Promptly prompted prompts? Or, y'know, something.
My brain is struggling with five ideas at the same time and while I kind of want to write all of them, I also don't feel like jumping into a real story right now. The solution, of course, would be drabbling all over the place, which is why your support would be most appreciated. Which is to say:
Prompt me! And others! And yourself! Like so:
Prompt me! And others! And yourself! Like so:
- I queued ( Read more... )
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He knows he's broken.
Not on the surface, and not in any way that matters to anyone else, but somewhere deep inside Danny knows there's something not quite right. Something different than it was ten years before, changed, altered from the living, breathing thing it was, slowly dying until it was the cold, hard knot that sits in his gut, only making itself known when he gets too close to reviving it. When he gets too close to feeling there, he retreats, and it stays dead.
He avoids it without even realizing it most of the time, backing off whenever it starts to feel like it might be waking up. Grace is an exception--he loves her wholly and without reserve--but what he feels for her lives in a different part of him, completely removed from that thing in his gut. He trusts her with his heart in a way he thinks he never can with another human being.
The...situation, for lack of a better word (or any word he feels comfortable applying without feeling like a scumbag) with Rachel is...there. It's comfortable, a way to reconnect with something beyond his job without threatening to wake anything unsettling inside him. And, if he's honest with himself, which he tries to be in every part of his life except this one, sometimes it feels a little like justice. She cheated on him, she left him--if he gets to be the other party to some of that, isn't it a little bit justified? (No, it's not a part of him he likes or is particularly proud of, but he's human, and admitting it has to earn him a few points, right?)
It's not Rachel that feels threatening, though. As he sees Steve go over the edge of a cliff, Danny feels that thing in his gut wake up, greedy hands reaching out to wrap around his stomach and twist. He knows he moves, knows he calls out because he feels it in his throat somehow, but he couldn't say what happened in what was likely only a few seconds before he saw Steve had not fallen any further than the ledge, but they felt like an eternity.
He can feel that thing rumbling around inside him as he races for a spot with cell phone reception--and dammit, next time they go anywhere off a main highway on this godforsaken hellhole they are taking a fucking sat phone. He feels it heavier than lead, pinching at him, as he races back down to find Steve still on the ledge and still awake and breathing. But it's not until he sees Steve being lifted into the chopper, on his way to being checked out and not dying suddenly and leaving Danny behind permanently does the thing feel warm and alive again, taking over his whole body with a warmth and happiness he'd forgotten, like some sort of rare drug.
He can't help himself, he has to express it. Partly because he knows he can shrug it off with a joke later, especially since Steve won't think he's serious anyway. But the impromptu sign language settles the thing inside him for the moment, happy for now to have had its say, and as the chopper becomes a spec in the distance, Danny turns and carries the thing in his gut, heavier when it's alive, but somehow comforting, back down the mountain.
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And I rather liked the descriptions of the 'monster'.
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