Kate watched from her hiding place as Daniel cautiously approached their suspect. "We can do this without anyone getting hurt," Daniel said.
"Can't you hear them?" asked their suspect. His blue eyes seemed to bulge from under his blond fringe, exaggerating the appearance of his psychosis.
"What do you hear?" Daniel asked.
Smith covered his ears, shivering violently. "Screaming," he breathed. "Wailing. Pleading." His blue eyes stared into nothingness.
"There's no one screaming," Daniel explained slowly.
Smith turned to Daniel. "Make them stop," he begged piteously. Smith lunged at Daniel, and fisted his hands in Daniel's shirt, his wild eyes pleading. "Help them."
Daniel gently pushed Smith away. "I can't, but I know someone who can."
"No, no, no, NO!" Smith bellowed. He turned away from Daniel and curled into himself, crouching on the cement floor. "Everywhere I go, every minute of my life, they scream and scream for help." Smith rocked slightly in time with his mantra.
Daniel stepped backward warily. "Is that why you killed those people?" he asked.
"They didn't understand," Smith crooned, eyes unfocused, apparently oblivious of Daniel moving away. "They wouldn't help."
"There's no one to help but you," Daniel said.
Smith shifted slightly and Daniel saw the glint of metal, cradled against Smith's chest. Smith's pale fingers stroked the blade, and Daniel chanced a look toward Kate's hiding spot. Kate threw her head toward the door in a gesture for him to get the hell out of there.
Daniel quietly paced backward, heading for the door.
"Why won't you help them?"
Kate's voice rang out through the warehouse. "Daniel, run!" she shouted as she sprang out of her hiding place. Daniel turned and sprinted away between the aisles, trying to remember the way out of the labyrinthine stacks and trusting that Kate was following. When he heard her cry out, he realized she wasn't following him, and he turned and ran back through the maze of boxes just in time to see Kate point her gun at Smith and stumble backward. Smith still had the knife clenched in his fist, and Kate's pale blue shirt was torn open. A dark red stain blossomed beneath the hand pressed to her side. "S-stop right there, Smith," Kate stammered, gritting her teeth and lifting one red hand to join the other on her gun. "Move—and I'll shoot."
Smith's eyes glinted viciously, and he raised his hands as if in surrender.
"Drop the knife," Kate said through her teeth.
Smith gave Kate a wicked grin and threw the knife with a flick of his wrist. "Kate!" Daniel shouted as Kate's finger pulled the trigger. But there was no stopping the knife, and Kate, unable to move quickly enough with the gash in her side, fell at the same time as Smith did, the knife lodged in the soft flesh between her ribs and her left hip.
Kate collapsed to the pavement, her gun clattering out of her hand. Daniel rushed to her, panicking and repeating her name.
"Daniel," she whispered thinly. "My phone." Her phone? Oh, of course, he still had it. He'd forgotten to give it back after Max had called earlier. He fished it out of his pocket and found the emergency dial button without any help.
He rattled off the address and Kate's condition, his mind clear and focused. He was discussing Kate's status as a Special Agent in the Chicago field office when he saw Kate tug the knife free with a grunt. She put pressure on her side with one bloody hand and the knife clattered to the floor.
"Kate!" Daniel exclaimed.
The dispatcher asked something Daniel didn't catch, but it obviously wasn't a guess at the truth, so Daniel just said, "No, she's—she pulled the knife out."
The dispatcher asked some inane question about Kate, to which Daniel replied, "She is a trained FBI agent." The dispatcher asked where she was based, even though Daniel must have said it eight times already. "The Chicago field office." Daniel put the phone against his shoulder as Kate's eyes drooped. She was obviously struggling to keep them open, but Daniel knew that, even with the pressure, she was losing a lot of blood, and he couldn't be sure she wasn't bleeding internally. "Kate, stay with me," Daniel said, slapping her face none too gently. "Stay awake."
Kate gritted her teeth and stretched her free hand out to Daniel.
He took her hand and she gripped it tightly, crushing his fingers. The dispatcher asked if Kate was passed out. "No, she's still awake," he said. He could hear sirens fast approaching. The dispatcher must have heard them through the phone, because the next question was if Daniel could hear sirens yet. "Yes, I can hear them." The dispatcher asked Daniel to stay on the line, but Daniel said, "No, we'll be okay until they get here." He hung up and dropped the phone on the floor.
