Archive of Our Own

The first thing Yoongi hears is the ceaseless, bothersome noise of something beeping over his head, that sounds rather like Jimin’s daily morning alarm. He fully expects it to be turned off after a few seconds, and for a pair of thick, wet lips to kiss his cheek, but it never comes. The beeping continues.

“Ji-Jiminnie…” he groans out tiredly, brushing his hands over to his left, where Jimin should be, but touches the edge of his bed and cold metal instead. A hand takes his, but it doesn’t feel like Jimin’s smaller one.

“Ji… Jimin?” Yoongi asks, wearily forcing his eyes open. His mouth feels heavy, as if unused for a long time.

“Yoongi-hyung,” an equally worn out voice greets.

Yoongi blinks his eyes open, watching blurry shapes form as his vision clears – as if he hasn’t used his eyes in years. “Hoseok?” He asks.

Hoseok’s grip on Yoongi’s hand tightens, and the older man furrows his brows in confusion as he tilts his head about to look at his surroundings; white bed, white floor, white walls. There’s a loss of sensation in his lower left leg.

“Hoseok,” he stares at the younger man, whose light brown hair sticks up like an unmade bird’s nest. “Why am I in the hospital?”

*

Hoseok stares at his phone, his call with Jeongguk continuing, lighting up white on his screen, and can still hear his voice trying to talk to him, persuade him, apologise to him, but all Hoseok can think about is why on Earth did technological advancements get rid of flip phones? He presses the angry red button on his screen violently, but it really doesn’t feel as satisfying as smacking shut a flip phone would.

Hoseok blinks away unshed tears and deletes Jeongguk’s number from his contacts.

*

“You were in a car accident,” Hoseok starts, and Yoongi waits patiently for Jimin and Jeongguk to burst out from underneath his ridiculously tall hospital bed with whistles, balloons, and those idiotic blow-up party knickknacks that he’s suddenly forgotten the name for, because this is a pathetic prank. It has to be.

Hoseok frowns. “Jimin and… and Jeongguk aren’t here.”

“Oh,” Yoongi replies unintelligibly. The feeling in his left leg still hasn’t returned. “Why?”

*

When Hoseok gets a call from the hospital five streets away from the convenience store he works the graveyard shift at on Tuesday nights, he literally sprints his way towards the fat, grey building. He doesn’t think to call Jeongguk – he’s always sleeping at this time.

“What happened?” He practically shouts after over an hour of waiting tensely in the waiting room. In that white, white room, Yoongi looks like a small, helpless animal, wrapped up in his white, white sheets. The doctor and the nurse shush him, but Hoseok can’t help it. He’s never been able to help his loudness, especially when it comes to the people he loves.

“You had to do what?!” Hoseok nearly screams this time. “Did you even get his consent before going through with a surgery like that?!”

“Sir, please calm down!”

“Jung-ssi, we had to amputate his leg – it was almost completely severed when paramedics sent him into our hospital. There was no way we could’ve saved it.”

Hoseok wants to dissolve into a puddle on the ground and melt through the floor, but he can’t, so he opts to stare widely at the doctor and the nurse. There’s a presence that should be in the room, but is missing. “I’m not his first emergency contact.”

“We couldn’t reach his first one.”

It takes three days for Yoongi to wake up, and every night, Hoseok returns to his now-empty apartment and screams his throat hoarse. Two nights for the two people he loves.

*

“Where’s Jimin?” Yoongi asks Hoseok.

“I don’t know,” Hoseok replies, and avoids eye contact.

*

Hoseok doesn’t know if he should call Jimin or not. He should, shouldn’t he? Jimin doesn’t have an excuse for not seeing his boyfriend at a time like this. He presses the green call button before his brain can supply him more excuses.

“Hobi-hyung!” Comes the cheerful, soft-voiced hello.

“Jimin, where are you? Yoongi-hyung’s in the hospital – they said they tried to reach you but you didn’t get their call? Did you pick up?” Hoseok babbles uncontrollably.

“Oh,” Hoseok is completely baffled as to why Jimin sounds so calm. “What happened to him?”

“He got into a car accident – they – they had to amputate him…”

“Amputate him?” Hoseok can hear Jimin’s frown through his phone. “He can pay for his own medical bills, can’t he?”

“I – what?” Hoseok splutters.

“This is awkward… I meant to tell Yoongi this in person, but maybe you can just deliver my message on to him for me?”

“Huh?” Hoseok is absolutely bewildered.

“Yoongi and I, well, we’ve reached an impasse, you know? We’re not really for each other anymore.”

“I – you –” Hoseok cannot believe his fucking ears. “Hold the fuck up, Jimin. Are you seriously breaking up with Yoongi through a phone call with me ? Not to mention right when he’s been in a car accident?”

“Would you prefer that I pour salt over his wounds once he recovers?” Jimin scoffs, the static through the phone sending sparks of anger through Hoseok’s body.

“You should at least break up with him in person, you absolute twat!” Hoseok snarls, ignoring the people passing by him outside Yoongi’s room.

“Look – Yoongi has his own important things to deal with, and I’ve got mine. It’s just better if he doesn’t see me again –“

“You mean if you don’t see him again!”

The silence that hangs in the virtual air is overwhelming, and Hoseok feels like he’s miles away from both Yoongi and Jimin, caught in the middle of a horrific end in their relationship. Jimin’s broken sigh snaps Hoseok out of his thoughts. “Yoongi and I have been falling out of love. He’ll understand. He’ll get through it. He has you, right?”

Hoseok wants to say “yes” , but he wants to say “no” as well, because Jimin is being a selfish little bitch.

“Oh, and could you move his stuff out of my apartment? His studio’s large enough for him to live in, isn’t it? Thanks!”

Hoseok wants to smash his finger on the red button on his phone again, but Jimin beats him to it. As he listens to the unrelenting sound of being hung up on, he groans. Knowing Jimin, he’d probably throw out all of Yoongi’s things before the week ends if Hoseok didn’t get them for his hyung.

*

Yoongi clears his throat, garnering Hoseok’s attention. “Jimin… he left me, didn't he?”

The look on Hoseok’s face is heartbreaking, as if he was the one who got dumped whilst unconscious over a phone call that wasn’t even meant for him. “You… you were expecting it?”

Yoongi shrugs. “I dunno… I mean, things were beginning to feel stale. I guess I just didn’t really expect it to actually happen it until it… happened.”

Yoongi can tell Hoseok is unsure of how to continue the dwindling conversation by his flitting eyes. Yoongi is also now quite certain that the itch in his left leg is a phantom one, because there’s no lump underneath his sheets where there should be one anymore.

“And… you’re okay?”

A sharp bark of laughter erupts out of Yoongi like a spitting volcano. Yoongi is far from okay. “My boyfriend of three years left me whilst I was on the verge of dying, and I’ve lost a limb and my home. Hoseok, do you think I’m fucking okay?”

Hoseok smiles at Yoongi, because he knows Yoongi isn’t angry at him, but at the world. Yoongi doesn’t think it makes it any better, but at least Hoseok hasn’t abandoned him like Jimin has.

“He said he was going to throw my shit out if you didn’t come get it, didn’t he?”

