A/N: Well, this is the last chapter. I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been reading this, and especially to the people who have reviewed. You guys rock!
The sun was just beginning to rise in Vegas. Mary could just make out the changing colours of the sky as she lay on the bed in Danny's old room. It was something she never thought she'd do again, not since that night before he went on tour.
She remembered being in the exact same position she was in now, her arm folded under the pillow, giving her a little lift so she could see over Danny's body lying next to her. Her body was curved into his, warmth filtering back and forth between them, seeping through their fully-clothed bodies.
Okay, so that was the one thing that was different. Clothes. That night there hadn't been any clothes. They had made love in the light of the moon, and then they'd just held one another until the sun came up, talking and biding time until he'd had to shower, put on his uniform and leave.
She wished they were back then right now. Growing up was highly over-rated, Mary thought. Back then, Danny wasn't devastated and she wasn't feeling useless, and that would have been a plus now. That night, it had been her holding back the tears all night, fearful of what the Marines had in store for her best friend, for the man she loved, and she knew that night had been one of the hardest of her whole life. But given the choice between reliving that night and doing this, she'd gladly go through it all over again. She'd do anything to stop him from feeling this way, even if she had to feel that way again, she'd do it ten-fold.
Danny shifted next to her, his arm moving from his side to her stomach, and she didn't even try to stop the butterflies fluttering inside of her because there was no point. No matter how much she told herself to get over it, she felt the same every time he touched her, so she decided to just accept it.
He wasn't sleeping, neither of them were. How could they? But she had gotten him to lie down. She had taken his hands, silently pulling him to his feet, and led him over to the bed. She had lain next to him, her hand moving to his cheek, the place where it still was now, her thumb running in slow circular movements over his skin because it was all she had. Words were useless, but she had her love, even if she doubted that it would be enough.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, his eyes flickering up to hers, sincerity flashing in them.
"For what?" she asked softly.
"For interrupting your vacation," he told her. "You always wanted to go to Hawaii."
With you, a voice inside of her said. I always wanted to go to Hawaii with you.
"It doesn't matter," she told him, the hand on his cheek moving through his hair.
"I bet Jake was disappointed," he said, and she swore she could detect a sneer in his voice somewhere.
"I told you," she said firmly, her voice stronger now. "It doesn't matter, Danny. Nothing does." And she meant that whole-heartedly. It didn't matter because the only thing she could think about was right now, in this room, lying beside her, even if her brain kept trying to pull her into her past.
"You keep doing this, don't you?" he asked her, wonder in his eyes.
"Doing what?"
"I don't know," he said with a soft shrug. "Saving me?"
"Are you kidding me?" she asked incredulously. "If anything, it's the other way around."
"Not really," he said. "I mean, maybe once with…" he drifted off when he felt her body stiffen next to his and saw her eyes flicker around the room. "But, really, it was you. All our lives, you've been there, you know? If you weren't, I'd be someone completely different."
"Is that good or bad?" she asked, a hint of a smile in her voice.
"You tell me."
"You're a good person, Danny," she told him. "The best."
"Sometimes I think I'm okay," he said, turning his head to watch the lightening sky outside of the window. "And then…"
When he didn't continue, "And then…?" she prompted.
He turned back to look at her. "And then I think about how much I've hurt you, everything I've done that made you doubt how I feel about you."
She felt herself pulling away from him, even before she knew it. "Danny, it doesn't—"
"Matter?" he asked. "It does matter," he told her seriously, his face turning back to hers, the hand that held her hand moving to her face to touch her cheek. "God, it does…" he said quietly. "You've been the one person in my life I knew I could trust, no matter what. You were there whenever I needed you, and I never appreciated that, never appreciated you.
"When I came back from the Corps, I just…I didn't know what was going on. I just felt so…disconnected, to everything. It was so different over there, and you…you brought me back, made me realise that things were okay."
"I didn't do any of that, Danny," she told him with a soft shake of her head. "You did. You didn't need me."
