Jason startles as a stranger on the streets of Gotham takes one look at him, looks at him in absolute horror, and then runs to the closest dumpster and vomits into it.
Jason is mildly offended. He doesn’t look that bad does he?
—
Danny glances back to look at the undead staring at him on the sidewalk and nearly vomits again. His soul is shattered. It’s like looking at a human after being hit by a car at 60mph who’s acting like they’re perfectly fine as they walk towards you.
—
Jason approaches the stranger, one hand hovering over the shoulder of the guy and asks; “Hey man what’s your problem? What's the deal w-”
The once retching passerby moves imperceptibly quick. His hands go through Jason’s chest and before he can even react he feels something snap back into place.
Jason can barely remember screaming as he near instantly blacks out from the pain.
Danny panics as the man whose soul he just snapped the main fragments together is lying unconscious on the dirty alley ground.
Shit. Shit. Why the fuck did he do that?
It was impulsive and instinctual, everything in his core screamed at him to help this man.
His soul is still shattered, looking at him now it’s like seeing a man in the process of being treated by EMTs after getting hit by a car at 60mph.
Hundreds of tiny shards of fragmented soul still carefully swirl around the newly healed pieces like a malformed planet and its many warped moons.
Danny can see the shards gravitate closer together. Good. He managed to stabilize the core and its now going to start the long arduous process of healing itself. With the amount of damage that was done, he can’t even imagine the pain that he was already in much less the pain he will feel as the shards stitch themselves back together.
Movement shocks him out of his thoughts.
The man is starting to wake.
Shit. He needs to get out of here but he can’t just leave this man be.
Danny grabs a piece of cardboard out of the recycling bin that he thankfully didn’t throw up in. With shaking hands he snatched one of the barely concealed knives from the man he knocked unconscious because of his stupid stupid actions, and scratched “if you need answers” and his phone number into the mildly stained cardboard.
Danny placed the note on top of the guy and bolted, turning into the nearest alley and vanished, flying back to his apartment as fast as possible.
All he wanted to do was life a (semi) normal life here. Guess that all changes now.
(#danny mends jason's shattered soul and shit goes down.#bones writes#and the thick plotens#can you imagine how fucking painful it would be for each tiny piece of your soul to mend back together?#and how much more coherent and clear everything would be?#consider: Jason running to Tim or Dick thinking he got poisoned but whenever a part of his soul clicks into place#his eyes glow a bright toxic green. not Lazarus green. it’s less murky and muddy colored. it’s purer almost#the first few nights are rough. his brother watches as he screams and howls in pain as his soul hungrily fits itself back together.#each piece clicking into place feeling both like a chronic pain you’ve felt for years is finally gone#and that same pain hitting you all at once increasing forever in magnitude. it’s hell. it’s the best thing he’s ever felt. it’s torture.#it’s like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders and he can finally breathe. it’s pure agony.#he’s never felt better but the process couldn’t hurt worse#what happens when his soul fully mends? he did die previously so does that unlock any abilities? that’s for y’all to write ;)#bones writes in the tags)
With each piece that clicks into place, he gets a new sensation that hits and feels differently than the last. Some are more intense than others, and some just make him feel winded for a few seconds.
Signal finds Jason writhing in pain on the outskirts of Crime Alley. He immediately calls for backup, and they get him back to the caves medical unit.
They do everything they can to ease Jason's pain. Tox screen came back negative for any poison that might have caused his condition, and painkillers have seemingly no effect. A second tox screen indicates that he is burning through the pain medication at almost speedster levels. So they get him on a heavy morphine drip and an epidural for good measure. Which seemed to help short-term during the worst of the pain bouts but made him loopy and incoherent in between.
While that is going on, the Bats have all hands on deck looking for clues on who hurt one of their own. They find the cardboard message and phone number close to where Jason was found and traced it to an apartment a few blocks away. When night falls, they will have their answers, one way or another.
Jason's soul shattered when Superboy punched reality. It simultaneously brought him back to life and irreparably broke him. The reason he stumbled around as a zombie was because of his shattered core, working on pure instinct because that's what the biggest central 'shard' had. The Lazarus pit acted as a glue that helped a few of the pieces stick together to give Jason consciousness again, but none of those pieces were supposed to 'go together l' so to speak. Like sticking a puzzle piece in the wrong spot, it left Jason/Hood unable to fully reform as some of his soul pieces will never be able to fit back together properly.
Here's the thing about mending souls. It is HARD! Danny as the Ghost King has a small bit of instinctual knowledge that allows him to break and mend a tiny part of the mess that is Jason's soul, but he's only started the process of healing. Here's the other thing. Souls aren't meant to shatter. They're a whole piece. Shattering would normally straight up kill you. The fact that Jason didn't die is because he was already dead when it happened.
