#Miscmonstro writings

[miscmonstro]

I’ve been seeing a decent amount of “Amity gets scooped and plopped into dc dimension” style prompts so consider: Shadow Zone Amity.

Amity doesn’t appear out of no where in Illinois, in the dc world. It’s not near Gotham/Star City/Metropolis. Instead it’s inside of Gotham (bc batman crossovers remain my interest but any city could work). 

So. Idk how many people are familiar with Transformers Prime but the shadow dimension is a mirror of the real world but in muted colors and people in the shadow dimension can see and hear people from the original dimension, however, people in the regular dimension cannot see/hear/feel/etc. anything from the shadow dimension.

I like that idea but instead of it being the shadow dimension being a mirror it’s a copy of DP’s world and instead of a one way type of perception the dp and dc dimensions remain separate… kinda.

Amity absorbs parts of Gotham and makes a shadowy copy of various places. The citizens of Amity are like, “Well. There’s a new park/office building/street/etc. I guess.” 

Gotham, meanwhile, remains the same. Physically.

Sometimes people will appear in Gotham, walking, sitting in the park, etc. But they never acknowledge anyone and can disappear between one blink and the next. If there happen to be two and they speak to each other, it sounds like static. No one can’t touch them- Gothamites go through them. These ‘shades’ are Amity people in the Gotham areas that have a shadowy duplicate in Amity. None of the Amity people are aware this is happening. 

I imagine the Gotham side of things dubs the Amity people shades ghosts XD

Anyway, on the Amity side a major ghost fight has to happen in one of the Gotham sections and so the Amity people run. Some are screaming, all are frantically trying to get away. One problem though- Ghost Zone ghosts don’t render on the Gotham side. So the Gothamites don’t see Phantom nor whoever he was fighting.

So now the Bats are desperately trying to figure out what could have spooked all the ‘ghosts’ (Amity shades) so badly because, I mean, it’s Gotham. It’s going to pop up again and bite them, right? 

I figure Gothamites can get into Amity too. If one of them passes a threshold from an area of overlap where Gotham exists in the shadow zone then they can step into Amity, however no one from Amity can see them and no one can hear them. If they get back to a place of overlap they’ll end up back in Gotham.

Maybe overtime the merging gets better/worse and things start interacting more. Roads appear and disappear on either side. Buildings clipping in and out of reality, the Amity shades being able to interact with Gotham by like tripping on things that exist in Gotham but not Amity, the Amity people seeing items move that Gothamites are moving around in their dimension, etc. I don’t know. But listen.

The court of owls needs to have one of their 13th floor shindigs and just. Amity shades everywhere. They take over all the 13th floors, making the owl associates terrified because why are all these ‘ghosts’ suddenly haunting notoriously cursed floors?? They begin to believe their own stories. Bonus if the Amity people take the coffee and that’s the only thing they can interact with from the Gotham side 13th floors so now the owl court is supplying the ‘ghosts’ coffee so they can still use the 13th floors as their meeting places in ‘exchange’. The coffee offerings are appeasement. Meanwhile Amity side people are convinced there’s a coffee ghost somewhere because these brands don’t actually exist and where else is it coming from?

The Nasty Burger and Bat Burger could overlap. Someone walks into Nasty Burger and orders Nightwings. Someone at Bat Burger walks up and asks for Nasty Sauce.

Vlads lab and the batcave could merge sometimes. Imagine one of the bats running an analysis and suddenly theres a different computer with cloning info or detailing how to cut off a ghost’s circulation to control them more effectively? Or Danny sneaks into Vlad’s lab and theres a stack of adoption papers and foster stuff for various situations (that belong to Bruce, unbeknownst to him) and is utterly horrified at the level of detailed scenarios that Vlad’s got adoption contingencies for.

[miscmonstro]

To be fair, Tim hadn’t meant to get so distracted.

It just happened on occasion. Something would grab his attention with both hands and wouldn’t let go, and he had never been one to deny his curiosity.

It started with Justice League Dark. Batman didn’t do well with magic and most of the bats and birds disliked it on principle- it made everything more complicated. They decided that it was best left alone.

Tim decided it was best put under a microscope. 

He began his search online, looking through forums and videos and online books for anything and everything about magic and demons and gods and found nothing that translated to his (admittedly scant) experiences with the items in question. There was too much dissent to discern what was real and what wasn’t, especially once religion and history got involved. If Hades was real, who was to say which stories were true? Which historical accounts could give him insight and which one would lead his quest for knowledge astray? 

He did, however, find one surprising consistency. 

Death. 

It was ghost stories to be more specific. Ghosts all around the world seemed to have similar abilities in any folklore; disappearing, possession, floating, telekinesis. The behaviors of so called ghosts tended to be the same as well. Despite death being ‘the great unknown’ it was surprisingly easy to find patterns once he knew what to look for. 

And so he dove deeper into ghosts. There was a decent amount of information about ghosts, all from similar sources. Culture preservation efforts and historical documents detailing funeral practices and tourist guides. And amongst the sea of the typical, there was something very atypical.

My Heart Beats for You, the title read. A PhantomxReader fanfic.

It was a behemoth with a word count clocking in around 153,432 at 58 chapters long and it was still ongoing. The view-count, 459,674, was up there too. Out of morbid curiosity he saved the web address on his phone to read later and returned to scouring the internet for information about ghosts as the first step to understanding demons and other such magic related things. 

That later happened sooner than he hoped when Tim was unceremoniously kicked off the Batcomputer by Barbra, who wanted to cross check information for a case and then update the firewalls.

He had an half an hour before he needed to suit up for patrol and Alfred had said he needed a break anyway. With that in mind, and feeling strange about it, Tim pulled up the story again. He hadn’t read anything like this since he was 13.

My Heart Beats for You by CheeringforPhantom

A PhantomxReader fanfic. After nearly dying under a collapsed building in a ghost attack, Y/N is saved from being crushed by none other than the city’s local hero, the elusive ghost boy Phantom. This sparks an acquaintanceship that slowly begins to turn into something more, but with the differences between humans and ghosts, how far can they go?

This is a SLOWBURN. Good things take time and if you don’t like it then leave!

“One of those authors,” he thought wryly. Still, it had to be decent if the audience count was so high. With a tap an a two stroke scroll with his index finger, he began on chapter 1.

Dust filled the air. Y/N coughed, the crushed particles of concrete uncomfortably coating the inside of their mouth. The building shook again and Y/N stumbled, cursing that they forgot their ghost-spray today of all days…

🤍🖤🤍💚🤍🖤🤍

He forgot about the fanfic after that. Life was busy and in the end, he’d not gotten very far on his self imposed task to understand the supernatural before other things grabbed at his attention. There was paperwork and meetings to field for the company, there were gadgets to tweak and analyses to do for his cases. It wasn’t until nearly seven months later, after a particularly bad fight in a snowstorm that left him battered, that the opportunity and motivation to read it cropped up again. He’d been benched after the mission, and would be for the foreseeable future as his arm and legs healed. Bruce and Alfred even teamed up to squirrel away his paperwork so he could ‘rest’ and thus, he’d been left with nothing to work on.

He scrolled through his bookmarks, bored out of his mind, when he saw the shortcut and thought, “Why not?”

Not remembering much, he reread chapter one.

… whispy tendrils of ghostly pale hair dancing around his face. His eyes were intense and bright ectoplasm green. They cast eerie, but comforting, light in the darkness.  

“Are you alright?” he asked. His voice echoed with an otherworldly quality.

Y/N swallowed dryly, heart beating frantically. “I-I am,” they replied, trying to keep the tremor out of their voice.

The unstable building groaned above them and his arms tightened around Y/N protectively. 

And then he started on chapter two.

“Ghosts never photograph well,” Phantom said bemusedly.

“I know,” Y/N sighed. “Even if it doesn’t come out good, that’s fine. I just want to have the memory of doing it, you know? It’s not everyday the hero of Amity saves your life.”

“Just every other day,” Phantom grinned. 

Y/N huffed out a laugh.

“True. Thank you Phantom. Really, this city wouldn’t be standing without everything you do.”

By chapter eight Tim was curious enough to search up what series Phantom was from. The story mentioned a lot of subtle world building, alluding to past events like a cursing ban that people obeyed for some reason. There were also a few off handed scenes and phrases that didn’t make sense like that part in chapter three where a woman scolded two kids for making a game of jumping over people’s shadows on the sidewalk because it was dangerous if they landed on the shadow, or that snippet from chapter six where the mailman accidentally delivered an empty box and the reader insert waved it off, saying the box would surely be needed later as a decoy. They were obviously references, but to what? 

His foray onto the web did not help. Nothing he looked up brought back any results, which shouldn’t have been the case. Over 450,000 people had read this. That was a mere 50,000 away from half a million- there was no way there wasn’t a fandom somewhere online. 

He gave up after an hour. Searching ‘Phantom’ merely brought up a dictionary definition and miscellaneous websites related to ghosts and anything else he could think of only yielded similar results. Scowling, he flipped back to the story. He wasn’t going to frustrate himself over a fanfiction. He did not sulk as he resorted to scrolling through the comments of the first few chapters to see if anyone was as confused as he was. 

Ectoplasmenigma

Ok but fr Phantom’s voice is 💚💚💚

> 131 replies (show)

Ineedcoffeeandsanity

Technus foreshadowing??? 

> 3 replies (show)

TheClownsInWhite 

The Fenton Watch LMAO! My favorite news segment XD

Love the fic :)

| 4 replies (hide)

> Pishposhyournastysauce reply to TheClownsInWhite

it keeps us alive haha

> Therapyisanevilghost reply to Pishposhyournastysauce

100% agree!

> SusonPlasmius23 reply to Pishposhyournastysauce

My cousin lived on the same block, they needed a new mailbox at least once a month.

> TheActualRealDannyPhantom reply to SusonPlasmius23

Sounds like them 😓

Greenskieshauntmynightmares

Omg those kids reminded me of a few years ago my sister and I were walking to school and she stepped on someones shadow and it was a ghost. We didnt make it to school that day lol those were the days

> 12 replies (show)

CasperHighisHaunted

I hate when box ghost steals my packages, so relatable 

> 1245 replies (show)

Apparently not, though the amount of role-players in the comments was kinda weird. Then again, he didn’t regularly read fanfiction so what did he know. Shrugging, Tim figured he’d just have to pick up more background details in future chapters and moved on.

Chapter 26

The Axion ghosts snarled and barked, only barely resembling the dogs they once were. Y/N looked around quickly, trying to find a way to distract them so Phantom would have enough time to deal with the Wisconsin Ghost…

… “- had it handled! You need to stay out of the way,” Phantom said sternly.

“I couldn’t leave you to be cornered like that,” Y/N declared defiantly. 

Phantom’s eyes flashed. “It would’ve been fine. If I get hit it’ll heal quick. The same can’t be said for you.”

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt you!”

Over the next few chapters the insert and Phantom grew closer and eventually, the insert began to struggle with the feelings that were growing for their friend. There was a lot of repetitive emotional waffling, unfortunately, but at this point Tim was too far in to back out. He’d committed to reading it.

Phantom smirked from where he was drifting lazily back and forth, tail swaying absently. “Miss me?”

“You…” Y/N gasped. They could feel tears building up in their eyes and they stubbornly refused to cry at the relief they felt. “You’re alright.”

“Did you really think the Goons In White could keep me down?” he scoffed, looping around himself.

“Phantom… it’s been days. I was worried.”

“I- oh.“ A conflicted frown creased his face. “I’m sorry,” he said carefully. “I forget how humans are with time…”

Soon he was halfway through the fic. Somehow. He did another, half assed search and predictably found nothing.

Chapter 34

… and comforting. Y/N leaned into the touch, startling Phantom.

“It’s fine. I know I’m cold,” he said, eyes skittering to the side.

Y/N hugged him tighter, ignoring the goosebumps that had broken out on their arms and relishing the feeling of that moment. They squeezed him slightly.

“Don’t apologize for how you are,” Y/N murmured into his shoulder.

Phantom didn’t need to breathe but he did it anyway, inhaling deeply and then pressing his face into the crook of Y/N’s neck. “Thank you.”

Tim read through chapter 46, then 52, and before he knew it he’d finished all the way up to chapter 64, the most recent chapter. Even worse, he wanted to know what happened next. Who was the Red Huntress? Had the Axion ghosts been taken by the GIW or had the Fentons run them out of town? Would Y/N make up with their friend with the unfortunate nickname Rats? It might’ve been a slowburn romance but the plot was good too.

And, well, the romance wasn’t that bad either.

Damn it, he was invested now.

And without the fic to occupy him he went back to searching for what it was based on. Obviously he’d been using the wrong keywords and now that he’d read significantly more he had other words and phrases to try.

The Red Huntress was only mentioned twice on a list of under appreciated superheroes so Tim assumed that the name was a coincidence and then tried Axion. After finding a lot about particles he oddly found a match in government files. Axion Labs, annual tax report, business licenses, copyrighted name. He assumed it was a coincidence too, at first, before he found a section while idly exploring their website about their specially trained Axion Dogs.

The Axion ghosts snarled and barked, only barely resembling the dogs they once were…

What a weird thing to include in a fanfiction. Things only got weirder when he began investigating the company. Vladimir Masters, the owner of the company, had a degree in ectobiology. The study of ghosts.

… but with the differences between humans and ghosts…

Why would a billionaire who had studied ghosts own a lab with special attack dogs? Dogs that had apparently become ghosts themselves if the fanfic and comments were to be believed. Tim was onto something, he could feel it niggling at his mind.

Suspicious, he went back to the Red Huntress. On both lists she was on the author, as they were the same person, had uploaded them from an address in Illinois, from a city named Amity Park.

It’s not everyday the hero of Amity saves your life.

There was no way.

But Amity Park was a very real place in Illinois with a population just shy of a million people. Axion Labs was based there.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was a buzzfeed style article from a neighboring city that stated, “50 Weird Things You Must Do In Amity” and was more of a culture-and-superstitions-you-should-heed list rather than a list of places a tourist or neighboring visitor would like to explore.

12. Never step on someone’s shadow!

In Amity it is considered extremely rude to step on someone’s shadow, especially outside near roads. 

Omg those kids reminded me of a few years ago my sister and I were walking to school and she stepped on someones shadow and it was a ghost.

47. Keep up to date with the Fenton Watch!

The Fenton Watch LMAO! My favorite news segment XD

This had blown way past coincidence. It turned out he had some digging to do because Tim’s gut was telling him that he had found something big. This wasn’t some obscure conspiracy, this was a million people living a Twilight Zone episode.

If all that was real, what about the GIW? All the ghost attacks people kept talking about? A chill crept down Tim’s spine. What did that mean for Phantom? 

… this city wouldn’t be standing without everything you do.

Surely it had to be exaggerated for the purposes of fiction. 

Right?

DC/DP Crossover Idea #45

Where Amity Parks insanity gets exposed to the Justice League not through rumors, teenagers being teens in social media, or even ghost shenanigans getting leaked out. No the Justice League discovered Amity Park because of a 100k slowburn strangers to lovers fanfiction written by a Paulina Sanchez with the pairing being Phantom/Reader, this being read by Red Robin who got curious on who this character ‘Phantom’ was and began doing research which eventually led him down a rabbit hole and discovering the fuckery of Amity Park.

Let it be known that RR didn’t actually tell anyone how he discovered Phantom or Amity Park, if he did then he would never had been able to live it down by his siblings or literally anyone who knew him.

[miscmonstro]

working on a concept for a dpxdc fanfic.

Tim, 17, is at the tail end of junior year at Gotham Academy. During gym he typically ducks into the toilet stalls or showers to change. He’s a vigilante and he can’t exactly explain his bruises/cuts/scars without causing concern, thus he just avoids anyone finding out at all. Unbeknownst to him, one of his classmates was in the same situation.

Wesley Weston was always late to the class after PE, he was always the last out of the locker room. He always showered after class and was very meticulous about putting away and taking out his uniform. He’d even refold his gym clothes a few times and comb his hair until nothing was out of place. Some thought he had OCD, others thought he was vain, and others still thought he was fruitlessly trying to be accepted; Wes was a known loner. There was plenty of speculation when the gossip mill was slow but in reality, Wes always stalled so he could change as quickly as humanly possible, but only after the room was empty.

By pure chance Tim forgets to switch out his gym shoes for his uniform shoes after PE one day and when he gets back to the locker room, it’s locked. Makes sense, the coaches always lock the locker rooms when there isn’t a class using them. Not having time to track down the coach and not wanting to be late to class, Tim picks the lock and out of habit, slips in quietly. He rounds the corner and sees Wes changing. More than that, he sees that Wes is covered in scars and scrapes. And in plain view is the still raw and distinctive injury Damian gave a mysterious, non-bat/bird affiliated vigilante recently.

That is how Tim accidentally discovers that Wesley Weston is Spyris. Spyris who appears and disappears without rhyme nor reason, who sometimes will hunt down Batman’s rogues and who sometimes will walk right past them. No one knows what Spyris does or why, just that he’s there and he’s competent enough to evade the batclan for the several months they’ve known about him.

Maybe he notices then or maybe Tim confronts him about it later but in any case, Wes automatically threatens to out him as Red Robin if he says anything and Tim is shook. When did Wes find out, how long has he known, how did he figure it out. Was anyone else compromised? And what did Wes want? What was Spyris’ goal?

Overall I want Valerie, Sam, Tucker, Danny, and Wes to be vigilantes in Gotham for whatever reason (ghost stuff?) working as a unit, but Spyris is the only one the bats/birds are aware of.

Tim and Wes passive aggressively stalk each other back and forth.

[miscmonstro]

The Infinite Realms are Infinite

We know DC loves their timelines and the heroes there canonically deal with different timelines/dimensions with other versions of themselves. In theory, the Ghost Zone is connected to each of these different universes. 

I remember reading a crossover fanfic a while back where Batman had asked Danny, as Phantom, to keep an eye out for a ghost of Jason. I just got to thinking-

What if Danny finds the wrong Jason?

[miscmonstro]

I saw a prompt abt Evil Maddie and her tangling with the man of bats but consider: instead of Danny being involved in any capacity at the beginning Maddie looks into the Gotham bats & birds for other reasons. She investigates and correctly connects Batman to the Waynes but erroneously concludes that hes the ghost of Thomas Wayne. She and Jack work on setting up traps all around Gotham. Danny then finds out later about her misconception and tries to protect Batman because he protects both humans and ghosts, personal feelings aside. Maybe he feels especially responsible bc Maddie is his mother. Batman runs into Danny and Maddie several times, one trying to convince him to lay low and one trying to capture him. He evades them and when it escalates maybe Jack gets more involved with team ghost hunter on the frontline instead of focusing on traps and Val is recruited by Danny to help save Batman from his parents (she reluctantly agrees but only because she is convinced that he isn't a ghost). Batman is confused by all these people chasing him and calling him a ghost and increasingly alarmed when he can't find anything on any of these people.

[miscmonstro]

Instruments that should become predominant in Amity as they embrace the hauntedness because they sound awesome and would up the creepy factor to outsiders:

Organs

Waterphone

Copies of The Apprehension Engine

Cristal Baschet

Glass Armonica

All kinds of Flutes

Euphone

Something similar to “The Wing”

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga

First: You are here

Next: Chapter 2

Fandoms: Danny Phantom, Batman (DC)

Specifically, Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust and help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

👻 {Chapter 1 Below!)

Danny groaned within the confines of his mind, exasperation and irritation and just a bit of fear welling up in his chest. 

His disgruntlement did not go unacknowledged. Danny wasn’t alone, even in his mind, and he hadn’t been for quite some time. Somewhere in Amity Park Tucker sent a wave of comfort in return, and he too was uneasy of the trip Danny’s eccentric parents had forced him to accompany them on. 

Sam, on a plane to Gotham, had her own problems and replied with a simple vague sentiment akin to ‘what can you do’ with less words. Her weariness seeped into it, making it feel quite resigned. It was as though she was awaiting some awful fate she’d long accepted and… no, that's exactly what it was. 

Tucker broke the relative silence across the link with an unrepentant, “At least one of us is going to survive to Christmas.”

Danny responded with the impression of bashing his own head onto a wall and Sam began to seethe. Despite her best efforts, her mind circled back to the annual gala her parents demanded she attend alongside them. It was hosted by a different snob every year, and while the scenery might have been different, the atmosphere was always the same. Without fail it would be simmering with thinly concealed flaunting and heavy with thick lies pasted atop one another.

Sam wished she could tell her parents no. She wished she didn’t have to do this. She would never voice those complaints and misgivings about the Christmas gala ever again, and not just because of Desiree. 

Every year Sam wanted to scream and every year she smiled and let her parents pick her outfits and acted like the perfect daughter. She couldn’t afford to be anything less at the Christmas galas and it made her want to hurl at the plastic cutout she endured becoming for those horrid days. Hurl, or commit a murder.

“I’m doomed. You’ll have to break me out of jail,” Sam muttered in her mind as the second option grew in appeal. “I swear these rich assholes get dumber every year.”

“And my parents get more insane,” Danny added gloomily. 

There was a hint of something from Tucker that Sam could tell wasn’t thought out and she mentally kicked him before he could put his metaphorical foot in his unphysical mouth. Tucker swatted her in retaliation but understood, switching tracks.

“Uh… yeah. That sucks. But we’re halfway through our junior year and then one more year before we’re free from our parents!” Tucker tried to comfort. Danny’s gloom lightened ever so slightly. 