“Well, he didn’t say that,” Hoseok cringes, “but we both know he would if I didn’t.”

Yoongi hums. “You’d better hurry along and move out all my prized personal possessions, then.” He teases.

Hoseok slaps him good-naturedly.

“Don’t bully the injured!”

*

A flash of hurt whizzes past Yoongi’s eyes, but Hoseok catches it anyway, when he tells his hyung that Jimin expected Yoongi to live in his studio.

“You’re staying with me,” Hoseok says determinedly, ignoring Yoongi’s weak protests against it. “With all due respect, shut up, hyung. You are not an inconvenience. I don’t know who’s been telling you that, and you are many things, but you are definitely not an inconvenience.”

Unfortunately, Hoseok has an idea of who might’ve been telling Yoongi that for a while, but he carries on smiling, and ignores the pit in his chest.

Something tickles at his throat, but he swallows the urge to cough.

*

It takes Yoongi a while to learn how to walk again – a good two months of physiotherapy, if he’s counting, and even when he finally exits the hospital with Hoseok by his side, a prosthetic leg attached to his stump of a left one, and a black-coloured walking cane, he still waddles a bit like a penguin that has yet to find its land legs after a journey of swimming through icy cold waters. Yoongi feels like he’s been swimming in icy cold water himself – Hoseok is a warm bowl of soup, but if the rest of Yoongi is shivering in the freezing depths of the Arctic, soup doesn’t really make his predicament any better.

He won’t tell Hoseok this, of course. He can deal with his problems on his own – like his piece-of-shit editor, who’s given him almost no time to find his bearings back in the “real world of adults, Yoongi-hyung, you’re a writer, not a child – I can’t just give you unlimited time to ‘rediscover your muse’. Shitty things happen to all sorts of people, and we just have to power through them. Van Gogh cut off his ear for his art, didn’t he?” How dare he. Not to mention, his editor was using the wrong fucking preposition. And he was younger than Yoongi!

“I’m not playing , I was injured –” Yoongi seethed, but his editor was having none of it. At least he got to work from home, though.

So maybe he’d anticipated Jimin leaving him. Maybe he’d had his doubts of Jimin’s fidelity – neither made the half-assed breakup easier to deal with. If in any case, Jimin had only succeeded in angering the black-haired writer, who was thinking of giving the character in his new book cotton-candy locks and a gruesome, graphic death. If Jimin had given him some closure, maybe he wouldn’t be so angry right now, but he is angry. He’s furious. That pink-haired fucker took away his muse and his ability to turn his thoughts into emotions, landscapes, and bushes of wildflowers on paper.

Yoongi’s eyes are as red as the day he met Jimin, but for a different reason.

*

Hoseok wakes up to the sound of something breaking in his apartment. In the midst of his sleepy daze, he thinks it might be Namjoon accidentally bumping into a lamp, or Taehyung and Jeongguk fooling around like the overgrown kids they are, but then remembers that he pretty much broke up with Jeongguk, and the only other living thing in his apartment is Yoongi, who really dislikes moving his body unless he absolutely has to.

When Hoseok hears an anguished yell, muffled by the walls between them, he kicks his duvet off of him and hurries towards the sound. He even forgets to put on his fuzzy, baby blue slippers.

He rushes into the guest room, where Yoongi has made himself a nest, and his feathers are frazzled and dark, glinting dangerously in the dim white light of the fluorescent bulbs overhead, and they paint Yoongi’s face in a disturbing shade of cosmic latte that looks too pale to be healthy. Hoseok hasn’t really woken up properly yet. Why is Yoongi on the floor? There are crumpled sheets of lined paper around the writer, and Hoseok feels like he hasn’t woken up. He’s still dreaming. He has to be.

“I hate this, Hobi-yah,” Yoongi groans wretchedly as he pulls at his hair and kicks a broken glass away with a slippered foot. “I don’t care about Jimin – I don’t! But he took my fucking life away! I can’t get a single word out of my stupid brain! I’m a fucking writer, it’s my job to turn my thoughts into books! And I can’t even blame him for my accident – it wasn’t like we were texting when I was driving, I was just fucking unlucky! My hand just fucking slipped off the steering wheel – who does that?! And now I can’t get anything useful out of my stupid head and my leg is gone and it’s all my fault and I can’t blame anyone but myself and I’m just useless and useless and useless –”

Hoseok’s body goes into auto-pilot, and he kneels down in front of his hyung and wraps his arms around his shaking shoulders.

“Hyung, please – you’re not useless, and it’s not your fault,” Hoseok gently insists, rocking Yoongi softly as he lets out a jarring cacophony of stormy swearwords. “No one could’ve seen any of it happen. You’re not any less worthy of a human being just because this happened to you. You’re not unlucky, accidents happen all the time, hyung. You’re so lucky that you only lost a leg, and that you had your seatbelt on, and that your airbag worked. You’re so lucky you’ve got friends who care about you, who won’t judge you or love you any less.”

Hoseok spends the rest of his night soothing Yoongi, holding him tighter when Yoongi tense up and begins breathing harsher, cleans up the crumpled balls of paper without looking to see what was written in them, convinces Yoongi to wash up and go to sleep, tucks him in and sets his prosthetic limb and his cane next to the dresser adjacent to the bed.

Hoseok wants to hate Jimin. He knows Jimin’s cheated before – once, he’d told Hoseok drunkenly about it, but he’d been crying, and Hoseok assumed Jimin would tell Yoongi, so he’d pushed it to the back of his mind, and it’d never resurfaced ever since.

Hoseok can’t hate Jimin. It’s not his place. Even Yoongi can’t hate Jimin, despite Yoongi having fallen out of love with the younger man. Hoseok just wants Yoongi to be able to live without feeling like a burden, and feel that he’s loved, even if he doesn’t have Jimin anymore. Hoseok doesn’t think he’s the best with words, but looking at Yoongi in a peaceful sleep makes him believe that they can be good to each other despite having lost important people in their lives. Yoongi’s so brave – a damn fighter, Hoseok thinks. Hoseok can hide his own problems for the time being, because they’re nothing compared to what Yoongi has been through in such a short amount of time.

He scampers away from Yoongi’s room as he feels the strong urge to cough. He doesn’t want to disturb Yoongi. He can deal with his own problems. He doesn’t need to drag his innocent hyung into them.

*

Yoongi admits that he has issues with displaying emotions and dealing with them in a healthy manner. He argues with Hoseok when the younger man tries to drag him out of the house for sunshine and fresh air and a change of surroundings not because he's stubborn or lazy (he’s both, but that was hardly the point), but because he didn't want judgemental strangers to stare at him on the streets. Yoongi may be a faceless author, but that anonymity still gives him zero comfort. He wants to tell Hoseok that he really appreciates his friendship and eagerness to help, but every time he begins to form the words in his mouth, they bubble and froth at his lips, and deflate dejectedly, because he's just a shitty person when it comes to telling people he cares about them.

It comes at no surprise to him then, that that may be the reason for Jimin leaving him so abruptly. Perhaps Jimin thought that Yoongi wouldn't care all that much if he left, because Yoongi never knew how to show he cared very well, or was just too much of a chicken to do so. And that's Yoongi’s fault. He’ll admit that much.

