Chapter Text
Blood is sticky, Daniel learns.
As Dr. Michael unpeels the ties off his hands, the silk reveals tacky and viscous dark blood, almost web-like. The cuts still torn open, showing the laughable attempt of flesh trying to fuse back together.
Pressure alleviated, the pain comes back stinging. Daniel wheezes out a small curse, fingers flinching as the doctor examines his wounds closely.
He has always been uncomfortable around doctors ever since he was a child. Multiple visits to sterile rooms where he was forced to perform basic tasks to prove his normalcy could do that to a person, a child. All because he could not sit still for long enough or spoke a little too fast at times.
The small medical office Danny is sitting in feels too similar to those psychology clinics. The walls are a familiar shade of off-white and it smells vaguely of rubbing alcohol. The Eye’s doctor looks like he’s around his mid 60s with thin wire glasses and a pudgy figure draped by his pristine coat.
The way he inspects Daniel makes him feel like he’s 7 again.
“Apologies but this might sting a little, Mr. Atlas,” Dr. Michael warns.
Daniel cries out sharply when the cool prickling burn of antiseptic brush across his right palm. The cotton swab turns red quickly but Danny is able to swallow down his wails, only hisses through the worst of it.
Dr. Michael works methodically in cleaning the wounds and soon, Daniel sees exactly how frayed his hands are. Clots and ropy strings of blood struggle to keep flesh together, skin curling out to reveal raw muscle.
“I’ll give the numbing solution a few minutes to set in before I will have to use sutures to close up the wounds,” Dr. Michael informs him, preparing the equipment on a small table off to the side of Daniel’s hospital-like bed.
Daniel can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the gory details of his palms.
“Are you afraid of needles, Mr. Atlas?”
Danny snaps his head up and lets out an incredulous laugh, “is that a serious question, doc?”
Dr. Michael only shoots him a look that makes him feel smaller than he already is, scrutinizing Danny through his glasses. He continues in the same laconic tone, “if it comforts you, your friend can come in instead of lurking in my doorway.”
“What—,” Daniel twists his body to find Jack leaning against the open door to the medical office, a mildly sheepish look on his face. Daniel just sighs, turning back to slump against the bed.
Jack’s steady footfalls enter the room as he murmurs softly, explaining, “I’m sorry, I was just worried about you, man.”
“I didn’t say you could come in,” Daniel protests. He hears Jack freeze abruptly.
Dr. Michael seems unimpressed by this little exchange and offers a small stool for Jack to sit in.
“I’m not a kid, I don’t need somebody to hold my hand and whisper comfort to me while I get patched up,” Daniel bites out before pressing his lips together in irritation.
A year ago, Jack would have given him a pitiful kicked puppy sort of look after a barb like that. However, he has put up with Daniel’s bullshit for a year and a little more so he merely raises an impassive eyebrow at him and sits on the lone chair. It’s not as close to the bed, but it does give Danny a good look at him.
He has taken off his outer jacket and his vest so he’s left in his white dress shirt with its sleeves rolled up, the edges of it smudged with brownish smears. He has folded his arms loosely across his chest but Danny has already caught sight of them — his hands.
They are still stained.
“Stop being difficult, Atlas,” Jack sighs, weariness colouring his voice.
Daniel feels a surge of annoyance and something akin to humiliation flare up in his chest. He hates being in this medical office and he hates Jack Wilder. The kid who, Danny swears, just yesterday was still pestering him about his role in the bigger scheme is now all hard lines, sharp jaw and dark eyes.
Merritt’s irritating voice looms like a devil on his shoulder, reminding him cheekily that technically Jack is only a year younger than him.
This exchange has tipped Daniel off balance. Sharp tendrils of shame and embarrassment flood through his body, heating up his face. He is vulnerable and hurt and in pain on an uncomfortable medical bed, his open wounds and open palms a stark revelation of who he really is inside — scarred, and irrevocably scared.
Daniel Atlas is scared of needles.
“It’ll be easier if you don’t look at it,” Dr. Michael says, taking his seat to Danny’s right with his small metal table of apparatus.
There is a small semicircle of a needle attached to a thin surgical thread and the metallic tweezers glint under the harsh white light of the room.
Daniel Atlas is scared of needles.
It’s a justifiable fear. It’s a common fear even. Daniel remembers being a kid, possibly 10 or 11, and squirming under the iron grip of his mother as a doctor administered an injection to his right arm. He remembers the bruising grasp of his mother’s fingers and the acute prick of the needle just as it pierced through skin. He remembers crying.
Daniel rests his right hand on the metal table, palm up, blood-stained. He doesn’t want to look at it but he can’t tear his eyes away.
“Danny,” Jack’s gravelly voice travels to his ears, and he snaps his gaze up to his.
In a few steps, Jack gets off his stool and lifts a hand onto Daniel’s neck, pressing on a point behind his ear before his voice dips low and sonorous, “you will listen to my voice, and only my voice. Keep your eyes on me.”
Daniel knows what he’s doing. He could easily throw off the attempt at hypnosis, but with the firm press on his pressure point and the persistent fear already in his head, it’s exhausting to try to fight it.
The training with Merritt has really polished up Jack’s hypnotism as Danny feels himself drifting, Jack’s dark brown irises the only grounding force he has.
He wants to fight it. He wants to scoff again at Jack’s pathetic attempt at fooling The Daniel Atlas. He wants to be in control of himself.
Daniel has always thought of himself to be deterrent of hypnosis. He has knocked off Merritt’s attempts multiple times, mostly due to knowing the tricks of the trade. He was always on high alert around the mentalist and it’s easy to shut him down when he’s prepared for it.
