Either Sonic Is A God Or Sonic Can Kill God And I

There are a few more run-ins with Batman after this. Sporadic and random, but they happen. Until eventually--Danny guesses that Batman figured out he had a pattern--Batman starts showing up often to this spot Danny's carved out for his own. Danny allows him. He knows he's encroaching on Bat's territory, and he views it as them existing in parallel to each other.

Danny's first proper conversation with Batman--the first one that lasts longer than a minute and consists more of short, awkward answers from Danny and curt responses from Batman--is when Danny, city-watching and lost in thought, tells him that he thinks Gotham is pretty.

Batman turns and looks at him, and goes: "...You do?"

Danny stumbles through an explanation after that, and somehow the conversation keeps going. And keeps going. And keeps going.

They don't always talk, and Batman doesn't always stick around for long, but Danny likes the little bouts of camaraderie they have. It reminds him of passing some of his classmates in the hallway, and they nod in greeting at each other. Sometimes, Batman lands on the roof, and then disappears a few seconds later. Danny thinks he might be checking on him.

Something interesting starts happening sometime after this. Usually, if Danny is flying to Gotham after a ghost fight, his injuries heal on the way there. Something about the rate he's burning ectoplasm that exacerbates his healing. Like cauterizing a wound.

That's been faltering lately. Danny doesn't know what's wrong. It started with a twinge in his shoulder that should've disappeared after a fight with Skulker, but lingered all the way to Gotham and up until Danny had to fly back to Amity. When he got back to his bedroom, it healed.

In any case, he didn't pay it too much to mind -- his little bumps and bruises were easy enough to hide from Batman. And they healed before he got home.

And then he shows up on their shared rooftop with a shiner that refused to heal, even when Danny tries to force it, nothing changes. It only forcibly reminds Danny that he doesn't have as much finesse over his powers as he wished he did.

He's frustrated and hurt, and on top of that, his ribs smart from a hit he took point blank. Deep breaths hurt. He pushes himself against the HVAC that's not up to code, throws up his hood, and curls into a ball.

This isn't something he can hide from Batman. A fleeting thought hits him to just leave so he doesn't have to explain himself if the man decides to stick around.

He doesn't.

And Batman, much to Danny's brief, insincere consternation, sticks around. He notices immediately that something is wrong. Danny keeps his head buried in his knees and tries to deflect.

It doesn't work.

Normally, Danny is very good at getting people to get off his back. Just be a bit prickly, a bit snappish, throw in some sarcasm, and they back off with a scoff, or they decide to scold him for that instead of pursuing their original reason for bothering him.

Unfortunately--Danny should've seen this coming, considering Batman's occupation--Batman sees right through him. He sticks around, verbally prodding at him, and when Danny snaps at him, he falls silent and just. waits. And perches patiently from a distance away. Which stings in a cathartic way.

Danny's resolve crumbles in minutes. Eventually, he silently turns his head and rests his cheek on his knee. He doesn't say anything, just hopes that maybe the light pollution in the city is bright enough to show off the bruise circling around his eye. Or it isn't bright enough, and hides it.

Batman is quiet for a beat. Then calmly and flatly asks who hit him. Danny stays stubbornly silent, and refuses to meet his eyes. When it becomes apparent he won't respond, Batman stares, and then reaches for a pocket on his utility belt.

He pulls out an icepack, and holds it out to Danny.

Danny is flabbergasted.

And then feels immediately fragile for reasons he can't articulate or understand.

Quietly, he takes it, and mutters "thank you". It's the kindest thing he's said all night.

Batman nods, and when he has to leave, it's with great reluctance.

This keeps happening. Danny shows up occasionally injured, mostly bruised and scratched up, thankfully. Batman appears, and notices, and quietly prods. Danny sometimes throws out an excuse--he fell, he tripped, he made some other clumsy mistake--and Batman doesn't believe him, but he doesn't pry. He quietly hands off to him something that could help. A bandaid or an icepack. Or just his quiet company.

The bruises increase; Batman gets just a little bit tenser each time. And then it plateaus.

