Mr. Fenton is a competent teacher. Almost too competent.
If Mr. Daniel Fenton had any more than a BS (with a minor in education), Tim would’ve flagged his profile as a potential Rogue. That’s the way of most charismatic academics, at least in Gotham. (Got a PhD? Instant watchlist.) Instead, he’s Gotham Academy’s newest celebrity, as a young, passionate, out-of-towner substitute while the chemistry teacher’s on maternity leave.
Tim gets the hype. Fenton seems to genuinely love teaching, and is invested in the welfare of the student body. He hands out bananas during exam week, hosts a “study habits seminar” each month to coach effective learning strategies, and the third time Tim falls asleep in his class, he even pulls Tim aside to ask if he’s doing okay. With all the late work he accepts and the protein bars he sneaks Tim, he’s every teen vigilante’s dream teacher. He could’ve been Tim’s favorite.
In fact, Mr. Fenton was Tim’s favorite. Up until Tim walks into Mr. Fenton’s chemistry classroom for a forgotten textbook, an hour after the final bell.
On the board where tallied scores for today’s review game had been kept, “THE CHEMISTRY BEHIND DR. CRANE’S FEAR GAS: ANXIOGENICS, NERI’S, & YOU,” is now scrawled. A detailed diagram of the human endocrine system projects in front of a small crowd of adoring and attentive students.
Fenton is wrist-deep in the skull cavity of an anatomical model. A short tug, and out pops the brain.
It’s plastic. It’s fake.
Tim identifies the nearest emergency exit.
Fenton turns to the door, and in the dark classroom with the projector illuminating half his face, his eyes almost seem to flash red. “What’s up, Tim?” he asks. His friendly grin is too big for his face. “I didn’t know you wanted to join the Just Science League!”
[OR: Danny’s a science teacher at Tim’s school. Gotham’s a pretty wild place, even for someone who grew up a superhero in a ghost-infested town, so he takes it upon himself to start a club teaching kids how to manage themselves in the event of a crisis. These Gothamites are pretty hardy, but a little extra training never hurt anybody! And he suspects one of his students might be a teen vigilante, like he’d been, back in the day. As a senior super, it's Danny’s duty look out for him! Surely, this is the subtlest and most appropriate way to give the kid pointers.]
[Tim immediately assumes supervillain.]
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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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(DCxDP) The obligations of a rogue versus those of a parent (pt. 2)
—
Tw: N/A
Will be crossposted to AO3 eventually
(Pt. 1 here) - (Pt. 3 here)
(Masterlist/subscription post)
—
It was a beautiful morning. Somehow, against all odds, the sun was shining through the thick smog perpetually covering Gotham.
And Danny hated it.
He was in pain, he was exhausted, he was grieving, and all he wanted to do was sleep for at least a week.
In an act of celestial mockery, the sun shone regardless.
After around twenty minutes of tossing and turning in bed, trying to get back to sleep, Danny gave up and pried himself out of bed.
He stumbled through the hallway and into the living room, staring openly at every splash of color he saw in the small apartment. He hadn’t forgotten what color looked like in the time he was in the lab, but it was comforting to see.
Someone cleared their throat. Danny whipped his head around, eyes falling on a scrawny, gangly man sitting down in a worn armchair, hunched over a laptop. He was looking at him with a dull, bored expression.
Right. Scarecrow.
His escape.
The chase.
His mom.
“You look a lot less terrifying without the mask,” Danny blurted out, slapping his hand over his mouth. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t call my normal appearance frightening,” Scarecrow hummed, focusing his attention back onto the laptop, “that’s what the costume is for, after all.”
“Oh.”
After a brief moment of excruciating silence, Scarecrow spoke.
“You any good with computers, Danny? Hacking, and all that?”
Danny jolted. Scarecrow needed his help with something! This was great! Now, he’d have more of a reason not to get rid of him!
“Oh, uh, yeah! Not as good as my friend Tucker, but I think I’m pretty good.”
“And you’re familiar with the GiW’s systems specifically,” Scarecrow continued, beckoning him over. Danny complied, shuffling over awkwardly. “Right?”
“Well, I guess? My friends and I got into their stuff a couple of times before they…”
“Wonderful,” Scarecrow said, standing up with a stretch. He shoved the laptop into Danny’s hands and gestured for him to sit down on the couch. “Then you can hack into their system and extract whatever files you can find.”
Danny stared at the man like he’d lost his mind. He looked back at him expectantly.
Danny sat down.
“Yeah, I-I can do that. Tuck and I built a back door into their system ages ago,” he said, checking the screen. It was clear that for all the skills that Scarecrow had, hacking was definitely not one of them. “But, uh, don’t you have someone else that usually does this sort of thing for you? Not that I’m complaining!”
Scarecrow scowled, and Danny felt his heart fall into his ass.
“Usually, I do,” Scarecrow huffed, “but I chose to leave my most recent job with the Penguin early, so now there’s no way that he or Eddie will help me with anything until I make it up to them somehow.”
“Oh,” Danny said.
He had no clue whatsoever who Eddie was.
