Work Text:
It was Tante Cordelia who told Ivan what Hanahaki disease was.
“It’s a Galactic illness,” Tante Cordelia said, “No one’s quite sure where it came from, but of course it caught on like wildfire on Barrayar after the isolation, over dramatic and repressed as you all are.”
Hanahaki was a disease that afflicted people who were in love, but whose love was not consummated.
“It doesn’t have to be sex,” Tante Cordelia said, “A kiss can work just as well, or even the object of affection saying “I love you” and meaning it.”
But as long as the love remained, and remained unrequited, flowers, or what looked like flowers, would grow in the person’s lungs, becoming bigger and more numerous until they cut off all air supply. Fortunately with modern medicine, it was a fairly simple procedure to remove the flowers from the lungs before it got to that point, but the flowers always grew back and had to be removed again once a year in the spring, the time in which they grew most rapidly and the disease was most acute. There were medications that could slow down the flowers’ growth a little and help with the symptoms, but no cure except for getting over the person, or entering into a relationship with them.
Ivan listened to all of this with a sense of horrified realization. Ivan wondered how he could ask whether someone could have hanahaki for a dead person without making it obvious why he was asking. Fortunately Miles, the ever morbid, preempted him.
“So what happens if the person you’re in love with dies?” Miles asked.
“If the person you are in love with dies the hanahaki flowers die too. Even if the person with the disease isn’t aware of the death. It raises several significant metaphysical questions, actually.”
Miles, uninterested in metaphysical questions, said, “So that’s another way to cure the disease, technically.”
“I suppose it is, technically ,” Cordelia said, looking down on her son with deep disapproval.
“So you can’t have hanahaki for someone who’s dead, then?” Ivan asked. This served the purpose of changing the subject just as things were becoming uncomfortable, and thus made it more likely that Tante Cordelia wouldn’t realize he actually cared about the answer.
“No, of course not,” Tante Cordelia said.
So Mamere wasn’t just pining after Ivan’s da. She was in love with a real, live person, and had been for almost Ivan’s entire life. Ivan wondered why she hadn’t done anything about it in all that time. (Selfishly, he wondered why she hadn’t given him a new da.) Ivan tried to put “hopelessly and tragically in love with someone unsuitable” and “Mamere” together in his head, and found to his surprise that it almost made sense.