Love in my Lungs

Marcy has always had fragile lungs.

Well. No. That is not quite right. Marcy knows always, knows the concept of this has been true for as long as I can remember, and there is evidence that this has been true for even longer than that. She has always had a liking for dragons and magic and other fantasy settings. She has always flapped her hands when excited and rocked her body when filled with joy. She has always been in love with both her best friends, with Sasha’s steel determination and Anne’s soft kindness.

Her lungs, however, only started failing her on this fateful sleepover of 2016. She can still pinpoint the exact moment it happened. The night air was cold on Marcy’s skin, The Ring of the Lords was playing in the background, both her best friends were asleep, and it suddenly dawned on her that oh.

They don’t love her back.

Her whole body had seized, then, violently enough for Anne to stir. Marcy vividly remembers the petals running up her throat, the taste of the leaves at the back of her tongue. She’d tiptoed her way to the bathroom and pulled out an entire daffodil out of her mouth. Then she’d sneaked her way back into Anne’s bedroom and had pretended everything was fine.

She never really got better from this. On the plus side, it never got worse either. People started to notice her coughing fits, her lack of stamina. They chalked it up to Marcy being Marcy. After a while, they forgot the poor state of her lungs wasn’t an always. No one ever found out about the flowers growing in her insides. Marcy never let them catch even a hint of it, and no one ever suspected sweet Marcy, naive Marcy, to keep any meaningful secret at all.

Marcy has had fragile lungs for a while. Hanahaki is not a life-threatening disease. It is painful- just like those feelings of hers are painful, just like this terrible love with nowhere to go is painful. Hacking out flowers is not a pleasant experience, and more often than not Marcy has found herself tasting her own blood on those petals.

Andrias’s sword is, surprisingly, less painful than her coughing fits.

It’s the shock, the rationale part of her brain, the one still running on autopilot, thinks. Everything else is focused on the sudden sensory overload. The flames bursting out of her chest. The strong stench of burnt meat. Her heartbeat speeding up in her ears. Shock dulls pain. It’s a form of dissociation.

“I’m,” going to die. Going to die. Going to die. She is going to die. “I’m sorry.”

Andrias tries to pull his sword out. She can feel the blade jerk back within her body. But he can’t. The sword is caught up in too much flesh and too many bones. Or rather, no. It’s tangled. Tangled in vines and roots and the sickness in her lungs and none of it matters because she is going to die.

“I’m sorry for everything.” She forces the words out, just as Andrias forces the sword out; and at last Marcy crumbles, in a pool of blood and petal, as her life and her love both spill out of her for the whole world to see.

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