#medic wally

[snowshinefivez5]

This is why Barnaby is so protective of his Medic (Wally)

Some of the frames

[darlingofpink]

I drew my boi Medic in his 1% psychopath era—🍎🚑

Welcome Home - @/partycoffin

Medic AU - @darlingofpink / @pplayz (me)

✦Stay safe, stay patient, stay strong, stay... Determined, pinksterz!💕

[andy-zone]

I had done it on Halloween, doctor Wally was always angry

[gorryb]

Hooplah and Remderem

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XXIII)👽👻💚

[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.]

🖤Chapter navigation can be found here🖤 Click to browse previous updates.

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts 💚 (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... J'onn broke the news that Danny thinks he's going to be forced into combat in exchange for his medical care. Everyone disliked that™.

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

COME GET YOUR NEW ART HERE 💥🍳!!💥 IT'S FIBERCRAFT!!Shoutout to @rainbowbeansprout for crocheting a fic accurate injured ghost Danny!! That's outstanding!!

💚👻👽👻💚

So, Wally broke all of the bones in his legs yesterday.

Which is…not ideal. Still. He’s pretty used to it at this point, though, and he’s already mostly healed.

It’s just that. Well.

…The rest of healing is kind of…time-consuming.

So Wally’s in basketball shorts and a mask and a t-shirt he’d started using as pajamas when he was in college and he’s on the med floor of the Watchtower, and yet another physical therapist is helping him bend his leg back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, because he’d tripped in the middle of the Speedforce and busted everything hip-down.

So. (Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Back…) This sucks.

“Do we have to do this every time?” Wally asks, as if there isn’t a team of medical professionals kept on hand to deal with Superpower-wrought Super Medical Problems.

“Do you have to shatter your legs every time?” the PT asks back wryly, which, hey! The pressure pressing up against his bare foot is an additional stressor to the sass. “Bend this more for me, Flash. You can do it.”

Wally grumbles, and pretends the angle his leg is bending at doesn’t make him wince. Wow is he going to have to build his flexibility back up again.

The physical therapy room looks just like any other gym, basically; a lot of squishy mats in playful colors, a lot of grippy tape; a LOT of wipeable vinyl surfaces that can be sanitized at a moment’s notice. It smells kind of weird and plasticky and kind of like alcohol cleaner.

It’s not his favorite room in the Watchtower, but, eh. It could be way worse. What’s unusual is the whirrr of the door opening and closing in one of the private care rooms for another patient, since, you know...HIPAA and all that. Wally assumes. Or is it costume confidentiality once you leave Earth's atmosphere...?

Usually everyone knows who’s stopping in for PE through the sheer power of the Justice League gossip groupchats. (There’s at least nine. Wally’s in four of them. He aspires to be in two more by April.) There hasn’t been a big fight that requires long-term medical care in a while, and there’s no one Wally can think of who’d need this kind of recovery.

Something’s buzzing at the outside of his awareness, though. It sounds kind of…

Wally perks up. “Hey, the alien kid’s here!”

The PT holding Wally up at the waist hums. Her name is Cindy, and judging from their previous conversations, she thinks that Wally is the dumbest man alive. “There’s a million of those, Flash. Which one?”

“The one who bit Superman,” Wally adds.

Judging by the face Cindy makes, this clarifies nothing.

“Most recently,” Wally stresses, carefully not wincing as his leg gets stretched out again, only to be pulled back into position as tightly as before. “OW. Cindy, you’re killing me.”

Cindy makes a strangled noise. She asks: “What, again?” which is how Wally remembers that he got torn back out of the time stream not all that long ago, and it may be a big gauche to joke about your own death with the people who care about it.

Whoops. Wally winces. “…Nevermind?”

The other PTs make various fussy and annoyed noises, but the alien kid is wheeled onto the other side of the medical floor’s only gym. (The actual training floors are on another level. Wally wishes he was there. Alone.)

(Without four PTs clinging to his legs at all times.)

Wally waves. It’s a nice enough gesture, and now that the alien-phantasm-turned-flesh-and-blood-boy is more physically embodied than he used to be, the boy even deigns to carefully wave back.

The kid’s PTs—Wally thinks at least one of them is from the team that supervises Bart and his super-powered-leg-problems—end up encouraging the alien kid’s chair round to the soft mats where the kid can lay down. He ends up in the exact same position Wally is—horizontal on the floor, legs forcibly pinwheeled by enthusiastic but firm PTs.

Wally can physically feel the kid’s astonishment and discontentment buzzing in the air as he figures out what’s being done to him. Wally can’t help but laugh.

