RED ALERT - STOP SCROLLING AND REBLOG IMMEDIATELY, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOUR BLOG IS ABOUT

RED ALERT - STOP SCROLLING AND REBLOG IMMEDIATELY, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOUR BLOG IS ABOUT

KOSA COULD BE VOTED ON IN THE SENATE VERY SOON!

IF YOU ARE A MINOR, YOUR TUMBLR ACCOUNT COULD BE AT RISK!

TAG EVERYONE YOU KNOW. DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO HELP.

CALL. YOUR. SENATORS.

@thebunnyofevil @itsapmseymour @bettinalevyisdetermined @singular-ghost-sound @staffs-secret-blog

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@holisticdetective42

Photos from #memes-and-graphics in the Stop Internet Censorship Discord server.

Posted May 18, 2024.

Hi, I’m glad I could reach out to you and hope this reaches you well. You’re a very popular blog on here and trans gender as well.

So you can understand that people want to stop KOSA, which is a bill that will censor much of this website including anything related to transgenderism and hrt. I know that this seems horrible but we need to spread the word so it gets stopped again.

Thanks so much and sorry if i bothered you.

I’m so sorry if this seems long but I really appreciate it and if you could spread the word, since censorship of the internet will affect every single person on it.

thank you so much for gathering all these sources. to anyone who sees this and is able, I urge you to call or email a senator. we don't have a lot of control in the United States, but this is a way we can have some agency against KOSA. I have the link for the Change.org page below

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Childhood Friends Jason and Danny: Remastered

CW: Mild Smoking / Smoking used as a form of bonding CW: Swearing || TW: Canon-Typical Violence expected from the DCU || CW: Mentions of Blood || CW/TW: VERY vaguely implied suicide || CW: Mild murderous intent

This is a rewritten form of my Childhood Friends Danny and Jason post. The original was set in a format that was meant to be more of a tumblr prompt rather than my usual written fanfic. (although it still ended up being 9k words) so i rewrote it!

Just like the original post, it comes with warnings! See the ones listed above. And without further ado, as I did for the original post:

Old Word Count Check: 9k | New Word Count Check: 26k -----------------

tell me once again i could have been anyone, anyone else before you made the choice for me my feet knew the path we walked in the dark, in the dark i never gave a single thought where it might lead

Danny Fenton is a born and raised Gotham child, a Crime Alley kid in and out. 

His parents are scientists, and nobody wants to fund their research. There is a running bet for when his parents finally snap and join Gotham’s long list of Rogues, the mad scientist peanut gallery. Jack Fenton is a construction worker, Maddie Fenton works at a corner store. It’s not a life either of them wants, and yet they still make time for science. 

Danny Fenton is also Jason Todd’s childhood friend. He is his best friend. They are the other side to each other’s coin; two halves of a whole. They meet when Danny is stealing a candy bar from a convenience store and gets caught. Jason knocks over the card rack, and in the commotion Danny flees out the front door with him hot on his heels. 

When they get a safe distance away, Danny pivots on his heel and shoves the candy bar into Jason’s chest with a heavy scowl, refusing to say thank you — it’s not thanks, it’s repayment. He refuses to have a debt to anyone; not even a kid his own age. Nothing ever comes free in Gotham’s streets, you’re dead if you think it does.  

But Jason surprises him, and gives it back. Danny is going to yell at him — who does he think he is — only to stop short. Out from Jason’s pocket is another bar, and Jason grins wryly at him, shaking it slowly. He says he has his own, and runs off in the opposite direction. 

Danny doesn’t see him until a week later, and when he does, Jason is cornered by three kids twice his age. They are beating him, and Danny thinks about leaving — it’s none of his business, but through the legs of the older kids, he makes eye contact with him. And before he’s really thought it through, Danny finds a broken bottle on the ground and throws himself into the fight, slamming the blunt end of the bottle into the side of one of the boys. 

They are black and blue in the end. Danny’s lip is busted and they both have black eyes, and Danny is missing a tooth. It’s a baby one, he doesn’t care regardless. He turns to Jason and drops the bottle, grinning bloody and panting.   

“Now we’re even.” He says, and leaves before Jason can say anything.

And it’s rinse and repeat. They keep running into each other. They keep helping each other. Repaying debt with debt until eventually Jason says that this cat and mouse is stupid, and they should just be friends. 

Danny agrees.  

It’s a friendship. Its partnership. It’s two balls of yarns being batted at each other; a game of cat’s cradle where they both decide to never untangle from each other. Danny doesn’t only protect Jason, Jason doesn’t only protect Danny. They’re equals, as they ought to be. Danny and Jason won’t have anything less. 

(“Where you go, I go. What you see, I see.” Jason says, his voice serious and full of conviction after Danny follows two guys into the even-shadier alleys of Gotham alone and nearly gets kidnapped. Danny’s lip is busted and his ribs hurt, but Jason has a vice grip on his fingers like he’s scared that he’ll disappear if he lets go. “Got it?”)

(Danny huffs but nods, he squeezes Jason’s hand. He’s trembling, just a little. But if Jason asks, he denies it. “Got it.”) 

“Like Batman and Robin.” Danny says when they sit on a rooftop late one night, hanging their feet off the edge and kick-kick-kicking at the old brick at their heels. They’re trying to glimpse a look at the dynamic duo as they soar across the foggy orange skyline, a silhouette of black, a flash of yellow. It’s a game for them both; trying to find the pair before the other does. 

Jason is winning, but Danny is close behind. 

When they’re a little older, Jason steals two cigarettes from his dad and brings them to the rooftop with a lighter. Danny mocks him for getting into an ‘unhealthy habit’, but when Jason lights them both and hands him one, he still takes it. 

(“Now who's getting into an unhealthy habit?” Jason says mockingly, holding his own cigarette clumsily between his fingers while Danny eyes his. 

“Shut up.” Danny retorts, but he’s hiding a smile in the curve of his lips and his voice lacks any kind bite. When he tries to suck on the unlit end, he chokes on smoke and careens into a coughing fit.

Jason laughs his ass off, and ends up doing the same.)  

(They will get better at it with time.) 

—----------

When Danny is eleven years old, his parents sit him and Jazz down and tell them that they’re moving out of Gotham. They say it as if it's good news. It is. It shouldn’t be. Jazz is ecstatic. Danny feels like his feet are going to give out underneath him. 

What about Jason? He thinks as they say that it's in Illinois. 

He can’t leave him here. 

They’re supposed to have each other’s backs. 

What is he going to tell him? 

He tells him the truth. He tells him when they’re hiding at the closest park, sharing a carton of Marlboro reds and a small bag of starbursts. Jason is chewing on the red and yellow ones, pressing the pink and orange ones into Danny’s hand.

Danny rips it off like a bandaid. 

“I’m moving.” He says in one breath. Fingers crushing the carton box as Jason stills. Their bird watching pauses as he turns his head to him.

He stares at Danny, uncomprehending. One second, two. “You’re moving?” He repeats, and Danny nods, a ball of knots growing in his ribs. Jason’s brows thread together, he’s frowning. “To… a new apartment?” 

There is a spiderweb in Danny’s throat, forcing it shut. He pries his jaw open, and forces himself to speak. “No, out of state.”

—----------

Jason won’t speak to him. He walks the other way when he sees him. He ignores him when Danny walks side by side and tries to say that it’s not his fault. It’s like talking to a brick wall. Jason is an immovable object, and Danny is an unstoppable force. Danny doesn’t want his last two weeks in Gotham to be one without his best friend. 

I don’t have a choice.

I don’t want to leave.

It wasn’t my decision.

Please believe me.

Please don’t ignore me.

Please talk to me.

(Danny and Jason are two halves of a whole. There was no separating one from the other without having friction.) 

Danny is half-convinced Jason will never speak to him again. He goes back home alone, in tears. Jason is mad at him. Jason’s not speaking to him. Jason is ignoring him. His parents come home late that night again, and Danny refuses to have dinner. He locks the door to the only bedroom they have and hides under the bed. 

On Saturday, Jason climbs the fire escape on the outside of the window and pushes it open. It creaks and squeals against the ruined frame, and he climbs through the gap. Danny stares at him from the bed, widened eyes. 

But Jason says nothing. He sits on the floor with his back to the window and crosses his arms, he’s angry. He’s scowling. He says nothing until Danny crawls over and fishes out a cigarette from under their dingy mattress and hands it to him. 

(It’s a ritual. It’s their ritual. When something is bothering the other, one half will hand their other a cigarette — any cigarette. Whether it be the one they’re using or a new one from the box. It’s an invitation, a go ahead, a silent ‘tell me your troubles’ to the other so that they can talk.) 

(If the other half takes it, then they can vent, rant, yell. Anything to get what’s haunting them off their chest. The half who gave it to them is silent, a shoulder to lean on, and ear to listen to, until they get the cigarette back, Then they can say anything.) 

He lights it, and like a dam bursting, begins to yell. 

I don’t want you to go.

It’s supposed to be you and I, always.

We’re supposed to have each other’s backs.

It’s not fair. You can’t leave me.

Who am I going to talk to now?

Why are you leaving?

You’re going so far.

I’m sorry for ignoring you.

I’m sorry I made you cry.

I’m sorry for hurting you.

Please don’t forget me.

He talks and talks until there’s nothing left of the cigarette but a burnt nub of ash. The remains are scattered around on the floor, Jason chucks it out the window, and Danny hands him another one. 

Jason gives it back, his eyes rimmed red and his chest heaving, panting. His chest hurts and his heart hurts. It feels like he can’t breathe, there’s a fist gripping his lungs; his throat. He wants to cry, he doesn’t want to. 

Danny is similarly as red-eyed as him, his face scrunched up in pain. He takes the cigarette that Jason gives back, and hops off the bed. For a moment, Jason thinks he’s going to tell him to get out, to yell back. They’re both stray dogs that bite the hands that feed, and they have always fed each other. It would be about time one of them showed their teeth. 

Danny hugs him instead, tight and suffocating, crushing Jason’s ribs as something wet and cold gathers at his shoulder where he’s shoved his face. “I’m not gonna forget you,” Danny croaks, “I’ll never forget you.” 

Jason digs his hands into the back of Danny’s shirt, he hangs his head and sobs.  

They both promise to find a way to keep in contact. Jason’s there in the kitchen when the Fenton parents return home from work. It’s Jazz who suggests penpals, letter-writing, since they don’t have phones. It’s a great idea. Jason writes his address on a napkin in the kitchen and Danny shoves it into his backpack.   

The next week, Danny is out of Gotham with his family and leaving half of himself behind.

—----------

Danny hates Amity Park from the moment he sees their stupid welcoming sign. It’s too bright, too clean. It looks polished and shiny and fake, right out of a ‘Welcome to Hollywood!’ postcard. Most importantly, it has no Jason. 

He finally has his own room in the house they move into, and he hates it too. It’s empty and plain and smells like plaster and dust. It feels all wrong. Danny is angry and hurt and alone. He sees his room and turns to his right on instinct to make a joke, but the air by his side is cold.

Danny takes the napkin out of his bag, and then throws the bag onto the bed. He hides in the closet until Jazz comes looking for him. 

He hates the middle school even more. It’s nicer than the school he and Jason used to go to before, with better teachers and better floors and better desks. It’s too bright, too nice, and he feels out of place like he does with everything else in this stupid city. He’s behind everyone in his class. 

(“We have a new student with us, class.” The teacher says, a woman whose name Danny doesn’t bother to learn. Danny stands next to her desk, hunched into himself and his hands shoved as far as they go into his threadbare jeans. “This is Danny Fenton, he just moved here from Gotham.” 

The reaction is immediate - shifty eyes and nervous chatter spread like a disease from desk to desk. Danny hears a girl whisper ‘He looks freaky.’ to her friend. He makes eye contact with her, and she wires her jaw shut. He continues staring at her.  

The teacher says to treat him kindly. Danny thinks fat chance. When she asks him if he has anything he’d like to say, he asks for his seat. He collapses into a desk by the window and hears the screech of desk legs moving away from him. He hates them too.)

He doesn’t get along with anyone. He doesn’t talk to anyone. He refuses to. His parents say they hope he makes new friends, and Danny doesn’t want any. He wants to go back to Gotham where Jason is. He butts heads with teachers, ignores his peers. He finds a spot in the bathroom during lunch and opens a carton of cigarettes that he nearly got caught taking. 

This place isn’t Gotham, and he hates it for it. 

He’s an outcast and he knows it — from his wardrobe that he hasn’t replaced, to his speech. His voice is thick with Gotham’s imprint; an accent that he never thought much of until he’s surrounded by people who don’t sound like he does.

(Late in the year, a teacher pulls him aside in a fit of annoyance and asks him why he couldn’t be more like his exemplary sister. Danny grins with all his teeth and tells that teacher that they’ve never even met his sister.)

(Gotham sinks its smog-and-coal stained claws into people and never lets go. It leaves a stain on the soul that smudges when you try and wipe at it, and Danny thinks it’s stupid that the people here think Jazz was left untouched by Gotham’s rust and rot. She wasn’t.)

(When school ended she’d disappear down the cracked and puddly streets much like Danny did with Jason, and only reappear back home when he did. And she returns as he did: ruffled and wild-eyed, teeth-baring. She’d be clutching a book or two — yellowed, torn, old, new, stained — under her arm like a dragon guarding an egg.) 

(Sometimes, like he did, she’d come back with a busted lip, a missing tooth. Something scratched, torn, bleeding. And they’d fix each other up silently while waiting for Mom and Dad to get home. Her fingers are quick and nimble, much more than Danny’s, but they are calloused like his. Her knuckles sometimes bloody. Half her books are borrowed, not bought.)

(She has her own scars that Danny doesn’t know the origin of, just like he has scars she doesn’t know the origin of either. Jazz has serrate edges just like Danny, she just hides it better than him.)

Danny finds people. Eventually. He watches during lunch as a kid with blond hair shoves another boy from their grade. His eyes turn to the teachers monitoring the lunchroom, and he waits, half-expecting for them to step in. 

He shouldn’t have expected anything. He sees a teacher watch the blond get in the boy’s face, and turns away. He’s right to hate this place. He watches as the blond takes the glasses off the other boy’s face, and breaks them.

And Danny stands up, blood beginning to boil. It’s not his business, but he and Jason have got in the way of fights before. Call it instinct if you will. And as he stands, he dumps the food from his tray onto the table and stalks across the room. There are eyes on him, other kids watch as he passes them by. 

The blond never sees him coming. He’s too busy mocking the boy, saying something in a nasally voice and calling him a mean nickname. There’s a girl there too, dressed in black, getting in the way of the blond and arguing back. 

Danny raises his tray like a weapon, and brings it down hard onto the blond’s head. He stumbles, he cries out, and Danny sees him whirl on his heel towards him. He looks hurt, infuriated. 

“You hit me!” He yells, and he looks half in disbelief. And the other half indignant - like he can’t believe someone would dare to. There are tears forming at the ends of his eyelashes. The other boy picks up his broken glasses and scurries away with the girl. He looks grateful. Danny twirls his tray and looks the blond in the eye. 

And hits him again.  

“You can hurt people, but I can’t hurt you back?” Danny scoffs when the boy yells at him to stop. But he doesn't hit him again. The boy runs off in tears, holding a red and swollen face, and Danny ends up in the principal’s office before class afterwards is over. 

He sits opposite to the kid he hit and his parents, alone. The principal calls him Dash, and Danny says, “I’m sorry.” The moment he hears it. All three adults look at him, the Dash looks smug, as do his parents. Danny smiles something mean and full of broken glass. “Not for hittin’ you. That your parents named you fuckin’, Dash.” 

He gets yelled at by three adults that day, and gets sent home with a week long suspension. 

When he tells his parents, they descend on the school like a pair of vultures — full of fury and out for blood, ready to tear into anything they can get their talons on — and currently their target is the principal. Danny comes along, and finds that they’re not the only ones. The bullied boy’s parents are there as well, their voices come through the door as they yell when the Fentons arrive. 

The bullied boy is sitting outside the principal’s office when Danny’s parents go in, and two loud voices ascend into four. He looks surprised to see him. “Thanks.” He says when Danny sits down across from him. “For saving me from Dash, I mean. You didn’t have to do that.” 

Danny just shrugs, uncomfortable with gratitude. “He’s a dick.” 

“I’m Tucker.”

“Danny.” 

