Chapter Text
Will coughs up the first flower on a Tuesday morning in late September.
The dorm bathroom smells faintly of bleach and the sugary artificial scent of whatever soap the university buys in bulk. The fluorescent light overhead flickers in uneven pulses, bleaching the tile too white, too flat. There are damp footprints near the showers. Someone’s rubber flip-flops sit abandoned beside the sink like shed skin.
Will leans over the basin with his toothbrush hanging from his mouth and spits.
Something blue hits porcelain.
At first, he thinks it’s toothpaste foam catching the light strangely — a streak of color dragged thin by water. He squints at it, brushes again, spits once more.
The blue doesn’t dissolve.
It rests there, delicate and intact.
He lowers the toothbrush slowly and bends closer to the sink. His reflection warps in the chrome faucet as he reaches down with unsteady fingers. What he picks up is impossibly light. A single petal, no larger than his thumbnail, veined with such intricate detail it looks illustrated rather than grown. The edges are soft, curved inward like it had once been part of something whole.
There’s a faint metallic taste at the back of his tongue.
Will presses his tongue against his teeth, swallows carefully, and watches his own throat move in the mirror.
“Oh,” he says softly, not startled — just tired in a way he can’t name.
He lets the petal fall back into the sink and turns on the water. It spins once in the drain before vanishing. He stands there longer than necessary, hands braced on the porcelain, staring at nothing.
Then he brushes his teeth again. Washes his face. Goes to class.
Campus smells like wet leaves and burnt coffee in the fall, sharp and bitter and alive. The air has that thin edge to it that makes every breath feel cleaner than it is. Will walks past clusters of students wrapped in oversized sweaters and headphones, their laughter rising in bursts that don’t quite reach him.
He tells himself he likes it here.
The dorm isn’t glamorous — the cinder block walls are painted a tired shade of off-white, the beds narrow and utilitarian — but he and Mike have softened it in small, stubborn ways. Mike’s side of the room is chaos disguised as intention: books splayed open spine-down, sticky notes climbing the wall beside his desk, highlighters in three different colors scattered like evidence of obsession. A faded poster hangs crookedly above his bed.
Will’s side is quieter. Sketchbooks stacked neatly. Paint tubes arranged by color gradient. A corkboard with pinned drafts and half-formed ideas. The fairy lights he insisted on hanging cast a warm glow in the evenings, pooling gold against the gray walls.
They share space without thinking about it. Hoodies migrate between closets. Shoes collect in a messy pile by the door. Mike’s laptop charger lives permanently in Will’s outlet because it’s closer to his bed and neither of them ever bothered to move it.
Mike is an English major because he believes stories reveal truth if you look closely enough. He won’t admit that outright, but Will knows. He’s seen the way Mike reads — hunched forward, pen tapping against his lip, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to catch a secret hiding between lines.
Will chose art because he didn’t know how not to.
The second flower comes three days later.
Mike is sprawled across the floor on his stomach, long legs stretched out behind him, one sock half-off his heel. He’s annotating something old and dense, muttering occasionally under his breath while stealing fries from a paper bag balanced dangerously close to his elbow.
“You’re going to fail calculus,” Mike says without looking up, scribbling aggressively in the margins. “And then you’re going to act personally betrayed by the concept of numbers.”
“I’m not failing,” Will replies, though he hasn’t turned the page of his sketchbook in twenty minutes.
“You said that last week.”
“That was different.”
Mike snorts. “Sure it was.”
Will stares at the blank page in front of him. His pencil rests unmoving against the paper. He can feel something building beneath his sternum — not pain exactly, but pressure. A slow, expanding fullness that makes it hard to draw a full breath.
He swallows.
It doesn’t help.
The cough slips out before he can stop it — small, sharp, wrong.
Mike’s head lifts instantly. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Will says quickly, already turning away. He reaches for his water bottle, using the motion to hide the way he presses his fist to his mouth.
Something soft lands in his palm.
He looks down.
This one is whole.
Five small blue petals arranged around a faint yellow center. Smaller than the first but unmistakably complete.
His throat burns faintly.
“Dry air,” Will says, forcing his voice to stay level.
Mike pushes himself up onto his elbows and studies him for a second too long. “Drink water,” he says finally. “You’re terrible at basic self-preservation.”
Will closes his fist around the flower and nods.
If only it were that simple.
By mid-October, it isn’t just petals.
They come fully formed now.
He looks them up at two in the morning with his blanket pulled over his head like he’s hiding from something that can see him. The phone screen casts a pale blue glow over his face. He scrolls past forums first — anonymous posts, half-jokes, blurred photos — before landing on something clinical.
Forget-me-nots.
Associated with persistent, unreciprocated romantic attachment.
