Chapter Text
stage 01. | present
There’s a smattering of blue and red petals across the white ceramic basin. Sweet, small rounded edges and crinkled bodies, powder soft and smooth to touch. A contrast against the clean white—blue, blue like the midday sky, blue like a pair of eyes caught in the light of the sun, blue like the shimmer of water under the movement of a waterfall; and red, red like the skin of a freshly picked strawberry, red like the fluttered feathers at the crown of a red-crowned crane, red like a sharp pinch of your finger and a prick of deep, smooth bloo—
There’s a drop there, in the middle of the petals. More than a drop, multiple droplets, the smooth, soft blues and reds dotted with splotches of—
His breath comes up short.
His throat is raw and his eyes are blurry and his head spins.
It’s not just that.
There’s green too. Entire stalks, sharp-edged leaves, spindly, twisting green stems. It’s not just petals and that’s why it feels like his chest is wired shut, his lungs constricting from something coiled tight against them. It’s spreading—no. It’s spread.
(“Time is running out,” his doctor had said to him, two weeks ago. “The pills will buy you one more week, maybe two. But we’re at the end of the road, Kozume-san. You have to make a choice.”)
(Or what? he had wondered. It had all seemed laughably impossible, at the heart of it. What was it going to do? Strangle his lungs? Wrap itself around his liver and wind its way up, squeezing his heart and twisting around his esophagus until he couldn’t breathe? Could that be any worse than this? He would die either way, he’d thought. The doctor just wanted him to think he had a choice to make in all of this.)
He picks up a flower. It’s whole, there’s no two ways about it. Skinny, crooked stems with pointy little leaves that, he thinks, were probably at least partially responsible for why his throat had felt so uncomfortable all evening. At the end of the stems—small, perfect, round forget-me-nots.
He almost laughs.
It’s funny, almost, or would be if it wasn’t so on the nose. It’s almost embarrassing in that way. A little insulting to be that cliche.
Red carnations and blue forget-me-nots.
He has never taken much of an interest in gardening, but he’s had to look up flower symbology for obvious reasons.
Red carnations, or, deep love, true love, an aching, devoted, desperate kind of love.
And forget-me-nots, or—well this one’s easy. True love, memories, soft blue petals meant to say do not forget me.
At least they’re not hyacinths, he supposes. It’s almost a surprise that they aren’t. Sorrow and regret is what the Internet said they mean.
He thinks that fits more than—the rest. He has had true love and he has had true love’s memories and now all he is left with is sorrow and regret.
So really, it should be hyacinths.
He turns the faucet and watches the water submerge the clogged sink. Flower petals and leaves and stems—and blood—everywhere, drowning, floating. He should have held himself over a trash can or the toilet. He knows better by now, but he’d needed to hold onto something. The white ceramic had felt cool under his palms.
He cups water into his hands and drinks it. His mouth tastes awful, like blood and potpourri. He’s lost his appetite recently. He can’t stomach anything for more than a few bites. Food and drink lose their appeal once everything starts tasting like copper and a bouquet of flowers.
He wants to avoid his reflection, but it’s difficult to do so when there’s an enormous mirror hanging above the sink.
His eyes flicker up and—he takes in a rattling breath, almost shocked. He has avoided looking at himself for so long he’s forgotten that he no longer looks the way he used to.
His eyes, still golden-brown, are dull around the edges now, with deep, dark smudges underneath. His skin is wan and drawn. He’s lost weight (he hadn’t had much to spare to begin with) and his hair looks dry and brittle. He can’t remember the last time he’d refreshed his color, so his dark roots have grown in too much. The blond at the ends looks pale and unhealthy. That at least fits the rest of him, in a way.
His favorite summer jacket hangs loose on his small frame and that’s a terrible sign. Not only because it had not done that when he had bought it, but also because a grown man of thirty-three should not look smaller in a jacket than he had when he was sixteen years old.
This was a mistake.
All of this—the last two years, the last, god, seventeen years of his life, what the fuck—all of it was a mistake.
He shouldn’t have come to this. Shouyo shouldn’t have invited him and he shouldn’t have said yes.
His breath catches when he hears knocking on the door.
“Just a minute!” he says and stares at the evidence in the sink. (He should just scoop the soggy flowers and petals and stems out with his hands, but suddenly he’s filled with a squeamish nausea that he’s never felt before—just the thought of touching any of it makes him want to throw up.)
The person knocks again, more urgently this time.
“I’ll be right out!”
He doesn’t know what to do. He stares at the mess—at the scene of his crime. (Is being desperately and awfully in love a crime? It seems like it should be. That, at least, would make all of this worth something.) It’s too much for him to clean up now. He doesn’t think he could bear it.
