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It took Dave two months to agree to the offer Joy made him during their trip to Japan.
She’d been sitting down across from him, tapping away at her phone, when Amy left to use one of the bar’s fancy restrooms. Once she was out of sight, Joy had lowered her phone and cleared her throat.
“You can learn how to control it, you know.”
He’d been staring off into space, looking at the rain-smeared blobs of light speeding by the window outside. He blinked and looked back at her.
“What?”
“The thing we don’t talk about,” she said, pointing a chopstick still sticky with sauce accusingly at his chest. “You can learn to control it.”
He squirmed uncomfortably, desperate not to think or talk about it. But he was drunk enough to answer, “Do we have to do this? Talk?”
Joy gave him a measured look. “Yes. Because you’re scared of it. Because Amy’s scared of it, for you. And neither of you need to be forever.”
“Can’t be scared of it once I’m dead,” Dave said. Unsaid, his mind whispered, though I already am in a way.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she sighed. Her collective self hated confronting this. She did everything she could to avoid having direct conversations on this subject with Dave, but he needed to hear this. She’d been putting it off for ages, though nobody else knew it.
“Then what are you saying?”
“I can help you learn control. It's not as though you can kill me if you lose it. And wouldn’t it be useful in the future if you could actually use your abilities to help a situation?” Joy caught sight of Amy exiting the bathroom and picking her way back to them. “Just think about it.”
They didn’t speak of it again for the rest of the trip. It simmered in Dave’s mind like a hot coal. Boiling through the haze of mindlessness he had cultivated in front of the TV most nights, and bursting into his thoughts like stray embers at random moments in his day. He’d wake up from dreams of flying and hunting and think about Joy’s offer.
Eventually, after over two months of avoiding the issue, Dave found himself standing in front of John’s house, unsure why he'd decided to go there. John was out for the next two days - he was off terrorizing a new music venue that hadn’t heard of him yet, a two hour drive away. Amy was visiting a friend from high school that weekend. Dave had left their empty house to buy groceries and found himself driving aimlessly, a slowly warming carton of milk and random food items sitting in a ripped paper bag on the floor of the passenger seat. He could hear the milk wobble when he turned corners a bit too fast.
The cracked asphalt flew by under him and the odd pothole made his bones rattle due to the practically nonexistent suspension of his car. The road was lined by a sea of broken and defeated houses, intermittently interrupted by the odd moving blur his peripheral vision told him was a person mowing the lawn.
Deep inside him, compressed and perfectly sealed, the Thing glanced at these moving blurs with curiosity. It was not hungry yet. They’d had a nice meal of cold spaghetti and a dusty old bottle of Red Mountain Dew that somehow tasted worse than it had last time. The Thing watched an old woman and her dog cross at the stop sign five streets ahead - a distance that should have been impossible for Dave to see as clearly even with his contacts before the Thing.
Dave turned before reaching the old lady and her dog, following a pointlessly meandering street that suddenly crossed a field of wreckage - the remnants left after the bombs that dropped back in the spider epidemic. After a few minutes of driving by fields of carnage and graffiti obscured by rampant greenery he dodged a huge hole in the road and was back on pavement. The road brought him to a series of oddly shaped streets, twisting and turning through fits of partially abandoned condo buildings and old farmhouses.
At some point some form of instinct took over, muscle memory probably, and Dave began to turn down familiar roads. Next thing he knew, he was parking in front of John’s place and stepping out of his car. He knew what he was here for, in a way. The Thing inside him had been staring up at the empty skies last night as Dave had been slumped in his chair on the balcony. They'd both been watching the stars. And for a moment, both of them wished they could be up there, flying.
Ten minutes later, he found himself standing awkwardly in John’s kitchen as Joy finished cooking while talking to him. When had it become time for supper? He wasn’t sure.
They made inane small talk for a while, then while everything was simmering, they sat down on opposite ends of the living room. They talked some more, about other things. Dave slowly answered questions about when this had started and what it was like to completely vanish inside the monster, to lose himself entirely.
An hour later, Joy convinced him to try an exercise in the garage. Instead of fully relaxing his hold on the Thing like he had before when they’d been on the verge of being killed, she asked him to focus on one small part and work on that instead. Like lifting your pinkie finger when you’re holding a snake in a death grip.
Her theory went like this: so long as the head of the Thing didn’t take control, then he would remain Dave.
