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The first time she met Nikolai, it was unspeakably rude.
“When did you have hanahaki?”
It’s maybe the rudest thing a total stranger has ever said to her. Lucy whips around, some mix of off-guard and in-disbelief that’s quickly seeping into vicious, boiling, abyssal anger. The man she sees is tall - taller than even her, with long hair that cascades loosely around his shoulders and one sharp eye. The other is covered in a large, blooming sunflower.
They’re in the empty pews of a church. She’d been looking at the stained glass. They say Judas died of flowers.
“What?” She snaps. “Do you want to die?”
“Ah ah ah,” the man says, then smiles like he’s found a joke. “I just thought you looked rather dour for someone that’d already had their flowers taken already! It surprised me.”
He doesn’t seem taken off guard by her at all. She hadn’t even noticed his presence till he -
What kind of response is that!?
He didn’t get any less rude at all.
“Haha,” Lucy says. “Get out.”
“This is a church,” he protests. “It’s open to everyone.”
It’s actually closed at the moment, and the only reason she’s here at all is because she’d slept the night in its sanctuary, then woken up with a stiff jaw in Anne’s Room. When she left her own private world, she hadn’t wanted to leave the church. It had reminded her of - something. Her childhood, maybe, the old orphanage and endless Sundays in places she didn’t want to be, herself, praying. Atsushi, maybe. She saw the stained glass in the morning light and the blood on their flowers and hadn’t been able to look away.
She looks back at the morning sun.
The man steps back into her field of view. For a half second, she thinks he’ll apologize. “Your veins are still prominent from the infestation,” he explains. “Not to mention the tissues of your mouth are still red. You still have visible gland swelling in your neck, and broken blood vessels on your visible skin, and your nailbeds are still hanahaki-pink. It’s obvious.”
It’s actually not obvious at all, and all of those things could easily be from like, anything else. That low, boiling anger bubbles over. Lucy digs her heel into a seed at the back of her shoe, feels Ann tingle under her skin, and lets it yank the whole world around her.
Except, when she reappears in Ann’s room, with all intention to kill the man and be done with it, he isn’t there. She waits, realizes he simply will not appear here, screams into the hem of Ann’s dress, and leaves back into the real world.
The man is still there.
He blinks at her. “Oh my! You should really be more careful with abilities - using one in a church..how scandalous!”
She scowls. “Like you didn’t use one to avoid mine just now?”
“That’s a secret.” He winks, then extends a hand. The hem of his suit sleeve has ruffles. “I think we’ve started wrong - I’m Nikolai.”
“I didn’t start shit,” she says.
“I can’t help it,” he sighs. “I’m - oh... a philosopher, of sorts.”
“Oh my god,” she says, agitated at the fact that she isn’t just leaving.
“What is philosophy but science, and what is science but the study of the natural world..?” He cocks his head, and he’s smiling. “And what is hanahaki but the joining of the two…? But this is rude - I want to know about you!”
Lucy, who can no longer just get rid of him, because he won’t appear in Anne’s room, and who has never committed a murder in the real world, resorts to thinking of all the sharpest things she could say. He read her like an open book. It itches down her throat, through her veins, like she’s still being poisoned from the inside out. It’s odd, the way so many of her memories have been filtered through a thin, emotionless sieve - the way she can remember smiling, remember feeling so overwhelmed with love, but no longer feels any of it at all. Her memories are glassy and cold in retrograde. Odd how she remembers feeling so much, and no longer feels anything at all, and then feels so much about the fact that she doesn’t feel anything.
It’s like there are still thorns in her. “Lucy,” she introduces, takes his hand and doesn’t let it go. “Question for question, right? Did you have sunflowers?”
Sunflower eyepatch. Fabric flower so large she hadn’t realized it was an eyepatch at all, at first. There are sunflowers embroidered across Nikolai’s suit, blooming wide around his hip, red ones over his chest and along his collar, stark colors on a pale blue fabric. The whole thing couldn’t be more - what was his wording - obvious.
“Oh, no. Not sunflowers.” Nikolai shakes his head, and his hair rustles against itself. His free hand comes up to tap his eyepatch. “Horrible case, though. I’m sure it would have killed me.”
She snorts. “And you still can’t get over it?”
