Chapter Text
September 2008
Danny found out his wife died over voicemail, which probably wasn’t the worst way he could have found out, but it definitely felt like it.
It’d been a busy day at the docks, but not so busy that he couldn’t have answered the phone when he felt it ringing in his pocket. It’d been such an absent decision not to pick up the call. Danny couldn’t remember why he’d ignored the call for the life of him. Had he been talking to someone? Focused on a particularly challenging piece of paperwork? Had he just not wanted to answer?
Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Danny got one last afternoon of ignorant bliss before his world fell apart.
“Your wife’s been in an accident. She didn’t make it.”
There was more to the message than that. It was from a PRT line, so they explained that Annette had died in a civilian car crash, not even any cape activities. There was some logistical stuff that Danny couldn’t help but tune out, and a number to call them back to when he got the chance.
It was after hours, but Danny didn’t hesitate to call the moment his brain was able to kick his body into motion. His fingers felt far away as he punched the numbers into his phone, but his vision sort of tunneled around them, too. It was a weird feeling, and Danny tried to will it away as he waited for someone to pick up on the other end of the line.
It was kind of more of the same. Chatter, the representative stopping to check the PRT’s records. Confirmation of what happened, an offer of support resources, not much more. A stranger, Danny realized. Someone who probably knew logically what Danny was feeling right now, but was so far away from that feeling themself that it hurt to keep listening to them talk.
He hung up when the PRT agent was in the middle of their sentence.
Danny sat there at his kitchen table, phone in hand, staring blankly ahead, when the weight of the cell phone in his hand suddenly became unbearable. He didn’t throw it, but it sort of thud when he put the device down on the table a little too heavily.
The feeling didn’t really go away.
Danny blinked a few times, suddenly realizing he hadn’t blinked for a little longer than he should have. He kept doing it. It wasn’t a rapid fluttering, but a hard, deliberate motion. Then, he focused that same attention on his hands and legs and made himself stand up.
He couldn’t really feel the ground under his feet as he walked through his living room, nor did he feel his palm on the doorknob as he opened the door. He did feel the cool stone through his jeans when he sat down on his doorstep, though.
Danny let out a long breath, something very heavy overtaking him. Exhaling didn’t help, even though it felt like it should.
A cat walked across the sidewalk in front of his house. It was a ragged thing, one of the strays his next-door neighbor fed, even though it was always peeing on everyone’s outdoor furniture. It paused to look at him, and Danny held out a hand limply, half wanting the cat to come over, to sense his anguish and offer him its comfort.
The cat turned away and kept walking. It wasn’t disappointing, but Danny’s hand felt even heavier when he let it fall.
There was a tingle of agitation in his thighs, and Danny stood up abruptly, even though that blanket of heaviness was still sitting on top of him. He forced himself to walk, but the spurt of energy wore off about halfway down the path away from his front door.
Danny kept walking. He didn’t know he was going anywhere, let alone where he was going, until he was standing at the foot of the Barnes’ driveway.
God, Taylor. He’d barely started processing what happened, let alone begin thinking about… He didn’t even know. The impact? How his life was about to change? How this all would affect Taylor?
Danny swallowed thickly, that heaviness having settled in his throat. His mouth was full of saliva, he realized. He hated swallowing saliva when it built up like this, but spitting it on the Barnes’ driveway felt wrong. Swallowing it wasn’t better, though. He kind of just stood there, unable to make a decision, until it sorted itself out. He had no idea if he spat, swallowed, or just drooled all over himself, but it was over, and his body was ready to start moving again.
He knocked on the door. He heard a distant call of response, and Zoe Barnes, Alan’s wife and Emma’s mother, answered a few moments later. She looked a little harried, but not terribly so. She smiled brightly when she saw Danny. “Danny! What are you doing here? Taylor called Annette to let her know she’d be staying for dinner.”
Danny felt like he was trying to jam two puzzle pieces that weren’t meant to fit together inside his brain. So many things about everything before him just weren’t adding up. The words made sense. So did the logic behind them. But it wasn’t right.
“Annette’s dead,” Danny said instead of trying to figure it out. The light expression on Zoe’s face twisted into confusion, then horror.
“Oh my god, Danny,” Zoe exclaimed, and then she was holding Danny’s hand, pulling him through the doorway.
