teen wolf (tv): e pili mai
fandom: teen wolf (tv)
pairing/rating: Danny-centric, pg13
summary: For the prompt: Danny and Jackson trapped in a cave-in with a Monster of the Week, flashing back to the important moments in their friendship.
With bonus hurt!Jackson and Danny saving the day like a big damn hero.
Danny’s classmates suffer under the illusion that Danny spends family trips lounging on the beach in low slung board-shorts sipping pineapple flavoured cocktails served in hollowed out coconut shells. In reality, he slumps, sticky and hot, in an auntie’s half-broken lawn chair, listening to his grandfather complain about haoles and wishing for rain to cool the damp sweat that pools in the hollows of his throat.
“It’s true,” he rasps, his throat raw from dust. “No beach, no lounging. Paradise in Waianae is a joke.” He wipes at Jackson’s forehead, at the edges of long cut that stretches from the top of his eyebrow into the hairline above his ear. His hands are sticky with Jackson’s blood, drenched through and slippery, and there’s a hint of something white in the cut before the blood wells too deep and thick to see anything of all. He swallows down bile.
Jackson laughs, gurgling, and his teeth are spotted black from the blood he hacks from his lungs. “Those names,” he says weakly, “you’re making them up half the time, I swear.”
Danny tries a laugh that comes out raw and broken. “Take your white ass to west Honolulu and see how you do.” He clutches Jackson a little tighter to himself, Jackson’s head lolling in his lap, and his hands leave long clear imprints of his fingers, streaks of red in Jackson’s shirt. Jackson sucks in another breath, one foot kicking weakly with the effort, and Danny tries to wipe the blood out of Jackson’s eyes, rocking slightly.
“Ow,” Jackson mumbles. “Tell me, about, tell me about that thing you did.”
“You’re going to have to be slightly more specific,” Danny says, falling back into the slightly acidic tone he usually uses with Jackson, when things are normal, when Jackson is leaning against his locker and smirking in that way he does, waiting for Danny to find the book he needs for their next class.
Jackson smiles again, brighter. “Asshole. That thing you did, when Lydia was in the hospital.”
Danny remembers. He remembers how no one seemed to know what was going on, but some people seemed to know more than others, he remembers how good Jackson looked in that suit, the grin Jackson had when he let Danny fix his tie for him, the joke he made about Danny and the water polo captain who’d come out earlier that month.
He remembers that tie hanging loosely from Jackson’s fingers as he sits in the hospital chair, the way Jackson’s voice had cracked on the phone.
“You called me,” he says slowly, blinking dust from his eyes. In his lap, Jackson murmurs. “You--I never heard you sound like that.”
“You took me to the ocean,” Jackson says, and Danny nods even though he doesn’t think Jackson can see him. It was cold, Danny thinks, closing his eyes to remember it properly, but the waves were slow and lazy, gentle. “Had that flower thing,” Jackson says, his voice even quieter.
“Yeah,” Danny says, and then laughs a little, “the lei for my cousin’s middle school graduation. My mom almost killed me.”
//
“Where are we going?” Jackson asks, and Danny casts a deliberate look about the beach parking lot as he turns the engine off. Jackson lets out a sound that Danny wouldn’t mistake for a laugh in a hundred years, and gets out of the car like an old man, weighed down by time and regret.
They walk down to the ocean, slipping on loose sand in the dark, and Danny grimaces slightly as he feels the grains slip into his shoes and prick against his feet through his socks. The moon is bright, bright enough for him to see the bottom of slicks go dusty white from the sand, bright enough to glitter oddly off the water.
“I should get back to the hospital,” Jackson says, and Danny says nothing. The flowers of the lei are soft against his fingers, and he clenches his fist until he feels the bite of fisherman’s twine, because he saw Lydia, heard the nurses talking. Danny has always been a pragmatist, and he thinks that it doesn’t matter one way or the other if Jackson goes back now or later, won’t change the news that’s sure to come.
“Here,” he says, instead, and beckons Jackson to him with a finger. Jackson is trembling, very slightly, and his hair is mussed, his shirt buttons undone.
“Lydia,” he says brokenly, and Danny takes his hand. He’s touched Jackson’s hand before, high fives and offers to be pulled to his feet, but this is different, this is him lacing their fingers and Jackson clutching at him hard enough to hurt, and he brushes his thumb against the back of Jackson’s palm and draws him into the shallows.
