So the prompt for Day 30 of Goretober was stiches, and this just kind of popped to mind. Poor Danny's first stitches. I have a drawing that goes along with this. it can be found here: moon-cloud101 DOT deviantart DOT com/art/Stitches-569268357

Danny was hurt, bad.

Sam winced as she saw Skulker's blades slice through Danny's flesh, his cries echoing around the small park. She watched in horror as Danny fell to the ground, landing flat on his back, eyes going wide and laying still for a moment, stunned. He groaned and gripped his bicep, green blood gushing from a wound. Adrenaline coursed through her body, but even so, she found herself frozen to the spot, unable to move, simply watching the events taking place in front of her. Luckily, the same adrenaline was moving through Tucker, and he sprung into action, uncapping a Fenton Thermos while Skulker was focused on the injured Danny.

"Danny!" Tucker shouted in concern, focusing the beam of light on Skulker, who promptly got sucked into the confines of the metal container. It was Tucker's yell that finally brought Sam back to her senses, and she ran after him.

Tucker rushed over to Danny, Sam right behind him. They watched as Danny's knees shook and he muttered curses under his breath. "Danny, oh my god, are you okay?" Sam asked, both her and Tucker wrapping their arms around his waist so he didn't end up collapsing. Familiar white rings appeared and circled Danny, reverting him back to his human self. Obviously he was exhausted if he couldn't keep hold of his ghost half. Changing forms was fairly dangerous; Danny could heal faster in his ghost form, but now that he was human again, it would take more than a bandage to fix his gaping wound.

"yeah." Danny attempted to laugh, only to wince in pain. "'tis but a scratch. A fleshwound."

"I swear to god, if you're quoting Monty Python…" Sam growled, frowning as she took Danny's hand, prying it away from his arm so she could examine the wound more closely.

The wound was deep, the blade had easily cut through his suit, skin, and layers of muscle. Now red blood gushed out of the wound, soaking into his shirt and beginning to drip from his arm and onto the grass. Sam shuddered, swallowing thickly and feeling bile rise in her throat.

"shit...Danny we need to take you to a hospital. I think you need stitches." Sam murmured. Both Danny and Tucker's eyes widened in horror at the mention of a hospital.

"Sam! No, I can't! There's ectoplasm in my blood! How do I explain that? Or the fact that technically I should be hypothermic, since my temperature is way below that of a normal human's. They'll wonder how I'm still alive, conduct other tests, and I don't even want to think about what conclusions they'll reach." Danny trembled, biting his lip and clenching his fist.

"Then what do you suggest we do?" Sam argued, "Even with your increased healing, this wound will take days or weeks to heal unless it's stitched! Not to mention the amount of blood you'll lose, and the threat of it opening when it starts to heal."

"Maybe we could do it ourselves?" Tucker suggested, trying not to look at Danny's cut too closely. He was always pretty squeamish; if it weren't for the fact that Danny was his best friend and he was worried beyond belief for him, he wouldn't be anywhere near all that blood.

"Are you saying that we, who have no medical experience whatsoever, should try and patch up his wounds?" Sam raised an eyebrow, to which Tucker simply shrugged.

"We've patched his wounds before."

"Yeah, but they were never this bad!" Sam said, growing frustrated. She noticed that Danny began to sway slightly and her grip on his waist tightened. Thinking quickly, she kicked off her boots and slid off her purple leggings, making sure her skirt stayed down in the process. She took them and tied them around Danny's arm, trying to stop the bleeding. Slipping her boots back on, she moved back into place by Danny's side, her legs feeling cold and bare without her leggings. Oh well, it's not like she didn't have countless other pairs at home.

"Sorry Sam." Danny murmured, while Sam simply shook her head and shrugged.

"I'm sure we could google how to stitch wounds closed." Tucker suggested, getting back on the topic. Sam sighed. They didn't have much of a choice.

"Alright. My parents aren't home, so we can go to my house. We'll just have to be careful not to get blood on anything. They'll freak." Sam could feel herself starting to shake, the excess adrenaline having nowhere else to go. She took a few deep breaths to try and calm herself; the last thing she wanted to do in this situation was panic and start hyperventilating.

