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chroniccombustion · 5 years

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Ipomoea Alba pt 2

From “Seven Days to Eternity“, part of @souyoweek2019

Genre: Hanahaki Disease, angst w/happy end, romance, M/M Rated: T Characters: Souji Seta (Yu Narukami), mentions of the Investigation Team, mentions of Nanako Dojima Warnings: minor descriptions of blood and vomiting Status: oneshot collection, incomplete

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“Ipomoea alba, sometimes called moonflower or moon vine, is a species of night-blooming morning glory… It symbolizes dreaming of love, or a love in vain…”

Day 3 (part 2!): Illness/Injury or Holding Hands

Yosuke stares at him from a few feet away. His scarf dangles from one hand as he stands there, frozen mid-action, with eyes wide and mouth agape. Fear and shock lace his expression. “Partner, wha— what happened?”

The sky is light again when Souji next opens his eyes.

He doesn’t really know where he is for a few minutes, his body tired and aching and his head pounding so hard he can barely think. He exhales and his stomach feels empty, sick; he inhales and his chest feels tight. As he tries to breathe he finds that his lungs will barely expand, that each breath is shallow and weak. It leaves a squeezing sensation behind his eyes and dots his vision with dull grey splotches.

Slowly he turns so that he can get one arm under himself and maneuvers until he’s able to sit up. He weaves for a few seconds and thinks that he might topple over, but he’s able to steady himself by leaning back on his hands. Afterwards he has to sit there motionless for a bit and reign in the overwhelming vertigo that threatens to make him vomit if he dares to open his mouth. He looses track of time after that.

Souji blearily fades in and out of focus for what seems like days. There is no sense of reality as he tries to piece together what’s happening, taking stock of himself one tiny little piece at a time as the haze in his skull allows. Beyond the persistent feeling of something being horribly wrong with him and the way his breathing is slow and labored, there is the painful, catching burn down deep in his chest. Part of it seems to be leftover from the fit that took place a little bit ago, but there is an ache there that speaks of muscles long strained, so whatever this is it’s been damaging him for a while now. Several hours at the very least – overnight more likely.

(Longer than that, highly probable.)

He licks at his lips and finds that they taste like iron and salt. Blood. Okay, he remembers blood… right? Yes. Somehow last night he had been bleeding. He runs his tongue across the backs of his teeth to discover another lingering taste, this one bitter and earthy, like what he would image licking a patch of unclean grass to be like. It sits on his taste buds like oil floating on water and he instinctively tries to swallow it back to wash it away – only for his dry, ruined throat to protest with a sharp, metallic pain.

Oh.

The memory of coughing violently, of heaving up splatters of scarlet, comes trickling back into his mind little by little as he picks apart the way his body hurts. Blood in the bathroom, flowers on the floor, pain and fear and asphyxiation; blacking out from weakness and lack of air after missing Yosuke’s calls.

Yosuke.

Shrieking, tearing pain lances through Souji’s body as violent coughing suddenly wracks him. He crumples over like a discarded paper crane, coughing so fiercely that he cannot even pause long enough between them to pull in more air. His vision goes white for a moment as what little oxygen he does manage gets lodged in his chest, catching just shy of actually making it into his lungs. Something clenches hard around his heart.

The feeling jolts him forward in a convulsion, forcing his diaphragm to constrict in a mockery of a hiccup, and Souji can feel something slithering up his windpipe into the back of his mouth. He brings cold, shaking hands up to cover his face as it hits his tongue and give a final, core-deep wretch. The object dislodges and Souji wheezes like he’s been punched as the airflow to his lungs is cleared enough for him to inhale. He pulls his hands away.

Terrified, he slowly opens his hands to reveal a perfectly formed white and yellow flower sitting in his palms, the edges stained red with watery crimson.

He isn’t dreaming. As much as he’d wanted to not believe his own memories of the night before, as much as he’d been hoping that it had all been a trick of his imagination and that he really did just have pneumonia, there is no way to deny that this is real and that he is horribly, undeniably screwed.

Hanahaki, the “Heartbreak Disease” – a rare affliction in which repressed feelings of love cause flowers to take root in the infected person’s heart and lungs, slowly growing until the victim either asphyxiates or dies of heart failure. There is no treatment, no cure. The only way to combat it is to either have the love that sprouted the flowers requited, thus withering them at their source, or to surgically remove them, which only ever has a 10% chance of being done before it’s too late. Even then, on the all-too infrequent chance that the surgery is successful, the victim is left permanently apathetic, unable to ever feel the emotion of love towards the same person again.

Souji knows what it is, has heard enough about the disease at school, on news segments, during his cleaning job at the hospital. He knows what it is and what it does and he knows how destructive it can be when it isn’t caught in time. (And it is almost never caught in time.)

Souji feels his vine-ridden heart sink. He’s dying. There’s no way around it, he’s actively dying. Hanahaki can only be removed up to a certain point before it leaves irreparable damage behind; the longer it gestates, the more time it takes for the infected to seek help, the lower the chances of survival drop. And Souji has been feeling the tickle in his throat for over two months now. It’s spread from his heart to his lungs, up his windpipe, to the point where he’s now choking on the blossoms as they work their way further and further into him. The love must be deep then, he thinks, for his symptoms to have gotten so severe so rapidly. He wonders just how long the roots have been growing, buried deep inside his heart where he’d been blissfully unaware of their existence until last night.

And he isn’t stupid – oblivious at times, yes, but when he’s being smacked in the face with context clues it’s hard for him not to notice. Every time he’d felt the worst of the tickle, the ache, the cough, it had always been around one particular person. The constant visits, the gentle way he’d taken care of Souji when Souji hadn’t had the motivation to take care of himself, the way he’d made sure to check up on Souji every single night; it had exacerbated the illness until it seems that now Souji only has to think about him anymore. Whenever Souji had smiled at one of his partner’s stupid jokes via text, whenever he’d remember a wink thrown his way after class and feel that giddy, warm sensation of butterflies in his stomach, the flowers had been shifting in his chest. After last night, after the way Souji had nearly choked on New Year’s Eve because his friend had whispered against his ear and sent a thrill down his spine, Souji has no choice but to make the obvious conclusion.

He’s in love with his best friend.

And oh, if that doesn’t throw the whole previous year into a brand new light. The twinges in his chest whenever the other boy would call him “Partner”, the way Souji’s breath would catch whenever his friend looked at him with those eyes. It had been so easy at the time to write them off as just weird situational quirks and stamp down the idea of it being anything more. Yes, he’d found the other boy attractive, funny, wonderful, but he’d never allowed himself to imagine his feelings to be anything other than objective, platonic. His friend had made it clear a long time ago that he was indisputably straight, and so if Souji had ever once harbored any sort of feelings for his partner then he made sure it stayed well and truly buried.

But that had apparently backfired in the absolute worst possible way.

Instead of burying away a crush he’d been planting seeds, watering them, incubating them until they grew into something else, something more, and now, like a Shadow, they’re clawing their way out and demanding to be acknowledged. Except he can’t deal with his sickness the way he could a Shadow. He can acknowledge it and accept it and embrace it all he wants, but no amount of dialogue is going to make this okay. In fact, he wonders if that would make it worse somehow. If he let himself pine openly and allowed himself to imagine all those scenarios he’s secretly wished he could (holding hands, leaning on one another, resting his head on the other’s shoulder, things his heart wanted but his head blocked out), would it give the flowers fuel to wrap ever tighter? Would fighting it back the way he has been give him any more time?

He wishes he knew.

Because as terrifying as it is to admit, Souji knows that at this point it’s only a matter of time before the vines strangle him. He’s living on when, not if, because as far along as he is, to where it makes his chest constrict just thinking his friend’s name, there is no possible way that emergency surgery would give him back a full, unhindered life. He would either die on the operating table, or he’d be sent home with an apology and a “there’s nothing we can do.” Confessing is his only viable option but why seek out the humiliation when he already knows full well he’ll just be rejected, leaving the flowers to spread even more rapidly with the confirmation of his inevitable heartbreak. It wouldn’t even be his partner’s fault – no matter how much his friend might want to help him, it would be impossible for someone so entirely heterosexual to ever feel the same for him as what Souji felt. And maybe there was love there, but it was philia, platonic love between friends, and Hanahaki was not a disease that could be driven out by technicalities. At best, it would only serve to give Souji a quicker, less drawn-out demise.

Souji stares down at the flower in his hands, the blood slowly drying and turning into crackling red flakes against his skin. He doesn’t know what to do. (There’s nothing he can do.) With a heart heavier than even the weight of the vines around it, Souji slowly drags himself out of bed and pushes to his feet. He shuffles like a zombie over to his desk and drops the wilted bloom into the trashcan beside it, taking a moment to brace himself on the chair and combat the dizziness before turning and making his way out into the hall. He leans against the wall the way he did the night prior, and uses its sturdiness to keep him upright as he moves towards the stairs. It’s only because he’s so numb, that his brain is still in thoughtless shock, that he’s able to make it down to the first floor of the house and into the kitchen without another bought of agonized coughing.

