Lovesick Gods

by Amanda Meuwissen

  “Organic food isn’t new age, kid,” Cho said with chiding amusement. “You won’t find me going to a faith healer any more than to a chiropractor, but I can appreciate the nuances of a good massage.”

  Danny groaned again. The way Cho played his fingers over the bottom of Danny’s foot like a piano felt sinfully good. Harsh enough to make him hiss, then soft and soothing to make him moan. Cho chuckled at him and pressed in deeper.

  What did he mean by emotions though? Danny wasn’t carrying any emotions in his feet. Just because he darted around the city at all hours didn’t mean…

  “Ugn…” Danny couldn’t stop the pleased noises from passing his lips as he drifted into that lovely place between awake and dozing, where he could float on a cloud with nothing to disturb his bliss. “Is there anything you’re not good at?”

  “Hmm…I’ll let you know if I think of something.”

  Danny laughed. The slow, constant pressure of Cho’s thumbs and fingers on his foot was better than any massage he’d ever received. The man really knew how to use his hands, but then, Danny knew that. Cho even worked his way higher, up Danny’s ankle beneath the borrowed sweats, and further up Danny’s calf where he tensed from being ticklish, before moving down and attending to each individual toe.

  Then the ball of Danny’s foot, the arch, the heel, the arch again. When Cho moved to the other foot, something inside of Danny shifted, as if the loosening of his muscles shook something else loose too. It took opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling above for him to realize he was blinking back tears. He touched a hand to his eyes. Why was he crying from a stupid foot rub?

  “Letting your guard down has its perils,” Cho said, never ceasing his motions, his voice soft and without judgement. “Sometimes we don’t even know what we’re holding onto until it slips out of us.”

  Danny glanced at Cho, but he kept his eyes on Danny’s foot, concentration and sadness on his face that Danny didn’t understand.

  “You don’t always have to be okay,” Cho said. “You don’t have to be anything when you’re here. Outside these walls you’re plenty. I don’t need Zeus in my home. In fact, I’d prefer he stay far, far away.” Pausing, he reached up behind him and patted the suit hanging over the sofa with a brief smirk.

  Danny choked out another laugh. But he was choking on too much, so much more than laughter, as unforeseen emotions caught in his throat.

  “Zeus in my bed, now, that is something to brag about. But I know where the real power is. All the parts I like to see bare, that’s not Zeus. Zeus is your mask. I like what’s under it.”

  “You don’t know what’s under it,” Danny said without thinking, because Cho didn’t know, not really, and he wouldn’t want the truth if he ever found out how low Danny had sunk.

  “Think you’re such an enigma, huh?” Cho pressed his thumbs into the arch of Danny’s foot again and held them there, applying firm pressure that hurt, but the pain was good, solid. His eyes looked so blue when they met Danny’s gaze. He was flushed and damp with sweat, casually dressed in his own home, attending to Danny when this time Danny had done nothing to earn his keep. “Tell me. What’s so terrible about Danny Grant?”

  Danny stared for far too long. At Cho’s eyes. At his face. At his hands ever moving. The words wouldn’t come to him, because there were too many of them, right on the brink of flooding out of him, and he couldn’t, couldn’t let all of them out at once.

  His tears fell more steadily—he couldn’t stop them—as he slowly drifted his eyes to the ceiling again and focused on the pain more than the pleasure of Cho’s touch.

  “I almost snapped a man’s arms last night.”

  Cho’s rhythmic rubbing stuttered, but only for a moment.

  “He didn’t even do anything. He was trying to break into a store, but it wasn’t a big deal, ya know? No dangerous Elemental. He didn’t have any weapons on him. But I was so angry.” The tears streamed faster down Danny’s face. “I saw Ludgate, the Elemental responsible for these heists, and he…he made me look like a fool, and I just…I wanted…something to make sense.”

  “We all lose our cool occasionally, Sparky.”

  Danny shook his head. “It wasn’t the first time. A couple weeks ago I broke a man’s nose. Gave him a concussion. Beat him until he begged for me to stop. If my last hit had connected, I would have killed him. Just like…” What was Danny saying?