For a few minutes, Sam looked out the window and imagined that she was going anywhere else to do anything else. There was a growing serene calm shared across the link, the tinges of uncertainty ebbing away. She could hear keys clacking away as Tucker typed and she could feel affection for Jazz from Danny as he texted her. 

And then Mr. Fenton startled Danny and unveiled a new anti-ghost device and Danny’s mood plummeted like a twelve ton rock to the bottom of the ocean. 

Tucker winced and tried to think of any joke that wasn’t a pun to lighten the mood.

Sam sighed. It was going to be a long, long break.

👻 {Boo!)

All too soon the plane landed and Sam zoned out while her parents immediately fought over what she should wear like they hadn’t ordered whatever the clothes were weeks ago. Sam had mentally checked out for self preservation the moment she stepped foot off of the plane. This wasn’t her first rodeo and she had the act down pat. Giggle when she was supposed to as her parents showed her off and stand silently behind them when they weren’t. At the seamstress or at the hotel lobby chatting with other rich people, the script was the same. It wouldn’t change for the gala either.

At least the previous two years hadn’t been as horrible with Danny and Tucker a mere thought away. 

The days dragged like an ant crawling through molasses and then the dreaded day arrived. The first night of the gala. Wayne Manor was old, she noted as their limo drew nearer. She could appreciate the architecture at least, and maybe such an old house had a ghost. At least that would be interesting.

Danny pointed out that she didn’t have a thermos.

She quietly conceded his point and wished for something regardless while she smiled blankly as her parents greeted Bruce, the host of the gala this year. With a polite greeting of her own the Mansons departed from the entrance and swept into the manor.

Straight away her parents engaged in some conversation and Sam stood a step behind them. Allowing herself one sad, longing look towards the quiet corners of the room, Sam bitterly wondered why the Christmas galas made her parents fanatical every year. They let her get away with whatever she wanted within reason the rest of the year, but as soon as Christmas was involved they expected her to be a doll.

With that last break of character she let a calm wash over her, perfected from years of galas, and let her perfect daughter mask snap firmly into place. 

“At least they’re only like this once a year,” Tucker commented, trying to look at the positives. 

Sam agreed. If they were so controlling year round then she was sure she’d have run away from them.  

“And at least the fruitloop is a shut in,” Danny added. The three shuddered at the thought of Vlad at the gala, Sam in particular. She didn’t want to handle him alone. Even between the three of them it was tricky to drive him off sometimes, never mind one on one.  

The clock ticked on at an agonizing pace. Eventually her parents sent her off to dance with the son of some CEO they were chatting with and she used the opportunity to escape after the dance. So long as her parents didn’t see her doing anything “unseemly” then she’d be golden for the rest of the night. She made her way over to a relatively secluded corner and cursed at the dress limiting her movements. Just walking felt like a chore in the wretched thing. Sam might have come from a family with money but she rarely dressed it. 

“Mission accomplished for the night,” she told the boys. “If I have to dance in these heels one more time…”

“You’ve almost made it through,” Danny encouraged her.

“And now you can scope out the room! Are there any cute girls?” Tucker prodded cheekily.

Before Sam could mentally reply a strange sensation washed over her. It felt like a gentle tug at her chest, at her core. Her lips parted and a faint golden-yellow mist emerged. 

“Ghost. There’s a ghost here,” Sam said, head snapping up from her cup of stuff she technically shouldn’t have been drinking as she began scanning the room with a critical eye.

“Ask and you shall receive. You totally jinxed yourself Sam,” Danny said, though his concern belied the light comment.

“You can handle it,” Tucker added at her uneasiness. “You’re-“

“No, this is different. I- I feel something in my core,” Sam said with growing alarm as the feeling didn’t fade. “Guys…”

Now it wasn’t just Sam who felt alarmed but they knew by this point how to prevent a crippling spiral of positive feedback. Dread settled in her gut and Sam couldn’t even tell if it was hers. 

“I think it’s tugging me,” Sam noted after a moment of observation. She stepped toward the crowd, toward the pull, and Tucker recoiled. 

“Um, hello, reason here. Shouldn’t you not be heading toward it?” he said.

“But what if it’s hold on her core gets stronger? She needs to do something,” Danny pointed out. 

“It doesn’t feel malicious so I’m assuming the worst. I might need you guys to pull me out of a mind trap,” Sam relayed as she weaved between the other guests.

There were twin nonverbal agreements from Tucker and Danny. Being connected to two other people usually meant that items and people looking to ensnare the mind needed to nab all three of them for anything to take effect, and for that Sam was grateful. 

Sam paused as the pull led her to a wall. Wherever she was being led was outside of the main room. Glancing around, Sam spied a confectionery table and she ducked behind it. Without a thought she turned herself intangible and invisible and walked through the wall, following the pull. After several rooms, some occupied by guests and some not, Sam came across a balcony.

Hunched over the railings was someone wearing a tux. Sam couldn’t see anything spectral about him and that put her on guard more than anything. The ones that were strong enough to appear perfectly human were the ones that always brought the most trouble. She stepped into the empty hall and dropped the ghostly aspects from her human form. 

“Are you alright?” she asked. That was usually a good way to start with nonviolent ghosts.

The person stiffened and whirled around. The first thing that Sam noticed was the tuft of white atop his head and the second thing-

A small cry for help. The tug increased and it almost felt like it wanted to yank her core out of her chest. She swallowed thickly and stood her ground. 

He narrowed his eyes at her ever so slightly. 

“Fine,” he replied curtly after a moment.

Sam scowled in return, a spark of temper rising. “Obviously not.” As much as she’d wished for a ghost earlier she didn’t want to deal with one so late at night, especially not one that could do whatever this was to her core-

“Deep breaths Sam,” instructed Tucker.

Sam inhaled deeply.

Danny prodded her and she refocused on the ghost. He hated when their attention was away from potential dangers for too long. 

“Sorry, I’m a bit short after dealing with,” Sam motioned in the direction of the main room, “all that. But seriously, what’s up?”

The ghost man scoffed and eyed her. “I’m not keen on spilling my guts to a stranger,” he said, voice barely above a hostile growl.

“Fair enough,” Sam said, appraising him. She was given the impression that he too found all the rich people business distasteful. Striding forward, she noted how he tensed as though he was ready to bolt at the drop of a hat. Thrusting her hand out in a very ill-bred manner and hoping it would put him at ease, she said, “I’m Manes.”

The man snorted. “Jason,” he said, accepting the handshake. 

Several things became apparent one after another.

Firstly, she could feel his core as it reached for her. This ghost’s core was so weak, so fragile that it wasn’t even really a core. It was a proto-core, meaning that it wasn’t formed from a death, and this ghost shouldn’t even be outside of the Ghost-Zone. He was basically an infant.

Secondly, the hand was warm. Warm as a human hand was, warm like it was alive.

And with how solid the man was and how fragile the proto-core was, there was no way that he was a ghost.

Sam tried not to stare at the very human man who was also a baby ghost. 

Jason raised a brow at her and she yanked her hand back like the contact burned when she realized that she’d been holding his hand for longer than what was polite.

Danny seemed to be coming to some conclusion as he turned the information around in his mind and Tucker was rooting through what they knew about ghost formation from some of his files. 

“Are you sick?” she blurted. It was the only thing she could think of. If Jason was slowly dying and had something he was passionate enough about to become an obsession then it might be possible that a core had started forming.  

Jason huffed out a puff of air that might have been a laugh. “No.” One of his hands made an aborted motion towards his side, like he was going to grab something and thought better of it. “I just got out here. Can’t I get even a moment to myself?” he complained. 

She snorted. She would’ve been more than happy to leave him to his own devices and would have if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a baby ghost. “Guess not,” she replied instead. 

“Is he a halfa?” Danny wondered.

Sam immediately refuted it, but Tucker wasn’t so sure. 

“It’s better to check,” insisted Danny.

“How can we tell? I have no equipment,” Sam reminded them as she shifted her gaze out over the snowy trees surrounding the manor. Aloud to Jason she said, “This is a pretty spot.” 

She was skeptical. They’d been told over and over how rare halfa were. Besides the three of them, Dani-with-an-i, and Vlad-the-supreme-fruitloop there were no others of their species. The common denominator, excluding Dani who had her own circumstances, was Fenton tech. Sam couldn’t fathom how Jason might have been exposed to a portal unless he was a clone. Turning, she looked him over again.

He was well built, likely had an active lifestyle, and had black hair and blue eyes. Sam found her own eyes drawn to the tuft of white on his head, and now that she thought about it, Vlad had a streak of white in both of his forms. Yet, Jason didn’t look like Vlad. 

Tucker added that he could’ve been a test tube baby and you didn’t have to have one person for that. 

“I don’t think he’s a Vlad experiment. Vlad would’ve never let him go, weak core or no,” Sam pondered.

“Unless he escaped,” Danny agreed.

“But then how’d he end up here?” asked Tucker. That was the most damning question, but life was stranger than fiction. However unlikely it was, they couldn’t discount it until they had proof.

There was a mental knock from Tucker and Sam let him in. He was seeing though her eyes, she could tell, and she made sure Tucker could see Jason’s face.

“Wait- that’s Jason Todd!” Tucker exclaimed with disbelief.

“Who?” Sam and Danny chorused.

“One of Bruce Wayne’s adopted sons. He supposedly died before he turned up alive. Or well, maybe he’s not so alive…”

Danny’s presence joined Tuckers in seeing through her eyes.

Sam was going to have to look into more Jason Todd later, but right now she was incredulous. “He might actually be like us?”

“Or maybe that’s just typical of resurrection?” Danny tentatively offered. “It’s not like we know if he really died or not. And we deal with the already dead. Have we ever even met a resurrected person? Can you really resurrect a person?”

“What do you mean, might be like us?” Jason asked. The hard edge to his voice was back.

“I’m going to tell him,” Sam decided. 

Tucker agreed enthusiastically and Danny cautiously. Jason had a core, however faint, and that meant the Anti-Ecto Acts applied to him.

Sam looked around. “There’s no one nearby, right?”

“No, there isn’t,” Jason replied guardedly.

Sam squinted at him but decided to get on with it. “Alright. Look. You have a core. A weak one, granted, but that’s enough to get you captured and vivisected.”

“What the hell?” Jason asked, rearing back with wide eyes. 

“I have your attention? Good,” Sam said, leaning toward him. “You really died, didn’t you? And when you came back you… well look. Ghosts are real, alright? And you are basically a baby ghost. It… your ghost part is basically screaming for help, that’s how I found you. But!” she said when he opened his mouth, likely to interject, “This means a set of laws called the Anti-Ecto Acts apply to you. By law you are not sentient, never mind other rights. If you get caught you’re toast.”

“Lady you’re insane,” Jason barked, stepping away from her. His core was agitated. 

“I’m trying to keep you after-alive,” she corrected. “The government has these floozies called the Ghost Investigation Ward, but everyone calls them the Guys in White since they wear white. If you see them, run, alright? They’re the ones who will capture and hurt any ghost, even if you’re just minding your own business.”    

Jason shook his head and inched into the hall. “How drunk are you?” he asked.

“Not at all. Listen, just be careful,” Sam sighed.   

Without a backwards glance, Jason left her on the snowy balcony with a snickering Tucker and a pensive Danny.

“Dude, you scared him off,” Tucker chortled.

“I needed to give him the important stuff in case we never meet again,” Sam replied dryly. “Ghosts are hard to accept outside of Amity.”

”I think I’m going to look into how he died and how he might have been brought back,” Tucker announced. Sam could tell he’d already connected with his PDA and was delving into the web for preliminary information, looking for promising leads. 

Danny was nervous but determined. “That’ll help us figure out what he is.”

“It is a new situation,” Sam thought to them as she peered down the hall. 

With a sigh, Danny mentally flopped onto a floor. “I guess I could ask Frostbite about coming back to life and baby ghosts when I get back.”

Sam’s initial, knee jerk reaction was to object and say that they should all go together, but Tucker was already in Amity so Danny wouldn’t be alone.

The two would be fine.

Oh who was she kidding? This was Team Phantom she was thinking about. Something was bound to go awry and she was in no position to help them when the inevitable other shoe dropped.

White, misty condensation swirled in the air as Sam exhaled noisily. She hated this time of year with a passion.

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Next: Chapter 2

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 5

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 4

Next: Chapter 6

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd (brief), Scarecrow

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

👻 {Chapter 5 Below!)

Danny crept forward, thermos in hand. Sam flung out a mental arm and he stopped as though there were something physically holding him back.

“He can’t just disappear off the roof, we need a plan to distract everyone first,” Sam said. 

Sheepishly, Danny clipped the thermos to the waist of his suit. “I didn’t even think about that.”

It made everything much, much more complicated. 

“Is the hostage ok?” Danny asked instead, eyeing the incoming heroes. There were two of them and as they slowed their approach it seemed they were talking to the two who had already been at the wall of vapor. That made a tally of four. 

Sam corrected, “Hostages, plural. And there were at least seven crashers.”

“There are four back there,” Tucker observed, noting a flat section surrounded by the telltale yellow tinged haze, “and one hostage.”

Danny, however, peered closer at the heroes. They were still a good distance away and if it weren’t for their night vision, he wouldn’t have been able to discern them. One of the heroes was the Batman himself, looking quite disgruntled. The shorter figure by his side couldn’t be anyone besides the boy wonder, Robin. On Batman’s other side was, surprisingly, Nightwing. The fourth person, Tucker informed them, was Orphan.

“It looks like they have masks. Why not go through the gas?” he wondered, staring at the heroes. 

Tucker turned it over for a moment and Sam scoffed. “It’s obviously the hostages. They can’t get any further or the goons will gas them.”

“Wait,” Tucker said abruptly. “The manor didn’t have anyone in it. Anyone that wasn’t already gassed- no paramedics and whatnot. You don’t think…”

There were specific situations in which paramedics wouldn’t wade into a mess to help people, and considering everyone had masks and that the inside was free of any other danger… 

“They’ve taken the entire manor and everyone in it hostage,” Danny realized with horror. The paramedics wouldn’t go in because they couldn’t without warranting retaliation from the crashers.

“And I’m going to bet, from the match that ghost is waving around, that the gas is flammable,” Sam added dryly. “Great.” 

Tucker warily shared the ratios of power running through the Wayne property; if the building caught fire, even without the gas, it’d burn down quicker than a building of its size ought to. And with the gas? He wouldn’t be surprised if the manor went sky high.  

Sam decided she was going to steal that idea for later, a faded overlay of Vlad’s mansion eclipsing Wayne Manor for a moment. 

“Could we revisit plan a? Think I could overshadow that ghost?” Danny wondered, eyeing the being in question, though silently he did agree with Sam’s mental picture. He studied their opponent. The ghost was, visibly, reminiscent of a living scarecrow. Danny was sure they could take him.

“We have to be very careful here,” Tucker thought. “I think we should find the three missing goons first.” 

He thought about TV shows and how the villain always had a backup plan. If the ghost was working with the humans, who didn’t seem to be under any ghostly influences, then they couldn’t assume that taking out the ghost would resolve everything.

Even after years of knowing him, Sam found Tucker’s ability to connect anything to electronics and pop culture oddly engrossing, but she pushed that thought aside to focus on the problem at hand. She had seen two of the goons earlier, during her scan of the mansion, however both were alone and had been stationary. With no hostages and no reason to confront them she’d flown past, still searching for the ghost.

“I can go back and knock them out,” she offered, perhaps a tad too eager, after sharing the information.

With simultaneous agreement from the boys she dove through the roof, and a moment later Danny followed, intending to find the missing crasher. Tucker proceeded toward the four crashers on the roof, eyebrows furrowed as he took in the details of the scene. He poked at the other two.

“Uh. Guys? Another problem.”

“Ancients, what now?” Danny groaned as he phased through a wall.

“The hostage up here is Tim Wayne.”

Sam sighed, instantly picking up on the newfound issue. “And that means Jason is on the roof or nearby and unaccounted for. Great.”

Danny nonverbally requested Tucker to keep an eye out for the young ghost and he agreed before gently nudging back, reminding Danny to focus. He then looked back to the goons and their unfortunate victim.

Ghosts were, by nature, beings of emotion. As such, they were in tune to it. The mansion reeked of fear, and now that none of them were stuck experiencing it, it wasn’t bad at all. Still, fear was a reasonable human reaction to the situation at hand, and so when Tucker pushed his celebrity awe aside and realized that Tim Wayne did not feel any fear in his current predicament, he was puzzled. 

At most, the young CEO felt slightly nervous, not fearful.

Tucker’s eyes narrowed. It was something he’d have to revisit later. Right now he needed to find out if there was some way that the crashers were communicating with one another and if he could use that to locate the last one. At first glance the crashers didn’t have much, just their spraying devices, the attached tanks, and a gun each, but upon further inspection they had comms as well. They rested on the insides of their masks and disappeared into their shirts.

“Bingo,” Tucker grinned. He reached out, spectral fingers brushing the edge of a wire poking out from the bottom of the crasher’s mask, and followed the frequency it was attuned to.

“And… gottem’,” he said smugly, sharing the general locations of the other comms, and in all likelihood, the other crashers. It was best described as knowing where your hand was in utter pitch black; you knew it was there, even if you couldn’t see it. Sam tapped at the two that she recognized and Danny changed course to head towards the remaining crasher, who was tucked into a dusty attic just below the roof. The last crasher had a visible weapon holster, a tank strapped to her back, and a device of some kind in hand. Unlike the other two, she wasn’t alone. Petrified, just like the majority of the victims within the mansion, were four more hostages. Although they weren’t bound in any way it was clear they would be unable to escape in their current state. 

And then Danny felt it. 

A tug at his core.

“Oh,” he thought breathlessly. It was one thing to feel the pull secondhand and another to feel it for yourself. 

If Tucker sharing the general locations of the comms was akin to knowing your body, then feeling who could only be Jason was like walking into a dark room illuminated solely by a spotlight shining on the man in question- it was impossible to not know where he was.  

And he was there, in that attic somewhere. 

Danny launched himself at the crasher and with one solid swing, sent the woman sprawling to the ground. With her out of the way he was free to follow the slight pull that was growing in strength. He intended to do so but didn’t need to as the moment the woman hit the floor a figure stepped out from behind one of the stacks of old boxes.

“Jason, I presume,” Danny said, switching to the human spectrum. 

“Who the fuck are you?” Jason asked, cocking a gun. 

“I’m Phantom. Manes mentioned you, so I thought I’d lend a hand,” Danny introduced while motioning to the unconscious goon.

“I had it handled.”  With a scowl Jason slowly lowered the gun and glared at Danny, eyes full of scrutinizing mistrust.

Despite that Danny felt himself grinning, almost against his will. Jason was here, safe and in front of him, and while his little core was struggling Danny knew he generated enough ectoplasm to easily patch up the cracks he could sense even from six feet away. 

“Danny,” Sam said sharply at Tucker’s recoil, “no. I can feel your bad decision from here.” 

“Please don’t kidnap a child without consent. Don’t be like Vlad,” Tucker helpfully supplied.

He blinked owlishly. Then the implications of what he wanted to do, of giving Jason’s proto-core his ectoplasm washed over him and Danny backpedaled, physically and mentally. 

“I’m not kidnapping you,” he blurted. 

Sam snorted. “Kidnapping, by definition, lacks consent.”

“What?” Jason questioned, taken aback.

“I mean,” fumbled Danny, “it’s not like I’m a billionaire with a adoption problem?” 

Jason opened and closed his mouth once, then twice, then shut his jaw with an audible click.

Tucker, the traitor, just laughed at him. 

“He probably thinks you were talking about his dad!” he wheezed.

Even Sam chuckled. “Brucie Wayne has an adoption problem. Danny. Jason was adopted.”

“Oh Ancients, you’re adopted?” Danny asked, mortified. “I was talking about someone else, I swear.” 

“You might fit the bill, maybe-billionaire Mr. King,” Tucker said gleefully, sending the impression of a wink. They didn’t know exactly how much of Pariah Dark’s horde had become Danny’s when he’d bested the tyrant, but it was more than enough to fill several rooms of the old king’s lair. 

“I’m not Vlad,” Danny muttered crossly, swatting Tucker’s presence. Besides, what was ghost wealth in the living world?

Jason cleared his throat. “So, what are you planning to do?” he questioned haltingly. He spared an obvious glance at the prone crasher. 

Danny flipped back into hero mode so quickly it would’ve given most people whiplash. “Status?” he thought, followed by a memory list of important items they’d been keeping track of since the mission started: the gas, the hostages, the ghost, the other heroes.

“The stragglers are out,” Sam reported, feeling quite pleased with herself.

“I can’t take out the four here and free the Wayne without the ghost noticing,” Tucker observed. “So we either need to get rid of the gas or take out the ghost, but Batman and co have eyes on him…”

“We’re going to save the hostage on the roof,” Danny said, both to the other halfas and to Jason. “I can distract the scarecrow and Manes can grab the dude.” 

“The gas is flammable,” Jason said harshly, confirming their suspicion. “There are dozens of people who are going to be burned alive if you fuck up-”

“We took out the three inside and the last four are on the roof. We know what we’re doing,” Danny defended. The skeptic criticism of the abilities of team Phantom was constant and yet he still felt oddly ruffled by Jason’s doubt. 

“And the remote charges?” Jason demanded.

“The what now?” Sam demanded, followed by a mental meme full of question marks from Tucker. 

“Uhhhh. Um, no,” Danny admitted sheepishly. “But we can get right on that!” 

Thunder rumbled, rattling the lone circular window nearby, and Jason’s scowl deepened. “Leave it to the bats. They know what they’re doing,” he said, though it seemed to be with a good deal of reluctance.

