Chapter 29

Danny gasped as he came to. Everything hurt at once, as if his body had waited for him to come to full awareness before it assaulted him with the reality of the wounds he’d sustained.

He remembered the glass, how Ludgate hadn’t been wrong—the mirror world had imploded, taking the fun house with it and impaling Danny from every angle. The pain had been excruciating for one long moment before he caught sight of Mal…and then faded into darkness.

“Danny!”

Groaning as Lynn and Andre rushed up on either side of him, Danny saw that he was in the med room on the hospital bed, covered in tubes and bandages and—oh god, his arms, his chest. It was all he could see of himself, his lower half covered in a blanket, but the top half, what wasn’t bandaged or hooking him up to machines, was a mess of angry, crisscrossed scar tissue.

“You’re okay,” Lynn said, a gentle hand coming to rest on his bandaged wrist.

“You just look like Edward Scissorhands.”

“Andre,” Lynn hissed. Her kind, patient eyes turned to Danny with a warm smile. “You’re healing. The scars will fade. Just relax.”

Easier said than done, since Danny’s healing factor meant he ran through pain meds faster than he could enjoy them and used up IVs like an entire burn ward even when he wasn’t near death. He barely believed he’d survived so many wounds. The trauma alone…

“Hang in there, Danny,” Lynn said. “Just rest. You’re going to be okay.”

She was giving him something, feeding meds into the IV that was—wow, strong, even almost enough to dull the pain, making his head feel fuzzy and eyes flutter with the urge to close. Lynn had perfected her cocktail for treating him, probably filling him with enough…whatever it was to knock out a dinosaur.

But no, wait! Danny didn’t want to sleep.

“…Mal…” he croaked, hand flailing out toward Andre, who caught it, squeezed gently, and met his fading gaze only to lose his smile, looking pinched and sad before Danny drifted into darkness again.

R

The next time Danny awoke, the pain was more manageable. Hours, maybe longer, had passed. The lighting was dimmer in the med room now. His depth perception extended farther than just the bed, and he could see Lynn and Andre mulling about in the main room through the large window, see Stella and Joey huddled together in separate chairs beyond the stretch of his feet, dozing against each other’s shoulders. And he could see his—

“Dad,” Danny squawked in equal excitement and relief as he saw John making a quick dart across the room. His father’s hands grasped one of his in both palms, warm and comforting.

“They told me everything I missed,” John said, taking a seat next to the bed. “I’m so sorry Ludgate used me like that, Danny.”

Danny squeezed his dad’s hand, happy he had enough strength back to manage. “I’m just glad you’re okay. Hermes got you out?” John nodded, and Danny’s eyes drifted to his bare arms and chest again. The scars were fainter now but still jarring. “All that glass…I must look like something out of a Halloween store.”

John huffed. “You look fine to me, kiddo. Getting all that glass out of you…I don’t know how Cho and the others managed.”

Cho…

“Mal!” Danny sat up abruptly as he recalled Andre’s expression. “Where is he?!”

“Danny, calm down.” John tried to push him back to the bed, but Danny fought against him, desperate for answers.

“Where is he?! Is he okay?!”

Stella and Joey stirred, then Lynn and Andre ran in from the other room, but Danny didn’t want to be surrounded and gushed over, happy as he was that everyone seemed to be safe. He had to know about Mal. His father, just like Andre, looked so crestfallen.

“Please…please tell me he’s okay,” Danny said, finally giving in to his father’s attempts to lay him down. He felt so weak, dazed from whatever Lynn had been giving him, or maybe it really was so much damage his body was trying to heal from that it was too tired to fight.

John hushed him as the others encircled the bed, Stella placing a hand on his ankle through the blanket, while Lynn checked his vitals. None of them would meet his eyes, but Danny couldn’t accept the truth he saw coming, didn’t want to believe that it had all been for nothing, that somehow Ludgate had still won.

“No…no, please…”

“Danny,” Stella said, that sad, sympathetic look burning through her smile, preparing him for the worst, when instead she said, “he’s alive. He just…won’t wake up.”

“Hasn’t woken up,” Andre reiterated, almost like a challenge, not to Stella, but to the fates leading their lives down darker and darker paths. “We don’t understand what’s happening to him, Danny, but he’s alive. It just doesn’t make any sense.” He turned his head to look behind him, and it was only then that Danny realized he’d always been looking down past his feet or to his left. He hadn’t yet taken in the room at his right.

Lynn’s hand brushed along his forehead, seemingly satisfied with the readings she was getting before she stepped back, giving Danny a clear view to the other side of the room.

