Title: Fugue States

Chapter Title: 2 – Aegrotat

Character(s): Jeff Hardy, Rob Van Dam, Shannon Moore

Rating: 15

Wordcount: 2,102

Disclaimer: The characters in this fiction are the property of TNA and the people who use them – they are nothing to do with me. All that I've written is just a fantasy.

Summary: Jeff awakes, Shannon does something stupid, Rob angsts.

A/N: Well, this took a while. Hopefully the next instalment won't.

…

Jeff rose up through black unconsciousness like a bubble, silvery and shivering; he broke the surface gasping. There was bright daylight and cold air on his skin. Everything was strange. He was blind for a moment; then light and darkness resolved themselves into vague forms.

His body was full of ache. His eyes were gummy, the left barely open. For a moment, he didn't try to move; just lay on his back, listening to the sound of his breath rasping and subsiding, a painful tide. He was alone. He knew where he was.

Flaking plaster ceiling, dust and spiderwebs. Ugly brown brick for walls. The tall windows let the light in, bright bars of Florida sun slanting to the floorboards. It was his place, his empty city pad. Jeff parted his desiccated lips, wet them. Cleared his throat; the effort in his ribcage stabbing pain through his belly, his chest. Tried to make noise. "Matt?" It came out thin and hoarse, like an old man's voice. "Matty?"

There was only the silence of an empty apartment, the faint growl of traffic outside, swelling and subsiding.

Jeff moved his fingers experimentally – first right, then left – and then flexed his toes. He tried to make a fist with his right hand; his fingers curled into his palm, weakly. Biting down on his ravaged lower lip, he brought his arm up, straight at first, then bending, to spay his hand across his face. Darkness. Relief. It didn't hurt. Not much. He had been afraid that he was irreparably broken.

His face, though, his face – it felt wrong. Lumpy, swollen, tender. Here and there rough with old blood. His left eye was a slit between massive lids, juicy and swollen, like overripe fruit. Jeff whimpered, between his teeth, heart tripping fast against his hurt ribs. He flailed one arm – flesh stretching over his ribs and flaring sudden pain at myriad locations. His hand found the mattress, the rucked linen sheet, seized and pulled at it, heaving himself up.

Sudden, massive pain, huge and crushing, like being hit by a truck. Unbearably tight at his chest, his stomach; couldn't breathe. Spots swam in front of his eyes, blinding bright. He was sitting, he was sitting, hands fisted in the sheets, jaw seized tight, waiting for the pain to subside. It didn't subside. He became aware of a thin, reedy whine penetrating the blood-haze of agony. It was coming from him.

He released the sheets, fell back to the bed, gasping. The hurt worked through him, like hands, gripping, pulling, punching. Hot tears pricked at his eyes, seeped out, wetting his face. An egg of emotion, vast and choking – frustration, misery, pain – rose up in his throat. He balled his hands into fists, raised them up – let them fall again. He turned his head to the side, breath raw in his throat. His vision began to clear, in his one good eye at least. The pain, like a tide, remained at high water. With the spots subsiding, something in his line of sight presented itself to him.

On the little card table beside the head of the bed, there was a clutter of things; his things, mostly. Notebooks, motley and well-used; dead tubes that used to contain oil paint, curled in on themselves; ink pens; charcoal; a pack of cigarettes. But there was something that was unfamiliar, that hadn't been there before.

A tall glass of water, and a little orange plastic bottle with a childproof cap. Jeff reached out a hand towards it, fingers palsied and twitching. He put his fingertips to it. It was real. He wrapped his hand around the little bottle, tight, and brought it to him, not bothering with the water.

…

Shannon stood in darkness. The murmur of the crowd fell soft all around him; soft now, the audience wondering amidst itself. Camera flashes went off like lightning strikes, throwing his shadow thin and angular onto the canvas in bursts of white light and intense shadow. The emptiness above him was a palpable weight, stretching up to the vaulted roof, bearing down with the cathedral's silent majesty.

He kept his head down, hands splayed stiff at his sides, feet armoured in his enormous, familiar boots and planted solid, apart. A rehearsed position. It wasn't hard, after all these years, to fall naturally into melodrama.

When the lights went up, bright, hard and all-consuming, and the crowd's babble rose into a scream, Shannon – for a heartbeat, two, three – didn't move. When he did, he made a production of surveying the crowd: slow head-turn, cold eyes. They cheered, they waved their arms, made excited faces.

Shannon hooked the microphone from the pocket of his coat. At his lips, he paused, breathing so that everyone could hear. Then he spoke. "Abyss."

The noise of the crowd rose again, louder, ascending in pitch.

"Abyss, you goddamn monster, I know you're out there." Shannon fixed his eyes on the runway. "You better listen to me, and listen good. What you did today, to Jeff, is only a repeat of what you've done to too many others, too many times. I don't care if there are people saying, 'oh, Jeff Hardy deserved it' and that he got what was coming to him. I don't care," he snarled. "You are not gonna get away with it any more."

Louder, louder. He was becoming a hero, right in front of his own eyes. Shannon glanced around, gaze swinging around the stands. They loved it. The happiness on their faces.

He took a breath. "You and me, Abyss. Next week. No disqualifications." He could hardly hear his own voice on the speakers over the roar of the crowd. He held out a hand, palm out. They quieted, barely. "If you don't show, or if Bischoff nixes the match," he turned his eyes to glare back at the runway, "I know you're not just a bully but a coward, too."

He dropped the mic. He knew it would work, knew it would be scheduled. Shannon climbed from the ring, the corners of his eyes on the entrance. It remained empty. Good. No one would mess with him this week. He needed a week of grace.

