#my arm got cut open like a slice of cake by the pavement too Danny

[vala-dreams]

I've recently been noticing some angermanagement (jason/jazz) ship posts on my dash.

And my brain only saw the potential family dynamic in those posts. Like,,,just consider this,,,, jazz grows up, moves to Gotham to work as a therapist, her highly traumatized recently dissected non aging little brother follows her. Jazz meets Jason, Danny's happy that Jazz's happy and still is very traumatized. Jason and Jazz grow closer and Jazz introduces Jason to Danny. She introduces Danny as her recently orphaned little cousin and mentions nothing about ghosts.

Danny has a LOT of trust issues and so does Jason so their first few series of meetings are awkward as hell. But they do get along eventually and it turns out Bryce's genes did carry over and he ends up sort of adopting Danny.

Until one day, Jason sees Danny hurt himself while chopping vegetables (or smth idk) and instead of red blood, green ectoplasm flows out of the wound. Jason recognizes that as something distinctly almost like the Lazarus pits and has an internal freakout.

And then he connects some dots on Jazz's polka dot dress and comes to the conclusion that Danny must be Damien's brother or relative (because they look just so alike) who was experimented on by the league and that Jazz, who also was part of the league, managed to grab Danny and run away.

And to him, that explains everything. It explains how Jazz fights like she has real world experience, it explains why she's distressed leaving Danny alone for even short amounts of time, it explains Danny's sheer reluctance to trust anyone other than Jazz, why he assess every room he enters and his absolute fear of hospitals.

And oh,,,Jason is going to murder Ra's Al Ghul

[belladonnaandulriched]

amped and wired, part two | chapter twelve: come for me

“Louise!” Mrs. Hamilton shouted from the corner. “Louise!”

She poked her head out of the back passenger window; Danny meanwhile raised his head from the actual passenger side of the car. The bunch of us jogged across the pavement to the front fender.

“The trash truck fucking took Scott away to the dump,” Frankie said in a single breath to Danny.

“Oh, my God, really?”

“Yeah. Lars threw something away by accident and Scott happened to be over there, too.”

“You can see what happened next,” Charlie added, panting.

“Alright, gentlemen, we're gonna have to push,” Mrs. Hamilton announced to us with a rubbing of her hands together. “Louise, you're going to have to get behind the wheel.” Louise climbed out of the back seat and behind the wheel; Mrs. Hamilton herself meanwhile took to the front seat next to her. She set her hands on either side of the wheel while the bunch of us congregated at the back of the car. Lars and I were nestled against each other behind the left tail light.

“I'm already getting a stitch,” he told me over Mrs. Hamilton's direction from the front passenger seat.

“You didn't hardly eat today,” I pointed out to him as we pushed the car from the back.

“Not really, no. I snuck a little before we went back to your place.”

“Aw—oh—ow! Oh, man, you ever gonna run out of it?” I demanded into his ear.

“Apparently so seeing as they took the remainder of her corpse,” he chided in a single breath.

The five of us picked up the pace and once we reached a good speed, we backed off and let the car coast a bit. Louise struggled to get the thing running. Meanwhile, Frankie and Danny turned to me.

“Where's the dump here, Joey?” the latter asked me.

“It's clear on the other side of town,” I told him, “we could get there on foot—I have many times, but it's kind of a bitch, though, especially since I think it might snow.”

“Well, fuck,” Frankie grumbled.

“Yeah, that's what I'm thinkin', too.” I looked down the street to find the car going off the side. That little market where we met Candace all over again, except there was a plain old sidewalk in lieu of a transformer. The passenger side of the car rolled up onto the curb; Louise shouted something.

“Looks like they lost the steering?” Lars wondered aloud.

“I haven't the foggiest,” Danny confessed in a low voice.

“Louise!” I heard Mrs. Hamilton declare. They came to an abrupt halt with the passenger side up on the sidewalk.

“The steering and maybe the brakes, too?” Charlie continued.

“In other words, that car is toast,” I concluded. The passenger side door swung open and Mrs. Hamilton climbed out; those sleek slinky boots clomped onto the sidewalk like horse's hooves.

“Grab the radar detector, too,” I heard her tell Louise. Louise said something.

“It's in the glove box.” Louise said something. “What? I swore it was in there!”

“Oh, dear,” Lars grumbled.

“By the way, of all people, I've always wondered why Mrs. Hamilton even has a radar detector,” Frankie confessed.

“That's a good question,” I said.

“Ugh—alright,” Mrs. Hamilton concluded with a sigh. “Here, I'll help you.”

She leaned in with both hands. She almost lost her balance helping Louise out of the front seat, but she managed to catch herself on the sidewalk. Louise closed the door and then she locked it herself.

“Looks like we're hoofin' it,” I said to them.

“Unless Mrs. Hamilton has a plan B,” Lars pointed out.

“As far as I know, there's no plan B,” Frankie argued.

“How'd you guys even get up here, by the way?” Lars asked them.

“Same way Danny did,” Charlie explained. “Just hitched a ride from the heart of New York City and got our asses up here because we knew upstate would be safe and a good place for us to lay low for a while.”

“So we're walking over to the dump?” Lars groaned.

“Apparently so,” Mrs. Hamilton said with a grim tone to her voice.

“Should'a darned your own damn socks while you were at my place,” I told him, and he raised a hand to slap me on the shoulder.

“Unless the busses are going?” Louise asked me.

“Today's Sunday, though,” I pointed out.

“Oh, damn.”

“Don't you have a car, though?” I asked her.

“I do, but it's in the shop. I usually walk to Black Orchid from my place.”

“And Cindy and Gwen have today off, too,” Mrs. Hamilton added.

