Death Is Not The Enemy

by notquitedeadyet (TeamOfEight)

Summary:

Was there really a need to go back?, Danny asked himself, staring at this new, foreign universe. Here, with no Guys In White or crazed parents chasing him with ecto-guns, and no rampaging ghosts to interrupt his every day or night, maybe he could finally follow the dream he'd given up on when he died, when the stars he'd always loved were once and for all labelled unreachable. Maybe, finally, he could be himself, without all the expectations and fears that came with the name.

Also, the fact that superheroes were a thing on this earth surely did not discourage his decision.

Or: Danny gets summoned into a new universe, makes some friends, becomes part of the most powerful vigilante clan ever, punches a bunch of satanists, finds the meaning of family and gets a chance at dreaming big. Definitely not in that order

Notes:

heyo, this is my first attempt at a fic in both these fandoms, we'll see how it goes.
before we start id like to state some things: most characters of the DP universe wont be nice people, because while i have nothing against them, i needed danny to have no reason to go back home.
also, batman canon is my bitch and i do what i want. fuck dc all my homies hate dc.
thank you for your time

Chapter 1: Portals, Satanists And A Passed Out Vigilante Partner

Danny wasn't having the best morning. Or day. Or week, really. Anyways.

First, he woke up late, still sore after an evening spent avoiding his parents’ ecto guns, which caused him to arrive late at school, where he had to take a test he'd completely forgotten about. But what really took the cake was Skulker’s big, annoying green ass exploding a bunch of stuff in the middle of town. 

Danny stood in the middle of the street, school backpack still on his shoulders, and considered knocking himself out with a well placed hit of his head against a lamppost. Cursing, he forewent the sweet, sweet oblivion of unconsciousness and ducked behind an alleyway, quickly stashing his bag somewhere it wouldn't be stolen and/or found by the ghost rats (they were green, big as house cats and very, very much a problem).

In a flash of green light he donned his ghostly appearance, immediately speeding over to where a column of thick smoke was billowing to the sky. There, Skulker could be seen in all his pompous, mohawked greatness wreaking havoc through the streets of Amity. 

“Hey, Ugly!” Phantom yelled, and wow, that was a new low for him, but he really could not muster the strength to come up with a better insult. Skulker barely spared him a glance and went back to shooting green blasts and causing general mayhem. Danny paused, perplexed by the unusual behavior. Not the property destruction, no, that was perfectly normal. What Danny found slightly unsettling was the absence of loud gloating and monologuing that characterized the ghost and, now that he thought about it, practically all his enemies. Ghosts really loved the sound of their own voices, huh? 

But back to the point. Skulker was quiet, looking almost bothered, and the ghost was known to be loud and boisterous, his every word self aggrandizing and sneering. Now, instead, he seemed confused, almost frantic in his destruction. 

"Hey, what's the matter with you today?" Danny called out again, this time coming to float a couple meters in front of the ghost.  "Something strange is happening,” Skulker said, pausing his tirade momentarily. “And it is not going to be pleasant.” Danny frowned, off put by the words, but decided to chalk it up to simple undead weirdness. But the matter seemed to distract Skulker from his mission of destruction, so Danny decided to indulge in it, hoping the ghost would get tired at one point and go back to whatever green hole he’d crawled out of.

“What the hell are you talking about?” At that, Skulker scoffed. “Do you not feel it, Phantom?” Danny just shrugged, provoking the other to scoff again, then immediately send a glowing green ball towards him. He dodged it, and Skulker didn't follow up with another attempt, so Danny let it slide.  “Of course you dont.” He continued, shaking his head, his green flame mohawk moving funnily on his head. “You are but a child, not yet attuned with the very fiber of existence. You do not feel how it twists and reshapes itself around you. You do not see how it is about to tear before our very eyes.” O-okayy, this one is either completely gone in the head or we have bigger problems, Danny thought, and I'm tired of bigger problems.

But now Skulker had seemed satisfied with his out of character speech, content to turn back to destroying the street, so Danny cast aside his worrying for whatever… that was and started shooting green blasts from his hands. As he was about to finally subdue the other ghost with a well placed hit to the gut, his senses flared up and he flew up a couple meters to dodge a blast coming from behind him. By doing that he had to let go of Skulker, who immediately went back to causing damage.  There, standing in the middle of the turned upside down road, stood two figures in matching lab suits, each of them holding an ecto cannon each. 

Great. Dear Mom and Dad were here, and Danny was on the verge of a very teary breakdown for the fourth time today. And it wasn't even three pm. The sight of the lab suits alone made Danny flinch, images of a stark, white lab room ceiling coming to his mind, the smell of disinfectant and ectoblood overpowering his senses and the sound of his own screams ringing in his ears as if he was still strapped to that medical table. 

He gasped for a breath he didn't need, forcing himself to come back to reality, and for the first time felt thankful that he didn't need to actually breathe, and how that made panic attacks way easier to delay. Sure, his mind was still in a frenzied state of panic, but at least on a purely physical level he was fine (as fine as you can be when you're dead, naturally).

"That is enough!" Boomed Jack's voice "Your nefarious plans have been foiled, Phantom!"  What plans???And you sound like a bad movie villain, you can’t not realize that!! he wanted to shout back, but was interrupted by Maddie.  "Your allegiance failed, ghosts, and we are here to stop your inane destruction!" 

"Allegiance???" Danny asked, both tired and pissed at the accusation "I was about to kick his green ass back to the zone before you interrupted me and helped him free himself!" 

"We will not be fooled by your words, scum!" Jack yelled back, the words grating on Danny’s nerves. He hated how the two hunters sounded, like they thought their obstinate mission a crusade against evil powers instead of just the two of them shooting at the teenager doing most of their work. By now, the two had resumed shooting at him with their ecto cannons, effectively contributing to the damage to the surroundings. 

Tired of it all, he decided that the two of them could deal with Skulker well enough on their own, but as he was about to turn and hightail out of there, the other ghost stopped once again. "It's starting!" He said gravely, and this time, Danny could feel it too.  The air felt charged and something in his very core told him to run, as fast as he could, and hide away until the next day had come and gone again. Horrified, he watched as a crack appeared in the air, and the four of them stared as it widened, revealing a massive portal floating in the sky. It was a great, purple thing, continuously swirling like the eye of a hurricane. More than a portal, it resembled the gaping maws of a hungry, deadly creature, widening more and more by the second, ready to swallow him whole. 

And so it did, because a strong current of air started pulling Danny into the portal, ignoring everyone else. “No no no!” He yelled, trying to fly in the other direction, futilely hoping to escape whatever he would find on the other side. But the pull was too strong, overpowering his every attempt.  Soon, he was clinging to the broken edges of the fracture, helplessly staring at his parents, who were staring at him, at the portal, in fascination, looking like they were seconds from busting out a recording device to document the event to analyze later. Even Skulker looked more sympathetic, his eyes holding Danny’s without sneer for the first time. He nodded at Danny, then turned and disappeared into the smoke. 

The pull was getting stronger and stronger by the second, and soon his grip gave, and all he could see was purple, swirling and unending.

Then, he was falling.

_._._._._._._._._._._

Tim was having a shit evening. Or day. Or week, really. Anyways.

First, he woke up, and that was never nice. Then, he found out that his previously believed infinite supply of coffee was almost depleted, so he had to stick to just one cup instead of his usual three. Now, Tim was not your usual seventeen year old. He didn't go to school, and right now he was extremely happy he’d dropped out the year before.  But what he did have, regretfully, was a whole business to direct. Don’t get him wrong, Tim loved being the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, it wasn't like Bruce had forced the title upon him, and Tim could still do his work from home, comfortable in his room, but what he dreaded in that moment was the non-delayable meeting he had with Mr. and Mrs. Anders, CEO and manager in chief of Anders Inc.  The two were, sadly for Tim who had to deal with them far too much, two of Wayne Enterprises’ biggest business partners. Notably and, even more sadly for Tim, the two were probably some of the most pretentious and stupid people he had ever had the displeasure to meet. 

In his year and couple of months as youngest CEO of a fortune 500 company ever, Tim had met plenty of people who scoffed at his age and believed his position to be achieved through nepotism instead of merit, but none of them quite achieved the sheer level of patronizing and attitude of superiority that Mr. and Mrs. Anders showed. And he had to spend several hours in an enclosed space with them that very afternoon, preferably without cursing them out and or bitch slapping one of them for asking about his high school diploma. (And it was a real concern, seeing they had asked a good three times before).

So, Tim went through the day, managing to do that without crying even a little, although he’d gotten really close to it when an employee spilled water on his suit as he approached the conference room where Mr. and Mrs. Annoying were waiting for him, or when the two commented about his lateness and how this ‘childish behavior’ would impact the company.

Then, he’d gotten home, ate with his family (which was a surprisingly pleasant affair, death threats from the youngest included (Tim believed by now that that simply was how Damian showed affection)), and got ready for patrol. Tim loved being Red Robin. He had loved Robin too, but there had always been the weight of a legacy before him that Tim had never managed to free himself of. But Red Robin was his in a completely liberating way. So he stepped into the suit and out on the roofs of Gotham. That night saw him partnered with Nightwing, taking the patrol route that brought them near Crime Alley. Not in the alley itself, no, because that was Red Hood’s territory, and while their tentative peace still stood, they knew better than to step in the Alley if not under extreme causes.

And now, the two of them sat in a dark warehouse, tied to a post. (Tim didn't particularly care for explaining how they were ambushed by a dozen men in black robes, or how they'd had the situation perfectly under control until one of the goons pulled out a military grade stun grenade that they definitely shouldn’t have had, making them easy targets for a well placed hit on the back of the head.) 

As he came back to consciousness, there were three things he took stock of: first of all, Dick was still very much out, so Tim could count him out for help, second, there was what Tim was rather sure was a huge pentagram drawn in suspicious red paint right in the middle of the room (everything was still a bit blurry, so he settled for a eighty-two percentage of being right), and last but definitely not least, the robed jackasses that attacked them were back, and were surrounding said pentagram, chanting ominously in a language Tim couldn’t recognize. Frantically, Tim nudged Nightwing, hoping for him to wake up, but the older didn’t ruse. He’s supposed to be the hard headed one! Tim fumed silently. What use is it if he only ever applies it to annoy me into sleeping, and then gets permanently knocked out by a satanist! 

The chanting got louder, and Tim didn't know what it was, but there was something wrong (other than the literal satanic ritual), and Tim could feel it in his bones. “Hey, assholes! Why don't you free me and see if the chanting helps against a broken bone!"” He yelled towards the hooded figures, because Tim had never been one of great improvisation skills. The man right in front of him, who was standing on the opposite side of the pentagram, glared at him, but seeing as everything was still so goddamn fuzzy, Tim did not particularly notice it. What he did notice was the gold lining of his tunic that no other cultist/satanist/whatever in the room had that marked him as some kind of leader, probably. Tim was not too sure of anything at that moment, because his head was pounding and he was tied to a post in the middle of a summoning but worst of all, he was in severe caffeine deficit. 

Anyways. 

“Silence, boy” Said Head Honcho Satanist, “You are about to witness the coming of something bigger than you.” He paused ominously, and Tim really wished Dick was awake, if only for him to not be alone through that bullshit. “Something bigger than all of us. And if He sees fit, one of your bodies shall be His earthly residence. Then, He shall rage His fire upon the undeserving, and the age of terror shall come!” Great, he was about to be sacrificed as a meatsuit for a cultist’s evil overlord to wear and then destroy everything. Also, couldn’t he have said in a less creepy way? He shivered, choosing to not comment out loud. Then again, he was talking about a satanist, so he guessed he really couldn't expect much.  Tim, in all his probably concussed, tied up glory couldn’t do anything else other than stare, and wish that Nightwing would wake up, as a swirly, purple portal opened a dozen feet over the pentagram on the pavement. Tim steeled himself for whatever was about to come through, but nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to see. 

Through his domino mask’s lenses, Tim stared in disbelief as a teenager (more like a teenager-shaped blur, and Tim was definitely concussed, damn those cultists) tumbled out of the portal. Moreover, it couldn't have been a normal teenager, no. It had to be a glowing, neon green and pure white teenager, and from the miffed and surprised looks on the cultists’ faces, the kid was not who they had been expecting. To Priest Prick Supreme’s credit, the man didn’t let his surprise get in the way of his evil plans of planetary destruction, and he kneeled in front of the teen, who was now getting to his feet and looking around in confusion, muttering a string of curses under his breath. 

“Oh great King, Lord of the Dead, Sire of Shadows, accept our humble gift and lend us your great powers to rain fury on this undeserving world!” The glowing boy’s eyes snapped to the figures on the ground, a look of disbelief on his face. “...What?” said the kid, and Tim didn’t want to sigh in relief before he was out of this shit situation, but every second that passed it looked less and less like earth’s destruction was impending, and more like instead of the supposed Overlord of the Undead, they'd managed to summon some random kid who was just as confused as Tim (he chose to ignore the glowing for the moment).

“One of these mongrels will host your spirit, O Great Terror, if you see them fit, and in exchange for an anchor to this world, we simply ask of you, Ruler of Death and Destroyer of Life, that you rain your hellfire on this undeserving world, and the pariahs of this dimension shall rise in the darkness you shall bring!” The robed man threw his hands to the sky, and then bowed again to the teen, forehead touching the ground. Wow. Thought Tim . What an overdramatic nerd.  At the man’s last words, ghost boy (Tim wasn’t in the best headspace for a clever nickname, so you’ll have to be happy with what you get) seemed to come to a realization, and then become even more pissed off than he had been before, like being summoned without permit hadn’t been rude enough.

