Far Away – Chapter Twelve

Chris was almost relieved when Danny's voice faded away to beeping. It had been wavering back and forth between dream-Danny's voice teasing him with promises that never happened and angry-Danny's voice yelling at him. It broke him.

So the monotonous beeping was welcome. At least, until it got annoying. It sounded like the A-scan got stuck. Great, Chris would have to debug it. He moved to draw it out, but his arm felt strange and heavy.

Chris winced and tried to open his eyes, thick and scratchy. He knew he had been crying in his sleep again.

"Chris? Are you awake?" Sam's voice spoke over the A-scan's beep. He made a noise in response as something nagged at his memory. He had dropped his A-scan, hadn't he?

The memories came back in a flash.

Chris jerked up, but Sam's hand gently pressed against his good shoulder. "It's okay Chris, it's okay! You're in the hospital!"

Chris blinked his heavy eyes for a moment, rubbing at them with his now-bandaged hand. Ah. He recognized the ugly color scheme.

"Sam?" he croaked. His throat hurt, and after his hand quested, he felt the bandages there too.

"Is he all here now?" Cathy's cheery voice piped in. Sam smiled.

"All here, I think."

"What?" Chris asked, puzzled.

"You kept crying out in your sleep, Chris." Chris had to make an effort to turn his head to try and see Cathy – who was sitting on the foot of the occupied second bed in the room.

"Danny!"

"He's okay Chris." Sam caught him before he tried to lunge from the bed. "He's just asleep this time. He ran away from the hospital to come after you when Mr. Smith told him what happened, and he wasn't anywhere near feeling well enough to attempt walking."

Chris gazed at Danny, relief mixing with recalled pain. He didn't want to think about it. "What happened? How did we get out of there?"

Sam fidgeted uneasily, then looked to Cathy. "Well…" Cathy stretched a leg over to Chris' bed, then the rest of her body followed. "Apparently, that Zerellian jelly in Danny? It's all fused now. It's part of him. So the Zerellians smelled it and since its motherworm jelly they obeyed him."

That didn't process well. "What?" Chris asked blankly.

"Well, the worker worms thought that yo…" she hesitated and looked to Sam.

"They thought you had stolen the motherworm and hurt her cause you were scanning the area and 'threatening' the jelly," Sam explained. "They thought you were threatening Danny and were going to… well anyways, Danny yelled at them to stop and they did."

"So we figured we could order them to let us go, and make peace with the Nubillians – which by the way, are Zerellians with armor," Cathy said cheerfully. "So the motherworm is being taken care of, the warship is preparing to leave, and Grandpa is really proud of us!"

"And I missed all this?" Chris asked. "Wow, being unconscious sucks."

He sat for a moment as he thought over all the new information and Cathy chattered on. So, everything was tucked neatly away and happy endings for the aliens.

"What about Danny?" Chris suddenly asked, looking at the boy in the other bed. He could feel pain starting to mount somewhere inside. "What's going to happen to him?"

Sam frowned. "I'm not really sure," she confessed, wrinkling her brow. "He's got that jelly all over inside him now. It's… permanent."

Chris swallowed hard to suppress whatever was rising in his throat to say. He didn't want to voice his fears. Danny just slept on, tucked away under another electric blanket. The beeping had turned out to be his health monitor, gauging his temperature. Even with the blanket, the readout was incredibly low for a human.

Danny wasn't all human. Not anymore. But as Chris looked at him, he was still Danny. Still the boy he had fallen hopelessly and utterly, head-over-heels, completely lost his mind in love with.

And he had lost him.

He was awake. Hell, he was alive. The most precious person in Chris' world was alive and would be okay, if a little different. His sun was back, and yet… Everything felt so much colder and darker. Because his sun was far away now.

He remembered what he had promised himself before – he would stay only as long as Danny needed him. The sun would be just fine without him.

He doesn't need me anymore.

Cathy and Sam looked confused for a moment and Chris realized he had spoken that last thought out loud. He barely kept his fingers wrapped around his self control as he excused himself to the adjoining bathroom. He ignored that a majority of his body was in bandages, including his foot being back into a brace. It didn't matter as he staggered to the bathroom. Their pain didn't register as he shut the door behind him and locked it…

Then everything shattered.

To Be Continued...

Author's Note:

"Angel of Broken Hearts" seems to be Chris' theme song for this...
Are we ever going to see Danny's side in this story? Uh, no. Real life does not come with omniscience. And we all know Cathy's theme is "Pop Goes the Weasel" on endless repeat.

Anyways. yeah. So, votage. Sequel: yay or nay.