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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.

The first crack is actually the inciting incident. Who dug up Danny Todd's coffin? Jason comes back with someone he claims is Danny and never explains it. If the Bats were able to track Jason's rampage around Eurasia there wouldn't seem to be anything connecting the various places and people he trashed. Whoever is the current Head of the Demon called up Bruce upset one of his kids invaded a couple of their bases (Bruce reminds them he has no control of Jason and hasn't since they threw him in a Pit).

Figure out everything all the lies and full of shit and they actually get a machine that works in Danny’s blood they find out that Danny is in fact, Danny Todd 

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.

The first crack is actually the inciting incident. Who dug up Danny Todd's coffin? Jason comes back with someone he claims is Danny and never explains it. If the Bats were able to track Jason's rampage around Eurasia there wouldn't seem to be anything connecting the various places and people he trashed. Whoever is the current Head of the Demon called up Bruce upset one of his kids invaded a couple of their bases (Bruce reminds them he has no control of Jason and hasn't since they threw him in a Pit).

Figure out everything all the lies and full of shit and they actually get a machine that works in Danny’s blood they find out that Danny is in fact, Danny Todd 

(Disclaimer: even if looking at things this way, "natural" does not mean either good or evil. Naturalness/unnaturalness is morally neutral and irrelevant. Eco-friendliness and global warming mitigation and habitat preservation and recycling and renewable resources and sustainability and etc etc remain very important, obviously.) ANYWAY what if actually our ancestors invented clothes when they still had fur, and they just wanted to move to colder places and/or make like decorator crabs? That would be funny. I don't know if we have actual scientific evidence of whether clothes were invented before or after the (partial or complete) loss of fur.

.... This made me curious and I did a cursory search and the first thing I found was: https://www.livescience.com/animals/land-mammals/chimps-develop-fashion-trend-by-shoving-grass-in-their-ears-and-in-their-butts (I don't know how much ublock is protecting me from that site but it might be a lot idk.) And the actual paper here: https://brill.com/view/journals/beh/162/6-8/article-p459_2.xml

"In addition to these material cultures, there has been growing interest in social traditions among animals, which may not serve an obvious instrumental purpose but nonetheless seem conducive to social cohesion. For instance, handclasp grooming in chimpanzees and bonobos (Pan paniscus) involves pairs of individuals clasping each other’s hands above their heads while grooming, a behaviour that varies between groups and appears to strengthen social bonds (McGrew et al., 2001; Nakamura, 2002; Fruth et al., 2006; van Leeuwen, 2021). Similarly, capuchin monkeys (Cebus spp.) engage in social games that involve complex interactions and play behaviours, fostering social relationships and group cohesion (Perry et al., 2003). Social games in capuchins, such as finger-in-mouth or object-passing, are group-specific, socially learned, and stable over time, suggesting they function as affiliative traditions that help reinforce social bonds (Perry et al., 2003; Perry, 2011). Furthermore, in species like humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), distinct songs are passed down and modified over time within populations, possibly serving as a form of social identity and communication (Fournet et al., 2018; Zandberg et al., 2021). In other cetaceans, non-instrumental behavioural traditions have been reported, like “tail walking” in bottlenose dolphins (Bossley et al., 2018) and, albeit less well-documented, orcas wearing dead salmon on their heads (Pare & LiveScience, 2024). This diversity in social customs highlights the importance of non-instrumental culture in the lives of animals, as these behaviours may facilitate group identity and social integration (Garland & McGregor, 2020; Goldsborough et al., 2021). . . . "In this study, we document two non-instrumental behaviours in chimpanzees, of which one is a newly emerged expression of an earlier documented behaviour. In 2010, in a Zambian sanctuary, a female chimpanzee named Julie was observed to repeatedly insert grass into her ear — an idiosyncratic behaviour with no apparent adaptive function. This unusual act, later adopted by seven other group members including her son, was documented as a striking example of social learning and cultural transmission in non-human primates (van Leeuwen et al., 2014). The grass-in-ear behaviour persisted even after Julie’s death, suggesting it had become a cultural tradition (i.e., besides being socially learned and group-specific, also durable and diffusing to new generations; Perry & Manson, 2003; Perry, 2011). Researchers confirmed its cultural basis by noting that it appeared in only one of four observed groups, despite all sharing similar ecological conditions. Unlike most chimpanzee traditions that involve tool use or foraging (e.g., Whiten et al., 1999; Boesch, 2013), the grass-in-ear behaviour more closely resembled human fashion trends, where the function may be less tangible than in the instrumental context of foraging. As such, the study, in conjunction with similar examples of non-instrumental traditions in other species, highlight animals’ capacity for social learning beyond practical needs, offering valuable insights into the evolutionary roots of the many forms and functions cultural diversity may beget."

