Page 31 of Lovesick Titan

It was all his fault. Mal was right about everything. Hisreflectionwas right. He was a monster, the same as Thanatos. Andre, all the others, they just told Danny what he wanted to hear because they didn’t want to believe he could be as cruel as the villain they’d once faced. But even when Danny made his plan against Mal, he’d thought of Thanatos, how he’d hurt Danny; how Danny wanted to hurt someone else the same way.

Now, he’d tried to make it right, but he couldn’t. Some things couldn’t be fixed after they were broken. He couldn’t save his mother. He couldn’t save Rick. He couldn’t hold back from taking a life he could have spared. He couldn’t even show kindness to someone who loved him.

“Hey, Danny, back from the station already?” Joey asked when Danny entered the house, studying at the table in the living room.

Danny smiled—and it should have been the hardest smile he’d ever mustered, but he was so numb, he didn’t even feel the strain. “Yeah. We’re gonna regroup tomorrow. Lots for me to think about. I’ll just be up in my room, okay? Call me down for dinner later?”

“Sure.” Joey nodded but scrunched his nose as he looked at Danny. “Do you need anything? Maybe I can help brainstorm about Hades.”

“Thanks, Joey. I appreciate it, but…maybe tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay…”

When Danny got up the stairs, he locked his door, took off his jacket, then his clothes down to his underwear, and crawled under the covers. He set his phone on the nightstand, and after a few minutes, it blinked at him.

Checking the message, he saw that it was from Andre.

Hey, man. How’d it go?

Danny didn’t realize half an hour passed while he stared at his phone until it buzzed again.

I’m gonna take your silence for either very bad news or very good. And if it’s the latter, I definitely don’t need details.

He would have appreciated Andre’s try for humor any other day. Any other time. Or maybe he wouldn’t have. Lately, there wasn’t ‘any other’ anything, there was just this. This emptiness that was sometimes anger, and sometimes sadness, and always like he was hollowed out from the inside because something was wrong with him. Something was missing that should have been there, some fundamental part of being human that he used to have, used to understand, but it was gone now and he didn’t know how to get it back.

He’d thought hurting someone would help. What more proof did he need to know he was broken? Later, as he started to fall for Mal, he’d thought maybe his nemesis could help him fit the pieces back together. Danny couldn’t even blame Ludgate for how everything ended. He’d had his chance with Mal, and he’d ruined it all on his own.

His phone buzzed again.

Danny?

A few more minutes passed before it buzzed one more time.

Let me know if you need anything, okay?

Setting his phone back on the nightstand, Danny played over in his head again and again how things had gone at Mal’s apartment, tried to think if there was anything different he could have said, but all the practice he and Andre had gone through hadn’t prepared him for Mal already knowing the awful truth. There was no way to defend himself because there was nothing to defend.

He’d realized helovedMal just in time to lose him.

Danny stared at the mirrors in his room for hours. At his cell phone on the nightstand. At his bottle of pills next to that. Whatbullshit. Howcould they work when he kept doing things worth feeling terrible about? It would be easier to take them all…

“Dinner, Danny! You in there?” came a knock at the door.

Somehow the whole day had gone by. Danny didn’t want to move, but he knew if he tried to hide, his family would just try harder to help him. And he loved them for that, but he didn’t want that tonight. He didn’t deserve any help.

So he called out, “Just finishing something, Dad! I’ll be right there!”

He dressed in comfortable clothes, pulled on a smile, and passed the rest of the evening as if he wasn’t empty and screaming inside. They even watched a movie after dinner, something Danny couldn’t recall the name of afterward, though he’d laughed along whenever John and Joey did.

When it ended, he headed up to bed early, told them he had to get back to work thinking up ways to bring in Ludgate and disrupt his abilities. It was easy to lie when he could use Andre’s trick with fogging the mirrors as an excuse.

“Yeah, he’s testing something and was gonna call me later. We just need to work out a few kinks. I’ll probably head to the precinct again tomorrow.”

“Okay, Danny. Have a good night.”

“Night, Dad. Joey.”

He kept his clothes on this time when he crawled into bed, wanting to be warmer. His mind couldn’t stop replaying how easily Mal had blasted him. How much he’d deserved that too. It made him shiver to remember and burrow under his covers all the more deeply.

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