Jackson sucks in a gasp involuntarily, reflexively, and balks, so Danny tugs him hard enough that he has to step forward to keep his balance. He feels the fabric of his dress slacks get wet, heavy, and pushes forward until the tops of his knees are submerged and he’s shivering very slightly from the cold. He brings up their joined hands and drops the lei over them, lets go so the circle of flowers falls down to Jackson’s elbow. Danny drops his arm, and his hand trails in the water, chills the tips of his fingers and under his nails. The water tugs at his legs in slow motions, and he takes a deep breath, another.
Jackson drops the lei without grace, and it splashes droplets against their silk shirts. They watch it float, close to them and then further away, a little closer and then a lot further away, until Danny can’t feel his legs anymore and his shoes are full of wet sand.
//
“It was because I thought she was going to die,” Danny says. “It’s an old custom.” Jackson groans in pain, muffling it quietly, trying to not let Danny hear, and Danny suddenly thinks of something that makes him laugh with an edge of hysteria.
“What?” Jackson asks, one hand pressed to his ribs.
“I forgot to cut the twine,” Danny says, swallowing a small fit of chuckles. “Probably strangled some endangered narwhal or something.”
Jackson is silent for a moment, and then spasms in silent mirth. “Poor fucker,” he says, and then dissolves into painful sounding giggles, Danny joining him until they putter out and die. “Wait until I tell Berkeley,” Jackson says, “you’ll have to come as my tutor after they reject your ass.”
“Please,” Danny says, smiling through cracked lips, “no one rejects my ass.”
“Gay,” Jackson says, and coughs a little. “We should get moving again.”
“Are you healing?” Danny asks. “You said it was fast.”
“It is,” Jackson says hesitantly. “I think. I’ve never been this badly injured before.”
Fanfuckingtastic, Danny thinks, but braces his arms behind Jackson’s shoulders and starts to push him to his feet. He barely makes it a few inches before Jackson spasms, gasping and cursing. He eases Jackson back into his lap and gropes in the dim light for Jackson’s hand.
“Maybe a few more minutes,” Jackson says. “Tell me another story, Scheherazade.”
“A literary reference,” Danny says, tightening his hold on Jackson’s hand. “you must be dying.”
“Your nerd is rubbing off on me,” Jackson says, and does something Danny thinks is supposed to be a leer.
//
Danny comes out to Jackson in eighth grade. Jackson laughs, stops, looks at Danny seriously for a beat, and then shrugs. “Okay,” he says, and steals half an orange from Danny’s lunch tray. They’re sitting in the back of the school, leaned back against a wall, and Danny picks at the loose threads in the holes of his jeans.
“I’m telling my parents later,” he says, and Jackson nods, turning the orange over his hands. The bell rings, and Danny takes their trays to the trash. He comes back for his bag and Jackson catches him in a hug, fleeting and awkward, his face squished into Jackson’s collarbone.
“See you,” Jackson mumbles, and walks away quickly.
//
“You rode your bike over later,” Danny remembers, “you threw gravel at my window and half-shouted ten lines of the Romeo and Juliet balcony soliloquy before I got you to shut up.”
Jackson doesn’t answer, and his weight is suddenly boneless, lolling. Danny shakes him.
“Jackson?” He pushes at the sticky mess of blood on Jackson’s face, tries to pull his eyelids up. “Jackson!” Jackson slides limply from Danny’s lap, quiet and pale, and Danny shakes him once, twice, desperately.
“Shit,” Danny pants, pushing himself to his feet, “shit, shit, shit.” He drags Jackson, halting and stumbling, down the uneven tunnel of rubble, tripping on rocks and debris, his fingers slipping with sweat as he clutches desperately at Jackson’s shoulders. It’s getting lighter, step by laboured step, and soon Danny can see the dust filtering through the air. He strains to look ahead, and his grip on Jackson slips. Danny falls hard to his knees in order to cushion Jackson’s head against the ground, and grunts in pain. He sits still for a moment, breathing hard, and that’s when he hears it.
A very faint shout, echoed and tumbled around the stones and the dirt. --anny!. “Don’t go anywhere,” he tells Jackson, smoothing at his hair, and he tucks Jackson’s arms against his chest for warmth. “I’ll be right back.” Danny hesitates, and then turns Jackson on his side, takes off at the fastest run he can manage, trying not to turn his ankle, and within fifty yards he can hear it clearly, Jackson! Danny!.
