Chapter Text
Colin Bridgerton’s world starts to end the day he coughs up yellow daffodils.
He’s in Italy somewhere, the details of the place lost on him, and he’s blisteringly, mind-numbingly drunk. Truthfully, he can’t remember the last time he was this drunk - the world around him is a blur of colors and shapes, his body marked up by the sweaty grips of whoever he’s close enough to to dance with. There are about a thousand types of alcohol burning through his bloodstream, and even with all of that, he can still feel the echo of everything that he’s been trying to forget.
The club he’s at is dingy and dark, but they didn’t require a cover and the liquor is cheap and the girls are, even through his haze, pretty. The music reverberates through his skull, and through flashes of bright, blistering light, he can see couples on the dancefloor, wrapped tightly around each other. Some of them aren’t even kissing, just dancing, but the ache of their closeness hits him square in the chest.
He tries to push through the loneliness that grips him, tries to lean into it when a pretty girl with black hair sidles up to him and yells something in Italian he doesn’t understand. The Colin of even a few weeks ago would have grabbed her immediately, would have crushed her close and grinded on her and then, more likely than not, brought her back to his hotel room before the clock struck midnight. He’d have laid her out across his bed, pressed inside her, mouthed at the hinge of her jaw until she came, and then sent her on her way without even knowing her name.
The Colin of today , though, feels her nails in his skin like tiny pinpricks of knives.
He stumbles away from her seeking hands. “Scusa,” he yells at her affronted look, the only Italian he knows. “Scusa, scusa.”
She steps closer, apparently not one to be deterred, and says something again in Italian. The lights of the club flicker across her face, throwing the sharp line of her throat and the dark gaze of her auburn eyes into relief. She’s beautiful, undoubtedly, but panic claws at his throat, burns up his lungs, and he suddenly realizes that if he doesn’t get out of here, he’s going to hurl across this club’s sticky floor.
“Scusa!” He yells, one last time, before he turns on his heel and starts to shove his way through the crowd to the back door.
It’s a landmine, trying to avoid drunk Italians and tourists alike, but eventually he stumbles through a door marked ‘EXIT’ and out into a dim, darkened alleyway that smells distinctly like urine and alcohol. The cool night air is a balm on his skin, but even so, he has to reach out and brace his hands flat on the brick wall in front of him just to stay upright. It’s so much quieter out here, and his heartbeat is so loud in his ears.
It’s not clear how long he lingers in the alley, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth to quell the urge to vomit. It takes some time, but eventually he feels okay enough that he thinks he can straighten up and go back inside.
And then he remembers the girl: her long red nails and her glossy curtain of black hair and her wicked, captivating smile and the way she had so clearly wanted him, and the nausea rushes up so fast that he doubles over and retches before he’s even aware of what’s happening.
It’s a kind of retching unlike anything he’s ever experienced - it burns, just the same as it always does, but there’s no splattering sick on the pavement, no acidic sting in his nostrils. Instead, something tickles his throat as he coughs and heaves, and when he opens his eyes and comes face to face with the result of his throw-up, he blinks in shock.
There, sitting on the pavement right below his open, panting mouth, is a pile of yellow petals.
--
In his hotel room, he spreads out his collection of flower petals on the desk and stands over them. The blur of alcohol has mostly faded, his mind clear. When he’d first gathered the petals and shoved them into his pocket, he’d been sure he’d return to his hotel room with something other than what he thought he saw - like he’d empty his pocket and pull out a receipt, or a piece of paper. Anything else that had magically transformed in his drunken haze.
But no. Those are petals, and they came out of his body.
Still staring in mute fascination, he fumbles blindly for his phone and pulls up a Google search. Firstly, he looks up yellow flowers, scouring through pictures to try and determine what exactly he’s looking at, and eventually comes to the conclusion that they’re daffodil petals. Then, he returns to Google, types: ‘threw up flower petals?’ And browses the responding searches
The first few links are useless - links to books about flowers or fictional stories - but, down the bottom of the second page, he finds a web article titled Hanahaki Disease . The blurb under the link indicates that it’s about a Japanese disease where people do indeed throw up flowers.
Hands trembling, Colin clicks on it.
Words jump out at him immediately: one-sided love , starts with petals and progresses to whole flowers , increasing pain, terminal.
Terminal.
His phone falls to the desk with a loud clatter, disrupting the petals, but he barely cares. Everything suddenly seems very loud - he can hear the rush of blood in his ears, the pounding of his heart in his chest cavity. Every breath slices through him like a blade, the inimitable curiosity of how many more of these do I have left?
It is an astoundingly lonely thing, Colin thinks, to face the inevitability of your own death.