Next instalment of TJ and Danny’s story, set in @wildfaewhump‘s Pathverse! Direct sequel to here , you should go read that first! Masterpost can be found here.
Danny took the next exit, without even bothering to read the signs. It wasn’t as if he had a goal in mind, not anymore – if he couldn’t go to Julie’s Agency there was no point driving to her city.
He was going to have to stop soon and decide what to do. But if he just kept driving, he could put off needing to make that call for just a little longer.
The outskirts of the city slid by his window. He tried to just drive, thinking as little as possible. Trying to keep his grip on the wheel steady but not white-knuckled, trying not to let his breathing speed up and up and up until he was leaning forward in his seat and accidentally roaring along at 20 over the speed limit.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
What was he going to do?
You’re really in the shit now, Danny, he told himself. Why did you call her? Why did you think she’d understand? Before this last year, before this endless slog through court case after violent court case, melt-downs and seizures, hospitalisations and Class-A memory ‘treatments’, picking right back up and going to work again afterwards, watching TJ get thinner and shakier and more threadbare every week without ever being capable of understanding why but still quieting under Danny’s touch like it actually meant something…
Danny wouldn’t’ve understood either.
He flicked the radio on, blaring voices spouting something inane. He jumped stations a few times, looking for something with music. He found something that sounded like country, listened to that for a minute or two, before flicking it off again in annoyance.
Of course Julie didn’t understand, because this was flat-out crazy, and Danny knew it. He didn’t know how it had come to this. What had he been thinking? What did he think he was achieving? This had been a mistake, from start to finish.
“Um. Handler? Danny?”
The white line on the road jerked and veered wildly in front of Danny as he swore, curbing the impulse to whip around and look behind him.
Fucking hell. Keep it together enough to drive, will you?
He spared a glance in the mirror. Sure enough, the Path was sitting up, looking small and hunched and incongruously clean in the grubby back seat of Danny’s old car. His thin pale fingers clutched at the black seatbelt.
“Jesus, kid,” Danny snapped.
“Sorry,” TJ whispered. “Sorry, I’ll – I’ll be quiet, I’m sorry...”
“No, I - ” Danny breathed out heavily through his nose, made his hands relax on the wheel. The way TJ was lately, Danny couldn’t raise his voice without the poor sod thinking he’d done something wrong. The way he cringed from the nurses, from other handlers, from Danny himself sometimes - it made Danny think hard, vicious things about whoever had been assigned to him before.
How could I have just gone on to the next job and left him there?
He tried to make his voice light. “No, kid, not your fault,” he said. “You just, uh, startled me. Didn’t mean to wake you, we’re hours away from where we’re going yet.” For God’s sake don’t ask me where that is, I don’t fucking know.
“I was awake,” the Path said, a wispy thread of voice from the backseat. “Um. Danny?”
Danny grunted to show he was listening.
“Are you really stealing me?”
Damn it.
“How much did you hear of that?” Danny asked, his stomach sinking. He’d thought TJ was safely asleep. Idiot.
“Um. All of it,” TJ said. “You said – Danny, you said – why do you think someone’s going to kill me?”
“I – well, because…” This was stupid. Why was Danny floundering for words in front of a Path? Danny could only catch the occasional glimpse of the Path in his mirror, and blindfolded TJ wasn’t capable of looking at anything, but still he had to fight back the feeling that TJ was looking at him accusingly.
“Because you’re sick,” he settled on eventually. He blinked hard at the wavering road in front of him, resettled his grip on the steering wheel. “And… and you’ll get better if you have time, TJ, but they don’t want to give you that time. Because it isn’t… ” The end of the sentence died in his throat. Because everyone’s too busy. Because there’s a contract. Because you’re not important enough.
Because it isn’t cost-efficient.
“Did they tell you that?”
“No,” Danny said. “I just… I can see how it’s going to go. That’s all.”
“Oh.” TJ’s voice was thin, quiet. He shifted, overlarge scrubs rustling. “So… so that’s why you’re stealing me?”
Danny winced. “I’m not – TJ, stop saying that. I’m taking you to a different Agency where you’ll be taken care of properly. It’ll all be okay, all right?”
