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Jiang Cheng’s mother had terrible hanahaki all her life.
She sparked with it. She spit thorns as easily as she did petals, neither giving her much trouble. Her Yu servants had procedures in place. There were accupuncture techniques that usually worked, and cleansing rituals which could clear an infestation for most of a year, if properly applied.
Hanahaki happened like that, according to common wisdom. Certain families were more prone to it than others, and the Meishan Yu clan had a reputation for particularly spectacular infestations.
Jiang Cheng had first coughed petals when he was barely eight, a few months after Wei Ying was brought to Lotus Pier. In the back of his mind, he wondered if his mother blamed Wei Wuxian's disruption of her household for the early onset, but Jiang Cheng remembered being proud, holding the first spit-covered petals in his hand as he ran to find his mother. It was proof that he was a Yu.
A-Niang had looked down at the spindly purple petals in his hand, and then rather awkwardly pulled him into her arms. Jiang Cheng hadn’t felt comfortable there, even as she stroked one hand down his back. A-Niang wasn’t great at hugs, not like A-Jie.
With hindsight, A-Niang had seen herself in his first petals, and known she had failed him. She was present, in his life every day for training and meals and directing someone else to fuss over his clothes. Her voice was always in his ears, and when it wasn’t there, it was in his mind, relentless, but still he missed her enough that he was choking for the missing.
The next petals he took to show A-Jie. Those ones were softer. Big white lotus petals, that he knew were for A-Die, but A-Die was busy, fussing over Wei Ying, so Jiang Cheng took them to A-Jie instead.
When he first spat soft pink blossoms out of season, he knew that was just his jealousy speaking through his body. A-Jie was not gone. She just had two little brothers to love. She told him so.
“Don’t worry, A-Cheng,” she’d said, brushing his hair which was wet from the river, “I have two arms, and two hands. Sometimes I shall use both at once to fix your hair, but if we’re going any distance, I have a hand for both you and A’Ying to hold.”
Jiang Cheng was a Yu. He was prone to anger. He was prone to jealousy. He was prone to hanahaki. Everyone knows that about the Meishan Yu.
He did not show Wei Ying the gnarled little buds which were Wei Ying taking root in his lungs. The boy was annoying, and loud, and took up A-Die’s and A-Niang’s and A-Jie’s time, but Wei Ying was also his.
When Jiang Cheng and A-Jie spent the autumn of his ninth year in Meishan, he’d spent the entire time coughing up bright red spider lilies, which some of his distant cousins thought were a very fetching hanahaki form.
Jiang Cheng didn’t tell Wei Ying about those lilies. He was embarrassed to let Wei Ying know that he’d seeped so deep in Jiang Cheng’s soul that his body was aching for him, because the flowers still came when he was back at Lotus Pier, even when they spent all their days together, pushing each other off piers and sweating through sword practice.
By the time he was thirteen, Jiang Cheng’s infestation was firmly established, and would be with him his whole life. He had gone through the evacuation proceedures a few times already.
The hanahaki healer, a man from Meishan Yu, seemed excited for each appointment as Jiang Cheng grew older, as though waiting for his petals and leaves to change to something more interesting. But he didn’t have a sudden influx of lustful need for local girls, or even a particularly strong shijie, for all that he knew that some of them were remarkable women. He liked watching them train, because it was important, as Sect Heir, to know the different strengths of his disciples.
Jiang Cheng had to see the healer late every spring. He was lucky. His mother had to see him twice a year. When the blossoms for A-Jie progressed from delicate little petals tinged pink, covered in spit, to bloody masses of petals tangled in Wei Wuxian’s buds, every cough harder to shake, he knew the healer was needed.
Jiang Cheng was used to it.
Perhaps, he should not have been so used to it that he had allowed Wei Wuxian to watch the proceedure
“I know hanahaki is common in families,” Wei Wuxian said, even as Jiang Cheng was settled on his back looking up at the wooden slats of the pavillion roof, “but does that mean the flowers are in a child’s blood, from birth, or do the flowers come because they are expected?”
