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Four years into the war, on a clear summer night, Ferdinand bid goodbye to Hubert as the dark mage readied his battalion to quell unrest along the Kingdom border. They clapped each other on the shoulders in a half-embrace, their animosity from their school days completely dissolved in the face of the strong friendship built during the war. After, Ferdinand walked through the gate to Garreg Mach, climbed up the steps to his old dorm room—it would always feel like a place undisturbed by the war, despite the several years of Garreg Mach being used as the Adrestian army's war base and the room being designated as General Aegir's sleeping quarters—and peered out the window. The pinpricks of torchlight carried by the hundreds of soldiers twinkled like a cloud of fireflies, a pond reflecting the stars above.
Ferdinand fancied that at the forefront, straining his eyes, he could see a man, not clad in metal armor reflecting the firelight, but in all black, a small speck of void amidst the flames.
It was then that he felt a sudden discomfort in his throat, a prickly insistence that could not be persuaded to lie dormant. It festered, pins and needles and sparks of pain in his throat, until he was doubled over, coughing, hacking up something solid.
After this bout—the discomfort only subsiding, not fully disappearing—he opened his eyes. His hand, shaking as he pulled it away from his mouth. The white of his glove contrasting nicely with the blue petals scattered in his palm.
He glanced back out the window, finding the shadow that he believed to be Hubert. The brambles in his throat grew again the second he located him.
This was not ideal.
~*~*~
Every child of noble birth was given the same books to read in their youth, the same sets of fairy tales and stories fitting for a child with bountiful imagination and the luxury of free time a noble upbringing had to offer. One such story centered on a brave and valiant knight, who had fallen in love with the princess he served. His love was so strong, it took root in his heart, its stems and leaves choking his lungs, petals tumbling from his lips. Red roses, in the story, symbolizing his most ardent affection for the princess. The princess was captured by a beast most foul, and the knight, spurred by his love, slayed the monster and confessed his love to the princess. The princess, returning his feelings, wrapped the knight in an embrace, and just like magic the roots were dispelled from his body, allowing him to breathe again. In the book, the love disease was called hanahaki, and Ferdinand had loved this book to no end.
How beautiful, for a physical proof of love to manifest, and in such a delicate form! How tragic, for the knight to nobly suffer his fate, shouldering the pain and yet still forging on in the pursuit of love! Of course, his mother reprimanded him; hanahaki was real, albeit incredibly rare, and a life-threatening disease. The only cure known for hanahaki was the reciprocation of feelings; it was either have your affections returned, or die. There had been some effort by the Empire's top mages and doctors to find another cure, but so far any attempt at forcibly removing the roots grown from the heart had ended in irreparable damage to the heart. Between the lack of test subjects and the urges from the Church to stop toying with experimental medicine, the treatment was abandoned.
Whatever positive sentiments Ferdinand had held toward hanahaki in his childhood were certainly gone now; as Ferdinand continued coughing up pale blue flower petals and long, flat leaves, he cursed his rotten luck. When he imagined his future as a boy, he had certainly never envisioned catching the incredibly rare disease that only surfaced once a generation. He'd also never envisioned falling for his least favorite classmate turned best friend. Ferdinand hadn't been consciously aware of his feelings for Hubert until he coughed up those first petals, and since then his mind seemed to only exist in two states; fantasies, thoughts he must have repressed surfacing until his head was only filled with thoughts of Hubert, and then desperately trying to think of anything other than his counterpart as those thoughts triggered another coughing spell.
His only options now were to get Hubert to love him back, or perish from the flowers slowly inching their way through his chest. He certainly hoped that the rebellion Hubert was sent to quell would be over quick.
~*~*~
The next few weeks were excruciating. Whenever he managed to not think about the other general, the symptoms were better. On those days, he could generally go about his day with only one coughing fit, and even those were short. However, days like those were few, when the object of your affections was the Emperor's right-hand man, an integral part of the cogwork of the army, and a dear friend. It was near impossible to go more than an hour without mention of the spymaster, bringing with it a seizing of Ferdinand's throat. "If only Hubie were here for a magic spar," Dorothea would say as they walked past the training grounds. "Aw man, Hubert's missing one of the dishes he actually likes!" Caspar would say as they sat down to eat in the dining hall. "Eek! Um, I'm just here to tend to the plants, don't mind me!! Me and Hubert started a small collection of poisonous flowers in here," Bernadetta would shriek as Ferdinand stepped foot into the greenhouse.
