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It starts one dreary morning in front of a miserable little coffee shop in Gotham, right on the border between Park Row and Newtown, the ‘civilised’ part of the city.
(It starts years ago, with a boy that’s not supposed to exist going into a portal that will break the world.
Or: it starts even before that, with a boy that’s not supposed to exist opening Lazarus-green eyes and kneeling at the feet of a three-thousand years old assassin.
In both cases, it starts with a vatful of ectoplasm and a machine that shouldn’t have been made.)
Danny’s at the point of his usual finals ADHD spiral where he thinks he can cram five months’ worth of material in his head in twenty-four hours right before said finals, so he’s got a latte with fourteen espresso shots and enough sugar to severely poison a small child (he had to sign a warrant. This is the only coffee shop that allows over ten shots of espresso in the whole of Gotham Bay.) when someone bumps into him and almost makes him spill his sole reason for existence.
Normally, Danny Fenton who is a retired brainwashed assassin and also the King of Infinite Realms knows how to hold in his temper. And, don’t get it wrong, he hasn’t just decided to slip this once - in his half-life of tightrope-balance act between civilian and assassin, alive and dead, he is always able to recover once he wobbles. But it does mean that his glare is a little too murderous for an untrained civilian when he meets wide blue eyes.
“Damian?” Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne asks, sleepy but still retaining enough mental faculties to be aghast at his thirteen-year-old brother suddenly looking like he's in his twenties.
Fuck, Danny thinks resignedly to himself. Of course it’d be the one person who’d never let this go.
“Coffee?” He lifts his miraculously-still-full cup at the tense birdie in front of him. “My treat, I promise.”
The discussion is long, and agonising, and for all intents and purposes it drags on for the two weeks it takes Drake-Wayne to confirm everything Danny’s told him: that he’s existed for a long while now in a place not at all close to Gotham and killed a lot of people and is officially dead and unofficially retired from the whole assassin thing.
“A blood sample will make your case easier to prove,” says Red Robin during the negotiations. It’s unclear if he means the clone bit, the Lazarus Warrior bit, the brainwashed bit, or some other convoluted plan he’s cooking up in that hamster-wheel head of his to notify the Batmiglia there’s someone with one-to-one copy of their littlest’s DNA running around Gotham and getting their bachelor in physics.
Danny drags a tongue over his teeth to make sure there’s the normal, human amount of them in his mouth, smiles. “Try to take any kind of sample from me and I’ll come out of retirement just to wipe Gotham out of the face of this Earth.”
The man on the other side of the table doesn’t react to the threat, which is a reaction in and of itself. “No samples, no mention that you exist to anyone who doesn’t figure you out themselves, no permanent access to any of your files… You have to admit, that’s a lot to ask for someone whose casualty list is in the triple digits.”
“And where’s your proof?” Danny asks, still smiling, and means: there’s none you can use without getting the original in trouble, too. It doesn’t matter if Batman himself tries to remove The Grandson of Ra’s al Ghul’s deeds; Danny has multiple copies of all of the evidence, and an in with the Justice League. He won’t win the fight, but the other side will lose, too, and that’s enough of a deterrent.
Drake-Wayne looks like he wants to sigh; instead he scoots the Deathspresso closer to himself, even if he has no intention of drinking it. It’s the fifth one he’s ever gotten for himself after listening to Danny’s order last Tuesday, but he never drinks them. Danny’s sure it’s got something to do with him being too paranoid to drink any liquids close to a bona-fide League of Assassins member, retirement notwithstanding, but he can’t say he’s not glad about it. Sure, the coffee might be going to waste, but Red Robin isn’t ruining himself with lethal amounts of caffeine every second day, so that should be enough of a win, no?
“…how’re finals?” He asks in the end, all polite curiosity. Danny doesn’t know if he appreciates or despises the small talk, because the man in front of him knows how many times he’s pissed in the last week; surely he knows how his finals are going.
It might be the Midwestern boy in him, trying to maintain a veneer of politeness even in situations like these. It might be simply that Danny has been lonely since the day he knew that loneliness existed as a tangible thing, and Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne is the only person who knows what it is exactly that Danny used to do before he took on the Fenton name, so he doesn’t feel like he has to pretend too much to hide things from him.
(Well, League of Assassins things. Infinite Realms things, by the grace of whatever gods exist, he knows nothing about.)
So Danny groans with all of the exhaustion and annoyance he has and begins: “I swear, these people are trying to kill me, do you understand? Kill me dead!”
The thing about meeting up with your genetic template’s vigilante older brother once a week so he can make sure you haven’t gone off the rails and started killing people again is that, by the fifth week, you’ve more or less exhausted all of the polite conversation starters - not in the least because said vigilante would rather stab himself with a fork in the throat than give away any information about his family to you, which means that approximately everything is off-limits to him.
