Back in January 2020, I was part of a long conversation with some folks in the Metrocity discord about a non-lethal Hanahaki AU set in the Megamind universe. Someone in another discord recently asked if there were any Megamind Hanahaki fics, and I remembered the first conversation, and...well...I typically do not enjoy Hanahaki Disease fics at all, but the setup from our discussion seemed like it had the potential for some delightfully angsty feels that would let me fix some of the things that squick me about this trope. So I wrote it!

Expect short chapters and frequent updates!


CHAPTER 1

Forget what you know of Hanahaki disease. Nobody dies of Hanahaki in this world.

Let us imagine a universe where unspoken crushes and unrequited romantic feelings for people manifest physically as magical flowers in the lungs and airway. Not rooted, not growing. Just manifesting there periodically, magically. The affliction starts with petals—typically small ones—and if left unaddressed, will progress to large petals, buds, and eventually whole blossoms.

This is not deadly, in this universe, but neither is it comfortable, physically or emotionally. A multitude of jobs exist around the affliction: therapists specializing in emotional distancing techniques, people purporting to be able to hypnotize you away from your affection, people to identify the small early petals so you have some idea of what you can expect to be dealing with. People who write horoscopes for what kind of flower you are—for people who know what kind of flower they are.

Not everyone knows what species the people who love them will be struck with. Those who begin dating before an emotional attachment forms may never find out. Knowing your flower beyond a shadow of a doubt is something of a mixed bag of emotional weight, because…well. Someone loved you. And you knew. Hopefully that story ended happily for both of you, but this is not always the case. Those who know their flowers often feel some amount of guilt about it; those who don't know their flowers make the best guess they can.

Surprisingly, many guesses are correct. Nobody is sure exactly what criteria control your flower, but expectation is almost certainly some kind of factor.

Color saturation is also a factor. The story is: the darker the color, the more "true" the love. This is romanticization, of course, but it does seem to hold some kind of truth—people 'in love' with celebrities cough up white flowers, and usually small ones if they reach the blossom stage of the disease. Such pale flowers typically indicate infatuation rather than love, which is doubly painful. In addition to the usual physical discomfort, it's terribly invalidating for the afflicted. Some people use the pale colors as proof they need to move on, while some insist the flowers are naturally white, are supposed to be that color.

Others search for ways to artificially color their petals and try to guilt their crushes into giving them a real chance. When Hal Stewart starts hacking up vaguely pink petals, you can bet the first thing he does is start looking for ways to darken them. You can also bet that Roxanne is having none of that, and reports Hal to HR the first time he awkwardly tries to give her a handful of red. Hanahaki manipulation is inexcusably skeevy.

"But the petals are real," he argues, wide-eyed and backpedaling frantically. "They're real! Roxie—"

"I don't want to date you, Hal."

"But if you'd just—I thought you were nice! Just give me a chance—"

"No." She rests her elbows on her desk, braces her forehead against her fingertips for a moment. Roxanne is a semi-public figure and conventionally attractive; she has received her fair share of dyed petals over the years and she knew exactly what to look for when Hal gave them to her. She also got over feeling guilty for other people's feelings long ago. "Hal, you having a crush does not mean I have to give you anything."

"But if you'd just get to know me—"

"I know you," Roxanne says, flat, lifting her head. "I know you well enough to know I don't want to know more. Look." She finally sighs and pushes her chair back, gets to her feet. Hal stumbles backwards to avoid getting hit by her chair. "You think I'm nice to you because I make interested noises when you talk about your life. Right? Yes? I do that because we are coworkers. Not because I like you." He stares at her, bewildered and offended. She shakes her head. "I—I don't like you. Okay? I'm sorry. I don't like you! And I don't want to date you! So I'm sorry you're sick, but—"

"I'm lovesick! We could—"

Roxanne explodes. "Stop!" she snaps. "Okay, just—fucking stop. I just told you, I do not like you! And you're still trying to get me to go on a date with you?" She throws up her hands, staring at him, bewildered and exasperated and so incredibly done with this conversation that she doesn't even know where to start. "Why do you want to be with someone who literally just said she doesn't even like you? Fucking—get help, Hal, you deserve better than that! Find somebody who…who likes classic video games and gets excited about anchovies on pizza! Who'll help you restore another fucking Commodore or, or a—a—what was the one from last week—"

"IntelliVision."

