Ghost Doctor
Danny became the new underground Gotham's doctor, unlike Dr.Leslie he treats anyone as long as they're willing to find him (and it is hard if is not the right time) and pay the price.
This may sound extremely sinister but the reality was that Danny was not interested in money; he was already King of a dimension and his funds were not going to run out while he was on vacations.
The treatments vary, along with the reviews, but this is due to the prices he give. When Danny treated the Joker, the clown ended up shaking and almost regretting his actions, falling into a laugh full of madness (Danny's price was simple: Face the same thing you put your victims through)
But when Dr. Freeze knocked on his door, tearfully begging to treat Nora, Danny cured her, his price being a smile and a plea "Live happily with your wife for as long as you can."
With all the knowledge that Frostbite teach him combined with Clockwork showing him all human advances on the future (is not illegal if your ghost parent show you) he rented a warehouse and with the help of some ghosts he dig a hole the same size as the warehouse but meters underground, after that he used his powers and sinked it directly into the hole; he developed all his machinery there, turning it into a Bunker that he was the only one who could access.
Therefore, Danny was a mystery, a danger, his prices were varied and he treated anyone: villain, hero, anti-hero, mafia, criminals, innocents, metas, etc. but your values and actions were what whispered your charge and not even an extremely high amount of money would convince him of giving you a different treatment.
Of course, when Jason jokingly visited him asking to cure the pits (He knew it had no cure), his slightest hope was rewarded when the Doctor simply smiled and accepted (His price? A date).
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DP x DC AU: Danny desperately wants to find the explosion guy. Tim is really good at covering his tracks... he didn't account for ghosts.
The explosions make it onto TV as purported terror activity and most people haven't heard of that part of the world much less ever given a second thought to care about it. The only real reason it gets reported on has something to do with the Justice League and... Danny knows too much.
He's been in training for Clockwork's court (which he's suspicious of- feels like kingly duty bullshit- but Danny is playing along out of curiosity for now) and he's learned a lot about how the living and non-living worlds collide. That means learning about CW's usual suspects- one of which just happened to have a ton of bases around the area Danny was seeing on the news.
It didn't take long for Danny to try to piece together that whoever blew up Nanda Parbat was trying to fuck with the League of Shadows, and was doing it successfully. Less green portals in the world the better, same goes for assassins. But it gets Danny thinking... Maybe he can employ similar tactics on the GIW Bases that keep spawning on the edges of Amity Park. It would at least set them back while he and his friends navigated the help line desk to request Justice League intervention. None of them can leave Amity Park, so outreach is going to have to be creative.
So Danny figures he'll just find the guy. Call up some ghosts who were there, or er, came from there and get a profile and track him down. But the ghosts keep saying it was The Detective. Annoying!
Danny goes full conspiracy theory, gets Tucker and Sam involved, and begrudgingly asks Wes Weston his thoughts.
He hadn't expected Wes to garble out a thirty minute presentation (that had 100 more slides left to go before he cut it off) about how Batman totally trained with a cult and so did his kids. Danny kind of rolled his eyes but... hey, new avenue of searching in the Infinite Realms at least.
The ghosts confirm that Bombs is for sure not Batman's MO- But maybe his second kid would know? The second kid was already brought back to life though, so no way to easily reach him... Danny starts to realize that this might be the work of a Robin now. Wasn't the red one known for solving cold cases? (Sam provides this information- its a social faux pas to not know hero gossip at Gotham Galas- everything she's learned is against her will).
It all comes to a head when Danny goes about the hard task of opening a portal for the guy to come through at just the right time, explain the infinite realms so he doesn't panic and then describe what the fuck was going on with the GIW. It takes months, just over a full year, of random (educated guesses) portal generating- Finally, Red Robin drops into the land of the dead.
"So, you're the guy I've got to talk to about explosions right?" Danny enthusiastically asks.
Tim thinks he's died and landed in the after life following 56 hours of being awake and plummeting off the side of a building into a Lazarus pool. Nothing makes sense about the kid in front of him.
"Yeah, I got a guy for munitions." Tim answers cooly.
"How do you feel about secretly sanctioned government operations that violate protected rights?"
"Gotta get rid of 'em some how. Need me to point you in the right direction?" This might as well be happening.
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It’s kind of funny and kind of sad how differently Tim Drake and Robin are viewed. They have very different reputations.
Robin is a skilled, dependable, and courageous hero who can take on Gotham’s most dangerous rogues, but because of Robin, Tim Drake is seen as flighty and unreliable, a weenie who gets beaten on by dime store bullies.
Robin is a stick in the mud. He has experience, he (seems to) know what he’s doing when the rest are still tripping over themselves. He’s the one other kid superheroes measure themselves against. They figure out he’s a scared but passionate dork eventually, but that takes months to years of getting to know him.
Tim is easygoing and sweet, but a total weirdo. Tim’s civilian friends and girlfriend think he’s a flake. He’s always running out on them or cancelling. His dad thinks he’s lazy, or a delinquent.
There’s this fascinating dichotomy of who Tim is, how he is perceived, and who he thinks he has to be, depending on whether or not he is wearing a mask. Part of the fun of Young Justice is watching the tension between these things escalate, as each member of the team realizes who they thought he is or who they want him to be is not the real Tim
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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?"