And then it comes to a head after a nasty, ugly fight with Plasmius that included his favorite physical pastime: strangulation. Danny books it to Gotham the moment he thinks the coast is clear, and is furious upon landing to find that the bruising refuses to heal.

He's not fast enough to leave before Batman shows up, seemingly having pinpointed the time of Danny's arrivals by now. He whirls around on his foot when he hears him landing, and isn't fast enough to slam his hand over his throat and duck before Batman sees it.

And Batman sees it.

And Batman is very calm, and very furious when he says; "Who did that?"

Danny, despite his flawless deflections all the other times, falters and panics. Caught off guard by his arrival and already running on adrenaline, he stammers out an inconsistent slurry of excuses.

"Nobody. Nobody! It was nobody-- just my, just my uncle--" Danny's eye twitches in panic, "Just- nobody. Nobody important. Nobody did anything."

It's too late to take back anything.

"Your uncle?"

Danny refuses eye contact, staring off over the edge of the roof widely, "No! No-- nobody. Nothing. Nothing happened." His ruined voice says otherwise.

"Is he the one that's been hurting you?" Batman sounds very resolute as he says this.

"No!" Danny's expression spasms, "No. No! It's. Nothing. He hasn't. I'm fine."

Danny isn't quite sure how he managed to get out of that conversation-- it ends up being a total blur--but he does know that he gets out of it with his secret identity intact.

He doesn't return back to Gotham for almost a month; he regrets it every time he misses the days he goes and visits. The passing time presses down on him. He feels increasingly flighty and on edge; his temper shorter.

When he returns, Batman is waiting for him already. He doesn't say anything, and for a -- disappointing? -- moment, Danny thinks they're just not going to acknowledge Danny's freakout the last time he was there.

But.

Batman is waiting for him.

And with a burner phone for him.

There's only one number on it: his own.

He doesn't need to say anything for Danny to catch his meaning, or what his intentions are.

Danny stares at it dumbly for who knows how long, his eyes stinging suspiciously, before he looks up at Batman. He's gawking.

The first thing out of his mouth: "Are you sure?" it's croaky.

Batman grunts affirmatively at him. Holds it out closer to him: "For emergencies."

"You don't have to do this." Danny says, but he's reaching out for the phone anyways, snatching it out of Batman's hands, and cradling it preciously to himself. He's so cognizant of his hand and the weight of the phone against it.

Batman says nothing; it means everything to Danny.

"And you're sure?" He repeats, and sniffs conspicuously. He hates how fragile his voice sounds. He knows how monumental this is, not just to Danny, but to Batman as well. That solidarity in heroism coming back to bite him as Danny knows, intimately, how important it is to allow someone access to you personally. "You-- you're sure? You're sure." He sounds like a broken record.

Batman nods curtly.

Danny's vision wobbles. His next words come out in a broken, horrifically fragile, barely-there whisper: "What if- what if I just, just want to talk? Uh-- text. N' it's not an emergency."

Batman thinks for a moment. "…You can do that," he says after a beat, "Call if its an emergency."

"Really?" Danny doesn't know why it hurts so much to say that. He sounds pathetically squeaky.

"Yes."

Batman is a man of few words; Danny quite likes that about him. He's surprised by it himself.

The dam ends up breaking; Danny's tears spill over and his shoulders convulse. When he cries, it's entirely silent, he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. He makes short, choked-off breathing sounds, and begins to curl into himself. He's not sure why he's reacting this way; it's just a phone.

He still ends up tilting in towards Batman, and collapsing into him. Batman catches him, and sinks them both to the ground, and lets Danny smear tears into the armor plating of his suit.

He doesn't know when they started showing up, but he bets it was when Vlad started visiting more often under the guise of "reconnecting" with Dad.

Danny only realized they were there nearly two months after the fact.

He tries not to think about it too hard, otherwise he gets incurably nauseous.

(There's always no less than three in his room when he goes looking. He's never found one in Jazz's. He doesn't know if he should feel relieved or not; regardless, he wants to peel his own skin off.)

