Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Gravedigger
Gotham’s cries of anguish were enough to wake Danny from a what had been a peaceful nap. His head shot up as his ears painfully rang from the ghost’s wail. The physics assignment he had been working on was stuck to his drool covered cheek. His six-foot frame creaked and popped as he got up from being bent over the quartz island in the kitchen. Bright green eyes illuminated the dimly lit apartment around him. The stove across the counter he was sitting at read eleven thirty at night. He vaguely remembered it had read eight fifteen when he’d been working on that last theory problem.
With a sigh Danny pulled the paper off his cheek and slapped his face a couple times to wake himself up. A hiccup of blue mist whisps out from between his lips as another unholy screech echoes through the city’s ambient ectoplasm, making Danny’s core vibrate painfully.
A pale scarred hand jumped up to hopelessly cover his ears. His ghost sense was going crazy as the spirit of the city mourned. This was the loudest the spirit of Gotham had been since the death of Robin. Danny wasn’t sure how much longer he could ignore it.
As the Ghost King he knew that the Spirit of Gotham couldn’t carry on like this for too much longer without it completely destroying the already contaminated ectoplasmic ecosystem around it. The veil was already thin enough in this city. He didn’t need it to become overrun with vengeful specters.
He took a look at the quiet room around him for a moment. The small two-bedroom apartment was the heart of Gotham City. It was something that both Sam and Danny were extremely proud of managing on their own. Danny’s Gotham University sweatshirt was thrown over the red velvet couch Sam had fallen in love with when she thrifted it back in Amity. There were model rockets lining bookshelves and a bench with tools for Danny to experiment on when he had engineering projects due.
The kitchen island was full of physics and engineering textbooks and half-finished designs. His current physics professor had an innate fear of computers and wanted them all to suffer by writing everything out by hand. He also had a Wayne engineering scholarship schematic started to his left, but his current assignment got napped on first.
Really, it’s a miracle that the schematic didn’t have copious drool stains on it yet.
Danny knew he should let the bats handle things in Gotham, but he had a job to do when ghosts started making a ruckus. He was a consultant for Justice League Dark after all.
Sam was going to kill him for running off and doing Ghost King duties without her, but desperate times called for desperate measures. It wouldn’t do well for the entire city to collapse while he waited for her to come back from her internship next week.
Of all times for her to wonder off to Metropolis, it had to be right after Robin was murdered. Tucker was up north at MIT for the next three months, so he was unavailable to assist with ghostly matters. Dani was off in Japan for sightseeing and Jazz was off in Stanford getting a doctorate.
He sent a quick text to the group chat, to be responsible. He wasn’t going to run into this without letting anyone know where he was going. This made him feel like he was growing as a person:
…city is screaming…gonna check it out…let u know how it goes
Jazzy: ????? How is the city screaming? Danny?!
Tucker: Dude…keep coms open
Sam: Report back ASAP
Danny put his phone into his pocket, rummaged through his backpack for a Fenton Thermos and grabbed his Gotham U sweatshirt. He pushed his constant bedhead through it and invisibly flew out of the window. The Gotham smog was still something that caused his undead lungs to seize up every now and again, but he was slowly getting used to it after three years of attending school here.
He’d taken Sam flying a few times around the city when he knew Batman wasn’t watching. Flying invisibly did have that perk. Sam loved the gothic architecture and Danny just enjoyed petting the gargoyles.
His favorite gargoyle was Dave since he was haunted and loved to gossip about the local heroes.
Both of them were studying at Gotham U. Danny had decided to focus on engineering and Sam had fallen in love with Gotham’s social justice program. Which was always ironic because they had the most corrupt justice system in the country.
“Now, where are you, Lady Gotham,” he muttered to himself as he followed the pulsing screams towards a graveyard in the fancy area of Gotham.
Now, don’t get Danny wrong. He lived in a decent part of the city. Or really as decent as Gotham’s inner city could get. Sam’s parents wouldn’t allow her to live anywhere that wasn’t “safe”, (Danny may have built a private ectoplasm based security system to further deter intruders) but this area made their fairly expensive apartment feel cheap and very lack luster. There were literal mansions lining the roads.
What was the ghost of the city doing in a place like this? Lady Gotham liked to hang around the Narrows and other crime infested areas. She fed off of their victories against villains, their fear and their loss. Lady Gotham was as much a blessing to this city as she was a curse. She loved her heroes, hated her villains, and only assisted when she felt it was for her benefit.
At least, that had been Danny’s impression of her. He hadn’t had much contact since starting school. He was trying to get the most out of him human life before he had to take over his Kingly duties. Clockwork had warned him that those would start to trickle in sooner rather than later…
But still, what was the spirit of this city doing screaming over a freshly dug grave. Danny allowed himself a moment to change form as he descended to meet her. She deserved him in his full regalia. She was an ancient spirit and he was her king.
