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I went through @starry-bi-sky's shorter dpxdc au's the other day, and fell too deep in love with too many of them. Here's something inspired by their Danny Fenton is Jason Todd au whose spooky elements and universe crossover gave me so many brainworms
He doesn't start talking about the nightmares. Dick never does - he starts with something light, something interesting, something warm. But they always come up. "Free since Thursday," Danny rasps into the phone. It's Sunday. He can still feel the dreams in the back of his throat and against the curve of his ribs, tar thick and heavy. He doesn't think it will ever go away, not anymore. It's as much a part of him as his blood, the real thing not stained on green gloves and a yellow cape, as his ears and mouth and teeth, as the dark circles under his eyes.
Danny picks up Dick's phone call without looking. The ringtone is set for him specifically - everyone in his contacts have a personalized ringtone, so he doesn't need to blink the blood out of his eyes to know if one of his people is calling.
"Seems they really are becoming less frequent," Dick hums from the other end of the country, soft and warm and comforting. "Good, that's good. I'm still looking into medication. I've found one that might work for you."
Danny leans his head against his phone. His body feels like one at war, stuck between night terrors and the fear-born insomnia that attempts to stay away from them. "We'll see," he mutters, low and tired.
"If it doesn't, I'll keep looking, Jay," Dick says Danny's name like it's the most natural thing in the world. "I'll get you sleeping again if it's the last thing I do."
In a little city in Illinois, with two adoptive parents working on a portal to the other side in his basement, Danny huffs a laugh.
"My hero."
-
Danny has an accident.
That phrase is so juvenile. Like he's a child that wet the bed.
Danny had an accident. Danny was in an accident. Danny messed up.
He doesn't know what to call it, but he needs to find out. Tucker called it the incident, once. It's carried with a tone that implies something big, but in the bathos way, were you're pretty sure it hides an embarrassing joke. Sam calls it june, like it's 9/11 and only the date is needed to explain it. Jazz calls it neglect. Their parents call it an oversight.
Death, Danny can't call it. He can barely bring himself to joke about it. He told the doctor that surveyed his lichtenberg scars that his heart probably stopped and started, like a natural defibrillator. The doctor doesn't take it as the joke he had hoped it was.
The day I died, his lips form the words without sound, the portal, the pain, the waking nightmare.
The one good thing about dying is that his dreams have stopped carrying the same weight. There's little to fear from the pressure on his ribs and blood in his mouth when he's already felt his body break open and mold itself into something new. His vision breaks red in the low morning sunlight. With the memory of death seeped into his mind, he no longer wakes up heaving or choking, crying or with ribs breaking in on him. He no longer wakes up breathing at all.
He thinks his heartbeat hurts more than it helps these days. It's a pain to get it going again each morning. With the echo of ticking clocks in his ears and blood still staining unfamiliar gloves to the vision of mangled hands, with the reflection of a shock and mind melting heat and eyes covering every inch of the portal, with the memory of death, both foreign and too close to home, Danny wakes as the living corpse he's become.
I'm not dead lingers in the back of his throat. It's a lie. The doctor said a mantra could help to wake up from his nightmares, but that one doesn't work anymore.
"I'm alive," his hoarse voice whispers into his too dead and too alive bedroom instead, because that one is true.
Danny's reflection in the window looks at him with five glowing eyes, overlapping and breaking of his face. He'd joke that the house is haunted, but it's just him.
He starts breathing again.