“Oh yeah no, you got the wrong guy, sorry.” he shrugged, not sorry at all. “You’re probably looking for Pariah Dark, right? Huge ass sword, poor fashion choices, big fan of destroying everything? Yeah, you called the wrong number.” With every second that passed the hooded figures that formed the circle grew unrested, murmurs of confusion growing in strength. “But that’s impossible!” a voice yelled over the crowd. “We have been preparing for decades! It has been made sure that this ritual would summon they who are crowned King of Ghosts!” 

And really, Tim was never one to call victory before having the cat fully in the bag (is that how it goes? Tim had lost all care)  but it seemed like the stanists’ plan for the apocalypse was hardly a possibility by now, and Tim really wanted to go home and lay down on a soft surface, and possibly pretend none of this ever happened.

“I really don't know what to tell you, my guy. Maybe you wrote some runes wrong. Anyways!” the teen clapped his hands together, gathering the attention of everyone in the room. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say you all are the bad guys,” he waved his hand in the direction of the bruising crowd, then turned to Tim and his still passed out partner, “and you are the good guys so I'm just gonna…” he continues as he steps out of the summoning circle. “How did you do that?? You shouldn’t be able to exit the circle, there’s runes for keeping you inside!” called another voice, (Tim felt like those people had a set number of things they could say like NPCs, because they sounded really repetitive) and the murmurings grew in volume, loud voices overlapping each other and doing a great disfavor to Tim’s headache. 

"We literally just established that your rune work is not on point, dude. Keep up." He rolled his eyes, then proceeded to punch the head priest in the face, knocking him out cold. As the rest of the cultists exploded in yells and started running out of the basement with no care for their fallen leader, Tim could only muster the care for a surprised ‘Huh.’ and a raise of eyebrows. But what baffled Tim the most was how the majority of the robed cultists had run at the first sign of trouble, and it wasn’t even that the boy had used some extremely powerful magic to defeat their leader, he’d just… socked him in the mouth. Cowards.

Eyeing the few people left in the room, who had started pulling out swords from under their robes, because of course, Ghost teen approached Tim’s post and swiftly untied him, before glancing towards Nightwing’s still sleeping form (seriously, how hard had they hit him), then back to Tim and raising an eyebrow. Tim ignored the silent question, choosing to turn to the very armed and very bloodthirsty half dozen satanists in front of them. “Thanks for the help, and for not raining hellfire on earth or whatever.” He aimed at the boy on his side, before charging the nearest sword-wielding death-eater-wannabe, seeing Glowy do the same with the corner of his eye. “No problem!” He yelled back at Tim as he shot… green lasers from his hands, effectively taking out another cultist, all while floating a couple meters off the ground.The next few minutes were a blur as Tim tried to avoid decapitation and other forms of maiming by broadsword, but soon enough, all their opponents were either out cold or writhing on the ground with a number of broken bones. 

“Well,” said Green, looking down at Tim as he was still hovering in the air. “I’d say it's been a pleasure, but being summoned by a bunch of satanists was really not in my evening plans, so. Bye”  He waved awkwardly and the next second he wasn’t there anymore.

“Wha..” Tim turned to see Nightwing, still tied to the pole, staring confusedly in the spot where the boy had been seconds before. He turned to Tim, a thousand questions indubitably going through his mind, but before he could open his mouth, Tim interrupted him. “No. I'm not going to explain anything.” He continued through the other vigilante’s sputtering. “You’re going to have to read my mission report. Also, you’re useless.”

 

Notes:

so basically i decided to post this now even though i wont have a lot of time to write in the next two months seeing as ill be finally graduating, but i still wanted to get you guys opinion on this.
i have most of this fic outlined, so i just have to write this. "just". lol. but i still should be able to update at least once if not more before im finally free of the eternal shackle that is high school, so do not fear.
so please, comment what you think, bc all your thoughts are important to this work and i appreciate them so much!

Chapter 2: Red Riding Hood Shot A Man

Notes:

hey!!! im back benches
i am going to cry so many people liked this and all your comments were so overwhelmingly positive i love yall
now enjoy this trash my gremlin children

Danny didn't know where he was, but it surely didn’t feel like anywhere he’d ever been before. As he flew over the city, weaving through skyscrapers and bigger buildings than he’d ever seen, he glanced below. It wasn’t the smog, or how the clouds created such a thick drape over the streets that barely any light passed through, and neither was she sheer immensity of the place compared to small, quaint Amity, that made Danny feel out of place, no. There was something about the very fabric of reality that felt different from what Danny was used to, like the very air was made out of different components. It was almost like the feeling he got when entering the Ghost Zone: something different on a level so visceral he could feel it in his bones.

Another universe , Danny realized, coming to a standstill midair, so shocked by the simple fact. Danny had already known, at least on a purely theoretical plane, that his wasn’t the only universe. The Ghost Zone was not called the Infinite Realm for no reason, after all, and that it was made so that every universe had its own corner of afterlife. But in the two years he’d been a ghost, Danny had only traveled far enough to reach the corners of his universe's afterlife once, and he hadn’t been in the most present headspace to enjoy all implications the mere fact brought. And now, confronted with the undeniable truth, Danny felt his head explode, filled with the infinite possibilities this all brought to light.

He resumed his flight, admiring the otherworldly beauty this strange, unfamiliar city carried, with its dark skies and tall buildings, their tops nesting in the black clouds. The streets were bright with lights and chaotic with noise so loud Danny could hear it just fine hundreds of feet in the air. It was nothing like Amity and yet the same as it, with its uncontrolled chaos of a city this wide and a familiarity of a people much too used to the inscrutable mechanisms of reality. 

He landed down on the roof of a building and stared back from where he came from. He could feel the portal, the rip in this dimension, swirling and never to be closed up, like an open wound. I have to go back , he thought, but even in his mind the thought sounded weak. Go back to what , another voice asked, and Danny knew already the answer. After all, what was there to go back to? A fractured family, indifferent to one side of him and nightmarishly violent to the other? Very few friends that were not even much of that anymore, drowning in their own pain and blaming him for it? A dream that died with him, and a life that didn't, but unsurprisingly didn’t last much longer.  He was dead, but he still had a life. Then they all started leaving, one by one, empty husks of promises left behind them, and suddenly he was dead, and death was all he had. Danny could only assume that at some point, Death and Life had gotten tired of coexisting in him that way.

He turned his gaze away, and looked around, trying to regain a sense of orientation even in a place so foreign to him. So caught as he was in his thoughts, Danny had not realized how the buildings surrounding him had become gradually smaller and more rundown, the streets quieter and darker. He turned invisible and lowered himself to street level, careful not to be seen by the few people still roaming around. After a few minutes of flying in complete silence, Danny found himself getting bored (he supposed that quiet nights and empty streets were the same even a universe away), so he phased through the walls of the nearest abandoned building, hoping to find something to occupy his mind. What he did find was a small, dusty room with an old piano leaning on a wall in a corner. A bit drafty though , thought Danny, eyeing the broken window. The building next to that one looked like an old storage room containing numerous framed paintings, including what Danny was pretty sure was an original Monet, holy shit , and although the outside of the building looked pretty rundown, the inside was well kept, not a trace of dust in sight. Not to mention the high security door and cameras. He left quickly, hoping the cameras didn’t have thermic sensors set on low temperatures.  

He continued this way, jumping from abandoned building to abandoned building (and there were quite a lot of them, damn) but every single one he stopped in seemed to be too dirty, or filled with rats or, in one case, inhabited (and hadn’t that been awkward. Only for Danny, obviously, because the man recreating the entirety of Titanic with his pet lizards still couldn’t see him). Almost an hour later, Danny stood- well, floated, really- in front of what looked like an old police station. Its first floor was completely burned down, and the side of the building, where once probably sat a fire escape staircase, was stripped down to the brick, some metal rods sticking out of it. Danny floated through the front doors, its metal panels fused and solidified back together making them impossible to open, and right though the ceiling, leaving behind the charred desks and file cabinets of the abandoned bullpen station. 

The second floor was somehow almost perfectly intact, but unlike the first floor, this one was sectioned off in smaller rooms instead of having an open floor plan. Most of the rooms Danny checked were in a state of disarray, papers thrown about on the ground and on the desks, chairs pushed over in what had probably been a haste to escape the burning building. Danny entered the next room over and- Bingo , he thought, scanning over the old but in good condition sofa and mahogany table. At the side of what he supposed was the break room was a mini fridge that, considering the extremely suspicious smell it was emitting, Danny was quite afraid to open. But other than that and a considerable amount of dust layering every surface of the room, the place was practically perfect. Intact furniture and walls, sturdy windows with no cracks in the panels, no grime or dirt and most importantly, no rats scurrying around— Wait. Had he been unconsciously looking for an inhabitable place all this time? He wasn’t staying, so what was the need for that?

But… He really didn’t want to go back. He had to, at some point. Danny had obligations back home in his universe, he couldn't just up and leave like that. But maybe not right now? It wasn’t like he’d never been gone for a couple of days, and almost no one had noticed. Yes… He’d stay here for a while, maybe a week tops. Just to explore this place.  After all, it wasn’t your typical Tuesday you ended in a different reality.  Besides, if the paper he’d found on the street was right and the two spandex-clad figures from before weren’t cosplaying lunatics, this world had superheroes! Real life, honest to god superheroes. Danny couldn’t believe it (Danny could technically be counted in the superhero category, but he had never seen himself as one, instead counting himself as more of a minor inconvenience that took out other, bigger inconveniences). He looked around the room. He had to get to work right now, if he wanted to be able to breathe in this room without sneezing his brains out.

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

“Sorry, sorry. Run that by me again?”

A sigh.

“How many times do I have to read this again, Dick? The report is not going to change.”

“Indulge me, please. I think I got hit on the head way too hard, because you’re saying words and I'm not getting any of them.”

Another sigh, this one longer and more suffering.

“It says: ’And then the flying, glowing boy proceeded to aid me in my fight with the cult with his powers, that seemed to comprehend invisibility and intangibility, other than the already mentioned flying and green hand blasts.’”

A pause.

“Yeah, it’s still not computing, B. Are you sure Tim was still awake when typing this?”

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

Danny huffed as he sat down on the now mostly-free of dust sofa. It had taken him a couple of hours to clean everything up using the borrowed (is it borrowed if the person you’re borrowing it from isn’t aware of you taking it) broom and dusting rugs, and now the sky outside the window was turning from a dark gray to a lighter, dustier but just as bleak tonality of gray. 

He had yet to deal with the smelly fridge, but as he settled into the surprisingly comfortable couch and transformed back into his human clothes he decided that a little sleep couldn’t hurt, so he burrowed further into the washed out-blue cushions and closed his eyes. Danny hadn’t needed more than a couple of hours of sleep a week for the last couple of years, but he still found the feeling to be extremely pleasant. He let out a deep sigh, his body truly relaxing for the first time in a couple of weeks, easily slipping into a dreamless sleep.

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

“I’m gonna go ask Tim what this means.”

“Let your brother sleep, Dick, he’s been through enough today.” 

“You don’t understand, Bruce, I need to know!”

“No, what you need is a soft bed and at least six hours of sleep, because even if you were lucky to not get a concussion, you still need to rest.”

“But Bruce -”

“I will be calling Alfred if you don't.”

“I’m going! I’m going.”

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

As he slowly came back to consciousness, Danny groaned at his stiff neck, yet somehow felt more rested than he had in quite some time. He took a couple of minutes to just lay there, taking in his surroundings. The light coming in from the window lit up the remaining dust in the air, and Danny got lost watching them dance around the room. He had almost forgotten how peaceful life could be. Then an explosion sounded in the distance, followed by the sound of car alarms. Danny sighed and got up, then  immediately freezing. This wasn’t Amity Park. There were no ghosts for him to handle, so the explosion had probably been caused by some criminal in search of chaos, and Danny didn’t deal with those. Danny smiled to himself.

Nevermind. He still had to deal with the foul smelling fridge, and Danny would gladly take a ghost attack over that thing. He’d have to bring this to the nearest dump, but before doing that he’d have to find said dump, and he preferred coming back for the vile thing instead of carrying it around town for who knows how long, so he transformed and, while invisible, headed out of his new temporary home. Luckily for Danny, the place he was staying in (which was apparently called Crime Alley and wow, Danny sure hoped the name was not reflective of the place) was close to a big and very illegal-looking junkyard, But after all, Danny himself was also very illegal under many different aspects, so. To each their own.

So now here Danny was, standing in front of the wretched thing, and cursing every higher power there could be that he didn’t have telekinesis. He took another couple minutes to steel himself, then with a steady stream of swears he leaned down to pick the thing up. But as he wrapped his arms around the fridge, he felt a faint buzzing coming from it. Holy shit, was this thing still working?? He moved it away from the wall, and there it was: the power cord still plugged in, and the on button glowing a bright red, somehow still pumping electricity through the dingy appliance.

Danny debated whether to throw it away or to keep it in case he needed something to refrigerate. He braced himself, stopped breathing (as one does when they don’t actually need to), and pulled at the door, standing as far away from it as he could and- nope. He shut the door immediately, regretting ever opening the thing. There were things a guy was never supposed to see, and after this, Danny was fine never coming within a six feet radius of a donut ever again. Plus, and he couldn't believe he had only remembered now, he had literal ice powers.

Dumping the fridge in the junkyard took little time, and soon enough Danny was back in his ‘apartment’, now newly nightmare-fuel-free. But other than that, Danny was ecstatic to know that there was a functioning power outlet in the building. Sure, he’d have to buy a charger, but Danny was sixteen. His phone was practically an extension of his hand at this point. Plus, if no one had bothered to cut the power in the building, there was a significant chance that they hadn’t cared to cut the water too, and after the last thirty six hours, Danny was in big need of a shower.  The bathroom was situated at the end of the corridor, and it sadly didn’t have any showers, so Danny settled with getting washed in pieces. It took some time for the water to stop running rust-red and it surely wasn’t ideal, but at least he didn’t smell like horror-donut anymore, even sitting in day-old clothes.

