The Himbo Act Is Only Partially An Act. Sometimes, Danny Really Is That Dumb. Danny Will Play Up Jack

He's helped the little girl, who was in a coma Astral projecting and had managed to get lost from the hospital she was in, and figured he was done.

A couple of months later, there's a knock on his dorm door while he's doing school work. He figures it's the dinner he ordered and opens the door.

Outside stands a red haired man, who seems confused about why he's there. And. That Girl. The not-a-ghost girl. The coma patient girl. Looking smug as hell. "Thanks for helping me get better!" She chirps.

He slams the door closed.

What the hell? She wasn't supposed to remember!

Danny's retired. The ghost of a little girl doesn't particularly care about that.

He's in Star City, attending college, trying to keep his shit together after some huge villain attack that almost leveled the city.

And the ghost of a little girl stops him in his tracks.

Normally, ghosts leave him alone. They know when someone's too strong to fuck with, and they know he doesn't want to get involved in hero shit.

The exception being murder victims who want him to help point cops in the direction of their murderers....

...and this one little girl.

She bears the marks of death by collateral, so clearly not a murder victim.

Danny tries to brush past her.

She reappears.

This happens again. And again. And again.

"Look, kid, if I help you then every single ghost is gonna be on my ass for making an exception. You need to move on, for your sake and your family's-"

"My name is Lian Harper," the little girl interrupts, kicking him in the shin, "An' you're gonna help my dad, whether you like it or not."

Death has been trying to reach the Joker about his expired extended Life Warranty.

But Death is an abstract thing, and it's reach is really limited to around those with a good understanding or connection to it.

Enter Danny Fenton entering Gotham for a fieldtrip.

Every single time the Joker is near Fenton, every fucking time, lethal accidents happen.

No one is hurt, except the Joker.

He's convinced that this kids a meta and his power is Bad Luck.

Danny's convinced the Joker is an idiot who has no situational awareness.

Lady Gotham is convinced this is hilarious and keeps delaying Danny's class return trip.

Fun thought:

What if Danny is Ghost Prince because he died and was revived by the Infinite Realms itself. Pariah was just a placeholder while the Realms waited for Danny.

Santa is on strike due to global warming.  All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger.  Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.

“Are you busy today?”

Danny looked up from his phone, where he’d been messaging Jazz. She’d been pestering him to be more social again. Damian had been getting progressively more twitchy recently and he couldn’t figure out why. So, he figured, why not?

“Not really,” he answered after weighing the pros and cons of his answer.

“Good,” he said. “You are coming to dinner with me.”

Danny blinked once. Twice. Damian didn’t change. He still stood, somewhat stiff and formal and agitated in front of him. “What?”

“I am bringing you to my family dinner. Tonight. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

Danny wasted approximately thirty seconds of those five minutes staring in shock, before remembering that Damian could and would drag him out the door sans shoes if need be. He’d done it before. Given they went to school in Gotham, that had meant that Damian had carried him over his shoulder to his car and thrown an ugly purple pair of crocs at him before Damian had dropped him off at his study group. He bolted to his room to grab his wallet and a jacket, then slid into the kitchen to grab an ecto blob boba smoothie and a piece of meat.

Damian grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the fridge, sans meat. “Time’s up,” he said.

“But my snack-” Danny tried…

“You will be fed,” was snapped at him as they left their apartment. “If you must have a snack, I’m certain one of the heathens has left something in my car you may have.”

'Well, shit,' Danny thought. 'Guess I’m gonna need to have that meat for a midnight snack.'

_______

Danny sat at a dining room table full of rich people in their own house and wondered briefly how this had happened. Damian had dragged him into the house as if he thought the halfa would run away given half a chance. Which, he wasn’t exactly wrong, but still. He had refused to let go until he’d forcefully sat Danny down in a chair and introduced him to the room at large as “my roommate who refuses to feed himself properly and is trying to burn the building down by incorrectly using the toaster.” Which, rude.

"How do you do that?” the blonde, who he thinks was introduced as Brown, asked curiously.

"He puts raw meat in it,” Damian growls.

Everyone in the room turns to Danny at once.

“Why?” one of the two largest men, this one with a white streak, demanded. “Even I knew better as a kid, and I didn’t even have a toaster.”

Danny blinked at that before replying, “Well, the toaster at home was the only appliance that didn’t reanimate food. Ever. The oven was guaranteed to do so and the few times we had a working microwave it was Russian Roulette of the end result being animated, electrically charred, glow in the dark radioactive, or actually cooked through.”

“Oh my god, is that an actual reason?” someone whispered.

Damian just looked betrayed. “Why?”

“I did tell you, didn’t I? I’m pretty sure I told you,” Danny said confused. No realization dawned in Damian’s gaze. “My parents are ecto scientists? I know I changed my last name when I came out here, but I was pretty sure I told you about that.”