He doesn't find any from when he last checked (this afternoon after school). Only then does he pull his burner out-- and still he hunches around it, trying to keep it out of sight, and marvels.

It's inconspicuously black and simple.

Danny spends thirty minutes messing with the ringtone, then spends another thirty coming up with a new contact name for Batman that isn't his hero moniker. It's one of those rare moments of awareness he has, remembering that cause has an effect.

(He has a premonition over texting Batman--because Batman said he could, and Danny might take him up on that--and someone; Dash, his friends, Jazz, his parents, Mr. Lancer--anybody--looking over his shoulder, seeing the contact name, and questioning him.)

He ends up going with 'Buzz' after his favorite astronaut.

(He can't explain why he's texting someone over burner rather than his regular phone, but at least he won't have to explain why the name is Batman.)

He considers sending a message. Something to check and see if the number Batman gave him was actually his--a part of him thinks he's been punk'd--or (more irrationally) see if the connection would still hold even this far from Gotham. Or, perhaps, to just tell Batman he made it home safe.

All options sound terribly unappealing, Danny's lingering mortification over his reaction to getting said phone clinging to him like a leech. He shuts the ideas down.

Batman wouldn't punk him, he's not like that. Flip phones don't need wifi, they need cellular connection. Amity Park has plenty and so does Gotham. The connection is just fine. Finally; Batman is on patrol (something Danny should be doing; there might be a ghost that snuck through the portal despite him checking before he left that it was off) he's too busy for Danny to be bothering him right now with unimportant updates.

With that being said; Danny shuts the phone with a satisfying clack and collapses into bed.

(He's back up again about two hours later, his ghost sense going off like a bucket of ice water being dumped on his head. He hates it when that happens, his nerves are always immediately shot.)

His first message is the following morning. Danny agonizes over it for ages in his room, stuck between needing to leave for school before he's late, and needing to sate his own anxiety over his phone.

The end result, as normal, is Danny approaching it the same way he approaches every uncomfortable thing: jokingly.

>> "hey houston do you copy?"

(It takes him five minutes to hit send. He plans on shoving his phone into his pocket and ignoring it immediately after.)

It takes thirty seconds for Batman to respond.

>> "Yes."

Danny startles. And then his surprise alights into glee, like a spark against gunpowder, that he promptly tries to keep contained. It's not normal to be this happy about a reply. It's not a big deal. The feeling burns in the back of his throat; Danny presses his lips together in order to stifle the smile.

He leaves his room and starts heading downstairs.

>> "just checking to see if the phone works" >> "didn't expect you to respond so fast" >> "thought you'd be sleeping or smth. arent bats nocturnal?"

>> "Yes." >> "I am not."

Batman is a terrible texter. Danny had no expectations of how he'd text, and yet it's exactly what he thought it'd be.

He's irrationally delighted by it.

That smile he's been trying to hide slips out and spreads across his face. It's like Danny can hear him talking, it's a bit dizzying how excited that makes him.

It's a bit unreal that he's actually texting Batman.

How crazy is that?

He hurries down the stairs, grinning from ear to ear.

>> "cool cool"

And runs into his parents in the kitchen.

The smile immediately fizzles out, the lighthearted, fluffy feeling in his chest dropping like a stone in a pond. Danny closes his phone before he can even think about it, curling his hand inwards to his chest the same way he does when he's trying to hide the screen of his other phone. The same one that's in his back pocket and hasn't been touched since his alarm went off.

"Where did you go last night?" Mom asks, mouth curled into a deep frown. "You left your phone in your room again."

Dread replaces the happy lump in his throat, and his lungs turn hollow and cold.

(He started leaving his phone at home sometime after his trips to Gotham became commonplace. Both to avoid uncomfortable questions if his parents checked his location, and then because it felt nice to be untraceable.)

Feeling like one of those little lumps of plastic that shrivel under high heat, Danny's shoulders hunch up.

Crap.

He averts his eyes and seals his mouth shut.

"Daniel James." Dad goes, his voice outside of its usual loud bluster. Danny inwardly slumps. "We thought you stopped doing this."

