A Garden of Regret /Oumasai/Saiouma Hanahaki AU

6 Months

3rd Person POV:
Six months ago, Kaede had started getting very serious about her relationship with Shuichi. They had been dating for about a year, and Kaede had always been pretty relaxed, but when Kokichi had started talking to Shuichi, and being more friendly with him, she had started being very intense about their partnership. She became more possessive, not letting Shuichi hang out with anyone besides the friends she knew and trusted and of course herself. She spent more and more time with him, until they were practically glued together. They had more dates, they gave each other lots of gifts, and were always being romantic. When Kaede had become clingier and more controlling, hugging her, Kokichi started to feel an odd and horrible feeling in his lungs, like something was twisting and tangling inside of his chest. Around a month after the change in behavior between the two, he had coughed up a flower petal.

As time passed, the occasional petal became bloody handfuls of honeysuckle petals. Nearly every ten minutes he would cough out the blood covered plants.
He became weaker and weaker, until the point where he skipped five or six days of school a month, and when he was at school, he spent P.E in the nurse's office due to his body being drained of strength, only needing to be hit with a ball to sustain a painful injury.

He told his friends more and more lies. A lie to cover up the weakness, a lie to cover up an exposed lie, a lie to cover up that lie, until no one knew whether he was lying or not.
Soon, Kokichi fell victim to constant bullying from Kaede and her friends due to him trying to befriend Shuichi. His friends asked him, begged him to go to a teacher for help after one day he met up with them with a broken leg and a huge cut on his face, after Kaede pushed him down the stairs.

But he never did.
He knew that the bullying would only get worse if he did.

So he lied.

"Haha, yeah, I told the teacher! She got detention and community service!"

When Kaede kicked him in the face:

"She got detention."

When Kaede threw his backpack with his phone, money, student ID, and other important items in it into the girls bathroom:

"Kaede got community service."

Eventually, Kokichi decided that he should just try to please her.
It worked. Sort of.

Kokichi stayed away from Kaede and Shuichi, and Kaede ignored him. The two got closer and closer, and Kokichi got sicker and sicker.
It took a while, but his friend's noticed how weak Kokichi was getting, how often he coughed, and how Kokichi practically lived in the bathroom.

They tried to find out what was wrong with him. They tried to help him.

But Kokichi wouldn't let them.

It hurt them to see Kokichi so sick, but they didn't know what to do, and eventually it became a new normal.