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Life had the most unfortunate timing, Danny has long since learned.
Danny slipped back into the shared apartment, slipped his shoes off, and sat down on the couch with a milkshake in hand and peace in his core. He had no university assignments due in the next few days, Sam was off volunteering at the gardens, Tucker was still on campus for a group project, the poor sap, and Jazz was out socializing for once in her life. He had the place to himself which meant he was free to watch the new Hubble documentary that came out uninterrupted, and at the time, it sounded like a blissful evening.
Then he spotted the red dot that skimmed over his Styrofoam cup, a touch away from the normal visible spectrum, and his day worsened instantly.
He hoped this was some idiot who mistook him for a Wayne. Again. (Okay, that has only happened twice, but once was insane enough.) Danny had been enjoying the lack of GIW in Gotham, and barring some new whackjob, he couldn’t think of anyone else who would set a sniper up outside his window. Well, his parents, maybe, but he refused to entertain the possibility that they figured out his secret unprovoked hundreds of miles away and decided to act on it, for his sanity’s sake.
With a sigh, Danny turned his chest intangible in case it was a normal bullet, and he leaned out of his chair and walked to the kitchen, away from the window, in case it wasn’t. The GIW weren’t known for subtlety, but they had gotten better over the years in their desperation to be relevant. There was a reason Amity Park was becoming a real ghost town, devoid of the living, because more and more people were fleeing when it became clear they would happily shoot and study ecto-contaminated individuals as well as ghosts. Which was most Amity Parkers, really.
Fortunately, the GIW no longer had complete legal leeway. He was pretty sure some bogus laws remained about detainment of ecto-entities and what-not, but they could no longer hunt down anything and anyone due to conflicting with the Meta Protection Acts. It didn’t stop them from trying, of course, but it was no longer legal.
Danny should have contacted those magicians poking around sooner, but in his defense, his first and only living experience with that type had been Freakshow, so he hadn’t realized that they were actually with the Justice League until he had redirected them away from Amity Park via portals and let Dora go ham on wards an embarrassing number of times. Trench coat guy was a good sport about it though.
Overall, Danny still agreed that it was probably best that the initial year of attacks didn’t make it past the ecto-contaminated phone lines (and government blackout) because a public spectacle of the Ghost Zone and Infinite Realms would be bad overall. There were enough people to worry about without adding the whole world to the list. However, having some discreet Justice League help to deal with the GIW and quietly scratch the laws nobody else noticed off the board was a godsend, and ultimately the reason Danny could go off to college at all. Go superheroes, for taking work off his plate!
Speaking of which, Gotham was crawling with Bats (one of which he was pretty sure was responsible for some of the GIW stuff, based on what Constantine said about hacking being a bat-power), so in addition to Gotham’s natural ectoplasm, Danny could focus on school for once without being the only one around capable of taking hits to solve problems. It was nice.
Maybe they could take care of the sniper too, but this, unfortunately, seemed like a personal problem.
Whoever it was, they were patient while Danny took a stroll through the kitchen and away from windows, so he doubted it was the GIW. Which was good, because they had it out for Phantom, not Fenton, and he didn’t want that to change. However, nobody would be after Fenton, so maybe his secret was cooked anyway. Ugh. This was not how he wanted to spend his evening.
He contemplated his options: face the sniper or sit here in the kitchen. Yeah, wasn’t much of an option, when the sniper already knew where he lived. Danny probably should do the responsible thing and communicate, especially since there was a large chance the others would be affected too.
Danny sent a quick text to the group chat, confident that it was encrypted to the Zone and back thanks to Tucker and wacky ectoplasm integration.
Dead Inside: hey guys don’t come back to the apartment. There’s a sniper outside the living room window :(
Dead Inside: for that matter watch out for snipers I guess?? ttyl
He stuck his phone back in his pocket, aware that he’ll probably get angry texts back, but he didn’t care as long as they were safe. Sam he worried the least about, considering her present company, but Jazz and Tucker were out in the open. They would have a harder time fighting back. He’ll check on them after he handled this guy. Snipers usually worked alone, right? So there probably weren’t more of them. Hopefully.
