Jetstream (Hawks Angst)

a weeks gone worse

(half this text is ripped from the sickfic chapter but it's heavily edited at some parts to make it fit my plans better 👍👍)

As the week continued on, Hawks felt worse and worse. He began showing up to the liberation front half-hungover, but the villains understood.

It was almost shocking to them to see him come in in such a horrible state so often. But they weren't mean about it, if anything they comforted him through his struggles, then they continued on.

Everything always continued on.

And Hawks was tired of it.

But he wanted to keep saving people. He wanted to be a hero. Part of him hoped he could be saved. That someone could save him the way Endeavor had to him as a kid. That someone could give him the same hope to escape this agonizingly infinite cycle of hurting.

But all that feeling would end and the end of today. But every end has a beginning.

So let's start in the morning.

He woke up at 5am to a call from Mirko. He hadn't spoken to her in a week. He was trying to put some distance between them. He didn't want her to worry about him as much as she was. The more detached they were, the less she would care.

He'd been consistently ignoring her calls, but letting her stay when she had to. Only twice over that week.

He'd had at least one panic attack every day. At least. He was living in misery.

He noticed himself getting more and more dependent on self harm and getting drunk that his time sober was quickly reaching and equilibrium with the times he wasn't.

His cutting had gotten deep. Most of them needed stitches, but he just wrapped them and hoped for the best, resulting in infections. Cuts over cuts over scars over more scars. The more he ran out of room, the more he did it, the more infected his wounds became, but he couldn't not do it. It calmed him; it distracted him from feeling like shit for a couple minutes.

It was an addiction. Completely. He didn't know how to function without it.

So when Hawks woke up to a call from Mirko at 5am, nauseous from hangover and feverish from the infections, he was incredibly irritated and instead of letting it ring, immediately hit decline. He shifted in his bed, but couldn't fall back asleep, resulting in laying back and thinking.

And thinking.

Then moving over the toilet and thinking. After vomiting, he simply laid on the cool tiles of his bathroom floor until his alarm went off. He didn't feel well.

But he went to the liberation front anyways. He worked all day anyways. He kept his mask up as always.

No one realized anything was wrong.
Except for one.

His day was long and exhausting. Then at the end of the day, while flying home, he found he couldn't breathe quite right. Like the world was closing in on him. He recognized the onset of a panic attack, but it was different. It was bad.

It was the first time he didn't feel free in the sky. He'd never started panicking in the sky before.

It had always been the one thing that helped, ironically, ground him.

He felt like nonexistent walls were closing on on him, like he was gonna puke, like he couldn't breathe even though he was surrounded by bountiful amounts of fresh, clean air. Tears began flowing heavily and dripping to the ground below him. His wings began to tremble so severely he lost control over them.

He plummeted downwards.

His heart was racing as he tried to breathe, tried to regain control over his body. He wasn't successful. He awkwardly crashed into the side of some random building, successfully dislocating his shoulder, hitting his head, and reopening lightly healed cuts.