Chapter Text
Johnny tipped his head back and opened his mouth, watching smoke curl up into the sky. The vapor glowed faintly from its brief stint in his ghostly lungs, drifting upward until it dissipated into the dark of night. A lone raindrop splashed onto his cheek. He sighed and pulled away from the physical plane just enough that the next few droplets passed through him instead. No one likes a damp cigarette.
The trip to Amity Park was always worth it, if only for the smokes. Of course, he could materialize a pack whenever he wanted, but the ectoplasmic memory wasn’t the same as the real deal. It wasn’t that the ghostly version was any worse — they just weren’t quite as filthy as the cigarettes he could pick up from a mortal gas station. There was something about the stench of fresh tar sticking to his clothes that Johnny missed.
He pulled his gaze away from the cherry red glow and scanned the empty parking lot again, searching for a particular telltale light in the night. On an ordinary evening, Johnny did his damndest to avoid Amity Park’s protector. When he wanted Phantom’s attention, Johnny usually caused some havoc to make his presence known. Tonight, quite frankly, Johnny was tired. He’d had a hell of a day, and Phantom was diligent. The kid would find him sooner or later.
Sooner had come and gone, but it seemed that later was about to arrive.
Phantom touched down on the asphalt with a peculiar look on his face. “Johnny,” he acknowledged. “What’s up?”
“Yo.” Johnny flicked the ash off his cigarette and pulled out the pack. “Wanna smoke?”
Phantom curled his lip and snarled at the cigarettes as if they’d insulted his honor.
Johnny shrugged and pocketed his loot. Never let it be said that the protector of Amity Park was not rude as fuck.
Despite that, the kid was a lot more tolerable than he used to be. Phantom's shift toward “more reasonable” and “less punchy” was the only reason Johnny was talking to him at all. Not that he wanted to be. He felt a little bit like a narc at the moment, but these days Phantom spent just as much time protecting ghosts from humans as he did the other way around.
“So, I ran into this dude in Gotham,” Johnny began.
“Yeah, I heard they have those there,” Phantom deadpanned.
Johnny snorted. The kid’s humor had improved, too. It didn’t do much to lift Johnny’s unease, though. He flicked his lighter nervously and said, “Listen, I never seen anybody like this guy before. Some kind of Quasimodo freakazoid. You seen that movie? Guy’s aura felt sort of like that.”
Phantom grimaced. “First off, incredibly rude. Second, what the hell does that even mean?”
“Well, for one thing, he beat the shit out of me,” Johnny said with a measure of excitement, gesturing with his cigarette.
“That doesn’t bother me at all.”
Johnny rolled his eyes and took a drag. Truthfully, it didn’t bother him all that much, either. It was the rest of the guy that really rocked Johnny’s boat. He exhaled downwind.
“I’m not sure what his deal is, but he felt really off,” Johnny continued. “Not like you —”
“Thanks.”
“— But not not like you, either.”
Phantom frowned. “Was he a halfa?”
And that was the weird part. Johnny shook his head. “I truly couldn’t tell, man.” He sucked on his cigarette again, then glared at its spent butt. The audacity. Johnny lit another while Phantom deliberated.
Eventually, the damned good samaritan said, “We should see if he needs help.”
Johnny blanched. “We?” He had no inclination of getting anywhere near the guy’s haunt again.
Phantom gave him a sharp look. “Of course. You’re going to show me where he is.”
A wall of smog greeted them as they exited the portal high above Gotham’s cityscape.
“Ugh,” Phantom wrinkled his nose. “This place is a swamp.”
“Hey, swamps are cool.” It was a token protest at best. Johnny was fully aware of how nasty Gotham’s air pollution was.
Phantom scoffed. “Okay, Shrek.”
“Who?”
For some reason, this made Phantom burst out laughing, until he switched to coughing. Served him right.
He caught his breath — and wasn’t that a trip. Johnny always thought it was weird that the guy bothered to breathe at all — and Johnny pointed him in the direction of the weirdo’s haunt. Phantom took off and he followed grudgingly behind.
“Looks like the shitty part of town,” Phantom commented as they approached.
“Yup. It is. I found him hopping around rooftops like one of them vigilantes.”
“Damn, really?”
“Yeah, you ever met any of those guys? They’re all nuts.”
Phantom threw him a suspect look over his shoulder. “Johnny, you do know that I’m basically a vigilante, right?”
Johnny smirked. “Case in point.”
Phantom rolled his eyes.
