Chapter Text
It all starts because Danny wants to eventually go to college, and like, he can only get the kind of education he wants if he can leave Amity Park. Unfortunately, with the GIW doing insanely illegal things and somehow getting away with them, Danny isn’t very likely to be able to leave Amity Park. Not long enough to go to college anyway, or get a fancy job with his college degree.
So the summer before senior year, long after Jazz has proven that it’s possible to escape the GIW lock-down, Danny, Sam, Tucker, and Ellie decide that GIW is going down.
They do this with a good, ol’ fashion haunting. Like, full-on poltergeist with it.
Sam and Tucker are amazing at logistics, which leaves Danny and Ellie and whatever ghost from the Zone that they can trick into helping out to wreck absolute havoc on the federal dickheads. And wreck havoc they do! It doesn’t actually take long to break the choke-hold they have on Amity Park, which is immediately noticed by the local teen population.
Sam and Tucker rally them to chase the GIW the rest of the way out. Despite GIW claiming to be there to help and protect the citizens of Amity Park, the younger generations had chafed under the overbearing rules they’d put in place. Judicious application of the knowledge that they were illegally occupying the city had been excuse enough.
Ellie had been riding a bit of a high, and honestly Danny wasn’t very hard to talk into pushing their advantage, even if it was probably pretty stupid of them. Amity Park isn’t the GIW’s headquarters, and Ellie had her own encounters with them while traveling which mean she knew where some of their bases were.
Anyway, what else was Danny going to be busy with for summer break?
He’d honestly had the best intentions, but with his typical luck, the fifth base has a rude surprise.
“Jazz, help!” Danny wails as he descends from the night sky like a comet, smashing his ghostly form into her very fleshy body. It changes a bone-breaking force into about ten pounds of weight, causing Jazz to grunt and take a step back while turning a little, grabbing onto his mostly-incorporeal body. “I’m too young to be a teen dad!”
Jazz lets out a slightly exasperated breath, completing the turn to look up at Ellie, who approaches much more sanely given her precious cargo. Spotting him, Jazz casually brushes Danny off her and steps forward to take a good look at the four year old boy pursing his mouth into a little pout and eyeing them all judgmentally.
“Oh my gosh, he’s so cute,” Jazz coos, leaning in to give the kid a warm smile. “Do you speak English, buddy?”
“I’ve taught him a little,” Ellie says, taking to the whole situation with much more aplomb. The kid frowns at Jazz, turning his face into Ellie’s collar. “He’s a bit shy,” she adds.
“Shy? He stabbed me,” Danny objects, folding his arms across his chest but floating over to join the huddle.
Jazz hums noncommittally, straightening. “Were you freaking out?” she asks, clearly knowing the answer.
“He was much cooler when he found out about me,” Ellie admits, glancing at Danny with a smirk.
“Uh, you were ten,” Danny says, “that’s a baby. Also not my clone. Also not a halfa.”
The conversation is calm enough that the kid turns his face back toward them, little brow bunched up into a tight frown. Jazz smiles again before looking away, obviously restraining her urge to engage. “Who told you to scream at a baby,” she says pleasantly.
“Ugh,” Danny says, rolling his eyes as he lands on his feet. “But seriously. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this. He can’t go free range like Ellie, and I still have school! And Mom and Dad are busy with the Guys’ Illuminati-slash-sugar daddies, and even if they weren’t, I don’t think they should be trusted with a stabby baby.”
Jazz glances at the kid before glancing between Ellie and Danny. “Well, there’s the obvious thing,” she says, not liking the thought much at all.
Yeah, none of them like that.
“You two might as well come up,” Jazz adds with a sigh. “It’s probably not good to fly with a toddler and I certainly won’t be allowing it. We’ll get started in the morning.”
Because yeah, when Danny and Ellie had discovered an itty bitty Wayne clone, they’d flown like mad to their big sister hoping for a better answer. And Jazz, of course, had gone out to the nearby park at night solely to meet up with them, given their very human passenger. They definitely can't hang out here all night, though, so the three of them went invisible to follow Jazz back to the house she's renting with two other roommates. As it was summer, one had gone back to their hometown, and the other was rarely in, so there was less risk but not none.
So, for the moment, there’s an empty house with one human girl, two halfa, and one baby.
Four years old isn’t a baby, Danny knows, because the baby was delivering some kind of awesome monologue when stabbing him in the groin. Unfortunately it wasn’t in a language Danny spoke, so he actually has no idea what the kid said, but it certainly sounded like a whole tweet's worth of presumably lucid and logically sound sentences!
But man, that language barrier. Which means that the kid has been reduced to pouting and saying 'no' a lot, so yeah: a baby.
Naturally now that they're in a new environment with a stranger, the kid starts that up again, which means Ellie smiles and dumps him into Danny's arm and leaves the two of them to take shelter with Jazz. Neither Danny nor mini-Wayne are happy about this, but thankfully mini-Wayne has given up on stabbing him when he didn’t bleed out the first time.
He’s so smart!
Danny’s feeling a lot of really complicated things right now that he lacks interest in sorting out. Mom and Dad had kind of sprung it on him and Jazz that they were clones when they were six and eight respectively; old enough to understand their genes weren’t the same as their parents, but young enough that ‘clone’ had become fact long before they could have a whole introspective fit of existential angst.
Of the three of them, Ellie’s struggled the most with being a clone. Mostly because The Creep had created her to be the perfect son, told her that, and then sicced her on Danny while planning to discard her like the rest of the unstable clones.
It suddenly feels very important that Danny inoculate mini-Wayne right away. Jazz luckily has some handy food in the kitchen, so Danny slices up an apple and fixes some instant oatmeal with a glass of water for the kid. He can hear Jazz and Ellie in the living room working to arrange travel and accommodations while mini-Wayne gives the food a dubious stare.
The kid sighs heavily and accepts the offering.
“Okay, cool,” Danny sighs with relief. “Now I just gotta deprogram the kid with a language barrier, no biggie.”
In the end, mini-Wayne does not take it well, even with Danny starting with pictures of his own template and holding his phone next to his face. Understandably so. He’s smart and cute, but he’s four. He was raised to answer to the name ‘Damian.’ He doesn’t understand why he can’t be Damian when it’s supposed to be his.
It feels a little like the most awful thing in the world to see a little kid sitting at the kitchen counter, clutching the spoon in one fist with his head a little ducked and big, fat Ghibli-tears rolling down his cheeks. He doesn’t sob, or say ‘no’ or call for anyone. He doesn't even run away. Danny didn’t know a kid could cry so silently. That’s-
All Danny can do is scoop him up – Mini-Wayne isn’t excited about that at all, and kicks him in the kidney about it – and try to mop him up a bit. Mini-Wayne is trying really hard to be brave, but then there’s snot involved and Danny has to get some paper towels wet to deal with it and it’s not very dignified.
By the time Jazz comes to check up on them, Danny is floating three inches over the kitchen counter with a sleeping baby in his lap. The look she gives him is perhaps well deserved.
“Jazz,” he says solemnly, “I think some things really are genetic.”