Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of this work of fiction, and no profit, monetary or otherwise, is being made through the writing of this.
Warning: Mentions of sexual assault (no details; non-graphic; mostly background). Mental and physical torture.
A/N: Written for Swifters as a gift (late for Christmas), and inspired by fan_flashworks challenges (livejournal and dreamwidth) Borrowed Title, Numbers, and Burn. I borrowed the numbers used in this from Tool's song, "Forty Six & 2" and listened exclusively to Tool's music while writing this. It's not the serial killer fic (that will take a bit longer to write) but I hope that you like it anyway. Merry (belated) Christmas, and Happy New Year!
Forty six and two.
The shadows crawl closer to where he's hiding, and threaten to swallow him whole, like fish eating worms off a hook. He pushes himself back into the light. It shines in the center of the room. A beacon that wards off the dark shadows, but offers pain instead of hope.
"Better off in the shadows," he whispers to himself.
Laughter echoes back. Cruel. Faceless. It has hands and feet. It surrounds him, like the shadows. Swallows him with blood that spills from his own split lip, the cut on his left cheek, just below his eye, the one above his eyebrow.
Blood and sweat are twins.
They are his comfort, and by turn, his tormentors.
They take turns beating him senseless, choking him on salt and copper. Make him drown in swallowed breath that doesn't make it past his throat and into his lungs.
He can't feel his left arm. A lost appendage. It dangles in his lap. He knows this because he can see out of his right eye, and he's sitting in the middle of the room, underneath the spot of light. It dangles, too. From a cord in the ceiling.
Occasionally the light, a bald bulb that leaks phosphorescent yellow, swings at the end of its noose. It makes inelegant arcs that circle his head and steal his sight. Temporary blindness. He can't see out of his left eye. Can't feel the left side of his body.
Whenever the light blinks out, he can see sparks. Fireworks in his brain. Can feel the electricity that should make the light work course through his own body. He knows.
Forty six and two.
Knows nothing.
Forty six and two.
Knows everything.
Says nothing.
Forty six and two.
Says everything but what they want him to say.
"Where is she?"
"Hollywood, Jamaica, you ever been there?" The words are slurred. He's said them before. He's never been there either. Read about it in a book. Or maybe saw it on the Discovery Channel.
He smiles with half his face. The other half is palsied. Hanging loose like his arm. Like one of those Salvador Dali paintings, the one with the melting clocks, or the one with the elephants with legs that stretched too thin.
He used to draw stick figures until his teachers told him not to. Made him give them clothing. No naked stick people. It's indecent. He's indecent. Wearing a pair of threadbare boxers covered with hearts. Cheesy. Gift of love. Hearts. Love.
He's melting.
He shivers beneath the bald light, watches it sway, and wonders when the blindness will strike him again.
Forty six.
Two.
Forty six and two.
Those numbers mean something.
"What do those numbers mean?"
The question is faceless. The voice is a hissing snake. Cold. Biting. Stinging and poisonous.
Danny screams as the poison strikes.
Fire.
Ice.
Forty six and two.
Forty six and two.
Fire crawls through his veins like a worm. Slow. Blind and burrowing. Spitting out the dirt that it eats, leaving fire behind.
"Shit, we're losing him."
The light blinks. Fades into the swallowing shadows. Reappears suddenly. A bucket of ice water that steals his breath, makes his eyes leak salt and poison. Burns.
He's on fire. Melting. Freezing. Losing to the encroaching shadows. They don't like to share. They're waiting, biding their time until the light does its disappearing trick again, and Danny's lit up like a Christmas tree.
The Christmas tree in his and Steve's living room has chains of popcorn and cranberries. Paper chains constructed by Grace and Charlie. Colorful lights that blink and wink, play tricks on the eye. Make Danny's heart stop and start again, like the bulb dangling from the crude ceiling.
Gifts. Bound in pretty wrapping. Curled bows. Tags with names written in tidy, block lettering.
They'd been waiting up for Santa. Steve and him. Grace and Charlie were asleep. There were cookies, a glass of milk, sitting on a table next to the tree. Danny'd gone outside to check on...
