Uh lesbians
While Danny's fight with him was heavily assisted with the help of other ghosts, and he'd needed to use a suit, he had still been the primary fighter in that fight.
This puts Pariah Dark in a...very odd position after he gets out of the Foreversleep again.
Because this is a baby ghost. This is a child.
Officially, for all intents and purposes, Phantom is engaged to Pariah Dark. He has permission to utilize Pariah Dark's lair, command his servants, use the Ring of Rage or the Crown of Fire, and essentially act on Pariah's behalf when Pariah is out of commission.
Phantom. A child ghost in both form and age.
Pariah may be many things, but a cradlerobber is not one of them.
However, in ghost culture, if he were to turn Phantom away that would be a huge mark of disrespect towards Phantom, his lair, and his Fraid. Phantom would be marked as a target for other powerful ghosts to hunt down, and his Fraid would be hunted for sport, all for the crime of just being a child that was unfamiliar with their customs.
Sure, ghosts are already hunting Phantom for sport, but Pariah Dark does not want turning Phantom away to add to it; the boy's Fraid has remained relatively safe so far. He doesn't want a child ghost to be beaten into his core or that child's Fraid to be shattered because that child ghost happened to be, legally, a runaway child bride. Which is...a whole other disgusting thing and title he refuses to let any child have branded on them courtesy of him, Pariah Dark.
So he changes the rules.
He's Pariah fucking Dark, what, like he can't? Who's gonna stop him?
He decrees that defeating a royal doesn't mean earning a place as their spouse, but instead earns a place in their Fraid.
He decrees Phantom his son. As Phantom is now his son, that means that the Fentons are his kin by extension, and Amity Park/all of Earth a haunt that belongs to his own kin.
So he begrudgingly extends protection over all of it, as well as actually starts doing boring meetings and shit because his new son has, apparently, made a lot of powerful friends in the Zone, and he doesn't want to show discord to the outsiders.
So he'll respect his new son's contacts and alliances.
For now.
But news travels slowly, and Justice League Dark doesn't hear the addendum when they research new hero Phantom.
They find text regarding the old rules.
Just after they've found text essentially confirming that sightings of Phantom in the past were the result of time travel, just after Phantom himself slipped up and said he'd only been dead one year.
To say Diana of Themyscira is furious is an understatement.
She's ready to start a war.
For those who do not know, Wonder Woman is a member of Justice League Dark in it's current member list.
Peter Parker my favorite heat seeking missile
art based on Existential Crisis Mode on Ao3 by @luciaintheskyainthi. Why draw actual scenes from the media when i can draw them in love and happy instead?
(also, art progress alert? lessgo?)
"I need your phone."
Tim looks up from his laptop. The boy in front of him looks like he's been dragged to Hell a week ago and just made it back: smudges of soot on his face, his not-so-white t-shirt smelling of smoke, and a nasty looking burn on his hand that he somehow doesn't even pay attention to. Tim thinks back to his mental list of 'Rogues currently on the loose', but it's only Ivy and Harley (who don't even count anymore), and Penguin, who is not known for setting things on fire.
"I can call 911 for you, if you want?" He offers, because this is still Gotham. Despite the fact that a slightly scorched guy casually walking into a coffee shop is not something out of the ordinary here, he's not giving his phone to strangers.
The guy grimaces and starts aggressively rummaging through his pockets.
"No, thanks, ACAB and all that, and they won't do shit here anyway," he says, and then pulls a handful of tangled golden jewelry — rings, chains, necklaces with various gems in them — from his pocket and places it on the table in front of Tim. "I need your phone," he repeats.
Tim stares. First, at the gold — these things look antique, and his parents were archeologists, he knows what he's talking about — then, back at the guy. He looks... ordinary, sans the dirt and smell.
But the burn on his hand looks significantly more healed than it did just a minute ago.
Thankfully, Tim has already had his cup of morning coffee. Which means he is thinking very rationally when he does get his phone out of his pocket and hands it to the guy, just to see what he does next.
"Thanks," the guy grins at him, plucking the phone out of Tim's hand and unlocking it. Tim's eyebrows shoot up — there's a password there! — but the stranger is already dialing in a number and pressing the phone to his ear.
