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Illuga had always known how to carry things.
He knew the heft of a newly cut stone for the lighthouse foundation, the satisfying strain in his shoulders as he lifted it. He knew the weight of a full patrol pack. The distribution of rations, bandages, rope and flint. He knew the heavy, living weight of a wounded comrade across his back. The frantic prayer in every footfall as he carried them home through the snow.
But this was a different weight. An internal one. A pressure that bloomed behind his ribs not in moments of fear, but in moments of impossible sweetness. It started with petals.
The first one caught in his throat during a strategy meeting. Flins had just finished explaining a new patrol route, his elegant hands tracing lines on the map with a precision that bordered on artistry. His voice is calm, measured, carrying the faint melodic lilt of a much older language. Explaining frost patterns on the northern ridge when Illuga felt it. A tickle, a hitch. He coughed into his fist discreetly, expecting phlegm from the cold.
Instead, a single perfect petal fluttered into his palm.
It was midnight blue, veined with silver like a frozen starfield. Beautiful and utterly terrifying. He closed his fist around it, the delicate flower crumpling into damp nothingness. He dismissed it. Frostflower pollen, perhaps. Some Nod-Krai plant he’d inhaled. A strange but explainable thing.
He was wrong.
The petals became a routine. They came when Flins smiled at him across the common room. A small private thing meant only for him. They came when their shoulders brushed as they poured over ledgers in the lantern room, the warmth of Flins’s arm seeping through wool and leather. They came most violently the night Flins fell asleep at his desk, head pillowed on a map of the ravine. And Illuga stood watching him for a long, stolen moment. The sheer unguarded peace on his face, the way the lamplight gilded his eyelashes… Illuga had stumbled to a wall, coughing a torrent of blue and silver into the howling dark. His eyes water from more than the wind.
Hanahaki Disease. The bards in Mondstat wrote about it. The Inazuman novels spoke of its tragic beauty. In the practical frozen hell of Nod-Krai, it was a death sentence wrapped in a metaphor. A flower growing in your lungs, born of unrequited love. It would grow and grow, until it filled you up and choked on its beauty. The cure was simple. Have your love returned. Or have the flowers surgically removed along with every memory, every feeling you had for the person who planted them.
Neither option was possible.
To confess to Flins? To lay that burden at the feet of the most competent, composed and extraordinary person he knew? It was unthinkable. It would be a manipulation. Love me or watch me die? It would shatter the effortless bond they’d built, poison every shared glance and turn their quiet understanding into a pit of obligation and pity. Illuga would rather choke.
And the surgery… to forget the feel of Flins’s hand steadying him when he was exhausted? To forget the sound of his voice reading old texts in the deep watches of the night? To forget the way his presence alone could make the crushing weight of the lighthouse feel lighter? It would be a cut of the soul. He would rather die as himself loving Flins than live as a hollow man who looked at his dearest friend and felt nothing.
So he carried the new weight. He learned its patterns.
He kept a tin of strong mint on him at all times, the sharp mint masking the ever present floral taste in his mouth. He excused himself abruptly from conversations when a fit threatened, blaming the cold air or a persistent cough. He took the most remote patrols, where his cough into the snow would disturb no one. He smiled wider, laughed louder and worked harder. If he was the unshakable Captain then no one would look too closely at the shadows under his eyes or the increasing gauntness of his frame. No one would notice how his once prodigious appetite had faded to nothing. How food tasted like ash beside the perpetual perfume of frozen blossoms.
Except Flins noticed. Of course he did.
Illuga saw the observation in those ancient, knowing eyes. The slight frown when Illuga pushed away a full plate. The tracking gaze when he returned from a “brief airing” on the wall, his lips tinged blue from more than the cold. The way Flins’s hand would sometimes hover near his back after a coughing fit. Wanting to steady, to comfort but never quite touching.
“You’re working too hard, Master Illuga,” Flins said one evening, his voice deceptively mild as he placed a cup of tea beside Illuga’s ledger. It wasn’t the usual blend. It smelled of pungent herbs, ginger and crushed pine needles. A tonic.