The thunder gave Sam pause.

“You mean the bats that have been standing and staring at the wall of gas for the past six minutes?” Danny snarked. “Real productive.”

Jason scoffed. “They’re trained for this kid, and the Scarecrow is a menace. Don’t throw your ass into the line of fire when you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out alive.”

“Firstly, rude, I can totally handle myself,” Danny said, raising a finger for emphasis. Sam shared a memory from a few days ago of him tripping up the stairs to his room. Danny, like the mature teen he was, nonphysically jabbed her side. “Secondly,” he raised a second finger, “I’m a ghost. As in, not alive. They can’t exactly kill me a second time.” 

“Not to mention hell has a good amount of snow…” Tucker snorted.

Jason didn’t seem to know how to react to that. Something sobering seemed to settle over him, something bitter and resigned and agitated. “Being a hero isn’t fun,” he warned. “It’s not a game.”

Oh. He thought the Phantoms were newbies. With an over exaggerated eye roll Danny replied, “I’m well aware, believe me. This isn’t my first rodeo. But if it bothers you that much we’ll just clear a path for Batman and his team and leave the rest to them.”

The rest being the cleanup, which they wouldn’t have been able to handle without compromising themselves anyway given the sheer amount of people around.

Jason, still brimming with misgivings, questioned pointedly, “What can two kids do that the bats can’t?” 

Danny’s answering grin was sharp.

👻 {Boo!)

They were nerds.

It wasn’t easy for the other students of Casper High to see- since their freshmen year the trio’s grades had taken a nosedive following the accident. But before that they had been excellent students, and not due to any particular intent. They were smart, granted in different ways, and it showed in times like this where all the little bits of seemingly pointless information came together and culminated in something truly irreplicable.   

“Tuck sends a heat blast upwards, Danny sends a cold wave downwards, and bam. Instant rain. It should wash away the gas,” Sam explained. “It’s already pretty close to storming so we shouldn’t have to do much.”

“Huh?” the boys chorused intelligently. 

Sam slammed a diagram depicting the water cycle into their heads. It didn’t really help.

“Ow,” Tucker complained. 

Consolingly, Danny gave Tucker a mental pat.

“Ok,” Danny said to Sam, “that works for Tuck but wouldn’t I just, like, freeze the clouds? I mean, dropping frozen clouds doesn’t seem like a bad idea but clouds are big and there are a lot of bystanders.”

“Storm clouds can also be several miles tall,” Sam informed him dryly, “but somehow I doubt that would be a problem for you.”

“Wait Danny, do you still have the Spectorly Splatterer Ectoplasmic Energy Disperser?” Tucker asked.

“Er, this?” Danny responded, pulling up the Fenton device he’d strapped to his side before they’d left for the Zone. “What could I-“

Tucker supplied a memory of the elder Fentons talking about turning ghosts into an ectoplasm spray so fine they’d be unable to reform and the corresponding invention. Not that it worked- ghosts could reform so long as their core was unaffected, and while the Spectorly Splatterer was adept at obliterating a ghost’s form it was unable to harm a core.

“Shoot ice at the Spectorly Splatterer and it should be able to disperse the blast, right?”

“Ah,” Danny hummed in understanding.

Sam made an unhappy noise. “We are not calling it that.”

“SSEED sounds cool,” Danny offered as he fiddled with the output on the device.

“That’s just hiding the repulsive name behind an acronym,” she grumbled, though she accepted it a moment later. 

“Yeah,” Tucker agreed. “Spectorly Splatterer is way cooler than seeds.”

“It’s SSEED you-“

“Annnnd done,” Danny announced. “I’ve turned the output range up as high as it can go. Are we ready?” 

“Do you need me to come with you?” Sam enquired. It would probably be difficult to hold the SSEED and shoot at it at the same time, not to mention Danny was really, really bad at telekinesis.

“Nah, you get to the roof and find an opening to nab the ghost,” Danny said. Lurking beneath his statement was the confidence that he could make a copy last long enough to do the job.

The three split up from where they’d remerged on the roof. Sam got as close to the ghost as she dared while Tucker and Danny flew into the sky, but where Tucker stopped and hovered just below the clouds Danny shot into them, heading high up into the atmosphere. 

“Ready?“ Danny asked when he got above the stormy clouds. He made a copy of himself and handed it the SSEED. With a nod the copy flew upwards and held the device down at an angle. Danny charged up an ice beam and Tucker started heating up the air around himself.

“Of course,” he said. 

While the boys started manufacturing the weather they needed the bats had finally started to move. Orphan and Robin retreated and Batman and Nightwing stepped up, closer to the dangerous fumes. 

“Are you going to see reason Batman?” the ghost called with a grin that revealed his distorted teeth. “Fear is what drives you, fear is what controls you, controls all of us!”

“Enough Scarecrow,” Batman growled, actually growled. Sam was not expecting him to sound so gravely, though perhaps it was due to a throat injury. 

“We’re here to negotiate your demands,” Nightwing stepped in. He was nervous, though nothing physically betrayed that. 

“There will be no negotiation!” seethed the scarecrow ghost, holding up the lighter. “I-“

“Got it!” Danny grinned in their mind as thunder roared above them. A mere moment later rain began to fall in torrents. 

“No!” the ghost screamed. “But I still have a backup!” The four crashers trained their weapons on Tim Wayne. 

“Timmy here doesn’t really need his brain, does he?” Scarecrow taunted, though frustration bled into his words. “I also have four unlucky captives hidden inside the manor. One word from me and they’re lost, slaughtered like hopeless, frightened little animals.”

He then dug around his burlap getup and pulled out a rectangular device. “The rain certainly puts a damper on things!  But I am more than prepared. How much of the mansion do you think will burn before the rain puts it out?”

Sam knew it was risky but she couldn’t let him do that. She circled him and launched herself at him, telekinetically shoving at the remote and knocking it out of his grasp as she kicked out his legs, making him squawk and flail on the slick tiles. 

Suddenly, two of the crashers attacked the other two and seeing this as an opening, Batman and Nightwing rushed forward to secure the Scarecrow and help the hostage, who had scuttled away as his captors had begun fighting amongst themselves. They didn’t know it, but yellow and green were not the natural eye colors of the two goon traitors. Even if they had, the masks obscured the goon’s faces quite well.

Sam silently thanked the other two phantoms and uncapped the thermos as Batman swung at the ghost and was more than surprised when the blow landed. The two began to struggle, though it was clear Batman had the upper hand.

Unneeded as Nightwing was more than capable of finishing off the two disoriented crashers, Danny and Tucker floated over to her, eying the fight warily. 

“How are we supposed to separate them?” Danny wondered and winced as Batman delivered a particularly severe blow to the scarecrow’s skull. 

“I don’t think he’s a ghost,” Tucker piped up randomly.

Sam and Danny shared in their confusion.

“He’s ghost-like at least,” Tucker conceded, “maybe liminal, but he can’t be a ghost. Otherwise this,” he motioned to everything around them with a broad gesture, “wouldn’t be happening.”

Sam, to be contrary, leveled the thermos at the grappling duo and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

Slowly, she lowered the thermos in quiet disbelief, thinking everything over. Tucker smacked his head.

“It was Jason,” he realized. “He set off your ghost sense before, right Sam?”

“… that makes sense…” she grudgingly admitted.

“But he looks so ghostly,” Danny whined. “It was an honest mistake.” 

“That means we could’ve just overshadowed him from the beginning!” Tucker huffed. 

They watched for another minute as the crashers and the not-a-ghost scarecrow were apprehended by the heroes.

“Well, I think we’re done here,” Danny groused, making a show of dusting his hands. 

“All in a night’s work,” grinned Tucker.

Sam rolled her eyes and despite the dark clouds blotting out the light above them, everything seemed to be brighter. 

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore @iglowinggemma28 @manapeer @azzysflowergarden @notwhat-i-seemtobe @whobee7 @trippingovermyfeet @stormhaven257 @imsociallyanxiousgetoverit @passivedecept @lovetheryu @ever-after-aaa @mysteriousooze @wegetitethan @cyber-geist @t-nayira

Chapter in a nutshell: Assumptions were made!

I wasn't planning on updating so soon. I wanted to post Sunday but I realized that I'll be at work Sunday and if I know myself I'm going to go straight to bed when I get home lol

Next: Chapter 6

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 2

First/Previous: Chapter 1

Next: Chapter 3

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

Warning for language!

👻 {Chapter 2 Below!)

The next day went by much as the previous one had. Sam sat and let people mess with her hair and slather makeup on her face and twitter over her nails. Internally, she grimaced. Still, between the mystery of Jason Todd to occupy her and Danny’s excitement about returning to Amity it was difficult to remain too sour. Unappreciative of the suck-up-stylists that her parents had deposited her with, she tuned into Tucker’s senses and they brainstormed how the heck a human could have a poto-core and what that meant for them. How common was this? Was he born in the Ghost Zone before ending up in Gotham somehow? Did the core even belong to the living human? Did they need to help him? 

Cores were… a little awkward to talk about with other ghosts considering that the majority of interactions the trio had with them revolved around conflict. Danny shouting punny retorts as they dodged blows or ectoblasts or telekinetically flung projectiles was bad enough, they didn’t need to try and weasel an entire biology lesson out of the ghost-of-the-hour on top of that. But they needed to investigate. Their current level of knowledge just wasn’t enough for the circumstances. Most of what they knew came from their own experiments, one crash course in ghost culture from Kitty before a very important ghostling-sitting mission, and a thin (and probably outdated) biology book Sam had strong armed Ghost Writer into lending her once. Even then, the trio had acknowledged that their cores were abnormal which was unsurprising given their halfa status. If they wanted to learn anything about conventional cores, proto-cores in particular, then Frostbite was really their best bet. 

Sam could feel Danny chewing on his lip. Anxious to get back to their haunt and itching to escape the confines of the GAV, his nervous energy overflowed and she found her leg bouncing impatiently. She risked a glance at the time and was miffed to see that it was hardly noon. 

“Half way there,” she told herself. One day and a half down, one day and a half to go.

“Halfa the way,” Danny snickered.

Tucker was amused despite himself and also disgusted at his own amusement.

“Traitor,” Sam complained at him. Puns were awful and she buried her fondness for Danny’s ridiculousness lest the other two think she was feeling fond because of the horrid joke.

“Hey! In my defense anything is better than these notes. Seriously, when did we even write all these?” retorted Tucker with a sliver of irritation. “And we need to organize them. It’s a such a mess after the scramble, I can’t find anything.”

Danny cheekily sent a mental gesture intoning his condolences in a sarcastic way that distinctly let them know that the notes were a Tucker-problem. 

Instead of offering her non-existent sympathy, Sam suggested, “You could always work on the essay Mr. Lancer assigned.”

Tucker shooed her out of his eyes in retaliation and she couldn’t help but snort. 

“You guys are so mean,” he complained. “But I guess this is better than english homework…”

👻 {Boo!)

The time passed slowly. Unlike yesterday, Sam’s parents dragged her to some set up to get their pictures taken. That, of course, took nearly an hour and a half before she was shuffled back to have her hair fixed just in time for the Mansons to rush back to Wayne Manor for the second night of the gala. 

And unlike yesterday, the night went wildly off script.

She was distracted, admittedly. Danny had just gotten home and was excitedly narrating all the random things he was going to de-antighost after his parents went to sleep. Tucker had been looking through her eyes and had paused his running commentary on the other guests as Danny chattered.  

She was standing behind her parents and for better or for worse, they were entirely absorbed in conversation with a middle aged, slightly portly man about a business thing. They didn’t notice when Jason Todd walked up to her. She certainly did with a slight jump, and not just because of the abrupt tug at her core. Mist escaped Sam’s mouth, so thin and pale that it was easily missed. It was nothing like the thick, vibrant plumes that ghosts in Amity triggered with their proximity. 

“Care to dance?” he requested faux casually, offering her his hand.

“Unsubtle,” Sam noted, accepting the offer.

“Guys what do I do?” Sam asked Tucker and Danny. Jason probably had questions, questions that the trio didn’t have the answers to themselves. 

Simultaneously, the boys gave mental shrugs and Sam nearly scowled. “Some help you are.”

His hands were still warm, still alive. He moved like a ghost though, so quiet and smooth it was like the physics of the world had no hold over him. Jason was taller than her so she had to look up to see his expression, which was pleasantly neutral, though his eyes held suspicion. They waltzed absently for several minutes before he finally spoke. 

“They wasn’t a ‘Manes’ on the guest list,” he stated.

Sam snorted. For some reason she wasn’t surprised he went though the attendees even though she hadn’t exactly been expecting it. “I didn’t realize you were human at first,” she admitted. Jason’s arm tensed beneath her hand. “I gave you the name I use when I work with ghosts.”

There was no reason to explicitly reveal she was a halfa, especially considering how poorly it usually went. 

His eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly. “Are you an exorcist or something?” 

“Or something.” Rather than switch partners when they were supposed to, the duo twirled off of the dance floor and separated near a wall. 

He studied her with sharp blue eyes that, for the briefest of moments, flashed green.

“Holy shit. I’m not the only one that saw that, right?” Sam thought, astonished.  

“Nope,” Tucker confirmed. 

“Saw what?” probed Danny. “I can’t exactly tune in right now unless I wanna risk slipping and bashing my head open in the shower.”

After almost three years of constantly being in each other’s minds, they were more than desensitized to the fact that there wasn’t any way to pause or turn off the connection. Still, Sam felt morally obligated to think, “Didn’t need to know that.”

On the other hand Tucker couldn’t care less. “You’d be fine, you’ve got a thick skull. Anyway, Jason’s eyes flashed green. And unlike the population of Amity, I’m going to bet that it wasn’t because of ecto-contamination.” 

Huffing, Sam knew complaining was moot and crossed her arms. Truthfully, it barely registered as strange in day-to-day life; it was just a part of their lives now. Danny supposed she might have been feeling a little self conscious in the suffocating environment where so many people had holier than thou attitudes and was subconsciously reacting to what she knew society would disprove of. Tucker supposed that Danny had spent too much time with Jazz recently.

Before Sam could deny that no, she wasn’t acting because she cared about other people’s opinions Jason shifted, drawing her attention back to him. 

“The Anti-Ecto Acts are a real thing,” he said at length.

“And?” Sam questioned a little sharply. 

Jason scowled. “Look, you came out of no where and dropped several bombshells all at once. Who does that? I didn’t even think you telling the truth until I found out the acts really existed.”

“Yeah, well. I figured you would run off and that would be that. You needed to know the critical stuff,” Sam defended. 

“Like I’m legally a non-sentient?” he asked dryly.

Sam looked away and scanned the opulent room. No one was outright staring but more than a few of the guests glanced their way with varying levels of discretion. 

Jason must have picked up on her reluctance to talk around so many people because he took her arm and led her through one of the open arches in the wall and then through several halls until they were in a secluded nook that you’d have to look for to find. Letting go of her arm he gruffly said, “There’s no one around.” Sam couldn’t tell if it was a reassurance or a threat.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“What are you?” he interrogated bluntly.

“Doesn’t matter,” she deflected. “What do you want to know about your situation and the world of ghosts?”

“Nothing until I know my source can be trusted,” Jason replied steadily. 

“Damn, he’s suspicious,” Tucker whistled and added as an afterthought, “but do you blame him?”

“Not helpful,” Sam shot back. Aloud she sighed. “Where I’m from there are a lot of ghosts. I help keep both humans and ghosts safe, from each other and themselves.” 

That explained what she did, but not what she was. Hopefully that’s how Jason meant his question and would be satisfied with her answer. He didn’t say anything, seemingly turning over her response in his mind.

“So you… break the law to help ghosts?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” Sam said. Technically everyone in Amity broke the laws dictated by the Anti-Ecto Acts in one way or another by virtue of living in a hotspot that still occasionally flipped between dimensions. “Most of it is dumb anyway.” 

At Jason’s raised skeptic brow she grumbled, “What? You gonna tell me government sanctioned genocide isn’t dumb?”

He blanched at that and said, “Yeah. Okay.” Breathing in once and then twice, he added, “Fuck. This is unreal. Genocide.” Running a hand over his face, he emphatically repeated, “Fuck.”

It clearly hadn’t clicked before Sam had stated it so brazenly. “Do you need a minute?”

“No,” Jason immediately refused. 

“Great then. Am I verified now?” Sam inquired a little too snippily. They didn’t have all night and if Jason was unwilling to take a minute, well, who was she to force him? Besides, someone was bound to tell her parents that she’d gone off with the son of their host without telling them. They were going to kill her.

“You already got one foot in the grave,” Danny amusedly pointed out. He had barely thought about watching the conversation before Sam projected her vision to him. Silently, he thanked her.

“You’ve got a little check mark and everything,” Jason said, latching on to the new train of conversation. Then with obvious reluctance he asked, “So is there some ‘welcome to ghost world’ sermon or was the info dump you dropped on me the gist?”

Sam paused to consider for a moment. 

“That was the general idea. You’re not a full ghost and there’s nothing pressing in Gotham that you’d need to worry about. And most GIW operations are more to the west so…” she shrugged. 

“Tell him about his core,” Danny urged. 

With a sigh, Sam obliged. “Well, there is one thing… so there are these things called cores. Ghosts can look like whatever they want and do some pretty cool stuff with their forms because a ghost’s body is a reflection of themselves. The one thing that doesn’t change is the core. It’s like a ghost’s soul and is the most important part of any ghost. Good so far?”

“I’m not a ghost,” Jason said irritably.

“Keep your pants on, I didn’t say you were,” Sam scowled in return. “Not entirely,” she mentally added. 

“So,” she continued pointedly, “there are different ways for a core to form but I’m not going into that. What I am going to tell you is that there are different power levels a core can be at and the levels can change over time. The softest cores have a distinct feel to them. They are called proto-cores and generally they small and pretty fragile. And unlike regular cores, they reach out to other cores if they need help. Kinda like how a human baby cries if it needs food or something.”

Hesitantly Jason said, “Yesterday you called me a baby ghost.”

“You have a proto-core so you should be. Imagine my surprise when you turned out to be alive,” Sam replied, hoping that she’d answered his unasked question. “Speaking of, can I feel your pulse?” 

Jason squinted at her distrustfully for a moment before complying with her request. He gave her his left hand and Sam carefully pressed her fingers into his arm. Twenty seconds later Sam could confidently say his pulse was steady and very typical of a human, if slightly quick.

“Unprecedented,” she murmured. It was a point against the halfa theory. The trio’s vitals ran slow and cold as humans. Even Vlad had a lower pulse and temperature, as they’d gleaned from his personal lab during one of their many escapades. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume Dani had a similar condition. “You really are alive, but you also have a proto-core. This… might be an issue.”

Jason yanked his arm back with alarm. Sam rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to tear your core out or try to make you full ghost, sheesh. It’s an issue,” she elaborated, “because proto-cores need a lot of ectoplasm to develop. Ideally I would take you to the Ghost Zone so you could live there for a bit. Since you’re human that’s not an option.”

“Why should I let it develop? You said you piece about avoiding the GIW and I got it. I don’t want to be more involved in this than I have to be,” Jason said sternly. “I like the way things are now. I don’t need ghosts in my life.” He turned and stepped back into the hall, back in the direction they’d originally come from. 

After his retreating form Danny felt an urge to do something. It gnawed at him and without a thought Sam quietly relayed on his behalf, “You’re probably starving. The ambient ectoplasm isn’t anywhere near enough for a proto-core. And regular cores can endure low ectoplasm levels but proto-cores can crack and even fade if they aren’t nourished. You were revived or whatever, right? For all we know your proto-core could be the only thing keeping you attached to your human body right now.”

Jason paused his retreat for the briefest of moments before ambling on, the only acknowledgment he’d heard her.

There was one desperate tug before the other presence vanished from Sam’s core.

“Cold,” Tucker noted as they watched Jason’s retreating back.

Sam waited a moment before following, intending to get back to the main room as quickly as possible despite her dread. “Rich asshole,” she corrected.

“He’s probably overwhelmed,” Danny reasoned a little restlessly. “But could he actually die?”

The ‘again?’ went unsaid.

“I dunno,” Sam thought back to the two. “But he’s an adult. He can make his own choices.”

“Except he’s also kinda a baby?” Danny said. 

Tucker paused, turning over the statement before conceding that Danny had a point. Sam internally groaned. Ghosts never left children alone, infants especially. It was a great honor to be a parent and dozens of ghosts would fight for the right to be an unclaimed ghostling’s primary guardian, rare as they were.

“You do know that ghost adoption isn’t going to be an option here, right?” she told them. “He’s ghostly sure, but he’s also very human.”

“Dani’s who know where and the only other person with a foot in both worlds is Vlad. That leaves us and I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be a teen dad,” Tucker said with distaste.

“But we’re adult ghosts,” Danny reminded them with an air of gloom. People who died with conviction strong enough to become an obsession or who died traumatically enough to became ghosts did so with fully matured cores. The accident that had half killed them was no exception. Although they were called “ghost children” it was a reference to them being human children when they’d half died, not that they were literal ghost children. If they had been, things would’ve been very different. 

Sam shuddered at the thought of being adopted by the Lunch Lady.

“But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s an adult human man,” Sam said. “You can’t adopt an adult.”

“And what if another ghost finds him and drags him off? Sure, they might want to help, but most ghosts will forget to pay attention to his human side,” insisted Danny. “We need to feed him.”

Sam thought that Danny was being weirdly determined about looking after Jason. Tucker agreed and Danny paused to mull over her observation. 

“It’s probably my obsession,” he concluded after a momentary pause. 