Some cases of hanahaki are terminal, overgrown, overpowering. An internal infestation that eats its host alive. Hanahaki starts in the heart, crowds through the chest, slips into the stomach, moves into the lungs, and then causes death by asphyxiation. Back then, she used to think that was the merciful type. Hers wasn’t that. Some cases are chronic - painful, fatiguing, unending. It scared her so badly, back then, the realization that if she wanted, she could live with it forever. She remembers sobbing for weeks before hacking them out.
Maybe she’s projecting a little. All that, and she still can’t get over it.
“Mm.” Nikolai’s eye glistens.“Did you know some cases of hanahaki can reach the eyes?”
Lucy startles. “The eyes?”
“It’s rare for hanahaki to move outside the chest,” he says. “Most people would never survive that long. But the lungs are connected to the entire facial system. They connect to the throat, which connects to the nose, which connects to the eyes. Sinus system, you see? Seeds can absolutely embed that deep..! My my, for someone so trigger happy, you really don’t know your anatomy. The whole body is connected! Hanahaki can creep anywhere, if well fed.”
For a moment, although only a moment, Lucy’s boiling irritation subsides. In its place there’s a deep, yawning thing. A feeling like horror, but not quite, or maybe like empathy, but more malicious. Nikolai has one eye hidden and the other fractured. His iris looks like stained glass. His pupil looks split in half, blooming out like a flower.
“Huh,” she finally says. Then, “Do you regret it?”
Hanahaki like that is the kind people die for. She once would’ve killed for less.
And Nikolai -
Nikolai laughs. His shoulders shake, his teeth show, vibrations down to his fingertips. He gasps like he’s coughing. His eyes glimmer with tears of laughter. The hair on Lucy’s arms stands on end.
They’re still holding hands. His grasp tightens, and he takes her hand with both of his. “Oh no,” he says. “It was the best thing to ever happen to me.”
-
Nikolai always smells like flowers.
-
Lucy was nineteen when she met Atsushi.
She really barely knew him at all. They only knew each other a few scant weeks. She had been so sure back then that he’d leave her. She’d been so sure he wouldn’t want her. She’d been so sure he was too good to be true. At first, he was so bright and brilliant to her, she hated him. But then he kept being there, and he kept being too good to be true, and he didn’t leave her. He was her prince charming. They’d met under a convoluted set of circumstances - he’d still been dealing with the unwanted consequences and ramifications of discovering he had a volatile, dangerous ability, and she had been… herself.
No one had ever liked her before in any real and true sense, never liked her enough to look into her and stay around, and in turn Lucy had decided not to like anyone else either. She threw people into Anne’s abyss with spite, which she still does, but not often, and she used her ability for gemstone smuggling, which she also still does, but only sometimes.
They met briefly. They met horribly. They never even exchanged numbers.
Nikolai, now an acquaintance, tilts his head against his knuckles. “You remember him?”
“I remember everything,” Lucy says, although it isn’t true.
The memories of him, of then, of that time, exist in isolation - incomplete, washed out and worn thin. Like a stage-play without sound, or a script without actors, or a painting without color. She remembers Atsushi, the verdant red sheen of her own blood on the checkered floor of her heart, remembers counting petals, remembers being scared, the way it felt endless, the long stretches of time that could’ve been days or weeks as she curled up in Anne’s room, rotting with flowers from the inside out, safe from the world of people that didn’t want her. She always needed an escape to survive. The orphanage, his scars, her scars. It had scared her so badly that she wanted something, and that she wasn’t good enough for it, and that for the first time, she wanted something that she could maybe even have.
The way her chest sparked and voice wavered, thinking: you don’t want me. Remembers thinking: he might want me, and it scaring her even more.
She didn’t know him at all.
-
“Anne’s room?” Nikolai asks. He laughs. “That’s where you were trying to get me when we first met, I suppose? Throw me in an abyss?”
They’re talking about the time she tried to kill Atsushi.
“It’s my heart,” Lucy explains. “Not many people ever survived it.”
-
These days, she keeps an awkward, almost compulsive record on him. Nakajima Atsushi, Nakajima Atsushi. Nakajima Atsushi. Nakajima Atsushi. Nakajima Atsushi. Nakajima Atsushi. She follows his social media accounts. She follows the social media account of his employer. She knows the menu of the coffee shop he frequents. She keeps up with every time he appears in the local newspapers, although it’s only happened twice. Sometimes, she even lingers in the places she knows she can find him. She watches him laugh, and studies his smile. She plays every memory of him over again and again in her head like a broken record. She’s memorized his voice, the mole underneath his left eye, the uneven splotch of his tan. Lucy knows where he lives, where he works, what he wants - he never kept it secret from her.
