Danny was tired, like 'I feel it in my bones and soul' tired.
And he didn't want sleep at home because there's only so many nights, he could spend lying awake making sure his heart was beating in case his parents checked on him.
Currently he was flying aimlessly not really taking in his surroundings, but he could neither sleep while flying or fly forever.
Normally he'd sleep over at Sam or Tucker's, but the Mansons had made it clear that he wasn't welcome at their house anymore and Tucker was grounded.
Both would sneak him in if he asked, but he didn't want them to get in trouble for him.
Which leads him to decide between his two choices, sleeping in a graveyard, or sleeping in a forest.
The graveyard was a little crowded with all the ghosts that called it home but he could probably find a quiet spot to sleep.
The forest had a great view of the stars but was filled with traps from both his parents and the GIW after tracking his ecto-signature.
Both options weren't appealing, but he wasn't about to chance sleeping on the roof of his house again.
There were too many ghost detecting guns attached to it now.
Danny sighed, graveyard it was, at least the ecto from all the shades/ghosts would hide him well enough.
Decision made, now all he had to do was make his way over there.
But first, where the heck was he?
Danny looked around at the unfamiliar grey sky and gargoyles littered around and realized he had no clue where he was.
He must have flown too far away from Amity without noticing...Again.
It was really becoming a bad habit.
Danny stared down at the city's inhabitants that were going home or heading to nightshifts or whatever and dreaded the long flight back to his town.
And maybe it was ghost instinct, or maybe it was just his exhaustion.
But his brain suggested 'What if I just possess someone?' And to him that seemed like a perfectly logical train of thought.
He wouldn't control their body or anything, just sleep in their skin...That did not make it sound better at all.
Before he could think twice, someone left a general store, arms filled with stuff and somehow projecting an aura of safety.
The two thoughts of 'They look comfy' and 'screw it' clashed together in his head as he made the very stupid decision of performing a swan drive right into the someone.
"WHAT THE-" "Don't worry, I'll be gone by morning I just need to sleep" Danny cut off the persons freakout-he should really get their name at some point- he would have explained more but the sleep gods had already done their job.
This left one very confused, scared, and freaked out Batkid.
Almost a decade ago, in November of 2014, I became so exhausted by seeing people throw around the absurd claim that Dean/Cas fans made up only 1% of SPN fandom that I decided to prove how wrong it was. The most readily available data which didn't rely on conducting a survey or poll -- and was therefore a more accurate representation of actual fandom activity rather than just whoever happened to respond to a survey -- came from fic numbers on Ao3.
I made a post about it at the time (the pertinent figures are included below, or you can see the original post here) and then completely forgot about the entire thing. Until now.
Why? Well, largely thanks to a sudden resurgence of the same old nonsense this week, mostly cropping up in the comment sections of a couple of polls that crossed my dash. The temptation to check if there had been any significant changes to the fandom's activity since I last looked ten years ago was too strong to ignore.
Friends. Things have proven to be shockingly consistent.
With the same caveat from last time -- that this is only showing trends in the subset of fandom who actively uses Ao3, and therefore obviously doesn't take into account the "general audience" subset of fandom who don't participate beyond watching the show and occasionally liking a social media post -- here are the numbers:
Old count | November 9th, 2014 | 4 episodes into S10
Total SPN fics posted - 86,352
Fics listed as gen - 22,718 (26.3%)
Fics with Dean/Cas - 33,762 (39.0%)
Fics with Sam/Dean - 12,286 (14.2%)
Fics with Sam/Cas - 1,634 (1.8%)
Fics with Sam/Dean/Cas - 787 (0.9%)
The remaining 18.6% of SPN fics were non-gen fics featuring other character pairings, including reader inserts and original characters.
New count | May 28th, 2024 | 3.5 years after finale
Total SPN fics posted - 290,707
Fics listed as gen - 61,343 (21.1%)
Fics with Dean/Cas - 116,925 (40.2%)
Fics with Sam/Dean - 34,673 (11.9%)
Fics with Sam/Cas - 5,548 (1.9%)
Fics with Sam/Dean/Cas - 1,957 (0.6%)
The remaining 24.3% of SPN fics are non-gen fics featuring other character pairings, including reader inserts and original characters.