“That makes sense,” Sam agreed. Danny was always quick to help humans, but even quicker to help ghosts in the rare times they needed it. And since Jason was a bit of both…

Tucker, however, wasn’t so sure. He didn’t voice any particular thoughts as to why but maintained doubt nonetheless. Instead, he lamented, “Well that was interesting. I’m going work on organizing my everything now. I’m still pretty pissed. My poor PDA…”

Wincing, Sam’s hand automatically rose to her chest, where her camera usually rested in her ghost form. “Yeah,” she agreed with heavy emotion. 

Her camera still didn’t work right. It was just their luck that they’d been pulled away from Amity so soon after the scramble incident. She couldn’t wait to get back, if only to sneak into the Fenton’s lab and try to fix the ghostly aspects of their tech. 

“We could also try to combine deflector technologies with your stuff,” Danny offered, picking up on some of Sam’s thoughts. “If we can make their ectosignature trackers ignore us there has to be a way to make the deflectors zap anyone but us.”

“It’s one thing to make the deflector ignore your own signature, but all three of us?” Tucker asked. “And what about our ectosignature combinations? How-“

While Tucker and Danny began geeking over the logistics of the hypothetical system Sam absentmindedly rubbed at the faint buzz coming from beneath her sternum. 

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so! That being said, I've never put my writing on tumblr so I've never done a taglist before; please let me know if I did an oops.

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore 

Also, thank y'all for the name suggestions! I liked more than a few of them but I'm still pondering so I'm not committing to anything yet :)

Next: Chapter 3

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga (formerly No Title Yet) 6

what's this? a title?? on MY fic?????

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 5

Next: Chapter 7

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

👻 {Chapter 6 Below!)

Jason was pissed. 

To be fair, pissed off could describe him at any given point, though the trio didn’t know that.

“So you just decided ‘hey, rain’ll work’,” he glowered. 

The four were in the attic. They’d returned the hostages and the crasher to the main floor for the paramedics and police to find respectively and then withdrawn to temporarily camp out. After a brief introduction of Tucker as Ghouley they glossed over Sam’s name, moving the conversation every which way before Jason had all but demanded to know how exactly they’d worked around the situation.

“Yeah,” Tucker shrugged. “And it did work, didn’t it?” 

Jason muttered curses to himself and with their enhanced hearing, the phantoms heard every word. Danny mentally shuffled at the colorful vocabulary and Sam’s snicker echoed in their heads. They weren’t quite used to it because even if they could curse in their minds, they could not speak those words aloud. Curses were used sparingly. It was even more unusual to hear from someone else; back home, no one could swear.

Jason didn’t respond to Tucker’s statement and the frown on what was visible of his face under the mask deepened. “That was reckless. And where is Manes? Four kids isn’t better than three.”

“Uh oh,” Danny thought. Tucker made a mental shooing motion at Sam.

“She’s coming here,” he said. 

Jason raised a skeptical brow and Danny hurriedly offered to make a copy and shift to look like Sam. Sam shot him down; he still wasn’t great at duplication. They didn’t need to explain why Manes dissolved into a puddle of goop.

“She’ll be here soon and if not, we’ll go look for her,” Sam settled on bullshitting. Really, while she and Danny went ‘looking’ for Manes she’d switch back to human and voila, cover complete. 

“You four have no idea what danger you’re in. Dead or not whatever, you can make your own choices, but it’s irresponsible to shove Manes into this,” Jason said sternly. “And it’s not your job to clean up other people’s messes.”

Not their mess? Maybe that had been true, once upon a time, and they had struggled and even quitted the hero thing at different points over the years. But it was always a Fenton mess, with the offending portal in their basement, and Sam and Tucker’s for daring Danny to do the deed of accidentally turning it on in the first place. They were the cause, so protecting Amity had been their responsibility by default. But now? Danny was the King of the Infinite Realms. All ghosts were his responsibility and far be it for Sam and Tucker to abandon him now. It was unthinkable. So it was their mess, always had been, and now always would be. 

“Why wouldn’t Manes help?” Sam scoffed. She swore she was going to punch him, baby ghost or not, if he spouted some nonsense about her being a girl.

“She’s a fucking human kid? And shouldn’t be risking injury like that?” he spat incredulously. “There’s no reason for a teenage girl to be cleaning up the Bat’s messes.”

“Hey! We’re also teenagers,” protested Danny, “and if we can do it, so can she.” 

“And how long have you been dead?” Jason shot back rudely. “You could be forty for all I know.”

Danny felt a spike of annoyance. 

“Ghosts don’t work like that,” Tucker huffed. He stared at Jason, mentally debating what they could, and should, share with him.

Jason was getting increasingly worked up. “Look, you might be teens, sure. Fine. The problem is that there wasn’t anything that could’ve hurt you, but that’s not true for humans.”

Sam, surprisingly impressed, remarked, “That’s actually really thoughtful. Pretty useless sentiment though.”

“I don’t think he knows that,” Tucker sighed, floating downwards and settling on an old boxy chest. 

Well, they weren’t going to tell him they were halfa.

“You’re clearly not familiar with the situation, but all humans who know about us and aren’t hunting us are automatically subject to be hunted,” Sam said, taking a different angle that would still explain her human side’s involvement. “Did you read the acts? The association and ecto-entity aid clauses? Just by knowing us and not wanting us to be tortured thousands of people’s untimely deaths can be swept under the rug. It doesn’t matter if Manes helps us directly or not, she and everyone like her are targets.” 

The only reason those parts of the acts were not enforced was because as much as they wanted to, the GIW couldn’t handle all of Amity. They didn’t have the manpower.

The angry frown shifted to a more troubled and less hostile expression. “I- just why?” Jason asked, seemingly at a loss. “Why would that many people risk themselves? Their families? There has to be more to this.”

“Ghosts aren’t all bad and people know it,” Tucker explained gently. “Some of these people have friends and family who’ve come back, some just don’t think it’s right. But truthfully, a lot of people are just too ecto-contaminated to qualify as regular humans anymore. According to the acts.”

“So Manes is in danger one way or another,” Jason muttered.

Jason was oddly fixated on Manes, but he was also just suspicious all around. “And most people agree they need ghosts to protect them from bigger threats,” Danny added cheekily. He figured he’d capitalize on the suspicion and distract him.

“Be back in a bit, we’re going to find Manes,” Sam blurted when she realized what he had, that Jason’s eyes kept flickering over to the ladder. She phased through the floor and Danny followed reluctantly a moment later. 

Jason eyed where they’d gone through the floor before asking Tucker warily, “Bigger threats? The hell does that mean?”

Tucker flicked Danny’s presence for leaving him to answer the new line of questioning, then thought back to all the strange things they’d been thrown headfirst into and the different ways they’d learned to handle them lest they sink. “Threats that make artificial rain look reasonable.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Jason growled. 

“Dude I don’t know,” Tucker exhaled exasperatedly, though he knew all too well. “Think, like, eternal sleep, mass mind control, evil plants destroying cities, that kind of thing.” 

With a dismissive scoff the younger ghost said, “Sounds like JL stuff. I would’ve heard of that.” 

Tucker hesitated, momentarily forgetting what JL was before nodding. “Ah, them. Yeah, the events are pretty isolated. A lot of people are interested in keeping this mess under wraps.” Vlad, himself and the Phantoms, the GIW, and most recently, Technus had all inputted their unique brands of high end cyber security, cloaking Amity in a veil that was nigh impenetrable to outsiders. “Even then, the League can never come near ghost hotspots.”

“Ominous,” Sam laughed.

“The vaguer I am, the more questions he asks, the more time you have to look busy,” Tucker replied with the air of ‘I’m doing you a favor’. 

Jason, perhaps emboldened by the absence of the other two, snapped, “But that doesn’t explain anything! Why can’t they? Preventing the destruction of cities is exactly what they’re for!”

“Dude, ghosts,” Tucker emphasized. “The acts aside, ghosts have an ability called overshadowing. It lets us possess people. Do you want to deal with a possessed Wonder Woman? The correct answer is no. Nobody does.”

Jason crossed his arms and studied Tucker. He breathed in and out once, and then twice. 

“So Manes said the GIW operate more to the west,” he mused, quite a bit calmer. “Where exactly should I avoid?”

“Illinois and Wisconsin for sure, Iowa is a so-so depending on the season. Consider it ‘visit at your own risk’. There’s also a hotspot in Oregon that they haven’t quite picked up on yet but a lot of people are worried that it’s only a matter of time,” Tucker rattled off, the maps of GIW activity zipping through his mind letting him answer easily. “The only exception is Amity Park. Ghosts are really common there and it’s where the GIW got started, but it’s also where they have the least amount of success.” 

“Amity Park?” Jason tilted his head. There was a spark of curiosity in him, the kind that made you want to know everything.

“Never search that up,” Tucker advised, knowing intimately all the triggers that search would trip. “I can get you a map if you’re interested in relocating.” 

“I think it’s been long enough,” Tucker thought.

“No thanks,” Jason backtracked quickly. “I’m happy in Gotham.”

Sam, on the ladder, switched back into her human form and climbed up the top few rungs. 

“Hey guys,” she said. 

Jason rose from the box he’d been sitting on and looked her over with keen eyes. “Did you get injured?” he asked with worry.

“No I- gah!”

Sam’s hold on the ladder slackened and Tucker shot over to grab her. If not for him and Danny, who’d been invisible just below her, she would’ve fallen. 

The fear was back. 

“Sam you have to switch back,” Danny thought quickly. It hadn’t become overwhelming yet but even in the few seconds that she was human it had grown at an alarming rate. Soon, like before, it would spiral out of control.

Sam wanted to but Jason was right there.

“Come on Sam, we’ll figure it out later. Change back. It’s not worth it,” Tucker insisted. Danny had reservations but he shoved them aside. He could deal with Jason if necessary.

“Going ghost!” Sam gasped. The rings enveloped her and once again the fear abated.

“Oh thank the Ancients!” Tucker said.

“Gah,” she groused. “What’s wrong with me?”

“I think you have some explaining to do.”

Three heads swiveled towards Jason.

They really didn’t have to- Sam’s knee jerk reaction was to scowl and say they didn’t owe him jack but… he felt so unwillingly fragile in a way that made him feel like failure, likely unused to situations where he didn’t have an upper hand. That made him fidgety and angry and the little bit of his guard that had fallen rose back up and doubled in height. Tucker winced. They didn’t want to intimidate him. With a sigh Sam made up her mind- what he’d seen was pretty damning anyway. 

Danny shifted back to visibility seeing as the gig was up. “Oh come on! We didn’t last two hours,” he complained.

“I’m a halfa,” Sam admitted slowly. “And there are only five of us in existence. So I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself.”

“Wait, so what’s wrong?” Danny carefully asked out loud. If there was one secret more well kept than the existence of halfa, it was the existence of their mental connection.

Sam grimaced. “I got hit with that fear stuff. It’s totally shut down my human side.”

Jason wasn’t that easy to divert. “Wait no, back up. Halfa? Explain.”

“Halfas are just that, half human, half ghost, and a well kept secret from the living,” Tucker said, eyeing Jason meaningfully. “Only two humans know.”

Sam, feeling bitter that she’d messed up again tonight muttered sourly, “I can flip between the living and dead. That’s unique to halfa.”

Jazz had known almost from the beginning- she’d figured it out early on and had committed to their corner ever since. Valarie was less accidental; the trio had decided to come clean for the sake of communication after too many close calls and while it had caused a few bumps in the beginning, overall their teamwork with the Red Huntress had improved. Even then, she’d known about Vlad and Dani so the concept of halfa was one she was already familiar with.

“So what am I then?” Jason asked. “I’m human but with a… core.” He was trying to mask his anxiousness at the question but said core was broadcasting his emotions loud and clear.

“We don’t know,” Danny said bluntly. 

“But we know someone who might,” Tucker added. “Have you ever wanted to visit the Ghost Zone?” 

“We know a doctor or two,” Sam elaborated. “You know, ghost doctors.”

Jason’s core fluctuated with irritation and a helplessness that was quickly converted into anger. “Great. Fantastic. So you don’t know what I am. Well I do and guess what? It’s called a zombie, kids.”

Danny shook his head. “You’re not a zombie, we’ve seen those.”

“What kind of undead are you then?” Jason questioned, staring pointedly at Tucker as he fiddled absently with his PDA. 

“Er,” Danny said, looking at his partners.

“He’s kinda one of us,” Tucker said, though he really wasn’t an ecto-entity. Still, with the way they were classed by the acts, there was no difference between them.

“He might find out from another ghost anyway,” Sam acknowledged. 

“We’re all halfas, actually. Team Phantom, at your service!” Danny turned back to Jason with an exaggerated bow.

Jason had been cycling through different reactions yet seemed to circle back to anger frequently. A greater intensity rattled him at the new information, converting everything else into utter rage. “Ok back the fuck up. You’re all teenagers?” His words were drenched in dismay.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Danny retorted confidently. In his mind all the headlines declaring them menaces and calling their intentions into doubt flashed by. Tucker gave him a mental hug. “He doesn’t know Danny, he doesn’t get it.”

“Yes, an adult kid,” Sam grumbled. “How innocent and unawares.”

“You three threw yourselves into a dangerous situation for no goddamn reason.” 

The deceptively quiet statement was razor-sharp and overwhelmed with reverberating sentiments full of pain.

This was, for some reason, quite personal to him. 

‘Upset child,’ their internal alarms rang, ‘do something!’

“We know about unnecessary risks,” Danny said at length. 

“We just mistook the liminal guy for a ghost,” Sam nodded.

“And ghosts are our responsibility,” Tucker finished. “We wouldn’t have stepped in otherwise. Like you said before, the locals had it under control.”

Jason grit his teeth and then deflated, taking a deep breath. “And you have no one else who could’ve done it? There’s no ghost police? You kids don’t have any mentors?” 

“Naw, we’re self taught,” Tucker said proudly. That was the wrong thing to say as Jason’s emotions constricted into a tight ball of frustration and fury.

“We had to step up. No one else would or could,” Danny explained gloomily. It wasn’t like they had wanted to do this. That made the already heavy emotions in Jason’s core even denser. 

“Gah. Okay, different topic. How am I supposed to get rid of the fear stuff? I can’t exactly go to a hospital,” Sam asked, changing the topic to something that would hopefully distract the pit of volatile emotion that was growing inside of Jason.

Jason jumped on the issue presented to him, more than happy for the distraction. “Usually there’s an antidote. This is a new variant so it might take a few weeks before an updated antidote is made.”

“Crud,” Danny cursed.

Sam sighed.

“We can say your grandmother took you to the officials and tell your grandmother you avoided the attack or something,” suggested Tucker.

Just as he finished Jason offered, “I could get Bruce to pay for a private physician.”

“Too risky,” Sam dismissed. “Our vitals are different. Besides, there are rumors that he funds the bats and the last thing we want to do is get near them.”

“Hm,” Jason hummed. He seemed to settle on something,resolving to do some unknown thing, before he spoke again. “Lesson one kids, lying. I’ll take the money and move it to make it look like a physician was involved. That way the story holds up. You ideally want three to four layers but in this case, two isn’t a bad place to start.”

“Won’t your dad mind?” worried Tucker.

With a smirk Jason said, “Not at all.”

“Great? But what do you want in return?” Sam asked suspiciously. 

“Just tell me how to get to the ghost doctor and we’ll call it even,” Jason proposed.

“Oh. Right, well, that’s a whole other can of worms.”

👻 {Boo!)

“So to recap. Living age means nothing. Ghosts age like trees. You three are independent adults. I’m a ghost orphan because hell if anyone knows. Nobody will care about that and if I go to the Zone, of which there are only two reliable ways to get there and they’re both in Amity, I’ll get mobbed and forcefully adopted and never see earth again. Did I miss anything?”

“No, that’s about it,” Tucker said too cheerfully. 

Jason rubbed his eyes and leaned back against the box he’d sat in front of when the trio had first launched into their long winded explanation. 

“I can adopt you. It’s… probably the best option anyway,” Danny offered hopefully, the very tip of his spectral tail twitching. “Ghosts won’t try to be malicious but they will forget how humans work. As a halfa there’s no risk of that from me and I’m really strong.”

“We. We’re a packaged deal,” Sam stubbornly interjected. 

“Oh boy,” Tucker exhaled. “Guys we’re not ready for this and there’s no way he’s going to agree-“

“Maybe. What does ghost adoption entail?”

Danny was more than happy to answer.

“We’d be your ghost guardians so we’d check up on you. We’d also do health stuff like cycle ectoplasm through your proto-core since it can’t pump on its own yet. And bonding stuff, you know, like play fighting. Ghosts love play fighting,” he jumped to explain. There was a powerpoint with the information and a mini Jazz in his head as he went through it. “But since we have human parts still we can watch movies and stuff, that should also work. Your emotions might get a little off balance since that happens as a core grows and we’d eat the extra. Also-“

“Hang on, eat my core? That thing might be the only reason I’m alive!” interrupted Jason with a recoil. 

At the startled anger-fear that he felt Danny rushed to explain but Tucker, who was more composed, spoke first. “That wasn’t what he meant. By eating the extra stuff around your core we’re trying to stabilize it. Ectoplasm is linked to emotion and too much of anything is bad. You can’t feel one emotion all the time but if you tend toward a specific emotion, you might generate too much of one kind of ectoplasm. Think of it like pruning the dead stems off a plant. It doesn’t hurt at all and helps keep a plant, or core in this case, balanced and healthy.”

“I hate that I know that,” Tucker said miserably, thinking of the plant example he’d just used. Sam gloated.

Jason turned that over for a moment before he sighed. “Alright. What else?”

“One last thing. Once- if we do this our cores will start generating stuff for you to eat too. It’s kinda like baby food for ghostlings,” Danny said with a grin at Jason’s perturbed expression.

“Don’t you kids need it? For your own cores or whatever?” Jason questioned with a frown.

Sam almost snorted. “Adult ghosts, remember?”

“And you don’t have to answer now, the offer’s always open,” Tucker placated at the sudden weariness from Jason. “You got lucky with the timing actually- the Christmas Truce is going to happen soon and nobody is allowed to fight during the truce. If you really don’t want to be adopted you could go to the Zone to see the doctors on Christmas.”

“They’ll totally follow you until the truce is up though,” Sam cautioned. 

“I can lose them,” Jason declared without a hint of hesitation. “I’m going during the truce.”

Danny sucked in a breath. It was hard to ignore the fact that there was what amounted to a sick, starving child in front of him and he couldn’t do anything about it. It was nauseating. To say he was disappointed Jason opted against adoption would be a gross understatement.

“We don’t know for sure yet,” Tucker said, though it rang hollow. Even without a more experienced eye they could all tell that his core was in a delicate state from proximity alone.

Still, Tucker had done the right thing in giving Jason the options. Meeting the medical yetis during the truce, however, ushered in a new set of problems.

“The party is at my lair this year,” Danny reminded them. “I kinda halfa be there.”

“This isn’t the time for puns,” Sam hissed. 

“He’s right though. As the new king he can’t exactly skip out again,” Tucker sighed without any remorse. He was looking forward to it and had been since last year. “Also Danny, you already used that one tonight.”

Danny elected to ignore the critique of his puns. “But it kinda works out, right? The yetis will be there. We have time to set up doctor’s equipment. We just have to ask if they’d be willing to help,” he pointed out.

“And if you ask they’ll say yes,” Sam thought. 

Danny felt conflicted after that comment. He didn’t make them do anything but if he so much as mentioned something in passing, they would go out of their way to do it.

“It won’t take all night,” consoled Tucker. “They’ll get to party with everyone else.”

“Alright, works for us,” Sam said aloud. “On Christmas we’ll take you to the Zone.”

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore @iglowinggemma28 @manapeer @azzysflowergarden @notwhat-i-seemtobe @whobee7 @trippingovermyfeet @stormhaven257 @imsociallyanxiousgetoverit @passivedecept @lovetheryu @ever-after-aaa @mysteriousooze @wegetitethan @cyber-geist @t-nayira @wisteriavines @starscreamlover

Next: Chapter 7

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 3

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 2

Next: Chapter 4

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd (mentioned), Frostbite (brief)

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

Warning for panicking/fear, sort of admitting it and being overwhelmed!

👻 {Chapter 3 Below!)

Sam wasn’t blind to the looks she received as she returned to her parents’ side, from the other guests nor from her parents. Her mother in particular eyed her speculatively, but thankfully she didn’t say anything about Sam’s disappearance. 

Yet.

The rest of the night went smoothly. Sam shut the boys out of her senses so they’d sleep. She knew all too well that if she didn’t they would stay awake to keep her company. Any other night she wouldn’t have minded terribly much but they were heading out to the Far Frozen tomorrow, without her, and they needed to be alert. She ignored her aching feet and almost reconsidered, mind begging for a distraction, but she reminded herself that somethings were worth suffering through. If she was lucky one of the boys would start dreaming soon. Though mainly incomprehensible, a dream would be preferable to hearing the woman behind her prattle on about the various scandals surrounding the host’s sons. The woman didn’t even have the decency to mention Jason, rendering Sam’s eavesdropping to be for naught. 

👻 {Boo!)

The next day Sam fussed at Tucker and Danny as they prepared to enter the Ghost Zone.

“-and don’t forget the Fenton phones,” she instructed redundantly. Jack and Maddie Fenton had been thoroughly distracted with the ghosts that had ventured into Amity in their absence and had taken off immediately that morning. Their nonattendance worked out wonderfully for the trio who intended to seek out Frostbite; they couldn’t use the portal if the elder Fentons were in the lab.

