Synopsis:
Caine is gone and the circus is falling apart. Pomni makes a last minute decision, one that changes everything.
This is a "What If" Au, where what if Jax isn't the one who abstracts in episode 9.
After the experiments, after the escape, after the panic of waking up on a slab—Danny flees to Gotham.
He is held together by stitches.
Stitches everywhere.
The autopsy cuts.
The places where limbs had to be reattached.
The incisions he closed himself, shaking hands sewing patch after patch of skin back onto his own body.
A patchwork person, more spectral than human, shambling through Gotham’s alleys on nothing but instinct. Sometimes lashing out in pain. Sometimes hiding. Sometimes just trying not to fall apart again—literally or emotionally.
Rumors start spreading:
Someone in Gotham has pulled a Frankenstein. There’s a stitched-together creature haunting rooftops and drainage tunnels, glowing eyes reflecting like an animal caught in headlights.
Naturally, the Bats investigate.
And Jason—Jason who actually reads the classics, who remembers every line of Frankenstein, who knows what it means to wake up changed and furious and hurting—decides he is the one most qualified to take this case.
Here is a drawing I've always wanted to do for many many years being the Nightmare before Christmas fan since childhood. putting Jack skellington, his sweetheart Sally and his ghost dog Zero in one glorious picture. and so I did and I hope you all love this piece as much as I do.
The Spot isn’t exactly human anymore. Its exposed body is always decaying, it smells like sulfur, it hunts whatever gets too close to its web of spots.
Hi, I keep creating new things instead of finishing my old ones. Here's another one! This exists because I saw an idea (thank you @whumpsday), loved it, and ran with it way too far so now I have an entirely new set of characters, oops. This one's about the kidnapped whumpees of an artist, dedicated to creating his perfect project, his masterpiece.
CW: med whump, whumpees being stitched together, creepy whumper, gore/descriptions of violence/medical procedures (the entire process is described and I tried to make it pretty graphic), restraints, whumpees awake during surgery.
There’s a scraping sound, a rasp of metal on metal, the scalpel dragging across the tray as the man at the foot of the table picks it up. Tenley can see it in his peripherals, the glint of fluorescents on steel, but he can’t turn his head to see it properly. Nothing but his eyelids move, and even that feels molasses-slow, like he has to work for it. He can breathe, but his chest is tight, heavy with fear and whatever drugs this man has put into him and oh, god, he’s terrified. He’s fucked. He’s so absolutely fucked. He’s going to die here, he’s going to die after being cut open and his organs harvested or whatever else by this creepy fucking man holding a scalpel and humming to himself and he’s going to be awake to see it and –
The man pauses. Fuck, something must have changed in his breathing, or he’s somehow gotten his attention, because the blade stops twisting, the glare of light off it holding steady, almost directly into Tenley’s eyes.
“Have you woken, my love?”
No. No, I haven’t. Go back to ignoring me.
A laugh. He still can’t move, and his silent pleas go unheard. “Beautiful, beautiful, that’s perfect. It’s perfect. That’s both of you, now.” He gives a delighted sigh. “How wonderful is that? You get to watch.”
He doesn’t want to watch. He’d have said as much, but his body is still not listening to him, and the most he can do is manage a noise that just sounds like a breathy sigh.
He hears it again from somewhere beside him, a drawn out sort of whine, like someone’s trying very hard to make noise. Both of you. There’s two of them here.
He can’t turn his head to confirm, but his stomach churns, acid rising to burn the base of his throat. Fuck this. Fuck this.
The man with the scalpel hums happily again, moving around behind the tables. There’s movement, and noise, the sound of things clicking into place, and whatever Tenley’s strapped down to sits up slowly. He doesn’t want to see. He doesn’t want to know, but now he’s going to, now he can see half the room and the rolling table with the tray of tools set just in between the foot of two beds. His right arm is unbound, but the rest of him isn’t, so even if he could move, he couldn’t go anywhere. The bed beside him sits up, too, and someone else’s left arm is pushed into his field of vision. The man wheels a table in between and reaches for Tenley’s arm.