Danny got to work quickly, hoping that if he ignored the gangly man, he would leave him be. Luckily, he did just that, leaving to go work on something in another room.
Danny checked the laptop’s security before continuing Scarecrow’s progress, making sure that the GiW wouldn’t be able to grab their location.
It was…threateningly good. Whoever Eddie was, he had somehow crammed the functionality of a top-of-the-line PC into a tiny, beat-up old laptop. It almost reminded Danny of Tucker and his terrifying competence with his PDA.
Tucker.
Amity park.
Home.
Danny snapped himself out of his thoughts, tabbing back into the application Scarecrow had up and began to work his magic.
He had near full access to the entire GiW database within half an hour.
Mumbling out a quick thank-you to Tucker, he called Scarecrow over to appraise his work.
“Fixed up some food for you while you worked,” the rogue said, handing him a bowl of oatmeal, taking the laptop into his lap as he did so, “didn’t know how well you could eat, considering you’re recovering from… surgery, so I decided to stay on the safe side.”
Danny had no clue what this guy’s deal was.
He definitely did not tear up at the first genuine thoughtfulness he encountered in weeks, and he did not look away as he ate so that Scarecrow couldn’t see his face.
At least Scarecrow was too focused on the laptop to notice or care.
Or, maybe, he was just mercifully ignoring him.
Either way, Danny ate slowly, not wanting to make himself sick. He allowed himself to absentmindedly look around the room for the first time, taking everything in.
It was strangely homey. The space was filled with warm browns and yellows, a few splashes of color on the wall in the form of (obviously gifted) paintings. There was a beat-up bookshelf against the wall, clearly second-hand, filled to the brim with psychology books. On every available surface there was a different colored candle, all at different stages of use, clearly collected over the course of years.
Danny knew that the man next to him was a crazed, murderous criminal, but his home was oddly reminiscent of Jazz.
He was not about to cry.
“Danny,” Scarecrow hummed, snapping him out of his spiraling, “can you explain this to me?”
He looked over. The rogue was pointing to a new report, seemingly posted only a few hours ago.
Nodding, he took the computer into his lap, pouring over the contents.
He read the report again.
And again.
And again.
Danny swore loudly, crumpling like a wet paper bag, head in his hands.
“What?”
“It’s…” he swore again, glancing back at the laptop, “they…since you became liminal from synthetic ectoplasm, when we’re within about 500 meters of one another, our ectoplasm signatures resonate, and they can’t track us with any of their technology.”
“How is that a bad thing?”
“If we’re not that close to each other, they can track us down from anywhere in the world.”
Scarecrow went dead quiet. After what felt like the single longest minute of Danny’s life, he let out a truly exasperated sigh, slumping over in his seat.
“Yeah, me too,” Danny mumbled, utterly miserable.
“…I’ll have to move my plans back a little,” Scarecrow sighed, “I can’t drag an injured child with me when I attack the Gotham GiW base, you’ll just get in the way.”
“Oh come on,” Danny whined, “I can take care of myself just fine. Besides, Batman brings kids with him to do dangerous stuff all the time, and he’s fine!”
“Might I remind you that the second Robin died violently,” Scarecrow snapped, “and that Batman most likely has more traumatic brain injuries than all of the Gotham rogues combined. That really isn’t the winning argument you think it is.”
Danny paused, trying to think up some way to win the argument. Then, he realized what he had ignored before.
“Wait, Scarecrow, you’re gonna attack the GiW?”
“That’s the plan,” he nodded, “and call me Dr. Crane. I’m only Scarecrow when I’m in the mask.”
But,” Danny sputtered, “Sca—uh, Dr. Crane—that’s insane! The weapons they’ve got- they’ll rip you apart!”
“Not my first time,” Crane said, making Danny wince. “Besides, I have plenty of experience avoiding gunfire. I’ll live.”
“You…” Danny was silent for a while, trying to think of something to say, “fine, but you have to take me with you wherever you go. As soon as they see either of us on their radars, they’ll hunt us down.”
Dr. Crane sighed.
“…Fine. I need some time to plan anyways. Now, you’re going to help me download these files, properly format them, and send them out.”
“…Why?”
“Well, some of the other rogues might appreciate the heads up, and I’d quite like them to be indebted to me. Besides, I still need to pay back the Penguin for ditching him, and he loves knowing things that other people don’t.”
Danny paused.
“That’s an awful idea, no offense. If any of the rogues know our weaknesses, they—”
“Danny, we’re censoring everything. The only things they need to know about are the GiW specifically, and any sort of laws surrounding them.”
Danny snorted.
“You care about laws now?”
“Yes, because if we get taken to Arkham, they’ll hand us off to the GiW the moment they ask, and it’ll be completely legal.”
Oh. Danny had honestly forgotten that Arkham was an option.
“…Ok. I’ll help you. Who are we telling?”
“I don’t think you really need to know,” Dr. Crane said, the faintest shadow of an amused look on his face, “but I’ll humor you for now. We’re sending the files out to the Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy via Harley Quinn, Two-Face, and Red Hood.”
Danny nodded. He could live with that.
“Alright, then let’s get to work.”
—
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