#Talia loves Damian; even when she killed him there is so much evidence that she had remorse and DID love him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jinmukangwrites · 3 years

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@damianwayneweek 6 (6-18): Baby Damian | Family bonding | First crush

Warnings: none

Notes: Short, sweet, barely edited cuz it's 1am. Please enjoy some de-aged Damian and frazzled Dick. Yes I'm back on my Damian and Dick bullshit. I just love them so much.

-o-o-o-o-

Three days, according to Zatanna. The magic that hit Damian isn't permanent, and should wear off on its own within three days.

Dick already doesn't know what to do with himself. He was hardly prepared to take over and raise a ten year old, let alone a toddler.

But here he is, sitting in the manor living room watching as a small version of his already little brother toddles around on chubby baby legs. He can't be more than two. He can walk around on his own well enough—though Alfred did block off all of the stairs in the manor anyways—and every so often he'll point at something and say... Something that sounds like a demand.

Dick wasn't really ever good with understanding baby gibberish. It doesn't help that Damian seems to have reverted in memories as well... so the things he's demanding probably aren't in English as it's not his first language.

Damian wobbles up to Dick, holding out a toy train that Alfred dug out from the attic that used to belong to Bruce. Dick takes it and thanks him, but Damian pays him no mind and returns to his toys, babbling about something only he understands.

It's so weird seeing him like this. All small, chubby, soft, and bright eyed. Dick doesn't know everything Damian has gone through... growing up in the League... and as much as Dick dislikes Talia, he knows she was the best mom she could be to him. She's raised him to be a smart, strong young man, and taught him to be able to protect himself in his dangerous surroundings... and of course Dick has known Damian long enough to have gotten through his walls and see the wonderful boy underneath, but as he watches this toddler squeal as another toy train turns on and runs on its own...

He cannot help but mourn the child Damian could have been. Should have been if every child in the world had the privilege of growing up in a safe home and no worries besides homework.

He shakes his head. He cannot think like that. Whatever child Damian could have grown into if he hadn't been raised by the League is still in there. Just a bit harder to bring out. Dick can feel himself getting closer every day.

Damian notices him shaking his head and makes a curious ah sound. He walks over to Dick, lifting his arms, and Dick assumes he wants to be lifted. He smiles at the kid and grabs him under the armpits and lifts him into the air perhaps a bit quicker than what he was expecting. The kid screeches as Dick lifts him over head and let's go for just a moment to catch him and bring him back down to his face.

Damian scowls a familiar scowl and hits Dick on the nose with his stubby little fingers.

"Bah," he scolds, and a laugh bursts from Dick's throat.

Yup, Damian is still in there.

-o-o-o-o-

"I'm beginning to understand why B adopted all of us when we were already in elementary," Dick complains as baby Damian screams in his wooden high chair—yet another thing dug up from the attic that probably belonged to Bruce.

Alfred hands Dick a rag with a smirk. The thrown bowl of mac-and-cheese is all over Dick's shirt.

"Master Bruce always had a tenderness for infants," Alfred replies as he uses another rag to wipe off the still screaming and complaining Damian. "He always found joy in finding whatever excuse he could to hold and play with a baby. We used to go to a church when he was still a child himself, and there was a woman there without a husband who would always bring her infant. He would always offer to hold the child for her during the sessions to give her a break."

There's a twinkle in his eye when he looks over at Dick. "I imagine that if this had happened to you, or your other siblings, when he was still around, he would have loved every second of it. Food throwing, tantrums, and all."

Dick can't help but smile. He looks over at Damian who's now kicking his legs and waving his now clean hands in a fit. "Still, I wonder what's making him so mad."

"He might not like the taste," Alfred says, "or the texture. Perhaps some experimentation is due."

After some expiration and a lot of screaming through baby lungs that couldn't possibly hold that much air, they find that Damian really likes tomato soup, apple sauce, and broccoli.

-o-o-o-o-

"Master Dick," Alfred speaks up on the first evening while they were showing Damian Pooh's Heffalump Movie. Dick was relaxing and watching the movie, trying to remember if he's seen this one or not, while Damian was on the floor playing with an old kitten stuffed animal.

"Yeah?" Dick asks. He looks over at Alfred, only to see Alfred raise an eyebrow down at Damian. Dick follows his look, then his stomach drops when he finds that under the recently shopped for infant clothes, is a full looking diaper.

Dick looks back up at Alfred.

"Please, god, no."

Alfred drops a diaper, a bag of wipes, and a cloth into Dick's hands. "Good luck, sir."

-o-o-o-o-

Dick's about to lose his mind. He did everything Alfred told him to. He read a bedtime story—Where the Wild Things Are, as it was Dick's personal favorite as a child. He made sure his diaper was clean. He turned on some white noise. He even gave him Zitka. Yet, everything he did, Damian would scream and sob in his borrowed crib until Dick picked him up and started to sing the lullabies sung to him as a child. He sings the ones from his own native language, and even though there's no way Damian understands Romani, the kid calms down and reduces to exhausted little hiccups and almost seems to fall asleep with his little fingers curled in Dick's shirt.

And the second Dick puts him down, the crying rekindles.

Dick doesn't know what to do. Damian cries and cries until he's held and sung to, but Dick can't hold and sing to him all night. He paces Damian's room, bouncing the aforementioned kid-turned-infant in his arms, mumbling tunes to whatever lullaby decides to leave his lips.

Alfred told him he has permission to wake him up if he needed anything with Damian through the night, but Dick can't bring himself to. Alfred already works so hard during the day and night, keeping the manor in shape and making sure Dick doesn't get himself killed during patrol... He shouldn't have to be relied on to take care of a grumpy baby that won't go to sleep.

No, no Dick can handle this. Damian is calm when he's held and sung to, so that's what Dick will do. He walks to the cradle and pulls out Zitka, then goes to his own bedroom to sit on his bed and holds Damian close to his chest, singing and bouncing him gently.

Eventually, Damian goes completely still against his chest, snoring slightly, but Dick's too fearful to risk anything now. He stops singing though, resorting to simply holding Damian and trying to keep his own eyes open.

He fails, but he wakes up in the morning with Damian laying on his chest, still fast asleep and drooling all over his shirt.

Dick doesn't look a gift-horse in the mouth. He shifts into a better position, then allows them both to sleep in a little longer.

-o-o-o-o-

Alfred discovers the problem quickly when Dick tells him how hard it was to get Damian to sleep. Turns out, Damian's teething. By noon, Alfred had returned from the closest grocery store with a few tools to help with that. He puts a few water filled plastics into the fridge, then gives Damian one to chew on in the meantime. And chew on it, Damian does. He gets slobber everywhere, but at least he's no longer so upset, especially once a cold one is exchanged into his grubby little hands.

-o-o-o-o-

"That's absolutely adorable," Barbara says over the phone. Dick's just finished sending her a massive amount of pictures he's taken of Damian after taking him outside to play in the backyard with the dogs. He's sent her the pictures mostly because he needs people to see how cute Damian is while trying to tackle a dog twice the size of him... but also partly because he gets the feeling once Damian's back to his normal age, he will make sure all evidence of this is destroyed.

Barbara is someone Dick's sure can keep pictures hidden in a safe place... just in case Dick wants to see them again after lying to Damian he deleted them.

-o-o-o-o-

Dick's beginning to understand why people like babies. Like, they're cute, yes. The sounds they make are cute sometimes too. The things they find funny are usually very goofy and enjoyable to watch. Their laughs are contagious, and their babbles are enjoyable to try and decipher...

But nothing beats watching them sleep, curled up against your chest. Full trust in you that you'll keep them safe. It's nap time, and instead of trying to peel Damian off from him and put him in the crib, he's decided to just let the kid pass out in his arms and use the opportunity to take a nap himself.

Apparently it's bad to always let babies sleep with you, but Damian's not going to be this small forever. Might as well enjoy holding him like this in pure peace while he can.

-o-o-o-o-

It seems Zatanna was generous with her prediction, as he wakes up with his breath being knocked out of him. Damian, his rightful age and dressed in his full Robin uniform, scrambles off of Dick's chest. It's all knees and elbows, and Dick's left rubbing his ribs as Damian pats his body, as if making sure he's really a 10 year old boy and not an infant.

"Good to have you back," Dick grunts, rubbing his eyes and holding back a grin.

Damian whirls on him and points an accusing finger. "I don't remember what all happened," he hisses, "but you will delete any photos immediately."

Dick bursts into laughter, grabbing Damians pointed hand and tugging him into a proper hug. Damian squawks just a little, but relents when Dick squeezes him tighter than what he would to an infant. Yes. This feels right. Baby Damian was cute and cuddly, but he really missed the prickly attitude of this rascal.

"Okay," he says, releasing his charge. "I'll delete the photos, after we tell Alfred you're back and you've changed out of the suit."

Damian huffs and nods. "That was horrible."

"I don't know, I thought it was fun," Dick teases. Damian glares at him and Dick grins back.

Yeah, he missed his kid.

#damianwayneweek2021 #damian wayne #robin #dick grayson #Nightwing #dc comics #jin writes #fanfiction

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redjaybathood · 2 years

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I hate to be doing this to Talia, but this just wouldn't happen otherwise. So. Sometime when she organized Jason's murdertour, and was prepping Damian to leave for Gotham as soon as Jason was done with it... Ra's found out that she was still going against his explicit orders, both in regards to killing Jason and grooming Damian to become his heir. And he had her killed.

It pained Ra's deeply, you see. Talia was his favourite child. He blames two people: the Detective, who always had Talia looking after him, seeing a path in her life where she could have walked independent from her father. And Jason Todd, the final act of rebellion. So Ra's decides to use Jason against Bruce while he takes over Damian's education.

Talia's murder was meant to be a setup, meant to make Jason think that Bruce did it. But Jason just can't believe it. He wouldn't kill Joker, why would he kill Talia?

Ra's uses Damian as "proof", feeding him a bullshit story about rape and so on.

Jason hears s bullshit from a mile wide. It's not only that Bruce wouldn't kill anyone in revenge even for rape, it's not only that he wouldn't have left Damian behind even if he did that should he have a mental breakdown for example; but Talia? Raping anyone? Raping Bruce? And okay, Damian is a kinder surprise. But Jason would bet that more than anything, he's a child of love.

And, okay, he sees Ra's plotting. And Ra's plotting is the only reason Jason is even alive, seeing as the old crone just hates his guts. As though he heard a prophecy that Jason would burn his kingdom to the ground.

And Jason has to go along, for now, before he finds out what the plan is and why and where's Ra's weakest spot.

So he goes to Gotham. So he blows up Batmobile.

And then he gets attacked by a literal baby with sword in hand. Tis is Damian, who's avenging his parents, both of whom, Damian was told, are slain by Red Hood, former protege of them both.

Oh, the hate Damian bears in his heart for Jason. Oh, the loathing.

Well, up until someone takes out all the assassins who serve as Damian's back up. And this person, in dark cape and face mask, rumbles: Damian, I am your father.

Damian realizes that Red Hood never killed his father, the Batman, and he may have nothing to do with his Mother's death as well.

Three of them are going to the League, to find out what happened to Talia.

(Bruce is barely functioning here; it's not only that Jason came back but he's a murderer now; it's not that he has a secret son that was raised as someone capable of murder as well. It's that Talia is dead, and they never got closure, always hoped for a nebulous future when the things are going to be simpler, and it never came; never will).

Their investigation, where Jason leaves a blood trail - only figuratively speaking, he doesn't leave evidence, he doesn't want Ra's to know he's coming - and Bruce not even arguing, just looking the other way, because he's so. Broken. And to Jason's credit, he doesn't do it with every one, just the ones who could tell Ra's about them. And he never does it where Bruce or Damian could see.

It all culminates in them infiltrating Ra's stronghold. Ra's expecting them. Battle ensues. Ra's tells them all, a classic villain monologue. Jason is the one who takes Ra's head, even if Damian has more right to it, and it would ensure a smoother proceedings afterwards. But he doesn't want Damian to ever question himself or be haunted by this act. He spares him.

And, in a sort of Riddic's Chronicles, he becomes the regent to the next Demon's Head.

While Damian and Bruce go back to Gotham. They both have a lot to process in terms of grief from losing Talia. And, in part, from kinda losing Jason, too. For Bruce, current situation is almost worse than if Jason never came back at all. And for Damian, there's so much resentment, still, because Jason was the catalyst to his mother's death, but he also is the one who stopped his grandfather and let Damian leave the League. And every day since he had to be fighting against the tide that wanted him, an outsider and the killer of Ra's al Ghul, gone. And Jason won't ever be living his life anymore, he's dedicated to the League, he's living Damian's life.

He can't even go kill Joker. That's not exactly how League operates now. Jason is trying to wrestle them back to what's it supposed to be, since he can't just let them go on their merry assassin way.

