afraid of standing still [2/4]
Title: afraid of standing still
Author: sherlockelly
Pairing: Dany Heatley/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Real people, fake story.
Word Count: 25,795
Summary: Dany Heatley continues to drift violently away from the idea of the man he had wanted to be.
one . two . three . four . notes
May 11th, 2004
Prague, Czech Republic
He tries to maintain his last bit of control, fighting against the warmth pooling through his body. His thigh muscles quiver like they do after a tough game and he concentrates on keeping still and quiet. It bothers him that he shakes like this, especially before they’ve really even started. It makes him feel delicate and small. But Michael loves it.
“Dany, baby, don’t,” Michael warns, his voice soft in Dany’s ear. It’s followed by warm, wet lips and tongue working over his earlobe and biting at the skin just below. “Yer thinkin’ too much. Jus’ breathe,” Michael’s nose presses into the hollow of his neck and he inhales sharply before closing his lips around the thumping pulse and sucking. Michael had flown all the way out to Europe for a weeks visit after his finals, not just for this, but Dany couldn’t help but give in.
Dany shuts his eyes and feels the slow twitching in his legs start to build again.
“‘Ere ya go,” Michael growls into his neck. “S’been a while, gonna hurt if ya don’ relax.”
Michael is paused just this side of inside him and his choppy breathing is making it hard not to comply. The lube and sweat has their bodies gliding together easily and Dany wants this so badly he’s about to beg for it if he can find his voice.
“Ready?” The calm voice speaks again.
“Been ready,” Dany forces out the words and smirks despite himself. Teeth nip at his throat in response, but moments later, with one quick push, Michael begins to glide in.
The air rushes from Dany lungs as he gapes helplessly, feeling each inch slide deeper. “Oh, fuck, Mike.” It comes out like a purr and Dany throws his head back as the warm throbbing envelops him.
It has been a while, at least three weeks with the way the end of the season travel had worked out, not to mention Michael’s finals schedule, then the tournament overseas, but the wait was certainly worth it.
Michael buries himself to the hilt and Dany feels the short staccato breaths puffing over his bared throat.
“Missed you so much Dany, fucking so much.” Michael’s lips feel cool on Dany’s flushed skin and he pushes up into the man above him for more. His legs are still trembling uncontrollably and he locks his ankles at Michael’s lower back to try and keep from being too distracting.
“Missed you, too.” The reprieve will be short, they both know; with the lockout looming, Dany had made it clear that he’d most likely be in Europe much longer than just a summer once September rolled around, but for now, this is enough. He tips his head back and allows himself to surrender.
July 12th, 2004
Calgary, AB
Dany knows that he’s had too much to drink. Hell, he knew that three drinks ago, but he’s chasing his own blackout at this point and Michael seems to feel the exact moment when Dany decides to stop pretending.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Michael isn’t exactly sober himself but he’s far from drunk and the concern in his eyes is as frustrating to Dany as everything else.
“Why the fuck won’t you just ask me!?”
Michael seems taken aback for a moment, but he barely skips a beat. His patience might be the most maddening part right now. “Ask you what?”
“You fucking know what!” These last few months suddenly feel like nothing but waiting for the other shoe to drop; for Michael to see Dany for what he really is and disappear into the past. He wants to get this over with so he can be alone again.
“Dany, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You do to! I know you do! Fuckin’ the whole world does, so why wouldn’t you!” He sits up fast enough to make his head spin, knocking the coffee table. What’s left of his beer spills across the glass tabletop. Michael scoots up, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion but that’s as close as he comes. Neither moves to clean the mess up.
“Is something wrong?” Michael keeps his voice calm and even, but it does nothing to make Dany feel better, not this time.
“You tell me! Is there something? There is fucking something!” He knows that Michael knows. He has to!
“You’re drunk, all right? Calm down, it’s not worth getting upset over right now, whatever it is.”
Every fiber in Dany’s body disagrees with that sentence so much that it actually aches in his chest. He sucks in a shuddering breath, his fists balling up at his sides. God help Michael if he decides to move an inch closer, Dany thinks as the bile builds up in his throat.
“‘Whatever it is?’” Dany’s voice is eerily stable to his own ears and he sees the unsettled look on Michael’s face.
“Dany, I swear to God I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry! I wish that I did but you’re not telling me. I can’t know if you won’t tell me.”
“Fuck you!” He’s so mad he can’t see straight, though how much of that is the booze is another story altogether. Dany makes several swipes for the toppled bottle before it’s in his hands and he’s so fucking mad he could just-
-the bottle explodes as it hits the wall, the dregs of beer left streaking amber down the wallpaper before Dany makes the connection that it was him that threw it. He sees Michael jump out of the corner of his eye and the momentary satisfaction when he catches sight of the fear flickering across his face is quickly dowsed with a sickly recognition.
God-fucking-damnit, he looks like Dan right now. Hands on the dash. He’s too drunk for this.
The sound that breaks the silence is a pained wail and it takes him a minute to recognize it as his own. When he shuts his eyes, his head spins and it takes only the churning of his stomach for his knees to give out.
He collapses on the couch, head lolling to rest on his lap. It’s too much. Everything is all just too much. The touch of a hand on his back startles him upright and he’s a fraction of a second away from throwing a devastating punch before he remembers that this is Michael.
Michael that is flinching away from him as his fist shakes, drawn back with bent elbow. His mind lurches forward slower than his body.
He lowers his hands back down, palms resting on his thighs as Michael wipes away some tears that Dany didn’t even know he’d let slip.
What’s worse than the fact that he realizes Michael is telling the truth about not knowing is the knowledge that he now has to be the one to tell him.
The last bit of control he has in his body snaps and Dany slumps over in Michael’s lap, finally letting the tears come. He doesn’t deserve to lie. He doesn’t deserve any of this, not one moment of his life.
‘You must let yourself feel every wretched thing.’
But he cannot find the strength to pull away from the warm arms and gentle whispers that wrap around him. No one should be allowed to touch him. He doesn’t deserve--
“I love you, I love you. Everything will be all right.”
It won’t be, Dany thinks, but to hear those words from Michael, fuck it all, it helps.
He stays up all night crying until he’s sober again, and Michael doesn’t let go once. Not until Dany’s eyes open and he doesn’t remember falling asleep on the couch does he realize that Michael hasn’t moved an inch.
The pale blue eyes, bloodshot from not sleeping, peer down at him through a veil of lashes and Dany’s stomach flips with dread for the coming confrontation. His throat feels raw from sobbing and his temples pound with the rhythm of his heartbeat. He wonders if maybe he’s supposed to be embarrassed, but all he can be is sick right now and even that feels like too much.