"Okay, Danny, I know you're exhausted, but do you think you could turn us invisible? It probably wouldn't be a good thing to draw a crowd." It was only eight at night; people were usually returning to their homes by then, but Sam didn't want to take any chances of running into people, not with the state Danny was in.

Danny slowly nodded his head and grimaced, trying to focus through his pain and exhaustion. Sam felt a familiar weird feeling wash over her, and she began to walk, Tucker stepping in sync, Danny following. She walked quickly, the boys matching her stride; she wanted to get Danny's wound taken care of as fast as possible.

After what seemed like hours of hobbling along, making sure Danny didn't trip or fall, they made it to the Manson Mansion. Danny dropped their invisibility and Sam unlocked the door and ushered Danny and Tucker inside, up the stairs, and to her room. Sam and Tucker maneuvered Danny around the various items on the ground and made him sit on the edge of Sam's bed, making sure his blood wasn't dripping everywhere. It was then that Sam took notice of the other injuries on his body; he had a small gash on his left forearm, a cut on his cheek that dripped a single line of blood, bruises littered across the skin she could see, along with other minor cuts and scratches, and he had a minor burn on his right leg.

"Oh Danny…" she murmured. The boy simply closed his eyes, biting his lip again, obviously in a lot of pain..

"Okay, let's see what the internet has to say about this…" Sam said, opening her laptop and immediately typing "how to stitch wounds" into the search bar. She browsed through a few websites and instructional articles before clicking on a video demonstrating suture techniques.

"So first thing first, we need some pain medication." she said, half to herself, pausing the video. "it says that ibuprofen is the best, 'cause it won't thin your blood."

Hoisting herself out of the chair at her desk, she ran to the bathroom, searching through the medicine cabinet until she found a specific bottle of pills. Jogging back, she uncapped the bottle and poured out four pills, handing them to Danny, as well as the water bottle she kept by her bed. Danny blinked, gazing down at the pills before popping them in his mouth and swallowing them with a mouthful of water. Tucker stood near the corner of the room, not quite sure how to help and looking like he was on the verge of passing out or throwing up.

Sitting back down in her chair, Sam began to browse through more sites, trying to determine what the next step would be; cleaning the wound apparently. She swallowed thickly, knowing this would probably really hurt Danny, but they needed to do it to decrease the risk of infection.

Moving throughout the house, Sam grabbed a washcloth, some tweezers, and some antiseptic solution, as the website instructed. She also took the time to carefully wash her hands, making sure they were clean and germ-free. Gloves were always a good idea in the world of medicine, so she grabbed those too, slipping them on. As she made her way to the bedroom again, she saw Tucker had moved himself to sit beside Danny, quietly saying words of reassurance to him. The boy with glasses looked up as she entered again, noticed her supplies, and swallowed.

"This is probably gonna hurt, just warning you." Tucker said and Danny grimaced, but nodded his head.

"Kind of expected that." Danny replied, watching as Sam removed her now blood-soaked leggings from his arm, stuffing them into a trash bin. She looked at the wound carefully again; it looked like most of the bleeding had stopped, however a small amount of blood still oozed out of the opening. After taking the washcloth and soaking it in the antiseptic solution, she began to wipe away the residue of blood from Danny's arm, both fresh and old. Breath hissed between his teeth and he clenched his fist, but otherwise gave no reaction. Sam bit her lip and tried to clean the wound as quickly, yet thoroughly, as she could. With the majority of the blood gone, the wound was now more visible, and Sam's stomach twisted. She could now see in detail the layers of flesh the knife had cut open, dried blood still crusting over some parts; she was just thankful it hadn't cut all the way to the bone.

"Okay...Now…" Sam murmured to herself, remembering the instructions and grabbing the tweezers. The site had suggested removing any debris within the wound, so Sam swallowed the rising bile in her throat once more and began to examine the wound, looking for any foreign objects. Luckily, she didn't see any. It was a clean cut.

