my body's aching like a knock-down drag-out
and my poor heart is an open wound
A Childhood Friends Au snippet that very briefly delves into Danny's life post-accident.
CW: Mild Mentions of Blood, Violence, VERY mild gore ig. Danny briefly recalls getting impaled during a fight.
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What they don't tell you about being dead is that it hurts. That it can hurt. That it can hurt more than when you were alive. That when you die, the emotions you die with stick with you like a leech that just won't let go. That emotions are ugly little thorns that stick their barbs into you and grow beneath your skin; or, at least, whatever’s left of it.
Danny is familiar with anger. It kept him warm in Gotham, when his parents weren't home from work and he and Jason were crowding Crime Alley with their presence. It kept him warm in Amity, when the fresh sting of moving was still needling into his heart and he wanted nothing more than to rip and tear into the closest person next to him.
He's familiar with violence. With fights. With death. He's seen people die in Crime Alley probably every day. From overdose, from gunshots, from stab wounds; anything that can kill, rest assured he's seen it. He's familiar with getting his own knuckles rough and bloody when other kids turn and bare their teeth at him and Jason; they're all just starving dogs stuck in a fighting pit, primed and ready to rip out each other's throats.
Black eyes, stomped hands, bloody noses. You name it; he’s had it. Gotham is paved with the blood of her children, and Danny likes to imagine that when he was born, the doctors handed his mother a file and told her; “Take it. He’s going to need it for his teeth.”
Danny’s mom (and dad, for that matter) was too busy trying to keep him and Jazz fed, so Danny stole the file from her drawer with Jazz’s help, and did it himself.
He’s familiar with anger, he thought he was getting better at it these days. It doesn’t come to him as easily as it did before. Of course, that was before Jason died.
Danny is less familiar with grief. Caring kills and Gotham kills the caring, so Danny cares very little about other people. Or he tries to. But grief hurts. His grief hurts. It hurts too much. It hurts like a bug trying to crawl out of his chest; like a rat chewing a hole through his heart. Some days he wants to dig his hands into his hair and split himself down the middle. Some days he just wants to scream.
He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
He wants the whole city to hear him wailing, some days. It sticks itself in the back of his throat like bile, and Danny is one wrong retch away from letting it loose. It sticks in his lungs like all the tar he’s smoked in since he was nine. It pushes and aches at his temples, in his head, like his brain is trying to swell out of his skull. His thoughts becoming so loud they threaten to commandeer his tongue.
He has no mouth, but he must scream.
Something they don’t tell you about being dead is that it hurts. That it hurts more than when you were alive. Something they don’t tell you about being dead is that it’s violent. That it’s bloody. Or as bloody as it can be when everyone has no blood.
Another thing they don’t tell you about being dead, is that it’s a lot like Gotham that way.
With no threat of death, Danny’s enemies forget death itself. Blood comes easy, like water, and teeth are encouraged. Bring your own fangs to the fight. Dying is something you can just walk off.
Danny’s been dead for three months. He can’t say he’s been walking it off easy. He’s perfected the art of turning his nails into claws since his heart was still beating, but he can’t say he’s perfected fighting other ghosts.
Scrappy is just not enough.
He feels like he’s back in Gotham again. Back in her death-shroud alleyways, fighting someone bigger than him. But there’s no Jason to watch his back, and Danny has to get himself out of there alone. Or he might just not get up at all.
Black eyes, busted lips. It’s familiar to him like an old scent, Danny isn’t quite sure that he’s missed it. It’s more familiar than his fights with Dash.
But there’s no one else who can do it but him. Not Sam, not Tucker. He can’t lose them too. He can’t. He can’t. He can’t. His heart can’t take another break, he already feels like he’s going insane.
With no threat of death, Danny’s enemies fight like death themself. He learns why when Technus puts a street sign through his stomach one day. It pins him to the asphalt like a moth pinned by its wings.
Danny claws at the metal like how an animal caught in a trap chews off its leg, and every move is blinding pain. He thinks he was howling, but it’s hard to tell. He couldn’t recognize the sound of his voice.