“Here!” he shouts, speeding up. He rounds a slight bend and skids to a stop, pebbles skittering out from his shoes. He touches the caved in barrier and curses. “Hey!” he shouts again, “over here.” There’s a scuffle, muted yelling, and then something moves on the other side of the barrier, close. Very close, close enough for fingers to suddenly appear in a large crack between two stones around the height of Danny’s knees. “Stop that,” Danny says automatically, “what if there’s an aftershock?”
“Danny?” The fingers wriggle at him, then disappear.
Danny tries to lick moisture back into his lips. “Stiles?”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “you okay? Jackson there?”
“No,” Danny says, swallowing hard, “Jackson--he’s unconscious. Shouldn’t he be healing faster?”
“Dunno,” Stiles says, sounding distracted. “Okay, hold on. Scott’s going to get Derek.” His fingers reappear, nails broken and bleeding. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Danny says, sitting down heavily. “if your hands get crushed and amputated don’t come crying to me.”
“Not even to weep tears into your manly shoulders?” Stiles asks, and Danny chokes out a laugh.
“My shoulders are manly,” he admits tiredly, tipping his head back and closing his eyes.
“Very broad,” Stiles notes cheerfully, and then gets serious. “Listen, Danny, that thing’s still around, and we’re not so sure it’s on this side.”
Danny tenses, his muscles aching, and pushes himself to his feet. “I’ve got to get back to Jackson.”
“Wait,” Stiles says quickly, “listen. This is good news. When it dies, all of its destruction sort of--snaps back. Everyone’s looking for it, even Mr. Argent. The faster it gets killed, the faster you get back to the land of the above. I’ve got these herbs here--” Stiles cuts off abruptly, and Danny can hear muffled voices. “Ah,” Stiles says, sounding relieved, “okay Derek says Jackson being unconscious is okay, it can accelerate the healing process or some shit.” His fingers disappear for a few seconds and reappear with a ziplock bag of white powder.
“Snaps back,” Danny repeats, his brain still playing catch up.
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “we’ve been calling it the Sasquatch Deux Ex Machina. Well, just me, but it’ll catch on. It’s catchy. Catchy like a fox.”
“Shut the fuck up, Stiles,” Danny says, and immediately feels much better. Stiles shakes the bag impatiently, and Danny squints at it.
“Spread it in a circle,” Stiles says. “It traps Sasquatch in the center and kills it.”
Danny frowns. “How?”
“Ah,” Stiles says, “well. We’re not sure--” Danny reaches for the bag in Stiles’ hands and Stiles grabs him, gripping hard.
“You can do this,” Stiles says, and the thin bones of his fingers curl around Danny’s wrists like iron bands. “You will walk out of here alive.”
Danny takes a deep breath, then another. “Yeah,” he says, and Stiles draws his hands back to the other side of the wall. “So what--”
A roar echoes through the cavern, rumbling along the ground and the walls and kicking up layers of dust and dirt and fine ground rock, gritty in Danny’s mouth and eyes. He coughs, waving a hand in the air ineffectually, and a rolling growl stretches to him, back from where he left Jackson lying unconscious on the floor.
“Jackson,” he coughs, and starts to run, fumbling blind as he blinks tears to wash his eyes.
“Danny!” Stiles shouts from behind him, growing fainter and fainter, “be the spark, Danny!”
//
When Jackson and Lydia passed their first month anniversary, Danny grudgingly goes to coffee with Lydia, who is dressed exactingly perfect, down to the last stray curl of hair in place and the scarf wound artfully around her neck even though it’s fucking California and doesn’t get much colder than fifty five in the dead of winter.
“You don’t like me,” she deduces within the first five minutes of sipping at mediocre lattes, and Danny shrugs. He doesn’t make a habit of lying just because.
“Not just now,” he allows, and Lydia smiles.
“Jealous?”
Danny considers this. “No,” he says, and she arches one perfectly coiffed eyebrow. “He won’t treat you right,” Danny says finally, and pops the lid off his coffee to slip the thin wooden stirrer into the badly-mixed drink. Lydia considers about this for a long moment, and Danny thinks about asking for more vanilla syrup.
“I won’t treat him right either,” she says, and Danny’s gaze jerks to hers, surprised. They stare at each other for a beat, and then Danny tilts his head, cautious. “I love him,” Lydia says simply, and smiles.
Danny leans back and stretches his spine until it cracks. “So do I,” he says. Lydia tips her cup at him in a toast, smile turned teasing, and Danny feels the corners of his mouth curling up to match.
//
“Jackson,” Danny pants, falling to his side, and Jackson blinks at him.
