Freefallintothevoid

make a girl smile today.

give her a sword.

Danny: Hell didn’t want me when I died, and heaven cast me out. So now I’m stuck in between on this little place called Earth. Sometimes I like to think it’s my own personal hell, but who am I to judge?

Tim, who was on day 5 of being awake: have you tried to fight god?

Danny: oh, I did, and I won. But the bastard is manipulative and decided that I wasn’t allowed in heaven because of pure spite.

Tim: interesting. Do you still want to fight gods?

Danny: depends. Me and Hades are under a truce, and Zeus kicked me out of Olympus. Sometimes I thought about fighting with Wonder Woman to get a rise from Zeus, but Hippolyta told me I wouldn’t be invited for dinner if I messed with her daughter, sooo….

Tim, pulling out his phone: cool, cool, so his name is darkseid, and he’s an asshole

Danny: say no more

When I read a fanfic I like, the author becomes a mini celebrity to me. So when an author with a work I like kudos’ or comments on my own fanfic I just-

Lucius Fox must be having SUCH a bad time if he knows Bruce Wayne’s secret identity because now he has to sit through board meetings next to a man who he knows broke sixteen bones between two henchmen last night because they didn’t give Batman the hideout address fast enough but is somehow patient and self-controlled enough to let Lisa from WE Accounting rip into him without even twitching.

The 2am snack rush

In situations and headcanons and such where Bruce doesn't tell the justice league his identity, I feel like one of the most often cited reasons is that they'd then immediately connect all of his many waves of increasingly smaller vigilantes back to him.

But I'd like to think it doesn't happen like that.

Like, at some point, Nightwing has been on the team for years, and somehow, no one that didn't already know him as Robin has connected him back to Batman, but of course both Bruce and Dick think they know, because they have to, right?

But then Bruce's identity gets revealed while Dick's off world or something, but he gets filled in, so he assumes that his identity is blown too, right? Of course, once you know Batman is Bruce Wayne, it'd be easy to put together that Dick Grayson is Nightwing.

So then Bruce and Dick have to rush to the watchtower from some sort of Wayne family event one day, but there's no real need to put on their costumes yet, because the league already knows their identities.

Until...

Green Lantern, watching a young man that he's only ever seen through gossip magazines fiddle around in the watchtower: Hey, Bru-Batman, I know we found out your identity and all, but do you really think it's a good idea to bring your children into this? I mean, what if he gets hurt?

Dick, incredulous: You... you do know who I am, right?

GL: It's hard to not know who you are. I saw you on a magazine cover just the other day.

-long pause-

Dick: Bruce, when you used to complain that you work with idiots, I thought you were exaggerating.

-general sounds of outrage from the JL-

Oh wow, this is great! Absolutely delighted to have inspired you!

Dick Grayson's unmatched success as a child vigilante makes a lot more sense when you remember the Court of Owls was a thing and that Dick was meant to be the next Grey Son.

There is no way that someone at Haly's Circus wasn't there keeping an eye on him while he grew up. A future weapon needs to be trained and monitored after all, and a circus, a place where weird skills are completely normal, is actually a great place to secretly train a child.

You know, just some knife tricks that translated really well into actual fighting. How to get out of restraints and pick locks while under a time limit. Death defying acrobatic stunts that coincidentally do wonders for parkouring. That sort of thing. Nothing that seems out of place for a boy growing up around circus performers to learn, but would literally any where else.

I mean, while I fully believe that most kids would want to kill the man responsible for their parents deaths, Dick was weirdly prepared to go through it. He tracked down Zucco with way more ease than any normal child should have too. He became the first child vigilante, for goodness sake. The first Robin! He only started getting formal training after he basically forced Bruce into it!

Bruce himself has no idea that this kind of competency in a child is unusual, considering he was much too blinded by the similarities between his and Dick's tragic orphanhoods.

Alfred is in a similar boat because he’s desensitized to weird children after he somehow managed to successfully raise Bruce 'The Batman' Wayne, so he doesn't clock the hyper-competency as abnormal either.

By the time the other batkids start popping up (Jason 'The Audacity' Todd, borderline-street rat with no fear) (Tim 'the greatest stalker in Gotham history' Drake, child genius, also bullied his way into becoming Robin) (Barbara 'raised by the only uncorrupt cop in gotham' Gordon) (Stephanie 'daddy issues and spite' Brown) (Duke 'Pretends he's the normal one and people believe him' Thomas) it's too late.

It would also explain how Dick got along so well with Damian out of all of them. Similar childhood with different approaches and all that. On some subconscious level, Dick recognises and resonates with the murderous ten year old assassin with strong familial ties to a secret elite assassin organization.

It isn't until after the whole Court of Owls and Grey Son reveal that suddenly Dick realises a whole lot of things about his childhood that suddenly make a lot more sense.