As they got closer to the neighborhood in question, Johnny got antsy. When they started flying around individual rooftops, Johnny began actively searching for an opportunity to peel off from Phantom’s search party and split like a banana.
The evening was looking rather sparse of opportunities, so Johnny decided to make his own.
“Listen, I gotta go.”
Not the most clever of exit strategies, but Johnny never claimed to be a tactician.
Phantom turned to look at him, one foot poised on the rooftop's edge. “But we haven’t found him yet.”
“Yeah, no.” Johnny scratched the back of his neck, looking anywhere except at Phantom. “I got a date.”
“I thought you said Kitty was having a girls’ night?”
Fuck it. “It’s a double date. Hottie number one is not getting my ass kicked by a freak. Again. Babe numero dos is gonna be me, lifting some cash off one of these rich Gotham fucks, and getting myself some more smokes.”
Phantom stared at him, his expression settling somewhere between baffled, disappointed, and insulted, despite the fact that Johnny was pretty sure he hadn’t insulted him at all. Maybe he was taking the entire concept as an insult to reality at large. Johnny sighed. There was no winning with this kid.
After a solid thirty seconds of gears visibly grinding in his skull, Phantom threw up his hands and said, “You know what? Have at it, dude.”
He turned around, jumped to the next rooftop, and walked away.
That was so much easier than Johnny had expected.
Given the significant workload involved in running multiple crime rings, Jason didn’t spend much time patrolling these days, but he liked to get out on the streets whenever he could. He felt it was important to show his face — or helmet, rather — not to mention, swinging from rooftop to rooftop and stalking from the shadows scratched a particular itch. It was relaxing.
Except when it wasn’t.
For the second time that week, invisible alien fingers pulled at a part of Jason’s mind that he usually tried very hard to ignore. Creeping pins and needles edged in on his thoughts. A static-cling haze threatened to shroud his judgment. Jason leaned against the cold brick wall of the alley, panting and blinking hard. The feeling was only getting worse.
Jason knew better than to engage an enemy who set off The Pit this badly. He knew better, yet just two days ago, he had folded under the impulse like wet cardboard. Wet cardboard drenched in acid. Green acid. Sort of like the caustic, clinging ephemeral ooze that was beginning to impair his vision.
Jason tore off his helmet and pinched the bridge of his nose. A low growl rumbled in his chest. The part of his mind that was still lucid, although swiftly diminishing and deeply alarmed, offered a quiet, “What the fuck, man.”
Jason didn’t have an answer.
He bared his teeth, palmed his grappling hook, and launched himself at the source of his torment.
Danny sensed him long before he saw him, and by the time he saw him, it was far too late. The thing was, Danny didn’t want to fight this guy. The other man was not a ghost, and Danny, as a rule, did not fight the living.
On the occasions that he encountered crime on his patrols, he would discreetly call in a tip to the APPD and then turn a blind eye. Danny may be partially alive himself, but the vigilante part of his identity was not concerned with the misconduct of the living. He simply didn’t have time to pick up another hobby.
However, while vague and unhelpful, Johnny's assessment was not far off the mark. The guy wasn’t a ghost, but he wasn’t not a ghost, either. And, more importantly, while Danny didn’t want to fight, the other guy clearly wanted to kick his ass all the way back to Illinois.
An impressive aura of rage preceded him, mixed with the sweet-sour stench of rancid ectoplasm. Normally, clean ecto smelled like a thunderstorm rampaging through an orchard. At least, that's how it smelled to Danny. According to his living friends, it smelled more like Jolly Ranchers dipped in battery acid. When it was left out to rot, Danny and his friends all agreed that it smelled more like citrus-but-worse, as the sharp sour edge turned sweet and cloying like an aromatic corpse.
Wherever this guy’s ectoplasm came from, it was decidedly on the rotten end of the spectrum, giving him the offensive fragrance of angry lemons.
This was concerning, but Danny didn't have much time to dwell on Mr. Lemons’ body odor. Before Danny could blink, the man had repelled straight up the side of the building, a forty-five in one hand and a swiftly retracting grappling hook in the other.
The bullets started flying the moment his masked face cleared the rooftop. The lead slugs punched a constellation through Danny’s chest. He didn't take it personally. With half a thought, his suggestible form was whole again. It seemed that however much of a ghost Lemons was or wasn't, his weapons were clearly calibrated to human.
Combat boots slammed down on the rooftop as the man landed, unflinching in the face of Danny's unique brand of bulletproof. He smoothly ejected the spent clip and closed the distance between them with a spinning roundhouse kick.
