Ailith Night

Which is not to say he doesn’t know Danny’s a bit of a sass meister, period. Just that his usual exposure to Danny’s range of snark is from a lighthearted place. Usually when he’s giving Bruce or Alfred a hard time, but doesn’t actually mean anything out of it. Which his tone and language usually reflect.

It doesn’t consciously occur to him that his kid could use his smart-mouth for violence until it’s already happening and the words are out in the air.

Danny (to someone else): wow. i thought you’d be jailbirding it up with your tax fraud friend. Doesn’t your type travel in herds?

Bruce (somewhere nearby): *record_scratch.wav*

Bruce: hold on—

The perfectionism of artists has them researching stuff in a way that only scientists can compare. Some artists become experts in biology or anatomy. Other special interests have them going down rabbit holes to make them better at their art.

Disney animators said "we are perfecting the code for this snow if it kills us" and researched and invented code until it acted like real snow in Frozen and snow scientists were like hey. Did we just fucking solve the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And the animators answered no. We made snow. YOU applied the knowledge and did the experiments to solve what could have happened at Dyatlov Pass.

A deep, intense, reverent love for the world — or at least some aspect of it.

A love for the way snow falls and birds call and water flows and trees grow and the sun shines and words rhyme and the universe spins and people live.

The love of an artist for their subject is just the same as a researcher's for theirs.

They say to be loved is to be known.

Have you ever been in a harried rush trying to get somewhere on time and you end up forgetting something important or putting something on wrong/backwards?

Especially with cloning. Like, not just any old rogue has the resources and/or expertise to pull that off. That's, like, major supervillain type plot. So it begs the question, what's an A tier supervillain doing fighting a dead prepubescent teenager in Small Town, Midwest, USA?

Like sever that shit to the last tendon,

And there’s a 60-70% chance that instead of being furious, like any other reasonable supervillain or adversary would be,

Vlad would, instead, just coo. At Danny. Utterly pleased with himself, and not dissimilar to the way a parent croons at their baby pointing at something. Spit out some shit like, "Aw, well done, my dear." while examining his hand.

And then resume the fight.

Jason is just chilling in a safe house at home when an ominous swirling green portal opens in the middle of his living room and several beings with giant eyeballs for heads pull a trussed up teen through.

Freaky eyeball: "Congratulations, revenant, you have been chosen to be the abom- I mean... the halfa's new guardian."

Jason: the fuck did he just call this kid?!

The eyeballs then promptly leave, the teen still trussed up in the middle of his living room. Jason unties the kid and sets about interrogating the kid because wtf. Jason finds out:

Kid's name is Danny

He's 15

He has no family or home to return to

He is a half ghost and has all the ghost powers that come with that.

Jason had an older brother once, his name was Danny, he was 15 when he died. Jason looks at Danny: black hair, blue eyes, simmering rage, gaunt corpse-like features. Yeah, this could work.

"Roy! I need a favor. I need you to hire someone to dig up my brother's coffin and transport it out of Gotham and, this is important, it needs to be super obvious until it's out of Gotham. Then Batman needs to lose all trace. Got it? Good. Okay kid, you need to turn invisible and stay invisible while I go steal a plane."

Cut to Batfam PoV, where Jason suddenly leaves town with no explanation, then the next day his older brother's corpse gets stolen ("Jason had an older brother?!") which Bruce fears is a sign their IDs have been compromised. They try to figure out what's going on but the corpse trail goes cold outside Gotham and Jason isn't answering any calls. He's all over Eurasia, fighting all kinds of people, even ending up in a few LoA bases. He finally stops at Nanda Parbat (to intro Danny to the remnants of the All Caste, but the batfam doesn't know that) before stealing yet another plane and heading back to Gotham.

For narrative purposes, assuming the end goal of this story would be for the rest of the Bats to learn the truth, there needs to be 'complications.' Cracks in the story that the Bats can question. Clues.

And even if each crack on it's own has an explanation, just having a lot of them pile up over time will steadily weaken the cover story. Until a shift in perspective allows all those ill fitting pieces to snap into place, the lies fall away, and the big picture resolve into truth.