Phic Phight: over and outside and under
Prompt from @ectopal: After the accident, Danny is stuck on the wrong side of the now broken portal. What does he do to try to get home?
@currentlylurking @phicphight
Word count: 5,498
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Danny wakes up.
Considering just how hard he got pitched out of consciousness before this, it’s kind of a relief.
The first thing he’s aware of is being sore, more sore than he can ever remember being in his life. Breathing hurts. The instinctive curling up in wordless protest to this whole ‘being awake’ thing hurts more. He doesn’t know what he’s laying on but at least it doesn’t feel like the cold tile floor of the lab. He stills, takes shallow breaths, reluctantly cracks his eyes open.
All he sees is broad, smeary strokes of greens, unnaturally bright on a gloaming backdrop deepening to blacks and violets. He blinks to clear his vision. His vision remains uselessly blurred. He swallows, grimacing at the dry click of his throat and the way his chapped lips stick when he opens his mouth. “Sam…? Tucker?“
His voice comes out in a low croak; weird to his ears in a way he doesn’t know what to think of, so he doesn’t. He’s more concerned about how there’s no answer anyway.
He tries to brace himself despite his soreness, to sit up and rub the bleariness out of his eyes, but he sort of—wobbles, instead. There’s nothing under him to brace against.
There’s… nothing under him…?
He squints around harder, trying to make sense of all this too-bright green and backlit black. Perspective is virtually non-existent. All he can tell for sure is that he’s floating in empty space.
“Uh,” he says intelligently.
“Uh,” he repeats with more appropriate panic.
“What—augh—AAA—!” And other similarly useful comments sputter out of him while he flails around like a drowning man for a while, clawing around in a blind panic and catching purchase on a big heaping pile of zilch. Where is he, where is this, what is this, he’s falling, is he falling, he can’t tell if he’s falling—
Something catches his eye, weird enough to slow his scrambling. His glove, to be exact. He’s still wearing his embarrassingly tacky jumpsuit, but… its colors have inverted? Black gloves are now a white so bright to make his eyes hurt if he looks too closely; the white of his upper arm is now a black so dark it seems to suck the diffuse white light coming from—his gloves? Are his gloves glowing?
He peers closer at the hem of his glove to the body of the suit, compares it to collar, belt, and boots, all of which are the same eye-wateringly bright white. Yup. That is a noticeable, low-level glow. Aura. Something. Why the fuck is he glowing?
He notices something beyond his immediate focus, something that wasn’t there before. Or he got turned around while panicking about this whole ‘is he falling or isn’t he’ insanity. Who cares. There’s something a lot closer than all this freaky, acrylic paint-like smears of color all around him. There’s the Portal. He’s never been happier to see it in his life, and starts dog-paddling towards it even as he belatedly registers something’s different about it. He can’t make it out at this distance; he’s maybe… 20 yards from it? 30? Perspective is still out the window even with something solid to focus on. It’s farther away than it looks from the foot of the stairs down to the lab, anyway.
It takes roughly an eternity to paddle to it, though really it’s probably only a couple minutes. Everything around him—and above, and below—remains terrifyingly empty and impossible the whole way over. It’s so quiet. Dead of night quiet. He pushes that observation away to deal with later as his gloved hands make a satisfying smack against the Portal’s riveted steel frame. He's—floating, ugh—near the top of it, giving him a bizarre top-down angle that makes it seem alien simply for having never seen it this way before. It’s still the most normal thing around by a country mile.
Maybe literally.
Maybe he shouldn’t think about that.
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