Lucy understands why she used to love Atsushi in a clinical, overcast sense. He understood her in a way she had never been understood before. He came back for her when no one ever had. That kind of thing.
She can never recreate the feeling.
-
Nikolai Gogol is a twenty three year old man from either Russia or Ukraine, although they met in Czechia. Although he calls himself a ‘philosopher,’ and often goes on long tangents to avoid giving a simple answer to anything, he’s actually a botanist. “I have a small background in animal sciences,” he explains. There’s something silvery and laughing in his tone, but that isn’t uncommon with him. “And.. human anatomy.”
“Stop dissecting plants in my studio,” Lucy says flatly.
He shrugs, “Kick me out.”
Last time she kicked him out, she’d turned around and closed the door to her studio behind her, then found him lounging in front of her three steps away. He’s never told her his ability, but she suspects it has to do with how easily he disassembles - anything, really. And how terrifyingly at-ease he is with her own deadly, nightmarish ability.
Then again, that could also just be Nikolai. He’s unnerving in a way she sometimes doesn’t notice, because she’s unnerving in almost all the same ways. “What are you dissecting?”
“Roses,” he says. “Rosa gymnocarpa. You had roses, right?”
Typical. It’s unbearably cliche - roses, of all things. They made thorns and fruit inside of her. She bled from the inside out. She hadn’t known that roses made fruits until her own infestation, where they bloomed in her stomach, kindly, like they wanted her to feed herself on the love that was eating her inside out. Lucy learned that the inside of a rose fruit was full of large, hard, shelled seeds that were wrapped in needling, itchy, inedible fuzz. They tore up her throat when she threw them up.
“Obviously,” Lucy says, unimpressed.
Nikolai glances at the project taking up much of the room and snickers. “Obviously.”
In the months she’s known him, Lucy has learned pressing a topic that he isn’t interested in with Nikolai is tantamount to signing up for a mirror maze. Pressing a topic he is interested in is barely better.
Background in animal science and human anatomy. Lucy has still never told him… “You asked when we met how long ago I took out my flowers, right?”
Nikolai brightens comically. “You still haven’t told me!”
“Guess,” Lucy says. He loves guessing games.
“Ooo,” Nikolai tilts his head.
There’s a freezing intensity to being under Nikolai’s attention. It’s not hot, far from scalding, not even warm, but her heartbeat picks up anyway. He studies every subject like a logic game, a philosophical dilemma, a paradox. He looks at the world like a puzzle he’s already solved, and like he’s the only person to have ever solved it. It’s frightening feeling.
Lucy doesn’t know much about Nikolai besides his fixation with hanahaki, general detachment from most things, and interest in her art. When she asked why he liked her, he lied to her face.
“Let’s see… based on your physiological markers…” he hums. “Six months?”
“Thirteen,” Lucy says.
“My my,” Nikolai says.
The damage to her body refuses to heal. It’s like her organs forgot their homeostasis. She mutters, “It’s not unheard of for hanahaki recoveries to be that slow.”
“Not unheard of,” Nikolai agrees mockingly. His eye slides to her project, again.
Most of Lucy’s studio is taken up by a stained glass garden.
Floor-to-ceiling. The whole studio apartment is a patchwork quilt of shaped glass and gemstones. Most of the materials are stolen. The glass, the precious metals, the precious gems. She learned herself how to pick up the pieces and put them together. It looks like a mess. She’ll often stare at it for hours. It looks religious, like a picture in the window of a church. The light shines through it. It’s centerpoint, though, it’s centerpoint - petals in amber, flowers in glass. They’ll never rot. They’ll never degrade. They’ve been perfectly, morbid preserved. It’s a labyrinth of them. When walking through her garden, they hang down around her like falling stars, like spring blooms that have iced over. They’ll remain there in stasis forever.
Someday, she’ll bring the entire project into Anne’s room, and they’ll remain there in stasis forever. The materials are stolen but the flowers are her own.
They still have blood.
