"GIVE. IT. BACK!" Danny screeched indignantly at the little blob ghost he was doggedly chasing on a merry run-around of the Ghost Zone. He usually paid the blob ghosts no mind, because they usually just existed and didn't cause problems, but this one had decided to steal his just-finished English homework and he categorically refused to redo it. Some of the only homework he managed to do finish before it was due, and this stupid little blob had just… arrghhh!
He couldn't even blast the thing, otherwise he risked incinerating the flimsy sheet of paper in its mouth!
It took far longer than Danny thought it should have, but finally, the blob realized that it was being chased because of what it had stolen, and it spit his homework out in an ecto-slime covered ball that plummeted toward the Zone's purple ground. Danny caught it, grimacing, and gingerly tried to unfold it.
It ripped into several pulpy clumps that Danny had little hope of trying to put together – and even if he could, it looked like most of the ink and pencil marking the paper had dissolved. Danny wanted to weep.
Maybe Mr. Lancer would take pity on him if he turned in the scraps, once dried and maybe de-contaminated, as evidence that he'd tried?
He dejectedly sighed, then turned to get his bearings to get back to the Portal. He kind of knew where he was; this was a newer area of the Zone for him that he'd been exploring and mapping, like the areas closer to the Portal that he'd become familiar with first.
He was about to leave when a strangely-shaped piece of detritus floated by. There were all kinds of weird things hanging around in the Zone, but this one—
Oh, he definitely had to take care of this first.
There was a man drifting through the Ghost Zone.
Granted, this would not be at all unusual if the man was a ghost. But Danny was 100% sure that this man was human, and about 93% certain that he was dead, given how heavily hurt he was.
Danny made an uncomfortable noise as he floated closer. For all the ghosts that existed in the Zone, he'd never seen an actual dead body in the Ghost Zone.
The man looked like he'd been blown up. He'd taken the brunt of the damage to his left side and front, where he was more shrapnel-studded, blackened char than meat. Danny grimaced at what was left of his face. The left eyelid had been completely burned away, exposing a cloudy eyeball, and the rest of his face on the left was little better. The right side of the face seemed to be more intact, but the remains of a red helmet on that side made it hard to tell.
Danny bit his lip. What should he do with the body? He couldn't just leave it here for any wandering spirit to rip apart or eat, but he was really squeamish at the thought of touching the dead guy. He'd dealt with all manner of creepy, horrible, gross things with the incursion of ghosts into Amity Park, but that was ghostly creepy, horrible, gross stuff! This was human creepy, horrible, gross stuff! And yeah, he watched his fair of gory horror movies, but it was different when it was a real guy!
Suck it up, Fenton, he thought to himself. You can't just leave him here. It would be awfully disrespectful toward the dead guy, and would leave Danny feeling guilty for probably forever.
Okay, just gotta… get him through the Portal… drop him off somewhere where the police will find him… Danny coached himself. With no idea where the man had come from, it was the best he could do.
Well, there was a possibility this was Vlad's doing, given that he had the only other stable portal in the world, but this was a ways away from where Vlad's portal was located in the Zone, and blowing a guy up and then dumping his body in the Zone didn't really seem like Vlad's style, anyway. Plus, the burns didn't have the characteristic green tinge of burns from ectoplasmic sources. (He definitely would have preferred to deal with ectoplasmic burns, instead of these normal, what, third-degree and higher burns, plus other injuries. The man looked terrible.)
He gingerly positioned himself on the man's right side, which was more or less intact, though Danny couldn't tell how far the burns or other injuries extended under the remains of the brown leather jacket and black… it looked like body armor with some half-gone red symbol on the chest. Danny heaved a sigh and, wondering why this had to happen on a day that had otherwise been peaceful so far, grabbed the guy's right bicep.
Danny gasped in surprise as he felt a weak buzz of energy from the man. A bit of ectoplasmic energy propping things up, to be sure, but underneath that, the man was unmistakably alive. Stubbornly, impossibly alive.
But he wouldn't stay that way for much longer if Danny didn't do something.
Change of plans, he thought as he tugged the man in a new direction. The Far Frozen and their medical facilities were too far away, but there was one place in this relatively unfamiliar sector of the Zone he could go to, with some new allies he'd recently made.
He hoped the Pool Sirens were in the mood to help him out.
Jason woke sluggishly, awareness returning slowly to him in pieces. Almost the entire left side of his body and a good chunk of the rest prickled strangely. He was neither hot nor cold, neither hungry nor thirsty. He felt like he was floating, but it could be that he was on the reeeeaaaally good drugs.
He didn't like being on drugs, but if someone had given them to him against his wishes, then he was probably in pretty bad shape. He couldn't remember what had happened to land him in such a state, but figuring it out was less important than just dozing comfortably for the moment.
He gradually realized that a pair of hands was moving up and down his body, mostly keeping to that tingly left side. The hands seemed to spend the most time touching his face and holding his hand, which seemed kind of weird. But not weird enough to be alarming yet.
Jason thought he would normally find this very alarming, because he didn't often let people touch him, but. Drug haze nap more important.
That was until his nose came back online some indeterminate time later from whatever had sent it to sleep, and.
He knew this smell. Knew it viscerally, immutably, down to his bones.
A little metallic, a little acidic, a little indescribably funky – a smell that crawled up your nose to beat on your olfactory nerves like tambourines.
Lazarus water.