—----------

So Danny makes one friend. He tells Jason about it in his next letter — one of many that he’s sent since he was able to. And by extension, he makes a friend in Sam Manson. She tells him ‘good hit’ when Tucker sits next to him during lunch when Danny comes back from suspension — now reduced to three days and detention after. 

Danny likes her for all of five minutes. And then his opinion sours. Sam asks him about his upbringing, about Gotham. She judges his smoking — he’s been caught doing it — and Danny is willing to let it slide. But Sam is judgy; pushy at all the wrong times, and Danny thinks he’d like her better if she knew what she was talking about. 

His opinion on Sam Manson? A brat. 

And he ignores it, for a while. He likes Tucker enough to tolerate her. He thinks she has some kind of superiority complex. She boasts about being vegetarian, and judges Tucker for eating meat, and other stuff that Danny thinks is annoying. 

When Danny has enough, he turns to Sam and asks her if she knows what the shelf life for a head of lettuce is. She says nothing, she looks confused. He asks her if she knows how much it costs for a loaf of bread. 

Her silence is loud. Her silence is damning. 

He turns to Tucker, and asks him if he knows the shelf life of a tomato, and the same bread question. Tucker looks between him and Sam like a fish out of water, he looks confused. “Like a week? It depends.” He stammers, “And bread’s been four bucks? I’ve heard my parents talking about it.” 

Danny nods silently, and turns back to Sam. He knows all he needs to. “You’re privileged.”

He watches, fascinated, as her face turns a new shade of red. 

Sam doesn't look at him for a week after, and Danny refuses to apologize. Tucker is caught between a rock and a hard place as his old friend and new friend are feuding with each other.

They’ll... sort it out eventually. 

—----------

Letter-sending is almost religious between Jason and Danny. When Danny gets home the first thing he does is beeline for his mailbox and search it for a letter response. Jason tells him that Crime Alley isn’t the same without him there. His dad has been getting into shit he shouldn’t be, and he’s dragging Jason along with it. 

(‘He has me jacking tires from cars.’ Jason says in a letter one night, ‘And he gets pissed if I take too long.’)

(Danny hates Willis Todd with all his being.)

Danny tells him about school in Amity Park, he tells him about the fight he had with a kid named Dash - and the subsequent friends he made from it. He says he’s been getting into the astronomy books in the library. His reading is getting better. So is his writing. His best subject is math. 

He sends Jason a book he thinks he’ll like. He stole it from the library. 

(‘Mom and dad have a creepy lab in the basement.’ He writes one day in the kitchen, one eye watching the door leading down to it. He isn’t sure what they’re making, but he can hear them working. He avoids it like the plague. ‘I have no idea what they’re making down there, but I bet it's more ghost stuff.’) 

(He’s never liked their inventions. They were half-baked creations they made from whatever junk they could find from their respective jobs. In Gotham, Danny would drag Jason into the bedroom when they went home and his parents were working on something in the kitchen.)

(“They’re safety hazards.” He complains when Jason jokes that he thinks it's cool. He has a vice grip on his hand, and locks the door when they’re both inside. “I’ll bet you that it blows up in an hour and we have to evacuate the building.” He never touches their things.) 

—----------

When they’re both twelve, Jason sends Danny a curveball of a letter. ‘I stole the wheels off the Batmobile.’ He says in the first opening sentence. ‘And then I hit Batman with a tire iron.’ 

Danny needs to read it three times before he can understand what it says. “Bullshit.” He says involuntarily at the kitchen table, and gets glared at by Jazz. The letter keeps going, and tells him about what happened leading up to it and after it — the crime front he uncovered at the wayward youth school he was sent to, his step-mom’s death, Willis’ arrest. It all sounds too crazy to be true. But Jason’s never lied to him before, not about this. 

And then Jason, that asshole, ends his letter with, ‘And now I think I’m getting adopted by Bruce Wayne.’ 

Danny’s yelling fills the house. There’s no way — there’s no. Way. Bruce Wayne and all his philanthropy would never, not once, look at Crime Alley. Except when Danny checks the Gotham news at the school library the next day, there are articles and articles of papers talking about Bruce Wayne’s new son: Jason Todd.  

Danny sends two letters. The first one is just a single paper with the words ‘WHAT THE FUCK JASON?’  written in bold sharpie, longform across the page. Danny writes ‘open first’ on the envelope he seals it in. 

The next letter is a proper one, tearing into him about stealing Batman’s tires — what was he like? Did he say anything? Was he as monstrous as the rumors say he is? — and apologizing about Catherine, and reluctantly about Willis. He updates him about the livings of Amity Park and everything that’s happened, and then he tells Jason to tell him all about Wayne Manor. 

He gets a letter response back in less than a week, express shipping. Danny calls him a fancy motherfucker in his reply back, but he’s grinning ear-to-ear as he scans through the letter. 

Jason tells him about the monster-sized library in the left wing of the house — and he did say wing. Danny can’t believe this. And he says that there’s a butler named Alfred, and Alfred will make him anything he asks as long as he does so politely. And that his bedroom alone is bigger than both their apartments combined.

He encloses photos, and Danny pins them up into his room. 

(For Danny’s birthday that year, Jason sends him the latest phone with a note attached - Bruce helped pick it out with him, and there’s a number attached to it. Danny tears through the living room to find the outlet and plugs it in. The first thing he does is text the number.) 

(He gets an immediate response back. Danny’s never slammed the ‘call’ button faster, and they both cry when he hears Jason’s voice pick up on the other end. The phone call goes well into the evening — it’s Danny’s favorite birthday present.)

—----------

“My parents are forcing me to go to this stupid ball next weekend.” Sam complains one Monday at lunch, where the three of them are tucked away in a neat little corner that gives Danny a good view of the entire room. It means that Dash and his gang can’t sneak up on him easily.  

His eyes slide to her lazily, his chin in his palm as he swirls the peaches on his tray disinterestedly. They’d begun to get along… steadily… recently, and it was through this that both him and Tucker found out she was mega-watt rich. 

(When she told them, Danny in an automatic response says, “I could tell.” And she whirls on him so fast he thinks sparks fly from the ground, their feuding nearly re-ignited.) 

He hums low, and stabs a peach with his fork. “Yeah?” He says, “Have fun.” Sam’s complained about these things before now, and he thinks it’s funny listening to her talk shit about all of the people she met and saw at whatever socialite event she was dragged into. 

Sam rolls her eyes at him, angrily grumbling under her breath. And she murders a tomato in her salad, “The only upside is that it’s a charity ball. My parents have been excited to go to one of the Martha Wayne Foundation galas for ages.” 

Danny’s head snaps up so fast he recoils back, he chokes on nothing, eyes bugging out of its sockets. “You’re going to Gotham?” He asks, breathless with the feeling of his heart skipping too many beats in too short of a time. Sam and Tucker look at him, surprise written on their faces. 

He doesn’t care. Sam’s going to Gotham. She’s going to a Wayne gala. 

A Wayne Gala. Where Jason will be. He knows he will, Jason’s told him all about it before. 

He leans forward, eyes ever wider than before. “Can I come with you? Please?”  

He hasn’t seen his best friend in a year. And Sam and Tucker look at him like he’s grown a second head. Like they can’t believe he would willingly ask to go to one of these parties when he has never shown an interest before. Not when he’s an even more avid-hater of rich people than Sam. 

“We can make fun of rich people together.” Danny continues, like he’s trying to sweeten the deal of Sam bringing him with when he never has before. He is. He hasn’t told either of them about Jason, he never wanted to. They’ll have to know about him after this, but for now Danny wants to keep him a secret a little longer. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? It’ll be fun. Please?”  

Please, he thinks, I’ll beg you, watching Sam like a hawk. His fingers dig into the table, he wants to go. He wants to see his best friend. He can make it a surprise. Just like how Jason sent him a phone, but even better. 

Sam agrees with a slow, confused ‘yes’, like she’s only saying it to figure out why Danny’s even asked. Danny’s grin is blinding in return, driven like the sun. “You won’t regret this.” he says, sitting back down. There is joy pushing against the back of his teeth and swelling all the way down into his lungs, pushing and pushing against him with a cheer. 

It takes convincing to let Danny come along. But all Danny tells his parents is that Jason will be there, that he and Jay won’t leave the building, they’ll be safe, and they agree. They’ve always supported him through thick and thin. He promises to be careful, he will. 

It’s Sam’s parents that take more convincing, and Danny isn’t surprised. They don’t want to bring just anyone with, and especially not Danny when they see him - unrefined clothes, his jeans fraying at the hems, shirts wrinkled and his hair uncombed. But Sam promises to be on her best behavior, and reluctantly throws in that she’ll wear whatever her mom picks out.

And just like that, Danny is coming along. Sam’s dad drags him out shopping for a suit when he reveals that he doesn’t own one — “I would have bought you one anyways.” He says at some fancy boutique with a name that’s as equally as presumptuous. “We can’t have a plus one coming with us in a cheap suit — no offense, Daniel.” 

Danny bites back what he wants to say; vitriol in its most poisonous form. All the sharp things he’s picked up from Crime Alley and put in his mouth in hopes of filing down his teeth, he swallows. He grins a grimace. It just barely feels like teeth baring. “None taken, Mr. Manson.” 

(They end up finding him a nice suit in classic black, and Danny thinks that’s it. But it’s not, he spends the next few hours getting it tailored to him. Mr. Manson is having fun, he says his wife loves to play dress up with Sam, and he’s starting to see the appeal.) 

(Danny tenses his jaw — embers simmer in his gut, and he stares at Mr. Manson, wishing to spit acid at him. He wants to rust every pretty, shiny thing he owns. I am not a doll, he thinks, and realizes exactly why Sam rebels so much. It’s only been a few hours, and he can’t stand it.) 

(He finds that he really hates suit jackets. He’s not quite sure why. But he likes the vests. He hates ties, and Mr. Manson buys him a silk blue one that Danny thinks about pawning the moment he gets back from the Gala.)

(“I get it now.” He says bluntly the next time he sees Sam, he meets her in her room, larger than his but smaller than the photos he’s gotten from Jason. He throws himself onto one of her bean bag chairs, landing on it with an ungraceful plop.)

(His fingers itch for the cigarettes he has in his jacket’s pockets, he digs for his lighter. He pulls out neither, for now. This is Sam’s room. She doesn’t like his smoking, and they’re slowly becoming friends. “You’re a saint for dealing with that for twelve years.”)

(Sam snorts at him, turns her head and gives him a grin. “Wanna put on makeup that would give my parents a heart attack?” She asks, and she’s already reaching over to her dresser for an occultic-looking eye shadow palette.) 

(Danny matches her grin with his own, and sits up. It’s not smoking, but that will just have to be a thing between him and Jason. “Hell yes, what do you have in mind?” They  call up Tucker to join them.) 

—----------

Sam’s parents own a private jet that Sam hates with a burning passion. Danny knows this because she’s ranting to him about it from their seats inside it, the ground far below them. They’re on their way to Gotham, and Danny’s excitement has twisted and churned into fear. Like milk into butter. 

His leg hasn’t stopped bouncing since they took off, and he misses half of Sam’s rant on the horrible usage of private planes amongst the elite and the fact that they pump more carbon into the air in one hour than a hundred cars ever will. He tells her as such, and promises to listen to it again when he’s not as distracted. 

(“Why are you so nervous anyways?” She asks with a heavy frown, leaning back into her plush leather seat. “You haven’t said anything at all about why you wanna go to this thing.”)

(Danny doesn’t wanna tell her. He chews the nail of his thumb, and he’ll chew it to the bed he thinks. He feels like a sparking live wire, his nerves frayed down to the thread. He’s going to see Jason in just a few hours, it doesn’t feel quite real. He still remembers the day he left like it was yesterday.)

(“I know.” He says when he realizes he hasn’t said anything at all. He presses his chin onto his fingers. His foot tap-tap-tapping. He wants a smoke to soothe his anxieties, but they’re on a plane. He’ll voice this to Sam later and she’ll scoff and say that she doesn’t feel any sympathy for him. But she gets him a sucker to chew on anyways.)

(“I can’t tell you,” Danny continues, and looks up to meet Sam’s eyes. “But it’s a surprise. You’ll see when we get there.”)

(If I tell you now I won’t be able to stop.) 

When they touch down they have a chauffeur waiting for them and a sleek black car parked. It’s all a little intimidating, overwhelming, but Sam just seems over it. And Danny can’t stop staring out the window as they drive into the city. It’s weird to be back. But it’s familiar, and welcoming in that way.

Sam seems all the more interested in the architecture, and so Danny points out the gargoyles perched atop some of the roofs. There are streets he recognizes, at first. Streets he’s gone down with Jason countless times, and then there are ones that he doesn’t. The richer parts of Gotham that Danny couldn’t afford to breathe in. 

(“You know a lot about Gotham, Danny.” Mrs. Manson says from the front, she peers over her shoulder with a sweet, practiced smile. “Did you research the city before we got here?”)

(“No, Mrs. Manson.” Danny says, glancing at Sam in confusion — didn’t they know? But her embarrassed look tells him no, they didn’t. Sam never told them. “I grew up here.” He knows his accent has steadily begun to fade since arrival, but surely it wasn’t entirely gone?) 

(Mrs. Manson blinks, her practiced smile sewn into her face. “Oh!” She says lightly, there’s only a slight crinkle in her brows as she tilts her head. “Mind I ask where?” She looks discomfited, and wary of how he might respond.)

(Danny’s never told Sam where he grew up. He didn’t want to deal with questions, or discomfort. But with Jason so close to him, he smiles all sharp things and discarded syringes. “Park Row, Ma’am,” he says, leaning in his seat, “but only the Elite call it that. Everyone else just calls it Crime Alley.”)

(Mrs. Manson says nothing, but both she and Mr. Manson look green around the gills, as if being near a street rat makes them physically ill. Danny soaks it in with delight. Good, he thinks, be uncomfortable. He settles back into his chair.) 

They stop at a high-end hotel that Danny’s only ever imagined staying in. A bell hopper takes their bags and Danny swallows the urge to bite his hand off when he grabs Danny’s bag. Don’t touch my things, he nearly snaps, ingrained-old instinct twitching his hands out for the handle before he forces it back to his side. 

It’s not going to be stolen, he tells himself. And follows the Mansons into the lobby. He feels out of place immediately, with its red carpet and marble floors and shimmering chandeliers. He squares his shoulders and sets his jaw in response, falling back on old habits of making himself appear as the biggest person in the room.             

—----------

They primp and preen for the night incoming once they reach their hotel room, their bags already waiting for them. Danny snatches his first and puts it somewhere easy to hide, and he ignores the shared looks between the Manson couple. He doesn’t care about their judgment. 

Sam’s dragged into a separate room by her mother, a plastic garment bag hung over her mother’s arms as she cheerily slams the door shut. Mr. Manson prepares himself, and Danny gets ready on his own, doing only what’s required of him. 

He paces through the room after he’s gotten into his suit, tugging on the sleeves of his fresh-ironed button down that’s been tailored to him specifically nervously. He’s going to wear a hole into the carpet or his socks, whatever comes first, and chews on his lip. He’s itching for a cigarette, and didn’t bring any with.

The tie is almost suffocating around his neck, tied there by Mr. Manson in a bout of faux-kindness. Danny knows it’s only an obligation to prevent him from looking like a mess. 

(When Sam comes out nearly an hour later, she wears a murderous expression on her face and her mother comes out looking like a preening bird. Mrs. Manson is wearing white, but Sam wears a soft baby pink. In a dress that goes below her knees with a small bow at the front. It’s sleeveless.) 

(Danny chokes on a laugh when he sees her, Mr. and Mrs. Manson mistake it for him choking on air, speechless. When he makes his way over, he gives her a raised-eyebrow once over. “Wow.” He says, and smothers his grin when purple eyes flick to him dangerously.)

(Watch your next words, Sam’s face reads. Danny presses his lips together to try and not laugh.) 

(“You look ridiculous.” His shoulders tremble with restrained glee, a fist pressing into his mouth. Sam glares at him like she’s mentally peeling the skin off his body like a potato, but the tension in her shoulders recedes slightly.) 

(“Good.” She sniffs, and looks down at the dress with a scowl. She keeps her arms hovering over herself like she’s afraid of touching the fabric.“I thought you were going to compliment me.”)

(“In that?” Danny snorts, “Never.”) 

