A New Beginning

Chapter 2

Time seemed to speed up, everything happened in a blur of color and movement as Robin ordered the team around and they started out of the facility and back toward the mountain. It was obvious that bringing the kid to a hospital would gain them a lot of questions that they couldn't answer, so bringing him back to the mountain was the safest bet. So, in one fluid motion, the Boy Wonder picked the child up bridal style, noticing with grim observation that he was frail and severely underweight, and he rushed out to the ship ahead of the rest of the team and started to clean the unconscious child up.

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The first thing he noticed was the white ceiling.

The pristine white ceiling. Looking around, he saw the perfectly white walls.

But then he noticed everything else.

He noticed the soft (at least compared to the cement floor he's used to) bed that dipped under his meager weight. He noticed the tightly wrapped pieces of fabric over his newly stitched wounds which were unpleasant as they made the aching injuries sting and itch but ultimately the white fabric made them inaccessible. He noticed the obnoxiously loud, yet unnaturally slow beeping coming from his left. He noticed the two pinpricks in his arm indicating some type of drug was being pushed into his body via intravenous tubes.

He was also in different clothes, so someone had to have changed him while he was unconscious. The clothes were the same, but obviously different from those he had been wearing previously. He was still in the oversized white shirt and matching grey sweatpants. But they were different, these clothes were clean and stiff in the way that indicated they were new rather than stiff from his blood and sweat and tears. His entire torso throbbed painfully, the most recent incision was stitched carefully and wrapped tightly with bandages, making it hurt to breathe as it put additional pressure on the old/new injury. His hair was also white again, and fluffy and clean, but white nonetheless. White, white, white.

He hated that color. Or, lack of color to be precise. Though he supposed it could also be the combination of every color depending on which definition was being used, artistic vs scientific. He found he didn't actually care which definition was being used, he simply hated white regardless of what it was.

The beeping was so loud, the fluorescent lights were so bright, and the room smelled like the lab which all made for suitable distractions from his internal debate over the definitions of color. His breathing picked up and his heart escalated to normal bpm for a human as he began to spiral. Danny reminded himself of the familiar event.

Panic attack. Sensory overload. He hated it when that happened. He hated his enhanced senses, they tended to cause him more grief than they were worth. After a minute he managed to get his heart to return to normal and in response his breathing slowed as well. Finally calmed down, the boy glanced at the door to see if anyone was alerted to the abrupt change and spike in his vitals. Nothing, no one. He sighed in relief, grateful that he had more time to decipher the situation and figure out the proper response. Whoever brought him here must have set the machine so they were alerted if his heart surpasses normal bpm, something that was highly unlikely as his vitals are always extremely low so whenever something happens, he would appear normal rather than distressed.

The thing is, this wasn't the first time he had been "rescued" and they never ended well for him. They always resulted in death and destruction. It really didn't affect him much anymore, he had become apathetic and numb to the situation and he could feel that apathy creeping up on him as the panic bled away. He carefully sat up, mindful of the needles in his arm as he moved so nothing was yanked out or pulled. When he was sitting cross legged on the bed, he reached over to the pole next to him and slipped one of the bags off it's hanger, then repeated the action and grabbed the other bag gently. He twisted the nozzles that were on the tubes, clenching the tube shut and effectively stopping the substance drip from entering his body. He doesn't like drugs being pumped into him, it dulled the senses and slowed both reaction time and reflexes.

He scanned the words printed on the first bag. A formula consisting primarily of carbohydrates, water, protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and essential fatty acids. So, in summary, nutrients. Then he turned his attention to the other bag and read that one. Just morphine. Painkiller.

Nutrients and painkillers. Strange. Neither of them probably worked due to his fast metabolism, but the implication was still strange.

Danny was by no means a dumb kid. Despite being cut off from the outside world for the better part of seven years - seven years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 14 hours his internal clock automatically reminded him - he was quite intelligent, especially for his age. He had an eidetic memory, which he despised and relied on in equal measure. He also knew things others wouldn't expect and wouldn't wish to know in various subjects and fields. The agents hadn't just wanted to know his limits physically, they wanted to know his every limit: emotional, physical, mental, everything. He was meant to be an advanced super soldier and they figured the best way to achieve that was to teach him about everything alongside the other experiments to evaluate how much he could comprehend and how quickly it took for him to comprehend them. So, he knew things.

This meant he knew that he was malnourished, and therefore he recognized that the Sodium Chloride was to combat this physical issue. He also acknowledged that he was in pain, so the morphine made sense to counteract that. But what is confusing him is the fact that the chemicals were real. Why would they start to address issues that they had not only caused purposefully but also showed no care for in the past?

Because while Danny's been "rescued" before, they were all fake and staged rescues. The GIW tested him on his reactions to being released in controlled environments where they could watch and analyze and laugh at his hope and desperation for it to be real and true. The IVs that were usually in his arms were always poisons or just simply water, but this time as he tore the bag open, based on the smell, these were exactly what the labels read as. They were real and after seven years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 14 hours, this was the first time it had happened.

His mind worked a mile a minute as he carefully removed the needles from his veins, wiping off the small beads of blood that immediately healed over, and he lowered his bare feet onto the cool floor. It was smooth, bluish bio-based tile rather than the solid grey concrete all the other fake infirmaries were.

Scanning the room one more time, he was surprised to see no faint glow on any of the surfaces. There were no white boxes in the corner and no ecto-shield. He started shivering, and the floor underneath his feet started to frost over. Danny watched with wide green eyes as his powers slowly released and his core pulsed without restriction. There were no power dampeners either. The boy let a wave of cold air wash out of him, dropping the temperature in the room to below freezing before using his ectoplasm to warm it up again to average room temperature. He noticed a camera in the corner and quickly encased it in a block of foggy ice.

If it's new, inconsistent with what has been precedent and established does that mean it could be real? Was he actually out?

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The Leaguers were surrounding Batman as he looked for any clue of who the metahuman was and what was done to him. They had been searching for the entire day but found nothing. Batman sighed, conceding temporary defeat, and turned to face the other heroes.

"We need to wait. If the kid can tell us the name of the organization, then I can conduct a proper search, but the tip was anonymous and we have no clue what the illegal lab called themselves." The Dark Knight explained. The others deflated, looking exhausted and worried and disappointed, reflecting exactly how the Dark Knight himself felt.

There was something about the frail and injured kid that was familiar, pulling at the edges of his mind as whispers of familiarity persisted, but he couldn't place where or why this kid set his instincts off.

Meanwhile, the Young Justice team was sitting around the kitchen, waiting anxiously for news on the kid. The mood was unnaturally solemn as they each were lost in thought. They all jumped when Flash sped into the kitchen, a serious and grim look on the man's normally cheerful face.

"He's awake."