Canon: Remove if not applicable.William got used to coughing up flower petals at a young age.
It wasn’t an unusual thing in the first place, it was a common disease that was usually left alone unless the person afflicted by it coughed up very large amounts of petals. But removing the disease had the side effect of the removal of the feelings that caused them, usually the love toward a specific person as that was usually the cause. Though the disease had mutated over time and wasn’t solely caused by one-sided attraction, and if a surgery to stop it was performed badly, it could leave a person entirely void of emotions. Coughing up petals was more an annoyance than anything else, to most who suffered from the affliction. Mostly they might complain about a sore throat and some inopportune times they had spat up a few petals. And William had to spit out petals far more often than other people who had the disease. But generally, he had other problems that he was more concerned about.
William had first contracted it when he was six, and ever since then he coughed up all sorts of flowers, born from a wide range of emotions. He didn’t know why he had the disease, or this variation of it, perhaps he simply had a mutated version of it in his genes and had had bad luck. Because any person was capable of making him cough petals.
Thankfully, not everyone knew the different meanings of flowers. Even more importantly, Licht didn’t know all their meanings in Clover, as they could be quite different from the meanings as the elves knew them. Because some of those meanings felt very personal.
“Only a narcissist would spit up flowers over themselves,” Yami remarked, when he came across William outside Castle Clover. He had been in deep conversation with Licht, and as a result his lap was full of various petals. When he heard Yami’s voice so suddenly behind him, he spat up a few petals of round-leaved sundew. He had to extract one of the leaves by hand when it partially caught in his throat, and he coughed because of it, for a change without coughing up more flowers. The sundew was one of the more unpleasant ones to cough up, he wasn’t exactly fond of them. Yami scowled, scoffed a “ew,” before taking a breath from his cigarette, and William could feel Licht bristle inside his mind.
William pushed himself up off his feet and away from the castle wall, and petals rained from his lap and his clothes, was caught by the wind and swept away in a flurry.
Yami’s scowl shifted, one eyebrow rising and the other lowering.
As he rose, William dragged the back of a hand across his mouth, to wipe off any saliva or pistils or small petals that might have caught on his lips. He picked a whole bindweed flower from the collar of his robe and let it be swept up by the wind out of his hand.
“What’re you doing hiding away over here, anyway?” Yami grumbled, stepping closer to invade William’s space. William leaned against the wall to look up at Yami, and when Yami put a hand against the wall to loom over him, William sputtered around small motherwort flowers that stuck to his tounge before he could speak. He felt a shiver run down his spine at the proximity and the way the man’s scent and mana invaded his senses.
“Just taking a breather, before I return to my headquarters,” he said, a partial lie. You never were entirely able to ‘take a breather’ and get away from all other people when you had one stuck in your mind. Not that he was complaining— at least not very much. It was simply that, that sometimes it would be nice to have some total privacy, which he never had. Licht might retreat to the far back of William’s mind sometimes, and seem as if he was not there, but William still knew, and he knew that the elf might still watch through his eyes and listen through his ears. “And you, Yami?”
“My legs ran off.” William shook his head at the answer, pretending like his heart wasn’t beating hard in his chest or that his hands felt sweaty. He could feel Licht’s attention shift inside him, but the elf had this far never figured out why his body reacted the way it did when he was around Yami. He turned his gaze down — felt his heart’s pace quicken a little as he ran his gaze along Yami’s body — and looked down at his legs, and then back up. “They look very present to me,” he said sweetly, and Yami breathed out a cloud of smoke that tangled in the feathers on William’s helmet. “You sure got a smart mouth on you, Vangeance," Yami remarked. William’s raised eyebrow was not visible to Yami, but he likely heard it on his voice. “You do realize the man is not actually your legs?” Yami snorted. “Sure he isn’t.”
“Or you could just walk or use a broom. I could make you one if you don’t have one accessible.” William smiled at him, but when Yami leaned down a bit to stare him straight in his face, he felt his face freeze in that expression. Honestly, this man… “You want to get rid of me that badly huh, William?”
William was about to protest, when he felt flowers in his throat and he started to cough. He leaned forward, a hand to his chest, and Yami straightened up and watched him. William spat out whole bright red roses of Sharon.
William’s breath was ragged, and he leaned against Yami for a few heartbeats as he tried to collect himself. When he straightened himself out, he saw Yami pick a flower out of William’s robe collar, though there were more of them stuck in it.
He looked at it for a few moments. Then Yami bared his teeth in a feral grin and he leaned closer, so that William had to tip his head back to look him in the eye. He could practically feel the flowers bloom inside of his stomach, and knew that he would be having to deal with an unusually large amount of them throughout the day. His cheeks flushed, the color partially hidden by his helmet, and when Yami crashed his lips to William’s, William let out a startled noise from somewhere between his throat and his nose.
He should push him away but— but when you’re suddenly being kissed by the person whom you have quietly been falling more and more in love over the course of a decade kisses you, it’s hard to resist kissing back. At least for William it was. He stretched up into it, felt waves of heat roll through him, into every little bit of him, and he felt his body respond to the tongue that slipped in past his lips and the hand that touched his jaw.
Yami broke the kiss when they both felt the presence of mana approaching, and Yami called out over his shoulder when he pulled away, drowning out William’s moan of protest at the loss. “You’re fucking late!”
“I was right on time!” the spatial mage protested. “You’re the one who wandered off, Mr. Yami. Ah, hello, Captain Vangeance,” he added in greeting to William once he caught sight of him.
Yami ignored Finral’s words. “Ah, there it went.” Yami picked up his fallen cigarette, and ground the heel of his boot against a small flame in the grass. William saw Finral spot the flowers that had fallen from his lips, and he saw his cheeks flush. William froze, realizing that he must understand their meaning, and maybe the young man saw it in his eyes or simply thought it was none of his business, but Finral said nothing about them.
“Let’s go, Finral, I gotta crap.” The tone in Finral’s “Eeehh…” was pretty close to what William felt about that line. It was one of those things Yami said that made him wonder why he liked the man at all. “See ya, Vangeance,” Yami offered in parting greeting, and William mumbled a few parting words in return. He could feel a wave of petals growing up his throat and choke him.
When the spatial gate closed, William wilted to the ground and flowers, shattered and whole, fell past his lips and onto the ground and he retched.
What was that? he heard Licht’s words echo in his mind from an odd distance, and William sank back against the wall again. “I don’t know,” William pressed out past pants and retches, truthfully but probably not in the way that Licht understood it. He scooped a bunch of flowers as he heard Licht comment that your body is behaving strangely, and William fumbled for a reply for a few moments before he found a simple one. “That is a natural physical response, that’s all.”
A hard gust of wind caught hold of the petals and the flowers, and in a storm of red, they twirled around him and sailed toward the sky as if possessed. William followed their journey up, until they were too small for his eyes to catch any more, and the evidence of his feelings had fully disappeared.