Chapter Text
Danny knew what he was facing because he’d seen it in himself countless times.
It was a terrifying thing to realize what he hated most about his father had wormed its way into his own very being. The rage alone was scary, becoming overwhelmed with this hot, intense feeling that he just couldn’t control, but to know it wasn’t him was something else. It was his body, some intangible part of his mind that had come from his father, and likely his father before him. Danny was just another kid in a line of angry, angry men.
His father was shouting. Danny couldn’t remember what he was shouting about. He could tell he’d shrunken in on himself, like he could somehow make himself small enough that his father wouldn’t see him. He didn’t feel small, though. He felt big. Not as big as his father looked right now, but that same rage being thrown in his face was brewing in Danny’s chest, and he worried it would grow too big for him to keep inside.
It made Danny aware of how alone he was. Sure, his father was right there, but there was no one else in the apartment. It felt like they were two red-hot stars burning away in an abyss of nothing. They were the same in a lot of ways, something deep and intrinsic shared between them, but they were still distinct in a lot of ways, Danny’s father’s rage burning so brightly that it scorched everything around him, and Danny’s anger tearing him apart inside.
His head was mostly filled with a distant ringing that was trying to block out the sights and sounds around him, but a little part of Danny wondered if this would be him one day, his anger boiling into rage so intense he drove his wife away and sent his kid cowering. Not for the first time, Danny felt a flash of anger that his father would stop him from having the kind of future he wanted. He wouldn’t subject a spouse or child to this if he could help it.
Danny hardly noticed the feeling, though. That little flash was a drop in the sea of buzzing anger that perpetually plagued him. Sometimes when he was walking around school or working on his homework, he could feel it dim down to something more akin to resentment, annoyance, or even just general irritability. Other times… Well, there was a reason he thought he was like his father.
He willed himself to stay still. It would be so easy to yell back, or even to take a swing, but his father hadn’t escalated things nearly as far as he could have, at least not today, and Danny knew the water he’d put in the ice cube trays in the freezer hadn’t frozen yet. If he got hit, he wouldn’t have a bag of ice to soothe the pain.
That didn’t stop him from simmering, though. He could tell that if his father’s tirade didn’t stop soon, he wouldn’t be able to stop it from erupting.
Danny saw the moment his father’s attention switched away from him, but it took him a beat longer to realize why. There was a tiny gnat buzzing around his father’s ear, and his dad took a moment to bat it away, but the gnat came buzzing back, and the time that his father took to kill it was enough to throw off his rhythm.
“Get,” his father ordered, turning to stalk off, and Danny seized the opportunity, hurrying to his room. He hopped over a couple of cockroaches in the hallway, too eager to get to safety to even think about stopping to get a cup to trap them and put them outside like he normally would.
Danny was still in his dirty school clothes from the day, but he barely hesitated to crawl into his bed and get under the covers. It just felt safer here. Always had, ever since he was a kid. He didn’t know why. There was nothing about it that made his bed any safer than any other place in his room, and his blankets would be rather pathetic protection if his father managed to get through the locked door. But still, there was comfort.
He heard a few more shouts from the living room, but he put his pillow over his head so he wouldn’t have to listen. It was too early to go to sleep, but Danny would take any escape he could get.
There were dead mice in the apartment when Danny woke up for school.
He couldn’t tell how many. They’d been smashed to a bloody pulp alongside some roaches, flies, and other bugs Danny couldn’t identify. They might have to call an exterminator, it seemed, if there were this many bugs and rodents in the apartment. And out of hiding, too. He’d think that his father’s noise would be enough to keep them away, but apparently not, and now they were dead.
It was really gross, but Danny took the time to clean them up, even if it meant he wouldn’t have time to eat before heading to school. He didn’t know why exactly. His hands just started grabbing the paper towels on their own, and his stomach just accepted that it wasn’t getting fed. Maybe his body knew to be afraid of what Danny’s dad would do when he woke up and saw the mess better than his body did.
He would be out of here soon, Danny thought as he descended the apartment complex stairs to head to the bus stop. He was seventeen. Close to graduation. He worked around the docks sometimes for some extra money—god knew that they needed it—and Danny felt pretty confident he could get enough work that he could get out of his dad’s house once he turned eighteen. Maybe not enough to go to college, but a guy could hope.
School was okay. Danny didn’t really want to be there, but it wasn’t like he wanted to be at home either, which was what made it just okay. The guys at the docks always said school was important, and Danny might be able to become something like an administrator or union rep for the DWA if he worked hard in school, though, so he didn’t really mind it that much. It felt nice that the guys at the docks thought he was smart, even though Danny wasn’t so sure. Still, it was encouragement, and Danny would take what he could get.