(He reaches for his phone and takes a picture to send to Tucker, and Sam nearly kills him for it. He manages to hit send before she can steal it out of his hands. And then he dodges her.)

And when it’s finally time to leave, Danny’s hands tap against his pockets in a quick-pace rhythm that matches his heartbeat. He’s stone-faced with anxiety, with fear, and as they make their way to the rented-out limousine Sam links her arms with him. 

It’s a comfort and anchor that he desperately needs, and he squeezes her arm gently with a weak smile. They had a better friendship thing than he thought. 

—----------

If there’s one thing Danny’s learned, it’s that he hates the paparazzi. They’re loud, bright, and demanding. Hordes of them push against the red velvet ropes that lead into the building where the gala is being held, and Danny wants to sink into his seat when he sees them from the limousine window. 

He can hear them shouting question after question, like a hive of buzzing bees. Well, no, that’s insulting to bees. But there’s wave after wave of them like an overlapping tide, Danny can hear them through the car when they pull up.

When he looks at Sam with wide, wide eyes, she looks back with a poker face. He wonders how many of these she’s been to for her to have a face like that. He forces his face to smooth over as well. They link arms once again right before the doors open, and he helps her out. 

He tries not to blink so much when he’s flashbanged with a hundred cameras at once. The shouting grows even louder, and he forces himself to tune it all out like white noise as he follows the Manson couple inside. On the stairs, they whisper to him and Sam that they’re to greet the Waynes first. 

Danny’s heart leaps into his throat, and he jams himself straight up like he’s been electrocuted. He feels Sam burning her eyes into him. 

He doesn’t look at her. 

He can’t tell if it's blood pounding or his heart beating that he hears in his ears as they walk towards the congregation of people at the near center of the room, Danny can’t help but compare it to an asteroid belt. Even from a distance, Danny can see Mister Wayne in midst conversation with a rich couple. 

There’s a picture perfect smile on Mister Wayne’s face that Danny’s only ever seen printed on the front of the billboards littered around Gotham. It’s almost surreal to see it up close and in person, and he feels stiff in his walking. His grip around Sam’s arm is near-bruising, he thinks. 

He loosens it with a quiet apology. 

It gets jammed back up his throat when he drops his eyes down and sees Jason Todd pressed against Mister Wayne’s side, dressed in a mimicking fine black suit like the one Mister Wayne wears. It looks even more expensive than the one Danny has on. He’s not sure how it’s possible. 

But Jason looks completely disinterested in the people around him, a look that Dany half-grins to. He’s not even trying to hide his boredom, and it’s so expressly Jason that Danny feels overwhelmed with too many emotions to name. That’s his best friend right there. 

He’s gotten taller in the year they’ve been away, he looks older. Danny bets he does too, but it’s so different seeing age on another person’s face. It’s sharp, abrupt. But Jason looks healthy. It’s the best thing Danny thinks he’s seen. And his hair has been cut, clean and professional. 

Look at you! He wants to shout, I almost didn’t recognize you! 

It’d be funny to announce himself with a joke, but he finds that words won’t come easy to him. He’ll stutter and trip right over his own tongue if he says anything, he can’t think of anything that works just right. All his words are all clogged up. 

Jason beats him to it though. Danny watches as his eyes sweep left, away from him, and then right. He counts the seconds before Jason sees him, because when he looks right his eyes flick to him, and then look away like an instinct. 

It would’ve stung, had Jason not immediately backtracked only moments later. Danny watches him do a double take, and then looks right back in Danny’s direction. Blue-meets-blue and the air holds still as their eyes lock.

The room feels like it's in slow motion as a grin stretches toothily across Danny’s face. It slants and goes lopsided, and the corner of his mouth trembles with the strain of how far his smile goes. It’s only been a year, and they’ve talked on the phone. But it’s not the same as being in person. 

He sees the moment Jason processes the sight before him. Danny’s arm is already slipping out of Sam’s by the time Jason fills an ecstatic smile out from over his mouth. Jason is already turning full-body towards him.    

His lopsided grin fills out on the other end. 

"DANNY!" Jason yells, his voice slicing through the air like a bullet. He cuts off whatever Mister Wayne is saying, and startles everyone within earshot in the process. Mister Wayne doesn’t have time to look down — to admonish or see whatever it was that Jason was yelling at— because Jason is already running across the floor.  

Whatever part of his arm that was still linked to Sam is yanked away, and Danny breaks away from her. “JASON!” He yells, perhaps even louder than Jason did, the two of them always competing in some way or another. 

There’s a dizzying sense of glee as Jason collides with him like an asteroid, and Danny grunts as the air is knocked out of him. But he’s laughing, the two of them nearly toppling over as Jason wraps his arms around tight over Danny’s shoulders. His fingers dig into Danny’s shoulder blades like he might disappear, and they both spin around in circles. 

I’ve missed you so much. 

I can’t believe you’re here.

I’ve missed you.

I’ve missed you.

I’ve missed you. 

“You didn’t tell me you were coming!” Jason cries, grinning from ear to ear even as his voice cracks down the middle, like lightning splitting a tree in half. Danny laughs brightly, unanswering, and hugs him tight as if they may as well fuse together. Jason pounds a fist into his shoulder blade, but goes back to squeezing him like a constrictor.

“I wanted it to be a surprise!” Danny says as their spinning slows to a stop. They don’t let go of each other, they refuse to, but they do pull apart slightly to look at each other better. Jason looks at him like he’s greedily trying to memorize every part of his face, a death grip put on his arms, and Danny’s grin widens. “How could my own best friend be adopted by the Bruce Wayne and have me not come see it with my own two eyes? I had to make sure it was real!”       

Jason’s eyes narrow but his smile betrays his face, “I sent you photos!” He accuses, and Danny notices the slight fade in his accent. 

Danny’s grin tilts again, twisting into something mischievous. "Oh that's what it was?" He feigns an innocent tone. “I thought you sent me pictures of a really convincing green screen.” He has them hung up in his room.    

The fist of Jason collides with his shoulder, hard, hard enough to leave a bruise. "You jackass." And then it grips back around his arm, and Danny thinks that Jason might tear fabric with how tight his fingers are. 

Danny’s laughing harder than ever, and Jason is holding back his own. 

They’re only interrupted by the soft, sharp clearing of someone’s throat. It breaks their attention away from each other and towards the source of the noise. 

Ah, right, Danny thinks, seeing Bruce Wayne standing before them. We’re at a gala. He totally forgot. 

Bruce Wayne is a tall man, he’s taller than Danny realized. And he’s built like Superman. But he looks just like he does in the billboards. Danny is expecting him to be upset with them both, despite the letters he’s read from Jason stating otherwise. But he’s not. He doesn’t seem to care that Danny and Jason have disrupted his pretty, rich gala. Instead he looks amused, with his eyebrow arched in curiosity. 

Overall, however, he looks fond. Fonder than someone would have been if they’d adopted a kid as a charity case. And Danny silently and guiltily admits to thinking it, just a little. He thought Jason was just going to be a replacement for Mister Wayne’s other kid after he finally moved out. 

But Danny’s a good judge of character — or he likes to think he is — and trying not to end up dead on the streets has refined that ability at least a little bit. And the eyes of Bruce Wayne do not look like the eyes of a man who only took in Jason as a charity case. They look like the eyes of a man who actually, genuinely, cares about Jason Todd.     

The wriggly, protective thing settles in his chest.

He doesn’t let go of Jason, which is fine because Jason doesn’t let go of him either, but he does twist his smile into something a little more polite. Or at least something more polite than he’s given the Mansons all evening. 

Mister Wayne’s eyebrow arches higher, and turns his blue-blue eyes onto Jason. “Who’s this, Jason?” He asks in that fancy High Gotham Elite accent, something that sounds like old transatlantic and the regular Gotham accent combined that Danny’s only ever heard in passing from whenever he and Jason snuck up to the nicer parts of Gotham. 

Jason doesn’t even bother to look sheepish, he just tugs Danny back into his side and loops an arm around his neck. “This is Danny, B.” He says, eyes flicking around the room to all the other onlookers. “We grew up in Crime Alley together, he moved to Illinois last year.” 

Danny watches discomfort flit across the faces of nearly every person present, soft murmurs sweeping across the floor like a small wind as their expressions turn flinty and cold. Danny doesn’t care — let them judge him for all he cares. In the end, they’re worse than him.  

Inching closer to Jason is as easy as breathing, although it’s completely unneeded as they are as close as they can physically get. Instead, he leans into him, straightening up like they’re back in Crime Alley and facing off a pack of angry older kids.  

He locks eyes with a balding white man who is particularly open about his own disgust in Danny’s presence at Wayne’s ‘pristine’ gala. 

Stay back, Danny thinks. He broadcasts. I bite. 

The man looks away first. 

Recognition crosses Mister Wayne’s face, and he visibly perks up, his smile softening as his blue-blue eyes then turn to Danny. “Oh, yes! I realize now, you’re always on the phone with him.” He holds out a hand to Danny, and Danny’s eyes flick to the glimmering watch wrapped around his wrist.

He wonders how much he could sell that for if he stole it, and he wrestles an arm free from Jason’s grasp to lean forward and shake Mister Wayne’s hand. He doesn’t touch the watch at all. “Nice to meet you, Mister Wayne. Like Jay said, m’Danny.”  

“You too, Danny.” Mister Wayne says, and Danny is impressed by how sincere he sounds. Maybe he is being sincere, maybe he’s just a good liar. But considering he looks at Jay like how Danny’s parents look at himself, he just might think it's the latter. “It’s a relief to see that Jason has a friend here.” 

“Thanks.” Danny smiles, “Jay’s told me a lot about you.” 

Mister Wayne’s brows jump momentarily, he looks intrigued. And Danny grins as Jason tugs on his arm and hisses at him under his breath. “Well then,” Mister Wayne says, clapping his hands together softly. “I bet you both have a lot to catch up on then, hm? I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt to let you go off with Danny, Jason.”

Danny perks up, excitement crawling up his ribcage as he shares a hopeful look with Jason. “Really?” He asks, and Mister Wayne laughs lightly.  

"Of course! How could I keep two friends apart? Go on ahead, chum. I'll come get you when the gala ends."

And with that said, Bruce Wayne bids them adieu and turns back to the rest of the party, returning to conversation with the gothamite couple again. And with it, he takes all of the attention as, almost as if he were the sun and everyone else was the solar system that was orbiting it. 

Danny has to admit, it was impressive. But it doesn’t work on him. 

He turns and immediately throws his arms around Jason once again, rocking them side-to-side with a laugh, Jason’s hands scrabbling at his back and gripping back onto his jacket hard enough to leave wrinkles. He’s on cloud nine, pressing his nose into Jason’s shoulder and breathing him in, with Jason doing much the same. 

He still smells like cigarettes, and Danny bets he smells the same. But covered by time and the more likelier option, cologne that costs the same as a house, the smell is smothered and faded. Something old, something new, he supposes. 

Sam wants answers when they finally, for real this time, pull apart, flouncing up beside them both in her pink dress and a burning look in her eyes. She asks him if this was why Danny wouldn’t tell her why he wanted to come along — and why he told her it was a surprise. 

Danny slings his arm around Jason's shoulders and keeps him close, with Jason mimicking him, his nails dig into Danny’s jacket, and tells her yes. That’s exactly why he kept it secret. “I don’t like sharing.” He says with a jack-knife and playful smile, and shakes Jason’s shoulder. “I wanted to keep my best friend to myself a little longer.”

(The sharp knife his tongue has turned into is quelled, and it’s a testament to how their friendship has grown from when they first met. Had she asked him a few months ago,  he would have said that it’s none of her business.)  

Sam's parents sidle in on behind her with saccharine sweet expressions on their faces, and Danny doesn’t fall for it for a second. He’s not dumb, he hasn’t forgotten that they too are disdained by him being near them. A Gotham street rat, the lowest of the low. But they are part greed, he is their in to the elusive Bruce Wayne, a man who somehow manages to be always in the public eye with his secrets on his sleeve, but also incredibly private. 

Danny ignores them.

He introduces Sam to Jason, and Jason to Sam. (And when Jason learns her name, he raises his eyebrow and looks at Danny, and then back to Sam. “You look more different than how Danny said you did.” He tells her, “More… pink.”)

(“It wasn’t my choice.” Sam grumbles, shooting her parents a look over her shoulder. Her mother just titters and says that she looks so cute, and she agreed to do it.)

And it’s not long before Jason drags them off to a dark corner of the buffet table, he and Jason weave in and between the other socialites with the same ease as weaving down the sidewalk at noon. Sam lags behind, and eventually catches up. They steal snacks from the table, and talk shit about each person in the room.

At some point, Sam is called away by her parents as they attempt to introduce her to the rare few handfuls of other rich kids in the gala that they want her to get along with. Danny tells her not to murder anyone before she leaves, and after she disappears into the throng of people, Jason tugs on Danny’s hand and drags him out to the west end balcony.

It’s cold out, and Danny’s jacket isn’t meant to keep the chill out but he doesn’t care. He goes over and hops onto the balcony railing as Jason reaches into his pockets and pulls out a cigarette pack from his inner jacket. Danny zeroes in on the carton, and Jason laughs at him.

"Don't tell Bruce," he says, handing the box to Danny first. "He's been trying to get me to quit ever since I moved in."

"Hah!" Danny snatches one stick out from the carton, and Jason counts his fingers as he pulls out his lighter. "That sounds like Jazz. She's been trying to get me to stop since we moved to Amity." Granted, she's been trying ever since she found out before they moved, but now she was even more insistent. It was funny what she did and didn’t tolerate. "She hasn't found my stash yet." He had more than one. He had to, Jazz was clever. 

“She’s started to grow her hair out.” He tells him, scrunching his nose. Jason gives him a surprised look, “It’s weird. I don’t think she knows what to do with it.” She’s always kept it short for as long as he could remember. It’s harder to grab that way.

(At some point while they’re outside, Danny suddenly remembers something and twists himself towards Jason — who’s leaning against the railing, his legs kicked out. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth, “Hey, you know since you’re a Wayne now, is it true that Bruce Wayne is Batman’s sugar daddy?”) 

(He tumbles into loud laughter when Jason chokes on smoke and yanks his own cig from his mouth, coughing into his arm harshly. “Wh- what?” He croaks, and Danny can see his eyes watering with the light filtering out from the window.) 

(“Don’t tell me you forgot.” Danny grins, gripping the railing and leaning forward to peer around him. “Seriously man, you get adopted by Bruce Wayne and you fucking forget all of the rumors surrounding him and Bats?”)

(“I didn’t forget.” Jason says, his voice rasping as he glares at him. “I just wasn’t expecting you to say that shit so suddenly.”)

(“So is it true?”)

(“Duh, it’s true.”)   

(Danny whoops into the air, leaning back to punch the sky with a laugh. “I knew it!” He cheers, and from the corner of his eye Jason scrambles to lean over and catch him from potentially falling over the edge. “Suck it, David Roberts. I was right!”)

(Jason sputters at him, his hand curled tight onto the shirt on his back. Danny sits back up, and it reluctantly falls away. “Do you still have that vendetta against him?” He asks, a smile disbelieving tilted on his face.) 

(He gets a scoff from Danny, “Of course I do!” He says derisively, he’ll always have a grudge against him, even if it’s as petty as something like whether or not Batman was a sugar baby. Never let it be said that Danny doesn’t hold grudges. “If I see him again I’ll rub it in his face.”) 

(Then he remembers another thing, and Danny perks up. Irritance melts away like snow under the spring sun and turns into genuine curiosity. “Hey— have you met the new Robin yet?” He asks, and watches Jason straighten up. “C’mon, you just said Batman was Bruce’s sugar baby. You’ve gotta have met Robin — what’s he like? Is he cool? I bet he’s cool, Robins are always cool.”) 

(Jason stares at him, and then splits into a wide grin. “Fuck yeah, he’s cool. He’s even cooler than the old Robin.”)

(Danny clicks his tongue, but he’s matching Jason’s smile with one of his own. “I don’t know man, I don’t think anyone could ever beat the original bird.” He jokes, “But you should get me his autograph the next time you see him, just in case.”)

(“No, no, I’m telling you, D, he’s fucking cool as shit—”) 

When the night ends and the Mansons are leaving, Danny and Jason walk back to Mister Wayne to tell him that Danny’s going. They’re both arm-locked again, and Danny dreads having to step away from Jason again, a feeling he knows Jason reciprocates by the circulation-crushing grip he has on him. 

