Where I’m reblogging stuff for my current DPxDC obsession, not strictly only the crossover bits. I’m aroace bc turns out all my attraction is used up on fictional characters. Currently, especially Jason Todd
masterpost please no editing, I know this has issues, I tried to read over most of it but I've had a migraine for days now and today learned I didn't get the jobs so--yeah not in the mood. But I hope you all enjoy this. I hammered it out in bits and spurts.
Danny doesn’t rust Gotham on its word alone. He has no doubt that what Gotham feels is real, but Gotham wouldn’t be the first parent to understand the situation with their children wrong. Wouldn’t be the first parents to go to war only to destroy their own.
While Gotham does rile against Danny’s insistence that he needs to check matters out himself, it still gives him permission to explore its streets. That permission is important. Danny could certainly hold his own, he was no mere ghost or specter, but the fight was unwanted. It iiis much easier to let Gotham open up a little tear in the fabrics of its reality and simply step through it.
He stumbles right into wall.
He clutches at his chest.
It hurts.
It all hurts.
In the caves with Dami, it doesn’t hurt so much. The pain was still there, of course it was, it was something that he could never let go of, but in the caves it was muted by the rough stone and the pool of green. Here there is none of that. Here Danny is truly alive. Or as alive as he has ever been since the…
Danny shakes his head. It feels like his brain is sloshing against the inside of his skull. Bones, they were overrated, really. At least he (or Gotham) had the forethought to make sure that Danny came out clothed. He smooths his hands over the lapels of the coat and the vest under it. Definitely Gotham’s doing. Danny didn’t think he had ever worn anything so fancy in his life.
Well, half-life.
The alleyway that he steps out of may have been next to a theater, but by the boarded up windows and smell of piss, it has obviously seen better days. He stands under the unlit marquee, looking up at the graffiti and fallen letters. There’s something beautiful about the decay of it, as much as the space is steeped in tragedy.
Danny tucks his hands in his pockets and starts off. Where? He isn’t sure, really. Danny trusts that Gotham will keep him moving in the right direction as long as he listens to it. And Gotham hums with information. Stepping onto its streets is like stepping into a bee hive. Danny follows the energy as it ebbs and flows, leads and warns. He trusts it.
Which is why it’s extra insulting for Danny to end up with a knife pointed at his throat and his hands raised.
“I told you, I really don’t have anything on me,” Danny says calmly.
“Bullshit! Who the fuck doesn’t carry at least their phone anymore?” The knife waves with the words. “Hand it the fuck over!”
“Cursing won’t make something magically appear,” Danny says. He probably should get an identity again. What year was it?
“Or I say what I fucking want to and fucking gut you so I can loot your body!”
“This body really isn’t worth that much effort,” Danny says, with as much of a shrug as he can do with his hands raised.
“Fuck y—”
Before the thug an even lunge, a mass of shadow drops between them and Danny. Fora moment, Danny is convinced that it’s Gotham, for all that Gotham is the one who led him there. It feels like Gotham, with the same deep love for the city and the same chasm where the little bird once was but… this one is alive.
Danny takes in the caped figure with no small amount of wounder. They feel like the honored dead, but they clearly live and breathe and ache. Their fist pulls back, ready to strike the cowering thug. Danny rests his hand on the arm. “I think making them piss themselves with fear is enough.”
Both the thug and whatever this creature is turn to incredulously look at Danny. He just offers a smile and a shrug. He plucks the knife delicately from the thug’s hand and flips it closed. “Now, maybe you should promise not to do this again since you’ve gotten to keep your face intact.”
“Y-yeah! S-s-shur! I, um, I’m s-sorry mister Batman, sir! I just… things have been really tight and my brother is still sick from the last fear gas—yeah. I, um, will just be going!” The thug says, jutting a thumb behind themselves. When neither Danny nor ‘Batman’ move, they turn tail and run.
After watching them disappear behind a corner, Danny turned and smiled at the looming specter. (He tucks the knife into his pocket.) “Thank you, Batman, for your gallant rescue.”
“Hn,” the Batman utters. He pauses a long time before saying, “You shouldn’t be out here this late.”
“Absolutely not. I believe I will be heading right home,” Danny says. The Batman looks at Danny’s hand, pale and slender against the dark, still on his arm. Danny holds up his hands and steps back. As the Batman aims some sort of gadget at the grungy architecture, Danny adds, “and I am sorry for your loss.”
There’s another long look before the Batman flees like the hounds of hell are on their heels, rather than just standing on a random street corner in Gotham. Danny watches until they vanish and then slip into the shadows himself.
He has a great deal to talk with Gotham about. He hadn’t understood that this about a little specterling. That changed things. Complicated them. Made them clearer.
#what the fuck is happening in dp why's there so much vivisection#not upset about it but I am intrigued
via @finch-the-foolish
So the thing you have to understand is in the show Danny's parents are mad scientists. And not only are they mad scientists, they're mad scientists set on studying ghosts. They don't think ghosts are people. They know ghosts experience pain and don't care, and regularly threaten to tear Phantom apart molecule by molecule:
^ said in front of Danny-their-son
And then these exchanges, following an identity reveal to the whole world. The reveal gets undone via reality hijinks later, but we still get this:
^ His sister Jazz gets it.
