The Health and Wellbeing of Hybrid Entities

Chapter 1: Adrift. Alone.

Chapter Text

The world is on fire, and Danny is burning.

The GAV is in shreds; wherever he’s crashed, there’s no way to determine up or down. He’s entombed in wreckage. Everything is on fire and everything burns, and it takes Danny all his strength to peel himself from where he’s contorted around the driver’s seat chair, to drag himself through the twisted metal and shards of glass with nothing but his hands and his tears.

He hurts.

It hurts so badly.

He crawls, because he can’t tell if he has legs or a tail right now, and is too afraid to find out he can’t walk by injuring one of his legs permanently. It’s hard to see through the smoke and the tears. He can’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe even if he wanted to.

There are instincts unique to being dead. Danny can’t tell up or down, and he can’t tell where he is or remember how he got here, but his core tugs him towards somewhere dark. Somewhere cool. Somewhere enclosed, even—even better, so Danny can curl up and sob in peace.

Danny wedges himself into a dark corner, curls himself up as much as he can, and lets himself drop into his core.

Something is touching him somethingistouchinghimsomethingistouchinghim—

Danny pops out of his core with a scream. No words. No coherency. Everything hurts, and all he can do is scream.

Someone is touching him. The thing touching him is body-shaped. Human-shaped. Danny screams higher, louder—some part of his hindbrain knows that if he screams for real then there won’t be a human but there will be guts and gore and blood, but Danny’s too tired to scream for real, and too weak. His scream is only enough to send the human sprawling back instead.

More humans take the place of the first. Danny keens, fights back a sob—when another tries to rouse him from his hiding spot with an exposed hand, Danny flashes his teeth.

The human flinches, but doesn’t go away.

Danny feigns a fanged bite. The figure jumps back. Good.

He’s too weak to run. He’s too weak to walk through the walls of his hiding spot and dart away. His visibility flickers—probably how a human found him in the first place. He’s so tired. Everything hurts. But if he looks dangerous and acts dangerous, maybe they’ll leave him alone. They have to leave him alone.

Please, please leave him alone.

They don’t.

There’s something in his face. Danny doesn’t recognize the shape immediately, but eventually something clicks: a loop on a stick is a catchpole. The strangers are trying to capture him.

He’s so afraid of something else around his neck. His whole body racks with shivers. He can’t run. He can’t bite. Please, please, please—

It doesn’t latch to his hand. It latches to his wrist.

Danny is only peripherally aware of being dragged onto his knees, of being dragged into a container. By the time the doors shut in around him, his mind is empty of anything that isn’t fear and pain, pain, pain.

He drops into his core.

Danny wakes up in a container.

It’s not the same container. But all containers are the same.

Danny screams. The soundwaves vibrate the glass until it shakes, slamming against the floor until cracks form in the concrete beneath him.

Still, no cracks form in the container. When he wails a second time, there’s no strength behind it. He just sobs.

He’s alone. He’s alone and he’s contained and no one is coming to get him. His transportation is in pieces. He’s injured and he’s scared. He’s so scared. Everything hurts. He wants to hide in his core and he wants to run away and he wants to slither through the wall and he doesn’t have the energy into any of it.

Danny curls up in a corner, hopes he’s left alone—or better, released—and hides.

He doesn’t know how much time passes before he hears a click.

…But he hears a click. Danny peeks open an eye.

There’s…food. He thinks it’s food, anyway. Oatmeal? It’s in a bowl and it’s beige and it’s on a tray on the ground.

Danny sniffs. …The last captors hadn’t offered him food. They hadn’t thought he’d had needs, or that they ought to feed him.

It’s a miserable, aching feeling when he thinks this is a step up.

There’s a flimsy plastic spoon on the tray. When Danny jumps on the bowl, devouring the contents as quickly as his body will let him, the spoon goes down the hatch with the gruel.

Danny falls back asleep in the far corner of the container miserable, cold, in pain, and injured. But he falls asleep full.

It’s a luxury to not be hungry.

There’s a click.

Danny ignores it. He’s not hungry. He’s sleepy. His body is trying to conserve calories and metabolize new ones. He doesn’t want to wake up.

The oatmeal goes uneaten.

There’s a click. Danny’s eyes crack open.

Apparently he’s been asleep for a while, because there are three bowls of uneaten oatmeal on the ground, waiting for him. All are in varying stages of crusting over.

Whatever. Free food. Danny wolfs it down anyway, and tucks himself back into his corner. He’s almost him-shaped again. His human traits are slowly returning, cell by cell, piece by piece. He can almost feel the fractures he knows he’ll have in his legs!

…Wait. Wasn’t his container opaque?

It’s…not anymore. The walls are clear. Danny can see—or, well, until he gets his eyes back, can sort of feel—the room around him, and the trace presences of the beings who occupy it.

It’s a lab. Danny knew it would be, but his core still drops down, down down. He had been praying he’d never see a live specimen lab ever again. He certainly hadn’t wanted to see yet another one from inside the cage.

Humans come and go from the lab. Most are in white coats and pants, but they’re not GIW. Or, well, they’re probably not GIW, anyway, considering that they’ve been feeding him. The guys in white never think of his needs, since they don’t care if he Ends or not. There are monitors that fuzz and warp in his not-vision with details he can’t make out on screen, but knows instinctively that the monitors pertain to him.

And to his capture.

There are some visitors in odd colored suits. They talk. The colorful ones don’t approach him, but they…watch.

No one approaches. Good. Danny will bite them if they do.

With the see-through window, Danny can see the bright-suited blob shove a tray of food through a slot in his container.

It doesn’t fall to the floor, though. There’s a little mechanical thing that brings the oatmeal and flimsy spoon to a safe rest on the steel floor.

…Alright. Bone appetite. Danny’s hungry, and food is food. He pours most of the bowl straight into his stretched mouth and scrapes the rest in with a spoon.

More of his wounds are sealing. Healing. His core doesn’t throb so horribly with pain. The cracks in his soul are smoothing out. With consistent food and rest, Danny will be able to actually mount an escape.

Good. Danny licks the flecks of meal from the edges of his mouth. Good.

When he naps, this time, it’s on purpose.

Soon he’ll be healed enough to leave.

The clear window doesn’t go away. Danny’s poor sight doesn’t improve, but he can see people come and go. Danny’s never truly left alone. There is always at least one brightly-colored human around (or one dark, silent human), and an assortment of white-coated scientists milling about.

The clear window lets them see him, presumably. If Danny wants to escape, he’ll have to be careful not to be seen.

Quietly, so quietly. Danny slo-o-o-owly amps up the resonance of his core.

There are cameras. There must be. There are always cameras. Disrupting the electrical flow in and around his container is essential to getting himself out of sight.

The lights flicker. The human milling about all flock to monitors, silent voices coming muffled through the see-though walls of the container. Danny reels in his resonance just a touch—whoops.

But no one is looking.

Something twinges in Danny. Well…no one is looking.

Very, very quietly, Danny peels a relatively safe amount of ectoplasm away from his core. A Danny-shaped shadow forms, and, yeesh, does he really look that bad?

Whatever. There’s no time.

Danny turns himself invisible. He slips through the walls of his container, and leaves the lab to explore the base.

Chapter 2: Afraid. Adrift.

Summary:

"Heeeeey. Remember the entity? ...No, not that one. The one we found at the Ken— Yeah, that one! Yeah, it's escaped. Should. Uh. Should we do something about that?"
*unintelligible muttering*
"No, it's not been threatening. Not unless we enter their space, anyway. It can't exactly go anywhere off-base but it is injured, so it might lash out at...? Yeah, okay. Sending out the troops. Will do." *click*

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

There are so many rooms! Okay, even if Danny had wanted to return to his container, he could never find his way back even if he tried. He is thoroughly lost and more than a little confused.

There is a cafeteria with loads of human bodies packed into it. There’s food too; Danny sneaks a sandwich from a counter. It looks like a NastyRib and it tastes almost as good.

It’s certainly better than oatmeal.

He works his way through it with an aching jaw as he glides through wall after wall. There are rooms everywhere, and one might be the key to his way out of this new imprisonment.

There’s an armory. It’s got swords and spears but also things he’s never seen. Ray guns. Lasers. A rubber duck? Several scary computerized…things. A mechanical spider. A curling iron?

Danny takes another bite as he stares. Weird.

There’s at least one room that’s just occult junk piled up every which way. Magic books. Haunted furniture. An entire…fireplace. The chimney is still attached.

There’s at least one spirit bound to a jar. Danny flees the room before his whole body can even slip past the wall.

There are rooms with big screens on them. Danny can sort of see how many there are, but all of them are pointed at places he can make out the general shape of— city skylines, skies, and low atmosphere.

Cool. Weird and spy-like, but cool. Maybe Danny’s been captured by something into world domination.

There’s a half-robot half-human who mans the computers. Even cooler.

Danny slips through the floor and points himself down, down, down, towards gravity, aiming to go as low as he can go. He phases through a few conference rooms and a smaller cafeteria and—

—His head pops outside?

Danny spins. No, he’s really outside. And it’s dark outside. It feels weirdly hard to respire, as if there’s no air here. And—

Danny stops. His claws dig into the metal of the building he’s half-in.

That’s the Earth.

Danny’s looking at the Earth. That’s the Earth and it’s blue and it’s green and gorgeous and Danny is not on it.

He looks up. Down? He tilts his head so that he can see the structure this building is built onto and holy sh*t that’s the moon.

Holy sh*t. Holy sh*t. Danny’s on the moon!!!

He’s on the moon?!?!

Okay. Best kidnapping ever. Better than that time Vlad had trapped him in a fancy party and he got to eat hors d'oeuvres for the whole hour he was stuck in his human form. Danny has made it to the moon.

The Earth is just over there. It’s so close and so round and so beautiful, and Danny doesn’t need to breathe in space! All Danny would have to do is…fly home.

He could fly home.

Danny could go home.

There’s a frost-bitten chill in his eyes. Danny tries not to cry. Home is right there. He could hone in on his regular haunt from anywhere in the world, and all Danny would have to do is…is trust that he’s strong enough to make the trip. Trust he won’t get weak and go human in space, and die over and over and over again as he tries to go ghost. Or drop into his core and just…float away. Never wake up again.

Danny doesn’t cry. He doesn’t want to. Not when he’s not home yet. He peels himself off the side of the space station, ducks back into the base, and continues his exploration.

…If there’s no point in escaping, he should find somewhere else to rest. Somewhere he can recuperate, even if there isn’t any food. Somewhere without scientists and cameras. Somewhere isolated. Somewhere cold, where he can rest his aching body without fighting the ambient heat.

There are a bunch of options. A high-tech gym. Empty conference rooms. The armory. A locker room, or three. A bevvy of unused bedrooms, which seem to have labels on them in a code Danny can’t read.

Whatever. Danny settles on hiding under the table of a tiny, empty conference room. It’s dark, for one thing. And the table is really heavy and strong. It’s cool, as in not too warm, on this side of the base.

There’s a window that looks out to the stars.

Danny wishes the stars would be so close when he gets home. Or if he was home. That he was home.

Danny wants Mom.

Mom doesn’t love him anymore, Danny remembers, tucking his head under his tail as he tries to find some sleep, but Danny wants her anyway.

His exploring’s taken a lot out of him. Danny drops into his core. Hopefully one more moon rock won’t be all that visible under a table.

Danny’s core gets kicked around a little by rubberized boots. It startles him into awareness, but not enough to push him fully out of his core.

The fingers that reach out to him, of course, are. As soon as too-warm flesh touches his core, Danny unwinds himself from it, bares his teeth, and bites.

His teeth sink into silk-smooth fabric and…no further.

No further?

Uh oh.

The limb he’s biting—the blue-and-red owner is being so gentle, careful to try and soothe him with words Danny can’t understand—it doesn’t matter, it’s still holding him. And Danny can’t bite him because his teeth don’t even put a dent in the skin and biting is doing nothing.

Everything is tooclosetoofasttoonear. Danny slips intangibly through the arm and the floor, and disappears into the base.

There’s a sound on the overhead speaker. It’s not an alarm, but Danny still has every reason to think that they’re making noises about him. He travels through room after unfamiliar room, hoping to find somewhere dark and empty and quiet and cold, and, surprisingly, finds himself somewhere familiar.

It’s not the exact same room as the one that held his container and the scientists, but it’s so similar. The soft, beige paint on the walls, made yellower by incandescent light. The tiled floor. The monitors. Only… Wherever his container is, it’s not here, because there are only half-drawn white curtains and white-sheeted cots.

Danny blinks invisible eyelids. Well, he is…tired. They look…

…Actually, they look really nice. Almost like real medical beds. Huh. Danny looks around for any attendants, and finds nothing.

So maybe he. Well. He hasn’t had anything as luxurious as a bed in…in a very long time. His invisible form slithers up the steel bedframe, careful to neither shift it nor make noise. He climbs onto the bedspread with his claws, and…

…And…

His face goes straight into the pillow. It still hurts to do more than he has to for survival, but his core straight up purrs. This is where he wants to be while his body heals. He wants cotton bedsheets and a mattress and a polyfill pillow. It would be better if the lights were out, sure, but if he keeps them on, no one will even know if he’s here. Fantastic.

Danny ignores the overhead loudspeaker as he drifts, tracing the weave with the point of a claw as his thoughts fuzz over.

This is nice.

This is really nice.

Danny wakes up to voices. He jerks up out of his drifting, claws embedded in the bed beneath him—

…Oh. They’re not nearby. Or, well they are, but the privacy curtain is working, and they’re not here for him.

There are young voices.

Young voices of young humans.

Danny squints. (Oh, hey, have his eyes grown back?) Why would there be young humans here? Humans Danny’s age? Are the scientists hurting them?

He’s too sleepy to fly over and see, so he only listens. They’re grousing—some grouchy, some whining. All easy and simple-natured. There’s the occasional hiss, the whap of a play blow of skin on clothing.

Huh. Danny’s tail flicks over the end of the bed. The human children seem…safe. Their voices aren’t raised in pain. Their needs are met. They’re not whining in hunger or despair.

Huh.

Danny doesn’t know what to think about that one. He mulls on the matter as he drifts back into sleep, core purring with quiet ease.

…

…Or no, he doesn’t. Something shifts his curtain.

Danny cracks an eye open. There’s a young human at his curtained door.

Its colors are familiar. Danny thinks he’s seen them on a visitor to the container. Reds and yellows and oranges, all blurry and melding in his eyes. It’ll be great once Danny gets all the cones back in his eyes again.

The human is small. It’s not getting any closer. Danny hisses, tucks his tail in, and assumes it’ll go away.

It goes with a hum and a buzz at a speed Danny can’t track. Great. Maybe Danny will go back to napping.

…It comes back. Danny readies himself to hiss again—

—Is that a. Is that.

Danny sniffs.

It is a chocolate chip muffin. And the human has it in his hands, presumably for Danny.

He licks his fangs. He wants it. He doesn’t want to startle the human, or make it think he’s attacking, but he wants it. It has sugar and carbs and fats and chocolate. It’s all calories. But he doesn’t want to be captured again, so if he plays this right, maybe the larger humans with containers will leave him alone.

The human drops the muffin onto the mattress.

It’s devoured in one bite.

It’s so good so good sogoodsogood. Carbs and fats and sugars!! And fiber!! And sure some of it sticks to his teeth and he feels more bloated and tangible and vulnerable to physical violence now, but this is a small human, and Danny doesn’t want to hurt it, and it probably doesn’t want to hurt Danny either.

His trust is really cemented, though, when the human vibrates on its own.

Fascinating.

Danny purrs, and the human does…its equivalent of the same. Maybe it’s not even human? Danny can’t feel any emotional transference, so it’s probably not like Danny, but it’s not…not dissimilar? Either?

It zips away faster than Danny can track and is back in zero seconds flat with an egg salad sandwich. If Danny had intact tear ducts, he would cry.

He eats the sandwich too, saran wrap and all.

There’s a ping from somewhere. The human ducks out of Danny’s curtained room to go find it, like a small dog finding the doorbell. Danny really should relocate if he wants to hide from the adult scientists, but… He’s tired. And he’s slept on this cot all through the night, so now the mattress is steeped with his blood and his ectoplasm and his aura. So it’s familiar.

And the human brought him food here.

And he’s tired. Danny doesn’t really want to move.

So he just. Curls back up. Presses his face into the pillow.

He sleeps.

Notes:

Bart Bart Bart Bart BArt BART BART BART—
From the tumblr tags: #Bart: HEY LOOK A GHOUL#Bart: *rubs like five brain cells together to form a thought*#Bart: (Knows this will be Trouble)#Bart: bet I can get him to be my friend :) Everyone likes chocolate!#Danny: what is this buzzing? Is that a person? Is that a HUMAN?
LOOK. If we call them core VIBRATIONS and VIBES and PURRING. I am going to say that Speedforce and ghosts are the most compatible socially. I am not going into it too deeply but one of the reasons that animals may be considered different species even if they're biologically compatible is because neither of their mating behaviors reads as sexy to the other. I propose that socially, Speedsters and ghosts could play fight without accidentally murdering each other. Like I think they could recognize "just joking!!!" behaviors from each other and keep it cool and fun and not Deadly. And they're both durable. They're both "technically science"-based but lets be real their existence is borderline magical in nature. This is my thesis statement. Anyway Bart made a friend :)

Chapter 3: Cornered. Unhappy.

Summary:

"So we found the thing. Guy? ...Girl?"
"Don't think they're a girl."
"Well, we don't know that. The kids found them, I think. They're not exactly stellar at hiding stuff. Should we try to wrangle them back into the hyperbaric chamber? Their wounds look pretty bad...wherever they are."
"Well...they're skittish, they're not doing so hot, and the fear is making them harder to treat. We should probably just... Well. Not let it go per se. But."
"Give them a break from the chase? Got it. Will do. Hopefully MM will be back soon, and we can finally solve this mess."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Sleeping in a puddle of your own fluids gets really gross after a while.

Danny grumbles quietly. Ew. It’s all…blood and plasma and goo and ectoplasm and various other nasty body liquids he doesn’t actually want to identify.

Gross. He’s soaked the mattress some too.

And he wants food. He can feel the empty cavern where his stomach ought to be rumble with wantwantwantwant. It makes his core whine—when his body is too damaged to be human, sometimes it treats itself as if being human is his obsession. He wants, because having human food and water and safety will make him more human again.

…Maybe he can snatch another one of those NastyRibs today. They’ve got meat. Protein.

Danny’s tail lashes as he considers going to the cafeteria again. But what if he gets lost? And loses his cot? It’s a nice cot. Much better than dirt and far superior to the container.

Maybe it is just smarter to go to sleep again? The more he explores, the more likely it is for someone to see him. To find him. To put him back in the container.

Danny presses closer to the cot mattress, his fluids squelching up around him. And what if the one thing finds him?! The thing he couldn’t bite?? That’s not safe! He can’t get picked up by it again! He can’t fight back! What if it crushes his core??

His curtain pulls back with a sharp skkkhsk of metal rings on metal bars. Danny bares his teeth and hisses, and—

—Oh. It’s the buzzing human again. Danny slowly lets his damaged muscles relax. It purrs in a language Danny can’t hear (did he lose his tiny ear bones??) very quickly and very pleased as it chats about something. Whatever. It’s not a threat and it’s a good distraction. Danny rolls onto his side so he can watch.

It makes a sad noise. Danny perks up. Why is it sad? Why would it—? BAGEL! Actually it doesn’t matter why the human is sad because it gives him a bagel. With cream cheese. Untoasted!!

Carbs go down sooooo smoothly. He doesn’t even get any crumbs stuck between his mostly-present teeth. It’s good. So good.

The buzzing human buzzes away, leaving Danny in a cloud of agitated air and a vague sense of concern. Concern? Did something happen?

The immature human voices come back. Danny perks up. They sound familiar, but they lack the vibrational quality of the buzzy human. It will be harder to tell what they want and where they are.

A face pokes past the curtain. Danny’s sight is too poor. He can’t recognize it. He hisses.

The buzzing child slides back in with a hvmmmmvm to put itself between Danny and the new face. Good. Bad, if the human gets hurt, but good that it doesn’t want Danny to get hurt either.

The new face doesn’t attack them either. It makes a long, drawn-out noise that Danny is mostly sure is a complaint or three, but the buzzing kid hops around, free and light, and zips off and zips back.

Danny peeks from under his arm.

Oooh. The new human has clean blankets. He does want those. Maybe they’ll sop up the fluids he’s sitting in. Now…will they offer them? Will Danny have to fight them for it?

His tail flickers. If they’re more like ghosts, he’ll have to fight. Danny doesn’t want to. They’re young humans. He might injure them without realizing. But he really wants those sheets. Maybe he could steal them very quickly…?

Danny doesn’t have much time to wonder though because he is snatched off the mattress??

He almost bites the buzzing human before he recognizes the buzzingbuzzingbuzzing under the skin of the human holding him in its grip. Why is he being held?! Is this a threat??

Is he going back to the container??

There are more young humans here suddenly, taking his bed and—hey! Taking his cot! They pull off the mattress, drag it off somewhere, and Danny won’t bite but he will phase through the arms of the small human and leave.

So he does.

It’s not comfortable to find another empty conference room and to hide there. But young humans are impatient.

They’ll leave Danny alone.

…eventually.

For now, though he’ll just hide his core under the table. It’s scratchy carpeting and hard wood on his sensitive core and he’s cranky and tired and he misses his cot.

If that red and blue thing tries to pick him up again, he’s going to bite him.

The hand that wakes him up is not the blue and red human this time.

Danny thinks it is, at first, and bites it as soon as he reforms. But this human yells and drops him, so it is not! Fantastic. Danny slides through the wall—

—And the human tugs him back into the conference room by his tail. Hello?! What?? Ow??????

Danny barely has time to bare his teeth before the whole world is spinning and moving fastfastfast and—

He plops onto his cot. Or. Danny is plopped onto his cot. He’s. On his cot?

The hell?

It’s. Danny sniffs. Pokes the mattress. There are new sheets on it. One layer underneath feels bouncy and tense, like it’s rubberized. But it’s his cot. Undoubtedly. It still sort of smells like all his juices rotting.

The buzzing human zips into the curtain that hides Danny’s cot. It and the new adult human start arguing. And then the adult starts buzzing.

Danny’s back is all tense and he doesn’t understand. Weird. Weird. Weird. Weeeird.

The adult goes away. Then Danny’s left with the younger buzzing human, and three strangers.

They’re so blurry. At least the humans that vibrate endlessly are red. The rest are a random mystery to him—splotches of warm reds and yellows on black, which is just dark enough to screw with his recently lacking depth perception. Fantastic.

Danny presses his face into the pillow.

His more-familiar-human buzzes off and is back in a flash—this time with a half-dozen different fancy breads.

They smell nice.

They look nice. Probably. Danny inches closer. There’s some spots of red, of blue. There’s probably fruits in them. Sugars, carbs—if there’s a lot of oils in them, that’s good for fats as well. Danny really needs the extra calories at the moment.

He almost goes for them. He does. But he doesn’t want to encourage that stupid picking-him-up behavior, so he leaves them be and pretends they’re not there, in the hopes that the young humans go away before he starts showing off his teeth about it.

The red human inches closer, and makes cunning little Don’t You Want It? noises. Danny’s neither a baby nor an idiot. He keeps a narrowed, half-formed eye out.

The buzzy human buzzes closer.

Danny stretches out his claws. A little twitch of pain and they solidify nice and sharp in the yellow light.

The buzzing human wisely takes a step back. And leaves the breads on the end of the cot.

Smart.

Danny doesn’t touch them until all four humans are long gone, their voices lost to the base. After that, though? Each pastry is gone in one bite.

Danny makes himself invisible, wishes for darkness, and he rests.

There’s more food when Danny wakes up the next morning.

Granola bars. Dried fruits.

…Oatmeal.

It takes forever and makes his back and tail ache like crazy, but Danny swaps his cot with one of the other little cots in this large, medical wing. His aura flares in the hopes that he’ll cut out cameras, but who knows if it will actually works.

Of course, it would work on another ghost, hopefully, and warn them to Stay Away! I’m mean! if they wandered into his territory. But otherwise, who knows? Maybe Danny’s too sick to actually be scary.

Danny sleeps behind a new curtain that night.

He doesn’t like that things that remind him of the container are chasing him.

The red human buzzzzes back into his old cot space the next day. When it sees that Danny is gone, it cries.

Danny carefully makes himself invisible. Just in case.

The human buzzzzzes away and doesn’t come back for a moment, until it does, bringing back one of the darker human-shaped blobs. One talks, and then the other, their voices as chattery and annoying as when birds get upset with other birds.

More whining. More noise.

Danny rolls over, puts the pillow over his head, and pretends he doesn’t exist.

He doesn’t hear any footsteps. He doesn’t see the curtain jiggle. Danny thinks he sees feet poking out from behind his curtain, just the once, but he doesn’t—

Something touches his invisible form. Danny flinches back into visibility, and—sh*t. sh*t. sh*t. They’re touching him. They’re touching him on purpose.

He tries to go intangible. The hands slip through him, but it’s not enough; they know he’s hiding here now, and now something is going to come get him.

A hand brushes his core. Danny whines.

The hand. Stops. Pulls back. Something— it’s flesh-colored and soft and is held out for Danny to investigate.

Brown-black tears plop out of Danny’s sockets without warning.

…Oh. It’s a band-aid.

It’s. It’s so simple in its familiarity. It’s soft. It’s rubbery between his fingers. The little paper peel. The—its—

…It’s probably fine. If. If they’re bringing him a band-aid.

Everything still hurts, but the background ache is easiest to bear when he sleeps it off, hour after hour of praying his body knits itself back together. He tries not to think about the things he’s lost. The physical, tangible flesh he’s lost. The brain matter. The organs. The…hopefully he hasn’t lost a limb, but he has a feeling chancing a transformation to look isn’t going to go well for his overall health and wellbeing.

Danny’s core keens. He wants Frostbite. He wants Mom and Dad. He wants Jazz. He wants someone to put him into a safe bed with ice packs and to bring him soft foods and to lay beside his core and purr and he wants someone to take care of him.

He wants someone to take care of him.

Danny needs someone to take care of him so badly.

…Danny drops his intangibility. Some of his body becomes borderline corporeal, even. He has no idea what he looks like or how bad the damage is exactly, but he hears a muffled gasp and an acute intensification in the buzzing, sharp and high and scared.

That’s not a proud, smug response. That’s not a mean, gleeful response.

Okay.

Maybe…Maybe Danny is actually safe here. Maybe this won’t hurt too.

Danny doesn’t remember everything, but he does end his session slathered in clear cream, wrapped in cloth bandages as well as two young humans can manage, and with a band-aid stuck against some cavernous hole in his forehead.

He’s even awarded a blueberry muffin for his bravery.

(Good for him.)

Notes:

Tags from tumblr:
#Bart: AAAAAAAAAAAH HE'S LEAKING AAAAAAA #Bart: ROB. KON. HOW DO YOU BABY PROOF SHEETS??? #Tim: What? Why would you need to—#Tim: Oh. sh*t. Uh. I think your friend's decomposing #Bart: I— THAT'S BAD. RIGHT?? THAT'S BAD?? #Tim + Kon: *shrug* #Wally: Hey. Bart. Would you like to explain this. *holds up extraterrestrial lifeform by the scruff* #Bart: NO THANK YOU :) THANK YOU FOR FINDING HIM *speeds off*

Chapter 4: Concerned. Confused.

Summary:

"Anyone assemble all of the patient notes?"
"They're all submitted. I pushed them in last night. Have you seen the photographs yet?"
"...The photographs?"
"Oh, man. You're going to want to get a copy of the slides after this. This rundown is going to be a doozy."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Batman clicks on the projector screen. Everyone in the room has access to the slides and note-taking abilities on their tablets. The assembled heroes quietly select their app of choice, sit back in their chairs, and ready themselves for the meeting.

“Good afternoon. For everyone in alternate time zones, good morning or good evening as the statements apply. Before I begin the approved agenda for this meeting, there are developments on the base that everyone ought to be aware of.”

Click. The slide changes to a fuzzy image of an unusually dense collection of shadows in a typical medical-wing setup. The specific location isn’t clear, but the phenomenon itself is stark against the white walls and flooring. The static on the cameras is atypical for the quality of equipment used on the base.

“There is an extraterrestrial lifeform that has made Medical Wing C their territory. Yes, we know they are there. No, they cannot be moved at this time. Please do not try to take initiative in doing so. Please do not enter the aforementioned medical wing. If you see this entity outside of the medical wing, please leave, ignore them, or otherwise make your presence known. They are generally in search of isolation and seek to remain unseen. All known attempts at self-defense by this entity have been largely non-hostile so far, but we do not know how or if that behavior will change as they heal.”

Batman…takes a breath. Not sighs. The vigilante has more control than that.

“They are severely injured. The exact nature of their injuries are still unknown, based on their—unique physiology—“

Barry squints at the screen. Nope. The cloud still looks like a cloud.

“—But the identified fluids they secrete have been recognized as at least partially composed of red blood platelets and a modified plasma. Based on their aggressive self-defense, the persistent seclusion behavior, and their general lack of responsiveness, the injuries are considered deeply severe and require rest to treat. It is imperative that non-medical staff and on-base heroes maintain as little contact with the entity as possible. We are attempting both delicate medical treatment and non-verbal communication, which have both failed thus far. We have reason to believe that the extraterrestrial is sentient and capable of communication based on—“

Click. The next slide is an image of a nearly-obliterated craft of some kind—tinted glass, wings, debris everywhere, twisted shards of metal that look like they scrape like teeth. Charred black everywhere. Barely visible is a torn–through upholstered seat ten yards away.

