#data enkrypton

Jazz leads the way down to the lab while Danny texts Sam and Val, and Tucker brings up the rear just in case Dani stumbles on the steps or anything. Superboy falls in step beside her, his posture lazy and his walk more a saunter than anything else, and Tucker suffers about it. It does not make it easy to concentrate on Dani, is all he’s gonna say. Like, he’s doing it, but it is frankly painful. 

God, why is this dude so pretty. Why is that a thing? Tucker really did not realize he was into dudes, much less this into dudes. 

Okay, well, technically so far it’s just been this one specific dude, and to be fair Superboy is a pretty impressive one specific dude, but seriously, he is this into the guy? Just–seriously? 

Tucker is going to have to reexamine so many things about himself after this bullshit gets fixed. Like, just so, so many. 

“So like what kinda lab we talkin’ here, am I gonna feel right at home or am I gonna feel like I’m there to punch a bad guy?” Superboy asks Dani, cocking an eyebrow curiously. “Which admittedly those lines are a little blurred for me personally, but just like the general vibes.” 

“I dunno, it’s a lab?” Dani wrinkles her nose, then just shrugs. “Lotta chrome, never heard of OSHA, better-lit than Vlad’s.” 

“Who’s Vlad?” Superboy asks. 

“A very punchable dude,” Dani snorts, rolling her eyes, and Superboy laughs. 

“Oh, you the punchin’ type, boo?” he asks, draping an arm across her shoulders and tugging down his glasses to shoot her a flirty leer over the top of them. “‘Cuz I could get behind that, personally, that’s right up my alley.” 

Dani looks briefly bemused, then incredibly delighted, and cackles gleefully. Possibly over the promise of future punching or possibly over getting called “boo”; situation unclear there. Tucker has some maybe-weird feelings about the flirting thing despite being perfectly aware of both who Superboy very unsubtly is as a person and of Dani’s total disinterest in ever developing impulse control and both of their very loud and enthusiastic attention-seeking tendencies.

Maybe it’s just that it might be weird to solve a problem for Danny via bringing over a dude who’s gonna hit on his clone/daughter/sister/cousin while they’re trying to save her life? Because that would maybe be weird, Tucker can admit how that would maybe be weird. 

Though he hasn’t really heard Dani laugh in a while, so . . . yeah, that could be worse, for sure. 

“Like I’m gonna share the punching, please,” Dani scoffs, flipping her mussed ponytail over her shoulder. “Punching’s all mine, Superfly, I got dibs.” 

“I dunno, how fast you get, boo?” Superboy teases, and she laughs again. “We can work it out the old-fashioned way if you wanna just race it.” 

“You can try, if you think you can keep up,” Dani replies smugly, making a show of examining her nails. Superboy laughs too, and she grins up at him, and Tucker maybe feels like–

Then Dani’s mouth tightens, and her eyes flare, and she–flickers. 

Crap, Tucker thinks, and Superboy’s arm sinks a few inches into Dani’s shoulders as her tangibility stutters, and he yanks it back, and her face goes dead-white and her eyes glow, and Tucker curses and Danny whips around and Jazz whips around a beat slower than him as her hand snaps reflexively to the pocket she’s been keeping the Ecto-Dejecto in and–

Dani makes a choking sound, and it’s probably just as reflexive when she reaches out with a fumbling, halfway phased-out hand, and she’s probably meaning to reach for Danny, but her legs and feet go just intangible enough to drop her into the stairs and she goes straight down. Danny lunges down for her, not even taking the instant it’d take him to transform but already phasing to try and match her tangibility. 

And Superboy snaps out his own hand and catches hers, and it–doesn’t slip. 

Tucker–blinks. 

Wait. What–? 

Then Dani’s intangibility phases Superboy, and they both fall straight down. Dani shrieks and Superboy yells, and they both disappear through the steps as Danny throws himself after them. Jazz is already whipping back around to barrel down the stairs, the epi-pen full of Ecto-Dejecto already clutched in her fist. Tucker runs after her so fast he nearly ends up falling down them face-first, his heart in his throat as he thinks–is Dani destabilizing again or was that just a flicker, is she already melting, is she already melted, is she– 

And he thinks, in a more pragmatic and matter-of-fact and genre-savvy part of his brain: how the frick did Superboy catch Dani’s hand? 

