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“What do you do with the flowers?”
Al-Haitham paused. “What do you mean?”
“Like, what do you do with the flowers you cough up? Do you keep them or…?”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “What—why would I keep them? I obviously throw them away. Why are you asking?”
“I was just wondering—I mean if you’re not using them—like, if I could possibly…have them?”
Al-Haitham stared at him incredulously. “You want my unrequited love flowers?”
“Yes?” Kaveh flushed red. “Since…since you’re not using them.”
Since you’re not using them—
“What the hell would I be using them for? What the hell are you using them for?”
Al-Haitham has Hanahaki disease and coughs up mourning flowers. Kaveh asks if he can use them for his ascension materials.
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Bookmark Notes:
they're both so fucking STUPID
how can two geniuses in their respective fields be the most fucking idiotic people when it comes to each other oh my lord -
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fucking hell
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“He’ll get over it. It’s a school crush that has probably gone on for—what, a few months? The flowers will clear out by then long before he starts suffocating from them.”
“You’re so callous, Al-Haitham.”
“Practical, you mean.”
“‘Practical.’ Imagine if you faced an unrequited crush. Imagine you started coughing flowers. What then? Would you have more sympathy for Effendi’s situation?”
“I wouldn’t let flowers grow in the first place.”
“And how would you go about doing that?”
“I’d rip out the seeds.”
“That’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?”
“No. I would never let my feelings get so out of control.”
“I’m not sure that’s up to you to decide, Al-Haitham.”
“Is it not?”
“You tell me.”
“Yes, It is.”'“How long have you had it?”
Since you left. “Not long.”
“How long, Al-Haitham?”
...There were always seeds, there was always something growing, but he didn’t start growing a garden until—
“A few months ago. Maybe a year.” That was when it had gotten worse.' (8 years)'He’d already given Kaveh so much in this life, what was one more thing? And it was also, perhaps, a little fitting...Because in a sense, Al-Haitham was just giving them back to their maker.'
“What about now? How in control do you feel over them?”
“Are you trying to prove me wrong?”
“I’m just asking you a question, Al-Haitham.”
“I guess the flowers inside me answer for themselves,”
“Do you have sympathy for Effendi now?”
“No, In fact, I know now that he was an even greater fool.”'Before he started coughing them up, Al-Haitham had never taken a good look at the flowers. But after he did—after bouts of coughing spells that left him wiping his counters and floors of blood—he’d look at the flower on the ground, seemingly still wet with afterbirth, and think it really is beautiful.
...Al-Haitham wasn’t a creature of desire, usually. But sometimes he wanted—in his bloodiest, dizziest, blurriest moments, he wanted —for the flowers to clear. Not to end, not to lessen, but to ease. To become something beautiful to look at again instead of something to hide in his lungs and hide in the bushes and hide as ashes in the hearth.
...And Al-Haitham wouldn’t admit it even at the threat of death, but sometimes he was afraid, too, that one day he’d choke on the flowers fully, one day he’d drown in his own blood, and then the flowers would lose their place to grow and he’d have nothing to look at at all.
Some days he could feel the roots stretching into the crevices between his bones—into the tendons, into the muscle. And it fucking hurt. But the sensation only followed after Kaveh’s laugh, Kaveh’s grin, Kaveh’s hair clips left in the bathroom and on the counters and between the couch cushions. So he couldn’t renounce it. Not entirely.''Al-Haitham rarely felt truly agitated by things, but when he did, it ate at him, clawed at him until he felt tilled like soil, scraped until there was enough ruin to grow something.'
'He could never ask Kaveh to care for a garden that was not his. He would never ask Kaveh of this.'
Kaveh coughed a flower 'so perfectly lain on the ground like a tragic figure in a painting.'
'When she died, Al-Haitham got his first practical knowledge of grief.
He’d read about it in stories before, had read the scientific categorizations of it, read poetry that described the hollow it carved in your heart, but no amount of bracing for impact could stop the wind from being knocked out of him.
So when the shadow became flesh, it cut a hole in his stomach wider than the one they’d dug to put her casket in. His knees did not buckle the way the poems said they would. He did not collapse onto the floor. But he’d felt something erode in him like the banks of a river.''he could ask no one else because he’d been the sole bookkeeper to the remaining history of her life.
What a burden to place on an eighteen-year old. What a great and terrible responsibility—knowing that your only record was your memory, vulnerable to warping, to retellings without ever having the original story to reference.
Knowing Kaveh felt a little like that. Not grief—but the shape of it.''It was moments like these in the liminal dark where he wondered—where the little yearning animal inside him wanted more than what he was content with. There was settling against Kaveh’s shoulder, and then his face in Kaveh’s book, in Kaveh’s voice swallowing him whole. Moments like these where he wanted more than just to know the presence of fire, but to feel.
He wanted to ask: do you want to eat me the way I want to eat you? He wanted to reach into the burning thing between them and feel the flesh curdle, to feel the pain so sharp and clear that nothing was muddled. A demarcation so stark he knew which side to stand on, so that he’d know for sure.' -
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hanahaki x2 lol
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flower of my flower
“What do you do with the flowers?”
Al-Haitham paused. “What do you mean?”
“Like, what do you do with the flowers you cough up? Do you keep them or…?”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “What—why would I keep them? I obviously throw them away. Why are you asking?”
“I was just wondering—I mean if you’re not using them—like, if I could possibly…have them?”
Al-Haitham stared at him incredulously. “You want my unrequited love flowers?”
“Yes?” Kaveh flushed red. “Since…since you’re not using them.”
Since you’re not using them—
“What the hell would I be using them for? What the hell are you using them for?”
Al-Haitham has Hanahaki disease and coughs up mourning flowers. Kaveh asks if he can use them for his ascension materials.