DP Crossovers is life

Ever since her Possession by Undergrowth, and being claimed as his Student as well as her connection to the Green in general, means she has connection and can call upon help from the Green whenever, wherever.

And then Danny got captured by the GIW - and she got desperate. So much so, that she unintentionally called for backup, a multitude of universes away.

The Plants VS Zombies Universe ... and the Plants heard the call. They did not know what the call was, only that it was desperate - and they needed help. After all, the Plants can spare a few ... hundred ... soldiers to help them out.

Sam got the scare of her life when a massive portal appeared and a giant flying RV showed up with a bunch of Plants on the back. No one else could understand them, except Sam - and once she explained the situation ... needless to say, the Plants were furious.

Needless to say, breaking into the GIW Base was really easy once you had an army quite literally backing you up. They broke in, shot anyone and anything that tried to attack them back - and got outta there with Danny.t

But he was incredibly injured, and needed time to heal. Time they did not have, because the GIW were most certainly gonna attack back. And Sam, the Plants and everyone in Amity knew that. So, Sam gave the Plants the greenlight, to completely protect Amity Park, and to stop the GIW.

The Plants secured an entire perimeter around Amity Park ... and thus, a 2nd War was brewing ... Plants VS GIW.

The Plants knew what to do, they had experience. They broke into GIW Bases to wreck their things, in a Turf Takeover. Stole important Files and escaped Taco Bandits style. They took out as many Soldiers as they could in Team Vanquishes. They blew up important bases and technology like their matches of Gnome Bombs. And when they brought out their Tanks, the Plants brought out their Dinosaurs. And they planted new Garden and territory in the ususal Garden Ops.

All of this chaos and mayhem, and yet the GIW remained consistently annoying ... like Zombies. They keep coming out of the woodwork, and eventually? The Justice League took notice.

I mean, who wouldn't? They're getting reports of a bunch of Sentient, Walking, Plants are attacking a bunch of Government Bases, blowing things up, and stealing information.

When the Justice League arrived, the Plants immediately defended ... because well, they attacked back. No one could understand the Plants, and Amity Park was too enclosed and secure for anyone else to explain ... aside from the GIW's blatant lies.

The Plants were losing, so they called in extra backup ... the PVZ Heroes. And well ... NOW things are becoming more and more chaotic.

Batman: What?

The Marigolds, the Catapults, the various Mushrooms, Aquatic and even Sky Plants! Roses, Citrons, E.M.Peaches, Bloomerangs, Coconut Cannons, Cob Cannons, Dandelions, Weeds, and so many many more! Yes, that includes PVZ2 and PVZ-Fusion Plants.

first of all i gotta say that it's not actually canon that he's from Illinois. the show is just "generic American small city" for his hometown and the fandom took context cues from other parts of the show and decided "Fuck it Illinois makes sense" and just kept that.

But I guarantee you, nothing about the show makes sense when you look at it too closely so take everything with a grain of salt. Yes I'm looking at you, Timeline.

the teenager in question is also kind of a ghost, hence part of the reason why the other ghosts are picking fights with him. He arguably picks a bunch of the fights himself.

it's not just the entirety of the Ghost Zone that get put into the antagonist role in the show either. Danny's other antagonists include:

A literal billionaire (who is also a ghost) (and gets himself elected mayor)

his parents (literally ghost hunters. who also fight the ghosts.)

a circus ringmaster with mind control and reality bending artifacts

Classmates at school who bully Danny

the closest thing we get to an adult who is on Danny's side is Mr. Lancer, who also supports the school bullies

the ghost who impersonated a school counselor and was literally in the role of Danny's therapist for a bit that one episode

A U.S. government agency

a girl he dates was actually being controlled by a dragon ghost and didn't actually want to date him. Have fun with that fallout kid.

the girl he dates for a bit who *wanted* to date him also shows up in costume to shoot him on sight.

his clone shows up and is supposed to be his enemy. he adopts her instead. yes those pronouns are all correct.

she's not really an antagonist but one of his best friends arguably kills him twice. once very much on purpose.

his other best friend and whatever happened in King Tuck.

like it's not enough that this show puts Danny (and friends) against the regular ghosts and the God-Like Being level ghosts and the literal Ghost Tyrant King guy

he can't even catch a break at home either

kid's literally surrounded by people deliberately or accidentally making his life harder, there are no safe Adults, there are barely any safe friends, and he is fourteen and half dead.

and his parents canonically want to rip his alter-ego apart "molecule by molecule" i am not kidding with that one.

