Hey FFNet, I'm back again. I'll always come back to this fandom. Anyone who's looked at my tumblr knows I'm in a really hardcore Motorcity phase right now. This is one of two fics right now, and there might be more coming. Also, so you know, I am officially on AO3 now and will be double-posting works there as well! Same username, feel free to look me up if you like that platform better.

I don't usually opt for the stressful fics, you all know I'm just a fluffmonger, but I really wanted to do a little something to explore the one thing that Kane and Mike have in common. It's not that heavy really, but I'll admit it was difficult for me to put Julie in danger! Also, just a note - I am not a medical expert. This is a very fictitious way to treat a wound and probably would not work in real life. Do not take this as good first aid advice.

Enjoy.

"CHILTON!" came Kane's hoarse roar. "GET – YOUR – HANDS – OFF – MY – DAUGHTER!"

Mike looked up at Kane, eyes widening, but in only a second he made a snap decision, his arms tightening around Julie's limp body. Kneeling only feet from the half-crushed body of 9Lives, where he had stopped after freeing her from the wreckage only minutes ago, his mind raced as he held her close and tried to come up with a solution.

Kane threw himself at the two Burners, tearing at Mike's arms. Mike tensed his grip, standing up admirably against the much larger man's blows. As his arms shifted, but never released, under Kane's attack, the Burner logo on Julie's vest came into view. Kane slowed, a shocked realization dawning on his face.

"What?"

"Kane," Mike said evenly, trying to support Julie's head as Kane's fingers still pried at his arms. "Kane, stop. Listen. Listen to her breathing. She's not good."

"What?" Kane repeated, looking at Mike's face again. His expression darkened. "This is your fault."

Mike's eyebrows lowered, his face hard. "Right now it doesn't matter whose fault it is. If we don't work together, right now, we could lose her."

"Why would I trust you?" Kane spat, still trying to break Mike's hold on his daughter. "Deluxe has the best medical care I could ever ask for. The amount of money KaneCo has put into-"

"We don't have time," Mike said, levelly but urgently. "Kane, her ribs are broken, I think she has a punctured lung. We have to work fast."

"Why should I trust you?!" Kane demanded again, loudly. He was almost frantic, and still furious.

"Because I would die for her!" Mike shouted back, his calm finally breaking. "I would die for her, Kane, and so would you, I can see that."

Finally Kane faltered. His anger gave way to a fear that Mike had never seen before, certainly not on him. "I don't know-"

"I need you to hold her, then," Mike said urgently. He finally loosened his grip, transferring her with the utmost gentleness into her father's arms. Kane knelt on the ground, resting her head in his lap to keep it raised.

Abraham listened to his unconscious daughter wheezing as she breathed in short gasps. "How do you know-?"

"You're the one who made basic medical training mandatory for the cadets," Mike said, a little harshly, moving fast. He dug inside Julie's semi-wrecked car, knowing what she kept there, and emerged with a pen. He began to unscrew and dismantle it. "Then when Doc Hudson defected here and saw what the conditions were like, he organized an emergency clinic and medical training for the general public, especially the gangs."

"Hudson's not a medical doctor," Kane said, watching warily as Mike discarded the pen's insides and palmed the tube that made the casing. He took a pocket knife out from inside his jacket.

"No, but he does know something about medical technology, and he saw that there was a need to fill. He organized just about everyone in Motorcity with medical knowledge and got everything together, including a space. They've saved a lot of lives." Mike still didn't look at Kane, focussing on the task at hand. With Kane's help, he pushed Julie's vest off her shoulders and lifted her t-shirt so that he could see where the injury was. Purple bruises swelled across her abdomen, blooming from the impact point where two of her ribs were obviously fractured.

"Chilton, what are you doing? That doesn't look safe-"

"It's crude, but it's our best chance at keeping her alive until we get her to Hudson's clinic. If we can get her to Mutt I can have her there in less than ten minutes, but we need to do this first." Mike finally looked up at Kane, giving him a hard look.

"But Deluxe-"

"Hudson is closer," Mike insisted. "Kane, the broken ribs have created a pocket of air outside her lung. It could collapse. We need to do this now. Hold her still."