“Where could you possibly have gone,” he asks, sounding grouchy, and Danny almost laughs. “The thing is down here,” he adds, and Danny fumbles to open the ziplock bag Stiles had given him.
“Yeah,” Danny says, taking a second to make his hands stop shaking and his thinking to clear. “Okay,” he says. Sasquatch wasn’t between where Stiles was and here, so it has to be between here and where they started. “Okay,” he says again, and starts crawling away from Jackson, thinking he’ll set up the trap fifty yards away for some margin.
He gets maybe fifteen yards.
//
When Danny was ten, his parents took him on a trip to the Big Island. They went snorkeling, to the store with the famous cookies, to the coffee place with sample cups that make Danny’s face twist, and then to Halema’umau, the flat brown plain with the sudden drop and the air that smells like salt and rotten eggs. His mother takes him by the hand to the edge, and they kneel to the side while the tourists gawk and take pictures. Danny’s aunts take out heavy packages, rice and flowers and sweet sausage wrapped in heavy green leaves.
“Wahi kapu,” his mother whispers, and Danny bows his head obediently, but his eyes strain for the red glow in the distance, the blasts of sharp heat that waft from the rim of the crater, the smoke that spirals higher and higher.
//
The first thing Danny thinks is that it really does look like Sasquatch. Big and tall and hulking and covered in coarse brown fur, eyes that glow in the dark.
“Danny!” Jackson says, panicked, and Danny moves in a scrambling crab-walk backwards as the thing takes a slow, even step forward. It growls again, and the rumble of it vibrates up through Danny’s ribcage. “Get behind me,” Jackson says, pulling at Danny’s shoulder, and he growls weakly at the thing in response. Danny stops with his shoulder pressed against Jackson’s, and lifts his lip in his best imitation of a snarl. The thing doesn’t seem overly impressed, and it takes another step forward. Jackson struggles up to his knees, swaying, and tries to push himself between Danny and the creature.
It’s this, more than anything, that makes Danny straighten out his spine and square his shoulders. “No,” he says clearly, and flings the entire bag of whatever the fuck it is powder outwards, little piles of dust falling in crystallized clumps around the thing’s feet. He and Jackson hold their collective breath, and Danny’s hand finds Jackson’s.
The thing sneezes. Shakes its head a little, and moves forward again.
“Well shit,” Jackson mutters. “it was good to know you, man.”
Be the spark, Danny thinks, be the spark be the spark be the spark. He closes his eyes, clenches them shut and screws up his face in concentration. The spark, he thinks, the spark the spark the spark.
The thing reaches out and tosses Jackson aside like a doll, and Jackson can’t help a short yowl of pain and fear, and Danny’s eyes snap open and the thing is there, right there in his face with his lips pulled back over elongated fangs and Jackson makes a broken, mangled noise as he tries to drag himself over to Danny’s side and Danny. Just. Loses it.
He howls, an angry, completely terrified scream, and there’s a tingling in his fingers and he suddenly smells sulfur and red dirt and tastes the ocean and he can hear his mother murmuring in his mind mai kahiki ka wahine--
The thing screams, and heat blasts past Danny’s face, scorching the tips of his hair, and the earth rumbles--
Jackson shouts his name--
Danny watches his vision narrow and feels himself slump sideways.
//
Danny wakes with his head pillowed Jackson’s lap. “Gay,” he rasps, and tastes ash. He blinks, his eyes adjusting to light, and sees Jackson’s face.
Jackson smiles at him, looking gaunt. “I told you I’m everybody’s type.” His face is black with soot, with suspicious twin tracks of cleaner skin. “The others will be here soon,” he says. “Derek is checking the thing out, Stiles is bringing an ambulance.”
Danny coughs. “What happened?”
Jackson wipes at his face, grimacing, and then more gently at Danny’s. “You went completely clobbering time on his ass. Scorched the living fuck out of him.”
“You’re mixing superheros,” Danny says, and Jackson laughs a little.
“You’re magical,” he says, teasing, and Danny smirks.
“It’s the gay,” he says seriously, “it was always fire. Never rainbows.”
“Well,” Jackson says, “that explains Stilinski.” Danny laughs, sudden and bright, and rolls over to retch weakly. Jackson waits until he’s finished and pulls him back onto his lap.
“I can sit,” Danny says, starting to rise, and Jackson holds him down with werewolf strength.
“We have a minute,” he says, and his fingers braid into Danny’s.
Danny holds tight, feels the pulse beat in Jackson’s wrist.
