AN: Ever since I learned about the fictional Hanahaki disease long ago, I've always wanted to try my hand at writing about it! This will be a story split between Kacchako and Tododeku. It's not gonna be super long.
Summary: In his third-year, Katsuki is given an ultimatum when violently coughing up pink flower petals makes his life a living hell. Either confess or die. And neither sound ideal. Maybe just maybe he'll befriend someone he's seen as a rival throughout this tortuous experience. Both pining over an oblivious pair of friends. Kacchako/Tododeku. Bakutodo friendship. Hanahaki Disease AU.
Happy reading~ :D
Singularity
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Stubborn
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In his eyes – love is a nuisance.
He doesn't have time for it.
Why should he be subjugated into conforming?
It's just a chemical reaction in the body.
He doesn't want it, doesn't need it, won't accept it.
Love is a nuisance.
"Son of a bitch…" Katsuki loudly gulps feeling his dry throat tighten, constricting his vocal chords from the inside out. No matter how much water and hot liquids he drinks, it doesn't help to soothe the aching throb that appeared three days ago.
He's eighteen. Third-year at U.A. One-track mind towards his future goals and aspirations.
He has the same four friends since the beginning of his starting days of his high school years – why would he waste his time on other idiots? Four was the perfect number to manage.
Yet somehow, one troublesome, one meddlesome – bubbly, kind-hearted, pink-cheeked, round-faced, gravity manipulator sneakily wormed her way into his closed off heart. He hasn't bothered to befriend her nor really interact with her much in their second and third years at the academy. She's gained his respect and acknowledgment, sure, but he didn't have time to nurture a new place in his heart for another. Four was his limit.
His mind was convinced of this. His heart wasn't.
Katsuki always finds his wandering eyes lingering far too long on the petite brunette and whenever they make eye contact, he juts an angry lip and growls with hard ruby red eyes. She'd kindly wave and smile at him before he'd storm off.
He's invested too many damn hours studying her face that he can write poetry of the way her short chestnut brown hair bounces with every step she takes. Knows when she's extremely eager about something with pink-dusted blushing round cheeks or when she's holding her tongue back from voicing her discomforts with tiny adorable pouts marring her perfect features. He can write sonnets about the way the sunlight glimmers and swirls in those expressive chocolate brown orbs or the way her eyelashes flutter in that innocent doe-eyed way that enraptures him. Write haikus about the way her – what he'd like to imagine feeling soft – lips and her smiles mean different things depending on the occasion.
He feels his heart swell anytime he finds his thoughts finding their way towards her. Clutching the cotton material of his school shirt, he angrily twists his fisted grip against his heart and mentally tells it to fuck off. Everything gets worse, jumbled, confused even, whenever his small glimpses catch her with that green-haired loser. He's outgrown that intense hatred he once felt for the male long ago, made amends even but that still didn't stop the crushing defeat he feels whenever he sees her looping an arm around the other male's arm and cheerfully tugs and pulls him this way and that.
His canines chomp down irritably, grinding his pearly whites until he reminds himself to take it down a notch. If he ground any tighter, his teeth would form a fine powder. Taking deep inhales of greedy air, he has to negate his longing heart by spouting ill-words towards himself.
He doesn't have time.
She's not worth it.
Stop wasting time on the what-if's.
Stop thinking he's ever had the chance with her.
Stop nagging heart, love wasn't in his plans for the future.
Just stop.
The more he pushed these feelings down, down, down for the past three years. The more they grew.
Katsuki grips his throat, scratching at the flesh beneath his dull fingernails, feeling his adam's apple bob with every forced gulp. He coughs and rotates his jaw in circular motions to try and get whatever's dislodged in his throat out. He's in the shared bathroom downstairs of the common area in their dormitory. Hands deathly gripping onto the porcelain sink as he leans towards the mirror in front of him, opening his mouth as wide as he can to check if there's truly something in there. He lets 'ahh's' rumble his throat, watching his uvula dangle as nothing is seen. Closing his mouth, he deeply frowns and starts to contemplate whether he should force himself to gag.