The healer was busy feeling down the line of Jiang Cheng’s neck, between his collar bones, placing silvery needles either side of the apple in his throat. He had already placed needles down his center, and then under the line of his lowest ribs.
Jiang Cheng was concentrating on moving qi through his meridians, like the healer had asked.
“Urgh, Wei Wuxian,” Jiang Cheng muttered. The healer tutted at him for moving.
“I was just wondering, Jiang Cheng! It’s like xiao-Dai, Dai Jinyui’s little boy. He’s exactly like his father, the same little frown, and annoyed by the same things, but is that because a child gets their temperment from their blood, or do they learn from their parent to behave just like them?”
Jiang Cheng wasn’t allowed to reply, because his qi and the healer’s qi and the needles were all interacting, forcing the nascent petals up his throat. The usual tickling sensations were suddenly present. Loud. Urgent.
Jiang Cheng bent over the bowl the healer’s assistant held out. He coughed for what felt like half a shi, the healer moving needles and pressing qi through his back into his lungs, each burst followed by more petals, more clumps of bloodied leaves in the bowl. There was a lot of Wei Wuxian, which was infuriating. When did he have time to miss him? He was still talking.
His lungs released in floods. The lightest and smallest petals first, the ones he’d always known where his demands for more of A-Jie’s attention, because they barely made a noise as they fluttered into the bowl. Less of his mother than last time, although her thin purple petals slipped in through any space left for them. Almost none of his father, but he had been taking time to teach Jiang Cheng bookkeeping, the last few months. There was always a cluster of heavier things, half-formed buds which didn’t bloom, curled potential of new leaves, never sure who or what or where or when these almost-things might be asking him to see.
Last was the tangled mess, mostly vines and dead rot. It tasted like pond scum, and smelt like rotting vegetables. It had to be tugged from him, the assistant’s fingers in his mouth to catch the edges of things as they came loose, and pull them free. The healer pushed qi through his lungs as a constant stream, until they felt like they were on fire, burning away the soil of his lungs.
“Gross,” Wei Wuxian said, looking at the mass of bloody rotting weeds on the top of the bowl.
“Shut up.”
He was exhausted when it was over. The healer drapped a thin cloth over his head, holding in the steam of a bowl of boiling water, scented with a concoction of healing herbs and oils. Jiang Cheng’s lungs felt like they were still burning, each breath heavy and raw, but easier than before the treatment.
Wei Wuxian was still there, talking to the assistant about which types of blooms they’d found in Jiang Cheng, picking through the blood and sputum and plant matter. What does that flower mean? Oh, gross, it’s got bits of Jiang Cheng in it. Is that lung? I thought that was pollen, but it feels like offal. I haven’t seen that bloom before, is it rare? Oh, this one is so spikey, it would have to hurt the bees that land on them. No wonder Jiang Cheng is so cranky all the time.
“No one would guess Jiang Cheng had chronic hanahaki,” Wei Wuxian muttered, the bloody gossip. “He tells everyone what is annoying him. He’s almost the angriest person I know, but Madame Yu has it as well, and she’s even angrier.”
“I would be easily irritated,” the assistant said, “with water weed in my lungs.”
“Exactly! How can someone so angry be holding onto enough emotion to have so many flowers in them?”
Jiang Cheng groaned, head over the steaming bowl, and a last few petals more blood than flower fell into the water.
“Shut up, Wei Wuxian,” he said, practically growling.
“See! That’s what I mean. And he’s never been in love either, which is fine, because being in love sounds so messy, and we’re so young. But Jiang Yanli’s hanahaki started flaring, and it’s definitely about Jin Zixuan, because most of the time she’s just got a few lotus petals, but when he comes to visit it’s peonies for months afterwards, which is definitely more than he deserves. How does the hanahaki know that peonies mean Jin?”
“The meanings are usually ones which only make sense to the sufferer,” the healer’s assistant said. “Since Jiang-guniang thinks of Jin-gongzi as associated with peonies, she is more likely to have peonies as part of her infestation.”