His hoody was traded for dark plate armor with constellations twinkling along the pauldrons and a cape made of pure darkness floated behind him, every now and again it would give a small twinkle as a star would be either born or die. His skin turned a pale blue, his ears pointed slightly, fangs protruded from his lips and his hair became a pure white. A crown of starlight appeared over his head wreathed in blue flames and what was once the ring of rage, was now a skull made of blue ice, his own personal portal to the ghost zone.
The spirit of the city was laying prostrate against the grave dirt. Her black dress was a like a pool black silky oil, tinged a light acidic green at the edges. Her claw like nails were gripping the loose earth like a lifeline. She hadn’t noticed her King’s arrival.
He looked at the headstone. It was of Jason P. Todd-Wayne. If Danny’s math was right the kid had only been fifteen when he died. His scarred hand twitched, remembering his own death at fourteen. Far too young to die.
“Lady Gotham, what has you mourning over this grave?” He asked, trying to sound Kingly. His voice was deeper than it had been at fourteen when he got his powers and title, but he still didn’t sound all that commanding.
It must have been enough since Gotham’s blood red eyes swiveled to him. “My King! You heard my cries! My Robin is dead. Killed by the clown and buried here.”
Danny’s green eyes widened as he connected the dots between the dead Boy Wonder and the very recently deceased Jason Todd-Wayne. Did that mean that Bruce Wayne was Batman? Weren’t there rumors he was dating Batman?
“I am truly sorry for your loss, my Lady, but death waits for no one,” Danny replied, as she hissed back at him. Danny floated backwards slightly at the hostility.
“My Batman deserves his child back! With your ambient ectoplasm floating around my city, I was able keep my Robin’s body in stasis and heal his injuries.”
She’d be reviving a zombie full of ectoplasm. Danny reached a handout towards the desperate spirit. Her obsession with her heroes was getting in the way of rules of the dead. “You can’t just revive a body, Lady Gotham. You know as well as I do that human souls are ferried to the Infinite Realms,” he attempted to reason with her, but she just clutched at her chest.
“Do you not see? I have my Robin’s heart. I kept it safe,” she replied and Danny felt a pulse in his core. It lurched like a bad bout of vertigo as she pulled out a bright white whisp.
A pure human soul, trapped in the living world.
Her eyes were welling up with green tears of ectoplasm. Danny’s hackles rose and his crown flared. There were rules to death. Clockwork had instilled those into him as basic Ghost King things he needed to know. Sam and Tucker had later made a PowerPoint out of them for Danny to study.
Hoarding a human soul from crossing over, was a crime that Danny felt he may need to enforce here. “Where did you get that, Lady Gotham? You know you can’t just take a soul from the land of the dead!”
She curled her body around the fluttering soul. Her razor-sharp teeth flashed as she gently caressed the spirit of the boy buried below. Danny noticed that the dirt was lined with ectoplasmic scars. “His soul never made it to the other side. It cried out as time ticked onward. I heard its call and took it before it was too late. You would know all about that, my halfa King.”
His eyes narrowed at the word time. Clockwork had pushed him to go to Gotham University, to live a normal life before taking over the Infinite Realms. Now, here was a ghost that might be trying to create a fifteen-year-old halfa hero to save Batman? What timeline nonsense was Clockwork trying to pull here?
There were going to be words with Clockwork when Danny got his hands around his obnoxious blue neck.
“Look, let’s put the soul down and talk this out. The kid deserves to rest. I know better than anyone what it’s like to die and then undie as a teenager,” he tried to reason with her, but she just grinned.
“Put the soul down?” She asked innocently and Danny realized his mistake a moment too late. Lady Gotham dove down into the ground with soul.
“I should have expected that…” he muttered as he jumped through the earth after her. The coffin was only six feet below the ground, but the spirit had already dropped the soul back into the kid’s body. She stroked his head, stray ectoplasm was being pushed into his body as the soul merged back with its body.
Danny could sense all the ectoplasm Lady Gotham had pumped into his body latching onto his soul. Before he could do anything Gotham vanished into mist and Danny watched in horror as the boy started to come to in his own coffin.
Danny did the only sensible thing he could think of and grabbed the kid by the armpits and intangibly pulled them both up and into the brisk cemetery air. The kid started to thrash around, the ambient, and frankly, contaminated ectoplasm of the Gotham city started to fight the boy’s developing core. Danny held the kid close as focused on his ring and punched a hole between their dimensions, it cracked like glass before shattering, leaving a personal sized hole in front of them. Without looking back, he launched both of them into the Infinite Realms.
The portal shut after them leaving them both floating in a quiet green abyss.