#this whole thing is a tw

[57oddities]

Ive updated the summary for CiaSoU! Now you kinda know what's gonna happen :]

What if Hux never died? What if Hux left? What if, in between Starkiller's demise and Snoke's death, he decides to leave in hopes of finding a better faction to lead?

What if, when he sneaks on a cargo ship to run, things don't quite go to plan?

What if his luck runs dry?

(Good god read the tags)

You can read it here!

[l-just-want-to-see]

pjo/hoo/toa + the cycle

The Lightning Thief / Growing Sideways, Noah Kahan / Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin + Saturn Devouring His Son, Goya + Saturn, Rubens / The Blood of Olympus / The Family Jewels, MARINA / The Last Olympian / The Sea of Monsters / The Family Jewels / Orestes Pursued by the Furies, Bouguereau / The Hidden Oracle / Apollo and Marsyas, Manfredi / In The Blood, John Mayer / The Sea of Monsters / The Combat of Ares and Athena, Jacques Louis David / The Family Jewels / Mark of Athena / The Combat of Ares and Athena / The Lightning Thief / Family Line, Conan Gray / Cronos and Rhea, Schinkel / The Lightning Thief / The Blood of Olympus / In The Blood / The Last Olympian / Chronos and His Child, Romanelli / Desireé Dellagiacomo / The Lightning Thief / Family Line / The Fallen Angel, Alexandre Cabanel + The Last Day of Pompeii, Bryullov / The Blood of Olympus / The Outcast, Botticelli / Glass, Irony and God, Anna Carson / House of Hades / Family Line / The Last Olympian / The Lament for Icarus, Herbert Draper + Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Roman School + Minerva and Arachne, Houasse + Venus Induces Helen to Fall in Love with Paris, Kauffmann / The Last Olympian / Hadestown / The Lightning Thief / apple, Charli xcx / The Last Olympian / I Would Leave Me If I Could, Halsey / The Sea of Monsters / ? / LET YOUR DAD DIE ENERGY DRINK, Lavery and Corrigan / The Last Olympian / Eat Your Young, Hozier / The Last Olympian / Orpheus and the Bacchantes, Lazzarini / The Blood of Olympus / Susan Smith, wych elm / Orpheus and the Bacchantes / The Burning Maze / ? / The Tyrant’s Tomb / Perseus Freeing Andromeda, Veronese / Abduction of Psyche, Bouguereau + Bacchus and Ariadne, Van Loo / The Tower of Nero / The Tower of Nero / The Tower of Nero

[lazylittledragon]

does anyone want 700 pages of cyra lore or are you normal

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[potato-lord-but-not]

and our next course: Michael Shelley

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[ratcandy]

today i had a discussion with someone on the things we call scorpions that are not scorpions . because entomologists love to call things by names they are not actually.

ended up with this little . presentation. guide. thing. there are probably many, many more, but this is what we came up with on the Spot

[finn-shavocado]

Gamefreak: this is iono, she is an electric type gym leader and a streamer. She was made to appeal to the masses with how popular streaming has become.

The fans: oh okay she’s cool yeah

Gamefreak: … and this is Larry. He’s literally just some guy

The fans: LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY LARRY

[yyshcul]

(dis)comfort in your absence.

the short film that i worked on from mid november to the end of december! i've already received my score so i think i'm allowed to post it now. it's the first short film that i've ever made & i don't have a lot of experience in animation & and know NOTHING about sound design so please ignore the flaws v__v pretend they don't exist.

animated in adobe photoshop & adobe premiere pro

for the background noise / music i downloaded a few lmms files that i found online and played around with them a little bit

[theloveinc]

Just thought about … oh my god. Bakugo’s first real battle with a formidable villain after your kid is born; he’s not exactly “out of shape” (he never quit the gym, routine, etc… just changed it), but he’s thrown down hard in the first couple seconds, and he’s slower to get back into position—taking the time to steady his feet and assess the terrain, pushing out the lil tummy he gained feeding you postpartum delicacies as he cracks his back—

And the villain, god help them, decides to call out to him as they use the few seconds of vulnerability to attack again, screaming, “hey pop pop, don’t tell me parenthood has made you soft! How ‘bout I start calling you ‘daddy,’ too?”

