Nightingale darts over, bullying Batman's elbow out of the way with insistent head nudges, before immediately reaching for the pocket on his hip. There's a displeased set to his mouth that's indicative to a frown.
Batman adjusts his crossed arms to rest on top of Nightingale's head, briefly flicking his eyes down, before returning back to his conversation partner. "--the system first. If we can get our hands on it without alerting anybody, that'd be best. Physical copies are preferable, but entering the building will--"
He moves his arms and looks back down at Nightingale, who's still trying to mess with his utility belt. His frown has deepened, and there's a frustrated scrunch in his brows that not even his mask can fully hide. "--Is there an issue, Nightingale?"
"Building's too cold," His kid mutters grumpily, releasing his hold on the latch and scrunching his fingers in and out; mimicking loosely some of his physical therapy exercises, "M'fingers keep lockin' up."
"What are you after?"
Nightingale taps on the pocket that holds the snacks.
Smoothly, Batman unfolds his arms, clicks the pocket open, and passes one of the bars to him, then shuts it.
With a grunt, Nightingale nods at him shortly, tucks himself into his side, and turns inwards towards Bat's cape to hide. Politely ignoring the sound of wrapper crinkling, Batman loosely drapes his arm over the front of Nightingale's chest and rests his hand over his opposite shoulder, keeping him slotted in place.
He turns back to his conversation partner and resumes speaking.
————————
Will the JLA make an appearance in the WTNS Fic? No. However, that sign won't stop me from writing little interactions with them, because I can't read!
Quick Snippet coz im at work but this was plaguing me. Concept of how Dani might come to be in this au
—————
“Do you want a sibling?”
Danny stops, the molten ball of ectoplasm fizzling out in his palm. Confusion zings through his chest, and his brows furrow. “What?”
Vlad follows suit in extinguishing his own plasma bolt, his expression calm as anything, like he was discussing the weather. “Do you want a sibling, dearest?”
Danny stares.
Sorry, what?
His frown deepens. “I’m not following.”
He receives an eye roll for his confusion, which is enough for Danny to reconsider throwing a melting wad of ectoplasm in Vlad’s face. “I was thinking about it, and I’ve always wanted more than one child. But I know how you are, badger, and wanted your opinion first before I do anything drastic.”
Granted, Amity Park is in no means small; it's its own decent size and is officially classified as a small city, but relative to Gotham, it's like comparing a bluff to a mountain.
Impressive in its own right, but not in the same league as the other.
That being said, you'd think Danny would have gotten used to the size by now with how long he's been visiting. Spending Saturday nights hanging out on a rooftop eight hundred miles away from home should probably constitute some sort of permanent adjustment to it. Alas; Gotham city remains taking his breath away.
Sitting up to stretch the slight ache growing in his lower back, Danny ignores the way his side twinges with the fading of a bruise he got this morning from a scuffle on his way to school. He raises his arms above his head, his chin tucking in instinctually while he wriggles his fingers, and lets out a short, involuntary grunt before slumping back down and resting against the roof's raised ledge.
It should make him nervous being this far away from Amity. If a ghost decides to attack, he won't know about it, and he left his phone in his room to avoid being tracked, so Sam and Tucker won't be able to contact him. He's completely unreachable.
It does make him nervous, but not enough to change anything. Before he left the house, he thrice-checked the portal to make sure it was completely locked. It doesn't negate the risk, but at least it makes it a little harder to happen. Despite that, there's always a small knot of preemptive guilt lodged in his ribcage when he's here. If something happens, it'll be his fault for not being around to stop it.
Danny's resigned himself to swallowing that bitter pill when it's ready.
Sighing out heavily, like a large, old dog laying on its side, Danny folds his arms over themselves and tucks his chin into his sleeves, his eyes unfocusing on the street below to listen to Gotham rumbling around him.
It's ironically meditative. Gotham is in no means peaceful--in fact, peaceful is the complete antithesis of the city--but it settles the restless, frenetic energy bustling under Danny's skin and buzzing like a pack full of cicadas in his chest.
He can't do this in Amity, he's too keyed up to his environment. He feels like he's always on edge, whether because he's waiting for a ghost to show up, or Vlad. Danny can't tell which one he prefers more.
At least with a ghost, he can fight his way out of the problem nine times out of ten. With Vlad, his opportunity to actually hit him slim down to one out of sixty. Vlad always makes sure to show up somewhere where there's other eyes watching them, and with their truce in place, Danny doesn't have much choice than to play along.
