A/N: So here it is - the last chapter with an epilogue at the end. After this I'll be returning to writing 'Perfect Shining Dark' with the occasional distracting one-shot that crops up and DEMANDS to be written!

Thank you all so much for reading this story and for all of you who took the time to review it, and especially all my 'regular' reviewers! :) Enjoy!

Chapter 7

"Hey we got a path through!" one of the search and rescue guys called back.

"You're up," the crew leader said.

Riley nodded, grabbing the portable oxygen tank and making sure her pockets were stuffed with the supplies she had grabbed. Working her way through the fairly small space that had been cleared, she came out into the collapsed but slightly open area of the room where the trapped detective lay. They'd received word that he had stopped responding, and her heart sank as his clearly unconscious form came into view.

"Mac! Hey Mac, can you hear me?" she called as she crawled over to him, quickly taking in his obvious injuries.

Not a shred of a response.

She quickly felt for a pulse in his neck. It was there but thready and slow, his breathing half-hearted at best, and his skin freezing. Not that she was surprised given how cold the air temperature now was let alone that his shirt and light jacket were absolutely soaked with cold water that was pooled on the ground beneath him. Not good. Reaching her hand beneath his undershirt, she lay the back of it on his chest, feeling exactly how shallow his respirations were and how cold his core really was. Her own pant legs were now getting wet, and she shivered at the thought of him lying in that water for hours. Fishing in one of her pockets and pulling out an oxygen mask, she called back to her partner, "James! Hey, James!"

"Yeah?" came a muffled reply.

"I'm going to need all three of our blankets, all the hot packs you can find in the truck, two bags of fluid, a bottle of sterile saline and a SAM splint."

"Anything else?" James called.

She thought for a few seconds while she turned on the oxygen tank and slipped the mask over Mac's face. "No, that should be it for now." She winced mentally at his severely broken left arm, and felt for a pulse in that wrist. Nothing. But given how cold he was, she couldn't be sure if that was simply because he was so hypothermic that he had already lost nearly all peripheral blood flow, or because the fracture had cut off circulation to his hand given that his palm was facing the ceiling when it really really shouldn't have been.

Double-checking to see if he had a pulse in his right wrist, her heart both sank and rose as she found a faint one under her fingers. On the bright side that meant that his entire body hadn't gone into final survival mode yet; but it also meant that either she had missed it on his left side, or his fractured arm had indeed at some point cut off his circulation. So long as he had received at least minimal blood flow to that hand for at least half the time he'd been trapped, he'd be fine. But otherwise…she winced in sympathy at the thought of him possibly losing it. Her stomach also sank a bit at the prospect of repositioning such a bad open fracture to try to restore circulation, but it had to be done. It was probably a good thing he was unresponsive at least for now. No amount of meds that she had would counter that level of pain. But her first mission was to try to start to warm him up.

"Hey Riley, here you go!" she heard James call.

Carefully making her way back around Mac, she met James halfway and took the supplies from him.

"It'll only be another minute until I get all the way through, but it'll be about another 15 before they can get the extrication equipment back in here," James told her.

She nodded. "Thanks. I'll need another portable tank then, and if you can get one of the other rescue crews to bring more hot packs from the station that'd be perfect."

"You got it," James told her, "I'll be right back."

Cutting and pulling away as much of Mac's soaked jacket and shirt as possible, she lay a single layer of blanket over him and placed the hot packs over it on his chest and up under his arms, folding the rest of the blankets over them. Adjusting the headlamp that was on her helmet, she finally found the faintest hint of a vein in the crook of his arm, she quickly slid the IV needle in, hooking up the first bag of fluid. Having specifically kept some of the hot packs in reserve, she wrapped and taped them around the IV tubing in order to the heat up the fluid before it entered his body. She wished she could at least insulate him from more of the intrinsic cold of the air, but most of him was still buried and there was nothing further she could do to try to warm him up and at least he wouldn't get colder. She crawled back around to his left side, her stomach filling with butterflies at what she had to do next. What if she made his arm worse? But looking at it, she realized that wasn't really possible. Reaching for his wrist she re-confirmed that he indeed didn't have a pulse in that hand.

"Hey Mac? Mac? You with me yet?" she asked him, looking back up at his face and searching for any sort of response.

Still not a thing.

