Shades of Petals

Eating Me Up Inside

Atsushi ignored Yosano's pointed look as she entered the woman's infirmary, waiting anxiously on what to do next.

"How was your outing with Fitzgerald-san yesterday?" she asked her and Atsushi tensed.

"It was fine," she said simply, going behind a curtain and taking off her clothes to wear the hospital gown after Yosano instructed her to. "Is this going to hurt?" she asked, changing the subject abruptly.

"No, it'll just take images from inside of you, which will let me see what's going on in your body," Yosano then informed her of how the procedure would go, which sounded painless and not invasive at all, thankfully.

"Okay, so just lay on this thing?" Atsushi asked when Yosano led her to a separate room and told her to lie down on the medical bed.

"Lay there and I'll turn on the x-ray generator so it'll work with the detector that will scan your body," Yosano explained. "The diagnostic radiography should be able to show me what's going on. I want to focus on the lungs."

"Why?" she asked confused, while Yosano worked.

"It should start there," Yosano muttered vaguely, further confusing Atsushi. "There or your heart. If it's at the heart, I'll have to have you go through an echocardiograph. But considering you're coughing up those petals and your chest pains, I want to at least say it started in your lungs, acting similarly to pneumonia."

"What do you mean?" Atsushi asked nervously.

"It's not something people would know about and it's just supposed to be a myth anyway. Myth, fable, urban legend —whatever you want to call it. Something people must've come up with to sow some angst about one-sided feelings and whatnot."

"I don't have one-sided feelings!" she immediately said as they finished up and she redressed herself.

Yosano raised an eyebrow at her, making her face flush red. "Didn't explicitly say you did. But we'll talk about that later. What I was going to say was the symptoms you told me about mimic what I know of Hanahaki —a 'fictional' disease where someone who has unrequited feelings for another, start to grow flowers in their heart and lungs and begin coughing them up. Usually, it's accompanied by strong pain. On a level of 1 to 10, how's the pain level? I don't want to say a normal level for others, but for someone like you, with a high pain tolerance."

Atsushi winced. "It...started out a 4 in the beginning. It escalated. Quickly."

Yosano pursed her lips, though her eyes began to look very concerned, making Atsushi squirm and feel even more worried.

"Current number?"

"8. Approaching 9. Quickly," she reluctantly added again.

The two shared an uneasy look and Atsushi was terrified of what was happening.

"What do I do?" she asked the other. "If it's like that, why is it happening? Can we find the ability user? Is there a way to stop whatever's happening?"

"I still have to process the x-rays to make sure," Yosano told her, though it seemed to them it was a foregone conclusion. "And...I took some of the petals you spit out yesterday —Dazai touched them and they didn't dissolve. He also seemed certain it wasn't caused by an ability and didn't feel like it at all."

"Then how did it start happening to me?" Atsushi's voice was growing shrill. "How do we make it stop?"

Yosano gave her a grim look. "If we take into account the fictional disease and what was supposedly said of it...your one-sided love needs to be returned. That or surgery, which I'm doubtful of. Plus, doing that will either get rid of your feelings and memory of your love...or get rid of your ability to love altogether. And no guarantees it'll work since there's no recorded records of this disease actually happening, outside of fiction."