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Sitting in Aquarium's office, holding a sniffling 4 year old little girl named ellen Nightingale on his lap with her head snuggling against his chest, nibbling on a Whale shaped cookie after all they both got lost.
He only looked away for a moment, and Bruce and the batfam dissappear on him while he was anazyling the heavier coffee choices at one of the Aquarium's coffee places.
Only to come out with a combination coffee that cost him 18 dollars more and nearly instinctly kick a teary eyed 4 year old Ellen that lost her mommy and mistook him as him, clinging to his leg out of the blue.
Apparently, Ellen got distracted by a cart vendor holding cute whale cookies while her mommy was talking to her big brother danta about not biting the birthday girl's older sister even if she being rude and now she lost, and she thought he was mummy and she doesn't know what do than the tears came.
Apparently, mommy looked like Tim only mommy had a bunch of pretty white fluffy in her hair and a lighting dancing on her face, but she extremely pretty and single to was Ellen's babbling about.
8 minutes in, a frantic pretty boy with mainly pepper flowing down salt like short hair came in, a 6 year old boy that look like him but white hair coated mainly piggybacking him that spotted him and Ellen, pointing at her.
"I found her first, i get to have The Death Pepper ice cream now!" Shriek out the 6 year old danta.
"Mommy!"
"Oh, thank ancients! Thank you for bringing her to the office here, mister..?" The supposedly Mummy glance his greenish blue baby-doll eyes at Tim, a strain of Lichtenberg figure spread upward from his neck to the forehead of his face as Ellen leaped into the arms of her mummy.
"Um- Tim Drake, and you are..?" Tim felt his face flush a bit as he stood up to shake hands with him.
"He is mummy, you dumb low-life bottom feeder!" Tiny fist waving as Danta imploded at him.
"Oh, biological speaking, yes. It's hard enough to get them to switch to Daddy, but it stuck onto me. My name is Danny Nightingale, and I appreciate that you found my little girl before I ranshake the entire aquarium like a pirate for buried treasure for her." Danny spoke softly, joking at the end, carefully holding Ellen, who snuggled her face against his chest like she did earlier with Tim.
"Yeah, she cling onto me harder than the octopus from Finding Dory when she thought I was you after I lost my own group." Tim said back, softly joking back while he sipped and choked his coffee as Ellen beamed about how Mister Tim got her two whale cookies with the blue eyes she wanted earlier and quietly failed at mumbling on can they keep him?
"Interesting.. well, she seemed attached to you, and you seem to be reliable enough to distract her from causing mayham. If you ever wanted to babysit for me, you can have my number?" Danny said, pulling out clownfish theme napkin and taking a pen from the office free pen jar.
'Wait, what?' Is what Tim thought to himself after Danny said his goodbyes, Danta sticking his tongue out, and Ellen cutely waving bye-bye as they left.
The napkin he was holding in his hand had an apartment address and a number contact along with a winking face and clumsily childish doodle of snowflakes, fire, and Dory fish next to it.
Bruce and the batfam came in the office seconds later after Tim pocket the contact info.
Might end up with a part 2. Idk yet
Now Jason would like it known that there was no mpreg situation going on. He isn’t even sure where people got that idea in the first place. Sure, he had taken a few Cores from the goons-in-white who had dared to set up in his turf.
And sure maybe the excess energy from the pit (no wonder he’d been so irritable) was what said baby halfas (Okay, so they’re half human? Alright) had used to reform. And maybe the oldest is visibly less than a year old.
But there Was No Mpreg Situation! He is this close to shooting someone! It was annoying (and slightly amusing) when it was just his goons, but now the Bats have seemingly got it in their heads! Dear Gotham it’s a good thing he’s not planning on like, ever revealing who he is because he would never be able to live this rumor down.
Jason has seen the four of them a couple of times in Crime Alley now. They looked like a family, what with similar facial features- err, actually, the kids looked like carbon copies of each other, but their mom/sister/aunt/cousin looked similar enough to be related to them by blood.
Normally, Jason didn't care for each and every family that moved into Crime Alley. Sure, he cared about all of them as a whole, but there were a lot of people, and he couldn't possibly get elbow deep in every life story he came across. So all he knew about them were three things: a) they were on the run from someone or something, b) they trusted each other and no one else, and c) apparently, they have made it their life goal to never make any kind of sense.
The list of shit they have gotten into included but was not limited to:
• one of the kids biting a gun. Not the hand of the attacker who was holding it, no, the actual gun. And he bit a piece of it clean off, which earned him - or her, actually, Jason knew one of the triplets was a girl but he couldn't tell them apart - a lecture from their... mom? sister? parental figure. The lecture was about how chewing metal does not help with iron deficiency.
