Author's Note: Requested by pandigirl19 over on Tumblr who asked for Magnum to be locked in a cage. Ya'll can blame the Hardy Boys for this one. Continuing the Bad Things Happen Bingo card: Locked in a cage. While investigating missing dogs, Juliet and Magnum find themselves in a rather unfortunate position.
Juliet groaned as consciousness returned, slowly, and dear God, what had she been drinking? Her head throbbed in time with her heart and she reflexively put her hand up to her forehead before several things occurred to her.
In all of her hangovers – few and far between as they were – they never centered at the back of her head like this, and, much more puzzling, she could barely move because of a warm, heavy weight pressed in on one side of her, tangled underneath half of her and half on top. Something sharp dug into the back of her neck which wasn't helping her headache.
What the bloody hell…
She finally managed to pry her eyes open, blinking to clear her vision.
It helped less than she liked. It was dark, save for dim light filtering through the bars and dozen or more circular holes in the walls.
Bars? Holes?
She attempted to sit up and promptly whacked her head against the low ceiling, which naturally just made her headache worse, sending spots dancing across her vision as she collapsed back down with a groan.
This time, when she opened her eyes, she didn't move, cautiously taking in her surroundings.
The ceiling was only a few inches from her face, her head resting against the back of the cage and her legs folded uncomfortably to fit in the small space, the flat of her feet pressed against the door. Small air holes lined the sides, higher up near the ceiling, and the door was barred with similar circles cut into the metal.
It was a dog kennel, she realized. One of those new, extremely expensive 'high anxiety' cages that looked more like something from medieval torture than a dog crate designed for destructive animals with separation anxiety. She almost laughed, and then snorted in disgust. This is what she got for helping Magnum with one of his missing pet cases.
High valued pets had gone missing all over the island – championship level dogs in the AKC and working animals from the K9 units and working homes. Were those the cases Magnum took on? No. He took the one from the eleven-year-old who's emotional support dog for his autism was stolen, who just so happened to be in the same yard as a three-thousand-dollar Pharaoh hound.
On the upside, she was fairly positive they'd found the kennel owner selling off the stolen dogs, given their current predicament.
If not, she was filing a complaint with customer service.
The kennel was likely intended for a larger breed dog, like a Saint Bernard or Tibetan Mastiff, but it was still pretty tight for a human. Even one that was only five and a half feet tall.
It was even tighter with two people crammed inside.
Magnum was stuffed in beside her, half on top of her and half underneath her, his neck bent at an incredibly painful looking angle, his shoulders pressed into the corner of the kennel and his legs contorted to fit in the space enough to close the door behind them. They'd actually had to take off his shoes to make him fit – at least, she assumed that's why he was barefoot. She couldn't imagine any other reason.
She realized she couldn't feel her phone in her pocket and cursed lightly. Of course they took it. Calling for help would be entirely too convenient. A quick search of Magnum's pockets and she confirmed what she already suspected – they'd taken his, too.
"Magnum," she tried, shifting slightly so she could at least face him instead of being crammed with his forehead pressed against the top of her head. Something caught her hair, pulling it painfully against her scalp, and she reached blindly where she thought she'd caught it on the cage somehow, but her fingers were met with tacky and warm that stuck her hair to her head and…whatever the hell that was. She winced and hissed and gently pried her hair loose and managed to twist around enough to get a look at Magnum.
She couldn't help the sympathetic wince when she saw his face. He hadn't gotten hit in the back of the head like she had – or maybe he had, and it was just his luck he'd been hit more than once, because shy of a sedan going thirty miles an hour, not much seemed to take the detective down with one blow. The side of his face from mid forehead down to his cheek was swollen and puffy, darkening the skin around it a spectacular shade of blue and purple already. She'd be surprised if he could open that eye in the coming hours. The tacky substance in her hair was blood from where the skin split at his temple that had freely run down the side of his face, giving the macabre appearance of shedding bloody tears. Unsurprisingly, he was still unconscious.
She tried to move out from underneath him, to see if she could kick the door loose with brute force or maybe just lever the door open with enough pressure, but she was too tangled up in Magnum's limbs to manage. She was a little too short and without him able to hold his legs out of the way of hers, she couldn't get enough space to pull back far enough to do any measurable damage.
"Magnum," she tried again.
Nothing.
She elbowed him in the ribs as best she could with her arm chicken-winged underneath them. She needed him awake, but she was trying to avoid being abjectly cruel with what was probably a grade 2 concussion on his part.
"Magnum," she tried louder.
He groaned slightly, but his eyelids didn't so much as flutter.
