An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
[Podfic] It's Too Early For This (54 words) by pieces0fstars
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harry Dresden/Johnny Marcone
Characters: Harry Dresden, Johnny Marcone
Additional Tags: Fluff, Humor, or at least an attempt at it, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Audio Format: Download
Summary:
Podfic reading of It's Too Early For This, by hiddenlongings.
Author's summary:
The morning after the night before.
Danny’s vision had blackened at the edges after the ectoplasmic explosion had thrown everyone in the room in a different direction.
He felt some probably pretty nasty wounds as they smoldered.
Colter’s magic was trying to consume him.
It licked hungrily at his hazmat suit that was as much a part of his ghostly body as his skin and it burned like the worst sort of acid.
There had only been a quiet moment of breathless anticipation before the spell had unwound with incendiary force. He had tried to get a shield between Mehr and Hood and whatever supernatural fuckery was happening but he wasn’t sure if it had been enough to help. The other two men had been thrown like porcelain dolls.
Mehr was crumpled into a small heap in one corner and it didn’t look like he was going to be getting up anytime soon. Hood had missed the vaguely landscape style framed print that hung from the motel’s wall but he had definitely needed to contort himself to steer clear of any of the sharp edges of furniture and walls and had managed to crash half-way through the drywall from the momentum of the detonation. He was back on his feet and standing strong but Danny had a sinking feeling that it was all a facade.
Hood's helmet was tilted just enough that Danny was pretty sure he couldn’t quite focus on what was happening around him. He wrenched his gaze back towards Miranda, cursing himself again for not forcing her to leave even if it would have been against her wishes. He growled low and threatening at the partially formed poltergeist that was creeping towards her.
Colter’s form flickered and staticked in the darkened shadows of the small room.
He wasn’t as corporeal as most of the other ghosts that Danny had dealt with in the past but that same wicked energy that he had felt from both the gem and the half-finished spell that had wound itself through Miranda’s body was emanating from his less than solid edges.
The corners of Danny’s vision were graying in and out with agony as he tried to force himself to move.
Miranda was curled as much as she could around the swell of her pregnant belly and she too had been knocked to the ground after being at the epicenter of the spell.
Helpless against whatever nasty fuckery the old bastard had planned.
If Danny was a betting man. (He wasn’t really. But this was his luck). He’d bet someone a nickel that she was going through a contraction.
Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut and her hands were clenched into white knuckled fists.
As though she could force herself to not give birth through sheer force of will.
If anyone could do it, Danny would lay bets on her.
But even her snarling ferocity had to bend to the whims of ancient instincts and he could see the tightening ripple of her abdominal muscles through the thin fabric of her t-shirt.
The older ghost's mouth was agape and his hazy white eyes stared with unblinking avarice at the swollen curve and Danny felt his growl turn into a whipsaw shriek of rage and he threw himself at the other ghost with all of his might.
Tumbling into the larger man Danny managed to get in a couple of hard punches before the poltergeist turned towards him with a bellow. Colter’s teeth lengthened into inhumanly sharp fangs that snapped down like a bear trap on Danny’s shoulder with a guttural growl of his own.
Colter was probably pretty high up on the power scale for ecto-entities in this universe. He’d been around for a long time, generations, and had had multiple opportunities between bodies to learn how to control his spectral form.
He had nothing on Danny; who had years of consistent first hand experience and a truly nasty collection of old wounds that had taught him some hard won lessons.
Danny couldn’t phase his way out of the gnashing teeth and if he tried to pull away with too much power he was going to have an actual chunk of his flesh removed and he’d start spurting ectoplasm.
Not ideal.
The ecto from Gotham had definitely helped give him some energy back but there was another way to get even more. Turnabout's fair play and all that. Colter’s mind, what was left of it, was still trapped in his humanity and his teeth might have been monstrous but that was an almost instinctual transformation.
Danny’s form twisted and distorted and Colter’s teeth were dislodged as Danny’s muscle mass changed from human lean to monstrous bulk. Danny’s eyes glowed with green flames as he turned to stare down at Colter with his inhumanly cold breath frosting in the poltergeist’s face.
Then:
Danny had been afraid that if he released it the spiteful little gem was going to go flying through any buildings that were between it and its target.
He had let it tug restlessly against the leather cord that he had wrapped around the palm of his hand a couple of times.
There didn’t seem to be a way for them to determine how close they were to finding the witch.
Just a steady pull that ignored obstacles and was mindlessly leading them across the length of the city.
Mehr had quietly led them to a nondescript little sedan that he had parked a few blocks away from the emptied factory he worked in. Gotham was a large city. There were several different kinds of public transit available to its citizens.
Danny was pretty sure each could also be qualified as a public health hazard.
The rickety little rust-bucket of a car was a welcome barrier against the angry taxi drivers that seemed to stalk the streets in complete defiance of any traffic laws.
Mehr had given up the keys without a protest when Hood had wiggled his fingers in his direction pointedly.
The older man had slipped into the backseat and pointedly clicked on his seatbelt. Danny had settled into the passenger side and when Hood revved the engine he immediately did the same. \
He had absolutely no interest in being flung through the windshield, corporeal or not.
When the other man seemed intent on peeling out of the grody little parking lot that the car had been huddling in without doing the same, Danny frowned deeply.
The helmet and body armor the other man wore would definitely protect him from a lot of things but. He snagged the seatbelt through Hood’s body and quickly clicked it into place.
Hood’s helmet spoke to some sort of offended astonishment as he pointedly tilted it in Danny’s direction as though giving him a pointed side-eye.
Mehr gently cleared his throat and that brought Danny and Red Hood’s heads around in guilty unison.
“Not that this little display isn’t absolutely charming but I believe we are currently on the hunt for a murderous witch. So if we could hold off on the flirting for just a little bit longer it would be appreciated.”
Danny settled back into the ragged fabric of the car seat with the cooling burn of a blush splashing across the bridge of his nose. Hood cleared his throat harshly before he put the car in drive and eased it onto the empty street. Danny held up his hand high enough that the other two men could see the direction that the gem was pulling in.
“Well. Onward I guess. Go that way.”
“Go left?”
“Right.”
“Right as in turn right or right as in correct?”
Hood blew through a red light and completely missed the turn that Danny had been pointing at.
“Jesus Christ!”
Danny squeezed his eyes shut and huddled into his seat as a cacophony of horns and swearing marked their passing.
It was audible even through the closed windows.
One eye squinted open gave Danny enough vision to slide the leather cord around the rearview mirror. The gem hit the glass of the windshield with a clack before it slid to the right and strained gently towards whatever it was tracking.
“Magical GPS. Follow the evil little arrow and leave me out of this.”
“Pussy.”
“Troglodyte.”
“Boys!”
Danny’s gaze flicked up into the mirror so that he could meet Mehr’s in the reflective surface.
They were crinkled with amusement. Or stress. Possibly both.
“Sorry, Mehr.”
Hood ran through a stop sign this time and Danny’s stomach heaved with a sickening lurch and he let out a high pitched squeak.
Hood’s mechanical chortle was cut off abruptly when he saw Danny’s narrow eyed expression and he covered the chuckle with a less than stealthy cough.
“Right. Right. Magical GPS. Got it.”
Danny leaned back into the tattered seat and eyed the road ahead with trepidation. One hand was firmly wrapped around the oh shit handle and the other wound around his torso in a vain attempt to act as an additional seat belt. Danny shut his eyes and gritted his teeth as he tried to stay in the present.
Jack and Maddie had both been horrendous drivers his entire life and it was a good probability that he would survive any sort of blunt force car to the face.
It would still fucking hurt though.
Thankfully the epic side eye he was giving the other man seemed to be enough for Hood to at least try and follow the basic rules of the road. The men fell into an uneasy silence as they tooled through the late night traffic. The only sound that Danny could hear aside from their breathing was the steady chink chink chink of the gem as it slid gently against the glass of the windshield and led them on a circuitous route through the city.
Even with Hood’s slight restraint they were still whipping through the streets before the gem’s glow began to dim and it eased itself away from the glass before it began to point towards a decrepit little motel that looked as though it had been dragged directly from the pits of some less than fresh hell.
It lay like a great pollution-incrusted toad in the middle of the city.
Its many eyes gaped wide from broken windows and Danny sighed deeply and dug his knuckles into his eyes until he started to see spots.
“Yeah. That seems about right. I go from murder apartment building to the Bates motel. Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who has to talk to the front desk person?”
“Or.”
Hood drew out mockingly.
“We can continue to follow the magical GPS and not bother someone that is more likely to shoot us in the face than talk to a bunch of weird guys in widely differing outfits. In Gotham.”
Danny sighed deeply.
Heartfeltly.
Was that a word?
Didn’t matter he knew what he meant and Hood probably did too with the way his helmet tipped back in a blatant, why me, gesture.
“So instead we show up at a possibly terrified or possibly murderous woman’s hotel door holding a magically glowing gem.”
“Dream big Nightingale. She might be both.”
“Both?”
“Terrified and murderous.”
“You sweet talker.”
“Besides. We don’t need to just walk up to her room. We could figure out which room she’s in and…”
Mehr gently cleared his throat behind them, breaking their intense focus on each other.
“Sir. Stalking a woman through the streets after whatever traumatic experiences she has already been through would be a cruelty.”
Danny recoiled from the idea as well and shook his head.
“No. You’re right Mehr. We followed the gem this far but Lady Gotham wasn’t exactly straightforward.”
Hood’s shoulders tensed as he crossed his arms across his chest.
“ Did you notice?”
Mehr nodded slowly in agreement.
“Not a single gendered pronoun to be heard.” T
he murderous witch is still within my borders. This should lead you to them.
“You don’t consider the word witch to be exclusively a term for a female magic user?”
“No.”
Danny shook his head again this time more thoughtfully.
“I guess I wouldn’t.”
Now:
The fluctuating eddies of Colter’s skin were marred with layers of different runic symbols.
They had been carved deeply into the soul of him. Multiple lifetimes of spell work deeply embedded in a soul that was older than it should have been.
They looked heinously familiar.
He had just seen them wound through Miranda's abdomen.
Danny bared his fangs at the older ghost and his words resonated through the room like so much angry static.
“ Thief. Soul stealer.”
Colter swiped ineffectually at the bestial form in front of him.
Danny had no real idea what he looked like at that moment. He had only thought briefly about what it had felt like to be small. The way his form would shrink in upon itself and leave him in the body that he had originally died in. And then he thought about being big. A brief vision of what Dan had looked like.
One of his possible futures.
One that he was closer to now than he had ever been before with the loss of everything.
And then he felt the way that his body had expanded as though he had taken a deep inhalation of air.
He had expanded not only his lungs but all of his metaphysical form and he could feel the strange feeling of something keratinous scraping against the popcorn ceilings of the dank little room. No nerves except for where the growths (horns?) went into the top of his skull and less than a moment's thought left them vaporous and running through the ceiling without leaving any additional scrapes.
Danny’s head snaked around on a sinuous neck and he snapped with jaws that felt too long and bit too hard.
He left a gaping hole in the poltergeist's ribcage and within it pulsed a core that tasted like still burning cigarettes and the selfish bitterness that seemed to imbue the spirit with all of its malice. An evil that had given Colter the selfish strength to curse his own line for such a very long time.
It barely burned going down his gullet but it sat like a hot coal in his belly for long moments before it was extinguished.
Then:
In the end none of them had to make a decision.
Whatever she was Miranda was nobody’s damsel in distress.
One of the parking lot adjacent doors swung open and she came shuffling out of the shadows until they could see her in the dim light of the half broken lamp lights. One hand trembled and shook and clutched the pistol that she was holding at her side and the other was wrapped around the unmistakable swell of her pregnant belly.
Danny slunk out of the car without actually opening the door and he could see the sharp intake of breath that particular bit of theater produced.
But Danny could also still see the twin green flames that his phantasmal eyes produced. They flickered across the window that reflected them even with the scratches and chips wearing away its edges. There was no hiding what he was when he relinquished his human body. Pretending to be some shabby little twenty-something while he was flanked by two equally threatening men was disingenuous.
Hood’s helmet and his kevlar lined chest plate promised violence and Mehr’s more graceful lope as he trailed behind them was its own sort of statement.
Miranda’s throat quaked with a deep swallow before she braced herself against their presence.
“Hello, Mrs. Colter.”
Danny did his best to keep his voice placid and he pretended to ignore the gun. Miranda’s lower lip quivered for a moment before she bit down on it fiercely. Her chin went up defiantly.
“I prefer Miranda.”
Danny let his lips quirk into a faint smile.
“Miranda. I had some questions for you.”
She let one of her eyebrows arch sardonically.
“Had?”
“The generational curse that I can see has been placed on you has answered a lot of the questions I had.”
The sigils looked like they had been there for a long time.
Years.
They glowed sullenly with the same malice that he had felt coming from the gem that Lady Gotham had given them.
Miranda brought the gun up and pointed it at his chest, her face had whitened as Danny spoke.
“No! No, I fixed it. He’s gone! He can’t hurt my baby. Not anymore.”
Danny caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and turned subtly towards it. Someone was peeking out from behind a curtain and Danny figured it was only a matter of time before a shaky cellphone video started making the rounds if they didn’t get out of the parking lot. It might already be too late honestly.
Curiosity killed more than cats.
Getting a terrified young woman to go back into an enclosed space with a bunch of strangers was probably asking for a lot as well. Hood thankfully was able to break the stand off this time. He tilted his helmet in a courtly little bow before he broke the growing silence.
“Has Drumm…Avery been helping you? If he has I can’t imagine he hasn’t taken the chance to complain about how much of a bleeding heart I am. We really are just here to help, Miranda. Please, tell us what happened.”
“Red Hood.”
The words were nothing more than a whisper of air. Miranda abruptly dropped the gun with a clanging clatter to the ground before she bent double over her belly. She wrapped both arms around her stomach as much as she could as she started sobbing.
Danny gently chivvied her back towards the door.
He made sure to keep several feet between them and trailed after her feeling helpless to stop her tears. He gingerly scooped up the gun to bring it in with them.
Danny felt his stomach roil with nausea as he tried to reconcile what he could see in front of him with what had happened over the last couple of days.
There was a picture coming together in his mind's eye.
A generational spell that entwined father and child in such a way as to make them inseparable.