He washes the blood from his hands in the sink and collapses into a chair at the table, where he stares at the wall without seeing it, tears slowly building in his eyes until they fall.

---

There is a knock at the door.

Souji blinks himself out of his disassociation, his eyelashes stiff and sticky with dried salt. How long has he been sitting there?

The sound of knocking comes again.

A glance over at the wall clock tells him that it is now very late morning, bordering on midday, and that he’s been sitting at the kitchen table for far, far longer than he’d realized. He isn’t entirely surprised. Having slept like garbage and not eating for more than twenty-four hours, plus the life-draining flowers and the loss of blood, it’s little wonder Souji is functioning like he’s only a hair’s breath away from slipping into a coma. He actually might be right now, for all he knows. Maybe that would be better.

The knocking returns, louder and more insistent this time, more like a banging than a regular knock. It sends a pulse of pain through Souji’s head each time the person’s fist connects with the wooden door, and he leans forward to prop his elbows on the table and grip at his temples with unsteady hands. He just wants to be left alone with his newfound fatalistic depression, thank you; he doesn’t want anyone else to see just how badly he’s doing.

But the banging doesn’t stop. It pauses for a few moments, tricking him, and Souji can just barely hear the muffled sound of his phone going off upstairs – but as soon as it stops, the noise at the door picks back up again. It’s clear that whoever is trying to get his attention is not going to give up until they get it, whether it be by phone or by forcing him to answer the door. He frowns.

Souji feels like utter hell; his chest is on fire, his breathing restricted and ready to cut off entirely with a single misplaced thought. Not only that, but he hasn’t had any kind of food or decent sleep or even water since the night before last and his entire body is making him acutely aware of it. He’s sick to his stomach with a blinding headache and is more than likely dehydrated, all in addition to dying. He is in no condition to be awake, let alone dealing with people right now.

His phone buzzes from upstairs with two more missed calls.

Souji groans into his hands, wincing at the ensuing vibrations as they rattle through his skull. There is a part of him, a very big, very loud part, which wants to just sit here until the person gives up and goes away. Maybe if he pretends he doesn’t exist then whoever is trying so hard to make him answer will simply forget that he does. A smaller, more logical part of him, however, knows that if the knocker is this determined to get hold of him then they more than likely will keep going until he either gives them a reason to stop, or they go over his head and get someone else to try and make him reveal himself. Like the police.

(And Souji really doesn’t want to get the cops involved; it seems like a lot of trouble to go to for someone who’s beyond helping anyway, and he especially doesn’t want it getting back to Dojima that he’s barricaded himself in the house. Or Nanako, for that matter.)

So, with all the strength that he doesn’t have and all the willpower he can muster, Souji tediously, painstakingly pulls himself into a standing position with the edge of the table and begins making his way over towards the entryway. He won’t let them in, he tells himself; he’ll just let hem know he’s alive and then tell them to go away.

The knocking has thankfully paused again by the time he reaches the door, the buzz of Souji’s phone slightly more audible now that he’s closer to the stairs. Outside, he can just make out the sound of someone cursing as the call goes to voicemail yet again, but the voice is too quiet, too muted through the wood for him to guess at the person’s identity. There aren’t too many people it could be, though, he thinks with another frown. If the person knows his phone number then it’s likely one of his friends.

He wants to go back upstairs and hide under his comforter.

Against every single cell in his body screaming at him not to, Souji reaches out and twists the lock. On the other side of the door, the sound of movement stills. Souji grips the door handle and turns it slowly with a hand that shakes from illness and rising anxiety. He doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to open the door and explain to this person why they need to leave and not come back, doesn’t want to have to see one of his – probably worried – friends get hurt when he refuses to let them help. There’s nothing they can do for him, and he can’t tell them the reason why that’s so. Not without hurting them even more. (He doesn’t want to eventually die knowing he’d been an asshole to the people that he’s come to think of as family.)

He turns the handle further until it clicks and tugs on it just enough so that the thinnest sliver of light breaks the seal between the doorframe and the door. “Who is it?” he rasps, voice broken and weak. It feels like acid in the back of his throat.

There is a sharp inhale. “Partner?”

Souji instantly feels sick.

He tries to push the door shut again, to put that barrier back between himself and the compass point of his ravaged heart, but Yosuke is too quick for him. The other boy surges forward while Souji is distracted trying to quell the twisting of the vines and presses his weight against the door, outweighing Souji’s own weak body and accidentally opening it up enough to get his hand inside. The door itself is knocked from Souji’s trembling grip and he stumbles backwards a few steps before catching himself on the wall and gripping onto it for dear life, head spinning and vision whiting out as he gasps for breath. Yosuke, oblivious, clambers inside.

“Dude, what the hell?” he snaps, voice irritated but underlined with obvious worry. “Where’ve you been?”

Souji hears him shutting the door behind him, hears the rustling of fabric as Yosuke presumable wrestles off his outer winter layers. He stays as still as possible, clenching his teeth against the nausea, the vertigo, the shortening of his breath. Maybe if he doesn’t look at Yosuke – even when his sight returns – then maybe he can stave off some of the worst of the flare up.

Meanwhile, Yosuke is still speaking as if he hasn’t yet noticed the state that Souji is in. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday!” he scolds. For a moment his voice is muffled slightly, as if obscured by fabric, but then the muffling is gone and the sound is back to normal. “First you disappear in a hurry on New Years, then you won’t answer your phone. Now you’ve got me standing outside your house, beating on your door like a nutcase and you can’t even---oh my god.”

Souji peels his eyes open from where he’d apparently squeezed them shut without noticing. He blinks away the lingering white edges of blurry film over his vision and slowly lifts his heavy head to look at the boy whose flowers are killing him.

Souji can’t even begin to imagine what he must look like. Pale probably, sickly. He’s still in his rumpled sleep clothes, hair limp and tangled in places from where he’d fallen asleep with it wet; he can feel his entire body shivering from the cold and the strain of holding himself up, even though he’s still half slumped against the wall. He can’t see them, but he’s sure there are probably deep purple circles beneath his barely-focused eyes, just above where he can feel the lingering traces of tear tracks over his cheeks. (He prays there isn’t any blood leftover on his lips.)

Souji swallows thickly, a tiny cough escaping and causing his shoulders to jerk. He closes his eyes and slumps a little further down the wall as he pulls in a shuddering breath through his teeth and grimaces at the way it makes his throat crackle with pain. He hears Yosuke take a hurried step closer as he slides a bit more out of his pitifully upright position and cracks his eyes open just in time to see his friend reaching for him.

“Don’t,” Souji croaks, and it takes a herculean effort not to start coughing at the way speaking feels like death. He slides sideways against the wall as best he can, just a little further out of Yosuke’s reach. “…Sick.”

Yosuke makes a strained sound in the back of his mouth, eyebrows furrowing together in growing concern. “Holy shit, man, I’ll say. You look like you’re about to drop dead!”

A harsh bark of sardonic laughter catches Souji off guard as it spills from his mouth; he disguises it with a short round of hacking coughs pressed into the crook of his elbow. “Should go home,” he wheezes once he can manage words again. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to keep from spitting blood and flowers with the object of his affections standing so close. He pointedly shoves aside the budding feeling of warmth that tires to grow at the thought of Yosuke, sweet and amazing, being worried for his well being.

He has to swallow back something dense and bitter as it tries to lodge in his throat.

Thankfully, Yosuke doesn’t seem to notice the odder-than-usual behavior, of if he does he likely attributes it to Souji’s illness. He frowns, though, eyes scanning every inch of Souji’s wrecked form with an intensity usually reserved for enemies in battle. He’s not a navigator like Rise, or even Teddie before her, but Yosuke is eerily observant in a way that he rarely gets recognized for; there’s a reason he makes such a good lieutenant, after all.

Just as Souji starts to feel the creep of anxiety from his partner’s assessing stare, Yosuke huffs loudly through his nose and takes a step away, rolling his shoulders back and straightening up with a decisive nod. “Alright,” he says to himself, nodding again. “Alright, okay…”

He reaches for where he’s already hung up his coat next to the door, and for a moment Souji is hopeful that his friend has actually listened to him. But then Yosuke dumps the scarf still clutched in is hand over top of the coat’s hood and turns back to look at him with his face set into a look of stony determination. Souji feels his stomach drop out.

“You know,” Yosuke says as he toes off his shoes and steps further into the entryway. “I would ask why you didn’t tell anybody you were messed up, but after seeing you close yourself off for the past two months I think I can already guess.” He steps right into Souji’s space, ignoring the way Souji tries to shrink back away from him, and goes to place a hand on his shoulder.

Souji’s eyes go wide. He presses himself closer to the wall as the trickle of panic becomes a stream and Yosuke’s closeness spurs a wave of heat to Souji’s face, the flowers shifting in response. “No…” he says, voice quiet and sandpapery.

Yosuke pauses with his hand still outstretched.

Souji takes a rattling breath, feels it catch on the vines in his throat. “Go home, Yosuke,” he says again. “I don’t want—“ His words cut off abruptly as the roots in his chest pierce deeper, cutting off his air supply and sending him into a startled, painful coughing fit. He slides the rest of the way down the wall as his legs finally buckle and give out, throwing his hands over his face to catch anything that his body might try and expel.

