A Gladiolus Heart

Chapter 1

Hello everyone. I've been wanting to write a story for these two for a long while now and here we are. This has been my otp since I was young and I decided to revisit Inazuma Eleven again. While I do enjoy Ares and Orion, my heart still goes to the original storyline. Thus, this fic is following the events of the original anime, during the FFI. This happens right after Fubuki returns from being injured.

Hope you all enjoy this GouFubu content. There seriously needs to be more fic about them and since I am thirsty for them, I'll provide hehehe.

Disclaimer: I don't own Inazuma Eleven and any of its characters. I also don't own the iodea of the Hanahaki Disease. But I did add some of my ideas to this fictional disease.

Enjoy!

Hanahaki Disease was a nightmare that came overnight. It started spreading five years ago but no one knew how and why it started. It just came so suddenly to several victims— a rapidly spreading virus.

When it first struck, the streets were filled with petals and many cities all over the world smelled like flowers. People here and there coughed up petals of different colors and hearts were aching all around. Some people even died due to the blooming flowers tightening around the heart and extending to the lungs, causing respiratory problems and other complications.

Hospitals were full of people suffering from the same symptoms. The government had to fund medical researches to find information on its causes and a cure for this spreading disease. It was a world-wide state of emergency. Eventually, studies have found that it was an effect of intense psychological and emotional attachment towards another person and if those feelings were unreturned then it led to the growth of flowers in one's heart.

In other words, unrequited love was the cause of Hanahaki Disease. How and why that's possible is still unknown to this day but only people with unrequited love were affected. All the rest who were without romantic love or involved in a healthy, reciprocal relationship were clear from the virus.

Thus, psychology and medical sciences worked hand in hand and found that one of the ways to cure the disease is for the victim's object of affection to reciprocate their romantic feelings. Another way of cure would be removing the flower through surgery but it also meant that one would lose their affection towards their beloved. There were also extreme cases where the removal of the flower would lead the victim to no longer have the ability to fall in love again.

There were many complaints in medical methods such as surgery and the production of pills. Thus, various therapies were developed such as hypnosis as an attempt to forget the feelings but it was only a short-term remedy. As of the moment, the best way was through surgical removal.

Many people called it poetic that one would grow a flower or two in their heart as proof of their intense feelings. But most called it cruel that one-sided love could actually end up killing people in one of the most painful yet beautiful ways. It's almost as if things were better if one would not love at all.

It was a sad reality.

Fubuki Shirou has witnessed it several times in his life and it was not uncommon that he was often the cause of it. It filled him with guilt when many of his female schoolmates fell for him, yet he cannot force himself to love them the way they love him. Thankfully, none of them have perished as they had chosen to have the flower, along with their feelings, surgically removed.

One of his past admirers had been his fellow teammate, Konko. She was a kind and sweet girl and it made him feel bad when he rejected her. But she understood his feelings and went under surgery. Nevertheless, they remained friends although some things between them inevitably changed. But she was still kind, and she held no ill-feelings towards him. He was grateful for that because he truly treasured their friendship.