Gravity Falls Twangst

Chrystanthemums

Me: This idea is weird, and maybe slightly cliche, nobody's going to like it.

Also me: Screw it, I'm sending it out into the world anyway.

Darn plot bunnies.

Written because apparently I can't get enough of torturing Stan.

********

The night he got Ford back, was promptly rejected again, and retaliated by essentially telling Ford that he was no longer his family, Stan went back upstairs and threw up in his bathroom.

The whole situation was kind of unusual, and not just because Stan had a very strong stomach on a normal day.

It wasn't a normal kind of throw-up; as a matter of fact, what came spewing out of his mouth was a cluster of bright red and yellow chrysanthemum petals.

And when he saw them, his reaction would have probably seemed even stranger: he leaned his forehead against the side of the toilet, and groaned in a tired voice, "Not again..."

It had started after he was first kicked out of his home. He'd just started coughing one night, until finally he'd spat a single petal out of his mouth. He figured he inhaled it by accident when he was driving with the window down, and just threw it away and forgot about it.

Then, when he began coughing them up on a semi-regular basis even if the windows were rolled up and he hadn't been anywhere near flowers recently, he told himself it was just something he ate, however weak of an excuse that was. But after almost a month of hacking up the occasional flower petals, he'd realized it was something really weird.

And his stomach hurt and his eyes watered, because he really wanted to find Ford and tell him about it, he knew he'd be so interested and want to find out what was causing the phenomenon and figure out how to fix it with his genius brain, and he knew that would probably never happen again.

********

It had gone on like that for the next ten years; every once in a while he'd find himself with that nasty tickling sensation in his throat, and have to spend a few minutes coughing until he'd got all the stupid flower bits out (it created a few awkward situations, but it also helped him escape from prison once, so hey, mixed bag). Then, after the portal incident, it was just something that happened every few months, or on special anniversaries like their birthday. It was like even the illness realized that Stan couldn't afford to be sick all the time, not when he had a job to do. And it almost stopped altogether when the kids came for the summer, enough that he almost forgot about it.

But apparently it wasn't gone at all-just dormant.

Stan wondered if he should be concerned that some of the petals in the toilet looked a little...bloody now.

Stan had looked up his symptoms before, of course. Ford was the smart one who enjoyed researching stuff, but that didn't mean Stan couldn't do it if he had to.

He'd finally discovered that this thing had a name-hanahaki disease-and where it supposedly came from. He'd wondered if it was due to his lingering fond memories of Carla or something, before the obvious answer came to him.

And further research had shown him that there was a controversial operation that could take care of it.

Operations, however, cost money. And when he read about the possible side-effects of getting rid of the flowers supposedly growing in his lungs...no, better to just save his money and worry about saving Ford instead.

Now, however, when he was gonna be kicked out at the end of the summer and left in the streets again, the idea of the operation became considerably more tempting...but he still hesitated to make an appointment.