Chapter Text
There’s a certain sort of familiarity to an inhibitor collar. It’s the strain, Bart thinks: all this speed inside of him with nowhere it can go. Lightning in a bottle all corked shut. It’s the weight, heavy around his neck. You are owned.
He blinks at the bioship floor, blearily. The wet squick of blood congeals thickly beneath him, and he idly twitches his fingers, hates how it burns. Shot. He thinks he got shot? No, lasers. Eye lasers. It’s been a while since he felt this slow. No healing factor. Right. The scars on his back attest that this is familiar, too.
Yelling, above him. He keeps his eyes closed. Doesn’t dare breathe. It could be guards, or a Beetle. Inhibitor collar means he can’t run. Only hide, hide, hide, and hope no one pays him any notice. Getting noticed means getting dead.
Something is off about this, he thinks, but it’s too hard to keep track right now. His head keeps protesting.
“...gonna bleed out!” someone says, panicked. “Let me give him medical attention! Or at least turn off the collar until there aren’t any holes in his chest-”
Another voice, calmer but sharp on all the consonants. Clipped. “Think of it this way, Zod: this thing is speedster powered. Without him you won’t be getting anywhere else in the timestream. You need him.”
“...Fine.”
A click. A breath. Things start trying to knit themselves back together inside of him and he groans, shifts. Tries to sit up, get away from the pain. Just plain old get away because Bart knows this, he knows this, and any opportunity you have to escape you have to take it-
It’s rare the Reach let him have access to his speed.
Then the wrong kind of lightning spits down his spine, starting at the base of his neck, and it all goes white and then dark, dark, dark.
This is familiar, too.
Bart wakes up slowly to the sound of his own shallow breathing, a hollow sort of throbbing permeating his chest. Just how hard was he hit that the pain’s this bad even after a good night’s sleep? He must have been totally moded, which means Jay is gonna give him the safety lecture again, and-
He registers the inhibitor collar.
Hands scrambling to his neck, he chokes on his next breath. It’s there. It’s real. Heavy lumpy metal against his bobbing adam’s apple, sharp pin pricks digging into his skin. There’s a slight tinge of red light in the peripheral of his vision, indicating it’s on and armed. Fuck. Oh, fuck-
This panic is a living thing inside of him. It crowds up his throat. He knows what this is, the way his breath just goes, but he doesn’t- he hasn’t, not for a year, now-
“Kid Flash?”
Bart’s eyes shoot open. Saturn Girl’s face looms in close and then jerks back when he automatically flinches. She has an inhibitor collar on too and he has to slam his eyelids close again, at the sight of it. Presses his gloved knuckles against the bioship floor and pushes until they crack, ignoring how dried blood crinkles and flakes, ignoring how it burns. Now is so not the time for a mental vacation to Apocalypse Uno.
“Hey,” he whispers, tries to whisper, voice dry. The Martian in the corner of the room glances over and away again, keeping watch. Chameleon Boy is curled up small besides him, asleep. The bio ship beneath him gives a settling thrum in what might be relief, or worry. Every breath aches, even as he focuses on keeping them nice and slow .
Steady. He is holding himself steady. He is here and he is now and he is not there. He is not.
Forearms trembling, he tries to sit up-
“No, no- don’t do that. You’re hurt. Badly. Rest.”
No kidding, he wants to say. He can feel the slick blood on his uniform, the scabbed wounds on his chest, how the bandages wrapped around him are starting to get crusty. But Saturn Girl looks guilty enough when he manages to glance at her face for a few moments, her eyebrows pinched low, and he decides to have pity.
He lays back down, and it’s like all the adrenaline leaves him in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Not your fault, Bart wants to say back, but he’s already falling to sleep.
Lor-Zod commands him to take his position on the treadmill. “Don’t be a fool, Earther,” he says. “Cooperate or I kill your friends.”
Bart’s not gonna be the one to tell the angry Kryptonian that it’s not just defiance keeping him still, it’s latent fear. Every muscle feels stiff with it, coiled tight and ready to spring with nowhere nowhere nowhere to go. Inhibitor collar on his throat, no power, hissed voices. If it weren't for the lack of ash falling from the sky, he would have sworn he was just having a slightly weirder than normal nightmare.
But the pain is too sharp to be anything less than real.
Somehow, he gets his feet out and under him. It pulls at the wound in his chest and he ignores the twinges, walks stiltedly to the treadmill of his own design. He wonders if he can destroy it. Just bam, gone.
The Martian in the corner of the room narrows its eyes. Bart doesn’t destroy the treadmill.
When he gets shocked, he winces, lets loose a soft grunt. It doesn’t surprise him- the casual cruelty of beings who have power over you and relish it has been something he’s learned to fear all the days of his life- but it does hurt
“Sorry. Wrong button.” Lor-Zod’s smirk is like oil.
Bart doesn’t say anything. Inhales and exhales through the clamp around his throat. Runs. Just runs.
He’s always been good at running.
Bart is on his hands and knees, thin watery bile on the floor in front of him, the Martian looming over his shoulder. The inhibitor collar’s light is back on and his chest really, really, really hates him, right now, catching on pain with every breath, every jagged cough.
“Get up,” Lor-Zod commands, pissed, and Bart purposefully does not flinch. Tries to breathe.
Hissing at the ground, he says, “I need food.”
