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spacedace · 10 months

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Yooo, got more Ghosts of Gotham snippets for you, this time with All The Danny Angst. All of it. Literally almost 5k words of Danny angst/hurt/comfort. My boy is straight up not having a good time and disassociating to the max to try and not be aware of that fact. Context/notes at the very end :D

For a long time, he wasn’t anywhere.

Wasn't anyone.

When it first happened, Danny was distantly aware of voices screaming-wailing-furious around him. Hands like vices on his arms then jolting and tugging and arms wrapped around him fierce-protective-scared. Something hot falling on his face from above, hitching breath beneath his ear, bodies covering him like a blanket or a barricade.

Mostly there had just been the pain.

So many times he’d been hurt over the years. Battles, fights, wars. He’d been hurt before. He’d known pain. He’d died of pain, once, maybe. Or maybe it hadn’t been the pain. Maybe he just thought that sometimes because the agony had all he’d been able to feel as the portal tore open a hole through his heart and changed him forever as it ripped a doorway between the Realms. Maybe that was happening now. Worse this time. Beyond anything he’d felt before, beyond his ability to even truly comprehend.

A piece of himself - of his very soul - torn out with bare fingers, digging in and ripping him apart. Something so much a part of who he was that he’d never known life without it suddenly yanked out by the root. Like a limb hacking itself away from his body with a knife, like his heart cracking open his ribs from the inside with the intention to maim and kill. A part of what he was that hated him so much it took vicious delight in trying to kill him as it tore itself away.

Hands in his hair. Safe safe safe. Lifted from the ground, from the bodies that cradled him, from the agony of the waking world.

Jazz.

Blood on her face, down her chin, pinking her teeth. Eyes like storms and seas, hair crackling like an inferno. Her fingers on one hand were blackened, some bent at wrong angles. She didn’t flinch as she brushed damp hair from his face with them, expression steady. There were things on the ground behind her, soft and strange and almost shaped like people if all the pieces were put together right.

They didn’t move.

There wasn’t much white left beneath all the red and black. It still made Danny flinch to see them. Jazz pulled him close and started walking. Those from fore, that cradled him and protected him - not part of him, but not hurting him either - followed in silence. Pink shirt splattered in more red. A letterman jacket torn. Blond hair ragged and burned. He knew their names once, before he was torn apart, before the pain. Now they were only distantly familiar. Echoes of a past lost to the pain of the violent unanchoring of his Core.

Jazz carried him, tucked him close as doors opened and the deathly stillness of where they’d been gave way to the chaos of beyond. There was something familiar in the brick of the buildings, the slant of the roads, the sounds of the people. Something that belonged to him, or did once before those pieces of himself turned and tore himself apart. His to protect. But he couldn’t tell if there was a him at all anymore, let alone a part of him able to feel that need to guard and defend.

Amity Park burned around them. More screaming - in fear, in rage, in declaration of war - as figures blurred in a mess of chaos. Running, fighting, falling.

Danny didn’t feel much of anything.

Jazz was safe safe safe as she cradled him close. The world seemed to shift around her to let them through. Bending and warping itself so that the path was always clear. Blood dripped down, fresh against the drying black on her face. From her nose, her eyes. Her heart was stead beneath his ear. Safe. She’d keep him safe.

More followed Jazz. Indistinct shapes with names he couldn’t remember. Faces he almost knew beyond the ash and dust and blood that coated them. Their steps silent in Jazz’s wake, eyes sharp on the world around them, hands shaking on weapons. Maybe he’d never been the protector. Maybe it had always been them.

They walked through chaos untouched, only pausing as they arrived at a familiar, haunted structure. Looming, shadowed, reeking of death and danger. It cast dark shadows even with the sun hazed and dimmed with choking smoke.

Home.

What had been home.

The crowd stayed on the street. Turning to face the flood of white descending upon them on the heels of wailing sirens. A flash of red high above. The cry of a Valkyrie leading the charge. Determined screams echoing her call.

Val.

Jazz thrummed safe into his shattered Core and never once looked back behind her. Brick and chrome. A wall that tracked the height of children that had died so many years ago. Steps down down down. Brick lost to chrome. Green and green and green as she carried him forward towards what had briefly been his death bed, into the swirling, gentle green and into the realm beyond.

