@the-ghost-trader - ooooh, i love this! it has the potential to be so incredibly sad, too, like poor Damian just trying to carve out something normal for himself only for it blow up in his face
BUT, shockingly, i'm not about the angst today! not yet anyway 😇
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“So, how was your day?”
Despite his answering groan, Damian likes this. This. This whole… thing he has with Danielle. With Ellie.
And, yeah, he’s not exactly told any of the others yet, but can you blame him? For wanting to keep something, anything, to himself. Wanting to keep this small little slice of goodness he’s managed to carve out, untouched and unmarred by his family, by their other lives, by the rogues, the vigilantes, the assassins, everyone.
“That bad, huh?”
Being with Ellie is freeing. That’s the best way to describe it.
She knows. Damian surprised even himself when he told her—not about the others, mind, but he supposes it’s not hard to put two and two together and Dani has always been smarter than most—but it’s the best decision he’s ever made, and no matter what the niggling little voice in the back of his head says (the one that sounds suspiciously like Father), he can’t bring himself to regret it.
He won’t. Because having Ellie know gives him freedom.
She’s a safe place, a hand to hold, a warm, welcoming presence when things inevitably turn ugly. It’s the freedom to just be normal when everything else in his life spirals into stranger and more stressful missions.
“Richard is being insufferable again. I do not understand his incessant need to know everything about my life.”
“Oh? What’s he done now?”
“I was subjected to an hour long interrogation about my love life, like it’s any of his business. It’s infuriating!”
“Ugh, tell me about it. I get the same thing from Jazz, constantly. It can be suffocating.” Ellie says as she curls herself tighter into his side. “But it’s just how they show they care.”
“Yes, well, sometimes I wish he wouldn’t—”
“Hey!” Ellie pushes herself up to glare at him, punctuating her shout with a soft whack to his arm for good measure. “What have I said about using that word?”
“Yes, yes,” he placates with a roll of his eyes, “‘Be careful what you wish for.’ I apologise, it won't happen again.”
“Damn straight it won't.”
She maintains eye contact with him for a second longer before tucking herself back into his side, squirming around with a long, contented hum that Damian can feel rumble through him. He smiles and doesn’t complain even when he has to shift to give her more room after a particularly strong elbow jabs him in the ribs. It means leaving the warm patch on the couch, but he’s rewarded with another long, happy moan as she settles and Damian can’t bring himself to mind.
Ellie constantly makes noises. Little mews and hums and laughs and songs known only to her. It reminds him of a cat, sometimes. He likes it. It calms him down; it means she’s happy, so he's happy.
They settle back into the cushions and Damian lets the subject drop, not wanting to spoil the moment. Outside, the wind changes direction and from where he’s laying he can watch as the snow starts to come down thick and heavy. Hopefully it’ll mean a quiet night's patrol.
“Is that why you haven’t introduced me yet?”
“What?” He can't help it, he stiffens at the thought of losing his secret, of the scrutiny he'll be inviting if he lets anyone know.
“Are you worried I’ll embarrass you?”
Damian’s eyes snap down quick to reassure her, only to see her light, teasing grin. He lets out a breath of relief. It figures she wouldn't worry about that.
“Of course not, don’t be absurd. You could never embarrass me.”
“I don’t know,” she muses, her voice taking on a dangerous lilt, “that sounds like a challenge.”
“Believe me, having been subjected to Father’s Brucie persona at every gala I’ve been to, it would take a lot to embarrass me.”
“Alright, bet. I’ll get you, just you wait.”
“You’ve already got me.”
She flicks him on the nose. “You’re such a sap.”
He hums his agreement, enjoying the tinkling sound of her laughter. And then, before he can think otherwise, he asks, “Is that why you haven’t introduced me?”
“That’s different,” she scowls. “You know how hard it is to get there, there’s no signal, and Danny only gets a break like—oh, Ancients!”
Damian gets another elbow to the ribs as she bolts upright, a manic grin on her face that has him laughing.
“What is it?”