Suddenly there are hands on his shoulders, an arm sliding around the curve of his spine, lifting, helping him to sit up and forward, fingers rubbing small circles into his shoulder blades. The new position helps; the hands and the faint scent of spice and Yosuke does not. His partner’s hands practically burn against Souji’s chilled skin, and while he tries to lean away from it, to jerk to the side and put as much distance between the two of them as he possibly can while fighting for breath, there is a small, stupid part of him, wrapped in choking vines, that wants. He wants Yosuke’s arms around him, wants to turn his head and breathe in the way his friend smells like orange tea and sunlight and the lingering chill of winter. Tears prickle at his eyes and he tells himself it’s just from the tearing feeling in his lungs but somewhere in the back of his mind he knows there’s more to it. He’s wanted for months now, even obliviously, and now that there is the tiniest example of his longing made real he’s in no position to enjoy it, or even to let himself pretend it’s something other than what it really is.

Flowers, bitter and limp and clotted with the metallic tang of his own blood, crawl up his throat and into his mouth. Souji clamps his teeth together until they ache and presses his hands against his lips to keep them sealed. He keeps the flowers trapped in his mouth and does not dare spit them into his palms.

Eventually, miraculously, the coughing thins out enough for Souji to part his lips behind his fingers and suck in a ragged, shuttering breath between his teeth. He does it a second time, then a third, and by the time he’s on his sixth or seventh half-successful inhale, he pushes the blossoms to the back of his mouth and swallows. The taste is awful, worse than when they’d been sitting on his tongue; the feeling of them sliding down into his stomach nearly makes him vomit them immediately back up.

“Don’t want me getting sick, too, or don’t want me seeing you vulnerable?” Yosuke whispers as Souji sags against his arms. He tightens his grip slightly, supporting Souji’s weight with ease. His voice is quiet, knowing, and somehow – in the lower, subtler notes – he almost sounds hurt. “Partner…” He trails off with a defeated sigh.

Souji lolls his head back with a muted ‘thunk’ against the wall. He keeps his hands gripped tightly over his face, labored wheezing muffled behind them, and looks up at his friend through heavy eyelids.

Yosuke’s face is pained. There is deep worry etched into the crease between his eyebrows, his mouth downturned and his lower lip held hostage by the points of his teeth. His eyes, however, are sad. The rich brown of his irises is dulled, deepened to something closer to a muddy charcoal grey, and as he watches Souji watching him, an unnamable emotion flits across them and the lines of worry deepen around his mouth. “Come on,” he whispers, “let’s get you off the floor.”

Souji has no energy left in his dying body to protest.

Yosuke wraps his arms tighter around Souji’s limp form and hoists him up until he’s somewhat standing again. He tugs at Souji’s elbow to try and dislodge one of the hands still clamped over Souji’s face, making a frustrated sound when Souji refuses to move it. “It’ll be easier if you put your arm over my shoulders,” he says softly, gentle and coaxing even in his worry.

(Souji has the idle thought that Yosuke will make a wonderful father some day and then has to shut his eyes tight to keep away the tears that mental picture tries to bring.)

Yosuke seems to think the action means Souji is fighting off another coughing fit, or maybe a wave of nausea, because he pauses in his attempt to move Souji’s arm and stays still to wait out whatever might be coming.

Souji focuses on the way his breathing hitches and snags, on the bitter aftertaste of the flowers still sticking to his tongue even now after he’s swallowed them down. He can feel the vines and roots seeking deeper purchase in his chest because of the image he’d unwittingly called forth, but his exhaustion actually works in his favor right now; he’s too tired, too resigned to hold onto anything for very long, so for now his lungs still work at least a little. The solid weight and warmth of his partner next to him, though, that is what prickles at his ribs and sets more flowers to bloom inside them. He cannot block out the very real person standing next to him, holding him up, breathing softly against him so that Souji can feel the way Yosuke’s chest expands with each inhale. Even without the sickness spreading through his body, Souji doesn’t think he’d be able to stop his heart from pounding with the boy he loves so close.

He coughs a few times into his hands, weakly, and when nothing dislodges or threatens to come up, he finally relents to Yosuke’s gentle grip on his elbow – though he does keep his blurry vision trained on the hand he relinquishes, scanning his palm for any sign of blood. Thankfully, there is none. He uses the back of his other hand to wipe at his mouth and it, too, comes away miraculously clean. The backs of his teeth still taste like metal.

“You good?” Yosuke asks him, taking Souji’s arm and draping it around the back of his neck.

(This isn’t fair, Souji thinks as he does it, because how many times over the months has he secretly wished he had the courage to lay his arm across his friend’s shoulders like this, the way that Yosuke so causally has taken to doing to him?)

Souji tilts his head to try and give his partner a semblance of eye contact, just barely falling short when he realizes he can’t bring himself to meet Yosuke’s gaze and looking at the corner of his lips instead. He gives a shaky nod in lieu of a verbal answer – all that he can manage at the moment for fear of his voice bringing up more blooms.

Yosuke’s frown deepens. He stays silent for a few moments, simply watching Souji’s face, until eventually he slides the arm around Souji’s back lower to settle his hand around Souji’s waist just under his ribs.

Panicking, Souji hisses, terrified that with Yosuke’s hand so closed to his ribcage that the other boy will be able to feel the roots of the plant through his skin. He brings his own free hand up to awkwardly brush at the one causing his distress, and pushes Yosuke’s fingers down until they come to rest against the curve of his hipbone instead.

Yosuke startles at the sound that Souji makes, gasping softly in shock and what can only be immediate guilt. His own breathing seem to stutter in his chest for a second, and he readily lets his hand be guided lower until Souji stops frantically pawing at him. “Shit,” he whispers, quietly terrified, ”shit, I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”

Souji still doesn’t trust his voice, still doesn’t trust his plant-riddled chest not to betray him, so he squeezes his eyes shut against the way Yosuke is looking at him and settles for another nod. His heart feels heavy for reasons other than the vines – he doesn’t like the way he knows his partner is going to blame himself for supposedly being the cause of Souji’s pain.

Yosuke gives another, “shit,” under his breath. He shifts so that he’s pressed more tightly up against Souji’s side and settles his grip more firmly around Souji’s hipbone.

The action makes Souji feel warm. Yosuke has always been very expressive with his hands – gesticulating wildly when he’s excited or agitated, waving them around almost like a miniature shield when defensive or nervous. It’s something Souji has noticed about his best friend many, many times in the months they’ve known each other. At first it was nothing more than an observation, a simple, “oh, that’s a thing he does”, but then he stared watching.

He’s watched them enough to know that Yosuke’s hands have calluses on them: lines across his fingertips from his guitar strings, roughened patches across his palms from the hilts of his kunai, thins white scars from where he’s fumbled them and been nicked on the blades. He knows that not only are Yosuke’s hands sure, steady, capable of slicing a Shadow’s head clean off with the right weapon, but also that they’re strangely gentle. Souji has seen Yosuke ruffling Nanako’s hair, playfully shoving at Teddie without malice when Yosuke pretends to be more irritated than he actually is. Souji has also felt those same strong, long-fingered hands on himself – on his back when Yosuke prods him in the middle of class, on his arm when Yosuke reaches out on his more tactile days, on his shoulders when Souji had broken down at last outside the hospital and cried out every last bit of pain and stress that he’d been keeping bottled up.

(And maybe, if he tugs at the end of a memory that might be a dream, the one from back when he’d been too depressed and hollow to tell when he was awake and asleep, Souji can imagine that the careful fingers through his hair were real, too. He doesn’t have the courage to do anything but imagine.)

He lets himself lean against Yosuke’s side as his friend starts to guide him towards the stairs. It’s for balance, he tells himself, that’s it, just balance. He refuses to acknowledge the way it makes a tiny thrill go down his spine; his throat twinges regardless. The leaning actually does help, though, despite causing more tension in Souji’s body than it reasonably should. He’s still sick, after all, and weak from exhaustion and what is probably dehydration on top of the inability to breathe. He isn’t entirely sure how he managed to make it down the stairs this morning without just straight up passing out on the way, but as he lets more of his weight sag against his best friend he realizes that the likelihood of him getting back up the stairs on his own would have been nonexistent.

They don’t really speak as they go – Souji keeping his lips pressed tightly together and keeping his breathing as controlled as he possibly can through his nose – but every so often as they make their slow assent, Yosuke murmurs encouragement. “Come on, I got you”, or “easy, that’s it”, or “almost there”, all spoken so softly into Souji’s ear that he thinks he could cry. The petals clog his throat and he swallows them back with a dry mouth.

They come to rest at the second floor landing, with Souji out of breath for more reasons than he could ever say out loud. He droops forward, still in his partner’s hold, and brings a hand up to his chest to try and equalize the pressure he can feel building around his heart. He breathing gets louder, harsher, more like a wheeze and less like a normal inhale-exhale – though to say it’s been anywhere close to normal for the past couple of days would be lying. His entire side feels hot from where he’s been pressed against Yosuke’s body, leaving Souji flushed and nervous, shivering both from the exertion of moving around and the melancholy happiness of being so close to the boy he’s dying over. He closes his eyes again and presses his hand harder against his sternum.