“The work doesn’t stop, Sir Flins,” Illuga replied, his voice a little rougher than it used to be. He gave his best, brightest smile. It felt like cracking ice on his face. “But I thank you for the tea.”
Flins didn’t move. He stood there, a quiet immovable obstacle in the flow of Illuga’s desperate performance. “It’s more than work,” he said softly. “You’re fading, Illuga. I can see it. The others see your strength but I see what it costs.”
The use of his name, suddenly stripped of the title was a direct hit. Illuga felt a vine twist in his chest, a blossom unfurling in a painful delicious rush. He brought the tea to his lips, using the steam to hide the spasm in his jaw. “Just a touch of the winter lung,” he managed. “It will pass.”
Flins’s eyes held his. They were the color of aged whiskey held up to a winter sun. A warm luminous amber, shot through with filaments of darker gold. In their depths which held the weight of countless seasons, Illuga saw a fear that mirrored his own. Not of the disease, but of whatever unseen enemy was causing the light to dim in the man before him. “See that it does,” Flins said finally, his voice a low cultured murmur and the words were a plea disguised as an order.
He knows, Illuga thought. Panic and a strange perverse hope clawing at his throat. He knows something is wrong. But the gap between knowing something is wrong and knowing he is the cause was as wide and dark as the Nod-Krai ravine. Illuga would throw himself into it before he bridged that gap.
The crisis came on a deceptively calm day.
The sky was a flat, pale grey and the wind a whisper. A perfect day for checking the perimeter wards. Illuga volunteered, needing the solitude and the vast white silence to cough his heart out without witnesses.
He was at the seventh ward, a stone monolith carved with fading geo sigils. The familiar ritual of channeling energy through his Vision to reinforce it usually grounded him. Today the energy sparked and stuttered, meeting a strange resistance inside him. A thicket where his lungs should be. As the stone sealed with a low hum, the pressure in his chest crested.
It wasn’t a cough. It was a convulsion.
He dropped to his knees in the snow, his polearm falling from numb fingers. He couldn’t draw breath. It was as if his throat had been packed full of damp soil and roots. He clawed at his gorget, gasping, his vision spotting. When the air finally tore through, it was accompanied not by petals, but by a whole perfect flower.
It was a luminescent blue, with a center of glowing amber that exactly matched the warm gold in Flins own eyes. It fell from his lips into the pristine snow, a shocking beautiful stain of color. He stared at it, wheezing, tears of pain and humiliation freezing on his cheeks. Then another came. And another. Not just flowers now, but thorned vines slick with his own blood tearing their way up his throat.
This was it. The progression. The pretty, poetic petals were over. Now comes the choking reality.
He was going to die here alone, in a nest of his own impossible love and Flins would never know why. The thought was more suffocating than the flowers. Flins would blame himself. He would search for a physical enemy, a toxin, a monster and find nothing. He would carry the mystery, the guilt of not solving it for the rest of his long life.
No. The thought was a last spark of defiance. Not like this.
With effort, Illuga staggered to his feet. He left the flowers where they fell, a tragic trail leading back to the lighthouse. He didn’t run, he couldn’t, but he walked with the single minded determination of a man marching to his own execution. Each step was a battle against the blood in his chest, the thorny vines twisting with every beat of his heart. He would confess. He would say the words, see the shock, the pity, the inevitable gentle rejection in Flins’s eyes. And then… then he would walk into the storm. He would find a clean, cold end that didn’t force Flins to watch him decay.
The journey back was a blur of white pain. The lighthouse door seemed miles away, then inches and then he was shouldering it open. Stumbling into the blinding, swirling prismatic light of the lantern room.
Flins turned from the desk, a calm query on his lips that died instantly.