To be clear, the initial image I had in mind was Damian being the Demon's Head and Jason his Shadow, his SiC. His knight, if you will. But I guess he still is, but they're also continents apart and won't ever see each other again.

#jason todd #damian wayne #fic idea

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thr-333 · 3 years

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Drastic Measures- Part 2

@daminette-december2019-2020

~Swordplay~

To summarise: I will have the love square one way or another!

Ao3

First >Next

--------------

As far as homes go it’s pretty good” Adrien stretches out, Plagg curls up next to him.

“Don't get too comfortable we’re going to be on the move,” Marinette types furiously at her computer.

“I will try my hardest,” Adrien stares blankly at her, sat atop a pile of grubby blankets next to a broken window. Marinette loses connection to her computer and slams it shut with a huff.

“Get some sleep I’m going to find an internet cafe,” Marinette stuffs the cheap laptop into her bag, amazing how something she bought at a hole in the wall place for thirty bucks didn’t work well.

“Who needs sleep when you can have coffee,” Adrian stands up, ready to follow her.

“Sleep Chat,” She pushes him down by the shoulders, “I need my partner fully operational,”

“Yeah kid, take a break, we worked hard,” Plagg yawns, turning over.

“You also worked hard Bug,” Adrien lets himself be pushed back onto the blankets.

“I won't be able to sleep until I know how everything is in Paris,”

“Neither can I,” Adrien protests, already half asleep.

“Sure you can, night Chat,”

“Night M’lady,”

Marinette leaves the same way they came in, though the window. She has to slide down the gutter to get on the street, Tikki hiding away in her bag. She has to go pretty far in town to find a suitable cafe, too far from Adrien to be comfortable. Marinette pops in her earbuds before opening her computer to let her talk to Tikki freely.

She doesn't immediately search up missing person cases. Looking instead at Paris tourist destinations and guides. Switching to the dangers of traveling to Paris; the only mention of Akuma being on obscure question and answer sites. She looks at kidnapping potential and then moves onto missing person cases. Adrien's is the first to come up, obviously.

There was lots of outcry among his fans. Many were throwing around accusations of foul play on Gabriel's part from abuse to locking Adrien away from the world. However, Gabriel was also fiercely looking for his son. Adrien hadn’t left behind any sort of note. Well only to Nino, which Adrien had told Marinette was asked not to mention to anyone.

Marinette then feels safe enough to look up her own case. It was smaller, although was gaining attention as Jagged proclaimed it to high heavens; more so asking what they did wrong and how they could fix it and asking for any sightings of her. That could be a problem if her picture was already around. Marinette pulls her hood up higher. They might have to get haircuts and wear disguises… on second thought wearing suspicious disguises in Gotham might cause more problems.

“Tikki they seem really worried,” Marinette watches the videos Jagged posted, her parents in the background running around talking with police.

“Of course they are Mari,” Marinette feels a light tap on her side, “But you're doing the right thing,”

“No I’m not,” not when she’s watching a video of her parents crying, “I’m doing what needs to be done, this is my responsibility, no matter what a certain someone thinks,”

She spits with venom. Maybe Adriens rant last night rubbed off on her.

“He’s the hero here,” Tiki says non accusingly, “Imagine if another hero came to Paris without asking you… remember Volpina?”

“Ah now that was an actual villain,” Marinette hadn’t trusted her from the start, “Plus she was akumatized,”

“Marinette,” Marinette can’t bring herself to feel guilty, even under tikis scolding.

“Right but that still doesn't give him the right,” Marinette huffs, “After all would he attack Marinette? No!”

“Are you implying you would attack Lila?”

“......... no,”

“Marinette,”

Marinetti smirks to herself instinctively looking around for Adrien to share her joke. Then Marinette froze. The cafe was empty, not even a barista. How had she not noticed!?

“Wait,” Marinetti says out loud before Tiki could talk, “I’m going to have to call you back, something just came up,”

Something was watching her from the kitchen door as if she couldn’t see them. Marinette tries to act normal going for the pepper on the table and putting it on her food. They move at the same time. The attacker runs towards her, Marinette throws the shaker at- Robin?! It hits him square in the forehead, with a curse he touches his bleeding forehead.

“I am so sorry!” Marinette panics, “That was meant to explode in your face!”

“How is that better?!” Robin runs forward, sword drawn. Marinette ducks behind the table grabbing her plate and frisbeeing it towards him, he manages to dodge this one, “Draw your weapon coward!"

“I don’t have a weapon!” She grabs the table cloth ready to take the vigilante down, “What is wrong with you?!”

He doesn't answer lunging at her again with the sword. Marinette kicks up the table then kicks it towards him in one swift movement. With the impact of the table he drops the sword, Marinette jumps up landing on the table which pins Robin down to the ground with its weight and hers, with the legs sticking up.

“I knew it,” Robin spits and she presses her weight into the table to keep him pinned.

“Excuse you,” Marinette catches his wrist as he tries to pull a dagger on her using the table cloth to tie it to the legs of the table, then does the same with the other, “You attacked me,”

“-Robin!” she hears a faint call, no one is around so it must be from his communicator, “-Robin report back to the cave!”

“I’ll take that~” Marinette sings songs ignoring how he growls at her. She rolls her eyes stepping off the table she needed to get out of here now.

She steps out of the cafe throwing the communicator and likely a tracking device too on the roof of a passing car then sprints in the opposite direction. She heads for the alleys looking for an area with no cameras as she runs. When she finds a spot Marinette transforms running back to their base with record timing.

“Adrien wake up!” Ladybug jumps through the window, barely avoiding landing on him, “Batman’s after us,”

“What?!” He sits bolt upright, Ladybug pulls him onto his feet.

“Move! Now!” She grabs their bags, Adrien transforms and they take off over the rooftops.

“What happened?!” Chat shouts as the runaway, “Is Batman chasing us?”

“Yes, well kinda-- Robin tried to kill me,”

“He what?!”

“As Marinette,” She adds, slowing down as they should have put enough distance between them.

“Did they figure us out already?” Chat Noir slows down into a walk then collapses on the rooftop,

"Probably,"

“This is the worst wake up call ever!”

“Well, it's about to get worse,” Ladybug cringes feeling the distinct trace of magic she was all too familiar with.

“Akuma?”

“Akuma,”

“Great, perfect,” Chat complains standing back up.

“At least we’re not at school,” Ladybug shrugs, launching herself over a roof.

“No you’re right being chased by a masked vigilante is a massive improvement,”

---

Wow

“Robin! Get your head out of the clouds and get over here!”

Damian breaks out of his trance, regrettably tearing his gaze away from Ladybug to the much less awe inspiring sight of Batman trapped under a car. They shouldn’t be wasting their time worrying about these established amazing hero’s and worry about that assassin on the loose. Who knows who she was after. She could be planning Batman’s demise at this very moment; if she was close with his mother then surely she knew their identities which was far far more dangerous.

Ladybug could handle herself as evidence by her going toe to toe with the newest villain. In a matter of minutes, the villain was down for the count with no help on their part.

“Ladybug!” He calls before she leaves again, maybe she could help him convince his father that he was being an absolute buffoon.

“Oh it’s you,” She says surprisingly coldly, “What do you want now?”

“Now?”

“Are, you here to attack me again?”

“... I didn’t attack you?” He had spent all morning tracking down a dangerous assassin.

“... Oh! Of course, you did- haha I just ummmm-- there must have been an… Akuma! Yes! There must have been an Akuma earlier that looked like you,”

“An Akuma was impersonating me?” Robin growls.

“Yeah, they do that sometimes,” Chat Noir pipes up, “It’s annoying,”

“Yes and if you’re here, that uh… that means the Akuma is still out there so we gotta go deal with that so-bye!” Ladybug swings off closely followed by Chat Nor; off to go save his name and reputation.

---

“So you really think that was an Akuma?” Adrien asks as they transform back.

“Maybe- I don’t know it was just an excuse so he wouldn't figure out my identity,”

“Well at least he doesn't know it,” Adrien shrugs as they walk through the alleys in search of a new place to rest that night.

“If he doesn't know then why would he attack Marinette?” She asks, “And if it was an Akuma that means Hawkmoth knows my identity which is so much worse!”

“Is it tho?”

“Chat,”

“I mean back in Paris it would have been bad,” They both cringe, “But here we have no home, no family, no friends! He cant use any of that against us now!”

Adrien beams his contagious smile.

“You always manage to find a bright side,” Marinette smirks punching him in the shoulder.

“So that's why,” They both turn around, staring in shock.

“Batman?!” Turning back their way out is already blocked by mister boy wonder. Who, by the way he is glaring at her, was not an Akuma this morning.

“I can't believe Talia called me because some teenagers were eloping,”

I know that name- WAIT!

“Eloping?!” Marinette chokes, “We are not eloping!”

“As in not at all,” Adrien blanches, “And I mean no offense Marinette you are literally the sweetest person but I can’t imagine anything more horrific!”

“Oh god, same!” At least now, “I mean once when we were younger…-- it was a silly crush!”

“Wait you had a crush on me?!”

“Yeah, well, you had a crush on me!”

“... oh god… I did, didn’t I?!”

While Adrien is dealing with that little revelation Marinette looks around for an escape. There isn’t much opportunity since both have their eyes on them, partly out of morbid curiosity at their little freakout. Well if you don't have a distraction homemade is fine.

“AKUMA!” They both look, predictably.

Marinette grabs Adrien and runs. She goes for the side Robins guarding, sweeping his legs sending him crashing to the ground.

“I’m not sorry!” Marinette calls as they sprint down the alley.

Marinette heads for the main street, enough of a crowd to camouflage. As they are walking through as casually as possible Marinette sweeps them both for bugs putting any she finds on random passerbys. They walk sometimes ducking into busy shops in hopes of losing their trail. They come across the mall which works perfectly for them. They stay until it starts to approach closing time, it’s easy enough to avoid security and so they get locked in for the night.

“So what do you want to do?!” They walk through the empty halls Adrien skipping along and looking at each display. Marinette stops outside an electronics store, the tv’s still on and displaying the news.

“Make a plan for a way to deal with that,” On-screen are the two of them, a video of Ladybug throwing a car at Batman, “This is taken completely out of context!”

“What’s the context?”

“Batman was being a little bitch!”

“I’m sure that will hold up in court,” Adrien laughs taking a seat in one of those massage chairs, “Besides what's the problem?”

“The problem?!” Marinette yells, “The problem is that now all of Gotham is going to hate us!”

“So? Do we really need them to like us?” Adrien gets up to stand by her, rubbing her shoulder.

“They did in Paris,”

“We’re not in Paris anymore,” Adrien says quietly, leading her towards the seats, “We have a chance to start new again, everyday something we haven't done before, a couple of pals living day to day on the edge, isn’t that exciting?”

“I just--” want to go home, “I’m tired,”

“Take a break,” Adrien sits her down in the massage chair with a kind smile, “I’ll keep watch,”

“.. ok,” Marinette curls up in the chair Tikki coming to lie beside her. With not much strength to fight it, Marinette falls asleep while she can.

-------------------------

Taglist? nope don’t have one, horrible at keeping track of them sorry~

#miraculous #miraculous ladybug fic #miraculous fanfic #miraculous marinette #Marinette #badass marinette #batfam #daminette #good adrien #slow burn

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night-fallz · 3 years

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Jason Todd x Avengers Crossover

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Ao3 // Wattpad

previous II next

Unexpected (part 3)

If he knew that he would be blamed for murdering someone the moment he got back to Gotham, then Jason would’ve waited another week or two before returning.

No matter what a lot of people said, Jason wasn’t stupid. He knows not to expect things that were unlikely to happen.

Jason couldn’t risk raising his hopes when it came to the bats.

He knew that he wasn’t gonna receive a warm welcome filled with hugs and cupcakes. Honestly, the most he expected was a nod of acknowledgment. And if he was lucky, then maybe- maybe he would’ve gotten a smile with the quiet whisper of a welcome back.

It made his heart twist in all the wrong ways to know that his family didn’t trust him as much as he thought. Jason genuinely believed that he and the bats were on good enough terms to earn him the benefit of the doubt.

He forced himself not to flinch as he met Batman’s harsh, distrustful gaze.

“I wasn’t even here when he was killed,” Jason tried to say as calmly as he could, knowing that if he loses his temper, everyone would use it against him. “I was following a case up in New York.”

He couldn’t go back to Arkham! Not again. Not with the Joker only a few cells away from him, taunting him with his laughter— his voice filled with cruel exhilaration as he continuously promised Jason that they would play together once again. How he would soon be reunited with his favorite playmate.

His favorite Robin.

He heard someone suck in a breath behind him.

Jason didn’t expect anyone to defend him. Not against Batman. But still-

He didn’t expect them to just stand and watch as Batman tore him into shreds once again. Batman threw accusation over accusation, yet he never once provided a single piece of evidence that proved it was Jason that did it.