Beside him, Yosuke makes a worried noise behind his teeth and adjusts his stance to better hold Souji’s weight. The fingers on Souji’s hip shift a little, seeking better purchase, and the pad of Yosuke’s thumb accidentally brushes against the hem of Souji’s shirt, almost-but-not-quite touching the skin beneath. Souji feels himself burn hotter. Heat floods his neck, his face, and he bites down hard on his tongue to stifle another wave of coughing as his chest tightens.

But being as close as he is, there is no way that Yosuke doesn’t notice.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “Dude, I think you have a fever, you’re really hot.”

Souji lets out a startled, raspy bark of laughter. What he wouldn’t give to hear the last half of that sentence in an entirely different setting. Months ago, maybe, if he’d been able to figure himself out instead of bottling up what he can see in hindsight were the beginnings of a crush. Too late now, he thinks, and there is a desperate sort of angry resignation, a bitterness towards himself, the circumstances, everything. It isn’t fair that he’s just now able to come to terms with his feeling when it doesn’t even matter anymore. And how ironic – knowing that he’s going to die anyway should alleviate the fear of confession, but it’s because of how much he loves Yosuke that he can’t tell him. If Yosuke knew he was the reason Souji had a garden of life-sucking flowers in his chest, if Souji died and Yosuke knew the reason why, then Souji knows his partner would blame himself for another death he’d been unable to prevent.

Because as much as they might care about each other, Yosuke is unequivocally straight, and there is no way he’d ever be able to love Souji back in a way that would whither the flowers twined in his ribs. Souji could tell Yosuke everything and it wouldn’t do anything but leave Yosuke feeling like Souji’s death was his fault because he was too heterosexual to love another guy. Even if he wanted to, even if he tried – and he would try, that’s the part that breaks Souji’s heart the most.

Souji opens his eyes to pull himself back out of his rapidly spiraling thoughts and finds that Yosuke has tilted his head to stare at Souji’s face beneath the silvery fall of his hair. Souji forces himself to meet the other boy’s eyes, to try and outwardly pretend that he’s only mildly sick and not slowly succumbing to an incurable disease, and while he doesn’t manage to smile or even to shape his expression into something reassuring, he does manage to croak out a quiet, “Flatterer…”

Yosuke blinks at him.

A moment of silence passes where they both just stay the way they are, paused in the upstairs hallway with Souji trying not to imagine a different scenario, a better scenario in which he and his best friend are close enough that Souji could lean in and rest their foreheads together. He wants to. He wants to; not even to kiss, just to be close, but of all the stupid things his ragged heart has been crying for today, that idea is among the worst thus far. So instead he keeps his spotty vision focused on Yosuke’s eyes and the way they seem to flick downward for a moment, away from his own. Souji swallows the taste of bitter petals.

Yosuke’s lips twitch slightly into the ghost of a smile that doesn’t quite reach the corners of his eyes. “Dude, really?” Yosuke finally says, voice still quiet and pitched so low Souji thinks he can feel it rumble in Yosuke’s chest.

(He feels something twist inside his lungs in response, like the flowers are turning towards Yosuke’s warmth the way normal ones face the sun.)

Yosuke straightens back up as best he can with Souji still slumped against him and glances down the hallway towards the bedroom. “For real, though? I know the house is cold and all but you seriously feel like you’re burning up. We need to get you into bed.” He looks back over and shifts a little more, adjusting Souji’s arm across his shoulder. “You good to keep going?”

Souji only offers a weak nod in reply.

Walking on a flat surface is much easier than the stairs had been, and it takes far less effort to make it to the door leading into Souji’s room – which is good, because he honestly doesn’t know how much energy he has left to spare. Yosuke helps him into the bedroom and over to where the futon lies unfolded and unmade in the corner. He makes another odd, wordless noise (this one more like an aborted exhale), and slowly, carefully, he lowers Souji onto the mess of blankets.

The change from being upright to sitting down makes him dizzy. Grey eyes clench shut as Souji fights back the lightheadedness, bringing his hands up to cradle his head in one and cover his mouth with the other. Just in case. He can’t see Yosuke at the moment, but he can hear the other boy moving, hovering near him while tugging at the blankets to bring them around Souji’s legs. Souji wheezes through his fingers. “Been in bed… for two days…” he whispers. His chest seizes for a second, his breath catching on his next inhale; he bites down on his lower lip and coughs once, twice, shallowly into his hand. His throat aches.

He hears Yosuke sigh next to him. A hand, strong and long-fingered and calloused and gentle presses against Souji’s shoulder and guides him downward until he’s lying back on the futon. Energy already sapped, he doesn’t fight it. He brings his hand down from his forehead – the one on his mouth still tightly in place – and cracks his eyes open. It takes a few seconds for the blurry swath of colors at his bedside to refocus into the form of his friend.

Yosuke gazes down at him, worrying his lip between his teeth. “When was the last time you ate anything?” he whispers.

Souji shrugs.

“Okay… Water?”

Souji shrugs again. “…Dunno.”

“You don’t—! Partner!” Yosuke runs a hand through his hair and clenches at the roots in obvious upset. He lets out a long breath through his nose, sitting back and crossing his legs, before dropping his hand into his lap and bouncing the knee beneath it in a silent display of nervous energy. Despite this, his voice, while rougher, more agitated, is still quiet, his words a harsh stage whisper as he says, “I’m staying here tonight.”

Souji immediately feels the roots dig deeper, wind tighter into his heart. He stares at Yosuke with wide eyes, struggling to pull in a new breath, to keep the taste of iron from the back of his tongue. He opens his mouth to protest, even knowing that his voice won’t come, but Yosuke gives him a look and barrels over any words Souji might have been able to form.

“No. I don’t care. You’re sick as hell – you’ve been alone this entire time, you can barely move on your own…” He trails off and gives Souji a very intense look that could almost read as anger or annoyance were it not for the way his brows arch upwards in clear distress. “Partner, you just admitted you don’t even know when the last time you ate was. I’m not gonna leave you here to just… I dunno, die in your sleep because you still can’t tell me when something’s wrong.” Yosuke looks away then, down and off to the side like he’s staring at the floor beside his right knee, but even with the grey spots at the edges of his oxygen-starved vision, Souji can see the gleam of something wet in his best friend’s eyes.

Yosuke chews at the corner of his lip, taking a long, deep breath in before letting it out slowly. His shoulders droop with the movement, making his whole body seem to deflate. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. He keeps his eyes trained on the spot he’s glued them to, unseeing and unblinking as the shine of salt water gathers on his lower eyelashes. “I should have come by sooner to see how you were doing. Like… I felt like something was off when you didn’t answer your phone, but I just… I guess I thought… after November… that you’d know you could come to me if you needed anything, ya know? Even if it wasn’t super important, cuz it’d be important to me…” He sighs. Ducking his head, he rubs at the back of his hair, hiding his face by turning it further away so Souji can’t see him. His voice is even quieter when he speaks again, carrying in a different direction where Souji almost doesn’t hear it.

“I should have been here…”

Souji stares at his friend, stunned. There is a new weight in his chest, one that has nothing (or possibly everything) to do with the flowers growing inside his ribs – this isn’t right. The whole reason he hasn’t said anything about the true nature of his condition is because he doesn’t want Yosuke to think any of this is his fault. Souji can handle Yosuke being upset with him for not telling anyone he was sick, he’s alright with Yosuke believing Souji was just being stubborn or hiding a perceived weakness; for Yosuke to blame himself for any part of Souji’s illness, even not knowing what it is, or for him to think he’s done something wrong or failed Souji somehow is the one thing Souji isn’t alright with.

He wants to tell his friend that it’s okay, that he didn’t know, that Souji didn’t tell him because he couldn’t. He’d tried, last night when Yosuke had been calling him, but he’d been too messed up to answer the phone in time, and for the hours preceding and directly following, Souji had either been head-first in the sink coughing up blood and petals, or he’d been passed out cold. He wants to explain that he’d been too sick too suddenly to even have any sort of warning for himself, let alone anyone else, but as he opens his mouth to try and find his voice, Yosuke takes a sharp, shuddering breath in and scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“A-anyway, yeah. Sorry. Uhm.” He straightens up, forcibly rolling his shoulders back and giving himself a decisive nod before finally looking back to where Souji is still staring at him with all the pain of a shattering heart. Yosuke does not meet his eyes.

“You just… stay here, okay? I’m gonna go shopping real quick and get some stuff to try and help.”

Souji licks at his lips in an attempt to unstuck his tongue. “You don’t have to do that,” he manages, voice crackling and impossibly quiet.

Yosuke makes a scathing, sarcastic noise that sounds like a mix of a scoff and a half-choked, mirthless laugh. He shoots Souji a hard look with pinched brows and replies, “No offense, dude? But uh, yeah, I kinda do.” He plants his hands on the floor and eases himself up into a crouch with a grunt. He braces his arm on his knees and leans forward, reaching out his other hand and placing it gently over Souji’s forehead.