And you see in these screenshots something else really important: They do not know that their son Danny is the superhero ghost Danny Phantom.
They love him! Every time they learn he's Danny Phantom in the show, they decide loving him is more important than the fact that he's a ghost.
Buuut.
This whole dynamic opens up a whole beautiful rainbow of angst fics, doesn't it?
What if they kill Danny before ever realizing it's him? What if killing him is what reveals it's him? What if they capture him and vivisect him and he can't reveal himself to them the whole time? What if they get far enough that it kills the human part of him and he can never give them solid evidence what happened to their beloved son?
What if he tries revealing himself to them after he realizes what they're about to do, and they don't believe him?
Because there's the other direction you can take this. A lot of people in the phandom were queer teenagers in the aughts, when the question of 'will my parents accept me even though they hate what I am?' was a very personally relevant question.
Which means you get fics where Danny reveals himself, and his parents don't accept him.
Where not only do they hate ghosts more than they love him, but they start treating him like they treat any other ghost.
And that includes experimenting on him.
ANYWAY! That's not even the only set of characters in the show that are big on experimenting on ghosts! There's Vlad, who clones Danny and maybe island of doctor moreaus a bunch of animal ghosts together into monstrosities, and there's the GIW, a Men in Black parody. Naturally, they want to capture Danny and take him into a secret government lab for lots and lots of painful experiments.
danny leaning into pretending to be Anything But A Ghost with the bats, but he goes with a different story for each bat/person and none of them put together that the potential fae at damian’s school, the hot vampire twink that jason has been flirting with, the Meta coffee shop employee Tim sees at his favorite shop, the alien kid that showed up in Metropolis, the possible demon that has been following the bats, the strange mer like being spotted in the harbor, he knows he's too uncanny to pass for human so he'll just play into *any* misconceptions, so long as they think he's anything but a ghost they would have no reason to think he was actually a ghost!
Red Robin watching from the rafters waiting for the rest to be in position to attack:
"So, the hostage has managed to derail the murder plan. Downside is that he's teaching Joker knife monopoly."
Batman "Repeat please?"
Red Robin "You heard me B. Knife monopoly. Least the victim has enough smarts to stall for time."
((That is not the case, Joker just doesn't register as a threat the same way a ghost would to Danny. He can survive anything a human can do unless they have ecto weapons. Which Joker does not.))
Just three friends hanging behind the Nasty Burger (Eldritch Danny AU)
This was made for my DPxDC crossover fic (Ghost-related Emergencies), just a note the fic is a crossover
Also here is the obligatory baby man (worm) version
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.
"Hey everyone, this is my big brother Danny. No, we will not be taking questions at this time. C'mon, Danny, I'm exhausted, let's go home."
Can he create it in an enclosed space and can that enclosed space be another human body?
You know when people say "There were signs...."? This is one of those moments.
I jest, I jest.
But Danny has done something like that before, though he used it on plants. If someone or something is touching him, he can cover it with ice. I think if he had enough time to practice, he would have learned how to make the ice go through a solid- likely with a touch of intangibility- and then freeze whatever is on the other side of that solid.
That could include the human body's interior. I personally love morally grey characters more than dark characters, so if I were to have Danny do this, it would likely be on someone who really deserved to be ended.
Joker, Scarecrow, and Pyg are the villains I personally hate and make Danny kill on the spot, so if he were to freeze anyone's insides, it would be them. He might even do it without letting the ice show on the outside. Like they would be in the middle of a villain monologue, and Danny, as casually as can be, walks by, taps them, or bumps into them for a brief second, and freezes them from that tiny contact. They fall to the ground dead, and no one would see the crystallized ice until thier autopsies.
This would, of course, convince the heroes that someone who killed so easily was at large. Out there was someone who had ice powers with deadly accuracy, and obviously had no quarrels with murder. The Bats would be on the hunt while Danny would just be another face in the crowd, blending in because he doesn't show any outside hint of his powers.
No meta gene to track. No record of past crime. No ecto-tech that's reliable. Not even signs of being a genius, since it seems his parents gave all the smarts to his elder sister.
In his human form, after years of practice, he can suppress every part of Phantom. He is a fully average, plain human when he dons his Fenton half.
But he's also someone tired of the crazy people hurting regular joes like him. He believes in second chances, not twenty chances. He's jarred, exhausted, slightly cynical, and has a permanent solution. Danny won't go out of his way to kill every supervillian, nor does he go out and play hero- he's got bills to pay and his mouth to feed. He has an employed adult - but if he happens to encounter something?
Something on the same level as those three monsters? Well, the Bats find more bodies in morgues with frozen insides.
Nature is incredible, you can really see just at a quick glance how these evolved to speak together in rhyming riddles while performing a spooky dance, laughing at you because they're The Wee Creatures Three and you will Never Get Their Key.