He took a step towards Jason and he had to force himself not to flinch. Batman wouldn’t… not with his kids in the same room.

He ignored the rising panic in his stomach. Jason was safe.

He was safe.

Bruce wouldn’t beat him in the cave. Not in front of everyone. Not in front of Damian.

Jason would be able to walk out of the cave with his ability to walk. He was gonna be okay.

“Look, B. You can even ask them,” he pointed at the spot where Dick and the others were standing. “I told them that I was leaving Gotham for a while.”

Batman turned to where Jason was pointing. “Well?” he asked expectantly.

The cave was engulfed in eerie silence before Tim opened his mouth, faltering a little when he met Jason’s pleading gaze. “He’s not lying Bruce. He told me that he had a mission out of Gotham while we were hanging out a few weeks ago.”

Jason could feel his chest loosen up for a few seconds, thankful that Tim confirmed his statement.

He remembered the day that Tim was talking about. The bats were getting even clingier than usual. They weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they were following Jason anymore.

Tim asked Jason if he wanted to watch a movie and Jason agreed.

The bats were gonna be watching him anyways— they didn’t even try to hide the fact that they bugged him and all the known safehouses he has.

At this point, Jason didn’t know whether he should feel offended with how much they underestimated or relieved.

They already viewed him as dangerous and unpredictable. If they ever find out that Jason’s been holding back, even if it was just a little-

He won’t let them throw him back to Arkham. Jason would rather go back to the League of Assassins.

If Jason wasn’t watching Batman so closely, he would’ve missed the sliver of a nod the man-made.

Jason tried not to think of the fact that Bruce immediately accepted Tim’s answer without hesitation.

For the millionth time in this conversation, he wished that he was wearing his helmet. Instead, he forced his expression to remain calm. To remain bored as turned back to Bruce an eyebrow raised.

“Is that good enough proof for you, old man?” he couldn’t help but spit out, bitterness clear in his voice.

Batman remained unaffected, not even bothering to verbally answer Jason’s question. Instead, he just nodded.

Jason’s heart clenched, of course, he wouldn’t get an apology. Batman was too prideful for that.

“Truth.” Cassandra’s voice rang across the cave, breaking the heavy silence. “No… not lie.”

Batman nodded once again and Cassandra’s eyes met his. It took everything in him to stop a retort from coming out of his mouth.

Couldn’t she have said that a few minutes ago? Before Batman ripped him apart like he was nothing but flimsy paper.

Still, he guessed he should be thankful that she defended him. Even though it was too late.

After a few seconds of no one saying anything, Dick broke the awkwardness with an annoying smile on his face. “Now that that’s settled, why don’t we get that movie started?”

It was only because of all his training that Jason didn’t break down right there.

Of course this was just another thing that they’d sweep under the rug. Something that they would never want to speak off again.

Discussions of what movie they were supposed to watch erupted the room. It didn’t take long for an argument to break out between Damian and Tim.

Jason watched the scene for a few seconds before looking away.

They looked like a real family.

He turned away, these things happened frequently enough for Jason to know that he wasn’t welcomed.

He blocked out all the noise as he walked towards his helmet, eager to put it back on.

It was only a matter of luck that the universe hated him so much that he knocked something down, the thumping noise alerting everyone that he was about to leave.

Jason couldn’t help but feel relieved that he put on his helmet as soon as he got his hands on it.

At least he didn’t have to go to all the trouble to force his expression to remain impassive anymore.

Batman could use it against him.

Dick’s eyebrows furrowed, “Where are you going, Jay? I thought you were joining us tonight.”

“Yeah, well maybe I’m not in the mood to watch a stupid movie tonight.” Jason spits out.

Was Dick being serious right now? There were so many things wrong with that question.

One: Why would Jason want to spend more time with the people who thought he murdered someone and didn’t even bother to defend him.

And two-

No one invited Jason.

Before anyone could say anything else, Jason hopped on his motorcycle. He needed to get out of the cave.

He could feel their eyes on his back but no one bothered to stop him.

The last thing he heard was Cassandra’s voice assuring the bats. “Be back,” she said with enough confidence that one would think that she could command Jason to turn around with only her words. “He will be back.”

Jason held in the harsh remark that threatened to leave his lips.

Plus, it wasn’t like Cassandra was lying. He knew it— and hell, the rest of Bats probably knew it too.

Jason would come back. He always did.

It wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.

But for now, he needed to get away. He thought that one week would be enough to calm the pit.

It wasn’t.

In fact, he feels like the interaction with the bats today just made it worst.

He’ll stay away from them for two weeks. That should be enough time for the pit to stop screaming at him.

But who would he stay with?

Jason had enough experience to know that the best way to calm the pit was to surround yourself with people you trust.

Kori and Roy were still in space.

And Talia was busy with the civil war against Ra’s.

Jason had no one else.

Except-

His phone grew heavier in his pocket and he remembered that an Avenger owed him a favor.

Clint said that Jason could text him whenever.

And the more he thought about it, the more Jason decided that he did trust the archer in some way.

Jason soon found himself staring at the side mirror of the vehicle and poisonous green eyes stared back.

He quickly averted his eyes.

Clint was his last choice. And Jason couldn’t risk being in the peak of a pit episode without anyone to keep him in his place.

He could do this.

It wasn’t like he had another choice.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

notes:

Balancing out school and volleyball was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Only one month has passed and I am swamped with work.

I don’t know how I feel about this chapter. It’s not my best work but I wanted to put something out for you guys!!

I hope that you liked it.

I’m gonna spend this weekend to try and get my life together so hopefully, that means that next week will be easier for me.

Especially since I still need to finish my permit course. (If you couldn’t tell, I’m kinda hating sophomore year of high school right now)

Like always, please leave a comment. i love reading them and they just motivate me so much! And they would help an extra ton these days.

And once again, if you have any fanfic requests, questions, or just suggestions for a specific fanfic i’m writing, just leave it in a comment down below or you can just message me here on tumblr.

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grayson1996 · 3 years

Text

BatFamily and Their Fears

Each member has a personal fear that is apparent through every arc/storyline.

Dick fears being unloved and being alone.

Because DC hates us (and Dick) this fear stems from experience. Now it's not that people stop loving Dick, it's that he perceives that they do. Batman kicked him out and fired him when he was shot. Dick saw that as Bruce no longer loving him. Barbara broke up with him after the killing joke because she couldn't handle being with him at that moment. Starfire left him after the mirage incident (even though it wasn't his fault). He's lost a lot of people and he fears that the people currently in his life will realize he's not worth their time and leave him.

Jason fears not being good enough.

Ironically him and Tim have similar fears. From his prospective he's just some street kid who got lucky. He had to live up to 'Golden Boy' Dick Grayson. He was stupid enough to be murdered and when he came back he found out he was replaced. To him this is all proof that he's not good enough, to anyone but especially not Bruce. Red Hood exists to prove that not only is he just as good as Bruce but that he's better then him. It all stems from his fear and own lack of self worth.

Tim fears being useless.

That's why the nickname "replacement" stings so much. He fears that if he can't prove his worth he'll be replaced just like Jason. His parents never wanted him and so he had to constantly provide evidence of his worth. He wasn't initially adopted by Bruce and so he had to prove to Batman that he could be useful as Robin.

Cass fears being a weapon

She was molded, arguably created, to be used by her Father as a weapon. She was designed to be lethal and efficient. So when she was given a chance to live life and have a family it meant everything to her. She doesn't want to lose this, she fears being a weapon because now that she knows what it's like to be human she never wants to go back.

Damian fears that his Mother is right.

Talia instilled several damaging lessons onto Damian at a young age. Number one, people are only interested in you if they find you useful. That's why he finds Dick's love so overwhelming. He is waiting for the shoe to drop, he thinks that if he does enough bad things Dick will stop loving him and so he preps for it. He also fears that if he doesn't prove his worth his Father and family won't want him. He and Tim and Jason are all so obviously alike. They've been raised to believe that they need to give someone a reason to put up with them. They don't realize that loving them is not a chore.

Bruce fears a lack of control.

Batman is always in control. He has plans and contingencies and contegencies for his contingencies. He's seen what happens when he doesn't have control. His parents died, all of his kids have died, all because he couldn't help them. Bruce needs to feel he has all his bases covered to feel secure and even then he's constantly fighting his own paranoia that's he's missing something.

#batfamily headcanons #dick grayson #bruce wayne #jason todd #damian wayne #cassandra cain #batfam

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icerosecrystal · 3 years

Text

Jasonette - A Second Chance Pt. 2: Reactions

A lot of people wanted a part 2 for my one-shot Jasonette - A Second Chance. Thank you to everyone who requested it. This is basically the reactions of the bat fam and Paris to the deaths and the revelations.

(The BatFam’s Reaction to Talia’s death)

Damian didn’t know what to think about his mother’s death. Yes, she was a horrible mother, but she still raised him. After everything she did to him, she was still his mother. He wanted to kill the girl, Marinette, for killing his mother. For taking away one of his parents. Even if she had bonded with him, her personality could be a facade. He was quite prepared to make her pay for actions. He had even grabbed his katana and was walking to Marinette’s room. He was about to enter and give her a piece of his mind when he heard sobbing. He put his ear against the door to listen better.

What he heard made him feel so guilty, “I made a promise that I wouldn’t kill anymore. I broke that promise. Deep down, I am a murderer.” He stumbled away from the door in shock. She thought that by killing Talia, she was a murderer. Marinette wasn’t blaming anyone for her actions but herself.

Damian went to his room and reflected on his own life. Now that he thought about it, he was much like her. They had both killed people. They also changed their ways after associating themselves with new people, in both cases the Waynes. Damian could still hear the despair in her voice as she talked to Todd. The heart-wrenching sobs. His family had given him another chance even though he had killed many. Even though he was a bratty child, he got a second chance. That was when Damian Wayne made up his mind. Marinette Dupain-Cheng was like his older sister. He would help her grow and would help her heal from her past. But most of all, he would give her a second chance.

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Bruce didn’t know what to think about Marinette killing Talia. He understood in this situation that it was an act of self-defense, but she could have easily disarmed Talia instead of killing her. Bruce rubbed his forehead in irritation. He never condoned killing, especially after what happened to his parents. His parents. He frowned in thought, did Marinette ever mention having parents? She mentioned the liar, the ex-partner, the villain, and the ex-classmates, but never her parents. Did she not have any?

Bruce went over to the Bat Computer and put in the name Marinette Dupain-Cheng. He found her record. She was obviously stated as dead. It seems like, at her funeral, her grandparents were present. But, her parents were nowhere to be seen which prompted a lot of questions out of the funeral attendees. When Bruce tried to find her parents, he found that they were very much alive. So why didn’t they attend her funeral? He tried to find something, but couldn’t. But something then caught his eye, some customers of the Dupain-Cheng bakery had commented that a couple of months before her death, Marinette wasn’t seen much at the bakery. Her parents, the owners, were also a lot more temperamental. A lot of customers suspected that Marinette was either being abused or neglected, although they couldn’t tell which. In Bruce’s opinion, both were rather concerning.

Bruce leaned back against the chair in thought, Marinette really had nobody left. She had a valid reason for revenge and took it. He thought back to his own parents’ death. It had been heartbreaking, but he had had people such as Alfred to comfort him, and help him. But Marinette, she had no one through all her heartbreak, no friends, no family, nothing. And now she had that chance, but it was ruined by her killing Talia. Bruce then decided that this would be the one instance that he condoned killing, and he would support Marinette and help her get her second chance at happiness and a family.

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Tim was still unsure whether or not everything was a hallucination. Once he realized it wasn’t he couldn’t believe it. Talia, the person who had somehow managed to escape death so many times was finally dead. She no longer had the ability to manipulate people. Tim didn’t really have a relationship with Talia, not the way Damian, Bruce, or even Jason did. But, he truly believed that life would be a bit easier without Talia Al-Ghul being a part of it. In terms of Marinette killing her, he was willing to give her a second chance, for he knew that she didn’t mean it.

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Dick was ecstatic the Talia was dead. She was a major bitch. Dick still remembered the night terrors that Damian experienced when he first came to the manor. He still experienced them, but they weren’t as drastic, thankfully. But, Dick would always hate Talia for pushing such a young boy to do so many bad things, that the moment he escaped those, he would experience vivid flashbacks of them. No, he was not sad or mad about Talia’s death. Not the way the other members of his family might be. And he didn’t blame Marinette in the slightest. He instead thought of her as a hero, but if she wanted to forget the fact that she was ever killed, he would respect that. He would give Marinette a second chance, the same way he did to Damian a few years ago.

