WIP excerpt for Marina behind the cut, who asked for something with Tucker and is getting “but it’s weird that it happened twice”. I wrote, like . . . twice as much of this as I meant to, haha, I kinda hit a groove here. Sorry for giving you /checks smudged writing on hand/ twice as much clone angst and teenagers in stressful situations having to handle life-threatening issues that are way out of their league with zero support from anyone who should be helping them?
Yeahhhhh, nobody got on THIS blog for either of THOSE things, hahaha.
Content warnings: clone degradation, chronic illness/pain, threat to the life of a minor, medical emergency.
(( chrono || non-chrono ))
“Access: zero-four-three-zero-four prime!” Jazz shouts–the emergency-open code for the lab door, which Tucker hasn’t heard in a while but definitely has not forgotten–and the door’s already snapping back into the wall as she hits the bottom of the stairs, but she’s running so fast she still hits her shoulder on it as she runs through the doorway. Tucker is slightly worse at running, so manages not to have that problem, but he heard how hard her shoulder hit.
She didn’t drop the Ecto-Dejecto, though, because, like–Jazz. So yeah, no surprise there.
“DANNY!” Jazz cries–or “DANI!”, because admittedly that is unclear sometimes and can get especially unclear in crisis situations, which this absolutely is–and Tucker runs through the door after her and sees her on her knees on the floor right next to a tangled pile of barely-corporeal bodies. Dani’s crumpled down small in Danny’s arms, flickering in and out of intangibility and visibly melting, and Superboy’s still holding her hand and hasn’t let go, and is flickering in and out in perfect sync with her. Danny’s a beat behind every erratic, unpredictable flicker, but managing to keep at least mostly on the same level of tangibility as Dani’s. Enough that she’s not falling through the floor, at least.
Yet.
“Dani, you just–just for a sec, okay, you just have to concentrate enough to stabilize for a second for the epi–” Danny half-babbles at her, and Jazz’s hands flutter helplessly above Dani, her eyes wide and panicked and Danny’s voice cracked and panicked, and Dani’s skin is melting, her body is melting, her face is melting, and Tucker is useless and needs to–needs to–
“Wow, you weren’t kidding about the chrome, huh, boo?” Superboy says, and Dani–
“H-huh?” she stammers, and her flickering–skips, and–
“The chrome. There really is a fuckton of the stuff,” Superboy says, looking around the lab and cocking an eyebrow. “How do they keep it all shiny like this? Like is there a polishing schedule? Like a daily rotation?”
“M-man, I dunno, I dunno how y-you clean ch-chrome,” Dani manages with a stuttered laugh, and her flickering stops, just for a second. Stops on tangible, just for a second.
But like Danny said, a second’s all Jazz needs to jab her.
Jazz jerks out with the epi of Ecto-Dejecto and stabs it into Dani’s thigh, and Dani yelps as the needle pierces through her jeans, the yelp cutting off into a stifled hiss, and Tucker desperately needs her to not phase out again before the whole shot injects and is totally goddamn useless to help her do that, and Superboy says, “I guess we could google it or whatever? That’s what I usually do for the normie shit I don’t know shit about.”
“W-what, no c-chrome in your lab’s home-sweet-home?” Dani asks with another stuttered laugh, and Superboy grins brightly at her.
“C’mon, boo, you know I never cleaned that place, I only ever fucked it up,” he tells her jokingly, and she laughs shakily, and Jazz exhales, and pulls back the empty epi. Dani’s melting face shivers, and quivers, and slowly, slowly starts, like–unmelting, and Superboy squeezes her hand and leans down in closer to her and peers over the top of his sunglasses at her with a wider grin. “Hey, boo. There’s that pretty face again.”
Dani laughs wetly, then ducks her head with a strangled little sob of a sound and turns tighter into Danny, burying a sob against his shoulder. Tucker doesn’t know if it’s pain or stress or–what, exactly, but Ancients, he hates the sound of it. He hates it.
He knows it was a tripled-up dose in that shot. The concentrated mix. Jazz told them she was loading a triple for next time. So like, unless they used it while he was gone–unless they did that, it was a triple dose.
It was a triple dose, and even after a triple, Dani’s still taking this long to fully come back together.
Tucker really wants to like, go puke or have a freakout or something, but that would not actually be helpful right now, and it definitely wouldn’t fix anything. And like–and he needs to fix this, because that’s what he’s for in this damn fraid. That’s like–that’s just what he’s for period.
He doesn’t know how to fix this. He just–he doesn’t know. And he’s supposed to know. He’s just–supposed to.
“It hurt worse that time,” Dani croaks, then laughs helplessly past another sob; around another sob. Danny’s grip on her tightens, and Tucker sees how hard he swallows. He whips out his PDA again, and the reflex is just–
“How much worse?” he asks, ready to type in whatever she says. “Like–scale of one to ten on the pain scale, last episode and this one.”
“It just fucking hurts, Tucker!” Dani yells into Danny’s shoulder, then chokes on another sob, and it just sounds angry. Danny’s jaw tightens and he squeezes his arms around her, and she sobs in actual fury. “Vlad was too stupid to make me right and I’m gonna fall apart because he was so stupid and it just fucking hurts, okay?! It hurts!”
She hasn’t let go of Superboy’s hand, and he hasn’t let go of hers either.
“I–yeah, I know,” Tucker says, and his throat just–burns, it feels like. “It just–symptoms, okay? We need to track those, remember?”
“I don’t care!” Dani yells. “It’s stupid, it’s stupid, I don’t care, Vlad made me wrong and I’m wrong and this isn’t–this isn’t gonna work, I’m not–!”
“Dani,” Danny says, his voice tight and strangled as he hugs her closer and buries his face in her shoulder too. She just sobs again. “Dani, I swear–we’re not gonna give up. We’re gonna figure this out. We’ll figure this out even if Tucker has to kidnap, like, the whole freaking Justice League.”
“I mean I have some theories about the process,” Tucker admits, mostly because he’s hoping it’ll distract her, and Dani sobs out a laugh, and then just sobs.
“It hurt so bad,” she chokes. “It still hurts. It hurts so bad, it’s so bad, Danny!”
“I–yeah, I know,” Danny says roughly, his own voice coming out a little choked too. “I just–I know, Dani, it’s–it’s–I’ve got you. We’ve got you. Whole fraid. I swear. We’ll go back to Frostbite for the eighty billionth time, we’ll go raid Vlad’s stupid froot loop lab, we’ll–we’ll figure something out. We will.”
Tucker is actually, like, going to go insane, he’s pretty sure.