Michael opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out before he’s closing it up again.
All morning Dany waits for Michael to say what he’d wanted to say. When the moment finally comes, Michael doesn’t judge him, doesn’t ask him what the fuck that was all about. He doesn’t mention a moment of the breakdown at all except to kiss Dany’s forehead and whisper ‘Tell me when you’re ready.’
Three days later, Dany is.
October 6th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
His mother had told him that a teammate was here to see him. Dany didn’t have the energy to protest. Once she’s gone from his room though, he feels alone. Desperately alone.
He’s moments away from crying out for her like he did when he was little, but the door to his room opens slowly and the presence of another is as close to comfortable as he thinks he’ll ever be again.
He’s taken something away from all of them, from everyone. He understands this more completely when Slava Kozlov looks at him from the doorway and Dany sees the haggard lines on the man’s face. He’s been crying.
Dany has to look away.
He counts the footsteps across the linoleum and listens as the chair creaks when Kozlov sits down.
He doesn’t want to be the first one to speak; he doesn’t know what to say. Kozzy leans forward, elbow resting on Dany’s bed and he clears his throat.
“I will tell you,” Slava begins, clearing his throat again, as though the words are stuck somewhere inside of him. “Just listen. Can you do this?”
Dany nods, lips pursed as he tries to keep his face steady.
“I was still in Russia, just a baby; only nineteen years old. We were late for practice. Me and--. I don’t remember, ah, not a whole lot of the day. I was speeding, didn’t want coach to be mad at me for being late; there was a blind left turn, they tell me.”
Dany’s stomach drops. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to have to know.
“In the hospital, they told me after, the car lost control, swerved off the road. I hit the windshield, face first. One day in a coma and I woke up. First thing, I ask about him, how he was doing after the accident. They tell me Kirill, my best friend, Kirill Tarasov. He hit the windshield, too. But he died right there on the road. Alone.
"For years, it has been twelve years. For all of them, I am unhappy, angry. I was the driver. I was responsible. He trusts me to get him there and I fail him. In the worst way, I fail him. My fault.”
He goes silent and Dany can hear himself breathing shallowly. In and out, in and out. It seems like all he can do now is breathe and wait. Slava holds his head in his hands and speaks into his lap, "Why does this happen again? I don't want to see it again."
Dany feels like he’s witnessing his own initiation to some horrific club. Time crawls as he waits for Slava to say more, say anything.
He isn’t sure how much time has passed when Kozlov finally looks him in the eye. “Dany,” he says it delicately, like this is the first time he’s ever used his first name, though with a strange twinge in his heart, Dany realizes that this may be the case. He feels a clammy warmth enveloping his hand and when he looks down, he’s surprised that he can see the Russian shaking as he takes Dany’s hand in his.
“This will be in your head,” he bows down, swallowing hard and biting his lip as he pauses, “for the rest of your life.”
Again the silence seems to stretch on for hours. The throbbing in Dany’s jaw gives him something to focus on as Slava blinks back the tears in his eyes. Dany wonders if maybe he should cry too, if his silence is damning. But he’s too numb, has cried for too long already to do anything at the moment.
Slava finally speaks as though with a sudden, great realization. “There are only broken words for a shattered man,” he mumbles, shaking his head, and the expression on his face looks so private Dany isn’t sure that the words are even meant for him.
“There are people, friends. Family. They will tell you ‘it gets easier.’” His accent is thick and lilting. “They are lying. It will not get easier. You will never wake up one morning and feel better about yourself than the day before. But, one day, you will come to live with this. And when you do, those same people, your friends, your family, they will mistake this acceptance for ‘easier’. But they will be wrong.
“Your life from this moment onward will be in two parts. You will have ‘before’ and you will have ‘after’. It will never go back to ‘before’. You will never be who you were.”
The hand clutching his own squeezes and Dany feels himself squeezing back. He wants to comfort his teammate, wants him to stop talking, stop crying. Tell him this isn’t a wound that he need open. This moment he’s referring to, this person that he thinks Dany is now, none of it feels real enough yet. The ‘you’ that Slava keeps mentioning is not familiar enough to be a ‘me’. Dany bites his lip until he can taste blood, reopening the split, but Kozlov starts to speak again and he barely has time to be distracted.
“As difficult as that may be to hear, I haven’t come to heal you. Those that come to do that are not your friends. You are not theirs to fix. No one will fix this, not even you. Not even time. The best thing that you can do now, the only thing that you can do, is to be honest about how you are feeling to them and especially to yourself. And Dany, solnyshko, you must feel. You must let yourself feel every wretched thing.”
Kozlov exhales and bows his head. Dany waits for him to say more even as the words already spoken swirl around inside his muddled brain and fall just short of sorting themselves out. His heart breaks all over again in the meantime, and Slava doesn’t say another word; he just holds on.
Dany can see Kozlov’s shoulders shaking slightly as the broken man before him allows himself to feel this own wretched things.
July 16th, 2004
Calgary, AB
“One day I’ll teach you to cook more than just macaroni,” Michael pinches Dany playfully, “then you can be the one cooking me dinner.”
“Maybe one day,” Dany agrees, reclining back onto Michael’s lap and closing his eyes when the fingers tangle up in his hair. “But why rush that, ya know? When you’re obviously the better chef already.” He feels the playful tug on one of his curls and opens his eyes up to Michael’s face.
He’s smiling, but the shadows under his eyes tell Dany all of the worry hidden just below the surface.
“Mike--,” the words are all there, somewhere in his mind, everything that he wants or needs to say just swirling around the whirlpool of his thoughts but-he doesn’t know where to even begin.
“Dany, I told you, when you’re ready.” Sometimes Dany hates that Michael can see right through him.
“I am. I am ready. I just, I--,” he opens and closes his mouth and nothing comes out but a squeak of nonsense. “This is never-this is not something I’ve ever had to tell before.”
Dany sits up abruptly, but doesn’t even flinch when Michael’s fingers rip lose from his hair. He turns to sit cross-legged facing the other man but he can’t meet Michael’s eyes. He doesn’t want to see his face when he admits what he is; what he’s done.
Michael is picking strands of Dany’s knotted curls from where they’ve twisted around his fingers. Dany watches as he drops them one by one to the floor. He has the urge to pick them back up, like part of himself is being discarded.
“I--,” his throat nearly closes up as he tries to speak, “I killed him.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
“I killed him. It was my fault. I killed him.”
“Dany--,” Michael reaches to touch him but Dany pulls away. It’s not supposed to happen like this. Michael is supposed to look appalled, not empathetic.