To put it simply, the constant reminders of the other man was a physical agony, both in his throat and his heart.
The flowers seemed to delight in cruel humor themselves. Forget-me-nots, Ferdinand was able to identify as the weeks went by and the attacks got worse. As if he was able to forget the other man when his affections for him were the very reason for his worsening condition. It had gotten to the point where, while soldiers under his command just thought he had a bad cold, those closer to him personally could tell something was wrong. Linhardt had been hovering more than usual (for even without a magical disease, Linhardt was often chastising Ferdinand for his reckless behavior whenever he was awake), reminding him to get some rest and to stop pushing himself. Dorothea, at their biweekly gossip sessions, would look at him expectantly, waiting for him to explain the reason for his sudden malady. Their prodding was for naught; Ferdinand told no one.
Edelgard was the most perceptive, and the most pushy. She called Ferdinand to the council room one day, the memo passed along by a soldier stating that there was an official matter of utmost importance to discuss. What her memo had failed to encapsulate was that the matter she wished to discuss was his coughing problem, nor that she instructed a few guards to hold the door shut outside the room until Edelgard allowed him to leave. Needless to say, Edelgard was now the one soul who knew of his affliction. She was concerned—as any close friend would be—but at least she didn't seem upset at him for falling for her retainer. Small miracles were all he had going for him these days.
~*~*~
On the fifteenth day after Hubert's departure, as the remaining members of the Black Eagle Strike Force stood around a war table planning out their main mission for the end of the month, they were interrupted by the doors being thrown open, revealing a single soldier, in disarray and doubled over gasping for breath. She was dressed in the uniform of a Vestra Sorcery Engineer. She pulled out a folded sheath of paper, held shut with black wax.
Ferdinand, standing completely still from the shock, the horrible suspicion creeping up his neck, and the petals creeping alongside it, noticed Edelgard's normally stoic countenance give way to an emotion he had never before seen on her: fear.
~*~*~
What was supposed to be a simple skirmish to quell a rebellion breaking out in a string of small towns across the Empire-Kingdom border turned out to become much, much worse. Hubert had led a rather large force for their task, but unbeknownst to him, the entire former Blue Lion class was lying in wait, alongside their own respective battalions. Hubert and his forces were outnumbered, and it was said that the resulting battle was a massacre. Lord Vestra had handed the letter and the key to his office that was nestled in the folded papers to the soldier himself, the soldier recounted, telling her to get back to Garreg Mach as fast as possible and relay the news to the Emperor. The letter contained instructions on what to do in his absence. It was unclear what the outcome of the battle was, and who survived.
Ferdinand didn't hear what else the soldier said, as he excused himself to run out of the room and vomit flowers. He wasn't sure if he'd gone far enough for the rest of the strike force to not hear him.
~*~*~
Eventually, a small force of stragglers, almost all of them injured, limped back to the Garreg Mach base. The only survivors.
Hubert was not one of them.
~*~*~
The storybook did not account for what happened to one's hanahaki when the one they had caught it for suddenly died on a battlefield. Ferdinand could attest that the flowers did not die alongside the object of his affections; instead, the disease got worse.
~*~*~
The Professor couldn't have returned at a better time. The Black Eagle Strike Force, down to seven, scattered and disorganized from grief, having lost one of the precious members of their flock, who was coincidentally the best strategist in the Imperial army. Professor Byleth, while a caring mentor, was also not moved by grief easily, and had experienced more than one death of a close friend during her time as a mercenary. She gave them time and room to heal, as well as took up the mantle as strategist, penning the battle formations for the march at the end of the month. Their first major campaign without Edelgard's shadow.