Danny didn’t bother to transform yet. His ghost form was super powerful now, but not subtle when it came to sensors. Frying them didn’t count as subtle, Tucker claimed. He just turned invisible and intangible and remained as he was to fly through the apartment and approach the position of the sniper from the side. He could bring out the big guns later if he needed.
Big guns that Danny evidently didn’t need. When he finally found the sniper, grumbling angrily under his breath about distractible college students and long bathroom breaks, Danny determined that none of his gear was ghost-hunting gear. It was…very nice gear, with bullets that definitely would have pierced his window and sternum no sweat, and a scope and silencer that had to be military grade or something, and the guy himself was decked in padded protective clothing and hiding all sorts of knives and smoke pellets and miscellaneous contraptions like a Bat wannabe. He didn’t notice Danny phasing this stuff in and out of his possession, so he wasn’t that good, but he was serious about the hunt. Just, in a human capacity.
Danny found that worse, honestly. At least most ghost hunters deluded themselves into thinking ghosts were the equivalent dangerous wild animals of the invasive species sort, but prepping like this for a regular human? That was a different level of psycho. One that was common in Gotham, unfortunately, but seeing it up close like this made Danny slightly existential on the subject.
He has been hunted for years. Never as regular human Danny Fenton though.
Well, it wasn’t too late for this to be a misunderstanding, of course. Still bad, but more of a product of Fenton Luck than some greater thing he needed to worry about. Unfortunately, this required further investigation. At least the actual threat to his safety was greatly diminished, but he would still need to be careful about the others who were, despite being very liminal, less bulletproof than he was.
The sniper in question wore a mask over the lower half of his face, but Danny didn’t think he recognized him. He was bad with faces, though, and the guy wasn’t liminal at all which made that worse. Barely ecto-contaminated, even. He even lacked the certain passive flavor Gothamites had, so he can’t have been in the city long, and the maybe middle-aged man certainly couldn’t be from Amity. So Danny was stumped there.
It would be convenient if the guy carried his wallet on him, or maybe a convenient manifesto of his intentions, but no such luck. Danny would have to stake out the guy staking him out, then.
Said guy clearly grew more and more impatient with Danny’s disappearance. To keep him from getting suspicious, however, Danny made a clone and he picked up his milkshake (taking a few sips because they were best when fresh; his clones were nothing but ectoplasm but he had tastebuds) and regretfully placing it back in the freezer, all while conveniently moving quickly and never keeping his vitals in view of the window. He watched the sniper shift around and watch him through the scope, finger on the trigger, but he wasn’t confident enough to shoot a moving target.
He intended to get Danny with one shot, clearly. A kill shot or nothing, no polite volley. Danny thought he was immune to being hunted with the intention of permadeath, but the scene made his insides squirm nonetheless.
His clone made a show of stretching and then heading to bed. Danny’s bedroom didn’t have a window, not necessarily for lack of wanting one, but he claimed that one because he was liable to float accidentally while sleeping, and he would have his blinds down all the time anyway. Besides, Jazz got the biggest bedroom by right of being the eldest, while the others shuffled into the others. The only reason they had four at all was simply because, between Sam and Danny’s access to a millennia’s worth of treasury items, they were technically rich. Thanks to Sam, nobody would question it either.
The sniper cursed under his breath, waited another twenty minutes to see if Danny changed his mind, before he packed up.
At that point, Danny remembered that he should probably update the others. Unsurprisingly, he had several new messages.
Communal Big Sister: Danny are you safe? You better not be doing anything reckless.
Communal Big Sister: Danny please give us an update
Goth Before Gotham: you know Danny sucks picking up his phone on a good day
Tech Genius: suddenly this group project doesn’t seem so bad
Goth Before Gotham: things are quiet where I am. Jazz if you want to come here that might be best. Ivy is cool with it
Communal Big Sister: I might. Tell her thank you. What did you tell her?