There was no thought, just adrenaline and rage. Who had— why— how dare someone put him back in the Pit!
He screamed and flailed blindly, shooting upwards and ripping his eyes open as fast as he could. Something was wrong with his left eye, but it didn't matter, because he was standing waist-deep in a glowing green pool and he lost his shit.
Even high on terror and fury-soaked adrenaline, he was still a Bat, still trained by the League of Assassins and more. He took in the situation in barely a second – only one person behind him, in some kind of small cavern, only one exit, standing in a Lazarus Pit (don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it—). He lashed out at whoever was behind him with a strike strong enough to break bone – maybe if he was lucky, he would hit the throat and collapse the windpipe, he didn't care about who it was or trying to stick to Bruce's rules this person had put him back in the Lazarus Pit – and gracelessly stumbled out of the Pit, rushing towards the entrance as fast as he could force his protesting and uncooperative and butt-naked – why was he naked? – body—
He barely had a moment, as he crossed the cavern entrance, to register the green sky above and the myriad colored pools below before he was tumbling straight off a cliff and into open air.
Danny clutched at his face, coaxing his squishy bodily ectoplasm back into shape and thanking his lucky stars that the guy he'd saved hadn't actually broken his face. Though, if he had to get his face broken, this was at least a good place to get it fixed.
A scream from the entrance startled Danny, and he looked up to see the man nowhere in sight.
Crap, he'd just run right off the cliff, hadn't he?
Danny zoomed over the cliff as fast as he could and caught the guy under his arms before he could hit the orange pool at the base of the waterfall, which was definitely not one of the healing pools. He sighed in relief, then tightened his grip as the man began writhing in distress.
Danny warned, "You know, it's a good thing I caught you, because that pool you would have fallen in? Terrifically strong acid. Would've melted you away and ruined all my hard work putting you back together."
"Let me go!" the man howled, thrashing. It was a good thing Danny had practice holding onto struggling beings. This one couldn't even shapeshift or squish into goo; made things easy.
Danny flew himself and his cargo back into the cave with his personal Pool and tried to deposit the man back in the ectoplasmic water, but the man became even more frantic and clung to Danny with all his might, refusing to let go and even going so far as to wrapping his legs around Danny's waist, which was both impressive given the damage Danny hadn't managed to fully heal yet and extremely awkward because the man was still completely naked.
"I'm not finished healing you yet!" Danny protested as the man clambered on him like a monkey. "Get back in there!"
"No fucking way!" the man snapped, tightening his grip with his right hand as his left spasmed. "I swore never to go back in a Lazarus Pit!"
Danny had the sinking feeling that he'd maybe saved a crazy guy. "Dunno what that is, but really, I'm just trying to help." The man continued to cling stubbornly to him and, with a sigh, Danny turned intangible. A perk of being a halfa, that he could do so in the Ghost Zone.
The man fell into the healing pool with a distressed yell and an almighty splash. Danny followed him underwater and hauled him to the shallower area he'd been set up in before. Of course, the man was still furiously resisting and protesting, but Danny had a solution to that too.
The Sirens didn't have to know that he had to freeze his patient to the bottom of the Pool to get him to cooperate.
As soon as he was free. As soon as he figured out how. Jason was going to kill this meta. Or, possibly, alien of unfamiliar species who conveniently knew English.
But to do that, he needed to analyze the situation. Escape. Come with a plan. Get his panicking hindbrain under control so he could think.
The meta didn't seem to recognize the term Lazarus Pit, but Jason was a firm believer in the philosophy that if it smelled like a Pit, and looked like a Pit, and acted like a Pit, then it was probably a fucking Pit. Though one that worked slower than what Pits should be capable of, and required extra direction or something – he couldn't tell what the meta was doing, but there had to be some reason he was methodically sweeping his hands over Jason's body and resting them on certain points. He'd also never heard of a Pit that flowed in a short river that turned into an iridescent waterfall, but there was all kinds of crazy shit on Earth. No way had Ra's found all the Pits. Could Pits form on other planets, though? He hadn't forgotten his glimpse of that eerie green sky.
Of course, his greatest source of information was his captor. Whether the meta or alien told truth or lies, it would tell Jason at least something about what was going on.
"So," he started casually. He wasn't sure how well he pulled it off, given how strained he sounded. "Want to tell me what's going on?"
The meta hummed. "Well, I found you drifting in the Ghost Zone. I'm not sure how you got there, or how you got so injured. Thought you were dead at first, you looked so bad, but you were alive, barely. So I brought you here, since it was the closest place I knew of that could save you."
Jason latched onto the unfamiliar term. "The Ghost Zone?"
The meta shrugged. "Yeah. Some people call it the Infinite Realms. It's a dimension connected to Earth where ghosts live."
Jason swept his gaze over the meta, with his white hair, Lazarus green eyes, and skin color just a few shades off from being healthy or alive. He looked… younger than Jason was expecting, like a teenager. "You don't look like a ghost."
The meta raised an eyebrow. "Have you ever seen one?" His hand covered Jason's left eye and poured liquid down his face, and he flinched minutely. But however the meta had restrained him, he couldn't move.
Jason distracted himself by thinking of Deadman, the one ghost he knew of. But he'd never actually seen the ghost Justice Leaguer when he wasn't possessing someone else's body – something that magic users could make happen – so it was a moot point. "So this is, what, some kind of afterlife dimension?" Jason asked skeptically. He didn't feel very dead. His body, especially the left side, was protesting his adrenaline-fueled run and fall.