Don’t touch me, he thinks, as he sees long, gloved fingers close around his wrist. Don’t fucking touch me. Get your hands off me. Please.
His arm is manoeuvred to rest on the table, and the same is done to the other boy’s arm. The scalpel is nowhere to be seen, for now, but that’s worse. It’s worse. When is it going to come back?
“This is wonderful,” the man is saying as he picks a pen, some bright purple marker, off the tray. “It really is. I wasn’t sure if you’d wake up, you know? I wasn’t sure if you’d get to be part of this.” He pauses, pen hovering above Tenley’s arm. “You’re part of it anyway, of course, really – but now you really get to understand, right?”
Tenley can’t answer him, but even if he could, his eyes are drawn to the quick and precise strokes of the pen over his skin, measured against the back of the other boy’s.
The man shifts their arms, lining up the marks on each of them, bottom lip between his teeth, like he’s really focusing.
“I’m just making sure I get it right,” he murmurs, like he feels Tenley’s eyes on him. “This is supposed to be perfect. I don’t want to get anything wrong.”
Tenley tries to scream again, to do something, but it’s just air that hisses out between his teeth.
There’s a tsk. “Don’t worry, my love. You’ll see. You’ll understand. You don’t need to be afraid.”
God, yes, he does. He’s so afraid that he can feel it in his bones, in his chest. He feels weak with it, like if he tries to let it go he’ll fall apart. He tries to move, and nothing happens.
He wants to go home.
His head lolls until his chin rests on his shoulder. He can still see everything in between the beds, and he does not win the fight to close his eyes. He doesn’t want to see, but something inside is screaming for him to not look away.
He doesn’t see the man reach for it, but the scalpel’s back.
Get that the fuck away from me. Don’t touch me with it. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.
The first press of the blade to his skin has him screwing his eyes shut in terrified anticipation, but he can’t feel it. The only sensation is the gentle tugging of his skin drawing apart under the steel, and somehow that’s worse, and he’s watching again now the blood spilling from the opening seam. It’s almost effortless, the way the scalpel pulls along the marker line, a steady hand on a steadier canvas. He can’t move. He can’t move, and his arm’s being carved open like he’s in a fucking butcher’s shop.
Bile rises in his throat again when the blade goes up the back of his hand, curving around his knuckles, exposing tendons and muscles to the air. Oh, fuck, he’s going to be sick, or pass out, or both. He can’t just – watch this. He can’t. He can’t sit here and watch this man cut him open and hum to himself like this is just another day. The things he would give to be able to move, even just to twitch a finger, to give himself a hint of hope instead of sitting here like a goddamned corpse that someone’s decided to take a look inside of.
Beside him, there’s another drawn out whine, and it spikes his fear so badly that his vision blacks over for a second. That reminder of someone else - another person witnessing this – makes his heart race, his throat constrict. He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want this, and he doesn’t want someone else to be there with him.
When he blinks away the fog, he wishes he hadn’t. The scalpel’s looped back around and is nearly back to his elbow now, the back of his forearm sectioned off in a neat shape.
There’s blood everywhere.
The blade crosses again, connects the end of the line to the beginning, and fuck, why couldn’t he have passed out properly? He doesn’t want to see this. He’d give anything to be able to close his eyes. But he can’t, so he’s stuck watching helplessly as the man fits the blade of the scalpel carefully under the edge of the cuts and lifts, peeling back skin and fat and god knows what else, blood spilling from beneath it, opening up to a gaping mess of muscles that shift and pull when his arm is turned to each side so the man can peer inside the wound.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. He can’t even scream.
It’s now that the man turns to the other boy’s arm, lifting it gently from the puddle of Tenley’s blood on the table and inspecting the marker lines. The scalpel presses in there, too, and it’s the same process. Up from the elbow to the back of the hand, the blade sliding smoothly across the back of the knuckles, and back down again. The lines join. The skin gets lifted away.