Rinsing the dirt off his arm, she took a deep breath and grasped his wrist with one hand and his arm right below his elbow with the other. She was going to have to apply some traction, try to straighten it and pray it worked. Adrenaline was racing through her. It wasn't so much the fact that she had never done anything like this before, but at the level of pain which she couldn't help but sympathize with even though he was unresponsive. He might not stay that way so much once she started manipulating his arm which had two inches of broken bone sticking out of it. For his sake, she hoped he did.

Holding his arm in place against her knee, she slowly pulled on his wrist. But while he hadn't given any indication he felt her start the IV, this, he clearly felt and responded to. His face tightened as a new thin line of blood traced down his arm as she straightened it and pulled against the edges of his skin where the bone had punctured through. He slowly woke up, and started instinctively to try to fight and pull away from where she continued her manipulation of his arm. Moving quickly to prevent him from injuring himself even further in his attempts to relieve what had to be excruciating pain, Riley pinned his upper left arm to the ground with her knee, holding his wrist firm and placing her other hand just below his collarbone to keep him down.

"Mac. Mac!" she called to him. "Mac! Hold still. Your arm's broken and you're going to make it worse."

Increasing but as yet incomplete understanding of his surroundings crept back into his eyes. But Riley could see that only made him more fully aware of the pain he was in, and as limited as his ability to move was, he continued to try to fight her efforts.

"James!" she called, "James, if you can get all the way through, I could kinda use your help!"

There were sounds of scuffling and her partner appeared a minute later, wriggling through the small space on his stomach. "What do you need?" he asked.

"He doesn't have a pulse in this hand, so I got to straighten his arm. I need you to hold him down."

James nodded and quickly pulled himself up. Crossing to where his partner and their patient were, he placed one knee on the man's collarbone, one hand right below his left shoulder and the other just below his elbow, pinning him to the ground. "Jesus he's strong," James muttered to Riley as the man continued to fight to pull away.

"I know," Riley said. Freed from having to hold their patient down herself, she returned her attention to the task at hand, double-checking for pulse. There still wasn't one.

"Mac! I know this hurts, but you gotta hold still," James told their struggling patient.

The blankness was gone and all he knew was a state of being. There was something on his face and his entire world was one of blurred and indescribable pain and he just wanted it to stop…tried to do anything to make it stop despite someone pinning him in place. But somehow voices behind the bobbing lights calling his name filtered through enough for him to understand "arm broken…make it worse…" and telling him to hold still. Some distant part of his brain almost made sense of everything. But it was all fuzzy and vague and incomprehensible, and his sheer desperation to relieve the agony in his arm was too strong and overrode everything.

Then someone held him down even more firmly, and any small amount of cognitive function left him as his arm exploded with from the inside out with pain that crescendoed, skyrocketing past what he could comprehend. It felt as though his arm was being shredded by molten, jagged glass without any end in sight.

Riley resolutely blocked out the man's gut-wrenching cries of pure anguish as she finished straightening his arm. She could feel the bones slide against each other as more blood traced down his arm, and she couldn't begin to imagine the pain he was in. But underneath her fingers she finally felt a faint hint of pulse return in his wrist. A sense of almost euphoric success filled her. Between the possibility of the potential irreversible loss of blood flow to his arm below the break and the fact that this was usually done in surgery, she had figured the odds of the limb getting a pulse back were slim to none. She securely wrapped the moldable foam covered splint to his arm.

As the liquid fire and gouging knives in his arm dissipated and slowly eased to a hot, pounding throb, absolute exhaustion crashed back over him. Despite the continued pain, the stability that his badly broken arm now had for the first time was a relief that was as far beyond words in the opposite direction as the pain had been, and once again he had very little to counter slipping back into the realm of unconsciousness. The blurry figure who was by his head shook him slightly, calling to him to "stay with me" and to "Stay awake!". But it was beyond his ability, and he let the blanketing warmth of unconscious darkness slip back over him.

The further half hour that it took the tech rescue crew to get through and extricate Mac was probably the longest half hour of Riley's life as there wasn't much more she could do for the unconscious detective than watch over him and hope his condition didn't deteriorate further.

And if time dragged for the two medics, it ground to an absolute standstill for Jo and Flack who couldn't do anything.

After an eternity lasting 45 minutes had passed from when they had first made contact with Mac, the rescue crew finally appeared.

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"Devon. Hey, Devon," Flack shook the little boy gently.