“Yeah,” he says.
pairing/rating: Danny-centric, pg13
summary: For the prompt: Danny and Jackson trapped in a cave-in with a Monster of the Week, flashing back to the important moments in their friendship.
With bonus hurt!Jackson and Danny saving the day like a big damn hero.
Danny’s classmates suffer under the illusion that Danny spends family trips lounging on the beach in low slung board-shorts sipping pineapple flavoured cocktails served in hollowed out coconut shells. In reality, he slumps, sticky and hot, in an auntie’s half-broken lawn chair, listening to his grandfather complain about haoles and wishing for rain to cool the damp sweat that pools in the hollows of his throat.
“It’s true,” he rasps, his throat raw from dust. “No beach, no lounging. Paradise in Waianae is a joke.” He wipes at Jackson’s forehead, at the edges of long cut that stretches from the top of his eyebrow into the hairline above his ear. His hands are sticky with Jackson’s blood, drenched through and slippery, and there’s a hint of something white in the cut before the blood wells too deep and thick to see anything of all. He swallows down bile.
Jackson laughs, gurgling, and his teeth are spotted black from the blood he hacks from his lungs. “Those names,” he says weakly, “you’re making them up half the time, I swear.”
Danny tries a laugh that comes out raw and broken. “Take your white ass to west Honolulu and see how you do.” He clutches Jackson a little tighter to himself, Jackson’s head lolling in his lap, and his hands leave long clear imprints of his fingers, streaks of red in Jackson’s shirt. Jackson sucks in another breath, one foot kicking weakly with the effort, and Danny tries to wipe the blood out of Jackson’s eyes, rocking slightly.
“Ow,” Jackson mumbles. “Tell me, about, tell me about that thing you did.”
“You’re going to have to be slightly more specific,” Danny says, falling back into the slightly acidic tone he usually uses with Jackson, when things are normal, when Jackson is leaning against his locker and smirking in that way he does, waiting for Danny to find the book he needs for their next class.
Jackson smiles again, brighter. “Asshole. That thing you did, when Lydia was in the hospital.”
Danny remembers. He remembers how no one seemed to know what was going on, but some people seemed to know more than others, he remembers how good Jackson looked in that suit, the grin Jackson had when he let Danny fix his tie for him, the joke he made about Danny and the water polo captain who’d come out earlier that month.
He remembers that tie hanging loosely from Jackson’s fingers as he sits in the hospital chair, the way Jackson’s voice had cracked on the phone.
“You called me,” he says slowly, blinking dust from his eyes. In his lap, Jackson murmurs. “You--I never heard you sound like that.”
“You took me to the ocean,” Jackson says, and Danny nods even though he doesn’t think Jackson can see him. It was cold, Danny thinks, closing his eyes to remember it properly, but the waves were slow and lazy, gentle. “Had that flower thing,” Jackson says, his voice even quieter.
“Yeah,” Danny says, and then laughs a little, “the lei for my cousin’s middle school graduation. My mom almost killed me.”
//
“Where are we going?” Jackson asks, and Danny casts a deliberate look about the beach parking lot as he turns the engine off. Jackson lets out a sound that Danny wouldn’t mistake for a laugh in a hundred years, and gets out of the car like an old man, weighed down by time and regret.
They walk down to the ocean, slipping on loose sand in the dark, and Danny grimaces slightly as he feels the grains slip into his shoes and prick against his feet through his socks. The moon is bright, bright enough for him to see the bottom of slicks go dusty white from the sand, bright enough to glitter oddly off the water.
“I should get back to the hospital,” Jackson says, and Danny says nothing. The flowers of the lei are soft against his fingers, and he clenches his fist until he feels the bite of fisherman’s twine, because he saw Lydia, heard the nurses talking. Danny has always been a pragmatist, and he thinks that it doesn’t matter one way or the other if Jackson goes back now or later, won’t change the news that’s sure to come.
“Here,” he says, instead, and beckons Jackson to him with a finger. Jackson is trembling, very slightly, and his hair is mussed, his shirt buttons undone.
“Lydia,” he says brokenly, and Danny takes his hand. He’s touched Jackson’s hand before, high fives and offers to be pulled to his feet, but this is different, this is him lacing their fingers and Jackson clutching at him hard enough to hurt, and he brushes his thumb against the back of Jackson’s palm and draws him into the shallows.
