broken bones are better with a friend
prompt: broken
whumpee: malcolm bright
fandom: prodigal son
heyo! hope you enjoy this fic :) it’s pre-brightwell and i found it very fun and surprisingly easy to write considering i don’t do a lot of ship adjacent stuff with them! but ughhh i love them sm....i miss them :’(
“Bright!” Malcolm hears Dani yell from somewhere quite far behind him. “Hold on! Backup’s almost here!”
Since when have I waited for backup? Malcolm wonders, pushing himself to run even faster after their escaping suspect. In front of him, the man rapidly changes directions and goes racing down an alleyway. Malcolm follows, his footsteps echoing off the walls.
“Hello?” he calls out, slowing to a walk, looking up and down the alley. He doesn’t see the suspect, but he’s certain that he’d come this way. “I know you’re in here. You might as well come out.”
He steps past a rusted dumpster, looks behind it to see nothing of interest, and is suddenly slammed backwards into the unforgiving brick surface of the wall behind him.
The suspect pins Malcolm’s arms to the wall with ease, despite Malcolm’s frantic attempts to shake him off. Up close, there’s a glint in his eyes and a smile on his mouth that makes Malcolm absolutely sure that this is their killer. Which does not exactly bode well for him.
“I didn’t do anything.” The man’s voice is grating and low and dangerous. Malcolm kicks at his legs and receives a knee to the stomach for his trouble. He bends over instinctively, but doesn’t make it very far, seeing as how both of his arms are being pressed into the wall.
“Sure you didn’t. You just happened to be running from the police, then?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You already said that,” Malcolm says, praying that Dani and that backup she’d promised are close behind him.
“Don’t care. It’s true.”
“We both know you killed those girls -”
Malcolm is cut off by a kick to his ankle. He feels something crack and yelps in pain.
“Shut up,” the suspect growls. “You just shut up right now.”
Malcolm nods. For a second there is silence.
“You thought you were helping them. By killing them.”
“What?”
“The girls. You thought killing them would save them.”
Suddenly the suspect is even closer. He shifts his arms rapidly, one arm now barring Malcolm across the chest and preventing him from escaping, while the other one slaps him hard across the face.
“I told you to shut up.”
“I’m not very good at listening to instructions.”
“Enough!” the suspect snaps, and Malcolm has a feeling that whatever comes next is not going to be good. But Dani is bound to be close by now, and if he can just hold this man off for a few moments more…
Whatever thought he was about to have next is interrupted by an extremely unpleasant twisting sensation in his arm. Malcolm is pulled around, away from the wall, and suddenly quite a bit of weight is being put onto his ankle, which starts hurting about ten times worse. He bites back a cry of pain this time, but not five seconds later he is screaming when the suspect suddenly grabs his arm, holds it out, and slams his own arm right into the center of Malcolm’s forearm. It hurts worse than Malcolm thinks anything has ever hurt before and for a second he can’t focus on anything except the pain, and then the suspect is grabbing his face and forcing Malcolm to pay attention to him.
“Leave. Me. Alone,” he whispers, and then he’s letting go of Malcolm’s face and running away and Malcolm tries to follow him but the world starts spinning and his ankle buckles beneath him and then he’s falling, falling, falling, and then he hits the ground and his broken arm makes contact and he thinks maybe he screams again, and then everything goes bright white.
--
“Bright! Malcolm. Open your eyes.”
Very slowly, Malcolm blinks his eyes open. He’s lying on his back, staring up at the walls of the two buildings and above them, the sky. His left arm feels like it’s on fire and he turns his head to make sure it’s not. His right ankle also hurts, though much less in comparison. He doesn’t even have to check to be certain that it’s not burning. It still hurts, though. A lot. He groans and the voice speaks again.
“Bright, say something” It’s Dani! But if she’s here -
“He got away,” Malcolm says urgently, using his good arm to push himself up. His head spins, but he stubbornly rides out the dizziness, closing his eyes until it passes.
When he opens them again, Dani is crouched in front of him, looking worried. “You good?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But the suspect -”
“We have him in custody. Of course, we could have gotten him into custody without you breaking any bones if you hadn’t gone after him on your own.”
“Or he might have gotten away for good.”
Dani sighs, the long-suffering, put-upon sigh of one dealing with the self-sacrificial tendencies of Malcolm Bright. “He might’ve,” she acknowledges. “I’d ask you not to do anything like that again….” She trails off, since both of them know how that sentence ends.
A few seconds of strained silence pass, and then Malcolm decides that sitting on the ground is not the best thing that he could be doing at the moment. He very carefully pushes himself up onto his feet and then nearly collapses when the weight of his body hits his hurt ankle.
Immediately, Dani is there, slipping an arm around his back and taking the weight off of his ankle. “What in the hell made you think that was a good idea?” she asks, and he gives her a one-shouldered shrug. “A bus should be here in maybe two minutes,” she continues. “Wanna sit back down?”
Malcolm relents with a nod, and together they gently sink back to the ground, leaning against the wall. Dani removes her arm from around Malcolm’s back but keeps a hand on his shoulder. “How much does it hurt?”
“A lot,” Malcolm answers honestly. “I’ve never broken a bone before.” And he certainly has no desire to repeat the experience. The pain is constant and burning and it’s not all-consuming but it’s impossible to ignore and it hurts and he just wants it to stop -
Dani’s hand presses into his chest. “Hey, calm down,” she says, voice gentler than he’s ever heard it. “I know it hurts, but panicking is only going to make it worse.”
He nods jerkily, forces himself to breathe calmly, and blinks the tears from his eyes. He can do this, broken bones are common and really, he could’ve had it so much worse. He is going to be fine.
Malcolm mentally repeats this over and over to himself: I can do this, I’m going to be fine, until at last the ambulance arrives. Dani helps him stand and guides him to the paramedics; and as they start checking him over and saying things like, “we’ll need to take you to the hospital to get these set,” and “are you sure you don’t want any painkillers,” his only thought is that he really doesn’t want to do this alone. But Gil is bound to have his hands full with their recently-caught murderer, and his mother is busy with some kind of social event that he’d been very relieved to get out of, and Ainsley’s on an assignment, and -
And Dani’s in the ambulance and they’re closing the doors and she smiles at him, sitting down next to him on the gurney. Her arm comes back to rest on his shoulder and he turns to look at her and he supposes he must look a little confused, because she says, “what? I’m not allowed to come with my friend to the hospital after he broke his arm and his ankle chasing after a serial killer?”
“No, I’m - I’m glad you’re here,” Malcolm replies, trying for a smile that probably doesn’t go so well with his grimace of pain as one of the paramedics pulls off his shoe to get a better look at his ankle. “It’s always better to break a bone with a friend.”
Dani laughs and turns to look at him at the same instant that he turns to look at her. She’s smiling but underneath it she looks worried, and her hand is steady and warm on Malcolm’s shoulder, and maybe it’s the pain and the adrenaline or maybe it’s not, but he thinks I want to kiss you, and then he thinks that maybe that’s not his best move, sitting in the back of an ambulance with an arm and an ankle that hurt like all hell, or maybe it’s a good idea and -
“Malcolm? You good?”
When he smiles at her this time, it’s genuine and happy and not at all underlined with pain. “Yeah. Apart from the broken bones and all. I’m...I’m good.”
thanks sm for reading this!!! i hope u liked it :)