A singular, blood-stained petal fell softly onto the polished wooden floor, almost floating on the heavy air of the room, thick with a weird kind of emotion. Slick, Mizi would call it. Sickening, all too revolting, like a stream of crimson bile rushing forward. Choking her, stealing gasp after gasp of trapped air from her aching lungs, congested with greed. Suffocating her. Killing her.
Yet, above it all, head tilted and glistening lips fixed into a perpetual sneer, stood confusion with her fingers roving over the dastardly flowers with a wide, curious gaze. Perhaps that was Mizi’s own, hazel eyes checking for further instability and stray petals within the band of pink and white sat neatly on her lap. A too-loose flower, two untwisted stems, none of which would do. Not now. Not anymore. Not for Mizi, not for Sua.
Still, her beloved would wear it all the same, with a smile that belonged more on a watercolour painting than a human, much like the rest of her, so quietly radiant as she was. She would be happy, she would feel loved. So long as Mizi could explain away the red stained white—paint, it’s paint, she would say—so long as Sua did not catch the way Mizi’s breaths came in shallower than they had the day before, voice nasally with blood that had not been there last week, it would be okay. Happy. Real, if only because Mizi had made it so.
Hypocrite, a voice sneered, angry and taunting both. Mizi ignored it, opting instead to gently place the crown on her desk, ready for its owner’s arrival. Still, it did not stop, only growing louder, louder, louder. Crowding around Mizi’s ears, her inert form, so full of shaking, racking movement only that morning. Mocking her, grinning as her gaze grew heavy with malice-induced grief. Yet, she did not swat it away. Would not. Could not.
When was Sua coming?
She tapped at her phone, screen glowing in response to reveal a picture of them both, only two days ago. A selfie, taken from a too-high angle which displayed their rain-wet foreheads more than anything else—a recent trend Ivan had shown her. She hadn’t gotten the hang of it, not yet, not exactly, so their chins appeared warped, sticking out at strange angles, lips nothing but blurred patches of red. And their eyes—wide as bugs, almost terrifying. And still, Sua seemed so beautiful there, bright with a soft, beauteous light. With life, almost.
They’d gone to a cafe, on one of those days when the sickness eating away at Mizi’s lungs was not so bad, or even there at all. (That was bad, she knew, a medical anomaly. Hanahaki did not grant you rest, only an aching kind of reprieve. To restock your bloody love anew, however useless it was—hanahaki did not, after all, come to those with loves so flimsy, they’d falter in the face of their own flowers. Perhaps this respite was something of a reward, guerdon for staying true to her love even as parasitic roots grew around her neck like a bruising necklace. Even as nothing made sense.)
Or perhaps it was recompense, for how the malady of the unrequited had settled its ill-fitting form under her skin, whispering crimson nonsense into her lungs and heart even as her love had found itself a worthy adversary in Sua, hit for hit. For every kiss Mizi planted upon her love’s gentle face, another would be stuck to her own, immediate, reflexive. It was in their nature, this love. For it to be unrequited was unnatural. Impossible.
Ah. The screen had darkened to black already, reflecting her sickly pale face, finally snapping to attention. She tapped at it again, and felt her stomach lurch. Drop. Light aflame, burn, melt away. In seconds, the phone was on the floor, launched into a smattering of crinkled and torn clematis petals on her pink rug. Cracked, now. Or had they always been there? How long? Not that it mattered, not anymore, not now.
She crawled over, shaking, laggard with leaden feet, and picked it up again, gaze only then catching fingers littered with cuts and scars that she swore hadn’t been there only two minutes ago. But that mattered not. After all, how could papercuts compare to a half-empty picture, love erased?
Or the full breaths you took when you saw her gone.
“That’s not true,” Mizi muttered, fingers squeezing around the pink plastic of her shattered phone. Careful not to touch the screen, lest she splinter it beyond repair. “I love her.” Not always. “You’re wrong. You’re—You’re wrong, she’s my god, my universe, she—You’re wrong.” And yet, look how angry you are.
Mizi didn’t reply. Couldn’t.
Because perhaps it was true. Perhaps she was angry, just a bit. A smidge. A modicum.
But how could she not be, when Sua was as much a spectre as a person, when Sua glowed with more radiance than the shining sun and yet left not even a sliver of light in Mizi’s life? Not even a single, captured ray, for all the promises they’d made beneath the old tree by her house, secret contracts spoken into charged nothingness and sealed a hundred times over with the wispy blood of their souls. All nothing, now. Unrecorded, unwritten, and thus un-real. Mere fiction. Mizi wanted to laugh. Made to. Stopped herself, because the flowers which had taken root would rock to and fro and trap the bubbling derision in her lungs.
And then she laughed anyway, because her lungs were devoid of even the beginnings of a root. Empty. At the realisation, she laughed harder, hot tears pricking at her eyes like needles. In her hand, the phone’s screen again lit with a faint glow, and instantly it was turned over with a shrill shriek.
“Mizi,” ah, there she was. Her angel, her damnation. “Mizi, my mizi. Won’t you embrace me?” Hands warm with a frigid non-life petted her shoulders, then, roaming south. Prying her open from where she had been curled up, cackling into the bloodsoaked air of her room.
“I hate you,” Mizi rasped, hoarse and desperate. “It’s so hard, but I hate you. Even when you’re not you. Even when you’re me. I hate you.”
The angel before her did not answer, opting simply to slot their fingers together, pushing until they were splayed on the too-cold floor, leaning into the notch of Mizi’s neck, smiling that ethereal smile. The one she’d worn when she’d given Mizi this dreadful ailment. When she’d left her, lying through her perfect teeth still.
And yet, it was all Mizi could do to stay awake as a fresh wave of growth rippled through her grief-stricken body, pre-bloodied clematises blooming within her abyss. To apologise before they’d rip through her throat, and Sua was gone once more. To pretend she was ever there.