A nasty sort of immortality that relied on the eradication of the next generation.
If Miranda had tried to consume Colter’s spirit to keep it from eating the baby’s growing soul; the job was only half done .
Just Before Now:
The circle was rough.
More of an oval than a true circle and the spray paint sat in haphazard droplets over the rough shag of the ancient carpet.
They’d started with red, it had felt appropriate. When that had run out Mehr had scurried out to his jalopy and brought in a bright orange that would have been more appropriate for a construction site.
Miranda had ignored Danny’s protests about her staying in the same room.
“If the circle isn’t going to keep me safe then I’d rather see him coming.”
She held up the little revolver she had been given back.
“The bullets have markings on them that will at least help slow him down if things go south.”
Danny had bickered a little bit with Miranda when he started to create sigils for his own personal circle.
“Those don’t look like the symbols that Avery found.”
Danny let himself float overtop of the still wet paint as he continued to spray in quick restrained little bursts.
“Yeah. I bet they don’t. I’m no historian but I think the ones Colter used were Old Norse. Perfectly serviceable for someone that wants to blunt force a ritual and doesn’t care about the side effects it may cause for the people caught up in it.”
Miranda had taken a heavy seat in the small recliner that the room had to offer and was watching everything with dull eyes encircled by bruised skin that spoke of a long history of sleepless nights. Her lips thinned and her eyes narrowed.
“Yes. That does sound like him. He always was a bit of a blunt object. Grandiose plans of immortality aside.”
When Danny had finished putting together the ritual he tossed the gem into the center of it and then floated a little hesitantly towards Miranda.
“Did you put Colter, his soul I mean, in a piece of jewelry? I need to pull as much of his spirit back out into this realm as possible. The more we’ve got the better.”
“Better for what.”
Danny’s grin was toothy.
“Why the better to eat him with.”
“You’ve contained his soul but if anything happens to the object you put him in he would be free to complete the ritual and take over your child’s body and mind.”
“My son.”
Miranda said, bleakly hand stroking at her belly.
“ Fred was so excited when I told him. A boy to ‘pass on the family name.’ he said. He’d always been disappointed in Avery. Barely talked about him at all. I only vaguely knew he existed before I found the books that Fred had. I don’t understand a lot of this magic crap. Just enough to make myself a problem I guess.”
She hesitated for a long moment before she slipped her wedding ring off of her hand and passed it to Danny.
Danny smiled at her, taking the ring delicately from her grasp before he dropped it next to the gemstone.
“Again. Not an expert but I think his soul looks to be a couple of hundred years old. So he’s done this shit for a couple of generations. I’m not sure why he waited this long though.”
Danny took a fang to his pointer finger and let a bit of green ectoplasm well up on the tip before he dropped it on to the circle he had made. Mehr crouched next to the chair and looked out across the ritual surface with narrowed eyes.
“Yeah. Drummond didn’t really like talking about it but I got a little bit of the story from him. Colter had his reasons for not choosing Avery. Not my business to talk about it but I think I know why. Regardless, we had a lot of long nights. Long nights working with this boy genius on his master plans.” He tilted a head towards Hood who was looking out into the parking lot through a thin gap in the curtains.
“Boy?”
Miranda’s voice was quiet but she looked askance at the muscular build of the masked vigilante in front of her.
“Oh yeah.”
Mehr chuckled. Danny thought he was trying, and succeeding, at cutting some of the tension.
“Took me a bit to figure it out. But Avery’s right. He’s a fucking bleeding heart with too much combat training and not enough therapy.”
Hood flipped the room at large off but didn’t bother to try and defend himself.
Danny thought his shoulders might be curled in just a little bit with chagrin though so he floated over to the other man and playfully butted his head up against the hard material of his helmet.
“Therapy’s for the birds.”
He said cheerfully.
“0/10 don’t recommend. Ignore being sad. Punch what pisses you off. And if it keeps coming for you, shoot it in the face. People can’t hurt your feelings if they’re souls have been moved to a different realm.”
“You mean if you kill them.”
“I mean 6 of one half dozen of the other. Death works in some cases but I knew a guy with a sword that could send people to nightmare dimensions for pissing him off. Boom. Problem solved.”
Hood slid a hesitant hand across Danny’s face pushing some of the wild white hair out of his eyes and tugging on it gently.
“You might be even more fucked up than I am baby boy.”
Danny grinned and leaned into the fond touch. “Sweet talker.”
Now:
Danny let out his breath with a deep sigh and let himself relax back into the ghostly twenty-something form that he was getting used to being.
He burped a little bit with his hand coming up to cover his mouth in a loose fist.
“‘Scuse me. Not the tastiest but a little heartburn isn’t going to be the thing that finishes me off. Now. Miranda.”
He leaned down and after a moment of hesitation scooped her up so that he could put her on the bed.
“I haven’t got the first idea how to help you...”
Miranda stiffened up into another contraction and she let out a low animal moan of pain.
“Yeah. With that. Those contractions don’t look to be too far apart. How do you feel about hospitals.”
Once she was able to relax her face out of the rictus of pain Miranda rolled her eyes at him.
“Get me somewhere with pain meds and an epidural or I promise I will cry all over you.”
Hood, who had gently tilted Mehr so that the older man was braced up against the wall muttered under his breath.
“Don’t threaten me.”
Before he tapped at something on his helmet. Getting in contact with emergency services it sounded like.
An ambulance ride for two.
Danny gently eased himself onto the edge of the bed. He reached out hesitantly to give Miranda a hand to hold on to.
“So did you have a name picked out?”
“Not…”
Miranda grimaced.
“Not really. I wasn’t expecting to get this far. And it might not matter anyways. If I get arrested for murder they’ll probably take him away from me.”
Mehr’s voice was raspy and a little wild but coherent.
“I mean I can probably get something figured out for you guys here. You won’t be a Colter or Slough but I’m sure we’ve got some room in our organization.”
He tilted his head and looked up at Hood through his lashes mockingly.
“Wouldn’t you say, Boss?”
Hood tilted his helmeted head backwards and let it hit the wall behind him with a thud.
“I’m going to regret all four of you. I can already tell.”
Mehr’s smile was a little crooked and mean.
“Five. You’re forgetting Drummond.”
“Goddammit.” Hood sighed.
“Five of you. Lucky. Lucky. Me.”
fin
Notes:
Hurray! It's done!! Hope everyone enjoyed! I did want to say if it wasn't completely clear. Colter was planning on basically possessing/overshadowing the baby permanently. So he had done that for a few generations before and he had planned on Avery being the next in line but decided against it for...reasons. Reasons, that I may share in a future installment. But thanks so much for sticking with me. Love you all!!
I'm working on Chapter 6 of Unlucky. Promise. But I've had to make some cuts for flow and thought you guys might enjoy this conversation between Danny and Jason.
The other man seemed intent on peeling out of the grody little parking lot that the car had huddled in without putting on his seat belt.
Danny frowned deeply before he reached through the other man to snap it into place.
"Click it or ticket, handsome.
"Turning yourself into street pizza just because you refuse to wear a seat belt is the epitome of toxic masculinity."
I know I'm pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of fanfiction things. I was just wondering if people had a preference for how I respond to comments, both here and on AO3. I'm NOT ignoring any comments/kudos/bookmarks. I LOVE THEM. I hoard them like a dragon for shitty days where I need to feel like I'm not a POS. But I've always run a little short in the spoons department as far as responding to them.
How would you guys prefer I handle responding to comments?
Just do what I do now, and just respond to direct questions
Acknowledge that I appreciate them more often in my authors notes
It was getting so late that it was almost early when Jason snagged a burner cell that he had stashed in the tv console and typed at the screen for several long moments.
Got a job for you. Time and a half. 9AM?
Whether his associate had already been on the phone or had received an alert, he was quick to respond.
Sitrep? Fred Colter. Social is XXX-XXX-XXX. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Yes. 9AM. Factory C.
Jason texted an affirmative before he pocketed the cellphone and moved towards the kitchen to try and clean up some of the mess he had made during food prep. There was still enough soup for leftovers and it had been easy enough to make. He had used mostly canned shelf-stable foods that he could keep around without having to worry about keeping track of fresh produce.
So, rinse the cans.
Throw them in the recycling.
And then bam only a pot and a couple of bowls to clean Jason forced himself to take a seat next to Danny with his own bowl of Minestrone soup.
His stomach had been starting to rumble when he had started wiping down the counter. He might have shrugged that off in the past (i.e. anytime before tonight) but the narrowed eye glare that he received over the rim of a bowl sent him slinking into the kitchen for his own soup.
Thankfully, Jason had been able to shove a semi-decent couch into the living room and there was just about enough space for two tall men to sit together and only knock knees.
“So it’s getting pretty late and I have a meeting tomorrow with one of my guys to help look into this.”
Danny immediately started to stand up. Jason’s hand whipped out and caught the taller man’s forearm in a loose circle. Enough of a suggestion to stop without putting any strength behind his grip.
“That wasn’t a request for you to leave.”
The smooth fabric of the suit felt so much colder than it should have been.
“Or a demand that you stay.”
He let go again quickly and stirred the cooling broth that remained in his bowl.
“I’ve got some extra blankets and pillows. From when my…my uh, brothers, spend the night. None of them are as tall as you but you're welcome to any bed, couch, or corner that you like.”
Danny hesitantly floated over to the sink in the kitchen; he avoided Jason’s eyes as he contemplated the offer and placed the bowl in the sink.
“I’m not saying no.”
Danny finally said as he fiddled with the faucet handle and started scrubbing the bowl.
Jason waited quietly.
He could hear the unspoken caveat that the other man was biting back.
But.
They literally had all night and the man had obviously been through a whole hell of a lot of trauma.
Recently.
The skin on his face might have healed without scarring but that didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things. He’d been fucking muzzled. Jason wasn’t going to let that go any time soon.
So.
He waited.
“There’s plenty of ectoplasm around here. The issue is…the problem. Look.”
Danny spun away up into the air letting the legs that he had formed turn back into a ghostly tail. It lashed and twisted, nearly tying itself into knots as Nightingale tried to form a coherent sentence.
“So. I eat ectoplasm. When I’m resting I basically take it in instinctually.”
Jason nodded, listening intently.
“But. I’m also, at least partially, made of ectoplasm. So are you.”
Jason tried to hide his hard flinch but he could tell that Danny felt the surge of rough emotions at the reminder that he had died too. The Pit’s had receded to a low hum in Danny’s presence and Jason had soaked in that calm. This wasn’t the Pit’s though. This was just his own trauma smacking him in the face. But, the other man was trying to tell him something. Jason clumsily tried to shove his feeling of okayimokayquestion? And he could almost feel it sink into Danny’s skin as the other Halfa dropped his shoulders back down from around his ears.
Danny scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair for another long moment.
Stalling.
He was stalling, and Jason couldn’t help his little churr of worry, though he cut it off with a hard bite to his lip. Even if the sound wasn’t coming from his mouth, the familiar motion of physically cutting himself off helped him muffle the instinctual sound.
“I’m not explaining this very well. I’m actually terrible at explaining things. So if I forget something or say it out of order it’s not personal. This is just. Honestly. It’s kind of personal and it’s kind of gross.”
Jason didn’t have to say anything this time he just let his entire face go flat.
“No. I understand. You can handle gross. This is just kind of…invasive. And cannibalistic?”
“Okay. Wow.” Jason said. “Dramatic.”
Danny dropped his face into his hands completely this time and just held them there for several long breaths. Jason just looked at the other man for a moment, puzzle pieces clicking together in his mind as he tried to organize the information that had been presented to him.
“You’re going to…consume…my ectoplasm.”
“That sounds so much worse than it actually is.”
“Worse than cannibalism?”
Danny ignored that snarky little question with aplomb.
“My core’s more developed than yours so it’s more like I’m going to filter your ecto. It’s kind of contaminated with something.”
Jason’s mouth dropped open and Danny held up a single hand; still not meeting his eyes.
“You don’t need to tell me what it is. Obviously. Our deaths, not just ours ; but ghosts as a whole, are personal. Asking about it without a truly pressing reason is enough to get you punched first, ask questions later, kind of situation.”
“And you filtering some unknown toxic goo in your sleep isn’t a pressing enough reason?”
“No.”
“Okay. So this is more like fluid bonding just without the sex and without the possibility of one of us getting pregnant.”
Danny paused for an even longer span of time before he mumbled something that suspiciously sounded like a plea for guidance from someone named Clockwork before he finally made himself look Jason directly in the eyes.
“That’s pretty much hitting the nail on the head. Although, I said you're contaminated. Not contagious. I’ve never had any issues from consuming contaminated ectoplasm.”
“You’ve done this a lot?”
Danny’s eyes gave off a verdant glow before he hooded his eyelids over the livid green, his pupils darting away from the shorter man’s face.
“Not…consensually.”
Jason didn’t bother to hide how much he didn’t like that particular caveat.
He crossed his arms over his chest and stepped up to Danny and, despite his slightly shorter stature, made it a point to loom over the other man.
“Yeah. That non-explanation is not going to fly. What the hell do you mean by that?”
Nightingale cringed down and away but Jason could tell he wasn’t trying to get away so much as make himself less of a target.
Fearsorrysorrysorry
Jason felt himself hesitate for a second. He’d never much minded being a bit of a bully, especially when it got him the results he wanted. This felt different though. Everything that he was picking up from the other Half radiated with sincerity. But, he didn’t have any way of actually knowing if what he was picking up was true or not.
Danny seemed to be at least relatively practiced at this sort of emotional communication.
Was it the truth though?
Danny slunk into the far corner of the sofa, letting Jason continue to loom over him but refusing to meet his eyes. When Danny huffed out his next breath, Jason saw a puff of unseasonably icy vapor before the man buried his face into the cracked pleather of the back of the couch. His shoulders were trembling minutely and Danny seemed to forcibly drag himself back to the present.
They had barely spoken to each other before this and Danny had tried to warn him that his explanations might not be eloquently given. Jason let himself stiffly fall onto the other side of the couch. Loveseat really. He let his head fall backwards out of his face. Jason let his fingers slip through the lengthening locks in contemplative silence for a long moment.
He needed a trim soon; he didn’t think he could pull off a low-slung ponytail the way that Dick managed it.
“I…apologize.”