The kid angles his head towards the speedster. His face still looks—well, it looks…bad. It looks bad, unhealed and still threatening to weep neon green body fluids; there’s a wet, living crack running up and down his face that makes eye contact kind of hard. His hands are all spidery—this kid can probably hold and grip things, but the previous breakage have left his hands a little too easy to splay, a little too oddly-angled. He’s too thin to keep himself fully upright for long. When he looks at you, his eyes shake like a poorly lined-up television signal.

Martian Manhunter had said that he’d once looked like a healthy, happy human child. His current form is a reflection of the injuries he’d experienced since.

...What a thing for a kid to go through. Wally wouldn’t wish this sort of injury on anyone.

“­Alright, up you go,” the PT above him—Rhys, Wally remembers at the very last second—orders, and Wally is prompted to let the man help him back upright. “Over to the bars for you. You think your legs are up to bearing that kind of weight as you try out walking?”

“…Sure,” Wally lies to Rhys. It’ll be fine. Probably. By the time he gets over there, his legs might have already speed-healed by then. “Hand me the—?”

“Yeah, yeah, here’s the crutches. Don’t destroy yourself trying to make this happen, okay?”

So Wally gets set up at the glorified playground equipment in his least restrictive gym clothes, one long iron bar under one arm, and one long iron bar under the other. Two full-size physical therapists spot him as the speedster completes the most strenuous task available to him at the moment: walking across a very short distance without putting his full weight on his legs.

Wally puts one shaking leg in front of the other. The steps are slow. The urge to zoom to the end of the little bowling lane he’s stuck in—and therefore shatter his legs under the speedforce, again—is irresistibly temping.

Healing sucks. And Wally’s even got the longer end of the stick.

In the end, Wally sticks the landing. He is unreasonably sweaty. He is miserable. But he makes it to the end. Every one of the witnessing PTs applauds as if this is a great success. It’s literally not. It’s the inevitable result of pushing himself too far for the third time this year.

A question buzzes through the air, fluffing through Wally’s hair and the little fine hairs up and down his body. It’s nothing but inquisitive—whatareyoudoing whatareyoudoing?

Wally lets the PT maneuver a chair underneath him. It gives him enough breathing room to turn his upper torso, and he ends up catching the eye of the little alien kid in the corner. He’s sat on a yoga ball, two members of his medical team and one of the kids’ PTs trying to get his attention back to his exercises.

“Hey,” Wally realizes suddenly. “Your casts are gone!”

The kids’ legs are actually bare, which Wally’s never seen before. They’re twiggy, sure, stretched taut over a bone frame, and discolored and pale, but they’re legs. Wally hadn’t even known the alien had possessed legs until he’d formed a physical body months and months ago.

“Dude, that’s great!”

Happy/smug/proud vibrates through the room, making Wally’s teeth buzz. The kid smiles through a half-split lip, and bounces on the yoga ball ever so slightly.

“Good,” the kid says, surprising Wally, his PTs, and the kid’s usual medical team. He was talking already?! He thought J’onn had said—

“Hurt?” the boy asks, concern/concern flooding through the air. Oh. Right. He’s probably here for his busted legs; it would make sense that by virtue of the setting, Wally would be injured too.

And, sure, Wally busted his legs, but he at least heals with all the swiftness of the speedforce. “Meh.” Wally waves off the question. “I’m fine. It’ll be quick for me; some rehab and some lunch and a few days off, and I’ll be in shipshape.”

Wait. Wally’s eyes scrunches up. Is using wordplay appropriate with this kid…?

“Pain?” the kid asks, and turned his attention to the closest member of his medical team. “He pain?”

The medical professional sighs, which finally clues Wally in that the man is no longer masked. Hey, the kid is out of medical isolation! “The Flash has his own medication, thankfully. His doctors know what to do.”

The kid frowns. He doesn’t get it. He looks at Wally, and he looks at the staffer, who shrugs. “It’s the usual indicator word he uses for pain medication. He’s wondering if you’re hurt enough to need some.”

Wally hums. On one hand, it’s sweet that the alien kid is worried about him. It’s a huge step upwards from the alien who spent all his time hiding in abandoned meeting rooms and occasionally biting Superheroes.

On the other hand, the kid doesn’t just look worried that Wally might not be getting care; he looks scared.

Something happened to this kid. Something he can't shake off.

Wally breathes in, and breathes out.

