Aosh had never fully been prepared to lose Tiza.
When he was seven and Tiza's existence was threatened by a mean-spirited girl with a Sharpie, he was ready to protect Tiza at all costs. When Tiza found out Aosh's real name and the brutal rejection that followed; Aosh was lost knowing that Tiza was so close in his grasp yet still unreachable, but he persevered. When Tiza left without a word, without a trace in the wind, even then Aosh in the midst of despair and loneliness had found a way to be ok with losing Tiza.
But Aosh had never really prepared himself to lose Tiza.
It was one of those things, the things that creep into your brain while you are trying to sleep and keep you up at night.The thought of losing someone you care about; the thought of losing Tiza. The thought of never seeing Tiza. The thought of Tiza being out there in the world somewhere, dead; Aosh never getting the chance to meet him. It wasn't uncommon and that's why it scared him. Sometimes it was hard to hold onto the hope that one day he would see Tiza, because the reality was he might find Tiza in the form of a gravestone. That reality was hard to accept and the odds were high.
After finding Tiza, Aosh had forgotten that life was still life. It wasn't fair and it gave just as much as it took.
Tiza's name seemed to still echo in the small space they were in, followed by the sound of Aosh running down the stairs. Panicked, he dropped to his knees and pressed his ear against Tiza's chest. The beating of his heart was faint and irregular, he was still breathing, and...his heat was still present if weakly so. But there was so much blood.
Aosh knew better than to move Tiza, but he had to do something. Shaky hands slowly moved behind Tiza's head, dragging through the warm blood and wet hair, to try and feel where the bleeding was coming from. The tips of his fingers grazed open skin, behind Tiza's ear. Pulling his blood covered hand out, Aosh quickly pulled off his sweatshirt and pressed it to the wound. Blood bloomed on the shirt like a rose opening its petals.
His other hand fumbled around in his pocket for his phone. Tears fell on the screen, his blurred vision making it hard to dial 9-1-1.
Bursting into the stairwell, Sean could hear crying and a fast, frantic conversation. He made his way down as best as he could, holding his side where most likely he'll have a bruised rib. Drying blood dribbled down his chin from his mouth. Two flights down and the crying gets louder and he sees that bitch standing there. Valencia makes no move as he draws near, her eyes glued down the stairwell, but Sean disregards her entirely when he sees what lies at the bottom of the flight.
Sean almost falls down the stairs himself trying to get to his brother. His little brother, the one who he was supposed to protect. The one he had failed again and again protecting.
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The early morning news played on the flat screen tv; the dull sound of it filled the hospital's waiting room. Not that Aosh and Sean paid any attention to it. They were forced to wait here in a sort of limbo while Tiza was taken to the ER. Neither man spoke a word to each other, not since they met in the stairwell over Tiza's body. What was there to say? They both feared the same thing.
Sometime later a doctor approaches them, making the duo tensely stand up.
"Is he…" Sean starts.
"Mr. Jeannot is fine," the man cuts Sean off, " He sustained a fracture to his skull, which was non-life threatening, a fractured ankle and femur, and a fractured hip."
The doctor opens a folder attached to a clipboard and pulls out a short stack of x-rays. He begins pointing at all the cracked and fractured bits. Giving a meaningful tap on the hip x-ray, he addresses Sean.
"His hip needs surgery in order for him to walk again."
Sean intakes a sharp breath. The doctor continues.
"When he was brought in he was severely malnourished and looking at the nature of his fractures...for a man of his age he shouldn't have sustained this amount of damage. Which leads us to believe his bone density is low. His heart beat also remains irregular, has he been diagnosed with heart arrhythmia in the past?"
Aosh's brow furrows and he glances at Sean who looks just as confused as he is.
"No...uh, no. I mean he-he has struggled with eating in the past but..."
'But I fixed that,' Sean thinks.
"His BMI is extremely low for someone his age, and upon further inspection his throat showed signs of purging over an extended period of time. Side affects of bulimia and anorexia are heart issues, the most common being heart arrhythmia, and loss of bone density, amongst other things. As of right now he's fine, but looking at the injuries he sustained it's likely due to loss of consciousness from his arrhythmia. Most people, when they tumble down a flight of stairs, are able to catch themselves or make an effort to cushion their fall. In your cousin's case the lack of awareness made things worse than they should've been."
He tucks the clipboard under his arm.
"I strongly suggest along with hip surgery, we put in a pacemaker to help regulate his heart. It's a safe surgery with a high success rate. If not, it leads to something like this happening again."
Sean looks to have gone a shade paler, his eyes giving way to how he's processing all this. He realizes that the two men are looking at him for an answer. Shaking his head; a wavering ' Do whatever it takes.' leaving his lips.
