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aerodaltonimperial · 1 year

Text

variations on a theme

Rating: T

Pairing: Hookhausen

Content warning: blood

“I’m sorry,” the nurse says. She looks it, too, and that’s the worst part. “We don’t see this very often.”

“It’s curable, right?” his dad replies. He’s already in problem-solving mode, typing things on his phone, finding ideas, making lists; he’s probably already got a plan. Knowing him, Hook’s probably already on the list for some expensive, experimental drug therapy. “It’s not fatal, right?”

The nurse doesn’t answer, but that’s answer enough. She purses her mouth, and looks away, and so does Hook. He stares out the window at the rain droplets congregating on the glass until the compulsion in his lungs is too overwhelming to ignore. Coughing always hurts when it’s so dry, when the hacking is so brittle, but this is something else. Hook presses a hand to his mouth and squeezes his eyes through the shaking, until the impulse fades.

When he pulls his hand away, there’s a crumpled flower petal in his hand, the edges smeared with red.

“There’s something we can do, right?” his dad asks. His voice is lower, his tone sharper.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse says. “He has to figure out who it is.”

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Hook presses his forehead against the car window as they drive. Beside him in the backseat, his dad is furiously searching on his phone. He’s trying to find a way around it. He’s trying to find a solution. But there isn’t a solution besides the obvious one; Hook has to figure out who it is, or else the roots will carve their place in his lungs and spread to his heart. The organ will be compost for the flowers, food for the blooms. Fitting, maybe—everyone always said Hook never paid attention to anyone else, and now he’s paying for it. He didn’t pay attention, and now it’ll kill him.

Ironic, that.

“You need to ask around,” his dad says, without looking at him. Hook thinks it’s self-preservation. If his dad can’t see the problem, then it doesn’t exist. And right now, Hook is the problem. “See if you can figure out who it is.”

“There’s no one,” Hook mumbles. His breath fogs the glass, a lopsided circle.

His dad taps the window, a signal to the driver. “You aren’t dating anyone? No flings, no one-night stands who could have latched on?”

“No.” When would he have time for that? “No one.”

“Ask around,” his dad says again, but he quiets when Hook starts coughing again. After, when Hook holds the crimson-tinged petals in his palm, his dad looks anywhere except his hands.

Hook isn’t going to ask people. He can’t think of a more embarrassing thing to have to do than work his way systemically through the only group of people he sees often enough for the emotion to stick and ask if any of them they are in love with him. He ignores it. Keeps wrestling. Bangs a few more heads in, hauls the FTW belt with him out of every ring. But after a week of miserably hacking up petals, staining the hotel pillowcases red, he begins to rethink it. Maybe the answer is obvious. Maybe he won’t have to ask many people.

The problem is, he’s got no one in his corner to approach first. And he doesn’t think the answer is obvious at all.

“Are you in love with me?” he asks, and immediately wants to fucking die.

Jack stares at him, eyebrows high. “What?”

“You heard me,” Hook mumbles. He sinks down into his sweatshirt hood, tugs the cords closed. Tries to block out the roar of humiliation that has coated his body and nestled within.

“No,” Jack says. And then: “Dude. What?”

“Nevermind.” Hook’s face is on fire. “I just…had to ask.”

“You think that’s why we aren’t partners anymore?” Jack asks, and laughs, like it’s the dumbest theory in existence. Like it’s ridiculous.

“No,” Hook grumbles, except he had, and now he’s pissed.

He decides not to ask any more people; dying can’t be any worse than this.

He’s forced to eat his words a week later. A new arena, a new nondescript hotel, a new toilet to kneel over as his lungs heave. The compulsion to cough is lasting longer and longer; Hook thinks he can feel the roots burrowing into the soft tissue of his lung, corroding the muscles. He chokes on a petal that doesn’t get all the way up and has to drag it out with one finger, triggering his gag reflex. His eyes prick with hot tears. The coughing doesn’t stop until he’s out of breath, propped up on the toilet seat with his elbow. He sucks in a ragged breath as the tears drip down onto the water and the petals and the blood.

Shit. Shit.

He’s going to wither away, hacking himself to death, because someone is in love with him—big, huge, soul-altering, life-changing love with him—and Hook’s too fucking self-absorbed to figure out who it is. Shouldn’t these things be obvious? Shouldn’t he just know?

He presses a hand to his face, drags it down through the salt tracks. Fuck.

He ends up spending the night like that, curled miserably around the toilet. The end, it seems, might come sooner than he anticipated.

“Mexico,” his dad says, without greeting, when Hook next picks up the phone. “There’s a trial going on in Mexico we can get you in. They go in surgically, take everything out.”

“Won’t it just come back?” Hook asks. The roots tighten around his lungs in response, like an affirmation.

“Buys you time,” his dad snaps. He lashes out when he’s afraid. Hook understands, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about it. “Time to figure out who it is. Haven’t you gone through options yet?”

Hook has, in his head.

His dad seems to figure this out, like usual. “Write them down. Now. Tonight.”

So Hook does. He tries to figure it out. He makes a list. He writes down every person who has interacted with him in the past two months and begins crossing them out, one by one. Some he knows are wrong, and asks via text anyway just to have confirmation: Bowens, Dante. Some he can’t even take seriously: Stokely, Moriarty, Big Bill. But as he runs his pen tip through them, he realizes he’s quickly burning through his options.

The flowers just started. It has to be someone in the past two months…right?

Hopelessness spreads through Hook’s chest as he stares at the names. He can’t possibly go back further than two months and get everyone. He doesn’t have the time. And as though the flowers are dead-set on reminding him of this, the coughing starts up. Hook curls up into a ball, hands cupped beneath his mouth. He catches the petals, but the blood runs rivulets down his wrists, his forearms; it pools on the desk, a damning and ever-widening stain.