"I did," he argued, eyes wide and pleading. "I still do."
"I wish that were true," she said, the words coming out in a mumble, and when she looked at him she seemed surprised that the words had been said aloud because she only ever really thought that in her head.
"It is," he said fiercely. "I need you in my life, Mary. Always." His hand moved to push back a piece of hair that fallen onto her face. "You really have no idea how special you are, do you?" he asked, although it came out as a statement since he already knew the answer.
"I'm not," was her response, just as he expected, along with the dipping of her face as her cheeks began to glow red.
"You are," he told her. "Just look at you…" he said, wonder in his voice and a smile on his face. "You're funny, you know, even when you don't even realise you are. You're smart, and strong, and sweet. And God, you're beautiful…"
He had tears in his eyes again, but now she wasn't quite sure why. "You just… You walk through that casino, and there were a hundred men, and probably a lot of women too, who couldn't take their eyes off you. Everyone who has ever met you has loved you. Don't you see that?"
She didn't reply, her face reddening further as she tried to turn her face into the pillow she was laying on.
"It's true," he told her. "My father…" he said, and for a second the words seemed to choke him. "He loves…" he stopped again, realising his mistake and closing his eyes for just a second. "…Loved you," he corrected. "You were like his own kid, you know? He'd tell me all the time, after I was born, he and my mom, they wanted a little sister for me. But once they met you, they didn't need another child because they thought of you as their own, especially my dad. He felt responsible for you, even before you came to live here."
"He was a good man," Mary said honestly. "You and him…you saved my life."
"Yeah," Danny agreed uneasily. "He was a good man." He shook his head to himself. "Was," he repeated. "It's strange to think of him in the past tense. To think he's never going to…" he trailed off again, his eyes moving back to the window and the changing colours of the skyline.
"I was so young when my mother died, you know?" he said wistfully. "I just remember her not being there anymore, and my father telling me she was in heaven and that she wasn't coming back. He made it sound so…peaceful there that it was almost a comfort. I don't have that now. Do you know what scares me the most? Sometimes…sometimes I forget her," he said sadly. "I forget what she looked like, how she smelt, how she hugged me when I woke up after a nightmare, or told me a bedtime story before I went to sleep. I forget what kind of a person she was." He looked back at her, tears in her eyes. "I don't want that to happen with him."
"It won't," she told him, her voice no more than a whisper as she wiped a tear that ran down her cheek.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"I just know."
"But what if it does?"
"It won't," she told him. "Not if you don't let it. Danny, you were so small when your mom passed, it's no wonder you forget the details. But you know she loved you, and you know you loved her. You remember that, don't you?"
"I guess so."
"You're older now," she pointed out. "You won't forget him, Danny, not for a long time."
"Do you want to know what's weird?" he said, "Every day I think about my mom, even though I can't remember her that well. I'll think about her without even realising it. I'll see some kid in the street with his mom, and I'll just stand there, thinking how I don't have mine. I think that, if I have kids, they'll never get to meet their grandmother. I'll hear someone say the word 'mom' and I think of her. Every wedding I've seen at work, I think about how she's not going to be at mine. Every Christmas, every birthday…it's there. It lessens, I guess, but it never goes away. And now…" he said, "I'm going to have that twice, aren't I?"
"Danny…" she said softly, taking his hand in hers.
He shook his head again, looking at the ceiling. "I feel like I've let him down."
"Why?" Mary questioned. "Danny, you never, ever let him down," she said firmly.
"I did," he told her. "He wanted me to go into the family business, but I didn't because I thought I was better than that. I thought I wanted bigger, better… I never even got the chance to tell him that I wanted to work with him again." He let out a sad, bitter laugh. "It's ironic. I decide to join the family business, and there's no family and maybe not even a business to join.
"And that wasn't the only thing," he said. "He loved my mom so…completely, you know?"
Was that rhetorical? she asked herself, while she let out an all-knowing, all-powerful, "Yes," that just escaped without her knowledge.