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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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I know the morality play of the Raphael/Atem duel gets...weird, a little bit. There's a bizarre emphasis on how Raphael believes it's selfish and wrong to carelessly send monsters to the graveyard and that gets played up in this duel, but...many, many previous duels have showed how sacrificing monsters and having them in the graveyard can be a good strategy, and work to one's advantage. It isn't always such a terrible thing. Atem using catapult turtle to win a duel is not exactly a new strategy for him, he's done it before, and it's far from the worst thing he's ever done if we consider season 0 canon. and yet the episode frames that as the big indicator of Atem "giving into darkness" which.........eh?
But. There is something deeper at play in this duel that goes far beyond how people treat their trading cards. The real problem here- and Yugi will spell this out later- is that Atem struggles a bit with empathy, but he especially struggles with it when his pride is on the line. This duel really had no stakes in it- Raphael tells him the professor is fine, and he states point blank he isn't going to use the Seal of Orichalcos- there is nothing to lose here.
But the two of them bet on their "sense of justice" at the start. To Atem, this is a very black and white morality. Atem's sense of justice tells him that Doma and any working with it are wrong (objectively true) and therefore anyone working with them is also evil (less objectively true). He can't quite see that the enemy in front of him might not be Bad with a capital B. Good is good, bad is bad, so if you're doing bad and working with bad- you're bad. Even if he respects you as an opponent. But what he can't really see is that Raphael is, fundamentally, a good person making bad choices because he's been hurt. Raphael basically spells it out for him, and he still can't see it.
So in many ways, this is the world view that Atem is betting on in this duel- Raphael is working with the organization that's trying to destroy the world, therefore he's evil, and Atem is good. And Atem has to be good, right? He's fought evil, he's won, he's not bad, he's not dark like the others who use milliennium items, he's not the "evil intelligence" Pegasus warned of in the manga and he definitely couldn't possibly have been an evil Pharaoh when he was alive...right?
And that's the other thing Atem can't admit, and it's what Raphael calls him out on most directly- Atem can't admit to his own darkness. He can't acknowledge the darkness in his heart, the potential for evil in everyone. Things have to be black and white for him, because if not...what is he? And it's so easy for Raphael to dig into this insecurity, it is so easy for him to make Atem doubt his own goodness- because he doesn't know who he was, does he? But he can't believe it, can't make himself believe he was a bad person before, and he definitely can't believe that he could be now. This is what's at stake for Atem during this game- it's his entire sense of self, really.
And this logic is actually deeply consistent with the earliest version of Atem- season 0/first manga arc Atem, and I'd argue, the morality play of this duel only really works when you consider that first arc/season 0. Stay with me now.
In season 0, Atem challenged "bad" people to shadow games with the intent that the game would decide who was right or wrong based on the outcome. The losers of his earliest shadow games usually lost because they couldn't follow the rules based on some character flaw. The games exposed their weaknesses and they paid the price for it. This was why he was always so confident- he was acting based on his sense of justice, and was absolutely certain in the correctness of his position (which, to be fair, was usually "save Yugi and/or his friends from literally dying), so...it wasn't necessarily an incorrect stance. Atem was doling out some pretty harsh penalty games, but he wasn't wrong about the flaws of these people he challenged.
What we never did was consider whether or not these people really deserved the punishments they were given. Did a high school bully really deserve to be tortured into insanity? Did an escaped criminal deserve to be burned alive? All justice, no empathy. But is that really justice at all? Now to be fair, with Yugi's influence Atem does calm down a lot over the course of season 0 and into Duel Monsters canon. He becomes a much better person. But we never exactly see him express remorse for the penalty games he inflicted, either. We never see him question his choices, or whether he was right or wrong.
Games are form of justice to him. To lose a game is to be in the wrong. He never lost, therefore, he was never wrong.
This inability to question his own beliefs and actions, to consider his own capacity for darkness, and to truly empathize with the person on the other side of the field, is what leads to him losing the test Raphael gives him. It is why he can justify playing the Seal himself- the methods don't matter to Atem in the moment- if he wins, he was right, he was good, and he's always been right and good, and that is all that matters because his sense of self is actually really fucking fragile if the outcome of a card game can shatter it- so he plays the Seal.
It reminds me of a quote from Avatar- "Pride is not the opposite of shame, but it's source." Atem is someone with an enormous amount of pride- and an equal amount of shame lingering just under the surface. Because I think that question Pegasus first posed to him- that question of evil- has been festering for a long time. I think Atem knows, deep down, that his early shadow games were wrong, they weren't that different from Pegasus or Marik or even Doma themselves- but he cannot go there with it, cannot let himself question it. I'll get into this more later, but Yugi will later tell him that in his doggedly stubborn sense of pride and honor, he can't hear others' pain or suffering. And I think this stubborn clinging to his sense of pride is a way of masking his own pain and suffering too, his own deeply felt shame- because Atem can't really hear that either.
Until he loses the game. Until he loses Yugi, and it shatters his pride completely, breaks him wide open.
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