Mal was laid out on another bed, resting on his side facing Danny, eyes closed and breathing steady. Dom sat in a chair against the far wall, awake, with Lucy draped across her from how she slouched out of her own chair, still sleeping. Dom nodded to Danny grimly. Her eyes were heavy. They must have been awake for so long, watching over Mal.

Without any bruises or cuts Danny could see, Mal looked peaceful somehow, only familiar scars revealed on his bare chest.

“Ludgate must have gotten in a lucky shot,” Lynn said. “The stab wound in his back went deep. The truth is, Danny…he shouldn’t be alive. The wound, how long he went untreated, how much he aggravated it, how much blood he lost…”

“But he’s stable?” Danny said, relaxing since he could see Mal clearly from where he lay.

“That’s where the weird comes in,” Andre said. “Cho doesn’t have a healing factor, but when he kept hanging on against the odds, we looked at his blood and…”

“And what?”

“There are traces of Lightning DNA instead of just Ice,” Lynn said.

“What?” Danny looked at each of them in turn. “How is that possible?”

“Whatever you did, Danny,” Stella said, “when you shorted out Ludgate’s belt, some of that energy went into Mal.”

“I can’t believe something like that could happen from just one moment of exposure,” Lynn shook her head. “Unless there have been other times he was in contact with your lightning directly? Not from an offensive attack, but…around you, sparking from your body like in the mirror world?”

Danny remembered more than once during their love making when he’d sparked strongly, eyes glowing, with the hair on Mal’s arms standing on end, especially the night before they faced Ludgate when their powers entwined.

“Yeah…a few times,” he said, not wanting to explain the truth in front of everyone.

“Multiple exposures could have something to do with it,” Lynn said, “but it’s still a one in a million chance that it wouldn’t do more harm than good, or nothing at all. Whatever the answer, because of that connection, however small, his cells have been regenerating. Not as fast as you—”

“He’s healing?”

“Partially. But it’s been slowing down. We don’t know if it’s enough. He’s stable, but…”

“He won’t wake up,” Danny said, the dull ache of failure mingling with his stubborn hope. Mal was alive. He was alive. There was still a chance. “What about Ludgate?”

“Where he belongs,” John said. “Infirmary for now while he heals his burns and…well, Cho gave him a hell of a beating when it was over. Once he’s healthy enough to make it to the courthouse, there’ll be a hearing, not that it’ll take much to get him in jail with a full trial pending. Everyone in Olympus City saw what he tried to do to you.”

Danny had almost forgotten. Ludgate had been broadcasting the fight. He wondered just how much the city had seen. But instead he asked, “My lightning…Ludgate didn’t—”

“Nothing like what’s happening with Cho,” Andre assured him. “No change to his blood, we checked, and he’s healing nice and slow.”

Danny refrained from saying, “Good,” despite how knowledge of the man’s discomfort soothed him, as long as he still lived to pay for his crimes the right way.

“You need to rest, Danny,” Stella patted his ankle again.

“Yes,” Lynn said sternly, “you do. By the time you’re able to get out of this bed, I’m sure Malcolm will open his eyes, and we can really celebrate, alright? In the meantime—”

“Everyone else is fine, right?”

“All present and accounted for,” John said. “Captain Shan, Hephaestus and Hermes, Carla and the kids…”

Danny smiled at that.

“Michael really wants a visit, Zeus,” Lucy called from across the room, groggy but loud enough to catch Danny’s attention. She hadn’t moved off of Dom, but she smiled as she roused from her much needed slumber. “Hurry up and get better so your mug doesn’t scare him too badly, and we’ll bring him in to help you and Mickey recover, okay?”

Danny chuckled as he met her eyes. “Sounds like a deal.”

The melancholy in the room was palpable, but they hadn’t given up hope yet that Mal would wake up. If becoming an Elemental at twenty-eight had taught Danny anything, it was that miracles could happen in the strangest of ways.

“Glad to have you back,” Joey said, big smile beaming from beside Stella.

Even with Mal still asleep, still healing, Danny felt warm and at peace with his extended family around him. “Thank you.”

Lynn’s new concoction worked wonders for a while, but as Danny recovered, his metabolism sped up again without having to expend as many resources healing. Soon, like he was more accustomed to, he burned through everything too quickly to dull the pain or to help him sleep. He found himself staring at the ceiling much of the time. Or at Mal.

They had to roll Mal over every so often, since he couldn’t move on his own. The first time they rolled him away from Danny, the sight of his back made Danny’s breath catch. The scar was gruesome, deep and jagged from however Ludgate had torn the glass free.

