Trying To Find A Fic. It's My Hero Academia. Izuku Asks All Might If He Can Be A Hero, Gets A No. Then

Gotham is full of flame actives. It is, in fact, rare to find someone born in Gotham who isn't flame active. There are a few sky lines, but most big names have some cloud or mist.

The Court of Owls has most of Gotham's sky flame users, which doesn't help.

Dp x dc idea 159

Danny is being hunted. Both his parents and the Giw. They all think he is a villain so he might as well be one.

He’d just choose who he’d be a villain for.

By then he had one choice. The flash. That man seems to care about his villain . He doesn’t think the man would let one of his villains be tortured or experimented on.

After his recent escape from the parties hunting him he sets out for central city. He’d just be a villain to an actual decent person instead.

I’m personally imagining him still a teen and doing the most mundane crimes. Just using his powers enough the cops can’t do anything to stop him.

Yes, but he hid behind a mask. In a safer (or just less corrupt) city, he wouldn't need to hide his identity. Like Nancy Drew or Scooby-Doo.

In a safer city, Tim Drake would have been a teen detective. Like Kudo Shinichi (case closed), Nancy drew, boxcar children, or any of a dozen others.

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?

Halfas can't die because they're half ghost, so normal stuff can't kill them. But they're also half human, which means ghost specific methods don't work either.

Fun fact: ghosts have death scars.

Fun fact: just because they can't die, doesn't mean they're unmarked.

So, Danny learns this on accident when he goes to visit Frostbite about all the scars he's been getting from Vlad’s Plasmius Maximus.

And Frostbite is horrified by the assortment of Death Scars on the Great One.

And then he learns that Phantom is still a newly dead *baby*.

With his trinkets, oscar makes a replica of the lamp. Problem is, he doesn’t remember which one is the real one until someone takes it and it get bigger.

Kleptomaniac Oscar

Oscar is a kleptomaniac. He doesn’t notice when he does it. His aunt compensated this by getting beads, pretty stones, and other small things. He learned how to do crafts with small items and he sells them next to his aunt’s stall on market days.

This makes life interesting when he joins RNJR+Q at Haven. Lots of little things go missing, dust, scrolls, lien. When they go looking for them and ask Oscar to help them look he looks confused until they start describing small things. Then to their confusion he starts patting himself down. He pulls more out of his pockets than they’d realized was missing, including Qrow’s flask. He apologizes and explains what his aunt had done and asks them to keep an eye on him because he doesn’t mean to steal anything, he really just can’t help it.

Nora thinks it’s hilarious and likes to take him on walks near prejudiced people. Ren helps Oscar return most of the things he takes. Jaune and Ruby (and later Yang, Blake and Weiss) get small trinkets (of various price and durability) to leave around for him. The first time he empties his pockets to find fistfulls of dust flakes and painted nuts and bolts he freaks out and tries to return them. Yang just laughs and asks his favorite color and Weiss hands him a bunch of containers for safely holding small amounts of dust and proceeds to teach him about dust. In great detail. He also finds an odd amount of glitter packets and weird not quite gem things. Jaune teaches him about sequins. Blake, after seeing him look at his assortment of oddities, leaves spools of thread and lengths of yarn. An unusual amount of cloth scraps find their way around that no one will admit to. (Qrow). There’s also still beads.

Soon enough, small treasures are found around the house: patchwork kerchiefs with initials beaded into corners, glittery cloth bookmarks, bracelets and necklaces with beads and nuts and bolts, sequined wrist and ankle bands.

Soul mark au

Humans have soul marks, a picture on their skin representing the one person who compliments them, helps them grow, keeps them safe. Some people have multiple soul marks, some only one, and some not at all.

Ghosts have Fraid marks, images or features in their appearance that reflect the members of their Fright.

Danny has had his soul mates, Sam and Tucker, for years. Sometimes, he'll find an odd colored bruise that lingers and doesn't hurt, but he doesn't think much of it.

Then he dies. His ghost form only shows his face, all other skin hidden away. It takes a while before he can bring himself to check that his soul marks are still there. It takes longer still to learn about Fraid marks.

"Why does everyone here wear sashes anyway?" Danny asked one day, while stopping by the Far Frozen.

"We are a Fraid. We are all similar in many ways, so we manifested another way to show our inclusion in other Fraids," Frostbite responded easily.

"What do you mean?" Danny asked, confused.