Jackson sucks in a gasp involuntarily, reflexively, and balks, so Danny tugs him hard enough that he has to step forward to keep his balance. He feels the fabric of his dress slacks get wet, heavy, and pushes forward until the tops of his knees are submerged and he’s shivering very slightly from the cold. He brings up their joined hands and drops the lei over them, lets go so the circle of flowers falls down to Jackson’s elbow. Danny drops his arm, and his hand trails in the water, chills the tips of his fingers and under his nails. The water tugs at his legs in slow motions, and he takes a deep breath, another.
Jackson drops the lei without grace, and it splashes droplets against their silk shirts. They watch it float, close to them and then further away, a little closer and then a lot further away, until Danny can’t feel his legs anymore and his shoes are full of wet sand.
//
“It was because I thought she was going to die,” Danny says. “It’s an old custom.” Jackson groans in pain, muffling it quietly, trying to not let Danny hear, and Danny suddenly thinks of something that makes him laugh with an edge of hysteria.
“What?” Jackson asks, one hand pressed to his ribs.
“I forgot to cut the twine,” Danny says, swallowing a small fit of chuckles. “Probably strangled some endangered narwhal or something.”
Jackson is silent for a moment, and then spasms in silent mirth. “Poor fucker,” he says, and then dissolves into painful sounding giggles, Danny joining him until they putter out and die. “Wait until I tell Berkeley,” Jackson says, “you’ll have to come as my tutor after they reject your ass.”
“Please,” Danny says, smiling through cracked lips, “no one rejects my ass.”
“Gay,” Jackson says, and coughs a little. “We should get moving again.”
“Are you healing?” Danny asks. “You said it was fast.”
“It is,” Jackson says hesitantly. “I think. I’ve never been this badly injured before.”
Fanfuckingtastic, Danny thinks, but braces his arms behind Jackson’s shoulders and starts to push him to his feet. He barely makes it a few inches before Jackson spasms, gasping and cursing. He eases Jackson back into his lap and gropes in the dim light for Jackson’s hand.
“Maybe a few more minutes,” Jackson says. “Tell me another story, Scheherazade.”
“A literary reference,” Danny says, tightening his hold on Jackson’s hand. “you must be dying.”
“Your nerd is rubbing off on me,” Jackson says, and does something Danny thinks is supposed to be a leer.
//
Danny comes out to Jackson in eighth grade. Jackson laughs, stops, looks at Danny seriously for a beat, and then shrugs. “Okay,” he says, and steals half an orange from Danny’s lunch tray. They’re sitting in the back of the school, leaned back against a wall, and Danny picks at the loose threads in the holes of his jeans.
“I’m telling my parents later,” he says, and Jackson nods, turning the orange over his hands. The bell rings, and Danny takes their trays to the trash. He comes back for his bag and Jackson catches him in a hug, fleeting and awkward, his face squished into Jackson’s collarbone.
“See you,” Jackson mumbles, and walks away quickly.
//
“You rode your bike over later,” Danny remembers, “you threw gravel at my window and half-shouted ten lines of the Romeo and Juliet balcony soliloquy before I got you to shut up.”
Jackson doesn’t answer, and his weight is suddenly boneless, lolling. Danny shakes him.
“Jackson?” He pushes at the sticky mess of blood on Jackson’s face, tries to pull his eyelids up. “Jackson!” Jackson slides limply from Danny’s lap, quiet and pale, and Danny shakes him once, twice, desperately.
“Shit,” Danny pants, pushing himself to his feet, “shit, shit, shit.” He drags Jackson, halting and stumbling, down the uneven tunnel of rubble, tripping on rocks and debris, his fingers slipping with sweat as he clutches desperately at Jackson’s shoulders. It’s getting lighter, step by laboured step, and soon Danny can see the dust filtering through the air. He strains to look ahead, and his grip on Jackson slips. Danny falls hard to his knees in order to cushion Jackson’s head against the ground, and grunts in pain. He sits still for a moment, breathing hard, and that’s when he hears it.
A very faint shout, echoed and tumbled around the stones and the dirt. --anny!. “Don’t go anywhere,” he tells Jackson, smoothing at his hair, and he tucks Jackson’s arms against his chest for warmth. “I’ll be right back.” Danny hesitates, and then turns Jackson on his side, takes off at the fastest run he can manage, trying not to turn his ankle, and within fifty yards he can hear it clearly, Jackson! Danny!.
