Archive of Our Own

No one really knows how it happened, but somehow they got settled into the manor again without even noticing. They’d only had to stay small for a day or so before Vic managed to get in contact with one of his dad’s old coworkers, who despite rather unfortunately sharing a name with Karen was nothing like her in the slightest and was in fact nothing but helpful. But after that they just… hadn’t left. Vic was the only one who managed to, since he actually had a job with obligations that needed him, something none of the rest of them had. 

They didn’t really talk to each other, either. They didn’t really talk at all. As much as they tried to avoid him, the only person each of them was really interacting with was Niles when he came in to talk to them even as they did their damn best to ignore them. Except for Jane and the others, who actually sought out interaction with exclusively Dorothy and no one else, none of them even really left their rooms. They’d listen to see when everyone else was quiet before sneaking down to get food if they actually even needed to eat.

Larry doesn’t know why he doesn’t try to talk to any of them. He feels like he should at least talk to Rita. She’s his friend. Sometimes it feels like she’s more than that. It was only the two of them for so long. Even when there were other people around, it still felt like it was only them. It’s like they’re extensions of each other at this point. “Friend” doesn’t feel like it covers it, but neither does “best friend” or “sister” and of course “housemate” doesn’t either. But Dr. Caulder says that Rita wants to be alone. He knows he shouldn’t listen to him. He knows he’s a liar. But it’d be just like Rita to want to have some space after everything that went down inside the painting, so this time he’s inclined to believe him.

Rita doesn’t know why she doesn’t try to talk to any of them. She feels like she should at least talk to Larry. He’s her friend. Sometimes it feels like he’s more than that. It was only the two of them for so long. Even when there were other people around, it still felt like it was only them. It’s like they’re extensions of each other at this point. “Friend” doesn’t feel like it covers it, but neither does “best friend” or “brother” and of course “housemate” doesn’t either. But Niles says that Larry wants to be alone. She knows she shouldn’t listen to him. She knows he’s a liar. But it’d be just like Larry to want to have some space and some time to commune privately with the negative spirit, so this time she’s inclined to believe him.

Cliff doesn’t know why he doesn’t try to talk to any of them. He feels like he should at least talk to Jane. She’s his friend, and maybe some of the other people in the Underground are his friends too. Penny is, at least. Sometimes it feels like she’s-like they’re-more than just his friends. Sometimes she feels just like his daughter. He knows it’s not fair to project his shit onto her. Onto them. He knows that, he really does, but he wants to talk it out with them regardless. But Niles says that Jane wants to be alone. He knows he shouldn’t listen to him. He knows he’s a liar. But of course Jane and the others want space, especially space from him, so this time he’s inclined to believe him.

Jane doesn’t know if she’s relieved that none of them have tried to talk to her or angry about it. Hammerhead is angry about it, because of course she is, but for once most of them are in agreement that it’s a good thing they’ve only had contact with Dorothy and Niles so far, even if they have to hold themselves back from wringing that bastard’s neck, if only because Dorothy is always with him and she doesn’t deserve to see that. She doesn’t listen to a word Niles says whenever he tries to talk to her. It’s easy to tune him out at this point. She just focuses on her own breathing and ignores him and imagines how satisfying it’ll be when he makes the mistake of coming to see her without Dorothy.

It’s not the only plan they make. Flit could get them out of there in two seconds, but then it would just be them, not the rest of the group. Team. Family. Whatever you want to call it. She could ask Flit to grab Dorothy and take them out of there, but again-that would leave the others behind. Even if she doesn’t always get along with them, they still don’t deserve to be here. They don’t deserve to be with Niles. So Jane keeps planning, brainstorming with Dr. Harrison and Mama Pentecost and the Secretary and ignoring Penny’s advice that they should just get out now with Dorothy and that the others will be fine on their own.

Flit is the one who explores the whole house to find out where Dorothy is staying. Flit takes the instructions to be as quiet as possible seriously, which is good since none of them want to deal with aem accidentally waking the whole house up. Ae gets as many supplies as possible, too, and Hammerhead stays up for the rest of the night and the following day to make sure Niles doesn’t come into their lockless room.

But honestly, the real problem isn’t Dorothy, it’s Danny.

None of them really know Danny except Dorothy and Larry since Vic went home and Flex could be literally anywhere on the planet at this point, but they can’t just leave them behind. Niles said that he would only hold onto them for as long as it took them to recover enough to grow back into a street, but who the hell knows if that’s true, and Jane trusts Niles about as far as Hammerhead can throw him. There are a lot of places in the house to stash a brick, and none of the places Flit checked were occupied.

Honestly, if Danny weren’t there, they’d be the destination, not one of the supplies they’re trying to gather, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Which means that they’re going to have to put off blowing this joint until they can find them, something that is definitely made infinitely more difficult by the fact that she’s getting closer and closer to giving in to Hammerhead’s requests to tear Niles’ head clean off his shoulders.

Unfortunately, there are probably only two people who know where Danny might be. Niles is one of them, and they’re definitely not asking him about them. Dorothy is the other, and Jane hasn’t been able to get her alone without Niles spying on her. She doesn’t even know what the kid’s powers are, just that they involve something vague and powerful and definitely ridiculous. So they probably aren’t going to be able to find Danny any time soon. Bad news, because they’ve got to get out of here soon or they’re going to explode. And they’ve got to bring everyone with them, even sentient streets who had been turned into sentient bricks.

But… Danny is a sentient brick. Niles probably can’t hurt them. Mr. Nobody managed it, but he managed a lot of impossible things. If they leave Danny behind, they’ll probably be fine. And Jane’s clinging to the idea of staying behind by the fingernails as it is. (Really, the only reason they haven’t bounced already is because Babydoll insists that they bring Cliff with them, and the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter wants them to bring Larry, and as much as she wants them to get the hell out of there Penny really does like Rita, and Jane is absolutely not leaving without Dorothy. Even if they have to leave the rest of them behind in the end, they’re bringing Dorothy with them.)

So Jane grabs the go-bag they have prepared that the Secretary quadruple-checked to make sure was full of the essentials and Flit bounces into Rita’s room and lands on her bed, crouching low over her. She’s not melting. She’s not asleep at all, actually. She’s just curled up on her side hugging herself. Penny makes a soft cooing noise of sympathy that causes Silvertongue to roll her eyes. Flit pokes Rita’s shoulder. “Hey. Meet us outside in ten minutes with everything you want to bring. We’re getting out of this dump.”

Flit’s gone so fast ae doesn’t even hear Rita saying “What?” into the darkness of her now-empty room.

Cliff is next, because he doesn’t really sleep even if he dreams, and he can get into Larry’s room the way that they can’t. (Well, Lucy could, but Lucy fronting wears the woman out too fast to be productive unless it’s just for short bursts, and she doesn’t like to do it anyhow.) Flit lands right on top of him instead of next to him, just loud enough to make aem wince at the noise but hopefully not loud enough that it’ll wake Niles up.

Ae doesn’t even need to tell him anything about running. He just looks at aem for two seconds and understands, somehow. Or at least Flit’s pretty sure he does. As he stands up with a clank, sending Flit tumbling off him, ae spins and says “You’ve gotta get Larry!” before vanishing. Hopefully he’ll understand that, too.

Jane fronts when Flit lands in Dorothy’s room. Flit means well, but ae is always a bit much, and Dorothy is… strange. She gets overwhelmed easily. Jane leans over her bed and shakes her a little, murmuring “Hey, Dorothy. It’s time to get up.”

Dorothy stirs and blinks up at her in the darkness. She’s so small. She’s hugging onto something that Jane can’t see-Flit, right up next to her in the driver’s seat, tries to draw her attention to it until Driver 8 shushes aem. “Jane?”

“We’re leaving now,” she says quietly. Dorothy tilts her head and sits up a little with a yawn. “Come on. I’ll help you pack your stuff, but we have to be fast.”

For a moment Dorothy just stares at her, and Jane worries she’s going to refuse. She really doesn’t want to have to force her to come, but she will if it comes down to it. Anything to stop Niles from fucking up another person any more than he already has. But then Dorothy kicks the covers back and holds up the object she was hugging onto. Bulky, dark, and rectangular. “I think all I want to bring is Danny. Is that okay?”

Thank god, they won’t have to leave them behind after all. Jane wonders how much longer they’ll need to spend recuperating. “You gotta get some clothes and your toothbrush, too. Why don’t I hold Danny while you get that stuff? We can put it in my bag, there’s still room.”