“Okay,” He said to exactly no one, patting his pockets and pulling out all their contents. “I’ve got my phone, twenty five dollars, a pen cap and… a limited edition mango jolly rancher.” Well. That wasn’t much to go off of, but Danny would make do. As his time the boy scouts had taught him, the main priority was shelter, then water and food, and after that all other commodities. Just kidding, Danny had never been in the boy scouts, that just seemed the most sensible course of actions to take. Hoping the water from the bathroom wouldn’t kill him at the first sip, that and a safe place to sleep were secured, but he sure as hell didn’t have enough money to last him a week, even if he ate only one meal a day, so he’d have to get a job, and one thing he knew was that no matter where he went, there was always some cheap fast food restaurant looking for desperate teenagers to overwork and underpay. Danny could totally hold a job for less than ten days without having a breakdown.

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

Danny could not hold a job for even three days without having a breakdown. He hadn’t expected everything to go perfect, he knew that being a server, especially in a part of town this bad would not be pleasant, but it wasn’t even the end of his second day working at possibly the seediest McDonald’s ripoff (McDonald’s apparently didn’t exist in this world, instead Danny found himself in something called the Big Belly Burger) he could have found, and he had already been yelled at twice, not to mention the gun that was now pointed at his head. 

Danny bravely held the tears in. And it wasn’t even like the gun could hurt him, because he was already dead, thank you very much, but it was the principle of things, you know? The vibes radiating off the armed man were just horrendous, and forget the smell. Couldn’t he at least have taken the decency to use deodorant before deciding to rob the sixteen year old behind the counter? God, it was like none of these people had any respect. 

“Put all the money in the bag now, kid, and don’t try to pull anything or your head blows off, understood?” The masked man said, waving the gun in front of Danny like he couldn’t see it from where it was two inches away from his eyes.

“Yes, yes, ok just give me the time to open the register, ok?” Danny asked, trying to keep the man’s attention on him. Unfortunately, the register was right next to the door, and the gunman was blocking the exit, trapping the family of three that had been dining there before his arrival inside the restaurant, and Danny didn’t want anyone to get hurt.  As he was reaching to pull out the money, the kid gasped, and both Danny’s and the man’s head snapped in her direction. Then, a bang resonated through the air, followed closely by the shattering of glass and a pained scream. The man’s gun cluttered to the ground as he held his bleeding hand. Danny took advantage of the man’s distraction and punched him in the face as hard as he could, knocking him out instantly. 

Cradling his hand to his chest (because punching without any type of protection when you have puny human hands hurts) he turned to the door. Behind the cracked glass stood a man, who was holstering his gun. After that, he opened the door and stepped inside. Danny didn’t know whether to thank the man or run in the other direction, because on one side he had just helped him and three innocents out of a rather sticky situation, while on the other the man struck quite an imposing figure. Besides, there was just something very… off about him, and it wasn’t the gun, or the other gun, or the other other gun, or the numerous knives strapped to his legs, or the- you get the point.

But then the girl ran up to him and hugged him around the waist and the man didn't immediately shoot her so Danny figured he was ok. “Thank you, mister Hood!” She said, and the man patted her hesitantly on the head. “Yeah, yeah, now get out of here.” Hood, apparently, told her, mechanized voice awkward. The girl ran up to her parents, and the three quickly left the place. Danny stared, still quite in a haze of confusion and sheer shock. Danny had been pointed with a very high number of weapons, but he had almost always expected it. In this situation, he had been caught completely off guard.

The man walked over to the counter, and Danny took a moment to really look at him. He was wearing a bright red helmet, and it matched in color with the insignia on his chest, but the brown leather jacket the man was wearing over it prevented Danny from fully seeing it. He was covered in weapons from head to toe, but the sense of danger he gave off was deeper than that. He didn’t set off Danny’s ghost sense, but it was almost like he put it on the edge. Hood, or whatever his name was, stopped in front of him, the counter being the only thing between them, and looked down to where the passed out guy was and  huffed “Nice hook, kid.” 

“Uh. Nice, shot, i guess?” Danny replied eloquently, eliciting an amused snort from the other. “No problem. You ok?”  Danny nodded mutely. Now that the shock had passed, he stared at Hood with a mix between interest and wariness. There was a high chance of him being one of those superheroes, what were they called? Justice Union? Anyways, he didn’t seem a crazed maniac that skinned puppies for fun. He was surely dangerous, no doubt, and there still was the cold, chilly feeling he’d had since the guy entered his field of vision, but Danny was pretty sure that if he didn’t give the man a reason to, he wouldn’t harm him. 

“Well,” Hood said, kicking the guy on the ground in the stomach and pocketing his gun, “This has been fun. Call the police and don't get shot too much. See ya.” And he was gone.

“Oh, what in the ever-loving hell.” Danny sighed at the empty restaurant.

Notes:

batfam member meeting numero two!!
anyways you might have noticed i changed the title. the previous one was a random thin i came up with bc i had no ideas but i feel like this one is a more comprehensive feel of the whole story, because for danny the real problem was never his death but the people that surrounded him, and this story is all gonna be about rediscovering himself when around people that care, so. tell me what you think!

Chapter 3: Me vs. The Great Evil (Canon Batman's Morals And Shitty Ideals) pt. 1

Notes:

guess whos done with exams and highschool in general?? *megan thee stallion 👅 noise*
anyways im free finally i hated that shit
now catch this totally filter chapter lol soz

The week passes way too fast, and suddenly it was Thursday again. Nothing spectacular had happened in the few days Danny had spent in this reality, and yet he felt the possibilities were endless. Here, Danny was a blank slate, no one knew him, and he owed nothing to anyone.

Sure, he lived in a hole in the wall, ate a meal a day if he was lucky and had to be careful not to get stabbed when walking into and from work, and yet it had been the most free he had felt in years .

Suddenly, it felt like so many things were in reach for him to grasp, the chance at a life that wasn’t a soulless husk of what it could have been. Danny had spent part of his time there remembering how it felt to fly just because he wanted to, without the stress of having to rush somewhere or to evade firing cannons. It was exhilarating, Danny found, to feel the wind in his hair, body unbound by gravity floating in the night sky. 

Without internet access it had been hard to research all the things he was so curious about, but Danny had made do with the occasional newspaper and the radio segments he listened to during slow hours at work. And oh boy, it sure was interesting, what he found. Apparently, not only were superheroes a thing, but there was a whole association of them! Plus, when he’d found out that some of them were aliens , Danny nearly had a heart attack there and then on the sidewalk. The mere implications of a statement like that had started filling Danny’s mind at the speed of light. Just the thought of visiting a different planet, a different galaxy had sent him into hysterics.

But it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, because he had to go back. It mattered to Danny. It mattered so much. He had duties he couldn’t pull away from any further, even if it felt like dying all over again, to give up this new, bright world of opportunities. But after all, when had he last put himself before everything else? Danny couldn't remember. So, in the low, artificial light of the night, he flew towards the warehouse that hosted the portal, as unwilling as the day he got pulled into it. 

But realistically, what would happen if he didn’t go back? The traitorous thought popped into Danny’s mind, mining at his already weak resolve. But for the first time in forever, Danny decided to indulge that selfish part of himself instead of pushing it away. Because after all, he doubted that the people he’d left behind would miss him all that much, and even if they did, they’d get over him fast enough. (God, it hurt so bad, to know that his impact on the world, on those that should have been his most trusted people, wouldn’t be more than a blip in their lives. To know that his parents would probably take weeks to realize he was gone, and that when they did they’d probably shrug, annoyed at the loss of a potential asset. To know that a minor inconvenience was all he’d ever been.)

 On the other hand, Phantom’s disappearance would probably be noticed quicker, but he doubted it would be mourned much more than that of Danny Fenton. He’d never been much of a hero to the people of Amity despite his actions, and even if they’d struggle without his help against the constant ghost attacks, they would get better at it eventually, so it wasn’t like Danny was leaving the whole town to the ghosts’ mercy. 

And anyways, Danny thought sardonically , it’s not like the consequences can get me while I'm in a different universe.

As he mentally argued with himself, he kept flying to his original destination, coming quickly to a stop as he arrived at the warehouse district. Originally abandoned and devoid of non-satanic-cult activity, the low building now sported a big sign on its metal walls stating the warehouse to be Wayne Tech property. Danny was vaguely aware of them (kind of hard with how the main company building’s neon sign was so bright it was easily spotted all the way from Danny’s makeshift apartment and the surprisingly high number of times the owner, Bruce Wayne, had ended on the news in the few days Danny had been here), but was confused as to what interest they had to an interdimensional portal, not to mention how they should not even have been aware of it.

Danny guessed it was partly his fault for leaving the thing unsupervised for that long, but he couldn’t even stand the thought of getting that close to it before.  

He decided to investigate, now that he was already here, even if looking at the portal gave him nausea (It looked so much like the thing that killed him, like a yawning, gaping maw ready to swallow him whole-). 

The whole thing was cordoned off with a long string of red tape, the wire mesh littered with warning signs. Danny phased through the metal walls, coming to stand in front of the swirling purple mass. He landed in front of it, absentmindedly turning tangible. The portal was surrounded by metal fencing, which was also covered in ‘danger’ signs. To the side was a table and on it what looked like several analysis instruments, probably an attempt to figure out what the portal was. He picked one up to examine it, turning it around in his hands.

“It’s impolite to touch other people’s stuff without consent.” A gravelly voice asked from above him, startling Danny into throwing the thing in his hand in the voice’s direction with a yelled curse, which rendered his invisibility useless. 

“Who are you?” The figure asked again, and Danny could not make out anything more than a dark outline of the man(?)’s form by where he was perched up in the rafters.

“How do you even know I’m still here, you shouldn’t be able to see me!” Danny exclaimed in confusion, ignoring the question. At that, the figure dropped to the ground without a single sound, and now that he was standing somewhere with better lighting Danny could see who he was dealing with.

“I don’t do well with trespassers, so answer the question before I’m forced to do something about it.” Batman said, rising form the crouch he’d landed in, pitch black cape moving silently around him. “Huh. You’re Batman.” Danny said matter-of-factly, once again ignoring the man, and he really should have guessed it before, but in his defence he still wasn’t used to ‘bat-themed superheroes’ being his first thought when meeting someone in a dark place. On the hero’s arm, Danny caught a glimpse of a screen with a thermal mapping on it, his figure a shapeless blob of blue and purple hues. As Danny still didn’t answer him, Batman growled and took a step forward, and really, Danny knew the man was intimidating, with the voice and the costume and the all around threatening aura, but it had been some time since he’d been afraid of a normal human, especially one that didn’t even know what a ghost was. 

Danny decided to turn visible, even though he could have easily left without much interference, because while he wasn’t scared of Batman, he still found his whole vigilante thing extremely cool. “My name’s Phantom, and that should really clue you in on what I am.” Danny said, lifting off the ground. “Ghosts don’t exist.” The man said, like he didn’t breathe the same air as an invincible man that shot lasers from his eyes and an immortal Greek warrior goddess.  “And yet here I am.” Danny shrugged, leaning back and crossing his legs midair like he was sitting on a recliner. As he did so, Batman pointed his fist at him, aiming a small wrist gun at him.

“I wouldn’t bother with that, it’s not going to work on me.” He waved a hand dismissively at Batman, but the man didn’t seem too keen on believing him and letting him go. “I’ll be the judge of that. Now, what is your business in Gotham?” Batman asked, voice brusque and direct to the point. “Uh, sure as hell nothing that concerns you, man, don't worry. I have no intention of going all psycho and blowing up half of town.”  Danny rolled his eyes. He knew the man was just doing his job (if it even counted at one), but Danny hadn't even done anything to deserve that level of wariness (except lurk somewhere he really should not have been, touch potentially dangerous stuff, come out of a weird portal and be generally suspicious, but whatever). 

"And how would I know that? According to Red Robin you were summoned by a cult with the intention of destroying the world, so forgive me for checking- will you stay still for a second?!" Batman erupted midway through the sentence. At some point through the encounter, Danny had started to slowly circle Batman in the air, forcing the man to spin around on the spot to keep Danny inside his field of vision. 

Danny snickered, but Batman didn't seem to be as amused as him, so he stopped moving, going still in the air with a dismissive hand wave. "Fine, fine, chill out. I'm not the one they meant to summon, they must have done something wrong thankfully because had the ritual been successful i guarantee you, hell raining down on earth would not be a comprehensive way to describe what would have happened." At being reassured that Danny was apparently not the bringer of chaos and dead puppies and all things evil, Batman seemed to relent a little, putting down his arm but still keeping all attention on him.

"Just who did they mean to summon then? And why did you get summoned instead?” Danny really didn’t want to explain the whole Pariah Dark debacle to him, partly because he didn’t really think Batman had the knowledge necessary to even understand and partly because Danny knew adults, especially those supposed to be in a position of power, had a certain tendency to not react well when confronted with someone who could challenge that power even when said person is explicitly not hostile. So Danny preferred remaining an unknown but fairly not-worrying variable in Batman’s eyes rather than the guy who defeated the being that could have brought destruction on this reality.

“His name is Pariah Dark,” Danny sighed, the simple thought of him making him frown. “He’s the Ghost King, but he was defeated some time last year and was sealed away by the ancients.” What he was saying wasn’t exactly a lie so much as simply him excluding some crucial details, but it helped make the lie smoother. “ I was probably caught in the summoning simply because I helped put the guy away and the ritual caught onto the residual energy from him on me.” Danny shrugged dismissively, and decidef to take Batman’s unchanging position as a sign he was yet to catch onto him. 

“Not that i did much, anyways,” He murmured to himself, loud enough that Batman could hear him but still think he wasn’t meant to, and hoped that the sulky teen act was good enough that Batman believed him.

