you were raised in comparison.
it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.
you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.
you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.
what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.
it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.
you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.
you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?
a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.
you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.
it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.
something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.
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clone danny's accident in the clone^2 au
Im thinking about clone^2 danny's accident in this au. he doesn't have his halfa powers in this au. He has his scary eyes and the ghost sense and the ability to see ghosts - kinda takes up a psychopomp role with his ghost cases - and enough ectoplasm to trigger the ghost defenses in his parents' house. But he doesn't have his ghost powers or his ghost half. He's just very strongly liminal.
And im just mmmmm thinking about how that came to be. When I originally made the clone danny au back in the summer i couldn't think of how he had his accident without putting him inside the portal, and I couldn't put him inside the portal and have it turn on and then just say "oh! he doesn't have any powers. he got hit with the full concentrated power of the sun a dimension with just a scratch"
like - like i can't do it. i just can't. i need some plausibility in my aus or i hit road blocks and can't continue (see: my jason variant au and why that took so long to post). but i was at work today thinking about clone^2 au and it hit me like a lightning shot. I think said in the original clone danny post that maybe he got electrocuted by the on button on the outside of the portal. But i was never really satisfied with that answer - it felt too placeholder-y to me. too simple. Less plausible to me than I liked.
so, solution: he still gets shocked by the portal outside, but its from a wiring issue that he spots outside of the portal. My first thought is; the portal had a wire that was unplugged. His parents, essentially, forgot to plug it in. Or maybe in all of their excitement they accidentally unplugged it and didn't notice. It just sounds like the right amount of cartoonishly silly that the Fentons are known for. "We put a second "on" button in the inside portal" -> "we forgot to plug it in"
Danny notices it while he's showing Sam and Tucker around the lab and the two of them are checking out the portal. Something caught his eye from the corner and while Sam and Tucker were talking, he went over to investigate. If this were canon, this would be just before Sam tells him to put on the hazmat suit and go into the portal so she can get a photo (iirc). (So he's currently in reg clothes)
And im imagining it as slightly off to the side. Its two black cords - an extension cord to the outlet and then the cord to the portal. and danny crouches down over it, frowning. his eyes follow the cord to the outlet, and then the cord to the portal, and he picks both up.
'did they forget to plug it in?' he thinks, turning his head to look at the portal's entrance. and logically he knows he should probably put the cords down and tell his parents, let them handle it since they have the expertise for this stuff. But...
his eyes draw back to the plug. it's just a plug. it'd be fine if he plugged it in, wouldn't it? surely, it'd be fine. he thinks about it for a moment.
he plugs it in.
immediately, the energy that had been building up slowly through the wires of the portal - the latent ectoplasm in the room being funneled through whatever tech his parents used to make it - goes through the cord. Like a dam bursting. In a flash, the portal turns on with a worrying bang.
At the same time, Danny is hit with a near-lethal amount of electricity. While not as agonizing as being inside the portal, danny still mentally checks out with pain. and he blacks out. when he comes to, he's laying on his back, still in the lab, with sam and tucker kneeling over him. they're talking - probably yelling, with panicked looks on their faces.
He can't hear a thing they're saying, his ears are full of the overly rapid, irregular beating of his heart and the pounding of his blood. His chest hurts like he's having a heart attack, and he grasps at his shirt as his breathing comes in short, labored.
"Hospital" he wheezes out, and sam gets up and sprints out of the lab upstairs. everything else feels like a blur - his parents and jazz are by him - his parents completely ignoring their swirling, working portal, someone's calling 911, danny's being loaded onto a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face.
danny gets discharged from the hospital a week later, and sick leave from school for another two. his parents refuse to allow him back into the lab, stating it was too dangerous, and their work comes to near grinding stop to watch over him. It's honestly kinda sweet, but the hovering is annoying him - stubborn, independent teenager that he is. When he gets back to school he's still relatively sat out for phy.ed - he's been getting random heart palpitations (which had been at its worst when he was still on sick leave) and what the doctors think is a strange case of arrhythmia. Although Danny insists that he's fine - he's breathing, alive. Nothing feels wrong with him.
Then one day in class, Tucker turns to him to say something - a joke -and yelps - "your eyes!"
Danny on instinct turns his head to the window, frowning. And in the faded reflection, his eyes are burning shade of green like that of the portal. He blinks, breathing in sharply, and they're back to the his old bright blue.
Unfortunately, they're in english class, and the entire room was staring at them. "Is there something wrong, Mr. Foley?" Mr. Lancer asks from the front. Tucker is still wide-eyed and in shock, and he looks quickly between Danny and Lancer.
