When I was a kid my family pretended to get raptured so I would think I was left behind on earth while they all went to heaven.
I was like 8 years old and my sister and mom had gotten really into the Left Behind novels (bible fan fic about the rapture). In the books when the rapture happened the clothes that people were wearing when they got raptured were left behind in neatly folded piles.
One day when I was getting home from school my family decided that they would leave piles of neatly folded clothes around the house, and then hide in the basement.
The intended effect was that I would get home and see the clothes then, think that my family had been raptured and that I wasn’t good enough to get into heaven… or something?
The problem was that I had never read these books, and didn’t really think about the rapture very often. There was no reason that I would see some laundry on the floor and think “The rapture happened and I’ve been abandoned by God! I’ll never see my family again!! Oh nooo!!!!”
I just sat down and watched cartoons and eventually my family got bored and revealed that they were all hiding in the basement.
It’s a good thing I didn’t understand the joke, otherwise that shit would have been traumatic.
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Gray and Graysons
One of the Bats has a secret. Something they never told to the others.
They were so very young but they have memories of a sibling, so small and tiny. They remember the burst of warmth they had in their heart when they held the tiny baby for just a moment.
But they weren’t allowed to keep them, their family couldn’t raise them. Money was tight, just enough for three but not for four, despite their shows always bringing in a crowd it was getting harder and harder for the world to be wowed by them in the new age and their sibling was too small and tiny and needed to be cared in a single place than for them to be on the road. Their lifestyle was not good for his tiny sibling apparently.
They had to watch as their parents gave his sibling away to people in suits, them promising to give his baby brother to a loving family when they find a ‘home’ for him. He watched his parents try to be strong only for his mother to break down once the car left down the road, his father holding her and apologizing, the rest of the circus troupe all silently coming over to give the heartbroken family condolences.
Richard ‘Dick’ Grayson had tears running down his face when he last saw his baby brother.
A brother he got to name before he had to be given away.
Daniel ‘Danny’ Grayson.
-x-x-
Dick never told the others. If anyone dug deep into his past they might find his brother’s birth records maybe, if someone got around to digitizing the paperwork for him but given the fact he was placed in the US childcare systems just a few days after his birth and the fact that Dick was still pretty young they most likely believed he didn’t remember his baby brother now. Not after so many years.
But they were wrong, Dick remembers. And he kept the secret close to his heart and memories.
And the only physical evidence he had was a single picture of him holding his brother, a smile on his tiny face towards their father who had taken the photo of them together. When he had lost his parents, lost most of the things that connected him to them, to his past in the circus that had been his whole life, had been taken from him in Gotham’s ruthless childcare system, he held on tight to the picture in secret. Hid it away from anyone trying to rip it from him, hid it from Bruce when the man took him in days later, hid it from Alfred despite how gentle the butler was towards him. He couldn’t, wouldn’t risk losing his photo at the time, he hadn’t trusted anyone and by the time he did he didn’t have the heart to reveal it.
So yes, the existence of his baby brother Danny was his most guarded and best kept secret.
So that’s why Dick, as Nightwing, nearly died from a heart attack when leaving a Justice League meeting he spotted a familiar face among one of the new engineers working in the Watchtower.
It was like seeing a young version of himself. Only, Dick could see that the young man was more than a copy of him, so much more than a clone. He held many traces of John Grayson but also had a bit more of Mary Grayson than Dick did. Small details that Dick foggely remembers taking note when he had held his baby brother.
“Hey, hurry up with that report Gray!” Shouted the head engineer from down the hall, his hand beckoning the young adult to come over.
“Coming! And boss, I told you Danny is fine!” Danny shouted back before hurriedly leaving a stunned Nightwing.
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