Danny closed his eyes.

—-

When he opened them again the world was ice and cold.

Jazz slept beside him. Face pinched and pale. Fingers slightly shiny and pink where they’d been charred before, prints gone with the long healed burns. There was blue creeping through the copper red of her hair. She shivered, and a large hand tugged the fur draped over her like a blanket higher, a damp cloth pressed to her forehead.

Dan, solemn and quiet in the blues and whites of the Yeti healers. He reached a hand to smooth it through Danny’s hair. Low rumble of here where here? It sounded familiar, something echoed in the black that had been all Danny had known while he drifted in Unbeing.

The pain had come back the moment he’d opened his eyes. Now churning with a horrible hollowed-out feeling. Jazz and Dan soothed it, but there was an aching emptiness where others should be. Where others had been before they’d torn themselves away. In his chest his Core felt like shattered glass, grinding over itself in search of what was no longer there.

Hush here rest Dan rumbled, lulling with the assurance of here here here. Jazz shivered in her sleep but reached out. Safe here safe.

Everything hurt.

Danny slipped into Unbeing once more.

—-

Jazz and Dan were gone when he drifted upward once more.

Elle curled against his side instead.

She clung to him with shaking hands, face buried in his chest as her shoulders shook. She did not soothe with Bond Calls of safe and here like their siblings but keened to him with scared hurt betrayed in agonized tones that set his teeth on edge.

She smelled of ash and blood.

He made himself aware of his body, of his arms and hands, even as his mind tried hard to pull back. Turned in slow degrees until he was wrapped around her in a protective hug. Too torn apart to respond with the shushing warble of safe here safe that had been pressed into him for the days-weeks-months he hadn’t Been. He settled for rasping, half-forgotten vocal cords, for a song he could barely remember hummed into her hair.

Elle clung tighter. Burning tears and gasping sobs and shaking so hard that a distant part of him thought it might shatter her Core too, like glass. He wanted to help, to protect. When Unbeing crept upon him, tried to pull him down and out of the overwhelming agony of having two of his Core Bonds viciously yanked out of him, he fought it.

Trembling and sick feeling, the sting of salt in an open wound as he tried to run a hand down his little sister’s small back in reassurance. He felt like he was choking on the rioting emotions that rolled off of her and polluted their Grave Bonds. He wanted to shove her away and curl in on himself. He wanted to hug her tight and comfort her.

He did neither in the end.

Unbeing pulled hard and he was too weak to fight it. Soothing nothingness eclipsed all, dragging him back to obliviousness. No Jazz. No Dan. No Elle.

No Danny.

—-

The bed beneath him was far less comfortable than the last time he Was. A mattress with a pile of worn and musty blankets in the corner of a small room that smelled mold-sweet. A window with a moth-eaten quilt stapled over it, only barely keeping too-bright sunlight at bay. Warped floorboards and water-stained ceiling and a baseball bat with dark red stains leaned against the wall. A battered laptop on a half-broken milk crate, images of space and low volume talk about star nurseries light years away from lonely little Earth.

Dan asleep at Danny’s side, large frame almost taking up the entirety of the small bed. Black hair in a familiar, awful mullet as he lay in human form. The smell of capsaicin and lidocaine and hand sanitizer rubbed into his skin. A forming bruise along his jaw, half hidden by the scruff of his unshaved face.

The documentary continued on. Danny lay in the dark and let himself fall into the wonder of space and the lulling hush of his brother’s breathing. Then he was nothing at all.

—-

There was a dresser in the room the next time he was aware. One leg missing, it was kept balanced with a stack of old Psychology Today magazines. White paint fell like snow on the floor around it where it peeled away. A collection of over-the-counter pain relievers and muscle relaxers gathered like soldiers at one end while half melted candles were settled around objects he couldn’t make out like an altar at the other.

He smelled the sweet smell of oranges and cloves on the muggy, warm air. He blinked passed the images of space on the laptop to see a small dented pot on a hot plate, steam wafting off it as Jazz leaned over to drop a half-wilted sprig of rosemary into the simmer pot. There was still blue in her hair, a long, wide streak stark and bright against the copper, almost glowing in the dim light of the room. Her mouth moved over words spoken too low to understand but soothing in their cadence and Danny felt something painfully heavy at the edges of his muted senses ease. Her magic burned low like a campfire after all the stories had been told, warm and reassuring as it wrapped around him.