The meta removed his hand from Jason's face and wobbled his hand in a "so-so" motion. "Kind of. Some people can end up here when they die, but some ghosts were never alive. I'm not too sure of the specifics of how ghosts form, and I definitely don't know everything there is to know about death."
Jason found that the sight in his left eye had improved, though it still wasn't back to what he'd consider normal. "Aren't you claiming to be one?"
The meta made a face. "I'm kind of a ghost, yeah, but I'm a bit of a special case."
"'Kind of' a ghost?" Jason parroted skeptically. The meta made a face but refused to answer. Jason switched tacks to more important questions. "What is this place, then? Why's it got a Lazarus Pit?"
The kid hesitated in confusion before responding, "I don't know what a Lazarus Pit is."
Jason didn't feel inclined to tell him what a Pit was. He had an uncomfortable thought – the Pit had seemed otherworldly to him, when he'd been near it. Maybe the Pits originated in this dimension? Assuming that the meta had been telling the truth, about this being another dimension. He hadn't caught any signs of lying, but he didn't know if a "kind of a ghost's" tells would be the same as a human's.
"What is this?" Jason finally demanded, his eyes flicking to the dreaded toxic green of the liquid he was almost fully covered in.
"Oh, this is my ectoplasmic pool," the meta said. "It's a healing pool that works best for people that have my… particular condition, or something similar. The Sirens let me use it as a favor in exchange for something I did to help them a little bit ago. Though I still don't know how to use it all that well."
"The Sirens?" Jason prompted.
"This realm is called the Prismatic Pools, overseen by the Sirens. Well, technically, they're Pool Sirens, because they told me they have a bunch of cousins like River Sirens and Ocean Sirens and Atlantean Sirens in other realms. There's pools and ponds of all kinds here, with all kinds of effects." Jason thought to the glimpses he'd caught of a color-riddled landscape.
"I thought you said this was a ghost dimension."
"Ghosts come in all shapes and sizes. I mean, I know yeti ghosts and dragon ghosts, so why not merperson ghosts?"
Jason didn't have an answer to that. He wanted to believe that this was a really weird, terrifying dream, except that Bruce had trained all his Robins extensively on telling dreams and illusions apart from reality because of all the mind-warping Rogues that Gotham had, and Jason had too much pride to lie to himself about which one this was.
He was, unfortunately, awake, and this was real.
This was real. Fuck. Getting back home wouldn't be as simple as just waking up.
"You mentioned that this dimension was connected to Earth." Though Jason still hadn't ruled out that he was on another planet. He was definitely taking everything the kid was telling him with a grain of salt until he could independently verify the information. "But last I remember, I was in my own dimension. Any idea how I got here?"
"Temporary portals to the Ghost Zone open pretty frequently," the meta shrugged. "No telling when or where they'll take you, but I'd bet that one opened wherever you were when you got in this state and spat you out here in the Zone."
Jason felt a thrill of fear. "How do I get back, then?"
"There's a couple permanent portals that are synched up to Earth's present timeline. But if you're not from the same time as those portals, there's a map I can borrow that can find temporary portals that lead to the right time and place."
Well, giving away the date he last remembered wouldn't hurt anything. The meta brightened up. "You're in luck! The permanent portals will do just fine to get you home. The one that's safer to use is in Amity Park, Illinois. Not sure if you can find your way home from there…?"
"It'll be no problem." Getting back to Gotham from Illinois would be a piece of cake compared to finding his way back from this "Ghost Zone." Again assuming that this meta was telling the truth, but Jason didn't have any other options for help at this point.
"So… what's your name? I'm Phantom."
"A bit on the nose, don't you think?" Jason grumbled. "Jason." Not much he could do to hide his identity here, with his clothes and armor and helmet all missing.
He looked over his "savior" irritably. Sure, he was definitely feeling better the longer Phantom worked on him – and he still couldn't remember how he'd ended up in such a state in the first place, except that there had definitely been a bomb – but there was a Pit involved in his recovery.
Or at least something Pit-adjacent, given the slower healing and the lack of burning acidic rage overloading his synapses.
"Did you have to use this pool?" Jason found himself whining. He knew he'd seen pools of all colors of the rainbow during his plummet from the cave. Maybe he wouldn't be so uncomfortable if the color wasn't the exact shade of toxic green of the Pits.
"Only a few of the pools can heal, and each pool has a… specialty, or type of being they work best on," Phantom explained. "Not that the other healing pools can't heal outside their specialty, but…"
"So why this one?" Jason demanded. "You mentioned that it was yours. Are you not allowed to use the other ones?"
"It… really depends," the meta hedged. "This realm is split up into a number of different territories among different Sirens. I was gifted this pool as a thank you for something I did that helped out some of the factions, but the others still don't like me, and I couldn't use the pool that works best on humans without risk of being eaten or torn apart. But this one works fairly well on you, especially since you already had ectoplasm in your system."
"What was in my system? Ghost gunk?"
"Ectoplasm isn't—okay, it can be ghost gunk, but there's a lot more to it than that," Phantom replied sheepishly as he worked on Jason's left foot.