Danny eventually slept and discovered in the morning that it had been two days since the fight. By day three, his scars were only the faintest grooves, so he asked for a mirror and only grimaced slightly at the mess of his face. He had a wicked scar through his hairline, but as it healed, the hair was coming back in rapidly. Maybe the most soothing part was being able to hold the mirror without any fear of his reflection.

He could eat normally too and finally convinced Lynn to let him try standing. Even though he ached everywhere, sitting up on the edge of the bed was only a minor struggle. Standing was harder, but he coped and padded slowly across the room to reach Mal’s bed.

Dom stood on the other side, while Lucy came up to Danny to help guide him closer. It felt so natural to have them both there. Dom had left from time to time, Priestly and Oz had come in occasionally, but Lucy only ever went out to the bathroom or to shower. She always came back.

Danny had insisted that he didn’t need to be watched over every minute. They all had the right to sleep at home, get real rest, and could come to visit him while still living their lives. But since Lucy was also there for Mal, she refused to follow suit. Which meant she and Danny had enjoyed several long conversations when it was just the two of them, including one around three in the morning that they hadn’t finished until the sun came up and Andre arrived with coffee.

Lucy had regaled Danny with the few happy memories she could recall from childhood, mostly of Mal whisking her away for birthdays out of their father’s sight or to see movies in the projector room of a rundown theater without paying.

Mal faced Dom’s side of the bed, so Danny reached out tentatively to trace his fingers along the new scar. The muscles jumped, twitched from contact, but nothing they’d done, nothing Lynn had tried, had made any difference. Mal just kept sleeping.

“I have an idea,” Danny said. “I don’t think I can do it yet, but…if I’m up to it tomorrow, I want to try.”

“What are you thinking, Danny?” Lynn asked from behind him.

He pulled his hand back, then lifted the other to fold over Lucy’s on his arm. “What if all he needs is one more jolt?”

R

The morning of day four, when Mal still hadn’t opened his eyes, Danny didn’t care if he felt weak, it had to be enough. The others who had been there when he awoke were all present, with Priestly added, peering curiously from the doorway to see what Danny would do. He’d made them all leave the med room, concerned what his lightning might do if it got out of control, since they still didn’t fully understand what it had done to Mal.

Standing in front of him, Danny reached one hand around Mal’s back to touch the scar and held the other over his heart. Then he started to spark.

He’d shocked others, traveled with people, used his lightning in so many ways, but only Mal had ever experienced Danny giving himself over fully as he had when they were together. He’d done the same when summoning his lightning to take down Ludgate. If that had saved Mal, then Danny had to believe that one more try would wake him up.

Feeling the energy course through him, his eyes glowed brighter as his lightning jolted around him, snapping like static at any nearby metal surface. He held his palms to Mal’s skin and whispered, “Please…don’t leave me alone when I’ve only just found you.”

Ice stirred in Mal, Danny could feel it, then see it as frost began to form from the places Danny touched, expanding over Mal’s skin until it covered every inch of him.

When a gasp broke the collective quiet, Danny gasped too.

R

Mal choked on the rush of air entering his lungs, not even fully remembering that he had taken a breath. He just knew he felt like his heart was going to explode, and he didn’t know how to slow it down. Gripping the wrist of the hand held over his chest, he felt the steady thrum of a hummingbird’s heartbeat—Danny.

Before Mal could look up to see if Danny was really there, a pop reverberated like every lightbulb in the area had exploded, and the room went dark. Had Mal imagined it? Was Danny with him? The last thing he remembered was all that glass and Danny lying on the ground, still and bloody.

“Da…” he tried to call for him, but his voice caught from how fast his heart was beating, almost like it was trying to sync with the speed of Danny’s lightning.

“Mal!” Danny’s voice called to him out of the dark.

Maybe Mal was dead, and they were reuniting on the other side.

Maybe Mal was in Hell, and Danny would always remain just out of reach.

The hand was wrenched from Mal’s grasp, and the moment he was fully out of contact with it, Mal wheezed as his heart finally started to slow down. Realizing how impossible it was that it didn’t hurt, that he wasn’t in pain, Mal merely felt like he’d been shocked and couldn’t come down from the initial jolt of…well, Danny. It had to be Danny.

He felt the deep chill of his ice start to fade as if it had been summoned to protect him. Voices swarmed around his head, and he tried to focus. New hands replaced the first, smaller, firmer hands, and he was rolled onto his back. He readied himself for it to sting like hell, only it didn’t. Ludgate had stabbed him; why wasn’t his back sore? He wriggled his toes, just to be certain he could. He wasn’t paralyzed, he could feel all of his body, there just wasn’t any pain.