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As Jason listened to his beloved pixie sobbing, it made his heart wrench. She didn’t deserve this, she didn’t deserve any of this. Yet, she had to experience things that many people don’t experience until much later in their life, or at all. He was mad at everyone who hurt her. He wanted to hurt them until they begged and said sorry to her. But, he knew that that wasn’t what Marinette would want. She would want to move on and start a new life and have a second chance as he suggested. As he rocked Marinette in his arms, he thought about Talia’s death. He didn’t think that Marinette killing Talia was bad. She was acting in self-defense, and he would rather it be that manipulative, prostitute of a bitch. His baby girl didn’t deserve to die after everything that she went through.

Besides, Talia had escaped death one too many times. Had she brought both him and Marinette back to life? Yes. Did they owe her anything because of that? No. She only brought them back to manipulate them into her little assassins. She wanted them to do all the dirty work for her. She and her father, Ra’s promised revenge, when really they were using their need for revenge as a leverage for them to stay in the league.

Jason looked down at the perfect little angel with a little bit of devil in his arms. She was beautiful. Her raven hair with navy highlights. Her beautiful heart-shaped face. Her pale skin with mildly flushed cheeks along with freckles sprinkled on said cheeks. Her pink pouty lips. But, his favorite part about her was her eyes. Her eyes were a beautiful almond-shaped, with long, dark eyelashes, and her shimmering blue-bell eyes. He loved the way her eyes held a different type of sparkle depending on her emotion. Yes, everything about her was perfect, and he’d be dammed if he didn’t give her a second chance to have a better life with him.

(Marinette’s Parents’ Reactions)

To anyone else, Marinette’s parents would be considered selfish and horrible parents. But to them, they thought that they were amazing parents. They always let Marinette do whatever she wants and never did ask her where she was because they trusted her so much. What they didn’t realize was that they were neglecting Marinette. When Lila came to their house along with some of her classmates and told them that they were bullying her, they thought that maybe Marinette was acting out because they were caring too much about her. So they stopped talking to her in hopes to give her more privacy and less of a reason to act out.

When she was revealed as the hero of Paris, they didn’t know what to think. And then she died. She looked so sad, but as she died, they saw a small glimmer of hope, as if she was excited to move on from her life. It was then that her parents realized that they were neglecting her. But it was too late to do anything. Their daughter, Marinette Dupain-Cheng, was already dead, and she wasn’t coming back. After that, they stopped doing anything. They didn’t attend her funeral. They didn’t open the bakery much anymore. They were mourning for the daughter they lost, they didn’t think that anything else could happen to make them feel worse until it did come.

The murderer of the Agreste’s except for Emilie and Lila, as well as the revelations that the Agreste’s were villains and that Lila was a liar, was a huge wake-up call for her parents. They then realized everything they did wrong. They started neglecting their daughter even more because of the word of a liar. They were horrible parents. And as they sat down on the couch replaying the murderer of Lila Rossi, they felt tears slip down their face, for they lost their daughter in the worst way possible. That was the day that they swore that if they ever had a second chance at being a parent, they would do everything in their power to be the best parents possible. They owed that much to their dead daughter.

(School/ School Board’s Reactions)

Both Mrs. Bustier and Principal Damocles were receiving a lot of backlash from Paris for being allies in Lila spreading her lies. Yet, they both claimed that it wasn’t their fault that Lila had tricked them. The only problem was that they claimed that in front of the school board who automatically decided to fire them. What school staff didn’t take responsibility for their students?

The bigger problem was when the school board realized that both Bustier and Damocles were probably neglecting the students and taking bribes. These actions should have them in jail. So, the school board started a case against both of them. They gathered evidence every time they took a bribe and every time they neglected a student. They turned the case in and received the news that a trial was being held against the two. All of the students and parents in Mrs. Bustier’s class were present during the trial. When Mrs. Bustier claimed that it wasn’t their fault that they believed Lila, Mrs. Rossi got out of her seat screaming and attacked the two. She was beating up both of them and screaming that if they had stopped her from lying or had told her, then her baby wouldn’t have been killed. It took four security guards to stop her. Once Mrs. Rossi had calmed down, she looked at the judge and announced, “I want to sue both of them.”

The judge agreed, seeing that they both had no remorse whatsoever and were more concerned about saving their own skins. In the end, they both got sued, hat to pay a fine of 200,000 dollars once they got out of jail. As for their jail time, they had to serve two years for educational negligence along with four more years of taking bribery. It wasn’t a good day for those two. What made it even worse was that once they were released from jail, they were forbidden from going back into the educational field. Unlike many others, Mrs. Bustier and Mr. Damocles were not getting a second chance, at least, not for a long time, and that satisfied everybody.

(Now for the best part, the class’s reactions)

The class was appalled by many things right now. They first found out that Lila was a liar and they betrayed and beat Marinette for no reason. Marinette was Ladybug and she was dead. Lila had worked with Hawkmoth, Mayura, and later Chat Noir to betray Ladybug. She was tortured by an unknown person and was later killed. They were each tortured, and it looked like they were tortured based on how loyal there were to Lila, seeing how Alya, Lila’s “best friend” was tortured the most. Mrs. Bustier and Mr. Damocles were going to jail for negligence and bribery, and they were never allowed to cheat again. The last thing they found out a couple of days later.

The whole class was meeting up, not to do anything, just to sit down in silence and look back at their friendship with Marinette. Suddenly, everyone’s phone beeped, which was weird because Hawkmoth had already won. When Alya turned on her phone to see the news, what they saw left them aghast.

There was a picture of a dead Adrien, Gabriel, and Natalie, they were bloody and looked to have been murdered. Then Emilie came into view with a somber look on her face, Gorilla following her. This surprised everyone, wasn’t Emilie supposed to be dead? Then Emilie took a deep breath and started talking.

“Hello Paris, if you don’t already know who I am, my name is Emile De Vanilly. The reason I am using my maiden name is that I found out that my ex-husband, dead son, and ex-best friend hurt Paris in many ways and I don’t want to associate myself with them anymore. If you are wondering what they did, they were the villains of Paris. That’s right, Gabriel Agreste was Hawkmoth, Adrien Agreste was Chat Noir, and Natalie Sancoeur was Mayura. Both Gabriel and Natalie terrorized Paris, and then later convinced Adrien to join them as Chat Noir and betray his partner Ladybug. Because of my family, Paris was terrorized and Ladybug, or rather Marinette Dupain-Cheng in her civilian identity is dead. And the reason why they did all of this was because of me, they were trying to bring me back”, Emilie cut herself off and started sobbing.

Gorilla moved his hand to her shoulder as a sign of support. He then continued where she left off, “No matter what Emilie says, this is not her fault. She didn’t force them to do this. I myself had no part in all of this. I had no knowledge of it either, but I am sorry Paris, I should have questioned Gabriel’s strange disappearances. I also noticed how aggressive Adrien had been getting and blamed it on hormones. I noticed that Natalie always looked sick, but whenever I asked she and Gabriel would exchanged looks, but not answer me. I am sorry Paris, I failed you because of my naive trust in the family I served and my colleague. This video was just Emilie and I saying thank you for fighting through everything and we’re sorry.”

The video then cut to Nadia Chamak discussing the video but nobody in the class was paying attention anymore. Not only was one person in their class a fake, but two. Adrien, he looked so sweet and innocent. But, he had broken their class apart. He must have known that Lila was lying and let it happen. He let them bully the girl who loved him. He betrayed Paris for his own selfish wants. He had broken every one. And now, he was dead along with Marinette’s other tormentors. But the end to their reign had a price, Marinette’s life.

Nino sobbed in the corner, why had he ever been the best friend of someone like that? Alya felt so guilty, she had betrayed her ex-best friend for a girl with pretty lies, and she would never be able to apologize. The rest of the class felt the same, all of them sobbing their heart out. From that day, Mrs. Busteir’s ex-class never trusted anyone. They were a lot more reserved and wary of others, and would always fact check. They always made sure that they weren’t seeing the mask of a person. Why? Because they owed that much to Marinette. If they couldn’t be there for her then, they would give themselves a second chance, and be there for their future friends.

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Guilt, happiness, wariness, surprise, sadness, satisfaction, regret, everyone that Marinette knew personally felt something different. But they all had one thing in common, they were going to give her a second chance, give themselves a second chance, stop others from having a second chance. For a first chance broke all of them to pieces, so why not have a second chance, for all of them to do what’s right and make a difference? Because Marinette deserved that much, they had broken her, so they were going to fix others. They were going to do what they couldn’t do for Marinette, for she was special, and she deserved a second chance, everyone deserves a second chance.

#mlb x dc #maribat #miraculous ladybug #batman #jasonette #jason x marinete #marinette x jason #batfam #post revenge #reactions #second chances #jason todd #marinette dupain cheng #mlb class

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thatasianstereotype · 4 years

Text

Father, This Is Your Future Son-In-Law.

A short little side companion fic to my Adrien x Damian series.

First: Fuck. I’m Gay.

Second: Damn, You’re Looking Fine.

Third: Shit. I Got To Deal With This Bitch (Again).

I’m still working on the fourth and final part of the series (it won’t be as long of a wait as Part 3). But I wanted to write how the Batfam reacted to their youngest suddenly getting a boyfriend while abroad.

Creative liberties were taken. Also, this is a crack writing.

The Demon Spawn who has gotten better at not attacking people at first sight but still just tolerates people. And his holier-than-thou attitude is still there with his love for throwing insults around like free candy.

This is the kid that manages to snag a pure cinnamon roll sunshine as a boyfriend?

This angry grumpy child?

Needless to say, the Batfam is in disbelief.

“What?” Bruce thought that the Teen Titans mission in Europe was done. “Why do you want to stay in Paris longer? Is something wrong?”

“No Father. I have simply found someone I wish to court. I will be spending time in Paris to see how best to present myself as an exceptional suitor that is all. Give my regards to Grayson that I will be missing Family Night but that I will make it up by introducing him to his future brother-in-law soon.”

Bruce was too much in shock to answer when Damian hung up.

“DICK!”

“I think it’s cute that Dami is getting a boyfriend.”

“Dick, you oblivious and naive child, you are completely missing the point.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “Look, I’m pretty sure Damian isn’t actually going to marry someone right now.”

“He said ‘future brother-in-law’ inferring that this courtship he wants to initiate will end in a wedding.”

“I think you are reading too much into this, B.”

“And you are not reading enough. Have I taught you nothing at all?

“You taught me paranoia.”

“I taught you to be prepared for every kind of situation.”

“Pretty sure the possibility of your 17-year-old son getting hitched in Paris can be ruled out.”

“Where did I go wrong with you?”

And Dick rolled his eyes once again at Bruce’s dramatic-ness. This. This is where Damian gets it from.

Ever the peace keeper in this dysfunctional trainwreck of a family, Dick managed to stop Bruce from flying to Paris. But much to their frustrations (even Dick’s who wanted to know who captured his baby bro’s heart), Damian did not tell them the name of his potential boyfriend.

All in all, Damian spent about two months and a half in Paris before coming back home to Gotham. And the Batfam could see a difference right away.

Damian was happy. He smiled (it was a little one but it had Dick squealing in joy) more and he was more tolerate of his brothers and schoolmates.

“We should’ve shipped him off to Paris earlier if he comes back like this.”

Tim was still staring at Damian like he was an alien. The demon spawn still insulted him every other day but hasn’t threatened to kill him at all since he came back. No ripping out his intestines to feed to the vultures or throwing him off a building for the rats to feast on. It was nice. Although a little part of him felt slightly unnerving. He doesn’t have any contingency plans involving a Nice!Damian.

Dick shook his head fondly at his little brother, taking away his coffee full of too much caffeine and replacing it with decaf. He has truly ascended to motherhood. “Well, I think it’s nice that Little D found love.”

“In the city of love. Is no one paying attention to that part?” Jason munched on one of Alfred’s cookies. “Cause I think that’s hilarious. I thought Baby Bat would’ve choked on all the happiness and bright clean air there.”

Dick whacked his arm. “Stop being mean to Dami.”

“But Dickie. It’s how I show affection.”

Adrien Agreste was the son of the supervillain Hawk Moth that have terrorizing Paris for the last 3 years. Batman was not at all pleased to hear that the Parisian heroes called for help and the Justice League turned them away. People have paid for that. Dearly.

“So his mom’s dead and his dad’s a criminal?” Jason looked over Bruce’s shoulder at the BatComputer. “Kid’ll fit right in with our family. Demon sure knows how to pick them.”

“Hnn.” Bruce grunted.

“I mean with you dating Selina, a notorious thief and doing the thing with Talia, a very dangerously lethal assassin, it’s no wonder where your son got his taste from.”

“Jason.” Bruce grunted in a warning tone.

“I mean when I’m right, I’m right.”

