No additional warnings for this scene.
He still visited Danny’s grave, and sometimes he thought it was almost a mercy that Danny died from Weaver’s shot gun blast, so that he did not have to live through the trauma of his father’s trial. The stark raving lunatic made a scene every day in court, and even Nicholas cringed at his screaming antics. It would have broken Danny in a thousand different ways, and really, Nicholas was grasping at any good reason for Danny not to be there. Being dead was the worst of them, but it was the truth of the matter, so Nicholas grabbed it and held to it and cried every night he came back from court. It was the worst week of his life, when he had to be present for the proceedings, and nobody gave a damn about him. Janine was long gone out of his life, and his ‘friends’ in Sandford were all his subordinates, so there was a natural emotional line there that he could not cross. He would have, of course, with Danny. Danny was not his subordinate, he was Nicholas’ friend, perhaps the best friend he ever had in his life, and when it came time for him to bear witness against Simon Skinner, he went into a long tirade about how miserable his life was without Danny. It was a bit embarrassing in retrospect, and certainly not what he was coached to say, but looking at that bastard who masterminded so much of what the NWA did just sent him off. It turned out to be one of the turning points in his case, though, as the jury was utterly moved to tears by the staid police inspector cracking on stand in grief and fury.
He did not really want to stay in Sandford after that, when the trials were all over and the Sandford police station rebuilt and the pub reborn under new ownership. The Andes did not piss him off so much, and he finally started understanding Walker about half the time, and Doris invited him over to Sunday dinner with her large, very large, just downright huge family at ‘the farm’ which had been in the family since before the Normans stormed ashore, apparently. Life could have been worse, but it certainly was not very good. To go back to London, though: that was betrayal. That was leaving Danny behind, walking out on the only memories he ever had of being genuinely, honestly happy. With Danny. Something kept him in Sandford, and that something was Danny, and sometimes Nicholas could admit that to himself and sometimes he could not.
Twice, Nicholas stopped the car for no reason. He did not know why, but he sat there feeling stupid and then watched a trailer truck run through the intersection, or a goat break across the road, and he knew that he would be dead if he had not stopped. Luck, he told Doris when he recounted such moments. She nodded, saying it was damn good luck.
Once, he tripped while chasing a suspect in a store robbery. It was chance that he was on hand, standing outside talking to one of the new owners of the pub, when the robber ran out of the corner news shop, waving his gun around and yelling. The man was crazy – genuinely crazy, it turned out, once he was brought in – and unhinged and hyped up on Mars bars. Nicholas yelled ‘stop! Police!’ and went for him, and the man broke like a rabbit on speed. It was a hell of a chase, over walls and through houses and the whole time Nicholas kept after him with everything he had, praying that the suspect was too distracted with running like a banshee to use the gun on anyone. Of course, Nicholas forgot that ‘anyone’ included himself. He rounded a corner and saw the man pointing the gun at him and tried to come to a full stop from full on and normally, he could do that just fine. This time he bailed ass over tea kettle in exactly the way Danny might, feet tripped up and falling face flat in to an awkward roll; as if he had never studied martial arts in his life.
Which, in the end, save his life. The man was a former military marksman and when Nicholas put it all together afterwards, he figured the two shots the man got off as Nicholas fell would have hit his abdomen and chest straight on. Nicholas studied the area carefully, looking for the puddle or candy wrapper or even (in a desperate thought) the banana peel that tripped him up. He found nothing but bare asphalt, not a culprit in sight.
Luck, Doris nodded wisely. Damn good luck, Nicholas snapped back.
Nicholas finally got a reputation for indestructible immortality when his car flipped outside of town on a rainy day. Nicholas was of course driving defensively below the speed limit with his seat belt on, and the tires on the police cruiser were relatively new, so it could have been worse. How, Nicholas was not sure, because a tap on the brakes sent the car into a 360, sliding sideways off the road and rolling twice down an embankment to land upside down in six feet of water. As he hung upside down, dazed from where his head hit the side window during the roll overs, the car started filling with water and Nicholas could not remember how to undo his seatbelt and realized the his door was jammed up against ground, and that this is what it felt like to be scared of dying. He panicked, disappointing himself, but it was the natural reaction of someone trapped and facing immanent drowning in filthy ditch water. As he bent up in a pathetic, instinctive bid to keep his face out of the water swirling around him, he saw his notebook floating up and he thought of Danny, and decided that he was tired of being alone, that dying on the job was not a bad way to go, and maybe if he did everything right and St. Michael had everything in triplicate, he would get to see Danny again. He relaxed and let his head drop into the freezing, murky, rising tide.
Danny reached over from across him and snapped the seatbelt open, and Nicholas dropped. He spun over awkwardly and let himself be shoved into the back seat by Danny, who kept pushing him, and who opened the back door which was not jammed up against anything. Danny kept pushing because Nicholas was still dangerously dazed and now swimming in near-freezing water and finally Nicholas felt himself being dragged out of the water and halfway up the embankment. He heard a car stop above him on the road, and then he was not being dragged any more, he was trying to crawl.
Farmer Williams, a cousin of Doris (one of thousands, as far as Nicholas could tell) wrapped him an old wool blanket from the back of his truck and used his cell phone to call in the accident. He patted Nicholas reassuringly, telling him it was a miracle, just a damn miracle that he got out before he drowned, and that he was a very lucky boy.
Barely coherent and stuttering, Nicholas looked down at the mess in the ditch, and stopped breathing. Danny sat on the other side of the embankment, across from him, waving happily, wearing his police uniform which looked dry and pressed and very regulation. Something shimmered around him and Nicholas swore for a moment he saw wings on Danny, which simply could not possibly be, but then how could Danny be at all, anyway? It was the best luck in the world and Nicholas smiled and waved back and started crying, because he realized then that he never lost Danny, and never would.