Just the thought of it is frustrating, and ectoplasm begins thrumming under the lines of his shoulders, building up tension until he can feel it humming in his skull. Squeezing his eyes shut, Danny presses his face into his arms and loosens out a long line of a low, grumbling sound.
It dispels the worst of the feeling like he's beating the dirt off a rug. Danny keeps going until there's no more air in his lungs, and then he lifts his head and tries to blink the black spots out of his vision.
"Problems?"
Crap--
Panic flares up through his throat and Danny chomps down the cry that lunges from his lungs. His hands claw into the ledge and his arms go taut as a bowstring as he twists around, nearly throwing himself to his feet.
It takes a second for his eyes to adjust--there are still pressure-induced black spots floating around like dust motes--but he zeroes in on the outline of a figure that keeps fading in and out of sight.
"Yah," he wheezes, squinting to make the figure sharper, "No. You sneaking up on me, for one."
There's an incremental pause before the figure takes half a step out of the shadows and Danny can make clearer of his silhouette, and more notably: the pointed outline of the bat ears jutting from his head.
Danny forcibly releases his hands from their locked prison, albeit individually. Some of his adrenaline drains out and he sits back down. "I think you're gonna kill me one of the days, big guy," he jokes lamely, "you can't keep gettin' away with this."
Right on schedule, he adds, unable to resist the urge to smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. The main reason Danny doesn't respond immediately to the unceasing sounds of gunfire that sprout up around here like weeds.
Batman doesn't respond to his lame attempt at a joke, and Danny doesn't take it much to heart. He's had worse reactions to his quips, and he's--for lack of better words--been around Batman long enough to know that it's just part of his quiet nature.
(It was an adjustment period at first though. Neither Sam nor Tucker are all that introverted. Sam, for all her gothy-ness, is very lively and animated. Batman's broodiness was completely foreign to him.)
(Albeit, some of the sarcastic remarks Danny's been able to draw out of him has left him in stitches more often than not; it's a personal goal of his to hear them more often.)
Silently, Batman drifts over to him, edging closer to the shadowier parts of the roof until he's only a few steps within arms-reach. Danny relaxes entirely as he does, slumping back against the raised edge and twisting himself to lean against it more comfortably.
It's hard to see, but he can just about make out the faint reflection of Bat's eyes looking him over, and he ignores the twitch to check for visible bruises that might've been left on his face.
He's gotten better at ignoring when he's in pain, sometimes he isn't able to heal everything after a fight, and still has obligations to fulfill--those mainly being school--but it's unfortunately translated to Danny becoming oblivious to when he has bruises on his face. Sometimes.
Which, you know, is less of a problem in Amity, but more-so one when he's in Gotham and talking to the masked vigilante he's somewhat-befriended. At least Batman doesn't grill him too ostentatiously about them anymore.
Batman goes near-imperceptibly still--Danny holds his breath, awaiting judgement--and then his hands twitch, before reaching for the large pouch attached to his thigh.
Crap. Danny slumps, disappointment zinging through his veins. He lifts his hand and searches for the bruise Batman saw, while said guy unclasps the flap and searches for the icepack he keeps in there.
His fingers press against his jaw, then tap up his cheek-- ow. Immediately, dull, throbbing soreness blooms out from his cheekbone and spreads across his cheek. Danny's eyes automatically sting on impulse, and he flinches away.
Man, he thinks, pressing his lips into a line, I thought that healed already.
He got into another scuffle after school, this time with Skulker--Danny's positive this is somehow Vlad's fault, he just can't prove it--and he got in too close during the fight.
It's something he's been trying out lately. It hit him recently that most ghosts probably didn't know how to fight--especially the ones he knows were average joes in their lifetime. While Danny knows at least some basic hand-to-hand thanks to Mom and Dad showing him and Jazz when they were younger.
Even if he's rusty, Danny's got the foundations drilled into him. So he's been running an experiment lately where, when he's fighting, he tries to close the distance between him and the other ghost so he can get physical hits on them.
There's been mixed results--mostly due to being in the air, Danny hasn't quite got the finesse of anti-gravity combat down--but he's been liking the positives.
Well, he tried doing the same with Skulker today, and got pistol-whipped for it. He's still mildly embarrassed, all things considering.