Not feeling like doing that, for now he'll simply continue to suffer as he washes his hands and turns to leave. One turned step facing away from the sink and he stops, hunching over when a violent cough takes over his body. Saliva drips out of his mouth as he heaves, now feeling the building pressure ten-fold. He pounds a fisted hand against his muscular chest, hoping that, that'll finally bring whatever is stuck out. When it doesn't, he closes his eyes and sticks his hand in, feeling for that small itchy whatever it is out of his throat. He wheezes around his fist, saliva coating his hand when his fingers pick at the foreign object. At first it slips from his fingers until he tightly pulls it out to reveal a pink bell-like head of petals.
Raising a confused brow at this, he squeezes the full head of the flower. Shakily squeezed in his grip, the flower's form starts to look like a dragon's head.
"Snapdragon" he spits the excess saliva and an overwhelming bitter floral taste into the sink, turning the faucet to drain it. He washes the flower to examine it further, knowing his suspicious is right. When he was younger, his mother had wanted a graceful little girl and when she had a rowdy son instead, she had forced some hobbies onto him. Having forced him into taking flower arrangement classes when he was just a kid and other things he deemed growing up as 'girly shit.' Now, for a minuscule of a second, he's actually grateful he could identify what came out of his body.
Rinsing his mouth with cold water, he examines his throat one more time before he turns and intends to leave for real this time. He's not blind nor stupid to what's beginning to happen to him but he's not going to easily accept it either. Growing up, everyone around him has warned him to think about falling in love someday. He's still young, he doesn't have to pick now. But sooner or later he would need to or else face the consequences. His mother would scare him to sleep with the myths of the hanahaki disease and he'd simply roll his eyes and scoff at her. Falling in love was pathetic.
Taking that step around again, he feels fine and hopes to remain feeling that way. Of course, nothing is ever made easy for him as he's once again hunched over, this time gripping his sides with both arms squeezing himself like a coiled snake. He hops and staggers in place when the sharp shooting pain impales him with spears of something prickly and gentle all at once. He throws up water with a floral scent, watching as loose petals come out.
Katsuki's eyes widened when traces of bright red blood sprinkle out, dripping in trails on the tiled floor. He uses his hand to tug on something much bigger wanting to extract itself from within him. Doing so, he picks at a medium-sized stem with fully bloomed snapdragons and green bulbous heads at the tips. He spins, steadying himself against the sink when his knees give out. Another punch hits his gut turning his vision blurry as the tears force their way out of the corner of his eyes. He loudly groans from the intense severe pain, so painful that it causes him to black out in a mess of blood, spit, and flower petals.
He lays there for what feels like hours until the light sensors of the bathroom leave him in pitch darkness and instantaneously come back on again a second later. It isn't until then that he starts to see light coming from the red-tinted thin layer of skin through his eyelids and the sound of a familiar voice that he comes around.
"Dude! You okay?!" that all too familiar voice of his best friend Eijirou came to the rescue, dropping his cup with a red toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in it. His friend drops to his knees and cradles his head in his lap, asking him questions while ignoring what is clearly evident on the floor around them.
Katsuki has the hanahaki disease with pink snapdragons coming violently out of him.
Pink.
Eijirou knows who that could be.
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Katsuki looks like utter shit in the morning.
Dark nasty bags under his eyes, blood-shot eyes, disheveled ash blond hair, pale ghostly complexion, a redden throat, inflamed bleeding tonsils, and chapped lips.
He's clearly seen better days and had better restful nights.
Not wanting to waste more time on willing his body to get some sleep, he ventures out towards the infirmary on the main school campus before class. He spent all night coughing out flower petals and to his immense relief, no more stemmed variety came out. Before entirely leaving the dorms, he heads towards the garden area to dispose of the flower petals in the bin filled with fresh soil mixed with decomposing peeled fruit skins that the girls had for their gardening and recycling needs.