Standing in a familiar basement laboratory in Amity, Danny and Tucker gave one another long suffering looks. 

“Calm down Sam,” Danny said.

“Between you and Jazz, it’s like I’m hearing double,” added Tucker.

There was a spark of amusement from Danny and a welling of irritation from Sam. “I’m just saying, historically something always goes wrong with these types of things,” she mentally scowled. 

Tucker waved her concern off. “Relax! I’m not saying you’re wrong but worrying about something that hasn’t even happened yet is-“ and he added a sentiment, a feeling of it-wastes-time-and-energy-that-I-don’t-have.

Danny hesitated. “Jazz is helping.” Nonverbally, he added that she had a modified Fenton phone through a series of impressions. “You’ll know if something horrible happens.”

That was not reassuring at all and Sam let them know that. 

Usually the trio relied on their link. They never found out how exactly it came to be or how to replicate it, but they agreed it had something to do with all of them being caught up on the same accident. Distance didn’t affect it, neither did time travel. There was only one circumstance in which they were out of reach, and that was when the trio was split between the human world and the Ghost Zone. The connection became unstable, not unlike a flip phone call with poor reception in a thunderstorm. Glimpses and fragments could filter through, but the link was largely dominated by a tingly unpleasant static which was often times accompanied by a headache. Needless to say, they rarely went to the zone nor returned without each other. Some situations, however, called for splitting up and thus they utilized the modified Fenton phones. Sam hadn’t dared take hers on the trip to Gotham and now she was sorely regretting it. Everything she’d know would be second hand through Jazz, which was jarring for someone who was accustomed to constant first person updates in real time. 

All she could do was nag at them and make sure they were as prepared as they could be. 

“We’ll be fine Sam,” Danny assured her as he strapped some ecto-something or other to his side. He felt a tad giddy- even after all this time he still felt cool ‘gearing up’ for their missions. 

Fondly, Sam let him know he was a total dork and was echoed by Tucker. 

The mellow moment passed and was replaced with a tense air as the boys stepped up to the swirling neon portal. Its spirals were hypnotizing in the worst way, the ebb and flow of the ectoplasm shrinking and stretching like a breathing, writhing mass. Ironically, it made the portal to the world of the dead look alive. Even from Gotham, Sam could feel it’s glow pressing into her eyes, demanding attention, and her heart fluttered anxiously. 

Every time she looked at it, an unbidden wave of green raced at her like a raging bull, engulfed her. Every time she looked at it, the accident replayed in her mind for a brief disconcerting second.

Time had taken the edge off of the emotions that assaulted her when faced with the portal. Tucker was still unnerved on occasion too, and he tended to squeeze his eyes shut whenever they passed through it. Danny though… he’d been on the inside and hadn’t seen what they had during the accident. He always felt excitement and dread but not the same fear Tucker and Sam had. 

It looked different from the inside, he said. It didn’t look like the portal. 

“Alright, we’re going through,” Tucker announced, cutting into the tenseness before it could become suffocating. “I’d say wish us luck but I think Sam needs it more.”

Sam mentally scowled at him as Danny watched mirthfully. “Get out of here,” she told them.

“We’ll be back,” Danny promised. 

“‘Course we will,” agreed Tucker.

As they went through the swirling vortex there was a cacophonous wail and then the bond was wrapped in a muting array.

“Stay safe…” Sam thought quietly.

But she knew from the crackles and sense of empty that they hadn’t heard her.

👻 {Boo!)

She hadn’t been to a gala alone, really on her own, for three years. It was odd but not unnavigateable. After all, the times she’d had to put up with them alone outnumbered the times she’d had Danny and Tucker with her. It should’ve been easy to fall back into practiced habit, especially with the predictable behavior that was expected of her.

The operative word was ‘should’.

Sam had already been feeling foul and the constant static with the occasional burst of clarity across the link only made her more so. Her headache was diligently working its way up to migraine and she was miserable. She’d gotten glimpses of shock, boredom, confusion, and excitement but she didn’t know what any of it meant. 

Whirling the drink in her hand, Sam watched the slivers of light glinting and reflecting with each turn. It was kind of hypnotizing. It was easy to ignore the shuffling and the oddly rising voices of the room if she only concerned herself with the little lights in her cup.

Her uninterrupted daze didn’t last long.

One moment she was struggling not to fidget, making an effort to keep a straight back and a serene air, refusing to shift her weight lest she appear skittish. The next moment she and every other guest whirled toward the sound of a crash and shattering glass. 

There were cries of dismay as a handful of black clad figures invaded the room, wielding guns and oddly, bug sprayers. Sam counted seven. 

“Nobody move!” one of them barked.

They wasted no time in taking hostages and Sam began to sweat. For all the variety of situations Team Phantom could handle and had been involved with, common human crime was almost entirely unfamiliar to them. She’d always been one for action but if her moonlighting as a Phantom had taught her one thing, it was that she had to consider her actions lest she make a situation worse. Sam had no idea how to approach this. 

One of the infiltrators stepped into the center of the room. A wide ring was cleared around him as people shuffled backwards. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “no one has to die tonight.”

Sam’s spine crawled. Trepidation. Anxiety. And an emotion she eternally loathed to admit she harbored: fear.

There were so many people- Sam’s eyes darted around the room.

So many people could get hurt.

A voice that sounded suspiciously like Tucker pointed out that this wasn’t her responsibility. Team Phantom focused mostly on human and ghost interaction in Amity and a timid Danny voice that was most-certainly-not-really-Danny asked if it was worth risking her, and their, safety.

Sam knew her life was fifty levels of weird and the fact that she had caricatures of her friends in her head after a few mere hours of their real counterpart’s absences was… it was something. She didn’t know. Jazz would’ve had a field day pouring over whatever that implied.

But was acting it worth it? If she went ghost and did something to get on the GIW’s radar the connection between Sam Manson and Manes would be scrutinized too closely. And if she was caught? It would be game over. Not to mention, she glared around the room through the pounding in her skull, that they might scan the guests. She didn’t want to drag Jason into anything ghostly, much less due to the necessity of escaping the government. And with Batman’s notorious stance on metas… well, she wasn’t a meta and the GIW sure as hell wouldn’t clarify that for him. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the so called ‘world’s greatest detective’.

So Manes couldn’t do anything here without the risk of Major Problems For Everyone, but could Sam Manson?  

Whatever Sam could do needed to be done soon. She needed to act. She’d done hostage negotiations before. Granted, it was with ghosts, but she remembered the basic setup. Listen to the demand and try to talk with them to find a compromise. 

Except she realized that the spokesperson had been talking the entire time she’d been grappling with herself and if he’d made any demands she’d missed it-

Sam wasn’t prone to panic, but with the stress of her parents breathing down her neck, Danny’s annual Christmas gloom, her and Tuckers desolation and vulnerability following the scramble, the mystery of Jason and the possibility that he could out her as Manes since she hadn’t realized he was human-

She couldn’t handle it.

It was all piling up and spilling over. So she might have been panicking. Just a little.

But she was a halfa, she had powers no human nor ghost possessed. She had a responsibility to help people. She had to do something. Sam wasn’t helpless. But as she stood there, struck perfectly still with a steady rhythmic pulse of pain crawling through her body and blurring the edges of her vision, with the gaping void where the frayed connection faded to nix, she might as well have been. 

👻 {Boo!)

Danny thought that their expedition was going pretty well. He and Tucker had made it to the Far Frozen nearly unmolested, though the brief altercation they’d had with Baby Face Boyle was hardly worth mentioning. The natural interference of the zone made the trio’s bond erratic and the side of headache was always awful, but with Tucker nearby it wasn’t so bad; the connection liked having him close when Sam was out of reach. 

Frostbite and the others had welcomed them warmly (heh) and while Tucker basked in the attention, Danny was more bashful. He was still a little embarrassed from the mishaps that had occurred when they’d trained him to use his ice. The ghost yetis didn’t seem to mind though, so long as there were no ice usage demonstrations involved, and were more than happy to help. Danny and Tucker had barely opened their mouths to ask if they could talk cores and Frostbite was already ushering them into the caverns that housed the medical facilities. 

After clarifying that no, Sam was alright and no, no one was about to cease, they explained the situation the best they could. 

Frostbite and the medic yeti were helpful, walking them through the basics of cores (though admittedly, it wasn’t anything they hadn’t generally known) and things like ectoplasm circulation and core surface density and the regeneration rate to core size to ambient ectoplasm ratio.

(Danny knew all that and he knew Tucker did too. His parents had cut up more than one blob ghost and they made sure the trio, Danny especially, knew what they’d found out each and every time.)

Still, they listened and Danny took notes on a little notepad. Tucker fidgeted, absently reaching for his PDA a few times before his fingers would curl and his arm would retract. 

The proto-core part of the lecture was interesting, it was new, and both halfas listened with rapt attention. Humans, Frostbite said, had fully defined traits. Cores were defined and were defining, much like human ambition. Unlike human anything, however, cores were ectoplasmic. So when humans died and the natural barriers of life were forgone, those definitions were free to collect ectoplasm and forge a core with the human’s traits. 

Proto-cores differed. They had a porous structure and would be hard pressed to preserve outside of ectoplasm rich environments without feeding often which the trio had known from the infamous ghostling sitting mission. What they hadn’t known was how exactly a proto-core came to be. Frostbite explained that they were made by the joining of two or more cores and were an echo of the parent cores, but only in the most basic structure. Ghostlings had no ties. They had no obsessions, no ambitions of their own. Those they would define on their own as their cores grew in size and strength. 

“So wait. If two or more ghosts have to mush their cores together to make a proto-core,” Danny puzzled, “how does it get a body? Is that just a thing that happens over time?”

“The ghostling’s parents donate their own ectoplasm to help form the body. You are aware of where your ectoplasm is, even when it’s separated from you,” the yeti medic shared. Tucker and Danny grimaced. It was weird, knowing exactly where your ghost-blood had been spilled, and they knew it too well. It was still a part of you even when apart from you. That made the samples of team Phantom’s ectoplasm in his parent’s lab extra weird. They could even tell when the elder Fentons were running experiments on the samples.

“This is because it is still a part of you,” the yeti continued, unknowingly echoing Danny’s thoughts. “When given to offspring, it acts like a signal that a ghostling’s parent can sense over long distances. In a place like the Infinite Realms, being able to locate your ghostling is of the utmost importance.”

There was a bit more from the yetis about parents cycling the ghostling’s ectoplasm and how avowing worked, but Tucker was quick to circle back to body formation.

“M’kay, but what if the proto-core doesn’t have parents? Could it find a living body or something?” he asked.

The yetis frowned. “What ghostling wouldn’t have parents?” the medic asked, baffled at the notion.

“There is no such thing,” Frostbite agreed. 

Tucker and Danny glanced at each other.

Danny fiddled with his pen. “So, hypothetically of course, there’s a zero percent chance that a human could have a proto-core?”

“Before you, Great One, I would’ve said yes. Now however? I will say it would be extraordinarily unlikely.”

“Great,” Danny said with a slump.

Across the link, Tucker wondered if the core was attached to Jason or if it actually was Jason’s core. Danny jotted the possibility down.

They thanked the yetis and took a quick break to check in with Jazz, who pointed out that Frostbite might be able to help Tucker with his PDA. 

“He’s kinda like a ghost doctor, right? You and Sam can’t be the only ghosts with techno-parts,” she reasoned to Tucker. “So ask about it! He might be able to help you.”

Hope fizzled up  in Tucker’s chest. Danny perked up too- he didn’t have any integrated technology like Sam and Tucker, but he knew their misery firsthand.

“That’s a great idea! Thanks Jazz,” Danny beamed.

“Do you really think Frostbite could help us?” Tucker asked, cradling his PDA. The accident had fused Tucker to his PDA and Sam to her camera. Now in ghost form and out, the devices were a part of them. 

On the outside the PDA looked fine, new even, but to Tucker it felt like he’d been laying on his arm for hours and it had fallen asleep. But unlike when a limb fell asleep, the awareness never returned and the pins and needles sensation never went away. That was on top of the PDA being a hacked mess.

Ghosts like Shulker and Technus heavily utilized technology, but more in the sense that they manipulated the use of and overshadowed the tech rather than it being attached to their cores in some way. If Shulker’s suit was destroyed, he could make a new one with minute complication provided he could get parts. Sam and Tucker, on the other hand, couldn’t just replace their camera and PDA respectively. 

Danny turned to the yetis, who had moved to a table and were hovering over something. “Hey Frostbite, so Tucker and I were wondering-”

The sudden spike of intense emotions across the bond through the unwavering obscurity shocked Tucker and then Danny, both of whom began to feel anxious as they caught glimpses of Sam’s mind.

The pain of the interrupted bond. A paralyzing fog of confusion and reactive anger. The urge to act and the inability to.

Fear. Overwhelming, all-encompassing fear.

And then it winked out, lost to the sea of static. 

Tucker’s stunned dismay mirrored his own.

“-if we could borrow the infi-map!”

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore @iglowinggemma28 @manapeer @azzysflowergarden @notwhat-i-seemtobe @whobee7 @trippingovermyfeet @stormhaven257

There might not be a chapter next week, and if there is then expect a shorter one as this upcoming week will be chaotic for me.

Next: Chapter 4

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 9

AO3 Link: here

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 8

Current Characters: Jason Todd, Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jazz Fenton

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

JPGPV = Jazzy-Pants Ghost Proof Vehicle

Warnings: Cursing. Discussion and description of the death picture and the portal incident. And technically someone steals an organ?

👻 {Chapter 9 Below!)

Jason was perturbed.

A lot had happened over the past week or so and it could be summed up as goddamned history coming to haunt him.

His history with the pits, his history with Bruce. History repeating itself in the form of three undead teenagers.

Jason let his head fall and he clutched the glowing camera a little tighter.

He had no doubt the picture he’d found was of something sinister . Honestly, he wasn’t sure how they’d survived something so horrific. Manes’ hand was literally melting . Not to mention the boys…

(Halfa. Half human, half ghost. He had a suspicion and he prayed he was wrong. His nightmares were going to feature screaming kids, dying kids, for a while; he could already tell.)

Why were they in a lab? It had to be intentional. Why else had Phantom been in lab coveralls? Why else would Manes have been documenting it? Were they sent into that tube to test it, whatever it was?

And the green.

He’d know that green anywhere.

History, over and over.

Dramatic irony unfolding. 

Squeezing his eyes shut, he wondered if this was what Bruce had felt like, loath as he was to think it. Seeing those kids and knowing they could do better if he steered them right… knowing that they were going to get themselves killed (again?) without him.

He was despairing, he knew, about how unfair it all was. While their situations seemed too similar to be comfortable, their attitudes couldn’t have been more differed than his own. He didn’t see himself in them so much as he saw three versions of Dick. Optimist. Hopeful. Helpful. Unlike his dear older brother though, these kids were utterly alone.

Usually he wasn’t so doubtful. He’d always been a decisive person. Acting with impulse and anger wasn’t the best approach for everything, he knew, but not once had he been called hesitant. It was just that this would be a huge deviation from his norm, not to mention he would have to hide the ghost thing from the others on top of the kids. He’d have to change nearly everything; his schedule, his tactics, his habits, and the list went on. 

God damn it. He was lying to himself. He wasn’t still considering it. The minute he offered the gremlins advice in the attic some part of him knew that he’d already decided to take them under his wing until he cleaned up whatever the hell was going on.

He just didn’t want to accept it. How long had he raged at Bruce for taking on young sidekicks? How much of a hypocrite could he be? 

Then again, the situation was totally different, what with them having to fear for their safety in a way even he, a crime alley kid, never had to. Gotham was rough, but the dark city would be kinder to them than Amity. Even the government didn’t so much as breathe in Gotham without the damned Bat’s say so.

The problem, overwhelmingly, was that not only did he have no idea who they were as humans, but they seemed to take their haunting of Amity very seriously. Something told him that they would never compromise on defending their city.

He could admire that. 

Jason set the camera down on the empty couch next to him.

He could also despise it. 

He ignored the part of him that sneered at himself. What could he possibly teach them when he had so thoroughly failed to even keep himself alive? 

He wasn’t perfect- hell, nowhere close- but he’d be damned if he let the trio go off on their own unless he was completely, 100% positive they could handle themselves.

Glancing to the clock, he wondered when exactly said trio would appear. They’d hastily promised transport before they’d left but had denied to mention a time. He didn’t know if the waiting was making his apprehension worse.

He was about to go into a whole other dimension.

A canyon that ate people? A dark forest that claimed the lives of any who dared to approach? A series of shifting dunes that would swallow any hapless wanderers whole? All contained on crumbling, floating islands beneath a green sky?

A truce in that hellscape?

It was too surreal to picture. 

It was also surreal to think he had a ghost core, but considering the fucking circus that was his life, he shouldn’t have been surprised. He was still vainly hoping that there was some kind of a mistake. 

A line appeared in the air.

Jason stared at it.

It grew in size and light, eerie green light, began to spill from the forming cracks. Jason tensed as a bleached begloved hand reached out and then groped around the empty air for a moment before clasping onto the edge of the crack. It flexed and then a familiar head of pale wispy hair stuck through the growing hole that had materialized in the living room.

“Hi,” Phantom grinned toothily. 

Parts of the portal’s border crumbled and fell to the floor and the kid grimaced apologetically. “Sorry about that, I’m new to the whole portal thing.” 

“It’s fine,” Jason dismissed. He’d gotten worse than portal crumbs in the carpet.

“Well, come on. We have a few hours before we have to be anywhere but I figured you’d want to explore a little first.”

Jason hesitantly approached the giant crack hovering in the air and Phantom offered his hand. Jason wasn’t going to take it initially, but the kid seemed so serious. Hiding  his grin, he took the offered hand and Phantom nodded very solemnly.

It was kinda adorable. 

“Ok. We’re going through the zone to Amity, where you can hang out. Then later we’re going to go through either the fruitloop’s portal or the Fenton portal to the zone and meet the yetis. Hang on tight, I don’t think you’ll want to fly on your own here.”

Jason couldn’t fly, but he could grapple just fine. He wasn’t going to let the kid attempt to carry him. But Phantom didn’t try to. Instead, he held onto Jason’s hand and helped him up into the portal.

The first thing he saw, besides Phantom, was an endless expanse of an unnatural green. 

It was a world of Lazarus.

Ghouley had said as much, but seeing it was a whole other thing.

And as he looked around at the disembodied doors and isolated islands, Jason knew there was no way a grapple would do anything. Ghouley had made it sound like neighboring islands were a skip and a jump from one another.

Then again, maybe they were when flight was factored in.

“I can’t fly,” Jason admitted. He’d need Phantom’s help to get anywhere.

“Not yet,” Phantom said, eyes twinkling with mirth. He pulled Jason the rest of the way through the portal and it closed behind them. Instead of plummeting to the abyss below they hovered, suspended in the foreign air. 

“Anyone can fly in the zone, even humans. It takes some getting used to, but we have time.”

“Not worried about a ghost snatching me up?” Jason snarked.

Phantom hummed. “Not really. Manes and Ghouley are running interference.”

He tugged Jason, who realized the kid was still holding his hand. It didn’t feel like they were moving and Jason had no way to tell if they were.

“So firstly, the Ghost Zone, or the Infinite Realms, isn’t like space. In space there is microgravity because everything naturally produces a tiny amount of gravity. It’s because particles are like that and they have levels of attraction- eh hem. There’s also time in space and there is a connection between the gravitational field and the perception of time and- uh. Anyway, there is no microgravity here unless the object or person is from a living world, and there is no time.” 

“Seems simple enough,” Jason said sarcastically. “No gravity and no time. Got it.”

Phantom nodded. “Yes, you have to keep that in mind. And now the fun part, flight!”

It was not fun. Phantom, for all his enthusiasm, was dreadfully awful at giving instructions. 

“You gotta feel like you’re moving.”

“Maybe pretend everything is magnets?”

“Have you ever flown? It’s like a weightlessness. Picture that…”

“Think of a line graph.” 

“Tilt forward? I mean you don’t have to, it’s more about what you think moving is like.”

He’d pictured soaring through the air, he imagined free falling, he remembered the little moments of weightlessness he’d experienced throughout his life.

Phantom was stupidly earnest with his instructions and relaxed the longer Jason struggled. He even started smirking, the shithead, but at least he didn’t make any comments. 

After at least two hours of struggling, he still could not fly (much to his irritation). He couldn’t even vaguely float in the direction he wanted to go. Phantom assured him it was fine, that he’d learn in time. 

He would admit, he was pretty pissed he made absolutely no progress. There wasn’t time, the appointment was today . And if he couldn’t move, how the hell was he supposed to escape ghosts?

Phantom hovered, watching him with an unnervingly unblinking stare. “Let’s head to Amity. There’s plenty to do there,” he suggested.

Amity. Fuck, he forgot that’s where the kids were from. They probably had people they were ignoring while he tried and failed to get his ass in gear.

“Sure,” he agreed unhappily. He didn’t want to, not really, but he wasn’t going to make the kids miss out on Christmas. 

Phantom blinked slowly, “We don’t have to, you know. We can keep working on flying.”

“I think I’m done with flying for now.”

Phantom’s eyes lit up, literally, and he grabbed Jason’s arm. “Come on,” he said, pulling Jason, “we’ve got to stop by the Nasty Burger. It’s always open.”

“No holiday plans?” he asked carefully. 

Phantom shook his head with a sour expression. “Just avoiding my parents.”

“Damn.”

Interesting.

👻 {Boo!)

