Work Text:
After the defeat of Pariah Dark, he sleeps.
Something akin to sleep, at least. He lies in his keep, curled tightly, like a cat in the sun, trying to make it make sense. To stop his head from splitting open and his thoughts from swirling out and pouring forth, painting his keep with their psychedelic color and nauseating patterns. His form keeps fluctuating from boy to ghost, and it hurts but it feel right and he can’t make sense of things. His eyes remain open, staring nearly unseeing at the wall. It’s stone gray and cracked and it’s stable, unlike so much of his life or afterlife or whatever it was considered at the time.
A boy king, they said.
A half ghost unfit to rule, not when his spirit was so unsettled. Not when he wasn’t ghost enough, still too mortal to serve the needs of the crown.
That hurt the most.
To know he was supposed to make things right, to force the ring of rage and the crown of fire into submission, to wield them as a king would, but knowing that he was found lacking, for something so out of control as being living. It makes his obsession itch and his soul feel wrung out. The static in his head grows louder, and thoughts get quieter even as he thinks them.
His allies and rivals are worried. He knows it, somewhere absently, that they take turns at his side and make sure Tucker and Sam can visit, that they even welcome Valerie into their midst despite her prominent position as a ghost hunter. His sister does not visit, and absently, he can hear the tinny voice of Tucker telling him that Jazz is covering for him, like she always does.
He doesn’t really hear. But he knows.
He isn’t sleeping. Not ready yet to succumb, unsure if he even can, with his form flickering back and forth and back and forth, his bones feel like t.v. static. He just needs a minute of time. Just a moment of rest to reset, needs to wait to sleep until his soul settles.
But his friends are worried and his crown is waiting, demanding in cold tones to ascend.
They let him be, sit silently and stroke his hands and arms and sometimes his shins, let him be for what feels like half an eon, but is more likely a week or two before they start to get angry. Sam screams until her voice is hoarse and Tucker takes up her tirade and his whole body shakes because it’s too much. He wants to help, needs to so badly it’s making his gums ache and his stomach twist, but he can’t. It’s too much to ask of him and not enough and he had thought he had gotten used to things, with the dependency Amity had on him, but it was too much.
He shakes.
And it’s Valerie’s cold low tones that make it through, “Goddamnit Fenton, I know things are shit cause of Pariah, but you’ve got people who need you. There’s more out there for you, someone who depends on you. The whole world’s waiting, you just need to get up and see it.”
And yes.
She’s right because she always is. She’s Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress. She always was the top of their class.
People are waiting, and someone, something is out there that will make him feel fulfilled. Purpose is waiting for him. All he has to do is make it through the moment.
He gets up, and his form stops flickering visually, but he can feel it, the off thump quiet thump silence of his heart, knows he is still a flickering light, his soul unsure which he should settle for, alive or dead.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
He gets up and walks through the portal back to his parent’s home and is only a little disappointed that they haven’t noticed he’s been gone.
He goes to school and avoids Mr. Lancer and sits in chemistry class and does not touch the beakers and holds conversations with Sam and Tucker and pretends not to notice the bags under Jazz’s eyes and the way she looks at him. He scrapes along his classes and sometimes finds it within himself to beat Skulker for the upteenth time that week.
Mostly he lets his mind drift and works on autopilot and tries not to think too deeply about the need to help and the call to serve and the desire for more, a pit in his stomach so insatiable he thinks if he ever got started he would never stop.
He messes in the lab and eats his mom’s probably radioactive hot dogs and tries not to wince when his heart goes flat for longer than a minute. He pretends to be human and lives in a haze and spends most of his time waiting. The something, the someone is out there.
Something to settle him. To make his heart beat right, to share the burden of king and ruler, someone to be his knight and advisor.
He kisses Valerie and Sam and even Tucker before realizing that something is off. Something is missing and it’s not the right path anymore, although it could have been.
Jazz asks him once what changed, what made him get up, why he didn’t just stay in his keep in agony for the rest of his existence, until someone came to end him, and he knows it comes out with a bit of reverb, just a bit too much ghost in it to be comfortable for mortal ears when he says, “Someone is out there, right? Someone who needs me?”
She blinks, and folds her hands neatly in front of her, always the therapist before she is a sister.
