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dcxdpdabbles · 4 days ago

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Die with a Smile

For @anonymous-existences who asked for a "Die with a Smile" by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga using Spirt Halloween ship. Hope you like it!

Danny remembers being alive, but it was a distant memory as if he had woken from a wonderful dream. He could recall no scents or tastes from his time being flesh and bone, but he remembered sights and sometimes, if he was lucky a few sounds.

The sound of his sister singing. His father's laughter. His mother's humming. His best friend's fingers tap on his keyboard. His other best friend's plants when the water of her watering can fell over their leaves.

Danny held all the sounds dear to his heart, even if he could not remember their names or voices. Just their faces, smiles, and the warmth in their eyes before the car accident. Danny had been a Halfa from the age of fourteen, but twenty years later, he had died in a collision caused by a drunk driver, turning into a complete ghost.

Like all his previous adversaries, Danny could no longer return to the human world willy-nilly. He had reformed after he died in the Zone, becoming one of its citizens, anchored to the Realms between Death and Life.

He needed a gateway made by a mortal who willingly invited him through. All natural portals were nice, but it was a one-way. Anyone could pass through them to the Realms, not vice versa.

His parents had unknowingly created an open invitation when they stabilized their portal, allowing ghosts to run a rampage in the city. Danny doesn't remember why they had made it, but he wishes it was still there so he could see them again.

So that he could feel the deep love so evident in the glimpses and flashes of their faces that ran through his mind. He couldn't find his way back, so he spent years looking. He was one of the few ghosts that had no anchored haunt. Danny spends all eternity flying through the Realms in search of the love that he had once felt.

He lost count of how long ago that was. But along the way, he picked up other various wonders.

A bag that opens to his pocket of cosmos is flung over his shoulder. A long cloak that protected him from the scorching heat, freezing blizzards, howling winds, and drowning rain. A glimmering book that recorded his adventures in the consultations. And many new friends who have been in the Realms for so long they had developed their own culture and given birth to generations that knew nothing of the mortal realm.

Danny's ghost's name had also faded from his mind, knowing he used to answer something when he was fourteen. He is grateful that his birth name stays with him, even if he does not know his surname.

He now went as the Wander. Always searching for something he did not know if he could hold, let alone own. Wander grew in power, for his death had brought along all the ectoplasm of his Halfa days, and while his travels were relatively peaceful, there were times he needed to fight his way through.

He has never been defeated.

That was Danny's experience now. Wander, find adventure, find friends, find new incredible sights, become saddened that the new things didn't match the love he set on a pedestal, and wander again.

Over and over. Never lingering for too long. Never belonging.

Just lost in the endless void of the Realms.

Then, Danny had run into him.

A human had fallen through a portal caused by unnatural means. It was due to being attacked by a monstrous tyrant that was threatening his world. Omega Beam radiation polluted the portal, and for a second, Danny had thought he had finally found a stable way into the human world.

But alas, when he approached it, an invisible force kept him from leaving the Realms. Its constant flickering and electrical crackles mocked him, even if the scene behind the portal depicted a broken world.

Danny wanted nothing more than to fly through the human world, feel all those fantastic emotions, and live again. He pushed and pushed against the force field; however, there was no open invitation. He could not pass through the portal.

The human that fell after being pushed by the sudden explosion could. Danny had caught him and nursed him back to health, and when he awakened, he was struck dumb by those intense, intelligent eyes.

Batman was the name the human gave him, and for a few months, that was what Danny called him. The way to his home, an Earth called Gotham, had closed as soon as the omega beams had vanished. Batman was beside himself, attempting to find another portal.

As the man was living without means of flight between islands, Danny offered to take him to a few natural portals. He warned him that even if he could enter said portals, there was no guarantee he would be back when he vanished.

Portals bend time and space. They may appear in the same spot, but it was also a gamble of when that would be. Batman had no care, taking Danny's offer, and the two went off on a new adventure.

The broken pieces of an endless city was the connection between the Realms and Batman's Gotham. It took some time before Batman admitted that the city they traveled through - as, for some reason, the city bounds stopped Danny's flight - was his beloved city. It was an exact duplicated, over and over again as time moved on in the mortal world; this one copied every new development without removing the old one.