"Our Fraid marks," Frostbite said, indicating his own, "Many beings of the Realms have their own way to show their marks, but we have no skin to show, and not all of us appreciate colored fur. This might be our Lair, but we have our own predators here if we aren't careful."

"What are Fraid marks?"

"Marks that show our allies and allegiances. Your human friends may even have their own marks."

"Sam and Tucker are my soul mates. I've had their marks forever. My sister, Jazz's too. But I haven't gotten new marks since I became a halfa."

"Didn't you notice?" Frostbite asked, amused. "You are a human ghost with fangs, pointed ears, and claws. You are here to check on other physical changes. Many of your friends in the Realms are not human, or have a very distinct non-humanoid form. Fraid marks are much more versatile than human, or even liminal, marks."

Something to note about the weighted blanket, the pebbles have to come from the person's grave or have been given to the individual directly, otherwise it's just a rock. So these blankets take a while to make, because the rocks need to mean something.

When Sam started putting pebbles on Danny, it was more for her piece of mind than anything. It quickly became something important to both of them. Tucker also did it sometimes, and Jazz after she found out, but it was mostly something between them.

It was also a little game for Sam: which ones would he like best? Sam ordered little geodes that Danny would display in his room, but his favorites were ones that were picked up off the side of the road with him in mind.

So when her parents took her places outside of Amity Park, she started picking up little rocks and pebbles wherever they went. It made the awful boring trips bearable. She always liked bringing her friends souvenirs, and with this? Even if her parents stopped her from buying anything, she always got something for Danny.

After something happens at FentonWorks, Danny asks if he can store his 'rock collection' at their houses. Of course they agree. And Danny isn't getting sleep, between ghost attacks and nightmares, so they look up stuff that might help. And they find weighted blankets. And they look at the literal treasure chest (gifted by Princess Dora for precious things, that Danny also can't keep at his house) and decided, why not?

The final product is a clashing collection of ghosts and stars and plants and hieroglyphs and tech and puns and books and bats in square patches of cloth that looks like a godawful quilt. Danny cries when they give it to him (birthday, death day, or something to brighten up a bad day) because it settles something in his core that he didn't even realize was hurting.

This weighted blanket that his friends and sister made is the closest thing he has to a grave. If the ghosts come through the portal and find him sleeping with it, they just turn around and come back later. It really is the best sleep he's ever had.

Any way, at some point, Sam's parents bring her to Gotham for a gala. She obviously manages to slip away outside and starts picking up pebbles. Her Fraid has learned that picking up their own rocks means more than sharing or trading, but she has more chances to pick up different ones than they do, so she 'buys in bulk' so to speak when she leaves. Also, the whole thing is surprisingly grounding for liminals, too and Jazz has been very stressed lately.

Anyway, one of the Wayne's, dealers choice, but I'm thinking Tim or Damian, maybe Cass or Steph, sees her wandering around outside and picking something up, or digging around in the garden, gettingclose to securityfeatures. They go out to confront her about it and she just answers politely that she's picking up pebbles for her friends.

One of them died, and we've just started making them weighted blankets out of grave pebbles. They found it so comforting we decided to make at least one for each of us. Solidarity, you know? Oh yeah, Danny died, but he got better. He's just got a medical condition now. And she just goes on as she keeps going around, picking up pebbles.

I imagine if it was Tim or Dick, they start giving Jason pebbles, just as a joke. They see him taking a nap, drop a pebble on him. He's being annoying, throw a pebble at him. And as this goes on, they notice: he keeps those pebbles. They're displayed in his preferred safe houses, and kept in his pockets. His temper has mellowed out a bit. And the others notice. So they ask.

And eventually everyone starts doing it. Jason quickly gets used to waking up from naps at the Manor to a small pile of rocks somewhere on his person. He starts sorting them.

And this gets to be such a habit that everyone starts doing to each other too. Bruce loves this because it's an expression of love that he doesn't struggle with, and that is accepted by all of his kids. The first time was an accident, mistaking a half blanket buried Dick or Bruce as Jason, or a joke putting one on a Tim that has randomly passed out somewhere.

That first person who talked to Sam realizes that Jason's got a lot of those pebbles now. They remember that she was talking about weighted blankets. So, for a group project, the bats and birds steal some of the pebbles to make Jason a blanket. And at first he's pissed. And then he sits under it- and wow this is the best blanket ever, no you can't touch it unless you want to lose your fingers.

Ok, so I've seen a few things that say Bruce Wayne and Sam Manson are Jewish. And I've seen a couple of things about Jewish traditions that say that they leave small stones on graves of loved ones, something about anchoing souls. And there's this one fic, I can't remember what it was or who wrote it, that had Sam placing small stones on Danny sometimes, just because.