Souji’s heart hammers against the vines encircling it, his breath hitching as the careful, calloused fingertips make contact with his skin. In that moment, before the flowers can surge to the back of his throat and bring the tang of blood and bitter petals to his tongue, Souji feels like he’s been suspended. Yosuke’s palm is warm, soft despite the barely-there scars, too thin to be detected. The touch itself is so vastly intimate, completely innocent and born from selfless concern and it hurts in a way that is devoid of physical pain. He can’t stop himself from instinctively leaning into it, pressing his forehead closer to the warmth of his partner’s hand. His face flushes; the tips of his ears and the bridge of his nose, the high points of his cheekbones – all burning like the last flicker of a candle just below his skin.

Yosuke frowns. “Yeah, that feels like a fever, alright.”

He pulls his hand away and Souji nearly rolls over to try and follow it, to chase the contact that made his pulse race but somehow didn’t launce him into a coughing fit. Souji feels the absence like a shock of cold – an involuntary whimper escaping, only for the sound to stay trapped in his sandpapery throat. A fresh wave of flowers begins to peel open low in Souji’s ribs.

Yosuke, however, seems to remain thankfully oblivious to the nature of his friend’s newest turmoil. He pushes himself to his feet and takes a few steps backwards so that he isn’t looming over Souji’s bed like some kind of nightmare. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promises, already started to back further towards the bedroom door. He keeps his focus half trained on Souji as he moves, clearly reluctant to let his partner out of his sight again. “I’ll get… I dunno, cold meds or something, fever reducer. Just…” he pauses, looks at Souji with a kind of desperate pleading shadowing his features. “Don’t move? Just rest? Call me immediately if something happens, okay? Or even text me, I’ll come right back.” He hesitates in the doorway, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he anxiously watches Souji for a reaction.

Souji grits his teeth and forces himself to nod. He doesn’t have the voice to tell Yosuke that his phone has probably been dead for hours, nor does he have the heart to tell him that cold medicine is a lost cause. Souji has taken cold medicine, has been taking it, but no amount of it – or anything stronger – will work. Not against the flowers blooming in his chest.

(He also doesn’t want to tell Yosuke that there is still at least half a box of medicine left in the bathroom; his memory of the night before is hazy and Souji has no idea what state the bathroom is in, or whether there is blood still caked on the floor.)

Yosuke gives Souji one last long, searching look. He nods once, seemingly to nobody, and Souji can hear him mutter a quiet, “Okay…” like he’s gearing himself up to leave his sick friend behind. Souji settles into the futon as best he can with a body that feels like lead and watches Yosuke watching him. Finally, reluctantly, Yosuke steps out into the hallway and pulls the door almost shut behind him. He leaves it open just a crack, enough that he could probably hear if Souji were to call out for him to come back if he really tried. Souji doesn’t. Instead, he listens to the sound of Yosuke’s retreating footsteps – hesitating several times before cautiously picking up again – until he can hear the far-off sound of the front door opening and then closing with a faint click of metal.

Souji lets out a long, slow, shuttering breath as some of the tension bleeds from his body, leaving him far more drained than he thinks he’s ever felt before.

He rolls his head so that he’s staring up at the ceiling, blinking back a wave of wet-hot, choking grief that bubbles from the pit of his stomach and spreads to every last part of him. It’s like he’s drowning, submerged in a rising, boiling tide that threatens to spill out of his eyes and scald a trail down his face. He coughs, sucking in a mouthful of air through his teeth afterwards, and for once it’s not from the flowers in his throat; it’s what’s left of a sob that he can’t quite manage to suppress. Souji brings his hands up to his face, weak and shaking, and presses the heels of them into his eyes to try and stem the flow of tears before they happen. He can feel them building, prickling behind his eyelids, but he’s so dehydrated that there is nothing left to fall. He doesn’t know whether to be thankful or not.

He doesn’t like that he’s relieved about Yosuke leaving for the time being. He shouldn’t be, he doesn’t want to be – even without the romantic feelings now strangling him, Yosuke is the best friend that Souji’s ever had and the fact that Souji had been desperately wishing Yosuke would go hurts him. It feels like he’s betraying Yosuke’s trust somehow, especially since his partner had been genuinely concerned about him, but every second Souji had spent near the boy he’s in love with had been pure, phsyical hell.

Which makes Souji feel guilty, despite the fact that he very much is not spitting up flowers on purpose. For every coughing fit Souji had had to try and push down, for every petal that threatened to climb his throat and expose or choke him, there was – as there always has been – a very large part of him that was instinctively happy to see Yosuke. He enjoys the other boy’s company; it’s why he’d gone and fallen in love with him in the first place and wound up contracting a horrible, heart-stopping illness. Honestly, if his life had come with a complaint department, Souji would have kicked down the door by now.

Souji contemplates taking Yosuke’s words to heart and trying to sleep. He’s tired enough, physically and emotionally exhausted enough that he could probably pass right out if he closed his eyes. The thought holds no appeal, though. He’s spent the past day and a half asleep and it’s more than a little disconcerting to think that most of it was involuntary. Besides, if he sleeps he might not wake up again and Yosuke could come back to a garden of blood-covered flowers. He shudders at the thought.

But that still begs the question of what he should or can do with himself until Yosuke comes back; because that’s the thing, Yosuke isn’t gone for good, just gone for now, and when he comes back he’s planning on staying the night. Any other time, Souji would be excited at the prospect of his best friend sleeping over; now, though, it fills him with anxiety. There is no way whatsoever that Souji will be able to hide his sickness from Yosuke for the entire night – what if he has another fit without warning? What if such close proximity to his crush (although it’s inarguably far deeper than a crush at this point) for such an extended period of time exacerbates his symptoms? The longer that Yosuke is around him, the more likely it is that the other boy will find out somehow, will see the flowers and the blood, will know.

And that’s something else that adds another loop to this maddening spiral Souji’s thoughts have decided to take now that he’s awake and alone and trying not to have another panic attack. Provided Souji is still alive when Yosuke finds out (because he will, eventually, if not today then after the disease has claimed Souji’s life), if Yosuke already knows what Hanahaki is he will definitely try to figure out the person causing it. He already hounds Souji upon occasion as to whether or not there’s someone Souji likes, what sort of girl is Souji’s “type”, and faced with something like this there’s little doubt in Souji’s mind that Yosuke will begin the quest anew with frantic fervor. Souji selfishly hopes he’s unconscious or already dead by the time any of that happens, just so he doesn’t have to expend the last of his energy trying to come up with reasons not to give Yosuke a name.

Something else he doesn’t want to think about dealing with is the thought that Yosuke might try and push him to get the surgery, even if it’s already far too late for it to be of any help. Souji remembers, back in middle school when they had first mentioned the disease in class, wondering why people would ever opt not to have the surgery if it meant saving their life. He thinks he understands now; the thought of never feeling anything for Yosuke ever again is enough to make the vines squeeze painfully inside his chest. Even if he did survive, even if the damage to his heart didn’t kill him within the next couple of years, Souji doesn’t know if he could handle living with all-consuming apathy where love and friendship once bloomed. He could live with loving Yosuke from a distance, if the flowers would let him, as long as he could stay by his side as his “Partner.” But to look at the best friend he’s ever had in life and feel nothing would just be…

He thinks it might almost be worse than death.

Souji can feel the prickle behind his eyelids returning and he presses his hands harder against his eyes. Alone, he finally lets out a dry, shuttering sob like he’s been wanting to for ages now. Crying over his predicament is unproductive, a waste of what little time he might have left, but seeing as how there isn’t anything else he can do that will help, he might as well be childish for a moment and let out some of the building pressure before that alone kills him. There’s no one around to see him, anyway. (And besides, just like before, he’s too dehydrated to actually be able to shed much in the way of physical tears anyway.)

Souji is afraid. He doesn’t want to die, but he’d rather do that than see Yosuke hurt or lose him entirely; he loves Yosuke too much to live without him, even if it’s just as friends. He would have been perfectly happy to lock that little piece of himself away, to hide his affections for the rest of his life and never love anyone else if it meant the two of them could always stay as close as they are now. He would never have pushed, would never have wished for anything else, been content with what he had, but it seems that whatever counted as fate in Inaba’s already-weird existence had decided that Souji hadn’t given enough just yet. It had taken a chunk of his teenaged years and turned it into what would likely have been a PTSD nightmare somewhere further down the road, it had taken his family and nearly destroyed them, it had taken pieces of his sanity and left him with trust issues and what was probably budding paranoia. Now, in its cruelest theft yet, it was forcing him to make a choice between his own life and the one person he couldn’t bear to live without.