A hiss breaks the silence in the back of the room. That’s nasty-looking wreck.

“—This craft. It is relatively rudimentary in its design, and would not have held up to prolonged space travel, but would have required complex intelligence to start and maintain transport. Basic testing has proven that its energy readings, while not precisely contiguous with the Speed Force, show that it has been in contact with extradimensional phenomena. A non-sentient life would not have been able to pilot it successfully enough to crash it—much less to avoid the farmhouse in its path. The result is that we have an extremely wounded entity with no shared form of communication. There have been worrying observations by their medical team, however.”

Click.

This slide is blank.

“We are now pursuing the possibility that the entity has been attacked or otherwise held captive by human organizations here on Earth. There are persistent triggers of aggression brought on by medical settings, adults, and more specifically, any present medical personnel and equipment.”

Batman pauses.

“Their medical team has informed me that their persistent fear has made treatment…difficult.”

There’s a snort from somewhere in the room.

“If you discover any evidence of possible extraterrestrial captivity or torture or experimentation among your usual cast of rogues, please forward everything you are able to base for further investigation. In this time period where the Lanterns are unavailable to return to Earth, Martian Manhunter has been notified of the need of his presence on the base, and will hopefully help settle this matter. In the meantime, as a reminder: do not enter Medical Wing C, do not engage with the entity in any way. Simply make your presence known, and they will flee.

“Now. Onto our agenda. First article: whoever has been taking the toilet paper from the supply closet, stop it. The league is not here to fund your lifestyle habit of two-ply toilet paper.”

There’s more food available more often.

It just appears at the foot of his bed. Like magic. Or, like…like a really, really fast human child.

Some of the packaged foods Danny can’t eat without swallowing them whole, wrapper and all. They’re just too fiddly to get with his claws—the solution is to just swallow it and let the whole thing dissolve in whatever weird ecto-acid is churning in his stomach at the moment.

The rest is fresh from the bakery—or, well the base, anyway, however this moon base gets their fresh foods. Muffins and croissants and sausage rolls and other things he would expect to see on a coffee tray or something.

…Danny prods his stomach.

He’s been too sore to notice, but this half-state of being a somewhat-physical half-ghost is super, super weird. He can eat, but it’s not processed like food is in his living body. Everything he can digest just gets incorporated. Everything he can’t just gets…

He looks down at the slowly growing puddle in his bed.

…Maybe ‘spit out’ is too generous a phrase. Expelled? Excreted?

Ew. Okay that thought is kind of gross and he doesn’t want to think about that while he can’t move away maybe.

He knows, instinctually, that he’s wounded, but this half-and-half state stops him from feeling the specifics. Knowing how, exactly, he’s hurt. Experiencing the majority of the pain and distress.

He curls up on his bed.

Danny hates it here. Not because it’s bad (it is) but because he wants to be home. He selfishly, desperately wants to be home. He wants his rocket sheets. He wants his room with its glow in the dark stars.

…He wants his dad to heat up soup and sit with him, like when he was little and had nightmares. He wants Jazz to sit on the edge of his bed and read to him.

Danny wants Mom.

…There is some other company here, though.

Sometimes, if Danny is mostly sated and kind of sleepy, the quick human buzzes in with a few of its age-mates. The two don’t get as close as the buzzing human can, because Danny can at least read the Excited!! or Nervous!! or Booored! energy on the human, which makes him more comfortable with letting it in close. Its friends seem to respect his space, though. They don’t go past his curtain, even if it’s open. They talk, but they don’t yell.

Danny thinks he’s getting the soft little bones back in one of his ears, but he can’t fully tell. He can hear that they’re chattering and he can hear which sounds they’re making, but he can’t understand any of them.

Auuuuughhhhh. He pushes the pillow more underneath himself. Does he have brain damage?? Is he…is he missing pieces of his brain??

There won’t be a concrete way to tell until he solidifies again. Gross. He doesn’t want to do that yet.

Or soon.

…Or at all, maybe.

Mom was so mad at him. Maybe he’ll be safe and he can come home if she…if he can’t be touched…?

…No. He remembers. Mom makes things for ghosts.

??Concern?Con??cern?

Danny looks up. Oh. He made the human vibrate all nervously. Danny’s fine. Well—he’s not fine but he’s not hurting more than usual or hungry.

The human is careful not to touch him when he doesn’t want to be touched, but Danny’s feeling generous. When the human puts its hands on the bed, Danny willingly brushes his knuckles up against it.

No claws. A peace offering.

The human goes suuuuper still.

…Uh. Did he break it?

And then it zoooooooms away faster than Danny can comprehend (he jolts) and sprints back with a whole lot of stuff in its hands, and a few things thumpthumpthump ono his bed. And.

Well. None of it smells like food? When he bites it, it doesn’t taste like food either. In fact the texture is…

Danny frowns. Turns over the object so he can see it better. (It doesn’t help.) Is that plastic?

Wait. Danny twists it in half. His wrists ache but the pieces rotate.

…It’s a rubric’s cube.

…Huh.

There are other puzzles too—things that taste like plastic and one that tastes like wood, which he might have dented with his teeth by accident. Whoops. Danny puts that one farthest away, in the hopes that he doesn’t accidentally damage it a second time.

…Huh. That’s. That’s nice.

Danny surprises himself and the surprised!surprised! human with a purr.

It’s not a lot. Not even monetarily is this little offering a lot.

But it’s more than Danny’s had in a long time.

Notes:

You know. Bones got a sneak peek of this and went "smh, Bruce Wayne can't even afford to get them all three-ply tp. For shame." This statement was how I discovered that three ply tp existed. Get on my level.
From the tumblr tags: #Bart: *huge eyes* WE ARE FRIENDS NOW HERE ARE MY FRIEND GIFTS!!! #Kon + Tim: um. I think they're just tolerating you dude #Bart: NO THIS IS A SIGN OF TRUST WE ARE BESTIES NOW I'M GOING TO BE SUCH A GOOD FRIEND!!! #Tim: ... #Kon: *shrugs* glad to hear it#this conversation is literally indistinguishable from Bart finding a stray cat #like the plot would be The Same
I don't like having outside POV on this since I wanted this to be largely Danny's own POV, so I might cut the Batman ch out in the end and make it...idk. An extra? Still deciding. Still, it's here, so here you go.

Chapter 5: Alarmed. Alert.

Summary:

"So...they're actually playing with the toys the Speedster brought?"
"Think so, yeah. They don't exactly come off clearly on the cameras. When they leave, though, the cube is always back to it's finished state."
"So. Like. If I bought a few things. Do you think the League, would like...I don't know...reimburse any work related purchases...?"
"Waaaaaay ahead of you. Are you thinking Learning Express, or Melissa and Doug?"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

One…Morning? Evening?

Well. One day, Danny rediscovers his tongue.

Most of the muscle is there. Things taste better after he remembers how to taste.

(If everything tastes like iron, well…Danny tries to ignore that.)

Its main function is social. When Danny needs the quiet humans he can’t see to Shut Up or Go Away!, it is now within his power to blow a raspberry.

A slightly bloody raspberry. But still! A success! And when the fuzzy red human buzzes and whines about scaring them off, Danny blows it one too.

If all it does is make the human cry more, hey. That’s not Danny’s business.

The buzzy human comes back with its friends, with fresh sheets, spilling nervousembaras!sednervous all over the room.

Blech. Danny saves himself the trouble and phases through his bed and through the floor below. He does not need to be grabbed again.

He has more energy than he used to. It gets him farther than he’s used to; by the time he finds and works his way through an apple, a pear, and a whole plate of chicken wings, he’s still not sleepy.

…Huh. He rolls over underneath his usual haunt: a conference table. He isn’t feeling the urge to drop into his core. He’s achy, sure, and his limbs hurt and his mouth hurts from eating and he can’t see, but also…

Is Danny bored? Is he finally well enough to be bored of being sick and injured?? That’s. Is that progress? Is it…regression??

Danny sulks under his conference table (his now) with a pile of chicken bones and a few stems and doesn’t know what to do.

If he goes back to his bed…will the sheets already be done? Will people be waiting to get him? Did he lose his…ugh, he doesn’t want to think of them as toys. His…enrichment? Educational tools?

…Okay they might be toys. Whatever. When Danny feels better, he’ll grab something more age appropriate. Maybe he’ll get them from his—

Danny flinches.

…From his house.

If he can get there.

Whatever. He doesn’t want to think about that right now. He wants to figure out how to get rid of his trash without revealing his location. Or leave his conference table shelter.

Danny drums his claws against the low-pile carpet that stretches below him. Should he stay? Rest up? Wait for the threats to his admittedly-kinda-pathetic territory to leave? Should he…go get more food? Should he explore more? He feels all kinds of sore and tired but his head mostly feels clear. Maybe if he—

There’s a hissing noise. Danny bristles. He hisses in like, but—oh. It’s a door.

…Oh. It’s the door.

Uh oh. That’s um. That’s.

Uh oh.

Danny quickly pretends that he hadn’t hissed. He invisibly pushes the top of his head through the thick wood of the conference table. They shouldn’t be able to see anything if he peeks.

Well. Unless they can? But if they can, that’s. Uh. That’s a whole new problem.

Several tall, colorful, adult humans walk into the room. He can’t quite tell how many. Just a bunch. And they’re tall. But hey, they’re color coordinated for easier determination, at least.

Danny lowers himself back down through the table. Should he leave? Will they see him if he tries to leave? Can they spot him?

He sits and worries and he dithers as the humans slowly surround the table and the hidden ghost underneath. Should he…should he go through the floor? Will they know he’s there? Is it even safe to get back to his cot yet?

Feet start appearing underneath the table. Danny shies away from them. He pulls his chicken bones away from them too; if they step on one, they might notice him.

Then everything gets quiet. There’s only one quiet, droning voice.

So maybe Danny peeks again.

There’s a giant shadow at the front. It’s probably human. It has black arms and black legs and a patch of what is probably skin in his very fuzzy vision. It stands beside a lit screen.

Danny squints.

…Oh. He can’t quite tell what it’s about, or what’s exactly is being shown on the screen, but he knows what a powerpoint presentation is supposed to look like: a person, a lot of talking, a screen, and a lot of people listening. They’re just…talking. They’re not even talking about Danny.

Okay. He’ll rest under the table. It seems…safe enough for now.

It’s better to listen to human heartbeats and breathing in a room than it is to sit in his silent one, waiting for some new horror to break the everpresent quiet. Danny lays on his belly, nose to the carpet, and counts how many feet are under the table. (There are sixteen feet.) Some humans are wearing real shoes, with inch-thick soles of hard rubber at the bottom. Some are wearing things that look like shoes, but are too flexible, with soft soles that bend and curl as they flex under the table. Very few of them have laces or fixtures. Huh.

A wrapper falls. Danny watches the ball of foil flutter to the floor, at peace with his position, tired of inspecting shoes. And then a face pops down.

Danny freezes. (It’s not the smartest move.)

The face that popped down probably sees him back, considering how still it goes. And then, very slowly, so slowly, a hand reaches down. Danny flinches back, and—

…It grabs the wrapper. The adult carefully gets back up. The face disappears.

Danny doesn’t move. Danny doesn’t leave. Danny doesn’t breathe.

He waits. The human slowly goes back to tapping its toes, wiggling in its seat—and vibrating, in a way that says bored/bored/bored the way the younger human sometimes does.

…No one says anything. No one does anything. No one jumps under the table to get him, there isn’t a break in the speaker that indicates identifying Danny as Present, or as A Problem. Danny is simply…hidden.

He should leave. It would be smart to leave. Danny would be safer if he left.

But also.

Maybe.

This might be the first time he’s been so close to humans in so long.

They don’t know he’s here. It should be…safe. If he just. Listens to the indistinct sound of human voices. Let them wash over him, like a radio left on in the other room.

Danny’s sated. He’s achy. He’s bored. He’s sad. He’s lonely.

…He stays.

He doesn’t notice his humming or the quiet purr in his chest before the hand comes back down again. Danny flinches away from it, the hum guttering to a stop where it had laid.

There’s something about its hand. The hand came down, before, but now there’s something more to it. Another color—a darker color. It’s hard to tell in the shadow underneath the desk. Maybe a—green? A blue? Maybe?

The hand shifts, just a little. And then the thing comes flying at him. Danny jolts backwards, digging his claws into the mere millimeters of carpeting underneath him, and—

Oh. The thing isn’t moving. It hasn’t even exploded.

Danny reaches out a hand. Taps it, gently. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t attack him. It doesn’t excrete anything acidic or bite him. He sniffs it, just to be doubly sure, and nope. It smells like plastic. The wrapper crunches under his hands, even when everything sounds mute and muffled. The noise is borderline imaginary, so Danny can’t exactly tell what it sounds like when he plays with the little plastic flaps.

He can tell what it is now, though. The food bar goes down whole, wrapper and all, into his gullet.

Nice. The outside tastes bad, of course, but it’s nice.

The hand goes away, and no one bothers Danny. It’s nice. There are voices, but they aren’t yelling. They aren’t mean to him. They aren’t talking about what his insides look like or how bad he is or how to take more pieces off of him.

…Danny’s core thrums evenly. Peacefully. Maybe he will want that nap after all. His body gets kind of grouchy when it comes to plastic. He can pretend that it isn’t grumpy with his improvised diet with a nap.

Danny curls up on the floor, core beating along with the quick and even taptaptaptaptap fluttering of a too-quick human heart, and settles in for a quiet one.

(When he wakes up again, no one is around to see him throw out his chicken bones in the tiny trash receptacle by the doorway.)

(His toys and new sheets are all there when Danny gets back to his cot.)

(He’s too relieved to do anything but take a second nap.)

“So,” Wally tries, leaning against the wall. “The… Alien? Extraterrestrial?”

Barry shrugs. Fishes a cheeto out of his bag. “Bart’s been calling it a ghoul. They crashed half a mile off the Kent farm a little after you popped out of the Speedforce; there’s a huge chance something happened to them as part of the temporal anomaly.”

“Happened as in…?”

“Yeah.” Barry takes another cheeto. “Bad.”

And theeeere is the visible guilt. There isn’t exactly any great way for Wally to feel after his unintentional resurrection led to an unintentional…something else.

“…Ah.”

Barry shrugs. There isn’t anything they can do about it; short of rewinding time and shoving Wally back into the Speedforce, which has been shoved off the table with a great deal of force by all of the man’s former teammates, there’s no way to undo the accident that landed the poor alien smacking straight into good-old-fashioned American dirt.

“Don’t worry about the way it happened. It wasn’t your fault, and it sure wasn’t intentional on your part,” Barry points out, and offers the bag of Cheetos towards Wally. The snack is gone in microseconds. The curse of speedsters is really footing the bill of all their emotional eating.

“So, they’re…do we know what they are? Because they definitely shapeshifted fangs as soon as I found their little—whatever that is. Container? Unit? Under the table.” Wally traces the vague shape of the thing’s cerulean heart in the air. “One second I was holding a glass paperweight, and the next I was on the opposite end of a very angry shadow-snake. I think they would have done worse than bit me if it hadn’t had a clear escape route out of there.”

Barry balls the empty bag and shoves it into a pocket. If he litters in the Watchtower, it’s going to be water cooler gossip for years. Bats would never let anyone defile his super cool, super-secret base with garbage without his own form of petty revenge. “Medical says it likely serves as an organ for him,” he says instead, since monologue about how inconvenient it is to be held responsible for his own actions wouldn’t be professional. “So. Think of it less as a container; think of it more as a turtle shell. Medical is pretty sure it’s a part of their body. Messing with it would really hurt them.”

“Yeowch.”

“Mmhmm. One micro-sec.” Barry darts out and away from his nephew; he just remembered he has bottled smoothies in his room. In the time it takes him to fetch two from his mini-fridge—one of his favorite flavor and one of Wally’s—and circle back, the dust motes in the air have hardly even realized he’s gone. They hardly drift even upon his return. “Here.”

Wally catches it easily. To anyone else, Barry would barely have blinked away. To any other Speedster…Barry knows intimately how lethargic and thick time feels against his skull. Slowing down to a mortal, human speed can feel maddening. Sore. Viscerally and bone-shatteringly wrong in his skin, maybe.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Barry would do that and more for his family.

They drink their smoothies.

“You know,” Barry breaks back in, the thoughts of their previous conversation looming lightly in his mind, “Medical says that the fact that we sometimes see their—let’s call it a core—is really, really bad. It’s not a shock that they’re hiding. It would be like climbing in a closet when you’re so vulnerable that you don’t feel like you can defend yourself.”

The rim of Wally’s smoothie bottle drops from his lips. The man frowns. “Oh?”

Barry shrugs. “Imagine losing your skull so that your brain is exposed all the time. Imagine being a cell and having your cell wall break so your nucleus is exposed?”

They both wince at the image.

“Oh boy. And Bart is…playing? With that entity?”

His uncle snorts. “You tell me. I think you’ve seen more of them than I have at the moment. All I did was catch them hanging out in a conference room. I have to admit, the purring can get a little loud in the…” he makes a vague gesture that could mean anything from room to atmosphere to Speedforce.

Wally’s been mostly of the same mind—the physics of the entity, whatever they are, aren’t specifically third-dimensional. It might be related to how they only sometimes manifest, or how they manifest with only partial corporeality.

“It’s been at least some play and some games for him, I’m sure,” Wally admits, a smile pulling at his mouth nevertheless. “I spotted him going through a stim toy website before he suddenly and mysteriously had a mission on the other side of the planet. But I think most of his concern is the…”

Wally winces at the thought of the myriad of medical issues the entity’s faced since his arrival to Earth. Barry’s wince stretches to match. They both saw the report.

“…So it’s been a lot of food on Bart’s part. A lot of managing his care of them too; Superboy and Rob aren’t the most straightforward team in the world, but I think they’re largely keeping Bart in check on this one— not that they’re on base as much as Bart is.”

Wally smiles. It’s not a very happy smile, or very relieved of his earlier guilt, but it’s a smile nevertheless. That’s fine. Barry’ll work on the rest on Sunday; they’re due for a good luncheon out somewhere nice. Their JLA-approved food budget can foot the bill. Maybe…Indian? There’s got to be good food in Delhi they haven’t tried yet.

“At least J’onn’s back on base next week.” Wally sighs, crooked and a little weary. “Maybe this will finally get them to stop running every time someone gets within forty feet of them. Like, they realize they’re losing vital fluids, right? Wait, is Bart even giving them any water?”

“…I’m going to hold off on that worrying thought. I have a different one I’m sweating over. Do we even know if Bart will let our resident telepath get within forty feet of his new playmate?”

Wally groans, face in his hands. Barry can’t help but laugh a little—perhaps tinged with desperation.

Sidekicks. Always with the new problems. At least last time they had this problem, Kon could talk.

Notes:

Every Speedster: *hands on each other's shoulders* OUR eldritch monster cat thingy
Medical: BLEASE do you think they would rate on an elementary level of play ability or do you think we have to worry about them eating spare parts??
If you were worried, Danny is drinking water. He is however drinking like out of unattended cups and several sinks though so it's not super efficient.

Chapter 6: Bruised. Bleeding.

Summary:

"Inbound communication from higher up. Manhunter's back in atmo."
"Got your notebook ready yet? We're attempting some pretty complicated alien-on-alien communication here. Who knows how this'll go."
Several boos sound out from the team.
"Camera 2 is onscreen— Jeff, if you jinxed us, I swear—"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny wakes up to an unbridled wave of nostopdon’t.

…He rouses. His lungs flutter.

Danny flinches.

There’s something— it’s large and it’s green in a way that humans are not and it’s taller and wider than Danny’s human and the space it makes in Danny’s senses—

The red human Danny is too attached to now buzzes to his bedside, spilling worrywor/rynerv/ous all over Danny’s section of this abandoned hospital. His muscles tighten up to compensate; and when the green not-human adult gets closer, Danny pushes himself forward on his elbows— closer to his vibrating human, closer to a defensive formation.

The green thing moves and Danny can’t see the gesture. He bristles.

And then

Danny’s skull spl

its

down the middle.

Everything hurts and everything is on fire.

Danny screams.

And he screams.

And—

Danny isn’t moving— everything else moves when Danny screams but he isn’t moving— the fast human has gotten even faster and they’re zooming through the building, through rooms and past adult humans that Danny has never seen, and all Danny can do is sink his claws into the human and hope that it stays. That Danny stays. In its arms, and not next to— that.

The fast-buzzing human finds a dark room.

It shoves Danny and itself inside. Good.

They hide.

Even better.

Someone comes to the door, and Danny can feel the frigid heat of a blast forming in his fingers. But it’s only two of the humans Danny has already met. And another young human.

This one has light hair, he thinks. It shines in the light spreading out from the cracked doorway.

They talk and they don’t crowd his space but to be honest Danny would rather they did. There’s something horrible out there, and he knows these humans aren’t that bad and whatever green thing out there certainly is. They should all be safe in this nice dark room.

He makes a grabby hand. Come here. Get closer.

…One of them does. Great! Danny gently bats at it with his knuckles until it joins them underneath the table. Danny puts the buzzing human in front of him and his new human behind him, so that he’s in the middle. There’s layers now. They can’t all get wiped out at once.

Danny makes grabby hands at the other. It makes a huffy sort of vibration. Probably a laugh. Stupid. Doesn’t it notice that they’re in danger??

Danny whips a very sharp comehererightnowbetween them— not lashing, but not gentle. They are in danger. Come here.

Thankfully, the last two obey—Danny’s pretty sure he’s being humored, but that doesn’t matter. Not as long as they’re all under the table. And safe.

The buzzing human’s anxious vibrations slowly move out into a slower, calmer boredom, and that’s fine, because boredom means that it doesn’t think they’re in danger. No one has found them yet and the humans are twitchy and nervous.

One of the darker-dressed humans says something. Danny can’t tell what it says, exactly, but he can turn his head to listen. The words flow around him like water. Someone else murmurs something else.

A human hand bats at Danny’s. Danny flinches. It—is it fighting?? Are they fighting??

They don’t start…hitting. But they keep batting at Danny’s hands, very carefully avoiding his claws, and—oh. They want to play. And they probably want to play quietly, so they’re being smart about not getting caught. Ugh. If Danny had his toys, they wouldn’t be so bored. This is almost worse than boredom.

…Fine. Danny’s claws don’t exactly retract like an animal’s, but they’re not so essential to his being that they’re formed and present all the time. The sharp shapes of his claws shift in the darkness, until they’re only blunt nails: suitable for playing.

All the humans make very excited noises under their breath. It’s all very interesting or something. It can’t be that special. Danny sees other ghosts reshape little bits of themselves all the time.

The quiet human in red gently lifts up Danny’s hands with its own. It gently tosses Danny’s hands in the air, so that they clap together very quietly once they fall down onto its own. Danny lets it happen. They’re this close to him anyway. They’re probably not a threat.

(The real threat is outside, anyway.)

Then his hands get flipped over. The human gently bats its hands against Danny’s, extremely careful not to anger him enough to claw. They do this a couple times before Danny figures the game out.

Oh. It’s a hand game—Danny even knows this one. It’s Ms. Mary Mack. The quiet one whispers the right tune under its breath.

Once Danny knows it, it’s easy to gently follow the motions. He surprises them when he knows the motions as well as they do; his wrists hurt when he goes too fast, or when the human kids do—when they push too hard, Danny makes himself intangible, to their delight—but he can be gentle, and eventually everyone else is gentle, and they carefully plot out Mrs. Mary Mack and a veeeery slow version of Concentration.

It’s all very fun, right up until the Large Green Not-Human pushes itself through the floor.

Danny pulls his hands back, unsheathes his claws, and shrieks.

Everyone yells and everyone gets closer—it’s a defensive formation and that’s good but it’s not enough if he needs space to help defend them—and everything is loud and upsetting and Danny’s already hurt but he can fight and he will—

—Apology, Apology— something whispers, infinitely quieter than the attack Danny had suffered.

He bolts upright. What? Oh, oh no. It wants to talk to him. Danny does not want to talk back. NonononoGoAWAY.

The giant green thing backs off. Danny gets a distinct sensation of —Questions, Answers— sent to him. The feeling is accompanied by a procession of Danny’s own memories: the stars from the base, the container he’d woken up in, his bed nest and all the waste in it.

Danny winces further back under the table. Just because he likes his cot and feels safe in it doesn't mean it isn't gross. It is gross. But everything is going to be gross until all of his insides are actually inside of him again, and not squished up in his more liquid form.

The quickfasthuman darts in front of Danny, as if it is going to be any defense against whatever this creature is, and starts yelling in its little human voice. Danny keens.

—Care, Concern— flows towards him. With it comes Danny’s memories of the buzzing human bandaging him, a flesh-tone bandage stretching across the hole where more of his nose ought to be.

…Danny stills. It’s. That’s.

It’s a very gentle emotion. Maybe the thing is…lying…? But if it was, Danny would be able to feel it. Right?

There are more thoughts and feelings that come by, first very quietly and softly, and then a little too fast to track as the being get ahead of itself. When Danny pulls away, it slows down, and the flow becomes manageable again.

The Earth. Green and peaceful.

Space. —Home. Home—

This base that Danny is on. On it are faces that the green being can see, that Danny can’t— but in its memory it shares, all of them are welcoming and friendly with…their coworker. This being.

(Is this an alien?!)

(The being pauses in its recollection. It feels distinctly —Amused, Amused—. And then Danny gets space memories!! Of Mars!!!)

He carefully eases his claws out of the carpet. Okay. This is pretty cool. Danny’s getting the hang of this.

He (thinks? Successfully?) bounces back a memory of his first room, his first shuttle model of the Atlantis, the glow in the dark stars on his ceiling.

The alien (Alien!!!) treats him to a memory of his own offsprings’ resting places in his home. On Mars.

Danny doesn’t even argue when his buzzing human tries to pick him up. They can break formation. It’s fine. Danny purrs and purrs with his core. For the first time in months and months, someone can speak to him properly. Someone wants to speak to him.

What Danny thinks matters.

The stranger invites Danny into a mutual conversation, and Danny accepts.

Danny sinks himself into a memory of the earth, as seen from the upper atmosphere. The stars were all-encompassing there. He misses flying.

The Martian sends him a memory of a crashed…

…Oh. Danny squeezes further under the table. That’s the Specter Speeder. From the stranger's eyes, his crash into the dirt looks so bad. That’s…that crash hurt him. He’s still hurt. Still so bad.

Even the alien’s —Concern, Fear, Worry— isn’t a comfort.

The Martian replays the memory of the bandaids again. And then a new memory: the laboratory where Danny woke up.

The room was full of nervous humans in scrubs and lab coats, all of whom were nervous, nervous, fussing over problems like safe food and adequate oxygen and sanitary environment and please, please be okay. Danny’s empathy is limited to other empathetic beings, but the humans' thoughts and worried faces are bare and transparently clear to the alien.

…Oh.

Danny thinks of the young humans crowded around him, trying to keep him comfortable and safe, even when the alien knows that the humans know that he isn’t a threat. But that they worry for Danny anyway, because he’s scared and unhappy and in pain.

Oh, Danny thinks. …Oh.

Notes:

Pndu56's comment on ch2 about Bart teaching Danny Patty Cake literally has stayed in my brain this whole time. Rocked my world. This one's for you, icon. We can however blame Tim for picking a game that's like way more complicated than Patty Cake like dude be nice his body is busted??
*
Martian Manhunter: Hey, how's it going?
Danny: has -2 physical brain left that can process sensory input
Martian Manhunter:
Martian Manhunter: oh no
*
YJ Team: Oh no too bad we have to hide under this table with our bestie :( so tragic
Batman (via comm): You literally do not have to. Get back here.
YJ Team: Oh nooooo too baaaad now we're teaching him Concentration :( It's so awful that we're stuck here
Batman: ...is he winning?
YJ Team: Nah.

Chapter 7: Status Update.

Summary:

"I'm gonna get 'em."
"You are— You cannot 'get' Martian Manhunter! Not only is he stronger, faster, and has superpowers, but he is also our boss!"
"I am! I will! I am going to!! Gretchen, back me up."
"Go get him, girl."
"No!!!"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The debriefing team meets J’onn in a meeting room not too far from the cafeteria. By the time he makes it to the correct floor, the team has clearly been waiting on him; on the table are a pack of Chocco cookies, a large order of fries, and a ten pack of chicken nuggets.

J’onn inclines his head. It’s nice to see that his favorite meal is remembered. “Thank you, Batman.”

Batman’s nod is equally as formal. The human is already most of the way through his italian sub. “No thanks needed. Were you successful in your contact with the entity?”

Ah. Right to the details, then. J’onn obliges the question with a seat at the table. Black Canary, a chair to his right, gently scoots over to provide him more space.

In the end, J’onn is relieved to have a prop in his hands. It creates a small, if flimsy barrier between himself and the images the boy had shown him.

What he knows now…

J’onn sighs.

The room is peaceful— likely intentionally so, in order to ease the oncoming conversation. Wonder Woman and Black Canary sit beside each other, their individual meals open and half-eaten between them. As the facilitator of the conversation, Batman sits at the end of the table; as the secretary of the meeting, Superman sits beside him, his sloppy joe in one hand and a keyboard beneath the other.

J’onn quietly tears open the packaging of his pack of cookies. Plucks one from its plastic insert inside. Chews. Swallows.

“The first thing to note is that although the entity's primary language is not known to me, he is extremely familiar with humans— and, likely, with Earth.”

Superman swallows the rest of his sandwich in one gulp, nods, and begins to type. Batman turns to face J’onn directly. “How so?”