“Don’t! You can’t touch me!” Dany’s head throbs as his tries to keep the memories at bay, as though he could ever talk about it without reliving it.
“I-please. I don’t understand.”
“I killed him! Aren’t you listening to me?! I killed him! I’m a murderer!” Dany shouts the word he’s kept in secret for himself and he swears he can see it in the air, hovering between the two of them. He’s never said it out loud before, not even alone, and the moment it escapes his subconscious, he feels it haunting him.
“You’re not.” Michael sounds far away; Dany’s head spins.
“How can you say that if you don’t even know? I am! Don’t tell me you can’t see that!” He sounds hysterical to his own ears but the words are coming a mile a minute now and he can’t shut up the voice in his head. More, more, faster. “That’s all this is! That’s what happened and that’s the fucking word for it, Michael! He’s not alive anymore and it’s my fucking fault so what the hell does it make me?! What does it make me if not a mur--,”
“Dany!” The other man’s voice screams loud enough to shut him up. He can hear the tears in Michael’s voice and that’s the only thing that makes him look. The expression on his face is enough to knock the rest of the air out of Dany’s lungs. “Dany, I don’t understand! Please! Just tell me what happened!”
He can’t. None of this is so easy that he can just say the words; and maybe the words don’t exist anywhere for this. He’s not sure that what he has are even feelings. Maybe it’s all just pieces of things that jaggedly try to fit together and create some semblance of a reality leftover. His reality.
He’s felt just as out of control of his life as he did the car, screeching and skidding in slow motion and he’s only gritting his teeth and closing his eyes and bracing for the impact. It’s all just bits and pieces and things he heard from other people: memories that might be real or might only exist because he needs them to be there, needs to have the answers to these types of questions.
More than anything, Dany wants to be able to explain how the smell of mulch makes his heart and jaw ache. He wants to have words for the hollowness in his ribcage when he catches himself smiling after a goal, and the way he chokes when his seatbelt tightens even slightly.
He wants to explain why he’s hidden all the old pictures of himself, and why he has to stare at his feet when he passes the family photos that line the walls in his parents’ house in Calgary; how they make him sick, how he wants to scream at that stupid boy with the easy, genuine smile, who feels like someone else sometimes he’s so far removed from it now.
He doesn’t have words for the feelings that come with remembering. And maybe if he did, he’d finally be able to breathe again, really breathe again for the first time, but --
“I was going too fast, too fucking fast, on purpose!” This is a fact. He knows this, the police, his father, they have told him this.
The first time he looked in the mirror after the accident, he’d hobbled to the bathroom in his house. He glanced up by accident. His mother found him thirty minutes later, dry-heaving into the sink, tearing all the stitches in his gums until he was spitting blood.
“On purpose?”
For a week after his parents flew home and he was alone again, he took the stairs without his crutches and brace; the shooting pain in his leg radiated outward until he finally collapsed at the top. Sometimes he would try to crawl the rest of the way to his bedroom, putting all his weight on his knees. He liked knowing if he needed the crutches, he’d have to make his way back to them first.
“To get home before-way too fast. And fucking, out of nowhere, another car. I-I think.” He closes his eyes and the memory is still just this side of existing. “And I tried to-I turned but. I killed him.”
“The other driver?” Michael’s voice is delicate, like glass. Dany opens his eyes. He breathes.
“No, Michael! Dan! Fucking Dan! Next to me, my fucking-my best friend. Next to me. In my car. In my fucking car. Dan. I killed my best friend.”
And like that, everything shatters.
“Oh, Dany.”
“I said don’t touch me!”
“Dany, my love, it was an accident, Dany. You’re not a murderer.”
“It doesn’t matter! Don’t you see that! It doesn’t matter what it was! It doesn’t change what happened.”
Why can’t anyone understand that?
October 5th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
The touch on his shoulder wakes him up so slowly he can practically feel each part of his brain whirring back into consciousness. The last part that emerges from his dreamless sleep wills him to open his eyes against the crackling fluorescents.
He knows enough to wish that he hadn’t when he sees his mother and notices she’s not alone. He sees Lu Anne’s face and his stomach drops.
Her cheeks are mottled pink and she frowns as she grabs for his hands, her clammy palms slipping over his skin before she finally finds a hold. He’s instantly awake now, panic rising. Shut this out, go back in time. He’s hyperventilating before either even opens her mouth.
“No.” It comes out in a pathetic whine. His mother brushes a hand through his dirty, matted curls, pressed limp by the hospital bed. The rush of blood in his ears is starting to blur the corners of his vision and his head spins.
“He’s gone, sweetheart. Danny didn’t make it.”
He trains his eyes on Lu Anne, she dips her head low in confirmation.
Dany is breathing too hard and too fast to answer.
November 20th, 2004
Bern, Switzerland
When Dany looks in the mirror, he doesn’t even recognize himself at first.
It’s exhilarating.
He turns off the bathroom light and watches as his right eye dilates, wide and black in the dim light. The old him stares back with a scared look.
Another flick of his wrist and the bathroom is flooded with light. He squints against it at first, but another look in the mirror and it’s that face he does not know. Not scared, scary.
He smiles.
He feels new.
November 20th, 2004
Bern, Switzerland
He’s whispering into the phone even though he’s alone in his apartment. It’s late enough, or rather, at 4 a.m., early enough, he feels like he should be talking quietly. Briere had made clear his plans to stay the night in Zurich after the game, the first without Dany, but having his personal space back was making Dany itch for some other forms of companionship. Michael’s phone call had been a very welcome distraction from his non-sleep.
“How’s it look?” Michael’s voice is amused, but tinged with worry that Dany can tell he’s trying to mask.
“Weird,” Dany can only laugh.
“And it’s never going to go back to how it was?”
“Naw, the doctor said that it’s totally blown. Something about the muscle that controls the iris, torn or something.”
“Jesus, Dany. That sounds really painful.”
“Well, not now it isn’t. Believe me, Briere won’t shut up about how sorry he is. Like I don’t know it was an accident, even if it is a permanent one.”
“Permanent? It really won’t ever go back?”
“Don’t think so.” Pause. “D’you think you’ll still want me?”
There’s a quiet breathy laugh over the receiver and Michael sounds a lot further than six hours away.
“’Course I do, Dany.”
“But, you haven’t even seen--,”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Dany smiles so wide he’s embarrassed, but his breathing is his only answer and after a bit, Michael speaks again.
“What do the Swiss boys think of it?”
Dany scoffs. “’M way too bruised up to be out and about right now.”
“Out of commission then? Even with all that space to yourself finally?”
