DC x DP Prompt — The Janitor
"Cheryl, I just locked Joker in the deep freezer, what do I do?" The words came out in a rush as he leaned against the hallway, nervously looking at the door as if the clown demon would somehow punch through six inches of metal and survive subzero temperatures.
"Are you fucking with me, Fenton? You know I'm in the middle of a shitshow right now."
He breathed out a little hysterically. "No, I'm not fucking with you. There's a bunch of Joker goons in the base on 7th street. I lured them into the deep freezer—"
"Yeah, uh-huh, the one with no exits. And then I barricaded the door."
There was an audible muffle of words and a few shouts and what sounded like gunshots. Danny was worried his closest coworker got shot until she came back on the line, out of breath.
"Let me get this straight— your first thought when the Joker invaded our headquarters was to lock him in a freezer?"
"No, I had time to think about it." Danny answered absently as he wandered down to the utility room after he turned on the fans to full blast. He wasn't the designated handyman, but a Fenton with a screwdriver could do anything, really.
Just because he was the janitor didn't mean he somehow lost the ability to fix a washer, oil a door, or wire a ghost electric chair. (Yes, that was a real thing, and yes, he did destroy it when he moved out of Amity Park.)
Speaking of moving, he supposes it's important on A. why he was in a Red Hood base (and more broadly, Gotham), B. Why he was a janitor in a Red Hood base, C. why he knew a lieutenant of Red Hood and D. why he had just committed what most would call felony murder.
(Danny would call it self defense, but potato pahtato when you're working for a gang.)
It all came down to one thing. He was good at cleaning. How, Danny "The Slob" Fenton, do such a thing when his room was sometimes more of a bio risk than the literal lab?
It's that Jazz was constantly stressed with school and taking care of him, so a lot of chores often fell to him.
Which meant cleaning up the lab.
Sure, he was no where near happy about this arrangement, but it wasn't like he could tell his sister "Hey! Stop giving me non-contaminated food and clean, woman!"
He was a lazy, deeply sarcastic, a borderline delinquent and a vigilante, but he drew the line at misogyny And, you know, his hotdogs trying to murk him in his stomach.
Ergo, Danny the bitter cleaner of all things radioactive and probably illegal.
The thing with the Fenton lab? There was always something staining the floor. Whether it be blood, ectoplasm, oil, lubrication for bolts, coffee, or an ungodly mix of all of it.
He had to get creative and fast.
Ectoplasm is a bit corrosive and stains like you wouldn't believe, even on metal floor. So he learned to put a bit of his own ectoplasm and mini ice particles so it would actually be able to be scrubbed out of the floor.
Coffee? Oil? Yeah. Cleaning supplies were mixed together like a potion master, toeing the line between dangerous and genius. He was always careful enough not to make chlorine gas or chloroform.
It became an uncanny skill, along with other things. He knew how to get spots out of clothing, how to make homemade detergent and how to get any stain or blemish out of almost any material.
So, when he moved to Gotham to complete his bachelors in chemical engineering at G.C.U., he knew he had to get a job somewhere.
And there was a lot of benefits for custodial staff in his position. Good hours, mostly at night or afternoons when he'd be free. And he knew a lot about cleaning, so why not?
...He hadn't really planned to be scouted as a crime cleaner, though.
But hey! They even gave dental. Red Hood didn't even seem all that bad, drug peddling and murder aside. (Unsurprisingly, he could put a lot of things aside. His parents and well, Phantom, etc.)
If he kept his mouth shut, head down and hands working, he could get a good wage and even better benefits.
Danny, much to his dismay and minor shock, became known as 'the guy who can get stains out of literally everything.' Goons would literally stop and watch him like he was preforming black magic on a crime scenes walls. Even more surprisingly, he got clients and friends from this arrangement.
(Ignoring that one time of the jackets he was randomly given looks like Red Hood's.
No pressure. Just a crime lord who (allegedly) put heads into a duffel bag and mailed it to another crime boss.
He does it anyway, because he has a reputation (and monetary gain) to keep.)
"What the fuck. What the fuck!" Cheryl hissed, whether at him or what he assumed was a gunfight in the background, "Jesus effin' Christ Danny, get out of there."
The halfa swung open the maintenance/janitorial supply room, trying to be nonchalant as his brain spirals and calculates. "I don't think Jesus can fuck Christ. They seem almost identical, y'know?"
Hydrogen sulfide would be the quickest killer, but chloroform could also do it if they didn't have enough acids and sulfur cleaning products.
Danny grabbed some plywood, a box full of tools, his handy dandy cleaning supplies and a big plastic bucket. He would call his shaky hands adrenaline instead of being absolutely terrified that the most notorious mass-murderer in America was a few rooms down.
"Danny, I'm not fuckin' joking. You need to get the hell out of there. That's an order, you brilliant, stupid piece of shit."