The vigilante looked less tense than before, but still not completely convinced, so Danny rolled his eyes and lowered himself to the ground, hoping that putting a stop to the blatant display of power might help put the man at ease. “Listen, the first thing I did after being rudely snatched by a literal cult was help your little masked friend so I feel like that should be enough of a show of trustworthiness to at least earn me a free pass from interrogation, don’t you think?” 

“You might not be hostile, but there still is a no-meta rule in this city to prevent any more accidents than there already are.” And now Danny was just a little bit pissed. “So what, are you going around evicting every single meta in town because you want to? It’s not like I'm the only one,” In just the week Danny had been living here, he’d met plenty of powered people, and none of them had either the disposition nor care to turn into someone deserving of this man’s distrust. His annoyance started to seep into his voice, distorting his words with static. “Besides, who gave you the right to decide who can live here and who can’t?” For the first time since the conversation began, Batman looked taken aback, and even though he composed himself immediately, Danny knew his point had gotten through.

Batman crossed his arms with a pensive hum, then nodded his head once at Danny. “I suppose you’re right,” He stated as if admitting he was wrong physically pained him, prompting Danny to roll his eyes again. He supposed that's the best he was going to get from the man.

"While you have done nothing to earn my suspicion," Batman continued, "You are an unknown variable, and I assure you that the moment you step out of line, I will be ready.” Ugh. What a hard-ass. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Danny waved at him dismissively, but Batman had already disappeared into the shadows.

 

_._._._._._._._._._._

 

When Bruce arrived back at the cave, Dick was asleep in the chair of the bat-computer, his son holding his face up in his hand, leaning on the armrest of the chair, and his cheek was still lined with pillow-marks. It was clear he’d been trying to wait for Bruce to be back, but had succumbed to sleep again under the fatigue of the previous days. 

Dick had arrived at the manor mere hour before for a long weekend with his family, but after a week of incessant patrolling, days spent poring over the case files for a particularly slippery serial killer, the hour and a half drive from Bludhaven to Gotham in the middle of the night had been particularly strenuous on Dick.

So, when an alarm for the warehouse containing the strange portal had gone off at three in the morning signaling an intruder, Bruce had opted to tell his son he could handle it on his own, leaving him to rest a bit more, even though he had refused to go to bed like Bruce had hoped he would. 

He opted to not wake the boy yet (Dick hated when Bruce referred to him as a boy because ‘he was almost twenty-four, for god’s sake’ , but he would always be Bruce’s boy, so it was a moot point anyways), choosing to change out of his suit. As he changed his clothes, he took time to think about what the boy in black and white had said in the warehouse. 

Maybe his words were just what Bruce needed. Maybe years ago, when the first powered people had just started to appear, his no-metas rule was effectively needed, but now, when a good portion of the world possessed powers they had been born with, and when most of those people didn’t want anything more than a peaceful life, it really wasn’t something that required Batman’s intervention. Hell, one of his children was a meta. He didn’t know why it had taken so long for him to realize he’d been enforcing an outdated and detrimental rule. He’d have to communicate this change to the rest of his family.

But for now, he stepped up to where his son was sleeping, undoubtedly uncomfortable, and put a hand to his shoulder, gently shaking him out of his slumber. 

“Bruce? You’re back already,” Dick looked at him through bleary eyes, trying to rub the sleep out of them. "What happened? Was everything ok?” 

“I'll tell you everything tomorrow, when you’re more awake, ok? Don't worry about it now,” Bruce replied softly. “Now come on, up you get. You’re not so small anymore that I can carry you all the way up the stairs.”

Notes:

not really good im sorry besties i promise ill do better
also kinda short? had to get this out :/
probs bc i wrote this instead of studying lol
anyways you might have noticed i cannot format. no thats it i have no solution to this problem

Chapter 4: The City

Notes:

*arrives a week late with a starbucks and no valid excuse* sup

edit: relized i switched tenses for like two paragraphs midway like a bumblimg buffoon. corrected it. why am i like this

The next week passed with little difference to the previous one.

 

Danny slept approximately twelve hours a day, to try and gain the energy he wasn’t getting from food, worked a good six hours at the diner and once every two days he spent twenty five minutes scarfing down whatever depressing meal he managed to afford, which usually consisted of instant ramen and various other precooked meals, plus an additional five minutes once or twice a week for a hard earned snack..

 

The remaining time, he spent exploring. Some days, he sat at the tables of the local library, easily melting into the faceless horde of students cramming for tests or whatsoever, and on the god-sent gift that was library pcs with free wifi, Danny dived deep into whatever he could learn of this universe, ranging from superheroes to scientific discoveries to why the hell did his favorite girl group have the wrong number of members.

 

 On other days, when he felt fatigued with the onslaught of new information, he soared around the tops of the city’s buildings, taking time to observe the bustling streets from the top of Wayne tower. Some nights, if he stayed out late enough he’d play a game of spot the vigilante, amusing himself by keeping score of how frequently he saw each spandex-clad hero. Unsurprisingly, the Red Hood took the definite lead, but that was expected, considering that the place Danny had taken residence in was smack dab in the middle of his territory.

 

Like that, another week passed, and Danny found himself, once again in front of the same warehouse. He didn’t make the mistake of immediately entering, this time, choosing to simply float in the air for a couple of minutes. But as he hovered there, telling himself that it was better for everyone if he went back, two minutes turned into five, then into ten, then half an hour, and soon enough he was flying back, heart in his throat. 

 

He couldn’t- he didn’t want to . Not yet.

 

He had nothing here. He was no one, no more than a speck of dust hurtling through space. It felt exhilaratingly like freedom.

 

I promise , he called out to the darkness, I am going to go back. But please , the darkness remained silent and empty, please, just for a little more. Let me have this.

 

Another week passed just the same, and he found himself once again frozen. He turned his back to the portal a second time. Then a third. A fourth- On the second day of the second month, he stumbled onto an article about the Martha Wayne foundation. His heart stuttered as he read of how every year, hundreds of people, ranging from six to twenty, got the opportunity to continue their schooling despite not having the money to. 

 

And maybe it was a bit of a leap, considering to even apply for a scholarship was required a lot of information Danny didn’t even have, but… Danny remembered how he had loved school. Well. Maybe not school itself, but the thrill of learning, Danny could never get enough of. The loss of that feeling, that opportunity, was the harshest pain that had come with his non-life. And now, he could have that again, without the weight of a whole town to defend from constant attacks, without the constant feeling of being an intruder in his own home.

 

When the week came to an end, Danny didn't even leave his new home. He did not stall as he stared at those metal walls, hoping the thing inside them would implode on itself, giving Danny the freedom of not having to choose. He did not think about what was going on on the other side. He did not think about this decision at all, because really, what decision was there to make he pushed his guilt down, down, down, so that he didn’t have to think about how he was neglecting his duty, how he was abandoning those he had sworn to protect, even if they hadn’t needed- hadn’t wanted him in a long time—.

_._._._._._._._._._._

He stared at the list he had compiled of legal information he would require to be accepted into the selection process for a scholarship at Gotham Academy. It was a long, long list, considering it started with proof of his existence that didn’t rely on ‘you’re looking at me, is that not enough?’ and ended with the school records of every year he had attended up to the current date.

 

Danny stared some more, then shrugged to no one. It wasn’t the first time he lied about something like his own identity, simply this time he was just lying to the entire American state on legally binding documents instead of his parents or teachers. Same thing, right?

 

The amount of research he needed simply to make up a background that would be easily believed occupied all the free time he could spare for more than a week, and that was just to gather information. Then, it was time for execution.

 

On a particularly quiet Sunday evening, when Danny was sure the library would be at its emptiest, Danny sat at the most secluded desk of the library’s computer room and started working. His hacker skills were not on par with Tucker’s, but with the help of some ghostly meddling, he was hopeful he would be able to pull this off without setting alarms off. Danny didn’t think he would ever be thankful for all the times Techno started shit up in the middle of the night, but as he hacked the evening away, he couldn’t help but feel grateful for all the knowledge on computers and ghostly possession of said computers to make them work just a tiny bit more efficiently he had acquired in those fights. As he typed on the keyboard, he hoped his glowing eyes weren’t in range for the security cameras to capture. 

 

Danny chose Springfield, Missouri as his ‘city of origin’, partly because it was located close to where Amity Park would have been, had it existed in this dimension. Additionally, it was far enough from Gotham that no one would be able to confirm his existence with real people, but close enough that the distance would have been manageable to travel by a single teenager.

 

The city’s orphanage had been overcrowded and understaffed for years, so Danny found sneaking a file containing his ‘information’ fairly easy, and were anyone try to confirm his stay there, Danny doubted the workers would be able to single out his face in an ever changing crowd of children, coming in and out of the orphanage’s doors on the daily. To anyone that tried looking into his file, he would appear as a normal child, abandoned on the orphanage’s doorstep before his third birthday by unknown parents that had decided to get emancipated in the summer after his sophomore year of highschool.

 

For now, that was the extent he could go to in that moment, because to be eligible for the scholarship, he had to have completed the previous school year, so it couldn’t result that he was already in Gotham before school let out. He’d need to come back in some time, and create a trail of his journey from Springfield to Gotham.

 

For now, that was all he needed. Quickly, he put in a request for an ID to the government website, canceled all proof of his presence on the computer and left before the clerk, who had been staring at him irritated since the clock struck 10PM got over his internal debate and decided to kick him out once and for all.

_._._._._._._._._._._

Danny never really spent much time close to the streets at night. Most days, he was sleeping before the clock hit nine, and those hours he found himself outside after the sun had gone down, he spent soaring so far up that people looked like dots in the distance.

 

Now, Danny didn't have any illusion about what Gotham was like, at night. He did live in Crime Alley, after all. It would have been hard not to hear the occasional shouts or gunshots. But that did not mean Danny was used to it, and while he was more than accustomed to fighting monsters on the daily, Gotham's kind of monsters were not of the ghostly kind. 

 

So, when he heard a whimpering cry from a dark streetway, Danny froze. He'd been coming back from a double shift that had been dumped on him because another worker had gotten suddenly sick, flying low through the streets, when he'd heard it. Heart (metaphorically) beating loudly in his chest, Danny approached the sound. 

 

There was a woman on the ground, the right leg of her pants torn where she'd been stabbed, wound leaking red through the hand she was pressing on it. She was crawling backwards towards the closed end of the alley, away from the man holding a bloodied knife. 

 

"Please," the woman whimpered, face already streaked with tears and sweat, but the man only took a step forward.

 

Danny had never fought a human that wasn't a ghost hunter, and even then, he wasn't really fighting, so much as trying to escape with all his limbs, but this time, not only was someone's well being other than him at stake, but he also couldn't use his powers. 

 

While he was quite a bit stronger than a baseline human even in his de-transformed state, he wasn't all that confident he would be able to take the hulking man down without getting cut up some, and while it took a lot more than that to take Danny out permanently, he wasn't exactly pressing to get stabbed.

Then, his eyes fell on a broken concrete brick a couple of feet away from the man. 

 

Taking a useless but steadying breath, Danny turned back into his human form, making sure to stay invisible, and quickly scuttered over to the brick. 

Before the man could get any closer to the woman, Danny turned visible and brought the rock down on his head as hard as he could. 

"Holy shit!!" He exclaimed as the man dropped like a stone.

He stared at the girl, who had brought an arm up to her face the moment he had hit the man.

 

Danny dropped the bloodied brick as if it was scorching, desperately trying to wipe away the flecks of red that had landed on his jacket,  and hoped that the man was simply unconscious. 

"Are you ok?" he asked hesitantly, and the woman only stared in shock.

As he tried to think of what to do next, Danny heard the sound of someone dropping down behind them from above.

 

He turned, startled, and came to face with a figure clad in purple, the color seeming almost black in the darkness of the alley. 

"What's going on?" The vigilante- Spoiler?- asked. 

"This- this man was hurting her and-" It wasn't hard for Danny to play the part of the scared teenager, considering that he was still quite perturbed by the situation (he'd never seen that much human blood that close before except from his own, of course ).

"Call-" the woman shook herself out of her daze, voice trembling, "Call the police" 

"I-I don't have a phone, can you-" Danny did have a phone, but seeing as he couldn't afford the bills, it was as good as not having one.

 

"They're already on their way, don't worry. An ambulance is also coming." Spoiler interrupted him, then moved to kneel down next to the girl's wounded leg. From a pouch on her belt, she pulled out a roll of gauze and a bottle of disinfectant, immediately starting to patch up the wound. As she did so, she spoke in a comforting tone to the woman, reassuring her that it was ok.

 

When she was done, she rose and turned to face Danny.

"I should tell you that you shouldn't have done that, and that you should leave stuff like this to the police, but I'm afraid it might sound a bit hypocritical coming from me, so. Good job." She laughed, voice light.

 

Soon, the quiet was interrupted by the sound of police sirens, and Spoiler moved to the entrance of the alley to meet the officers and medic team. In the frenzy of people, Danny quietly took his leave, not waiting around for people to start asking questions he might not have been able to answer, slipping away unseen.

_._._._._._._._._._._

The next day was Danny's day off, and for the first time, he decided to spend it roaming  the streets on foot for the first time, because while the encounter the previous night had brought to his mind the full implications of Gotham being called the capital of crime, it also made Danny realize that he hadn't really gotten to know the city. Seeing it in the light of day (which is a different thing than the sunlight, because it seemed that Gotham was not too accustomed to a sky that wasn't some shade of gray), while actually walking through the streets, painted a drastically different picture from the one he'd gotten flying over it. 

 

And yeah, it was a bit grimy and dark, shadows lingering in places they shouldn't have been, but Danny quite liked how the dark buildings somehow glimmered with every bit of light. 

