Chapter Text
There was a lot of water, surrounded him everywhere. When Dylan had been in danger, he'd acted on instinct and got there in time, managed to be the hero. Danny should be proud, forget about the part he played on everyone's danger and move on. But he couldn't. There was something about that moment, once the excitement and adrenaline of their last act wore off, that brought him back there.
He dreamt about being back underwater and being too late, or not going in at all. Danny rationalised it thinking it was probably some sort of underlying guilt at his attempt at substituting Dylan and all the consequences it had had. His ego had got the best of him, again, and everyone had suffered. Yes, it was probably just that. Nothing else. His repressed guilt made him dream about not being able to save Dylan because he felt it had been him who had put the older man in danger in the first place.
But even after rationalising it and telling himself it hadn't been his fault, even apologising to Dylan, the dreams didn't stop but started to change. Danny dreamt it was him that was there, underwater, unable to open that damn safe, feeling the level of the water rising, and rising and he couldn't breathe anymore... The dreams were too vivid, too recurrent, they were starting to become a problem.
He tried to stay as alert as usual with copious amounts of coffee and red bull, but couldn't hide the dark rings under his eyes. (He even tried using concealer, but didn't get he skin tone right and ended up making them more obvious). He was more tired, more on edge. It took longer for him to learn new tricks and sometimes he messed up. Which was absolutely unacceptable, J Daniel Atlas never messed up.
So, he had a problem but he didn't know why or how to solve it. He had never been scared of water or too much of enclosed places despite having a bit of claustrophobia or he'd never been able to pull off half his tricks. No, there needed to be something else there, something that his trip underwater had reignited. He just couldn't figure out for the life of him what the hell it was and how to solve it. He kept it going for two or three weeks, documenting himself on nightmares and sleep disorders, on recurrent dreams and the ways to stop them, but nothing seemed to fit exactly what he was going through, no solution seemed to help. He hated going to bed, but sometimes he didn't even need to be in bed, just fell asleep in random places. Things changed when he had the most real dream in his life, one thursday night.
Danny is in a water tank, one of those like the ones Henley used to use and he can't get out. There's water everywhere and he can't hold his breath for much longer and he's going to drown because he doesn't know how to get out and there's people watching him and laughing at him and they aren't doing anything, why aren't they helping? He's searching frantically for the way out, for a trap door, for something, but he can't find anything and he's swallowed so much water already, he can't, CAN'T breathe and he's hitting the glass and no one's helping him and he's desperate, desperate for some air, desperate to breathe and there was only water, water in his mouth, water in his lungs, he wanted to cough but he couldn't, it wasn't too much and the scene in front of him was getting blurry...
And suddenly he awoke with a start, eyes flying open, and took the deepest breath ever, gasped with nearly all his body, suddenly out of the water tank but feeling as if he'd been deprived of air for all that time. Then he doubled over himself, and, without time to reach his bathroom, was violently sick on his bedroom floor. Part of him still felt trapped there, in the water tank, only water and nobody to help, drowning in front of an audience, dying without no one caring.
“Hey, what's happening? You all right, man? You were screaming in your sleep.” A concerned looking Jack said from the doorway, followed by an equally worried Lula.
Danny could hardly focus on either of them.
“I don't feel so good.” He muttered.
Jack moved from the doorway to next to Danny, taking in his pale skin and the hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He noticed the mess on the floor, but didn't say anything.
“You must have had the mother of all nightmares, huh?”
Danny attempted a smile and in the middle it changed into something Jack didn't recognise, like a silent cry for help, desperation in his friend's blue eyes and a second later he promptly passed out.
“Danny? Come on, man, don't scare me. Danny?”
There was no response as he cradled the unconscious body of his friend in his arms.
When he awoke, Danny could hear voices.
“We should call a Doctor” someone was saying “I'm sure the eye has some trained personnel in case someone injures themselves at a show or something.”
“It's three in the morning, they're probably not available.” Another voice said, an older sounding one. Merritt, he realized and the other one was Jack.
He opened his eyes and everyone was on him with worried looks.
“I'm fine, you don't need to call a Doctor.”
“Are you sure? 'Cos you were out for like 20 minutes...” Lula said, offering a mug of chamomile tea. “It's gone cold, but...”
“No, it's okay, I like it like this, thank you. It's just... these damn dreams, they're draining me.”
And so Danny explained about what he'd been dreaming, because even if usually he was a pretty private person, this had obviously gotten out of hand. And maybe they would had an idea of how to deal with it, fix it, fix him. Merritt suggested hypnosis and although he was generally against, Danny finally accepted, because he was getting a bit desperate for a good night's sleep.