He walks out when he stills, spine tingling when he finds the object of his affection squatted down by a rose bed. One hand lightly touching the white roses, while her other hand scooped under her so her skirt wouldn't fly up. She always wears black tights but she was still modest and ever careful to not embarrass herself. He watches her from the cherry blossom tree in the middle of the gardens. His heart erratically thumps at the sight of her smiling angelic face leaning closer into the rose petals to smell them.
Katsuki hates this.
He's too stubborn to allow himself to confess.
He's too pissed off at himself for falling in love.
It was never meant to be this way for him.
Love was never a part of his future plans, dammit!
His demeanor instantly reverts from a soft lop-sided smile that was quickly forming to an irate scowl the second his ears perk up at the sound of that green-haired loser calling out to her. She looks up with a wave of her hand, forgetting all about modesty as her skirt sways. She gets up while snapping the rose out of its home and runs out the garden to go give the other male her affection.
He doesn't know for sure – only assumptions – that, that lucky bastard is what her heart truly desires.
Katsuki doesn't know how to do 'nice.' Not the most social of the bunch unless he's yelling his opinions which half the time no one cares about unless their battle strategies. He just doesn't know how to click with the others despite having three years to learn.
At the infirmary, Recovery Girl gives him dire news.
"Your condition is already far advanced, My Dear" she gravely informs him, "In fact, I'm surprised you've managed to keep it suppressed for this long"
"How bad?" he grits his teeth, swallowing a hard lump of petals threatening to spill out.
He watches as the school nurse looks over the x-rays before looking back up at him. "You won't make it to graduation if you don't fix this yourself" she tells him in a serious tone.
"I either confess like a weak little bitch or I fuckin' croak before finishing high school?" he keeps his tone even, venom lacing every word as he confirms the information she just gave him.
She nods, "My Dear, we all need love. Those who can't see that get diagnosed with hanahaki"
"This is bullshit!" he feels his palms heating up to pop mini explosions from his quirk. "I didn't ask for this!" he yells, angry tears leaking at the corner of his eyes, "Can't you fix this?!" he pleads, having heard her earlier telling him to deal with it himself but the pain – the pain was too much even for someone as strong-willed as him.
Recovery Girl shakes her head, "You're still young, Katsuki and I'm not about to be the one to sentence you to a life without emotions" she tells him as he grows silent for a brief second before he asks for her to further elaborate.
She tells him that the surgery would remove the spikes of snapdragons from his ribs, the ones that entangle his bones like tight-constricting vines. They're the main source of his intense pain. Once the flowers are gone, it'll still take him weeks of coughing out a mixture of remaining flower petals and floral scented blood. The procedure messes with the limbic system in the temporal lobe of his brain. His main emotional processing center – the amygdala would be shocked fried and rewired with the lack of flowers that are meant to be there. "Like a common cold, you need to let this naturally heal itself. Surgery speeds up the process but the payoff is much worse. I know you're a passionate young man, and I won't take that emotion away from you just for the sake of saving your life from something you can cure all on your own" she writes him a hall pass to enter class with an excuse but refuses to do more for him.
Katsuki leaves the infirmary with a 'tsk' of his tongue and mulls over the elderly nurse's words for some time before ultimately entering the classroom. He skips lunch and avoids his small group of friends. It's a Thursday and he doesn't make himself known until Art class which lasts around 14:20-15:10.
Eijirou, Mina, Denki, and Hanta are all seated in a circle around each other, easels and drawing horses crowded. They're about to scoot over to make their small circle bigger for Katsuki when he ignores them to go to the back of the class and settles by himself across the room. His heart aches at the sight of the petite brunette who's making him involuntarily suffer. Damn her and her cute self.
He angles his easel and drawing board at the perfect angle where he can't see her nor the damn nerds she's always hanging around. The green-haired loser and the one with glasses. They're painting their assignment and messing around by brushing paint onto each other's skins with their paintbrushes.
Katsuki turns his head to cough, a couple of petals covering his opened palm. He crushes them in his hand but still decides to use them as his main focal piece to paint. If he can't escape his torture, he might as well receive a grade for it.