He grinned at that, looking her in the eye. "But I didn't get it," he said. "He'd go to the cemetery every birthday, every anniversary, and just stand there for hours. And when he asked me to go with him, I'd just blow him off, or I'd go and wait there, looking at my watch every couple of minutes because I thought I had somewhere better to be. I didn't see why he went there. I didn't see the point. I didn't need to go to a grave to think about her. She wasn't there, not really."
"Maybe it was just something he felt he had to do," she suggested. "To honour her, to show her he was thinking of her. You can't see a thought, Danny."
"And I should have understood that," he told her. "Instead of acting like an ass and making out I had some other great use for my precious time."
He gazed at her with a faraway look in his eyes. "And he knew," he said simply.
"Knew what?" she asked.
"That you were it."
"'It'?" she asked. "What?"
He smiled, his hand moving to her face. "Everything," he said.
She shook her head and closed her eyes, "Don't," she told him, but his finger over her lips stopped anything further she was going to say.
"Before you even moved in here, he knew," Danny said. "You were always the one thing in my life that never changed. He made me promise, more times than I can count, that I wouldn't hurt you. He told me once that he saw himself in me. He saw himself watching my mother when you and I were together.
"The day after that I joined the Marines." He looked up at her. "But you already know that." He was quiet for a moment. "Even when I came back, he just sometimes used to look at me and ask 'what are you waiting for?' You know what? I could never give him an answer."
"We tried, Danny," she said quietly.
"No," he told her. "We didn't. Not really. He was so happy when we told him we were getting married. That was the one thing that I know made him proud of me."
"It wasn't," she told him. "He was proud of everything you've done."
He shook his head. "I let him down again," he told her. "I disappointed him when I let you tell me it wouldn't work, when I let you walk away."
She felt a tear slide down her cheek and she quickly caught it with the back of her hand. She pulled away from him, breaking the contact between their bodies as she turned to get away from him. This wasn't why she was here. "I can't," she told him, swinging her legs from the bed, only to have him reach out and grab her wrist, pulling her back to him.
"My father was right," he told her.
"Danny," she implored, "Not now. I can't do this now. I don't know if I can do this ever."
"We have to," he told her. "Because he told me that life was too short to not do the things I want to do, to not be with the person I'm supposed to spend the rest of my life with. And God…" he said, tears in his eyes. "I know that now more than ever."
She could feel the tears welling in her eyes, clouding her vision and making his face blurry, like a dream she sometimes had where he was exactly these words to her, but right now, in this situation, it felt more like a nightmare.
"I want to be there for you, Danny," she told him. "I really, really want to be your friend and go through this with you. But…"
"But you don't believe me," he finished for her. "Do you?"
"I can't be your consolation prize again, Danny," she said. "It hurts too much. It hurts both of us."
"You've never been that."
"Come on," she reasoned. "When you're scared, when you're hurting, you come to me. And I want to there for you, but it just confuses things."
"That's not true."
"It is," she said sadly. "When you went away, both times, I know you were afraid of what would happen over there, and I don't blame you, and you came to me. When you got back, you were hurting so badly, you proposed, just because you were so afraid of being alone. When you were alone, all of those bad memories came back, all those horrible things that you saw and were part of…and I wanted to make it stop. You were so afraid of having nothing, that you wanted everything. I don't know if it was a conscious thing, but that night when you asked me to marry you…you offered me everything I ever wanted, everything I had told you I wanted. You used that against me, made it impossible for me to see things clearly, to see them how they really were. I'm not blaming you, Danny, really, because I should have known better."
"You did," he told her. "We postponed things, didn't we?"
"We did," she agreed, "But it didn't make things better. I knew you weren't ready for that."
"And you were?" he accused. "I wasn't the one who called things off. I may have been scared of committing to you, but it was only because I didn't want to hurt you. I've never been good enough for you, Mary, and I've always known that, but I wasn't the only one afraid. And I wasn't the one who was too scared to even try."