Jason glared at the green pool he was mostly submerged in, the pool that Phantom had described earlier as "ectoplasmic." "I swear, if you've infected me or something with the shit in this pool—"
"Oh, no, the ectoplasm in your body has been bonded with your tissues for years, at least. It's definitely been there a while," Phantom informed him cheerfully. Jason was becoming more upset by his words, because with that time frame… he could only think of the Pit as the source of his exposure, given its similarities to the "ectoplasmic pool" he was in now. "Normally, ectoplasm can't bond with living tissues, but there are some situations that can cause it. Usually, uh." Phantom's voice dropped. "Related to death in some way."
Definitely the Pit, Jason thought hysterically, closing his eyes and trying to regulate his breathing.
Oblivious to Jason's distress, Phantom continued, "I sure don't know how you managed to get such rancid ectoplasm in your system, though. Don't worry, though, I've been purifying it while healing you! You should feel much better once I'm done."
Oh, great, the Pit was rancid. Jason was upset and also triggered by being in a pool of glowing green funky-smelling liquid that was healing him, but not once had the Pit Madness threatened to make an appearance, which lent credit to Phantom's words.
If Phantom was telling the truth, and knew what he was talking about… Jason was getting steadily more convinced that Phantom wasn't lying, which was concerning on many levels.
The Justice League would freak out when they found out that there was an entire dimension of dead people connected to and accessible from Earth and they didn't know. Because Bruce didn't know, because it would be in the Batcomputer files if he did, and it wasn't.
Thinking about other people's soon-to-be problems was a welcome distraction from his own, so Jason resolutely decided to do that while waiting for Phantom to finish patching him up. He had more questions, so many questions, but he was not up for continuing to pursue his interrogation at that moment, between the information he already had to chew on and the aftermath of – was it Two-Face, or Penguin, or Black Mask? Definitely one of the more traditional gangsters – someone getting lucky and pretty literally blowing Jason to hell.
What a mess.
Healing someone was a lot easier when they stayed still, Danny found. Even frozen to the bottom of the Pool, Jason twitched and jerked as much as he could within the restraints. It didn't take a genius to see that the man was deeply unsettled by his circumstances.
It probably didn't help that Jason was naked. Danny had not been happy when the Sirens had instructed him to remove all of Jason's remaining clothes. He understood that the clothes would have been a pain to work around, and that the man's nudity was no more transgressive than if they were in a human medical setting, but still.
Danny was doing his level best to ignore the man's exposed genitals as he worked, and was deeply grateful that those areas had escaped unscathed enough that Danny didn't have to give them any attention.
He was already having enough trouble coaxing his personal Pool into healing Jason without overloading his system with ectoplasm or ectoplasmic energy. It was difficult to balance coaxing the many different tissues in the human body to regenerate in the right places and cleanse the poisoned ectoplasm in Jason's system at the same time, because purifying the bonded ectoplasm reset its "memory" of how Jason's body was supposed to look. Losing that "memory" was obviously not helpful when Danny needed it to reconstruct half of Jason's face (a particularly finicky area to heal, especially because how it looked was just as important as it having all of its tissues functional), regrow some of his fingers, and regenerate bits of different organs that were impacted by shrapnel and, in the case of his lungs, by air pressure damage.
Danny had a newfound respect for whoever could use magic to heal humans fast, because this was hard. There were just so many different types of tissues, and they all had to go back in the right places, and some of them were in layers that were paper-thin; and without ectoplasm to "remember" where everything was supposed to be and what everything was supposed to look like, the only other blueprint was the DNA. And if you tapped into the DNA wrong enough and triggered mechanisms that were only supposed to be active when a person was a literal fetus—
Well. The Sirens warned him to stay away from it for a reason, and to rely on fueling ectoplasmic-based regeneration on Jason, because he did have the much simpler and more straightforward ectoplasmic "memory" to work off of. Trying to heal an organic being using its DNA, rather than just supercharging the healing processes that were already there? (Of course, there was only so much damage that human healing processes could fix, depending on the type of tissue. Regrowing a limb was the kind of thing that would need that deeper kind of healing.) Even the Sirens, who took great pleasure in sticking their noses into other realms' gossip, only knew of two individuals in the Zone who could manage DNA-based healing without causing nightmare fuel-worthy problems, and Danny had access to neither of them.
It was extremely tempting to just let the Pool have its way with Jason, and heal him fast at the cost of having a bunch more ectoplasm in his body, maybe even getting a core kick-started. But it wouldn't be right, subjecting the man to a partial species change without his consent when Danny could avoid it.
"What did you do with my clothes?" Jason asked, breaking Danny's train of thought.
"Oh, they're over there," Danny replied, pointing at a tattered pile against the wall. "Sorry, I needed to take them off since they were in the way—"
"Is that all that's left of them?" Jason said with disbelief, squinting.
"Yeah," Danny said quietly, trying not to remember how he'd had to phase tiny fibers and bits of plastic and metal out of Jason from where they'd been driven or melted into his flesh.
"Shit. I mean, I knew I got hurt, but not that bad," Jason murmured.
"Yeah, you were… almost dead when I found you. I thought you were dead, at first. You probably would have been if you didn't have that ectoplasm in your system."
Jason flinched. "Tell me more about this… ectoplasm I have in my body."
"Long story short, it's the stuff ghosts are made of! It doesn't accumulate in or bond with organic bodies except in very, very specific and hard to create circumstances. I'm guessing you've been exposed to some really funky things in your life?"
Jason snorted. That sounded like a yes.