Danny wished the Path hadn’t overheard. He wished this conversation could have held off until they’d stopped; he couldn’t assess the Path’s body language. Fuck, Julie had said that word, described this as ‘stealing’, and maybe now it had stuck in TJ’s head.
He wondered what the hell went on in that head sometimes; how did a Path see the world? Not how normal people did, clearly. Obviously a Path wasn’t really capable of understanding right and wrong, and the law, and morality. But... TJ had seemed to understand a lot of the things he’d read for the court. He definitely understood what ‘stealing’ meant.
Danny was half waiting for TJ to challenge him on it. They’d worked a case a few weeks ago, theft of a car and some power tools – perhaps TJ was now going to ask Danny what made this any different, why they’d helped send that person to jail but now Danny was taking off with Agency property.
Danny sighed. No, you idiot, he thought, exasperated with himself. Poor fucking kid’s probably a bit preoccupied with the whole ‘they’ll kill you’ thing. Pull your head out of your ass.
In the end TJ said neither of those things, though.
“You’re still going to be in… in a lot of trouble,” he said instead.
Danny laughed, a harsh, coughing noise that surprised him. “Yeah, kid, probably.”
“What if you can’t find another Agency?” TJ sounded calm, reasonable.
Danny resisted the urge to swear. It’s a good fucking question, isn’t it? “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s… it’ll be fine. It’s not your problem to worry about, kid, so just - ”
Danny’s phone rang.
The sound filled up the car, irritatingly cheerful electronic trilling. Danny knew who that would be; didn’t even need to look at the display. TJ subsided into silence. Danny drummed his gloved fingers on the wheel, gritted his teeth, wished he had a cigarette or a coffee or fucking something to calm himself down with.
If Danny really intended to make a run for it, he ought to throw that phone out the window and keep on driving, he knew. People could track you with those things.
But keep on driving to where? In the end, Danny didn’t have any real idea what he was doing. And the only one around to talk to in this car was a Path.
So he took a hand off the wheel and hit the button that answered the phone.
“Danny,” Julie said, her voice filled with relief. “Thanks for picking up.”
Danny made a noncommittal noise.
“Danny, where are you?”
He glanced around. Danny hadn’t driven in this area much; he didn’t know what the street was called, or even really what suburb he was in. Not much in the way of signs to help him out, either. But did that matter? He might have answered the phone, but Danny wasn’t at the point where he was willing to give Julie either of those things.
“You’re sending people out after me,” he accused her. “The cops, or, or an Agency acquisition van.”
“Danny, I want to help you, I - ”
“If you wanted to help me you could have heard me out,” he snapped. “But you’re not going to, I can fucking tell.”
“Hey, you’re the one who hung up on me, remember?”
“Yeah, cause you weren’t listening to me!” Danny said. The scenery sped by, a patchwork of industrial-looking squat concrete blocks of buildings and what looked to be neglected empty land, filled with scrubby trees and patchy fields that were more weeds than grass. He tried to keep his voice down, keep calm, but it grated and wobbled in his ears regardless. “You didn’t have any intention of helping me with TJ, you just lied to me to shut me up when you said you would fix it.”
Julie was better at lying than she’d been before, but the seam was still visible to Danny. The point where she had just started agreeing with anything he said in an attempt to get him to do what she wanted.
“No, Danny,” she protested. “Look, Danny, I just – I don’t know this Path, okay, I don’t know what your situation is, but I want to help you. So if you want to talk about the Path, okay, let’s talk. I’m listening.”
“Talk about….” Danny glanced up to the mirror. At TJ still sitting there, turning his head this way and that. Making Danny think vaguely of a baby bird, head too big for its little neck. Listening to everything they were both saying. “Look, he’s not dangerous or anything.”
“Okay. Danny, is… is TJ…” Julie’s voice hushed, suddenly, as if she was talking about something obscene. “Danny, are we talking about the child of someone you know? Or your child? Because…”
“Wh- No!” Danny yelped. He took his eyes off the road to gape, horrified, at Julie’s name on the display for a moment. The car wavered underneath him and he dragged his eyes back up.