“It's alright, though,” I told her. “I've walked from my parents' house by the lake shore to over that way with my old hockey buddies in the past before. It's kind of long, but it's not that long, though. It's not like we're walkin' down to Syracuse.”

I led the way to the other side of town. We got, I'd say, about five blocks from the supermarket when the lake effect began to take hold. I peered over my left shoulder to behold the sight of the clouds rising from the cold dark surface of Lake Ontario. Not that long, but it felt that way when it started snowing.

“Are you sure it's this way, Joey?” Mrs. Hamilton called up to me at one point.

“He's from here, Lili,” Louise answered for me. “I'm sure he knows it's this way—”

But to be honest, I really had no clue where I was going, especially since the lake effect did more to throw me than anything. I also kept expecting to see another clone of Maya laying on the sidewalk before us, just like on that one night.

I also kept thinking about what Lars did. The man killed his wife and not only lied to me about it, but he also cut her up into slices like she was a carcass or something, and proceeded to eat her. And he put the remainder of her dead body in that dumpster for safe keeping.

Scott probably found it and got curious, and it made me more nauseous than the very sight of Charlie eating a slice of the dead wife without his knowing what he had put into his mouth. At least, that was my hope. For all I knew, Scott could have found another clone.

And right as that thought crossed my mind, I spotted something in the middle of the street, just prior to the intersection. Something small, dark, and... bloody. Bloody right on the pavement. Like someone had hit someone else's dog and killed it right there. It didn't help matters that I saw something shiny on one side of the object, either, which made me think of a dog's eye. And yet it looked flattened as we got closer to it. Someone hit someone else's dog and flattened it like a fucking rubber band, eyes included?

Someone hit someone else's dog and flattened it and put a shoe on it?

No. “What the hell is it?” Louise wondered aloud. The bunch of us congregated around it.

“Looks like a—a foot,” Charlie stated. Like someone lost their foot at the ankle and kept their shoe on, and the outside of the shoe was then caked in blood.

“There's another one up there,” Frankie pointed to across the intersection. Indeed, we crossed the intersection to find a second foot. Following that was a line of pure unadulterated blood on the pavement. I could only assume, much to Lars' chagrin, that the blood would take us to the dump. Whether it was his wife's blood or from something else was beyond me.

“It's a trail,” I concluded.

“Scott probably knew we'd be following him,” Charlie figured, “so he gave us a trail to lead us there.”

“A trail of blood to lead you home,” Mrs. Hamilton said aloud.

Indeed, we kept at it along the pavement with our eyes glued to the trail of blood there. Every so often, I glanced to my left to make sure the lake effect snow was not yet there. And every so often, there was a body part on the pavement, albeit parts that looked real and also fake at the same time: there was a piece of an arm of which we walked by which had a tiny glimmer of neon light inside of the flesh. Scott must have found a clone in the back of the trash truck and gave it hell.

The wind picked up as we neared the other side of town and what I remembered was the dump. Somewhere in those piles was Scott, and somewhere next to him was the sliced and diced corpse of Lars' wife.

Sure, I knew my way around 'Swaygo. And sure, I walked that distance before. But after sprinting after Lars up a single block, eating it in a bush—a literal one plus Mrs. Hamilton's bush—and pushing a car, I was exhausted. The trail of blood seemed to run into itself, or I was running myself into the trail of blood, I don't know.

But I recognized the outer white concrete walls accompanied with a chain link fence. The trail of blood stopped at the driveway, but this place wasn't all that big. Just a single dirt lot with a bunch of trash and shit stacked up for the time being before it was taken down to the incinerator or other places, given most people there didn't know the difference between throwing something in the green garbage can or the regular one for that matter, from their own ass. I rounded the left side of the concrete walls, past the front entrance so we wouldn't have to deal with the front gate. I had this feeling, this feeling that reignited within me after Scott and I rekindled things between us. I could trust him. I could trust him again.

I reached about a foot from the front entrance when within my line of sight, I noticed a peculiar pile of trash consisting of an old television, a mattress, and—

“Scott!” Frankie called out.

He had nestled up before a small stack of old magazines and comic books, things people had just thrown out at leisure. I spotted something else next to him. Even in the dim light, I could make out the sight of arms and legs, albeit listless ones. Scott had cozied up next to her on the old mattress and propped her up against another stack of old boxes. The skin on her face was tired and old, pale and sickly, as if she hadn't eaten in ever. Her body had withered and waned into a slow breathing thing. She looked like a marionette puppet that had been stung by a bee, or a bunch of bees.

“I was wondering when you guys would get here,” Scott told us once we stood right in front of him and behind the chain link fence.

“What—What—” Lars sputtered. I recognized that black hair and that coat. Her skin was a patchwork of her own skin—I think—and the skin of who knows who else. Her eyes blinked at a slow pace. In the dim light, I could tell those were regular human eyes. No neon to be seen. The bunch of us congregated before Scott and... her.

“Gentlemen, the prototype,” he introduced us.

“This is the prototype?” Lars asked him in a broken voice.

“Made of human faces, broken bones, cow's blood, and a tree branch,” Scott continued with one eyebrow raised. “At least that's what she told me.”

“I—I am—” she sputtered in a small whisper of a voice: she did in fact have a British accent, and the way in which she spoke made me think of all of the clones that were being made in that warehouse down in the City. “—my name is Maya Sorenson, and I don't know if I am going to live to see the morning. Or if the morning might see me in order to eat me alive.” Every word she said was followed by a sharp intake of air, like she needed an inhaler or something.

“And yeah, there was another clone in the garbage truck on the way over here,” he said. “I took care of business and made sure she was put to good use.”

“Fucking hell,” I breathed out as I looked over at Lars. There was a few things on his mind, and there was on my mind, too. But one thing was for certain and that was we found the actual Maya.