What Do You Have There?
A knife!
Danny plunked the butter knife in its pedestal of importance. The nice thing about having a billionaire vigilante for a... foster is the amount of money Danny was allowed to drop on his hobbies. For example, his extensive collection of souvenirs.
They're not just any old regular souvenirs. No, no, no. That would be so boring! No, these souvenirs, he obtained from the various muggings, knife fights, and various other situations he's been in ever since he was dropped ungraciously into Gotham.
The butter knife? Damian. Precocious, stabby Damian who he had startled into the stab instinct. A point of pride, really. Danny knew Damian was good at fighting! It was practically, in ghost terms, a super enthusiastic hello! Yes, the butter knife would be kept in the well lit part of the wall. Alfred had told him to stay home today to recuperate. He didn't need it, since the wound would heal in an hour or two, but he'd take staying at home any day.
A couple of hours later, well into the afternoon and right before what Danny knew to be their patrol hours, Danny had a visitor.
"Danny."
"Oh, hey, Damian! What's up?" Danny turned around to see Damian hovering awkwardly near the door.
"I am here to... check upon your wound. It is imperative that it gets proper treatment."
Ancients, Damian was exactly like those alley kids. He just ate a thesaurus instead of the drawling accent the alley kids picked up. Which meant Damian endeared himself to Danny pretty quickly. Like a little ghostling.
"Oh, I'm good. See? No blood is leaking out of the wound." Danny held up spotless bandages.
Danny watched Damian step into his haunt- his room- with a pleased hum. Damian inspected the bandages and stepped back with a sharp nod of approval. His eyes flicked to the wall that Danny was rearranging (again) and did a double take at the butter knife in the middle.
"Is that the butter knife I stabbed you with?"
"Why, yes, it is!" Danny beamed.
"Why on earth would you display that?"
"Because you stabbed me with it?"
"That makes absolutely no sense, you simpleton! When someone stabs you, stab them back!"
"That would be mean!"
Damian spluttered. Danny tugged the kid closer to the wall, cheering inwardly as Damian didn't shove him away. It might be because he was exaggeratedly wincing as he moved his "injured arm" but Danny has learned to take a win where he could find them, especially with ghosts. Not that Damian was a ghost, but he sure acted like one.
"Do you want to see my collection?"
"Your collection?"
"Yeah!" Without giving him time to answer, Danny barreled ahead. "So this is the knife you stabbed me with. Which, by the way, was an awesome show of strength and accuracy."
Damian grimaced. Danny continued blithely, secretly memorizing Damian's reactions to laugh at later.
"And this is the knife those guys stabbed me with that one time Cass found me. And this one is a bullet someone shot at me down by the docks. I think I interrupted some kind of meeting?"
Damian's jaw had a slight tick to it that would have been a baffled frown on anyone else.
"And when was this?"
"Oh, like a week ago."
"What? When did you go to the docks?!"
"At night. I couldn't sleep."
"And you went to the docks?! How did you even get there?!"
"Walked," Danny lied, like a lying liar. He floated, obviously, but none of them knew that. "Anyways, this is a law book! Someone threw it at my head!"
"Hey, guys! What're you doing?"
Danny and Damian turned around.
"Richard? Brown? What are you doing here?"
"Oh, Bruce wanted me to come back for the weekend," Dick said. Danny knew it was code for "something's going down and we need back up." Man, he still couldn't believe they didn't know he knew they were crime fighting vigilantes.
"Same!" Stephanie said. Danny was glad to see that her wounds from "cartwheeling in the manor" were healed.
"I see. Danny was showing me his collection of... objects people have used as weapons against him."
"What?!"
"Yeah!" Danny beamed, completely innocent. "Come on! I'll show you!"
With that, Danny continued to ramble. He just knew that the way Dick's and Stephanie's smiles strained would give him a good laugh for weeks to come. "And this is the glass bottle a drunk tried to shank me with in Crime Alley, and this is a knife the Red Hood himself threw at me."
Dick interrupted, face stiff. "Hood threw a knife at you?!"
"Yeah, but that was because my kids broke into his safe house and I was trying to get them to stop looting the place. And he didn't know I was a kid too, so he aimed a gun at my head. He shot at me too, but I couldn't go back to get the bullet, or else it would have joined my collection." Danny grabbed a box and shook it, metal rattling inside.
Dick smiled sweetly, Stephanie and Damian inching away from it.
"Oh, wow, I see!"
----
In his apartment, Jason shuddered. He grabbed his guns.
"Something's wrong. I just know it," he muttered to himself.
----
Danny smiled innocently as he described the horrific, near death events he got his souvenirs from.
"This is my bullet box! Man, Gotham has a lot of gun fights. I got shot so many times!" Danny complained, shaking the box like a rattling toy.
"Did you know Danny snuck out to go to the bay?" Damian snitched immediately, like a snitch.