"—an IntelliVision or something! God! Date someone who's actually excited about you! What is wrong with you!"

She stalks off, still shaking her head, the dyed petals clenched in her hand and her purse slung over her opposite shoulder. Ugh. Ugh. Of all days NOT to get kidnapped by the city's supervillain.

Regardless. The point is: Hanahaki is desperately uncomfortable, but it is not deadly. The flowers have neither stems nor roots. They're a pain in the neck (literally) to expel, but once they are out, you generally do recover for a while before the next attack hits. Most people run afoul of the disease at some point in their lives, to some degree. Only a fraction make it to the blossom stage, but most people who feel romantic attraction do have some experience, at least.

Which means there are resources to deal with it. Not just the aforementioned professions, but medications as well. Liquid suppressants and lozenges only work for so long and have limited effectiveness, but they exist. Hanahaki inhalers and bottles of expectorant also exist—these tend to work a little better than the suppressants. Societally, people tend not to question when someone needs to excuse themselves suddenly; it's considered terribly rude to demand an explanation or deny a request to be excused. Live shows are more liberal with their commercial breaks, sports are played differently.

By far the most common response to the first few Hanahaki attacks is for the afflicted to confess their feelings to their pseudamour. Sometimes this results in romance, sometimes not. A rejection generally helps in recovering from the affliction somewhat (sometimes it takes a few tries. Hal, for example, doesn't give up easily), but…

Occasionally there are stakes involved that complicate things. Close proximity alleviates symptoms almost entirely, so hiding is easy if the afflicted spends enough time around their pseudamour. It's not unheard-of for someone to want to manage their affliction quietly on their own and let their feelings remain unknown. Sometimes someone is happy with the state of things already, other times they value their pseudamour's goodwill too highly to risk jeopardizing it. Sometimes people work together and office relationships are complicated, sometimes they live far apart, sometimes they work terrible hours and can't spend much time pursuing any kind of relationship.

And sometimes there's a power imbalance. For example, if the afflicted is a supervillain who regularly drugs and kidnaps his pseudamour. Or if the afflicted is a quick-witted reporter who regularly gets tied to a chair and used as bait by her pseudamour, a self-described cackling madman.

That sort of thing could be…messy.


Megamind assumes he is exempt from Hanahaki nonsense, growing up. He's an alien, after all, and the very few crushes he developed during school were quickly and easily squashed long before he started presenting physical symptoms. So he assumes he doesn't have to worry.

This turns out to be incorrect.

Roxanne is a spitfire, better than he ever could have dreamed. She's intelligent and has a strong personality, Megamind knows that even before he kidnaps her the first time. Those are the prerequisites. But she's also bold with him, even in the beginning before they're comfortable with each other. She snaps back when he taunts her and it is delightful.

"Miss Roxanne Ritchi, was it?" he says, when a brainbot pulls the bag off her head the first time. "Up and coming reporter at KMCP News. What a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance."

She blinks once at him, glances around at the battle deck, and then she does a combination head-tilt and scowl and says, in a tone of extreme exasperation, "You know, most people just make an appointment with the station if they want to talk to me. Or they call me. On my phone. Phone? You know phones? I have one. You could have tried that instead of going to all this trouble."

"It was no trouble at all, I assure you." Meanwhile, he's frantically trying to reassess. Every other person who woke up in the chair this way has taken at least forty seconds to say anything, and only a handful of them reached for criticism first thing.

But Roxanne just rolls her eyes and keeps on going. "No trouble for you, maybe. I might have doubled up on hairspray today if I'd known I would be getting up close and personal with a burlap sack."

He cocks an eyebrow. "Yes, because hair is such a consideration for me."

She cocks one right back. "Yes, actually I think it is. You definitely groom; nobody's eyebrows just look like that."