Dany catches himself nodding in response. “Eh, yeah.”
“Pity. Doesn’t mean you can’t look.”
“With my one good eye maybe,” he scoffs. “‘Sides, I haven’t left the apartment in a week.”
Michael hums in disapproval; Dany knows that Michael doesn’t like it when he spends too much time alone, and truth be told, Dany doesn’t like it either: too much time to think.
“Doesn’t mean they can’t look.”
“Sorry. Doctor’s orders,” Dany protests smugly. “But what about you?” It’s as if his body suddenly realizes how long it’s been, and simply the rumble of his own words in his chest is enough to get him half-hard.
“What about me?” Michael plays dumb but his voice gets huskier as well. Dany smiles as he makes his way from his living room to his bedroom.
“You been out having fun?” The bed squeaks under his weight as he lays out flat in top of the comforter, sweatpants slung low on his hips, worn t-shirt riding up to his navel as the mattress dips under him.
“Once or twice,” Michael’s voice catches in his throat and Dany loves that they always seem to be on the same page when it comes to moments like these.
“Tell me about him. Please,” he’s already got the phone smashed up against his shoulder and ear as his fingers stroke at the exposed band of skin. He strokes his thumb over the pale patch of curls leading down from his bellybutton, watching how they bend under the weight of his finger.
“A few inches shorter than you, dark auburn hair--,”
“What color is that?”
Michael laughs gruffly and just the sound makes Dany’s cock twitch. “Like a dark brown-red. And big brown eyes.”
“What was his name,” Dany’s fingers slip under the waistband of his sweats but freeze there.
“Don’t remember.”
“Good,” Dany bites his lip. “D’you take him home?”
“What are you wearing?” Michael ignores Dany’s question. “And before you say anything, the only right answer is ‘nothing’.”
Dany lets out a gravelly laugh, his mouth curling into a smile. He misses Michael so much it aches sometimes. None of the boys he’s brought home in the meantime are good enough to fill that hole, and he loves that Michael feels the same.
“Gimme a sec,” Dany is already shimmying out of his sweats and boxers, shucking his t-shirt off and throwing to the floor. It’s warm in the apartment, the heat on full blast, already condensing up the bedroom windows and Dany feels completely alone in the world; no one else on the face of the Earth but Michael.
“Y’good?” Michael’s voice is breathy and Dany knows he’s in much the same position right now in his dorm in Kelowna.
“Yeah. D’you let him fuck you?” Dany doesn’t want to mince words, not tonight. He hasn’t done this for a long time and he’s chasing his release already.
“Dany,” Michael sighs in feigned exasperation. “The only person allowed ta fuck me is you, you know that.”
Dany’s smile curls up, lips over teeth. That’s exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Go on, then.”
“Well,” Michael inhales sharply and Dany pictures Michael’s hand wrapping around his cock, stroking up to the tip as he relives the details. “He had a good mouth.”
Dany groans, finally wrapping his hand around his own length. His hips jump up expectantly and he really wishes Michael were here next to him.
Michael exhales loudly as he speaks. “Got back to his apartment and he was on his knees for me in a second.”
“Fuck, Mike.” He strokes to keep up with the images flashing in his mind.
“Couldn’t take me near as deep as you can, but he fuckin’ tried.”
“I’d kill ta taste ya right now,” Dany’s back arches off the mattress and he pinches his eyes shut harder and pictures it in his head: himself on his knees in front of Michael, sucking him as hard as he wants to after all these weeks apart. How those fingers would twist up in his hair and pull just enough to bring a twinge of pain.
“God, me too, Dany.” Dany lets his legs fall open as he thrusts wantonly into the air; nothing to be embarrassed by here, no one to see him this exposed. The sound of Michael’s voice is almost too much after this long and he wants to be ashamed of the tears in his eyes. “Fuckin’ miss you so-oh-much,” Michael’s voice catches and Dany bites his lip.
“You swear too much,” Dany chuckles, rubbing his thumb over the slit, picturing Michael’s face, flushed and smiling.
“You love it when I talk like that.” Dany cedes his loss there, fisting himself faster.
“Talk to me,” Dany finally exhales. His faltering, panting breaths echo in the room.
“I miss you, I want you. I love you.” Maybe Michael is crying, too. “Come for me.”
He does, stars bursting behind his eyes, a quiet sob on his lips. “L’you too,” he slurs as he spills across his chest, hearing Michael following behind him.
They breathe in arrhythmic synchronicity for a long while until Dany can hear Michael falling asleep.
“Come home,” the man pleads with one of his last rational thoughts before sleep.
The idea of home is foreign to his mind and Dany cringes at his own aversion to the thought of coming back to whatever it is he could truthfully even think of as ‘home’.
“Soon,” he promises, but even he can hear the lie in his voice.
September 29th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
Dany feels like he’s lying on a pile of gravel. Maybe he’s hungover, though he can’t remember even drinking. But God, the way his head is throbbing…
Maybe he’s on the ice, leveled by a hit or a punch. His feet are cold and everything feels heavy. He knows he needs to stay still and wait for the trainer. The ice smells like pine needles and wet leaves.
He can’t open his eyes. Something with a sharp corner digs into his spine and this might not hurt so much if he could just breathe properly, take this compression off his back. He tries to roll over (he knows that he shouldn’t), but his body won’t move, won’t cooperate with the instructions he screams at it in his mind. His chest feels ripped open and he can’t catch his breath.
He thinks he hears himself gasping as he tries to fill his lungs, or maybe that’s tires on pavement.
Everything smells like rubber and hissing, twisted metal and the trainer still hasn’t come yet. Something is wrong.
Dany tries to call for help but he can’t shut his mouth, can’t form the words. It comes out as a groan, and fuck why can’t he move his jaw! What the fuck is going on! The panic seeps into his bones and why the fuck won’t his mouth shut?!
He feels trapped in a spider web, the tangles of tiny threads closing in around him and he tries to kick to break free of this feeling of crawling all over him but his knee feels on fire and there’s someone screaming something at him from maybe a million miles away.
Tiny yellow fairy lights flash through the thin skin of his eyelids but it does nothing to quell the terror bubbling inside of him. He can feel time passing; each second hurts as it rips through his body and crackles frayed nerves to life.
He hears a sound that he recognizes as his voice, a rasping moan that fades the moment it leaves his permanently-parted lips.
Everything is underwater where he is; the ice is melting all around him and sinks deeper into the growing ocean. He can’t move his arms or legs, his face is throbbing. He can only breathe in water when he tries and the edges of his mind are slowly creeping back into blackness.
Maybe he’s dead.
