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muffinlance · 6 days

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Read "Suki, Alone". Liked it in general. But can they please, please hire someone who knows both the show's actual events and how to follow through on a character arc? Because guys. Guys. That comic is not implying about Suki what they meant it to be implying, and all because of literally one line.

So like. From a writer's standpoint:

What they meant to do: show Suki as a community-oriented person who cares for her people, and believes in everyone succeeding together.

As opposed to (spoilers): the thief girl they set her up in contrast with, who's pretty upfront and consistent on primarily looking out for herself. She betrays Suki for one (1) corn chip to improve her own life at the prison, no surprise.

But the problem is: they give Suki an inspirational line to the effect of "we're all working together and we'll all break out together"

You know

The thing she does not do in the show

So if both the show and this comic are canon, then instead of setting up a compare/contrast with the thief girl, they've just set up a comparison. One were Suki is arguably worse, because she's been leading a significant number of prisoners on with her "we'll all fight and win our freedom together!" business, only to straight up cut them out of the escape loop and abandon them, whereas the thief is only leading Suki on in the sense that Suki keeps telling her what it's morally correct to think and confuses snide replies with agreement

My dudes. My fellow writers. You people actually being paid for this. There were so many ways to fix those awful implications against our girl's character, the simplest of which would be to not include that line. Or they could have, you know, made it canon compliant with what actually happens in the show, so that this comic doesn't set Suki up as a betrayer instead of a community builder. Like... just send all her good prison buddies off to other prisons in the wake of the warden finding out they're colluding. Have it timed to be right before the next new prisoners arrive, thus setting it immediately before the Boiling Rock episodes, so Suki didn't have anyone left in the prison she'd want to take with her on a breakout. For bonus points, include a page or two of her and her Kyoshi warriors opening up the cell of one of her prison friends post-war, thus implying she's tracking down and actually fulfilling her promises. Maybe even show her doing the same with thief girl, who was established as being imprisoned on false charges anyway, and also showing that Suki is A) the bigger person, and B) willing to acknowledge her own role in mistakes (because I cannot emphasize enough how much thief girl was not hiding her own priorities, and it was Suki who approached HER with all this, not the girl ever doing anything special to weasel her way in) (this would also open up an opportunity for paralleling Suki's earlier in-comic mistake of not listening to one of her friend's very valid thoughts and feeling, which lead to the girl leaving their island alone pre-canon; a "seeing people as they are, not what you want them to be" moment)

Anyway yeah enjoyable enough for a quick read but another one for the "this can't be canon or the characters are So Much Worse than they were in the actual show" pile

At least Aang didn't promise to murder anyone in this one

#I also have minor critiques like #Why are all the guards drawn as short and noodly-armed as Sokka pretending to be a guard #Why are the guards the only ones allowed to have funny lines #Did anyone consider using a lack of dialogue in some panels to establish mood and let the visuals speak for themselves (no they did not)#Why is Azula villain monologuing for so long at the start #She does like her villain lines but in the show they're short #And generally aimed at fresh opponents #Not last week's old news #I kept wondering why Azula was even there instead of generic lackeys especially since she had to have been dealing with the conquest of #Ba Sing Se around then. big This Could Have Been An Email vibes #Also as a gardener #HOW FAST WERE THOSE PRISON PLANTS GOING TO SEED AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME #Apparently they needed minimal (almost no?) light and tiny cracks of space and were nutritious and tasted good raw and grew so fast they #Could substantially affect the diets of multiple prisoners within a short time span?#I WANT THEM IN MY INDOOR SETUP ASAP #Screw lettuce I want Suki's Magic Beans #avatar the last airbender #atla #Suki #There continue to be no comics in Ba Sing Se but this was a better attempt than some #Suki Alone

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faeriekit · 6 months

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Health and Hybrids (XV)👽👻💚

[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 TWOis 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 and this is part fifteen...somehow...

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts

Where we last left off... Author regrets both use of Roman numerals and Old English but you know what? We ballin'. Also Danny woke up! With only some complications! woohoo! 🎉

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 comes in and out of consciousness in bursts.

Wherever he is, it’s not the Guys in White. He rules that out very, very quickly.