Dorothy only grabs a few things-a change of clothes, a teeny tiny toiletry kit, a little blue bag full of something that rattles around, and a pad of paper. Jane helps her pack it up and makes sure one of them is always holding onto Danny at all times. She doesn’t ask why Jane won’t let her turn the light on. Why she won’t let her do anything that could risk waking Niles up in the other room. The idea of him catching them is terrifying, but there’s no time to wonder when the change was made from anger at him to fear of him, or if it’ll ever go back to just anger.

She steps back from the co-front just long enough for Flit to take Dorothy’s hand and bring them plus Danny outside. They worked out a long time ago that their powers don’t work as well when they’re co-fronting, and they’ve all been so messed up since the painting incident that it’s a struggle to teleport even one other person, so they can’t risk messing it up with a variable as small as that.

The bus is dark. Dorothy leans back and looks up at it as they land. Jane shakes off the rush of dizziness and weakness crawling up in the back of her throat and tells her to go in, making sure she brings Danny with her before tossing their now shared bag up behind her.

Larry and Cliff are already outside, making sure they don’t look at each other. Larry’s got a bag, though god only knows what’s in it, but all Cliff has are things he’s stuff into his oversized jacket and pants pockets. Larry makes a coughing sound like he’s about to say something, and Jane interrupts him before he can by jerking her thumb at the bus and saying “Get in.”

Cliff shrugs and obeys. Smart man. (Jane never thought she’d think that about Cliff of all people.) Larry hesitates. “We’re waiting for Rita, right?” There’s a low crackling sound and for a moment a faint blue shine glimmers through his clothes as the negative spirit chimes in its agreement. “I’m not leaving without her.”

Jane doesn’t say anything. She can feel Larry glaring at her. Honestly, the reason why she doesn’t answer is because she doesn’t know. They have to get out of there, and if that means leaving Rita behind then so be it, but… could she really leave her behind? Could they really leave her behind? Knowing what Niles is capable of? The kind of person he is? Jane taps her foot nervously. They won’t leave without her, but if Niles wakes up and catches her, then they’re out. They have to be. Even if she gets hurt. Even if Penny would honestly kill her for it.

And then Rita quietly scrambles out of the house and down the path until she gets to them, lugging two bags with her that she drops so she can give Larry an enormous hug that makes him stumble backwards. Jane throws her bags in too. She feels a little sick. They’re close. They’re so close. They’re so fucking close. If something’s going to go wrong, it’ll be right now.

She rushes the two of them-three of them-into the bus, keeping one eye on the manor’s door and expecting Niles to burst out at any moment to try to stop them. To tell them that there’s no fuel in the bus. To say something about how he slashed the bus’ tires to stop them from using it to get away. To say that he has leverage against them that he’s going to use to keep them with him. To say something, anything that he thought would make them stop and stay with him. 

But the door stays shut. It stays shut as Larry and Rita settle down next to each other. It stays shut as she closes the doors of the bus behind them. It stays shut as Driver 8 gets up next to her and takes the controls with her. It stays shut as they carefully maneuver the bus down onto the main road at an achingly slow pace. It stays shut as they get just slightly down the main road that heads into the heart of Cloverton. And it stays shut as they floor it.

They’ve been on the road for approximately four and a half hours, with the sun just barely peeking over the horizon, when someone finally says something.

“Jane, where are we going?” Rita asks, after exchanging meaningful glances with Larry that they were probably both misunderstanding for the past three miles. They’re at an intersection in Clinton, Dorothy’s nose pushed right up against the glass even though this is presumably nothing she hasn’t seen before, since it looks just like every other county they’ve driven through so far.

“Driver 8,” he corrects, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Cliff starts a little from his place at the back of the bus. “Jane is taking a break right now. I’m better at driving, anyway. It’s my job.”

Rita nods. “Driver 8, then. Where are we going?”

“We figured we’d head to Detroit first. Cyborg can help us get some supplies and that’s where Garfield was seen last. That’ll be the first place Caulder looks, though, so we can’t stay there for too long.” Driver 8’s tone is clipped. “If he doesn’t have any ideas, we were going to try heading to Washington or California for a bit, then Canada. It’d be easier for him to find us if we stuck together, so the best bet is splitting up, at least until Danny is recovered enough to grow large enough to accommodate people again.”

“Um,” Dorothy says, peeling her face away from the window and lifting up Danny as she reads the words written on them. “Danny wants to know why we’re hiding. Oh-and-” She pauses and waits for them to write some more. “And they want you all to know that they’ll be okay, but that it’ll take a little longer for them to be able to be a street again.”

“Well,” Rita says, trying to be a bit delicate, because if Danny doesn’t know what Niles did, Dorothy probably (make that a definitely) doesn’t either. “We’re… uh… we’re hiding because we don’t want Niles to find us, because he did some… bad things.”

“Meaning he completely fucked up our lives just because he could,” Cliff mutters from the back of the bus. Rita sits up higher in her seat so she can turn around and smack his shoulder for swearing in front of Dorothy, like that’s the reason they shouldn’t be telling her exactly what Niles-what her father did to them. “Well, he did!”

Dorothy hugs Danny a little closer to herself. “Well, Danny says that doesn’t sound like the Niles they know.”

Before they could start the long, hard process of detailing exactly how Niles had repeatedly screwed them over, Larry clears his throat.

“Regardless of all that, we should figure out where we’re going to go after Detroit. Shouldn’t we try to find Flex and the rest of the Dannyzens?” He points out. “They deserve to know that Danny’s okay, even if they’re, uh, smaller now. And Flex could probably help us. He was in the Ant Farm just like-just like I was, he knows what those kinds of people are capable of, he’ll want to do something to help us.”

(Larry barely manages to suppress his shudder. He never thought he’d be grouping Niles in with the people who tortured him down there. But even if Niles hadn’t done it personally, he must’ve had a hand in it, even if that hand was one that had just stayed itself from stopping it. He’d always believed that Niles had rescued him. But to rescue someone you have to know where they’re being held in the first place, and since Niles had caused the plane crash…)

“Mr. Flex is nice,” Dorothy agrees like she’s ever met him. Maybe she has-he was living on Danny with her, wasn’t he? Stands to reason that they would’ve had some sort of contact. She probably hadn’t stayed in that weird Escher print of a basement the entire time she’d lived with them. “Danny says so too. I think we should find him and Miss Maura.”

“I have a friend in Illinois,” Cliff says out of goddamn nowhere. “I should probably tell her that I’m still alive if we’re going to be heading to Detroit anyway.”

“Since when do you have friends?” Jane asks, rolling her shoulders back and cracking her neck. How Driver 8 manages to ignore the woman’s dozen and a half constant aches and pains is a mystery to her.

Larry tilts his head. “Since when have you been to Illinois?”

Rita frowns. “Cliff, I have an honest question. Do you think Michigan and Illinois are the same state, and that Detroit is in Illinois?”

Dorothy bites her lower lip. “I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

Jane strongly considers smashing her head against the horn.

Dorothy sits at the back of the bus on the floor and chews on the Sour Patch Kids that Jane got her when they stopped for her bathroom break. Danny rests on her lap with the open bag of candy sitting on top of them-she checked to make sure they wouldn’t mind, and they’d said that it was okay. She rubs her fingers on the hem of her shirt and tries to think. Tries to categorize these people and map out an escape route with Danny that she can use if something happens.

Mr. Larry’s driving now, even though they had an argument about whether or not he should be allowed to do it. (“We’re not letting you drive, Larry. You almost crashed the bus off the road once, we don’t need you to do it again.” “It’s not going to happen again! You know the spirit and I are on good terms now!”) He hasn’t said much to her, he just shook her hand when Dr. Caulder-her dad, but it’s hard for her to think of him as that, he was never there for her-introduced them. There’s something else inside of him, too, but she hasn’t really seen it yet, not since they got out of the painting. But Danny says that he’s okay, and Danny’s smart and knows how to spot good people, so she believes them.

Miss Jane also has a lot of people inside of her. She’s someone Dorothy can count on, though. Jane’s the only one of them that she really knows. It was always nice to get to talk to her. That’s how Dorothy knew that it would be okay to follow her when she said that they were leaving. She doesn’t know a lot of the other people inside of her-Jane only ever explained it to her once, the first time they met, when she was trying to fend off any of Dorothy’s questions about it-but the nice fuzzy one, Rain Brain, and the nice sad one with the long name Dorothy couldn’t remember who only showed up once and didn't seem to really notice that she was even there, showed her how to do pretty watercolors. So the other people inside are good just like Jane is.

