#after this is 100% a baby-stealing Damian arc. Whoopsie. Blew up your base. Took your kid too. Suck my nuts. *middle finger emoji*

[faeriekit]

And, if Danny was honest, the pay was bad too.

Sure, overshadowing someone in order to peek in on what this creepy old man was up to was perhaps a pretty dark gray on the morality spectrum, but. Come on. The king's ransom in hazard pay wasn't worth the murder attempts the guy was bringing to the table. Danny was straight up ransacking this guy's personnel file, and nowhere in there was there any sort of upside or benefit to make anything about this job worth the risk.

Ugh. Whatever. Danny shed the researcher's body from his person the way a snake would shed its skin. He'd find out what this guy was hiding, remove the rancid ectoplasm from equation, and call it a day. Month. Year. Whatever it would end up being; taking a break from his significantly less perilous physics internship wasn't worth...whatever this was.

Danny slithered invisibly down narrow, ninja-filled halls.

In the basement was the bathtub of evil, just as Danny'd confirmed. It looked infected. It smelled rank. Even where he was— invisible, hovering midair over the pit of gunk— Danny kind of felt like he wanted to throw up.

There were a bunch of people hanging out there, which seemed...purposeful. A bunch of ninjas. A woman. The aspirational dictator in question.

...A kid with no soul. That's...weird...

Danny drifted closer, concerned. It's a kid with no soul— genuinely no soul; not stolen, not bartered away, not locked away or misplaced. The brain was clearly keeping the body running, kept the muscles warm and the stomach moving, but there was nothing human behind those eyes.

Something was wrong. Something very, very strange was about to go down.

And then, while Danny wasn't paying enough attention—

"Push him in," the woman commanded. Her tone was steel.

Someone else to do the dirty work. Danny sighed. He watched, ambivalent, as the kid was tossed into the drink like a poorly tossed skipping stone. He certainly sank like a rock.

The ectoplasm bubbled and burped. The assembled supervillains waited for...something. So Danny waited too.

...But nothing happened. He sighed, silently. Well, what was supposed to happen?

Danny lowered himself to the surface of the green pool, not really deciding what to do from here. Mostly just...looking. The ectoplasm was frothy and oil had begun to solidify atop the surface; it looked congealed, and smelled like rot.

At the bottom of a semi-opaque lake was a soulless teen, eyes open, looking right at him.

...Danny sighed. He knew it was a reflex. There wasn't anyone in that body, per se, but the brain knew enough to automatically track movement. It was a reflex, not a cry for help.

But Danny wanted to help. That was why he was here. Even if he had to suck it up and ignore the sensory distress of plowing through the grossest contaminants he'd ever seen for the sake of a kid with no soul.

He dove.

It was hard to see. It was hard to feel— the odor was so strong and the sensation was so slick and cloying that it felt like it ate at all of Danny intangible flesh. He felt gnawed on. He felt infected. He felt used.

At last, he saw a hand. Danny grabbed it and pulled upwards, and—

—Danny/Jason remembered Mommy rocking him to sleep, pretending that Daddy was coming home when he wasn't going to come back for months and months—

—Danny/Jason remembered pickpocketing, lifting wallets and tires and anything not nailed to the ground, ready to fight a big black Bat for the trouble—

—Danny/Jason remembered missing Mom as Alfred put him to bed, the light out but the nightlight on, looking forward to a few snatched moments of his best Shakespeare performance—

—Danny/Jason remembered flying, falling, breaking, shattering, being blown to smithereens—

Danny-and-Jason's fingers clawed onto the shoreline. He-and-him-and-they crawled forward, wheezing, rasping, as his-their body pulled itself forward.

Every unmasked face had a pleased, smug smile. No one deigned to help him/them.

"Welcome back," the woman greeted with a paper smile. "How do you feel?

He-they grimaced. "Peachy keen," Jason/Danny drawled through gritted teeth, royally pissed. This hadn't been the plan. This was nowhere remotely near the initial plan.

"Good. Perhaps you can be of some use yet."

Jason and Danny were in perfect agreement on that front: absolutely not.

But Jason knew how to play the game. He-they smiled. The more they relied on Jason, the more Danny could do to solve...this. And, perhaps, he-and-him-and-they-and-them could figure out how to drain the swamp of this eyesore on his way out.

"Sounds good to me."

Danny has initially infiltrated the League to figure out the whole deal with the corrupted ectoplasm pit in their basement. But when he saw the creepy old man who was in charge, his shit disturber instincts took over.