Goth Before Gotham: The truth, though it’s not like I know much since Danny is ghosting us. Besides, remember Ivy pretty much knows everything now so it wouldn’t matter anyway
Communal Big Sister: Right, sorry it’s a habit. I’ll head over.
Tech Genius: ugggghhhhhh I don’t wanna stay here but Ivy still scares me. Danny hurry up and respond
Dead Inside: chill guys I’m not more dead than I started
Dead Inside: sniper is a normal guy. No ghost gear
Dead Inside: following him back to his hidey hole now to see what’s up
Tech Genius: so I can come home now cool
Communal Big Sister: be careful Danny
Dead Inside: careful is my middle name
Goth Before Gotham: stop lying you dork
Goth Before Gotham: if you crash into Bat business though I’m going to laugh
Dead Inside: I wish. This is sooo boring
He turned off his screen at that and stashed his phone back in his pocket. Danny hadn’t been kidding either. Trailing after this guy was certainly not his preferred activity, and he had a feeling it would be a Bat problem anyway. Danny was very respectful of their territory, and he wanted to focus on school anyway, so he made it a point to never get involved in their business. Him helping out ghosts around Gotham and clearing out some of the worst gross and stagnant ectoplasm didn’t count, because that was his business. No Bat ever came busting down his door, so he assumed they reached mutual passiveness, or something.
Technically Danny had never met nor spoken to a Bat. He didn’t think. Only members of the JLD who agreed that it was better to be subtle. They wanted news of the Infinite Realms to spread as much as he did, which was not at all. However, Batman’s reputation preceded him, as with the whole clan, so Danny assumed they were among the few who knew tidbits and didn’t advertise it. Surely, then, they noticed that Danny came to Gotham, right? Every ghost he talked to that made it a hobby to follow them around always spoke highly of their detective skills, and Danny was pretty sure they were liminal somehow, so they might have noticed his presence here. Right?
Admittedly it would be pretty cool to meet them, but he also heard about their nosiness, and while Danny, like most ghosts, was ambivalent about secrets, they were living and also infamously intense, so maybe it would be best to not get too involved.
Ivy was an accidental exception, but she and Harley weren’t vigilantes—or rogues anymore—so it was different. Besides, it turned out Ivy was extremely liminal—a wholeass revenant, actually—having briefly died (several times) to some cocktail of Realms plants (maybe even from Overgrowth’s lair) that made it here, and then apparently once some other time he was polite enough not to ask about, so she clocked him instantly without actually knowing what she was feeling. And, well, Danny couldn’t leave someone like that in the dark anyway; he understood what it was like to be a medical anomaly and have to guess at things. She was lucky everyone thought she was a meta or mutant.
Anyway, Sam befriending Ivy because she was the out-of-towner crazy enough to want to work at the same garden, and then they bonded over shared plant-themed liminality, but that was honestly as far as Danny went to knowing someone who knew the Bats. His few run-ins with “rogues” that weren’t really rogues didn’t count. Grundy was one of his, and Wylon just hung around Grundy’s space. Were there other bad guys probably ecto-touched? Heck yeah, but that wasn’t Danny’s problem just yet. He left those to the Bats.
Hopefully they caught wind of this guy soon, because Danny didn’t know how to fight regular dudes. He shouldn’t, really, in any serious manner, because that could be how they started their life as ecto-contaminated which wasn’t great for the already mentally unstable. As already established. (He was convinced Joker might even be a ghoul of some sort, but Danny never had the misfortune of witnessing that guy up close, so it remained a mystery.)
Finally the sniper made it back to his hideout, which was…just his house, Danny was pretty sure. With the gear being brought to the basement expertly hidden through a locked hatch under a rug, which absolutely was not ghost proof. After Mr. Sniper trudged back upstairs to mope on his couch, Danny snooped around his creepy basement.
There remained no convenient written manifestos of his intention; however, there was a bullseye with his mechanical engineering professor’s picture on it, filled with bullet holes in the eyes, and a bulletin board filled with basic information of Danny and all of his classmates in his machine learning lab. Pictures and addresses, namely.
