“What’s wrong?” his father asked.
“He won’t shut up…” Danny whispered.
“That was what made you stick around. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even a sense of obligation. It was a way to stick two fingers up to your Da. To say – I’m better than you. And now…now you’ve found out the old wanker didn’t walk out on you. He was torn away and it almost killed him.”
“What’s he saying?”
“He…he won’t shut up…”
“He made a deal with the devil just to get you born, knowing that the price was his own image in your eyes. Meanwhile you…Danny Morrigan, carefree student, professional loser, you stick your cock in some random girl drunk one night and get her pregnant and what do you think? You think oh no, why me? Why’d it have to happen to me? How’d I get so unlucky?” and by now Thomas was rocking with laughter.
“Who’s the better man now, Danny?”
Tears stung his eyes, but even as they did so, he felt for the first time that something was wrong. Self-doubt he could accept; but this was more than that. This was self-loathing, and much as Danny Morrigan may have second-guessed himself over the years, much as he may have felt deep down that he wasn’t as good a person, a partner, a father as he could be, he had never had the sense that he hated himself.
But if this thing in front of him wasn’t speaking in his own inner voice, then-
Two things happened at the moment of that realisation. The first was that in mid-hysterics Thomas stopped laughing, as suddenly as if someone had just flicked a switch.
The second was that Tony Morrigan stood up with a yell and a string of swearwords, almost knocking over his chair as he did so.
“Who the fuck are you?!” he demanded.
Danny followed his eyeline. “You…you can see him?” he asked his father, pointing to Thomas.
Tony didn’t reply with words. Danny simply watched as all of the colour drained from his father’s face. A second later, moving his attention back to where he was pointing, Danny could understand why.
He hadn’t been imagining things before when he’d thought the Thomas-shape had grown. Now fully nine feet tall, and broad as a tree trunk, the former Lircom team leader was looking less and less human with each passing moment and more and more like one of the monstrosities Danny had walked amongst in the Otherworld; this one bearlike in its bulk, but with four-inch claws sprouting from its hands and feet and teeth like tongues, each of which undulated in its mouth like grass stalks in the wind.
“The circles…” his father croaked.
“Circles don’t work if I’m brought in,” the thing slobbered, and smiled hideously at Danny. “Right, Danny?”
“You never were a part of me.”
“Part of you? I am you!” the Thomas-thing howled, and then it attacked. Danny had been steeling himself for this ever since the transformation had begun in earnest; thinking back to the things he’d learned during his time in the Otherworld, trying to line up the knowledge in his mind. Making himself ready for the thing when it came at him.
Problem was, it didn’t come at him at all.
Tony had time for one shout of alarm and pain before the thing barrelled into him full-tilt, sending him sprawling through the cottage. Furniture splintered in the Thomas-thing’s wake as it captured Tony in its grasp and shook him violently like a ragdoll, before tossing him to the floor, looming over him.
“Da!” Danny shouted. Before he had time to plan, he had thrown himself onto its massive back and wrapped his arms around its neck. The smell of the thing was overpowering; his mind reeled from the sensory overload even as it tried to bring its massive arms around to bear on him, to tear him off.
Failing in this, it adopted a different tack and simply slammed its entire bulk backwards, crushing itself against the nearest wall, or more accurately crushing Danny’s body-
-except Danny’s body wasn’t solid enough to be crushed by the impact.
He phased partially through the wall, momentary flashes of Al from Quantum Leap passing through his mind as he did so. The world spun crazily as his opponent threw itself this way and that in a desperate bid to shake loose of this passenger even as Danny tried, tried with everything he had to squeeze tighter around that neck and ignore the waves of stench coming off this fucker-
Tony was up and charging, something in his hand-
Too slow. A massive hand, swinging out…
“NO!” Danny shouted, and in the moment the Thomas-thing managed finally to get him loose. He crashed through two of the legs of the table and phased through the remaining two, half of one leg passing through the floor. He was able to pull his leg back up before the urge to solidify got too much.
His father was down, and bleeding. Out of the fight. Danny picked himself up and circled around until he was between the Thomas-thing and his father’s prone body. Around him, the cottage’s interior was in ruins.
Just like that, the Thomas-thing was no longer. It shrank, condensed, and now-
“Alright lad?” said Steve.
“Never better lad,” Danny said grimly, never taking his eyes off the shape in front of him, watching for a flicker of movement, anything that would signal the next attack.
“Enjoying all this aren’t ye?”
“Yep. Laugh a fuckin minute.”
“Come off it. You, the centre of some mystic prophecy? You, the last hope for Ireland against the powers of darkness? Right up your alley this is. Always so pleased with your own cleverness. Loved putting one over on dopey Steve. Funny how I ended up with the life you envied, isn’t it.”
“You’re not Steve.”
“You always were an egotistical cunt,” the Steve-thing carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “That’s why the mundanities of family life weren’t floatin yer boat, right or wrong?”
Danny didn’t reply. He was trying to stay calm. Everything he’d learned, all of the synaesthesia tricks he could employ to fight these fuckers on their levels, they depended on him staying calm. If this thing got him angry, he was dead.