The knocking comes again and with it, this time, a flare of irritation.
“There are other bathrooms!” he snaps, gripping the ceramic edges of the sink.
The knocking pauses and he lets out a ragged breath of relief.
A blue petal floats in the middle of the wreckage.
Forget-me-not, he thinks.
(When I’m gone, when this disease takes me—forget me not.)
“Kenma,” a familiar voice says on the other side of the door.
He—Kenma—takes in a panicked, shocked (tired) breath.
“Please,” Kuroo says. “Open the door.”
* * *
stage 02. | six months ago
It had been gardenias, the first time. He remembers being stunned by it, disbelieving of what he’d seen after a terribly sudden coughing fit left him with three curled, beautiful white petals. He had only ever distantly heard about people having the affliction (that’s how he’d thought of it that first time—an “affliction,” as though it could be cured through over-the-counter medicine or willed away through the sheer power of thought); he had never met anyone who had suffered through it.
The doctor tells him it is not as uncommon as he might think, that every internal medicine doctor—and a whole branch of specialists—is trained in medical school to deal with the different manifestations of the disease (not affliction) and offer different treatment options. It’s not commonplace, but it’s not unheard of, he says.
(“I thought it was a fairytale,” Kenma says the first time he talks to the doctor. “Something parents made up to—I don’t know, scare you away from dating too young.”)
The doctor comes later, though. First, he’d wanted to know how this could happen to him, what it could mean (he did not ask who it might be about, because that much is—), so he’d taken a picture of the white petals and searched for the meaning immediately.
Gardenia; symbolizing deep care for another, hidden affection, a secret love
He’d thought he’d been mistaken at first. It would be patently absurd for him to be coughing up a flower that meant secret love, because that would mean—and it couldn’t. It could not mean that, Kenma could not let it mean that.
Maybe if he’d taken it more seriously then, maybe if he hadn’t done what he always does and avoided—avoided until he could not possibly ignore it any longer. Maybe then it wouldn’t have gotten to the point of inevitability.
Akaashi’s voice rings through his aching head.
You need to see a doctor. These things progress faster than you’d expect.
He can feel it pressing against his lungs, whatever is growing within him. Lately, it almost hurts to breathe.
Kenma squeezes his eyes shut. He braces himself and calls Shouyo.
The phone rings only twice before he answers.
“Shouyo.”
Shouyo is back on the other side of the world now, playing volleyball in France because he and Kageyama had finally gotten their heads out of their asses and decided to do something about the thing that had been obvious to anyone who had eyeballs and spent more than ninety seconds in their presence. France and Italy are a lot closer than Brazil and Italy, as Shouyo had explained when he’d told him the news.
“Kenma?” Shouyo sounds sleepy.
Kenma doesn’t know what time it is in France right now. He barely knows what time it is in Tokyo. He rubs his eyes in exhaustion.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” Kenma says.
“No, it’s fine, it’s—” there’s soft noises on the other end and Shouyo does a bad job of covering his phone receiver, so Kenma can hear Kageyama’s sleepy questioning. “It’s Kenma. Go back to sleep, Sleepyama.”
There’s some rustling and Kenma figures that Shouyo has gotten out of bed.
“What is it? Is everything all right?” Shouyo sounds more alert now, more worried. He knows that Kenma doesn’t like talking on the phone. He has also never called him in the middle of the night before.
“That depends,” Kenma says slowly. “On how you feel about gardenias.”
There’s a confused pause on the other end of the call.
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”
Kenma lets out a long and careful breath through his nose. He looks at his search results (he’d looked it up again, because it had been months since the first time and he had forgotten exactly what it all meant) and his eyes blur in front of him.
“My body is trying to tell me something,” he says. “But I don’t think I should listen. It would be…stupid to listen. Idiotic. Possibly suicidal.”
Kenma can almost hear Shouyo straighten in alarm at that.
“Suicid—Kenma. Are you all right? Do you need me to call someone? Is everything okay?”
Kenma sighs. He looks at the familiar white petals in his hands.
Hidden affection; a secret love.
This can only get worse before it gets better. It always does, for him.
“You and Akaashi were right,” he says. “I should have listened.”
“Oh,” Shouyo says quietly. “Oh, Kenma.”
Kenma doesn’t say anything for a long time. When he does, he sounds apologetic.
“I’m sorry to ask you this,” he says. “But would you come with me to a doctor’s appointment?”
As these things go, Shouyo can’t just take off in the middle of volleyball season and doctors can’t just see you with no notice. That’s for the best, in a way, because Kenma is so dazed (and at least partially in denial) that he’s not sure he would believe anything the doctor tells him anyway. Hanahaki sounds like a made up disease; it’s the kind of illness that only happens on the news or to other people, not to you.