―――――

In Danny's castle, somewhere in the Infinite Realms:

Sam: Can you repeat where you plan to take your date?

Fright Knight: to the island of dolls, a place full of terror and mystery, perfect for a mind as disturbed as Timothy's!

Tucker: Yeah... I don't think you should call your date “disturbed.”

Sam: I don't think you should take your date to the scariest place on Earth!

Danny: No, no, no, no, let take him. If Tim is as ecto-contaminated as I think he is, he'll love the place!

Fright Knight: MY KING HAS SPOKEN! I WILL TAKE TIMOTHY TO DOLL ISLAND!

Fright Knight disappears.

Sam: ... Well, that date is going to be a disaster.

Tucker: One question, is that island really haunted?

Danny: Ohhhhh, it's VERY haunted, trust me, you don't want to mess with the ghosts the there.

After the date with Tim.

Fright Knight enters the castle: THE FRIGHT KNIGHT HAS RETURNED TRIUMPHANT!

Sam: Holy shit, seriously?

Tucker: Maybe Tim YES IS disturbed...

Danny: Hehe, I told you so, congratulations Fright Knight!

―――――

Just say something~ Here’s a quick little tutorial on how I comment with GIFs.

<img src="paste the full url of the image here" width="the size you want the image to be, as a percentage of the image's original size">

So most of what you need to remember is just this:

<img src=" " width=" ">

"img" stands for image. "src" stands for source. So this is basically saying, "the image source equals this url, and the width of the image should be this", in HTML. Width is width, and in this case it's also size in general because Ao3 automatically scales the height based on the width, so you don't have to bother to specify the height. You can specify the width as a percentage (width="100%" for full-size, width="50%" for half size, width="10%" for teeny-tiny size, etc) or as a static number of pixels (width="400", width="580", or similar - if there's no unit written, it means pixels). I prefer percentage because it will scale based on the size of the viewport (the screen or window) each user views it with, instead of being the same number of pixels no matter what (so potentially too large on a phone screen or too tiny on a big desktop screen).

The < > are basically the frame for the HTML element, there to tell ao3 it's a chunk of HTML and not just plain text to be printed verbatim. This isn't quite how HTML elements are normally written (usually they would be framed between <> </> or < /> instead of just < > ), but we can keep it simple in this case because Ao3 applies some auto-formatting automatically. It puts the whole thing inside a paragraph <p> </p> element, and if you bothered to write a proper closing /> or </img> it auto-deletes it anyways. Anyway, using prev's example image, and choosing to set the image size to 50% of the original size, it'll look like this in the comment box:

<img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/d7fe78d5eaa0583006cb7719f65b2ce7/00d18f61900c4f4e-5a/s1280x1920/42e3a2745b5a530c21b710523205d2c679cec035.pnj" width=50%>

Tim is REALLY bad at taking care of himself or the house because he’s got CEO stuff and also vigilante stuff so Danny picks up what he can around the house.

He cooks meals.

He makes Tim lunch every day.

One day, Tim forgets his lunch

Danny marches into the Wayne Industries building, fresh out of a lab at Gotham U, holding an embarrassingly cute lunchbox.

He wants to shove his lunch box into a drawer, but the EMEA lead is chatting about the roll out of satellite internet to the region and Tim actually cares about that.

There's a ping from his personal phone. Then another.

Tim risks a look at Tam. She's grinning at him, her phone balanced on her cheek. Oh, she did not.

A third ping.

His phone vibrates from a call. Tim shoves it off his desk, the carpet absorbing the sounds.

The last 10 minutes of the call are agonizing. Tam's still staring at him, ignoring her own work to torture Tim. When they finally finish, Tim slams down his laptop to reduce distractions and looks at her.

"What?"

"A cute boy brought you lunch in a cute space bag and you ate all of it."

"Danny's a good cook."

"He implied you live together."

"We do."

Tam slams her hands on his desk. "Why haven't you told me you have a boyfriend you live with? I thought we were friends, Tim."

"Danny is not my boyfriend, and I have mentioned him. He's my roommate at Gotham U."

"Tim, roommates don't usually make each other lunch and hand delivery it."