Illuga stood framed in the doorway, a sculpture of ruin. Snow melted in clumps from his coat, his face was a ghastly mask of pallor and frozen tear tracks. At the corner of his mouth, a vivid smear of blood and sapphire blue pollen glistened like a grotesque jewel. His breath wasn’t breathing; it was a wet, ragged sawing, a bellows fighting against a clog of roots and petals.
“Illuga!” Flins was across the room in a heartbeat, hands outstretched. His usual composure shattered into pure alarm. He reached for Illuga’s arm, his shoulder, searching for a wound. A break, anything tangible to fix.
Illuga didn’t speak. Words were beyond him. The confession wasn’t a sentence in his mind; it was a final, desperate momentum. He took one lurching step forward then another, his vision tunneling until all he could see was Flins. The anchor, the cause, the only star in his drowning sky.
His legs gave out.
He didn’t crumple to the floor. He collapsed forward, directly into Flins. It wasn’t an embrace, it was a fall. A surrender. His full weight, all the exhaustion and the dying weight of the flowers crashed into Flins’s chest. His arms, numb and heavy but somehow found their way around Flins’s torso. Clinging with the last reflexive strength of a drowning man.
Flins staggered back a step under the impact but held firm. His own arms coming up automatically to catch him, to hold him upright. Illuga buried his face in the curve of Flins’s neck, his body wracked by tremors that were part shivering cold. Part suffocating convulsion. He was gasping, each inhaling a desperate whistling struggle against the bloom in his lungs.
“Illuga… gods, what’s happened?” Flins’s voice was tight with fear, his hands moving over Illuga’s back. Feeling the tremors and the alarming thinness beneath the layers. “Talk to me. Where are you hurt?”
The closeness, the solid warmth of Flins. The familiar scent of crisp and warmth of him was both agony and solace. It loosened something. Not the flowers but the dam holding back the truth. The words fought their way up, tangled with the roots in his throat.
“Flins… I…” he choked out, the sound muffled against Flins’s shoulder. A cough seized him, violent, deep but he didn’t let go. He clung tighter, as if physical contact could anchor the words and could make them safe. When the fit passed, he dragged in a shattered breath. “I need… to tell you. Before I… can’t.”
“Tell me later,” Flins urged, trying to shift him. To get a look at his face, to assess the damage. “You need to sit. You need help—”
“NO!” The denial was a burst of frantic energy. Illuga pulled back just enough to look at Flins, his grip on Flins’s tunic white knuckled. His eyes wide and desperate, were swimming with tears of pain and terror. “It is the help. The only… the only help.” Another cough, this one he couldn’t stifle. He turned his head away, body convulsing and a tangled thorny vine slick with blood. Studded with wilted blue petals spilled from his lips onto the stone floor between their feet.
The world stopped.
The sound of something turning. Everything faded into a profound, ringing silence. Flins’s supportive hold went rigid. His eyes dropped to the horrific, beautiful offering on the floor and then snapped back to Illuga’s face. To the shame, agony, raw and unveiled love staring back at him. Centuries of knowledge of whispered lore and tragic poetry crystallized into a single, devastating understanding.
“Hanahaki,” he breathed. The word wasn’t a diagnosis. It was a death sentence heard in a loved one’s voice.
Illuga saw the comprehension dawn, saw the blood drain from Flins’s face leaving him as pale as the moonstone lens. This was it. The moment of truth he had both craved and dreaded. He was still clinging to Flins, his body sagging. Held up only by Flins’s stunned arms and his own failing will. There was no elegance left, no brave face. Just the wreck of him, hanging onto the reason for it all.
He didn’t have the breath for pretty words. He poured everything into his gaze, into the frantic grip of his hands on Flins’s arms. The evidence was on the floor. The truth was in his broken body.
“It’s you,” he gasped, the confession torn from him like the vines had been. A fresh tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek. “It’s always… only ever been you. Your mind… your patience… the way you… you see everything.” He was shaking violently now, the admission both a release and a final expenditure. “I like you, Flins. I am… in love with you. And I am… so… so sorry.”
He braced himself, his body tense against Flins’s hold. For the flinch. For the gentle, inevitable push away. For the end.