No. He can’t be dead. It hurts too much.
continue to 3
Author: sherlockelly
Pairing: Dany Heatley/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Real people, fake story.
Word Count: 25,795
Summary: Dany Heatley continues to drift violently away from the idea of the man he had wanted to be.
one . two . three . four . notes
May 11th, 2004
Prague, Czech Republic
He tries to maintain his last bit of control, fighting against the warmth pooling through his body. His thigh muscles quiver like they do after a tough game and he concentrates on keeping still and quiet. It bothers him that he shakes like this, especially before they’ve really even started. It makes him feel delicate and small. But Michael loves it.
“Dany, baby, don’t,” Michael warns, his voice soft in Dany’s ear. It’s followed by warm, wet lips and tongue working over his earlobe and biting at the skin just below. “Yer thinkin’ too much. Jus’ breathe,” Michael’s nose presses into the hollow of his neck and he inhales sharply before closing his lips around the thumping pulse and sucking. Michael had flown all the way out to Europe for a weeks visit after his finals, not just for this, but Dany couldn’t help but give in.
Dany shuts his eyes and feels the slow twitching in his legs start to build again.
“‘Ere ya go,” Michael growls into his neck. “S’been a while, gonna hurt if ya don’ relax.”
Michael is paused just this side of inside him and his choppy breathing is making it hard not to comply. The lube and sweat has their bodies gliding together easily and Dany wants this so badly he’s about to beg for it if he can find his voice.
“Ready?” The calm voice speaks again.
“Been ready,” Dany forces out the words and smirks despite himself. Teeth nip at his throat in response, but moments later, with one quick push, Michael begins to glide in.
The air rushes from Dany lungs as he gapes helplessly, feeling each inch slide deeper. “Oh, fuck, Mike.” It comes out like a purr and Dany throws his head back as the warm throbbing envelops him.
It has been a while, at least three weeks with the way the end of the season travel had worked out, not to mention Michael’s finals schedule, then the tournament overseas, but the wait was certainly worth it.
Michael buries himself to the hilt and Dany feels the short staccato breaths puffing over his bared throat.
“Missed you so much Dany, fucking so much.” Michael’s lips feel cool on Dany’s flushed skin and he pushes up into the man above him for more. His legs are still trembling uncontrollably and he locks his ankles at Michael’s lower back to try and keep from being too distracting.
“Missed you, too.” The reprieve will be short, they both know; with the lockout looming, Dany had made it clear that he’d most likely be in Europe much longer than just a summer once September rolled around, but for now, this is enough. He tips his head back and allows himself to surrender.
July 12th, 2004
Calgary, AB
Dany knows that he’s had too much to drink. Hell, he knew that three drinks ago, but he’s chasing his own blackout at this point and Michael seems to feel the exact moment when Dany decides to stop pretending.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Michael isn’t exactly sober himself but he’s far from drunk and the concern in his eyes is as frustrating to Dany as everything else.
“Why the fuck won’t you just ask me!?”
Michael seems taken aback for a moment, but he barely skips a beat. His patience might be the most maddening part right now. “Ask you what?”
“You fucking know what!” These last few months suddenly feel like nothing but waiting for the other shoe to drop; for Michael to see Dany for what he really is and disappear into the past. He wants to get this over with so he can be alone again.
“Dany, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You do to! I know you do! Fuckin’ the whole world does, so why wouldn’t you!” He sits up fast enough to make his head spin, knocking the coffee table. What’s left of his beer spills across the glass tabletop. Michael scoots up, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion but that’s as close as he comes. Neither moves to clean the mess up.
“Is something wrong?” Michael keeps his voice calm and even, but it does nothing to make Dany feel better, not this time.
“You tell me! Is there something? There is fucking something!” He knows that Michael knows. He has to!
“You’re drunk, all right? Calm down, it’s not worth getting upset over right now, whatever it is.”
Every fiber in Dany’s body disagrees with that sentence so much that it actually aches in his chest. He sucks in a shuddering breath, his fists balling up at his sides. God help Michael if he decides to move an inch closer, Dany thinks as the bile builds up in his throat.
“‘Whatever it is?’” Dany’s voice is eerily stable to his own ears and he sees the unsettled look on Michael’s face.
“Dany, I swear to God I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry! I wish that I did but you’re not telling me. I can’t know if you won’t tell me.”
“Fuck you!” He’s so mad he can’t see straight, though how much of that is the booze is another story altogether. Dany makes several swipes for the toppled bottle before it’s in his hands and he’s so fucking mad he could just-
-the bottle explodes as it hits the wall, the dregs of beer left streaking amber down the wallpaper before Dany makes the connection that it was him that threw it. He sees Michael jump out of the corner of his eye and the momentary satisfaction when he catches sight of the fear flickering across his face is quickly dowsed with a sickly recognition.
God-fucking-damnit, he looks like Dan right now. Hands on the dash. He’s too drunk for this.
The sound that breaks the silence is a pained wail and it takes him a minute to recognize it as his own. When he shuts his eyes, his head spins and it takes only the churning of his stomach for his knees to give out.
He collapses on the couch, head lolling to rest on his lap. It’s too much. Everything is all just too much. The touch of a hand on his back startles him upright and he’s a fraction of a second away from throwing a devastating punch before he remembers that this is Michael.
Michael that is flinching away from him as his fist shakes, drawn back with bent elbow. His mind lurches forward slower than his body.
He lowers his hands back down, palms resting on his thighs as Michael wipes away some tears that Dany didn’t even know he’d let slip.
What’s worse than the fact that he realizes Michael is telling the truth about not knowing is the knowledge that he now has to be the one to tell him.
The last bit of control he has in his body snaps and Dany slumps over in Michael’s lap, finally letting the tears come. He doesn’t deserve to lie. He doesn’t deserve any of this, not one moment of his life.
‘You must let yourself feel every wretched thing.’
But he cannot find the strength to pull away from the warm arms and gentle whispers that wrap around him. No one should be allowed to touch him. He doesn’t deserve--
“I love you, I love you. Everything will be all right.”
It won’t be, Dany thinks, but to hear those words from Michael, fuck it all, it helps.
He stays up all night crying until he’s sober again, and Michael doesn’t let go once. Not until Dany’s eyes open and he doesn’t remember falling asleep on the couch does he realize that Michael hasn’t moved an inch.
The pale blue eyes, bloodshot from not sleeping, peer down at him through a veil of lashes and Dany’s stomach flips with dread for the coming confrontation. His throat feels raw from sobbing and his temples pound with the rhythm of his heartbeat. He wonders if maybe he’s supposed to be embarrassed, but all he can be is sick right now and even that feels like too much.