"Yeah," she said, "Because you fought so hard to change my mind."
"You had always believed in us, Mary. Always. When you stopped…I guess it made me doubt what I thought I knew. It made me question myself."
"And now, right when you're going through the hardest time of your life, suddenly you're seeing things clearly?"
"Not suddenly," he said. "I've known for a while, it's not exactly anything new to me. I just figured you were better off without me. Telling you how I felt, it made me feel selfish, to think about how I was feeling. For once in my life, I wanted to put you first."
"And now?"
"Now I'm being selfish," he said simply. "We've been doing this for so long, this merry-go-round of feelings and back and forth, I'm just… I'm too dizzy to keep doing this. I want to stop," he told her, his hand tight around hers. "I want you to stop with me."
For a moment, Mary didn't respond. She was trying to take it in, all of this information, all of these words, and she wanted so desperately to believe them, so much. And then she regained herself as she shook her head. "No," she told him, and maybe she was telling herself too. "This isn't why I came here. This isn't what we should be talking about."
"Why not?" he challenged.
"Because…" she began.
"Because my father just died?" he asked, and when she couldn't reply he placed a hand under her chin to lift her eyes to his. "That makes it exactly the right time, Mary, don't you see? My feelings for you have never changed, through everything. They've gotten stronger. I'm sick of pretending that they're not there, that you're not the person I want to spend the rest of my life with and that I'm okay seeing you every day without being able to tell you that you're the most important thing in my life."
"And you think it's been easy for me?" she asked him. "You want me, and then you don't. You're here, and then you're gone. You want to marry me, and then you don't. You keep saying how I'm the one you're 'supposed' to be with, Danny, but do you know what that tells me? You feel like you've let your dad down because we didn't work out, and now…now you're trying to make that up to him in some way, doing what you thought he wanted from you. It tells me that you're only doing this because everyone thinks we should be together.
"You know, I didn't just lose the guy I've loved my whole life when I gave you that ring back…I lost my best friend, and that hurt more than anything else. We've been trying, so hard, to get that back, and I want to get that back, but if you and I go down this road again… We're gone for good."
"Are we always going to hide behind that excuse, Mary?" he asked. "Or are we actually going to take a chance?"
"I don't know, Danny…" she said, shaking her head and pulling her hand from his so she could stand up, the more distance between them the better right now. "This all just…too much…"
"You know what?" he said, shuffling to the edge of the bed to sit before where she was standing. "I've heard every excuse you can think of. I've heard every excuse I can think of. But you know what I haven't heard you talking about?" She looked at him expectantly. "Jake," he said simply. "I haven't heard you mention him once in all of this."
Danny stood, "You know that you mean the world to me, Mary, and if you told me, just once, that you were with this guy for keeps, that he was who you wanted to be with…I'd step back, because all I've ever wanted was for you to be happy."
That was true, and she knew it. If she was being honest with herself, she'd have to admit Jake hadn't really entered her thoughts once since she got to this house, not since she'd seen him walk away.
He had moved closer to her again, his hands finding hers, surprising, comforting and scaring her all at the same time.
"I don't know what else to say to you," he said honestly, the redness of his tired eyes making her want to reach out and hold him. "Twelve hours ago, I thought I had pretty much everything figured out, you know? The casino was gonna be gone, I was going to work for my father, and I was going to wait until you were ready because I knew, I still know, that we'd end up together.
"Now… Now my father is gone, and everything I thought I knew is different. I don't want to be that person who always looks back on his life and wishes they had done something differently. I don't want to live with any regret or fear, not anymore.
"I don't know what will happen after tonight, when we have to go back to reality and live and breathe in a world where my father isn't going to be there to tell me how much of an idiot I'm being, or to bail me out of trouble I've managed to get myself into, or to just tell me that I'm doing something right when I don't have a clue. There is so much in my life that I don't know. But the one thing I do know…is that I love you."