Jason gritted out through his teeth and pulled his hair sharply enough to make his scalp sting in protest to the rough treatment.. He had been trying to get used to being less angry. Learned to start ignoring the hazy green that liked to fog his vision at the slightest setback or perceived betrayal.
This sudden onset was a problem and he needed to figure out how to control himself before he scared the other Halfa away. A thought that made worms wiggle and twist deep in his belly and left him unsettled and twisting his fingers in impossible knots with his hair.
Hesitant fingers reached out, always intentionally in his full field of vision, before Nightingale gently disentangled the thick curls from the white tensioned grip that he had on them. Once he had managed to pull Hood’s hands down from his scalp Danny released them back to their own devices before he lay his hands upright in Jason’s lap.
“Please don’t hurt yourself.”
Danny’s words were a quiet murmur as he let their fingers intermingle.
Jason’s laugh was despairing but he let himself gently wrap his hands around the delicate wrists that had been presented to them. Granted Danny had already proven to Jason in a hundred ways that he would be able to get out of the grip no matter how it tightened. He had to get past this feeling of constant anticipation of being held from something. It was obvious that Danny was doing his best to explain what was happening but he had a limited amount of knowledge that he could share and it didn’t have any sort of greater overarching themes. The man knew bits and pieces of knowledge that he had been able to gather after his death and it was all swirling together with whatever nightmarish scenario had left him falling into the Gotham skies.
“I’m sorry too.” Danny’s voice was hoarse as though he was holding back some great emotion.
“I told you I can’t always explain things well. In this instance it’s a combination of things that were done without my consent by the government scientists .”
Danny snarled at the word scientists showing off sharpened fangs that had dropped neatly into his mouth before he withdrew them back into whatever pocket they were normally stored in.
“And other things that I did for my own survival.”
Nightingale’s laughter was low and embittered before he leaned into Jason’s side and whispered into the other man’s ear as though that would change what he was about to say.
“The friends I had to consume in order to regenerate in a place without ectoplasm or food. They had us fight for resources like some sort of gladiatorial show. Loser gets vivisected and then eaten by the survivors.”
“And the winners?” Jason asked with numb lips.
“Winner. Red Hood. The winner managed to set off a cataclysmic rune circle built off of the unwilling sacrifices of those he had eaten and with the assistance of his few remaining, dying, friends. He blew up the world and got knocked ass over bootstrap into a parallel dimension. So I’m going to have to ask for just a little bit of fucking grace when I’m trying to explain something deeply traumatic to you.”
“Understood.”
Danny wrenched his wrists out of the gentle clasp that he had allowed Jason to hold on to.
“Fantastic. I’m going to sleep. If we don’t need to meet with your associate until tomorrow morning, now is the time.”
Before he could stop himself Jason let out a despairing whine as Danny went to move away from him. Danny paused; only half standing as his eyes swiveled back to meet Jason’s. He waited for a long moment while he watched Jason struggle to articulate himself.
“Please.”
Jason managed as his throat worked up and down with tight emotion.
“Stay. Sorry.”
Danny slowly sat back down next to Jason, his eyes watchful. It took several long moments of silence before Nightingale slowly released some of the tension from his shoulders with a deep sigh.
“Okay.”
He tilted his head forward and clunked his and Jason’s foreheads together softly.
“I could probably stand to give your trauma a little bit of grace as well.”
“Please.”
“Okay. That’s fair man, but we do really need to get a bit of sleep before it gets too much later.”
Jason nodded silently before he stood up on shaky legs, and his fingers skimmed across the ear that Danny had whispered into.
The same one that held his earpiece.
And the deep split at the top from a hit that the Joker had managed to notch into it with one of the wild swings of his crowbar.
Before he could try and come up with some sort of rusty domestic protocol that Alfie might have insisted on, Jason watched the taller man peek into a closet with a grunt of approval as he snagged a fluffy pillow from the top shelves. With unerring aim Danny chucked the pillow into the most defensible corner of the apartment and without so much as a puff of effort he pulled one of the large blankets that Jason had given him so recently directly out of his chest. The man’s legs slowly dissolved into a singular tail and he let his weight land ever so slightly on the fluffy cushion he had provided for himself. His tail curled softly, and was already starting to snag ectoplasm.
Some of which, Jason was horrified to see, came from his direction and seemed to have some sort of additional gasoline sheen on top of it that the other man ingested without apparent complaint. Hopefully whatever was contaminating him would start to lessen its effects soon.
Jason didn’t have a whole lot of hope though.
A lot of his assholery didn’t come from the Pits.
He’d claim a lot of it as his own, a direct pipeline from both his birth and adoptive father.
He kicked off his boots and the jacket before slinking into the too small shower stall with some of the worst water pressure he’d ever experienced. Jason was tall enough that he had to duck his head underneath the too low spray and let the lukewarm water hit him in tepid placid splats. He forced himself to relax his shoulders until the water started to go completely cold.
Then he stayed for a little while longer until he started to shiver. When it felt like the water was starting to bite at his skin Jason reluctantly reached for a bar of soap and quickly scrubbed himself down. Stepping out of the stall into the cramped confines of the bathroom he stared in appalled silence as he realized that he hadn’t brought any sort of pajamas in with him.
The thought of climbing back into even just his sweaty boxers made his stomach turn.
Whatever.
Nightingale had just talked about vivisection and cannibalism. He could probably handle some gnarly scars.
Jason shuffled back out into the main living space of the efficiency with a towel wrapped around his waist and another scrubbing his hair. Danny’s barely slitted open eyes met his for a brief moment before the other man turned away and seemed to go right back to sleep. Jason quickly slipped a pair of oversized track pants on before he nearly face planted onto the bed.
Tomorrow was going to be a long day with an early start he needed to get as much sleep as possible.
If he had any nightmares, Jason doesn’t remember them.
Hood could barely feel Phantom’s presence at his back as he strode towards an unassuming door.
It had been thoughtfully placed directly next to a dumpster. It was overflowing with black plastic garbage bags that smelled pungently enough of the refuse from the docks that most people steered well clear of it.
The door itself looked just like every other door that led into the decrepit remnants of the factories that had once been the backbone of Gotham’s commerce.
The fact that Hood had to hold onto the doorknob for just a moment longer than normal, before the biometric lock released in his hand, was going to be his crew's little secret.
He slipped through the door easily and let it stay open for just an instant longer than normal before he felt a reassuring hand tap lightly on his shoulder.
hereI.mhere.
He tilted his head in acknowledgement and sent back a thrum of recognition.
It was earlier in the day than he was usually awake for and Jason gratefully accepted the additional weight of his helmet. It hid the dark circles that were a near constant presence underneath his eyes and the faint pallor left behind by too many days hidden away from the sun. It was early enough on the weekend that no one else should have been in the office ahead of him.
Thankfully, Hood doubted that Mehr had ever been late to an appointment in his life.
The man’s slight form was neatly overshadowed by the massive bay of computers that he seemed to be working off of but Hood could feel Danny’s flickering attention shift towards him immediately.
Him?
Jason managed a rumbling note of assent that resonated out of his chest as walked up to Mehr and greeted him with a curt nod.
Even if the older man had stood up Jason would have towered over him.
As it was, all Jason could really see from this angle was the sharp half-ponytail that the other man had pulled his hair back into.
Salt and pepper hair and his khakis and polo shirt should have made him look like a man ready to join an IT department at a highschool.
Until you met his eyes.
The first time Jason had met Mehr he had had to force himself to not shift uneasily away from the piercing hazel eyes that didn’t miss a detail. He had studied Red Hood with a cool detachment that had brought back an uncomfortable sense memory of his first few nights as Robin.
When Batman had kept him close to his side and watched his every move with the occasional disgruntled Hn if he did something that the Bat didn’t fully approve of. The fact that the older man was at least a foot shorter than Batman did not change Jason’s feelings on the matter at all.
Jason’s uneasy respect, and the literal bag of money, that he had handed the man at the beginning of their acquaintance had been enough to at least earn him the appearance of respect.
The ensuing years meant that they had learned each other's quirks and now Jason felt like they had a pretty good understanding of each other. Jason tilted his head towards the computers in silent question.
"Right. I read the file that you sent.”
Jason had done no such thing. Oracle was such a know-it-all sometimes.
“Overall, whoever made it did a damn good job.”
“But it was made?”
“Yes.”
Mehr nodded fingers typing quickly as he pulled up a couple of different files.
“Whoever paid for Colter’s fabricated past; paid for the best and it was probably a long time ago. The last twenty-five years are real, as far as I can tell.”
“Any idea why?”
Mehr shrugged.
“My first guess would be some sort of government cover-up. Nothing so official as Witness Protection, but this kind of made-up paper trail is going to be out of reach of most civilians. And most organized crime enterprises would sooner shoot somebody in the face than do this much work. ”
Jason hummed just under his breath, letting it catch and distort with the vocal synthesizer on his helmet.
He could fully admit it was creepy as shit.
That’s why he had started doing it in the first place when he had first started prowling the streets as Red Hood.
Danny echoed back the sound in a subterranean basso and Jason was interested to see the way Mehr’s head twitched subtly towards the noise.
Interesting.
He’d thought that regular humans wouldn’t be able to hear the ghostspeak.
He’d done some vague testing of it both with the members of his family as well as tech.
Nobody had so much as flinched when Jason had started to practice sending emotions in their direction.
He’d half expected for B to break out in hives, but no such luck.
The little chirps of noise that came so easily to him when he was with Danny were a lot harder to replicate.
He’d finally managed it when he had been face to face with Alfie’s vegetarian lasagna, one night.
Nobody had flinched.
Which didn’t necessarily mean anything.
But if nothing else, Jason would have expected to be mocked lightly by at least one of his brothers.
Jason cleared his throat, and let himself lean against a nearby chair back.
Danny stopped humming too, although it took him a discordant moment to catch up.
That could have just been because the man was trying to be creepy though. It seemed to be one of Danny’s favorite pastimes.
He delighted in being spooky.
Jason had felt a flash of yes.h.i.i and could feel the cold spot of air that betrayed Danny’s position move away from his shoulder.
“Were you able to dig anything up about his past life? Was his wife a part of that as well or did he meet her afterwards?”
“Looks like, afterwards. They were married for around 10 years; they tied the knot just after his retirement. It’s harder too because a lot of the documentation that would help me figure out who Colter used to be is all going to be on actual physical documents. In Wisconsin. If the paperwork even still exists it’s going to be in some sort of storage facility. That’s as long as some eager beaver paper pusher didn’t shred the documents and we’re shit out of luck.”
“Anything else? Why was he in town?”
Mehr let out a quiet humorless chuckle.
“Oh you’re going to love this.”
Another couple of clicks on the keyboard brought up a familiar face. Jason stared at the expressionless mugshot that had been taken of one of his lieutenants. A man that had been missing for more than a week and he hadn’t been able to find hide nor hair of the man.
“Best as I can tell, meet Fred Colter’s nee our disfigured corpses son.”
Jason sighed deeply and with his whole chest as he contemplated Avery Drummond’s face. Who, now that he could see the two men’s pictures side-by-side, had the exact same brown eyes and a similar smirk.
“So he had a kid before he was put into whatever sort of protective program he disappeared into.”
“Yes. And then he decided for some godforsaken, reason, to come to Gotham and have some sort of family reunion. One that ended in his murder and the disappearance of his son.”
Danny slowly uncurled from the little corner that he had started to make his own. He had never had a home that was completely his before and it still felt too good to be true. He yawned and stretched his hands above his head and leaned back and back and back; doing a lazy little loop de loop in the air.
He cocked his head to one side as he stretched his hearing out to the rest of the building.
Nothing sounded out of place.
No footsteps or voices.
Just the low scratching of some industrious little rodent that was making its own nest in the walls a floor below him.
He raked a hand through his wild white hair and contemplated what he was going to do with his morning. He had managed to gather a small collection of plastic bottles that he had cleaned out and then filled in a public bathroom. The moldy comforter made a comfortable little nest that he could curl up in without having to worry about getting too warm.
The little basket next to the window…had not been there last night.
Still yawning, Danny floated over to the woven basket that someone had placed inside without disturbing him.
When he caught sight of the handwritten note that had been placed on top of his newest present he let out a little chirrup of glee. More presents from Hood. Once he managed to get himself a little bit more established Danny was going to have to figure out where the other man lived so that he could return the favor.
Sneaky presents were the best kind after all.
It meant that the other man had been thinking of him without wanting to bother him. The most recent note was just as sweet as the first had been.
THOUGHT YOU MIGHT NEED THESE. RH
The note was attached to the top of a little pad of paper and included a ballpoint pen. Danny carefully sifted through the basket with something approaching awe.
Nobody had ever given him such thoughtful gifts before.
His parents had been prone to forgetting his birthday and Christmas.
Jazz had always remembered but cakes and the like were completely out of the question in their house when the eggs were prone to reanimation. So it had usually been some sort of pre-packaged cupcake or at best a new pair of sneakers to replace the ones that had been accidentally dipped in acid.
Danny purred quietly when he pulled out a fuzzy throw blanket in a deep green color that wouldn’t show stains.
A couple of different bottles of cleaner.
One for fabrics and one for tile or linoleum.
Some paper towels for easy cleanup and disposal.
Then finally with shaking fingers he pulled out an oversized hoodie that would be able to swing down to at least his knees; this one in a sturdy black woven material that would drape without clinging to him.
Danny buried his face in the thick material with a stifled gasp as he hugged it to his chest and finally let himself actually think about his sister.
She had always done what she thought was best for him.
No matter the cost.
One of the last sounds he had heard before falling through the rift in the sky was the sound of explosive ammunition being set off with extreme prejudice.
Ancients, he even thought that he might have seen Vlad of all people coming in with his friends trying to get his parents to see reason. It had sounded like the world was exploding around him and Jazz had only been given an instant to hug her little brother tightly to her chest, her lips brushing his forehead before she pushed him back and managed to shove some sort of small tech directly into an opening in his chest.
A gash that the scientists had left on him after they’re latest session and left a couple of his ribs exposed to the open air.
She had screamed a phrase in a language that seemed to reorient Danny’s world as he fell up through the sky and then started falling straight down into an entirely new world.