Mister Wayne mourns his leaving, but tells him that he’s always welcome to visit whenever he feels like. “Any friend of Jason’s is always welcome to the manor.” He says, a grin blinding across his face. 

It lifts Danny’s spirits more than he thought it would. Jason throws decorum to the wind and cheers. 

—----------

It becomes a new routine for Danny to go to the Wayne galas whenever they’re hosted and Jason comes along. They coordinate it, funnily enough, and the Mansons are all too happy to bring him along as his and Sam’s chaperone. 

(Of which she blames him for because she keeps having to wear clothes her mother picks out until the both of them can wrangle Mrs. Manson into letting Sam wear the style she likes. It takes a bit of convincing and bartering — Sam can either pick the color and Mrs. Manson the style, or Sam can pick the style and Mrs. Manson the color. In the end, they settle on letting Sam pick the style and Mrs. Manson the color.) 

Danny is all too happy to spend the evenings with Jason again, and his parents are happy to let him go with the conditions that he keeps his grades up. They love him, and they’ll let certain things slide, but grades are not one of them. Danny thinks it's a fair trade in order to see Jason again.

No matter what, they always end up on the west end balcony at one point or another that night. Sometimes Sam joins them, but she hates the smell of nicotine, so those moments are far and few in between. She stands outside the door and hides behind the curtains, hiding from her parents.         

Finally, eventually, Danny is invited to stay at Wayne Manor for a weekend or a break. There he meets Dick Grayson, who shows him and Jason how to scale up the chandeliers. Danny’s not too good at it, but Jason picks up on it remarkably quickly and helps drag Danny up onto one. 

(“He’s crazy!” Danny whispers, stifling his laughter as he situates himself on one of the arms of the chandelier. It rocked, and Danny kept a shaking vice grip on the metal. He can’t stop looking down, his jaw unable to stop dropping. “This is fucking crazy!”)

(Jason is stifling laughter as well, hiding his mouth behind his hand. “I know! You should see him when he’s going down the banisters. I think he’s responsible for Bruce’s gray hairs.”) 

(Bruce asks them to try and stay out of trouble more often than not, a small fond smile on his face followed by an exasperated sigh. Danny and Jason cross their pinkies jinx around each other, hidden behind their backs, and chorus, “We will!”)

And sometimes, Jason comes to Amity Park instead. Danny drags him all across town with Sam and Tucker, showing him all their favorite spots. He still avoids the lab like a plague, but points the door out to Jason when he comes over for the first time. And he shows him the ecto-samples in the fridge, and grabs a knife when a possessed weenie flies out and tries to attack him. It ends up embedded into the table, and Danny winces at the crack it leaves in the wood. Whoops.

When Christmas break rolls around, Danny jumps at the chance to spend the time with Jason at the manor instead. He loves his parents, he does! But holidays are the only times he ever sees them argue badly and he doesn’t want to be in the house while they are. He calls Jason on the first day after his parents set the tree on fire by accident. 

He and Jazz are at the manor by the next evening. He loves his parents, but it's one of the few times they don’t notice their disappearances. It’s the only time.    

Whenever Danny visits, he and Jason stay late into the night talking, or playing video games, or stargazing. On warmer nights Jason shows him a way onto one of the rooftops and they sit on the tiling and look at the stars, largely unobstructed at Wayne Manor due to its distance from Gotham and its sickly orange light pollution. 

Danny points out constellations — things he can’t find in either Gotham or Amity — and rambles on and on about space. It’s not looking for Batman and Robin, but it's the next best thing. Danny brings out a bag of starbursts with him and they split the colors between each other. Jason buys him a book on Mars for his birthday, and Danny gets his hands on a limited edition ‘Dracula’ he finds at a thrift store in Amity. 

—----------

Of course, with how often Danny’s begun attending the charity events in Gotham, it’s only a matter of time where one of them gets hijacked by one of the many rogues. While Danny has witnessed villain fights in Gotham before, and turf wars, and gang fights, it’s still always a little terrifying. 

It’s even more terrifying when the first time it happens, he loses Jason in the chaos and crowd. They were together with Sam, and then the next thing he knows Jason is gone. Danny nearly breaks Sam’s hand with how tight he holds onto it — the difference to before and to now, is that he always had Jason with him. 

He’s in tears with abject terror, and when Batman gets him and Sam out of the building, he latches onto his cape before he can blink, babbling that Jason Todd — his best friend, his other half — was still inside. That he disappeared, he can’t find him. 

The idea of losing Jason to one of these things, after everything they’ve been through. Danny can’t stand the thought of it. It's incomprehensible. 

(“You and me against the world, right?” Jason asks, nine years old while they sit in a dirty alleyway behind a dumpster. He shares a sandwich he stole with Danny, and there are stray cats rubbing themselves against their feet.)

(“Of course!” Danny says, and takes a piece of the sandwich. “You have my back—”)

(Jason smiles, “And I have yours.”) 

Batman places thick, gloved hands onto Danny’s shoulders and snaps Danny out of his impending panic attack. In a gruff voice, he tells him that he’ll find Jason, and that he’ll make sure he was okay, but he needs to calm down. Danny forces himself to. 

Then he disappears back into the chaos, and Sam lets Danny crush her hands and hide himself in her shoulder. 

When they find Jason afterwards, everyone is being tended to by EMTs and there are police barricading the entrance. Danny crushes the front of Jason’s jacket with his fists and yells at him for disappearing during a rogue attack. He tells him that if he ever does it again, he’ll kill him. And then he drags Jason into a bone crushing hug.   

The second time this happens, Danny doesn’t even realize Jason is gone until the aftermath. They’d already been separated before the attack happened, and when he stops Robin and Batman before they leave, he’s trying to keep his breathing under control. He’s already searched the crowd for Jason Todd, and he cannot find him. 

"That- that asshole fucking disappeared on me, again." His voice has an embarrassing crack in it. "Please tell me you've seen him." He doesn’t know why this has happened again, but he promises himself that he’s not letting Jason out of his sight.

It’s Robin that steps forward this time, and he reassures him that he got Jason Todd out of the building, he was the one who got him out. “He’s probably looking for you too, uhh…” Those words alone are enough to make many of Danny’s anxieties fade away. He’s alive. He’s unharmed. That’s all he could ask for. 

"Danny," Danny says, blinking the sting from his eyes. He looks him up and down, and then frowns. “Jay owes me your autograph.” 

Robin makes a sound like a choked cough and a laugh, and he pounds his chest quick and short. A smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Next to him, Batman’s mouth presses into a line. “What?” Robin says. 

“Jay owes me your autograph.” Danny repeats, his frown steadily deepening. 

“And why is that?” 

He shrugs, turns his head to look over his shoulder and search for Jason again. It’s not helpful, he’s not tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd. He knows Robin said that Jason was fine, but he’s back to biting his lip anyways. “He says you’re cool, and I don’t doubt him. You’re doin’ a lot of good for the people in Gotham.”

Robin is silent, and Danny looks back to him after seconds of it. He stares at him, at Danny, and then grins like he’s lit up the sun. 

—----------

By the fifth time it happens, Danny is cussing Jason Todd out in a way that would make even the most hardened criminals blush, Robin carrying him out in an impressive bridal as he does. “I’m going to put him on a fucking leash!” Danny snarls, all blood-stained lips and back-alley pocket knives. “I have his back, he has mine! And I can’t fucking have his back if he has no back to have.” 

Robin laughs quietly at him, and Danny shoots him a glare so venomous that it shuts him up in an instant. But he’s still wearing a shadow of a smile on his face. “I mean it, I mean it!”

“I know you do.” Robin says, and puts him down. His hands glue themselves to his side, glove-covered fingers curled up tight. Then they cross across his chest. “But what happens if he says he’s gonna put a leash on you?” 

Danny scowls, turns away to let eyes scour across the streets with the other gala-goers, looking for Jason. “Then I’d let him.” They were partners after all, equals. It’s not Danny that gets a say in everything they do, nor is it Jason, they both do.  

(And he tells Jason as such when he sees him, jabbing a finger harsh in the center of his sternum. Angry and hurt beyond measure and confused on why-why-why Jason keeps disappearing. “I ought to keep you on a leash.” He hisses, his voice softer than the fangs he’d bared at Robin, but still sharp. “Seriously, Jay. What happened to having each other’s backs?”)   

(“I’m sorry.” Jason says, shoulders wilting and fingers gripping onto him. But he doesn’t tell him why, and Danny is licking wounds in the dark where he can’t see.) 

The eighth time the gala gets hijacked, it's not by any rogue villain in particular, but a gang that happened to have gathered too much power before anyone could notice. And when Jason nor Bruce are to be found for hostaging, the gang takes the next best thing — the now-famously known family friend Danny Fenton. 

Danny is terrified — an arm around his throat and a gun to his head, how could he not be? He’s seen plenty of violence growing up — fights and murders and gang wars out in broad daylight before he moved to Amity, Danny’s seen death before. Blood is carved out into the concrete streets of Gotham, a permanent rust cast over the city. Danny’s seen it before.

But he’s never stared it in the face so broadly like this. His mouth has dried up and gone void of all his normal quips. He keeps glancing over to Sam, her face white with terror as her parents hold her close and tremble on the nice shiny floors. 

He can’t find Jason, no matter how many times his eyes sweep the ballroom they’re in. For once, he’s glad. He’s glad. Maybe it’s a good thing he disappears so often, so quickly, whenever there’s an attack on the galas. Something about gift horses and mouths and not looking into them.

Robin appears some minutes later like a blazing fire, Batman quickly in tow, and he breaks the wrist of the man holding the gun to Danny’s head. And then he breaks his jaw with the cleanest punch Danny’s ever seen. He’s anger incarnate. 

It’s chaos incarnate. There’s yelling and screaming, Danny throws himself to the floor away from the fight as Robin twists and dives at the next gunman like a wild dog. The air knocks out of his lungs with a grunt, and he crawls away from the fight. 

Or he tries to. 

From the corner of his eye he sees the gunman who held him hostage come to. He sees him sit up, blood spitting from his mouth with a crooked jaw. He sees the man see Robin, halfway through tearing a man clean in half with nothing but fists and Gotham-sharp teeth.

And he sees him reach for his gun. 

Danny can already hear Jason yelling at him before he even gets to his feet. He can already hear the scolding that will turn his ears blue as his voice works on its own, a call of alarm and a bellow of “ROBIN!” and he can feel Jason gripping his arms and yelling at him like a phantom limb, his hands push him off the ground.   

His feet slide, and he’s staring down the barrel of a gun. 

There’s a deafening bang that makes Danny’s ears ring, but that’s something he only registers thirty seconds after a bullet rips through his jacket, his shirt, and then his skin. It’s only something he registers after he mind-numbingly crashes to the ground, but the shock of pain that runs up his spine with the feeling of skin-hitting-marble pales in comparison to the blossoming, terrible agony that erupts through his shoulder. 

Maybe it’s the shock, but he watches in morbid fascination as blood pools out and stains his shirt like a flower unfurling in the sun. He doesn’t feel it as he lifts his hand and brushes his fingers against it, he pulls it back and his fingers come away red. 

He knows getting shot hurts. But it’s mind-numbingly so. Or maybe that’s the shock again. 

Then he breathes in, sharp and rough because he’s forgotten to breathe, it sounds like a gasp, and then everything comes in to focus with startling, pin-pokingly clarity. 

And with that focus, he hears something guttural. Something furious. He drags his eyes up and focuses on Robin. 

Robin looks like fury unparalleled, he’s crossed the room to get to Danny and his jaw has dropped into a shriek or a snarl — Danny’s not quite sure, his brain feels fogged over. But whatever it is, it’s animalistic in nature. He arrives like a tempest, his foot stomping down onto the man’s wrist with an ugly snap. He follows it up with a swift kick to the gunner’s face, and Danny hears something crack. 

He twists on his heel, cape swishing and his body crouched like an animal about to pounce. And Robin’s diving back into the fight like a monster unleashed.     

And Danny is still bleeding on the floor. His hand sticky and hot, the reality of it all comes crashing down on him like a house. Through the blinding pain, he’s scared. He’s cold with terror.

I’ve been shot.

I’m going to die.

I don’t want to die. Please. 

His heartbeat zips in his ears, rapid and quick as if it’s trying to keep up with the blood he’s losing. His senses are all over the place — there’s fighting and crashing and yelling, and then he’s back underwater with only his gasping and his heartbeat to keep him company. 

Sam comes into focus, she’s found her way towards him. And he doesn’t realize she’s there until she’s already curling her arms under his and trying to drag him away to the wall. She’s stronger than she looks, but he can feel her shaking. He looks up at her, and her face is pale.  

Then he’s laying next to the wall, and Sam is back in focus, leaning over him. Her eyes teary-red and face twisted in fear as she puts pressure on his shoulder. His eyes flick down to her dress, and there is blood staining the front of her corset. 

He licks his lips thoughtlessly, and tastes iron. “I wouldn’t rate this experience.” He says with a groan, turning his head. He’s trying to distract himself — anything to focus on something that isn’t his shoulder. “Zero out of ten, don’t get shot, Sam.” 

She presses her lips together, and he takes it as a victory anyway because he smiles a little himself. “It’s not something I usually try and plan.” Sam retorts, voice cracking and uneven. He feels bad, she looks like she’s going to cry. “Why’d you do that, Danny?”

“She’s right.” Someone says, and Danny turns his eyes and finds Robin appearing beside him. He’s ruffled and bloodstained, and the whites of his mask narrow into slits. Danny distantly wonders how he did that. “Why did you do that, Danny?”    

Danny thinks for a moment, watching with blinking eyes as Robin grabs the end of his cape and tears off a chunk of it. He's going to ask why, but then Robin bats away Sam’s hands and takes her place. “He was gonna shoot you.” Is all he can think to come up with, and he sucks in air through his teeth at the jostle his shoulder receives when Robin presses down and presses down hard. 

Robin barks out a sound that sounds like a laugh, but is too harsh to be humorous. “I am wearing a specialized, military-grade body armor, if someone shoots me it’s just gonna fucking bounce off.” His lips pull back like all the stray dogs Danny’s seen get cornered in an alleyway, and it’s something so profoundly Gotham-like that Danny smiles back. 

“You don’t know that.” Danny retorts, his mouth always running before his mind can catch up. Sam makes a huffy-squeak sound, and Robin looks at him like he’s going to sink his teeth into his throat. Danny only offers back a sloppy, innocent smile.

Robin scowls, and turns his head with a string of muttered curses directed for Batman. Danny tries to follow his gaze, but turning his head makes his vision swim and fuzz around the edges, which he knows isn’t a good thing. He hums deep, dazed, and finds himself looking at Robin’s face again. 

“Your friend Todd will kill you if you die.” Robin tells him, noticing Danny’s drifting off. He sounds upset on his behalf, and Danny’s not sure why, they’ve only talked a handful of times, for barely a minute each time. “You know that right?”

“Someone’s already beat him to that.” Danny jokes, but neither Robin nor Sam smile at him. It has the opposite intended effect, and he watches Sam’s lip wobble precariously. Guilt plops like a rock in a pond in his stomach, and he presses his mouth into a grimace. 

He’s quiet, mouth tilting downwards while goosebumps crawl up his arms with a shiver. “I’m glad he’s not here, though.” He mutters, and it’s supposed to be to himself but Sam and Robin hear it anyway, and Robin tenses up like a spring pressed down. “I’d hate to see the look on his face.”

Robin says nothing to him. But there is a stubborn, fixed set to his jaw. 

Paramedics arrive, and Danny is loaded onto a gurney. An EMT is tending to his shoulder, and he’s not the only one injured — other people have been shot as well, hurt by glass, by anything — but he’s one of the guests in critical condition. 

He looks for Jason in the crowd, up until the ambulance doors close. And he doesn’t find him. 

He does, however, find him when he wakes up from surgery. Their fingers entwined with Jason fast asleep in the guest chair that’s been pushed against his bed. Mister Wayne is there, leaning against the wall and dozing his eyes, and so is Danny’s parents and Jazz. 

Danny turns his eyes onto Jason, and squeezes his hand tightly. Jason shoots up like a rocket, eyes wild and wide and focusing instantly on Danny. He looks like he’d been crying. 

