tablestoastandtime

[tablestoastandtime]

Hand-holding that may be incidental to treating an injury but is still done so tenderly by the attending character- coaxing clenched fingers open in order to examine the injury; keeping a hand steady while tweezing out bits of debris; clasping palm-to-palm while holding a burned hand under cool water; thoroughly rubbing balm into cracked, dry skin; holding the hand still in a firm but gentle grasp when dabbing away blood and cleaning a wound; cradling a hand in their lap while suturing up a laceration; carefully manipulating broken fingers to set them; swaddling frostbitten fingers in a warm, damp cloth; gently squeezing each fingertip in turn to check circulation; turning a hand this way and that to wrap bandages around it; lifting a hand to take a pulse at the wrist; massaging stiff or sore knuckle joints; holding a frigid hand cupped between both of theirs to warm it; and on and on...

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”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

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characters who dig themselves out of their graves (whether literal or metaphorical) are at the top of the list. nothing beats a character who should have died but didn't and comes back to haunt their own life and the world around them, benevolent or violent it doesn't matter, it's enthralling either way

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not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.

[tablestoastandtime]

Fanfiction is great because you can see so clearly how people learn to write.

Some people, it's clear, learned almost entirely through absorbing the world around them. Grammar and punctuation will be all over the place, spellings are approximate, but the voice of the narration will come through so clearly. You can hear the dialect of the people around them as of they're telling the story. It's not a written story, it's a transcription of how they talk in their day to day life.

Some people learned through reading a gazillion books as a kid. Grammer and spelling will be rock solid, formatting occasionally based on the single tab of physical books rather than the double tab of online scrolling, but dialogue is often stilted and overly formal. You might notice a lack of contractions and very rigid rules they made for consistency that actually have a lot more flexibility than they think. They tend to have a fantastic grasp of sentence flow, though.

And other people formally learned how to write. This could be anywhere from taking school classes seriously because they enjoyed writing stories as a kid to literal certifications and jobs in the field. Grammer is flawless. Punctuation is triple checked. Foreign words are in italics. Characters have distinct voices. But their self indulgence is tempered by perfectionism. They know precisely what they want from a fic. Authors notes often feature mutterings about their happiness with the chapter. Kaomojis often appear! They seek a style to their writing, and it makes for some wonderfully clever plots! These are the ones most likely to get fun with formatting!

And some people.... Some people examined it all. They dissect dialogue, people watch, cross reference behaviours and compare characters to people irl. You can tell almost immediately who had formative experiences with Terry pratchett and/or ghibli, because it's these people. While others see writing as fun, expression, craft, they see it as art. Plain and simple. Sure, the grammar is occasionally sacrificed on the altar of creative freedom, and the occasional sentence might miss a full stop, but these people seem to self reflect on themselves as part of the art making process. On occasion, these people have the most masterful grasp of dialogue and invocation and hand sewn characterisations. Formatting is pretty standard because all the focus is on the actual words. These fics can be edited to the moon and back!

All of these can vary wildly in forethought and quality, and betas can often catch individual problems before they hit post, but just. Isn't it so cool? What's that one Oscar Wilde quote about every mask just being another fragment of yourself?

Did you recognise yourself?

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sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

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One of the worst things about coming back to a writing project is reading through it, enjoying it, then hitting the point where you stopped.

"What do you mean you didn't finish it?"

"What do you mean there's only half a paragraph of notes at the end?"

"And I'm the one that has to sit down and spend multiple hours on writing an ending to this thing? I have to answer these open questions and resolve these themes and make sense of what you were trying to build to?"

[tablestoastandtime]

subtle ways to include foreshadowing

one character knowing something offhandedly that they shouldn't, isn't addressed until later

the crow rhyme

colours!! esp if like, blue is evil in your world and the mc's best friend is always noted to wear blue...betrayal?

write with the ending in mind

use patterns from tragic past events to warn of the future

keep the characters distracted! run it in the background until the grand reveal

WEATHER.

do some research into Chekhov's gun

mention something that the mc dismisses over and over

KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOU PUT. don't leave things hanging.

unreliable characters giving information that turn out to be true

flowers and names with meanings

anything with meanings actually

metaphors. if one character describes another as "a real demon" and the other turns out to be the bad guy, you're kind of like...ohhh yeahhh

anyways add anything else in the tags

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Your OPSEC is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Okay so one of the many things that drives me absolutely nuts about most TV shows and (some) books that involve secret or classified information or secure facilities is how absolutely not secure everything is, so these are a few basic things that people get wrong:

You can't carry around classified information. There are, I assume, exceptions in specific cases, though they are assuredly very carefully managed, but random intel agent #12 cannot legally just take home classified information so they can work on it at home. That's incredibly illegal. And that's for a reason--secure facilities are, as the name suggests, secure. Everywhere else is varying levels of not secure. Even for people working with regular business or government materials on their work phone or laptop, there are varying levels of strict rules about where you can leave it, how to report a lost device, and not keeping it in checked bags.

Badges should be innocuous and limited in visible information. Any sensible security system doesn't have badges that are numbered/colored/otherwise identified by access level, because that is a really easy way to identify targets for thieves/people who want to break in. American federal ID cards (CAC for military, PIV for civilian) have really specific layouts. Some companies distinguish between full time employees, interns, vendors, etc in their cards.

Badges shouldn't be displayed outside of the office. This is not really followed by real people (if you get on the metro on DC you will see a wide variety of visible badges), but displaying a badge is not security-wise because 1) it makes them easier to steal, and 2) it can make you a target.

Names/access level/information shouldn't be openly announced. I'm looking at you, MCU Spider-Man fanfiction. Just. Don't.

Confidential/classified information shouldn't be openly discussed. Stop having your characters talk about confidential or classified information in front of people who shouldn't know it, or even just out in the open at all. They shouldn't be telling their parents, their friends, their spouses, etc. Even businesses or government buildings that deal with sensitive information, there may be spaces where certain things can or can't be discussed, and employees/contractors will go through approximately 8 million trainings on where you can't discuss certain information. This also involves erasing whiteboards, locking computers, etc.

You can't have cell phones in certain secure facilities. People shouldn't be having their cell phones with them in SCIFs. This prohibition extends to all things that can be recording devices, including furbies.

[tablestoastandtime]

not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.

[tablestoastandtime]

some people are taking "doomed" to mean "dead". this is actually a misconception! you can be doomed even if you don't die! it's sometimes worse if you don't die!

[tablestoastandtime]

How to Scratch a Record - Multiverse

Just half a one-shot set in my How to Scratch a Record 'verse (which is why I'm tagging Tim). This isn't canon to that verse and a bunch of the little details have changed so don't assume that any specific thing will definitely happen over there, but this concept hasn't left me alone so-

Down the line Jason and other Bats encountering a Batfamily from a universe closer to canon

Multiverse shit was always sketchy. Even at the best of times, with the best possible combinations, it was always weird and a little bit unsafe to have multiple versions of the same person running around. Sure it could lead to really fast problem solving, but it could also lead to some of the worst knock-down drag out fights any particular thunderdome had ever seen.

Jason wasn’t thrilled about having a complete second set of his family on site, was what he was saying. The costumes varied a bit, but it wasn’t that hard to pick out who was who underneath.

What he really didn’t like, was that it was pretty obviously his double dressed to the nines in a leather jacket and shiny red helmet. Jason didn’t want to be Red Hood, and he didn’t like what it said about their world that he was so comfortable in the role.

It didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter. Legacy titles were legacy titles and sometimes people picked them up to pay respect to someone they had valued. Despite their ups and downs, Jason had never wanted anyone to think he didn’t value how much Alvin had done and continued to do for the Alley. If Alvin really ever needed someone to cover for him while he was unavailable for an extended period of time, Jason would at least consider it.

Except. Alvin was a lot of things and stubborn was chief among them. He would never walk away from Gotham, from doing what he thought was right his own way, even when he fucked up. If Alvin Draper wasn’t the Red Hood where these alternates were from then he must not be able to do the work.

Jason didn’t like the thought, like grit caught in his teeth.

To be fair, the feeling seemed to be at least somewhat mutual. The Jason-in-the-Hood had been shooting him stony and clearly assessing glances periodically since they’d arrived, but hadn’t made any attempt to approach. Jason figured it’d be some time in the next twelve minutes or so unless something more pressing came up.