Kane was terrified, and he didn't trust Mike at all, but if there was anything in the world that outweighed his hatred for Mike Chilton, it was his love for his daughter. He gripped her arms and held her in place.

Mike placed the tip of his knife just above one broken rib. "Sorry, Julie," he said quietly, looking scared.

Julie came to in the bright sterile white of a KaneCo hospital room. Slowly taking in her surroundings, she realized there was someone sitting at her bedside.

"Dad?" she whispered hoarsely.

"Nah, sorry," Mike said as he leaned forward into her field of view. He gave her a gentle smile. "Don't try to sit up. Your ribs are broken, and, uh, you've been stabbed. A little bit. Also, you just have bruises, like, everywhere."

"What?" she asked blearily. Then, registering both the room around her and Mike at the same time, her eyes flew wide. "What are you doing here? Get out before you get caught!" She tried to wave him urgently away.

"No, don't worry, I have… permission. Sort of," he reassured her as he built up her pillows and gently helped her prop herself up a little. "Permission in the sense that I punched three ultra-elites and Kane himself when he tried to take you without me."

"You punched my dad?" she asked. Then her hands flew to her mouth.

He smiled. "Don't worry. He punched me back. I didn't have this shiner until an hour or two ago, it's not from the bots or the soldiers." He pointed at his face. Then, carefully, he reached for her hand. "You're still under anaesthetic. But don't worry. I already knew."

"How?" she asked softly, brow furrowing with worry. The influence of the anaesthetic not only loosened her tongue but made her emotional as well; her eyes welled with tears as she feared what was coming next.

"After you crashed I got to you first. Dragged you out of the car. He came running through, saw me holding you… just screamed at me. I think he thought I might have hurt you. He called you his daughter then."

Julie put one hand over her eyes, the other still gently clasped in Mike's own. "What happened? I don't remember anything since the attack, the bots, the crash…"

"I think this is the first time you've woken up," he told her. "And, well, Kane's daughter or not, you're still my Julie. I knew what I had to do to save your life, and somehow I managed to convince Kane to help. He was terrified, Jules. So was I. Your lung was punctured, I had to use Hudson's emergency methods and get the excess air out of there as fast as I could."

"In the field? But we keep the first aid kits at the garage… you wouldn't have had a needle." She looked down at her chest, where she could feel a dull ache.

"I used the tube from a pen and sucked the air out myself," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "By the way, I owe you a pen."

"Oh my god, Mike," she murmured. "And he let you?"

"Only to save your life," he told her. "Then we got you into Mutt and took you to Hudson's clinic. They handled the emergency care, and then as soon as you were stable, Kane took over and said he was bringing you back up here. When I told him I wasn't leaving you that's when he sent the soldiers at me and the punching happened."

Julie sighed heavily, looking into her lap. "I didn't want you to find out this way," she said after a moment, very quietly.

Mike scooted his chair closer to the bed and reached with his free hand to wipe the tears out of the corners of her eyes. "I know," he answered softly. "I'm sorry you didn't get to tell me yourself. But I promise you, it doesn't change anything. You've proven your loyalty to our cause and to us a hundred times over. If anything, I'm sorry you didn't feel like you could tell us before."

Too emotional to speak, Julie leaned her cheek into Mike's rough hand, scabbed from the fight's smaller wounds. His skin may not have been soft, but his touch was.

"I know we've said a lot of… unkind things about Kane. And if I told you we never meant any of it I'd be lying," he said. "But knowing what I know now changes… everything."

"I'm sorry," she said sadly.

"Don't be," he insisted. "You didn't do anything wrong. I'm not upset. I understand why you never told me. I wouldn't have either."

"You're taking this a lot better than I expected…"

"No matter what, you're still my Julie." She looked up into his face, and he was giving her perhaps the tenderest smile she'd ever seen on his face. The black eye made it quite a sight.

"I'm sorry he punched you," she said.

Mike shrugged. "I still got here. That's all I needed."

"Where is he now?" she asked, the question occurring to her for the first time. Her mind was unclouding, but slowly.

