Chapter Text
"Mount Everest ain't got shit on me"
Chapter One
Tim Drake
It’s not the first time someone has hovered over his still, unbreathing body, but there’s a radical change in intentions.
“Danny, please,” murmurs his sister, Jazz, mournfully. “You need to get up. Please.”
In the corner of the room– he doesn’t have to open his eyes to know; the core of his existence is tied to their prolonged presence– are the only two other people in the world who care about his existence. Well, that’s a lie. Plenty of people, both living and dead, care that he’s still roaming about. Again, there’s a dramatic difference in intentions.
When Tucker started turning away first, and Sam’s glare bordered on poltergeist territory, Danny got the message, too. That his prolonged existence is too painful for them, too.
“You need to eat,” pleads Jazz, a pillar of immovable sisterly love and concern. “Drink something, at least. Move.”
If you’d asked Danny five years ago, he would have told you that he’d died five years ago. That day in the lab. When childish curiosity had him venturing into the portal, had him experience– to date– true and vivid torture. If you’d asked his parents, too, they would tell you that their beloved son, Danny Fenton, died exactly two years ago.
Present-day Danny thinks that he’s still in the dying process. The only reason he hasn’t succumbed is that others need him. The only others he’d deign to need back.
So, at Jazz’s request, he drags himself out of his apartment for the first time in days– out of his room, for that matter, haggard, ragged, run-down-to-the-bone and every other adjective you can think of that means bone-tired . And at her insistence, he reluctantly makes his way to the bodega down the street from his shitty, cash-only apartment building. Impenetrable stomach and stellar immunity system aside, Sam and Jazz banded together to throw out the moldy ingredients in his fridge– and mysteriously block the sink so he wouldn’t drink from its murky water.
“There!” Tucker’s trying to act enthusiastic, mustering up energy where Danny can’t. “Ohh, Sam, we never get these kinds of snacks at Amity. What the fuck’s a Bat Chip? Get that.”
Wordlessly, feeling faint in the harsh fluorescent light of the store and distracted by the whirring of a broken machine somewhere, Danny obeys, and reaches for one of the many Bat-themed products he’d seen around town.
“Okay, but you need to get something healthy, something hearty,” Jazz acquiesces. “Bread. Jam? We can make that bacon in the morning, Danny.”
That’s it with Jazz and Tucker. They’re always and hopelessly optimistic. It’s always we with them. We will make breakfast in the morning, Danny. We should go for a walk, Danny. We will survive this, Danny.
The plastic, bullet-hole ridden basket becomes heavier the more Danny trudges the aisles of the small but surprisingly bodega as it’s filled with the eclectic tastes of not one, but three different people, excluding Danny himself. When he’s done, he pays in cash; Sam makes him buy two of those eco-friendly bags so that he won’t have to use plastic bags. He, as always, pays more attention to the dead than the living.
Danny meets Tim Drake in the elevator. Just as the elevator breaks down, violently jolting in place before settling precariously.
Danny wishes he could say this wasn’t a common occurrence, but it is in the shitty building they live in. It’s not the first time the elevator has been stuck. All the other times, though, he’d been alone and simply phased back to his apartment; let someone else deal with the problem for once. Silently, and resigned to his fate of waiting this out, Danny presses the Call for Help button that he’s pretty sure doesn’t work.
Because he’s not alone today.
The scoff that seems to be permanently stuck in Danny’s nostrils finally gets a good reason to, you know, be scoffed. The annoyed sound he makes is offsetted by the only other person in the elevator’s breath audibly hitching in panic. It’s a guy who lives a couple of floors up in the only apartment that can access the rooftop. Like with all of his neighbors, Danny has kept a polite distance from him, not wanting to–
“Oh, he looks handsome,” Sam had commented the first time they’d seen him in a Margot Robbie, Wolf of Wall Street-esque accent. Tucker, despite his ability to literally shift through Danny– and walls and floors and objects, lurks over Danny’s shoulder. Jazz agreed with her, then shuddered because the guy, according to her, looks too much like Danny for her to consider him attractive.
“I have one word for you,” had been Tucker’s response, uncaring that they were talking over Danny’s head in the very same elevator. Tucker, sans glasses Tucker, had raised one finger in Jazz’ face. “Twincest.”
Ew ! Two identical sounds of disgust– Jazz and Sam– followed in tandem with Danny’s silent disturbed look.
