Ch.12: The Here and Now

With their arms crossed over their chests, Danny and Sam watched in amusement as their friend struggled to push open his front door. Beads of sweat dripped down Tucker's face as he pushed on the door with all of his weight behind it. There was no point, however. Tucker's front door was just like Danny's, except ten times worse. No one was entirely too sure how it managed to stay up, for the door was dry-rotted and nearly falling off its hinges; yet, it remained intact.

Leaning over to Sam, Danny muttered, "Should we help him out or no?"

Humming contemplatively, the female's eyes narrowed. Danny grinned amusedly as Sam slowly starting shaking her head. Finally, Sam muttered back, "Nah, he can suffer some more. I'm sure he's done something at some point to deserve this karma."

"Haven't we all?"

"Undoubtedly, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

The ebony-haired teens watched Tucker for a little while longer, grinning as their friend struggled with all of his might against the dry-rotted piece of junk. All the while, Tucker cursed and heaved as he used all of his weight against the door. Finally, the boy broke down and shot a look over his shoulder, calling to the other two teens, "Would the two of you grace my humble self with your help already?!"

"Calm yourself, peasant. Your master has heard his servant's cries." Danny responded, grinning as he separated from Sam's side. The girl snorted quietly behind him, and Tucker glared at the other boy's remark, muttering something about not needing pretentious bastards in his life. Danny's grin only grew as he stopped in front of Tucker's door, looking it up and down. "Hm. Tuck, I think there's only one way to take care of this."

"And what way would that be, oh great and mighty overlord?" Tucker drawled, rolling his eyes.

BANG!

"AHHHHH!"

Sam guffawed as Tucker shrieked, looking at the place where his door had previously been. Danny dusted his hands off victoriously, his expression morphed into pride. Stunned and sorrowful, Tucker peeked into the new opening in his doorframe, looking at the splinters of what once had been his door spread all over the ground. Whimpering, the cocoa-skinned boy said, "You broke my door."

Clamping Tucker's shoulder, Danny replied, "It was broke before. I just made it unfixable."

Theatrically, Tucker mimicked sobbing.

With a pleasant hum to himself, Danny stepped inside the empty doorframe, followed by a trudging Tucker. Sam brought up the rear, a skip in her step as she trailed after her male friends.

The shack they entered was small, so much so that 'small' would almost be an understatement. No more than ten people would be able to stand in the single-room hut at a time, and even with no furnishings of any kind, it would still be very cramped. Fortunately, the trio had nowhere near that many friends. Still though, it wasn't very pleasant, eliciting Sam to casually comment, "You really need to get this place fixed up. One day, it's gonna collapse, and you're not going to be able to get out, starve, and die."

"That's what you useless losers are for." Tucker replied, placing his hands on a panel on the only windowless wall. He pushed in, the panel falling back, and moved it to the side, revealing a closet-sized room inside. It was no closet, however; it was a secret stairwell. Tucker entered it without a second though, ushering both of his friends through. Sam and Danny passed him, heading down the steel stairs, their footfalls resonating off the walls.

As Tucker pushed the panel back into place, hiding the stairwell from any unwanted guests, Danny called as he descended, "What if Sam and I just let you die?"

"Then I'd come back as a ghost and kill you."

"It's unfortunate that that's an actual option."

The trio wandered into the main portion of Tucker's lab/garage was much, much larger than the shack that sat above it. Examination tables took up most of the space, most of which had unfinished androids on top. There was a large computer console- a present from Danny –in the corner by the staircase, a mini-fridge sitting next to it. On the far side of the room, there were two doors, one that was normal wood and the other that was made of glass. The wooden door led to Tucker's bedroom, and the glass one led to a long aisle filled with the techno-geek's prized androids. One of the androids was the war-bot that had been named "Droid."

(Danny never understood why that one was on display. Looking at it brought him back to a time in his life that he did not particularly like to revisit, but it never had seemed to bother Tucker. The ebony-haired boy wanted to ask his friend why (why is it there? Why doesn't it bother you? Why do you torture me like this?), but Danny could never muster up enough courage to go through and raise the question.)

