#this is from practice btw | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

starry-bi-sky · 1 month

Text

i need to get this out of my head before i continue clone^2 but danny being the first batkid. Like, standard procedure stuff: his parents and sister die, danny ends up with Vlad Masters. He drags him along to stereotypical galas and stuff; Danny is not having a good time.

He ends up going to one of the Wayne Galas being hosted ever since elusive Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham. Vlad is crowing about having this opportunity as he's been wanting to sink his claws into the company for a long while now. Danny is too busy grieving to care what he wants.

And like most Galas, once Vlad is done showing him off to the other socialites and the like, he disappears. Off to a dark corner, or to one of the many balconies; doesn't matter. There he runs into said star of the show, Bruce who is still young, has been Batman for at least a year at this point, but still getting used to all these damn people and socializing. He's stepped off to hide for a few minutes before stepping back into the shark tank.

And he runs into a kid with circles under his eyes and a dull gleam in them. Familiar, like looking into a mirror.

Danny tries to excuse himself, he hasn't stopped crying since his parents died and it's been months. He rubs his eyes and stands up, and stumbles over a half-hearted apology to Mister Wayne. Some of Vlad's etiquette lessons kicking in.

Bruce is awkward, but he softens. "That's alright, lad," he says, pulling up some of that Brucie Wayne confidence, "I was just coming out here to get some fresh air."

There's a little pressing; Bruce asks who he's here with, Danny says, voice quiet and grief-stricken, that he's with his godfather Vlad Masters. Bruce asks him if he knows where he is, and Danny tells him he does. Bruce offers to leave, Danny tells him to do whatever he wants.

It ends with Bruce staying, standing off to the side with Danny in silence. Neither of them say a word, and Danny eventually leaves first in that same silence.

Bruce looks into Vlad Masters after everything is over, his interest piqued. He finds news about him taking in Danny Fenton: he looks into Danny Fenton. He finds news articles about his parents' deaths, their occupations, everything he can get his hands on.

At the next gala, he sees Danny again. And he looks the same as ever: quiet like a ghost, just as pale, and full of grief. Bruce sits in silence with him again for nearly ten minutes before he strikes a conversation.

"Do you like to do anything?"

Nothing. Just silence.

Bruce isn't quite sure what to do: comfort is not his forte, and Danny doesn't know him. He's smart enough to know that. So he starts talking about other things; anything he can think of that Brucie Wayne might say, that also wasn't inappropriate for a kid to hear.

Danny says nothing the entire time, and is again the first to leave.

Bruce watches from a distance as he intercts with Vlad Masters; how Vlad Masters interacts with him. He doesn't like what he sees: Vlad Masters keeps a hand on Danny's shoulder like one would hold onto the collar of a dog. He parades him around like a trophy he won.

And there are moments, when someone gets too close or when someone tries to shake Danny's hand, of deep possessiveness that flints over Vlad Masters' eyes. Like a dragon guarding a horde.

He plays the act of doting godfather well: but Bruce knows a liar when he sees one. Like recognizes like.

Danny is dull-eyed and blank faced the entire time; he looks miserable.

So Bruce tries to host more parties; if only so that he can talk to Danny alone. Vlad seems all too happy to attend, toting Danny along like a ribbon, and on the dot every hour, Danny slips away to somewhere to hide. Bruce appears twenty minutes later.

"I was looking into your godfather's company," he says one night, trying to think of more things to say. Some nights all they do is sit in silence. "Some of my shareholders were thinking of partnering up--"

"Don't."

He stops. Danny hardly says a word to him, he doesn't even look at him -- he's sitting on the ground, his head in his knees. Like he's trying to hide from the world. But he's looking, blue eyes piercing up at Bruce.

Bruce tilts his head, practiced puppy-like. "Pardon?"

"Don't." Danny says, strongly. "Don't make any deals with Vlad."

It's the most words Danny's spoken to him, and there's a look in his eyes like a candle finding its spark. Something hard. Bruce presses further, "And why is that?"

The spark flutters, and flushes out. Danny blinks like he's coming out of a trance, and slumps back into himself. "Just don't."

Bruce stares at him, thoughtful, before looking away. "Alright. I won't."

And they fall back into silence.

Danny, when he leaves, turns to look at Bruce, "I mean it." He says; soft like he's telling a secret, "Don't make any deals with him. Don't be alone with him. Don't work with him."

He's scampered away before Bruce can question him further.

(He never planned on working with Vlad Masters and his company; he's done his research. He's seen the misfortune. But nothing ever leads back to him. There's no evidence of anything. But Danny knows something.)

At their next meeting, Danny starts the conversation. It's new, and it's welcomed. He says, cutting through their five minute quiet, that he likes stars. And he doesn't like that he can't see them in Gotham.

Bruce hums in interest, and Danny continues talking. It's as if floodgates had been opened, and as Bruce takes a sip of his wine, it tastes like victory.

("Tucker told me once--") ("Tucker?") ("Oh-- uh, one of my best friends. He's a tech geek. We haven't talked in a while.")