There are a few more run-ins with Batman after this. Sporadic and random, but they happen. Until eventually--Danny guesses that Batman figured out he had a pattern--Batman starts showing up often to this spot Danny's carved out for his own. Danny allows him. He knows he's encroaching on Bat's territory, and he views it as them existing in parallel to each other.

Danny's first proper conversation with Batman--the first one that lasts longer than a minute and consists more of short, awkward answers from Danny and curt responses from Batman--is when Danny, city-watching and lost in thought, tells him that he thinks Gotham is pretty.

Batman turns and looks at him, and goes: "...You do?"

Danny stumbles through an explanation after that, and somehow the conversation keeps going. And keeps going. And keeps going.

They don't always talk, and Batman doesn't always stick around for long, but Danny likes the little bouts of camaraderie they have. It reminds him of passing some of his classmates in the hallway, and they nod in greeting at each other. Sometimes, Batman lands on the roof, and then disappears a few seconds later. Danny thinks he might be checking on him.

Something interesting starts happening sometime after this. Usually, if Danny is flying to Gotham after a ghost fight, his injuries heal on the way there. Something about the rate he's burning ectoplasm that exacerbates his healing. Like cauterizing a wound.

That's been faltering lately. Danny doesn't know what's wrong. It started with a twinge in his shoulder that should've disappeared after a fight with Skulker, but lingered all the way to Gotham and up until Danny had to fly back to Amity. When he got back to his bedroom, it healed.

In any case, he didn't pay it too much to mind -- his little bumps and bruises were easy enough to hide from Batman. And they healed before he got home.

And then he shows up on their shared rooftop with a shiner that refused to heal, even when Danny tries to force it, nothing changes. It only forcibly reminds Danny that he doesn't have as much finesse over his powers as he wished he did.

He's frustrated and hurt, and on top of that, his ribs smart from a hit he took point blank. Deep breaths hurt. He pushes himself against the HVAC that's not up to code, throws up his hood, and curls into a ball.

This isn't something he can hide from Batman. A fleeting thought hits him to just leave so he doesn't have to explain himself if the man decides to stick around.

He doesn't.

And Batman, much to Danny's brief, insincere consternation, sticks around. He notices immediately that something is wrong. Danny keeps his head buried in his knees and tries to deflect.

It doesn't work.

Normally, Danny is very good at getting people to get off his back. Just be a bit prickly, a bit snappish, throw in some sarcasm, and they back off with a scoff, or they decide to scold him for that instead of pursuing their original reason for bothering him.

Unfortunately--Danny should've seen this coming, considering Batman's occupation--Batman sees right through him. He sticks around, verbally prodding at him, and when Danny snaps at him, he falls silent and just. waits. And perches patiently from a distance away. Which stings in a cathartic way.

Danny's resolve crumbles in minutes. Eventually, he silently turns his head and rests his cheek on his knee. He doesn't say anything, just hopes that maybe the light pollution in the city is bright enough to show off the bruise circling around his eye. Or it isn't bright enough, and hides it.

Batman is quiet for a beat. Then calmly and flatly asks who hit him. Danny stays stubbornly silent, and refuses to meet his eyes. When it becomes apparent he won't respond, Batman stares, and then reaches for a pocket on his utility belt.

He pulls out an icepack, and holds it out to Danny.

Danny is flabbergasted.

And then feels immediately fragile for reasons he can't articulate or understand.

Quietly, he takes it, and mutters "thank you". It's the kindest thing he's said all night.

Batman nods, and when he has to leave, it's with great reluctance.

This keeps happening. Danny shows up occasionally injured, mostly bruised and scratched up, thankfully. Batman appears, and notices, and quietly prods. Danny sometimes throws out an excuse--he fell, he tripped, he made some other clumsy mistake--and Batman doesn't believe him, but he doesn't pry. He quietly hands off to him something that could help. A bandaid or an icepack. Or just his quiet company.

The bruises increase; Batman gets just a little bit tenser each time. And then it plateaus.

And then it comes to a head after a nasty, ugly fight with Plasmius that included his favorite physical pastime: strangulation. Danny books it to Gotham the moment he thinks the coast is clear, and is furious upon landing to find that the bruising refuses to heal.