"So! Now that it's in there, it's never gonna leave on its own."
"Is there any way to get rid of it?" Jason interrupted before Danny could continue.
Danny grimaced. "There are ways to forcibly remove it, but definitely do not recommend. It's integral to your body now. Removing it all at once would be like… removing all of the vitamin E from your body all at once. Very not pretty, but while you might not die from not having it, you're certainly not going to be happy without it, either."
Jason seemed disgruntled by that.
"It's not so bad. I mean, I could see it being bad with rancid ectoplasm, but I'm purifying it right now, so it'll be much better."
"Like how?" Jason demanded.
Danny hummed. "Well, I'm not sure how the bad ectoplasm affects your body and mind, because I've never seen it in a human before, but I know ectoplasm like that is terribly poisonous to ghosts. So I don't know exactly what differences you'll see, but I can guess."
"Oh, great." Jason made it sound like the world was ending.
"It's not bad." Danny rolled his eyes. "Any of the negative effects will be gone, whatever they were for you. You'll almost definitely see an increased healing rate and increased appetite. And you'll want to look out for potential mild enhancements in things like strength, speed, flexibility, and senses, but I don't know which, if any, would develop. Oh, and likely an increased sensitivity to the supernatural, but you might've already had that; I don't think the ectoplasm being rancid would have stopped that…"
"Do you know anything for certain?"
"Nope!" Danny replied with a forced cheerfulness. "Ectoplasm bonding to a human is super rare. Most ghosts wouldn't even know anything about it!"
"But you've experienced it. Or at least, have organic tissue bonded to ectoplasm," Jason accused, his eyes piercing.
Danny flinched hard and barely managed to avoid destroying the progress he'd made on regrowing the nerves in Jason's left index finger. "Oh, uh, no, that's not!" he stammered. "What made you think that?"
"You pretty clearly implied it earlier," Jason replied, looking amused for the first time Danny had seen. "A 'kind of a ghost,' with a healing pool that works best on your specific condition, that works well on me… pretty obvious."
Crap, he had said that, hadn't he? He had to pay more attention to what he let slip. "Please don't spread that around," Danny pleaded, pausing in his ministrations. "There are a lot of people who would do anything to get me on their lab tables, if they knew that."
"…Alright."
They fell silent. Danny continued to work.
"Finally done," Phantom sighed, pulling away from Jason. With a wave of his hand, the ice restraining Jason while Phantom worked vanished. Jason immediately flailed and staggered out of the pool, his legs shaky. He collapsed on all fours against the wall, panting and trying to get his anxiety under control.
Fuck. He was out. He was out. No more green pool stitching him back together and leaving madness and pain in its wake – okay, this one hadn't done that last bit, but it was still far too fucking similar for Jason to be calm and collected.
"Hey man, you okay—" Jason uncurled and punched Phantom in the face with every scrap of strength he could muster. The ghost weighed barely anything at all and obviously hadn't expected the attack; he was sent flying.
"There's this thing called medical consent," Jason growled as he stalked away towards the sad remains of his clothes.
"I saved your life!" Phantom protested. Jason wasn't sure how he was speaking, because his face had collapsed in on itself like it was made of putty. But, as he watched, Phantom's face rose back into shape. Handy trick he had there. "How was I supposed to know if you had, like, a DNR document somewhere!"
"I don't have a freaking DNR, and I didn't – don't – want to die! I take issue with the Lazarus Pit you used to heal me!"
"I still don't know what that is!" Phantom snapped.
"Whatever." Jason, unfortunately, believed him, after all the information Phantom had given him. Which meant he'd attacked a Good Samaritan, twice, but Jason couldn't quite feel sorry about it right then.
Still being in the same room as the Pit – sorry, "pool" – had him completely on-edge, even without the Pit to spur on his temper.
Jason grimaced as he surveyed the remains of his gear. It all looked too heavily damaged to be salvageable, aside from a handful of small gadgets and pocket-sized gear that had been stored in his belt on the right side. Replacing all his gear once he got back to Gotham would be a massive pain in the ass. He combed through the remains of his clothes and found what was left of his red and black undershirt; the rest of his armor was too stiff to repurpose. Grimacing, he tied it into a rudimentary loincloth. Then he knotted the belt in a loop around the right side of his neck and under his left arm, to carry what little of his gear was still good. Finally, he slipped on his boots, which weren't damaged enough to compromise them. Everything else was a lost cause.
Jason turned around to find Phantom floating off the ground a little ways away from him, waiting for something.
Phantom dubiously eyed the loincloth. "I suppose that's about the most you could've done with what was left."
"Better than nothing," Jason grunted, crossing his arms uncomfortably. "Now how do we get out of this place?"
Phantom warily offered a hand. It was an obvious offer to fly Jason where he needed to go. "We'll need to stop to see the leader of this area of the Pools before we leave their realm. Then I'll take you straight to the portal to Amity Park."
Jason grimaced. He didn't want to rely on the well-meaning kid for transportation, but more than that, he wanted to get out of this freaky dimension. "We have to see this leader?" he asked to confirm.
Phantom nodded vigorously. "Oh yeah. It's hard to get out of the realm unscathed, otherwise."
Jason sighed. "Fine," he said as he took Phantom's hand. "Lead the way."
