Chapter Text
The clock ticked past midnight, August became September, and Dipper Pines had a coughing fit.
He shouldn’t have been awake, much less at his desk, mindlessly sketching. An oceanscape, by then. Anything to stop his pencil from recreating the skyline of Gravity Falls again. Or worse, her. His thoughts hummed in speeding circles, present but drifting to the background. Then he had the sudden sensation of choking and reflexively coughed again and again to dislodge the offending object. HIs throat cleared, and he could feel whatever had been blocking it on his tongue, strangely silky. Dipper reached his finger and thumb into his mouth and removed what seemed to be a small, white flower petal.
Weird.
Three months in the weirdness capital of the world had desensitized Dipper. He tossed the petal into the trash can under his desk and returned to his oceanscape until his hand got too heavy to lift the pencil. Then he got up and trudged the few steps to his bed, curled up under the covers, and utterly failed to sleep without the sound of his sister’s breathing across the room to calm the dizzying mumbles of his mind. ‘
It was not an isolated occurrence. Far from it. Every night for a week, always a night, always a single white petal. Always when exhaustion had muted his racing thoughts but before his body could give in to the necessity of sleep.
Then it happened at school.
Coughing fits during gym class were really nothing new for Dipper. He didn’t think anything of it when he lost his breath halfway around the track he’d been jogging and doubled over; covering his mouth because much as he wanted to hack openly into the grass he couldn’t help but care a little about appearances. So when he pulled his hand away to discover a pair of white petals in it, he stared at them for a long moment, then curled his hand into a fist when he felt his teacher come up behind him. “You okay, Pines?”
“Yeah.” he answered, shoving the offending objects into his pocket, because they’d draw too much attention just shaken out of his hand. “Just a little winded.”
“Take it easy.” the teacher said, surprising advice from a gym teacher. “Don’t hurt yourself out there, but mind your time.”
When another petal came out that night, it was the final straw. Every day for a week then twice in one? Dipper started his research. He didn’t have the journal anymore, but he’d all but memorized it and, at least journal 3 had nothing on the subject. He had something better though, access to the author.
Halfway through composing an e-mail to Grunkle Ford on the subject, Dipper backed out of his e-mail account and returned to the web search homepage. He’d realized as he typed how it sounded. Coughing fits. Flower petals. It sounded vaguely romantic, didn’t it? Perhaps this was a mystery better solved on his own. So, some web searching would be required.
Half an hour later, Dipper had his answer. He doubted he’d be sleeping any time soon tonight.
Hanahaki disease. Named from the Japanese words for Flower and To Throw Up. A rare disease most commonly occurring in East Asia. Symptoms are exactly what it sounds like and the cause… well that just sounded dumb. But three pages deep into the search results for his fifth term used and there was no denying it. Dipper was physically ill with a rare disease caused by unrequited love.
If you’d asked him over the summer if loving her was killing him, he’d have said “not literally, but kinda.” or maybe even just “Yes!” if he’d felt like being particularly dramatic in that moment. He came to terms with the fact that he would die for her if he had to a long time ago. This though? Was uncomfortably literal, and the more he read the worse it got.
When Mabel poked her head into his room at quarter to four in the morning, Dipper almost slammed his laptop shut. Like he’d been looking at porn. He resisted the temptation, hand on the lid of his laptop, instead just opening another tab to show his homepage instead. “Dipper? Are you gonna sleep tonight at all?”
“Sorry.” he said automatically. “Just. Fell down a research hole. We can stop by the store for an energy drink on the way to school.”
Dipper was instantly glad he’d changed tabs, because Mabel wandered over beside him and leaned heavily against his side, draping her arm across his shoulders. “Whatcha researching?”
Dipper glanced across his tabs. An online radio station that had paused naturally without him noticing. Two social media sites. His new tab, and two from his research, one just an online document for notes, still untitled, the other displaying the letters Hanaha before cutting off. Best stick close to the truth then. “Just some weird Japanese stuff.” he said. The thought flowed naturally as soon as he said the words. “Are we getting Soos a Christmas present or a Hanukkah present this year? Like, his family’s catholic but Grunkle Stan kinda all but adopted him…”
If Mabel thought it was weird he was thinking about gift-giving already a week into September she didn’t say anything. She got caught up in the premise and an hour later they were searching auction sites for obscure anime series. Just before five AM Mabel promised she would begin her reconnaissance into what DVDs Soos already owned in the morning, as she wanted to catch an hour or two extra z’s before school. Dipper bid her goodnight and, once sure she was gone, returned to his research.