Forty six and two.
"What do those numbers mean? Where is she? Where is the witness?"
A fist tastes like blood when it strikes - his face, his stomach, the side of his body that can feel - like a snake.
"Forty six and two blackbirds baked in a pie," Danny says. Means to sing it, but his lips don't want to cooperate, and the shadows take advantage. They always take advantage. Hitting him when he's down. Keeping him kneeling, sitting, laying low so that they can tower over him like self-propagating gods, multiplying like bunnies in heat.
"Funny." The voice doesn't sound amused.
'Does that make this ironic?' Danny wonders. His mind is still as sharp as the flat side of a spoon. Bent as one, too.
Danny laughs. It comes out like splinters in his chest. They eat his heart and lance his veins. Break apart in his lungs, and leave him breathless.
Homicidal light. It blinks. Makes an arc over Danny's head and bites him so hard that he loses vision, thought, the beat of his heart.
He's drooling. A cool trail that leaks from the right side of his mouth and spills out onto the floor that pillows his head.
The light watches. Circles overhead. Chases the shadows away from her victim. She's a vulture. Cruel. Mocking sincerity. She pretends to care. Danny doesn't trust her. Doesn't trust the questions she spins, or the promises that she forces him to swallow like bits of broken glass. Halloween candy with pins and needles. A dirty syringe filled with truth serum, arsenic and STDs.
They aren't real. Her promises. The images his mind is conjuring. Worms on a hook. Writhing. Twisting away from the gaping maws of birds and fish alike.
Danny's left side is gone. He can't see it from where he's lying, even within the light's golden bow.
He's not sure whether he should laugh or cry. He went outside to get a present for Charlie. It was in the trunk of his car.
Danny knows the inside of the trunk of his car like he knows the palms of his own hands. Intimately.
There's nothing romantic about it. His trunk is a harsh lover. All bruising touches. Rope burns. Choking exhaust fumes. Not a safe word in sight, or within hearing range. Danny's never been a fan of BDSM. He wonders if the binding his trunk offered him was meant as foreplay.
His own hands are rough and calloused. Steve's never complained. Rachel hadn't complained either, back when they'd been together.
Danny's never complained about his own hands either. The way his goofy thumbs keep hitting the wrong letters on the keyboard when he's texting. The scars from broken glass that litter the palm of his left hand. The lack of clarity on his life and love lines which make it difficult for a palm reader to tell him his fortune with any certainty.
Forty six and two.
"Tell us what we want to know and you can go home to your husband and kids."
The light winks at him.
A shadow closes in.
"Forty six and two foot, three foot bunch, daylight come and me wan' go home." Danny's lips are rubber and glue. Except nothing sticks to them but saliva and blood. Dried puke and remembered cum from days, maybe hours ago.
Harry Belafonte would not be proud. Where is the tally man come to tally Danny's bananas? He's got enough to make an entire boatload of splits. Just add chocolate syrup and stemmed cherries. Marshmallow creme. Whipped cream.
Everything is salt. Including the water. Buckets of ice that bleed and burn where it touches skin and bone.
Forty six.
Two.
Syllables in as many words.
The alphabet, twice, minus four of the doubled letters.
Four letters unaccounted for. Just like the girl. Hiding from the shadows. Danny won't reveal her to the light.
The shadows circle. Close in. Shy away from the light. Leave Danny gasping for air, clawing at dirt, crawling on his belly like a worm.
They'd sung Christmas carols. Steve, Charlie, Grace, and Danny. Danny'd read the Christmas story dressed in jeans and a red shirt, a Santa's cap on his head. Steve's smile had been brilliant.
The light is blinding in her affections. Single-minded focus. Danny doesn't want her as a lover. He misses Steve's touches. Kissing underneath fake mistletoe. Kissing in the laundry room. In the kitchen. When Steve doesn't have time to shave, his stubble rubs against the smoothness of Danny's cheek like sandpaper.
Forty six and two.
"Just tell us where she is, man."