Miss Rita is… she’s something. Someone. She’s nice, but there’s something flat about her. She always seems too-too-something. Too much. She’s just too much. She’s not bad, not yet, but she’s not good and safe, either. She reminds Dorothy of the girls in her town who’d follow her around and dare each other to touch her before running away whenever Dorothy tried to look at them. And Danny doesn’t know her, so they can’t say she’s good like they say Mr. Larry is good.

Dorothy shoves more candy into her mouth, making sure to leave the yellow ones in the bag, since those are the worst ones, as she eyes Mr. Steele. His problem is that he’s really big. Really, really big. And she doesn’t really know him, and neither does Danny, and right now while he tries to talk to Jane he’s ignoring her so she probably doesn’t like him either, because that’s how that works. He hasn’t done anything to hurt her yet, but that doesn’t make him good, it just makes him like Miss Rita. Undecided.

The bus goes over a bump in the road and Dorothy almost spills her candy while grabbing for Danny to make sure they don’t go flying, Miss Rita nearly slides out of her seat onto the isle, and Miss Jane ends up half on top of Mr. Steele.

“Careful up there!” Miss Rita yelps, adjusting her position. One of her suitcases came unlatched when it was jostled, and Dorothy spots something pale blue and thin sticking out of it. Before she has much time to wonder what it is, they go over another bump, and the entire thing spills all over the bus.

“Sorry!” Mr. Larry calls back. “The roads here aren’t great!”

Dorothy puts her bag of candy on one of the seats just in front of her and weighs it down with Danny, giving them a little pat so they know that she won’t leave them there forever as she moves to gather things off the bottom of the bus along with Miss Rita, who’s muttering something about how maybe the roads would be better if they weren’t being driven on by someone who saw through tinted goggles out of two holes cut in some bandages.

The pale blue thing Dorothy saw turns out to be a hair ribbon, and she hands it to Miss Rita carefully, trying not to get it any dirtier than it already is. Miss Rita takes it and piles some socks on top of it, squishing it down into the suitcase it had come from. Dorothy chases after a few more things, including a shiny tube of lipstick that she only noticed had rolled away because of how it reflected the light of the sun.

She tries to tune out Miss Jane and Miss Rita bickering about why Miss Rita decided to bring two suitcases full of things with them in the first place when they were trying to move lightly and fails. They’re just so loud. They’re so loud that when she crawls back to the end of the bus and pulls Danny back into her lap she doesn’t even notice that she’s still clutching the lipstick, rolling it back and forth between her fingers repetitively.

Dorothy knows she should give it back. It’s not hers. Stealing is wrong. But it feels nice between her fingers and it’s still so loud that everything Danny does to try to distract her from asking her to name everything she can see outside the windows when she stands up (corn, a few scraggly trees, telephone wires with birds sitting on them she can’t identify, more corn, telephone poles, even more corn) feels like it’s getting stuck in her brain.

All she can do is cover one of her ears with one hand and squish her neck down slightly painfully so her other ear presses into her shoulder as she keeps rolling the tube in between her fingers. She hopes the rest of them don’t notice. Mr. Larry is probably too busy driving to notice, which is good, and Miss Rita and Miss Jane are still arguing so they won’t notice, but even though Mr. Steele is looking out the window there’s a chance he could look back and see her. Dorothy closes her eyes. She’s glad Dr. Caulder isn’t here, at least. It would be so much worse if he were here.

Eventually, the noise cuts out, but it’s still hard for Dorothy to move with it fuzzing around under her skin, so she stays put until the bus comes to a sudden stop. Even then, she only opens her eyes, finally uncovering her ears when Miss Rita bends down in front of her.

“We’re getting lunch,” she says. Dorothy suddenly becomes aware of the crushing hunger in her gut that the sour candy didn’t do much to satisfy. “Come on. You can leave Danny here, Cliff and Larry are going to stay out here to watch them.”

Dorothy reluctantly sets Danny down (they show her a small smiley face of reassurance) and follows Miss Rita out of the bus, sticking close to her as they head into the harshly lit fast food joint. Dorothy screws up her eyes, but not before she sees the handful of other people in the diner have turned their heads to look at them. Miss Rita tries not to look like she’s watching them right back. Miss Jane doesn’t watch them at all, tossing her head and ordering a salad and a massive milkshake.

She steps back and looks at the two of them. “C’mon, Dorothy. Rita’s gonna get one of everything, so you can pick out what you want first.”

Dorothy nervously steps forward and looks up at the menu. She can read it. Marion and Danny always said that she was a good reader and writer and artist. She knows she can read it. She knows she knows what the words mean. But when she opens her mouth, still not sure of what she’s going to ask for, nothing comes out except a small cough. Cheeks burning, Dorothy looks down, which turns out to be a mistake, since it means she sees how the lady behind the counter is looking at her.

When Dorothy had been living on Danny, her face hadn’t been a problem for anyone. Nobody had stared at her. There had been people there like her, who taught her terms like “craniofacial disorder” and who taught her two sign languages and who bought her nice things to rub her hands on and who were her friends. She’d been safe and happy with Danny and her friends. Everything had been perfect with Danny. But before that there had been the tiny town where everyone knew her and hated her except her only friends, all of whom but one were imaginary. This lady looks at her like that.

Above Dorothy’s head, Jane and Rita exchange glances, one of them looking decidedly more murderous than the other, but neither of them particularly happy. Jane pulls out a crumpled wad of cash from her pocket (stolen from Niles, of course-she’s not spending her own money on this trip unless she has to) and drops it on the counter. “Another large chocolate shake and some chicken nuggets, and whatever Rita wants.”

Jane steers Dorothy back out of the diner and onto the bus. Larry and Cliff look up from where they’re talking to each other. Dorothy keeps looking at the floor. Everything feels prickly and fuzzy. She forgot, somehow, that there were people out here like her old town. That there were people out here who did that kind of thing, the kind of thing no one would ever do with Danny because everyone on Danny was her friend.

She sits at the back with Danny and rolls the lipstick tube between her palms until Miss Jane and Miss Rita get back with their arms full of food. Miss Rita brings her one of the big milkshakes and a paper bag full of chicken nuggets, and instead of taking them Dorothy wordlessly holds out the stolen lipstick.

“Oh, is that mine? I didn’t even realize it was gone.” Miss Rita takes the lipstick back easily, trading it for the milkshake and setting the bag down next to Danny. “I can show you how to put it on if you like.”

Dorothy shakes her head and looks down. Not quite sure what else to do, she takes a sip of her milkshake. It’s surprisingly difficult to drink, but it tastes amazing. It’s still hard to form words properly, but she suddenly wants Miss Rita to know that she would like it very much if she’d show her what to do, just not right now. It ends up coming out a bit jumbled-“Maybe another time?”

Miss Rita smiles and pats her knee, then puts the tube back into her lap, much to Dorothy’s surprise. “Sure. Whenever you like. Why don’t you hang onto it for me? Just for now?”

“...Okay.” Dorothy watches her sit down on one of the seats that’s just a row closer to her than the one before that was.

Maybe Rita can go solidly in the “good” category now, too.

“That guy behind the counter was flirting with you,” Larry remarks, adjusting his jacket. At least they didn’t decide to run in the summertime, even if the almost completely cloudless sky above them doesn’t seem to realize that little fact. He’s holding approximately a million bags of chips, cookies, and gummy candy.

“Was he?” Rita smoothes her hair down absently. She’s glad she brought her sunglasses. It’s one of those days where bright lights are difficult to deal with. Niles always said that it was a byproduct of her condition, one that she could learn to master in time. She just never got around to telling him that it had been happening since long before her accident. Or “accident.” Whatever.

“I’m a little surprised you didn’t notice.” Larry knocks on the door of his bus, and Cliff opens up for them. Jane, who’s dangling out of one of the windows despite the cold air, slides back inside to join them. Larry’s bringing her candy after all.

“I guess my mind was… elsewhere.” It’s true enough. She doesn’t really think about men all that often anymore. Not since the incident with Steve and the Doom Patrol. Though she didn’t really think about them much before that, either, unless they were Niles or Larry. Larry doesn’t need to know that, though. Or at least, she doesn’t need to explain it to him. It’s one of those things he’s good about.

“Did you bring the cookies?” Dorothy asks from her place on the floor. She really seems to like sitting at the back of Larry’s bus instead of sitting in any of the seats. Danny’s beside her, as per usual, and it could just be Rita’s imagination, but they seem a little bit brighter than usual. It could just be a trick of the light. Not that light reflects much off of bricks.

Larry lifts the little blue bag up and shakes it in an answer, heading back and distributing his goods evenly in the seats. He passes the last of his wares, a pair of thin gossip magazines, over to Jane, who grins and sets them down next to her. She requested them for Mama Pentecost. Said that if they were going to take turns driving, they might as well make the most out of it.

