Work Text:
“Tucker, I still don’t think you’ve thought this through,” Sam says.
“What’s the harm in it?” Tucker asks. “It’s not like I’m walking right up to Danny and telling him everything we know and everything we’ve done wrong.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong—”
“Sam. I’m asking Vlad to show me everything he has on Danny, and how he knows he’s evil. I need more evidence than we have to believe that he is.”
“How about ‘he tried to kill me at Circus Gothica?’ Is that not pretty iron-clad evidence?”
“That’s where I’m starting,” Tucker says. It’s the first thing he’s said to Sam that isn’t a lie.
Well, second. He really isn’t going to talk to Danny. Danny asked for space. And this is a problem of Tucker’s own making. He needs to figure out how to fix it.
But he’s not talking to Vlad, either. He knows Sam trusts Vlad wholeheartedly, but something has always felt a little off about him to Tucker. Why keep so much hidden? Why not engage with Danny directly, and make Tucker and Sam do all of the confronting? Why not tell Valerie who they are? Why upgrade both of their suits at once, instead of leaving one of them with them, and making sure they can protect themselves at least somewhat? Too many questions are piling up, to the point that it’s all building to an intense feeling of his instincts screaming at him “Don’t talk to Vlad.”
And Tucker is done not listening to his instincts.
“I still don’t like this,” Sam says, pulling Tucker back out of his head. “What if you start poking around and Danny finds out, and realizes we’re onto him?”
“I’ll be careful,” Tucker says. “I can handle it. I handled you and Danny both being hurt and unconscious, didn’t I?”
Sam glares at him, but Tucker doesn’t take it back.
“I’ll tell you what I learn,” he says instead. “I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“You better,” Sam says, still glaring at him. Tucker gives her a look and leaves.
Her parents probably aren’t going to keep her locked up for too long. She’s not as hurt as Danny was, after all, and she still needs to go to school. In fact, Sam’s suit took the brunt of the damage, and whatever Vlad did to upgrade it apparently did its job, because the suit had looked mostly unharmed too.
Tucker waves to Sam’s parents as he leaves, who give him at least a polite wave back. He’s pretty sure they like that he made sure Sam was okay. It’s gained him some points with them.
That’s not something Tucker has time to focus on, though.
So, Circus Gothica. Sam’s right in that it’s the most damning evidence in regards to Danny being evil. But if Tucker’s really running with his instincts that Danny’s not a monster (and he is ), then something else had to be going on. The first and most helpful thing to do is probably figure out what happened there.
And since only two people were watching Danny closely at that point, and one of them is the ringmaster now in jail, and the other is the only one of them who has confirmed access to some kind of recording devices, Tucker starts by heading to the training grounds to look for anything Vlad has on the topic. If Vlad’s there, he’ll just pretend like he’s there for training, and that the last battle finally changed his mind in regards to Danny in the opposite direction to how it actually did. If he’s not, well, there’s got to be something in those training grounds he hasn’t found yet. If it’s actually Vlad’s base of operations while he’s here, there’s not enough technology in the main base to know everything he knows.
Unless it’s back in Wisconsin, where he said he came from. Man, if that’s the case, this is going to be a lot harder.
Tucker shakes himself. Worry about that later.
Thankfully, when he gets to the training grounds, no one’s there, and the training grounds are almost silent. In fact, the only sound is coming from the chain of one of the punching bags, gently swinging back and forth. Everything looks perfectly in order, and there’s nothing that he isn’t expecting to see.
But there has to be something. There’s no way Vlad upgraded their suits with just the things in this room. Unless he really did take them all the way back to Wisconsin, which is still a possibility. But why go so far away, and risk something happening while he was gone?
Tucker, after a moment’s hesitation, twists his suit on and flies up by the ceiling obstacle course, as good a place to start as any. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, and if there was something there to find, they would have found it any of the number of the times they’d used the course itself.
Tucker had blasted a punching back against the wall before, so those are out, along with the ghost targets, which are meant to be hit. The Danny dummies went up after everything else in here, so thankfully, those are out too, and Tucker doesn’t have to spend time looking too closely at them. He never wants to see those things again.
That leaves the room itself as the only thing he can reasonably expect to find something in. There’s a lot of space along the walls that’s designed to get hit by something. The walls behind the ghost targets have dents and burns. The walls behind the sparring ring have padding. The walls on the other side of the ceiling obstacle course have boarded up windows.
Tucker turns to face the one wall separated off a little bit, which is the area with the chairs to sit in. Right now, the only one sitting there is Vlad’s larger one. So where did the two smaller ones go?
Tucker twists his bracelet, retracting his suit into it, and walks over to look at the wall there. Unfortunately for his room theory, there’s nothing that could possibly lead to a hidden compartment or room or anything of the sort. In fact, the wall is so plain and smooth that there don’t seem to even be any differences in paint. Tucker bites his lip, staring at it for a moment. There has to be something here. But if it’s not on the wall, he can’t think of anywhere else it could be. Nowhere Vlad would expect them not to touch.
Realization strikes Tucker, and he turns to face Vlad’s chair. He takes a breath, then walks over and sits down in it. He’s not as tall as Vlad, but he starts feeling around for similar places Vlad could reach while sitting in it, and—
There. A button underneath the arm. Tucker presses it.
A soft click, and Tucker looks to his right to see the entire smooth wall slide back, and reveal a long staircase.
He takes a deep, shaky breath, and twists his suit back on. Then he stands and walks over, starting slowly down the steps. He doesn’t hear any voices coming from down there, so Vlad probably still isn’t there.
