Sunflower | ZARRY

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His throat hurts, but he can't stop coughing, the sound crude and raw in the silent hotel room. Tears make their way from his eyes, passing fluidly across his cheeks and wetting his stubble, only to dangle mockingly on his jaw, and fall in the dark blue sheets, darker spots forming in the cool material. It has been like this for more time he cares to count, too bothered with processing his feelings and dealing with the pain.

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Hanahaki Disease, how fucking awesome.

Zayn would laugh at his bad luck if he didn't felt like spitting his lungs at any second. This thing, this disease, only proves how low he stepped, how pathetic he became on the course of five years; for it to appear after so long it's somehow a welcome surprise, but yet unpleasant.

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Another series of coughs racks his whole body as it bends over itself, his hands curling around his lips, a dozen of bright yellow petals leaving an aftertaste of earth and sun and sorrow on his mouth as they spill, fresh and deadly. Zayn holds them against his chest, his grip so tight some of them get crushed, the clear color darkening slightly, identical to the way his tears darken the sheet covering the bed. They are the proof of his failure, his absolute wretchedness.

To have Hanahaki means to not be loved by the one that matters the most to the person. An illness caused by unrequired love, who consumes its victims slowly, making their lungs fill with roots and flowers; the roots that crush them, the flowers that crumble and come in form of petals through their mouths, suffocating and painful till the body can't handle anymore, the roots squeezing the lugs to the point of asphyxiating the poor sick person to death. The cure, a surgery that together with the roots, also took away the feelings for the person; on rarer cases, the loved person reciprocating their love.

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It's not romantic or beautifully tragic in the way some crappy authors write and girls fantasize about; it's sick and awful, to feel the physical pain of your broken heart wrecking you from inside out. While most people choose to get rid of the flowers undergoing surgery, there are the ones whose love is too strong to let go. A curse, this disease, not a creepy way to show the limits – or lack thereof – love brought someone.

Unfortunately, Zayn's one of these types of person; too coward to confess his real feelings, but too stubborn to forget them, preferring his death over a black space on his memories where his beloved used to be, his mind remembering the person with nothing but an strange detachment, unnatural and fake, or at least, this is the way the recently operated said they feel, on one of those dozens of programs that accompany cases of rare diseases, Hanahaki being the most popular, even if not that rare anymore.

He refuses to forget all the warm smiles, the light green eyes that shine with very simple gestures of affection, rough voice drawling syllables with thick accent. Lazy days of playing video games in the bus, eating pizza and cuddling on too-tight bunks, the smell of sweat and conditioner for curls and something different, like coconut but not that sweet overwhelming all others. Crazy days full of practicing and screaming girls and the urge to lit a fag soothed by long limbs curling around his waist, large hands caressing the sharp bones of his hips in circular motions.

Forgetting about Harry and all the fuzzy, soft emotions – the bad ones too, of days where he couldn't manage the strength to get up, afraid of the surge of sensations, not admitting them not for himself or Allah, less so Harry – would hurt more than this cursed roots squeezing his lungs to death.

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