Hanahaki

[foundparadise]

The Hanahaki Disease Meme

The Hanahaki Disease is an illness born from one-sided love, where the patient throws up and coughs up flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. The infection can be removed through surgery, but the feelings disappear along with the petals...

1- Discovery:
There's the one person who makes your heart leap into your throat- but wait, that's not your heart. Where are all these flowers coming from? And why do they remind you of your beloved?

2- Concern:
Someone you know has been acting strange lately... Coughing a lot, hiding their hands all the time... It's enough to make anybody worry.

3- Sicker and Sicker:
Coughing up flower petals all the time isn't easy to hide. But it's getting harder to even breathe, now. You're going to have to make a decision, and soon...

4- Confession:
Everyone knows that there's two ways to get rid of Hanahaki: Surgery (the risk dependent on the time period), or confessing your feelings. Time to toe up and face your beloved and just tell them that you love them so much you're dying from it.

5- Post-Op:
The other option... You just couldn't tell them, but you weren't ready to die. Still, without those feelings the world seems a little less colorful. Can you still be friends with them now that you have to start all over? Do you want to?

6- Make your own!
There's flower petals coming out of somebody's mouth in some way for some reason- make this prompt your own.

Just as a note, due to the nature of the meme vivid descriptions of coughing/choking/gagging are probably going to happen. If you want it toned down, make sure to put that in your top-level.

Comments

agreed! let me know if you want anything changed! ♥ also, apologies for the length! setup @_@

[indigently]

[ The first time Kaveh felt the pull of the flowers in his lungs was after a particularly bad argument, one that ended in shouting on his part before he stormed out of the shared common spaces of Alhaitham's house and to the refuge of his bedroom. Curled up and cocooned in the covers, he'd allowed himself tears that had started as those of frustration— although as his breathing devolved into a series of coughs, they became a result of the strain, and then alarm as the coughing fit ended, leaving in its wake the delicate petals of a padisarah strewn across his pillow.

The next day, hungover and miserable, Kaveh devoured every book the House of Daena had on botany-related illnesses. When that failed, he turned to Tighnari and his personal collection, but in the end, he found a name where he least expected, in a book of Inazuman folklore, but even that was all stories, no real answers to be found. Only the strange, burning knowledge that he's in love with the one person on Teyvat who won't look at him twice.

Since then, it's only gotten worse. Days have bled into weeks and weeks to months, Alhaitham still drives him insane, they still fight like bull and lion, and Kaveh is still in love and still coughing up flowers. Only now they're flower heads instead of petals; and now the delicate leaves are sometimes stained at the edges with blood from where their roots have dug into his lungs.

The stories in that book, one he's now read possibly a hundred times in search of answers or even clues, talk of a surgery, the only cure outside that one more obvious one— the impossible one, that is— but Kaveh's not sure such a thing really exists in their world. Nor is he even sure he would want it, if it did. The idea, after all, stands polar to everything for which Kaveh has ever stood.

(And besides, who would he be without the simmering frustration and anger that drive him when the Akademiya's scribe is at his most contrary?)

The answer to that, of course, is somewhere not here. Here, with his blonde hair loose over his shoulders as he fights back a series of coughs angling to ruin his whole evening— although really, he supposes, the evening was already happened when he found himself eavesdropping on their temporary houseguests, the Traveler and their Mora-hungry companion. And apparently Alhaitham can get through a conversation without verbally reducing someone to nothing, at least when that someone isn't him.

It's an ugly, jealous realization.

Shortly after, with a bloodied padisarah crumpled into the trash and a tired, wan expression on his face, Kaveh emerges back into the house, to the kitchen where he's sure Alhaitham is waiting on him to finish dinner. ]

Sorry I couldn't say goodbye to your friends. [ There's a roughness to his voice that shouldn't be there. He clears his throat, hating how clogged it feels, takes in a breath as if it will somehow clear the way for him to breathe normally again. ] I wasn't feeling well.

Sorry for the delay!

[admonishinginstruction]

[Alhaitham's problems had begun around the same time, the argument with Kaveh and his retreat to his room causing pain in his chest... abnormal for him. He wasn't bothered by arguing with his housemate normally. But this... this was different. He'd finished his evening before going to his own room, settling in with a book.

He had coughed, thinking it was from dust in the older book he was reading, but it continued... and continued. Before he coughed something up, and found a Sumeru rose petal in his hand... Something his rational mind couldn't comprehend. He took the petal and stuck it in the back of one of his personal books that night.

It would become the catalyst of a flurry of research. Through all of the resources he had as the former Acting Grand Sage and current Scribe, he hadn't been able to find anything.

Only hearing of 'hanahaki' legends from Eremite mercenaries he traveled with at one point for the Akademiya. It seemed out of place for Sumeru... but. Even after asking some of the mercenaries about these legends, all he had were stories and rumors.

And a strange pain in his chest.

He at least had a name... and now an acquaintance who traveled Teyvat. He would ask at some point in the future. For now, he bid the Traveler and Paimon farewell, turning towards the door that opened and blonde that came through the door.

The pain in his chest got worse as he saw how... tired Kaveh looked.]

I'm sure they'll be back. Better if they stay healthy.

you are totally okay! weeks are busy for me anyway :3

[indigently]

[ There's something special about that Traveler. Everyone says so. From the moment they swept into Sumeru, to their role in the overthrow of the corrupt Akademiya Sages and their plot against their Archon, everyone has talked about them practically non-stop. He'd heard whispers of their deeds even out on his job in the desert, and then he'd come back and everything was different, an evil overthrown and his roommate— not exactly known for his altruism— right in the center of it, working alongside someone he'd known for a matter of weeks, if not days.

Meanwhile, their own attempt to work together, years ago, ended in misery and a once-bright friendship in ruins.

(And all this time, he's blamed Alhaitham's stubborn, cold attitude, and yet the scribe was able to work with a whole team of others... what if the fault was his all along?)

The Traveler, who today came into their Alhaitham's house at his invitation, who it seems has again been embroiled in some dangerous plot in which his roommate's solution has, once again, involved someone relatively new to his acquaintance. Whom now seems to be the object of concern on the scribe's behalf—

Since when, he wonders, did Alhaitham care about someone's well-being?

The thought is a bitter pain in his lungs, and Kaveh is left to scramble for a glass of water before the cough in his throat can build to the point it needs to escape. ]

You're worried for them. How tender-hearted of you. [ It's spoken in an attempt at sardony, but his voice cracks against the obstruction in his throat and he just sounds tired and sad. ] If it wasn't for the repeated shots at my painting-hanging skills, I'd wonder if Siraj had actually succeeded in doing something to you.

[ He wants to scream, but screaming will make him cough, and coughing will bring up a flower, and that will just lead to questions he's not ready to answer. ]