The two Batmen were certainly having fun, if the staredown they hadn’t let up on was any way to judge. Jason was also a little suspicious of how easy it was to tell them apart; his own Bat with navy highlights and yellow accents, armoured to take a bullet and allow for the kind of acrobatics that made him seem half liquid half wraith. The other Bat was all monochromatic blacks and grays, a shadow brought to life and layered with semi-flex plating that looked like it was intended to stop a shell from a tank rather than a shotgun. How he moved Jason sure didn’t know, but he was absolutely certain that whatever this Batman hit went down.

Over at the Batcomputer, in what Jason was pretty sure was a blatant breach of multiversal protocol, the two Tims were huddled over casefiles both on screen and from some kind of tablet the visiting Tim had pulled out. Interesting to see him in a Red Robin suit even with the cowl down, since local Tim was pretty adverse to anything and everything to do with the Red Hood, but maybe he’d stepped into the role to support his Jason after-

Probably not worth speculating on though, not unless he wanted to really get into the nitty gritty of gossip that very likely wouldn’t ever be relevant to him again.

More interesting was the almost identical Batgirl costumes the Casses were wearing. They matched down to some of the semi-decorative stitching and it was frankly more than a little uncanny. Was the design just that good that they’d inadvertently recreated them in some sort of convergent evolution thing, or was the second Batgirl just some kind of multiversal constant? Did Jason even want to know?

Maybe he’d be better off hanging out with the Nightwings. Sure Dickhead could be annoying, but at least they were similar enough to clearly be on the same page about things but not literally indistinguishable. That probably meant they were safe.

“Hang on,” the words from the computer interrupted Jason’s train of thought. Alternate Tim, Red Robin. “If your Jason went straight from Robin to Jayhawk and hasn’t changed since, then who’s the ‘Red Hood’ that keeps turning up in all these cases? And why’s he been operating so long? Don’t tell me the Joker swapped sides and you’ve just been letting him run Crime Alley.”

The temperature dropped.

No one talked about the Joker, not really. Not in years.

To this day, his death was something of a sore point for the original Dynamic Duo. Jason knew where he stood on the matter, but there was no point starting a fight over it, not unless Dick really wanted to push on why he didn’t trust Hood with any of his siblings.

So why did it sound like this other Tim thought the Joker was alive?

Their Tim clicked open the file, and Alvin’s masked face filled the monitor. “The Red Hood, a.k.a. Alvin Draper has been operating for almost a decade now. He started making waves in Crime Alley before debuting officially by murdering the Joker on live television, and ever since he’s been a big player in the Gotham underground. He’ll lend a hand sometimes, but he’ll just as often blow something up to act as a distraction if he doesn’t like an investigation. By day, Draper runs a medical research company with multiple production labs in the city and a prominent IT division that donates labour to small businesses across Gotham. He’s got a good dozen other investments and corporations, most linked to aliases, though that he owns them is an open secret. By most recent estimates, he’s got at least two precincts on his payroll and he and Gordon have been in a kind of cold war about controlling police patrols in his territory for years. Draper is-“

“Not real,” Red Robin interrupted.

“Excuse me?” Their Tim sounded offended, and honestly Jason agreed. Who did this guy think he was deciding who was and wasn’t real?

Apparently even Bruce agreed, finally breaking the stalemate and stepping towards the workstation. “Alvin Draper is very much a real person. He’s been both a help and a hinderance on countless cases, and I’ve personally spoken with him both in and out of costume-“

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure that’s all true,” Red Robin waved off the sentiments. “I’m not denying that there’s a guy running around doing all of that, but I’m telling you that that’s not a name that belongs to a real person. It’s an alias I’ve been using since I was fourteen. If you’ve got someone claiming to be Alvin Draper on your hands, what you’ve actually got is a Tim Drake that is lying to you.

“And has been for ten years apparently, wow.” Red Robin blinked. “Good for him, I guess, though not so much on the very prolific murder.”

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Jason’s double said, dismissive and cold and so fucking sure of himself. “You’re telling me that even across universes you’re stealing my shit? What this guy crossed dimensions and decided to try being a crime lord for the fun of it?”

His words were tacks under Jason’s skin. What the fuck did any of these people know about Alvin?

“You don’t get to talk about him like that,” he snapped. That red helmet caught the glare of the overhead halogens like a warning light.

“Just look at him,” Red Robin waved at the monitor and then back to himself. “That’s literally me in six years and a domino mask. Sure, the beard hides the jawline a bit and I think he’s got some light contour on his cheekbones or something, but it’s not like we don’t know how to recognize someone in a disguise. That’s literally my face.”

