#i headcanon that in the double life health sharing system you don’t get sick if your soulmate does

[mooblooms-and-glares]

Wait a minute, about the whole “Jimmy is like a canary in a coal mine” thing, wasn’t the whole point of bringing canaries into the mines because they have sensitive lungs and died a lot faster than the miners? (I’m not sure if it was specifically their lungs, but they were definitely more sensitive to contaminations in the air)

So uh… hey what if uh… what if canary avians are also more sensitive to toxins in the air than normal humans (and maybe even other avians)? And what if they get sick a lot easier when the air is contaminated, so it would be really really bad for a canary avian to be in an environment where the air might be polluted.

Like uh… hypothetically, of course, say if their house started burning down? And they were in the middle of a raging fire, breathing in lungfuls of smoke with every painful breath, but they can’t stop now because their soulmate worked so hard on their house and it’s Jimmy’s their own fault for making Scar some hypothetical person mad in the first place.

So they just fight through the pain and wonder if something as simple as breathing has always been this difficult. They’re sure it’s nothing. They just focus on pouring water over the roaring flames and bite their tongue as they feel their soulmate’s burns as clearly as if they were their own. And the fire eventually calms but it’s mostly because there’s hardly anything left for it to consume.

And while they have to deal with petty neighbors who only helped for their own personal gain and a rage-filled soulmate who’s one wrong step away from making the situation 10x worse in the name of revenge, the pain in their chest keeps growing and growing and their breaths keep getting shallower and shallower.

They manage to get the situation under control, the neighbors leave and their soulmate agrees to take some time before retaliating. And the canary can finally let out the breath that they’ve been holding in for what feels like an eternity. Except it doesn’t seem to work, the heavy weight in their chest that they’d previously mistaken for adrenaline and fear and guilt only seems to get worse as they try and fail to take one normal breath.

Their soulmate’s concerned and pained voice reaches their ears, but the canary doesn’t register the meaning of the words. They just keep trying to breathe. Just breathe, for crying out loud, it’s not that difficult. The slight cough they’ve had since the first smoke-filled breath quickly morphs into a loud, harsh, painful hack.

Their soulmate has to call for help again because even if they knew what to do, they wouldn’t be able to fight through the sharp pain in their chest that flares every time the canary sucks in another desperate, choking breath.

The two sit amongst the ashes of their home, leaning into each other as they wait for help to arrive. The canary tries to listen to his soulmate telling him to take it slow, to just breathe in and out as best he can, but he can already feel himself losing his grip on the waking world as black spots dance at the corners of his vision. One can only go so long without enough oxygen to their already-delicate little lungs, after all.

As he feels steady arms take him from his soulmate’s weak hold and gently lower him onto the smoke-stained grass, he catches a glimpse of his soulmate collapsing into the arms of another, shoulders shaking with the pain the canary caused him to feel. The only coherent thought he can manage is the hope, the desperate plea to any higher being that might be watching, that he isn’t dying.

The last thing the canary wants is to drag his loyal coal miner down into the poisoned caves with him.

Hypothetically, of course.