The knot of guilt formed about twenty minutes later. He had just effortlessly lied to his own twin, and kept up the ruse for over an hour. He didn’t know if doing it to hide the fact that he had apparently developed a terminal illness during their time in Gravity Falls made it better or worse. Yes, terminal. By the time the sun began peeking through Dipper’s bedroom curtains, he was certain of that much. Hanahaki disease was typically, ultimately fatal.
He didn’t return to his research for months. The disease progressed, and Dipper kept it secret. How does one tell their family they’re dying from their own feelings, after all? He cut off contact with Wendy. Buried her hat in the far corner of the laundry room and hoped his mom wouldn’t ask him whose it was when she found it. That seemed to just make it worse though, the ache in his chest he now knew wasn’t purely emotional got worse. He was spewing upwards of five petals a day across three or four coughing fits. So he dug the hat back out, actually washed it, and started wearing it as the chill of fall began setting in.
There were good days and bad days, as with any disease, he imagined. One or two petals a day on good days, seven or eight on bad ones. On bad days, some of the petals were yellow instead of white. The fits still usually happened at night. He tried going to bed earlier, as soon as he finished his homework. Sometimes the coughing fits would happen during the day instead, other times they’d wake him up. One particularly memorable night in mid-November he couldn’t breathe at all when he woke. Couldn’t even pull in enough air to cough. This is it he thought. Convinced in that moment he would suffocate in his bed and die. Eventually he managed to choke out a clump of four or five bright yellow petals that got spit all over his quilt. Suddenly he understood why the other half of the word Hahahaki implied puking. The choking had set off his gag reflex and he barely thought to scoop the petals into his trash can before bolting to the bathroom so his dinner could safely come up as well.
His mom came in the bathroom to check on him just about when he was done. She pulled him into a hug and rubbed his back and he buried his face against her and cried. He knew it seemed dumb, crying because he’d puked a little. It was a flimsy justification, but he took it. He cried for what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes. Clinging to his mother and praying that all this would just go away.
The next day she kept him home from school, and threw out the meat sauce she’d used with dinner the night before “just in case” and the knot of guilt in his stomach grew. So, apparently, did the flowers in his lungs, as he managed to cough up a full dozen petals between four coughing fits. Half of them yellow. The day after that he bought a notebook. A simple spiral-bound one subject notebook with a blue cover. He opened it at his desk before even starting his homework and started writing.
This notebook is only to be read in the event I, Mason “Dipper” Pines suffer an untimely death. Included in these pages ought to be instructions for the handling of my body, and distribution of my possessions, followed by a letter addressed to each of my loved ones. As I am not of legal age and will not mark this notebook as important in any way, I expect most of the instructions to be disregarded. I do insist that the letters be torn from this book and distributed as addressed though. Thank you.”
That single paragraph took half an hour to write. Constant stop and start and reconsidering phrasing and word choice and he was writing in pen too so he had to be extra careful. No crossing things out like he’d done in Journal 3. This had to look professional if he had any hope of it being taken seriously. He actually ripped out three pages before being content with the final version. Then, exhausted, he closed the notebook and spent the rest of the evening on homework.
He spent the rest of the month on the instructions, although there weren’t many of them. Legally speaking, the bulk of his more valuable possessions actually belonged to his parents. Things like his video games, his books, and items with sentimental value took some time to mentally distribute. He added a small handful of local friends to the list of people he’d need to write letters to, just to explain the choices for what physical items he intended to leave to them. Just in case his intentions actually played out, and if they didn’t, so they’d know what he had wanted.
Largely, it was just a surreal experience. The awareness he was going to die dramatically overtaking the awareness of why. Once or twice over the summer, he’d had the passing thought that he was about to die. It was like each of those moments were being stretched into months and he wanted nothing more than to talk about it. He should tell Mabel, he knew. He reflected at the beginning of December that his initial lie and subsequent daily lies of omission would open a gulf between them sooner or later. For a moment that stretched into the next several days, he hoped he would choke to death first.