The staircase makes a u-turn halfway down, and leads back into what must be the basement of the house. As soon as Tucker makes the turn, he can see the bottom of the staircase open out into a wide room. It looks like a lab of some kind, with various machines and consoles and scrap material laid out. Tucker couldn’t hope to have the time to understand what all of it’s for.
Instead, he heads for a table in the middle of the room, with large stacks of papers laid out on top of it. Tucker pulls one over at random and peers at it. Originally he was just planning on searching for information on Circus Gothica, but there’s clearly more than that going on here. What he finds, however, sticks to his original plan.
He’s holding a sketch of the staff he remembers Freakshow using, along with detailed explanations of how it’s possible the staff can control ghosts. Vlad’s written down several theories in regards to how, but the page ends with much more frustrated rambles, seeming irritated that he can’t come to a conclusion.
But for as much as he can’t, this certainly explains a lot for Tucker. He takes a deep breath, tries not to get caught on the idea of Danny being mind controlled by that Freakshow guy for who knows how long, and sets the paper aside to grab later. He’ll need to show that one to Sam.
The next paper he grabs is several scribbled attempts at poetry that seem to be dedicated to Danny’s mother. Tucker pulls back in disgust, and sets that paper as far away from him as he can get it.
The page after that seems to be designs for his, Sam’s and Valerie’s suits. They include detailed schematics of how the suits work, none of which is too surprising to Tucker, except for the parts of the designs that include spy cameras.
Okay, so that’s not great. Not loving the implication that Vlad has been spying on the three of them while they fight Danny, and— and talk to Danny, and fight with each other.
Tucker sets that paper aside and shakes himself. Move on, deal with guilt and emotions later.
The next page is a schematic for his and Sam’s upgrades. Which… doesn’t seem to have any upgrades to weapons, or armor capability, or flight. Instead it details an explanation of how the suits can be used to control the heart rate, breathing, and body of the wearer.
Oh fuck, Tucker has to get out of here.
He grabs all of the pages he’s read, holds them close to his chest, and turns—
Right into Vlad’s waiting gaze.
“Hello, my boy,” Vlad says, as Tucker’s heart stops in his chest. “And what exactly are you doing down here?”
“V-Vlad, hey,” Tucker says, hating how obvious the fear in his voice is. “F-funny story, actually. So I, uh, I tripped, and fell right into your chair, and it opened the wall, and I just wanted to see what cool stuff you have down here in your lab, so I—”
Vlad puts a hand on Tucker’s shoulder, and Tucker stops, staring wide eyed up at him.
“Well, I suppose this brings the need for a charade to an end,” Vlad says. “Come with me.”
“I don’t—”
Vlad reaches inside his coat, pulls out a small remote, and presses a button on it. Tucker’s arms stiffen and lock in place at his sides, and when Vlad starts walking, he feels himself follow.
“I was hoping I would have more time before moving into this phase,” Vlad says, as if Tucker can hear him over the thumping of his heart in his chest. “But I suppose now is as good a time as any.”
Then, as Tucker watches, a black ring appears around Vlad’s waist, travels up to his head, and answers the only question Tucker had left.
“Y-you’re Plasmius,” he manages.
Vlad Plasmius gives him an amused look. “Well, it took you long enough to catch on to that,” he says. “I’ll admit, I don’t know what Daniel saw in you in the first place. Surely there are better companions out there than a couple of idiots who drop him the first second someone who’s halfway decent at manipulation comes along. But, ah well, hardly the point. Though I don’t imagine Daniel would care enough to come here if it’s just you in danger, after all this. Tell me my boy, how would you feel about kidnapping his sister? And remember that your opinion is irrelevant.”
Tucker can’t even manage to get enough breath in to formulate some form of response.
“I think that will work well enough,” Vlad says, turning and pressing a couple of buttons on the console to his left. “Of course we’ll need to keep Samantha away from the duration of this one. Can’t let her go thinking it’s your fault Jazz goes missing, can we? And I think we’ll skip the talking, just in case.” He presses another button on Tucker’s suit, and the next second, Tucker can’t open his mouth.
Vlad turns and walks back over towards Tucker, and pulls up the visor over his eyes. He smiles in amusement at the terror that’s definitely clear in them.
“You know, this might be fun after all,” he says. “Now let’s get moving.”
…
Sam, from her spot listening to the entire exchange on the steps, takes that as her cue to turn and run as fast as she can back up to the training area, while still being quiet as she does so. Her heart is in her throat, and her hand, ironically, is twisting the bracelet on her wrist back and forth as she runs, to the point that it’s started tearing up the bandage on her wrist.
She makes it, somehow, through the training grounds and outside, and keeps sprinting until she makes her way to an alleyway she can duck into. She has just enough time to press herself back against the wall before she sees Tucker fly past the alley on his suit. She’s going to have to pray he didn’t see her, which is a far cry different from her original goal of sneaking after him to make sure she could protect him if she needed to.
The next second, she looks down at her bracelet. Her immediate instinct is to tear it off and crush it under her shoe, but that will definitely alert Vlad that something’s wrong.
No, she has to keep it on for now. She has to— she has to do something. She has to— what can she do, she doesn’t even have a weapon she can use because every weapon she has access to can be taken over against her will except— except—
Sam squeezes the bracelet on her wrist tightly. She pulls in as deep a breath as she can manage after having her world so completely and thoroughly shattered, and leaves the alleyway to start running home.