Roses and daises and dandelions. Idyllic like a wildflower field.
“Lucy,” Nikolai’s comes like a windchime or a fae in the dead of night, “don’t leave me in asymmetry - what if I, too, possess that same morbid, masochistic curiosity? Guess me! Guess me!”
“...”
“Come on,” his teeth show sharply. “Guess me.”
Unlike her, Nikolai appears a picture of perfect health. His skin is porcelain smooth, his nails long and sharp and firm, his complexion pale but with a healthy, rosy flush. Even his hair, long and loose, is thick and well-groomed. Striking as his entire appearance is, it is not deathly. Even his eye, fractured and shaking, is not a sign of ill-health, not really.
When she takes his wrist and presses her index finger to his pulse, it’s deep, slow, and steady.
His skin is warm, but not hot. His every breath is smooth where it rises and falls through his chest. Nikolai is always startlingly unchanging.
He said seven months for her. She isn’t even half as much as an expert as him.
“...Seven years?”
He laughs. “Three.”
“Huh.”
Nikolai flicks her paring knife in the air. He’s been using it to cut apart the rose, leaving a mess all over her table. “I would tell you why I had them…” he says in his voice that means he’s lying, “but truthfully, I don’t remember.”
-
“I want to see him again someday,” Lucy confesses.
“My my that sounds awful,” Nikolai says. “I simply cannot ascertain what possesses you in these moments. I would simply rather die.”
“I just - ” he still smells like flowers, “I don’t know.” Lucy trails a hand down Nikolai’s throat. “It’s not that I miss him, but - you know?”
The compulsive stalking, the obsessive rumination. She wonders if Atsushi even remembers her. In her fantasies, she shows him through her garden of glass and flowers. He breaks something by accident. She doesn’t feel anything at all, but he smiles.
Nikolai wears sunflowers in place of a missing eye, covers most of his skin, and approaches everything with an unnatural, unnerving detachment. He is unnerving like her in almost all the same ways, but only almost. She has never heard him speak a word of whoever it was that he had flowers for. Over her, Nikolai’s throat stretches like a taunt.
“Not at all,” Nikolai answers, and does not speak another word on the topic.
-
At nineteen, Lucy opens her own chest, hacks out the bed of daisies and dandelions with a scissor and a paring knife, and only cries for a few hours.
It’s in Anne’s room. She deliberates on hours between sewing scissors and a paring knife and her own soul’s claws. Anne is a sharp doll, after all - Anne of Abyssal Red has sharp claws, and a monstrous body, and a cruel, permanent smile. But Anne refuses to do it. No matter how strongly Lucy wills it to rip her open, crack through her ribs and tear out her flowers, Anne won’t do it. So Lucy does it herself. The paring knife to cut herself open, the scissors to cut out the flowers. Roses for love, daises for innocence, dandelions for a child’s wish. Atsushi was her prince charming. She understands this in a deep, visceral way that is steadily falling away into retrograde monotone.
A memory comes to her slowly, through the process - in this memory, she’s seven or maybe eight, and eating the roses that grew outside the church windows.
These are just as rotten, she thinks.
-
“I have a fascination with hanahaki,” Nikolai corrects sharply. “It is not a fixation.”
-
At twenty, Nikolai woke up a God.
It happened at the alter of a church; he came into himself in a pool of blood, just like a newborn. It was his own blood, he quickly concluded, and it was his own bed of flowers, framed around him like a funeral pyre. It was dawn, the birth of a new day, and light filtered through around him in shades of pink and gold. Although he was nauseous, and his vision blurry, and dizzy from head to toe, and logically, probably dying from the sudden removal of so many flowers - he understood innately that this was the best he had felt in his entire life. In fact, he knew, he had been helplessly, desperately searching for this moment his entire life.
He did not recognize the location. He did not recognize himself. He had no memories at all, aside from the distant impressions of concepts, information untethered to the context through which he learned it.
There, Nikolai understood, he had been reborn.
Ba-thump.
He was enlightened, a new kind of being. This was liberation of the truest kind.
He remembered nothing, but knew everything; he ran through every thought he could, but did not feel anything about any of it at all. This, he realized with delight, was everything he ever wanted, and he no longer even wanted it, because he didn’t want anything!
His past self left him a book.
