#poor jazz

"Before we start, my name is Timothy Drake-Wayne, please call me Tim, and you have permission to hug me, cling to me, cry on me, or even squeeze my hand tight enough to break it. Whatever you need to do to get through this discussion. I'll even leave for snacks if you need to say something intensely personal or that you feel I shouldn't hear," his son said with a small, supportive smile. Bruce was so proud of Tim, he'd come so very far since first coming to them. "I'm very well used to standing in as an emotional support person when a foster kid gets comfortable enough with Bruce to want to tell him exactly what happened wherever they'd been before coming here, and I'm perfectly content to keep doing so for as long as I live here."

Bruce watched as Jazz processed everything Tim said and caught the question in her gaze before she'd even opened her mouth to speak it. "Tim has decided he wants to work with CPS when he gets older, take his own experiences with the system and use them to help improve it. I do whatever I can to help him, to help any of the children who find themselves in my care, achieve his dreams," he explained softly, pride warming his heart and voice. "I'm not sure how well you remember him, but my first adopted son, Dick, recently decided to open his own gymnastics studio here in Gotham. His experience with you and Danny when you lived with us really left an impression."

Jazz nodded in understanding before glancing at Tim, reached for his hand, and took a fortifying breath. "My—the Fentons are… scientists, inventors, innovators, they—they discovered, independently, an entire species of interdimensional beings with incredible powers and such a rich mixture of cultures, and… and they decided those beings were unnatural, that they were evil and needed to be experimented on and exterminated. They created a portal to these beings' home dimension in our basement without following any sort of safety regulations or protocols." Jazz took another breath, swallowing as she looked down at hold on Tim's hand. "Th-the green on me and Danny when we first got here, it's called ectoplasm. It's basically the lifeblood of these beings, it makes up almost their entire bodies. Their dimension is full of it, as any excess they produce gets shed off into the environment around them.

"When the Fentons created their portal into the Infinite Realms, they didn't realize they'd installed a secondary switch that also needed to be flicked for the thing to work. A switch that was on the inside of the portal shaft and could only be reached by physically going inside it." She shuddered as she tried to bite back tears. "I wasn't home at the time. I was tutoring a fellow student in English at the local fast food joint. Danny was at home with his two best friends. Mom and dad had left the day before to track down the supposed "ghost" that had caused their magnum opus to fail to work. He should have been safe.

"I got a frantic phone call from Danny's friend, Tucker, telling me I needed to get home ASAP, that Danny'd had an accident and wasn't waking up. The student I was tutoring asked me what I was waiting for, to get going, and so I did. I—by the time I got back to the house, Sam and Tucker had managed to drag Danny away from the portal, but i-it was pretty obvious what the accident was, I mean… the portal hadn't been on before I left…"

Bruce had a bad feeling about where this story was going. He'd seen the product of lab accidents too often to be able to con himself into thinking it could be going in any other direction. He almost stopped her from continuing, but while she was very obviously distressed, the process of telling him, of telling them, seemed to actually be doing her some good, so he kept his silence and watched as she clenched Tim's hand even harder for a brief second before relaxing her grip almost entirely.

"Sam was fussing over Danny's prone form, trying to make him more comfortable on the steel flooring without moving him too much, while Tucker was pacing between the two of them and the swirling mass of green that was the portal when I got there. As soon as they saw me, Tucker was on me with tears in his eyes. "We thought he'd died," he said. "The screaming—we thought he was dead. We're so sorry, he could have died—we're so unbelievably sorry,"" Jazz quoted with a strained voice. "Sam's makeup was running from how much she was crying. Sam never cries, and there she was, kneeling over my barely breathing baby brother, nearly sobbing in terror and guilt. They—Sam had apparently dared Danny to go inside so they could get a picture, and while in there, Danny tripped, and he hit the secondary switch. The Fentons had apparently not turned the other switch off after the thing didn't work the first time, and Danny ended up paying the price of their stupidity. He was alive, he'd survived, but now he's rightfully terrified of anything to do with electricity above what comes out of your stranded wall outlet. Only, come to find out, Danny hadn't survived. Not entirely… not unchanged."

Knew it, Bruce thought wearily as he leaned back in his chair. He resisted the urge to rub his hand across his face or run it through his hair and instead just continued to listen to Jazz's tale.

"The combination of all that electricity running through him, killing him, as a portal made pretty much entirely of ectoplasm opened up literally right on top of him changed Danny on a molecular level. He's no longer fully human. He's now something called a halfa, half human and half… half ghost."

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FINALLY got that finished! I sincerely apologize for not getting this out yesterday, I had to take a general health day due to both my lactose intolerance realizing, three days after the fact, that I'd eaten dairy and decided it didn't like that at all, and my sleep schedule being crap the past two days (⁠-⁠_⁠-⁠;⁠) that's why today's post says "day 8/9", I'm counting it for both days since I *did* start writing it yesterday (⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

For anyone reading this directly after day 6 but hasn't read any of the reblogs of day 6, this is actually chapter 4 of this fic, not chapter 2. I have two amazing co-writers who have each written an amazing chapter for this fic, which can be more easily read on AO3 by hitting the link up at the top!

Also, due to this fic having two co-writers for it, from now on, when I post a new chapter for it here on Tumblr, I won't be linking back to my previous chapter, since there will be two chapters between each of my own. Instead, I'll be linking back to the first post back on day 6 and to the AO3 version, where the entire fic will be readily available for reading.

Also also, because this is being co-written, any and all updates for this fic will be highly sporadic at best. Please don't harass me or my co-writers for quicker updates, we're all very busy people working together to write this purely for fun.