Just as Bakugo’s turning back around with a new fire in his eyes, blood all warmed up, and shooting off to grab them by the throat to end the fight in one single move.

[dimpleskinard]

Firefighter pilot Thomas "Tommy" Kinard.

[dansemacabre]

i’ve been thinking about “sixer, it would eat you alive” since i read it and. man. every layer you peel back makes it worse. im not a bill apologist but. shit

if you (1) take it at face value, it paints bill as an apologetic murderer in his single (and maybe sole) open moment of regret. he doesn’t let his walls down often- only with ford do we even get to see the remnant of his galaxy, see the “actual remorse” ford describes, get just a hint of his origins. but he does it, because he thinks ford should know.

if you (2) take it from ford’s point of view, as something he committed to journal three, like. wow. imagine being so committed to a being that you’d hunt down and kill the monster that destroyed his home, only to (assumably) figure out later that that being was the monster. the small moments of trust, the “good times”, are so key to manipulation. how long did ford hold onto that one shred of vulnerability? no wonder ford stayed for as long as he did. in his eyes, bill was a survivor. ford wanted to survive too.

(slight tw below for unreality- any time i mention our reality, i mean “our reality” as a narrative device used in the book of bill as a proxy for the idea of bill being in our reality, since he can’t actually be in our reality. all of this is a fictional theory about a show/book with fictional contents!)

but if you (3) remember that “even his lies are lies” and absolutely Nothing bill says should be trusted. Whoo boy. if i read tbob right the book itself is being created in the theraprism (even tho it shows up with the ciphertologists at some point? idk that’s a whole other post). it’s meant to show what the reader wants to see; it manifests in our reality as what the collective fandom wants to see. so if we want to see truth, if we want to see where bill ended up and who he actually is, there’s a non-zero chance that the whole interaction was a complete fabrication.

imagine bill, stuck in the actively harmful, probably earth-illegal theraprism, once again being forced to be “fixed” and molded into something more palatable, being forced to conform no matter how much it hurts. (i know natural uncontrollable mutation ≠ just so much murder and destruction and chaos, but. you can’t ignore the similarities. bill has obviously been thinking about those silly straws.)

he looks back on everything that went wrong, back on his relationship with ford, back through every dimension where he wins. would that one moment, that one truth amid centuries of lies, have saved him from purgatory? if he had just been open? shown his damage? maybe he did think of his parents, or his henchmaniacs (especially the oracle). people who he might have once opened up to. maybe he just wanted to open up to someone again.

so in his own weird way, stuck in a cell, he reshaped reality again. in this reality, for this fleeting moment, he had been someone worth believing. and ford had listened, hell, ford had wanted to help. looking back, knowing how he treated ford, knowing how ford ended up because of it, maybe bill would have said the most honest thing he’d ever told ford: i am the monster, i am not worth your time or belief, and i will eat you alive.

[feastofsnakes]

Harry Goodsir // Kingdom of Conscience

[sweetmapple]

Mostly Hiring manager, but HR manager and PR manager too

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XXVIII)👽👻💚

[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... Danny has another hashtag breakdown! Man, we've got a lot of these, huh? It's YJ's fault this time; whoopsie doodles! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

💚👻👽👻💚

“Danny,” Diana says from the door.

Danny looks up from his place in the book. It’s definitely aimed at younger kids, but it’s a pretty wordy picture book; there are a couple paragraphs he can’t quite parse, but he’s making pretty good progress on the words he can’t recognize.

It’s a story about a cat who misses its mother. Danny tries not to relate to it too much.

“Hm?” he asks, flipping the front flap of the dust cover over his current pages to mark his place. The book goes back onto the nightstand, beside his space shuttle; Danny uses the railing beside his bed to support himself stepping up and out of his wheelchair, leaning on the railing until he can figure out…wait, where’d he leave his old people walker?

“This walk is long. You will want your chair.”