Your name is Nikolai Gogol. The hand it was written in was cursive, and playful. Innately, Nikolai knew it as his own. And I have just died for you. I don’t know how drastic the alterations will be. I suspect that removing my hanahaki will destroy myself entirely. I should assume you a newborn. There is one thing that you must know, first and foremost, more than anything:
The name of the one that did this to us was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Do not seek him out. He will remake you.
Nikolai, for all he no longer had a heart, fell a little in love with his past self.
-
Lucy Maud Montogomery is twenty years old and making a masterpiece. Nikolai sometimes wonders if his former self would have liked her dearly.
Today, Lucy is showing him her ability:
“Anne of Abyssal Red,” she explains. Her voice is uncharacteristically quiet; he likes to examine the contrast between her highs and her lows, because it reminds him, somewhat, of himself, or what he used to be. Lucy’s eyes flash deep and sharp. “You want to see?”
He hums. “Do a countdown!”
She claps her hands. “Alright. Three, two, one - !”
The world drops out below him; his shoes tap down on a pink-and-white tiled floor.
Anne of Abyssal Red is…
“This is Anne,” Lucy introduces.
She perches in the arms of a towering, monstrous doll. Its eyes are blacker-than-black, its smile sewn into a permanent snarl, its hands large and clawed; it hovers less like a Queen than a pawn, or a mother. Its dress even matches Lucy’s!
“Cute,” he says.
Anne’s room is warped, displaced, and playlike. It’s unmistakably childish, much like a church nursery. The walls mimic a clouded sky, an endless pink oblivion that horizons into nothing. Nikolai reaches into the cuff of his sleeve to press his fingers into the world outside; his nails click against the real world. He can leave whenever he’d like, he concludes, and although his heart had never faltered in the first place, something even deeper relaxes.
Freedom from the self is tantamount, he idles, but engagement even in the material realm is reason enough for discomfit.
“Aww,” Lucy laughs. “Thanks! It’s my heart.”
How, he wonders, would he have reacted to this before?
Nikolai has always been very self aware. He’s still very self aware. He never would have been able to…
“Once upon a time,” he idles, “I think I would have killed you for this.”
Lucy tilts her head. The angle is remarkably doll-like. “Ah?”
“I used to be the kind of person that couldn’t stand to have a heart,” Nikolai explains. “Now that I don’t have one anymore, there is nothing to not stand.”
Lucy’s hanahaki was so different from his. He’s rarely found cases like hers, cut out but lingering, damages that won’t heal. It reaffirms to himself his own enlightenment. But it’s - fascinating, too, this bleeding, bruised desire. The want to be wanted and the want to want to be wanted. The way it wraps her head-to-toe, the fact she can’t get over it, the loss that she revolves around, the orbit of her own mind that finds itself creating a new garden out of glass, because it no longer has its own garden to grow inside. Roses, dandelions, and daisies, was it..? In some rare cases, the same person can get hanahaki twice. Nikolai wonders if she’ll be like that. He will not.
His own desire used to be so much worse, he knows; it killed him in every way that mattered, after all - like divine ordainment, or a trial by fire, to free himself from all desire, Nikolai first had to experience it so strongly as to let it kill him entirely.
“Wow,” Lucy says. “Bragging to my face?”
I suspect that this will destroy me entirely.
The Nikolai that used to exist was inseparable from his own heart - that sad, pitiful, anxious existence. That Nikolai would have hated the reminder that anyone’s heart could be distilled into a physical space, that his own heart could also be put on display, that he would have killed Lucy on the spot.
It’s no longer Nikolai’s problem.
What a wonderful existence, he thinks to himself, not for the first or last time. Across from him, Lucy’s long lashes catch the pink light of her heart, and Nikolai feels a laugh behind his tongue. “Absolutely!”
-
He deserves it. He’s on top of the world. He’s more free than free. The Nikolai that used to exist was a genius ahead of his time, a mad mind pursuing greatness: Nikolai is the face of that greatness. His own magnum opus! What’s done is done. What’s gone is gone. There is no other answer.
And still -
The name of the one that did this to us was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Do not seek him out. He will remake you.
Nikolai does not want to be remade.
-
“I want to know your ability too,” Lucy says.
“It’s called the Overcoat,” Nikolai tells her.
“That doesn’t tell me anything!?”
-
I know you. I know you do not want to be remade.