“I wonder if I’ll ever get some blooms,” Wei Wuxian said, rather wistful for someone poking their fingers through the disgusting remnants of Jiang Cheng’s lungs. Wei Wuxian was so weird. “I’m not a Yu, but I have been raised by one. That would prove whether it’s blood or how one is raised, wouldn’t it?”
“That would not be enough for proof, Wei-gongzi,” the healer said, “but it might be something worth studying. I shall add your information to my records, if you do become afflicted.”
The healer kept a record of Jiang Cheng’s blooms, for his on going treatment. Jiang Cheng kept his own record as well, dried petals and leaves tucked between thick paper in his room that had burnt. The memories of his childhood longings were destroyed by the Wen, which seemed appropriate at the time, when he’d been busy coughing from the smoke.
If Wei Wuxian ever got his own hanahaki, he never told Jiang Cheng about it.
That probably meant he never had. That man couldn’t keep anything inside. He’d never have been able to hold onto a secret desire long enough for it to bloom.
Jiang Cheng woke up coughing.
That was nothing new. He did that every night.
He had been dreaming of A-Jie’s death. He had been screaming at Wei Wuxian. He had been clawing his way through the dead, cutting his hands on sharp broken bone.
There was blood smeared on his sheets. It looked like he had coughed up lumps of lung, chunks in the bedding. It might just be leaf clusters with particularly sharp edges, cutting up his throat. It could be more than that.
He cleaned himself up, and checked the bloody mess for flowers he recognised.
There were none of the floaty blossoms he had always known felt like A-Jie.
There weren’t any of the bright red spider lilies he knew had been for Wei fucking Wuxian.
What was he grieving, if they weren’t even lodged in his lungs anymore? Has his grief changed his longing for them? Not just jealousy, possession, anger. Now it was rage, and fear, and desperate loneliness.
Jiang Cheng kept one of each of the new blooms, carefully washed and dried like the old Yu healer had taught him. “You’ll never be able to deal with the causes of your emotional upheaval, if you can’t even look at the blooms,” he had said. The man was dead now.
Jiang Cheng hated that healer, or at least the memory of him.
He hated these new flowers, ones he’d never seen before.
He hated that the familiar petals he’d thought were a constant manifestation of his love for A-Jie had deserted him, when he needed to remember her most. He wanted to hold blossoms in his hand and remember her smile, but instead he held her son and hated that she would never see him grow up.
He hated that his lungs were so full that he could barely breathe.
He hated even more that he was a Jiang-zongzhu who couldn’t be trusted in the water, because the youngest shidis could swim longer and stronger than he could, his lungs almost useless under strain.
He hated these new blooms more than he had ever hated the ones dragged from his lungs when he was young.
Once, he fell into a coughing fit so intense that someone had to swoop in and pluck A-Ling from his arms, or else he might accidentally harm the baby. Afterwards, A-Ling crying big hiccupping sobs in someone else’s arms, Jiang Cheng looked at the bloody smears coating huge white petals on the floor. He pulled thorns from his gums, leaving raw and bleeding wounds behind.
There was a chance that Wei Wuxian of so long ago had been right, and the raising of a child was just as important as their blood, to determine their health, their longings, their hanahaki.
Maybe A-Ling could swim easily all year long. Maybe A-Ling didn’t have to be crowded with rage and pain, spitting buds. He wouldn’t have to feel the breathlessness of lungs more tangled with leaf than air. A-Jie could have raised her son to only have a cough or two, not the thick entangled mass of his own lungs. Jiang Cheng was too much like their mother, just the way she’d raised him.
Perhaps all Jiang Cheng had to do was be better than his mother. Different.
He had lost his A-Die and A-Niang without their blooms changing at all. He had coughed blood and blooms for the Jiang Sect all through the war, except when his mind was so distracted by battle that there was no time for loss or longing. But now, his A-Jie and his blight of a shixiong had died almost together, and he was barely fit enough to be Jiang-zongzhu in the aftermath.
Jiang Wanyin, wrote to his great-grandmother, Yu-zongzhu.
His blood was mixed into the ink of the letter, because he’d coughed over his ink stone and couldn’t breathe properly enough to reach for a clean brush.
Jiang Cheng needed the assistance of a hanahaki healer.