When the portal first turns on, all the lights in the apartment flicker. Later, they will cause the largest blackout in Gotham's recent history. For now, the momentary darkness is illuminated by a sputter of green. Danny's shitty miniature closet, now covered in metal gadgetry and wires, crackles with contained lightning. Their breaths catch.
And then - silence. The lightning zaps against metal. Green fades out, and the lights turn back on.
"No," Danny breathes out, stumbling into the portal as if to grasp the swirling ecto with his hands. He fails, same as when he'd tried to rip open a portal through his own powers, and his gloved fist slams against the metal as he lets out some truly vitriolic curses. Gotham had been educational in that regard.
For her part, Jazz's knees go limp and she slums to the floor. Her teeth bite into the meat of her cheek and she listens, mind blank, as Danny paces.
" - the safety switch is on, I'm not that dumb. Voltage was good - maybe the building cables are too old? How are we supposed to replace that?"
"It wasn't the cables," says Jazz, finding her voice calm. "We bypassed into the grid - "
"I guess we're going to have to change that back before we get found," Danny rubs a hand down his face and sprawls beside her, staring up at the portal's ceiling covering his closet. His voice is small as he admits, "I don't know how I fucked up."
He'd grown up so much this past year, his voice deepening and stubble needing to be shaved off with such frequency he'd spent a week preening about it. In the mirror he looked increasingly like their father, shoulders broad and strong. Jazz stretched out beside him and grabbed his hand, and together they numbly observed their hopes and dreams sputter around them.
"Do you think this is how mom and dad felt when their portal failed?" Jazz asks.
"Theirs didn't fail," said Danny. "The safety switch was turned off."
"Ambient ecto levels match Amity," said Jazz, forcing her brain to think mechanical analytics instead of psychoanalyzing herself and her brother, or worrying about going back to their boring, unfulfilling waiter jobs as they hustled for money.
At least they'd see the Wayne family again. Maybe if they were stuck here she'd flirt back for real.
"It's not enough," said Danny. "It was never enough to be a power source, that's why they blew out all the blocks. The calculations don't match - I know the blueprints of the portal and I know I matched it. Maybe they added an extra power source besides electricity?" He starts muttering calculations and possible fuel sources. Jazz tunes him out when he starts wondering where to get uranium.
A horrible thought had occurred to Jazz and she squeezed her little brother's cold hand tightly. It wasn't only ghosts who existed in the Infinite Realms, but they made up a majority of the creatures found. How did they get there? Ambient ecto, strong emotions -- that created shades, like the countless they'd encountered in Gotham. How did they cross over?
This dimension had been thrilling and concerning all at once. So many heroes, and so many insane villains to match, and aliens and gods and the safety of the planet got threatened every other week. At least it didn't fall to Danny to fix things, but. She's pretty sure at least some of those doomsday scenarios involved odd magics that sucked out the soul to power something else.
"Does death give off energy?"
Danny cut himself off and gave her a look. "Duh, ecto."
"There's the missing link," said Jazz. "It's gotta be, right?"
"What, death? I can't exactly build this on a graveyard. Can you imagine the headlines? Actually, can you imagine the bats?"
She sat up. "I mean. You."
"Me," said Danny. Then, "Oh." A nervous laugh escaped him, eyeing the portal in his closet the same way a mouse watched a feral cat. "You think. I created the portal?"
"You must have," said Jazz. The triumph of certainty forced her to stand up, pulling Danny up and clutching both his hands now. "That's the missing link. The extra energy!"
"And how is that going to help us?" Danny cried, giving their clutched hands an incredulous shake. "Do you want us to kill someone just to get back home?"
That snapped her triumph back to reality. She and Danny stared at each other. "And what if you're wrong?" Danny's eyes gleamed green around the edges. "We'd have just -- I refuse. I can't. And I can't exactly die a second time."
He paused. "I mean, I probably could, but - "
"No," said Jazz sharply. She was not as strong as Danny but he was unresisting as she hauled him out of the portal. His room was a mess of abandoned clothes around their packed belongings, strewn with metal parts and tools. They went to the very edge of the room, to the curtained window, and she spared a thought to hoping the green glow and flickering lights hadn't been spotted. The last thing they needed was the bats descending upon them now. Not when the portal was done. Not when they were so close.
"Maybe I'm wrong," said Jazz. Her body was between Danny and the portal, and it's gaping maw was not, objectively, hungry. It was just a trick of the mind. Her own racing heart acknowledging mortality. "And I mean, there's no guarantee it would work again the same way."
"It probably would," Danny muttered, looking out the window. "I did die again, before, when Sam - it worked again. And there's Vlad."
"Okay," said Jazz. "Okay. We can - "
"We won't," said Danny, sharply.
"Of course we won't," said Jazz. "But if we don't, then - "
"We could ask the Justice League for help ," said Danny without much enthusiasm. They shared a mutual grimace. "Like, 50-50 odds they do help us out. Batman isn't as much of a creepy fuck as he seemed at first. And Superman is downright cool! And an alien! They got to understand wanting to return home."