Michael opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out before he’s closing it up again.
All morning Dany waits for Michael to say what he’d wanted to say. When the moment finally comes, Michael doesn’t judge him, doesn’t ask him what the fuck that was all about. He doesn’t mention a moment of the breakdown at all except to kiss Dany’s forehead and whisper ‘Tell me when you’re ready.’
Three days later, Dany is.
October 6th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
His mother had told him that a teammate was here to see him. Dany didn’t have the energy to protest. Once she’s gone from his room though, he feels alone. Desperately alone.
He’s moments away from crying out for her like he did when he was little, but the door to his room opens slowly and the presence of another is as close to comfortable as he thinks he’ll ever be again.
He’s taken something away from all of them, from everyone. He understands this more completely when Slava Kozlov looks at him from the doorway and Dany sees the haggard lines on the man’s face. He’s been crying.
Dany has to look away.
He counts the footsteps across the linoleum and listens as the chair creaks when Kozlov sits down.
He doesn’t want to be the first one to speak; he doesn’t know what to say. Kozzy leans forward, elbow resting on Dany’s bed and he clears his throat.
“I will tell you,” Slava begins, clearing his throat again, as though the words are stuck somewhere inside of him. “Just listen. Can you do this?”
Dany nods, lips pursed as he tries to keep his face steady.
“I was still in Russia, just a baby; only nineteen years old. We were late for practice. Me and--. I don’t remember, ah, not a whole lot of the day. I was speeding, didn’t want coach to be mad at me for being late; there was a blind left turn, they tell me.”
Dany’s stomach drops. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to have to know.
“In the hospital, they told me after, the car lost control, swerved off the road. I hit the windshield, face first. One day in a coma and I woke up. First thing, I ask about him, how he was doing after the accident. They tell me Kirill, my best friend, Kirill Tarasov. He hit the windshield, too. But he died right there on the road. Alone.
"For years, it has been twelve years. For all of them, I am unhappy, angry. I was the driver. I was responsible. He trusts me to get him there and I fail him. In the worst way, I fail him. My fault.”
He goes silent and Dany can hear himself breathing shallowly. In and out, in and out. It seems like all he can do now is breathe and wait. Slava holds his head in his hands and speaks into his lap, "Why does this happen again? I don't want to see it again."
Dany feels like he’s witnessing his own initiation to some horrific club. Time crawls as he waits for Slava to say more, say anything.
He isn’t sure how much time has passed when Kozlov finally looks him in the eye. “Dany,” he says it delicately, like this is the first time he’s ever used his first name, though with a strange twinge in his heart, Dany realizes that this may be the case. He feels a clammy warmth enveloping his hand and when he looks down, he’s surprised that he can see the Russian shaking as he takes Dany’s hand in his.
“This will be in your head,” he bows down, swallowing hard and biting his lip as he pauses, “for the rest of your life.”
Again the silence seems to stretch on for hours. The throbbing in Dany’s jaw gives him something to focus on as Slava blinks back the tears in his eyes. Dany wonders if maybe he should cry too, if his silence is damning. But he’s too numb, has cried for too long already to do anything at the moment.
Slava finally speaks as though with a sudden, great realization. “There are only broken words for a shattered man,” he mumbles, shaking his head, and the expression on his face looks so private Dany isn’t sure that the words are even meant for him.
“There are people, friends. Family. They will tell you ‘it gets easier.’” His accent is thick and lilting. “They are lying. It will not get easier. You will never wake up one morning and feel better about yourself than the day before. But, one day, you will come to live with this. And when you do, those same people, your friends, your family, they will mistake this acceptance for ‘easier’. But they will be wrong.
“Your life from this moment onward will be in two parts. You will have ‘before’ and you will have ‘after’. It will never go back to ‘before’. You will never be who you were.”
The hand clutching his own squeezes and Dany feels himself squeezing back. He wants to comfort his teammate, wants him to stop talking, stop crying. Tell him this isn’t a wound that he need open. This moment he’s referring to, this person that he thinks Dany is now, none of it feels real enough yet. The ‘you’ that Slava keeps mentioning is not familiar enough to be a ‘me’. Dany bites his lip until he can taste blood, reopening the split, but Kozlov starts to speak again and he barely has time to be distracted.
“As difficult as that may be to hear, I haven’t come to heal you. Those that come to do that are not your friends. You are not theirs to fix. No one will fix this, not even you. Not even time. The best thing that you can do now, the only thing that you can do, is to be honest about how you are feeling to them and especially to yourself. And Dany, solnyshko, you must feel. You must let yourself feel every wretched thing.”
Kozlov exhales and bows his head. Dany waits for him to say more even as the words already spoken swirl around inside his muddled brain and fall just short of sorting themselves out. His heart breaks all over again in the meantime, and Slava doesn’t say another word; he just holds on.
Dany can see Kozlov’s shoulders shaking slightly as the broken man before him allows himself to feel this own wretched things.
July 16th, 2004
Calgary, AB
“One day I’ll teach you to cook more than just macaroni,” Michael pinches Dany playfully, “then you can be the one cooking me dinner.”
“Maybe one day,” Dany agrees, reclining back onto Michael’s lap and closing his eyes when the fingers tangle up in his hair. “But why rush that, ya know? When you’re obviously the better chef already.” He feels the playful tug on one of his curls and opens his eyes up to Michael’s face.
He’s smiling, but the shadows under his eyes tell Dany all of the worry hidden just below the surface.
“Mike--,” the words are all there, somewhere in his mind, everything that he wants or needs to say just swirling around the whirlpool of his thoughts but-he doesn’t know where to even begin.
“Dany, I told you, when you’re ready.” Sometimes Dany hates that Michael can see right through him.
“I am. I am ready. I just, I--,” he opens and closes his mouth and nothing comes out but a squeak of nonsense. “This is never-this is not something I’ve ever had to tell before.”
Dany sits up abruptly, but doesn’t even flinch when Michael’s fingers rip lose from his hair. He turns to sit cross-legged facing the other man but he can’t meet Michael’s eyes. He doesn’t want to see his face when he admits what he is; what he’s done.
Michael is picking strands of Dany’s knotted curls from where they’ve twisted around his fingers. Dany watches as he drops them one by one to the floor. He has the urge to pick them back up, like part of himself is being discarded.
“I--,” his throat nearly closes up as he tries to speak, “I killed him.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
“I killed him. It was my fault. I killed him.”
“Dany--,” Michael reaches to touch him but Dany pulls away. It’s not supposed to happen like this. Michael is supposed to look appalled, not empathetic.
