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It takes four days for Danny Ocean to come back. Of those four days, Rusty Ryan spends three and a half of them positively stinking drunk. The one day of enforced sobriety is reserved for nodding here and signing papers there, and crying in the funeral home, despite his best efforts not to. Then he goes home and spends the rest of the day getting absolutely stinking drunk.
It’s about a day and change later, change because it’s the middle of the night. The only reason Rusty’s still awake at this point is because he’s spent so much time crying that the bones in his face ache. It’s a good thing too, because otherwise he probably wouldn’t have heard his front door swing open. He’s still tipsy enough to be uncoordinated as he stumbles to his feet and in the direction of the door. It’s probably not the smart thing to do, but Rusty doesn’t really know why he should bother with a self preservation instinct at a time like this.
Making it to the living space takes longer than he’d like, and once he gets there he pauses, hand gripping the doorway to keep him upright, because there’s someone in the middle of the darkened room. Then that person says his name, and Rusty just about tears the paint off of his doorway because of how tightly he’s gripping it.
Shit, that’s Danny’s voice.
***
Danny’s sitting on Rusty’s couch, in Rusty’s apartment, looking at Rusty while Rusty stares back at him with a drunken sheen and all the shock of a man who’s seen a ghost. He’s crouched at the arm of the couch with his elbows propped on it. Danny’s watched him open and shut his mouth a few times without saying anything. Usually, Rusty would have a thing or two to say, but he seems lost in a way that Danny’s not sure he’s ever seen before. There’s something lacking behind his eyes. The usual brightness is gone, even when he does finally conjure the words it seems like he’s been fumbling for.
“I knew you faked it,” Rusty tells him. Based on the way that his normally immaculate apartment is currently being kept, Danny’s pretty sure that’s a lie, but he’ll let Rusty have it. “I just thought, if you were really going to do it, you would’ve told me.”
“I didn’t fake it,” He says to Rusty. It’s an admission that he can’t look Rusty in the eyes for. “The last thing I remembered was you.” He doesn’t bother elaborating, because him and Rusty both probably remember the last breathing time they saw each other far too clearly for either of their likings. “And then I woke up in the basement of some funeral home.”
He’d been cold, even dressed up in what he assumes is the suit Rusty had picked for him to be buried in. That figured, it doesn’t make sense to keep corpses warm, but being a corpse hadn’t figured at all. He hadn’t even paused to think of it until he tried to leave the basement and found the door to the upstairs locked from the outside, with no way of opening it without a key, and no one else in the room. That had made him look around, and, well––
One of the only things worse than realizing you’re trapped halfway underground with a host of dead bodies is realizing that you’re just another one of them. Danny’s breath would’ve caught in his chest if he still needed to breathe. Picking the lock had proved an impossibility, even with all the prickly and poky tools that the room had to offer, on account of the fact that Danny quickly realized he couldn’t move his left arm at all below the elbow. He could barely feel it. Even now, most of his body feels far away, like he’s not quite in it.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Danny had thrown a chair through the only window in the room. It had been on the top half of the wall, sitting just above the ground, and just the right size to climb through. The six tries that it had taken for him to break the glass were less than ideal, and the alarm going off even less so, but––
He’s here now. He’s with Rusty, who’s lying straight to his face and Danny can’t seem to understand why.
“You knew I didn’t fake it,” Danny tells him. This time, he looks Rusty in the eyes. “You were in charge of the funeral arrangements.” He clears his throat, which has started to go rough from emotion. “You saw my body.”
Rusty nods. He’s doing this thing that Danny’s only seen a couple times, where he looks like he’s about to cry, but doesn’t blink enough to shed the tears so they just pile up in his eyes.
“You did something.” Not an accusation, not a question. Just a statement.
Rusty shakes his head.
“Just tell me––”
“I didn’t do anything,” Rusty tells him. “I would’ve––Danny, I watched them try to bring you back five times on the way to the hospital. If I could have done something, I would have, but I don’t know what this is.”
Danny looks down at his hands as a new kind of nervous bubbles up in his chest. He hadn’t liked this already, but Rusty’s admission almost makes him nauseous. The tips of his fingers on his bad hand prickle nervously.
“You didn’t––”
“I wouldn’t have let you wake up alone,” Rusty tells him. “And you didn’t––”
“I would’ve told you.”
“Then what the hell—“ Rusty doesn’t bother finishing. Danny’s not sure if either of them could come close to finding an answer that even made sense, much less a correct one. “Alright,” he mumbles as he looks at Danny. Whatever it is, it’s alright since I’ve got you, it says.
Danny doesn’t know if that’s true. He doesn’t know what to think about any of this. Absent-mindedly, he pinches his numb arm.
“You want a drink?” Rusty asks, sounding like he’s had a few too many already. “I’ve got…” He looks around him, throws his arms halfway up in mild irritation at the state of the room around him. “I’m sure I can find something.”
“Water?” Danny’s throat has tasted like chemicals since he woke up, and he feels dry, inside and out.
“Sure.” Danny drums his good fingers against his bad hand. The texture of his own skin almost makes him grimace. “You should have some too.”
“No thanks,” Rusty replies. He finally has a grin on his face, as loose as the focus in his tired eyes. “You’re back,” he continues. “I feel like celebrating.”
Danny doesn’t, but he certainly won’t stop Rusty. He hardly seems like he should have another drink, but the look on his face suggests that he needs one, as much as Danny hates it. He guesses he’d need a drink too, if he was in Rusty’s shoes. A drink, or maybe something a whole lot worse. Rusty sways to and from the kitchen, mostly graceful, even in his drunkenness. It seems so purposeful, almost like he’s dancing. Danny guesses he can pretend that’s exactly the case, the same way it seems like Rusty’s going to pretend like all of this is fine. Like Danny hasn’t been dead for the better part of a week, like his skin isn’t sickly gray and his eyes don’t look fogged over from all that time in the morgue.
Danny only wishes, god he wishes, that he could do the same.