Archive of Our Own ^beta

when you first meet lucien, you feel something sprout inside your stomach. throughout your night in wonderland you water it with alcohol and fertilize it with jazz and secondhand smoke until it blooms with the promise of a new vision. you wakes up the next morning with your throat clogged with something thick and suffocating that you cough out into your hands. cupped in your shaking palms are a couple of wet, crumpled tulip petals, dainty and white as freshly-fallen snow. you're as captivated by them as you are afraid, and you might have thought they were a prank or a hallucination if you didn’t cough up several more petals while brushing your teeth. you don't know what the flowers are or how they got inside you, but you start to suspect why when you feel their roots digging deeper into your intestines every time lucien calls you ginsy.

the flowers grow with every look, every touch and talk and moment you share, until you're so full of them you barely feel the need to eat. but every night, without fail, they shed their petals from your tongue and leave you shaking and weak, feeling emptier than you ever did before they took up residence inside you. you wish they would stay always in bloom, but every time lucien rejects your poetry or leaves to find a better writer you feel them withering inside you, their petals dropping heavily to the pit of your stomach to be expelled in private later. you wish you could appreciate the sight of them glistening on your pillowcase, but their delicate beauty just reminds you of his.

eventually you find out david has them, too. he hides his illness well behind a handkerchief and a composed facade but you discover his secret when you find red rose petals scattered on the essay he left on lu's desk. you're surprised to also see droplets of blood forming dark stains on the paper, and when you ask david about it, he tells you his have thorns.

you want to despise him, but you end up pitying him more than anything. after all, you are after the same thing. with futile longing in your veins you both turn your heads to bask in lucien's light whenever he's around, vainly stretching your leaves toward a sun you'll never reach. you may be rivals, but at the end of the day you're both alone in the dark without him, heaving shriveled flower petals into your bathroom sinks.

you become so desperate to keep the flowers alive that you crave lucien's attention like a drug, vying for it constantly. you think if he would just reciprocate, love you as much as you clearly love him, the flowers would never die again and you would be spared from the endless nightly torture. finally you manage to catch his mouth in a kiss and you feel the flowers blossom and multiply, growing so tall they fill your throat and make it impossible to breathe without gasping for air between each press of lips -- but in your dizzy ecstasy you don't mind, because you’ve never felt so much life inside you.

when you pull away there are white petals clinging to lucien's lips and what was once a dazed expression transforms into one of revulsion as he spits them out onto the grass.

"not you, too," he says as he turns away, sounding hurt, but you're the one who feels like your heart has just withered inside you along with the flowers.

david finds you in the morning with blood on his lips and you can tell from the paleness of his skin and the desperation in his tone that the deadly roses inside him have spread throughout his body, tearing at his flesh from the inside. you send david after lucien and try to find someone else to replace him, but not even the tall blond you lose your virginity to can make the flowers grow again. afterwards you stand in the shower with a hand pressed to your stomach, hacking up petal after petal and watching them collect in the drain.

the next thing you know, david is dead. the roses didn't kill him, but the person who put them there did.

"did he tell you how he did it?" bill asks you.

"he said he stabbed him in the chest -- "

"no, allen. the stomach . he stabbed him in the stomach, split him open, and tore the roses out with his bare hands."

you feel the blooms of your own flowers drop all at once from their stems. that night, in your worst vomiting fit yet, you find that each of the white petals you expel is stained red in remembrance.

from his jail cell lucien asks for your help. you want to give it to him, but when you look at lucien's hands curled around the bars, still scarred from the thorns they’d dug out of david’s belly, all you can see is the rosepetals crumbling in them and staining his fingers with blood.

instead of turning in the deposition, you go to the hospital and ask to be cured of your illness. they tell you it's called hanahaki , the disease of unrequited love. you should have known. they warn you that you'll lose your romantic feelings for lucien when the flowers are removed, but you insist that this is what you want. it's not a loss when you choose to let go.

only one flower survives the procedure intact. you bring it to lucien in his cell, pass it to him through the bars as an offering of peace. sitting on the floor, lucien gently runs his fingers over the flower's curved white petals, tracing the blood-red veins that serve as a tragic reminder of the roses he refused to handle with the same care. nothing stirs in your stomach as you watch him. nothing buds, blossoms, or blooms. lucien is no longer the sun that fuels you, and you feel healthy, whole.

"will you write to me?" lucien asks you.

you tell him you’ll send him flowers.