He feels sick. Actually, physically nauseous. His stomach is well beyond empty, to the point where he doesn’t feel the hunger, only the acidic sensation of his body trying to eat itself to compensate. The only thing in there is the mouthful of flowers he’d choked back earlier to keep from coughing them up in front of Yosuke, and they sit sour and heavy in his gut like he’s swallowed wet cardboard. His whole body feels weak, too – a combination of the oxygen-deprivation, the exhaustion, and the constant, simmering fear mixed with his sickness and a minor loss of blood. He doesn’t think he can do this. He doesn’t think he can pretend he’s not dying for very much longer, not in the face of his worried best friend, not when Souji is already so tired in so many ways. The temptation to break down and pour out his terror and pain and desperate desire to not die where his partner can hear is already overpowering and the more Souji thinks about it the more can feel the hopelessness creeping into his throat to drown him.

This isn’t fair! How much more is he supposed to give? He’s already stretched himself thin for months to keep his friends alive but heaven forbid he be allowed to think his job was done, heaven forbid he be given the chance to rest. He shouldn’t be petty or selfish, he knows, but right now he’s running out of energy to care. He’s dying, damnit, he’s earned the right to be upset right now!

Souji forces his body to move and rolls onto his front with a tiny burst of energy born from sheer frustration. He takes advantage of the house’s empty silence and buries his face into his pillow, biting into the fabric with all the strength his jaw can muster and screams. Out comes a gravelly, cracking sound that embodies every ounce of fear, of desperation, of anger, sorrow, disappointment, everything that Souji has been trying to bottle up and just can’t anymore. He screams until he’s out of breath and gasping into the pillowcase, until his throat and chest are raw, until he can feel the twist of angry vines inside his ribs. Then he takes a long, broken breath in and screams again. The end of it catches on his grief and folds in on itself until it becomes a sob. Tearless, he cries into the pillow until the last of his strength gives out.

He feels like a corpse when it’s over.

Wiped out in a way he didn’t even know he could still be, Souji lays there on his stomach with his face smothered in his pillowcase, sucking in what air he can past the fabric and the rising pressure in his windpipe. It burns on the way in, like coals in his throat, bright and sharp with a glow that grows brighter with each inhale. He shifts, lifts his head from the pillow to try and give himself easy access to fresher oxygen, and to his slow-blooming horror it does nothing to help.

Oh no.

No, nonono, not again, not now.

Souji takes in a breath as deeply as he can – and immediately drops his head back into the pillow as a massive, wracking cough shudders through him. He tastes metal and salt sliding along the length of his tongue, feels the light spatter of blood as it hits the backs of his teeth. Something lodges in his chest just before it hits the line of his throat and the next reflexive breath in never makes it into his lungs.

He wasn’t aware he still had the energy left in him to panic anymore, but as Souji prizes his head back up off the pillow and sees the faint smear of crimson on the white of the fabric, he feels his stomach dropping out. It’s like being plunged into the coldest water possible, so frigid that it nearly slams into him as solid ice. Yosuke will be back soon. Yosuke will be back soon and Souji had been holding onto hope that he could at least make it a few more hours without an attack, without his friend seeing. Once again, it looks like the universe has decided to steal that shred of hope away.

Souji pushes himself up on arms that nearly buckle beneath him and climbs to his feet with help from the nearby furniture. He almost collapses before he can ever take a step. Woozy, head reeling, he throws out a hand and plants it down on top of the dresser so hard his palm stings, but manages to steady himself once more and stands there swallowing against the flowers until he can get a breath in. This is quickly becoming a habit he would give his sword arm to be able to break.

Like an awful recreation of the day before, Souji stumbles – somehow – out into the hallway and then down it towards the bathroom door. The last few steps are practically at a run as he over exerts his failing body and has to let the forward momentum of his wavering balance keep him moving those final few feet through the door. He doesn’t make it to the sink this time. Instead, the moment he makes it into the room his legs give out and he falls, landing on his knees with a vibrating ‘CRACK!’ against the tile. Pain lances through him like lightning, stealing the last of his breath. He doubles over onto his elbows and curls into a wretched little ball as the shock to his body sends a spasm through his mutilated chest.

The flowers push their way up through his windpipe, coiling their roots ever tighter around his heart until it feels like it’s going to burst inside the greenhouse that his ribcage has become, and Souji coughs and gags and wheezes until the floor is slick with red and scattered blossoms and his vision clouds over black.

He falls to the side like a ragdoll when the last of his strength finally leaves him, narrowly avoiding bashing his head against the edge of the bathtub as he slides down onto the bloody, sticky tiles. Blindly, like a dying twitch just before the final spark goes out, Souji kicks at where he remembers the door being, trying to find it with his foot to push it closed. His heel connects with the bottom corner and he shoves with what little energy he has left until he hears the metallic click of the latch.

He slips away into limbo then, with only a muted sense of sound remaining. He hears the rush of blood inside his skull, the slowing beat of his pulse in his ears, and somewhere, as if from deep below the crushing water of unconsciousness, he can hear the far-off thumping of footsteps coming briskly up the stairs.

Souji fades in and out of existence, never quite making it into oblivion but far enough in that he can scarcely feel his body. He can’t move, doesn’t have the wherewithal to try. His breathing is shallow, ragged, with his throat and lungs burning and his mouth tasting of iron and acid. He can feel the damage to his windpipe causing it to swell, leaving a tight, harsh pressure after every forced exhale. His lungs barely respond as he struggles weakly to fill them, the vines wrapped between the spaces of his ribs preventing them from expanding. But it’s his heart that’s the worst. There is a horrible, stinging, pinching sensation around his heart; even in his semi-conscious state, Souji knows that the roots have probably begun to pierce through it. Oddly, perhaps because his brain is slowly powering down, he finds he feels… not quite peaceful, per se, but something bordering on acceptance. Resignation, maybe. He doesn’t have the energy to think about it too hard.

From off in the hallway, he can hear what might be a voice calling his name. He can’t be sure if it’s real or not, thinks it might be a hallucination. It doesn’t matter either way – his voice is gone and his body too destroyed to find the strength to answer anyway. Please don’t find me, he thinks, just in case. Don’t see me like this….

“Partner? Where’d you go?”

Please no.

“Dude, answer me, where are you?!”

I don’t want you to be sad.

“Why is there blood on your pillow?”

Yosuke’s voice grows noticeably more anxious with each unanswered plea, cracking slightly on the final word as Souji’s absence stretches on. The footsteps return, this time getting louder as Yosuke presumably draws closer to Souji’s hiding spot. There is a knock on the bathroom door.

“Souji?” Yosuke calls again, and the mounting distress is clearer now without the distance to obscure it. “Souji, are you in there?”

Souji doesn’t answer, wouldn’t even if he could. Childishly, foolishly, his half-conscious mind thinks that maybe if he stays quiet enough then Yosuke won’t find him – that his friend will keep moving, keep looking elsewhere. Or better yet, just give Souji up as a lost cause and go home so that Souji can die quietly. It’s against Yosuke’s nature, though, and there is a small part of him that knows this, even through the haze that fills his head and weighs him to the floor.

True to form there is another knock, louder this time, more frenzied. “Souji, if you’re in there, please fucking say something.”

There is a pause, like he’s waiting for a response, listening for words that Souji doesn’t have the ability to give. Souji can hear a faint sound of shivery breathing behind the door and an image of the worried, tense expression that had spread over Yosuke’s face just before he’d left flickers across the dark of Souji’s vision. He can picture the way Yosuke bites at his lip when he’s anxious or scared and trying not to let it show, the pinched look around his eyes. It’s not a look that someone as full of sunlight as Yosuke should ever be made to wear.

The door handle rattles like someone has taken hold of it from the outside. “Souji, please, please say something, I’m seriously freaking out right now.” There is another pause. Then, harsh and sad and cracking, there comes a whispered, “There’s a fucking bloody flower in your trashcan…”

Souji feels his tattered heart give a tiny lurch.

No…!

A shuddering, damp inhalation comes from behind the wood of the door and the doorknob turns until the latch clicks, but the hinges themselves do not squeak as if they’re being used. “Fuck it,” Yosuke whispers, voice bordering on panic now, “fuck it, I don’t care if you’re naked or something, I’m coming in!”

Before Souji can try and will his body to curl up tighter in a vain attempt at instinctive protection, the sound of the door being swung open reaches his ears, followed immediately after by a horrified rush of air like his friend has just been punched in the stomach.

“SOUJI!”

Footsteps on tile, the wet sound of socked feet on drying blood, someone dropping to the floor beside him and grabbing at his shoulders, tugging him, pulling him into a warm lap, trembling fingers sweeping the red-matted hair from his face. The touch is nice despite the circumstances, like a balm on his clammy skin, and Souji lolls his head slightly to chase after the feeling.

Yosuke shakes him gently, frantically. “Souji look at me, look at me, please! Wake up!”

Souji tries to peel his eyes open, the lids feeling like they’ve been glued shut. He feels them flutter a little, thinks he might have managed to let a sliver of light through, but his vision is still dark.

“Come on!”

I’m trying, he thinks. I’m trying, I’m sorry…

One of Yosuke’s arms circles around Souji’s shoulders, holding him closer, keeping him from sinking back to the freezing floor; the other disappears from where Souji can feel it. There is a rustling of fabric, then a tinny beeping sound overtop a plastic clicking before the quiet, obnoxious burble of a distant phone line. Souji leans into Yosuke’s heat as best he can – he hadn’t realized just how cold he’d been until now.