Merritt doesn’t try too often because he remarks that Danny is “the easiest to read out of all of them and the most susceptible to hypnosis that to hypnotise him won’t be fun, it’d just be sad.”
Daniel would rather saw off his own hand than to admit that it's true.
He falls and falls into Jack’s brown eyes. The tension in his shoulders melts away and he’s the most relaxed he has been in the past year.
It's a strange feeling. It feels like sinking into the deep waters of the ocean, slow and weightless. Like there is a part of him that urges him to swim up, to break the surface, to fight it. But the further he sinks, the easier it gets to ignore any form of rationality.
He is zoned into Jack’s dulcet tone, guiding him to a locked memory.
Nothing is ever locked, he imagines the other saying.
Jack presses a metaphorical key into his hand and lets him twist it into the lock. The memory unfolds like a movie.
It’s about the four of them. Him, Jack, Merritt, and Henley.
This was before their big show in Vegas. This was during the year they spent preparing for it. When Henley was still on their side, serving her role, certain in her purpose.
Danny knows why he has locked this memory away. Buried it deep, shovelled it under the piles of other compartmentalized thoughts.
It was the first time Henley had ever smiled that brightly at him. A genuine smile. Not a sneer, not a pitiful lift of her lips, not a stage act grin. Her lips bloomed into a gratuitous beam, eyes lighting up at the knock of the last pool ball into the pocket.
The Horsemen—before they were the Horsemen —were out in town, in the back of a bar, playing pool. A flimsy toss of coin appointed the teams and Henley was not happy to be paired with Daniel. He couldn’t blame her. With only a couple of months as a team, all of them knew the competitive streak that came with the magician.
However, after a brutal defeat by Jack — Merritt flubbed every ball during his turn —, Daniel’s determination only strengthened and when Henley finally struck that final ball, she whooped excitedly and twirled around to give Danny the loveliest grin and then proceeded to throw her arms around him.
He stood frozen, breath stilling before she pulled away, jeering at the other team. In this scenic movie reel, the dim lighting of the bar turned her hair bronze and her cheeks golden. She smelled like roses and rum. Daniel struggled to hold onto her.
The memory warps into a different one.
A smile spread wide, a flash of pearly white teeth.
Head thrown back in laughter, meticulously styled dark hair.
A black leather jacket, a deck of cards.
That’s the thing with Jack. Unlike Henley’s, Danny never had to work for his smiles, he gave them willingly.
The memory isn’t a specific one; it’s a mix of all the times Jack has ever looked at him with a shine in his eyes. The look of absolute joy changes into a wide beaming bravado of a grin on top a stage that shifts into a small slant of lips after a cheeky retort.
These memories aren’t labelled with feelings. Daniel’s not so good at compartmentalization like that. But, as he shuffles through the scenes, there begins an unravelling in his thoughts. He doesn’t tug at it but it almost becomes apparent when Daniel focuses on the most recent memory.
Jack, eyes dark and intent, wrapping Danny’s hands with a gentle kind of reverence alongside a firm resolve. His lips are pressed into a thin line, a strained sort of smile as he lifts his gaze to Daniel’s. Daniel feels—
A press on his neck floors him.
Daniel flinches, swinging hands clattering a pair of scissors off the table, and head knocking against the hard back of the bed behind him.
“Fuck,” he swears, squinting and blinking, eyes fluttering as he reclaims his bearings.
Jack is frozen in front of him, a stunned look across his face, and Danny finally registers what has happened. There is a sudden pounding in his head that’s eerily similar to the sinking feeling in his chest.
Anger bubbles in his throat as he throws a glare at the other magician. Daniel spits out, “what the hell, man?!”
“Look, Danny, I– I didn’t mean to—”
Jack looks horrified, hands braced in front of him as if Danny is about to lunge at him. Well, he really feels like it before a steady grip on his wrist forces him back.
“Mr. Atlas, calm down. You are going to pull your stitches,” Dr. Michael chastises him with a frown.
Daniel’s attention snaps to him and he glances at his right hand.
Neat, dark stitches run through the wounds on his palm, securely closing the gashes. The everflowing red has seemed to disappear, and what is left is the uncomfortable feeling of taut skin being tugged and stretched. Daniel can’t suppress the involuntary flex of his fingers and the neat lines shift in response. He hears Dr. Michael sigh.
“I really would hate to have to redo the stitches. I will need to wrap up your hand in gauze in the meantime while the stitches heal,” he continues. “After that, I will need to stitch up your other hand as well.”
The unnerving sensation of open wounds on his left hand undoes him, the prickles of pain looming past the numbness. An itch starts up in his sewn right hand and it’s an effort to maintain his composure. Daniel lets out a shaky breath.
“Danny…”
He flicks his gaze back to Jack. A worried expression is strewn across his face and Daniel is familiar with this one — brows furrowed, eyes wide and searching, cheeks ruddy — it’s the face the younger makes when he’s terrified of screwing things up.
Daniel wants to scoff at him, to yell at him to get a grip, to dismiss it completely. All reactions he has given him in the past.
Now, he can only offer his own horrified expression. Exposed and raw, like the gaping wounds on his left palm. Daniel darts his eyes away and his voice is a little strangled as he says, “just- just leave me alone, Jack."
Danny tries not to clench his fists, a reflex to the stinging hurt in his chest. A few seconds pass before Jack’s boots ring heavy in the silence as he steps away from him. Daniel chews on his bottom lip as he listens for the soft click of the door closing.
When it does, the numbness ebbs away to sharp, pulsing pain.