He also has some really complicated and unnecessary feelings about how Superboy didn’t let go of Dani’s hand when she phased him out and dragged him down with her. Like–that is standard superhero shit, Tucker reminds himself. Like–yeah. That’s standard. Fully normal and typical. 

But he’s definitely still having some weird feelings about watching the guy go right through the stairs with Dani without knowing jack shit about what was happening and not even hesitating. 

“DANNY!” Jazz cries–or “DANI!”, because admittedly that is unclear sometimes and can get especially unclear in crisis situations, which this absolutely is–and Tucker runs through the door after her and sees her on her knees on the floor right next to a tangled pile of barely-corporeal bodies. Dani’s crumpled down small in Danny’s arms, flickering in and out of intangibility and visibly melting, and Superboy’s still holding her hand and hasn’t let go, and is flickering in and out in perfect sync with her. Danny’s a beat behind every erratic, unpredictable flicker, but managing to keep at least mostly on the same level of tangibility as Dani’s. Enough that she’s not falling through the floor, at least. 

Yet. 

“Dani, you just–just for a sec, okay, you just have to concentrate enough to stabilize for a second for the epi–” Danny half-babbles at her, and Jazz’s hands flutter helplessly above Dani, her eyes wide and panicked and Danny’s voice cracked and panicked, and Dani’s skin is melting, her body is melting, her face is melting, and Tucker is useless and needs to–needs to– 

“Wow, you weren’t kidding about the chrome, huh, boo?” Superboy says, and Dani–

“H-huh?” she stammers, and her flickering–skips, and– 

“The chrome. There really is a fuckton of the stuff,” Superboy says, looking around the lab and cocking an eyebrow. “How do they keep it all shiny like this? Like is there a polishing schedule? Like a daily rotation?” 

“M-man, I dunno, I dunno how y-you clean ch-chrome,” Dani manages with a stuttered laugh, and her flickering stops, just for a second. Stops on tangible, just for a second. 

But like Danny said, a second’s all Jazz needs to jab her. 

Jazz jerks out with the epi of Ecto-Dejecto and stabs it into Dani’s thigh, and Dani yelps as the needle pierces through her jeans, the yelp cutting off into a stifled hiss, and Tucker desperately needs her to not phase out again before the whole shot injects and is totally goddamn useless to help her do that, and Superboy says, “I guess we could google it or whatever? That’s what I usually do for the normie shit I don’t know shit about.” 

“W-what, no c-chrome in your lab’s home-sweet-home?” Dani asks with another stuttered laugh, and Superboy grins brightly at her. 

“C’mon, boo, you know I never cleaned that place, I only ever fucked it up,” he tells her jokingly, and she laughs shakily, and Jazz exhales, and pulls back the empty epi. Dani’s melting face shivers, and quivers, and slowly, slowly starts, like–unmelting, and Superboy squeezes her hand and leans down in closer to her and peers over the top of his sunglasses at her with a wider grin. “Hey, boo. There’s that pretty face again.” 

Dani laughs wetly, then ducks her head with a strangled little sob of a sound and turns tighter into Danny, burying a sob against his shoulder. Tucker doesn’t know if it’s pain or stress or–what, exactly, but Ancients, he hates the sound of it. He hates it. 

He knows it was a tripled-up dose in that shot. The concentrated mix. Jazz told them she was loading a triple for next time. So like, unless they used it while he was gone–unless they did that, it was a triple dose. 

It was a triple dose, and even after a triple, Dani’s still taking this long to fully come back together. 

Tucker really wants to like, go puke or have a freakout or something, but that would not actually be helpful right now, and it definitely wouldn’t fix anything. And like–and he needs to fix this, because that’s what he’s for in this damn fraid. That’s like–that’s just what he’s for period. 

He doesn’t know how to fix this. He just–he doesn’t know. And he’s supposed to know. He’s just–supposed to. 

