Hello! I just read your Akashi and Hinami superhero AU (I love it, btw), and I would like to know if it's okay to request HinaShi Hanahaki AU (If you don't know, hanahaki is a fictional disease that make you cough flowers--they are blooming in your lungs--because of unrequited love)
It's not like the paintings. It's nothing like how she expects.
The artwork she has seen always captures the person in rapturous agony. An exquisite pain that makes suffering beautiful. Shiori has always disdained those pictures, just as she has privately scorned the people who suffer.
Instead, it's a hiccup. A momentary soreness of the throat, as if she is coming down with a cold, then a queasiness, and finally a polite cough into her napkin. At first, she thinks it's blood she sees in her napkin, and wonders if she's dying from tuberculosis. Then she sees the camellia petals and thinks, Ah. Wrong diagnosis. Dying, all the same.
But it's so absurd. She crumples up the napkin and throws it away. It is easier to believe she somehow mistakenly ate flowers for lunch and is coughing up the effects than to think she has come down with that fanciful disease.
I would not. I could not. I give myself to no one. That's what she has always believed about herself. She is not someone who is passionate. She is not someone who has fits of beautiful suffering.
She didn't even think she could fall in love. That's not the kind of person she is.
The second flower is larger. Another red camellia. She flushes it down the toilet. Then she goes back to work, as if nothing happened at all.
She doesn't think about it at all. People will think it's because she is in denial, but it's not that. Having come down with this absurd disease, she refuses to acknowledge what it means. You're wrong, she thinks, to the petals in her hands. You're wrong about me, you're wrong, you're wrong. Shiori goes about her daily business with rote efficiency, and if anyone notices that she's occasionally excuses herself with more frequency, no one says anything.
It's only when confronted with Hinami's concerned gaze, that Shiori has to finally accept what this means.
"Why wouldn't I be, Senpai?" Shiori asks with a smile.
"You seem... pale. Youji said something the other day about it too. Are you--"
"I have been recovering from a cold, Senpai," Shiori says. "That is all."
It's you, she thinks. You are the flowers that are killing me.
She decides this changes nothing. She will go about her day, pretending.
A/N: Thanks, anon-friend!! I only learned about hanahaki disease because of another anon-friend, but I don't think I've written one before? Maybe I have, I can't remember. At any rate, thank you for asking! I also feel the need to point out that @melissaabroad wrote a MasaYou hanahaki AU story, and you should check that out =D