He began trotting back to the deep freezer, inhaling through his teeth and scrubbing his face. "Kinky," he said, with levity he sure as hell didn't feel, "Hey, so, I'm gonna have to call you back. Tell me once you get out of your Nerf gun battle."
Danny snapped on a respirator, tucked his phone away, and quickly dumped a mixture of chemicals he knew would kill, well, a lot of things.
He'd heard the screaming and gunshots even through the thickest 1950s subzero room known to man. Kind of hard to muffle even that.
But alas. He went partially intangible, hauling his bucket of unicorn love and sparkles, floating up towards the air ducts. With no pizzaz, he dumped the entire thing in the vent system for the room.
The screams immediately rose in volume, and so did the ping of gunshots. Not wasting the time to poke his intangible head in and see how they were doing, he reappeared back in the hallway.
To be a safeguard even for an empty base, he quickly hammered in some plywood to any vents, duct taping the edges.
And for the coup de grâce, he sealed the door with his ectoplasm ice, cranked up the fan and turned the temperature to the lowest it could reasonably go.
"Have fun in there kiddos," he rapped the door, and then got the fuck out of the base. So really, he was following Cheryl's order. So it wasn't insubordination, no siree. Just insurance.
Danny found himself grabbing a cup of coffee. It wouldn't help his nerves, absolutely not, but at least it gave him something to do with his hands as he called up Cheryl.
"Danny!" She immediately snapped, and he winced.
"Hi, Cheryl," He demurred, hoping to project the most charming air that she could definitely see through. "How're you doing?"
"Don't change the subject, pretty boy."
He held his tongue at a sarcastic comment to that. "Mmmm yeah, so. About that. Would you mind like, not telling the Big Guy about what I did? Keep it like, anonymous act of charity?"
"Why." The word was sharp, almost unquestioning. Danny kept from squeezing his plastic ice coffee cup so hard that it would explode.
Okay. Okay. He had to do this. "I'm a Meta." He explained. "I really— Like, I left something definitely a Meta could do to keep the Joker in the deep freezer room." He really didn't want to become some super soldier or enforcer. He would quite literally rather kill someone before he did that.
It wasn't like there wasn't Metas in Gotham or, hell, some gangs. But he wasn't just Danny the Throw Him At Any Problem Because He Has Powers guy, and he never wanted to be. He just wanted to get his degree, get paid, and get out.
"Too late. I'd already told him that you'd locked Joker in there."
Danny smacked his head against the cafe table, wishing he inhaled more of the chemical weapon in the plastic Home Depot bucket.
"Cheryl," He said, with thinly veiled horror and dread.
Her voice audibly softened. "Danny. It's fine. You know he wouldn't throw you off the Harbor or anything. Hell, he's probably going to be grateful, however uncharacteristic. Everyone 's gonna be. It's the Joker."
Danny gave a truly pathetic groan as the now murderer of the Joker, and wondered if being fed to the fishes was truly a worse fate.
Jason was smoking on one of the balcony of his many safe houses, holding a picture of the man in front of him.
It'd been a long night and a long morning. Once he had gotten the intel that the Joker was locked in a deep freezer, in one of his goddamn bases, you bet your lucky fucking stars he had gotten there faster than Bruce had gotten to him.
It had taken hours to get into the room from whatever the hell was coated over the door, and dear fuck was it worth the effort.
The Joker was dead. So were many of his closest lieutenants and underlings. Some had died from GSWs, other from chemical burns or inhalation, and the Joker? The best of all.
He'd died slowly and painfully from hypothermia and the chemicals.
It had been a mixture of vindictive, vengeful glee and deep exhaustion as he carefully monitored the cremation process of all of the bodies.
It was over. It was fucking over. His syndicate would be in pieces that Jason would euphorically grind his heel into.
Now all that remained of the infamous, homicidal Joker was a plastic bag of grey ashes.
Jason wasn't sure what he was going to do with it now. Maybe he could flush it down his toilet. It'd clog, but he wouldn't give two shits.
Maybe he could even sent it to Bruce. The thought brought a huff from his lips as he blew out the smoke from his cig, eyes examining the picture from the file.
Cheryl had referred to this Danny as 'pretty boy' on many occasions, and Jason was inclined to agree. A mischievous, almost boyish face of a 22-year-old. The famed Red Hood Janitor, jack-of-trades.
The killer of the most prominent killer of all time.
He couldn't summon as much jealousy of it should have been me, twisting the knife in his gut rather than the feeling of relief. Red Hood had struggled even getting close, whether it was his obscene amount of gang members or it was fucking Batman or one of his little soldiers preventing him from putting a bullet in his head.
No, it wasn't as much anger but interest that he twisted around in is mind, thumb hovering over the face of Danny Fenton.
He'd like to meet this man. Jason was sure that it would be a conversation he wouldn't want to miss.
Red Hood, covered in blood and flicking a cigarette butt off his balcony, smirked and picked up his burner phone.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
theartofmadeline
