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Flower lung.
Love sickness.
Petal death.
Choking vines.
Fatal blooms.
Flores exscreare.
Hanahaki.
Everyone on the planet knew what Hanahaki was. No one had quite figured out how it was, but it was common knowledge that about twenty years ago, people started coughing up flower petals, choking on them for months, years if they were unlucky, before they suffocated on their own lungs. Then, miraculously, there was a breakthrough. Someone had found a cause, and therefore a cure. The flowers were the result of suppressed feelings, each and every petal that passed the lips was something felt, but unvoiced, struggling to make it out into the world, and the only cure was to speak those feelings into existence and give them room to grow.
Really and truly, the flowers could come from any form of repression from something as daunting as refusing self-actualization to something as simple as hating your boss and keeping it a secret. But the most common was love, romantic love, especially. It started young, middle schoolers would find themselves hiccupping up honeysuckle because their seat partner in math got a new haircut. It was very rarely fatal at that age, partially because adolescent crushes weren’t usually as dedicated and long-lasting as they’d need to be for death, but also because the culture had simply changed around it. If the result of not talking about your feelings was literally fatal, talking about them became incredibly commonplace. Generally, the subject of the feelings didn’t have to be the one hearing the feelings said aloud. So long as you spoke them, gave them room to breathe, and there was somebody there to accept and acknowledge the feelings, you were fine. In fact, an entirely new profession, Venters, sprang up just because people wanted an easily accessible place to dump their feelings before they became fatal.
Only, sometimes it didn’t work like that. Sometimes, a stranger in a room who was paid to listen didn’t cut it. Sometimes there were particularly virulent strains (usually involving love) that did actually require a full-on confession, and wasn’t that just so romantic? An illness that forced people to reveal their deepest secrets to the one person they’d never want to tell. Something like that wouldn’t be upsetting or traumatizing for either party at all. It made so much sense to make a hundred different romance dramas about it. Movies, TV shows, books, plays, music, hell even videogames weren't safe from the eternal presence of Hanahaki. And, largely, everyone was fine with this. It was romantic, remember? Who wouldn’t be okay with it?
Leo Valdez wouldn’t be okay with it. He’d lived that story, every agonizing minute of it. He’d stood there and teased Jason when he coughed up a couple of morning glory petals for the first time, felt the weight of preemptive grief on his shoulders when gardenia petals were stained red with blood, and wept hysterically at a hospital bedside surrounded by whole red carnations. Jason had Hanahaki for seven years, one of the longest cases in recorded history, and he had the kind that required a proper confession, but he never did it. Leo begged him, sobbing on his knees and clinging to his best friend, for him to just say what he needed to say to whoever he needed to say it to, but Jason couldn’t. Or maybe he just wouldn’t.
“I’m a coward,” Jason panted, rubbing the back of his hand over his mouth. He’d just vomited up a bouquet of chrysanthemums and daisies and sunflowers and he was left weak and trembling in its wake. “And selfish. I’d rather die than risk living in a world without them in my life.”
Leo stood there, tears steadily rolling down his cheeks. “I hate you,” he whispered before the petals of marigolds started floating past his own lips.
Jason just gave him a sad smile. “Me, too.”
But that was three years ago, back in the fifth year of Jason’s sickness when it was starting to get really bad. He’d gone another two years coughing up florist shops before being hospitalized, at which point Leo finally had his breakdown. He’d begged Jason not to leave him, promised he’d do anything to keep him, and even confessed the desperate love he’d been whispering to Venters for years. Then, with IVs stuck in his arms and a breathing tube shoved up his nose, Jason finally relented. He held Leo close, kissed away his fat, ugly tears and said the three most beautiful words imaginable. They’d kissed and promised to live the rest of their lives together, the end.
Right?
That was certainly when the credits would have rolled in the chick flick of their life, but the benefit of movies is that there are no consequences. The movie ends, and everyone goes back to scene one to wait for someone to hit play again. Real life didn’t work like that. Real life had all those big, cinematic moments, but instead of a director shouting cut, you had to wake up the next morning and go to the grocery store because you forgot to buy toilet paper on your last shopping trip. Real life kept moving.