It merely expanded right next to the old building. The natural portals across the range were unstable, lasting only a few seconds before Batman was forced to throw himself back into the Realm or he got stuck at the wrong time.

Batman left a clue at every stop the portal gave him, claiming one of his children would notice and help find a way to bring him home. Danny wasn't so sure, but if the human found comfort in the thought, he would not be the one to burst his bubble.

As for Danny, the familiar emptiness that came with the urge to move on never showed itself. He found comfort in the footsteps of Batman. He found glee in the laughter around the small fires they make in the destroyed streets, void of any color.

Danny had forgotten most colors, so used to the Grey's, blacks, whites and dark purples of the Realms but the way Batman spoke of it made him think back to the reds blues yellows and greens he had not realized he missed.

Slowly, his journal filled itself with nothing but the mortal he had found.

Batman survived on what little they could find in the broken streets of his colorless home. He seemed disgruntled by the silence of the repeating streets, the obvious signs of violence that never quite healed in his city.

After a while, Danny realized he felt whole again. As if a part of his soul had been returned. Batman did not bring him back to life, but he made him feel alive.

Danny informed him it meant the land was cursed, but that only earned him a cold glare and a sharp bite of beef jerky from a gas station with its window smashed in. Their travels continued, with Danny dreaming of the five sounds he could recall of his loved ones- he did not need food anymore as a ghost, but he did need sleep. His core required recharge- realizing a new sound had been added.

The sound of Batman's soft taps as he marched on, searching for a way home.

Danny created a new constellation for him. He named it the Lost Vengence. It seemed right, even if Batman rarely spoke.

A few months of them together, Batman had wandered into an air that exploded with green grass. He grasped for his belt, but whatever he was searching for wasn't there, and he fell to his knees screaming.

Danny, who hadn't breathed it in, had rushed him over to a crumbled hospital, strapping the human down and panicking over his state. He was no doctor, but if he left Batman alone to get help, leaving the area that didn't allow him to fly would take far too long, and Batman would die.

Already, his heart was beating too fast for a human. Danny had ripped off his strange mask, trying to get him out of the clothes covered in the green goo, but it didn't do much. All that was left was a human- a handsome human- screaming his head off.

Eventually, Danny realized that his journal may have the answer. He could not always remember what he recorded, but if he asked it to, it would pull up records of adventures he may have forgotten.

There was a method of passing on his healing that Frostbite once shared with him long before his death. He pressed his hands over Batman's chest, not with his palms but with his soul, and prayed the human would accept it.

A few minutes later, Danny's ectoplasm had sunk through the skin and cleaned out the effects of the strange grass. Batman slumped against the metal table, breathing heavily and sweating profoundly, but he stared up at Danny as if he were bestowing an angel.

Since ectoplasm was purely emotional, no words had to be shared between them to know Danny had wanted to save him more than anything. Had felt the way Batman made him feel complete.

"My name is Bruce Wayne," Batman had told him later that night while the pair looked through a mall that seemed to have been flooded. The water splashed against their mid-calfs, slowly picking their way through the new clothes that Bruce could wear.

His soft smile filled up to his core, and neither mentioned the way the distance between them closed or the fingers that laced together,but Danny knew he had found it.

What he had been searching for all these years.

Bruce would sometimes stop them in the nicer parts of his city- places that merely went out of business instead of being broken down- and treat him to the few things he had forgotten of the human world.

An ice cream parlor had been stripped clean, but the owners had left one fringe with three tubs of ice cream. As time was frozen, it was good to eat, and Danny realized that while he did not need food, he did enjoy it. Bruce was sensitive to the weather that changed every few hundred miles.

In the parts with ice and snow, he curled up on Danny's chest, protected by the cloak that expanded to cover them. In the fires, he was carried on Danny's back, the fabric of the cloak protecting him from burning while Danny's hair flickers snowflakes for him to breathe.

Other times, he merely liked holding hands because he, too, felt whole with Danny.

Then they came upon a part of town that belonged to Bruce's third youngest son. He called it the Nest, and a date and time was carved on the wall. His son had found a way to stabilize a portal, and he planned to pull Bruce back home.

The boy thought Bruce was trapped in the past, but his rescue would still work. Bruce could finally return to the humans.

