Dash Parr is fast. He wants to be fast all the time, but he's forced to live in a world that's slow.

Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. Fastslowfastslowfastslowfastslow–

Dash's brain is wired differently than anyone else's. His speed isn't limited to just his running. If he wanted to, he could solve several dozen math problems in under a minute, given that he had a writing utensil that could handle the friction. Math was easy, once he got the hang of it, but it took so long for him to get the hang of it, and it was because the explanation was always slow.

To him, it felt like he was going a hundred miles an hour while he was doing whatever he was doing, while everyone else was puttering along at fifteen. It didn't matter what the task was.

For example: his teacher teaching.

Mrs. Mahoney teaching. Mrs. Mahoney teaching math. Fractions and decimals and long division and everything else.

Long division was right. It was taking ages for her to get to the point.

While the teacher explained it in class, Dash sat in his desk chair, listening to the explanation with strained attention.

Mrs. Mahoney's chalk hit the board. "First, you put the dividend under this little symbol here…"

And then what?

"And the divisor goes… pardon me, children." A coughing fit.

And then what?!

"The divisor goes, um, here. And then we can begin dividing."

Then let's start dividing, already!

"And then, um… you just follow me, follow what I'm doing here. Like so. It's really an easy method once you get the hang of it, so don't be discouraged if you don't get the hang of it right away–"

Ugh.

Lectures in school made Dash's skin crawl. Not in the creepy, scary movie way. It was like there was a bomb inside him, waiting to explode. His arms and legs itched and twitched with electricity, waiting for the moment he could sprint.

Plus, Mrs. Mahoney was a painfully slow talker at the best of times. She was long-winded, even by human standards.

Human. Dash stared at a passing bird flying by the window. He was a human, but he also wasn't. He was a super. Supers were people, but were they human?

Dash's eyes glazed over as the bird flew out of sight. He knew his parents came from a laboratory, grown from human DNA that some scientists had messed with and made adult people out of. But Dash was born as a baby, like a human.

Half and half? Part super, part human? One foot in both worlds. Violet, Jack-Jack and him.

"Mister Parr!"

Dash's head darted up, and his thoughts scattered entirely. "Huh?"

Mrs. Mahoney deftly gestured towards him with her head, her attention focused on his hands. Dash glanced down and noticed that his finger was tapping on the table to a noisy rhythm, completely independent of his command.

It was a very, very fast rhythm. A decidedly unhumanly fast rhythm.

He immediately stopped the tapping. "Oh."

Some kid snickered behind Dash, and his head whipped back to glare.

It was just Douglas. Douglas liked to push Dash's buttons, and it was weird because he was never really mean about it. It was like how Dad and Uncle Lucius poked fun at each other.

Still, Dash glared at him anyway. Cause he felt like it.

Class continued as normal, and the rest of the school day did, as well. For Dash, feeling like his limbs were on the verge of imploding for eight hours a day was normal.

After school was when he got to stretch his legs.

Since Syndrome and the Screenslaver, Dash had been able to guilt his parents into letting him walk - rather, run- home from school (Violet, however, wasn't so lucky). He usually did a few laps around the park before he returned to the house, and then ran laps around that. It was never a straight shot from one place to the other.

His powers had developed so that he was practically invisible while he was at full speed, so it was a non-issue in terms of being caught. It was just as well, cause if he never got to run, he thought he might go crazy. One hundred percent nuts. And then he'd be caught for sure.

Sure, he had his track meets, but that was for fun. This was something he needed. He thought track would let him blow off steam, that it would be a good outlet, and it was in some ways, but it never offered him enough.

Running, running without restrictions... it made him feel centered. It let his thoughts stay in order, instead of darting around from place to place to place, like they did when he was still. He could focus on things.

Such as how to mess with his sister the next time that Tony was over at their house. Or his plans for what order he would do his homework in. Or about his ideas for new Jonny Quest episodes. Important things like that.

Home was better than school. It was definitely better than school.

Dash could zip from room to room freely, as long as no guests were visiting, and he and his siblings interacted using their powers. They never said it out loud, but it was fun using their super abilities around each other, even if Mom had banned the game where one of them used Jack-Jack as a missile and the other had to dodge/block lazer beams.

That game had been great while while it lasted. Nobody ever even got hurt or anything. Dash guessed it wasn't good for Jack-Jack, though. Maybe the toddler shouldn't learn that friendly fire was fun, cause then he would think it was fun all the time.

And then, the next morning, it was back to school. Every day. Every single day.

Dash sat in a desk and listened to Mrs. Mahoney talk about long division and other math things and Abraham Lincoln and the food chain and prefixes and suffixes and the water cycle and ugh.

He could get through it. He was strong. He was strong, he reminded himself, as he tried to restrain his muscles from thumping his pencil on the surface of his desk.

Cause if he started fidgeting, he'd reveal himself. It had almost happened about a hundred million times before. Fidgeting wasn't something he could do.

So, every day, he took his Ritalin and he saved all of his energy for his long runs and he eventually came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter whether he was totally human.

It didn't matter cause he had Violet and Jack-Jack in the same boat as him. They understood him, even if the school didn't try to understand, and even if their parents tried their hardest but never really would understand, no matter how much they loved him.

He was a person, and that's what mattered. No matter what his DNA said. He could be completely alien and still be a person. That's how it worked.

He already had his superhero name picked out. The Dash. It sounded so incredibly awesome, he coudn't believe that he had come up with it himself. He adored it.

And one day, he'd get to use that name. One day, he could run and run and run as fast as he could, not a single person telling him to slow down, free from the confines of academic brick walls.

Until then, he stared out the window, watching birds and trying his best to listen.

Note: I wanted to try a slightly experimental writing style for this drabble. It's meant to be really choppy and disjointed, so that it mimics Dash's thought process, you know? I just don't know how much it actually worked in terms of readability. Oh well. If it works, it works, if it didn't, it didn't! I'm just happy that, lately, I've got new ideas to practice with after so long of not having any inspiration at all.

Side note: The discussion of whether supers are human or not is in NO WAY related to my headcanon that Dash has ADHD. It's a worldbuilding thing that I definitely want to explore in future fanfics, whether they're about neurodivergent supers or not. I just didn't want anyone thinking I was implying that people with ADHD are like aliens or something! I'm autistic myself, so I know I wouldn't want anyone implying that about me, and I only saw that my writing could have possibly been interpreted this way until JUST before I was ready to publish it.