Work Text:
I’m going to tell you a story.
Picture if you will, a normal accident and emergency room, or emergency room if you swing that way. There’s strip lighting, there’s busy people rushing around, there’s a very stern receptionist who keeps everyone in line. It’s Saturday night in central London, just a normal Saturday, really. It is horrendously busy, full of drunks and broken ankles and people who just couldn’t wait through the weekend. The hospital building itself is a brutalist monolith, ugly but beautiful, a metaphor for something.
Imagine, please, a well-dressed woman sitting in a plastic chair. At this point she has been there for hours even though she has the best private queue jumping coverage money and privilege can buy. One of the things they never tell you when you take out insurance is that when it comes to emergencies, especially ones in public, you still end up going down the A&E plughole, same as everyone else, and no matter how good your premiums are you are still stuck drinking bad machine coffee at 3AM as your thighs stick to the cheap plastic chair, with nothing to do but waste time and phone battery as you wait your turn.
Normally our heroine would never be seen in public, let alone under the watchful eye of all this CCTV, especially not while wearing her real name and referencing her real medical records. She had no choice, though, because she was found in public with the wrong wallet in her handbag and she was brought here by a well meaning samaritan.
It started with a cough. Coughs are normal, especially in an ex-smoker, so she didn’t think anything of it. Not until it turned from a normal cough into That Cough. She was startled the first time she saw the burst of red against her palm. She hid away from it, closed it in her hand. Coughing up blood is terrifying, but she can deal with normal levels of terror. Even though nothing says The End like a burst of blood in a handkerchief, she can deal with normal catastrophes.
How is one supposed to feel when one realises that it isn’t normal blood that is staining her hand? That there is instead a thing hiding between her closed fingers, red as blood but not at all blood. Relief? Confusion? Answers on a postcard.
Under the strip lights of the hospital waiting room the cough is getting worse, but not fast enough for her to be fast tracked.
An hour later and she’s finally seen and things inevitably accelerate. She moves into a cubicle and waits again, and when the sun begins rising over London she is led to a different uncomfortable chair before a large machine covered in cautions and warnings, now only in bare feet and a hospital dressing gown.
It has been a very long time since anyone referred to her as an English rose, but the X-Ray doesn't lie.
The radiographer runs out of the room and then our heroine is ushered down the hall so that they can put her in the MRI machine that is kept aside for true emergencies. They tell her in no uncertain terms to hold still as can be, but she can’t stop the cough once it starts. They give her something that stops the cough dead, and as the magnets thump horribly around her she has a grain of hope in her heart that there will be some treatment, that they are all mistaken, that this is just bronchitis and that what she keeps coughing up is just strange mucus.
They lead her into a nice room, the kind reserved for bad news.
“There must be a mistake”, she says.
‘Don’t you know who I am’, she doesn’t say.
Don’t you know that karma can’t come for me until I am done?
“No”, the doctors shake their heads, “there is no mistake.”
They leave her alone for a while to ‘come to terms with it’, and instead she calls her insurer, and another doctor is summoned to give a second opinion.
“There isn't a cure”, that doctor says. “There are no options.”
She calls the insurance again. The panic in her voices makes them escalate her further up the chain to get rid of her. She’s drifting into bed-blocking territory now in their eyes; someone unable to accept the horrible news and remembering that she has power and influence enough to make it unpleasant for them. This time, the consultant is summoned. He’s tall and unlike his colleagues he has the clear skin and bright eyes of someone well paid and well rested.
“It's a stress related illness”, he snaps. “Take the sea air, Miss Burnwood. Have an affair. A fling. Get it out of your system. It doesn’t have to be a death sentence, not unless you have a death wish”.
‘Just get laid, you frigid bitch’, the subtext screams.
That doctor is removed, and soon after another consultant comes and apologises.
“You have a very rare illness”, he says. “We can give you something to help protect your lungs, but you're already going to pay for that cough suppressant as it is. I am sorry. There is counselling available, and you will be first on the list if we hear about any clinical trials that are recruiting in the near future. A nurse will be by with some information and your discharge papers promptly.”
“We are sorry, Miss Burnwood,” he says as he flees.
And so Diana Burnwood dresses again in the suit she’d picked out for a completely different circumstance, picks up her handbag and leaves the counselling leaflet on the bed, edges delicately crumpled, and walks out into the brand new world of the dying.