That was… a thought. Jesus Christ. It had somehow never occurred to him. Danny wasn’t anywhere near the point in his life where he’d be contemplating babies, but even so – even so – how had he never thought of that? That if he did, there was a non-zero chance they might be…
“I’m talking about an adult Path,” he said, to Julie, forcefully. “Not a child. He’s not related to me in any form. He’s my Path from work, just a regular assigned… fuck, you know what I mean!”
“Uh huh,” Julie said cautiously. She sounded relieved; papers shuffled again, and Danny suspected he could hear her typing something. “All right. What class is he?”
Danny let out a breath, trying to calm down. “E,” he said. “We worked in, um, Criminal Justice. The courtroom mostly, sometimes the police station.” He chewed his lip, considered and rejected two or three different sentence beginnings. “It’s fucking hard work, OK? It’s difficult, the readings are always long, and it’s bloody dark stuff sometimes, and they never….”
“Class E? OK,” Julie said, gently. “Where is, um, TJ now, Danny?”
“He’s here,” Danny said, exasperated. “I can see him right now, okay, he’s still got his blindfold on and he’s in the back seat and he’s not causing any trouble. He’s never caused any trouble, even though he’s been treated like shit.”
“He’s in the back? He can’t touch you?”
“What? No?” Danny glanced in the mirror. Still just a puzzled TJ, seatbelt done up, eyes covered, hands in his lap.
“Okay, good.” Julie started speaking rapidly, urgently. “Danny, I really really need you to pull up by the road and wait for me. Okay? You’re not going to understand why, but we did this in training, right, so I need you to trust me. You’re probably confused and that’s okay…”
“What?”
“Danny, you know that Paths can affect people’s minds - ”
“You think he got to me? You think that’s what this is about?” Danny shook his head, bottling up the stream of swearwords that wanted to escape. Julie thought that TJ was somehow making Danny do this? TJ, visibly upset by the change in routine, shaking and frightened at getting into a slightly different car, who’d been in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere and dried blood all over his face just a week ago? “You’re wrong. Dead wrong. How would that even - ”
“I know that what you’re doing probably makes perfect sense to you now,” Julie interrupted, her voice somehow managing to be both soothing and urgent. “You just have to trust me that it doesn’t, Danny, okay? You can’t rely on your instincts now.”
“Fuck’s sake, Julie - ”
“Nothing is the way it seems. It’s not your fault. You’re in the presence of a Path; they get into your head, they can make you think or feel whatever they - ”
Danny growled in frustration. He hauled on the steering wheel, hand over hand awkwardly, to navigate a turn. “Julie, cut the crap! Trying your scaremongering bullshit on me like I’m some clueless layperson? He never fucking touched me, and he’s fucking E, he’s not even capable of that!”
“Danny, you may not know as much about him as you think you do,” Julie insisted. Some of the cool soothing quality frayed away from her voice. “Come on! I know it’s hard but think. You know why we take the precautions we do, you know the damage that can be done! It’s not your fault, you’re confused. Once you tell me where you are - ”
“I’m not confused,”Danny snapped. He felt sick. If this was what Julie thought, there was no chance of this turning out all right. Not within any Agency. It didn’t make sense but had that ever mattered to Agency management? “I’ve never been confused.”
“- once I know where you are I can help you, okay? We can sort it all out, for you and TJ both, it will all - ”
“Sort it out!” Danny snarled. “Oh, yeah, sure you fucking will! I know how you’ll sort TJ out!”
“Danny - ”
“This is bullshit! I’m not going back to your goddamn cold-blooded, two-faced – uh- ”
Danny caught his breath. The metal barrier that lined the road, painted with yellow chevrons, was coming up fast – way too fast.
Fuck, there was a turn, he hadn’t seen -
He slammed his foot onto the brake pedal and wrenched the wheel to the left; metal grated and squealed in protest. The car was sliding – Danny’s seatbelt was digging painfully into his ribs as the world swung back and forth violently, and he realised in the half-second he had that the car was fish-tailing as it hurtled towards the metal barrier and the downward slope that lay beyond.
Somewhere in the background, Julie’s voice was asking something, pitched high with concern, but it was drowned out by the screeching of tires and the sound of TJ’s frightened yell from the backseat.
Danny’s car hit the barrier, and the world rolled over and over on itself in a sickening whirl that ended with a metallic crunch.