He's not fast enough to leave before Batman shows up, seemingly having pinpointed the time of Danny's arrivals by now. He whirls around on his foot when he hears him landing, and isn't fast enough to slam his hand over his throat and duck before Batman sees it.

And Batman sees it.

And Batman is very calm, and very furious when he says; "Who did that?"

Danny, despite his flawless deflections all the other times, falters and panics. Caught off guard by his arrival and already running on adrenaline, he stammers out an inconsistent slurry of excuses.

"Nobody. Nobody! It was nobody-- just my, just my uncle--" Danny's eye twitches in panic, "Just- nobody. Nobody important. Nobody did anything."

It's too late to take back anything.

"Your uncle?"

Danny refuses eye contact, staring off over the edge of the roof widely, "No! No-- nobody. Nothing. Nothing happened." His ruined voice says otherwise.

"Is he the one that's been hurting you?" Batman sounds very resolute as he says this.

"No!" Danny's expression spasms, "No. No! It's. Nothing. He hasn't. I'm fine."

Danny isn't quite sure how he managed to get out of that conversation-- it ends up being a total blur--but he does know that he gets out of it with his secret identity intact.

He doesn't return back to Gotham for almost a month; he regrets it every time he misses the days he goes and visits. The passing time presses down on him. He feels increasingly flighty and on edge; his temper shorter.

When he returns, Batman is waiting for him already. He doesn't say anything, and for a -- disappointing? -- moment, Danny thinks they're just not going to acknowledge Danny's freakout the last time he was there.

But.

Batman is waiting for him.

And with a burner phone for him.

There's only one number on it: his own.

He doesn't need to say anything for Danny to catch his meaning, or what his intentions are.

Danny stares at it dumbly for who knows how long, his eyes stinging suspiciously, before he looks up at Batman. He's gawking.

The first thing out of his mouth: "Are you sure?" it's croaky.

Batman grunts affirmatively at him. Holds it out closer to him: "For emergencies."

"You don't have to do this." Danny says, but he's reaching out for the phone anyways, snatching it out of Batman's hands, and cradling it preciously to himself. He's so cognizant of his hand and the weight of the phone against it.

Batman says nothing; it means everything to Danny.

"And you're sure?" He repeats, and sniffs conspicuously. He hates how fragile his voice sounds. He knows how monumental this is, not just to Danny, but to Batman as well. That solidarity in heroism coming back to bite him as Danny knows, intimately, how important it is to allow someone access to you personally. "You-- you're sure? You're sure." He sounds like a broken record.

Batman nods curtly.

Danny's vision wobbles. His next words come out in a broken, horrifically fragile, barely-there whisper: "What if- what if I just, just want to talk? Uh-- text. N' it's not an emergency."

Batman thinks for a moment. "…You can do that," he says after a beat, "Call if its an emergency."

"Really?" Danny doesn't know why it hurts so much to say that. He sounds pathetically squeaky.

"Yes."

Batman is a man of few words; Danny quite likes that about him. He's surprised by it himself.

The dam ends up breaking; Danny's tears spill over and his shoulders convulse. When he cries, it's entirely silent, he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. He makes short, choked-off breathing sounds, and begins to curl into himself. He's not sure why he's reacting this way; it's just a phone.

He still ends up tilting in towards Batman, and collapsing into him. Batman catches him, and sinks them both to the ground, and lets Danny smear tears into the armor plating of his suit.

Yet still they had been more willing to dismiss his readings, but when Jazz accidentally set it off, they were quick to assume she was a ghost. At the time, Danny had concluded that Jazz's personality made her stand out from the family, which, in their minds, made it more believable that she was not entirely human.

He never questions it too much, happy to side-step their suspicion with flimsy excuses. Danny will admit that he also believed his parents were not the brightest crayons in the crayon box, though he does that quietly and only to his most trusted of friends.

Turns out, it was because his parents already took into consideration that Danny wasn't entirely human to begin with. When Danny turned fifteen, his parents came into his room, one late Friday night, and sat him down to drop a bomb on him.

