Chapter Text
Ellie didn’t mean to get caught. Honest.
She had been hiding in the Fentons’ house for almost two years now. Long enough to grow complacent. She had… It had been two years. Somewhere along the way, she started thinking she would never get caught.
And now she was dangling upside down from the ceiling, leg caught in a hunting snare. Electrified ectoline started cutting into the skin of her ankle.
Worse, this was during school hours. Jazz and Danny weren’t home to provide a distraction and free her.
It was just her alone with the Drs. Fenton.
“Honey!” Jack called. “I caught us a ghost!”
Fuck.
Ellie was in ghost form right now, which was both a blessing and a curse. She was clearly a ghost, and she very much couldn’t turn back. Couldn’t reveal the existence of halfas.
But at least they wouldn’t connect her to Danny.
“—a stupid pop quiz. I hate Mr. Lancer, I swear,” Danny finished, dropping his bookbag down into a chair at the kitchen table.
“He’s not that bad,” Jazz said. “He was always my favorite teacher back in middle school.”
“Whatever. I say he sucks. Can’t wait until I’m in high school and never have to see him again.”
Jazz huffed. She pulled open the fridge and quickly closed it again when two meatloaves tried lunging out to attack her.
“Mom must have cooked dinner early tonight,” Jazz said. “I wish-- I mean. It’s perfectly fine that she keeps doing that. I love when food gets stored in the fridge.”
Danny snorted.
“Nasty Burger tonight?” he asked.
Jazz grimaced. “She won’t want us to waste the meal.”
“She doesn’t have to know.”
She sighed. “We really don’t have the money to be eating out this often. I’m sorry, Danny.”
He waved a hand at that. “It’s fine. Not your fault. We’ll just… eat the meatloaf.”
“Let’s get started on our homework.”
“Aw, come on!”
“You have to do it, Danny. We may as well get it over with.”
“Ugh.”
Jazz sat down across from him at the table and pulled out a math textbook. It had a slip of notebook paper already on the correct workpage, with Jazz’ name and the date written at the top. Danny grumbled and pulled out his own language arts workbook.
Stupid homework from stupid school.
Mom and Dad were clearly down in the lab, given both their lack of presence upstairs and the occasional banging or whirring sounds coming from down below. Danny and Jazz slogged through their homework at the kitchen table diligently. Jazz finished in forty-five minutes. It took Danny an hour and a half.
Their parents finally emerged just as he was finishing up, at around 5:00. They both had bright smiles, and Mom had her blast goggles on.
“You two seem happy,” Jazz said. “Did you have a big breakthrough today?”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Jazzy!” Dad boomed. “We caught a ghost!”
Danny ducked his head to hide his grimace. Jazz-- the more accomplished liar of the two of them-- smiled.
“What type of ghost is it this time?” she asked. “Not another ectopus, is it?”
“This one’s humanoid!” Mom gushed. “We caught Phantasm!”
“You what?!” Danny shrieked.
“That’s so great!” Jazz said quickly, covering for him. “You must be exhausted from a long day of work, then, huh?”
“Oh, I suppose,” Mom said.
Dad shrugged. “I was so excited, I hardly noticed time passing. But you’re right, Jazz, I am a bit tired.”
“Why don’t we go out to celebrate?” Jazz suggested.
“What a wonderful idea!” Mom said. “We can go to that new pizza place!”
“That sounds great!” Dad agreed. “I’ll get the keys!”
Five minutes later, they were all piled into the GAV and tearing down the streets of Amity.
Danny discreetly texted Sam and Tucker a Code Black alert.
They met up in Sam’s room, as previously agreed. Sam and Tucker looked grim when they got there.
Ellie was crying.
She held out her arms for a hug, and both her siblings ran to her.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re safe now. We’re gonna keep you safe,” Jazz said, stroking her hair.
“How?” Ellie asked. “They could just-- They could do this again!”
“They won’t,” Jazz soothed. “We’re leaving tonight.”
“We are?” Danny asked.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “Ellie’s right. If they did it once, they’ll do it again. If I had known they were actually willing to go this far, we would have left a long time ago.”
“This was always a possibility,” Tucker said softly. “It’s why we made the backup plans. You each have three separate fake identities ready to go. All your documents are in the bags. You just need to pick which backstory you’re gonna go with.”
“There’s money in the bags, too,” Sam said. “I know that’s… not as helpful as the papers, but—”
“No, it is,” Jazz said. “We’re definitely going to need money.”
Danny nodded. “What identities do we got, Tucker?”
“Okay, so you’re all family in all of them,” he said. “The first one? You’re orphans who were all sent to live with an implied abusive uncle and then ran away. That’s the Atkins identity cluster. The next one is the Lloyd family. In that one, you were all foster siblings/human trafficked together and have since trauma-bonded and escaped. Danny and Ellie are bio related in that one; Jazz isn’t. Next is the Dixon story. For the Dixons, you were all cousins at a family reunion gone wrong when a rogue attacked. You three were the only survivors and have been running and hiding since.”
