Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Danny’s eyes sluggishly dragged open as he heaved, hacking up nothing but air and his own spit. The sky was green, blazing neon against his eyelids and worsening his migraine by miles. He was here. He was in the Ghost Zone.

Danny tried to twist, but moving felt like trying to shift concrete. Black flooded his vision and Danny struggled to pull his eyes open again. He didn’t recognize anything—purple against green, swirling, folding, and warping. Slits in the Zone’s fog showed brief flashes of white or blue, but Danny couldn’t move, couldn’t pull himself to one. He had to… what did he have to do?

He was moving—drifting, actually—and not of his own accord. Everything looked hazy, and his whole body ached, which was strange, since he usually didn’t physically feel as much in his ghost form, not unless… oh. Right. He’d been captured. Danny’s breathing, unnecessary yet still an ingrained habit, quickened. At the same time, something in his unfamiliar environment changed—he wasn’t drifting anymore. He was being pulled.

Danny tried to fly, to move in the opposite direction, especially when he saw the swirling whirlpool of ectoplasm dragging him through the green atmosphere. His efforts were futile, and he felt himself draw nearer and nearer at a growing speed. Resigned, he let his burning muscles relax, but otherwise braced himself. He let his eyes close, but they flew open as he was suddenly tugged faster as he heard a voice, from seemingly every direction, murmur, “My king…”

It felt like a suction cup, if suction cups were overtly aggressive and all-consuming. Like he was being dragged, but from the inside of his chest—was-was that his core? The voice crooned and echoed wordlessly, the sounds bouncing around his aching skull as ice washed over him.

Danny didn’t exactly know when he dropped through the folds between Infinity and Mortality, just that ice bit through his body in a way that shouldn’t have been possible with his core. Smog that felt almost tangible clouded his nose when he sucked in an automatic breath, and Danny’s attempts at floating or turning intangible did nothing as he dropped.

A grunt escaped Danny when he landed roughly on something metal before slipping off and onto the freezing, wet ground. He wheezed, pain radiating on the side that was thumped. After the worst of it dulled, the chill on his face matched the throb of his body’s pain, and Danny finally realized he had landed in a pile of snow. With his ice core, Danny was used to the cold. In fact, he loved it whenever he visited the Far Frozen. It was the same here, wherever he’d landed. He gave his core a few more relished moments of relief thanks to his snowy bed before Danny forced himself to sit up.

A brick wall stood behind him, which was convenient. Danny let himself rest against that, his head tilting against it to take in his surroundings. Wherever he was, it looked like it was the dead of night.

Instinctually Danny applied pressure to his left wrist, and the sharp pain against his torn vein gave him a bit of forced clarity. Huh, he was behind a dumpster. And that was a lot of glowy blood.

His migraine made itself known again with another stabbing throb, his skull starting to feel like a maraca with how much he was hit around. Blood seeped through his fingers, and he swallowed down the reflexive gag.

Blood on his hands, seeping through his clothes, decorating the white, white walls with red-green-redgreenredgreen—no. Danny gasped, physically hunching over to drag himself out of that. Thinking about that didn’t help. Panicking wasn’t going to help right now. Staggering upright, Danny somehow managed to hold himself up as he panted, essentially face planting the wall to stay standing.

Then, suddenly, his chest burned with frost and ice that crawled up his throat almost painfully—something that had never happened before—and puffed out of his mouth. Ghost.

Danny spun around, and then almost toppled over when the world spun with him. He probably would have fallen if not for an odd, squishy shadow bracing against his side before vanishing, like a literal wisp. “Who—” he tried, and it came out as a croak that was more rasp than sound.

“My king,” were the words repeated once more, their meaning conveyed despite being enshrouded by the sounds of frigid wind gusts, an echo of sirens and the scratch of gravel. The shadows of the alley swirled unnaturally, coalescing into a humanoid, possibly-feminine figure. The ghost’s head dipped towards him as if in reverence, to Danny’s bemusement. “You are welcome in my haunt. I am the Lady Gotham.”

Danny frowned, but his natural defensive stance that he had fallen into loosened. “Uh,” he said, “thanks? What—”

The ghost—Lady Gotham? He honestly wondered how some ghosts got their names at this point—gave an odd rattle, like drain-pipes rubbing against each other in a way that somehow conveyed the impression of a smile. “It has been so long,” she said in a frigid-warm whisper. “But I haven’t the time. My Knights will bring you no harm, my King. They shan’t dare to hinder you.”

Danny blinked, stunned, confused, and hurting. It was a horrible mix he didn’t wish upon anyone. “What ar-are you talking about?” Danny demanded, done with it all. “Knights? I don’t understand. Where—”

“Hey, you,” a rough, strangely mechanical voice startled him enough to almost lose his footing on the icy ground, and Lady Gotham disappeared. It came from a dozen feet away, near the mouth of the alley Danny apparently landed in. Danny whipped around at the sound, and if he had been in his human form, his heart would have been pounding. As it was, his core pulsed a bit more rapidly. Danny grabbed the edge of the dumpster and slouched a bit farther down behind it.

Danny didn’t say anything, but he heard a few footsteps come closer before the stranger continued, in a softer, clearer tone, “You need some help?”

Danny peeked out, trying to get a better look, to assess any danger. His vision still wasn’t the best—his ghostly body, although more resilient than his human form, was still suffering the effects of electric shocks and that blood blossom concoction, not to mention the steady blood loss from his wrist. It was night, the entire alley covered in snow even if it wasn’t actively falling, and the glow from the streets haloed the figure from behind, obscuring most of his face from Danny’s angle. The man—and he was definitely a man, from the bulk of his shoulders as well as his deep voice—held something metallic under his arm. A helmet? The vivid red color matched his jacket, and Danny noted the multiple holsters strapped around his waist. At least the shapes of his weapons suggested normal pistols and not anything like his parents’ creations.

“Kid,” the man spoke again, taking another step. Danny brushed aside his initial confusion at being called that—his migraine almost made him forget that he was still in his ghost form and therefore looked fourteen, rather than the nineteen-year-old that he normally was. “You’re hurt.”

“So?” Danny replied defensively. “Was it the blood that tipped you off or my luxurious, glowing skin?”

Skin that was tinged blue and very much screamed not human, but the man hadn’t even seemed to notice if the way he jolted said anything. His head tilted, and the man reeled like he was just realizing Danny had oh-so-helpfully kick-started the festive green decoration. The man stepped forward, and Danny was abruptly distracted by a cold shiver racing down his spine that the man didn’t seem to notice. “You’re… You aren’t human,” the man accused.

“Are you?” escaped Danny, completely bypassing his brain-to-mouth filter—not that it worked on days where he hadn’t been tortured and experimented on.

The man stiffened, and Danny took a step back himself as a sheen of green glinted in the stranger’s eyes. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he growled, all softness gone from his tone.

Danny took another step back, his shoulder scraping along the brick wall as it lended support. He focused, pushing past the spike of pain in his head as he flashed his own eyes a brighter ecto-green in warning. “Lady Gotham said I’m welcome,” Danny said. Was this one of the ghost’s knights? He didn’t sound very friendly anymore.

He couldn’t tell if the ghost’s permission meant anything or not, because the man just straightened, fists clenching. “Look here—” he hissed, but Danny stopped paying attention to words when the man’s core suddenly burst with anger and annoyance in such an unnatural way that Danny immediately was on edge. It seemed to permeate the very air, and in that moment Danny realized he was not welcome here, not in this haunt. Because that’s what it was—this guy’s haunt, not Lady Gotham’s. He couldn’t handle a fight right now, and weird maybe-ghosts were not on his list of things to meet.

“Hood!” a faint voice shouted, and Danny’s gaze tipped up at it before there was another dizzying ache from another, larger swell of foreign anger. Danny, who did not want to get hurt when he was still trying to see straight, pushed all his effort into intangibility, and ran.

★★★

The fresh layer of snow made Crime Alley look deceptively peaceful, and although Jason knew from experience that there would indeed be less crime tonight on patrol, the neighborhood being called Crime Alley assured there would always be some crime. Whatever peace could be found due to the inclement weather—though the snow itself had stopped a few hours after nightfall—would be filled up by Red Hood’s need to look out for his people—the working girls still on street corners, homeless trying to get by, to get warm whatever way they could.

Jason himself had decided to stop for a few minutes by a burning barrel, a few homeless men braving his presence to get warm beside him. He recognized them—they’d been on the street a lot longer than the others that didn’t dare approach. They didn’t speak, which was honestly preferable to Jason. It allowed him to let the rage inside him incrementally cool as the fire warmed him from outside. He had just come across a disgusting excuse of a human trying to bribe a teen with promises of warmth, the middle-aged man’s lascivious tone sending shivers down his spine, colder than the weather could ever make, and igniting the fury that characterized the Red Hood.

Bundling that rage up often ended in a literal blow up, but the quiet helped him ride it out. He glanced down, taking in the blood drying on his boots, and relaxed. Killing might have been off the table, but maiming was quite a calming hobby when pointed in the right direction. It even had the bonus of getting at least one more offender off the streets before they could be ‘tempted’ to try again.

“Hood.”

A flair of anger before Jason managed to open his eyes. “Red,” Jason drawled flatly over the comms—of course the little shit had hacked in and messed with his mute settings. Or maybe that was Oracle; it was hard to tell sometimes. He grappled up to the roof ledge Red Robin stood on, shuffling papers like he wasn’t in a crime lord’s territory whilst said crime lord still had his gun out. “What the hell are you doin’ in my Alley?”

“Investigating,” Tim said, then didn’t elaborate. Jason decided to flick off his gun’s safety—a rubber bullet one, but still—which made Tim continue. “There’s some gang movement from the East End, we think towards Crime Alley. I’ve been tracking it with Oracle all night.”

Jason flicked the safety back on. “Just you, Replacement? Surprised the old man let you come here.”

“Since when have I ever listened to him?” Tim huffed, “And I’m solo—you of all people should know that.” Jason scoffed at him, but Tim either didn’t notice or couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge it. “Anyway, I’ve had increasing gang activity all over East End—”

“Because it’s January, and companies drop their pay and some people need to get back whatever they splurged on presents for their families,” Jason pointed out. Something Bruce never seemed to care about, aside from marking the uptick in activity before Christmas and after New Years.

“—and they’ve been mobilizing through the Alley,” Tim continued. His papers—one looked like a printed out meme and Jason was suddenly more concerned with how much caffeine Tim had ingested today instead of gang activity—were shifted to reveal a blown up map of the Alley, eight dots marking meeting points. “They’re moving something, and we’re not sure what it is just yet but we wanted you warned so you didn’t try busting in on one of our operations. Again.”

Like they hadn’t done the exact same thing to him several times. Bats.

Jason let out an exaggerated sigh. “Fine,” he said, holding out a hand. “Give it he—”

Jason stopped mid-sentence, freezing. What the ever-loving fuck was that?

Ignoring Tim, who he vaguely registered as sounding concerned, Jason spun to face what he knew was the southern edge of his territory, in the direction of the Bowery. Something inside him… where the anger was, the rage, the fury… it was almost… shivering. Where he’d always associated the never-ending burn of his damn pit madness, deep in his chest, something was making that feeling turn on its goddamn head. And he could feel that something was something external. And it was south of him.

Before he knew it, Jason was spitting out a command to stay there, Replacement and didn’t even bother getting his grapple back out to start leaping over the buildings. He darted down and up, that strange sensation growing to an unsettling degree before abruptly evening out as Jason felt himself practically walk right over it.

Trap, came a belated thought, but Jason couldn’t see anything. Wrong, wrong, wrong… what’s happeni—there. A voice, scraping like wintery ice on his ears when his beanie rode up, in a way that should not have been possible. The rage that had been building and simmering all day was suddenly banked like a fire pit being doused with sand. The sudden silence, the lack of anger, left him uneasy and wrongfooted.

He could sense—fuck, somehow he could sense whatever it was below him in the alley. He backed away from the edge of the roof and the strange feelings within him only abated slightly, but it was enough for his logic—and his training—to kick in. Dropping into the alley wasn’t an option; the strange influence over him would be too much at once, and as backing away proved, proximity was a factor. Quickly he went down the fire escape on the other side of the building—approaching on even ground wasn’t much better, but hell, what else could he do?

Jason made his way over to the mouth of the alley, forcing himself to ignore yet still categorize, what he felt happening to him. Going slowly, it wasn’t as intense, he found. Like he was acclimatizing to the… thing causing it. He reached the mouth of the alleyway and made sure his guns were accessible as he peered around the corner. A figure stood there in the darkness, back to him and obscured partially by a dumpster. What caught Jason’s eye first was the shock of white hair, but what quickly followed was how short the figure was, almost like… shit, was that a kid?

“Hey, you,” he called, trying to announce his presence without scaring them and winced in tandem when he heard his voice, warped by the technology in his helmet. The kid was… weird to say the least, with oddly flat shadows and reflections of white on the brick walls a little too bright to simply be from the light. And then he proceeded to feel guilt—what was happening to his emotions now?—over how they spun, catching the barest flash of green before they ducked behind a dumpster. A white glove still poked up over the edge in a way that made Jason more worried that they were actually just catching themselves before falling rather than simply hiding.

A set of clicks, and a short pattern had his helmet loosening with a barely audible hiss, and Jason was quick to tuck it into his side as he took a few steps closer. “You need some help?” he asked, aiming for gruff-but-soft and somewhat achieving it. He was rewarded with a tuft of white poking out, impossibly green eyes locking onto his, like the kid was looking through his domino. That odd pull from earlier—the one that had tamed the Pits—rattled around in his chest, the sensation odd but not angry, which was concerning in and of itself.

The kid continued to assess him, and Jason saw them clock both the helmet under his arm and the guns strapped to his body. That was the one thing Jason always struggled with, calming kids new to the Alley. They didn’t know that he’d never point those guns at them.

Jason continued his own assessment, and his eyes widened behind his mask when he finally looked down. There in the snow—it looked mussed, like something snakelike had run through it a couple times, but an even more concerning factor was the green sludge decorating that end of the alleyway, almost like radioactive Mountain Dew. Looking back at the strange kid, Jason noticed smears of the same stuff on the dumpster as well.

“Kid,” he said, and their brow furrowed. Jason took another step forward, only to feel a rush of what he could only describe as phantom pain. A wave of aching, pounding, stinging, fuzziness, HURT washed over him. “You’re hurt,” he said, almost inexplicably.

“So?” they—he, the voice was pitched lower, even while being young—retorted sharply. “Was it the blood that tipped you off or my luxurious, glowing skin?”

This little shit. It reminded him of the Alley kids, who were either silent shadows that tailed your every step or were nothing but mouthy brats who couldn’t stop themselves from dissing everything from your shoes to your seventh great-grandmother even if they tried. It had Jason stepping forwards, another bubble of something fizzing within him as the realization crossed his face. “You’re…” he trailed off, trying to make sense of the intrinsic knowledge that warred with all of his training. “You aren’t human.”

Eyes, bright green, seemed to dig into his very being. “Are you?” the boy asked in a mere whisper, an echo of surety immediately knocking Jason off balance.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Jason demanded in nothing short of a growl, the flood of anger rushing over him almost overwhelming with the freaky tranquility he’d had before. His eyes burned, and the green had to be showing through the domino with how bright everything seemed.

The boy took a shaky step back. Jason barely held in a gasp when the boy’s eyes flashed green, just like his own. “Lady Gotham said I’m welcome,” he said nonsensically.

Jason clenched his fists as the Pits seemed to decide it was going to ignore whatever had made it calm earlier. “Look here—” he hissed, but was cut off.

“Hood!” he heard, a bit of a distance away but still recognizable as Red Robin. It was only then that Jason noticed the constant static buzz coming from the small extra comm in his ear, and a matching faint buzz from his helmet. Jason’s annoyance fed his growing anger as he and the strange boy both looked Red Robin’s way. Tim was above them, leaning over the roof Jason had originally stopped on. Jason looked back to the boy but… he was gone. The hell?

“Who was that?” Tim asked sharply, dropping down.

“What’s it to you?” Jason snarled, and that anger almost felt like his own—anger at the interruption, at the confusion, the fear, all wrapped up and… and directed at the kid who always managed to end up on the other side of his gun. Goddamnit. “Fuck. Shit.”

“Jar,” Tim muttered after he glanced Jason over with calculated precision only few could manage. And then the self-sacrificial idiot immediately crouched by the nearest sludge of green with a swab and a test tube with zero regard for Jason or whatever the hell was going on in here. It made the rage build again, and not for the first time, Jason wished that Tim wasn’t such an easy target. “What happened to your comms and tracker? You couldn’t have turned them off—and what was with you bolting like you had N on your tail trying to hug you?”

“Nothing,” Jason bit out, trying to bank the rage again. He craved that tranquility, and immediately pushed those thoughts away because they just made him more mad. Tim capped the sample he took and turned with a frown.

“Jason, that was the worst lie you’ve ever said,” Tim deadpanned. Green filled his vision, and Jason stubbornly shoved his helmet back on, only to hear the crackle-hiss of the comms.

Tim seemed to clock that Jason’s simmering rage was actually building to dangerous levels—pit rage levels—as he slowly tucked the sample into his utility belt. “You alright there, Hood?” he questioned. Was Replacement trying to be subtle while reaching for his bo staff? It wasn’t working.

Jason gritted his teeth. “Get out of Crime Alley. Now.”

“B will want—”

“Now!” Jason bellowed, advancing forward suddenly, which had Jason’s desired effect. Tim quickly grappled away, swinging out of his sight in moments. The comms stayed on the fritz, but honestly, Jason appreciated the lack of follow-up commentary that was no doubt happening between Tim and the rest of Gotham’s vigilantes.

He steeled himself, and had just enough of a mind left to swap his holsters around, the rubber bullets in easy reach, just in case. Jason walked out of the alleyway, cocked his head, and followed the sound of the nearest scream. He was done with Bats tonight.

𓌜𓌜𓌜

A figure emerged from the shadows as the last crunches of the Red Hood’s footsteps in the fresh snow faded and the alleyway became empty of life. The figure came not from Gotham, nor another world, but they had enough knowledge of death to understand what the vigilantes, there only moments ago, did not.

Mirroring the one they had been assigned to follow, the figure darted from the shadows to collect their own sample of the glowing substance. They capped the vial and left, continuing their mission by rushing to catch up with the vigilante their leader had ordered to be followed. Staying in the alley had been an act of disobedience, but one look and the assassin had known.

Ra’s al Ghul would wish to know of the Lazarus-Water-like substance flowing through another’s veins.

☾ ☾ ☾

Jazz knocked her head against the textbook splayed open in front of her like some kind of holy tome. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg remained unbothered by her frustration.

And now here she was, personifying a book of all things. Maybe that was a sign to put it away.

Her thesis sat in front of her, lines of scrawled sentences almost mocking her as they blurred together. Yeah, okay, it was probably time for a nap. She had a couple months before it was due, but it still managed to build up her anxiety until she forced herself to breathe.

Calm, she scrawled the reference out in handwriting vaguely neater than her previous notes.

“Mandy, I’m going to bed!” she called. Jazz got a muffled acknowledgement from her roommate as she stood, rubbing her eyes and slipping into their living-room/kitchen/sink-and-counter. Jazz opened their minifridge and grabbed some off-brand liquid yogurt that sort of just ‘tasted’ before returning to her room. Ducking under the bed, she grabbed the little packet of powdered ectoplasm and poured it in. The packet itself went into another container, which was then locked back up and pushed under her bed. The string cheese she put next to it was still in its package, and definitely not alive—it was just to function as a control.

She did not want to be anything like her parents were.

Jazz could probably survive without supplementing, but that would make it all a whole lot harder to handle. As it was, she could already feel her emotions regulating. Sighing, she tucked herself under the covers, and flicked the TV on. For a dorm, it was always oddly quiet. It was probably the effect of living in a loud house that made it so she couldn’t sleep without any noise.

Idly, she flicked through the channels. Cartoons, documentary, politics, cartoons, news, ne-wait, what?!

