We Keep Going, That’s All
@whimpers-and-whumpers , this is for you. Hope your surgery goes well today!
CW: Aftermath of near-death, hospital whump, recovery whump, survivor’s guilt, alcohol use, referenced drug use
Ryan shows up to the hospital with Coke bottles full of liquid that absolutely is not Coke - or not much of it, anyway - and Nate doesn’t refuse the gift.
He twists off the plastic cap and takes a drink, wincing at the burn down his throat. “Jesus, Ryan, this is m-m-more Jack than Coke.”
“Yeah, well. Figured we could use some relaxing.” Ryan gives him a slight smile, and the bruising that’s been along his jaw - the obvious press of fingers - is finally starting to fade. Off-white bandages ring his neck, hiding from direct view the deep, slowly healing gashes rubbed in by the iron collar he’d worn for a year.
There are other wounds, Nate knows, underneath the lightly-draped black t-shirt Ryan wears, under his effortlessly casual, perfectly-on-trend jeans.
There are deeper wounds still entirely underneath his skin, inside his head. Nate knows those even better. He doesn’t begrudge Ryan the need to find some way to fuzz out the edges of what must be written in stark, bright blood in his memory.
Nate spent a year and a half doing the same, after all, before Bram came back for Danny again.
“How is he?” Ryan asks, settling into a hard wooden chair with plastic back and cushion in a dull pastel mauve. “Any different?”
"Then y-yesterday?” Nate exhales, slowly, rubbing at his unshaven jaw. The stubble prickles his fingertips, itches a little as it grows in. There’s a razor in the private room’s little bathroom, but he doesn’t have the energy to use it. All of Nate’s energy now is focused entirely around staying right here, being right here, for the rare moments that Danny is both awake and himself.
“Yesterday wasn’t… great.”
"No, it wasn’t.” Nate sighs, leaning over in the chair he sits in, next to Ryan, reaching out with his good left hand to gently nudge a bit of wavy red away from over Danny’s face.
The love of his life - the man he’s killed for, twice, and would kill for again - lays on his stomach with his head turned to one side. The hospital blanket is pulled up nearly to his chin, hiding from view the fact that nearly all of Danny seems made of bandages these days, bandages and tubes and wires. He breathes slowly, a drugged deep sleep to let his body rest and try desperately to heal itself around the nearly-fatal place the knife went into his back.
He sleeps, more than he’s awake. But Nate makes sure that when his eyes open, someone is here for him, every single time.
“Today has been a little b-better, I think,” Nate says after a moment’s though. He brushes a crumb from the corner of Danny’s mouth. “He ate a l-little, this morning. Just Jell-O and a little bit of cereal, but…”
"But something.” Ryan nods, takes another drink, looks out the window. Outside, the day is bright and sunny, with a cloudless blue sky. The courtyard below is full of visiting families and patients taking walks through the landscaped flowers, all of them in brilliant bloom. “Have you even left this room since we got here?”
"No.” Nate doesn’t bother to lie.
Ryan looks over at him, and smiles very slightly. “Remind me to bring you by some multivitamins do you don’t die of Vitamin D deficiency.”
"I’m f-fine.” Nate takes another drink, feels the warmth slowly spreading through his shoulders, relaxing the knots and tension that have been slowly building day by day. The ‘bed’ he has here is just a visitor’s couch built into the wall, lumpy and hard, with exactly one flat pillow with a scratchy pillowcase. But he’d rather be here than anywhere else. He’ll be here for every single second Danny needs him. “I eat oranges for breakfast every d-d-day. No sc-… sc-… scurvy for me.”
"Didn’t we joke about scurvy once?” Ryan asks, slightly faintly, looking up at the ceiling. “After Danny came home the first time?”
"M-Maybe. Don’t remember. Why do you c-care if I feel good, anyway?”
“My brother can’t fuss over you right now,” Ryan says with a casual shrug. “So someone has to. He’ll never let me live it down if anything happened to you while he’s here. I’ll get chewed out if you get so much as a headcold and we both know it.”
Danny shifts a little and both men go silent, watching him move in the bed - just an inch or so to the right, his eyes tightly closed, body tensing as even the slightest movement brings a wash of pain.
"It’s okay,” Nate whispers, and Danny’s eyelids flicker, slowly open. The blue in them is hazy and clouded, but not empty. This time, at least, it’s Danny who is looking at him, and not the other one, the one that Nate knows only as someone else. The one who runs Danny’s body when Danny can’t do it any longer.