In the first week of December, he wrote his letter to Mabel. It was ten pages long by the end, front and back, a solid seventh of the pages available in the notebook. He cried five times writing it and it took him all seven days from the first to the start of Hanukkah to get it done. Then he decided to take a break from writing goodbye letters for the holiday. On some level, maybe he’d expected that decision to also put his disease on a break too, because when he woke up on December 8 and promptly hacked out a pair of bright yellow petals, he couldn't help but feel surprised, and a little betrayed by his own body in a way he hadn’t been able to put into words until than.
On the third day of Hanukkah, multiple packages came in the mail. Gifts, mostly ordered by their parents over the internet, arrived and were distributed. There were two extra boxes though. One with a foreign postmark, the other from Gravity Falls. Mabel shrieked and tore into the former, leaving Dipper to open the later. He stopped to open the attached letter first, and froze when he recognized Wendy’s handwriting.
Officially, these are holiday presents. Unofficially, it’s a bunch of junk we couldn’t sell the last of in the Gift Shop. I thought it’d be funnier to make you two fight it out over everything but Soos insisted we send doubles. We did three handwriting tests to decide who would write the note. Melody won every time but since you don’t know her too well you got me instead. Hope you enjoy everything, and can’t wait for next summer! - Wendy. (Soos, Melody, and Mrs. Ramirez.)
Dipper could hardly see when he was done with the letter. He pushed the contents of the box around without unpacking it. Bobble heads, Shirts, he did pull out a pair of hats identical to the one he’d worn for the summer. He blinked hard, desperately coaching himself not to cry. Mabel was squealing in delight and pressed a stuffed polar bear, a puzzle box of some kind, and a thick envelope into his arms. Gifts from their great uncles. Dipper set the former two aside and dug into the thick envelope. He managed to skim the cover page, a quick note in Ford’s familiar handwriting that said something about appreciating having someone to share his speculations about the enemies he and Stan had encountered with.
Dipper was pretty sure the purpose of the stuffed polar bear was not to squeeze and bury his face in so he didn’t sob on Hanukkah. It’s what it ended up good for after he dropped the letter and stack of notes from Ford. The cheap fabric and soft, faux fur smelled like mail and Mabel came over and curled into Dipper’s side to check through the box from Gravity Falls. When she turned to him and said simply “I miss them too.” he couldn’t take it anymore, got up and excused himself.
He came back a few hours later, just in time for dinner. Everything felt surreal though, because while it seemed nothing had changed for anyone else, something deep and intensely personal had changed for him. Dipper was done giving up. He was going to fight, he had people to fight for. It was time to get to the bottom of this Hanahaki crap and find a way to get better.
It turned out, not only was there a cure, it was embarrassingly easy to find information about it. He may actually have seen some of these articles on his first web search adventure, he just hadn’t understood them. Vague references to a surgery had meant nothing to him before he understood the disease entailed flowers literally growing in his chest cavity. Now though? It was clear. There was a surgery to cure Hanahaki Disease...and it was controversial. At best. In fact, Dipper could find almost no information about it besides opinion pieces declaring the surgery to be a direct affront to the will of God.
Well then. Time to find a more professional source than the internet.
The first day of Winter Break, Dipper informed his parents he’d be spending the day at the library, and hopped a bus to Oakland. He hadn’t ridden a bus since the end of summer, and while the city busses were laid out a bit differently than the ones he and Mabel had taken to and from Gravity Falls, the nostalgia set off one of his worst coughing fits to date. The driver and three fellow passengers checked up on him. He thought it was over when a single yellow petal came out, but fell right back into it until a clump of too many white ones followed. By the time Dipper got to his stop, his eyes were watering and his throat burned.
Thankfully, the cool late-December air took care of the nausea before he got to the library, where he spent hours digging through their collection of medical texts. It was lucky most of the texts were so dry, as he kept getting distracted and trying to read about other illnesses as he went. The first spark of boredom would always set him back to his task. It took hours, but he finally found a chapter on Hanahaki Disease. Dipper settled in at one of the library tables, grabbed some scratch paper, and started taking notes.