It was hard, though. Talking to his friends, grabbing his things from his locker, walking to his class… Just having to pretend he hadn’t had to scrub mouse blood from his carpet. Worse, some part of him being grateful the mice were dead, because it meant his dad had hit something instead of him. None of these other kids had to deal with stuff like that. Well, maybe some of them, but the way they smiled and joked with each other just seemed so easy.
Someone down the hall shrieked. Danny couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, but it didn’t really matter. He craned his head, trying to get a look, as some jocks jeered and stomped. There were roaches in the hallway, apparently. At least that’s how Danny understood it. Not the strangest thing, and definitely not the first time Danny had seen roaches at school.
But during his first period, one of the ceiling tiles came loose, and a rat fell onto the teacher’s desk, and then maybe half a dozen more were spilling out. The teacher screamed and jumped back, and the kids closest to the door just got up and left. Most of the students recoiled, some getting to their feet, as the rats’ heads swiveled around. Danny could see their noses twitching. He wondered what they were thinking about.
One of the rats jumped on the teacher, and then the rest of the rats leapt off the desk toward the students. A girl reacted quickly, jumping up to whack one of the rats hard with her binder, once and then twice. That seemed to kickstart some of the others into action. There was another girl with lacrosse gear, and she got her stick out to whip the rats across the room. Danny expected that to do it, but they just got up the moment they hit the ground and ran back toward the students.
A couple of bigger guys ended up stomping the rats until they couldn’t get up anymore, the girl with the lacrosse stick batting the other rats back until they were all dead, unconscious, or otherwise unable to move. At least three people were crying. Danny wasn’t one of them, but he wasn’t feeling great. It was a pretty brutal sight. They were just rats, but it was still a terrible thing to see.
“Maybe there’s something going around,” Danny spoke up as the silence stretched through the classroom. “My dad killed some mice last night.”
At least he’d thought they were mice. They could have been rats for all he knew. These ones were definitely rats, but his dad had really pummeled the rodents he’d found in the apartment, so Danny hadn’t been able to tell.
There was noise outside, and the teacher and a couple of kids poked their heads out to investigate. Other classrooms were having similar problems, it seemed. No one was really sure what to do. Then the fire alarm went off, and that answered that.
The teacher rounded the students up, organizing them into lines to head out to the field outside. Danny and his classmates knew this routine well, but somehow the hallways still seemed chaotic. There were flies, roaches, and more rats there, it seemed.
Outside, it wasn’t much better. Crows, seagulls, and starlings started swooping immediately, and traffic built up around the exit, students caught between trying to get away from the grounded vermin inside and wanting to avoid getting pecked by the birds outside. Danny was sort of caught in the middle, sandwiched between people pushing on all sides. It was pretty terrible, all that skin and clothing rubbing against him, and he ended up shoving back even though he knew it was making the problem worse.
A lot of kids ended up running once they got outside, not bothering to wait for the teachers or principal to make an announcement. Danny was among them. He didn’t see any sense in standing around waiting to get pecked.
There was no bus, the morning bus having already come to drop everyone off at school, which meant Danny had to walk home. Not ideal, especially given the birds and all, but he really didn’t mind getting some fresh air after getting caught up in that mass of panicking students. It was a wonder no one got hurt, at least as far as he’d seen.
Danny saw a lot more rats on the street as he walked toward his apartment. He stopped a couple of times to bat a bird away from pecking at someone, but he managed to avoid getting attacked himself. It wasn’t, like, a swarm of pests flooding the city, just a few here and there, but they were all attacking people, which told Danny something was really wrong.
It was 1986, four years since Scion appeared, and the world changed. Danny had seen segments on the news speculating what exactly that meant. There was a range of theories, but Danny never really believed them. Now? He could maybe believe there was some kind of supernatural force riling up the city’s vermin. Or maybe something had just gotten into the water. He didn’t know.
It was only when he’d gotten home, and his dad erupted from his room, shaking rats off himself, that Danny wondered if it might have something to do with him.
It was crazy, but the rats weren’t biting Danny, the roaches weren’t crawling up his legs, and the flies weren’t swarming his head, even when he pried the bugs and rodents off his father. And when they checked with their neighbors, Danny realized they were getting attacked too, and it sounded like it had only started when he’d returned to the apartment building.
That didn’t mean anything, but after hours of more and more pests appearing in the apartment, “impossible” started sounding less and less like a real excuse.
It was still insane, though. Even if some part of Danny believed it, the thought of voicing it felt even more impossible than the idea that he was somehow making all this happen. His dad wasn’t yelling at him right now, far more concerned with stopping the pests from getting into the apartment, but Danny was pretty sure that would change if he said something.
He couldn’t just stay quiet, though, could he?
He could, apparently. Danny dumped out all his school stuff from his backpack and, almost on a whim, filled it with all the things he’d need if he… He didn’t know, ran away? He’d thought about it before, usually when nursing a bruise, but it felt surreal packing his things. He’d only sat with this new reality for a few hours now, and he didn’t even know if it was real. He had to test it, though, and he knew he wasn’t coming back if what he suspected was true.