Damian’s eye twitched. “The crazed, zealot, mad scientist Fentons?”

Danny sunk into his chair with a sigh, resigned. “Yeah, them. After the Justice League took them in, I’m pretty sure they put my sister, friends, and I on some kind of potential rouges watchlist because of it. I’m just glad they managed to close the portal and confiscated all the weapons blueprints from them and the GIW.”

“They only took the weapons blueprints?” Richard asked.

Danny shrugged. “They took all of them, but the weapons were getting really dangerous. They kept upping the sensitivity so they targeted more and more liminals, ecto-contaminated people. I know how to make everything because I had to sabotage or fix everything so it wouldn’t target me.”

"Why would it target you?” Bruce asked, concerned.

Danny stared blankly at the man. “Do none of you follow the news? My lab accident was used as evidence of human experimentation at their trial. The whole house was an OSHA violation. The only reason their ecto levels were as low as they were is because they wore specialized hazmat suits twenty four-seven. That whole thing is why my sister and I changed our last name. So we could avoid,” he waved his hands around, “this.”

The sound of someone clearing their throat quietly brought the questions to a stop. Danny looked over at the man to give him a relieved smile, which grew truly grateful as the butler placed a plate of spaghetti in front of him.

Once everyone was served, Danny dug in. 'Damn,' he thought, 'steak cuts in spaghetti? Must be a rich people thing.'

With the butler, Alfred, if he remembered correctly, standing by the door, no one focused their questions on Danny, for which he was very grateful.It also took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that no one else’s spaghetti had steak cuts. In the meat. He carefully chewed the next bite of meat and sank down in his chair with an embarrassed groan.

“Is there a problem?” Damian asked, a smug, knowing glint in his eyes.

“I made a bet with my friends that I could last at least a semester without anyone figuring out this,” he gestured at the very delicious spaghetti. “I owe them phone numbers now. I don’t suppose you know where I can find Dr. Pamela Isely?”

“And who else’s number do you need?”

“Tim Drake, can I pass your number to my tech friend so he doesn’t remotely brick my electronics?”

A string of startled laughs erupted from the table at the question.

Danny needs a few...odd things. A few dietary and emotional requirements unique to his physiology. Meat is one of them.

But like, raw meat. He doesn't have to eat it often, maybe twice a month, but it does need to be completely raw.

He also needs to eat non-sentient blob ghosts, which are very different from sentient ones. Same amount, maybe twice a month.

He's weak to hot temperatures, where most humans require some sort of positive contact he needs to fight, if he gets too much sunlight his dopamine levels drop, and oddly enough as he got older milk or products with a lot of milk started to affect him like alcohol affects humans.

Now that he's made it to college, hiding most of these things is easy enough.

He chose Gotham, because of minimal sunny days and naturally cold weather. He regularly goes for walks at night, to fill his need for fighting. He says he has a milk allergy, and avoids milk products.

The blobs and the raw meat are a little uh. Those are a little hard.

He's taken to ducking into a bathroom stall to just swallow the blobs whole. But the meat...

He decides to sear the outside and leave the inside entirely raw. Does this detract from the nutrients by cooking them off? Yes. Does it mean he needs to eat raw meat four times a month instead of twice? Yes. Does it mostly hide that he's doing this in front of humans? Kind of.

Until he got a vegan roommate.

Said roommate is far too sharp-eyed for his own good, and now the guy is being weird.

Or: Damian's roommate is a meta who clearly has dietary restrictions outside the norm. It's fine; Damian understands that like animals in the wild, people have different diets. But the cuts of meat Fenton is eating are...subpar. Damian isn't sure how to be...civil, or appear polite, or not be a "snob" if he suggests Fenton allow him to procure farm fresh cuts of steak from cows raised in an open pasture and were well taken care of.

I Think Not

Bruce sat at his desk, head in his hands, fingers rubbing at his temples. It did nothing to soothe his headache as the fire lizards continued to whirl and pivot in the air in leftward circles, chirping and chattering at each other and Bruce.

Alfred stood in the doorway, eyebrow loudly raised, despite the elder man’s silence. Bruce ignored the judgment radiating from his direction.

“Father, I-” Damian burst into the room, neatly stepping past Alfred before stopping just past him, eyeing the fire lizards.

Bruce felt his headache spike.

“Father,” he says again, this time with anger and fire in his voice, “who is threatening you so?”

The harnesses of the fire lizards catch the light, highlighting the flowers embroidered on every strap and, if that wasn’t enough, the icons of the flowers on the connecting parts of the harness.

“There is no threat, Damian,” Bruce let out another sigh as he dug his fingers harder into his skull.

