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Inhindsight, Danny really should have paid more attention to his wording. He knew better. He knew the rules. The ‘W’ word was a taboo, capital T.
But did that stop him from groaning out to Sam and Tucker, “I wish I could learn who my bio parents are,” like a DUMBASS?
No. No, it did not.
And so, naturally, his life went to shit. Again.
It started, as these things often did, with boredom and emotional vulnerability. A dangerous cocktail.
Danny was lying upside down on his bed, half his upper body hanging off the mattress and onto the floor while Tucker was attempting to reprogram a ghost sensor and Sam was chewing through another environmental journal that made her “grr” under her breath every three pages.
“Y’know,” Danny mumbled, kicking his feet against the air. “It’s weird not knowing where you come from. Like... I was adopted, right? But I don’t know anything about my bio parents. At all.”
“Still no records?” Sam asked, not looking up.
“Zilch. Nada. Tuck tried deep net diving and even broke into some government records nothing came out of it.”
Danny sighed. Then groaned. And then—the fateful moment.
“I wish I could learn who my bio parents are.”
Silence.
Tucker’s tablet screen froze.
Sam's book snapped shut.
Danny blinked upside-down at their horrified expressions. “...What?”
“You said the Taboo,” Tucker whispered.
Danny froze.
“No. No, I didn’t. I—frick, frickety frick on a bookshelf full of goosebumps, no—!
Green smoke puffed into the room.
A curvaceous woman with flowing dark hair and a theatrical sense of sparkles popped into existence. “Your wish is my command!” Desiree trilled.
“WAIT—NO—I DIDN’T MEAN—” Danny shouted as he disappeared in a puff of aggressively pink smoke.
He landed face-first in soup
Which would’ve been tragic enough, except the soup was not his soup, and it was being consumed by what looked like an ultra-formal mafia dinner party.
"HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY!” he cursed.
Danny peeled his face out of the bowl slowly, blinking as he registered exactly ten people at a long, extravagantly decorated dining table, all staring at him like he had personally insulted their tuxedos.
The silence was deafening.
There was a long pause.
Ten people stared at him.
Danny groaned.
He sat up, soup juice dripping from his chin, and rubbed his
head. “Oh no,” Danny said. “Call Of Cthulhu! I said the Taboo!”
One of the older teens leaned back, clearly amused. “I’ve never heard anyone curse in book titles before. I’m stealing that.”
“Please don’t encourage him,” said the pale, exhausted-looking boy next to him.
“Honestly?” drawled the amused one. “It fits him."
A man at the head of the table cleared his throat.
He had that vibe. The “strict dad” vibe.
“Can you tell us your name? And how you got here? You mentioned a… Taboo?”
Danny, brushing string bean from his sleeve, blinked up at him and asked, “Uh, yeah. I’m Danny. Can I get your names first so I know who I’m talking to?”
The man nodded, clearly used to weird situations, and gestured around the table.
“I’m Bruce. These are my children: Dick, Jason, Tim, Damian, Cass, Stephanie, and Duke. That’s Alfred.”
The older man at the side of the room gave a small bow. “Master Daniel.”
“I—Okay.” Danny stared blankly. “Cool. I am very much not freaking out right now.”
“Are you… famous?” Cass asked, leaning forward slightly.
Danny looked her dead in the eye and said, “Only in the context of property damage.”
Jason snorted into his drink.
Alfred, already putting a plate of food in front of Danny, said briskly, “You appear underfed. Eat.”
Danny blinked at the roast chicken and mashed potatoes.
“Thank you, mystery butler man.”
“You’re welcome, young man who fell from the ceiling.”
“I didn’t—y’know what, sure.”
He ate. With the vigor of a boy who spent the morning fighting a sludge ghost and the afternoon getting kidnapped by the cosmic equivalent of a glitter cannon.
When he was halfway through a second helping, he finally looked up.
“So. I’m from Amity Park. Tiny town, lotta ghosts, full of nonsense. The W-word is a Taboo you know W-I-S-H. Say it, and weird stuff happens. Like me disappearing from my home and landing here, where are we by the way?.”
Bruce raised an eyebrow.
“Gotham,” Tim said. “You’re in Gotham City.”
Danny went still.
