1 Vlad

I've worked in libraries before and agree, I would be torn between delight at organizing everything properly and horror at how much time it would take with everything else that regularly needs to be done daily in the library.

Ok, so.

Blob ghosts are like ecto filters. And there are some fics where ghosts just...roost and lay eggs or whatever. Biology says: now you have babies. But the babies aren't always the same level of intelligence.

But if you share ecto during this time or whatever... I mean, look at Box Lunch!

So Danny's little ghost babies need a little extra, because their Mama is part human. This Wayne Enterprises contest helped him find a way to stabilize his babies with Real World materials AND fulfill the Protect obsession they inherited from Danny.

The animal designs for the Fenbots? Those are the bodies his babies wanted. The mass produced filters? Blob ghosts really like their job. (Also, some fics say blob ghosts are gossips. This and Technus, is the communication system for the Fenbots.)

Ghosts hear about what Danny is doing for his babies and go, huh. Can you help with mine?

Danny quickly becomes a ghost doctor specializing in identifying obsessions. Some Fenbots have multiple Littles to balance Obsessions. Some merge together and work better for it. This also happens, naturally and willingly, when people start pack bonding them.

The little ones are flexible for a while and Danny's are at least a little more present in a way others aren't. So they more easily bond back and have favorites.

So that Sea Dragon that didn't make it? Was Danny's baby. Maybe bonded with one of Princess Dora's. And while the Core Protection System worked, that body is gone. So of course he held a funeral. (And if that town got a ghost dragon that spent as much time checking in on the kids and turtles it protected as swimming in the sea like it used to, well. No one's complaining.) (If there's sometimes an extra dragon, no one says anything. Just local legends to tell tourists.) (The Atlantians know and invite it down to visit sometimes.)

Maybe Danny has babies like normal ghosts. Maybe giving his blood/ectoplasm to the machines is enough. And the more they are acknowledged and loved by people, the more they grow.

There's an up-and-coming Tech Giant, called Fenton Works, and Batman is determined to prove that the company is a front for a villain.

Danny, after his parents turned from Ghost hunting to being the first official Ghost Anthropologists, decided to repurpose some of their weapons.

And, well, there was a contest being run by Wayne Enterprises; whoever can design a robot that will help the environment got prize money and a grant.

Danny, in all his mechanical engineering prowess, was bored. So he designed a thing. Repurposed the Fenton Guns into a cute robotic tortoise that would clean the beach.

It spiraled from there, and now Fenton Works is the leading name in green technology that's cleaning up the Earth bit by bit. Sea Dragon robots that clean oil and trash from the ocean; beach tortoises that clean the sand and beach and deposit their hoard of trash into designated receptacles that Danny uses as material to make more robots; Cryptid "stalker" robots with long legs that delicately patrol forests to perform "fuel management" and clear out the underbrush to help manage wildfires; moving gargoyle robots that sit on top of skyscrapers to help clean the air with huge sail-like wings, etc.

Basically, Danny pulls a Doctor Elisabet Sobeck, but with less world ending and more actually helping. (Not that the world ending was Elisabet's fault, of course, but different franchise)

And due to the number of times aliens try to attack and rogues send their own robots to attack people, naturally Danny installed self-defense protocols, along with one single golden rule written into the very OS of every single robot; Save Humans Whatever the Cost.

Problem is, Batman has never seen robots like this not be used for evil purposes, and he knows that their power source (a closely guarded Fenton Works secret) is some sort of liquid that glows green.

He really only knows of one liquid that glows green.

So he's determined to find everything he can about Fenton Works, because there's no way that Daniel Fenton isn't actually a villain in the making.

Danny's just thrilled for the chance to work with Wayne Enterprises.

“Are you busy today?”

Danny looked up from his phone, where he’d been messaging Jazz. She’d been pestering him to be more social again. Damian had been getting progressively more twitchy recently and he couldn’t figure out why. So, he figured, why not?

“Not really,” he answered after weighing the pros and cons of his answer.

“Good,” he said. “You are coming to dinner with me.”