Devon blearily sat up, the fleece throw Ellie had covered him with falling off his shoulders, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked at Flack who was kneeling next to the couch just below his eye level.

Behind Flack, Jo woke up Ellie who had fallen asleep in the big armchair in the living room with Devon, the DVD menu for 'The Emperor's New Groove' still on the TV. "Hey, sweetie, you can go to bed now," Jo told her quietly.

"What time is it?" Ellie mumbled.

"6am," Jo replied.

Ellie looked over her mother's shoulder at Devon. "I didn't want to leave him out here by himself," she said.

"I know, honey," Jo said, giving her a quick kiss on her forehead.

Ellie wrinkled her nose at her mom's show of affection in front of Flack, even though he was oblivious to the exchange going on behind him. Ellie would have died before admitting it, but she had a bit of an 'older guy' crush on the detective.

"Thank you for watching him," Jo continued, "You're awesome and I owe you a pancake breakfast."

"Tomorrow at that one place we found last week?" Ellie asked hopefully.

"Done," Jo said with a small smile.

"Uncle Don?" Devon asked sleepily.

"Yeah, it's me," Flack, "How're you doing buddy?"

"Ok," Devon said in a little voice, "Where's daddy? Is daddy with you?"

Flack looked down briefly, "No, no he's not."

Devon's eyes shimmered as tears sprung to them. "Where is he?" he asked, "Is he okay? Couldn't you get him out?" His voice wobbled and Flack grabbed him into a hug before setting him back on the couch and holding both the boy's shoulders in his hands.

"No we did, kiddo," Flack told him.

"Then where is he?" Devon pressed, "How come you didn't call me?"

"Because we couldn't get him out until not all that long ago," Flack said, "And he got hurt kind of badly so he's at the hospital right now."

Mac had been rushed, still unresponsive, to Trinity General where how bad of shape he was in was made official. One of the main tendons in his forearm had been almost completely severed when his broken left arm had been rolled in the secondary collapse and it had also suffered fairly significant damage from the lack of blood supply during that time. He had multiple bruised internal organs, his pelvis and right leg were each broken in two places, and he had been in profound hypothermia. But this latter near-fatal life threat had actually probably saved his life.

As the doctor had explained it to Flack, when crushed or compressed for extended periods of time, ones muscle and surrounding tissue got damaged and destroyed and release toxins into the blood stream when the pressure on them was released. But not only had the medics on scene anticipated this and loaded Mac with IV fluid to help dilute any toxins once he was freed, because he was so cold his periphery circulation had been significantly restricted as his body had shunted blood to his core to try to keep his vital organs warm. Given how long he'd been trapped and how much of his body had been crushed that whole time, he almost certainly would have died from the toxin release if he hadn't have been so hypothermic when they had pulled him out of the building.

"Can we go see him?" Devon asked.

"Of course," Flack said, "Why do you think I'm here?"

The sheer happy relief that flooded the little boy's face melted Flack's heart.

When Flack had left the ER, Mac was awake (although somewhat in and out) and in critical but stable condition. He was going to need surgery, lots of them to be exact, but the doc had agreed it wasn't anything that couldn't wait for Flack to get Devon and the boy to see him briefly first.

"Where are your shoes?" Flack asked him.

"By the door," Devon answered.

"Go run put them on and we'll get going," Flack told him.

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Devon clutched Flack's hand very tightly as they walked through the ER to the trauma room where Mac was. Flack had no idea if the boy remembered the last time he'd been to this same ER when Mac had found him beaten and with cigarette burns all over his lower body hiding in the back of his closet and his mother lying murdered by his father in their living room. Flack somewhat doubted that he did with any specificity, but either way, a busy city ER was an intimidating place, especially under these circumstances.

Flack knocked on the glass sliding door as he opened it and went into the room. Devon hung nervously a step behind him, gripping his hand even tighter. Mac had been sleeping but he opened his eyes and turned his head at Flack's knock.

"Don?" he asked in a somewhat groggy voice, a fair number of drugs now running through him.

"Yeah," Flack answered with smile, "How are you doing?"

Mac just nodded. "Warmer," he said.

"Good," Flack replied, "I've got someone here to see you."

Mac angled his gaze down as Devon took a couple tentative steps forwards, completely intimidated by the surroundings and the vulnerable state Mac was in.

"Daddy?" he asked in a very small voice.