But admitting that he's just human and has some character flaws does fucking nothing for his creativity, so he uploads all his unfinished work into a USB, and smashes his laptop with a hammer from Hoseok’s toolbox.

*

Sometimes life is kind, and gives Hoseok small miracles in the form of his physics professor emailing in sick, so he doesn't have to attend that eight o’clock lecture he didn't check the time properly for when he signed up for it. Sometimes life is confusing, like when he woke up in a dorm room on the other side of campus with faerie lights circling his entire body and a pair of black-and-pink striped socks on his feet. He still hasn't figured out that one yet, but it makes for a good ice-breaking story.

Sometimes life is cruel, and seems like a dream – or, more accurately, like a nightmare, because he's just coughed up bleeding carnation petals into his bathroom tub.

*

“Yoongi-hyung,”

“Yeah, Hobi?”

“Is Hanahaki real?”

Yoongi stops mid-type. Hoseok had very grudgingly allowed Yoongi to continue writing on the old PC in his flat after walking in on Yoongi screaming wildly at his destroyed laptop.

“What kind of question is that? Of course it's real.” Yoongi scoffs lightly, in that cocky way he usually does when he knows he's right about something. Hoseok ignores it. “People just don't like making a big deal out of it when they end up with it, and no one living in the twenty-first century is ever truly committed enough to their partners to feel so broken after a relationship. People get over things. It's just what people do.”

Hoseok frowns, his darker eyebrows diving delicately from underneath his lighter bangs. “You always have such pessimistic views on life, hyung. If I looked at everything the way you do I think I might hurl myself off a high balcony.”

“I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist,” the writer protests, eyes never leaving the computer screen as he resumes typing. “Romanticism and idealism are overrated concepts that are just utterly stupid for living a proper life. No one and nothing will ever live up to your expectations if you wear rose-tinted glasses everyday, no matter how trendy they might be.”

“But there are still people in this century who've suffered from Hanahaki, right?”

“I guess. I really don't keep up with doctors, Hobi.”

“I know,” Hoseok rolls his eyes, but there's a small smile on his sunny face. “So… what do you think of them?”

“Why the questions?”

“Just curious,” Hoseok replies quickly. He clears his throat before continuing, and pointedly ignores Yoongi’s hawk-eyed stare. “Thoughts?”

Yoongi swivels on his swivel chair, looking up at the ceiling before looking back at Hoseok. “I dunno. Never really thought about it before. Had no reason to.”

“Really? Do you, I don't know, feel pity for them?”

Yoongi scrunches up his face in a manner that looks so much like Jimin, and Hoseok’s heart breaks a little. “No. There's nothing to feel sorry for. When has feeling sorry for anything ever fixed anyone's problems?”

“That's not what I meant –”

“I know what you meant,” Yoongi interrupts, “and all I think is that people suffering from Hanahaki just see the world a little differently. I don’t think it's got anything to do with the legitimacy of their love. People always have a choice, even when it comes to heartbreak. Hanahaki is just like… like a character flaw.” Yoongi shrugs, but then shoots Hoseok a suspicious look after a few seconds. “Is this about Jeongguk?”

“Of course not,” Hoseok speedily answers. “Yoongi-hyung, you'd know if I had Hanahaki. We live in the same flat and we’re basically joined at the hip. Do you think I have Hanahaki?” He teases gently.

Yoongi hums, and carries on working.

*

To Yoongi, romanticism and glorification are things that humans could live without, much like recreational sex, luxury fashion brands, and extravagant side dishes in preposterously expensive restaurants. However, for numerous reasons, this poisonous idea has become a vice for many, and Yoongi must now bear the burden of fighting the perpetual war against these toxic isms. The short story he'd been working on before the car accident was about two soldiers lost in the depths of the Vietnam War, but ever since Yoongi learned that Jimin had left him, he's been unable to cough up another word for it. He's been spending most of his working hours reading his old work, reading his favourite works by other authors, and vomiting crappy poetry and uploading those pieces onto his Tumblr. He's thought about trying to publish them, but he isn't pretentious enough to do that.

He puts the project on hold, and opens a new, blank document.

He doesn't write anything in it.

*

Hoseok wants to laugh coldly when he searches up the meaning of red carnations, and he wishes his heart didn't ache for Jeongguk, but he can't deny the truth. His whole being hurts because Jeongguk left him.

He wishes he were Yoongi, because Yoongi wasn't hurting.

*

Yoongi hurts so fucking much.

He hurts because his writing is going nowhere; he hurts because a good chunk of his leg is gone; he hurts because he's essentially a parasite living off of his good friend; he hurts because Jimin left him; he hurts because he can't love someone properly, because he should probably be spitting out flower petals by now, but he isn't, because he's fallen out of love just like that.

In fact, was it even love he felt for Jimin back then? Suddenly, he can't seem to remember. It seemed like it was ages ago. He doesn't remember what he felt when he snuck into Jimin’s apartment because the pink-haired man had a roommate whose ass had a stick permanently shoved up it; he doesn't remember what he felt when he watched Jimin practice for his solo dance recital day after day; he doesn't remember what he felt when Jimin dragged his lazy ass out of bed at four in the morning to frolick in a children's playground and watch the sunrise – but he remembers the sky in its gradient of glory, shifting from ultramarine to deep cornflower, then changing like a chameleon, the first slivers of warmth radiating in rays as the sun continued to climb upwards, pink mixing with blue and swirling into yellow against all odds.

Yoongi thinks that there are a multitude of factors that made him believe he was in love with Jimin, but in reality, he wasn't. It was only a belief that fueled their relationship, and nothing more, nothing concrete. He remembers events, and knows what he had felt at the time, but can't recall the emotion like he can a scent. He doesn't even remember Jimin’s scent anymore, and he thinks that's what hurts the most.

Is he just incapable of love? He's believed that he was in love with a bunch of high school flings, and in hindsight had realised that those relationships didn't really mean anything. As a teenager, they meant the world to him, but as an adult, he felt nothing but confusion and contempt.

He thinks he has his priorities in a tangle, because here he is, moping about a guy who doesn't love him anymore, and whom he doesn't love either. Yoongi should be worrying about his job, his writing, and his leg. It's starting to itch a little on the stump, and he still has trouble fitting his prosthetic on by himself sometimes. He wishes Hoseok couldn't see through his pride that easily.

Speaking of Hoseok, this was the one time Yoongi wished he were him, because Hoseok wasn't hurting.

*

Living with Hanahaki proves to start off easily enough. The red carnations now have a new friend – gardenias. It took Hoseok a while for him to identify which flower it was because of all the blood that was inevitably mixed in with the petals.

“An Americano, please,” he orders, suppressing the flurry of coughs threatening to spill out his throat, which have begun to increase in quantity per day, but only barely. He read somewhere online that hot beverages help keep them down, and also disencourage flowers to grow because of the extreme temperature.

“The fuck is up with you and flaming hot food these days?” Yoongi asks at dinner as Hoseok microwaves his cream of mushroom soup, and cuts up a small chili pepper into it.