"And what are they going to do?" Jazz crossed her arms. "Stop saving the planet from Darkland - "
"Darkseid - " Danny corrected.
" - Just to help out two random people who can't even prove they're from another dimension punch a hole in reality? I refuse to be to be stuck here labeled as a supervillain just because there are actual curses on this horrible city with fantastic welfare resources that makes everyone with ambition go evil!"
"Shh," said Danny. He pushed the curtains to more fully cover the window. "Don't tempt fate. Or the bats. Or like, Justice League Dark."
Silence filled the apartment. "It's not the worst thing," said Jazz. "Being stuck here."
"Bats haven't yet figured out it's me doing lowdown vigilanteism," said Danny, without enthusiasm.
"I think American History is different here and I'll fail miserably."
"You can study for your GED," said Jazz, pointedly. "And me too. And Gotham U has pretty good scholarships."
"I bet we can seduce the Wayne's into paying tuition."
That made Jazz laugh. "We could. I think they've offered it, actually." She'd pretended at ignorance the first time, then demurred the next. They hadn't offered thrice, but it was only a matter of time.
"I can convince them to give me a job at Wayne Tech," said Danny. "Behold: I build portals that don't work."
She elbowed him lightly. "No guys in white to hunt you down."
"No crazy ghost hunting parents," said Danny, but his voice wavered.
"Yeah," said Jazz. She turned back to the dark, silent portal and bit her lip. "No parents."
"We haven't been very friendly."
"I miss them," Danny's voice cracked. "I miss them so bad. I want to go home!"
Even though he was taller than her now - an absolute travesty of genetics - he burrowed his face in her shoulder as they hugged. "We will," she murmured fervently. Maybe there was truth to the curses driving people evil here, because an insane idea took root in her mind. "We will. I promise." She hugged her little brother tighter.
When they separated and she calmly walked into the portal, Danny said, "What are you doing?"
"Turning the safety switch off," said Jazz, doing just that. It was a small thing, nothing like the original portal. Danny kept all the cables securely tied to the sides. After the accident he'd always been careful about lab safety protocols.
Accident. She can't call it that anymore.
"That's probably smart," said Danny. He rubbed his fist over his wet eyes. "I'll just. Unlatch from the power grid before someone realizes what we did."
"Okay," said Jazz. Her fingers were tight against the switch. "Hey Danny?"
The portal switched on. The swirl of green caught her abdomen, turning her entire body weightless. Then, the next second, while her senses struggled to reorient and her stomach realized it abruptly did not exist - displaced, moved into another dimension, ecto filling her senses like she could taste the color green - the electricity hit.
When she comes to, Danny is hunched over her. Her ears keep ringing long enough for him to start crying, and Jazz lifts a tired, heavy arm to wipe his tears away only for her hand to pass through his flesh. Her skin was blue, tinged green from the light of the portal behind them. He'd pulled her out of there. He'd pulled her out of the portal.
"It worked," said Jazz, her voice hoarse and barely a whisper. "It worked!"
"You fucking idiot!" cried Danny, dripping snot at tears all over her. "You - you - "
Jazz's tired hand falls to the ground. She can't feel her heartbeat. Her entire body aches, nerves dull and firing at the same time. A faint scent of pork mixed into the ecto in the air like an army of ecto-weenies marching out of their fridge. Maybe she'd gone full ghost and her body was still in the portal, eternally suspended in the ecto with electricity running through it's veins: the conduit. The missing link.
Was it like this when her little brother had died?
"We can go home," she told Danny. It was what mattered now. He'd have to carry her body into the portal, but by all the Ancients, they could go home.
"So did you!" Jazz forced her upper body upright. "Come on, Danny." If she was a ghost, why did her limbs have to ache so much? "Hey, how do you 'go human'?" A nervous laugh of pure hysteria escaped her. "I mean, I should probably check - "
Danny sucked in a large, desperate breath. Then he cracked again. Jazz ached to comfort him. She focused on the humanity of him - slipping back to life, her heart beating in her chest, the exhaustion in every one of her muscles -
The window shattered. Her elbows slipped and cracked into the floor, through the floor, and half her body followed until Danny's arms hauled her back up and pressed her to his chest. Past his shoulder she could barely see the dark shadow of one of the local bats, illuminated by the green portal light because every other light was dark. Could barely hear those affected gravely voices say, "Holy shit --? Danny? Jazz?"
"Don't come closer!" ordered Danny through the snot and tears, hauling her further upright and ready to bolt.
The sudden movement reminded her of her stomach that didn't exist anymore. Her body fought between passing out and throwing up.
And it was that: the darkness tinging her vision that forced her out of it, less a gentle slide into being alive and more like tumbling down a slope. Gravity slammed into her and forced her back down, her hair turning red again, skin going from hypothermic to pale.
"Fuck yeah, I'm not dead," wheezed Jazz, newly human and alive again, and then threw up at the mouth of the portal her death created.
"What," said the bat. "The fuck."
