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Danny slowly uncurled from the little corner that he had started to make his own. He had never had a home that was completely his before and it still felt too good to be true. He yawned and stretched his hands above his head and leaned back and back and back; doing a lazy little loop de loop in the air.
H e cocked his head to one side as he stretched his hearing out to the rest of the building.
Nothing sounded out of place.
No footsteps or voices.
Just the low scratching of some industrious little rodent that was making its own nest in the walls a floor below him.
He raked a hand through his wild white hair and contemplated what he was going to do with his morning. He had managed to gather a small collection of plastic bottles that he had cleaned out and then filled in a public bathroom. The moldy comforter made a comfortable little nest that he could curl up in without having to worry about getting too warm.
The little basket next to the window…had not been there last night.
Still yawning, Danny floated over to the woven basket that someone had placed inside without disturbing him.
When he caught sight of the handwritten note that had been placed on top of his newest present he let out a little chirrup of glee. More presents from Hood. Once he managed to get himself a little bit more established Danny was going to have to figure out where the other man lived so that he could return the favor.
Sneaky presents were the best kind after all.
It meant that the other man had been thinking of him without wanting to bother him. The most recent note was just as sweet as the first had been.
THOUGHT YOU MIGHT NEED THESE. RH
The note was attached to the top of a little pad of paper and included a ballpoint pen. Danny carefully sifted through the basket with something approaching awe.
Nobody had ever given him such thoughtful gifts before.
His parents had been prone to forgetting his birthday and Christmas.
Jazz had always remembered but cakes and the like were completely out of the question in their house when the eggs were prone to reanimation. So it had usually been some sort of pre-packaged cupcake or at best a new pair of sneakers to replace the ones that had been accidentally dipped in acid.
Danny purred quietly when he pulled out a fuzzy throw blanket in a deep green color that wouldn’t show stains.
A couple of different bottles of cleaner.
One for fabrics and one for tile or linoleum.
Some paper towels for easy cleanup and disposal.
Then finally with shaking fingers he pulled out an oversized hoodie that would be able to swing down to at least his knees; this one in a sturdy black woven material that would drape without clinging to him.
Danny buried his face in the thick material with a stifled gasp as he hugged it to his chest and finally let himself actually think about his sister.
She had always done what she thought was best for him.
No matter the cost.
One of the last sounds he had heard before falling through the rift in the sky was the sound of explosive ammunition being set off with extreme prejudice.
Ancients, he even thought that he might have seen Vlad of all people coming in with his friends trying to get his parents to see reason. It had sounded like the world was exploding around him and Jazz had only been given an instant to hug her little brother tightly to her chest, her lips brushing his forehead before she pushed him back and managed to shove some sort of small tech directly into an opening in his chest.
A gash that the scientists had left on him after they’re latest session and left a couple of his ribs exposed to the open air.
She had screamed a phrase in a language that seemed to reorient Danny’s world as he fell up through the sky and then started falling straight down into an entirely new world.
He could barely see anything through the lights and explosive noises that had erupted around him but it hadn't looked survivable. He could see Jazz’s eyes red-rimmed and blackened with soot and bruises for a long moment before the portal had snapped shut. Gone so completely that he couldn’t even see a scar in the sky above him as he began to fall.
He had felt the finality of whatever Jazz had done.
There wasn’t going to be a way for him to go back home, even if he had wanted to.
He had the last piece of his world and family hidden behind his heart.
Still holding the new hoodie tightly in one arm Danny pulled it free gently; desperately trying not to damage whatever Jazz’s last gift could possibly be. He looked down at the little cube in the palm of his hand and he could see that Jazz, Sam, and Tucker had all written their initials on it. Danny ducked his head down a little bit so that he could look at the tech a little closer. It looked to just plug in to a normal USB. Jazz and his friends would have had months to plan their insane rescue mission. Hopefully wherever he had landed they had similar technology.
Although if he glanced at the little box out of the corner of his eyes he could see the low sheen of some sort of magic that they had coated it in. Knowing Tucker it was more than likely going to force itself to work with any sort of operating system he was able to find.
Danny floated over to the corner that he had made his little nest in.
It was easier to pull ectoplasm from the floor when he only had a few layers of fabric separating him from it so he didn’t have to worry about needing to find or haul a bed frame into the little studio.
The moldy comforter was carefully folded; as neatly as he was able to manage and placed to one side.