Danny was just a tiny bit enamored with the city's gothic style, with its wide spaces and ancient stone buildings, gargoyles perching on every other roof. The modern look of the sleek, metal and glass skyscrapers fit right in with the older buildings, and Danny thought the city wasn't as bad as some people online described it.

 

Sure, Gotham was still riddled with criminals and thugs, but that didn't mean that normal people didn't live there. The streets were bustling with people going about their day. Just because they were used to walking with a gas mask and a taser in their pockets didn't mean they didn't live their days like any other human.

 

Danny liked walking around not knowing where he was, simply taking one step after the other and not caring about where he was going, taking in everything he could.

He'd been walking for some time when he found himself in a quaint, quiet street not so close to the Alley that one every four buildings was abandoned yet far enough from the richer parts of the city that his charity bin clothes and ratty shoes wouldn't attract nasty looks.

 

A truck was parked in front of an old store, and a man was finishing unloading several boxes from its back. When he was done, the old man that had been standing next to him pulled a wallet from his pocket, handed the man a wad of cash and thanked him with a friendly smile.

Then, the man climbed back into the truck and drove away. The old man stared at the boxes for a second, then shook his head resigned and started bringing one of the boxes inside.

 

"Do you need a hand?" Asked Danny immediately, crossing the street. As he got closer to the shop, he noticed it was a bookshop, the front window display showcasing a number of thick, old but well kept tomes of all kinds and colors. 

 

The man turned, surprised by Danny's voice.

"Why, thank you very much, young man!" he smiled warmly. The man's open expression, coupled with his small, plump build and old style of clothing made him look like the stereotype for a librarian.

Without saying anything, Danny set to work lifting the boxes. 

They were heavier than he thought, probably containing books now that he thought about it, but thanks to his powers, Danny was way stronger than he looked, and soon he deposited the last box next to the counter inside the shop.

 

He took a couple seconds to observe the interior of the place, which consisted of floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books. The place was small and full but didn't feel cramped thanks to the high ceiling and steady current of air from the door and the wide window Danny could see in the back.

 

"Thank you so much for your help, son. Say, what is your name? Forgive this old man for not asking before, but my mind isn't as steady as it once was." The man asked as he rubbed his back absentmindedly.

 

"I'm Danny, sir." Danny said awkwardly, eyes darting between the man's eyes and anything else in the room, from the books to the tiny plant on the front desk (Danny didn't want to be rude by not looking the man in the face, but he'd never been especially good with strangers, especially adults).

 

"None of that sir stuff, son, my name's Eugene Liu." He patted Danny on the shoulder, then moved to the back of the shop, where under the window he'd seen before were placed two comfortable looking armchairs and a small coffee table. 

"Now, would you like to stay a minute for some tea? I'd like to thank you for your help. I probably would have broken my back hauling all that weight by myself!" 

 

"Ah- thank you very much, sir- Mr. Liu, but there's no need really!" Danny tried telling him, but the man just waved his hand dismissively.

"Don't be silly, son, it's a pleasure! Now sit down, sit down! I'll be back in a minute." Danny sat dumbfounded in the chair, which he found felt like sitting on a cloud, and waited for the man to come back. 

 

Not two minutes later, the man was back, a tray in his hands. He put it down, then sank into the chair next to Danny's with a satisfied sigh.

The tea was still steeping in the mug, but a tray of tiny biscuits of all shapes and forms was sitting next to it, and Danny didn't hesitate to take one for himself, too aware that free food was as precious as gold right now. 

 

It wasno' as awkward as Danny would have thought, surprisingly. There was something about Mr. Liu that put Danny at ease. He didn't force him to make eye contact, or to speak. In fact, Danny barely said ten words in the whole exchange, but he was more than content with just listening to the man speak, and the man didn't seem to have any problem with that.

 

Mr.Liu talked about his niece, who'd been helping him with the shop but had just recently left to attend college in Starling, leaving him to deal with it by himself. He commented on how small Danny was (dying before puberty gave him that desperately needed growth spurt had left him barely five foot four and very pissed about it) and how he needed to eat more, yet it didn't sound patronizing but almost caring.

 

An hour later, he walked home, still not sure about what had happened. His stomach was pleasantly full, and he had somehow managed to get a job offer. According to the man, the shop needed a 'young soul around to keep it alive' and since his niece was not here to liven up the place anymore, Danny could take her spot for the moment. Plus, the shopkeeper had apparently noticed how despite his short stature and apparent lack of muscles he hadn't struggled to carry the heavy boxes at all, and a hand was always needed for lifting. Danny dif not think about how the man had called him a 'surprisingly strong string bean'. 

 

Apparently, the shop also sold antique and rare copies of books, so the man offered him a salary that was practically three times what he did right now flipping burgers and almost getting robbed at gunpoint. 

 

He'd have to quit his job at the diner, the following day.

_._._._._._._._._._._

He was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to sleep after a long day, when he heard a crash and a pained groan coming from his room.

Notes:

hm
conflicted feelings about this chapter
shit happens but also feels like a filler?
but also, some moderate shit is about to go down so stay tuned.
many words, not sure how many of them i actually like

!!!IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! DANNY IS A SHORT KING AND YOU WILL TAKE THIS HEADCANON FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS

as always you are encouraged to tell me whats wrong with this bc i have no doubt that something is

dannys fav girl group is twice, and in his world somi actually debuted as the tenth member. although shes not his bias danny is devastated when he finds out shes not in the group here. also he totally believes jihyo is the lords second coming and he will not hear a word about it. yes i know you have no idea what im talking about just smile and nod. its all good

Chapter 5: Encounters Of The Fourth Kind (Vigilantes Breaking Into Your Home At Night)

Notes:

i? had a dream i was tim? for some reason. not very realistic, tim-me and damian had a brotherly relationship. also bruce was straight up fucking dead so. anyways back to scheduled bullshit.

Ok. You know what? No. I changed my mind. Fuck superheroes. What the fuck , Danny thought, staring at the unconcious body laying prone on Danny's floor. The unconscious body that belonged to one vigilante, anti-hero and known-to-behead crime lord. Who, might Danny add, was BLEEDING all over his WOODEN FLOORBOARDS. What the fuck. How was Danny even supposed to get that shit out. 

But he's digressing. 

He poked the guy in the arm with the tip of his foot a couple of times, but other than letting out a pained groan, he stayed firmly passed out.  Danny shut the window  which the Red Hood had probably used to enter the building, then took a second to take in the man's state. 

Other than the very bloody stab wound in the guy's left thigh, one of the helmet's lenses was broken, so the guy had probably passed out because of the hit to his head. The cut on his leg wasn't extremely big, but considering the amount of blood that was still flowing out of it even then, it must have been pretty deep, and Danny was aware that there's only so much blood baseline humans can lose before the damage starts getting serious.

Danny sighed, and stared at the ceiling as if contemplating a higher entity. "Fucking fuck," he hissed between his teeth, "why me,". 

Then he took a steading breath, willing himself to ignore the cold, off-putting aura the man gave off, and went to search for a first aid kit in the pouches of the vigilante's belt. It was very well stocked, and Danny almost cut his fingers on various bat shaped blades several times before finally pulling out a small box containing gauze and disinfectant. Luckily, he also found a tiny spool of medical thread and a curved needle. With one of those bat-blades he'd previously mentioned, Danny made quick work of the fabric around the wound, making the hole already present bigger so to have easier access to the cut. He used a piece of gauze to clean away the blood as best as he could because while it was far from the optimal material, there was nothing better in the kit.

As he dabbed the gash with antiseptic, Danny took mechanical, deep breaths. He didn't really need to breathe, but Danny had found that even if his body didn't register the intake of oxygen, the action felt… grounding. It helped Danny not get lost in the myriad of inputs that overcame him whenever in a stressful situation. Danny thinks it's probably some kind of fucked up defense mechanism, that makes him a thousand times more alert, like a supernatural boost of adrenaline. But outside of battle, when he didn't need to look out for attacks on all fronts, it only served to overwhelm him further. So, he breathed. He focused on the flow of air in his lungs, on the steady rise and fall of his chest, and let everything else wash over him.

He threaded the needle, and willed his hand to be even steadier than they already were. Even so, Danny didn't really have a lot of practice stitching wounds. (That was a lie. Danny had stitched dozens of wounds. He was just not used to doing it to someone that was alive, and breathing. To someone that was not himself) 

He paused midway through the third stitch, coming to a dead still. A gun pressed to his temple. 

"Who are you," Red Hood asked, now very much awake.

"I'm Danny, please don't shoot me, I'm just trying to make sure you don't bleed out on my floor," Danny raised the hand that wasn't holding the needle. He shivered, that cold sensation getting stronger. 

"How the hell did you get in?" The gun didn't move from its position, but it wasn't digging in his head anymore. 

"Listen, I don't know where you think you are, but you're not there. YOU are the one that broke into my place." He knew the vigilante most definitely had a concussion, but Danny would be much more willing to help if the guy wasn't pointing a fucking gun at his head. Sure, it wasn't like the thing could bring much permanent harm to him, but again, it was a matter of manners. 

The vigilante looked around him and, after realizing where he was (or maybe where he wasn't), muttered a 'fuck' and pulled the gun back. 

Danny took that as a signal that he could go back to his stitching, but as soon as he looked down, a gloved hand stopped him.

"Thanks a lot, kid, but if you don't mind I'd rather not get stitched up by a nine year old."  

"Fuck you, I'm sixteen," Danny spat back. (He wasn't, not yet, but who sat there and counted months, right?) Strangely, despite the deathly vibe surrounding the man, Danny didn't feel real danger coming from him. "Also, no offense, but I doubt you're in the right condition to stitch something like this yourself ." 

"Kid, I assure you, I'm a professional. I know how to patch myself up," Red hood snorted, trying to take the needle out of Danny's hand and missing by a good inch or two.

"That's great, but it also doesn't make the concussion you just proved you most certainly have magically disappear. " 

"Kid-" The man started, voice tense, but Danny interrupted before he could continue. 

"Listen, I-I know you have no reason to trust me, and I know you can do this yourself, but you barely know where you are and you seem to be having vision problems. It's not the first time I stitch a stab wound and if it helps you can watch everything I do and- i don't know- shoot me if i do something suspicious."  Danny kept looking down, scowling at the gash like it had personally offended him. After a long pause, Hood sighed. "Alright, alright kid. You win." He shifted, leaning back from the defensive position he'd been in, but his hand did not release its grip on the gun. "Just know that the second you even blink in a sketchy way, I'm blowing your brains out." Danny wasn't sure it was possible to look suspicious when just blinking, but something he was sure of was that Hood was one that made true to those types of promises. 

He went back to his work with a huff and nothing else, repeating the stitching motions in a methodical, precise manner.  Still, the vigilante's gaze seemed to almost physically weigh on Danny, only one blue-green eye visible through the cracked lens piercing into him like a cold scalpel. 

Barely ten minutes later, Danny slapped a gauze on the newly closed cut and leaned back to sit crisscross, knees aching from all the time spent leaning on them.

"So," Danny started before Hood could say or do anything, "Now that you're done bleeding out on my floor, can I know how you got to bleeding all over my floor?" 

"Don't worry about it, I'll get out of your hair right now." The man stumbled to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall, and in a swift motion opened the window and slipped out, surprisingly careful for a man that injured. 

"Wait-" Danny started, but the whirring sound of a grapple gun interrupted, and seconds later, Red Hood disappeared into the night. 

Danny stared out the window for a good couple of minutes, then, being careful to side step the bloody puddle, walked over to the couch and, without even bothering to wash the blood off his hands, threw himself on it, passing out the second his head touched the cushions. 

 

(Everybody knew the Red Hood was friendliest with kids, especially those who lived in the alley. But Jason had never seen this kid, Danny, he said, around, and he didn't have the usual heavy accent all street rats had. The usual accent Jason himself sported. But he also saw how thin his wrists were, how his collar bones jutted out of ratty, two sizes too big shirt. He saw the steely determination to help in his eyes and the stubbornness to have his way, the one he saw far too often in his own when he was young and hopeful, wearing red green and yellow. It could have been a ploy from some rival of his, to take him out when he least expected it. Or, it could have been a child, far from home and so, so lost but still caring and too kind for this world. 

So Jason kept his gun close and his eyes wide open, but he let the boy prove his trustworthiness.)

  _._._._._._._

Considering the dubious legality of his employment in the first place, all Danny had to do to quit was walk in an hour before his shift and tell the manager of the place, a shady, balding man in his forties called Keith, that he was quitting, and that was it. 

On his way back home, he stopped to buy a bottle of bleach and some rubber gloves

Danny was aware that having postponed cleaning up the blood was going to make it even more of a bitch to clean up, and he definitely didn't have the budget to buy products that would actually remove the stain from his floor, so he resigned to knowing he was going to have to break his back scrubbing that shit out and hope the place at least stopped smelling like a slaughterhouse. He had very little hope of salvaging the wood paneling. 

Two hours later, back throbbing and arms faintly aching, Danny stared at the offending stain like it had killed him itself. 

"It's not like this whole place passes sanity inspection, anyway. What's a blood stain more?" He grumbled to himself. 

The next few days were a flurry of adjusting to the new routine. Mr. Liu had agreed to pay him at the end of the week instead of the month, so Danny went a bit hungrier for a couple of days before finally being able to permit himself a meal a day. Consequently, he didn't need to sleep as much as he did before, which was a relief because most of the following nights had found Danny passing from a peaceful rest to a fitful, nightmare filled sleep around the second half of the night.  (The dreams didn't linger for more than a couple of seconds into wakefulness, but Danny couldn't shake the deep seated feeling of guilt and the faint image of familiar, angrily accusing eyes out of his mind.)