“You’re not allowed to die without me.” Jason says, voice rasping and hoarse, and quiet enough that it hardly disrupts the quietness of the room. It’s not what Danny’s expecting him to say, and as such it tilts a laugh out of him as abruptly as a kick in the chest. It makes his shoulder, put in a sling, hurt.  

He wraps a grin across his face. “Okay.” 

—----------

(Robin shows up on his windowsill later that night, and when Danny sees him he lets loose a string of swears that would have Alfred Pennyworth holding out a jar full of quarters.)

(“Holy hell, man.” Danny says when his heart rate has finally stopped going through the roof, his only good hand clutching over his heart. He can feel it pounding through his paper-thin gown. “Does Batman know you’re here?”)

(In the dim lighting, Robin’s sheepish expression tells him all he needs to know. “Jason was worried about you.”)

—----------

Everything crumbles out from under Danny’s feet when he’s fourteen. 

It starts with a phone call on a late night in April. Danny hasn’t heard from Jason in nearly two days, and the third is creeping up on him like a snake in the grass. No texts, no calls. His messages have been left unread since yesterday. 

And maybe it’s not a good thing that Danny is so attached to Jason. He can hear Jazz telling him all about unhealthy codependent relationships and their negative impacts on the psyche and development of people, but he doesn’t care. He wouldn’t be so worried if his texts weren’t left on delivered. 

Something feels rotten in the state of his heart, choking up his ribs until unease threatens to choke him out. So in the safety of his room he burns a walkway into the carpet as he types out Bruce’s number and tries to convince himself that everything was fine. 

He knows that Jason and Bruce got into a fight recently — but about what, Danny’s unsure. Jason wouldn’t share with him, and even though he’s come to expect the strange bouts of secrecy, Danny is still a little hurt that Jason won’t share his troubles.  

Right before he presses ‘call’, Danny has a last-minute moment of doubt — a fear that maybe he’s overreacting. That he was worrying for nothing. That maybe Bruce confiscated Jason’s phone, and any day now he was going to get a letter instead explaining what happened. 

But he didn’t survive Crime Alley for as long as he did by always ignoring his intuition, and Amity Park is making him soft if he’s thinking about doing it now. He knows Jason and Bruce got into a fight, but he also knows that Bruce loves Jason and he would know if anything happened to him. 

His thumb hits call, and Danny holds his breath as he shoves the speaker to ear, listening to it ring. 

It rings. And it rings. And it rings. 

Danny’s afraid it’s going to go to voicemail, he’ll call again if it does. And then it clicks, Bruce’s voice comes through with a hoarse, “Hello?” It barely sounds polite, like he’s only partially remembering his manners. Danny wouldn’t pay it much to mind if Bruce didn’t sound like he’d been crying all day. 

In the last two years of Danny’s life, in all the times he’s visited the Manor and gone to Galas, in every letter, conversation, and text he’s sent and had with Jason, he’s never seen or heard Bruce cry. 

His blood turns to ice with dizzying speed. 

Danny twists on his heel, and his pacing kicks up speed. “Mister— Mister Wayne?” He stammers, he’s never stuttered before. “I’m sorry- sorry to bother you this, uh, late at night. But I’m calling because Jason—” 

He hears Bruce inhale sharply on the other side. Danny’s anxiety skyrockets into terror. 

“--hasn’t been answerin’ any of my texts, and— and I’m gettin’ real worried.” 

There’s a special kind of dread in his stomach that you can only really feel when you’re worried about someone. The kind that makes you antsy; that makes you need to move and keep moving, but doesn’t get the feeling to go away. It sits itself on Danny’s shoulders and presses down and down on him, until he’s got himself hunched up to the ears. 

The silence on the other end of the line has him winding up like a coil ready to spring, and Danny forces himself to keep his breathing steady as Bruce says nothing. That special kind of dread moves itself, crawls up his stomach until it sits in the back of his throat, waiting for him to choke. 

“Mister Wayne—? Mister B?” Danny calls, “Bruce?”  

He hears a shaky breath, and then Bruce’s voice is crackling through on the other end. A sigh that sounds as trembling as Danny’s legs feel. “Jaylad— he’s—” Bruce’s voice cracks, “he’s been killed.” 

Danny’s mind lags, and then his vision whites out with a mind-numbing shock, and everything grows rapidly hot, then rapidly cool, like a blacksmith striking his white-hot weapon. Bruce’s words are like a dumbbell dropping. Weighted with a thud that resonates through the soles of his feet, and equally as incomprehensible.

He’s not sure how long he’s silent for - time blends together while he’s trying to wrap his mind around the fact that Jason was dead. He can’t. He can’t. It sounds like an awful joke, a lie. Jason was going to steal the phone from Bruce’s hands right this moment and tell Danny it was a lie. 

Danny is granted no such mercy. 

When he finally speaks, his tongue is lead-heavy in his mouth, and dry. “What?”    

There’s a rustling sound, and Bruce speaks again. He’s grief-stricken, robotic. “I’ll send you and your family invitations to the funeral.” He says, and Dannny stares at a wall, unable to say anything at all. “I’ll pay for the flights, your hotel costs. Everything.”

Funeral. That word rings in his ears. No, no, no, no, no, no. 

Danny says nothing. Bruce breathes out again, sounding on the verge of tears again. “I am... so sorry, Danny.” 

And then he hangs up. Just like that. Like he hasn’t pulled out the age-worn rug from beneath Danny’s feet. 

He barely has the sense to pull the phone away from his ear and stare at the end call screen. His best friend is dead. Everything feels all clogged up, from his heart to his lungs to his brain, nothing’s connecting. As if someone’s tightened the pipes and blocked the water from passing through. 

His best friend was murdered.

Danny didn’t even ask who did it.

His best friend is dead. 

He turns slowly around the room, jaw hanging in horror while his thoughts repeat the words back to him. Maybe, if he thinks it enough times, it’ll drive a pickaxe through the ice-thick layer covering his mind and something will break through. Maybe reality — that Jason was still alive. That this was a nightmare. That he was going to wake up any moment now. 

Jason is dead. 

Danny’s eyes land on a photo on his desk, framed, of him and Jason. The memory of the photo pulls to the front. His parents had taken the photo when he and Jason were still young and on the first day of school in second grade.  

Jason was murdered.

Jason is the only one smiling in it, but it’s because he’s laughing at Danny. Danny, who is glaring at the ground in embarrassment, one hand gripping onto Jason’s hand and the other white-knuckling the strap of his secondhand backpack. 

There’s a snapping sound in the back of Danny’s head, the sound of a pickaxe cleaving an ice lake in two. Reality crashing down onto him like a bolt of lightning.

He’s gone.

His lip curls, it wobbles. Tears fill his vision rapidly, and grief claws its way up his throat until he’s gagging on it. It lurches, then lunges, and Danny’s knees hit the ground with unrestrained, striking pain. 

When he breathes in, it hurts. His lungs balloon up with air, raggedy and torn. His next breath out—

Danny shrieks.

 

Jazz comes barreling through the door within seconds, and Danny doesn’t even notice. He hunches into himself, clutching the phone to his chest and tearing his lungs into ribbons. She pulls on him, and he lets himself be moved until Jazz has him leaning against her. 

His fingers claw onto her shirt, and his next breath is another shriek. Another awful, horrid wailing sound that rattles through the house. Danny hurts in a way that he wants to make physical. On himself, on the walls, on the floor, on anything he can get his hands on. 

There’s the sound of thud-thudthudthudthudding, like incoming thunder coming up the stairs and down the hall. Danny’s parents burst into the room like a storm, ghost weapons drawn and ready with the fury of two grizzly bears coming to protect their cubs. Instead, they find Danny, inconsolable on the floor of his bedroom. 

(Sometimes, grief has a gravity that you never get up from.)

Danny skips school for the rest of the week, paralyzed with grief. He draws the windows, locks his doors, and buries himself under his bed and blankets with a blackhole in his chest. He cries so much his eyes ache and his throat goes sore.  

The funeral comes around that weekend, and Danny almost refuses to go when Jazz and his parents come knocking. The thought of lowering Jason into the ground is too much to bear, not when they had so many plans for the future. 

Jazz coaxes him into it, picking the lock on his door and sneaking in to see him herself. She crouches at his bedside, where he hides like a hedgehog under the blankets, and draws him out with the convolution of closure. She’s got a quick tongue, one that’s made for silver and scalpels and cutting precision, and she tells him that he’ll regret it forever if he doesn’t go.

So Danny, with limbs made of lead, drags himself out of bed. And when the funeral comes around, he wears the only suit he owns — the one that’s been fixed and stitched after he’d been shot a year ago. His fingers run over the stitching on the inside. 

It’s a closed casket funeral, something that both horrifies and infuriates Danny all the same — he wants to know what Jason’s murderer did to him that resulted in this. He wants to know, but he’s sickeningly relieved he doesn’t. 

(He’s not sure if he could handle seeing the body.) 

There aren’t any more tears left for Danny to shed as the coffin lowers into the ground, so instead he wants to vomit up his grief. 

He catches Bruce Wayne before he leaves, and the man looks just as bad as Danny does. He snags his fingers on his sleeve, and stops him in his tracks. When Bruce turns to look at him, his once-vibrant eyes gone dull, Danny looks back up at him. 

(Danny is certain that he looks as dead as he feels.) 

Sorrow ages Bruce, it carves itself onto his face like stone. And Danny says nothing for a long moment. He could almost call it solidarity, the anguish that clouds heavy in the air is both of theirs to share. 

Danny licks his lips, and when he speaks, his voice is rasp. “Who did it?” He asks, curling hands tight around Bruce’s sleeve. He grips his other hand around his jacket, gripping hard enough to leave wrinkles. 

He surprises himself; tears fill his waterline. “You said he was murdered, Mister Wayne.” He continues, and his lips twist with a slow-igniting hatred for Jason’s killer, “Please, who did it.”

Bruce looks down at him, and he says nothing. 

Something hot and angry flashes through Danny, his face twists up all ugly-like. For a moment, he wants to snarl. He wants to tear something to shreds. Instead, he shakes Bruce’s jacket desperately, “Bruce, please,” his voice fractures, “tell me who did it.”      

Bruce refuses, his face full of grief. 

Danny lets go of his jacket, the slow-burning hate threatening to unfairly round on Bruce like a hound. And he leaves. 

He never returns to Gotham. 

—----------

Danny steps foot into the lab for the first time a week after he heard the news of Jason’s death. He steps foot into it with Sam and Tucker in tow, and their once-hesitation disappears into wonder when they reach the bottom of the stairs. 

Looking down the tunnel feels much like looking down the barrel of a gun. And then it looks like all of Crime Alley’s grungy, trash-cluttered alleyways, the stench of rot at the mouth.

Danny steps inside it. 

And Phantom falls out. 

—----------

(The Phantom is an unsettling child, and it’s hard to believe that he’s the city’s hero. There are whispers, and whispers, and whispers amongst themselves. There is a hole in that child’s chest, a swirling black one where his heart should be. And black lightning figures claw up his arm and face, staining his muted green skin.)

(They wonder who he’s crying for, with black tar tear streaks permanently carved into his cheeks. There are reports of seeing the boy sitting in the park, legs curled up on a bench with a finger snagged on the hole in his chest. He pulls and picks at the edges like a scab, staring ahead like he’s lost in thought.) 

(Some days, when Danny feels more dead than alive, he turns the portal off in the basement and sleeps in the tunnel.)

—----------

When Danny realizes he can find Jason in the Ghost Zone, he lunges into it with a vigor he’s missed since the funeral. He spends a weekend inside it, scouring the Zone for hide or tail of his best friend. His core thrums with near-deceptive levels of hope. 

He finds the Undercity of Gotham; a massive floating island that holds a looking glass of his home city on it. There are spiraling industrial skyscrapers, monorails that twist and turn upside down like rollercoasters. The buildings twist, warp, and stretch in physic-defying ways that can only come from the Infinite Realms. Buildings float above the city, still connected to it.   

Danny flies above it all, hawk-eyes scouring into every alley and street he can see. In Crime Alley, he finds Robin. And he almost misses him entirely. 

He doesn’t look like Robin, not at first glance. He wears a red hoodie that Danny nearly mistakes as Jason’s — it’s what makes him go back for a second glance. It’s big and ratty, and he wears beaten up converse in Robin-yellow. His knees draw up to his chest, with jeans that have holes at the knee. 

But he wears the Robin-green mask, and there is the insignia on his chest that Danny almost doesn’t see. 

Danny hadn’t known he died.

“Robin?” Danny calls, tugging the goggles off from his eyes. The name tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop himself, and Robin snaps his head up so fast that Danny reels himself back. He’s never seen him so sullen before. So… unaware. 

He frowns at him. “What’re you doing here?” 

Robin stares at him, his brows thread together. “Who’re you?” 

Danny’s frown deepens. 

“What?” He looks down at himself; his white boots and star-trapped hazmat suit that he always has unzipped and tied around his waist. At his gloves and olive green skin, and his ugly, black lichtenberg figures. “I know I look different, but I didn’t think I looked that different.”

He drifts forward like wood on the water, head tilting to the side as he looks back up to Robin. “It’s Danny? Danny Fenton?” Robin jerks back as someone had hit him with an electric stick, like someone had tased him. “I’m looking for Jason, have you seen him?” 

Robin stares at him. He opens his mouth to say something, but no sound comes out. It wires itself shut, only to open again. It’s strange — it’s almost uncomfortable. 

Danny thinks for a moment that he should crack a joke to break the steady-rising tension. He didn’t think he’d get a reaction like this — he thinks he should ask Robin if he’s become a fish.

But silent as the grave, Robin lifts his hand — ungloved and calloused — and peels his mask from his face.

Underneath is Jason Todd, his face a mirror of grief and thickened horror. “Danny,” he whispers, “what are you doing here.”  

Danny stares back. 

Shock steals the tongue from his mouth, leaving him mute and tilted off balance. In a single moment, everything suddenly clicks into place. A broken piece finally found; the missing piece from the center of a puzzle finally being slot back into its spot. 

The disappearances, the secrecy, Robin’s fury when Danny had gotten shot. Jason was Robin this whole time. His best friend was Robin. 

And he was also here.

His arms lift on their own, and without any conscious thought of his own, he lurches forward. Jason lunges at the same time, and they collide like two stars, crying.  

—----------

Jason drags him to his favorite gargoyle, his fingers bruisingly tight around Danny’s, and when they get there the gargoyle turns from its spot, rumbling with the sound of rock scraping against rock, and nuzzles Jason in greeting. It makes no sound, and returns back to being a stuart guard.

Jason pushes Danny down onto the ledge and demands to know everything — what he’s doing here, in the afterlife. And Danny, the tips of his ungloved fingers beginning to turn a pale emerald, tells Jason about stepping into the portal. 

He can’t meet Jason’s eyes when the color drains from his face, and Jason’s fear becomes so thick in the air that Danny can feel it sinking into his core. His hands curl tight into the stone ledge.

“Danny,” Jason breathes, his eyes wide, “you didn’t… kill yourself because of me, did you?”

“No.” Danny sinks his teeth into his lip to stifle his grimace, uncomfortable even with his own answer. His core twinges like an instrument going out of tune, and he ignores it. “No, no. I didn’t. I promise, I didn’t.”

Jason looks unconvinced, and Danny knows why. But he doubles down, it was an accident. “I didn’t know the portal was going to turn on, seriously. It was an accident.” He insists, “But- but enough about me. Jay, what the fuck happened? Bruce wouldn’t tell me anything at the funeral.”

It’s a mistake to ask, it’s a stupid mistake. 

Jason opens his mouth, and then fixes it shut. Any color he had left disappears from his ghostly face, and he shrinks down into his hoodie. His eyes flick around nervously. “I- um, well.” 

And Danny curses himself — Jason was murdered; his death is worse than Danny’s will ever be. He shouldn’t have asked him that.  

He hurries to remedy himself, twisting fully and nearly slapping his hands down over Jason’s. “You don’t have to tell me that.” He says quickly, face twisting in regret, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. You don’t have to tell me. I can talk about something else.”

Jason says nothing, but he nods, silent. Danny takes the ‘go ahead’ with both hands and stumbles his way into a one-sided conversation about the latest discoveries in space, and all of his ghost fights he’s had. He tells Jason about his fight with the Lunch Lady ghost, and about that time Sam turned into a fire-breathing dragon during their school dance because she got her hands on a cursed amulet and Paulina pissed her off.