“He has many memories of flying freely in Earth’s atmosphere, specifically; the stars line up with the star patterns as viewed from this planet. He is intimately familiar with several aspects of Earth’s culture, including the idea of ‘a bedroom’, which he identified as his own, and a childhood toy, which was a scale model of an Earth spacecraft. If I was shown a variety of options, I could likely pick out which craft specifically. He has a mind for detail.”

Superman’s fingers flick rapid-fire over the keyboard. J’onn happens to be aware of the Krytponian’s career, as the local telepath, but rarely is the man's passion so clearly shown; the focus and quick hands certainly project an air of professionalism around an otherwise at-ease debriefing room.

“You’re using he/him,” the Kryptonian observes, making additional notes in the margins of the in-progress report. “How did that come about?”

“He does have an understanding of the most common gender identities of Earth, and has a favored one. How he came about it…” J’onn inhales. It is a very human gesture. “…I do not know his origins for certain, but I have several theories.”

Batman cuts off an oncoming question from Superman with a silent wave of his hand. “Base information first. Questions and theoreticals at the end.”

Superman’s face at the hindering of his professional instincts is perhaps less than completely mature. “Yes, yes.”

J’onn takes a second cookie.

It’s easy to report on certain things; the entity's initial inability to communicate without acute pain, the subsequent reaction of the teenage team, the eventual discovery of clear communication and transference of emotion.

“Not all of his thoughts were particularly clear.” J’onn nibbles on the edge of his cookie. Black Canary pushes aside her empty tray of California rolls to give her pen and notepad space. This portion of the debrief necessitates more of her skills. “Most of the memories that he aimed to show me were value-neutral, or otherwise unrelated memories, likely due to the stress of his current and deeply traumatic situation. He preferred memories that did not have pain or distress associated with them. When prompted—I displayed my own perspective of the crash we had found him in— the associated memories that were brought up implied that not only was he the pilot of the craft, but that he had a hand in building it.”

Superman’s rhythmic tapping undercuts the soft conversation. “So he is sapient, then, despite the difficulties in communication,” Wonder Woman confirms softly.

“More than. There are echoes of formalized schooling and other instruction in his mind, although I couldn’t discern the topics of the lessons.”

“Were there other beings like him? Anyone we could reach out to? Family members, friends…?”

J’onn hesitates. There’s no way to confirm what he saw. However…

“…There are memories that he has of his own person, in which he looks very human. His self-conceptualization is of an adolescent human boy.”

The grief in the room is palpable. J’onn doesn’t have to look up to feel it press in on him from all sides.

“I suspect that…in the same way that Superman has largely spent his life on Earth, this boy has at least spent several years on Earth as well. There are glosses of memories of an adapted human house, though I was unable to safely explore how far back they went. There are humans who prominently play a role in his self-image and expected worldview, although the mental representations of them have scarred over with some form of psychological trauma. Overall, despite his current form, there was likely a time this child felt safe around both humans and human scientists.”

Silence rules over the room.

“...Do we know what changed that?” Black Canary asks, without looking up from her notes. Her pencil eraser taps quietly against the table.

J’onn sets the package of cookies to the side. “Not…so exactly. There were hints of memories threaded throughout the recalled moments that he did not wish to pin down. Claustrophobia. Fear of incarceration. The fear of physical harm done to him— and the psychological harm of knowing with exact certainty that there were those willing to hurt him. …Intimate betrayal.”

Superman and Black Canary’s eyes quietly close. Batman looks hardly moved under his cowl; if J’onn could not feel the man’s stress spike in the air, he might not have ever known how worried the human was.

J’onn isn’t actually meant to know Superman’s circ*mstances as to his arrival on planet Earth, but there are equally few ways that any of the league can hide the entirety of their thoughts from him— especially at the time of his initial arrival into the League, when mental defenses had yet to be erected in a comprehensive manner. This situation smacks strongly of the story of Clark Kent, son of his human parents.

“There is no way to confirm my guess without further conversation on the topic. However, it is incredibly likely that he lived under the radar, on Earth, for a lengthy enough span of time to acclimate to human society. The discovery of his non-human biology would have spurred further action, and the result would have given reason for his fear of medical professionals, scientists, and adult humans. Likely, the other humans in his memories meant to support him, and were prevented from doing so or injured in the process. The vehicle that had crashed back to Earth would have served as—”

“—An escape route,” several voices overlap together.

J’onn nods. His fingers steeple together. “There is no way to know how far into space he had gotten, or if his escape was aided by others of his species, or even if the point of origin was in low atmosphere or Earth's orbit. Either way, our patient is alone now, is in extreme background pain, has lost perception in several of his senses that exclude taste, and has reluctantly bonded with the junior team due to a lack of more familiar presences.”

Batman’s emotional presence circles into a silent exhale of frustration. “That would be Impulse’s under-the table operation,” the human correctly identifies, dry as the desert.

(J’onn is certain that the vigilante will never reveal it, even to himself, but the exhale has its own quiet, microscopic tinge of reluctant amusem*nt.)

“I don’t think it qualifies as under-the-table if you have a running file on his activities, dated and timed by every individual interaction,” Superman points out, not even bothering to glance at the now-slightly-peeved Batman.

“Hn.”

“Oh, very mature.”

“It was not league sanctioned.”

“Neither are the majority of your movements,” Wonder Woman points out. The fork from her salad punctuates her sentence with a tease and a wave. “If you informed us your security plans for the Watchtower any earlier than a week after you had already installed the new measures, I would assume you were an imposter and prepare for battle.”

Batman hardly looks put out. He achieves deception with his whole body. J’onn genuinely admires how discordant his behavior and churning thoughts can be.

“Hn.”

“Oh, very well-spoken,” Black Canary flatters insincerely, toying with her pencil against her paper.

It would be very immature of Batman to sulk. Therefore, he does not.

“Returning to the point of this meeting… Are there any other pertinent details we ought to know?”

J’onn considers shrugging. He packs three chocco cookies into his mouth instead, chews, and swallows. There are only two cookies left in the pack, now.

“The biological mechanism utilized for his empathic sense is vibrationally-based. That would be why my initial attempt at communication failed so tremendously; if he does have a neurological center, it is too deeply damaged to interpret telepathic input. He has a fondness for astronomy, can recognize the color red with greatest ease, and likely needs high contrast if we would like him to recognize any materials we provide. He imprinted on Impulse likely because the boy’s presence in the Speedforce mimics the energy readings he expects to see in those of his species.”

Superman hums. His fingers fly. “So he must have met others of his species before.”

J’onn makes a so-so motion. “There is no way to be certain. His abilities may be instinctually pre-programmed, or he may have had access to outside materials to teach him.”

Batman’s arms cross. His sandwich, which had been sitting on the table, is now entirely vanished— wrapper and all. “Was there any evidence as to either particular theory you were able to pick up on?”

“...No.” Hadn’t he indicated such?

“Was there any personal information you were able to pick up on?”

J’onn has to think about that one. The topic hadn’t come up during their mental exchange, when so much more of the focus had been on creating basic understanding of the Watchtower, his presence within their base as a patient and not as a prisoner, and his current location on the moon. Anything else that J’onn might have gleaned would have to be determined on supposition and analysis.

“...He enjoys astronomy.” J’onn tries to recall the exact memories he had seen, and only ends up reiterating what he has already said. Perhaps highlighting certain moments will make the narrative clearer. “His childhood dwelling had little stickers on his ceiling. They would stay lit even when the room went dark—”

“...Glow in the dark stars,” Superman whispers under his breath. J’onn exhales. This isn’t a familiar point of human culture for him. He’s glad his description is recognizable.

“Yes. He organized them to mimic Earth's constellations. He had smaller, handheld versions of rocket ships. Even if he had not known of extraterrestrial origins, he was drawn to the cosmos.”

Batman coughs. The gesture is a reflex to suppress some welling emotion. J’onn pretends that it works. “Both items are…markers of a young child,” Batman admits. “Indications of a quite young, very human childhood.”

Ah. J’onn can more deeply recognize the sense of tragedy welling in the air. The items are astronomy-based yes, but they equally highlight his age.

“When he donned a human appearance, he matched the coloration of the human family who took him in. As fleeting as their acquaintance might have been, he modeled his human form after them— solidly enough and surely enough that, if he feels strong enough to form a mental self-representation, I can see the outline of it in his memories.”No details, beyond vague hints in the entity's mind of his hair and her eyes and their skin.

“Very loved,” Wonder Woman murmurs.

“Very young, and very loved,” Black Canary reiterates with a sigh. Her notes are a black mess of graphite. “And now he fears adult humans.”

“Yes,” J’onn admits. The cookies are gone. He sets the wrapper to the side. He reaches for the chicken nuggets. “That said, he has an instinctual familiarity with black and with red hair, will likely experience less fear with a female profile as opposed to a male, and responded favorably when offered the chance to interact with an adult who did not mean him harm. The fact that we have largely indestructible adults at our disposal works to our advantage.”

It is very, very clear who exactly fills that description. Wonder Woman sits up straight, laces her fingers together, and very kindly curtails her smugness. If Superman and Batman would like to be jealous of her current position, they may do so at their own discretion.

Notes:

Superman & Batman: HEY
Wonder Woman: Back off, boys! I get to see the baby!

Chapter 8: Curious. Curious?

Summary:

"So...how exactly are we going to get Wonder Woman into appropriate PPE?"
"..."
"...Do we even...would a standard gown even fit over her biceps?"
"Yeah...?" *ripping noise* "Oh. Uh. Maybe we should order up real fast. Can someone get Batman in for a rush order?"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny only doesn’t throw something because he already knew someone was on their way. The alien told him so. It’s not a surprise.

There’s someone new here. In his room. At the edge of his curtain. Too close to his bed. Danny doesn’t like it. He doesn’t hiss, because that’s Rude, but he does push his shadow to be bigger. Longer. Darker.

The human just waves. Waits. Holds something out in its hand. Danny doesn’t care. He can’t see it and he’s not going to go over there.

The human makes more words Danny can’t hear. Blech. He wonders what everyone knows here that he doesn’t. Is it French? Is it German? Jazz—

Thinking about Jazz makes his heart hurt.

Danny curls up further into the dark spots on his bed.

The human steps past Danny’s curtain. Danny does hiss, now, something long and low and halfway out of a human hearing range.

The human pauses. Its black haired-head tilts. It says—something else. Its tone is still gentle.

Danny doesn’t trust it. But it doesn’t get any closer, either. It only…holds out a hand.

There’s something in that hand.

It’s a trap, it has to be. But—

The alien said that they had friends in this tower. That the humans here are…safe. Danny doesn’t believe it. Danny is afraid to believe it.

But one of them gave him food.

…And the younger ones feed him all the time.

So maybe. Danny. Maybe he can. He flinches and he leans forward.

Danny can. He can’t see most things. But something aches in his skull where he is meant to see color and shape and familiarity, and something in his melted brain whispers wait, watch.

Danny’s back arches.

He waits. He watches.

…The object doesn’t do anything. The human simply sets it on Danny’s side table, and then it’s an object. A mostly white, somewhat red object. The other colors might be blue, or gray; they’re not distinct enough to be distinguishable in Danny’s mostly mush eyes. It’s oblong, and sort of round and—

Danny jerks upright. He snatches the item off of the table as quickly as he can, brings it as close to his eyes as he can— IT’S A ROCKET!!!! It is!!!! With fuel thrusters and everything!! If Danny had his whole brain he thinks that he could even recognize which one!!

He purrs, and he purrs, and he purrs, and he takes his pillow and he settles the hard plastic into his kind-of-damp (but mostly dry!) pillows and leans into it, happy to have this thing he likes and can recognize!!

Fine. Danny can like this human. When it comes back with little pills in a paper cup, it bravely gets closer, so Danny can see black hair pulled back, a tail swinging behind her, a tinge of red under a mostly-opaque white medical gown, and gold bracelets on her arms.

…Danny touches the bracelets to investigate before he can even be scared. They shiver with energy. Danny’s fragile form shivers back.

The human spends a lot of time with words Danny can’t hear on the paper cup, and she pulls out each little pill inside so that she can say more things, show him what it looks like, let him smell each capsule and tablet.

When the buzzing human comes back with a vibrato of joycurio/us!/joy in its wake, eager to see Danny as he is relieved to see it, Danny shows him the little paper cup.

The buzzing human trills with relief! Relief! Relief!

…That’s got to be safe enough, right? …Right?

Danny…

It’s been a while since he tried to dry-swallow medicine down his torn esophagus, but everyone’s immediate rush to find him water makes the swallow easier than Danny might have thought.

Some of the medicine is going to make him sleepy. Danny remembers enough about medicine to remember that. The thought of being vulnerable and not able to wake up is scary; but if Danny is going to get better, he’s going to have to trust that not every human wants to make sample slides out of his organs and jam needle-long electrodes into his brain, and he will have to fall asleep and not cry about it.

The cup of water the quickquickquick human gets him is so nice. His claws clink against the ceramic of the mug. Most of the liquid actually makes it into his mouth, and some of it even into his throat.

Danny lays down, pulls the rocket ship closer to his fragile form, and purrs. The fastquick human takes Danny’s hand so that he’s not alone.

At some point, his paper eyelids shut.

Notes:

Medical sees that the alien entity-child takes their meds voluntarily and collectively the whole team bursts into tears.
Also, Diana absolutely dipped into the Air and Space museum in DC to get something nice before her official visit to the alien kid was approved. She is very, very smug that her gift is immediately elevated to Best Toy lol.

Chapter 9: Wet. :(

Summary:

"So. We have to do something about the hygiene situation."
"Like what? He already has rubber sheets."
"No, like...like a shower. Do you think he's getting clean with all that stuff everywhere?"
"I don't know if he can stand that long. Or be subjected to the sensory experience of water. Think we can just send Impulse along with some baby wipes?"
"Wh— No, we are not sending a teenage superhero along with a pack of baby wipes and hoping this turns out alright! I— Ugh. Can someone get me a line to Wonder Woman? Let's see how far we can get his goodwill to go."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny is not in the container.

He very much doesn’t like the container.

The new lady and all the milling-about humans and his quickfast human have, however, encouraged him back to this room that looks just like the container's room, with one key difference. This one has a bathtub.

Danny touches the water.

It is too hot.

Danny does not want to go into the bathtub.

No one…no one is making him go in the bathtub. But everyone is gesturing, and making encouraging noises, and it makes Danny shrink into the sparse shadows of a partially-lit room, too afraid to get near the water, and too unhappy to cooperate.

It’s too hot. It smells funny in the way that cough drops and antiseptic tastes funny so it’s probably good for him, but Danny’s not a person and the water is too hot for him to put his core into.

The youngest human is so sad that it reverberates throughout the room, moaning and groaning and toying with Danny’s pull-toy fidget, which Danny is kindly letting it keep. It is laying on the floor. Danny does not have any feet for it to trip over right now, but Danny is hovering above it, so no one with a flesh body falls and hurts something when they trip.

Breaking bones hurts. Danny would know.

The new human lady tries to encourage Danny with his rocket ship. It doesn’t work. The bath is too hot even with the rocket ship in it. Danny wishes there was something he could use to change the temperature.

…He reaches over the side of the tub. Danny swishes a finger around in the water.

Nope. Still too hot.

Okay. Danny needs… Something. He needs. Something.

He quietly removes himself from the most familiar human and just…floats around the room. It is mostly bare. There is space for lots of humans to work with lots of technology to make things happen, but the room is mostly empty right now, except that it has a whole bunch of humans and Danny in it.

There isn’t anything helpful in this room. Danny goes to the next room.

(The new human lady follows behind.)

The next room has…the container. Danny hisses when he sees it.

No one does anything.

…Okay. Danny slides further into the room. No one is making him go in. Okay. He can…explore.

There are other things in the room. Danny can’t tell what all of them are, so he just starts opening things. He finds stuff made of wood and cotton. He rips something small in half, and a bandage falls out. He sticks a wet wipe in his mouth before he realizes it’s a wet wipe—that one drops out of his mouth and onto the floor. It tastes so bad.

The human makes a sad noise that might be a laugh too, but Danny can’t interpret now. He’s on a mission. He has more important tasks to finish.

There are more rooms with more things and Danny keeps looking. He finds towels and medical robes in cabinets and machines that do things that Danny can’t tell and tubes of all sorts and packages of medication Danny can’t eat. He keeps opening doors and looking inside and closing them because none of them help.

…There’s some white packets inside of clear plastic wrap. Danny can’t tell what they are. Is this something that he can use? Will it help?

Danny flexes his comeherelookitthis aura with a curl of his tail, and the human buzzes to attention in Danny’s current room.

Danny hands him the pouch.

The human does something to it. The crinkly-shiny wrapper falls to the floor. The human makes a noise, the packet creaks ominously, and the human holds out its hands so that Danny can take the packet back.

He takes it back.

Danny immediately drops the packet back to the floor because it’s hot!!!! Ugh!!!! If he had known that the package was one of the hot packets, he wouldn’t have bothered!

He floats elsewhere into the room, sulking. He opens more cabinets and doesn’t close them after. He—

Wait.

—Danny feels out with a hand. It’s…cold inside.

Danny shoves his face into the cabinet. There’s no food, just little vials, but yes! Cold! He shoves a hand inside and roots around, even though he is also trying not to crush or break the little vials. The white-coated humans don’t get close or try to get him, but they do make sad noises. Danny hummmmms an apology. But—

Out of the fridge comes squishy packs. There is nothing in them but squishy wet material. They are only cold.

Perfect!

Danny grabs as many as he can with his hands and one in his teeth and his teeth tear through the plastic a little and he kind of tastes the goo inside (gross!), but he has armfuls of cold packs and they are all very good at being cold packs.

The buzzing human comes back to find him and laugh, laugh, laugh all the way through the soft layers of the universe, but Danny doesn’t care, and also he needs it to show Danny where the bathtub is again so he can go sit in the gross medicine water. He might be a little lost.

Thankfully, once Danny stops moving and just stands around, it does. Great!

The lady is still there with the rest of the humans. Whatever. Danny spits the cold pack in his mouth into the bathtub and medicine water probably goes everywhere, but he can’t tell and doesn’t care. The rest of his pile he dunks into the tub by himself.

Now. Danny sticks an arm in the water.

It’s…better. Not so warm. Danny could probably tolerate it now. He doesn’t want to, sure, but he’s also covered in his own waste products and hasn’t cleaned anything in ages and ages and who knows how long. So probably washing out his insides in uncomfortably warm water and a little bit of cold pack medium is better than, uh…not doing that.

Danny slides carefully into the bathtub. Gross. The water is gross. Also it smells bad. Wait. Could he smell before?

He sniffs again. His hands slide through the water, and Danny has to work not to make himself intangible so that he doesn’t get wet. Getting wet is the point right now. He brings one of the cold packs a little bit closer to his body, the cool water radiating from it, and gently splashes water onto his abdomen.

Danny can’t exactly tell where and how he’s injured, and this form hides his wounds even from himself. Still, he remembers…he remembers most of the bad things. Being pinned down. The restraint bruises.

The bright lights.

The…scalpels…

When the human lady is suddenly at his side again, Danny flinches back into invisibility. She doesn’t yell at him for disappearing, or pull out a weapon to punish him.

She has ice packs in her soft flesh hands. One by one, without looking where Danny is hiding in thin air, she drops them into the bath, cooling it further.

…Danny quietly slithers back out of the shadows. The woman makes a quiet noise, and then she leaves the side of the tub.

He doesn’t know how to respond. He continues to wash himself by gently splashing water on his torso. There’s organs under there he’s gotta clean. Probably. If not, he ought to wash anyway.

Huh. There’s no soap here. Can he get soap? Maybe the weird water is supposed to be the soap. Bathwater doesn’t exactly lather, though.

Whatever. Danny washes everything from his sore scalp to his largely-nonexistent toes/tail. The water turns a filthy, corroded black-brown. Danny doesn’t even ask if the white-coated humans want anything to do with the water; he doesn’t want to see them, and this is nasty.

He pulls the stopper out. The water goes down. Danny watches it drain.

…Okay. So. They’re on the moon. Where does his gross water go? Danny hopes they don’t recycle it. A base full of mostly-humans probably doesn’t know how to filter ectoplasm out of the water supply. Or, depending on what they know or don’t know, they might not even know they have to.

Do they know what Danny is?

Danny hopes they don’t. Maybe they would give him back to the lab if they did.

…He doesn’t want to think about that. He wants another bath. Danny fusses with the taps by the bathtub long enough that the human lady comes back, with her fully articulated fingers that can grasp and twist and pull.

This time Danny gets cold water, which he likes. He doesn’t like that she’s so close, but he appreciates the help. The tub fills, and Danny washes again, and the lady comes back with a very soft towel that Danny wants to add to his bedding.

Danny definitely pushes the towel through his body a few times. It’s mostly to get the most water off of his body as possible, even though the human woman keeps her attention on him as he does.

He doesn’t relinquish the wet towel.

The woman holds her hands out for it.

…Danny scoots a little further back. It’s a nice towel. He wants it on his cot so that the sheets don’t absorb as much waste ‘n blood ‘n stuff.

One of the other humans in white walks forward, and Danny pushes himself as far back as he can go. It ignores him. It hands a second towel to the human lady with the red colors, and walks away.

The human lady turns back to Danny. She holds out her hand and a fresh towel, not suffused with contaminated medicine water.

…Kay. Danny can do Tradesies.

Danny gets a new towel, is nice and dry, and roams invisibly back to his cot.

The sheets are all nice and new when he gets there. The humming human’s little friends are all there, chatting and toying with Danny’s stuff. Hey!

He makes the head and his chest sticking through the ceiling visible to human eyes, and he hisses. They scatter quickly. It’s a little funny—he’s not actually mad at them, but they can’t tell, since they can’t hear the little tones in his core. Danny drops to float over his cot, lays down the towel, wraps himself in it, and puts his things back into his bed.

It’s kind of like having a grave. It’s nice and cozy.

When the small humans poke their heads out from behind the curtain again, Danny purrs so that they know he’s laughing at them.

If they fuss, that’s their fault. Danny pulls his rocket ship into his pillows, finds a stretch toy that’s easy to chew on, and eases himself onto his cot for a nap.

Notes:

Danny: I need an ice bath. Cold. Please.
Medical: *writes ??? next to the alien kid's recorded temperature readings*
I had a week off, I did a poll on tumblr as to what people wanted to be updated, I slammed some computer keys together and this came out. Want the early updates and the chance to vote on things? (If I ever do polls again I guess.)

Chapter 10: Curious? Fun?

Summary:

"They came in!! Okay, everybody shut up— Wonder Woman's on-planet, right? Someone get one of the Flashes in here!!"
"Why're you yel— Oh!! Hey, everyone! They're here!!"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

“Gifts from Medical, coming through!”

Wally barely feels the way Bart whacks him with a spare pillow case, but the whiffing noise is kind of a clue that the teen wants him to slow down. Or, in all actuality, Impulse probably wants Wally to buzz off, but Wally’s got boxes and boxes of tinker toys in his arms and nowhere else to put them down, so there really isn’t an alternative but a direct route to his destination.

“Go away!” Bart complains, and whacks the back of Wally’s head with the pillow case again. Wally hopes it’s one of the clean ones. He’s seen the ones that Bart’s favorite patient has…used. “No adults allowed! Bats said so!”

That's true. Batman had said that. “Well,” Wally says, dodging his way to the curtain to Bart’s clear dismay, “Medical said it was alright, and we all have to listen to them. They also packed gifts for your bud, so…”

Bart grabs onto the back of Wally’s suit and digs his feet into the tile. “Thatdoesn’tmeanyoucanbargeinhisspace!” the kid protests, teeth gritted, as Wally drags him across the floor with nothing but a determined gait and a tiny bit of the speedforce. (Just a little.) “It makes him nervous!! And then he’ll bite you!”

Oh, yeah, the biting. Wally stops at the edge of the curtain, hands on the gross gray fabric. Hrm.

“Uh.” There’s gotta be a solution to that. He looks down at Bart’s weird mop-head hairstyle. “Will he stop if I bring gifts?”

“Nah. He’s going to eat you.”

…Great.

“Bossy,” Wally decides, even if this is, in the end, for the alien-kid’s sake. Bart squawks. “Oh well. I gotta deliver these anyway. Hey, stranger; I come bearing gifts from your medical team! Uh…hiss if you get mad, I guess?”

Wally bumps the free-flowing curtain to the side with his hips, showing off the aforementioned pile of toys in his arms before poking his head in.

The cluster of darkness on the bed, being largely a mass of black in the vague shape of a humanoid, says nothing.

Bart crawls underneath Wally’s outstretched pile of deliveries so that he can go straight up to the bitiest occupant of the Watchtower proper. The teen kneels down on the floor, put his chin on the entity’s cot mattress, and leans up on the bed up at the shadowy mass of teenager up above him. “I can tell him to go away if you want me to,” he tells the entity, who sort of…turns? Towards the speedster. “I could beat him up.”

Wally snorts. No he couldn’t.

“…I could get Superboy to beat him up,” Bart immediately amends, which, hey! Not nice!

…True, maybe, but not nice!

The shadow-kid doesn’t get up and leave, and he doesn’t start hissing or throwing things—both things Wally is pretty sure he’s capable of. And, well, Wally has a job to do, and unless the alien entity teen actually discourages him from doing it, Wally’s going to do his best to help the kid out on this one.

“Bart, if you really want to help him feel comfy when I pop this on his bed, get between him ‘n me, please.”

Impulse, thankfully, holds off on sulking. He hops onto the alien kid’s medical cot-bed, carefully tucking in a blanket beneath him as to stay…sanitary.

Wally’s got to admit. It doesn’t smell so hot in here. Maybe he ought to have let medical wrestle him into some hygienic gear instead of zipping straight down. Eh. Too late now.

Wally carefully releases the pile of presents from the kid’s medical team onto the bed— snatching one or two bouncers out of the air before they fall onto the floor.

Bart and the nameless alien kid lean in closer to inspect the colorful packages. “Oh, sweet!” Impulse exclaims, eyes wide. “Hey, look, you got new stuff!”

New stuff is right. Finance lets medical essentially decide their own budget; purchase orders of new physical therapy tools are consistently approved even with oversight. In this case, it looked like the team was more than happy to take advantage of that goodwill with a run to the local children’s educational shop.

There are boxes upon boxes of colorful children’s toys on the mattress. Bart looks like Christmas has come early. The alien kid looks—at attention? At least? His claws gently rake over the rainbow-bright cardboard boxes, turning them this way and that so that he can see.

Wally zips away and zips back with a chair for himself. The cot is gross, yes, but more importantly, Wonder Woman has made very clear in her notes that the bed is part the kid’s perceived personal space. Violating that trust with the alien-entity-kid is largely a non-option. If they want to hold themselves up to the standard that J’onn was able to impart in their brief conversation, they have to be kind, careful, and considerate of his personal space.

The Flash (the second) hops into the chair. “Want to help the kid open the stuff, Impulse? Might be hard with his. Uh. Hand claws. Claw…hands?”

They both look at the aforementioned being’s hands. The claws look like hands and sometimes they look like claws, but they mostly don’t look like anything. If Wally stops paying attention, he legitimately thinks he’s alone in the room with Bart and a stiff breeze.

“…Fingers,” Bart finally decides on. And then he beams. “Yeah! Okay. Hey, look! Let’s open this one!”

The kid-alien-thing mostly seems to respond to the brightly-colored and waving object in his vision and Bart’s cheery tone. Still, react he does. The amorphous form gets closer, tilts forward, and shimmers ever so slightly with attention as Bart begins to narrate his unboxing of colorful grip-shaped silicone toys, with little suction cups on the ends so that they can stick to things.

Bart sticks one to the kid’s side table. It takes the kid a second to observe, come to a conclusion, and then—fumblingly—claw the bright blue sucker off with his fingers until it comes free. The wobbly form of a teenage alien tries, misses, and then tries again to get the suction cup to relatch onto the table. The purr at his own success vibrates quietly through the room. It…the sensation shivers through Wally’s body.

It feels very, very weird. A little too personal. Like…the sound is embedded beneath his skin. Wally carefully scratches at himself, but the sensation of fingers on his suit doesn’t get rid of the feeling brushing against his muscle layer.

Bart doesn’t even react to the feeling, even if he can tell that Wally’s getting twitchy. “Tim thinks that most of his being is extradimensional. That’s why I can tell what he’s up to more; he zings in the speedforce.”

Wally slowly pushes himself up in his chair. “Wait, really?”

Bart doesn’t look up from his new project: unwrapping the cling wrap from dry erase lapboards. They look like they have the alphabet dotted along them in little spots of blue ink. “Mmhm.”

That’s… “Does Barry know?”

“I dunno.” Bart shrugs. He’s too busy watching his friend watch him unwrap preschool toys to give a clearer answer. “You can text him I guess. I think it’s just a theory, but he’s not biting you for being in his space right now, and he’s hissed at like everyone else who’s been here. Hey, look!! This one’s slime!”

Wally half gets up out of the seat. “Okay, okay, I think that one—“ He’s gone and back in a couple of nanoseconds, a plastic cafeteria tray clutched in his fists. “—That one needs a tray, I think. Don’t mess up the sheets with your new goo just because you’re excited.”

Impulse, teen speedster from the future, and a so-far nameless, bodiless alien teenage entity, share a vaguely textured cafeteria tray as they smush purple and yellow sensory beads around in rough circles. There are other toys that get opened, but are left largely untouched: a clock puzzle with insertable shapes serving as the numbers, and a 3D drawing pad with reusable cords on a velcro backing. The winner of the batch seems to be the colorful sensory beads in little tubs, considering that the two recipients of the stuff seem to gravitate back towards it with every new unboxing.