He let his eyes close as she finished. Words of power replaced by soft sniffs of pain and the hush of someone crying and trying very hard not to be heard.

—

Elle sat beside him, sallow in the low glow of the laptop when next he slipped out of Unbeing. She wasn’t crying as she had last time he remembered seeing her, but her eyes were tired as she stared longingly at the images on the screen. Not a documentary on space but some overly saccharine hosts of a show about obscure travel destinations talking too brightly over sweeping images of far-off places.

The light that crept past the makeshift blackout curtain of the quilt was street lamp yellow. The laptop clock said it was a little before midnight. He watched Elle watch the travel show, her hands shaking as she picked at her nails til they bled. Her lips were chapped and torn from biting them, hair greasy from running her fingers through the locks over and over again. As the show ended she sat and shook for the seconds it took for the next to begin, looking like she might be sick.

She never was able to feed her Obsession as easily as he could his.

He wondered why she didn’t return to her travels. Why Dan didn’t order her off to go exploring as remedy to her burgeoning Core Sickness. Why she sat curled up in a ball rocking at the foot of the bed staring at images of places that would do her much better to go and see herself rather than watch on a screen in the dark.

—-

The next time he saw her she looked better.

There were still dark circles beneath her eyes and a weariness to the set of her shoulders, but her nails weren’t bleeding and her hands were steady as she fussed with safety pins to make the blazer of the second-hand skirt suit she was wearing fit better on her tiny frame. Not perfect, but better, healthier. A little closer to the bright-eyed girl he’d been watching grow up in quick moments over the years when she came to visit.

It was a different room they were in this time. An open door nearby showed the bedroom he’d come to himself in, mattress stripped bare with the sheets and blankets being shoved into a laundry bag by Jazz. The room he was in was a little bigger, a squat living room with a window leading to a fire escape and a grungy and unfamiliar city street beyond. He sat on a floral couch that smelled of cigarettes and mildew, a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs in his lap. The laptop was open to space once more, set on a crate acting as a coffee table beside a half-zipped purse and a cup of cold coffee.

The eggs were burnt and left a greasy residue in his mouth. He ate them mechanically as he watched Dan step in to help Elle try and salvage her work with the suit and the safety pins. The hospital scrubs he wore made his too-pale skin look even more washed out, but his hair was neat in the low ponytail he wore it in and his hands deft as he helped Elle force the oversized blazer to fall into something a little more fitting.

Somewhere in the distance there was the sound of people shouting and fighting, sirens wailing in the distance, the laughter of a kid echoing through the thin walls separating them from the apartment next door. Danny ate his eggs. The shattered glass in his chest was a little less sharp, cutting edges finally grinding down little by little.

He was slipped out of Unbeing more often, he was pretty sure. Less time seemed to be passing between his moments of awareness of the world around him, his time as Danny instead of Nothing stretching out longer. The pain was still there, still awful, but it was less. He could feel his other Core Bonds now. The emotions of his Grave not something he instinctively pulled back from and rejected, but something he could recognize and feel and even respond to in kind sometimes.

—-

There was an afternoon where he sat in the living room with Elle and Dan. Nail polish and acetone sharp on his nose as Elle sat on the floor and focused on painting Dan’s nails. Satisfaction curling along the Bond between them as she finished without smudging. Her eyes bright and hopeful as she turned to Danny, asking what color do you want?

The options she flourished at him were limited. The bright blue with the black glitter that adorned Dan’s nails. The black and dark red she’d worked into something like an ombre on her own nails. The last bottle was a deep purple, almost black until the light hit it just right. The color of Sam’s favorite lipstick as she smiled and smudged the color in the shape of a kiss onto his and Tucker’s cheeks at the end of summer break before they all piled into different vehicles to go back to their respective colleges.

Just so you don’t forget me, dorks. A laugh, a wink, a hug so tight that it felt like there was nothing else in the world except the three of them.

“Purple.” He’d said, voice hoarse and unfamiliar even to his own ears.

