Health and Hybrids (XXVII)👽👻💚
[I can't remember the original prompt posters for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]
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💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts 💚 (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)
Where we last left off... Danny has another hashtag breakdown! Diana helps mediate. Stinky Dad and the Alien Guy observe.
Trigger warnings for this story: body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) | my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.
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Danny’s space-watching time is very important to him. He’s pretty sure it’s on his schedule, even.
Every few days—and even more days in a week, now that people are relatively certain that he’s not going to start hitting the medical staff—Danny gets wheeled over to the big window to stare out at the moon.
The moon hasn’t changed all that much since his first few visits, since. You know. It’s in space. Still, the stars shift in their positions, and sometimes they face Earth, and sometimes they do not, and a couple times Danny sees people flying out there, which is super neat.
Sometimes Danny sees maintenance workers out doing repairs on their buildings, too. They wave back at him when they’re not busy or carrying something, which makes Danny’s core bubble and spark with joy.
So, Danny is watching the stars twinkle in the sky with all the meditative calm his Obsession requires when something plops onto his head. It doesn’t hurt, but it does put pressure onto his neck. Ow.
Danny hisses automatically, but he already knows who it is—the quick-fast-kid-who-hasn’t-introduced-himself practically vibrates against Danny’s skin, all excited by omg/omg/misch/iefomg.
Typical. Danny wants to feign a bite, but his neck kind of hurts. He settles for grumbling. “What?”
“Dude,” the teenager says, or, uh, Danny approximates he says something kind of like dude, anyway— “Want to come see a feoht?”
Uh. “A what?” Danny asks, ignoring how the guy’s chin keeps digging into his scalp. It might be the most non-medical physical contact Danny’s had since he broke down with Diana. Maybe.
The teen backs up, and models some very quick punches into the air, making his own sound effects to match. It’s all very impressive, or whatever. Danny’s not going to applaud, though; his arms are tired.
“…Sure.” It’s not like Danny has anything better to do.
“Berstan!” the kid chirps, and—
Danny clamps down on his wheelchair wheels because holycraptheyaremoVINGFAST. His wheels aren’t on the ground—the teen is carrying him, chair and all—!
He’s going to be in so much trouble for running. Danny’s wheels touch the ground, and he drops straight to the floor. His hands shake all the way up to his elbows as he grips his wheels. He is going to be in so much trouble when the nurses look for him and he’s not there.
Oh no. Oh no.
“Here we are!” the quickfast teenager announces, grinning. They’re in a room with a big, rubberized floor. It’s basketball orange. The rest of the room is virtually indistinguishable from the cloth folding walls Casper High uses to divide the gym into smaller gyms—giant cloth panels line every surface that isn’t the floor. Walls. Ceiling.
Well. It’s certainly…sound dampening. There’s vents, though. So. At least they can breathe.
The other teenagers Danny recognizes yell out to them, cheerful as ever. One waves—the kid behind him waves back, and then they’re all clustered together, pleased and breathing heavy and slightly sweaty.
“Feel alright?” one teen asks—Danny recognizes him after a second; he usually has a leather jacket on over his brightly colored shirt. He isn’t sure what the huge S is for, but hey, it’s a cool emblem or whatever. Danny used to have his initial on his…
…Danny doesn’t want to think about that, actually. He doesn’t want to think about anything about home at all.
Oh. Someone asked him a question, and now they’re all looking at him for answers. Danny nods jerkily—something sloshes inside his skull, though, which. Ew. He scrunches his face up when everyone else starts to look worried about his expression, though; it’s no big deal! It’s just! Gross!
The boy who is very fast pats his hand before sliding to the other side of the room. There are buttons there, which he presses; the room shifts, just a little, to make a piece of the floor turn away in favor of a rack of weapons. The teenager who’s always masked, but is now in an exercise shirt, whistles approvingly, and two of the teens—whoah—start flying off to grab at the equipment available.
…There’s some cool stuff there. Danny. Danny might…
He doesn’t want to fight, per se, but. Um. Weaponry is intrinsically cool. There’s no doubt about it. Half the reason he liked to play Doomed was collecting the newest and coolest weapon to blast at all his enemies with! And Tuc—
—and—
—Tucker—
Something clicks right up in front of Danny’s face.