He scrunched the rich green fabric of his new blanket into a nest that he would be able to curl up in comfortably as long as he continued to not have bones.
The cleaning supplies were left in the basket for the moment.
He still wanted to do a little more exploring before the sun fully rose and cleaning could wait until after he’d rested some more.
The motley little collection of plastic bottles was tucked in next to the cleaners.
It wasn’t a lot but Danny tweaked the bottles and looked over his few belongings with something like pride.
With a great deal of reluctance Danny twitched back into his human form only staying in it long enough to slip the hoodie over his bare torso before reverting back to his ghostly body as quickly he could manage. Danny let his fingers smooth down over his hazmat suit and even though he normally couldn’t even feel whatever clothing his alternate was wearing he could feel a hint of extra warmth on his body from the extra layer.
He floated back towards his window and let himself go invisible and intangible as he slipped through the rotten wooden boards that half covered the broken glass. The early morning sun was still hiding behind the tall buildings and left the streets of his new home murky and fog covered.
The chill of the mist seemed to penetrate right to his core and Danny shivered with delight.
He let the droplets of moisture phase right through him and he could feel them wicking away the muck and blood of his capture and subsequent escape. The miasma of smog and water felt like a blessing after the close confines of the laboratory and Danny let himself spin and swirl through it.
It was early enough that he could just make out a couple of windows with their lights on.
3rd shifters coming home for the day or maybe a few of especially early birds that were preparing for the long day ahead of them. The sidewalks themselves were bare of any commuters and even the women who had been patrolling the area for customers had finally headed back to their homes.
The city wasn’t completely quiet though.
Danny could hear what sounded like pigeons cooing and beginning to stir from their nests and someone had a radio playing a softly sung ballad in Spanish.
The more Danny scouted around the more it felt like any sort of normal morning in a big city.
Well, what he had always imagined a big city would sound like.
Whatever alternate earth he had ended up landing on seemed to be on a similar timeline at least.
There weren’t a lot of cars lining the streets but the ones that were there looked to be worn from long winters. The rocker panels rusted and were eaten away by the spray of slush from salt covered pavement.
The lines of the cars were different though, a little longer and sleeker than the vehicles he was accustomed to.
Still though; they were undeniably gas powered cars just like those he had grown up with.
As he got closer to the edges of the urban sprawl Danny started to hear the low susurration of swiftly running water.
He trailed the edges of the river, ducking under huge cranes and flying over large shipping containers.
The closer he got to the waters edge the more the smell of pollution and rotten fish began to overwhelm him.
The water looked near pitch black with an oily rainbow sheen coating the top of it.
Sam would have been having absolute fits about this place if she was here Danny thought wistfully.
He hadn’t seen a single designated green space at all in his exploration and the water smelled absolutely toxic even to him.
As he darted around his new haunt Danny was starting to get a vivid picture of exactly where he had ended up.
The entire place seemed to be the worst sort of urban sprawl, a broken down neighborhood trapped in the center of a river that was surrounded by an even larger city. With the cracked concrete, the empty warehouses and the prevalence of a less than legal nightlife as its main source of income the whole place had the feeling of a place that had been abandoned due to neglect and fear.
The unwanted bastard child of an aging royalty.
It took him a couple of hours but Danny managed to circle the entire island, noting decrepit bridges as the only escape.
Winding his way through the blocks of housing Danny did start to notice some bright spots in the otherwise dingy atmosphere.
A small diner whose warm lights shone out onto the pocked sidewalks. A woman, he presumed a waitress, between her clean white apron and the neat bun that her graying hair had been pulled back into, was wiping down the tables.
A few blocks down, now that the sun was finally starting to peek over the rooftops he could see a line forming for what looked like a local soup kitchen.
All of the tables and floors were worn but scrupulously clean.
A couple of brave souls were already huddled over their pancakes or oatmeal with one of the employees waving a full coffee pot at them playfully.
Peering in through the window Danny smiled softly at the friendly group. Maybe once he managed to clean up his mortal body a little bit Danny would be welcomed here too and he could eat some freshly cooked food for the first time in longer than he wanted to think about.
When another early riser slipped obliviously through his body Danny startled and zipped up onto a nearby roof.
He hadn’t even felt the other man come up behind him.
He had used to be better at this, more aware of his surroundings.
In Amity Park he had been able to feel the trails that the local human population had made through the ectoplasm that had filled the air.
He didn’t always know who it was, but Danny had always been able to determine without so much as a glance, whether there were any civilians in his trajectory.