“If all this hadn’t happened, how long do you think it would have been? Before you fucked off and left them, I mean. Oh maybe not the way your Da did it, admittedly – the total walkout, the complete vanish. No. You’d have done it the standard way. Probably had a wee affair with some random buck from work and then give Ellie the speech,” and his voice changed to Danny’s, “it’s not working out love. It’s not what I’m after. I’ll see yis right though never you worry – and I wanna see wee Luke every weekend…every other weekend….every month…every few months…on special occasions…definitely next birthday, sorry about that last one there, I’d a lot on…”
“No.”
“You’d have left them and gone back to the life you thought you were robbed of…” and the Steve-copy smiled, “and you’d have been glad you did.”
“You don’t know that.
“So I’m wrong?”
Danny didn’t answer.
Steve was gone a moment later, replaced in an eyeblink by another phantom facsimile.
“Why? Why wasn’t I good enough for you?” Ellie asked him.
“I’m not playing this game,” Danny replied, his voice betraying him by quavering as he spoke. “You’re not Ellie. You’re not Steve. You’re not anyone. You know fuck all about me.”
“I don’t know you?” Ellie laughed mirthlessly. She took a step toward him. Danny had to stop himself from matching the gesture. She looked, sounded, smelled so perfect…
“I know you alright. Do you think when I found out I was pregnant, when I rang you, I did it because I wanted to trap you? I thought you had a right to know. That was all. I didn’t ask you to leave Maggie. Didn’t ask you to come back to me. So when you did those things I thought – I hoped – it was because you loved me, not because you thought you had to. Did you really think I didn’t know, Danny?”
“It’s not true-”
“So I’m wrong?”
His head was spinning. Any hope
of remaining calm had long since been pissed away. He was barely keeping upright, let alone staying calm. The cottage around him was swirling.
He half-expected the attack to come then, with him so off-balance.
He was right. Just not in the way he’d expected.
“Hey, Da,” said Luke.
Not Luke the baby. Not Luke who he’d held in his arms and listened to his full-stomach breathing until he himself had drifted to sleep.
This was grown-up Luke, likely around Danny’s age himself. It wasn’t just the hey, Da that immediately made it obvious who he was; everything about the bo..the man before him said to him, plain and simple, this is your son. He was tall, he was broad-shouldered, he looked a little like Danny but more like his mother truth be told. But he had Danny’s eyes, just like his baby self.
As a baby those eyes had twinkled with mischief and merriment, and now…now there was only deadness there.
No hate, no anger.
Nothing.
“Luke?” Danny croaked. “Luke, I…”
“How’s things?” Luke said, glancing down at his watch. He was dressed smartly, in tailored trousers and a fitted white shirt and tie. He looked good, like a successful young man.
He also looked as if he was impatient for this meeting to be over.
“I tried…” Danny sobbed, staggering forward, the cottage long forgotten. “Luke, I tried…I tried to get you back-”
Luke held up his hands as if to ward him off. He smiled a smile reminiscent of Ellie’s father and the way he’d smiled at Danny – that expression that seemed to ooze disgust, disdain.
“That’s grand, Da,” he said. Another check of the watch. “Look I…I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got so much on at the moment and…” and his son sighed heavily, “…look let’s not kid ourselves, right? Every few months we do this lunchtime thing and we talk about football and the price of mortgages and whatever shite we can think of to get the time in. Why not just call it quits, eh?”
“No…” Danny breathed, aghast. “No…please, Luke. I’m sorry…I-I-don’t know what I can do to make it up to you-”
Luke shrugged expansively. “Forget about it! You said it yourself – the fatherhood thing came too soon for you. You weren’t ready. Hey, at least you gave it nearly a year, eh? And I turned out alright and things turned out,” he paused and there was that fleeting expression of disgust again, “alright for you too. So where’s the harm.”
No. No, I didn’t want this. You’re my little boy. My baby boy. You looked up at me and I was your whole world and I CAN’T LOSE THAT-
Luke spread his arms. His eyes, until now dead, glittered with an inhuman light that Danny was too far gone in grief to have a hope of noticing.
“C’mon, then. One last hug,” he said, and beckoned.
Danny staggered toward him without hesitation, spreading his own arms wide, ready to throw himself into his son’s embrace-
-and was pulled back.
“Stay away from him,” said Tony Morrigan, blood-encrusted and looking like shit, but very much up and awake.
Luke’s expression darkened instantly. “Let him go,” he hissed through teeth no longer square and human, but pointed and predatory.
“He’s my son…” Danny said weakly, trying to struggle free of his father’s grip.
“No he isn’t. But you’re my son.”
Luke launched himself forward. Tony shoved Danny to the floor and brought something around from behind his back, swinging it in a wide arc-
There was a wet noise from somewhere above Danny’s head. As he heard it, he felt the fogginess that had descended upon him begin to clear almost immediately; the shapes above him coalesced from what had once been an image of his son and his father into-
-a shape, with too many arms (legs?) and a head that began from somewhere on its chest; to call it simply monstrous would have been to undersell its alienness. It was unrecognisable even as something humanoid, let alone human.
What was recognisable was the iron shortsword impaling it right through its chest.
