Chapter Text
The woman sitting in the chair across from Beomgyu is pretty. She has an old-American-movie beauty to her, elegant and real but unreachable. Like the distance between their two seats: hers an old warm caramel brown armchair with rounded arms, and his a couch of matching color. There’s two fluffy white pillows on either end of the couch, and he’s in the middle, hands clasped in his lap, looking at a beautiful and distant woman. He’s not supposed to be here. At this point, that’s the least of his worries.
She taps a pen against a carefully bound notebook. Her manicured nails are a subtle red, verging on pink. Her jewelry is modest but expensive. Everything about her seems modest but expensive. He’s sure she made all of the money to pay for these things off of people like him. People sitting in her office because they had nowhere else to go. People who weren’t supposed to be there.
She’s been studying him like he’s the most curious test subject for the length of their whole conversation now, some five-ten minutes or so. He’s been counting her blinks. She tells him, “This sounds like a rather serious issue that you’re describing, Mr. Kim.” There’s a slight accent as she speaks. He suspects that this “Dr. Theresa Yung” actually is American – but then, Koreans rarely choose to specialize in rare diseases. Anyway, he couldn’t say. As far as he can tell, they may very well both be using fake names today. “But it’s nothing I’ve never encountered before,” she continues. “There are measures we can take against it. But… you are aware, I’m sure, that there are solutions to hanahaki that don’t require surgery, yes?”
Beomgyu kneads the fingers of his right hand into the back of his left. He wants to grip the chair and dig his hands in. He wants to pull at something, to tug at a loose thread and watch something start to unravel. But nothing frays in this woman’s perfect office, except for him.
“I’m aware,” he says.
She nods. He doesn’t seem to need to explain, which he’s glad for. Everyone has their reasons to keep a secret.
“Well, there are rare disease surgeons I can recommend you to if that’s what it comes to. With this all being under the table as it is, however, the lack of proper documentation can cause… discrepancies.”
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want to know.
“For the time being, there have been rare cases of curing this disease without surgery or confession. We can try some things out for a few weeks and see how that goes. How does that sound?”
Beomgyu nods numbly. He knows the likelihood of success here is extremely small. He’s looked into just about every potential solution to this. He doesn’t care. The curated woman sitting before him seems so perfectly in control of her whole life that right now, he just wants to throw the reins of his life into her hands and let her take over. Just for a bit.
She asks for more details about his current symptoms. He explains them in depth. She doesn’t say that he’s running out of time in quite so many words, but they both know.
Hanahaki, a rare disease which goes by many other names, is rather well-documented, despite the lack of known ways to cure it. When somebody keeps a secret dear to their heart, particularly one about love, they can develop flowers in their heart, lungs, etc., that they begin to cough and vomit up, until the point where it could kill them. The best known methods to cure it are to confess one’s feelings or to undergo a surgery with more risk than return. The timeline varies, but follows a general pattern; the flower petals will develop over weeks, and the symptoms will get particularly problematic and frequent by the first or second month. Most who’ve died have passed within half a year of development.
Beomgyu is about to hit month six. Now, he can officially no longer go on shows or tour, or people might find out. Some of his staff already have. That’s why he’s here, finally talking to someone else about it. At least it gives him a partner (or two) in crime. The rest of the group think that Beomgyu is sick. They’re meant to give him space so he can recover. Beomgyu doesn’t know what the others think he has, and he’s trying not to think about it.
Mid-conversation, Beomgyu pauses the disease specialist woman to ask, “Excuse me one moment. Do you have a bucket?”
Without pause, she retrieves a trash can from a corner of the room and passes it over to him. He leans over it, hacks up flowers painted all white and pink like Valentine’s day, and with an apologetic smile, beckons for her to continue speaking. One perfectly painted eyebrow arches up subtly at him from across the room, but she doesn’t comment.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s trace this back to its roots – pardon me. No pun intended.” He doesn’t even try to acknowledge it. “When did you first develop symptoms?”
They’re filming for an episode of To Do. They wake up early and drive for a long time to the filming location, and inevitably everybody nods off, one by one. Beomgyu couldn’t sleep the night before, and he can’t sleep now. It’s becoming more common for him to not be able to sleep.