“It’s the holidays! It’s nearly Truce Day! You know I said I had a family thing around Christmas?”
“Yes?”
“Well, do you want to come to it? I can introduce you then! I mean, it’s going to be a bit formal and you’ll have to meet everyone, not just family. There’s going to be some banquets, you’ll have to sit through some long speeches and you have to be on your best behaviour at all times, okay? Absolutely no fighting, it’s called Truce Day for a reason!”
“What?”
“Yeah, it’ll be perfect! I think Jazz is going in a couple days earlier to help with the preparations, so I’ll get her to let Danny know—and fair warning, he will try to give you the shovel talk, but this is great! It’s Truce Day, so he can’t actually do anything about it!”
“I’m sorry, but you're going to have to explain a bit.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s a bit much—but that’s family, right? Danny can get pretty protective over me, which is why going on Truce Day is the best time to do it! He can’t even command the Fright Knight to stab you! It’s genius!”
“Ellie, what?”
“Like, yeah, sure, he’s the king, but even he has to obey the rules of Truce Day—and then once you’ve spent all day with him, he’ll see that you’re a fantastic, wonderful, kind, brilliant, smart, strong, capable person and he’ll get over himself and everything will be good!"
Damian collapses down onto the couch, the wind knocked out of him. This is… He had not expected anything like this at all. For all that Ellie talked about her family, she had never mentioned this.
“Did you… did you say your brother is a king?”
“Yeah! High King Phantom, have I…” The manic grin slips off her face as she turns round and notices Damian. “Have I not mentioned that before?”
“No. No, you have not.”
“Ah. Sorry. Probably should clarify that I’m also a princess.”
“Right. Yes, that follows.”
“And I’m not really his sister, I’m his clone.”
“What?”
Damian blinks and tries to say more, but he has no idea what he’s meant to do with… any of this information.
Normal. He thought she was meant to be his normal. Nothing could have prepared him for this.
Not that it changed anything, of course, of that he was certain. It’s just… a lot to take in. Overwhelming. But it's okay! He takes a deep breath, and another, and a sense of calm washes over him. Ellie makes one of her little hums as she cocks her head to the side to consider him and he can't help but relax at the normalcy of the sound. It'll be okay, he's dealt with stranger and he can deal with this.
“I’ve, uh… I’ve told you that we’re half ghosts, though, right?”
“What?”
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Tumblr deactivated my account but I am back. And I brought you some chaos.
Now, hear me out. Danny Phantom x Frozen crossover.
Just Danny being somehow teleported to Frozen world and meeting Elsa. They bond over royalty problems and ice powers (and their initial struggles with controlling their powers), and Danny uses his Phantom form to match Elsa's white hair, and they complain to each other about how they were hunted for who they are, and Elsa says something about how she's scared that her powers can hurt people after that time when she froze everything and Danny goes "Me too! A version of me once destroyed the world and I had to prevent that from happening!", and Danny's reaction to Olaf is just "It's like when hotdogs come to life in my house but friendly, so cool!"
* runs out of breath, pauses *
And Danny and Elsa both have red-headed sisters who at some point dated not-good-for-them guys. And Anna was frozen before being brought back to life and what if she's a halfa now? She had her hair turning white like a ghost, and she sort of died, right? She should be at least liminal! And Elsa actually could be some kind of Infinite Realms entity, with that whole fifth spirit thing from the second part.
And then Danny shows this cool new world to Jazz, and Elsa introduces Danny to Anna, and now Jazz bonds with Elsa over having chaotic younger siblings who want to save everyone. And when Dani joins, she immediately goes to explore and cause chaos, and she meets that giant snow monster (did you know that his name is Marshmallow? Adorable) and for no particular reason they form some kind of friendship, so now people can see Dani being carried oh so gently by this living mountain. Well, when she's not out of kingdom, of course. She might be starting a revolution in some authoritarian country, don't mind her.
