#anticipating the delicious reveal of your miraculously alive friend actually being dead after all and has been for longer than you thought

[jaewritesfic]

Everlasting Trio DPxDC Nobody Knows Au

I love nobody knows aus.

I love aus where danny flees to Gotham after a Bad Time with his parents.

So what if:

Sam moves to Gotham for college after graduation. Tucker has flown down from MIT over the semester break to spend the month with her. They've stayed very close knit.

They're having brunch at a small cafe maybe a week in, and suddenly Sam's hand darts across the table and grips his forearm so tight it hurts.

He startles and asks her what's wrong, but she doesn't answer. She's too busy staring across the room with a haunted look on her face. Tucker follows her gaze and goes cold and still with shock and disbelief.

They're both frozen because that? That looks like Danny.

Danny, their childhood best friend. Danny who came to their freshman year of high school a little different. Withdrawn.

Danny who kept pulling away and making excuses no matter how hard they tried to engage him, who looked more tired and ragged with every passing week.

Danny who disappeared without a trace shortly after he turned sixteen and who, though it largely went unspoken, they believed dead and gone forever.

"It's not," Tucker whispers weakly. "It can't be, right?"

The guy across the cafe is older than the kid they remember, of course. Around twenty, exactly how old they are. How old Danny should be. He's tall, tall like they and Jazz always assured Danny he would be once he hit a growth spurt and into his dad's genes.

His nails are painted and his ears are pierced and his hair is a little longer, but he sits in front of his papers and computer with eerily familiar bad posture and a pen tapping at his bottom lip like their Danny always did when he tried to focus.

He looks leagues healthier than their Danny did before he went missing.

He huffs a breath out of his nose and pokes his bottom lip out as he scowls at something on his screen, and before Tucker can even process the gut punch of such a familiar mannerism Sam is out of her chair and halfway across the cafe.

Tucker scrambles after her with half coherent protests.

He reaches the table as Sam slams herself down into the chair across from the doppelganger, the guy jerking in surprise and blinking up at his two unexpected guests with confusion and alarm.

Then, slowly, Tucker watches his face go pale and the confusion be replaced with dawning shock, recognition and something unreadable.

"Oh," Danny breathes.