Star’s Obsession Pit

A simple mission. In and out. That was the brief.

Not so.

It was a test. A final one, and he’d failed. It mattered not that he was a single six year old, up against twenty incredibly dangerous and armed men and women. It mattered not that he had killed most of them. Most was never good enough.

To this day Danny thinks about that, remembers that night, that week, that month all too clearly. He analyzes it, the ins and outs, tries to figure out where he went so wrong that the rug-pull caught him with such surprise. His point of view is limited, and his ability to gather information is Mission Impossible levels of high-diff. The LoS is so dark not even the furthest reaches of the dark web has access to their movements, and he can’t exactly pop on a plane as he pleases to fly on down there. By the time he doesn't need a plane to fly, Damian is safe (or as safe as the heir to the Demon Head can ever be) with their father in Gotham, and Danny is locked down to Amity Park with bigger fish to fry than old news.

So Danny’s never figured it out.

But Danny still remembers.

He remembers the wrenching shock, the pain, of being cast out from the only home he’d ever known.

He remembers going back. During the day. They were, after all, the League of Shadows. Night was their purview, night was when they were at their strongest, when they were most alert. But shadows also formed even at the highest noon and so Danny used them with more determination than he’d ever known.

His brother.

He had to get to his brother.

He had to get Damian.

He remembers the shake in Damian’s voice when he asks what Daniel is doing there. The way it’d gone into a rage - Damian would not be turned traitor. He remembers the feeling of the cool blade sinking into the base of his throat and severing his spine. The look of shock, as if Damian couldn’t believe his blade actually connected. Danny remembers falling back. An outstretched hand. Splashing into toxic swirls of green. The pain as he’s corroded from the outside in, and then sucked away.

The Lazarus Pits are just ecto infused with magic until it boiled. Go figure, huh?

He’d woken in America. Coughing up pond and Lazarus water as he scraped his way onto a greasy, muddy bank, he's bloodied and bewildered but healed. Later he would learn that in fact he’d awoken in Amity Park. It's a region where the veil was so thin because of the ley line crossroads that bisected it that even before the portal it had been drenched in ambient death energy. Hence, the presence of the Fentons and their eternally curious daughter, Jazz, who’d taken one look at him, screeched, and dragged him to her “mommy” and “daddy”, confident they could fix him.

Danny isn’t sure he’s fixed.

Chewing his lip, he absently rubs the nearly invisible mark at the hollow of his throat as he scrolls through the article. Damian is doing well. It’s been ten years since they last saw each other. The two of them are sixteen now and Danny has his driving test next week. Damian has started a foundation dedicated to the welfare of animals rescued from factory farms. In the photograph he’s standing in front of and slightly to the side of his father – their father. Bruce Wayne. He looks proud.

It’s all so mundane.

He switches tabs. In glaring, downright accusatory, red is the name of his alter ego on the public database the JL’s put together of known rogues – its very own FBIs most wanted list.

Alter ego. He wants to scoff. It’s been a while, sure, but Danny’s been trained extensively in the art of subterfuge, misdirection, infiltration, lies, keeping secrets, and Danny Phantom is barely a stage name. It’s a pun at most. It’s him. Simply him. And that was the entire point, because a piece of him was always hoping that Damian might see him and find him. Yes sure he’s visibly male, his name is changed a little, and his ghostly nature screws with every picture taken of his ghost half, but that hardly means a thing. Damian is blisteringly intelligent and they’re trained in the art of disguise besides, Danny is confident Damian will recognize him if he sees him. With the upswing of inevitable publicity... Well.

Danny hoped.

He’s never blamed his brother. Not for anything. They’d been in an impossible situation, he sees that now, one that Danny only exacerbated by not accepting the terms of his exile and going back, ever the fool. If anything, Damian had shown a surprising level of mercy not usually granted to traitors by giving Danny what would have been a relatively quick and painless death.

With his heart rotting into the swelter of his churning stomach, Danny bites into his thumbnail, his twin’s scathing bluster of yesteryear echoing loudly in his ears.

He’s used to getting this level of vilification from his parents, but this-

This hurts worse.

“Is this... because of back then?” Danny whispers. His room is empty, Vlad’s newest batch of bugs deactivated. Nobody answers him.

