Whatever Walk There, Walks Alone
Danny is, in a word, miserable. In more words, he’s fucking miserable and honestly completely done with everything.
Sam, Tucker, and Jazz managed to get him out of Amity less than an hour after Jazz’s text came through. It was a simple text, just two words: code ghost. For all that it was simple, it had still paralyzed him. ‘Code ghost’ meant that his parents, meant that Jack and Maddie, had found out about Phantom. Sam came up with it and dropped it on him, Tucker, and Jazz around a year ago—after the first time his parents left him nearly fully dead. He and Tucker never though they’d actually use it, but Sam and Jazz had exchanged a look. He’d ignored it at the time, but…
…now he was on a bus to Gotham, New Jersey, and his parents wanted to strap him to the table in the basement and cut him open. Not ideal, but hey, he made it two years without them finding out, so that has to count for something.
Gotham isn’t his first choice—isn’t anybody’s first choice—but his options are limited because of his ghost half. That, and there are very few places his parents would think to look. Gotham has the unique advantage of the fact that his p—that Jack and Maddie are banned. They’d apparently been classed as rogues last time they visited, and agreed to never step foot in the city to avoid Arkham. When they’d learned that, Jazz had stepped out of the room. Her muffled screams echoed from the room over. So, with his options being Gotham or a small town in Oregon and his travel funds being limited, he did the smart thing for once in his life.
He ran to Gotham.
That’s the first time anyone’s said that Gotham is the smart choice, but Danny’s full of firsts.
The bus jerks, stumbling over something in the road. Danny bangs his head against the window and winces. He’s pretty sure they just passed into Washington DC, so he’ll have to get off the bus soon. Take a horrible, miserable little walk over to the next bus. Ancients, he’s sick of walking and busses and transfers. Why the fuck did the fastest route go through Atlanta? He shifts, legs stiff from being in one position for so long. Not that there’s another position he could put them in. Small spaces are the name of the game on these hell machines.
He almost wishes someone could have come with him, but Jazz stayed to try to slow their pare—slow Jack and Maddie down, Sam and Tucker couldn’t just disappear because their families would worry, and Dan and Dani were somewhere in Brazil last he knew. At least his fellow sort-of-triplets would probably come find him at some point. Danny doesn’t want to be alone, and he especially doesn’t want to be alone in Gotham.
Despite not needing as much sleep as he did when he was fully alive, his eyes still blink heavier and heavier. Over twenty four hours of anxious fear and miserable busses and no sleep at all will do that to a ghost. The bus jerks again and the impact of his head on glass snaps him out of the half-sleep he’d fallen into. He has to stay awake, just long enough to get on the next bus. Then he has ninety minutes he can use to fall into blissful nothingness.
The bus pulls into a building that wouldn’t be out of place in Amity, all grimy and worn down and clearly a relic of a bygone era. He’s only been out of his hometown for a little over a day, but maybe it’s the knowledge that he can’t go back that sends his heart aching. It’s definitely just the exhaustion that’s making his eyes water and nothing else.
Danny stumbles off the bus with everyone else, bleary and sick of sitting. He finds an out of the way space and squints down at his phone screen. There are messages from Jazz, Sam, Tucker, Dan and Dani, even Valerie and Vlad. Nothing from his parents, but they’re probably too busy trying to get together everything they need to find him and tear him apart molecule by molecule. He blinks out of those memories and focuses on the time. The next bus leaves in twenty minutes, so he hefts his bag onto his shoulder and tries to follow the signs to where it departs from.
It takes him nearly the whole twenty minutes to find it because he kept getting turned around. Who knew being dead tired could make someone get lost so much? He pays his fare with the cash Sam had tucked in his go bag and collapses into a seat in the back. It’s not long before sleep carries him away for a peaceful ninety minute nap.
It was not peaceful, but at least he slept the whole ninety minutes. There’s nothing like terror and betrayal fueled nightmares of being vivisected by your parents…by Jack and Maddie. The bus rocks into the station in Gotham, and Danny gets off with the two other passengers who were stupid enough to come to the damned city. Literally damned, which was a fun thing to learn during one boring lesson with the Observants. Apparently, cities can be damned! That feels like it should be illegal or something.
As he steps out of the station into the early morning light—or, more accurately, the early morning gloom—Danny has the far too late realization that he knows far too little about Gotham. He should’ve spent some of those mind numbing hours on busses googling. There are signs for hotels everywhere, and he has enough cash that he could probably get a room…but that feels open. Exposed. Like it’s the first place anyone would look for him, like it’s obvious. Besides, an unaccompanied minor paying for a hotel room in cash? Sounds like a recipe to get the cops called, even in a place with Gotham’s reputation.
Danny walks past the bright signs, past the nice shops and tourist-y looking places. He walks and walks until the smog is around mid-day bright and the buildings around him are crumbling and splashed with bullet holes. The twisting in his stomach and the whirling of his mind slow. He’s not quite at peace, no one is at peace in Gotham, but he feels settled. This part of the city has Death hanging heavy over it, like a warm blanket. His walking slows, but doesn’t stop.
His feet carry him here and there, following alleys and slipping down nearly invisible side streets. Around and around and around he goes, until he’s standing in front of an unkept graveyard in the middle of the warmest Death blanket he’s ever felt. He reaches a hand out and presses it against the rusty gate, ready to break in and pass out in a nice space between graves, when it occurs to him that maybe, just maybe, that’s not the best idea. If someone were to see him from the outside, there’s a good chance they’d call the cops.
So, for the same reason he avoided the hotels, Danny turns around. He can’t bare to leave what’s rapidly starting to feel like home, though, so he casts his eyes around for some building he could reasonably break into and pass out in. For once, his luck gets bored of screwing him over and there’s a definitely abandoned building right across the road. A definitely abandoned building with boards over everything on the two lowest floors, meaning it’s easy peasy for Danny to get up to the third and not worth it for anyone else. Hopefully.
He jogs over, not bothering to check for oncoming cars, and slips into the alley bordering it. The barricades continue on the side, and there’s the occasional scuffed set of holes in the brick that probably once belonged to a fire escape. As he looks for the most promising third floor window, he wonders if the escape was stolen by a rogue and what they would even do with it. His vision of Batman fighting an old, mechanized fire escape gets shoved away by the sound of a motorcycle gunning it down the road, causing Danny to jump and flicker into invisibility. The sound fades out fast but Danny stays invisible, heart pounding (well, beating at the correct pace for someone who is not half dead). It’s…probably a good time to crawl up into that third floor.
One quick flash of far-too-bright light later, which to the singular camera hidden up on a neighboring building looked like it came from nothing and resulted in nothing, and Danny floats up and through a broken window. The apartment it’s attached to is dark, dusty, and dead in a way that feels perfect. Every old, decrepit building needs a ghost haunting it, and Danny will happily haunt this house. Maybe he’ll even clean it up.
For now, though, he sets his bag in a corner a that faces the window but is out of sight from it and drops to the floor. Another flash of light and plain old Danny formerly-Fenton is curled up in the filth of a long abandoned apartment, too tired to even shiver at the cold that’s creeping in.
It’s going to be a long night.