She rapidly flicked back to the first news channel. Smoke was billowing out of the side of a building, a building she recognized that had cracks and burns riddling one of the wings. The science wing. She saw body bags being carried out of the hole, and the helicopter didn’t help in figuring out the body types of the people in the bags. She didn’t know if he could die, but thinking about the possibility of it made her chest rattle and eyes burn dangerously. Some of the wall was just gone, shattered windows decorating half of the building with what were definitely blaster shots spread around the lower levels. Impact points she knew with uncomfortable familiarity, which could only mean one thing.

She ran out of her room, leaving behind the scene of her brother’s desecrated school.

“Jazz?”

“Emergency,” Jazz replied promptly, unable to care how insane she likely looked as she dragged a chair over to the corner of the kitchen. The roof tile lifted easily, and Jazz held her breath through the falling dust. The go-bag was stocked, something she’d normally never grab unless she was completely alone but this was bad.

“Jazz, what are you doing?” Mandy demanded. “What’s going on?”

Jazz paid her no mind, tossing supplies out onto the floor until she found the stupid brick of electronics. “Danny?” she called the second the buttons registered. He’d pick up. He had to pick up—he kept his stupid phone in his thigh, he’d know if it was buzzing or ringing or doing anything of the sort. She ignored Mandy—as well as Mandy’s boyfriend, who wasn’t technically allowed in the girls’ dorms—and all of her loud questions, dodging the hands that reached for her. “Danny, you better pick up-”

Nothing. Inhaling sharply, she dialed again. “Sam? Tucker?” Nothing. “Val,” she tried desperately. “Danny?” Nothing. Her breath hitched, and she tried again. “Vlad? Dani?”

Ttsss…

Jazz all but collapsed at the sound of it going through. A triple beep sounded for the recording—it made sense considering how rare it was for Dani to remember to keep her phone charged and the fact that it went through meant the phone wasn’t destroyed so she was probably at least alive—and her words practically tumbled over themselves in her rush to get everything out. “Dani, someth-thing happened w-with Danny, the-the G.I.W. were at his school and he’s not—he’s not responding and neither is-is anyone in Amity, not even Vlad—I need you to stay away, th-they might find you and I n-need you sa-safe right now, okay? I’m going there now.”

Amity Park was weird, but these signals were built to go through—what did it mean when the phone that was meant to work through dimensions only managed to get one person?—and then her call dropped, her heart falling even further. “Dani?!” she called desperately, mashing the buttons but getting nothing but an error screen. Horror, then sadness, then desperation and anger. The brick of a phone fell, and Jazz shut her eyes, trying to figure out what to do.

“Jazz? Are you okay?”

Mandy. “No,” Jazz answered, serene and honest. Heard footsteps backing away, and then watched as Mandy and her boyfriend—Don? Clive?—freeze as Jazz opened her eyes. The room was dark enough that Jazz could catch the glint of blue on a metal bowl set on the drying rack, the room looking brighter than it probably should have been as she pinned them under her stare. Her voice, deceptively light, still rattled with a sense of danger. “No, I don’t think I am.”

Chapter Text

Danny didn’t know what made him listen to Jazz when she urged him to continue his education. School was the worst. He also didn’t know why–after capitulating to his sister a few months after high school to look at colleges–he decided to accept the one basically paid-for by Vlad.

(He shouldn’t have left Amity Park.)

Especially when most of the first classes were gen-eds. Here he was, sitting in yet another literature class learning things he’d only ever need to know in a tussle with Ghost Writer–which was already unlikely because of that little deal they made a few months into Danny being Ghost King. The college class wasn’t that bad, though the professor was nothing like Mr. Lancer, and Danny hadn’t decided if that was a good thing or not yet.

(He won’t ever find out, never.)

“What’cha thinking about?”

Danny shivered, shoving the snickering Wes away from his eardrums. Disgruntled, he asked, “Really, dude? You had to be right in my ear?”

(Maybe he should have savored that moment. Snicker back, even just nudge his shoulder to feel him breathing, moving, living.)

“C’mon, Danny,” Wes sighed, twirling his eraser on his finger like a basketball. Danny subtly kicked the chair leg, jostling him enough that the eraser dropped. Wes glared with his nose all scrunched to let him know it was teasing, and continued easily. “D’you miss Lancer? Like, at all?”

Danny glanced back at their professor. They did voices for the characters, sure, but it always seemed to fall flat. “What, don’t you mean ‘Endless Night, Mr. Weston, it seems you have finally left that horrendous gym of yours’?”

(Teasing. He missed teasing. He missed having someone who knew him enough that he could.)

Wes snorted, a little too loud. The teacher paused in their lecture, giving a stern look. “Sorry, Prof,” Wes apologized.

Professor Abrams huffed a little, but continued. Wes kicked Danny’s chair in retribution. Danny ignored it, looking down at the book they were covering–Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Why did everything in his life have to have ghosts in it? And stupid Christmas too! Ugh. He’d had enough of that over break.

Wes noticed his diverted attention from their scintillating conversation and leaned close to his ear again. “Spooky enough for you, Phantom?” he whispered.

“Fenton, Wes,” Danny muttered, tired of his antics. The old and the new.

(Yeah right. He should have savored them.)

Wes jabbed him with the pencil eraser. Danny poked back with the ruler he’d been using for designs, hitting a soft spot and making Wes yelp.

“Boys!”

“Sorry Professor Abrams,” Danny and Wes called monotonously. They waited until they finally stopped checking at their corner of the room before unanimously turning to each other again, Danny quickly opening his mouth before Wes could get a word in. “Not here. Seriously, it’s not high school anymore.”

(He’d probably do anything to go back, nowadays.)

Wes rolled his eyes. “‘Lord of the Flies, do you really need to use the bathroom again, Mr. Fenton’,” Wes chuckled. Danny subtly whacked his arm.

“‘Late again, Mr. Weston? Great Gatsby, it’s almost like you don’t have a miniature clock on your wrist’,” Danny quoted back, and got his foot trodden on.

“What?” Wes mumbled defensively, abruptly pretending to scribble something down when the Professor checked on them again. “It’s not like the Guys in White are here–it’s plenty far from Amity Park, Phantom.”

(Well. Now it’s too. Damn. Late.)

Everything blurs after the windows shatter from the ecto-gun blasts.

Speak and the menacing government agency shall appear.

Danny’s classmates screamed, ducking for cover under their desks as the Professor shielded their face from the falling shards.

Danny and Wes shared a shocked, horrified expression.

“Hand over Daniel Fenton, now!”

Danny couldn’t breathe.

(Useless. His fault.)

Professor Abrams yelling. Students running for the door. Wes staying with Danny.

Shots. A black-haired boy falling, clothes smoking with ecto-burns.

Danny’s core burning like dry ice.

“Who do you think y–” A thud. The Professor’s still body. Wes’ tight grip, shaking Danny.

(HIS FAULT. USELESS.)

Danny standing, trying to surrender.

Wes, jumping in the way. Hitting the desk. Blood. So much blood. Wes’ slack face.

(They’re dead. Dead. Dead.)

The darkness of a thermos.

Pain, reverberating through his body, up his arm like the accident–was he home? Back in the portal? No, he can’t…

Burning. Running through his veins, filling up his lungs. Something stabbed his wrist, felt despite the loss of circulation from the cuffs. He was cuffed? But Danny was laying down. Why was he cuffed laying down?

“Shock it again. Keep it in its ghost form.”

Pain.

White-hot, all encompassing pain. It burned, like he was being torn apart from the outside in while needles blazed across his skin. His throat burned–from screaming or pain he didn’t know. It hurt, more than he could comprehend.

Time blurred, twisting together and blinking in and out of focus. How long had it been—how long had he been here? His mind felt like mush, unable to even differentiate five seconds from five hours. He felt disorientated, barely aware of anything until it was right in his face.

“Hand me…”

“—ood, just need to… look at this, here—”

It felt like before. When, sometimes, Danny messed around with a bunch of ice cubes, making them race on his plate or just seeing how cold his hands could get. It was hard to remember, but this felt just like then–the way ice had burned like fire when he got too cold, just a hundred times worse.

“The levers! Hit the… wrong, you hear me! I’ll fi…!”

“–aitor! Agent J, trap–!”

“Locked–”

Screams. Ecto-blasts. Bodies hitting the walls, the lab tiles. A flickering green glow.

Vlad.

(Vlad?)

VLAD!

Vlad was poking him.

Why was Vlad poking him?

“Hey.”

(Huh?)

Vlad didn’t poke Danny.

“Wake up, dude. Wake up!”

Danny gasped, coming up swinging. Knuckles skimmed fabric, and his shoulder erupted in pain.

“Woah! Hey, hey, can you look at me? I need you to breathe, alright? Sir?”

Danny dragged his eyes up, seeing the world through the black static that edged his vision. His eyes latched onto color, and calm. His chest heaved once more, and fell still as Danny nearly collapsed with relief. The gravel and grit on his skin wasn’t fun, but it was different, and it was textured. He was outside, it was cold. He wasn’t there.

“Oh damn–dude, please don’t pass out on me–”

“Fine,” Danny croaked. He looked up again. Yellow flooded his vision, saturated and almost neon against the gray backdrop. Even just seeing something aside from the white, clean lines of the G.I.W. made him untense, which probably wasn’t a good thing. His eyes dropped down again, and he froze at the sight of blood decorating his arm. Ah. Right.

Danny’s left sleeve was clinging to his skin but luckily it was midnight blue, so he thought the blood wasn’t too noticeable. He quickly looked away in the hopes of not drawing attention to it. Danny soon realized that he had absolutely failed to do that–it was obvious this guy in front of him was looking right at it, even though the mask obscured his sightline.

Wait. Mask?

“You don’t look fine, man,” the mysterious and weirdly dressed guy said, then muttered, “…all bloody and sleeping with below zero temps…”

“I’m fine,” Danny rasped, ducking his arm behind him. Taking in his surroundings, he realized he was laying on a rooftop–after fleeing far from whatever that dude was in that alley, Danny had used the last of his strength to float upwards to a random rooftop and collapsed before de-transforming. It was now morning.

Bumblebee pinched his nose—mask nose? Nose mask?—and sighed. “I’m on your side, man. There are places that can help you—I’ve got some pamphlets, if you want them. But right now, you are very bloody, and it can’t be healthy to stay outside in wet clothes even if you are a meta.”

Danny blinked slowly, confused. “Might not be my blood,” he defended.

Bumblebee probably blinked under those weird white eye covers—he paused long enough so Danny made an educated guess. “Is it your blood?” the guy asked, somehow managing to sound judgemental and factual at the same time. Danny held his ground until Bumblebee crossed his arms, gaze locking onto Danny, and pointedly began to raise a brow that had Danny deflating, almost automatically.

“Maybe,” he said, still stubborn, “but I’m f-fine now.”

Bumblebee grabbed Danny’s hand, startling him, but he just squeezed it. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Listen, if you don’t want the pamphlets, just come get off this roof with me. Let me buy you a hot chocolate or something…” The guy peered over the roof ledge. “We’re on top of a café, it’s not far.”

“Haven’t you ever heard about stranger danger?” Danny snarked, pulling away.

“Haven’t you heard of Signal?” Bumblebee rebuked. Danny paused, because Bumblebee said it like everyone knew that name. Apparently catching it, Bumblebee gave a double take before cocking his head. “Seriously? Signal, the day shift? Nothing?” Signal whistled, shaking his head. “Damn, you haven’t been here long, have you?”

“What?” Danny blurted.

Signal—what was he, a traffic light? What’s with the name and the yellow getup? Was there another guy dressed in green?—snorted. Danny had the impression that he was rolling his eyes. “Your accent, for one. Two? Dude, no Gothamite is wild enough to leave a bleeding teen on a roof this close to Hood’s territory.”

What in Clockwork’s name was a ‘Gothamite’? Where the hell was he?

“Uhh… yeah. Got here yesterday, I guess.” There was that eyebrow again. And now crossed arms. “Ok, sure,” Danny decided. He liked hot chocolate, and just thinking of the warm drink now made his stomach scream in hunger, his brain finally deigning to register it. “Hot chocolate.”

Signal shook his head. “Right. There’s a fire escape to your left, or I can carry you down.” Signal seemed to be eyeing his arm, almost pointedly. “It might be better if I do, just so—”

“Too late!” Danny chirped, painfully bright—literally, because the pitch scraped against his sore throat—and jumped onto the landing. Signal shouted something—probably to be careful, the loser—when it shook. Danny simply hightailed it down before Signal tried grabbing him, considering the alarmed look on his face. The fire escape rattled like it was emphasizing the thought, but Danny ignored it and dropped the last handful of feet to the floor.

His knees and sore muscles definitely didn’t thank him for that, but Danny made himself continue walking around to the front of the building before halting in front of it. Signal almost crashed into him, and Danny heard him mutter something like, ‘reckless’, ‘doing a runner’, and ‘crazy’.

A bell chimed as they walked in, with Danny trailing behind and taking note of the employee and customers’ interesting reactions to a masked guy in bright yellow combat gear walking in and ordering two hot chocolates. Two? Danny frowned. This guy wanted to keep talking to him, didn’t he?

Signal glanced back at him with a subtle motion to sit down that really meant nothing when half the place was staring at him already. Either way, Danny picked out one of the tables with wooden chairs—just because Signal may or may not be some kind of public cosplayer that was incredibly weird, didn’t mean that Danny wanted to get his blood flakes trapped in the cushions. He was pretty sure that’d be unsanitary, but considering his family was a living, breathing OSHA violation, he couldn’t be sure of that.

It took a few seconds—and several glances—but everyone turned back to their tables, the few conversations that were happening restarting, but significantly quieter. Signal kept up his cheery smile, and Danny observed him greet a little girl running out and around her exhausted mother’s legs, crouching down to talk. It was oddly adorable, and made him think of Dani. His core twanged, worry for her crawling up his spine. She had to be okay, but what if she wasn’t? They had found Danny, what if they found her? What if—

Danny startled out of his thoughts, eyes locking onto the cup set down in front of him. Idly, Signal smiled. Danny noticed that even though he looked nice, his smile didn’t really meet his eyes completely.

“So. I have a feeling you received a proper ‘Gotham Welcome’ yesterday, am I right?” At Danny’s blank look, Signal nodded at his arm. “Mugging?”

Danny looked at his arm, then back at Signal. It’s not like he was about to say, “No, actually, it was a bunch of government agents experimenting on me, totally legally by the way since apparently I’m not considered sapient.”

“Yeah… wait. How’s that considered a proper welcome?”

It was Signal’s turn to stare for a moment. “You’re joking, right?”

Danny felt he had erred somewhere important. He fake laughed, “Totally! Totally joking, definitely. Gotcha!” His forced cheer faded awkwardly, and he hid behind his cup as he sipped the hot chocolate. Oh, yum, that was good stuff.

Luckily this Signal guy appeared to let it go. “You got a place to stay, man? Parents you can call, or anything?”

“I’m almost twenty!” Danny retorted, even though he wouldn’t have ever called his parents even if he was a younger teen in this exact situation. “And… yeah, I’m good.” He looked down into his nearly empty cup. “Thanks for the drink, but you don’t have to worry about me or anything. I can take care of myself.”

“Didn’t say you couldn’t, dude.” Signal nodded at his arm. “Might want to clean that up, though. The Bowery’s a bit better than Crime Alley—”

“That’s an actual name?” he interrupted, bewildered.

Signal let out a long suffering sigh. “Yeah—you’ve probably seen it as ‘Park Row’ on maps or something. Still, we’re not too far away and muggers might still have blades just as dirty over here. Just—okay, I’m gonna be honest here, you look like shit.” Signal valiantly ignored Danny’s look of irritation. “Clean up, maybe take a bus further south. If you make a habit of sleeping on rooftops, you’ll probably meet Spoiler or Red Robin. They’re cool with metas—don’t be afraid to ask for help, yeah?”

Danny stared, because none of that meant anything to him. It felt a bit like he just had a bucket of water dumped over his head. He was out, he was away from the G.I.W, he wasn’t home. Signal’s smile faltered a bit, but the costumed man stood up anyway, reaching behind and yanking out, as promised, a small stack of different colored pamphlets.

“I’ve gotta go,” Signal said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Crime never waits, especially here. Try not to bleed out any time soon!”

“Right,” Danny rasped, throat suddenly feeling like sandpaper, eyes trailing the—hero? Vigilante? Costumed do-gooder?—out of the door.

Everything felt a bit numb as his gaze started to drift. His head dropped down, looking at the dregs of his hot chocolate. Having been privy to two kinds previously—the watery, off-brand powder mix from the store and Vlad’s horrid, too rich and thick version that you needed a spoon to ‘drink’—this tasted far too good to waste. He tossed the remaining drops back and swallowed thickly, mind drifting to Jazz.

What would she do if she was in his place? Take in his surroundings and make a plan, probably. She’d probably do better in ‘Crime Alley’ than him—man, who the heck thought that was a good name?

Glancing outside the windows to check the street, his gaze caught and refocused onto something a bit closer. Cocking his head to decipher the backwards letters, Danny felt a bit of sensation trickle back down to his numb fingers. That… That would work. He just had to think like Jazz, and maybe, just maybe, he’d make it out here.

★★★

The first thing Duke did after his post-patrol shower was to, naturally, annoy Tim.

It wasn’t antagonistic, but Duke saw Tim in that exact same spot sans the third coffee cup before he started his patrol. Considering Duke knew that Tim had gone out the previous night—against the schedule, which was unfortunately common for everyone in the family despite being equally belittled for breaking it—this meant that he was probably on intervention duty.

“Hey, Tim,” Duke greeted, faux-casual in a way that was only obvious to them.

“Duke,” Tim greeted in turn, tone curt despite probably not trying to be offensive. He was just ‘like that’ according to Steph.

There was nothing but silence and silent-judging for a few minutes. Duke slowly resigned himself to dealing with an overtired Tim—he definitely would have noted and either mentioned or side-eyed him for his tone.

“You’re judging me.”

Duke startled, eyes flickering to Tim’s face but the other teen just whirled around in the seat, plucking another vial from a centrifuge and began preparing slides with a snap of rubber gloves. Duke’s eyes narrowed—both of those items were supposed to remain in the lab area of the Cave.

“How long have you been awake?” Duke asked instead of answering.

Tim sighed heavily, like Duke was the one causing him stress. “Really?” he asked dryly. “I can move if you want to digitize your report.”

“Move up to your room, maybe?” he suggested. At Tim’s very flat and very unnerving look, Duke stepped back and put his hands up. “You’ve been awake for like, at least twenty hours.”

“I had a nap,” Tim protested. “All of you always get on me for not sleeping—I sleep!”

Duke rolled his eyes. “For how long?”

Tim glared and pointedly did not answer. Duke hadn’t lived here long, but he had heard the stories of Alfred sedating Tim the second he realized that Tim hadn’t slept in over seventy hours. Plus the half-dozen other stories of Tim’s two-hour naps being the only thing keeping him sane for nearly three weeks despite the constant mental and physical tax on his body.

But, alas, he hadn’t been here for very long as previously stated. Very few among them could actually bench Tim—not because of their authority, but because Tim wouldn’t listen. Alfred had the gentlest iron fist over all of them, but even with him it was a toss up for if Tim listened or not. It had been weird—Alfred had Duke shutting up and listening within the first five hours of him living here. He had never known another man to have so much power, especially in his station, but Tim was a wildcard who needed every single loophole read out to him and then Tim had to pause and think it through before deciding if he wanted to agree or not.

“What are you doing?” Duke asked instead. Tim resettled, expression slipping into that of a sleep-deprived teen instead of a glaring porcelain doll. “That doesn’t look like blood.”

“It’s not–at least, it’s not human blood,” Tim replied, standing up with a huff and a series of loud pops that had Duke wincing. The slide he had been looking at was quickly fed into the sequencer, while Tim motioned for Duke to take the chair and look into the microscope. The remaining slide was a weird, glowing green. Duke had no clue if it was only glowing to him due to his abilities or if it was just Tim not caring about it at all. The cells looked—weird. “It’s not acting like any substance I can recall, and I can’t find any relevant mentions in the database.”

Duke tried to use a needle to spread the substance a bit, only for the cells to combine, of all things, before scooching away. A probe brought it back into place, and Duke stared at the thing, dumbfounded, as the super-cell wriggled, warping in shape before splitting several times almost simultaneously. Whatever it was, it looked alien.