Like they made us a sandbox of a Nickelodeon cartoon and just half assed it by grabbing a bunch of two-by-fours, nailing them together... and then sticking them on the beach.

and then people still get mad when the fandom shows up to build sandcastles and dig to china. Yeah, we know they didn't make it That Deep on purpose.

He's never safe.

Home, school, the zone, hanging out with friends, walking down the street, in anotger state; there is nowhere for Danny to go and be safe.

Most ghosts he's met (pretty sure everyone but Frostbite and Pandora), his parents, his friends, Vlad, Jazz; there is almost no one who has not at least once been his enemy.

Can you imagine living like that? At any moment of any day, anywhere he is anyone; even one or both of his best friends, his sister, his mom and dad; anyone could turn around and suddenly become someone he has to fight.

No, wait, hold on. There's a thought.

Y'know that common thing where we make Danny have a slower heart rate because ghost boi?

So, that's supposed to be true. As a halfa he should have a steady heart rate around 20bpm in both forms. And originally that was true after his body settled into its new healthy after the accident. But by the time anyone team Phantom thinks to actually check that stuff just in case, Danny is already Stressed™ 24/7, so they inaccurately judge his baselines to be in perfectly normal human ranges. Like, 70bpm at rest and 120 immediately after ghost fights.

The fandom gets creative because the show either deliberately or not, puts Danny in absolute batshit situations and tries to sell it to us as normal. He became evil in a timeline because he cheated on test once and it dominoed from there? Come on. The fandom basically takes the show apart (molecule by molecule) and comes up with insanely creative ideas to explain some of the trends

They teach him the wrong lesson!

He doesn't like Christmas for incredibly justified reasons? Time to teach him to keep his mouth shut and never again speak about his own preferences, because Someone Might Get Upset At Him.

He cheated on a test? Time to teach him that being anything less than entirely honest can amd will get all his family and friends killed. (But not TOO honest, because his secret identity is there to save him from humans, not the ghosts)

Oh, you died? No, you don't get to ask for mental help, get your ass in that rubber suit and go out to fight crime and injustice.

An old, creepy man is sniffing around his mother and him? None of the adults are reliable enough to help, so you might as well just keep quiet and eat the torture with a side of electrocution until Vlad gets bored or messes up and he can escape.

Your bully regularly crosses at least some sort of line daily? No, you don't get to fight back, because the Ghost of Nerds Past is a blind motherfucker who thinks "fighting back" is "being a bully".

Mental health? Who needs that, when the school counsellor could be the creepy, suicide baiting ghost that everyone else seems to like?

Tim summons Danny, Danny appears in his Infinite Realms High Prince gear, taking care to be ever so slightly eldritch in case it's the GIW trying to summon him again.

Tim offers his soul for Danny to bring Jason Todd back to life.

Danny...isn't a demon, and has no ability to bring someone back. He does, however, recognize the half formed ghost floating behind Tim and screaming at Danny to fuck off as a baby halfa. More than likely, the soul got split from the body, and lost.

So he leans over, taps the scared and angry ghost-kid on the forehead to give him an ecto-boost (enough so that he'll have the energy to detach himself from the other kid and instinctively be drawn to his own body again), and pretends to make a deal.

Tim has to summon him and talk to him about his life once a week for three years. If after those three years Danny feel that the information provided is not sufficient (in other words if he feels that Tim's living situation still isn't great), Danny will collect Tim.

Three years pass, and Tim's reports are...concerning.

Danny isn't super convinced Tim's living situation isn't not the best.

So, on the dawn of the third year, in front of the entirety of Young Justice as they were having a get-together, Danny tears open a rift and grabs Tim by the cape.

"It is time to uphold your deal," Is all the information Danny gives before he yoinks Tim into the Infinite Realms.

