He was no botanist and he may have lost his medical licence along the way, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ignore the morning sickness or the tight feeling in his chest, and especially not the unassuming little bundle of flowers he’d coughed up into the sink the day before.

They were small, smaller than his fingernails, round and fluffy and coloured a vibrant yellow. Medic wasn’t that well-versed in flower language apart from the basic variants of roses, but he’d caught Heavy reading a book on the subject in the living room once. He’d startled quite badly when he noticed Medic watching him, but then calmly explained that it was good practice for his English and asked Medic if he was interested in borrowing it.

Medic was quite fluent in English, in spite of his accent, and he knew that Heavy knew this, but he decided against embarrassing his friend and politely agreed to have a look at it. He’d forgotten to return it, but Heavy hadn’t asked him about it since and so he figured it would be alright if he held onto it a little longer.

Yellow acacia flowers. Secret love.

Medic had run the tests and checked his vitals, in spite of the fact that he already knew what it was. Hanahaki, a disease caused by unrequited love where the afflicted coughed up flowers over a few months—or, in rare cases, years—until the plants multiplied inside their lungs quicker than they could be expelled and suffocated them. A slow and agonising way to die.

Medic had known what to expect. He had, after all, been coughing up petals for weeks.

He hadn’t expected the whole flowers to come so soon, due to the nature of the respawn system, but he supposed it was inevitable either way. There was no cure for the disease and Medic couldn’t hope to achieve what centuries of research had failed to do in such a short time—because his time was short, there was no doubt about that. It was advancing too quickly.

Surgery wasn’t an option, and Medic had laughed bitterly when he realised that. He was a damn good surgeon and the Medigun would allow him to perform the surgery on himself, so logically the odds were stacked in his favour, especially since the thought of permanent death was terrifying. He would survive and return to health and no longer have to worry about dying.

Except the thought of no longer loving him was worse.

So Medic endured. It was easy enough to pretend he was fine around his teammates, who knew not to ask too many questions lest they lose an internal organ in their sleep. Heavy sometimes looked at him more closely than Medic would’ve liked, and he’d caught him talking in hushed whispers with Engineer before dinner on multiple occasions. Engineer would throw him a quick look, notice him staring, and then avoid him for the rest of the evening.

Normally Medic wouldn’t hesitate to insert himself into their business, especially since it was very obvious it concerned him, but lately he couldn’t be bothered; too many sleepless nights spent vomiting in the bathroom were taking their toll on him.

The yellow flowers didn’t last long, replaced instead by more beautiful but just as small flowers of a striking dark indigo colour. Medic had picked one out of the more recent bunch, washed off the blood and flipped through the book until he’d found the right page.

Heliotrope. Eternal love and devotion.

Of course.

Medic tossed the book on his nightstand and fell back against the pillow with a sigh, clenching his hand into a fist and crushing the delicate flower. When he opened his hand to brush off the petals, a sweet fragrance wafted into the room, much too potent to belong to one single bloom. That was surely the reason for his watering eyes.

His performance on the battlefield worsened as the disease progressed. He often found himself short of breath, which made him slower and more vulnerable and constantly turned his vision blurry at the edges. Nearly every time he died and went through respawn he was forced to run to the bathroom and throw up the day’s dose of flowers, which made him late to coordinated attacks and led to them losing matches.

The others were starting to catch on, and Medic was trying too hard not to vomit all over the dinner table every night to say anything in his defence.

Eventually, as it was bound to happen, he misstepped.

He’d dimmed the lights in the infirmary and turned the lamp on his desk away from him and still everything seemed too bright. He was supposed to focus on the team’s monthly medical check-up sheets, but every time he tried to write something down a tremor came over his hands and the letters on the page fused together into intelligible gibberish. In the dead silence of the soundproof infirmary, his own breathing grated on his ears.

By the time he reached the bottom of the first sheet he was exhausted, and he put the pen aside and dropped his head in his hands, focusing on taking one breath at a time. He was so frustrated—at his teammates, for not leaving him alone, at the universe, for doing this to him, at himself, for catching the disease in the first place—that he didn’t hear the doors opening or the footsteps approaching his desk.

A hand rested gently on his shoulder. Medic, against his better judgement, startled himself into looking up, and once the room stopped spinning and the vertigo passed his heart seemed to halt.

