Chapter Text
Damian al Ghul Wayne felt it when his twin brother died.
He never saw it coming. There was no warning, no way to have predicted it. Damian handed his school bag to Alfred when they arrived home, went to his room to change clothes, and counted the minutes he could go without running into another of his bothersome siblings as he traveled the Manor. He was on his way to Father’s office when he collapsed.
It was an unexpected shock at first—he was standing in front of the office door one minute and crumpled on the ground the next. Damian barely had a second to process, his mouth falling open as a sudden rush of sensation overtook his everything. The best way he could describe it was liquid fire. Magma ran through his veins, traveling up one arm and spreading across his body like a spider web, leaving him writhing on the ground as he screamed. His skin was oversensitive and his senses both heightened and numbed and he felt too much and God it felt like dying—
There was a voice, he recognized distantly. Someone was speaking to him– no, pleading to him.
“…y bat, come on, please, Dami, tell me where it hurts, I can’t help you if I don’t know– Tim! Get Bruce, quickly!"
There was a gasp and fast footsteps hurrying away from them.
Damian didn’t cry often, and rarely in the presence of someone else. But in those few moments, his anguish consumed him and he let himself sob, succumbing to the darkness as he fell limp in his oldest brother’s arms and a faint scream that wasn’t his own reverberated in the depth of his bones.
Danyal al Ghul, aka Danny Fenton, was torn apart. His DNA was altered, rewritten, and fused with something foreign and inhuman. There was no way to put it lightly, no catchy theme song that could make his death seem less traumatic than it was. There are no words for the pain he felt; there are only words for what happened after. Falling out of the portal, hair white and eyes green, throat scarred with a scream that ripped his very soul from his body and shoved it back inside. There were several minutes of ringing in his ears before his surroundings caught up to him and the crying of his closest friends snapped him out of his trance. He asked them what was wrong; they laughed and cried harder. How do you tell your best friend that they had left their life behind in one fatal mistake? How do you tell someone that they aren’t alive human anymore?
Sam and Tucker said neither of these things. They embraced the ghost of their friend because he needed them. He was the most important thing at the moment. And when Danny felt a tugging somewhere within his chest and a light circled his waist, they were there, sobbing and laughing for real this time, gasping and cheering and holding and hugging and pressing their hands to Danny’s chest to feel the abnormally slow thumping of his heartbeat because the nightmare wasn’t real, that was a heartbeat, he’s alive, he’s alive, HE’S ALIVE.
Damian woke to the beeping of a heart monitor, lying on a cot beneath white cotton sheets in the medical bay of the Cave, completely surrounded by his relieved family.
Danny woke in his bed alone, feeling cold and empty and sore, and he wondered if he was even awake at all.