A/N: This was going to be only about Danny fighting therapy; and then I went through the script for 1x18, watched a bit of it…and this is the result. I think I'm going to keep going through episodes, find mentions or hints of Danny's PTSD, flesh them out.
He tells Linda to forget about the shrink; he'll just call "Amazing Grace," the department shrink, do the mandatory eval, get back to work.
But he keeps putting it off.
After all, he doesn't need clearance from a shrink to work desk-duty. And until his finger heals in six weeks, that's all he'll be doing.
So he ignores his father's weekly phone calls, pushes everything back down into that steel box labelled Things I Don't Think About.
He puts in his forty hours a week of mind-numbing desk duty, teaches Sean how to hit a baseball.
Those…episodes…the ones Linda calls "panic attacks" and "flashbacks"….are getting worse, but he gets pretty good at telling when he's about to have one, so he ducks into the bathroom if he's at work, or the basement when he's home.
The day before his appointment to get the splint off his broken finger, he calls "Amazing Grace," requests his Fitness for Duty eval, and curses out the receptionist when she says the doc is booked straight for the next three weeks. "I can refer you to a Dr. Leslie Summers. It won't be an FFDE, but it should be enough to clear you for duty."
Simply because he wants to get back to work, he takes the referral, squeezes in the last appointment that Friday night.
"I've read your file, Detective Reagan. You had plenty of chances to get seen at the VA when you returned from Fallujah; that way, you could have an official diagnosis in your chart."
"An official diagnosis of what, and how the hell would that help me?"
"PTSD, and it would help make sure you got services."
He stands up, shaking with fury. "I don't have PTSD, I don't need help, and I sure as hell don't want to sit around waiting for the VA for ten years to get told I'm crazy and be put on ten different pills that are gonna make me feel like shit! All that bureaucratic b.s. would get me in the Rubber Gun Squad for life!"
"And that is exactly my point; you're overreacting to what is really a quite simple process. Perhaps you shouldn't be carrying a weapon, with that much anger."
He storms out, drives to the office of Amazing Grace, sits in the parking-lot until she leaves for the night. Then he walks up to her. "Dr. Meherin."
"Detective Reagan, I heard you called to make an appointment; unfortunately, my schedule's full."
"I can't…I gotta get cleared for duty, Doc! I can't spend the rest of my life on desk-duty."
She sighs. "I can give you twenty minutes. Start talking."
He follows her back inside to her office, tells her how, yeah, he punched Cassidy but it was a heat-of-the-moment thing; he's not like that, normally. Yeah, he's had similar incidents, but they were really bad guys.
He clams up when she asks about Fallujah.
By some miracle, thirty minutes later, he's driving home with the form clearing him for duty in his pocket, and another one being faxed to Gormley.
Two days later, he's back at work; and two days after that, Linda is kidnapped by Salazar's men.
He attacks the filing cabinet in the precinct until Jackie and Gormley pull him off. "Stand down, Reagan! Danny, stop!"
He swings at them, then realizes he's crying.
He heads back to his house in the morning, goes over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any evidence CSU might have missed, anything that might tell him where they took Linda.
He finds nothing, and he kicks the wall. This is his worst nightmare. He doesn't know how he's going to survive without her.
He calls her phone, leaves a message for the kidnapper, tries to slow down his breathing when he realizes he's hyperventilating.
But that just reminds him of Linda and he breaks down crying.
He's running on no sleep and no food (other than three bites of the Chinese Jackie bought him) when they execute the raid on the second house. He hears a groan while he's fighting with Bad Guy #5 (or is it 6 or 7?), and then he opens a door, and Linda is there, and he unties her and holds her close.
He doesn't let go of her hand while the EMT's check her out, declare her fine but dehydrated; and he drives home.
He doesn't realize he's crying until she starts rubbing his back. "Shhh, I'm here, Danny, I'm right here. You saved me, you found me, it's okay."
He cries into her hair. "We found…the Hummer, with a body; I thought…I thought…"
"I'm here. I knew you'd find me, Danny."
He holds her until she falls asleep. As long as she's here in his arms, what does he need a shrink for? All that…Michael Oates, and Fallujah and all that other crap…that means nothing in comparison to the threat of losing Linda. All he has to do is keep her safe, and he'll be fine.