Warnings: Dark, AU, lab fic. Ongoing.


It was heat. The ghost body formed grotesque bubbles as he cooked, greenish splotches that stretched his non-skin and burst to add new agony as he felt something like bare nerve exposed to air. He screamed and cried. There was no use in trying not to, a very early lesson. It was odd to think he'd ever imagined that might be possible. Surely he'd been insane in some different way, even before his arrival.

When darkness filled the room again, he still felt weak, his body aching from its effort to rebuild itself. Breathing was instinctual, even in the ghost body, and it had taken some effort to force himself to stop taking in the scalding air. Now he tried to force himself to breathe again, and more importantly to think, to pull his mind away from the immediate memory of pain.

"Hey. Hey, do you hear me?" Daniel was speaking. Not the calm, steady encouragement the man gave, but urgent attempts to pull him back from the edge he'd been pushed to. "Blue guy? You need to talk, right? Come on..."

Just as he was afraid of being left alone, so was Daniel afraid of losing his only companion. It was quite touching, really. He took a few shuddering, weak breaths, the lingering fear of choking pushed back by the cooled air. "Yes. Yes, Daniel."

He heard Daniel let out a heavy breath, a sign of relief. "Okay. Where are you?"

Daniel didn't really believe it, not yet, but he tried. Closing his eyes, the man forced himself to remember and forget at the same time. "Outside."

"Right. Great." There was still a tremor in Daniel's voice. Sometimes, when they were experimenting on the man, Daniel would scream at them, demand and then beg that they stop. He even cried on occasions, as if feeling some of the same pain. There was no point, not really, the humans wouldn't listen. Eventually Daniel would give up. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, even though he never reciprocated when Daniel was being hurt, knowing it was useless. "We have to talk about something."

"Yes." He was repeating himself. Even with the stars fixed in his mind, it was still all he could do to not remember what had just happened to him. "You have to start."

"All right." Daniel's breathing was starting to even out. "I have something. A few months ago I went to my first school dance."

Sometimes it was hard to understand how young Daniel was. The man felt ancient. "That's good. What did you wear?" It was the most insignificant detail he could think of.

"I have a grey suit. My mom..." His voice trailed off, then began again with the same determined strength. "And I wore a dress shirt and a blue tie."

"I see." He couldn't quite find another question. The sky in his mind flickered dangerously, threatening to return to the dark room. "Keep going."

"I got to take a really popular girl. Paulina. She's the prettiest girl in school," Danny went on helpfully. "It didn't go all great, though, she wound up fighting with my best friend, and then Sam turned into a dragon."

Like the claims of superheroics, Daniel's stories were always colorful. It hardly mattered that the man believed little of them. "That must have been unpleasant."

"Yeah. She was huge, too. And blue. And strong, and breathed... Anyway, my dad... Anyway, I managed to help her turn back. It was all because of some cursed ghost necklace." A few false starts weren't unusual, but at least Daniel had learned to redirect himself. "The necklace was gold. It was a bunch of thick pieces, but really close around the neck, kind of like a choker? And there was a green stone in the center."

Little details added life to the story. "What happened to the other girl?"

"She kinda ditched me for another guy. But it wasn't all bad. Sam and I wound up dancing a little." That part of the story over, Danny switched to details again. "Paulina wore this pink dress and had pink gloves on. It looked nice with her eyes, she has green eyes. Sam had this black and purple dress. She looked good too. I mean, when she wasn't a dragon."

"I assumed."

"You'll like Sam," Danny went on, a bit pushy, but it was doubtlessly important to him. "Tucker, too. I'll introduce you."

"Yes." Now he could see the stars clearly. He was fine. Nothing was wrong. "I'll look forward to it."


The ground was shaking. At first the man assumed it was some very peculiar experiment, but that couldn't be right, there was no one outside monitoring. Experiments never happened in the dark, unless they damaged his eyes in the process.

Then he assumed he was imagining it, but Daniel's voice rang out, alarmed. "What's going on?"

"I don't know." He really didn't. How strange. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah... I'm flying now. The shaking's just weird. Do you think there's an earthquake?"