Upon reaching the lower level, the trio split from their single-file line and dispersed to their usual spots. Tucker grabbed his rolly-chair- another present from Danny. Sam grabbed a water bottle from the fridge and took a seat on one of the examination tables, which was almost always empty because the female loved to sit there. Danny chose to remain standing, leaning against one of the walls and crossing his arms casually over his chest.

"Alright buddy-boy, what happened on your mission that was so amazing that you didn't even finish your drink?" Sam asked Danny, raising one of her eyebrows expectedly.

Tucker leaned forward excitedly, already knowing the best detail of all but knowing so little still. Sam noticed the boy's excitement but said nothing, simply waiting to hear how this would play out.

"Well, for starters," Danny began, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a little, silk bag. He tossed it onto the table next to Sam, letting her take a look at the contents inside: the O'Keefe's wedding rings. "I got my job finished."

Sam rolled her eyes at that statement and inspected the rings with interest. Tucker scoffed at the other teen and said, "Dude, you always get your gigs finished."

Danny grinned cheekily. "Yeah-h-h, I know."

"Get to the juicy details already before we have to lob your head off." Tucker snapped, his eye twitching.

"Aw, don't get your panties in a twist. I'll get on with it…" Danny said. He dove into the story, starting with the boring details that Sam and Tucker only half-listened to. The teen boy didn't mind them; he was rushing through those parts anyway. They only perked up when he said, "Unfortunately for her, the couple's kid walked in as I was about to leave. What was her name? Lila? Leila? Something like that, anyway. I had to take care of her for obvious reasons."

The boy's last statement was rather ominous, even if Danny hadn't really done what he had implied, but neither Sam nor Tucker were phased by the implication to begin with. If anything, it seemed to finally capture their attention. Tucker asked curiously, "So what sort of freakish nightmare did you conjure up?"

In reply, inky black dripped into Danny's eyes, covering up the icy blue quickly. As soon as the color was erased, the same monster from the O'Keefe fizzled into existence behind Danny, looming over the shorter boy menacingly. Its red eyes flickered back and forth between Sam and Tucker, hissed, and then dispersed in a poof of black fog as the inky black drained from Danny's eyes, leaving them their original blue again. Neither Sam nor Tucker seemed all that impressed by the boy's creation.

"Considering what you've created before, that was kind of cheesy." Sam commented, looking at her nails and inspecting them for flaws. Tucker nodded in agreement.

Danny's eyebrow twitched in irritation. "I hate the both of you."

"Hate us while you tell us the rest of your story, will ya?" Tucker replied.

Eye twitching, the ebony-haired teen silently seethed to himself as he wrapped up his story by rushing, "After that, I left the mansion, ran into Bats, hopped on my bike, and drove away. The end."

"WHAT?" Sam screeched. She held up her hands and gestured for her friend to backtrack. "Wow, wow, wow, back up this gravy train real quick! You ran into the Bat, and you're not going to tell us the details? What the hell, man?! Go back and start that again!"

"You don't deserve the details, you pieces of shit!"

"Another Demon Strikes in Gotham," "Bill and Mariana O'Keefe Killed by Mysterious Figure, Daughter is the Only Eyewitness," "Who Will be the Demons Next Victims?"

The headlines flashed across the computer, glaring at the weary Dark Knight with the heat of one of Superman's laser-beams. They were like hammers against the forefront of his mind, drilling in the fact that he hadn't been able to stop another tragedy that could have been easily preventable, had he shown up just a little earlier than he had. Batman didn't make things easy on himself either. He kept asking himself how it had all come to this.

(How can that little brat do these things? How come I wasn't there to stop those bullets, to stop that girl from becoming traumatized? How could I let him get away? How come I can't find him, no matter what I do? How come? How could? How, how, how?)

The articles raised a lot of generic questions: who and what are the mysterious creatures killing off people? What was their end goal? Did they get anything out of such killings, or was it simply a game to all of them? Where did they come from? Where did they hide? How did they even get here? Etc., etc….

