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wordsintheatmosphere · 6 years

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The Language of Flowers

Series: Persona 5 Pairing: Akira/Mishima Rating: G Summary:

[For MishiMonth2018 - Day 3: Flowers]

Akira wakes up coughing flowers the day after he asked Mishima out. It’s hard to recognize the petals when they are already in pieces out of his throat, but he has heard of this disease before.

—

He wakes up with a burning itch at the back of his throat. He is choking on something lodged inside, and when he digs his fingers into his mouth and pulls out the warm, wet lumps, the sight of yellow petals greets his eyes. He is far too concerned with removing as much of it as possible to think about the why. Through his hacking coughs and his wet, pained heaving, Morgana paces worriedly by his side.

“Flowers,” he says, his voice tight with worry and concern, his tail flicking around with pent up agitation. “But why?”

Why indeed, Akira thinks, because it is the morning after he’d asked Mishima out and the boy had said yes.

—

The wet, crumpled petals lie in his palms like abandoned golden scales, pathetic and wilting. They’re too scattered and broken for Akira to know what kind of flower, but from the size and shape of the petals (and a brief scan through the flower encyclopedia he bought for his part-time job), he would guess a yellow tulip. “But why is a flower growing in you?” Morgana asks, and Akira runs the back of his shaking hand across his forehead, slick with sweat.

He’s heard of this illness before, yes. “Hanahaki Disease,” he explains, his voice a bit hoarse from all that coughing and vomiting he’d just done. “The scientific cause is unknown, but some say it’s a disease of the heart.”

“What kind of heart disease sprouts flowers in your throat?” Morgana hasn’t stopped pacing on the bed, and Akira is thankful for his concern because it keeps him thinking, keeps him sensible and grounded even though he’s still reeling from the whole of it.

He looks at the petals in his hand. A yellow tulip. “Unrequited love,” he says.

—

There’s no cure for it, but he asks Takemi anyway. She removes the stethoscope from her ears and looks straight into his eyes. “Can you stop loving that person?” she asks.

“It’s not that simple. I can’t just decide not to,” he says, and Takemi shrugs at his reply.

“Then the cure is not that simple. You can’t just decide to cure yourself when you’re ill.” She pats him on the back, almost comfortingly. “Relax. You won’t die from it, as long as you cough it out when you can. It’s a pain in the ass, that’s what it is, but it’ll fade.”

The implications are there. She has already decided that it’ll fade because he’ll get over his unrequited love. He shrugs her hand off him, feeling a bit irritable, and leaves.

— Mishima hasn’t quite looked him in the eyes, but he doesn’t object to eating lunch alone with him. His shoulders are tense and he flinches when Akira pulls nearer, so Akira decides on sitting across from him instead. “Tell him the truth,” Morgana hisses from inside his bag, but Akira tucks the bag at an angle so that Morgana’s eyes are no longer on them.

“Mishima,” he says, “would you rather we remain as friends instead?”

Mishima chokes on his drink, and his face turns a bright red. “What? What brought that up all of a sudden?”

“I’m just worried I’m rushing things. Maybe you’re not comfortable being with me.” Akira knows he’s probing more than usual, but if Mishima doesn’t feel the same about him then he wants to hear the truth.

“Oh. Oh, uhm, that’s not true. I think.” Mishima lowers his voice, his eyes still not meeting Akira’s. “I just—you know—never dated anyone before. So I—I don’t know.”

Maybe it’s best we remain as friends, Akira thinks, but before he can say it Mishima interrupts.

“But I don’t hate it. The thought of dating you…is that weird?”

The smile is hard to fight off his face, so Akira doesn’t bother. “No,” he answers, and downs his canned coffee in an attempt to wash out the taste of the wilted yellow petals. “Not weird. Let’s take it slow. Okay?”

—

He never does tell Mishima about the flowers. Sometimes when he coughs the sound is so deep and heavy that Mishima looks at him with concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Mishima asks every time, but Akira brushes it off.

“Why won’t you tell him?” Morgana asks in exasperation as he spits out more petals into the school sink. It would’ve been a pretty sight if the petals weren’t coated in his saliva, crumpled from his throat and already destroyed from his fingers pulling them out. “Shouldn’t he know about this?”

Akira doesn’t answer. As hard as it is to stop loving someone, it’s just as hard to force someone to fall in love. There’s no sense in scaring Mishima over it, no sense in letting Mishima know only to blame himself for something he can’t control.

The next day Mishima shows up with a convenience store bag and hands it to him. “Cough medicine,” he says, and though he is smiling sheepishly there’s worry in his eyes. “I hope it works.”

It won’t work, but Akira takes it anyway. When he looks inside the bag, there’s about five different bottles and a dozen cough lozenges.

“I didn’t know which would work, so I bought them all.”

The thought of Mishima worrying over the medicine aisle, of him grabbing all of them and paying with his own money all for him, makes a different kind of ache in Akira’s chest. “Thank you,” he says. “It means a lot.”

Mishima doesn’t have enough money for lunch that day, so they share Akira’s meal. Today he sits next to Akira, and their shoulders press together as they each eat half a bun. The tension in Mishima’s shoulders is still there, but it’s so much smaller than before.

“Come over. I’ll cook something for you.” The words slip casually out of Akira’s mouth, but his heart is racing from the warmth of Mishima’s shoulder against his. When Mishima glances at him, he hurriedly takes a bite out of his bun to mask his nervous energy.

“You cook?”

“Sometimes.” He swallows the last piece of bread down and wipes his sweating palms against his pants. “Just curry, though.”

“Just curry sounds great,” Mishima says.