He had made it sound like he needed reassurance, but he was certain.
Jazz nods once, sharply, the way she does everything nowadays, sharply without soft edges. He thinks the change is because of him, but can’t bear to consider it anymore deeply than that. “Yes.”
He doesn’t track the date anymore, doesn’t need to. There is only the now and the before. Reaching towards the after.
Each moment is tracked with the funny beating of his heart, the half drum missing it’s bass beat.
The days pass all the same, days and then months and then a year. He gets good at drifting, mind dormant and still as can be while in the in between. The now until after.
He turns eighteen in the Nasty Burger and barely tastes the char on it before he’s finished and tells his sister he’s going to move on.
She asks about colleges, like she always does, and he shakes his head.
“Dead boy, remember? I don’t think I need college anyways, just need to drift around for a bit, haunt another town, just until after.”
She does not ask what after is, knows after two or three years of the absent version of him not to expect a straight answer. It’s obvious she doesn’t like it, but Jazz doesn’t like a majority of the things he does, or rather doesn’t do, and so she flattens her lips in that unhappy way, and lets him fly home instead of demanding he ride home with her.
His parents don’t notice, or maybe don’t care when he drains his college fund and buys an old truck. They don’t tell him to call, don’t make demands, barely notice when he packs his room.
His dad manages to wish him luck at college before he goes, but his mom is busy that day.
He shrugs and texts his friends goodbye, and leaves a week after he turns eighteen, in the middle of his senior year.
His toyota is packed with a sleeping bag and a sleeping pad, both hiking gear he pilfered away from his dad’s stash, some waterbottles and shelf stable snacks, although he hasn’t really had much of an appetite since spending every other second as a ghost, his backpack full of clothes, a travel telescope, his phone and a set of earbuds.
As Amity shrinks in his rearview mirror, the flipping of his soul stops for just one moment, and he’s human when he whispers goodbye.
It’s a rather drab affair.
The school calls his parent and then his sister and then him last.
It takes them a month to make the first call, and by the time they get to him, he’s been staying in Pennsylvania for weeks and has no means to get back to town.
The receptionist over the phone marks him as unenrolled and no one makes a visit to the Fenton home to find him. He had always been a disruptive and odd kid. No one really expected him to graduate, and although no one ever voiced it, he knew they all expected him to move on and disappear.
He stays in the truck for a few weeks until he can afford to rent a room in a motel and then he nests a bit. He stores his gear in his car and hangs his clothes in the closet, puts his telescope near the balcony and lets himself buy real groceries instead of just instant meals.
Pennsylvania is home for just over three months, working at a bookstore and letting himself drift. He walks the streets a little inhuman, and it’s nice, to be protected and not so underestimated. Sure his frame is small, but his teeth are sharp and as vacant as his eyes could be, he thinks they come across haunting and not just dumb.
He works night shifts and there’s no uniform, but he wears the same sort of outfit everyday, directing students to the textbook section, kids to the fantasy novels, and the regulars to their preferred reading nooks, wearing a rotation of printed t-shirts and blue jeans, always the same red sneakers.
He works his shift alone, save for the owner on some nights, and it’s peaceful, cause the owner is an older lady who leaves him be most nights, except for when she bugs him to eat more, telling him he looks half dead.
He lets himself smile and accepts her homemade soup and cornbread. It’s a bit like having a proper mother, and it’s disconcerting for a kid who barely had a mother growing up. He loves his mom and his sister but neither of them could raise him right, not for any real thought of their own.
But the owner of the bookshop, Mrs. Dervitable, her smokey perfume and floral print dresses, she ruffled his hair and made sure to force him to take a break in the evening, sent him home with baked goods once a week and told him to sleep more.
She also tells him he should do something with his life, not stay in this damn town and grow old and mean like her, that he should move on, travel, go to school, make something of himself.
He laughs openly with her and tosses an arm over her shoulders, tells her he could never bear to leave her all by her lonesome, that he will stay until they both kick it, long as that may be.
Mrs. Dervitable tells him he could charm the devil, and he winks conspiratorially, wholly different with this one woman than with anyone else he knows or used to know.
Three months in Pennsylvania and Mrs. Dervitable does kick it.