  “Like…?” Cho prompted when he trailed.

  It was the last thing Danny ever thought he’d confess, especially to Cho, but the words found their way out of him anyway. “The night I killed Thanatos.”

  ß

  Danny had sent the message to Cho just like they discussed—a call into Haven that would be relayed to Cho describing the time and place for them to meet. Where was he? Thanatos had taken control of the power station almost an hour ago, but he had more than just the workers inside held hostage. Danny had received a call to his own desk phone at the precinct from Thanatos himself. He never could have anticipated hearing his mother’s voice on the other line.

  “Danny, don’t listen to him—” she’d said but cried out before she could finish.

  Danny had barely explained the situation to his father, Andre, and Lynn, before he raced out of the precinct. His father’s eyes had looked so panicked. Danny couldn’t lose somebody else—he couldn’t lose anybody else. Not his mother. This had to end tonight, but he’d failed to stop Thanatos so many times. He needed Cho’s help.

  Where was he?

  The sirens in the distance were growing closer as Danny stood before Thanatos, who barred entrance into the power station. He was up in the air a full story high with his shadows whipping about, maddening and menacing.

  The power station was coal-fired with a steam boiler. The steam drove the turbine and generator to produce electricity for half of Olympus City. Gas waste alone could be dangerous if tampered with, but Thanatos’s shadows were infecting more than just that. Danny could see them coiling around the smokestacks. It painted such a bleak picture juxtaposed against the bright colors of the circus in town set up just outside the power station’s perimeter like some awful parody of a horror movie.

  “Do you really want to take yourself out too?!” Danny cried up at him. “You’re putting the entire city at risk!”

  “Explosions can be contained,” Thanatos said, a reverberation in his voice to mask the sound of it, like he was speaking through a modulator. Maybe he was. Maybe it was simply part of his powers. “Crippling the city for days—weeks—by taking out this power station is just a bonus, Zeus. Losing your partner, why...that made things interesting, didn’t it? It birthed you. It started all of our fun. What will losing your mother do, I wonder?”

  His shadows were expanding, covering the entire building. Danny had to act. He couldn’t lightning jump into the air, he needed solid ground, but a bolt of lightning discharged toward the power station could be just as dangerous as Thanatos’s shadows. He needed Cho’s ice.

  “Please, don’t do this,” Danny said, hands held up, hoping he could stall, that Cho would show up in the nick of time and maybe this was all part of some grand plan Danny would thank him for later. “If you want me, I’m right here. Just let these people go.”

  “Oh, I want you, Zeus. I want you to feel the strength of Death before it comes for you too.”

  “Danny, you have to take the shot,” Andre spoke over the comms. “You have to risk it. His shadows, the pressure he’s building in the generator…”

  “You can do it, Danny,” Lynn added in support.

  The two of them had been with him since the beginning. Danny thought Cho would be here tonight too, but now he knew his nemesis wasn’t coming.

  Summoning his lightning, he felt it spark from the coil in his gut and spread outward like a shockwave. His white and yellow suit lit up the dark of the night, electricity archi
ng further from his body, higher, stronger. Danny was going to hit Thanatos with everything he had.

  “That’s what makes you so pathetic, Zeus. You think Death will wait for you,” Thanatos said with a subtle flick of his wrist.

  The explosion was quieter than Danny expected. Contained inside the building by Thanatos’s shadows, it was muffled, the way movies sometimes show an explosion in space. But the eruption still came—before Danny surged his lightning forward.

  The windows along the top floor of the station blew out, and Danny could see the fire inside. In moments, every building and street lamp went dark for blocks on end like a great blanket had been dropped and the only light left was from the flames and Danny’s sparks.

  When his powers diminished in his shock and the sound of the muted blast faded, all Danny could hear was screaming.

  He tried to lightning jump inside, but he’d never been in the power station before; he didn’t have a clear enough picture in his head to reach it. He bounced off of Thanatos’s shadows and fell to the ground practically at the other Elemental’s feet.