Well, then. Couldn’t she have said that before Danny did all that pulling? Danny falls back into his chair, kinda peeved. “Fine.”

Diana smiles. She doesn’t have to wear the mask around him anymore— Danny’s pretty sure that his injuries have been declared as clotted, or sealed, or whatever at this rate. They for sure swabbed his ectoplasm and came to some kind of conclusion, anyway, which means he only looks gross, but isn’t, like…actively leaking fluids.

On the one hand, gross! But, well, you know. Nothing for it but bandaids and time.

And her face looks nice. Danny hadn’t known what she’d looked like, before. She smiles when she sees him. Her light eyes crinkle, and her lips turn up… She’s nice. Danny’s sure that she’s only there to be in charge of him in case he gets scary, but she’s in charge of him and she’s nice. She doesn’t have to be nice; lots of people have been in charge of him and been mean about it. There was that one guy who kept holding him—with the taser—

(Time slips away from him, a little. When he gets back to the world in front of him, Diana is carefully looking at his face, the back of her hand stroking the back of his.)

Danny’s in his chair. He’s not…there. He’s in his chair, on a big space station (????) with a bunch of really colorful fighters on it, and Diana is touching his hand (that’s so much weaker and slower than it used to be) and he’s not hungry and he’s only scared because of memories. He’s safe. He’s not being pinned down by the neck so that they can strap down his wrists and hips to the table—they’re not shocking him—he can move his fingers, he’s not stuck in his core—

His core throbs. Danny bites into his bisected lip, and tries not to cry.

“Are you alright?” Diana asks, voice gentled. The soft touch of her hand doesn’t stop. “We can wait. There is no—“

Danny shakes his head, and takes his hand away so he could wipe at his eyes. It’s fine. Bad memories are everywhere: in the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling, in the hands of people taking care of him. That’s not… There’s nothing Danny can do about that. That just. Takes time.

…He think he might have that time. Now. He thought he would die for good in that five by five box, waiting for something that would finally end him instead of just keeping him in a cycle of injuries he never fully healed from.

But now he’s not. He’s here.

He wants to keep going.

“Alright,” Diana says, slow and careful. “Hold on.”

Danny doesn’t hold on—or, well, you know, he engages his core muscles and all that, but he doesn’t cling to his arm rests or to the frame of his chair because he knows that Diana is really, really strong, but she also really, really doesn’t want to hurt him.

She rolls him out of the medical wing and into the space station proper. Danny feels like he’s been here before, but he doesn’t remember it super well. Maybe it was when he was sick or something? Either way, a lot of different people wave at him as they go by—or just straight up stare, if they’re rude—and Danny generally just watches people rush by, carrying all kinds of equipment, and a potted plant, and a…starfish in a jar…?

Oh, the starfish waves at him???? Danny waves back because?? What??

Danny rolls to a stop at a smooth, cylindrical elevator. It looks like a giant test tube.

…Oh boy. Danny takes a deep breath, and holds it. Reflexively. Sure, this elevator probably isn’t like being dunked into water to see if his body absorbs ambient oxygen from the atmosphere or if his biology is truly not oxygen-based, but the memory is. Bad.

They go upwards. Nothing happens but Diana’s pushed button.

Danny exhales.

They get off at a section of the base Danny’s never been to, and it's essentially just a long, somewhat narrow hallway. The walls are actually painted a creamy off-white here, and there’s…like…decorative panels towards the base of his wheels trailing down the hallway? An orange ceiling, too?

Huh??

The rooms are numbered, but they’re not plain steel like in other areas downstairs; some of them have stickers, or drawings, or marker written straight onto the door itself. They look...cozy...? Danny thinks so, anyway, compared to the rest of the ultra high tech space base.

They roll to a stop in front of a door. It’s got a number on it, same as all the others, but there’s a box cutout taped to the front of it. The—

—The print is of the same style of space shuttle Danny keeps next to his bed, inked onto glorious cardboard medium.

Danny stares.

“Gegrapa,” Diana urges, so gentle. Too bad that, uh, Danny doesn’t know that one. He looks at her. She mimes touching the door— Oh. Got it.