He understood. Danny had lived his life. Now, it was time for Bruce to finish his.

"Will you go? Would you leave me?" Danny knew the answer to his questions the second he looked into Bruce's eyes. It cracked something deep inside, but he was not angry or feeling betrayed.

"I'm sorry," Bruce whispers, tracing his hand on the curve of Danny's cheek. The ghost leans on it, wishing, not for the first time that he had the sensation of touch again. He only gets brief impressions of something against him, but Danny can not feel the texture of Bruce's clauses.

The warmth of his skin.

"Don't be. This was the best part of my existence in a long time. You were everything that I had forgotten about love."

He knew humans were warm. He remembers a tiny moment when his sister's fingers in his hair comforted him.

But he could not remember what their warmth felt like.

Bruce's face crumbled before it softened. "I'm not gone yet. We have a few hours."

"Just three," Danny whispered, looking at the numbers on Bruce's watch. He had set a countdown to when Tim would activate the machine- the portal- that only called Bruce home. Since the boy did not know it wasn't a time issue but a different reality, he had unintentionally made it with only Bruce in mind.

The force keeping all ghosts like Danny in the Realms wouldn't let him enter.

"I know how I want to spend them." Bruce found a record player broken in the movie theater beside his son's shining new hideout. Apparently, it was the one that had been abandoned in Bruce's youth.

It played a lovely old, slow dance from the forties that echoed through the dusted room, surrounding them in its soft, wistful melody. Bruce guided Danny to the center of the stage- the only place not covered in dust or supplies- and carefully bent him into an elegant dip.

At that moment, Danny and Bruce were all that existed in the broken-ended city of Gotham's past.

A smile blooms on Danny's face, twirling around the man who caught him and guided him, saying without words how much he adored Danny. The unsaid words between them meant nothing in the face of their world ending, but their smiles made up for it.

Danny's book had fallen open at one point, his collected stars and cosmos flying out to surround the pair as they swayed and slowly danced. He felt the thumping of Bruce's heart against his chest, pressing closer to record the feeling in his core and soul.

Song after song. Step, spin, sway, dip, intelligent eyes that watched him with the same amount of wishful longing and bright, loving smile.

"I could die again," Danny told him, hands on Bruce's shoulders and the human hands on his hip.

"I am," Bruce whispered back as his clock started beeping. They had ten seconds left. "I want you to remember me with a smile."

"Of course." Danny leaned back only far enough that when he pushed his face against Bruce's, their lips sealed in a burst of incredible, indescribable sensations. All at once, it's like sounds, feelings, tastes, and sights rush back at him, making him feel as if life was being breathed back into him, only for it to vanish as Bruce's body slowly fades away.

He leans back after his hands pass through Bruce's body, no longer anchored enough in the Realms to hold, and gives him the brightest smile he can muster. Neither mentions the tears rolling down their faces as he whispers.

"The party is over, and our time on this Earth is through, but I'll love you. For all eternity. I always do when I think of those who are still alive." Danny watches him fade away in soft, gentle sparks that he would later gather and shift into stardust.

He places them in Gotham's skies so Bruce can have a tiny part of him, even though he cannot see it. Danny turns around and marches back towards the realms.

The Wander must find a new purpose.

#dcxdpdabbles #dcxdp crossover #Die with a Smile #Part 1 #spirt halloween ship #TW: Main charater death #Danny misses his human side #Bruce fell in love but he has a life to live #They were only meant a little while #slight angst #bittersweet ending?#Tim brings Bruce home #Danny is unaware he's an Accient since he can effect the living world even if he can't travel to it

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misstrashchan · 6 months ago

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So. What's the opposite of a sacrifice?

With the final episode looming it's a question we've been turning in our heads, so I wanted to give my best guess/analysis as to what it might be before Jon and Muna come to tear our hearts out in the final episode.

This is the question Hayward asks Paige, and later Carpenter, and it seems to be the underlying thematic statement of the series, in response to Carpenter's exposition in the first episode of the Silt Verses that introduces us to the fundamentals of the world and system they live in:

CARPENTER:

A god must feed.

A god must be fed.

This is a fact agreed upon across every territory in the Peninsula. And so, really, the only difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...

...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make.