Danny’s dad wasn’t happy that he was leaving, wanting Danny to stay to protect the house, but a flurry of flies zipped in and went right for his dad’s mouth when Danny opened the door, and that was enough for Danny to have the chance to slip away.
Oddly, he didn’t see a lot of bugs or rodents when he walked down the stairs. He didn’t see any birds when he stepped out either, not until he’d been walking for awhile. He must have walked almost the distance it’d take him to get to school before he felt the urge to look behind him, and he saw a swarm following him.
It was a terrible sight. It’d scared him so much that he broke into a run, and he made it about two blocks before his lungs started burning, and he realized the swarm probably would have caught up with him if they wanted to. He stopped and turned around to look at it.
It was a lot of rats, but there were tons of birds in the sky too. He was sure that if he looked closer, he’d see a bunch of bugs too, but he was too far, and his eyes were too bad to really get a good look. There were a lot of them, enough to make a big dark spot on the sidewalk, but they weren’t just standing there. Well, some of them were, but the birds were going after the cars in the street, and there were a lot of rodents walking around who weren’t part of the main mass following Danny.
They were looking for people to attack. That much was obvious. But they weren’t attacking Danny. That could only mean he had something to do with this.
He was glad he brought his bag. He wished he’d had more faith in himself to pack more stuff, though. A change of clothes, the little plastic bag he kept what little money he had in, his retainer, his toothbrush, a pack of wipes, some hand sanitizer, a water bottle, a stick of deodorant, a pocket knife, his keys, a notebook, a light blanket, a little bag of plastic army men he hadn’t realized was in one of the zippered pockets… It wasn’t enough. It had to be, though, because there was no way he could stay in the city, not with the danger he posed to everyone around him.
It was fitting, maybe, that a guy like him got a power like this. He’d never wanted to hurt people, but he always knew it was going to happen someday. It was just happening sooner than he thought it would.
The next… Danny didn’t even know how long it was. The next while. It was a lot of the same.
It took some time for Danny to fall into a routine. There was a range to his power. Through some trial and error, he eventually figured it was around two or three miles. If there was someone to attack, his army of vermin would leave him, but if there wasn’t, they would just sort of cluster around him.
They’d always leave a clearing for Danny, so he never actually touched them unless he tried to, but it was still pretty gross. All the little bundles of flesh were small enough that he had a really hard time gauging how many there were, but Danny was pretty sure they didn’t leave him once they left his range, and he’d walked through a lot of the city, and that meant there were a lot of them. Enough rodents that he couldn’t see the ground for a good stretch. Maybe if his eyesight were a little better, he could, but Danny could only see so far, and the swarm covered all of it.
He couldn’t just sit surrounded by his rodents, bugs, and birds, though. Not forever. He got hungry, and he didn’t have that much water, and the thin blanket he had really wasn’t enough to keep him warm at night. Danny wished he had the resolve to tough it out, but he didn’t, so he ended up taking a trip back to the city for supplies, and that became his new normal. Collect supplies, find a place his power wouldn’t hurt anyone, camp out for awhile, repeat. Forever.
He left the edge of Brockton Bay after… He didn’t know. A few weeks? He was pretty sure the city sent someone to investigate. He never saw them, but sometimes his rats would leave him, and he knew it had to be for a reason.
Rats, not birds or bugs. They eventually all became rats. It was only after Danny had traveled between a few cities that he really understood it. The vermin he collected never tried to take his food or raid any of the shops he swiped his supplies from. They ate each other until they shit and vomited a new, dark substance that would mold itself into rats. New rats, more durable than a regular one, Danny learned after some experimentation.
He didn’t know what it meant. He did know it meant he didn’t have to share his food, though, and it meant he really wasn’t doing that much damage when he had to venture into a city or town.
He stopped seeing people at some point. There was still food and newspapers and such, so Danny had to assume that there were still people around, and they’d just learned to anticipate when he was coming. That must have been hard to coordinate. Did they have some kind of alarm system? Was there enough time to put something in the papers, or maybe on the news? He wondered what they called him.
“The Exterminator? Mouse Trap? Ratcatcher? Pied Piper?”
He said the names aloud as he sat in his little circle. The rats were staying away from him, but he’d caught one just to have someone to talk to. The rat just stared back at him, utterly lacking understanding on its face, and a spike of anger sent Danny throwing it back into the mass surrounding him.
He felt bad almost immediately, even though he knew that hadn’t been a real rat. It was an effect of power, just like everything in his life had become.
“Rat Rage,” he said quietly, more to himself than the rats. It wasn’t like they could listen. Even with them around, he was more alone than he’d ever been.
But that didn’t last forever.