It takes a little over a month for the doctor to see him. On the one hand, Shouyo is able to take a flight from Lyon to Tokyo by then (Kenma pays for it, of course). On the other—
He coughs the last of the petals into the sink at the doctor’s office. It looks like a massacre of colors—reds and whites and blues and even some pink. In terms of symbolism, he seems to have coughed up an entire dictionary of flowers. His throat is scratchy and sore and there are spots of blood on his chin.
When he comes back out of the bathroom, face pale and hands shaking, the nurse takes one look up from her station and gives him a sympathetic look.
“Don’t worry, Kozume-san,” she says. “We know how to clean it up.”
He has been coughing up flowers for months by now—months of feeling a lump catch under his throat, months of his lungs slowly constricting, months of coughing and heaving to expel this thing that is growing within him, violently and without his permission. It has changed—this had shocked him at first. It had been white gardenia petals the first time, and then small, purple heliotropes, perfect little yellow honeysuckles, curled pink hydrangeas, and, eventually, red roses, carnations, and, of course, forget-me-nots. He didn’t know what you coughed up could change. The first day he’d spit out blood-red petals, he’d nearly panicked.
It’s grown since then—the flowers, the variety, the number of times a day he has to excuse himself to shake out something that’s lodged in his throat.
He has tried his best to ignore it, to squash it, to visibly expel this feeling (and plant) from winding in through his system, but while the roots will take, his desperate need to free himself from them will not.
He’s in a bad state by the time his appointment rolls around.
“This is rapidly advancing, Kozume-san,” his doctor—a kind but firm, slightly balding middle-aged man named Yamanaka-san—says. “Why did you wait so long to come in?”
Because he’s stupid and stubborn. Who is better at avoidance and denial than Kozume Kenma?
He just shakes his head wordlessly.
“You’re not yet terminal,” Yamanaka-san says, “but at the rate at which you are developing flowers…how often do you produce a full bulb?”
Kenma looks down at his hands. Next to him, Shouyo seems to understand his anxiety. He takes one of Kenma’s hands between his own—his hands are bigger than they used to be, firmer and more callused, showing evidence of years of playing volleyball—and squeezes.
Kenma takes a calming breath.
“Once every three days,” he says. “Mostly they’re petals and leaves. And stems.”
“You have multiple varieties, yes?”
“It depends on the day,” Kenma says with a nod. “But there have been…at least six or seven kinds. Maybe more.”
Yamanaka-san is a good doctor. He takes that information in stride, without breaking his poker face, but Kenma can see how his shoulders stiffen.
“That’s not good, is it?”
Yamanaka-san pauses. “It is…unusual. Typically, a patient will show one to three types of flowers. More than that means there are conflicting feelings occurring, too many of them, possibly all too deep. It isn’t fatal yet, but it makes your case more complicated. It isn’t…ideal.”
“Too deep?” Kenma asks, his ears ringing. “Too as in not—”
“No, it is still treatable,” Yamanaka-san says. “But at this stage, with as many flowers as you are producing—Kozume-san, I must be frank. You have maybe five or six months left before they take permanent root within your system.”
Kenma’s throat goes dry. Shouyo squeezes his hand so hard Kenma almost flinches.
“I will prescribe you pills in the meantime to suppress the symptoms as much as we can, but I will warn you—they won’t cure the disease and they won’t buy you time.” Yamanaka-san is compassionate, but firm. “They will only make you feel better in the short term. The medication is to help manage your condition for now.”
Kenma takes a breath and nods.
“Six months…” Shouyo says. He’s been quiet this entire time. Kenma had needed him for moral and emotional support and Shouyo, to his credit, had been unflappable about it. He had nodded when needed and sighed when needed and squeezed Kenma’s hand every time Kenma had been on the verge of leaving his body. Now he asks the question that Kenma can’t bear to ask. “What does that mean, Yamanaka-san? What will happen in six months?”
“Untreated Hanahaki is serious. It can be—and often is—terminal,” the doctor says. His voice is kind, but his eyes are serious. This is no lighthearted matter. Yamanaka-san has dealt with Hanahaki patients before; he has lost them to unrequited and unfulfilled love. “At its end stages, the roots will eventually wrap around your lungs and climb up your esophageal tract, restricting your airways until you can no longer breathe. You will choke on petals and vines will throttle your heart. They will develop at a rate that even medicine cannot fight against.”
Yamanaka-san pauses and says, grave and soft, “It will feel like you can never come up for air. That your heart is physically breaking.”