“It hurt worse that time,” Dani croaks, then laughs helplessly past another sob; around another sob. Danny’s grip on her tightens, and Tucker sees how hard he swallows. He whips out his PDA again, and the reflex is just–

“How much worse?” he asks, ready to type in whatever she says. “Like–scale of one to ten on the pain scale, last episode and this one.” 

“It just fucking hurts, Tucker!” Dani yells into Danny’s shoulder, then chokes on another sob, and it just sounds angry. Danny’s jaw tightens and he squeezes his arms around her, and she sobs in actual fury. “Vlad was too stupid to make me right and I’m gonna fall apart because he was so stupid and it just fucking hurts, okay?! It hurts!” 

She hasn’t let go of Superboy’s hand, and he hasn’t let go of hers either. 

“I–yeah, I know,” Tucker says, and his throat just–burns, it feels like. “It just–symptoms, okay? We need to track those, remember?” 

“I don’t care!” Dani yells. “It’s stupid, it’s stupid, I don’t care, Vlad made me wrong and I’m wrong and this isn’t–this isn’t gonna work, I’m not–!” 

“Dani,” Danny says, his voice tight and strangled as he hugs her closer and buries his face in her shoulder too. She just sobs again. “Dani, I swear–we’re not gonna give up. We’re gonna figure this out. We’ll figure this out even if Tucker has to kidnap, like, the whole freaking Justice League.” 

“I mean I have some theories about the process,” Tucker admits, mostly because he’s hoping it’ll distract her, and Dani sobs out a laugh, and then just sobs. 

“It hurt so bad,” she chokes. “It still hurts. It hurts so bad, it’s so bad, Danny!” 

“I–yeah, I know,” Danny says roughly, his own voice coming out a little choked too. “I just–I know, Dani, it’s–it’s–I’ve got you. We’ve got you. Whole fraid. I swear. We’ll go back to Frostbite for the eighty billionth time, we’ll go raid Vlad’s stupid froot loop lab, we’ll–we’ll figure something out. We will.” 

“Tucker? What took you so–” Jazz leans into the hall behind Danny, looking pretty stressed-out herself, and then cuts her own question in half and immediately looks just as baffled. 

Tucker maybe, uh, should’ve texted again. Like–maybe that was a thing he should’ve done. 

“So like, remember when you told me that Doomsday game was stupid?” he asks. “Well, it’s not, and also it gave me an idea? Kinda? Like–well, very much so it gave me an idea, yeah. Like, definitely there’s an idea.” 

Dani peers out from behind Danny and Jazz, looking exhausted and pale and just barely frowning, and Superboy’s sullen expression immediately clears and he pushes his glasses up into his hair and winks up at her. 

“Hey, cutie, ‘sup?” he greets. Tucker would assume it was a “cute girl” thing, except he didn’t do it when he saw Jazz, so presumably it’s more an “obviously identical to the guy answering to ‘Danny’ and therefore obviously who they’re here for” thing. Or maybe he just likes brunettes more than redheads. 

. . . yeah, unlikely. 

“Oh my god, you seriously kidnapped a superhero for me?” Dani asks, a brief flash of glee crossing her tired, pale face as she half-covers her mouth with a hand, eyes sparkling with a delight Tucker has really missed seeing. He also appreciates that she went straight to “kidnapped”, it’s very flattering that that’s her first thought. “Tucker, that’s so sweet!” 

“Oh my god, you kidnapped the actual Superboy,” Jazz says incredulously, then scowls disapprovingly at him and plants her hands on her hips. “Tucker! What is wrong with you?!” 

“I mean he came along willingly, I didn’t have to actually–uh, I mean, not that I would have actually–yeah no he came willingly, I didn’t have to enact Plan Krypton-napping,” Tucker admits sheepishly, though he’s only actually sheepish about any of it because Superboy’s, like, literally standing right next to him and all. Probably that sounds bad, from Superboy’s perspective. “So it’s fine! I didn’t actually have to commit any crimes, and thought-crimes don’t count! Therefore I am blameless and nothing is wrong with me and you can’t be mad about it!” 

“Yes we can, you should’ve taken backup, dummy!” Jazz retorts in exasperation, throwing her hands up in the air before gesturing pointedly at Superboy with both of them. “He can fly! That is like half of his whole thing, is that he can fly! What were you gonna do if he just pulled an up, up, and away?!” 