Of course, the favorite has to be the messy toy. Honestly, Wally should have guessed. Whatever. The plastic and wrapping trash is gone in seconds, leaving the kid’s space nice and clean, since apparently Wally is hanging around to be adult supervision. He might as well help out a bit.

And, apparently, the alien kid has something of a heart in his not-quite-present body; when Wally’s done throwing the trash out, the kid’s projectile of choice to chuck at Wally’s torso is a red block of floam putty sensory beads, matching the red of Wally’s suit.

…Wally’s going to take it as a nice gesture. The kid is purring and playing and generally disarmed, so this is probably an attempt at bonding.

The kid has a toy. Bart has a toy. Wally has a toy.

“Thanks,” he says, and unwraps the plastic on the stuff.

The alien might not have words to respond, but he purrs, and he purrs, and he purrs, and Bart hums right along with him.

And they knead putty together.

Notes:

Toys for injured ghosts:
-Squigz™ Master Set
-Squish & Squeeze Sensory Beads
-Double-Sided Early Writing Skills Lapboard
-Shape Sorting Clock
-Rainbow Cord & Picture Pattern Maker
Yes I used real toys and went on a fake shopping spree; I used a combo of Lakeshore and Melissa & Doug, mostly looking for stuff that either aided with fine motor skills, language acquisition, or both. They know Danny doesn't speak English and they know he has trouble with his hands, and at least one of the Medical team has to have or has young kids, and this is what they came up with collectively. Do they resent that Wonder Woman got to him first? No, definitely not. :( They did try to find toys that weren't outrageously condescending, though; no dolls, no fine motor toys meant for, like, ham-fisted babies. The fact that the toys are, like, equally interesting to Bart, is, like...unique to Bart. Maybe Kon, too.
Bart, Kon, Cassie: Hey! Want a slime?
Danny, Bart, Kon, Cassie: *squishing slime in parallel play with the alien-kid*
Tim, actively scamming Lex Luthor from his laptop as they speak: I'm busy too no worries :)

Chapter 11: HOT. HOT. HOT.

Summary:

"Phone!"
"What— Who's calling? We're single-project down here! If it's Batman again—"
"I'll tell 'em to make it an email. Yello', how can I help you?"
"..."
"Someone get down to Wonder Woman STAT!"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny’s alone when the itch starts.

And. When it starts. It’s just that: an itch. It tingles, and Danny tugs at the loose skin with his claws, and it fades into the choir of background pain in his mind.

It happens a few more times. In his stomach. In his eyes; Danny bats at the sensation with his hands, curled and careful, and it…tamps down. A little.

And then the itch stops going away.

He gets visitors; the humans like to play with his toys, and Danny lets them, because they’re young and he’s nice and they’re not mean to him. Not like— Their names escape him, but all the beings in his head are blue and firey and loud and not nice, and the green inside his blood burns instead of soothes.

Danny presses himself against the mattress of the cot. His towel wraps around his middle, to catch the Grossness. The young humans are nice. They are not a threat. Even when they’re loud, they’re not mean; they’re just young, and just playful.

He doesn’t want to play with them today, though. They ask him to play, and he bats them away with his claws put away inside his skin.

The itch has become a burn. He can’t play with them today.

It hurts.

Danny hurts.

Danny hides under his blankets and then he doesn’t, because the blanket on his cot scratches up against his itchy parts and he can’t sleep away the burn.

He wants to hide in his core. He wants to hide. He doesn’t, because he’s safe here, and if he goes back into his core then his flesh body won’t heal.

But it hurts.

Danny doesn’t even notice he’s curled up and crying until something touches his shoulder. It’s gentle, but Danny is so scared. He bolts upright—

Oh. The touch is from the alien’s friend. The lady.

He knows this lady.

…Danny starts crying again. He doesn’t know why—except everything hurts, and he’s unhappy, but he’s well fed and well watered and clean, so why does his body hurt so bad?!

The lady pulls back his sheet, makes quiet, insistent, worried words, but Danny can’t understand her and everything hurts and he doesn’t know why and he wants his mom. Danny wants Mom, and she’s not here, and she never ever ever will be ever again—

There are gentle hands on his body. They hurt, even when they’re light and gentle.

Danny cries.

The human lady peels back his towel, and—he doesn’t know what she sees, but she says something stern and not as gentle-quiet and Danny hisses, scared, so scared, so hurt, so frightened.

The soft words come back. A soft touch to his shoulder. An apology.

The whole world hurts, and no one can help him.

…And then there’s a hissing sound.

Something very very cold touches him.

It’s not real cold because it doesn’t make him feel better, but his nerves are trying to interpret what he feels and what they come up with are a “????” that blisters across the wildfire of pain burning through him.

The hissing sound comes back. Again. More cold. More—something else touches him. He’s moved. Something else touches him again.

It hurts. Everything hurts. Everything hurts and Danny wants to go home and go to bed. And he can’t. And—

Someone pulls his blanket. Something pulls at him. There are hands, and there is a hissing sound, and there is a sensation of something Cold and Wet touching him across his burning abdomen.

Danny cries.

He cries.

He cries when a pillow appears in his arms and he cries when his spaceship appears there too. He cries when he’s alone and he cries when he knows humans are there. He cries, and he cries, and he doesn’t stop crying until the wildfire pain becomes only a burn, and then only a pain, and then only an itch again.

It itches.

Danny sniffles through brand-new sinus cavities. He itches. Everything is sore and he’s unhappy.

He’s also…on his back. The lady is there in the chair the buzzing-human-adult left there after its own visit. She is slumped over.

Danny doesn’t have the strength to purr for her attention. He’s too tuckered out.

He just. Warbles.

Thankfully the noise is enough. The woman carefully rises in her chair. She doesn’t move for a second.

Danny warbles again. A little quieter. A little more scared.

She leans closer. She says something—the syllables don’t make sense, but she sounds wet, and she sounds tired, and she sounds sad. And she’s still sitting with him anyway. There’s something in her hand, and—

Danny taps the occupied hand. What is it?

She makes a noise. She lifts her hand.

Danny moves the hand instead of the object of interest. It’s objectively easier.

The item is a spray bottle. He sniffs it. Smells kinda weird. Does it taste like anything? He presses his tongue to it.

Well. That tastes bad.

…And then his tongue goes numb.

Oh.

Oh!

And Danny’s still too tired to purr, but he makes a few grateful noises anyway, and the lady pets his hair with her blue-gloved hands.

The itching is gone. Numbing spray doesn’t last forever, but it’ll work for now. He has to rest while he can.

The burning will be back.

But for now...he’ll nap.

Notes:

Tags from Tumblr:
Diana: !!!!!!!????????????!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!?!??!?!?!!!!!!????!!
Diana: *yanks phone off hook* HELLO HEALERS. WHAT DO I DO.
Victor (on help line duty): ?? Wh— Medical? This sounds like...I'm forwarding you to medical. one sec. Hold on.
We are turning a corner I thought we ought to have been turning, like, five chapters ago. Whoopsie! Also, I'm alive! In a crisis? Sure! But I got several hours free today so here's this. Also they're cuddliiinngggg 😊🧡🧡🍊🧡

Chapter 12: ...Resignation.

Summary:

"Lucy? Did you leave the door open?"
"...No?"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

…Danny still hates the container.

But really. This was how it was going to end all along.

He doesn’t like the container. But he mostly understands that it has a job and that job is to make the air inside this giant space ship more Air-Like so that his human lungs can absorb more air. He gets it. Even if the alien had to come back and explain it to him twice so that his brain could hold onto the information. Danny understands the container.

He just…

Danny is ill-formed and shallowly built and more a whisper than a body right now, because of. Because. Because of what they did.

And it hurt. What happened hurts now. It had hurt so badly. When Danny’s not real, it doesn’t hurt. His legs don’t hurt because they’re not real. His head doesn’t hurt because it’s not there. His belly doesn’t hurt because it’s imaginary. He’s not real. The pain can’t be real because he isn’t there to feel it.

…But if he ever wants to be real again….

The container looms.

…If Danny ever wants to be real again. This won’t be enough. Being a shadow of an idea of a dead teenager isn’t enough. If Danny is going to be real, to heal, this isn’t enough.

And he knows it isn’t. The burning proves it.

Danny runs his fingers around the rubber gasket of the container. Is it worth it? To face what happened to him? To understand how badly he was hurt? To remember the truth?

It doesn’t seem like it is. Danny wants to go back to his cot. He wants to hide under the thin sheet. He wants to make the room dark and hide in the corners and never be a person again.

But if Jazz was here…

If Jazz was here. She would want him to heal.

Danny doesn’t want to heal. He just wants to be better already. But Jazz would want him to heal. And Tucker. And Sam. And the ghosts who cheered him on, who fought for Danny until the last second.

Danny never sought death, but sometimes the green door pops into his visions in the dark of his bedroom and tries to coax him home.

…Danny clutches his rocket toy tight. He edges his way in.

The door of the chamber slams shut behind him.

It’s dark in here. Not too dark. Not completely. Just. Dark.

Danny takes a deep breath. He tries not to cry. He lays down on the bed in the container, and—

There’s a flush of light as his body tries to form. He’s not going to cry. He—

More light.

More pain.

More—

The memory of taking a blast straight to the face slams into Danny like cannonball.

And then he’s gone.

“The patient, he— …in the hyperbaric chamber?! On his own?! How—“

“Showing symptoms of—vitals dropping—he—“

“—the—“

“—is on and on max capacity, we can’t go in and risk—“

“—fragile state—“

“Wait. Is that—“

“—Oh, Jesus f*cking Christ—“

“…It’s moving.”

Notes:

Tags from Tumblr:
#:) #the medical team is NOT having a good time #there were many guesses on ao3 but lemme tell you. healing be itchy #Diana: *went to get lunch* #Diana: ... #Diana: WHERE DID HE GO #Medical: SO DON'T FREAK OUT MKAY PLEASE MS WONDERFUL WOMAN
Also, sorry gang; I try to get to every comment, but it's increasingly become clear that I can't handle writing/formatting/posting in a timely manner AND responding. So. If you have an explicit question that no one's asked yet or an insightful comment, I will try to get a response to you. Otherwise: thank you so much for reading and responding and commenting! I do read every comment and I reread most of the ones with words in them. I just also. Have executive dysfunction and a day job haha. Thank you for sticking with Hybrids! This was meant to be a short side project!!! Oh no!!
We are finally turning a chapter I thought would be more like chapter six material! ᕕ( ◎_◎)ᕗ Whoops!

Chapter 13: Status Update (2).

Summary:

"Oxygen level?"
"..."
"That's. That's bad, right?"
"I hate how we have to ask that. Genuinely, I can't tell. Most of his vitals mimic human standards, but the blood pressure, the temperature...the, uh...the obvious..."
"Well. Our best guess is that he's been subsisting off of or accustomed to consuming human foods; until we can prepare something more specific, I'm going to prepare a standard human nutritional IV for our patient here. And just...stick it in wherever he's got flesh, I guess."
"Got it. Will do."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

…Bart doesn’t really do patience.

He doesn’t have to, so he doesn’t. Growing up in a world that wasn’t exactly real didn’t make for a real strong understanding of reality, or timing, or estimating how long something takes, or how long it would take a garden-variety human to complete a task.

He sits in the chair. He kicks his legs.

So. Bart doesn’t really do patience. When he wants to make his way through a book, it takes a few seconds to read through the whole thing at his standard pace. It’s great! Finishing the Troy Dodson series had taken ten minutes. He watched the full set of movies on quadruple-fast mode in about half an hour, and then still had the time to show up to the tower for trivia with the team that afternoon. It had been Crash!

And when—when Bart had wanted to learn how to cook, he went through half the recipes in Ma Kent’s copy of The Delights of Cooking in two days flat. And that was with missions. He even taught himself how to prepare squirrel from the back of the book! It tasted…uh, weird, sure, but that might have been his substitution of Caribbean jerk seasoning for garlic powder.

Patience is… Well, when Bart is on a mission and he has to wait for everyone to go at a human-comprehensible speed when laying out the plan of action, that’s patience. Sometimes he jumps the gun a little, maybe—but usually it all works out!

And when Bart has to wait for Barry and Wally to be free and off work for their day jobs, because they’re adults with real world things they have to do and Bart’s just—well, he’s—he tries to be patient! And he distracts himself with other things, and he takes the time to explore the world and get in new experiences he couldn’t have before in his own little virtual world, and he tries new things, and he eats new foods, and then Wally or Barry shoot him a text or ring him up and then he’s back in town in seconds anyway!

…But there isn’t a way to speed this along.

The doctor with the cute cat lanyard and Wonder Woman both have been trying to explain to Bart how bad the damage is. But Bart can tell. He has eyes.

His friend is physical now, but he’s not…right. His face is caved in, like someone hit him really really hard, or someone gouged out the whole front face of his skull—Bart can’t see any red matter, but that’s because of the pulsing green sheath that’s covered all of his friend’s open injuries.

And there’s a lot of green.

That means he’s super injured. Bart can see most of his glowing green not-face through the window of the metal tube his friend is sleeping in.

It’s not just his missing face, his crooked jaw, or his barely-moving chest, or his green-soaked fingers anyway; there’s open pits in his chest, slathered in green goo that shifts when he breathes and glows just a little in the odd light of the medical wing, lumpy and half-scarred from stitches that were sloppily applied. Utilitarian.

Tim told Bart that the sutures were probably meant more to prevent extra clean-up in a lab setting than to keep Bart’s friend alive.

…Bart doesn’t really want to think about that.

There are lime-tinged scrapes and scars across and around his friend's hands and up his arms, verdant-veined legs that aren’t exactly the right shape and orientation legs should be, crevasses in his stomach, his chest, against his collarbone, and the clawed-out pit where a face should be.

All green. So green. Like grass… Like the Earth, when Bart comes home from space.

It’s scary. It’s frightening.

Wonder Woman gave Bart a hug and said it would be okay when the Medical team started to apply white-swathed casts around misaligned legs, and Bart almost cried. The medical team thinks the green is his friend’s body working on healing him. That Bart’s friend will be okay.

Bart lets everyone say comforting things, because it’s kind when everybody’s kind. But Bart’s been an experiment in healing the unhealable and he knows as much as anyone else does that there’s simply no way to know if his friend will be okay.

But his friend isn’t alone like he was. Bart makes sure of it.

So he sits at his friend’s bedside, eats a granola bar, kicks his feet in the stiff chair Medical had to offer him, and Bart practices his patience.

By the end of this, he might even be good at it.

Notes:

As a reminder, tumblr followers get the chapters sooner than everyone else 👀 I posted this to tumblr last night and then immediately fell asleep.
(Actually, no I didn't. We proceeded to have cornbread discourse. "'Coursebread" if you will.)
Tags from Tumblr:
#Medical is just holding a bunch of clip boards with question marks on them #“So...what temperature is he meant to be???” #“uh” #“hm.” #“The green stuff is...part of him. Right?” “...yeah? Maybe?” #We got ONE partially-formed teenager!! #sure he's missing a lot of his face. Oh well!
Also: sorry gang; I try to get to every comment, but it's increasingly become clear that I can't handle writing/formatting/posting in a timely manner AND responding. So. If you have an explicit question that no one's asked yet or an insightful comment, I will try to get a response to you. Otherwise: thank you so much for reading and responding and commenting! I do read every comment and I reread most of the ones with words in them. I just also. Have executive dysfunction and a day job haha. Thank you for sticking with Hybrids! 🧡👻🚀

Chapter 14: I don't know where I am and I don't like it.

Summary:

"Em ougewfgjah, bjbjapaopapapapa....Shakira Shakira!"
"Please change your playlist for your rounds. We've heard this ten times now."
"It's literally in my earbuds. You can't hear it."
"I can hear you. And you're annoying. And—"
"Is that—"
"Call Wonder Woman. NOW."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny wakes up with a gasp.

He’s—where is he? Everything hurts. He can barely think. Danny groans, long and loud, and lifts up an aching hand to his temple.

His fingers come away green. Aw, f*ck. What happened to him? What’s going on? Why is his hand…blurry? Is he concussed? Is something wrong with his eyes, or with his head??

(He hopes it’s not his head. It’s waaay easier to heal from one than the other.)

Danny tries to sit up, and— NOPE. Ow. Bad idea. Suuuuuch a bad idea. His arms and hands and his neck and his back are screaming at him, now that he’s awake enough to pay attention. Ughhhhhhhhhhh.

He lays back down. His eyes don’t—well, they don’t shut all the way, which part of his brain labels as very bad, actually, but the world does turn darker and greener as he tries to shut his eyes, and that’s close enough to closing his eyes that Danny can mostly zone out past the pain.

He licks his sore lips. They taste like copper. And battery acid. …And Pixie Sticks.

Ugh, ecto-blood. His own, he assumes.

Everything is blurry and everything kind of hurts and he doesn’t know how he got here or what’s going on. Danny tries to roll over, tries to get more comfortable, but something starts dragging on the inside of his arm, which means intravenous lines.

Ugggghhhh. He hopes it’s got pain meds at least.

Awake him can deal with this later. Danny zones out, his labored breathing evens.

He’s asleep before he knows it.

Danny wakes up next to quiet murmuring, and to weird sensation of something moving in his arm.

He yawns—and his jaw cracks apart farther than usual, with more clicking noises than his jaw usually makes. Weird. His arms come up, his eyes unblur…

The tugging sensation doesn’t go away. Danny sniffs blearily. Blinks.

Two white-coated humans(…?) in PPE pause at his bedside, a half-dissembled IV shared between them.

Danny stops breathing. He can’t—is he—

His eyes go to the ceiling. The floor. He doesn’t recognize the room he’s in. He doesn’t understand. Is this the Guys in White again? Is he— Did he never leave? Is he trapped? Danny doesn’t—he can’t—

—One of the white coats starts making worried noises, which. Danny’s never heard that before. It’s usually threats. They raise both their arms, and Danny flinches back—

…And so do they. Huh. Hm. Are the Guys hiring scaredy cats now? That would be a change of pace, if they were as scared of Danny as Danny is of them.

The second person clicks the new IV bag into place. Danny stops focusing on number one and starts focusing on number two.

They don’t make any overt tells either. The IV line is already in him, and the bag is… Well. It’s not red and Danny’s not in any pain, and it’s not green either. It’s just. Kinda opaque? Milky? The person doesn’t start cackling evilly or telling Danny how screwed he is, either. They both just sort of…tidy up?

The first one doesn’t get closer, either, but Danny can mostly tell that they’re scanning him visually. Their attention goes from his face, to Danny’s visible arm, to the puncture point in his elbow for the IV needle.

Danny also eyes his IV point. Well. It looks like a needle. Doesn’t hurt all that much.

Someone says something he doesn’t catch. But the tone isn’t…mean, or anything. If anything, it sounds quiet, and low, like they’re trying to keep him calm.

Danny doesn’t understand.

He moves as far out of the way of them as possible. It only has the effect of a few inches and it's so painfully slow. If that. He— he remembers. He’s supposed to be scared of— something. No, he knows it—

The labs. He’s supposed to be scared of the labs. The smell is rank there and there’s always screaming and Danny had been hurt there; really, really hurt.

He’s still hurt. He’s still in a lab. In a room. In some sort of too-small prison, and now his barely-sewn together lungs are trying too hard to keep air in his body and it’s not working, and—

Danny barely pays attention when the first doctor leaves. He sees the other back into the door and reach for the phone line, and he can’t stop breathing and he can’t calm down because that means that they’re calling for help and they’re going to hurt him all over again. Tie him down. Cut him open. Shock him, until he can’t breathe without screaming—

Someone new comes in. They look— rushed. Danny can see her actively tying up long black hair, threading a mask up over her face, pulling on one of those paper shifts the doctors wear. The only difference is that she doesn’t put boot covers on.

She has big, bright boots that go all the way up her legs. With his green vision, they look kind of…greyish? (Maybe they’re pink..?)

Either way. They look…ridiculous. Danny doesn’t exactly forget to be scared, but also…what the f*ck.

The woman sees that Danny can see her. She waves.

Danny presses back against his— cot. Bed.

That doesn’t stop her. She pulls latex gloves from out of the paper slip she’s wearing and snaps them on, revealing a thin layer of something shiny underneath her elastic-bound sleeves. Once that’s on, she does a visible body checkup of herself: boots, gown, gloves, mask, hair.

…No hair net, though. Or goggles. The Docs in White always wanted to be fully covered when they saw their victims. Being able to see her eyes is a lot…friendlier.

She figures herself out. Straightens. Gives a double thumbs up.

…Danny's eyes roam around. There’s no one nearby. There's only a wall behind him. Is she looking at…him? Is that directed to him?

She doesn’t move immediately— and once she’s in, the second doctor leaves the room entirely.

…The new person takes over. She goes from monitor to monitor, getting closer, but with none of the focus on Danny, per se. She reads his stats, verbalizes them out loud, which, doesn’t sound like…English? But enough to confuse him? It’s kind of like trying to discern Esperanto when he's not thinking about how it's not English.

Ancients. The pounding in his head is getting worse. Maybe Danny has a concussion or something.

The woman doesn’t…get. Him. In fact, he seems to be the least interesting thing in the room to her. Her time is spent on reading the charts and the machines waiting around him, putting something into a…fridge? A Cabinet? In the corner of his room? And otherwise, she leaves him alone.

Until. She does get up and look at him, and all of Danny tenses up painfully. He can’t move. Something’s holding down his legs, his body’s stiff, and all of him is so tired that he genuinely can’t tell if his waist is tied down or if he’s just that exhausted.

He can hear his heart rate monitor kick up. He can’t move, not really. He tries to go intangible but his core just throbs with misery, and—

She mostly just pats his sheets. Not his person, even. Apparently the torture is being held off for now.

“Eow eart wel?”

…Danny squints. That is almost English.

“Eom hebbjan yift,” she adds, leadingly, as if Danny is a friend she can tease and not a subject under threat of the knife. He doesn't like it. It hurts. Nothing is real and everyone hates him and all he wants to do is leave but his body is rejecting him and—

Something light and plastic thumps down onto the bed.

Danny blinks. He looks—down. (His neck makes him regret that.)

Is that a…is that a space shuttle? No, ‘cause Danny thinks he recognizes it. It’s Discovery? Isn’t it? That’s the one they just retired. He tries to grab it, but— ouch, oof, his fingers can’t even stretch, bad idea—

The woman gently guides the shuttle into his hand. It doesn’t even hurt. And.

It’s cold to the touch. The model is plastic, it shouldn’t be so cold, but the sensation is distinctly cool and kind of familiar.

…Oh. Danny struggles to flex his fingers around the thing.

It’s him.

Or. Well. The shuttle is his. It has his ectoplasm imbued all throughout it. He can even sort of feel the sensation of carefulplayingcareful he’d have felt while near it. The feeling is weak, and timid, but it’s still there.

So. Then. When did he get it? And…why? Why was it allowed to him? How did he get it?

Is this how they’re feeding him now? Instead of showering him with poorly filtered ectoplasm every time he gets rowdy, are they actually trying to feed his Obsession? For real?? That’s—that’s brand new behavior from the—

Danny blinks. Wait. That’s not it either. Because there’s an IV in him. So…they know he’s getting human food.

So. Uh.

Hm.

Danny doesn’t want to get his hopes up. But this…might not be the Guys in White.

Of course, they might not be better than the GIW either; it’s a total possibility that Danny’s getting suckered into some scheme where every gentle permission and soft voice is a debt he owes…some new reason to take…

His eyelids twitch as they try to shut. He’s so tired. Fear kept him mobile, but now…everything is so heavy.

The lady carefully shushes him, ever so gently. She pulls up his blanket for him. Pats it down.

Danny shivers. He’s so, so scared.

“Ræste þiht,” the woman whispers. The words sound fond. Danny’s so scared, but he’s so tired. His heart is beating so fast. “An freond becymþ hraðe.”

It’s reassuring.

Danny doesn’t want it to be.

He falls asleep the way the desperate do—clawing at the last traces of wakefulness, only to have his consciousness ripped from him.

Notes:

If you thought Danny was just mega brain damaged for English, this is your reminder to read the prompts 😛 There's more to iiiiiit!
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#Diana: Hi friend! :) I'm glad you're awake! #Danny: *dialling 911 and failing* HELLO???? POLICE?? ANYONE?? HELP???
Also the author has been shot in the foot for choosing a form of English that has VIRTUALLY ZERO resources on how to find words and match words from Modern to Old. I've created such a problem for myself. This is legitimately going to hinder how long it takes me to write chapters and dialogue nooooow 😅

Chapter 15: I don't know who these people are and I'm hurting.

Summary:

*microwave beeps*
"The sad Oliver gruel is ready!"
"...Please don't call the patient's nutritional supplement 'sad Oliver gruel'. It's demoralizing."
"Alrighty-o then. The alien boy's mush meal is ready!"
"I'm retiring. Effective immediately, actually."
"M'kay. See you tomorrow."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny comes in and out of consciousness in bursts.

Wherever he is, it’s not the Guys in White. He rules that out very, very quickly.

For one. The Guys in White would not hire a lady to sit around and mind him constantly. He has— The same few doctors come in and out of green-tinged vision consistently. Their tags are different desaturated colors, but he can recognize most of them.

And, somehow, the lady is there. If not at his side immediately, at his side quickly enough.

With his space shuttle.

With a grip toy.

With…oatmeal.

The oatmeal is what really clues Danny in that this can’t be the GIW.

The GIW would never waste human food on him. Never. It creates too much of a logistical mess: a paper trail of payments, feeding people that don’t exist; the need for cleanup of bio-waste that no one wants to deal with; the cleaning and sanitizing of utensils, which could easily contaminate a living person.

And yet. There is oatmeal.

Mushy, unappetizing oatmeal.

The lady feeds it to him when she’s around. She spoons it into his mouth, quietly chatting all the while. She could be telling him how she’s going to cut out his organs to be chopped up and mounted on glass slides for investigation for all that Danny knows, but still, very patiently, she spoonfeeds him little mouthfuls of oatmeal.

She waits for him to swallow every time. If he stops eating, she lets him stop.

It’s kind. It’s gentle.

It’s…it’s the nicest thing Danny’s had in a long time.

It’s so nice that he stops being overtly weird when the doctors come in. He knows it’s a bad idea. He knows he’s shooting himself in the foot probably.

But…but no one is being mean to him. Everyone is being careful. Gentle.

Quiet. Slow. Obvious.

One of the doctors drops a meal tray once and everyone rushes to quiet it, to check that he’s settled, to…comfort? Him?

The oatmeal tastes bad, by the way. It’s also how he finds out part of his tongue is numb.

Or maybe it tastes bad because some of his tongue is numb.

Either way. Ew. It’s bland and it tastes bad and Danny works to finish all of it, even though he has an IV in him that puts food into him.

His IV itches. He’s sad that he can’t move and can’t protect himself. He’s tired and he’s bored of sitting here. He doesn’t know where he is and no one can tell him because he can’t understand them.

There’s no TV.

There are other concerns to be worried about, but Danny would like a television, please. Something with news on it. Something that could ground him in a location, or a place, or…

The air hisses. For a moment, breathing is going to be easier as the air cycles. It hurts, still, to breathe—the GIW hadn’t thought Danny needed to breathe, so they hadn’t put him back together right. He breathes through cobbled-together organs and raw pink seams, but yet. He breathes.

Danny lays there, and he breathes. He clutches his space shuttle toy between his wrist and his thigh, because he can.

There’s a whisper against the door. The heavy mechanisms of the door clank out of place.

Danny’s eyelids flutter as they fail to either open or close. The green in his vision bunches and falls as they try. The lady must be back.

Surely, enough, she is. Her paper gown is a mint blue today. It matches her mask and her gloves, but not her pinkish-grey shoes. She comes through the door, and—

—there’s something behind her.

It’s. They’re. Humanoid? They’re…green?

Danny stares, his head against the pillow, his eyes wide. They’re. They’re floating.

He can’t stop staring. His eyelids don’t even twitch. The lady walks to his bedside, and the…the other one follows him.

“Wel mette,” he lady greets him again, her fingers on the very corner of his mattress and no further. “Eom hebbjan ure freond.”

Danny has no idea what that means. He stares; he stares at the…their… Is that a ghost? Is a ghost just…walking around??

The—the being has—their head isn’t super. Humanoid. It’s more oval and angular, to be honest. But the rest of them is; their outfit is certainly out of the world Danny has grown up in, and is mostly constructed of straps crossing around the larger shapes of their body. And a…cloak…?

Is this a ghost?? It has to be, right? But a ghost of what??

There’s a sensation. Danny doesn’t have control over his body in the way that he’s used to, but this sensation isn’t aimed at his—it doesn’t—it’s not physical. It’s just a touch. A feeling.

Like he thought. A sensation. But still. Its presence is…Danny’s pretty sure it’s a greeting.

He…he doesn’t greet back. He doesn’t know if this is a friend.

…Lots of ghosts pretend to be something they’re not. He doesn’t know who this ghost is. He doesn’t know who this lady is. His head hurts and it’s hard to think and he knows everyone just wants to hurt him even when they pretend not to. Or they don’t even know it yet.

So he turns his head and pretends he’s dead. (Or. Uh. Dead-er.) Dead things don’t have thoughts, duh. You can’t read mine if I don’t have any!

The ghost drifts closer. Danny can’t move—he can’t run, can barely flinch—but he can feel how taut he gets the closer they get, the further they get into his personal bubble.

The greeting comes again. It’s quieter on the second round. Gentler. The ghost is trying not to scare him, is trying not to hurt him. Just careful, gentle contact.

Danny squeezes his eyes closed. It doesn’t work (whoops) because his eyes don’t close right (he forgot about that) and then his head hurts a lot because he’s working a whole lot of muscles who were not prepared to put in so much effort at the drop of a hat.