Healing a soul is nigh unheard of. Only a few people have done it, and it was ALWAYS immediately after the soul had been broken. The fact that Jason has lived so long with that train wreck of a soul is nothing short of a miracle. And Danny healing it? Even more impossible than that. And infinitely more complicated. Jason has lived with his soul patched together for years at this point. Things have grown. Sharp Edges have smoothed. Tiny, disparate pieces have clumped together and fused into knobbly, frankenstein bigger pieces. His soul will never be exactly as it was before he died. It will be a horror show of scars and cobbled together parts. But by the end it will be better than it WAS.
Not that the Batfam have any idea of this. They just know that half the time Jason is screaming in pain, while the other half he cycles through grief stricken tears, homicidal rage at Bruce, Dick, and every other member(even Alfred, although this always devolves into Jason sobbing that he doesn't mean it), and giddy euphoria when the pain finally abates for a moment and he feels better than he has since that fateful night. The euphoria is always the worst for them because Jason always acts so like his former self. He ACCEPTS HUGS and laughs and talks about the magic of Robin, and it never lasts. Dick is ready to kill whoever did this to Jason. Yes, they've all watched the footage from the alley. Yes, they've cleaned up the video enough to see the blank horror on the young man's face right before he plunges his hand into Jason's chest(obviously some sort of meta). They all can tell this wasn't planned. The boy just wanted to help. But that doesn't change the fact that he's not dealing with the fallout of Jason swinging through every emotion as his soul pieces itself together piece by agonizing piece. Every single one of them wants to put the fear of GOD(Or just the Batman) into him.
Do the Bats call in a magic user to take a look at Jason when all the toxicology comes back negative? If they do, do any of them realize that Jason's soul is finally healing? Does Danny ever try to check up on Jason? Sure, the initial intervention was instinctual, but he'd want to check up on his 'patient' eventually. Maybe Danny can even help speed up his recovery! Yeah! That's what he'll do!
It isn't until Nightwing almost decapitated him that he remembers he's being hunted by the Batfam.
Jason's current situation will fix itself naturally, but it will take time, unavailable resources (ectoplasm) and there's a chance something will stick worse than it was…
Jason needs more interventions from Danny, not only will it speed up the sticking, it will also keep him as aligned as possible, and above all it will give a lot of ecto…
and the Bats will only realize they need Danny after more assassination attempts and the Halfa goes underground…
… what's more, the vigilantes aren't even sure he's still in the city.
Danny wouldn't leave Red Hood. Sure, the thought might cross his mind. But at the end of the day, Danny's senses of compassion and responsibility are just too strong. He won't leave the poor guy when he could help.
He will, however, be a lot more cautious.
Invisible, intangible, not even breathing. Tight hold on his core so as not to trigger any alarms with big cold spots. Mostly just hovering nearby so Hood can leech ecto from him; only reaching in to realign for very brief moments when Hood is asleep and the attending Bat is focused on something else.
Danny won't leave, but he can't afford to get caught again.
Danny only becomes more resolved to not reveal himself the longer he stays in the manor. Every Bat member is furious with him(and holy shit Brice Wayne is BATMAN Wes would never shut up about this if he found out). Being in close quarters with people who are actively hunting him is doing bad things for his own mental health and giving him flashbacks to living in his parents' house; but Jason needs help more than he needs his sanity. Maybe if he can heal him enough, they'll go easy on him? He knows they won't. After all his parents didn't and he was their son, what would these people do to a complete stranger that hurt one of their own? He has to believe they'll treat him fairly, or he'll have a breakdown, and then who would patch up Jason?
It takes weeks. Danny's sure he's flunked out of all his classes, which he hates to do after Sam and Tucker worked so hard to make him a fake ID and get him funds, but making sure this guy heals properly is more important.
His soul looks grisly. It's warped and so misshapen it barely looks like a soul at all. The surface is pockmarked with fissures and cracks where pieces no longer fit together, and the whole thing is held together with ectoplasm(the pure kind, not that rank sewage that had been there previously), giving it a sickly green tint. It looks like bad reconstructive surgery on a fourth degree burn patient, but it's finally in one piece. Danny adds a bit of his own ectoplasm to the mix, to help keep the patches in place until the soul finishes healing, and finally goes to leave.
Only he can't. The entire mansion is locked down by a powerful binding ritual. Danny had been so focused on healing Jason, he'd stopped paying attention to what the Wayne's had been doing. (It worked with his parents) So Danny missed when they had figured out that "Daniel Nightengale" had disappeared from his college dorm, and eventually deduced that he was still by his 'victim'. A quick call to Constantine and there was an airtight seal around Wayne Manor preventing any supernatural being from entering or leaving.
