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The smell of burlap in his nose was only slightly more distressing than the ghost-proof binds around his wrists and ankles, if only because while he's been caught with anti-ghost device before, having an itchy sack over his head was irritating every inch of skin it touched and left him fidgeting in the back seat of whatever car he had been stuffed into.
All-in-all, really the cherry on the Shit Sundae that has been his trip to Gotham.
Danny tried, truly he tried, to think of where exactly it had all gone wrong in his life, and seeing as how he was trapped in a car after getting jumped by a series of terrifying shadows, he figured the easy answer was going to Gotham in the first place. But...the more he ruminated on things, partly to answer his own question and partly to keep his heart from rocketing out of his ribcage from stress, he found himself going further and further back.
Was his choice in going to Gotham, notorious pit of crime and weirdos that made Amity look downright Norman Rockwell in comparison, really the start of things going downhill, or was it agreeing to help Clockwork in stopping the spillover from The Ghost Zone? For the life of him he couldn't figure out just why he agreed; it wasn't like he was hurting for things to complete with his already full plate. With ghost fighting, school, and his parents perpetually on his ass, he was barely getting any sleep as it was, and he could only assume the supposed Time Lord Ghost knew that. So just what compelled him to dump everything and fly to New Jersey of all places?
Did he need to get away from it all that badly?
It all sounded like such a good idea at the time, and damn if Danny didn't relish in feeling helpful to one of the few allies he had in the whole ghostly dimension. Too often did he feel like a lure lost to the current, doomed to drift until something beyond his control came along and made it clear just where he sat in the cosmic food chain.
A feeling that only increased as he rocked and bobbed with the rhythms of the car.
Really his life was too much of this; brief glimpses of control before the blinds are ripped off and he's aware of his minuscule status in things, like an ant made to comprehend the old tube screensaver and trying not to go mad.
...quite possibly it was never in the cards for him. From waltzing into a homemade Stargate crafted from the scatterbrained schematics of his father and thinking he would somehow escape unscathed despite years of experience with their inventions telling him otherwise, to being born to a family of scientists who bet on the Sunk Cost Fallacy and somehow won, to that time a dog supposedly peed on him as a baby in the first of a long string of disastrous Christmas'...the weight of his lot in life was causing him to clench his teeth so hard from stress he swore he heard something crack.
And of course...how could he forget his latest fuckup? Giving an assassin of all people access to his latent ghost abilities and then set him loose on an unsuspecting public.
Honestly, if whoever was behind the wheel was looking to crucify him for that, Danny would happily hold the nails steady.
Unfortunately, as though sensing Danny's mental self-depreciation and reminder of who's in charge, the vehicle began to slow down, gliding to a stop smooth enough to have the young hero briefly think the wheels tucked under at some point and they were flying the entire time, as though the car came from the Back to the Future version of 2015.
With the stop coming far quicker than he was ready for, Danny had little time to mentally or physically prepare himself for what to expect, which would explain the lack of dignity in the yelp he let out when strong hand yanked him out the car and planted him into a decidedly less plush seat. As much as he felt his blood and ectoplasm spike from renewed stress in being removed from his brief Limbo, it settled when it dawned on him that he wasn't currently being strapped to a table and having lines drawn on him like where the most choice cuts were.
So these weren't the usual goons he was used to dealing with. Which was both good and bad since relying on the typical goon behavior was what helped him get out of jams.
Thoughts briefly left his brain however, as his irritating hood was ripped free from his head and white light filled his vision. While Danny blinked furiously in an attempt to dislodge the spots disco-dancing in his field of eyes, he slowly began to behold shapes that illustrated his current predicament.
A cavernous room threatened to swallow him, littered with shadows of increasing levels of darkness. The more Danny's vision cleared, the more and more he became aware of the room, with it dawning on him that it seemed cavernous because he was sitting in a literal cave; one big enough to easily fit a cathedral or five. Keen ears caught bats scuttling and skittering overhead, their high-pitched chatter echoing off the walls and what looked to be many, many strange devices that sat further back in the sprawling void as their blinking lights reflected off other bits of machinery. Shadows of strange shapes loomed further back, somehow adding to the overall gravitas of the ancient structure despite many of them looking like oversized toys.