Fork paused in midair.
His pupils shrank. “To Kill A Mockingbird!”
Jason leaned over to Duke. “That feels less like a swear and more like a panic response.”
Danny stood up so fast the chair clattered back. “I’m in GOTHAM? As in CRIME-GOTHAM?! No no no no—how am I supposed to get back?! What if something happenes in Amity while I’m gone?! What if I miss a math test and Mr. Lancer makes me write a five-page essay on ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events?!’ And—and oh no! Isn’t this the city with the death mist ghost lady who hates visitors?!Lady Gotham?! I’m gonna get exorcised by a building!”
Duke looked like he was trying not to laugh. “I dunno, man. You’re kinda living ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ right now.”
“I’M GONNA HAVE TO READ IT AGAIN,” Danny wailed.
Cass tilted her head. “Do you… need help?”
Danny flailed dramatically. “Unless you can teleport me back home, help defeat a ghost with way too many tentacles, explain to my sister why I vanished without her trying to shoot you, and write an emergency English paper for me—YES.”
Alfred appeared silently at his elbow with a pen and a notepad. “If you dictate the essay, I shall do my best.”
Danny blinked at him.
Jason leaned forward. “Don’t test him. Alfred once wrote my ten-page psych analysis in the time it took me to eat a croissant.”
“I think I love you,” Danny whispered at Alfred.
The butler just raised an eyebrow. “Master Jason is exaggerating. It was only six pages. And you were eating three croissants.”
Danny’s hands flopped uselessly at his sides. “This is so much. This is too much. I need to sit down—wait, no, I’m already sitting—I need to lie down. On a floor. That doesn’t cost more than my house.”
Steph patted the fancy rug beneath his chair. “I give it a solid seven out of ten for mental breakdowns.”
“You people are too calm about this,” Danny muttered, clutching his hair. “Do you get magical teenagers falling into your soup regularly?”
There was a pause.
“No,” said Bruce.
“But there was that one time with the alien goat princess,” Dick said helpfully.
Jason frowned. “I thought she was a centaur?”
“Nope. That was the one with the lava cult.”
Cass nodded solemnly.
Danny stared at all of them. “...You’re not kidding.”
Duke sipped his water. “Welcome to Gotham.”
Danny slowly sank to the floor.
The carpet was stupidly soft. Like, criminally soft. Danny was at least 65% sure it had more expensive threads than his entire wardrobe.
He mumbled into it, voice muffled, “Holes. Holes and cornfields and at least three haunted porta-potties. That’s where I should be right now.”
“Haunted porta-potties?” Tim asked, blinking.
Danny flipped onto his back and flailed vaguely. “Don’t ask. Long story.”
Tim, who clearly had a death wish of his own, glanced over and asked:
“So what was the wi—”
“NO!” Danny screamed.
Tim blinked. “I was just gonna say w—”
“Don’t say it!”
“I was going to ask what the—”
“DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE!”
Tim held up both hands. “Okay, okay. Fine. I won’t say it.”
Danny paused mid-anxiety spiral, eye twitching.
Steph held up a fork. “So… what was your intent? Like what did you want?”
Danny froze.
The room froze with him.
Danny slowly turned around, one step at a time, like the world was rewinding on a scratched DVD. “What I wanted…”
Everything crashed into place like a dropped puzzle box finally snapping together.
The reason he’d said the Taboo. The exact words. "I wish I could learn who my bio parents are."
Bio.
Parents.
Desiree didn’t send him somewhere random.
She granted the W-word.
She sent him to his blood family.
“…Oh,” Danny whispered.
“Oh no.”
The room collectively paused.
“…You good, man?” Duke asked.
“No!” Danny cried. “I am very much the opposite of good! I am the direct inverse of good!”
Jason slowly lowered his drink. “Okay… what exactly is happening right now?”
Danny looked around at all of them like they were the ones who had dropped a teenage stranger into a soup bowl.
Danny groaned, running both hands through his hair. “When I said the W-word. I said I wanted to know who my bio parents were and then—poof! Face first into your soup!”
Dick held up a hand, cautiously. “Wait. So you think… she brought you here because we’re your—?”
Danny didn’t let him finish.
He screamed.
“I’m biologically related to FANCY RICH PEOPLE?”
