Work Text:
Jim Kirk had a predisposition for Hanahaki disease.
It was genetic, of course; his mother had had it, and after the death of her husband she had fallen ill and eventually decided to go through the surgery.
Jim often wondered if she had known, before, that the risk of never being able to love again would include never being able to love her own children.
He wondered that less now.
He never coughed up flowers for her. He coughed them up for Sam; first, tiny daisies, and later, chamomiles. Perfectly white petals. They never grew into full blooms, never fell out drenched in blood, and eventually, they stopped coming at all.
He was already in space by the time they started showing up again.
He had almost believed that he could go his entire life without ever falling in love, but of course, Jim Kirk could never get that lucky.
It started with tiny pink petals, light and soft, fluttering as they fell from his lips. Then they grew, each petal two to three centimeters long, coming in pairs or triads, then with pollen stamens, white with dark pink tips. By the time the full blossoms fell from his mouth, lightly dotted with blood, he knew who the object of his affection was, and knew he would die with the taste of peaches on his tongue.
Except—except, then the blue started.
Tiny petals once more, bright, light blue and dark, night purple, uniform in shape and size. He didn’t recognize them until the full blooms finally came—cornflowers.
Peach blossoms and cornflowers. Pink and blue.
They made for a beautiful swimming bouquet before he flushed them down the toilet.
He knew the others could tell that he wasn’t doing well. He didn’t cough too much while on duty, but his voice was still rough no matter how much tea he drank to soothe it. The circles under his eyes didn’t let up no matter how much sleep he tried to get, because he always woke up to cough from dreams he couldn’t remember. He was losing weight as the flowers in his lungs sucked the nutrients from him.
Jim should have been dead by now. Everything he had read on the subject said so. If not cured or treated, the disease had an 86.3% fatality rate in the span of six months.
But his love was slow, calm, clean. The petals came full and uncrumpled, rarely marred with blood, and Jim allowed the coughing to overtake him in waves, like floating on an ocean. He was in no rush to die. He was in no rush to heal.
He went about his life as though it was nothing, as though he wasn’t actively dying. Bones would say he was killing himself, and Jim earned a small coughing fit for that thought. It didn’t matter either way. He had what he always wanted, his ship, his friends, his found family. He could die in peace, if that were necessary.
There was no way it wouldn’t be.
One time, late at night, Spock caught him hunched over the toilet seat. Jim managed to flush before he could see, said he was just a bit sick, and hoped Spock couldn’t smell peaches on his breath, wouldn’t know the difference in the sounds he made. Spock asked him to go to sickbay but Jim just smiled wearily and lied that he already had, that he just needed to sleep it off.
Spock only raised an eyebrow when Jim showed up on the bridge the next morning as though nothing had happened, and if he heard Jim hacking in the bathroom since, he didn’t bother him.
When the flowers started coming up with branches and leaves, Jim knew the end was near.
He already found himself out of breath more often. It had almost gotten him killed on a few missions, and the only thing that kept him on his feet and dodging phaser fire was the thought that if he got hit, he would have to go to Sickbay. So he swallowed the cough and kept on running.
He couldn’t run forever, though.
He was in a state of delirium, or at least, he had to be. He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Wouldn’t have dragged his feet, leaning against the walls for support, gasping for breath with every step. Wouldn’t have entered the room knowing how late it was and, despite that, knowing he would be there.
Wouldn’t have begged for help.
There must have been a part of his mind that still thought he could be saved, salvaged, or he wouldn’t have done that. But he knew, deep in his heart and growing in his lungs, that he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Didn’t even want to.
That he even woke up at all was a miracle. He tried to speak but Bones shut him up, pointed out the air tube stuck down his throat, and gave Jim a PADD to write on instead.
Jim didn’t want the surgery. He wouldn’t do to his friends what his mother did to him. No matter how much they begged him. It was almost a constant cycle, coming and going and crying and begging, and Bones, there in the corner, a hovering shadow just waiting for him to acquiesce.
But Jim had made his mind up when he was ten and showed the first symptoms. He didn’t want the surgery.
And Bones cried.
Because Jim had told him, before. Years before. It wasn’t like this back then, before all the flowers, but Jim loved lightly, easily, and there was no shame, no awkwardness, and they were both happy. Jim never asked for this. And there was nothing Bones could do.
Untreated and uncured, 86.3% of all Hanahaki patients die.
Come the next morning, Jim would be nothing more than a statistic.
The autopsy was almost easy. Jim’s skin gave way under the scalpel and his ribs didn’t resist as Bones pushed his sternum open. His lungs were almost brown with the mass of roots, and when Bones opened those up too the flowers almost jumped at him, like a perfectly trimmed garden in red-pink soil.
They were fresh, their scent permeating the air. He had barely realized the fondness he had grown for cornflowers. The peach blossoms reminded him of home, his mother, his cousins.
The cornflowers reminded him of Jim.
He wept.
Almost a hundred years later, in the garden in front of Leonard McCoy’s house, when the ambulance pulled up and the medics announced him dead, a dozen cornflowers slowly wilted.