Tim grimaced, shifting uncomfortably. “I did notice he kinda looks like me back when I was younger. But I looked into it, and it just turned out he was my dad’s illegitimate brother-”

Bruce stepped closer, getting a hand on Tim’s shoulder and Jason’s gut twisted. “I found those records as well, some of them paper copies down at the city archives with all the hallmarks of original documents-“

“But if we’re looking at an alternate version of Tim Drake,” the Bat in black caught the thought mid-train.  “Then he may very well have planted those records years ago to handle the inevitable questions that would emerge from sharing a face with an actual resident of this universe.”

“Or maybe he just exists here! Maybe that’s the big differentiating factor between our universe and yours; that to you Alvin a lie but here he’s real,” Jason exploded. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t. He’d known Alvin for years, grown up with him always there in the background even after they lost touch, Alvin hadn’t been lying to him all that time. Not about something as fundamental as his identity.

Right?

Nightwing, not theirs but the one with the heavier gauntlets and the extra inch of lift in his boots, rolled his shoulders casually. “Well there’s an easy way to find out. Bring him here, grab a few samples, and test not just for the genetic match to the Timbos here, but also for any lingering magic or transdimensional radiation that might suggest he’s not supposed to be here. Anyone got his number?”

All eyes turned to Jason, which he kind of resented. It wasn’t like Cass and Alvin hadn’t gotten close during her run as Red Robin. He was pretty sure they still texted, whereas he and Alvin has been rocky for a long time. He knew he could rely on Hood if he really needed help, but Alvin was always unwilling to push for any kind of closeness and Jason had never quite managed to purge the slimy guilt that came from spending too much time with him. It wasn’t fair that he got to do that when others couldn’t, wasn’t fair that Alvin prioritized his wants and needs when there were people that needed him out there.

He did still have his number, though.

Maybe calling would help, would get Alvin in here and he could prove that he wasn’t secretly Tim Drake and this was all a big misunderstanding. He could be a Martian in deep cover or something, or he was a rapidly aged clone, or maybe he was just a guy who looked kind of similar to Tim.

Maybe he hadn’t lied to Jason.

There really was only one good way to find out. So he pulled out his phone and dialed.

Maybe it was going to be okay.

[tablestoastandtime]

[tablestoastandtime]

Retract Before Impact - Dick I

There more things change, the more they stay the same. Gotham stays Gotham even with some people off the board and others stepping in where they shouldn't be.

Capes and masks adjust, and the clock carries on.

(This is the first half of the first chapter of a sequel to my other fic Take It Back Now Y'all https://archiveofourown.org/works/21208958 and will not make sense without it. Retract Before Impact is now up here https://archiveofourown.org/works/63185353)

There was a time and place for rebellion, and after a long year on the streets and several weeks of rehab after a run in with Two Face, Dick was a master at picking his moments.

Bruce had set Rules about anything to do with the Red Hood. Don’t engage alone, don’t actively seek out unless there was a strong reason to believe he was apart of an ongoing investigation, and under no circumstances assume you can sneak up on him without him noticing. That last one Dick found a little offensive. Sure Hood was good enough to catch onto when he was being tracked by a giant man in a kevlar composite cape, but Dick was sneaky and had managed to find ways to stay unnoticed while dressed constantly in bright colours. Despite the similarities, Robin and Batman were not playing the same game. If Dick didn’t want to be seen, he wasn’t going to be.

That last rule alone would have made the Red Hood a tempting target for some under the table recon, but that was without even getting into the jerkface himself. In his multiple encounters with him, Dick had found the Red Hood to be arrogant, obnoxious, and way more dangerous than he had any right to be. Whoever he was, he was a professional. To get that good someone had to make him that way, and if Dick could gather enough intel to start pointing fingers at who, then they might be in business as to figuring out what exactly this guy’s deal was.

And Dick was well aware that Bruce was both obsessing over that question and basically clueless. He was letting some of those early interactions and some weird behaviour by residents blind him to the reality that Red Hood wasn’t just some guy committing crimes because if he was then he wouldn’t be anything like the way he was. Red Hood was lying to them, lying to everyone, and Batman and Robin were the only ones with anything close to a full picture.

If Batman couldn’t be objective about the case, then Robin had to be.