Danny found working at the library peaceful, and it gave him an inordinate amount of time to read. Not many people wandered in daily, and those who did could easily divided in three distinct categories. 

One: the occasional passerby who'd stumbled upon the shop and found it interesting enough. This category was mostly comprised of elderly people out for a stroll or teenagers hanging out somewhere less crowded, and rarely did more than walk through the rows of shelves before sending a polite smile to Danny and leaving as empty-handed as they'd come. 

Two: the regulars, who Danny could not create a demographic for because of their total variety, walked with a sense of purpose of those who were there for a reason. Some of them, after having made their purchase took their little pile of books to the armchair in the side room, and spent a couple hours lost reading. There were two people  Danny couldn't help but put to mind, just because of their infallibility to show at the appointed time. One, a little girl with colorful beads in her cornrows who showed, without fail every Wednesday and Friday, each time with a different book in hand. She didn't even buy anything most times, but Mr. Liu had told him she was welcome nonetheless. The other was a young man who couldn't have been much older than Danny himself, and sported a hairdo Danny really couldn't describe as anything other than skunk-like and an old leather jacket. The first time he'd come in, he'd faltered on the doorstep the moment Danny had politely greeted him, then proceeded to look at him weird the whole time it took Danny to ring up the book he'd chosen and tell its price. 

The third and last category was the collectors. They came in, with their expensive clothes and superior attitude, collected the order they had placed with the owner, and left. Danny was pretty sure some of those clients were part of some foreign royalty. Or mafia. Either one of those. 

But other than the very little time he spent overanalyzing the clients, he studied. Danny might have been a gifted student, but after two years of barely scraping by, he had some notable gaps in his schooling, and if he wanted to get into the Gotham Academy scholarship program, he had to make sure he was not simply on par with the course; he had to excel. The bookshop didn't have a wide collection of school textbooks, but Danny didn't mind the old, used ones the public library had. So Danny checked out a couple books every couple weeks, going through them with a fervor no professor had ever been able to instill in him (he supposed that finally having a real, concrete goal in front of him provided that final push he'd always needed). But as much as the library could provide, they didn't have everything Danny needed. He was already planning to take several AP classes and even if the scholarship would pay for some course material, they surely wouldn't spill a penny more than necessary, so Danny saved up. 

 

 

Day after day, he sat at the bookshop counter, cheap markers and pens scattered around him and the book of the day, he ate less than he should have, and he slept. Well, not always, that last one. Some nights, he laid there, bone tired and yet unable to give in to sleep, eyes darting from left to right, as if trying to catch something. Could a ghost feel haunted? Because that's what he felt like. He felt the ghosts of his own actions, his mistakes and his choices, breathing down his neck like a bloody apparition. (How could he be so selfish? Was anything he was doing even worth it? At least before he was alone only in spirit. Now? Now he doesn't exist at all anymore.)  

At one point, tired even of looking at the ceiling, he stood up and in an almost mindless float, he found himself on the roof of the building. The sky was a gray, lifeless sheet of clouds and smoke, and the permanent lights of the city made it look constantly looming over the buildings, but Danny didn't find it intimidating. It wasn't quiet, and it wasn't peaceful, not in Crime Alley, but it did put things in perspective. At first Danny tried reading, but after hours upon hours of doing just that he really didn't see the charm of it.

At some point, he didn't know when, Danny started sketching. He didn't have the money for a sketchbook, so he mostly drew over the margins of the notebook he used to take notes. He didn't know how to draw very well, and had to use a pen, so naturally most of his drawings weren't the best, but it was soothing nonetheless. 

One night in the middle of May, two months since Danny had arrived, the sky was cloudless. It had been a very windy day, and the wind had carried the seemingly eternal wall of clouds away for a moment. Danny laid on the roof, an unusually chill end of spring  breeze ruffling his hair, and stared at the stars. They weren't as easy to see as they'd been in Amity, too washed out from the bright lights and persistent fumes coming from the city, but they seemed to shine with a different type of light. Maybe stars were made of something different here. 

A whirr and a soft thump broke Danny out of his musings, and he sat up to check it out. He turned towards the sound and there stood, on the roof of the building next to Danny's, the Red Hood, fiddling with a lock on the roof entrance. As he opened it, the man froze, then turned to face Danny, finally noticing him. Danny only raised a hand in greeting. After a second of hesitation, Hood, nodded sharply once, and disappeared in the door. Danny went back to looking at the stars. He wondered if they maybe even had different planets in the system. He'd have to check that out the next morning.

Notes:

danny:h-
every single gotdamn vigilante in a fucking tousand mile radio:

help why is it that big in pc mode

also i am my own worst enemy bc my probably ADHD ass would NEVER be able to read paragraphs this long, so i know, and im sorry that i suck at formatting.

Chapter 6: The Good And The Great (And The Worst Of Them All)

Notes:

lmao sorry for dipping for a hot minute there i got hit by a case of Life
as an apology get this short chapter that WILL make you pissed at me and probably sad
also i wrote a thing in the meanwhile if ur interested in a jason centric crack oneshot
!

Time passed, both at a snail's crawl and so fast Danny struggled to keep up, and soon school let out for summer vacation.

He'd "bought" the bus ticket that would corroborate his presence in Gotham almost a week before the end of the school year, and the moment his legal presence touched ground on the town's soil, he collected his ID and applied for the scholarship.

 

Thanks to Bruce Wayne, patron saint of all illegal interdimensional immigrants, that last step was not as hard as Danny would have guessed. As he had come to find in the past few months, the man had spent years and millions of dollars making sure that even people with more precarious backgrounds could get the education they deserved. 

Danny didn't struggle to admit he'd cried, after receiving the confirmation email that he'd been accepted in the selection roster for the scholarship.

He knew nothing was even decided, yet. But even then, just the simple possibility of things changing sent an impatient shiver through his body.

Things were ok, right now. They weren't great, not even good, but this moment was the stepping stone to getting there, and Danny felt excited for what was going to come, even if he knew it was far, far in the future (Danny didn't remember the last time he'd thought he was going to be happy).

 

The selection test would take place on the eighth of august, exactly two months after the end of the previous term. Danny's schedule did not change that much, with the start of summer, if not for a couple hours more spent on the library computers. He studied, most of all, crouched over thick, old (and probably outdated) books, or sitting in front a screen until his eyes watered and the library clerk started glaring at him. 

 

In the meanwhile, he started saving up. Were he to get in, the scholarship would provide him with a uniform and the textbooks for compulsory classes, but the material for the several AP classes Danny was planning to take were not going to be covered, and he knew that even buying second hand books was going to be expensive. 

At the end of the day, when finally came the moment to crash on the ratty couch, Danny was so tired, bones heavy and limbs like lead, that he most often slept peacefully. 

The nightmares still woke him in the middle of the night, but they didn't linger to the point of sleeplessness. 

 

One thing did change though, and that was the very strange relationship with his equally strange neighbor. Well, it didn't really change much as in that it simply existed at all, now, even as bare bones as it was . A week after their first encounter, Danny had come home from work to find a tweed basket on his couch, red ribbon and all. Inside of it, were an unexpected concoction of objects, which mostly consisted of cleaning products and snacks of various sorts. In a small paper envelope, Danny found a small stack of twenty-dollar bills and a note that only read the word ‘sorry’. 

 

The heavy duty bleach did do wonders in removing the red stain from the wooden paneling, although it left behind a slightly discolored patch, but it was still better that than something straight out of an active crime scene, so Danny took it as a win.

And really, both the snacks and the money did wonders for his eating regime. With it, he was able to afford a small electric camping stove and a pot, and now he could eat something other than things that came out of a box ready to serve. Sure, it was mostly plain pasta or rice, and maybe beans on some days, but that stuff was practically gourmet compared to what he'd been eating before.

 

In the following days, Danny had seen the guy another couple of times. It wasn't often, maybe once or twice every couple of weeks, and most of their interactions consisted of curt nods and waves from across building roofs. 

On one of the last nights of June, as Danny sat there in the tepid summer air, simply listening to the sounds of the night, the loud boom of an explosion shook the ground. It was close enough that he could see the flash of it going off but not enough he’d have to worry (the fact that he didn't do much more than be startled at the sound was a testament to how used already he was to Gotham as a whole). The moment it went off, several figures appeared on the city skyline, quickly headed to the source of the explosion.

 

Danny stretched his legs, trying to shake out the cramps that were starting to form from sitting for too long with his legs crossed. For almost twenty minutes, he watched the thick, dark smoke billow upwards in a massive column. The flames were waning, but were still strong enough to light up the smoke, painting it in reds and oranges. He sat there a bit more, until a soft thud behind him alerted to the presence of someone else.

 

“Shouldn’t you be inside taking shelter?” Red Hood said as Danny turned around to face him.

“I like watching the lights,” He shrugged, turning back to face the fire, which was being slowly put out. “Plus, it’s not like it's gonna do anything to me from this far away.” 

“That’s fair.” A pair of legs stepped up next to him, and Danny looked up to see that to accompany the slight smell of smoked leather, a slight sheen of ash was dusted on his shoulders. “And shouldn’t you be there dealing with the whole… you know?” Danny asked intelligently, waving in the vague direction of what had recently been a warehouse.

 

“My job is done for the night,” He shrugged nonchalantly. “Plus, there’s already enough people looking into the situation. Wouldn't want to step on anybody's toes.” 

Danny only hummed absently, and they both turned back to watch the fire burn, until almost half an hour later, the flames had disappeared completely, leaving behind only smoke and a few glowing embers. They didn't talk, nor did much to acknowledge each other’s presence, but it was a comfortable silence. This was probably the most significant interaction Danny had since he arrived here months ago that wasn't either his boss or a customer, and Danny was pretty content with it.

 

“You know, I've been seeing you around an awful lot recently for someone I’m pretty sure hasn’t been in town that long.” Hood broke the silence, turning his blank slate of a mask towards Danny. “You got caught in that robbery some months ago, and now I find out you live next to one of my places. I’m pretty sure I saw you on the fucking bus once. If I didn't know better, I’d think you’d been following me.” His tone was light, but there was a slight accusatory note in it that danny didn't dare to ignore.

 

“How do you even know I haven’t always lived here? Maybe I should be the one worried about stalking.” Danny shot back, raising an eyebrow. “After all I’m not the wanted crime lord out of the two of us. Plus, I’m sure someone would have noticed you if you were to take the bus, you know, with the red bucket and all.” Immediately after saying that, Danny winced internally, hoping the guy (the international, wanted criminal with a body count higher than Danny even wanted to think about) wouldn’t shoot him on the spot for acting too familiar with him, but Hood just snorted and sat down next to him, not too far that he needed to raise his voice to be heard but not too close to raise both their hackles.

 

“You don’t really have a Gotham accent, kid, and while I don't pretend to know every single person in here, I know I haven't seen you around here before a couple months ago.” Damn this guy is observant, Danny thought. “And I do have a life outside of… this,” he continued, gesturing to his getup as he said the last word, “ that requires me to use public transport.” For some reason, it seemed difficult to picture someone like the Red Hood as a normal person. 

 

Danny squinted at the man. “Are you that old lady with the pet snake that always looks me in the eye when she’s feeding it live mice?” Danny seriously didn’t know how she was allowed on the bus. 

“What the fuck? No?!” Hood sputtered, the sound coming out distorted through the voice modulator in his helmet. “What about the guy with the stuffed Chihuahua that was definitely alive at some point?" Hood stared at him with what Danny could only guess was a look of bafflement (the blank helmet didn't convey anything but a deadpan stare, so Danny could only imagine what face the guy was making underneath it). 

It was surprisingly easy, talking with Hood, considering he was a homicidal murderer turned hesitant morally-gray vigilante, but Danny found himself relaxing as they talked about the weirdest encounters they'd had with Gotham's populace. 

 

It was well after midnight, when Danny started struggling to contain the yawns, when Red Hood stood up and made to leave. "I'll leave you to get some rest." Danny sleepily nodded with a mumbled "Night", and once the masked man had smoothly jumped over to the other building, he waved once and ducked back inside his apartment, crashing on the couch like the dead (ha!).

 

_._._._._

 

Danny hadn't thought much of that encounter. It had probably just been a one time thing, and now that the vigilante had assuaged his worries about him being a potential danger, he would soon move on to his next target. Instead, Danny's encounters with the man only increased. A couple times a week, never on the same days, as Danny sat in silence (as much silence you can have in a city as restless as Gotham), he was joined by the mask, and they talked about nothing and everything. Danny was unsure of how to feel about this development, because on one hand, he really could not understand why the man even bothered with him, to spend hours he could have surely invested in something more productive just to talk to a random kid. 

But on the other side. On the other side, Danny had started to live for these encounters. One thing vital about Danny was, that despite being very introverted, he didn't do really well alone. And here, surrounded by unknown faces and foreign roads, he was starting to feel too much like a castaway, lost in a too vast ocean (but he'd been alone long before arriving here, hadn't he?). 

So he grasped onto this small piece of driftwood, clinging to it with all the strength he had, and hoped not to drown. 

 

At some point, Hood started stopping by with bags of still-hot take out, claiming it still was to repay Danny for sewing him up all that time ago. Danny had hesitated in the beginning, but had quickly given in to the prospect of free, freshly made food. He didn't care to deny for some twisted sense of dignity, because Danny had learned long ago that pride did you no favors except digging your grave a lot earlier. 

Hood never ate. He never removed his helmet, but little by little, Danny liked to think he was getting to know the man, even without knowing all the superficial information. To Danny, a real name, a face, they weren't really all that important. 

But he knew smaller, yet somehow much more important details, like how he seemed to tense whenever one of the other vigilantes were brought up, yet never talked harshly about them, how involved he was in making sure the streets felt even just a little safer for the common folk, or, strangely enough, how utterly he despised pigeons (maybe it was that the pesky birds shat on every inch of the city without a care, or maybe it was the fact that most of them had probably come in contact with dubious substances and now resembled a strange mix of bane and poison ivy, with weirdly muscular bodies and toxic green feathers). 