There was just something about this place that left him feeling constantly on his back foot.
Tail?
Whatever.
Amity Park may have been coated in ectoplasm but he had still been able to feel the people moving through it.
Here it was like all of the people had been a part of this liminal space for so long that they were a part of the atmosphere, generations of people living and dying and being buried in it.
It was more akin to the Ghost Zone than the mortal plane that he was used to.
Danny slunk back towards his apartment as the streets started to fill up with commuters.
T his time he was careful to float well above the scattering of people.
It had always felt weird as hell whenever any sort of living thing passed straight through him and Danny had no interest in feeling that particular sensation again any time soon.
When he finally passed back through his window Danny sighed deeply as he let himself slip back into an at least semi-tangible form.
Alighting on the fuzzy softness of his new blanket Danny settled in for a late morning nap.
Once he got a little bit more rest he could start to clean up the worst of the water damage and mold.
The gift basket and the clippers had definitely come from Hood so he was going to work under the assumption that he was welcome in the other man’s haunt.
At least for now.
Snuggling into the deep folds of the fabric Danny could already see the ectoplasm start to seep back out of the floor as his eyes started to slip closed.
He hummed deeply at the unexpected comfort that he had found and let himself slip slowly back to sleep.
When Dick saw Jason the next afternoon he didn’t like the way that his younger brother's eyes were lined with dark bruising from a lack of sleep.
“Problem?”
Jason shook his head even as he took a deep draw from the energy drink he was clutching.
“3 out of my 4…employees.”
Lieutenants, Dick’s brain replaced the slowly enunciated word.
“Came to the meeting we had scheduled.”
“And the fourth?”
“No call. No show. I might have to get HR involved if this continues or maybe a welfare check if they don’t get in contact with me.”
Dick nodded thoughtfully.
HR would probably be the mousy little man that had been working on Jason’s books both legal and not for the past few years. T he man seemed to blend into furniture while also being comparable to Red Robin with his skill with computers. The welfare check was probably going to be an oversized boot to whichever door the missing lieutenant was known to hide behind.
Dick had never actually been to the warehouse that Jason had converted into an open plan office space for the people who worked under him but he had seen the blueprints and been impressed.
Jason had even begrudgingly brought some of his paperwork to Bruce when he had been in the process of legitimizing his business.
A quick glance through the documents had shown that Jason had been deadly serious about taking care of the people that worked for him. W-2’s, health insurance, the whole nine yards.
You could say a lot of things about Jason but he had never failed to commit.
As Red Hood he controlled the trafficking of drugs into the Narrows, made sure that the area children were kept well clear of it, cracked down on violent crime both day and night and ran a legitimate charity as Jason Todd-Wayne.
The man needed to have employees that he could trust.
If only to make sure that he didn’t run himself completely ragged.
No matter what he or Tim might think, sleep was actually a required activity that both of them needed to partake in on a more regular basis.
Dick clapped his hand on Jason’s shoulder in commiseration.
“Hopefully nothing too exciting comes from that. Maybe he just forgot.”
Jason nodded in feigned agreement as the pair turned to start walking towards the Bed, Bath, and Beyond that they had agreed to meet at.
Like hell had the man forgotten a meeting but Jason pushed that out of his mind for the moment.
H e was determined to make the strange man more comfortable as soon as possible.
Even if he was living in a murder house.
Dick had needed to physically remove over a dozen didn’t blankets from Jason’s grasp while they had wandered through the too bright lights aisles of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Every time he had seen another one Jason had fussed and compared the textures between the fluffy dark green throw and the next blanket that had landed in his line of sight.
" You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“You really think he’ll like this blanket?”
“I think he’ll like any of these very nice blankets but if you get him more than one or two he’s going to be overwhelmed by choice.”
Jason’s eyes flicked over the remaining options in front of him.
He snagged another blanket that was a dark gray that wouldn’t show dirt too easily.
“Two then. One for now and one for when I switch out the green to wash it. So he doesn’t think I took it away.”
Since he was laser focused on the texture in front of him Jason couldn’t have seen Dick tilt his head slightly back, his eyes squeezed shut for just a moment while he silently asked for patience.
“Sounds good.”
“Don’t patronize me, Dick. ”
Dick bit back a smile while he watched his brother, hulking and bulky with muscle, slowly pet against the grain of a throw blanket covered in mushrooms.
