#egyw

[ectoentity]

So, the Haunting Heroes server did a Who Wrote That game with the theme of "wingfic" a while back. I did an entry and I liked it enough that I decided to expand on it. Gonna start posting scenes here whenever I get them done, and eventually piece it together for ao3. This first part is the intro, but the rest probably won't actually be in order.

Update Mar 11, 2024: Here is the Subscription Post

Ectoplasm Gives You Wings

(Working title)

DPxDC, T-rated genfic.

Everyone knew ghosts had wings. It was in every ghost story throughout history, regardless of culture. It was one of their defining traits, like going through walls or fading into invisibility. The unquiet dead soared through the night on birdlike wings, occasionally leaving unnaturally large feathers as an omen of impending death.

As soon as the newly-working portal spat Danny out, he knew there would be no hiding what had happened. His ghostly form came with a pair of large wings that didn't go away when he turned back human. In his ghost form, they were mostly black with bars of white near the bottom edge. The reverse was true when he was human. It was an indication of what had happened to him that he couldn't escape.

Tucker and Sam tried to play it off to his parents as a meta mutation that had suddenly appeared. They'd heard of it happening before on TV and through the internet. Besides, there were winged people in the Justice League. Danny's parents had never talked about them being secret ghosts.

Danny would never forget his parents' horrified faces as they came downstairs and found him. The way their eyes skipped over his face entirely and focused on the wings behind him. His dad frozen in place, expression slack with shock. His mom's face going from horror to determination as she set her jaw and reached for a bazooka.

Danny and his friends managed to escape them and run all the way to Tucker's house. Running was harder with a new pair of limbs hanging off his back like so much dead (hah) weight. It was clear that Danny couldn't stay here. His parents might be cranks, but once they realized the portal worked they would have evidence to prove Danny was a ghost. At least, sort of. Would they try to experiment on him, or just try to help him pass on? Danny assumed it would be the latter, but he had also assumed his mom wouldn't ever draw a weapon on him.

Tucker and Sam helped him to pack a camping backpack full of spare clothes he'd left at Tucker's, a handful of important essentials like a first aid kit, and a sleeping bag. They left for a while and came back with a cheap cellphone, a handful of prepaid phone cards, and a surprising amount of cash. Who would have thought Sam was secretly loaded?

They argued all night about where he should go. Danny barely knew his Dad's side of the family, let alone whether they'd take him in. His mom's sister Alicia was somewhere in Arkansas, but Danny couldn't remember the name of the town. Besides, he hadn't seen her since he was about nine. What if she believed Maddie over him? Tucker and Sam suggested their own family members. Danny turned them down. He didn't want to be a burden to his friends' families.

In the end, they decided that he would blend in best in a big city far away from Amity. The next day, Danny climbed on a Greyhound bus headed to the East Coast. He couldn't hide the wings, no matter what he did. The best he could do was wrap the sleeping bag around himself like a blanket. Thankfully, no one on the bus seemed to care. They all had their own issues to worry about. Most seemed content to watch their phones or the scenery instead of looking too closely at the weird kid wrapped in a big, lumpy sleeping bag.

As the hours dragged on, Danny was increasingly greatful that everyone was minding their own business. There was something else wrong with him. His hands kept slipping through the sleeping bag. Going through solid objects, like a ghost.

The plan was to find a place in Metropolis that provided resources to meta kids. But by the time the bus reached Gotham Danny was exhausted and anxious. His hands had started to go through things. What if he went straight through the bus while it was driving? He had to get a handle on this. He could always go to Metropolis the next day.

Danny got off the bus. The city around him was gray and dreary, from the concrete sidewalks up to the cloud-covered sky. It felt like the sky was too close, more of a ceiling than an open expanse. Something about it gave Danny a strangely claustrophobic feeling. He tried to shrug it off as the lack of sleep catching up to him. The last time Danny slept was the night before the portal accident. That had been well over twenty-four hours ago. He needed to find a safe place to sleep.

[hadeiadel-blog]

[ectoentity]

Ectoplasm Gives You Wings 0.?

Hey here's a scene that happened long before Danny showed up have fun

Here is the subscription post

Need to know concept:

When you're in a world where wings are associated with ghosts, you're gonna assume that coming back from the dead with wings means you have some unfinished business. Harley Quinn POV.