There was another silence. An extremely tense one.
Jason raised an eyebrow. “Uh… yeah? That’s us.”
“I CAN’T HANDLE THIS INFORMATION,” Danny wailed. “I sleep in a closet, my house is radioactive, my current phone is held together with tape and prayers!”
Steph raised a slow hand. “Do you… want it to not be true?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” Danny flopped dramatically onto the floor again.
“You’re all so shiny! You have coordinated outfits! This place smells like lemon polish and generational wealth! I do not belong here!”
Bruce finally cleared his throat. “Danny. If the ghost sent you here because of your… wi-sh, then it’s possible this is true. But we can—”
“NO TESTS,” Danny shrieked, pointing at him. “No DNA, no hair samples, no ‘surprise this is a blood drive’ trickery!”
“No one was planning a blood drive,” Tim muttered.
Cass helpfully offered a juice box. “You’re dehydrated.”
Danny took it and sipped. “Thank you.”
Jason leaned toward Bruce. “So… what do we do? This isn’t exactly a ‘hey, surprise, you’re our cousin’ kind of Tuesday.”
Bruce sighed and looked at Danny, who had curled into a dramatically horizontal fetal position on the area rug.
“…We give him time.”
Danny raised a trembling hand from the floor. “Also snacks. And someone text my sister before she hacks a satellite looking for me.”
Alfred appeared beside him with a phone, cookies, and a weighted blanket.
“Master Daniel. Welcome to the family.”
Danny stared up at him with the deadest expression he could muster.
Then, from beneath the blanket: “Crime and punishment.”
Danny was buried under a weighted blanket, three comforters, and half a plate of cookies. He was currently rotating between sipping juice, muttering book titles and trauma-bonding with Alfred.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family was having a Very Serious Discussion in the hallway.
“You ran the swab?” Tim asked, already typing.
“Yup,” Jason said, holding up a used fork in a Ziploc bag like it was a murder weapon. “He licked this. We’re golden.”
Steph looked mildly horrified. “That’s gross.”
“That’s science.”
“I also got a strand of hair,” Cass added, entirely too casually.
Bruce gave a slow, approving nod. “Good work.”
Duke squinted at him. “We’re all just… ignoring the part where we’re violating like five privacy laws?”
“It’s Tuesday,” Tim replied. “It’s tradition.”
“He said no tests,” Dick pointed out.
“And I said I wouldn’t ask for one,” Bruce said. “That doesn’t mean I won’t run one.”
“Great parenting,” Jason muttered. “No wonder we’re all emotionally constipated.”
Bruce ignored that.
“I’m running it against our records now,” Tim said, scrolling. “If he’s related to any of us, the batcomputer will flag it.”
Then—
BEEPBEEP.
Everyone in the hallway froze as Tim’s tablet flashed.
MATCH: 99.98% CERTAINTY
SUBJECT: DANIEL JAMES FENTON
RELATION: PATERNAL
Jason stared. “Holy sh—Sherlock Holmes and the Parental Plot Twist.”
Tim turned the screen around slowly. “So uh… Bruce? You’ve got another kid.”
Bruce blinked. Blinked again.
“…Why does this keep happening?”
Meanwhile—
Inside the room, Danny paused mid-cookie.
The door creaked open.
Seven people slowly entered.
Danny narrowed his eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason,” Jason said, far too casually. “Just wondering how you’re feeling. Emotionally. Physically. Genetically.”
Danny squinted harder. “...What.”
Steph stepped forward. “Sooo hypothetically—just like a fun party question—what would you do if we said we might’ve run a tiny DNA test?”
Danny froze.
The cookie slipped from his fingers in slow motion.
“You did not.”
"We did.”
“You monsters!”
“In our defense, you fell from the ceiling, screamed about the W-word, and declared that we are your bio family.”
Bruce knelt awkwardly by the couch. “Danny. The results say I’m your—”
Danny threw a pillow directly at his face. “NARNIA AND THE BETRAYAL OF SCIENCE! I SAID NO TESTS!”
“Surprise family is hard,” Dick said gently.
“I'M GOING TO COMMIT FAMILY INSURANCE FRAUD!” Danny screamed, and promptly vanished through the wall