“Nothing, just trying to diversify my diet,” he smiles innocently, then promptly chokes on a chili pepper seed.

“Uh huh,” Yoongi replies disbelievingly, but goes back to facing his fried rice, and pokes it with mild interest.

*

It hurts when Yoongi walks for more than half an hour with his prosthetic on, so he stops doing that, and after time, holes himself up more often in his room at Hoseok’s place. He reopens the blank document, and begins typing.

When I woke up to a loss of limb, I felt like the world had toppled around me, as if there had been a force field protecting my body, except for my lower left leg.

Yoongi frowns at the sentence, then backtracks, and rewrites it.

When Kim Bulhaeng woke up to a loss of limb, she felt like the world had toppled around her, as if there had been a force field protecting her body, except for her lower leg.

*

When the purple hyacinths gurgle out of his mouth and bubble over, falling and crashing down a waterfall of tap water, shampoo, and blood, Hoseok cries, because even if his head won’t admit the truth, and his heart’s too slow to notice what he’s feeling, his lungs will. Under the spray of burning hot water, his sobbing is sure to go unnoticed by Yoongi, who, last Hoseok checked, was scrolling through his phone on the couch, far away from the bathroom.

He can feel the flowers now – he hadn’t been able to before. Three was his magic, unlucky number; all sorts of things happened when it entered his life like an unwelcome guest, a shadow looming and towering over him, blocking the sunshine. He’d read on the Hanahaki thread that those suffering from Hanahaki would begin to feel the weight of the flowers in their respiratory system physically when around three types of flower petals were being vomited. Usually, by the third month after the first signs of petals, patients would begin to require more serious care, and Hanahaki would begin to grow worse after that, and that was also when the suicidal thoughts began to emerge.

Once, at three in the morning, Hoseok had been mugged. Another time at three in the afternoon, Hoseok had missed his bus, and been late to an important audition for a dance company that eventually created a name for itself so big that dancers from the company were basically red carpet celebrities. At three in the morning, Jeongguk had told Hoseok over the phone that he’d been cheating on him for just under a year.

The thing is, Hoseok can’t despise Jeongguk for what he’s done, because he’s so hopelessly in love with him, even after his betrayal. He certainly can’t make a villain out Jeongguk’s other lover, because it was Jeongguk’s fault that he chose to cheat on Hoseok.

The thing is, Hoseok wants to hate Jeongguk so much for what he’s done, but he simply can’t. He’s sorrowful over their broken relationship that he chose to break, even though he’s miraculously forgiven Jeongguk for what he did. He can’t even believe himself, nevermind what Yoongi will say when he finds out, because Hoseok knows he can’t hide his sickness forever. Not to mention, what would his parents say? He regrets leaving Jeongguk, even when in reality, Jeongguk had left him a year ago – perhaps not physically, but mentally and emotionally. And that’s what hurts Hoseok the most.

The hyacinths are beautiful, but they’re a bitch to cough up, being much smaller than his carnations and his gardenias. They tickle his throat annoyingly and the itch never seems to go away, even if Hoseok hacks out his entire breath trying to force them up into his mouth.

The record for the largest variety of Hanahaki flowers is only nine. If Hoseok’s lucky (or unlucky), he’s already a third of the way there.

*

Yoongi spends a lot of his waking hours lying in his bed, sitting in front of Hoseok’s computer, and pacing around the flat, because his doctor said that he needs to make sure his other leg stays healthy, and he doesn’t want to go outside all that often. In fact, he doesn’t want to go outside at all, but both Hoseok and his editor insist on it, so he’ll cooperate, albeit quite grudgingly.

“One day you’ll suffocate in this house, Yoongi-hyung,” Hoseok frets, and pulls open the curtains in Yoongi’s room with a loud, zippy noise, and opens the windows. Yoongi merely grumbles and pulls his sheets over his face, and listens to the faded sounds of traffic beneath their building, and Hoseok’s audible intake of breath. His breath catches in his throat, and Hoseok coughs a little.

“You okay?” Yoongi mumbles, still stubbornly trying to chase his sleep.

“Y-yeah, okay,” Hoseok replies, then hurries out of Yoongi’s room. “Breakfast’s –” a wheeze, “ready in ten!”

Yoongi groans and heaves his upper body away from the comfort of his bed after five minutes, and fumbles with his prosthetic. He’s become a lot better at putting it on over a month or so of getting used to it, but still thinks it’s too much of a hassle. It’s just difficult. Life’s fucking difficult. Tying his shoelaces is the most difficult. He feels like he’s internally voicing a lot of first-world problems but right now, he couldn’t care.

Breakfast consists of rice, scrambled eggs, kimchi, and tofu. Yoongi digs into it delightfully, but it doesn’t show through his lethargic actions. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Hoseok smile lovingly at him anyway.

*

The third month arrives all too soon, and by then, Hoseok has amassed a collection of five different kinds of flowers. The rhododendrons, in their assemblage of vibrant pinks and purples, mark the day the third month begins, a code for danger. Beware! They cry. The petite forget-me-nots pop up less than a day later, their cute shades of blue taunting Hoseok cruelly. At least the rhododendrons didn’t poke fun at him. As if he needed the forget-me-nots to remind him of what he had with Jeongguk.

He’s really suffocating now – it’ll be any day when he slips up and releases a confetti shower of bloodied flower petals into Yoongi’s face, he’s sure of it.

*

No matter how much it pains Yoongi to live, he won’t kill himself. There’s just no point. He won’t inflict harm on himself either – at least not consciously, because that’s pointless as well. What would his dear readers say if he slit his wrists one day and fell to the ground in a graceless lump, bleeding his life out, all because he was feeling a bit sorry for himself?

“Uh, that’s a gross oversimplification of how suicide works, and honestly, also a bit ignorant,” Hoseok makes a worried face at him.

Yoongi shrugs. “Opinions, opinions,” he says, his Daegu drawl coming out to play as he lazily waves his hand in the air. “Life is just a problem of perception. People perceive the world in different ways so people have different coping mechanisms and different mindsets.”

“Yes…” Hoseok starts uneasily, “but you still shouldn’t dismiss people’s problems as issues with their worldviews.” Hoseok squirms as Yoongi stares at him coolly. “Hyung,” he adds.

The writer sighs. “I’m not dismissing them, I’m just trying to get rid of the idea that self-harm and suicide are these amazing, romantic ways to solve your problems!” He leans forward on the couch towards Hoseok, looking at him seriously. “For example: Kwon Neulbin and Daniel Lee are both young Korean high school students; Neulbin has lived her entire life in the South Jeolla Province, and Daniel was born in America and came back to Korea recently because he wanted to apply to a Korean university. Both students are under great pressure to study hard and get into the best university, but they fail. What happens next?”

Hoseok rolls his eyes. “Daniel commits suicide because you hate westernisation and the glorification of depression and suicide that comes with it.”

“Ha! Wrong!” Yoongi exclaims, though it’s somewhat muted in excitement and a lot more snarky. “Or at least, partly wrong. Both students kill themselves. Why? Because Daniel’s concept of the world has been tainted by the idea that depression is beautiful and suicide is an art form, because that’s all the West brings for us. But Neulbin kills herself because of the Eastern idea that suicide is a glorious way to die in order to avoid shame, all because she didn’t get good enough results to be accepted by the best university her parents could afford.”

