Flowers apart

14 (Finale)

(A/N: FIRST AND FOREMOST, HAPPY BIRTHDAY VENTI! I'm late by 13h/1h (depends or where you live) but, hey, I'll just pretend that I made it in time.

Collating all results from ao3 and Wattpad, we have fourteen '3's, ten '2's, five '1's. Somehow all of you knew that 1 was the bad ending...HOW???

Anyways, congratulations! You all avoided the ending where Venti yeets himself to the afterlife and my cousin actually proposed lovers' suicide for Xiao ehe but crisis averted, eh?

I made it according to my house unit number, which was 231, so I put the happiest ending to the saddest ending according to this sequence. And the votes say 3, so here's your third ending.

I will explain all the endings at the end of this story, and maybe I'll have bonus angst chapters for angst lovers and alternate endings? I don't know, but stay tuned for more!)

It's so suffocating.

I can't breathe.

But I can smell the flowers.

I feel numb.

But I can feel the pain.

My mouth is filled to the brim.

But I can taste the sweet honey pollen.

I can't understand what I'm hearing.

But I can hear the growing buzz.

I can't think.

But my mind is filled with him.

Each memory surfacing,

Like a flower blooming.

Each bleed into my mind.

And blur the painful edges.

Colours of 

white, red, blue, and gold are what I can see

Gold is the one that shines the brightest, 

etched into my mind forever.

And teal too,

stuck onto flimsy strands that blow in the wind.

The wind...I want to feel it again.

And cradle the freedom of the spirit of the air in my arms.

And yet these limbs of mine are getting weaker.

The noise is getting louder.

The air is getting lesser.

It's so suffocating.

But yet,

I feel so happy.

Because-

***

I found you again. The sentence rang in Xiao's mind again and again as he paced outside the Baizhu's operating room.

Suddenly it was a replay of everything again, but even worse. He was waiting outside the cursed room where Venti was in, and it felt exactly like that day when he was waiting for Barbatos to come out alive and well.

Look how that turned out.

There was this terrifying sense of foreboding that Xiao couldn't shake off, this familiar and terrifying fear that Venti, his Venti, was going to slip from his hands again with no way of getting him back again.