When he heard a voice, a familiar voice, Danny felt a sudden and irrational tide of panic and shame sweep over him. Of all the people who could've wandered in on his little pity party, why did it have to be someone he recognized? Why couldn't it have been someone relatively new, someone who wouldn't have known him from before, someone who likely would've just assumed he was clumsy? Good ol' Ketch luck. Nice to see it didn't actually turn good when I crossed dimensions again.
Thankful that the mattress was covering his face, Danny took a second to get his emotions back under some semblance of control. The last thing he needed was for someone to figure out how much of a mess he'd really become. He liked to think he'd done a decent job of covering it up since getting back, although maybe that was just his own self-delusion. By the time the mattress was lifted up and Danny could make out Vi's face, he'd managed to get that 'I'm okay' mask mostly back into place. "My mom was just glad I stopped walking home through cemeteries," he quipped.
He tried to sit up and immediately regretted the sudden movement, one hand flying to his head to try and stabilize the suddenly wobbling room. It wasn't the collisions with the stairs that did it, though they probably didn't hurt. I need to just give that alchemist chick my firstborn or something. Christ. "Mostly my pride," he added, clambering slowly into a crouch and sliding out from under the mattress. He gave Vi a grateful nod as he stood, slowly this time, and got a good grip on an exposed piece of the mattress frame. "And also possibly a few brain cells." Those that weren't already dead from his repeated benders, anyway.
He stood there for a moment, suddenly feeling awkward. It wasn't every day that you found somebody at the bottom of the steps under a burned out mattress. And maybe it was that shame that did it, that made him feel like he needed some cover story to justify all this, but he added quickly, "I was cooking. And, uh, there was a fire. Grease, y'know, and you aren't supposed to put water on those and it was pretty big so I knew I needed something big to smother it and so I thought, hey, mattress! Only then the mattress was on fire and, uh, it didn't make out quite so good as the stove." It was quite possibly the most ridiculous story anyone could have possibly come up with, but it was the best he could do on short notice. "So. Uh. Yeah." He gestured at the mattress.