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faeriekit · 2 months

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Health and Hybrids (XIX)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

PART ONE is here PART TWO is here PART THREE is here PART FOUR is here and PART FIVE is here PART SIX is here and PART SEVEN is here PART EIGHT is here PART NINE is here PART TEN is here PART ELEVEN is here PART TWELVE is here PART THIRTEEN is here PART FOURTEEN is here PART FIFTEEN is here PART SIXTEEN is here PART SEVENTEEN is here PART EIGHTEEN is here...nineteen...oy vey.

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

Where we last left off... THE BART RETURNS! The earth rejoices! 🥳🎉 Physical therapy can be fun, even if it usually isn't!

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 learns a few more words with practice.

Foda is simple. If Danny is hungry, he can ask for foda. It sounds exactly like food, and when he asks, they feed him.

…Or they up his IV. Which. Danny’s tongue might still feel sore and nasty, but the doctors and nurses and millions of minders don’t seem that mad when he sticks his tongue out at them. Sometimes they even laugh.

They don’t even sound all that mean.

It takes Danny a good chunk of waking time for him to realize that he…probably is hooked up to something he doesn’t want to think about, since all the efforts of lifting and moving him haven’t resulted in a single bathroom trip since he woke up here.

Firstly: horrible.

Secondly: his legs are super, absolutely, positively immobilized, and if someone doesn’t give him enough medication quickly enough after it wears off, Danny is very aware that something is deeply wrong with them.

So. Uh. That’s…gross.

He learns bealo just as quickly. He isn’t sure what bealo means, per se, but when he says it, they up his medication until Danny can pretend he doesn’t have any legs again.

God niht is goodnight, unless Danny is feeling snippy, and then it’s just niht.

…The one lady who minds him always says the whole thing, though. Even when Danny’s mean. Like the one time he threw his rocket at someone.

Or the time he started ignoring everyone when they tried to touch him.

…Or the one time he tried to freeze his IV bag, and put everyone on alert because if he’d been human, that would have seriously hurt him.

“Sorry,” Danny’d whispered, even if it wouldn’t mean anything to her.

She’d patted his hand and meant it. Danny’d had to dry his eyes with his wrist. “Eall es wel.”

Anyway.

Danny hates being in the freaking bed every hour of every day. So when his “sitting up” exercises turn into “hey, let’s try the wheelchair” practice, Danny gets so excited-slash-nervous that he kind of feels like he’s going to throw up all the liquids he’s been injected with.

None of the regular people try to lift him. Instead the lady does it herself, scooping Danny up in very strong arms, the golden cuffs on her wrists weirdly warm on Danny’s skin. When Danny’s settled, his legs sticking out real weird and his back kind of sore, he’s…out of bed.

He’s. He’s not in bed anymore.

And. Sure. It’s temporary, but it’s not the bed. Danny can wriggle, and he can sort of palm the wheels underneath him with the heels of his shaky hands, and he can see so much more of himself than he has in ages and ages.

For one. Both of his legs are in casts. That’s. Not good. He can’t feel it right now, but the sight of fully encased legs…

Well. If he can transform that won’t be a problem. If. If he has to escape. But it is…it’s super scary. He mostly remembers being captured, but the…the other people had been focusing more on his thoracic cavity and his face and head.

…So why are his legs so bad? Did something else happen?

(It did, didn’t it?)

(…Didn’t it??)

His hands shake, but there’s something to all that grip training, or else Danny wouldn’t be able to paw at his neckline to look down his own shirt. Or, well, his cloth nightie, anyway.

It’s good that he looks, since, well…his chest is glowing a solid green.

Whatever should probably be scar tissue. Uh. It…isn’t. There’re gouges down his chest and a crater where his heart should be that probably should be healing over, considering, you know, he’s not freaking dead at this exact second (mostly??), but. Instead of, like, healed flesh, or, say, his insides, there’s a transparent green…jelly… holding him together.

He can see how the green bounces with his heart beat.

...Danny drops the neckline of his gown. His breath comes in choking bursts, eyes pressed into his eye sockets—he feels sick.

He is sick. He has been sick.

The humans are keeping him here because he’s a freak of nature and he’s broken from head to toe and the Guys in White carved his flesh out of his body and opened him up like a can of cranberry sauce.

He presses his hands to his chest, to his stomach, just trying to breathe for long enough that he doesn’t throw up his oatmeal and occasional juice and IV nutrition onto the pristine floor of his sickroom. The people around him all make sympathetic noises that don’t help because he doesn’t know what they mean.

And then he feels something weird.

Not all the sensation in his fingers are back. It’s easier for him to feel impediments than it is to feel textures—something that blocks him from moving, rather than anything sensory-specific. He can usually tell when he touches fabric, because when he moves too far, it pulls tight around his hand. He can tell when he’s on something solid when his hand fails to go through it.

There is something solid sticking out of him.

Danny’s heartbeat quickens. It’s not. It’s. There’s something in him.

And it’s not—it’s so solid. When Danny brushes his hands against it, he can feel his skin and his flesh move with it, trying not to dislodge the thing embedded in him. It pulls at his skin. He doesn’t know what it is.

His fingers tremble as he tries to brush over the object through his gown, trying to figure out its shape from faulty touch alone. It’s like waking up to find himself jammed with needles all over again.

People are talking around them. Danny doesn’t try to listen in. He’s scared. He’s so scared. Something’s happened to him, and he didn’t even notice.

Some of it is—hard. There’s a crinkling sound when he moves. Danny manages to pull his gown neckline back again to catch something of a glimpse, and all he sees is plastic.