“Don’t! You can’t touch me!” Dany’s head throbs as his tries to keep the memories at bay, as though he could ever talk about it without reliving it.
“I-please. I don’t understand.”
“I killed him! Aren’t you listening to me?! I killed him! I’m a murderer!” Dany shouts the word he’s kept in secret for himself and he swears he can see it in the air, hovering between the two of them. He’s never said it out loud before, not even alone, and the moment it escapes his subconscious, he feels it haunting him.
“You’re not.” Michael sounds far away; Dany’s head spins.
“How can you say that if you don’t even know? I am! Don’t tell me you can’t see that!” He sounds hysterical to his own ears but the words are coming a mile a minute now and he can’t shut up the voice in his head. More, more, faster. “That’s all this is! That’s what happened and that’s the fucking word for it, Michael! He’s not alive anymore and it’s my fucking fault so what the hell does it make me?! What does it make me if not a mur--,”
“Dany!” The other man’s voice screams loud enough to shut him up. He can hear the tears in Michael’s voice and that’s the only thing that makes him look. The expression on his face is enough to knock the rest of the air out of Dany’s lungs. “Dany, I don’t understand! Please! Just tell me what happened!”
He can’t. None of this is so easy that he can just say the words; and maybe the words don’t exist anywhere for this. He’s not sure that what he has are even feelings. Maybe it’s all just pieces of things that jaggedly try to fit together and create some semblance of a reality leftover. His reality.
He’s felt just as out of control of his life as he did the car, screeching and skidding in slow motion and he’s only gritting his teeth and closing his eyes and bracing for the impact. It’s all just bits and pieces and things he heard from other people: memories that might be real or might only exist because he needs them to be there, needs to have the answers to these types of questions.
More than anything, Dany wants to be able to explain how the smell of mulch makes his heart and jaw ache. He wants to have words for the hollowness in his ribcage when he catches himself smiling after a goal, and the way he chokes when his seatbelt tightens even slightly.
He wants to explain why he’s hidden all the old pictures of himself, and why he has to stare at his feet when he passes the family photos that line the walls in his parents’ house in Calgary; how they make him sick, how he wants to scream at that stupid boy with the easy, genuine smile, who feels like someone else sometimes he’s so far removed from it now.
He doesn’t have words for the feelings that come with remembering. And maybe if he did, he’d finally be able to breathe again, really breathe again for the first time, but --
“I was going too fast, too fucking fast, on purpose!” This is a fact. He knows this, the police, his father, they have told him this.
The first time he looked in the mirror after the accident, he’d hobbled to the bathroom in his house. He glanced up by accident. His mother found him thirty minutes later, dry-heaving into the sink, tearing all the stitches in his gums until he was spitting blood.
“On purpose?”
For a week after his parents flew home and he was alone again, he took the stairs without his crutches and brace; the shooting pain in his leg radiated outward until he finally collapsed at the top. Sometimes he would try to crawl the rest of the way to his bedroom, putting all his weight on his knees. He liked knowing if he needed the crutches, he’d have to make his way back to them first.
“To get home before-way too fast. And fucking, out of nowhere, another car. I-I think.” He closes his eyes and the memory is still just this side of existing. “And I tried to-I turned but. I killed him.”
“The other driver?” Michael’s voice is delicate, like glass. Dany opens his eyes. He breathes.
“No, Michael! Dan! Fucking Dan! Next to me, my fucking-my best friend. Next to me. In my car. In my fucking car. Dan. I killed my best friend.”
And like that, everything shatters.
“Oh, Dany.”
“I said don’t touch me!”
“Dany, my love, it was an accident, Dany. You’re not a murderer.”
“It doesn’t matter! Don’t you see that! It doesn’t matter what it was! It doesn’t change what happened.”
Why can’t anyone understand that?
October 5th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
The touch on his shoulder wakes him up so slowly he can practically feel each part of his brain whirring back into consciousness. The last part that emerges from his dreamless sleep wills him to open his eyes against the crackling fluorescents.
He knows enough to wish that he hadn’t when he sees his mother and notices she’s not alone. He sees Lu Anne’s face and his stomach drops.
Her cheeks are mottled pink and she frowns as she grabs for his hands, her clammy palms slipping over his skin before she finally finds a hold. He’s instantly awake now, panic rising. Shut this out, go back in time. He’s hyperventilating before either even opens her mouth.
“No.” It comes out in a pathetic whine. His mother brushes a hand through his dirty, matted curls, pressed limp by the hospital bed. The rush of blood in his ears is starting to blur the corners of his vision and his head spins.
“He’s gone, sweetheart. Danny didn’t make it.”
He trains his eyes on Lu Anne, she dips her head low in confirmation.
Dany is breathing too hard and too fast to answer.
November 20th, 2004
Bern, Switzerland
When Dany looks in the mirror, he doesn’t even recognize himself at first.
It’s exhilarating.
He turns off the bathroom light and watches as his right eye dilates, wide and black in the dim light. The old him stares back with a scared look.
Another flick of his wrist and the bathroom is flooded with light. He squints against it at first, but another look in the mirror and it’s that face he does not know. Not scared, scary.
He smiles.
He feels new.
November 20th, 2004
Bern, Switzerland
He’s whispering into the phone even though he’s alone in his apartment. It’s late enough, or rather, at 4 a.m., early enough, he feels like he should be talking quietly. Briere had made clear his plans to stay the night in Zurich after the game, the first without Dany, but having his personal space back was making Dany itch for some other forms of companionship. Michael’s phone call had been a very welcome distraction from his non-sleep.
“How’s it look?” Michael’s voice is amused, but tinged with worry that Dany can tell he’s trying to mask.
“Weird,” Dany can only laugh.
“And it’s never going to go back to how it was?”
“Naw, the doctor said that it’s totally blown. Something about the muscle that controls the iris, torn or something.”
“Jesus, Dany. That sounds really painful.”
“Well, not now it isn’t. Believe me, Briere won’t shut up about how sorry he is. Like I don’t know it was an accident, even if it is a permanent one.”
“Permanent? It really won’t ever go back?”
“Don’t think so.” Pause. “D’you think you’ll still want me?”
There’s a quiet breathy laugh over the receiver and Michael sounds a lot further than six hours away.
“’Course I do, Dany.”
“But, you haven’t even seen--,”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Dany smiles so wide he’s embarrassed, but his breathing is his only answer and after a bit, Michael speaks again.
“What do the Swiss boys think of it?”
Dany scoffs. “’M way too bruised up to be out and about right now.”
“Out of commission then? Even with all that space to yourself finally?”
Dany catches himself nodding in response. “Eh, yeah.”