Tim swore, distracting him into looking up, just in time to see Tim practically toss the slide into the biohazard trash.

“Alien?” Duke guessed.

Tim frowned, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. It only served to make him look more tired than he already was. “Maybe,” he sighed. “I don’t know. I thought it was Lazarus-related, but the makeup is entirely wrong even if the cells are… similar, so to say. Could be a new element, could be something earthly, could be from space—I just don’t know.” Tim huffed and turned to Duke. “You saw something interesting on patrol.”

Duke jolted, and mentally scolded himself for it when Tim’s stare turned scrutinizing. “How did you know that?”

Tim smirked. “Didn’t. Now I do,” he replied airily. Duke groaned. “Your comms went offline for approximately thirty-six minutes. I couldn’t get into your mask cam—”

“Hey!”

“—which was doubly odd.” Tim raised a cocky brow, uncaring of Duke’s interruption. Which, rude. “You’re living in a house made of detectives, Dukiebird. You’ll have to get much, much better if you want a chance at fooling them, much less me. So, you’ve got a few options here.”

“You know you sound like a shitty rogue, right?” Duke warily wondered.

Tim gave every sign of ignoring him, but Duke managed to catch the slightest hint of a smug smirk. “One, you keep trying to lie and horribly dodge questions, which will result in me digging into your recent history and behavioral patterns to figure out what was up with you today. Two, you blow me off and I follow a similar plan to numero uno, only there are even higher chances of me calling in Babs to supply some blackmail if my own doesn’t suffice—which it will, just so you know. Three, you answer with a half truth which will involve me tracking you to ensure you haven’t been compromised and then ripping into everything I can just to learn what you did. Four, you tell the whole truth, and I will stop—”

“Four!” Duke yelped. “Dude, what the fuck?”

Tim gave a noncommittal wave that paired horribly with his saccharine smile. “You may have ran a baby gang when you were just a baby yourself, but I’m the Robin who blackmailed Batman. Like I said—you are going to have one hell of a time trying to get around me.”

“Jesus,” Duke hissed.

“I prefer Tim, actually.”

Duke groaned. “I don’t know, dude! You didn’t have to go all Predator on my ass—everything was pretty normal! I decided to head through the Bowery instead of the Narrows ‘cause Steph’s still out on her trip. Couple muggings, saw some odd activity on the edge of the Alley but that’s pretty normal anyways. Weirdest thing was probably this bloody teen sleeping on the roof. I swear his eyes were glowing green when he opened them—”

“Glowing?” Tim interrupted. Duke generously didn’t continue as if he hadn’t said anything, like a polite person. “Was it this shade?”

Tim plucked another vial—how many of those did he have?—and held it up. It seemed like it hadn’t taken a ride in the centrifuge just yet, and it looked like violently neon Mountain Dew. As Tim held it up, it almost pulsed with light. A shiver wracked his spine—that was not normal.

“Yes,” Duke managed.

“What about the blood? Weird color?”

Duke shook his head. “Nope, normal red.”

Tim frowned, setting the vial back down. “Hm. Make a paper report and don’t tell Bruce.”

Duke startled. “What? Why?”

“Something happened with Jason last night—I went out to talk to him about gang movement on his turf,” he supplied at Duke’s weird look. Sue him—Tim and Jason probably had one of the most convoluted relationships among the Gotham vigilantes. “He froze and ran off, and I found him in an alleyway with all of this stuff. He didn’t say anything, but he was flighty and defensive when I asked. It was just inside Crime Alley—I am sixty-seven percent sure that he met whoever splattered this stuff around.”

Duke involuntarily let out a strangled note. “Just sixty-seven?”

Tim gave him yet another flat look. “You’re still new. Jason isn’t—he’s probably the second easiest to read out of everyone, though.”

“Wouldn’t that be Dick?”

Tim snorted. “Dick hides all his anger at the world in a smile and a joke. I’d need to watch him to see if he was genuinely hiding something to figure out if he was lying or not. Jason’s got his heart on his sleeve—a very pissy, angry heart, but it’s there nonetheless.”

While Duke’s mind imploded at that revelation, Tim simply continued on.

“Jason isn’t going to like me poking into his business, but he’d like Bruce butting in even less. It’s better for everyone’s welfare if Bruce doesn’t know because if he does, he won’t be able to resist just a little poking around which will lead to a lot of poking around, no matter what he says. Jason isn’t going to be placated by Bruce’s reasons, he’s only going to care about Bruce’s actions. Since B’s pretty much the exact opposite, it’ll lead to a fight we really can’t afford right now.”

Tim spun around, suddenly very much in Duke’s face with a finger on his chest. “You will write your report and hand it in to me so I can file it. Do not skip out on the teen’s description—he might be important. If I was a betting man, I’d say that he might have something to do with this,” he motioned at the series of vials, “and keeping quiet for now will help relations with Jason. I’m not asking for you to hold your silence forever—just until we get this figured out. Capiche?”

“Capiche,” Duke croaked. The immediate switch from the intimidating Red Robin to gala-boy Timothy Drake was unnervingly creepy. He looks like a pod-person, Duke thought, watching the sweet smile spread over Tim’s face as he patted Duke on the cheek before returning to the chair.

“I’ll take a nap later, Dukiebird,” he said with a somewhat patronizing tone. “Why don’t you get some rest—you have school in the morning.”

Duke shook himself out and groaned. He was a vigilante now—a Gotham vigilante, which automatically meant that he was made of tougher stuff than a good quarter of the hero population despite his youth and inexperience—but facing Tim’s wrath was far more terrifying than preparing to fight a rogue.

☾ ☾ ☾

Vlad did not know whether he should consider it luck or misfortune to have found himself near the Far Frozen upon escaping through the G.I.W’s flickering portal. Daniel had disappeared through the portal in one blink of the swirling green ectoplasm, and upon its unstable return, Vlad had followed, but Daniel was nowhere to be seen.

He definitely considered it lucky that the yetis of the Far Frozen were as forgiving as they were skilled in medicine. Daniel’s friend–Frostbite–took Vlad at his word about their escape and then subsequent separation, willingly treating the injuries Vlad sustained from facing those imbecilic Guys In White. However, his injuries were truly nothing compared to the condition he had found young Daniel in at the base, nor those of his college classmates.

Frostbite and his people had been wary of Vlad at first, but it had been years since the…debacle with the Infi-map, and since Daniel had become Ghost King, their adversarial relationship had thawed into a strained acquaintanceship at the very least. The yetis were understandably conflicted when Vlad requested the map’s use once more to aid in his search for Daniel; the one thing he was sure of was that the young man was deposited somewhere in the Infinite Realms. Although Frostbite seemed almost reluctant to do so, Vlad was denied and told the map was unavailable.

Eventually, with time being the final thing Vlad needed to fully heal, he left the Far Frozen to return to the living realm. Having moved out of the Mayor’s Mansion in Amity Park years ago, Vlad had rebuilt his own mansion for the final time once again outside of Madison, Wisconsin. When Daniel graduated and received a full ride to the local Madison Area Technical College, the boy was unfortunately more suspicious than grateful at first. Luckily, Vlad was finally able to barter for Daniel’s acceptance by accepting his additional terms that they would not interact nor would he ever live with Vlad.

Their state of détente hinged now not only on the usual threats to each other’s secret halfa status, but on simple avoidance of each other. That, of course, didn’t mean Vlad stopped… keeping an eye on Daniel. It was his money putting the boy through higher education, and if anyone asked Vlad would absolutely claim he was just… monitoring his investments.

Vlad had never felt the need to be concerned by the G.I.W. Unlike Daniel and his very public heroics, Vlad couldn’t deny that he would prefer to put his secrets first before others’ safety. Besides, the entire agency consisted of idiots–or so he had thought.

Somehow they had discovered Daniel’s dual identity.

Vlad winced as he sat in his favorite armchair, back twinging in pain. Regardless of his injuries, he was nowhere near Daniel’s spry age of almost twenty, especially in human form. To think, just days ago Vlad had been weighing the pros and cons of sending the boy a birthday gift next month.

Maddie, his cat, jumped up to curl into his lap and Vlad mindlessly started to pet her. He’d need to increase the security for the mansion–he had only just returned from the Ghost Zone, but enough time must have passed for the G.I.W. to regroup. Vlad was no longer on their radar as a minor beneficiary; instead, he was a target.

Vlad sighed. Only Daniel could have gotten him to expose himself as a halfa, as the only one Vlad now deemed worthy of such loyalty. And it wasn’t even purposeful on the boy’s part. But if Vlad’s identity hadn't yet been revealed whilst Daniel’s was, who had told them?

Apparently Vlad wasn’t the only one asking that question–but without the knowledge that it wasn’t Vlad.

A bang echoed from the front hall, startling his pet from Vlad’s lap. At first he feared it was the agents, but a blur suddenly flew through the wall towards him, causing Vlad to sink through the floor on instinct.

“Where is he?” Danielle shouted at him–because it was her, Danielle, that followed him through the floor into his basement laboratory. Vlad hadn’t seen nor spoken to the girl in years, only gleaning minor updates about her from offhand comments from Daniel or his sister Jasmine. Danielle was in a rage, hands pooling with simmering ecto-blasts. Vlad stayed in his human form, holding his hand up in surrender. “What have you done with him?”

“Danielle, you are mistak–”

“Shut up!” she screamed, and Vlad noticed the tears in her eyes. “He never should have trusted you!”

“I tried to save him!” Vlad yelled back, annoyed. “It was the Guys in White, girl!”

Danielle took in gasping breaths and sank down to the ground. “W-what?” she stuttered when she landed. “Y-you tried?”

“Of course I did,” Vlad said, warily keeping an eye on her dimming fists.

Danielle collapsed, de-transforming as she did. She didn’t look a day older than he’d last seen her, which surprised Vlad momentarily. Daniel sure had grown. “He’s dead?” she whispered. “Gone?”

“What?” Vlad asked, thrown off. “Sweet sugar cookies, no! Well, not more than any of us three usually are.”

Danielle glared up at him from the floor. “You said you tried. Where is he then? W-what happened?”

Instead of pulling up a chair as he wished to do, the lab was sparsely furnished these days, so Vlad deigned to lower himself to the floor next to the crying girl. That’s what one did when faced with a crying child, wasn’t it? Vlad hadn't had the experience–or, well, he had, but he hadn’t truly cared back then.

“I rescued him, Danielle–”

“Ellie,” she interrupted with a glare. “Only my friends call me Dani. No one calls me Danielle.”

Vlad’s eyebrows rose, but nodded. “Ellie. As I was saying, I rescued Daniel, but… it became complicated. He is somewhere in the Ghost Zone.”

Ellie sniffed and looked at him with suspicion. “Somewhere?”

“The agents, when I found him… they had done something to Daniel, it looked like he was powering their own portal, though I am not sure how. They had hooked him up to it in his ghost form, subdued him with blood blossoms and electricity.” Ellie gasped and shook her head, but didn’t speak. Vlad continued, “The portal was unstable, but also the safest exit for both of us. I pushed Daniel through, but it flickered, and when I entered myself, Daniel was nowhere near. I had appeared near the Far Frozen, and have only just returned.”

Ellie looked over to Vlad’s portal, the operational warning light blinking while its heavy machinery doors hid its swirling vortex. She didn’t look at him as she asked, “How do I know you’re telling the truth? Jazz said she called you, but it didn’t go through.”

“Jasmine?” Vlad questioned, but with no response he just sighed. “I am not sure. Chief Frostbite can confirm my injuries and arrival, but he only took me at my word as to Daniel’s fate. I suppose there are the agents I battled…”

Ellie scoffed. After a few moments of silence, the suspicion had not gone away. “How’d you find him so quick?”

Vlad grimaced. “The connections I made years ago with the agency came in handy once more. Though judging by the shouts of ‘traitor’, such connections are quite severed now.” He paused, before deciding to be transparent. “I may have also listed myself as Daniel’s emergency contact in his school files. Without his knowledge. I was notified after the attack on his classroom.”

“Creep,” Ellie muttered, wiping her eyes. Her indignant energy seemed to disappear in mere moments. Vlad stayed quiet, unsure if any sort of reassurances from him would be welcome. After a while, she appeared to steel herself, getting to her feet. Vlad followed her lead, unsurprised by her newfound look of determination when she turned to face him.

“Jazz is coming up from Chicago,” she told him. “She saw the college on the news, and when she called me she said I was the only one to pick up. She didn’t know why, but with you so close to Danny out here–”

“You made some assumptions,” Vlad finished, running a hand to smooth his ponytail.

“Duh,” she said, crossing her arms. “But if it wasn’t you, who tipped them off about Danny? They went after him at school. As Fenton, not Phantom.”

Vlad nodded. “I was wondering the same.”

The young girl–was she one? Why had she not aged like Daniel? The scientist in him yearned for answers–studied him for a few moments, then seemed to come to a decision. “We’re going to go looking for him,” she stated.

“Pardon?”

“Well, what else is there? We’re both halfas–the G.I.W. will be hunting us down like they did Danny, right? Where else to go but the Ghost Zone?” At Vlad’s flabbergasted look, Ellie rolled her eyes. “Thought you’d like the self-preservation angle.”

“No, you–you want my help?” he couldn’t help but ask. Obviously, Vlad worried for Daniel, he had just rescued him! But as Ghost King, Daniel was far safer in the Infinite Realms than anywhere else, and Vlad hadn’t thought Ellie would want to tolerate his presence more than this singular, fraught conversation.

Ellie scowled. “Well, you’re not my first choice! But Jazz can do more here, and if she gets ahold of Sam and Tucker, and Valerie too, they can help her. And…” her eyes darted to him, scowl diminished, “…two’s better than one. So I’ll suck it up and work with the local fruitloop.”

Ah, the Little Badger’s favorite nickname for him. How bittersweet.

“I see,” Vlad said. “In that case, where do you propose we begin?”

Chapter Text

Staring at the ceiling, Jason tried to figure out what to do.

It felt a bit like his entire life decided to start spinning on a dime, and it seemed like no matter what, the coin couldn’t choose what side to land on. Perpetually stuck on its side—like how Jason was perpetually stuck in wrongness.

Only, that wasn’t right anymore. How the hell did, what was it, a two minute interaction bulldoze over the fundamentals of his life?

Jason lived. Jason died. Jason came back. Jason came back wrong, but he was still back—still alive. Jason had a brand new dial on his anger levels, one that was perpetually stuck on max. Jason was a killer who would never fully clean his hands of what he did. Jason was violent and ruthless and wrong.

Something was different now, and it was driving him insane.

The itch to move niggled at the back of his brain, and he scowled as he forced himself upright. The tranquility from the day before was a damned double-edged sword despite barely having lingered past whatever the deal was with that kid—thing? Alien? Something buried inside him keeled and crooned for some kind of word that escaped him.

Sometime during the flashbang of peace, Jason let his guard down. Which meant that when it vanished, the Pit was all consuming, bombarding him with anger and the need to kill, to make things right. His only saving grace was that the Pit was, for the lack of a better word, tetchy. It made him irritable with the need to do something but it didn’t seem to have an active target—for better or for worse, Jason didn’t know.

Running his hands through his hair for the nth time, he started for the closet before freezing and thinking better of it.

But she might have some clue. She might know what was happening to him, and fuck if he ever wanted another weird and crazy thing involuntarily done to his body.

But, on the other hand, so much could go wrong.

He strode to the closet before he could think anymore, dodging the swinging door and dropping onto a knee to pull the burner out of a pocket made in the doorframe, only five or so inches up. His siblings, all trained to pat downs and high hiding places, wouldn’t find it down there. Any of their more thorough searches were mitigated by not wanting to piss Jason off more than necessary and Jason rarely—if ever—allowing them inside in the first place.

Then, on the floor of the closet, Jason stared at the innocuous phone. It was small and old, and yet still slim and sleek. Not a marketable phone or one that had ever seen anything more than perhaps one trade before both seller and buyer were tracked down. There was a lot of danger that came from devices like this. Jason didn’t know why he hadn’t broken it the second she gave it to him.

He did know. She cared in her own fucked-up way. He tried to get rid of it, but… he couldn’t. It was an advantage in the right moment. Besides, he preferred her blasé, brutal honesty to Bruce’s false promises. Both had a habit of dancing neatly around something they didn’t want to say, but Talia’s eyebrow raise could be an answer in itself while Bruce always ended up saying something that he’d go back on in a second because the mission. Came. First. Not his kids, not the world, just him and his self imposed burden.

Jason barely realized he was holding the ‘1’ until he heard the dial tone.

It sounded like the breakfast gong in Nanda Parbat. Jason snorted at that little memory before stilling as he realized what he just did. Shutting his eyes and swallowing in a fruitless effort to shove down the green, Jason breathed.

And because of that, he nearly missed the little puff of static that marked the beginning of the call. Two sharp sounds like a nail being dragged over glass in lieu of a greeting further knocked him out of his head.

“Talia,” he growled. His voice was rough from how tense he’d gotten and from the frustrated snarling he’d done at ass o’clock.

“So it is you, Azizi,” Talia murmured, making Jason’s heart and fists clench in unison. “I wondered if your senses would return to allow you to call. However, it seems as though you forgot about who helped you from what I have heard.”

“Cut the shit,” Jason spat. “What fucking experiment did you conveniently lose in Gotham?!”

A garbled scream soon drowned out by a chiding hum—he must have caught her on a mission. “Is that any way to speak to your—”

“You are not my mother,” Jason hissed. “Fuck off, Talia, and answer my damn question.”

Talia clicked her tongue. “I should hope that your tongue remains still should we ever converse again.”

“Stop dodging my fucking questions—what the hell did your fucking dad drop off? Or was it you deciding I needed another goddamn thing on my plate?”

“It makes me curious, Azizi, with how convinced you seem to be of my supposed wrongdoing.” Her voice was louder now, clearly having taken out her marks. Difficult ones, if she deigned to actually fight them instead of a quick and easy poisoning. The satisfaction in her tone would have been noticeable if not for the fact that Jason knew how even a slight disappointment would lead to words cut short and a much sharper tone.

“There’s some kind of–of–” Jason bit the words down, shaking himself off in hopes of tempering the rage. Side note; it did not. Growling, he tried again, “There’s a fucking Pit–Thing in Gotham, and I want to know exactly what the League decided to fuck with.”

Silence. Nothing louder than wind hitting the receiver echoed over to him for several seconds. Just as he was about to start shouting, Talia answered. “What is this ‘thing’ that you speak of?”

Trickles of doubt rolled down his spine but Jason was mad, and he finally had a palpable target.

“Well either it’s a Lazarus adjacent alien or Ra’s was playing scientist with a damn kid,” he snarled. “I know exactly what I said to you when I left—if I ever find out that you were hurting children after my warning—”

“You will do unsavory things to my belongings and attempt a beheading against me,” Talia finished flatly. “You made yourself quite clear, however foolish you have been. What is it that troubles you so?”

“Really?!” he spluttered, standing up to start pacing. Green ominously shined at the edges of his vision. “Did you not hear a single fucking thing I’ve said?!”

“Your volume has ensured it. What is it that worries you so? As you said, this supposed alien might not have anything to do with the League.”

“You aren’t listening,” Jason hissed. “If not the League then definitely the Pits—Talia, whatever they are, they fuck with whatever the Pits did to me. Tell me that Ra’s didn’t decide to conduct more unethical experiments, I dare you.”

Another long, exaggerated beat of silence.

“Well,” Talia began, her frown audible, “if there have been any plans, I am not privy to them. As far as I can see, there has been no conceivable notion for my Father to prod Gotham in this instance. There has also been no fuss within the League.

“Azizi–Jason, it seems like we have a problem.”

Jason—somehow—managed to refrain from throwing the phone into the wall and forced himself to start planning.

★★★

“When can you start?” was the first question out of the barista’s mouth when Danny asked about Elixir Cafe’s graveyard shift opening after he cleaned himself up in the bathroom.

“Oh, uh…tonight?” he had stuttered, and then had to answer her rapid-fire questions as she basically filled out his application in front of him. Besides the side-eye when he hesitated on a last name, it was Danny’s easiest and fastest interview ever. She didn’t even ask for a current address, and with one up-and-down look at him she marked down ‘prefers cash wages’.

