Archive of Our Own

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It got worse with the weather. That was something that most people didn’t know. Roy hacked and coughed into the toilet bowl, body straining and stomach aching with the force of his system trying to expel the liquid. He watched as the toilet bowl slowly filled up with specks of blood and little amaryllis petals.

This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten all the way to the petal stage. But it was the first time it’d happened without him being in Dick’s physical proximity.

Panting, he leaned back on his folded legs, still feeling the itch at the back of his throat that Roy knew wouldn’t go down for a while yet. He breathed in shallowly, having practised this with a handful of doctors over the course of his life.

Someone placed a glass of water on the bathroom sink. Roy, spitting into the toilet one final mouthful of blood, pushed himself to his feet and closed the lid to flush. “Thanks,” he muttered to Ollie, throat still hoarse. He took a small mouthful and swished the water around his mouth, closing his eyes as he spat into the sink so he wouldn’t have to see all the blood and bits of petal that would come out.

“I’ll make you some tea,” Ollie said quietly, padding out of the bathroom. They were more practised at this than anyone should be.

Ollie always gave him ginger tea, mixed with a little bit of honey. It was soothing for his throat, he said, and Roy didn’t complain, though now he couldn’t taste either of those things without the memory of the aftertaste of blood flooding back to him.

He took small sips now as he sat at the kitchen table, relieved that Mia had decided to take Lian out for the day.

Ollie was still bustling around the kitchen; Roy knew, without having to even look at the older man’s features, that it was Ollie trying to rein in just how much he hated all of this, the very fact that it was love that was hurting Roy so literally.

“I’ve never seen petals before,” he finally said, wiping his hands dry on the kitchen towel. “Is it… getting worse?”

Roy had had the Hanahaki disease since he’d been a teenager, and now, after living with it for almost two decades, there were very few things that Ollie hadn’t seen.

He shook his head and gave Ollie a little shrug. “Normally I don’t get the petals without… being near him.” He looked away as he said that, because even now, it was awkward to talk to Ollie about Dick.

Maybe things would’ve been easier if Ollie didn’t primarily see Dick as the person hurting Roy, no matter how ridiculous he knew sentiments like that were. There weren’t many people whose cases went to the chronic stage, because most people would move on. Most people didn’t feel as strongly for two whole decades.

“Being on the team?”

Roy ran a hand through his hair, still feeling shaky from his bout of coughing. “You know I couldn’t say no,” he told Ollie. “When they wanted to start the Titans back up again.”

A war was raging behind Ollie’s eyes as his met Roy’s, but finally, he blew out a breath. “Yeah, I know,” he said, shaking his head. “I just… wish it were different.”

Roy gave him a small smile, but didn’t say anything to that. They both knew that despite the pain, he, like most people with the disease, didn’t wish it to be different. Not when it got to this level, anyway.

“What flowers are they, anyway?” There was a hint of curiosity in Ollie’s voice. “The doc you saw a few years back said they’d most likely stay the same, if they ever appeared.”

Roy snorted. “That doctor was about a decade ago, Ollie,” he said, and then downed the rest of his tea in a few hard gulps, relishing in the way it flooded his mouth with something other than the taste of blood. “But yeah, they haven’t changed. Amaryllis.”

“Some control the petals and roots by attacking the type of flower,” Ollie offered. “I can ask Dinah if she has anything?”

Roy was already shaking his head. “No, you know how those go. They just make you feel sick, throw up a whole lot of plants for a week, and then a few months later they’re back again. Nothing’s a long term solution.”

Ollie came over to him with a kettle and the little tub of honey to refill his mug. He clapped his hand on Roy’s shoulder, and left it there. The warmth leeched into Roy’s skin, and he was glad all over again that he got to have this, got to come home to a family.

He wished the disease knew that that was enough.

He and Donna weren’t dating anymore, but Donna was the only one who knew that Roy had the Hanahaki disease. It was funny, because they’d gotten much closer after they’d decided that dating wasn’t working out for them, but sometimes Roy wondered how much easier it’d be if he and Donna had fallen in love with each other, instead of with other people who they’d both gotten the disease over.

Donna’s case hadn’t lasted as long as his had, but that was mostly because she and Kory had begun dating a few years later. Roy didn’t know where they were now with their relationship – either they were taking a break or trying out the long distance thing – but he knew that Donna didn’t have it anymore.

But she zeroed in on him the moment he walked into the Tower, Lian holding onto his hand and skipping beside him, humming a tune to a song she’d probably heard from Dinah and Mia on their day out.

“Hi, Lian!” she said, greeting her by swinging Lian up.