—And breathes in sharply when Cindy starts wiggling his feet. She doesn’t respond at all to his glare, because she is a professional, and he is not a big baby of a superhero.

Mean.

“I’m fine,” Wally finally responds, trying to alleviate the kid’s concerns through sheer vibes-telepathy alone. Who knows if it’s working, but it makes Wally feel better about trying at the very least. “I’ve got my own team to fix me up, and they do a good job of taking care of me. Even if they’re bullying me at my most vulnerable.”

“Anything for you, boss,” Cindy volleys back cheerfully. “Gimme your other leg.”

The tension in the air slowly dissipates. The kid doesn’t stop shooting occasional looks at the unadorned, half-out-of-uniform Flash, but he does let Bart’s little PT team get to working on stretching out his previously-bound now-physical legs and getting him upright—if only for a few seconds at a time, balanced precariously by humans who actually touch his back and arms and hips and legs.

Wally’s session wraps up before the kid’s does. He’s not in any rush. He gets onto the walking crutches Rhys leaves out for his temporary use and lopes over to watch, occasionally hooting and applauding when the kid pulls off something no one’d been sure he could do.

The double handed high-five Wally offers him at the end is punctuated with shaky eye contact, two working hands, and a green-threaded beaming grin.

*

Diana cheerfully digs into her kebab lunch, plastic cutlery pushed to their maximum limit before threatening to break under her prodigious strength. “You know, Batman,” she starts, beaming, “My charge gave me his name the other day.”

Bruce sets down his muenster-ham-and-whole-wheat sandwich mid-bite. “I’ll need to hear everything,” he says immediately, to which Diana tuts.

“Oh, Batman, I could never break his trust like that,” she says, sweet as anything. She finesses a bite of lamb from the skewer and takes a neat bite.

“…Wonder Woman,” Batman says.

“Hm?”

“Diana.”

“Is there something you needed, Bruce?” Diana asks, pleased with herself. There genuinely is very little that could be done with a vague description of a now-altered human form and a first name alone; besides, she genuinely does feel that hearing the boy’s name come from others’ lips would be upsetting for him. Danny offered his name to Diana alone, and so it shall remain until hers alone he offers it to others.

Still, she is not above bragging.

“I need information.” Bruce’s face underneath his mask is stone.

Diana dips a second chunk of lamb into a little container of tzatziki sauce. “Well, then,” she points out, “Shouldn’t you spend some time building rapport with my charge, then?”

The feared Batman of Gotham, father of a half-dozen highly trained heroes, bristles like a wet cat. The demeanor is almost comical. He knows what he looks like to non-Gothamite children. He knows his suit will make this fight for common familiarity an uphill battle.

Diana smugly works through her lunch and ignores Bruce’s silent brooding as he does the same.

[vixezn]

Yandere! Wally Darling x Medic! Reader

🩹 - When he first saw you, he was excited that the neighborhood has gotten a new friend!

🩹 - After you settled in, he was quick to visit you! Your house looked so interesting, it was obvious you were special.

🩹 - As he walked in, the first thing he noticed was how many doctor supplies there were! 

🩹 - When he found out that you liked taking care of others and had medical supplies on hand, he found it adorable!

🩹 - Sooner or later, he was enamored with you! You were just so thoughtful! You even changed the saying ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ to ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor close’, just for him! 

🩹 - (He felt so special when you told him why you said that, made him fall even more in love!)

🩹 - You fit in with the neighborhood so quickly! You were the missing piece! 

🩹 - You tried to join in on other people’s hobbies, like Julie’s jump roping, Sally’s acting, and even Wally’s painting! But you always cared too much to do so! Oh, don’t trip on the sidewalk! You’re standing a bit too close to stage’s edge! Oh my gosh, is that red paint or blood? Go wash yourself off!

🩹 - Wally loves it when you take care of him! Giving him ice packs, asking him to sleep better, To go outside, To not stare at them when they sleep! Oh, he loves the attention you give him!

🩹 - He loves it so much that he would pretend to be hurt just so you could give him a bandaid or an ice pack! He has a whole drawer full of the leftover bandaids you’ve given him, he just can’t throw them away, they’re from you!

🩹 - Since you can’t tell the different between red paint and blood (You grew up without any painting supplies), he uses that to his advantage! Oh no, he went to the picnic with a little red on his knee? Better need another bandaid!

🩹 - If/when you finally realize the difference between red paint and blood, you disregard any time he comes to hang out with it.

🩹 - And he absolutely hates that he lost some of your attention! Does he need to get hurt on purpose?..Does he need to use someone else’s blood?