He flinches.
“You good?” the teenager asks, big blue eyes on him as Danny struggles to breathe. “Do you want hweorfan?”
Danny gasps around three uneasy breaths before his ears catch up. Or. Well, his ears work, but his brain doesn’t know what the teen is saying?? Danny shakes his head anyway—he doesn’t want more to happen. He wants less.
The teenager frowns. Danny immediately worries that he did something wrong. “Okay, but tell me if you change your mod.”
As soon as Danny figures out what that is? Sure. He’ll tell him.
In the meantime, the kids split up into groups; one set of two goes to one side of the gym and the other goes in the air, floating on the other si— wait, they can float??
…Danny stares, and two ostensibly human-looking teenagers take to the air, loudly teasing the two left on the ground, and, yeah. They’re flying. Danny watches as the one on the ground starts counting, ready to start their match, only to interrupt his own countdown for a sneak-attack at the start and a PIFF of a smoke bomb going off. Danny can’t see the buzzing kid disappear from sight as the air begins to thicken, but there’s a distinct taste of JOY/games/VICIOUS that flutters through him that tells Danny that, wherever he is in that smoke cloud, he’s living his best life.
And. Well.
The fighting is—there isn’t a better word for it, it’s just so damn cool. There’s kicking and punching and throwing and tossing and—sure, Danny can take a few hits and deal out some surprise punches when he has to, but these kids know what they’re doing, which is so cool, because once Danny lost the benefit of gravity mid-fight basically everything Mom had trained in him had been thrown out the window. The physics were just never right.
(And— Mom—)
Like, all the punches are happening at speeds that Danny can only kind of follow. His neck starts hurting from trying to follow them—but he can’t stop watching, and the kids are really having a blast. They’re laughing. They’re teasing. They show off, even, stopping to pose and flex and be admired by their sole observer, which Danny obliges with some gentle claps. The others are quick to jump on any distraction, though, and are more than willing to have Danny be the center of attention while they sneak up on showstoppers, stick or lasso in hand.
On one hand, Danny should probably be more alarmed by the sight of kids acting as literal child soldiers training to be combat ready. He…he’s pretty sure he’s meant to be one of them as soon as he’s recovered enough to get trained.
And…it is scary. It is kind of a scary thought that Danny might have to go back to…go back to fighting and getting hit and hitting and everything that fighting means.
On the other hand, there’s no one here. All the kids here are Danny’s age, and they’re not fighting because someone is making them; they’re having fun, and their job is to help people.
…Danny puts his legs higher up on his wheelchair, until he can wrap his arms around his knees. They’re supposed to beat up threats, but they don’t think that Danny’s a threat. They’re letting him sleep in a bed and get medical care and making sure he gets medication and everything. They let him hang out with their children and he has toys and fidgets to pass the time, and maybe he’ll have to pay them back later, but… isn’t helping out because he got helped only fair?
And they let non-humans live on Earth! That one teen’s stinky dad said that they could help Danny stay on Earth, he thinks. Or, uh, it’s what he thinks the green guy translated that as? So as long as he doesn’t leave, they could even protect him from the— all the bad stuff on Earth! So really, all Danny has to do is work on getting better. He’s safe here. Diana is here, the stinky dad is here, and there’s a whole team of super-people with super powers ready to help people.
Danny’s safe. He’s calm. He’s fine. He’s…worried that Diana doesn’t know where he is, but she’s smart and there’s probably cameras.
He watches the teens play around with various weaponry like they’re his model rocket. There’re thrown projectiles and giant hammers and dodgeballs and sticks, staves, and lassos; someone pulls out a shield, of all things, glittering gold and gleaming with something that itches at the back of Danny’s eyeball, and there’s a gun that sh—
Danny only breaks out of the memory of RUNNINGRUNNINGRUNNING when he realizes that someone is holding him. He’s choking. He doesn’t know who’s holding him, but they’re not hurting him right now and he can see a crowd of other colorful figures around him, which means he’s not with the Guys in White.