He can’t help but wonder if his hopes have been answered in the worst possible way. Damian called him a betrayer. Being a full blown rogue is barely a hop, skip, and a jump away from the concept.

Be careful what you wish for. You’d think, with Desiree around, Danny would have learned that lesson by now.

But he’s always been pretty shit at learning.

He looks up and out his bedroom window. Technically he’s grounded. Just as technically he can leave whenever he feels like it and his parents know they can’t stop him. They’ve long since grown into a form of shallow resignation about him, of tired acceptance, where they don’t actually expect anything of Danny anymore. At least, not anything good, or worthwhile. And certainly not success.

He’s used to being a failure, he thinks, tears beginning to burn in his eyes. But shit. He looks back at his phone and tightens his lips until they don’t tremble.

“I didn’t think I’d fucked up this bad...” Danny whispers, and it’s no use anymore. He bows over his lap and presses his face into his hands, the shameful wetness too obvious to be denied. Of course. He can’t even comport himself with dignity in privacy with no need to fit in. He sucks in a shivering breath. Of course.

Failure. Fuck. Danny is such a failure.

It’s all he will ever be.

Danny is in Gotham for college, and during finals month the Joker goes on a spree. After the Joker breaks out of Arkham for the THIRD time Danny in a fit of sleep deprived pique does a bit of research, breaks into Arkham, and swaps prisoner transfers so that the Joker is taken to a prison out of state.

It’s only after finals are over, and he has slept for two days, that he calls Tucker to check on his half brained plan, to find out it worked? Somehow it worked. The Joker is now at a different prison where he has no corrupted guards etc to help him breakout and is now stuck there.

By swapping paperwork, Danny quite accidentally managed to cut through all those problems. The transfer was already happening before anyone knew anything about it. Therefore, it didn't need some corrupt officials to sign off on it; the receiving prison didn't have to be strong armed into taking him; and probably most crucially, Joker had no time to breakout between learning about his transfer and said transfer happening.

I also think it'd be good if Danny didn't even send him somewhere super high security (ie Belle Reve). Those transfer are probably rarer and come with too much fanfare. Instead, Danny sent him to some random prison in, like, Wisconsin* or something. Which, on top of being narratively funnier, actually works out better because it's so far removed from Joker's normal network of goons and corruption. He either has to wait for his normal helpers to get there, or try to build all that influence back from the ground up while being stifled by being under such close watch and having to fight his way to the top of whatever established hierarchy there already is in the new place (again, alone, without his own established network bolstering him).

Either way it's gonna take time. Months and years even. And, once they know about it, time is very useful to the Bats for cleaning house before Joker inevitably ends up back in Gotham. The more of the Joker's network they can root out and clean up, the harder it'll be for him to breakout again later.

Plus, the longer this random prison can hold him, it helps build very strong evidence for Bruce's legitimate attempts to get Joker transferred. No more other institutions arguing they don't have the means to secure someone like the Joker. Security isn't the issue; Exhibit A, this prison did it for years no issue.

OKAY, I REALLY HOPE THAT THIS POST WILL BE READABLE

This is a post about my AU, we'll call it overturned AU (let's thank my friend for coming up with this name) , because usually when I draw stuff for miraculous, I do it for my AU so I thought that it's probably a good idea to provide some basic information 😌 I'll give you more info when it's relevant, cause I have a whole doc about this AU lol

General info in text:

at the beginning of the story they are 17yo, it's their Terminale year (to specify: at the very beginning Marinette is 17 and Adrien is 16, because Marinette's birthday is in July and Adrien's in October)

KWAMI SWAP, so Adrien/Bug is the holder of Ladybug's miraculous and Marinette/Lady Noire is the holder of Black Cat's miraculous

they first met as Bug and Lady Noire and Lady Noire became Bug's first friends since... oops, you'll found out in the future (you can probably guess honestly)

Adrien used to be homeschooled, but for his Terminale year he was enrolled in a public school (i will ellaborate on that in the future!)

Adrien and Marinette quickly became friends, they didn't understand why it's so easy to talk to each other (maybe because you were already friends... but as... superheroes...)