Seeing glowing pools of all colors of the rainbow riddled in the craggy landscape during their flight to the leader helped Jason to further separate the pool he'd been trapped in this time from the Lazarus Pit in his mind. The swirling green sky and the vague merperson and fish shaped figures flitting between the pools and waterfalls hammered in that this place was about as different from Nanda Parbat as he could get.
The leader of this territory of the Prismatic Pools turned out to be a mermaid named Khayasa with blue skin and shimmering red and purple scales. She was a rare Greater Siren, which meant that she was the approximate size of a five to six story building. They found her lounging in a semi-clear teal pool that was more of a lake than a pool, surrounded by a handful of attendants.
She cupped her hands together for Phantom and Jason to land on, smiling and displaying her alarmingly sharp teeth. "Oh, my dear, you're looking so much better than you were!" she cooed at Jason. "Little Spookfin did such a good job of patching you up! Such a good hero to ghosts and humans alike."
Jason coughed at the nickname while Phantom cringed in embarrassment. And now that Jason thought about it, Phantom's outfit did look suspiciously like a hero outfit…
Khayasa raised her hands so that they were closer to her face. "Normally, we'd tear a ghost with an ice core like Phantom apart and feed him to our guppies!" she giggled conspiratorially. "But he saved us centuries, if not millennia, of cleanup after a stunt that rotten core Plasmius pulled."
"They have a bitter rivalry with ghosts with ice cores. Something about water cores and ice cores being similar but too different to get along? I don't know, I didn't get a clear answer last time I asked," Phantom murmured in explanation. Jason had no idea what cores were, but now did not seem like the time to ask.
"Is there anything more we can do to help before I send you off with Guide Jusenkyo to take you safely to the edges of the realm?" Khayasa offered.
Phantom cleared his throat. "Well, I was wondering if you knew what a Lazarus Pit is? Jason seemed convinced that my Pool was one."
Khayasa smiled at Jason. It was not a friendly smile. "If you ever compare my Pools to one of those cesspits again, I'll dump you in our best melting Pool. I promise, it's an agonizing way to depart."
How am I supposed to tell the difference between a Pit and a Pool? Jason thought. Wisely, he didn't say it out loud.
"So… what are they?" Phantom prodded.
"They are one-way leaks in the barrier between our dimensions," Khayasa readily explained. "As a form of ectoplasmic pools, I am familiar with them, but I am not sure why humans have named them Lazarus Pits."
Jason stiffened. "If these are ectoplasmic pools, and the Pits are ectoplasmic pools, then—"
Khayasa looked utterly affronted. "To say they are the same is to… what comparison would a human understand… say that a koi pond and a cesspool both have water."
"Ew," Phantom said quietly.
"Ectoplasm tends to decay to normal water over time in the material world. But a continuous leak establishes a permanent pool. Ectoplasm is not meant to stay in the material world for so long, and it's completely cut off from the natural filtration in the Zone. It gets contaminated with all sorts of human world materials and emotions and energy over time, and without filtration it all just stagnates…"
"I was in one a while ago," Jason volunteered.
Khayasa's face contorted in disgust. "Eww! No wonder you reeked so bad when Phantom showed up with you. I thought it was just all of the burned… real world stuff." She turned to Phantom. "You did cleanse him properly like I taught you to, yes?"
"Of course!"
Khayasa leaned close to Jason and sniffed him deeply. "Mmn. I can still smell a little on him, but if it had been with him a long time, that is no surprise. It will fade with time, now that most of it is gone." She paused, studying Jason. In his current state of undress, it was a little disconcerting. "I am surprised. I had thought the leaks wouldn't be a problem anymore. Where were you exposed?"
"Deep underground, in the mountains of Pakistan," Jason hedged.
"Mmm, I suppose that makes sense," Khayasa said thoughtfully.
"How so?"
"As I understand it, much work was done by both sides on the ley lines, long long ago. If that side's magicians do not remember, perhaps they were warding the ley lines against other dimensions, and effects on this one were just a side effect. I know there are many other dimensions that intersect with Earth; it is quite a chaotic nexus!" She laughed. "The barrier was strengthened, but… the ley lines extend far below ground. It is possible – probable, given what you're telling me – that the magicians missed strengthening the barriers too far beyond their physical reach. I can only imagine how difficult it would be for squishy humans to get far beneath the surface of the planet."
"So, that means…?" Phantom prodded, while Jason was already putting together the implications and not liking the picture they created.
"In other words," Khayasa continued patiently, "Any Lazarus Pit that still exists must originate many miles below the surface of the Earth and work its way up. I imagine there are many Pits undiscovered simply because they have not made it to the surface yet, or because they are in inhospitable locations. I have heard rumors from my Atlantean cousins that there is a Pit somewhere in your dimension along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, along the spreading boundary."
Jason blanched. Most of the aboveground Pits had been destroyed, courtesy of Batman and the al Ghuls (though for separate reasons); the thought that there were fresh Pits just waiting to be found, bubbling up from the depths of the crust, made his stomach churn.
Shit, did the Atlanteans in Earth's dimension know about the Pit that Khayasa just mentioned? They would undoubtedly appreciate the info.
"Have I reassured you sufficiently that my Pools are nothing like those noxious leaks?" Khayasa sniffed.
"Oh, yes," Jason hurried to reassure. Intellectually, he completely understood that the Pits were the foul versions of the Pools that were here in this dimension, but trauma was not such an easy thing to placate. He would definitely be having nightmares for a while after this. But at least he wasn't dead, and had come out of this ordeal saner, to boot.