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It isn't until movie night at the dorms that someone else discovers his secret. Katsuki is usually dragged to their Friday movie nights to participate now more than ever with there just being a few months left until they graduate.
He wants to sarcastically say out loud how he might not even be there to see it but bites his tongue. Excusing himself to go grab a glass of water from the shared kitchen, he fills up his glass and takes a much needed gulp. When his lips leave the glass rim, he sees a wispy swirl of blood floating around his water before it vanishes. Ignoring it, he tosses the rest of the water down the sink's drain. Lately, he's only been able to drink water. The cold soothes his scratched up insides compared to hot tea and forget about soda – the carbonation is a killer on his sore bleeding throat. He can hear his class and their reaction towards whatever's happening in the action-packed American film they're watching but he can't bring himself to join their positive aura just yet.
He hates having an ultimatum.
Either confess or die.
How is that fair?
After being consumed by thinking it over, he knows he definitely doesn't want surgery anymore. The pain was dreadful at first that he was desperate for a way out. Now that he's grown accustomed to the signals his body gives him with every cough or rasp of his voice – he's thinking, is he so stubborn he'd rather die before confessing? And what if she outright rejects him, will he still die but this time having a much shitter time?
He feels that all too familiar rumble yet again as his body prepares him for a pretty bad episode. He deathly grips the kitchen sink, arm muscles flexing as he braces himself. Leaning over the sink he violently coughs with a rattle that moves his entire body. Gagging on the sensation of the stems ripping into his esophagus, he feels blood sliding down his throat as he shoves a hand inside to get the fully bloomed flower out. He feels a snap inside of him when the two-spiked stem tears itself allowing him to take both out, one at a time. His eyes pearl up with tears as his lips quiver. Coughing up flowers makes him feel vulnerable. He just wants the pain to go away but it won't because he's too damn stubborn.
He'll surely die at eighteen. Never reaching his dreams.
He just wanted to be a pro-hero.
Was that really too much to ask for?
He's feeling like a kicked puppy, shuddering as he leans over the sink. He won't let the whimper escape his bleeding lips. Wiping his mouth, he scoops up the stemmed flowers and loose pink petals from the sink to dump them in the trash can instead.
"You've got it too?" he hears a stoic voice ask.
It causes his blood to boil at the fact that he's failed to notice the new person entering the room. The hanahaki disease has weakened all his senses, especially his alertness.
"I don't know what you're talking about" Katsuki spat at the half-n-half, two-toned bastard leaning against the fridge. Shouto walks closer to the blond male, not replying immediately as he goes to reach for a glass cup in a cabinet.
"Normally, I'd pretend that you're right but," he opens the fridge to take out a pitcher filled with iced green tea out, "I'm not one to beat around the bush – I've got it too, Katsuki" Shouto casually tells him, unafraid to be honest. He too is pining over someone that he's not sure even likes him in that way. Fighting his own turmoil and demons about his lineage, his famed father, and his messed up family life were all a cake walk compared to being so consumed by a crushing love that may or may never happen in this lifetime.
Katsuki throws his own pink petals away to turn and face Shouto, watching with slowly widening eyes as his glass of green tea gets filled with feathery green carnation petals.
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Done! To be continued.
Originally this was going to be a two-shot but I feel like that'd be rushing things. Like I mentioned before, it's not gonna be a long story since I have my other Kacchako fic to update and focus on. This is just a nice lil' side project. If anything, this will be less than five chapters.
Snapdragons meaning in the language of flowers: grace and strength.
I don't own Katsuki Bakugou or Shouto Todoroki and all other characters mentioned or those that will be used in this fic – Boku No Hero Academia is owned by Kohei Horikoshi.
I just own the idea/plot/story/whatever you want to call it~ lol :P
Please do review! Follows and Alerts tell me that you guys are at least interested in the story but reviews really let me hear out what your feedback and personal opinions on my stories are!
If anyone is afraid to leave reviews due to language difference - please don't be! I can fluently read Spanish and partial French! :) And hey, that's why Google translate was invented after all! LOL.