Don-centric tag to "The Fifth Man"
Warning: rated T for language
Author's note: thanks for reading
Thank you to the reviewers who um…..reminded me that graph…is graft. Oops. Thanks for being gentle. Much appreciated.
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For the Good or the Bad
by felldownonce
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It took a few days for Don to find out and even then, it was only by mistake.
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David and the rest of his team brought him up to date about the complicated case. Amita gave him a CliffNotes version of the key they sought and how Charlie figured it all out.
His brother told him about the diamonds.
"They sparkled when they fell," Charlie said, lost for a moment, going in and out of his head like he had been for days. "I helped David pick them up. Then Dad called. You were awake."
Nikki, never one to mince words, told Don, "I came to and there was blood, Boss, almost more than I've ever seen before, unless I was lookin' at a dead body."
She said Sinclair called for an ambulance.
And Granger, well he tried to hold it all in, with so much pressure that Nikki thought for sure he would break Don's ribs.
Don remembers some of that. He could taste the stuff. Copper and saliva. He couldn't keep it all in his mouth. Choked as some of it spilled out from his throat.
When Granger shoved his hands aside and warned him, "This is gonna hurt like hell, Don," he didn't have to bother. Don knew what was coming and all he could think about was that it couldn't possibly hurt any worse, worse than the excruciating torture he was already experiencing. He couldn't process it, wrap his mind around it, understand how he was still breathing when it felt like his lungs were frozen. He dug his right heel into the ground, dribbling it, pounding it up and down and up and down, like a basketball against the concrete of the patio, trying to find relief from what was happening to him.
"This is nothing." Colby said, his voice tight, focused, determined. "This is seriously not that bad. There's no shrapnel and you have all your limbs and fuck, Don, I swear to god, this isn't that bad. I've seen a lot worse. The bleeding's already slowing down."
And Don stared at him, right in Granger's eyes and Colby stared back and swore under his breath, "I know how to stop this, Don. You're gonna' be fine."
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The ambulance.
Loud and bright and nauseating.
David had to stay on site, at least until a senior agent arrived. It flashed in Don's mind to tell somebody that, but he realized he didn't care. Talking would require air and he was in short supply.
Granger was a constant. He stayed the whole time, on the concrete, and when the stretcher was moving, and when the bus was rolling, Colby kept pressing and periodically yelling.
"Don!" And Don would open his eyes.
But he was losing track of everything. An oxygen mask was helping him to inhale and he must be exhaling because he knew, he could feel and hear the rumbling in his chest, and he was aware of how critical things were, even though the motions were slowing down and Don thought in a moment of lucidity, this is what it must be like to be on acid, and some day he'd have to ask his father if he was right.
"Don!"
He tried to open his eyes.
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He sits up, Robin propping a pillow under his neck, and an hour later his doctor tells Don about his collapsed lung and the artery he leaked all the blood out of. There's something about a graft, but Don'll let Charlie and his dad brief him on all that.
Facts.
With facts and details Don usually makes calm out of chaos. But he's the victim this time and he understands now, why so many of them just want to go home and skip the explanations. Why so many of them want to move on and pretend to forget.
Don tells the doctor, "Thank you," and asks, "When can I go back to work?"
Then he counts silently the seconds it takes the doctor to consider the question. After ten, Don decides that maybe "when" is actually "if," so he closes his eyes and counts another five seconds and thinks, gefeln, gefeln, gefeln, please, please, please. Don't do this to me. Don't tell me I can't go back. I'll get my head out of my complacent ass. I'll be more careful.
I'll always assume there's a fifth man.
"We should have you on your feet in a few days," the doctor says confidently.
Don blinks and rakes a hand through his hair and pretends he's stating an assumption and not asking a question. "Work."
"Limited duty, and by that I mean strictly desk, half-days. Baring all complications, you should be able to go into the office in two weeks. The field…no sooner than six weeks. And even then, you'll have to steer clear of possible contact."
a dank
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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No one knows what happened when Don was by himself, in the ER, so he has to fill in those blanks himself.
The cold was running neck in neck with the pain by then. They'd given him something, something to make the hurting a little better, a little numb.
But they couldn't make the cold go away. He recalls his teeth chattering, keeping rhythm with his breathing. It felt like inhaling was the only thing they were letting him still do more or less by himself, so he concentrated on his teeth and lungs rattling in unison.
That was something he could do. He could control that.
He stopped trying to listen to any of it and when different people were calling his name, people other than Colby, Don didn't care. He couldn't give a damn.
It was then that it dawned on him he was probably dying.
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That's it.
That's the sum of everything he remembers.
Somewhere along the line, a day or two after he can sit up and eat more or less solid food, Nikki gives him his cell phone and with that action, Don recalls holding it in his hand, but he can't remember if he heard the line ringing before that mother fucker stabbed him.
He doesn't remember the knife.
But he can feel it cutting up and into him.
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It took a few days for Don to find out and even then, it was only by mistake.