Danny leans forward just enough to touch the door with his fingertips.

The door says something in a robotic voice, but the synthesizer is too mangled for Danny to make out the words. The door slides open horizontally into the wall, instead of the way the other doors open like portals or from below, and it’s kind of cool?

Inside is a bedroom. Danny stares.

…No, it’s actually a bedroom. Not a medical wing, not a cot, not a repurposed conference room or—it’s actually got a bed in it. Like. A real one. There’s a wooden headboard and it’s got a mattress on it that’s thicker than a VCR.

There’s constellation sheets on a bed big enough to curl up on.

There’s a nightstand, a small desk on the far wall—there’s a little lip where the bedroom dips into a tiny sitting room, a small television on a table and a small table and chair. It’s kind of…it’s kind of like a little hotel suite.

Danny’s mouth goes dry.

He doesn’t move, and Diana doesn’t wheel him in. “It’s okay,” Diana says, and—Danny almost flinches when she touches his hair, but it’s only Diana, who’s never hit him, and they’re fine. He’s…safe. It’s safe. He’s safe here. “Do you want to go in?”

Danny doesn’t move. His hands don’t touch the wheels. They’re shaking; he puts his hands in his lap and he tries to breathe. “…What?” he asks hoarsely.

“A rum for my Danny,” Diana murmurs, quietly. Danny’s heart throbs at the possessive. “You are healthier now. You do not need doctors every hour, but only sum hours. You cuðe spenda more time here, all ana.”

Words go by so fast even at Diana's smooth, unhurried pace— and Danny licks dry, split lips. He looks around the room—and the room is small, sure, but they're in space. Space will always be a premium. Even in this small room, though, the furniture is sparse and placed distant from each other…distant enough that Danny can wheel around freely in his chair.

There’s a Moon clock display hung on the wall over the doorway, and Danny can faintly see the outline of what he assumes is the current lunar phase as seen from Earth.

Having the lamp isn’t exactly the same as glow-in-the-dark-stars, and thank goodness for that. If it had been, Danny might have cried.

(Or, he realizes, something burning in his eyes that isn’t ectoplasm, maybe he is crying.)

“...Me?” Danny asks, terrified to know the answer. Is this room for him?? Is he getting a room here? Is he supposed to stay here? On the moon?! Is he supposed to stay with everyone here, in a tiny room, where there’s nowhere to go and nowhere to escape?

…It’s a bedroom. It’s already so much more than the stupid guys in white ever gave him.

“Yes,” Diana says, and lets go of his hair. “Use it, or do not. Sitta here, or sitta in the medical bay, but now you have two choices.”

Okay. So Danny has choices. He swallows his feelings—they taste a lot like snot—and rolls himself inside to inspect the room.

There’s another little fridge inside the sitting area. It’s not right next to the bed like it is beside Danny’s cot, but it is the same style of fridge. When Danny pops the door open, it has the same styles of snacks. Fig Einsteins. Peanut butter squeezies and applesauce squeezies and yogurt squeezies. Protein shakes in bottles. Pedialight. Hummus packs.

Danny might still need someone to open the snack packs for him. That’s kind of a high dexterity food, if he thinks about it.

“If you wish to sitta here, we will visit you all you like. There is a belle at your bed,” Diana says, and walks in with all her purple scrubs and tied-up hair to point to a little button on his nightstand. It’s red. It’s got a little smiley face sticker next to it, and Danny thinks he recognizes the style from one of his nurse’s bestickered name tags. Belle is probably a direct cognate for bell. He’ll be able to get everyone to come up here if he needs help.

…Okay, that’s kind of nice. To have personal space. He hasn’t had that since… Danny’s eyes squint as he thinks; he rubs an eye. Wait, when had he been squatting under a conference table? Was that a real memory??

Diana is very tall, even in the little space, but when she ducks her head, the gesture makes her a little smaller, a little more manageable for Danny’s lower-than-usual-gaze. Now that he can see her expression, she looks soft, and even uncertain, even though she looks stone and strong on the television when she goes out to fight. “Do you like it?” she asks.