“Not that one,” Danny said. “If adults find us and we’re only cousins, they’ll separate us.”
Tucker nodded. “Okay. Atkins or Lloyd then?”
“Can you tell us more about each of them?” Jazz asked.
“Sure,”” he said. “Atkins family were super wealthy and you all had a large inheritance—”
“Nope,” Sam said. “Vetoed. Too easily fact-checked.”
“But it was stolen by their evil foster uncle!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “Anyone with an inheritance worth stealing is someone who would pop up in a Google search of their name.”
“She has a point,” Danny said.
“Okay,” Jazz said. “The Lloyds, then.”
“The Lloyds,” Tucker said, “Live in Gotham. And their names are David, Ellison, and Jaslene.”
They took three different buses and hitchhiked five separate times to get to Gotham.
Gotham quite literally stank. The sky was perpetually gray and overcast-- when it wasn’t mysteriously blood red. Everyone was so suspicious. In both ways-- as in, they were suspicious of other people and acting suspiciously themselves.
After a week and a half of hard traveling, the three of them stank and were covered in grime. They were clearly pinging to everyone as homeless runaways.
They kept moving, drifting away whenever an adult stared too long, until they eventually filtered into the worst, seediest part of Gotham City: the neighborhood called Crime Alley.
It was there that they found a condemned, boarded up dump of tenement building, filled with other homeless people squatting in their own claimed apartments.
They had to go all the way up to the top floor. The seventh. Lower floor apartments were obviously premium picks, and the Lloyds-- new in town as they were-- did not have that luxury afforded to them.
“It’ll be hard to run if we need to,” Danny said.
“What choice do we have?” Jazz asked.
“Come on, Ellie, it’s time to change your bandages,” Danny said.
Ellie nodded, and lifted up her shirt, careful in her movements. A significant chunk of their money had gone towards food and first aid supplies. Sam’s parents may be rich, but that didn’t mean she had tons of piles of cash laying around that she could give away without anyone noticing. They were going to need to come up with a different solution here soon.
And they’d need to prioritize the medical supplies, Danny thought grimly. Food, they could steal, or beg off of people. But bandages? Those needed to be sterile, and so therefore they needed to be storebought. Clean and fresh and packaged.
Jazz removed the soiled wraps and gauze pads from Ellie’s chest. She checked the stitching of the Y-incision for signs of infection. Carefully cleaned it, gentle as Ellie hissed at the slightest touch. And then rebandaged her back up.
Jazz helped her put her shirt back on, and it struck Danny just how young Ellie was. Sure, she only looked three years younger than he was-- ten to his thirteen-- but she had only really existed for two years.
Two years old, and she had been cut into pieces. Gutted like a fish.
Hate and anger burned in Danny’s chest. In his core. How dare they? Ellie was his little sister. She was practically a baby. She needed hugs and blankets, not--
Not a bare, moldy studio apartment room. Echoing and cold.
“I’m gonna go out and find some stuff for us,” he announced. “Blankets, maybe. Clothes. Whatever. I’ll be back.”
“Stay safe!” Jazz called out.
Danny nodded absently, already out the door.
Gotham continued to be a shithole. He wandered over broken-up pieces of sidewalk, keeping his eyes down and his hands shoved into his jacket pockets. Careful not to bump into anyone.
A few people bumped into him, and were no doubt disappointed by the lack of a wallet or any cash to lift.
Danny used intangibility to swipe a few spare wallets from those would-be thieves. He felt no guilt about it either.
It occurred to him that he had the ideal skill set for a thief, really. Almost all of his powers were geared towards being undetectable. Invisibility, intangibility, technological interference...
The sky grew darker, and the air grew just a bit colder. The streets thinned, people disappearing into the safety of their homes and hideouts.
That was when Danny spotted the motorcycle.
Finding a chop shop in Crime Alley was shockingly easy. Danny walked out a half hour later $2500 richer.
He went back to his apartment with his sisters.
“Danny!” Ellie said. She ran to him and wrapped him in a hug.
“You have to call me David, remember?” he said.
“Right!” she said. “Sorry.”
“What about Davey?” Jazz asked.
Danny’s face wrinkled. Jazz giggled.
Danny put the new cash in the bag that was never more than five feet away from Jazz. Ellie gasped.
“How much did you get?” she asked.
“$2500,” he said.
“How did you get that?” Jazz asked, suspicious.
“I stole a motorcycle.”
“Danny.” Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose.
“What?” he snapped.
“You could have gotten caught!”
“I didn’t! And we need to make money somehow! Sam’s cash will only take us so far.”
“I get that, but I’m planning on getting a real job,” she said. “I’m fifteen. That’s old enough for a work permit.”
“...Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” she said. “I appreciate you doing this, really, but it was an unnecessary risk.”
“How’d you even know how to steal a bike anyway?” Ellie asked.
Danny shrugged. “I just possessed it.”
Ellie snickered. Even Jazz smiled.