Whumptober From The Gas Station

Chapter 1

Prompts - misunderstanding, touch starved, helplessness, pneumothorax.

Whenever Jack got sick, he'd tend to power through the day at work rather than stay home. Even if he called in sick to Mama and Pops, they'd likely call him in either way to deal with some sort of minor disaster at the station, whether it be squirrel blending homeless men who definitely weren't your crazy racist colleague attempting to feed some unknown cosmic evil beneath the building, or a drunk Jerry getting a hold of fire crackers. Out of those two examples, the latter was definitely the scariest. He hadn't had miniature explosives thrown at his head since high school, and he really, really  wasn't keen on reliving said experiences again any time soon.

So, for the most part, he couldn't really be bothered. They were quite unhappy with him when he took a few days after having his leg literally chopped off, and he'd ended up being called in days later anyway, so staying home because he has the flu or a chest cold wasn't exactly going to go over well. Plus, if really needed, he could just puke in the sink or something, right? It's basically the same as staying home. Between making himself a cup of coffee that afternoon, loosing time, and the now, being roughly nine-thirty, something felt incredibly wrong.

The was a sharp pain just about where he guest-imated his lungs to be, and each breath he sucked in was short, hitching his chest and bringing with it a sharp, reverberating pain throughout his chest.

Jack's gotten sick in all sorts of ways in his life. Before going into foster care, he didn't have the best living space, a lack of proper amenities and the neglect from a disinterested, meth head father easily amounted to a lot of unaddressed illness in his childhood. In the first grade he managed to catch strep throat, to which it proceeded to be ignored for several months. It escalated until he'd managed to also develop pneumonia during it. His throat was so swollen during the whole thing that he could barely eat, which led to him dropping even more weight that he certainly could not afford to lose. In the end, he's not exactly sure what led to his father actually taking some initiative and getting him the antibiotics he needed, but either way, it took roughly four months for it to happen.

That wasn't even the last time he'd catch pneumonia, not even close. Vaccination wasn't exactly popular around his area due to the whole Andrew Wakefield incident, which led their town of freaks and conspiracy theorists to just about shit themselves. It didn't really matter to a majority of folks there that the whole study was later found to be fraudulent, because in their minds, that all but cemented it's authenticity. Big Pharma and all that, you know? Frankly, he doubts anyone even read either the fraudulent study or the ones correcting the record, given the towns astonishingly low literacy rates. It probably came mostly from word of mouth from someone who saw some loud, eye catching newspaper headline somewhere and then it went from there.

Sure, not everyone in the town was like that or subscribed to those beliefs, but it sure was a frightening majority. Hell, even after he went into foster care he still didn't get vaccinated for years. He finally got a foster family willing to get him up to date on them when he was fifteen years old, and by then he'd already gotten chicken pox once and the flu more times then he'd like to say.

Basically, all this is to say that illness is something he's been very well versed in in his lifetime, but in all the times he'd been sick, he'd never been sick like this. It felt like someone had punched him in the chest really hard and now he was in a perpetually state of breathlessness, like he'd had the wind knocked out of him. That's why he'd decided to call in sick that day. He'd gotten Pops on the phone who sounded surprisingly concerned. Most likely, this was due to how shit he probably sounded on the phone, and without argument, he'd given him the day off. He'd even ended it with a "Take care of yourself, Jack." before hanging up, which is probably the closest thing to a goodbye that he'd ever received from Mama or Pops in the last seven or so years.