It didn’t come.
Flins stood utterly still, holding the weight of Illuga’s confession and his collapsing body without a word. The light played over his face, catching the sheen of unshed tears gathering in his own eyes. He looked not horrified, not pitying, but utterly profoundly shattered. As if Illuga hadn’t handed him a secret, but a tragedy he’d been silently witnessing for months.
A deep, shuddering breath escaped Flins. The hands that were holding Illuga up slid one to cradle the back of his head, fingers tangling in sweat damp snow matted hair. The other splaying across his trembling back, pulling him closer, tighter into the shelter of his own body.
“You fool… why apologize?” Flins whispered, the words raw vibrating against Illuga’s temple where it was pressed against him.
Illuga shuddered, a sob catching in his ravaged throat. This wasn’t rejection? This was… something else… Something that felt like the ground shifting under his feet while simultaneously offering solid ground.
Flins pulled back just enough to look into his eyes, his own gaze blazing with a fury that was pure fear. “Do you have any idea,” he said, his voice trembling, “what these past weeks have been like? Watching you disappear? Watching you carry this alone? Seeing every cough, every wince or every time you smiled so bright thinking I was failing to find the poison, the sickness or the thing that was hurting you?” His grip tightened. “You thought you were protecting me? You were breaking my heart.”
The words washed over Illuga, incomprehensible in their implication. The congestion in his chest was a living, painful mass. But it was suddenly secondary to the hurt in Flins’s eyes. The heat of his hands, the way he was holding him not supporting a casualty, but clinging to something precious nearly lost.
“All this time,” Flins continued, his thumb brushing a frozen tear from Illuga’s cheekbone with a touch so tender it burned. “I searched for enemies in the snow, in reports, in shadows. I never thought to look for the enemy in your own heroic, ridiculous heart.” His own tears finally spilled over, tracing silver paths in the swirling light. “I have loved you since the day you argued with me about battle patterns. You were so wrong and so brilliantly, passionately convinced you were right. I have loved you through every stubborn decision, every silent burden, every moment of exhaustion you thought you hid.”
He leaned his forehead against Illuga’s, their breath mingling. Flins' warm, steady and Illuga's are still ragged but slowing. “You are not alone in this. You have never been alone. My love is not a weak, hidden thing. It is here.” He took Illuga’s cold limp hand and pressed it firmly against his own chest where his heart was pounding a joyful, terrified rhythm against Illuga’s palm. “It has always been here, waiting for you.”
The words were a key turning in a lock rusted shut by fear and duty. Illuga felt a great, internal shudder. A release that had nothing to do with coughing. The thorny knot in his chest didn’t just loosen, it dissolved. Withering from the inside out under the radiant warmth of Flins’s spoken love. A warmth spread from the point of contact over Flins’s heart, flooding his own frozen core. Melting the permafrost of lonely devotion.
“You… love me?” The question was a child’s whisper, fragile with awe spoken against Flins’s lips.
In answer, Flins closed the distance and kissed him.
It was not gentle. It was salvation. It was a desperate, claiming seal on the vow just spoken. Its lips meet with the force of a long denied truth. Tasting of salt, blood, mint and the fading sweet perfume of dying flowers. Illuga kissed him back. A weak grateful press, pouring all his relief, his wonder and his returned love into the connection.
As they kissed, Illuga felt the last vestige of the disease break. A final, clean tremor passed through him. He broke away, turning his head to cough a deep, clearing, empty sound. This time, only a wisp of grey desiccated pollen floated out, dissipating into the light. No vine. No petals. No weight.
He drew a breath. A clean unobstructed breath that filled lungs that felt new, that felt his own for the first time in months. The air was sharp with cold and ozone and the scent of Flins. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever tasted.
He sagged fully against Flins then, not in collapse but in pure staggering relief. The strength to hold himself up vanished, replaced by a bone deep weariness and a lightness that made him dizzy. “It’s gone,” he rasped into Flins’s shoulder, his own tears starting anew, but these were sweet cleansing. “The weight… it’s gone.”