He doesn’t know what it is.

He doesn’t know who to ask. He can’t understand anyone and he doesn’t know if he trusts them.

They put something in him. There’s something embedded in him.

He thinks he’s going to cry.

Something touches his arm—Danny flinches. His core tightens with stress as he puts a metaphorical hand on the button, ready to run and hide at any notice.

It’s the lady. He knows her.

No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know her at all. He can’t talk to her in any way that matters. She’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know why she’s here, or why she’s keeping him here.

She’s nice. She fed him. But is that all it takes to trick him? To make him compliant? Pliable?

She stops touching him when he gets scared, her eyes worried. She kneels—closer than Danny would like, probably, but she keeps her hands to herself. Danny’s heart races faster, out of order, starting and stopping and starting again like a bad engine.

“Eow eart wel?” she asks from his left arm rest, a common question, so softly. Danny doesn’t know what it means. “Eall es wel. Ænlic eow, ænlic me. Bruce bræð wið me?”

She takes a big, deep, breath. Her hand rises slightly over her chest, following an exaggerated movement. Don’t panic. Breathe. Breathe like me. One, two, three.

Danny’s breaths are more choked. More panicked.

But when she breathes, he breathes with her—even with every stutter in between.

“Hwæt es woh[O3] ?” the lady asks, so gently it’s almost a whisper. Her pointer finger hovers over his body, but doesn’t touch—and eventually, Danny figures out she probably wants to know where he’s hurting.

But he’s not hurting. He’s scared. There’s something inside him, and he isn’t sure what it is. He presses the heel of his hand to the object. He feels something rigid refuse to bend inside his flesh.

There’s something of recognition in the woman’s face. “Inne cwic tima,” she says, more certain of answers outside the room, and darts away,

Danny wants to bounce his bound leg. He feels awful when anyone is in the room with him, considering how little of them he knows, but, somehow, it’s so much worse when he’s actually alone.

When she comes back, there’s a second person who walks through the double doors with her, in blue scrubs with ducks on them. They wave to Danny.

Danny…blinks. He feels numb. It’s kind of a problem.

They take it in stride, though; in their hands is a blank board and a chunky marker. The cap comes off, the new person scribbles for a minute or so, and then turns the board around so that Danny can see.

It’s a…person. A rudimentary outline person, sure, with some visible bones and organs to fill in the person-shaped outline. Danny can recognize most of them from anatomy class, although those memories are more…personal, now. A little more painful.

The person taps on the board. The person points to Danny.

Danny frowns.

The person turns the board back around and makes some Pew, Pew, Pew! sounds with their mouth, occasionally opening and closing their hand over the board to match the noise. There’s some more scribbling. When the board turns back around, there’s a violent smudge of marker on top of the drawn person’s drawn intestines.

The person takes their covered pinky finger and erases a little neat circle of marker in the intestines, mostly favoring one side. They draw a little arrow from the hole to the general outside-of-the-person blank area. Then another circle, with a thicker circle inside.

Danny recognizes the object jutting out of him. Oh. This is how he got it.

The person—probably a doctor, Danny guesses, or the surgeon who did this to him—do these people even need credentials, actually?—hands the board over to the lady. They hold out ten outstretched fingers, marker under their arm, and make a show of counting every one of the outstretched fingers with the opposite hand. Then they take the board back.

And then, when they write on the board, Danny can actually understand what they say.

Or, well, it’s numbers! The numbers are the same as his—the line and a circle is clearly meant to be a ten, and the little x is a multiplication symbol— they draw a 10, as clearly and a brightly as it could be against a stark white board, and add a little x 7, probably to indicate a week; the result is ten suns times seven, or seventy suns.

Danny feels his heart bounce in his chest. Danny would bet a whole lot of money that the number is meant to be seventy days. There is an end point. It’s not that Danny is free to be subjected to random anatomical whims—there’s a goal here. This was purposeful.

The little circle-within a circle gets erased. The hole is scribbled through as if it was never there, and the person makes a weaving gesture with the marker that Danny is certain is meant to be sewing.

Tears prick at his eyes. The lady gets close by him again, but Danny lets her. His hands aren’t good enough for wiping tears the way he wants to, yet. Help and company are good.

She gives him a tissue from Danny's bedside table. He takes it with a whisper of a grip.

“Seventy?” Danny rasps, tearful. Hopeful. Terrified of hope. He practically jams the tissue into his eye sockets.

The lady’s eyes go wide. “Seventy,” she repeats, marveling.

It’s enough. Nothing is perfect, but it’s enough. And if Danny's allowed to spend so long in front of the space window that he falls asleep in his wheelchair, well. It's not like he was in charge of where they went.

#*hip checks through the door* hey losers! Guess who uses Arabic numbers!! Two earths!!#also if ANYONE is shitty about stoma bags or ostomy bags on this fic or in this chat I'm going to fight you. Lots of people have them.#they're usually a temporary procedure and even if they're not they're pretty normal and a lot of people have them. I knew at least one #like haha this is a body horror fic but ostomy bags are a REAL THING that people HAVE as part of their medical journey DO NOT be rude!!#So what we know of his injuries now: messed up legs. Messed up guts. Messed up chest. Is there more...? Who can say. 👀#health and hybrids #dp x dc #dcu crossover #tw gore #tw medical #tw body horror #dpxdc #dcxdp #danny phantom #incarceration to elopement to healthcare pipeline #His healing is speeding up and his language is getting better! When can we get a Diana POV?? <- me to me

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