Chapter Text
Jason was having a good day. It was a good, normal day, and he had been feeling pretty good… until he very much was not.
He had a lazy Sunday afternoon, slowly turning to evening, meandering through downtown Gotham and visiting some of his favorite shops. He left a classic motorcycle shop with a new part for his work-in-progress bike, and was making his way to an old, dusty used book store that he rarely bought from, but found it a good way to browse and pass time. He found himself perusing the leatherbound Easton Press books and he took interest in two books: The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes and Poems of Emily Dickenson. He picked them up and made his way to the counter, satisfied that he at least now had something to bring to Duke’s birthday dinner that evening.
Jason had not missed the worn poetry books from various authors subtly cornered away on Duke’s shelf in his apartment. Duke would never admit it, but Jason knew he would appreciate the Easton Press books, though he was definitely going to make a comment about how pretentious the leatherbound covers with 22kt gold inlay were. All the more reason to buy them, Jason reasoned, feeling both satisfaction with the nature of the gifts and what he anticipated to be the false-annoyance of his brother.
They were meeting at a steakhouse not far from the book store, a rare moment where the family was coming together outside of vigilante-activities. It was… hard to meet at the Manor for birthday meals anymore, though efforts had been made to potluck or grill out there, Alfred… wasn’t there anymore, and the loss was hard for everyone involved. Jason was sure that had Selina and Damian not still been at the Manor with him, Bruce would have just spent his days in the Cave or in a penthouse in the city.
Jason left the book store, and that is when his good, normal day, turned, not poorly, but… odd.
He wasn’t exactly sure what it was that set him off as he made his way up the street, but as he made his way towards a crowd of tourists, the hair on the back of his neck prickled, and a sense of obeisence overtook him. There was a sense of… not quite danger, but the sense of being near something unsettling and powerful.
He felt his guard rising, glancing around furtively, but was startled by the blaring of a horn and the sound of a crunch as one car in the adjacent street rear ended another. The momentary lapse in his attention had him walking straight into one of the tourists, his large frame nearly knocking the other man’s smaller form over.
Jason took a step back, bringing his attention back to what was in front of him, an apology forming on his lips. “Hey, sor-” he stopped.The man he bumped into, tan skin, dark tousled hair, and some of the bluest eyes he had ever seen outside of his own adoptive family’s, collected himself and turned to face him… and Jason had the sudden feeling of a prey animal being examined by a predator. It was not a feeling he was used to being on the receiving end of.
Even more startling, he felt the long familiar waves of the Pit rise in him, except instead of the familiar rage, it was more reactive, unsettled and wary. Jason fought to swallow it, to assess what was in front of him.
The man cocked his head, examining Jason. Jason felt every hair on his body stand on end as he felt some sort of… energy coming off this guy. He didn’t know how to qualify or quantify the feeling.
“Huh,” the man’s voice was smooth, his expression puzzled. “You’re… weird.”
“... What? Rude.” Jason spat reflexively, his mouth not quite catching up to his brain processing the fact that there was something so not normal about this guy, and why did no one else seem to notice? He could distantly hear the drivers of the vehicles that bumped each other arguing. He tuned it out, his attention focused entirely on the man in front of him, the Pit instincts in him screaming at him to run, to defer, to attack.
Jason fought to ignore it, he spent years learning not to let that rage guide him and to control it. It had been a long time since he felt like he was losing control.
The other man’s cheeks reddened slightly, “No, I’m sorry, I mean-” he hesitated.
“DANNY!” A voice called out. A teenage girl bearing a striking resemblance to the man approached them. Jason estimated the man to be close to his own age; he guessed the girl to be a sister?
“Danny, we’re going to be late! This is the last tour of the day!” The girl stopped, looking between the two men, before her eyes settled on Jason. The unsettled feeling Jason had intensified, and he swallowed a wave of green, only for her to look at him and-
“Oh, you’re a weird one.”
“Excuse me.” Jason ground out through gritted teeth. “What the fuck are you?”
“Late.” The girl said simply, turning to -her brother?, “When you’re done flirting with the locals, come find me.” She turned around and weaved her way through the crowd to the front of a line of a gimmicky tour bus wrapped with “Spooks and Spectres! The most haunted tour of Gotham’s Ghosts!”
“I’m not-!” The man- Danny- yelped, his ears reddening further. He sighed and refocused on Jason, who was getting more on edge. “I’m sorry about her, she shouldn’t be out in public sometimes. Listen,” Danny reached into his jacket, Jason couldn’t see *where,* and his hand reflexively twitched towards his pistol in the small of his back when the man’s hands disappeared. The other man caught his movement and his mouth twitched.
“Man, you Gothamites are so paranoid. Here’s my number,” He reached out, offering a business card towards Jason, who took it cautiously. “Give me a call sometime, I have a doctor who might be able to help your, ah,” he glanced around and lowered his voice. “Issue with your ectoplasm.”