For one. The Guys in White would not hire a lady to sit around and mind him constantly. He has— The same few doctors come in and out of green-tinged vision consistently. Their tags are different de-saturated colors, but he can recognize most of them.

And, somehow, the lady is there. If not at his side immediately, at his side quickly enough.

With his space shuttle.

With a grip toy.

With…oatmeal.

The oatmeal is what really clues Danny in that this can’t be the GIW.

The GIW would never waste human food on him. Never. It creates too much of a logistical mess: a paper trail of payments, feeding people that don’t exist; the need for cleanup of bio-waste that no one wants to deal with; the cleaning and sanitizing of utensils, which could easily contaminate a living person.

And yet. There is oatmeal.

Mushy, unappetizing oatmeal.

The lady feeds it to him when she’s around. She spoons it into his mouth, quietly chatting all the while. She could be telling him how she’s going to cut out his organs to be chopped up and mounted on glass slides for investigation for all that Danny knows, but still, very patiently, she spoonfeeds him little mouthfuls of oatmeal.

She waits for him to swallow every time. If he stops eating, she lets him stop.

It’s kind. It’s gentle.

It’s…it’s the nicest thing Danny’s had in a long time.

It’s so nice that he stops being overtly weird when the doctors come in. He knows it’s a bad idea. He knows he’s shooting himself in the foot probably.

But…but no one is being mean to him. Everyone is being careful. Gentle.

Quiet. Slow. Obvious.

One of the doctors drops a meal tray once and everyone rushes to quiet it, to check that he’s settled, to…comfort? Him?

The oatmeal tastes bad, by the way. It’s also how he finds out part of his tongue is numb.

Or maybe it tastes bad because some of his tongue is numb.

Either way. Ew. It’s bland and it tastes bad and Danny has to finish all of it, even though he has an IV in him that puts food into him.

His IV itches. He’s sad that he can’t move and can’t protect himself. He’s tired and he’s bored of sitting here. He doesn’t know where he is and no one can tell him because he can’t understand them.

There’s no TV.

There are other concerns to be worried about, but Danny would like a television, please. Something with news on it. Something that could ground him in a location, or a place, or…

The air hisses. For a moment, breathing is going to be easier as the air cycles. It hurts, still, to breathe—the GIW hadn’t thought Danny needed to breathe, so they hadn’t put him back together right. He breathes through cobbled-together organs and raw pink seams, but yet. He breathes.

Danny lays there, and he breathes. He clutches his space shuttle toy between his wrist and his thigh, because he can.

There’s a whisper against the door. The heavy mechanisms of the door clank out of place.

Danny’s eyelids flutter as they fail to either open or close. The green in his vision bunches and falls as they try. The lady must be back.

Surely, enough, she is. Her paper gown is a mint blue today. It matches her mask and her gloves, but not her pinkish-grey shoes. She comes through the door, and—

—there’s something behind her.

It’s. They’re. Humanoid? They’re…green?

Danny stares, his head against the pillow, his eyes wide. They’re. They’re floating.

He can’t stop staring. His eyelids don’t even twitch. The lady walks to his bedside, and the…the other one follows him.

“Wel mette,” the lady greets him again, her fingers on the very corner of his mattress and no further. “Eom hebbjan ure freond.”

Danny has no idea what that means. He stares; he stares at the…their… Is that a ghost? Is a ghost just…walking around??

The—the being has—their head isn’t super. Humanoid. It’s more oval and angular, to be honest. But the rest of them is; their outfit is certainly out of the world Danny has grown up in, and is mostly constructed of straps crossing around the larger shapes of their body. And a…cloak…?

Is this a ghost?? It has to be, right? But a ghost of what??

There’s a sensation. Danny doesn’t have control over his body in the way that he’s used to, but this sensation isn’t aimed at his—it doesn’t—it’s not physical. It’s just a touch. A feeling.

Like he thought. A sensation. But still. Its presence is…Danny’s pretty sure it’s a greeting.

He…he doesn’t greet back. He doesn’t know if this is a friend.

…Lots of ghosts pretend to be something they’re not. He doesn’t know who this ghost is. He doesn’t know who this lady is. His head hurts and it’s hard to think and he knows everyone just wants to hurt him even when they pretend not to. Or they don’t even know it yet.