The light is coy. She flirts. Kisses Danny on the cheek that isn't dead. Pinches his ass with fingers that are pure acid and lace. Makes lightning shoot through his bloodstream and out his fingertips, the top of his head, and the soles of his feet.
There's a pool of water beneath him. He's deadweight floating. Flotsam. Jetsam tossed overboard to lighten the load. It's too late for him to be recovered like lagan. Nothing buoys him beyond the cool caress of the cruel light and her deceptive fingers that give room to the lurking shadows, and lets them play.
"He's useless. We've been at this for days, and all he's said is nonsense."
A kick tastes like bile and copper. It burns, and twists like a coiled snake. Danny's sucking on pennies and quarters. Choking on sweet vermouth and pine needle tea.
They'd gotten a real tree this year. Fallen pine needles stuck on the bottoms of their feet. Danny'd joked about making pine needle tea. He remembers tasting it once. Something one of his grandmothers had made once upon a time. Bitter and strong. He'd been told that it would put hair on his chest. It hadn't.
Forty six and two.
"Forty six and two," Danny says the numbers that have been rolling around in his head, in his mouth, for days now.
The light holds her breath, and the shadows crowd in, darken her edges like a graveyard giving up her bones.
The words taste like a pair of balled up sweaty, mildewed socks stuck to the roof of his mouth and plastered to his tastebuds. Like the briny mold of sticky cum that had been hard to swallow, but even more difficult not to.
Humiliation hadn't worked as well as the broken record in his head had played, and that particular game had come to a quick, abrupt end.
The numbers were stuck in Danny's head, they wouldn't come loose. Numbers without meaning. Empty words like the promises that the light had once made Danny.
"Forty six and two tailors went to kill a snail," Danny says, misquoting a nursery rhyme he's read to Charlie on occasion from a book that Rachel had given him. He knows it by heart. Charlie does, too. At least he did when he was little.
Backhands to the face taste like the choking, chalky scent of kerosene lit fires. Molotov cocktails that explode within the stomach, and burn the eye sockets dry.
Danny has no more tears left. His eyes weep blood the thickness of fresh maple syrup.
They were going to have waffles for breakfast Christmas morning. Eggs and turkey bacon. Strawberry compote. Powdered sugar. Maple syrup that boasted Canadian roots.
Danny and Steve would've indulged in whisky coffee. Grace and Charlie in sparkling grape and apple juice.
Danny's blood is the color of watered down cherry juice in the pool of cold wetness that floats the right side of his body, buoyed by the light's indulgent benevolence. It's fake. Her benevolence is nothing but malevolence in disguise.
Forty six.
Two.
The number of days one can survive without food, give or take a few. Danny hasn't eaten since Christmas Eve dinner. Turkey, ham, buttered rolls, pineapple, stuffing, noodles and rice.
The shadows give him water. It's plastic and tinny. It makes him sleep. He lies in his own piss. It mixes with his blood. With the water that buoys him like amniotic fluid. The light is his mother. She brings him comfort, and pain. Life and death.
Forty six and two.
"Forty six and two." Danny's voice is a rasping wind. "Human evolution. Jungian theory built on the blood, sweat and bones of Melchizedek."
Danny doesn't know what he's saying. He's repeating words. Phrases. The song that's singing in his veins and searching for a way out.
Somewhere there's a violin playing. A lonely, mournful tune. A death knell. "Silent Night," in doleful strains. Steve's voice breaking with worry.
Steve's always at his best in the morning. Fresh and eager to greet the day. Danny's more of a night owl. Together, they burn the candle at both ends.
The scent of burning flesh isn't nearly as sobering as it should be. Danny's not awake, but the hairs on the back of his neck, those on the outside of his right thigh, are screaming black smoke. Daring him to keep pretending that he's asleep when consciousness is on the tip of his tongue, and burning the back of his right eye socket.
He can still see. Out of his right eye. Over the tip of his nose. He wonders if his left nostril is still functional, or if it's as droopy as the left side of his mouth.
Both of his lungs fill with filthy, recycled, days old air. There's water in the bottoms of them. It's like drowning, but not as peaceful as he's read about. He isn't floating.