The greeting turns a little…melancholy. It matches the tone that the lady takes on when Danny’s breathing stutters and his body screams with exhaustion he can’t shake.

He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He doesn’t want to be poked and prodded and then attacked when the ghost realizes Danny’s not Fun the way the ghosts want him to be—willing to play around when people get hurt or ignore the pain around them. Danny just wants to be left alone.

The greeting is gently let go. From the ghost comes a question—something soft. Something celestial. Danny can’t tell the specifics, but there are moons and stars in the question.

…His fingers flex around the plastic shell of his model shuttle. There’s. He’s. Space?

The green ghost turns to the lady. “Læt uns ga an wealc”, they say, in those words Danny doesn’t know and doesn’t understand.

The lady says something back to them. They say something back to the lady. The lady goes to the wall, where there is a phone, and says something.

Danny tenses. This is it. She’s calling in for backup. More people are coming and it’s going to hurt.

The phone call ends. The lady comes back and Danny tenses—

But there’s nowhere to run and his physical body is too weak to hide properly. She reaches his bedside, reaches out her arms, and Danny flinches away.

He can’t shut his eyes. He can’t stop seeing her outstretched arms because he can’t shut his eyes.

“Mæg eom ahebbe eow?”

Danny doesn’t know what that means!!!

The ghost brushes their fingers up against the steel rail of Danny’s cot. There’s an image—of the lady, clear as day, in a red and blue and gold outfit, bridal-carrying someone from building rubble. There’s a prodding at his core that says you, there, in particular.

He’s dumbfounded. Like, to lift? To lift him?

There’s a sense of agreement, and then the image of a cot with wheels. The wheels are the focus of the message.

…They’re asking Danny permission? To go somewhere?

On one hand, no, Danny doesn’t want to be any further complicit into whatever horrible kidnapping scheme this probably is. This place sucks. He doesn’t want to see more of it. This is the second worst kidnapping he’s ever had and he wants no part in it.

On the other hand, however, this place sucks, and getting out of this room, even if only temporarily…

Danny licks his lips. There’s craters in the soft tissue. He tastes orange pixie sticks and the sour tang of battery acid.

If Danny is very, very smart. And very, very careful. And very, very quiet… Well. What are the chances they wheel him past the exit on this excursion?

Sure, they’re pretty low. But there’s hope.

Danny hasn’t had hope in ages.

He nods. He hates that he does—his neck jerks upwards, and then he’s sore and tired everywhere and in his head and neck and shoulders, and he’s not going to be able to move much more than that for literal hours (sorry, oatmeal mush), and he’s said yes.

“Þancie eow!” the lady says, and the ghost translates that for him as thank you and then she lifts Danny up off the bed cot he lives on like he’s still a ghost, and not made of heavy, teenage flesh. Wow is she strong. Danny hopes her job isn’t to hurt him. Otherwise he’s going to be a smear of green on the wall and then what would the point of inspecting his insides be??

Danny gets lifted. Danny gets carried.

(It’s not an amazing experience on his aching body. He thinks some of his bruises start to leak ectoplasm in self defense. Her arms are as stiff as rocks.)

Being lifted is also how Danny finds out there’s something caging his legs. They don’t seem to be caged together—they hang individually—but they keep them taut and aligned so that all the pressure of being lifted is on his hips, and not his legs. Considering that Danny’s received pretty medium care for his troubles…that doesn’t bode well for whatever state his legs are in.

Danny gets gently, gently placed down onto a new cot. The side bars are metal, but thinner than on the bed he woke up on.

The world starts to move.

Oh. They’re moving. Danny’s moving.

It’s kind of startling. The world’s been so static and fuzzy for so long, and now he’s bedridden but moving.

The ghost opens the door, and Danny’s still body and the bed follow with it. The lady has to be pushing, then. They go through it and—

—Danny blearily squints. Ow. Bright.

Bright, LED light follows Danny down steel hallways and past strangers in bright outfits, their colors pale and washed out by Danny’s attempts to squeeze green eyelids together and stop seeing everything.

He wants to stop. This is too much. He bites his lip—jaw aching—and grunts—throat tearing—and—

The ghost that keeps trying to talk to him sends some other emotion, and Danny purposefully ignores them. It’s easy enough to block things you don’t want to feel. The green wall of a body floats out in front of him to open another door, and Danny is pushed inside.

The lights are off in here. The tension in Danny’s forehead gets a little quieter. That’s…nice. It makes the window in the room seem bigger and brighter, and—

Danny jerks. His whole body screams at him as he claws against the cot, trying to get closer, closer—

He hurts something in his back. He can tell. There’s something in his hips that’s strained, or possibly fractured, as he climbs across a horizontal surface. The beings around him make worried, scared noises, and that doesn’t matter right up until the bed moves so Danny can push his face right up against the glass.

Because that’s space out there. The stars are out there. And Danny is so, so close to them.

It’s so…

…Danny doesn’t know how much time he loses to starlight before he falls asleep.

“Did you see!” Diana gushes, the windows going by. The cot (and the alien in it) she pushes through the hall, the occasional curious eye turning to them as they go past. “J’onn, did you see, he had glowed! I know we had hoped that he would be receptive, but—“

“Diana,” J’onn murmurs, his voice low. Wonder Woman’s head tilts to find him behind her, and she only slows just enough to not run the cot or its occupant into any unsuspecting superheroes.

The first fear is for the worst scenario. “Did the excursion hurt him?”

The Martian hesitates. “…No,” he says, and nothing more. He drifts forward to the metaphorical prow of their vehicle, and Diana sets her shoulders into generating momentum. J’onn opens doors for them as they pass.

The alien child isn’t awake to consent to be returned to his newly cleaned bed, but Diana feels secure enough returning him to his usual haunt that she proceeds to do so.

Even when physical, he is frighteningly limp in her arms.

She takes care to support his head as she pulls him up to her chest. He is so fragile. When the light comes across his face as he moves, parts of his face are still ominously transparent. Ominously liquid. Ominously green.

Diana should not be able to see the inner airways of his nose, nor the thin, still-healing holes in his skull, or his irises while his eyes try in vain to shut with skin they do not have.

She lays him down. Gently, she tucks him under thin sheets with gloved hands.

J’onn drifts over to her side. His feet haven’t touched the ground—not since he was reminded that visible signs of non-human life might be reassuring to a non-human. “He doesn’t remember us,” he says. Diana hears him.

And then she hears him.

“He what?”

“He has no memory of his time on the base. He has no memory yourself, of our previous communication, of the junior heroes… He has no understanding of the layout of the base, nor of things we had already established: my status as an alien lifeform to Earth and the base’s lunar occupancy. As far as he knows, he woke up here a week and a half ago to strangers having taken up a caretaker’s role, and he doesn’t know why and if we will harm him.”

Diana stills. She…takes a deep breath.

“Alright,” she whispers. And then, louder: “Alright. We can fix this.”

And they will, although it will take time, because even if he doesn’t remember them, Diana knows him—a child with too much fear, who likes to be around others, who occasionally plays around but likes his boundaries respected. A child who put glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.

“Oh,” Diana realizes at last, reaching a point J’onn had already understood: “Impulse is going to be so disappointed.”

Notes:

If you like piña coladas....and getting caught in the rain.....if you're not into yoga....if you have half a brain...... 🍸 Oh, sup everyone.
So; I don't actually feel all that motivated to add translations to the fic. Creatively, I don't care. Y'all can be as much in the dark as Danny; in the end, it's not about what's being said, it's about the lack of understanding. The replacement of understandable language for something so familiar and yet so foreign. The Old English is symbolic of a language barrier, not literal. I did, however, agree to add the original intended "translations" (the text I butchered using several etymology websites) to someone who asked nicely, and I can understand the curiosity to want to know more as the story unfolds. You will be happy to know that I have been trying to add translations to the previous chapter, and you'll perhaps be a little bit worried that the HTML is kicking my ass completely haha 😅. Like. It's real bad when I can't even get liveweave to even pretend to know what's going on. It's like not even CSS. It's HTML, and I'm losing. To the person that declared that I should add translations to the fic, however, regardless of authorial intent, and proceeded to attempt to retranslate the fic back themselves, you'll be happy to know that I deprioritized this part of the clean-up for the time being. 👍🏽 Who knows when I'll get back to trying! 🧡
To the people that actually knew Old English from the last chapter...I'm sorry for everything I can and will do to your area of study for the duration of this fic, haha 🙇🏽♀️ You are all very nice. I am not about to improve. What the hell is a participle.
Anyway! Extra long chapter time!
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#Bart, guarding his friend's stuff in the other room: I sense something Not Cool :( #Kon: whoah, are you psychic?? Can I get a reading?? #*they proceed to distract themselves for an hour before remembering the Not Cool Vibe Bart felt*

Chapter 16: I don't recognize anything around me and I'm frightened.

Summary:

"So, like, can we sanitize his space shuttle, or are we just leaving it as is in his bed? Because everything's supposed to be fresh and sterile in there and it's the only thing we can't replace on the regular."
"Do you think you can bear to pry his comfort toy out of his injured hands while he's asleep?"
"...Maybe? If we just swish it around in some isopropyl alcohol, let it dry... It'd be fast. We'd give it back quickly."
"Okay. New question. Remember when our lovely patient started using sonic attacks when he was distressed?"
"I...might see your point on that second one."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Days pass. Nights pass.

(He thinks.)

He gets a new room. This one has a window. He can’t stare at it all the time, but when he does, he can feel himself growing stronger. Steadier. The change in his body is borderline tangible.

If only it was physical. He’s still too weak to lift anything but his arms, and not even all the way. Moving his head is tiring. Lifting his head is impossible.

But he tries.

A lot.

The doctors and the lady have to make upset noises with him when he does, but he wants to be able to see everything they’re doing to him. So far it’s a lot of tubes and needles, but what if they become scalpels and clamps?

…Danny tries to assure himself that they probably won’t be.

But they might. Things could change.

And that eats at him constantly.

Someone puts a big circle on the wall in his room. It’s large. It’s a little fuzzy at its distance on the far wall, but it’s got little arms on it, and little dots in equal degrees around the circumference. It takes him almost two napping periods to realize that it’s a clock.

Danny squints. He can...almost read analog. (Probably.) It sure doesn’t help that he has no idea when night is and when day is, though. He sleeps at one hour and wakes up at another, and the room will look entirely the same. Was it a few hours’ sleep, or a day’s? Was it longer? The world spins outside his window, big and blue, and he spins against it in a station on a lonely moon. There’s no way to tell.

Someone eventually notices that he’s bored, though, because he gets a television and a remote.

It’s a super thin television. At first, Danny spends time wondering why they put a screen with no system in his room, and then hour later the lady starts pressing buttons on the remote, and the screen lights up with a news program.

…The TV is too far away to see all that clearly. He can see some of it when he squints, but then all the colors turn lime green.

The banner on the bottom of the screen scrolls with headlines, and cool, it looks like they invented new letters while Danny was asleep. Fantastic. His head hurts from trying to squint to read, but it kind of looks like a kindergartener scribbled all over an otherwise serious news report.

Great. Now he’s getting a headache.

But the noise is…nice. It’s distracting. The news anchors chatter seriously as Danny gets yet another IV swapped out in his arm, and the heavily geared-up doctors have started telling Danny things he doesn’t like to listen to too much because if it is threats, great, he should ignore that; if it’s not threats, then, well, Danny’s bored of it all anyway.

“—Wel?”

Danny blinks. Well. That sounds like ‘Well’.

He shifts just enough to make eye contact. A doctor looks down at him from their place at his bedside. Their scrubs are kind of blue-green, with little flowers on the trim.

They have human eyes. The sight of soft, brown eyes probably ought to be reassuring, but they just make Danny more nervous.

“Eow eart wel?” They ask again, soft and slow. That middle bit sounds kind of like ‘art’. Ha. Old timey Shakespeare. ‘Art well,’ like ‘you art well—‘

Wait. Danny takes a deep breath. Blinks. His chest arcs up, just a little—just enough for the doctor to realize that Danny’s more than just looking, he’s paying attention. Are they asking him if he’s well?

Danny reflexively opens his mouth and flexes his throat, tries to answer—

Nope. Ow. The noise he makes sounds like the garbage disposal is backed up with angry blob ghosts. It hurts just to make. But the sound makes the doctor look at him; they see him.

“Inne cwic tima!” Danny hears, and then they’re jogging out of the room, and Danny is left alone. His throat hurts.

His head thumps back onto his pillow. The news program plays on. There’s a damaged city he’s never seen before on the news.

…And then the doctor comes back. Danny’s head is swimming, so he almost doesn’t notice their return, but they’re holding something, and that something has a sippy straw.

Danny is perfectly happy with a sippy straw.

The straw is put into his mouth. Danny goes sippy sippy.

…The water sloshes a little weirdly through his throat. Some of his tubes might not be where they ought to be, which is weird. Isn’t he supposed to be human right now? Or. Uh. Kind of human? Human equivalent? …Close enough…?

Danny drinks. When the pain in his throat goes to normal pain levels instead of new and angry pain levels, he lets go of the straw, and the doctor lets him.

Their fingers carefully brush Danny’s hair. Not very hard. A little too slowly. Just at the hairline. But it reminds Danny so much of sitting at home with Dad on the couch, home from school with a fever as Muppets tapes play in the background, that tears leak out of his busted eyes. The tears are probably just as green.

“Eow eart wel?” the doctor asks again. So gently. So careful.

“I’m tired,” Danny rasps.

The effort of speaking crashes into him in seconds. If things are happening around him, he doesn’t understand any of it. Nothing reaches him. He’s so tired.

He’s out before he knows it.

Notes:

I can't imagine being a nurse to this guy. Imagine your patient is a teenage kinda-human-but-not-really who needs so much help but also clearly thinks you're out to get him, and you can't communicate otherwise. There's probably like at least one horse girl who would be like We Can Communicate Without Words 😌 Our Bond Transcends Species but I would constantly be putting on umpire padding just to feed them lol. Reasons I didn't do medicine professionally number 4.
Also shoutout to Martian Manhunter who was the first to suggest grabbing stuff to make the kid at ease, since the room isn't actually meant for long term care necessarily— especially not for adolescents. Being able to actively see and experience the kid's anxiety makes for informed suggestions.
Tumblr tags for this update:
#Martian Manhunter: he's bored. Give the boy a television#Medical: :0 Sir yes sir!! #Medical when they hear Danny: HE SPEAKS!!! :D #Medical when they realize they can't understand him: OH NO!!! D: MM COME BACK PLEASE #Danny, realizing he didn't know how to read analog even when he was well: sh*t. >:(

Chapter 17: I don't know what's going on and it sucks severely.

Summary:

"So. Our lovely patient here. You’ve met him.”
“I am on break. If you block me from my meal while I am off the clock and not in charge of supervising whatever madness is going on in this medical wing, I guarantee mutually assured destruction.”
“Whatever, still. He spoke to me today.”
“That's the goal. I guess. Even though his throat and mouth are still…aren’t they being held together with that solidified non-matter matrix?”
“Yeah, his face is still mostly goo. But he spoke, or he tried to at least. Aditya, has anyone actually checked if he knows English?”
“...That’s a problem for someone on duty.”
"Are you serious?!"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny can raise his head now.

Only a little. It still hurts his neck for a while after. But his arms and his head both rise, now. His fingers curl, now, too.

The result is that Danny can now watch and change his own television channels. No more news! Now it’s all Food Network, all the time, baby. The result is that sometimes the doctors tending to him get distracted by various pasta dishes, but also. Danny is also distracted by various pasta dishes.

And roast chicken.

And fried potatoes. Every potato ever, actually.

…It makes eating his oatmeal a more awful ordeal.

“Aw, dyrling, na þa sæd egean,” the lady says to him, spoon at his lips. Danny weakly moves his arm towards her, but only manages to hit her elbow with the heel of his thumb. “Inne cwic tima, gise? Hiere þa læce.”

Danny is pretty sure his face is a nightmare to look at at the moment, but he still makes the world’s saddest expression at the lady, because she hasn’t blasted him or hit him or even sedated him yet, and he needs something. Anything.

He’s pretty the lady makes an equally sad look under her medical mask, but Danny is hungry and he’s tired all the time and he’s sad and he wants a cheeseburger. Or fries. Or…or anything at all!

Danny’s look gets progressively sadder, and the lady gets progressively sadder to match, and then they’re both just looking at each other so very sadly until a doctor physically has to cut between them to reach for Danny’s green-speckled blankets.

Ugh. Great. Now he’s cold too. He can’t quite muster a glare, but the doctor gets an extremely stern squint from him for their “help”.

The only response Danny gets is a half-strangled laugh. That is not the response Danny needs. He needs immediate respect and a Nasty Burger number two special.

And a new blanket.

“—Eall dæg?” the doctor asks the woman, but not Danny, and then he has to listen to everyone talking about him in a weird language without even pretending to ask for his input. It’s extremely annoying, and Danny half-considers falling asleep to avoid it. His gaze slides back to the television. He’s just as capable of ignoring everyone else as they are. He bets it sucks. He hopes it sucks.

They talk for a while, but then the lady takes the oatmeal away—and hey! Danny’s eyes widen and sting from the stretch. Uh. Maybe he didn’t think this one through. He’d still thought he’d get lunch out of this.

Um. He would like to continue to receive meals. But he’s watching her walk out with his oatmeal, which is the only human food that’s ever been given to him here, and…

Danny’s stomach cramps. It’s probably just anxiety.

He wishes he’d eaten the stupid oatmeal.

The doctor stays with him, setting the blanket into a laundry bin and checking over Danny’s body (ew) (gross) (nasty) for whatever they have to check on him, and Danny tries to go intangible at least four times during the check only to get oWOUCHOW jerks inside his core. At least one time, he flickers invisible. Not much, he thinks. Probably just an arm and the chunk of his torso.

The doctor pauses. Danny waits for things to (start to hurt) get worse.

…Danny doesn’t move. It hurts to breathe. Every time air scrapes through his nose and mouth, it burns a little more.

The doctor doesn’t move.

So they just.

Wait.

They move very, very slowly. They touch him, and his—skin—and they rotate him to check underneath him. If they find something of whatever it is they’re monitoring him for, he gets wiped down with something gooey and wiped clean, and sometimes he even thinks they bandage him.

Danny wishes he had a bath. A whole, real bath. Where he could wash his own hair. And wipe off whatever this goo is.

When they’re done, the lady comes back in.

The sound of the door latching shut makes Danny flinch. Is she going to punish him? She walks to his bed. With her medical mask over her face, Danny can’t see if she’s visibly mad at him or not. She doesn’t look mad though…does she?

She stands to his good side, presumably so that Danny can see her. The oatmeal is back—it looks kind of gloopy, though, like it’s been badly reheated. The lady shows something to the doctor, who makes an irritated groan, and then they start talking to each other again. She cuts off to show him something, though—

Danny blinks. She’s showing it to Danny. He…looks down at it.

It looks like a mustard packet. It’s a black packet with yellow streaks, with writing on it with those letters Danny’s never seen before coming here, and it takes his eyes a second to focus on the package before realizing that there’s a little bee and pot on one end of the packet.

Oh. It’s honey?

Oh!

…Oh!!

Danny jerks upright, and, OW, and he definitely scares the lady and the doctor who rush to settle him but there’s honey?? Flavor??? His food can taste good again??!

He wheezes— and slaps a stinging hand onto the packet. “Pl’s?” he begs. He’d stopped begging in the old labs, no one there had listened to him—and he’d stopped begging for them to be gentle, to stop hurting him, to let him go. But for food. For food that tastes, Danny might do anything. Anything. “P’lease? Ple’se? Pleese?”

“Pleece?” the woman repeats, baffled. The word doesn’t mean anything to her; she’s only repeating the sounds. But Danny can’t stop begging.

“P’lease?”

“Pleece? Pleace?”

“Please?!”

“Awrite þis,” the woman mutters, and the doctor leaves. “Bist wel. Eom hebbjan eower wist. Es wel.”

And that still means nothing to him, but the lady gently lifts him up until his back can lay on the pillows, and he can sit more than lay. Danny watches in raspy silence as she rips the packet open and dumps the contents into the oatmeal. She stirs with gloved hands, ensuring that the packet is equally distributed. And then there’s a glob on her spoon, and the spoon to his lips.

Danny takes a bite. Tears well.

“Shhh,” the woman coaxes. “Wanian ma?”

Ma sounds kind of like more. Danny opens his mouth, and is rewarded with another spoonful.

He doesn’t start crying in earnest until the bowl is gone. But that’s alright. The lady finds tissues, somewhere, and he gets to look into her human-blue eyes as she carefully dries over and around his still-soft, green-edged wounds.

It’s a very nice gesture.

Danny sobs a little harder.

Notes:

Now featuring mouse-over text for translations! Only works on computers. Sorry. Why? Couldn't get any of the other things I wanted to work to work. Translating the not-the-same English isn't a huge priority for me, so this may be as good as it ever gets; a hop, skip, jump, and a LOT of work to get to the translations, since they're narratively not the point.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed!
Tags from tumblr:
#Diana: kids like sweets right? Honey? We have honey packets in the caf for the tea drinkers #Closest Doctor: I don't know if it would be too hard for him to digest at this stage— #Diana: look at him. Look at my sad child #Danny: *having several simultaneous crises* #Closest Doctor: ...Okay. I will say. That's pretty bad. Yeah he can probably digest like a teaspoon of honey; lemme go add that to his chart as something we're trying...

Chapter 18: I don't know what's happening and I'm bored.

Summary:

"Hey, do you hear that?"
"...What, the light buzzing?"
"No, that's different. That's—"
*Crash* *Shatter*
"—Damn it! Can you call Wonder Woman back?!"
"Yeah, I got it."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

So. Danny is halfway through his squeeze this, please exercises where he has a grippy thing the doctors give him where he tries to squeeze this until they make calm noises again when something bursts through the door.

He’s so distracted that he drops his squeezing machine.

Everyone immediately gets terse and guarded— the lady who looks out for him the most actually pulls up in front of him? Like, protecting him? With her body?? It’s so far out of left field Danny has to wonder if they’re, like, keeping him for something important down the line instead of just treating him.

The doctors take shelter behind medical equipment where they can, but whatever the assailant is, it’s too fast for them to put up their defenses. For a second, Danny is instinctually scared— the doctor in the periwinkle scrubs sees him almost every day, changing out his bag and fussing with his lower half under his blankets. The doctor in green makes him do the hand stretches he doesn’t want to do and sit up so that he can do it more often again.

He’s used to them. He doesn't want that to change, or— Or for them to get hurt.

The blur darts through the doors and past the doctors and is definitely aimed at Danny, so when the lady catches it (with one hand??) and hauls it up out of reach of Danny’s cot, Danny’s relieved wheeze is genuine and emphatic. Ohgodthatwasscary.

On the other end of her arm is a teenager. A teenager in a…red…outfit, probably, unless he really likes gray and Danny’s eyes are actually working normally for once. Gray hair. Some kind of face, presumably.

The teen’s legs keep spinning until he realizes how caught he is. Then he goes completely limp in defeat.

“Cild Lihting se þridda,” the lady scolds, not unlike how Danny’s heard Vlad scold his cat for throwing paperwork off his desk. “Hwæt eart eow dydest?”

“...Naþing,” the teenager lies, badly, and it sounds so much like Nothing, mom, wasn’t me, that Danny can’t help but choke out a laugh.

It makes his chest muscles spasm and his throat sore, sure, but that’s not the point. The lady keeps scolding the teen she’s holding up midair, but the teen lights up at Danny’s choked out wheeze like the sun. Almost literally, actually— the green starts accumulating in Danny’s field of view as his body tries to compensate for whatever’s going on in the atmosphere around him.

The doctors slowly let down their improvised shields, fetching Danny’s lost grippy tool (ugh) and putting it back in his hand (UGH). Danny gives one, pathetic squeeze of the tool, and then decides to visibly languish, because this sucks, obviously. The fact that no one can sympathize with his struggle isn’t new. Just watch him go limp about it.

The next time the lady and the teen stop making scolding and scolded noises, Danny looks over; the teenager has been, apparently, wrangled into a hair net and face mask. Okay. So it’s not that Danny is off limits then— or maybe he is, but either way, it’s more about getting people into the right gear than about keeping them away from him. Once the teen’s been sprayed down with something that smells absolutely gross, forcibly gloved, and dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, the teen is back on his feet and hollering as he leaves the lady behind. “Þancie eow!!”

“Slaw, lytel Lihting!”

Slow, Danny understands, parsing out the weird words as they reach him. Lytel might as well mean little. This sucks. He can never tell if he’s right when he guesses, and he just gets lucky when people understand him back, or whether people are pretending to understand him more than they actually do. Lighting is a weird nickname for a kid though.

—And then the teen is a foot away from his face and babbling at top speed, entirely at ease with their proximity and hands moving a mile a minute, and Danny has not been losing enough time for that to be anything other than either magic or a superpower.

Oh, his brain corrects. The word clicks into place. Lightning.

It’s probably some kind of magic, Danny’s guessing, because as he’s absolutely flabbergasted that someone is leaning into his face and trying to engage him that talk that isn’t happening, his ghost sense flares with a backwash of OMGHIHELLO!!MIS/SEDYOUMISSED//YOUPLAYING?? that. Uh. Is very…a lot? Very intense??

Very…welcoming?

The lady who minds him but isn’t a doctor sighs, picks the teenager up by the waist (??) and sets him a whole foot back. The teen doesn’t even stop chattering, his aura flaring alongside a story Danny is definitely missing, but not unappreciative of.

He throws something onto Danny’s bed. Danny drops the grippy tool in order to grab it, to the doctor’s verbal dismay.

But.

Like Danny’s model shuttle, which never leaves his side, the thing on his bed is Danny’s.This is Danny’s weird, flimsy, squishy toy.

The teen practically vibrates with pride.

…Okay, then. He’s kind of confused, but like. You know. He’s not against this.

Danny picks the squishy, blue thing in his trembling fingers and shakes it around without any sense of fine motor control, and the thing leaps out of his fingers and lands on the floor pretty much instantaneously.

It makes a weird suction noise. Danny peeks over the bed to find it sitting upright, stuck to the floor.

The teen responds by throwing even more colorful, oddly-shaped toys on the bed.

Danny knows enough about doctors to know that there were probably structured plans on how Danny was supposed to spend his time on specific exercises to target specific muscles and stretch specific parts of his hands, but the teen sits at his bedside and plays with toys Danny doesn’t remember with him, and no one stops them at all.

It’s nice.

For about an hour, until Danny truly tires, it's almost…normal.

Notes:

For the people who keep trying to mass translate large swathes of not-so-Old-English text, there are hovertitles available to peruse on a deskop view. You can see everything. Pinky promise you're not losing anything even if you don't read them.
My laptop exploded, I lost the original version of this chapter, I lost chapters for QR and Comets AND the timkon clone baby tumblr WIP, this new laptop had to be purchased and then sent back and then brought home, again, and then I had to drive ✨someone✨ to the ER, which I was capable of doing but less so with someone who didn't want to go!! And was upset the whole time! Which, fair, but there isn't an option that isn't getting X Rayed in the world's most mediocre ER sorry I wish there was <3 My car broke down too but that didn't affect the timeline on this chapter. Anyway. I'm gonna go lay down for a few years brb

Chapter 19: I don't know what's touching me and I don't know why me.

Summary:

"I don't know...do you think he's ready for a field trip? I mean...he's still kind of fragile..."
"Okay. Look at the boy in that bed and tell me he's totally fine with just sitting here for another week without looking out the window."
"...I mean...you're right, but..."
"Look. We'll be around the whole time. Ms. Wonder Woman is going to be with him every step of the way. He's a good kid. He needs a field trip."
"Alright... Look alive, everyone! Anyone know where night shift stashed the wheelchair?"

Notes:

Hey. Psst. Hey. Read me first.
I put this in the tags in the tumblr update and everything, but no one is allowed to be rude about real irl medical procedures in my notes, okay? Look me in the eyes. You know not to be rude about real life medical procedures in my silly body horror fic, right? You know not to make fun of or act all grossed out about medical things people live with for possibly the rest of their lives, right? 👀 You can do that? You can be polite? Have manners??
Okay. Just checking. Let's see the fic!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny learns a few more words with practice.

Foda is simple. If Danny is hungry, he can ask for foda. It sounds exactly like food, and when he asks, they feed him.

…Or they up his IV. Which. Danny’s tongue might still feel sore and nasty, but the doctors and nurses and millions of minders don’t seem that mad when he sticks his tongue out at them. Sometimes they even laugh.

They don’t even sound all that mean.

It takes Danny a good chunk of waking time for him to realize that he…probably is hooked up to something he doesn’t want to think about, since all the efforts of lifting and moving him haven’t resulted in a single bathroom trip since he woke up here.

Firstly: horrible.

Secondly: his legs are super, absolutely, positively immobilized, and if someone doesn’t give him enough medication quickly enough after it wears off, Danny is very aware that something is deeply wrong with them.

So. Uh. That’s…gross.

He learns bealojust as quickly. He isn’t sure what bealo means, per se, but when he says it, they up his medication until Danny can pretend he doesn’t have any legs again.

God niht is goodnight, unless Danny is feeling snippy, and then it’s just niht.

…The one lady who minds him always says the whole thing, though. Even when Danny’s mean. Like the one time he threw his rocket at someone.

Or the time he started ignoring everyone when they tried to touch him.

…Or the one time he tried to freeze his IV bag, and put everyone on alert because if he’d been human, that would have seriously hurt him.

“Sorry,” Danny’d whispered, even if it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

She’d patted his hand and meant it. Danny’d had to dry his eyes with his wrist. “Eall es wel.”