Dorothy watches Larry sit down before tearing open her bag and stuffing two cookies into her mouth at the same time, other wrist flicking briefly up by her head before she lowers it back down and rubs the dirty floor of Larry’s bus with her fingertips. Rita doesn’t tell her to stop, but for a moment when she sees it all she can hear is Niles describing certain aspects of her own condition. The ones that she could never really find the right time to tell him had been happening since long before she fell through the gangplank into the river.

(She’d almost started to doubt that they weren’t really symptoms of her condition and had been around for much longer, convinced that Niles had been right about them the whole time, when she first met Larry and watched him vanish into tasks like cooking and gardening. When she saw him get overwhelmed and squeeze his head between his hands almost like she used to, rocking back and forth. But then he’d confided in her that they’d been around for much longer than he’d had the negative spirit inside of him, too, and Rita had remembered all the times as a kid when her parents had tried to force her into clothing that didn’t feel right or dragged her into rooms that were too bright and painfully loud, and-

Well. It was the first time that she realized that Niles could really and truly be completely and utterly wrong about something that he claimed to be an expert in.)

Rita remembers what he used to tell her when she did those things, and how that always made her feel worse afterward. How Larry always seemed worse afterward, too. She narrows her eyes at Dorothy, who’s noticed that she’s watching her by now and is furrowing her eyebrows up at her.

Rita smoothes down her hair again and resists the urge to twist it around her fingers and press it against her lips and decides as she sits down on the floor next to Dorothy to ask if she’s willing to share any of her cookies and Cliff eases the bus away from the gas station and convenience store that Dorothy shouldn’t have those kinds of memories trapped in her head the way Rita already does.

Dorothy peers curiously at the paper Jane-or one of her people, maybe-is drawing on, trying not to be too obvious that she’s doing it. There are notes in two languages Dorothy recognizes and one she doesn’t scribbled on the edges of the page-English and Spanish and something made up of curling ticking letters that she doesn’t think she’s ever seen before.

“That looks really nice,” she says when Jane or whoever it is catches her staring at the page. “I like the bug that you drew here.” Dorothy reaches up and taps the page. “The way you drew the legs and eyes is really nice.”

“...Thank you.” She holds out her hand, which Dorothy shakes, a little confused. None of the others shook her hand. They just said who they were when she called them Jane by accident. She’s not so sure about the handshaking. It feels too formal. Jane and her people aren’t supposed to be formal. “I’m The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. I don’t think we’ve met.” Her gaze shifts down to the paper she’s drawing on and the colored pencil she’s drawing with. “Are these yours?”

Dorothy nods sheepishly. “But it’s okay. I like watching you draw. You’re way better at it than me.”

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter tilts her head to one side. “Art is subjective,” she says slowly as she shades the side of the bug that Dorothy pointed out. “No one is bad at it. Some people just like their own art more than other people do. That’s the way it is. You could show me some of your art, and I could prove it to you.”

“Oh. Um. Well.” Dorothy hesitantly takes the pad of paper from her and flips through the pages until she finds the drawing that she thinks is the best. “Here’s a butterfly I drew. It’s a painted lady. There was someone on Danny who would let me draw hir butterflies before ze could release them. Ze said that they were kind of endangered, so it was really important.”

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter doesn’t say anything, and Dorothy wonders if she should tell her to forget it. It’s not important. It doesn’t look the way her art does, like it could just step off the page at any moment. It’s not good.

“You’re very talented,” The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter says, and Dorothy almost drops her pad of paper. She traces one finger over the edge of the penciling, being careful not to smudge it as she moves. It’s easy to do it when you have lots of practice. “The shading on the wings and the coloring of the proboscis must’ve taken you hours.”

“Not really. It was always, um, a little hard to draw them, because they moved so fast. So you had to be quick. So this one was…” Dorothy looks down at the butterfly drawing and tries to remember. “Fifteen minutes, I think. Which is why the coloring is funny, because she flew away and I couldn’t really see where she went and I wanted to draw her, not any of the other butterflies.”

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter hums as she moves her fingers in a circle around the butterfly’s wings. For a moment, if Dorothy strains her eyes, she can almost see them fluttering open and closed. If she looks up, she’ll see the surprise on The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’s face-she’s never animated someone else’s art before. Just her own. She didn’t even know she could animate anyone else’s art. However, Dorothy doesn’t look up, so she doesn’t see that. 

She does hear The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter inhale slowly and say, “You could be a professional artist someday. Not many people are this good with colored pencil. They don’t think of it as professional enough.” She tosses her head and scowls, and Dorothy doesn’t need to be a mind-reader to know exactly what she thinks of people like that. “You could sell this.”

“No!” It bursts out before Dorothy can stop herself. She closes the pad of paper and hugs it to her chest. She can’t imagine anything worse than that. Sharing it with The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter is one thing. Heck, sharing it with the world would be one thing. Selling it is another. Selling anything she’s ever drawn is a very different thing. “I mean-I just meant-”

“I understand.” The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter doesn’t yell right back at her or hit her or anything. She reacts like Danny would if they were hearing this from Dorothy for the first time. The way Danny and everyone on Danny had always reacted. It’s so confusing. This is the outside world, it’s not supposed to be like the safety of being on Danny, it’s supposed to be something worse. “It was just a suggestion. You don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to sell any of them if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t.” Dorothy looks away. Back toward Danny. Maybe she’s still somehow inside their safety bubble, and that’s why things are like this. That would make sense. They always said they would do anything to protect her, even if they got hurt doing it. If they are protecting her even now then she should tell them to stop. She can handle anything the world throws at her as long as Danny recovers the way they’re supposed to. “I just… I don’t.”

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter nods, and then she’s gone, Mama Pentecost in her place and reaching for her small stack of magazines that she’s already read through a dozen times over. Dorothy heads back to her place at the back of the bus, still clutching her paper even though she had to leave her pencils behind.

Maybe next time Dorothy can show The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter her drawings of the Dannyzens. She thinks she’d like that. To be able to share them with someone who doesn’t know them. Especially if The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter promises not to show anybody else, because even if Dorothy does show her the drawings of her friends (both real and imaginary-Dorothy’s drawn them all), that doesn’t mean she’s going to give up all of their secrets.

Still, though… maybe she could tell her about some of them. About the imaginary family she made for herself who taught her to read and write so well that everyone on Danny complimented her for it. About George and Marion who some people said literally weren’t all there but who showed her how to hug people so tightly it cut through the sensorily unfriendly outside world. About Marissa, who was everything to her, the first person to understand the pieces of her that came from her birth mother. Dorothy has a lot of drawings of her.

If she’s going to tell any of them but Danny about any of it, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter feels like a good place to start.

“We should make it to Detroit by tomorrow if we keep going like this,” Cliff says, tracing the crease of the new map they just bought with one finger.

“We would’ve been there a day ago if you’d just looked at the map instead of ripping it in half.” Jane rolls her eyes.

“Real rich, coming from you,” Larry points out. The two of them turn to glare at him in unison, and he shrugs and leans back. They’d probably bite his head off if he told them that the resemblance between them was uncanny when they acted like this, right? That seemed like something they would do. “I’m just saying.”

“Detroit’s a big city. Do any of us know where the kid actually lives?” Cliff asks. Dorothy, who’s used to being referred to as “the kid,” looks up from where she’s quietly talking to Danny on the floor before going back to her conversation when she realizes they don’t mean her. “Do any of us have his phone number? Or are we just going to stand on a street corner and be assholes and yell ‘hey, Cyborg, we’re not criminals but you should come over here and get us!’ and see if he gets there before the police do?”

“Yeah, Detroit’s a really big city in the state of Michigan and not Illinois,” Jane agrees, “but I figured that since I’m the only one here with a phone and I don’t have his number, we were just gonna have to ask around to find him. He can help us figure out where Gar is, too, since we’ve got to make sure he doesn’t try going back to the manor.”

“Rita has a phone now,” Larry says helpfully. Rita, who’s watching Dorothy and only really half paying attention to the conversation the rest of them are having since she gave up on stopping Cliff from swearing around Dorothy approximately forty hours ago, starts a bit at the sound of her name. “She doesn’t have Vic’s number, but her and Gar have been texting for a little while. She made sure he knows not to go back.” He looks at Rita to make sure she’s still not really paying attention and drops his voice down to a whisper. “I think she’d still like to meet up with him, though.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Rita says crossly. “But… yes. You’re right. I would.” She squeezes her hands together. “Victor might know where he is. He knows a lot of things. Or that… that computer in his head does. Or they both do. Or-” She throws her hands up. “Or whatever!”