He avoids looking at Batman directly as the man silently hands him an icepack, the item already wrapped in a thin cloth he probably pulled out of the same pocket he kept the icepack in. Danny plucks it from him easily, and presses it against his cheek. The dull, pulsating ache begins to fade away.
"Thanks," he mutters.
A curt hum. "I could handle it, Tom."
Danny frowns instantly, a corrosive feeling recoiling like a spring in his chest, as if his mind was physically rejecting the idea. "No." He says shortly, "Don't start." They're not having this conversation again.
He doesn't know about Danny's situation--and Danny is painfully aware of the wrong implications he keeps sending his way, every time he shows up busted one way or another--and Danny wants to keep it that way.
Gotham is the one reprieve he can find that makes him feel close to normal, he's not ruining that by revealing to the local vigilante that he secretly has ghost powers and flies over an hour every Saturday to escape the city he's supposed to be protecting. He'll be disappointed by Danny's cowardice, or worse; he'll think he's a freak.
Batman's displeasure is close to palpable, Danny can feel it rolling across his skin. He ignores the part of him that shrivels up at the feeling.
Danny looks away and out across the street, his eyes vaguely unfocusing as he slumps his elbow into his knee, resting the weight of his head against his icepack. "We had a pop quiz in science on Tuesday." He says, trying to forcibly lose the curtness making him staccato.
Take the olive brach, he thinks, poignantly aware of Batman's presence still beside him. Lets change the subject.
"...How'd you do?"
Danny's mouth curls up. "Good! We got our results back yesterday, and..."
"Uhp-uhp-bup-bup." Danny says loudly, cutting off the crime lord bleeding all over his living room. He presses a finger to his lips, despite knowing that Red couldn't see it, and stifles his rage behind a playful smile.
He's lucky he's facing the kitchen, his back turned to Hood. He can see the fury green of his eyes reflecting back at him in the chrome of the sink, he's threatening to crush the rag in his hands. His vision is futzing out in the corners of eyes.
"We don't speak the 'J' name in this household." He says in almost a sing-song, because if he doesn't, then the Gotham oil sitting, boiling, behind his teeth and coating his tongue will spittle out and Danny's already haunting his apartment just by his mere presence. He doesn't want to haunt it more.
He can hear the whine of the lightbulbs, threatening to burst like a popped balloon. He turns the water off and and rings the rag out tighter than he perhaps should.
"You don't like the clown?" Hood asks him, and Danny's not sure if he's mocking him for it. There's a knowing lilt in his voice that throws back Danny to their first meeting on that balcony. If he were anyone else, Danny might've just punched him.
His heel turns sharply towards him, a tight smile on his face and an even tighter look around his eyes. At least he knows that the green has faded because the pounding behind his eyes are gone, his grief-born, death-made rage sizzling back beneath his veins. "I think you already know why, Ridin' Hood."
Ellie's older brother killed himself before she was born.
And Ellie misses him.
It's weird to miss someone you've never met.
She knows he grew up in Gotham with Jazz. She knows they grew up in a small flat in Crime Alley--and when she first heard the name, she looked Danny in the eyes and bewilderedly asked him why it was called that. He gave her this half-tilt, amused smile and told her to guess--and Danny often spent most of his time running around outside.
She knows that he wanted to be an astronaut, he has a model spaceship sitting on his shelf that's collecting dust. She knows that he likes calligraphy; there are fountain pens in his desk in the center compartment drawer that's supposed to look hidden, and his cursive is nice even if his plain writing is unintelligible.
She knows that he had a bit of a sweet tooth, but only for specific kinds of candy. She knows he likes starbursts the most, because in the same drawer with his fountain pens are a bunch of unopened red and yellow starburst candies. She knows they're his favorite because there aren't any pink and orange ones saved in there, the wrappers are in the garbage can under his desk.
She knows that he liked car stuff. He could guess a car's year based off its build and tell you exactly why he knows, right down to the shape of the headlights and the slope of the windshield. He liked old motorcycles and wanted to get his own one day.
She knows he had a best friend, his pictures are everywhere along the side wall in his room. When Ellie was snooping through his room when they first met, she found a shoebox in his closet full of letters from someone named Jason Todd. She read many of them before putting it away.
It's weird to miss someone that's still right in front of you too.
Ellie's older brother is always so open and happy to see her, he's always a phone call or a flight away. He smiles when he sees her and asks her how she's been. He makes jokes and rags on her the way only older brothers -- or so she's heard -- can.