Ever since Joker died, Harley expected his killer would come after her. She hadn't been with him for a couple years, but that hardly made up for the shit she'd done while they were together. Really the only surprise was that they hadn’t killed her first as a warning to him.

So when she walked into her apartment kitchen to see a guy with huge wings wearing a red helmet, Harley wasn’t terribly surprised. Not about the break-in or the gun pointed at her, at least.

"How'd'ya manage to fit those things in here?" she asked. The guy didn't answer. The wings flexed like he wanted to open them, but there wasn't any room.

"Harley," the Red Hood said, sounding very intimidating with some kind of voice modulation. "You know why I’m here."

"I can make a guess, big guy," Harley said sadly. "Nothing I can do to change your mind?"

"You let it happen. You helped him. Why should you escape justice?"

"I did my time for most of it. And I spent the last couple a years trying to put him in the ground. That doesn't fit into your equation somehow?" She tried edging slowly to a shelf where she had a gun of her own. Red Hood noticed. He stepped forward and grabbed her by the collar of her shirt.

"Did any of that bring back the innocent people you killed? The children you tortured?"

"Woah, woah, woah, time out. I never did anything like that to kids." Harley held her hands up in a T shape above Red Hood's fist. "I did some awful stuff I ain't proud of, but I never tortured kids."

"You didn't seem to care that he did."

Harley sighed and lowered her hands onto Red Hood's arm and tried to look into the eyes of his weird helmet. "What do you expect to happen here? You want me to beg until you feel satisfied? Sorry, buddy. Not really my style! I don't like a lotta what I did back then, but I can't fix it. I'm trying better now. If that's not good enough for ya, that's too bad."

The Red Hood didn't move for a moment. It was kind of creepy, if Harley was honest. He didn't say anything, he didn't twitch. Was the guy even breathing? It was always hard to talk to someone in a full face mask. There was no way to tell whether they were even listening. Contrary to popular belief, Harley didn't talk just to hear her own voice! Not often, at least.

The hand let go of her shirt. Harley pulled back to regain her balance, but she didn't relax just yet. There was still a big murderous birdman with a gun in her apartment. Even if he wasn't about to shoot her just now, he was still dangerous.

"Fucking hell," the guy said. He seemed to stagger backwards until one of his wings clipped the half-wall separating the kitchen from the living room. Then he leaned against the pillar heavily.

"Shit. You're right. This is pointless. Why am I here?"

Harley took her chance to grab her gun just in case, but Red Hood didn't seem to notice. She stared at him with suspicious, narrowed eyes. "Do you mean here in my apartment, or are you really having an existential crisis right now?"

"I'm not having a- Fuck. I guess I am." He held his head in his hands. "I'm sorry, Harls."

Well, that was an unusual nickname. It wasn't something she heard much outside of kids from the Bowery or Narrows. Most other kids in Gotham got swept up by their parents before they could talk to her.

"You lose somebody?" she asked softly, gun tucked in her pocket. "Sibling? A kid?"

Red Hood choked out a bitter laugh. "Myself." When Harley's eyebrows did a wild semaphore of emotion, the asshole deigned to explain. "He killed me. I... I came back. Figured, y'know, I must've been brought back for a reason, right?" He sunk down further against the pillar, the white tips of his mostly-black wings spreading across the floor like the fabric of a cape.

Damn, Harley thought. That made a fucked up amount of sense. "I can't really blame you for thinking that," she admitted. "The feathers a new fashion choice then?"

"You could say that. Shit." Red Hood reached up to the bottom of his helmet and depressed some trigger there. Harley heard a hiss of pressurization before it popped off the guy's head. The first thing she saw was black hair. That wasn't surprising. The surprising thing was when he leaned his head back against the pillar, revealing a young face and a shock of white hair in his bangs. Then he opened his eyes, and they were as blue as the sky.

"Hey kid? What did you say your name was?"

He took a devastatingly long time to respond.

"They called me Robin, once."

[ectoentity]

Ectoplasm Gives You Wings - Flying Lesson

New scene for this fic! This one is a bit of a doozy: nearly 3k words just for one scene.

Masterpost/Subscription Post for this fic.

DPxDC, T-rated Genfic

Context: This scene is the second time Danny has met Red Hood.

