#another Everyone in DP Is Dead Or Otherwise Inaccessible AU™

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids 👽👻💚

[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 whatever prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

[Here's part one or whatever. If I feel like making more I'll make more and/or post it to ao333333.]

💚👻👽👻💚

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.