#Danny treats the Justice league like vaguely popular celebrities.

[kizzer55555]

Phantom was a strange kid. There was no way around it. Roy (not Roy, the real Roy is missing) knew it the minute he crashed through a brick wall and landed onto his coffee table, breaking it with his head and oozing some sort of green glowing stuff from most of his body. Yet the only thing the kid did was look mournfully at the table and apologize for the mess before jumping out the window and continuing his ‘tussle’ with killer croc.

So after those red flags red arrow had to physically drag Phantom away from the fight and get him some form of medical attention. But when he asked where the boy was injured the kid just looked at him blankly and claimed killer Croc never landed a hit on him. When Roy- the clone tried to motion towards where his side was still bleeding that toxic green substance that was now covering his moldy couch, the kid just answered that those were injuries he got before the battle. As if that answered anything. Roy tried to patch the kid up as best he could despite the boy’s insistence that he could just sleep on it and he’d be fine.

Ro- the clone was not having it. And it really shouldn’t be harder to bandage a teenage…meta? Alien? Than it was to bandage superboy, Wally on sugar, and Wolf at the same time. And yet, he was once again proven that no matter what, the world hates him. Good to know.

Because he could have sworn that the bandages were just going through the kid’s torso. Add onto the ice powers, heat vision, shields, flight, super strength, clones, invisibility, and whatever the world that thing where he split his torso and head in half was, this kid had way too many powers. And Roy would like to believe, for his own sanity, that the kid does not also have intangibility and just chose to get punched into multiple buildings.

After some struggling, he finally gets the kid semi bandaged. Does he look like a mummy? Especially with his pale skin, whispy white hair, and thin, almost skeletal, frame? Why yes, yes he does. But he’s a bandaged mummy so it’s good enough for now.

But the clone should probbaly find out where this kid came from.

If would be helpful if the boy gave him any information other than the name Phantom.

Meanwhile, Danny is confused at this adult…teenager? Adultish teenager with a beard? His head hurts, he’ll think about it later. Yeah, he doesn’t know what to make of him. He didn’t shoot. So was that a declaration that Danny was welcomed? Or was it a warning that Danny should stay away? He was getting mixed signals. Sure, all those times he was hit by his rogues usually ended with friendship so was no attack a declaration of war? Or was the arrow guy just really friendly?

Danny was right and his injuries healed up by morning. So he left after a metal thank you to his savior. But he had to get back to Amity. Vlad had done some damage with his lastest attack but thanks to a good nights rest it seemed he was back to 100 percent. All Roy woke up to was some empty bandages left on his couch. Completely untouched (Danny wasn’t just going to leave perfectly good bandages covered in his ecto blood. Besides, he was used to phasing gunk and stuff off bandages to reuse them). And no other sign that someone had been in the apartment. Even the hole in his wall was patched up. Roy was pretty sure he somehow got drunk last night and hallucinated the whole thing. That would have probably been the end.

Only…they kept running into each other. Over and over, it was the same thing. Whenever Danny got injured (mostly from Vlad) he would start fleeing the area. And he was drawn to the city Roy/not Roy made his base. And over and over, without fail, Roy would patch him up.

The clone was starting to think he was hallucinating. That the lack of sleep and accumulation of stress had him seeing a boy who wasn’t actually there. With his young age and undead appearance, the clone wondered if maybe he was starting to hallucinate the ghost of Roy Harper himself. Like taunt at how he couldn’t find his original no matter how hard he searched. Sure they looked nothing alike but when was the last time the clone even looked in a mirror?

Well, as far as hallucinations were, this one wasn’t all bad. It gave him someone to talk to and almost acted like a conscious, telling him to clean up after himself or get more groceries. Sometimes even nagging him until the clone did so. It became more obvious that this was a hallucination when the Phantom started talking about his home life. About everyone trying to kill him, his parents and their threat of vivisection, a secret government agency the clone had never heard of after him, and oh yeah, that the kid was a ghost. Not a meta or alien with ghost like powers. A legitimate, foot in the grave, ghost.

So he was hallucinating a dead kid with trauma. Perfect.

Why his mind decided on that, the clone would rather not figure out. It was nice hearing stories of another clone out there though. One who was accepted by their original. The clone knew that wasn’t how things worked in the real world. Superboy was a perfect example. It was a nice story his mind made up though. So he listened to the boy and let him trauma dump, probbaly a side effect of the clone’s mind to make him feel better. If someone with a worse life than him showed up it would make him feel better about his own circumstances right? Besides, there was no way some with this tragic of a past existed. Especially not one who would smile so brightly.

So Roy let him keep his delusion to himself. He never spoke about it with the other heroes he sometimes ran into. He never talked to the ghost boy unless they were alone. (Because sometimes the kid would walk alongside him in the streets wearing a hoodie to hide his gravity defying white hair, chatting the clone’s ear off about anything and nothing). And the clone even gave into his pestering about a healthy diet, grocery shopping, sleep, and showering. It was a win for all! The clone noticed Phantom showing up more and more, often with no injuries for the clone to tend to (with all medical supplies ending up clean and refilled the next morning as if never touched) and the clone just got used to it.

That is, until one day when he was cornered by green arrow who tore into him about his unhealthy habits (hey! He’s been doing better, give him a break!) surrounded by the other teens and Phantom just popped in to add his two cents to the argument. The clone easily ignored his hallucination and would have continued doing so until Wally looked at the glowing floating teenager and asked those 6 damning words that changed everything the clone though he knew about that last 6 months.

“So…anyone gonna explain the kid?”

“Wait…you can see him?!”

“… so basically just about everyone in my life has tried to kill me at least once, it’s kinda become my go-to way of making friends, just striking up a conversation with anyone who shoots me. It’s worked with just about all of the rogues in my hometown, including my clone-turned-sister who I had brunch with just last week. Even my parents used to shoot at me, but that was only for like a year or so and in their defense they didn’t actually know it was me, haha. It’s kinda funny, the only person who ever managed to actually kill me was a friend of mine who didn’t technically kill me the first time, and then only did it a second time to fix some rewritten timeline stuff, and I still dated her for a while after that. Oh, speaking of dating, my first girlfriend tried to kill me WHILE we were dating, but again, in her defense, she didn’t know it was me haha. But yeah, that’s kinda why I kept talking to that guy while he was pummeling me, just a bit of a pattern I’ve wound up developing. Anyway, what was the question again?”

“… How did you get in my safe house, and do you need medical attention.”

“Oh! I crashed through the window, and probably. Also, I’m gonna pass out.”

And then Danny passed out.