Flins held him through it, his own body shaking with the aftermath of terror and joy. He lowered them both carefully to the floor, not letting go. Cradling Illuga against him as they sat amidst the scattered light and the lone, fading blue flower.
“Never,” Flins vowed, his voice thick, his lips pressed to Illuga’s hair. “Never do that to me again. You do not get to love me in secret. You do not get to die for me without my permission. Your love is a gift, Illuga. The most staggering gift. And I will spend every day of my long life making sure you never, ever forget that you are loved in return.”
The room was quiet except for their breathing and the hum of the lights. The words soothed him, like shelter after a long storm. Easing something raw inside his chest. Still, one small thorn remained. Not from the sickness, but from a deeper fear. The same one that had made him hide it all.
With immense effort, Illuga lifted his head from Flins’s shoulder. His face was ravaged pale, tear stained, shadowed with exhaustion. And yet, his eyes were clear. The glow in them no longer fighting the cold gold, held only a soft weary light. He looked at Flins, really looked. Seeing the love that had been there all along and a fresh quieter ache bloomed.
His hand trembling slightly, came up. Not to cling, but to touch. Fingertips brushed Flins’s cheek, tracing the path his own tears had taken moments before. The touch was a question, a verification of reality.
His voice when it came, was a cracked airy thing. Barely more than a shaped breath. All his strength had gone into the walk, the confession, the collapse. What was left was pure, unshielded truth.
“…Were you… scared?” Illuga whispered, his brow furrowing with the pain of the ask. “When you… saw?”
It wasn’t about the flowers. It was about the man behind them. The crumbling facade. The weak, loving, needy thing he had hidden. Was the truth of him, once revealed something to fear? The last vulnerability, offered not in the heat of crisis but in the trembling aftermath.
A soft, broken sound escaped Flins. Not a laugh, but a release of pure emotion. He turned his face into Illuga’s touch, pressing a kiss to his palm. His own eyes shimmered.
“Terrified,” he admitted, the word raw and honest. “But not of you. Never of you, my dear.” He captured Illuga’s hand, holding it against his cheek. “I was terrified of the silence you were carrying. Of the thought that you might leave this world believing you were alone in it. That was the only monster in the room.”
He leaned forward, until their foreheads rested together again. A temple of their own making. “Your need doesn’t scare me, Illuga. It’s what led me to you. Let me be the answer to it.”
Illuga’s eyes fluttered closed. A single, hot tear escaped tracing a new path down his cheek. It was the last one of the old pain. The thorn was gone.
He didn’t have the strength for more words. Instead, he let his body speak the rest. He let his full weight settle against Flins, his head finding the hollow of his shoulder once more, his hand going limp, trusted in Flins’s grasp. A complete surrender. A silent, vulnerable reply
Okay. I believe you. I’m here. I’m yours.
Flins understood. He always did. With a tenderness that felt older than the stone beneath them, he didn't just adjust his hold. He rearranged them. He shifted, leaning back against the base of the wall and carefully guided Illuga down with him. Until Illuga was cradled fully in the circle of his legs, his back against Flins’s chest. One of Flins’s arms wrapped around his waist, a firm band of security. His palm splayed wide over Illuga’s still quiet stomach, feeling the unlabored rise and fall of breath. The other hand came up not to stroke but to simply cradle the side of Illuga’s head, his fingers sinking into the sweat damp hair at his temple. His thumb rested lightly on the pulse point there. A silent monitor of life returned.
Flins then bent his own head, until his cheek rested against the crown of Illuga’s head. He didn't just rock them. He enveloped him. Their bodies aligned, curve to curve with no space for cold or doubt to seep in. It was a hold that spoke of deep knowing, the way to ease a shudder and the angle for a weary spine.
The vigil was over. The healing had begun, here, in the sacred intimate of a hold that left no room for anything but shared breath and mended hearts ~