Because Danny will die again if he has to search for appropriate themes of conversation with Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne every five seconds, he opens his mouth when they meet up on a late summer afternoon and out comes, “Annie’s Lamp is out in the cinemas; wanna go see it?”
Obviously Mr. Red Robin himself knows Danny’s been wanting to see that movie for the last three months; the story it’s based on happened in Amity Park, after all, and Annie herself has been deeply excited about it. Danny’s been obsessively checking the release times since before they’d bumped into each other.
The other stays silent for so long that Danny’s running through all kinds of contingency plans - he’d rather not get locked up for the audacity of existing yet again, thank you very much - before Drake-Wayne moves. Moves, as in, nods decisively, something hiding in the tight corners of his pursed mouth.
“You’re paying for the popcorn,” Danny shoots out immediately, because he has never not pushed. “You and your trust fund baby money, got it? I’m a poor uni student, I can’t afford to give out 20$ for oversalted popped corn, but you can.”
An eye-roll so subtle it almost looks more like a laugh. “For all your Deathspresso’s done for me, and just for that, I’ll buy you popcorn. This time.”
Danny laughs and doesn’t mention how sure they both sound there’s going to be a next time.
(The movie is, objectively, terrible. There's no internal consistency to any of the characters, Annie most of all, and the gore is so over the top it circles right back to being a comedy. Danny likes it as a piece of the horror zeitgeist (see, Sam? Some words you use do make it into his ears and remain in his brain! Even if it's mostly the words having to do with ghosts…) but wildly disapproves of it as a proper retelling of Annie's story, which means he goes on a three-hour rant about the watering down of human tragedy to make space for cheap jump-scare horror and the tendency to shy away from existential horror that's more sad than scary in the current film industry, squished onto a tiny bench in the Starbucks directly next to the cinema.
Drake-Wayne is surprisingly adept at giving other examples and opinions supporting or detracting from Danny's point, some of them even making some amount of sense, which is why Danny gets his ravenous ass delivered first to a magnificent Shawarma place for almost all of their falafel and baklava, and then to his tiny apartment in Crime Alley by an understated but still unimaginably expensive car at 4am. It's a reflex to wave to the driver as he's going up the stairs, and maybe Drake-Wayne doesn't think he can see this well in the dark - but Danny gets a wave back.)
After that, suddenly it's not all that complicated to find things to talk about in their weekly, sometimes biweekly meetings. As it turns out, Drake-Wayne is in fact a huge-ass nerd that used to read Goosebumps in the morning and Steven King just before bed when he was four, determined to find correlation between the Joker's madness and the whole horror thing in the way only an underdeveloped kiddie brain tries to do with things that aren’t at all connected.
Danny, by virtue of living in the most haunted place in the USA and being the King of Infinite Realms, has A Lot of opinions about all of that. Loud opinions, even, and it becomes such a Thing between the two of them to get into almost-shouting matches about the (dis-)continuity of this and that franchise, that the Shawarma place starts recommending them as a weekly entertainment to its regulars.
(”On Ramadan, you do this? Bhaisaheb, have you no shame?” Danny puffs up with outrage once. Uncle Iftikhar shakes his head with mirth.
“No rules against watching good show for free, ey. Don’t want me to make money on your back, don’t do circus at my front door.”
“What a respectful way to call me a clown.” Timothy snrrks from behind his Deathspresso cup to-go, but doesn’t announce his presence otherwise, because he’s a coward. Aunty Naila still scolds him every time she sees him for being skin-and-bones, which Danny thinks she would continue to do so until Tim’s rolling down the filthy Gotham streets to get home; being Red Robin, however, means he’s granted some measure of insanity. Ergo, this song-and-dance of ‘I’m not here, you can’t tell me what to eat because I’m not your child, I am a capable adult’ that everybody’s been stuck in the middle of, because of them two.
Well, whatever. Danny admits they’re a world-class act, but he can’t help himself! Timothy has the cunning and diction required to talk around some of the shittiest comic-book opinions Danny has ever had the displeasure of hearing, and to make them sound reasonable with his thesaurus vocabulary. To leave him be without disagreeing would put a stain on Danny’s honour, and that, well, that just cannot stand.)
It’s a cold winter evening and Danny’s tracking Red Robin’s emergency patrol on Twitter, a little grumpy Mr. Freeze has cancelled their date, when he notices for the first time that he’s been calling their outings dates for the past two months.
What the fuck, Danny thinks hollowly, and sits down, right there on the wet, grimy sidewalk in front of the Deathspresso coffee shop to think over his entire life. (The coffee shop has a name, obviously, but Danny can never seem to remember it.) How is it that Danny’s been looking forward to seeing this man that quite literally holds the key to his freedom in his hands not because he needs to keep an eye on him, but because he’s been genuinely enjoying his company?