She smacked top of the cage open palmed, making even herself wince at the clang of metal on skin, much louder than she'd intended.
That got a reaction.
Magnum jolted violently awake, exploding into motion before his eyes were even fully open. His head reared back into to hit the wall of the crate much like she had, his hands and feet coming up between them in a display of flexibility she would be jealous of, except for the fact that he used them to shove her violently against the opposite wall of the cramped space, pinning her there with his palms pressed against her shoulders and his knees against her thighs.
"Ow, Magnum!" she protested, bringing up her own hands as best she could to grip his forearms. "Same side!"
She could see the moment he recognized her – his dark, sharp gaze softening slightly when he realized it was her.
She could also see he was thoroughly concussed, given the unevenness of his pupils and the way he had to squint to see her.
"Higgins?"
"Yes, Magnum, me. Could you…" she glanced meaningfully at his hands, still pressed with bruising force against her shoulders. The space was already small enough without being crammed into an even smaller area.
He didn't let go, just let his elbows bend slightly, but it was good enough.
"Are we…" Magnum cast an appraising eye over their prison.
"Literally in the dog house? Yes. My guess is Rick's intel was correct – we found who's been stealing dogs, but they…" she trailed off, frowning.
Magnum…wasn't acting normal.
No, not normal. That was unfair. They were crammed into an unbreakable dog kennel with no way to call for help and he was sporting a pretty decent head injury, so there was some allowances she was willing to make, but then she considered how blasé he'd been about being left adrift with a homicidal federal agent, or even the general sunshine-y mood of being in the hospital after he'd been kidnapped, stabbed, again left to tread water for hours, shot and thrown from a moving vehicle by a psychotic ex.
This was different.
"Magnum, are you…"
"Shut up," he snapped. He was breathing hard but his breaths were shallow, his eyes squeezed shut and she could see him curling further in on himself as best he could with the limited space, as if trying to make himself smaller.
Or the space seem bigger.
"Are you…claustrophobic?" she asked, not unkindly.
Magnum jerked his head once. "No," he ground out. "I have a thing with cages."
Juliet felt about two inches tall.
As soon as he said it, she remembered the conversation with Rick traipsing through the jungle – about how for long stretches, Magnum was kept in solitary confinement and they didn't know if he was dead or alive.
She doubted solitary was wide open spaces with plenty of light and few bars.
"I'm sorry, I –"
"Stop talking," he snarled, biting his lower lip. "Talking makes it smaller, so just…give me a second, okay?"
She clapped her mouth shut with an audible clack of teeth. She even held her breath, watching and waiting because there was little else to do. If talking made it seem smaller, she doubted any form of touch, comforting or not, was going to make anything better, but at the same time, if he had a panic attack in such a small space…
It took a moment for her to realize that Magnum was talking to himself. Muttering would be a more apt description, but she could catch a few words.
The words to Henley's Invictus. Over and over and over again, except he didn't get slower as he repeated them, he instead sounded like he was ramping up, skipping over portions of it or getting it out of order the faster he recited.
She knew an exercise in mindfulness when she heard one. Except…if Magnum was pulling on something to keep him here and now and here and now was the problem, it wasn't going to work.
Fully prepared to get smacked or worse for her troubles, she gripped his arms in her hands with bruising force. "Thomas Magnum, breathe," she ordered.
Magnum's fingers tightened on her shoulders in response.
"Magnum, I need you to focus, and what you're doing clearly isn't working for you. We have plenty of air. It's uncomfortable but not crushing. We can get out of this, I promise you, but not if you hyperventilate and pass out on top of me again like some sort of wilting flower."
It was a gamble. Magnum seemed to do better with positive reinforcement, but she also understood a primal need for honesty and SITREP in dire straits. Besides, her bedside manner was more in line with that of a porcupine and false platitudes sounded like just that when coming from her. There was just as much of a chance she was going to make this worse rather than better, but besides swimming, sitting passively on the sidelines was top of the Things She was Shit At list.
Magnum stopped muttering to himself. She felt his arms relax marginally in her hands as he forced a breath out, inhaling sharply through his nose again as he forced himself to at least try and breathe normally.
"Are you okay?" she asked, when she saw his dark eyes blink open again. She cringed inwardly at the bright red of his left eye from petechial hemorrhaging. They hit him hard.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm…" he trailed off, and the muscles in his arms went rigid again. "Nope. Nope. Not okay. Nope, nope, nopenopenope…fuck it."
With no other warning, he flipped on his back, letting go of her shoulders so that his were pressed flat against the floor of the kennel. In the same motion, he reared his feet back, knees almost to his chin before slamming both feet as hard as he possibly could against the door.