Satisfied the wound was clean, Sam removed her gloves and walked back to her laptop, reading what to do next. The hardest part was coming up; the actual suturing. After reading over the first couple of lines, Sam asked Tucker to take a needle and thread from her sewing kit and boil it in water to decontaminate it. Tucker nodded, almost seeming thankful to get out of the room. He grabbed the sewing kit she kept on her desk (she enjoyed making plush spiders and bats), and disappeared from the room.

Sam took a fair amount of time to read through the next section; she wanted to make sure she didn't make any mistakes. It looked complicated, but not undoable. Clicking on a video, she watched a person demonstrate the technique on a banana. It didn't look so bad. The only thing was she didn't have a curved needle, only straight ones, which would make the whole process more difficult. She wondered if they could buy a curved needle for next time. Sam paused for a moment at the thought. She hoped to god there wouldn't even be a next time, though she knew in the back of her mind that there would be. Danny always got hurt after his fights, whether it be a simple bruise or a bad cut. They'd only been fighting ghosts for a few months now; the ghosts were only going to get stronger, and Danny was only going to get more injuries. The thought sickened Sam. She wished her best friend didn't have to go through all of this; he had a hard enough life as it was. However, he was the one who had chosen to be the protector of Amity Park, and with that, he had accepted the consequences.

Sam sighed, looking over to Danny with a concerned expression. It was then that she remembered his other wounds, having forgotten them with everything she was worried about.

"We should probably take care of your other cuts." She said, and Danny looked over to her, a little surprised. He looked down at his left arm, seeming to just notice the small trickles of blood running from his wrist to his hand.

"Oh yeah…" he murmured and Sam shook her head, grabbing the gauze she kept in her desk and some disinfectant spray. She took his wrist and sprayed the solution on it before starting to wrap the bandage around it.

"Keep pressure on that." She instructed, already starting to see some of the blood seeping through the bandage. Danny nodded, placing his hand over his wrist, and she began to work on the burn on his leg, covering it in a burn ointment and wrapping a bandage around his thigh, over his jeans. It wouldn't do much, but it made Sam feel better having the burn covered. She worked on cleaning some of his minor scrapes until Tucker came back, clean needle and thread in his gloved hand. She was glad he had the foresight to put on the gloves and not contaminate the recently-sterilized needle.

"Alright, let's get started." Sam said, putting on another pair of gloves and taking the needle and thread from Tucker. Tucker removed the gloves from his hands, not needing them anymore, and the two of them moved on either side of Danny, Sam sitting next to him and tucking her legs underneath her so she was slightly taller. Tucker, being Danny's moral support, grabbed his left hand. Danny released his injured wrist and Tucker quickly replaced it with his own hand, making sure pressure stayed on the wound.

"Ready?" Sam asked and Danny bit his lip, dipping his head once in affirmation. Taking the needle in her hand, Sam inserted it into one side of Danny's wound, pushing it as deep as she could, before moving it to the other side of the wound and back up. She began to tie knots in the thread, four of them, as the video had suggested, and then took some scissors and snipped off the ends. "One down." she said, then moved her eyes across the length of the cut, sighing, "and many, many more to go."

It took almost an hour and a half, and 21 stitches, but Danny's wound was finally closed. After applying the last stitch, Sam wrapped Danny's arm in a thick layer of bandages, instructing him not to take them off for a while. Danny closed his eyes, falling back onto her bed, a thin sheen of sweat coating his face. The whole thing had been difficult and painful for him; he had not let go of Tucker's hand through the entire thing, squeezing it hard when Sam got to particularly painful spots. Now he was simply exhausted, too tired to even move into a more comfortable position.

Sam and Tucker began cleaning up, taking their supplies and putting it back where it belonged. It wasn't long before they both noticed Danny had completely passed out on Sam's bed.

"We should call his parents and tell him he's sleeping over. Jazz will probably be worried sick; she knew he was fighting Skulker." Tucker said, "And I should probably call my parents to tell them the same." He took out his phone to make said call, leaving the room for a brief moment.

Sam took the time to examine Danny, noticing the pale color of his skin littered with bruises, and the dark shadows beneath his eyes. This life was taking its toll on him; she wondered how much longer he could keep this up, and what would happen if he couldn't.

She didn't want to think about it.