Tucker had floundered. “Not Jazz and the neighbor. Danny and the neighbor.”
Danny had facepalmed when, after a beat, Jazz and Sam had agreed.
Turning into half a ghost, fighting countless foes, taking Pariah Dark’s title of King, being experimented on by his parents and an opaque governmental entity only jaded him enough to ignore the first alarmed noise of the neighbor. The second expression of fear gets a concerned look from Danny. The third–
A throat clearing doesn’t exactly make his voice any less hoarse or grating. “You okay, man?” he asks anyway.
His (they’re not twins, okay? They’re not that similar up close) neighbor is glaring a mighty lot into his own shoes, looking resentful and panicked at the same. The latter a cause for the former, apparently.
“Yes,” his neighbor says through gritted teeth; Danny notices that his arm is wrapped in a heavily-decorated brace– so is his leg. Great. Another issue. Rules of neighborly conduct already have Danny situated on the other side of the tiny elevator. Close enough to touch, to hurt, but the way the neighbor’s huddled against the buttons, Danny’s ghostly senses aren’t exactly blaring. His sensitive hearing, however, picks up on the skip in his heart when he says, “Claustrophobic.”
It’s not a complete lie. Maybe an understatement? A past experience?
“Oh,” Danny says, uninterested, and also because he has to say something. Awkward, tension-filled silence acts as a third presence in the small space after. The neighbor seems to get a handle on his nerves, stoically clenching his jaw– the things Tucker and Sam would say if they were here about that jawline. A determined okay is whispered before he starts trying to get a signal on his phone to call for help.
Danny lets his head drop against the metallic wall, and closes his eyes in resignation. He readjusts to let the grocery bags in his hand drop to the ground and then crosses his arms, in it for the long haul.
He opens his eyes at the sound of a mild swear. “No signal,” the guy informs Danny. With the attitude of a problem-solver, albeit a bit more frantic, he starts exploring the tiny elevator, starting with the Call for Help button and the phone. When the duct taped wire disconnects from the wall almost immediately, Danny almost laughs, and the guy slams it back with gusto.
“How shitty is this building?” the guy mulls in disbelief.
The bout of amusement leaves Danny jubilant enough to respond. “Very very shitty,” he says with a breathy smile, still amused. “I know this is, like, the worst thing to say to a claustrophobic person, but relax. This happens all the time. This your first time?”
Disbelief bleeds into, great, horror. “Christ,” he swears. Pushed hard enough, he goes to force the doors open. They don’t even budge a little. Oh, so the building did spluge on something, then.
“Hey, man–” Danny tries and fails to get his attention as the guy, effectively having reached his limit, starts to, like, jump up and down, trying to reach the ceiling tiles. It’s Danny’s turn to feel alarmed when the elevator chamber is rocked by the guy’s rapid movements. It’s not so much fear as it is…resignation again, is that the right word? Because Danny won’t die in an elevator accident, and he also doesn’t want to see someone else die via it. If the guy doesn’t stop, Danny will have to expose his identity by saving them, and Batman allegedly hates metas, and Danny will have to spend weeks alongside Tucker, Jazz, and Sam trying to carve a new identity in a new city. Ugh, he’s becoming exhausted just thinking about it.
Any hope of being just a spectator plummets when the guy turns to face him with an expectant, sort of desperate look that Danny can’t resist. “Help me up?”
“Oh, this is just like a rom-com,” says Tucker from…somewhere. He manifests right next to the guy, hearts in his eyes. Sam appears behind him, rolling her eyes, arms crossed. “Don’t really help him! You can sit, chat, charm– hold on, I gotta get some info of this guy before–”
“Already done.” Jazz appears, all business-like. “Timothy Drake, apartment 501. He either runs a coffee shop or is addicted to caffeine– like, he could power this elevator by what’s running in his veins right now. And he’s a photographer. Really g–”
Sam disappears.
“Are you okay?” Timothy Drake asks, momentarily forgetting about his own plight in the face of Danny’s spaced-out expression. The elevator settles now that he’s not hopping around anymore.
On its own account, Danny’s jaw clenches and unclenches, irrationally amused/angry at his ghosts’ interference. He can’t focus–
“Bro?”