He bleeds green. It mixes in black with the pitch blackhole in his heart, which throbs and twists and cries in time with his reckless panic. The finger-choking terror of dying again strangles out the air he doesn’t need. His blood evaporates, only to reabsorb into him. It just bleeds out again, cycling like a snake eating its own tail.
Danny breaks his nails clawing at the metal, and eventually gets it in his mind to pull it out. So he does, and the end drips ectoplasm green as he gets to his feet. In red-vision, Danny sends the sign back with snarling, vicious fervor. The pain is irrelevant in his rage.
Only after the fight does the hole the pole left start to close. Danny doesn’t shift human until it’s gone. Unlike other injuries, a scar stays behind. Ugly; mottled, it aches for a week with every twist and stretch his body makes. He hates it.
Being dead is agony.
Every part of him is in pain. Every step, every word he speaks, everything he does, it is prerequisite with pain. The body is temporary, but the soul is forever, and death has carved into it with its freezing green hands and left him with never-ending heartache. It has torn from him and stolen what of him it could, and in return it’s left him with sorrow.
His pain is his grief, and he’s sobbed in the safety of his room more times than he can count. It’s still as fresh as the day he heard the news of Jason’s death. He knows, instinctively, that it will stay fresh forever.
In his room, Danny shoves his hands over his mouth and shrieks in whatever, muffled way he can into his pillow. It’s not enough. It’s never enough. He needs to be louder. He needs to be heard. He refuses to be.
Being dead hurts.
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It’s been a long time since we were three - Jen, Michelle and I, and nobody else. Really it was two first, them, from the first day of junior infants, when children were seated alphabetically. Smythe sat with Tengu, that was the natural order of things, and for them, that was that.
Plenty of people stay friends with that first kid from that first day, it’s just how it works out. You end up spending eight years or more joined at the hip with that snot nosed kid who borrowed your pencil and chewed off the eraser on the end, or snipped chunks out of your hair with safety scissors. But maybe, even to small children, a special, unbreakable bond is born from the experience of witnessing one another cry softly into your copy books as your parents reverse out of the car park and abandon you in a new, strange place with twenty-nine five year old strangers.
It worked out well for them, though, Michelle, who was bullied for looking foreign, and Jen, the tiny, confident child who had mastered the art of the creative insult by the time she could speak. Boldly, she stood up to anyone who said a word to her new friend, and no, Tengu isn’t hard to pronounce, you just can’t read. And, by the way, you have chocolate smeared around your mouth.
I crashed their party in the autumn of 2002, uncomfortable in my first ever uniform, and made to sit down at the back of the room like an inconvenience with maths worksheets while everyone else participated in their Irish lesson. I didn’t even know that Irish was a language before then and thanked my lucky stars that ten years old was considered too late to learn and rendered me exempt, because the thought alone of attempting to make those foreign, hacking sounds at the back of my throat was enough to make me shudder.
It was Jen, to my left, who nudged me, “are you dyslexic?”
“No, I'm American.”
“What are you doing here then?”
“I moved.”
“Why?”
I was grateful when the teacher told us to pipe down, because I wasn’t really sure how I was going to answer anyway, but it was only a minute before a piece of folded paper landed on my desk.
A note.
Did you ever go to Disneyland?
Yes No
I circled yes and tossed it back at her. Of course I’ve been to Disneyland, like, five times. My great aunt took me on every single birthday, and I went on all of the rides I was tall enough for.
The notes didn’t stop, one after another, question after question, and I shrunk a little under her curious gaze at the desk next to me, not really ready to be observed with such intensity, but it didn’t matter what I wanted. Jen wanted answers.
“Do you have Coronation Street in America?” She said, trailing me into the yard as I tried to find a secluded spot to eat my sandwich.
“Hm? Where’s that?”
She giggled, “What about Quality Street?”
“Are they, like, kinda the same thing?”
“Do you know any WWF wrestlers?”
“I know them on the TV, I guess.”
“But not in real life? Have you met any celebrities?”
“Um, I saw the guy who played Screech on Saved by the Bell one time.”
“I dunno who that is. Anyone else?”
She could be pretty annoying, but disarming and easy to warm to nonetheless, but it was never Jen that was the problem.
It was her best friend Michelle.