Mary felt her breath catch in her throat as her heart pounded furiously against her chest, so hard she thought it might break out.
"That's the one thing I'm sure of," he continued. "It's the thing I've always been sure of, even if I was afraid of it. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And it's not because I'm trying to prove something to someone, or because I want approval, and not because it's what's expected. I want to be with you because I love you, and because you love me. I can't be the bigger person here and tell you that I'll wait, because I don't want to, and I know you don't want to either."
Her eyes were filling with tears, so much that she could hardly see out of them, but she knew the sincerity in his eyes, in every part of him, that made her think that maybe…just maybe…
Screw it.
"Say it again…" she whispered.
"All of it?" he asked. "Or just the main part?"
"Just the main part."
One of his hands came up to push back a few strands of hair that had fallen loose. He pushed it behind her ear, his hand lingering on her cheek.
"I love you, Mary," he told her. "Absolutely, completely, seriously, painfully…"
She closed her eyes, waiting for the dream to end or for the pin to drop. When she opened them again, he was looking at her expectantly.
"I love you," she whispered.
And then his arms were around her, tight and restricting, but that was good, even when tears fell down her cheek onto his shoulder and she felt his shirt dampening where her head lay. She wasn't even quite sure why she was crying, but both of their lives had changed tonight, in so many different ways.
Danny pulled away, his eyes red and swollen, and Mary brought a hand up to his face. She leant in, and as light as a feather, her lips touched his. He responded in kind, a hand moving back up to her cheek, tilting her face up to his as his lips touched hers again. There was more behind this kiss, more force, more love, more certainty.
As they parted, her hand came up to find his, their fingers intertwining, and this was right. The sun was still coming up in the sky, filling the room with new light, new hope. Reds and gold's from its rays shone on them, warming them through the glass, as Mary led him to the door.
They passed down the halls, and this time there was no stopping, no looking back and remembering. There was no more time for contemplation, because looking back just made the future seem so impossible. She led him down the staircase and stopped, turning to face him as they reached the front door.
"I don't know if I can do this," he confided nervously.
"Do what?" she asked, the hand that was holding his gripping tighter.
"Open that door," he said. "Go outside. Go back to the world."
"You said that was what you wanted."
"If I go out there, I can't pretend that my father's going to open that door and walk in any minute. I go out there, and he's really gone." His eyes closed. "There's so much to do. I have to identify the…" He took a breath when he couldn't complete the sentence. "I have to organise the funeral, figure out what to do with the business, and—"
He stopped when her lips came to his again, her arms closing around his neck and cutting him off before he could go any further.
It was only a brief kiss, and when their lips parted his arms slid around her waist, her forehead resting on his with his eyes still closed.
"I don't know if I'm strong enough to do this," he confessed.
"You don't have to be," she whispered. "I can be strong enough for the both of us. You've always taken care of me, Danny, and now I'm going to take care of you."
He nodded, a small smile as he looked her in the eye. "Tell me everything's going to be okay?" he asked her.
She kissed him again, a little deeper than before but still brief and comforting, full of future and promise.
He was right, there was so much to do, most of it painful and they weren't looking forward to any of it. She didn't know how things would play out, if they could get through the next few days and the funeral, and the thing that came after that, and after that. They would find out if all of this had been worth it, the years of heartache and confusion, although she had a feeling she already knew the answer.
Mary cleared her throat, gently pulling back from him and placing a hand on either cheek. "Everything is going to be okay," she told him. And this time she meant it. After all, she had never been able to lie to him.
She took his hand in hers again, feeling his grip tight in hers as she laid her free hand on the door knob.
"Ready?" she asked.
He took a breath, and then nodded.
She opened the door to the sight of the three people she had left out there what felt like hours ago, all of them waiting patiently on the porch, all turning at the sound of movement, the light of the fully-risen sun shining down on them.
Danny and Mary walked out hand in hand, into the day.
A new beginning.
A new life.
The End