When she stays the night he lets her sleep in his room. He gives her old shirts for her to wear because she doesn't have any pajamas ever since she left Vlad's wing. They're too big on her and smell like cigarettes. She's sure that you're not supposed to like the smell of nicotine, but Ellie does. It reminds her of Danny.
He snarks at her and tries not to cuss as much, and he shares the pink and orange starbursts he loves so much with her. Presses them into her palm and won't share the red and yellow ones because 'those are for Jason.'
When Danny's not paying attention he slips back into his Gotham accent, and Ellie didn't know that's what it was when she first heard it. She'd never been to Gotham before then, but she liked hearing it. She likes when it gets thick and lacquers his every word.
Ellie misses him, because his smile doesn't reach his eyes the way they used to. Ellie's never even seen the 'way they used to' in person. She only knows because he looks like a whole other person in his photos with that Jason.
Ellie misses him, because she knows he's a banshee. She knows that that's not something easy to become. Her older brother can joke as much as he wants, but she can taste his grief in the back of her throat like a sob. It stings in her eyes when his core throbs and twangs the air around them like a guitar string.
Ellie misses him, because Danny's hands are rough and they aren't from ghost fighting. It's from Gotham, he said, and didn't say much else on the matter. She thinks he sounded as fond as he did bitter about it.
(She's only been to Gotham once. Once to try and see the place her brother--and sister--grew up in. She didn't make it much an afternoon before she was booking it out of there, and hating herself a little for it. She wants to know the place her brother grew up in. She wants to know her brother.)
Ellie loves her big brother so much; she's never even met him. Not in the way Sam and Tucker have, nor in the way Jazz grew up with. She's never known him alive, she's never known him not grieving. She doesn't know how to make it better.
She's the only Fenton whose never known Jason Todd, and that shouldn't be as important as it is. She supposes she should be grateful: she was only born because her brother died, and he would've never died if Jason Todd hadn't.
She's not grateful. She misses her brother. He killed himself before she was born.
There's singing in the Wayne Manor, echoing through the halls and swirling through pillars like a choir in a cathedral. Like a bird amongst the trees.
Faint as it is from the foyer, Bruce has to strain his ears to make out the lyrics, but it is, without a doubt, singing.
He is very, very careful to slip his shoes off without making a sound. Takes extra care to not let the door slam behind him, lest he interrupt the song floating through the house and alert the source of his arrival.
Alfred has never sung in the years Bruce has known him. Not when he was a child, not as a teenager, and not now as an adult. He will play music at times -- when he's cleaning, or cooking, or doing something that doesn't require is upmost attention -- but he doesn't sing.
Besides, even if Alfred did decide to change his tune about his tunes, the voice singing like a bird up on a line is too high and young to belong to him.
So it must be Danny instead.
The door closes behind him without so much as a click, and he creeps down the hall towards the source. Naturally the closer he gets, the louder the singing becomes, and the louder it becomes, the less sure Bruce is that Danny is singing an actual song. The sound shapes the air in what he thinks may be a language -- and if it is, it's one he's unfamiliar with. It comes as a surprise to him.
He's learned many languages on his travels to become Batman, he could write entire books in a dozen different ones. He's learned languages that have nearly been lost to time and have rarely seen the written word -- and yet this, whatever the sound spilling from Danny's mouth is. He doesn't know it.
Danny's full of surprises, he's learning. A clear pond with a bottom deeper than it looks. Bruce is trying to reach that bottom.
Alfred is already there as well when Bruce finds the room Danny's in, his back to the wall and his hands resting against his cane calmly. His eyes turn to him easily, Bruce doesn't dare speak.
He does, however, dare to peek around the corner and peer into the room Danny's in -- just for a moment. Just long enough to check on him. There's been a handful of times where he's accidentally startled the boy without meaning to, and the times he hasn't, Danny's revealed to have whip sharp senses, head snapping up if he even so much as catches Bruce in his peripherals.
He's laying on the ground. Again. Feet propped up on the cushions of the sofa like he's sitting sideways.
("S'comfortable," he tells Bruce when asked, "helps me think.")
His eyes are closed, an arm thrown over his forehead, the other resting across his stomach with his cane. He's stolen one of Bruce's shirts again. He's still singing, Bruce would dare call it vocalizing, simple as that, but it sounds too much like he's trying to speak for him to suggest otherwise.