He’s hyperventilating. He can’t help it. He can’t stop it! His lungs hurt and there’s no end to the stress pressing out of his chest. Someone is holding him; where’s his chair? Did he lose it?? That’s really expensive medical equipment—they’re going to be so mad at him—!
Someone lifts him out of the stranger’s arms. It’s one of the older quick-buzzing humans. Not the teenager, and not the oldest one, he thinks. Danny can’t tell. He can’t breathe, and it’s hard to focus.
He’s shushing Danny like he’s a kid. Danny would be insulted, except he can’t breathe, and he really wants someone to help him, and his eyes are all weird and he can’t see and he doesn’t know where he is and his core hurts and his chair is gone—
Oh. The guy puts Danny’s hand on his chest and models breathing in with one big, visible breath.
Danny breathes in.
The guy models breathing out. It’s a long, slow breath.
…Danny struggles through the follow-through, but he manages. Well. He chokes hard enough to cough, twice, but…close enough.
The colorful forms milling about slowly disperse, until it’s largely just Danny, and the fast guy radiating very measured levels of calm, and his friend in black and blue, who is eating a sandwich. They breathe in, and they breathe out. That one guy eats his sandwich.
Danny looks around. He’s…the room he’s in is really big. Tables. Benches. Little stands of foo… Oh. He’s in a cafeteria. Cool.
…He squints through the new haze of green in his eyes. He’s probably strained something, but there are more important things at stake here: can he get some real food here?
“Where is here?” Danny asks. Rasps. He’s mostly horizontal, so manipulating his head around to glance at his surroundings is kind of a strain on his neck. Is that a hot dog cart?
“Wistheall,” the two say simultaneously—the guy in black and blue and a bird on his chest swallows his sandwich. “…Want a snakka?”
You know what? Danny’s going to assume that this means a snack. Sure! Why not. Nodding his head so quickly hurts, but he’s also not walking anywhere, so it’s not like it’s a full-body pain. The buzzing-quick guy sort of just…carries him around and asks Danny what he wants, and the bird guy gets it for him.
The little vibrations the guy is giving off are tinged a little with wor/ryworry/worry, but the guy’s mostly…at peace? Forcibly shoved it all down? Danny and the guy are practically chest to chest at this point, so it’s probably just that Danny’s close enough to feel even really quiet things.
His suit is super smooth, by the way. It’s not, like, skintight—there’s a little armor underneath, Danny can feel—but the fabric itself is like super slick. It’s cool. Texturally.
Also, he gives Danny a tube of something that are clearly off-brand Prongles, so Danny’s mostly just enjoying that instead of wondering what’s up with this guy and his friend.
“Are you okay?” the guy finally asks, his chatter mostly winding down into a question Danny can recognize. Danny swallows his bite of chips with a swig from his water bottle, and nods. He’s…unsettled, but he’s fine. He doesn’t know where he is, but he didn’t know where the teenagers had left him either, so this is about what he expected.
Even under his red hood-and-mask, the guy’s eyes are kind. Kinda worried. Not mean. “Something bad happened?”
…Danny looks back at his chips. Something bad happened, but it didn’t happen recently. “No,” Danny muttered around the crumbs in his mouth. He swallowed dryly. “Not…not now.”
The vibrations slow, and dim, melancholy lacing through the air. The sensation makes Danny itch. “Before?”
Danny nods. He thinks about his body melting from the outside in, his face dripping off in chunks of wet matter, his throat torn open still screaming.
“It was a—“ Danny tries, but he doesn’t actually know their word for gun or blaster. He just forces his fingers to make a familiar symbol, holding his own middle and end fingers back, leaving a shaking, uncomfortable thumb and pointer.
The quiet pew pew sound effects probably aren’t necessary, but the more detail, the better, or something like that.
Danny remembers how hot it got. Just…all the heat and light, and he could smell smoke right up until he couldn’t. And his face…everything hurt—everything still hurts, even—but the scary point had been when suddenly his face hadn’t hurt, and there was nothing left to feel.