I had this thought. Since Danny and Jason aren't dead, what if their loved ones made them weighted blankets, with those stones instead of beads/rice/what-have-you in regular weighted blankets.

Those blankets quickly become their favorite. It's soothing on an instinctual level. Sleeping with those blankets is the best sleep they've ever had. No nightmares. Just happy, sleeping, ghost purrs. Because those blankets are full of love and recognition of loss and ghosts appreciate that recognition of loss from the living, need it.

It's why Ember wants to hear her name, why Skulker and Technus shout their names and titles. They want to be recognized.

Just imagine, movie night at the manor. Some poor soul tries to playfully steal Jason's weighted blanket. Jason's eyes haven't been so bright since he emerged from the Lazarus Pits and he's snarling and growling to impress a dragon. Message received: don't touch the blanket.

“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.

Ok, so.

Blob ghosts are like ecto filters. And there are some fics where ghosts just...roost and lay eggs or whatever. Biology says: now you have babies. But the babies aren't always the same level of intelligence.

But if you share ecto during this time or whatever... I mean, look at Box Lunch!

So Danny's little ghost babies need a little extra, because their Mama is part human. This Wayne Enterprises contest helped him find a way to stabilize his babies with Real World materials AND fulfill the Protect obsession they inherited from Danny.

The animal designs for the Fenbots? Those are the bodies his babies wanted. The mass produced filters? Blob ghosts really like their job. (Also, some fics say blob ghosts are gossips. This and Technus, is the communication system for the Fenbots.)

Ghosts hear about what Danny is doing for his babies and go, huh. Can you help with mine?

Danny quickly becomes a ghost doctor specializing in identifying obsessions. Some Fenbots have multiple Littles to balance Obsessions. Some merge together and work better for it. This also happens, naturally and willingly, when people start pack bonding them.

The little ones are flexible for a while and Danny's are at least a little more present in a way others aren't. So they more easily bond back and have favorites.

So that Sea Dragon that didn't make it? Was Danny's baby. Maybe bonded with one of Princess Dora's. And while the Core Protection System worked, that body is gone. So of course he held a funeral. (And if that town got a ghost dragon that spent as much time checking in on the kids and turtles it protected as swimming in the sea like it used to, well. No one's complaining.) (If there's sometimes an extra dragon, no one says anything. Just local legends to tell tourists.) (The Atlantians know and invite it down to visit sometimes.)

Maybe Danny has babies like normal ghosts. Maybe giving his blood/ectoplasm to the machines is enough. And the more they are acknowledged and loved by people, the more they grow.

There's an up-and-coming Tech Giant, called Fenton Works, and Batman is determined to prove that the company is a front for a villain.

Danny, after his parents turned from Ghost hunting to being the first official Ghost Anthropologists, decided to repurpose some of their weapons.

And, well, there was a contest being run by Wayne Enterprises; whoever can design a robot that will help the environment got prize money and a grant.

Danny, in all his mechanical engineering prowess, was bored. So he designed a thing. Repurposed the Fenton Guns into a cute robotic tortoise that would clean the beach.

It spiraled from there, and now Fenton Works is the leading name in green technology that's cleaning up the Earth bit by bit. Sea Dragon robots that clean oil and trash from the ocean; beach tortoises that clean the sand and beach and deposit their hoard of trash into designated receptacles that Danny uses as material to make more robots; Cryptid "stalker" robots with long legs that delicately patrol forests to perform "fuel management" and clear out the underbrush to help manage wildfires; moving gargoyle robots that sit on top of skyscrapers to help clean the air with huge sail-like wings, etc.

Basically, Danny pulls a Doctor Elisabet Sobeck, but with less world ending and more actually helping. (Not that the world ending was Elisabet's fault, of course, but different franchise)

And due to the number of times aliens try to attack and rogues send their own robots to attack people, naturally Danny installed self-defense protocols, along with one single golden rule written into the very OS of every single robot; Save Humans Whatever the Cost.

Problem is, Batman has never seen robots like this not be used for evil purposes, and he knows that their power source (a closely guarded Fenton Works secret) is some sort of liquid that glows green.

He really only knows of one liquid that glows green.

So he's determined to find everything he can about Fenton Works, because there's no way that Daniel Fenton isn't actually a villain in the making.

Danny's just thrilled for the chance to work with Wayne Enterprises.