  “Danny!” Andre and Lynn called out, but Danny barely heard them. He had to get inside. The police sirens were getting closer. His father would be there soon. Danny had to save his mother! The screams were already fading…

  “Do you know what that sort of explosion does to a person?” Thanatos said as he descended from his towering height, the shadows spiraling around him like tentacles as his feet gently touched down. “The heat. The intensity.”

  Danny snarled and blasted fresh bolts of lightning from his hands, but Thanatos’s shadows deflected them like annoying gnats.

  “Danny, the police are almost there,” Lynn said. “We still have power at the precinct. Just hold on.”

  Danny didn’t want to hold on. He wanted to get his hands on Thanatos and slam him into the pavement. Lightning jumping forward, he dug his fingers into Thanatos’s black and purple suit, but the shadows dove at him like an extra pair of hands and pried his arms back.

  Thanatos laughed at him. “There’s nothing left to save, Zeus. Whatever might be clinging to life in there is too busy choking on smoke.”

  Danny lunged at him with a broken howl ripping from his throat even as he was held in place. His lightning snapped around him like a whip, refusing to be snuffed out by the shadows he’d been chasing and fighting and hating for six long months since they’d first choked Rick from the inside out. And now Danny’s mother…

  With a flinch, Thanatos stepped back as if the electricity had finally started to hurt him. Danny couldn’t hold back. Couldn’t concede. Couldn’t stop no matter what.

  “Yes,” Thanatos laughed louder as Danny crackled and glowed with his power, summoning all of the lightning that had diminished before. “Isn’t the darkness beautiful, Zeus? Can you see it now? The power that Death brings out in all of us!”

  Howling once more, Danny’s vision turned gold from the sparks flowing through him. Thanatos’s shadows tried to beat his lightning back, to subdue it like so many times before, but for every inch the darkness overtook, the brightness of Danny’s lightning lashed back with a vengeance.

  It was so bright in the darkness with half the city powerless, Danny could only see Thanatos’s silhouette. He kept pulsing brighter, brighter, until his lightning exploded out of him with a blast much louder than the power station explosion.

  Gasping for breath, Danny rolled across the pavement in the aftermath, but he didn’t pause; he lurched to his feet and lightning jumped to where Thanatos had been thrown the other direction. The Dark Elemental’s shadows had dwindled but still churned around him like mist. Danny didn’t care. He fell upon Thanatos and yanked him up by the front of his suit.

  The man laughed at Danny again—always laughing—but Danny’s adrenaline was too high, his anger spiked, his mind empty of anything other than rage.

  Lightning pulsed from his hands into Thanatos’s chest, and the Elemental in black seized with a jolt as if he’d been shocked with a defibrillator. He struggled for air, but it only made him laugh harder.

  “Shut up!” Danny screamed and shocked him again. His lightning circulated through Thanatos like a Tesla coil going haywire, funneling into him over and over. He’d never discharged so much power before, and never into a person. He hadn’t dared, always afraid he’d hurt someone if he let so much of himself go. Now, hurting Thanatos was all that mattered.

  As the minutes passed, the man’s laughter slowly died and screams took its place instead. Danny liked those screams. He thrived off of them; they spurred him on to shock Thanatos again. Again.

  He didn’t realize the police had arrived and that Andre and Lynn were the ones screaming now until the smell hit him. Thanatos was long silent, still and limp in Danny’s hold. There were no more shadows, just the smoke rising off of Thanatos’s suit from how he was…cooking.

  As Danny realized what had happened, he tasted bile in his throat, but when he turned to throw up, he could see officers headed his way, guns drawn, with his father among them, and he couldn’t let them see this. He couldn’t let his father see what he’d done after failing to save his mother. With Thanatos’s charred suit still clutched in Danny’s fingers, he lightning jumped to the morgue.

  Lynn’s scream was much louder in person, her hands flying up to cover her mouth as Danny appeared in the middle of the main room with an electrocuted corpse in his lap. Andre threw up before Danny did. Lynn was used to bodies, but her expression… Danny couldn’t look at it.