Dan dropped the medical journal he’d been reading to turn and stare at him. Elle went still, eyes wide and bright with hopeful tears. Her smile watery as she grabbed the bottle from their makeshift coffee table and scooted over to sit at his knee.

He was there the whole time. Feeling the cold polish on his nails, the warmth of Elle’s hands wrapping around his, the low rumbling purr Dan filled the air with. The longest he’d been anywhere for…he wasn’t sure. A long time. Elle’s hair, cut into a short bob the last time he’d seen her before everything…went wrong, had grown out. It fell in curls past her shoulders now. How long did that take? How much time was he losing?

Danny curled between his siblings, staring down at the deep purple of his nails until it was gone and all that was left was the increasing ache of Unbeing.

—-

There was a woman with a baby on the couch next time he came back. He blinked at her, trying to place who she could be as he stood in the crooked doorway between the bedroom and the living room. Dan knelt on the floor with his medical bag open, tending to a gash on the woman’s arm with quick stitches and reassuring words. Jazz bounced the baby in her lap where she sat on the coffee table, talking low about you’ll be safe and won’t find you here and we’ve got you.

The woman and her child are strangers to him, but there was an echo of familiarity to the situation. Someone scared or hurt or hungry, ushered into their tiny apartment for sanctuary. A pair of teens with bruises and wary eyes. An older man and his dog shivering from cold. Men, women, children, outside, and in between. Anyone his Grave met in need of help.

Danny shuffled passed them, following a path he can’t remember taking before but knew all the same to a dimly lit shoebox of a kitchen. The cupboards are thin in their holdings, but well organized. He found mason jars of loose-leaf tea that smell of herbs and Jazz’s intentions, starts the kettle on the stove and stumbled his way through a process he must have done a thousand times before but that he was never truly aware when he did. A bottle for the baby with the tin of powder milk in the fridge. Tea for the mother, honey and lemon for health and taste. A collection of snacks scrounged together for everyone to chew on. Check to make sure all the blinds had been pulled closed on the windows.

The baby was back in the woman’s arms when he came back out. Dan packing up his medical supplies and gathering up the used, bloody gauze. A door Danny has no memory of walking through is open leading to another bedroom unfamiliar to him. Jazz inside makes the bed with clean sheets before she went through and checked the locks on the window and those installed in the door to make sure everything worked. She brought the keys to the woman, so that she might be able to lock the door to the guest room behind her and know she was safe. Kindness did not mean safety in Crime Alley, every little bit of extra assurance that could be given would help settle their occasional guests’ nerves.

“Thank you.” The woman said, voice rasping and strained as she took the baby bottle and acknowledged the tea set out for her on the nearby table, keys slipped into her shirt for safe keeping. There was a ring of bruises around her neck and a little blood that hadn’t quite managed to get wiped away drying on her upper lip from a recently broken nose. There was still fear in her eyes, always darting to the door as if expecting someone to break in at any moment. Jazz had pulled the blood-stained bat from their bedroom, prepared if someone did.

“No problem.” He said, voice rusty from lack of use. The woman didn’t seem surprised by it, he wondered if he was known beyond the vaguely familiar walls of his Grave’s apartment. If he wandered out with one of his siblings sometimes distant and hollow. Becoming a known sight to the neighborhood with his vacant stare and silence as he drifted by oblivious to the world around him. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the woman with her injuries and haunted expression just didn’t have it in her to think it strange that he croaked like a half-dead frog.

Dan dropped a hand on his shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. Thankful here? thankful echoing out through their Bond and filling Danny’s chest with warmth and aching melancholy at the same time. He tried to push back here with you here to his brother but only felt the broken glass of his Core grind together. Dan smiled down at him anyway.

He felt himself tipping back into Unbeing as Dan drifted off to scrounge together some spare clothes for their guest. Jazz keeping her sharp eye on the door. They were strong enough to protect themselves and the young family that was hiding with them. His last though as he drifted into Unbeing was that he wished he was strong enough to stay.

—-

There were chips in the purple of his nail polish when he came back next.

It was still there though, still shiny beneath the gold-red slant of the setting sun as he sat in the squeaky folding chair on the roof with Jazz. It hadn’t been that long since his last moment of awareness. Less time in the Unbeing, more time in his Grave.