"Shall I send you on your way then, dears?"
"One more thing," Phantom said, a little nervously. "Would you happen to have anything he could wear?"
Khayasa brightened. "Oh, yes, random junk shows up here all the time! We're close to an ectoplasmic gyre. You wouldn't believe the kinds of things that get caught in the currents that run through the Zone! Nixie, go find the dear something to wear, would you?"
"Right away!" the little nymph – this one had legs, except with fins in place of feet – sped off across the lake. It didn't take her very long to return.
"Let's see… I think this will fit you nicely!" Nixie announced, holding up her prize.
It was a hooded sleeveless robe that shimmered a silvery blue color. Jason wasted no time in putting it on and repurposing his loincloth as a belt to hold it closed. The cloth was silky and loose on his body; it was quite comfortable.
"Thank you," he said, a little uncomfortably. These beings – ghosts – had gone out of his way to help him, and in return he'd been standoffish at best.
"Best be going now, dearies," Khayasa said. Phantom wrapped a secure arm around one of Jason's and they were suddenly floating again. "I believe one of my rivals is coming to pay me an unexpected visit." Her eyes narrowed, and Jason was hit with the abrupt premonition that he did not want to be there when her rival arrived.
Another Siren, this one in various shades of green and of indeterminate gender, beckoned with a whispering voice, "Come, I will show you safe passage from our realm."
As the Prismatic Pools slowly receded, Jason allowed himself to hope that Phantom was trustworthy and would truly be taking him home, after all.
Jason spent all of his time drinking in as much as he could of the Ghost Zone while they traveled to the supposed portal. Phantom occasionally pointed out a landmark of interest, but for the most part, the two remained silent.
Jason could definitely understand why this place was called the Ghost Zone. The inhabitants could be described as nothing other than spectral, and the sheer breadth of time periods and ideas represented among the inhabitants was like nothing he'd ever seen. He hadn't noticed any specific alien cultures represented, but maybe they were just in the wrong part of the Zone for them.
At one point, Phantom warned that they were getting closer to the portal and would therefore be passing into a territory that was made less of large, established realms, and more of small individual realms with all kinds of ghosts, including aggressive, territorial ones.
Jason noticed some of the residents eyeing him like he was a snack, but glares from Phantom warded them all off. Phantom must have been either powerful or respected, at least in this area.
Finally, Phantom pulled them to a stop just in front of a patch of green that stood out from the rest of the sky. It was a brighter green and swirled hypnotically. Somewhere in his gut, Jason knew that this would take him back to his home dimension.
"Well, here we are," Phantom announced. Instead of shoving Jason forward through the portal, like he was expecting, Phantom changed his grip to be holding Jason more firmly.
"What are you doing?" Jason asked, a warning in his tone.
"The exit is going to be bumpy. Hang on tight!"
"Why?"
Phantom didn't answer; he just lunged through the portal at a much higher speed than earlier. He swore and scrabbled to grip Phantom more firmly. Stupid freaking ghost – what was he talking about; aside from a sensation like static and the normal feeling of a shift that came with crossing dimensions (though this one came with an extra feeling of death grave awakening—), there was nothing really hard about this—
"GHOST ALERT! GHOST ALERT! GHOST INVASION HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE FENTON LAB!"
He found out why.
Unfamiliar silver and green weaponry sprang from every nook and cranny in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Jason barely had time to take the lab in before his vision was blurring with the speed Phantom was dodging the bright green energy attacks. They made it to a doorway, which was blaring, "WARNING, BLAST DOORS TO THE FENTON LAB HAVE NOT CLOSED PROPERLY. PREPARE FOR COMBAT OUTSIDE THE FENTON LAB." And then suddenly they were in a kitchen, or what looked like a kitchen, except weapons were bristling everywhere like in the lab. Then a living room, which was also overloaded with weapons. Then there was a sensation like ice water pouring down his spine, and they flew straight through a wall without breaking it, and they were outside.
From the outside, Jason could only hear, "WARNING. FENTON GHOST SHIELD HAS NOT DEPLOYED. GHOST HAS ESCAPED THE BUILDING." It was a wonder that that was the only audible warning outside, given the absolute cacophony inside the house.
Phantom didn't waste any time distancing himself from the death trap of a house they'd emerged from. What was that attached to the roof?
But they were definitely home. The scent of the air and the wind in his face (and another indescribable feeling that said home) told him that. He saw several billboards referencing Amity Park, including one studded with several burns that claimed that the town was a nice place to live.
Phantom had lived up to every one of his promises. He was healed, the Pit Rage was gone (just regular old trauma left), and he was back in his home dimension.
Jason felt really bad for attacking the kid, now.
They took a meandering route through town, probably to help throw off trackers, and then finally Phantom deposited Jason in a narrow alley behind the public library.
"Will you be able to get home from here?" Phantom asked as he let go of Jason.
"Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem." One coded message through the library's computers, and he'd have a pickup within a couple hours.
"Wait, before you go!" Jason called, a little panicked as Phantom prepared to launch himself in the air. "I wanted to say thank you, and sorry for punching you twice."
Phantom looked surprised, like he wasn't used to hearing thanks or apologies. "Oh, uh, thank you," the kid replied awkwardly, looking a little tired as he ran his hand through his hair. "And it's alright. I get it. Trauma is a bitch. Those Lazarus Pits sound nasty. I appreciate the apology." He looked around furtively. "Now, I gotta go. Don't want to lead the Fentons straight to you." He rocketed up in the air before Jason had a chance to say anything else to him.