And that meant Jason and Leo kept moving, too. The doctor said that Jason was cured. Kind of. See, because Jason had stubbornly lived with Hanahaki for such an unprecedented length of time without being cured or dying, he was a little medical mystery and the first ever case of what was being referred to as “Chronic Benign Hanahaki,” which that he was going to keep coughing up petals, probably forever. His body had gone so long turning its feelings into flowers that it didn’t know how to do anything else. It wasn’t dangerous, so long as he didn’t do any more little suppression stunts, and the only physical change he had to deal with was a few petals whenever he was hit with a surge of affection for the subject of his original feelings and floral-scented breath. It should have been super easy to deal with.
What they’d failed to consider was that Jason was obsessed with Leo. What was probably imagined to be a couple petals a day was buckets. Jason’s base state was, apparently, thinking about Leo, and when he really got that big heart of his a-thumpin’, the flower output multiplied. It still wasn’t dangerous, especially if Jason took a huff from his inhaler of people-friendly herbicide, but it was annoying as hell.
For instance, when Leo came home from his toilet paper run to a veritable carpet of bright red rose petals leading to the bedroom, he felt his temple throb. “Jason!”
Jason stuck his head out of the bedroom, clearly having expected a warmer reception, based on the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt like a hussy. “Yes?”
“Do you see anything wrong with this picture?” Leo asked, gesturing around. He glanced over and saw that there were a bunch of sorrel blossoms on the coffee table like an army of defeated lady bugs. He felt his eye twitch.
“I don’t see a problem; I don’t have my glasses on.”
Leo reached down and grabbed a folded pair of socks from a nearby basket of laundry and attempted to hit Jason between the eyes. He missed. Horribly. “There’s flowers everywhere, Jason! I literally cleaned the whole apartment yesterday!”
“They’re gestures of love,” Jason insisted. He picked up a cluster of myrtle from a different table. “This one means ‘love in a marriage.’”
“There’s not going to be a marriage if you don’t knock it off.”
“I can’t help it. It’s a medical condition.”
“You could, I don’t know, sweep them up, like I have to every day.”
“But I want you to see them,” Jason protested. “It’s romantic.”
“News flash, Jason, it’s actually kinda gross,” Leo shot right back. “You cough these things up out of your lungs, remember? They’re basically loogies with good PR.”
Jason actually looked a little hurt. “You don’t have to be mean about it.”
“Well, you don’t have to–” Leo cut himself off with a grimace, feeling a strange tickle in the back of his throat. He coughed a couple times and then a single petal, a red columbine passed his lips.
Silence fell between them, tense and uncomfortable before Jason cleared his throat. “You, uh, wanna talk about it?” Leo shook his head. “Are you willing to do it anyway?”
Leo sucked on his teeth before begrudgingly nodding. “Yeah, I, um…”
“I’m gonna go put on a shirt,” Jason suggested. “Do you think you could maybe make some hot chocolate?”
“I’m mad at you, so I’m not spending fifteen minutes making you the real stuff,” Leo warned. “It’s Swiss Miss or nothing right now.”
Jason smiled gently at him. “I like Swiss Miss.”
With that, they split up to do their separate tasks. Jason retreated to the bedroom to de-hussy himself while Leo took up his familiar position in the kitchen. He used the extra -marshmallow packets, dumping Jason’s marshmallows into his own mug out of instinctual kindness because Jason didn’t like marshmallows and even mad, Leo couldn’t force them on him. After that, he started heating up the milk to water ratio that he’d perfected long ago because he wasn’t an animal who offered water-only hot chocolate during an argument. He did heat it up in the microwave, though, because he wasn’t in any state to care about being a monster.
When he finally brought the mugs out, Jason was sitting on the couch wearing one of his favorite purple hoodies, and all of the sorrel blossoms had been hidden away. Leo couldn’t be bothered to care where they wound up. He curled up in his spot next to Jason and started slowly sipping on his hot chocolate. Jason didn’t push for him to start talking, he just sat there taking up space and waiting for Leo to take the stage when he was ready.
It took Leo a whole mug of hot chocolate and half of a second one before he was ready.
