Chapter 126:
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Ellie caught Danny by the back of his pajama shirt, and banked hard, zooming back up towards the Tower. This'd teach her to let other people take care of her brother. Why couldn't things be simple for once?
Danny moaned and curled in further, very committed to his fetal position. Ellie could, quite literally, feel his pain. Ellie's Obsessions were almost identical to Danny's, and her core was modeled on his, so she had to guess that he was freaking out over the betrayal, the danger to Ellie and the others, and the possibility that one of said others might be an assassin themselves, and he was having trouble processing the conflict. (Ellie's Obsession was, at the moment, telling her she really needed to put Danny in a nice, safe little box far away from anything difficult until his core healed. This wasn't particularly helpful.)
Luckily, Ellie knew the magic words to snap him out of it.
"Danny, I need your help here," she said, voice strained. It wasn't a lie. She could carry Danny without any trouble, but maneuverability was an issue when your load was as big as you were, and not cooperating.
The results were immediate. Danny's skin was paler than usual, his skin slick with ectoplasm and sweat, and his eyes weren't quite focusing on Ellie's face, but he was again present in the moment, Ellie's request for help overriding whatever logic loop he had been stuck in. If Danny's human half (or any part of him, really) had been working a little better, he probably would have been able to pull himself out on his own, but Ellie couldn't really blame him for his inability to do so.
"Keep an eye out and help me dodge!" said Ellie, narrowly avoiding a very medieval-looking spiky thing.
"R-Right," said Danny, barely audible over the whistling wind in Ellie's ears and the sounds of supernatural battle. It was a good thing the two of them were so similar, and so used to fighting together, that they didn't really need to communicate beyond that.
It was also a good thing that both Danny and Ellie had some control over their flight path. With the number of combatants, there was always something that one or the other of them hadn't seen. Danny yanked Ellie out of the way at least half as often as Ellie pulled him away.
There were a lot of people in between them and the Tower, now. This wasn't looking good. It would be really great if Ellie randomly developed some kind of teleportation power right about now.
Holy- Where did Vlad come from? Oh. Right. Vlad could teleport. Heck. She had forgotten about that in the heat of the moment. The older hybrid grabbed the shoulders of the other two, and with a sickening wrench, they were in front of one of the Tower doors. Ellie wasn't sure if this was the door they'd come out of, and she didn't really care.
She whistled sharply. "Cujo!"
The huge dog barked, then shrank, worming his way out of a knot of enemies like he was threading a needle. Ellie threw herself through the door, and dragged Danny, who had gone limp again, deeper into the room.
Apparently, it was the same floor, because the nurse, Prunella, ran out to them. Ellie positioned herself protectively between her and Danny, hissing in warning. She didn't plan on letting anyone else near him, not after this.
"I can help," said Prunella.
"Yeah? Me too!" said Ellie. Ellie might not be good at healing, but she was more than acceptable. She had learned at the reflection of St Judith's Nursing School, the one that had been blown up in the real world. It was one of the most modern medicine establishments in the Zone, and they had made great advancements in core resonance healing in the last twenty years. According to Sister Judith, anyway.
In theory, Ellie and Danny should be particularly compatible in that regard, as they had nearly identical ectosignatures. But being this angry was not conducive to the technique, nor was being in combat, for that matter.
"I just want to help," said Prunella.
Those ghosts who were less combative, more hesitant, or less willing to risk their lives, milled around behind her. Many of the others, the ones more enraged by either the breaking of the Tower truce, or by the idea of bounty hunting, were outside, fighting. Some of whom were rushing in behind Ellie, Cujo, and Vlad, no longer interested in fighting now that Danny was back inside.
But Ellie couldn't tell if all of the ghosts coming in had actually been fighting for Danny, or if they had only been fighting their rivals. She couldn't tell if the ones who had stayed, like Prunella, weren't just biding their time, either, so under these circumstances, the best option would be to...
Run?
No, there were still Valerie and the rest of Danny's humans to think of (it was way too easy for Ellie to think of them as 'Danny's humans'), Ellie might not know anything about healing on a different floor, and Danny might even be more seriously injured on another floor.
Okay, so running was out unless someone made a move, then it would be right back in again.
But that left her with few options; none, really, that she could think of. She couldn't take her eyes off the crowd long enough to heal Danny.