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It's not until later that evening when the two men are allowed to see Tiza. The nurse leads them to his room and quietly lets them inside. Tiza comes into view as a set of dimmed lights flicker on. Gauze is tightly wrapped around his head, and black and blue bruises litter his arms. He's hooked up to several machines that hum lowly. The outline of the casts on his lower body can barely be seen from under the blankets he's wrapped up in.
Aosh comes to the bedside while Sean has stopped a few feet away. It feels like this isn't real; like it shouldn't be real. The Beta doesn't want to come closer. The nurse addresses them both.
"His surgeries went well, but he's been having a hard time maintaining consciousness. We're going to keep monitoring him closely." She reaches for his charts at the end of the bed and begins to write on them.
Aosh's gaze traces Tiza's comatose face. If not for the atmosphere and the circumstance, the Omega would almost look peaceful. Unlike Sean, although Aosh doesn't want this to be real he forces himself to accept the fact that Tiza is lying there. He lays his hand on Tiza's where it lays next to his side, just so he can confirm for himself that Tiza is alive and fine. A steadier heartbeat can be felt under his palm and Aosh squeezes the back of Tiza's hand.
It twitches under his grasp.
Blond eyelashes flutter open.
Tiza's glossed over gaze goes toward the hand laying on his own then up to Aosh's face. Something akin to a sigh leaves his chapped lips and tears collect on the edges of his eyes. The corners of Tiza's lips upturn and Aosh's name barely makes it out of them. Aosh squeezes his hand once more, the heavy feeling in his chest becoming lighter.
"I'm here, Tiza." He holds back all of the emotions welling up in him and tries to stay calm, for the weak Omega below him.
Tiza's eyes stay on him, the haziness in them not leaving, but then his head turns to look at the other visitor in the room.
The heart rate monitor beeps rapidly.
Tiza's eyes shoot open and his hand jerks away from Aosh as he looks to where Sean is standing at the end of his bed. He thrashes and pulls at the wires that connect him to all of the equipment. His voice, raspy and panicked,yells:
"Get away from me!"
The nurse comes to his side quickly and pushes a button on the wall. She tries to get Tiza to calm down, but can't get him to stop thrashing around. Not a minute later two more nurses come rushing into the room and assist her. Aosh and Sean are quickly ushered out of the room, the last thing they see before the door is shut in their face is Tiza crying and screaming.
It's not till a while later one of the nurses comes back to them. She told them that shortly after they left Tiza lost consciousness again.
This happens the next couple of times Sean is in the room and Tiza happens to regain consciousness. It comes to a point that one of the nurses, obviously exhausted from having to calm down the Omega calmly tells Sean that it would be best if he didn't visit Tiza.
She stops him from entering the room.
"I'm sorry but, seeing you is putting him under too much stress. At some point it's going to hinder his healing. So it would be best if you waited to visit him."
Sean looks like he has something to say but instead just storms down the hall. The nurse turns to Aosh and says that he's welcome to come in if he'd like. The Alpha watches Sean retreat down the hallway for a moment before he's walking after him.
Aosh follows Sean as he makes his way into the parking garage.
"Sean,wait!"
"Leave me alone." He calls out headed towards his car.
"You can't just leave him here!"
Sean is just coming to where he is parked before he turns around with a pained expression on his face.
"Well what am I supposed to do? I can't even see him without him having an episode!"
"He needs his family here."
"Yeah well obviously I'm not wanted here. I just…goddamit." Sean leans on the trunk of his car, keys clinking together as he buries his head in his hands.
"I don't know what to do…"
"How are you supposed to? No one is prepared for something like this to happen."
"No," Sean grits out, exasperated, " I never knew what to do. Especially with Tiza. I was never prepared to take care of someone else, I could barely take care of myself. Then I was thrust into taking care of him, putting myself in charge of protecting him ever since his mother died."
Aosh comes next to him to lean against the car, letting his elbows come to rest on the cool metal.
"...How did she die?"
Sean scoffs and fiddles with the keys in his hands, letting his fingers run over the ridges of one of them.
"She was stabbed right in front of him."
"And… your father?"
"A selfish, drunken bastard that only cares about money. What else is there to say?"
Aosh shrugs, "I feel like there's a lot you're still not telling."
"Yeah and I feel like it's none of your business." Sean spits back, he didn't know why he had to explain himself to this guy.
"Listen, I'm just trying to understand the whole story, regardless of if you want to tell me or not, whatever had happened led up to Tiza getting hurt."
"Why do you even care so much? What is it about him that just attracts your kind in like a magnet?"
"My kind? Wow ok," Aosh shakes his head, agitated,"You want to know why I care?"