• getting kidnapped and creeping out their kidnapper to the point of him returning the kids back home. A few witnesses said one of the kids was actually driving, sitting on the kidnappers lap behind the steering wheel and cheerfully commanding the man to speed up or brake. Their mom actually apologized to the kidnapper for the incident and offered him homemade cookies for his troubles. He ran away without them.
• driving a lady at the laundromat insane by repeatedly walking inside and climbing into one of the washing machines. They never got out of it, just one kid walking into the laundromat, climbing into washing machine, then another kid, looking exactly like the previous one, walking inside, climbing into the same washing machine, then another kid walking into the laundromat- well, you get the idea. The lady claimed she's seen at least five kids do that in a row, but when she looked into that washing machine, there was no one inside.
• casually falling out of windows. Or, better, walking out of them like they were doors, at any given opportunity. The witness - an old man who was helping their mom with groceries - said the mom did not care in the slightest, and when he asked her about it, obviously concerned, she just said, tired and exasperated, 'they like the feeling of free fall, don't worry, they'll come back in a minute'. Sure enough, they did, not a scratch on them. The family lived on the sixth floor.
• eating insane amounts of food. Jason personally witnesses their mom give them her wallet, telling the kids, 'eat until you're full', and promptly passing out on the table, her head on her arms. The kids then proceeded to eat four whole pizzas, three burgers each, then seven brownies and at least five cups of soda. What was interesting about it was not only the amount of food they ate but the way they never left their mom unattended, one of the kids always staying beside her sleeping figure as the other two went to order.
And now, all four of them were standing in front of him. Not Jason Todd him, but Red Hood him. And he was... confused.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I said, can you watch them for a few hours? Three, maybe four," the mom, Jazz as she introduced herself, was looking at him like it was he who was speaking nonsense, not her. Because asking a crime lord to watch three kids in the middle of the night is not something a sane person would do.
"Why?" He asks, bewildered, because what the fuck else is he supposed to say?
"I need to kill a man, and if they come with me, it will take three times longer," Jazz tells him. Is she saying the kids slow her down or what? Jason can admit he's never been this confused in his entire life.
"You could ask me to kill a man, while you stay with them, no?" He tries to reason, but the girl waves him off:
"No, that will take even longer. Besides, no offense, but you kill people to simply end their life, and I need that man to fucking stop existing forever."
What's the difference he almost wants to ask. But instead of that, he just sighs.
"Why me? I'm sure you could find a babysitter-"
"No babysitter will handle them. The last one told me they have been running laps on the ceiling, which is, actually, not that big of a deal. They are kids. Kids like running around," she huffs, and Jason suspects she is missing the point here, but okay. He gets why babysitters are not an option.
"You do understand what they can witness if they stay here?" He asks, as the last attempt to reason with the girl, but she just nods and leans down, making all the kids turn to her.
"Okay, you menaces, tell me what not to do while you're staying with Mr. Red Hood."
"No eating people," one kid starts.
"No driving people insane," the other one continues.
"No, um, stealing eyeballs," the third one finishes, and what the fuck are those ground rules? Is this girl a mother to eldrith horrors? That would explain some shit.
Jazz turns to him, "See? They're all good."
In what world is that good? Jason debates if he should start running now or when she leaves.
"Do they have names?" He asks instead. The girl nods:
"Danny." His surprise must be evident even through the mask because she sighs and points to each kid, "Diane, Daniel, Dante. Dani, Danny, and Dan. Actually, you know what, let's make this easier," she rummages through her bag and gets a marker out before gesturing to the kids, "Come here."
As they do, she proceeds to draw numbers 1, 2, and 3 on their foreheads. Then she nods to Hood and puts the marker away.
"Okay, that's better. Behave, you monsters, I'll be back soon!"
After she leaves, Jason looks down at the kids. They also look at him, eerie and unblinking.
Finally, one of them - number 2, Dani, if he is not mistaken - asks:
"Do you want teeth? We have a lot."
"She doesn't mean her teeth," number 1 clarifies, "She means other teeth."
...This is going to be some very long three hours.
Danny has found himself as a cat. And there’s good news and bad news about it. The good news is that he’s a magical cat or something similar, seeing as he has two tails and can go Very Big if he wants to. Bad news? He’s pretty sure they’re in a different dimension now.
Cute news, both Ellie and Jordan are itty bitty kittens and utterly adorable, he would murder for them. They’re so tiny! Like, yeah they got physically de-aged before all this so they could properly pass as his kids- along with part of Dan’s parole- but this? He could hold them in his hands if he still had them!
Alright! First things first, find a shelter and avoid the destroyed buildings along with whatever destroyed them in the first place. Then he could figure out if this is an accident or some sort of forced vacation. But shelter first.
Fanart for Dad shaped - Chapter 3: Food by Clouds (myheadinthecoudsnotcomingdown) from ao3