Chapter Text
There are (of course there are) complications to the surgery.
Only the surgeon had no idea what it was but understands that there has been one, seeing the particulars of the situation. Shao Long sneers bitterly.
“Good for nothing,” he says as the attending’s back is turned, perfectly still within earshot, but what does he care. He rakes through his long hair by the roots and ends up tugging on it, fingers curling at his scalp. He touches his throat, wraps firmly bound, becoming flimsy until they fall. The seed grew back, they said, or maybe it never quite left, they speculate. This is Shao Long’s seventh consult. This condition has been going on and growing, ever persistent, for the past seven months. He grows sick of waking to blue petals.
“Good for nothing,” Bitter and bitter by the day, bile tastes stale and staler as the blooms rise up his throat, hacking his lungs, overflowing his mouth. He comes to hate hyacinth, the mortar sink, himself. He swats the tap and lets the water run as he heaves and breathes through his last round of sickness. The sound of rushing water doesn’t console him but it serves to distract him; distracts him nicely, just good enough. Dark eyes of his screw shut. Blue petals stick around and accumulate at the drain.
Fuck this,
Shao Long doesn't even know who he is in love with. Not that it was worth knowing, anyway, seeing he was suffering this clearly because it was not reciprocated.
“The flowers aren’t the disease itself,” His latest doctor is an unremarkable-looking man, glasses that fog his eyes and of average stature and hairline. “but one of the symptoms.”
You can imagine the deep lines on Shao Long’s subtitle face as he was given this diagnosis. More philosophical than medical, Shao Long criticises, but he sees with a weary resignation science had a twisted sense of humour. There’s art in maths. There are numericals in the prettiest designs. Clarity and calculations. Literature and lunacy. Truth in buffoonery.
Essentially, what the plain old man said and what the younger man caught was that cutting them out does nothing because:
The source isn’t in his lungs but is in patterned behaviour, instinct, attachment.
The body keeps “rewriting” the same conclusion faster than the scalpel can erase it.
The flowers grow back because nothing in his thinking changed.
This is why the surgeons are useless. This is why it keeps returning.
He cannot name the feeling, so the body keeps trying to.
By the time the Doctor Li Shen had finished Shao Long stopped scowling and took on instead an apathetic understanding. Hanahaki. Atypical presentation. Three years, if you don’t fall deeper and down our drugs.
So now Shao Long stands in front of his bathroom mirror. Antiflorals, he takes a headcount, antimetics, pulmonary stabilisers, inhibitors lay in the cup of his palm. They’re just bitter lozenges and anti nausea meds. He thumbs the pink one and slides that onto his tongue first, idly chewing, he pockets the rest and walks out.