Mechanically, the surgery was simple. All the usual risks of surgery, anesthesia, oxygen circulation. The text was hardly a step-by-step guide, but Dipper got the jist of it. Cut him open, take out the flowers, sew him up. A lot of other medical detail steps in between, but that was the basics. So why the volatile reaction online? When he found the paragraph that started to explain that, he had to read it three times before he finally understood.
The surgery didn’t just remove the physical symptom, but the emotional root as well. Somehow, in removing the flowers...his feelings for Wendy would be removed as well.
Oh.
That was okay, wasn’t it? Sure, something in him shied away at the idea of his emotions being physiologically manipulated like that. Still, it wasn’t like he hadn’t been trying to get over her. He tried re-reading the paragraph, and then reading further, trying to determine if it would just be his romantic feelings for Wendy that he would lose, or all of his feelings for Wendy. For that matter, how did he even parse those out from each other? Dipper couldn’t fathom just. Not loving her anymore. Would he just stop caring for her? She wouldn’t mean anything more to him than any other attractive teenage girl? ...would he even still find her attractive?
There were too many questions, and this dry textbook chapter was not giving him the answers he was looking for. In fact, it just gave him more questions, because apparently, that was just what happened if the surgery went well. His stomach dropped reading the final paragraph, and that was all the acknowledgement the side effects got, a paragraph. Citation of multiple instances of the patient losing all memory of the subject of their affection post-surgery. As if that weren’t bad enough, the last sentence…
Dipper closed the book with a thud and tore up his notes.
So much for surgery.
It was on the bus home that Dipper began to reconsider that gut-level dismissal. Why had he reacted so strongly? Nevermind that it seemed like it was only a slim possibility. Was a hypothetical future romantic interest worth his life? - yes, if he’d love her like he did Wendy. An unsubstantiated hope began to take root, that if he could just..fall in love with someone else than the feelings, and with them the flowers, would go away on their own. He didn’t want to cling to that hope too closely, that’d be a lot of pressure to put on any new romance he could possibly find. It wouldn’t be fair, if he could even find it.
Still. It was quite a blow to realize that his only hope of survival was to risk his very ability to feel romantic attachment. Which, again, how could he even begin to parse out what that meant from other kinds of love? He’d never put much thought into how there were different kinds of love. Loving Wendy came as naturally to him as breathing, just like loving his parents, his grunkles, even Mabel. It wasn’t until now he’d stopped to think about the ways it was fundamentally different. Besides the obvious elements of physical attraction, what else separated the feelings? For a moment he entertained the thought it was admiration, or the nerves… his first meeting with great-uncle Ford killed that possible distinction. So what was it? He spent the whole bus ride thinking about it and couldn’t place the difference. Then he went into an extending coughing fit that made him miss his stop and produced a series of single white petals.
The walk back from the stop he eventually got off at was longer than expected, and Dipper wasn’t home until after dark. His technically-true excuse of having missed his stop and having to walk home had led to a family meeting later in the month that led to a New Years present of brand-new cell phones for himself and Mabel. Smart phones at that. The underlying meaning behind the gift, the concern for his safety as they allowed him greater independence, only made the knot of guilt he’d been carrying in his gut since he first lied to Mabel in September that much worse. Here he was with a loving family, looking out for his long-term well being, and he couldn’t even tell them he was sick.
It was using that phone to text with Wendy a few weeks later that he had the realization. Why he’d felt the need to keep it secret. Beyond just not wanting to worry his loved ones, or suffer their suffocating concern. He needed to tell her first. It was, after all, all about her, wasn’t it? He was sick because of his feelings for her. Loving her might literally kill him, and surviving meant he would never feel the same way, for her or possibly anyone else, ever again. So didn’t she deserve a say in what he did?
He must’ve tapped out the words “Hanahaki Disease” a dozen times over the next few months in text windows to Wendy. He always backspaced them and everything else he’d have said on the subject. Again and again he concluded it was a conversation best had in person, and again and again he wavered on that and almost told her by text. Once he called her even, but he’d forgotten to text first and she answered quickly and told him she had to go before hanging up on him. Later she texted that she’d been in the middle of making dinner and they’d joked about her cooking for a few minutes before he lost his nerve entirely.