He could barely see anything through the lights and explosive noises that had erupted around him but it hadn't looked survivable. He could see Jazz’s eyes red-rimmed and blackened with soot and bruises for a long moment before the portal had snapped shut. Gone so completely that he couldn’t even see a scar in the sky above him as he began to fall.
He had felt the finality of whatever Jazz had done.
There wasn’t going to be a way for him to go back home, even if he had wanted to.
He had the last piece of his world and family hidden behind his heart.
Still holding the new hoodie tightly in one arm Danny pulled it free gently; desperately trying not to damage whatever Jazz’s last gift could possibly be. He looked down at the little cube in the palm of his hand and he could see that Jazz, Sam, and Tucker had all written their initials on it. Danny ducked his head down a little bit so that he could look at the tech a little closer. It looked to just plug in to a normal USB. Jazz and his friends would have had months to plan their insane rescue mission. Hopefully wherever he had landed they had similar technology.
Although if he glanced at the little box out of the corner of his eyes he could see the low sheen of some sort of magic that they had coated it in. Knowing Tucker it was more than likely going to force itself to work with any sort of operating system he was able to find.
Danny floated over to the corner that he had made his little nest in.
It was easier to pull ectoplasm from the floor when he only had a few layers of fabric separating him from it so he didn’t have to worry about needing to find or haul a bed frame into the little studio.
The moldy comforter was carefully folded; as neatly as he was able to manage and placed to one side.
He scrunched the rich green fabric of his new blanket into a nest that he would be able to curl up in comfortably as long as he continued to not have bones.
The cleaning supplies were left in the basket for the moment.
He still wanted to do a little more exploring before the sun fully rose and cleaning could wait until after he’d rested some more.
The motley little collection of plastic bottles was tucked in next to the cleaners.
It wasn’t a lot but Danny tweaked the bottles and looked over his few belongings with something like pride.
With a great deal of reluctance Danny twitched back into his human form only staying in it long enough to slip the hoodie over his bare torso before reverting back to his ghostly body as quickly he could manage. Danny let his fingers smooth down over his hazmat suit and even though he normally couldn’t even feel whatever clothing his alternate was wearing he could feel a hint of extra warmth on his body from the extra layer.
He floated back towards his window and let himself go invisible and intangible as he slipped through the rotten wooden boards that half covered the broken glass. The early morning sun was still hiding behind the tall buildings and left the streets of his new home murky and fog covered.
The chill of the mist seemed to penetrate right to his core and Danny shivered with delight.
He let the droplets of moisture phase right through him and he could feel them wicking away the muck and blood of his capture and subsequent escape. The miasma of smog and water felt like a blessing after the close confines of the laboratory and Danny let himself spin and swirl through it.
It was early enough that he could just make out a couple of windows with their lights on.
3rd shifters coming home for the day or maybe a few of especially early birds that were preparing for the long day ahead of them. The sidewalks themselves were bare of any commuters and even the women who had been patrolling the area for customers had finally headed back to their homes.
The city wasn’t completely quiet though.
Danny could hear what sounded like pigeons cooing and beginning to stir from their nests and someone had a radio playing a softly sung ballad in Spanish.
The more Danny scouted around the more it felt like any sort of normal morning in a big city.
Well, what he had always imagined a big city would sound like.
Whatever alternate earth he had ended up landing on seemed to be on a similar timeline at least.
There weren’t a lot of cars lining the streets but the ones that were there looked to be worn from long winters. The rocker panels rusted and were eaten away by the spray of slush from salt covered pavement.
The lines of the cars were different though, a little longer and sleeker than the vehicles he was accustomed to.
Still though; they were undeniably gas powered cars just like those he had grown up with.
As he got closer to the edges of the urban sprawl Danny started to hear the low susurration of swiftly running water.
He trailed the edges of the river, ducking under huge cranes and flying over large shipping containers.
The closer he got to the waters edge the more the smell of pollution and rotten fish began to overwhelm him.
The water looked near pitch black with an oily rainbow sheen coating the top of it.
Sam would have been having absolute fits about this place if she was here Danny thought wistfully.
He hadn’t seen a single designated green space at all in his exploration and the water smelled absolutely toxic even to him.
As he darted around his new haunt Danny was starting to get a vivid picture of exactly where he had ended up.
The entire place seemed to be the worst sort of urban sprawl, a broken down neighborhood trapped in the center of a river that was surrounded by an even larger city. With the cracked concrete, the empty warehouses and the prevalence of a less than legal nightlife as its main source of income the whole place had the feeling of a place that had been abandoned due to neglect and fear.
The unwanted bastard child of an aging royalty.
It took him a couple of hours but Danny managed to circle the entire island, noting decrepit bridges as the only escape.
Winding his way through the blocks of housing Danny did start to notice some bright spots in the otherwise dingy atmosphere.
A small diner whose warm lights shone out onto the pocked sidewalks. A woman, he presumed a waitress, between her clean white apron and the neat bun that her graying hair had been pulled back into, was wiping down the tables.
A few blocks down, now that the sun was finally starting to peek over the rooftops he could see a line forming for what looked like a local soup kitchen.
All of the tables and floors were worn but scrupulously clean.
A couple of brave souls were already huddled over their pancakes or oatmeal with one of the employees waving a full coffee pot at them playfully.
Peering in through the window Danny smiled softly at the friendly group. Maybe once he managed to clean up his mortal body a little bit Danny would be welcomed here too and he could eat some freshly cooked food for the first time in longer than he wanted to think about.
When another early riser slipped obliviously through his body Danny startled and zipped up onto a nearby roof.
He hadn’t even felt the other man come up behind him.
He had used to be better at this, more aware of his surroundings.
In Amity Park he had been able to feel the trails that the local human population had made through the ectoplasm that had filled the air.
He didn’t always know who it was, but Danny had always been able to determine without so much as a glance, whether there were any civilians in his trajectory.
There was just something about this place that left him feeling constantly on his back foot.
Tail?
Whatever.
Amity Park may have been coated in ectoplasm but he had still been able to feel the people moving through it.
Here it was like all of the people had been a part of this liminal space for so long that they were a part of the atmosphere, generations of people living and dying and being buried in it.
It was more akin to the Ghost Zone than the mortal plane that he was used to.
Danny slunk back towards his apartment as the streets started to fill up with commuters.
T his time he was careful to float well above the scattering of people.
It had always felt weird as hell whenever any sort of living thing passed straight through him and Danny had no interest in feeling that particular sensation again any time soon.
When he finally passed back through his window Danny sighed deeply as he let himself slip back into an at least semi-tangible form.
Alighting on the fuzzy softness of his new blanket Danny settled in for a late morning nap.
Once he got a little bit more rest he could start to clean up the worst of the water damage and mold.
The gift basket and the clippers had definitely come from Hood so he was going to work under the assumption that he was welcome in the other man’s haunt.
At least for now.
Snuggling into the deep folds of the fabric Danny could already see the ectoplasm start to seep back out of the floor as his eyes started to slip closed.
He hummed deeply at the unexpected comfort that he had found and let himself slip slowly back to sleep.
When Dick saw Jason the next afternoon he didn’t like the way that his younger brother's eyes were lined with dark bruising from a lack of sleep.
“Problem?”
Jason shook his head even as he took a deep draw from the energy drink he was clutching.
“3 out of my 4…employees.”
Lieutenants, Dick’s brain replaced the slowly enunciated word.
“Came to the meeting we had scheduled.”
“And the fourth?”
“No call. No show. I might have to get HR involved if this continues or maybe a welfare check if they don’t get in contact with me.”
Dick nodded thoughtfully.
HR would probably be the mousy little man that had been working on Jason’s books both legal and not for the past few years. T he man seemed to blend into furniture while also being comparable to Red Robin with his skill with computers. The welfare check was probably going to be an oversized boot to whichever door the missing lieutenant was known to hide behind.
Dick had never actually been to the warehouse that Jason had converted into an open plan office space for the people who worked under him but he had seen the blueprints and been impressed.
Jason had even begrudgingly brought some of his paperwork to Bruce when he had been in the process of legitimizing his business.
A quick glance through the documents had shown that Jason had been deadly serious about taking care of the people that worked for him. W-2’s, health insurance, the whole nine yards.
You could say a lot of things about Jason but he had never failed to commit.
As Red Hood he controlled the trafficking of drugs into the Narrows, made sure that the area children were kept well clear of it, cracked down on violent crime both day and night and ran a legitimate charity as Jason Todd-Wayne.
The man needed to have employees that he could trust.
If only to make sure that he didn’t run himself completely ragged.
No matter what he or Tim might think, sleep was actually a required activity that both of them needed to partake in on a more regular basis.
Dick clapped his hand on Jason’s shoulder in commiseration.
“Hopefully nothing too exciting comes from that. Maybe he just forgot.”
Jason nodded in feigned agreement as the pair turned to start walking towards the Bed, Bath, and Beyond that they had agreed to meet at.
Like hell had the man forgotten a meeting but Jason pushed that out of his mind for the moment.
H e was determined to make the strange man more comfortable as soon as possible.
Even if he was living in a murder house.
Dick had needed to physically remove over a dozen didn’t blankets from Jason’s grasp while they had wandered through the too bright lights aisles of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Every time he had seen another one Jason had fussed and compared the textures between the fluffy dark green throw and the next blanket that had landed in his line of sight.
" You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“You really think he’ll like this blanket?”
“I think he’ll like any of these very nice blankets but if you get him more than one or two he’s going to be overwhelmed by choice.”
Jason’s eyes flicked over the remaining options in front of him.
He snagged another blanket that was a dark gray that wouldn’t show dirt too easily.
“Two then. One for now and one for when I switch out the green to wash it. So he doesn’t think I took it away.”
Since he was laser focused on the texture in front of him Jason couldn’t have seen Dick tilt his head slightly back, his eyes squeezed shut for just a moment while he silently asked for patience.
“Sounds good.”
“Don’t patronize me, Dick. ”
Dick bit back a smile while he watched his brother, hulking and bulky with muscle, slowly pet against the grain of a throw blanket covered in mushrooms.
“I’m not. From what we’ve been able to piece together about this guy he deserves every bit of our consideration. But buying the wrong...” Dick flicked his hands up to create quotation marks in the air “blanket is not going to be the reason this guy tips over the edge.”
Rubbing his thumb and forefingers together this time on a blue and white check fabric Jason continued to avoid eye contact.
“I scared him. I’m always talking about giving people a chance. Making sure that they’re not judged for their pasts. But I didn’t even give him a second to try and explain himself, just treated him like a threat from the get go.”
"Yeah.” Dick’s voice was soft. “Just because we’re all trying to move past our own personal histories doesn’t mean that we weren’t shaped by them. He scared you too.”
“He didn’t mean to though.”
“The hell he didn’t. We’ve all seen that recording. The only reason that man didn’t suplex you into the ground was because of that muzzle.”
Dick’s eyes flicked around them, triple-checking that nobody was within earshot of their conversation.
“He used those electrical snips you left him. He’s staying in that shitty little efficiency in your territory. Trust goes both ways and it seems to me that you're both working on it.”
“What other fucking choice does he have?”
Jason growled in frustration and swiped his hands through his hair leaving it curling wildly and swept up off of his face.
“Whoever he is, that man can fly, turn invisible and slip through solid objects. He’s got a whole lot of options even if he doesn’t want to be a hero or a rogue.”
Dick clapped his hand up on the taller man's shoulder and started to drag him out of the aisle that they had been occupying.
“Now, let’s go look at the cleaning products. I’m thinking we go for unscented and dye free. Let’s try to not induce any unexpected allergic reactions in your guest.”
The employees of the thrift store had given him a wide berth but Jason was sure that they had still heard him as he muttered murderously.
He picked through the selection of cheap baskets that had all probably come from some sort of department store.
“...cheap. Made in China. Cheap and made in China. Whatever happened to craftsmanship I ask you…”
Jason would have had to be a lot more oblivious than he had ever been to not notice the mechanical sound of a phone snapping a picture of him.
The Narrows had accepted Jason Todd’s return from the dead with open arms but Gotham as a whole had been less than impressed.
He was 100% sure that picture was going to be sold to the local paper with some sort of ridiculous headline.
Riches to Rags: Gothams (Least?) Favorite Son Forced to Shop Second Hand.
As though choosing to shop at a local thrift store was something to be ashamed of.
He had his own fucking money.
Hell he could steal one of Bruce’s credit cards and the man wouldn’t say a single word.
It was the principle of the thing.
He could have purchased blankets made from the furry asses of rabbits mixed with clouds.
Jason may have not had the best start in life, even compared to some of his brothers, but he remembered that sickening feeling of being given things that he felt he hadn’t earned.
Money was basically Bruce’s love language.
The man could be an emotional brick wall.
He hadn't been able to verbalize his feelings in a supportive or even normal way. It had taken a lot of fighting and hard work on both their parts, but Jason knew deep in his bones that Bruce loved him.
Shockingly, the man who dressed up as a giant bat to fight crime didn’t have the most healthy of coping mechanisms.
When Jason had first come to live with Bruce he had felt those debts piling up like boulders in his chest.
He didn’t want to do the same thing to his stranger.
Jason had thought about purchasing a phone for the man but that had also felt like a step too far.
The pen and notepad had felt like a good compromise.
The guy already knew that Jason was sneaking into the apartment he had selected and hadn’t seemed too upset or paranoid of the clippers that he had left.
If Jason had been raised by absolutely any other family he would have been wringing his hands while he watched the young man gently sort through the gift basket that he had finally selected.
To be fair if he had been raised by absolutely any other family he wouldn’t have been spying on a maybe alien on a rooftop across the street with a pair of Batnoculars. (Jason and Bruce blamed that particular nomenclature on a pre-teen Dick).
He fumbled them hard though when the white-haired stranger disappeared in a flash of light and he saw the bare skin of what looked like a human man's back, black hair brushed his shoulders and scars criss-crossed his back. The skin quickly disappeared underneath the oversized hoodie that Jason had snagged from the same thrift store that he had purchased the basket from. '
Another flash of light and the man was back to white hair and the hazmat suit before he disappeared into absolutely thin air.
Jason slipped away as quickly as he could manage.
It was one thing for the man to know that Jason was leaving him creepy little presents.
If he got caught staring through a pair of over-powered binoculars Jason wouldn’t be surprised if the man drop kicked him across the length of the city.