The light is no longer being kind. She plummets him into darkness, lets the shadows swallow him in a cacophony of sibilant whispers that feel like wooden mallets striking flesh that's already been tenderized.
The end is near. Danny needs to learn to swim with the half of his body that's still functional. When the light returns as he knows she will, he needs to be ready. The shadows will subside, slink back into their dark corners and wait for answers that they hope the light will reveal.
Forty six.
Two.
Forty six and two.
Light returns as a series of barking flashes that leave trails of smoke curling around the shadows like cats' tails, owning them, pulling them back and away from Danny's place in the center of the room. He's the turkey dinner. Stuffing removed.
"Danny."
This time the light is different. Her hands are shaky. Uncertain. They don't hold Danny as securely, or harshly. Her beams are softer, dulled. No longer biting and cutting. She doesn't burn when she touches.
"Danny, can you hear me?"
The voice is a tunnel. Echoing. Not once had the shadows called him by name. They'd only been interested in the girl. The witness. The numbers forty six and two. Numbers of a house and a street. Sesame Street. Elmo's house. That had gone as well as Danny's singing nursery rhymes had.
"Forty six and two," Danny answers, lips tripping over themselves, his tongue knotting itself into the back of his mouth and sticking.
There's a remnant of blood, the stale taste of cum and the mildew of balled up sock back there. He chokes, and his entire body is embraced by a single shadow that shakes like a tree in the wind.
In his mind's eye, Danny can see the palm trees bending in the backyard that now belongs to him as much as it has always belonged to Steve. The ocean lies a few yards away, mercurial and unforgiving in her churning depths. Danny's been pulled under by her crashing waves before. It feels a little like this. Drowning. And this time it's just as peaceful as he'd read it was.
"Danny, I've got you, you're safe now." The shadow's voice is trembling almost as much as its hands are, and Danny has a fleeting notion that he knows this shadow, almost as well as he knows the palm of his hand, the inside of his trunk. Intimately.
He blinks. The shadow doesn't fade away in the dim light. The bulb hangs loose overhead. Her light gone. Replaced by the light of something else flickering.
"How is he, Steve?"
Another shadow. A different question. Another name.
And suddenly the pieces start to fit together. Danny knows these shadows. The shadow holding him. Returning feeling to his paralyzed limbs, the half of face lost to electric shock and an angry fist.
"He's in shock. He's -"
"Steve?" The name sticks on the roof of his mouth, comes tumbling off a tongue that's grown thick and dumb from relief and fear that this is just some trick of lighting. An angry mistress lashing out at her captive, binding him to a love he doesn't want.
"Yes, Danny, it's Steve, I've got you." Steve's voice is as thick as Danny's tongue, and something wet and warm splashes against Danny's cheek, mingles with the grime and syrupy waste of Danny's eyes.
"What." Danny closes his eyes. Swallows Sahara dryness. "What day is it?"
Steve shakes, runs his fingers through Danny's hair, cradles his head to his chest, presses a kiss to Danny's head. "It's the twenty-ninth, Danny."
Danny licks his lips. They're cracked. They taste like blood. It takes him longer to do the math than he'd like, the numbers, forty six and two almost crowd out the numbers that he needs - twenty-four and twenty-nine. Subtraction is a simple math. The opposite of addition. Yet it takes Danny longer than it should to come to the number, five.
"Five," Danny says, the number getting stuck to the fabric of Steve's shirt. "Five days."
It feels longer, and shorter than that.
"I'm sorry," Steve says, choking on the word, rocking Danny.
Danny shakes his head, uses his good arm to pat the part of Steve's back that he can reach. "'s'okay. You've got me now, right?"
"Right, I've got you now, and I'm never going to let you go," Steve says in a voice that's more of a growl than anything else.
"I'm afraid that you're going to have to let him go, hoss." Lou's voice breaks through. "Paramedics are here. I'm sure that they'll let you ride in the bus. Kono, Chin and I will take care of everything here."
Danny doubts that Steve's heard everything that Lou's said. Though he nods in response, he holds Danny tighter, and it's a push-pull, tug-of-war between the paramedics and Steve before Danny's finally released by his lover.