It’s disgusting, Tenley thinks, and it’s terrifying. Blood and tissue everywhere, their arms coated in it, the man’s gloves stained red. Open wounds and writhing muscle, things he was never supposed to see, things that were never meant to be opened up to the air. It’s – fuck, it’s awful. He can’t take his eyes off it.
He doesn’t realise that he’s started to cry until the man picks both of their arms up, measuring them against each other again. His vision blurs over the scene of him making several small slices at the corners of each wound and lifting carefully the piece of skin on each side, but not removing it.
No, he says to himself when their arms are fitted together. He can barely see through his tears, but he can make out the way the gloves slide against their blood-slick skin. No, no, no. Stop touching me. Let me go.
“Loves,” the man breathes. “I know. I know, it’s an emotional moment. But don’t cry. Look, look how well you fit together.” He holds their arms together, fingertips to fingertips, elbow to elbow. The missing pieces of skin are perfectly matched, the edges lining up like puzzle pieces.
It’s then that Tenley has the nauseating realisation of what this man really intends to do. He makes a desperate sort of moan, a protest that barely reaches the front of his mouth, and the tears fall harder. His vision blurs again.
“Shh,” soothes the man, and he only cries harder. “It’s okay.”
He steps away but comes back half a second later with some sort of restraint that he uses to strap their arms together in position. He takes a needle off the tray, and some sort of thread. Tenley can barely see at all, but it’s clear what he’s doing, shucking off his dirty gloves in favour of new ones and threading the needle and thread together. He lifts their arms to check, then sets them down again, bringing the needle close.
He still can’t feel anything but the pulling of the edges of the wound, that lifted skin that the needle is travelling through, down under one side and up on the other, through the other boy’s skin, and his. Together. Through his tears, he sees the man shift the restraint to get past it. From the back of the hand to the elbow on one side now, and each stitch feels like it lasts hours, the horror building with each loop of the thread. Needle down, needle up, thread tightened. Tied off. Again. Over and over, he watches it dip beneath his skin and come back out through someone else’s, and he can only imagine the sound of it tearing if he ripped his arm away. It’s flesh on flesh, insides on insides, skin held together by thread and a careful hand.
He lifts their arms, shifts the position of their elbows so he can get to the underside, and Tenley still can’t stop looking. He wants to. He doesn’t want to see this. Neither, by the sounds he can hear from beside him, does the other person.
Another wave of nausea washes over him. The other person. The other person whose arm is being stitched to his. He struggles to get his breathing back under control, head spinning, sick to his stomach. The stitches are nearly back to the elbow now, the circuit almost closed. The needle goes in, the needle comes out. And in. And out. The gap pulls together with one last lift of the needle, and it’s tied off with deft fingers.
Now that their arms are held together, the restraint is removed entirely, the metal of the buckle clicking when it drops down onto the tray. There’s not as much blood flowing now, but what spilled is still there, a thick puddle underneath their arms and dried smears of it on everything.
Tenley tries to breathe, but he can’t, not well. The tears won’t stop.
The man steps back to admire his work and gives a delighted laugh. “Oh, look at that. Look at that,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like he’s talking to Tenley anymore. “It’s beautiful.”
He turns and drags over a cart piled with unopened bandages, and the finality of it all sends Tenley into a harder fit of tears. The man makes a sympathetic noise and grabs his face with his blood-wet fingers. He can feel it smear across his cheek.
“You’ll see,” he says, and presses a kiss to the top of Tenley’s head. “Don’t worry.”
He changes his gloves again, and swaps out the bloodied table with something cleaner to rest their arms on. The wetness on Tenley’s cheek dries slowly.
He fits the end of a bandage into Tenley’s palm and wraps it backward to the other boy’s hand. It wraps around, and around, and around, and around, covering the evidence, hiding that gruesome mess beneath it. Tenley’s almost grateful.
The man doesn’t pay much more attention to either of their crying, anymore, too invested in what he’d done.