The mirror looked like somebody had punched it just off dead center with a balled-up fist. Shards of glass held on by dried up glue radiated out from it so although his reflection was fractured Danny was able to fully see the remnants of the plastic muzzle.
He could see the 12 pinhole scars that surrounded his lips. Hopefully they would fade with time and all the ectoplasm he could eat. Hell, at this point he might even be able to get some real food in his stomach.
His stomach rumbled as he thought of eating a burger.
Of course, he still couldn’t really open his mouth completely.
The clear plastic surrounded his lips and were held in place by metal staples that punched deep into the flesh of his cheeks and chin. Danny angled his head this way and that, trying to get a good angle on the first one.
When he had woken up Danny had been able to spit out the metal plate that had been attached to his tongue. It had left his mouth feeling raw and empty.
It reminded him of when Tucker had finally gotten his braces removed. The teen had constantly been running his tongue over his teeth, flexing his jaw to feel the freedom of movement.
He didn’t have full range of motion yet, but Danny was able to at least open his mouth up a little bit.
The sink was barely holding on to the wall below the shattered mirror and it looked like something small and furry might have died in it at some point in the distant past. The taps looked to be in okay condition though.
He hadn’t had a drink of water in longer than he wanted to think about.
Danny turned the faucet handle without a whole lot of hope and was only mildly disappointed when the pipes didn’t even rumble. The building had obviously been abandoned for a long time. Any water that might have been left in the pipes after the water was cut off had probably dried up a long time ago.
Okay.
So, no water for him yet.
But once he got the rest of the hardware off of his face, he could go completely intangible and sneak through the city without having to worry about getting mugged.
Danny reached for the cutters again.
He couldn’t put this off any longer and at least he wasn’t going to get any more electrical shocks when he pulled the staples out.
He did need to figure out a way to thank his benefactor.
The clippers felt like a present that welcomed him into the other man’s haunt. Practical in more than one way, while letting him keep his autonomy. He could get this piece of Ancient’s forsaken plastic off of his face and use it for help setting up electricity in his new little home.
The purr that erupted from his chest was rough and unpracticed, but he couldn’t help but eye the tool fondly. The rumbling sputtered to a stop when he reached for his face, but it had felt nice while it lasted.
He winced as he wiggled one of the blades underneath the staple. He see-sawed the staple back and forth to try and pull it free. He didn’t really want to cut them into multiple pieces.
Danny healed fast enough that he needed to worry about his skin growing over straight pieces of metal. So, they needed to come out all in one piece. The porcelain of the sink tinkled quietly as the first staple fell into it. Small dots of green blood landed next to the staple in quiet patters.
It took several long painful minutes to slowly remove all of the remaining metal. When he was on the last few, he had to hold the plastic to his skin so that it wouldn’t swing painfully loose.
When the last staple finally came out of his face Danny threw the plastic muzzle away as fast as possible.
He ignored the sharp crack as the plastic cut through drywall as he brought his hands up to his face and ran them across his jaw for the first time in months. He disregarded the bright shocks of pain as his fingers ran over the deep puncture wounds and he let his mouth fully drop open.
The bones of his jaw clicked and popped at the unfamiliar movement as he yawned.
Shutting his mouth with a click he bared his fangs at the mirror.
Finally, he had the last physical piece of the GIW off of his body.
His scars were still there.
They would be for a long time.
Now that the muzzle was gone though Danny looked down at his own body thoughtfully; and saw a stranger. He had been in his ghost form since he had been kidnapped by the GIW and the scarring was the only thing that had changed. He had stayed physically the same as when he had first died; his ghostly form apparently incapable of aging; he had been trapped in his fourteen-year-old body.
They had only ever known him as Phantom.
Not that any of the agency’s men had ever called him that.
Not that any of them had ever asked him either.
Instead of a name they had listed some sterile combination of letters and numbers in their system to identify him. No longer human and so no longer deserving of a name or any sort of respect. After everything that had happened did he even have a human form anymore?
They had cut into him with scalpels that had been coated in something that the Drs. Fenton had invented it to make it possible for them to vivisect the ghosts that they had imprisoned. Danny inhaled deeply as he reached for that other side of himself.
It burned like an overstretched muscle, but he could feel himself ease into his human form. The glowing rings slowly faded away and for a long moment Danny couldn’t force himself to look into the mirror again.
So, he started by taking an inventory of what his body looked like currently.
He was barefoot.
They’d managed to surprise him. His par…The Fenton’s had let them right into his childhood bedroom. He’d only had a couple of moments to try and scramble free of his bedding before the net had landed on him and pinned him to the ground with unnatural weight.
He’d transformed into his Phantom form almost without thought. Desperately trying to faze through the corded metal of the net and being met with electrical shocks. The Fenton’s had figured out how much Phantom had hated electricity. That it was one of the main things that could still hurt him on the mortal plane.
They and the GIW had used it as punishment and containment.
Watched him twitch and scream with vindictive eyes.
While he had writhed in the containment desperately trying to escape, he had vaguely heard the sound of Jazz screaming. He had heard her fists pounding desperately against her own bedroom door.
They must have locked her in.
She had screamed his name.
Thrown her body against the sturdy wood in a futile effort to try and save him.
Phantom had snarled from inside of the net and opened his mouth. He hadn’t known if he was going to bite his attackers or if he could have gathered the breath to wail. He hadn’t been given the opportunity to do anything though.
A long plastic pole had whipped through the holes of the net, and he had felt a needle enter his neck. Whatever had been in the syringe had burned like fire.
Phantom’s cries fell off into a choked silence as he lost consciousness, his blurred vision catching on the glow in the dark stars that his dad had helped him put on the ceiling before fading to black.
Danny shook his head hard.
He shut his eyes tightly; fisted hands coming up to grip his hair as he shook.
He used the sting to try and bring himself back to the present.
He blinked his eyes open, using the heel of his palm to wipe away green tinged tears from his cheeks.
He had time.
Hood’s presence was a distant feeling that felt vaguely like he was asleep, his emotions were evened out into a peaceful purr of indistinct comfort.
He started again.
Bare feet.
Pajama pants.
Even with the GIW’s dubious care it looked like he had managed to grow at least a bit taller.
The hems of the soft pants were too short.
They barely skimmed the top of his bony ankles.
They used to be some sort of plaid pattern but even buried beneath his ghost form they had been worn thin. Worn so thin he could see the individual threads that abutted against his knees and his hips. The elastic waistband was the only thing keeping the pants on him.
He may have grown taller, but he hadn’t managed to keep any sort of body fat with that growth.
His ribs were a bony ladder that climbed up his sides.
The neat little Y cut that they had made on his chest had healed at least.
The sutures had fallen out at some point and the scar had faded to barely gnarled flesh against his too pale skin.
Danny took in a deep breath before he finally managed to bring his eyes up to the mirror and he stared at his face for an instant before he had to turn away.
Black hair.
Blue eyes.
Sickly pale skin without an ounce of the baby fat that used to fill his cheeks out.
The holes that dotted his face from the staples and the bars through his lips were filling in quickly.
The months in the laboratory seemed to have made his healing even more powerful. His core had turned in on itself somehow. He hadn’t been given the opportunity to defend himself so all of the power at his disposal had focused on keeping him healed enough that he didn’t die permanently.
Shifting back into his ghost form with a quiet sigh of relief Danny let himself relax back into his hazmat suit. He was fully clothed at least, and the baggy material made him look a little bit more substantial than he actually was.
Danny turned away from the mirror without bothering to look again. He let himself lift off of the ground as he turned intangible and phased out into the late afternoon sun of this strange city.
The light of day didn’t lend the city a lot of extra charm, but Danny still let himself swirl in a slow loop at the feeling of freedom.
No friends.
No family.
But also. No enemies.
A fresh start: and if he could steer clear of Hood maybe the other man would let him be.
Danny figured the man had tracked him to the building. It was still well within his haunt, so it made sense to Danny that Hood would be able to find him within its boundaries. The other man had even left him those clippers as a present for him without trying to take away Danny's freedom of choice. Letting him take the muzzle off himself without further argument. This was probably a safe a place as any that he would be able to find with this much ectoplasm just free floating through the cities structure.
Danny floated with uncertainty in the air for a long moment as he tried to decide what he should do next.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs flitted through his thoughts.
He had shelter, shabby as it was.
He could stand to make it a little more comfortable though; like he had thought about the day before. Blankets, some bottled water.
Some…food!
Danny’s head whipped around as his peripheral vision picked out an incongruously brightly colored building.
The name wasn’t familiar, ‘Big Belly Burger’.
But Danny recognized a fast-food restaurant when he saw one.
For a moment he fantasized about walking through the front doors and buying out the menu. Eating his own weight in hamburgers, cheese, and fries. He looked at the doors longingly before he flew around to the back of the squat building.
Not only did he not have any money, but Danny was under no illusions that he wouldn’t cause a stir no matter which way he entered the building. A fanged, green skinned alien or a too skinny boy in barely any clothes.
The police or CPS. were probably on speed dial.
Definitely not an option.
He wasn’t super surprised that the garbage bins were padlocked but that wasn’t going to stop him. He let his nose lead him towards the dumpster that had food smells coming out of it. The other one was probably just cardboard. He slipped through the plastic without any trouble, and it only took Danny a moment for his eyes to adjust. Once he could see more clearly, he started to sift through the bags that had been carelessly tossed in.
It didn’t take him long to strike gold. The brown paper bag had been crumpled up and he carefully ripped the bag open pulling out a half-eaten cheeseburger and a few French fries. It was all cold at this point, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours old.
The deep rumbling purr of happiness came out of his chest without a conscious thought.
Yum.
Greasy low-quality beef with some plastic adjacent cheese. Neither of them ecto-contaminated so he didn't need to fight them first.
It had been such a long time since he had last eaten that it didn’t take very much before Danny had to put the food down with a sad little chirp. He didn’t want to push too far. Bring all that food right back up just because he didn’t have enough self-control.
The dumpster's confined space was also starting to creep in on him.
Now that the worst of the hunger had been quelled, he could feel his anxiety at the thought of being trapped again rising in his chest. He popped his invisible head out to take a long look around to make sure that no one was waiting for him. No one could see him, but someone might have heard him rustling through the paper and plastic like a particularly large racoon.
The coast seemed clear though, so Danny let the rest of his body rise out of the dumpster as he contemplated his next destination. Food, shelter…water wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Maybe there was a general store nearby that he could steal a couple of cases of water from. He didn’t enjoy the thought of outright stealing from a local business. Food that had been thrown away was one thing; but he didn’t want to cut into the already razor's edge of profitability that those kinds of stores had. Sucking his lower lip into his mouth Danny nibbled on it in thought.
There had to be some plastic bottles that had been discarded.
Maybe if he could find some of those and then a public water fountain that would work. It wasn’t like he actually needed water. It was just something that he would enjoy having, both for drinking and possibly for getting the worst of the blood and muck out of his suit. Mind made up Danny headed out of the parking lot; his eyes raked the ground looking for any bottles that he might be able to scavenge.
Jason had to bite back a curse when he picked up the little tracker that had fallen off of Gotham’s newest resident.
I t looked like it had just rolled into the shadow of the old cast iron tub.
Hopefully that was what had happened, and he would actually come back. None of Oracle’s cameras had been able to pick up when the man had left the building. No doors or windows had opened or closed.
He was thankful to see that the man had at least taken advantage of the wire cutters that he had been given. Though he winced beneath his hood at the scattering of staples that had been left in the decrepit sink. The man had also left the bars that had pierced through his lips in a neat little pile in the living room.
Jason put a couple swabs of greenish blood into an inconspicuous pocket. There was a hole in the wall that had the cracked remnants of the plastic muzzle buried into it. The man was definitely going to notice that it was gone but Jason wanted to get as much information as was possible about whatever had happened to him.
He’d have to brave the Batcave, but it might be worth it to see if there were any answers as to where the man had come from.
His nose wrinkled a little bit when he walked back out into the living room. He had another helmet covering his face but just the memory of that mold smell was enough to make his stomach lurch a little bit. The place was disgusting and dangerous between the bodily fluids and the water damage, but it didn’t seem to bother the meta at all. He also didn’t have a lot of options if the man went to ground somewhere else.
Gotham wasn’t a small city and the man could fly. He could already be halfway across the Atlantic for all Jason knew.
Placing a few inconspicuous bugs throughout the apartment made him feel a little better at least.
He’d be notified about any noises and hopefully be able to figure out how to introduce himself a little less aggressively.
Because Jason had actually been raised by the World's Greatest Detective and no matter what Dickface said he wasn’t oblivious.
The strange man had calmed the Pit in a way that had never happened before. It had left him able to sleep more peacefully than he had managed in years.
Jason was almost giddy with the feeling of uninterrupted sleep and the fact that his little gift had been accepted.
That left a warm spot in his chest that he barely recognized. He wanted to feel that way again. Wanted to keep finding things that the man would enjoy and be if not trusted as a friend at least accepted.
Jason side-eyed the black mold on the walls. Starting with some bleach maybe. An alert popped up on his UI before he could go much further though.
Red Hood had a meeting with some of his lieutenants in the next half an hour.
He growled a little bit with frustration, but Jason needed to make sure that he kept a firm hand on the people that he employed both as Jason Todd and as Red Hood. He slipped back out of the window and immediately caught sight of a familiar shadow across the street.
Jason sighed heavily before he grappled his way over to the building across the way. He landed quietly on the roof, his boots barely crunched on the crumbling concrete.
Nightwing let his leg drop down from the edge of the building, his arms swung down from their position on his knee as he stood up fully. His head cocked back a little to meet Jason in the eye.
Jason didn’t give him a chance to say anything in the futile hope that he could control the conversation they were about to have.
“What do you want?”
Jason knew that Dick could hear the growl underpinning his modulated voice by the way his brother arched a single eyebrow at him.
“Fuck off.”
Jason spun on his heel already completely done with the older man.
“Come on, Little Wing. Don’t be like that.”
Hood let out a rumbling snarl when he felt Dick’s hand land on his shoulder. If he had put any force behind it Jason would have shrugged it off and kept going. Instead of the implacable grip that Jason knew the man was fully capable of, he could barely feel the press of fingertips through the heavy weight of his Kevlar.