🩹 - When he complained to Home, he realized a way to get all of your attention! When he asked Home about it, Home agreed to help him! Such a wonderful friend, Home is!

🩹 - When he asked you you hang out at his place to paint, you were ecstatic! Hanging out with a close friend, who wouldn’t?

🩹 - At his place, he asked you to go replace the water, third room down the hall!

🩹 - When you got to his bathroom to replace the water, you just couldn’t help and check to see if he has enough medical supplies, what if someone got hurt and you weren’t around?

🩹 - As you opened the drawer, you were surprised to see it full of.. used bandaids? What? When you looked closely, they were all yours that you gave him!

🩹 - You checked the next drawer and there were just photos upon photos of you. You staggered back and hit a smaller body behind you.

🩹 - “Hello, friend. I see you were just a little.. too curious, weren’t you?” He giggled, before something swung at beside your head.

🩹 - He felt gravely sorry for hurting you, but he needed to help you get settled in his place without struggle! Oh dear, the gash on your head seems serious..

🩹 - But he was sure you could help yourself with healing up! After all, you’re really good at that.

OSNSKDMSND I TAKE REQUESTS 

[snowshinefivez5]

OH MI DIOS QUE HERMOSO!!! 💕💕💕 do not DARE apologize for tagging me 😤🧡🧡🧡 I absolutamente love it, this made my day like you have no idea

TW:BLOOD

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He got a little too silly /j

Medic!Wally by @snowshinefivez5 (sorry for the tag!!)

Btw the two drawings on the right are a reference to these panels of the tf2 comics!!

Hope you like it!! 🐛

[gummy022]

“Would you like some cupcakes neighbor!?”

Go on, take one. He made them for you :)

Au by @azraelcreates !

[syncrovoid-presents]

Wally and the Colour RED

Wally and the colour Red have an interesting relationship in Welcome Home. This is a rambling/analysis of different things I've found that makes me believe it's an important detail moving forwards with the Welcome Home Mystery!

First! Why do I think this matters?

There's a few reasons why I think this matters! First, while all the members of the cast seem to be tied to a colour, none is as focused or as consistent as Wally and the colour red! The two primary examples I'll use to cover this is one that we've had for a while, and two that we got in this update. Those being the signatures at the bottom of the guestbook, the interactable telephone, and the name graphics on the transcript page!

Interestingly, all of the cast are directly tied to a specific colour! The signatures at the bottom of the Guestpage and the colours of the "calls" on the telephone are the same for each character. This being pink for Julie, orange for Sally, yellow for Frank, green for Poppy, turquoise for Howdy, blue for Barnaby, purple for Eddie, and red for Wally. This is consistent (and possibly something to pay attention for in the future?)

Notably however, Home is signed by Wally, while the audio file for Wally's "call" recording is also called "duet" when you open it in another tab. Audio files with "duet" is a sign that Home is present. This means that red is not strictly a Wally colour, but also the colour for Home!

(if you're curious, the other audio called "duet" is Wally's little song he sings)

This is interesting, because Wally and Home are often treated as a duo, moreso than any other characters of Welcome Home. I would also like to point out another detail, one that I think ties into this tie between Wally, Home and the colour red.

The Records

All the records from Wally's hidden message ("I will help you understand neighbor, I will find a way soon.") are red! Sure, some are glitched, but they are all red. As is this record with the strange audio (has anyone decoded this yet?). This audio is directly tied to Wally, as it's called "(DRAWING?) WITH WALLY DARLING".

However the hidden one's may not just be Wally. Though they are all name the tab "answer" when opened, I'm tempted to say that "answer" is wally prompting us to answer (or, alternatively, Wally is trying to answer us, however he perceives us).

I believe that Home is there too in the audio. If you listen to all of them in a row, turning up the audio will reveal that there is a heart beat in the background. This, I want to say, is Home and not Wally, as Wally does not seem to register them. It peaks about halfway through with Neighbor, coincidentally the audio that is both glitching and is made of a series of clicks rather than voice lines.

I have seen people say that this is "Help Me" or "Hello" in morse code. I do not know which is the agreed translation is (to me it sounds like "…. . ..-.. .. -.. ---", which translates to "HEĘIDO", which is not a word. However it most resembles "…. . .-.. .-.. ---" which translates to "HELLO")

Regardless of what Home may be saying, it shows that the hidden recordings can be put together into a timeline that sounds like one recording, which means it's most likely all recorded at the same place. Ergo, Home is in the hidden recordings as well!