The problem with a city like Gotham - or at least this part of it - was that there were very few open spots away from prying eyes. Even rooftops often had cameras near the access door, or looking over from the next building over. Danny got that people here were paranoid about crime and potential supervillain attacks. He didn't blame them. He just wished he had somewhere private to practice flying.

After weeks of searching, he finally found something. There was a corner of one park that looked like it had been allowed to grow wild for years. The remnants of a half-collapsed pavilion were completely overgrown with vines and flowers. There were even skinny saplings growing out of what might have once been a sandbox. People didn't go there. Danny couldn’t find any cameras aimed at it. This was as close to privacy as he could get.

Danny found a stump that was about two feet tall and stood on top of it. He spread out his wings. The muscles ached as he stretched them, too used to being folded close against his back. Danny awkwardly flapped them. It felt a bit ridiculous. He knew the basic physics of how flight worked. The air underneath the wing moved more slowly than the air on top of it, creating a pressure differential that caused lift. He just wasn't sure how that translated to flapping. Did he have to lean a certain way to get the right angle?

"Come on, Fenton. Bird brains do this every day. It can't be that hard."

He crouched down on the stump, wings arched over himself. Then he leapt into the air. He desperately flapped his wings downward. For a moment it actually worked. Instead of falling, he stayed where he was. Half a second later, the sensation was gone. Danny tilted to the side and hit the ground with a heavy thump.

"Ow."

Someone laughed. Danny shot up in an instant and spun to the source of the noise. A tall woman with red hair and green skin leaned against one of the pavilion's remaining pillars. Danny instantly knew why this part of the park was overgrown.

"You're not the kind of bird I expected to find out here," Poison Ivy said with a faint smile.

"I. Uh, I am really sorry, Ms. Ivy. I didn’t realize this was your park. I'll just..." Danny edged back towards his backpack. Poison Ivy rolled her eyes.

"As long as you don’t hurt the plants, you're fine. Stay away from the red flowers if you like keeping your limbs."

Danny stared at Poison Ivy. "What. Really? You're not gonna murder me for stepping on the grass?"

"Nature is more resilient than you think. If you get too rough, you'll get one warning." She smiled at him. Danny didn't know if that was good or not.

"My friend thinks you're cool," he blurted out when he couldn't think of anything to say. "In junior high she got detention for wearing a Justice for Ivy shirt she made. She's like. Extra-Vegan or something? I don't really get it, but she's really into environmentalism and stuff." The words sounded lame to his ears, so Danny couldn't imagine how dumb he must sound to the supervillain. Her eyebrows raised for a bit, looking a bit surprised, and then her face shifted to a muted frown.

"Well, I'm glad to know there are some children with sense." It looked like she was going to say something else, but her gaze was caught by something in the sky. Now that Danny was listening, he could hear the sound of wings. He wasn’t terribly surprised when Red Hood landed in front of them.

"Two visitors in a day? What a surprise." Ivy didn't smile at Hood, but she didn't seem like she was about to attack him either.

"You're a popular lady," Hood said. "How've you been, Ivy?"

"Just tending to my garden, keeping some rodents on their toes. I'm sure I can find something to keep you busy if you're bored."

Ivy's words were sharp, threatening in a way they hadn’t been when she was talking to Danny. He started to slowly edge his way closer to his backpack. If they were about to fight Danny didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

"Mask's keeping me busy enough, thanks," Red Hood answered. His head moved to keep track of Danny. Shit.

Apparently Ivy noticed it too. She smirked, her posture relaxing. "Oh, I see. Are you starting a little flock of your own?"

"Hell no," Danny sputtered at the same time that Hood said "Cut it, Isley." For some reason that only made Ivy smile more. Were they enemies or friends? Danny couldn't tell what was going on.

"You ought to teach your baby bird how to fly before he gets eaten, Hood."

"Hey! I'm not doing that bad."

"You landed on your face," Poison Ivy, the superpowered ecoterrorist with a doctorate, tattled. Red Hood snorted.

"I was about to offer," he said. "Sorry for trying to be polite."

Danny reached his bag and picked it up, but didn't put it on. Putting it on over his wings without going intangible was a frustrating task, and he wanted to be able to run if he had to. "I can figure it out on my own. I don’t need a babysitter."