Danny wouldn't call this a friendship, but it was certainly something to enjoy.

 

 

Of course, good things never lasted long.

 

 

August seventh, the day before the entrance test for the Gotham Academy scholarship, was set to fall on a Sunday, and Danny knew that if he tried studying any more he'd only stress himself out more. So he'd decided to take a day of rest, not bothering to even set an alarm to wake him up. 

 

At some point in the morning, when the sun was already high , the sound of tires screeching and a singular gunshot going off in the distance woke Danny up.

Sleep had left his mouth dry as a desert so he stood up blearily, opening his eyes just enough to make sure he wasn't walking into any walls, and walked over to where he kept his bottled water. (Yes, the building had running water, but it was far from drinkable, and although it might not have been able to kill Danny off permanently, he really could live without having his mouth taste like rust every time he got thirsty). Without looking, he blindly grasped for the bottle on the table. After missing several times, Danny resigned to having to open his eyes. As he tried once again to grab the water, Danny watched with growing horror as he failed again to wrap his fingers around the plastic bottle.

 

He tried again, his chest suddenly feeling too tight.

 

Once again, his hand passed through the bottle, intangible and almost transparent. 

 

The buzzing in his ears was deafening, his whole body trembling. His chest was an ice block, and his limbs felt like they were simultaneously made of lead and helium. Why? Why now? He couldn't deal with this now.  

 

Taking in a deep, shaky breath, Danny stared intensely at his hands. By now, the translucency was slowly but surely creeping up his wrists. Please, no. Trembling, he tried, again and again, to grab anything, the bottle, the table, the phone, his own hands, getting increasingly frantic with every failed attempt.

 

He took a step back, and when he looked down, he was standing in the middle of his chair, phased into it. Oh God.

He stumbled away, falling to the ground. He wasn't- he wasn't even properly touching the floor, instead floating a good inch over it.

 

This had never happened before- if he could just get his powers under control- if he could just focus-   

He grasped his head in his hands, tears flowing freely from his eyes. Yet even they were not solid enough to pool on the floor, instead falling silently through the paneling.

Is it my time? Am I going to vanish now, and no one will realize? I don't want to go yet. I'm not ready. Please. 

 

Notes:

hope you suffered! also i have a tumblr !!!

Chapter 7: And I Keep Fallin', I Keep Fallin' Down

Notes:

and then i said 'im gonna update once a month', you know, like a liar.
lol sorry for the wait ig
also didnt answer to a lot of comments bc brain no workee but i saw a lot of yalls theories for whats happening and i think only like two people even got close to it but nice try to everyone else

Jason didn't know what to think about his new neighbor.  

With his thin frame and eyes that knew too much for their age, the boy reminded Jason a little too much of himself if instead of being angry at the world he'd chosen to mourn his every loss. In the short time Jason had known Danny, a melancholic, slightly regretful air had stayed firmly settled around him, like it'd been physically weighing down his shoulders. Even when he smiled, his eyes retained a certain somber quality, like he'd lived something he could never forget, even for just an instant. 

 

And yet, the kid still looked at the world with such wonder Jason couldn't help but think that whatever had hurt Danny somehow hadn't managed to be quite enough to break him completely. 

 

So when he felt a wave of wrongness drift over from the abandoned building the kid had taken residence in, ignoring all instincts that were telling him that now was the moment to run, get away from whatever was inside there, danger , he stood up, ignoring the pit crawling under his skin. Instead of turning and hightailing it as far away as he physically could from whatever was making that green part of him so, so afraid, he took a breath, put on his helmet and ducked out of his apartment window and into the kid's. 

 

He didn't know what to expect, but whatever he was standing in front of really didn't fit in the realm of possibilities Jason could have even started to imagine. The room was much like the first time he’d seen it, mostly bare except for a few pieces of forniture, but the biggest difference was the kid himself. Jason knew, rationally that Danny couldn’t have been older than sixteen, but he’d had that old look in his eyes that really all street kids have, like he had seen and lived through too much to be properly considered a child, and for up until now, Jason hadn't really processed that no matter what, Danny was still so painfully young. (Jason was nineteen. He, too, had lived so many terrible, terrible things to be anything remotely close to innocent. He’d done just as many terrible things. And still, he was much too young. No one is ever the right age to suffer. ) 

 

But in that moment, Jason looked at Danny and realized that, as strong as he had been until now, all the kid needed was someone to offer help. (Jason remembered being twelve and alone, living on the streets, obstinately stubborn that he could manage on his own, and yet still yearning desperately for someone to just care .)

 

Danny was on the ground in the middle of the room, close to the side of the couch but not quite leaning on it, with his arms wrapped around his knees. Jason couldn’t see the kid’s face, but going by the choked, gasping breaths coming from Danny, he was sure he was crying. As another almost violent tremor shook through Danny’s body, Jason felt his heart stumble in his chest. 

 Slowly, he approached him, making sure to be in the kid's range of sight and willing his footsteps louder than he normally would. No use of scaring the kid more than he already was.

"Danny?" He called, crouching slowly in front of him, but the teen didn't give sign of having heard. "Hey, kid, it's me. Hood." Jason didn't know what he was doing. "It's ok, listen to me. You're safe."

"Shit," he cursed when he went to put his hand on Danny's shoulder and it slipped right through him. 

 

Jason didn't know much about the kid to begin with, but in that moment, a new piece of the puzzle slid into place and suddenly he found himself staring at a much clearer picture. Jason had heard one too many story of children suddenly developing meta abilities and being driven away from home by scared, hateful parents, and according to the thin, white lines that could be seen on the kid's chest when his too-large shirt's collar dipped, his parents hadn't been loving before then, either. 

 

But Jason didn't know what had triggered the episode, or if it even was something that needed to be triggered, and not simply control slipping out of Danny's hands unprompted. He didn't know what to do, if he could do anything to help at all. 

"You're safe." He repeated, because at least he could comfort the kid through the attack until it was over. 

Danny finally raised his head, but even though his eyes were on Jason, they were glassy and unseeing. Tears were pouring heavily down his cheeks, and he was gasping for air like he'd been drowning. 

"Kid, can you hear me? You need to slow down your breathing, you- shit," he removed his helmet. The last thing Danny needed was an impassive mask and a voice filter that made Jason sound uncaring at best. 

"It's ok, it's ok. No one can hurt you, you're home." Jason kept trying to reassure the boy, hoping that at least some part of him was hearing his words. 

~*~*~*~

Danny was going to disappear, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He was disappearing, and no one would notice. 

He could feel it, he was starting to lose feeling in his extremities. Was this how it felt, to vanish into thin air? Like being unraveled from each end, like a blanket with a loose thread?

His chest hurt. Why did his chest hurt, if he wasn't even real anymore? Why did it feel like he was suffocating? His ears were ringing. No, not ringing. It was a buzzing sound, almost metallic. Then, the noise changed. It was… a voice? Someone was speaking. To Danny? How… Danny didn't want to go, yet. And the voice… You're safe . Safe? Danny hadn't been safe in years. And yet, Danny wanted to believe the voice. He wasn't gone yet. It's ok. I'm here for you. 

 

Danny blinked. The owner of the voice was crouched in front of him, the red domino mask covering his eyes not enough to hide the worried look on his unfamiliar face. 

"Hood?" Danny asked, voice hoarse, taking in the familiar leather jacket and the red helmet lying on the ground next to him.  

 

Right. Danny remembered Hood. He was… a friend? He didn't know if that was the right word. Simply, he cared, and Danny cared, too. Danny liked caring. He liked the feeling of someone caring about him. It made something inside of his chest come alive, like a sort of humming that warmed his bones.

 

The man sighed in relief and sat back on his haunches, taking in a shaky breath. He nodded once, and slowly brought a hand up to rest on Danny's arm. It- huh. Danny stared in confusion at the hand on his arm, puzzled at the warmth of the contact seeping through the thin shirt he was wearing. Ah. He wasn't gone yet, then. 

Slowly, Danny unfurled his legs and arms, and patted himself with his hands. He had to check. But all of him seemed to be back to full solidity, like he'd never started vanishing. 

"Hey, are you fee- woah!" Hood started, but was quickly interrupted by Danny throwing himself bodily on him, sending them both sprawled on the ground. 

Danny laid there, with his arms around Hood's neck and his head on his chest, listening to the quick pace of his heart. Slowly, minute after minute, Hood untensed under him, his heartbeat going back to a slow, comforting rhythm in Danny's ears. 

"I'm still here, right?" Danny asked then, voice barely a whisper.

"Yeah," he responded after a pause. "You're here." He brought a hand to rest on Danny's back, heavy and solid and so very real. 

You're safe .

They stayed like that for so long Danny was pretty sure he'd fallen asleep at some point, because when he opened his eyes again, the sun was starting to set, a golden light spreading over the room. 

As he sat back up, Danny realized that Hood, too, was asleep. (Jason hadn't felt comfortable enough to let his guard slip around someone since he was fourteen and still calling the Wayne Manor home.)

Danny poked the older- although not as much as Danny had first guessed, going by the young features of his face- man in the side a couple times, too spent to even think about being embarrassed. He knew, logically, that he should feel some kind of embarrassment, but his bones felt heavy with fatigue, and he couldn’t muster up the strength to feel anything more than grateful. 

With a tired groan Hood sat up next to him, rubbing his face with both his hands. “Are you feeling better?” he asked after a silent pause, voice rough from sleep. 

Thankfully, Hood did not ask Danny to explain what had happened, and after that, neither of them spoke much, but Hood refused to leave until Danny had made it abundantly clear that he was not at risk of something happening again. (At that, being confronted with even such a small crumb of care , a part of Danny, one he thought had died a long time ago, one buried so deep in the back of his mind, shook off a little of the brine that had been encasing it).

 

That night, laying there in the dark, surrounded only by the sounds of the city and the ever present fear of disappearing, he didn't sleep.

 

The following day passed in a haze, which was not very good, considering it was the day the admittance test for the scholarship was taking place. Still, he went through the motions of getting ready like a spectator to his own actions, and walked up to Gotham Academy and into the designated room with heavy limbs and a heavier heart.

 

The test was… a lot. Sitting there for what felt like days but had really been three hours and forty five minutes, surrounded by a dozen other people and trying to concentrate on what the political consequences of the hundred-year war had been was certainly not helped by the persistent feeling of weariness clouding his mind.

He walked back home on autopilot, both body and mind so tired he didn’t spend a second thinking the test over. What was done was done, and now there was only waiting. The results would be out the following week, so Danny laid on his couch, and welcomed the quiet of unconsciousness. 

 

For six days he did not stir, going into a sort of vegetative state. He didn't eat, he didn't drink. Hell, he barely even breathed. But most importantly, he didn't dream. On the seventh day, he woke to his phone completely dead and a strange sort of smell in the Gotham sky. The smell, which was an unpleasant, sickly sort of sweet, was accompanied by the sound of sirens and the much closer sound of terrified screams. Danny looked outside the window with bleary eyes, only to spot several people on the streets, some on the ground, cowering in fear, others frantically running from nothing at all. In the distance, an explosion went off, and a cloud of vomit-green smoke rose to the sky.

Ah , Danny thought. So it’s Scarecrow this week. After the third attack he’d assisted to in a month, Danny had seriously considered keeping tally of them to see how long it took to get the full rogue gallery. Sort of like pokemon, you know?

 

Calmly, he swapped the window frame he usually used, which was made of a couple pieces of plastic melted together, and let light into the room, for the reinforced one he had made specifically after the second smoke grenade that landed at his feet. It was made of wood and metal scraps he’d found dumpster diving, and while it wasn’t airtight, it was pretty good for keeping out any undesired object, and any poisonous gas that still managed to slip through was rendered useless by Danny’s very small need to breathe. And if he somehow still inhaled some of it, Danny’s blood was acid enough to burn through anything before it started circulating in his body.

 

Now that he felt rested enough (physically, at least), as he sat in the dark waiting for his phone to be charged enough to turn on, he felt the fear of potential failure settle back in on him. Because this was Gotham, and there are just so many times life can be put on hold before a toxic gas attack becomes a minor inconvenience, the results went up with a thirteen-minute delay. 

 

He opened the email.

 

Mr Fenton, the Martha Wayne Foundation is happy to congratulate - 

He closed his eyes, and slid a bit further down the couch. Fuck yes.

He’d have to put a lot of shit in order in the next few weeks, buy the school books and material the foundation wouldn’t cover, but now was no time for that. What he wanted now was some fast food, because while he technically didn’t need to eat, he sure liked it, so he would get up and- nevermind. Chemical attack going on outside, not the best environment for a quick trip to batburger and all that. Shame.

~*~*~*~

Monday was shaping up to being very boring, Danny decided, now that he didn't even have several years worth of school content to frantically study to keep him occupied during the lulls between customers at work. 

So when the door chime announced someone entering the shop, Danny perked up at the opportunity to do something that wouldn't kill the last of his brain cells by listening to some idiot's opinion on tiktok.

Danny was surprised to see Skunk-Boy so soon, considering it hadn't even been a week since his last visit, but nonetheless went to greet him when he realized that- ah. Of course. He really should have realized sooner. 

Danny watched Red Hood browse the store like everything was normal, and pick two small, tattered books out of the shelves. He settled them on the counter in front of Danny and pulled his wallet out to pay. 

"So," Danny said, scanning the book prices. "Are we, like. Pretending I don't know?" 

"What?" Hood startled at being addressed like that. 

