Curate, connect, and discover
“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.
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.