Slow and sleepy, Danny sings like he's trying to turn his voice into a flute and an old lullaby. It sinks molasses slow and mud-thick through the meat of Bruce's arms to twine around the bone, soaking into the marrow, and he sings like he's trying to wrap ribbon-thread music around Bruce's ribs like a garland.
Music is, of course, supposed to speak to you. Bruce has heard that enough times to repeat it deaf. This though, feels like Danny's trying to speak and it just happens to come out music. Vowels and consonants forming lazy like the slow pull of a river, its current meandering with the pace of a ticking clock.
Bruce once heard Alicia Walker call Danny "songbird" through the phone during one of their weekly talks, he sees why that is now.
He swears though, that Danny is trying to speak a language Bruce can't understand. The phonetics too deliberate to be otherwise, words trying to take shape that just aren't quite right. He knows, the same way he knows someone is watching him by the rise of the hair on his neck.
Danny's eyes are closed, so Bruce lets himself slip out fully from behind the wall, and leans against the doorframe. Just to listen, and decipher what it is that Danny's trying to say.
Safe to say, he doesn't figure it out when Danny finally stops. He's sure that his voice has thoroughly sunken into the stones of the manor, and the only way Bruce could get it out is if he wrung it out. He will not.
"I've never heard that language before." He says quietly, before the air can fully settle and the thick melody thins.
He can feel Alfred's eyes burning holes into his temple as Danny full body flinches and jerks like a fish out of water. Ah, whoops.
Danny's head whips around to him with a wide blown look. Hair falls over his face, messy from the rug and curling around the ends. "Uh--I--" he stammers, Bruce waits for him to find his tongue, "I- uh-- I'd be, uh, surprised if you did."
Bruce pushes himself off the frame, lets his arms drop to his sides. "What was it?"
Danny turns his gaze to the rug, ducks his head as his shoulders curl up. Bruce recognizes the response, it reminds him of a turtle retreating into its shell, or a clam trying to hide.
He's shaking. His heart is burning in his chest, pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs, and there's a trembling, aching rage building beneath his tongue and pressing against his teeth.
In his hands, his fingers tense and wrists locked, the article reads in big, black font: JOKER LOCKED IN ARKHAM ASYLUM AGAIN!
Danny shouldn't feel so angry about this, this is a good thing. Gotham doesn't have to deal with him for another few months at the least. He should feel relieved, a little more at peace.
He is not.
He cannot swallow the fury thudding behind his eyes, the burning white heat searing a deeper hole in his chest. A searing green filling static in his ears in the way only the rage of the restless dead can have.
How is he going to kill him now?
Arkham may be the only asylum in America made entirely of tissue paper, but it's still an asylum. There are cameras, guards, other patients resting inside. Danny can think of a million different ways to sneak in and kill Joker, but someone will hear his screaming.
It'd have to be rushed.
He doesn't want it to be rushed.
It's a cruel thought. Cruel and cold and merciless, but Danny doesn't feel an ounce of shame, not an ounce of guilt, for it. He wants to be alone with the Joker when he kills him, that's all he wants. In Arkham, you are never alone.
He forces his anger to bubble back down into his chest, stuffing it between his heartstrings and his ribs like a blanket you're trying to bunch up into a corner. It sizzles and burbles. The static begins to fade out into a high-pitched ringing; it sounds like distant screaming.
Danny is still trembling, but he can think a little clearer now.
He can wait.
He can wait. He can wait. He can wait. He canwait. Hecanwait. Hecanwait.
He can wait.
He's waited five years for this. He can wait one more week. One more month. One more year. However long it takes for the Joker to break back out, Danny can wait.
And when the Joker does, inevitably, break out.
Danny uncrinkles his fingers around the edges of the newspaper, loosens his limbs just enough so he can pay for it.
He'll be waiting.
The dead, after all, have all the time in the world.
There are two things Daniel Fenton knows that his family knows as well:
He’s adopted.
He can’t remember anything else before that.
‘Adoption’ is a loose term, implying that they went through the official legal processes and troubles of adopting a child into their home willingly, and with the full intention of doing so going into it. That is not what happened. What happened is that Jasmine Fenton found a half-dead child, in strange clothing, in the middle of the woods at her Aunt Alicia’s cabin, and then she went and got her parents.
What happened is that a twelve year old Danny woke up in the same cabin, wearing clothes much too big on him that didn’t belong to him, and with very little memory of before that moment. He wakes up like a spring being set loose, sitting up so fast he scares the daylights out of Jasmine Fenton sitting next to him. He wakes up, reaching for his sleeve for something that isn’t there, and when it isn’t his mind stutters, like he’s tripped at the top of a steep hill.