". . .izzat. . .Is that a giant penny? " Danny squinted into the darkness, the lone spotlight shining down on him messing with his night vision while he did his damndest to banish the looming smallness creeping into his bones.
Again his ears picked up on a new noise; a fresh scuffling, bouncing here and there off the walls and other surfaces and making it impossible for him to pinpoint what it is or where it was coming from. But one sound that was unmistakable was that of footsteps making their way towards him.
Deliberately.
From a shadow that previously went unnoticed by him as Danny did his best to absorb what he was looking at, a figure seemingly peeled itself from the darkness as though part of it. Like a spawn escaping its parent, the entity separated from the larger sprawling void and continued its way into the world, walking across the stone floor with echoing steps that rattled through Danny's mind as his brain worked overtime to process fresh information.
A cape settled around broad shoulders like folded leathery wings that absorbed all surrounding light, obscuring the powerful figure hidden just underneath. An unmistakable scowl stood out on the little bit of exposed face.
The ears.
The height.
The symbol on the chest nearly obscured by the folded over cape, its shape that of a bat encircled in the only noticeable color, that of an unmistakable evening yellow.
"We need to talk ."
A voice like a rumble, like a towering mountain that's knowingly devoured many-a-climber and will continue to do so, like the looming paranoia that settled into the corners of every dark room at night and whispered into your ear that there are things that do go bump in the night, was directed right at Danny, shooting through him somehow worse than any blast from Skulker.
A voice that spoke of Vengeance, of the Night.
A voice belonging to the only -
"B-B-Batman?! "
Shock and mortification wrestled inside the ghostly hero as he did his best to deal with just whose presence he was in suddenly. Never in all his days did he think he'd have an audience with The Caped Crusader, and never in those same days did he want his voice to reach the kind of pitch that escaped him. It made him feel new, downright pre-pubescent while being stared down by such an omnipresent figure in crime fighting that briefly it had him feeling like an unworthy amoeba.
The looming figure peered down at the captive ghost boy, featureless eyes narrowed to slits in a way that Danny somehow could feel in his bones; the man looked every bit like something cut from the inky black fabric of space itself. The combination of ambient bat noises mixed with the tattered fringes of the suit blending in with the dark left Danny with the image of the little flying figures making up the cape, forming into a tool made to fight crime. Now he hovered over Danny like a sentinel, oozing a field of intimidation that clung to the young ghost like warm fingers to frozen limb.
"I've been tracking you for some time. You don't make it easy." Rumbled the man, and as if cueing a beautiful assistant for the next trick, a screen lit up next to him, sparking a jump from the captive ghost. On it was him , or, at least blurry images of him as he streaked through the smog-choked sky. They made up something of a collage, all various shots of him in differing levels of Bigfoot-like blurriness put together like a quilt, with the most clear one screaming out to him just like the nightmares he's been having the last few days.
It's him, framed by the brutalist interior of the unmistakable eyesore that is Arkham, head turned to one side as though looking for someone, no doubt taken by some security camera.
"Oh... oh-god -"
It was that night , the night he made easily the biggest mistake in his life, and that's including the time he literally lost half of his humanity.
"Out of all the pictures I've been able to get of you, I'd say this is the most interesting. It was taken the same night The Joker was found dead, somehow with his heart removed without the use of surgical tools or physical trauma of any kind."
Danny felt the gaze go from the screen to him, eliciting another flinch despite there being no discernable pupils on the Bat's mask. "This happened not long after the cameras caught you phase through the walls like they were nothing. "
Ghosts don't breathe, they literally can't. Being made from psychic dimensional runoff and tattered soul stuff made their biology ephemeral at best and hypothetical at worst, but Danny? As much as he feared being too ghostly to fit into human society anymore, he relished the fact that even in ghost form he could feel the evidence of his body's functions, stymied though they may be. Even as a ghost his heart beat; it was a stuttering, arrhythmic sort of thing, more akin to a barely functioning music box wheezing out signs of life than a proper organ, but he happily held onto whatever sensation of functionality he could if it meant he wasn't fully leaving his humanity behind.