"Do I look like a babysitter, kid?" Red Hood drawled. He dropped his hands to his sides with the palms facing Danny, as if to emphasize the twin pistols holstered at his waist. It would be a fair point to anyone whose parents didn’t regularly work on ray guns at the dinner table, Danny supposed. "I just wanna make sure you know how to get out of trouble. If you can't fly, all those things do is make you a bigger target."

Danny glared at him. That blank helmet didn't give away any indication of what Hood was thinking or how honest he was being. If there was anything he'd learned in the last few weeks, it was that good things usually came with a catch.

"For what it's worth," Poison Ivy interjected, "you're safer with Hood around than most other places in this city."

Oh great, the supervillains were teaming up against him.

"Do you offer to tutor all the homeless kids you find, or just the ones that remind you of yourself?" Danny spat. He didn't want some fruit loop in a helmet projecting on him. Poison Ivy burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. Red Hood seemed to sigh.

"I do tutor kids, actually," he grumbled. "You should come by the community center on Seventh sometime."

That caught Danny off guard. He had seen that there was a community center there, but he wasn't sure whether it was another place that would hand him back to his parents. If Red Hood was involved with it, maybe they wouldn't. Who cared about catching a runaway kid when the area's murderous gang boss was there?

"Fine," Danny said. "But we're staying here. Uh, if that's okay with you, ma'am." He belatedly looked to Poison Ivy for her approval. Danny might not entirely trust Poison Ivy, but he figured it was better to stay here than to follow Red Hood off somewhere else. Ivy had recovered from her laughing fit. She looked over at Red Hood with narrowed eyes and slightly pursed lips, thinking it over.

"As long as you both behave, you're welcome to stay."

"Thank you, Ms. Ivy."

"I promise not to step on your murder begonias," Red Hood said. Instead of being angry, Ivy just rolled her eyes.

"I'll leave you boys to it." Poison Ivy waved at them as she walked off, the branches of trees closing to block the path off behind her.

"She's a lot less murder happy than I expected," Danny commented when he figured she might be out of hearing range.

"Ivy isn't as scary evil as a lot of media claims," Red Hood said. "She won't hesitate to feed you to her plants if you come out here with a hatchet, though." He shrugged and started taking off his heavy jacket. Now that Danny was looking, he could tell it wasn't a normal jacket that he'd just cut the back out of. It was made with holes for his wings, and the fabric between the lower part of his wings and the bottom of the jacket buttoned together to look a bit like a normal jacket. Red Hood undid all the buttons before pulling the whole thing up off his wings. Danny was a bit jealous. He'd had to cut holes in his clothes, and it was a struggle to get them on right.

"Alright, kid, spread your wings out?"

Hesitantly, Danny did as he was told. He still wasn't used to seeing the limbs stretch out on the edges of his vision. Danny himself had only really gotten a good look at them once. He'd taken a nap in a mall fitting room not long after getting off the bus in Gotham. There he'd been able to take a look at his wings in the store's large mirrors. They were mostly white, with black on the lower edge of the wing. There were black lines higher up in three rows, each progressively more spotty. The pattern was the same on the back as on the front. If not for the fact that they'd gotten him chased out of his home, Danny would almost think they were pretty.

Red Hood circled around him, looking his wings over. Danny didn't know what he was looking for. Other than having wings in the first place, Danny didn't think there was anything unusual about them.

"Okay, first lesson," Red Hood said. "There are different kinds of wings. They're good for different things." He spread out his left wing all the way. "What can you tell about the shape?"

"Uh... other than big?" Danny looked back at his own wing and tried to compare it. What if he thought about them like plane wings? He knew a little bit about how those worked, and there were different types for different jobs."Yours are really long and wide. I know in planes long, skinny wings are better for distance flights, but wider wings have less drag."

"Huh. Good thinking." The gang boss sounded almost impressed. "Yeah, in birds it's something similar. Big rectangular wings are good for long, slow soaring. They've got a lot of surface area so it's easier to take off than if they were skinny. So, what do you see with yours?"

Danny nodded and considered his own wings. Now that he was looking at them, it was obvious they weren't proportioned the same. Danny’s wings were shorter, more rounded than rectangular. He couldn’t think of any planes with round wings like that.

"So mine are, what, less good at soaring?"

"That's one thing," Hood said. "But they're more maneuverable. Think of it like being an acrobat when I'm a marathon runner."

That was neat, Danny had to admit. He liked the idea of doing cool aerial tricks. That would at least make this crappy wing situation a little more bearable. Except...