The sirens quickly grew ear-piercingly loud, and when the door behind them flew open with a bang, Daniel shouted loudly until the paramedics found them.
The paramedics shouted terms and numbers at each other, and someone tried to persuade Daniel to move away, but he insisted on staying with Kate. She had held his hand when he needed it before, but he had never had the chance to return the favor. He kept his grip, only letting go twice: once to let the paramedics get her on the stretcher, and once to climb into the ambulance. She slipped in and out, and Daniel could track her consciousness by the pressure on his hand. When she was more awake, her grip tightened, and he dutifully relayed the information to the paramedics.
He held her hand through the hallways of the hospital, too, until they reached an operating room. Daniel squeezed her hand tightly before letting her go. She disappeared into the room along with a team of doctors and nurses.
Daniel stood in front of the door and wiped a bead of sweat from his face. He didn't realize until after he'd smeared his fingers across his face that they were red, covered with her blood. He stared at them in horror and fled for the nearest bathroom. He scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and though he could scrub the blood from his skin, he could not erase the memory of Kate lying on the cold cement floor of a warehouse, a knife protruding from her side, her shirt stained with blood. He stared at his hands and his face, pink and raw. She'd taken that knife for him. The terror on her face as she'd gestured from her hiding place for him to leave. Her frantic cry for him to run. Facing Smith while Daniel fled. It all made sense: she'd seen the knife in Smith's hands long before Daniel had even suspected, and she'd gotten Daniel out of the way before he could get hurt. And then she'd taken the knife.
As he dried his hands and found his way back to the operating room, Daniel shuddered at the thought that he might have been out of the warehouse if he hadn't realized she wasn't following him. She might have bled out before he even realized anything was wrong.
Daniel paced in front of the operating room until the surgeon emerged, pulling the surgical mask away from his face.
"How is she?" Daniel asked quickly.
The surgeon nodded. "She's going to be okay. We stopped the bleeding, but she's going to have to be on bed rest for a while. The wound went very deep, and she's lucky there was no internal bleeding. Are you—?" The surgeon made a vague hand gesture that Daniel took to mean 'an item'.
Daniel shook his head. "We're just friends. We work together. Sometimes."
The surgeon nodded. "Well, we're going to move her in a little bit. Do you know how to contact her family?"
"Her partner should h—"
"Where's Katie?" came a gruff voice from down the hall. Joe Moretti, in genuine Chicago cop mode, strode toward them. Daniel was very glad the ex-cop's gaze was fixed on the surgeon and not on Daniel himself.
The surgeon turned. "Are you—"
"I'm her father," said Joe.
"Ah. Well, we've just finished patching her up. She'll need bed rest, but she'll be okay. We'll be moving her to a recovery room shortly." The surgeon's pager beeped, and he ducked his head. "Excuse me." The surgeon left, headed for another surgery, leaving Daniel at the mercy of Joe Moretti.
"What happened?" Joe asked.
Daniel rocked back on his heels. "I was talking down a suspect—he was crazy, more so than I am on my worst days—and she was standing back, ready to come in if the guy rushed me or something. I didn't even see it, but all of a sudden she was telling me to go, so I started backing up, and that's when the guy pulled out a knife. Kate—" Daniel stopped. It was almost impossible to tell the story, and he took a moment to gather himself. "She told me to go. I thought she was following, but she'd stopped and faced him." He paused, remembering her cry and the blood. "She shot him as he threw the knife at her. Hit her in the side." Daniel gestured to the place on his own body, just above his hip. "I called the emergency dispatcher. She—" Daniel shuddered. "She pulled it out herself."
Joe didn't respond. He just stood silently, staring at the door. A nurse came to show them to Kate's recovery room a few minutes later. They were situating Kate when Daniel followed Joe in. Joe took the chair, and Daniel stood back, in the corner. The nurses left, and all that was left was to wait for her to wake up.
A/N: I don't own Perception, which should be obvious from the URL in your browser. Reviews are appreciated, of course. Aaaaaaand about eighty five million thanks to my beta/editor, EnoughToTemptMe, even if I did have to bribe her with scones.
