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Tess would wake coughing petals. Dead, rotting, but petals nonetheless. After a few occurrences, she would start waking up in whatever corner of the room she had crawled to the night before to avoid having sick flowers cover their bed. The flowers coloured a sweet strangeness to the world before her, dead as she knows it.
The decaying paint of the walls around her would tint her hair when she slept on the floor, leaning against them. A less than graceful way to slip into unconsciousness, but nothing in this world needed to know grace, for survival was never pretty.
The first few times were worrying, but there are many more things to fear than death. Infection, the deathless death, was always waiting for them at the bottom of a stairwell.
Joel didn’t know of the flowers blooming from her. Tess knew how to hide them, and she knew how to hide what she wanted.
Until one day, in which they found themselves in their shared house, a rare occasion, and Joel came up to her.
“There were some…” he said, taking from his pocket a petal the colour of blood, the edges darkened and curled inward. “I found some of these on the floor.” He gestured. “Why—”
An unwanted wish sparkled in his confused eyes. Only once had Tess found she could look at her own eyes through them like looking through a mirror. Scared of how easy it was, she never did it again.
“Don’t worry, I… I wasn’t buying any flowers.” Tess laughed gently, mocking any idea of sweetness; something she couldn’t have wasn’t something she could want.
Joel sat down slowly on the bed. “Yeah. No. That’s… Right.” She knew this wasn’t what he meant. She knew he didn’t mean anything. “You wouldn’t. You can’t either way.” He looked away.
When caring for a partner for long, one tends to learn when the other doesn’t believe in something; Joel doesn’t believe in beauty for prisoners, he doesn’t believe in finding strength in that. Nothing she could recall him saying, from the little he said, would contest her assumptions. Tess drew breaths, shorter each time.
She found comfort in little words. She found comfort in the lack of them. She found comfort in the fact that eyes and mouth corners and hand gestures said more than sentences ever could.
For many years, she tried to wish for hostility. She couldn’t find comfort in that.
Multiple times had her stomach turned and asked her how someone could want, not what they could never deserve, but what could never grow. Two solitudes together were still lonely.
The silence choked her lungs, and she coughed again. As she turned away hurriedly, Joel moved towards her. Tess was ready to push him away; fortunately a hand flick was enough. He hadn’t always been observant. “Let me… Let me look for something humid,” Joel said.
Tess coughed and coughed until no petals were left. By then, Joel had given her a towel, wet with a fraction of the water they had left.
As he handed her the towel, he was too worried to notice his fingertips brushing by her face, the worn glass of his clock leaving its mark, but she did.
Tess didn’t want to let go of the towel, since it would show the petals. Even if Joel could see it, useless as it could be, she didn’t want to show him something… unlike them. It wasn’t like them to feel so naked in front of the other, to show such vulnerable things.
Their past lives were something to be earned. They had to learn each other before they could talk to each other. Like a flower, a heart was something to bloom, not to force open.
Either way, Joel saw her create petals and he didn't know how, but neither did Tess, and that he did know. They did know each other. But they still couldn't open up. When would enough be enough?
Joel backed away. So did Tess. She was tired. She was tired of this.
Tess almost spoke, but no words came out. This time it wasn't the flowers choking her. She walked out of the apartment.
—
Every night, it worsened. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't eat, she couldn't stop coughing. She'd noticed Joel's hand flickers when she coughed, and his hesitation when reaching for her.
It didn't change from night to day, but he was present. He started being home when Tess slept. He stopped trying to hide the way he looked at his broken clock. He cleaned the petals when Tess was too tired to do so.
He'd never said it, and she'd never thanked him.
—
One day, Tess, lonely, coughed. She coughed so much that petals piled up on the floor. She could barely breathe. She couldn't focus. No breaths lasted long with the convulsion of her lungs. Her body went still, but the petals didn't stop streaming down her mouth.
Her body was turning into stone. Her throat was sore. And she couldn't stop. And Joel wasn't there, but there was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do. Joel wasn't there. He wasn't, and she wasn't okay with that, but she had to be. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing to be done.
And so, in a world of chaos, Tess quietly disappeared from time, like a shell taken by the ocean. In a few years there would only be proof of something that tried to bloom, but couldn't. And there would be one mourner.
And the story is never over, but it is.