Danny fidgets.

He—does. He likes it a lot. The room doesn’t have any windows, but if Danny moved all his things in here, got used to being able to come and go, and people coming in and out…this space could be just another space. It’s quieter than the medical ward. More peaceful.

…The room is utterly devoid of other people.

(Danny thinks of The Box. Danny thinks of being in The Box.)

(Danny doesn’t like remembering The Box.)

“I am scared,” Danny admits to his twitching thumbs, his fingers itching for a fidget toy or one of his physical therapy tools. Diana’s face immediately drops.

“Why are you scared?”

I’ll be alone Danny wants to say, but he doesn’t know the word for alone and he struggled with phrasing. “No…people here.”

“That is triewe. You would have more dīegolnes here,” Diana agrees, and straightens out of her crouch. “Is that good, or bad?”

It isn’t good and it isn’t bad…? Danny isn’t sure how to phrase it. It’s neither. Being alone is just scary.

“You not hurt me,” Danny tries, knowing he’s missing some connecting word in the middle. He ignores how Diana comes back to kneel beside him, because if he looks at her, he won’t say anything. “Do not.”

“No,” Diana says, from beside and below him, gentle, careful. “We do not.”

No. They don’t. Danny swallows. “Bad…hurt me.” He doesn’t know the word for Earth or planet or even downstairs, so he just meekly points downwards.

Diana stills. It’s like watching Vlad’s Maddie cat spot a bird to hunt down. Danny tries not to feel pinned. “On eorþegearde?” she asks, still light, still gentle. Danny can hear a shadow of steel, though, and he counts himself lucky that she’s never treated him like an enemy. Danny quickly nods. His eyes squeeze shut.

“Who?” Diana asks feather-light.

Danny doesn’t want to tell them what he is. Admitting the name of the agency hunting him itself would be given in.

…But maybe if he doesn’t say the name…and they...and they promised they'd help hide him...

He wants to be right. Danny wants to be right that they're nice, and that they want to help him. Danny wants to be right that they want to protect him. As long as he never, nevernotevernever tells them he's a ghost...

Maybe someone will help him. This time.

“Bad,” Danny repeats, because he genuinely has no idea how to translate?? “Wants…hurts me? For…” WHAT WORDS DOES HE KNOW? Danny gives up and just draws a y-shaped autopsy incision on his chest. It goes down from his collarbones to his belly button.

Diana watches. Her eyes are sharp.

“Do you feel safe with the staff dunstæger in medical?” Diana is quick on the ball with the question and Danny nods quickly—he’s never alone there, and no one’s ever hurt him, and people whose job it is to help people are always coming in and out, and Medical helps them too.

“Good,” Danny whispers. “Talk…talks to me.”

“Ealne weg,” Diana affirms firmly. Whatever that means. “We will cepa you safe.”

You safe and we is all Danny needs to hear. He could probably cry by himself, but Danny wants the comfort anyway; Diana lets Danny take her hands into his, and he lets tears fall into someone else’s grip instead of his own.

*

Bruce is halfway to the monitor room before he feels himself be picked up from underneath the armpits.

Usually finding himself at inappropriate heights involves horseplay from Clark. No one else would be so bold as to actually put their hands on him within the professional setting of the Watchtower—and Bruce has worked very, very hard on maintaining a reputation that keeps the handsier of his fellows at bay.

The culprit is not Clark this time. Bruce finds himself looking downward at Diana’s tearstained face, fury and resignation warring in her expression.

Bruce is careful not to sigh. “Wonder Woman. What is the matter?”

“Someone,” Diana grits out, voice carefully modulated to cut out her own pain, “Hurt my charge.”

On the one hand, the situation with their patient is exactly as Bruce had expected. The circumstance is tragic. The circumstance was predictable.

On the other, Diana's new upset means that Bruce now has more information to work with than ever before.

Bruce can work with this.

“Tell me everything.” Bruce’s voice is just as firm—even held midair like a cat. “I will help you in every way I can.”