Chapter Text
Danny was confused.
A second ago he was sure he’d been walking, slowly and painfully, but walking all the same.
Now he was staring straight up into five pairs of worried eyes peering down at him. Steve, Grace, Amber and the two paramedics who’d helped him walk down from the rubble.
Their faces hovered close, too cloyingly close, blocking out the wide expanse of blue overhead. He couldn’t breathe. His vision greyed and for a second he could have sworn he was back down in that hole in the ground, pinned underneath that beam.
He flailed, desperate to get out, to get up.
Steve must have understood the problem because suddenly the faces backed away and the sky opened up overhead.
“Come on buddy, just breathe,” Steve murmured, his hand firmly planted on Danny’s shoulder.
“Danno?” Grace’s voice was querulous in his ear.
“I’m okay,” Danny mumbled, turning his head to try and find his baby and give her a reassuring smile. She tried to give him one back, but when one of the paramedics pulled out his gear and began maneuvering a blood pressure cuff around Danny’s bicep, her smile faltered and her eyes filled with tears.
Danny caught Amber’s eye and she seemed to understand because she put her arm around the little girl’s shoulder and eased her further away, turning her around so she couldn’t see what the paramedics were doing to her father.
“What happened?” he glanced up at Steve.
The paramedics were trading numbers over his head, a terse truncated code he couldn’t quite understand. But there was tension in their voices he chose to ignore, concentrating on Steve instead and sticking to his story that it was a flesh wound and he’d be stitched up and home by the time it got dark.
“You fell down,” Steve supplied with a dry grin.
“My stomach cramped up, knees gave out,” Danny suddenly remembered. Remembered too practically taking the two girls down with him as he’d unexpectedly plummeted to the ground.
The medic lifted Danny’s shirt up, exposing the wound in his abdomen. Danny winced as the man’s fingers gently probed around the edges of the makeshift duct tape bandage. “We’re just gonna let the hospital deal with that,” the medic said, glancing at Danny in sympathy as he dropped the shirt back down.
Danny caught sight of a gurney being trundled towards them just as the medic swept up his hand and began prepping it for an IV.
“Ya know, that’s okay,” Danny struggled to disentangle his arm from the medic’s grip and lever himself up to a sitting position. “I don’t need a ride. I’m sure Amber or Steve can just take me to Urgent Care for some stiches and then I’ll just be on my way and Amber and I will be off for our vacation in Maui.”
“Danny, let them help you, okay?” Steve set his hand back on Danny’s shoulder, pressing down to prevent Danny from wriggling any further upright. “That pain in your gut isn’t going to pass and if you get up you’re just gonna fall right back down. Honestly I’m impressed you stayed upright for as long as you did.”
“No. No. It’s not that bad. I’m fine,” Danny lied, barely containing a groan as white hot pain seared through his lower abdomen. Lips trembling, he felt sweat pop out on his forehead.
The paramedics’ voices buzzed in his ears. Sharp and urgent. He felt a biting sting in his hand and knew he’d lost the battle to get back up and go to the hospital on his own two feet. He didn’t think it’d been too much to ask to not collapse in front of his daughter, but obviously he’d been wrong. Just one more way that the universe had decided to screw him.
“Danny, listen to me,” Steve soothed, slipping his fingers around the back of Danny’s head. “It’s okay. You’re going to be fine. You did not claw your way out of that rubble only to die up here? You got me?”
Danny shook his head, closing his eyes as a burst of painful laughter bubbled out of him. He’d always known he’d been living on borrowed time. He’d cheated death again and again since that horrible day in September all those years ago, but he’d known eventually it would catch up with him, and he’d leave Grace without a father. It would be nice to see her one last time, but he didn’t want her last image of him to be like this. So he didn’t ask Steve to bring her over, and he hoped to God Steve knew better than to do that to his little girl.
They jostled him when they moved him onto the gurney. He cried out, tears leaking from his eyes. He tried to curl into a ball, but they wouldn’t let him. And the pain sunk its teeth in and tore him apart.
“Danny!”
The last thing he heard was Steve shouting his name. And then there was nothing. Like he’d always known it would be.