He let his muscles relax and dropped his shoulders as he stopped moving. He had hoped that he could put off having a conversation for at least a little while. He should have known better though.
Every single bat and bird in Gotham were going to stick their nose in his business.
Jason should count himself lucky that it was only Nightwing. At least Wing would be less likely to mock his mother-henning tendencies than the others.
Pot, kettle and all that.
He still couldn’t bring himself to look the other man in the eye though.
“O told me about how the Pit reacted to this guy.”
Dick’s voice was even but Jason could hear the underlying stress of it.
“ Of course she did.”
“B got a file started.”
“Of course he did.”
“The Robins have added some extra surveillance to the street and Red’s working on tracking him when he’s invisible.
“Of course they are.”
“Hood.”
Jason turned around, head still tipped down and away, so he didn’t have to meet Dick’s eyes.
“I don’t know what you want me to say. You know everything I know at this point.”
“I really don’t.”
“Did O show you any footage of him in the apartment?”
Nightwing took the change in subject in stride.
“Yes. Whatever he’s doing with the Lazarus water seemed to help him though. He obviously couldn’t eat regularly with…” Dick waved vaguely at his face. “All this going on. So, it’s good to know that he has some way of getting nutrients.”
Sharp eyes flicked to the side in thought.
“Is it affecting whatever Lazarus water is still in your body?”
“Sometimes it feels like I’m overflowing. Like the water is going to drown me from the inside out.” Jason’s voice was hoarse as he didn’t quite answer the question. “You’ve seen my eyes.” He stops, struggling to vocalize what he was feeling.
Nightwing waited patiently for Hood to gather his thoughts. His hands stayed relaxed at his side and his face tilted so that he’d be able to hear whatever Jason had to say. No matter how quietly it was muttered.
“It magnifies my emotions. Not just the negative ones.” Jason huffed quietly. “Okay, mostly the negative ones. But still, they’re already overwhelming and it was like it all went quiet. Like the tide went out and I could breathe again.”
“Okay. Well, that’s good to hear. Are you still feeling better?”
Hood didn’t know how to answer that question, so he ignored this one too.
“He needs bleach.”
“What?”
Nightwing’s voice pitched a little bit, but he held steady.
“He needs cleaning supplies. That apartment is covered with mold.”
“Okay.”
“And blankets. Everybody likes blankets.”
“Right.”
Hood’s voice was strained and even with the modulator he was sure that Dick could hear how panicked he felt.
“What do you give a probably alien as a housewarming gift?”
“Hood.”
“What if he doesn’t like the clippers, I gave him?”
“Hood!”
“I know he used them but what other option did he have?”
“ HOOD!!”
“What!?!”
“How about a gift basket?”
“What?” Jason’s racing thoughts skidded to a halt.
“A gift basket.”
Dick held his hands out to slowly spin Jason around so that he could look up into his little brother’s eyes.
“Nothing too extravagant. B and Penny-One are out for this current mission.”
Jason felt his eyes widen as he contemplated the atrocities that could be committed by two older men with too much money on their hands and absolutely no idea how non-billionaires lived their lives day to day.
“No. B’s going to want to buy the building, isn't he?”
Nightwing grimaced a little bit, looking away and running his hands through his hair.
Jason’s voice goes even more monotone.
“B has already bought this building, hasn’t he?”
Holding up his hands in a placating motion Nightwing shook his head no.
“Then, who? Wait. No.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid that…”
“Why would the Replacement buy a random apartment building in my part of the city?
“Little Wing.” Nightwing's voice is calm but firm with warning.
“Fine.” Jason snarls. “What the fuck does Red Robin want with this particular little hellhole?”
“I think he was hoping it might be a nice enough Christmas gift that you wouldn’t give him any more humiliating presents”
Jason barked out a sharp laugh. “Fat-fucking chance. R squared didn’t like the Play Bunny mags I got him? Time to up the game then and see if I can’t find any of the really niche stuff. I’m thinking of the Gay Kama Sutra. Hardcover of course. Add a couple of close comfort condoms so that he and his boyfriend can play it safe.”
Dick finally let the stoicism drop from his face and he had to turn his head away a little so that Jason wouldn’t see the smile that was creeping across his face.
“Listen man it’s getting late enough that I need to head out, but we could meet tomorrow at Bed, Bat, and Beyond. Get some reasonably priced blankets, towels, any sort of cleaning supplies you think he’ll need.”
“Fine.” Hood grunted as he grabbed his grappling gun.
“I’ve got a meeting soon and then I’ll need to sleep for a couple of hours. Let’s say noon, tomorrow.”
Nightwing leaned forward, his hands were placed on both of Jason’s shoulders as he gently knocked their foreheads together.
“With any luck; we can get him a little more acclimated to Gotham before B shows up trying to adopt him.
“He has to be in his twenties at least.”
“I don’t think that would really stop him.”
Red Hood couldn’t help but chuckle himself as watched Nightwing backflip off of the building, waiting a concerning amount of time before setting off his grappling gun. Just so he could get the biggest arc possible to spin and kick through the night.
“Show pony.”
Jason gave one last glance at the building. He hadn’t noticed any changes and there wasn’t anything else that he could really do tonight to help the man.
He needed to get his head in the game and figure out which one of his Lieutenants was fucking around on him.
There had been an increase in the quantity and decrease in the quality of the drugs they were importing.
Red Hood stepped up to the edge of the roof and tipped off backwards without pulling his own grappling gun at all. He let himself free fall for several stories before he landed on a particularly sturdy piece of fire escape, and then to the ground.
He had been very clear about what was and wasn’t allowed in his city as far as the drug trade went. It seemed like someone was either cutting his purity or adding unknown shit into it to increase their profits.
Striding off into the dark Jason fingered the handles of one of his guns.
It would be interesting to see where this investigation would lead him.
Danny could feel the flood of fond exasperation that swept through the man across from him and he finally let his muscles loosen.
The man may have been stand-up enough to pull him from electrified waters but that didn’t always mean much. The fact that he seemed closer to laughter than anger after a pretty intense, if short-lived, fight was definitely a point in his favor.
Maybe now that they’d sized each other up Danny could just slink out of this guys haunt without any further problems.
I mean, he had a lot of problems actually, but this could be one less.
Maybe?
Possibly?
As he struggled to regain his footing Danny felt the other man's full attention settle back on him.
Absolutely everything throbbed on his body as he got back up.
The fall and the electric shock would have been enough for him to retreat to his core even a year ago. He was tougher now, more used to pain. So he was up and on his feet even though it was nearly the last thing he wanted to do. If the ground had been just a little softer or the man across from him had been just a little less scary Danny would have stayed face-planted right where he was. As it was, one of his feet dragged behind him a little as he started to stumble away.
Ow.
Ow.
Ow!
Behind him the man cleared his throat pointedly and Danny turned his head just enough to see him out of the corner of his eye.
“I’m fine O; but we’ll need some sort of medical assistance for our…visitor.”
Danny didn’t even try to hold back the rumbling bass of the growl that erupted from his chest.
Like hell.
The other man.
Hood?
Raised an eyebrow at him and after a breath of thought seemed to purposefully push a little hesitant reassurance towards him.
Danny’s nostrils flared wide and on the exhale he pushed out a wisp of frosty air.
Which hadn’t happened before when Hood had sent emotions his way.
This was the first time it seemed intentional though.
As though he’d put some effort into it rather than an instinctual response.
Which, if this was the man’s first time meeting another ghost-adjacent person, was pretty impressive.
More than just a very, pretty face whatever he was.
But Danny had learned his lesson about being led around by pretty people who were able to beat the shit out of him without breaking a sweat.
Danny relaxed his grip on his solid form and felt the dim shadows of the sewers recede just a little bit more as his skin started to glow. His legs merged together into his tail and he let himself start to float into the air with, if not ease, at least long practice.
Hood’s eyes widened a little at the transformation but didn’t budge an inch. Instead, he let his head fall back a little against the wall deliberately making himself look more relaxed and less threatening. Danny may not be able to speak because of the muzzle but his derisive snort spoke volumes. Hood held his hands up in silent surrender.
“Okay. Fine. No hospital or anything. But we can help you with the muzzle at least. See about getting that off your face.”
Danny snorted again and this time he let himself float back up towards a thin sliver of night sky that he could see. It wouldn’t be wide enough for his shoulders but the plastic would fit through easily enough through the small gap.
The man’s voice was fading but he could still feel the surge of worried aggravation when he said.
“Fine. Have it your way.”
Whoever O was hadn’t had any sort of audible reaction to what Hood had said so they probably had cameras along with the other equipment that the man was packing. So at least two people in this strange new world had already seen his face and what the GIW had done to him.
It took a little bit of wriggling, and the painful stretch of the plastic muzzle compressing on his face but Danny managed to slide back onto the streets.
Camera’s didn’t tend to work too well around him but the tech from this world might be different.
So with another shuddering effort Danny managed to make himself go invisible and intangible.
From what he had seen while he was falling from the crumbling portal he had landed in a sizable city.
The stars were all wrong and he couldn’t quite grasp where he was in relation to where he had been.
Did this Earth even have the same number of continents?
Countries?
Not that it really mattered.
There was no going back to the life (HA!) that he had had before.
Wherever he had landed, it looked rough.
A lot of the streetlights had been smashed, leaving deep pools of darkness that Danny purposefully skirted around.
Even if the only thing that was still visible was the muzzle he didn’t need anybody trying to grab onto his face.
He flitted through the back alleys ignoring the deals for both drugs and bodies that were going on around him.
Everything looked as consensual as it could be and he didn’t see any kids involved.
Frankly, at that point he considered it none of his business.
He was also just tired.
Most of the buildings looked like they were occupied; with the occasional spot of warm flickering light from a television. But any city of even moderate size was going to have abandoned buildings. It took him a little while but Danny finally found what looked like an abandoned apartment building. Most of the windows had been smashed and the front door was hanging off of a single hinge at an angle that suggested it had been pushed inwards forcefully.
Danny cautiously floated up a couple of stories and peered in through a few windows.
He could see the occasional sleeping bag and the small stashes of supplies that some of the city's homeless had left there but between the police tape and the blood stains Danny figured something violent had happened here.
Violent enough to keep all but the most desperate of people out of the building.
Perfect.
The building was steeped in death and when Danny put a cautious hand on the bricks he could feel the treacle creep of the ectoplasm that inundated the porous surfaces.
He carefully maneuvered the muzzle through the shattered remnants of wood from a boarded off window.
The rest of his body slipped through the boards with no issue.
The apartment had never been anything glamorous.
Wall to wall carpeting in a shade that may have been beige but now had a noxious undertone of green from the mold and the water damage. The wallpaper had once had fat yellow roses peppering the wall in inconsistent rows, mismatched now where the sun had faded the once bright colors.
Danny took in a deep breath of decay, it felt just like home.
Danny let himself relax back into visibility as he scanned the room in front of him.
There were water stains creeping up the drywall, heaviest around the window and in the corners leaving the once cheerful wallpaper peeling up and bubbling.
He let himself spin around for a moment taking it all in.
Not a single piece of rubble was anything even close to white in color.
No medical equipment.
No weapons, ecto or otherwise.
Danny let out a low rumble of pleasure.
Perfection.
He’d go out and scavenge some blankets.
See if he couldn’t cobble together some sort of generator.
He had never been the brains of the family, but he was no lightweight when it came to cannibalizing what someone else had already built.
Danny dragged the remains of a moth-eaten comforter into the darkest corner of the living room and let himself fully curl up onto it with a heavy sigh. Thin lines of ectoplasm started slowly leaking up out of the floor and made a beeline for his chest. When he finally dropped off to sleep Danny felt better than he had in years.
When Red Hood slipped onto a rooftop across the road the stranger didn’t even twitch.
Pulling a small pair of binoculars out of one pouch, he also pocketed a small handheld device that was connected to the tracking device he had managed to slip into the folds of the black rubber hazmat suit the other man was wearing.
Whatever he was, and however he turned invisible the tracker had worked fine.
Wherever Jason might have been expecting this strange visitor of Gotham to go it certainly wasn’t here.
Crime Alley was one thing.
This building though was even more decrepit than the usual.
There’d been a mass murder at some point in the early aughts.
Nothing too noteworthy.
For Gotham anyways.
A drug deal gone wrong, amped up with some of the fear toxin that the Scarecrow specialized in.
Red Hood had managed to keep most of the homeless clear of the old apartment building just in case.
He’d funded several halfway houses in the Narrows and tried to keep everyone at least marginally housed and fed.
One thing about his little empire, Jason had no end of odd jobs that he was able to offer to anyone that needed some help to get back on their feet. He’d been deep in the weeds of getting a rehab facility set up for the last several months. Getting funding hadn’t been the biggest problem; if Bruce was good for nothing else he was at least usually willing to throw money at a problem.
He had also given all of his children a thorough education in business and whatever else they were interested in.
Finding good, i.e. non-villainous, counselors was proving to be tough though.
Nearly everyone with a higher education in Gotham seemed to be on a watchlist of some sort.
Anyone with common sense and a Masters degree tended to abandon the smog-filled skies as soon as they were able to graduate.
Hood didn’t feel like he was being particularly picky either.
He sincerely didn’t care about any sort of non-violent criminal history and even then it definitely depended on the circumstances.
A spouse beater wasn’t going to get into the Narrows to profit off of his little growing empire.
A girl that had killed her rapist on the other hand.
Well.
Some people got exactly what they deserved in death.
No matter what Batman thought.
Tossing his hair out of his face Jason finally knelt down to take in what he was seeing.
Oracle was quiet too.
He’d turned on the recording when he’d slipped into the sewers and hadn’t felt the need to turn it off since.
He had heard the gasp of outrage that had slipped out when she had seen the other man’s face.
Whoever had done that to him; it was malicious.
Torture on a human rights level, even if he wasn’t technically human, wasn’t going to be tolerated by any Bat or Bird.
“We’re going to need to figure out who did that to him.”
O’s voice was grim and Jason gave a grunt of agreement.
Tilting his head, Jason watched the throbbing glow of the Lazarus water as it seeped into the man’s chest.
He wasn’t going to lie, at least not to himself, that was spooky as shit.
“I’m not familiar with whatever tech or magic this guy’s got going on but I’d say he’s probably ingesting the Lazarus water to help with his injuries.”