Steve holds Danny's hand throughout the brief, yet thorough examination by the paramedics, aids in getting Danny situated and secured on the gurney, and then he does get right on the ambulance beside Danny, keeping his eyes locked on Danny's until Danny's eyes close.
Danny doesn't intend to keep his eyes closed for as long as he does. He's just exhausted. Keeping the witness' location a secret, and holding onto the truth of those numbers, forty six and two, for so long had taken a lot more out of him than he'd realized.
Each time he opens his eyes, no matter how brief the act of returning to consciousness is, it's Steve's eyes, or the profile of his face, or the plane of his abs, covered by a tee-shirt that's obscenely tight, or the curve of Steve's lips that Danny sees. And always, there's the steady, solid grip of Steve's hand anchoring Danny to the here and now, rather than to the room of light and shadows that often chased him in his disjointed dreams.
When Danny opens his eyes for longer than a few minutes at a time, two days later, there's cause for celebration. The team, Charlie and Grace, crowd into Danny's room, and it's only a little overwhelming. Danny doesn't equate them with the shadows of his nightmares for longer than a few minutes of panic during which Steve holds his hand, and rubs his thumb over Danny's knuckles, grounding him in reality. Keeping him safe and sane, and free from the litany of numbers, of nursery rhymes used as distractions.
New Year's Eve, they celebrate Christmas. Danny gets a baseball jersey for his favorite team, featuring his favorite player, from Santa, and a gold chain from Steve. They share a beer (Danny isn't cleared to have alcohol yet, drugs still linger in his veins) and some of the bubbly grape and apple juice that they got for the kids. Instead of whisky and coffee, they have tea with lemon and honey with their breakfast.
The neighborhood, and official fireworks make Danny jumpy, but he tries not to let it show (at least not to Grace and Charlie). Steve knows, holds his hand, kisses him through a series of fireworks that sound like rapid gunfire, and remind Danny of electricity coursing through his body - he can feel his left side now. It tingles and feels like pins and needles at times.
Recovery, he learns, will be slower than he'd like it to be, but his memory is mostly intact, in spite of the mind-numbing drugs, and the calculated torture, and beatings. The mind games. The play of light and darkness.
The doctors tell him that it will take time for him to make a full physical recovery. That he won't be ready for desk duty for two to three weeks. Physical therapy. Visits to a chiropractor and massage therapist. Full duty will come weeks after that, and only once he's also passed the psych evaluation.
Recovery of his mind - forty six and two are still there, and so are the nursery rhymes he'd used to keep his captors from learning the truth of what those numbers meant, of where the girl was - will take longer. Not that he's broken. He's not. They didn't break him. The light and her minion shadows did not prevail against him.
It'll take time to heal.
Time that encompasses more than the five days that were already stolen from him. He'd lost Christmas. Had almost lost New Year's Eve, and if what the doctors had said was true, Danny'd almost lost more than that. He'd almost lost the New Year, and years to come, as well.
But New Year's Day dawns bright and far earlier than Danny would like it to. Steve's back is to him. Danny can see the faint line of a scar that disappears somewhere on Steve's right hip. A knife wound. A story that Steve will never share with him, because it's classified.
Danny's life is an open book. Together, Steve and he make a nice set of bookends. Somehow it works. Danny knows it probably shouldn't, but he doesn't care. He wants this. He wants Steve. Secret scars and all. Steve understands the scars that Danny's hiding better than anyone else.
Danny takes a moment to drink in the vision of his lover, backlit by the early morning light that seeps in through the slats of the blinds on their bedroom windows. He breathes in, feels the slight rattle in his lungs and dismisses it. He's on antibiotics. His lungs will clear up, again, with time.
Time. Danny's new mantra. One that will help keep him sane. One that will help him savor this, and other moments, in the new year.
Steve turns toward him, a smile playing about his lips, and love shining in his eyes. Danny pulls him down beside him, kisses him like a man hungry for air, like a man who's come back for war, like a man who knows he's dying, but is desperate to live.