“I’m not. From what we’ve been able to piece together about this guy he deserves every bit of our consideration. But buying the wrong...” Dick flicked his hands up to create quotation marks in the air “blanket is not going to be the reason this guy tips over the edge.”
Rubbing his thumb and forefingers together this time on a blue and white check fabric Jason continued to avoid eye contact.
“I scared him. I’m always talking about giving people a chance. Making sure that they’re not judged for their pasts. But I didn’t even give him a second to try and explain himself, just treated him like a threat from the get go.”
"Yeah.” Dick’s voice was soft. “Just because we’re all trying to move past our own personal histories doesn’t mean that we weren’t shaped by them. He scared you too.”
“He didn’t mean to though.”
“The hell he didn’t. We’ve all seen that recording. The only reason that man didn’t suplex you into the ground was because of that muzzle.”
Dick’s eyes flicked around them, triple-checking that nobody was within earshot of their conversation.
“He used those electrical snips you left him. He’s staying in that shitty little efficiency in your territory. Trust goes both ways and it seems to me that you're both working on it.”
“What other fucking choice does he have?”
Jason growled in frustration and swiped his hands through his hair leaving it curling wildly and swept up off of his face.
“Whoever he is, that man can fly, turn invisible and slip through solid objects. He’s got a whole lot of options even if he doesn’t want to be a hero or a rogue.”
Dick clapped his hand up on the taller man's shoulder and started to drag him out of the aisle that they had been occupying.
“Now, let’s go look at the cleaning products. I’m thinking we go for unscented and dye free. Let’s try to not induce any unexpected allergic reactions in your guest.”
The employees of the thrift store had given him a wide berth but Jason was sure that they had still heard him as he muttered murderously.
He picked through the selection of cheap baskets that had all probably come from some sort of department store.
“...cheap. Made in China. Cheap and made in China. Whatever happened to craftsmanship I ask you…”
Jason would have had to be a lot more oblivious than he had ever been to not notice the mechanical sound of a phone snapping a picture of him.
The Narrows had accepted Jason Todd’s return from the dead with open arms but Gotham as a whole had been less than impressed.
He was 100% sure that picture was going to be sold to the local paper with some sort of ridiculous headline.
Riches to Rags: Gothams (Least?) Favorite Son Forced to Shop Second Hand.
As though choosing to shop at a local thrift store was something to be ashamed of.
He had his own fucking money.
Hell he could steal one of Bruce’s credit cards and the man wouldn’t say a single word.
It was the principle of the thing.
He could have purchased blankets made from the furry asses of rabbits mixed with clouds.
Jason may have not had the best start in life, even compared to some of his brothers, but he remembered that sickening feeling of being given things that he felt he hadn’t earned.
Money was basically Bruce’s love language.
The man could be an emotional brick wall.
He hadn't been able to verbalize his feelings in a supportive or even normal way. It had taken a lot of fighting and hard work on both their parts, but Jason knew deep in his bones that Bruce loved him.
Shockingly, the man who dressed up as a giant bat to fight crime didn’t have the most healthy of coping mechanisms.
When Jason had first come to live with Bruce he had felt those debts piling up like boulders in his chest.
He didn’t want to do the same thing to his stranger.
Jason had thought about purchasing a phone for the man but that had also felt like a step too far.
The pen and notepad had felt like a good compromise.
The guy already knew that Jason was sneaking into the apartment he had selected and hadn’t seemed too upset or paranoid of the clippers that he had left.
If Jason had been raised by absolutely any other family he would have been wringing his hands while he watched the young man gently sort through the gift basket that he had finally selected.
To be fair if he had been raised by absolutely any other family he wouldn’t have been spying on a maybe alien on a rooftop across the street with a pair of Batnoculars. (Jason and Bruce blamed that particular nomenclature on a pre-teen Dick).
He fumbled them hard though when the white-haired stranger disappeared in a flash of light and he saw the bare skin of what looked like a human man's back, black hair brushed his shoulders and scars criss-crossed his back. The skin quickly disappeared underneath the oversized hoodie that Jason had snagged from the same thrift store that he had purchased the basket from. '
Another flash of light and the man was back to white hair and the hazmat suit before he disappeared into absolutely thin air.
Jason slipped away as quickly as he could manage.
It was one thing for the man to know that Jason was leaving him creepy little presents.
If he got caught staring through a pair of over-powered binoculars Jason wouldn’t be surprised if the man drop kicked him across the length of the city.
No need to push his luck at this point.