His chest tightens as he reads.
There’s a section about surgical intervention. The language is sterile, almost comforting in its detachment. Removal of foreign growth. Emotional trigger severance. Minimal long-term physical complications. Patients report relief.
Emotional trigger severance.
Will stares at that phrase until it blurs.
He imagines waking up and hearing Mike laugh from across the room and feeling nothing. Imagines Mike leaning over his shoulder to read something on his screen and feeling no spark of warmth, no panic, no unbearable swell beneath his ribs. Imagines hearing his name in Mike’s voice and not flinching.
The idea hollows him out more completely than the coughing ever has.
He locks his phone and lies awake, listening to the slow, steady rhythm of Mike’s breathing in the dark.
Two blossoms come up that week.
He hides them both.
At Nancy and Jonathan’s apartment, the air is thick with takeout containers and overlapping conversations. The kitchen light flickers intermittently. The couch is too small for the number of bodies crammed onto it. Max and Lucas are mid-argument about a movie neither of them finished. Dustin is gesturing wildly with a plastic fork, explaining something about robotics ethics as if it’s urgent. El sits perched on the arm of the couch, quiet, observant.
Will feels it before it happens — that subtle tightening in his chest — and then Mike shifts on the couch.
His knee knocks against El’s.
Neither of them move it right away.
They don’t even look at each other.
It’s unconscious.
It’s nothing.
It’s everything.
The pressure spikes so sharply Will has to stand. The legs of his chair scrape loudly against hardwood.
“You okay?” Mike asks immediately.
“Bathroom,” Will says, already moving.
He barely gets the door locked before the coughing overtakes him. It tears out of him, harsher than before. Three flowers fall into the sink in quick succession, scattering against white porcelain. One clings briefly to the rim before sliding down.
His hands shake as he grips the counter.
In the mirror, he looks thinner. There are shadows beneath his eyes that weren’t there a month ago.
He rinses the flowers away and waits until his breathing steadies.
When he returns to the living room, Mike’s eyes find him instantly.
They don’t leave.
Back in the dorm that night, long after the hallway has gone quiet, Mike speaks into the dark.
“You’ve been weird.”
Will stares up at the ceiling, counting the faint glow of the fairy lights reflected there. “I haven’t.”
“You have.”
Silence stretches between their beds.
“Are you mad at me?”
The question lands wrong — too vulnerable, too close to something Will doesn’t want examined.
“No,” he says quickly. “God, no.”
“Then what?”
Will thinks of surgical forms. Of white rooms. Of waking up empty.
“Nothing,” he says.
Mike exhales softly, unconvinced.
Will feels the weight of that disbelief settle somewhere deep inside his chest.
And this time, when the pressure builds, he doesn’t try to pretend he doesn’t know why.
The pressure doesn’t crest that night.
It lingers.
Will lies on his side facing the wall, the fairy lights casting dim constellations across the cinder block. He can hear Mike shifting occasionally — fabric rustling, mattress springs complaining softly — but neither of them speaks again.
Will presses his palm flat against his sternum.
It feels warm there. Not hot. Not sharp. Just occupied.
As if something has rooted.
He closes his eyes and tries to imagine it clinically: vascular tissue, organic growth, benign but persistent. Something the body mistakes for necessity.
His body has always had bad instincts.
The cough wakes him just before dawn.
He barely makes it to the communal bathroom in time, one hand clamped over his mouth, the other bracing against the cool hallway wall as he moves. The fluorescent lights hum to life as he stumbles inside.
He doesn’t bother with a stall.
He grips the edge of the sink and coughs.
One flower falls.
Then another.
Then another.
They land wet and luminous against white porcelain — five-petaled, blue, unmistakable. One catches on the drain and trembles there as water pools around it.
There’s more blood this time. Not a gush. Just thin red threads laced delicately along the petal veins.
Will stares at them.
He feels strangely detached, like he’s observing a phenomenon rather than participating in it.
“Okay,” he whispers to himself, voice hoarse. “Okay.”
He washes them down carefully. Watches them spin out of sight.
When he looks up, his reflection looks back at him with hollowed eyes.
He presses his fingers against his throat, as if he can feel where they’re growing.
—
Mike notices everything.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. But in accumulation.
Will stops finishing meals.
He starts timing his showers at odd hours — too early, too late.
He keeps mint gum in his pocket constantly now, the sharp scent of it clinging to him.
Mike watches.
He doesn’t say anything for three days.
On the fourth, he snaps.
They’re alone in the dorm. Rain hits the window in soft, relentless sheets. Will is sitting cross-legged on his bed, sketchbook balanced against his knee, though he hasn’t drawn more than the same curved line over and over.
Mike closes his laptop with more force than necessary.