Spy looked down at him, the visible parts of his face schooled into careful neutrality. Medic met his eyes and his lungs immediately constricted painfully, and it took every ounce of willpower he had for him to swallow the flowers threatening to spill from his throat.

He expected Spy to simply raise an eyebrow and stare at him until Medic gave in and explained himself, or perhaps to subtly prod at him until he found what was wrong, or even to forego subtlety entirely and outright ask for an apology. Spy was too much of a gentleman and much too dignified to start yelling obscenities at Medic, even if Medic had technically wronged him for a good reason. He’d been avoiding him, yes, but he’d been avoiding everyone.

He did not expect Spy to wordlessly hold out his other hand and reveal a single, blood-stained indigo flower resting in the middle of his palm.

Heliotrope. Eternal love and devotion.

“You were not in your room,” Spy explained when Medic simply stared at the flower, “So I checked the bathroom. I found it on the floor next to the sink.”

Medic swallowed, his throat dry, and dared to look back up. Spy’s features were as neutral as ever, but there was a sheen over his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and Medic was so shocked to see it that the words he’d wanted to force out died on his tongue.

“Were you going to tell me?” Spy asked softly, in that tone of voice that meant he was either furious or wounded.

Medic couldn’t figure out which one it was, and in the absence of a response Spy tightened his grip on Medic’s shoulder.

“Well?” he insisted, “How long?”

Medic managed to get his voice working. “A few months,” he rasped, too busy watching Spy’s expression to cringe at the horrible sound. Spy closed his eyes and nodded slowly, the way he did whenever he was emotionally overwhelmed and trying to compose himself, but when he opened them again they still gleamed in the dim light of the room.

“Is it someone I know?” he asked, trying for light-hearted and missing the mark completely.

Medic blinked. “What?”

“Doctor,” Spy said, not quite forceful enough to hide the way his voice trembled, “I am trying very hard to be supportive in the face of learning that you are actively choosing to die for someone who surely doesn’t deserve you. Don’t make this harder on me.”

Something clicked.

“You don’t know,” Medic said, bordering on hysterical because he’d always assumed—

Spy scowled. Definitely furious. “And how on Earth would I know who the object of your affections is? You’ve never talked about…”

Spy trailed off. As much as he prided himself on his ingenuity, Medic had always known that he wouldn’t ever be the smartest person in the room so long as Spy was there with him. He was good at his job, better than any other spy Medic had ever met—his only weakness was that he tended to overlook himself whenever he was part of the equation.

Spy’s grip on Medic’s shoulder went slack, and the mask of neutrality cracked and shattered when he met Medic’s eyes and found there all the answers he needed. Medic watched his expression rapidly change from realisation to incredulity, to relief and then finally to unmistakeable, blinding anger.

“You utter imbecile,” Spy hissed, grabbed Medic by the front of his shirt and pulled him into a searing kiss.

Medic made a noise of surprise in the back of his throat and then immediately melted into the touch, bringing his hand up behind Spy’s head to deepen the kiss. The office chair creaked under the weight of two bodies as Spy unceremoniously climbed onto Medic’s lap, and Medic suddenly found all his previous thoughts scattered on the wind.

“You thought—” Spy gasped when they broke apart for air only to immediately kiss him again, “For months you—” This time it was Medic who pulled him back in, again and again, and eventually Spy had to rest a hand firmly on Medic’s chest to allow them both to catch their breath.

Medic instinctively began to rub circles into Spy’s waist, his chest painfully tight. His face must’ve been positively love-struck, because Spy huffed out a laugh that made his eyes crinkle at the corners and leaned down to brush his lips against his.

“I love you too,” he whispered, and something in the vicinity of Medic’s heart spasmed.

He turned away and began to cough, a horrid noise that only got worse the longer it went. He felt Spy hastily climb off his lap as the flowers started to come, first fluffy and yellow and then beautiful dark purple, and just when Medic was beginning to feel lightheaded and thought he might die from the blood loss after all the coughing suddenly stopped, leaving him gasping for air in a way he hadn’t been able to do in months.

A hand was gently patting him on the back. Medic leaned his entire weight into the body next to him and started to laugh, and when Spy pressed a kiss against his temple and teasingly asked him what was so funny he simply pointed to the floor.

Among the blood splatter and the veritable sea of scattered petals there lay a single, thin stem filled to the brim with miniscule pale flowers in full bloom. Spy leaned forward to have a closer look and immediately sneezed, and he muttered something about his allergies to the sound of Medic’s laughter.