Dipper graduated from Eighth Grade on May 18, two weeks before returning to Gravity Falls. He’d finished his letters almost a month ago. Stan, Ford, Soos, A couple friends here in Piedmont even. The hardest had been the one to his parents. It’d come in just under two pages but every word had been agony. The morning of graduation he gagged brushing his teeth and coughed up a pair of petals in a brand new color. At first he thought they were just white, but as he threw them away he noticed the hint of pink in their edges. That was new. New developments were double edged. On the one hand, they ignited his curiosity like nothing else. On the other, it couldn’t possibly be good news.
He very nearly missed his cue to walk at the ceremony. Feeling a bad attack coming on, Dipper excused himself to the restroom where he coughed and gagged for much too long. He gripped the sink tight, choking and hacking and briefly he questioned if he might die here. The boys room of his school theater. Well, if he wasn’t going to make it to high school it was as fitting an end as any. He was still crying as much from the thought as from the horrific burn in his throat and the lack of oxygen to his brain. Then it came up, and for a second Dipper thought he was just puking.
Then, coated with spit, an entire flower plopped out of his mouth into the sink. No stem, just five white petals around a yellow-green center. Gasping for breath, Dipper stared at it for what felt like a long time. Everything burned. His lungs, his throat, even his nose felt like it was on fire. Every breath just aggravated the pain. He coughed a little more, but they were forced little things. There weren’t more petals coming up right this minute. Just...this...this new development was...something terrifying. He sucked in a long breath, and it burned. He breathed back out, and it burned. He breathed, clutching the sink, until the burning eased and he could, gingerly, pick up the flower from the sink.
Then Dipper dug into his backpack and pulled out a book he didn’t care too much for and pressed the flower in the pages. A point of curiosity to indulge. What kind of flowers was he hacking up anyway? He returned the book to his backpack, and himself to the ceremony just in time to slip into line behind Mabel and file into his seat for the ceremony. He dropped his hand and wiggled it, and she took it and squeezed. If he squeezed back even harder, she’d probably think it was just nerves and not pain.
Mabel must have been actually nervous, she didn’t let go of his hand until her name was called and she crossed the stage. Dipper followed a moment later.
That night, he pulled the now dry and rather flat flower from its book, set it on his desk and snapped a picture before throwing the entire thing in the trash. After that he texted the photo to his friend Zachary, who was something of a wizz with plants. The text to follow simply read “Hey do you know what kind of flower this is?”
“Looks like a Christmas Rose. Why?”
“No reason.” It was an obvious enough of a lie it didn’t even feel like a lie. More a polite way of saying none of your business. Christmas Rose. Dipper made a mental note to look that up after dinner. He didn’t have to. When he got back to his phone it had a dozen notifications, all from Zachary, detailing the flower that Dipper had thrown up.
The Christmas Rose was another name for the white Hellebore flowers. Hellebore Niger, in particular. Apparently the roots were black, which was imagery Dipper really hadn’t needed. Black tendrils flowing from green stems digging into his lungs and heart… he dismissed the thought the best he could and kept reading. A list of countries where it was typically found - a variety specific to Japan called Snow Queen jumped out at him, as much for the place of origin as for the fitting name. Apparently it was poisonous, which accounted for the burning, but had a long history of medicinal use anyway. Supposedly there was a superstition that associated the flower with protection from evil and there was also a myth about them involving the Christ Child which - Dipper wasn’t sure how he felt about that last part. He wasn’t sure how he felt about any of it, honestly. He texted back a quick “Thanks, Zach.”
“No, thank you.” the reply came a little too quickly, and Dipper abruptly remembered his friend had virtually no social life and Dipper had come out of the blue with a question about one of his biggest passions.
He stared at the phone a while too long, then texted back a suggestion that they hang out before he headed to Oregon for the summer. The other boy hastily agreed and they made plans. Dipper almost canceled the plans when he woke up the morning of because he coughed up a series of pink petals before he could even finish getting ready. Ultimately he was glad he went. He got to hang out with a friend, play card games and board games and talk about science - albeit slightly heavier on the botany and geology than Dipper was generally interested in. Despite the rough start it was a good day, and Dipper snuck in a few more questions about the Hellebore flower. It was in no way illuminating regarding his condition, but it satisfied the curiosity born when he saw that flower in the sink at graduation.