In most scenarios where Danny heals Jason of the Pit Rage, Jason is always grateful, but I want to take this in a slightly more interesting and angsty direction.
Jason is pissed at Danny. Well, pissed might be an over-exaggeration or oversimplification of how he feels. Jason doesn't know HOW he feels. He's lived with the Pit Rage for so long, had to wrestle control and fought to regain any semblance of self and suddenly he has to start over from scratch. Yeah, he feels better. He feels fantastic actually, but his very soul has been altered with no regard to his autonomy. So he's choosing to be pissed. This is easy to maintain when he keeps tripping over his own feet in the clear hallways of the manor, his internal equilibrium shot. When he finds the fucker who did this to him...Well, he probably won't shoot him, but beating the guys face in isn't off the table either.
Danny wants to cry. All the negative emotions he's been suppressing are back with a vengeance, and he swears he hears the whine of the Fenton bazooka powering up more than once. He can't get enough air, even when in ghost form. The manor halls are too dark for midday and it leaves Danny stumbling blindly through the halls. He wants to curl in a ball and have a nice pity party/panic attack for the next month. He can't though. The Bat Brood has become too good at detecting him, and now that Jason's conscious again, they have someone who can see him, whether he's invisible or not. (A downside to using his own ectoplasm for the patch jobs, but he'd wanted to make sure Jason had the best chance at recovery, and as a half-human/Ghost King, his personal ecto was the closest match to what Jason needed.) Danny is being chased like a rat through the halls of Wayne manor, getting more and more desperate with every close call. He can't see. Doesn't know where he's going. Being led-herded-Trapped. Enemies. Caught! No! Mom please! I'm your son! I promise! Please! I'm your son! I'm alive! Please!
***
It isn't until they have their 'culprit' pinned in one of the inner lounges and take in the wide panicked eyes staring through them, and the desperate, terrified pleas to parents that he's their son, please he's alive, that everyone finally remembers that their 'enemy' is just a human that wanted to help their brother. They were so focused on what Hood was suffering that they forgot this wasn't one of their Rogues out to break them. And now they have a distraught meta curled into a ball, cowering in such blank terror that Nightwing feels his heart break a little. He takes a step forward, watching how the young man (not even twenty, still has that gangly, too-long limbed look of a teenager who hasn't grown into their skin yet) violently flinches, his whispered pleas increasing in pitch as he pleads for his mother not to shoot him. The room is deathly silent, everyone staring with growing horror at the trembling figure on the ground. Bruce's face is impassive, but Dick can tell from the tension in his shoulders that he's struggling not to comfort their intruder. Jason looks ready to murder someone not the kid. The subtle twitch of his fingers for guns that he doesn't have on him gives it away. The Bat Members exchange looks, silently conversing, before half of them leave the room silently. Tim stares at Danny, like he's just given him a piece of a puzzle and is itching to go back for more, but dutifully leaves. There's a time and place for interrogations, and metas having PTSD flashbacks and panic attacks are not one of them.
Jason, of course, doesn't leave, but he does move to the far wall, leaning against it and deliberately relaxing. That only leaves Cass, Steph, and himself. Slowly crouching down, he extends his hand out.
"I think we got off on the wrong foot," he says gently, taking in the full body flinch at the sudden voice in the quiet. "My names Dick Grayson, and you're in Wayne Manor. It's 3:30pm July 22nd, 20XX. You're in the blue lounge room at the northernmost point of the manor. There's a door to a library on your left, along with a door into the main corridor behind me. It's currently 95 degrees outside-" he keeps up a soft stream of words, talking about inane things. How old the room is, what it was used for, the time Jason snuck a girl in here under B's nose (I did not Dickweed! That was you! I was the one who covered for your ass!) A constant stream of nonsense as they watched the tension slowly unwind out of Daniel and his eyes slowly regained focus. Gradually, he stopped shaking, uncurling from his position on the floor. "Hey there," he says once Danny finally looks at him. "Can we talk about-" Before he can say anything else, the kid vanishes from sight, a slight breeze ruffling his hair and clothes. Jason's gaze is pinned on the far wall.
"He's gone," he grunts, stepping away from the wall and towards him.
"Not surprised," Steph added, creeping further into the room now that their meta had made a break for it.
"Scared," Cass supplied, her eyes still lingering where Danny had been sitting. "Don't do that again," she added. Dick stood up again, stretching after crouching down for such an extended period of time.
"He'll turn up again. There isn't exactly anywhere for him to go."
"No," Cass said, steel in her voice. "Don't do that again. Trapped. Let him go. Answers not worth it." Refusals sat on the tip of Dick's tongue, his inner voice saying how they had no idea what this meta had done to Jason, that he was an unknown. Then his mind supplied him with the look of terror and the pleas for his parents to spare him with crystal clarity and he shut his mouth, nodding once.
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