He didn't really have time to explain more, honestly, he was running late for a meeting with the Observants, political education lessons with Ghost Writer, and also he had to prepare for family dinner. Lunch. Linner? Whatever.

He makes quick work of shoving Tim into a room, telling him it's his, and setting Dani loose on him. She's thrilled to be an Aunt and has the energy to match Tim's tenaciousness, she'll be able to keep him out of trouble until Danny can finalize the adoption tomorrow.

1. Tim saw just a flicker of Jason's ghost when Danny gave him that ecto-boost before Jason was pulled back to his body.

2. Jason's body woke up as it does in canon, gets hit by a car and that's when he and his ghost get separated, so his body does wander around catatonic for a while and get picked up but Talia and eventually given a pit bath. His soul gets pulled back into his body while Jason is in the pit.

2a.Unfortunately, a bit of the pit has already made itself at home in the empty vessel, and Jason isn't strong enough to force it out. His own soul jumps in and fills the rest of the space; but as much of the pit as has climbed in him, that's how much of his soul is stuck outside of him. The bit stuck outside of him includes a couple core traits, most of his ghost powers, and all of his ghost memories, as well as a couple other critical memories from Before.

3. Tim is not taken in front of Young Justice. Tim is taken while a Pit-controlled Jason is trying to beat the shit out of him in Titan's Tower.

4. The presence of the King cows the Pit into enough submission for the rest of Jason's soul to force it out. The sudden loss of the Pit Rage plus the wave of soul settling and new memories prevents Jason from acting before Tim is gone and the portal closed. Now he's about to go on a whole new kind of rampage to get his stupid self-sacrificing little brother back.

5. Tim isn't foolish enough to spill all the secrets he knows in some futile hope to save himself. He is very careful about what kind of information he gives, even if it means the Demon will come to collect sooner.

.

Tim doesn't know why the Demon wants 3 years of weekly check ins before it claims his soul. Nor what information would be sufficient to stave off that eventual collection date. (Tim has no misconceptions that the Demon won't collect him eventually. He sold his soul to it. Sooner or later that debt will come due, right?)

Maybe some weird supernatural rules thing? Tim read about one Demon case in Constantine's Watchtower reports where the Demon would possess people and cause planes to crash exactly 40 minutes into the flight. And then another that made deals and would come to collect after a decade. So timeframes can be weirdly important to Demons. And maybe this one's important timeframe was 3 years.

Maybe that's just how long it takes the Demon to fulfill it's side of the deal. Tim knows he saw Robin's soul that night at the summoning. Just for a moment, but he was there. Had he been haunting Tim? Irrelevant. Tim knows the Demon did something at that moment; but it's only now, 3 years later, that Tim is seeing the fruits of his deal. Robin is here. Angry, out for Tim's blood for having the audacity to wear his uniform, but alive. It took 3 years, but Jason is alive and he can go home now and be Robin again and that's what matters here.

Also because reality kept glitching around his face.

So for three years, Danny's been preparing; on the human side of things he's been getting registered as a Foster Parent, taking parenting classes, reading parenting books, saving money, getting an apartment with at least three rooms in Gotham so that adopting out Tim won't be too outlandish for CPP, getting recommendations on good child therapists from Jazz, and psyching himself up.

On the ghost side of things; he's been filling out paperwork, preparing an extra room in the castle, arranging for bodyguards for the very human teenager, collecting all sorts of protection amulets and ghost fighting gear for the kid, and convincing the skeleton crew (literal) to wear funny wigs so the teen won't be scared.

So when Tim is finally pulled through the portal, the human side of things isn't ready yet; there needs to be social workers involved, Danny has to prove he's got a viable means of income, Tim has to talk to a bunch of suits, and also he needs to get into contact with those recommended therapists for the kid.

Instead, he takes him to the Zone.

He still has a lot he needs to do, aside from the lessons with Ghostwriter and the meetings with the Observants and preparing for Linner with his family, and drops Tim off in his room full of gadgets and an eagerly awaiting new Aunt.

"No time to explain, running late for meetings, that's your new Aunt. Dani, meet Tim. Tim, meet Dani. Bye."