“She wasn’t home when I got back from work,” Danny went on numbly, the words just falling out of his mouth as Zoe led him to the kitchen table, much like the one he’d left his cell phone on. “I checked my phone to see if she’d called me, and I had a voicemail. They said there was a car accident.”
Zoe put one hand over Danny’s and used the other to cover her mouth.
“Hey, Danny,” Alan greeted casually as he entered the room. He paused, taking in the scene, and his expression shifted. “Is everything okay?”
Zoe got up and got onto her tiptoes to whisper into Alan’s ear. Danny watched his face as Alan processed the news. Like Zoe, there was confusion, then horror, before settling into shock.
Was that what Danny was feeling? Shock? It sort of felt like he was feeling nothing, but there was something overwhelming about it at the same time.
“Wh… Does Taylor know?” Alan asked eventually. Danny didn’t answer. Alan swore softly and turned, running his hand through his hair, before turning back to look at Danny. “I- We can tell them together. Taylor and Emma.”
Danny didn’t say anything for a few long moments. Alan and Zoe looked at each other, then started to move away, and the emptiness Danny was feeling was suddenly replaced by a visceral need to be the one to talk to Taylor. “We can do… Together. We can talk to them together.”
The Barnes nodded, and Zoe stepped away to get the girls. Alan took a few steps and sat down at the table by Danny. He didn’t say anything, but Danny didn’t want him to. He needed a moment to collect his thoughts before Taylor came in.
He felt a stab of guilt when he saw her. Earlier, he’d thought about how he’d gotten a few extra hours of ignorant bliss. He was about to take that from her and end her life as she knew it. The mere thought of pulling her to join the state he was in made his stomach churn.
But he’d felt guilty about not answering the phone when he received the call, too. Taylor would be just as upset if she didn’t know longer than she had to. He couldn’t do that to her either.
Taylor and Emma were talking when they entered the dining room, voices light and excited as they always were. Taylor’s expression didn’t dim at all when her eyes fell on Danny. “Hi, Dad! What’s up?”
Danny tried to smile, but he didn’t think he could. He had to get it together for Taylor, though. What in the world was he supposed to say, though? Maybe it would be easier to just let Alan or Zoe do it. But, no, he knew he couldn’t take the easy way out. Taylor was going to remember this moment for the rest of her life. It had to be him.
“Hey, kiddo,” he greeted softly. Taylor stared at him, and he wondered if he looked as bad as he felt. Zoe and Alan both had a bit of a reaction to the sight of him, but Taylor was thirteen, and honestly, she was not very perceptive. Did she even know anything was wrong? “Could you sit down? I have something I need to tell you.”
Taylor’s eyes raised a fraction. She looked at Emma, who just shrugged helplessly. The two of them sat down wordlessly, clambering onto the dining room chairs.
Danny took a deep breath, made himself meet Taylor’s eyes, and forced the words out. His voice remained even, all things considered, but he thought it still sounded blocky. He explained what happened and tried his best to assure Taylor, carefully watching her face for any sign of what she was feeling right now.
Emma started crying first. It wasn’t that Taylor couldn’t cry or anything, just that Emma cried a lot more easily than Taylor did. But hearing Emma enough to set Taylor off, and that was enough to set Danny and the Barnes off, and soon they were all openly sobbing.
Taylor stood up and moved forward, practically making herself collapse against her father. Danny caught her easily and maneuvered her so she was sitting on his lap. She was a little too old for that, but he didn’t care, because he was holding her, and she was real, and he wasn’t alone anymore.
He hadn’t realized how isolated he’d felt being the only one who knew. He felt terrible for dragging Taylor and the Barnes into his little, broken world, but the sheer relief of it was overwhelming enough to make him cry even harder.
But then another thought hit him. He was still the only one who knew. Alan, Zoe, Emma, and Taylor were crying over Annette, but it wasn’t Annette whom they’d lost. Annette had been gone for a long time. Danny was the only one who knew it was Tommy who’d died.
1989
In hindsight, having a bunch of people hiding in one place was a pretty terrible idea. Danny was twenty, dumb, and panicking, though, so it was the best he could manage at the time.
Anyone who was at all involved in campus life knew who Lustrum was. When Danny first started college, he’d even gone to some of the protests she’d organized. He stopped when she started to get more and more misandrist.
He could put up with a little misandry. Danny understood that women had a lot to put up with from men, but it’d gotten to the point where he’d get looks anytime he joined an event, even if he’d just gone to support a friend. It didn’t really bother him, though. He’d found this way to the local gay scene after a few months, and that was a lot more his speed.