When they ask him for his name, he tells them, clearing muddled thoughts from his mind; Danny. He’s twelve.
(He thinks that’s his name, at least. It sounds right; it feels right. If he thinks really hard about it, he thinks he can remember someone calling him that, utter adoration in their voice. So it must be his name.)
The Jasmine girl convinces her parents to take him home with them, and they give him the spare guest room upstairs. He has nothing to fill it with.
It’s… a strange experience, to go to a ‘new’ home when he doesn’t even remember his old one.
The official adoption process… happens. He can’t say it’s easy, or difficult. He’s oblivious for the most of it, Jasmine intends on helping him settle in and Danny can’t say he enjoys the smothering. He learns that he is stubbornly self-independent, that’s one new thing he knows about himself.
His adoption papers say ‘Daniel J. Fenton’. Danny remembers staring at the name ‘Daniel’ for a long, long moment, something curdling sour in his sternum. His name is Danny, that he knows. But it’s not Daniel. But he doesn’t know any other way of saying it, so he keeps his complaints to himself.
(Jack Fenton boisterously claps his hand on Danny’s shoulder and jerks him around, grinning wide as he welcomes him into the Fenton Family. Danny’s mind blanches at the touch on his shoulder, an instinct snapping like the maw of a snake, telling him to cut off the man’s fingers for daring to touch him.)
(He keeps the thought to himself, tension rising up his shoulders the longer Jack Fenton’s heavy hand stays on him.)
They found Danny in the summer. It’s a perfect coincidence, Maddie Fenton says before she goes back into her lab with Jack Fenton. She says it’s enough time to allow Danny to adjust; that they’ll enroll him into the school year in the fall. Then she stuffs a canister of ectoplasm onto the top shelf, and disappears like the ghosts she studies back down the stairs.
(There’s something eerily familiar about the ectoplasm sitting in the fridge, something unsettlingly so. Danny knows what that stuff is, but he doesn’t know where. When the house is empty, he takes a can from the fridge and inspects it.)
Jazz wants him to leave the house. Danny doesn’t want to step foot outside of the FentonWorks building until he has something that quells the feeling of vulnerability he gets whenever he does. He tried to once, and he felt exposed. Unsafe.
He turned back around and went inside.
—-------
Where do we go
When the river's running slow
Where do we run
When the cats kill one by one
—------
One day, when the house is empty — or, as empty as it can be; the Fenton parents down in the lab, and jazz out with friends. Danny is making a sandwich, and he caves into the urge to flip the knife in his hands between his fingers. A childish impulse, but one he falls for nonetheless. It comes to him easily, like second nature, in fact. The slip of the blade between his fingers is seamless, flowing with an ease like water running down the wall.
He’s almost startled by it; his body holds memories that his mind does not. Muscles that know which way to move and twist, limbs that know how to hold and how to throw. He continues twirling it, fascinated, as if he were a scientist discovering a new species of animal.
It’s not for a handful of minutes when a new thought hits him; an impulsive thought that pops in the back of his mind like a firecracker; Danny moves without thinking.
He turns, and throws the knife. The pull of his shoulder, the flick of his elbow, is familiar like a hug. He knows when to let go, and the blade flies through the air in impressive speed, embedding itself into the wall with a hearty, loud thunk. Sinking into the drywall like butter.
Danny stares at it in shock, he feels relieved — about what? — before he feels the guilt. He scrambles across the kitchen to pull it out, heart racing in his chest at being caught, and prays no one notices the hole it left behind.
(He runs up the stairs before anyone can find him, food forgotten, and hides the knife beneath his mattress like a guilty murder weapon.)
After that, he leaves the house more. It’s more out of fear of being caught than the desire to leave. But Danny is quickly learning that among all things, he is someone who was dangerous, before he lost his memory. Even with his mind in fractures, he is still dangerous.
He’s not sure how to feel about that — he thinks he should be scared. He feels a little proud, instead.
—------
Hazel beneath our claws
While we wait for cerulean to cry
Unsettled ticks run through time
Enough for the hunt to go awry
—-----
There’s another thing he learns about himself. That he knows about since he woke up. He knows that he left someone behind. He doesn’t know who, but he knows they must have been close; he’s always looking down and finding himself surprised when the only shadow he sees is his own.