Anyway.

Danny hates being in the freaking bed every hour of every day. So when his “sitting up” exercises turn into “hey, let’s try the wheelchair” practice, Danny gets so excited-slash-nervous that he kind of feels like he’s going to throw up all the liquids he’s been injected with.

None of the regular people try to lift him. Instead the lady does it herself, scooping Danny up in very strong arms, the golden cuffs on her wrists weirdly warm on Danny’s skin. When Danny’s settled, his legs sticking out real weird and his back kind of sore, he’s…out of bed.

He’s. He’s not in bed anymore.

And. Sure. It’s temporary, but it’s not the bed. Danny can wriggle, and he can sort of palm the wheels underneath him with the heels of his shaky hands, and he can see so much more of himself than he has in ages and ages.

For one. Both of his legs are in casts. That’s. Not good. He can’t feel it right now, but the sight of fully encased legs…

Well. If he can transform that won’t be a problem. If. If he has to escape. But it is…it’s super scary. He mostly remembers being captured, but the…the other people had been focusing more on his thoracic cavity and his face and head.

…So why are his legs so bad? Did something else happen?

(It did, didn’t it?)

(…Didn’t it??)

His hands shake, but there’s something to all that grip training, or else Danny wouldn’t be able to paw at his neckline to look down his own shirt. Or, well, his cloth nightie, anyway.

It’s good that he looks, since, well…his chest is glowing a solid green.

Whatever should probably be scar tissue. Uh. It…isn’t. There’re gouges down his chest and a crater where his heart should be that probably should be healing over, considering, you know, he’s not freaking dead at this exact second (mostly??), but. Instead of, like, healed flesh, or, say, his insides, there’s a transparent green…jelly… holding him together.

He can see how the green bounces with his heart beat.

...Danny drops the neckline of his gown. His breath comes in choking bursts, eyes pressed into his eye sockets—he feels sick.

He is sick. He has been sick.

The humans are keeping him here because he’s a freak of nature and he’s broken from head to toe and the Guys in White carved his flesh out of his body and opened him up like a can of cranberry sauce.

He presses his hands to his chest, to his stomach, just trying to breathe for long enough that he doesn’t throw up his oatmeal and occasional juice and IV nutrition onto the pristine floor of his sickroom. The people around him all make sympathetic noises that don’t help because he doesn’t know what they mean.

And then he feels something weird.

Not all the sensation in his fingers are back. It’s easier for him to feel impediments than it is to feel textures—something that blocks him from moving, rather than anything sensory-specific. He can usually tell when he touches fabric, because when he moves too far, it pulls tight around his hand. He can tell when he’s on something solid when his hand fails to go through it.

There is something solid sticking out of him.

Danny’s heartbeat quickens. It’s not. It’s. There’s something in him.

And it’s not—it’s so solid. When Danny brushes his hands against it, he can feel his skin and his flesh move with it, trying not to dislodge the thing embedded in him. It pulls at his skin. He doesn’t know what it is.

His fingers tremble as he tries to brush over the object through his gown, trying to figure out its shape from faulty touch alone. It’s like waking up to find himself jammed with needles all over again.

People are talking around them. Danny doesn’t try to listen in. He’s scared. He’s so scared. Something’s happened to him, and he didn’t even notice.

Some of it is—hard. There’s a crinkling sound when he moves. Danny manages to pull his gown neckline back again to catch something of a glimpse, and all he sees is plastic.

He doesn’t know what it is.

He doesn’t know who to ask. He can’t understand anyone and he doesn’t know if he trusts them.

They put something in him. There’s something embedded in him.

He thinks he’s going to cry.

Something touches his arm—Danny flinches. His core tightens with stress as he puts a metaphorical hand on the button, ready to run and hide at any notice.

It’s the lady. He knows her.

No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know her at all. He can’t talk to her in any way that matters. She’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know why she’s here, or why she’s keeping him here.

She’s nice. She fed him. But is that all it takes to trick him? To make him compliant? Pliable?

She stops touching him when he gets scared, her eyes worried. She kneels—closer than Danny would like, probably, but she keeps her hands to herself. Danny’s heart races faster, out of order, starting and stopping and starting again like a bad engine.

“Eow eart wel?” she asks from his left arm rest, a common question, so softly. Danny doesn’t know what it means. “Eall es wel. Ænlic eow, ænlic me. Bruce bræð wið me?”

She takes a big, deep, breath. Her hand rises slightly over her chest, following an exaggerated movement. Don’t panic. Breathe. Breathe like me. One, two, three.

Danny’s breaths are more choked. More panicked.

But when she breathes, he breathes with her—even with every stutter in between.

“Hwæt es woh?” the lady asks, so gently it’s almost a whisper. Her pointer finger hovers over his body, but doesn’t touch—and eventually, Danny figures out she probably wants to know where he’s hurting.

But he’s not hurting. He’s scared. There’s something inside him, and he isn’t sure what it is. He presses the heel of his hand to the object. He feels something rigid refuse to bend inside his flesh.

There’s something of recognition in the woman’s face. “Inne cwic tima,” she says, more certain of answers outside the room, and darts away,

Danny wants to bounce his bound leg. He feels awful when anyone is in the room with him, considering how little of them he knows, but, somehow, it’s so much worse when he’s actually alone.

When she comes back, there’s a second person who walks through the double doors with her, in blue scrubs with ducks on them. They wave to Danny.

Danny…blinks. He feels numb. It’s kind of a problem.

They take it in stride, though; in their hands is a blank board and a chunky marker. The cap comes off, the new person scribbles for a minute or so, and then turns the board around so that Danny can see.

It’s a…person. A rudimentary outline person, sure, with some visible bones and organs to fill in the person-shaped outline. Danny can recognize most of them from anatomy class, although those memories are more…personal, now. A little more painful.

The person taps on the board. The person points to Danny.

Danny frowns.

The person turns the board back around and makes some Pew, Pew, Pew! sounds with their mouth, occasionally opening and closing their hand over the board to match the noise. There’s some more scribbling. When the board turns back around, there’s a violent smudge of marker on top of the drawn person’s drawn intestines.

The person takes their covered pinky finger and erases a little neat circle of marker in the intestines, mostly favoring one side. They draw a little arrow from the hole to the general outside-of-the-person blank area. Then another circle, with a thicker circle inside.

Danny recognizes the object jutting out of him. Oh. This is how he got it.

The person—probably a doctor, Danny guesses, or the surgeon who did this to him—do these people even need credentials, actually?—hands the board over to the lady. They hold out ten outstretched fingers, marker under their arm, and make a show of counting every one of the outstretched fingers with the opposite hand. Then they take the board back.

And then, when they write on the board, Danny can actually understand what they say.

Or, well, it’s numbers! The numbers are the same as his—the line and a circle is clearly meant to be a ten, and the little x is a multiplication symbol— they draw a 10, as clearly and a brightly as it could be against a stark white board, and add a little x 7, probably to indicate a week; the result is ten suns times seven, or seventy suns.

Danny feels his heart bounce in his chest. Danny would bet a whole lot of money that the number is meant to be seventy days. There is an end point. It’s not that Danny is free to be subjected to random anatomical whims—there’s a goal here. This was purposeful.

The little circle-within a circle gets erased. The hole is scribbled through as if it was never there, and the person makes a weaving gesture with the marker that Danny is certain is meant to be sewing.

Tears prick at his eyes. The lady gets close by him again, but Danny lets her. His hands aren’t good enough for wiping tears the way he wants to, yet. Help and company are good.

She gives him a tissue from Danny's bedside table. He takes it with a whisper of a grip.

“Seventy?” Danny rasps, tearful. Hopeful. Terrified of hope. He practically jams the tissue into his eye sockets.

The lady’s eyes go wide. “Seventy,” she repeats, marveling.

It’s enough. Nothing is perfect, but it’s enough. And if Danny's allowed to spend so long in front of the space window that he falls asleep in his wheelchair, well. It's not like he was in charge of where they went.

Notes:

Guess who uses an Arabic numerical system?? Two earths!!
Also, and this goes without saying, but I am trusting you all to be normal and not rude about real irl medical procedures real people go through, okay? No one act all grossed out about surgical things that are a part of many people's real life health journeys in the comments. Some people just Have ostomy/stoma bags. Sometimes they're temporary. Sometimes they are not. I know someone who had one up until the end of her life, since surgery wasn't as good when she was young and it was that or death. Okay? Yes, this is my silly body horror fic, but let's all remember the difference between green gore and real treatment.
So. We see more of Danny's wounds. We're on the mend. We got a Bart. As to the future...? 👀
Tumblr tags:
#*hip checks through the door* hey losers! Guess who uses Arabic numbers!! Two earths!! #So what we know of his injuries now: messed up legs. Messed up guts. Messed up chest. Is there more...? Who can say. 👀 #incarceration to elopement to healthcare pipeline #His healing is speeding up and his language is getting better! When can we get a Diana POV?? <- me to me
Also yes the hover titles are on the computer etc etc No, not being able to read the dialogue is not an issue, you're meant to muddle it out just like Danny, don't get discouraged if you're confused. Diana is not your POV character. The Boy is.

Chapter 20: Status Update (3)

Summary:

"Uh."
"What 'uh'?"
"...Did you let them in?"
"Let who in?"
"Look at the monitor."
"...NO. Did you clear them?"
"No!! Ah, shhhh— Right. Uh. Hm. Think we can go get them...?"
"One day I'm going to just call their parents and have them fix their own kids, I swear."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The next time Diana comes to visit her charge, her gloves are blue. Her scrubs are a pale pink. She is given a new face mask, and a new hair net, and walks through the double doors without needing to be buzzed in.

Alright. Perhaps the boy is not genuinely “her charge”. Still, he is hers to protect and to keep; although her position is, officially, as security to the medical team working with their young patient, the medical team knows as well as she does that the boy does not genuinely intend harm.

Is he prone to outbursts? Perhaps, but very few of them are powered. It is entirely understandable too, according to the mental health professionals on board the Watchtower: trauma affects how well one comports oneself and how one interprets their environment. They may see things, hear things, or misunderstand things, and believe they are under threat. The circ*mstance makes for a great deal of residual fear and mistrust.

Diana was once raised amongst communities of women with few untouched by battle fatigue. She recognizes the signs of lost time and of reawoken fear. She understands what battle-weary warriors are truly fighting against.

A doctor and a nurse mumble a greeting as Diana passes by them. “Morning, Wonder Woman.”

“Good evening,” Diana returns, eyes crinkling. One nurse visibly glances out the window—and then smiles, sheepishly, having forgotten their location in space. Time zones on the Watchtower are often…flexible; Diana, however, has only just returned from her day job. “How is the patient?”

A doctor jerks their head towards the monitor. It is only ever left on if no one else is in the room; privacy is key to recovery. The active monitor means that the medical team has left him alone for now. “Take a look. You might have to go kid wrangling again, Ma’am.”

Alright. Diana obliges them.

On the monitor, in little stick-figure form, are three figures, all sitting or crowded around the room’s singular bed. Her patient sits in his little white gown, legs still as ever, as Impulse drapes himself across the bedspread, and Robin (ex-Robin? Third Robin? Doesn’t he have a new name now?) stands at the bedside.

The Speedster wiggles, mouthing out words she can’t hear without a microphone. Robin is focused on something in his hand—a tablet, perhaps? If Impulse is chattering into the air, then Robin is short on answers; her charge, in comparison, looks back and forth between them, likely unable to understand what the two are up to.

Diana’s mask catches her sigh. “Busy, are they?”

“Do you think you can hold the red one down long enough for a refresher on proper PPE usage?” the doctor begs. The question appears to be genuine. “They just zoomed in a little bit ago. We’ve been trying not to disturb them, but without masks and gloves…”

…Her charge was still at risk for possible contamination or infection, as they couldn’t get consistently accurate test results on his immune system. Diana hummed. She could see the problem.

“I shall. Buzz me in, if you will.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The door clicks open. Diana strides through, unafraid of teenagers or similar ilk, and content with her position as designated scolder.

And, to his credit, the Robin at her charge’s bedside recognizes Diana’s lack of enthusiasm with the situation, and winces with artful precision. Silly boy— as if Diana would believe that any Bat would be ashamed of breaking a rule if they had already chosen to break it. She cannot help but be fond of each Bird’s eccentricities in their own ways. Robin hides the contraband food in his hand behind his back.

Impulse, however, hardly notices her approach, draped over her charge’s casts as he is—a whiteboard in his hand, furiously scribbling away at whatever attempt at communication he has decided to test today. Having met several male teenagers in her recent years, there is a decent chance he has been drawing genitalia as well.

Diana politely coughs into her mask. The gesture is entirely performative. Robin responds by hiding a separate can of energy drink—opened—on the side table behind him, in the hopes of hiding it from view.

Impulse, who failed to notice her arrival, continues to scribble. Occasionally there will be a burst of superspeed, but it will be in contained little bursts. He likely either wants to preserve the marker, or he is taking more care with his attempted art than usual.

Her charge looks up.

His eyes are still a concern—glazed with a green film, they jitter back and forth ever so slightly when he tries to focus on any one object in particular. He hasn’t indicated any discomfort with his eyesight, however, so it hasn’t been addressed beyond documentation.

The crack in his face—from two inches above his white, nebulous hairline and trailing down to his chin—is visible evidence of an injury or gouge of some sort, with new pink skin all around the edges as the only visible sign of inhuman levels of healing. Diana has seen a number of scars, and a number of healed, gaping wounds, but it is occasionally unsettling to set eyes on her charge and see the still-healing brain matter, skull, and inner sinus cavity through a viscous, green, not-quite-organic wound filling material.

There seems to be a consistent rate of healing, though. Diana can only hope that recovery is possible.

“Good afternoon,” Diana greets softly. Her charge’s discolored fingers flex as his face turns to look at her. “Are you well?”

His green-tinged lips part and then come together again. He’s not not paying attention—he listens very well, and has begun to use certain words in English to compensate for his need for communication. That being said, Diana has little idea what he is and is not capable of understanding.

Impulse, however, finally recognizes the newest occupant in the room. “Wonder Woman! Uh—we totally had permission to be here this time! Promise!!” he offers, immediately switching from someone gleeful to see her from someone remembering their misdeeds.

Diana is very lucky that her mask covers her fond smile. If it is her job to be stern today, she ought to live up to the task. “Did you, now?”

Impulse beams sheepishly, and rolls off of the casts of a bemused half-alien boy. “Yes! Remember last time when the nurses all said I could ‘come whenever’ and ‘bring a friend’ and—“

“You were asked to buzz in ahead of time and put on your protective gear?” Diana finishes, wry. Before she is able to scruff him appropriately, however, the superpowered boy is already gone and back—now with an askew hairnet, an upside-down surgical mask, and gloves a size too large for his hands.

“So I did that!” Impulse protests, the mask moving unnaturally over his face. “Look! All dressed up!”

It is a well-intended last minute effort. Alas, it would all be for naught. Diana scoops up a squawking speedster by the nape, and a now-blinded-by-a-misplaced-surgical-mask Robin, and trots them both back to larger medical.

“One moment!” Diana tosses back to her charge, who is, understandably, concerned.

Still. It takes Wonder Woman, two nurses, and a paraprofessional to successfully sanitize and gear up an uncooperative speedster. Robin sulks through the entire process, but capitulates to it with more grace.

Her charge’s green eyes shine and his fingers curl around his few personal possessions as Diana returns to him his companions; she wishes, so dearly, that she could ruffle his pale hair. “All done!”

The teenaged heroes sprawl across his bed just as casually as they had before—if better prepared for their environment. Robin largely gives her charge his space, careful not to impede where he isn’t wanted, but Impulse freely shares affection that her charge, at least, does not visibly deny.

Diana has her own routine to complete. She heads for the intravenous injection bags, pulls out a fresh one, and cracks the seal. After that, it’s shaking to mix the concoction and a fresh replacement.

Impulse grabs one of the toys off of her charge’s side table and brings it into his lap. The board is tilted, and all the slotted-in pieces fall out. He spends some time sorting them by shape, and then by color, until her charge lifts trembling fingers to pick them up, very carefully, one by one.

She’s impressed. His pincer grasp recovery has not been consistently smooth sailing. “Excellent work,” she praises.

Robin looks up from his tablet. Impulse looks back at her and beams. Her charge gives her a brief look, observes that she doesn’t need anything from him at the moment, and gets back to sorting the little pieces back into their allotted slot.

Impulse rests his chin on the steel arm bar of her charge’s cot. The pose seems…uncomfortable. “Hey, Tim. He got them all right.”

Timothy Robin taps away at his tablet—no doubt taking down documentation of his own. Diana can’t help but feel affection; every Bat and every Bird is so nosy, but if she wants to actually see those notes on her charge, she will have to press Batman for them with a reasonably-sized threat.

“Really?” Robin asks, eyes on the screen. “Do you think the pieces were matched based on color, or actual understanding of the numerical system?”

Diana looks down, line in her hand as she reconnects the intravenous bag. The toy in her charge’s lap is a mock clock face. Each of the numbers is printed onto the removable piece, in different cut-out shapes, and painted different colors.

The atmosphere changes. The air itself tastes different—something like electricity sparks on her tongue. And then it’s gone.

“No, he’s looking to put the clock face back in order, specifically,” Impulse confirms. Ah. Speedforce. Diana should have been able to recognize the feeling by now. “He’s kind of annoyed, actually. It’s like a baby toy.”

“Well, it is a baby toy.” Robin taps away.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s annoying. He knows he should be able to do it.”

Impulse buzzes again, and her charge hums, stuffing his flat hand between the board and the sheet until he can tip it over without grabbing at it. He repeats the same process, the only difficulty stemming from his shaking grip and his shaking eyes.

The urge to pull him close and pet his hair is understandable, Diana reminds herself, but not conducive to his long-term comfort. She smiles at him, as best as she can behind a surgical mask, and discreetly checks his drainage bags to see if they need replacing while she’s already close.

“All’s well,” she declares at last, finished with anything that isn’t social. Thankfully, having two teenagers in the room takes care of her charge’s most frequent issue—boredom. She claps her hands together, and her charge looks up at her, eyes vibrating. “Do you require anything?”

Her charge looks at her. Her charge looks at his friend. “Ouatair?” he tries to enunciate, tongue thick against the green-filled split in his hard palate. “Pleese?”

“Ithinkhewantssomewater,” Impulse rushes to translate, but Diana already knows this request. The water provided is chilled in a refrigerator, and it takes no time for her to find sanitized cup and straw—steel, so as to be safe when dropped, and relatively uncrushable, with a handle for simple gripping.

She presents it to him grip-first. His expression is grateful, and frustrated. No warrior wishes to be in the position of needing constant. Diana can understand the wish to do things on his own.

“Soon,” Diana offers, voice a whisper. “You’re already better off than before.”

Her charge grumbles into his cup. His tongue, half-green, finds the straw for him; he chomps down on the straw, slurps as loudly as he can, and sulks.

Teenagers. Diana finds herself unable to understand how Bruce has so many of them, and understands perfectly well how easy it is to take on a child in need and make them your own.

The cup goes back onto the side-table, half-empty.

“Hey,” Robin starts again. He puts his tablet to the side. The white board is pulled out of Impulse's hands and goes onto her charge's lap, and with only a little whining. “How’s this?”

Her charge mumbles something neutral. His eyebrows scrunch together, but he takes the offered blue marker from Impulse and lets the boy uncap it for him.

“Yeah, it’s more adult or whatever,” Impulse encourages. Her charge sticks out a green-mottled tongue, but takes the marker to the white board and writes. Robin peers over his shoulder to watch. “It’s just the alphabet. A, B, C, D~!”

Her charge hums the tune back to him, continuing seamlessly where Impulse left off. The teen hero beams.

Diana stills.

“Yeah, you got it!” Impulse encourages, and peeks over the edge of the board to see her charge hard at work. His letters are wobbly, certainly, and there are some that he misses, but the alphabet song is a longstanding English-language tradition. He know it. He knows it by rote.

“You missed the ampersand,” Impulse points out. Her charge scowls through the fissure in his face.

…There is no reason for Diana to get excited. Yet. Robin-the-former is already jotting down his own notes, pleased with his observations. There are many reasons and many ways this teenager might have picked up the song. J’onn famously picked up on Earth’s radiowaves before being transported to Earth; this could be further evidence that her charge has some connection to Earth, or it could be a connection to something more bizarre and unusual.

There is no shortage of unusual events these days.

And, of course, Diana runs out of things to do. She smooths down her charge’s blanket, which he hardly notices in his frustration. She refills his water. She is tempted to go grab her copy of The Art of War from her bag in the other room, which she has read before, but which she is rereading at behest of Bruce’s newest initiative: Tactical Book Club. She is optimistic about the opportunities for further education this will provide her comrades-in-arms, if not underwhelmed by the reading material. As long as the teenage heroes are in the room, Diana is obligated to remain with them, in the event that the danger level might…fluctuate. A book would give at least the semblance of privacy to the three.

Her charge makes a noise. “Hay!”

Diana looks up. In shaky hands, resting on his lap, he holds up a largely complete alphabet. There are one or two shaky letters—thorn, which is fairly common, and eth, perhaps less so—but otherwise carefully drawn, very neatly done.

“Excellently done,” Diana praises. The alphabet is a triumph of the physical work it takes to heal.

Her charge beams through his craggy face, buzzing with delight.

"I dunno," Impulse teases, upside down on her charge's legs. "They're kinda wonky."

The boy's face scrunches, smears the color away with a swipe of his arm, and draws something else.

The board shakes with his exertion as he lifts it back into place on his lap, and Diana allows herself to sigh, audibly; sure enough, as she had expected, there is a misshapen, blue, cartoon representation of a penis.

Robin full-on cackles with surprise, but Impulse falls of the bed with laughter.

Unfortunately, it is now Diana's job to figure out how to scold a teenager, and one who speaks no known language besides. Based on the resulting expressions she earns, Diana is unsure if the scolding works, but. Well.

...She tried.

Notes:

Additional letters that have been lovingly added to the English DCU alphabet:
Thorn: þ (th sound)
Eth: ð (also a th sound, slightly harder)
Ampersand: & (between Y and Z)
There are letters in the alphabet now that duplicate or share certain sounds between them, so I'm not too worried that both thorns and eths are in there cohabitating. Also, if you haven't heard the alphabet song in the last half a decade, they recently changed it without altering the tune, so I think the actual melody of the thing wouldn't fall apart if we threw some more things in there for funsies.
Also, this finally marks the full visible scope of Danny's injuries, many of which he isn't actually aware of: damaged limbs, damaged intestines, and an active actual hole in his face. He's on the good meds, so he can't actually feel it, but the ectoplasm is actively holding him together. Now. What happened?

Chapter 21: I don't understand what's happening and no one is answering me

Summary:

"Oh, hey. Check the news."
"Oh." *click* "Who is it this time?"
"Wonder Woman. Doctor Cyber. Shouldn't be too long."
"Huh. Bet it takes less than an hour."
"Bet you half an hour."
"I'll take it! Easy money. You ordering in today, or...?"

Notes:

EXTRA TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR:
vomiting, panic attacks

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Danny can hold a spoon now. He is unstoppable.

So, when the lady isn’t there to feed him dinner (more mush), one of the not-the-lady nurses gives Danny a tray, and lays a mat over his lap so that he can eat without completely messing up his bedsheets.

Eat he does. Slowly. Maybe a little messily, and it’s kind of embarrassing to have to admit to himself that food definitely spills out of his mouth and onto his lap. The doctor/nurse/medical person, whoever they are, turns on the television, and Danny doesn’t try to ask for the remote. The television only gets something like ten channels, and none of them are cartoons at lunch hour.

So. News it is.

Most of the news follows the same cycle; the weather, sports teams Danny can now recognize the colors of, traffic cameras, and events with long, scrolling text to detail the happenings onscreen. There’s something about dogs? That’s fun. The scientist/nurse/tech, whoever they are, says something in the tone of Aaw, aren’t they cute? as puppies run about and wrestle on screen.

Danny kind of misses Cujo. He picks at his bedsheet, and doesn’t say anything.

The dog program transitions away— there’s a bright banner in its place. Danny’s seen it before: it’s something to the equivalent of Breaking News. It’s usually weather, or crime, or something.

Um. But it’s not that. Danny’s spoon drops, because a ROBOT LADY lights up the screen with a glistening silver suit, not unlike the Ecto-Skeleton his parents used to keep in the basem*nt. Or, well…this one might be more streamlined?

Danny shifts. He can’t help. He’s here, in the hospital. Or. Uh. The space…hospital. His body is very broken.

But there’s a robot lady wrecking a town on Earth.

And Danny can fly.

…Could fly. Could have flown. If he was. Well.

Danny’s not well, and his body aches and his hands don’t work and his legs work even less, but there’s people out there who need help. People who are getting shot at with rays and Danny can fight them, and humans can’t. Danny can help. He—

His core throbs. Danny chokes. He pulls at his chest, trying to find some kind of purchase on his medical gown to tug himself—up?? Out?? He can’t fly right now, but maybe—?

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, abide, abide.”

Danny grits his teeth. “Look!” he snaps, and jams a finger at the television. “There’s—look! There’s a giant robot out there punching buildings!”

“Wacie,” the human protests, but at least turns up the volume so that Danny can see better. “Wacie, þær eart firas þær nou.”

What does that mean?!

Danny hasn’t lifted himself in forever. His legs don’t work, but his arms…might.

He presses his palms down to the mattress. He pushes.

There is a liberated fraction of a second where Danny’s whole weight is on his arms.

—And then he comes crashing back to reality, his elbows snapping back into place. His butt slams back onto the bed and the whole frame jitters.

Danny pants. His arms quake.

The medic completely barrels through Danny’s usually meticulously-kept personal bubble, trying to make sure Danny didn’t dislodge his IV or rip his ligaments and tendons or tear his muscles or. Something. Danny barely notices, barely cares, because someone else blasts onto the television screen in a red bathing suit and gold boots.

And suddenly, both the people on screen are fighting. It’s brilliant. It’s bloody—it’s physical, in the way that flesh and bone and metal must be. Danny’s never seen serious fighting like that before.

And the new woman flies.

Danny stares.

She flies. She fights. She wins—narrowly dodging or displacing lasers with something shiny on her arms, and getting long hair singed in the process. In the end, the robot is tethered down with some kind of shiny metal rope, screaming and kicking all the way.

…Danny barely remembers to choke in air. That's so cool.

The medical person says something reassuring, but Danny’s too tired to listen. He watches this new woman take her applause, floating down on nothing but air to meet the reporter and answer questions. She looks poised. Confident. People clap. People shout things out. People smile. People cheer.

…No one is screaming. No one is running.

There are no ghost hunters in the crowd.

Danny’s exhale is manual. So is his inhale. His heart monitors are making all sorts of funky pictures most likely, but that’s not his business—he watches a woman in armor who flies take off into the sky, free to come and go as she pleases.

It…it hurts. It’s so beautiful and so peaceful and gentle and it hurts so much.

His eyes well up with tears. Why did she get this? This…niceness? Everyone had hated him when he'd tried to help—the teachers, Vlad, the town, his parents. They’d hated him! All he ever wanted to do was help like she did!

What made him so different?! Why was it Danny who got hunted down and shot at? Why was it Danny who got kidnapped and taken hostage?!

Tears burn his eyes like fire. It’s got to be the salt. Danny’s strangled whine turns into a choked off sob before he can catch it. His hand goes to his mouth, but he can’t stifle the noise.

He doesn’t want to. He wants to cry. He thinks he deserves it.

The tears come until he is sobbing, crying, wailing—because WHY WHY WHY was it so easy to hurt him?! WHY DID THEY HURT HIM, WHY DID MOM HURT HIM, HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG!

A towel appears in his hand. They’re so nice to him here. So much nicer than when Mom and Dad had—

Danny’s cries are as much screams as they are anything else.

There are hands on his shoulder. On his back. Rubbing. Danny wants to shove them off but the lady isn’t here, which means that it’s one of the staff-members who isn’t supposed to touch him. They’re not supposed to touch him in case Danny hurts them but one of them gave Danny a clean towel to scream into and is rubbing his back because he’s crying.

They’re trying to be so nice and gentle but EVERYONE JUST WANTS TO HURT HIM.

They’re smart, though. They notice before Danny does, and have a bucket ready by the time heaving sobs turn into outright vomiting.

At least the mush mostly makes it into the bucket.

…So.

Having a breakdown…sucks.

Danny has to carefully brush his teeth with an extra-soft bristle brush and rinse out his mouth before he gets more water.

Someone is being very nice. There’s artificial fruit punch flavoring in his drink. He wants to feel grateful but he mostly feels dead.

…His eyes slide listlessly across the room. Ha. Dead.

Danny is horizontal and wrung dry and too tired to do anything but pant by the time the lady comes back to his room. She’s in quicker than usual—her gown is sort of sloppy, hair sticking out of her hair net, and she’s still looping her mask around her ear.

She gets down on her knees beside his bed. She asks him if he’s alright.

Danny’s not alright. He isn’t sure he’s been alright in…ages. Ages and ages. Before he was trapped and tied down. Before he was hated. Reviled.

…Before he was Phantom, maybe; before Danny Fenton had died a shocking, senseless death.

Tears try to wring themselves out of his aching eyeballs, but he’s too dry-eyed to cry; the lady make sad, wet eyes for him, and that’s probably enough between the two of them. Danny’s misery is a vast, gaping void, and all he has to show for it is the shovel he’s been digging through all this sh*t with for the last few years.

The lady brings her hands closer to his hairline, curled fingers hovering in the air. Her word’s don’t mean anything to him, but the gesture is clear: May I?