Shannon knew that Immortal would honour his demand, simply because he had no hope in hell of facing up to the monster and winning. He was playing into their hands. They should be happy.

…

The studio was a labyrinth. It was a warren of echoing corridors, empty rooms. Little backstage nooks, crowded with technicians' gear. Fluorescent strip-lights making deep shadows and washed-out bright spots. It was, ultimately, a very easy place in which to hide.

Rob was hiding. He had been hiding for hours: in the steam-clouded, thick-smelling lockerroom, under the pound and hiss of the shower; smoking three unaccustomed cigarettes at the desolate back of the building; watching the spotlit ring from a backstage niche. He had witnessed Shannon's return. Shannon, so small, standing in his own shadow out on the canvas, bristling with rage.

Despite the hours and the scalding water and the soap, Rob's fingers still ghosted with the memory of Jeff Hardy's skin, his blood. He had touched him, barely, when they came to the rescue: fingertipping his body on the mat as if with reverence at the damage done; mouth open, tasting the stagelight heat and the thrill of Hardy's vulnerability. He could have done anything to him. All the things he dreamed of doing for weeks, coiled tense in his muscles every day. Hate was tangible: it was the ache in your jaw from clenching, it was the contusions on your knuckles from overtraining, it was the sound of his voice when he snapped at the people around him he was supposed to care about.

It was not only this, for Rob. It was, although he didn't admit it, even to himself, the strange urgency in his half-waking dreams, in the dark, a pulse of blood that sparked a craving like to scratch an itch. The things he wanted to do to Jeff Hardy. Things he couldn't tell, couldn't even imagine the words forming on his tongue. They would burn. They burned already, in him, every night.

These were the things that Rob was trying to hide from; it wasn't only people he couldn't face. All these dark, hot secrets – and the sound of Jeff's voice in the physio room, the voice of a man just awoken from a long, long sleep. A voice that frightened Rob with its uncertainty, its need. Its innocence.

…

When Shannon arrived back at Jeff's place, it was close to twilight, the sky growing cool and balanced on the edge of daylight. Jeff's apartment was full of shadows and silence. Shannon, just inside the door, stopped. He let his duffel bag (spare clothes, toothbrush, hairspray) hit the floor, unminded. He listened for the sound of breathing.

It was there. Thready, raw. But there. Shannon closed the door behind him, and went to check on Jeff.

Jeff's bed was little more than a mattress on the floor. A hastily-hung curtain surrounded it, barely seperating it from the rest of the apartment. Behind the curtain, it was dark, and Jeff looked worse than Shannon remembered. Cherry-red and plum-purple, misshapen. There was a scatter of white pills across his lap. His hand lay half-open, cradling the bottle. The expression on Jeff's face, such as it was discernable, looked strained.

Kneeling beside Jeff, Shannon gathered up the pills, eased the bottle from Jeff's hand. Jeff didn't stir. Shannon palmed the bottle, fingering it. For a moment he did nothing, but knelt on the splintery floorboards, watching Jeff's chest rise and fall with his breathing. His flesh, all tender and ripe with hurt, wrapped tight around his ribs in crisp white tape. Beetle-black stitches lacing up deep red scores. Wet scrapes, patterned bruises. Shannon grit his teeth, closed the bottle in a fist.

He screwed his eyes shut, and went somewhere else. Somewhere where it was summer, and the sun baked the sky pale above the greenest trees. The scratchy, taut feel of the trampoline under his bare skin, sweat-slick at first then sun-dry, lying under the Carolina sky with Jeff and Matt at his sides, arms, legs just touching, easily. Endless days, and balmy star-speckled nights that smelled of jasmine and sounded with crickets. Under the cover of these nights, shrouded with reefer smoke, Shannon sometimes watched Jeff, sometimes Matt, without even realising what he was doing.

Jeff was finely-cut, wiry, fair-haired and sun-kissed. Matt was sturdier, darker, older. He had an irresistable musk. Jeff looked more like a boy-angel. Shannon was in awe of them both.

Shannon was awoken by a touch on his hand, the one that held the pill bottle. He opened his eyes onto a room full of evening darkness; the bed; Jeff, eyes dark slots but open, awake. Alive. Jeff made shapes with his mouth. No sound came out. Shannon dropped the bottle, took the water that stood untouched on the little table beside the bed. He brought it to Jeff's lips. Jeff strained toward it, weak. Swallowed once, twice, wetting his chin, his chest. Shannon took the water away. Jeff sunk back into the pillow, eyes closing. He was silent for a long time. Shannon had begun to think that he'd fallen asleep again, getting ready to ease up, off his aching knees, when Jeff spoke.

"Shannon."

"Yeah?" Shannon barely more than whispered.

"What's wrong with me?"

Shannon was quiet for a moment, turning over thoughts. "What do you mean?"

"It's not – it's not when I think it is. And the way – the way they looked at me." Jeff's eyes moved under his lips, a flicker of a frown. "Everything's wrong. I'm so confused. Like I don't know which way is up." He opened his eyes, darkly shining. "I can't think straight."

"Jeff." Shannon bit his lip, ran a hand though his hair (down now, soft). "You think it's October."

"Yeah."

"You know that's not right, don't you?"

"Yeah." Just a sigh.

"Do you remember anything, Jeff?"

A pause. Stillness. Their common breathing. Then the faintest tremble of Jeff's swollen lips. He shook his head. Shannon's heart tripped inside him, vertiginous.

"I guess that's something we have to talk to the doctor about."

Jeff turned his face away, his eyes tracking shadows, seeking nothing. Quietly: "Yeah."