It took a few tries, and a failure resulting in the sudden reappearance of the BATMANTIS??? in John’s garage attempting to take a bite out of Joy... only to instead taste a metal shelf it tossed to the ground in disgust. The haze of insects that were Joy waited a moment until the BATMANTIS??? suddenly sank in on itself leaving a dazed Dave rubbing his jaw. A few more (much gentler) attempts later, Dave managed to release the Thing’s right scythe.
They watched as Dave’s hand melted and reshaped itself. The bones turned to putty and the whole hand wobbled for an instant, like a glove filled with water. Then the thumb lengthened into a long curved hook, while the rest of the bones melded into an even longer arm of razor sharp spines. The skin melted into a hazy white shell, like a cataract covering an eye. Barbs began growing out of his forearm too, but he clamped down on the Thing inside him, and they slowly slid back under the skin.
Joy congratulated him for his success. He returned his arm to normal, then redid the same exercise twice, succeeding both times. Once Joy was satisfied, they went back to the kitchen where the food was on the verge of being overcooked. Joy invited Dave to eat supper with her and they watched TV.
Dave still didn’t really know what to make of Joy, but he didn’t feel as strange about her presence anymore.
Over the span of the next six months, they experimented together. Dave's ability to control the Thing slowly growing stronger. One freezing December night, he flew for the first time. It was amazing. They were far from Undisclosed for that test. After that, Joy tried to convince Dave to tell Amy. Dave pushed it back a few days, not wanting to bring the subject back… until the day he really didn’t have a choice anymore.
They were running from a wave of fleshy ghost-dog things that had erupted from some kind of cursed pendant one of their viewers had sent them in the mail.
Well, it had really been one creature at first. Rising from the depth of the shiny gem in the pendant until it lept out and glared at them. They had been in the fields near the old abandoned industrial complex. They stood in front of the weird ‘dog’ for a few moments, as it sat there looking like a cloudy bag of jello with six legs and a face like an inverted pug. It was about the size of three pugs. Instead of a snout, it had a cavity, as though someone had punched its mouth into its skull, towards the spine. It was puckered like a cat’s asshole or a sour old lady’s mouth. Then it opened it’s reverse-mouth, revealing something that looked a bit like the toothier equivalent of a blend between a bloodworm and an eel.
“Oh wow. Ew,” was all Amy had time to say before it lunged at them, the teeth extending forward and only just missing John’s crotch by inches.
Everyone pretended not to hear the high pitched yelp John let off at the thought of losing his manhood.
Luckily for him, he had his gun ready and shot the pendant hanging inside the ‘dog’, his aim perfect.
Unluckily, the fragments flew off to become eight more ‘dogs’, all growling and running at them.
Even less luckily, the growing mass of ‘dogs’ stood between them and their getaway van. The trio started running. Nobody wasted any breath on screaming “RUN!” this time. Especially when the blood chilling howl of a perfect chorus of eight ‘dogs’ sang out behind them.
John did spend some precious oxygen yelling, “My dick’s too hard for you to chew on, try this instead!” followed by shooting at the eight dogs. It wasn’t his best one-liner, but they can’t all be gems.
Each shot that touched one caused it to burst into eight more identical copies. It took less than ten seconds for the already-dangerous eight-dog problem to grow to a 43-dog problem. It was like throwing gasoline on a flaming hellborn hydra and hoping it would kill the thing.
John ran out of bullets, cursed and put more energy into running. “At least they get more transparent every time a bullet hits!”
“So you can shoot them better and make more of them!? Fuck no that’s not a good thing!” Dave yelled back.
“This way!” Amy yelled, turning slightly and almost colliding with Dave who was looking behind them. “The building!”
Nobody bothered asking “What if the door’s locked?” because it didn’t really matter if it was. Dave was going to bust the thing open and if anyone asked later, it had been unlocked the entire time.
Dave put a bit more oomph to his running to pull ahead and yank the door open to the sound of tortured metal. Then they were in and he attempted to close the door against the dogs, just holding it shut.
The others stumbled around in the darkness, gasping for air, until Amy’s phone flashlight turned on, illuminating a vast empty space. There were old rusty stairs leading up to a closed door that presumably led to a stairwell. She didn’t have time to look anywhere else because Dave yelped and she spun around.
The ghost dogs were forcing their way through the door. Their cursed little heads melting through the metal like they were pushing their way through deep snow, not easy going, but not impossible.
“Go! I’ll hold the door until you’ve got a head start. I’ll be right behind you.” Dave ordered them.
John finished reloading his gun, but just nodded and went running towards the stairs leading up.
