Health and Hybrids (XVII)👽👻💚
[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.]
PART ONE is here PART TWOis here PART THREE is here PART FOUR is here and PART FIVE is here PART SIX is here and PART SEVEN is here PART EIGHT is here PART NINE is here PART TEN is here PART ELEVEN is here PART TWELVE is here PART THIRTEEN is here PART FOURTEEN is here PART FIFTEEN is here PART SIXTEEN is here and we're limping into part 17...
💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)
Where we last left off... Two! Words! In! English!!! And a television? Hardcore!
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 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.
“Mæg Ic?”’
…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.
“Mæg Ic?” the doctor asks again.
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.
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Hunger
Ghosts need to eat.
And you’re brain’s probably went to a dark place immediately, but no. There’s nothing cannibalistic or depraved about it.
There are plants based on ectoplasm, animals that reform. The Ghost zone simply has food. And ghosts eat it to survive, just as humans do.
In addition, ghosts do not tend to eat in meals.
In the Terminal, that lawless place in the shadow of Pariah’s Keep, they scavenge. They eat frequently, and whatever they can get their hands on.
Whereas in Elysium, the major Greek kingdom, they host meals. Roughly every earth fortnight, they will hold a massive banquet and eat until every one of them is satiated.
In such a place as a kingdom of the ghost zone, none go hungry. It is a value most everybody shares.
Then there is Danny.
Danny who does not know any better, the Phantom who has been starving for so long he is used to it, the boy that eats nothing but the excess ectoplasm his parents make him clean out of the ecto-filtrator.
He knows nothing of food. Has never known anything expect his volatile core and finicky abilities.
oOo
And now that she took a step back and actually looked, Pandora could see. This child’s core was something erratic, as though he’d been consuming raw ectoplasm. And his aura was faint enough that he must have been eating little of that, still.
That- that couldn’t be healthy. Pandora was no expert on the limits of those so liminal as to be halflings, but he was still a child. Even in the Wastes ghosts did not come so unhealthy as this.
But then, if he was liminal, and of the human realm, it was no surprise he didn’t know any better. Had he even ever eaten real food.
She wondered how he had functioned this long, wondered if he even understood there was anything wrong. He was young enough that he could likely digest food most ghosts could not handle, but Pandora did not know how well that would let the child sustain himself, considering she didn’t make a habit of testing the limits of child-stomachs.
So she easily grabbed Daniel in one hand, ignoring his alarmed yelp.
“We need to take you to a doctor at once, little one!” She said, rushing him from the outskirts to the depths of Elysium, paying no mind to his protest.
And if the child became an honored guest at her feasts after that, no one was complaining.
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