#jason stumbles across where danny was held captive

[sleepy-writes-stuff]

DP X DC WRITING PROMPT #19

Beware! Not gonna lie, this prompt is creepy. I was feeling some horror vibes and decided to write it down. Whether or not it's actually creepy is for you guys to decide tho. However, just in case...

CW: Mentions of blood/ectoplasm, human experimentation, and descriptions of other unsettling imagery. Mind the tags!! They can give you a summary of what this prompt is about.

(#) = Notes at the end of post. Important context!!

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Echoes of the Soul

Danny is captured and taken away by the GIW to be experimented on and despite the combined efforts of his friends, family, and former enemies he's never found. Decades pass, the GIW were shut down at some point and put to trial for all of the atrocities they committed while Danny is recorded as the first superhero know to history. Tragic though his story may be, many modern teenage heroes look up to him.

Danny would only be seen as a memory by the world. Seen as someone who did actually exist at some point, but time and mystery have lessened his impact on other's thoughts and emotions like many other people and instances throughout history. However, it isn't until Jason is on his way back to Gotham since the first time he died(1) that he accidentally/unknowingly takes a detour.

He can't pinpoint why he's taking a longer route back to the city of his birth and death, but something in his chest, his heart, is telling him to follow an unknown path. Though mildly irritated, he follows it regardless. The incessant tug at his ribcage eventually leads him down some back roads into the middle of nowhere, where he finds something.(2)

From the outside, it looks like a regular dilapidated house in the country that was long left abandoned. Something inside Jason screams that the isn't the case at all. He dismounts his motorcycle and circles the property for anything suspicious. He's as cautious and stealthy as a cat stalking a mouse through the grass. Finding nothing, he eventually makes his way to the door, having to break it down to even enter it.

As he steps into the house, all the hair on his body stands on end and he's immediately on edge. Nothing on the ground floor seems suspicious, if a little empty. It was clear nobody had lived here for quite some time, but the feeling in Jason's chest wouldn't leave. If anything, it wrapped itself tighter around his chest, squeezing his lungs and heart to point of almost panicking.

Searching the house and finding nothing in the side rooms, he eventually finds a door to what he can only assume leads to the basement. As soon as his hand even touches the doorknob, his skin is crawling with chills and his teeth are chattering no so much from the cold but from fear he can't locate the source of.

The door creaks when it opens and reveals the stairs leading down into a yawning mouth of darkness. Flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, he cautiously begins his dissent. Once at the bottom, he finds another door. Only this time, it's completely out of place. Instead of a rotting, wooden door barely hanging onto it's hinges, this door is made of thick reinforced steel with a lever and a keypad where a doorknob should be. It's not difficult to figure out the code to unlock it. With his history, it might as well of been child's play to crack it.

Once the door was opened, however, he wished he'd left it locked. He wishes he never even set foot in this house or even followed the tugging at his ribs in the first place. On the other side of the door was a lab. All of the equipment and surfaces were left in disarray, some trays full of tool even knocked onto the floor as if whoever owned the lab was in a hurry. Or whatever they were studying was trying to get out.

The fact that he was looking at a destroyed lab, was the least worrisome observation, however. Everywhere he looked there were splatters of glowing green, some duller than others. Just the sight of them had the Pits roiling in upset, tinting the edges of his vision green as well. He steps further into the lab, careful not to step on any of the sharp tools littering the floor as well as any puddles of glowing green.

Eyes constantly scanning for any movement, he eventually makes his way to the center of the room, right next to a large, steel lab stable, complete with wrist, ankle, and neck staps. The surface was littered with deep scratch marks and more splatters of the same glowing green substance that he can only assume is blood. There was even an almost perfectly shaped handprint of the stuff curling around the edge of the table. Morbidly curious, he reached out to touch the handprint, wondering if it was related to the Pits somehow.

He didn't get to wonder for long, however. As soon as his fingertips so much as brushed against the handprint, the feeling he'd been following for the past week suddenly had his chest in a stranglehold followed by a vomit-inducing yank that left him dizzy and off-balance. He didn't have time to gather his wits before his ears were flooded with hair-raising screams and sounds of struggle.

Ignoring the nausea, his head whipped back up to the lab table he was standing in front of. What met his eyes was a young boy with black hair and terrified green-tinted blue eyes as he laid strapped to the table with men in white lab coats surrounding him, with one in particular having his green stained arm elbow deep in the boy's vivisected chest.(3) This one is important! More context below!

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Notes:

(1) This takes place before Jason returns to Gotham in Under The Red Hood

(2) What Jason is feeling is his baby halfa core reacting to a distress signal being sent by another halfa.

(3) This isn't a time travel prompt. What happened here is Jason got sucked into a very corporeal memory/imprint that belonged to Danny. What Danny experienced in that lab filled him with such raw emotions that everything that is part of him (i.e.- his blood) trapped every experience into a playable memory when said blood is touched. The memory is, in essence, still very much a part of Danny. What does that say about Danny's current existence? He's trapped. He's trapped in a neverending, disjointed cycle of reliving everything that was done to him and is forced to haunt the very lab he was held captive in. What does this mean for Jason since he got sucked into it? He's trapped too! However, with another person there, they can help Danny break out of the cycle and free himself. What will escaping mean? Will he permanently die? Will he come back a full ghost? Will Jason helping another person through the horrors of their own death help bring closure to his own? What does this mean for the rise of Red Hood? That's all up to you guys!