"The Bay?! Danny! You know that's where people dump bodies, right?!" Stephanie poked him in the arm.
"Yeah, but like... I wouldn't die. And besides! I missed my friends!"
"You mean the minions you made in Crime Alley?" Steph asked. Danny pouted, eyeing the way Dick's gaze roved over his souvenirs and paling the more he realized how often Danny "got hurt."
Damian bumped a shoulder against Dick's arm. Danny returned to the conversation.
"If anything, I'm their minion." He said, remembering the times the Alley kids sent him on food runs.
"Fear Danny, the overlord of street rats."
Danny snorted. And- "Oh! Yeah, there was like a weird owl looking guy? And then they stabbed me with a finger and I kept it because woah, cool talon looking thing, right? And then they threw a bunch of those tiny knives at me? And then they just kind of vanished? Gotham is so weird."
And now, with all of them pale and stressed out of their minds, Danny swung a devastating blow called guilt trip.
"And that's the batarangs!" Three heads swung over to the line of batarangs. "Those vigilantes kept throwing them at me! One of them even hit me in the arm. Those things are sharp, man."
"Uh. Which ones?" Stephanie asked.
"Hm?" Danny hummed obliviously.
"Do you know which vigilantes?"
"Oh, it was like... the purple one. And the sword one? And like the one with the yellow insignia in the middle. And... all of them, I think? Except for signal. That guy's cool."
Stephanie and Damian had matching veiled looks of guilt. Dick shot them a sharp look. Danny decided to deal the last bit of damage to Dick.
"I'm glad you guys are way less stabby than the general Gotham public though, butter knife incident aside. At least I don't have to worry about you guys getting into danger, right? If you guys got hurt like my family did... I don't know..."
Danny smiled-squinted at them, channeling Cujo at his cutest and saddest: when he doesn't get to eat off of Danny's plate. So, pretty sad and pathetic.
"Uh, yeah." Dick said, guilt splayed all over his face. "Alfred said dinner was almost ready."
"Yes," Damian cleared his throat, looking away. "We shall partake in Pennyworth's hard work."
"Ahaha!" Stephanie laughed, nervously. "Welp, let's go bother Tim!"
Falling into step behind them, Danny grinned.
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"what are you doing," eddie mumbles in confusion, hair fanned out on steve's pillow, the moonlight streaming in giving him a hazy halo.
there's a hand on the side of his face and it's cupping his cheek, thumb stroking over his skin. it's soft, so soft, too soft. another hand is trapping his against the mattress, fingers trailing over his forearm before tangling into his own and squeezing tight. it's gentle, so gentle, too gentle.
eddie isn't soft, eddie isn't gentle. eddie isn't making love in a full size bed with wallpaper that matches the drapes. he isn't fluttering kisses in time with fluttering heartbeats and the fluttering wings of butterflies trapped in his stomach like the most lovely cage.
eddie is fucking at 2am when there's enough intoxication to make him look like he's worth it. he's rough and wild, quick and easy. a means to a barely wanted end because he's there and willing and with long enough hair to let people imagine he's someone else.
he should be caged instead of the damn butterflies. he bares his teeth and thrashes his limbs just to fight and see what he can get away with. he laughs loud and brash in the face of sweetness just to see anger, just to see hurt.
he has half a mind to think he's a feral animal that's hardly been trained, performing in some fucked up circus that charges two bucks to see him snarl and hurl insults at anyone who passes by. he bites at the hands that try to touch, try to feed, proving to the onlookers that he's only worth the pocket change they pay to see him.
but steve. he's holding his face like he wants to, holding his hand like it's the most important thing in the world. he's pressing kisses along eddie's jaw without any hurry, without any rush, kissing just to kiss. feeling just to feel. he's like a ray of goddamn sunshine even in the darkness that midnight provides, warming eddie from the inside out.
eddie wants to run. he wants to scream. he wants to feel like he's allowed steve's soft and gentle but he's-
"is this not okay?" and now steve's looking at him with all of whatever he's trying to give him lacing into his face, his eyes and spit slick lips sparkling in the moonlight like a shiny new toy. "do you not like it?"
concern and care are different sides of the same steve shaped coin and if eddie looks hard enough, he can see them blurring together in his frustratingly beautiful sparkling eyes and those damn butterflies start to come back.
"no, it's-" he let's out a sigh, relaxing his tight muscles and sinking into the bed, sinking into whatever steve is willing to give him. "just different, is all. good different, i think."
steve smiles and eddie shakily mirrors it back, before he's ducking his head again and slotting their lips together, fingers still holding tight to eddie's, still cupping his face like it's something precious.
eddie's come to terms with the taste of the metal bars of his cage, teeth wearing down as he tries to bite his way to freedom. maybe this time he'll let himself get used to the taste of soft and gentle smiles if it means loving steve.
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