“You better!” Amy threatened Dave before running off behind John, climbing the wobbling rusty stairs as fast as her legs could take her.
John struggled with the door at the top of the stairs, but soon managed to force it open. There was a dusty old stairwell in it, and hazy light coming from above. Amy yelled to Dave, “We’re clear! Going up!”
They started their way up, legs burning, when the unearthly howling from the ‘dogs’ suddenly grew much louder and there were heavy footsteps banging up the metal stairs below. The door must have opened. Then a slam that shook the building a little and the howl dropped in volume again. Heavy panting that followed them up the stairs.
“You alright?” Amy called down.
“Just - Fine - Go!” Dave yelled back, between gasps for air.
Seconds later, Amy and John turned the last bend and came face to face with a door. It was locked from the inside, though Amy only pointed that out to John after he rattled the handle frantically for a few seconds. Then they were through, the dying rays of sunset right in their eyes.
A minute later, Dave stumbled through the door to the roof and they shut it behind him. There was nothing they could grab to block it more.
“Heard - them - start - coming - through,” Dave choked out. “Don’t have long.”
John and Amy looked around for solutions while Dave caught his breath.
“How the hell are we even supposed to deal with those things? Shooting them just makes more of them.” John said.
“It’s the bits of pendant that make more. Maybe we need to stick them back together somehow?” Amy thought out loud. “But we don’t have any glue, or any way to put them back together. And we only have a few minutes before they get here and eat us or something.”
“I’ll look for a way down, maybe there’s an outside stairwell down.” John jogged off to look around the lip of the building.
Dave rose to his feet. “Why did the cursed ‘dog’ appear now, anyway? We’ve been fucking around with that pendant all day.”
They’d received it in the mail that morning and tried all sorts of things to get it to ‘work’. Oddly enough, it had been indestructible while the sun was up. It still was, but it had begun to set early, the way it did every December, close to the shortest day of the year.
The sunset was gorgeous now. The clouds were bubblegum pink on deep blue skies. Someone, somewhere else, was thinking it was the most beautiful, romantic evening of their lives. They were probably curled up with someone they loved, both drinking hot chocolate, eating peppermint cookies and watching the sunset through their window, next to their real fireplace snapping and crackling with real flames.
It was hellishly cold today, and the wind felt like it was piercing right through all three of them, twice as bad on the roof as it had been on the frosty ground below.
“…Maybe that’s it.” Amy said. “The viewer who sent it said to keep the gem covered. It’s been out in full sunlight all day, but it’s sunset now. Almost night. Maybe they’ll just vanish once the sun rises again.”
“Maybe, but we can’t wait that long, we’ll die.”
John jogged back to them. “Bad news, there’s no ways down. We’re stuck here.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then Dave took a long deep breath and let it out. “Ok. Ok. Fuck. I might have an idea, but neither of you is going to like it.”
“Great, better than nothing.”
“I really didn’t - don’t - Don’t hate me for this please.”
“Ok, see, now I’m worried. You never stall the bad shit, but you do the really bad shit.”
Dave almost stalled again, when they saw the first reverse pug ghost thing start oozing through the door. As one they all ran away closer to the edge of the building. Dave finally managed to speak, staring at the ‘dogs’ and not looking at the other two.
“Joy’s been teaching me control. I can fly us out of here. Probably.”
Amy and John’s eyes widened. They shared a look and then John burst out, “You’ve been turning into Batmantis again without telling us!? What the fuck Dave?? Do you want every cop around to know!?”
“Not fully! And I’ve been practicing in your garage.” Dave glanced back at the door, now oozing at least twelve ‘dogs’. “I can grow just the wings and fly us to the car.”
Amy didn’t hesitate, “Then do it please!”
Dave blinked, surprised for a moment at how Amy had believed him immediately, then nodded nervously.
He took off his coat and pulled off his shirt, handing them to her, shivering. Then, much faster than any transformation they’d seen him go through, it started. His fingers became webbed, then split in two, like his hands were peeling off from the top and pulling down from the bottom. The top fingers had the webbing and the bottom ones didn’t. Somehow, they both remained the same size. Then the wrist began to lift off and with it came an expanding membrane of skin, peeling endlessly from the pinkies, down duplicating arms. The bat arms’ fingers grew longer and longer and with them the membrane expanded. Until the arms completely separated from his original ones, peeling the membrane with them and showing it growing along his flanks instead all the way down under his pants. The bat wings continued growing in length, and with them Dave’s chest changed shape, growing wider and deeper, filling with powerful muscles. The parts that changed went from normal white-guy skin with blue veins, covered in almost as much body hair as a bear, to clouding over into a smooth, hairless opaque white armor.