“…Mm,” Danny agrees. His eyes fall closed when she gently scratches at his scalp with her fingers.

No one’s touched him gently, on purpose, in…ages. When he was little, Dad used to pop him between him and Mom in bed. Mom would brush out Danny’s bangs with her fingers and Dad would hum. It was always something ill-fitting and silly. Guns N’ Roses. Led Zepplin. Santana. Sometimes Jazz would sit with them, crushing him until Dad had to pull him up and out of harm’s way.

In the quarantine lab, hurting him had just been part of the scientific process. What if there was some new discovery under his fat layer? On the other side of his ribs? Nestled between his alveoli?

Danny sniffles. He’s too dry to cry. He blinks invisible dust off of his eyelashes, and focuses on the weird lady who’s with him now.

Up close, when his eyes work, she looks nice. She has blue eyes, like him. Like Dad. They’re kinda…glowy, maybe? Sparkly? They remind him of ice in the Far Frozen—inhumanly brisk, and impossibly clean. She has eye crinkles where she smiles, tan skin making them more defined than their actual depth. Between her hair net and her medical mask, little wisps of black baby hairs shine through.

She pets him. She smiles. Danny isn’t sure why, but. Whatever. Jazz used to insist that human skin-to-skin contact was an essential need, so this is probably, like, also medical care.

Yeah. Danny squints. …Sure.

Whatever. It’s nice.

So Danny gets petted and it’s fine. He almost doesn’t notice the giant gauntlet under the paper sleeve of her gown, but then it’s right in his field of vision, and. Hey. Didn’t he see that on TV, like, an hour ago?

Danny stares.

He can’t actually tell if they’re gold under the pale blue color of the gown, but. The color is certainly some sort of unusually colored metal, cold to the touch even through the paper-like material of the gown.

…He doesn’t want to touch her, or let her know that he’s touching her. But. He brushes the back of his wrist against the bracelet, and it hums against the paper gown between it and his bare skin.

The lady blinks. She looks down at where they made contact, and asks him if he’s alright.

Danny looks away.

She knows she saw him reach out to her, though, so she takes her hand off of his hair (…hey…) and pulls back the sleeve on her gown. “Sest,” she offers. See?

It is the same kind of bracer he saw on TV. Up close he can see the designed etched into it—geometric lines stretching down from her fingers to her elbow, terminating in something structural. Not quite diamonds. Just…strong.

There’s a couple of very, very tiny letters down towards the bottom. His eyes strain when they try to make any sense out of them; they’re too small for him to actually focus on, which sucks.

She steps back, and pushes her sleeves down to show off her gold bracers. She lifts up the hem of her gown, revealing red boots that go waaaay up her thigh. They have the same gold metalwork as she does on the bracers.

Danny just saw those on the television. His eyes widen.

“You—“ he starts, and then remembers their difference in language. He points his hand at the television. “You fought? You were on TV?”

“Hwæt?”

“The TV?” Danny repeats. She doesn’t understand. Danny doesn’t know how to tell her what he means. “The…you were there?”

She looks at him to expand. Danny looks back at her.

…So they just stare at each other silently.

The door cracks open; the person who’d mediated Danny’s breakdown pokes their head in and says something. “Eower feoht wæs an þe box todæge.”

The lady blinks. Danny blinks. Wait. Did they just call the television the box?

“…Box?” Danny clarifies, and lifts a hand to shakily point at the television again.

The lady blinks, and grins. “Yea!” she returns, pumped up. She stands, to the powerful height she’d had on the television—excuse him, the box—and flexes her now-exposed arms to show off massive biceps.

Holy moly. Danny hasn’t seen any bigger biceps on his Dad.

She flexes one arm, the other, both—in front, and behind. If Danny had that much definition, he’d be showing off too! She leaps back impossibly far—and holy crap she can fly— to show off some mock punches at invisible enemies at speeds that Danny would be hard pressed to follow even with supernatural abilities.

He goggles.

She laughs at him, but she doesn’t sound mean—she sounds show-boating and silly, and teasing and playful, but not mean.

She’s like him. She’s not a ghost but she flies and she’s not human. She’s not human just like Danny. Just like that one green guy. Like the fast kid who visits him.

It’s such a relief. It’s so scary. Who are these people? Why are they healing him? Why are they keeping him?? Why do they have access to so many non-human people? What do they want him for? Is Danny supposed to fight like that?

He would fight. If he had to. He’s done it before.

If they make him fight, Danny’s pretty sure he’s going to fall apart like cheap glass.

The lady comes back when Danny goes quiet, her gloved fingers brushing up against his knuckles. The sensation is enough to bring Danny out of his…fog. Sometimes everything is so cloudy and vague. The pain medicine makes it go away, and the pain medicine brings it back.

Danny curls his hand into a shaking fist. He bumps her knuckles against his.

She makes a surprised noise. Danny feels her gently move his fingers, rearranging, moving where his thumb goes—

He huffs out a laugh. His fist wasn’t good enough to her standards. Her fist bump meets his in the middle with a smirk and a laugh, victory written all over her face.

Notes:

Healing isn't linear, my dude has so much trauma it's insane, I figured out that this chapter was a panic attack like an entire day after I wrote it, and heeeeeeey, guess who got more ✨blood taken✨! This is quickly going from "Faer's dissection fic" to "Faer's medical venting fic" lol. It's fine. Don't worry about it 👍🏽 'S all good bby.
Also. Diana teaching the baby how to punch right. It's perhaps not the right vibe to set in a medical wing with a traumatized kid, but it IS good for flexing his hands. So. The medical team is grouchy but not verbally disapproving.
Also, did we all see the art? Clap if you saw the art. @Neurotraum does amazing things. Everyone go say nice stuff to them.

Chapter 22: There's a stranger in my room and I don't appreciate it.

Summary:

"He just— he just kept trying to get up. He couldn't even hold himself up, but he kept pushing, and pushing—"
"Devin—"
"And, like, maybe it was just excitement, or whatever? But then he saw Wonder Woman win, and he just got so stressed out post adrenaline crash that he got sick over it. I held him as he cried, and all he could do was throw up..."
"Hey...Devin. Deep breaths, okay, Devin? I know... It's a lot Devin, I know...we can only do our best. Same as him. Just do what you can."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

There’s a green guy in his room.

Danny keeps eating his mush. There’s mush apple in it today, for variety. It’s probably triple-pasteurized applesauce, but it’s something, and Danny’ll appreciate it while it lasts.

The green guy and the lady are talking. Danny is happy to ignore them—they’re quiet, and careful, even if they’re trying not to act too suspicious or too quiet. Danny has the sneaking suspicion that he’s supposed to be getting used to his presence. Like a cat meeting another cat, or something.

The thing is, Danny kind of remembers him—but his brain’s been so loopy and weird, it’s kind of…hard to be certain? There are some memories of pain, and some memories of stress, and…maybe he was there for one of his star-walks? Danny thinks?

His memories are all mush. Since waking up here, Danny’s been more confused the more he’s become aware.

He sticks his spoon in his mouth.

Hello, the green guy tries, flexing some oddly solid aura, but Danny’s very busily ignoring him; the television has another news segment on weather in places Danny’s never seen, and he’s trying really hard to remember what the extra letters actually sound like.

There’s, like, an ampersand in the middle of words here. What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I would like to talk, the not-ghost says without speaking, which is how Danny knows he’s not human. He doesn’t feel like a ghost, per se, and Danny’s breath is normal and as warm as his body can arrange it. It’s still weird though, since he clearly wants to communicate in some way, and Danny just.

He digs his teeth into the plastic spoon. It’ll leave little tooth-shaped dents. He focuses very firmly on the television spot. There are so many towns. Some of them have very silly names. One of them is having an asteroid shower, if Danny trusts his understanding of the icons they’re using.

Asteroids are cool. There’s a couple shots of the sky and a projected time at 8pm in some time zone. Maybe he can get the fast kid to tell his medical team he wants to see them. Maybe they’ll actually let him out of his room at night to watch…?

A hand gently fans at his sleeve so that the breeze jostles the fabric just a little bit. It’s a signal Danny’s gotten used to—a non-verbal, attention-grabbing signal that doesn’t require physical touch.

Danny looks. The lady waves.

He huffs.

“Licie,” the lady asks gently, but firmly. It’s a pretty insistent Please.

Please be polite with the guests, Danny. Your father loves Vlad, so please be nice, Danny.

…Danny doesn’t quite roll his eyes but he does. Look away. He doesn’t want to talk to them. Boundaries aren’t so… Empathic beings are…

“Do I have to?” he asks, and then remembers. Right. Different language. “Ic sceal?”

“Licie. Pleese.”

Danny’s face scrunches up. All the scarring his face probably has pulls taut. “…’Kay.”

“Min þanc.” Thanks.

Danny…reluctantly…faces the green guy.

He looks. Nice. Enough. He’d look better if he wasn’t staring—if Danny couldn’t physically feel how heavy the green guy’s attention was weighing down on him, pressing into his head and shoulders and neck, and—

Danny looks away. Again. The lady sighs.

The green guy sends waves of peace, calm, which is definitely a threat! Danny’s been smacked by Nocturn more than once! He knows what safety feels like when wielded as a weapon!

Apology wafts around the room, but Danny doesn’t want to hear it. Feel it. Smell it? Whatever. It has nothing to do with him. Danny wants to fiddle with the bits of his space station and maybe practice writing his name again, which has so far been less than a success. But he should probably introduce himself soon enough.

It’s only been. You know. …Literal months.

Questions and answers/queries and information? the green guy offers to trade, which is theoretically nice. But Danny’s been hunted for answers before—and sometimes just straight up hunted for fun.

There’s no information he wants to give.

Ask me? comes instead.

…Danny’s fingers still. Wait. He’s allowed to ask?

A bubble of amusem*nt/worry bursts. Yes. If Danny has questions, he can apparently…ask.

Okay. Danny sets the space shuttle aside. He tilts his aura around, and bends it—if the green guy were a ghost, they’d be able to share more emotions with Danny’s guard slipped downwards. He’s going to bet it works…kind of the same way for whatever he is.

Who’s the lady? Does she have a name?

There’s a bubble burst of a memory—some dude in all black with little cat ears announcing This is Wonder Woman, hand out to present her to the listener. Without her scrubs on in the memory, she looks…like a warrior.

Armored. Strong. Black hair, gold gauntlets and red boots. Firm back. Like on the television

…In her scrubs, she just looks like the same lady as always. In his head, she looks as powerful and mighty as Pandora.

Danny’s heart picks up. Breathing becomes—harder. Does she fight? Does she fight all the time?

Memories of shared battles play out from the green being’s point of view: punching and throwing and whipping her lasso in the air and confidence and freeing prisoners and the power of the gods behind her, a royal in her own right—

…Will Danny have to fight?

The green guy murmurs something sad, grief flashing up against Danny’s low emotional shields. His hands reach out—but Danny leans back. He doesn’t want to be touched. He doesn’t want to feel the dude feeling bad for him. He just wants to know; will Danny be forced to fight?

There’s a deep, painful sympathy brushing up against him. Danny recoils. The thoughts of healing, doctors, naps, coming off his meds, recovery. Of concern, worry, Wonder Woman settling the patient’s blankets, his green-marred face raw and luminescent.

Healing. Resting.

Which. Danny glares. He gets that. But what happens after? Medical care is expensive, and Danny doesn’t even have hint of an idea of how long he’s been lying here. He knows that nothing comes free.

The green guy’s expression squeezes with concern. His head might be kind of funky-shaped, but the face is pretty human equivalent. Danny would have struggled to read Frostbite’s more than his. Danny doesn’t like that.

Danny misses beings he recognizes. He wants his friends. He wants Jazz. He wants Frostbite or Wulf or…or…

…Or Mom…or Dad…

Something touches Danny’s hand. Danny looks down. The green hand that reaches for him doesn’t grab, exactly, but it lets him know that the dude is there, at his side. I’m sorry, the guy says, more sentiment than thought. And then there’s a struggle to convey the next few thoughts.

…Because the guy doesn’t have as much experience of being outside as the school bell rings, children going in. Lunches in the headquarters cafeteria. The phone in Flash’s hand turned sideways, so that Martian Manhunter can see the dead-fish kiss between Rosalinda and Romero from last night's episode—

Wait, is the guy actually an alien? It’s kind of rude, but Danny. Gawks.

The concern hanging around in the air of the room turns into green-tinged amusem*nt. The green dude and Danny have already had this conversation.

…Danny peeks at his water bottle on the side table and sheepishly rubs his nose. Ah. Whoops. They have?

Yes, the alien continues, and pulls his hand back. But they were having a conversation. About school. And healing. And recovering, and a comfortable space to rest, and an apartment on Earth and peace and family, and—

Danny shoves his emotional shields all the way back up before he. Before he forgets. His heart is pounding. He can’t look.

He can’t.

He.

…He can’t have that again.

The green guy—the martian wants to tell Danny something else, but he can’t—he can’t open himself up to that anymore.

Danny doesn’t have a mom anymore. Danny doesn’t have a dad anymore. His sister is—gone. He’s not going to hurt himself for wanting them back. There's no family and no house and no safety.

There are more quiet, empathetic presses against Danny’s emotions, but Danny pulls the covers up as high as they’ll go, and breathes through the thin cotton sheet pressed against his face.

It catches his tears, when he has them.

Someone mutters, and someone else mutters back. When Danny feels something touch his wrist through the cotton blanket, he can’t help flinching, but the speaker’s voice is familiar enough that he settles quickly enough. Danny listens to the lady—Wonder Woman, he remembers—hum softly.

…It’s a nice hum.

She hums, and she strokes his wrist, and she doesn’t go anywhere. She’s a stalwart, soft presence at his side.

It’s nice.

It's... Relatively, it's safe.

Danny eventually stops acting like a baby, and. Takes the sheet off. He isn’t crying, so there aren’t and tears to wipe away (there’s no need to check the footage, just believe him!), but it takes him a second to get himself reoriented to the room without a giant psychic presence in it.

But the whole time, the lady just…rubs his wrist, and then his mildly obliterated (but mostly healed!) hand. And hums. And lets Danny reorient himself, at his own pace, and in a safe space.

Danny sniffles. He hopes it’s all mucus in his sinus cavity, and not, like, more ecto. But who knows?

The lady tilts her head forward, until Danny can see the blue eyes peeking over her lavender surgical mask. Her hand comes to her chest to tap against the paper-thin PPE covering her top half.

“Wonder Woman,” the lady says, firmly and clearly. “Diana.”

…That’s a name. Danny’s nose scrunches. That's a human name. That's a very recognizable, extremely culturally familiar human name.

They never introduced themselves, right?

Maybe…well… He is in space. Maybe he’s far enough away that no one will know him if he says his name.

(Or maybe Mom won’t want him back anyway, even if she found him.)

And there’s probably a million black-haired kids named Daniel, anyway. It’s a biblical name. These people don’t even speak English or Esperanto, or anything else Danny knows; so maybe it’s. Safe?

And…maybe Danny just wants to hear his name said again.

“D…”

The lady frowns, and then eases closer. Danny—gently—tugs on a lock of her hair until she lowers, and his mouth can reach her ear.

“D’nny,” Daniel James Fenton whispers into Wonder Woman’s ear.

Diana raises herself back upright. Her eyes are wet.

“Danny,” she repeats back to him. Her callused hands gently take both of Danny’s scarred and lumpy ones. “Wel mete.”

“He believes that we are going to require his presence in combat as payment for his recovery,” J’onn reports diligently, and stuffs his trepidation deep into his countenance.

The league around him groans.

Notes:

Okay, there's context clues for every non-English word in this chapter. We get what we get. Shoutout to Aelfay for posting a comment so correct it seared the top layer of my brain off and made me want to write again. This is 'cause of you ✅
"Where did you go for a month??" Phic Phight "What's Phic Phight??" It's where you post Phan Phic for a month "What's phan fic?" phic for danny phantom phans "...There's a month for that?" Yeah anyway read it all here 👍🏽
Thanks for reading! And commenting. I can't get them all anymore but I read and appreciate all of them.

Chapter 23: Status Update (4)

Summary:

"Hey. So. Remember how Wonder Woman is here to stop the patient from exploding us if he gets too stressed?"
"It's fiiiiiiiine! He's, like, a normal kid now! He knows what we're up to, he's figured out the routine, he recognizes us... It's all good~🎵 We can get in an hour in under three hours, and I promise it'll all go fine."
"Your optimism is admirable but not only do I not want to die, but I also don't want this kid to get set back by retraumatizing himself by accidentally hurting us. Did you think of that?? Hm? Did you think of that??"
"The staff down there already work with the kid heroes. It'll be fine! Don't be a scaredy cat, Winnie! Get Devin to bring the wheelchair around so that we can get moving; we're cutting it close to missing our time slot."
"If we all die, I am blaming you. Explicitly. This foolishness is going in his chart for digital posterity."
"If we all die, I bet it's a real alien invasion. This kid's just a kid. It'll be fine."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

So, Wally broke all of the bones in his legs yesterday.

Which is…not ideal. Still. He’s pretty used to it at this point, though, and he’s already mostly healed.

It’s just that. Well.

…The rest of healing is kind of…time-consuming.

So Wally’s in basketball shorts and a mask and a t-shirt he’d started using as pajamas when he was in college and he’s on the med floor of the Watchtower, and yet another physical therapist is helping him bend his leg back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, because he’d tripped in the middle of the Speedforce and busted everything hip-down.

So. Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Back… This sucks.

“Do we have to do this every time?” Wally asks, as if there isn’t a team of medical professionals kept on hand to deal with superpower-wrought Super Medical Problems.

“Do you have to shatter your legs every time?” the PT asks back wryly, which, hey! The pressure pressing up against his bare foot is an additional stressor to the sass. “Bend this more for me, Flash. You can do it.”

Wally grumbles, and pretends the angle his leg is bending at doesn’t make him wince. Wow is he going to have to build his flexibility back up again.

The physical therapy room looks just like any other gym, basically; a lot of squishy mats in playful colors, a lot of grippy tape; a LOT of wipeable vinyl surfaces that can be sanitized at a moment’s notice. It smells kind of weird and plasticky and kind of like alcohol cleaner.

It’s not his favorite room in the Watchtower, but, eh. It could be way worse. What’s unusual is the whirrr of the door opening and closing in one of the private care rooms for another patient, since, you know...HIPAA and all that. Wally assumes. Or is it all about costume confidentiality ethics once you leave Earth's atmosphere...?

Usually everyone knows who’s stopping in for PE through the sheer power of the Justice League gossip groupchats. (There’s at least nine. Wally’s in four of them. He aspires to be in two more by April.) There hasn’t been a big fight that's required long-term medical care in a while, and there’s no one Wally can think of who’d need this kind of recovery.

Something’s buzzing at the outside of his awareness, though. It sounds kind of…

Wally perks up. “Hey, the alien kid’s here!”

The PT holding Wally up at the waist hums. Her name is Cindy, and judging from their previous conversations, she thinks that Wally is the dumbest man alive. “There’s a million of those, Flash. Which one?”

“The one who bit Superman,” Wally adds.

Judging by the face Cindy makes, this clarifies nothing.

“Most recently,” Wally stresses, carefully not wincing as his leg gets stretched out again, only to be pulled back into position as tightly as before. “OW. Cindy, you’re killing me.”

Cindy makes a strangled noise. She asks: “What, again?” which is how Wally remembers that he got torn back out of the time stream not all that long ago, and it may be a big gauche to joke about your own death with the people who care about it.

Whoops. Wally winces. “…Nevermind?”

The other PTs make various fussy and annoyed noises, but the alien kid is wheeled onto the other side of the medical floor’s only gym. (The actual training floors are on another level. Wally wishes he was there. Alone.)

(Without four PTs clinging to his legs at all times.)

Wally waves at the kid. It’s a nice enough gesture, and now that the alien-phantasm-turned-flesh-and-blood-boy is more physically embodied than he used to be, the boy even deigns to carefully wave back.

The kid’s PTs—Wally thinks at least one of them is from the team that supervises Bart and his super-powered-leg-problems—end up encouraging the alien kid’s chair round to the soft mats where the kid can lay down. He ends up in the exact same position Wally is—horizontal on the floor, legs forcibly pinwheeled by enthusiastic but firm PTs.

Wally can physically feel the kid’s astonishment and discontentment buzzing in the air as he figures out what’s being done to him. Wally can’t help but laugh.

The kid angles his head towards the speedster. His face still looks—well, it looks…bad. It looks bad, unhealed and still threatening to weep neon green body fluids; there’s a wet, living crack running up and down his face that makes eye contact kind of hard. His hands are all spidery—this kid can probably hold and grip things, but the previous breakage have left his hands a little too easy to splay, a little too oddly-angled. He’s too thin to keep himself fully upright for long. When he looks at you, his eyes shake like a poorly lined-up television signal.

Martian Manhunter had said that he’d once looked like a healthy, happy human child— that his current form is a reflection of the injuries he’d experienced since.

...What a thing for a kid to go through. Wally wouldn’t wish this sort of injury on anyone.

“Alright, up you go,” the PT above him—Rhys, Wally remembers at the very last second—orders, and Wally is prompted to let the man help him back upright. “Over to the bars for you. You think your legs are up to bearing that kind of weight as you try out walking?”

“…Sure,” Wally lies to Rhys. It’ll be fine. Probably. By the time he gets over there, his legs might have already speed-healed by then. “Hand me the—?”

“Yeah, yeah, here’s the crutches. Don’t destroy yourself trying to make this happen, okay?”

So Wally gets set up at the glorified playground equipment in his least restrictive gym clothes, one long iron bar under one arm, and one long iron bar under the other. Two full-size physical therapists spot him as the speedster completes the most strenuous task available to him at the moment: walking across a very short distance without putting his full weight on his legs.

Wally puts one shaking leg in front of the other. The steps are slow. The urge to zoom to the end of the little bowling lane he’s stuck in—and therefore shatter his legs under the speedforce, again—is irresistibly temping.

Healing sucks. And Wally’s even got the longer end of the stick.

In the end, Wally sticks the landing. He is unreasonably sweaty. He is miserable. But he makes it to the end. Every one of the witnessing PTs applauds as if this is a great success. It’s literally not. It’s the inevitable result of pushing himself too far for the third time this year.

A question buzzes through the air, fluffing through Wally’s hair and the little fine hairs up and down his body. It’s nothing but inquisitive: whatareyoudoing whatareyoudoing?

Wally lets the PT maneuver a chair underneath him. It gives him enough breathing room to turn his upper torso, and he ends up catching the eye of the little alien kid in the corner. He’s sat on a yoga ball, two members of his medical team and one of the kids’ PTs trying to get his attention back to his exercises.

“Hey,” Wally realizes suddenly. “Your casts are gone!”

The kids’ legs are actually bare, which Wally’s never seen before. They’re twiggy, sure, stretched taut over a bone frame, and discolored and pale, but they’re legs. Wally hadn’t even known the alien had possessed legs until he’d formed a physical body months and months ago.

“Dude, that’s great!”

Happy/smug/proud vibrates through the room, making Wally’s teeth buzz. The kid smiles through a half-split lip, and bounces on the yoga ball ever so slightly.

“Good,” the kid says, surprising Wally, his PTs, and the kid’s usual medical team. He was talking already?! He thought J’onn had said—

“Hurt?” the boy asks, concern/concern flooding through the air. Oh. Right. He’s probably here for his busted legs; it would make sense that by virtue of the setting, Wally would be injured too.

And, sure, Wally busted his legs, but he at least heals with all the swiftness of the speedforce. “Meh.” Wally waves off the question. “I’m fine. It’ll be quick for me; some rehab and some lunch and a few days off, and I’ll be in shipshape.”

Wait. Wally’s eyes scrunches up. Is using wordplay appropriate with this kid…?

“Pain?” the kid asks, and turned his attention to the closest member of his medical team. “He pain?”

The medical professional sighs, which finally clues Wally in that the man is no longer masked. Hey, the kid is out of medical isolation! “The Flash has his own medication, thankfully. His doctors know what to do.”

The kid frowns. He doesn’t get it. He looks at Wally, and he looks at the staffer, who shrugs. “It’s the usual indicator word he uses for pain medication. He’s wondering if you’re hurt enough to need some.”

Wally hums. On one hand, it’s sweet that the alien kid is worried about him. It’s a huge step upwards from the alien who spent all his time hiding in abandoned meeting rooms and occasionally biting Superheroes.

On the other hand, the kid doesn’t just look worried that Wally might not be getting care; he looks scared.

Something happened to this kid. Something he can't shake off.

Wally breathes in, and breathes out.

—And breathes in sharply when Cindy starts wiggling his feet. She doesn’t respond at all to his glare, because she is a professional, and he is not a big baby of a superhero.

Mean.

“I’m fine,” Wally finally responds, trying to alleviate the kid’s concerns through sheer vibes-telepathy alone. Who knows if it’s working, but it makes Wally feel better about trying at the very least. “I’ve got my own team to fix me up, and they do a good job of taking care of me. Even if they’re bullying me at my most vulnerable.”

“Anything for you, boss,” Cindy volleys back cheerfully. “Gimme your other leg.”

The tension in the air slowly dissipates. The kid doesn’t stop shooting occasional looks at the unadorned, half-out-of-uniform Flash, but he does let Bart’s little PT team get to working on stretching out his previously-bound now-physical legs and getting him upright—if only for a few seconds at a time, balanced precariously by humans who actually touch his back and arms and hips and legs.

Wally’s session wraps up before the kid’s does. He’s not in any rush. He gets onto the walking crutches Rhys leaves out for his temporary use and lopes over to watch, occasionally hooting and applauding when the kid pulls off something no one’d been sure he could do.

The double handed high-five Wally offers him at the end is punctuated with shaky eye contact, two working hands, and a green-threaded beaming grin.

Diana cheerfully digs into her kebab lunch, plastic cutlery pushed to their maximum limit before threatening to break under her prodigious strength. “You know, Batman,” she starts, beaming, “My charge gave me his name the other day.”

Bruce sets down his muenster-ham-and-whole-wheat sandwich mid-bite. “I’ll need to hear everything,” he says immediately, to which Diana tuts.

“Oh, Batman, I could never break his trust like that,” she says, sweet as anything. She finesses a bite of lamb from the skewer and takes a neat bite.

“…Wonder Woman,” Batman says.

“Hm?”

“Diana.”

“Is there something you needed, Bruce?” Diana asks, pleased with herself. There genuinely is very little that could be done with a vague description of a now-altered human form and a first name alone; besides, she genuinely does feel that hearing the boy’s name come from others’ lips would be upsetting for him. Danny offered his name to Diana alone, and so it shall remain until hers alone he offers it to others.

Still, she is not above bragging.

“I need information.” Bruce’s face underneath his mask is stone.

Diana dips a second chunk of lamb into a little container of tzatziki sauce. “Well, then,” she points out, “Shouldn’t you spend some time building rapport with my charge, then?”

The feared Batman of Gotham, father of a half-dozen highly trained heroes, bristles like a wet cat. The demeanor is almost comical. He knows what he looks like to non-Gothamite children. He knows his suit will make this fight for common familiarity an uphill battle.

Diana smugly works through her lunch, and ignores Bruce’s silent brooding as he does the same.

Notes:

Behold, the most tangible fanwork ever created for this fic: actual crocheted InjuredGhost!Danny!!

@rainbowbeansprout did such an amazing job, and Danny came out so amazing and intricate!! The work is stunning!!
Meanwhile Danny!! Is!! Out!! Of!! His!! Leg!! Casts!! 🤜🏽👊🏽🤛🏽👊🏽✊🏽 Heck yeah!! He's almost fully on his way to recovery from what the crash did to him, but the rest...
Tags from Tumblr:
#Bruce: have you considered being nice to me. #Diana: No. Why? Do you need me to be nice to you? #Bruce: ...no... (lying) #Danny: Is this where they turn me into a super warrior #Wally: no actually we're going to sit on a yoga ball for like. Ever. And then we have like to walk the bars #and up stairs #and DOWN stairs #Danny: this may actually be. Worse?? #SHOUTOUT to the medical team for not triggering Danny the whole time they touched him!!! Big feat for Danny for letting people touch him!!!

Chapter 24: I play a card game, and I don't hate it.

Summary:

"Do you think I can get them to deal me in?"
"Do you think they'll pay you to play cards with the kid?"
"...Maybe?"
"Ask management preemptively and see how far you get."
"But if I phrase it as occupational therapy...!"
"You don't qualify as a physical therapist!"
"Do they know that??"

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

“Green one,” the quickfast one says. The masked teenager groans.

Danny looks down at his cards. He’s got a green eight. He drops the card onto the pile, and waits, perfectly aware that the girl is only down to her last two cards. The card flutters vaguely toward the pile on Danny’s bed cot.

He’s sitting with his legs crossed now, he admires. Holy crap. This is what dreams are made of.

“Brucetwo,” the teen in the leather jacket demands, slapping down a—Oh, it’s a green 2+ card. It’s take two. Right.

The blonde girl scoffs, but her two cards bloat back up to four. Quickly though, with a little shuffling, the four become three with a green three slapped down on top of the deck.

Everyone is down to only a three or four cards. Danny is sweating through his medical issue tee and shorts.

Danny has not won a single game yet.

Danny really wants to win.

The masked teen (why is he wearing a face mask?? Like…over his eyes?? Not even his mouth??) opens with a new complication: a red three.

The red-haired quick-kid flicks a wild card plus four down with a smirk, pleased to make this Danny’s problem. “Blue, cnyttefour!”

Okay, so what is cnytte?? Danny just got used to ‘take’. What is this new synonym. Why is everyone determined to hurt him like this. Why couldn’t these people just use Esperanto.