“And…?”

“And so this is a global phenomenon! This isn’t just me hating on Western media! This is a problem that exists in all cultures because of closed-minded ideals such as “one has to get into the top university otherwise one is trash” and “I’d rather die literally than die metaphorically of embarrassment!” It’s passed down from generation to generation! Neulbin got into lots of other universities, but she still killed herself because her parents were unrealistically disappointed that she didn’t get into the top university. So what? She got into the second. She could’ve been quite happy and quite successful there, but her parents gave her zero support, and that taught her that if she didn’t come out as the top of everything, she was worthless, and her life meant nothing, so she ripped it away.”

Hoseok is silent for a moment. “This is all very hypothetical, hyung.”

“Do not make me find suicide case studies, Hoseok.”

“You know what, I’ll take your word for it,” the brown-haired man replies quickly, “but there are still many factors to what leads someone to commit suicide. You’re talking about a very specific, age-restrained example.”

Despite being a writer, and an established one at that, Yoongi has always felt that he’s been shit with words. “I just… I just want people to stop looking at the world with so many high expectations. I want to be able to express that idea eloquently. It just doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“That’s not true –” Hoseok starts, but is cut off abruptly.

“We both expected Jimin and Jeongguk to love us unconditionally, and to never betray us, but they did,” Yoongi says, his words cutting into both men like a cold knife. “That’s the work of expectations and misplaced optimism and the romanticisation of love. When they left us, they took something away from us, because we put all of our trust into them, and they broke it.”

Hoseok is silent, looking at a corner of the room that Yoongi knows is empty. Ever since the accident, there’d been an uncomfortable pit in his gut, growing and growling every now and then, and it put Yoongi into unrest. It tells him he’s not good enough, and that he’s less of a human being without his leg, even if his brain knows it’s just that fucked-up part of him playing mind games. The pit makes Yoongi want to die, or chop off his other leg, or quit his job, but he does none of these things, because he’s over the idea that pain is an artistic expression of the soul. To him, pain is practical. Pain lets him know that there’s something wrong, and he needs to change it. He can’t just tear up his exam paper when he’s stuck on a hard question. He can’t just take some sleeping pills and never wake up the next day. He’s got a problem to solve.

“Jimin took my muse,” Yoongi admits softly, and it almost passes Hoseok’s ears completely. “What did Jeongguk take from you, Hoseok?”

*

My life, Hoseok thinks in his head, as he pukes up a rainbow of flowers into the toilet bowl.

*

Yoongi cries softly, curled up in his bed above the sheets, and Hoseok’s faint yet explosive coughing rings in echoes through the apartment.

Why can’t we make decisions with our heads, and not our hearts? The question lingers like a dark cloud above her, following her home as she makes her way down the street in crutches. The streets are soulless – those who see her pay her no attention and no sympathy as her arms tremble with the exertion of making her way back alone for the first time in years. Girls who used to be her friends have taken off like migrating geese, leaving her behind. They’re light-years away, in more ways than one.

*

Autumn brings with it a cool, gentle breeze that finally coaxes Yoongi out of his cave in Hoseok’s house, and the younger man uses the season to further wheedle Yoongi out into the open air. If Hoseok’s been observing correctly, Yoongi’s only been outside three times in the span of five months.

“Why are you wearing that?” Yoongi asks Hoseok, squinting at his face.

“Wearing what?”

“That. That mask.”

“Oh,” Hoseok says. “Just trying to keep up with the trends, hyung!” He says, and pulls down the white mask and throws up a cute V sign with his fingers. Yoongi retches.

“That is absolutely disgusting,” the writer replies with a scoff as he secures his prosthetic. Hoseok walks over to help him tie the shoelaces on the shoe, and Yoongi gives him a small, shy smile. “So where I am being kidnapped to?”

“You’re not being kidnapped!” Hoseok exclaims as he loops one end of the shoelace over the other. “You just need to be inspired by something that isn’t collecting dust in your room. Do you even open the windows if I don’t open them?”

“No.”

Hoseok sighs, then helps Yoongi up from his seat. “I genuinely believe you could die in this house if I left you to your own devices.”

Yoongi hums, a grin cracking on his face. “That’s probably true, Hobi,” he teases, and stands up. “So where to?”

“It's a surprise!” Hoseok grins back widely, and drags a wobbly Yoongi out the door.

*

As much as it might annoy Yoongi to confess, he agrees that some fresh air does wonders for him. The cool air sweeps past him and Hoseok, sending their hair flying upwards as they walk down the street.

“Now doesn’t that feel nice, hyung?” Hoseok probes, his voice muted faintly by his mask.

“Yeah,” Yoongi says softly, still getting used to walking without his cane. Hoseok’s arm is firm on his, acting as a support. Yoongi knows that no one can tell he’s an amputee – at least, no one looking too closely – but it still takes him some time to stop himself from flinching every time a stranger gives him a once-over as he walks with somewhat of a limp. He turns to Hoseok as they walk.

“Yeah?”

Yoongi smiles behind his mask. “Thanks, Hobi.” He wants to say more, but it’s still too early; the wounds are still red and raw. He stops himself before he stutters.

Hoseok looks at him for a moment, his eye-smile ever present. “No problem, Yoongi-hyung. After all, what are friends for?”

*

“I found this place around a year ago on a drunken escapade with my friends from my dance lessons,” Hoseok says as takes a sip of his hot, lavender tea. He’s always been more prone to the cold, and with his drink, he feels safe enough to pull his mask down in front of Yoongi. He’s been living off hot beverages and spicy food for the past couple of months to keep the coughs at bay.

They’re sitting in a cafe with private booths – the ones studious high schoolers usually use for studying away from home. The first time Hoseok had been here, he hadn’t been able to sit in the booths, as he was chased out of the cafe after trying to dance on their countertop.

Yoongi nods, and drinks his coffee; no milk, no sugar. “Do you still go to your dance lessons?” He asks.

Hoseok shakes his head in denial sheepishly. “Got no time for it anymore, hyung. Ever since I graduated I just haven’t been able to find a lot of time for my hobbies.”

Yoongi blinks blankly at him before scratching his neck. “Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s okay hyung, no need to sympathise with me about it,” Hoseok quickly replies as he sees Yoongi begin to tap his foot nervously.

“I… I just wish I could help you out more, Hobi.”

Somehow the simple sentence feels loaded with emotion and hidden meaning, and Hoseok smiles widely at his hyung. He’s sure that his teeth are probably gleaming by how happy he feels. “You’re a great hyung, and you help out lots.”

“I really don’t.”

With a moment’s hesitance, Hoseok reaches across the table and takes one of Yoongi’s hands in his own. “Maybe you’re a bit lazy, and a bit grumpy. But you’re not useless, Yoongi-hyung. Please believe me.”

The writer looks down at their hands, wide-eyed, shifting between their fingers and Hoseok’s face. For a second, Hoseok thinks Yoongi might just snatch his hand away and grumble to himself, but Yoongi relaxes, and shoots Hoseok a small, toothy grin of his own. “You know… you can tell hyung anything, right?”