Mike glanced towards the door. "Out there, somewhere. He and Jacob have been fighting for… hours."

"What? Jacob's here too?"

"Yeah. He was helping at the clinic and rushed over the moment we brought you in. And when I came back here with you, so did he." He smiled and squeezed her hand. "He was pretty worried. He cares a lot about you. We all do."

"I thought he swore never to talk to Kane again," Julie said.

"I guess he changed his mind," Mike answered with a shrug. Looking back at her, he admitted, "The circumstances are a bit unique."

"What have they been fighting about?" she asked, a bit nervous to hear the answer.

"Everything," Mike sighed. "But mostly, you, and me. Kane doesn't want to let up on me or the Burners, or Motorcity in general. He wants to crack down on you, too, make sure you can never go back to Motorcity, and definitely never see me again." At this he tightened his grip on her hand, unconsciously, but she squeezed him back in reassurance. "Jacob is trying everything. Appealing to their friendship, to the memory of your mother, to your dad's love for you and the hope that he respects you… I don't know. I couldn't keep listening, it was giving me a headache."

"This is too much," she groaned. Lifting his hand back to her cheek and leaning against it, she covered her eyes again with her free hand. "How… how did you two even manage to call a truce long enough to take care of me?"

There was a brief pause, and then she felt Mike move to rest on the edge of her bed, not taking his hand away from her face. With the other he gently moved her fingers away from her eyes, clasping them in his own. Looking up at him, she wasn't quite sure what to think of the expression on his face.

"The only thing your father and I have in common is how much we love you. And we could both see that in the other." He held her gaze, his right thumb rubbing gently against the backs of her fingers. "You were more important to either of us than our rivalry, than Motorcity… than anything."

"Mike?" Julie questioned softly.

"Jules, I… thought you might die for a while there," he said, his voice catching briefly in his throat. "For a few awful minutes before I got to you I even thought you might already be dead. And then I had to force myself to…" He remembered thrusting the knife into the cavity in her chest and shook the image from his head, wishing he could forget it entirely. "And I realized that, no matter how many times I told myself that I had to focus on Motorcity, on the Burners, on the fight against Kane, that there would be time for everything else later… the truth is that the thought of losing you absolutely terrifies me. And of course I'm scared of losing any of you, but…" He sighed. "For a long time I've been telling myself that romance was an unnecessary complication right now, that it would just be a distraction, and I didn't want to mess with the dynamic in the group because we're all such good friends. But honestly, Julie, we live so much on the edge, and there's never any saying what's coming tomorrow, and whatever the risk is I can't lose you without ever telling you how much I care about you."

Mike closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his thoughts, and as he did so Julie squeezed her own eyes shut against tears and pressed her cheek into his hand again. "I love you, Julie. You don't have to feel the same, but I need you to know that I love you, with everything I have, and I never want to feel the way I did when I pulled you out of that wrecked car ever again." He paused. "Are you crying?"

No matter how hard Julie tried to will the tears down, they were leaking out anyway, so she opened her eyes again and looked up at his bruised face. "I always thought it was impossible. I always thought that even if something happened between us, it would break the moment you knew he was my father…" She seemed to smile and sob at the same time. "I thought it would be best just to be friends, because I never believed that… and then you just… all at once…" she trailed off, unable to finish any of her thoughts.

Mike laughed, half-sadly, as he leaned close to her and tried to rub the tears away from her face. "Please don't cry," he begged her, happy and distressed at the same time.

"I love you too, Mike," she finally managed, holding his hands against her face.

Mike stroked her cheeks gently, leaning down over her as carefully as he could. His nose bumped against hers and they looked at each other for a moment, smiling, a little bit overwhelmed. Closing the space between them, he kissed her slowly, lovingly. She was more than happy to return the gesture, weaving her fingers in between his own. After a moment he pulled back and rested his forehead against hers, and they took a few seconds to appreciate the closeness. She squeezed his hands, and he wiped her damp cheeks again, still trying to dry them. Then, unable to resist, he leaned in and kissed her a second time, smiling against her lips.

The door opened and there was a growl. "CHILTON. GET. YOUR. HANDS. OFF. MY. DAUGHTER."