That’s what he wrote to himself before self-reincarnation.
Technically, yes, there has been a continuity of consciousness. But in every way that matters Nikolai is not the Nikolai that used to exist. But this Nikolai still trusts that Nikolai. He respects that Nikolai. Their self awareness has not changed. Their competence has not wavered. The madman is the same as the magnum opus. But it shouldn’t be possible to remake anything without its pieces. And Nikolai no longer has a heart.
But Nikolai doesn’t want to be remade.
Why doesn’t he want to be remade? Why doesn’t he want to be remade? How did he know? How did he know? How did he know? Did he think: I know myself, and I know I will not want to be remade? That isn’t right. That shouldn’t be right. They’re not the same person!
It shouldn’t be possible to remake anything without its pieces. And Nikolai no longer has a heart.
He does have pieces of the Nikolai that used to exist. But they’re not his pieces. He left himself books, pages and pages of writings, chronicles of information.
He has reviewed his own notes:
That Nikolai had hanahaki from his heart through his fingertips. Flowers bloomed out from underneath the nails of his fingers and toes, to the point it pressed the nailbeds open. They filled his stomach through his intestines. They filled every breath he took, pressed through his entire facial system, budded in his middle ear, pushed against the blood-brain-barrier, seeded in the marrow of his bones. They tore through the skin at the joints, where they sprouted into the light. An entire garden grew through him. He was so full of want with nowhere to go. Flowers grew in the gaps between his teeth, through his entire head, until they damaged one eye and cannibalized the other in entirety.
What a pitiful existence. A heart dictates the actions of a soul. Now, Nikolai is a soul in pure form. He’s calmer than calm, steadier than steady, purer than pure.
The Nikolai that exists now is not the Nikolai that used to exist.
But -
I don’t want to get remade I don’t want to be remade I don’t want to be remade I don’t want to be remade - the flash of lucy’s teeth - I don’t want to be remade - the color of her blood through her skin - I don’t want to be remade - the lilt of his own cursive - I don’t want to be remade - panic, fear, love, affection, overwhelming, overpowering, desire, delight. The sun in the morning the call of dove the ringing of a bell the beat of his heart. He’s so scared sometimes. He’s so full of everything. I don’t want to be remade.
If that Nikolai once thought it was possible to come back together, then this Nikolai, a being of rationality, will simply have to trust his own word.
-
Nikolai has always been very self aware.
-
Just like the severity of the infestation itself, the effects of removing hanahaki depends on the person. All it does it remove the love. What removing the ‘love’ means depends on who it belongs to. For someone like Lucy, it kept the integrity of her memories but took their emotional potency. It greyed her previous emotions but not her identity, and not her future. But Nikolai lost his memories, his identity, his very heart. Thus to imply - ‘you would be in love every second of your life if you had a heart; it is impossible to remove one aspect without the other’ his desire used to be his entire body, ‘you were defined entirely by your heart.’ To remove one aspect the other had to be removed entirely. He is the most severe case of hanahaki alteration he has ever seen. He’s practically unheard of. But to be free, he first had to let it eat him alive. What a philosophical phenomenon, right? How scary. But done is done.
-
He has to believe that to survive.
-
He does show Lucy his ability, eventually.
Nikolai brings them both to the top of a cathedral, at its highest point. It’s a brilliant, blue skied day, and the sun is so bright is could burn him to ash, and it’s cold this high up. Lucy toes the edge curiously - not even cautiously.
“Your ability?” She prompts expectantly.
He says, “Step off the ledge.”
“For real?”
He grins. “Scared?”
Lucy scoffs. “Of a drop like that?”
“It’s enough to kill.” He spins a dandelion between his fingers. He repeats, “Step off the ledge. Scared?”
She eyes him. Unlike him, her eyes are startlingly clear - a deep, unsettling clarity, so pure it becomes blacker than black. He wonders if she trusts him, and thinks it would be stupid if she did; there isn’t anything to trust. Her hair is almost the same red as the inside of her heart, and her eyes are twice as large as buttons, and she’s totally off her rocker. Sometimes she likes to braid his hair, even though he never wears it anything but loose, and always undoes it after.
Without another word, she steps off the ledge. Nikolai lets her fall until the very last moment.
There might be an interior to the Overcoat. Nikolai has never bothered to look inside.