The Dark Knight already had the answers to all of those stupid questions. The demon (singular, not plural) was a teen boy named Danny. He was the creator of the Dark-Net and took jobs from others for his own personal gain. He undoubtedly received some physical reward out of each kill, but it probably was a game, anyway. Danny came from a combination of a shattered family, the system, and the streets. God knew where he holed himself up in anymore. Danny reached where he was now by pushing others out of the way and walking over them. It was all easy answers to easy questions. Batman didn't need that; he needed to know the harder stuff.

Last time Batman checked, Danny didn't do much to hide his identity when he was out on gigs. Hell, the teen hadn't even been wearing a domino mask when the Caped Crusader had run into him two nights ago. How the hell was it that every victim- not one, not two, but every single one of them -claimed that they saw a monster? "The stuff of nightmares," as one victim described it? If it had only been a handful of the victims that gave this description, it could've been passed off as some stress reaction to trauma, but not every single victim would conjure up a monster. At least one of them should have been able to tell police, "It was a boy. He was a teenager. He had black hair and blue eyes and killed so-and-so." But nope. The cops and every government agency was still waiting for that to happen.

It was impossible to know how Danny was tricking people- kids, Batman corrected himself; the only people to get away with seeing the teen were kids younger than Danny –into believing this illusion. As far as the Dark Knight knew, the teen didn't have any form of illusionary powers or any type of technology that could hide his true appearance while keeping up with his movements. Plus, those options didn't really make sense anyway. While he had only run into the teen a handful of times over the past year, Danny had never looked anything other than Danny. That could mean Danny was selective about when he turned his powers/technology on, but then, wouldn't he have to activate his method whenever he became caught? Wouldn't the remaining victims catch a small glimpse of the teen before the grotesque illusion took over and not see a monster from start to finish?

Batman didn't know the answer to any of those inquires, much to his persisting frustration. He hated not knowing, and he positively despised how positively sneaky Danny had become. Oh yeah, the teen's hiding skills had been ridiculous before, but now it was practically impossible to deal with. No matter how many times they tried, neither Oracle nor Batman could get a definite ping on the teen and his whereabouts. Needless to say, both geniuses were becoming very frustrated with this fact. Both frequently found themselves working on the case in their free time, even if it got them nowhere.

An irate sigh slipped from the Dark Knight's mouth. Batman raised a hand to his temple, rubbing at it to lessen the throbbing that had begun. It was a fruitless endeavor, as it typically was whenever Danny was involved, but that didn't stop Batman from trying. His eyes scoured the headlines on his computer for the umpteenth time; nothing changed.

It wouldn't be the first time he thought it, but Batman wondered about all of the 'what ifs.' What if Danny had been raised with his parents and loving sister? Would he have been a normal teenager with average grades and a group of friends? What if he had simply been happier during his childhood and had all of his rage expelled? Would he have then been adopted by a family desiring another child to brighten their house with laughter and glee? What if Batman had simply approached Danny differently? Would the Dark Knight have been able to persuade the teen to leave his evil doings behind and join the right side?

Batman sighed. Who was he kidding? There were so many things that would have better than this fate, and many of them weren't particularly kind, either. However, at least in those hypothetical scenarios, Danny didn't have a rap sheet a mile long, two friends who were just as invested in the criminal underworld as he was, and a program dedicated to aiding the other world plunderers.

The Dark Knight could still vividly recall the days leading up to the teen's reappearance as "King of the Crooks," as many enjoyed calling him now. Back then, Danny had just fled, and Batman was doing all he could to find him. At the time, most of the Caped Crusader's work was done on the Dark-Net. The thought had been that the boy's intense love and protectiveness for his creation would help to lead Batman to where the boy had run off. The Dark Knight hadn't expected his searching to be easy, but he had believed it would have been easier than it ended up being. Within the first couple of days, it was obvious Danny either hadn't touched the Dark-Net at all or he had found a way to mask his movements on his beloved program. At first, Batman had believed the first option wasn't really an option at all- Danny would never leave his precious baby alone for so long; it needed and deserved his unwavering attention, of course –but as the days dragged on, things began getting out of hand on the program. Business as usual was becoming more and more chaotic, and things that would have never been allowed before quickly became mainstream when people began realizing that Phantom wasn't cracking down on it anymore. That's when Batman realized that Danny hadn't touched his program once since he had fled from the Dark Knight.

