#though i would advise being subscribed on ao3 as they will just mail u when ive updated

[petite-phthora]

I'm sorry

[DP x DC fic]

[Love at first… murder? - part 20]

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Part 1

Ao3

---

The moment their lips touch, the feeling of the Pit washes over Jason, drowning out everything around him. They jerk away from each other. Two pairs of toxic green glowing eyes meet.

Jason feels as if he's disassociating as he speaks.

“You’ve died?”

It’s too much.

Everything is too much.

After a week of not feeling much from the Pit except for calmness and contentment, the sudden spike is jarring. All he can think about is how it’s back. He let his guard down, and now the Pit is acting out at full capacity again. Overwhelming his senses. Overwhelming him.

Though it's not rage.

It’s something else…

Joy? Exhilaration? Recognition? Reverence?

He can’t tell. And it doesn’t matter.

It’s back. It’s in control. He can’t help it. He can’t stop it.

But he also can’t let it hurt someone. Not again. He can’t let himself hurt someone. He can’t let himself hurt Danny.

Jason has a gun in his hand.

He hadn’t been aware he had pulled it out. But now he is acutely aware of the gun he has pointed at himself.

His hands are trembling.

 “—How'd it even happen? I didn’t think—“

Danny is rambling on about something. Jason doesn’t listen. He can’t listen. He’s dazed from the Pit madness— Though it’s not really madness at this point, is it?

Insanity? Lunacy? Craziness? Hysteria?

Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. He can’t see anything but green.

“—so glad we’re the same, this is great news! It makes everything so much easier!—“   

Danny keeps speaking to him.

As he thinks about Danny again, the Pit hones in on him.

Danny.

It all started with him.

The change in the Pit… The change in his feelings…  

The change in him…

Somehow, someway Danny is the focus point. He’s at the center of it all. He knows something. He’s the one that started this— this—

Madness.

Jason wrenches back control over his arm and redirects what he’s aiming at.

He points the gun at Danny.

“—she saw I was her new patient clearly. But hey, th—”

His hands are still shaking.

His vision as green at the Pit.

"What is happening to me?"

---

Well fuck.

Danny thinks to himself

Danny is completely still as he gazes in Jason’s direction. He eyes the gun for a second before dismissing it and locking eyes. It’s not like it can seriously hurt him, and it seems to be a comfort for whatever is going on with Jason.

Speaking of…

“Jason—”

Danny gets cut off by a bullet to the leg. He instinctively turns intangible, the bullet getting embedded in the ground underneath him.

It’s silent as they both stare at the spot in the ground the bullet hit.

Danny opens his mouth to speak again but gets cut off but another bullet shot, quite literally, through his leg.

“Jason—“

Jason isn’t listening. Instead, he has pulled out a second gun and shoots that one at Danny as well, getting the same result. He lets out a frustrated sound before dumping both guns on the ground as he grabs another weapon.

“Ja—”

A Batarang through the head shuts Danny back up again. Danny lets out a small breath before just deciding to wait it out.

Jason seems to be considering his weapons before his eyes land on his watch.

“Don’t worry though! While it may look a little dangerous, it’s actually quite harmless to living humans!”

He glances between the watch and Danny a few times. Danny notices this and comes to the same realization. He tenses, and that’s all the confirmation Jason needs.

He aims the watch at Danny.

Danny does not move.

It’s silent for a few tense moments.

“Well? Start talking.” Jason’s voice cuts through the silence.

Danny says nothing for a few seconds, considering where he should start.

“Well, ever since I was born, my parents—” He cuts himself off with a yelp as he quickly moves his legs. The toxic green laser shot from the watch just barely missing his leg and instead singeing the ground between his legs.

“Dude—”

“Get to the point.”

“I’ll have you know this is all very important background information!" Danny pouts for a second before quickly getting back on track when Jason shoots him a look.

“So, my parents are self-proclaimed ecto-biologists. Have been my entire life—”

“The hell is an ecto-biologist?”

“I’m getting to that! You know, interrupting me constantly won’t—”

Another laser shot, this one doesn’t miss and hits Danny’s shin. He lets out a small his of pain. It’s not too bad, but it still burns.

“Alright, alright! So uhh, ecto-biologists. Yeah, so my parents are basically scientists specializing in the field of the supernatural, and in particular, ghosts, also known as ectoplasmic beings.

“An ectoplasmic being is called as such because they are made, either entirely or partially, of ectoplasm.

“Wait, do you even know about ectoplasm? You should probably know about ectoplasm. You know, toxic, green, glowing—“

At the description Jason tenses, but does not fire.

“Right, okay so you do know—”

“What do you know about the Lazarus pits?”

Danny, who has never heard of the Lazarus Pits before, gets unnecessarily defensive.

“What do you know about the Lazarus pits?” he asks in an accusatory tone with narrowed eyes. He crosses his arms and points a finger at Jason for good measure, forgetting about the watch ray still pointed at him.

Naturally, he gets shot.

“Ouch! Ah fuck, okay, okay. I’ll talk. Damn. That thing hurts, you know!”

“That’s the whole point.”

“Anyway, I have never heard of these Lazarus Pits before. I’m referring to ectoplasm. It’s the stuff we— ghosts are made of. My parents have always been fascinated by ghosts. They wanted to study them.

“The problem being that they had never even actually seen a ghost before, and so they have been trying to build a portal into the Ghost Zone—”

“The fucking ‘Ghost Zone’?” Jason cuts in incredulously.