“Okay,” he says. “What is going on?”
Will doesn’t look up. “Nothing.”
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Shrinking.”
The word lands heavy.
Will’s pencil stills.
Mike stands and crosses the room in three strides. He doesn’t touch Will, but he stands close enough that Will can feel the warmth of him.
“You think I don’t see it?” Mike demands quietly. “You leave in the middle of conversations. You barely sleep. You look like you’re—”
He cuts himself off.
“Like I’m what?” Will asks, too calmly.
Mike hesitates.
“Sick.”
The word reverberates.
Will swallows.
“I have a cold.”
“For three weeks?”
“It’s lingering.”
“Will.”
Something in Mike’s voice fractures.
That does it.
The pressure rises fast this time — sudden and merciless. Will’s breath catches halfway in.
He turns sharply, but he doesn’t make it to the trash can.
The cough tears through him, violent and uncontrollable. He doubles over, one hand braced against his mattress.
Something soft hits the floor between them.
Mike freezes.
Will squeezes his eyes shut, but another cough forces itself out — and another flower drops, landing beside the first.
The room goes silent except for the rain.
Will can’t bring himself to look.
He doesn’t need to.
He hears Mike inhale sharply.
“…Will.”
There’s no mistaking them. Not at this point. Not with the blood faintly staining the center of one petal.
Will straightens slowly.
He still doesn’t meet Mike’s eyes.
“I was going to tell you,” he lies.
Mike steps closer.
“Since when?”
Will doesn’t answer.
Mike crouches carefully, like he’s approaching something fragile. He reaches toward one of the flowers but doesn’t touch it. Just hovers his fingers above it, as if expecting it to dissolve.
“They’re real,” Will says hoarsely.
“I can see that.”
Mike’s voice isn’t disgusted.
It’s shaken.
Will finally looks at him.
Mike’s face is pale. Not horrified — but deeply, unmistakably hurt.
“How long?” Mike asks.
Will counts backward in his head. Late September. Tuesday morning. Fluorescent light.
“A while.”
“A while,” Mike repeats faintly. “And you just— what? Dealt with it?”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Tell me.”
The simplicity of it almost makes Will laugh.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Because you had a girlfriend. Because you just broke up. Because you deserve uncomplicated things. Because loving you already feels like asking too much.
Will says none of that.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says instead.
Mike stands abruptly.
“It obviously does.”
He runs both hands through his hair, pacing now, the way he does when he’s trying to think his way through something impossible.
“This is that thing,” Mike says suddenly.
Will’s stomach drops. “What thing?”
“The thing we never talk about.”
The air changes.
Rain pounds harder against the window.
“There isn’t a thing,” Will says, but it comes out thin.
Mike turns to him sharply.
“Don’t.”
Silence.
They stare at each other across the small, cluttered room that has held years of shared history. Basements and sleepovers and almost-confessions.
“You think I don’t know?” Mike says quietly.
Will’s heart slams painfully against the bloom inside his chest.
“Know what?”
Mike’s jaw tightens.
“That you look at me like I’m—” He stops. Swallows. Starts again. “Like I’m something you’re trying not to want.”
The words hit harder than any cough.
Will feels the pressure spike again, dangerous.
“Mike,” he whispers, warning and plea all at once.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” Mike continues, voice rough. “You think I didn’t feel it change?”
The bloom surges.
Will staggers back a step, hand flying to his chest.
“Stop,” he breathes.
But Mike steps forward.
“When did it start?” Mike asks. Not accusing. Not cruel. Just desperate for a timeline.
Will can’t answer.
Because the truth is: it never really did.
The cough rips through him again.
This time it’s brutal.
He drops to his knees.
A cluster of blossoms spills onto the carpet — bright blue against dull gray. One sticks briefly to his sleeve before sliding down.
Mike is there instantly.
“Hey— hey—”
He grips Will’s shoulders, steadying him as the coughing subsides into ragged breaths.
The flowers lie between them like evidence.
Like proof.
Mike looks at them.
Then at Will.
Something shifts in his expression.
Not fear.
Recognition.
And underneath it—
something else.
Will sees it flicker there, barely restrained.
And that’s what terrifies him most.
Because if Mike looks at him with horror, Will knows how to survive that.
But this—
This soft, dawning, complicated something—
This could undo them both.
“Will,” Mike says again, softer now. Closer.
Their knees are almost touching.
Rain fills the silence.
Will’s throat burns, raw and open.
He waits for rejection.
For distance.
For something to break cleanly.
Instead, Mike reaches up — hesitant, trembling — and brushes his thumb lightly along Will’s jaw where a smear of red lingers.
The touch is brief.
But it’s not accidental.
And the bloom inside Will’s chest reacts like it’s been struck by lightning.