kissed him, again and again, until Karamatsu slowly started to kiss him back. He'd kiss him, he'd keep kissing him, until he understood that this was real. That Chibita burned for him just like he did for Chibita. That if he'd gone, then the hole in his heart would have been something unfixable, a wound that would never go away. That Chibita loved him.
Because Karamatsu's love for the world was, by and large, unrequited. Chibita had a feeling that he wouldn't stop spitting up peonies any time soon. But at least one person liked him back, shared in his idiocy and his love both, and always would. He'd hold him at night, and kiss him awake in the mornings. Their lives would merge, become one shared entity, and he'd hold that fragile, overlarge heart in his hands. He'd protect it, and he'd love it, because more than anyone else in the world, Karamatsu had gifted it to him.
Chibita held Karamatsu close and kissed him long and slow and sweet. He could feel Karamatsu's bones beneath his fingers, knew he'd gone too long devoid of real sustenance. He looked forward to filling those spaces again with oden and kisses and words whispered in the darkness. He looked forward to spending the rest of his life doing just that, and the rest of Karamatsu's. The future had gone wider, had stretched longer, in the blink of an eye. He bit down on Karamatsu's lower lip and started to explore it, their new, bright future, with hope in his heart.