"I'm adopted?" Danny repeats, dazed, as his mother holds his hand. His dad rubs his shoulder, offering comfort. He never would have thought for one minute that he wasn't their son by blood. Jack and Maddie Fenton never treated him any different form Jazz, never even implied it.

"In a way." Maddie winces.

"What do you mean?"

"Maddie wasn't always convinced of ghosts," Jack admits. He offers his wife a small smile when she bashfully tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Danny knows she only does that when she feels embarrassed about being wrong. "Before meeting me, she had been studying for medical engineering, and switched over to my field after joining Vlad and me in a field project."

"In all honesty, I only agreed to go to the field research because I had a crush on Jack and just wanted to spend time with him. I didn't actually think his research had any merit." Maddie admits, and suddenly Danny realizes why everyone on her side of the family grumbles about Jack ruining her future.

Honestly, he would have thought the same if that had happened to his sister or daughter, even though Danny spent nearly every family reunion fighting to defend his father's honor.

"We went to an area that was said to have a strong connection with the afterlife. It was the location of an old cult that got busted and broken apart by the FBI." Maddie continued blissfully unaware of her son's thoughts. "As you know, ghosts heavily overlapped with the occult. When we got there, I found the secret shrine by accident while leaning against a wall. Inside, Jack claimed he knew what the runes surrounding the shrine meant and did since his family was witch hunters, and he accidentally started the ritual when he stepped on them to get a closer view."

"What was the ritual?"

Jack sighs. "It was meant to offer a sacrifice. I think the cultist did it backwards, so instead of us offering a sacrifice, it gave us a sacrifice. It took the blood from a small cut I had on a rock and...you formed."

Danny stares, waiting for them to repeat themselves. They stare back for a moment, then slowly he asks. "I'm younger than Jazz, though? How could I have formed before she was born?"

Maddie makes a small noise. "You formed into a newborn baby, literally grew from the drop of blood, just floating in the air, then vanished into a green portal not even ten seconds later. It all happened so fast, I wasn't even sure it was real. Thankfully, we had a recording of the event on our surveillance cameras, which were strapped to our heads. Once we realized that we had really created a life from the ritual, we attempted to rebuild the portal to get you back. Our first prototype caused Vlad's accident, and we gave up on it until a few years later. You popped out again, and this time we kept you."

"So....I'm not human?"

"Based on all the tests we had done, you are. We even checked for a meta-gene, but... nothing. Until recently, we never brought it up because we thought you were our little miracle....until SuperBoy announced that some Kryptonians don't develop full powers until puberty, and we realized that you....have been off since you turned fourteen. We realized you finally hit puberty."

"Well, I wouldn't say finally, but okay...."

Jack sighs, taking a seat on Danny's other side. His large frame nearly crushed Danny, but oddly, it was a comfort, and he found himself leaning into his father's side. "Danny, despite you froming form my blood, you don't have my DNA in you. Or Maddie's or Vladdie's. You're....a human of an unknown donor- we suspected the cultests but the police wouldn't let us get samples from them. That was our theory for the longest time, but son, we know you've been finding changes in your body that aren't exactly human."

Danny bit his tongue, wishing that he was brave enough to mention Phantom. Instead, he shrugs, "I haven't felt that different."

"Nothing at all?" Maddie probs "You know you can tell us. We love you anyway."

"Well, sometimes I-" Dannt starts feeling both of the adults leaning closer, and for a minute, he thinks he might actually do it, but at the last second, he chickens out and blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind: "Sometimes I know things are going to happen before they happen."

"Like what, honey?"

"Natural disasters. Bad luck. Attacks," Danny lists, trying to think of how his ghost adversaries fit into modern life. Technically, they weren't lies, so his parents had no reason to call him out on it. "I see them in my dreams."

"You can see the future." Jack mutters, "That actually does make sense. The shrine was meant to have one of the members become an oracle, trading thier eye sight for it."

Huh. How convenient, thank you, crazy mountain cult people. Danny thinks, nodding his head like he knew Jack would say that.

