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“It’s… It’s called Hanahaki disease.”
“Okay, who is this Hannah, and why does she play hockey?”
“Ha-na-ha-ki,” Willow repeats. “It’s Japanese.”
“How did it spread here?” Giles frowns. “And to such a localised area–”
“Well, it’s not real, see,” Willow adds.
The others join on the frowning.
“Try telling that to the boy in hospital with flowers in his lungs,” Ash ventures.
“There’s gonna be more,” Xander speaks up gravely, “there’s not exactly a cure for this thing.”
“I thought it wasn’t real?” Buffy cuts in, shaking her head in bewilderment. “How can it have a cure?”
“Or victims,” Ash mutters.
“Well, the thing is…” Willow chews her lip. “It’s fictional. Or was, until lately.”
“Where did you two come across such an illness? Granted, I haven’t many Japanese texts on hand, but–”
“It’s, um, kind of an internet thing,” Willow says, with a bashful shrug.
“So this thing is coming out of the internet?” Buffy looks around. “Last time we had to fight the web, I don’t remember loving it.”
“Even more people have a computer in their home by now,” Ash worries. “We can’t find and stop them all.”
“Wherever it’s coming from, it doesn’t exactly work like that,” Xander says.
Everyone’s eyes turning to him leave him a little trapped in the headlights.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Buffy shrugs, amused. “Just, you’re not normally knowledge guy.”
“Hey! I have plenty knowledge!”
“Then keep telling us,” Ash prompts.
“Right. Well. It’s not like you look at a screen and ‘zap,’ you now have flowers inside you. How many of you guys have looked at a screen this week?”
The group gathered in Buffy’s living room glance around at each other. Slowly, each hand goes up.
“And no flowers,” Buffy admits. “So…?”
“This thing… why don’t you explain it, Will?”
Willow startles, suddenly flustered.
“No, you!” She hisses.
“Why should I–”
“You’re ‘knowledge boy,’ remember?”
“Guys!” Buffy cuts them off, and gives the pair a pointed look.
They share a bashful look, and after a quick, silent conversation, Xander sighs and turns towards them, Willow looking righteously smug at his side.
“People get sick when they love someone who doesn’t love them back.”
There’s a brief, baffled silence.
“Excuse me?” Giles asks, brows screwed up in a frown.
“It’s a kind of… trope.” Willow says, hopeful expression sinking when the faces stay blank. “People like to write stories where the characters have this disease… makes them confess, o-or something.”
There’s a collective silence where, much to Willow’s apparent relief, no one decides to ask how she found out about this.
“Alright.” Giles is the first to speak. “Let’s suppose these cases do operate as they do in this… online mythos. How would confessing one’s feelings aid in a cure if the victim’s feelings are, indeed, unrequited?”
“There’s kinda different versions…” Xander pipes up, before trailing away.
Willow rolls her eyes.
“Well, that’s where it gets fuzzy. Sometimes, it’s all sad-ending, boo-hoo. Other times, it’s only when someone believes their feelings are unrequited, so the truth can cure them!”
“I guess we can test it?” Ash offers, doubtful. “Ask the guy – or any of the others – if they like someone. Track ‘em down, get them to ‘fess up?”
“We can try, but it’s temporary,” Buffy sighs. “Someone’s made this happen. I’m willing to bet that the folks in this town who know about this sickness have also got access to a bunch of online-witchcraft stuff. It has to be some kind of spell.”
“Willow, can you track anything of the sort?” Giles asks, to which she nods. “Brilliant. You work on that. Someone else ought to go to the hospital, see if this boy is still there. Although if his affliction is already grave, we may have to perform our healing experiments on someone else. If the hospital can offer some kind of surgery to facilitate his breathing in the meantime–”
“No!” Willow exclaims. Then shifts under the gaze of the room which travels to her. “I mean… they should keep him alive, absolutely. But, if it is like the stories, it’s not exactly that simple. If they remove the flowers, it means they lose their connection with that person. They lose their love.”
“Wow,” Ash breathes.
Giles scrubs at his brow.
“Perhaps you ought to return to the beginning, explain what exactly the symptoms are of this sickness,” he says. “Is there anything else we should know?”
“Well, it kinda starts like any other cough, I suppose,” Willow shrugs. “Then you start coughing up flower petals. And when you get to the whole-flower stage, and the not-breathing, that’s when you should really be worried.”
“I don’t know about you guys, but having a dead-end love life is looking like a plus right now,” Buffy chimes brightly. “And you two should be good, coupled up as you are.”
“Very well, we’re all safe,” Giles says, already gathering his, by now redundant, papers. “But I say we’d better get moving before this escalates any further.”
Buffy nods, running her eyes over the room.