After what seemed an eternity, the shape pitched forward and slammed face-first into the floor, unmoving.
“Your son, eh? Hope that comes from the Ma’s side of the family,” his father grunted.
He extended a hand to Danny and pulled him to his feet.
“Thanks…” Danny wheezed.
“This isn’t a dream,” Tony Morrigan said. It was not a question.
“No.”
Tony absorbed this revelation and all of its frankly staggering implications for the timeline.
“Shame,” he said.
“Nice sword.”
“This,” his father said with satisfaction, putting one foot on the corpse and yanking the sword free with not inconsiderable effort, “is Moonblood.”
“Class name,” Danny said approvingly.
His father smiled so broadly at this that if his lips had been sharper the top half of his head would have rolled off. “See,” he said, ”I knew it was.”
It was then that the corpse decided it wasn’t a corpse after all.
Catapulting itself upward, it struck out, sending first Danny and then the shortsword flying from Tony’s grasp, leaving the older man defenceless.
Danny rolled and got to his feet, reminding himself as he did so that no matter how convincing the illusion or strong the enchantment, what he was seeing wasn’t Luke…
…unnecessarily, as it turned out. The figure before him, the thing that had his father by the throat, lifting him clean off the ground and throttling the life from his lungs, was Luke no longer.
“Kill me once, shame on you,” James Morrigan growled, looking into the wide and terrified eyes of his son Tony. “Kill me twice…”
“Daddy…??” Tony choked, his eyes wide and terrified. He was making no moves to fight back, even to struggle, as the air was being cut off from his lungs.
“You caused all of this,” James was saying, even as his grip intensified and black spots peppered Tony’s vision as oblivion beckoned. “Your incompetence…you doomed us all…you miserable, worthless excuse for a son!”
“Akkk-” it was all Tony could manage, the only sound his collapsing windpipe could form as the life was squeezed from it. He was about to die, and the last thing he would see was his father’s angry face. Just as he’d always known it would be.
Moonblood’s blade erupted from James’ throat.
Tony was released. The blade was retracted. James turned, and even as he did those features began to ripple again, to change as he searched for a new form with which to probe the mind of his attacker, find a weakness, exploit it-
Not this time.
With a roar that shook the cottage, Danny Morrigan swung the sword and cleaved the head of the monster before him clean off its shoulders.
The head fell one way, the body another. Neither man moved for a moment, awaiting another resurrection, until both pieces of the thing began to steam. Moments later, they had dissolved into the ether, leaving behind only a foul-smelling gunk.
With perfect timing, a plate that had until that point been teetering on the brink of one of the cottage’s sideboards chose that moment to launch itself into oblivion, in so doing completing the total and utter destruction of every piece of furnishings inside the small dwelling, leaving only Tony and Danny Morrigan sitting amidst the wreckage.
For a while, they simply sat. Danny had endured many awkward silences with his father over the three years since he had reappeared back into his life. This was somehow different; for one, they were both quite simply fucked from the craziness that had just ensued with the shape-shifting monstrosity and trying to reassemble their thoughts…but that wasn’t all of it. There was something else. Or maybe, on Danny’s part, it was for the first time in thirteen years a lack of something else.
“You know…” Tony was the first to speak, although with the red ring around his throat still glowing fiercely it was scarcely more than a fi
erce whisper he could manage, “it’s not easy having kids. You doubt yourself. You have bad days, and if, from time to time, the reason you tell yourself that the only reason you’re not up and leaving for something easier is because of some sense of duty…well, that’s not cowardice. That’s having balls enough to see a responsibility through even in your long dark nights. Then before you know it, you’re through it, and you realise you were just over-thinking it.”
“And what if I’m not?” Danny said. “Over-thinking it. What if I’m not?”
“D’you love her?”
“How do I know?”
“Does she make you happy?”
Danny blinked. It was such a juvenile question. Love couldn’t be defined that simply, could it? Was that how two-dimensional love was? Wasn’t it more of a question of having a deeper, more primal, spiritual-
“OW! What the fuck!” Danny said indignantly, because his father had just reached across and clouted him very rigidly across the back of his head.
“It’s not a fuckin’ quadratic equation son! You’re thinking again aren’t ye?”
“Of course I’m-”
“Jesus. You must have gone to university or something, am I right? Too fuckin clever for your own good. Stop thinking about it, just answer. Does she. Make you. Happy?”
“Yes.”
“Now. Again, no thinking or I’ll clout ye again. Does making her happy make you happy?”
“Yes,” the answer was out almost before he’d realised he’d even spoken. The suddenness of it amazed him.
“Then I’d say one, you love her, and two, for the love of fuck stop over-thinking it.”
“How do I stop over-thinking it?”
“How about this,” Tony grunted, trying to stop from grinning and not quite succeeding. “If you find yourself thinking about over-thinking it, you’re over-thinking it. Take a kick in the balls and see me in the morning.”
Danny couldn’t help but laugh at that. “I just…” he started, and then stopped. “I just…when you walked out on me, and on my Ma, you didn’t seem unhappy. And I always thought, is that how it happens? Do you not even realise and then one day you just up and walk away-”
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