Michelle Tengu didn’t really talk. Kids in the class would try their best to make her say something, they’d ask her if she was mute, which she wasn’t, she was too shy to speak sometimes, and when she did her voice was whisper quiet, which didn’t help.
“What?” Our classmates would bellow, “I can’t hear you, you have to speak up!” and underneath the table her hands would ball into fists and her face would burn furious red.
Usually kids like Michelle were too much effort for me, I dare say boring, even, I tended to gravitate towards loud, borderline obnoxious types but I quickly learned that wherever my new friend Jen went, Michelle went too, so her presence, I would have to learn to accept.
Once I got over my impatience with Michelle’s quiet nature we tended to get along pretty well, she was the perfect antidote for Jen and I, who would often launch into spirited arguments about stupid things that hardly mattered, but she was so good at being diplomatic, logical, making sense of things that seemed so complicated to us but simple to her. Michelle was very good at being right. All of the time. It was one of the interesting things about her.
There were other interesting things, of course, which I began to discover during the long, humid summer of 2004. Like the way her hair, long, sleek and black, reflected the sunshine, and her pouty mouth and chestnut brown eyes. Girls weren’t gross to me in that way anymore, especially Michelle.
It was her house where we hung out, mostly, because my house had a fussy toddler in it and Jen’s parents were weird and always made us participate in chores, but Michelle’s house wasn’t perfect either. Her parents were always hovering within earshot of the living room as we three friends hung out, and they made sure that Michelle’s bedroom was always off limits to me. Jen could go up there all she liked, to fetch a CD or a teen magazine for us to fill out the stupid quizzes, but not me. I had to park myself on that pale blue couch and listen to my friends giggling through the ceiling while Rahim grilled me about my education.
“I don’t get why they’re like that,” Jen would say in consolation when we walked home together after another summer afternoon in the Tengu’s semi detached. “They’re the same with the sleepovers, even though they’d be so much more fun if you were there too. I honestly just don’t get it."
But I did.
And as time went on the girls would understand too, because by twelve almost everything felt different to the way it felt at ten. There wasn’t only Michelle and her pretty glossy hair anymore, there was Jessie and Alice and Amy, and eventually, my very first girlfriend Holly whose friends used to shove digital cameras into our faces when we tried to kiss at the teenage discos, and who would start dramatic, weekly arguments with me over text message if I dared to so much as ask the girl next to me to borrow a pencil sharpener.
Things became extra complicated when somebody left a handmade card and a packet of gel pens on my desk for my birthday, which I assumed were from Holly, and thanked her, much to her chagrin, because it hasn’t actually been her, no, she’d bought me tickets to see Dodgeball at the cinema.
It was Michelle.
Holly insisted that I give them back to her, so I did, with all the sensitivity and tact a newly turned thirteen year old is capable of, which is almost none, and left Michelle standing forlornly in the yard holding the card I had barely read dangling limply from her fingers.
It was her, eventually, who launched a campaign against me after many weeks of being an obliging boyfriend, claiming that I was spending far too much time with Holly and her friends and had forgotten all about those who had welcomed me with their friendship when I was displaced and alone at the beginning, but I didn’t think of it like that. I still wanted to be friends with her and Jen, they were my main friends, but I needed to make time for my new friends too. There was only so much of me to go around, surely, if she were so reasonable, she would understand.
“You don’t care about us at all anymore,” she hissed at me in the school yard with tears in her eyes, “It’s all about Holly and her gang now. Well, she can have you, you don’t have time for anybody else these days.”
She ignored all my attempts to make it up to her, and we only drifted further apart after that, losing ourselves to the new landscape, the new rules of secondary school, finding different interests, different people, different music, ways to dress and express ourselves to spend our time until eventually the only thing we had in common was Jenny Smythe, the girl who had stood in place while we swirled around her, a rock in a churning ocean of teenage angst. If it wasn’t for her, I know I would hardly see Michelle at all. I’d never have to think about her.
But I do, and now instead of her giggling I hear her sobs through the ceiling of the living room.
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Big thank you to @nexility-sims for helping me make sense of this montage scene! It was driving my crazy for weeks <3 <3 <3
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