“Here!” he shouts, speeding up. He rounds a slight bend and skids to a stop, pebbles skittering out from his shoes. He touches the caved in barrier and curses. “Hey!” he shouts again, “over here.” There’s a scuffle, muted yelling, and then something moves on the other side of the barrier, close. Very close, close enough for fingers to suddenly appear in a large crack between two stones around the height of Danny’s knees. “Stop that,” Danny says automatically, “what if there’s an aftershock?”
“Danny?” The fingers wriggle at him, then disappear.
Danny tries to lick moisture back into his lips. “Stiles?”
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “you okay? Jackson there?”
“No,” Danny says, swallowing hard, “Jackson--he’s unconscious. Shouldn’t he be healing faster?”
“Dunno,” Stiles says, sounding distracted. “Okay, hold on. Scott’s going to get Derek.” His fingers reappear, nails broken and bleeding. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Danny says, sitting down heavily. “if your hands get crushed and amputated don’t come crying to me.”
“Not even to weep tears into your manly shoulders?” Stiles asks, and Danny chokes out a laugh.
“My shoulders are manly,” he admits tiredly, tipping his head back and closing his eyes.
“Very broad,” Stiles notes cheerfully, and then gets serious. “Listen, Danny, that thing’s still around, and we’re not so sure it’s on this side.”
Danny tenses, his muscles aching, and pushes himself to his feet. “I’ve got to get back to Jackson.”
“Wait,” Stiles says quickly, “listen. This is good news. When it dies, all of its destruction sort of--snaps back. Everyone’s looking for it, even Mr. Argent. The faster it gets killed, the faster you get back to the land of the above. I’ve got these herbs here--” Stiles cuts off abruptly, and Danny can hear muffled voices. “Ah,” Stiles says, sounding relieved, “okay Derek says Jackson being unconscious is okay, it can accelerate the healing process or some shit.” His fingers disappear for a few seconds and reappear with a ziplock bag of white powder.
“Snaps back,” Danny repeats, his brain still playing catch up.
“Yeah,” Stiles says, “we’ve been calling it the Sasquatch Deux Ex Machina. Well, just me, but it’ll catch on. It’s catchy. Catchy like a fox.”
“Shut the fuck up, Stiles,” Danny says, and immediately feels much better. Stiles shakes the bag impatiently, and Danny squints at it.
“Spread it in a circle,” Stiles says. “It traps Sasquatch in the center and kills it.”
Danny frowns. “How?”
“Ah,” Stiles says, “well. We’re not sure--” Danny reaches for the bag in Stiles’ hands and Stiles grabs him, gripping hard.
“You can do this,” Stiles says, and the thin bones of his fingers curl around Danny’s wrists like iron bands. “You will walk out of here alive.”
Danny takes a deep breath, then another. “Yeah,” he says, and Stiles draws his hands back to the other side of the wall. “So what--”
A roar echoes through the cavern, rumbling along the ground and the walls and kicking up layers of dust and dirt and fine ground rock, gritty in Danny’s mouth and eyes. He coughs, waving a hand in the air ineffectually, and a rolling growl stretches to him, back from where he left Jackson lying unconscious on the floor.
“Jackson,” he coughs, and starts to run, fumbling blind as he blinks tears to wash his eyes.
“Danny!” Stiles shouts from behind him, growing fainter and fainter, “be the spark, Danny!”
//
When Jackson and Lydia passed their first month anniversary, Danny grudgingly goes to coffee with Lydia, who is dressed exactingly perfect, down to the last stray curl of hair in place and the scarf wound artfully around her neck even though it’s fucking California and doesn’t get much colder than fifty five in the dead of winter.
“You don’t like me,” she deduces within the first five minutes of sipping at mediocre lattes, and Danny shrugs. He doesn’t make a habit of lying just because.
“Not just now,” he allows, and Lydia smiles.
“Jealous?”
Danny considers this. “No,” he says, and she arches one perfectly coiffed eyebrow. “He won’t treat you right,” Danny says finally, and pops the lid off his coffee to slip the thin wooden stirrer into the badly-mixed drink. Lydia considers about this for a long moment, and Danny thinks about asking for more vanilla syrup.
“I won’t treat him right either,” she says, and Danny’s gaze jerks to hers, surprised. They stare at each other for a beat, and then Danny tilts his head, cautious. “I love him,” Lydia says simply, and smiles.
Danny leans back and stretches his spine until it cracks. “So do I,” he says. Lydia tips her cup at him in a toast, smile turned teasing, and Danny feels the corners of his mouth curling up to match.
//
“Jackson,” Danny pants, falling to his side, and Jackson blinks at him.