He’s afraid of failing his classes, of losing an important battle and leaving the town vulnerable, of his family and friends dying, of becoming like Dan, and countless other things.

But perhaps most of all, he’s afraid of his original family.

The League of Assassins.

When Danyal Danny first came to Amity Park, it was because of an infiltration mission. The League had questions about the area and a couple crazy scientists living within it.

But Danny also suspects it was a convenient way to get rid of him. They never said it, but he felt it. He was the spare heir, the weaker twin, the failure.

He had been ordered to send back reports periodically, but he has no idea what happens to them. Supposedly, his twin was responsible for them, an early lesson in the duties he’d need to take on as the heir. But considering how Danny never received a single response, he doubts the other boy ever read them. Or maybe he did, but he just didn’t care.

Maybe if he was even more lucky, they had forgotten him entirely.

Danny wants to be forgotten. If the League forgot him, it would mean he could stay with his family. His real family. The ones he had been sent to spy on, yet who had accepted him far more readily than his blood “family” ever had, even as he started to let them see what he really was underneath his infiltrating persona.

Every report sent back was a risk. A chance that someone would remember the heir’s brother and order him to return. Every time, he was on edge for days, weeks, after it was sent out. Nothing ever happened.

But he was too afraid to stop.

If someone was reading them and noticed it, the League might send someone to check on him. Make sure he hadn’t gone rogue or been killed by something that could threaten their organization later.

He couldn’t risk it.

So he lied, pretended he was still loyal. Every single report was sent out on time, all in the same cold tone even as he left out more and more details about his true circumstances. He would not risk his family. Even if it meant he could never let himself move on from what the League had done to him.

And then one day, those fears were realized. His eyes locked with a pair he’d prayed to never see again, and he felt himself reflexively still, wiping all traces of emotion from his expression.

Damian al Ghul. His brother.

“Danyal. Ahki. Your mission is over. I’ve come to bring you home.”

Danyal paused, staring back silently, then asked in a blank voice, “Is anyone else aware of this?”

Damian’s brows furrowed at the question. “No, I–”

He’d thought so, when he first saw Danyal. His twin looked… relaxed. But then their eyes met and all emotions suddenly drained from his body, and Damian felt a sharp pang of regret. Clearly, that relaxation was just a mask. Had Danyal been forced to keep it up this whole time? How deep had his real personality—the child he’d watched ramble about the night sky at Nanda Parbat—been buried?

He attempted to smile reassuringly as he reached out a hand to his twin, told him he could finally come home even if it should have been far sooner. That expression fell gradually as the silence stretched for several moments in the air.

Then, Danyal finally responded. He asked flatly if Damian had come to retrieve him on his own.

Damian frowned. Was his brother worried that he was only reconnecting because of the League’s orders? Considering his failure to communicate before, it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Still, it hurt. He opened his mouth to reassure him that he was here of his own accord, that he wanted to help him.

A fist collided with his temple, cutting off the rest of his words.

Damian stumbled back, only barely managing to block the second strike towards his gut, and then was forced to leap back as Danyal’s leg snapped up into a kick.

He backpedaled rapidly, creating a space between them, and raised his open hands up in front of him—showing he had no weapons, yet still positioned such that he could easily throw more blocks if necessary. Danyal’s blows lacked the same machine-like precision that had been drilled into both of them, but he was fast. Far faster than he was when they last fought.

“Akhi— I don’t want to fight! I’m here to help you! Don’t you want to come home? Our family—”

Danyal’s eyes seemed to glow with unrestrained fury, and he leapt at Damian again, launching into a new flurry of strikes that he was forced to block or dodge. It would have been easier if he counterattacked, but he didn’t want to hurt Danyal more than he already had.

“Home?!” Danyal spat. “FAMILY?! What family!? Grandfather, who only saw me as a failed tool? Mother, who sent me out to survive on my own? Or maybe you, the one who never objected to any of it or attempted to contact me?”

The strikes finally broke off as Damian gave in and seized an opening and shove Danyal back, forcing them apart.

“That place was never my home.”

Damian felt his heart break. Why couldn’t he have been a better brother, done something sooner?

“But then… why send the reports? Why stay here?”

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