Jane rolls her eyes again and turns back to face the road, turning the bus on. They’d pulled over so they could get their bearings after Larry pulled out the map he’d bought the last time they’d stopped, which he’d for some reason neglected to mention having until that point.

Larry himself goes back to looking out the window. There weren’t very many interesting things outside, but he’d been counting the birds he could see lining the wires above the fields. He wishes Rita were still sitting next to him. It was always easy to talk to Rita. You’d think that after the first decade, they would have run out of interesting things to talk to each other about, but no. Maybe that’s just how it was when you loved someone.

(Larry couldn’t risk saying that kind of thing out loud. He didn’t want to be misunderstood. He wasn’t… interested in Rita, not like that. Maybe when he was younger he would have thought he was, but by the time Niles took him from the Ant Farm and stuck him in Rita’s life he was old enough to know that that’s not the way things ever went for him.

Similarly, for awhile, he’d worried that Rita might have been in love with him. The way she’d watched him move out of the corner of her eye and the way she laughed at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. But no. She felt-she feels-the same way about him that he felt-feels-about her. Love, of course, as strong as any other kind, but not in love.

There was a difference. It had taken Rita a long time to learn that she could love people without being in love with them. No one had taught her that while she had been out there in the world, living her life. She’d had to learn it while enclosed in the walls of the manor. Larry had been, in that regard, perhaps a little luckier. He’d learned that from Sheryl. Unfortunately, just because he’d known it didn’t mean that he’d been able to do anything useful with it.)

Then Dorothy climbs up onto the seat just behind his and presses her face against the window. “Are they blackbirds?” She asks, pointing to the birds perched on the wires. She tries to remember the only other kind of bird she really remembers the name of that might fit the profile. “Or are they, um-grackles?”

Larry frowns a little behind the bandages. “No, they’re starlings. They look a bit like blackbirds. But, see how their tails are short and thin like that? Grackles have different tails, and they’re a bit bigger. There are probably some out in the corn we could find to compare the two.”

“Ohhh.” Dorothy only stays quiet for a moment. “How many kinds of bird are there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A lot.” Larry studies the empty field they pass by before suddenly shooting his hand out. “There, see?” Dorothy follows his finger. “Up there. Do you see it flying?” Dorothy nods fast as the smudge of distant wings suddenly drops down to the ground and out of sight. “That was a kestrel, an American kestrel. It was hunting.”

“I thought it was a kite,” Dorothy admits. “You know a lot about birds, Mr. Larry.”

“Not really. I just… knew someone who really liked them.” John wasn’t an avid birder or anything, but sometimes when they allowed themselves to wander through away from their usual spot they’d get to see something special like the swarming murmurations of starlings that seemed to move with a massive collective mind of their own. Birds always reminded him of John. “I always think of him when I see one.”

Larry doesn’t realize it, but right then and there Dorothy decides that he’s good, too.

They’ve only just made it into Michigan when Dorothy, her voice shaking a bit more than usual, announces that she has to go to the bathroom. Since it’s Cliff’s turn to take her, Larry switches out his position at the wheel, and Dorothy and Cliff head off.

The bathrooms inside the convenience store are divided by gender, so Cliff waits outside and reads the packaging on the nearby rack of chip bags to fend off boredom. She’s in there for awhile, but it hasn’t been Cliff’s turn to take her for a bit and to be honest he has very little concept of time. This could be completely normal.

When Dorothy pushes through the door, one of her hands is anxiously squeezing the bottom of her shirt. She does that a lot, Cliff’s noticed. “Can-can we go back to the bus now, Mr. Steele? I-I wanna talk to Miss-to-” She’s learned by now that Jane is a lot of things, but she’s not a ‘miss’. That’s okay. It’s kind of tiring to think of people like that all the time, anyway. And it means that Jane is more like Danny, which is good because everyone should be more like Danny because they’re the best. “I want to talk to-”

Her throat feels tight and her stomach clenches. She should’ve known this would happen. She should’ve been paying attention. It’s her own fault for not noticing, really. It always is, isn’t it? Dorothy rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand. She feels so stupid. She keeps forgetting that things are different here than they were with Danny and the Dannyzens.

Cliff drops down to his knees beside her with a loud clanging sound. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He pats her shoulder extremely awkwardly, trying not to do it too hard. “Are you okay? Who do you want me to get? Are you sick?”

They’ve been surviving off of fast food and candy and have been subjected to poor quality roads and even worse quality driving skills since they left. It’s definitely not improbable that she’s feeling a little sick. If Cliff still had a stomach, he’s pretty sure it would’ve been left behind the third time Jane chose a conversation with them over looking at the road and almost hit a deer.

Dorothy shakes her head, though. Her cheeks are bright red as she pulls the hem of her shirt down lower. Both her hands are shaking, Cliff notices.

It probably takes him longer than it should to connect the dots.

“Okay, you wait here or go back into the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” He squeezes her shoulder and stands up. There’s some money in one of his pockets (stolen from Caulder, of course. He’s pretty sure they all took money from him) and he’s pretty sure he remembers convenience stores selling hygiene products. It’ll be faster than walking back to the bus and seeing if Jane has any in her bag.

He finds them easily enough. They’ve got both pads and tampons, but Cliff remembers being absolutely terrified of tampons when he was her age, so even though they don’t have the pads with the kiddie shit on them he grabs a box of them anyway. Surely this isn’t the first time it’s happened, she’d be acting way differently if it was, but there’s something a little… off about her response.

Cliff pays for the box fast (the woman behind the counter seems rather resigned to her fate of helping a giant robot man buy a box of pads) and brings it back to the bathroom for Dorothy, who disappears inside with it. When she comes back out and they leave, Cliff pauses just outside the door and looks down at her.

There are a lot of things he wants to ask. If she’s okay. If he should’ve gotten her anything else. If the reason why she seemed-and still seems to be honest-so uncomfortable is just because it’s a shitty thing to deal with or if it’s because of something else. He could just come right out and ask her if she’s, you know, like him, and that’s why it’s so hard. He could, but he doesn’t, because he barely knows her, and because it would be weird to ask, and because it’s not his business, and because it doesn’t really matter, does it?

(Well, it mattered for him, but that’s not the same, is it? It took him until he was eighteen to even meet anyone like him. That’s different from Dorothy already, who’s god knows how old but looks no older than twelve or thirteen and already knows so many people like him. Like her, maybe. It’s probably nothing. It’s nothing.)

“Dorothy-“ he starts, and she looks up at him, brown eyes big and glimmering with something way down deep inside. “Ah, forget it. C’mon, let’s get back to the bus. We don’t want to keep Larry waiting. He’s already not going to like that we didn’t bring Rita back any snacks.”

“Should we go back in and get some?” Dorothy asks. She almost laughs a little at the mental image of Larry trying to scold Cliff for real, like Cliff’s not practically twice his size. It’s already funny enough when Rita and Jane do it.

“Nah. Rita’s still got stuff left over she can eat, and I think Larry would rather we make it to Detroit this afternoon instead of getting hung up on that stuff.” Cliff pats Dorothy’s shoulder again. A bit firmer this time. She hums a little in agreement.

When they head back to the bus, Larry gripes at them as predicted, even though Rita assures them that it’s fine, really, and she has plenty of food.

When they drive off, Dorothy sits in the seat next to Cliff’s. 

“I call the shower first!” Jane shouts over her shoulder, sliding past Vic and running through his apartment in search of his bathroom. Dorothy watches her go, holding Danny close. They’re almost completely recovered, at least enough to shift from portable brick size to something larger. Maybe not a street just yet, but still. An alley at the very least.

In the end, they hadn’t needed to do much to find Mr. Cyborg-call-me-Vic. They’d decided to get some real food first before doing anything else, which meant they’d ended up at a small diner that didn’t pay any attention to them. Dorothy got french fries and fish and chips and orange juice and Rita ate her way through a stack of pancakes that Flit gleefully said were as big as Dorothy was. 

As soon as everyone who needed to eat had a full stomach, they’d planned to start asking around to see if anyone knew where to find Detroit’s premiere superhero. Fortunately, said superhero was waiting for them outside, where he explained to them that months ago he’d had Grid set up a system that could filter and tag any mention or description of them on social media before warning them that Niles could potentially do the same, and he knew that none of them wanted their location revealed to him through a tweet that said “who r these cosplays & why r they here while i am trying to eat my BRUNCH” along with an accompanying rather blurry photo.

Before he could finish scolding them and probably sounding a lot like his dad, though, he’d almost gone down under the weight of Rita’s massive hug. 