“Ok.” Tim started off tonight’s Family Meeting (excluding Damian), the topic being one certain ex-assassin’s love interest. “Looking further into the Agreste kid shows he clearly did not take after his villainous dad. He is one of Paris’ teenage models and have a huge fanbase dedicated to how pure and sweet he is. He is a literal walking ray of sunshine.”

“How the fuck did that sunshine child tame our literal feral demon brother?” Jason said. Always the VIP asking the important questions here.

Tim actually had an answer for that. He pulled out several charts and data on his laptop and showed it to the others. “Looking further into Adrien, I have found evidence that he is the cat-themed superhero Chat Noir. Being a loveable and touch-starved kitten appealed to the demon brat’s almost non-existent affections.”

“Timmy, Dami is capable of love.” Dick said in a disappointed voice.

“I said almost non-existent, didn’t I?” Tim waved the Mom’s disappointment away. “But you guys have got to see this.”

He pulled up a video of Chat Noir and Ladybug on the big screen. They watched him using his signature move: cataclysm. No one spoke for a few minutes as they processed the sheer destructive powers of the hero.

“You know what.” Jason broke the silence. “I have no more questions. I can kind of see how Agreste is the demon’s type.”

What baby assassin wouldn’t be turned on by the literal godly destructive powers the baby kitten held in his hands?

Dick, the only one wanting to keep things semi-PG here, smacked the back of his head.

“Baby brother.” Cass greeted. She is back home from her Hong Kong trip and heard all about the famous Adrien Agreste. She thought it was adorable and that Adrien and Damian made a cute couple.

“Hello, Cassandra.”

She peered down at the list he was currently making. She gestured towards it with a confused look.

“I am compiling a list of tasks that needs to be done before my Chaton and new sister-in-law come to Gotham. Only the best for them after all.

Her eyes lit up. “New sister?”

“Yes. My mon amour’s sister will be our new one.” He pulled out a picture of her on his phone for Cass to see. “Her name is Marinette and she will be a fine addition to the family.”

“Baby sister.” Cass said happily. She was always up for new family members.

“Yes. I imagine you two will get along the best.”

But she couldn’t help but notice that with all the preparations he is making, even if it is for his boyfriend and new sister, is a bit —how would Steph say it?— overkill.

Her coal black eyes were sharp as she observed his body language. “You very serious on this. Why?”

He can never hide anything from his sister. “I wish for them to have a good impression of our family so that their family will not be disincline to reject my proposal for marriage.”

“Marriage?” She was still quite unfamiliar with some words in English.

“It means that you will be getting another brother too.”

“We will wed.”

Dick hasn’t even finished his cereal yet. He looked over at Damian’s serious expression. “Did you even ask him yet?”

“I will present myself as an extraordinary suitor that he will be more inclined to say yes when I ask.”

“At least you’re treating your man right.”

Damian took offense. “Why wouldn’t I treat my mon amour with anything but the upmost respect and love?”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Little D. I’m just glad you’re in a good relationship and from what I can see, Adrien adores you very much.”

Damian smiled. “I adore my Chaton a great deal as well. Would you like to come with me to pick out a ring?

Dick could just hear Bruce’s voice in his head saying he shouldn’t be encouraging this. But come on, this was his baby brother who grew up learning how to hurt people finding a precious loving relationship for himself and he will be damned if he doesn’t support this.

“Of course. I’ll be honored to help.”

His baby brother brightened before he launched into a rant.

“I’m having trouble finding the perfect gem to complement his eyes. They are a certain shade of forest green you see. And many jewelry stores do me a great disservice by not having that certain shade or having utterly appalling quality for what my Chaton deserves.”

Taglist:

@iglowinggemma28 @iz-bell-saiah @nach0ava @roselynfey @mochinek0 @wannajointhecrabcult

#ml x dc #gaydrien #adrien agreste x damian wayne #adridami #1K fic

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ectonurites · 3 years

Note

for the character headcannons ask game, jason and cass?

ALRIGHT ALRIGHT im putting this one under a cut because it got SUPER long bc i cant shut up ever

lets start w jason

A (realistic headcanon):

ok using the ‘realistic’ category here loosely but GOD i love the idea of Damian & Jason having interacted while Jason was staying with the League before getting dunked in the Lazarus Pit. like. this obviously would need to be set more in preboot and following the Lost Days & Batman Annual 25 version of Jason’s resurrection, but god the idea of it just makes me scream in a good way. Like... these are things Jason likely doesn’t remember very clearly once he’s brought back to life more fully by the pit because he was uh pretty catatonic, but Damian being a little kid and knowing about the boy that his mother keeps around the base, that she’s trying to help bring back to health. Damian not even knowing that’s his big brother, just that he’s a presence that shares his mother’s attention. Jason again being unresponsive but like, ok god you know that part of lost days where Talia shows the others observing him that he only fights back at those he perceives as genuine threats trying to hurt him,

Because Jason can perceive that she’s safe, she’s not actually trying to hurt him, he trusts her because she saved him? thinking about lil child Damian who is ya know already being trained in fighting stuff and like the idea of him trying to provoke Jason just to see what happens but Jason not fighting back because on some level be it his connection to Talia or even little baby Damian visually reminding him of Bruce, he knows that Damian is safe too 🥺

and then when Jason and Damian meet again in Gotham as Red Hood & Robin respectively, Jason not really remembering because there was so much going on back then for him, but Damian realizing that oh... that was Him

B (hilarious):

alright so if we are looking at comics currently, in modern stuff jason is what, like 22? hes old enough to drink in the US but still definitely early 20s so around my around my age, thats what im using as a basis here. if we adjust timeline and still consider his death having happened when he was 15, that puts it around 2013. and then coming back to like interacting with people about three years later if we still kinda base things off of the preboot timeframe (since we never got a super solid retelling of the timeline of death -> resurrection -> training -> tries to get revenge aside from knowing he went to the all-caste instead of the lost days version of the story) making him reenter the regular world and stuff around age 18 in 2016. meaning a solid three years of pop culture that he was entirely missing, and like im sorry but he really doesn’t strike me as the type to bother looking into what he missed, he’s kinda busy focusing on other stuff. lets take a quick look at some major things from those years. 2013 gave us ‘what does the fox say’ and ‘the harlem shake’ . 2014 had that time U2 just put a fuckin album on everyone’s phones, The Fault In Our Stars movie came out. 2015 introduced the phrase ‘Netflix and Chill’ and the whole blue & black vs gold & white dress debate happened. imagine any of the other batkids (or even arguably roy during rhato stuff) bringing these things up and jason’s ensuing confusion. thank you for your time

C (heart-crushing):

so. there are two specific instances from rebirth era Jason i want to bring up here and much like a lot of these it’s less a headcanon and more of an inference based on observations, but i wanna take a sec to discuss Jason’s relationship with other people’s death. early in rebirth, Tim ‘dies’ from that whole thing in detective comics. he didn’t actually die, we as readers know, but in-universe they all very much so thought he was dead. frustratingly a lot of the batfam wasn’t really shown mourning him aside from in the Detective Comics Rebirth title itself (which just. when a major character dies even if its temporary- that should have a ripple effect) BUT an exception to that is in RHATO 2016, where we get this offhanded comment in Jason’s internal monologuing

similarly later when Roy, who like, had an incredibly close relationship w Jason that had just gotten mended before Heroes in Crisis, gets fuckin murdered in that whole thing... Jason doesn’t go to his funeral either. He leaves a dramatic voice mail and then visits the grave on his own later, choosing to instead keep working on the mission they’d started rather than going and taking the time to mourn properly.

Jason’s relationship with death is incredibly complicated, obviously. He has died, he has come back, and he now is willing to cross the line most other bats won’t and will kill people when he deems it necessary. I think thats something important though- he doesn’t just like... go around killing for fun (usually, some writers preboot made him a little murder happy but even then usually this still was vaguely followed) he kills people he thinks deserved it. Like, even looking back at the mess of Morrison’s Jason during Batman & Robin 2009, Jason was still trying to bring a sense of justice with who he was killing (”punishment that fits the crime”), it wasn’t killing for the sake of killing. He sees things in this kind of almost black and white ‘people who deserve it’ and ‘people who don’t’ way, and he has no problem dealing with death when it’s with the people he thinks deserve it.

but when someone who doesn’t in his mind ‘deserve it’ gets killed? i think he just goes into total avoidance mode. throws himself into other things he’s doing, tries not to dwell on it too much no matter how much he still thinks about it (this is especially evident in him consistently telling people “i’m fine!” after what happened to Roy, despite bringing Roy up literally like every few issues for a WHILE after he died and very clearly still struggling with it, Artemis is the only one who gets through to him on it a little bit)

but yeah, I just think that from Jason’s relatively unique situation of having been murdered, he knows what it’s like and he is perfectly fine wishing that on people he thinks are bad and deserve it, but it crushes him to imagine the people he loves and cares about having to experience something as painful as what he went through. not to mention the whole “I came back, why do I get a second chance at all this when they, who are a much better person than I am, probably won’t” mindset we get some implications of him having

D (canon is a coward and won’t)

hello DC i am once again insisting a batfam member is bisexual

CASS TIME

A (realistic headcanon):

ok so we know cass likes ballet. thats canon. however i think we also should in general explore cass experiencing other types of dance/performance as well, be it herself as a performer or even just watching. like... god imagine her & like my brain just automatically for group activities puts her with tim steph and duke but also for this in particular I feel would be a Jason embraced activity, but like them going to see a broadway show or some other professional theatre or something, and her just being enthralled by the reading of body language of the performers! like again by any point in current stuff cass does have like, the ability to speak fine (reading still hard tho) but even so I think like. okay im a theatre kid if that’s not obvious from the Everything About Me but one thing I always do after seeing a show is ya know spend dinner afterwards discussing it with whoever i saw it with.

I just think that like, bringing those people i just mentioned to the table to discuss seeing a show after would be so FASCINATING because cass would bring this whole perspective of critiquing their acting on a whole different level- not based on how well they delivered lines out loud, but by what their body language was saying as they moved on stage. like im very amused by the idea of cass getting a totally different picture in her mind about what a character’s motivations were because she was paying way more attention to what their physicality was saying vs the words that were written and how they were delivered. i think the debates her and the others would have would be EPIC there. jason defending the text as it was written adamantly and cass being like ‘ok yeah sure but thats not what they did’

B (hilarious):

cass having no concept of money because why would she bother? is SO funny to me. like it’s not that she couldn’t be reasonable if she wanted to, but like, she knows that the Waynes are well off so it’s not something she actually needs to be concerned about, so she just goes hog wild. takes steph out to fancy dinners and makes steph order for them since cass ya know doesn’t really read the menus, and steph’s like ‘jesus christ this costs-” “don’t worry about it” “but cass-” and she just holds up one of bruce’s credit cards and steph’s still like “but you don’t even know the range-” “it is fine”

bruce does not have the heart to tell her to stop

C (heart-crushing):

i mean this is pretty much canon but especially now after death metal where she’s remembering, not just being told by a guy using weird alternate timeline technology, that she used to be an adopted member of the Wayne family... like that hurts so bad. To look at these people who have ya know been kind to her, Bruce has still been a father-like figure to her (i mean literally from the moment they met in New 52 canon during the flashback in Batman & Robin Eternal, where he’s telling her that she’s not a monster just because of what people forced her to do.... that she’s a hero... that hug.... dad behavior), and they do to some extent treat her as family... But to then really know, to feel and remember that she was actually adopted! She was a part of their family. To look at how she’s been calling herself Orphan while working with them this whole time... that’s so heartbreaking! I have cried about this idea so much! I want so badly a conversation between her and Bruce now where he offers to officially adopt her again, I need it so bad and if it doesn’t happen at some point in the next year or two I will be so distraught.

D (canon is a coward and won’t)

i want an in-depth exploration of cass’ relationship to her own gender. being raised without language and you know with so much of her life being independent (remember: CASS RAN AWAY AROUND THE WORLD WITHOUT REALLY KNOWING ANY SPOKEN LANGUAGE) and outside of an organized society impressing too much of gender expectations on her, i feel like the way she experiences it would be very unique! like sure she’s so far been fine with being assigned ‘girl’ (ya know that comes with batgirl, and how people just automatically treated her based on how she looks) but in terms of gender expression and like her actual relationship with ‘traditional femininity’ etc like... because of how she was raised I just think she’d have a really different perspective on it that could be cool to explore, and I think she’d fall outside of the binary after she really thinks about how she identifies.

tldr on that: she/they nb cass is what i’m getting at here

#onwater #jason todd #cassandra cain #sam writes

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fancyfade · 3 years

Link

Drake was even more ineffective in combat than Damian had expected him to be. So of course he was injured. Of course he was ignoring all of the dumb civilian rules around it – stay out of the field until you heal, be a coward, et cetera –

and it bit him in the ass, too. Damian had to fall back to him. To that defensive position Drake loved so much.

