I once more believe Battinson Batman needs to be given a child. Or multiple. Multiple children. I am also once more rotating Ghosts Have Wings Au.
So Batman, still early in his whole vigilante career ends up busting a shipment, nothing too surprising there. Pretty usual honestly. Except for what was in one of the crates already open. Because it looks like some sort of gemstones but… perfectly spherical. Strange. Suspicious.
But it’s also late, er, early in the morning, and the GCPD is notoriously corrupt, so like, he’s not going to just leave the weird gemstones, each about the size of a plum or so. (Dear Gotham he’s apparently hungry, and might inwardly vow to never let anyone realize what his tired mind decided to use as measurement)
So he, unknowingly spurred on by more than just a slight bit of ecto contamination, takes the strange spheres back home. Just puts them in his pockets and heads back to the manor that they moved back into after the whole Riddler mess. (He even found a cool cave! With a bunch of terrifying bats, but they made a glass separator! For safety!)
But in Bruce’s defense of forgetting about them, he’s more than a little tired and hungry and just wants to sleep for a bit, y’know? So maybe he forgets about the gems as he falls asleep in the chair in the cave (Alfred was not pleased!) until he starts digging around for them. Erm. Did they fall out somewhere?? There’s no holes in his belt pockets…
And maybe these sort of things shouldn’t slip his mind, the spheres had felt Weird with a capital W, but he gets forced to a circus and there’s an… accident. So maybe he pushed it away as not important because there’s now an angry grieving eight-year old living with him and he’s panickedly reading any and all sort of parenting books he can get a hold of because he has no clue what he’s doing.
Yeah, maybe his back is itching like crazy no matter what he tries, and maybe he threw up the other day, but it’s fine. This is fine.
….
Oh dear Gotham those are feathers, this is not fine- ALFREEED!
So there are a bunch of fics where Danny and Damian are twins and Danny eventually has to go to Gotham or Damian/another bat interacts with Danny as ghost king. But I do you one better. Danny faked his death because of failing a mission/he actually died and his mother brought him back. (Or maybe he revived on his own after constant Lazarus exposure over time and knew he couldn’t go back). Anyways, Danny knew that he needed to go to Bruce Wayne in Gotham if he ever needed anything but only as a last resort as they would expect him to go there. So he’s been monitoring Bruce from afar and immediately knew when Damian joined the bats. He clocked him as the new Robin and started following his hero career more closely. He was content to watch his family from afar. Even after the accident. Then something happens where Robin was said to go missing and when no news showed up after a few days, Danny got worried so figured it couldn’t hurt to do a quick trip to Gotham.
He dresses in all black and a hood made using an old ninja Halloween costume. Not nearly as much protection as his old league uniform but with his ghost powers he doesn’t really need protection. Just anonymity. He goes to Gotham in phantom form, making sure all his white hair is carefully tucked in the black hood so only his green eyes remain. He uses his old assassin training and finds Robin drugged and captured in an old warehouse by the court of owls. Robin clearly isn’t thinking straight but Danny puts him in a simple choke hold to knock him unconscious anyways. Better safe than sorry. He quickly frees the boy and drops him off in an area he knows the other bats are searching. After watching to make sure Damian is safe and a bat finds him, he leaves.
Damian could barely remember his capture but he thought he saw a figure in black with glowing green eyes. He could have sworn the future was trying to kill him but…he woke up looking at another bat (or maybe even the manor). Did his family save him?
Meanwhile, Danny can’t stop thinking about Damian. Despite his assassin training, he was drugged and hurt. Danny thought his brother could handle himself. He thought he would be safe. But what if this happened again? What if the colony of bats wasn’t enough? So Danny couldn’t help the occasional visit to Gotham to make sure his twin was ok. Most of the time he didn’t do anything, just watched. Sometimes, though, there would be an instance where Damian got out of a dangerous situation and no one knew how. A building collapsed, Damian appeared unharmed outside. A goon was about to get a lucky shot? Somehow the bullet missed or the goon got taken out when no other bats were nearby. Fear gas? Damian faintly remembers warm hands hugging him as he struggled. And while he thought it was weird he heard his brother’s comforting voice when it should be a nightmare, he chalked it up to the fear gas anyways since there was no other explanation.
