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Haru's eyes open, his vision consumed by his living room filled with potted flowers, colors vibrant and blinding in their negative meanings. Betrayal, pain, loss, hatred, resentment, feelings Haru has seen in various eyes and has charged his own batteries with them. He places his newest flower on the table, a metallic tang present still but the crimson washed enough for the purple to shine through. Haru smiles. His collection is not done, but he's not far off.
“Desire for forgiveness, huh? From who? Certainly not from you.”
Startled at the voice, Haru looks out the window to the street, where Rin—his infuriatingly good-looking neighbor—stands with a wide grin. He holds a potted flower of his own, likely a new addition for his chock-full garden. A tansy. What did Rin do to warrant such a flower?
“Forgiveness from God,” Haru responds with confidence, because his victim was staring upwards as she coughed and bled and collapsed and died.
Rin snorts. “For trusting you?”
Haru shrugs, approaching the window with easy steps and a dark aura. “Most likely,” he says as he grabs the small pot from Rin's hands, his eyes roaming over the golden buttons. A speck of dry blood is still stuck in a crevice that he's itching to clean.
“It's not for you, handsome,” Rin murmurs, his smirk unmoving but Haru notices the subtle twitch of his nose. If he were in Rin's position, he would react the same way.
“I don't want it. You can't even clean it properly,” Haru grumbles and shoves the pot back towards Rin's chest, who huffs and frowns at the harshness. Grains of earth fall to the ground, and Haru spots the second Rin's potted perfection sours alongside his patience.
“I was in a hurry, you little shit.”
“Excuses. You don't treat a person's final flower that way,” Haru argues, standing still as Rin rushes closer and almost collides against his forehead.
Rin seems to be fuming, and the uncomfortable silence drags on; but Rin's new smile arrives quickly and Haru is really taken aback. It isn't their first quarrel—and it certainly won't be the last—but Rin usually takes longer to calm down.
“Huh, look at you having some morals, Haru. And here I thought you couldn't be more attractive.”
Haru doesn't reply, but his now twitching nose speaks louder. His hammering heartbeat—and unavoidable impulses—force him to move and close the gap between him and Rin and kiss his annoying grin.
But Rin flinches back, avoiding Haru's lips just in time.
Haru isn't surprised, his brain always expects it.
But his heart never does.
Feeling the harshest ever pressure against his abdominal muscles, Haru starts coughing. Cough after cough after cough, unending and violent, the air he needs to breathe leaves his lungs at a hundred miles per hour. It turns into retching, drooling, and thick drops of blood flying off that land on Rin's face.
Rin is unfazed.
Haru, on the other hand, widens his eyes like plates when he feels the ever so scary sensation of slimy petals sliding their way up his esophagus. They block his airway and it takes nothing for him to start choking, sealing his fate considering Rin would never dare help. Haru is not one to give up so easily, however. He closes his watering eyes as he coughs one last time, brutal and exhausting, spitting out a perfectly formed flower, but sticky and covered in saliva and mucus and blood. He would be disgusted if that flower didn't represent such a pure feeling of his about Rin.
“Wow. Not a flower I expected, Haru,” Rin says, making Haru open his eyes, his heavy breathing still trying to recover. His sight is blurry, but even he can discern a bird's-foot trefoil lying on the window sill.
Revenge.
“What kind of vengeance are you planning? And on who? Me?” Rin asks with the most amused voice Haru has ever heard from him. He hates it.
“No,” Haru manages to say. “It's not me.”
“Well, you threw that up, Haru. No one else.”
“It's them,” Haru wipes his mouth as he turns to look at his living room, filled with potted flowers, colors vibrant and blinding in their negative meanings. “They're taking revenge on me.”
Rin's snicker doesn't surprise Haru either. He sounds stupid to his own ears too.
“Keep laughing if you wish. It will happen to you too.”
Rin actually stops laughing and clicks his tongue, the slightest twitch in his amusement only noticeable by Haru once more. “Psh, how so? I haven't done anything to deserve that.”
Haru narrows his eyes, pointing with his finger towards Rin's garden. It is funny really, how Haru realizes only now that Rin has the exact same flowers as he does—and one flower that symbolizes heartbreak that he doesn't have but desperately needs as well—with the exact same hateful meanings.
Rin presses his lips together before he starts acting all high and mighty, something Haru can never take seriously. “Oh come on, it's not my fault I can't love these people back!”
“You're a psychopath,” Haru hisses, crossing his arms with little to no indignation whatsoever.
In fact, he stands still as Rin moves closer, this time almost touching his nose instead of forehead. There's so little distance between them Haru senses the chills running down Rin's spine.
“Takes one to know one,” Rin whispers, his breath tickling Haru's lips. Haru is about to consider trying the kiss again, but it's Rin the one who gives it a shot this time. He approaches him slower, letting the expectation kill Haru second by second.
But Haru knows this game already.
Not only does he dodge the kiss, Haru also shoves Rin's face back with his hand. If Haru were meaner, he would have guided Rin's head to collide against the window, but he wants to be merciful today.
Rin blinks, his expression telling Haru he expected it as well, but as with him, the heart never knows.
With widened eyes, it's Rin's turn to start coughing, just as violently, just as scary, just as depressingly disgusting. It should horrify Haru how Rin bends down and punches his own chest to help the flower move around his insides to avoid it from choking him, but it only serves to amaze Haru.
How it satisfies his need to manipulate people to respect him and love him and worship him, without ever planning to give anything in return. When they find out, only flowers with negative meanings are coughed out as they die. It's fascinating.
“Fuck,” Rin curses, finally coughing less as he clutches onto his flower in his hand. Haru doesn't have to ask which one it is, the yellow color that peeks through tells him everything.
“Such a shame,” Haru says, raising a hand to wipe away a drop of blood from Rin's lips. “I would have loved to add that one to my collection.”
Rin cackles. “Who says you can't?”
“Us. You're still alive,” Haru says, very matter-of-fact. It makes him smile how it doesn't faze Rin at all.
“Keep dreaming, babe, you'll have to kill me yourself. I will add your final flower to my garden, and something tells me it'll be pretty soon,” Rin says, his smirk bigger and hungrier.
Haru huffs, satisfied, and with an enormous desire to ravish that shit-eating grin until there’s nothing left.
“We'll see.”