"No." Daniel's first suggestion was good. He concentrated and forced himself up off the ground. Now he wasn't bothered by the instability underneath, only the odd sounds. Something, somewhere, was straining apart...

"Do you hear that?" Daniel tended to ask silly questions when he was nervous. "It sounds like metal twisting. Like a girder or something."

"I don't know." The man was starting to grow agitated. Pain was familiar. Darkness was familiar. This, this wasn't anything he understood, it could be something new, something worse...

"Maybe somebody's breaking out." There was a breathless excitement in Daniel's voice. "You think we'll..."

Daniel's question was interrupted by a thundering noise and the ground leaping up, smashing against the man's body. It didn't hurt, not really, but the impact and the strangeness of it all stunned him. For several moments he laid on the ground, before realizing that he was stretched out flat, a sensation he'd entirely forgotten. The edge of the cylinder that contained him was under his legs, faintly uncomfortable. He couldn't make any sense of it.

"Come on!" Now Daniel's voice was harder, firm. The man opened his eyes. Their containment pods were just far enough apart that the ghostly glow couldn't quite give details in the dark, only the reassurance that the other was still there. But Daniel was somehow over him, his expression clear from the faint illumination of his body. His eyebrows were drawn down, mouth set, and his hands reached around the man's arm, pulling him up. "We gotta go, we gotta go now!"

Where could they go? There was no real outside, it was a fantasy. The boy was unnaturally strong as a ghost, and finally lifted the man partially over a shoulder before flying up. Intangibility was a familiar tingle, one of the simpler powers granted to a ghost. He'd never felt it shared from someone else, though, and finally closed his eyes to escape the utter disorientation of seeing collapsed rooms and piles of debris as they passed through. When an odd chill hit, he realized with astonishment that there was a breeze, and opened his eyes again.

The outside was real. Below them, a building half-collapsed, odd inhuman beings also fleeing into the night, the sounds of howls and shifting rock and men shouting. Around the building, there was a black flat surface, and beyond that trees. A forest. The building was isolated, somehow he'd known that, although he couldn't remember how he'd learned it. He closed his eyes again, dizzy.

Other than the sound of wind and of Daniel's breath, quickened with urgency and fear, it was nearly as easy to pretend he was back in the building as it had once been to pretend he was outside. Daniel carried them for a period of time the man couldn't define, but it certainly felt long. When they paused, and Daniel lowered them both to the ground, he could no longer hear the sounds from the building.

"Oh, man. Oh man." Daniel's breath was too fast, now, near hyperventilation. The man opened his red eyes in concern, to try to look the boy over and be sure he was all right. Curling up, Daniel tucked his head between his knees and folded his arms over it, as if hiding himself. "We're out. I can't believe it. I can't believe we're out."

He could sympathize deeply with that sentiment. A sudden irrepressible urge took him, and the man glanced up to see the real night sky, between the pine branches overhead. It was surprisingly similar to his imaginings. The main difference was how huge it was. Even with the trees cutting off some of it, it was overwhelming, too big to be understood. With a strange rush he felt that he'd begun flying again. No, not flying, falling, he was falling up, into that too-large sky...

When he came back to his senses moments later, Daniel had pulled out of his own fit and was now leaning over him, his eyes wide. "Hey! Hey, what are you doing? What's wrong with you? Come on, don't die on me now!"

The dizziness was starting to fade, but he squinted his eyes as he looked up at Daniel, trying not to see that sky again just yet. "I'm not dying."

"You were breathing weird. Then you fell over." Daniel was starting to calm down again, but there was still concern in his expression. "Do you feel sick?"

Agoraphobia. He had no idea where he'd learned the word, or why he recognized it so suddenly, but sometimes his memory was like that, odd useless bits floating up. "I'm not sick, either. I'm just..." The man paused. That wasn't true, not really. He was sick, just not physically ill. "I don't think I can walk yet."

"Okay." Danny looked up and around, taking in their surroundings. "I guess they're going to be pretty busy for a while, but I want to keep going. We can't let them catch up."

As dreamlike as the whole situation still seemed, he could agree with that much.