— When they get to Akira’s place, he excuses himself to the washroom. The petals have changed. He looks at the small, purple flowers and tosses them out. He doesn’t have his flower encyclopedia at hand to look it up, but he recognizes them as lilacs. He’s so busy thinking of the change in flowers that he doesn’t notice Mishima staring as he ties on his apron and prepares the ingredients. Their eyes meet when he happens to glance up, and Mishima hurriedly looks away.

“Enjoying the sights?” Akira says, more as a joke than anything, but Mishima’s cheeks redden. The sight of it makes Akira falter, and he returns his attention back to the chopping board because, hell, if he doesn’t he’ll end up cutting his finger off from how much Mishima has thrown him off his stride.

“You look different when you cook,” Mishima whispers, barely audible. “it’s a good look.”

A sharp pain digs into Akira’s finger. “Shit,” he mutters, and presses his finger into his mouth to soothe the pain. The metallic taste of blood mixed in with lilac tastes strange. Mishima leaps up to help, his eyes wide, and Akira directs him to the cabinet where the bandages are kept. He watches as Mishima helps to stick a bandage on, eyebrows furrowed in concentration and concern over something as small as a nick from a careless hand.

“I swear I’m a better cook than this,” Akira says, and Mishima finally meets his eyes and smiles.

“Oh? And here I was thinking that maybe you were better at the whole ‘looking good in an apron’ rather than the cooking.”

It’s Akira’s turn to blush now, and he swallows hard. “I mean, I can do that too. If that’s what you prefer.”

Mishima pauses, blinking slow at his reply and then rapidly reddening, like as if he’d only just realized what he’d just said. “Uh—actually, how about I just—you know—help out?”

A small groan sounds from the inside of Akira’s bag, forgotten in the corner of the café. “Give me a break,” Morgana mutters, and Akira pointedly ignores the comment as he hands Mishima another knife.

Later when the curry is all cooked and they are quietly eating, Akira clears his throat and glances over the table. “So. Aprons, huh.”

Mishima coughs over his food, choking and pained, and for a moment Akira is reminded of his own coughs over the sink, of the flowers that return no matter how many times he throws them up. But it’s only the food and Mishima recovers soon, wiping his mouth and darting his eyes anywhere but Akira.

“Uh. Weird?”

Akira smiles, spooning another mouthful of curry into his mouth. “Not weird.”

He expects Mishima to relax from that, but Mishima returns his gaze on him, curious and intense. “And you?”

It takes a while for Akira to catch on. Talking kinks over food is not part of the plan, but Mishima doesn’t seem ready to let it go. “You really want to know?” he asks.

“I just want to know more about you, Kurusu,” Mishima confesses, and now there’s nothing Akira can object to that. He feels the same way, after all. He spoons a few more bites of curry into his mouth, chewing carefully as he thinks.

“There’s one I can think of right now,” he finally says, and it’s worth the baiting because Mishima is leaning forward now, eager and curious to know. “Do you want to hear it?”

“It’s only fair,” Mishima says, and Akira smiles. He leans forward too, careful and slow.

“I really would like to hear you call me by my first name.”

Mishima’s eyes widen at that, and he pulls back. “Uh. Really? That’s it?”

“Is that a no?”

“Not a no.” Mishima swallows, looking down at his fidgeting hands. “But I—that might be a bit hard right now.”

Akira has already expected this, so he goes with Plan B. “Then how about I call you Yuuki instead?”

Mishima snaps his head up at that, and though Akira had thought his face couldn’t get any redder, he is proven wrong. “Oh.”

“Is that a no too?”

Mishima drinks his water with a trembling hand before answering. “Not a no.”

— The itching in Akira’s throat has subsided, though there are still a few petals he manages to cough up. It turns out the small, purple lilac petals are much easier to spit out than the large, yellow tulip ones, and he smiles wryly at the thought. At first he thinks the itching subsided due to the change in flowers, but when he checks his flower encyclopedia for purple lilacs he can’t stop the smile on his face.

“You look better,” Morgana says, cautiously examining the discarded lilacs in the trash. Akira lies down on his bed and grins.

“I’ll be fine in time,” he promises.

— And it’s not an empty promise either; the itching dissipates to barely a scratch, until one morning Akira wakes up without a throat full of lilacs. It’s a strange feeling, relying on the presence of the disease in order to understand what Mishima thinks of him, but Akira no longer needs it to tell. There’s no need of flowers to touch Mishima’s hand and feel his fingers squeeze back, shy and nervous. There’s no need of flowers to watch the way Mishima’s face lights up when they see each other in the classroom every day, even if they’ve seen each other the day before and the one before that. And there’s no flower to express the feeling of Mishima leaning on him to sleep, safe and comfortable and with his guard down and leaving himself vulnerable for once, for once.

They stop by the flower store one day, the store that Akira works at. Really, he’d expected to dislike flowers after his whole unwanted ordeal with them, but he finds them difficult to dislike when they are still so beautiful, even in scattered, broken pieces. Mishima isn’t all that into flowers, but he appreciates their beauty all the same and finds Akira’s knowledge on their meanings fascinating.

When Mishima points at the purple lilacs, Akira hesitates. He still remembers the feel of them in his throat, the taste of them in his mouth, and it’s still strange to see them here when the first image of them in his mind is always their crumpled petals in his palms. “Akira,” Mishima whispers suddenly, and Akira’s throat and chest tightens so much that at first he is afraid that the lilacs have returned. “Sorry. Is that uncomfortable?”

“Not at all,” Akira answers, smiling a little and bumping their shoulders together lightly, the only kind of public affection Mishima is comfortable with. For now. “They just remind me of you. The first emotion of love.”

#persona 5 #shuyuu #yuuki mishima #yuki mishima #mishimonth2018 #akira/mishima #the language of flowers #my fic #fluff #hanahaki disease #but it's not too angsty #because i don't write angst that well honestly #so it starts out one-sided #but becomes mutual love later

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