Whatever. Danny bites his lip and pulls the trigger: wild card plus four. He quickly points to the leather-jacket teen. “R-red. Br-take eight.”

The kid splutters. “Hey! That’s not the riht!!”

That is for sure how he and Jazz used to play it in after-school. The other kids never complained. “Is.”

“No, it’s not??”

Danny sticks his tongue out. The leather-jacket wearer squawks theatrically; it takes the mask-wearing kid thirty seconds to find the official pdf of the rules of UNO, and a new argument is off to the races.

“Atredde!!” the teen demands, snatching the phone out of the masked teen’s hands to show Danny the screen. “Þær, there!!”

“I can’t read,” Danny points out cheerfully. He can read some things, sure, but not when he refuses to look at the phone.

The phone gets closer and closer to Danny’s face, and Danny looks anywhere else—at the ceiling, the floor, and his bed, all without letting the guy point it out to him.

“Atredde,” the guy demands, the glass of his screen mashed against Danny’s cheek. Danny struggles not to laugh. “Atredde, atreddeatreddelooklooklook, you wearg—“

“No aðs, no aðs!!” the only girl of the group yelps, grabbing the spare pillow from underneath herself to start beating him with. Danny’s assailant shrieks. “Do you want to get in trouble with Wonder Woman?!”

“Wonder Woman wolde take my sid!” the teen hollers. Danny ponders if biting him would solve anything for all of two seconds before the doors smack open.

Everyone looks at Diana. Diana looks at everyone.

“I win!” Danny cheerfully announces, and sets off more yelling.

Danny does not, in fact, win anything other than a late lunch. Still, it is enough that he won, even if he has to sit through a gentle, brow-raised scolding as the nurse cleans his port and replaces his stomach-hole bag.

Lunch is a smoothie with powered vitamins and some pain medication mixed in. Life goes on.

For the first time, though, Danny doesn’t eat lunch alone; since he can, like, keep his bed relatively clean now that he isn’t constantly leaking ectoplasm everywhere, there are four teenagers crammed onto his bed with sandwiches, wraps, and sodas of their own. Danny can phonetically pronounce the brands on the side of the can, he notices. He has no idea what they mean, but sometimes the girl in the blonde bob and the too-fast teen will ask him to pronounce them, and they only snicker sometimes.

The teen in the mask makes a noise. “I want a lið. Whawant anything?”

“Nah,” No,” “Na þancs,” all echo.

Danny sucks on his smoothie straw. It tastes like bananas today. Ew; potassium. “What is… lið?”

The teen holds up a can of soda in his ungloved hand. Danny makes a face. He’d love a Mountainous Dunk right now, but gas in his bag…eugh. More trouble than it’s worth.

“No.”

The teen shoots him a pair of finger guns and darts out the door, leaving the rest of them behind to argue over UNO rules in at least two languages and without any expectation of resolving the issue.

Danny peaceably polishes off his smoothie. He’ll have to get the back done again, but eh. As long as no one’s directly looking at the process while it’s going on, he doesn’t super care whether or not anyone’s in the room, per se? Is that weird? Is this weird??

It’s probably weird. But also. Danny has fuzzy memories of roaming the building and leaking goo the entire time he was out and about, so… Suck it, he can do what he wants! He’s sick!! And maybe even dying??

“What is þæt andwlita??”the blonde girl asks, only for the quick-fast teen to poke Danny in what can be assumed to be a grumpy expression. Danny feigns a bite just to be mean. The other teens don’t even pretend to think it’s a threat—the blonde even laughs.

The teenager comes back and sits on Danny’s bed again, mattress barely bouncing as he makes himself comfy. It takes Danny a second to realize that he didn’t come back empty-handed, though—but instead of sodas, the guy brought back a tablet and a weird expression under his mask.

“…Look,” the teen finally says, and flips the tablet onto his lap so that the screen is visible. The teen clicks on a browser, and types in a word Danny isn’t familiar with, and pulls up a stock photo straight out of a photo frame Danny could buy at the craft store. He points to the smiling woman, the man, and the kid in the picture. “Moder. Fæder. Dohtor.”

Danny glances at the photo, and then at the teen. …Okay…?

The teenager bites his lip, and picks a new photo. This one has two men and a child, but it was basically the same. He points to each person as he named them: “Fæder and fæder, and sunu.”

Danny looks at the photo. He looks at the teenager. He looks at the photo again, and the masked teen backs out of the photo he onscreen to pick another one—with a woman and a man crouched around three kids and a dog.

“Moder. Father. Daughter. Daughter. Son.”

Realization breaks over Danny—oh. These are supposed to be families. These are family titles. Huh.

Danny scrutinizes the image. They…you know. They look happy. Danny used to…

…Mom, and…

It hurts too much to look at the photo for long. He knows that it’s fake, and he knows that models just get hired for show, but even the imaginary families hurt. Happy, loving people exist out there in the world.

Danny was in a box. Danny was in a box.

Danny—

The teen makes another noise, and Danny drags his focus out of his melancholy doom spiral with every tooth and claw. He manages. Barely. The masked teenager switches over to a drawing app and pops a tablet pen out of—nowhere, actually? Where did that come from??

The teen hems and he haws and he fills out a stick figure with some red and black clothing details—and a mask, and a bowl cut, which is how Danny figures out it’s a scrappy little self-portrait. It doesn’t look at all like the oversized tee tucked into the teen’s short shorts, but you know, whatever.

Next to him, the dude draws a giant, brick-wall-broad, no-eyed, man-shaped blob with upright pointed ears.

It’s. Uh. It’s sure…something.

“Son,” the teen labels himself, and then draws an arrow to the giant, colorless blob. “Father.”

…Danny squints. Is that normal? To have a huge hulking entity-dad, and then have a short, shrimpy-looking teen waif?

Like you, imaginary Jazz interrupts, since he was thinking about her.

He carefully bats the thought away before it can make him cry.

“My father,” the teenager adds, since Danny probably looks like he’s mostly paying attention. “Stincende.” And then the guy draws a bunch of stink lines coming off of him, just to prove a point.

Danny chokes more than he laughs. The teen’s friends laugh outright, teasing with words that are a little too quick for Danny to parse and snickering under their breath. The masked teen smiles quietly.

“So mean,” the teen in the leather jacket declares, cackling mercilessly. The orange-haired teenager wheezes breathlessly.

“Stincende hlaford of the trask,” the teenager adds mildly, cheerfully without mercy. “Very boring. Very stif. Very grimm.”

Okay, so some of those words were definitely straight-up cognates. Mr. Lancer gave Danny a C in English last semester, but Danny’s going to guess that, based on how their language is pretty much entirely similar, that the stink lines are more of a metaphor than anything.

“Gross,” Danny decides. He’s not sure if the word actually means gross or if it’s more of a medical-trash-and-waste-disposal sort of word, but his audience of four snicker and bump his shoulder and that’s good enough.

“Mmhmm,” the masked teen agrees. He clicks on an eraser tool, enlarges it, and wipes himself clean off the image. In his place, he puts a little white-haired figure in a white medical gown.

…Oh.

Between them, the artist puts speech bubbles, giving both the drawn Danny equal part in the imaginary conversation.

“Talking,” the teenager says without looking at Danny. Eventually, when the speech bubbles are done, he lifts his head. “Yes? No?”

…Is this a request? Is this a demand? Danny fists the sheets between shaking fingers. Nowadays, they always shake at least a little. There are no perfectly still days.

“Have to?” Danny asks, hesitant. It’s a common enough clarifier to use when he doesn’t want to do something. They try to explain what they can to him here, but the language barrier is thick and impenetrable in many places.

“No. He just wants to.”

“…Why?”

The masked teen frowns. He takes the tablet back from his lap and begins to draw something way more complex.

Everyone else slowly works on their food, but the masked teen doesn’t return until he has, from what Danny can tell, a thickly complicated organizational tree chart.

He recognizes a few headshot photos in the middle. The green guy. The human-looking guy in red that Danny does PT with sometimes.

Towards the bottom are the teenagers—both ones Danny does and doesn’t recognize, and some of the teens around him are photographed in different hats and outfits and masks. The quick-fast-red-haired teenager Danny’s come to recognize used to have shorter hair, apparently? Now it’s down to the teen’s neck. Meanwhile, the blonde girl’s got a haircut; her new look has a shaved undercut and a body too short to prop back up into her photographed pigtails.

The guy in the leather jacket looks the same.

…Danny holds up the tablet to compare to the teenager himself, who kindly poses the same way as he does in the picture in the same way: suns out, guns out. Yep. That’s him alright.

At the top of the organizational tree are three people—a dark-haired guy who Danny’s seen in passing, Diana, who is both a superhero and a super-minder, and some scary lookin’ dude who looks exactly like the doodle Danny just saw absolutely smothered in stink lines.

The tablet falls out of Danny’s hands. He’s not mad or anything, but he tends to drop stuff when holding it becomes too much of a burden.

So.

The masked teen’s dad, is, like…one of several bosses. One boss is the person watching Danny at all times, which is…weird. Danny isn’t sure he warrants, like, constant security from a high-ranking super-someone. He mostly just sits around all day. Sometimes he gets his stretches in. Sometimes he gets wheeled out to look at the stars, and then he just…sits some more.

Danny shifts in his seat. So maybe he. Maybe…

…Okay, so even if talking isn’t good, per se, at least maybe he’ll figure something out? Maybe?

Like. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out, like…why he’s here. Why he’s in space. Why they’re taking care of him.

Danny doesn’t look forward to talking. But it’s. Fine.

Probably.

He nods.

“…Yes?” the teen asks again, double confirming that this is what Danny wants. Danny doesn’t want this, but he wants answers, so he nods again, more firmly. But still. Staring. At the sheets underneath him.

“Okay.” The teen opens up a messaging app, and types something into the address bar. “Now? Or later?”

“Later.” Danny’s got to rest and digest lunch first.

“Okay.” The teen types into the tablet with the little pencil. Danny sees verbatim what the masked teen wrote when he turns it around: very literally, “Yes,” and “Later.”

There’s a little spot for Danny to sign his name. The teenager gives Danny his pen.

…Danny just hits the send button and is done with it.

Notes:

If you saw this on tumblr last night, that's because I posted it last night. My entire family has gathered in solidarity for a large life event, so I quite genuinely got it onto a post and fell the f*ck asleep. Godsspeed.
Also, some things aren't "translated" because they're doubled over or revealed in the next line. If you are on the computer, the mouseover translations persist. If you are on mobile, this affects nothing of your reading experience. Danny's understanding of New English is slowly coming to form.
Anyway. Tags from Tumblr:
#Bruce: you're a teenager. How do I approach a new interaction with a frightened alien child you have already bonded with. #Tim: don't worry. I got this 👍🏻 I'll talk you up ahead of time #Bruce: (has had teenagers before) #Bruce: (has reason to be suspicious) #Bruce: Hm. #also Kon got the actual rules to UNO uploaded into his brain so this is deeply frustrating for him to play against Danny (house rules only!)
I cherish and appreciate all your comments, I just have no time! To respond! To anything!! T_T Take my love in the form of fic pls

Chapter 25: I meet someone new, and it's...not amazing. But it's fine.

Summary:

"Should we, like...pack him a lunch?"
"I don't think it'll take him that long."
"...But what if he gets nervous?"
"He's just going to meet Batman. The guy can't even grill him properly since he's not fluent. If we give him extra food and he eats it out of nerves, he might just throw it up."
"I mean, I guess..."

Notes:

Trigger Warning for this chapter:
...Yeah, this probably constitutes a panic attack.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

On the one hand. The room Danny’s in has a killer view of the earth from the moon.

The wall is basically just one big window. Danny is also apparently permitted to mash his face into the glass and ogle the Earth from Space for as long as he wants until the stinky dad, whoever he is, finally emerges from the depths of the building.

Diana’s the only one beside him today. She looks nice—nicer than usual, in her armor and bright clothing rather than soft scrubs and hair net. She can push his chair without getting tired—she could probably fly and carry him too, if she had to, so. Danny’s maybe counting on her liking him if this stinky dad tries to be mean.

So. Diana (nice lady) and Danny (half-dead ghost boy) are quietly seated in a dim, peaceful board room, absorbing the early morning (?) space radiation when the door hisses open across the room.

In the doorway is a long, dark, shadow of a man.

…And the green guy!!

Okay, if the stinky dad man brought a friend to this meeting the same way Diana’s meant to supervise him, Danny feels like he’s been lawyered up for the sake of some kind of court trial. This is not fair. Danny wasn’t able to review his case with his legal representation before this.

Well. Danny fumes. Whatever. His lawyer is Diana, the most powerful living being he’s seen ever in his life, and she can totally kick the green guy’s ass. Hell, Danny could probably kick the green guy’s ass.

...You know. If he wasn’t. Sick.

The stinky dad guy looks a lot like the blob his kid drew him as. That’s kind of neat—his suit is all black with little to no variation, which sort of just washes out the colors Danny might have been able to see if his eyes were still good. He’s very quiet, which is nice, and he’s very not-trying-to-read-Danny’s-mind, which is even better.

The two sit. Danny’s already in a wheelchair, so he just lets Diana wheel him to the table. The lady sits beside him in the spinny office chair.

Hello, the green guy opens with, already toying with the edges of Danny’s aura.

Danny sends back an abundance of ass-kicking emotions.

…Alright then, the green man capitulates, the barest hint of bemusem*nt quickly stifled.

Good. Danny is mean. He’s awake enough to be mad about other people touching his aura from any end of his personal bubble.

But then the green guy…says stuff to the dad guy? And it’s very? Quiet?

Explanations, the green guy says. The image of a sign language translator at a baseball game floats over to him, and—

…Oh. He’s translating. For Danny.

That’s…nice? Nicer than Danny expected, honestly? Most of the time, people are perfectly happy to misinterpret him. It was kind of the way of the world at this point. Getting blamed for stuff, getting accused of stuff…

Man. If they turn out to be indoctrinating him for secret war purposes, at least they’re going all in. Danny might actually. You know. Like it here. A little.

He squirms in his chair, and tries not to look at anyone in particular. Diana—the lady who’s been nice to him—makes as if to straighten his hair for him, and remembers at the last second that he doesn’t like to be touched.

And sure. Danny doesn’t want to be touched. By bad guys.

…But Diana’s been really nice to him, so. Maybe. He scratches at the back of his neck, and ducks his head down—and remembers to use his words. “Yes,” he consents verbally. He can’t make eye contact. But he can…let her. Brush his hair back. A little.

Diana asks something long and complicated—and the green guy presses an image of Wonder Woman asking permission, being kind, being gentle—up against the edges of Danny’s awareness.

Danny nods at the floor instead of at the lady. It’s fine. She’s fine. It’s fine.

And her fingers carefully brush through the front end of his fringe, and Danny. Danny is so normal about it. He doesn’t even cry or anything. Not even in front of his friend’s stinky dad.

And she doesn’t do it like Mom did it. And she doesn’t ruffle his hair like Dad did.

But it’s. Nice. And she doesn’t pull.

…And she doesn’t hit.

Danny eventually leans back into his wheelchair. It’s a little bit embarrassing to be halfway in and halfway out, but. Whatever. The scary-looking-dad with the earsies on his helmet has his own teenager. He should understand what it feels like to get emotionally weird with your teen in a public place. If he doesn’t, well...he wouldn’t be a great dad, then, and his opinion would suck anyway.

Based on what Danny knows about the masked kid, Danny isn’t sure the guy would tolerate a bad dad. The teen seems kinda unhinged.

The man says something, and the green guy presses a number of translated feelings against Danny’s awareness: Greetings. Questions about Danny’s wellbeing. Curiosity, but not demanding.

“…Hello,” Danny says back, and. Waves.

The man waves back. He’s got little claws on his gloves.

…Like a cat? Is it to go with his ears? Danny wonders about the possibilities of the guy being cat themed. It’s possible, presumably.

So…they want to know how Danny’s doing? Danny shrugs, and he glances at Diana, since, you know, she could probably fill them in? She does speak their language. And she’s been here the whole time.

The lady leans in close to him, black hair falling out from behind her ear. “What do you want to say?” she whispers into her ear, hand covering her mouth from their watchers.

Uh. It’s up to…Danny?? Somehow??

Danny winces. “…Good?” he tries, unsure if the word he uses means okay or fine or well. “…Not…hungry?”

“Very good,” Diana agrees, a little louder. She looks proud. Being not hungry must mean a lot to her, then. It means a lot to Danny too—he can remember the sensation of his stomach rubbing against itself, friction pulling raw at his insides as acid ate at him.

It was. Bad.

It was bad.

Danny’s glad he’s not there anymore. Anyway, there’s a guy in the room who reads minds, and Danny doesn’t really want to share that memory with anyone ever; especially someone who could turn it back on him.

The stinky dad says something else, but he uses words too thick and long for Danny to understand. The green guy translates, pure conceptual recall brushing against Danny’s outer aura—Needs? Wants?

…Danny frowns.

Danny looks at Diana, who looks back at him. Wants, needs…? What?

“Do you need aniþing?” Diana whispers to him, which. You know. Mostly makes sense.

Does Danny…need anything? He has medical care, he has food, he has water, he has toys and brain teasers, even…he has people to hang out with, he has people who stretch his legs with him so that he can go back to normal…heck, he doesn’t even have to clean his own waste bag. There’s people who do that for him.

Like. What more could Danny ask for?

Danny shrugs. He just wants to heal up and run away. Maybe…maybe, if Diana is real and not just pretending to like him to keep an eye on him, she’d let him visit her later or something. Danny would do what Dani doe—did. What Dani…did. And he’d just go a bunch of places and come back when he wants to.

But. No. There’s nothing he really needs right now.

The pointy-eared guy and the green guy share a look and a couple quiet words. Danny flares his annoyance into the silence, but all he gets is a silent Apology/Apology, which isn’t answers.

Ugh. Danny leans over the arm of his wheelchair. This is kind of super boring; it’s more boring than it is frustrating, even.

The stinky dad guy says something else, and Danny feels the push and pull of something double ended tugging on the outer edge of his aura. Additional/information, giving/take?

Danny really wishes he’d brought a fidget toy or something. His nerves are ramping up but all he can do is contort his fingers together, feeling the strain in and the joints click as he pushes them together and twists them apart. They want…to ask him questions? No, they’re already asking him questions. They want Danny to…give them questions??

…Danny doesn’t really want to. Still, he probably…should.

“The…space station,” he says, using the wrong word for their big space building but not knowing the better one; “Is this…where…why is it?”

The black-caped dad grumbles something vaguely approving. A tablet pops out of the table—spooky—and the guy starts drawing on it, explaining all the way. The green guy simplifies more of the verbally complicated concepts for Danny as they go.

Anyway. So they’re in space because it’s their…job? Danny thinks? They do…fighting stuff. Which Danny knew. Because he’d seen them on the news.

But it looks like they do a lot of things—they clean up after storms, and chase regular bad guys and super-bad-guys instead of just big ones. And they stop bad aliens from hurting people on Earth.

The green guy shifts from a green-looking, pointy-headed, red-eyed form to a warm, brown, human skin tone. And even. Like. Human clothing.

Danny stares.

…And the guy immediately takes back his natural form, his body physically shifting and morphing, which, fair, but holy crap. He’s living, on Earth. He passes as normal, on Earth. No one snitches on him. No one’s selling him to the government for parts. No one’s trapping him in a cage and not feeding him.

This guy works here, and everyone lets him.

Danny shifts in his chair. He…he wants that. He wants that. He wants to pass as human and not have to worry about…about anyone getting rid of him. He wants to go back to school. He wants to hide, and never ever not ever be found by anyone or anything when he does.

“I want that,” Danny says. There’s no inflection. He feels dead. He is dead, but usually he doesn’t feel it. “What do I do for…that.”

Help/Searching/Finding? the green—alien—questions, but there’s nothing for Danny to find. He knows exactly where everyone he loves is—and unless they’re already fully formed in the ghost zone…

…Well. Danny has forever to wait and see if he’ll see his friends and sister again. Maybe he’ll find them again one day, in a world purely green and glowing.

He shakes his head.

The next question comes…softer. Gentler. The mental push feels more like a breeze than a gale. Friends…Home/family?

The question comes tinged with all sorts of sensations that Danny’s suppressed—warmth, security, happiness, oxytocin, fondness, pride and being the source thereof, warmth and love, love, love—

Danny’s sweating. He can’t stop. His hands are shaking faster than usual—he kicks the brakes off his chair with the heels of his palms, and jerks the wheels back, pulling away from the desk—

He’s halfway across the room before he hears the noise. It’s just. Noise. It’s Diana, carefully shushing the loud heartbeat churning in his ears, hands on his hand, trying not to cage him but trying to keep skin on skin contact. Her hand is on the back of his hand, and on his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Diana whispers. Danny’s shaking. His whole body is shaking. “Shhh, sh sh sh. It’s alright, it’s okay.”

It’s not it’s not it’snoit’snotit’sNOT. His sister is dead. His friends are dead. His parents sold his captors the equipment to catch him and they didn’t care if he got hurt doing it and now they’re DEAD. They tore open his hometown down the middle just to catch him, they stole him—they took his dead parent’s things as tools to hurt him—they HURT HIM and there isn’t—he can’t—he can’t—

Something is holding him down, and Danny thrashes. He has arms, but they’re injured—he has legs but he needs a tail and he—and—

He cries into Diana’s arms, sobbing and wailing. It’s a miracle that the building stays together. She holds him tighter, and he cries even harder into her soft under-layers.

He wants to run away. He needs to run away. Someone is holding him, and he can’t even flicker through her the way he wants to; his core is already too strained just from talking.

Danny’s sick. He’s dying. He’s—

“Take a breath,” Diana whispers, calm and sure. She models it for him. Danny gasps in air. “Good. Lete it out slow. As bobbels in a straw.”

He tries to copy her he does and she’ll be so angry if he can’t do it right on the first try but she lets him try, over and over again, until Danny’s able to stop hiccupping and leaking tears and ectoplasm all over her and realize that she’s holding him like a baby. Like. Actually cradling him against his body armor.

…You know what. He’s too tired to even be embarrassed. Screw that. Danny leans all the way over her and goes completely limp. Someone else can deal with his him for a little bit.

She does. Diana just…holds him.

It’s nice. Mom and Dad used to do that for him, when Danny was still…more human, he supposed. More than he is right now.

Something else touches his hand. Danny looks blearily downwards.

The teenager’s dad gets to his knees and takes Danny’s hand—and he doesn’t need the translation to understand.

“I’m sorry,” the man says, over and over again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Danny blinks sleepily. What does his friend’s stinky dad have to be sorry for? He didn’t even do anything to Danny in the first place.

Danny won’t remember, afterwards, being wheeled back to his room for a nap. They must have wheeled him back, though, because the alternative is that Diana tucked him into bed like a baby, and that’s just kind of embarrassing to even think about for too long.

Notes:

Animated Batman is a good person who cares about kids more than he does solving problems with privacy violations and puncturing of boundaries, from what I can tell. You can pry tired-empathetic-parent Batman out of my cold, dead claws when it comes to this fic. Enough hyper-competence. I need hyper-empathy.
Also, poor Martian Manhunter lmao free my man he did nothing wrong. He literally just gets the short end of the stick since Danny is SO mistrusting and is the only one Danny can theoretically communicate with. Which he WILL NOT. NO talking ME ANGY <- Danny, all the time (Also also here's some minor metacontext as to why Danny and J'onn are NOT besties. TLDR, it's kind of biologically driven, kind of culturally crossed-wired.)
Tags from this chapter:
#Diana: I have been allowed to touch him. Ergo I can pick him up now. This is permission #Bruce (in the meeting review later): ...no #Diana: why not??#Bruce: that is. most certainly not how human trauma works. Keep asking before you try anything. #Diana: ah. Understood.

Chapter 26: Status Update (5)

Summary:

"Martian Manhunter's updating the patient's paperwork."
"Oh, that's sweet of him."
"..."
"...Oh."

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

“His control over his emotions slipped during the interview,” J’onn sighs, hovering alongside Bruce as they carry down the hall.

Bruce grunts. He isn’t quite capable of complicated speech yet. The teenage alien crying, too scared to let even the internationally-favorite, universally beloved Wonder Woman hold him without screaming…a person he already knew would take care of him…

J’onn continues, nevertheless. The thin privacy of his mind aside, Bruce has always appreciated the Martian’s understanding of Bruce’s oft-shifting moods. “His memories of his home and his family were tied up with extensive pain. I would continue under the assumption that his human family turned on him after discovering his nature—there may have even been collateral damage to others around them at the time.”

Bruce breathes in. Bruce breathes out.

“He thought himself akin enough to humans to be betrayed when he was seen as an 'other'. He knows that he is far from home, he knows that he has been targeted for his non-human traits and abilities, and he has reasons to think that he may not return again—what they are, I could not tell, but the sentiment was clear. This escape was purposeful, as was commandeering the vehicle he used to do so. He is alone. He is scared.”

“Known or unknown threat?” Bruce growls, not quite up to elongating his bite into a full sentence. J’onn is more than skilled enough to skim lightly over the words, and match them to Batman’s pointed fury.

“Our patient is familiar with the threat. I could not recognize the insignia or acronym from his memories, but they had enough resources to keep him captive and alive—without food or water. Likely, for a lengthy amount of time.”

Bruce’s near-running stride slows to a stop. J’onn, ever-patient, floats to a standstill beside him.

“No food,” Bruce confirms, just to make sure he heard correctly.

J’onn nods.

“No water.”

“There was an alternative method used to keep him alive, although the details weren’t significant to him in his flashback. The method may have been possible due to his minor healing ability, or something unique to his species.”

No food, Bruce thinks. No water. Kept alive as a function. Worried that he’s meant to be used as a weapon, kept in isolation, afraid of what humans in uniform might require of him for help.

This isn’t just torture. It is, specifically targeting a half-human entity, entirely purposeful dehumanization.

Of a child.

Of a child.

Bruce inhales. Bruce exhales.

This is not something that will be solved short-term. He has to keep an eye on the long-term goals for this teen—safety, recovery, reassurance, and reintegration.

Doable. All he has to do is break larger goals down into reasonable steps.

“Update the pediatric psychiatrist that Dr. Martin referred him to on the details.” Bruce’s demand comes out as flat as it gets. It is hard, when he’s stressed, to make his words hit with any intonation. Everything he forces out is precise. To the point.

J’onn nods. “I will.”

“This is personal medical information, to be accessed only on a need to know basis.”

J’onn floats slightly higher, something relaxed in his face. This is a significant gesture, meant to remind everyone involved that this is a child, not a resource, and not a mission to be solved. This is a patient. “Understood.”

“If you pass this on to Diana, do it in person. Minimizing documentation…” Bruce falters. There isn’t a strong, authoritarian way to phrase how he feels about being someone to store clinically cold information about a boy who had likely been imprisoned, if not actively experimented on, if not actively tortured. How he needed to minimize behaviors that would exactly model what was done to the boy by his captors.

A smile flickers over J’onn’s expression. It’s suitably fleeting, but it comes and it goes—and it’s extremely polite of him to emote so visibly for Bruce’s sake. He makes sure to project his appreciation as best he knows how—blindly, without a telepathic sense to know what J’onn will and will not see.

“Understood, Batman.”

Bruce grunts.

They split at the end of the hallway, each dedicated to their own tasks.

J’onn will inform the medical team of what triggers may affect their patient’s long-term recovery and the quality of their stay. He is a thorough and patient coworker, and Bruce is grateful to have him on his side.

Bruce, in the meantime, has a favor to ask of Alfred and Dick on their way back into Gotham; more importantly, this is a favor he has to ask of Alfred’s employment-provided Costco card.

There’s something new in Danny’s room.

He transfers himself into the wheelchair to look at it, scrambling down the bed the way the physical therapist taught him to—the new thing isn't at bed height, but it is pretty low, and it has a door that he could probably reach from seated height or standing.

The square thing’s door swings open.

Inside are…little water bottles. Canned juices. Those mushy fruit-filled bars, and something so obviously wrapped in a yellow Fig Einstein wrapper that even the gibberish non-English is super clear.

There’s a bunch of things. Just. So many; and all in a few different types, too. The whole thing is filled with so many choices.

…Huh.

There are disposable straws in the door. Danny has to borrow a nurse’s ID card to open the can tab in the end, and his unwrapping of a straw is more than a little shaky, but Danny takes his medication with a mango-pineapple juice blend instead of his usual cup of water, and he’s perfectly fine with that.

Notes:

This is technically the second half of the last chapter which is why we are so short. Also:
Tags from tumblr:
#don't come @ me about reusable straws they're not disability friendly and kid's got mobility issues and a busted throat #the healing power of having little treats #little snacks even #also. the work in establishing trust that the medical team has put in is the ONLY reason Danny feels safe eating randomly appearing food #medical team is crying in the club rn

The Health and Wellbeing of Hybrid Entities - Faeriekit (2024)

Chapter 1: Adrift. Alone.

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Chapter 2: Afraid. Adrift.

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Chapter 3: Cornered. Unhappy.

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Chapter 4: Concerned. Confused.

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Chapter 5: Alarmed. Alert.

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Chapter 6: Bruised. Bleeding.

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Chapter 7: Status Update.

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Chapter 8: Curious. Curious?

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Chapter 9: Wet. :(

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Chapter 10: Curious? Fun?

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Chapter 11: HOT. HOT. HOT.

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Chapter 12: ...Resignation.

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Chapter 13: Status Update (2).

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Chapter 14: I don't know where I am and I don't like it.

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Chapter 15: I don't know who these people are and I'm hurting.

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Chapter 16: I don't recognize anything around me and I'm frightened.

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Chapter 17: I don't know what's going on and it sucks severely.

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