Danny thinks that Sam probably wouldn't like Anna and Kristoff much because they're just such naive sunshines and Sam is, well, goth. Sam tells Danny that if she hadn't liked naive sunshines, she wouldn't have befriended him and Tucker, and proceeds to have a long conversation with Anna about how being from a rich family sometimes makes having any relationship so much harder. She then starts talking with Kristoff about animals rights, and Danny thinks that maybe he unleashed a power he wouldn't be able to stop.
Tucker probably doesn't find anything that really catches his attention in this world because there's no cool tech, but maybe he tries to apply his tech knowledge to magic and gets some crazy results (what do you mean you can't use "water has memory" thing for phone/computer memory? Well, watch him make this new cool computer that can make pictures out of ice and is even capable of making 3-dimensional ice sculptures images! How? Well, some ecto, some runes that Dani found for him in this world, some science... He's just that smart, yes.)
There are unconfirmed sightings of very confused Dan surrounded by trolls. They might have accidentally adopted this sad angry boy to show him love and affection.
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Part 2 of The Gotham Puddle Boy: Danny Fenton
Danny wasn't too concerned about getting in a car with a stranger in what may well be the crime capital of the world.
If he got weirdo - or Dash-like - vibes he could just slip out of sight and vanish into the wind. Being half ghost made a lot of human dangers less so.
Plus, perks of being a Fenton: riding in the car with a stranger wouldn't make him nervous about their driving. No one in the world was worse at it than his dad.
So a few minutes of trading jokes and a promise of video games was all it really took to get Danny to say "sure" to going back to Tim's house.
The car was nice, at least, and they bantered over music even as they left city limits, which Danny chose to ignore for the time being.
Around 10 minutes later they turned to approach the gates of a veritable mansion that unfortunately brought forth the memory of his first time approaching Vlad's house.
He was silent as Tim buzzed them in, and as they crawled slowly up the driveway he took the opportunity to ask.
"You live here?”
“Yep! Bruce Wayne is my adoptive father. Welcome to Wayne Manor!"
Not long after the building’s front door was opening before they could touch the handle, with an older man in a suit greeting them. "Master Tim, welcome home. I see you've brought a guest."
A hand clapped down on his shoulder as he was introduced, "Danny this is Alfred, Alfred this is Danny. We'll be in my room playing Damned."
"It is a pleasure to meet a friend of Tim, Mister Danny."
"Ah, you too. And just Danny is fine, Mister Alfred."
Alfred smiled and secured a promise that they'd be down to at least stretch their legs and eat something after an hour had passed before Tim was ushering them through the building to his room.
Sam was a good person, but also openly hated rich people despite technically being one. Her parents, however, were a nightmare hidden behind a thin facade of civility when in public. Vlad was also a nightmare. Axion labs had been run by some tycoon and they killed their innocent dogs. Lex Luthor openly hated Superman - which would be totally understandable if it were because he never so much as glanced at Amity Park’s issues instead of because of his incredibly Xenophobic stance on any and all non-humans. All told, Danny didn’t have a good track record with -illionaires - not the adults, at least.
'...Okay, maybe I should just avoid Bruce,' he thought, settling on the floor at the foot of the bed in the enormous room they'd entered to face the gloriously massive TV while Tim booted it up.
An hour later, Alfred was knocking on the door to herd them to the dining room where he'd prepared "refreshments." It was nice to enjoy homemade food that didn't fight back for once - he hadn't eaten at Sam or Tucker's house in a while and takeout wasn't quite the same. Even if they were unfortunately healthy snacks - the strange slices he'd learned were apricot were surprisingly good.
Alfred had them stretch their legs again two hours later - this time snackless - and Tim decided to give him a tour. The house was immaculate and the kitchen would have made the Lunch Lady greener than normal with envy.
It was also empty.
"Don't you have a bunch of siblings?" he asked on the way back to the room.
"Yeah, but they're all out doing their own things until lunch." He stopped just after closing the door behind him to grin at him. "Speaking of which. Can you stay for lunch?"
Danny blinked at the sudden manic energy starkly contrasting with the incredibly normal question.