"I need to get into the air first."

"We're getting to that." Red Hood opened his other wing. "Alright, I'm gonna show you how I take off in slow motion and explain what I'm doing."

Danny wasn't sure how that would work, but he nodded and watched.

"First, I lean over a bit, but not enough to make me unbalanced." Hood did so, and bent his knees a bit. "Then raise up your wings as straight up as you can." Danny watched Hood stretch his wings up, up, taller than any person could stand. "When you do your down-stroke, it's not directly down. Imagine it more like you're trying to make your wings into scoops and push the air down and away." Slowly, carefully, Hood's wings lowered. Like he said, they went more forward than down. The wingtips stretched out in front of Hood, feathers fanned out as wide as they could.

"Okay," Danny said. "I think I can do that."

Danny crouched a bit, then raised his wings straight up above him. It was kind of like stretching an arm, but it moved differently. Then Danny flapped his wings like Red Hood had demonstrated. Instantly he could feel the difference. Air caught under his wings, forcing the rest of his body up. His feet left the ground. It felt amazing. Danny almost cheered, but he realized the one flap wouldn't keep him up for long. Danny's white feathers came up for another stroke.

Instantly he hit resistance. It felt almost like his wing slipped under the air pocket it had been above before. Danny swore as his feet hit the ground and he stumbled to his knees.

"You got some air that time," Red Hood commented helpfully. "Do you know what went wrong?"

"If I knew I wouldn't have done it," Danny snapped. He was suddenly struck by how weird this situation was. A couple months ago Danny's biggest concern was keeping away from Dash when he was near a locker. Now he was getting flying lessons from the Red Hood, of all people. The guy was a crazy gangster who'd decapitated people. He'd killed the Joker. Half of Gotham talked about him like he was a monster.

But then again, Danny thought, maybe that wasn't the whole story. Ivy was supposed to be a monster, too, and she'd just treated him like a normal adult would. Danny's parents had thought...

He shuddered, forcing his thoughts back to the present. Hood was looking at him silently with his head tilted slightly to the side.

"You alright there, fledgling?"

"Would you stop calling me that?" Danny folded his arms and tried to think about how it had felt when he tried to fly. "When I tried to bring my wings up, it felt like I hit a bunch of resistance, and then I slipped."

"You kept your wings wide open when you brought them up for another flap," Hood explained. "You gotta fold the primaries in a little bit, or you'll be fighting against the air above your wing." He stretched out one wing and demonstrated by halfway folding his wing, just the first part with the largest feathers.

Danny groaned. "How do birds make this look so easy?"

Red Hood chuckled. The sound was really ominous with his helmet's weird voice filter. "The birds that don't fly get eaten." For a moment Hood gestured like he was going to say something else, but then he stilled. "Shit."

"Uh. Should I run?"

The Red Hood shook his head. "Sorry, pollito, there's something I gotta go take care of. If you want, I can meet back here in a couple nights for another lesson."

"Why?" The word was out of his mouth before Danny could think. "I don't get why you're so worried about helping me. I'm not even from here."

Instead of making another stupid joke, Red Hood stepped towards him. Danny took half a step back on instinct, and Red Hood stopped. "Look, kid. Danny. I don't care where you're from. The minute you started sleeping on my streets, you became someone I'm here to protect, alright?"

Danny wanted to roll his eyes and make some flippant comment about capes, but he couldn't. There was something real in those words. Some kind of gut feeling told him that Red Hood was being absolutely honest. He didn't know what to do with that.

"Yeah. Okay."

Hood watched him squirm for another moment before he went and picked his jacket off the overgrown picnic table. It took him a minute to slide it back on and do up the buttons on the back. Danny was still kind of jealous of how easy it looked.

"Keep practicing, pollito. I'll be back in two days." He leapt into the air and took one huge wingbeat to clear the trees. Showoff.

Danny watched him go, trying to take note of how Red Hood moved his wings in the air so he could practice it. Then his brain caught up to something.

"What the hell is a pollito?"

[ectoentity]

Ectoplasm Gives You Wings Subscription & Masterlist

This post will list every scene of Ectoplasm Gives You Wings that I post on Tumblr. If you want to get updates, please subscribe to this post to get notifications when I comment with a new scene.

Intro scene

Flashback?

Flying Lesson (New Mar 10, 2024)