He'll have a sit down and explain things properly, because there's no way Dani will, once he has the time.

Tim is thinking the worst.

His soul has been collected by the demon, as he's always been expecting, and he was immediately taken to a room with a very large bed.

There are items, various tech, around the room.

He supposes he should count himself lucky that the demon wants him to not be bored.

Then the demon says that the floating girl his age is his Aunt?

And he just leaves?

Wait, is Tim a demon now?

The girl, Aunt Dani as she insists, has enough energy to rival Bart.

Keeping up with her is exhausting but something he can do, thanks to being friends with a speedster.

He learns many things that he's gonna have to talk to the demon, who apparently is not a demon and is in fact an inter-dimensional being hellbent on adopting him, in order to get clarification.

Tim is being forcibly not forcibly adopted. If not by human standards, then by this realms standards.

He is not going to be a bed warmer, and if the rage that Aunt Dani showed indicated anything, he's pretty sure his inter-dimensional Foster Father and family would tear the world to shreds.

The demon (he has got to stop calling him that but it's stuck in his head) has apparently been going all out; taking parenting classes and taking note of things that Tim mentioned in their talks, ending up with a literal list of Tim's likes and dislikes.

Dani isn't sure how Tim's new guardian brought someone back to life, and she's pretty sure he didn't, so Tim's gonna have to ask for some clarification on what exactly happened that night.

The room is his, entirely, and everything in it.

His new guardian has a human form, and a wholeass human identity, and is already trying to figure out how to spin this with CPP to gain official custody on the grounds of criminal neglect.

Injuries are different for this species, as none of them really thought that his injuries from his beatdown were bad until he almost fainted bumping his broken leg onto the bed frame.

The doctors are yetis.

Jason, though.

Jason's pissed.

He's also scared, but he's refusing to dwell on that.

His head is finally full of the memories he'd lost to the Pit.

He remembers getting his by a car, remembers following Batman as a ghost, remembers watching Batman nearly kill some guy for just stealing a sandwich.

He remembers watching some shortstack bounce in after B left, call an ambulance for the guy, and stay with him to make sure he wasn't mugged.

He followed that kid for weeks after that, mentally adopting the little freak, only stopping when the little idiot summoned a fucking demon with enough power to send him flying back to his body in Nanda Parbat. When his little brother sacrificed himself to a goddamn demon.

Jason also realizes what he's wearing, and very hurriedly swaps back from his Robin leotard to his Red Hood gear, finally clear enough in the head to realize that uh. No.

Just no.

Tim was right and pants were the future.

Next, he beelines for Raven's room, already pushing the panic button he'd ripped from Tim's uniform.

He has a plan.

He's going to let Raven know what Tim did, and by the time he's done explaining, B and Dickwing should arrive, and then he'll explain again so that B can go talk to the JLD.

He refuses to let this happen.

This cannot happen.

Soon enough, Raven is waking up the rest of the Titans, and Jason is digging through Tim's room for clues so that Raven can summon the bitchass fucker that kidnapped his brother.

He's not alone in his search either; Superboy got called in by Wonder Girl and Impulse, and they're all digging through Tim's room for clues.

No one is happy with him at the moment, since he was pretty up front about beating the shit out of Tim. He's holding them off by saying it's a Gotham thing, but it's definitely only their concern for Timmy that's preventing them from dogpiling his ass.

Then Superboy notices a lead-lined box.

Jason shoos him out of the room, because he knows Tim and knows for a fact there's probably kyptonite in that thing, and cracks it open. He catches a glimpse of some of the printed papers inside it, slams it shut, and shoves everyone else out of the room.

It takes everything he has not to vomit once he goes through the papers. He's careful to keep them in the box, because he doesn't want Superboy to...know this.

The kid was...researching. Mentally preparing himself for sex work.

Was that the deal?

Was his little brother, right now, at this very moment, getting-?

The door slams open, and Jason is faced with the reality that he's going to have to tell B and Dick something far, far worse that "Tim got kidnapped by a demon".