Only now, with his heart firmly lodged in his throat, Danny found himself fully wishing his body was just as much an animated mass of goo like the rest of the ghosts.
Sweat broke out cold and embarrassing on his brow, and privately Danny wished (because every Amityville resident knew better than to voice them these days) that The Batman was unable to literally smell fear like he heard he was capable of.
"Uh...I...well... y'see - "
Nothing was coming out right. Nothing was going right for him ever since convinced himself to fly for hours on end across several state borders until he was smack-dab in the middle of a town just begging for Robocop's intervention. He missed his home, as increasingly strange as it felt and stressed his parents made him with their fair-weather parenting skills. He missed Jazz's smothering that she insisted was necessary for this time in "important development in a young teen's life," despite only being two years older than him. He missed pummeling ghosts since at least their punches and sudden sneak attacks felt familiar. He missed seeing the stars, which was impossible in this stupid town thanks to the green/grey smog that coated the sky in a perpetual haze.
Try as he might to project the image of an unpredictable ghostly figure, a specter of cold death powered by the Great Unknown, all Danny could do was hold back the shake in his bound limbs as the thought of "I want to go home" bounced around every section of his skeleton, making him feel like a child trembling at the feet of an angry adult.
So while it wasn't a surprise when he felt tears well up, it was to a tremendous amount of shame that his plans for coming to Gotham had fallen this far and he was trapped before Batman, willing himself not to cry.
"Jeez B, give the kid a break. I'd say it looks like you're gonna scare the life out of him, but I guess he's already there."
High above, somewhere in the sprawling and dense shadows of the cave (and somewhere behind all the stress and other assorted emotions Danny was just barely able to acknowledge that he was indeed in THE Batcave), came a voice.
Its breezy tone and casual language stood out in direct contrast to Batman's all-business gravel, and a second after Danny heard it, another figure seemed to drop down out of the inky darkness, landing cat-like near the other man.
Where the Caped Crusader stood tall, dark, and imposing, like the very thing sleep paralysis demons looked under their beds for, this new person sported a casual gratefulness that Danny usually only saw in ghosts. Nearly as tall as Batman, the lithe younger man smiled down at him, dark suit broken up by bright blue lines that met on the chest in the shape of what appeared to be a bird, all while wild wavy hair shone under the harsh single light Danny sat under. With a tisk and a shake of his head, the new guy looked from him to Batman, giving The World's Greatest Detective himself a half-amused/half-disappointed look like one would an annoying cat. Eyes sparkling with mischief despite hidden behind a black and blue domino mask.
"Forgive my colleague -" that same breezy voice came out, stepping between Danny and Batman with a posture that spoke both confidence and friendliness, almost like a police officer trying to calm a child. "He's gotten so used to scaring the crap out of mutant gator men or nightmare clowns that he tends to push the 'dad's mad' vibes up to ten in every interrogation."
"Someone with the ability to phase through objects is the very reason we're down a certain nightmare clown, Wing." Batman nearly growled, his voice and presence standing out the more Danny acclimated to the new member of the little interrogation group. "He's involved ."
"He's a kid , B." The supposed "Wing" sighed, once again seeming like someone who should have known better than to expect anything less than full on Oops All Bad Cop from Batman. "Poor guy looks ready to crawl back in his grave."
Numbly it began to dawn on Danny that he wasn't about to be destroyed at the hands of Batman over some misguided "greater good," and tentative hope began to spread throughout his body.
"I mean, at least try to get him on your side before bringing up his connection with Hood's new skillset."
Hope thoroughly dashed, Danny felt he was owed a little panic when he started finally fighting his bonds, rocking and writhing in his chair like someone pulled a string on his back.