Danny blinked once. Twice. Damian didn’t change. He still stood, somewhat stiff and formal and agitated in front of him. “What?”

“I am bringing you to my family dinner. Tonight. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

Danny wasted approximately thirty seconds of those five minutes staring in shock, before remembering that Damian could and would drag him out the door sans shoes if need be. He’d done it before. Given they went to school in Gotham, that had meant that Damian had carried him over his shoulder to his car and thrown an ugly purple pair of crocs at him before Damian had dropped him off at his study group. He bolted to his room to grab his wallet and a jacket, then slid into the kitchen to grab an ecto blob boba smoothie and a piece of meat.

Damian grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the fridge, sans meat. “Time’s up,” he said.

“But my snack-” Danny tried…

“You will be fed,” was snapped at him as they left their apartment. “If you must have a snack, I’m certain one of the heathens has left something in my car you may have.”

'Well, shit,' Danny thought. 'Guess I’m gonna need to have that meat for a midnight snack.'

_______

Danny sat at a dining room table full of rich people in their own house and wondered briefly how this had happened. Damian had dragged him into the house as if he thought the halfa would run away given half a chance. Which, he wasn’t exactly wrong, but still. He had refused to let go until he’d forcefully sat Danny down in a chair and introduced him to the room at large as “my roommate who refuses to feed himself properly and is trying to burn the building down by incorrectly using the toaster.” Which, rude.

"How do you do that?” the blonde, who he thinks was introduced as Brown, asked curiously.

"He puts raw meat in it,” Damian growls.

Everyone in the room turns to Danny at once.

“Why?” one of the two largest men, this one with a white streak, demanded. “Even I knew better as a kid, and I didn’t even have a toaster.”

Danny blinked at that before replying, “Well, the toaster at home was the only appliance that didn’t reanimate food. Ever. The oven was guaranteed to do so and the few times we had a working microwave it was Russian Roulette of the end result being animated, electrically charred, glow in the dark radioactive, or actually cooked through.”

“Oh my god, is that an actual reason?” someone whispered.

Damian just looked betrayed. “Why?”

“I did tell you, didn’t I? I’m pretty sure I told you,” Danny said confused. No realization dawned in Damian’s gaze. “My parents are ecto scientists? I know I changed my last name when I came out here, but I was pretty sure I told you about that.”

Damian’s eye twitched. “The crazed, zealot, mad scientist Fentons?”

Danny sunk into his chair with a sigh, resigned. “Yeah, them. After the Justice League took them in, I’m pretty sure they put my sister, friends, and I on some kind of potential rouges watchlist because of it. I’m just glad they managed to close the portal and confiscated all the weapons blueprints from them and the GIW.”

“They only took the weapons blueprints?” Richard asked.

Danny shrugged. “They took all of them, but the weapons were getting really dangerous. They kept upping the sensitivity so they targeted more and more liminals, ecto-contaminated people. I know how to make everything because I had to sabotage or fix everything so it wouldn’t target me.”

"Why would it target you?” Bruce asked, concerned.

Danny stared blankly at the man. “Do none of you follow the news? My lab accident was used as evidence of human experimentation at their trial. The whole house was an OSHA violation. The only reason their ecto levels were as low as they were is because they wore specialized hazmat suits twenty four-seven. That whole thing is why my sister and I changed our last name. So we could avoid,” he waved his hands around, “this.”

The sound of someone clearing their throat quietly brought the questions to a stop. Danny looked over at the man to give him a relieved smile, which grew truly grateful as the butler placed a plate of spaghetti in front of him.

Once everyone was served, Danny dug in. 'Damn,' he thought, 'steak cuts in spaghetti? Must be a rich people thing.'

With the butler, Alfred, if he remembered correctly, standing by the door, no one focused their questions on Danny, for which he was very grateful.It also took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that no one else’s spaghetti had steak cuts. In the meat. He carefully chewed the next bite of meat and sank down in his chair with an embarrassed groan.

“Is there a problem?” Damian asked, a smug, knowing glint in his eyes.