-
“I think I was scared,” she tells him once. “It was so scary that I’d change if I loved him, so I decided I didn’t want to.”
-
He thinks about the name sometimes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Nikolai knows he used to think that person held the key to his heart.
-
He meets Fyodor for the first time after rebirth in an antique shop.
Lucy frequents these places, sometimes. Nikolai tags along this time, because she’s told him that there’s an old flower-themed playing deck there. The interior is a bit dim, but gold-lit, and Lucy’s quick to lose herself among the glassworks. Nikolai’s started carding through the flower deck with a critical eye when a thin, bitten pair of fingers plucks a card from his hand.
“Ace of of hearts?” comes the voice, wryly amused but fundamentally detached. “How fitting. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Nikolai’s head whips up. The man in front of him is a nightmarish thing, sickly-pale, darkly cloaked, raven hair tangled under a worn hat, strands falling into a pair of cherry-red eyes. The thing in Nikolai’s chest skitters shyly. It’s a physiological reaction.
He doesn’t recognize him for a moment. The name is ash when it comes to him. “Fyodor?”
“Ah, so he did leave you letters.” Fyodor’s mouth curves. There’s something to it, the way he instantly, easily pins the fact that that-Nikolai is not this-Nikolai - he left you letters, not you left yourself letters. But an irrational, or maybe horribly logical thought comes: that Fyodor is making fun of him. “I thought so.”
Nikolai left himself a descriptive profile of Fyodor. He never does anything by coincidence.
You do not want to be remade.
Steps come behind him. Lucy peers at Fyodor. “I didn’t know Nikolai had friends.”
“He’s not,” Nikolai says flatly.
Fyodor shrugs.
“He’s not?” Lucy’s focus shifts to the playing deck, to the card in Fyodor’s hand, to the way - Nikolai feels perfectly still, like an insect in amber.
When Lucy takes his hand, she folds their fingers together, and presses her thumb to the pulsepoint of his wrist. She folds her fingers around his throat and presses her thumb into the pulsepoint behind his jugular. Pulses aren’t taken with the thumb; it has its own already. His eyes stray to her. Something itches. He wonders if he’s changed at all.
There are certain things he has to believe to survive. Nikolai has never wanted to die.
“You can consider me a curious - ” Fyodor’s eye crinkles and it isn’t warm, “stranger.”
Lucy’s head tilts at a wrong angle. “Right,” she says, and the air compresses. Nikolai realizes a second late that Lucy had nearly brought them to Anne’s room.
Overreaction, he thinks of laughing.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Fyodor says kindly. The notes Nikolai left himself said: He is the definition of bad news. “My ability is not kind.”
Lucy glances at Nikolai, then back to Fyodor, and because Nikolai can’t seem to move, kisses him on the mouth. If Fyodor does anything to that, Nikolai does not see it. She drags him out of the shop herself. “What an asshole,” she says, and plays with his hair around red nail.
-
At nineteen, Lucy opens her own chest, hacks out the bed of daisies and dandelions with a scissor and a paring knife, and only cries for a few hours. At twenty, Nikolai he did more or less the same but, he likes to think, without much of any expression at all.
-
He comes with her when she works up enough nerve to talk to Atsushi.
Lucy is - is - is - she’s not sure why she thought she could do this. Nikolai watches her hover at the door to Atsushi’s workplace for approximately twenty seconds before he swings open the door, pushes her forward, purposely trips her, and then laughed when she almost falls. The bundle of bells at the entryway chimes loudly.
“You flower-eyed little - ”
Lucy spots Atsushi. He’s peering wide eyed at the scene that her and Nikolai make in the entryway. Lucy waits for her chest to catch, but all that happens is her throat closing up.
“Um,” says Atsushi.
Atsushi works as a clerical assistant at a local law firm in a somewhat small Japanese city. Apparently, today he’s on desk duty at the front. Lucy would be surprised, except she has his whole work schedule memorized. And his favorite foods. And his favorite flowers. And the shape of his freckles. A handful of weeks. A feeling she doesn’t remember but can’t forget. Seeing how much Nikolai truly did not want to see the person who had given him flowers made her realize how much she truly wanted to see the person who had given her hers. She didn’t know Atsushi at all. There’s no way he knew her. He won’t remember her.
“You don’t remember me,” she says, disappointed despite herself.