So, imagine you're a medieval pauper or something in some universe that doesn't even know the Ghost Zone exists. You have no clue that Pariah Dark (the current reigning Ghost King) has set his sights on your world until the hellfire and acid rain starts, and by then it's too late; you've been agonisingly killed and absorbed into the ranks of the Ghost King's skeleton army.

For the next twenty thousand years or whatever, your soul is an unwilling passenger bound to your own ghostly skeleton, and you watch as your afterlife is used to further a mad tyrant's agenda of multiversal world-domination. When the Ancients cram him into the Coffin of Forever Sleep and forget about your existence, you think oh well, I guess I'm going to be standing on parade rest for the rest of eternity, but it's whatever because infinite boredom is still better than being a vehicle for senseless violence.

Of course, however many eons of years later, some hubristic nincompoop (Vlad) opens the coffin and triggers doomsday, and Pariah Dark is back, shit. But Pariah isn't really all there mentally after eons of sleep with whatever kind of dreams, even worse than he was before, so instead of sending your corps of enslaved souls into a world to wreak havoc or whatever, he literally just yoinks a whole town into the Ghost Zone. That draws in Phantom, who goes rage-mode on your King with absolutely no holds barred, and takes the fucking crown.

But, of course, he doesn't know you exist because for as long lived as ghosts are, they forget stuff. Your existence is no longer relevant outside of paperwork and official documents, so with slight trepidation, you settle back into the millennia-long dissociative fugue you were in while Pariah was asleep.

That doesn't go well, for the weirdest fucking reason.

Apparently, your new King is actually kind of on top of paperwork. (He watches Jazz do college application paperwork, and comparing it to the Fenton parents' willful, gleeful tax evasion, he deliberately selects the better role model.) It takes him a couple years to make it through the literal archive of paperwork - some so old it's written on papyrus or sheepskin. Eventually, he sorts the paperwork into various categories with magic or whatever, keeping all contracts that Pariah and other Ghost Kings made under royal auspices, because now they're his contracts, as well as any requests that are either dated in the last two thousand years or still relevant despite being older than that.

Turns out, Pariah Dark never anticipated that he would be dethroned. Makes sense, he was insane and power-drunk. Following that assumption, all of the skeleton army is contracted to the Ghost King as a general monolith, rather than Pariah Dark specifically. The dude's obsession (not capitalized) with being The Ghost King made it so he literally used the Royal We for catering contracts. Mind-boggling. That means that, now that Pariah is no longer King and Phantom is, the skeleton army is now Phantom's.

Of course, a Danny who is on top of paperwork is still a Danny who looks at the fucking mountain of single-page, half-spaced, font-size 8 lists of the people Pariah enslaved and goes, "oh shiiiit." That means he does two things. He:

1. Has a split second of contemplating ghost tax evasion (is it really evasion if he's technically the one collecting taxes? He decides he's not going to test it...)

2. Realizes that he needs to call in the big guns, and he enlists Jazz to help him figure this out with the promise of one lunch for her and one therapy session for him per each session of bureaucratic triage.

Because he pulls in Jazz, they realize a lot quicker that the lists of names are actually all attached to a single contract, and that that contract is literally binding conscious souls into violent servitude. Predictably, they figure out how to free those souls, ie you, from your bindings, but even the best ghost lawyers tell them there's really nothing to be done about your collective indentured servitude.

Despite this, Danny manages to implement the concept of intelligent disobedience, allowing you to disobey if something is ethically or morally wrong, or even if you plain just don't want to do it. He knows what mind control is like, and the concept of Free Will is important to him. He also rounds up as many ghost therapists as he can find, and sets them the task of working through the skeleton army's trauma in a healthy way.

So, imagine you've gone through all that. You feel personally indebted to Danny, just like most of the skeletons. Most of you have now been redistributed to wherever you want to be, so there's an entire new subspecies of ghost that just sort of exists in the Zone, now. Brenda, who used to be part of your regiment in the army, works in Ghost Writer's library now, for example. You're very proud of Brenda, because not many people can cold-call Ghost Writer once a day for weeks at all, much less badger him into letting them work for him. You personally have chosen to join the Skeleton Crew, the ones closest to Danny and the ones who do tasks like menial labor, dusting, cooking, etc. in the King's Lair. Your life is on the up-and-up, you saw some shit and lived through it! Somehow, High King Phantom can still throw curveballs, though, because

I propose instead: Big, goofy top hats that each has a large name tag pinned to the front so it is easy to differentiate the skeletons. In addition, each hat is enchanted to play “spooky scary skeletons” whenever a human is nearby that hasn’t noticed them. That way there’s no way the skeletons can accidentally sneak up on any mortals.