. . . okay, valid. 

“Oh, hello there, Tucker!” Mrs. Fenton greets brightly, then looks briefly surprised by Superboy’s presence. “Who’s your friend, dear?” 

“Um,” Tucker says, then rips his hands off Superboy and himself back out of the other’s personal space and nearly falls off the stoop in the process. “Hi, Mrs. Fenton! Mrs. Danny’s Mom! Uh! This is–” oh god how did he not think to think of a fake name for Superboy, he thinks desperately, then just panics and goes with the first Street Fighter character that pops into his head–“Cam! Cam Lee! Friend of mine. My friend. Who is mine. We, uh, met on the internet? Cam really likes . . . cosplay. And . . . stuff.” 

Jesus, how was the first character he thought of Cammy? Cammy! The clone of the evil dude, even! The clone who wears a leotard with a thong in literally all her most iconic designs! 

Please, please let Superboy not ask where he got the name idea. Ever. 

Mrs. Fenton’s surprised look immediately melts into one of those weird sappy ones adults get when they’re being insane and thinking grown-ass teenagers are being “cute” or whatever, and she folds her hands together and coos. Tucker has one perfect, crystal-clear moment of oh no in his head before she says, “Oh, that’s so sweet, Tucker! Jack! Say hello to Tucker, he brought his boyfriend!” 

“Boyfriend?!” Superboy sputters the exact same way he said “pretty boy”. Tucker will never know peace again, he is now intimately aware. Also, apparently Danny’s mom is taking his apparent bisexuality better than he is, which is honestly just embarrassing. 

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear, is this a crossplay?” Mrs. Fenton asks with a concerned little frown, then calls back to Mr. Fenton again: “I mean girlfriend, sorry!” 

“Hello, Tucker! Hello, Tucker’s girlfriend!” Mr. Fenton yells cheerfully as Tucker catches a glimpse of him tackling their struggling refrigerator through the kitchen door before they both go rolling out of view with a series of obnoxiously loud crashing sounds. “Nice to meet youuuuu!” 

Tucker absolutely, absolutely should not have picked anything with any semblance whatsoever to a gender-neutral name. Sue him, okay, his best friends are named “Danny” and “Sam”, “Dani” and “Val” are also things, and “Tucker” is in fact only slightly an improvement on any of that. Frick, even “Jazz” isn’t technically that gendered! There’s definitely at least a dude Transformer named that, if nothing else! 

“So nice to meet you, dear,” Mrs. Fenton says, beaming brightly at Superboy. “Oh, aren’t you pretty! Love the hair, you kids are so creative!” 

Superboy hopefully actually listened to at least most of the “Amity Park: Ghosts, Spirits, & Not Getting Your Ass Spectrally Kicked By Either 101” speech and didn’t just tune him the frick out for infodumping on him too hard and talking his ear off, but it at least seemed like he was listening? Like, he asked some questions and stuff and seemed to be following along okay, more or less? Mostly? 

Tucker really, really hopes Superboy listened to the ghost speech. 

“Okay, so like, avoid anybody too glowy for right now, maybe?” Tucker says as Superboy lets him down on the sidewalk just down the block from FentonWorks, which Superboy is currently squinting through his sunglasses at. Which, like–fair, Tucker figures. Definitely fair. “As in let me deal with anybody too glowy for right now, that’s probably just for the best right now. Like I’ll tell you who’s cool and who I’m gonna have to soup and who we need to flee from in a blind panic, yeah?” 

“‘Soup’?” Superboy repeats skeptically. 

“Thermos thing,” Tucker clarifies. “Remember the Thermos thing? We call it souping, sometimes. Also I mentioned we need to not say anything whatsoever to Danny’s parents, right, like I definitely mentioned that being a thing?” 

“Seven times,” Superboy says. “One of which was a seventeen-minute rant about their shitty tech skills.” 