Two of which were exed out: Gina Albert and Harry Danvers. Two classmates that Danny didn’t really know, per se, but he recognized that they had been absent from the last class—Gina maybe more.
His blood ran cold.
Oh.
This guy was really after plain ol’ Danny Fenton. And his strictly living and not bulletproof classmates. For being Prof. Milton’s students?
The reasoning was beyond him, but Danny didn’t really care, knowing what was at stake here. This whackjob better stick to alphabetical order in his serial killer efforts, because this ended with Danny.
He would… send his regards to Gina and Harry, whether they made it to the Realms or not. Maybe Danny should get one of the bookkeepers to check… He doubted they were ghosts, unless being murdered tipped them over, but there were plenty of afterlifes in the mix to check nonetheless.
Danny begrudgingly left the basement alone, even though it would be easy to trash his equipment. It wouldn’t get this human killer arrested, just slow him down. Since him being arrested and not picked apart molecule by molecule by government lackeys was solidly on the table, Danny preferred that option. He would have to be patient.
He checked his phone again to let the others know he was about to fly back.
Tech Genius: hey why isn’t the security system on?
Goth Before Gotham: bet Danny forgot
Oh shoot. Right. The system he and Tucker installed. It was more geared to keep out ghost hunters and other ghosts, so he didn’t think about it when he discovered the guy was a normie. The metal shielding over the windows and outer walls totally could have stopped a sniper bullet, though. Whoops.
Dead Inside: …yeah I totally forgot
Goth Before Gotham: told ya
Dead Inside: ANYWAY I’m heading home. You guys should be safe too, I was the only target. Will explain later before Jazz yells at me for texting and flying
Communal Big Sister: Acceptable.
Communal Big Sister: Did you get this marksman’s ID?
Shoot. He could have snooped the rest of the house for that.
Dead Inside: …actually I’m doubling back and then I’ll head home.
Goth Before Gotham: come to the greenhouse instead. You got Ivy worried lol.
Dead Inside: dang okay
—o0o—
The guy’s name was Linus Peters, an overall underwhelming name for somebody with a deadly vendetta. He obediently flew to the Gotham City Botanical Gardens, set up in Robinson’s Park thanks to some fancy Wayne donation and Ivy’s practical home. Like any ghost or spectrally aligned entity, she has a protective streak, so Danny knew better than to not humor her. Jazz probably made the situation scarier than it needed to be with her fretting anyway.
“This isn’t how you keep a ‘low profile,’ sprout,” Ivy chastised immediately.
He threw his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t do anything! This guy has it out for my professor, I think. He’s just…going after students.”
Jazz frowned. “This person… he already got somebody, didn’t he?” she surmised quietly.
“...yeah. Two of my classmates.”
It scratched at him, because Danny hated for people to get caught in his crossfire. Technically that didn’t apply here, but it made him feel strange all the same. Death itself wasn’t that horrifying. He was the Ghost King, and he knew death was just a beginning in itself, but that didn’t mean the ending couldn’t be tragic. They were his age, with more life they could have lived.
And they were killed, for nothing.
Just because the GIW were less of a problem, it didn’t mean that Danny and those around him wouldn’t be subjected to being hunted like some… thing. Some means to an end.
It bothered him, deep in his core.
“Danny,” Sam warned.
He snapped out of his thoughts, aware belatedly that frost was started to gather on the plants around him. “Uh, sorry,” he apologized sheepishly.
Ivy looked at him, mouth pressed in a line and eyebrow raised, clearly displeased but restrained enough not to say anything. “My children are more resilient than that, but do be cautious. That goes for this killer of yours, too.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied with a non-serious eye roll. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to die. Again. And even if I do, I’m an expert on it.” Getting, say, his heart pierced with a bullet might temporarily kill his human half, but as long as his core was undamaged, it wouldn’t stick. His halfa status wasn’t all that fragile, he discovered a while ago.