Aosh rolls up the sleeve of his thin undershirt.
"This. This is why I care so much." he says pointing at Tiza's name in his skin. The surprised look on Sean's face is almost laughable.
"If you would listen to anybody but your own self for once you'd realise I never had any intention to hurt Tiza. I've been nothing but respectful to him and given him the space he needs. Never did I once push him to do anything he didn't want to do. Whatever prejudices you have on Alpha's don't put that on me. We all aren't the same. But you...if you don't think you have a part in how things ended up, then you're deluded."
Aosh gets up from where he's leaning and starts walking back but not before sending Sean a hard glare.
"Leave if you feel too much guilt being here. He doesn't need your guilt, he needs support. But if you can't look past your own mistakes to make things right then don't even try. There will be someone here when he wakes up, whether it's his real family or not."
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Sean doesn't come back after that. Aosh wonders if he had been too harsh, but the thought doesn't last long, not when he goes back into the hospital room and sees Tiza quietly laying there. Somehow, impossibly so, things have gotten more complicated.
First Sean, whom he didn't already have a high opinion on, shows this possessive side of his. Second he learns that Tiza comes from an abusive home. Aosh had suspected some kind of trauma, but...well actually hearing that there was some truth to his speculations was sobering.
Even if it wasn't to the same degree, ever since he was little Aosh wanted to protect Tiza. A part of him wishes he could've been there for him. The Alpha knows he would have benefited from the same kind of treatment when he was younger. That was one thing the Alpha and Omega had in common he supposes. They were both very lost little kids with no one to turn to. Maybe Sean felt like he failed to protect Tiza but Aosh felt the same. He remembers what he had promised Tiza in the gazebo and how he couldn't deliver on it.
'I promise that no other person let alone an Alpha will make you feel that way again. Whether you're my fated mate or not, you're someone I care about and I'm not going to let someone I care about be treated that way.'
What a joke. But dwelling on that doesn't help the situation either. He'd be no better than Sean at that point.
Aosh moves the only other chair in the room by Tiza's bedside. It creaks as he sits in it. Aosh doesn't know what to do. It's just him and Tiza in this quiet hospital room. He guesses he'll just wait. Wait until Tiza wakes up. Because he doesn't know what else to do. Three months of torture and of trying to forget culminated to this point. The tv flickered on; the Alpha figuring a little background noise would be better than this uncomfortable silence. He scrolled through the channels only stopping a moment to see what each one was playing, not really paying attention. Until a particular movie caught his eye. Aosh recognized it as one of those B horror films he saw when he was younger, the kind Pops would rent for movie nights when Aosh was a kid.
It's a movie he knows Tiza would like to watch. A fleeting memory of Tiza laughing at a cheesy horror game, tugs at the corners of his mind. It used to make him smile but right now all it did was make the corners of his mouth tug downward.
It's funny how after all these months that he'd known the guy Aosh thought he knew what Tiza liked. Tiza wasn't much of an open book, but there were times where Aosh could read him. All those times when his face cracked just a bit and he let himself live in the moment. And then the times he engrossed himself in something he was passionate about and showed that he truly liked something. The times where the Tiza of his childhood daydreams and the Tiza in reality actually overlapped and became one. Tiza wasn't much of an open book, but one that Aosh wanted to open up and read. If the Omega ever gave him the chance.
A woman is running on screen, being chased by thick vines that move along the ground. She rushes past trees in this jungle like area until her foot catches on a root sending her tumbling into the mud. Vines quickly wrap around her ankles and she is dragged back the way she came; her screams shrill. Violently she is pulled upwards to hang in front of her captor, a giant venus fly trap-esque monster with sharp teeth.
"I lost it…"
Aosh whips his head towards the sudden voice beside him. Tiza's eyes, half lidded, are staring at the tv screen. He repeats the words again, if a little more broken. Confused, Aosh moves into Tiza's line of sight.
"What did you lose?" Aosh asks, noticing how Tiza looks more distraught as time goes on.
Tiza presses his lips together into a frown, looking like he's seconds from crying.
"Our plant. For our garden...I lost it. I'm...the worst aren't I?," a shaky hand comes up and wipes at his red eyes, "I'm so sorry."
Tiza leaves his arm over his eyes.
"Don't worry about it. I have-"
The crying has stopped and Aosh reaches over to lift Tiza's arm away from his face. His eyes are closed again, unconscious.
'Our plant.' Aosh repeats in his head.
The Alpha sets Tiza's arm next to where he lays, giving his hand a firm squeeze and a 'I'll be back.' before he leaves the room.