Vic had said that staying with him for a day or so would be fine, especially since they’d let him stay at their house for a bit. So he’d brought them back, contacting his dad to let him know that they were on the way, and now there they were, watching Rita fruitlessly attempt to race Jane to the bathroom.

Vic looks at Dorothy for a moment before his eyes drop to the brick in her hands. He smiles. “How’s Danny doing, huh?”

“Good,” Dorothy says, holding her friend out so that Vic can see for himself. She’s glad that everyone here likes Danny. Everyone should, but so many people don’t.

The words Hello, dear! It’s so nice to see you again. You look wonderful! appear on Danny’s side. Vic’s little smile turns into a grin. Even while minimized, Danny’s comforting aura still feels like a warm hug on a cold day. If someone had told him a year ago that he’d be happy to know that a sentient brick was okay and on the mend…

“They’re going to be able to get bigger soon,” Dorothy says happily. Vic was a real superhero, it was okay to tell him all of this. “And they said I should ask you if you know where Mr. Flex is, and Miss Maura Lee, and Marion, George, Ava, Nikki, Hank, Lysette, Rufus-”

“I could probably find Flex,” Vic says thoughtfully. He raps his knuckles against the wall absentmindedly. Dorothy imitates him. It feels nice. “And even if he’s not still with the rest of the, uh, Dannyzens, he might know where they are.”

Before Dorothy can set Danny down somewhere so that they can be a proper part of the conversation since it involved their personal superhero and their citizens, Cliff interrupts them by coming up behind them and poking Vic’s arm. 

“Do you have a landline I could use?” He pulls a clear plastic bag with a piece of paper inside of it out of his pocket. “I want to call my friend, and Jane won’t let me near her new phone after I broke the last one, and even if she did… you know, robot fingers.”

Vic bites down the urge to say since when do you have friends that aren’t currently in this apartment and gestures toward the mini kitchen. He’s been keeping some technology off Grid ever since the incident. He knows it’s stupid and probably paranoid and that if his dad found out he’d probably flip because half the shit with Grid wasn’t even real, but it makes him feel better. Just like the decision to rent an actual apartment to live in separate from his dad and half the size of the one Silas wanted him to rent makes him feel better.

Cliff heads into the kitchen as Vic, Dorothy, and Danny go back to discussing the location of Flex and the rest of the Dannyzens (former Dannyzens?) as well as what Danny thought their recovery timeline might look like once they were recuperated enough to become something larger than a brick-i.e., how long they thought it would take them to be able to jump again, how long it would take them to be able to grow again, how long it would take them to be able to support multiple people again, and so on and so forth.

Rita’s rooting around in the kitchen, having lost the bathroom race. Cliff fumbles around with the phone and the number on the piece of paper nestled safely in its ziplock bag. She watches him punch in 555-0197-7093 with careful force as he tries not to damage Vic’s phone. 

“Calling your friend to tell them that you just learned Illinois and Michigan are two different states?” Rita fills a glass with water. They’ve mostly just been drinking sports drinks and whatever sugary nonsense they can get from fast food joints, and while that’s great for keeping her blood sugar up and therefore great for helping her keep her form together, she also knows that she should probably drink some real water before she starts seeing spots, or something.

“Her,” Cliff corrects automatically as he listens to the phone ring. “And will you let that shit go? It was an honest mistake.”

“She’s not going to let it go,” Larry calls sleepily from the other room where he’s sucking down the last of the juice he got at the restaurant through a straw and offering little to no important commentary on the three-way conversation happening right next to him between Vic, Danny, and Dorothy.

Rita smiles around her water and goes back to searching for an actual snack, coming up with some goldfish crackers, a slightly overripe banana, and a bag full of frozen cherries. She’s only just started on the banana when Cliff straightens up, and for a moment Rita can feel the fact that he’d be smiling if he could.

“Hey, Kate! It’s, uh, it’s me. I’m sorry for not calling you sooner, a lot of stuff happened all at once.” He pauses and shrugs. “Yeah, uh, I’m really sorry… No, it’s okay. How is everyone?”

Already tired of listening to half of a conversation, Rita wanders back over to everyone else, still demolishing her bag of cherries. Vic is in the middle of pulling out a tablet and showing Dorothy what looks like an interactive map of the entire west coast for some unknown reason, Larry is asking Danny if Niles did anything to them while they were in his custody because he hasn’t had the chance to ask until now, and Jane is still in the shower.

It should’ve been like this from the start. They never should’ve had to deal with Mr. Nobody and Niles and the apocalypse and the Bureau of Normalcy. It should’ve just been this. But how could it have been? If Niles hadn’t caused the “accidents” and authorized the experimentation, none of this would have happened. 

But… that doesn’t make it all worth it. It just doesn’t.

After both Rita and Jane have showered and Dorothy’s been convinced to at least take a brief one herself, they all sit down on the floor in Vic’s “front room” or whatever the hell you call it. Well, Rita sits on the couch, but everyone else sits on the floor. Dorothy props up Danny so everyone can read what they have to say in case they’ve got anything they want to contribute.

“We need a game plan,” Vic says, folding his hands together in his lap. “Niles is going to come looking for you here. I won’t cooperate, and neither will my dad, and I’m on good enough terms with most of the other superheroes who are active here that they probably won’t help him either. But we know that that’s not going to stop him.”

“Kate says we can stay with her for a few days,” Cliff says hesitantly. “But I don’t want to intrude on her or get her all caught up in this bullshit any more than she already is. I don’t want Niles to find out about her. About her powers.”

“Cliff’s mysterious long distance girlfriend aside”-Vic gives himself a moment to bask in Cliff’s indignant spluttering-“you guys need to face some facts.”

Rita squeezes her knees together and resists the urge to thread her fingers through her hair. “Like what?”

“Look,” Vic says carefully, “guys like Niles, they don’t give up. He wants you guys back, especially Dorothy. I left because he let me leave, and you guys got out because you were lucky. We’ve got Danny on our side, and once they’re up to full strength they can keep us-they can keep you out of his way, but he’s not just going to stop. He went to a lotta trouble to catch you guys and keep you. He’s not just gonna let you go.”

“He didn’t keep us.” Larry automatically jumps to Niles’ defense before twitching. One of his hands darts up to his chest while the other curls up into a fist. “It never felt like-I know he caused the accidents. I know he did… all of this to us. But it never felt like the house was a…” He trails off. 

He can’t say that the house never felt like a prison because that’s not true. It’s just not. Niles always seemed to find a reason for him to stay inside. Hell, he’d acted like letting Larry plant a few seed packets was a favor, only to suddenly pretend that he’d been on board the whole time. And there was that whole thing where he’d tell Larry to sit on his hands, that he shouldn’t let the twitching from the negative spirit inside of him override his ability to be normal like that. And there’d been the way that Larry and Rita could never quite let their guard down around him the way they could around each other. That had all felt normal. But it wasn’t, was it?

“He kept us,” Jane says shortly. Hammerhead’s there, pressing up against her edges. Ready to front if they need to. Penny’s there too, but Jane doesn’t want them to run. “He was going to-he was going to leave me with them. The Doom Patrol and Dr. Clay.” Rita subtly holds her jaw up. It’s stupid. It’s been decades since everything with Steve happened, really. (It’s only been months since he dragged her biggest shame into the sunlight.) “He fucking-I told him things. We told him things. And he was going to throw us away, because-what, we weren’t fucking good enough? Immortal enough, or whatever the fuck?”

“That’s not what he said,” Dorothy says quietly. She’s been looking down at a silent Danny for the entire “team meeting” until now. She hasn’t really talked about her dad at all outside of that first question until now. Part of it is because she doesn’t know who to believe. Part of it is because she doesn’t know how to think of him. “He said you were… he said you were all like me.”

Everyone except Dorothy and Danny exchange glances. None of them really know what Dorothy’s powers actually are. Privately, they all suspect something akin to reality warping because of what happened in the painting, but none of them are really sure. They’re all just a little bit closer and a little bit farther than they truly know.

Since she’s not receiving any response, Dorothy keeps going. Her voice gets stronger. “He said I was his daughter, he said that every time he came to see me when I was living with Danny and he said that when we got out of the painting, but I’m not, am I? I don’t look like him and I don’t sound like him and I don’t act like him. But he said-” Her breathing gets faster. “He said I was his daughter. He said you were all my siblings. But that’s not right either because you guys say that he did bad things to you. He says that he hurt you. Fathers aren’t supposed to do that.”