Danny still knew that Lustrum was amassing followers at Brockton Bay University, and that she’d eventually started collecting parahuman lieutenants to lead some of her rallies. He didn’t really keep up on the activist scene, let alone the feminist scene, though, so he hadn’t understood what was happening when he heard screams sounding from around his apartment complex.
Danny thought it was just some fellow college kids having fun, but the screams continued, and he got worried. Tommy did too, getting up from his desk to grab a knife from the kitchen. That almost surprised Danny more than the screaming. “Do you know how to use that?”
“No,” his boyfriend answered, shifting the knife in his hand experimentally. It was the biggest one they had, one Tommy had gotten in a big bag of loose utensils from a friend when they’d graduated. It was a flimsy and serrated thing, and Danny was terrified to cook with it. He didn’t even like the sight of Tommy holding it. “It couldn’t hurt, though.”
Danny grabbed the metal bucket by the door that he, Tommy, and their roommate put their mail in, dumping the contents on the floor. It was probably unnecessary, but the idea of having something to defend himself with made him feel a little better, even if all the noise outside was probably just some dumb frat prank.
Danny still hovered behind Tommy and let his stockier boyfriend take the lead as they ventured out of their apartment.
The screaming got louder when Tommy opened the door. Tommy dropped his knife almost immediately and grabbed Danny’s hand. He didn’t see what Tommy was reacting to, but the sound of the knife falling was enough to spook Danny into running when Tommy started dragging him after him.
“Oh shit. Oh fuck,” Tommy was muttering, mostly to himself, as he thundered down the staircase. Danny dropped the mail bucket, needing to flail his free hand to keep his balance. Danny wasn’t all that clumsy of a guy, but he hadn’t grown up with stairs, so he wasn’t the best at them. Tommy was going fast enough that Danny was worried he might slip and fall.
“What’s happening?” Danny asked when they reached the bottom of the stairs, and he felt steady enough to look around. Out the windows, he saw more people running, but he couldn’t see what they were running for.
“I just saw the blood,” Tommy told him, shaking his head. He started moving for the exit, tugging Danny along after him. “There were, like, three guys on the floor and, like, give girls. It- fuck, Danny, it was so bad.”
Danny heard footsteps overhead, but they were already moving outside. It was past sunset, so Danny couldn’t see that well, but almost immediately, Danny could see a few more scenes a little like the one that Tommy had described. Clusters of women surrounding men on the ground, more men running, Danny couldn’t make sense of it.
Tommy started running again, and Danny tried his best to keep up. Neither of them was in bad shape, but neither was really in good shape either. Tommy went through phases where he tried to go to the gym, and Danny worked by the docks when he needed some extra pocket money, but they were far from runners. Surprisingly, Danny wasn’t feeling winded at all, though.
Danny realized Tommy was following a group of three men and a woman about halfway down the main street leading away from their apartment. The group noticed them and slowed just enough for Tommy and Danny to catch up.
“Do you know what’s happening?”
“Where are you going?”
“Can we come with you?”
“Did you see what those girls were doing?”
They all kind of talked over each other, but stopped quickly in an effort to save their breath. These people didn’t know anything more than they did.
Now that they were closer, Danny did recognize some of them. A friend of his and Tommy’s, a girl from his accounting class last semester, one of his neighbors, and a stranger. It made him feel a little better. He still didn’t know what was happening, but they had a plan, and Danny was rattled enough to put his faith in them.
He didn’t know the place they brought him and Tommy to, but he recognized it. It was on a street he’d walked down often enough, but he’d never looked inside. He still didn’t know what it was, even once he was in there. There were couches and a kitchen, but it didn’t look like an apartment.
There were some older folks inside, not elderly but not college-aged, who looked startled to see them. The guy that Danny didn’t know spoke before they could. “There’s some kind of attack going on.”
One of the older folks looked alarmed. “What do you mean attack?”
“A bunch of girls beating up guys,” the girl from Danny’s accounting class said, “but it’s everywhere.”
“There were girls cutting up some guys in our apartment,” Tommy added, and Danny’s stomach turned. He was glad he hadn’t turned his head when they’d been hovering in their doorway. Part of him was morbidly curious, a desire to see something that would help him better understand what was happening, but he knew he might’ve panicked too much to make it here if he’d seen it.
