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When Danny moved to Gotham, he was a sickly, scrawny thing. Eighteen and more bones than skin, more lanky limbed and feral grinned than a boy anymore.
Eighteen and more horrific sweet thing than handsome child, sweet child. The skin on his eyelids were nearly translucent, the veins webbing under his hands pulsed with brackish green blood.
Fresh out the sewers, crawling from the proverbial muck of the city, he was nothing more than a bit of a monster. A thing to be pitied and looked down upon but never helped. Feral.
It took mere days for him to establish himself as a thing who lurked in the corners of alleys, stuffed between dumpster and walls, a thing that laid rest under rickety fire escapes and wailed at passerby in a warbling cry, a drowned bird, caged and broken.
Days passed and he learned to blend just enough to avoid lurking eyes, how to weaponize flashes of his pale skin and sharp teeth, a warning, the green of his eyes poison, acting much the same as the neon colors of poisoned flora and venomous fauna.
It took weeks to make his skin look human again, to make it take on the slightest bit of color, less like a ghost and more like a deathly sick mortal. Longer still to find his voice, lost as it was in the spiraling misery of a ghostly wail.
It took a month and a half for his broken wrist to set, having to be broken and reset twice before it healed in the right position. The purple bruises on his skin did not fade as easily, perhaps due to strain or perhaps because he would miss them, those last signs that his parents had ever lived at all, that they had loved him enough to avenge him. Loved him enough to kill him.
Or at least to try their damndest to get rid of his ghost.
In that month, he nested. Or something of the sort. He lurked, haunted, dwelled in the crooked eaves of a run down apartment on the borders of Crime Alley, a territory recently dominated by the bloody shadow of the Red Hood.
Danny took up space.
He was allowed to take up space. Eyes greener than anything natural, death pale and nearly illuminescent, human and humaner with every breath he took, forcing his lungs to expand and contract, manipulating the ecto in his veins to keep his heart pumping, a raggedness to his voice he could not keep at bay and would not disguise.
He straightened his spine and wore his inhumanity as a cloak, a shield, something once hidden away, treasured and holy, now on full viscous display. Jazz had always said he should be a little bolder, be a little more mean even, if it meant being safer.
She was the one who told him he deserved to take up space. And she was the one who had told him to run, packed his open wounds with ecto soaked gauze and sent him away, his core and his very being spiraling madly through a crumbling portal.
It was the memory of her skin pressing too hot on his forehead that kept his head high most days, kept his teeth bared and his eyes flashing bright terrible green.
His hair wisped in windless rooms, and he tried not to think of how if he were taller, stronger, if his eyes were red rather than green, how much he would look like Dan.
The residents in his building learned how to cope with his presence. The ghoul who slouched through the halls in the dead of night, kittens curled up to his chest and under his coat, thin cracked fingernails offering water and stale bread to the local homeless, but food nonetheless.
He was a monster, yes, but he was theirs. More theirs than the Bat and his birds, terrors in their own right, but never belonging to the city.
Danny fit; he was a manmade monster, a selfmade demon. All twisted emotions.
Love and hatred bottled up and intertwined so tightly that he could burst with it. Sometimes he floated so easily, like gravity could not, and had never had a hold on him.
Others he was earthbound, burdened with being loved and then forgotten.
Sent away bloodied and bitter and cold. Broken and brought deliverance by a bloodied and bitter and cold city.
A half year later and he was mostly a man. Mostly a man save for when he wasn’t. Save for the nights he let his shadow grow claws and don a crown that could never truly be seen in mortal light, let the ice fall from his fingers and dance around a ring which no human thing could look at straight.
Mostly a man, in the days he spent in community college classes, in the way he worked his hands to the bone washing dishes in the back of a thai restaurant, in the way he tried his best to keep his monster curled tight and content in his chest.
Save for the evenings when the working girls’ screams punctured the night, the nights when he woke in a cold sweat, the feeling of another soul crossing over. Save for the mornings he stared, hunched shoulders shaking, braced against the bathroom sink, the terrible sobering knowledge that he was not just balance but bridge.
Mostly a man save for the truth of a monster.
Nevertheless, he remained. Mostly whole, mostly a man, and mostly good.
Two years later and he had a penchant for going days as a mortal, every move calculated and steeped in careful consideration. A job worked across town, precisely a thirty seven minute walk, hats and headscarves and beanies and wearing his hair too long to be business casual in an effort to hide his inhuman ears. Glasses with the slightest tint to them, in conjunction with thin lenses worn specifically to dim the green that shone from his eyes.
A gait that suggested new in town, an easiness to his steps which made him seem touchable, breakable, as if he were anything of the sort. Purposeful vulnerability, baring his most human traits and keeping his ghost curled tight in his ribcage, only to be let off the leash when needed.
Or when indulged.
A panther’s shift from prey animal to predator. A roll of the shoulders and a sharpening to the eyes, a smile with teeth just a touch too sharp. Uncanny valley, or something of the sort, something a bit more perhaps, on the evenings where his soul felt like a cat stretching in the sun and scratching at the door, begging to be let out for a spot of fun in the most haughty way possible.
The monster who lurked through the seamlines of Crime Alley and The Bowery, who slunk through shadows with ice on his breath and wind dancing between pale clawed fingertips.
And then the blink of an eye and a boy once more. Rail thin even after years of eating well, midwestern accent still peaking through in flattened vowels, a boy who swapped thin flannels and sweaters for thick woolen coats and plaid scarves.
A parlor trick, an illusion, a ghost boy and a boy ghost. A monster of a man and a man of a monster. Shrodinger’s boy in the most gruesome sense of the phrase.
It was just how Gotham liked it. Paradoxes and paradoxes, layered together into a bouquet of hurts and retribution and revenge and absolution.
A boy who wore healing and hurts in equal measure, dealing fear and comfort with the same thin hands.