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THE NSLARRY MANIFESTO
No, it's not One Direction.
My favorite ship in the whole world is the Negative Spirit and Larry from Doom Patrol TV, and here's why. This is still a major WIP so dfgtjnromfen sorry to anyone reading it before I finish it and publish the update.
The Background
Larry Trainor
Larry Trainor was born in the late 1920s. He always knew there was something different about him, and so did everyone else—there were whispers all around about how Larry liked boys, how he was going to ruin his parents’ reputation at the church. He married Sheryl Trainor and had two children with her, joining the air force and becoming a test pilot for their missions. Sometime in the 1960s, he met John Bowers, a mechanic who he would later fall in love with.
Before his mission on the X-15 that would take him into the Earth’s atmosphere, John had asked him to make a choice—him or the lie he’d been living. Larry blew up at him, and left for the skies. Every time Larry went up in an airplane, he was running from himself, trying to escape the suffocation of the ground below. Every time he landed back on the surface his heart would fragment even further. He loved John and John loved him but ultimately he was always too afraid.
The day of the X-15 flight, Larry’s mission was successful. He left the atmosphere… and immediately merged with an energy rift that had appeared there, which sucked an alien life form known as the Negative Spirit out of their dimension and into Larry’s body, where the Spirit would live for the next sixty years. He passed out, the plane fell back to Earth onto a field and exploded—but Larry walked out, alive, his body burned to something unrecognizable.
The Negative Spirit
The Negative Spirit is an alien from a dimension known in the comics as the Negative Space, or, in the show, the Negative Nebula. Not much is known about its history, other than the fact that it missed home deeply and never wanted to be inside of Larry either. The Negative Spirit, or TNS as I will refer to it in this document, has the ability to fly, possess electrical things, make portals between dimensions, electrocute people, and of course, to sustain the life of its host indefinitely. It can leave his body, but (for the first season) when it does, he passes out. With TNS inside of him, Larry is immortal and doesn’t need to eat or drink. The presence of TNS makes Larry lethally radioactive, so he wears special bandages over his body all the time to contain the radiation—a radiation that would’ve been possible to contain without bandages if he bonded enough with the Negative Spirit possessing him, as we see later in Space Patrol.
The Negative Spirit’s relationship with Larry is difficult at best, at least initially. It is not entirely antagonistic, as we see in 1996 (Portal Patrol), but they both resent one another for ruining each other’s lives. Larry’s life had been ruined by his own actions long ago, but he was never able to acknowledge that, placing the blame on TNS, who Did Not Ask for any of this really.
TNS is merged with Larry entirely, so it can see his memories, past, and thoughts. There is nothing he can hide from it. Larry is incredibly depressed and repressed and all of the “-pressed”s, so being forced to experience his mind at all times is deeply torturous to TNS, especially since Negative Spirits (also their kind’s name) are implied to be more sensitive to emotion (Paw Patrol, when Niles speaks to Larry in the bus).
The ANT Farm Era
After being taken in to heal from his wounds, Larry is forcibly transferred to a prison for metahumans called the ANT Farm, run by a secret faction of the government intended to “contain and eradicate oddities” called the Bureau of Normalcy. He does not know at this point that he had merged with TNS.
One of the agents, Charles Forsythe, begins to torture Larry with electricity if he talks back or does not comply. They do a series of tests on his durability—with TNS he can survive deep cold and oven heat, he can take intense amounts of pain, he is immortal. He is also again lethally radioactive, so either he or the agents are in safety suits whenever they interact. Forsythe taunts him for his sexuality and for not being “normal” even before the accident. They want to use his radioactivity as a weapon.
One day after a particularly bad day of torture, TNS leaves Larry’s body for the first time and kills the agents torturing Larry. This shifts Forsythe’s focus from torturing Larry onto torturing the Negative Spirit, and Larry is fine with this. “If they’re torturing it they’re not torturing me.” When TNS refuses to surface, Forsythe nearly shoots Larry, and when TNS surfaces, he immediately begins playing loud sound on a torturous frequency that would become near-lethal to TNS. Just before it kills TNS, Forsythe shuts off the sound. Larry goes back to his cell.
Once back in his cell, Larry meets Flex Mentallo, his neighbor. Flex has the ability to do magical things by flexing his muscles, and he opens the wall between his cell and Larry’s cell so they can discuss an escape plan. When Larry refuses to try to escape, maybe even believing he deserves the torture, TNS leaves his body and asks Flex if he can take it home. He says yes, but TNS says Larry has to leave with them too. Before they can start their plan, Forsythe goes to Flex’s cell and says he’ll burn Flex’s wife alive if he tries to escape, thus ending all hope of escape for NSLarry…
until years later, when:
Pre-canon Doom Manor Era
Niles, secretly working with the Bureau, comes to transfer Larry to his home in Cloverton, Ohio, where he lives with famous actress Rita Farr, also an immortal metahuman. They bond, and Rita’s movies make Larry feel less alone as a gay man. Niles gives Larry special bandages to contain his radiation, goggles, and an outfit to wear, so he doesn’t have to wear a giant safety suit all the time. When he comes out, he looks like the Invisible Man.
For many years he is at war with the Spirit within him. In 1996, the Negative Spirit of that time gets a visit from a dying future Larry. Though their relationship has only been torturous and resentful at this point, TNS possesses 1996!Larry's body and greets future Larry fondly by helping bandage him up and stop his bleeding. It holds Larry by the shoulders…
…and comforts him. While it is unable to provide the help that Future!Larry needs, it states “You are stronger than my Larry, but… still so much fear.”