"Uh, I don't have to be back at the hotel until like 5, so, sure?"
"How do you feel about playing a little prank?"
Danny grinned, "What did you have in mind?"
---------------------------------
POV Jason
Jason’s patience was running incredibly thin. He had been looking at tubes of water for hours while Bruce kept asking variations of the same question. His only consolation was that Duke took up half of the attention or he might have punched him by now.
The only reason he even showed up was that he’d been told there was potential Lazarus water in Gotham - or something similar. But after hours upon hours of tests by the computer and him and Duke staring at it he was certain; that was water. Bruce had lost it.
Just as he braced himself to try and knock some sense into Bruce, Alfred came to fetch them to lunch.
‘Finally,’ he thought, power-walking to the exit.
“I’ll be up in a minute, I want to set up one more scan to run while we’re eating,” Bruce threw after them.
“It had better only be a minute.” He paused to glower ominously over his shoulder, simmering with rage at all of the wasted time - and using that to smother the concern trying to bubble up.
“Finally,” Duke said once they were out of the batcave. “I thought we were going to be in there forever!”
Jason ignored him as he fished out his phone.
“Oh hey, group text from Tim; he has a guest that fits the family theme so he’s going to try and prank Bruce to see if he’s actually ‘lost the plot.’”
Jason grimaced, “Great, so instead of a productive lunch we’ll be playing house plus ‘guest that definitely isn’t the former Jason Todd, just a very similarly looking friend of the family’ for an hour.” He ran a hand down his face, sighing in frustration. “Count me ou-”
He froze in place, every muscle flinching to a stop.
“Uh, Jason?”
“Quiet.” He hissed, eyes darting to the stairs as voices began to drift their way.
Every hair stood on end as he stood there, something in his blood echoing dissonant signals of danger-run-hide-flee-don’t move-stay still-stop-stop-stop even as his conscious mind demanded he confront the problem head-on. But he couldn’t move - frozen as surely as if he’d been hit by one of Freeze’s ice rays.
As the stranger came into view his mind gave up on the danger signals, finally settling on don’t move don’t move don’t move even as near-unbearable levels of anxiety bubbled up in his gut. He barely registered Tim standing next to the guy as his head turned to stare him down, Jason’s eyes widening and shoulders hunching now that this… person’s full attention was on him.
The person hesitated a moment at the top of the stairs before smiling.
“Hi! I’m Danny, you must be Tim’s brothers?” he chirped, voice friendly enough that the anxiety uncurled just a bit. Just enough for Jason to register Tim staring at him oddly and Duke looking between the two of them.
Tim descended the stairs, done waiting for “Danny” to take the initiative, perhaps, while Duke took his silence as a cue to give the guy his cover story.
“Just me, actually,” he said. “The name’s Duke. J here is a friend of the family.”
“Oh, uh, nice to meet you both anyway. Sorry for crashing you guys’ lunch,” he rubbed a hand over the back of his neck sheepishly before following Tim down to their level, still smiling calmly. “My parents are in town for some engineering convention and Tim kind of rescued me from dying of boredom.”
Abruptly, Jason found himself completely calm - relaxed, even. Suspiciously so; all of the rage and frustration he’d felt ever since emerging from the Lazarus Pit was suddenly swapped out for a level of relaxation he could nearly call “Zen.”
He would nearly suspect a meta had broken Bruce’s rules, but he was the only one to react. Tim and Duke were clearly unaffected and the guy was either one hell of an actor or had genuinely only noticed him when he saw him.
Meaning this was potentially Lazarus related - and even that thought could not cut through the sheer tranquility he was feeling to cause panic. His thoughts, at least, were unaffected.
Also, he kind of just wanted to enjoy not being angry for the first time in ages. Sue him.
So he plastered on a Wayne-family PR smile and ended the second awkward silence of the day.
“Don’t worry about it; any friend of Tim’s is a friend of ours, at any rate. We have maybe two more minutes before Alfred actually manages to wrangle Bruce out of his study, why don’t you fill me in on this prank.”
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