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The fight had been a week ago, and Danny knew he shouldn’t have let it settle and fester, but the relationship rules didn’t apply. He couldn’t go to bed angry if he simply refused to sleep.
It was stupid. But the words kept repeating in his head, a cacophony of voices exacerbated by his poor sleep and the pain lacing up his arm to his heart, rattling around. It was stupid but it was the week before his death day, and Danny had wanted so badly to be human for so long.
But he would never have the chance to be, had accepted his demons and his ghost and let it slip like second skin over his humanity until he was more ghost than man, had let himself be as inhuman as he needed to be, in order to survive.
Jason had lived it with him. Had held him shaking apart on the nights where it was hard, where shining metal and the scent of burning food made him spiral back into a place where he was young and alone and fending for himself against people who claimed to love him, but only when he was human. Only when he put his best foot forward and lied to their faces about where he went and when, why he was different.
He had thought it worked. That Jason had known him, seen him truthfully, loved him wholly, monster and man and the thing he had become, the best and worst bits of both.
There was no such thing, really, as walking the line wholly. He was both and neither and something different entirely.
He wasn’t like Dani, a ghost girl in a human body sometimes, or even like Vlad, who had for a time been a human man who could be a ghost.
He wasn’t even like Jason, who came back with soul splintered to bits, a fledgling core and scraps of memories, but human and humaner with every part of his life he reclaimed. Soul so far anchored into Gotham that the city herself fueled his rages. Sent her soldier to dirty up her streets and clear the way for something better in the future.
It was probably unfair.
To hold Jason accountable for a decade of hurt and confusion and building his identity on a tightrope of frayed edges.
It was probably unfair, but Danny had never had a fair day in his life.
So he didn’t talk about it, haunted the halls of their apartment rather than coming to bed, held his silence and ignored the offerings of food in the fridge.
Somehow along the line, he settled. Too much of a good thing, or whatever the phrase was.
Danny thought he still loved Jason. Loved him the way he loved coffee in the morning, a necessity, an addiction he was happy to be slave to. Only for the last week, it had been burdensome, to love with an inability to walk away.
He didn’t know whether or not he wanted to be let go, set adrift, or if he wanted Jason to get angry and fight for the life they had built together.
Danny’s arm hurt.
He couldn’t think straight.
As much as he wanted to miss his sister, wanted to wish for her advice, he missed his mom.
Almost ten years since he had last seen her, smoking gun in hand. Almost ten years since the last time she had made an attempt on his life, nearly followed through, and it wasn’t Jazz and her headstrong realist views that he craved, nor Tucker’s enthusiasm, Sam’s determination and teasing advice, but the unique smell of disinfectant and peach shampoo.
He missed the feel of his mom’s hands running through his hair when he was sick. Missed the way she smiled dismissively at him, missed even the way that she was always a better mom when she was absent, leaving instructions and half-edible food and calling to remind his dad to pick him up early on Wednesdays, even though when she was home, she was the one who always forgot.
He missed Jason too.
His laugh and his smile and the scar on his lip and what it felt like to trace the skin of his cheekbones and temple. What it was to be loved, to be held as he shook apart, to have someone who saw him for who he was, both monster and boy, both ghost and man. Someone who knew his powers and his heart for people and did not ask him why he did not fight. Someone who knew him enough to not ask him to sacrifice himself, even when they probably should.
Jason was just in the other room, but Danny had never felt further from him. Not in the three years they spent wrapped up in one another’s skin, a secret to share with no one, just one another, reveal after reveal, bit by bit, souls bared one moment at a time until they were one in mind and spirit.
The disconnect felt starkly, nauseatingly different.
He wanted to be human enough for Jason.
He wanted to be tame and good and kind.
But he was bitter and small and feral, his ego torn between begging for forgiveness for the sins he committed, and being angry and resentful for the hurts against him.
A week without speaking and it was less a fight and more a battle of wills. A burden that took on more than just words that should have been more carefully chosen.
A week and then Danny didn’t know if love would be enough for them.
Knowing one another, loving one another, it did not stop the hurt.
Did not stop the fear.
A future of further hurts? One last big hurt and then retreat within his head and live monstrously?
Let his shadow grow tall and sharp, his hair go from wisps to flames, eyes from green to red.
Resist and do the good he knew he ought to do.
But Jason hadn’t reached out either.
It was messy and complicated and Danny didn’t know nor want to bother with human customs of understanding. There was a time he hadn’t even tried at all, but that was before Jason. Before the apartment with his space posters on the wall and his lego sets on the counter, before Jason’s clothes became theirs, when his bed was a rickety frame never slept on, before their room decorated with paper crafts and finicky designs.
Jason humanized him. Made him a better man.
But his humanity was not his identity.
For Jason to forget, forget his monster, it was as if he did not know Danny at all.
At the end of the matter, he could hardly remember the words that had started it all.
But the discontent remained.
And Danny was a creature of habit. The day he began his silence, was the day it was already too far down the road to change. Paralyzed by indecision, he let go of his ironclad reign over his core, not too much to give in and fully let go, but enough for half an afterlife to leak through.
He faded a bit, a ghost in the cabinet or under the sofa, something that lived in the dishwasher or the deli drawer in the fridge, a slip of a thing that made the electronics fry and avoided being seen directly, could only ever be seen out of the corner of an eye.
It was much easier to lose his humanity than to gain it again. Was a dead thing more than dead if it never spent time alive? The shade that used to be Danny didn’t know. But questions and pondering and looking for answers were a human trait. So it put it out of mind.
And in time, Jason stopped hoping. But he never stopped loving.