it's a fun hc of mine that during dick's robin days, he went through the "omg i wish i had a cool secret language so i can have secret conversations with my friends" phase all kids go through. but one of his closest friends at the time also happened to be the batman, a guy with possibly the most bizarrely diverse arsenal of skills in the world. bruce sees the merit in the entire idea of a coded language to communicate rudimentary information when they can hear but not see each other. so why not make a code built on bird vocalizations? it's pretty much incomprehensible to anyone without a trained ear or comprehensive knowledge of birding and impossible to even passably mimic without proper training, so while the chances of interception are high, the chances of someone understanding it enough to interrupt during the middle of a bird-convo and feed false information are not.
it also, batman and robin come to realize, feed into the "holy fuck our vigilantes are cryptids" idea. bird sounds that come from seemingly no determinable location (ventriloquism) come to mean batman and robin are nearby. to the goons of gotham, bird song becomes inextricably connected to getting your ass kicked by the dynamic duo. the real reason why criminals don't operate during the day is because they get skittish and jumpy about if the sounds of birds chirping are real birds or some masked vigilantes lying in wait to rock your shit, and it's just easier to commit crimes during the night when all the birds are asleep so you know for sure.
ornithologists have boards on their bedrooms dedicated to the bird-bats of gotham. they've written dissertations.
the bird language becomes a bit of a batfamily bonding connection. teaching each other how to do different clicks and whistles, making up slang so bruce and barbara can't complain of clogging up comms with non-mission relevant talk, searching up birds to associate them with different people, psychologically terrorizing the criminal populace of gotham by chirping at them...
how the bird code works is that there's a bird assigned to each one of gotham's major heavy hitter criminals and vigilantes, and a few assigned to heroes out of the city (by which i mean the ones the bats associate with often enough to have a sign to address by). the only birds i've got so far are the robin (for robin. self-explanatory) and the glistening-green tanager (for the joker). i only have one for the joker bc i wanted to reference this hc in one of my fics and so searched up green birds to find the most eye-searingly annoying-to-look-at green bird i could find, and the glistening-green tanager was the closest one to fit the bill.
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Dpxdc AU: consultant groups can be used to outsource problems for companies so why not monarchies?
Danny is listening to the various eyeballs and ghosts chatter on about all the issues that he now has to oversee and advise and make so many freaking decisions on. It’s annoying that it all has to come down to his call because he was a dumb 14 year old who didn’t want his town to permanently live in the ghost zone.
Now 17, King of the Infinite, and a bit wiser to the world, Danny is doing his best to balance his teenage ambitions to not give a shit and his protective obsession to very much give a shit.
Sams parents are making her learn the family business and Tucker is trying to make this internship he’s got with a fancy tech company out of New Jersey into a career without college… so while they’re commiserating with Danny the idea comes up.
Earth has a shit ton of heroes. Like, ever since the Justice League *poofed* the GIW out of existence with the Meta human acts- more and more caped crusaders seemed to be coming out of the wood work. More villains too but still, more people who seemed wise to their abilities and morals. Danny has literally never taken an ethics class.
But rn, Eye-mothy and Eye-Bert are arguing over how Danny as King Phantom is supposed to tackle the problem of some fucking pool acting as a weird trade route with a cult and… ugh it’s just so boring but like also such a fucking problem. But… maybe it can be someone else’s issue.
Opening a portal, Danny escapes into space and gets to work finding the base of operations- Tucker had told him there was a new satellite after all and there’s no way it wasn’t connected to the hero orgs- and boom he flies into the Watchtower.
“Hey- are any of you guys willing to consult on some weird pools of ectoplasm in Pakistan? Green and glowing little lakes of bullshit and magic?” Danny asks into the meeting room of the JL regardless of their startled and alarmed exclamations.
“… I could consult on that.” A voice comes from the corner, and Danny recognizes him as one of the bat people. Or bird? The guy is in a lot of red and clearly wasn’t supposed to be in this meeting based on the way he’s propped in the corner. The room erupts in protest but Danny barely hears them through his excitement and focus on the dude.
