JJBA x Reader

Josuke x Hanahaki!Reader : Suffering

[Art by Pastaronii on DeviantArt]

[Requested by : SimplyShitty Ask for angst and you shall receive! I had to do a bit of studying for this one since I wasn't super familiar with hanahaki but I hope you like it and I'm sorry if I got any of the details wrong!]

Being in love was supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be something that all the little boys and girls looked forward to. It was supposed to be perfect when you found it, unrequited love being a distant memory when you laid eyes on the one you thought to be your soulmate. That was how it was supposed to be, anyway.

Unfortunately for you, you had the luck of falling in love with none other than Josuke Higashikata. The two of you had known each other for a number of years and had been nearly inseparable. Around the start of high school was when you'd begun to notice your feelings for the boy were becoming a lot more than just friendly.

Yet you stood idly by as you watched girls flirt with him, as you watched him branch out and make new friends like Okuyasu and Koichi. It was good for him, you convinced yourself. He needed other friends than just you. At the end of the day, he was still closest with you and so it didn't bother you to see him growing.

But as time went on and more and more girls began to gain interest, you could feel him slipping away from you and those feelings you'd been harboring began to eat away at you. You longed to tell him, longed to let him know that you loved him more than anything and that you wanted to be the one he called his own, but you didn't want to stand in the way of his happiness. Or at least, what seemed to make him happy.

The truth of the matter was the Josuke harbored similar feelings for you. He would watch the way you batted your eyes at him or became flustered when Okuyasu and Koichi teased you. He could feel his heart beat faster whenever you entered a room. His feelings matched your own, but he felt like he was driving you away by being so clingy towards you, so he branched out into the arms of all the girls who fawned over him.

The first time you started to notice the negative effects of those feelings of desire for Josuke was during dinner with your parents. You started to cough, nearly uncontrollably. Deciding it best to take your leave until your fit was over, you walked to your bathroom and locked yourself in. The coughing fit went on for a good while until finally, you coughed up what appeared to be flower petals. Cherry blossom petals to be exact.

You'd read it in fiction before, never believing the lore to be true, but standing there with those flower petals in your hand, you couldn't deny the evidence. Hanahaki was real and boy, did you have a bad case of it. You stayed trapped in your own bathroom for a while longer, debating over the options you had in front of you. You could stay trapped in this unrequited love, or you could tell your parents and get the surgery to remove the flowers and ultimately, your love for Josuke.

You fought with yourself for a while. If you told your mother, would she even believe you? Honestly, something as far as coughing up flower petals over unrequited love seemed unbelievable, but the evidence was too much. But if you did tell your mother and she did believe you, could you live with never being able to love Josuke again? In a few slim cases, it was possible for the love to come back and for people to redevelop their feelings, but if that did happen, your love would most likely be unrequited again.

A sigh parted your lips as you came to the best decision you could. You were going to tell your mother and you were going to get the surgery done. It was what was best for you. It would save your life after all.

So with tearful eyes, you broke down in the arms of your mom, explaining to her the way you'd felt towards Josuke and the situation you were ruefully trapped in now. She listened as you poured your heart out. Despite the obvious crazy nature of the situation, she listened and comforted you through your pain.

When the day came for the surgery, you tried to fight her. You'd take the suffering, you'd take your ultimate death. The surgery was terrifying to you, the thought of never feeling love for Josuke again was awful. You tried so hard to bargain with her, to obtain her approval to not let you go through with it, but she refused to let you back out. She wasn't going to lose her daughter.

And so it went, you got the surgery and the doctors were able to easily remove the flowers. They told you that since they had caught it so early, there would be no lasting effects, yet you found yourself feeling empty. You wanted to be happy. Happy that you were going to live, happy that things would never be weird between you and Josuke, but instead all that you felt was empty. It was like a part of you was missing, like you'd torn a shard of your heart out through that surgery.

Your attitude around Josuke had completely changed and it didn't go unnoticed by the boy. He found himself pining for the way you used to treat him. The smiles you'd give him, the way you'd get shy when he'd tease you, how you would scrunch your nose up over his antics, but instead all of that was replaced with a nearly stoic expression. One that broke his heart.

And just when the boy didn't think losing the way you were couldn't get any worse, he found himself developing a cough. It started out as a normal cough, something he'd probably gotten from another kid at school, but he only realized how bad it really was when he'd coughed into his hand

and found flower petals.