“I need an ambulance,” Yosuke says in a single desperate breath. “My friend is sick and he collapsed and there’s a lot of blood and I think he might be dying!” He makes a noise that’s somewhere between a whine and a sob and it tears at what’s left of the heart in Souji’s burning chest. “There’s fucking–! There’s flowers everywhere – it’s like he threw up flowers, I don’t know what to do!”

Souji wishes he could get his limbs to move; he wants to turn onto his side and nuzzle his cold, bloodied face into Yosuke’s thigh, to throw an arm around his best friend’s waist and tell him without words the it’ll be okay. He wants to be able to take that heart-shattering fear and anguish from his beloved’s voice and bring back the sunlight that Yosuke always exudes. His body lies limp and uncooperative, though, and so all Souji can do is listen, hearing slowly beginning to fade, while Yosuke finishes the phone call with a cracking voice. He tries to ignore the droplets of something wet and hot that land on his face when Yosuke leans back over him and wraps his other arm over Souji’s chest.

“Stay with me, Partner,” Yosuke whispers, pressing their foreheads together, gradually starting to rock back and forth with Souji in his arms. “Stay with me…”

He repeats it over and over again into Souji’s temple like a despondent prayer, and it’s the last thing that Souji hears as he finally slips away into dreamless black.

---

Sound is the first sense to return to him.

There is a whooshing, steady and hollow. It acts as a droning background to a high-pitched, mechanical beeping somewhere off to the side that makes his head ring with dull pain. Somewhere in the distance, muffled, there are faint voices exchanging words he can’t make out, and the sharp ‘tic-tic-tic’ of retreating shoes.

Next to come back is touch. Souji can feel himself lying on something soft; a bed, probably, but it’s firmer than his normal futon and seems to be slightly elevated so that he’s propped up and not lying completely flat. There is something he guesses might be a blanket draped over him that feels slightly scratchy and has little to no weight to it. Something kind of rubbery presses lightly into his face, just below his cheekbones, and apparently has been shoved up his nose. It doesn’t hurt him, which is nice, and as he breathes in he notices the cool stream of air that trickles from it. He breathes again. Nothing catches in his lungs.

There is a chill to the room around him. It doesn’t seep too badly through the blanket, but on the parts of him that are uncovered he feels it the most – his neck, ears, and face, and also, oddly enough, his right wrist all the way up to his elbow. His hand, however, is warm, with something slotted between his fingers. He flexes them just barely, and whatever is covering his hand gives a gentle squeeze in return.

“Partner?”

Souji tilts his head towards the voice. It’s quiet, rough, laced with tired hope. Even half alive, Souji would recognize it anywhere. He takes another breath, deeper than he thinks he should be able to take, and pulls at whatever strength his heavy, aching body might have left. He focuses on grounding points – the warmth on his hand, the voice beside him – and slowly, haltingly, Souji manages to crack open his bleary eyes.

At first there is pain. The light overhead is not particularly bright, but to eyes that have been bathed in darkness for an eternity, the florescence is like a blow to the back of his skull. He feels his face twist into a grimace involuntarily and he has to will himself not to squeeze his eyes shut and hold them like that, instead settling for narrowing them down to slits as he waits for the light to even out. Eventually it does and the room comes into bleary color, a collection of shapes finally fusing together to form a solid picture with fuzzy edges. Beside him, a blurr of copper and orange shifts into his peripherals.

“Hey,” Yosuke whispers, and the sound is so full of hope that Souji instinctively wants to reach over and bury his face in the crook of his friend’s neck and shoulder.

He shifts a bit more so that Yosuke is centered in his vision and squints at the other boy’s outline. It takes him a few seconds of stillness, of willing his eyes to focus properly, of blinking to try and clear the lingering static from the edges, before Souji is able to open his eyes a little further and actually see. Yosuke is an absolute wreck.

Tear tracks stain his cheeks and his eyes and the tip of his nose are red from crying. His hair is tangled in places along the sides and right in the front, as if he’d delved his fingers into it at some point and tugged mercilessly. He sits hunched over the side of Souji’s bed in a shitty plastic hospital chair that looks about as comfortable as their school desk chairs after a long night of fighting in the TV world, one arm draped over the mattress. The other arm lies crossed underneath it, with Souji’s hand wrapped up tightly in his own.

Yosuke feigns a smile, the expression looking strained and worn thin. “Hey,” he repeats, “you with me?”

Habitually, Souji parts his lips to try and respond, only to find his mouth and throat unbearably dry. He swallows a couple of times in an attempt to fix the problem and has to unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth, his throat raw and stinging like he’s poured down a bottle of bleach.

“Don’t,” Yosuke chides him softly. “Just nod if you can hear me.”

Souji does, and his vision only swims a little bit.

His partner lets out a long, deep sigh of relief, his entire body releasing a tension that had seemed almost embedded into his bones. He sags forward and drops his head onto his arms. “Thank god…” The hand over Souji’s own squeezes again, tighter this time, like he’s still afraid to let go, and his muffled voice cracks and stutters as he speaks. “I was so fucking scared, I thought…” He pauses, tightens his hold on Souji’s hand even more. There is the sound of a ragged inhale. “Don’t ever do that to me again, man. Ever. I can’t… I almost—!” He sits back up with a shuttering breath, fresh tears already spilling from his eyes and carving new paths down his face.

Yosuke lifts Souji’s hand from the mattress and curls his free one around it as well, holding it in both of his own like it’s something sacred. He screws his eyes shut and brings Souji’s fingers to his lips. “You dumbass!” he rasps against the backs of Souji’s knuckles. He presses a fervent kiss to each one, lingering for a moment before moving on to the next; when he’s done, he leans down to rest his forehead against the places his lips have just touched. “You absolute fucking dumbass…”

Souji stares at him, utterly gobsmacked as his partner cries silently against his hand. Surely this is a dream? One last hallucination before his brain finally shuts down and he succumbs to the choking, bitter flowers rooted around his heart. He takes an experimental breath in and while it does hurt, it’s more like an ache, a soreness that sits around his muscles and not deep inside his ribs. His chest moves, rises and falls with each new set of inhale-exhale – there is no catch, no halt. Nothing clogs up his sandpapery throat. Nothing tickles.

A fantasy then. Maybe he’s already died and this is what has been awaiting him; the illusion of a flowerless heart, of working lungs, of the boy he’s fallen helplessly in love with holding his hand and placing kisses across his fingers. There is no way that this is real.

But maybe, if all of this is nothing but a vision as the last few traces of his life flicker out, then would it be such a terrible thing for Souji to be a little selfish? Just this once? He’s either already dead or about to be so, just one stolen moment can’t be too much to ask for. He lifts his fingers, still unsteady in his body’s weakness, and brushes them through the copper strands of Yosuke’s fringe that lay within his reach. He’s always wondered what Yosuke’s hair felt like, if it would be coarse because of the dye or if it would be soft to the touch. He notes with quiet delight that it is, in fact, as soft as he’d hoped it would be.

Yosuke twitches at the contact. Eyes still shut tight, he nuzzles his face further down the back of Souji’s hand and closer to his wrist. The action pushes Souji’s fingers deeper into Yosuke’s hair and Souji delicately catches at a thin lock of it to stroke beneath the pad of his thumb.

Souji swallows again, licking a dry tongue over his bitter-tasting lips to try and make his mouth work properly. “Y’suke…” he breathes, his voice nothing more than an echo of the air slipping past his teeth. He has no idea if the other boy – the image of his beloved – can even hear him, but it doesn’t really matter. He just wants to say it. If only this one time. Because he knows he’ll probably never get the chance to do this again.

He just wishes it could have been real.

He shifts his fingers so that he can lovingly sweep a few strands of hair from where they’ve fallen across Yosuke’s eyes, a small, sad smile tugging at the corners of Souji lips. “Love you…”

To his surprise, Yosuke wheezes out a sharp, soggy bark of laughter. “Yeah, no shit, Partner.” He repositions one of his hands, sliding his palm around to fit against Souji’s own and slotting their fingers together once more. His grip is like gentle iron, tight and secure but not enough to be painful. He still doesn’t open his eyes. “Nice of you to wait until you nearly die on me to let me know.”

Souji is… confused. Even for a dream this is a little unexpected, and he’s still foggy-brained on top of everything, not yet fully “awake” and functioning.

He doesn’t get a chance to do much more than furrow his brows slightly, because Yosuke finally lifts his head from where he’s been reverently pressing it to Souji’s wrist. Red-rimmed eyes open, and the usual amber-brown of his irises has now turned a hurt, murky auburn. “You wanna know how I found out?” he asks, and there is an edge of near-hysterical sarcasm to his words. He doesn’t wait for Souji to react. “Turns out my best friend has something called ‘Hanahaki Disease’, which makes him grow goddamn morning glories in his heart, because surprise, surprise! He’s been bottling up his feelings again, and now it’s literally killing him.”