The entire cage rattled but remained intact.
He pulled his legs back again and slammed them full force into the door once more. And again, and again, and again – there wasn't enough space for them to try it in tandem. Her knees would've smashed directly into his, and she was too short to get the same leverage Magnum could.
On the sixth or seventh try, she heard something crack, but it didn't sound like metal. On the other hand, maybe it was, because Magnum lurched forwards, twisting around and narrowly avoiding kicking her in the process as he reached through one of the bars he'd managed to kick loose. It was one, and only marginally, but there was enough space he could force his hand through, fumbling for the lock on the other side.
"Magnum, my hand is much smaller, I think I can – "
She'd barely gotten the words out when she heard a click and Magnum was out of the cage before she could finish the thought, never mind the sentence, scrambling forwards on all fours as fast as humanly possible and practically launching himself out of the kennel.
She waited a moment for him to get clear before sliding out after him. The lights were considerably brighter, and between the banging on the metal and her own head injury, they felt more like miniature suns than overhead halogens, and she had to squint to get her eyes to adjust.
"Good God, I'm going home and swallowing a bottle of aspirin," she muttered. She carefully touched a hand to the back of her head and felt the lump already forming. "Well, maybe first a trip to the ER."
Magnum stood several feet away, leaning over a pallet piled high with dog food bags, forehead pressed against the top bag. She could hear him fighting to get his breathing back under control, saw the way that his shoulders still shook from the adrenaline and turned away to allow the man a moment of privacy to collect himself again, except something caught her eye.
Magnum wasn't standing evenly, one foot lifted slightly off the floor. It would've been easily dismissed, except she could see it shaking even from where she stood. Worse than the rest of him, so it wasn't just shock.
So it wasn't just metal she heard break.
"Magnum," she said carefully. "What did you-"
"It's not broken."
"That sounds very definitive for someone without a medical degree and a tenuous grasp of first aid," she retorted, reverting easily back to their familiar banter.
She could play the 'let's pretend this never happened' game with the best of them, and she was rewarded with a hoarse chuckle from the private investigator.
"All true, but I think we can agree that I'm a bit of a human disaster, can't we?" He lifted his head and stood up straight…ish. In the full light of the warehouse, his face looked even worse than it had when she first saw it. His left eye was definitely swelling shut, and she would be shocked if he didn't require stitches for the gash over his eye. He listed slightly to one side but caught himself on the pallets before he fell. "I know what broken feels like. This isn't it."
"Tendon?"
His foot jerked slightly and he hissed. "That would be a yes. Definitely a tendon. Ugh. That's four months recovery time."
Juliet fought the urge to roll her eyes, instead scanning the walls for hopefully a land line she could use to call Katsumoto and an ambulance. "Oh, no. You'll have to spend sixteen weeks on your back in the lap of luxury on an multi-million dollar island paradise estate, sipping drinks from coconut shells with little umbrellas in them while your friends and Kumu Mother Hen you."
Magnum actually laughed at that, and she felt a weight she didn't realize was there slowly lift from her chest. Psychology was not her forte, and she meant it when she said psychiatrists retired on cases like Magnum, but she was glad he was at least…well, something she was familiar with.
In denial.
She spotted the phone. "Don't move. I'm calling back up."
"Uh, could we not mention the part where we were locked in a dog kennel?" Magnum asked. "Not for any real reason, just…you know…kinda embarrassing, you know?"
"Said the man who knows no shame," she retorted. But she saw the flash of something in Magnum's gaze. Something more than just worry or awkwardness.
There was something darker there. Something she wasn't prepared to try and understand – maybe not ever.
She thought about how to this day, Magnum never called himself a prisoner.
"You think I want to admit that we were locked in a cage together?" she said instead, rolling her eyes. "Please. I have a reputation to think about, Magnum."
Yes. Two could play at this game.
Author's Note: If you're wondering how the hell two grown adults were crammed into a cage, I highly recommend looking up Impact Crates, specifically, one called "the Colossal 750". It's four feet long, and 38 inches wide. I made it shorter in this, more like a Navy coffin rack, but you know what? It's fiction, and I can do it. Plus, if you look it up, you can see what a pain in the ass it would be to break out of it. Anyway. Higgins is still a challenge to write, but I hope I did her justice. It took until about episode 15 for me to really like her, probably because I share a lot of her negative traits and I don't like seeing them play out on a screen in front of me. But, lemme know what you think! And as always, feel free to come say hi over on Tumblr disappearinginq!