"I promise, I'll pay you back," Jason swore to the empty alley. Siccing the Justice League on the town – because clearly something was going on here, for it to have a literal portal to an afterlife in the basement of some definite mad scientist's house – and making sure that kid had proper support for his heroism, even if he wasn't doing it in the human realm (though, with those portals and Phantom's mixed body, it was possible he was), would be a good start.
He ducked inside the library, grateful that this town was weird enough that no one batted an eye at a random guy showing up in a shimmery robe and stained combat boots.
When the Batplane touched down in a clearing outside the town, where Jason had been instructed to wait, Jason was astonished to see essentially the entire Batfamily, in uniform, pour out of the plane.
"LITTLE WING!" Dick wailed from the front of the pack. "We thought you were dead!" Jason was so astonished that he didn't even try to dodge the hug Dick came flying at him with, like he normally would have. (Some part of him maybe didn't even want to… without the Pit whispering poison in his ear, it was kind of nice getting such blatant affection and proof that he was wanted.)
"We weren't sure you were dead," Tim corrected, eyeing Jason as if he'd been replaced somehow, despite the multiple identity checks he'd put in the message for pickup. Which was fair, because he was definitely not known for tolerating affection from any of them. "Since we couldn't find your body, just scraps of equipment."
"The probability he was dead was high; don't kid yourself," Damian butt in, trying to look like he didn't care about Jason's ultimate fate, even though he had come racing across the country at the drop of a hat for Jason.
Cass snuck up on the side of Jason that Dick wasn't hogging and gave him a quick hug.
Bruce also didn't say anything. He probably didn't know what to say, Jason thought with a snort. But Jason could tell, even with the cowl covering half of his face, that he was very glad to see Jason safe and in one piece.
"What are you wearing?" Dick asked when he disengaged from the hug, more quickly than Jason expected. Maybe he was expecting violence if he pushed Jason's tolerance limit.
"Oh, have I got a story for all of you," Jason said, smirking. "The entire Justice League and the Atlanteans are going to freak." He looked directly at Bruce. "And so are you."
A/N:
Figured, with the current (7/10/2023) DDoS attack on AO3, that now would be a good time to port over some fics.
Bruce does, in fact, freak out when he learns that Jason almost kind of should have did die. So do the rest of Jason's siblings. The Justice League invades Amity Park pretty shortly after. Danny gets all the support he could ever wish for and more. He fends off Bruce from adopting him, but he's not successful at fending off Jason's bid to be his older brother, so he gets kinda absorbed by the Batfam anyway.
Off-screen: the blob ghost that ate Danny's homework gets scritches and ecto-snacks from Clockwork as thanks for guiding Danny to where he needed to be at the right time.
I hope you guys liked the original location and characters! When the same locations and characters are repeated over and over and over in DP fanfic, especially given the sheer size of the Ghost Zone, it gets really repetitive... Khayasa was based off of and named from the Great Fairies in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Jusenkyo is a blatant reference to Ranma 1/2, and thanks to KittyKate on the BatPham discord server for Nixie! Also the Sirens in Khayasa's territory have totally been fighting over the remains of Jason's stuff ever since he left; real world items are a commodity in the Zone since there are some ghosts like Walker and the Box Ghost who go out of their way to confiscate and hoard them. And if anyone was wondering, the rival that interrupted Khayasa had totally sensed Danny (or rather, his ice core) hanging around for far longer than she thought acceptable and was going to make her grievances about that known.
The remaining Pits may be subjected to a sudden raid of remora and other cleaner ghosts cleaning them up. Ra's is very unhappy about this. The material dimension's Atlanteans and Aquaman are very dismayed to learn there is an undiscovered Pit in their territory. It takes them a while to find it, simply due to the difficulties inherent in searching the entire Mid-Atlantic Ridge and braving the extreme environments of underwater volcanism.
Fun fact: the yetis of the Far Frozen developed their advanced healing tech directly in response to some kind of dire insult from the Sirens. There's nothing quite like spite as a motivator, lol. I headcanon that the yetis of the Far Frozen are Ghost Zone historians, which is why they have so much knowledge and so many artifacts, and it plays perfectly into their cores because freezing something in ice preserves it for a long, long time!
Am I following DP naming conventions for ghosts? No, I am absolutely not. "On the ball" or pun names are definitely not my cup of tea. I understand why they're used in kid's cartoons, but. No.
A DNR document is a legal "do not resuscitate" document that instructs health care providers to not attempt CPR or, sometimes, other lifesaving measures if the patient does not want it. People usually get them at the end of life, or if they have a terminal illness.
So the "pressure wrecked Jason's lungs" thing? It's called pulmonary barotrauma, and it's caused by over-pressure in the lungs. Those tiny alveoli in the lungs that allow for gas exchange - aka the things that get oxygen into your bloodstream and carbon dioxide out - are fairly delicate and prone to rupture when air pressure inside the lungs exceeds what they can handle. This can happen from explosions that produce a shock wave (aka a "wave" of compressed air that can exert a tremendous amount of pressure/force), where it's called blast lung, and can also occur in divers when ascent is handled improperly (when the decrease in water pressure causes the air in the lungs to expand thanks to Boyle's law).