"Hey - hey!" Went the flyboy, hands raised and gently approaching Danny like he was a wounded animal.
"I'm scaring him?" Batman went, the whisper of a smirk in his voice betraying his otherwise stony demeanor.
"My bad, my bad." An almost unnaturally bright and perfect smile was thrown his way. "Guess it's a little early to try and lighten the mood seeing as how you're still trussed up like a Thanksgiving Turkey."
"I - I, he - it wasn't - I didn't even know what he was doing until - until it was already, he - he already -"
Hot shame rose up from his chest and parked in his throat like bile as Danny stuttered wildly and fought against the wave of emotions battering against his ribcage. The events of that night played over and over again in his head, rising up like debris from the tide; finding Jason, telling him about ghosts, activating the ectoplasm in his blood certain it was going to work out for the better (and privately looking forward to having another hybrid to talk to), all while ignoring red flag after red flag until it was too late and he finds the newly activated half-ghost holding a man's heart in his hand.
"Your fault" , his mind rattled up at him. "This is all your fault."
"I didn't know!" Danny rasped out, voice caught between wanting to furiously defend himself and fighting the rising tsunami of emotion caught in his throat. "I - I didn't know he was a psychopath! All I wanted to do was help and the next thing I knew he was flying to this big ugly castle and - and - and -"
"Hey, it's okay kid. We're not the kind of guys to put in the thumbscrews to get information, right B? "
Any attempt at ease the other hero was trying to inject into the situation was just as quickly sucked out in the face of Batman's intimidating presence. "He's involved with what happened to Red Hood. . .with what happened with Joker . We need answers if we want to be able to find Hood."
"So let's work with him." The younger hero made a show to point towards the quietly panicking Danny. "Because we're gonna get nowhere grilling him all night until he's well done." As the hero tossed his hair while imploring Batman, Danny couldn't help but feel a twinge of awe mixed with envy under the smothering panic; that kind of effortless charisma never came naturally to him. "You already have his butt tossed on the fire, so instead of basting him, how about we try a slower roast?"
"...only if you stop with the puns. They're a little rare for my taste."
"Sorry big guy, I skipped lunch to get here."
Though the words were telling him that he wasn’t about to be locked up forever, allowing him a moment to catch his breath, the puns had him briefly wonder if getting eaten was a possibility.
"Is Batman a vampire?!" Floated across his mind before the image of the Caped Crusader filled his vision. Looking up he found himself once again being stared down by the man, the judgement alone feeling like an oppressive weight.
"My partner here is certain you'd be willing to help us solve an issue we've been having as of recent. I, meanwhile, am certain you're the source of said problem, but either way - we do need whatever information you have on ghosts."
Batman raised his hand, drawing Danny's attention to a little silver remote sitting in the black gloved fingers. "Are you willing to work with us to find Red Ho -"
"Yes!"
The outburst rocketed out of him so fast that all three seemed startled by it, but Danny found himself talking again before his answer even finished echoing down the cave.
"Anything! Anything I can do to help, please tell me! I'm sorry! I'm so - so sorry , I didn't mean to cause any of this - I just wanted to solve some weird shit and now people are dead because of me and -"
Shameful images of his future self, laughing mad and full of so much hate, filled his mind's eye. That version of him had been a personal boogeyman ever since his harrowing trip through time, resulting in him becoming hyper aware of any kind of behavior that resembled the killer ghost. The idea that any kind of action on his part has resulted in deaths of humans was abhorrent, so it's no wonder the feeling of crushing guilt over his involvement in the loss of life was the thing to tip the scales and finally let some stray tears loose.
"I didn't want this. . .I didn't want any of this. I just want to help but - but every time I do I just make things worse."
His voice came out thick while furiously staring at the cave floor, unable to look Batman in the eye while so emotional. Still his shoulders shook as his breath rattled in his chest, doing his best to hold back the urge to dissolve into a puddle right there.
