tw: blood and vomit.
also, I made an error in chapter one about hinawa's flower color and didn't catch it in my editing. I mistakenly wrote it as the white camellia, which means "waiting," and not the yellow camellia, which means "longing" (and which is his flower). sorry!
Over the next few days, Hinawa kept to himself, and whenever he felt the familiar tickle of flower petals in his throat, he excused himself to the restroom to cough it up. The flower petals were usually accompanied by blood, and in excess, vomit.
"Lieutenant Hinawa, can I speak to you?" Captain Akitaru Obi asked him one day.
"Yes, sir."
Hinawa got up from his desk and followed him into his office. He waited as Obi turned to look at him and gave him a grim look.
"You've been taking a lot of time out the past couple of weeks, Lieutenant," he said. "Everyone else in the company thinks that it'd be best if you take a few days off and rest."
"What?" Hinawa asked incredulously. "I'm fine. There's no need for everyone to go through all of that trouble."
"Really?" Obi asked. "Because we think that if you had some time off, then you can heal better."
"I'm fine, really," he said. "No need to make special accommodations for me."
I don't want to tell anyone just yet about my illness. If they knew, they'd all treat me differently, and I can't have them doing that. Hinawa sighed and turned to leave. Especially Maki.
"Lieutenant, if you want to talk to someone, then there's bound to be someone here at Company 8 for you to talk to," Obi told him.
Hinawa stared at him. "Yeah, maybe, but I don't want to drag everyone into my personal problems."
As Hinawa returned to his desk chair, Maki looked at him worriedly. He knew that she would undoubtedly be one of the biggest ones to worry about him, followed by Tamaki, Iris, and Lisa. He felt her eyes bore holes into him until he glanced up at her.
"You should stare at your work as much as you're staring at me, Maki," he said.
"S-Sorry, Lieutenant!" she said. "I just thought that you'd at least take a day off since you've been so sick."
"I'm perfectly capable of working while sick," he said. "Besides, it's just the flu."
"Yeah, you're right."
She grabbed a file from the stack next to her and looked through it. She set it down on the desk and began typing it up into the laptop on the desk in front of her. "Maki, I can still carry my workload as well," Hinawa said. He knew that she had taken on the majority of his paperwork for him so that he wouldn't have as much to do, thereby giving herself more work and him hardly any work at all.
"Lieutenant, I don't mind doing all of this work," Maki said. "Besides, you need to rest. We have training today with Arthur and Shinra."
Maki was right; if he was to help train the problem children, then he needed to be in top form.
"Can you get me up when it's time?" he asked her.
"Of course," she told him.
Hinawa headed down the hall to his bedroom and turned on the light. He laid back on his bed and closed his eyes.
Can I ever bring myself to tell everyone about my illness? he wondered. He sat up and coughed lightly, and saw yellow-colored camellia petals fall into his hand. There was no blood or vomit — just petals.
Hinawa's head began to pound. He didn't want to believe it; he had tossed aside every inkling of truth he had of his Hanahaki diagnosis. But here was the hard truth in front of him: yellow camellia petals clutched in his fist. If he were a Third Generation, he'd have burnt them immediately. Instead, he stupidly tossed the fistful of flowers into his garbage can and watched them flutter to the bottom.
I'm not dying. I don't have Hanahaki Disease. I'm not dying, he repeated, until it became a mantra of sorts.
He clutched his chest, where he knew the disease had already taken root. He felt a panic attack rising. He needed air, fresh air.
"Lieutenant, are you okay?" he heard Maki call from the doorway.
"I'm fine. I just need some air," Hinawa replied.
"Let's go up to the roof, you can get some fresh air there," she told him.
Hinawa followed her out of his room and to the stairwell leading up to the roof. He looked up the stairs, hesitating. He had never had any problems before with stairs, so why is he so worried about the stairwell now?
"Let me go open the door so that some fresh air can come down this way," Maki said. She hurried ahead of him and opened the door. He could hear Arthur and Shinra arguing on the roof, and Maki began yelling at them to be quiet.
Now that I'm getting some fresh air, I'm feeling loads better, Hinawa said. He slowly began his ascent and climbed onto the roof of the cathedral to a scene of chaos.
Arthur and Shinra were busy arguing while Sister Iris and Tamaki sat nearby on a blanket. Hinawa sighed in frustration; this was not what he wanted to be dealing with while he was sick.
"You two shut up," he said. "It's time for training."
"Yes, sir."
"We're going to run through some simple procedures with you guys," Maki said.
"Lieutenant, are you sure you're up for this?" Shinra asked.
"I'm perfectly capable of handling myself. I'm not that sick," Hinawa said sternly.
"Just wondering."
Maki laughed nervously. She was glad that the lieutenant was feeling so well. But she still wanted him to take a little break to recover.
Hinawa felt the silky feel of a camellia petal crop up into the back of his throat. He ignored it as he watched Maki, Arthur, and Shinra train. Just this once, he wanted to be with his company as their lieutenant, not as an outsider. He cleared his throat and felt a single petal fill up his mouth. He turned away and coughed it out.
This is not the time to be coughing out flowers, he told himself.
He watched as Maki single-handedly felled both Shinra and Arthur. They groaned as they both came to their feet; Maki dusted her hands off and walked over to Hinawa.
"It's your turn, Lieutenant," she told him with a smile.
"Maki, I don't think I should be training while I'm sick," he said.
"Are you so sick that you can't train?" she asked him. Her violet eyes skimmed over him.
"N-No," he lied. He hated lying to Maki, but he couldn't bear to tell her the actual truth: that the reason why he was sick was because of her.
"Lieutenant, if you don't feel like training with us, we'd be more than glad to train with Maki," Shinra said. He kicked Arthur. "Right?"
"Yes, we'd be more than glad to train with the ogress," Arthur said.
"Who are you calling a gorilla cyclops?!" Maki yelled, punching Arthur and Shinra.
And to think that fate chose her as the one I had to fall in love with, Hinawa thought, sighing. He walked over to Maki and tapped her on the shoulder.
"I owe you for this," he said.
"Yeah, don't worry about it," she told him cheerfully. "Go get some rest."
Hinawa headed back inside. Something had to give eventually.
