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The bedroom is dark. Danny lays on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He’s exhausted from the events of the day – exhausted from feeling and exhausted from trying not to feel for so long. He should sleep, wants to sleep more than anything, but adrenaline keeps him awake.
And how novel is that? Adrenaline, his body’s dormant fight or flight response sputtering to life after so many months. It seems that the moment he allowed himself to feel, all those weeks of running and hiding finally caught up to him.
Was it weeks? How long had he spent with the Waynes? How long had he been running before that?
Danny stares at the ceiling, paralyzed for once with emotion rather than it’s lack. How long has it been since-
His mind skirts around the thought, shies away from a scene it cannot forget but cannot name, not even here.
How long has it been, since he’d seen his friends?
---
“Good morning, Doe.”
Danny blinks, still staring at the ceiling. Warm light blankets the room, and he realizes that it must already be day.
He leans his head towards Damian, who is standing expectantly by the door, as though awaiting a response. Danny does not speak, and Damian quickly begins filling the silence.
“Breakfast is in the dining nook, courtesy of Duke. I apologize in advance for the quality of food which you are about to consume, but he insisted. Tch. Of course, it is nothing like what Todd or Pennyworth could prepare, but he insisted on being the one to cook. I suppose it is better than letting Grayson into the kitchen.”
Damian walks around the room as he speaks, pulling clothes out of Danny’s unpacked suitcase and setting them aside.
Danny tries to remember what he usually does in these moments, and pulls up blank. He hasn’t been a complete vegetable all these months. He’s vaguely aware that he must have dressed and washed himself sometimes, but the casual way Damian goes about preparing him an outfit for the day suddenly has him feeling awkward, unsure in his own skin.
He makes a questioning noise. Damian pauses briefly at the sound, shooting him a glance before continuing.
“Oh, the food? Yes, well, Grayson had all the staff sent away for the remainder of our time here. Barring of course the necessary security stationed around the island, but you wouldn’t have noticed them anyway. They’ve been paid for the whole two weeks, of course, but Grayson thought that you might be more comfortable without unnecessary scrutiny.”
Danny vaguely recalls something like that being discussed around the dinner table, but he’d spend most of that meal remembering how to taste.
“Do you require further assistance, Doe? I would of course be happy to direct you to breakfast after you are done dressing.”
Danny stares at him. For the first time, he truly takes in his foster brother’s face. The boy is young, skinny but not malnourished, with lean muscles and a soft jawline that betrays his youth. Danny thinks that, given time, it will grow into something sharper.
Damian looks both hopeful and resigned as he asks his question. Danny shakes his head and sees Damian’s face flicker with surprise.
“Very well,” he says. “I will inform my brothers that you will be joining us thusly. We will await your arrival in the breakfast nook.”
And with that, he turns to leave, shutting the door behind him.
Danny dresses methodically, examining each item of clothing before he dons it. Where did these clothes even come from? He didn’t recognize a single piece, and he’s sure that he’d had some spare outfits in his knapsack. Did his old clothes get thrown away? When had that happened?
Questions fill his mind as he wanders towards breakfast, following the smell of burned bacon.
Breakfast is a loud affair.
“Breakfast is great,” Dick says, barely hiding a grimace. “Thanks for cooking, Duke!”
“You need not lie on Thomas’ behalf,” says Damian. “How did you manage to both burn and undercook the bacon?”
“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad! You guys are just spoiled!”
The conversation devolves into friendly bickering between siblings. Danny imagines opening his mouth to speak instead of eat. If he could, he would agree with Duke, maybe chime in with some stories of his own. After chipping a tooth on a sentient casserole dish and fighting piles of possessed meat, Danny doesn’t think any meal that doesn’t bite back is worth complaining about. And at least Duke’s cooking isn’t as bad as his dad’s.
The thought comes unabated, like a splinter beneath his nail. Danny hears something crack, and thinks it might be his mind.
“John?” Dick asks, gently.
Danny comes back to himself. Registers the tension in his right hand. Looks down. Looks back up.
Three concerned faces stare back at him, questioning.
He doesn’t blame them, even as he internally shrinks from the attention. It’s probably the biggest reaction he’s had since – well, since yesterday, technically – since moving in with them.
And it’s not exactly a standard human response.
Danny carefully removes his hands from the table. He folds them carefully in his lap, breathing deeply and trying to return to that foggy place where he doesn’t have to present and his body doesn’t move without thinking.
He ignores the deep gouges in the wood. He ignores Dick’s apology for fighting; ignores the way Damian mutters “that was mahogany” and the way that that makes Stephanie fall over in laughter. He ignores breakfast, ignores his body, ignores everything until he falls into a careful fog.
---
Stephanie groans. When that doesn’t get a reaction, she slumps further into the chair and groans louder.
Nothing.
“Ugh, why couldn’t it have been Dick?” She asks, not expecting a response.
She leans forward, resting her head on the table and looking wistfully towards the beach, where Duke and Damian are playing 1:1 volleyball. It would be more fun with her and Dick, but Dick was on a call with Oracle and somebody had to watch John.