“Y-yeah.” Well, now he has to help him; otherwise, he’ll look like a psycho. “Sure. Not sure I can carry you, though.” A lie, a bald-faced, laughable lie that Sam would howl at. Months of malnourishment have whittled down the extra muscles he’d packed his last year of school, but the ghost super strength gives him a de facto swimmer’s body. God, he misses swimming. If only it–
“I can try to–” Both their eyes fall to Tim’s cast– cast s, plural. He has a wrist brace and a cast that stops right under his knee. Danny wants to laugh. He really does.
Maybe claustrophobia is contagious; because as Danny takes a step back to assess the small, shitty elevator, the walls are sort of closing in. He takes in a deep breath and half-asses the explanation, “Got into parkour a while back. Don’t judge.”
And by ‘parkour,’ he means flipping, flying, and phasing off various sized objects, including buildings. In the graveyard where all deleted files go, Tucker probably has countless videos of Danny performing feats of strength impossible for a human to recreate. Not wanting to see Tim’s reaction– someone will report it to him soon enough, Danny backs to one corner and leaps . He’s limiting himself, really, because he doesn’t leap up as his instincts would have him do; instead, he jumps enough to kick off the left wall, high enough to reach enough momentum to, when he lets gravity pull him, land on the right side’s rail. On the next breath (gotta look like an effort), he pushes off and reaches for the ceiling. He punches it, for a lack of a better word.
It’s less of a punch and more of a…push? If he adds a little extra strength to make that tile move, it’s just because he wants to go home and curl up in bed for the next two days. Whatever his motives are, it works. It’s a testament to his self-control and temper that he makes it so that the tile only shifts slightly.
A beat too late, he makes a sound like landing back on his feet hurt as they should from such a landing. Tim’s staring at him in relief and mild surprise.
“There’s no use! ” taunts Jazz with a sing-song voice. She sounds like she’s– Danny palms his face– on the elevator. “You’re not going anywhere. What are you gonna do, stand on the roof? Hulk out over the doors?”
“We can knock this guy out,” offers Sam, appearing mid-circling around Tim, not unlike a predator cat. “Phase him through. Disappear.”
“That was dramatic,” Danny says aloud, not at all talking to Tim. He still looks at him. He’s not not sheepish when he does it again. This time, he reaches out his hands mid-jump and, with an exaggerated breath, hauls himself up to his elbows. It’s utterly dark up there. Barely a thought goes into prompting his ghost-green vision forward.
Sigh.
Something compels him to look up. A bright, overhead light, probably all the way up to the fifth floor. A long way down. But it’s right up there, and Danny’s trapped. It’s– it’s not breath-taking. It’s breath- constricting.
He lets himself drop.
Both arms let go. On their own accord.
No thinking whatsoever. Just done; want to get away.
Oof. It’s not him muffling the sound of his pain; it’s–
“Holy shit, are you okay?” Danny launches himself off Tim, who had apparently deemed it fit to try to catch him.
Flat on his back, Tim’s eyes are tightly shut. He’s clutching at his leg, which he had half-landed on. Guilt pools in Danny’s stomach. This wasn’t just about hiding his powers. It was because he’s freaked out over a stupid light for a stupid–
“Fine,” Tim breathes. He’s telling the truth. He recovers almost immediately. “Fell down some stairs a couple months ago. Doesn’t really ache anymore.” A lie. A second lie. “What did you see?”
Oh, shit; he was supposed to scope out where they were.
Jazz’s head– just her head– peeks out from the roof, a concerned look in her eyes. She’d seen his freakout. “You’re in between floors. Too far from each to really reach.”
“Between floors,” repeats Danny; deadpan. “Can’t reach.”
Wilts; that’s the only word that comes to mind to describe how Tim’s expression changes. It folds; like Danny’s just confirmed his greatest fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” Danny says, somewhat awkward, shifting uncomfortably. He is so not equipped to handle a freakout. He can barely handle his own, and he has three support buddies. “Hey, what’s your name?” Before he slips and calls him by name before they introduce each other.
Tim’s response? Too gone, his breathing’s already accelerating. Dropping eye contact, he starts shaking his head, as if in disbelief, in denial.
“Bro?” It’s what Tim called him a minute earlier. “You–”
“Can’t.”
“Just–”
“I can’t–” murmurs Tim, an emotion step away from agonized. His eyes, glossy, are far away and panicked. “I can’t– I just; no. I can’t be here and I can’t breathe here. Small spaces; that’s the only thing that I can’t–” He chops his hand through the air like cutting off something, the movement frantic. The mumbling continues–
“What are you doing?” hisses Tucker in Danny’s ear. It almost makes him jump. “Comfort him.”