"If you develop any more powers or any new changes, you can tell us. Okay, honey?" Maddie mutters, pulling him into a hug.

"Okay."

And that was that. His parents gave him more reassurances that they loved him no matter what; his mother smoothed his face with kisses, and his father crushed his bones with a bear hug. But eventually they brought him his favorite takeout and left him alone in his room to play more video games.

Danny would have forgotten all about it, happy that his secret ghost side remained as such, had he remembered to shut off his live stream when his parents came in. The thing is, Danny never had any views and was so used to it running in case Tucker had time to join that he never checked it.

Thus, he missed the moment a little boy from a certain farm clicked in to watch him play and overheard everything. He also missed the boy logging out to call a certain best friend in Gotham, whose father had a cave filled to the brim with means to track Danny down.

A couple of months passed, and his daily life remained mostly the same, but every once in a while, his parents would ask about any recent predictions.

Jazz was skeptical about his powers, even with her knowledge of Phantom, so to spite her, Danny made random things up that came true every two days after he announced them.

He found himself giggling at the luck that his random predictions were true, sure that at some point they would fail. The Fentons always got the latest predictions at the breakfast table, treating it the same way they would Danny, updating them on school or a new video game he bought.

None of them were aware of the many bugs placed around their home, recording audio from a certain group of Bat theme individuals who had installed them one day, when all the Fentons were away. And thus, what Danny considered small white lies made offhandedly, that group carefully recorded and investigated each one as if it were a warning to come.

They found that a majority of the predictions weren't just prewarning; they almost seemed to appear from thin air the moment Fenton spoke them. In fact, based on a certain bo staff wielder's calculations, it seemed like Fenton was pulling them from alternative universes, shifting the time in this one to create small rifts.

Convinced he was doing it on purpose, the youngest boy and his farmer best friend set out on a small mission to steal some DNA, getting close and "accidentally" spilling the boy's smoothie while playing catch in the local park.

Fenton had been very understanding when the two children apologized profusely, offering to buy him a replacement and to clean up the cup. They placed the said cup and straw in a ziplock bag, promising to throw it away later when they got closer to the trash bins. He also didn't seem to mind when the clumsy of the two got his bracelet stuck in Fenton's hair after attempting to offer him candy from his pocket, even though Fenton was sitting down on a blanket with his two friends.

After running numerous tests, the group was surprised to find that Fenton came back as a regular human. Deciding it wasn't possible, they reached out to their coworkers who had access to a database of multiple planets and their people, with a growing green law infurcers and an island connected to gods.

Shockingly, Fenton matched with the island instead of the multiple plants.

Fenton was a minor god, raised as a human who carelessly bent reality to his will.

This investigation concluded with Danny Fenton getting a target painted on his back by Earth's many protectors, casually watching him from afar. This also meant that, at one point, a leak occurred when Wes Weasley noticed Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman casually having a burger at Nasty Burger, but no one believed him.

So he did what any other teenager does.

He went online to vent. His post was picked up by a certain cult survivor who thought that this was the sign to come back after nearly twenty years of silence, and he went around rebuilding the following that once worked to have their god get a physical form.

Thus, by the time Danny Fenton is sixteen, he is interrupted during a regular shopping trip by a large group of people wearing white and black robes appearing out of nowhere and bowing before him, praising his name. Before he has time to even think beyond assuming this was a weird prank, he is thrown into a van and taken away to a mansion built in his honor.

Danny is freaking out about it until Batman, Red Robin, and Nightwing are able to infiltrate the mansion that same night and get him out. They are oddly respectful and somewhat unsure of how to speak to him, which is why Danny realizes they honestly believe him to be a minor god.

This is the moment he finds out that for the past year, the Justice League assumed he was a minor god, and that all his little white lies were affecting reality. No matter how many times he tried to correct this error, no one really believed him, because they all assumed he was just pretending to be human.

Or, in Wonder Woman's case, assumed he was a new god and was just getting his footing in his domain.

They gave him offerings. Ask for his prayers. Requested that he avoid blood sacrifices or ask for any pain from humans. Treated his whims like Danny was a coworker with a different religion.