Damian pointed harshly at the fire lizards chittering away in the air above him. “Yellow Carnation. Spider Lily. Butterfly Weed. Basil. Aconite.” His finger moved to point at Bruce. “Someone is angry at you and willing to kill you by any means necessary. Something needs to be done. ”

“Damian-”

“Bruce!” Tim barreled into the room, looking harried. “Bruce, where’s my coffee! I’ve got a meeting and I spent all night working on it and I need coffee or I’m going to pass out in the middle and they won’t take me seriously! Why are there so many fire lizards in flower harnesses oh my god who did you sleep with?!”

Bruce covered his eyes and tangled his fingers in his hair, despairing.

“You imbecile!” Damian shrieked. “Do you know anything about flower language?!”

“Bruce!” Dick hit the doorway and launched himself over the bottleneck of the doorway, rolling over the floor and popping to his feet in front of the desk Bruce was sitting behind like the flimsy shield it was. “Bruce, is Jason coming?”

Bruce dug the heels of his hands into his eyes briefly, before removing them to address his boys, his precious children, the source of his headaches.

“Boys!” he shouted to get their attention over the squabbling. They all looked at him and he pointed at the fire lizards. “Those are Jason’s Damian. He isn’t coming Dick. I don’t know anything about your coffee Tim.”

Tim’s eyes narrowed as he took in the fire lizards’ harnesses again. Then he pulled a token out of his pocket and held it to Bruce. “Is this his?” he asked. The token was of a poppy, colored white.

Bruce raised an eyebrow and nodded.

After a moment of silence, Tim’s screech caused the fire lizards to go between.

“Jason stole my coffee!”

Gothamites have aliases. It's something that doesn't make sense to outsiders, but it's true. Parents usually give their children an alias as a birthday present between the ages of 5 and 10.

Jason's revival isn't new in Gotham. Minor revivals happen all the time. If they didn't, Gotham would be a barren ghost city. The thing is, these minor revivals take years off your life. So all the kids and teens that died in Joker's attack on a school? They are now adults and teens. Can't go back to your old life? Here's a new identity!

All the dumb grunts getting hired by villains? Kid's who died too many times to get much out of school. They don't have the education to even try for a regular job.

All the homeless people, kids especially, on the streets? Teens and adults revived from kids who never got to learn where babies came from until they got slammed with hormones and couldn't deal with the consequences.

Most people in Gotham have died at least once privately, some publicly.

Jason was living on the streets after suffering under abusive Willis and drug addict Catherine Todd when he got picked up by Batman. You bet he died at least once.

Bruce's parents died? They gave up their revivals so Bruce could still have something of a childhood, cause you bet he died there.

Tim lived alone and unsupervised for most of his childhood? You sure bet he died. Was he also surrounded by the cursed objects his parents brought home? If this boy didn't have frequent encounters with questionable beings, I would be surprised. (Low key suspect he came out immortal and pulls stupid stunts regularly to 'grow up' with 'growth spurts'. Forever 17 Tim Drake has a reason, now.)

So, they all have aliases. The Wayne's and the Malones and the Drakes and the Cobblepots and everybody.

And this means that will readings are a pain the ass to everyone not from Gotham, because by the time Final death comes, you've got at least 3 aliases you need on your will for it to be legitimate.

1 Vlad

2 Danny

3 Dan

4 Danni/Ellie

5????

Danny turned the knob on the door to the old janitor closet and stepped out only to pause.

This was not his high-school. Instead he was in a fancy office of some kind with a bunch of blueprints on a desk. Oh well, his portal powers were new and still developing so when he realized he would be late for school even if he flew he decided to use his new ability and aim for a closet he knew the cleaning crew only used sparingly.

At least he partially succeeded. It was a cleaning closet, just not the cleaning closet. He knew he should hurry and at least try to get to school on time but he also knew that it would be a waste of effort, besides those blueprints looked pretty interesting.

It only took a moment before Danny spotted something wrong with the first blueprint and out of habit of correcting his own parents blueprints so they don't explode and whatnot, he grabbed a red pen and began correcting mistakes and leaving little notes and helpful suggestions. He even drew up blueprints for new parts to make the energy consumption for one blueprint design functional.

"Wha-how did you get in here?!"

Danny jolted, dropping the pen and papers as a tall man stood in the doorway,probably Mr. Fox if the nameplate on the desk was anything to go by. Danny made a quick excuse about Narnia needing him before ducking back into the closet and flying out and away with his ghost powers...only to find out he's in another dimension and Amity park doesn't exist here and not one but two weird rich people want to adopt him.

He wonders if this red Hood guy would protect him from the horrors of adoption if he asked nicely.

Not my post, but I say:

AU where Tim wasn’t ever obsessed with the Flying Graysons or Batman and Robin, and thus never found out their identities. And then at 15 years old his class gets assigned a “fun” research project to propose who resident boogeyman Batman could be and, being the overachieving genius that he is, Tim gets sucked into a conspiracy theory rabbit hole and actually uncovers the truth. Mostly he’s mad that he can’t actually give his excellent presentation bc he can’t compromise Batman’s identity even more, can he?