“Danny–” warns Jazz. “He’s about to have a panic attack. Get him to calm down.”
“Tell him to breathe,” says Tucker.
Sam snorts from behind Tim, but it’s not unsympathetic; just towards Tucker. “Thanks, that helps,” she says sarcastically.
“It’s okay,” Danny says. The mumbling has progressed into pacing, and Tim, tall and freaking out, is starting to make the elevator rock. Danny jolts into action. “You’re gonna be okay. I know it feels like the elevator’s too small, like there’s two many people here–” He lifts a glare at Jazz, Tucker, and Sam. They’re making him feel claustrophobic, too. One by one, after a glower of their own, they dissipate into thin air.
“You’ve been stuck before.” Tim finds enough clarity to interject, demand. “How long did it take for someone to get you?”
Well, he’s never stuck around long enough to figure that out. Misinterpreting his silence, Tim’s breathing quickens.
Wires grating against each other knocks Danny’s teeth together at the sudden intensity of it. It must be so loud that it has to reach human ears, but Tim’s oblivious to the world; stuck in the smaller, narrowing one of his.
“Hey,” says Danny. “Hey, hey–” he almost says his name. “You sound like you’re going to asphyxiate. You need to–”
And Tim must have taken a sharp corner or something, because one second, he’s breathing out like he’s crying, pacing back and forth, and the next, the elevator groans. Realization dawns on Danny with the same too-late quality of getting sucked into the thermos. The elevator groans again– no, screeches, as if something is being pulled taunt, and they’re wavering like a roller coaster.
There have been moments like this in Danny’s life. It’s not the most his life’s been in danger, or at least, in danger of getting a little hurt. His senses always react all the same. Lately, underused, they’ve been a little haywire, eager to act, quick to trigger. The elevator lurches , and the future’s very near and clear to Danny, like the ground they’re about to meet very soon. And become smooshed versions of themselves. Tim, anyway. The ground shifting below their feet launches the already panicking Tim to pitch forward.
Acting on instinct, Danny reacts in two ways.
With one hand, he catches Tim, and since he’s only handling him with one arm, he holds him at arms' distance, close enough to make him stop rocking back and forth and being a general, freaked out disaster.
With the other, the feeling he gets is sharp enough to make him lash out. His clenched teeth, a step away from shattering , smash together when he throws his hand and blindly throws down everything he’s got into keeping them steady. The ice is pulled from his core, almost painfully so, with the eagerness that it does so, and like boulders falling chaotically into place, he feels the the two giant ice tower-like tentacles he’d haphazardly thrown together settle; one balancing each side of the shaky elevator.
A haggard breath is released from his lungs. They’re okay. He doesn’t have to run; Tim won’t die.
Tim…is freaking out.
Why did he send everyone away? He has no idea how to–
Tim nearly collapses, weak knee obviously too sore. That’s when Danny realizes he’s still holding on to Tim with one arm.
“All right,” he says, calmer that he’s secured their safety. The second he hears rescue coming, he’ll draw the ice back into his core, and it will be like he never used it. If he’d been a little more invested in this, he’d have done this a lot earlier. “You gotta listen to me now.”
Tim shakes his head, eyes squeezed shut. “Did you feel that? We’re gonna drop. The walls are gonna–”
“No,” Danny says firmly, lifting his chin. “No, they’re not.”
“We’re going to fall. Do you know how many tons of metal is going to– how quickly we’re going to reach the–”
Having had enough, Danny, employing Jazz’s surefire way of calming him down, uses the arm already on Tim’s elbow and fully pulls him into his arms. “Sometimes, when you’re freaking out this much, you don’t need to calm down; you just need to get it out of your system,” Danny tells him. “Focus on me. Just me.” He has always found that a steadying presence is always grounding.” That’s what Jazz has always been. Never what his parents have ever been.
For a total of two seconds, Tim freezes in Danny’s hold, before a shaky breath tears out of his chest and–
“We’re strangers,” breathes Tim on a panicked laugh. He shuts his eyes. He also shakes his head. “We shouldn’t– we shouldn’t–”
“Are you uncomfortable?” Danny’s prepared to draw away. He starts to– only to have Tim Drake curl into him, welcoming Danny’s grip on the back of his neck.