Danny scoffed — he could see a move like that coming a mile away — and liquefied his midsection. A spike of surprise cut through the other guy's rage as his foot met little more resistance than jelly.
A grin cut across Danny's face. Clenching down, he caught Lemons’ leg halfway through his stomach, disrupting his opponent’s balance and shocking him even worse. Lemons didn't let his surprise show outside of the spasming of his aura. He pivoted on his grounded foot and redirected into a roll that pulled his leg free, sending bits of Danny's stomach splattering into the air.
Danny didn't mind. By the time Lemons had steadied himself into a crouch, Danny's ectoplasm had already returned to its rightful place. He opened his mouth, intent on dropping a quip about a warm welcome for his cold dead heart when his opponent lunged again.
Lemons was relentless, and a damned good fighter, to Danny's pleasure. However, he wasn't a ghost. He didn't share Danny's supernatural constitution, nor did he have any weapons or abilities that could deal ghostly damage, so Danny pulled his punches to match.
At the same time, his powerful, uncontained aura made Lemons' ghost-adjacent status perfectly clear. For that reason, Danny didn't make any move to end the fight early. He wanted to be polite, after all, and it was considered rude to thrash a ghost in his own haunt upon first meeting him — even if the ghost in question wasn't actually a ghost. So Danny met him at every attack, and brought just enough offense to be considered respectful.
A volley of throwing stars sailed by. It occurred to Danny that Lemons might not be picking up the friendly vibes he was putting down. The man wasn't exactly well. In a word, his aura felt sick, which was corroborated by his rabid behavior. Case in point: Danny presently slithering out of a hold as Lemons gnashed his teeth way too close to his face. The thing was, fights like this were common between ghost-kind, but normally there was something resembling dialogue, whether it be a pithy exchange of terrible puns or silent flashes of aura. Meanwhile, Lemons was doing the aural equivalent of screaming like a child having a tantrum, and the resulting vibes were atrocious.
Still, Danny had met worse, and he had even befriended worse, once he had gotten past his own screaming-tantrum phase that had colored his ghostly youth in splashes of red and green. When Danny was a baby ghost, he, at least, had access to clean ectoplasm that Lemons was sorely missing. Danny could never forget the dramatic, chilly events surrounding his own ghostly maturation. He also recalled that his ghost half had hardly been more than a year old at the time. Danny couldn't describe how he knew, but there was something about Lemons' aura that said he was a lot older than one year. Yet, he was still reading as a baby ghost in Danny's senses. Danny wasn't a doctor, but he imagined that poor nutrition probably had something to do with the man's stunted growth.
Danny rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding a bowie knife to the neck. He considered his options. Ideally, he would prefer to take Lemons to his doctor in the Far Frozen, but he imagined that conversation wouldn’t go over well.
"Hi, did you know you're super sick, and can I please take you to a doctor? Also, you reek, and I've been calling you 'Lemons' in my head this whole time. I hope you don't mind."
Maybe he shouldn’t mention that last part, but Danny didn't have to be a genius to guess what kind of response he'd get from any of those remarks.
As it stood, the most Danny could do was offer some of his own healthy ectoplasm in a sort of transfusion between auras. Lemons seemed subconsciously eager to shed his own tainted ecto into the polluted air and absorb Danny's good 'plasm through ghostly osmosis. Danny kept the offerings small, taking the same care he would with a victim of dehydration. It wouldn't heal him, but it would at least relieve some of his pain.
The fight wore on with the passage of time only marked by the distant chiming of a clocktower. Danny recognized its toll for the second time that evening. His stamina was dwindling, no thanks to the energy he was slowly feeding his new friend, but he could feel that Lemons' rage was waning as well.
They faced off, Danny gasping for breath, limbs quivering. His opponent was breathing heavily as well, braced in a powerful stance that seemed to be the only thing keeping him upright.
Danny whipped a spontaneous limb at his ankles, and sure enough, the other man collapsed. Danny let himself drop to the rooftop with a groan.
Usually, lying face-up on the ground after a nighttime fight had one benefit: a pleasant view of the stars. This was not the case under Gotham's smoggy sky, painted orange by the city's equally disgusting light pollution. Sighing in disappointment, Danny rolled onto his side.
Lemons was lying with his head propped, evidently giving Danny the eye through his domino mask.
Danny's stomach growled.
Lemons hauled himself upright. In a gruff voice, he asked, "Wanna grab a burger?"
Danny flopped onto his back again. "Fuck yes."