Notes on data:
All data was collected while logged in on Ao3 to ensure no incorrect counts were caused by hidden works.
There is some overlap within these numbers due to fics which are tagged with multiple pairings. This might be possible to account for if someone felt like doing more intensive data collection, but I've already spent about an hour and a half on this and that's already a lot more time than I'd like to be doing voluntary math. I enjoy statistics as a point of interest, but goddamn do I hate actually crunching the numbers.
It bears mentioning that Sam/Gabriel (5.1%), Sam/Jess (2.2%), & Dean/Reader (2.5%) all have higher counts than Sam/Cas (1.9%) & Sam/Dean/Cas (0.6%), however I didn't make note of those pairings in 2014, so I'm unsure if there has been any change.
I shouldn't have to say this, but literally all of us are just smashing our fave characters together like dolls, so as interesting as these numbers are this post is not intended to suggest that any ship is "better" than any other ship. This post is intended to do nothing more than show the available data which disproves a baseless claim about the size of Dean/Cas fandom within the larger SPN fandom.
TLDR; the percentage of active Supernatural fans on Ao3 who are interested in Dean/Cas as a pairing is significantly higher than 1%, and that has been a consistent pattern within the fandom for the past ten years.
headcanon that jason reads to cass. well, it started as him reading to cass -- she got to work on her literacy, and he got to share his favorite books with someone -- but it kind of isn't just cass anymore.
tim was the first to join them. he'd sit at the end of the couch and listen. jason's got a good voice for reading, very calm and measured, and having that sort of steady, relaxed sound in the background made tim feel comfortable enough to fall asleep to the sound of his brother reading.
damian, oddly enough, was next. he walked into the library one day, fully prepared to dye tim's hair purple or something while he was asleep, but he came across jason reading aloud and short-circuted a bit. he didn't get read to growing up in the league of assassins, so the concept was pretty foreign to him. but he kind of liked it. so he sat down in one of the chairs and listened.
dick's Sibling Bonding Radar just went off one afternoon and led him to the couch in the library. tim was already asleep and damian was settled into the armchair, entranced, so it was cass that made eye contact with him and put a finger to her lips, telling him not to interrupt. not that dick was going to -- he was already stretching out on the floor, careful to be absolutely silent so as not to disturb the peace.
steph, kate, duke, and barbara don't live at the manor, but every time they're in the house during this self-imposed quiet time, they'll find a spot on the couch or the floor to listen. in the kind of life they have (the one where you dress in kevlar and spandex and go out at night to punch people) (or during the day to punch people) (or you run an enormous computer to help the people in the kevlar and spandex... okay you get it) it's nice to have some quiet time with their family.
When Steph and Cass get married they don’t take the last name Brown (Daddy Issues™️) or Cain (Daddy Issues Prime™️) or even Wayne (Steph absolutely REFUSES to become a Wayne nosirree), but a secret fourth thing (Gordan).
Fuck whatever DC is doing with the al Ghul's characterizations and story lines, I've decided that from now on the al Ghul's are gonna be DC's version of the Addams Family instead.
Now I don't mean just give the various al Ghul's the exact personalities of the various Addams and call it a day. That's boring, that erases all the interesting parts of the al Ghuls, that's just using "find & replace" and not actually adding anything. I mean give them the vibes of the Addams Family.
Keep the al Ghul's as the al Ghul's with all their scheming and machinations and world domination attempts but give them all the unhinged energy, the casually insane view of the world, the deranged levels of love and devotion for family. Make them that group where objectively they are batshit insane but also you cannot argue with the fact that they are indisputably the most stable and functional family in the entire universe.
They're creepy, they're kooky, they're mysterious and spooky. Ra's many opulent homes and impenetrable fortresses are a museum and the al Ghul's really are a screa-um whenever people come to see-um (or when they lay waste upon their enemies in a surprise attack that has been planned for months and is just the first domino in a series that will ultimately lead to achieving a far greater goal).
They all love each other and want each other to be happy, they express this primarily with stabbing and murder attempts (its fine, death is a thing that happens to other people).
And forget the League of Assassins being a cult. Just make the whole vast globe spanning organization a collection of cousins/aunts/uncles/dear old friends ect. No one (not even the al Ghuls, if they cared to keep track of such things) is sure who is actually related to them and who just got absorbed into the ever expanding family tree based on their vibes being right.