“No, I’m–” He squeezes his eyes shut one last time, as if gathering courage in the darkness, and then re-opens. Bright blue meets a dull one. That dilated gaze studies Danny piercingly, and oh, he’s underestimated Tim, hasn’t he? But Tim only says, “I’m okay.”
“You’re okay,” Danny repeats. Tim’s shuddering under his touch yet craving yet. He…gets the feeling. It’s the most human contact he’s had in years. Heaving breathing fills the room as its only sound as Tim draws closer and closer until he’s damn near hyperventilating in the crook of Danny’s neck. Emboldened by Tim initiating the embrace, Danny readjusts his hold, holding him more securely, one hand in his hair (which he somehow thought would feel less personal; what a lie) and another stroking his back.
The way Tim’s simultaneously coiling into himself and into Danny makes him think– “There’s no shame in it either,” Danny murmurs. “Like…people can huddle for warmth. Human nature.” Is it Jazz’ snort that he hears or is he imagining it at this point? “Or animals,” he says, almost pointedly. Because he ’s not human entirely. “Penguins do it.” Oh, shit. There’s a villain called Penguin here, right? “Or bats. It’s a defense mechanism. To minimize noise and, like, intimidate predators as a first line of defense.”
For some reason, this tears out a laugh from Tim. “Bats,” the other boy repeats. A little while later, still letting Danny hold onto him, he suddenly jolts. “Holy shit, we don’t even know each other’s names.”
A skip in his heartbeat. Danny smiles, though.
“Timothy Drake,” Tim introduces as they’re half an hour into their first official meeting. “But you can call me Tim.”
It’s only with the briefest hesitation that Danny says, “James. James Jones.”
Guess Danny’s a liar, too, but Tim smiles anyway, too.
The bag that Tim was holding on to is actually filled with air-tight Chinese food, still piping hot after Tim unravels the millions knots of the plastic bag.
“It’s my comfort food,” Tim had said when he inevitably got hungry. When Danny said that, it’s okay; I have my own dinner, Tim asked him to bring it out. He was introduced to a fiercer, mama bear kin Tim when he lifted his measly grocery bags.
Post-panic attack Tim was also bold. He’d snatched the bag towards him. With a disapproving eyebrow raise that rivals one of Jazz’ scathing looks, he’d held Danny’s options; most of which weren’t fit to make a meal except for a lonesome can of peanut butter, jar of jam, saltine crackers, and bag of sliced bread.
“This is unacceptable,” Tim had said. “Eat my comfort food, too. Be comforted, too.”
The smell wafting off the iconic containers– that Amity never had– was tempting. And if Danny had to eat one more peanut butter sandwich, he was pretty sure he’d throw up. He acquiesces. “Do you have anything vegan in there?”
And that’s how their rescue finds them another half hour later: facing each other, criss-cross applesauce as Jazz hated to hear Danny say, a feast of Chinese food between them.
Or, correction: Tim’s mid-chortle and Danny’s hand is mid-raised while holding onto a bottle of water, a rare smile on his face as he– “It wasn’t grass,” Tim argues intensely. “It couldn’t be.”
Danny shrugs, biting back a widening grin and failing, because it’s one of his favorite, most ironic stories. “They called it an ultra-recyclo-vegetarian diet.” He forgoes the part where one of his best friends, Sam, was the one pushing the diet, and the insane lunch lady ghost with crimson red that had been unleashed as a result. At least she serves as a memorable first villain.
Tim snorts on his next bite of orange chicken. “There’s no such thing as ultra–”
And that’s when the elevator doors are forced open by half of a semi-familiar face, which is twisted in concern as he roars. “Tim?”
“Date night’s over,” whispers Sam in his ear before disappearing, though she casts a fond look at Danny’s assembly of vegetables.
Like he’s being snapped out of a trace, Tim physically jolts, rising to his feet surprisingly gracefully. Danny remains seated, relaxed as he finishes the last few bites of the most delicious meal he’s had in months.
God knows that he has to move out of the building; it’s not just about affording or not being able to afford friendships anymore. It’s incidents like this. What if the next, he had to visibly use his power? When the person in the broken elevator with him wasn’t hyperventilating 90% of their time together.
Too bad. He was just starting to like Gotham. It seemed as good a place as any to disappear.