Ferdinand was not in attendance. At some point between Hubert's death and the preparation stage for the campaign, Ferdinand's condition had worsened, and every member of the strike force found out about it in some way. They all saw him cough up flowers, and they all likely knew who it was for, from his inability to manage his grief and how often they found Hubert's office door slightly ajar, Ferdinand sitting on the floor by his desk, surrounded by a mounds of blue flowers. He couldn't fight anymore; he could barely spar without having to stop and hack out a flower, and the roots, as they wrapped themselves around his lungs, sapped him of his strength. The rest of the force thought it the best idea to leave him behind, to manage the troops at Garreg Mach while the rest of them fought.
It was the day after they departed, Ferdinand sitting at a desk tallying up the supplies they had at the base—there was a lot they needed to replenish, the campaign had required many rations—when another coughing fit began, and Ferdinand hacked out another fully formed forget-me-not. He was ready to add it to the pile when he saw that the bright blue hue of the petals, usually as untarnished as a clear summer sky, was laced in red. His flowers hadn't come out bloody before then. Bloodied flowers were the sign of the final stage of hanahaki.
It was then, with striking clarity, that Ferdinand thought, I am going to die.
~*~*~
Hubert's body hadn't been recovered—from the account of one of the survivors, in which they swore they saw a figure in black downed by a pegasus knight and then set on fire by a Bolganone spell, there likely wasn't a body remaining—but they still made a headstone in his honor, even with no grave. Shortly after Hubert was confirmed dead, the rest of the Strike Force had held a small funeral for him, just the remaining Black Eagles in the clearing outside Garreg Mach where they chose to place his headstone. Until then, Ferdinand had felt a bleak sort of emptiness since hearing the news; he knew he was in shock. It was after he had begun the walk with them, when they passed the tables in the gardens of Garreg Mach, that it occurred to him that he and Hubert would never again meet under the shade of a tree, sipping on their respective beverages and discussing matters of importance and matters of no importance at all.
This realization stabbed him in the chest, the twin pain of the roots around his heart and the sudden needles of grief making him come to a stop, his breathing rough and ragged and too loud in his ears. He wasn't sure what Dorothea, who had been walking beside him, saw on his face, but whatever it was, she kindly urged him to sit this one out. Ferdinand would have felt offended that she thought he wouldn't be able to handle ceremony, if she hadn't been absolutely correct.
Now, while the rest of his eagles were off fighting the kingdom and he was growing more and more aware of the limited time he had left before his breathing was cut off entirely, Ferdinand made his way to Hubert's grave for the first time.
It wasn't exactly a grave, because again, no body, but with the headstone marked with Hubert's name and date of birth, it still felt like his final resting place. The clearing Edelgard had chosen was perfect; the gurgle of a nearby stream, a small break in the trees, a beam of sunlight illuminating the headstone. There was an irony in Hubert, a creature of the shadows, being commemorated in the singular patch of light in the surrounding dark grove of trees, but it was hard to care much about that when faced once again with the unmistakable reality of his death. There were several different bouquets of flowers around the stone, some old and wilting, some fresh—he knew that Edelgard came here regularly. During the walk over, Ferdinand had several coughing attacks, and rather than letting the flowers and petals and leaves fall to the forest floor, he held them, carrying them to the grave. He washed the blood out as much as he could in the nearby stream, then placed the forget-me-nots around Hubert's grave. The bright blue of their petals were illuminated in the sunlight, like they were glowing.
Ferdinand sat in front of the headstone in silence. If he tried to speak, he knew he would only vomit more flowers, and he really didn't want to sully this place with any more of his blood, and so he instead sat there, the quiet of the forest a backdrop for the noise of his thoughts. It almost felt like Hubert was sitting there with him, in comfortable silence as they were whenever they drafted battle plans together, late at night.
Ferdinand didn't know how long he stayed there, but he knew as he left, that he would probably never return.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
When the Black Eagle Strike Force—down two students and up one professor—returned to Garreg Mach, they found Ferdinand, lifeless in his bed, flowers growing out of his throat, surrounded by a halo of blue petals.