“Yeah,” Hoseok says, and swallows a flower petal coated in guilt.

*

Yoongi knows, but stays quiet.

*

As the pair finish their drinks and share a piece of tiramisu cake, Hoseok helps Yoongi out of his seat and they walk over to the counter.

“That’ll be nineteen-thousand and two-hundred won,” the cashier says.

“These places are really trying to milk our money, aren’t they?” Yoongi says snidely, barely out of hearing range from the cashier after Hoseok slaps Yoongi’s hands away from paying. “I’ve had samgyeopsal for only eleven thousand won before.”

“Did you really expect a fancy little cafe in Hongdae to be inexpensive, hyung?” Hoseok pokes.

Yoongi scowls after a moment’s thought. “No, now shut up.”

Hoseok laughs out loud – the sound is a glimmering of bells washed in starlight that can’t even be muffled by the mask over his mouth. “Wanna go for ice cream, hyung?”

Yoongi shrugs indifferently. “If you want.” It seems apathetic, and possibly even rude, but Hoseok knows that it’s only Yoongi-speak for “I don’t want any, but I’ll come with you” .

“Cool! I’ve always been meaning to try those rose-shaped ice cream cones!”

“The fuck? Those things cost like six thousand won!” Yoongi exclaims shockingly, as if someone had just told him it cost sixty-thousand won. “You’ve already spent too much in the cafe today!”

“You can pay for it, then.” Hoseok quips back, and drags Yoongi off to the ice cream shop.

*

Yoongi thinks it’s bad humour that Hoseok wants to eat a flower-shaped ice cream cone, but stays quiet.

*

“I hope you’re happy,” Yoongi mutters, but the corners of his lips are twitching good-naturedly.

“I’m quite happy. Thanks for paying, hyung!” Hoseok says cheekily, and licks off a pink ice cream petal. “Mmm, strawberry!”

Hoseok hasn’t felt this light and unburdened in a while. Although it’s been a year since his graduation as a dance major, he’s still working three different jobs and only one of them is related to dancing, and he’s not even dancing in that job. He’s the receptionist for a dance academy. With Yoongi now paying half the rent (at Yoongi’s insistence), Hoseok can afford to quit his grocery store job, and spend more time with his hyung. Maybe he’ll find a dance crew to join again, soon.

He’s in the middle of talking with his mouth full of ice cream and trying not to get it on his mask before he sees dark clouds fall over Yoongi’s eyes, and they shift from his face to somewhere behind him.

“Jimin, do you want me to buy you an ice-cream cone?” He hears faintly. The voice sounds a bit familiar, but Hoseok disregards it. There are lots of people called Jimin in this country, but Yoongi doesn’t look away.

“Hey, hyung, don’t pay attention to them, it’s none of our business,” he tells the writer, but it falls on deaf ears.

At the same time Yoongi looks back uneasily and opens his mouth to utter an awkward “um,” , Hoseok hears: “Yah, that’s hyung to you, Jeonggukkie!”

It feels like a shitty drama to Hoseok when he turns his head to look behind him, as if there were a camera somewhere, capturing his every move, and replaying it from five different angles in slow motion as he sees bubblegum pink hair nestling into the shoulder of Jeongguk.

“Uhh…” Yoongi says, but his voice sounds so far away.

Hoseok’s heart lurches straight into his throat when Jeongguk meets his gaze. He sees panic race through his ex-lover’s eyes, before they glance at the now melting strawberry rose in his hands, flickers to Yoongi, whom Hoseok can just feel is giving off murderous vibes, then hardens back to Hoseok.

“Hoseok,” Yoongi says, his voice laced with warning and something unpleasant, but it’s not direct at him.

Something else is threatening to lurch out of his throat now, and as Jimin begins to turn around to look behind him, Hoseok pulls Yoongi away and practically hauls him away – away from Jimin and Jeongguk. The ice cream cone falls out of his hands and hits the surface of the road clumsily, a puddle of pink that Hoseok now wishes were Jimin.

“Hobi –”

“We gotta get the fuck home,” Hoseok wheezes, and pulls up his mask.

*

“Hobi!”

Yoongi’s heart broke when Hoseok had told him Jimin had left him without a single goodbye to his face, but it’s breaking even harder now as he watches Hoseok stumble into their apartment and collapse on the floor, clutching his throat and coughing his lungs out.

“Stay –” Hoseok rasps, and it can hardly be comfortable for him to be making that noise, “away!” He pushes Yoongi away from him as the writer tries to face him, still keeping in mind that Yoongi doesn’t have a leg. The detail only makes Yoongi tear up even more, and he tastes salt on his lip. Hoseok tries to get up from the ground and make a beeline for anywhere else that isn’t around Yoongi, but he doesn’t even have the energy to do that.

“Hoseok! I know! I know about your Hanahaki! You don’t need to hide it from me!” Yoongi bursts out as he crawls back to Hoseok’s side, and pulls the mask off of the dancer’s face.

Flowers erupt from Hoseok’s mouth at that moment, falling to the ground like some sort of sick, glamorised piñata explosion that Yoongi wishes wasn’t real. He wishes that Hoseok’s Hanahaki was part of a fiction novel. He’d seen one of Hoseok’s flowers before – a deep red one that Yoongi couldn’t quite tell if it was a rose or something else. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but Yoongi had his doubts, and didn’t want to scare Hoseok away. He just didn’t expect it to come to Hoseok puking his respiratory system out onto their living room floor.

Yoongi doesn’t expect a lot of things to happen, he now realises.

When Hoseok raises his head in shame to look at Yoongi, his eyes are red and tears are streaking down his face. Yoongi thinks his face probably looks the same. There’s a trail of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, and Yoongi sniffles as he reaches down to wipe it away uselessly. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” He asks through his tears.

“Couldn’t,” Hoseok says, and he sounds like sandpaper, “was so – embarrassed – who the fuck even suffers from this – shit – anymore,” he begins coughing again.

“How many flowers, Hoseok?!” Yoongi desperately cries out as he watches his friend cough up his life and his love helplessly.

“Five, hyung!” Hoseok cries back, and leans on Yoongi as he continues to cough, rattling their house and shaking Yoongi’s bones.

Yoongi looks down at the bloody, flowery mess that came out of Hoseok, and fully bursts into soul-wrenching tears. “I c-can’t fucking believe Jeongguk – and Jimin, h-honestly – I should’ve known!”

Yoongi wonders why he didn’t recognise the telltale signs of Hoseok suffering so violently from Hanahaki; they seem so obvious to him now that he looks at his friend’s face and his skin isn’t as pink and healthy as before, and his cheekbones jut out like grisly warning signs. Hoseok even looks skinnier than before, and Hoseok had already been a wiry guy. Yoongi’s heart shatters in his chest when Hoseok faces him again.

“Don’t – don’t worry about me, hyung,” he says through blood, sweat, and tears.

Yoongi swipes one of his sleeves over Hoseok’s face, then over his own as he feels his expression scrunch up in an attempt to stop the tears from flowing. “Shut up Hoseok!” He heaves, breathing heavily as he tries to calm himself down. “How can you expect me to not worry about you?”