(Is Sensei Ra's father you ask? Well he's certainly someone's father - probably.
Anyway have you heard about Cousin Cheshire? Despicable poisoner of a young woman, capable of the most horrific things imaginable - yes she is the sweetest dear. Like I was saying though, she just had a baby!
Everyone in the family is just so excited to throw a baby shower to celebrate! Ubu has really gone all out with the spike traps, he does so love getting to welcome a new addition to the family.
Talia of course has cultivated a brand new strain of the most toxic plants imaginable to make a brand new kind of necrotizing poison. You know, as a nice little romantic gift for Cousin Cheshire and that young man of hers. It really is so important to make sure you take time for you and your partner to go on dates and have a few pitched battles to the death on dark rooftops in the pounding rain when you have children.
Now there is some to-do about it all of course, you know how family get together can be. Everyone is arguing over who should get to give little Lian her first weapon and what it should be. Nyssa is pushing for grenades but Ra's is insisting on a sword - he's traditional like that you know - but Dusan has the vote so far on throwing knives. You know the kind that have the little divots along the edges of the blades them to make it easier to get the poison you dip them in to stick.)
I'm just saying that the al Ghuls should be a delightful cross between the Bond Villains they were originally conceived as and the lovingly unhinged Addams Family. It just feels correct in my heart.
(Again keep the interesting aspects of the characters and the nuances of who each of them are like their drive to save the world through destroying humanity and their strong environmentalist leanings and their constantly playing 5D chess and everything, but like, take away the racism and the cartoonishly evil for no reason bullshit and give them some fun feral energy to go along with it).
When Cass started making posts about analysis of her favorite media, she wasn’t expecting to garner any sort of attention. She was just doing it for fun. But, then she had people who started to follow her for it.
Then, she decided to make videos online. Which got even more attention.
The videos that do the best, though, are always the ones she does over a show called Specter. A show about a kid who becomes a ghost and has to deal with all the craziness that comes with that. Apparently the creator said it was loosely based off of his childhood.
Oh, and apparently he’s seen her videos. Apparently Danny Fenton is a fan.
People always say bruce kidnapped jason immediately after meeting him but at least he only took him in after leaving him at the crime orphanage didn’t work out. With cass they had exactly one conversation consisting of them drawing in the dirt and throwing punches at each other while bruce projected his past experiences onto her and then he was welcoming her in like “i have complete confidence that she won’t kill anybody”
honestly i don't even remember creating anything for the file tagging system on my laptop, but i was just searching for something in a finder window, and--
Bruce, Jason, and Cass can move eerily silently all for their own reasons.
Bruce has trained and trained and trained, because in his mind he had to be perfect and nothing else would do. He learned to walk silently from the League of Shadows in their slippers and light clothing, and then he came home and put on boots and Kevlar plating and learned it all over again.
He practiced for days on end, wearing hyper clean boots around the house, learning how to transfer his weight softly, how to step like a ghost, how to prowl absolutely silently through the echo chamber ballroom.
Jason rose from the grave with an affinity for magic. It clings to him like a fine mist. When he remembered Bruce's training, of course he could walk silent as the grave (his own grave). But as he got heavier, as his body got away from his slim, stealthy build, it wasn't enough anymore. But he willed his steps to be silent, and the magic around him obeyed.
Now he can slip in and out of silence at will. He can be sprinting full-boar over asphalt in combat boots, but if he doesn't want you to hear him, you won't. He never sneaks up on children or citizens, but his prey doesn't know he's there until he strikes.
Cass only knows how to move soundlessly. She watches other people walk with their heels jabbing into the ground and their toes slapping down and wonders if they know how loud they are, how easy they are to find and follow, to hurt. Her body just doesn't move that way, her muscle memory from a thousand painful lessons as a girl making a noisy footfall a non-option.
Sometimes she gets too comfortable. She's in the manor, she's around Bruce, there's carpet and walls and a ceiling and only five people in the whole building. And then she hears her own footfall, or a creak in the floorboards below, and then she sees Cain in front of her in her mind's eye, and she fixes it. More careful now because it happened again.
Of course all of the Bats know how to sneak. But those three know how to move like wraiths.