“Where could you possibly have gone,” he asks, sounding grouchy, and Danny almost laughs. “The thing is down here,” he adds, and Danny fumbles to open the ziplock bag Stiles had given him.
“Yeah,” Danny says, taking a second to make his hands stop shaking and his thinking to clear. “Okay,” he says. Sasquatch wasn’t between where Stiles was and here, so it has to be between here and where they started. “Okay,” he says again, and starts crawling away from Jackson, thinking he’ll set up the trap fifty yards away for some margin.
He gets maybe fifteen yards.
//
When Danny was ten, his parents took him on a trip to the Big Island. They went snorkeling, to the store with the famous cookies, to the coffee place with sample cups that make Danny’s face twist, and then to Halema’umau, the flat brown plain with the sudden drop and the air that smells like salt and rotten eggs. His mother takes him by the hand to the edge, and they kneel to the side while the tourists gawk and take pictures. Danny’s aunts take out heavy packages, rice and flowers and sweet sausage wrapped in heavy green leaves.
“Wahi kapu,” his mother whispers, and Danny bows his head obediently, but his eyes strain for the red glow in the distance, the blasts of sharp heat that waft from the rim of the crater, the smoke that spirals higher and higher.
//
The first thing Danny thinks is that it really does look like Sasquatch. Big and tall and hulking and covered in coarse brown fur, eyes that glow in the dark.
“Danny!” Jackson says, panicked, and Danny moves in a scrambling crab-walk backwards as the thing takes a slow, even step forward. It growls again, and the rumble of it vibrates up through Danny’s ribcage. “Get behind me,” Jackson says, pulling at Danny’s shoulder, and he growls weakly at the thing in response. Danny stops with his shoulder pressed against Jackson’s, and lifts his lip in his best imitation of a snarl. The thing doesn’t seem overly impressed, and it takes another step forward. Jackson struggles up to his knees, swaying, and tries to push himself between Danny and the creature.
It’s this, more than anything, that makes Danny straighten out his spine and square his shoulders. “No,” he says clearly, and flings the entire bag of whatever the fuck it is powder outwards, little piles of dust falling in crystallized clumps around the thing’s feet. He and Jackson hold their collective breath, and Danny’s hand finds Jackson’s.
The thing sneezes. Shakes its head a little, and moves forward again.
“Well shit,” Jackson mutters. “it was good to know you, man.”
Be the spark, Danny thinks, be the spark be the spark be the spark. He closes his eyes, clenches them shut and screws up his face in concentration. The spark, he thinks, the spark the spark the spark.
The thing reaches out and tosses Jackson aside like a doll, and Jackson can’t help a short yowl of pain and fear, and Danny’s eyes snap open and the thing is there, right there in his face with his lips pulled back over elongated fangs and Jackson makes a broken, mangled noise as he tries to drag himself over to Danny’s side and Danny. Just. Loses it.
He howls, an angry, completely terrified scream, and there’s a tingling in his fingers and he suddenly smells sulfur and red dirt and tastes the ocean and he can hear his mother murmuring in his mind mai kahiki ka wahine--
The thing screams, and heat blasts past Danny’s face, scorching the tips of his hair, and the earth rumbles--
Jackson shouts his name--
Danny watches his vision narrow and feels himself slump sideways.
//
Danny wakes with his head pillowed Jackson’s lap. “Gay,” he rasps, and tastes ash. He blinks, his eyes adjusting to light, and sees Jackson’s face.
Jackson smiles at him, looking gaunt. “I told you I’m everybody’s type.” His face is black with soot, with suspicious twin tracks of cleaner skin. “The others will be here soon,” he says. “Derek is checking the thing out, Stiles is bringing an ambulance.”
Danny coughs. “What happened?”
Jackson wipes at his face, grimacing, and then more gently at Danny’s. “You went completely clobbering time on his ass. Scorched the living fuck out of him.”
“You’re mixing superheros,” Danny says, and Jackson laughs a little.
“You’re magical,” he says, teasing, and Danny smirks.
“It’s the gay,” he says seriously, “it was always fire. Never rainbows.”
“Well,” Jackson says, “that explains Stilinski.” Danny laughs, sudden and bright, and rolls over to retch weakly. Jackson waits until he’s finished and pulls him back onto his lap.
“I can sit,” Danny says, starting to rise, and Jackson holds him down with werewolf strength.
“We have a minute,” he says, and his fingers braid into Danny’s.
Danny holds tight, feels the pulse beat in Jackson’s wrist.
“Yeah,” he says.