(Danny shut down in his grief -- his friends are worried, but can't reach him. When he goes back to the manor with Vlad, he fishes out his phone and sends them a message.)

(They are ecstatic to hear from him.)

It all culminates until one day, when Danny is leaving to go back inside, that Bruce speaks up. "You know," He says, leaning against the railing. "The manor has many rooms; plenty of space for a guest."

The implication there, hidden between the lines. And Danny is smart, he looks at Bruce with a sharp glean in his eyes, and he nods. "Good to know."

The next time they see each other, Danny has something in his hands. "Can you hold onto something for me?" He asks.

When Bruce agrees, Danny places a pearl into his palm. or, at least, it's something that looks like a pearl. Because it's cold to the touch; sinking into Bruce's white silk gloves with ease and shimmering like an opal. It moves a little as it settles into his hand, and the moves like its full of liquid.

Bruce has never seen anything like it before, but he does know this; it's not human. "What is it?" He asks, and Danny looks uncomfortable.

"I can't tell you that." He says, shifting on his foot like he's scared of someone seeing it. "But please be careful with it. Treat it like it's extremely fragile."

When Bruce gets home, he puts it in an empty ring box and hides the box in the cave. He tries researching into what it is. he can't find anything concrete.

Everything comes to a head one day when Danny appears at the manor's doorstep one evening, soaking wet in the rain, and bleeding from the side.

#dpxdc #dp x dc #danny fenton is not the ghost king #dpxdc crossover #dpdc #dp x dc crossover #dpxdc prompt #man i just really need more dpdc stuff where danny and bruce have a good relationship. like man i NEED it. like i need to see these two #bonding together. and not in a cracky 'oh danny is a distant friend/cousin/etc' stuff but like. active participants in each other's lives #or as active as can be in this case. i neeeeed these two getting along and caring about one another #this idea came to me like last night and hasn't left since nd it was driving me up the wall to think about both positively and negatively b #i neeeded someone to hear about this or i was gonna implode #danny is the first son #tried to just get the general gist of the idea down but i definitely thought of the idea that bruce lowkey suspects vlad for having a hand #Vlad allows Danny to sneak off because he thinks Danny is alone. if he knew Bruce was there he'd be piiisssed and would put a stop to it #Sam and Tucker are alive they just got ghosted for a bit by danny bc he was in Major Grief and didn't wanna socialize. He couldn't go to #them because he didn't wanna put them in danger via Vlad.#oh that thing he handed Bruce? Yeah that's his ghost core. I have a headcanon (that isnt always applied) that ghosts can take their cores #out of their bodies at will and painlessly and without issue. and its common practice actually to do so bc they can be a not insignificant #distance away from said core before problems start to act up. and its common for ghosts to leave their physical cores at their lairs for #safekeeping because as long as the physical core is fine: so is the ghost. they can reform if their body gets destroyed. it also acts as a #fast travel sometimes. where they can reform at their core in an instant. its not inspired in the slightest by SU but i do see the overlap #most cores are pretty small for safety sake: its harder to hit if its small. and they're pr resilient too but its better to be safe than #sorry. so yeah. danny essentially gave bruce the physical embodiment of his soul and indirectly said #'if anything happens to me at least i'll be safe with you'#danny doesn't know he's batman btw #starry rambles.#was gonna go into danny becoming a vigilante beside bruce but im sleeeepy so i'll do that in a reblog. he's gonna go by nightingale if #anyone is interested. stereotypical but to be frank it is a *good* name imo. has a good amount of syllables and consonants to it #and the bird theme. and since its part of an ancestral name it has even more backing for it being bird-y without being meta

307 notes · View notes

feartoxinjelloshot · 1 month

Text

The Black Mask was both with the name Roman, to Charles and Ruby Sionis, the wealthy proprietors of a cosmetics business empire based in Gotham City.

By all accounts he was a normal toddler. He was weaned off of milk and sent to preschool and potty-trained and all of the other things small children were bound to do. He was a quiet, polite, intelligent little boy who did his parents proud - they had been trying for a child for a long time, someone to inherit the business when they passed on. They made sure tiny Roman was aware of his importance early on. What better way to make a child feel special, feel loved? They were going to trust him with everything. He was going to be just fine at it.

The company, really, was Ruby's world. She was a woman, and cosmetics were a feminine empire. Charles - though he held his fair share of business responsibilities - was always more dedicated to his lifelong passion for hunting and taxidermy, which had been instilled in him by long family trips with his own father, out to remote stretches of forest, mountain and grassland to take down all kinds of exotic trophy prizes. When Roman got old enough Charles bravely attempted the same with him, even buying him his first very own gun for his tenth birthday. Roman was shy and hesitant, sometimes to the point of vexing his father with his lack of confidence, but Charles was patient and understanding and slowly coaxed the hunt out of Roman as well. The kid had a real talent for it, when he got over himself enough to calm down and aim. He was a genuine crackshot, and his father bragged about it at every chance, talking him up and ruffling his hair fondly. Those were some of the few times Charles saw his son show him a real smile.

The other side of it was not as comforting.