Other spots where red is brought up

There are other instances of red being tied to Wally. Some are obvious, like his love of apples (red ones specifically), the Wally prints/finger paint on the bottom of the guestbook, the background of the "i <3 Wally" gif/sticker in the sticker section of the site (also shared with Home. Wally's character description is also shared by home!), Wally himself in the "so-below" page, among other things. Such as the Wally themed telephone being red, despite his more iconic blue swirled hair (or blue and yellow-trimed sweater), his clothing in multiple official artworks, the Wally cereal box, and more.

(Like something I've noticed, which is that Home is the only house that's a solid colour (red!) without any pattern breaking it up, plus the most "standout" red that Wally typically wears being tied around his neck (symbolism?). Plus the "W" of Welcome Home is red! That's fun too!

There's also some... stranger ones. Such as this hidden piece of morse code found by this person, which spells out ".. -- .-. . -..", or "IM RED" when translated to english.

And more hidden ones too, that tie into the hidden staff page (I have a post breaking that down that you can find here!! I cover everything I could find plus went through the website code, if you want to know everything about the secret staff site check it out!)

There is the red safe, which has in WHRP universe lore!! I delve into this in my other post, just know that it is something that exists both in the secret website (it is what introduces you to the hidden website!) AND it exists in the WHRP world, both written about in printed emails and as a physical object seen within The Room:tm:. You may also notice everyone is represented by their original colours, except for home, who is now white (or blank?).

There's also scrap pieces of red paper spilled on the ground in The Room:tm: (that have drawn spirals), a red clock in the style of Wally's red car, a red painting of some sort on the wall of The Room:tm: (that we never get a good look at, though it may have a drawn yellow eye in the upper center), a red apple, and most importantly of all, this:

The Red Notebook

This is no ordinary notebook. This here is the notebook that the WHRP team have "loaned" the Question Answerer, also known as the Head Curator of Question Answer! according to the printed emails. This book is very important because there are multiple signs that it was written by Wally. Inside is a sketchpad attached to the lefthand interior bookcase with little paintings and a handprint suspiciously similar to that on the bottom of the GuestBook page and doodles in the styles Wally has used (spirals, finger paint smiley face, the drawn apple, etc).

(by the way, if you're interested in what the note says the most accurate translation I've found is by Tumblr user truckfreaks

"Hello,

My name doesn't matter. I am here to catalogue something I'm not sure is fully real. But it must be. I'm holding all the evidence in my hands. Pictures. Characters. Text I can barely read. It's called "Welcome Home" and it looks like it might've been a children's book? Like I said, I can't tell.

It was sopping wet when I found it. When I first reached into one of the brightly colored envelopes, my hand was already covered in some gross, [unknown - possibly “oozing”] material. It feels like antiques are always covered in some kind of grime. I'm trying to clean up what I have and do a little more digging.

There's only one name I can make out right now... Wally. Probably important, but like I said, I'll keep looking.

XOXO"

The wrap up (don't want to make this too long!)

Regardless of what you make of this, it shows that there is even more proof of Wally, not just the character but the Wally ""haunting"" the website and the Wally within the WHRP universe, all being tied to the colour red. (Quick clarification: The Wally we see in branding, clips of the show, etc are all Wally, however he isn't current Wally. He is the Wally of the past, the original Wally, the base Wallly, whatever you want to call him. Therefore I separate him from the "now" Wally. It's unconfirmed whether the Wally that's seemingly trying to communicate with us through the website is the same as the Wally that seems to be related to all the objects being sent to Question Answerer, who is the same Wally that is constantly calling them. If so, then there is only one "now" Wally. If they are separate, then there are two, possibly one in the website itself and one focusing on Question Answerer. Please note, this is all speculation).

While it's true that red is Wally's favourite colour, I believe that it's far more than just that tying Wally and the color red together. Going forwards, anything red that isn't immediately branded as a Wally related object should be considered important, at least I think so.

As for the connection between Wally and Home, both sharing the colour Red? I think this primarily is a display of how the two characters either rely on each other or are, in the vaguest of ways, tied together by fate.

Good bye for now!

[junespriince]

Winged heart au

Wally, doing some work:

Dick, coming in: so on a scale of 1 to 10... Is a arm supposed to do this? *Broken arm wiggling*

Wally, used to this now: how.

Dick: ... I slipped off a roof trying to prove a point to Red hood.

Wally: I'll get the plaster I stoled for work. Want me to doodle once it dries?

Dick: yes please!!!