Across the world at this time is our other protagonist in this tale. A handsome man, tall and with good cheekbones and the meticulously shaved head of a man who knows it suits him better than pretending. He wears a suit that costs more than your apartment, and he is a professional killer, but he could be anyone. His ability to be anyone is his appeal; you never see him coming, but you love to watch him walk away.
He normally would receive his debrief from his handler, Diana Burnwood, but today he receives instructions to meet with a new contact in the city instead. This isn’t unusual, our man thinks. After all, his handler is a busy woman. Together they work for a large company that provides them with a generous benefit package; everyone has days off, even him.
Even if he isn’t aware, news travels fast through the information hungry underworld. The moment Diana was captured on St Thomas’ A&E’s CCTV, everyone in their employer knew more than our protagonist does.
Our protagonist isn’t thinking about that. His hands still ache from strangling a man to death. That doesn’t really go away, however many times you do it, and it always is the kind of gnawing pain he struggles to fully compartmentalise. It was why he started using the fibre wire in the first place, but he decided against it this time.
Our man, the infamous Agent 47, arrives at his rendezvous point to find an unfamiliar analyst holding an umbrella. He cuts a very average silhouette against the St Petersburg skyline. Our man 47 hands over the contents of the safe and his signature guns. While he is flying out in the lap of luxury, first class the whole way, his contact will smuggle his guns out through back channels. They will arrive at his next location faster than he will. Time was he would travel with them without complaint, huddled half-frozen in a cargo hold for hours before being released at the other end by a baggage attendant who easily doubled his salary by looking the other way. Those years are long gone. He likes being able to have the finer things, even if he worries that he’s lost his edge since he embraced them fully.
“I heard your girl is dying”, his contact the analyst remakrs with a conversational twist as he finishes the debrief and shakes 47 by the hand. “A shame, I’m sorry.”
“I don't have a girl”, 47 says. He drops the hand and walks away.
The contact huffs a laugh, the kind that says that his priors about 47 have been well satisfied with this interaction. “Not for much longer with that attitude”, the analyst mutters, and many men have said things to 47 to stop him leaving or to change his mind. He is proud of how good he has become at resisting the one-liner temptation that hallmarks agents who don’t make it back.
Nevertheless, this time, he turns around.
“That cough she's had”, the contact says, “it's no ordinary cough. It'll kill her.” He scoffs, arrogantly, “and it'll be her own fault.”
47 sneers. “Impossible. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
The man says a word, and 47 stops in his tracks once again.
“You know it.” the analyst says, and there’s a nasty, perverse delight in the way he revels in Diana’s misfortune. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? There’s a book, back at HQ, on who she’s soft on. The currently odds on is that it is probably you -”
The bullet hits the analyst between the eyes and he falls down where he stands in a crumpled heap. The way the blood pools in the deep lines of his forehead makes a pattern that is almost ironic, if you are in on the joke.
47 reclaims his guns, cancels his flight, and prepares to take the hard way out after all.
There are two known cures for Hanahaki Disease. The first is the one everyone knows, true love’s kiss. The second is decidedly less romantic: a double lung transplant.
Most people don’t live long enough for the transplant option to be viable, and so the former is considered the general cure. For most sufferers, true love’s kiss is a simple affair to arrange. It is thought that up to a third of hanahaki disease is undetected because people are always receiving kisses from their true loves just in the normal procession of their lives. Even for those who do end up needing an interventional kiss, there’s vanishingly few people who won’t step up to the plate and do the work of conjuring up feelings enough for someone who is literally dying from their love for you not to at least try. The secret is, if you get very unromantic about it, is that It doesn’t have to be a true love’s kiss, not necessarily. The body just has to think it is.
Medical studies have shown that the mechanism of action is the satisfaction of the ventral tegmental area, the hypothalamus, and the nucleus accumbens along the caress of venus that runs along where each intersects. Properly stimulated, it restores the balance of neurotransmitters and reduces the cytokine storm that causes the unusual symptoms to manifest. The message passes between the lovers through the empathic system that most humans have.
Diana knows that she loves 47. She also knows that medically, he cannot solve this. She knows this because she has his medical records, and she knows his diagnosis is one of classical psychopathy, and classical psychopaths are missing the key empathic pathways in the brain that allow for the cure to work. So as much as getting cured should be easy, she knows that she is ironically fucked.