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Returning an hour later, Aosh walks down the hallway leading to Tiza's room with a backpack stuffed with essentials and a small potted cactus. Staying by Tiza's side was the only option for him. Figuring it was better than worrying at home, Aosh called a ride and headed back home to grab an overnight bag. And if Tiza was upset about losing the cactus Aosh had gifted him, then the Alpha was going to fix that.
Aosh convinced himself he was ready to move on, yet as stubborn as his heart was, held onto just a shred of hope, if you could call it that. Yes he had bought Tiza a cactus to start his garden, but he had also bought himself an almost identical one. Letting go seemed so impossible to him at the time, to appease his yearning heart this was the compromise. Two plants connected by two hearts. Yes it was overly sentimental, it was very Aosh. In the end he will always be the hopeless romantic.
Aosh had no clue where Tiza's cactus had gone but hoped that the Omega wouldn't notice when he woke up that the two weren't the same. The soles of his shoes skid to a stop some ways away from Tiza's room. That woman was standing in front of the door, looking in. Getting a good look at her now, Aosh could admit that she was beautiful, but she had this air about her that he did not like. Like she was playing chess and making moves in her head at every moment. It was very...Alpha. And it was disgusting.
He approaches her undaunted, intending to give her a piece of his mind. Looking to her left she sees him approach, then pays Aosh no mind other than saying.
"Here comes the real one."
"What?"
She doesn't answer him but instead keeps her gaze fixed on where she can just barely see Tiza through the glass.
"Why don't you go in and see him? It's the least you could do," he says. This was just as much her fault as it was Sean's and because of that Aosh held nothing but contempt for her.
"I've seen all that I need to from here. He's broken, that's all there is to it."
"What are you to him, really?" Aosh finally asks the question that's been burning in the back of his mind, he wanted answers and a reason for all the hate he felt towards this person.
She looks him up and down, eyes stopping on the familiar plant in his hands and huffs a laugh,
"I should be asking you that. You're his real fated mate and yet you let an Omega like that go around unbitten. Whatever game you're playing, you're not very good at it."
"Don't take me down to your level. 'Games', that's real Alpha of you. Way to play into that stereotype. And what do you mean by real fated mate?" Aosh furrows his brow as he realizes what she was getting at.
"You...you lied to him, didn't you?"
This person had the audacity to lie to Tiza and say that she was his fated mate?! What kind of scumbag did that? Thinking back on it, when Tiza stumbled across Aosh's mate mark was that the reason why he was so freaked out? Because he thought he already had a fated mate? From the very beginning, without him knowing it, this person ruined things for Aosh. His teeth grit together as she just laughs at him again and he uses all of his self control to not pick a fight with her.
"I told him what he wanted to hear. And I got what I wanted, a beautiful little doll of an Omega for a mate. You wouldn't be looking at me that way if you saw how happy he was."
"He's not some object for you to play with. I don't even know if you know what real happiness looks like."
Aosh doesn't know what happiness looks like on Tiza either, but he knows it's not the gloomy, far away look he had the day before in her arms.
She shakes her head and comes away from the door.
"You're too sentimental. Omegas only know happiness when we give it to them. He's like all the rest, just a pretty thing that needs an Alpha to survive. Without us they are nothing. Don't fault me for doing my job and don't act so high and mighty. If you want to still fight over this toy you can have it. I have no use for broken things."
She walks past him and Aosh calls out to her.
"So that's it?! You're casting him aside after all that you've done to him? After all the effort you put into this?"
"Opportunity is a well that never runs dry for us. When there is one Omega begging for attention, there are many watching from the sidelines waiting for their turn. Have fun with it, if it makes it."
Aosh has never wanted to tear down someone more than he wanted to right now. Fingernails bite into his palm while he watches her back go down the hallway. The urge to rip her to shreds and bring her, bloody and battered, back to Tiza danced across his mind.
'Crack'
A miniscule crack spreads from where he's gripping the pot. 'Our plant.' echoes in his head. Red hot flames of rage dull to a flicker. Turning violent would make him feel better, but wouldn't help the situation. Tiza was injured because people did what they thought he needed rather than letting him decide, that much Aosh understands. Tiza couldn't tell him what he needed but he's sure serving him his ex's head on a silver platter wouldn't be on the list. It's late and he's tired. In the end Aosh just wanted to be by Tiza's side.
Coming into the room, he sets the cactus on the small table next to Tiza's bed. Aosh makes himself comfortable in the armchair, pulling out a blanket he brought from home to cover himself. Laying his head on the back of the chair is awkward , and he knows he'll probably have a neck cramp later but he makes do.
"Goodnight, Tiza." comes out as a sigh and he gently rests his hand on top of Tiza's as he tries to get some rest.