The realization was…startling. Then confusing. Then worrisome.

There wasn't much that could keep Danny from his cherished brain-child for more than a couple of hours. The fact that the teen hadn't done anything with it in days, almost a week even, set off warning bells that said, "Hey! Danny's fucking screwed! It might be in your best interest to check in on him." Batman would have, if he could, but with the ways were, the Dark Knight could do nothing for the teen until he found out exactly where he was, and there was no way he could that unless Danny left a footprint somewhere, anywhere, so long as it wasn't nowhere.

But unfortunately, the teen refused to surface for weeks on end. The Dark-Net, after the initial first week of neglect, began suffering. The signs of decay were small at the beginning; there were a few glitches, like text coming up weird and means of communication never fully going through. The people using the system sorted it out, though, not really bothered by the small bugs here and there. The malfunctions grew worse, however, and within two weeks, no one was bothering to use the system anymore. It was too much of a flight risk, and the Dark-Net had become too frustrating to work with. It was abandoned by all, and everyone fell back on Calculator's old system.

For about a month and a half, the Dark-Net remained nothing more than a deteriorated slate of code. Batman gave up trying to decipher anything in the unintelligible script. Danny could not be found through it; there was no use in picking it apart anymore.

However, around the two month mark of Danny's disappearance, the Dark-Net came back out of nowhere and stronger than ever. The original system had been completely trashed and redone. It was no longer just one of the most prosperous programs on the deep-web; it was its leading site, and so help you God if you weren't part of its user database. The Dark-Net was no longer just there, beckoning any spectator to become part of it; it was now something that forced its presence amongst people and demanded control of all. No one seemed to mind this, however; in fact, Batman would say some even preferred the hold that the Dark-Net's creator had on everyone.

Upon its re-launching, Danny graced everyone who logged on with a pre-recorded video. It starred him, of course, in his many shapes and forms, courtesy of his disguise generator. However, to each of his sides, there had been two other figures: a female with ebony hair and a black mask and a different male, also with a mask but with green circuit-like designs. In the video, Danny had gone on to sarcastically ask for forgiveness for his absence and a firm claim that it would not happen again. He also went on to say that now he had also joined forces with the infamous Black Thorn and respected Drone. Together, the trio would work together from then on for just about everything. Danny finished his video by saying something that was meant to be a bad joke but sounded more like an ominous threat than anything else.

Since then, Batman had been doing his best to track the teen. It wasn't going well, but that didn't stop him from trying. One of his methods was trying to figure out the teen's friends. If they were so close, being able to track even one of them should let the Dark Knight trace them back to Danny. It seemed like the boy had taken it upon himself to keep them safe from his sights, though.

Hm. Stupid kids.

At the announcement of the trio's new alliance, Batman would have been lying if he said he hadn't been shocked. The last time he had checked, Drone and Black Thorn were at odds with Danny. They had been involved in numerous scuffles, and the ebony-haired boy had given up their HQs without a second thought when the Dark Knight asked. What had prompted the three to become partners in crime, huh? It surely wasn't something that their good and gracious hearts had pushed them to do. However, on that thought, Batman had also recalled an image of a different trio on a different spectrum of morality, as it had seemed at the time: Graveyard, the female known as Snowbird, and the robot called Droid.

It was undeterminable what provoked the illustration in his head, but all the same, something stuck out to Batman. One thing led to another, and the Dark Knight found himself comparing an image captured of Snowbird during the ghost invasion to a picture of Black Thorn facing off against Graveyard in the middle of a Las Vegas street. It didn't take the computer very long to conclude what Batman already knew: the two pictures were of the same person, just with different names and gimmicks.