…The guy holding him pulls Danny’s fingers away from his face. Oh. Danny was pulling at his still-green, still-healing wound. He. Uh. He doesn’t remember starting to do that anymore.
“Sorry,” Danny whispers. He swallows something wet from his sinuses to his stomach, and has to fight back the memory of a blood-and-ecto-and-flesh slurry taking its place in his esophagus as he tried to crawl away to die. Again.
The man sends out pulses of sorrysorrysorry through his skin. “Me too,” he murmurs back.
Then Danny gets hitched up—Danny squawks—and gets thrown into a better position over one shoulder, so Danny has better height to see from and a better perch in the guy’s arms. Danny drops half his prongles on the floor in the process. “Want to go find your chair?” the guy asks, body vibrating just a touch outside of Danny’s conscious awareness. Still, even without seeing the guy’s face, his whole body radiates sympathy/curiOSITy/Hungry.
…Didn’t they just eat?
Either way, Danny’s not torn between staring sadly at the ground where his prongles lay cold and bared to the cruelty of the world or getting up to go find his chair. “Yes,” he agrees, and uses the flat of his forearms to haul himself up higher onto the guy’s shoulders. Kindly, the guy in red doesn’t even budge. “Thank you.”
“Na geswincan,” the guy reports back easily, which Danny is pretty sure is a less-formal you’re welcome. Too bad there’s a whole language’s worth of context Danny’s missing out on here. His friend even snags Danny an extra can of prongles, and is kind enough to rips open the seal for him.
Nothing beats recovering from a crying jag like chips. Danny takes them earnestly.
The quick-fast guy hooks his arm onto his friend’s, and the world starts to stretch and blend into the in-between planes of reality, slices of world layered atop each other. The guy smashes through each one and pulls them both along for the ride.
It’s not quite like dunking his head in the portal, but it’s not not like sticking his head in a homemade portal either. Danny shakily pulls out a chip and starts chewing. He’ll just take the ride as it comes.
*
“Superboy.”
Kon winces.
“Robin.” Wonder Woman’s eyes turn to the more remorseful end of the bunch. “Wonder Girl. Impulse.”
“Wedidn’tmeanto!” Bart wails into a pillow, which. Fair. Cassie is sweating from possibly every pore she’s ever had (and maybe even a few she doesn’t??), and Tim is doing that stoic-faced thing that means he’s flipping the hell out too much to even tell his face to make expressions about it.
Kon just looks…miserable. Just absolutely miserable.
“…Triggered by firearms, maybe…?” Tim mutters under his breath, which means that he’s theorizing about their guest’s symptoms rather than coming up with solutions-oriented paths out of this confrontation and Cassie wants to shake him because this is NOT the time, Timothy Jackson Drake, except he’s kind of made of mortal human flesh and if she actually shakes him too hard he might die.
“I hope you understand how deeply irresponsible it was to take our patient out of his rooms without any form of supervision from either myself, his medical team, or an adult up to speed with our patient’s medical and psychological needs.” Wonder Woman’s voice is sharp—and her eyes are on Timmy Wonder Boy, who’s barely paying attention, making it clear that the majority of her ire is currently on him. “All four of you are being taken off of mission rosters for the next month in favor of remedial training. I hope that you are all satisfied with the decisions you made.”
“Fiiiine,” Cassie groans. Kon slumps in place. Tim nods without really looking.
Bart, still wailing at lightning speed into his pillow, continues doing…that.
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the thing about being the highest-ranked and most-decorated officer in any GAR/Guard capacity, fox thinks, is that unsurprisingly nobody could give less of a shit or listen to anything he says. it’s not like he earned those medals and recognitions and perfect test scores or anything, now is it, kote?
or, after the zillo beast disaster, the coruscant guard medbay just so happens to be much closer than the GAR one, and surprise surprise, senators don’t want meatdroids to be treated in their facilities after they’ve just protected them with their lives. fox tries to reason against this. fox is unsuccessful, because no one listens to fox.
which is how he finds himself crammed into a corner along with cody, ponds, bly, rex and their jedi, looking out across a medbay which is quite frankly a goddamn disaster rivalling the fight with the zillo beast in proportions. skywalker tries to step out towards one of the medics, and has to be pulled back by the collar of his shirt by amidala, squawking loudly when he’s nearly rammed over by mauler, crucifix and a shrilly screaming crash cart.
it’s not like fox said this would be a bad idea or anything.