Ivy placed a hand on her hip. If Danny didn’t know better, he would have guessed that Jazz was actually her clone or something, just for that. “Take it from someone who died and came back too, your majesty. It never gets better.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong. “Fair enough.”
“Regardless, Danny, you can’t ignore something as dangerous as this,” Jazz fretted. “For your classmates’ sake, too. What if this guy attacks your class? What if he shoots you in public and you’re outed as a ghost?!”
“Oh, so now you’re okay with me getting shot.”
“Danny.”
“Okay, okay, fine. Plan. Yeah. I…totally don’t have one of those unless beating up this Linus Peters guy counts.” Ugh, why were humans trickier to deal with than ghosts or ghost hunters? The former? Piece of cake. They fought until all the pent up energy was released and their societal convention of mutual beatings restored the peace, or he souped them for a temporary timeout, or in the worst cases, he put their timeout in Walker’s hands, but that rarely was necessary. The latter? Annoying but usually breaking their stuff was an A+ plan in most scenarios.
Jazz’s phone dinged with a notification in her pocket, because unlike the rest of them, she made sure the group chat was never on silent. He checked his phone at the same time she did.
Tech Genius: I can run a check on him rn. I bet I can hack into his stuff, easy-peasy Foley guarantee
Sam squinted at her own device. “Tucker, I swear to the Ancients if you tapped my fucking phone again, I’m going to start deleting your Sims save files.”
Danny’s phone rang immediately, barely before the threat was out of Sam’s mouth. He rolled his eyes and answered it, putting it on speaker to save everyone the trouble.
“Hey!” Tucker protested. “It was Danny’s phone this time, and it’s not even hacking if it’s all in my network, so jot that down. And excuse me for wanting to be included in the conversation.”
“Oh, is that the disrespecter, I hear?” Ivy asked with faux sweetness.
The shriek Tucker made was inhuman and hilarious. Ivy obviously wasn’t seriously planning on maiming Tuck, not beyond what was socially acceptable for liminals, but she also didn’t let go his dislike for plants.
“Sorry ma’am I shutting up,” Tucker squeaked.
“Anyway,” Jazz interjected with her certified ‘I’m being the mature one right now’ voice, “the matter at hand? Can’t we leave an anonymous tip or something? Otherwise I won’t be opposed to, perhaps, stealing his gun so he can’t use it?”
“You just say that because you want a rifle,” Danny huffed. He loved Jazz, really, but he wasn’t that confident in her aim, even though it has gotten better. “Ivy, how would one, hypothetically, leave a note for a Bat without actually talking to one? I don’t know if I have the mental capacity to get involved.”
She raised her brow at him in a delicate arch. “I’ll admit, with your unique resources, I assumed you knew their whereabouts better than anyone else. Or could know.”
“I mean, yeah, sure, I could ask some of the shades that follow them around like they’re a tv drama, but I don’t actually want to know their IDs or anything.” Ghosts didn’t do secrets, not really, but Danny had enough self-preservation to not want to poke that bear on purpose. “I’ve been staying out of it, really!”
“I suppose that’s prudent,” Ivy agreed. “In that case, there’s the roof of GCPD, if you wish to traverse that ground. Otherwise, usually they have a way of showing up on their own, be it convenient or annoying.”
“Can’t you text them or something?” Sam asked. “I thought you had some communication with them.”
“I can, sure, but they’ll ask questions. I was under the impression that’s what you’re trying to avoid.”
Danny weighed his options, hoping to find one that solved this sooner rather than later. Linus the Human Sniper was on his couch wallowing for tonight, but tomorrow? Danny couldn’t guarantee that he would try to go after him again, or skip around, and the latter was something he didn’t want to entertain. It was also late, and Danny wanted to sit down for real; however, it being late meant that it was getting to be prime Bat hours (as well as prime “don’t walk Gotham if you’re not proficient with a Creep Stick” hours), so maybe…
“Actually, maybe I can flag down a Bat. Discreetly and stuff. Give them a little note with the guy’s name and address and stuff,” Danny mused.