He’s in the backseat, next to Taehyun. Yeonjun and Huening Kai sit in front of them, and Soobin is in the passenger seat. It’s September but it hasn’t quite started getting cold yet, so Beomgyu’s overestimated the weather. He’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and he has to cross his arms to keep warm. He’s drawing circles absentmindedly in his pant leg with one hand, shivering silently to himself because it’s too cold in the car, too, but he’s not going to wake everyone up to ask for the AC to be turned down.
Taehyun shifts beside him. He thought Taehyun had fallen asleep, but now the bright-eyed wonder is blinking at him, half sleep-dazed, half amused. Beomgyu feels like the world is crashing and falling apart around him.
“Cold?” Taehyun whispers. “I told you you’d need a jacket.”
Nobody would fall for it, but Beomgyu tries to put on an act of not being cold. These days, Taehyun doesn’t fall for any of his acts. He just laughs lightly at his hyung and leans over so he can shrug off his jacket. “It’s fine,” Beomgyu whispers to him, but Taehyun duly ignores him, wrapping the jacket over Beomgyu’s torso like he’s tucking Beomgyu into bed.
“There.” At this angle, he has to look up to smile at Beomgyu. “My cute, warm hyung.”
Beomgyu stops breathing. They hit a bump in the road, and Yeonjun’s head bangs against the window, and everyone is awake now, so Beomgyu makes fun of Yeonjun before anyone can pay attention to him and his rapid, abnormal heart rate.
It works on everyone, mostly, except that Kai glances back at him and takes in the jacket over his chest, and meets his eyes for a moment long enough that Beomgyu thinks it means something, but he doesn’t know what.
And he gets out of the car when they arrive, and excuses himself to go to the bathroom, because something is tickling the back of his throat. He’d think something he’d eaten earlier had gone down wrong, but he hadn’t actually eaten anything at all. He stands in the bathroom of some filming location he doesn’t even recall the name of now, and opens his mouth, peering in and reaching with his fingers to try to find what’s wrong.
He pulls out a single, solitary petal, that had gotten stuck to the roof of his mouth.
He knows what hanahaki is. He thinks to himself, thank god he’s not in love. He must’ve just accidentally swallowed a flower petal earlier when they were all out walking. It happens. Hanahaki doesn’t. Not to boys who aren’t in love.
And then they’re on tour. And they are beasts of legend, and they are forces of nature unreckonable with. And Beomgyu is in love, in love with the lights and the thrum of the music that becomes a constant entity, living under his skin both on and off stage. He is in love with his teammates, his friends, his everything and his all standing ever by his side, constantly doing more than he ever thought they could. He knows they’re incredible. More than that. They are what miracles make in the dark in a universe far away.
He’s watching his members sing their ending song. He lingers in the back, awash in love, nearly overwhelmed by it. He’s watching the way the light catches them, like a halo reaching down from the heavens to hold them close. And then Taehyun turns, just a bit, to look back at Beomgyu as he sings. And he beckons Beomgyu closer, and something lurches, tugging and daring to break somewhere inside Beomgyu’s gut. He can’t tell whether it urges him to follow Taehyun or to turn away. But he was not built to defy Taehyun, nor those cosmos-wielding eyes, and he lumbers forward, lost, until Taehyun’s hand takes his. They sing – god knows he doesn’t remember which song it was now, but it is beautiful and they sing in perfect unison. And Taehyun is just looking at him, just stars in his eyes and a smile, and Yeonjun comes closer and loops an arm around Beomgyu’s shoulders, and Soobin is laughing at something that Kai’s done, and Beomgyu wonders what he’s done to deserve them.
He doesn’t know. He can’t think of anything at all, but they’re tugging him forward, to wave to their audience before they say their goodbyes. And as they stumble through the backstage hallway, laughing and jostling each other side to side, Beomgyu makes a joke that makes them all laugh. He feels warm all the way through his heart, even as he tells them to go on ahead. Even as he slips into a quiet employee’s bathroom, where everything is silent, and the bustling noise of his band gets farther and farther away.