Yet every time there is a particularly dangerous encounter, he swears he sees the figure in black. Damian sees the figure more and more yet none of his family do. They swore to keep an eye out anyways in case. You never know. Sometimes the figure becomes more clear and Damian has tried to chase them but always loses them quickly. One time the chase lasted at least five minutes and Damian managed to corner the figure in an alleyway only for them to pass through the wall.
The bats suspect that this could either be meta abilities or magic. The funny thing is, there were no traces. No one sees the figure except Damian. No one hears them, and there is nothing to indicate their presence, not even footprints. It’s like they were never there and no matter how hard they try, there is no footage of the figure. Sometimes cameras glitch out and sometimes they only show Robin, sometimes neither or they seem to loop on themselves. So the bats are leaning towards Magic.
They call Constantine to give Damian a thorough check and he declares that Damian shows signs of interacting with a ghost. And that stumps everyone. A ghost? If it was a friendly specter like Deadman then he would help everyone, not just Damian. If it was hostile, it would never help Damian. So why is this ghost only focusing on the youngest bat and why? Is there even someone that would come back from the afterlife to help the demon brat, let alone have the will strong enough to manifest a ghost that can affect the living? Damian was a former assassin after all and he’s hardly the friendliest bat. So who would help him that has already died?
Throughout this, Damian is silent. Because there is one person he knows to have died that might do this. One person skilled enough to avoid the other bats and evade Damian during a chase. One person Damian would acknowledge as having a will stronger than his own. But something was wrong…because he was sure that that person didn’t have green eyes.
So the next time the figure shows himself Damian attacks. Not just a chase but an outright challenge. Hand to hand combat. And as Damian punches and kicks, the figure expertly parries each attack. And as the fight goes on, Damian watches. And he knows those moves. Those dodges. Those blocks. He can read this figure’s fighting stance like the back of his hand because he grew up with it.
And Damian knows without a shadow of a doubt as the figure disappears into he ground, that despite the changed eye color, the tan skin, the increased height, his brother’s ghost has come back to watch over him.
And for the first time in many years, Damian cries. That’s how the bats find him.
@forgivenpunishment // one taser might not do it, but what about...?
Holding off a wave of people was no small effort.
Keeping an army off the back of another person while throwing yourself in harm's way, regardless of your strength, was something noble. Something that deserved praise, recognition; the undertaker's efforts would not go unnoticed.
... unfortunately for him, though, it wasn't Vash that they wanted. It wasn't Vash that would be swarmed by fully-amped stun batons and tasers and more bodies trickling in, crowding the hall to prevent escape, or even basic movement that might've allowed him to get the upper hand as some old, croaking voice shrieked don't kill him! We need him alive, he's useless to us dead...!
That had been nearly an hour ago, now, though. Trivial. Shouts and crackles of electricity had been replaced by the din of machines; the hum of glaringly bright surgical lights; the slow, steady blip of a heart monitor keeping track of vitals as six men bustled around the surgical table that they'd strapped him to. They'd cut him out of his clothes to save time, as well; naked save for the various nodes and monitors they'd fastened to him, and a clean, white sheet over his hips that went down to mid-thigh.
Was that sparing his dignity, or theirs? It didn't really matter, did it. No, no, what mattered now was how the subject was feeling whenever he came to again--
I find it interesting that hayley clearly sees the mikaelsons as her family and feels a deep sense of love and loyalty towards them, but she’s been consistently shown to be wary of hope being raised around them.
peace and love to anyone wanting to migrate away from tumblr but i will simply not be doing that. when the lights go off the only place i'm migrating is to my to-do list
Despite the fact that Eleven is most definitely not able to destroy a dimension, The Upside Down is a mirror dimension to the Right Side Up, so much so that things happening in the upside down, ACTUALLY REFLECT on the Right Side Up (lights flickering etc), and as such cannot be destroyed without potentially catastrophic results to the Right Side Up.
It is by all evidence shown, the CLOSEST parallel dimension to the kids, destroying it, could potentially unravel whatever's holding the kids dimension together killing everyone and everything inside of it.
You cannot destroy an entire dimension without catastrophic side effects to surrounding dimensions. ESPECIALLY if that dimension MIRRORS yours.