So he turns his head and pretends he’s dead. (Or. Uh. Dead-er.) Dead things don’t have thoughts, duh. You can’t read mine if I don’t have any!

The ghost drifts closer. Danny can’t move—he can’t run, can barely flinch—but he can feel how taut he gets the closer they get, the further they get into his personal bubble.

The greeting comes again. It’s quieter on the second round. Gentler. The ghost is trying not to scare him, is trying not to hurt him. Just careful, gentle contact.

Danny squeezes his eyes closed. It doesn’t work (whoops) because his eyes don’t close right (he forgot about that) and then his head hurts a lot because he’s working a whole lot of muscles who were not prepared to put in so much effort at the drop of a hat.

The greeting turns a little…melancholy. It matches the tone that the lady takes on when Danny’s breathing stutters and his body screams with exhaustion he can’t shake.

He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He doesn’t want to be poked and prodded and then attacked when the ghost realizes Danny’s not Fun the way the ghosts want him to be—willing to play around when people get hurt or ignore the pain around them. Danny just wants to be left alone.

The greeting is gently let go. From the ghost comes a question—something soft. Something celestial. Danny can’t tell the specifics, but there are moons and stars in the question.

…His fingers flex around the plastic shell of his model shuttle. There’s. He’s. Space?

The green ghost turns to the lady. “Læt uns ga an wealc”, they say, in that English Danny doesn’t know and doesn’t understand.

The lady says something back to them. They say something back to the lady. The lady goes to the wall, where there is a phone, and says something.

Danny tenses. This is it. She’s calling in for backup. More people are coming and it’s going to hurt.

The phone call ends. The lady comes back and Danny tenses—

But there’s nowhere to run and his physical body is too weak to hide properly. She reaches his bedside, reaches out her arms, and Danny flinches away.

He can’t shut his eyes. He can’t stop seeing her outstretched arms because he can’t shut his eyes.

“Mæg eom ahebbe eow?”

Danny doesn’t know what that means!!!

The ghost brushes their fingers up against the steel rail of Danny’s cot. There’s an image—of the lady, clear as day, in a red and blue and gold outfit, bridal-carrying someone from building rubble. There’s a prodding at his core that says you, there, in particular.

He’s dumbfounded. Like, to lift? To lift him?

There’s a sense of agreement, and then the image of a cot with wheels. The wheels are the focus of the message.

…They’re asking Danny permission? To go somewhere?

On one hand, no, Danny doesn’t want to be any further complicit into whatever horrible kidnapping scheme this probably is. This place sucks. He doesn’t want to see more of it. This is the second worst kidnapping he’s ever had and he wants no part in it.

On the other hand, however, this place sucks, and getting out of here, even if only temporarily…

Danny licks his lips. There’s craters in the soft tissue. He tastes orange pixie sticks and the sour tang of battery acid.

If Danny is very, very smart. And very, very careful. And very, very quiet… Well. What are the chances they wheel him past the exit on this excursion?

Sure, they’re pretty low. But there’s hope.

Danny hasn’t had hope in ages.

He nods. He hates that he does—his neck jerks upwards, and then he’s sore and tired everywhere and in his head and neck and shoulders, and he’s not going to be able to move much more than that for literal hours (sorry, oatmeal mush), and he’s said yes.

“Þancie eow!” the lady says, and the ghost translates that for him as thank you and then she lifts Danny up off the bed cot he lives on like he’s still a ghost, and not made of heavy, teenage flesh. Wow is she strong. Danny hopes her job isn’t to hurt him. Otherwise he’s going to be a smear of green on the wall and then what would the point of inspecting his insides be??

Danny gets lifted. Danny gets carried.

(It’s not an amazing experience on his aching body. He thinks some of his bruises start to leak ectoplasm in self defense. Her arms are as stiff as rocks.)

Being lifted is also how Danny finds out there’s something caging his legs. They don’t seem to be caged together—they hang individually—but they keep them taut and aligned so that all the pressure of being lifted is on his hips, and not his legs. Considering that Danny’s received pretty medium care for his troubles…that doesn’t bode well for whatever state his legs are in.