  He had to tear his mask off so he could breathe, and only then did he realize how much he was sobbing and retching and oh god, what had he done?

  The only thing he managed to say, the only thing he could say was, “I couldn’t stop.”

  ß

  Mal stared. He hadn’t known. People had speculated that Thanatos was dead, but there had never been any confirmation. There had never been any recorded deaths at Zeus’s hands.

  “You…”

  “I killed him,” Danny said again. He’d looked far away after saying it the first time, like he was remembering the details of that night. “He didn’t leave. I didn’t run him out of the city. I killed him.”

  Finally, Danny looked at Mal, though he had to see a giant blur for all the wetness in his eyes. Mal’s hands were motionless but remained steady on Danny’s skin.

  “ZEUS KILLS SUPERVILLAIN doesn’t make a very good headline,” Danny said numbly. “Nobody outside my family or the team knows. We had to clean up the body afterward.”

  Mal shivered as a chill ran through him, and that never happened to him.

  “He’d killed so many people, and he just kept laughing about it. When I got the upper hand, I put everything I had into that lightning, and finally…finally he stopped. But it wasn’t enough. I kept shocking him, over and over, electrocuting him until the air smelled like…” Danny’s nose wrinkled as if catching a whiff of that smell now. “He stopped laughing. Stopped screaming. Just laid there smoking. We couldn’t even pull his mask off later, it was so fused to his skin. We still don’t know who he really was. But the worst part?”

  Fresh tears pooled liberally as Danny’s gaze turned distant again. “Sometimes I don’t even care that I killed him. Sometimes I don’t feel anything. And then, when I think I’m okay, I’ll dream about that smell and the way Lynn and Andre looked at me…

  “I’m supposed to be better than this, better than…” He sniffled pitifully. “I’ve never killed in the line of duty, but even if I had, this wasn’t like that. Now, I’m afraid I’ll lose it again and kill somebody else, and my friends keep trying to help but nothing helps.”

  “Nothing?” Mal asked, squeezing Danny’s ankle until he looked at him.

  What was he thinking, psychoanalyzing, trying to make Danny feel better because he couldn’t stand to see the kid in pain? It left him too open, his own
mask falling away by telling Danny he preferred him without one.

  He was risking too much, but he couldn’t leave Danny a whimpering mess. Danny was better than this, better than him, better than what he thought of himself. Danny wanted to make a real difference, save lives, be a hero. People weren’t like that. Didn’t he understand how rare and precious he was in a world filled with monsters like Thanatos?

  Danny had been a light for this city when it was plagued by darkness, and outside of his suit he offered a rare softness to Mal’s life too. That’s why Mal had anticipated snuggling last night, but Danny had proven to be the opposite of his expectations and curled into a ball on his side of the bed like he was trying to hide from the world. Now Mal knew why.

  And it was all his fault.

  No. Mal couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t give Danny that kind of power over him. But he couldn’t deny how much he wanted to say he was sorry for not being there like he promised.

  “Danny…the reason I—”

  “Shut up, Cho. Come here.”

  Reaching for him, Danny tangled his fingers in the fabric of Mal’s zip-up and tugged downward to get him to obey. Mal wanted nothing more than to listen if that’s what Danny needed. After everything, he could offer that much.

  Shifting on the sofa, Mal crawled up and over Danny’s legs to settle in his lap. He dipped down as Danny pulled him closer, descending slowly until their lips brushed. Danny tasted like cinnamon.

  “I didn’t know,” Mal said, breathing the words against Danny’s lips. “But I do know Thanatos isn’t worth your grief.”

  Danny grimaced, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” and tried to recapture Mal’s lips.

  “Danny—”

  “I can’t talk about it.” His tears were drying, but there was something dark in his eyes. “I can’t talk to my dad because he just smiles and pretends it’s okay when he knows it’s not. I can’t talk to my sister because she always gives me this ‘poor Danny’ look like I’m pitiful, and I am. My foster brother thinks I’m either crazy or a flake. And Lynn and Andre…” He shook his head, mouth curling into a sneer. “I’m just their damaged superhero.”