#like Actively seeking him out for fights where his whole strategy seems to be Feral Energy

[goddess-of-graphite]

was thinking about this again and... i mean it’s not really the prompt but it did remind me of the ghostspeak-from-afar thing

anyway have this thing that was sitting in my notes for ages

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“Once the doorway has been opened, it cannot be so easily closed again.”

Clockwork’s warning rings in his ears, over and over again, even as he helps the rest of his fright pack their things into the Spectre Speeder.

It is a risk. Perhaps not one he should be taking, as King-to-be, but...

There is an ache, a hollow place where another of their little ghostly family used to be. Something had ripped one of their own from them, and ghosts are not beings who let go easily. Team Phantom will not give up hope of finding their lost member any easier.

So they gather what they cannot leave behind, unsure when they will be back (if they will ever be able to return) and sequester it all away in the Speeder, along with everything they’d need to build a portal or three to the Ghost Zone, their weapons, and enough ectoplasm to keep a city running for thirty years; they say their goodbyes without fanfare and promise to call if they can get the Fenton Fones working where they’re going.

And then they leave, disappearing through the portal in the Fentons’ basement.

Clockwork said that Jason had been forcibly returned to whence he came. That is their only clue, except for the stories he used to tell - about a dark city, and a man dressed as a bat, and rooftops guarded by gargoyles.

They will start with that.

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Jason is angry, and mourning, and half-convinced his memories of the time in between dying and living are little more than strange fantasies.

The other half of him already knows there is no way back, even if the memories are real.

(His fright is gone and it hurts- )

He tells no one of the memories. He speaks nothing of ghosts, and infinite realms, and a half-dead boy and his friends and the things they did together. Instead he settles back into a life he had left behind, a skin that feels too big for him and yet far too small, a world that is familiar in the worst of ways.

He goes along with the woman who dragged his soul back into his walking corpse until she turns him loose on Gotham, and he rages and kills and taunts the Bat with all his failures because he has nothing else.

He wrestles with the corrupted energy of the Lazarus Pit and does things he regrets. He stands on a precipice, balanced precariously between what he thinks he can live (hah) with and what he knows he cannot. He decapitates drug lords. He avoids the new Robin. He kills those who harm the innocent. He doesn’t interfere when he sees the bats in trouble. He claims Crime Alley as his turf (his haunt, wails something inside of him) and becomes a crime lord. He can’t help himself from leaving clues for the bats, that the boy they buried might not be truly gone.

He fights the Bat, once. It is violent and bloody and when it’s over Jason is left seething with rage that both is and is not his own.

So the next time they cross paths, he fights the Bat again.

And again.

And-

(There is a sound like a bell, like ice shifting, like whale song, like static and the caw of crows and a million other little things; the silent ringing of the space between stars, cold and heat and light and colour. It is a roar and a whisper and a siren’s call, a voice so familiar to him that it soothes the jagged, broken pieces inside of him.

It rings across Gotham, not heard so much as felt down to your very bones; once, twice. He is still, no breath in his lungs, and though Batman is mere yards away with hands on a batarang and a grapple, Jason pays him no attention: his sight is riveted on the horizon, searching for a figure he knows like his own soul.

The third time, Jason answers in kind: a trilling that is too loud to have come from his physical throat. It sounds like glass splintering and the silence after an explosion and the click-click-click of picking a lock, like the clang of metal against metal and the strange sound that lingers in the air afterward, like wings beating and the lyrical call of a lone bird, like a fire burning dry grass.

It contains all the things that have gone unsaid for the past two and a half years he has been alone. Pain and loneliness and anger at things he cannot change. And relief. So much relief that his limbs are weak with it.

They’re here. They’re here they’re here they’re here

They came for him.)