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Daan remembers the flowers.
He'd known young Elise Von Dutch for but a week when he first felt the tightness in his chest. Nerves, he assumed. Every man with hot, flowing blood felt nerves, met with a girl so beautiful, didn't they? Then the next new moon brought with it him bowed over the bog, retching on the cloying poppy-flesh that caught in his windpipe, painting the bowl with beautiful layers of somnifacient crimson.
The affliction was a known quirk of Sylvian's devoted, he'd discovered, frantically poring over an old tome in the wee hours of the morning. Alll-mer gave rewards for your devotion to symbolism, Gro-goroth bestowed you fated prey and a predator well-matched, Rher drove you completely and utterly mad, and Sylvian planted seeds in your lungs for the sake of loves and lusts, ensuring you'd suffocate on the newly-rooted blessings if you didn't take advantage of Her suggestion. To discover that he might still be tied to those damned Old Gods was no comfort for Daan, but he must admit, he'd long thought there was no use in trying to resist their corruptive force. It had already touched him, inside and out, and there was no escape short of making himself anew.
(And he felt made anew with Elise, of course, but she wasn't long for the world.)
He remembers the flowers, yes, but he remembers the way they wilted even better. Splayed, blackened roots hacked to shreds between his gnashing teeth, floating in the pools of floral-sweet rot that had heaved their way up from somewhere deep and dark inside him. The physical, tangible proof of his one-forever only-ever love, reduced to a frothing, decomposing slurry not even fit to work as fertilizer. No wonder he's grown so bitter over the years.
Something of slender, careful filigree catches in already quite gummy cogs of his mind when he meets the blonde woman's gaze across the train. He doesn't think he knows her, but there's a warm tug in his gut that he summarily shuts down, returning to the file he's been fussing with.
He's a man, he tells himself. A lonely man, yes, but loneliness does not have to make you foolish or desperate. He does not know this woman. He does not think he wants to, either, the way she raises her voice at that poor black-haired girl who's made the mistake of tripping over her outstretched boots. Watch where you're going, she snaps, teeth bared. You'll get yourself killed someday with that kind of aimlessness.
(That's very good advice, miss, he finds himself thinking. I ought to follow it to a T. Watch my steps, yes, I'll keep them pointed far, far from your corner...)
The train sputters. Daan's chest aches when he rises; he remembers the flowers.
He bumps shoulders with the woman outside, overhears her name as she's approached by a sweet young lady with wavy ashen hair. Daan feels a sickness mounting within him; he remembers the flowers.
Her name is Karin. Even the barest brush of her body lets him know that she is soft and warm, a tempting rock to tether himself to if to call her a rock wouldn't be antithetical to her being. She smells like many things. A suggestion of heady night florals, fanning clouds of powder-down, guilt and gunshots and cigarettes and the bubbling amniotic fluid of whatever gutter she crawled out of. Daan feels the urge to gag crawling up his throat, along with something else; something slick and fluttery that catches far too easily on the ridges of his trachea. He finds that it's getting harder to breathe, though he desperately does not want to clear his throat; he remembers the flowers, after all.
Putting his terror aside, he brings his fist to his mouth and politely coughs.
(Why doesn't he just let himself choke?)
When he lowers his hand, there's a feather stuck between his fingers.