It’s not sudden, apparently, because apparently she was dying of some sort of cancer, and none of his coworkers know him enough to say.
It’s awful, even though he sort of knew it would happen, cause she never laughed when he told her he would move when they both died, only ever smiled indulgently and called him a charmer. He may have even been able to feel it, if he concentrated enough, something sweet and rotted about those nearly dead.
He packed up and moved on the same evening he found out. There was no need to quit cause she was dead, no one to really notify. No last paycheck either cause she paid in cash, always winking and giving him an extra twenty on weeks he “looked especially thin.”
The flipping in his soul continued.
Static in his soul, and dust gathering in the corners of his mind, he hit six small towns before doubling back and settling in Ohio.
He works as a forest ranger in the national park for the fall season, but when the snows come in the winter he moves on.
At his time in the forest, he bunks with a retired firefighter, an older man named Mark who reads trail guides in his spare time and snores louder than his dad. It works just fine for him, and his telescope goes next to the window, his clothes folded under the bed and his everyday ranger jacket next to the door.
He stops wearing sneakers and starts wearing hiking boots, lets himself wake slowly in the morning, and finds two lost hikers during his time there.
One of the hikers looks at him like he’s god, and Danny can smell butterscotch and rot, and knows he saved the man’s life.
He says nothing, just warns him to be more careful next time, and sleeps easy.
He lies about where he comes from, changes his accent a bit, and learns to forage from Mark.
They cook chanterelles over a wood stove and swap half made up stories on where they grew up.
When he moves on, he leaves the telescope with Mark and wishes him luck.
He tries not to think about how the coming winter made their cabin smell of nothing but fresh cut grass, flower pollen, and rot.
When he leaves, he knows Mark will die in the winter, and he hugs the man before he gets in his truck.
He thinks of himself like a gateway. There’s something to be said about walking the line between dead and alive, and then something else to be said about constantly flipping back and forth between the states.
There’s something unique about him, something different than any other halfas.
He can sense incoming death, can try possibly put it off, prevent it for a time, but perhaps not consciously, only if it’s up in the air. If death is imminent, he doesn’t think there’s anything he could really do, except perhaps ease suffering when it comes.
Warning people would only panic them.
So he drifts in lazy circles through the Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia before making his way back up. And he knows and he learns and he tries not to think about it but he knows. The girl bagging his groceries smells like death, but it’s not hers. Someone she lives with though, will die in the coming weekend. The man at the gas station recently lost his wife. The car next to him at the stoplight is going to get into an accident today and everyone in the car will die. The old woman at the restaurant recently had a heart attack, and she will have another soon, if the scent of honey and rot is to be believed.
He hopes that when he finds what he’s looking for that the knowing will stop. He hopes but he doesn’t hold out faith that it will happen.
Periodically, he texts his sister. Love you, thanks for letting me go, not coming back yet.
They both know the yet is an impossibility. He will never come back to Amity. Neither of them admit it.
He drives through West Virginia and up to New York and avoids the cities for a while. He wants to be in the trees again. It’s been a year or so, and when he looks at a calendar, he realizes his birthday has come and gone, and his body is nineteen but his soul is still fourteen and dead, but the trees don’t care so neither does he and his tire pops on the backroads in some small northern town.
He finds the number after fighting for a signal and his car gets towed into town by an overfriendly girl with a gap in her front teeth.
She smells sweet, but it’s perfume, and in her shop, there is no rot. He lets himself relax a half second, nice to be around the living when so used to the dead.
She buys him a cheap coffee and tells him he should get new tires, asks him where he’s been to wear them out so thoroughly.
He tells her, “Around,” and the conversation fizzles.
He pays in cash and stays in yet another cheap motel, and is out of town within a week.
He lands in New York City but hates the smell. The sewage and human matter all on top of the sweet rot of death and he moves on quickly, doesn’t even take his bag out of his truck.
A few hours south and he finds himself in Gotham.
It’s an odd city. It’s got the rot and the sweetness in the air, but there’s so much ecto it might as well be alive.
There are no ghosts there. No ghosts but him, his reflection sometimes looking like himself, but more often than not taking the form of an older man, someone who looks like the darker version of himself, but he can’t quite tell if it’s in his head or not.