He thinks that he must have sung to them a lot; he finds himself humming familiar melodies when he’s lost in thought. Lullabies lingering at the tip of his tongue, an instinct to turn and sing them to someone beside him. He can’t remember the lyrics, but his mouth does, it tries to get him to say them when he’s not thinking. He can’t.
Danny’s found himself humming under his breath more times than he can count, trying to recall whatever it is his mind is trying to claw forward.
(“That’s a pretty song, Danny.” Jazz tells him at breakfast one day, Danny screws his mouth shut. He hadn’t realized he was humming. “What is it?”)
(Something mean and possessive rears its head on instinct, uncoiling like a snake from its ball. His shoulders hunch defensively, he bites his cheek to prevent himself from baring his teeth. He doesn’t know what song it is, but it’s not for her. “I don’t know.”)
He misses his person. Dearly. He knows, the longer he is without them, that they must have been close. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel like he’s missing a chunk from himself. He wouldn’t be turning to someone who's not there; reaching for a hand that’s missing, birdsong on his tongue, a story to tell.
A dream haunts him one night. Warm and familiar, he’s holding onto someone smaller than him, they’re tucked into his side like a puzzle piece. He’s humming one of his songs that is always playing in the back of his mind, an unfinished tale of a harpy and a hare. Danny can’t remember their face, not all of it. He remembers green eyes, hair dark like his own, skin brown like his.
He loves them more than anything else in the world, a fact he knows down to his soul. He loves them so much it fills his heart with sunlight. Danny squeezes them tight, nuzzling into their hair; he makes them laugh. Then, he proudly boasts something. That when he takes something of their father’s, that his person — a sibling? That feels right — will be… the word fades from Danny’s mind before he can make sense of it.
His person hugs him tight, his… brother? And their mother — a woman whose face he can’t remember either, but who he loves like a limb nonetheless — appears, smiling. Her hands reach for them both, voice calling them, ‘her sons’. There’s ticking in the distance, it sounds like the fastening of chains.
Danny wakes up cold, tears streaming down his face. The details of the dream already fading from his mind like the cold pull of a corpse.
—-------
Harpy hare
Where have you buried all your children?
Tell me so I say
—-------
When school starts that Fall, Danny joins the sixth grade class, and quickly learns more things about himself. One of those things being that he’s smarter than the rest of his grade, whatever education he had before, it was better than the one he’s getting now.
Everyone knows he’s adopted right off the bat. He tells them when the teacher forces himself to introduce himself, but it’s not like they needed him to tell them for them to know; he never existed in their little world before now, and the Fentons are pale as they come. Danny is not.
He befriends Sam Manson and Tucker Foley; they ask him about the scars fading up and down his arms, they ask him about the scar carved diagonal across his face.
Danny, as politely as he can, tells them he doesn’t remember. He thought kindness would come second nature to him, his dream burned into his mind where he hugged his brother so sweetly. Apparently, his sweetness is only second nature to people he considers his own.
(It becomes even more apparent when Dash Baxter tries to bully him later that day, and Danny ruffles like an eagle threatened. His mind whispers, hissy and agitated, sinking like a shadow at his shoulder, several different ways Danny could kill him for talking to him like that, and fifteen more ways he could cripple him.)
(Danny ignores those thoughts, up until Dash Baxter tries to grab him. Then he breaks his nose on the wood of his desk. It’s easy how quickly the rest of his grade sinks him down to the status of social pariah.)
(At least Sam and Tucker still talk to him after that. When Danny goes to the principal’s office later, he wisely doesn’t mention the worse things he could’ve done than break Dash Baxter’s nose.)
—--------------
It clicks and it clatters in corners and borders
And they will never
Hear me here listen to croons and a calling
I'll tell them all the
Story, the sun, and the swallow, her sorrow
Singing me the tale of the Harpy and the Hare
—-------
More dreams come, of course they do. Each one halfway to forgotten whenever he wakes up, ticking faint in his ears. He is many different ages. He is young, shorter than a table. He is older, holding onto his little brother. He is singing in almost every single one. He is singing to his brother.
Danny can barely remember the lyrics, he’s begun leaving a journal by his bedside so that it’s the first thing he can write down when he wakes up. He’s a storyteller, he learns. He feels like a historian, trying to piece together a culture long dead and forgotten.
His most vivid dream-like memory is not a happy one, and for once he’s almost relieved he barely recalls it. He is somewhere that isn’t home, but his mother and brother are there. He is dressed in black, blades keen in his hands.