“Great! I’ll have him back before the end of the day! Lets go Bird boy!” And with that, Danny grabbed the Bird, chucked them both through a portal back into his thrown room and begins to explain the way these eyeballs are totally trying to trap him into doing more work than he needs to do.
“What do I call you by the way? I’m Danny but you’ll probably hear them call me King Phantom.”
“I go by Red Robin, and honestly, I’ve been trying to get this shit taken care of for years.”
From there Tim becomes a regular consultant for King Phantom- the Bat Family is losing their minds with him constantly going to the land of the dead but also Constantine said not to piss off the king at all costs.
Danny is just thrilled that this dude has a shit ton of insight as well as business sense- like he could legit run the monarchy way better than him despite the fact that they’re the same age.
They end up working together for years, and even when there’s not an active issue at hand, Danny will meet up with the bird just to talk.
Sam and Tucker think they’re hilarious each time they ask if Danny’s proposed yet.
Tim has already planned their wedding but all of that information is in a folder more secured than the nuclear codes- Danny needs to ask him on a date first.
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What Do You Have There?
A knife!
Danny plunked the butter knife in its pedestal of importance. The nice thing about having a billionaire vigilante for a... foster is the amount of money Danny was allowed to drop on his hobbies. For example, his extensive collection of souvenirs.
They're not just any old regular souvenirs. No, no, no. That would be so boring! No, these souvenirs, he obtained from the various muggings, knife fights, and various other situations he's been in ever since he was dropped ungraciously into Gotham.
The butter knife? Damian. Precocious, stabby Damian who he had startled into the stab instinct. A point of pride, really. Danny knew Damian was good at fighting! It was practically, in ghost terms, a super enthusiastic hello! Yes, the butter knife would be kept in the well lit part of the wall. Alfred had told him to stay home today to recuperate. He didn't need it, since the wound would heal in an hour or two, but he'd take staying at home any day.
A couple of hours later, well into the afternoon and right before what Danny knew to be their patrol hours, Danny had a visitor.
"Danny."
"Oh, hey, Damian! What's up?" Danny turned around to see Damian hovering awkwardly near the door.
"I am here to... check upon your wound. It is imperative that it gets proper treatment."
Ancients, Damian was exactly like those alley kids. He just ate a thesaurus instead of the drawling accent the alley kids picked up. Which meant Damian endeared himself to Danny pretty quickly. Like a little ghostling.
"Oh, I'm good. See? No blood is leaking out of the wound." Danny held up spotless bandages.
Danny watched Damian step into his haunt- his room- with a pleased hum. Damian inspected the bandages and stepped back with a sharp nod of approval. His eyes flicked to the wall that Danny was rearranging (again) and did a double take at the butter knife in the middle.
"Is that the butter knife I stabbed you with?"
"Why, yes, it is!" Danny beamed.
"Why on earth would you display that?"
"Because you stabbed me with it?"
"That makes absolutely no sense, you simpleton! When someone stabs you, stab them back!"
"That would be mean!"
Damian spluttered. Danny tugged the kid closer to the wall, cheering inwardly as Damian didn't shove him away. It might be because he was exaggeratedly wincing as he moved his "injured arm" but Danny has learned to take a win where he could find them, especially with ghosts. Not that Damian was a ghost, but he sure acted like one.
"Do you want to see my collection?"
"Your collection?"
"Yeah!" Without giving him time to answer, Danny barreled ahead. "So this is the knife you stabbed me with. Which, by the way, was an awesome show of strength and accuracy."
Damian grimaced. Danny continued blithely, secretly memorizing Damian's reactions to laugh at later.
"And this is the knife those guys stabbed me with that one time Cass found me. And this one is a bullet someone shot at me down by the docks. I think I interrupted some kind of meeting?"
Damian's jaw had a slight tick to it that would have been a baffled frown on anyone else.
"And when was this?"
"Oh, like a week ago."
"What? When did you go to the docks?!"
"At night. I couldn't sleep."
"And you went to the docks?! How did you even get there?!"