More people came into the building. From listening in on all the conversations, Danny got the idea this was some kind of makeshift church for queer people, which wasn’t really his thing, but he wasn’t complaining. The Bellhouse, they called it. Danny didn’t know what a bellhouse was supposed to look like, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t one. It was more of a narrow townhouse, and it didn’t even have a bell. Danny wasn’t sure how safe it felt, especially as more people began pouring in.
Once they had about a dozen college kids, mostly men, inside, the older folks got off the couches and started directing them to barricade the doors.
“It’s Lustrum’s gang,” one of the girls said, one Danny didn’t recognize. She was hanging back from the rest, looking shaken. “I heard Lustrum was going to… I knew she was going to try something tonight, but I thought everyone was exaggerating! I mean, killing all men? That’s just something people say!”
Danny thought the same thing, but it was true, apparently. The women at Brockton Bay University were really trying to kill all men.
He helped some of the other boys rig the pieces of furniture against each other, blocking the door, then propping up the table in the kitchen to block the window. It was far too small, but Tommy found a desk upstairs that they could put under it. It wouldn’t do much, but maybe it’d look like a real barricade from the outside.
They all sat on the floor when they were done. Danny let Tommy hold him, feeling a little pathetic for how useless he’d been, how it’d been Tommy who got them out of their apartment, but he was grateful for the contact. His heart was pounding against his chest so hard that his teeth hurt. He knew he was safe, for now at least, but his adrenaline was still roaring.
It happened so suddenly, and it was all so extreme. Really, killing all men? Starting with a college? And a bunch of women actually doing it? Danny had only gotten a glimpse, but given how many people had fled here, what happened at Danny and Tommy’s apartment wasn’t an isolated incident. This was so very real.
Some people tried to peer out the window around the barricade. One of the older folks started messing with the radio, keeping the volume low enough that everyone had to stop whispering to hear.
“...at Brockton Bay University. Beware potentially dangerous groups of women in the area. Lustrum suspected to be located on campus, with parahumans lieutenant on the North and East sides of campus and more moving downtown. Parahuman Response Teams en route. Repeat, riots occurring at Brockton Bay University…”
“We ran East, right?” Danny whispered to Tommy. Their apartment was a little North of campus. That meant they were in the danger zone, right?
“You’re better at that kind of stuff than me,” Tommy whispered back. His hands were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white. Danny took one of his hands to keep him from hurting himself.
“Does anyone have a gun?” someone asked, getting a series of shaking heads and murmured ‘no’s, Danny and Tommy among them. Who carried guns on a college campus? “Pepper spray?”
Both of the girls and one of the guys did, and the Bellhouse had a canister in the kitchen drawer. They briefly discussed who would be getting each of them, and those people moved closest to the door.
“Those aren’t going to do anything against Diamond if she shows up,” one of the boys said, one who looked a little familiar to Danny, but he didn’t know the name of. He looked around. “You know, that girl Lustrum’s got who can turn into crystal? I don’t know any of the other capes, but I remember that one. Her eyes are probably made out of rocks. Pepper spray’s not going to do anything.”
“You spray pepper spray into people’s mouths and noses, too,” one of the girls pointed out, but she sounded uncertain. “Even if she’s made of crystal, she still has to breathe, right?”
They were all a little more nervous now. A couple people got up to look for makeshift weapons. The kitchen here was lackluster, no real knives in the drawers. The best weapon they found was a rolling pin, which Tommy ended up with. Danny got an umbrella, which wasn’t bad, but he didn’t think he was going to be fighting off one of Lustrum’s lieutenants with an umbrella.
They talked a bit in hushed voices, mostly about what they’d seen. One of the guys Danny sort of recognized said he’d been about to enter a gay bar when people started running down the streets. The girl Danny didn’t know saw her boyfriend get castrated. Another boy saw a cloud of what he said was bear mace over a group of maybe half a dozen men. Danny and Tommy’s friend said he saw a guy getting dragged out of his apartment by his hair.
Tommy’s hand clenched on Danny’s hand even tighter. He’d been really brave so far, but hearing all these stories made it feel so much more real.
They all heard when the screams started outside. Danny wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but he knew he had to keep his eyes on the door. He could hear a strange noise that sounded a little like metal scraping against metal, and he knew that there was a parahuman nearby.
He somehow convinced himself that the parahuman wouldn’t find them until he could hear the door being torn off its hinges.
