Lian Harper has an imaginary friend. Roy thinks her new friend is imaginary at least. Dani is very much not imaginary as he soon finds out.
Okay, so I don't know much at all about Roy & Lian, so I did some very fast searching to try and get an idea about them for this. Sorry if Roy is out of character!
Have some spooky very slightly eldritch Dani/Elle being a very polite unwanted house guest/imaginary friend:
When Roy had first noticed Lian idly chatting with thin air beside her, he hadn’t thought much of it.
She’d been playing with the latest batch of stuff animals Jason had brought with him last he’d visited, joyfully arranging her plushy hoard just how she wanted them in her overly full room - they were going to have to do another toy purge soon, it was starting to get hard picking a path through to the bed again - and happily talking as she did. It wasn’t anything exactly uncommon. She liked to introduce new plushies to the older ones, make sure everyone knew each other’s names and got along, the way that little kids did. He noticed she seemed to be holding each plush out as if showing it to someone beside her, which was a little odd, but still nothing of concern.
It wasn’t until the tea party - knees bent up to his ears as he curled over the tiny, brightly colored table Kori had gotten her a couple months back - that he was formally introduced to her imaginary friend and put some pieces together.
“Do you want some tea, Dani?” Lian asked, holding out the bright red child-sized tea pot to the one seat at the table that was not occupied by one of his daughter’s favorite plushies or Roy. He watched as she paused, head tilted to listen carefully, before giving a bright smile and pouring a healthy amount of imaginary tea into the cup in front of the seat.
“Well, I don’t think I’ve met Dani yet.” He said, offering out the tiny cup she’d put down in front of him for his own healthy pour of non-existent tea. “Is she a new friend?”
Lian smiled brightly, gap tooth smile bright as she launched into telling him all about her new friend Dani - with an I, Danny with a Y is her big brother! - who fell out of a hole in space right into Lian’s room and who was a ghost princess with superpowers who beat up evil ghosts with her big brother. There are surprisingly few elements from any of the shows she watches or books he’s read to her, and he’s delighted by how vivid an imagination she has in her creation.
It’s easy to roll with imaginary friend Dani. Lian’s friend Marcus had an imaginary friend last year and Roy had learned enough from Marcus’ mother’s exhausted research dive into the topic over play dates to know that Lian making a friend of her own was perfectly healthy. She had plenty of friends, was doing well in school, no bullies or isolation, just a bright creative streak and a boundless enthusiasm for make believe. In a few months to a year Dani the ghost warrior princess from space - green space! There aren’t any floors and everyone flies and there are floating islands and - would be set aside in favor of other forms of entertainment. Just a fond memory for him to recount when she was a little older.
But then things got…strange.
Things in Lian’s room shifted just out of place where they usually were. Then around the house - common areas only though, never his room. Small lost objects appearing on the kitchen counter where they hadn’t been before. A blanket that had been folded on the back of the armchair draped over him when he woke up after falling asleep on the couch. Lian munching on little healthy snacks - a peeled orange, her favorite rice crackers, carrot slices - that no one had made her and that she couldn’t have possible gotten herself. Glow in the dark stars that he had not bought pressed onto her ceiling in the shape of accurate constellations.
That last one had not been the last straw, exactly, but it had been noticed about the same time all the rest of the very concerning little things had been. Talking with Lian about them all only had her explaining that Dani was doing it.
“She said wants to help.” Lian explained, little legs kicking as she focused on her drawing. “She’s stuck here til her brother comes and gets her. She said she wanted to be a good guest while she crashes with us.”
There’s something about that specific phrasing coming from his five year old daughter - crashes with us, not a term Lian’s used before and that he’s pretty sure no one else has ever had reason to use in front of her - that makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Lian doesn’t notice his apprehension, little tongue poking out in concentration as she adds more green to the paper. He doesn’t much care for the strange shape of the spectral figure his daughter depicts, hovering over her squiggly rendition of herself in her bed, the ghost creature being shown holding a green star up to a field of others in what Roy realizes is meant to show Lian’s bedroom ceiling.
Lian pauses suddenly in her drawing, head coming up and tilting as if listening, eyes drifting to look at a point close to the ceiling. “Oh.” Lian says, turning to look back at him with a frown. “Dani says there are bad people coming.” Another glance towards the spot near the ceiling. “She says she’s gonna make em go away if that’s okay with you.”
His stomach cramps with anxiety at the declaration just as he catches a dark figure shifting on the roof of the neighbor’s house, a flash of metal in the yellow glow of the street lights. There’s something cold on his shoulder suddenly, almost feeling like a small hand, the vague impression of something not altogether human at the corner of his vision.
Fuck it. He decides. If Lian’s maybe-not-so-imaginary friend wanted to deal with the people that he was just now aware of surrounding his home and putting his daughter in danger, then he wasn’t going to stop her.
Roy barely has the word yes out of his mouth as he darts up to grab Lian and run her to safety before all the lights in the house - hell, the neighborhood - begin to flicker and he catches a flash of bright, glowing green eyes turning towards the people outside. Distantly he heard a cut off scream and wet crunch and pressed Lian’s face to his chest as he ran for the safe room.
He was going to have to call the League about this one.
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