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johanna-swann · 1 month ago

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You know what would be an incredibly juicy plot that the show will sadly never go for? Buck avoiding being near his nephew. Out of all the 118 characters he had probably the most special relationship to Bobby and as of 8x18 he has barely allowed himself to even begin grieving him.

And then like a month after the man who was like a dad to him died his sister who barely had a connection to Bobby at all decided to give Bobby's full name to her newborn son. That kid is not just a Robert by middle name, his full name ist Robert Nash Han and Athena is already calling him Bobby.

Buck knows it's not the kid's fault and he doesn't love his nephew any less than he loves his niece, he doesn't even really blame Maddie and Chim - they're trying to honour Bobby in their own way. But the "real" Bobby Nash hasn't even been in the ground for a month, it feels like his body is barely cold and Buck is only beginning to really deal with this loss.

Every time someone calls the baby by name he flinches internally and he hates himself for it. He avoids holding him, avoids being alone with him, avoids talking about him and he hates it, hates that he is being so selfish about it, but he can't help it.

After Jee-Yun was born and they finally felt safe about covid he spent as much time with her as possible and it brought him so much joy. Spending time with little Bobby brings him pain. He tells himself he just needs to get over it, that it'll pass, but for now it just hurts.

It takes Maddie a little while to catch on, but she does eventually notice that Buck is avoiding her. He basically lived on her couch for a while there and visited her a lot and now that his nephew is born and he should have all the more reason to want to come over he suddenly has an excuse to almost never be around? It's weird and so different from how he acted when Jee was a baby.

She finds an opportunity to corner him eventually and he confesses everything. That he hasn't been avoiding her, but little Bobby. That he respects her and Chimney's decision, but doesn't like it. That he knows it's not fair, but he doesn't know how to handle it yet.

And there's not really a solution. Maddie admits that maybe they should've discussed the name as a family. They hadn't even asked Athena for approval and it was really soon after the funeral, maybe too soon to start naming babies after Bobby. She suggests that Buck could call his nephew by a different nickname. The middle name isn't really an option, but there are other nicknames for Robert. Everyone else has already taken to calling the baby Bobby or little Bobby though and just Buck using a different nickname won't make a big difference.

So Buck simply repeats that he'll get over it with time. That the pain of losing the original Bobby will become more manageable with time and he will learn how to deal with this better. Neither of the siblings are really happy with this outcome, but there isn't much else to do. Maybe as a final scene one could see Buck going back to therapy and starting to grieve Bobby for himself - not just follow Bobby's last wishes, taking care of the team or trying to be okay too hard, but to actually feel the loss for himself. Show Buck willing and beginning to work on this.

#this plot would do two things #finally give buck's grief a little more room #and put a strain on the sibling bond which we haven't seen since buck begins and even then it was only one episode #just saying this could be interesting #911 spoilers #911 abc #evan buckley #maddie han #maddie buckley #robert nash han

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spacedace · 4 months ago

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another bit from the "Constantine adopts Elle au" idea I posted a snippet of yesterday:

The days immediately after the…loss of Elle’s brothers weren’t the hardest. It would, they’d all learn soon enough, only get worse as their friend’s mental state continued to deteroriate. At the time though, it had certainly felt like it couldn’t have gotten any worse.

Elle had always been, for as long as Lian had known the other girl, been a bright, energetic person. Even when being drug from bed in those ungodly hours that so easily could be labeled as late night and early morning equally to go fight some asshole who couldn’t wait for decent crime-spree hours. Elle had never been so cruel to the rest of them as to be chipper during those awful exhausted - and exhausting - incidents, but she’d always been upbeat. Rousing them into feeling more alive with a carefully currated playlist blasting over the comms and promises of delicious, greasy breakfasts at their favorite twenty-four hour diner that she always delivered on.

She was always vibrant, always excited for whatever came at her next, always dancing ahead of them all in search of a new hobby, a new special interest, a new once-in-a-lifetime experience. Her eternally burning hope that the horizon would have something better, something brighter not a foolish security blanket to hide behind but a weapon she weilded against the world. A spine of steal, a heart of a stellar nursery, a hand equally capable of being stretched out in friendship or clenched into a fist ready to deliver the nastiest left hook that side of Metropolis.

Elle Constantine was a lot of things - a good number of them questionable - but in every single one of them, she was full of life.