“Ash, you with us?”
Jumping, Ash blinks around at her.
“Hm?”
“…Going to the hospital?”
“Oh, um, I’ll join you guys over there, that alright?”
There’s a slight pause, but then Buffy’s nodding.
“Sure. See you there.”
~
“Vampires can’t get sick.”
Ash stands in the doorway of the crypt, eyes fixed on Spike, sprawled on his sofa. The whole, hurried walk over, her chest tightened with every step, remembering the hoarseness of his voice, the coughing fits that have been plaguing him these past days.
“Know that, don’t I?” He sighs, voice scratchy. “I wanna find who’s been throwing spells around this time. Have you spoken to that witch of yours?”
“I’m a witch too,” Ash says quietly, stepping inside.
“Oh yeah, I forget. The useful one, I mean.”
Closing the door, Ash stops, makes herself take a breath before she turns back to face him.
“Actually, I have. She said–”
“Oh, bugger–” Spike chokes all of a sudden, sitting up sharply. The coughing takes him in a second, great hacking spasms that shoot up the length of his body.
Eyes widening, Ash hurries forwards, hovering in front of him as if she can do anything to help.
Loud, crunching coughs resonate through Spike’s throat, and then something is spilling over the fist he holds in front of his mouth. For a hysterical second, Ash thinks it’s blood. Then the wide, curled red petals are falling at her feet.
“You have it too.”
Panting in the wake of his spate of coughing, Spike drops his fist and looks up at Ash tiredly.
“Have what?”
She winces at his raw voice, cracking and whispery.
“Willow called it Hanahaki. Flowers growing in people’s lungs until they… until they can’t breathe.”
Spike sits back, slinging his arms over the back of the couch.
“I’m not the only one, then.”
“Seems like people are getting it all over Sunnydale.”
“The flowers are a bitch, I’ll give ‘em that, but if suffocation is the worst they’re gonna do, I’ve got nothing to worry about, do I? So why are you here to dote on the invalid vampire, instead of the living, breathing humans apparently ‘bout to drop dead out there?”
Ash chews on her lower lip, staring down at the flower petals scattered around her boots. Her own voice is thin as she replies.
“The flowers mean you… you get them if you have feelings for someone, and that person doesn’t love you in return.”
Spike’s quiet for a long moment. Neither of them raise their eyes to the other. At length, he clears his throat.
“That so?”
“Maybe… you should tell them? If– if you know who it is.”
Spike does look up at her, then.
“Are you barmy? I can’t tell her.”
Ash’s breath catches in her throat. Her voice doesn’t dare go past a whisper.
“Who is it, Spike?”
He scoffs, looking down with a shake of his head. He pulls his arms down to his sides, fidgeting on his seat.
“If you’re right, the fact I have these… Means she doesn’t love me back anyway, isn’t that right?”
“…Love?” Ash echoes.
“Better run along with the rest of your bunch and figure out how to switch this mojo off, pet. More ‘n anything, I’d like a smoke one of these days.”
Ash shakes herself and fixes her hands on her hips.
“We are, Spike. But I mean, we don’t know if this thing means that… whoever it is doesn’t love you back. Not necessarily.”
“It doesn’t?”
She shakes her head.
He chews his cheek for a long second, then sighs.
“Who am I kidding. Don’t need to ask to know the Slayer can’t stand me.”
He pushes up from the sofa, striding over to grab a drink. Ash stumbles back, lets him pass without trying to follow.
Glass clinks as Spike pours himself a generous splash of bourbon. Takes a bracing sip before turning back to Ash. She’s still standing in the same spot, her back to him.
“It’s Buffy?” She asks. She’s quiet, voice unreadable and he can’t see her face to help parse the tone.
“Go on an’ laugh,” he says darkly, taking a slouching seat on the sarcophagus. “Know it’s pathetic.”
Ash clears her throat rather forcefully before finally turning around.
“No. She’s– I mean, Buffy is great. Amazing.”
Spike only takes a long, commiserating sip from his glass.
“I should– the others are waiting,” she says tightly, stepping towards the door. “Just thought I should tell you what’s going on. So… I’ll see you.”
“Give ‘em hell from me when you catch ‘em, hm?”
She nods quickly and slips out the door.
The moment Ash is in the cemetery and alone, she walks as fast as she can, trying to calm her gasping breaths. “Don’t need to ask to know the Slayer can’t stand me.”
The Slayer. Buffy.
Spike loves Buffy.
It makes sense. Every sign, every fight, every look shared between the two of them plays over in Ash's head. It makes sense. They match each other’s strength. And who isn’t spellbound by Buffy?
At the edge of the graveyard, Ash drops to her knees as the first coughs shake her, the rain of petals spilling between her fingers.