“um, vod”, cody begins, unsure, “what’s - is that guy sewing wooley up with thread?!”
meathook, who is in fact sewing wooley up with thread, and looks about as happy about it as his patient, and who fox honestly thought was going to cry when he announced the influx of patients about to descend on them, snaps something about triage over his shoulder at hound, whose arm is decidedly bent in a way it shouldn’t be, jerking his head to gesture at the rickety cot next to cody’s ARC. fox is pretty sure they salvaged the thing from a dumpster. he slaps a bandage on the stitches that fox fears might be from the same dumpster.
“putting those advanced reconnaissance training skills to use, kote”, says fox, who invariably turns into the worst possible version of himself whenever cody opens his mouth within a klick of his vicinity.
skywalker harrumphs, evidently at the end of his impressive patience. “well, why?! hey, trooper! these men need bacta!”
“do they, now? i’m sorry, i hadn’t noticed”, a low voice hisses angrily behind them, and fox is the only one who doesn’t jump on account of he’s too dead inside to be scared of his CMO anymore. a grave error, he’s sure. “i guess i’ll just go pull some out of my ass along with a tank and painkillers, then! hadn’t thought of that yet!”
warcrime, whose eye is twitching and who is holding a bloody saw in visible consideration of using it, pins skywalker with a look that has had shinies all over the guard peeing themselves. “we don’t have any fucking bacta, you absolute numbskull.”
“but that can’t be right”, cody pipes up again, next to a very troubled looking generals kenobi and windu. fox sympathises very much with the patented migraine-glare on windu’s face. “why do you not have any bacta?”
“because i like to smear meiloorun juice all over my patient’s stab wounds, commander”, warcrime says. “it’s a homeopathic medicine thing. because the chancellor refuses to give us any, genius.”
“what?!” skywalker says, bristling. “that can’t be true! he wouldn’t -“ he’s cut off by his comm pinging loudly over the moaning and crying in the medbay, and warcrime leaning close enough to be heard with a whisper.
“well, he would, and if you don’t believe me, there’s a holorecording of him telling marshal commander fox why biological weapons on the homefront have lower priority and therefore half rations of everything. now get out of my medbay or find out why they named me warcrime, sir.”
amidala, the collective braincell holder for both her husband and the senate combined (on occasion), tugs him out of the way of warcrime’s bonesaw and ire. fox, who very much enjoys not being the primary target of a medic for once, unfortunately also has to be the adult in the room. “sirs, a transfer to the GAR barracks medbay might be a preferable- AH, MOTHERFU-“
“get him, stabby!”, rabid whoops from where he’s resetting thire’s nose, who echoes a much more nasal and muffled, “go, ftabby!”
“get kriffing FUCKED, stabby, you absolute-“, fox seethes, trying to swipe for the medic’s head and nearly planting one on cody instead by accident, who unfortunately manages to evade the swing fox is admittedly projecting very obviously on account of the sedation hypo jammed into his flank.
“medbay rules, sir”, stabby calls, dancing away towards mauler and his crash cart, while someone bumps something solid and flat against the backs of fox’s thighs that he can’t help but tumble back on, already seeing two codys and blys dancing around his vision. “commander fox protocol dictates he is to be helped to sleep as often as possible, sir.”
“a desperate but well-founded measure, i’m sure”, kenobi of all people agrees, and fox waves an unsteady hand in what might be the general’s direction to the sound of cody’s scandalized gasp. “as you were, officer… stabby.”
“traitors”, fox slurs, just as his com-unit begins to ping with an urgent notification. before he can try and answer it, warcrime has ripped it off his arm and flung it somewhere out of his sight. eh, it probably wasn’t anything THAT important, fox thinks. and if he wakes up two days later to a near-hysteric meathook kissing the glass casing of the guard’s brand new bacta tank over and over again, he decides to just roll over and go back to sleep.
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