[snowshinefivez5]

So many ships 🚢 Ask away if curious about any of them or the characters in general ✨️

[darlingofpink]

Got their info sheets up! I'll do the other characters next, but fur now, a lil' break ><

Welcome Home - @/partycoffin

Medic AU - meee

✦Stay safe, stay patient, stay strong, stay... Determined, pinksterz!💕

[andy-zone]

It's doctor Wally I did this at ibis X I hope you like it, it was a nice practice haha

[evilhorse]

You need help, fella—medical help!

(All-Star Comics #61)

[brew-berry-a-trash-artist]

A character bingo I was insane enough to draw

Has sat unfinished for a bit I lost motivation for this one and I’m hoping it comes back soon

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (V)👽👻💚

[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.]

PART ONE is here PART TWO is here PART THREE is here PART FOUR is here and this is part five💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts

Where we last left off... Batman had a meeting! Danny acquired age appropriate enrichment toys. All is well. You know. Except for the everything else. But it’s fine and MM is on his way so it’ll all be great soon for sure! :)

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my awful attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

One…Morning? Evening?

Well. One day, Danny rediscovers his tongue.

Most of the muscle is there. Things taste better after he remembers how to taste.

(If everything tastes like iron, well…Danny tries to ignore that.)

Its main function is social. When Danny needs the quiet humans he can’t see to Shut Up or Go Away!, it is now within his power to blow a raspberry.

A slightly bloody raspberry. But still! A success! And when the fuzzy red human buzzes and whines about scaring them off, Danny blows it one too.

If all it does is make the human cry more, hey. That’s not Danny’s business.

*

The buzzy human comes back with its friends, with fresh sheets, spilling nervousembaras!sednervous all over the room.

Blech. Danny saves himself the trouble and phases through his bed and through the floor below. He does not need to be grabbed again.

He has more energy than he used to. It gets him farther than he’s used to; by the time he finds and works his way through an apple, a pear, and a whole plate of chicken wings, he’s still not sleepy.

…Huh. He rolls over underneath his usual haunt: a conference table. He isn’t feeling the urge to drop into his core. He’s achy, sure, and his limbs hurt and his mouth hurts from eating and he can’t see, but also…

Is Danny bored? Is he finally well enough to be bored of being sick and injured?? That’s. Is that progress? Is it…regression??

Danny sulks under his conference table (his now) with a pile of chicken bones and a few stems and doesn’t know what to do.

If he goes back to his bed…will the sheets already be done? Will people be waiting to get him? Did he lose his…ugh, he doesn’t want to think of them as toys. His…enrichment? Educational tools?

…Okay they might be toys. Whatever. When Danny feels better, he’ll grab something more age appropriate. Maybe he’ll get them from his—

Danny flinches.

…From his house.

If he can get there.

Whatever. He doesn’t want to think about that right now. He wants to figure out how to get rid of his trash without revealing his location. Or leave his conference table shelter.

Danny drums his claws against the low-pile carpet that stretches below him. Should he stay? Rest up? Wait for the threats to his admittedly-kinda-pathetic territory to leave? Should he…go get more food? Should he explore more? He feels all kinds of sore and tired but his head mostly feels clear. Maybe if he—

There’s a hissing noise. Danny bristles. He hisses in like, but—oh. It’s a door.

…Oh. It’s the door.

Uh oh. That’s um. That’s.

Uh oh.

Danny quickly pretends that he hadn’t hissed. He invisibly pushes the top of his head through the thick wood of the conference table. They shouldn’t be able to see anything if he peeks.

Well. Unless they can? But if they can, that’s. Uh. That’s a whole new problem.

Several tall, colorful, adult humans walk into the room. He can’t quite tell how many. Just a bunch. And they’re tall. But hey, they’re color coordinated for easier determination, at least.

Danny lowers himself back down through the table. Should he leave? Will they see him if he tries to leave? Can they spot him?

He sits and worries and he dithers as the humans slowly surround the table and the hidden ghost underneath. Should he…should he go through the floor? Will they know he’s there? Is it even safe to get back to his cot yet?

Feet start appearing underneath the table. Danny shies away from them. He pulls his chicken bones away from them too; if they step on one, they might notice him.

Then everything gets quiet. There’s only one quiet, droning voice.

So maybe Danny peeks again.

There’s a giant shadow at the front. It’s probably human. It has black arms and black legs and a patch of what is probably skin in his very fuzzy vision. It stands beside a lit screen.

Danny squints.