There is a God for anything in their world as long as there is someone believing in it. But all Gods need human sacrifices. A god must feed. A god must be fed.

These simple rules have been used as fascinating and horrifying metaphors of our modern society, and to explore themes of faith and sacrifice throughout the story.

And so the final question the last season proposes is if we can find a way to make something better, that can exist outside of this ultimately unsustainable exploitative system and the harm it inflicts upon ourselves and the world, when it has come to define so much of the way we live and how we think. And that means figuring out the opposite of a sacrifice, if they want to kill the idea, the lie, that is at the heart of their world.

At first I thought the opposite of a sacrifice, of offering up to the gods, was about killing your gods. Starving them out. Refusing to offer up anything. And that is part of it, I think. I mean it's literally been a repeating mantra of multiple characters this season once they've reached they're breaking points. Violence in revolution as a tool to overthrow oppresive systems is sometimes needed and necessary. But what about after? What kind of future or vision for a better world can there be? There needs to be something at the heart of that movement that isn't just about violence against their opressors, because you then define yourself in relation to them.

This is even illustrated in the Many Below god Paige created having predator and prey emeshed together, a movement defined by their resistance against the predators of the world, the beasts, cannot seperate themselves to meaningfully create a better future that exists outside of that dichotomy. I think Hayward realises that even earlier in S2:

HAYWARD:

There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied.

A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare.

Both animals are dead.

Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin.

Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably.

The god must have struck just as the prey died.

White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.

(Unhappily)

And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid.

It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages

I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.

Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.

There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.

Which then makes sense why he's the one proposing the question of what the opposite of a sacrifice is to Paige (and Carpenter), for this very reason.

I think the answer is pretty simple and yet, like most simple truths in this world, it's forgotten and overlooked or twisted as naïve.

Preservation. The opposite of a sacrifice is preservation. To better explain this let me use an example:

If someone who cared about you tells you you're working too hard at your thankless job, sacrificing your sleep, your time, your personal relationships, your physical and mental wellbeing, far past the point considered sane, they'd tell you to stop. To make sure you take care of yourself. Instead of endlessly feeding yourself into a machine to justify your existence.

Applied to the world of the Silt Verses, it's not just self preservation and caring for yourself. It's about caring for, protecting, and preserving the lives of those around you, that is the ultimate act of rebellion and political warfare, the first steps forward towards a better world. Caring for humanity.

Whenever our characters reach a breaking point of turning against their gods, there's a common thread of wanting to save their fellow man, and realising the inadequacy of a god's ability to do that. Whether that's somebody close to them (like Faulkner and Paige):

Or humanity as a whole (VAL and Shrue):

SHRUE:

Use them, pass them on, do not forget the suffering that keeps the engines of this world turning, forget the name of your god and cherish the name of your neighbour that was swallowed up by it-

Cherish your neighbour. Be kinder to one another.

This can even go back to Carpenter's rejection of the Trawler-Man back in S1, her fury at the fact those she loved had been eaten (her family) and would continue to be eaten (Faulkner).

CARPENTER:

(Yelling to the river)

It's over between us, you twin mouthed prick!

Do you hear me?

Does that stir you from your torpor? Pry the barnacles loose from your sodden ears?

My father and mother were Gregory and Sandra Glass. My grandmother was Adalina Glass. My brother was Em.

They died for you.

Every single one of them died for you and they thought it meant something.

My name is Carpenter. And I am still alive!

I have loved you for so long. I have tried to know you for so, so much longer.

And I'm done with you. Here and now. I'm not laying down my life for you.

I'm not dying, do you hear?

The same breaking point for Faulkner at turning against his parish and finally snapping is the idea of Carpenter being offered as a sacrifice, an offering returned, begging for her to live.

I must clarify this is my own interpretation of the question and themes the story proposes. I'm

I'm not sure we'll actually get a hard answer so much as different characters offering their own answers and us as the audience encouraged to think for ourselves what it might be. I think this is what Hayward's answer might be at least, anyway, because like me he's a corny motherfucker:

If a sacrifice is the idea that the most meaningful and transformative thing you can do is to give up your life, your sense of self, to die, then the opposite of that would be to try to keep on living, and finding meaning and transformation in that, surely?

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