He tells him about the first time he met Skulker, and Jason is frowning the entire time Danny talks, which is a better alternative than before when he was silent and pale instead. “Why didn’t you just dodge?”Jason asks when Danny complains about getting shot.

Danny stares at him, and as his silence extends longer than it should, he can physically see a headache forming on Jason’s face. “I..” He says carefully, sheepish embarrassment crawling green up his neck. “didn’t… think of that, at the time.” 

Jason makes a low, distressed sound in the back of his throat that resonates down to his core. A sensation that is indescribable to Danny, but recognizable all the same. “I’m showing you some of the stuff B taught me.” 

They fall into a comfortable silence some time later, looking below to the mirrored, wonderlandian version of Gotham that bustles and shifts with life just as much as it does in its living counterpart. It’d almost feel normal, but they’re missing cigarettes to share. 

Jason breaks the silence. “It was the Joker.” 

Danny snaps his head up, and looks at Jason with eyes wide and the feeling like he’s been kicked in the gut. Breathing is a habit he can’t seem to shake as a ghost, and he holds it for a moment. “What?”

“The Joker.” Jason repeats, a set in his jaw and his eyes fixated to the ground below. “He did it.”  

The Joker, Danny thinks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what he means. The Joker killed him, and Danny doesn’t know how. He doesn’t need to. The act alone is enough for him to want to bury his teeth into his throat.

He breathes out slowly, and the unforgotten, embering hate he’s kept tucked away since the funeral creeps out like frostbite on his fingertips.  

The Joker.

He’s pushed it to the back of his mind for a while now, too distracted, too busy to laser in on slow-roasting animosity he feels towards Jason’s killer. Like clothes being left on the line. Rage so intense that it leaves him shaking crawls up his throat.

The Joker. 

Danny burns it into his mind, and looks away. “Okay.” His nails dig into the ledge, and the concrete cracks and crumbles under his fingertips. 

The Joker.

The Joker, he thinks, I’m going to kill you. 

—----------

Jason keeps his word, and the next time Danny visits, he drags Danny out to the mirrored Wayne Manor and promptly kicks his ass. And then he does it again, and again, and again. And then he shows Danny all the stuff that he can do to get better. 

Danny is scrappy, he’s all made of claws and hounds teeth, but his biting and snarling is too unrefined and rough for anything more than back alley street brawls and school fights. It’s not enough, Jason makes sure it will be. 

It should be frustrating, and it is. But it's fun, in a strange, probably ghostly way. He learns from the ghosts of Martha and Thomas Wayne that fighting was as much of a social activity as it was a show of power. He doesn’t talk to them much, but he sees them occasionally. Thomas Wayne keeps a pair of brass knuckles that belong to his grandfather on him, and Martha keeps a nasty surprise in her heirloom ring.

It’s cathartic in a way all his fights in Amity aren’t, and despite the amount of times Jason lays him flat on the ground, Danny is having fun. He’s learning in a way that doesn’t make him want to tear his hair out. 

Danny tries taking Jason through the ghost portal one day, insistent to meet back up with Sam and Tucker, and to bring Jason back to the land of the living even if it’s only for a little bit. But they both learn that Jason’s like Kitty, and his ghost is tied to the Zone. He can’t leave without possessing someone else, and neither Jason nor Danny want to do that. 

Danny makes up for it by promising to try and visit every day.

His grief doesn’t go away despite reuniting with Jason, but like a soothing balm the edges soften and hurt a little less with the comfort of knowing that Jason was just on the other side. 

(Even if some days it’s not as effective, and Danny’s hit with a random bout of sorrow that threatens to swallow him whole. Overwhelming as the day he first learned of Jason’s death.) 

(In turn, it changes the way he looks — his skin becoming vibrant and emerald, his tears fade until they’re no longer opaque streaks down his face. The black of his eyes bleeds into white, and his scars shift into green.) 

—----------

It doesn’t matter in the end though, because six months later Danny has the worst week of his life and loses Jason again. And in one timeline, his family as well. 

For a second time, Danny scours the Ghost Zone looking for Jason. He stops ghosts and asks if they’ve seen him, he looks under nooks and crannies. He looks up, he looks down. And he can’t find him, it’s like he’s disappeared. He can’t find him, not even when he turns himself inward and turns his ear to the seventh sense frequency.

Ghosts are like radios; they all have their own core sounds. It’s like recognizing someone when their back is turned, and when ghosts develop bonds strong enough, they can pick them out from a crowd. It’s normal. Just another way of knowing who from who.

Danny tunes into the frequencies of the surrounding Zone, like standing in the forest and hearing the birds and bugs, and he hears nothing that sounds like Jason. 

And he doesn’t understand why. 

Jason’s lair is still in the Zone, Danny knows because he checked. He checked, and then he checked again. It’s an apartment building on the street he and Danny frequented in Crime Alley, and in it on the third floor is a small apartment with a door that leads to Wayne Manor, and another that goes to Danny’s. 

Ghosts are capable of moving on, of fading, and nobody knows where they go after, but they know that when they do go, their lair disappears with it. 

And Jason’s lair is still in the Zone. So he didn’t move on. He’s still here, somewhere. 

Danny visits his lair as often as he can — ghosts can feel it when another entity enters their home, it feels like a knock on the backdoor. Of someone tripping the floodlights, or the alarm.  

He visits, and Jason does not show up. Danny’s grief returns back twofold, and he reverts.  

—----------

“Wayne is throwing another one of his indulgent charities again.” Plasmius says when Danny is nineteen and they’re both in the midst of a fight, the two of them floating above the city skyscrapes of Amity. His hand engulfed in pink-red flame that he throws at Danny. It’s their second fight in a week, and Danny hates how persistent he’s been lately. 

It was normal for Vlad to do this — to bring up Bruce’s parties, and in a mocking voice ask if Danny was going to come with him. He needed a plus one, and who no better than the ex-family friend of the man? Danny’s learned to tune him out. Vlad never ends up attending anyways.

(At least he’s stopped bringing up Jason. Vlad only made that mistake once.) 

Fire collides with his shoulder, and Danny grunts unwittingly. The heat lingers for a moment, and then sinks down into his skin, close to his core. He’s gotten used to the strange, consuming way ghost injuries work, and barely bats an eye as an instinctive film of frost slides over the burn like balm. 

He twists his wrist and slices his arm up, and a wall of shards fling themselves back. It’s only fair he returns the favor. Fire for ice, ice for fire. Danny bares fangs, churning a mean smile over his face. “Need a plus one, Vlad? I’m sure Mister Wayne will let you bring your cat.”

Vlad sneers at him, “Oh how funny, Daniel.” He teleports out of the way of the shards, but not before one catches him by the arm. It slices his suit and Vlad hisses with pain as green blood begins to bubble up. “No, no, I’m afraid my little Madeline will have to remain home. All those people will ruin her fur.” 

“So you’re not going?” Danny clicks his tongue, his voice a coo and just as mockingly sweet. He twists his body, and avoids the path of a red-pink plasma blast, and the heat grazes past his stomach. Jason’s training, despite being brief, has come in handy in the last five years. Danny moves with an uncanny grace through the air. He’ll never win a fight against Batman or his clan, but it’s good enough for the people he does fight. “Shame, I’m sure you and Luthor would get along like a house on fire.”  

Vlad’s expression warps with displeasing anger, and he immediately raises a hand full of dripping molten. Even after all these years, he is easy to rile up. All it takes is finding the right button. “Don’t compare me to that incompetent.” He snarls, and he throws it with a force at Danny. “I am nothing like the idiot who can’t even keep control over his own company tech.”

The conversation is forgotten in lieu of Vlad’s vendetta against Luthor, but Danny keeps the charity locked in the back of his mind as he and Vlad try to tear each other apart. He’s graduated high school by the skin of his teeth, and with Sam and Tucker preparing for college, Danny doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. He’s long since realized that his dreams of becoming an astronaut are nothing more than flowers left on his grave. That aspiration was left at the foot of the portal with the rest of his heart.  

But school is out of the way, and the ghost attacks are beginning to dwindle down. The prospect of Danny leaving Amity Park is beginning to look more and more possible. More and more like a reality. He never wanted to stay in Amity Park — and a long time ago, he wanted nothing more than to return to Gotham, where the other half of himself lay. 

At a lull in the fight, when Danny’s blasted Vlad back far enough that he can pause, he finds his eyes drawing towards the horizon.

He hasn’t stepped foot in his home city since Jason’s funeral, and just like the day he left, something burns in the core of his chest, low and rumbling and hateful. Familiar in the same way that his grief is, familiar in the same way that dipping a red hot weapon into water and watching it steam is. 

Ember can be sated with the promise of letting her perform on the terms that she uses no mind control. Technus is on parole with Pandora after he fucked with Athens. Aragorn is being kept under control by Dorathea. 

Skulker will always go after Danny, but Danny can handle him just fine inside or out of Amity Park. And he’ll be out of commission for a while after their last fight. Spectra, the Box Ghost, Lunch Lady— anyone else? Sam’s planning to stay local, and Valerie is too. They can handle them just fine on their own.

Danny’s business in Amity is nearly finished. 

His business in Gotham?

Is not. 

(When Vlad Plasmius flies back into the fight, the hole in Danny’s chest — nauseating, spinning, always churning, always crying — is turning and warping sluggishly like a rubber band being stretched and pulled. The tears that are always marring his face come down ink-thick, dripping off his chin in gelly chunks.) 

(He’s not sure if Daniel even notices that he’s crying again.)

When Vlad returns, Danny dodges one of his fireballs — it skims past his ear and would have burned off the hair at the side of his head if Danny hadn’t already shaved it himself. He doesn’t return fire. Instead, he shoves his hands into his pockets, and tilts himself upside down. “You said Mister Wayne was hosting another charity soon.” 

Vlad raises an eyebrow at him, wary in the pivot of behavior when Danny doesn’t try and attack him back — ghosts are prone to mood swings, but Danny’s always been good at handling them… Sometimes. Danny nearly smiles at him — he’s learned since last time. The hand that had been ready to fire at him lowers a little. “I’m surprised you remembered, little badger. Yes, I did. Why?”

His core thrums low, and it thrums loud enough that Danny doesn’t even need to vocalize it. Something ugly sits in the back of his throat, between his lungs, burning beneath his skin that he keeps hidden beyond the tense hunch of his shoulders. “Weeelll…” He drawls, “While you were dusting rubble off your ass, I got to thinking: it has been a while since I’ve been to Gotham. And you need a plus one, or you won’t go.”

He twists himself back upwards with a shrug, his mouth stretches up into something Danny attempts to make innocent. It doesn’t work, Vlad eyes him like he’s an animal hunting. 

Danny feels like an animal hunting. Finally. He throws his hands out of his pockets, “So, I will, reluctantly, grant you your lonely, old man wish and accompany you to Gotham. I’m sure Mister Wayne will be surprised to see me.” He says, and he keeps his eyes locked on Vlad. 

Vlad still looks wary. Uneasy. Danny expects this, and he watches him narrow his eyes in suspicion, rather than hope. “While I am… touched by your offer, Daniel, I want to know why.” 

That would be giving his enemy a loaded gun. Danny refuses to hand over the one he’s got.

“If you don’t attack me for two weeks after the charity, I’ll let you pick out the suit.” He says bluntly, “And I’ll spend quality time with you on weekends until those two weeks are up.” He knows it’s something he’ll regret — he hated suit-shopping with Mr. Manson when he did it seven years ago, and he knows Vlad will be ten times more insufferable, and spending weekends with him sounded like a nightmare. But he can’t take it back. 

But it’s hook, line, and sinker. Vlad’s eyes dilate like a cat seeing a laser pointer, his mouth twists into a grin, and he lunges forward. Danny flinches back, his hands igniting in green plasma, ready to knock out his teeth, but Vlad doesn’t attack. He grabs his wrist instead, “Deal.” 

Oh yeah, Danny’s going to regret this as Vlad drags him down to earth, a vice grip on his wrist that he could easily get out of in a number of ways. But, a look to the horizon that brings return of the ugly thing in the back of his throat makes him think it’ll be worth his while.  

—----------

Being back in Gotham feels like deja vu. The towering skyscrapes passing over his head, the bustling streets. It’s all much the same — recovering from a Poison Ivy attack, if the vines sprawled over the walls were saying anything — but the same nonetheless. 

He’s in the back of a sleek limousine, sunken into the leather seats with a pit in his stomach. The car is ten times nicer than anything the Mansons could afford. It’s similar, but not the same. Danny’s changed too; taller than before, leaner, older.  

It was a fight to let Danny keep his piercings in, and it's a fight he wins with the terms that he wears something gala-appropriate. Danny sticks a hanging diamond in one ear, a pearl in the other, and lines the holes up the curve of his ears with gold. And for good measure, he puts a diamond ring through the piercing in his eyebrow.     

Vlad sits across from him with a look of satisfied smugness, preening like a cat that caught the canary with the purring core to match. Danny wants to take the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and dump it over his lap — see if he’s smug then. 

He refrains, and itches for the cigarettes he remembered to stowaway this time around. Smoking doesn’t have the same effect as it did before, but habits are hard to break and Danny’s not too keen to break this one. It’s stashed away in the pocket of his pants, and his lighter hidden in his vest. 

But he must be broadcasting his need for a smoke too loudly, Vlad gives him a reprimanding look that is so annoyingly authoritative and parent-mimicking that it's a nicety that Danny only rolls his eyes. “Don’t give me that look,” he says, lip curling at the corner, “you’re not my dad.” 

“I could be.” Vlad retorts smoothly, and gives him a dark look when Danny fakes a gag. His fingers thread over his lap. “That… stuff kills, Daniel.” 

Danny snorts roughly, and he thinks for a moment to light a cigarette just out of spite. He doesn’t, he won’t waste a stick on him, but he checks the front to see if the driver is listening. He leans back into his seat when he sees the privacy screen pulled up; “I’m already dead, fruit loop.” 

—----------

Pulling up to the entrance is another bout of deja vu, but it is unwanted. The paparazzi are as unchanging as they were seven years ago — nasty, gossip-feeding parasites that jump their prey with their dizzying questions and seizure-causing, flashbang cameras. 

Pulling up to the red carpet, Danny feels much like he’s about to put on a show. He’s buzzing, is what he is, straight down to the core. A tunnel-visioned intensity that makes him want to pull back his teeth and bite. To sink his teeth into something, to do something irreversible. Unchangeable.

Unmuzzle me, he thinks, fingers curling around the door handle, let’s see what happens.  

Vlad reaches over and blocks him, and Danny snaps his eyes onto him with an unspoken, glaring, ‘What?’. Uncharacteristic severity is written on Vlad’s face, “I’m not sure why you’ve decided to come back here, Daniel,” he says, “but we’re more alike than you think.”

“No,” Danny snaps, instantaneous. He curls back his lips and shows teeth, “we’re not.” 

Eyes narrow at him, Vlad raises a challenging brow. He lets go of the door, and leans back against his seat. The paparazzi have turned their attention onto them, and they need to get out of the car soon. “How so.”

The door clicks, and Danny is throwing his leg out before he’s got the door all the way open. “I succeed.” 

—----------

He’s granted a soft mercy in that the paparazzi don’t recognize him at all. He was never that important in the grand scheme of things — a friend of Jason Todd-Wayne to the media, and that’s all he ever was. So when he steps out of the car, the paparazzi lose interest quickly in favor of the more recognizable Vlad Masters. 

Vlad Masters, like always, has to ruin it. One reporter yells over the cacophony of voices, pushed to the front of the red velvet rope, asking Vlad who he was with. Danny was hoping he’d be able to pass through without a trace. 

With a charming, honey-warm smile, Vlad slinks forward with a graceful tug on Danny’s arm, and brings him to the front of the reporter’s camera. “Why,” he croons, placing his hand on Danny’s back, “this is my godson! I’m sure some of you remember Daniel Fenton, yes?” 

If only Vlad was actually a vampire, Danny laments. Then he could push him into the sunlight and watch him crackle and turn to ash. Unfortunately, that is something that someone from Gotham would be more likely to do, and so he settles on giving him a look that would kill him a second time. 