He’s dizzy when the spell finally ends. He sags onto the wood and gets his sleeve in the red, doesn’t even care. He’s a mess.

Correction: he’s dying.

Hook drags his palm across his chin, skin coming away wet, and can’t think of a single thing to do about it.

A week later, as he’s hacking up pieces of leaves along with the petals in bed, unable to even move himself to the bathroom, his mind reaches wide for anything else to latch onto. He can’t focus on the pain burning through his chest, or the sharp pangs where the roots have gone deep into the surrounding muscles; he’ll lose it if he focuses on each shuddering heave, on how much blood comes up with all the offending flowers. He throws his awareness back into memories, because at least there, he can find peace.

He must fall asleep like that, eventually—fitful. Poor. He’s back in the ring, staring out at the Las Vegas crowd. His arm is held up in the air. He feels good, really good. He remembers how good this one felt, how right. How he crashed into the shore line and wanted more.

Hook wakes with tears on his face, and an ache in his chest that has nothing to do with the vines slowly choking the life out of him.

He wishes he could have had that.

He wishes things were different.

Hook doesn’t usually get what he really wants.

“I’ve booked our flights to Mexico City,” his dad says.

Hook knows it won’t work, but he doesn’t say anything. He just nods, and moves the eggs on his plate around with his fork. Food just tastes like copper and roses now, anyway.

He’s been able to keep it all under wraps, all things considered. The worst of the assault usually hits in the middle of the night, and while his eyes sport the bruising of insomnia, no one else has figured it out yet. Until he’s in the ring, gliding out of the way of Matt Hardy’s arm and doesn’t quite go as far as he needs to. Until the impact knocks the wind out of his chest, and then, the compulsion slots itself into the hollow space created. Until he’s kneeling by the side of the ring with both hands curled around the ropes, spitting petals and thorns and blood onto the apron.

“Holy shit,” Ethan Page whispers. He backs up, hands high, as though it’s contagious. As though touching the petals will lead to an outbreak, a contagion explosion. As though Hook has any choice in coughing them up in rough, dry heaves.

His head spins. His thoughts blur. His eyes burn.

Someone helps him out of the ring. He’s still coughing, still convulsing; each heave now ripples through his whole body. He wonders, idly, wildly, if the roots have curled into his arms and down into his intestines. Maybe they’ve infiltrated his entire nervous system. Maybe he’s not really himself anymore, merely the host to an invasive, parasitic infection, deceptively lovely.

The coughing fit doesn’t stop. It doesn't end. Hook collapses against a shockingly cold wall and keeps bringing up more, more, more. This is it, right? The end. He can’t breathe. He can’t stop. He’s going to hack up his lungs, and the only thing that will remain will be the outline of where the muscles used to be, a skeleton ribcage of roots and vines.

Hands press against his face, warm. “Hook, Hook—”

Hook knows that voice. He tries to crack one eye open. If this face is the last one he sees, he thinks maybe it will be alright. “D.”

“What’s happening?” Panic. That’s panic in his tone. “Hook, what’s happening?”

Danhausen doesn’t twist away when Hook coughs up a mouthful of petals onto his lap. He doesn’t so much as flinch when the blood splatters along with everything else.

“I’m sorry,” Hook whispers. He doesn’t know why he’s apologizing, other than for the months of silence. The pull-away. The abandonment. His own emotions, really; his own fear, shame, embarrassment. He reaches for Danhausen’s face and can’t wholly control his hand. His fingers slide down the man’s cheek, leaving red trails in their wake. “I wish it were you.”

“Hook,” Danhausen says, rushed and terrified. “It was always Hook. It was you the whole time.”

Pressure against Hook’s cheek: Danhausen’s mouth, the ghost of a kiss, a gasp and a sob at the same time. Hook’s whole body shudders. His vision goes red, then black.

The pain in his lungs blossoms bright enough to swallow the sun, and then abruptly disappears.

He’s grateful for his lungs, now; he doesn’t take them for granted anymore, the way they expand and contract, the way they press up against his ribs, the way he can fill them to the point of pain. He does that, too, every fifth breath or so, just to prove he still can.

Hook wakes slowly. He fills his lungs, listens to the steady beat of his heart. He stares at the outline of the morning sun around the hotel curtains and breathes, in and out. The arm looped around his middle tightens ever so slightly.

“Morning,” he whispers, because he’s still got the oxygen within, because he can. Hook thinks he’s going to do a lot of things just because he can.

A kiss on his shoulder blade. “Morning.”

The world is brighter without the roots embedded in his core.

“Is it time to get up?” Danhausen murmurs. His mouth remains against Hook’s bare skin, trailing higher.

“No,” Hook says. “It’s still early.”

Danhausen hums an affirmation. “Good.” The hand on Hook’s stomach slips lower. He shifts, taking Hook with him until Hook is on his back against the pillows. Danhausen’s mouth skims across Hook’s jaw. “Danhausen has plans.”

“Good,” Hook sighs.

Perhaps one day, he will be grateful for the blooms the same way he appreciates his lungs. One day, he may accept how they helped him. It won’t happen overnight; he may not keep flowers for awhile. He may not be able to abide the clouds of floral perfume at the department stores. But if his lungs catch and stutter, if his breath comes quicker and faster, if the inhales grow ragged and hoarse, at least now it’s for a far lovelier reason, the kind that touches him with reverence and whispers adoration against the salt on his skin.

#wrestleprompts #hookhausen #i asked the group chat if this pairing needed more hanahaki #and the resounding answer was YES OF COURSE #so here you go #a variation on a theme

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