The next day they were ready to find the root of all this, just Danny and Merritt in the room. Atlas wasn't an easy person to hynotise, because he didn't like relinquishing control to anyone, and fought against it with every part of his being. Fortunately, Merritt was good, one of the best and so he managed to put him under in a relatively short time.
With some carefully chosen questions about his nightmares and what started (the incident in Macau, drowning there was always drowning) he started connecting dots and forming a theory. He asked some more questions and then the important one.
“Has anything like this ever happened to you?”
“No”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” It was strange, even off putting to see Danny so docile, so obedient, but he needed to be to fix whatever had broke when he saved Dylan.
“Tell me about it. Tell me about when you drowned, Danny. It's there, in the back of your mind. Maybe you repressed it, maybe you forgot it. You were probably a kid and you drowned. Tell me about it.”
There was a change in his breathing and his eyes, and Merritt knew he'd found something.
“Where are you?”
“The Hamptons. It's a big beach, I'm here with my family, it's the first time we've come. There's a lot of waves but they say it's okay if I go in. That there would be some warning if it's too dangerous.”
“You go in despite the waves, to the water.”
“Yes, but they are dragging me, and pulling me away from the shore. I'm screaming for someone to help me, to get me, but nobody's coming. I try to get to shore but the waves pull me under, throw me in every direction and no one's coming. It's so cold and I can't breathe and I know they're seeing me but nobody's coming and I can't.... I can't breathe.”
“It's okay, it's over. What's the next thing you remember?”
“Waking up in the sand, puking water, the life guard was standing over me, telling me to take deep breaths. She... and this doctor, they were very nice to me, gave me a towel and told me it was fine now, they had to call my parents because they hadn't even noticed I was gone. They told me to suck it up and stop making a scene.” His voice broke a little and his eyes were bright, a couple of tears falling down on his cheeks.
“Jesus....”
Merritt ended the trance and Danny looked confused, wiped the tears from his face not understanding how they got there.
“What did you find out?”
“You drowned as a kid. What do you remember about a trip to the Hamptons?”
“Not much. I know we went there, I was like ten or eleven... but I don't....”
“The current pulled you in and the life guards had to drag you out. Your parents told you to stop making a scene.”
Danny didn't remember it, but it did sound strangely familiar, specially the second part. He remembered being crushed because he'd almost died and his parents didn't want to hear his whining.
“I don't know if it's the drowning or your asshole parent's reaction that traumatized you, but you suppressed it all these years. Dylan almost drowning must have un-supressed some of it, made you remember. You should probably...”
“Can you re-supress it?” Danny asked, suddenly remembering more clearly. The waves, hurting him, his screams and how no one came.
“You should probably deal with it, you know. There might be another incident like this one and we'd be back to the start.” Merritt said. It was understadable that the kid wanted to forget, but it was probably not the healthiest choice.
“I'm not asking you if you should. I'm asking if you can.”
With time, Danny had forgotten a lot of his past, let go of a lot of hurt. He would rather it stayed that way.
“I can. But Danny...” He usually called him Atlas, but this was too personal for that. “You know you have us, to talk about things. We would never do something like that because we care, ok? Even me.”
Danny smiled.
“That's...nice and I'm grateful for all of this, Merritt, I really am, but I can't... If I'm at that beach again, if I see... “don't me a scene”, “you're embarrassing us”... I just... please...”
“Sure, kid. But can I tell the others? They're really worried, you should have seen Jack's face when you passed out, I've never seen him like that, I think they deserve to know what happened. Don't worry, I'll tell them not to tell you anything about it, so it will remain buried on the darkest corners of your mind.”
“Thanks again.”
“You're welcome. And if you want to talk shitty parents or shitty family in general, you know where I'm at.”
“Yeah.”
Merritt erased what had surfaced of the Hamptons incident and Danny went back to sleep again. He told Jack and Lula and they were quite shocked, Lula nearly crying. They were much softer with Danny's little weirdnesses after that. Maybe this was one of the reasons why Danny needed control so bad: deep down he felt no one was going to help him even if he needed it, so he needed to be able to know every detail of everything, so he could get himself out of even the most impossible situation. He nearly died because no one came to help (no one cared that he was in the danger in the first place) and that couldn't happen again.
Merritt smiled more often at him, sometimes sided with him, afterwards. He carried a little piece of Daniel Atlas most people didn't have, not even the showman himself. It had helped him understand him better, read him in a clearer way. See him as more than just a dick.