Maybe even sad, old thieves got to go to Heaven.

“Malcolm, open your eyes. Look at me,” Lynn said.

Blinking, he squinted at the dim blue lighting that started to come on around them—the emergency lights? Was he in the morgue? Before he could ask, he caught a glimpse of Lynn’s face and then a shock of brighter light as she flashed a penlight in his eyes.

“Shit, doc…don’t blind me,” Mal said, his voice hoarse but not as winded as he expected. “Trying to focus here.”

“Mickey…oh thank god.” Lucy. She was here too. She was safe.

“Give me room,” Lynn said, but Mal had to know, he had to be sure it hadn’t been an illusion. Because Danny was there, but Danny was dead. If Mal was alive…

“Danny…” he called, this time getting the name out, blinking past the spots Lynn had left behind in his vision, hand reaching out in the direction he thought Danny had been.

A strong hand gripped his, and in the shadowed lighting, as the spots cleared, Mal saw a familiar silhouette and a big dopey smile.

While Lynn continued to protest, Mal reached up with his other hand and pulled Danny down until their foreheads touched. He was real. He was there. He was alive.

“Sparky,” Mal choked on the emotions threatening to spill out with his words, “don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“Me?” Danny balked. “You’re the one who’s been in a coma for days.”

Days?

Their foreheads and hands were pried apart, as Lynn edged in and began to look Mal over without the awful penlight. Mal could hear Andre and Priestly arguing in the background over how to get the lights back on. He could hear Lucy half-laughing, half-crying as she talked hushed with Stella. He could hear Dom’s gentle murmurs. He could hear so many voices distantly, but it was Danny’s he focused on because he had been so certain he’d never see him again.

“I’m fine,” Mal insisted when Lynn kept on well after Mal could clearly see and hear everyone, even sat up halfway to look around. “Just getting my bearings. Nothing even hurts. Ow!”

She’d pinched him. “Just checking,” she shrugged.

“I’m fine,” Mal said again, feeling more and more exposed as he lay there with a throng of people watching him while he was bare-chested, which was a privilege to be earned, not something just anyone got to gawk at. “Can someone get me some clothes?”

“On it!” Andre offered.

Mal tried to sit up fully, much to Lynn’s horror, but as soon as he got to about a forty-five degree angle, he lay back down. The room spun. And he felt nauseous. And okay…maybe his back was a little sore now that his body had caught up with his mind.

“Take it slow,” Lynn said. “You’re not healing at Danny’s speed, just…close to it. You’ll need a few days before you can get out of bed.”

“Close to it?” Mal frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“For once, Mickey,” Lucy said as she sidled up next to him and took his hand, “it’s okay to listen to the voice of authority. Stay in bed. We’ll explain.”

Lynn crossed her arms with a look that said she was judge, jury, and executioner here.

“Wouldn’t dream of disobeying,” Mal said. “Now what’d I miss?”

He didn’t much care for the chaos that followed and the many faces—much as they were the faces of friends and…well, people he was still a little surprised he considered friends. Dom gave him an unsympathetic look and said to stop being a lazy ass and get better already, coz she’d been getting bored waiting on him to wake up. The subtle shift of softness at the end of the phrase was only something Mal would notice.

The lights came back on thanks to Priestly or Andre or some combination of the two, and Andre brought Mal a shirt he could pull over his head—slowly, with Lucy’s help. With the lights on though, he could finally see Danny’s scars, reminders of all the places he’d been skewered. The cuts were already so much lighter than seemed possible after days, but eventually they’d be gone entirely, just like Mal had hoped.

“How is it you can turn into a shish kabob, and I still end up with a longer recovery?”

“The universe must like me better,” Danny said.

“No arguing that,” Mal laughed.

Hearing the how and why of his recovery was a trip, though Mal wasn’t surprised to hear about Danny’s last light show since he’d felt it.

“Basically, there’s a little bit of Danny in you now,” Andre said—only to darken to a deep red the second the words left him.

“Phrasing,” Priestly muttered.

Andre elbowed him while Dom stood back, grumbling to express her distaste for all the mushy affection going on, Lucy being the worst culprit. Eventually, Dom was able to pry her away to get something to eat, take a break, give Mal space. And more importantly, give Mal and Danny space.

Mal wished the hospital beds were larger so Danny could climb in beside him. For now, he sat in the chair at Mal’s left, looking tired and moving like an old man any time he got up, but at least he was healthy, healing, alive.