“Hey,” Danny says, in a hoarse whisper. He tries for a smile, and it’s faded and wobbly, but it’s there. Then he lifts his head a little, looking over to see Ryan. “Oh, you’re both… here. How long was I asleep?”
"Four hours or s-s-so,” Nate says, standing up - ignoring the twinge of pain in his bad knee - and moving the pillow under Danny’s head to still support him even as he moves. A hint of freckled shoulder shows, with its swirling trace of scars from Bram’s knife. There’s a star carved into the back of his left shoulder that Nate did, at Bram’s command, once.
Ryan’s gaze be damned, Nate leans over to kiss it, and to kiss one by one the carved letters that are still there, faded, in the back of Danny’s neck. A. D. N.
He tries not to feel the guilt that twists in him at the ownership Bram had meant to make obvious, there. His own first initial with Bram’s initials, his own… his own culpability.
“How do you feel?” Ryan asks, leaning over close to Danny.
Danny’s nose wrinkles. “You smell like a liquor store.”
“Yeah, well. When your big brother scares the shit out of you by getting himself stabbed almost to death because of you, maybe you need a little pick-me-up now and then.” Ryan manages a half-cocked smile, but it’s fragile, and they both know it.
With a hiss of pain, Danny moves his hand up the bed, offering it to Ryan, who takes it without hesitation, leaning over so his forehead rests gently against Danny’s.
“I’m okay,” Danny whispers.
“No, you’re not,” Ryan whispers back.
Nate moves to sit back in his chair, then stands again, restless. He doesn’t want to sit there but he doesn’t know where he does want to be… until he looks at Danny, thin and dwarfed even by a small hospital bed. He sets down the mostly-jack-and-a-little-coke and climbs into the bed without hesitating, laying down behind Danny on his side, letting his good hand rest just next to a swirl of Danny’s hair on the pillow.
Danny’s smile widens - not that Nate can see that, from his vantage point. Although Ryan can. “I’ll be okay,” He corrects himself, watching his brother. “They said there’s no sign of paralysis. I’ll walk, I’ll probably even run after a while.” He tries moving and hisses again. “A long while. It’s going to be okay, Ryan.”
“You always were way more optimistic when you were high as balls,” Ryan whispers, and he and Danny laugh, until the action makes Danny whimper at a new spike of pain. “What do we do now, Dan, huh?”
“Keep going,” Danny says, voice low, barely audible even to the two men on either side of him. “That’s all. We keep going.”
“I keep thinking I should’ve died back there, ten times over,” Ryan murmurs. “But every single time, you took the pain for me. I should’ve died-”
“Nah. You’re my little brother. I need you here.” Danny manages to keep the smile, then, and his blue eyes are warm. “If you feel so bad about it, sneak me some of that booze next time, yeah?”
“Dan, I am not going to help you mix IV drugs and alcohol-”
“Just leave it in a really easy-to-reach place and I’ll help myself.”
Nate’s rumbling laughter interrupts them. It’s such a rare sound that both of them go immediately silent when they hear it, and Danny even tries to look over his shoulder, gritting his teeth through the ache to see the smile on Nate’s face. It’s slight, nearly private - a smile barely noticeable by anyone who isn’t looking for it.
But Danny is, and through the fog of the painkillers still coursing through his system, he sees it.
“What?” Ryan says. “What’re you laughing at?”
Nate lays a hand over the star he once carved into Danny’s skin, and moves to rest his nose, just lightly, against the warmth of Danny’s neck, breathing in the scent of him under the hospital-smell that surrounds them. “Nothing,” He says, and Danny shivers a little as his lips move against the curve of the D at the back of his neck. “I’m j-j-just… realizing I’m g-going to listen to you two do this for the r-rest of my life.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Ryan’s voice is dry.
“No,” Nate says, eyes closed. He can almost feel them in the cabin, like this, just the two of them on days Bram was gone. Lying in the bed wasting the whole morning being warm, just them together. Warm and safe. It feels like being in Danny’s apartment during their year and a half of freedom, the way sometimes when Nate couldn’t get out of bed Danny would just stay with him, holding him, until the pain inside of Nate had lessened enough to let him stand.
Now it’s his turn to hold Danny.
@tiddiroki @whump-it @bleeding-demon-teeth @finder-of-rings @whumpywhumper @endless-whump @18-toe-beans @pumpkinthefangirl @goneuntil @swordkallya @astrobly @evermetnotforgotten @whumpiary @card-games-and-pain @raigash @whump-tr0pes @orchidscript @wildfaewhump @doveotions @eatyourdamnpears
gummygunk
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
discoholicmusic
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