It was only after she’d given him a spare uniform shirt and copy of the menu to memorize that he thought to question her expediency. The answer being, quote, “It’s Gotham, kid, no one wants the night shift”, wasn’t very reassuring. But at the look on his face, she did say it usually wasn’t that busy, the shop was just a chain store with an open-twenty-four-hours gimmick, and most Gothamites didn’t go for coffee at two A.M.

So there Danny was. After an hour training at the start of his shift, he was left alone—completely alone, since the most recent customer left with the worker who was teaching him. Between getting hired and starting his training, Danny had spent the afternoon using one of the three public-use computers in the back corner of the shop—because yeah, this place was an internet cafe too, it really was pretty great—to research where the hell he had landed.

Apparently the Ghost Zone had spat him out into what seemed to be an entirely different dimension. There were new major cities, and dozens of actual, real life superheroes. And Danny had just met one of Gotham’s, because that’s where he was. Gotham, New Jersey. Though he was wrong about the traffic-light theme, it seemed.

No, it seemed that Bats were the City of Crime’s—yes, that was its literal nickname and Danny felt like he should be more than mildly concerned about that—chosen protectors.

Batman—literally how uncreative was that? At least Danny had the decency to use a thematic pun—was the main vigilante from what he’d read. He was also the one most documented outside of his city due to being on a literal superhero team. Danny, after some digging, was able to find a number of other vigilante names, but absolutely zero pictures. There were maybe ten floating around, but they were so blurry and out of place that they could have been cosplayers or just people in ridiculously similar outfits.

He had to go digging through a half dozen forums—mind you, Danny was like the baby-est of baby hackers, hardly good enough to do more than subvert public cameras so he could access them via Tucker—to even find some names. That wasn’t even mentioning the eight dozen conspiracies and the sheer amount of ‘non-believers’ who denied even their existence.

Signal, from his meager learning, was one of the most known simply because he was the only vigilante seen in daylight—which was another controversial thing because Gotham itself seemed to be downright vampiric. Between several other cliche and horrible names, Danny didn’t even know which ones were real.

How could one of them be a little kid for like, fifteen years? Danny just ended up brushing off those crazy conspiracies as a lost cause, research-wise. At that point, he just sat and made himself absorb his new reality. He was in a different dimension completely from his own, brought there by some ghost named after her haunt—or was it the other way around? Whatever, that didn’t really matter. He felt conflicted, though. On the one hand, a little part of him thought it was really freaking cool there were established vigilantes in this place, like he was back home. On the other hand, even though this place was a ghost’s haunt, it was really low on ambient ectoplasm compared to Amity Park, and the sorta nice lady ghost couldn’t really negate that super intimidating, red helmet ghost guy being angry at him.

Laying low was the best plan of action, Danny decided. He’d work nights, which were chock-full of crime as evidenced by the multiple vigilantes needed across the city, and explore during the day. Though he would stay out of Crime Alley, like Signal suggested. Of course that was where he first appeared in this world, and of course it happened to be the red helmet guy’s haunt—sub-haunt? Was that even a thing?

Danny hadn’t yet come to a decision on that before the bell chimed at the door, making him lift his head from the pillow of his crossed arms. A glance at the clock on the wall showed it had gone just past two A.M.

“Hi, welcome to Elixir, what can I get for you?” Danny asked, scrambling for customer service. This was his first customer, after all.

All it got him was a weird look from the brown-haired guy, who surreptitiously glanced him up and down before stepping up to the counter. “Large chai latte.”

What, no please? Danny shook the thought away. “Sure. Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

Okay no, he was just rude. Lovely. “$5.78, please.”

Danny tallied that up, gave the guy his change, and made the drink. It was simple, at least, to just hit a couple buttons for coffee and stir the powder in. Danny almost expected more bells and whistles on machines like this.

He called the name—Dirk? What kind of name was Dirk?—and beat back his inner Jazz with a stick. His thoughts were his thoughts, darn it. Just as he was about to rest again, the bell chimed once more. Danny, from all the warnings the other barista had given him, had assumed that there was like, no one but criminals out at this time, which he thought would mean maybe one or two customers total. Considering that she left pretty much immediately after Danny proved he could finish three orders without much trouble, his assumptions felt pretty valid.

What he hadn’t really considered was that criminals might get thirsty too. And judging from Dirk the Jerk’s widening eyes and quick snatching of his finished drink, this lady walking in was someone to be wary of. Though at first glance, Danny wasn’t totally sure why.

Like, sure, she entered carrying a baseball bat with spikes over her shoulder, but then again, this was crime-ridden Gotham and she was a young-ish lady. Self-defense was important, duh. Her makeup was a little intense, but after being friends with Sam for years, Danny didn’t really linger on that thought for long. And she was smiling! When Dirk widely skirted around her toward the door, Danny happened to make eye contact with his new customer and she winked. Instinctively Danny smiled back—now that he thought about it, she kind of reminded him of a mixture of Kitty and Ember.

“Hi, welcome to Elixir! What can I get started for you?” Danny asked, blinking at the flash of shock that instantly dissipated into a wide, contagious grin.

“Oh, you’re such a doll, honey,” pale-and-party chirped. “It was such a good idea to come here—got anythin’ you recommend, darlin’?”

Danny shrugged. “I’m pretty new, so feel free to try stuff out.” Then, abruptly recalling that she was probably a criminal, he added, “As long as you’re paying, that is.”

She barked out a loud, bright laugh. “Oh, I could just steal you away!" she squealed. She actually hopped onto the counter to pinch his cheeks. Stunned, Danny didn’t move away until after the first squish. “Lemme try that… ooh, so much looks so good! Hm, gimme a medium spiced citrus coffee, please!”

She was so much better than Dirk the Jerk, criminal or not. “Want any foam?”

“‘Course! What’d ya take me for, a peasant?” she asked with mock challenge.

Danny couldn’t stop his laugh. “None hath dare claim such high stature in the home of this king,” he snorted. Friendly-criminal-lady burst into laughter once more. She was definitely a vibe. “Name for the order?”

After a long, startled beat, she answered. “It’ll be for Harley, hon.”

He pulled the citrus peels—mainly orange and lemons—from the container it had been marinating in. Cinnamon and nutmeg immediately slapped his face as he dropped the peels into the cup and started the espresso machine. He had never mixed citrus and coffee before, but it looked a bit like pie as a drink.

“That’s $4.90,” he called over his shoulder. He dumped the coffee over the peels and the syrup coating them, giving it three good stirs before topping with some foam. He grinned mischievously at her smirk, trading the fiver for some change and presenting the drink like she wasn’t there. “Spiced citrus for Harley!”

She laughed, swinging her bat to the other shoulder as she took the cup from him and took a sip. “Oh, yum! Thanks a bunch, kiddie. I’ll get outta your hair now,” she thumbed over her shoulder at the entrance, then twirled around.

“Stay if you want,” Danny said before she could skip all the way to the door, and she stopped. “We’re open twenty-four hours.”

She stopped then twirled again. “You know what?” she asked, “I think I will!” She pivoted and slid onto a seat in the window, and after a quick thumbs-up that Danny returned, took out her phone and dialed. Danny only caught the start of her conversation—“Ivy, listen, you won’t believe…”—before he consciously tried to tune it out to give her privacy. Plus, speaking of phones…

After a quick wipe-down of the counter, Danny slunk down a bit below the edge of it and surreptitiously went intangible to root around for his Fenton Phone. Initially just earpieces, Tucker had vastly improved on the implementation of ectoplasm in tech, making actual working cell phones compatible with the Ghost Zone. They needed updates every once in a while back in Amity Park, but for the most part connections were stable.

The comm lines were just static, which should not have been possible. He couldn’t even put it in his ear, that was how loud it was. The cell was hardly any better, with the screen covered in glitchy lines so thick it was hard to see his text.

But, at the very least, he could click and scroll as normal. Alarmed at how bad the comm lines—created to cross literal dimensions—were, he quickly attempted to get to Tucker’s messaging. He didn’t even bother attempting a call, instead trying his luck on a message. Short, simple, and hopefully easy enough to break through.

Halfsies:

Safe. wrong dimen. help

Not willing to only send out just that one line, he shifted to the group chat—or what was hopefully the group chat, considering the crappy visuals.

Template:

Safe. anyone?

…It would have to do. He didn’t know what happened to Vlad, but he must be on the G.I.W.’s radar, so it probably wasn’t smart to try contacting him directly. The panic attack he could feel attempting to claw at his chest—Tucker always answers within five minutes, Sam wouldn’t waste time after knowing something happened, Jazz definitely wouldn’t waste time and would be marching over as she texted—was barely diverted by yet another chime of the door.

Danny’s eyes widened as he took in the big guy shouldering his way in, a classic ski mask obscuring his face. He gulped as the dude took a menacing step toward the counter, hand withdrawing from his pocket menacingly.

“Ahem,” Harley called out––not even the sound, she literally called out ‘ahem’ like a word––and both Danny and the man froze.

The dude whipped around, then took a step back as Harley slammed her bat on the ground. He took another step back when she wiggled her fingers at him in a cute wave. The dude obviously didn’t think it was cute though, judging by how fast he ran out of the store, already a few feet away by the time the bell chimed with his exit.

“Th-thanks,” Danny said.

“Sure thing, sweets!” Harley hefted her bat up again and tossed her cup in the trash. She walked over and stuffed some bills in the tip jar. “You workin’ again sometime soon?”

“Uh… yeah, I think. Same time tomorrow, probably.”

“Great!” she cheered. “Toodles, hon!”

That was… something.

She skipped out the door and out of sight of the window. Half a second later, Danny heard two consecutive shrieks before all was silent once more. Danny blinked after her, half dazed. Well then.

At least he wasn’t wrong about her being like Ember and Kitty. He, under no circumstances, could ever let them meet. That was one trio he never wanted to see on his bingo card, ever.

Even if he did have the particularly strong feeling that if they wanted to talk, he wouldn’t be able to stop them. Danny took a moment to glare at the clock on the wall. He was probably imagining things, because it almost looked like a winking face for the briefest flash.

Ominously, there were no more customers for the rest of the night.

When someone came to relieve him for the morning shift, the man taking his place asked, “First shift? How’d it go?”

Danny’s “All good… pretty quiet I guess,” was met with a skeptical look, but also an uninterested shrug. And with that, Danny left Elixir Cafe to explore Gotham under the rising sun.

☾ ☾ ☾

Samantha Manson could say—with one hundred percent accuracy—that she did not like hospitals.

They were loud with an overabundance of white and cream. Machinery blared between one IV finishing and monitors detecting the barest spikes. People’s voices dominated the background, and the screaming and shouting down the hall was doing nothing to soothe her nerves.

“Room 341 is on the left,” a nurse or doctor—someone wearing scrubs, at least—said before turning into an unlabeled room.

Sam sucked in a deep breath, glancing at Tucker. He was pale, eyes slightly glazed. Sam didn’t know how much better she was compared to that.

“C’mon,” she said, the strength in her voice immediately dying into a croak.

Tucker abruptly inhaled, like he’d forgotten to breathe. “Right,” he replied, raspy. Their hands were clenched together so tight that Sam wouldn’t be surprised if their fingers lost blood flow.

Stepping into the room felt a bit like walking into a funhouse. The walls were the same horrible tannish cream, the floors and ceiling a painful white. There were a couple ‘You can do it!’ posters around which almost managed to force a hysterical laugh out of her chest. One large poster between two bolted-shut windows dictated the patient name, the two nurses responsible for care, current pain and goal pain levels, and a diet chart with expo marker all over it. Reality seemed to crash down on her with a wave of cold, realizations of this happened sending shivers up her spine. Realizations of how this could have happened to any of them, ever since one incident that barely lasted five minutes.

One that was her fault to begin with.

“Wes,” Tucker breathed, snapping her out of her spiral.

If the room felt like a funhouse, seeing the patient in the bed felt like one of those weird, warped mirrors.

Half a dozen tiny bruises and red marks scattered over one wrist and hand from where they had changed his IV. Even more red abrasions decorated what she could see of his arms in various different shades. A couple white and grey cords went down his smock, with an electrode on his temple and an oxygen mask on his face. Another series of cables were hung up on the end of the bed, some trailing under the blankets and others hanging bare.

The worst of it all had to be the bandages around his neck and half his face. One cut on his cheek had been left out to heal with stitches and blue dye smeared around, hints of yellow bruising peeking out from the dressings on his cheek. Sam couldn’t help but to think of how much worse it had to have been, and she couldn’t even see most of his body.

“Wes,” Sam called hoarsely.

The boy in the bed twitched, and it made her knees weak with relief. Tucker, who had already half-collapsed against her, was definitely feeling the same. She felt off balance, however. There was someone else supposed to be there, either sandwiching or being sandwiched. It felt wrong for there to just be two of them. No pillar to hold them.

“H-Hey,” Wes managed, barely audible over the grit in his voice and the constant sound of the mask.

Tucker made the first move, stepping close. “Ancients, Wes, you scared us,” he choked out.

Gathering herself, Sam stepped forwards too, poking a clear stretch of skin determinedly. “Never again,” she told him. “You and Danny do not need to compete for the fastest induced heart attack.”

Wes snickered and started wincing.

Sam raised a hand—solely as a threat, mainly from how ingrained the reaction was—with a threatening look. Wes sobered for half a second before bursting into laughter again. Tucker, who started giggling by proxy, ended up getting hit upside the head.

“Hey!”

Sam sniffed. She wasn’t going to just put her hand down after that—what was he expecting?

Somewhere in that interaction, the tension broke. Something ugly still coiled within her, but she could breathe. “Wes,” she started before pausing. Debating silently as the other two turned to look at her, she decided to continue. “Wes, what–what happened?”

Wes’ eyes—which had been slightly unfocused before—glazed over. Sam held back a flinch, shoving the regret away. They needed to know what happened to their best friend. To their third.

“They found him,” Wes whispered, stark and haunting. Sam shivered. “The- The Gu-Guys in Whi-ite.”

Sam and Tucker stiffened in tandem, sharing a sharp, panicked glance. The first article—‘Madison Area Technical College Suffers Chemical Explosion’ was barely believed when so many videos and pictures were suddenly redacted. With more photos being uploaded than taken down, the clear line of blaster marks was stark—even if most had called them residue from grenades or other such items. The second article, clearly censored heavily with the abhorrent title of ‘Government Agency Working to Find Fugitive’ made it hard to think of anything else. Heck, even the censoring of the agency’s name was alarming. Even so—they’d hoped. Maybe Danny had gotten away and was laying low until he charged his phone or fixed whatever was causing the interference.

The confirmation…

“Window-ows an’ walls,” Wes continued hoarsely. “E-Ecto blasters an– hrk, k-khack–”

Sam and Tucker startled as Wes started hacking. One of the little machines at his side began beeping loudly—Wes could only hold up a few fingers to get them to stay still.

The nurse was smiling when she entered, like their friend wasn’t halfway to his deathbed—Danny would have made that joke before she even had a chance to think it—and simply moved to a secluded computer. The blaring stopped after a few taps, and she asked Wes a couple questions before leaving again.

“I’ll have someone in to change out your water,” she informed them, nodding at the quarter full bag paired to Wes’ ventilator. “Have a good day.”

Tucker weakly echoed it.

“Stop,” Wes said firmly before coughing again. It didn’t turn into a fit this time. “Le-Let me– just let m-me finish.”

Sam nodded, forcing herself to stand tall once more.

From there, the story evolved. Danny yanking Wes down barely a beat after the windows exploded, straight through their tables in a fruitless attempt to avoid flying shards. Hearing the sound of brick getting blown apart from several rooms over before their own wall caved in, men in white pouring in like moths to a flame. Calling—demanding—for Danny and not even giving him enough time to stand up before they started firing as students scrambled for the door.

How Danny had frozen, near immediately, and shouted at them to stop. The way Wes brokenly recounted how much of an obstacle he was, trying to pull Danny along only for the teen to hold his ground as half a dozen ecto-guns trained onto his form. How Wes barely thought before moving, right into a blast.

That was the majority of the damage, apparently. Two had hit him—one in the junction of his shoulder, the other just under his ribs. The momentum had flung him back and to the side, head slamming into the corner of a desk as debris scraped past. He was lucky he hadn’t hit his temple, apparently.

Sam never wanted to be in a world where ‘lucky he wasn’t hit an inch over’ was a sentence she had to live with, ever again.

Wes was exhausted by the time he finished.

“Should you, uh, take a nap, dude?” Tucker asked wearily.

Wes sighed. “Can’t,” he mumbled. “Wrong drugs.”

Sam snorted, unable to help herself. And then, suddenly, Tucker had started snickering and their hysterical laughter began to pull Wes in as well.

“Ribs,” Wes whined after a minute.

“O-Okay,” Tucker managed, slumping against one of the plastic chairs, “I ‘s hurting—heh—me, too.”

“Pathetic,” Sam hissed playfully, and they nearly devolved into another puddle of inappropriate laughter when a doctor came in to replace the water on Wes’ ventilator. She also swapped his mask out for a nasal tube, telling him to hit the button if breathing got any more difficult.

“Ow,” Wes mumbled, forlorn as he tried and failed to pick up his arm in an attempt to wipe the moisture from his face. Tucker rushed forwards, carefully patting the skin dry. Wes sighed. “Thanks.”

“Where’s your family?” Sam asked suddenly, eyes narrowed. She was no stranger to messed up families—not with how often sleepovers between the three of them quickly became dissing matches against either the Fentons or the Mansons—but she had thought that Wes’ had been good.

“Work,” Wes replied, much clearer without the mask. Tucker wordlessly gave him a water jug—pale grey with a dark blue lid and overly bendy straw. “Ez couldn ’ta stayed but ‘e was here last night. Dad ‘n Ky are gonna come… tomorrow, I thi-think. Kyle’s too feral to leave home alone, but they’re c-calling tonight.”

Sam snorted. She’d never met Easton or Kyle, but she’d been privy to several dramatic recountings of how Kyle just did not believe in ghosts. It was honestly hilarious.

Just then, however, Tucker raised his PDA with abrupt triumph. “Phones!” he shouted cheerfully.

Sam restrained her reflexive need to kick and instead glared, opening her mouth to berate him when a different nurse popped his head in and calmly asked them to quiet down.

Flushing, Tucker lowered his device with a sheepish nod.

“Okay,” Sam huffed, once he was gone. “What was that about?”

Breathing deeply, Tucker nodded and scootched his chair over to the side that lacked the rolling table so Wes could see too. “I haven’t been able to get anything from Danny—but that’s just the automated system. What I can do is pull remotely!” he exclaimed, this time with a much more appropriate volume. “I need to desync myself from the server first, which should kickstart the sub-routing program and pull active data from–”

“English, Tucker,” Wes groaned. “I don’ got no brains for this, dude.”

Sam snorted in agreement.

Tucker, meanwhile, pouted in what was clearly meant to be a scowl as he started fiddling with the buttons. “No one has any culture here, I swear.”

“We have no culture. Me. Compared to what, that?”

Tucker did manage a scowl this time, slapping away the finger Sam had imperiously pointed at his chest. “My Nan made me this sweater,” he said defensively.

Sam raised a brow. “And I can tell.”

Wes burst into startled snickers, wincing every other second as Tucker let his head drop onto one of the grip bars.

A sudden set of shrill beeps made all three of them startle, however. After half a beat of looking around, they realized it was actually coming from the PDA.

“That’s… interesting,” Sam decided on. She was sure she’d never heard those notification sounds before.

“It’s working.” Tucker was completely locked in. After a set of incredibly exaggerated taps accompanied by a brief, bright flash of golden irises to unlock some kind of password, the PDA rebooted and started pinging. “Oh–oh, oh crap–”

“Tucker, what’s happening?” Sam demanded. Wes tried to sit up, but Sam and Tucker swiveled to glare him down before the three of them simultaneously returned to the tiny screen.

“I’ve got something from Danny and voicemails from Jazz and Dani—just look at this.”