Unlike every single other transformation they’d witnessed, the changes stopped there. There was no melting of the face and head, eyes expanding to a painful size. There was no uneven stretching of arms into scythes, no knees flipping backwards into legs ending in claws.
Dave was maybe a little taller? His wings were immense, each one easily extending ten feet in the transformation. The thin, fragile white skin had turned into thicker flexible leather.
The first ‘dog’ managed to escape and went howling over to them. Dave grabbed Amy around the waist with one arm, and scooped John up with the other. Then he yelled, “Hold on!” lifted them up a little and took off running to the ledge, wings extending as he went.
Amy yelped, but managed to grab a secure hold on the arm holding her and wrapping her other arm around his neck. John was taller so his feet bounced off the ground a bit as Dave took off, but he managed to wrap his arms around Dave and Amy, desperately aware that he wasn’t near strong enough to hold on this way through actual flight. But fuck it all, he was going to give it his best shot.
Then they were pushed upwards by one huge wingbeat, sending them over the edge, into the sky. And then they were falling. Wingbeat up again, falling again. Up, down, up, down. The time between each flap sped up a little as Dave figured out how to keep them all as steady as he could.
Amy was glad that all she could see was Dave’s chest - as weird as it was for it to be completely hairless. The shell-like substance it was now was smooth and warm against her face. Dave’s arm was like steel, holding her steady against him.
John could see the sky behind Dave - their heads were almost touching. He could see the wings lift and push down. He could see the cotton candy clouds get closer and further away, like a sickening rollercoaster yo-yo. He was holding onto Dave with all his might, probably crushing Amy’s arms a little. It was hard holding on, Dave’s muscles underneath rippling with each wingbeat. Dave’s arm was strong against his butt, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t be enough to save him if John lost his grip.
John was almost too shocked to even think about any sexual innuendos or jokes he could make about the whole situation. Not because of the fact that Dave could fly or was strong enough to hold both of them - they’d all known that for years now. But because Dave had learned to control the BATMANTIS??? like they’d always secretly dreamt he would.
John had spend weeks comforting Amy after the whole thing had started. Not every day for weeks in a row, but spots here and there. Especially after particularily rough nights where they had to work extra hard to hide what Dave’s other form had done. Comforting her for dead dogs and her husband’s ‘sleepwalking’.
He’d also talked to Dave, but he couldn’t recall anything he did as the BATMANTIS??? All it ever did was make him hate himself even more.
And now Dave was flying them to safety.
Which meant that on top of being able to fly them to safety again some other day, it meant they could rely on other stuff the BATMANTIS??? could do. Dave had already figured out superstrength a while back, but maybe bulletproofing himself and also swords-for-hands were on the table now, which was pretty great.
But the best thing in all this was that maybe it meant Dave hated himself a little less.
Dave landed about as well as he could without breaking all three of their legs. In other words, he yelled at them to curl their legs up as well as they could - he only dropped a few feet when Amy kneed him in the crotch by accident - then he transformed his legs into the bouncy, reverse-knee’d variety. He swooped down next to the car, landed with a bounce, successfully didn’t break anything or anyone’s anything and set his friends down.
John jumped into gear and ran for the car immediately. Starting it up, ready for a getaway. Amy wobbled over a few feet, where she puked. When she turned around, Dave was fully human again and shivering violently. He’d opened the door for her and was standing with one foot in the passenger side of the van, staring at the industrial building they’d just flown down from.
Amy looked back up at it and saw the roof was covered in the dark silhouettes of almost four dozen six-legged dogs, moving around like ants. They weren’t going anywhere, just pacing around and glaring at them from the roof.
She gave Dave his shirt and and coat back and he moved out of the way so she could get in. She jumped in and shuffled over to the middle seat. He climbed in after, struggling into his clothes, with numb hands. Amy helped him tug his shirt back on right and find the sleeve of his coat.
“What are they waiting for d’you think?” Amy asked them both, glancing over to the roof every few seconds.
“I think they might just be too stupid to go back down to follow us.” John said as he cranked the heating up higher at the sight of Dave’s blueish face. “Close the damn door, you’re letting all the heat out.”
They sat in the van for a few more minutes until the sun set and it became clear the dogs weren’t going to do anything.
“Should we just come back and deal with them tomorrow? If Amy’s theory is right they’ll turn back into bits of glass by morning.”