The ‘fruitloop’ portal was very different from Phantom’s portal. Where Phantom’s portal was more akin to going through a broken mirror the other portal was smooth and the rim was circular… it looked like a boom tube made out of Lazarus waters. 

“The fruitloop is very distracted,” Phantom said smugly. “So we’re free to go.”

They slipped through the portal and Jason was met with the visage of a lab. 

“Oh shiver me timbers,” Phantom spat not three steps in. “You need to hide- Shulker got away.”

He ushered Jason into a- very menacing- tube shaped pod and shut the side almost all the way before dashing back to the portal. And he wasn’t a moment too soon- a large figure walked through the wall and immediately locked eyes with Phantom.

“Whelp,” the robot with a fiery green mohawk said.

“Shulker,” Phantom returned. He seemed to glow brighter for a moment and then-

Something crashed over him, something cold and ridged and hefty. But… it felt good, even if he didn’t know what it was; it felt refreshing, not unlike a mint. 

It felt solid.

It felt strong.

It felt safe.

“Just passing through,” Shulker grumbled, glowing a bit brighter himself. 

Beneath the cold was another feeling, something cool and smooth and metallic with sharp edges. Belatedly, Jason realized that the two sets of impressions were from the two ghosts staring each other down.

Phantom squinted distrustfully at the other and then nodded. “It is truce day,” he said.

“Otherwise I’d have your pelt,” Shulker sneered in apparent agreement. He cast an equally suspicious look at Phantom before making his way to and through the fruitloop portal, the feel of sharp metal vanishing with him.

Phantom’s glow paled and the heavy cold vanished immediately. He flew back to the pod and opened the door. “I’m so sorry, I know it can be uncomfortable to be around heavy moods but I needed to make sure Shulker didn’t notice you and would leave,” he grimaced, biting his lip. 

“It’s fine,” Jason said, voice more strained than he would have liked. “The moods are…?”

“Oh. Like, uh, ghost auras. But we call them moods.”

That didn’t really explain anything but Phantom was more concerned with getting them out of the lab. He took Jason’s hand again. “Here, I’ll need to hang on to you just a bit longer, okay?” He didn’t wait for a response and the strangest feeling spread over him. Phantom summarily plunged them through the wall. It was disorienting, to say the least.

It made sense because ghosts, but come on .

They went through the wall, down into the floor, then through dirt before finally popping up on a grassy patch outside of the back of a mansion.

“Looks like our ride is here,” Phantom said cheerfully, motioning to a car (if it could be called that) which looked like it wasn’t legal to be on the road. A large acronym, JPGPV, was printed on the side, though it failed to hint at what exactly the vehicle was.

And were those tank treads ?

“Is that safe?” he asked dubiously. He’d been in a lot of vehicles and never had he felt so vaguely threatened by one before.

“Jazz is driving,” replied Phantom. That didn’t explain anything.

They approached the car (if one was being generous) and Jason ended up in the back seat next to Phantom. The driver’s seat was occupied by a young woman, presumably Jazz, who was probably at the tail end of her teens. The passenger’s side had a dark-skinned boy with glasses who was fiddling with a futuristic looking sci-fi gun.

Jason did a double take.

(He almost didn’t recognize the face he’d spent the morning studying without the pained contortions.)

“No trouble?” Jazz asked, looking at Jason through the rearview mirror.

“Nope,” Phantom said, popping the p. He buckled into his seat.

Jazz nodded. “Great. That’s good. Anyway, nice to meet you Jason. I hope the trip wasn’t too bad. The zone can be overwhelming the first few times.”

She started the ignition and began backing out of the mansion’s rear driveway.

From the pointed ears and fangs, he was going to guess she was a meta.

“Nice to meet you too,” he said awkwardly. “And the zone was fine.”

“He can’t fly,” Phantom butted in gleefully. 

The kid in front, who had to be Ghouley, snorted.

“Hey, it was his first time! And Danny, human,” Jazz said.

There was a flash as the rings manifested and the messy haired boy Jason had glimpsed the other day sat slouched in the seat next to his. 

(This kid might have died, a nauseous part of him whispered. If he was right then this kid had died. He’d died screaming .)

“Sorry, forgot,” Phantom, Danny said.

That was progress.

“Danny, huh?” Jason said.

“He didn’t even introduce himself?” Jazz grumbled. “He’s Danny, or Phantom as I believe he introduced himself as. I’m Jazz, his older sister. And this is Tucker.” 

“I’m Ghouley,” Tucker said, never looking up from the little output display on the gun. “Manes- er, Sam, can’t go human with the fear stuff or she’d be here too.”

Danny, Tucker, and Sam from Amity Park. Now he was getting places. 

They’d tried to lie about it at first, and now they were being so open about it. He wondered what had changed.

“What you got there?” he asked, motioning to Tucker.  

The kid grimaced. “An ecto gun. It’s specialized for tagging anything with a signature and doubles as a tracker. I’m trying to sabotage it but I need some more… stuff.”

Danny perked up. “I can take a crack at it.”

“Mom and Dad’ll be in and out of the lab all day,” Jazz reminded them. “You’ll have to distract them or steal the tools from Vlad’s.”

“Wait, no. I think you still have the emergency ghost tool repair kit from your birthday, right? There has to be a calibrator in there.”

“A calibrator would work but I was thinking of uploading an alternate signature directly to the gun, it would seem more like a mistake on their part…”

The three began chatting about the methods and logistics of sabotaging the gun and while Jason was no slouch, he couldn’t really follow along. 

“Why does this gun need to be sabotaged?” he asked during a lull in the conversation. “I’m birthday cake confused.”

The car burst into snickers. 

“You tried to curse, didn’t you?” Jazz asked, amusement dripping from every word.

Tucker twisted in his seat to see Jason. “Welcome to Amity, a nice place to live. You can’t curse, can’t say the ‘w’ word, and can’t live without ghost insurance.”

“The ‘w’ word is wish. Don’t say it, there’s a ghost genie named Desiree who grants the ‘w’ word monkey’s paw style,” Danny stage whispered.

“Wait, so I can’t strawberry curse? That’s rocky road!”

He was never letting anyone know about his time in Amity. The things coming out of his mouth were humiliating .

The snickering continued. 

He noted that they didn’t answer the question.

👻 {Boo!)

There was something wrong with Amity Park.

He grew up in Gotham, had died, was revived, got trained by assassins, and to this day spent his time running around with a mask to terrorize the city’s criminal underbelly like some kind of bad dream. Gotham had a lot on the daily, had seen a lot in her past, and so in theory he really shouldn’t have found something he wouldn’t have been able to handle. 

In theory.

They’d picked up some food from the Nasty Burger before sitting down on a little building overlooking a park. From this one vantage point there was more than enough to force him to reevaluate that theory. 

There were floating buildings. What the fuck was that about? Buildings didn’t float, not even the magic ones he’d seen. The sky was tinged green and the soil had purplish tints, not unlike the ghost realms or whatever the hell the Lazarus dimension was called, and there was an ambient lighting that didn’t seem to come from anywhere. And something was off. But… the grass was swaying gently, the sun was shining, and no matter how he looked about, something uncanny and just out of reach mocked him.

He set that aside and continued to observe. It seemed like Jazz wasn’t the only one with mutations- the people he saw at the park had mutations, all of them. Fangs and pointed ears and ash tinged skin, like they were teetering on the edge of oxygen deprivation. Glowing, sometimes flashing eyes. Pointy fingers. It was a city of vampires.

People would walk and flicker, as if they weren’t entirely there. The shadows moved on their own. There were a few cars without drivers. Ghost birds perched next to living ones on the power lines. 

Hence his conclusion: There was something wrong with Amity Park.

While at the end of the day he was categorized as a vigilante, he was also a detective.

“Amity is the most haunted place on earth,” Tucker shrugged when he asked what was going on with everything.

“How does haunting equate to all this?” Jason motioned to everything around him.

“In layman’s terms? Ghost juice.”

“Ghost juice,” he repeated flatly before casting his drink an overly suspicious glare.

It had the intended effect when Danny laughed lightly. “It’s everywhere. Food, water, air. Ectoplasm, I mean. It’s seeped into everything, not to mention that this world and the Ghost Zone kinda have joint custody of Amity? Everyone’s liminal at this point.”

Liminal. He’d read that word not too long ago when going over the Anti-Ecto Acts.

“Liminal? As in… ectocontaminated..?”

The whole damned city? That was sobering. 

Tucker sighed. “Pretty much. Ectocontaminated… no one calls it that except hunters. Speaking of, I don’t think I need to tell you that if you see the GIW, you need to run.”

“Sure, won’t make me look suspicious or anything.”

“Everyone runs now,” Danny commented morosely. “No one wants to risk being captured.”

Something tightened around his neck, something like a noose. “They just… take people?”

“We break them out,” Tucker supplied easily, like the government kidnapping people wasn’t a big deal. “They’ve never gotten too far. We won’t let them.”

We won’t let them. Firm. Unwavering. A statement that brooked no room for failure.

Fuck, he hoped the kids weren’t in over their heads.

The kids were very obviously in over their heads.

“I can feel the depression from here,” Manes said, phasing up through the roof. Jason couldn’t see her and made a show of looking around like a civilian.

“She’s staying invis. Can’t have Manes Phantom hanging out with Fenton and Foley,” Danny said, taking a bite of his burger.

He tucked away the names for later. “I thought you were Phantom?”

“And I thought you’d grab me something,” grumbled Sam.

Tucker, nose wrinkled, pulled out a burger, partially unwrapped it, and held it aloft as though it had personally slighted him. “One veggie burger,” he said with clear distaste.

Sam snatched it up.

“We’re sorta all Phantom?” shrugged Danny, answering his question. “We’ve got Danny Phantom, Manes Phantom, and Ghouley Phantom. It’s because no one knew our names at first and then we all kinda responded when people called for Phantom, so…”

“That’s not confusing at all,” Jason said dryly. 

“We know who people are talking to, unless they don’t know,” Sam said.

Good awareness then, he noted. He’d have to see how much, if any, of that translated to spatial awareness in a fight.

“Huh.”

Yeah, they definitely weren’t going to leave their city. And he couldn’t leave Crime Alley…

He’d propose the idea of sparring later. Nothing fancy, just some hand to hand to gauge how much they knew. Danny could make portals so it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that they could swing by Gotham or that he could pop into Amity for a few lessons. 

He didn’t want to mimic the old bat, but it had become commonplace for mentors to do their patrols and cases with their protégés. It was a tried and tested method. Briefly, he contemplated setting something up. He was a known ‘contact’ of Red Hoof after all, but if he let them shadow him on patrol… they could ‘feel’ his core from what Sam had said and he had no clue how to hide it. They’d know he was Red Hood in a heartbeat so… he’d have to tell them who he was. 

Red Hood was an anti-hero for a reason. He killed people. He didn’t think what he was doing was wrong, harsh maybe, but justified. Never had he shied away from violence.

Never had he given a psychopath the opportunity to hurt people, over and over again.

How could he tell three half-dead, possibly murdered, kids that he thought killing was okay?

(How many ghosts had he created?)

Yeah, no. He couldn’t tell them. He’d just have to do as regular old Jason. Besides, he wasn’t planning on sticking around for more than a few months anyway. Just however long it took to clear up the acts and whatever was wrong with his ghost side. There was no point in breaking the big identity rule. 

Jason shuffled the thought away and went back to his mental notebook. He’d made a lot of progress. Now he had names to investigate and since he was inside Amity, well, a little visit to the public library was in order. 

He side eyed the kids. The three were completely silent and the boy’s faces were eerily blank as they stared out over the park.

Hm. Alright.

He had a few things he wanted to do. 

1- break into the library. Comb through the newspapers and then hit the computers

2- find out more about the kids. Preferably, who set their deaths up and where it happened

2.5- make sure the kids were competent; if not, give pointers

3- figure out if the lab from the picture was related to the League of Assassins and Ra’s. There was no way that much Lazarus was a coincidence

4- destroy the lab of whoever had the tunnel (again, no one should be messing around with Lazarus waters. No one.)

The list would not be accomplished in one visit but Jason was confident that he’d be able to work through it. 

He stuffed the rest of his burger into his mouth, grimacing on the inside. That was his unhealthy treat for the week. Still, Danny had been so excited to swing by the Nasty Burger he couldn’t really say no. 

It wasn’t as good as Bat Burger, but it wasn’t as bad as the name might have implied.

Swallowing, he looked at the still frozen kids. They were still occupied with whatever so he took the opportunity to stare a little.

Stemming from the fingers on Danny’s right hand, just barely visible, thin grey lines radiated out like vines.

He had never seen anything like it. 

(He’d seen the same pattern glowing in negative, sharp against the halo of white engulfing the boy.)

Jason sighed heavily. He needed to focus.

Step one: get to the library. The lie spilled from him too easily: “Hey. Uh, I figure I’ll wander a bit, you know, see the sights. You kids should go spend time with your families or whatever you do today.”

There was a pause, so slight that it would’ve ordinarily been dismissed. Then, the boy’s faces quickly adopted expressions. 

Jason wondered what that was about. He added it to his ever-growing list of ‘weird fucking ghost shit’. 

“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Sam said blithely.

“I wish my parents didn’t,” Danny said miserably.

“You’re always welcome at my place,” Tucker offered. “My cousins are kinda annoying but hey, no ghost traps.”

Danny grimaced and bit a fry in half.

“How about this? It’s already three. Jason can explore till nine. We’ll meet back here and then head to the zone,” Sam strongly suggested.

No one objected.

Six hours was good enough for him.

👻 {Boo!)

The library was laughably easy to break into. 

Maybe it wasn’t wise, but with all the flight cancellations, who would expect Jason Todd to be in Amity Park when he’d been spotted less than three hours earlier in Gotham? 

He skimmed the layout and made a beeline for the periodicals. Depending on how far back he needed to go he might end up having to break into the archive too.

A green sticky note was slapped on the topmost paper. He was going to ignore it, at first, but something about it grabbed at his attention.

‘ It is not necessary to show others you have changed; the change will be obvious, ’ it read.

Clearly it wasn’t anything important. Maybe the librarian was into scavenger hunts. He put the note aside and out of his mind, turned to the complication of papers, pulled out the first one, and began to read. 

👻 {Boo!)

Five hours later Jason still hadn’t gotten to the computers. 

The papers were chock full of information. Ever so slowly he made his way backwards, watching as the eldritch city transformed from something inexplicable and alien to a scarred city that held wounded history in every crevice. 

The widespread liminality? An ongoing ectoplasm exposure issue that initially stemmed from an outbreak at the local high school three years ago.

The ‘don’t step on people’s shadows’ rule? There were shadow ghosts, notably the Halloween spirit, that you didn’t want to piss off.

The little shrine of new books in the library labeled ‘Do Not Touch’? Tales to entertain a ghost that liked to trap people in fantasy stories and read to the children on occasion.

The dreamcatchers hanging literally everywhere? A peace offering to the ghost god of dreams, or a warding away of the entity, but they prevented him from trapping you in an unwaking slumber in any case.

The frankly bizarre two mailbox system? A set up to prevent the box ghost from tampering with and or stealing packages en-masse. 

The greenish sky and purplish soil? After effects of the city being pulled into the mother fucking Lazarus dimension for a whole god damned month.

How the hell had something of this magnitude flown under the radar? 

And the kids.

Holy hell he had never been so right yet so wrong before.

They weren’t just in over their heads, they’d been drowning in a tsunami and somehow managing to stay afloat at the same time. And as much as the papers said, there was a whole lot they didn’t say. The sheer number of documented altercations put his number of confrontations to shame and he had no doubt there were plenty of fights the papers didn’t know about. Fights aside, so many pieces were still missing. How had the Phantoms been created in the first place? Had it been intentional? Where had the ghosts been four years ago, five, six, seven? Why only the past few years?  

It was like every time he set a timeline for associating with them something cropped up and pushed the deadline back further and further. It was going to be a quick association at first, then a commitment, and then a long-term commitment that just kept getting longer. 

He rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. 

It wasn’t so much about his help being good or not, rather that he was going to help at all. They needed any help they could get. 

How could he sit here and plan to walk away?

(He was exactly like Bruce, wasn’t he?)

👻 {Boo!)

His despondence dawdled and did not help with his apprehension regarding the yeti visit. Deciding to leave the library early, Jason put everything back where it belonged and removed all traces of his presence before heading back to the rooftop overlooking the park.

He had a lot to chew on.

Around quarter to nine Danny as Phantom flew up to him, glowing in the dimming world around them.

“Hey Jason! How did the exploring go?” he greeted cheerfully.

Jason quirked a brow. “Well enough. You seem to be in a better mood.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “So here’s the plan. We’re going to be going through the Fenton portal and then heading to the Great Star Bridge Sera- er, it’s basically a mansion. Super pretentious name, if you ask me.”

Jason couldn’t help but wonder why it had to be there. He didn’t really like the idea of going to a mansion but didn’t bother to say anything about it.

“Alright, let’s get going. Are Manes and Ghouley…?”

“They’re at the portal.”

Danny then took his arm, turning them invisible and flying up and towards some unknown place.

Flying like this was different. It should’ve been impossible, supporting his weight just with one arm. It was as though Danny had turned gravity off for just the two of them.

Their destination became apparent as they approached a building with a giant glowing sign labeled ‘Fenton Works’ alongside an arrow oh so helpfully pointing down to the building they were perched upon. He’d read about them in the papers.

He could only imagine the portal was nearby. 

Jazz had made it sound like she, and possibly the trio, frequented the other dimension. One of the newspapers had an interview with a ghost named Kitty, who claimed that the Phantoms took wayward ghosts back to the zone. It wasn’t unreasonable, given the amount of ghost fights he’d read about, that the Phantoms spent solid chunks of time in both dimensions. Jason didn’t like the idea of having to sneak by people who hunted him to get home every day on top of all the regular vigilante crap. It was exhausting for him and it could only have been the same for them.

The kids probably had been caught off guard before, trying to pass through.

How badly had they suffered?

“Nervous?” Danny asked, slowing to a stop.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe they were still…

“Are- did you die?” Jason asked in a rush. Immediately, he wanted to take the words and stuff them back in his mouth. 

Danny was quiet for a moment. “Why?”

Scrambling for an answer, he meekly offered a thought that had occurred to him yesterday on patrol.

“I mean- are they gonna ask me about my…?”

Would he have to explain his own demise?

He would if he had to, in the barest sense, but it wasn’t information he was going to volunteer.

“Ok. So, don’t do that. Ever,” Danny gently admonished. “Real quick lesson in ghost manners. You don’t ask about death. It’s a sensitive topic among ghosts. And to answer your question, yes, I did die. I can’t say what the yetis will ask but one of us will be right there at all times, okay?” 

Danny, even as Phantom, was dwarfed by Jason. He was sure that he could punt the kid pretty far, so small he was, and he still had baby fat clinging to his cheeks.

Would he ever get to grow up?

Or had that been ripped away from him?

Jason cleared his throat. “Right.”

Danny took them down to the street right in front of Fenton Works and then phased them through the floor and into a stairwell.

“Ready?” he asked.

Manes poked her head out of a doorframe at the bottom of the stairs.

“As I’ll ever be,” replied Jason. 

Danny floated them down the stairs and through the doorway. Tucker was inside with Sam and they split with Sam taking point and Tucker covering the rear.

The wall of the lab they directed to was shockingly familiar. If one took out the blast doors and the active portal, the setup was identical to that of the picture. 

Danny confirmed he had died.

Sam had referred to the boys as Fenton and Foley earlier. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know which was which; one of them was Fenton, and that was enough information.

With sick horror, it dawned on him that one of the boys’ families owned this lab. One of their families hunted ghosts. One of their families hated the Phantoms. One of their families had killed them. 

The Fentons had killed their own child and his two friends. 

They had died right here , in this very portal.

Why the hell were they here?

“Jason? Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said shortly.

What were the kids playing at?

The three seemed to silently agree on something. 

“Jason,” Tucker said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “we’ll be with you, alright? If something’s up we can handle it. We can help.”

“How can you be here?” he asked a little desperately. “This is-”

He couldn’t even think about the warehouse.

Danny hugged him slowly, and then Sam, and then Tucker joined them. 

It didn’t matter that they were pressed up so close he could feel their bones digging into his body because there wasn’t a single pulse among them.

The kids had died.

“You saw that picture, didn’t you?” Tucker said lowly. Jason didn’t deny it. 

“It’s mildly uncomfortable but we had to deal with it pretty early on,” Sam explained. “We’re largely used to it by now.”

Anger that had been silently simmering began to boil.

“You had to deal with it?” he repeated shrilly.

Of course, he thought bitterly. If the Fentons had killed the kids, likely with the intention of collecting their ghosts for some fucked up study, then the trio would’ve been forced into the lab at one, or several, points. But why come back at all?

The portal they died in. It was one of the only stable portals. They’d have to deal with it if they wanted to use the portal to herd the ghosts out of Amity.

Unwilling to dislodge the kids and possibly hurt them, he couldn’t move. Not with all three pairs of arms wrapped around him. But goddamn it, he was tempted to break something.

“… it’s not that bad. We’re fine. We’re not going to make you confront your death, alright?” Danny said.

“ My death? What about yours? This is cookies and cream awful. Who the hell made you deal with it? Chocolate Raspberry. Who ?”

“We did because it was the right thing to do. It’s a story for another time, okay?” Sam said a little desperately.

Danny lifted one arm and wrapped it around Sam.

Tucker pressed his head against Jason’s shoulder. “Jason. I know this kinda sucks but there’s nothing you can do. It’s in the past now.”