So really, for all that he was definitely breaking an explicitly set rule, Dick was doing his job to support the team more than anything else. Bruce would probably even agree with him if he wasn’t too busy using his orphan-tinted glasses.

Which meant that there was less than no reason to hesitate as he made his way to Crime Alley on a school night.

The key to any good investigation was in the groundwork. Going to the right places, finding the right evidence, talking to the right people, were the only ways to really get insight into a situation. Sure Batman seemed omniscient, but that was only because he spent hours cataloguing every kind of gravel in Gotham so that the one time it mattered he’d have the answer ready to go. If Dick wanted to understand the Red Hood, he was going to have to be that meticulous. With someone like this, there was no such thing as a clue too small.

So he started simple; boots on the ground and eyes in the sky.

Crime Alley was always a weird place to patrol. Bruce was never entirely comfortable there, and it showed in the set of his shoulders and the way his usual quiet notes were nearly entirely absent when they passed through. While Dick got it, personally he still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t throw up if he went back under a bigtop for all that he missed the lights and flights, Bruce’s reticence left him at a disadvantage now.

The other big barrier was of course the fact that while Robin was a target, a deliberate one but a target nonetheless, there wasn’t a disguise Dick could use that would keep him safe. Kids in coats were just as at risk as kids in capes, at least in this part of town.

So in the end Dick opted for the extra armour and snuck out in costume, ducking in and around air conditioning units that belched dust and exhaust pipes that stank of burning.

Red Hood didn’t have an official territory yet, at least not one on the Cave’s maps of the city, but there had been rumours for a while about the Ibanescus being ousted and no one had successfully moved into their streets since. It was as good a place to start as any.

For the first two and a half hours, Dick mostly hid dead ends. There was a suspicious amount of activity visible through the windows at a couple of sites, but even as Dick thought through the logistics of setting up a stakeout without Bruce finding out, the movement revealed itself to be children. Some were ducking in and out of what were primarily back entrances, others just seemed to move back and forth behind the blinds, giving Dick only the general note of their heights and speeds. Enough to tell there was at least six occupants and none of them tall enough to be adults.

While it was weird to see this many kids in one place, Dick didn’t see how it could have anything to do with Hood. Kid gangs were a survival strategy, from what he understood. Trying to interfere would make him a threat to their very way of life unless he could convince them he wasn’t trying to hurt them or turn them in. The cape might be enough, but Dick wasn’t really in the mood to fight a bunch of kids for no reason.

He’d circle back if he couldn’t find anything else.

The next hour, it started to rain, and Dick very much did not curse the way water slipped in the tops of his boots and soaked down his socks. He was a professional, and he’d chosen this outfit. He could suck up any design disadvantages, especially when he was on a mission.

Wet surveillance of people mostly just minding their own business was not more fun than dry surveillance. At least when he went to the docks just about everything was wet, including a bunch of guys unloading large tubs, buckets, and barrels from a fairly small freighter in the middle of the night, so it wasn’t a Robin-exclusive problem. It kind of helped to make it a team sport. Everyone in the city versus the sky, and unfortunately this inning wasn’t going well.

But the barrels looked promising! First glance they looked like they were industrial, which was as vague as it was useful. There were a lot of industrial buildings in Gotham, but almost all of the reputable ones were on the other side of the city and usually got their deliveries from the mainland rather than the bay, and industrial packaging were one of the laziest ways to hide weapons Dick had seen. Cheap, yes. Deeply boring and uninspired? Also yes.

If the Red Hood was planning to make an official claim in Gotham, he was going to need weapons to get his point across. And Dick had a hunch he’d just found one of his shipments.

The thing was though, if Dick didn’t prove these were weapons, and if he lost track of them, there was no way he was going to be able to convince Bruce to act on it. Oh it might be enough to get him to look into the shipment, but there was no way he’d link it to the Red Hood unless that smug jerk was picking up the weapons in person. And that was assuming he didn’t lecture right over Dick’s discovery and then cut him out of the case entirely for being biased.

So Dick had to prove that’s what this was, that that’s where these were going, and then he could call in the big bad Bat.

He needed to get closer.

Getting off of the warehouse roof he was perched on was easy enough, a story and a half landing he could make blindfolded and in his sleep. The rain offered enough noise coverage and turned the night shades of slick-black that ought to let him get close without having to pull out his best impression of a barrel. He’d put work into that one, and while it was enough to get Alfred to crack a smile, he hadn’t had the chance to field test it yet.