…Oh. He can’t quite tell what it’s about, or what’s exactly is being shown on the screen, but he knows what a powerpoint presentation is supposed to look like: a person, a lot of talking, a screen, and a lot of people listening. They’re just…talking. They’re not even talking about Danny.

Okay. He’ll rest under the table. It seems…safe enough for now.

It’s better to listen to human heartbeats and breathing in a room than it is to sit in his silent one, waiting for some new horror to break the everpresent quiet. Danny lays on his belly, nose to the carpet, and counts how many feet are under the table. (There are sixteen feet.) Some humans are wearing real shoes, with inch-thick soles of hard rubber at the bottom. Some are wearing things that look like shoes, but are too flexible, with soft soles that bend and curl as they flex under the table. Very few of them have laces or fixtures. Huh.

A wrapper falls. Danny watches the ball of foil flutter to the floor, at peace with his position, tired of inspecting shoes. And then a face pops down.

Danny freezes. (It’s not the smartest move.)

The face that popped down probably sees him back, considering how still it goes. And then, very slowly, so slowly, a hand reaches down. Danny flinches back, and—

…It grabs the wrapper. The adult carefully gets back up. The face disappears.

Danny doesn’t move. Danny doesn’t leave. Danny doesn’t breathe.

He waits. The human slowly goes back to tapping its toes, wiggling in its seat—and vibrating, in a way that says bored/bored/bored the way the younger human sometimes does.

…No one says anything. No one does anything. No one jumps under the table to get him, there isn’t a break in the speaker that indicates identifying Danny as Present, or as A Problem. Danny is simply…hidden.

He should leave. It would be smart to leave. Danny would be safer if he left.

But also.

Maybe.

This might be the first time he’s been so close to humans in so long.

They don’t know he’s here. It should be…safe. If he just. Listens to the indistinct sound of human voices. Let them wash over him, like a radio left on in the other room.

Danny’s sated. He’s achy. He’s bored. He’s sad. He’s lonely.

…He stays.

He doesn’t notice his humming or the quiet purr in his chest before the hand comes back down again. Danny flinches away from it, the hum guttering to a stop where it had laid.

There’s something about its hand. The hand came down, before, but now there’s something more to it. Another color—a darker color. It’s hard to tell in the shadow underneath the desk. Maybe a—green? A blue? Maybe?

The hand shifts, just a little. And then the thing comes flying at him. Danny jolts backwards, digging his claws into the mere millimeters of carpeting underneath him, and—

Oh. The thing isn’t moving. It hasn’t even exploded.

Danny reaches out a hand. Taps it, gently. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t attack him. It doesn’t excrete anything acidic or bite him. He sniffs it, just to be doubly sure, and nope. It smells like plastic. The wrapper crunches under his hands, even when everything sounds mute and muffled. The noise is borderline imaginary, so Danny can’t exactly tell what it sounds like when he plays with the little plastic flaps.

He can tell what it is now, though. The food bar goes down whole, wrapper and all, into his gullet.

Nice. The outside tastes bad, of course, but it’s nice.

The hand goes away, and no one bothers Danny. It’s nice. There are voices, but they aren’t yelling. They aren’t mean to him. They aren’t talking about what his insides look like or how bad he is or how to take more pieces off of him.

…Danny’s core thrums evenly. Peacefully. Maybe he will want that nap after all. His body gets kind of grouchy when it comes to plastic. He can pretend that it isn’t grumpy with his improvised diet with a nap.

Danny curls up on the floor, core beating along with the quick and even taptaptaptaptap fluttering of a too-quick human heart, and settles in for a quiet one.

(When he wakes up again, no one is around to see him throw out his chicken bones in the tiny trash receptacle by the doorway.)

(His toys and new sheets are all there when Danny gets back to his cot.)

(He’s too relieved to do anything but take a second nap.)

*

“So,” Wally tries, leaning against the wall. “The… Alien? Extraterrestrial?”

Barry shrugs. Fishes a cheeto out of his bag. “Bart’s been calling it a ghoul. They crashed half a mile off the Kent farm a little after you popped out of the Speedforce; there’s a huge chance something happened to them as part of the temporal anomaly.”

“Happened as in…?”

“Yeah.” Barry takes another cheeto. “Bad.”

And theeeere is the visible guilt. There isn’t exactly any great way for Wally to feel after his unintentional resurrection led to an unintentional…something else.

“…Ah.”

Barry shrugs. There isn’t anything they can do about it; short of rewinding time and shoving Wally back into the Speedforce, which has been shoved off the table with a great deal of force by all of the man’s former teammates, there’s no way to undo the accident that landed the poor alien smacking straight into good-old-fashioned American dirt.