They had given up on themselves. 

It was all too common with heroes, wasn’t it? To save everyone else? But what about them?

Oh, how he wanted to rage. 

But he couldn’t. 

Keep it together for the kids, he scolded himself. He made progress. He had the lab. He discovered that the Lazarus water thing was actually the Fenton portal. He found out more about the kids.

He made progress. 

Inhaling quietly, he focused on the oscillating edges of the portal, moving in and out in a mockery of breathing.

His breath hitched.

The kids weren’t breathing . Their chests were still, their diaphragms didn’t move and never would again, up and down, in and out. Their lungs-

- were vibrating?

The pure confusion overrode everything for a moment. The kids were vibrating. And there was a sound quite similar to purring, though it felt as though it reached all the way down into his soul. 

“… are you kids purring at me?”

“No,” Danny said, continuing to purr. 

“Is it working?” grinned Sam.

“We’re ghosts, not cats,” Tucker scoffed. 

“We could be engines.”

Danny groaned and thunked his head against Jason’s arm. “One time.”

“One time’s all it takes,” snickered Tucker. 

“Danny overshadowed a car once,” Sam explained. “But he wasn’t really, he was in the engine and didn’t realize it. He was stuck as a car for almost a full day.”

“It was an anti-ghost vehicle too, mind you,” Tucker added.

“Stooop,” Danny complained. 

“It was his sister’s car.”

“Guys, I’m already half dead, please don’t kill me the rest of the way.”

“Jazz-”

Danny reached past Jason’s head to presumably clamp a hand over Tucker’s mouth. “Okay! That’s enough for today! We’re going to be late!”

👻 {Boo!)

Jason avoided the manor.

That wasn’t atypical, not really, but missing his phone call to Alfred was. Especially on a holiday; especially on Christmas.

He wasn’t at his official residence, nor his unofficial one, and so the only thing to do was to go through his safe houses. Easy enough. If there was one good thing about the whole mess with Dr. Crane, it was that they had more time now that their civilian identities were “hospitalized”.

One of the safe houses, located in an old apartment, showed signs of Jason being there recently. Why hadn’t he gone back to his actual apartment?

There were no real clues- nothing to hint at his home being compromised, nothing to indicate why he’d come to this particular apartment. The perishable food indicated Jason was residing here now, and had been for a few days as his suit from the gala was here, as was an assortment of gear Jason never left behind. Among them were his prized handguns. 

So why were they here when Jason wasn’t? 

There was only one other thing out of place. One clue that might lead to an answer instead of more questions.

Laying on the couch was an odd camera. It didn’t look like the kind of camera someone could buy at a store, no matter how high end. Some of the parts were standard, others looked custom, and none of them looked over a day old. Someone took good care of this camera, and if there was something he knew, it was cameras. 

Jason had never been interested in photography and there was no way he knew how to care for a camera. So, to whom did it belong? 

Well, if he left it here he’d never get answers. Jason might be bitchy for a while but the answers would be worth it. Besides, he’d get it back. Eventually.

Red Robin picked the strange camera up, tucked it into one of the dozen pockets on his person, and left the apartment. 

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore @iglowinggemma28 @manapeer @azzysflowergarden @notwhat-i-seemtobe @whobee7 @trippingovermyfeet @stormhaven257 @imsociallyanxiousgetoverit @passivedecept @lovetheryu @ever-after-aaa @mysteriousooze @wegetitethan @cyber-geist @t-nayira @wisteriavines @starscreamlover @recently-diagnosed-lady-knight @thescarletcryptid @jaguarthecat @blankliferain @crimsonaccent @terzatheunderscorerima

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 4

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 3

Next: Chapter 5

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Gotham's Spirit (brief), Jason Todd (mentioned once)

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

Warning for panicking/fear via fear toxin.

👻 {Chapter 4 Below!)

One borrowed artifact usage later found Danny and Tucker tumbling out of the portal created by the infi-map, only saved from face-planting into the rough concrete by the natural levitation afforded them by their ghost forms. Still, when the connection snapped back into place they gasped and almost dropped regardless. It was like someone had yanked the curtains away from a window full of sunlight and their eyes needed to adjust. 

And the fear. The fear was overwhelming.

“Sam!” Tucker and Danny cried, unintentionally in unison.

“Tucker? Danny?”

“Sam what’s wrong? Where are you?” Tucker asked, frantic.

“Tucker…” Sam wavered as a fresh wave of anxiety overcame her, swamping all else with its sheer volume. “Don’t. You can’t come here, it’s too dangerous!”

And then, “I’m going to die again, for real this time. I don’t want to be a full ghost. I don’t want to, not yet.”

She couldn’t leave them behind.

“Sam this isn’t like you at all,” Danny asked with impossibly increasing alarm. They’d faced a lot and never, not once, had Sam expressed her rare hysterics like this. If even the Pariah Dark and Dark Danny incidents didn’t make her cower, then who or what could?

But Sam’s only response was uptick in horror.

“Guys, guys,” she thought desperately. “They’re going to find us.”

Tucker questioned, “Who Sam? Who is-“

Scenes flashed through her mind in rapid succession- men dressed in white and red crystals and sterile lab tables and the saw-

The elder Fentons, looming over them.

They balked, especially Danny. It was everything from their worst waking nightmares.

“Sam!” Tucker barked. “Focus! Where are you right now?” 

Images of the gala poured in.

“Wayne manor,” hissed Danny. “What’s happening there?”

“And how’re we gonna get to Wayne Manor?” Tucker bemoaned. “We don’t know where we are or even have a map of Gotham!”

Danny hesitated, wondering if the PDA would be able to connect to the Fenton satellite like the Ghost Finder. They’d done it once before to reverse-track his parents, but could they use it to find Sam?

As luck would have it, they didn’t need to find out. 

A hazy ectoplasmic figure appeared before the duo, making them tense. It was a ghost, that much was obvious, but there were no defining traits to the haze. The figure flickered under their scrutiny but never cleared. Tucker tried to focus on the rough texture of his jeans and the little particles of dust drifting through the air, anything to take the edge off of Sam’s emotions; the fear was only getting more intense and soon it would be crippling. They couldn’t afford to risk that kind of distraction, especially during a fight. And Sam’s urgent pleas to run, get away were horribly distracting. Knowing this was going to be rough, Tucker grimaced. The figure, thankfully, was not hostile. 

“I can take you to Manes,” they said. Their voice was hardly that, the words barely discernible to human ears. There were screams and wails and crackles and moans, howling winds and cawing crows. 

“No, don’t!” objected Sam.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Danny agreed gratefully and hesitantly. “But uh, who are you?” 

The ‘can we trust you?’ was unspoken.

“Gotham,” they introduced. “It’s an honor to meet you, King Phantom.”

“Great, it’s nice to meet you too,” Danny replied, resisting his urge to awkwardly glance to Tucker. As much as he didn’t like all the ghost king nonsense, he wasn’t above using the title if necessary. If Gotham was a city spirit, then they could be immensely helpful. 

“The map must have brought us here because they could help us,” Tucker reasoned. Working with the knowledge that sometimes the closest portals to a specific location could be anywhere in time and space, they had asked to be taken to the place they could most quickly find their version of Sam. If Gotham could get them to her then they had to trust the spirit, if only because according to the infi-map said spirit could direct them.

“No!” Sam said harshly. “You can’t get caught!”

“So,” Tucker cleared his suddenly dry throat. “Wayne manor?” 

Gotham gurgled and writhed and shot into the sky, Tucker and Danny close behind.

In their heads, Sam screamed her protests.

👻 {Boo!)

Wayne Manor was situated on a hilltop. Tucker was glad gravity didn’t interact with ectoplasmic based organisms in the same way it grounded everything else or they would’ve been out of breath halfway up the incline. As it was they flew with no resistance, three indistinct blurs invisible to living eyes. The manor came into view rapidly to Sam’s vocal dismay and the other two Phantoms scrutinized the building. Wayne manor wasn’t the first manor they’d seen, nor the biggest, but it was still impressive. What was more impressive was the amount of chaos surrounding the manor- cars were scattered about, some on the manicured lawn, several crashed into other cars. There were police vehicles and ambulances too, flashing lights casting sharp beams of bright colored lights into the chaotic dark abyss. The police and medical personnel scuttled every which way, and it was Danny who noted that every single person was equipped with a gas mask of some kind. 

It took Tucker an additional moment to realize that there were figures on the roof. Odd, but currently irrelevant. 

Danny disagreed, registering that they were fighting. Instantly he felt a tug, an urge to investigate and help, but Gotham didn’t stop and dove straight through one of the outer walls. Immediately Danny put the rooftop quarrel aside and didn’t hesitate to follow the city spirit, not when Sam needed them. It was a good thing too as the mansion was a maze, or it would’ve been if they hadn’t been able to bypass the walls. Still, there were many rooms and without Gotham it would’ve taken them minutes to find Sam. Minutes they might not have. Perhaps realizing that her protests were for naught now that they were so close, Sam quieted down her verbal thoughts, though her fear never abated.

There were guests flung about the various rooms in groups of two and three, cowering and whimpering. Their wide eyes darted and skittered around, tracking nothing. 

“What’s wrong with them?” Danny asked, frowning as they passed a hiccupping girl. 

It was then that Tucker’s attention turned sharp as he automatically tried to find an answer to Danny's question. It was a habit of his, to try and find answers, and his effort proved fruitful as he saw the faint, yellowish tint in the air. “It’s some kind of gas,” he realized. While the people outside had masks, everyone within the manor was bare faced. He wondered if that was why Sam was so afraid. Aloud to Gotham he asked, “So what’s with this yellow mist?”

“Fear triggering gas,” Gotham rasped, “new variant.”

Tucker took that to be an affirmative.

“What, is that some kind of neurotoxin?” Danny mused. 

“Dude, how should I know?” Aloud he remarked, “That explains the masks.”

“But we’re unaffected… do you think going ghost would help Sam?” Danny asked hopefully.

Sam’s presence, petrified and passively lurking, jumped at her name. Still, there was no commentary nor impression from her besides the disconcerting dread.

Tucker mentally shook his head, both as a negative and to refocus. “I don’t know. We haven’t breathed in any of the stuff, and even if we had, the gas wouldn’t be able to find anything to interact with since, you know, ghost biology. Sam’s already infected though so who knows if going ghost would help.”

With a determined frown Danny replied, “We have to try.” 

When they phased through the next wall they were met with a large, ornate room full of people. Even with the crowd the two Amity boys spotted Sam hurriedly and rushed past Gotham to her. She was standing, one of the few who still seemed able to, and the haze was noticeably thicker here than it had been in any of the halls. Besides the hazardous vapor there didn’t seem to be any danger, and for that the two were grateful, especially Tucker. 

Sam was, as she’d been continually expressing, unhappy that they were there, unjustifiable distress clouding any rational thought. Danny and Tucker looked at one another. They’d been so caught up in getting to Sam and now that they were here, they didn’t quite know what to do.

“Can she phase the gas out?” wondered Danny. Images and memories flickered by, unified by the idea that they could phase out bullets and debris and other miscellaneous things. 

“I dunno?” replied Tucker, though they both knew Danny wasn’t asking, rather brainstorming aloud.

“It’s better than nothing,” Danny decided. “You gotta go ghost Sam.”

The girl shook her head frantically. “No,” she said, the denial echoing in their thoughts. Her eyes swiveled around the room, looking at nothing.

“Please?” asked Tucker. 

Danny made a thoughtful noise and then reached out a hand, carefully taking hold of Sam’s tense shoulder. Tucker understood his plan moments before it happened, in tandem with Danny as he settled upon his own actions. It wasn’t something they did often, but extending their phasing to objects was possible as it was with people. Danny hoped to phase Sam out of the gas since she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do it herself. His ectoplasmic energy rippled out, entwining with Sam’s own and shifting her a few degrees away from the regular world. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to help and at a loss, he gave a mental nudge through the bond. What else could they do? 

Sam’s insistence they leave grew louder again and Tucker glanced around, trying to see if there were any doors or windows they could open to dissipate the fumes. Danny glanced to Gotham, who had been hovering idly. “Do you know if we can do anything to help?”

Gotham echoed physically, like lapping waves oscillating in five dimensions, and sank into the floor.

“Gee, thanks,” Danny huffed. 

After a disgruntled second Tucker pointed out, “Intangibility isn’t the same as going ghost. Swapping your biology might just do the trick. Come on Sam, you can do it!”

But Sam didn’t want to- Batman, the GIW, the elder Fentons, her own parents- they couldn’t risk it, she couldn’t risk it with the two boys right there. She downright refused to put a target on them. 

Danny pointed out that he and Tucker were already in ghost mode so it was sort of a moot point. What was one more? 

That made Sam react. She went ghost, the white rings appearing around her and swapping out her human features for that of her ghost form. She grabbed their wrists and flew, yanking them along as she went shooting through one of the grand windows and out of the mansion altogether, a tattoo of ‘escape-escape-escape’ beating in her head.

“Whoa!” Danny screeched. Tucker decided that, if he’d been human then, he’d have thrown up. Unexpectedly going from a standstill to traveling around 200 miles an hour had that effect.

The two let Sam drag them, unsure of what else to do right then. Danny had dense ectoplasm and between him and Tucker they would be able to stop Sam’s mad flight, but then what? They were still too near the manor and Gotham in general for comfort, not to mention that if they made Sam stop she might decide to fight them. They couldn’t risk a ghost fight outside of Amity. 

The dilemma was quickly resolved; it hadn’t taken a full thirty seconds before Sam’s thoughts cleared. It felt like someone had dumped ice water over her human self. The link was flooded with confusion, then embarrassment, then anger, and then finally tempered resentment. Feelings akin to the notion that she shouldn’t have gotten caught like that crawled along the link, the tumultuous ricochets of which were only just beginning to subside now that they were all close together.

Without the intense emotions and the frantic rush to assist Sam it swiftly became apparent that the experience had been draining. Sam was still twitchy and high strung and the boys’ cores were rattling discontentedly. 

“We’ve all been caught off guard,” Tucker pointed out, trying to assuage Sam’s agitated thoughts. “It happens.”

“Not to mention that it’s gas. Who would’ve expected that during a party?” Danny added. At the flat feeling from Sam he amended, “A party outside of Amity and anywhere ghost infested.”

“Guys, I know. I just need to process,” Sam sniped, slightly defensive. She didn’t like her own weakness and never had.

The trio of halfas hovered there for a moment, high in the dark cloudy sky. Sam’s broken camera floated in front of her, the straps around her neck preventing it from drifting away. She watched the few strange reflections the scant light cast on the dimly glowing casing and let the link sink into a more stable state. 

“We need to go back.”

That was Danny’s thought, vague impressions of maskless people and the rooftop quarrel snaking through his statement. They were rapidly overshadowed by the more solid and practical concepts running through Sam’s mind. They needed to go back because she was supposed to be there and have been there the entire time, and even if they didn’t always get along she couldn’t leave her parents in danger.

Tucker shared his memory of the yellow tinged halls. There hadn’t been immediate danger to the guests as far as they knew and besides, what could they do to help except dissipate the gas?

In response Sam shot back with a memory of her own. The gala crashers had been armed and willing to hurt people. And what had happened to the hostages? 

While Tucker processed that new piece of info Danny obligingly pointed out that they could overshadow the crashers, free the hostages, and turn them in.  

Sam’s interest spiked, Tucker’s head snapped up, and in between one flash of dry lightning and the next, a plan began to form.

👻 {Boo!)

The plan almost immediately went awry.

“There’s a ghost,” Danny hissed as they returned to the Wayne property, a faint wisp of blue escaping his mouth. A moment later Sam and Tucker exhaled yellow and silver respectively.

Tucker groaned. “Great.”

With years of practice they quickly took inventory, shooting images and scattered words and impressions back and forth. Fortunately, though Sam didn’t have much, Tucker and Danny had rushed straight to the Wayne property from their trip to the Ghost Zone and as a result had a few gadgets that could be utilized against ghosts. Danny tossed Sam the spare thermos he’d packed and a wrist ray.

“Tucker and me on ghost confrontation, Danny you free the hostages,” Sam said, catching the thermos and ray with a nod. 

Danny mentally paused for an instant and then sent a swift confirmation. He tended to be more battle oriented than the other two, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hold their own. In this situation, so far out of Amity, they needed subtly and Danny was anything but. Overshadowing the crashers was something he could do that wouldn’t immediately scream, “Look! Ghosts!” to the world.

“I’d say good luck but we’ve got this,” Tucker said, projecting a confidence he didn’t quite feel. 

They split up after that, Sam and Tucker roving the outside and inside of the mansion, searching for the ghost with an intense, single minded focus that only ghosts could have. Danny, invisible and intangible, floated over to an ambulance, hoping to find information on the captives. 

There was a lot of chatter to sift through including the numerous reports and updates about the fight on the rooftop, which seemed to have turned into some kind of Mexican-standoff. He perked up upon hearing that the hostage was one of the Wayne kids and drifted closer to the officer who had mentioned it.

“… yeah. Yeah. Have you seen Red Robin yet?” the officer demanded into the talkie he had, eyes scanning the surrounding mayhem. Then the officer scoffed. “I’ll take the witness accounts later, or better yet, make Don do it. I- hello? Hello?”

As the officer shook the device with clear aggression Danny realized that he’d gotten too close and the talkie had shorted out. 

Still, what he’d overheard was alarming.

“We might have Batman and team nearby,” he cautioned. “Heads up.”

Tucker was going to say something, likely along the lines of ‘damn, we’re all screwed’ but was interrupted by a mental scowl and elbow from Sam. 

He wasn’t wrong though, and Danny chewed his lip. Batman was famous for his detective skills. They had to tread extra carefully now. The dreadful sound of a flatline interrupted his thoughts and with a wince, Danny backed further away from the vehicles lest he accidentally interfere with the various medical electronics in the ambulances. He circled around, trying to get as close to the cop cars as possible to continue listening in. 

Meanwhile, Sam wove through and around the mansion furiously, her disquiet and anger fueling her pace. Tucker took a different approach, opting to borrow a phone someone had dropped as a focus and reaching out, searching for anything odd. 

“The roof!” Danny suddenly remarked. “The hostages are on the roof with the crashers. There are a few police officers up there too, and two heroes.”

“These guys didn’t plant a bomb or anything, right? ‘Cause there’s a lot of power underneath the house, and it’s not coming from the main power line,” Tucker said.

Danny combed through what he’d heard once more before replying, “Not that I know of-“

“I found the ghost,” Sam interrupted. There was something off in her voice that the boys couldn’t quite place. Sam herself didn’t know either, but it was vaguely unsettling.

“Where are they at?” Danny questioned, heading to the roof.

“He’s fighting the heroes. The hostages are on the other side of the roof but he’s bottlenecking the rescue attempts with the gas and blocking anyone who gets past it.”

Tucker arrived as Danny did and the ghost was immediately obvious.

It was a humanoid ghost with spindly, straw-like hair and a disturbingly stitched face with no nose. The limbs were entirely out of proportion, impossibly long and stick-like, and it was difficult to tell where the sewn skin began and where the tattered, patched clothes ended. His bulging eyes glowed a miasmic yellow and tied around his neck was the distinct form of a noose.

“He can’t see us or he’ll blow our cover wide open,” Danny warned.

“More heroes incoming,” Tucker added, spying more of the local vigilantes approaching. “Just what we needed!” 

Sam cursed, feeling a faint and familiar ping in her core. “Jason’s nearby too. He must be a hostage.”

The trio felt a strong, shared sense of exasperation. Yet again it seemed that Murphy’s Law had decided to make things as complicated as possible.

“Of course. Sure. We’re the Phantoms so why not?” Tucker lamented.

After a moment Danny declared, “Somehow I think I should blame Clockwork for this.”

“Seconded,” Sam huffed.

“Thirded,” chimed Tucker. 

A dimension away, a time adjacent ghost sneezed. 

👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

@depressed-bitchy-demon @dp-marvel94 @birbtails @mr-lancers-english-class @miraculousandmore @iglowinggemma28 @manapeer @azzysflowergarden @notwhat-i-seemtobe @whobee7 @trippingovermyfeet @stormhaven257 @imsociallyanxiousgetoverit @passivedecept @lovetheryu @ever-after-aaa @mysteriousooze @wegetitethan @cyber-geist

Someone had asked if this is on AO3 and it is! I only have one AO3 account but I have a few side blogs to keep my fandoms organized. This has led me to start posted my works anonymously in collections with names linked to my blogs. This one is in the collection called Miscmonstro Incognito and the fic is still named No Title Yet.

Next: Chapter 5

[miscmonstro]

The Uno Reverse Adoption Saga 7

First: Chapter 1

Previous: Chapter 6

Next: Chapter 8

Halfa!Trio Au crossover with Batman

Current Characters: Sam Manson, Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton, Jason Todd

Summary: Forced to attend a gala by her parents as she is every year, Sam Manson was resigned to suffer through the stifling three-night gala until something pulled at her core. The something turned out to be a someone. Just who is Jason Todd and can the trio gain enough of his trust to help him before his struggling proto-core collapses?

👻 {Chapter 7 Below!)

The immediate problem they had to address was hiding Sam. 

“Someone should see you leave,” Jason suggested. “And then? Freedom.” 

To what extent? They had to hang around to steal some of the antidote whenever it was completed. Biting his lip, Danny wondered if Sam would be alright in her ghost form for so long. Tucker reminded them that they’d been in their human forms exclusively for the first month after the accident so surely it worked the other way around. Then Sam recalled all the difficulties they’d had with their ghost powers in their human bodies- would her human side start leaking into her ghost form?