Probably best not to pull out new tricks when he didn’t have backup.

As he crept closer, he caught the dull sound of voices shouting over the wind. Not really the smartest thing to do if they were trying to get away with a crime, but plenty of the criminal element in town had a few screws loose and it was cold enough out Dick could see how they might think they were all alone out here.

Too bad for them they were wrong.

He couldn’t make out specific words, but that was secondary. He flicked the recording device in his belt on and he could review the audio later. There might be something useful in the back and forth, but if Dick wanted to get home with anything useful tonight he needed to keep his eyes on the prize.

The men were moving their cargo onto the back of a truck. Suggested either they weren’t going to a site elsewhere in the docks, or whoever they worked for had the foresight to check the weather reports. Dick wouldn’t trust Hood’s consideration for his employees as far as he could throw Croc; Hood was pretty scrawny, Dick was confident he could toss him at least a few metres if he caught him off guard. Moving Croc anywhere he didn’t want to be on the other hand required a kind of advantage Dick wasn’t getting without multiple levers and a pulley or two.

These barrels, though, Dick was pretty sure he could move at least a few feet. Even if they were full of guns and sand, he’d been working on getting past his regular body weight exercises into moving real amounts of iron. Dick was finally tall enough after his last growth spurt to be able to help with evac of potentially unconscious civilians without risking drag injuries, so now he needed to be able to move them easily and comfortably, and Bruce had stepped up his training to match.

He was pretty sure that would carry over into moving barrels full of crime. Probably.

And he only needed to move one far enough he could take a peek and some pictures, maybe throw a tracking device or two in there, and then he could go back home, get dry, and show Bruce that he was right, that Red Hood was dangerous and no level on the Bat Sad Orphan Senses made him any less of a threat to the people they were supposed to be protecting.

Easy. Dick bet he could even convince Alfred to make him some hot chocolate when he got back if he pretended he’d gone out in the rain to finish his homework in the gazebo out on the grounds.

Dick took another few minutes to watch the rhythm of work, to find the beat of it and learn the gaps. There weren’t many, but they were there. Clearly no one was too invested in watching their sixes in the dark, and they were all darting between what little covering the awning that ringed the edge of the boat and the lip of the nearest warehouse offered to try to stave off the worst of the wet. That left the barrels in the middle of the boat unattended, at least for now. Dick would have to accept getting completely soaked, but at their current pace of work he’d have at least a minute or two to get his evidence.

Waving goodbye to the concept of being dry and embracing his future as a semi-aquatic bird, Dick waited for a man in a threadbare yellow rain slicker load another barrel precariously onto a dolly before slipping past him, sticking to the shadows of the dock lights and leaping onto the side of the boat.

His brother in inadvisable canary attire wheeled away the barrel down the ramp, and Dick thanked the last round of R&D Bruce had done on their gloves. The old design wouldn’t have had the grip to keep him from slipping into the harbour. As it was, he was able to twist himself up and over the lip of the boat, landing in a very quiet squelch as his socks pressed into the reinforced soles of his boots.

Urgh.

Maybe at the end of this Dick was going to need to find wherever it was Hood kept his wardrobe and dump water in all of his shoes or something. There had to be some kind of karmic retribution for this.

All around him, the sound of the rain had grown cacophonous, hitting the water, the steel of the drums, the deck beneath his feet. It was like he was in a bubble of sound and shifting pressure, and Dick couldn’t help feeling like he was an explorer of some kind, coming up on something old and untouched. He just hoped there wasn’t a surprise giant boulder hidden somewhere around here.

The barrel he’d set his sights on was indeed not that hard to move and there was a semi-reflective corrosives sticker plastered to the side of it, which to Dick cemented the reality that whatever was in here was a lie. Any corrosives in appropriate protective insulation ought to be heavier than this, just on sheer density. In the work of seconds Dick was able to teeter the barrel around the corner of the boat’s central cabin, not much space but hopefully enough for what he needed to do, and then it was just a matter of working the edge of a batarang under the lip of the lid, seesawing it back and forth until the steel popped loose.

Carefully, carefully, he took the lid in both hands and set it quietly on the deck. Then he took a look at its contents.