Granted, the enchantment still needs some work. It’s supposed to be kind of like a doorbell to alert people of the skeletons' presence, but really Danny’s intention of making the crew less scary leaked in and now the song plays in the presence of fear. Oh, and also when multiple hats/skeletons are in an area the music doesn’t synch up at all.

The result of this is that when the rescue team for Tim comes barging into the castle, terrified for the safety of their Robin- well. Have you ever gone down an aisle of a toy store and turned on all the singing toys at once? Yeah. It’s an absolute atrocious racket.

Hey there! Just a friendly reminder/PSA from your friendly neighborhood Pixiemage!

“Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” is too often (incorrectly) used as a cover-all tag, on fics ranging from Vaguely Uncomfortable to Serious Shit, as a replacement for any intense tags relating to the story. People will use it to say “Holy shit guys some INTENSE SHIT happens in this story” without actually saying what that Intense Shit™ is.

In actuality, the “Dead Dove” tag is meant to be used in addition to other warning tags. Pulled from a scene from the show Arrested Development (look it up on YouTube!), it means “Hi! Hey! I labeled this fic to warn you of what’s in it, so you might REALLY want to read those labels! This fic is exactly what it says on the tin! The tags are accurate! Don’t say I didn’t warn you, because this is me warning you! Read the tags!”

So before you accidentally use the “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag without context, here’s your preemptive lesson for next time. Please tag your fics accordingly! Ta!

Its so easy y'all. So easy. Like the one time I was reading a fic, it wasn't tagged with SA/CSA warning tags when I first read it bc it was only just the first few chapters but there are certain scenes in the story that seems to be building up to... something.

One reader commented about it saying "I have specifically excluded works tagged with SA/CSA for my mental health but it seems that this fic is still leading up to that, how upsetting. Can you please fix the tags so that people would be able to avoid triggering themselves accidentally?" The author apologized and fixed it. And the work still has thousands of hits and kudos!!

Warning: I'm Sleep deprived and english isn't my first langauge

Batman: hrm?

There are two ways I can see the Ghost Death Showing™ going, either by making the asker FEEL the ghost's death pains or by literally PHYSICALLY re-creating and inflicting their Deaths upon their askers. Like "Oh you're so curious huh? Then I'll let you get the full experience free of charge (𓁹‿𓁹)"

Like with Ember (Not sure if its canon, but her burning to death(?)), she'll either make the asker feel like they're burning alive but without the actual fire so the asker just crumbles in pain screaming (to the horror of everyone else bc they likely dont know what's going on) or physically lighting the asker in an inextinguishable fire until they get burned to a crisp or to ashes.

Maybe those killed this way by ghosts have basically zero odds of coming back as a ghost themselves, they just go straight to their eternities instead of lingering or straight up have their soul 'End' if the ghost is powerful enough.

“I don’t think so, son.” Jack responds, kissing Danny’s head.

Anger directed at him, specifically, but other kinds, too. Sam's anger at the world comes to mind very easily - she's always so passionate, whether it's about her desire to continue with her gothic lifestyle or over climate change and animals' rights. It makes her eyes glow (not literally but it may as well be), and Danny's half-convinced that one reason she always wears combat boots is to give her rants more emphasis when she stomps her foot in rage.

Tucker's anger is most often mixed with jealousy or envy, because as content as he was with his life, friends, and family in general, he never took kindly to himself or the things he liked being viewed as lesser - love for his PDA, love for his meat-heavy diet, desire to be popular, desire to have abilities like Danny's. When they were younger, Tucker's defense or pursuit of these things led to arguments and rants to rival Sam. As often as Danny was caught in the middle or was even the target of his anger, he had gotten very familiar with it, even though Tucker's anger, unlike Sam's, had mellowed as he grew older.