Next came Drone. The Dark Knight didn't have to do much to confirm his suspicions. After drudging up some old footage, Batman watched a few minutes of the robot Droid conversing with Graveyard during the ghost invasion, courtesy of some street-cameras. At some point, Batman watched as Graveyard began laughing. The robot complained, and the white-haired teen replied, "Sorry, sorry… It's just… You only changed the last two letters of your other alias."

Drone. Droid. It didn't take a fucking genius to figure that one out. God, how brain-dead was Batman to have missed such glaring truths? Neither teen had really gone out of their way to disguise their conspicuous appearances or abilities!

With that in mind, questions Batman had previously had- why didn't Danny want to stop Black Thorn? Why was he so hesitant to intervene on Drone's gig and so reluctant to restrain Black Thorn? Why did he let them go? Why was he so remorseless with every other villain? –suddenly became answered, and they were like another punch to an already bruised pride.

Black Thorn and Drone had been Danny's friends. Damn it, why was Bats just figuring this out?!

Uh. In the very least, it seemed that the three teens had been going through a rough patch of some sort, if Danny's sudden willingness to turn them in was any indication. Batman still had no concrete reason as to why Danny had fled, as well, but still, the Dark Knight had more answers than he had previously. And he sort of hated himself for it. If it was any consolation, though, the three teens had obviously kissed and made up, their bond stronger than ever, and everyone knew the saying: "The family that kills together, stays together."

Yup. Those little bastards had gone and started killing, Danny being the first to engage with such remorseless acts. Undoubtedly, with his prompting, the other two had jumped on the bandwagon and gone along with him. It was disturbing how quickly they had engrossed themselves in that life, accepting it with open arms even. They even had a confirmed kill count on the front page of Dark-Net for each of the three. Currently, Danny and Black Thorn were currently warring for first place while Drone lagged behind quite a bit, seemingly less interested in who won.

What disturbed the Dark Knight the worst, though, was that, at one point, all of the teens could have been saved from this fate. Not just Danny, but all three of them! None of the "Crime Trio," as they had been nicknamed, seemed beside themselves to jump in the way for someone else. This was shown when Danny undoubtedly roped both of the others into helping him round up the invading ghosts so long ago. It's just… No one had realized that they needed guidance, that they needed to be corrected. If this had been recognized a year ago, maybe none of them would currently be rocking the criminal underworld.

Tiredly, Batman reached up and rubbed his face again. With a sigh, he began rising to leave but was stopped when a box popped up on the screen in front of him. The Dark Knight read the code inside in the box and felt his ire return. Though the text was indiscernible- nothing more than a jumble of letters and numbers really -Batman still knew what- who exactly had sent this to his computer. Among the many things the teen did, this was probably the most grating of them all.

Falling back into his seat, Batman pressed the "OK" option inside of the box. Immediately, a video-call popped up. Unsurprisingly, Danny was the one staring into the camera, a devious smirk gracing his lips as he said, "That sounds like a plan. The others and I will be sure to be there at the appointed time."

Batman did not respond, and if there was anyone else on the line, the Dark Knight did not hear them reply either. But wasn't that just typical? Every time Danny did this, he never let the older man intervene in any way, never let his face be seen or voice be heard. Danny simply let the other watch, dangling the very last snippets of criminal arrangements in his face, taunting, "Hey look! You know something bad is gonna happen, but what could it possibly be, huh?" It was cruel, but then, Danny had become very cruel anyway.

On the screen, Danny nodded something to whomever he was speaking with and then said a snappy goodbye. The music came on behind him, and the teen grinned to himself as he kept the feed going, allowing Batman to irritably watch the motions go on. It continued for some time before Danny mouthed, "This is your fault." Immediately afterwards, the teen hung up, leaving Batman to remember that, yes, part of this reality may very have been his fault. But not all of it fell on him.

(It's not like it mattered, though. Danny would never take any blame.)