That Hanahaki can be terminal and that its final manifestation feels like the full extent of the physiological effects of heartbreak is not an irony that is lost on Kenma. Unrequited love killing you by making your body literally break your heart is—
He shouldn’t laugh.
He almost does.
He smiles, at any rate.
“You will have to make a decision within the next six months, Kozume-san,” the doctor says. “There are two surgeries available if the Hanahaki does not cure itself.”
“What are they?” Kenma asks, a little numbly.
“The only way to cure Hanahaki is to remove the root cause. We will remove the afflicted growth, but it comes at a price.”
Of course it does. These things always do.
“What price?”
Yamanaka-san looks sad. “You can choose to lose your memories or lose your ability to love.”
Shouyo draws in a sharp, awful breath.
“Doctor, how can that be—how can those be the only two choices?”
“Unrequited, festered love is one of the most difficult illnesses to cure. The only treatments that have proven fully effective have been to remove all memories of that love so that it no longer hurts you, or to remove the ability to love, so the act of it can never hurt you again. I'm sorry,” Yamanaka-san says, shaking his head gently. “I wish there was another option.”
It’s funny, or it would be if it wasn’t so goddamned fucking awful. Either he never loves again or he forgets his first love, his forever love, the love he’d tried to kill and bury, only to be choking on it once more.
How could he have let this happen again? How could he have been so fucking stupid?
“Kenma,” Shouyo whispers.
Memories or love. Memories, or love.
But then, wouldn’t it be easier? If he could just…forget it. Forget everything that’s happened, forget every godawful, terrible step that’s brought him to this doctor, at this time, his heart aching and his throat full of longing petals?
He could start new. He wouldn’t have to feel awful every time he saw him. He wouldn’t have to care as he watched him move on, find life without them (without him). He wouldn’t have to remember everything—remember their past, remember their life together, remember how much he’d fucked up, remember how much he still fucking lov—
“Memories,” he says out loud.
“Kozume-san?” the doctor asks, surprised.
“I choose memories. Take them from me,” he says, his voice hard. “Erase them. I don’t want them anymore, I don’t need them, I don’t—”
“Kenma,” Shouyo says and suddenly Kenma’s being turned toward him. Shouyo looks as pale as Kenma must—it’s terrible; pale isn’t a good tone with his bright orange hair or his sun-bloomed freckles—stricken, horrified. He’s not taking this well. “You can’t. Please, think about what you’re saying. Think about what you would be losing.”
Kenma swallows, his eyes stinging.
“Is this what he would want? For you to forget everything you had together? Everything you’ve both shared? The things that made you both you?”
Kenma can’t stand this anymore.
He can’t take the heaving of his chest, the way it always feels like there’s a blade stuck between his ribs. He can’t take the sleepless, restless nights, remembering things he has said and done, things he has tried to bury for six years. He can’t take it—the way his skin itches, or the way his brain aches, the way there is always something scratching at his throat. The way he feels like there are butterflies crowding his stomach every time he sees him, or how one smile is enough to derail his entire fucking day. He can’t take being the only one to keep holding onto these memories.
He can’t take, one day, seeing him with someone else.
“Shouyo, I can’t,” Kenma says urgently. There’s a hard lump in his throat and for a moment he’s terrified he’s going to start coughing again, but no, this time it’s just his normal emotions. “I have to let him go. I have to let what we had go. Please. I’m so tired. Can’t you see how tired I am?”
Shouyo looks like he’s going to cry. He tucks Kenma’s loose, dull bangs back behind his ears.
“I know, Kenma,” he says, voice tight. “I know you are.”
“Kozume-san,” the doctor says quietly. “You have six months to decide. You don’t have to commit to anything now. Just think about which would be…more bearable, in the long run.”
It’s both the kindest and cruelest thing he could say, but then, what else does one say to a Hanahaki patient nearing his terminal stages?
“Don’t make a decision yet,” Shouyo says—begs. “There’s so much to save, Kenma. Not everything was bad, remember? So much of it was good. And you loved him. For so long. How can you want to lose that? How can you want to lose something that was so important to you? Who will you be without that?” Shouyo’s eyes are glimmering. “Just wait. There’s still time.”
Time for what? Kenma wonders.
He thinks his time has well and truly passed and that is why he is here, under harsh fluorescent lights, in a plastic chair, learning about how to surgically remove his heart.
Don’t be ridiculous!i an achingly familiar voice says in his head. They can’t remove your heart, Ken-chan. It’ll still be in there. It will just be a little heart-er to use it. Heart-er! Get it? Get it??
Kenma’s chest aches.
Something scratches the back of his throat desperately. He tries to hold it back, but it’s no use. He manages to grab a handful of tissues from the doctor’s desk just before he coughs up a splay of pink and white petals.
* * *