See, both sides of Roman's family line, in varying quantities and distributions, had always been prone to hereditary psychosis. This particular affliction had miraculously skipped both of his parents, and in a superstitious attempt to ward it away from themselves and their son, they neglected to ever mention it to him. In fact, they made a concentrated attempt to prevent him from ever figuring out what psychosis was in any meaningful way that might affect his development.

Roman grew up surrounded by animals. Sometimes they were whole animals, deer and tigers and caribou; sometimes they were just the head, set into a wooden plate on the wall. Each had a different personality and a different voice. They had been his friends since he was a baby, and he considered them truer confidants than even his parents. They comforted him when he was at his worst, spoke to him in quiet tones that he had learned by that point not to respond to in front of his parents: it's okay, you're okay, champ and you only did what he made you do and but you won't pick that awful gun up again, right?

But he never forgave himself for killing their sisters, the ones in the woods that looked and moved like them, with beating hearts in their chests and big shining eyes that went flat when his father finished them off. He never forgave himself for skinning them with a silver knife and eating their flanks when there was nothing else in the camp at night, because his father said he was proud of him and his chest was cleaved down the middle by a child's sick loyalty.

At a lack of other avenues Roman constructed himself into two faces. The first one was a happy, healthy little human boy who went to school and smiled at his parents and never made eye contact with any of his father's taxidermy or walked around the house at night on soft padding feet. The other one was his true self - an animal, among other animals, whose face looked less like the one in the bathroom mirror and more like a black thing with white eyes, too big to be a wolf and too small to be a bear, that howled its gleeful music up the chimney along with the chorus that lit up the mansion's crowded hallways just before dawn.

And for a while he survived like that: with his mask in the day and his life at night, not content but not wholly unhappy either.

But he had done his job well. He had done his job so well that his parents, through a combination of their own prideful ignorance and Roman's genuine deception of them, had not noticed that anything at all was wrong with their son. He passed his classes and didn't make trouble and spoke of his friends on occasion, and went hunting with his father every summer, and he was fine. They were all fine.

So on his eighteenth birthday they gathered him up and had a party for appearances and said Son, we had you late. We were old then and we're older now. We want to retire. And we love you, and we trust you, and so we're going to give you the company.

And Roman thanked them, gathered every shred of his human mask up to his face, looked at it, realized it wasn't going to be enough to cover himself up, and went deep into the house with his friends and didn't come out.

His parents were devastated. They'd been working so hard for this. The past eighteen years, and they'd been raising him for this. He loved them. They loved him. How could he be unhappy? And throwing a tantrum like a child? What had they raised him for if not this moment?

Roman, in the house, had been busy with the process of taking one of his father's unused taxidermy mounts, a deep dark glossy lacquered thing, and using his hands and a whittling knife to carve it into his real face.

The black mask. The wolf. It came out looking more like a skull, but he figured that it was penance, after all, for all the siblings he had killed. He put it on and was overcome with hysterical calm relief, which was when his parents found the spare key to his rooms and broke in.

Their anger at him for what he had done quickly turned to rage at each other, and the company, and then Roman again, and each other, and through their screaming match and Roman's hysteria and the ceaseless chattering of the animals on the walls, nobody remembered the leftover sconces of candles downstairs until the smoke alarm went off.

To be short: Roman made it out. He was the only one.

Obviously, he was the primary suspect for the fire. They didn't believe that he couldn't have engineered the physical evidence, or that he wasn't lying about where he was at the time. There was nobody else alive from the house to confirm his statement. His face would never be the same again, that much was clear: the detectives and psychiatrists made quick work of the family mental history that he claimed he had never even heard about before that point - fat chance, kid - and by the time he got around to blabbering over his so-called siblings nobody took him seriously at all. They wrote him up. He couldn't be officially accused until the hearing, but it was an open-and-shut case. Poor bastard, but hey, it's Gotham. Shit like this happens every other week.

Roman Sionis never made it to the hearing. He was out of the hospital for three hours before anyone noticed he was gone and his trail stopped cold at the exit doors. In forty-eight hours he had gone from one of the richest teenagers in the city to homeless, penniless, barefoot, and permanently disfigured - the fresh lacquer on his wooden mask had melted in the heat and fused straight onto his face, unless he wanted a complete transplant, skin and all.

Roman didn't. He figured that he had hidden enough. In his abject shock, he was starting to show some of his father's confidence, something he really always had hidden somewhere in the back but had always been pressing himself down too hard to show. He went into the guts of the city and stole a new set of clothes - all black, like the mask. If he was going to do this, he might as well do it in style. He was intelligent, a fast-talker, knew when to be quiet, and he really was still a crackshot, even after all those years. That was shit that could get a man pretty far down where he was.

The police never found Roman Sionis. They found the man who wore his body, sure, but the boy had been gone for a long, long time.

#black mask backstory piece because i felt like it #uneditied and its 1am btw. which is to say IGNORE ANY TYPOS PLEASEEEE #scribbles #clipsverse #black mask #roman sionis #its been haunting me that the image i have of kid roman in my brain is literally just thst one guy from metal family. can anyone here me #i WILL practice music all summer. etc

89 notes · View notes