A scoff. “I will not tolerate your petty whims, Earther-”
Bart doesn’t lift his eyes. Breathes, breathes through the pain. Keeps his voice steady and low. “I have a speedster’s metabolism. My body’s trying to heal me and run at the same time and there’s not enough to go around-”
“If you aren’t going to cooperate, you know the consequen-”
His head snaps up. He’s glaring and he doesn’t care, or maybe he does. “I am not a fucking machine!” All his tightly wrapped panic is a ball in his throat. “I am not pretending or exaggerating- if I keep running I am going to pass out and crack my head open. I know my fucking limits.”
Better than most. Bart knows exactly how starved he can get before he becomes physically incapable of running.
His breath is going, again.
Bart closes his eyes and spits stomach acid onto Bioship’s floor. Later, if they survive this, he’ll apologise properly for throwing up on her. The Legionnaires are watching with wide eyes. He feels like he’s pulling apart at the seams, like every millimetre of contact between him and the collar is a blade slicing him wide open.
Zod gets a confirming nod from the Martian and then stares. Stares.
“Three minutes,” he says.
Pressing his forehead against a clean patch of floor, Bart just keeps breathing. In and out. He gives himself five whole seconds before he forces himself to sit up, groans when he realises his wounds have cracked back open and bled through the bandages, two symmetrical dots of growing red.
Saturn Girl redresses them. Chameleon Boy has to open the granola bars tossed at his feet and hand them to him, one at a time, because he can’t get his stupid, useless, shaking hands to do it on their own.
“Can we knock the speedster out? His mind reeks of fear and it’s making it hard to focus.”
It’s the first thing the Martian has said that they’ve been privy to, and Bart stiffens from where he’s sitting besides the Legionnaires. Chameleon Boy glances at him, concerned, and he just gives a tiny little head shake in response. Say nothing. Do nothing. Don’t draw more attention to yourself than what you have to.
His hands aren’t vibrating, but they are starting to tremble again, and it’s almost the same thing. Getting signalled out, it’s never a good thing.
Lor-Zod sighs like a true teenager. “No. We might need him.”
I am literally right here, asshats, Bart thinks, but the Martian turns to look at him and he remembers that, oh, right, mind reader. He averts his eyes and glares at a chair in the corner. Breathes and breathes and breathes, ignores the way it hitches on the outtakes.
Saturn Girl mouths, ‘Are you alright?’
Bart just nods. He kind of has to be.
Bart is pressed so tight against the wall that it has started to meld around him in a weird, all sided hug. His breathing is coming and going too fast for his stupid, slow body to hold onto, and he knows it. Sweat drips down his spine.
"I am losing my patience," Zod says, and Bart swallows dry. Flexes his poor fingers, which need new bandages soon. The life support of the bioship must be damaged somehow: there's not enough oxygen in the air. He's sure of it.
"Just-" he puffs out. Resist the urge to yank at the collar around his neck and scream. "Just stop- looming. Give me, give me a sec. Just let me. Catch my breath."
Lor-Zod watches him. "This is what the so-called heroes of this era are composed of? Pathetic."
He stops looming. Bart works on swallowing air in a way he won't choke on it. Doesn't make a retort because he thinks that this is kinda pathetic, too.
The inhibitor collar around his neck is so heavy. His chest burns. His hands throb with pace to his pounding heart. Just thinking about it has his breath start stuttering again and he has to squeeze his eyes shut and press his forehead against the cool, grounding walls before he can get it back under control again.
Chameleon Boy and Saturn Girl don't try to touch him. They haven't since the first time.
Breathe. Breathe. Steady on.
Jay had sat three feet in front of him all throughout his first panic attack, talking in low soft tones. Bart had clutched and scratched at the cast wrapped tight around the broken leg he'd managed to get on a mission. He remembers the panic about not being able to get away, but not any distinct reason he got set off in the Garrison's perfectly quaint kitchen.
Afterwards, sweat in his eyes and unopened water bottle in his shaking hands, Jay had told him, "When your body's been put in a real stressful situation for a real long time, it sets up- safety mechanisms. Things to keep you alive. But it's not very good at letting those mechanisms go, afterwards, so your body has all these instincts set in place that it don't need anymore, but still act up. Makes your breath go, sometimes."
Bart had just closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, exhausted. When Jay had pressed a firm, gentle hand against his shoulder, he had leaned into it.
In a tiny bio ship, a thousand miles away from home, Bart works himself into a similar position for the night. He feels just as tired, just as small, but there's no comforting palm to be found.
Tomorrow there will be more running, more looming, more pain. His neck aches, and it's only been a couple of days of the inhibitor collar. He's already losing the weight he had painstakingly picked up in the last few years. They're not feeding him enough.
That's okay. Bart is used to working in less than optimal conditions. The quicker his body gets back on board and stops flipping the hell out, the better.
He tells himself this. He tells himself it's true. For the first time in maybe ever, though, he finds himself wishing that an adult would come and save him. Get him out of this. It had always seemed so pointless to wish for it during the Reach Apocalypse, where no one had had any more power over the situation than he did.
But Bart is feeling pretty powerless, right now. Powerless and panicked: the two go hand in hand. He thinks he could kinda use a hug.
He hopes Jay isn't worried too much.
He hopes they'll be out of here soon.