Shades of Petals

The Girl Who Spit Flowers

It is painful, he wanted to say. Painful, bloody, and so horribly beautiful and agonizing...

"Do you know how it ends?" he whispered, afraid to know.

"I don't," Lucy admitted. "I'm hoping it has a happy ending."

Me too.

They were alerted to the café door opening and he turned and saw Yosano and Dazai entering. One look and they both knew each other knew.

"Come with me, Fitzgerald-san," Yosano said with a grim tone.

Clenching his hands, he returned her book and moved away from a silent Lucy, following after the duo. Lucy stared at their backs anxiously, wondering what was going on.

"You know what's happening," Francis accused. "You took x-rays," he directed towards Yosano.

Yosano gave him a side look, walking towards the elevators. "She has something that looks like Hanahaki."

"Hanahaki is fictional," Dazai said lightly, but he looked too serious. "But somehow the urban legend isn't quite an urban legend."

"We'll need to talk...options with the others," Yosano said gravely.

"Options?" Francis' insides felt like they'd been frozen.

"This doesn't sound good," Dazai muttered, the elevator reaching their destination quickly.

The three of them quickly reached the Agency's main office and entered the chaotic room, with everyone up to their usual antics and in a good mood.

Yosano cleared her throat and looking at her face guaranteed everyone else became serious, the chaos dying down as they looked to them.

"Yosano, what's up?" Ranpo straightened up, smiling lightly but his eyes were slightly opened to show his own seriousness.

"I have something to say about Atsushi-chan," she announced to a stock still room.

"I have the President," Dazai spoke up, having gone to get him earlier while Yosano had called attention to herself.

"What is the meaning of this?" Fukuzawa asked and Francis looked to Yosano blankly.

Options. She was speaking of options. What kind of freaking options?

"Atsushi-chan is suffering from Hanahaki," Yosano revealed.

Tanazaki raised his eyebrows. "The fictional disease? The one K-Pop fans like to do tons of fan edits on?"

His sister lightly elbowed him. "Not just K-Pop fans, Junichiro!"

"I thought that was just a folklore?" Ranpo asked, seriousness on full blast as he set aside his Ramune bottle on the desk next to him.

"Excuse me, but what is Hanahaki?" Kenji interrupted, raising his hand.

"I second that," Edgar spoke up hesitantly and Francis dazedly just noticed the other was there as well.

"It's a myth that someone with a one-sided love towards a person gains the affliction, where they start blooming flowers in their heart and lungs and start to vomit up flower petals. To that end, it becomes steadily worse as time passes and the afflicted begins to cough up blood with the petals, though some say they start coughing blood from the beginning," Yosano explained.

Francis heard a gasp and he looked to see that Lucy was in the corner, hidden and quiet so no one had noticed her enter and stay there. She was clutching that damned book.

Dazai took over. "Eventually, they begin vomiting up full flowers, which means the disease is in its last stage. Death is usually the outcome."

"But it's not real," Edgar argued vehemently, oddly getting louder and passionate about this. But The Guild, what was left of it really, had grown extremely protective and attached to Atsushi. "How can you talk about it like it's real, when it's supposed to be a myth? How can you even be sure Miss Atsushi has it? What if it was an ability from a Gifted?"