The people armed with pepper spray stood up, spraying the intruder as she tore through their barricade. Danny saw a flash of blue, and he knew it was Diamond. The pepper spray wouldn’t do anything. They were fucked.
Danny had seen pictures of Diamond before. She was a tall, willowy woman with long hair, covered head to toe in a blue, almost green, crystal-like substance. It wasn’t really armor, though, not a coating either. It was like she was made of the stuff, like a statue carved out of the material.
She didn’t have hands, Danny noticed, as Diamond used twin blades at the end of each arm to cleave through the men and women who’d tried spraying her with pepper spray. It looked painful, but Danny was sure they’d died pretty quickly.
Someone started crying, but most people were getting to their feet, including Danny. Silently, he prayed he didn’t accidentally open the umbrella and smack Tommy in the face.
Danny and Tommy were sort of in the middle of the pack, so Danny got a good eyeful of Diamond tearing through a few more college students before she was grabbing Tommy by the throat.
The blades that made up her hands melted away somewhere between getting pepper-sprayed and attacking the people inside. One of the older folks had a belt that he was swinging at Diamond, which really had no hope of doing any damage, but Diamond had to shift her weapon into a hand to bat it away. That alone spared Tommy a bloodier death, human fingers wrapping around the soft part of his neck.
“Tommy!” Danny cried as Tommy was lifted off the ground. Danny stepped forward, umbrella raised, but Diamond’s other hand was still sharpened, so she sliced through it pretty easily. Danny felt the tip nick his chest, her arm swinging hard enough to make him stagger back, and suddenly Tommy was gone.
Not dead. Gone. Physically not there anymore.
One moment Tommy was dangling by his neck, feet a good few inches off the ground, and then he just wasn’t there. Diamond stumbled back, almost like she’d been unbalanced by the sudden loss of his weight in her hand, and brought a hand to her throat. Danny froze for a moment, not sure what to do, before his survival instinct kicked back in, and he started hitting Diamond over the head with the other half of his umbrella. It wasn’t a very good weapon, the middle part spinning anytime it made contact, but he was hitting her, which no one had done before, so that was something?
“Ow! Danny?” Diamond said, and Danny nearly froze. She knew his name? Did she know him? Danny thought Diamond’s domino mask didn’t really hide her face that well, but he supposed it didn’t really need to, given she was covered in crystal. Maybe she wasn’t crystal all the time? That was how powers worked, right? Was she a classmate of his?
Danny only questioned it for a moment. He kept hitting her with his umbrella even though he was pretty sure it wasn’t doing anything.
“Fuck, Danny, stop,” Diamond said, raising an arm to block Danny’s blows. “You’re supposed to be hitting Diamond, not me!”
What was that supposed to mean? Was she trying to trick him?
Diamond jabbed her bladed hand forward before making a grab for the rolling pin with her more human hand. “Seriously, stop it.”
Danny lowered his hands, no longer having a weapon to attack with. In his peripheral vision, he was vaguely aware that the few people behind him had frozen. “What are you doing?”
“What are you talking about?” Diamond asked, looking at Danny quizically, then turning around. “Where did Diamond go?”
Had Danny somehow concussed her? “You’re Diamond.”
“What? Don’t even joke about that, Danny,” Diamond scolded, her tone completely unfitting her appearance. Danny could feel the cogs in his brain working to figure out what was happening, but it wasn’t quite working.
“Um, who do you think you are?” one of the survivors behind Danny asked. Diamond just looked confused.
“Um, I’m Tommy? Tommy Creel?” Diamond said, sounding genuinely confused. “What are you-”
Diamond cut herself off when she tried to rest her right hand on her hip, only to poke herself with the sharpened tip. He yelped, then looked down at his hands, and let out a half-scream. The bladed hand morphed back into a regular crystal hand, which seemed to freak her out even more.
“What the fuck?” she cried, looking panicked. She looked up, meeting Danny’s eyes. “Danny- Danny, what’s happening? Why are my hands made out of crystal?”
Danny couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He didn’t know what to say. “You’re- You’re Diamond.”
“What? No…” Diamond looked at her hands, then pawed at her face. Danny saw her eyes widen with horror, gaze desperately turning on Danny a heartbeat later. “No, no. Danny, it’s me. It’s Tommy. Your boyfriend. I promise. I know- I know I look like this, but I’m me. Please believe me.”
Danny just stared back, heart pounding so loud he could hear it, unsure what to make of the words the figure before him was saying.