Even if she professed her undying love to 47, and he reciprocated, they could kiss as much as they wanted and she’d still choke to death on a lungful of metaphors.
She has few options, and so, despite ruining a man’s life for saying it, she decides to take the consultant doctor’s subtextual advice and get laid.
She was married a long time ago, and even though she knows there's no feeling there anymore on her side, she still makes the decision to seduce her ex husband before she makes her play for any particularly attractive strangers. There was love there, once. They proclaimed it before their friends and family. There is a legal record of this fact. Legal proof that Diana Burnwood is capable of love.
She tracks her ex-husband down to his suburban house and his city office in a single afternoon. He never tried very hard to hide from her, never took her and her work all that seriously, as she well remembers. It is pathetically easy to manufacture a serendipitous meeting between them. She rearranges his world so their eyes meet across a crowded room. She wears the dress that she knows sparks nostalgia in him for when things were good, and plays it off like it is just a mad coincidence. He falls for it easily, he immediately lies to his new wife about a late night at the office, that they are having dinner in a beautiful restaurant inside the hour, laughing about old times as he shreds his wife’s reputation to make fodder for the new nest he’s building, and from there she doesn’t have to do anything more to break up his marriage and destroy his life than wait.
A week later, after he grunts out an orgasm with the three words on his tongue that she knows he pathetically means, and rolls off her into immediate slumber in the sterile bachelor penthouse he’s been forced by his wife’s lawyers to move into, Diana holds her breath and closes her eyes and waits for her lungs to clear, waits for the consultant to be right, that all she needed to do was have an emotional connection and a good fuck and she’d be clear of this nightmare.
This is a fairytale disease, however, and fairytales are never that simple.
The coughing fit grabs her harder than any has before and she rolls over and coughs and coughs and coughs until something that feels impossibly large forces its way out of her throat in reverse, alongside a wet handful of petals. She spits the lot of it on to the rug, her chest heaving and she continues retching as she stares at the mess on the rug for a moment before she picks the delicate little bud up. It feels real as one from any bridal bouquet, but it felt huge coming up out of her lungs. She tests it with her thumb and finds that the stem is as springy as a real rose, and there’s even a little premature thorn there. It’s not sharp, yet, but it wouldn’t take much for it to become so.
She wipes the blood from her mouth, climbs out of her ex’s bed, and disappears into the night as quickly as she reappeared.
The research she’s done says that this is the point of no return. Once the thorns manifest, every exacerbation she manages to endure brings with it another couple of percentage points onto her daily risk of death, either through drowning in her own blood as the spikes tear through her soft spongy lungs, or by tearing open her throat as she coughs whole stems up backward, raking her trachea open.
She goes to Cuba on a whim because she wants to go dancing. In Old Havana she wears a beautiful dress that moves like water as she haunts the salsa clubs from midnight until sunrise. She lets beautiful and desperate young men take her home and worship her body like it's liberation, escape, a green card. She lets herself enjoy their bodies, feeds off their concern as they panic when she starts coughing.
She's not frigid. She has sex, she has a lot of sex, she experiences old love, new love, every love but true love, and every morning she coughs up another chestful of rose petals, still burdened with the curse.
47 reads everything he can about hanahaki disease. He doesn’t presume to find anything she hasn’t; she is far better than him at all of this. Instead, he tries to think laterally. Think about what he would do, in her position. They have complementary skill sets, not identical ones. Even though he is always trusting of her excellence, perhaps he can still help.
Across the world he meets with people claiming that they can cure the disease. Most are snake oil salesmen at best or fraudsters at worst. Everyone can make claims that their little pill or concoction works. No one is usually around long enough to prove it. None of them have heard of Diana or any of her known aliases.
Deep on a forum he finds the name of a man who does seem to have some form of cure. He only treats women, though. It's not that men aren’t prone to developing Hanahaki, far from it. It affects both sexes broadly equally. This man however, has motivations. He is the lowest of the low, the true scum of the earth.
47 takes some of his neglected vacation time and goes to Japan in search of this man and his cure. The address he manages to find are the public offices of a private doctor. Ostensibly he is a dermatologist, but his large traditional house with its equally large, sumptuous grounds are right in the heart of Kyoto old town and tell of a different profession than one peddling acne treatments and removing precancerous lesions.