(She would admit that the description 'heal Danny' sounded far more optimistic than the probable reality.)
She edged closer to Danny, a warning in the back of her throat. She was getting ready to fight, defend, carry out her Obsession.
(Behind her, Danny was mumbling something about faces and trust.)
"You're scaring the children," said Vlad, whose ghostly outfit now looked genuinely medieval, stepping between Ellie and the ghosts. "Some of you are hundreds of years old. You could act like it."
"It's my job to heal the sick," protested Prunella with the frenetic energy of someone whose Obsession was over-stressed. "Please, let me help."
Ellie relented. "F-Fine. But you make one wrong move..." She let the threat hang, because she didn't really know what she would do.
"Danielle, my dear, you won't have to do anything," said Vlad. "If anyone behaves improperly, I will make sure they are sorry."
Ellie relaxed marginally at Vlad's surprisingly supportive presence. Vlad was usually an enemy, but he was a known quantity, and he wanted Danny for himself. He wanted Danny alive and well. Vlad was an evil creep, but his evil was limited. He had lines he wouldn't cross, and those lines had, miraculously, become thicker with time, rather than thinner. Although, in Ellie's opinion, he couldn't get much more evil than trying to melt her.
Maybe she was being uncharitable with that. He had gotten better.
A bit.
She stepped back to Danny, keeping her eyes on the ghosts until she was able to crouch down next to him and run her hand up over his shoulder. He was shaking. But...
"Sorry for scaring you," he said, voice very uneven. "I think- I think I'm alright now, mostly. I think."
"You don't sound very sure of that," said Ellie.
"Well, I'm not." He laughed nervously. Wisps crowded into his hair, giving him a rainbow halo. "Couldn't be, really."
"I don't think you're alright."
Danny's core felt distressingly similar to how Ellie's had felt when she was destabilizing. Not exactly the same, but then Ellie obviously didn't have the same connection to Danny's core as she did to her own. Had he felt like this back then, watching her melt? Maybe. She couldn't say. She'd been more concerned with the melting bit.
But Danny felt like he was growing stronger, more stable again. His emotions, the ones Ellie could pick up beyond the wisps' calming mist, felt steadier, more even.
"You're probably right," he agreed after a moment. Then he flinched away from Prunella as she sat down, cautiously, next to him. "I don't want to go all... fuzzy, again," he said.
"No," said Prunella, voice very low, low enough that even nearby ghosts would be hard pressed to hear it. "That would not be wise at this point. If I had any idea-" She shook her head "You need your wits about you. Even if that does limit what I can do for you."
Danny folded his lips in and gave Prunella a frustrated, wary look. "Maybe you could say what, exactly that is and how you're doing it this time," he said, just as quietly.
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Jazz, Sam, and Tucker, sat in a small room with a low ceiling, sharing the results of their training with one another as the ship creaked and moaned around them. Well, Jazz and Tucker were sharing. Sam had already demonstrated her trick with the camera to, well, basically everyone.
Jazz had picked up a sort of telekinesis where she could make glowing yellow copies of her own hands. Tucker kept making jokes about 'Bigby's Hand.' Jazz kept muttering something about Danny being able to see the future.
Tucker had less to show. He wasn't sure what, if anything, had been happening with the Egyptian's machines, much less if he had caused it. On the other hand, his PDA was holding a 100% charge, and had been for several hours, and he claimed that it was running faster. He had also said that hieroglyphs kept flashing in the notification bar, but Sam hadn't seen one yet.
Sam, meanwhile, hadn't given up on being able to control plants. She had brought a tiny little African violet with her. Jazz was trying to coach her through her visualization process. It was a lot more meditative than what Sam had been trying to do before, but it still wasn't working. She glared at it and sighed.
"You know," said Jazz, "we won't be there for a while yet. It might be a good idea to go to sleep, get some rest. Giving ourselves eyestrain isn't going to help anything."
Sam sighed. "Yeah. You're right." She looked over at Tucker. "You'd better not be up playing with that the whole time."
"Uhhuh," said Tucker, entirely engrossed in his PDA.
Sam's lips twitched up, and she dumped the remainder of her cup of water into the flowerpot. It had been looking a bit dry. She stood, and followed Jazz to their bunks.
Walking away, she didn't see the plant shiver, glow, and grow.