Jason kept quiet.
Oracle was only marginally talking to him.
She was typing quickly; looking for commonalities.
Clues as to what the hell was going on with their newest visitor.
Jason’s voice was the barest whisper but he knew that the microphone would pick it up.
“How is he even collecting it? I’ve never seen the waters in this quantity in Gotham and he seems to be pulling it out of thin air.”
“I’m not picking up any sort of machinery or tech. The only metal I’m picking up is localized around his face. You tussled with him. Notice anything noteworthy?”
Jason bit his lip to hold back a bark of laughter.
Tussled.
Like they were kids on a playground.
Like the guy in front of him hadn’t managed to literally rip his helmet off of him in pieces.
At least Dick had finally managed to convince him to remove the bomb that he had stored in it for a while.
That would have been an interesting way to go out.
“You’ve been unusually quiet even for you. What are you thinking?”
“That he sets off the Pit.”
Oracle’s gasp was bitten off but Jason still heard it.
He ignored it though and plowed on.
“Not. Not in the same way that I’m used to.”
Less blinding rage and more. Jason wasn’t sure if he could explain it to anyone.
They knew about the rage that seemed to envelope him.
It didn’t always have a trigger; just came out of fucking nowhere to ruin his goddamn day.
Sometimes though.
Sometimes it was worse.
The scrape of metal on concrete seemed to be a pretty consistent one.
Green flooded his vision and he could feel that seemingly endless well of rage start to rise in his chest.
If he was in the manor or the cave he always tried to keep well away from everyone.
Jason didn’t know what he would do to himself if he somehow managed to hurt Alfie.
That strange feeling of fear mixed with curiosity had seeped through him like a warm mist.
A hiss from a frightened animal not a roar of intimidation.
Not a hint of malicious intent; even after that frankly epic blow to his mask.
The Pit had risen to meet it, enraged and tinted with his own fear, and then had paused.
Writhing in his chest like a physical being.
Like a heart attack made of magic.
And then.
A feeling he had never felt before.
A deep rumbling purr of recognition.
All of this in the span of moments while he had watched the other man try to catch his breath.
All of it a silent undertone that felt like an alien language that he had never heard before but that made perfect sense.
“I can’t explain it. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”
“Can you make a comparison? It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.”
Jason went silent for another long moment.
His eyes were still fixed intently on the other man.
Who definitely wasn’t breathing.
That fact didn’t seem to bother the stranger at all as he twisted into a deeper curl.
His entire body was molding to the shape of the used to be 90° walls and the man was about 70% cube.
Jason bit his lip hard enough that he could taste the faint tang of imminent blood.
What could he compare this feeling to?
He stumbled over his words for a moment, wetting his lips.
“It’s not…not quite the same. You remember the first time Martian Manhunter telepathically communicated with you?”
“Yes?”
“How it wasn’t just words.”
“Yes. There were undertones of his emotions too.”
“Right. That’s kind of what this was like. No words. Just emotions. Communicative emotions. He knew what he was doing and had some control over it.” “
So you felt his emotions but they weren’t just pressing into you the way the Martian’s sometimes do. He was using it as a form of communication that he had control over.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Jason nodded, even though he wasn’t sure if Oracle could actually see him through her cameras.
“I think he could understand what I was saying.”
The man’s sarcastically cocked eyebrows had also heavily implied that he understood what Jason was saying perfectly.
And that he was unimpressed.
“He just couldn’t verbally respond to you because of that horrible muzzle.”
“Well that and I think I really pissed him off when I grabbed him.”
“No.”
Oracle’s voice is only a little dry.
“A person who doesn’t enjoy being snuck up on and grabbed from behind by a total stranger. Call Ripley. I can’t believe it.”
This time Jason snorted softly. He had always loved those Ripley’s Believe it or Not books.
It wasn’t Shakespeare by any means but he had always laughed a little bit at the sight of the monkey and fish body’s that had been put together to make a ‘real mermaid’.
The tv show was fun too.
In the right light the tv host, (Dean something?) had even looked a little bit like Superman.
Nowhere near enough jawline, but the resemblance was there.
Jason huffed the white patch of hair that hung over his forehead out of his eyes as he came to a decision.
“Listen. The tracker obviously worked. I’m just going to leave our guest a little present and then leave him alone. He hasn’t hurt anybody and he definitely could have knocked my whole block off if he had wanted to.”
“Okay, Hood. I’ll pass this along to everyone.”
As though B hadn’t probably been metaphorically champing at the bit and listening to the entire conversation.
The man was busy; but meta’s put his back up for some reason and he had been a little (psychopathically over-protective) of Jason ever since his miraculous return.
The man had also been trying.
Trying so hard to make up for his past mistakes with Jason and his other children.
A part of that was that he had basically ceded control of the Narrows to Red Hood.
Gotham at large may have been the Bat’s territory but all of his children had started to break it into pieces for themselves.
Nightwing was in Bludhaven, but Bruce’s adoption ‘problem’ was rampant enough that the others had managed to create their own sectors within Gotham.
Batman’s grip on the city hadn’t loosened as he aged but he had started to place his trust in his proteges.
That trust did not extend to keeping his nose out of everybody’s business but at least he had learned to occasionally keep his mouth shut.
Danny’s eyes were a little bleary when he opened them up as the sun slowly crept towards his dark little corner.
It took him a second to focus on the object that someone had placed in front of him.
He could feel the muted presence of the other ghost at the edge of his senses.
Long gone; but apparently fully capable of sneaking up on a (more dead than usual) Halfa in his sleep.
The bolt cutters looked to have been coated in rubber and were a matte black that looked expensive. There was a little note placed jauntily on top of the tool; the paper folded in half so it would stand upright.
THIS IS GOING TO HURT LIKE A BITCH. HOPE IT HELPS. RH
The handwriting was blocky but dark with good quality ink that hadn’t smeared or blotched even with the obvious haste that the note had been written.
Danny let his tail flick out and gently tip the note over so that he could look the tool over with more care.
Even with the rubber it was definitely going to set off that satanic little metal plate that was on his tongue.
The man was right. It was going to hurt like a bitch.
He blamed his exhaustion for why he hadn’t gone out and stolen something like this for himself though.
His brain had been too foggy and his body too damaged to try and figure out how to do anything except find somewhere to go to ground that he would be able to pull the plasma out of.
He felt healthier than he had in a long time after his impromptu nap/meal.
It was still going to be dangerous to do this.
If he hadn’t been able to feel the flood of emotions from the other man Danny might have hesitated.
Humans lied.
They lied all of the time.
The man could have coated the cutters with something nasty.
But it didn’t feel like something the man would do, somehow.
Danny reached a trembling hand out to the cutters and reluctantly pulled them closer. They were sturdy. Heavy-duty and hopefully capable of cutting the sutures and metal bars that wound through his face.
He took several deep breaths as he thought about how he was going to manage this.
The bars that went through his lips were close enough to each other that Danny was able to get two of them at a time between the blades of the clipper and he pushed down hard.
There was a moment of triumph when he felt the click of metal separating before his face lit up again with electricity and he writhed on the filthy carpet for several long moments waiting for the metal plate to stop shocking him.
It was lasting a lot longer than he was used to though.
It was hard to think through the pain and it took Danny several long seconds to realize that there was probably some sort of a failsafe on the tech that meant that if he managed to break any of the connections it wasn’t going to stop shocking him.
His whimpers were muffled as the remaining bars still kept his lips fused together and his hands clenched hard into the carpet and missed the handles of the clippers a couple of times before he was able to bring it up in fits and starts to clip the next two bars.
Thankfully they split as easily as the first two but Danny was starting to smell burning flesh and acrid smoke tickled his nose as the tech fought against his attempt at freedom.
Two more to go.
Then he could hopefully pull the metal plate out of his mouth and the staples would be cake after all of this.
Horrible.
Bitter.
Poisonous cake.
The last two gave way at the same time as Danny lost consciousness. The plate sputtered out with a sullen click and Danny let himself slump down onto the floor and let the darkness take him.
At least there was enough ectoplasm to keep him going in this city even if he wasn’t conscious enough to reach for it.
Batman let his muscles slowly unclench as he watched the boy through his binoculars.
He hadn’t known if he was going to be able to stand by and just watch for much longer.
The glowing Lazarus water had started to slip back out of the carpet as soon as the meta had collapsed back into it.
The Narrows and Crime Alley were Red Hoods; but Batman was never going to leave his boy behind again and if this new boy, young man perhaps, was going to be a denizen of Gotham he deserved every bit as much of his protection as the rest of the population.
More than that, he needed to contact the League.
Whatever sort of monsters, human or otherwise, had done this were going to pay for this if he had any say in the matter.
Batman’s lips tightened a little bit before he swung away on a grapple gun’s wire.
The viscous liquid drip…drip..dripped off of the tip of a clawed finger.
Landing on the bricks below, it sounded incongruously like rainfall.
The acid green substance defied gravity with its tendrils creeping out and then into the porous surfaces of a badly maintained sewer system. His hands were covered in tight fitting gloves, still glowing white even amongst the filth. They lay lax, palms up, and fingers loosely curled to create a small divot in the center.
It took a long time, and it hurt this waiting.
Slowly, though, his patience began to bear fruit.
In his slightly cupped hand pooled the unnaturally rippling ectoplasm.
Danny laboriously, in fits and starts, managed to bring his hand to his chest and tipped the meager liquid directly into his organs. He whined softly with relief as he felt this new world’s ectoplasm nourish him. He didn’t know what would happen if he had a direct source to guzzle from, though. He couldn’t even really describe the difference that he felt. he just knew that it was present and almost alien.
Although Danny smiled slightly, he supposed at this point, he was the alien life-form.
He grimaced then at the feeling of the restrictive plastic that was still strapped to his face before he was forced back to stoicism when it cut painfully into his skin. It wouldn’t be pretty if he had to try and projectile vomit through the thin metal bars that pierced his skin. He finally heaved a deep breath and gingerly wrapped his arms around his torso, doing his best to avoid any sutures, before he pillowed his head on the sinuous length of his tail. Curled into as tight of a ball as his battered body would concede, Danny finally allowed himself to start crying. Tears streamed down his face, and if he had had the ability, he would have screamed.
Wailed.
At the loss of everything.
His jaw wouldn’t move, held in place by some sort of wire that wound its way through his gums and bones held in place by the plastic of the muzzle. Whatever Fenton invention they had used on it made it nearly impossible to remove. It refused to phase through walls with him and was strong enough that he couldn’t manage to snap the wire into pieces.
They had learned their lesson early on with him.
They hadn’t wanted to hear what he had to say anyway. Had only cared about what they could discover next. What they could find as they tore through him with methodical, scientific patience. He was a ghost. Long dead. Why would they waste the supplies on feeding him? They had tried something different.
Something…bad.
This shallow pool was a slow method of collection, but it also gave him time to recover his strength, and it didn’t hurt anyone else. He wasn’t being forced to harm anyone just to survive. He couldn’t remember when the portal had started to fall to pieces around him. Cobbled together as it had been, a mixture of human and animal blood used by his friends in a desperate attempt to free him from the laboratory that he had been imprisoned in.
Danny had appeared amongst the clouds and didn’t have the strength to stay afloat. Danny’s ghost half was supernaturally hardy, but even he needed time to recuperate after plummeting from that high in the air. He had tried to control his fall, but he had just been so tired. Normally, floating felt more natural to him when he was like this than walking. But his injuries even before he had escaped had left him weak. At least he had managed to avoid skewering himself on the steeple of a church. Had felt something close to horror at the thought of being killed (again? fully?) by the sharp points of a metal cross.
A sudden noise distracted him from his agonized sobs.
Danny growled low in his chest as he heard something splashing through the sewer water. Gross. That water couldn’t be sanitary. Seemed questionable to him. He wanted to disappear away from whatever was making that much of a ruckus. Sure, he could technically still turn himself invisible, but that wouldn’t hide the trail of ectoplasm that he had left in his wake. Better to make himself as scary as possible. At this point he’d probably have trouble fighting off the ghost of a fly, let alone whatever monster was roaming through near pitch black tunnels with apparent ease. He couldn’t bare his teeth anymore, but he let the sonic rumbling coming from his chest turn up a gear. There was another splash, and this time, it was followed by a curse. Someone had just fallen face first into that foul water.
Okay.
That helped the fear a little bit.
Danny let the growl ebb away with a quizzical chirp. He’d have to be even worse off than he currently was to not recognize that “ Mother Fucker!!” that echoed off the brick walls for a moment. The tinny sound of some sort of earpiece let him hear the faint sound of the feminine laughter of whoever was on the other line.
“Shut it, O. It’s your fault I’m down here anyways.”
The voice was raspy, but it also didn’t sound completely natural. Some sort of mechanical modulation that gave him the heebie-jeebies.
“ I told you. Cameras caught something falling out of the sky. I found the furrow that it left.”
In the goddamn cemetery.”
“ Yes, but you saw the same thing I did.”
“Yeah, something dragged itself away from the impact site.” “
Satellites saw whatever fell. They literally survived a fall from low atmosphere space and then had the strength to pull themselves into the sewers.”
The damned muzzle meant that there was no way for Danny to run away from whoever was looking for him. Every other piece of clothing went intangible with no issue; but the Fucking Fenton Wire™ made it literally impossible for him to get his face through anything. Forcing himself through would probably end with him missing a bunch of teeth and a good portion of skin from his face. It might be worth it; Danny had taken enough blows to the head that he knew his teeth grew back eventually. Maybe he’d get lucky and the man would give up after his impromptu dip in sewage.
Has he ever been lucky in his entire life?
The abrupt blast of light as the man held up a small penlight felt like it pierced him solidly through both of his eye sockets.
“Hmmm, I’m seeing some sort of liquid.”
“ Blood?”
“I mean the splatter marks. They match up to what I’d expect to see if someone managed to drag themselves through Gotham city water.”
“ But?” “
"But this shit is looking a hell of a lot more like Lazarus Water?”
There was a long buzzy pause that came out of whatever kind of earwigs these two weirdo’s were wearing. Danny forced himself to lay even flatter to the ground. He took in a deep breath and fully stuck himself into the corner. Maybe his ratty old hazmat suit would let him pass as a pile of dirty laundry or a trash bag. It wouldn’t work, but Danny hadn’t had too many great ideas about how to talk to a man without showing off his wired. shut. teeth. He also seemed familiar with ectoplasm. Though it didn’t seem to be a happy association. His modulated voice had dipped into an even lower register.
