Thanks to @sliveringcarnival I am now currently fixated on Carolus' and Charles brotherly dynamic...
Chucky had been sipping on some tea, enjoying his calm quiet breakfast, since everyone had still been asleep. He was actually feeling semi-helpful and went out to grab the mail. It had been the usual bills and magazine ads, however, two envelopes stood out to him. Seeing it had his name on it, he tore the thing open and read its contents, nearly choking on his drink. He immediately bolted to his twin brother's room, practically kicking down the door.
"CAROOOO!"
"What? It's like 7 am on a Saturday"
"Aufwachen, aufwachen, aufwachen!!!"
(wake up)
"I'm up..."
"I GOT IN!"
"For what?"
".....College! University whatever the word is....AND THEY SENT YOUR IN TOO OPEN IT"
Carolus was operating on 4 hours of sleep, not fully grasping what his twin had been blabbering on about.
"Okay Okay...To Carolus Klaus Reinhardt we are pleased to welcome you too----I GOT IN! WE BOTH GOT IN"
"WE BOTH IN! What were you even applying for?"
"To get my degree in criminal justice"
"Yeah that. CONGRATS!"
"Congratulations to you too! What are you going into again?"
"Engineering and Mathematics"
"Right that!"
"MOM!"
"MOM!"
"....What are you two screaming about?"
"WE GOT IN!!!"
"WE GOT ACCEPTED INTO COLLEGE!"
"OH MY GOD CONGRATULATIONS!!! I'm so proud of you both!!!"
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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I'm in A Mood™ (stressed) so im going back to my roots of melting two character together into one person. So bruce wayne!danny fenton. Danny Fenton who, for eight years, grew up in a beautiful gothic manor with his mom and dad under the name "Bruce Wayne". Playing piano with his mother, running around the manor with his father.
Then when he's eight it's ripped away from him. There's blood on his hands and pearls pooling at his feet, and both his parents are dead in front of him.
And he gets shipped off to distant relatives "the Fentons" shortly after, Alfred close on his heels because someone needs to take care of him, someone that knows him. Bruce goes to the Fentons for the safety of anonymity. Gotham's press wants to sink its teeth into him.
Danny misses his city even if it took everything from him. There are shadows in his eyes and he's pale as a sheet even beside his distant cousins, and they change his name to "Danny Fenton' because nobody should know that their newest child was illustrious orphan Bruce Wayne.
They call him Bruce behind closed doors. Danny prefers it that way, he clings onto the name -- the one his parents gave him -- like a lifeline. He makes friends with Sam and Tucker. Tucker takes one look at the willowy, morbid little boy standing in the corner like a shade, ghosts in his eyes, and drags him out into the sunlight, and takes him over to Sam.
When Danny is twelve, he's still not over it -- and he's a little obsessed with the Fentons' research, with the morbid. He has books upon books on death, murder, detective work. Anything he can get his hands on. And stars. He loves stars.
Alfred owns the apartment next to them and comes over regularly. Danny clings to him.
When Danny is twelve, he's still quiet, meek, a shy little thing prone to being bullied. Freaky little Fenton with the night in his eyes and too-cold skin even before he put one foot in the grave. in a sleepover in his room with Sam and Tucker, he tells them the truth. They're his friends, he trusts them.
"My name is Bruce." he murmurs, voice quiet as the breeze, always quiet. he's staring at his star-covered sheets.
"Like Bruce Wayne?" Tucker asks, a joking tone in his voice.
Danny smiles a little, lamb-like with insecurity. "I am Bruce Wayne." And he takes them down to the lab, disrupting Maddie and Jack, to prove it. Sam tells them of her own wealth then shortly after. They start calling Danny "Bruce" in private too -- its trust. Thats what it is. It's trust.
Sam goes to media functions and comes back with aching feet and complaints on her tongue -- and Danny soaks it up all like a sponge, splayed across a beanbag chair with Tucker in her room. He's not envious of her, he used to go to events with his parents and they kept him safe from the ugly of Gotham's Elite. For the most part. He's had comments made at him, he doesn't miss them.
Alfred returns to the manor semi-regularly, Danny goes with him. he wanders the hallways and helps Alfred clean, the last thing either of them want is for their home to fall into disrepair. He brings Jazz with him next time, then Tucker, then Sam. They all help him clean, and he shows them his room. The one across from his parents', it feels strange.
When Danny dies when he's fourteen, the first adult he tells is Alfred. He and Jazz go over to his house more often than they stay in the Fentonworks building. At least at Alfred's, the food doesn't come to life. Alfred sits at the kitchen table and weeps when Danny tells him, Jazz is upstairs, and its just the two of them.
Danny's ghost form wears pearls around his wrist and the gloves look stained with some kind of black substance. He looks like a child who died in a lab accident, but he also looks like a child who has shadows dripping off his shoulders, curling at his feet, hanging from his eyes.
because amorphous blob batman has my heart always and danny/bruce will not escape it even in death even if that IS the only reason im giving him Mild BatBlob Vibes...so far
when they go to the manor, alfred helps danny make a pile of stones between Martha and Thomas' graves, nobody but the two of them (and sam and tucker) will know what it means. (not even bruce's children later down the line, not for a long, long time)
danny dives into ghost fighting on shaky feet and not half as witty as he once was in one world. he's skittish, skittering between blasts from shadow to shadow and clumsily making his way through each battle. but helping people lights a fire in him. he still has shadows dripping off his feet but there's a purpose in his eyes.
and god help him, he's going to help people.
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