H̼ɐ̼ℓƒˢiꁄꉖ:

sAf͛e. Ꮤяo҉༙྇nᎶ ∂ι𖢑𖤢N. h̫̱̫͎̠̞̽͌͆̒̔EⱠp҉༙྇

T҉༙྇ℇᙏየ𐌋𝚊̴T͓̽e̽:

Ꮥ𝒶𝖋𝚎༽. ⓐክyo༙྇҉ηє? 

Sam stared and definitely didn’t process anything until Tucker turned the screen away. “What is that?”

Tucker shook his head, eyes glued to the text. “No clue. I know for a fact that half of those characters don’t exist on my baby, which means it’s either a glitch or an error.”

“How?” Wes asked, bewildered. Reasonable—as a relatively new member of Team Phantom, he got his own set of tech as well. That meant he was familiar with the theoretically impossible creation straight off the bat—but he didn’t have any experience with a Tucker that messed something up.

Sam didn’t want to think of what it meant if it wasn’t Tucker who messed this up.

Tucker shrugged helplessly, chewing his lip. “I… I can try to get one past whatever that was.” He pulled out a stylus and began dragging things around on the screen. “The message… it’s glitchy and I’ll work on decoding what’s not there first, but if I’m right about what it says… I don’t know if I can fix this.”

“Would Technus help?” Sam questioned.

Tucker cocked his head, grimacing at a flash of red before looking up. “I don’t know,” he replied eventually. “He definitely wouldn’t hurt, at least. Might like the challenge.”

Sam nodded, mentally flashing through several thoughts and half baked ideas. “They’ve gone too far,” she stated.

“Mn?”

“The Goons in White.” She couldn’t seem to lift her gaze from her hands. Like the rest of Team Phantom, she was covered in tiny, barely noticeable scars. Thin, jagged white lines danced up her palms, a shade or two lighter than her skin. The fingerprint on her middle finger had burned off along with a sliver of her opposite palm from touching the barrel of a still-hot ecto-gun. Little starburst scars sat on her knuckles and the tops of her fingers from punching one too many ghosts, electronics, and people. A long thin cut along her pinky remained one of the only slashes on her body, and it was from her being a stupid toddler who got her hand stuck between plastic. “We can’t let them do this for any longer.”

Tucker’s head whipped up, eyes wide with panic. “What?! Sam, we can’t fight them! Look at me—I’m the literal definition of a beanpole!”

“Wire, more like,” Wes said dryly. “Too short ‘ta be a pole.”

“Oh, just because you’re a giant doesn’t mean—”

“Boys!” Sam snapped. Two sheepish eyes met hers until Wes started coughing again. It took five seconds of careful hovering before he sagged back into his bed, weakly motioning for her to continue. “Tuck, Wes, think about it.”

She stood up and started pacing, far too worked up to sit. “They’ve been going after ghosts for ages. They’ve been hunting Danny for ages and this just proves that they don’t ever plan to stop. And then where will they stop?!” Sam exclaimed, swiveling around to face them with both hands on her hips. “Half-ghosts, perhaps? Or will it be liminals? Or—better yet—anyone who’s just contaminated, which, if you even bother to remember, is pretty much anyone who's lived close to a graveyard for too long?

“Because I don’t think they’ll stop. They’ll make excuses. ‘Oh, we had to take it in for questioning’ turns into ‘It’s contaminated and contagious’. Casper High graduates being hunted down just like Danny was because of how cursed the school was. Children being brought in because kids are affected easier. The darn librarian, whose only sins were being incredibly annoying and living in Amity Park?” she bit out.

Sam took a breath, forcing herself to calm down before she disrupted the people outside. “Or,” she continued in a chilling, factual tone, “will they try and start recreating what happened? We saw just what they were willing to do to get Danny—eight dead and over ninety injured.” Wes flinched, looking away. Sam had half a mind to stop, but she needed to finish this. “They have no qualms about killing normal, everyday humans. Who’s to say they’ll have an issue of simply… taking someone. Perhaps they’ll follow your family lines and take a relative because of that sliver of connection.”

“Sam–”

Sam shook her head, cutting him off. “We can’t let them do this any longer. I won’t let them do this any longer,” she hissed, determined. “They’re not incompetent losers anymore—they’re a danger.”

“Sam!” Tucker shouted. “I agree!”

Sam inhaled, ready to start up another triad when she registered what he’d said and deflated. “You… do?”

Tucker rolled his eyes. “You’re not the only one that’s thought about what happened.” A distinctly somber note in his voice overlaid the room as he swallowed. “It’s horrible, but… what can we do? We’re barely legal!”

“A lot.” Sam glanced at both boys. “Getting the public on this should be the first thing—it won’t matter how much information they’ve redacted and hidden if we can get a sliver of it popular for even ten minutes. It’ll cause outrage and people will save it in places the government can’t reach.”

Wes shivered. Both Sam and Tucker looked over to him, and he grinned. “Jus’ remembered your grandma.”

Sam smirked. “Thank you,” she said, because that was a compliment she’d always accept. “I can ask her about her tricks on getting the public into stuff activists’ had been working on. Stick to what you’re good at—you’ve backhacked the G.I.W. before, right?”

Tucker frowned, but Sam could see the resolve straightening his spine. “That was before they reworked their system… but I could get Technus on this. Maybe.”

“What ‘m I gonna do?” Wes asked.

“Focus on getting healed up,” Sam instructed after a long moment. “Once you’re out we can–”

"No!"

Sam startled, barely managing to balance Tucker when he jumped and nearly tipped his chair over. “...What?”

Wes was giving them a pained but determined look, hands clenched into fists on the bed. “I can’t do anythin’,” he croaked. The look on his face made the bandages wrinkle. “I can’t even get out of m’ bed, I can barely sit up, an’ I was this close ‘ta getting a stupid catheter. I can’t– no, I won’t jus’ sit here while you’re fightin’ the jerks who did this to me. I care about Danny too. Don’t–” his voice cracked, and he coughed before repeating himself. “Don’t take him away fr’m me.”

Stunned at the outburst, Sam couldn’t manage to even form words until a nurse once again poked their head in to shush them.

“Communication,” Tucker said suddenly.

“Wha?”

Tucker was already grabbing his bag, pulling out bits of metal that made Sam wonder how he got past security. Was it the ectoplasm? It was probably the ectoplasm.

“If I’m busy,” he broke off, glancing conspicuously at the door as he lowered his voice, “breaking into the government, ahem, I probably won’t be on top of monitoring other stuff. But screens—they can’t be good for you with your concus–”

“It’s fine,” Wes bit out, like he was daring them to say anything otherwise.

Used to both Danny and herself, Tucker wisely let the subject drop. “Okay, then you can monitor messaging—I’ll show you how to restart the server, and here—”

Tucker wasted no time in starting to deck out the little personal drawer. Sam watched, thinking out their plans and worrying for Danny. She might not be able to do anything right now, but there was definitely one thing she knew for sure.

No one messed with Samantha Manson’s family and got away with it. No one.

Chapter Text

Jazz had her head tucked between her knees, her breathing fast but carefully paced as her thoughts raced around. Brakes screeching outside caught her attention and she swiftly wiped away any tears that escaped before she stood, reaching for her door.

She was wearing clothes that definitely needed a wash, and her eyes itched something fierce. A glance at her watch showed that it was barely past eight in the morning. She had been home for a grand total of three hours and had done nothing but sit on the floor beside her bed, staring aimlessly into a wall.

Great. Lovely. She was just absolutely peachy.

The commute from Chicago to Amity had been blissfully quiet, and Jazz was only surprised that she hadn’t been pulled over from how fast she’d sped. She was glad that her hometown wasn’t more than a few hours out, because she barely managed to remain in her dorm for longer than a scarce hour before she couldn’t resist leaving any longer.

And Jazz just had to be in this wonderful mood. She had a grand total of five hours of sleep over the past two days just getting quotes and references lined up for her thesis, Danny was functionally missing and Jazz couldn’t get in contact with any of the people who would know if he was gone or hiding. She drove at whatever-o’clock-in-the-morning despite having promised to avoid any kind of night driving, she was stressed, she was hurting, and she did not want to deal with her parents—who, as it turned out, weren’t home.

Jazz didn’t think she could stand another conversation about how much they longed to mince Phantom up into tiny, microscopic pieces. She felt too close to shattering, and she couldn’t afford that right now.

The steps downstairs were unsettlingly familiar. Jazz’s feet moved automatically, shifting on the balls of her feet, sticking to the middle of the steps except for the three in the middle where she simply stepped to the side. Not much had changed—she last came around a month and a half ago for Thanksgiving, since the house was a midpoint between Chicago and Madison. The turkey was actually edible with both Danny and Jazz there to mitigate any incidents, even though they both had to deal with the exhausting conversations and oddly nostalgic memories of doing nothing but watching as her parents bustled around. She lived in this house for around two decades, and had so many memories tied to this place.

So why did she feel like such a stranger in her own home?

Jazz heard talking before she even hit the last step. There were more rags around than she remembered. A single slipper sat sideways against the wall, braced on a step. It could only have been Jack’s from how large it was.

Jazz inhaled sharply and shook her head. She was getting distracted. She was letting herself be distracted. She had to think of Danny.

She breathed. Once, twice, thrice. Anxiety rolled, but determined resignation acted as a dam. She wasn’t fine, but she would be.

“Mom, Dad,” Jazz called, voice raspy and rough. She hastily cleared her throat, back straight like she hadn’t interrupted their conversation.

“Jazzypants!” Jack exclaimed, lighting up. He bulldozed forwards, arms wide open for a hug.

“Jazz!” Maddie greeted, eyes hidden by her goggles with delight splashing over her voice. “I didn’t exp—”

Jazz ducked under her father’s arm, spun to keep facing them, and took a pointed step backwards. Jack’s brow furrowed, grin turning uneasy as Maddie’s smile twisted into a frown.

“Jazzy?”

“Mom. Dad,” she repeated, far more curt. Her parents shared an alarmed look. Jazz ignored it. “I think we need to sit down.”

They sat. Jack tried to get some fudge still tucked away in the fridge and barely made it off the couch before he was hit with two strong glares.

Maddie cleared her throat, removing her goggles and pulling down her hood—it was such a clear sign that she wanted a heart-to-heart, and something inside of Jazz began to crumble. “Jazz,” Maddie began, trepidation clear, “I’m happy you came to visit, but isn’t it a school day? What happened?”

“What happened? What happened?” Jazz parroted incredulously. “Have you not looked at the news?”

“No, we just got back—” Jack started.

Jazz swiped an arm out like she was batting the explanation—the excuse—from the air. “No—”

Maddie slapped a magazine onto the table, the ensuing noise loud and ringing against the sudden silence.

Jazz swallowed, abruptly aware of how angry she had gotten. Her eyes felt bright, and her parent’s gazes had their own ecto-glow shining right back, betraying just how high strung everyone had gotten.

She breathed. She had to breathe. She had to calm down.

But, somewhere deep within, a traitorous sliver of her mind thought what if the eyes hadn’t been such a slow, smooth transition? After all, she only realized how weird it was when she moved out and they were commented on. What if that’s just another thing that her parents will hold against her if she speaks out? They themselves were so willfully blind to their own symptoms…

“Sweetie,” Maddie stated, breaking her out of her thoughts. The word wasn’t the start of something, or a rebuttal, or even some silent scolding. “Jack. Calm down, please.” Maddie waited, deliberate, for three seconds. Then she nodded, taking the goggles Jack had been fiddling with and setting them on the table. “Okay. Honey, what happened?”

Breathing was not helping. Her nails pressed into her palms before she forcefully relaxed them. Jazz shut her eyes and focused on her heartbeat, and forced herself to talk. Calmly.

“Danny’s school was on the news last night,” she said, deliberately slow. She didn’t open her eyes. That horrible sliver in her head laughed. “It looked like someone raided the place. There was a giant hole in the wall. There were scorch marks everywhere. The windows were broken.”

When she opened her eyes, she was staring at her hands. She couldn’t pull her gaze any higher than her chipped painted nails. “I—Danny—” Jazz broke off, swallowing thickly before continuing. “There were injuries, and there were fatalities. They haven’t released any statements on who died, and I couldn’t get in contact with anybody, not even Danny. He–He might be hurt, Mom, I can’t—”

“Oh, is that all?”

Jazz’s head snapped up, stunned and shocked into stillness.

Maddie was smiling again, like Jazz hadn’t delivered such disheartening news. Maddie waved her hand in the air, like she didn’t just hear that her son was missing while the people who’d been with him were dead and injured. Maddie—her mother—was sitting across from her, and suddenly Jazz knew that she was staring at a stranger.

‘Oh, is that all?’

Maddie continued, lacing her fingers with Jack’s hand. “We figured it out!” she exclaimed brightly. “That horrid ghost boy was hiding in our boy’s body—that’s why we could never get to him!”

“Hiding right under our noses!” Jack shouted, slamming his free fist into the couch cushion. “That’s why Danny was gone so much during ghost attacks! I can’t believe that spook actually hurt people! It’s horrible—”

“And don’t worry, sweetie, the G.I.W. told us that it was necessary—but all those poor people who thought that ghost was their friend ended up hurt! I can’t believe that we didn’t notice the possession—”

“—so we will never, ever let that happen to you—”

“—and with the Guys in White, we can—”

“—the defenses! Don’t worry, Jazzypa—”

“Don’t call me that!”

Silence.

Jazz’s vision was filled with black spots, chest heaving. Oh. She was standing now. She–She was—

“Don’t,” she warned, swallowing, “call me that.”

“Honey, I think you ne—”

“I think you need to shut up!” Jazz snapped.

Maddie startled, reeling back as Jack’s jaw dropped, stunned as he stared at his daughter.

“Don’t you dare—”

“I don’t care, Dad!” Jazz hissed, head snapping to look at him. “Both of you, be quiet.” Jack’s jaw worked, but he said nothing. “I—No, okay, this is how we’re going to do this. I am going to ask questions. I’m going—I just, I just need you to answer me. Nothing else. Just that.”

Her parents shared a look. Jazz pretended not to notice the hurt and confusion riddling them. Jazz was very good at pretending.

“Danny. What did you do?” she managed to ask haltingly.

Hesitant, Jack answered, “We realized that the ghosts only appeared when Danny was in town—just this Christmas! I know you couldn’t make it, but Jazzy, you weren’t there. You didn’t see him. Dann-o looked so down! Nothing like our boy—he didn’t even talk to us! That’s when we started suspecting, see? We–Well, Maddie noticed that everything always ended up happening around him and no one else.”

“And then Jack noticed that the few times we saw Phantom around, Danny had been home too,” Maddie continued. “And he was always so scared of them, we were worried—so we called the G.I.W. to check, and they said he was too highly contaminated for it to be anything other than possession. We told them his school so they could pick him up and help him, Jazz.”

“I thought they’d go in the front,” Jack muttered, frowning. “The–The casualties.”

The word seemed to force itself out of his mouth.

Jazz felt a hysterical laugh tickle her throat, the sensation brazen against how numb she had gone. Her father wanted nothing more than to kill his son, but it’s the death of others that gets to him? Was this her fault? She was the one who told Danny that she didn’t want to visit at all until December was done and over with, she’d heard that argument so much. Danny had covered for her, had decided to bear it out alone without her there to buffer—

“We were there just earlier!” Maddie said firmly, as a clear distraction from the destruction the previous night. “They knew what they were doing, sweetie, they’ll find a way to get Phantom out and get our boy back.”

Jack grinned. It was weak, but bright. “It’ll never hurt you kids again,” he swore. “Dann-o’s room at their base is really nice. They couldn’t let us in for the procedure, but they let us see him!”

“Wasn’t that blonde Agent so nice?” Maddie asked, warm.

Jack laughed, untangling their hands to sling an arm over her shoulder. “He really was! Told us exactly when to expect the call!”

Maddie chuckled, and looked back at Jazz. The room quieted again. “Jazz?” Maddie tentatively called.

But Jazz wasn’t listening. She hadn’t been listening since ‘procedure’.

Her body felt a million miles away, but she’d be damned if she didn’t crack down on this. Right. Now.

“Do—”

Her voice cracked, gave out.

But, at least, she had their attention. It was like ants against too-numb skin. Funny, how she’d begged for attention when she was younger, begged for them to give Danny attention, begged for any kind of recognition that couldn’t be derailed by some kind of ghost conversation when this has been probably the deepest talk they’d had since she was eleven and she wanted to be done with all of it.

“Do you know what you’ve done.”

It wasn’t a question. Her voice had gone low and dangerous all on its own.

A low, dark chuckle made its way out of her mouth. “Of course you don’t,” she muttered to herself airily. “You never do.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Maddie demanded, straightening and just short of standing up.

“Do you know what my thesis is called?” Jazz asked abruptly.

Knocked off balance, Maddie’s angry expression turned to something more confused and pensive.

“Come on, Mom,” Jazz jibed, unable to help herself. “After all, I based it after both of you.”

“Jasmine Fenton!” Maddie snapped. “That is enough!”

Jack, on the other hand, frowned at the ceiling. “Something about, uh, hypocrites?”

Jazz inhaled sharply, and found that he’d locked his bright blue eyes on her nearly glowing teal. Danny’s eyes matched his.

That thought knocked her out of her head. Ancients, she was so, so far from civil right now. Dora was going to throw a fit if she heard of this.

“Y-Yes,” she managed, forcing herself to sit back down. “It’s titled ‘The Need to Step Back: How Implicit Bias Can Run Rampant and Ruin Everything’. The name can be workshopped later, of course, but right now I think it makes everything very clear.”

“But how is that based on us?” Jack asked, aghast.

Jazz refrained from bashing her head into the wall to get some blissful quiet and some much needed sleep. That was probably why she was being so wild right now—Jazz never functioned well when she got too little.

“Mom, Dad,” she started. It felt like a mockery of just—what was it—barely half an hour previous. “I need you to think about what I say, and not dismiss it.”

“We’d never—”

“You do,” Jazz interrupted firmly. “So I am going to talk about this very simply.” Staring them down, Jazz decided that she never wanted to face them like this, ever again. “When you start your research, you have theories. Ideas and hypotheses, things you’ve written down and questions you’ve kept in your own head. You start your trial, the experiment, whatever it is. And then, you learn.”

Jazz shut her eyes, lacing her fingers together. “You fill in your sheets. You answer your questions. You check your sources so you aren’t referencing the same person in a loop.” She opened her eyes, and set a hard gaze on her parents. “You do not take the first confirmed theory and run with it.”

“Jazz—”

“And you do not, under any circumstances, force the ‘evidence’ to fit the theory. You do not get angry when your first form of research is obsolete. You do not pin the subject of your research down under expectations and questions you’ve answered in your head because this is real life!

“You can’t play with this stuff!” Jazz exclaimed, gesturing to their house. “You keep doing this! You never take a chance to research anymore, you have your theories and you run with them! Everything you’ve found so far are just–just words you made up before you even figured out your subject!”

“Ghosts are dangerous!” Jack yelled, both of them having caught on.

“Yes they are!” Jazz bellowed right back. Shocked, her parents stared back with slack jaws.

Silence, again. Jazz was sick and tired of the silence.

“They can be dangerous,” Jazz clarified with narrow eyes, daring them to say anything else. “But you never researched further than test one. You can’t claim to know how ghosts work based on a month of research into a substance that is obviously different from the present. Look around! We’ve had ghost attacks, and your current theory being that Phantom gets a secondary sensation of pleasure from attention? Hello, that still requires thoughts! You can’t claim an entire species to be non sentient and non sapient just because you can’t open your eyes to reality!”

Maddie stood up, hands slapping onto the table. “Young lady, I know that you aren’t—”

“SHUT UP!”

Jazz stood too, face to face with her mother, bright purple against shining teal. “Just listen to me!” she cried—begged, really. “The Guys in White? They’ve hurt more people than the ghosts have! And you keep blaming the ghosts because of one somewhat-proven hypothesis you didn’t properly test! You can’t keep doing this, not with me. Not with Danny.”

“But he’s getting help!” Jack exclaimed, frowning.

“He’s getting hurt!” Jazz bit back. “You’re being blind—stop thinking about ghosts for two whole seconds and think about us!”

Her chest heaved. Whatever determination and resolve she had earlier just crumbled.