“They don’t test! They don’t even have any basic safety protocols in place!” Tucker hisses. “Literally they got one of their kids literally killed via a portal to the Infinite Realms with no safety locks on it and didn’t even notice! Like I’m not this liminal because the Fentons have safety locks or literally any basic shielding or food safety knowledge! Which, on that note, don’t eat anything they offer you, if they offer you anything. Probably they won’t, they’re not really the type to think about basic human needs or general human politeness, but yeah.” 

“Yeah, I’m still not clear on the whole ‘liminal’ thing,” Superboy says. “The liminal thing is confusing.” 

“So are literally our entire lives,” Tucker replies frankly, making a mental note to get him a mini-primer or something. Maybe some notes or a spreadsheet. Like just whatever Superboy can brush up on while they’re poking at his DNA or whatever, basically. There is no such thing as knowing too much about ghosts, as far as he’s concerned. “So anyway, yeah, just lemme take the lead with the Fentons. Actually any Fentons? Just–let me take the lead in general, for right now. Like–uh. Please?” 

Probably Superboy is not gonna be down with that, actually, because he’s–actually Tucker’s not sure, is he an emancipated minor, or . . . ? Like, dude makes his own money, obviously, and he does his hero work solo, plus it’s not like he called any parent/guardian about leaving Hawaii on basically a whim, so . . . yeahhhhh. 

“I’m down with that,” Superboy says with an easy shrug, spreading his hands. “Your stomping grounds, man, not mine.” 

Tucker stares blankly at him for a moment, then decides not to look that gift poltergeist in the mouth. 

“Cool,” he says. “Uh–thanks. Uh–this way?” 

“Oh yeah?” Superboy asks, cocking an eyebrow at Fentonworks’ whole . . . Fentonworks-ness as he looks at it over the top of his sunglasses. Tucker boils in embarrassment, and also boils in renewed bewilderment about how pretty this dude’s eyes are. Just–pretty. So pretty. Tucker just came out to rescue Danny’s clone-sister/daughter/cousin and he is honestly feeling so attacked right now? “Good thing I sprung for the local tour guide.” 

“In my defense, this town is so much weirder than you know,” Tucker says. “Just–so much weirder.” 

“There’s this eternal party in space I just go to whenever I’m bored,” Superboy says. “Got a teleport thing that takes me, it’s kinda sick.” 

“. . . okay so your opinion of ‘weird’ is not universal, is what I’m hearing here,” Tucker says after a moment. Danny would friggin’ love that, if they weren’t all freaking out about Dani right now. 

“That’s what they tell me,” Superboy replies with another easy shrug. 

“I’m definitely making the mistake of assuming you’re a normie, yeah,” Tucker says, which is definitely a mistake he keeps making, for whatever reason. Probably, like, habit from interacting with literally every other living being he’s encountered in his life up until two years ago, he guesses. “Alright, yeah anyway, Fenton parents, threat level . . . orange, I’d say? Like not full red, but we’re getting there. So, uh–follow my lead, and please don’t maim them if they try to net you. Or shoot you. Or shoot you with a net, that’s also a–uh. Yeah.” 

He spares a moment to suffer in mortification over the way Superboy’s pushed his glasses up into his hair to squint at him, then flees–strategically retreats–towards FentonWorks. 

It is just very clearly time to strategically retreat, is all. 

Or, uh, time to figure out how to handle Danny’s parents, Tucker mentally amends with a wince as he gets close enough to see their stupid van haphazardly “parked” more on the sidewalk than the street. Parts of it are actively smoking; the rest is dripping bubbling ecto. 

“Trippy,” Superboy muses, floating up a few feet to peer over the top of his sunglasses at the top of the van. Tucker dives forward and automatically grabbing the guy in an attempt to yank him down out of the air before anyone mistakes him for a ghost. They very much do not have time for that right now, especially right outside the Fentons’ place. 

Unfortunately, his yank less yanks Superboy down than it yanks himself up, which is officially the closest he’s ever gotten to doing a pull-up, so he guesses that’s cool or whatever, but also not helpful. 

“Did I mention how you shouldn’t fly around here?” Tucker asks, maybe a little bit dangling off Superboy’s waist right now. Like, just a tiny little sort-of bit. “Because if I did not, that was a serious oversight on my part. So, uh, please come back down here, dude.” 