There are no ghosts but him.
Just the rot and the crime and something about it makes the bits of his soul that flip and swap around settle, settle on dead boy, but it’s okay. He is more than happy to be a ghost if it means that the static clears and he can think and move without pain lacing his sides and bearing it’s revenge on his joints.
He finds a warehouse no one seems to be staying in and makes it his own. There’s a door that locks from the inside, a room with reinforced windows and only a few bullet holes in the walls, and he sets up his bags. He blows up his sleeping pad and lays out his mattress against the far wall, keeps his food storage in the empty cabinets along the left wall, hangs a cheap sheet over the windows to block the morning light.
He wears his ranger jacket and keeps to the shadows when he walks at night, phases in and out of his little room by the docks and pretends not to hear the deaths in the city.
It’s comforting, in all of it’s oddity. Familiar in an uncomfortable way, but for the first time in years, he feels settled into his skin, like it’s actually his again.
His head is quiet and for the first time in years, when he contacts Jazz, he calls her instead of texts.
“I think I’m on the right track,” he says, standing on the rooftop at near midnight, tracking the bright colors of the Robin boy from halfway across the Bowery.
“Where did you land yourself this time?” She doesn’t sound surprised to hear his voice, but nothing could shake Jazz anyways, so he’s similarly unsurprised.
He laughs a bit when he tells her, “Gotham. It’s somehow better and just as bad as I’ve always thought.”
She huffs over the line and the affection in her voice grates on his very being, “Only you, Danny, only you would find Gotham City a good place to settle down.”
There’s quiet over the line and it’s good, he thinks, because he remembers many similar silences over their childhood, from the times before he died, when they could be silent and understand one another without any words at all.
“Have you found them? The person you are looking for?” She whispers, and it’s like she’s in the room with him, and he doesn’t think he’s ever missed her so much in his life.
“Not yet,” he pauses, hums and his soul flips back and forth a bit, not as fast as usual, like in response to his words, “But soon, I think.”
“Will you come home then?”
“You know the answer, Jazz. Don’t make me say it, please.” He never feels so small as to when she’s disappointed, and he doesn’t think he could take it.
He has gone so long without seeing her face, he thinks it could kill him all over again to have to tell her that he would never be coming home.
“I know, Danny.”
She breaths over the line for a few minutes and then hangs up and he can’t fault her for it because he knows she is crying half a country away, knows that she gave up her future for him, to make him feel safe and make sure he wasn’t alone in that house, but it hurts.
He’s alone in the city, a city of monsters who look like men and dress like men, but die and wake up all over again, just like monsters do.
He works as a busboy sometimes, and sometimes works for the local gangs. He doesn't hurt anyone, not intentionally at least, but he’s usually hired as a guard, to protect higher ranking people, or something stupid, and he doesn’t really pay attention to the reputation he gets, just keeps his head down as best as he can, calls Jazz twice a month at least, and texts her every week.
He tells people to call him Specter, but more often answers to Spook, Spirit, Shadow, and Wraith.
He sticks to the smaller gangs in his local area and avoids anyone with a theme, as hypocritical as it sounds.
He is up front with his prices and his willingness for violence.
He has rules.
He won’t hurt kids or women, will only fight if the others don’t back down first, won’t kill or maim.
The line of potential investors is still high.
He avoids the Bats through sheer luck and a bit of invisibility, but the kid, Robin, seems to have sharp ears and a bit of death around him.
The static in his soul settles to a quiet buzz, and he knows someone is coming, the one he has been waiting for.
Whispers of a ghost haunting the Bowery reach his ears and he smiles when he hears, his heartbeat thumping unevenly in his chest and his fingertips ice cold and slightly pointed.
His reputation grows long shadows and by the time the newest player in town shows up, the Red Hood, he is firmly cemented in his place as one of the best body guards in town.
His favorite game is to elude the Batman, lead him on merry chases through greater Gotham, dancing circles around his Robin and then watch from his vantage point floating in the sky as the kid - who isn’t really a kid as he is only a few years older than Robin - curses his name and stomps around the rooftop looking for clues.
He sees men die on a weekly basis, and the scent of rot and sweetness stops bothering him so much.