“I can’t do this,” she realized, standing and stumbling away. “I can’t—I’m going to find Danny’s friends. M-Maybe you can look into your friends and see where you went wrong. If—” she broke off, swallowing. She didn’t have the strength to turn back, shoes half on and a hand on the doorknob. “If you can’t realize how much you’ve hurt us, I will make sure that you will never, ever hurt us again.”

“Jazz—”

“Jazzy, please—”

Jazz opened the door. “Goodbye. I… Just think about it.”

★★★

“Tim.”

“No.”

Bruce fought the urge to pinch his nose. “What are you making Duke hide?”

Duke had been squirrelly all morning and pairing that with bits of a torn paper report was suspicious. Bruce hadn’t found all the pieces of the report—just enough for a name and the middle portions of Duke’s scribbly writing. It seemed like Duke decided to tear it up and scatter them through several trash cans.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t even think to toss some stuff over what he threw in the med-bay trash can when it was Bruce’s turn to clean up that morning. Considering how most of the household soaked documents before tossing with Alfred, Bruce, and Tim being outliers in only that they used vinegar and separated the wet mush into different cans, there was really only one person who could have made that blunder. Even Steph, who rarely did more than use a shredder and drizzled the pile with glue, had a more secure method of disposal.

It seemed like Bruce had been spoiled with his last couple of children, each preloaded with paranoia—barring Cass, but then again she didn’t work with documents on her own and had seen how they disposed of things appropriately by the time she was working solo.

Watching Tim pause with a squint so slight he nearly missed it proved his assumptions. Then, with abrupt arrogance, Tim stuck his nose in the air in what was a clear mockery of Damian as he repeated, “No.”

Bruce opened his mouth to scold Tim on his behavior before righting himself. Tim was deflecting—quite obviously, which was somewhat alarming—and that didn’t bode well for whatever he was trying to hide.

“Tim,” he ended up saying, voice low and firm, “I will find out eventually.”

Tim raised an unimpressed brow, dropping the act. “Like how you found my trackers, eventually? Or perhaps in the time it took you to learn about my batmobile.” Tim tilted his head slightly. “Eventually.”

Bruce grimaced. He hadn’t managed to find Tim’s trackers for months on end—he wasn’t quite sure how long it had taken him to find them, but it was far longer than he was willing to admit. And he honestly still had no idea when Tim bought his own batmobile nor did he know where he got the money for it, just that it existed due to Tim offering it up when Bruce’s batmobile suffered a rather large blow to the engine, featuring Bane playing a deadly game of hopscotch.

“If you can’t be honest with me now, there are chances of it coming back to hit—”

“In the field, yada yada,” Tim finished, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’m aware. You, however, cannot handle benching me at this time.” He nodded towards his laptop, directing Bruce’s attention to where he was updating the gang territory map. “From East End to Crime Alley and vice versa. I’m working with Jason on this but it’s delicate, and Duke just stumbled on Jason during an embarrassing moment. He’s already on edge from that—you know how much he hates being soft when one of us is around.”

Bruce was very much aware of that. Painfully aware, in fact. Batman was once in the same area as Jason ferrying a preteen away from a warehouse and Jason decided to aim at Bruce and let the kid pull the trigger to make her feel better. It was a rubber round, but it still nearly made his knee give out. Bruce didn’t know why he thought it was imperative for the child to do and had wondered many a time if Jason was trying to turn Gotham’s children against him considering how the pair had both began to immaturely laugh at him.

Still, he frowned. “What did Hood do?”

Tim sighed. “Duke didn’t want to talk about it—something with a kid? From when I caught it I’m guessing that he stumbled in on Jason giving a kid a ride on his shoulders while they played bongos on his helmet. It made him standoffish and he was not in a good mood when I contacted him earlier. I still need to work on this case, and I can’t do that with you hovering.”

Bruce’s frown deepened. He was aware of why, but it irked him into wanting to know more.

It was good that Jason was still being good to the people in Crime Alley. It was just… concerning, with his history. Jason needed to be careful—he had stopped outright killing but maiming wasn’t much better. Jason was getting a handle on himself, but it didn’t mitigate any of the damage he’d done previously. Bruce couldn’t let himself reach for Jason as he was now, not when Jason was so willing to spit on what it meant to be Bruce’s son.

“B.” Bruce took a measured breath, and focused on the present. “Jason showed no signs of being in an episode. He’s just embarrassed and Duke hasn’t been around him long enough to know when he’s being serious or not. I’ll handle it.”

Bruce sighed. “All right. But Tim—tell me the second Hood slips out of his jurisdiction. He’s still too unpredictable.”

Tim gave him a nod so blank that it made Bruce wonder if he said something wrong. Instead, he eyed Tim’s mug.

“And cut back on the coffee. You need to be at your best in the field.”

Tim groaned and Bruce allowed himself a smirk as he walked away, listening to the mutters of Tim swearing to drill proper document disposal into Duke’s head.

★★★

A week had passed since Jason spoke to Talia. A week since his painstaking balancing of the Pits had been thrown completely out of whack. As the days passed, one of the things Jason did was work to regain that knife-edge equilibrium as best he could—which meant a lot of goddamn League meditation and a lot of cathartic gang member head-crackings.

Tim never said anything on the one or two team-ups they ended up in as Red Robin and Red Hood near the edge of the Alley. They’d found laced drugs to be the mystery shit being trafficked through his territory—and everyone in and out of Crime Alley knew that was one of the few things to get you on Red Hood’s bad side. But despite not saying anything overtly, Jason swore the Replacement’s constant side-eyes made his skin crawl and something inside him shudder. But maybe that was the damn Pits too.

As much as his anger made him a little more rough with his takedowns, the meditation did help when he forced himself to do it, and it also helped him evaluate what exactly happened that night. Something that the rage had overwhelmed in the heat of the moment was Jason’s own worry; objectively he knew that it had been a kid bleeding in that alleyway, he had even told Talia that much because it pissed him off, but without the cloud of panic and defensiveness at the kid’s words and glowing features, Jason remembered the obvious fear in the boy’s neon eyes.

Fear he could empathize with, for multiple reasons.

After a few days of silence on Talia’s end, Jason had bounced back enough to think more logically. He chatted up some alley kids about the strange kid, but they hadn’t seen anyone young with white hair like that at all. Funnily enough, one kiddo named Leah mentioned Jason’s own civilian identity to the Red Hood—or at least, the identity he’d used since returning to Gotham—because of the white tuft at his forehead.

One thing he couldn’t shake from the strange encounter was that question from the boy.

“Are you?”

Or, ‘Are you human?’

Was he? Could the Lazarus Pits have changed Jason that much?

Even though Talia couldn’t confirm a connection between the Lazarus Pits and the boy, Jason knew. There was a connection, somehow. Somehow, this boy had been through some sort of hell, and came out the other side changed.

Like Jason.

The kid looked real young. As young, if not younger, than Jason had been when he…

“Are you?” haunted Jason’s dreams. It echoed over and over, dispersed between the Joker’s fucking laughs, the cracks of breaking bones, until finally being overcome by the cacophony of the final explosion, which unerringly jolted him awake.

Waking up, therefore, put him in a shitty mood, and so he’d had a pretty shitty week. The only bright side so far had been that he didn’t see hide nor hair of Batman lurking at the Alley’s edge, though Red Robin’s more frequent appearances during patrol probably explained that.

So here he was. Jason had ended patrol earlier than usual, having felt his eyes drifting shut as his people reported to him about neighborhood complaints, any repercussions from the gang busts, stuff like that. But when he shot awake—literally this time, he was going to have to patch that safehouse’s wall now—Jason had slipped his helmet and gear back on to do some pre-dawn rounds.

Without really thinking about it, he made his way towards the edge of the Alley nearest to the boy’s disappearance. He’d gone back to the alleyway already, but the combination of melting snow and time had cleared any sign of strange blood or potential footprints. Now, he started canvasing the nearby rooftops and streets. The area was on the edge of the Bowery, but unless Oracle was actively spying on him, he didn’t think he’d see Spoiler since her patrols ended long before dawn, and last he’d heard Cass was still in Hong Kong. It was that vigilante twilight hour.

That didn’t mean Gotham’s crime was at rest too. While he was out there, Jason had stopped a carjacking, b&e, and whatever deal was going down on one of the street corners. Honestly, that one was an accident—he looked real intimidating in the full Red Hood getup, and they obviously weren’t expecting him to be around so early. Or so late?

As the smog-obscured stars began to disappear more completely, Jason decided to call it quits. His stomach had rumbled once or twice, since he hadn’t had the best of dinners, which was ages ago now anyway. He was about to grapple up to the roofs when a chill ran down his spine.

That feeling.

It was weaker, he thought. And harder to pinpoint. As he scanned his surroundings, he wondered why. God, was it weaker because the kid was weaker?

Jason started walking but kept to the shadows. After going a block in what he thought might be the right direction he stopped. The only signs of life on the street were himself and a dark-haired guy making a beeline for the twenty-four-hour convenience store on the same corner that failed deal had been at. No kid in sight, no bright white hair.

The feeling wasn’t going away, and the only place open was that convenience store. This stretch of the street was residential, and with no one outside and no weird feeling when he came by earlier, Jason doubted the kid was in any of the other nearby buildings.

His stomach rumbling again made the choice for him. If he didn’t find the kid at least he could get a protein bar or something.

The bell chimed over him as he walked in, and the rush of indoor heating made Jason shiver. A quick evaluation confirmed two visible exits, front and side door, and two others—the dark-haired guy from before and an old man at the counter. The former looked college-aged, maybe. The old man looked up when he entered, but remained unphased at a helmeted vigilante showing up at his shop and simply nodded. Jason responded in kind, then in the corner of his eye he noticed the younger guy’s shoulders suddenly stiffen. Simultaneously, that feeling he’d followed… shuddered.

Jason faked ignorance, but noted the guy’s white-knuckled grip on his soda can. Jason pretended to browse the pre-packed sandwiches while he actually looked up at the security mirror in the top corner of the small shop.

Was it because he was the Red Hood? This guy was definitely eyeing his guns, but his body language was more scared than jittery, more like he was about to bolt than snatch one. His hair looked like it could use a wash, but he himself looked pretty put together—kinda cute, really, with those bright blue eyes—minus the big coffee stain on his left pant leg. So, typical college student aesthetic. Didn’t have a good coat for the weather though, which was concerning.

As Jason meandered into a different aisle, the guy seemed to shake himself out of it, quickly grabbing what looked to be a random bag of chips and heading to the counter. Jason grabbed his own protein bar and stood right behind the guy. If the strange feeling hadn’t started fucking vibrating Jason would have maybe found the guy’s reactions kinda funny. But the Pits fucking vibrated. Hummed or some shit, and it felt really fucking nice. Jason hated it.

The old man took his sweet time, but after giving the guy his change the dude bolted—but in a very purposeful, ‘I am calmly walking out and nothing is wrong, this is my natural pace’ way, and… and how the hell did Jason know that?

Tossing a twenty on the counter, Jason followed, not letting the guy out of his sight. “Hey!” Jason called out before he could duck into an alleyway. The dude looked like he really wanted to keep going, but surprisingly he did turn around, plastic bag hanging loosely from his fingertips.

“Uh, hi. Can I help you?”

Jason watched him fidget for a minute. “Yeah,” he said eventually, tilting his head. The Pits rumbled, tugging at him. Between the creepy-pleased humming and the unadulterated blips of terror, he was getting some really mixed messages. “Seen a white-haired kid around, maybe fourteen or so?”

The guy blinked. “N-nope. No kids. I’m too young for kids. Not that—wait, you said seen him. Oh, no, haven’t seen nobody, Chief.”

…That was a new one.

Something pinged in the back of Jason’s mind though. Something stood out in that weird ramble.

“How’d you know the kid’s a ‘he’?”

The guy’s eyes widened, and at the same exact fucking time Jason felt a sharp sudden wave of FEAR. Jason instinctively took a step back as his heart rate skyrocketed, hand dropping to breeze over his gun to check if it was still there. Jason was consumed in waves of pin-sharp waves of something screaming that this was wrong, don’t do it, stop what you’re doing battering at what had to be the inside of his chest. Jason choked on his next breath, startling both of them. In the split second that followed, the guy ran.

Cursing, Jason chased after him. Motherfucker was fast. He almost lost the trail, but those waves of fear-panic-tired were like a beacon that Jason really tried not to freak out about as he followed the echoes and the internal tugging sensation around street corners and into various alleys. They definitely weren’t in the Red Hood’s territory anymore, but Jason barely spared a thought to realize that as he dodged black ice and lumps of slushy snow.

A yelp after the guy turned into another alley warned Jason something was wrong, but an almost overwhelming burst of emotion told him much more. The foreign terror overwhelmed him, and his training went out the window as Jason burst into the alley, guns drawn, before coming to a total halt at what he saw.

The guy he was following was sprawled on the icy ground a few yards in, some other guy in a hoodie kneeling on his back while another was in the middle of snatching up the convenience store plastic bag from where it had been flung farther into the shadows. It didn’t take much of Jason’s detective training to realize this guy ran his way straight into a mugging. And the alley was a dead-end. Shitty luck.

Annoyingly, Jason related.

Jason lifted one of his sidearms with rubber-rounds and cocked it. He took that back—maybe this guy was lucky after all.

“What do we have here?” he growled.

The thug rooting in the bag dropped it immediately. “Oh, fuck!” he said, raising his hands and backing up. The other mugger perched on Jason’s stranger twisted around before scrambling off and to his—no, her feet.

Seeing as they hadn’t had a chance to actually do anything, Jason lowered his arm and stepped to the side, gesturing behind him with a tilt of his head. “Scram.”

“We’re gone, Hood,” the one who swore said, leaping over the strange guy who still lay on the ground, barely having twisted himself upright. “Sorry, man,” the thug muttered.

The woman in the hoodie was slower to leave, but followed. Jason walked forward to take her place—he had questions for this guy, and he wanted real answers.

Before he could do anything, the guy on the ground’s expression changed suddenly, and there was another wave of foreign emotion. Jason actually stumbled. “No!” the stranger shouted, raising one hand futilely as Jason internally cursed at himself. Maybe that lady wasn’t as harmless as her friend seemed.

And… maybe the dude’s gesture wasn’t that futile.

The sudden glow of neon green almost blinded Jason as it blasted instantly from the guy’s palm, directed at something—someone—behind Jason. Jason heard the hoodie lady gasp behind him, then a thud.

Turning around, he saw her collapsed on the ground, whatever that beam was having knocked into her shoulder. The shoulder of an arm holding a big fucking knife. Her nicer buddy stood a few feet away, eyes wide as saucers.

Training taking over, Jason kicked the knife out of her hand and behind him before anyone else could move. Another, even stronger tug of something in his chest drew his attention again despite the obvious other danger. Whatever it was, Jason just knew his suspect—his meta suspect was either going to run for it or devolve into a full-on panic attack.

Making a quick decision, Jason fired a warning shot near the other thug’s feet, jolting him from his shock. The round bounced up, sailing cleanly between his legs, causing the man to yelp and draw them together suddenly. “Get the fuck out of here before I change my fucking mind,” he menaced. The thug jumped to pull his dazed partner up and away.

The guy he’d followed had scooted back further into the alley, but from the glazed look in his eyes, staring unseeingly where the woman had fallen, he wasn’t in any mental state to go anywhere. This was supported by the flood of fear-guilt-shock-regret-protect-sad in the air that Jason tried with all his mental might to suppress or outright ignore. It was weird—the lack of anger wasn’t one he was sure he should appreciate or not, but his annoyance and irritation had, at the very least, remained untouched. It seriously was starting to get to him, image flashes of his own goddamn trauma trying to seemingly latch onto his brain.

Jason approached cautiously, not sure what to expect. This whole set-up was eerily familiar to the one he’d been in with the white-haired kid, and the thought made him really look at the guy. They could definitely be related, that was quite obvious. Honestly, this guy was like a slightly older, inverted version of the kid.

“Hey man, they’re gone,” Jason said, with no response. “You hurt?” Still nothing, and the guy’s breathing was getting faster, guilt-terror-sadness almost overwhelming. Jason kneeled down to his level, holstering his gun and removing his helmet. He was directly in front of the guy’s eyesight, but nothing seemed to register.

Among the flashes of Jason’s own horrible memories fighting to the surface, thanks to the guy’s somehow palpable turmoil, a more recent memory of the tail end of one of Jason’s rages came through. Jason had luckily been confined within his safehouse, but somehow Dick had broken in near the end. Jason had come-to in a mirror image of this stranger, finally surfacing when Dick grounded him with two hands on his shoulders. After things had passed, Jason had berated the shit out of his brother for his idiocy, but it had worked.

Jason laid his own hands on the guy’s narrow shoulders with steady pressure, and the effect was immediate. The dude’s blue eyes flashed neon green, just like the white-haired kid’s had that night, as they stared into Jason’s own. Jason gasped as he seemed to fall into that gaze, something deep within him—within his soul, quite simply connecting. The terrible waves of foreign emotion faltered, changing to confusion-wariness-shock-fear-sad-protect, and something in Jason felt… warm. The pits… settled.

“What…the fuck,” Jason whispered, effectively breaking the moment.

The guy blinked. “…Shoot.”

Jason huffed. “You got that right,” he said.

“You’re…” the guy trailed off, then in a panic looked behind Jason, but they were alone. “She didn’t get you, right?”

Jason leaned back, removing his hands from the guy’s shoulders while eyeing the hands twisting nervously together in front of him. “Thanks to you, apparently. Meta?” he asked.

If this guy was like the kid, Jason didn’t think he was actually a meta. He was almost certain they had something to do with the Lazarus Pits, at this point. The guy’s look of confusion backed that up. “Huh?”

“You’re like the kid,” Jason stated. When there was another flare of fear, Jason continued, “Why are you… are you afraid of the kid?”

“What? I—no, I’m… I’m not. Afraid of the, uh, kid. He’s…” the guy seemed to struggle with his words, which was starting to annoy Jason. He just wanted some solid fucking answers. As if Jason’s wish was heard, something changed in the guy’s expression. “Do you… not know what he—what we are?”

Jason wanted to believe this guy was talking about himself and the kid. But that ‘we’… he meant Jason.

The guy’s next question confirmed it. “You died too, didn’t you?”

Jason didn’t answer. Echoes of ‘You aren’t human.’ and ‘Are you?’ drifted through his mind. Abruptly Jason rose to his feet and after a moment’s hesitation the guy did as well. He seemed to regret asking that, which… duh. Fucking rude.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t—that was out of line, um, Red Hood, sir. Sorry. I’m Danny, by the way.” He stuck out his hand.

Jason just crossed his arms, leaving Danny hanging until he awkwardly let his arm drop. “Where’s the kid?” Jason asked.

Danny eyed Jason. “Why d’ya wanna know?” he hedged.

“Because he was fucking hurt, and a meta—or not-meta, whatever—in fucking Gotham. And you’ve got the same fucking mojo as him, which I can fucking feel for some goddamn reason, and I’m sick of it!” Jason ranted, finally fed up.

Danny’s jaw had dropped, his mouth making an ‘o’ shape. A sudden windchill swept through the alley, and both he and Jason shivered. Danny gulped, glancing to the shadows a moment before seeming to steel himself.

“The kid… he’s me.”

A car backfiring from far away punctuated the statement, but otherwise the alley was silent.

“…you.”

“Yeah. Me. Ghost-me.”

“…ghost-you.”

“Yep.”

Jason shifted, frowning. “Bullshit.”

“It’s not!” Danny protested. He glanced around, then walked further into the alley, gesturing for Jason to follow. “I’ll prove it,” he said. The sky may have been brightening above them steadily, but a cloudy Gotham morning made the alley’s shadows all the more stark.

Jason scoffed, but followed. He was the goddamn Red Hood, powers or not to potentially contend with. “You think you’re a ghost. Do you think I’m a fucking ghost?”

“I don’t think—ugh, just watch. Or… actually, close your eyes. It’s bright.”

“What’s br—shit!” For a split second the alleyway was illuminated in light, the afterimages of two rings of white seared into Jason’s retinas. When he blinked them away, Jason was shocked.