Just like he’d thought, the first thing he could see was sand going about three quarters of the way up. Dick snapped a quick picture and then leaned in to start digging one-handed. The other braced his weight on the edge so he didn’t tip headfirst in. One swipe, two, sand clumping together in the wake of his wet gloves and clinging to the creases in the fabric, and then- yes, contact with something plastic-wrapped and hard, metal for sure and made of edges. Dick wrapped his fingers around what he was giddily sure was a completely different kind of barrel, and let his tipping momentum carry him back and out.

It was still dark when his boots squelched onto the deck for the second time, but no amount of night or haphazard packaging could hide that he was now very clearly holding a partially assembled weapon that absolutely did not pass through Gotham’s firearm screening process.

Dick had his proof.

He took another few photos and then tossed it up and over the edge of the boat. Even if it was just the one, semi-automatic weapons weren’t the kind of thing Dick could let hit the street when he could do something about it. If he had the time, he’d dump out every barrel on board into the bay. And maybe after he’d presented the case to Bruce and gotten that hot chocolate, they’d come back just the two of them, the Dynamic Duo, to chase down this shipment and turn the weapons over to the police before they could hurt anyone.

The thought was a filament running through his chest, loops of glowing warmth wrapping themselves under and through his ribs. All he had to do was get home.

Dick crouched to lever up the barrel’s lid from where he’d laid it on the deck, only the barest of scrapes across the wood as he awkwardly wedged his fingers underneath the lip. The worst kinds of weights were always the weirder shapes; ultimately harmless, but unwieldy and frustrating. In this case, manoeuvring a steel lid that was more than twice the width of his torso was an experience Dick really hoped he’d hit another grout spurt soon enough to avoid in the future.

His best bet was to probably to position it for a straight deadlift and hope that the boat didn’t shift enough to send him tipping over. The sooner the lid was back in place, the sooner he could get somewhere dry.

Motivated by thoughts of the Cave’s industrial space heaters, hot chocolate, and successfully escaping trench foot Dick hefted the lid up, all legs and carefully braced wrists. It would also be embarrassing and not at all helpful in being taken seriously on this case to hurt his back on a secret Robin-only mission and then have to try to explain to Bruce that, yes he’d disregarded proper body mechanics when lifting a steel plate with no external pressure but it was definitely fine to trust him in a fight with a murderous mob boss.

Yeah, there was no way that would fly.

That being said, it still burned in his shoulders as he carefully pivoted the lid flat and positioned it back over the mouth of the barrel and his triceps sure weren’t thanking him from the awkward half-extended hold.

The lid dropped back into a place with a clang and Dick froze.

Rain pounded against the deck and boots thumped on the ramp. A deep voice called out to start the truck.

Maybe no one had heard that.

Dick wasn’t exactly looking to find out either way,

Back the way he came, jumping off the boat into the dark, wasn’t a great option but the only other things he could try were the brightly lit and populated lamp or taking a dip into the water and swimming for it. Both of those sucked. So he rounded the corner and back into the black it w-

“Well what do we have here?”

Uh oh.

Directly in front of him, where there wasn’t supposed to be anyone for a solid fifteen seconds, was yellow rain slicker, his mean mouth curled into a wet grin that caught the sallow docklight.

So someone had heard the lid moving after all. Whoops.

It was fine. Dick could take one guy.

More footsteps, heavy work boots and the splash of slightly acidic puddles, three more figures in various shades of worn safety-brightness melted out of the rain. Okay, four people was still doable. If Dick was quick he might not even end up in the bay.

“Nothing to worry about, routine inspection you know how it is, but it looks like you gentleman have done a bang up job and everything is up to code so I’ll just be getting out of your various hoods,” even as he said it, Dick shifted his weight to try and get some grip on the deck. The hidden treads on the pixie boots were good, but he was pushing his luck and he knew it. He’d thought after going toe-to-toe with Freeze a few times he’d be less worried about picking fights on what was functionally a slip-and-slide, but he wasn’t feeling as good about his odds as he’d like.

Maybe it was the lack of back up. Even if he called, Batman wouldn’t be here in under five minutes.

Which was fine. Dick had this, he totally did.

Beneath his feet, the deck rocked.

Towards the back of the group, slick, dull steel caught a tongue of light as its owner hefted it up and distant lighting split the clouds. A crowbar, chipped and weighty and between him and the dock.

Time to go, before anyone else decided to introduce their partners for the evening to the scene.