“Sometimes I think you forget you almost died,” Leo said quietly into the mug he’d stolen from Jason. “You just… You decided how I’d react if you told me how you felt and then chose to just give up without even giving me a chance. Would you have ever said anything if I didn’t confess first?”
Jason was completely and totally silent for a moment, which made his single word answer drop like an anvil. “No.”
Leo squeezed his eyes shut and just focused on his breathing. He’d already known the answer before asking the question, but it was still awful to hear out loud. Jason had almost died. He was ready to punch his own ticket, just because he thought Leo was a shitty enough person to totally abandon him over feelings. It wasn’t fair. “I still get mad at you sometimes,” he confessed. “I go see a Venter about it when it gets really bad because I’m worried that if I talk to you, I’ll prove you right.”
Jason went very, very still. “Prove me right about what?”
“That I’m a bad person and dying would be better than talking to me.”
Jason made a strangled noise, then got down on his knees in front of Leo, cradling his face. Leo pressed into his palms and squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn’t have to see Jason’s face twisted in pain. “Sweetheart, no. No no no. That’s not it at all.”
“Then why?” Leo asked, ignoring the way his voice broke on the last word. “Why did you just… You just assumed I’d be so awful that dying was literally the better alternative.”
“I don’t know,” Jason admitted. “I was… scared. I was dying and it was all my fault, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do the one thing that would have fixed it. I knew you would have been nice about it, even then. You stood with me through every second of my Hanahaki and you never complained. But there was one tiny fraction of a chance that you wouldn’t, and I was so terrified of that one possibility that I refused all the others.”
Leo swallowed thickly. He didn’t want to admit it, but he understood where Jason was coming from. “I probably wouldn’t have said anything, either.”
Jason sighed and pressed his forehead to Leo’s knee. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I put you through that.”
Leo could have said the expected it’s okay or I forgive you, but it wouldn’t have been right. It wasn’t okay, and he'd forgiven Jason a year ago, really he had. Instead, he just said, “I love you.”
Jason pressed a kiss to Leo’s knee, right where his forehead had been. “I love you, too.”
“Enough to clean up your flower mess?” Leo asked hesitantly. “Like, I get what you’re saying about them being a sign of love, I really do, but they don’t feel like that. You see the flowers and know what they mean and what feelings they represent, but all I see is a reminder of the worst seven years of my life. They remind me that you almost died before I got the chance to love you properly.”
“That’s fair,” Jason said a bit begrudgingly. He chewed his lip in thought for a moment, then looked up at him. “Can I buy you flowers?”
“Uh, sure?” Leo said, somewhat hesitantly. “That’s gonna get kinda pricey after a while, though.”
The furrow between Jason’s eyebrows deepened, then his eyes lit up. “Alright, then. I’ll grow them.”
Leo blinked. “You’ll… grow them?”
“Yeah,” Jason said, nodding like a very enthusiastic bobblehead. He stood and cupped Leo’s jaw in both his hands like he was cradling the whole world between his palms. “No more death flowers. From now on, the only flowers you’re going to see are ones that I grew for you. Is that okay?”
“You’re ridiculous,” Leo giggled breathlessly. “All I asked is for you to pick up a broom and you’ve decided to become a horticulturist instead.”
“I’ll get the broom, too,” Jason promised. “But I want you to have absolute proof that I’m living and that I love you. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Leo said, feeling almost helpless. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Then he grabbed Jason by the ears and kissed him.
From then on, things were better. Not perfect, but better. Jason still coughed up flowers, plenty of them, and try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of all of them. Leo woke up in a bed of baby’s breath and red and blue salvia on more than one occasion, and sometimes Jason just missed a spot or simply forgot. But that was okay. The petals were still a monument to their past terror, but now there was a monument to their future commitment. Now Leo could go out on their little balcony and be enveloped by the scent of daffodil and yarrow and jasmine and ivy and aster and, Leo’s favorite, rosemary. He could breathe deep and be reminded by every sense that Jason was alive, that Jason was alive and loved him enough to learn how to garden and to wake up every morning to cut two blooms to live next to the bathroom sink for the day.
And that, Leo thought, was good enough for now.