The doctor has an inner sanctum that he insists on taking 47 to. In the secret courtyard, hidden from view from the outside world, is a rose garden. "Donations, from happy patients", the doctor says, and 47 tamps down the visceral chill that runs down his spine as he watches the blooms wave in the afternoon breeze.
47 has gone in under the cover of a second opinion, but both he and the doctor know he is there for another reason, the layers of deception common among men of their purported interest. There are men who love to ruin the vulnerable; he found this man’s name on a forum for them rather than for sufferers. “I can't cure them directly,” the doctor says, and then pauses, licking his lips lasciviously, “but I do my best to help. Sometimes it works. Someone at least gets something out of it, this way. They are so beautiful, after all. Their lungs gasp so prettily. I have a girl coming in this afternoon, perhaps I can introduce you? Perhaps together, we can try and cure her?”
47 strangles him. When the girl turns up a few hours later, she turns out to be a woman in her early 20s, pretty enough with red dyed hair and a sakura blossom stuck between her two front teeth. He hands her all his research and a bundle of money and tells her that she should call the boy she is avoiding and tell him how she feels, and even if he rejects her, to stay away from old men who say they can help. She folds the documents into her knapsack and he tells her everything he knows, and hopes that it is enough.
He burns the house down with the doctor’s body in it, but not before he digs up the rose garden and salts the earth. He doesn't find any evidence of Diana there, but this time he’s thankful.
Diana returns to London. She has a new plan, and she must be home to achieve it. Weeks on from her trip to A&E, her breathing is compromised but she has managed the unexpected and suppressed the urge to cough through the combination of steely willpower and small, careful sips of codeine syrup. Together they keep the urge to cough down. 30% of hanahaki sufferers develop an opiate dependency, but it is unlikely to kill her, and it works. She plays the numbers, same as she always has.
She keeps working, signs back into the ICA’s servers and accepts work as if nothing has happened.
The next time 47 hears her cough, he asks her about it, and she tells him not to worry. “Seasons are changing, 47. Nothing more than that.”
She doesn’t think he knows, but she also knows that if he did, he wouldn’t say anything. He can at least be trusted to do that.
She has immense control over her body, always has done, and so she learns that she can clear her lungs on cue, which helps her in making the case for her plan B. If she allowed the doctors from that first night to see her they would want to study her, but she has no time for that. Instead, she goes to a very discreet doctor on Harley Street and enquires about a lung transplant. When that doesn’t work, she goes to a normal NHS clinic under an assumed name with a medical file that could double as a textbook for advanced lymphangioleiomyomatosis and does the same.
She gets nowhere.
As the weeks drag on the thorns get sharper. She knows she is losing the battle. As a last hurrah She flies to Japan and meets with the man who first identified the disease, the one who named it, who has dedicated his life to it. She’s read every paper she can get her hands on and he’s the one who pioneered the medical model, who swore it wouldn’t be a fairytale disease forever. She tells him everything, her dilemma, her position, her enormous wealth and her terrifying black market power. She tells him she can find a donor, have one killed to order. She just needs to have someone to do the surgery.
He listens to her, nods along sagely with a deeply compassionate look in his kind eyes and then takes her hand and tells her to enjoy her life. Tells her that she is remarkable, but she is unlucky. He wishes her the best.
He drinks his tea, and his obituary a week later talks about his dedication to his patients, his wife of nearly fifty years, his love of brutalist architecture and his life well lived.
That is the point at which she disappears.
They have both spent twenty years learning from each other how to be invisible, and so it isn’t a surprise that when Diana disappears, it takes him a month to run out of places to look for her.
He goes to all the places they ever condescended to meet. He flies significant routes back and forth on significant days. He hikes into the wilderness to relive their first moments with nothing but her ghost for company. He struggles. He gets headaches. He spends a long dark night of the soul drinking a bottle of whisky in a remote cabin and cries for the first time in his adult life.
He eventually receives notice of a body found in the Thames that matches her description. His contact says that she had to be identified by her dental records but that it is her, and so he flies back to the UK for the funerals, because she kept two different lives, and he is the only person who attends both. He wears black, keeps to himself, drinks tea and bad wine and allows himself to mourn for the first time.
The day after she’s burned and her ashes divided between the two plots she had prepared is when he finally gives up. He takes the first flight to Thailand. He’s booked into a remote resort he’s never been to before, high up in the mountains near the Burmese border in a cloud forest. From the pictures on the website it looks dramatic and isolated enough to allow him some space, give him some time to clear his head.