He manages it despite the flood of lights turning back onto him, clamors of voices trying to get a peek at him. Danny grants Vlad the mercy he didn’t show him, and plasters a lopsided smile onto his face for the cameras to snap and catch. 

But he doesn’t stay for questioning, he lets them take their pictures, and then turns on his heel to stalk inside. His fingers flex, curling in and out of fists, and Vlad hurries gracefully after him as he reaches the top of the steps. Vlad’s annoyance pokes at him irritatingly.

“I told you that I would come.” Danny says with unhelpful innocence the moment Vlad is beside him, meeting his glaring gaze piercingly. The orchestral music buries his voice so that only he and Vlad can hear. “Not that I would play nice.” 

“Do not embarrass me, Daniel.” Vlad hisses, trying to look the utmost calm as eyes turn onto them. Danny feels a little smug when Vlad doesn’t even try to flash red eyes at him. 

“I should be saying that to you.” Danny retorts, smiling gleefully when Vlad’s eye twitches. He detaches himself from him before Vlad can get a word in, and disappears into the throng of socialites. 

Finding Bruce Wayne is easier now that Danny’s nearly a full head higher than everyone else in the room — those Jack Fenton genes coming in handy — and it’s even easier to see just how Bruce is capable of drawing attention to himself. He is the brightest person in the room, a sun creating its solar system.

Knowing now, through Jason, that he is Batman — even years after the fact, Danny would still sooner believe that Bruce was Batman’s sugar daddy instead. And he has to applaud the man — his acting skills are phenomenal. 

But still, something seizes nostalgia in his heart. He hasn’t seen Bruce since Jason’s funeral; hasn’t spoken to him either. His contact number lingers in his phone, but has gone untouched for the last five years. 

Danny doesn’t know how to feel about him — petulant anger, perhaps, for preventing Jason from telling him he was Robin. It’s a childish, unfair anger, Danny knows the importance of a secret identity, knows the importance of who should know and who should not. It’s not fair to hold it against him.

He can’t blame Bruce for wanting to keep it secret, for wanting Jason to keep it secret too. Batman has many, many enemies. 

And much like the sun he compares him to, Danny’s feet carry him forwards, weaving silently through the crowds of rich people vying for even a second of his attention. The Crown Prince of Gotham, Danny can’t help but think to himself. He huffs silently.  

The little prince too, Danny realizes when he gets closer. Bruce hasn’t noticed him yet — or, at least, he’s pretending not to have noticed him. And there’s a little shadow clinging to Bruce Wayne’s side, his newest baby bird; Damian Wayne. 

A smile stifles itself on his face when he sees the surly expression on Damian’s face, his hand curled subtly around the pant leg of his father as two elderly women crouch down and coo at him. Danny thinks the only reason they haven’t started pinching his cheeks is because Damian looks like he’ll bite their fingers off. 

It reminds him strongly of Sam, who hasn’t gone to one of these things ever since Danny stopped. 

The feeling of someone staring drags Danny’s attention away from Damian, and instead brings it back up and up, and onto Bruce. He meets his eyes, and Bruce stares at him with a furrow between his brows — like he recognizes him, but he’s not sure from where. 

Danny, in return, plasters a crooked smile across his face — one more genuine than what he gave the paparazzi. Arms spreading like wings, he steps around a middle-aged man and on instinct slips into whatever remains of his Gotham accent; “Mister B! It’s good to see you again.” 

Recognition flashes through Bruce’s eyes, and he smiles widely. 

“Danny.” He says, breathing his name out like he can’t believe his eyes. Danny’s grin grows ever wider, and Bruce slips between the crowd surrounding him — little Damian trailing behind — and pulls Danny into a one-armed hug, a bright laugh barking out of him. “Look at how big you’ve grown! It’s good to see you again.” 

The downside to being a ghost is that Danny can only sense other ghosts and, if they let him, their emotions. Surrounded by the undead, Danny’s gotten used to blocking out the white noise of ectoplasm and its intent. A ghostly radio, if you will. Everyone always knows a little bit of what everyone else is feeling.  

But that little trick doesn’t work on humans, and so he hesitates when Bruce hugs him — he wasn’t expecting it, and he’s unsettled by the realization that he doesn’t know if Bruce means it. He puts his hopes into thinking he does, and softens unwittingly. 

“You too, Mister Wayne.” He admits, breathing in and startling himself with the smell of Bruce’s cologne — it hasn’t changed since he was a kid; still rustic, still old. He returns the hug quickly, and pulls away like he’s been burned, clapping Bruce on the shoulder with a friendly smile. 

Only then, when he pulls away, does Danny also realize that he can sense Time on Bruce. He can sense it the same way he can breathe in dust and have it choke him in the back of his throat. In the same way people are sometimes, and at random, hit with a bone-seeping exhaustion that leaves him wanting to bury himself. Indescribable but undeniably recognizable. 

His smile almost falters — what was Bruce doing with Clockwork? 

He doesn’t ask, — he doesn’t know how to. It doesn’t matter in the end anyways, because he’s drawn away from the dust in his nose by the feeling of his ghost sense tingling in his chest. It creeps up his lungs, rising like a spider up a tree, before it suddenly stops. Stuck by the time it reaches his collarbone.  

It buzzes softly, and then dissipates. Danny almost frowns. 

Damian Wayne appears, coming out of Bruce’s shadow like a ghost, and hovers close to his father’s side. He glares daggers up at Danny, and Danny would think it endearing if he wasn’t so focused on the fact that he’d triggered his ghost sense — but only halfway. That’s never happened before.

What did that mean? 

“This must be Damian?” He asks Bruce, offering out a questioning smile. Bruce gives him back a nod, hand placing itself on Damian’s shoulder like an anchor. Fondness painting a brush across his face, it’s a look that Danny saw once a long time ago.  

His heart stings, just a little bit. “You’ve really expanded your nest since the last time I saw you.” 

Damian’s eyes narrow at him, it reminds Danny of a stray kitten puffing up its fur, and Bruce laughs lightly. Danny wonders if it makes him suspicious. “You are… very right, Danny.” Bruce says, still smiling, “Tim’s also here, I’m sure you’ll run into him somewhere.”   

“Father,” Damian says before Danny can respond, his eyes carry an unnatural tint of green in them as he glowers up at him, blending in like watercolor to be near-unnoticeable. “Who is this man?” Danny can respect the distrust palpable in Damian’s voice, they can be kindred spirits that way. 

"I’m Danny," He says, and holds out his hand for Damian to shake. He doesn’t take it. “Fenton, that is. I’m - was, uh, Jason’s best friend.” Was. Not is. Danny hates the reminder, even after five years. There’s an ugly squeeze in his chest that he tries to ignore, his smile tightening up like screws in the corner.

Damian’s lip curls up in the corner with barely concealed suspicion, and when he looks to Bruce for confirmation, Danny drops his hand. He only seems sated when Bruce nods, and straightens up more than Danny thought he possibly could. 

“How has Amity Park been treating you, Danny?” Bruce asks, a genial look on his face that Danny still can’t help but question. Maybe it’s because he knows he’s an actor now, and maybe he’s scared that perhaps Bruce doesn’t like him as much as he thought before.  

“It’s… treatin’ me well.” He says, a moment of hesitation slipping through his voice, his mouth tilting awkwardly. He’s never been good at small talk, it feels like he’s trying to wedge out a weed rooted stubbornly in his garden. “As well as it can, at least. It’s not Gotham, that’s for sure.”  

“I doubt anything could be like Gotham.” Damian sniffs, as prickly as the cacti sitting on Sam’s windowsill. Danny hums low, noncommittal. Five years ago that was a good thing, and five years now, Danny’s not so sure. 

“Are you planning on going to college?” Bruce asks, his head tilting like a curious puppy. Danny can’t help but just keep marveling at how well of an actor he is. “I remember you saying that you wanted to be an astronaut when you were younger.”

Danny’s smile twists bittersweetly. “No, actually.” He says, and sees surprise flitter itself across Bruce’s face. “That dream is… no longer possible, unfortunately.”

Bruce’s brows thread together, his smile drooping in oblivious confusion. “May I ask why?”    

Against what is probably his better judgment, Danny unfurls his hands and rolls up the sleeve of his scarred hand. Spidery, silvery, lichtenberg figures crawl up his arm like cracks in a window, disappearing under the rolled fabric at his elbow and up to his shoulder. Some of the scars are raised, the ones thicker, and the thin ones smooth. 

He watches Bruce’s eyes widen in alarm, he watches Damian’s do the same. And he resists the urge to pull his arm away when Bruce grabs his wrist in his hands that are too calloused for a playboy billionaire. “Dear god.” Bruce exclaims, looking over Danny’s arm in barely concealed — or well-acted — horror. “What happened?” 

Danny’s reply is probably curter than he wanted: “Accident.” He says, his smile pressing bitter into a line. Gently, he wrings his arm from Bruce’s worried hands and rolls down his sleeve. “Was sometime after the funeral. I’m no longer healthy enough to be an astronaut.” 

“That must have been quite the accident, Danny.” Bruce breathes, worried pity embroidered into the lines of his face. Danny knows, and he thinks that Bruce might be thinking of a reason different than what he shows on his face: lichtenberg figures aren’t permanent. They fade with time. Danny’s scars should have faded by now, and he knows it’s concerning that they haven’t.

Quite the accident indeed. 

But he shrugs dismissively, hand raising to rub at the back of his neck. The fuzz of his undercut prickles his fingers. “It is what it is.” He says when he drops his hand, “I’ve come to terms with it. Sorta.” 

Eventually he detaches himself from Bruce, eventually, because he sees Vlad approaching from the corner of his eye and from the clouding in his lungs that indicate him of a ghost nearby. Vlad’s got his greedy look in his eyes, the one Danny knows means that he’s chomping to use something to his advantage.

It’d be quite the boon for VladCo to collaborate with Wayne Industries and all its connecting branches. But unfortunately for him, Danny notices him faster than Vlad can clumsily weave through the rest of the Gotham Elite. With a less than graceful smile, he dismisses himself from his conversation. 

Then he turns, and with the years of expertise of weaving through crowded streets, Danny disappears into the swarm of socialites that sweep forward like the tide. He smothers a grin when, from the corner of his eye, Vlad’s face twists up in petty frustration as he gets swept forward, then pushed to the back of the crowd. 

Finding Tim Drake is easier than Danny thought, but it’s unintentional. Much like Bruce, Tim is surrounded by a crowd of Gotham’s Finest, another sun in the galaxy of the ballroom. He’s in a group of older men, people that Danny can only assume are fellow tycoons trying to bolster themselves up in the eyes of the second biggest fish in the room.  

It’s funny how much they puff and preen themselves up, like fish trying to spread their fins and make themselves look bigger. More important. Unlike fish, it’s ineffective. They look like blustering fools in Danny’s eyes, and Tim Drake’s strained expression only makes it more apparent. 

He wonders if anyone’s ever told them that people with power don’t tend to show it off? 

Tim Drake’s eyes drag over to the side, disinterest lighting under the chandeliers, and they lock onto Danny as he approaches. Danny slinks his shoulders back, fixing a lopsided smile to his face. He tries to look relaxed. 

He expects to see some kind of dread cross Tim Drake’s face — another little fish come to bother him. 

Instead, he’s surprised, and Tim Drake perks up with blinking eyes and ducks between two tycoons with a polite smile already stretching across his mouth. “Danny Fenton!” He says, coming to a stop before Danny in only a few quick strides. “What a surprise, we weren’t expecting to see you tonight.” 

Dirty looks burn themselves into Danny by the tycoons Tim was talking to, with scowls marring their faces as they side-glare at him with all of the subtlety of someone throwing a brick through a window. Danny’s smile grows into a grin, he hopes they know that with any kind of bark, they need a bite to go with it. Danny’s long since perfected the art of sharpening his teeth.

“Tim Drake!” He exclaims back, leaning back on his heels while his hands shove into his pockets. “I’m surprised you recognize me.” Bruce hadn’t, but he’s not sure if Bruce was only pretending. 

Tim smiles, easy-going and tilted. The picturesque image of a teenage CEO “There are pictures of you in the manor with Jason.” He says. Danny tries not to think about what that means — it’s only natural that Bruce would have photos of Jason up. Of course he would. “It’s hard not to recognize you.”

Danny wonders if, just like Bruce, Tim’s smile was real or not too. This family is full of liars, he muses, and he can’t hold it against them. He’s one too. 

The corner of his mouth crinkles up in the corner, “You sure?” he asks, tilting his head to the side. “Bruce didn’t at first, and I’ve changed quite a lot since I was fourteen.” More than you know. 

Tim shrugs, “You know how Bruce is, he forgets what shoe goes on which foot in the morning.” 

Danny’s smile hollows, “I suppose.” 

“What are you doing here, if you don’t mind me asking?” Tim’s nails scratch behind his ear, curiosity feigning through his voice. A carefully placed falter in his smile that makes him look genuine. “You haven’t gone to one of Bruce’s charities in years, and the Mansons weren’t on the invitation list.” 

The Mansons. Sam told him before, years ago, when his grief was still newborn-fresh and burning holes into his chest, that her parents were all up in arms about the lack of invitations they were getting. They wanted her to try and convince him to go back to Gotham. 

Obviously, he told Sam that she can tell her parents to fuck off.

“Oh, I’m here with my—” Danny forces a smile and tries not to choke, “—godfather, Vlad Masters.” It’s a good thing that Vlad was trying to cozy up with Bruce right now, he can’t imagine what kind of smug preening he would do if he heard Danny refer to him as his godfather with his own voice.  

A low, surprised hum emits from Tim’s throat, his eyebrows raising. “The CEO of VladCo?” 

It’s not a surprise to Danny that Tim already knows who Vlad is, he’s a rival businessman after all. He nods lazily, and when he looks to find where Vlad is, he finds him still trying to get through the crowd of socialites barricading Bruce Wayne. His expression was as calm as could be, but there was a tick in his jaw that made Danny think he was seconds away from barreling through people like a steamroller. And if that was the case, Danny’s hand was resting over his phone and ready to record. 

“The very same.” He says, looking back to Tim. “My parents were college friends with the guy apparently. They fell out of contact for a few decades and only reconnected a few years ago.”  

Their conversation ends with Danny rolling his neck with a series of loud, cold-causing pops and him offering Tim a fang-tilted grin. “I’d love to keep this conversation running,” He says, the tips of Tim’s ears turning faint pink, “but I need a smoke break and a rich-people break, no offense.”  

“None taken.” Tim responds quickly, his voice half-a-mutter before he fishes out his phone and holds it up. He smiles, “Can I get a photo before you go, though? Something to hold over Dick’s head for not coming.” 

And Danny is never one to pass up causing Dick trouble, his grin fills out on the other end and he barks out a laugh that comes from the center of his chest. “You’re speaking my language!” 

He settles himself on Tim’s left side, throwing his arm around his shoulder as he bends his knees and stretches his prettiest smile across his face. Tim holds up his phone with a matching grin, and through a series of quick click-click-clicks, he snaps a few quick photos. 

Danny peers over his shoulder as he goes through the photos. They’re all the same, but Tim settles on one in the middle and holds it up for Danny to see. He whistles low, under his breath, and playfulness pulls over his mouth. “That’s a good one,” he jokes, “send that one, my hair looks fantastic.” 

Tim snorts at him, red still cherry-dusting over his cheeks. But he nods anyways, and as he exits out of the photo album, Danny steps away and around until he’s facing him again. He’s never liked looking over someone’s shoulder on their phone that much. 

“I’ll be on the West End Balcony,” Danny tells him, shoving his hands into his pockets and nodding towards the balcony. Carefully, he sees something flash through Tim’s expression — wide-eyed, dare he say startled. But it’s gone before he can pick through it. Times like this made him wish that everyone here was a ghost — they’d be easier to read that way. 

I’m out of practice, he thinks. It’s not a good thing. He’s becoming a rusty knife. He shouldn’t. 

Danny keeps his smile and begins to back up slowly, “Let me know how Dipstick reacts, alright?” He asks, and Tim waves a hand at him, mouth half-tilted and mimicking with a murmured ‘yeah yeah’. Danny grins at him, and flips himself around on foot like a skater on ice, marching towards his favorite balcony. 

—----------

(When Danny is out of earshot, Tim pulls out his phone and opens up the group chat. He dodges out the way of an approaching businessman, and quickly loads up the photo into the dock. It’s the group chat that only recently added in Jason.)