"I mean. It's not like there's a lot of people going around with their hair like that, Skunk-Boy," Danny continued, ignoring an enraged 'Skunk-Boy?!’ from Hood, "Plus, you're also wearing the same jacket you wear as Hood. Seriously dude, your disguises could do with some refining. Also, your total is eleven seventy." Hood only gaped for a moment, mouth opening and closing as he tried to find something to say. Then he scowled hard enough Danny was worried his face would get stuck like that. 

"You know what? Fuck you, I'll be right back." Then he turned and left, without his books. 

Fifteen minutes later, he was back, sporting this time a worn black hoodie and a beanie to cover his hair, sporting the same frown as before- wow, maybe it really was stuck like that now. 

“So, what's up with the hair?” Danny asked, grinning at the other man- and wow he did really look young. He couldn't have been more than a couple of years older than Danny.

“It’s like that on its own,” Hood grumbled, like this wasn't the first time he had this argument.”  

“You’re telling me you- what, won the e-boy genetic lottery?” Danny raised an eyebrow, but Hood’s face only contorted more, this time in confusion. 

“See, you just said a bunch of words, most  of which i know the meaning of on their own, but somehow you managed to say something that made no fucking sense.”

“That sucks, I guess. As I said before, your total is four twenty dollars and sixty nine cents.”

“You know it’s not.”

“Yeah but it’s funny.”

“Just give me the damn books.”

(And if before storming out of the store blustering and stomping he ruffled the Dnny’s hair and checked him over to make sure he was ok, well that was his business and his business alone.)

Notes:

ok so ill have to explain some shit here bc i danny really doesnt know any of this, bc while he is a ghost he never had anyone explain shit to him. the point is that danny, like any other ghost, needs an obsession to keep him here, but while for full ghosts it's an all encompassing desire that controls them more than they control it, for him its more what anchors him to eality, and its much less strong, and thats why he was even able to leave amity behind. his anchor is not so much protection but his loved ones themselves, because he doesnt think life is worth not-living if he doesnt have his loved ones. in amity he was able to cling to his sense of duty more than his affection torwards his family and 'friends' but now that he's completely cut ties and hes alone, his control starts slipping. in the same vein, right now jason is the only tether he has to reality.

hope everything was clear
also this chapter feels kinda weird idk tell me what you think

Chapter 8: The Twilight Zone

Notes:

HEEYYYY BITCHES HOW YALL DOINGGGG!!!!
yes its been two years but what can i say. i got a job. i worked a job. had several emotional and mental breakdowns. quit my job. got prescripted antidepressants and anxiety medication. decided uni was a thing i had to do. got into uni. am now procrastinating studying. yayyyy
kneeways heres nothing

On some days, Danny felt a strange sense of disconnection from his life. It was almost like hearing a conversation from behind a door, words easily understandable yet still muffled. 

It wasn’t a new feeling, Danny realized. It had been there, maybe not always, but since a long time ago, some days more and others less. Maybe, in the middle of the night, as he had tried to catch his breath, a part of him had felt that missing connection to reality, but in the end, it had been overshadowed by other responsibilities and issues.

But as he sat in his drafty, abandoned building of a home, the cold, hollow feeling that sat in his stomach and snaked inside his limbs was all he had to think about.

 

The tiny digits on his phone screen signaled midnight. Happy death day, he thought to himself. Danny looked on as the clock kept ticking forward. One part of him felt confused, like he’d expected something to happen. What, he didn’t know. After all, the world hadn’t bothered to stop on the day he died, so why would it acknowledge that it had been two years since then? (No one had even seemed to notice, forget about caring)

 

There was a dark sense of irony to this day. Nothing would be different, the next twenty-four hours mind numbingly similar to all those that came before it since coming here. It lined up perfectly with the day of his actual death: a shitty day, preceded by other shitty days and followed by countless other just as shitty days.

 

Maybe it was a little morbid to celebrate the day of your own death, but Danny was not really doing much celebrating at all. Maybe that's worse, he thought, as he stared at the sliver of artificial light coming through the cracks of the window paneling. 

 

At some point through his musings, he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, he was waking up, a strange, chirping sound echoing throughout the room. It was still dark outside, although according to his phone it was not night anymore and just one of Gotham’s preferred grey days, but the room was bathed in a feeble, toxic green light.

 

Danny stared at the ecto-blob in confusion, as it floated around his living room, emitting curious noises as it poked at Danny's belongings. 

Ah, shit, he thought. 

 

He had been aware, in the back of his mind, that a permanently open gateway would sooner or later attract attention from either side, and since Batman had already dealt with one of them, it was only a matter of time before the less-than-living side of reality started poking their heads in the portal. But Danny had liked pretending the portal was a non-issue, and until now, it had been, and things had been great (they’d been fine at most, but the absence of bloodthirsty ghosts did great for Danny's morale.).

 

Now, confronted by how looking away from your problems and pretending they simply weren't there didn't work, Danny kind of wanted to stomp his feet and whine about how it wasn't fair, but since he was a self-respecting undead teenager, he only shoved his face in a pillow and screamed a little. At the sound, the blob startled, and floated warily over to Danny. When the boy didn't seem to make any move, the blob hesitantly nudged his arm. 

 

He sighed and patted it lightly. It cooed again, then settled on top of Danny's head, nestling in his hair. Danny didn’t know how to feel about ecto-blobs, other than the fact that they were a clear sign that the portal was picking up activity. On their own, they weren’t either good or bad. They were just round masses of ectoplasm with no discerning feature nor particular sentience that floated around in search of bigger sources of energy to be assimilated into. Most of the time, they just floated in Danny’s proximity for a day or two until he naturally assimilated them (a couple of times, a blob had tried to get Danny to actively eat it, which had been extremely unpleasant for the boy).

 

The time on his phone told him it was almost time for his alarm to go off, so he got up and got dressed quickly to head to work.  As he walked through the streets, he promised himself he’d check out the other side of the portal and see how long he had before the crazies started showing up- wait. Did living in a world where even normal people could be superpowered mean the ghosts would be juiced up too? Ah, well. It sounded like Danny was in for a real good time. 

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

“Okay. It’s definitely staring at me.” 

“How do you even know that? It doesn't have eyes.” 

“Because it’s following me when I move, dude.” To prove that, Signal took a step to the side, and the thing in front of him mirrored the movement.

“What is it, anyways?” Oracle’s voice through the comms pulled the two vigilantes from their bickering “I’m looking at the feed from your cameras, but whatever it is you’re looking at is causing some kind of interference in the feed. I only see a green spot with static around.” 

Red Robin frowned at the thing in front of them. “I have no idea what it is, but it does look like a floating green blob. It’s almost like it’s made of some kind of plasma-like substance containing energy? I am so confused.” 

Signal eyed the thing worriedly as it started inching more towards him. “Uh, guys?” he called, but both Red Robin and Oracle were too concentrated on trying to figure out the energy readings the thing gave off and trying to figure out its nature to hear him. 

“Guys!’’ He repeated, raising his voice, as the blob got closer and closer to him 

“Uh oh” Red Robin said, finally focusing on the rapidly advancing blob.

“What do I do what do I do what do I do!” Duke was panicking. He kept backing away, but the back of the alley they were in was getting closer and closer. “Red, do something!” he yelled, and Tim scrambled for his bo staff, quickly unfolding it. He swiped it at the blob, and the two watched as it slid cleanly through it, not even halting it in its course. 

Signal squeaked a bit, and Red Robin let out a curse. On the comms, Oracle was saying something, but Duke wasn’t really listening. As it got to inches of him, Signal closed his eyes and held his breath.

 

When nothing happened, and both Red Robin and Oracle had fallen silent, Signal risked opening an eye. He looked around, but the blob was nowhere to be seen. “It’s- gone? Just like that?” He asked, hesitantly relieved, turning to the other vigilante.

“Uh,” Signal didn't like the look on Red Robin’s face. “Not- not really.” He pointed to Signal’s shoulder, and when the boy looked- the cursed thing was sitting there. 

His scream was loud enough it could be heard on the other side of the city.

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

“What’s going on here?” Bruce asked as he stepped foot in the cave. At his words, three heads snapped towards him. A stool with several energy monitoring devices had been carried over to the bat-computer, where Barbara’ face was projected on the main screen. Duke, still in uniform save for the helmet, was sitting at the computer’s chair, and Tim, who was also still wearing his costume except for his gloves and cape, was pointing at one of the several measuring tools at the first boy. On the side, Damian, the only one in civilian clothing, stood with his sword drawn. 

“Oh thank god you're here.” Tim said, deflating. “Just to be clear, none of this is our fault.” 

Bruce stiffened. That didn't bode well. As he walked toward his children, Tim stepped away from Duke, revealing the subject of their panicking. It was a… thing, certainly. Green, roughly spherical and lightly glowing. It didn't look menacing, but Bruce knew better than not regard the thing with absolute prejudice because of that. 

“We found it in an alley near the West End while we were looking into that thing with the Bolivian cartel, and it hasn’t shown any hostility yet, but it seems to be particularly interested in Duke.” Tim started explaining. “We did some analysis, but its giving results I don't understand. It seems to give off both low level radiation and UV rays all while being electrically charged. Also, I think we found a new state of matter, because this thing seems to just ignore quite a few laws of physics.” 

Before Tim could devolve into an hour-long rant on specifics and technicalities, he was interrupted by Barbara’s voice coming from the bat-computer’s speakers.

“I received the data you just sent me, and I’m running it through our servers to see if we’ve ever recorded something similar.” Just as she finished speaking, a ping came from her side of the call, and she quickly checked the results. 

“It’s-huh,” she frowned at her screen, and Bruce resented that. “Data almost identical to this one, if only in typology and not magnitude, was recorded on two other occasions by Batman and Red Robin. Hold on, let me check,” She typed something on her keyboard, the clacking sound reverberating sonorously through the cave. “It’s- oh yeah, that checks out- either of your encounters with the portal situated in Warehouse 13 and the unknown identified with the codename ‘glowstick boy’-” Bruce’s ‘That is not the approved codename, Barbara,’ was promptly ignored, “the readings are nearly identical, although the boy gives off a distinct electrical field either the blob and the portal are missing.”

 

 

While the others discussed the technicalities of the entity, the blob on Duke’s shoulder migrated down his arm, wrapping itself around his hand. Nervously, Duke lifted it to his chest, cradling his englobed hand in the other. Apparently satisfied, the blob released his hand and settled in the cranny formed between his chest and arms, almost wiggling to fit in the tight space.

 

That was kinda cute, thought Duke almost hysterically, moving a hand to hesitantly pet the top of the thing. As he did so, the blob gave a sort of pleased chirrup, moving up slightly to meet his palm as he instinctively went to move it away. As he pet the thing more, it seemed to almost melt in his grasp, a low buzzing sound coming from it.

After several minutes like that, Duke started relaxing. The little guy wasn’t that bad after all. In fact, it was sort of adorable.

 

“Uh, Duke?” Steph’s voice broke him out of his thoughts, and suddenly Duke noticed that all eyes in the room were pointed at him.

 

“It’s ok guys, I think it might be friendly- or, well, not hostile at least.” Duke reassured, but Bruce immediately stepped up with a shake of his head. “We don’t know if it’s going to remain that way. Until we know exactly what it is, we have to assume it’s dangerous.”

 

“This little guy? C’mon, B, there’s no way he has bad intention, he’s literally purring. Like a cat! And even if he did, you heard Babs, he’s so weak we wouldn’t struggle stopping him if he went rogue!” At that, Bruce let out a deep sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘’Him? Don’t tell me you’re already attached to the thing.”

 

“His name is Blob Ross.”

 

“Good Lord.”

 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

In the weeks before the start of school, a strange sense of calm excitement settled into Danny’s daily routine. Now that the scholarship entrance exam was done, without that frantic rush to cram as much information in his brain, Danny could wade through his days at a slower pace. In less than twenty-five days, he’d be sitting in a classroom once again, this time surrounded by complete strangers. To everyone else- teachers, students, even the janitors- he would be a blank slate. Not the son of the town’s mad scientists, not the flaky kid who missed so many lessons and came in bruised more often than not- just one of the hundreds of kids that attended the academy.

 

The concept itself is freeing, and Danny felt a sort of manic breathlessness at the mere thought.

 

At the same time, nothing will be familiar to him. He’d gone through the past fifteen years of his life knowing almost everything about his surroundings. Amity hadn’t been small enough that its inhabitants were living in each other’s pockets, but after almost two years of protecting it, flying daily over it, he’d known each back street like the palm of his hand, and most of its citizens if not by name, then by face. Hell, he’d basically spent all ten years of schooling with roughly the same thirty people.

 

And now, while no one would know him, he too would be in open waters.

 

Danny had two weeks left before he’d be thrown to the sharks. He’d gotten his uniform fitted two days before, thankfully avoiding any Harry Potter-esque scene in the tailor shop’s fitting rooms, so all that was left to do was buy the books. Thankfully, the books weren’t pre-bought by the school, but a small fund from the foundation was allotted to each beneficiary to choose their own material, as each student could choose their classes. This way, Danny could buy secondhand books for his normal classes and still have some money left for the AP classes materials. He’d still have to dig into his meagre savings, but this way he wouldn’t have to deplete it completely.

 

Hood- Jason, as he’d introduced himself this morning when he’d offered to help him carry his books from the library, was walking next to him, arms full of school textbooks.

 

They walked in comfortable silence, and something inside of Danny settled. He’d be fine, maybe.

Notes:

ok so ive been reading this other fic and it was tim/danny and it got me thinking sooo bad. would yall like to see something like that or should i keep it familial?

edit: allright everypony ive seen yalls opinions and will be keeping this stricly platonic- also considering the fact that a ship would have made my own life harder and the fact that i never planned for it when i started it i would have had to overhaul the whole thing. maybe ill write a oneshot some other time about it but for now this boy is getting more siblings than he can count

also forgive the shitty chapter as i try futilely to get back into writing