That was one of the lessons that had been seared into Dorothy’s brain over the years from people like Maura Lee and Danny and the other Dannyzens like George and Marion. They’d all said that people weren’t really your family if they really hurt you. That if something like that happened, then Danny would be your family, but the old people weren’t your family anymore. Everyone on Danny said that. Some of them had come to Danny because they couldn’t be around their first family.

That was what Danny called it. Those people who you’d started out with. Your first family. But later on there had been changes, because apparently your first family didn’t have to be really your first. You could call it your first as long as it wasn’t the one you had ended up sticking with and loving and being loved back by. Living with Niles and the others at the manor and treated more like an object than an actual human being hadn’t been Dorothy’s first life, it had been her third that she could remember, but it could still count. That was the way it worked. 

“Yeah, that’s right,” Cliff says suddenly. “Dads aren’t supposed to do that shit to you. They’re supposed to love you and take care of you and shit.” Dorothy’s not sure why he’s looking at Jane. “They’re not supposed to hurt you. And if they do, then it’s up to them to actually try to change and be better like they’re fucking supposed to, but they never fucking do.”

Vic makes a noise in the back of his throat. Larry looks back and forth between Jane and Cliff. Rita bites her lip and doesn’t bring up the fact that honestly most of her issues come from her mother and not her father. Hammerhead moves up next to Jane. Jane doesn’t step back right away, but she does consider it even as they start to co-front for the time being. Dorothy picks up Danny.

He’s right, they say, smooth writing appearing and disappearing just fast enough for all of them to get a chance to read it. That’s not what parents do. Niles… I should have asked him more questions, when he told me to watch over Dorothy. But he promised to keep the Bureau of Normalcy away from me. He said that he’d make things difficult for them. I would have helped her if he hadn’t been there, of course. Dear Marissa had already brought her inside to take care of her.

Dorothy swallows and flicks one hand anxiously. She knows the story of how she arrived on Danny. She knows she ran away from home after her only friend had to move away because his parents got tired of dealing with the odd looks and whispers from everyone who was just nosy and the threats from the people who were violent. She knows she stayed alive for two days on her own with only her imaginary friends to protect her before she found Danny. She knows Marissa, who was her second friend she didn’t create herself, saved her. If Only because Niles-Dr. Caulder-her dad-whoever he is-couldn’t get to her fast enough. She knows the story and only partially because she’s the one who lived through it. But the rest of them don’t.

“He could’ve set the Bureau on you as easily as he kept them away,” Rita says tightly. “He knew that Larry was in there. He knew that he had him, and-he probably knew they had Flex, too. And everyone else they kept locked up down there. He just only needed Larry, so he only got him out of there after he’s the one who got him locked up in the first place.” Rita’s getting more and more agitated by the second. Larry reaches up to squeeze her knee tightly and she calms down a little. Just a little. “He could have died. And where would Niles have been then, hmm? Playing house with me, his own personal-”

Her voice dies. Rita’s not entirely sure what she was going to say. Pet or monster or freak or a dozen other words she’s heard used to describe her both before and after Niles came into her life. Larry said that the house didn’t feel like a prison, and maybe he’s right, because certainly at least to Rita it felt like a zoo. The poor souls-even Steve-in the Doom Patrol were just another exhibit, there to remind her that she couldn’t get past the glass no matter how hard she tried.

“Look,” Vic says before the silence can draw out for too long, “what matters more than anything else right now is staying away from him. Not what he did. Just-just forget about that for now. We’ve got to compartmentalize. I think you guys should keep going west while I try to find Flex. I’ll get you set up with supplies and everything.”

“No offense, but I gotta say that I think we should talk about what he did.” Cliff bounces his knee and resists the urge to rock. He’s tried rocking before. It doesn’t work out as well now that he’s not in a human body. “Even if it’s just because-look, if he catches us again, he’s gonna do the same shit he did to make us stay there earlier, except this time there’ll be locks on our fucking doors.”

“He didn’t keep us,” Larry says again. He doesn’t know why he keeps defending Niles. Usually Rita would be the one doing that. She was with him for the longest, after all. When they were living alone together, there were plenty of times she tried to justify everything Niles did, having entire conversations with herself before quite literally breaking down in tears of frustration. “We could’ve left whenever we wanted to. Especially this time. We just didn’t. That’s all.”

“Yes he fucking did,” Hammerhead spits. “So it wasn’t fucking keeping us when he was telling us how the outside world would never accept us? So he wasn’t fucking keeping us when he told us how we’d be hated if we went outside? When he told us that if we ever wanted to leave the house we would have to hide and not be ourselves? When he said that now that we knew what the outside world was like, we must have understood how it was a horrible place to people that are different?”

“It is horrible,” Rita says reluctantly. “The real world is horrible. He was right about that. They hate us out there. Even when I was trying to fit in with everyone and nobody knew about my… condition… they still hated me. There are monsters out there. For everything else he did that was awful, Niles was just trying to protect us from them.”

Dorothy bites her lip. “Maybe the real world is bad,” she offers softly. “Maybe it’s bad, but there’s people like Danny out there.” She lifts them up a little. “So it can’t all be terrible. Danny wouldn’t exist if everything was terrible.”

They all sit in silence for a moment, absorbing that.

“So,” Cliff says slowly after the beat has passed, “did this team meeting accomplish anything except making all of us feel like shit?”

There’s no answer.

Dorothy watches out the window the entire time they eat dinner. She’s never been in a city like this before. Danny told her about cities, and she’s read lots of books with them, but it’s not the same as seeing them in person. It just isn’t. She even sets Danny up so they can look around too, even though they’ve seen plenty of cities. They always told her to hide whenever they jumped to a big city because it wouldn’t be safe if one of Niles’ enemies found her, but they’d always sounded sad about having to make her do that.

“Hey, Dorothy,” Vic says from behind her. She looks back at him, mouth full of vegetarian hot dog. “I think I’d like it if you could tell me what your powers are. I’m not gonna interrogate you or anything, but I’d be helpful if we knew. Just in case Caulder shows up or we get in a fight or something.”

Dorothy swallows her bite of hot dog. She glances down at where Danny is silently leaning against the window before looking back up at Vic. “it’s kind of hard to explain…” She says slowly. “But sometimes things just… jump right out of my head.”

Before she can explain any further, there’s a loud pounding knock on the door, and a man’s voice calls, “Victor Stone?”

Larry and Cliff immediately retreat back into Vic’s bedroom. Rita, Jane, and Dorothy all look like normal people, so they don’t have to hide, but Rita does catch Danny when Vic throws them to her and hides them behind her back. Vic moves a little closer to the door, motioning for Dorothy to stay where she is.

“Who’s there?” He calls. There’s a little camera installed outside his door Grid is connected to and that his landlord definitely doesn’t know about and will hopefully never find out about, but someone must know it’s there because when Grid taps into it and shows him the ongoing footage the lens has been covered.

In response, the door gets kicked in.

Hammerhead fronts immediately, rushing the first guy who charges into the room with a gun. “It’s the fucking Bureau again!” She shouts, slamming him against the floor and snapping his gun in half easily. They punch him in the face in between words. “I thought these fucks all died? Dorothy, get out of here! Use the fire escape!”

Terrified and overwhelmed, Dorothy heaves the window open and clambers out of it. It’s a long way down, and the fire escape seems extra rickety, but she only hesitates for a second before scrambling down it. She doesn’t like the idea of leaving the others behind. They’re her friends. And Danny’s more than just a friend, they’re her family. She can’t just leave them. It’s not right.

They’re waiting for her on the ground.

Dorothy expects them to draw their guns. Her heart is hammering in her ears and she feels like she’s going to throw up and her stomach is cramping again because that Midol Jane gave her wore off at least an hour ago and they’re hurting her friends and the closest thing to father that she has and she can’t do anything to stop them because when she’s like this she can’t control her powers and-

“Don’t worry,” the man in the lead says. He has grey hair and pale skin. His smile is just a little too wide and vicious. He reminds her of the fathers of the kids who picked on her. When she was living with her first mother. “We’re not going to hurt you, and neither will they. We’re just getting Caulder’s stolen property back. We’ll even give you a chance to say goodbye before we take them back to home base.”

Dorothy’s ears pop.

Pretty Miss Dot and Paddle The Sky are on them before they even realize it.

She knows she shouldn’t. She knows it’s wrong. She knows that it’s dangerous to let them out like this. On people who don’t have power, in full view of the public, when she has her period, all of it. It’s everything her first mother from her first family told her not to do, but it’s also everything that Danny and George and Marion told her not to do to protect herself. She knows she shouldn’t. She knows it’s wrong.

Dorothy closes her eyes and breathes through the power anyway.