"How bad was it?" he asks Charlie but his brother tells him, "I'm not sure, Don. Most of the time I was trying to figure who did this to you. Dad and Robin were always here."
His dad just says, "We'll talk about it later, Donnie, when you're home. You just need to concentrate on getting better."
Don doesn't have the heart to ask Robin and he can't push his father or Charlie. They aren't ready for that.
So he asks to see the notes.
Hospital reports read like short stories. He's seen enough to know that. The report will fill in the gaps, tell him all the medical that no one else seems to want to share.
His doctor shows up. She has a non-nonsense, get to the point presentation that Don appreciates. "I understand you're inquiring about specifics."
"Yeah," Don nods, biting his bottom lip. "I need to know what happened to me. I lost two days of my life."
She mentions the surgery and again Don glosses over during the nitty-gritty about the synthetic graft and how his lung was re-expanded. He'll look those procedures up on-line, when he can concentrate on the actual details and the possible long-terms consequences.
Worry about it a different time, when trying to breathe isn't still an exhausting exercise.
Don's connected to most of the transparent tubes he started out with, so the doctor basically uses those as play-by-play visuals.
"You were on a ventilator for approximately twenty-four hours to assist your breathing."
His burning throat is aware of that. His deep, scratchy voice is a testament to it.
The doctor lists the medications and purposes and when she says the word, "Arrhythmia," Don cocks his head to the side.
"It's resolved," she smiles reassuringly. "We'll have you completely weaned off the meds before you're discharged."
Somewhere in the next few sentences, Don realizes the medical mumbo-jumbo she's reciting means that at some point four days ago, he no longer had a blood pressure or a heart beat.
Ahhhhh.
Light bulb.
He assumed his aching ribs were from the stabbing but...evidently not.
CPR.
"I was dead?" he asks, more like a scoff than confusion.
She corrects him. "Not by the clinical definition."
Even Don, semi-drugged and with his less than stellar biology grades, knows that she's tap dancing with semantics.
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It sucks enough that he scared the shit out of everyone, so Don grins and bares it.
The residual pain.
The phantom slicing into his skin.
The chest tube sliding out of his body with its sickening tugging and grating.
Walking hunched over in the hospital hallways with glass chips jabbing into his lung.
Deep breaths through clenched teeth.
Don smiles with controlled cringes through all of it, making light of his misery.
Everyone wants to believe he's all right and quite frankly, everyone includes Don himself, and he's good at pushing through, so he gets out of the hospital and it's not until he's at Charlie's after that first half-day back to work, with no one else in the house, that he thinks about the fact that he flatlined.
He died.
The last few hours his mom was alive, she played with childhood friends and planted spring flowers with her mother. She was there in the house she grew up in, watching her father placing logs in the fireplace on cool evenings.
She saw an incomplete bridge and asked Don to help her finish building it. And he did, one reluctant word of encouragement at a time, because he knew it was hopeless. She was going to cross that bridge with or without his help.
"Thank you, honey," she said when she told him it was done.
Then he woke up his exhausted father and told him to come to her room, because for real this time, now. This moment. Don's mother was dying.
He sits on the couch that first day home from his first half-day back to work and he wonders where his bridge was the day in the hospital when he died.
There wasn't a bright light or childhood flashes or anything.
There was nothing.
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On the third half-day, David drops him off at Charlie's after work and Don waits until David is long gone before he catches a cab to the house where he was stabbed.
He gives the cabbie fifteen bucks to idle and he walks up the driveway, around the path, to the patio by the guest house.
It's no longer a crime scene but no one has totally scrubbed away a dark red stain.
Normally he would lean over to examine something like this…evidence…but his lung and healing wound are having no part of that.
He braces for the pain and slowly, methodically, lowers himself to his knees, so he can get a closer look at the place he almost bled out.
He doesn't remember falling.
He just remembers lying there thinking there must be a mistake because something like this wouldn't happen to him. Of all things to get him….a goddamned knife? Really? Not a bullet or a mad man with a bomb. A knife.
His blood is ingrained in the crevices of the cement like graffiti, announcing, Don was here.
He reaches out and touches it and for a split second, almost expecting a little red to come away on his fingertips.
This isn't him and he needs to snap out of it. This isn't like him, to perseverate on what's already done.
When he was released from the hospital, he didn't go to Bradford's and he didn't go to temple.
He didn't play a game of pool with his father and he didn't visit his mother's grave.
He came here, to this place, because there's nothing to discuss with anyone.
He tried talking months before all this happened. He tried understanding his life and he's realizing that it really isn't worth the effort.
It isn't bleeding on the ground or his dying in the hospital that Don can't comprehend, what he can't stop thinking about.
It's that despite everything this last year, all the searching and talking and questioning he's done, he's right back to where he started.
Believing that in the end, there won't be any answers or ultimate judgments, for the good or for the bad, to everything he's done.
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The End
Thank you for reading.