(Tim is perhaps a little too eager, a little too smug. His fingers fly across the screen. But he’s not eager enough, perhaps, the moment he hits send he turns his phone off and shoves it back into its pocket.)

(And ignores the buzzing.) 

Tim: hey Jason your best friend just showed up to gotham for the first time since your funeral Tim: [image]

—----------

Time is a funny, funny thing. Maybe even funnier now that Danny personally knows the man in charge of it all — man? Entity. Amorphous personification of the concept of time and all things connecting to it. 

Stepping out into the West End Balcony is like a dull knife being driven into the space between his ribs, wedging itself into his lungs and filling it with time-made ash and dust. It’s a blast from the past, as bitter as crab-apples and as painful as it is familiar. Timeworn instinct has his hands digging into his pockets for his cigarettes before he can think. 

The last time he stood here, his heart used to beat right. And it used to beat at the same tempo as the boy he shared the space with. The carton clunks, dull and cardboard, while his fingers scrape against the side. Danny fishes a cigarette out from its bed, and shoves the box back into his pocket. 

Like casting a line out into the ocean, Danny reaches out his core and silently broadcasts a whalesong; tuned to a frequency only a ghost could hear. Gotham is full of ghosts, and he doesn’t doubt they hear what he’s saying — but, it only matters if the right one hears him. 

He waits for a response, and gets nothing back. Danny turns, and makes himself a tripping hazard on the railing; sitting on the edge and sticking out his legs for no one but the air to step on. Gotham responds by winding its hot city wind through the skyscrapers and structures.

Gotham takes an invisible finger and tilts his head up, and Danny only sees the ugly pollution-yellow sky staring back down at him. Time is a funny, funny thing, because despite all his love stars, when faced with the blanket smog that covers them up, he feels more at home. 

Maybe it’s from who he’s used to sharing it with.

Nimble, calloused fingers find his pockets again, and Danny pulls out his lighter with rehearsed ease. He catches his cigarette between his teeth, and click-click-click, the lighter blooms to life with a small flame dancing beside his fingers. 

There’s a poem here, he can feel it. Under the smog-written sky and surrounded by concrete, there’s one here. He’s too tired to find it.  

Danny lights the cigarette, and the lighter dies in response. And when it returns to his coffin-like pocket, Danny slumps, he’s left alone with his thoughts, and breathing out smoke he lets them cash in.

He’s tired. 

He’s tired.

Ancients, he’s so fucking tired. 

There’s a sleep-heavy ache in his eyes when he allows them to close, and if he would, he’d sit himself on the ground and duck his head between his knees. He’s not as small as he used to be, but he thinks he could still hide. 

Instead, Danny soaks in the sounds around him; lets it sink under his skin like water soaking through his clothes. Orchestral music floats through the two glass doors like it’s coming through underwater, muffled by walls on all four sides. Late night traffic travels around the sides of the building from the roads in front and behind him.

Danny’s surrounded by the special kind of ambience you only hear on the west end balcony. With a cigarette hanging from his lips, his mouth curls into something threatening to become as ugly as the rest of the rust-stained city. 

He used to play a part in this ambience, once upon a time ago. Him and Jason both did, they had parts to play in the whole symphony of the city. Whether it be the drumming of their feet slapping against the street, or their voices ricocheting against the walls. They all had their parts to play.

And now it was just him. Jason was nowhere to be found. 

Something hopeless and fear-making wound like a spring through the whole of him, steadily winding up like a music box chrrrrting, ready to play once the fingers let go. Something all-suffocating with a dizzying sort of intensity that’s familiar to all ghosts.   

Danny holds his cigarette from his mouth, and holds his breath, trying to rid himself of the awful, shiver-making fear that’s creeping through his veins. When he breathes again, two minutes later, the spring jitters and jolts. The music box begins to play a grieving tune that he’s learned to heart. 

Grief. It’s an awful, fickle thing. It’s greedy, all-consuming, a hunger that’s never fucking happy, never sated. It must always be eating. Eating away at whatever it can find of its host, eating away until there is nothing left of its host. 

There are ways to sate it. Time is one of them. 

But ghosts are emotional creatures, they have no bones, no organs, no buffer to sequester the wounds of feeling away in order to mitigate the damage it does. They feel from their crowns to their soles, and emotional wounds never really heal. 

Not the worst of them anyways. Not the ones you die with. 

No, no, instead, they scab. They scab and fester, never really scarring. It never scars, that would be too kind. That would mean healing. No, it scabs. It covers itself in dried blood until it’s ready to be picked at again, and again, and again, until it’s bleeding fresh again. Until it’s bleeding like it never really stopped. 

Danny’s grief will never go away. Of that he knows for certain. Grief is a parasite all on its own without the influence of ectoplasm, but with it, it is never ending. It’s as fresh as the day it appeared and burrowed itself into a hole in his heart, and it will eat and eat and eat. 

He opens his eyes when his ghost sense tingles, mixed with the phantom pain of a scream locked in the back of his throat. It leaves a heavy feeling in his mouth that is neither grief nor nicotine, and it sits at the base of his tongue and coats his throat like a hand ready to suffocate him. 

If he narrows his eyes and focuses, it almost tastes like ectoplasm. 

But he doesn’t dwell on it long, cigarette hanging from his lips, because the source of the feeling drops down beside him. The heavy smog in his mouth evaporates, only to be replaced with an instinctive kind of horror that makes him flinch uninhibited. 

The Red Hood drops beside him, and he comes bearing a core of his own. One twisted. It sounds like a record player out of tune and played backwards; warped and slowed down, submerged underwater. Danny’s never heard something like it, goosebumps rush over his arms. 

He almost misses the fact that the vigilante is standing in the same spot Jason did, and when he realizes, that fact alone is enough to make him forget his onset horror. His core seizes something possessive.

Don’t you dare stand there, Danny almost hisses, a burning-sort of possessiveness coiling over and around his ribs like a weighted tangle of blankets. He grits his teeth, nearly biting his tongue to prevent himself from saying it, and a snarl curls his upper lip. 

He yanks out his cigarette to press his mouth into a line, nicotine smoke pouring out between like a cheap mockery of his ghost sense. Danny chews his jaw, and exhales deep out his nose. The possessive feeling dares to only make itself sharper, rather than duller.

“Red Hood.” He says plainly, trying not to sound as irrationally hostile as he feels. His cigarette is pinched between the ‘v’ of his fingers, and his only free hand coils and uncoils itself on the railing like claws. Danny almost looks down to make sure he’s not leaving scratches. “What a surprise to see you here.”  

It’s only through process of elimination that Danny knows who most of the vigilantes in Gotham are. Nightwing is Dick, Red Robin is Tim, Bruce is Batman, Damian is Robin, and Cass is Orphan. He’s pretty sure that Duke Thomas is the Signal, but that he’s not for sure about. 

However, there were vigilantes who he didn’t know the identities, of whom he had no interest in actively seeking out the identities of — it was none of his business. But Spoiler and Batwing were some of those vigilantes, Bluebird as well. 

And Red Hood too. Most recent of the roster, as far as he was aware, and local crime lord. 

It was fine, Danny of all people knew the importance of a secret identity. It was only through Jason he was able to figure out Batman’s and his cohorts. 

The Red Hood says nothing to him; he just stares, and despite his helmet he reminds Danny of a deer in headlights. He could barely pick out what he was feeling through the static strangeness of his core, so Danny didn’t bother. Instead he focused on the wound up tension in his shoulders.

It was like he wasn’t sure what to do in front of Danny, like he wasn’t expecting him to be here at all. 

Danny presses his lips together, and he forces himself to raise an eyebrow despite the displeasement frosting over his core and through his chest. “Am I in your spot?” He asks, still as plain as day, and he pushes himself off the railing. 

He doesn’t want to leave, he only just got here. But he wasn’t going to fight with a vigilante. “I didn’t think vigilantes used the Wayne Hall balconies,” he continues, and angles his back to the door, “I can leave.” 

Danny takes a step back.

And like stepping on a live wire — or maybe his brain pressed a button that finally got him working — the Red Hood lurches, his hands arched and reaching for him like he’s going to grab him. Danny will bite his fingers off if he does. 

“No!” The Red Hood yells, sounding like Danny leaving was the last thing he wanted. Danny stops in place, and the Red Hood straightens up, his fingers cringing back. His arms twitch, and then drop to his side.

“No,” He repeats, and he sounds more sure of himself. Sturdier. “You’re fine. I’m just stopping here for a quick rest before resuming patrol.” 

…Danny narrows his eyes. His arms cross, and he takes a step back anyways. The Red Hood’s shoulders scrounge. “I thought you only worked in Crime Alley.” Suspicion crawls up his throat, and Danny knows better than to look away, but he spares an internal glance to Tim.

The Red Hood is silent for two seconds too long, and Danny takes another step back. “Detour.” He says, and Danny calls such bullshit. 

But, if the Red Hood isn’t chasing him away, then Danny will take back his spot. He breathes out smoke, turning his head away from the Hood. “Alright.” He says, and threads his wariness through his voice as he walks back to the railing.

Maybe it’s just him, but it feels like the Red Hood is tracking him as he moves. Danny thinks maybe he should ask the Red Hood if he thinks he’s a wolf. 

Danny moves a little further away when he sits back down, crossing his arm over his stomach as he presses his cigarette to his mouth. It burns the back of his throat, and he watches the Red Hood from the corner of his eye.

And the man… is silent. He says nothing more and lets a quiet fall over them — Danny tries not to care enough to make it feel uncomfortable, but Hood is unsettled by something. Spooked, even. He’s lost in thought, Danny doesn’t need to see his face to know that, and he leans against the railing in a mimic to Danny. 

It’s not good enough, he switches to something different, deeply uncomfortable. And then does it again, and again, and again. It’s distracting, annoying, like a fly buzzing against the window. Danny watches him adjust and adjust.

He finally, finally, flips over until his stomach leans against the railing, his legs kicked out. It is so starkly Jason that that possessive, angry thing in Danny’s chest rears out its fury head and he nearly sinks his teeth into Red Hood’s jugular. 

How dare you. How dare you. Howdareyouhowdareyou.

Danny forces himself to stare at the doors, blood and ectoplasm pounding static in his ears. Ghosts are emotional creatures, and that means they can be irrational. He nearly smushes the cigarette in his hands. 

When his cigarette is nothing but a butt of crumbling nicotine-paper, Danny crushes the cig in his hand and watches the ash flutter in soft gray flakes to the ground. The heat of the stick stings his hand into something painful, but it’s nothing his healing can’t fix. It won’t even scar. 

He wipes the remaining ash staining his hand on his pant leg. Danny can already hear Vlad’s complaining in his ears when the fabric comes back smeared, and he wipes his pants again for good measure. 

Red Hood is already holding out another cigarette before Danny can reach for his pockets. 

(“A ciggie for your thoughts?” A young Jason Todd whispers one nippy Gotham night, an impish grin pressing like ink across his face. A cigarette pinched between two fingers. “I stole two from my old man, he won’t even notice they’re gone.”)

Danny stares at it, his tongue made of lead in his mouth. He flicks his eyes up to the whites of Red Hood’s helmet, something pitting and unreadable in the bottom of his stomach. “I have my own.” He says when his jaw finally decides to move, and the wilt the Red Hood hides is a snowflake melting in Danny’s hands. It is brief, but Danny still sees it. 

He shrugs, acting as if he hadn’t been expecting Danny to take it. “Alright.” He pulls away, quiet.

It’s a split second decision, Danny doesn’t even think it through. When the Red Hood looks away, Danny snatches the cigarette out of his hands and sifts his lighter from his pocket. “But if you’re offering,” Danny says, holding the cig between his teeth, “then I won’t say no.” 

The Red Hood says nothing in response, and Danny lights the cigarette. Over the sound of his muddled core, Danny thinks he can hear something hopeful. He waves it away with the smoke falling from his mouth. 

Silence returns to them, a little more comfortable, and a little more expectant. The Red Hood leans back against the railing and stifles a fidget with his hands, staring out over the gardens below like he wasn’t trying to look at Danny. 

Whatever he was expecting, he began to lose hope for it as seconds dragged out into minutes. Whatever had been digging tension into his shoulders finally began to pull away, leaving him slumping. Danny eyes him out from the corner of his eye, unsure of what he was expecting.

The only thing he can think of is Red Hood was asking for his thoughts. He was asking him what was wrong. What the weight on his shoulders was. ‘Tell me your thoughts,’ Danny thinks he was saying, ‘something only I will know.’ 

He thinks of Jason, and all of those nights on rooftops, in parks, behind dumpsters, anywhere they could hide, and he thinks of all those times smoke twisted through the air and choked itself in Danny’s lungs. 

Danny’s breath in is quiet, but the Red Hood flinches like it’s a warning bell. He doesn’t look at him, grief filling in the hollow of his heart like a leak in a ship. Danny takes a bucket and fills it until it’s spilling over the edge. 

And he dumps it over the side. “The Joker killed my best friend.”  

Five years and he’s only finally said it out loud. Five years and countless, smolder-torched, sleepless nights stuck in a cycle of grief and anger and blood-dripping revenge. And he’s only now just said it aloud. 

He breathes in trembling. 

Nails dig into the railing, bone-breaking tight, and Danny looks down to make sure he hasn’t cracked the concrete. It crumbles against his palms, but it remains unwavering. He stares for a few seconds too long, and then he looks up. 

Danny doesn’t look at the Red Hood, but he can see him tense from the corner of his eye. He pets the stone idly, feels the pebbles dig into the pads of his fingers, catching under his nails. “He beat him to death.” 

He beat my best friend to death. 

He beat him to DEATH. 

Ihatehim. 

Danny closes his eyes when he takes his next breath, almost afraid that he might start spitting fire if he doesn’t. Or maybe he’ll spit glass instead, he’s always chewing something sharp. Burning, seething, always-needing hate sends vertigo spinning through him in waves, and Danny’s teeth grind into each other. “He beat my best friend to death.”   

The Red Hood is silent, and if it weren’t for the muddy tune of his static-warping core, Danny would have thought he left. But he’s there. Just silent. He doesn’t speak until Danny opens his eyes, lashes blink-blink-blinking to push back the sting and tears that threaten to well up. 

He finally speaks when Danny looks at him, and he’s as soft as gravedirt when he says: “How do you know?” 

Rulebreaker, a quiet part of Danny’s mind whispers. The cigarette is still perched between Danny’s fingers, half-forgotten in his grief. He bounces it idly, and takes a drag. “His ghost told me.” He says, smoke pouring out. His ghost told me before he disappeared. 

Whatever answer the Red Hood was expecting, Danny doubts it was that. He just stares at Danny, face obscured and unreadable by his blood-red mask. Danny uses his silence to look away, to gather his thoughts. 

Maybe he should pass the cigarette back over, he thinks, and let Red Hood tell him a thought in return. Troubles for troubles, it would only be fair. Danny shared his secret, Red Hood should share one of his own. 

But Danny would never ask that of him. They were strangers. So Danny will give him another secret instead. 

“I want him dead, Red Hood.” Danny says, voice slicing through the air with all the elegance of a dull and jagged knife cutting through butcher meat. There is an unexpected shake in Danny’s voice that he doesn’t want present. 

Red Hood jerks. He stares. 

Danny presses forward, his face scrunching up ugly like and smoothing over with the sharp hiss of an inhale being dragged through teeth. “I want to kill him.” It comes out a whisper, ragged and hoarse. It’s his very own vice that Danny gets to keep all to himself.

Well, a vice that he used to keep all to himself. It should scare him how easily he wants to spill blood, how quickly Danny wants to wrap his hands around Joker’s throat and rip off his head. He’d do it without a second thought. 

Danny pushes himself off the railing, his hands trembling with ill-concealed hurt. He takes one last hit, and breathes out one last cloud of smoke. “I think I’ve taken up too much of your time, Red Hood.” He says, offering the silent vigilante a lopsided smile that he barely believes himself. 

It’s a twist in behavior. It’s probably suspicious. 

The Red Hood just stares at him. 

He should go visit Jason. It’s been so long. It’s been too long. Are there florists open this time of night? Danny wonders, and he bets there probably is. There’s always something open in Gotham.

The cigarette crumples up and crushes itself in his fist-curling hands. Danny turns on his heel and leaves.  

---

when she says she doesn’t send nudes