They argued a long time about that, but eventually just decided to stay there and take turns sleeping and watching the dogs. At dawn, they watched as each of the dogs winked out of existence, an object falling to the ground where they’d been standing.
They went back upstairs and found that there were 43 identical pendants scattered on the edges of the rooftop now.
Back at John’s place, those all went into a perfectly sealed ziplock bag covered in electrical tape with a big “DO NOT OPEN AT NIGHT” written with John’s new glow-in-the-dark marker, straight on the tape. It was whiteish enough to be legible even without shining a light at it. Then the contents were placed in a ‘containment box’ (an old fishtank with sealed edges) and kicked into the back of the storage shed, next to a box that contained an infinite number of identical boxes, but that wouldn’t keep anything you put into any of them.
They all celebrated not dying with beer and pizza, while Amy grumbled about not being able to film anything of worth. The dogs had been invisible to their cameras and the stuff they had brought couldn't see in the dark. As for the chase at the start, they just hadn't had the time to take out their cameras, since they hadn't been expecting the necklace to work all of a sudden. She had plenty of footage of the pendant looking useless and tacky in full daylight though.
Joy joined them and Amy extricated the entire story about how Dave had learned to turn into a literal batman from both of them.
“How’d you know you could do it?” Amy asked him.
“Do what, let it out? I’m always keeping it contained. Day in, day out. Easier now with the antidepressants, you were right. But I always have to hold it in - of course I can let it out.”
Amy took in a slow breath. “Right. Because it never went away. You just hid it better.”
“Well, it wasn’t hurting anyone but me.” He saw the look on her face. “It wasn’t hurting hurting me! Just - I don’t want to look at dogs or humans and have to hold on tight to the thing inside that says they’re food. It’s not painful, just…” he trailed off.
“It’s emotionally painful.” Joy cut in.
He didn’t answer, but his face said it all. Amy gave him a hug, and they promised to talk more about this when they got home. The subject drifted to happier things and eventually back to what Dave could do now. He showed how he could control the change - though he had to be careful about it, by turning one of his hands into a scythe and then back again.
They spent twenty minutes testing all the things he could cut with a knife for a hand, before Joy got bored and declared she was going to beat them all at one of John’s games. The insult couldn’t go unchallenged and Dave returned his hand to human form and joined them. It began to snow outside.
As they sat, Amy and Dave crammed on the loveseat, for the first time in a long while Dave felt the fist clenched around his heart relax a little more. He wasn’t human - technically had never been, though he remembered a time where he’d been Other David and 100% Organic Human. That knowledge had spent the past decade tearing him apart in a thousand little ways. John and Amy didn’t care that he wasn’t. They’d decided to stick with him even after they figured out what he was. They’d stuck with him when the BATMANTIS??? thing had started. And now, for the first time since then, he could see the idea of that other him didn’t worry them as much.
He felt a painful bubble of shame at the thought of how much he’d worried them and scared them over the years.
But years of actually good changes to his life and Amy hammering in how much he deserved to be loved by himself as well as a hundred other small good things he’d learned, helped him take a deep breath and let himself look outside of the shame bubble. It was there, yes, and it had been there for a long time. It would probably never really go away, just grow slightly smaller, maybe. But beyond that bubble and all that negative shit he hated about himself, he’d managed to do a thing that was good.
He’d learned to control the Thing. Himself. This other him, that was hungry and violent, but objectively cool in several ways. It wasn’t just a liability now. It was a tool he could use. As long as he was careful with it, he could trust himself to be able to use it. Like a gun.
Also, he’d saved them all from an almost certain death, but that was a pretty commonplace situation, so he wasn’t going to lord it over the others. Well, not too much anyway.
He snuggled in a bit closer to Amy, both of their fingers still clicking away violently at the buttons on their controllers, trying to win the game against the others. She leaned into him, a slightly stronger weight. His anchor, his lighthouse.
His character died and he leaned over the small gap separating them and kissed her cheek gently, just because he wanted to. He felt like he’d swallowed the sun and he was burning up with love for everyone here. One of those rare moments he felt he could taste the good things in life. She looked up at him and smiled, and kissed him back, a quick peck on the nose, that had them both giggling like children.
Inside, the Thing was quiet and content. Its mate was safe. They were digesting pizza. And it had stretched a little in it’s prison. It did not struggle against Dave’s hold on it. And Dave did not have it in a stranglehold. They were balanced together, for the first time. It felt good.