“Gonna invisibly stick it in their pocket or something?” Sam guessed with a smirk. “I’d bet they’d notice and smack you.”
“Ten bucks says Danny gets away with it, as long as he doesn’t do it to Black Bat or Signal,” Tucker added.
Ivy laughed. “Oh, sprout, you will mess with them so badly with a stunt like that. I’m all for it, honestly. It’ll be good to keep them on their toes.”
Guess he was going with that plan then. They would probably figure out it was him, since it would be suspicious for a ghostly thing to happen when the Ghost King was residing in Gotham, but without direct engagement and a headstart, he should be able to avoid confrontation and questions, right? Right. Cool. Solid plan.
He left to do just that while Jazz and Sam headed home. Ghosts didn’t manifest in Gotham as easily as they did in Amity Park (not that any city could; Amity was an anomaly in that way), and most of its ecto-residents were purely of the shade variety. Since coming here, he ushered a lot of the ones who were stuck back to the Realms if they wished, but just as many wanted to stay, which made sense: shades were more attached to their haunts than an ideal. Most people couldn’t see them, because they weren’t powerful enough to appear when they weren’t swimming into ectoplasm. Unless you were liminal or a ghost, that is. (Sometimes he wondered how many people were in Arkham because they were liminal enough to see the wacky stuff but couldn’t articulate it…?)
Danny knew where to look for them, and a few rounds of ‘check here they might know’ later, he found someone who happily pointed him towards Red Robin. That worked.
Said vigilante was going… somewhere, running from rooftop to rooftop. Thankfully he didn’t seem to have ghost sensors built into his (really nice looking) equipment, because he hardly reacted beyond a shiver when Danny got close. Huh, this guy wasn’t as liminal as Danny would have guessed. There was something there, but not much beyond the average Gothamite’s levels. Anyway.
Danny dropped the note on the rooftop in a place where he guessed Red Robin would see it, and was rewarded with the vigilante pausing and going to pick it up. He read it, frowned thoughtfully, and then grappled in a new direction while touching his earpiece.
Yup, all good. Danny left it to them, but he remained vigilant for the sake of his classmates, just in case.
Thankfully, Tucker informed him that he was arrested a few days later, and Danny relaxed. He had enough on his plate as it was, so it was nice to have some reliable (if a bit intimidating) vigilantes around that could handle it better than he could.
—o0o—
Tim might go insane if he didn’t figure out who left the tip for the Peters case. How had they known he was working on it, or that he would be at that location when he was? Tim had been detouring to grab a burger for crying out loud! (As much as his siblings liked to over-exaggerate, he did not forget to eat. Most of the time.)
Peters had been a straightforward but frustratingly slippery case. He knew that Peters was going after the students of Milton after the death of Harry Danvers, later connected to Gina Adams. Peters had declared his murderous intent to Milton directly, which had been given to the police in a statement, but instead of going after Milton, he started with the college students, perhaps in lieu of Milton having a family. Peters’ wife had been killed in a dye plant due to faulty equipment said to have been designed by Milton, though when Tim had looked into it, it likely boiled down to poor management rather than a design flaw. Not that it stopped Peters from declaring his revenge.
Tim had been preparing to canvas the rest of the students when he got the tip. Wary of it being a trap, because holy cow an address was too good to be true, he bribed Steph in watching Daniel Fenton’s apartment, on the suspicion that Peters was going down a specific roster based on the first two, but lo and behold, Peters was in his home—under his wife’s maiden name, which Tim really should have caught sooner.
That case was solved quickly after that.
But the tip haunted him.
Was there a new informant in town, trying to get in his good graces? Unlikely, since there was no calling card. A new vigilante that slipped all of their radars? Someone else? Peters had no clue when he was questioned, and for all of his belligerence, Tim believed that much. It was a real head scratcher, and Tim was going to lose more sleep on that than he did the case itself.
Unfortunately, there was always more work to be done. He put the handwriting in the system (and lamented that it was written with pencil lead) and hoped that the informant-wannabe made another move. They always did, eventually.