“Are you okay?” A blend of amusement and worry makes him look up; it’s Tim, sans mask, in his loose black hoodie that he normally throws over his Red Robin costume when he doesn’t have time to change. How long has he been sitting on the ground like a fool, that Tim’s patrol is over? “Danny?” Tim asks, because they’ve been using first names for a while now, and Danny, well. Danny has never not pushed, so:
“Are we rescheduling this date or going on one now?”
And Tim goes quiet, face smooth but a little pink, and then he crouches down to Danny’s eye-level, offers him a gloved hand. It’s warm with his body-heat even through the synth-kevlar.
“Have you ever seen Gotham from above?”
Danny has; but he’s sure the view with Tim in it will be unforgettable anyways.
(It is, obviously. But even more unforgettable is Damian Wayne’s disgusted, horrified non-expression when, on a shadowy rooftop half a year later, Tim deigns to introduce the two of them with a quick and simple, “And this is my boyfriend, your only successful clone. Say ‘hi’ to your big brother!”
The sword in the gut is entirely expected, so Danny laughs it off.
Tim doesn’t.
(Tim is very, very scary when he’s mad. Hot like burning, of course, but so very scary.)
Somehow, Danny being undead royalty is easier to swallow for the Son of the Bat than it is that he likes Tim romantically.
Tim is made to go through so many tests of character to ‘determine his suitability as Danny’s paramour’. He passes, of course, but he’s pissed about having to do it in the first place, to say the least.
Danny passes his own tests with flying colours, as well. Though how much of that is his own skill, and how much of it is Cujo existing on the same plane of existence as Damian, that’s another question entirely.
One thing is clear, however: no matter how much Damian and Tim might say they dislike each other, they are in the end still siblings, and so Tim ends up engaging in the oldest form of bribery known to humankind: if you don’t tell dad about [my secret boyfriend I’ve been sneaking around with], I’ll buy you [this super-expensive vegan restaurant chain and make sure their practices are humane and eco-friendly (and halal, yes, obviously, Damian, I’m not a moron, how can you quality-check their products if you can’t eat any of it—)]. Damian has been socialised into human culture for long enough to know how to press that advantage, as is the right of every younger sibling; he even has a mentor in Danny, younger-sibling-instigator-extraordinaire himself, so he knows he can (and should!) ask for even more outrageous stuff whenever he feels like being a little shit.
Bruce does wonder why Tim’s been spending quite so much money on his fourth son recently, but they seem to have a good relationship now, so what is he supposed to do about it? Complain they fixed their shit by throwing money at the problem until it went away instead of talking it out like adults? Mr. Sparkling-Mental-Faculties himself? Pschhh. He has the money to spare, and he doesn’t even have to spend it removing bloodstains from their couches after yet another sibling disagreement between them two anymore - if they ask, Bruce will double their monthly allowance himself!
(Three years later, when John Constantine summons the Ghost King in a last-ditch attempt to save the universe from yet another total extinction event and Red Robin tumbles out of the summoning circle right after him, bruised and half-naked, Robin crosses his arms over his armoured chest and lets the two nincompoops deal with the shitshow. They’ve made their bed, and now they’ve been caught lying in it; free entertainment is never to be passed up.
Karma is requesting your owed dues, he mouths to a fire engine-red Tim over Batman’s combat-ready shoulder. The eldritch being curled around Red Robin’s extremities blinks a myriad of its visible eyes in a slowly-quickening dissonance, and vibrates the air in what Damian has learned is the closest approximation of laughter Danny can get in this state of existence.
Batman throws a batarang. Danny opens one of his hyper-dimensional mouths full of needle-bone teeth and eats it with a deafening screech that scrambles half the technology in a kilometer-radius.
“I knew he was a monster-fucker but holy shit,” Signal mutters under his breath nearby. Hal Jordan has joined the fight, confident he has the upper hand with his plentiful experience of dealing with extraterrestrial horrors. He’s being quickly disabused of any notions of competence he holds.
Jon levitates closer to Damian, brow furrowed in thought. “Should we tell them—”
“—absolutely not, don’t ruin my fun.” Damian rebukes calmly. Flash is gently flung back by a feathered tentacle in, as Mr. Lovecraft the Cowardly would say, colours this mortal world has not been made to perceive.
“Shrimp colours,” Beastboy mumbles somewhere under a collapsed chair.
“Wait, those exist? I thought it was just some fun inaccurate tumblr science!” Blue Beetle is vibrating with excitement.
“I cannot believe you let those words out of your mouth, dude.” Tim lobs at them over a bruised shoulder. Danny’s incandescent eyes have started growing multiple pupils with spinning colours that make it hard to think. Wonder Woman looks at one of them for a little too long and stumbles backwards into a pile of rubble like a Gotham drunkard.
Is this what Tim felt when he introduced Damian to Danny, all those years ago? This unmitigated chaos, this entertaining headless-chicken running? Damian ducks under a bit of high-velocity flying debris and feels a smirk pull at the corner of his mouth.
What did he know? His eldritch clone’s taste in men does result in some good entertainment, at least.)