So seeing her so completely empty…

The Justice League had gotten roped in on their mission before they even realized the scope of it all. Grand-Bat looming and scowling and digging his grubby fingers into things, the rest of the League not much better as they wormed their way in on the case. For all the good it had done, when they’d been too late actually on the scene to be of any actual use. Only able to show up hours after their initial call for backup when the shit show was finally over and the world saved.

She and the team were all still reeling by the time the got there. Elle still crumpled on the ground, coverd in soot and blood in a writhing heap of pain no one else could even begin to understand. The still air rent by her ragged, broken voice wailing and keening like a banshee from the stories of old.

Screaming until she coughed up blood. Hands dripping red and green ripping at the dirt, at her clothes, at her hair, her skin. Shreiking in mindless, all consuming greif as they tried to calm her down, the only words anyone could make out the broken shapes of her brothers’ name.

Jon had to pin her arms to her side in the end, face pained as he tried hard not to hurt her while keeping her thrashing frame in place. Connor crouched before her cradling her tattered hands in his as he tried desperately to get her to follow his breathing, his own voice thick with barely contained tears. Damian, soft hearted beneath all his bluster and bristling, dropped to his knees beside her in the blood soaked ground and simply wrapped his arms around her in a hug.

There had been nothing Lian wanted more than to be with them in that moment. To join her team in trying to help their friend through the initial horror and agony of having a part of herself so cruelly ripped out and crushed before her very eyes. She wanted to wipe at the endless tears falling down Elle’s face and hold her hands and wrap her in a hug and weep with her over what had happend.

Wanted to get them all out of there, get them back to the Tower, get them all washed up and bundled in a protected, quiet corner where they could all cling to each other in the dark in a mess of blankets and pillows like the children they were. Wanted to shield Elle from the watching eyes of the Justice League members, the clean up crew, the gawking civilians and hungry press. To protect her while she was so horribly vulnerable, her friend ripped open and bleeding out in front of the world like a sideshow and not a girl who had just lost the only people in the world that had known and loved her since the very beggining of her fucked up life.

But Lian was the leader of the Titans. She was the one they trusted to make the hard calls. To look after them. To be their champion against not just their enemies but their allies too when it was called for.

So that’s what she did.

She stood with her feet planted firm on the slick, broken ground. Spine straight, shoulders back, head high and gaze full of hellfire. A sentry between her confused, greiving friends and the good intentioned but ultimately distructive attempts of the Justice League members before her to help.

Lian’s arm was broken in at least two places, hanging limply at her side from a dislocated shoulder. Her weapons buried in the flesh of one monster or other that they had faced that night. Her poison tipped nails split and torn, fingernails missing entirely on three fingers of her left hand. Her mask was cracked and broken somewhere in the debris, leaving her only with a domino that had nearly been clawed off with the rest of her face. Blood going cool and tacky where it had poured down her ragged cheeks, settling in the hollows and lines around her mouth. Pinking her teeth whenever she spoke and the gruesome evidence of the brutal fight found its way to curl insideious in her mouth, down her throat, into the cold pit in her chest.

When she met her grandfather’s grim, obscured face it was with her mother’s strength and her father’s stubbornness and her Pops’ willingness to shoot any motherfucker who dared to try.

Clark’s gaze was on the hunched crowd behind her, tight lines on his face as he stared at his son making it all to clear that he wanted to move past her and insert himself into the situation. To use his everything will be okay voice to command them like confused civilians or lost ducklings in need of a minder. He wanted to play the part he always played in times of disaster: shining beacon, untarnished champion. The last thing her team wanted, the last thing that Elle needed on top of everything else.

Lian’s good hand flexed by the pistol strapped to her thigh in a small warning. The Man of Steel knew well enough that there was glowing green waiting for him in the clip. Her gramps’ obsessive paranoia, her Pops’ good advice about big blue boyscouts who couldn’t keep their noses out of of other people’s business.

They stood in tense silence for long moments, the stillness only broken by Elle’s broken voice rising up in a keening wail for those she lost.

A stand-off that Lian knew that she’d win, one way or another.

Her gramps’ shoulders lowered, so minutely as to be inperceptible to anyone not in their family.

“Wonder Woman will be here shortly.” He said in his low rumbling voice. Beside him Clark finally drifted to the ground, a concession from both of them. “Justice League Dark went radio silent seven hours ago. Last transmission from Zantanna indicated they were dealing with an interdimensional issue and would be unreachable for at least three days.”