He goes hiking at dawn the morning he arrives, and it is of course kismet that he finds a pile of red petals under a tree before he even leaves the resort. He follows the trail of them like something out of a fairy tale, winding along the cultivated paths and ornamental gardens until he finds the source.
She is sitting on the veranda of a lodge identical to his, and she has a bowl in her hands. There is an IV in her arm, and he distantly remembers that this hotel is also advertised for high end medical recovery for those coming to Thailand for its surgical marvels. Despite the drugs, Diana looks terrible. She isn’t pale and wan like a Victorian maiden dying of consumption, she is instead red and blotchy, her eyes bloodshot and her lips cracked. She’s nothing like the cool princess he worshiped from afar, instead her face is swollen and her hair unkempt, and there’s petals and thorns and branches everywhere, and blood, so much blood. From the boughs that lie at her feet, she has entered the final stage. She probably only has days to live.
Their eyes meet in the morning mist. The bowl in her hands clatters to the floor, blood and petals splashing across the pale tile.
He strides across the garden, stepping over an ornamental pond in one huge step to take the shortest path to her. Runs up the steps to where she has just struggled to her feet and kisses her.
The kiss is everything all at once, but it’s not like the movies, not like the fairy tales. Or maybe it is. Neither of them have been in a movie or a fairy tale before. The credits don’t roll. There is no happily ever after here; no riding off into the sunset at 6:43AM. They both know that it cannot work, but they do it anyway. It feels so good that they keep doing it.
The scent of dying roses is all around her, and he holds her as she is racked with a coughing fit and he feels the thorns fill her mouth. She tries to keep kissing him through it even as she coughs petals into his mouth, but the cough keeps coming…and coming…and coming. He holds her, rubs her back, tells her his truth, that he’ll be with her until the end, that he wish he had come sooner, that he’d always loved her, and she gasps for breath between the coughs, and by the confusion in her eyes he realises that something has happened. Perhaps the magic that causes the disease still has a trick up its sleeve.
The petals that are coming out are changing before his eyes, withering away first into black and then further into ash, over and over and over until she spits out the last piece into her palm. All that’s left of what tried to kill her is a tiny flake of black rot; the seed of all this horror is just a speck the size of a poppy seed, easily ignored.
It’s not over, though. She is bleeding and weak. He feeds her water, gets the concierge on the phone who brings the medical car and the duty doctor around. 47 holds her the whole way down the mountain until they drive into the nearest city, to a large white hospital that gleams with new money. Diana is swiftly admitted, and the last 47 sees of her for the next few months is the lingering look back they both cast, he as he walks out of the hospital, her as she’s wheeled away down endless corridors. He commits her to memory, pale and drawn, breathing pure oxygen but alive, despite it all.
When he sees her months later she looks much the same, even down to the oxygen, but now they are alone. When he undresses her he traces the scar down her sternum with a ghostly touch of reverence, listens to how she breathes with her new lungs, the lungs he procured for her, hand delivered to the hospital; what macabre luck that a delivery driver with the perfect genetic profile was going so fast in the driving rain and took such a risky turn on that corner just as 47 was walking past.
She’s still exhausted, still vulnerable, she still needs clean air and very little movement. The immunosuppressants are taxing her whole system, but her own lungs were barely more than a bloody pulp when she was finally stabilised.
They don’t make love for a long time, literal months after they begin this new life together, and when they do it isn’t with a passionate embrace or a feral hunger. He had always figured that had they done this in the times before, they would have the kind of sex that involved hanging off the chandelier, the kind of fuck that was creative and ambitious and something for the history books. He never imagined it being the way it ended up being, soft and careful and with frequent breaks, murmured apologies rejected under soft lips, the whole thing taking place in the warmth of the afternoon sun after a long nap, both of them stretched out in a huge bed together. She is still herself, of course. She always tells him what to do, and she does so in this as much as in work. She wants him inside her, stubborn woman that she is, because he has been more than content to kiss and touch and lick and caress her until she was more than satisfied, content to continue doing so until she begged him to stop or sent him away. Still, there in the soft afternoon they manage it after many months, and it is beautiful, in its own special way. The way she gasps like she’s run a marathon, the way she laughs, the way they both groan with full lungs, grateful for the opportunity.
Like I said. They don’t live happily ever after. No one does.
But they do live.