"I- no, um- Danny's eyes- they- were, um..." He looks panicked, confused.
Danny steps in, and leans over to Tucker. "I think he just spooked himself, Mr. Lancer." He says, looking frontward with his brows furrowed. "Sorry, it won't happen again."
Mr. Lancer looks unconvinced, and suspicious, but he lets it lie. "Are you feeling alright then, Mr. Fenton? Do you need to see the nurse?" It wasn't a secret to the school or student body that he'd been to the hospital from a lab accident - and that it'd resulted in heart problems that he was recovering from.
Danny grins at him, and pounds his chest lightly, "I'm fit as a fiddle, Mr. Lancer. No heart attacks here." He jokes, and leans back into his seat. Mr. Lancer stares, eyes squinty, and then returns to the lesson.
It keeps happening. Danny's eyes turn green at the most random of times, and the three of them begin wittling down what was causing it. In general, Danny's eyes were turning green whenever he was engrossed with something, or when he got emotional - when he was laughing, angry, upset, anything. Sometimes it resulted in heart palpitations, sometimes it didn't.
his ears were hurting too, aching, like when they were cold. Danny wakes up one morning and spends twenty minutes in the bathroom turning his head left and right - his ears were beginning to point. Sam thought it was cool - Danny just thought it was concerning.
He was seeing things too - apparently. He struck up a conversation with someone on the street once - a strange looking man who looked terribly pale and wore old clothes. He looked delighted to be talking to Danny - and then Sam and Tucker walked up to him and asked who he was talking to.
("What do you mean? I'm talking to him.")
("Danny, there's no one there.")
("What?")
After multiple instances of this, they configure that the accident had given Danny some sort of ability to see ghosts.
("So you're meta now?")
("Mm... I don't know. That doesn't feel right.")
("Oh come on, that basically fits the name to a tee!")
("I know, but I just- it doesn't feel right to call myself meta.")
("If you don't like meta, why not just call yourself liminal? Since the portal is supposed to access the afterlife and it gave you powers to see ghosts.")
("Huh, good idea, Sam. Liminal it is, then.")
And as time goes on - and his parents begin to catch and experiment on ghosts - danny adjusts to these weird new abilities. It's not so bad, he supposes, its just some creepy eye magic and a ghost sense. He can live with that, and no one needed to know. He could go back to being normal - right. ...Wrong.
Do his parents really have to catch ghosts?
plus additional sketch that i made at like 3am last night because i needed to draw it down -- aha ignore the inconsistent drawing ability that i have. i'm more of a writer than i am an artist.
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I want a comic that shows how the batfam’s disabilities and/or health issues limit their efficacy and the frustration that brings. Give me all of Bab’s monitors going out, her sitting in the dark as her family fights against an unexpected or unknown weapon, and let me see the barely restrained panic. Let her stew in her helplessness, and let her rage at the inconvenience and unfairness of it all. Let her healing be nonlinear, because her incredible feats as Oracle don’t change the fact that she could rush to them right now as Batgirl.
Let Tim feel the proverbial leash of only being able to go so far for so long, because there’s a limit to how many doses of antibiotics he can carry with him. He’s blatantly defied almost every single authority figure he’s ever had, and this is what he has to obey? Let it interrupt his work, and let him obsessively wonder how much more productive he’d be if he didn’t have to spend the time counting and refilling his medications. Let Bruce coming back from a deep space mission be a reminder that there’s an extra step for him to be able to do the same. Let Tim feel the horrible, complicated, conflicting cocktail of gratitude and fury and appreciation and love and guilt when he finds out that each family member carries extra doses on them just in case they get sucked into a portal of some kind on Gotham’s whacked streets.
Let Cass feel the mosquito-bite hurt of not being able to read mission reports as quickly as her family of detectives and geniuses. Let the suggestion of a word-to-text program be offensive before it’s appreciated, because knowing something will be helpful doesn’t always mean she’s ready to accept it. Let her feel trapped by an inability to fully vent what she’s feeling because she doesn’t know the right words. Let her feel the hurt of some people not caring about what she’s trying to say because she can’t always communicate her ideas quickly or concisely enough. Let her hurt turn to rage, because if those people don’t matter then why is she so upset at their decision to disregard her? Why is there a niggling need to prove her worth and intelligence?
I’d just really love to see more of this in fics, comics, etc, because sometimes it’s hurtful even when it shouldn’t be, and sometimes it sucks in ways you never thought it would. Sometimes a disability or health issue actively impedes progress and makes you an inconvenience, and seeing these heroes deal with that would be so helpful in dealing with it.
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