The air is heavy on her skin. When she opens her eyes again, the man from the Bureau is not smiling anymore, his gun trained between her eyes with shaking hands. It’s hard to bring to life so many people at once. But Heart Of Ice does what Paddle and Dot didn’t have time to do, knocking him back easily and freezing the gun in his hands solid.

“Leave my friends alone,” Dorothy says, hands curling into fists. “You’re not taking me back and you’re not taking them away and you’re not going to hurt anybody anymore.”

Dorothy doesn’t know the man that says he’s her father. Not really. She never knew her birth mother. She knew her first mother, who wouldn’t let her go to school because she said that Dorothy’s face would scare the other kids, who made her have a reason to create her imaginary friends in the first place. She knew her only real human friend Thomas. She knew Danny, who gave her a home with people who never hated her. She knew Marissa, who was the first woman Dorothy had ever met who was like her, who had cried and hugged her so tightly when she heard that Dorothy had never met her birth mother, that she didn’t know what tribe she was from, what her heritage was, who her people were. 

And now she knows Jane and all the people inside her and Larry and Rita and Cliff and Vic. She knows them and she cares about them and they care about her. They took her with them because they care about her, because they didn’t want her to end up like they did. That’s what Jane says, and she believes it, because they’ve proven it.

The Bureau people scatter like leaves in the wind, and Dorothy lets Paddle and Dot and Heart Of Ice fade away when they’ve run off. She remembers hearing the group-hearing her friends- talk about them earlier that day, and Danny told her plenty of stories about them to stress the importance of always staying close to them so that if they ever had to jump to get away they wouldn’t leave her behind by accident. They don’t seem very scary now. 

Distantly, she’s aware of the sting of the asphalt against her skin when she falls to her knees, suddenly dizzy. It’s like there’s a hole widening inside of her that she can’t shore up, and suddenly she’s so very afraid. Hands made of wax instead of skin yank at her clothing and pull at her hair and claw at her arms.

(Her first mother said that she shouldn’t ever use her powers. That she shouldn’t give people a reason to think that she was any more of a freak than she already was. That anything and everything that happened to her and the people around her was her fault for being the way she was. That she deserved everything she got for being who she was. That if Dorothy was smart, she’d do them all a favor and leave.

Danny said that she shouldn’t use her powers too much in case she got hurt. They worried that during the uncontrollable bursts of something that came out of her when she used her powers at the wrong time she would get hurt and they wouldn’t be able to help her. Marissa had the same fear, when Dorothy confided in her about it, and later so did George and Marion. But they’d also promised her that if she did use her powers, she wouldn’t be in trouble for it. That sometimes you just had to let everything out, and that was okay too. And that if she was using them to help other people, it was always, always okay.

These new people haven’t seen her powers. They don’t even know what they are, really. Dorothy doesn’t know if they’ll like that she used them to protect them. To protect herself. It’s not bad to use them to protect herself, is it? Right? Danny always said that it was better to help other people than to help yourself, but they also said that helping yourself was okay sometimes, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. Dorothy definitely just hurt someone else.)

There’s a loud clattering sound from above and then a shout of “Oh, shit!” before a pair of black boots appear in front of her and Jane kneels down and puts her hands on Dorothy’s shoulders. “Are you okay?” She shakes Dorothy a little before wincing. Probably shouldn’t have done that, but fuck, what the hell does she know about kids? “Hey, Dorothy, are you okay? They didn’t hurt you, did they?”

Dorothy fumbles for her wrists and shakes her head to clear it. Can’t Jane see the sharpness in everything, the blood around her hands? Can’t Jane hear the whispering of the wind through jewelry and the pounding of footsteps? They’re all so loud and so sharp, she can’t be the only one that hears them.

“No,” she says. The words feel slow and hard to get out. Not the way they do when she gets everything trapped under her skin. All the sounds and sights and touches that get locked up inside of her and make it so she can’t speak. This feels different, but still difficult. “I stopped them. They were going to give me back to him and they were going to hurt you, but I stopped them.”

“Great. That’s great, Dorothy. That’s amazing.” Jane helps her to her feet. The world feels oddly distorted, like Dorothy’s the center of a massive but very weak black hole. She must’ve used her powers, whatever they might be, to get away. She’s probably tired, then. Rita’s blood sugar always crashes after she has a meltdown, and it took the Underground lots of practice before they could use just about any of their powers without feeling fatigued afterward. “I’m really proud of you.”

Dorothy takes a small step back, and Jane worries she’s said something wrong. Dealing with kids is not her forte. Even Hammerhead is better with kids than she is. She’s a protector, after all, and of course she likes kids, but everyone’s always surprised to learn that she’s not that bad with them, too. Shit, shit, she really should’ve left this job to someone else-

Dorothy’s arms are small but strong as they latch onto Jane’s waist, so tightly that it almost takes her breath away. She hugs back automatically. She’s not big on physical contact with anyone. There’s a reason Hammerhead fronts when the woman is faced with unwanted touching, even from friends. But… this is fine. This is different. Maybe it won’t be different the next time Dorothy tries something like this, if there is a next time, but this time it’s okay. This time it’s good.

“Sometimes things get out when I use my powers,” Dorothy says, voice muffled by Jane’s two shirts. She’s not crying, not yet. She hasn’t really cried in a long time. Crying was for babies, and Dorothy isn’t a baby anymore. She’s a woman, or at least she’s supposed to be. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted everything to stop. Danny said that was okay, but he said that it was bad.”

“It’s okay,” Jane says. She somehow knows exactly who she’s talking about. She runs her fingers down the back of Dorothy’s head. She’s not really sure where the words are coming from, but they feel right. “That doesn’t make you a bad person. You were just trying to protect yourself. And us. And you did it. You fucking did it. Who gives a shit what Niles thinks about you or about any of us. You’re not a bad person. You did what you had to do and-fuck, kid, you did great.”

Dorothy nods into Jane’s waist, and the hands made of wax let go.

There are a lot of things to say. Things like “I didn’t know Niles was even still in contact with the Bureau” and “I didn’t know he’d stoop so low as to send them after us, that fucking rat bastard” and “I’m really sorry about your living room, Vic” and “I think Danny’s okay, those agents didn’t put a scratch in them but I think I accidentally, um, oozed on them a little during the chaos” and “Here, Dorothy, let me put some of this on your knees.”

Dorothy tunes most of it out. She doesn’t want to think right now. She’s too tired to think. She just wants to sit on the ground and hold Danny and pull her fingers through her hair and breathe as they tell her that they’re so, so proud of her, and that she did so well even if they didn’t get to see it because they were too busy trying not to get absorbed into Rita when she broke down.

“He’s not my dad,” she says to nobody in particular. She traces the reassuring words that appear in Danny’s side. He let her keep Danny. He said that she understood why she was so attached to them, and that he wouldn’t deny her a chance to take care of them while they recovered. Danny had wanted to stay with her, too, so the only time she left them alone was when he took her to see Jane. “I don’t know what he is. But he’s not.”

Dorothy doesn’t remember anything about her birth mother or the people who could have been her people. She wishes she did. She remembers too much about her first mother and the people who hurt her and the only person in the world she didn’t make up who cared about her before he had to leave. She remembers as much as she can about Danny and the people who lived on them, the people who loved her. The people like Marissa and George and Marion and Maura Lee and Danny themselves.

But Niles Caulder is in barely any of those memories. In all of them, he’s trying to talk to her, force his way into her life, make her into something for him to keep. She doesn’t like that. It feels wrong, especially now that she knows that that’s what he did to the people she’s with now.

They’re not her family. Maybe they could be, if she gave it enough time, at least for right now, they aren’t her family. But they’re more of a something to her than Niles Caulder, and that counts for a lot.

Jane kneels down in front of her. “Hey, uh, kiddo,” she says, a bit awkward. “If you want to stay here, you can, but Vic thinks we should head to California. Talk to the Justice League, or some shit. God knows if they’ll actually be helpful, but we’re meeting up with Gar on the way there. He’s Rita’s son, I think he’d like you. But you don’t have to come. Danny says it’ll only be a day or so until they’re able to jump with people, right? You can stay here, even though your-even though Niles might come looking for you.” Jane glances back at the others and holds out her hand. “Or you can come with us. If you’d like.”

Hey, Dorothy. It’s time to get up. We’re leaving now. Come on. I’ll help you pack your stuff, but we have to be fast.

Oh, is that mine? I didn’t even realize it was gone. I can show you how to put it on if you like.

Great. That’s great, Dorothy. That’s amazing. I’m really proud of you.

Dorothy nods, slowly, and accepts Jane’s hand.