Lately, being around you makes Ness feel as if he is slowly suffocating.

It is as if there was something seizing at his chest, clogging his windpipes. Growing. But Ness could handle that—he could handle the asphyxiating throbs at practice, the dizziness at the thought of you, and the uncomfortable feeling that his body might be occupied by more than just himself.

It was a few weeks ago that he discovered, when he knelt over to regurgitate stomach-scraped gastric juice in the toilet, that perhaps there were things that he could not cast off as seasonal sickness.

Blue petals swirled in murky water. They were dainty, beautiful—an acknowledgment of the possibility of the impossible. Those blue rose petals, sheening with gut-wrenching metallic red and muddied by his faults, were once rooted in his lungs. Hanahaki, Ness recalled, he had Hanahaki disease—born of unrequited love.

But Ness did not care.

For if it were for you, his everything, the reason he still believed in magic, then he would not mind bearing it just a little longer. Until he died from this disease, he would love you. He would harbor those roses until they stole his final breath.

Today, he was fighting the urge to leave early during one of Bustard München’s training sessions. His stamina had dwindled far from the magician he once was—the petals fell out more frequently now.

“Kaiser!” Ness chirped affectionately as he made his way over to you. He tasted the bile, fresh on his upturned lips, “Do you want me to get you any water while we’re resting?”