"I've good food issues, he's got food issues. This works for both of us." On the floor, his phone vibrates again. "What did you do?"

"Sent a photo of the lunch bag and you eating to Dick."

Okay, could be worse.

"And the photo of Danny from the front desk. He still had his googles from lab around his next. He's perfect for you."

"We're not dating!"

"Yet," Tam calls, already leaving his office. She's texting something. It better not be to Dick.

Tim's phone rings for a third time. He scrambles to pick it up, but it's not Dick calling. It's Danny. He picks it up.

"Hello?"

"Hey! At the store. What do you want for dinner?"

"I'm being teased at work," Tim offers.

"Comfort food it is then. Pizza and beer."

Meal planning is one of those coupley things too, isn't it? And Danny knowing his comfort foods.

Tim looks through his open door, to where Tam is sitting at her desk, frantically texting.

Tim: my family has informed me that we are Dating and that I have to bring you to Sunday Breakfast.

Danny go with the flow: cool I’ll make fudge

Tim: this is the gang

Danny sees Chaos siblings: I can vibe with this.

Danny sees Bruce: BE GONE SATAN

Jazz, pissed, takes Danny to Mr. Lancer and asks who or what overshadowed him to give Danny, a bleeding heart for animals and dogs in particular, "Where the Red Fern Grows" as an extra credit assignment? Mr. Lancer is confused and horrified, he had meant to give a space themed fiction novel, and apologizes profusely, promising to give Danny the extra credit while also handing him the right book. Danny hesitates and looks up at Mr. Lancer with wide, red rimmed eyes, making Lancer promise he won't have to read about puppies dying again, and Mr. Lancer feels gut punched as he promises, so Danny takes the book.

Dan, talking to himself: this’ll teach that immortal loser what happens when you try to recruit me for his creepy assassin gang

Red Robin, activating comms: O? Ima need you to direct be to the nearest jeweler, I’m getting married

Oracle: I don’t get paid enough for this shit

Red Robin: you don’t get paid at all

Baby Danny Wayne AU

The Flash: uh, bats?

Batman: what?

Flash: what’s that?

Baby Danny: *sitting in Batman’s lap with a Batman onesie on with the fabric cowl pulled over his head and a pacifier the shape of a bat in his mouth*

Batman: this is Baby Bat,

Danny: *making a scary face* bah!

Batman: *nodding* very good, very terrifying.

Flash: …ok

~~~

Danny: *crying loudly while Superman is holding him*

Batman: *digging through a diaper bag* I know you’re hungry, baby. I’m getting you bottle now—

Danny: *suddenly staring at Superman’s chest and making grabby hands* uh! Uh!

Batman: …hon. Superman doesn’t…have that ability…

Danny: *still reaching* nom nom!

Superman: *superman.exe stopped working*

~~~

Wonder Woman: *holding Danny* this is my nephew, I will kill any who harm him

Danny: *staring starstruck at WW*

Wonder Woman: my tiny warrior

~~~

Danny: *staring at Green Lantern* icky

Batman: *nodding* good observation

Tim: What…?

Danny: yeah the GIW are trying to figure out how to get through it to get to the rest of the realms but it has been stumping them. Its kinda funny to watch actually.

Tim: who…?

Danny: the GIW? It’s actually A-sync but they’re a subdivision of Ghost Investigation Ward. It’s a government funded anti-ghost group. *clicks* Pests.

Tim: okay. Im gonna need you to back up ten steps, what?!

*proceeds to explain the realms*

Danny: yeah the realms is the glue between dimensions ya? The backrooms is where this semi-sentient mold lives. Its like the first level of a video game, the higher the level, the weirder it gets.

Tim: and what level are you from?

Danny: the boss level. *said casually*

Tim: *sus look to Danny.* hmm okay… How do I get back to my dimension?

Danny: thatll take a bit, gotta find the correct universe for your specific bat colony. Time dilation is a factor too. You’ll be here a while. *looks at him up and down* Ya you could pass. We’ll say you’re Dani’s older brother thats been traveling. That usually works around these parts.

Tim: and what parts is that?

Danny: Illinois. *opens door into the streets of Amity Park* For my town specifically, we get a lot of tourist as the most haunted town in america that new faces tend to blend in.

Tim: god damn fuckin’ mid west. *thick jersey accent*

Danny: Ahhh east coast. Been a while since we had any of those. They got their Salem, Maryland witch trials. They-

Tim: You mean the Massachusetts Salem trials?