"Walked," Danny lied, like a lying liar. He floated, obviously, but none of them knew that. "Anyways, this is a law book! Someone threw it at my head!"
"Hey, guys! What're you doing?"
Danny and Damian turned around.
"Richard? Brown? What are you doing here?"
"Oh, Bruce wanted me to come back for the weekend," Dick said. Danny knew it was code for "something's going down and we need back up." Man, he still couldn't believe they didn't know he knew they were crime fighting vigilantes.
"Same!" Stephanie said. Danny was glad to see that her wounds from "cartwheeling in the manor" were healed.
"I see. Danny was showing me his collection of... objects people have used as weapons against him."
"What?!"
"Yeah!" Danny beamed, completely innocent. "Come on! I'll show you!"
With that, Danny continued to ramble. He just knew that the way Dick's and Stephanie's smiles strained would give him a good laugh for weeks to come. "And this is the glass bottle a drunk tried to shank me with in Crime Alley, and this is a knife the Red Hood himself threw at me."
Dick interrupted, face stiff. "Hood threw a knife at you?!"
"Yeah, but that was because my kids broke into his safe house and I was trying to get them to stop looting the place. And he didn't know I was a kid too, so he aimed a gun at my head. He shot at me too, but I couldn't go back to get the bullet, or else it would have joined my collection." Danny grabbed a box and shook it, metal rattling inside.
Dick smiled sweetly, Stephanie and Damian inching away from it.
"Oh, wow, I see!"
----
In his apartment, Jason shuddered. He grabbed his guns.
"Something's wrong. I just know it," he muttered to himself.
----
Danny smiled innocently as he described the horrific, near death events he got his souvenirs from.
"This is my bullet box! Man, Gotham has a lot of gun fights. I got shot so many times!" Danny complained, shaking the box like a rattling toy.
"Did you know Danny snuck out to go to the bay?" Damian snitched immediately, like a snitch.
"The Bay?! Danny! You know that's where people dump bodies, right?!" Stephanie poked him in the arm.
"Yeah, but like... I wouldn't die. And besides! I missed my friends!"
"You mean the minions you made in Crime Alley?" Steph asked. Danny pouted, eyeing the way Dick's gaze roved over his souvenirs and paling the more he realized how often Danny "got hurt."
Damian bumped a shoulder against Dick's arm. Danny returned to the conversation.
"If anything, I'm their minion." He said, remembering the times the Alley kids sent him on food runs.
"Fear Danny, the overlord of street rats."
Danny snorted. And- "Oh! Yeah, there was like a weird owl looking guy? And then they stabbed me with a finger and I kept it because woah, cool talon looking thing, right? And then they threw a bunch of those tiny knives at me? And then they just kind of vanished? Gotham is so weird."
And now, with all of them pale and stressed out of their minds, Danny swung a devastating blow called guilt trip.
"And that's the batarangs!" Three heads swung over to the line of batarangs. "Those vigilantes kept throwing them at me! One of them even hit me in the arm. Those things are sharp, man."
"Uh. Which ones?" Stephanie asked.
"Hm?" Danny hummed obliviously.
"Do you know which vigilantes?"
"Oh, it was like... the purple one. And the sword one? And like the one with the yellow insignia in the middle. And... all of them, I think? Except for signal. That guy's cool."
Stephanie and Damian had matching veiled looks of guilt. Dick shot them a sharp look. Danny decided to deal the last bit of damage to Dick.
"I'm glad you guys are way less stabby than the general Gotham public though, butter knife incident aside. At least I don't have to worry about you guys getting into danger, right? If you guys got hurt like my family did... I don't know..."
Danny smiled-squinted at them, channeling Cujo at his cutest and saddest: when he doesn't get to eat off of Danny's plate. So, pretty sad and pathetic.
"Uh, yeah." Dick said, guilt splayed all over his face. "Alfred said dinner was almost ready."
"Yes," Damian cleared his throat, looking away. "We shall partake in Pennyworth's hard work."
"Ahaha!" Stephanie laughed, nervously. "Welp, let's go bother Tim!"
Falling into step behind them, Danny grinned.
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