Jazz's anger was a bit quieter, sterner, but Danny had been on the receiving end of her lectures about one thing or another fairly often. For all that she was a redhead, Jazz was rarely particularly explosive with her anger. She had her moments, but she had decided young that she'd wanted to be a psychologist, and blowing up at clients wasn't productive. Jazz uses her anger as fuel, an inner fire that motivates her every decision, thought, and action. Given how quickly she'd gotten him out, Danny couldn't help but wonder even now just how long Jazz had been angry.

And his parents.... they never kept their anger a secret, and it was almost always directed either at him or at a ghost. Anger at their son was fueled by disappointment, most often, or exasperation, frustration, confusion, or any combination thereof for missing classes, failing tests, forgetting chores, or just being less perfect than Jazz and less passionate about ghost hunting than they were. Their anger at ghosts was a manic thing, driven by decades of theories assumptions and research the lies they told themselves about how ghosts worked, sprinkled occasionally with enough right answers to keep the fire burning.

The anger they had towards their son when they learned he was a ghost... well. That's how he got here, in a dirty alley in a dark city with an atmosphere filled to the brim with... something he could maybe get used to if given enough time. Despite being found, despite hearing the calm-yet-frantic orders to others he couldn't see concerning plans to get him medical attention as quickly as possible, Danny wasn't all that certain he'd have that time and resigned himself to choke on both the thick, cursed air and his own blood.

Batman held him close, nearly tucking Danny's face into his chest. The hole in his gut was a dull thing at this point - which was probably a bad thing, but Danny found it harder to care with each passing minute. At least the bleeding was slowing down, either because of Batman's handiwork or because he was running out. Probably both.

And Batman's face... huh. That was a strange look. It was mostly covered with the cowl, but tightness in his voice, the sharp twist-snarl of his mouth... that was anger, right? The way his breath came out in ragged gasps even as he kept his orders and descriptions clear... was that rage? Was the way his hand trembled as he took Danny's pulse and studied his complexion frustration? Was the way he put a hand against Danny's bloody and tear-stained cheek and swiped a thumb slowly and softly under his missing eye a sign of repressed fury?

"...please... don't be mad.... I'm sorry...." Danny choked out hoarsely. He didn't want to see anger anymore. He was tired of it being directed at him. It made him want to cry again, but he'd long run out of tears.

Batman's voice paused. Even as the tinny voices in his comm grew louder, he ignored them and turned his full attention to Danny. The weight of it settled around Danny's shoulders like a heavy shroud, and he choked again.

"I'm not mad," Batman said quietly, and how even the other voices were quiet in order to listen as closely as they could. "Not at you. Never at you. At the monsters who did this to you."

But I'm the monster, Danny couldn't say. Breathing was too hard now. But he looked back up into Batman's face and saw the lines of his mouth twist in a different direction. Still a horrible mangle, but not in anger. Batman's breathing grew rougher, and Danny's brow furrowed in confusion. He swallowed thickly and tried to speak again.

"....why?"

Batman stopped breathing. One second. Two seconds. After the third, he pulled Danny gently upward, and he could only see the dark body armor in his line of sight. He had long since lost the energy needed to lift his head on his own, and the rest of him was as limp as a ragdoll. But he could easily hear the ragged breathing even over the sound of his own sluggish heartbeat.

"...You didn't deserve this. No matter who or what you are, you deserved better than this. I'm sorry. For not saving you."

....oh.

....Oh.

....Was this.... was Batman.... sad....? For him.....?

...huh.

this and also if you’re going to have people commission you for fics, if you’re going to link your ko-fi or ways for people to donate or give you money in any way, shape or form, make sure you talk about it outside of ao3. you can’t mention anything about money or donations on ao3, as it is against the site’s terms of service and yes, you absolutely can get reported for it.

“college is absolutely nothing like this” “why are we writing four people on the team scoring a hat trick in one game” “so tech work is nothing like this, hope that helps!”

Fandom is not banding together publicly to talk about what we hate (other than canon) and it’s definitely not tagging the fic/author so other people can read the “dogshit” (real quote btw) and hate on it too.