Dick sprang forward, hands up and ready to catch yellow slicker’s shoulders as a pivot point to launch up and over, aiming to clear the group entirely and get moving. He needed to make space if he was going to win this.

And preferably they’d have this showdown on solid ground.

Indignant shouts followed him into the air, and the bucko with the crowbar took a swing at him that he had to twist around. He managed to land it anyways because Dick was a professional, but it cut the distance he’d been hoping to cover in half and landed him right behind someone in a delightfully orange jacket with a much less delightful knife.

Dick let the motion of the boat pull him out of the way of the first stab forward and snapped a heel into the offending wrist, hard enough he could hear the crack of contact over the roiling thunder.

A hand swiped at his leg even as he pulled it back and under him to push him up into a punch that caught one definitely-suspecting guy right under the jaw. The momentum rocked him right into the path of Yellow Slicker and Dick used the time it bought him to duck out of the next swing of the crowbar.

And the next, and the next, and it was tricky because whoever this was clearly had experience using what should have been innocent industrial equipment to crack heads, but Dick was moving backwards with every juke and he was getting closer to the gangplank and then he’d have the room to really turn this fight around.

There was almost a rhythm to it, duck, jab at the elbow, snap back to himself and slip another few feet away. Crowbar closed the distance every time, but neither of them were connecting hits, and Dick was pretty confident he had the stamina to win this match up.

Overhead, the sky rippled with blinding heat and it threw the other ‘dockworkers’ into a single frame of sharp relief.

One of them had a pistol.

Training stole his limbs from under him and threw Dick into a cartwheel that flowed into a backwards handspring and it got him out of the way of the first gunshot and carried him right into the next swing of steel.

The hook of it scraped along his tunic and pain exploded through his shoulder blade and into his spine. The fabric held. The bone held. Dick let the blow push him into a spin and carried it into a high kick right into Crowbar’s temple.

Metal hit the deck and then the man. Despite the rain spending all night trying to ruin his life, the storm applauded.

Dick didn’t try to fight the grin. He had more interesting opponents anyways.

“Now I know OH&S can get a little lax in Gotham, but I don’t murder actually gets you out of a bad rating.” The gangplank was only a few feet behind him, only a bout two and a bit feet wide. A little fun and they’d chase him right down towards the dock, and his ducks were in a barrel, but he needed them in a row. If they chased, he’d have the luxury of fighting them one at a time. “And I’ll admit to fibbing a bit. Your railings are terrible and you don’t clearly indicate the onboard fire extinguisher. Best I can give this operation is a C.”

Yellow Slicker glowered at him and crouched to take up the mantle of Crowbar.

Yeah, they’d chase.

Dick cocked a hip, angling his aching shoulder towards the dock behind him but keeping eyes ahead. “Aw, I know it’s tough to get critical feedback, but how else are you going to get fully certified as mooks? Do you really want to stay as lowly stooges forever? Think of it as career development!”

“Get back here you little shit,” snarled Crowbar’s successor, advancing on him as the other uncertified clowns rallied behind him. Crowbar, on the other hand, stayed down. Good.

Another redistribution of his weight and Dick could feel the corrugated steel of the gangplank under one foot. Perfect, two more steps and he could get to the fun-

Behind him, metal creaked.

Dick turned on his heel just in time to see a hulking figure in soaked-through denim halfway through swinging a bat at his head. He flinched back, trying to slide out of range and lost his grip on the slippery deck, one pixie boot going out from under him and he tried to twist with it, get himself some of that space back, and steel toes collided with his cheek.

Needles of rain pelted his face, his arms, his legs, and lightning cracked the sky apart.

His hands skidded, trying to find some traction. Something heavy and metal collided with his chest. All the air punched out of him and he tried to go for his belt. If he could get a weapon maybe, a batarang, a smoke pellet, anything-

“Oh no, none of that.” It was Dick’s brother in yellow, his companion in canary, and he had the crowbar up overhead.

Dick tried to move but there was no room.

Thunder splintered the beating rain.

The crowbar came down.

[tablestoastandtime]

the most annoying stage of burnout is when i want to write, and i have the urge to write, and somewhere in my skull are the words that want to be written, but they have to get through the cursed minotaur maze first and nobody remembered to bring string

[tablestoastandtime]

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

[tablestoastandtime]

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not