The white-haired kid stood in Danny’s place. No… the white-haired kid floated in Danny’s place.

“See?”

…The white-haired kid was Danny.

“Nice magical-girl transformation,” Jason managed to quip, hoping to hide his initial shock. Danny just grinned, which Jason hadn’t really expected. “Still not a ghost, though.”

Danny’s smile dropped. “I think I’d know if I was a ghost or not, dude,” he said, but then squinted. “Though, with your whole… thing…”

“My what?”

Danny shrugged. “This dimension’s whack, man. I don’t really know.”

“So now you’re a multidimensional ghost?” Jason asked, incredulous.

“Ghost King, actually.”

Fucking hell. It’s like his transformation into a younger form gave him age-appropriate little-shit powers. “Why should I trust anything you say?”

Danny laughed. “It should be obvious that I’m a terrible liar.”

“Oh yeah?” Jason was suspicious of that grin. It reminded him too much of Dick. “Why’s that?”

“Because you can see right through me!” Danny answered, turning freaking invisible for a split-second before reappearing. Jeez… Jason should have trusted his gut and not asked.

Chapter Text

Danny tried to smother the smug amusement down but didn’t quite manage, the emotions manifesting around him when Red Hood reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose with a quiet mutter that Danny didn’t catch.

Honestly, it was his own fault—he couldn’t blame Danny for taking advantage of such a good setup!

“So you’re a multidimensional king who happens to full-time as a ghost and part-time as a little shit.”

“Hey!” Danny protested. “I resemble that remark!”

The white, dead eyes of the domino exuded an incredibly strong air of dismayed annoyance. The amount of ire conveyed over just five seconds of silent staring should’ve gone in a record book.

“Full-time little shit, then,” Red Hood said rather flatly. Danny frowned at him before screwing up his face as he realized that yes, getting mouthy was in fact something that happened whenever he slipped into his ghost form.

Danny crossed his arms, kicking up his legs. Hood’s eyes tracked the movement, a singular brow raised as Danny forced himself to look relaxed in mid-air.

He began—valiantly, if he might add—fighting off a panic attack. Everything had been happening all at once this week and Danny wasn’t sure if he should be glad that Jazz hadn’t been tossed here with him. His breakdown would be much harder to put off, for starters, but she’d also be there with him even if she didn’t get him. She’d be annoying, badgering him into thinking about his feelings, making him work through what happened on his own—

“Danny!”

Hands on his shoulders, squeezing like they had not a minute earlier. The touch should’ve burned, should have made him flinch back while echoes of bruising grips wracked his frame.

But it didn’t.

Danny gulped in a large breath of air, forcing his lungs to work rather abruptly. The touch sizzled, almost—unlike earlier, when they’d just felt like hands. Now, he was acutely aware of a tacky sensation that was not-quite metaphysical enough to disguise a sudden puff of what he could only describe as smelly. He really could not be blamed for what happened next. Honestly. Danny did valiantly try not to, but alas, his body couldn’t refrain from convulsing as he gagged.

Hood’s hands pulled back immediately while Danny fiercely wiped his nose. “Really?!” Hood demanded, sounding rather off balance. Danny wrinkled his nose, sending the masked man a dirty look. “See if I help you out again–”

“Sorry,” Danny coughed, shaking himself out. It did nothing to help with the way the sticky sensation lingered. With no warning, he transformed back into his human form, nose wrinkling at the rather obscene language that spilled over Hood’s lips.

The stench had vanished, however, and so had the grimey sensation. Danny heaved a sigh of relief, shivering.

Then he proceeded to realize that the Red Hood—infamous for being a murderous crime lord, definitely at least two steps left from human, who had seen Danny use his powers and demanded answers without as much as a by-your-leave—was giving him the flattest, most utterly done expression on earth. While Danny couldn’t feel emotions as strongly in his human form, the mish-mash of annoyed-frustrated-exhausted-givemeanswersdammit spoke to him rather incessantly.

A flicker of tar in his peripherals and a faint shift in the wind proved that Hood wasn’t the only one starting to get fed up with Danny.

“Sorry,” he repeated sheepishly before waving at his general body. “Were you, like, dunked in an ecto-cesspit?”

Hood stared at him with crossed arms. The white eyes all these vigilantes seemed to love were rather unnerving—Danny was the one who never blinked, and he found he wasn’t quite a fan of that being swapped around. “What.”

“Ecto-sewage?” Danny tried. When that didn’t seem to click, he continued, “Rancid ecto? Slop-toplasm?”

“Okay, back the fuck up, literally what.”

And that was definitely not a question. Right. Danny should stop tap dancing on his nerves.

…Danny did not, in fact, know how to not tap dance on someone’s nerves. Wonderful.

“It’s like if someone took teenage gym-stink and tried to mask it with a boatload of AXE body spray, thought it didn’t work well enough, and added grandpa cologne for good measure,” he tried to explain. “But, like, sticky. It’s just… eugh.”

Hood stared even harder. “So I’m not human. You’re not human. You have ghost powers. And I stink.”

Danny nodded hesitantly.

Apparently giving in, Hood face-palmed and groaned to himself about something. Danny watched as the oh-so-fearsome crime lord dragged a hand down his face. Slowly. With gusto.

“So what, you can just sense it on me?”

He shrugged, tilting a hand back and forth. “Sorta? You’ve got that vibe, y’know.”

Was Danny being vague on purpose just to see Hood visibly restrain himself from throttling him? Maybe. Listen, Danny’s sense of self-preservation apparently died along with him.

He bit his lip to hide a snicker at that internal thought just as Hood purposefully strided forwards, finger jabbing into Danny’s sternum. He grimaced, stumbling back slightly at the unexpected strength.

“Where the hell do you live?” Hood demanded. “I am tired and fucking done with today and I do not need a precocious little shit—”

“I am not little,” Danny interrupted stoutly.

“—badgering me about my ‘stinky vibes’ here in the fucking open,” Hood continued, like Danny hadn’t even spoken.

“It’s a dead end alley,” Danny pointed out, just to be contrary.

If Hood hadn’t popped a blood vessel yet, Danny would be surprised. But, also, crime lord. Danny needed to put his inability to not shut up away. See again; ‘inability’. That was very much a warning, even though Danny didn’t have it labeled in the proper fluorescent orange.

Desperately trying to salvage the situation—just why did he have such an insulting motor-mouth—he tossed his arms out with a grin that he hoped was a lot less weak than he felt and said, “Welcome to Casa la Danny?”

Hood sent a nonplussed look at him. “First, it’d be ‘Casa de’ and not ‘Casa la’ unless you mean ‘La casa de’. Second, I highly recommend that you do not fucking lie to me.” Then, when Danny didn’t falter, the look turned into something genuinely perplexed.

“Well, technically I’ve been up there,” Danny continued, motioning to a broken third story window that led to an unused storage unit—look, he literally just ran to one of the most familiar areas he could remember after being bombarded with whatever sticky, hyper-aggressive mess Hood had, sue him. “It’s really nice, and I don’t technically freeze, though it can get a little chilly, I guess—”

“Stop. Just—stop.”

Danny bit his lip to stop the perpetual word vomit that tried to escape.

“What the hell,” Hood breathed to the sky. “Fucking why.” He dropped his head back down to point menacingly at Danny again, far too close for comfort. “No, not you—you can just shut up. Fucking shitballs. Damni–”

“Language.”

Danny blinked at Hood as Hood stared incredulously back.

“I don’t have the spoons for this, goddamn,” Hood groaned. “Fucking can’t even believe—y’know what, shithead?”

“I am very opposed to being called that,” Danny announced at the pause.

Hood inhaled sharply, breathed out, and steeled himself. “I don’t think I give a fuck anymore,” Hood said, the air radiating with honesty-honesty-honesty, I am so far past done with you. It prickled at Danny’s skin so voraciously that he ducked his head sheepishly as he scratched his neck. Hood was so reactive—teasing him was just so fun. “You—ugh. Whatever you did—whatever you even are—living in this kind of shithole sucks. I’ve got a place nearby and you can sit there until you give me actual fucking answers.”

Danny stared, and stared some more. “…That is so sketchy. You are a literal crime lord offering a whole freaking house.”

“And you’re a fucking ghost that refuses to give me answers while living in a fucking dump. You are aware this is mob territory, right?”

Danny startled. “What, really? Those are real?”

“What the fuck do you mean, are those real?!”

He made a face and opened his mouth to retort when a shiver wracked up his spine and puffed out of his mouth in a cloud of misty blue.

“The fuck is that?!”

Danny, who had directed all of his attention to the swirling shadows, snapped to look at Red Hood incredulously. Even if he didn’t know exactly what he was—and honestly, Danny wasn’t too sure himself—he should have at least known the sensation of whom he was a denizen under, even if their first meeting had been too brief to exchange names.

“My King,” Lady Gotham greeted once more, bowing her head. Danny glanced back at her and startled. The dark, rolling shadows had slowly coalesced into a similar form to that she’d shown when they had met. Outside of that, she looked very different—which was incredibly unusual, considering how ghosts didn’t like changing their forms, and if so, not anything near as permanent as this looked.

Instead of just being a mix of tar and shadow, she now seemed to have actual skin a few shades lighter—the texture of which was hard to discern, with the stony appearance contrasting with smooth highlights—smattered around her head and where the tops of her arms were. Foggy black swirled over the rest of her, some drifting vaguely over her head in a mockery of hair, an iron wrought wreath of broken stone and shattered glass flickering into place in such a way that Danny noticed Lady Gotham visibly relax.

When her head lifted, Danny found himself pinned with glowing yellow eyes that shimmered with so many emotions that it made his head swirl.

“Who the he—”

Lady Gotham turned, shadows twisting into skin so she could tilt a slight grin at him, tilting her head—not as deeply as she did for Danny, but far enough that Danny immediately understood that Red Hood harboured her deep respect—in turn as shimmering yellow eyes met the flat white of his hidden ones.

“My Knight,” Lady Gotham breathed, absently drifting forwards, “it has been so long, bloodied avenger, and yet not long enough.”

Hood, who had frozen, suddenly snarled as he backstepped, clutching his chest as he wildly glanced back and forth, snapping out a harsh, "What in the absolute fuck is going on!?”

RAGE–panic–restraint–helpme thrummed through the air. Danny shuddered at how sharp the emotions were, almost feeling tangible in how they stabbed at him. Danny was starting to regret winding him up earlier—he might not have known how to actually explain properly, but past-Danny’s motor mouth was clearly making a mess of things now. Fun reactions or not, it was definitely biting him in the butt now.

“Lady Gotham,” Danny tried quietly as the storm brewed, “I’m not sure–er, well, should I get him—”

“Ties mia,” she snarled at him, shadows flaring. Danny flinched back at the echoes of steel rip-tear-screeching that overlaid her voice, the tiny black pupils blowing out wide—and he now noticed that her pupils were oddly ovular and spiky—and blacking out the glowing yellow of her sclera with sudden, frightening swiftness. But, just as quickly as the tar had warped, she found herself once more and settled—almost forcefully—back into her previous form, sans a lot more skin. “I said my Knights won’t dare to cause harm, little King, and I meant it. Do not do me a disservice in proving me a liar.”

Those last sentences—mostly devoid of the concrete and ash that coated most of her words—were directed at Red Hood.

Red Hood, who had stilled, froze in place. Danny tried sensing his state, but his emotions were just. Gone. Not vanished, but definitely suppressed in a way that felt akin to that of Lady Gotham instead of anything he’d done himself.

Lady Gotham, for her part, slunk forward, shadows solidifying over her to form skin once more. “Poor boy,” she crooned, carding not-quite-fingers through his hair.

Danny, hesitant, strode forward. Hood’s head tilted slightly, like he was registering Danny’s movement—but Hood didn’t move at all. Danny couldn’t even tell if the man was breathing anymore. “What…What happened to him, my Lady?”

“Much,” she replied, simple and aching. Hood’s breath hitched when shadows formed a palm to cup his face. “I recommend you take his offer, my King.” Danny opened his mouth to protest when her head clicked around to send him a look. “My Knights have many homes—you would be far from pushing him from his nest. As for your question…”

She hummed lowly, like the rattle of wheels over a grate. Hood jerked slightly, rearing enough to pull from her grip despite his planted feet. Lady Gotham sighed, and slipped a little further into a more formless shape as she backed away. Danny automatically stepped forward when Hood staggered, but the man just dropped slightly, a growl low in his throat. Danny’s eyes caught on flexing muscles and swiftly glanced up at Lady Gotham.

And immediately looked down when he met her knowing look that was far too similar to Clockwork’s—particularly that of the moment before he yeeted Danny into a different time period—for his liking.

“He was borne of me, lived of me, and protected me and my own,” she continued eventually. “But he did not die of me, and I could not let that stand. The second I turned my gaze inwards, the second I dared to look away from my favored even to tend to my own wounds—no. I cannot look away again, my King. I won’t risk it, not again—but I did it. My Robin lives on now as Red Hood, my bloodied avenger, my Knight, malgraŭ tiu klaŭnon!”

Her words were vicious, and the one spat was accompanied with the visceral concept-sensation of acid melting and refusing to stop. Danny couldn’t help but shiver either—he was glad Wulf assisted in getting him fluent in Esperanto, but even just hearing clowns was going to give him the heebie-jeebies no matter the language. To learn that Red Hood was so similar to him in ‘living in spite of that clown’, as Lady Gotham so eloquently put it, sobered him up.

“Even so, he’s still a stranger,” Danny reasoned. “And I don’t want to infringe on his Haunt.”

She huffed. “You must care much for the man interrogating you.”

Danny spluttered as she nudged forward a hint of Hood’s emotions and prodded at his—specifically, his attraction. “I’m not—just no—my Lady!”

Her laugh rattled the alley, finally knocking Hood out of his stupor. “Go with him, little King. Your chosen quarters are rather… lackluster. Your simple and passive assistance in my betterment has been far too grand to let something as important as housing fall to the wayside—and regardless of your help, this is no such place for a King of your nature. Aside from that, my Haunt has welcomed you in its entirety. Do not mistake this fortune as falsity—and I do believe that answers are owed to my Knight, are they not?”

“Y-Yes, but I’m healed, there’s no need for me to—”

“Harm to the mind can be equal if not worse than harm of the body, not to mention your core,” she hissed, form stretching to pluck at strings—Danny’s strings, the emotions he’d been stubbornly shoving down and hiding—and letting hurt-fear-anxiety-panic flood the alley. Then, almost patronizingly, she crooned in a way that made Danny’s traitorous body relax. “Little King, I will not claim to know of what happened, but it caused enough distress to warrant requesting a lesser being to house you. It does not matter if you choose to live where I am most barren or where I am most present. I granted you sanctuary even if you did not see it as such, and you will take advantage of it. You are hurt, and you are harmed.” She narrowed her luminous eyes. “Unless you believe me to be a liar.”

Danny jerked, startled. “No!” he yelped, stammering. “Sure, it was, uhm, not something I ever want to repeat and I might be a little traumatized, but it’s only a smidgen!”

Lady Gotham cocked the shadowy-tar that formed her head, the wiry branches of her crown growing in a mesmerizing way. Firm, she stated her words and empowered them with truth-trust-me-loyal-love-love-love. “You will take what has been offered, and you will heal. And as I dare to be so bold, help my Knight heal with you.”

Danny spluttered, puffing up with indignation and alarm. “You can’t—”

It was too late. Lady Gotham gave a sharp grin as she vanished, oppressive presence disappearing alongside her. The only thing that remained of her time in the alley was a rather incessant emotion of playfulness that was so obviously a wink-wink, nudge-nudge that it had Danny ducking his head to hide his flushing cheeks.

Across from him, Hood was none the wiser. His suppressed emotions were back in full force, but they now held an overwhelming tone of confusion.

Honestly, Danny couldn’t blame him. In fact, he empathized with the soft, near silent, “What the fuck,” rather well.

“So!” Danny clapped his hands together, directing Hood’s shell-shocked expression to him. “Guess I am taking you up on that offer then!” And, reminded by his own experiences at knowing nothing about all this ghostly-ness, he winced sheepishly and amended with, “With answers. Definitely going to give you answers this time. Uhm, what I can give right now, at least—I maybe-might-need to head to work for the morning shift in… eighteen minutes?”

The I’m-Going-To-Throttle-You expression returned. Danny took it all back—teasing Hood was way too fun to let go.

☾ ☾ ☾

It was really starting to sink in for Dani why ghosts called the Ghost Zone ‘the Infinite Realms’.

She and Vlad had started their search by visiting the relatively chill ghosts and their haunts, asking if they had seen Danny at all. They suspected Danny had somehow passed through the Ghost Zone into another dimension, according to weird texts Tucker told Dani about when they finally got in contact. But maybe a ghost had witnessed Danny exiting the Zone and could point them the right way. If they hadn’t seen him, all Dani and Vlad could do was ask them to keep an eye out for their king.

Dani didn’t know who Vlad could possibly be on friendly enough terms with—besides, like, Skulker maybe. As for Dani, she checked in with Youngblood, Kitty—plus Johnny 13, by extension—and Desiree first. She saw Ember in passing, and while she hadn’t seen Danny either she did inform Dani that Wulf had been arrested by Walker again, and that maybe he could help if they broke him out.

When she next saw Vlad he was leaving her next stop, Ghost Writer’s library, which made them both realize they probably could have planned their search out a bit more. He informed her that neither Fright Knight nor Amorpho had encountered Danny, and while Spectra had tried to talk circles around Vlad, Bertrand had said that neither of them had seen Danny either. And Dani was right—Vlad also found Skulker, who said he’d pass along Tucker’s request for help to Technus. Though, Vlad apparently worded it more like a challenge to Technus, which actually was pretty smart and definitely raised their chances of getting the ghost’s help.

Like she said she would, Dani sucked it up and made herself stop searching for a moment to divvy up the various ghosts they knew and start a checklist. She was just so worried about Danny it felt like time was of the essence, and that wherever he was, she would be too late to save him. Like she was too late to stop the G.I.W in the first place… unlike Vlad.

It was really weird, talking to Vlad.

Danny had told her when she stopped by Amity Park between her travels that Vlad was mellowing out, especially ever since Danny became Ghost King. He never said Vlad was trustworthy, and always reiterated that Vlad was still a certified fruitloop, but Dani could now understand the conflicted face Danny started to make if Vlad ever came up in conversation—which wasn’t often with Dani. She had avoided Vlad since she initially left his side, having felt betrayed when she realized he thought of her less like a daughter and more as a means-to-an-end in his pursuit of the ‘perfect’ Danny clone. While Danny and the others were considerate enough to avoid speaking of the man around her, it seemed harder for them to do so recently, especially because of the full-ride to college thing and Vlad’s supposedly new emotional maturity.

Mostly talking to Vlad just felt…awkward. When he offered to visit the more annoying or dangerous ghosts, like the Box Ghost or Vortex, Dani’s initial reaction was to be contrary and argue to at least visit the harmless Box Ghost. When she realized what she was arguing for—visiting the Box Ghost? Voluntarily?—she likened the feeling to sucking on a lemon. But with more open communication between them, they decided that Dani would check with Pandora and Princess Dora. Unfortunately, none of them had anything new to contribute to the search.

When Vlad and Dani tried to visit Clockwork, he wasn’t at his clock tower, which was strange. The Observants also were unaware of both Danny and Clockwork’s locations, which smelled fishy to Dani. Observants were literally called ‘observant’, yet they had no idea? When the annoying eyeballs remained tightlipped even in the face of Vlad trying to flex his intimidating vampire aesthetic, Dani pulled the old man away, an idea forming. Vlad seemed confused that Dani would back down so quickly, which was…fair. Dani would be confused too, knowing herself.

Ignoring Vlad’s indignant protests that it was a waste of their time, Dani dragged Vlad to the Far Frozen. Eventually growing tired of his whining, Dani told him no, she wasn’t doubting that he told her the truth. However, they both knew Vlad didn’t have the best track record for interacting with the yetis, even if they were unerringly polite. Being polite did not equate being trusting, she explained, and Vlad finally caught on. Before they had entered the Ghost Zone at all, she had interrogated Vlad about everything, including his visit to the Far Frozen after escaping through the faulty portal. He had told her about asking for the Infi-map to help look for Danny, but he had been told it was unavailable.