@clockwayswrites I will never again see a bittern without thinking of Birdritch Danny.
Imagine if the first time Danny Birdritched, he hadn't feathered yet. Or some convoluted AU of an AU where it's 14yo Danny Birdritching out in Gotham.
Just, think of how much more funsettling it'd have been if, in the Bat's first interaction with him, all of Birdritch Danny's extra weirdness (plus the innate weirdness of birds) hadn't been hidden by the full feathered fluff.
This was a commission of a Danny Phantom OC, I thought, but it was pretty cool and they gave me a lot of creative freedom, so I thought it would be cool if it was really dirty instead of 100% rendered. I think it's one of my favorites commissions
Sinking into the green is a relief. Something in Danny loosens the further that he submerges himself. Something calls like home.
It would be easy to lose himself in it.
He had, before.
How long had it been?
Focus.
Dami.
Damian needs him to focus.
Damian is waiting for him to come… not home. Danny doesn’t have a home anymore, not since— but Damian is important to Danny and he needs Danny to protect him. He needs Danny’s help. He needs Danny’s care.
Danny blinks into the green. It swirls into focus around him, or as in focus as the green ever gets. The blur between the ever shifting shades never truly settles, but it’s easier to pick out the objects floating in the void. The stones. The doors. The bones.
It’s too much. Danny isn’t sure if he can navigate it anymore. That part of him that was meant to be a normal ghost… never mind. The present mattered more than the past. Damian mattered more than the past. The broken bird too. Apparently his name was Robin.
A Robin from Gotham.
Danny had never been to Gotham. He had heard of it, of course he had, who hadn’t? But he never traveled much while he was alive. As a half ghost it had been easier, but never just because he wanted to. His world had been Amity Park, Aunt Alicia’s homestead, Vlad’s mansion, and the haunted places in between.
It is fortunate for Danny that Gotham has quite a presence in the green, as certain cities do. After taking a deep breath that does nothing for him here, Danny lets his senses extend into the green. The pool he came from swirls just above his senses. Further there is Paris with its mound of carefully stacked bones. London and its tunnels. Stonehenge. The vast, deep sea, still so out of reach by humans.
Gotham.
The city sits heavily in the green. Chunks of gothic architecture pierce through the veil like ribs through skin. After the blood red of Paris and the kaleidoscope of Barcelona, Gotham’s aura is startling dark. It hangs like a heavy shadow, the sort that that gently wraps one up as night settles. Jagged lines of curses cut though the dark like lightning.
He’ll have to take care not to get struck by one.
Danny sinks into the dark. His eyes hang around him, keeping careful watch on as Danny digs claws into footholds. The dark shifts around him, defensive and resistant like a dog with its fangs bared. Danny tries to say he means no harm, but oh how Gotham wails!
A son lost.
A protector untethered.
Oh how Gotham tried!
Oh how Gotham gave so that the son could live!
But it moved the pieces too early. The son, so vibrant with new life, moved too early. Gotham hadn’t the time to make him whole. To give him back his spark!
And then the son had been taken.
Gotham roiled, the darkness frothing around Danny. No!, he soothed, The son yet lives. He is without his spark but he lives! Danny has seen him, touched him, felt where the soul is missing like a weeping wound. But Danny needs to understand what happened to know what he should do.
Gotham’s moods shift swiftly between anguish and hope, pain and joy, anger. Gotham bristles. The dark becomes different—menacing shadows that stretch across a midnight street. The shadows close in, oppressively tight.
Danny lets his powers flair. Not fully, no, never, but just enough. Just enough to let Gotham know he is no pup to be threatened like that. He is Phantom! He has been broken and remade by the green itself time and time again! He has been fused with it! Saved by it! Doomed by it.
He is not to be threatened.
Gotham flairs. Its grip eases. Its wary now, but still stays on the aggressive despite what it must feel now from Danny. Danny can appreciate how dictated to its people Gotham is.
Explain it to me, Danny asks gently. Explain him to me. Your son. Your prince of a prince.
Gotham ripples: doubt, pain, acceptance. The desire to see its son safe and whole wins, and so it begins to explain to Danny about its Prince and those he made his sons. Gotham’s sons.
No hate to anyone or their fics, write and read what you want, but I personally find “Danny’s parents love him and they do reconsider their prejudice upon learning the truth, yet their prejudice has already done irreparable damage to his health and their relationship” far more interesting than “Jack and Maddie are evil and hate ghosts so much they vivisect their son”
Danny, under his breath, while watching Bruce drag Hal into a closet: I'm not a Homewrecker. I'm not a Homewrecker. I'm not a Homewrecker.
*In the closet*
Bruce: Has your ring identified the interdimensional entity yet?
Hal: No! I don't get it. It keeps telling me 492 lifesigns, 492 human 1 extradimensional. But then I ask it to confirm 493 lifesigns and it says negative, 492 lifesigns. Every individual scanned comes back human and this mysterious entity is nowhere to be found except when I scan the whole party. It doesn't make sense!