“I just don’t know what to make of him.” Jazz said, tapping at the can of birch beer she held as she stared out over the narrow slice of Crime Alley they could see from their apartment’s roof. “Sharon says he isn’t mad at me or anything, but I can’t figure out why else he feels like he has to shadow me whenever I’m closing for the night.”

The seat was a familiar kind of uncomfortable beneath him, the street below one he recognized even as he failed to produce any kind of memory of seeing it before. The fact that they lived in Crime Alley - famous the world over as the worst neighborhood in one of the most crime ridden cities in the world - was something else he was only passively aware of. He didn’t remember being told that was where they were or the process of getting them moved there. He just knew.

“Sounds like he likes you.” Danny said to the fretting silence that his sister had fallen into. He couldn’t recall the rest of the conversation - was it a conversation if she was just talking to a wall? If Danny was an empty shell for her to hold up to her ear to try and make out the impression of a response? But he recalled his sister’s anxiety, her fluttering worry, the impression that she was looking at things all wrong.

The tapping on the can stilled, and he could feel hope hope hope filtering in through their Bond before Jazz soothed it into here reassurance safe. Jazz was the best at controlling what came through the Bonds. Always able to make sure that they only felt what she wanted them to, slipping only rarely to allow them unfiltered access to the full range of her emotions. She was able to help them with that too, when they asked. He wasn’t sure if it was her Empathic abilities that gave her that skill, or her position as Grave Stone. Either way, she always worked hard to feel steady and sure to all of them, even in the most chaotic of times.

Danny remembered the press of safe safe safe she’d instilled in him after…After. How it was the only thing he could feel from her even though he knew she’d faced Them. He’d heard screaming - her voice - heard rage and fury and awful, awful wailing. He hadn’t felt any of it though.

Unbeing pulled at him at the painful memories.

Danny pulled back.

He was on a rooftop eating Thai food with his sister, listening to her worry that a guy that clearly liked her actually hated her instead because she was Jazz and always too in her head about those kinds of things. Unbeing kept him from the pain, but it kept him from everything else too. He’d end up back there again, eventually, he knew. The shattered glass of his Core was worn now, like sea glass tumbled smooth beneath the waves. There were still sharp edges though, still pieces where a whole should be.

Jazz bumped his shoulder with hers gently. Her smile was soft and hopeful as she said, “He does not. He barely even speaks to me.”

“Because you never shut up.” He said with a croaking sort of laugh. His voice sounded better. Less rusted and stuck in his throat. He sipped at his own birch beer, cool in his hand. “Whenever you get nervous you just start babbling and don’t stop. Has the guy even had the chance to say anything?”

She shoved him with an affronted squawk and by the end of it his hair was sticky with soda and his clothes dirty with the grime of the roof and the ache in his sides from laughter was greater than the ache in his chest. They climb the fire escape back down to their apartment, Jazz hustling her way through getting ready for work while Danny tried to scrub himself clean in the kitchen sink.

Everything was wrong. In a hundred, thousand different ways. The apartment, the city, the way they were all crowded together. Jazz should be in Princeton, becoming the world’s most effective and terrifying psychologist. Dan in the Far Frozen devoting himself to being one of the Yeti’s finest healers. Elle off darting across the world, never landing in the same place twice unless it was to come visit. Danny in Amity Park’s little community college, struggling his way through a planned path that might one day lead him to NASA and space.

He didn’t know where Tucker, Sam, and Val were. Only knew they were alive because he could barely, barely feel the Bonds connecting them to him. Amity Park was gone. A memory of fire and screaming had had barely been aware for. A collection of nightmares that left Elle shaking and crying often enough to trickle through the bleak distance of Unbeing for him to know it happened.

His Core had been splintered by his parents’ visceral, violent rejection. The Grave Bonds he had with them ripped out of him at the root with the full weight of their hatred and disgust at knowing what he truly was. The pain so excruciating and the fear of following the same dark path Dan had once upon a time so great he fell inward, tucking himself away from reality itself to live in the endless oblivion of Unbeing.

It was all wrong.

