Suspicions

Skipper enjoyed Sundays, specifically Sunday mornings, since it was most often the one day of the week, he had the morning to himself for longer than a half-hour. Sure, he could take a page from his boys and sleep in, but there was something about those few hours of quiet that left him feeling more refreshed than if he had gotten a few more hours of shut-eye.

Or that was normally the case, but this Sunday was a different story. Rather than enjoy his coffee and flip through the paper, he was staring at a handful of shriveled blood-stained flowers half contained in an equally blood-stained tissue.

When Skipper had first spotted petals while emptying the trash, he didn't give it a second thought. Each of his men had proved to be a lovesick fool for someone at one point or another. Petals came and went over the course of a few weeks or months at the most, but nothing that warranted concern. But the wads of blood-soaked tissues shoved to the very bottom of the can had raised an alarm. While there could be some bleeding in the early stages of Hanahaki when the plant first formed, the amount of blood he had seen was a sign that the disease was far past its early stages. And morbid curiosity had pushed him to unravel one of those bloody tissues to confirm what his gut already knew: one of his boys was painfully and hopelessly in Love.

The fully formed violets and carnations were almost unrecognizable at this point, having dried into a mangled clump over the last day or so, but they seemed as vivid to Skipper as the first moment he saw them. Eying the short remains of broken-off stems, he rubbed a hand over his chest feeling the raised scar dividing his chest. He had been just as gone years ago if not more so. Hans' betrayal had done nothing to wither the bouquet in his chest but instead spurred it so that his only option was to have it removed.

To have one of his own men suffering with advanced Hanahaki right under his nose seemed impossible and yet the evidence was laid out before him. But what worried him more was the fact they were hiding it and for it to have progressed to the point of full flowers like violets and carnations without raising suspicion worried him more. Even if it could take years for Hanahaki to mature into a life-threatening condition there was only so much damage that could be repaired which meant that he couldn't wait for one of them to confess.

But at the same time, he had to know who it was before he could confront them. Whoever it was had probably taken great lengths to hide how far their Hanahaki had progressed or hide that they had developed Hanahaki, to begin with. If he wasn't careful, he could inadvertently push whoever it was into guarding their secret closer than before and he wasn't convinced that whoever it was, was planning on going under the knife. Although he didn't believe for a second that it was a case of wanting to die, even if there had been hundreds of documented cases since the procedure to remove the flowers had been developed where people opted to die from Hanahaki. Often in those cases, people either lost their significant other and because it seemed like they could never feel loved the same way again. Then there were others who were so far gone on someone and had been for so long that or they couldn't imagine falling for anyone else that they would hide it until nothing could be done. To Skipper, it sounded like committing suicide without pulling a trigger and it was hard to imagine any of his men taking that way out.

Still, feelings were difficult which made Hanahaki difficult, and it could be easy to fall into a thought pattern of thinking you were getting over someone, but your heart wasn't getting the memo. Which is why Skipper was having his suspicions that Kowalski was not coping with the end of his relationship with Doris as well as the man said he was.