Danny didn’t think so. They were already split pretty evenly on both sides. 

“Hello?” Jason called, waving a hand in front of Danny.

“Sorry, got distracted,” he excused. 

“Yeah, leaving in an ambulance wouldn’t be bad,” agreed Sam. Jason was right about that- it added a layer of believability to their cover story. 

“Yeah, except where are we going to get an ambulance?” Tucker said. 

“We’re going to steal one,” Jason replied.

👻 {Boo!)

“I cannot believe this.”

“Rich people logic,” Tucker thought sagely.

The three had stared at Jason after his proclamation, however the youngest ghost was serious. They needed some evidence if they wanted their cover story to work, thus they needed witnesses, and so they went along with the madness. 

“Not the craziest thing we’ve done,” Sam pointed out.

“Rich people logic,” repeated Tucker. Sam internally elbowed him as he chortled.

Danny didn’t disagree but his disgruntled feelings spoke for themselves. He didn’t think it was right. Someone else, someone alive, most definitely needed the ambulance.

“We’re protecting Amity, think of it like that,” advised Sam. “People can’t look too closely or we’re toast.”

That placated him quite effectively- there was little Danny wouldn’t do for their home. He still felt guilty though and it hovered on the edges of their minds.

They didn’t really have a plan besides ‘distract and steal’ and the simple goal had a simple execution. Jason distracted the driver of the vehicle stationed the farthest away from the commotion while the trio overshadowed the people in the back and put them to sleep. Now, without hindrance, they began faking the notes and records that would’ve been taken from a patient in an ambulance- heart rate, temperature, oxygen levels. Really, the hardest part was mimicking the handwriting of the other reports.

When the vehicle began moving they assumed that Jason had finished his bit of distracting the driver long enough for them to secure the back, that they were now off to the hospital. They weren’t expecting, when the ambulance stopped, for Jason to be standing behind the doors and then raise an inpatient brow at them as if to say, ‘are you coming?’

“Why is he sticking around?” Danny wondered. It lacked his usual suspicion and was more of an innocent curiosity. Jason’d had the perfect opportunity to leave. Why didn’t he? 

“And where did he take us? It’s too quiet to be a hospital,” Sam pointed out.

“Let’s find out,” said Tucker, flying out the back. 

“Did you drive this thing?” Sam asked Jason, tapping one of the open doors as she poked her head out.

With a smirk he replied, “Sure did.”

“Don’t they need it back?” frowned Danny. While he wasn’t feeling any hostility towards Jason he really, really wasn’t liking the Gothamite’s way of doing things.

Waving a hand Jason said, “Yeah, they’ll get it back. Now hurry the hell up, we need to go before they get here.”

“Before who gets here? And we can’t just leave them like this!” Danny insisted, waving at the slumped forms of the ambulance personnel. 

Jason twitched, irritation rolling over him. “The replacement driver. Someone owes me a favor so they’ll be taking it back to the manor. The employees will be fine. Now can you please go invisible and follow me?”

“Follow you where?” Danny shot back, still unsatisfied. 

“A temporary apartment. You can’t be seen until the antidote is made, right?” he explained slowly with a twitch. He was both proud and disapproving, though of what was hard to pinpoint. “You need a place to hide out.”

“Not exactly? We have a way home,” Danny said, relaxing now that he knew what Jason had been trying to accomplish. 

“Not really. We have to give it back,” Tucker objected. “It’s best to not hold onto it.”

Sam grimaced, thinking of all the trouble the artifact could, and would, cause. Still, they were on a time limit. “Later. We have to move now.” Nodding at Jason she added, “We’ll be right behind you.”

Jason took off without replying, walking quickly and moving through the winding streets and alleys that spoke of more than a passing familiarity with the layout of the area. The city was cold, a light layer of snow and ice wrapping everything in an icy coat. Whatever scant lights there were bounced off of the wet pavement. Along the edges of the road were buildups of slush as the snow melted. It had been unusually warm in Gotham for the past two weeks. The buildings grew more and more decrepit, the windows more dark and dustier, and Jason stuck to the shadows, which was likely because he stuck out with the expensive suit he was sporting. 

“He moves good. Like really good,” Tucker observed as Jason slunk from one patch of shadows to another. “It’s so smooth. His movement, I mean.” 

“Maybe he took dance lessons,” Danny chuckled.

Sam silently recalled that the oldest Wayne, Richard, was from a circus and that his birth parents had been acrobats.

They all shuddered.

Circus aside, her point was that Richard had certainly retained his grace. The trio toyed in jest that perhaps Jason was secretly an acrobat. 

After a few more twists and turns and stretches of street Sam said, “I think we’re here.” Jason had begun scaling the side of an immensely unsafe appearing apartment building with a clear destination in mind- one of the many gritty windows on the fifth floor. The sides were grimy and cracked and Tucker had a feeling the inside wasn’t going to be that different.

He wasn’t exactly wrong. Although tidy and well kept, the paint was peeling off of the scraped up walls and the carpet was stained and worn. There were few personal effects, none in fact, Danny realized upon his survey, though Sam insisted the small, lonely cactus in the corner counted.

Jason shimmied through the window, having a momentary snag trying to get his head and shoulders through, and landed on his feet on the carpet. He turned and closed the window with a slam before glancing around the apartment. “I know you’re here.”

Sheepishly, the trio became visible.

“Sorry, kinda forgot,” said Tucker.

“Right. Well, welcome to the apartment. This is the living and dining area. The kitchen is behind you. Down that hall there are two bedrooms, the one at the end is mine. The door on the left is the other room and the one across is the bathroom,” Jason said, pulling off his suit jacket and draping it across the back of the squashed sofa. “You’re welcome here anytime. Questions?” 

Several, Sam grumbled silently. The other two agreed to varying degrees. The apartment didn’t feel lived in and Danny couldn’t help but note Jason hadn’t said his apartment, rather the apartment. Did Jason actually live here? 

Jason was still jittery. They didn’t need to drill him. A version of Jazz in Tucker’s head said something about trust and space. 

“No,” Danny replied politely. 

Jason squinted at them as though he didn’t quite believe the teen, but he didn’t push either. “Great. I’m going to shower. There’s probably some sandwiches in the fridge,” he said, heading toward the hall. “If not, help yourselves to whatever is around.” He disappeared into his room for a minute and then, with an armful of clothes and a hanger, went into the bathroom.

As soon as the three heard the door lock they looked to each other.

“So, sandwich?” prompted Tucker. 

Sam leaned around Danny and swatted at his tail. 

“We can’t leave him here,” Danny thought, looking around the dreary apartment. There was a little part of him that was fixated on getting the ghostling something to eat but a larger part was worrying about a well-meaning ghost kidnapping the relatively defenseless, very unequipped-for-ghosts human and accidentally killing him.

“Christmas is in three days. He’ll survive until then,” Sam replied. She figured that most of his worry was unwarranted, somewhat. Not only had Jason been on his own for a while but Danny, like all ghosts, was really bad at not indulging his obsessions. And Jason, for better or worse, certainly fell under that purview. Still, with their luck, something was guaranteed to go awry.

Tucker agreed with Sam. “Just keep in mind that you’re not thinking objectively,” he cautioned. It was easy to get stuck in fervent pursuit of satisfying an obsession and unlike full ghosts, they couldn’t afford to lose themselves to it. Thankfully their link allowed them to temper the urges as none of their obsessions overlapped, but dealing with them was never easy. 

Danny’s tail lashed in the air at their agreement, but he didn’t oppose their reasoning. Regardless, they all knew that the moment an opportunity arose to adopt Jason, Danny would be there in a human heartbeat.

“Adoption has its own problems. He didn’t seem keen on leaving Gotham and you refuse to leave Amity, and that’s putting aside our human lives. There’s too much to balance,” Tucker pointed out. Danny’s mind went to the map, but Sam was quick to dissuade that notion with her sharp disapproval. It wasn’t theirs and the longer they had it, the more likely something was to happen to it.

They couldn’t do that to the yetis.

Danny agreed, it was selfish, but his resolve to make things work out remained. He’d find another way.

Tucker shared the concept, loosely, of ambiguity and things uncertain. Jason hadn’t agreed to adoption and might not, so there wasn’t any reason to act as though he had or even would. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

Danny snorted, his exhale manifesting as an icy cloud in the otherwise tepid room.

“Fine,” he grumped, tamping down on his urge to complain. Although stubborn, he was too tired to start up another debate. 

Tucker too felt worn out after the day of flying through the zone and then dealing with everything that had followed. Sam concurred. After everything, a nap sounded perfect. 

She paused.

“I can’t turn back.”

Ghosts didn’t sleep, not like humans. They could sleep in their ghost forms but it wouldn’t benefit their human side nearly as much. 

“There’s not anything we can do about it,” Danny said, adding a silent but emphatic, ‘that sucks’. 

Grumpily, Sam drifted to the kitchen and, crossing her arms beneath her head, curled up on top of the fridge. Some sleep was better than none at all. The other two followed, and Sam nudged open the upper cabinets for some more space out of the habit of needing space rather than the necessity of it. 

“Why not the couch? Or the table?” Tucked asked, coiling his tail around the side of the fridge. Danny wedged himself in between the two and Sam rolled her eyes and didn’t reply. It just felt right and there were few words to explain it.

Danny dozed off first. After days of fitful sleep with one eye open so that his parents did not use their gadgets near him nor accidentally harm him with their well meaning anti-ghost products, he was exhausted. One night of good sleep hadn’t been enough to make up for the days of neglected rest. Sam followed, still wound like a tightly coiled spring and untensing bit by bit. Tucker, however, selected to remain awake despite his own yearning to nap. 

With the other two asleep he had the rare opportunity to keep all his thoughts to himself. He turned over everything, committing it to his near perfect memory. His PDA might not be working properly but thankfully its connection to his memory seemed unaffected. He could still recall anything on the device and store information from his mind to it. And there was a lot for him to take note of. 

Jason, for one, was nothing like he’d seemed at a distance. His core felt like a soft contact lens, thin and transparent and if too much pressure was applied in the right ways it would tear wide open. And unlike a lens they couldn’t just order a new one. Adoption or some pseudo equivalent was the only real long term solution he could see that would help strengthen the fragile proto-core, though that idea was to be confirmed or rejected by the yetis if all went well. 

Jason seemed resistant to adoption but Danny had been extremely enthusiastic about the idea and the complications that it would cause were not even fleetingly considered. Tucker knew that they were already stretched thin. The GIW had been getting worse and with Jazz in college it was getting harder to escape the human hunters without injury to either party. He felt bad but would be forever grateful that she’d decided to ‘stay local’ to ‘reduce loans’ because without her to run interference, things would’ve gone south ages ago.

There was also only so long they could dodge the whole king thing. Even when they worked together to scrape by with addressing the bare minimum of Danny’s duties, they were still occupied for hours. 

As things stood, none of them might graduate high school. They’d never been the most diligent students, but they’d never been in the failing zone before. 

He worried. For all his nonchalance and notorious ‘go with the flow’ attitude he couldn’t help it. Danny’s nervousness and Sam’s forethought had tempered him and together, they’d been up against enough for the phantom to recognize that sometimes, you just had to worry.

Being human was a part of them as much as being a ghost was. ‘Halfa’ was not a misleading label. It seemed that as of late the ghost side was demanding more and more of their time, leaving their human sides playing catch up. And to add responsibility to a ghost kid, who was also a human adult with separate needs, into the mix? As much as he liked Jason so far he wasn’t sure they’d be able to hold up. His thoughts were interrupted by groaning wood. 

Tucker perked up but didn’t move when he heard the door open. Jason had gotten out of the shower and had retreated to his room some time ago. He couldn’t see the oven nor the microwave from his vantage point and so he wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed. 

1 hour 12 minutes 37 milliseconds, his PDA informed him. 

Jason exited the hall and glanced around the room, frowning. The formal wear had been shed in favor of simpler black jeans and a plain red t-shirt that looked tight on his shoulders. 

“Up here,” Tucker said quietly, garnering his attention. “Phantom and Manes are sleeping.”

Jason raised a brow and looked up the fridge. “Okaaaay?” he said. “Is this a ghost thing?”

Tucker snorted despite himself because it was, wasn’t it? “Sort of. Ghosts will hunker down anywhere.” 

Then, to Tucker’s confusion, Jason climbed onto the counter and sat cross legged on it. “Hm. I don’t feel different,” he muttered, leaning back and looking up at Tucker. 

“Ok?”

“I’m going to give this ghost stuff a try,” he replied by way of explanation. 

Tucker hadn’t been aware Jason was at odds with his ghostly fragments. The discomfort rolling off of him corroborated his statement and was a testament to how unsettled the idea of having ghostly attributes must have made him.

“The location is usually related to their… theme in some way,” Tucker clarified instead. “Box Ghost will go for boxes. Johnny 13, he’s a biker, usually hangs out in car lots or in places that are popular for dates. I’ve got a strong tech affinity so you can find me around computers, same with Technus. As a ghostling you might not feel any strong inclinations yet. That’s totally normal.” 

Jason snorted. “Normal? I think that’s the first time anyone’s called me that.”

“First time for everything, though your situation overall is weird. Like dude, we don’t even know how you exist,” Tucker shrugged.

Jason’s core pulsed with doubt and resignation. “Fuckin’ fantastic. Will the doctors even be helpful?”

“The yetis are good at what they do,” Tucker assured. He was half expecting Danny to say something in defense of the Far Frozen’s inhabitants even though the other boy was fast asleep (judging by the mellow flatness that filled his mind).

Jason’s brows crept up to his hairline. “Yetis?” 

Tucker grinned and he knew it widened unnaturally, but Jason didn’t seem perturbed so he didn’t bother adjusting it. “Yes, yetis. There are all sorts of folk in the Ghost Zone, you see…”

👻 {Boo!)

The two talked quietly for a time. Tucker recounted some of the funnier and stranger things that had happened in the Zone and Jason would, on occasion, ask a question that Tucker did his best to answer in a way that wouldn’t bore the little ghost. He’d never had much of a filter and after the accident he’d gotten in a habit of rambling. Jason seemed more amenable to the visit now that he was gaining a sense as to what the Zone was like. Confronting the unknown was easier when you knew what to expect. 

Their companionable conversation was cut short by a buzz and Jason snarling with a curse. Tucker didn’t realize how lax Jason had become during their conversation until he’d tensed back up.

“Sorry, have to take this,” he said with distaste, pulling a phone out of his pocket as he climbed off the counter.

Tucker waved him off and Jason returned to the hall, and then presumably, his room.

Tucker didn’t hear the door close.

He wondered who was calling Jason at this hour- it was three in the morning. He idly debated listening in but then decided against it. It wasn’t like Amity where they needed to monitor for people contacting the news and in turn, alerting the GIW.  

Jason returned looking and feeling ruffled. 

“I’m guessing it wasn’t good news,” Tucker said.

Jason snorted. “Nosey siblings, that’s all. I forgot give them the usual ‘fuck off’ after the party.”

Tucker stilled. “Oh no,” he thought with abject horror. “We forgot to call Jazz.” 

The two corners of his mind he’d automatically turned to were muffled with the warm blanket of sleep. He had to deal with this distressing revelation on his own.

Jazz was going to kill them again, somehow. If anyone could manage it, it would be her.

“Actually, that reminds me that I ought to give a call to a sibling of my own,” Tucker drawled faux casually. “Mind if I borrow the guest room for a moment?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Sam had moved into the cabinet earlier, leaving Tucker on the edge of the fridge (perched above the doors) with Danny squashed in the middle. In theory, getting away should’ve been easy, but his tail was still tangled. Carefully, as to not disturb them, he extracted himself from the pile and floated down. “Thanks.”

He flew down the hall and turned intangible, going straight through the door. 

The guest room was a pale, washed out color that might’ve been blue once. There were thick, dusty curtains over the window and Tucker belatedly realized that the room was dark. The single twin bed had a plain metal frame and a red comforter with a matching pillowcase. There was a dip in the middle of the bed, indicating that the mattress was sagging. Next to the bed was a small nightstand with a blank alarm clock and a small white trash can. 

Besides that there was a mirror hanging on the back of the door and nothing else. Clean and minimal seemed to be the theme of the apartment. 

Tucker pulled out his Fenton Phone and turned it on. He wasn’t worried about waking her up. Either she was up anyway or sleeping fitfully enough that she might as well have not been sleeping in the first place.

“Jazz?”

“Tucker Fredrick Foley,” she replied immediately. 

Uh oh.

 👻 {Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.)

Taglist time! If you want to be added, just say so!

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Likely no chapter next week, am busy @_@ (as evidenced by me postin at 3 am). Minimal editing happened, might go back and touch the chapter up. Now time to go fight hair curler things >:[

Next: Chapter 8

[miscmonstro]

Screams. Groans of misery, moans of pain. Growling. Gurgling. Rasping breaths, rattling, hacking, wailing, shrieks. These are the traditionally typical, gruesome sounds of ghosts.

But not all ghosts had deaths where these sounds would’ve been made. Not all ghosts drowned, for instance, so why are so many ghosts be depicted as gurgling? And in Danny Phantom, plenty of ghosts were never even human. I mean, just look at concept ghosts like Undergrowth and Nocturne.

So why would ghosts make these sounds? 

Why can’t it be singing, Ghosts could be very musical. A choir of ghosts sounds like a cool way to describe a group of ghosts and it would be so fitting. And if screaming is a regular part of singing ghosts will definitely have a different perspective of hauntings and scares than humans do. 

In a lot of fanfics I’ve read words like “static” and “screeching” have been used to describe ghost speak/language and I thought that those kinds of noises and sounds compliment this ghost singing concept well. 

Anyway, l thought it would be hilarious if for whatever reason Danny got roped into caroling one year or something and he just. Could not sing in human. Its all ghost singing that, to human ears, sounds awful and horrific.

The ghosts on the other hand are very impressed.

On the flip side maybe since ghosts are singers, his human singing gets a lot better. Maybe even too good- we know from ghosts like Ember that singing can be hypnotizing (literally and metaphorically). 

(I saw a siren halfa thing somewhere and was wondering how that would work biologically/socially and it spawned this.)

[miscmonstro]

You Strike Me as Familiar (I’ve Never Met You Before)

Remember that poll? Now its time to fanfic! If you’re wondering how this fanfic + poll thing will work, check out this post. 

Current Characters: Tim Drake, Wes Weston

Summary: Tim forgot to change his shoes after PE. This creates more problems than one might think, but it also opens up a whole world of opportunity.

🪤 + 📱 - Segment 1 - 🪤 + 📱 

He’d forgotten to change his shoes, and honestly? Tennis shoes were more comfortable than the stiff oxfords the dress code required. Of course he’d try to get away with not changing his shoes at some point.

…or maybe he’d made the mistake after running on four hours of sleep. Not that he’d admit it. In any case, he couldn’t go to class like this. With a frustrated exhale, Tim turned sharply on his heel and marched back to the locker room. He tried the door and couldn’t hide his grimace when he realized it was locked.

Tilting his hand and raising his arm, Tim examined his watch and realized that he did not have much time before his next class.

He could still make it if he was quick.

Glancing around the hall to ensure no one was nearby, he pulled out a small, black rectangular box and used his thumb to pop it open. Inside was an array of slim tools with a variety of flat and curved and hooked tips, all designed just for this. Picking the lock and getting the door open was a quick process and he silently slipped inside, ready to grab his shoes and bolt. Instead, when he rounded the corner into the should-be-deserted room, he came across Wesley Weston.

Wesley was a classmate of his and was also the most unremarkable boy Tim had ever come across. Lean and stupidly tall, the redheaded boy had pale skin dotted with freckles and an obvious midwestern accent. He was a scholarship student from a small city in Illinois with two parents, divorced, and two sisters. Basketball and photography were his pastimes. He had a bit of a reputation for being a neat freak and he knew all the gossip, somehow. Wesley was very self conscious, however, and so while he was aware of the drama at any given time he was never really a part of it. Reserved and not-rich, no one paid Wesley much mind. He wasn’t worth much attention.

Or so Tim had thought.

He stared and wondered just how wrong he was. Automatically, he catalogued the sickly bruises dotted along Wesley’s arms. There were probably more under the tank top he had on.

One injury drew Tim’s attention more than the others. 

Wesley’s forearm was cut. It a long, ugly thing that started at the elbow and curved around to slice into and past his wrist.

It was the exact same injury Damian had inflicted on Spyris with his kusarigama two nights ago.

That was one heck of a distinct cut. Tim couldn’t call this a coincidence, not even remotely.

That meant he’d just discovered that Wesley Weston was Spyris. 

This was huge. Spyris was a vigilante? Villain? They didn’t know. In fact, they knew worrying little about the new player even through he’d been around for a good seven months. His movements were erratic after they’d confronted him initially and none of his actions had discernible patterns. Tim had spent many-a-night tearing his hair out as he searched for buried clues no one could find. The only thing the bats knew, besides the fact that he was a caucasian male, was that he had may or may not have had freckles. 

This was a golden opportunity to glean information- motives, goals, mode of operation, everything. 

Spyris was tricky though. Tim couldn’t afford to scare him off or he might never get another chance- he would have to approach this very, very carefully.

He could turn around and walk out. His reputation might take a hit if he showed up to class in the wrong shoes, but could he risk alerting Wesley? 

Or he could get his shoes and play it off, pretend the coach let him in. But maybe… he could dig. Just a little- they were alone in here anyway. And besides, it’s not like Wesley had any reason to be suspicious of Tim Drake.