So it was no wonder a yelp escaped him when a warm hand landed on his shoulder.
It was Batman, looking down at him, a large hand planted on his shaking shoulder.
As terrified as the man’s presence had been making him, what with being the stalwart and no-nonsense figure of darkness notorious for stalking the shadows of Gotham, it seemed like something about him was making the effort to soften. As though a stone was trying to make its edges smoother. He still towered over Danny, an image of all black that looked like something that just crawled out from under the bed to prove the parents of a frightened child wrong about there being something there…but beyond all that seemed to be a glimmer of something else.
A reminder of the man under the mask and reputation as the terror of Gotham City.
“I believe you.” His voice seemed to cut through the din of emotions Danny was grappling with, as precise and delicate as a surgeon’s knife. “And I apologise .”
Furiously Danny tried to blink away the tears in his eyes as he looked up at the man, as though that would somehow help him hear better.
“W-what?”
“Holy - I gotta call Double R, let him know Christmas came early. We got the rare B Apology.”
The chatter from the younger hero went ignored, along with the follow up statement of “damn, that means I havta call Spoiler, let her know I owe her fifty bucks,” and focused instead on the all-absorbing presence of Batman, who was looking down at Danny like he was a broken teddy bear.
“I protect Gotham and its people - that’s what I’ve dedicated my life towards, but in my desperation I’ve overlooked a key detail that. . . no, I wasn’t overlooking it, I was ignoring the obvious.”
Against all odds, the hint of shame seemed to coast across the man’s features.
“What’s that?” Danny ventured, emboldened to ask thanks to the hero’s sincerity.
“That you’re a kid.”
Not even a second later a beep and a hiss was the only warning Danny got before realizing the ghost-proof binds around his wrists and legs had detached, falling to the floor as useless as a regular pair of handcuffs. Danny couldn’t help but raise his hands up, the idea that he’s free slowly trickling into his mind before looking back at the man who both captured him faster than Skulker could ever dream and then let him go just as easily. His mind felt like it was moving in slow motion, barely registering the words of the other hero as he muttered "coulda sworn someone mentioned that already, but whatever -"
“I let my desire to see someone close to me brought back blind me to that fact, and I know it won’t make up for dragging you here, but I want to formally offer you the opportunity to help me.”
Danny’s body, which had run the gamut of the emotional rainbow, felt like it was vibrating so hard that he was nearly numb from it all. He found he couldn’t blink, couldn’t look away from the man apologizing for his actions who, only minutes earlier, accused him of being a foreign issue to his town responsible for the rampage caused by a wild hybrid. His heart felt stuck, he didn’t know if he was breathing or just waiting for some kind of last minute psych-out before being stuffed in a bag and thrown off a bridge like so much garbage in the Gotham harbor.
But that moment never came.
Instead he found himself taking stock of his surroundings, once again taking note of the towering figures deeper in the cave, the impressive computer occupying a whole wall, and the image of the younger hero excitedly holding a phone, clearly recording the exchange with obvious excitement on his face. When he caught Danny’s probing gaze, he shot back another breezy smile. “Don’t mind me, I just know some people who’ll never believe me when I tell them I saw a Batman apology. Figured I should record this for posterity.”
To his side, the ghostly teen caught the barest of headshakes from Batman, like a father bemused about his child rather than a general telling off a soldier.
It reminded him of his dad a little bit. . . god, he just wanted to go home.
“Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll help you take down Red Hood.”
And as if his experience in Gotham wasn’t already so goddamn weird already, Danny was treated to the image of THE Batman actually offering a smile his way. Strangely it offered him a degree of comfort he didn’t realize he needed.
“Good.” Batman nodded before walking back to his computer, his inky black cape swirling behind him. “Then let’s start with telling me what you know about ghosts.”
It was something familiar. Something tangible, in its own way.
It finally felt like progress after all this time spent in the smog-filled city.
Finally, Danny could see things coming together where he could eventually go home. . . but first, he had to wrangle this Red Hood.