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#Danny realizing he didn't know how to read analog even when he was well: shit. >:(
faeriekit · 6 months
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Health and Hybrids (XVI)👽👻💚
[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 PART FIFTEEN is here and this is sixteen *SixTeen theme plays*
💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts
Where we last left off... Martian Manhunter finds out that,yeah, dude, when your brain is missing chunks, you can't write or access data without the hardware to store it. My dude remembers nothing.
Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.
💚👻👽👻💚
Days pass. Nights pass.
(He thinks.)
He gets a new room. This one has a window. He can’t stare at it all the time, but when he does, he can feel himself growing stronger. Steadier. The change in his body is borderline tangible.
If only it was physical. He’s still too weak to lift anything but his arms, and not even all the way. Moving his head is tiring. Lifting his head is impossible.
But he tries.
A lot.
The doctors and the lady have to make upset noises with him when he does, but he wants to be able to see everything they’re doing to him. So far it’s a lot of tubes and needles, but what if they become scalpels and clamps?
…Danny tries to assure himself that they probably won’t be.
But they might. Things could change.
And that eats at him constantly.
Someone puts a big circle on the wall in his room. It’s large. It’s a little fuzzy at its distance on the far wall, but it’s got little arms on it, and little dots in equal degrees around the circumference. It takes him almost two napping periods to realize that it’s a clock.  
Danny squints. He can...almost read analog. (Probably.) It sure doesn’t help that he has no idea when night is and when day is, though. He sleeps at one hour and wakes up at another, and the room will look entirely the same. Was it a few hours’ sleep, or a day’s? Was it longer? The world spins outside his window, big and blue, and he spins against it in a station on a lonely moon. There’s no way to tell.
Someone eventually notices that he’s bored, though, because he gets a television and a remote.
It’s a super thin television. At first, Danny spends time wondering why they put a screen with no system in his room, and then hour later the lady starts pressing buttons on the remote, and the screen lights up with a news program.
…The TV is too far away to see all that clearly. He can see some of it when he squints, but then all the colors turn lime green.
The banner on the bottom of the screen scrolls with headlines, and cool, it looks like they invented new letters while Danny was asleep. Fantastic. His head hurts from trying to squint to read, but it kind of looks like a kindergartener scribbled all over an otherwise serious news report.
Great. Now he’s getting a headache.
But the noise is…nice. It’s distracting. The news anchors chatter seriously as Danny gets yet another IV swapped out in his arm, and the heavily geared-up doctors have started telling Danny things he doesn’t like to listen to too much because if it is threats, great, he should ignore that; if it’s not threats, then, well, Danny’s bored of it all anyway.
“—Wel?”
Danny blinks. Well. That sounds like ‘Well’.
He shifts just enough to make eye contact. A doctor looks down at him from their place at his bedside. Their scrubs are kind of blue-green, with little flowers on the trim.
They have human eyes. The sight of soft, brown eyes probably ought to be reassuring, but they just make Danny more nervous.
“Eow eart wel?” They ask again, soft and slow. That middle bit sounds kind of like ‘art’. Ha. Old timey Shakespeare. ‘Art well,’ like ‘you art well—‘
Wait. Danny takes a deep breath. Blinks. His chest arcs up, just a little—just enough for the doctor to realize that Danny’s more than just looking, he’s paying attention. Are they asking him if he’s well?
Danny reflexively opens his mouth and flexes his throat, tries to answer—
Nope. Ow. The noise he makes sounds like the garbage disposal is backed up with angry blob ghosts. It hurts just to make. But the sound makes the doctor look at him; they see him.
“Inne cwic tima!” Danny hears, and then they’re jogging out of the room, and Danny is left alone. His throat hurts.
His head thumps back onto his pillow. The news program plays on. There’s a damaged city he’s never seen before on the news.
…And then the doctor comes back. Danny’s head is swimming, so he almost doesn’t notice their return, but they’re holding something, and that something has a sippy straw.
Danny is perfectly happy with a sippy straw.
The straw is put into his mouth. Danny goes sippy sippy.
…The water sloshes a little weirdly through his throat. Some of his tubes might not be where they ought to be, which is weird. Isn’t he supposed to be human right now? Or. Uh. Kind of human? Human equivalent? …Close enough…?
Danny drinks. When the pain in his throat goes to normal pain levels instead of new and angry pain levels, he lets go of the straw, and the doctor lets him.
Their fingers carefully brush Danny’s hair. Not very hard. A little too slowly. Just at the hairline. But it reminds Danny so much of sitting at home with Dad on the couch, home from school with a fever as Muppets tapes play in the background, that tears leak out of his busted eyes. The tears are probably just as green.
“Eow eart wel?” the doctor asks again. So gently. So careful.
“I’m tired,” Danny rasps.
The effort of speaking crashes into him in seconds. If things are happening around him, he doesn’t understand any of it. Nothing reaches him. He’s so tired.
He’s out before he knows it.
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