When the duffle bag of heads roll, he is there, in the shadows, guarding some kingpin or another that hired him that night, picking at his nailbeds and thinking about how he’s guarding his current employer’s enemy the very next night.
Not that it matters, when the gunfire sprays and his next appointment gets shot through the calf, a clean shot, his prerogative is to protect today’s investor.
He swings them clear of the gunfire, but keeps them in the building, intent on knowing more about the man in front of him. The Red Hood, an alias previously used by the Joker, who was still snug as a bug in a rug in Arkham.
The man flaunted his guns and his power, swearing to the assembled criminals that he would be taking a cut of their livelihoods lest they choose to die instead.
He heard enough after that, and dropped his client off at a safehouse before retiring to his own warehouse to catch a minute or two of rest.
It was only the next morning that he realized the flipping of his soul had ceased almost completely, going from constant noise and static and moving to life and death and life and death and back again every moment to perhaps every few minutes.
The only change had been the emergence of the newest figure in Gotham’s underbelly, the Red Hood.
He takes no more clients, holes out in his warehouse home and debates moving on.
It’s stupid, to want to move on when Gotham just began to sink into his skin, but it’s been months, and his birthday passed again. He’s twenty years old and living more securely than he ever has in his life, twenty and a criminal for hire, making more money than he had in months of working diligently at restaurants or bookshops.
There is no longer anything righteous or good about him, not since the day he tore a being’s core from their chest and claimed the throne for himself.
He is a Spectre, a ghost, a dead dead boy.
In the end, he stays.
But he walks the straight and narrow, doesn’t go out at night to taunt the little Robin nor frustrate the Bats. He doesn’t answer calls on his burner from his various investors, and he is the first to hear the rumors that the Red Hood killed Spectre just like he killed the lieutenants.
He keeps his head down and his story straight. He tries not to notice the increase in sweetness and rot in the night air, tries to not hear the whispers on the street, tries not to see the way that the Red Hood is good.
He tries hardest to not notice that his soul is stationary again, no longer flipping like t.v. channels, but staying mortal until he deigns to change to dead, and then back again.
When Red Hood finds him, it isn’t a surprise, just an inevitability.
He comes alone and enters through the door, and he is sitting eating a pack of ramen straight from the pot and it isn’t exactly the most presentable he’s ever been, but he straightens his back as best as he can and looks at the masked man in the face.
It isn’t as if he could die, so there’s no reason to be afraid, even if his display of bravery could set off the other man.
Instead, Red Hood shucks off his helmet, domino mask firmly in place, and asks in a surprisingly youthful tone, “Why the fuck is the pit quiet around you?”
He hums and asks, “Do you mean the static?”
Hood shakes his head, eyes flashing bright green and suddenly the scent of cinnamon and rot nearly doubles. “The pit. The Lazarus pits.”
He cocks his head to the side in return and nods, “For me it’s static, like my head is buzzing and my joints ache and my soul is misaligned. All of it is quiet and peaceful around you.”
“Why?” Red demands, hand on the gun at his waist.
He shrugs, “My fault, I think. I’m half dead, which was fine with little to no symptoms, but then I accidentally accepted a kingdom, and the static started. Somewhere around four years ago.”
The other man’s hand drops from the gun on his hip and he runs it raggedly through white tufted hair, “I died and came back four years ago.”
Oh. “So maybe both our faults.”
They stare at one another for a moment. He tries not to think about how his soul has slotted back into place near completely, how he can feel it, the air of death around himself dissipating a bit, no longer absolutely steeped in it, but remaining the normal amount for a ghost.
“Do you want to sit? I’ve got more ramen.” He offers, aware it’s likely not enough.
There is much to discuss. Much he has not covered or brushed over. He can feel the demand of the ring of rage, the burning possession of the crown of fire, demanding to be claimed, to claim him in turn.
He hasn’t even broached the topic of knighthood, and from what little he knows about Red Hood and his agenda, he is nearly certain that the man will not so easily be torn from his work.
He hasn’t said the word soulmate yet, although that is probably the best word for it. A balm for the other’s soul, their unique fingerprints matching and healing the cracks in the other, a king and his knight.
Red Hood nods and sits wearily, and Danny busies himself with putting together another pot.
Those things could wait.