Hoseok only cries in response, and Yoongi echoes him.

“Don’t tell me you were just going to – going to let yourself – die,” Yoongi whimpers uncontrollably, “Hobi-yah! You can heal yourself, I know you can! Please – don’t die for that stupid bastard! He’s not worth it!”

“I’m sorry, hyung! I’m sorry!” Hoseok wails, hitting Yoongi’s shoulders weakly. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t apologise to me, Hoseok,” Yoongi sobs as he holds Hoseok in his arms, small whines pitifully forcing their way out of his traitorous mouth every few seconds as he tries to hold onto his heartstrings. “I just want you to get help. I know I’m being selfish when I say this, but please – please, Hoseok, please… don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone.”

The phantom itch in his nonexistent leg has returned, but Yoongi ignores it. He knows it’s selfish for him to ask Hoseok to live just because it would cause him a lot of misery, but he can’t watch his best friend fade and wither away like his flowers on the living room floor.

“Your love shouldn’t hurt you, Hobi – it’s not real. You don’t need to love him to survive. You can live for yourself,” Yoongi says instead of pleading Hoseok to stay by his side. “I know you’re not really in love with him, just the idea of what he is and was. He’s not your life – you are.”

Hoseok only cries harder.

*

“You’re right,” Hoseok says after his coughs have ceased.

Yoongi’s fallen asleep against the back of the couch, but his vice-grip around Hoseok’s shoulders remains as strong as ever. The sun outside the window has lowered itself onto the roof of an adjacent building, washing their apartment in a soft, blood orange glow. Yoongi stirs at the sound of Hoseok’s voice, broken and hoarse from his crying and vomiting. “Hmm?” He murmurs sleepily.

“You’re right,” Hoseok whispers, not trusting himself to not burst into tears if he breaks the fragile quietude. “You’re right. Love shouldn’t be sad… love shouldn’t hurt me.” He shakily touches his chest. “This… this isn’t love.”

Yoongi watches him carefully before laying his forehead on Hoseok’s neck.

“I… I didn’t want to die,” Hoseok continues softly. “I just didn’t think it would… I didn’t expect it to worsen this quickly. It was like I was living in one of your stories, hyung. I just didn’t think it was actually real until… until this happened.”

“I’m sorry, Hoseok-ah."

“Why are you apologising?” He asks Yoongi with a small smile even though he can’t see it. “None of this was your fault.”

“I’m still sorry.”

The clock overhead ticks on as Hoseok breathes against Yoongi’s chest, and feels his breath against his neck. Life would continue without him if Hoseok chose to give into his disease, but Hoseok finds that he doesn’t want to miss out on life. Not anymore, at least. Not when he has Yoongi. He remembers the flurry of unhealthy thoughts he’d had when Jeongguk left him, and how he believed he had no one anymore after depositing all of his happiness and love in the younger man.

“If you stay with me, I can recover,” he tells Yoongi. “I want to recover,” he adds with determination, and turns slowly to look at the writer.

Although Yoongi’s eyes are misty with sleep and red with sadness, that signature gummy smile that Hoseok adores so much still stretches across his face. “I’m not going anywhere,” Yoongi says, and that’s that.

*

The librarian shoots Yoongi a look that that seems a lot like she’s trying to find out what’s wrong with him when he checks out Rare Diseases of the Mind and Soul , but he pays her no attention. He reads it on the way home on the bus, and finds out that every kind of flower that a Hanahaki patient coughs up means something. It’s been a month since Hoseok began his treatment with a doctor of Yoongi’s choice – Hoseok deserves the best, goddammit. Hoseok's flowers have decreased in their quantity. The carnations pop up now and then like irritable red traffic lights, and so do the forget-me-nots for obvious reasons, but only the rhododendrons are a constant presence. Yoongi’s grown somewhat accustomed to cleaning up the frilly purple petals around the house, having decided to get off his lazy ass and pick up some of the house chores to lighten Hoseok’s load.

Yoongi smugly snaps the book shut after searching up what gardenias and hyacinths mean, and steps out of the bus to his stop with a spring in his step, and makes a beeline for the nearest florist on the street. When he returns home, Hoseok is cooking dinner.

“Yoongi-hyung! Just in time – the kimchi jjigae is almost ready! What’s that you’re holding?”

“Nothing!” Yoongi blurts out, and scurries out of the living room as fast as he can manage.

After dinner, Yoongi stretches himself across the couch “like a privileged housecat” according to Hoseok, idly watching the television screen flash in different colours. He scowls haughtily when Show Me The Money comes up, and reaches forward towards the coffee table in an attempt to change the channel, but falls short of grabbing the remote from his position. He huffs in annoyance, and flops back down on his back with a small, irritated rumble. A peal of laughter dances through the white noise of the television screen, and Yoongi watches as Hoseok walks over with a hand behind his back, and changes the channel for him.

“How can you be so lazy, hyung?”

Yoongi shrugs nonchalantly, looking at Hoseok’s upside-down face as the younger man leans over and smiles at him from above.

“Just wanted to ask – what is this, hyung? And why was it on my desk?” Hoseok queries cheekily, and reveals a small pot of ivy from behind his back.

“Um,” Yoongi says, and sits up. He self-consciously looks away from Hoseok. “It’s for you.”

“What is it?”

“A pot of ivy.” Yoongi reaches for a spare couch pillow quickly, and hugs it to his chest.

“And why’d you give me a pot of ivy, hyung?” Hoseok grins widely, his eyes disappearing behind crescent slits.

“‘Cus you deserve it,” Yoongi says shyly, and promptly sneaks out of the living room again when Hoseok has his back turned, cooing at the plant.

*

Hoseok spends the majority of the next two months being treated as an in-patient as his body begins to reject his Hanahaki flowers. The pot of ivy sits pleasantly on his white bedside table; a reminder of his friendship with Yoongi.

“I’ve never seen any Hanahaki patient recover so smoothly in my entire career,” his doctor ponders out loud as Hoseok hacks up blood and plant matter. The dancer shoots him a baffled look as he pukes up a long stem into the metal bowl in front of him. “The adverb is subjective,” his doctor continues when he sees Hoseok’s expression.

Hoseok can barely breathe during the entire five-hour ordeal, tears and snot streaming down his face in pain as he suffocates and forces the rhododendrons out his throat. The root system is so large that his doctor has to physically pull them out of his chest. He loses his voice for the next two weeks after bidding the purple blooms adieu.

“With the rhododendrons gone, the other flowers will be very easily removed by your body, since the window of danger is now closed,” Hoseok’s doctor says as something gets scribbled onto a piece of paper, “and it’ll probably happen quite randomly, maybe when you’re out getting groceries or running some other mundane errand.” His doctor faces him and looks at him over his oval-shaped glasses in a manner that makes Hoseok feel a little out of place. “Please bring everything back when you do so we can analyse them.”

“Uh, everything?” Hoseok asks in confusion.

His doctor pointedly stares at him. “The expelled flowers, Hoseok-ssi. I need it for research.”