“Pity. Doesn’t mean you can’t look.”
“With my one good eye maybe,” he scoffs. “‘Sides, I haven’t left the apartment in a week.”
Michael hums in disapproval; Dany knows that Michael doesn’t like it when he spends too much time alone, and truth be told, Dany doesn’t like it either: too much time to think.
“Doesn’t mean they can’t look.”
“Sorry. Doctor’s orders,” Dany protests smugly. “But what about you?” It’s as if his body suddenly realizes how long it’s been, and simply the rumble of his own words in his chest is enough to get him half-hard.
“What about me?” Michael plays dumb but his voice gets huskier as well. Dany smiles as he makes his way from his living room to his bedroom.
“You been out having fun?” The bed squeaks under his weight as he lays out flat in top of the comforter, sweatpants slung low on his hips, worn t-shirt riding up to his navel as the mattress dips under him.
“Once or twice,” Michael’s voice catches in his throat and Dany loves that they always seem to be on the same page when it comes to moments like these.
“Tell me about him. Please,” he’s already got the phone smashed up against his shoulder and ear as his fingers stroke at the exposed band of skin. He strokes his thumb over the pale patch of curls leading down from his bellybutton, watching how they bend under the weight of his finger.
“A few inches shorter than you, dark auburn hair--,”
“What color is that?”
Michael laughs gruffly and just the sound makes Dany’s cock twitch. “Like a dark brown-red. And big brown eyes.”
“What was his name,” Dany’s fingers slip under the waistband of his sweats but freeze there.
“Don’t remember.”
“Good,” Dany bites his lip. “D’you take him home?”
“What are you wearing?” Michael ignores Dany’s question. “And before you say anything, the only right answer is ‘nothing’.”
Dany lets out a gravelly laugh, his mouth curling into a smile. He misses Michael so much it aches sometimes. None of the boys he’s brought home in the meantime are good enough to fill that hole, and he loves that Michael feels the same.
“Gimme a sec,” Dany is already shimmying out of his sweats and boxers, shucking his t-shirt off and throwing to the floor. It’s warm in the apartment, the heat on full blast, already condensing up the bedroom windows and Dany feels completely alone in the world; no one else on the face of the Earth but Michael.
“Y’good?” Michael’s voice is breathy and Dany knows he’s in much the same position right now in his dorm in Kelowna.
“Yeah. D’you let him fuck you?” Dany doesn’t want to mince words, not tonight. He hasn’t done this for a long time and he’s chasing his release already.
“Dany,” Michael sighs in feigned exasperation. “The only person allowed ta fuck me is you, you know that.”
Dany’s smile curls up, lips over teeth. That’s exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Go on, then.”
“Well,” Michael inhales sharply and Dany pictures Michael’s hand wrapping around his cock, stroking up to the tip as he relives the details. “He had a good mouth.”
Dany groans, finally wrapping his hand around his own length. His hips jump up expectantly and he really wishes Michael were here next to him.
Michael exhales loudly as he speaks. “Got back to his apartment and he was on his knees for me in a second.”
“Fuck, Mike.” He strokes to keep up with the images flashing in his mind.
“Couldn’t take me near as deep as you can, but he fuckin’ tried.”
“I’d kill ta taste ya right now,” Dany’s back arches off the mattress and he pinches his eyes shut harder and pictures it in his head: himself on his knees in front of Michael, sucking him as hard as he wants to after all these weeks apart. How those fingers would twist up in his hair and pull just enough to bring a twinge of pain.
“God, me too, Dany.” Dany lets his legs fall open as he thrusts wantonly into the air; nothing to be embarrassed by here, no one to see him this exposed. The sound of Michael’s voice is almost too much after this long and he wants to be ashamed of the tears in his eyes. “Fuckin’ miss you so-oh-much,” Michael’s voice catches and Dany bites his lip.
“You swear too much,” Dany chuckles, rubbing his thumb over the slit, picturing Michael’s face, flushed and smiling.
“You love it when I talk like that.” Dany cedes his loss there, fisting himself faster.
“Talk to me,” Dany finally exhales. His faltering, panting breaths echo in the room.
“I miss you, I want you. I love you.” Maybe Michael is crying, too. “Come for me.”
He does, stars bursting behind his eyes, a quiet sob on his lips. “L’you too,” he slurs as he spills across his chest, hearing Michael following behind him.
They breathe in arrhythmic synchronicity for a long while until Dany can hear Michael falling asleep.
“Come home,” the man pleads with one of his last rational thoughts before sleep.
The idea of home is foreign to his mind and Dany cringes at his own aversion to the thought of coming back to whatever it is he could truthfully even think of as ‘home’.
“Soon,” he promises, but even he can hear the lie in his voice.
September 29th, 2003
Atlanta, GA
Dany feels like he’s lying on a pile of gravel. Maybe he’s hungover, though he can’t remember even drinking. But God, the way his head is throbbing…
Maybe he’s on the ice, leveled by a hit or a punch. His feet are cold and everything feels heavy. He knows he needs to stay still and wait for the trainer. The ice smells like pine needles and wet leaves.
He can’t open his eyes. Something with a sharp corner digs into his spine and this might not hurt so much if he could just breathe properly, take this compression off his back. He tries to roll over (he knows that he shouldn’t), but his body won’t move, won’t cooperate with the instructions he screams at it in his mind. His chest feels ripped open and he can’t catch his breath.
He thinks he hears himself gasping as he tries to fill his lungs, or maybe that’s tires on pavement.
Everything smells like rubber and hissing, twisted metal and the trainer still hasn’t come yet. Something is wrong.
Dany tries to call for help but he can’t shut his mouth, can’t form the words. It comes out as a groan, and fuck why can’t he move his jaw! What the fuck is going on! The panic seeps into his bones and why the fuck won’t his mouth shut?!
He feels trapped in a spider web, the tangles of tiny threads closing in around him and he tries to kick to break free of this feeling of crawling all over him but his knee feels on fire and there’s someone screaming something at him from maybe a million miles away.
Tiny yellow fairy lights flash through the thin skin of his eyelids but it does nothing to quell the terror bubbling inside of him. He can feel time passing; each second hurts as it rips through his body and crackles frayed nerves to life.
He hears a sound that he recognizes as his voice, a rasping moan that fades the moment it leaves his permanently-parted lips.
Everything is underwater where he is; the ice is melting all around him and sinks deeper into the growing ocean. He can’t move his arms or legs, his face is throbbing. He can only breathe in water when he tries and the edges of his mind are slowly creeping back into blackness.
Maybe he’s dead.
No. He can’t be dead. It hurts too much.
continue to 3