“I made a bet with my friends that I could last at least a semester without anyone figuring out this,” he gestured at the very delicious spaghetti. “I owe them phone numbers now. I don’t suppose you know where I can find Dr. Pamela Isely?”

“And who else’s number do you need?”

“Tim Drake, can I pass your number to my tech friend so he doesn’t remotely brick my electronics?”

A string of startled laughs erupted from the table at the question.

Danny needs a few...odd things. A few dietary and emotional requirements unique to his physiology. Meat is one of them.

But like, raw meat. He doesn't have to eat it often, maybe twice a month, but it does need to be completely raw.

He also needs to eat non-sentient blob ghosts, which are very different from sentient ones. Same amount, maybe twice a month.

He's weak to hot temperatures, where most humans require some sort of positive contact he needs to fight, if he gets too much sunlight his dopamine levels drop, and oddly enough as he got older milk or products with a lot of milk started to affect him like alcohol affects humans.

Now that he's made it to college, hiding most of these things is easy enough.

He chose Gotham, because of minimal sunny days and naturally cold weather. He regularly goes for walks at night, to fill his need for fighting. He says he has a milk allergy, and avoids milk products.

The blobs and the raw meat are a little uh. Those are a little hard.

He's taken to ducking into a bathroom stall to just swallow the blobs whole. But the meat...

He decides to sear the outside and leave the inside entirely raw. Does this detract from the nutrients by cooking them off? Yes. Does it mean he needs to eat raw meat four times a month instead of twice? Yes. Does it mostly hide that he's doing this in front of humans? Kind of.

Until he got a vegan roommate.

Said roommate is far too sharp-eyed for his own good, and now the guy is being weird.

Or: Damian's roommate is a meta who clearly has dietary restrictions outside the norm. It's fine; Damian understands that like animals in the wild, people have different diets. But the cuts of meat Fenton is eating are...subpar. Damian isn't sure how to be...civil, or appear polite, or not be a "snob" if he suggests Fenton allow him to procure farm fresh cuts of steak from cows raised in an open pasture and were well taken care of.

Fenton parents make an invention to reverse a ghost's evil impulses!" It actually brings a ghost's instincts forward. The effects last about two weeks.

The Fentons are in Gotham when they get the chance to use it on Phantom.

Good news: it happens near the Bats, so he's quickly rescued.

Bad news: baby ghost instinct wants parents and turned human to get reassurance. That did not happen and now Red Hood has a crying, keening teenager shaped leech.

Ok, so I've seen a few things that say Bruce Wayne and Sam Manson are Jewish. And I've seen a couple of things about Jewish traditions that say that they leave small stones on graves of loved ones, something about anchoing souls. And there's this one fic, I can't remember what it was or who wrote it, that had Sam placing small stones on Danny sometimes, just because.

I had this thought. Since Danny and Jason aren't dead, what if their loved ones made them weighted blankets, with those stones instead of beads/rice/what-have-you in regular weighted blankets.

Those blankets quickly become their favorite. It's soothing on an instinctual level. Sleeping with those blankets is the best sleep they've ever had. No nightmares. Just happy, sleeping, ghost purrs. Because those blankets are full of love and recognition of loss and ghosts appreciate that recognition of loss from the living, need it.

It's why Ember wants to hear her name, why Skulker and Technus shout their names and titles. They want to be recognized.

Just imagine, movie night at the manor. Some poor soul tries to playfully steal Jason's weighted blanket. Jason's eyes haven't been so bright since he emerged from the Lazarus Pits and he's snarling and growling to impress a dragon. Message received: don't touch the blanket.

The himbo act is only partially an act. Sometimes, Danny really is that dumb. Danny will play up Jack Fenton obliviousness, but he really does have his own blind spots.

But space? Yeah, Danny literally cannot help himself.

Okay so Danny gets adopted by Bruce. Yeah? Yeah.

And they don't know about his powers? Obviously. We know this part of the story.