“Says the dude who’s climbed up here,” Superboy snorts, but does, mercifully, actually settle back down on the sidewalk. 

“I would not describe that as ‘climbing’ so much as ‘failing’, but you do you,” Tucker says. “C’mon, we’re going in. Try to look, uh . . . less like a superhero.” 

“I am literally incapable of that one, buddy,” Superboy says dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. “On account of how they made me in the literal exact image of the superhero.” 

“. . . yeah alright, that wasn’t a fair ask,” Tucker admits with another wince. Well–Danny’s parents aren’t that observant when they’ve got a distraction distracting them, and obviously they need distracted, so . . . it’ll probably be fine? Probably? 

“Samples, like I said. We’ll do it in the basement lab,” Jazz says as she snaps her gloves on. Superboy half-eyes her over his sunglasses, then shrugs, tucking his hands into his pockets. 

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “Whatcha need, bone marrow? Spinal fluid?” 

“. . . saliva,” Jazz says, giving him a weird look. “Maybe a finger prick for a couple drops of blood. More invasive options are for if the minimally invasive ones fail.” 

Superboy laughs like he thinks she’s joking or something. Tucker, like . . . wonders if maybe he should find that concerning? Like, possibly? Because that seems like maybe the kind of thing he should find concerning. 

Though he’s not gonna lie, it’s a little reassuring that Superboy’s cool with the invasive options from the get-go. Like, that’s helpful, just in case they do need to get a little invasive here. Though that’s probably coming from the part of him that was willing to go full “acts of supervillainy” and kidnap a superhero, considering. 

. . . also, a little not reassuring, considering how easy Superboy is actually willing to give up his DNA? His, like–Kryptonian-ish DNA? That is part Kryptonian? 

In retrospect, maybe Tucker should be a little bit alarmed about that. Like, possibly. Maybe possibly. Like, it’s working out for him, obviously, but like, maybe he should be worrying about Superboy’s nonexistent vetting process? Maybe Superboy should be worrying about his nonexistent vetting process. 

. . . . . . yeah, they’ll revisit that conversation after they help Dani, Tucker decides privately, as the guy who was in fact willing to kidnap a superhero to fix this situation. Just–after they get her DNA sorted, yeah. 

“Going for the spinal fluid sounds badass, though,” Dani says. “How do you get that?” 

“Needle, usually,” Superboy replies with a shrug. “They just stick it in your spine. Though sometimes they gotta drill a hole in your skull or whatever, depending.” 

“Whaaaaat, that’s sick,” Dani says, looking delighted, and Superboy smirks at her. They are definitely, definitely gonna have the “vetting process” conversation, Tucker thinks, pulling out his PDA to pop a note about that on his to-do list and attaching a reminder or seven. He’d put it in his calendar, but since he has no idea how long this whole thing might take, the list seems more fitting right now. Like, this could be several days. Or weeks, even. 

Not months, though, since Dani almost definitely doesn’t have that long. 

“‘Pretty boy’?” Superboy repeats incredulously, wrinkling his nose in distaste, which is honestly probably the least grossed-out reaction he could’ve expected to get. Tucker suffers, and also continues to fail mission “develop self-control” very, very badly. 

“Listen, you’re pretty, that’s your cross to bear, not mine,” he lies with a dismissive shrug as he hits the Fentons’ doorbell, seeing as Superboy’s prettiness is absolutely his cross to bear. “Deal with it.” 

Superboy doesn’t say anything. Tucker–pauses; glances over to him. Superboy’s looking at him with a really weird expression on his face, and immediately jolts and whips his head towards the door as soon as he sees him looking. 

. . . okay, Tucker thinks, and then something explodes on the other side of the door and he gets distracted by needing to immediately throw himself at Superboy and cling to him before the guy tries to run in and be a superhero about said explosion. 

“Normal! Normal thing! Normal Fentonworks thing!” he blurts, trying very hard not to focus on the warm, leather-wrapped muscles he is currently clinging to. He got used to Superboy holding him over the course of their multi-hour flight–like, arguably–but he did not get used to holding him, and also this time there’s actual ground under his feet so he’s not freaking out about possibly falling and breaking his spine or his PDA.