And despite the injury, Brown ordered Damian to look for evidence in the base, as if she could order him to do anything. He already knows what he'll see –

And he sees it. Nothing.

That's the rule. People leave footprints, and you're not a person – you're a shadow. The last man in the base has destroyed his notes, disconnected the comms, and fled. When he returns in failure, he will almost certainly be killed – but he will return. It's what they all do. They can't leave, even if the alternative is death, because leaving is also death – but meaningless death. Shadow assassins die for Ra's Al Ghul, not for themselves.

keep reading

Okay so oof. Very long chapter (also now we have surpassed 200k words!) I rewrote parts of this chapter literally 3 times and edited parts of it (not batfam/main character stuff, just how I was handling the League of Shadows assassins, so if you read it before seeing it on tumblr no need to re-read) after posting because i kept being conflicted on stuff. But it’s on its final form now

decisions under cut, as usual (tw mentions of suicide, fictional. just in the under cut though not in the chapter)

anyway explanation

Initially, the League of Shadows assassins were really... suicide happy? IDK how to describe it. The internal logic was that they have been shown to do so gladly in the text before (Bane of demon they jump off building to save uh... helicopter space? and in BTAS they erase their minds to avoid being captured by Batman. I also know they do have some type of cyanide pill in Son of the Demon plotline they try to use when Qayin is interrogating one).

But anyway having them all do that with no question felt kind of dehumanizing and definitely unnecessarily angsty and just trying to get them out of the way, and while they are obviously very dehumanized by Ra’s Al Ghul, they should still be not dehumanized in the text. So I made it so they were a bit more neutral, viewing themselves as being capable of resisting revealing info to the Gotham police and viewing themselves as professionals in a bad situation.

A pretty big theme among lots of the League members, even Damian, is dehumanization though, as seen by Teen Titans Rebirth (first 6 issues) and The Shadow/ Batman.

I tried to make it clear in the text that Tim wasn’t just trying to be mean to Damian because he’s mean – he didn’t even know that Dick and Alfred lied to Damian. But also that “you’re just jealous about Bruce picking someone instead of you” is definitely canon IIRC it was in Gates of Gotham (him hypothesizing why Damian doesn’t like Cass).

I also hope the buildup to the little doubts Damian had were clear enough that it doesn’t look weird he believed Tim

you can tell here I decided to go with the Alfred doesn’t apologize thing I was asking about earlier, because while Alfred expresses regret I don’t recall him ever apologizing for doing something to another person in canon (just like. being an inconvenience normally or like sorry if he didn’t know someone was a bad guy, not ‘I treated you wrong’). So pretty much like my mom LMAO. We’ll see how it affects his relationship with Damian.

Also max i stole your league of shadows assassins play snake on their phones headcanon :P or at least Damian programmed snake

WRT Damian’s dream scene: They always seemed super trippy in the comics, so I keep that here too (and Talia tells him no one has good dreams because when we saw her dream in Batman Chronicles #8 it was very similar in theme to Damian’s - a lot of demon imagery and angst)

#dc fanfic #damian wayne #dc comics #batfam #robin #my fanfic #league of shadows

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akimmito · 4 years

Text

Heroes are made by the path they choose

Previous | AO3 | Next

--------------

Chapter 8

Marinette is sitting on a bench, phone in hand, dark glasses and a black coat; she remembers several years ago when she was in this same place meeting with Marianne. Now she's back, but not to recall memories of her embarrassing adolescence. No, she's in that place for business, the place is solitary enough for a meeting without attracting too much attention, especially if it's information that she doesn't want anyone to hear.

"What's so important?" She speaks when a person sits next to her, she doesn't need to see him to know who he's, after all, there is only someone who should be there at that moment and in that place. She made sure that it was, a little magic to persuade people not to pass.

"I heard that a demon wants to get one of your jewels in Turkey, I'm not sure of his motives, but an angel was bothering me to do something. You should talk more to them. "

"Yeah, because it's very normal to befriend angels. The casual Friday of every human. "

"You would be surprised, they're a lot of fun… until they harass you relentlessly, they can be very annoying when they want. "

"That's my point." She smiles and takes off her dark glasses at the same time as he does. "What else do you know? You wouldn't ask for a meeting just to tell me that, knowing how much you run away from relationships and human interaction in general. "

"Well, darling, it's always a pleasure to see you. Any gathering is worth enjoying your figure. ”Marinette laughs and prepares for whatever she will say next. "The Shadow League searches for their heir. They called hell and found out that the boy was not there, Ra’s was willing to make a deal to retrieve his body and bring him back to the Lazarus Pits. It's only a matter of time for they to locate him, you must be careful. "

"Ra’s doesn't like to be betrayed." she murmurs. "How did you get the information?"

"A lovely encounter with a demon and one of those assassins, the poor man I was trying to protect, all wanted him very dead. The demon didn't kill him, but there was nothing I could do against a murderer like that, I barely made it out alive and now I have a new beautiful scar on my leg. "

"One day like any other, you're a lucky man."

"Since that night it only increased, I must thank you." He leans toward her with a smile.

"Do you want to go for a drink? To thanks for the information. ”She smiles back. The two get up immediately and begin to walk the streets of Paris, Marinette makes sure that a glamor covers them both to avoid being bothered. She grabs his left arm and he leans into her to whisper in her ear, tickling her skin where his breath hits.She laughs "Now, what has become of your life, John Constantine?"

----------------

Cooper @ KCoopL98

It is a wonderful day, nothing can ruin it. Not even you, damn butterfly!

Alix @LostHeroBunnix

The more mysterious you are @MariLenoir, the more curiosity you generate in us.

Chloe B. @BourgeoisQueen

@LostHeroBunnix, right?!

Adrien A. @AdrienAgreste

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen I saw her walking to the Sena, wearing a black coat and putting on sunglasses. Very suspicious.

Epic Kim @Epic_OrginalChampions

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgtreste What if she has a secret lover? With the demon boy she has for a son, I would sneak out too.

Damian @DamianLenoir

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgreste @Epic_OriginalChampions Mother has no secret boyfriend or lover. Imagination must be a nice place, but get out of there.

Epic Kim @Epic_OriginalChampions

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgreste @DamianLenoir Look at him, poor baby, he's in denial.

Damian @DamianLenoir

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgreste @Epic_OriginalChampions Denial is what you'll feel when they tell you that you'll not be able to swim in a year.

Alix @LostHeroBunnix

@BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgreste @Epic_OriginalChampions @DamianLenoir How much violence, please, I want to be present when it happens

Felix @GarahamV_Felix

@LostHeroBunnix @BourgeoisQueen @AdrienAgreste @Epic_OriginalChampions Why do we need tabloid newspapers? You do a great job, guys. If you're going to speculate nonsense, do it via text message. Uselesses.

----------

Marinette returns to the country house when dinner is over, only to be greeted by Damian as soon as she opens the door. The boy looks incredibly threatening with his arms crossed and a suspicious look, she has returned too late.

"Where did you go, mother? I can smell the smell of alcohol and it's barely 9 pm, you must have left Paris two hours ago, too early to be drinking. ”He frowns more, looking her up and down, noting the differences in her outfit since he saw her leave, realizing that the black stockings are missing.

"I just went for a walk and stopped at a bar." All right, she shouldn't be so intimidated by her son, but Damian does it very successfully. In her defense, he was trained to be a killing machine, he knows very well how to stand and look to achieve that effect.

"Alone?"

"Uh, well..."Marinette is just a little drunk, so that helps the questioning go so well for the boy.

"Because you don't bring your stockings, I can also smell a cigar aroma and I know that you don't like nicotine, you are disheveled and you have a mark on your neck. "Damian is hurt to list everything he can notice, he didn't even try to further hide the evidence. He really hates Kim, especially because he was right.

"He's a... friend..." She doubts, actually, she doesn't have the slightest idea of her relationship with him. Adventure of one... two, no, three... yes, three nights, maybe?

Is he so bad that his mother must hide her partner from him? He's not going to bite him, just a subtle threat with a knife, nothing too so bad.

"Mother, you don't have to while. If he hurts you, I will mutilate it, but if you agree… ”The rest is not understood because he's said in grunts and, for less understanding, in Arabic.

"He's a friend, Damian. I met him four years ago while investigating a series of murders that ended up being the victims of sacrifice for a cult that spread to various regions of Europe. "The boy heeds his words, he did not think she was going to tell him about his friend, like if I really believed it was just that. When she passes him, the smell of cigarettes is much stronger, reinforcing the idea that it was not quality time for friends. "We started investigating it and he took us to Liverpool, where I met him. I was investigating the case with Felix, but seeing the circles and rituals performed, I diverted it in another direction while I followed the correct leads, I had the feeling that I would end up facing something darker than just a cult."

"And you met him." He sits down on the couch across from her, Marinette takes off her slippers and sets them aside. She thinks for a moment before continuing.

"Yeah, he was also investigating. These people seemed to want to carry out a demonic summoning ritual, I didn't know their real motives for this, but I wasn't going to wait for them to succeed… unfortunately they were successful the night we faced them, Azrael, nice meeting. "Damian barely flinches at his sarcasm. "You can't imagine the problems we had in sending him back to hell, all while Plagg was laughing at us. "

"In my defense, I knew you would win." The little god comes out of Marinette's coat. "And next time you meet the alcoholic guy, don't take me. Unless you want to face another demon or angel, you are fun when you do. "

Marinette sighs, of course the Kwami of Destruction would love the amount of chaos those beings generate.

"Whatever, we met several times later. He seemed intrigued by Plagg and the fact of my magic is very different from anything he had seen."

"Tell him when a possessed woman attacked you in a bar! It was fun. ”Plagg laughs as he remembers it, all the chaos it caused in the few minutes she was there. He loved it, it was a great day.

"I didn't know you were involved in that kind of thing." He admits, it's something he never thought would be related to his mother, as kind as she's, no one would ever imagine.

"Sometimes, but they are only favors for him. I prefer not to get into such situations, they are always prone to end in a real disaster. "She sighs looking at his hands.

"It's so much fun." Plagg laughs as Marinette shakes her head.

"Yeah, we know chaos amuses you." She smiles wearily and gets up. "I'll go to sleep... Damian, I love you so much."

Damian just watches her go after saying those words to him, he didn't expect her to say that to him. He knows that she loves him and he wants her back, that's why he tries so hard to always look presentable when they go out and not cause any problems, he doesn't want his reputation to be ruined because of him and for that reason she'll no longer wants him by his side. It would be terrible.

And that's why he doesn't like the people who approach her, what if they don't like him? What if they demand that his mother get rid of him? What if she gets a partner who doesn't want him around? He will couldn't accept it.

Seeing Talia three nights ago still haunts him, even though it was just an illusion created by the Akuma. When he thinks about the League he only feels two things, fear that he will be taken away from his mother and fury at what they did to him.

If he ever returns to the League of Assassins, it will be to exterminate them all.

-----------

Tim Drake @TimDrakeW_

The only good thing about going to Paris is that I already have an appointment with Marie Lenoir for a suit. Thanks @OliverQueen!

Roy @RoyHarperQ

@TimDrakeW_ You failed to thank me? I was the one who felt sorry for you because Dick is dragging you to Paris with him.

Jason @IAmYisus_XD

@TimDrakeW_ @RoyHarperQ He turns off notifications for his posts, he won't tell you anything.

Dick Grayson @TheFlyingGrayson

Tomorrow we arrived in Paris, the last time I visited the city I was six years old and still in the Circus. I have a whole tourist route to follow!

#dickinette #dick x marinette #maribat #ml x dc #maribat au #mominette

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mydeardeath · 4 years

Text

To belong with (4/8)

Whole series on tumblr (to belong series tag) or AO3

---

He woke up with a hell of a headache but at least he wasn't still in the alley. Lots of people would have loved to find him in this position. No, instead he was back in the manor, in his old room. Which wasn't much better. He would have preferred to be found by the outlaw. Unfortunately, Kori was in New York since Dick was here and Roy was in Asia. The only positive point was the plate of Alfred's cookies waiting for him on his bedside table with a glass of water. After swallowing it, he got up, going straight up to the cave, sure to find Bruce down there and the missing pieces of last night.

As expected, the old man was there but, more surprisingly, Dick and Damian were also present. The last was brooding in a corner, his jaw clenched and arms held against his chest. Jason turned to Dick, silently asking him what was going. But, by the look Dick gave him in return, it seemed the other didn't know much either. Then his big brother attention turned to Jason's sweets and he tried to reach for them. Jason quickly moved the plate out of his reach and went to stand beside Bruce, avoiding Dick pleading eyes. These were HIS baked goods, he wouldn't let anyone touch any of it. Focused on Dick, he hadn't noticed Bruce stealing one of his cookies and when he realized what had happened he turned an indignant look on his former mentor. Bruce didn't even spare him a glance, still bent over the computer. At least, it made Dick giggle a bit, breaking a bit of the heavy atmosphere.