His eyes widen even more, somehow. “No I… Lucy?”
“Oh,” she says.
“Lovergirl,” Nikolai snickers.
“Um,” Lucy says, taken aback. “Sorry, um, yeah. It’s Lucy. Hi Atsushi. This is my… friend, Nikolai. It’s been a while.”
She’s fantasized so long about tying a bow here. Wrapping up her own feelings. Moving past this compulsive, obsessive, insane fixation.
Atsushi practically beams. “Lucy! I’m at work right now but - if you’re just here to catch up - ohhh I know, we can - !”
“Meet at the coffee shop nearby?” Lucy finishes. She’s watched him for a long time. In her soul, Anne’s dress drags along her checkered floor. Her breath comes easier. “Sorry I’ve um, kept up with you a bit. I’ll see you there? I have something I want to show you later.”
-
These days, Nikolai flits from country to country.
Botany opens a surprising range of jobs, and while Nikolai will never take a position that requires years of commitment, he sometimes undertakes projects that last months. He looks himself in the mirror and catches his own sunflower eye.
He doesn’t move in with Lucy, but she became so tired of him plucking flower petals onto her floor and dissecting roses onto her table that she set him up with his own shawled section of her studio. Sometimes she steps out of her heart into his lap and presses her nails against his throat. These days, Nikolai operates mostly by whim. He suspects this was always true, but not to the degree it is now. He kisses her on the mouth and she leans in, because he’s unnerving in almost all the same ways she is. He tells her about his old self, and daddles about his botany jobs; he signs onto a research paper for hanahaki all of one time, before deciding he cannot stand research teams. She walks him through the garden in her studio. He eyes the blood on the flowers in the glass.
So on, so forth.
-
Nikolai always smells like flowers.
-
“You never told me,” Lucy says one day.
Nikolai, who had been quite taken by watching the pigeons outside Lucy’s open window pick up dandelions for their beaus in the gardens outside, waits just a moment to twist his head and still doesn’t look at her. “Hm?”
“What your flowers were,” Lucy says. “I had daisies dandelions and roses. You..?”
Nikolai had cremated his garden alongside his blood, as a funeral pyre to commemorate his rebirth. He never told Lucy about much beyond the initial waking up at the church.
“Yes yes,” Nikolai rocks forward on his shoes. “After I reawakened, reborn - I had created a catalog of them! After all, moreso than mere parasites, hanahaki flowers symbolize the key to my own enlightenment. I could not forget it! Thusly - ”
Much like himself, Lucy is partial to long ramblings. She never interrupts his. This time, she visibly shuffles him to the tertiary of her attention and preoccupies her hands with sewing glass. Nikolai suspects she doesn’t understand what he’s on about.
He concludes, “I would show the hill I left the ashes.”
“Let me guess, you threw them at the wind?”
“Absolutely!”
“Hmm,” Lucy says. “But what flowers were they?”
“I don’t know, what flowers were they?”
Lucy’s eye twitches. She jerks her head at him, crosses her arms. Nikolai leans back on his feet and against the open window. He wonders if he could fall right out.
“I am trying to make you something,” Lucy says agitatedly. Nikolai stares. Lucy stares back. She flushes. “Whatever,” she mutters. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Nikolai agrees.
Lucy has been restless since she took Atsushi to her heart again.
The studio has felt empty, without the garden taking up half its space. She relocated it to a corner of her heart, and walked Atsushi through. Lucy has still been sewing flowers and putting together glass, but not for anything in particular anymore. Today, she’s putting together sunflowers. But Nikolai never had sunflowers.
Unbidden: Nikolai remembers - those flowers hadn’t felt like his; they had felt like someone else’s, they had felt like the fact that he belonged to someone else. His notes had told him that Fyodor once tended a wide array of plants.
“It’s a secret,” Nikolai admits, then winks. Gestures her close with his index finger. “That is to say…”
Lucy eyes him, then tip toes across to close the space.
He folds his hand around her neck, finger on her nape, thumb on the pulse-point by her jugular and pulls her ear to his mouth. He might have picked the motion up from her. She likes to check his heartbeat. He sees the moment she realizes ‘secret’ means he’ll whisper it.
His teeth form a stage whisper: “ - ” and against his thumb, where his own pulse beats, he can’t tell hers from his.