Lian screeched and giggled. Donna had been doing this since before Lian could walk, and Roy knew that the rest of the Titans regularly grumbled – goodnaturedly – that she’d won ‘favourite aunt’ place only by her strength. “Aunt Donna! Look at my flower bracelet! We made you one too!”

Donna let out a gasp at just the right places, and set Lian down on a nearby table so Lian could pull out a crumbled flower chain from her pocket. “That’s gorgeous! You wanna put it on me?”

Lian solemnly unclasped the daisies, sticking her tongue out as she tried to reattach them. Then, when slipping one of the stems through the other proved slightly too difficult for her motor skills, she looked towards Roy.

“I see how it is,” Roy said even as he came over to help. “I don’t get a flower bracelet but the moment you need help with one for Donna, I get called over?”

Lian laughed. “Of course, daddy,” she said. “You don’t appreciate my flower bracelets enough.”

Roy let out a mock gasp. “Is this because I said I preferred a flower crown?” When Lian nodded, he said, “Well, I still stand by that. They stay safer.”

“What, on your head?” Roy’s heart did a backflip at the new voice, but at this point in his condition, he never knew if it was because he was so used to his body jumping through hoops to make itself sick whenever he was around Dick, or if it was his actual reaction to Dick. “Is this with or without the hat?”

“Uncle Dick!” Lian shrieked, jumping off the table towards him.

“You’d think she hasn’t seen you guys in years, with how she reacts at just a week away,” Roy commented, but he couldn’t help the smile as he watched Dick rush forward to catch Lian, and then use her momentum to spin her around. There weren’t a lot of people he trusted with his daughter, but Dick’s hands, the hands that had held her before Roy himself had, the hands that had given her to him, those he trusted with her life.

And that was precisely the moment he felt something travelling up his throat. Swallowing hard and fighting the urge to gag, he sent Donna a panicked look.

Donna’s eyes widened just a little before she went swiftly into action. “Roy, I need you to look at something for me for a sec. Dick, can you watch Lian?”

Dick was frowning at the two of them. “Is everything…?” He trailed off as Roy gave him a quick but very forced smile before rushing out of the room.

It was lucky there was a bathroom so close. Roy barely made it to the toilet before he was coughing and throwing up flower petals, this time more coming out than before at Ollie’s place. The clean white ceramic was immediately stained with red of the petals, and bright blood, but Roy could barely see it from how hard he was fighting to draw in breath.

He wheezed in air and then coughed out again, another load of flowers coming out with spit and blood. Coughing, hacking breaths drained him of energy, and a fierce stabbing pain was in his throat as it was scraped raw from the plant.

Suddenly, strong hands came to hold him upright. Donna was grabbing him with one arm and pounding his back with another. “Get it out, that’s it.” Her voice was firm and hard, like a nurse’s. Roy had never asked her how it’d gone away, if she’d had to surgically remove anything; he hadn’t wanted to know after his condition had hit the chronic stage, because there was rarely any way back from that.

With one more bout of flowers coming up, Roy could finally breathe in properly. He leaned back against Donna, mouth stained with red and not caring about anything except just getting his breath back.

Donna rubbed his arm a little, shifting to flush away all evidence. She let him sit there for a moment, using her strength. “They’re bigger than they were last time,” she said conversationally, like they were talking about the weather.

Roy huffed a laugh. “Yeah.” His voice came out all scratchy and wheezy, and he knew that Lian was going to look at him funny all day. “They’re, uh, growing.”

Donna’s arm stilled a little. “Roy,” she said. “You know all the health problems you’ll have if you let them keep going.”

“What else am I s’posed to do, Donna? Quit the team? I can’t do that – that’s not in me. And at this point, it’s pretty obvious I can’t quit him.”

Roy felt more than heard Donna’s deep exhale. “When was the last time you saw a specialist?”

“I have an appointment in a couple days.” He’d known it was getting worse again after the last time he’d stayed at the Tower for so long. The only real saving grace here was the fact that Dick couldn’t stay here all the time, not like how it’d been before. It felt wrong without him, and he always came back with more weight on his shoulders than when he’d left, but small mercies and all.

Roy couldn’t cut Dick out of his life – they were far too entangled for that – but he wouldn’t stop Dick from leaving. That seemed to be the recurring issue here, the fact that he was willing to follow Dick wherever he went, but Dick would go, because he answered Batman’s call above all others.

“C’mon, I’ll get you something cold to drink,” she said. “It’ll numb your throat for a while.”

As Roy followed Donna, he knew that things would get worse the longer they went like this. But like any other person under this curse, he didn’t think of it like that – all he knew, when he felt the flowers blooming in his lungs, when he peeked out a window and saw Dick and Garth in the garden throwing a frisbee with his daughter, was that he probably wouldn’t change anything that had led him here.