Bruce suddenly turned to them apparently finished with whatever he had been doing when Jason arrived.

"Now, that you're all here we can begin. As you all know, yesterday dozens of people appeared all over Gotham through different breaches. Most of them were secured, they were all pretty disorientated and have yet to be interrogated. But, some of them have already been identified." Bruce showed a few documents on the screen. Some of the faces were familiar to him. He just couldn't remember why.

"They all have a common point. They're supposed to be dead. All presumed victims of robots attack six years ago." Jason felt Damian tense up behind him. "No bodies were ever found in the center of the attack so we can't be sure they were really here."

"Maybe the robots weren't here to kill, just to take people." Dick hypothesized.

"It's a far-fetched theory and we shouldn't rush into..." Bruce started only to be interrupted by Damian. "Tim may still be alive."

"Damian." Bruce sent his son a warning look, showing exactly what he thought of the idea.

"I think he's right." Every head turned to Jason, Bruce reproach dying in his throat. He hadn't expected Jason to side with Damian. "I thought I was just imagining things, but with what you said... I think it was really him. He was the one who knocked me out in that alley."

"Let's not make any hasty assumptions. We have to proceed with methods and not let our emotions..."

"I'm gonna get him" Damian cut him off once again, not waiting for an answer before making his way up the stairs.

"Damian !" Bruce yelled after him but his son completely ignored him.

***

Sometimes, Damian really wanted to hit his father in the face and demand he stops being so cold. He could see the irony here since he wasn't so fond of showing his emotions either, but this was about Tim. Bruce should be a least a bit more enthusiastic at the possibility that he was not dead as they had all thought. If there was a chance that Tim was alive and out there, he would find him and bring him home.

Damian called Barbara immediately after exiting the cave, waking her up. She started to complain at him for interrupting her well deserved sleep, saying it would better be important.

"Well, finding if Tim is really alive didn't seem to be a top priority for father. So, how important it is, depends entirely on you." Damian announced, his frustration evident in his voice.

Barbara sight but she listened when the boy explained the entire situation and what had led him to think that Tim might be back. Damian knew she most likely thought he was delusional and still hanging on flimsy hope. She didn't call him out on it and simply complied, using the eyes of every camera to look for Tim. He thanked her for at least trying because it didn't matter if she believed or not. What mattered was that she was helping him and that's all he was asking for. Plus it wouldn't be the first time one of them had come back from the dead. It wasn't impossible. Especially not in their family.

Damian started by checking every hospital and clinic for John Doe patients that had arrived last night. He had no trouble convincing the nurse to let him see with his own eyes every one of them. But, well, it wasn't hard when you were using the fact that you had lost your mate in the event of the robots attack and that you were hoping to find them back. Once again, it didn't matter if they believed that it was survivors of the attack that had reappeared or not, they all pitied him for losing his mate and didn't dare refuse him that.

Next, he went to all of Tim's old safehouses or any of the one the family had been using six years ago. He didn't get much result from it easier. The Drake mansion was also a dead end and Damian was running out of ideas.

Getting a bit desperate after checking Tim could have deemed safe, Damian decided to simply seek near Tim last known location. Fortunately, his father like to keep tabs on everything so he didn't have to call Jason to ask him where Tim had knocked him unconscious last night.

As he grew more and more frustrated as the hours ran by, Damian put on his Robin uniform despite the fact that it was still daytime and decided to pay a visit to every criminal hang out in case they were holding Tim.

He didn't get what he was looking for, but he did get to beat up some assholes and that help him feel better. Slightly.

***

All hope had left him by the end of the day. He had looked everywhere he could think of, in vain. There was no trace of Tim anywhere. He had called Barbara many times throughout the day, and he could hear the pity growing in her voice every time he did and she had nothing new to tell him. So he just turned off his phone to stop the constant buzzing of his father trying to contact him and went home.

He shed his clothes off on his way up to his room and plop down on the bed without bothering to take a shower. And for the second time in a day, he felt someone else's presence in the room. He hadn't thought they had anything left to discuss. He had made it pretty clear that he didn't care about supposedly being in danger and if that was really the case, he didn't need her protection. He hadn't needed her for years.

No dagger came to his throat this time. His opponent hadn't been waiting in a corner of his room this time but had been lying in his bed. In an instant, he felt their weight fell upon him and hands choking him. This was definitely not Talia.

He kicked them off him with a strong blow in the guts and send them rolling on the floor. Damian quickly got up and stood ready to fight. The intruder didn't waste any time to jump back on him, going for a nerf strike but he lacked the strength for it. His attacker seemed to have knowledge that a common thief would not have. But an assassin, especially one sent to kill him, shouldn't have been this weak. Because it made no doubt that Damian was stronger. In a matter of seconds, he had him in a headlock and was letting them struggle vainly against his hold.

He released them once they had stopped kicking. Damian went to turn the light on while the intruder was taking deep breaths, sitting on the floor. The man wasn't looking at him and most of his face was hidden behind his hair. Still, Damian could tell it was him.

"Tim" the name escaped his lips and the man raised his head towards him suddenly.

Damian fell to his knee in front of him and started to reach out to him with his hand. He stopped just before his face, not daring to touch him in fear he would disappear.

“Damian ?” Tim said softly, his voice barely more than a whisper. Damian let out a strangled laugh as his hand finally touched Tim.

“You came back.” Damian couldn't hide the wonder in his voice and he didn't care. This was Tim.

“Is this real ?” He asked Damian.

“I hope so. I missed you so much.” Damian answered honestly.

Tim apparently did too since he slammed his full body into Damian's and hung onto him as his life depended on him. Damian dared hugged him back. He could feel Tim's ribs under his fingers. The Omega had lost a lot of weight.

"Don't cry, Timothy," Damian told him, caressing his cheek.

"I'm not the only one crying here." He offered him a small smile.

"You were dead."

"I never died. One minute I was in Gotham fighting this waves of robots and the next I..." His voice broke down as his whole body started to shake.

"Shh, it's okay. I got you. You're home now." Damian soothed him.

Tim buried his face in Damian's neck, taking deep breaths of his scent. It helped him calm down and soon Tim was nodding off. He had probably been sleeping when Damian came home and their fight and talk must have wearied him out even more. Damian carried him to the bed, putting him gently under the sheets. He was ready to let the other man alone when Tim put his hand on his arm.

“Stay, please. I don't want to be alone." Tim pleaded.

"I'm not leaving you. I promise." Reassured, Tim went back to sleep, nestled against Damian.

#damitim #timdami #to belong series #part 12

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unavenged-robin · 5 years

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“Can you please come and get me” Damian and Tim

He was expecting it would happen, and, on some level, maybe he was even hoping it would. He knows it’s unfair to even think about it, but Dick had preferred Damian to him. Not in the beginning, of course. Tim knew that in the beginning it was just out of obligation and good intentions that Dick had taken the Robin’s cape away from him to give it to their newfound little brother, a child who didn’t fit anywhere else but with them. Tim had hated Dick for it anyway, but over time he had understood him too. It was necessary, and it worked. They owed Damian at least a way out of the League.

But what had hurt the most - and this is something he’s never going to say out loud because he’s too ashamed of himself to even admit it in front of a mirror, let alone bring it into words ― what had hurt the most had been observing the duty turn into affection, watching from the sidelines how Dick had slowly fallen in love with the brat. Dick had loved Tim too, of course, but not like that. Never like that. Tim had been Dick’s little brother ― he too unwanted, at first ― but Damian had been something else. His Robin. His son.

But now the cape and the cowl were back into Bruce’s hands, and Bruce was not Dick. Now the Batman was flying alone.

If he were a slightly more deluded and cruel man, Tim would believe that Bruce missed him, that he preferred him over Damian, but he just couldn’t shake off the obligation Dick had left him. There was some sense of vindictiveness in that thought: that the true Batman wanted him, Tim, and not his own blood son. And why not, after all? Damian was everything that a Robin shouldn’t be: he was violent and dangerous and arrogant and he had blood on his hands. At the age of ten, Damian had already killed as many people as the enemies they chased every night. Why would Bruce accept that? How had Dick accepted it in the first place?

Tim sighs and rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands. He’s being unfair, he knows. He’s angry and alone and he had missed Bruce so much, he’s almost gone mad with the quest to bring him back. And now Bruce was here, and he was alive, but still out of Tim’s reach, still out of his life. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth even if it shouldn’t: Tim doesn’t know what he was expecting, it was obvious enough that Damian was not going anywhere, it’s not like he thought he would be Robin again.

…except that maybe he was. Bruce had sent Damian back to his mother once, hadn’t he? He had washed his hands of his son once, so why not twice? But no, this is unfair too. Damian was different now, better. Still a brat through and through, but he was getting the hang of Robin, and Dick had softened him around the edges with so much care and attention that it would be just shameful for Bruce to throw all that work out of the window.

But there was another way, and Tim discovers he believed in that second option so much that he took it almost for granted, to the point that he never even talked about it with anyone, including those directly concerned. The truth is that Tim always believed that, after Bruce’s return, Dick would just go back to being Nightwing and keep Damian with him ― maybe as Robin and maybe not, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway: there could be two Robins, one in Gotham and one in Bludhaven. It would’ve been even. It would’ve been right.

There was nothing of Bruce in Damian, he was all Talia and a little bit of Dick. Even the pang of jealousy he felt every time he thought about it couldn’t deny the evidence of the facts: Damian belonged with and to Dick. He loved him, he respected him. It was so easy too see it even through all the brat’s defensive shields, that every time Damian looked at Dick his eyes were full of the unmistakable wonder of someone who’s seeing the one and only hero of his life. It would be cute, if anything related to Damian could ever be cute.

And Dick… well. Tim knows about Dick’s inquiries with their lawyers, of his weekly appointments with social services, he knows about the adoption paper Dick had asked to get in print. Tim remembers the proud looks, the praises always ready on the tip of Dick’s tongue, he remembers the love he kept hidden behind the teasing, the way Dick never lost his temper with Damian and, in contrast, the burning fury that he bestowed upon anyone who dared to threat or hurt his Robin.

Now Tim stares at his computer screen without actually seeing it, his work momentarily forgotten. Dick going back to Bludhaven and to Nightwing like nothing ever happened sounds unfair too, for him, for Damian, even for Bruce. Tim doesn’t know if they ever talked about it, if there was an argument or a fight, if Bruce had insisted on keeping Damian with him, or if Dick had handed the boy over before the question even presented itself. He could ask Barbara: she would know, wouldn’t she? And then again, what would be the point? Dick’s back to his city and his life, Bruce’s back to the Manor with Alfred, and Damian’s back with his father. Tim’s the only one who can’t go back at all.

Except for this.

A red light on his monitor flashes three times, signaling an incoming contact. Tim checks the input and approves the connection, then he turns on his microphone, his mind already focusing on the coordinates that now appear in front of him.

Batman’s voice rumbles through his headphones, filling his head with the bittersweet memory of the few nights that Tim had believed, even if just for a moment, that he would never hear that exact voice ever again.

“Red Robin, I’m going to need your support tonight”, Bruce says, impassive as ever.

Tim checks his cameras feed and by the sheer number of thugs currently gathering in the new Penguin club, he can easily believe that even the Batman would consider this a two-man job, the kind that requires a Robin to his side.

Tim bites his lips. He should ask about Damian, shouldn’t he? He hasn’t seen Robin in weeks. Where the hell is the kid? Is he grounded? Is it Tim’s business if he is?

“Red Robin?”, Bruce calls to him again, and there’s a new edge to his voice, something Tim can not define.

“ETA ten minutes”, Tim responds out of habit. “I’m on my way, Batman.”

“I’ll wait for you”, Bruce announces.

And Tim can’t lie to himself: it does feel good.

Months go by. Batman stops flying alone. Damian starts to look a little bit like Bruce too. Nightwing is back to his city for good. Tim keeps mostly to himself. It’s not good, but almost. It’s a new thing, a new balance. And all things considered, it could be worse.

Then Damian dies. Bruce shatters and Batman snaps. Dick dies too. It’s all so quick, it would stand to reason it should barely have the time to hurt, but that’s wishful thinking: it hurts as hell, so much and so deep Tim feels like he’s drowning in pain, burning from the inside out while falling into an arctic abyss.

The first thing he does when they get Damian back, is fall on his knees and hug the brat to his chest for the first time in his life. He’s surprised to learn that Damian smells good and that he feels little and soft into his arms. He’s not surprised when Damian, in spite of everything, hugs him back.

Still, Tim makes sure he’s not there when Bruce tells Damian about Dick. He can bear a lot of things, but not that. He can barely deal with his own grief ― meaning that he does his best not to deal with his own grief. It’s simpler that way.