“Don’t worry about the way it happened. It wasn’t your fault, and it sure wasn’t intentional on your part,” Barry points out, and offers the bag of Cheetos towards Wally. The snack is gone in microseconds. The curse of speedsters is really footing the bill of all their emotional eating.

“So, they’re…do we know what they are? Because they definitely shapeshifted fangs as soon as I found their little—whatever that is. Container? Unit? Under the table.” Wally traces the vague shape of the thing’s cerulean heart in the air. “One second I was holding a glass paperweight, and the next I was on the opposite end of a very angry shadow-snake. I think they would have done worse than bit me if it hadn’t had a clear escape route out of there.”

Barry balls the empty bag and shoves it into a pocket. If he litters in the Watchtower, it’s going to be water cooler gossip for years. Bats would never let anyone defile his super cool, super-secret base with garbage without his own form of petty revenge. “Medical says it likely serves as an organ for him,” he says instead, since monologue about how inconvenient it is to be held responsible for his own actions wouldn’t be professional. “So. Think of it less as a container; think of it more as a turtle shell. Medical is pretty sure it’s a part of their body. Messing with it would really hurt them.”

“Yeowch.”

“Mmhmm. One micro-sec.” Barry darts out and away from his nephew; he just remembered he has bottled smoothies in his room. In the time it takes him to fetch two from his mini-fridge—one of his favorite flavor and one of Wally’s—and circle back, the dust motes in the air have hardly even realized he’s gone. They hardly drift even upon his return. “Here.”

Wally catches it easily. To anyone else, Barry would barely have blinked away. To any other Speedster…Barry knows intimately how lethargic and thick time feels against his skull. Slowing down to a mortal, human speed can feel maddening. Sore. Viscerally and bone-shatteringly wrong in his skin, maybe.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Barry would do that and more for his family.

They drink their smoothies.

“You know,” Barry breaks back in, the thoughts of their previous conversation looming lightly in his mind, “Medical says that the fact that we sometimes see their—let’s call it a core—is really, really bad. It’s not a shock that they’re hiding. It would be like climbing in a closet when you’re so vulnerable that you don’t feel like you can defend yourself.”

The rim of Wally’s smoothie bottle drops from his lips. The man frowns. “Oh?”

Barry shrugs. “Imagine losing your skull so that your brain is exposed all the time. Imagine being a cell and having your cell wall break so your nucleus is exposed?”

They both wince at the image.

“Oh boy. And Bart is…playing? With that entity?”

His uncle snorts. “You tell me. I think you’ve seen more of them than I have at the moment. All I did was catch them hanging out in a conference room. I have to admit, the purring can get a little loud in the…” he makes a vague gesture that could mean anything from room to atmosphere to Speedforce.

Wally’s been mostly of the same mind—the physics of the entity, whatever they are, aren’t specifically third-dimensional. It might be related to how they only sometimes manifest, or how they manifest with only partial corporeality.

“It’s been at least some play and some games for him, I’m sure,” Wally admits, a smile pulling at his mouth nevertheless. “I spotted him going through a stim toy website before he suddenly and mysteriously had a mission on the other side of the planet. But I think most of his concern is the…”

Wally winces at the thought of the myriad of medical issues the entity’s faced since his arrival to Earth. Barry’s wince stretches to match. They both saw the report.

“…So it’s been a lot of food on Bart’s part. A lot of managing his care of them too; Superboy and Rob aren’t the most straightforward team in the world, but I think they’re largely keeping Bart in check on this one— not that they’re on base as much as Bart is.”

Wally smiles. It’s not a very happy smile, or very relieved of his earlier guilt, but it’s a smile nevertheless. That’s fine. Barry’ll work on the rest on Sunday; they’re due for a good luncheon out somewhere nice. Their JLA-approved food budget can foot the bill. Maybe…Indian? There’s got to be good food in Delhi they haven’t tried yet.

“At least J’onn’s back on base next week.” Wally sighs, crooked and a little weary. “Maybe this will finally get them to stop running every time someone gets within forty feet of them. Like, they realize they’re losing vital fluids, right? Wait, is Bart even giving them any water?”

“…I’m going to hold off on that worrying thought. I have a different one I’m sweating over. Do we even know if Bart will let our resident telepath get within forty feet of his new playmate?”

Wally groans, face in his hands. Barry can’t help but laugh a little—perhaps tinged with desperation.

Sidekicks. Always with the new problems. At least last time they had this problem, Kon could talk.