Chapter Text
The night was alive with static, though there were no storm clouds lying bruised over Gotham. Voices hovered on the wind with no one there to say them. His skin felt too small, his chest wrapped tight with something almost like panic. The jolt of his feet landing on rooftops, the scrape of grit was loud, louder even than the pounding of his heart.
Damian was beginning to regret not saying anything.
Something had felt off for days, lingering in the back of his mind—but not like this. Not this constricting pressure, the sense of something burning around him. Light flashed in the corner of his eyes, not bright enough, big enough for lightning, but just as jolting.
His vision almost seemed sideways, or overlaid with a different image. He couldn't make sense of either, his body moving on instinct and training.
A voice broke over comms, familiar but unurgent. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t tell who was speaking or what they were saying over the roaring in his head.
The roar of grandfather’s voice, the cold fire in his eyes, the promise of punishment.
Damian landed again, rolling, bleeding off momentum. He kept moving, the pounding of his heart, the emotion rolling through him demanding it. Gotham at night glittered through the smog, pinpricks of light that poked and blinded. He was on the trail of something, some one. He saw the silhouette in front of him. He knew he had to report, knew he had to keep up, but it felt so—Unimportant. His mouth moved automatically. He called in the sighting, updated his location, all purely by rote. The world felt far away, distant and faded.
His hand, gripping a katana that was almost as big as he was, looking across the sparring mats to see his own face mirrored back.
He took another leap, body automatically braced for impact, calculating angles and where to cut off his target. He hit the arc of his jump—and choked on a scream, eyes blind with the sudden shock of pain and panic. His nerves shattered with abrupt agony. He couldn't breathe. His left arm spasmed as what felt like fire climbed it, cracking his chest open wide. It didn't stop, the pain marching on past his chest and through the rest of his body. No nerve left untouched, no torment left unknown.
Gotham faded and green filled his vision. The toxic brightness of Lazarus nearly blinded him, the scent, familiar and hated, flared like acid in his nose. He was a live wire, and there was nothing to ground himself with.
Damian felt the air rushing past, felt the stomach twisting sense of falling. Instinct warring with pain, with the scream that he could hear echoing in his head. He shifted, braced for impact.
The crashing burn reached a high, and emotion scraped itself into the wailing hollow of his chest. Fear, shock, confusion. He couldn't stop the scream that ripped up his throat, and it joined the one in his head, bouncing off brick and mortar.
More voices, unfamiliar and frantic, joined the ones on his comm. Damian managed to pull in more air, but couldn’t manage words. The scream bursted out again—the green crashed around him and it was cold fire. He landed, bounced—and still he fell into the green.
The green snapped, crashing into pitch blackness without warning, and he slid helplessly into it.
An echo lingered in Danny’s ears. It had for days, a wavering, distant note with no speaker to carry the sound. It rode under each word, haunting every syllable. Danny couldn’t make it out, no matter how hard he strained his ears to listen to the steadily rising pitch.
It was familiar, like the clipped notes of a song he knew too well.
Choked gasps of pain, muffled sobs. Moving forward, in spite of aches and bruises.
Dread followed the sound, just as haunting. It ghosted along his skin, settling uncomfortably in the center of his chest where it hummed and thrummed a discordant melody.
It was fear without purpose, without target.
An echo with no clear source.
Danny’s head was stuffed with cotton, his ears dulled with the echo. He could hardly focus, could hardly think as he dodged the flash of claws and the snap of sharp teeth. He grit his own fangs in defiance of it all, braced against the onslaught with everything he had.
Everything, despite the fatigue slowly squeezing at his chest. Despite the sound rising in his ears— a roar, the garble of static—
A scream.
A scream, sharp and shrill, cutting through the night. Danny tore his eyes from the panther just long enough to scan the nearest buildings. His vision tunneled, the pitches of the roofs all jagged, wavering points silhouetted against the night sky. Too tall, too sharp— more skyscraper and spire than townhouse and garage. He tried to make sense of it, as if enough staring might sharpen his surroundings into answers.
A jolt tore through Danny’s arm, fire racing whitehot along the course of his veins. He shot high into the sky, clutching his arm tight as he inspected it for damage, expecting to find the puncture of fangs and the ooze of ectoplasm.
Blisters on his hands, red and raw. Gripping a sword against thin bandages.
His glove brushed smooth, intact fabric. There was no blemish, no tear…
The fire in his veins spread all the same, prickling tendrils of flame pooling in the palm of his hand. It crackled, electric and sharp. The echo in his ears grew with it, a cadence rising higher and higher with the flames kindling beneath his skin.
The searing, hot fire of punishment, the taste of failure and loss.
His breaths came ragged and quick, the world a haze of screams, too familiar and too near. The fire raced through wires as much as Danny’s veins, the bite of electricity and the whir of machines. A pressure settled beneath his hand, digging into the center of his palm—
It burst.
The tunnel of his vision stained green, the light as sudden and piercing as quick flashes of lightning driving towards the earth. The scream that echoed in Danny’s ears had a voice now, drawn ragged from his own throat. It tore through him, unmade him— the unbearable magma of the earth’s core and the frigid ice of the endless sky, each fighting to carve a place at the center of his being.
It should have been him. It always should have been him.
The echo was more memory than sound now. Snaking wires, a tunnel through the earth. The nervous beat of his own heart, thumping, thumping, thumping —
Stopping, as abruptly as the shock.
The green left just as quickly, the world seeming to shift on its axis in a rush of falling, fading stars as Danny slid into the inky black.