Somehow, though, despite all of that, he’d laughed with his sister over her crush on the guy she knew from work. He made dinner out of box mac n’ cheese and frozen chicken nuggets while Elle swore up a storm about how much she hated that fucking evil bald bastard that was her boss. He talked to Dan during his minuscule break at the hospital and listened to him bitch about Officer Grayson showing up during his shift again. He let himself fall into the comfort and steadiness of his Grave, those who were there with him, and Was.

He woke up the next morning as himself after going to sleep without falling into Unbeing. Dan’s hair in his mouth and snoring too loud in his ears. Jazz swearing in the kitchen as she burned breakfast, still half asleep from her long shift at the bar. Elle using all the hot water as she got ready for another day of nine-to-five drudgery working at LexCorp.

Danny stumbled out of bed, present in his own body for the first time fully since before his and his Grave’s lives had crashed and burned. His Core hurt, his body was heavy with grief, but he was Himself enough to feel it and not run. He was able to push back the lulling pull of Unbeing to step out of the bedroom and breath.

It wasn’t going to be easy. He knew from half-remembered moments of Jazz speaking to him. Gentle words about healing not being linear, of good days and bad, of healthy coping mechanisms and grounding techniques and the collection of half-broken dishes she had in a box for days he just wanted to break shit instead. But he knew these things because Jazz had been there for him to say them to him. Jazz and Dan and even Elle who he knew was fighting against her very Obsession to stay there with him to make sure he’d be okay one day.

Reaching out to them through his Bonds, his Core jangled like sea glass in his chest biting and sharp as ever. But the sting had become something he could live with, lessened a little by the warmth of feeling his Grave reach out to him in turn. Everything was wrong, and for such a long time he hadn’t been anywhere at all, had lost days-weeks-months to the numbing nothing of Unbeing. But as he sat on their smelly couch eating Jazz’s terrible food, losing his coffee to a half-asleep Dan as Elle snapped the wet towel she’d used to dry her hair at him, he felt…

He felt.

And that was as good of a start as any.

So this is actually the earliest in the timeline of the snippets I’ve written/posted so far (and honestly I don’t think there will be anything from before this, this is basically The Start, just from the point of view of someone not fully there for it all). It also takes place over the first year and change that the Pham are in Gotham. Danny is in a bad place for that first year so he missed most of it. He doesn’t even know about Dan stealing medical supplies from the big fancy hospital and getting on the radar of one Officer Grayson and that shit started basically their first week in town lol

Jazz does magic, becuase why not? She doesn’t have the cool ghost powers the rest of her family has (she has some from being a Liminal, but nothing like what Danny & co have), she needed something to even the playing feild when fighting ghosts so, magic. She’s also a bartender at a bar in Crime Alley called the Dead Man’s Hand and is already falling for everyone’s favorite friendly incredibly violent neighborhood vigilante.

More of my headcanon bullshit with a group/family of ghosts being called a Grave:

Originally I thought “oh the head of the Grave should be like the Grave Mother/Father/Whatever” and then I wanted to slap myself because Gravestone is right fucking there like, my god. How did I miss that before? The had of a Grave should be the Grave Stone. That just makes sense, seriously how did I miss that? lol

I have a lot of feelings about redeemed Dan, and they can pretty much boil down to: If he gets the help he needs and is in a better place mentally, he’d probably throw himself into doing everything he could to help people while never using his powers to hurt people again. My man is a total pacifist in this (at least as long as no one fucks with his family, promises might get broken then). He was studying under Frostbite to be a healer/doctor when shit went down and is doing the best he can to keep on that medical track with thier new limited resources.

Elle actually starts out working as an interpreter/translator for Lex Luthor. The pay is terrible, she’s constantly trying not to murder her boss (valid) and she has to commute all the way to Metropolis every day. Why does she do it then? How does she end up working for the Justice League instead? Those are for future snippets/scenes to cover haha

tl;dr on the context notes: I have a lot more scenes I’m gonna write and I have a lot of feelings about this AU.

Gonna start posting this on AO3 soon after I clean up what I have written and figure out what order I wanna post things. This is gonna end up being entirely vibes with scenes/chapters being largely out of order and generally none of the connective tissue stuff stories usually have, basically how it’s been so far lol

Side note, I’ve written almost 30k words for this AU. Most of it a mess, but still. This thing has me in a chokehold and is not letting me go lol

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