In complete and total silence, his ears still ringing from the music they’d just made, he hacks and coughs and wheezes and hurts until five perfectly formed flower petals sit in his hand.
He leans his head against the wall and slides down. He laughs. Five, just like them.
He crumples the petals up and throws them away.
The perfect pen clicks once, neatly, against the perfect notebook. The click resounds exactly to the beat Beomgyu can still hear in his head, that memory of music neverending.
“How long between the first and second instances?”
“Three weeks, maybe?”
She scratches something in her notebook. “Can you estimate when it got worse?”
“It started to get worse around two months ago. Around late November.”
“Symptoms?”
Beomgyu shrugs. “Blood, flowers. The usual.”
“Complete flowers?” She asks.
“Some,” he says. “Not really.”
“And the most recent instance was?”
“I have moments here and there, but it’s all minor. The worst one was three days ago.”
“How many flowers?”
Beomgyu thinks about it. “Five or six, maybe.” That had been one hell of a headache to get out of his system. Worse yet with the dance teacher over his shoulder, watching with dawning horror as he realized what was wrong with Beomgyu.
And Beomgyu had kept it such a good secret until then.
She jots down more notes, asks more questions, and then with a sigh says, “We’ll just have to do our best with what we have. The stakes are, well… high. But if this is the path you choose, then…”
The fleeting question of how many patients she’s had that didn’t make it in the end crosses his mind. He ignores it.
“One of the most common tactics people take is to fall out of love with the object of their interest. Alongside that, we’ll have you take various ‘potions,’ if you will. They won’t taste good, or be necessarily good for your body or health, but the side effects are controlled.”
Controlled. He barely succeeds at not laughing out loud. Good thing he’s past the point of caring about side effects.
“The hope is that we’d succeed in killing the roots of the flowers, so that they simply stop growing. This is a physical phenomenon, at the end of the day.”
She tells him to track the success of both tactics – though, he’s not completely certain how one tracks the success of “falling out of love.” Then she gives him a slip of paper, like a brochure, watermarked as being an official document of the London Institute for Research of Rare Diseases, with a numbered list labeled how to fall out of love. This time, he doesn’t manage to keep from laughing out loud. She doesn’t comment. Maybe she knows it’s deserved.
Finally, she gives him the “potions,” and sends him on his way. They’ll meet back up in a week. If he makes it that long.
But, whatever it takes, no?
When he makes it out of the therapist’s office, hood up and mask on so that he can’t be recognized, he’s ushered into the back of a tinted-window vehicle (but not their usual van) by Jisoo, one of the managers. The dance teacher had told Jisoo nearly instantly after he found out about Beomgyu’s condition, because purportedly he “could not deal with this shit by himself.” Which was kind of fair, although Beomgyu had been dealing with it by himself for months before that. Anyway, if Beomgyu had to choose someone to know about and “help” him with the issue, he’d choose Jisoo over the dance teacher, who’s more an awkward, gruff kind of guy.
He gets into the back of the car. Jisoo drives in silence, and Beomgyu unfolds the list of “ways to fall out of love,” as it were. The list reads:
- Focus on every flaw they have. Turn everything good about them into a flaw as much as possible. Under no circumstances compliment them.
- Keep your distance. Avoid them like the plague. Think of them like they are one.
- Get rid of reminders of your love. No matter how sentimental or valuable.
- Only use terms to refer to this love as something of the past. It is already done and over with.
- Do not under any circumstances inquire as to the condition of your former object of interest or their life.
- Focus on your own feelings. Spend quality time alone.
- Tell yourself, every day, that you are falling out of love for them. Remind yourself of the reality you are aiming for.
- Condition yourself to associate them with bad thoughts. Every time you see them, think of terrible things.
- End everything before it’s really, truly over. Leave the party before everyone else does because you don’t have to wait for anyone else. Remind yourself that attachments are finite.
- Grieve your love. Give it a grave. A proper goodbye.
From the front of the car, Jisoo finally speaks up to say, “What is that, anyway?”
Beomgyu sighs, folding it back up and stuffing it into his pocket. “Complete and utter bullshit.”