When a hand forcefully landed on Danny’s shoulders, the tips of his gloved fingers caught against the concrete of the floor and threw out sparks as he was dragged backwards by ungentle hands.
“ Wait! Hood, be care…!! ”
Danny had had more than enough of being manhandled in his lifetime (afterlife?) and he didn’t even let the woman on the other side of the microphone finish her warning before he whipped his body around and smacked his clawed fingers across the face of his unknown attacker. It wasn’t exactly like a hot knife through butter, but Danny could feel the way the tips first caught in the metal of the full face helmet that the man was wearing and a push of ice into those cracks shattered the rest of the man's headgear. In a normal situation (for Danny) this would be the point where the person, ghost, being of unimaginable power, etc, etc would either turn tail and run in the other direction or at least shrink away from whatever had just ripped apart what looked like it had been a very expensive piece of body armor. This time, though, he didn’t even have time to react before being punched straight in the nose.
His head snapped back hard for a moment before he twisted sinuously around and launched himself at whoever had hit him. Only for the much taller man to nimbly spring away from where he had been and leaving Danny crouched in the grotty water that was already up well past his shins. At least his feet had decided to reappear. Small favors and all that. Danny swung out in a wide arc with his claws bared rather than in a fist and let out a little growl of frustration as he hit nothing but air. The other man was quicker on his feet than Danny was used to and he didn’t want to put his full force behind the blow anyways.
He’d gotten into plenty of fights with ghosts, in their form of rough and tumble play, and a little less regularly by humans that meant business.
This felt like a combination of the two and that was fucking weird man.
Not to be trusted.
It's time to try and actually fight his way out of this situation since this asshole wouldn’t just leave him alone to sulk in the sewers.
Danny instinctively tried to open his mouth wide both to show off his sharpened fangs as well as to hopefully wail into his attacker's face. Of course, the wire cut that off hard, and he had to pull back with a sharp, frustrated whine as he pawed at his face for a moment. Scrabbling to get that stupid mask off so that he could defend himself. His claws caught on the edge of the plastic, but it didn’t budge. He only managed to snag a finger through a small loop of the metal before it shocked him hard enough to drop him completely in the water, the muzzle sparking and pulsing in punishment and making it impossible for him to keep on his feet. He could feel the way the water around him electrified and was relieved when the other man had the good sense to jump out of it.
This time when a hand came down to grab him the stranger had at least gone for a limb a little further away from whatever fuckery was happening on his face and he felt now much gentler hands wrap around his ankles. They gently dragged him up and out of the water, plopping him relatively softly on the cement again before relinquishing his hold and backing up with his hands in the air. Danny flopped onto his belly and pushed himself away as quickly as he could. He ended up on all fours with his forearms flat on the ground so that he could hold his head up away from the ground but not have to try and hold onto his teetering balance.
Electricity flashed through his face and left him seeing stars and smelling burnt flesh.
He was gasping for air.
Air he knew that he didn’t really need anymore, but it still felt so necessary.
Deep inhales and slow exhales to try and calm himself down and to get the equipment on his face to stop fucking zapping him. It took several long seconds before he was able to get the courage together to look over and see what the stranger was doing while he was having an electricity induced panic attack. He hadn’t heard the other man leave but that didn’t mean much when this sort of stuff happened. He couldn’t hear much of anything with the way it felt like electricity jolted through his brain. It brought back not only recent memories of this being used as a punishment but older, harder memories from his deathday. But no, the stranger hadn’t had the decency to leave. Instead he had just taken a seat across the stream of water from him and was watching him carefully from behind another smaller mask that still hid a good majority of his facial features.
Who wears two masks?
Seriously.
He could see the black hair with a shocking patch of white, turned a little brown gray from the muck of the sewer water.
The sight made his core hum inquisitively.
That was a very distinctive sort of mark to have. Danny cocked his head a little further and, this time, let himself reach out with tendrils of inquiry from his core to see how the other man reacted.
At first, he didn’t.
React that is.
Didn’t seem to have any sort of idea about what was happening, and then Danny felt the first flutters of a very, very new core as it responded with a stressed chatter of noise. It said don’t hurt me…I’m just a baby…Just a baby . Be calm. Safe. safe. Danny’s eyes blazed green as he reacted to the placating emotions the man was obviously sending his way unintentionally. Even after everything he had gone through, Danny didn’t want to be a bully. Sure his face, hell his entire body, fucking hurt, but he had all but face planted into the other ghosts territory. He hadn’t known where the portal had been going to take him. All he had been able to gather from the abrupt conversation that he had had with Jazz was that it was somewhere the GIW would never find him.
A dimension far far away, where he would be safe.
Alone.
But safe.
He had grabbed onto that with both hands and hadn’t let himself think about what he might be losing. So he had managed to get away from an evil government agency, lose his remaining friends and family permanently, only to land smack dab in the middle of some powerful baby ghosts haunt.
Just his fucking luck .
♡♡♡♡♡♡♡
Jason wasn’t often at a complete loss for words.
He had words to spare.
Profanity laced, but still, available for use at all times.
When the call had come through from Oracle, he had felt cold dread start to creep down his spine. Some thing had landed in Crime Alley and walked away from the impact. It was late enough that he had been considering turning in for the evening. When he had heard the subtle ping of his earpiece. Jason had almost considered declining the call. Whatever it was that Oracle needed at this time of night wasn’t going to be good. Even the criminals went to bed eventually.
He clenched hard on his motorcycle's handles before he accepted the call with a gruff. “What is it?”
“ We’ve got something or someone that just landed hard in the Gotham cemetery.” “
Why aren’t you sure if it’s a person or an object?”
“ They fell from literal space. Some sort of portal ripped open the sky and dropped something through it. I’d say the only person that would be able to survive that kind of a fall would be Superman.”
“But it’s not him because?”
“ Because Superman is currently working a case with B, and he was the first person I called. Present and accounted for.” “
And you don’t think it’s a random object falling from a portal because?”
“ First. When has it ever just been a random object?”
“Hn.” Jason grunted in agreement.
“ Secondly, it’s not there anymore. Camera’s went a little fuzzy, but somebody pulled themselves out of the impact site and slid through a sewer grate.”
“Hn.” This was not a grunt of agreement. This was a grunt of displeasure. Oracle had worked with enough bats and birds throughout her lifetime to be able to tell the difference immediately. “
Yes. I literally mean through. It looked like liquid, but it moved under its own power.” “
Hn.”
“ Don’t whine. It’s not befitting a crime lord.”
Jason didn’t even bother to respond as he pulled in through the cracked open gates of the cemetery. Better to park his bike here rather than on the street. B would actually never let him hear the end of it if someone tried to steal his tires.
It didn’t take him long to find the impact site. There were spatters of sinister glowing green liquid, and the sight of it made Jason’s gorge rise. There was no way that was what it looked like. As he circled around the deep divot in the earth, Jason could make out what looked like handprints in the earth.
Whoever had landed here had hit the ground with enough force to dig several inches into the loamy soil before it looked like they had crawled out with clawed fingers digging deep divots into the dirt as it dragged itself towards the slim opening that led into the Gotham sewer system.
“Yeah, there’s no way I’m fitting through that opening.” Jason drawled. “We’ll have to call in one of the Robins. What a shame.”
“ Nice try. There’s a manhole less than 50 feet from where you’re standing.”
Jason let his face drop forward with a dramatic sigh before he strode over to the manhole. With a grunt of effort, he pulled the thick metal up and to the side before he peered down into the darkness. Thankfully, his mask helped him see through the pitch black, and he was able to locate a ladder without trouble.
He curled his lip a little with disgust before dropping down into the muck. The ladder was made out of a sturdy metal, but he could still feel flakes of rust coming off underneath his leather gloves, and his boots slipped a little on some sort of slimy algae. Jason could hear Oracle breathing quietly in his ear, but they had both gone quiet as he had gotten closer to whatever fresh horror had arrived in Gotham city this time. The water was as disgusting as he had feared when he finally hit the floor, but it was still less slippery than trying to walk on the slick sides that slanted inwards to direct the water. Hood’s mask would have had trouble distinguishing the dark stain of normal blood from the filth that coated the surfaces around him but the bright neon of whatever this creature was dripping stood out in stark contrast to everything around it.
It looked toxic.
Malevolent.
His impression of danger only deepened when he felt his chest rumble like he was standing next to a speaker thrumming with bass. He was so focused on following the small trailing drops that when Jason tripped over some sort of submerged trash he didn’t have the wherewithal to catch himself.
“Mother FUCKER!”.
Thankfully his mask was sealed tightly enough that none of the disgusting water actually got into his mouth or eyes but he knew that as soon as the mask was taken off he was going to be able to smell himself. Hell, regular civilians would be able to smell him coming before they heard his motorcycle. The thrumming noise came to an abrupt halt when he hit the water, and then Oracle's laughter rang out across the line. Jason had to grit his teeth hard to hold back an annoyed snarl.
“Shut it, O. It’s your fault I’m down here anyway.”
“ I told you. Cameras caught something falling out of the sky. I found the furrow that it left.”
“ In the goddamn cemetery.”
“ Yes, but you saw the same thing I did.”
“Yeah, something dragged itself away from the impact site.”
“Satellites saw whatever fell. They literally survived a fall from low atmosphere space and then had the strength to pull themselves into the sewers.”
“Hn, I’m seeing some sort of liquid.”
“ Blood?”
“I mean the splatter marks I'm seeing. They'd match up to what I’d expect to see if someone managed to drag themselves through Gotham city water.”
“ But?”
" But this shit is looking a hell of a lot more like Lazarus Water?”
Jason had been feeling more and more sketched out as he stepped past what felt more and more like he had stepped into an evil Jackson Pollock painting. He could see handprints in the smears of green that looked almost human. But there was something wrong with the edges. Like whatever had made them didn’t have just normal fingertips. Little indentations in the brick marked the spaces where claws had dug in a little too forcefully to be human.
When Hood finally turned a corner in the sewers and found the source of the Lazarus water he barely even paused when he saw the dirty frayed edges of some sort of black rubbery suit and just reached out to drag whatever the hell had been stupid enough to show up right on his fucking doorstep out of the darkness.
“ Wait! Hood, be care…!! ”
The clawed hand that whipped out of the darkness shone off-white even in the darkness of the sewers, but Hood didn’t have time to dodge before they caught hard in the alloy that covered his left cheek. He felt the fine cracks as they started to form before he was hit with a sudden icy cold that burned ferociously for a moment before he felt his helmet completely shatter. Jason could only see a vague shadow of whatever had just hit him, but it was more than enough, and he aimed a hard punch directly where somebody's nose should be.
If it had a nose.
He felt cartilage snap under his knuckles and smirked when his opponent's head snapped backwards. And continued backwards further than any human spine should be able to bend. It twisted sinuously around and sent another swiping blow in his direction. This time Jason had enough time to dodge the uncanny blow, and he leapt backwards to give himself some space. He heard a low growl of frustration from the man across from him, and Hood’s eyes widened as he caught sight of the other man's face for the first time. The clear plastic of the bite mask was deeply embedded in the skin around the stranger's face.
No.
Jason’s breath caught.
Not embedded.
Sewn.
The edges were sewn into his skin with what looked like a thin wire. Where the metal bars that would usually be in front of his lips had instead been wound through them. Sealing them completely shut. The young man’s eyes glowed the same neon green as the Lazarus water. Eerily similar to his own eyes when the Pit rage took over; but brighter, almost incandescent. His hair swirled in violent waves around his head as though taken by an unseen riptide, glowing white in the gloom. His skin was almost as pale as his hair; though the filth of the sewers had spread a disgusting film across his face. Jason could see the tear tracks that had sloughed off the dirt in ghostly pale streaks.
The rumbling growl that Jason had heard was coming from deep within the man’s slender chest. He could see the way the man’s jaw clenched hard as he strained to open his mouth against the tortuous contraption that was entrenched in his face.
He hoped, God did Jason hope, that the mask was a new fixture because whatever he had been trying to do, the young man jerked his head sideways and pawed ineffectually at the edges of the plastic. Clawed fingertips caught and held but weren’t able to pull the fucking muzzle off of his face. With a newly frustrated growl, the man changed tactics and looped a finger through the metal x’d through his lips and pulled. Jason couldn’t see where the electric shocks that started to spark across the mask came from. There didn’t seem to be any sort of electronics attached to the mask itself but wherever they had come from the shocks were enough to drop the man where he stood.
He was nearly covered by the sewage that he had fallen into, and Jason had years of training to thank for the fact that he managed to get out of the water before it became dangerously electrified. He scrambled up into the tunnel that the other person had emerged from while he tried to figure out how he was going to help this poor fucker without getting electrocuted for his troubles. After several long seconds Jason finally managed to reach out and snag the, hopefully rubber, tattered ends of the guys pants and dragged him up and out of the water with a grunting heave.
Jason curled himself away from the sparks that were still coming off of the guy.
Jesus.
Were the electronics in the man’s mouth?
It took several heaving breaths, nostrils flaring and chest racked with silent coughs, before the guy managed to get up on his knees and elbows. He rested his forehead on his fisted hands for several long seconds as they both tried to decide how best to handle the situation going forward. Green eyes slid over to him, and Jason felt a completely foreign crash of emotion sweep through him in a wave. The top notes of whatever this being was sending his way were aggressive!mean!GETAWAY! But underneath that was a wave of agonized terror that left him nearly breathless.
Jason held back a snarl of fear when he felt something shift in his chest and respond without his conscious permission. Something that felt a little bit like the Pit but a lot like when he was trying to sooth his siblings after a hard night. Safe…safe here. Jason slowly slid further down the wall and took a deep deep breath to try and calm himself down.
They both lay, covered in filth, as they tried to recover from the sudden cessation of violence and stared into each others eyes. “
So…uh Hood? You okay?”
Jesus, now he’d have to talk to Oracle about everything that had just happened in the space of several silent minutes.
No.
Worse.
He’d have to explain what happened to Da…Batman.
Jason let his head fall back against the dirty brick and groaned aloud.