Elle’s dad - her family - were unreachable. John Constantine didn’t know that he’d lost his three sons in the span of a handful of minutes, that his daughter was being crushed beneath the weight of greif and trauma to the point of madness. Wouldn’t know for days what tragedy had struck his family, had destroyed the strange but happy life he and his adopted children had carved out for themselves.

John Constantine. Zantanna Zatara. Detective Bobo. Boston Brand. Asa the Nightmare Nurse. Elle’s family, out of reach while she writhed and wailed in agony. The only people who might come close to understand just how deep, how awful, the pain of her brothers’ loss truly was.

Diana was something, was someone, but the Amazon’s time being split between JL Light and Dark meant that she wasn’t a touchstone to Elle in the way the rest of the core members of the magical team were. Elle commented once that Diana was more like a fun aunt she barely saw growing up. Someone she was always excited to see and hang out with, someone she wanted to make proud, but not someone she felt especially close to in comparison to the rest of her family.

Lian did not give in to the pained urge to close her eyes and swear.

She was keenly aware that all it would take was a single crack, as narrow and insignificant as a strand of hair. The smallest hint that the crushing weight of everything that had happened - that was still happening - was effecting her and they’d be back at the attempts to push past her and take over. A desire to help, the restless urge to jump in and save the day, to ease the pain of those so clearly suffering, blinding them to how much worse they would make things in the process.

The intentions were good, but the ultimate results blistering and painful and too often overlooked as the next disaster pulled thier attentions away. Stubborn insistence that their experience overruled her and her team’s instincts. The hands of the older heroes always reaching, unaware that they were too sharp as they dug into the soft flesh of the Titans’ fresh wounds. Picking apart their flaws and failures in the name of bettering them, never stopping to consider the wounds they pressed hard against as part of their lecturing might still be open and raw. That while the men before her had hands in raising most of them, that did not mean they had perfect comprehension to who the Titans were or always knew what the members of her team really needed.

“Have Wonder Woman go to the Tower.” Lian said, knowing that her grandfather heard Selina’s cadence in her voice. A habit, a gamble. Catwoman had been her mentor for a time, had helped her sharpen her claws and her instincts and that budding part of her that would make her a leader one day. Sometimes it pushed Bruce into listening to her, sometimes it just led to him pushing back.

He’d find that latter option unwise at the moment, though.

Her beloved Grand-Bat or no, she knew where his armor was weakest. Knew how to make the single shot she’d manage to get off on him count. Knew just how far she’d go to make sure that Elle and the rest of her friends were sheilded from any and all harm when they were so vulnerable.

She was their champion, their sentry, their knight.

Batman, of all people, knew the lengths a knight was willing to go in the name of the oaths they took.

She watched him shift back. A silent, unseen signal between him and Clark having Superman step back too. Lian wasn’t sure if her grandfather had found the wall she presented him too strong to conted with, or if Elle’s heart wrenching screams of greif and agony made him decide against testing the wall at all. Whatever it was, Lian would take the small victory where she could. It was the only real one she might be able to claim that day.

#dpxdc #lian harper #bruce wayne #clark kent #elle phantom #dani fenton #dani phantom #connor hawke #jon kent #damian wayne #constantine adopts elle au #but not the Paper Moon version of the Constantine adopting Elle au - that's a different au #lian is the leader of the titans in this #she deserves it (or maybe she doesn't that shit has gotta be a headache and a half on the best of days)#also fully believe Jason would both teach Lian how to shoot and give her guns when she starts doing hero work #that's his little girl too he's not letting her go out there unless she's armed to the teeth and ready to kill a god #Lian has two days *and* two moms and one grumpy Grand-Bat #anyway no one is having a good time right now #honestly not even sure if this would make it into the fic if/when I post it since this was one of the first things I wrote and my ideas #on the story's plot have changed since I ended up writing this #but it still helped give me a good sense of how I wanted to write the characters and the Titan's dynamic in this #(Surprise! They're just as co-dependent as all the other teenage superhero teams end up being!)#*slaps roof of this version of the Titans* this baby can fit so much trauma in it!#*slaps roof of Justice League Dark* but this baby might be able to fit even more!#i really just can't let Elle have like a nice story where she's adopted and everything is great I gotta put her through the Horrors instead

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