“My what?” Jason barked out, confused, staring at the back of the card in his hand with a hastily scribbled cell phone number scribbled on it.
When he looked up, the other man was gone, the odd roiling feelings and Pit rage leaving with him.
Jason looked back at the business card, turning it over, and his eyebrows raised, bewildered.
“Daniel J. Nightingale, PhD.
Aerospace Engineering Department
Wayne Enterprises”
~~~~~*****~~~~~*****~~~~~
Outside of Amity, Gotham was definitely the most haunted city Danny had ever been in, which was why he chose to make it his home. The amount of ambient ectoplasm and general chaos allowed him to blend in with the living while making it easier to wave off his occasional eccentricities as being just another Meta if anyone even guessed that. Gotham was dark, dreary, and reminded him of a mix of Amity and the Realms. He still wasn’t used to all the people, and Gotham’s Ghosts seemed to like and respect him enough in the brief encounters he’d had with them. There were few shades and spirits that lashed out at him, but his Presence made most of them back off and shy away.
Finishing school had been tough, but not impossible, while juggling his duties as High King of the Realms, as well as his slow transformation into… something else. The older he got, the more experience he gained and time spent in the realms, the more his ghost form became… different. There was a split, his “Phantom” form, the inverse of his Living body, and then there was… well, Sam called it his Lovecraftian Nightmare form.
Danny was becoming an Ancient.
His response was to put it off for as long as possible.
“You’re procrastinating against your destiny, Danny.” Clockwork had said in their first true discussion about it.
“I’m going to Live my Life to the fullest,” Danny shot back. “There will be plenty of time when I am no longer Living.”
Danny enrolled himself in a university with hybrid courses, choosing to study what he loved the most: Space.
It made the tendrils of galaxies, of planets and asteroids and stars flickering in and out, in his Eldritch form make more sense, he supposed.
He would never make it to space with NASA, he knew. He could never pass a physical, but also… as a ghost, he discovered that he was not bound by the physical limitations of his body.
The first time he visited Mars, he nearly cried. His favorite spot to *get away from everything* was sitting on space debris in Saturn’s rings and stare out into the abyss. Even icy Pluto, no longer *technically* a planet, soothed his ice core when he wanted nothing more than to be alone.
He wanted to share that feeling with the world. He chose to study Aerospace Engineering. To be nothing more than a cog in the scientific machine that would give the humans of the Living Realm access to things beyond their planet and what the Justice League decided to declassify.
In the time he spent in and out of the Infinite Realms, he discovered that time moved differently in the Realms vs in the Living world; Danny suspected there were elements of Time Dilation; he could spend a month or three in the Realms and have a handful of days to weeks pass in the Living world.
It honestly made his life easier… if he needed more time to study for his courses, he just brought his books to the Realms and studied there, resulting in higher scores on his exams. He wished he knew that trick in high school; he could have gotten into better universities… not that Vlad couldn’t have just bought his way into any university he wanted.
When he presented his thesis at an Aerospace convention, several companies reached out to him with job offers. NASA, JPL, Queen Consolidated, LexCorp. Danny didn’t need to work, didn’t need the stress of a job when he could instead travel the world with Elle and keep taking classes for fun, but having a purpose outside of his duties as King and embracing the full experience of Living? His biggest push was to not continue being indebted to Vlad.
An email from Tiffany Fox from Wayne Enterprises’ Research and Development department gave him pause, and back and forth emails and meetings led to his employment agreement.
That was six months ago.
A new apartment in Gotham. A new place to land. Danny felt like he could finally breathe.
Elle graced him with her presence after spending several months traveling in Africa, and thrust a handful of brochures in his face, declaring that they were going to spend some “family time” this week. Her top choice was a “Spooks and Spectres” tour. The flat look he gave her didn’t deter her.
“Don’t you want to get to know your more notorious neighbors?”
He’d agreed to it. Going on ‘Haunted Tours’ was their thing, after all, enjoying the cheesiness of them. Every now and then something outside of Amity showed them something of interest, but most were nothing more than, well, ghost stories.
That something of interest had never been having himself nearly knocked over by a very handsome man who reeked of spoiled ectoplasm. Danny hadn’t even known ectoplasm could spoil that badly, but the sourness that emanated off the man’s aura couldn’t be anything but. He wasn’t a halfa, Danny could tell that much, but he also… touched by death in a way Danny had never seen before.
The other man, as sour as his expression and energy had been, looked as confused as Danny felt, and certainly wasn't outwardly hostile. Danny, not wanting to interrogate the man in the middle of a crowded street, quickly committed his face and energy signature to memory. He tried to smoothly (and felt awkwardly) hand over his phone number before he turned to go find Elle. If the guy didn’t reach out to him, Danny was sure he could find him again; he had never met someone who felt like… off, that sick, before. Frostbite would know what to do.
For now, he couldn’t wait to see what kind of cheesy ghost stories that a city full of vigilante and villain violence could produce.