They are atop a moving train. They are fleeing something. His brother is struggling to keep up, he is small, and young. It’s beautifully sunny, they are somewhere green and lovely.
It is a fast dream.
His brother stumbles on something, and Danny, fast as a whip, snatches him by the back of his shirt and hoists him up to his feet before he can fall. “Watch your feet, habibi.” He murmurs low, a hand on his back. It’s hard to hear, there is wind in their ears.
His brother, face obscured in all but his eyes, which are green as emeralds, nods.
The dream blurs, but Danny falls behind. His foot catches on air — impossible, it should’ve been, at least. He never trips. — and he lands against the roof with a thud and a grunt. His mother and brother stop, and turn for him.
The train hits a turn before Danny can get up, and he shouldn’t have, something pulls on him, he swears, but he slips. He can’t find the purchase to pull himself up, cold fear hits him as his nails scrape against the metal.
His mother and brother’s horrified faces are the last thing he sees before he disappears off the side of the train.
(The ticking is at its loudest when he wakes up, pounding against his inner skull. He only manages to write down ‘train fall’ in his journal, before he’s flipping over to press his head into his pillow to get the pain to stop.)
—---
She can't keep them all safe
They will die and be afraid
Mother, tell me so I say
(Mother, tell me so I say)
—-------
When Danny is fourteen he is still humming songs he can’t remember, his mind still in a broken puzzle. But his room is now decorated with stars and plants in every corner. He has a guitar he keeps in the corner of his room, and he plays the lullabies in his head on the strings over and over again.
The ectoplasm in the fridge still unsettles him, still reminds him of a past he can’t recall. The knife beneath his mattress has returned to the kitchen — he doesn’t need it. He found a box in the attic last year, it had his name on it, and inside he found familiar, strange clothes, and more weapons than he thought was possible to carry on one person.
(Even without knowing that the Fentons prefer guns to blades, Danny knows, instinctively, that they were his weapons. He was — was? Is — a dangerous person. He takes the box down to his room to sort through. The weapons all fit into his callused hands almost perfectly — the grooves worn to fit his palm. They’re just a little small.)
(He tentatively takes a small blade with him to school one day, and feels much more comfortable with it sheathed beneath his shirt. He’s kept it on him ever since, like he’s reunited a lost limb to himself.)
Danny doesn’t have a name for his person, his little brother, nor does he have a name for his beloved mother. He’s haunted by dreams every few weeks, many of them repeating. He’s ingrained the words he can remember to memory, and the ones he doesn’t, he writes down in his journal. His little brother; Danny calls him a bird, he can’t figure out what kind. His little bird of some kind; when Danny takes something from their father — what, he can’t remember what — then his little brother will be a little bird.
(He doesn’t have a name for his brother, yet, but he’s calling his birdie in his head. It’s better than nothing.)
—------
Seeker, do you ever come to wonder
If what you're looking for is within where you hold
Will you leave a trail for them to follow a path
You'll soon forget
Home
—---------
When he’s fourteen, Danny dies. It does nothing to fix his fractured memories, much to his consternation. It just confirms something he already knows; that he was someone dangerous, and that he still is.
When the shock of death has worn off, Danny inspects his ghost in the metal reflection of the closest table. It’s blurry, hard to see, but shock green eyes pierce back at him, green like the portal. Lazarus, Danny’s mind whispers, and he blinks rapidly.
‘Lazarus,’ he mouths to himself. It’s familiar. Sam shows him with her phone what he looks like, joking that he looks like an assassin. Danny doesn’t think she’s that too far off.
He doesn’t tell her that. He tucks the thought away with the rest of his secrets, and fiddles with the hood gathering at his neck, attached to a cape with torn edges swinging down to his ankles. He pulls it over his shock white hair. It shadows over his face impossibly so, until all you can see are his green-green eyes peering out like a wolf hiding in the brush.
He ends up calling himself Phantom.
(Maybe now he can start putting lyrics to his lullabies; his memories may not have returned, locked away with the sound of a clock, but the dead can talk. One of them may just have answers.)
----------
Home is where we are
Home is where you are
Home is where I am
-----------------
Dedicated to @gascansposts for being the one who introduced me to the band Yaelokre, and thus being the whole reason I was inspired to write this in the first place >:] Those lyrics at the line breaks are all from their album Hayfields.