Maybe the pseudo-sister of the Ghost King would get a different answer.

Sadly, she did not. Frostbite sounded truly apologetic, though, and Dani was able to pry out of him that it was Clockwork who had the map, and Dani’s suspicions grew.

So there they were—Dani had just left the Far Frozen, and Vlad waited for her a little ways away in a warmer section of the Zone. Their next stop would be Walker’s prison, which they had decided was better to visit together to lessen the chance of getting unjustly arrested and needing to jailbreak the other—if they were both imprisoned, a prison break was easier with more accomplices, at least. They didn’t know if Wulf’s portal powers would be of any use without a solid destination in mind, but at least it was something Dani knew they could actually do, and something they should do, since Walker’s so-called ‘justice’ wasn’t likely to be truly fair.

Before Vlad could ask, Dani shook her head as she approached. “They didn’t lie to you,” she said, “but they didn’t tell you everything. Guess who has ‘checked out’ the Infi-map, and is also nowhere to be found?”

Vlad’s red eyes glowed. “Of course,” he drawled, “the meddling Clockwork.”

“Maybe he’s using it to look for Danny?” Dani posited, but it sounded weak even to her. Vlad definitely looked doubtful about it.

“Knowing him, he would have seen Danny being abducted in the first place,” Vlad sneered.

“He’s Danny’s friend, though,” Dani argued, “his mentor. There has to be—oh!”

Dani gasped at a sudden deluge of sensation, of raw emotion; she could only interpret it as the entire Infinite Realms screaming to her. Her entire core strained against the encompassing nature of the feeling, which as it continued felt so much like… like Danny! Danny’s… oh no. It felt like terror.

“Ellie?” Vlad questioned, and she vaguely noted him drift closer to her in concern.

“It’s Danny,” she said breathlessly. “Something’s wrong. Can’t you feel it?”

“I… the Realms feel strange. But I suspect I am not sensing this as strongly as you are, correct?”

“He’s terrified,” Dani said, shaking her head to focus more on Vlad. “How do I know that? Why is he so scared?”

“Perhaps it is the nature of your cores, or a connection as his clone, or even both,” Vlad suggested, and Dani hated that damn gleam in his eye. “There is also the factor that Daniel is the Ghost King, but for you to…” Vlad seemed to pick up on her wariness and abandoned his hypothesizing. “Shall you revisit Chief Frostbite? He may know more, or have anoth—”

He was cut off as Dani gasped again. She folded at the waist and clutched at her chest, mostly out of surprise, as another wave of terror flowed through her core from the ectoplasm surrounding them. It was followed by a nauseating mix of guilt-protect-fear-sad that overwhelmed her to the point that she couldn’t focus on anything else.

Until she felt a soft sensation brush against her cheeks—such a stark difference to the feelings, to Danny’s feelings—and she pulled her mind forcefully away from the maelstrom of emotions. Blinking, Dani noticed she had unconsciously started crying, and, to her shock, it was Vlad brushing away the tears that had reoriented her focus.

She floated away from him in an instant, roughly scrubbing her own cheeks and avoiding eye contact. He didn’t protest the movement, and after a moment cleared his throat.

“I will visit Frostbite with you this time,” he declared.

“I don’t need your stinking help!” Dani retorted, but she did fly off in the direction of the Far Frozen.

Annoyingly Vlad followed her. “You were just incapacitated, girl!” Vlad chided, and even though Dani outwardly scoffed she realized he had a point. “If Daniel continues…” he trailed off.

“Fine!” Dani said, speeding up just to be annoying. She had found out while they canvassed the Zone that the old man had a slower natural flying pace than she did.

They traveled in silence for a few minutes, the ectoplasm around them steadily getting colder. Finally Vlad spoke once more. “Did the connection to Daniel…”

“He was still scared,” Dani admitted. “It was completely overwhelming at first. Then there were other feelings, but… it’s hard to describe. Not good feelings but less… dire? Immediate? Kinda… repetitive. Like everything was swirling, down and down and down but never-ending, and I had to… almost push it all out of my core to focus again.”

Vlad hummed. “That certainly is concerning.”

Dani shot him another glare. A few moments later, they had both reached the icy cave system where Dani had just met Chief Frostbite. She noticed Vlad shiver a bit and she smirked to herself a little. Her expression fell again though when Frostbite emerged, obviously concerned at her quick return.

“Young One? Is something wrong?” the yeti boomed, then punctuated with a slight growl towards Vlad.

“Mr. Raccoon-Eyes over there didn’t do anything,” Dani thumbed over her shoulder and ignored the indignant scoff from behind her, “but I almost passed out a few minutes ago because we think Danny’s in trouble!”

Frostbite softened. “You worry so mightily for the Great One! It is admirable, but to affect your health so severely is indeed worrying…”

“That isn’t what she means,” Vlad interrupted. “I barely sensed it, but something reverberated through the Zone that impacted Ellie’s core. She believes the foreign emotions are those of your missing King.”

“Our King,” Frostbite chided, then seemed to register what Vlad had said and his eyes widened. “Oh my. Can you describe the issue, Young One?”

Dani repeated what she had described to Vlad, and the older halfa chimed in with his own theories about her supposed connection to Danny.

Frostbite hummed and went to check something on the monitors in the cave, though Dani couldn’t begin to guess what any of their surprisingly advanced technology did. Danny had told her how when Frostbite first helped with his new ghost powers, he had woken up floating in a test tube, the tech supposedly monitoring his health. Was Frostbite gonna stick Dani in a tube? She really hoped not—no matter how… cordial she was acting with Vlad, she did not want a repeat experience of being trapped in something like that with him waiting outside. No way, José.

Luckily, after the machines made a few beeps Frostbite returned. “There indeed was faint fluctuation through the ectoplasm of the Infinite Realms. I believe your extreme similarities to the Great One made you particularly sensitive to it, and Plasmius’ proximity to you enhanced it for him.”

“But what does that mean about Danny?” she persisted.

Frostbite frowned. “The emotional echoes you felt were likely enhanced by his connection to the Realms as its King. It is likely that whenever you visit the Realms, you will be able to sense his most extreme emotions, and perhaps even faintly while in Amity Park, as an extension of his haunt.”

Dani gulped. “So he really was feeling like… like that?”

Frostbite nodded glumly, but then he seemed to realize something, dashing further into the cave. Dani and Vlad shared a look and followed. After a few moments analyzing the screens, and pressing a few buttons, Frostbite faced Dani with a grin, and a spark of hope bloomed within her just from that.

“We are able to measure fluctuations in the Realms’ ectoplasm, but most of our monitoring is within the Far Frozen as we do not often travel from our haunt,” the yeti explained. “However, we do have some other areas we monitor on behalf of the Observants.” Dani cringed, Vlad made a sound of disgust, and Frostbite gave them a commiserating look. “But this is good news, my friends! It is clear that the fluctuation’s strength greatly varied, which means somewhere in the Infinite Realms there is a point of its greatest strength!”

Vlad grinned sharply, snapping his fingers. “And where the signal is strongest…”

“…we can find Danny!” Dani exclaimed.

★★★

Tim had worked many a frustrating case, but this one took the cake.

It wasn’t even that Tim was overlooking the keys to figure it out—there weren’t any keys to begin with. No proof, no evidence, no nothing. His leads so far were all barebone guesswork or simply just intuition, which might’ve worked if he was building the case on a time crunch. Considering that he wasn’t working on the fly and actually had the time to work it out…

To be frank, it was driving him up the wall. A closer look into the green substance proved that it was, at the very least, adjacent to the Pits. Even confirming that made him want to pull his hair because he discovered that the better than state-of-the-art sequencers and data constructors were voiding anything surrounding the material. It wasn’t dumping data—it would be far simpler if it was. But no, it was like the machinery just saw the sample and blue screened in the least obvious way. It wasn’t collecting anything beyond registering that yes, there was a substance, and yes, it was right in front of the sensors.

Which meant that Tim had to, annoyingly, investigate by hand.

On top of that, the League of Assassins were making horrendously obvious moves. Tim had caught sight of three or so L.o.A members in Gotham at any given time—general spies and information runners, ones who occasionally tailed the Bats but were most likely just plants to keep an eye on the city. Lately, Tim had counted at least a dozen and his contacts within the League were reporting an interest.

And that meant Green-Goopy-Boy was also at least tangentially related to League business. Lovely. Spectacular.

Tracking down League members was painful enough as is. They were almost obvious to him whenever they were sleuthing in their nightgear—which was how he was spotting them, but he wasn’t counting out a couple being purposefully obvious to draw eyes away from their stealthier companions—but finding them in their day clothes was annoying.

The biggest give away was relying on word of mouth, trying to find those who had moved to Gotham by their neighbors and blockmates because Ra’s was far from stupid and would dutifully cover any tracks of new arrivals with detailed records. Pairing that with searching for newcomers with warm skin—because the majority of Gotham had a grey overtone, probably due to the lack of sun—and Tim had yet another set of barely-there leads to follow.

Tim was running on two hours of sleep after seven hours of painstakingly decoding and isolating cells, two hours of information gathering, six of a somewhat rough patrol, and was looking at nine hours of sitting at a desk, being the famous teenage CEO. He had eight meetings planned for today, two of which being board meetings. Two.

So, Tim felt utterly justified in getting a coffee before his hell day—it also marked the end of his Red Robin patrol.

The cafe chosen was pretty far out of the way, but it was the one Duke had put in his report. As a bonus, going here instead of the one closer to the tower gave him a plausible reason for delay if it came to it. Three birds with one stone, or however the saying went.

Tim’s eyes flickered over the menu, ignoring the chime of the door. It was… oh, it was seven in the morning. That was a lot earlier than Tim thought it was. Hm.

“Hi, have you decided on what you want?”

Tim shook his thoughts away—more time for himself since he wasn’t due in the office till nine and the meetings started at ten, the drink prices were decent and they had a good selection available, his left bandoleer was digging into his trap, two other people inside seated in the corner that Tim would have shacked up in if they’d been anywhere else–and stepped up to the counter.

“How many shots are you legally allowed to give me.”

Tim internally winced, because he wanted that to come out as a question. That just proved that he really did need the caffeine boost.

The barista steadily raised a brow. He, oddly enough, had no reaction to serving Red Robin. “I’d recommend no more than four, but policy states that a singular order cannot have more than eight.”

Tim considered that. It was better than the one by Wayne Enterprises—seven, though Bruce often bribed the employees to drop the max to three whenever he ‘thought’ that Tim was overdoing it, the traitor. Another quick glance at the menu had him jerking his head in a nod.

“Large dead-eye, three pumps of caramel, splash of oatmilk.” He narrowed his eyes as he considered the amount of caffeine, and decided. “Four extra shots of espresso.”

He had some restraint. Seven was his usual amount, anyways.

“It’ll probably be bitter,” the barista warned half-heartedly. “Holding the shots ‘til it’s done will take a bit.”

Tim glanced down at his mildly bloody getup—breaking up the utter catfight between a working girl and a mugger who had a rather unfortunate choice of victim, who had an even more unfortunate attitude that had him knocking both of them out not half an hour previous—and then back up again. “Taste means nothing to me.”

The barista snorted and rattled off his dues. Tim forked the money over, and pretended to scan behind the counter while keeping an eye on the barista. He fit the descriptions Duke had left in his file, so was this the boy on the roof? The one that Duke had brought in here? Tim recalled a note saying that the kid—though he was older than both Duke and Tim, but he didn’t look like he was in his twenties quite yet—was a new arrival to Gotham.

Tim frowned thoughtfully. Was he trafficked? The Bats kept an eye on people entering the city for several reasons, and Tim couldn’t recall anything with the barista’s profile within it. That meant no paperwork, and working a job so close to Crime Alley this soon after daybreak?

His skin had the same gray overtone that most of Gotham did, which was weird enough for new arrivals. Was he a shut-in? Or perhaps this was more evidence towards a trafficking victim that hadn’t seen the light of day in who knows how long? His accent definitely put him as an outsider, but how long had he been in the city for? Jason had talked to that mysterious young boy a week ago, and Duke suddenly talking to a bleeding teen on the roof the morning of, not too far from that alley? There had to be a link there, but was he right or was he reaching?

A League runaway, even? That would make sense with the increase in LoA members and the mysterious green substance.

“Have you lived here long?” Tim asked aloud.

The barista didn’t answer at first before startling, realizing that Tim was asking him the question. The corner of his mouth ticked up as he turned around with two of the seven shots and set them next to a cup—and, now that he was finally paying attention, Tim managed to catch sight of his nametag.

“That easy to tell?” Danny questioned in turn.

Tim half-shrugged. “It’s the accent.”

Danny huffed. “Of course it was,” he grumbled. “Ugh, at least I got this job quick.”

“Really?” Tim asked, eyes flickering to the clock. Morning shifts were common, even if it was pretty early.

“Yep. Had to cover the morning shift but usually end up with the graveyard one.”

Tim winced. That made… far too much sense. It was also another point in the direction of someone who’d been trafficked into city lines.

“How are you handling it?” he hesitantly asked.

Danny shot him a flat look, pouring the completed shots into the cup without any apparent care in the world before spinning around, apparently not dignifying that with an answer.

Which… fair. Most Gothamites weren’t eager to spill their life story to one of the vigilantes unless they were hurriedly trying to avoid a beatdown when caught in the wrong.

“Crime Alley isn’t the best of places for Outsiders,” Tim tried instead.

Danny shrugged. “It’s been good enough for me.”

Tim didn’t hide his skeptical expression. Way too many things were off about the man—his non-reaction to Red Robin, the ease in which he’d settled, and the way his eyes tracked over everyone, constantly looking for danger. “Red Hood doesn’t take kindly to harder crimes,” he warned finally, half sighing. “If you end up under any seedy employment… well, Hood rarely makes exceptions for anyone that breaks his code.”

Danny snorted, oddly enough. “I’m not looking to mess with him. Just to, y’know, mess with him,” Danny replied, a slow grin starting to quirk his lips.

Tim frowned. “What?”

Danny looked up after setting another set of shots aside. “You’d know him, right? Since you’re both vigilantes? I saw him a while ago,” Danny admitted casually, looking far too happy about that fact. Tim’s eyes narrowed behind the domino—definitely the ‘kid’ from the bloody alley he was looking for, then. “And honestly? Phew, hot.”

Tim froze. His eyes widened. “What?” he repeated, far more incredulous.

Danny grinned, unfettered. “Very easy on the eyes,” Danny informed him, like his words weren’t actively melting Tim’s brain. “He looks like the kind of guy that’d treat you right, and with his code? He’d tell you if you were doing anything wrong and he’d probably shoot his own kneecap if he was doing something wrong instead. And he has such a malewife vibe, it’s just ugh, Ancients—”

Tim zoned out, staring past Danny as he continued to ramble about Red Hood. He was melting. This was going to be the death of him. Tim wasn’t going to be able to look Jason in the eyes for months.

Danny turned back to the espresso machine. Tim immediately began the process of suppressing any and all memories of someone describing his brother as someone hot. It was an unfortunately familiar process, what with the spotlight Dick often showcased himself as—both willingly and not—in both capes and civvies. Bruce’s persona was literally just a himbo playbow that became a smidgen less playboy once he started taking in kids, and no matter how toned down ‘Brucie’ was with flirting now, he would likely never escape his wild days. Most capes were often put on pedestals of differing vulgarity, for lack of a better term, and simply had to deal with it alongside the occasional bouts of needing to bleach their brains.

The door rang behind him and Tim shifted to look at who entered in the reflection, somewhat relieved of having something new to focus on. Tim proceeded to freeze before slowly turning around.

“Hiya, birdie!” Harley Quinn chirped, bounding up to him and pausing when she was three feet away. “Naww, don’t worry, birdie—we’re not up ta anythin’ naughty, promise!”

“She’s correct,” Poison Ivy agreed, stepping out from behind Harley, glancing Tim up and down with the slightest smile. “Just a simple coffee run, tonight.”

Tim nodded. They’d been on good behavior for several months already, and he was their favorite besides—whether the latter was a good thing or not changed often enough that it didn’t mean much more than the occasional attempts to get Tim to let some of their misadventures slide.

And if he might have allowed the more harmless of those occasions slip by, who was he to say?

“Harley!” Danny greeted suddenly, with far more cheer than someone new to Gotham should have had when coming face to face with not one but two rogues.

“Danny!” Harley cheered in reply, lunging past Tim to pinch Danny’s cheeks—Tim did not envy him, having been on the wrong side of that far more than he’d been comfortable with. Danny slammed Tim’s drink down to the side a meer moment beforehand, saving his ambrosia without any time to spare. “Pam-cake, c’mere—this is King Coffee, who humbly allows us peasants ta use his abode.”

Danny snorted, batting her hands away with a careless ease that had Tim startling. Out of the corner of his eye, the customers who’d been sitting relatively aloof to Tim’s presence began to edge away—that was the proper reaction, and Tim silently sidestepped so that he was blocking the women’s sightline. Mildly reformed or not, Tim did not want to deal with either of them if they did decide that they needed a ‘prime pranking target’.

Now, at least, anything they did was likely to be far from fatal. Inconvenience, on the other hand, was something either woman could do in spades.

“One time,” Danny hissed back before looking at Ivy with the same flat expression he’d used against Tim. “She called herself a peasant once and I played into it and now she won’t stop.”

Ivy’s grin grew into something more genuine as she stepped past Tim as well, plucking Harley up from under the armpits and pulling her away from the counter—which she had been attempting to clamber up to gain access to Danny’s cheeks once more. “Sweet pea, I thought we were here for drinks, not to cause a ruckus.”

Harley let her head fall back with a grin far too wide for the innocence she was trying to display, jerking her head up a little to bop her nose against Ivy’s. “We always cause a ruckus when you’re out, Red.”

Ivy rolled her eyes and dropped Harley, who dramatically flopped onto the floor. “You were the one who spent days bribing me into coming here.” Her eyes flickered up, finding Danny’s for a second before she smirked. “Though, I suppose that I can see some of the appeal.”

Danny shook his head at their antics, and met Tim’s eyes through the domino. “Coffee Monstrosity for one vigilante?”

“That’d be me,” Tim replied unnecessarily, voice fainter than he’d like it. Harley and Ivy were kind of fun to hang around in empty warehouses or on rooftops—even in the park, back when Tim was still Robin and snuck off to talk and convince her that the less terrorism, the better—but having a civilian interact with them in the same ways in a cafe of all places had him off balance. He started chugging the second he got his hands on it.

It was pretty good, despite the bitter tinge—he could taste other, subtler flavors that would probably fit better as a drip brew. Maybe he should bring Bernard here for their next date? If he got lucky, maybe he could create some sort of link between them—Danny was closer to Jason in age, but Bernard just had that kind of charm to him that the gap wouldn’t mean much friendship wise, the confidently awkward puppy that he was.

But then again, Bernard had gotten along with Ivy a little too well when they had met last, despite it having just been in passing. He eyed Ivy as she easily shucked off her cropped yellow flannel onto Harley’s head, pinning one hand down with her foot and catching one flailing hand with the other.

Idly, he wondered if he should stick around to watch the two just in case or not. The civilians had fled with a quiet decorum and only minor swearing when the door chimed, which meant that the only people in the room were the two former rogues, the far too comfortable barista, and Red Robin.

It almost sounded like a joke; a vigilante, two mildly reformed rogues, and a barista walk into a bar…

“Pammy, please!” Harley cackled—the sound grated on his ears, far too familiar in a way that made him automatically tense—as she kicked a leg up, wrapping it around one of Ivy’s and trying to right herself, only to end up belly flopping instead, fruitlessly trying to bring Ivy down with her as the other woman did her best to remain still, eyebrow raised first at Harley and then at Tim.

Tim blinked, decision made, and stepped over the stray leg, tossing the empty cup in the trash on his way out. He’d just stick to his Zesti Colas once he got into the office—in the off chance that Danny wasn’t the mystery puzzle Tim had been sinking his hands into, he’d still end up on the list from his sheer nonchalance when faced with two of Gotham’s Sirens. It was one thing when Tim did it and another when a civilian genuinely enjoyed their presence.