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Three weeks after he’d smuggled himself out of a hospital room for a head injury that still definitely was not healing, Ogami Banri sat in yet another specialist’s office and considered how deeply he hated the fact that apparently, this doctor thought that the fact that they were naming a strain of disease after you was a reassuring thing to say to somebody who had come to you for a fatal illness in a totally unexpected place.
Everyone knew that there were three types of Hanahaki: traditional or romantic, platonic, and grief-stricken. Traditional was the most fatal, though the easiest to cure: you simply removed the flowers from the lungs, and the person unlucky enough to catch it would lose all memories of the person they’d fallen for unless they fell in love with that very same person again, and the Hanahaki came back, and the Hanahaki was cured by the impression that the love was reciprocated. Platonic was far less fatal, and harder to treat: it tended to start in some random organ before growing vines along the patient’s veins, and, unless the person who the patient had the Hanahaki for was cruel enough to throw the unrequited love in their face, you could live like that for quite some time—up to ten years, fifteen if you were really lucky—before the vines burst their thorns through your veins. Grief Hanahaki was the rarest and most insidious and, it was generally agreed, the worst: it lived in your stomach and slowly starved you to death, and the only cure was surgery, and you could never really regain those memories of the person you’d lost.
Banri had gone on a researching binge, shortly after meeting Sunohara Momose. One morning he had woken up to the most dreadful cough, looked at the new flower petals strewn over his pajama arm, and decided that it might be important to know as much about Hanahaki as physically possible.
Before the accident, he had figured he had about three or four years left. He hadn’t yet figured out how to break the news to Yuki.
About three weeks after the accident, and five days after he’d withdrawn all his money into cash and slipped away in the dead of night, leaving behind only a letter and a bloody flower to explain himself, he’d slipped into a train station bathroom and unwound his suddenly horrifically itchy bandages to find flowers growing out of the still-bloody gash, ripping open the fresh scabs.
At first, he had decided it was nothing he needed to worry about—maybe his traditional Hanahaki had shifted to platonic and was just being a bitch about it?—but as time passed, and the flowers growing down his face became more and more irritating, Banri decided to bite the bullet and go see a doctor. He could… probably get Yuki off his one-person emergency contact list before they contacted him or anything, right? There were special laws in place for when you had Hanahaki for somebody and wanted time before telling them, after all, and…it was absolutely Yuki Banri had the Hanahaki for. He wasn’t an idiot.
(He hadn’t told Yuki who the Hanahaki was for in the letter, but…that was more cowardice than idiocy, really, and there was no possible way Yuki hadn’t guessed it.)
And now, Banri sat groggily in a hospital bed sometime after being told that there were now four types of Hanahaki, and he was the first carrier of the fourth type, which would be scientifically named after him, at the very least until they learned which type of lost love caused it.
Banri did not feel like this was as fascinating as the doctors apparently seemed to, and thought to himself that they had probably forgotten to cushion their words around him and his life-threatening illness— after all, he had had romantic Hanahaki for years, and this was in his files. They probably assumed he’d come to terms with his death already, if they thought about his feelings at all in their excitement over discovering a new strain of Hanahaki.
His head throbbed, and he reached a hand up to discover flowers poking through fresh stitches where there really ought to be no stitches at all, and a raised scar where there ought to be stitches, and suddenly remembered a conversation with the doctor after his initial MRI—that this Hanahaki was lodged in his brain, and they could operate but it would be dangerous, and he’d given his consent and signed a whole bunch of waivers to allow them to operate…
His eyes fell on the computer screen, filled with ignored data as the doctors continued celebrating, and froze when he saw the date on the monitor.
It had been four months.
The last time he’d looked at a calendar, it had been a dingy January and he’d been signing and dating all those damned waivers—and now it was April—April 15th, he noted, and, oh, hell, he’d lost four fucking months.
Maybe it was not his diagnosis the doctors were celebrating.
Banri swung his legs further over the side of the bed—they felt heavy, and he realized it was because he was deeply tired, which—that was probably related, he realized, to the IV in his arm, which he hadn’t noticed until right this moment—
God, he wanted Yuki. He was willing to risk even the humiliation of Yuki realizing that Banri was in hopeless love with him, because—how in the hell had he lost four months, what had happened to him, nobody he knew was here, and though he wouldn’t have expected his parents or step-parents to come even if he was dying, he’d hoped that somehow…
But the doctors had been very accommodating about removing Yuki from his emergency contact list, and Momo apparently no longer lived at his parents’ house, according to his sister, who had had several incredibly cruel things to say about him when Banri had called, given his full name, and asked if Momo would be willing to be his emergency contact going into his Hanahaki surgery, so nobody was there, and nobody would be there.
At this point, he was bundled into a wheelchair—probably for the best, he doubted he’d be able to stand—and taken off for an insane amount of cognitive tests, which he did progressively better at as the sedative left his system, and finally he was taken back to the hospital room he’d awoken in and one of the nurses said to the other as she left, “Oh, thank God that all worked.”
What “that” had been, Banri learned in the days to come, was replacing the Hanahaki into his skull, because the surgery to remove it had apparently completely destroyed his sense of self and also all of his memories, though luckily they'd come back after putting the Hanahaki flowers back into his skull.
God.
No matter how lonely this recovery was, and how strenuous all the tests they performed on him were, and how much Banri wished for someone he loved to show up, it was definitely for the better that Momo and especially Yuki didn’t see him like this.
Besides, all that time sitting alone in a hospital bed gave him plenty of time to apply for jobs, and by the time he was released—and he actually was released this time, he didn’t need to sneak out, which was wonderful— he had an interview set up with a promising looking company called Takanashi Productions.
Banri raised a hand to the flowers spilling down the side of his face and smiled. Everything was going to be just fine.