BUT. On a casual trip out for food or whatever, Danny and some of the bat sibs get cornerd by reporters and paparazzi. There panicking bec danny JUST got here and they haven't had time to breif him on how to interact with the media and he's totally gonna flounder and they need to help him before he totally flubs it!

Exept, he doesn't. He smiles, nice and bright, into the camra. He waits patiently for each reporter to ask their questions and then answers confidently, giving them something walst acctually answering nothing. "Where are you from?" "A small town, I'm sure you wouldn't know it but, really, it's about where I am now."How did you come to be adopted by bruce?"Well, I look quite a bit like my new brothers, don't you think? Haha. I like to think it was meant to be."

And on and on he gose, dancing around them, shareing professionally worded jokes and calmly addressing eatch person as they viyed for his attention, controlling the flow of conversation.

The bat kids all look at eatchother.

This kids been media trained.

So, Danny is Dick's younger brother. He was given up because he was born premature and had health issues. Dick didn't know or thought the baby didn't make it.

Fast forward, Dick is now Nightwing and Danny is Phantom. Danny is in Gotham, for whatever reason, and comes across someone who echos ectoplasm back at him, like a half formed core. It's familiar in a way he can't name.

That chemical that is used to make Talons, Dionesium, is a stabilizing force for halfas. Dick has trace amount in his system.

Danny, in trying to find this guy, keeps finding Talons, who are all ectoplasm starved halfas with injured cores. Danny quickly learns to be careful about them, so when Nightwing shows up, echoing ectoplasm, Danny treats him like a Feral cat.

Red Hood thinks this is hilarious until Danny does it to him too. (Per DC, the Lazarus Pits are impure Dionesium. Per fanon, the Lazarus Pits are rotten ectoplasm.) Danny doesn't know about that yet. All he knows, is he just found out he's not as alone as he thought and these two are even nice! Even if the one with a clearer core is very obviously sick with some kind of contamination.

Gothamites have aliases. It's something that doesn't make sense to outsiders, but it's true. Parents usually give their children an alias as a birthday present between the ages of 5 and 10.

Jason's revival isn't new in Gotham. Minor revivals happen all the time. If they didn't, Gotham would be a barren ghost city. The thing is, these minor revivals take years off your life. So all the kids and teens that died in Joker's attack on a school? They are now adults and teens. Can't go back to your old life? Here's a new identity!

All the dumb grunts getting hired by villains? Kid's who died too many times to get much out of school. They don't have the education to even try for a regular job.

All the homeless people, kids especially, on the streets? Teens and adults revived from kids who never got to learn where babies came from until they got slammed with hormones and couldn't deal with the consequences.

Most people in Gotham have died at least once privately, some publicly.

Jason was living on the streets after suffering under abusive Willis and drug addict Catherine Todd when he got picked up by Batman. You bet he died at least once.

Bruce's parents died? They gave up their revivals so Bruce could still have something of a childhood, cause you bet he died there.

Tim lived alone and unsupervised for most of his childhood? You sure bet he died. Was he also surrounded by the cursed objects his parents brought home? If this boy didn't have frequent encounters with questionable beings, I would be surprised. (Low key suspect he came out immortal and pulls stupid stunts regularly to 'grow up' with 'growth spurts'. Forever 17 Tim Drake has a reason, now.)

So, they all have aliases. The Wayne's and the Malones and the Drakes and the Cobblepots and everybody.

And this means that will readings are a pain the ass to everyone not from Gotham, because by the time Final death comes, you've got at least 3 aliases you need on your will for it to be legitimate.

Can someone help me find a post? It was baby ghost danny and baby ghost jason.

Danny's rouges haven't bothered him in a while, and when he goes into the realms to check on things, they're all surrounding red hood. I think jason is in his red hood gear, anyway.

And one of the ghosts tells danny to leave them alone, they're dealing with a baby ghost, he's only a couple of years dead. And danny breaks down and has a tantrum, yelling about how he's not even or just barely a year dead, you've never been like this to me, I don't trust you with the older baby.

Somewhere in the thread, I think Danny and Jason sibling bond.