Oh, prompts! If you're still accepting them—could you do some more on that one prompt you filled a little while ago concerning Casey and Donnie, where Casey fell from the building rooftop (I think that's what happened) 'cause you were an evil little child and left us on one of the most soul shattering and heart breaking cliffys known to human kind...xD <3
follow-up to this prompt, coming your way – and sorry anon, you asked for this ages ago.
Casey flirts with consciousness two or three times before he makes any real commitment to it. His whole body is an ache – even blinking seems to shoot railroad spikes of pain back through his eyeballs and into his brain – but there’s a sixth sense tugging him into wakefulness, something primordial telling him ‘you’ve slept long enough.’
So he blinks himself alert, ignoring the subsequent headache, and goes through an unfortunately well-practiced mental checklist. Still breathing, all extremities accounted for, no medical hardware attached to his person – check, check and check. He’s in pretty good shape so far.
So now Casey just needs to puzzle out why he’s in the hospital in the first place. Details are sketchy.
And ‘hospital’ is more of a blanket term. He’s in the lair, he knows that right off the bat – there’s a pretty distinctive aroma. But even more distinctive, impossibly familiar, is the combined smell of engine oil and antiseptic and hazelnut coffee and the heated edges of something electric and burning.
He would know that smell anywhere. He would know it eighty years from now. When he’s forgotten his own name and where he was born and what his mother looked like, he would remember April down to the crooked tilt of all her playful smiles, the unobtrusive way Mikey’s kind presence could fill a room, and Don’s inimitablepersonal scent of medicine and mechanics.
Casey smiles. It hurts his entire face, but god help him, he smiles anyway. And when he squeezes the curled fingers of his left hand, they tighten around a work-hardened, three-fingered hand.
“I told you not to fall asleep,” Don says quietly, sandpaper rough, without so much as lifting his head. “You can’t do anything right.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Casey remembers Don whispering, what feels like moments or years ago. “Just stay with me, please.”
“That’s me,” Casey agrees cheerfully, even though it comes out a few shades too pale. Anyone not a ninja wouldn’t have noticed, but Don has him pegged. He’s treated to a narrow look from muddy, masked eyes; and then Don unfolds his tired body from the side of the cot – doesn’t unfold his hand from around Casey’s – and reaches for him.
“Next time you scare me like that,” Don tells him succinctly, “I’m throwing you off the roof myself.”
Casey closes his eyes – rewarded when Don’s forehead touches his, a proximity that isn’t usually allowed. And in that shared place between the two of them, Casey promises, “I’m not goin’ anywhere, Don.”
“Damn right you’re not. You’re on bed-rest until I say otherwise. Doctor’s orders,” Don replies right away, and it should put everything back to normal, Casey knows that’s what he was aiming for.
But Don’s voice wobbles, just a little, and his hand in Casey’s clutches tighter. So Casey lifts his free arm to hold him that much closer, and they’ll stay that way until Mikey and April barge in with breakfast.
Their family is a lot smaller these days, but they still know how to take care of each other. They’ll always know that, Casey thinks, even when they’ve forgotten everything else.