“I can’t believe Ludgate snuck up on you,” Danny said.

“He didn’t exactly sneak up on me.”

“Then how did he stab you? The feed cut out, so no one actually saw.”

“He went for John,” Mal said. “For that damn mannequin and I—”

“You got stabbed saving Dad?”

“It wasn’t your father—”

“But you thought it was.” Damn, Danny really could look at him like he owned the world. Mal might never believe he deserved it, but if he said that out loud, Danny would only call him a hypocrite.

“Guess you’re a terrible influence,” Mal said.

“Yeah. Guess I am.” But his smile was sad. Not dark, the darkness was dimmed finally—or lightened, Mal supposed—but it was still jaded.

Mal couldn’t shake the moment in the mirror world when Danny had looked at him with resolve and been willing to sacrifice everything just to save him and to give Ludgate justice instead of vengeance.

“What’s wrong?” Danny asked, lacing his fingers with Mal’s.

Tightening his hold on Danny, Mal tried to ignore how he was still hooked up to the heart monitor, the IV, and other machines he wasn’t familiar with that filled the room with white noise. “I meant it, Danny. Don’t ever scare me like that again. I know you wanted to be better than Ludgate, to prove him wrong, to show him…and me…that darkness can be defeated without more darkness, but if you were willing to risk that and for even one moment…wanted…”

“I didn’t want to die,” Danny said, scooting closer to Mal, practically off the edge of his chair. “I didn’t. I tried to follow you. I wanted to save all of us. I just wasn’t fast enough. But I had to risk it. I’d risk it again. I’d risk anything. Not just for you, but for me. For my mom. For Rick. For everyone who believed in me.

“Maybe I was okay with not surviving if everything else turned out like I’d fought for. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go. I’d be proud to go out like that. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to have one more day to live my life better. To see what comes next. To see where this might lead.” He lifted Mal’s hand and squeezed it tighter.

“Danny, I don’t want you to go out that way,” Mal said, cursing the dampness in his eyes that came so readily, especially when he could see the same waterworks building in Danny. “I want you to go out old and boring in your bed, you hear me?”

Danny chuckled and sniffled and rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. “You did it too, you know? Risked it all to do the right thing. I never would have forgiven you if you’d died a martyr after making sure I survived.”

That was the real miracle, that they’d survived together, both against the odds, and were here now, hands clasped, alone in the med room, safe. “I suppose we’ll just have to watch each other’s backs a bit better now.”

“Does that mean once we’re well enough, Ice Man, you’ll join me on patrol?”

Cheeky brat. “We’ll see. Might need a night off once in a while.”

If it meant keeping Zeus within his sights, playing by the rules didn’t sound half bad. But that didn’t mean he’d never consider pulling another heist beneath the radar.

Expression dropping, Danny gave up any pretense of humor and looked at Mal with real tears forming. “It really scares me sometimes, you know?”

“What does?”

“Everything. The future. Tomorrow. How we move on from this. The thought that someone, someday, might try to take you away again. Or threaten my family. Or know how to get inside my head…”

“Danny…” Mal pulled Danny closer, up out of his chair, so he was leaned over the bed, pressing his forehead to Mal’s again. “Stop. Just breathe. Remember where you are. You’re safe. For now, you’re safe. We’re all safe. And tomorrow, we’ll deal with what comes next. And we’ll do it again. And again. And if someone ever gets inside your head like Ludgate, like Thanatos, you’ll be stronger and you will beat them, because you’re not alone. You’re brilliant and beautiful and so easy to love, Sparky, that anyone who meets you never wants to let you go.”

Danny sobbed like he was struggling to accept Mal’s words, overwhelmed by the idea that anyone could love him. It just made Mal love him more.

“Lucy, for one, already staked her claim, so good luck getting rid of her.”

Danny choked as he tried to laugh through his tears. Then sniffled harder, laughed harder, and pulled back to look at Mal. “And you?”

“Good luck getting rid of me either.”

Drawing Danny toward him, the press of their lips made Mal shiver. There was always a little of Danny’s lightning at the end of his nerves. Too much could be a weapon just like Mal’s ice, but the buzz of Danny’s skin was pure addiction—almost as addictive as the beat of his heart.

“You don’t have to be okay, Danny,” Mal said, repeating a promise from days, weeks earlier. “Just be here. With me. Be you. And we’ll get through this, whatever comes next.”

“Okay,” Danny said, lips still hovering close. He sighed, like that was all he’d needed to hear, and when he pulled back to sit on the edge of his chair, his smile didn’t look as sad.