Siyeon is 16 when she almost dies for the first time.

She’s talking to someone from school, a decent enough boy who wants to befriend her for some ulterior motive or other, she’s sure, until someone familiar walks by in the distance and she can’t help but stare. 

Siyeon only ever watches from afar now, but she remembers the way they used to play together as children after school. They’d spent hours and hours together doing whatever they wanted, shenanigans of all and every kind.

The way she walks, the way she smiles.

Something comes up in and she feels like she cannot breathe. The boy stops talking when Siyeon turns away and brings a hand up to .

“Are you alright?” he (Mingyu? is that his name?) asks, eyeing the way she coughs thrice into her hand. Siyeon furrows her brows when the lump moves further up . Oh, god. What is this? 

“I’m fine.” She stops and nods to give him a weak smile. She needs to get to the bathroom. “I just have to go. See you some other time.”

She doesn’t bother waiting for his response. On the way to the toilet she almost bumps into someone standing near its entrance and nearby chatter from a group of girls fades.

“Siyeon?” a voice asks, and Siyeon feels sick. She can’t take this, not right now.

Stumbling into the nearest toilet, she leans heavily onto the rim of the sink and coughs, harder and harder, until the lump in dislodges and rests in , a flat and foreign tasting object she automatically removes with her hand.

It is a single petal, glowing perfectly even in the dingy cheap bathroom lighting, pure white except for a drop of deep, dark red stained at the very tip. Her heart lurches and her eyes shut tight. she knows what this is.

“Siyeon? Is that you? Are you alright?” The same voice eventually calls from closer than before. She jerks and dashes into a cubicle, locking it shut.

“It is.” she sits heavily on the closed toilet seat and examines the petal, turning it with the tip of her fingers. “It’s me. Yeah. Yeah, I’m alright, don’t worry.”

A long pause.

“Alright.” the voice says. A memory flashes through her brain and she only feels sicker. “I’m going now, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you,” she replies, sits still until the sound of footsteps stop pacing and eventually fade, thinks about old friendships and gentle hands and an argument that cost her more than time. And that was that.

At home, she turns on her laptop and searches. The petal she coughed out is from a from a beautiful calla lily.

She searches some more until the sun has set and there is no sound from anyone but her. Hundreds of articles on the Hanahaki disease dot the web and she reads them all, looking for something she can't seem to find the answer to.

Three weeks of agony later, when the lilies she coughs out come in groups of six and are no longer white but deep, dark crimson, she goes to see a specialist. When she returns hours later, painkillers in hand, she immediately walks over and looks at the photos on her desk. One in particular depicts two girls slumped together against each other and smiling at the camera. She confirm there and then that she now feels nothing for Jeon Somi.

Hunched over on her bed, she winces and tries to force herself to cry. She feels nothing but even that in itself is a feeling, cold and void and unforgiving, resoundingly and horrifyingly empty. She tries to cry and nearly does but ultimately doesn’t because there is nothing to cry about. When she tries hard to think of Somi and an emotion together all she gets is a faint headache in return.

Fate is ing cruel, she learns. And she still tries to grieve. Not because she grieves for her lost feelings, but because she grieves for memories that never last and the person she used to be.

The second time it happens, she coughs out pretty pink carnations. Siyeon goes home and trashes her room, tearing apart pictures and throwing out whatever she didn’t need, and goes to see the specialist the very same day. She returns home and as an afterthought throws out anything pink or white that remains. 

Lying on her bed in a room newly cleaned and almost bare, she stares at the ceiling and thinks. Everything hurts, hurts so bad she cannot tell what exactly is hurting and whether it’s just her head or her lungs or her body or her heart or some disgusting combination of them all, but she smiles. She doesn’t want to ever fall in love again.

The third time it happens, she cries.