Yosuke pauses to take in a shuddering breath, glancing away as he sniffles and blinks against the new wave of moisture that has begun to gather in his eyes. “Do you have any idea how terrifying it is to sit there and be told that the most amazing person you’ve ever known is dying and there’s nothing they can do to save him? That unless someone can find whoever it is your partner is in love with and get them to love him back in the next couple of hours, you’re gonna lose him? Because it fucking sucks!”

Yosuke tugs away the hand not holding Souji’s like a lifeline and furiously scrubs at his face with the back of it. He pushes the hinge of his wrist against his eyes and ducks his head to hide the tears now freely flowing down his cheeks. He sobs once, quietly, his shoulders trembling as he suppresses the rest. “I didn’t— I didn’t even know you were sick before today, I couldn’t… I felt so useless!” His fingers curl and uncurl around Souji’s own, rhythmically squeezing as if he’s trying to remind himself of Souji’s warmth and solidity.

Souji squeezes back as best he can.

“And then they told me I should go ahead and start saying my goodbyes, that you might still be able to hear me if I talked to you, and I just… We already did this with Nanako, I couldn’t fucking do it again.”

Yosuke leans in again, resting his forehead once more against Souji’s arm and wrapping his free hand over the pulse point on Souji’s wrist. He just breathes for a moment, letting the steady ‘beat-beat-beat’ beneath his fingertips pull him back in. His eyes reopen and stare unseeing down at the white fabric of the bed sheets. “So I broke down,” he whispers. “I started talking, saying anything that came into my head cuz I guess I thought maybe if I begged hard enough you’d just get better or something. I told you if you woke up I’d go out and drag every single girl in Inaba over here until I found the one you liked, and if that didn’t work then I’d go to Okina and try there, too. Anywhere you needed me to look. And then when… when you just kept slipping away, I didn’t know what to do, so I got desperate and said I’d go look for you a boyfriend instead if that’s what you wanted and that you could even have me because fuck, I’ve been falling in love with you forever but I’ve been too stupid to ever admit it.”

Souji’s eyes go wide. Even in those tiny moments he’d allowed himself to have, back when he hadn’t known just how deep his affection for Yosuke truly ran, Souji could never have come up with something like this. He’d never fully let himself imagine Yosuke returning his feelings, never bothered to treat it as a possibility because he didn’t want to acknowledge his own crush or give himself anything like false hope. So this, all of this, is well beyond anything Souji thinks could feasibly play out inside his head. If this a product of a dying brain then it’s gotten well away from him and left him reeling; if it’s a piece of whatever afterlife he’s been given, then it would seem the gods haven’t been paying much attention.

If it’s neither, then Souji might just have lost his damn mind.

He steals a quick look around the room while Yosuke’s gaze is still fixed on the bedspread, grey eyes flicking from corner to corner as best they can with Souji still a bit too weak to move his head. This is definitely the hospital; he’d spent far too much time here in between his part time job and his family being bedridden to not recognize it. The beeping sound he’d heard upon first waking is a heart monitor beside the bed, connected to his body below the scratchy covers by a thin black cord. The steady whoosh of air is a different machine entirely, one with a clear plastic tube that leads to something lying loosely across his chest. He remembers the rubbery something over his face and up his nose and realizes it must be an oxygen pump, feeding air directly into his lungs.

(Souji swallows and expects the flowers to come rushing back up his windpipe, still baffled when there’s no sign of them.)

He glances back to find that Yosuke is now watching him with a look of wild-eyed caution.

“You had a… a seizure or something right after that,” he says, voice so low it’s almost drowned out by the ambient sounds of the hospital machinery. “Started convulsing, coughing up more flowers. At first they thought it was another attack but when they went to try and clear your airways they pulled a bunch of roots out of your throat.” He stops to inhale deeply, his shoulders rising and then falling again as he slowly lets the breath back out through his nose. “I dunno what happened next cuz they made me leave, but then they came back like an hour later and told me you were gonna live and that it looked like you’d kicked out the entire plant somehow, roots and all. They said the only way that was even possible was for the love that grew the damn thing in the first place to be requited. Considering I had literally just told you I loved you, it wasn’t that hard to piece everything together after that.”

Silence stretches between them. In the quiet, with only the machinery for noise in the background, it had been easy to mistake this for a dreamscape, to think that he’s finally fallen comatose and that this is his one final chance to be at peace before his body gives in to death. But… it isn’t. Souji blinks slowly, taking in his surroundings with an altered perspective. He can still feel the non-weight of the blanket, the chill of the circulated air, the pressure of Yosuke’s hands covering his own. He isn’t dead, nor is he dying. Souji is awake and alive and this is really real.

It’s almost too wild to believe.

Because he’s spent so long convincing himself that this could never happen, that this is something he’d never be allowed to have, Souji still can’t quite process it all. Yosuke, sunny, bright, wonderful Yosuke… loves him back.

Yosuke loves him back.

Like a man who’s spent his whole life in the darkness finally seeing daylight for the first time, Souji lets the fragile spark of hope within him stay lit. It catches on the love-starved ground of his battered heart and fans itself into a small, steady flame. “I love you,” he whispers again with a stronger voice than last time. Because he wants to. Because he can.

He doesn’t notice that he’s tearing up until the lines in his vision blur out. He blinks to clear it away. “I love you.”

Yosuke stares at him. His expression is unreadable, too many different emotions mixing together and Souji can barely see through the thin trickle of tears that have started falling in earnest now. He hears the scrape of chair legs on the floor, feels the loss of heat as Yosuke relinquishes one of his hands from the desperate clinging to Souji’s pulse point. There is a quiet sound of rustling fabric, the creak and pop of plastic as Yosuke rises slowly from his chair. Warm, calloused fingers brush through the wetness on Souji’s face, tenderly wiping it away.

“I love you, too,” is whispered near his ear, just before Yosuke nuzzles at his temple. “I love you so goddamn much, Souji, I was so scared I was gonna lose you.” There is a pause, a shaky breath, and then there are lips being pressed against Souji’s forehead, soft and reverent, and Yosuke’s fingers return to stroke though Souji’s hair.

Souji leans into it, revels in it without hesitation. A tiny shiver goes down his spine and for the first time ever he lets himself enjoy it. No flowers surge up to try and choke him, no clogging, suffocating mass of bitter petals fills his mouth with blood and bile. The tears gather faster as something new wells up inside Souji’s chest, bringing with it a feeling that might be budding joy. It’s been so long since he’s experienced hope; he almost doesn’t recognize it.

Yosuke dips his fingers down again to wipe futilely at Souji’s cheekbones. “I’m glad you’re alive,” he murmurs, and another kiss is pressed to Souji’s hair.

The hand in his own isn’t enough. Souji shifts his free arm, the one still under the blanket, and starts to try and pull it free from its cotton prison. Something tugs at his skin, causing him to wince, and Yosuke must feel the expression under his lips because he pulls away to awkwardly reach across himself and place his hand over Souji’s shoulder. He pushes down gently to stop Souji from tugging his arm out of the covers.

“No,” Yosuke tells him, quiet and firm. He pushes down on Souji’s shoulder slightly, as if to hold it to the bed. “You’re gonna knock your IV out.”

Souji whimpers. “Wanna hold you.”

Yosuke leans back enough to where he can blink down at Souji with a faint dusting of pink across the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t say anything for a moment, just searches Souji’s face with his eyes.

“…Please?” Souji rasps, because now that his heart is beginning to understand that he can have this, it refuses to accept anything else. It strains against his heavy body, reaching desperate tendrils of want out in any direction it can in hopes of quelling a months-long ache.

Yosuke’s expression softens. “Okay,” he whispers, squeezing Souji’s hand again.

The nurse finds them later, curled up against one another as well as they can be in the tiny hospital bed that only barely fits one. Yosuke is folded up like a cat at Souji’s side, head tucked into the space where Souji’s shoulder meets his collarbone, mindful of the breathing tube and the still-healing chest just below it. Souji’s cheek rests against the crown of Yosuke’s head and he’s long-since nuzzled into the softness of his beloved’s hair.

One of Yosuke’s arms is draped carefully over Souji’s stomach below his ribs – the other squished between their sides with their hands entwined.

--- --- ---

(A note from the author: I couldn't decide between a happy ending or an unhappy ending while I was writing this, so I put up a poll on my twitter asking for people to vote between the two and Happy Ending won by a good margin.

The unhappy ending would have seen Souji waking up in the hospital to find the doctors had performed emergency surgery on him to remove the moonflowers. He would have miraculously survived, but any and all feeling he’d had for Yosuke would have been gone, leaving Souji completely apathetic towards him and slowly causing their entire friendship to disolve until they were little more than strangers. The rest of the game’s events would take place and Souji would go back to the city at the end of the year. On the day that Souji left, Yosuke would have gone back home after seeing his former partner off at the train station and started coughing up sunflower petals into the bathroom sink.

>:3 Y’all dodged a bullet~)

#this is 2 weeks late because my computer copped out and I had to go find another one UG!#fanfic #fanfiction #persona 4 #p4 #souyoweek2019 #souyo #souji seta #yu narukami #yosuke hanamura #hanahaki disease #tw blood #tw vomiting

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