When Hoseok leaves his white room and is sitting next to the hospital pharmacy awaiting his medication, it irks him that he’s being seen as a research subject. He supposes it shows on his face when he goes to collect his medicine, as the pharmacist gives him a small smile and tells him that his doctor “doesn’t mean to be rude, he’s just kind of shitty with social interactions” .

“There aren’t many survivors of Hanahaki so he’s naturally curious about the disease. I nagged him into adding these throat lozenges into your prescription,” the pharmacist says, his handsome face looking ridiculous behind the glass between him and Hoseok. “They’ll help soothe your throat if you feel any discomfort.”

“Thanks,” Hoseok says gratefully at the man, and sure enough, a week later when Yoongi claps his back after Hoseok tells him his good news with joining a new dance crew, he feels something rise violently up his chest, and coughs out an entire gardenia plant into his rice.

“What the fuck!” Yoongi reels backwards and almost knocks his bowl off the table.

“Yes!” Hoseok squeals, slams a palm on the table, and and punches the air with his other fist. He carefully puts the flower in a plastic zip-loc, and stores it in the fridge for good measure.

The red carnations find their way out of Hoseok’s lungs as he and Yoongi go through a box of Jeongguk’s things that the younger man had left at Hoseok’s apartment over the period of their relationship. Looking at that Stüssy shirt only made Hoseok mildly annoyed – he no longer missed Jeongguk, or felt the creepy urge to sniff the white fabric. His body rids itself of the hyacinths weeks later, when he comes across a couples getaway coupon to Sapporo, and only feels displeasure at the thought of spending time with his ex. There were so many things that Hoseok had overlooked in the relationship because he was so blindly in love with someone he actually didn’t know all that well – the way Jeongguk would make everything a competition; the way he’d laugh so loudly in public as if he wasn’t disturbing anyone else; the way he always expected Hoseok to pay for their dates just because he was older…

Months ago, he would’ve wondered why the very reasons he liked Jeongguk were now making him angry. Now, however, he doesn’t care.

The forget-me-nots follow when Hoseok doesn’t remember the combination code for a time capsule that belonged to him and Jeongguk. He throws the box away the next day.

*

“Do you ever feel like you’re not a whole person?”

“All the time,” Bulhaeng replies with a soft whisper. She sounds like a feather floating on a breeze, dangerous yet delicate. “I’ve never been comfortable with my physical existence, and now that the world’s taken away one of my legs, it doesn’t make it any better.”

Kim Baram was the only person who ever stopped to ask Bulhaeng how she was doing after the accident. Baram was also her cousin, and they’d always been close, but they’d grown closer ever since she lost her leg.

“I don’t think it makes it worse, either,” Bulhaeng says with a small, sheepish smile. “If you don’t count the fact that it’s a bit more frustrating to get to places without transport. But using my crutches has given me some sick muscles!”

Baram bursts into wild laughter when Bulhaeng raises her arms and tenses her biceps. “How can you still be so happy after all this?” She asks after she’s calmed down.

“You give me hope,” Bulhaeng says honestly after a moment’s pause. “You’re like the wind to a ship lost at sea on still waters. Everyone thought I was gonna die, you know. How morbid of them. They still look at me like I’m dying. You were the only one who cared enough to still treat me like regular person… so that’s what I’ll be. I’m just another regular person who doesn’t need pity just because I’ve lost a limb. Humans lose things all the time. This is just another fork in the road. Even if you left me suddenly I still think I’d be alright, but you were the one who allowed me to believe that I didn’t lose my inherent, human value. Or whatever.”

Baram looks at her with a such a warm look that it reminds Bulhaeng of winter thawing. “Do you know what gave me hope?”

*

“You.”

“I’m sorry?” Hoseok looks up from the free gossip magazine he got from the side of the road a day ago. Yoongi is standing so far away from him that it’s a bit awkward, and he puts the magazine down on the coffee table. The ivy plant now resides on it, for everyone to see. “Yes, hyung?”

Yoongi opens his mouth, and a shrill noise comes out of it.

“Um,” Hoseok supplies unhelpfully.

Yoongi then shakes his head furiously, seemingly at himself, then speaks up again. “Your flowers. How are they?”

“All gone. Well, the doctor said that there’s currently that new one growing in me – the one that makes or breaks my recovery. Why’d you ask, hyung?”

It had scared them to know that Hoseok would still have to go through one last flower before he was truly a recovered Hanahaki patient – the cyclamens. Just thinking about forcing that plant out his throat made Hoseok shiver. Recovery from Hanahaki was rare, and it was partly because some patients didn’t make it out alive after their lungs began growing the tubers.

Yoongi walks over to the couch, and sits down next to Hoseok solemnly.

“Hey,” Hoseok says calmly. “What’s up with you, hyung?”

Yoongi makes a face at him that looks a bit like a pout, and curls his arms around Hoseok’s torso slowly before snuggling into him. “I care about you a lot, Hobi,” Hoseok hears Yoongi whisper.

“I know, Yoongi-hyung. I care about you a lot as well.”

Hoseok starts to spend more of his time with Yoongi – he keeps this quiet, but he’s scared he won’t live through his Hanahaki even though his feelings for Jeongguk have died. The flower growing inside his lungs has yet to die. The doctor said that it would take at least two months before he’d start coughing flowers again, so Hoseok is determined to spend the rest of his healthy months by Yoongi’s side. The writer has taken to his prosthetic comfortably enough to go outside alone without Hoseok’s help. Sometimes Hoseok wishes Yoongi still needed him in that way, but he thinks about the possibility of him never coming back to Yoongi, and squashes the thought. It’s selfish, he thinks.

“I’m going to be alright, Yoongi-hyung,” he reassures the writer as the paramedics load him onto the gurney like a ‘fragile; handle with care’ package. There are unshed tears in Yoongi’s eyes that remind Hoseok of the twinkling stars they gazed at on a weekend trip to Jeju Island. “And even if I don’t make it –”

“Shut up, Hoseok – don’t say that!” Yoongi interrupts with an upset glare.

Hoseok smiles through the pain that’s blooming in his chest, and squeezes Yoongi’s hand. “Of course, hyung.”

*

Severed Schoolgirl is a popular seller – it didn’t break any significant Korean literature grounds, but Yoongi’s readers are happy with him, and that makes Yoongi happy as well. His editor is also quite cheerful himself.

“Let’s grab lunch, Yoongi-hyung,” he says, and it’s not really a suggestion as he tugs Yoongi towards a fried chicken restaurant. “My treat. Now what are you thinking for your next book? How about a space romance between an astronaut and an alien? Or maybe between a social recluse and their pet lizard. Thoughts? Ideas?”

“How about a Hanahaki patient?” Yoongi says quickly before his editor can jump on another train of thought.

“A Hanahaki patient and a lizard? What kind of romance is that?”

Yoongi swallows the urge to scold the other man. “No, I meant that I want to write about Hanahaki.”

“Oh.” His editor blinks. “Alright.”

Yoongi’s never really gotten the hang of him.

Later that night, he returns home and is determined to begin his new book whether he has help or not. On the coffee table, the ivy plant stays sitting, now joined with a cyclamen plant enclosed in a glass container. Yoongi carelessly tosses his bag onto the couch after taking out his laptop, and begins planning the story. It’s called Resignation and Goodbye.