Damian and Duke had been taking turns for days. Dick had all but forced her to sit down, taking her phone away and saying something about connecting with John.
Stephanie didn’t care. She knows a grounding when she sees it.
Grounded from the cowl, grounded from Gotham, grounded from helping Tim on his case, and now grounded from enjoying her grounding.
She and John were sitting on a small patio near the beach. Normally, a private resort like this would be bustling with visitors and staff, but Bruce’s money was enough to buy off “problems” like that. Imagine having to spent your vacation surrounded by, shudder, millionaires! Oh, the horror! Let alone their staff. Despicable! Obviously that was far too unseeming for a billionaire like Brucie Wayne.
And herself, apparently. She hates being friends with rich people sometimes. Without the staff, she can’t even waste Bruce’s money by buying a thousand virgin strawberry daiquiris. Ugh.
Stephanie shudders despite the warmth. It had been three days since Dick had sent away the staff, and this whole place felt like a ghost town. Complete with one free ghost, John Doe.
She turns her head, looking at the boy. He was dressed for the beach, though Stephanie doubted he’d dressed himself. Apparently he was back to doing that thing where he couldn’t do anything himself.
“Didn’t you speak?” She asks, a little annoyed. “Duke says you aren’t a meta, and you told him that somehow. Can’t you just tell me what changed?”
John, as always, remains silent.
Waves crash in the distance.
She had been in Jump City when Jason found an unknown child wandering around Crime Alley, and hadn’t spent much time in Gotham while Bruce went through the trouble of adopting him. She’d visited the manor once or twice, half expecting John Doe to turn towards vigilantism like the rest of them, but this foster case was shockingly normal. Just a normal traumatized kid in need of a home.
Stephanie had half forgotten that most trauma cases didn’t end up as villains or vigilantes, but statistically it made sense that some people just got traumatized. It was an unpleasant reminder, but one she understood.
John blinks. It's the first time he’d blinked in sixty-two seconds.
She wishes he’d blink more. It would make him look less like a corpse.
“I thought you were making progress.” She says. “I thought you were close to a breakthrough.”
John Doe gives no sign that he’s heard her.
Duke had no problem talking to John like he was a normal person, filling in the blanks on John’s side like he’d actually responded. Damian spoke to him like he spoke to everyone; the little brat was used to giving orders to people who wouldn’t speak back, so no surprise there. Dick and Bruce and Alfred had endless patience for him. Tim and Jason could spend hours working in silence with John sitting vegetable-like beside them. Even Barbara could stomach standing in the same room as the kid!
Only Stephanie struggled to put up with him. Only she could be selfish and mean enough to resent having to spend time with a traumatized kid who needed her help.
She wished Cass were here, for what little it would do. Cass’s powers of observation were second to none, but they weren’t magic. Cass was the only other person who seemed as unsettled by John as she was. If even Batgirl struggled to figure out what John was feeling, she had no hope of understanding him. If there was even anything there to understand.
Cass couldn’t read what wasn’t there. She couldn’t read what was already dead.
The though comes again, and she tries to push it from her mind. It wasn’t fair to John, and it wasn’t fair to her and Cass. But here, alone on in a ghost town, sitting next to what might as well be a corpse, she allows herself to be human, with all the feelings of hurt and resentment that comes with it.
---
Danny comes to in a living room. He blinks the sleep from his eyes as he looked around, trying to figure out where he was. He’s sitting in a plush chair with blankets piled up to his chest. Some black and white movie he didn’t recognize plays on a wide flat-screen TV. The rest of the Waynes – although only Damian had the name, technically – are sprawled out across the floor and a nearby couch.
The curtains are pulled loosely across the windows, and Danny sees a scrap of starlight through a gap. An analog clock ticked silently, hands pointed towards 1:35. It doesn’t display the date like a digital clock might’ve, and Danny feels a flash of true annoyance.
It grows within him. How long had he been out of it? Was the breakfast incident just this morning, or several days ago? How much longer did he have on this island?
Quietly, Danny slips out of the chair. He steps over Dick’s splayed legs and Duke’s snoring frame, slipping through the doorframe without alerting anyone.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he feels a sudden need to move, to run, to be anywhere except for here. He starts by exploring the home – hotel? – he’s spent the past however long inhabiting.
The space is impressive, but nowhere near the size of Wayne Manor. It’s like some rich person’s idea of a quaint seaside cottage. The rooms are filled with chintzy seashell decor, the walls and furniture are garishly patterned, the floors are dark hardwood with massive rugs underneath all the furniture. But all the appliances are new and every room is three times bigger that what Danny thinks is necessary. The whole structure is sprawling, although it’s only one floor. Danny assumes that an 80-year old grandmother was given an unlimited budget to design her dream retirement home; no stairs, but endless drawing rooms and kitchens.
Danny finds a library, an office, and what looks like a conference room before he realizes there’s no computer in the building. Of course there isn’t. What kind of resort has a computer room for their guests?