“Ghost Zone, Infinite Realms, the In-Between, Purgatory, whatever you want to call it. It’s the in-between of every single universe and dimension, the glue between realities, yada yada yada.

“It just so happens to be the place where ecto-beings, ghosts, reside. And my parents wanted in. Their portal was their life work, and when they finally finished it and plugged it in it… didn’t work…”

“Right…” Jason’s tone is dry, his expression full of suspicion and doubt about the story Danny is telling.

Danny resolutely pushes on.

“So, being dumb teens, me and my friends went to check it out…” Danny takes a breath to steady himself, hugging his knees and gaze turning to the ground.

“I— my friend dared me to go inside. It would be a cool picture, you know? And it didn’t work. My parents’ inventions never worked— So yeah, I uh, I stepped inside…

“The inside was awfully roomy and awfully dark… So I went in further and I— I happened to trip on a cable.”

Danny doesn’t notice himself trembling slightly. Doesn’t notice his breath quickening. Doesn’t notice Jason’s frown.

“Naturally, I tried to catch myself. I tried to steady myself using the wall but…” He lets out a small laugh. “Should’ve known there was an on button on the inside…”

“D—” Jason tries to speak up but Danny doesn’t hear him, staring at nothing as he continues.

“And then my vision filled with green.”

---

The green in Jason’s vision has dimmed.

Jason frowns as he watches Danny stare into the distance, his eyes glowing green. He’s trembling, and Jason wants nothing more than to go over there and hug him, to comfort him, but…

He takes a deep breath and keeps the watch ray steadily pointed at Danny.

He can’t.

Not right now.

First, he needs to hear him out.

---

“Danny” Jason calls out to him.

Danny blinks. He looks around for a moment before taking a steadying breath.

“Right, right. You wanted the story. Right, so… While my parents had plugged the portal in, they had built the on button on the inside of the portal and then promptly forgotten it was there…

“So the portal turned on with me inside. Thousands of volts of electricity ran through my body. Green as far as I could see, as far as I could feel, as far as I could touch…

“I don’t know how long I was in there for. Screaming, as an interdimensional portal opened right on top of me... As my DNA was stripped from my body and rewritten into something other… As I died and got revived over and over and over again…”

Danny takes another few deep breaths, pausing in his speech. He runs a hand through his hair. He feels tired… heavy… mourning…

Two strong arms wrap around his body in a hug.

Danny leans his head against Jason’s shoulder.

He doesn’t cry. But neither speaks as they sit there, while the trembling in Danny’s form diminishes. Once it’s gone, Danny speaks up again.

“And then it stopped.”

“Danny—”

Danny shakes his head in response.

“No, no. It’s better to just… get it all out in the open now…”

Jason, while clearly disagreeing, keeps his mouth shut. Letting Danny choose whether or not to continue.

“So yeah. When it stopped, I fell out of the portal, different. I was a ghost, but also… not. I had died, but not quite all the way.

“I was a ghost, and human. Both dead and alive. Shrödinger’s boy, if you will. A halfa is what they me—call us— Half-alive… Half-dead…”

“And then… then they came through… Other ghosts…

“Now that the portal was open, they could reliably enter our world. Driven by Obsession, they would do anything they could to get what they wanted, often harming the living in the process. And that’s where I came back into the picture…

“No one could do anything to stop the ghosts. Yes, my parents were ghost hunters, but they weren’t all that… good at it… So I had to do something. I couldn’t let people get hurt when I was able to help, to do something.”

Danny pauses in his speech. After a while of sitting there in the embrace. Jason speaks up, breaking the silence that had fallen over them.

“When I was 15, I died.”

 Danny listens, turning to look at Jason’s face. “I was trying to find my biological mom, and followed a lead to Ethiopia, but…

“It was a trap.”

Green tinges the corners of his vision but Jason pushes on.

“She was being blackmailed by the Joker and lured me there to— She— She handed me over to him…”

A deep, calming, breath.

“He beat me… over and over and over again, with a crowbar. And that wasn’t the icing on the cake, no!” Jason lets out a laugh “He blew the place up once he was done with me…”

Danny puts his hand on one of the tensed arms still holding him. Jason pauses, forcing himself to relax some before proceeding.

“Six months later, I crawled out of my own grave… I think I  wandered around aimlessly for a while, I don’t know. My mind wasn’t quite… there…

“Then, someone found me and put me in a Lazarus Pit… They’re these glowing green bubbling pits in the ground. They heal the sick and dying but kill the healthy.

“I don’t remember much from what happened back then.” He admits. “Everything was a green haze. The Pit, it— it took over my mind, my emotions, my control…

“Eventually, I made my way back here, to Gotham. I became the Red Hood, stealing one of the Joker’s old aliases as a big ol’ ‘Fuck you’ to him.

“I tried to get revenge… I failed… Became a crime lord, grudgingly reconnected with my family, etc., etc., all while trying to deal with the Pit.

“While I was in there, in the Lazarus Pits, it didn’t just bring back my mind, it— it changed me…

“Now, I can easily get irrationally angry over the smallest things. It’s like the Pit… latches onto my feelings, and increases the anger tenfold, I—

“I remember it all…” He takes a deep breath. “Whenever the Pit madness is in effect, whatever it makes me do while it has me under its control. When I’m lost in a raging green haze…”

“I remember…”

Danny moves up a bit in Jason’s hold. Putting his arms around Jason’s head and gently pulling him against his shoulder.

They hold each other.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

---

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