Was that—some kind of—compliment? It didn't sound like one, but—

"Regardless," he says, waving a hand. "Wasting daylight. Behold!"

He lays out the plan for her the same way he has for everyone else, the pieces of it he's calculated to frighten new pawns. Giant tesla coil, its design optimized for maximum output—he blows a derelict pile of scrap to smithereens to demonstrate; the lightning strikes beautifully and Roxanne jumps. Piranha tank below the tiny kidnapping dais—a squad of brainbots flits past and chunks of white fish and the piranhas go nuts.

Roxanne squints at him. "Okay. Why am I in a Faraday cage?"

Megamind pulls up short. "What?"

"This is a Faraday cage." She stares pointedly around at the mesh box that encloses the dais. "Am I supposed to feel threatened by a Tesla coil from inside one of these? Because I don't."

Megamind glares and pulls a lever. Lightning strikes with a BANG, crackling alarmingly bright along the cage's edges.

"Yeah, okay!" Roxanne snaps when the light and sound fade. "It's loud, I get it! But my point stands, this completely defeats the purpose of—"

Megamind glares at her and swiftly pulls his gun, dehydrates the safety cage, and re-holsters his weapon in a smooth motion and a flash of blue-green light. "Happy now?" He curls his lip. "Don't test me, Miss Ritchi, you won't like your results."

"With a sample size of one, I'm sure I won't."

He very nearly laughs at that, but he's a pro and he keeps his expression mean without too much trouble.

But it goes on like this. She's fun! And she doesn't actually wind up needing that particular safety precaution. Which is fine, of course; he has others. Still.

The problem with most people is that they freak out if they don't have some kind of visible protection between them and Megamind's machines. They freak out too hard—they scream at the drop of a hat, they thrash around. Some of them don't stop screaming; trying to mic those broadcasts is always a nightmare.

But Roxanne doesn't scream at all. She just makes faces. Some of which are honestly better than screaming! Megamind can tell when she's scared and after a while he starts to see that as a win, too.

Well.

He thinks he knows when she's scared. He has less of an idea than he realizes.

Roxanne is genuinely frightened, that first time she wakes up in his lair. But Roxanne reacts to fear with bluster, with anger, and she's quick on her feet, which means she's good at hiding her true feelings and only showing what she wants to show. And—and this is the important part—that first time sets the tone of the rest of their interactions.

She wakes up inside a Faraday cage. She knows she's safe from the machine he shows her. And it is a reasonably fine mesh, which means she is also safe from the piranhas below.

Until he dehydrates the cage, of course, but one of Roxanne's roommates in college kept piranhas and left them in her care when she went to study abroad. Roxanne knows piranhas; they're skittish fish and they can go for months without food if they have to. A tank of starving piranhas might be alarming, but Megamind feeds them an appropriate food where Roxanne can see him do it; they are fed and distracted and he clearly isn't the sort to neglect his fish's needs.

So. Roxanne wakes up frightened, but Megamind unintentionally reassures her too completely for her to really fear for her life around him ever again. She goes home that night incredibly confused and craving fish, and Megamind has more fun than he's had in a long time. And when Minion asks, "Who shall we use as bait, Sir?" before their next battle, Megamind hesitates.

"I think," he says slowly, "I think the one we grabbed last time added…some dimensions to the scenario. What was her name."

Minion blinks at him. Megamind doesn't forget names. "…Miss Ritchi, Sir?"

"Yes. Her. Her again, I think."

Minion pauses. "Maybe someone else this time, and then her?"

Megamind shrugs. "Oh, we may as well just go for it, Minion. Besides, I have some excellent wordplay in mind for this next one! I want to see where she goes with it. Yes," he decides with an air of finality, "yes, definitely her again."

His decision is immediately validated when Roxanne shakes herself awake in the kidnapping chair two days later and the first thing out of her mouth is a dismayed, "Oh no, you again?"

A fantastic choice. Megamind has no regrets.

And no idea what's coming, either. He really should have kept his distance.