It takes less than a second before someone evidently picks up, and the guy starts talking.
"I have less than three minutes before the phone dies, so listen very carefully. Etrigan is fine, Jason is not, Klarion is still being a bitch. Dora won't help anymore, so you're on your own until Sam makes it there with the staff. I'm in Gotham because, apparently, mazes and I don't mix well together, so if you could summon me back, that'd be cool," he says, a look of mild annoyance on his face.
Tim is back to staring at him. He recognizes some of the names, and, well, one could have been an oddity, two a coincidence, but three is a pattern.
"The fuck you mean you can't, I gave you the incantation two months ago!" The guy raises his voice, his foot tapping on the floor in frustration. "Do you think I just go around giving my summons to people for shits and giggles? Like, yeah, have a spell that unleashes a cosmic being of immeasurable power, use it as a bookmark!"
This interaction, despite Tim only hearing one side of it, gets more and more alarming with every word.
But then, the boy suddenly straightens up and stills, his eyes flashing bright, unpleasantly familiar green.
"You what?" He asks, his voice slipping from just angry to quietly enraged hiss, "Sold it to whom?!" But, before he gets an answer, Tim's phone makes a thin, tiny buzzing sound, and the guy takes it off his ear, looking at the screen.
"No, no-no-no," he mutters, shaking it like that would make it work. To no avail, though: the phone screen flashes a few times and goes black. The guy curses. At least Tim thinks it's a curse because he doesn't understand a word, but the stranger's face and intonation are telling.
"Useless fucking moron of a human, I swear I'm going to drown you in cow shit once this is over," he switches to English, dropping the phone on the table right by the small pile of gold, "I'll bargain your pathetic soul from everyone you've ever dealt with and give it to the Observants, and maybe, after a few millenia of endless Council paperwork, I'll have mercy and sell it back to Lucifer and watch him fry you on a skillet."
...Whoever the boy is, Tim absolutely refuses to ever piss him off, okay. That's an impressive threat to even make, not to mention being able to go through with it.
"Do you need help?" He asks cautiously. If he is getting his context clues right, this is something that involves JLD, and maybe John Constantine specifically since Tim doesn't know any other man who is a magic user, sold his soul numerous times, would care about Etrigan's wellbeing, and could invoke this kind of murderous intent.
The boy looks back at him, his eyes back to normal blue.
"Huh? Oh, no, I doubt this can be helped," he waves Tim off and pinches the bridge of his nose, "Sorry about the phone, but, unless you have a way to yeet me across the globe so I end up in London in the next twenty minutes..." he shrugs, smiling in that helpless 'nothing you can do here' way.
Tim picks up his phone. It's dead, wholly and completely, won't even turn on when he tries.
He really, really shouldn't do that. This is definitely none of his business, and very much out of his capabilities and area of expertise.
But he thinks about the zeta-tube in the Cave.
"Actually," he says, and the guy's eyes snap back to him, a bewildered sort of surprise on his face.
Peter always hiding his injuries cause they’re usually from fighting villains, and one day he gets attacked while as Peter Parker and it makes the news but he still goes to an event (cause he’s always either missing them or showing up late cause of his Spidey stuff so he tries to show when he can)
And his friends, who just saw him get injured on tv, are watching him walk around, slightly hunched over, a bit pale and shaky, trying to pretend he’s not injured, and are all realizing with various levels of horror that Peter actually always looks like that, so how often is he showing up to events hella injured??
Tim: Bruce, I’m gay
Bruce: oh
Tim: oh?
Bruce: I mean you being gay sort of ruins the entire edgy thing the batfamily has going on
Tim: what?
Bruce: because you’re gay.. you’re happy..??
Tim: when Dick uses the term gay he means something different than me
Dick, poking head into room: no we mean the same thing, I just didn’t want to explain it to him
Tim: no Bruce, I’m bisexual, I’m into men and woman
Bruce: oh, congrats? Me too?
Tim: WHAT?!
Dick: Superman was my co parent at one point I definitely saw them kiss
Tim: again, WHAT?!