Mac felt his throat catch at the sight of Devon just standing there with his hair sticking out in every sort of direction and his clothes all wrinkly from sleeping in them. He pulled his good arm from under the warming blanket. "Come here," he said.

Devon's chin wobbled as at Mac's injunction he rushed over, melting into tears and climbing on the chair that Flack pushed next to the bed so he could reach. Mac wrapped his arm around Devon's back as Devon clung like a vice to his neck.

"I…thought…you weren't…coming back," the boy sobbed in a muffled voice.

Flack's own vision swam as he watched Mac murmur words of reassurance in Devon's ear despite struggling to stay awake against the drugs running through him. If Flack was brutally honest with himself, he hadn't thought they'd be pulling Mac out of that building alive either.

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Epilogue

Multiple surgeries later (mostly to repair his severely damaged arm, but also to put rods in his leg and screw his pelvis back together) and a relatively short stint in rehab, Mac found himself back in his apartment, relegated to the couch and enjoying watching Don be the one to negotiate a minefield of strewn out lego pieces and the excruciating pain that accompanied accidentally stepping on one.

"Hey Devon, you want to know something pretty cool?" Flack said from where he emerged from behind the kitchen counter and gestured for Devon to come over.

Devon hurried over, intrigued by the secretive look on his godfather's face.

Flack put his arm around Devon's shoulders and indicated Mac. "Did you know your dad is like Wolverine?"

Devon's eyes grew big while Mac tried desperately to smother a snort and keep his face neutral. "Really?" the boy asked in awe.

"mm-hmm," Flack nodded. It hadn't taken long for him to see just how unsettled everything that happened to Mac and the continued process of his recovery had made Devon. It was a scary, tough thing for a kid to go through anyway, but Flack had expected once the whole intimidating hospital stage was done that the boy would be able to see that Mac really was going to be okay. But Devon had remained very muted and worried-seeming, and it had struck Flack: Mac was the person who literally saved the little boy's life and given him stability, a future, love and a home for the first time. For the kid to see Mac of all people first in serious shape he had been in at the hospital and even now still weeks away from simply attempting to walk had to have turned the child's world upside down and deeply scared him. Looking back, Flack had a suspicion that Mac had long ago picked up on Devon's persistent and understandable fear, being remarkably attentive in a quiet reassuring way to his adopted son as well as being more compliant with his pain meds than Flack ever remembered him being.

But clearly Devon's mind still wasn't at ease and Flack decided it was his turn to try to reassure his godson in a way he knew Mac couldn't.

"How is he like Wolverine?" Devon insisted.

"Well," said Flack, "You know how your dad's had to have all those operations?"

Devon nodded.

"They put metal in his skeleton, just like Wolverine."

Devon's eyes grew wide. "They did?" he asked in an awed tone.

"Yep," Flack replied.

"Even the spikes?"

From the couch, Mac choked as he fought to contain a sudden snort of laughter.

"Ask him," Flack said, gesturing to Mac and grinning impishly at his friend. Mac mouthed swear words back at him, and Flack grinned even broader as he turned smugly away, returning his attention to the stove and the saucepans he had on it.

"Are you really like Wolverine, daddy?" Devon asked, running over to Mac, excitement shining from his eyes. How the kid never managed to step on those damn legos Mac had no idea.

"Not quite," Mac laughed. "Wolverine could make himself better, remember? And if I could do that I wouldn't be lying on the couch not able to walk just yet, with your Uncle Don being the one trying to make some strange imitation of spaghetti over there."

"Don't let him fool you," Flack told Devon conspiratorially as he leaned his elbows on the island counter while the sauce he was cooking came to a slow boil. "He is like Wolverine, and it's most certainly not a strange imitation of spaghetti. In fact it's going to be the best spaghetti you ever had. Want to help me put the garlic bread in the oven?"

"Yeah!" Devon said, jumping up and running over.

Flack swung the boy up so he could reach the freezer door and retrieve the garlic bread from the top shelf inside it.

"Uncle Don?" Devon asked as Flack set him back on the floor.

"Yes?"

"Can you put extra cheese on it the way daddy does?"

"Oh, daddy puts extra cheese on it does he?" Flack asked as he caught Mac's grin at Devon's request.

Devon nodded his head.

"Well I'll tell you what," Flack said kneeling down and resuming his conspiratorial tone, "We'll put extra, extra cheese on it." He winked at Devon who beamed at him, and returned Mac's smile to his friend with a gloat.

Mac simply shook his head.