Another clock displays the time: 2:15. Nobody has bothered him yet, but Danny knows that his foster family rises early, even on the weekends. What time is dawn? How much time does he have before people start to stir?
Danny doesn’t know what drives his fear, but part of him knows that he’s running out of time. He paces up and down the halls, looking for some way to contact the outside world. Finally, in one of the sitting rooms near the front door, he sees a phone. It’s a landline, the kind that all hotels have, ancient technology out of place with all the modern appliances. There’s a list of important extensions – concierge, cleaning, maintenance – taped to the machine, but Danny ignores them.
The numbers come to mind quickly. He dials without thinking.
The dial tone sounds like a gunshot in the dead of night, and Danny flinches, trying to muffle the speaker with his hand. The phone rings once, twice, and Danny stares nervously in the direction of the movie room. There’s no indication of movement, but he doesn’t know how long it will last.
On the third ring, someone picks up.
“Hello? Who is this?” The stern voice is familiar, and Danny thinks that he might cry.
He opens his mouth to speak, but manages a choked cry. He hears it distort to static that reverbs through the other end of the line.
“Maurice, who is that?” a muffled voice calls from the background. “It’s after midnight.”
“I don’t know, Angela, they won’t respond.”
The Foley’s home phone. The only safe number he had memorized.
It’s been so long since Danny last spoke. He’d sat through all the medical appointments with Bruce, vaguely listened to them talk about “selective mutism” and “trauma responses,” and had believed that he could choose to start talking whenever he felt like it. But now, sitting in front of the phone, he feels a spike of fear shoot through his heart.
He can’t speak. He opens his mouth and air passes through noiselessly. Mr. and Mrs. Foley are talking and they’re about to hang up the phone and this could be Danny’s one chance to reach out and he’s losing it.
He acts without making a decision.
A spark of energy from nearly depleted stores. Ghost Speak rattles through his lungs, a language more of feeling than of thought. He reaches out across phone lines and pushes a piece of his core into the message.
C̴͎̬̦̳͒̍̑̀̀̉̕͜ǒ̵͍̭͇͒̃͒̂m̷̦̣͖̳̎͒͛͆̉̀͊͝ͅͅe̸̳͎̪̤̱̖̾̓͜ͅ.̶̡̛͙̻̺̜͎̺͆͒̈́̽͌͌͜ ̷̙͓̌̽T̷͔͙̿̓́̄̏́̾̚u̴͉̹̩͘͜c̶̞͉̤͔̙͎̯̱̉̈͋̾́k̵̨͙̰̪̗̾̕ė̶̡͙̦̼̠̀̐r̴̗̖͔̦̖̯̽̈̅.̸̨̛͍̣͎̜̳͒̎̒̌͘̕̕ ̷̢̧̭̟̃̀̏̅̉̂Ǹ̸̘͚͍̙̌̅̀͠e̶̡̯̫̖̲̜̻͉̋̎̓̉̕ć̸͕̹͖̬̰̫͗̀͒̋͜k̸̨͎̰̾̈́͂͊e̵͕̠̖͑̒̌̓r̷͉͎̭̽͝ ̵̡̗̜̖̈́̓̉́͂̕ͅÏ̷̝̝̬̮̟̜̜̉̆̈́͜s̸̛̹͗͒̒̏͝ḻ̴̱̺̘̾̏͑̆̐̈́ͅȃ̴̡̼͓͉̤̅̐͋̈́̽͒͘ņ̸͕̩͔̃͆̈́͗͌d̵̤̟͇̾̇̆̅̐̏̕ṣ̴̀́̈́.̸̟͈̩͍̹̘̆̇͝ ̴̡̨̖̞̺̻͚̼͐̀̐̈́̇͒̚͝S̶͙̫̔à̶̢̩̒͘f̵̛͖̯̯̏̉̾̆͒̕ę̴̧̨̠͉̝͂̈̈̍́̂͌̈́͜.̴̛͇̰̹̀̈́̑ ̴̻̫̗̞͕̻̅H̷̯͗̉̒̉̈́̕ę̶͕̘͔̭̎́̈́̓̓͘͘ͅl̸̰̣͖̜̟̪̯̓̆̌́̔̊̿p̶̖̦͙͈͕̙̀̍̽.̸̬̼̺̲͚̯̒̎̽̏̋́͝ ̴̧̡̡̢͈̞̤̆̅͛͜
He hears shouts on the other end of the line before his phone melts, the pulse of energy too much for the machine to handle. He suspects that the Foley’s phone might be damaged, too, but he isn’t worried. He doesn’t have Technus or Tucker’s skill with electronics, but a piece of his message has already found a home in their landline. Tucker’ll figure it out, and then he and Sam and Jazz will know that he’s safe.
He leaves the smoldering electronic where it sits, suddenly dizzy. He throws a thoughtless ray of ice towards it, hoping it’ll be enough to prevent a fire, and stumbles towards his room.
He’s asleep before his head hits the pillow.
---
Somewhere in a government facility, sirens wail, and a light begins to blink.