It’s pink.

Purplish-pink. There must be a word for this specific colour, but Taemin doesn’t know it.

It lies so prettily on the white porcelain of his sink pink porcelain like Kibum’s cheeks when he blushes and Taemin feels sort of numb. Hanahaki disease is something that happens to someone else – to Jonghyun, to Taesun, to his vocal coach – but he can’t quite picture himself pining after someone who’s not interested.

Taemin carefully picks the petal up and flushes it down the toilet.

It’s only just started. Maybe it’ll go away in a few days. There’s really no need to tell anyone yet.

~

It feels like even the walls have eyes.

Taemin coughs slightly. Jonghyun and Jinki turn to look at him, and he wonders whether they can tell the difference between a flower cough and a flu cough. Is there difference at all? They must have noticed that he’s been coughing a lot recently. Should he take up smoking once more, so that he has a plausible cause for his persistent cough?

The meeting breaks for lunch. Taemin declines to have lunch with anyone else and instead spends his half hour looking for cough drops in the convenience store around the corner.

When he comes back, Kibum hands him his thermos.

“I don’t want coffee,” Taemin replies. Kibum takes his coffee black and far too strong for Taemin’s tastes.

“It’s turmeric tea with lemon and honey,” Kibum explains. “There’s no ginger, don’t worry.”

A sudden fit of coughing prevents Taemin from replying. He can feel the flowers expanding in his chest, as if Kibum’s attention is like sunlight to them. How is he supposed to get over Kibum if he does things like this?

“You might want to lay off iced drinks for a while,” Kibum continues, frowning. “We have practice all of next week, you can’t afford to be sick. I’ll bring tea for you, okay?”

Is this what it is like to be in love, Taemin wonders, to die a death of a thousand cuts, welcoming each one?

~

“You’re not going to be able to hide it for much longer,” Jongin says. “Jonghyun knows what it is like, remember? And he said the surgery wasn’t painful at all, so there’s really no point in delaying it, is there?”

Taemin sighs and delays his answer by eating a mouthful of naengmyeon.

But this is Jongin and Jongin knows him like no one else, so he just waits patiently until the silence becomes so unbearable that Taemin has to speak up. “It’s just… I don’t want to not feel anything for Key-hyung. I really like him. I don’t want to… to not love him.”

“Then tell him. It’s not like he’s straight and there’s zero chance of your feelings being reciprocated, right?”

“No. You know that’s not how it works, you can’t choose to fall in love with someone. Faking it doesn’t work.”

“And you know this ends in death, right?”

“I won’t let it get that far,” Taemin says. “If it doesn’t go away by itself soon, I’ll do something, I promise.”

~

It’s more than just a petal or two in the sink now. Taemin wakes up to petals on his pillow and under his blankets. He picks them all up, and they go from ten to fifteen to twenty and then he stops counting.

He carries cigarettes around. Minho and Jonghyun are very open about their disapproval, while Jinki is sympathetic. Kibum brings him herbal teas and heat packs and chewing gum.

But none of it matters when – of all people – Choi Jin is driving him home from practice and Taemin’s mouth fills with saliva. He’s thrown up enough from drinking from being sick from cucumber to know that he’s not going to able to hold this at all. He reaches for the door and then it just happens.

The petals rise up his throat and fill his mouth and he can’t breathe and he’s coughing and spitting them out and they just keep coming-

~

He runs and fights and screams, but at the end of the day he’s really no match for the managers who drag him to the hospital and hold him down while the nurses sedate him. His parents just stood by and watched when they came to take him from his house.

The doctor comes, checks on the machines that are wired to him.

Taemin’s in a fog, dazed and losing the battle to stay lucid. Still, he forms the words with an uncooperative mouth. “I don’t want this.”

The doctor looks at him.

“I don’t consent. I don’t consent to the surgery-”

The doctor walks away.

The world goes dark.