The night before Iwaizumi leaves for California, his mother gives him a gift. It's wrapped delicately in yellow wrapping paper.
Iwaizumi has a feeling he knows what it is.
"I know it's last minute," She says, sitting next to him on his bed in his childhood bedroom. "Your bags are all packed, I don't expect you to make room to take it with you or anything, of course." She watches him, hands folded in her lap. "Ah, and you'll probably think it's embarrassing any-"
"Mama," Iwaizumi interrupts, fighting back a little smile at her fretting. "Let me at least open it before you try minimizing it."
"Right, right." She laughs, waving her hand. "Of course. Go on then. Open it."
Iwaizumi doesn't take his time tearing it open.
It's a book. A scrapbook, Iwaizumi guesses. It has his name handwritten in both kanji and hiragana on the front. It's a little smaller than the other scrapbooks his mom has on her shelf. The binding is a dark forest green.
The only sound in the room is the flipping of pages. Iwaizumi takes his time to study each page, his chest feeling a little tighter the more he flips through the book.
Iwaizumi knows his mothers have always taken lots of pictures, ranging from polaroids to digital. His aunties too but he still finds himself surprised by the amount Sachiko has collected in the book. Including pictures she must have received from other people because neither of his moms were present at said event.
The pages are simple. Each one has about two to five (depending on the sizes of them) pictures on it. They're decorated with stickers and little notes written in his mom's graceful handwriting neatly squeezed where they can fit and still be legible.
Notes like "you gave your poor mother a fright the first time you came into the house with one of these" under a photo of Iwaizumi proudly showing off a jar with a beetle in it and "i'm surprised you convinced tooru to go, lol" by a photo from a fishing trip Iwaizumi took with the other third years.
"This is one of my favorite pictures," His mom says, watching as Iwaizumi flips pages over his shoulder. She points to a picture of the two of them when they first moved into the house. He was only three. They're sitting on the front steps together, neither of them are looking at the camera. He has his arms wrapped around hers and is looking up at her as she laughs.
And he breaks.
"Oh, Hajime." She says softly, pulling him into a tight hug. He tucks his face into the crook of her neck and she strokes his hair as he cries. He feels like he's five again, crying because he accidentally squashed a bug when he was trying to catch it. Ten, crying because he was sick with the flu and thought he was on the brink of death. Thirteen, crying because he and Oikawa had a fight and he thought he would never talk to him again.
Eighteen, crying because he's leaving the country tomorrow and it suddenly hit him that he doesn't know what he's going to do without his mom.
He doesn't say that though.
He doesn't tell her that he's scared, scared that he's going to crash and burn in California, scared that his friendship with Oikawa won't survive the distance, scared that everything is going to go wrong because he left.
Or that he's really going to miss her.
(Maybe he should have told her that.)
-
That night before Iwaizumi spends his last night in his childhood room, he wraps the scrapbook up in the hoodie that Oikawa gave him and tucks them both into one of his bags.
He thinks about where he's going to put it in his dorm room when he gets to California.
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Halloween prompts no. 19
Danny is flung into a new dimension by Skulker and they continue to fight above a strange city. Danny makes sure to end it quickly after that in case he attracts the attention of yet another person or group of people who want to hurt him for whatever reason..
He flies into a nearby building only to discover a freaky mad scientists lab and finds a clone of someone named "Robin". The clone was appearently a baby that they were planning on brainwashing and raising in a cult like setting to kill the "Bats"
"Jee, is the rodent problem that bad?!" Either way he decides to kidnap the baby and destroy everything in a blaze of glory. No child soldiers on his watch. No siree! He then portals his way home.
What he did not count on was him immediately running into his parents in his ghost form with a very alive baby in his arms. They stared eachother down in uncharacteristic silence, one afraid that they would hurt the baby with thier reckless firing and the others staring slack jawed cause why does he have a baby?!
The whole of Amity Park is also asking this question. Many assume its his, despite his age because teenages parents do exist, plus phantom kept calling it "his" baby so...
Others are worried that he might have just taken a baby from a dangerous environment and decided to keep it not realizing how much work a baby is. (Spot on) Both theories raise questions about how ghosts view families and how they reproduce. Upon asking Phantom he turned bright green, made a witty one liner and bolted.
Frostbite calls Danny in to give a check up to both him and the baby and uses this time to get a DNA sample from the child, and with a bit of ghostly magic he tracks down the parents and contacts them by straight up ringing thier doorbell. He and Alfred get along immediately.
Eventually Frosty tricks Phantom into coming back to Gotham and reveals the babies paternity in front of the batfam and the bird in question (whichever one) is freaking out a bit, "I'm too young to be a father!" style and Dannys like, "Cool. Cause I have no intention of sharing! Byeeee!" Before vanishing. Frostbite wants a nap.
Cue batfam following Phantom back to his dimension via Frostbite only to discover various people in Amity Park have also grouped together armed with ghost hunting gear to capture Phantom and get the baby away from him. Yeah, they know the kid has good intentions but hes only 14 and its not good for him or the baby. So they're effectively acting like undead CPS.
About time.
Anyway, Danny realizes he can't revert to his living form because his ecto signature would still ping on the equipment as Phantom and thats not something he wants to explain right now. Or possibly ever. With that being said he refuses to abandon his child. Hes only had them for two weeks and they're already his whole world.
Sam keeps telling him this was stupid and even Tuckers concerned. "How will you take care of a baby, dude? You can't even balance your hero life with you real life" Okay, fair. Jazz then started talking to him about talking to the babys father to at least get some help raising them and Danny finally agreed. For the baby's sake.
Bruce is so relieved when he finally gets to see his grandchild safe and sound.
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You could play with the dirty part of the canon description by having Slash and his people roll in mud to hide their scent.
Parts of the Code labelling using weapons/traps as dishonorable could have started as agreements made that Slash's people wouldn't keep using their old tactics, maybe forced on Thunder's Clan to keep them from becoming too powerful, if they DID fuse.
I'm more liable to just remove the "dirty" thing entirely honestly; I just think it's so shitty I'd like to nuke it from orbit, you get me? Every single time they want you to hate someone, they make them fat and/or stinky. I'd rather just put that kind of rhetoric in the mouths of cats like Clear Sky and The Wind Runner, a lie to demonize their enemies, not really based on truth.
I think I might take the trap stuff though; that actually fits in nicely with how ThunderClan's the only one that uses spears. I won't have it be code yet, though, that's going to come a lot later. First two commandments of the code are Borders + Mercy, followed by Law 3 when Riverstar dies in some decades.
Also gonna need a name for Slash's new group. Hey, maybe THESE guys can be called Warriors, actually. Warriors of the Forest, like what the first arc used to be called before it was renamed TPB.
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