Danny gets gently, gently placed down onto a new cot. The side bars are metal, but thinner than on the bed he woke up on.

The world starts to move.

Oh. They’re moving. Danny’s moving.

It’s kind of startling. The world’s been so static and fuzzy for so long, and now he’s bedridden but moving.

The ghost opens the door, and Danny’s still body and the bed follow with it. The lady has to be pushing, then. They go through it and—

—Danny blearily squints. Ow. Bright.

Bright, LED light follows Danny down steel hallways and past strangers in bright outfits, their colors pale and washed out by Danny’s attempts to squeeze green eyelids together and stop seeing everything.

He wants to stop. This is too much. He bites his lip—jaw aching—and grunts—throat tearing—and—

The ghost that keeps trying to talk to him sends some other emotion, and Danny purposefully ignores them. It’s easy enough to block things you don’t want to feel. The green wall of a body floats out in front of him to open another door, and Danny is pushed inside.

The lights are off in here. The tension in Danny’s forehead gets a little quieter. That’s…nice. It makes the window in the room seem bigger and brighter, and—

Danny jerks. His whole body screams at him as he claws against the cot, trying to get closer, closer—

He hurts something in his back. He can tell. There’s something in his hips that’s strained, or possibly fractured, as he climbs across a horizontal surface. The beings around him make worried, scared noises, and that doesn’t matter right up until the bed moves so Danny can push his face right up against the glass.

Because that’s space out there. The stars are out there. And Danny is so, so close to them.

It’s so…

…Danny doesn’t know how much time he loses to starlight before he falls asleep.

“Did you see!” Diana gushes, the windows going by. The cot (and the alien in it) she pushes through the hall, the occasional curious eye turning to them as they go past. “J’onn, did you see, he had glowed! I know we had hoped that he would be receptive, but—“

“Diana,” J’onn murmurs, his voice low. Wonder Woman’s head tilts to find him behind her, and she only slows just enough to not run the cot or its occupant into any unsuspecting superheroes.

The first fear is for the worst scenario. “Did the excursion hurt him?”

The Martian hesitates. “…No,” he says, and nothing more. He drifts forward to the metaphorical prow of their vehicle, and Diana sets her shoulders into generating momentum. J’onn opens doors for them as they pass.

The alien child isn’t awake to consent to be returned to his newly cleaned bed, but Diana feels secure enough returning him to his usual haunt that she proceeds to do so.

Even when physical, he is frighteningly limp in her arms.

She takes care to support his head as she pulls him up to her chest. He is so fragile. When the light comes across his face as he moves, parts of his face are still ominously transparent. Ominously liquid. Ominously green.

Diana should not be able to see the inner airways of his nose, nor the thin, still-healing holes in his skull, or his irises while his eyes try in vain to shut with skin they do not have.

She lays him down. Gently, she tucks him under thin sheets with gloved hands.

J’onn drifts over to her side. His feet haven’t touched the ground—not since he was reminded that visible signs of non-human life might be reassuring to a non-human. “He doesn’t remember us,” he says. Diana hears him.

And then she hears him.

“He what?”

“He has no memory of his time on the base. He has no memory yourself, of our previous communication, of the junior heroes… He has no understanding of the layout of the base, nor of things we had already established: my status as an alien lifeform to Earth and the base’s lunar occupancy. As far as he knows, he woke up here a week and a half ago to strangers having taking up a caretaker’s role, and he doesn’t know why and if we will harm him.”

Diana stills. She…takes a deep breath.

“Alright,” she whispers. And then, louder: “Alright. We can fix this.”

And they will, although it will take time, because even if he doesn’t remember them, Diana knows him—a child with too much fear, who likes to be around others, who occasionally plays around but likes his boundaries respected. A child who put glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.

“Oh,” Diana realizes at last, reaching a point J’onn had already understood: “Impulse is going to be so disappointed.”

#Bart guarding his friend's stuff in the other room: I sense something Not Cool :(#Kon: whoah are you psychic?? Can I get a reading??#*they proceed to distract themselves for an hour before remembering the Not Cool Vibe Bart felt*#health and hybrids #dp x dc #danny phantom #dpxdc #dcxdp #tw gore #tw medical #tw body horror #dcu crossover

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