But after he’s sure the news has been delivered, he tries to stick around. Pop by the Manor more often, try some small talk, lend a hand in a few missions where his presence was never requested in the first place. He can’t be Dick, he could never be Dick, but he can at least make an effort.

He’s still surprised when, while he’s driving home from the office, his phone starts ringing, and Damian’s name comes across the screen. Calling each other is not something they do unless they’re forced to.

“Hello?”, he asks tentatively.

“Drake.”

Damian’s voice sounds deadpan as ever, but there’s something weird in the way he breathes out Tim’s last name: unlike the usual, this time it doesn’t really sound like an insult.

“Hi brat”, Tim answers, tapping his fingers on the wheel. “What’s up?”

Damian inhales quite violently and for a moment Tim’s worried he’ll start screaming at him. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Can you please come and get me?”, Damian asks instead and Tim hits the brakes just a little too strongly, screeching to a halt in front of a yellow traffic light. The car behind him honks at him, but Tim doesn’t care.

“What?”, he asks, because it’s not even the weird request of picking him up, it’s that please that makes his skin crawl. “Damian, what happened? Are you in trouble? Are you hurt? Did someone take you hostage and now you’re trying to sound like a normal kid?”

Damian doesn’t answer, not really. But his breathing stutters just once, and Tim understands.

“Alright, whatever, I’m coming”, he corrects himself. “Where are you?”

The boy needs two more shaky breaths to answer. It hurts that Damian’s trying to hide the fact that he’s crying even if he knows that Tim already knows.

“In Bludhaven”, he manages to say eventually, and he seems to choke on the word.

“I’ll be right there”, Tim answers softly. Damian doesn’t need to say where exactly in Bludhaven he is, Tim already knows.

He runs the first red light of many, and barely takes notice of it.

He gets to Dick’s apartment in record time, and finds Damian sitting on the doorstep. His eyes are perfectly dry and his face more than stoic, but there’s no hiding his slumping shoulders or his messy hair. When Tim suggests to get inside the apartment the kid shakes his head with such determination, he doesn’t have the heart to insist, even if he’s tired and really needs a rest.

Instead he just walks Damian to his car, sits again in front of the wheel and starts the engine. He doesn’t turn the radio on, and doesn’t ask any question either: if Damian’s uncomfortable with the silence, Tim’s sure he’ll let him know.

“They stole the car”, Damian offers after a while, as Tim speeds through the evening traffic. “That’s why I needed a ride from you.”

That’s a lie. Damian could have stolen another car without batting an eye. Then Tim’s mind registers: the car.

“The car?”, he repeats out loud, glancing at the boy sitting next to him. Damian’s looking the car window, all that Tim can see is his reflection mixed up with the street lights. “What car? Bruce’s car?”

Damian shrugs, like it’s inconsequential to him. Tim sighs. He’s not looking forward to having to tell Bruce that one of his expensive car has gone missing by the hand of his youngest son, that has also just risked to get caught by the police by driving it in the first place.

He doesn’t argue with Damian about it. He’s not in the mood, and it would be useless anyway.

“I miss him”, Damian says after a minute.

Tim’s grip on the wheel stiffens so much his knuckles turn white, but he tries to sound as normal as he can when he answers the boy.

“I know, gremlin. Me too.”

“Father refuses to talk about him”, Damian adds. “It’s like he’s never existed for him. How could he- “

There’s that choked sound again, then silence, and Tim can see it all so clearly even without other words: he can see Damian asking one, two, three-hundred times about Dick, grasping at memories, trying to relieve the good times, holding on whatever scrap Dick’s left behind him. He knows that feeling all so well: the need to keep the person you lost so close in words and memories since there’s no other way to have them with you anymore. And he can see Bruce turning him away, refusing to talk, refusing to share. Pain was something too personal for Bruce, something that only the Batman had the right to see. Tim had felt it on his own skin, he knows how much it hurts, and it was more than Damian deserved.

“We could go back to Dick’s apartment”, he says after a moment, even if the very idea makes him sick. “Stay there for a few days. He wouldn’t mind, you know? He’s always loved having us there.”

He keeps his voice soft, clear of any emotion. This is Damian’s choice, not his.

But again, Damian just shakes his head no. The doorstep is as close as the boy’s willing to get. Tim understands that too.

“Okay, then let’s go to mine”, he counterproposes. “I have a new couch and it’s quite comfortable.”

He leaves the offer there for a moment. Damian doesn’t say anything, but from the corner of his eyes, Tim sees him shrug again and takes it as acquiescence enough.

#tim drake #damian wayne #richard grayson #bruce wayne #i missed writing about these two #and i missed writing Tim #h/c prompt meme #my fic #shari writes #Anonymous

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nothingofnotereally · 5 years

Text

Unpacking Rebirth!Talia’s Upbringing

Okay so…. Can we talk about Rebirth Talia al Ghul? People who aren’t familiar with her history, her almost 50 year history at this point, and more importantly aren’t familiar with it in depth often have no idea why it is that Talia fans think that her treatment post Morrison, but even moreso post-Rebirth, is a radical rebranding of the character they’ve known for so long. And I could talk about that, and maybe one day I will, but today I’m going to talk about something different, but related.

I’m going to talk about Talia’s background in Rebirth, how it accounts for her being a dramatically different character than she was in her classic form and whether she’s still salvageable as anything other than a mustache-twirler.

I. The Demon’s Daughter

Let’s be clear: the little we know of Talia’s rebirth childhood is absolutely horrific. Pure nightmare fuel. While their traditional dynamic was troubling and problematic, it was also loving in its way, and Ra’s was controlling of her, while also protective of her. Now, instead, we have this:

This issue has been out for a while, but I haven’t seen anyone really unpack what it is Talia is saying here, because we’re all focused on the stupid swordfight with Selina. But look at what it is Talia is saying and what it means about her upbringing.

Talia is saying that, basically since she was a toddler, she has been physically abused, and forced to fight, by her centuries old swordmaster father. In fact, her very first memory is bleeding from wounds caused by her father. From then on, her life is a fight to survive against her own father, which I’m guessing was pretty damn difficult especially when she was an actual child. And often, when she loses?

She dies. Or rather, she is murdered. Repeatedly. By her father.

And then he resurrects her and starts over.

And about those resurrections? It’s not like he just picks her newly killed body and immediately brings her back - check out that first panel on the second row. Not only is she killed and revived countless times, he lets her corpse at least partially rot before resurrecting her, so that when she returns to life, she is treated to the sight of her skin regrowing over her rotted flesh. And as soon as Ra’s notices she’s alive again… they start again.

How long did that go on? Unclear, but she’s still fighting him as a grown woman in the equivalent of this time period in The Gift...

...so I’m guessing the answer is “it didn’t stop until she left him.”

To be honest, I’m not really sure what the Rebirth version of Ra’s and Talia’s dynamic even was. The classic relationship doesn’t work at all with this backstory, and we’ve never really seen a lot of what the new paradigm might be since they’ve been out of contact since well before Rebirth. But what we do know is, she was an active assassin from a young age.

Unlike Classic Talia who was actually never an active assassin at all:

We can also glean bits and pieces of information regarding her Rebirth upbringing from other appearances. Over in Silencer, we find out that despite her brilliance, the fact that she was carrying out assassinations for him, and the fact that she could defeat her ancient swordmaster father even as a child, she was never good enough for him:

He was dissatisfied with her, and so he created metahumans using his genes to replace her. Ultimately, this drives her to plot against Ra’s because... who wouldn’t?

It’s not entirely clear what her ambitions were, specifically but judging from this bit of Batman and Robin (New52, but seemingly still canon for Damian’s backstory):

It involved winning Batman over to her side and ruling the world through Damian. This is further confirmed by her comment to Honor in Silencer Annual #1 here:

Where she indicates that Bruce is family to her, and still features in her future plans. What’s strange here is that she also says later that she intends to kill him personally, which is. Weird and out of nowhere, but what else is new. As a sidenote, Silencer is just strange because it ignores everything about Talia’s history not just in terms of changing her personality but in terms of ignoring the timeline of events, but... moving along...

Talia intends to form Leviathan to break free of him and pursue her own agenda. But, while apparently finding her insufficient, Ra’s cannot let her go. Not only that, he actively works to destroy everything she is trying to accomplish, including trying to kill Batman just because she desires him. In fact, he also tries to have Talia herself assassinated:

Another thing is, Rebirth Talia is rather older than she looks, as evidenced by her having been an adult when she met Honor.

Which means, in the end, we have a woman who was abused and repeatedly killed by her father, then thrown in a Lazarus Pit (but only after her body has lain around long enough to partially decompose!) and forced to repeat the cycle for who knows how long, but apparently quite a long time - decades, maybe centuries. Who even knows. She’s been working as an assassin since her teens. Despite her excelling and even surpassing him in various ways, he considers her inferior, and begins seeking to replace her with artificially created metahuman heirs. Eventually, Talia decides she wants to break with him, and he responds by first trying to destroy everything she cares about and then trying to have her killed.

OKAY, SO. Nightmare fuel. I genuinely can’t begin to imagine what it would be like growing up in that environment, and under the circumstances it’s certainly no shock that Rebirth Talia is warped.

Even so, what stands out to me in the B&R issue is that, initially, even her wildest ambitions required her to exercise power through a man – it’s just her son instead of her father or her potential husband. This says a good deal about how her upbringing, as well as her father’s fixation on marrying her off, has affected her self-image. And for those who say Talia evidences arrogance and self-importance… yes she does. Which is often a symptom of low self-esteem. In fact even Narcissistic Personality Disorder typically stems from overcompensation for a feeling of worthlessness.

The traditional/original Ra’s/Talia dynamic had some elements of this story, but not all and not nearly to the same extent. Furthermore, Classic Talia had something else - someone else - to love and look to for hope. Rebirth Talia does not. Because as far as I can tell, in Rebirth, Talia and Batman’s relationship has very little in common with the conflicted romance they shared in their original stories. And that’s how we transition to...

II. Beloved of the Bat?

So, Bruce Wayne.

Again, the extent of their relationship in Rebirth is unclear, but it definitely isn’t what it was pre-Rebirth.

The original Bruce/Talia story is basically as such: Talia meets him when she’s kidnapped by Dr. Daark, and falls in love with him. Bruce is also drawn and attracted to her. This results in Ra’s deciding to test Bruce for suitability as Talia’s husband and his own heir. Bruce passes, but unsurprisingly has no interest in running a criminal empire, though he does fall in love with Talia. This leads to a rather intense on/off romance that ultimately results in Damian Wayne, and continues until Tower of Babylon when Talia finally tires of being stuck between her father and her lover and breaks away from both of them. With Bruce and Talia’s relationship having been called to an end (by her, mind you – one day I may do a writeup on Bruce/Talia and how often what happened between them is misremembered by writers and readers alike), Bruce becomes involved with Catwoman in Hush. Even so, we see in Death and the Maidens that Bruce does still love Talia.

Meanwhile, Talia’s previously unknown sister Nyssa kidnaps and repeatedly murders and resurrects her (sound familiar?) until she more or less goes mad. By the end of the ordeal, she can barely speak, and she willing to do anything for Nyssa to avoid being killed again. This results in Talia disavowing her love for Bruce, which seems to be the catalyst for him to finally move on from her, though not without considerable pain.

Okay this is important to run down, because the Rebirth story has changed everything about their relationship.

Gotta love those evil expressions. It helps us remember that she’s a heartless monster.

Anyway so, In Silencer Annual #1, Silencer does note that Talia had previously said she was in love with Batman, so we know that she loved him, okay. But what does love mean to Rebirth Talia? We can find the answer to that if we go back to Roles of Engagement:

She “loved” him because she considered him a potential equal. That’s not really a bad basis for loving someone initially – and even Classic Talia’s love for Bruce was initially sparked from a place of admiration. But while Classic Talia eventually grew into a more complete love for him, it seems like Rebirth Talia is still stuck on objective: seek worthy mate. In fact, once it’s clear that she and Bruce are not coming back together, she just goes ahead and propositions Slade Wilson because she figures he can give her strong children, too:

Notably, this obsession with strong offspring sort of comes out of nowhere when Morrison takes over, but anyway, from that perspective it’s not hard to understand why Bruce’s feelings for her would also be somewhat muted in Rebirth:

Because while Classic Bruce/Talia was a love story that stretched for over 30 years in our time, and most of their adult lives in canon… Rebirth Bruce/Talia is repeatedly presented as a short infatuation on his end, and a dangerous obsession with genetics on hers. The above panel is from Batman #66, and is part of the Knightmares arc, which is important because while it appears to be Selina saying it… it’s actually Bruce’s thoughts about the women in his life coming out through his imagined version of Selina. And to him, those women amount to nothing much – none of them even warrant a direct callout. Everyone besides Selina is a “whoever.”

Interlude and Sum I

So... Classic Ra’s was controlling, possessive and dismissive of her at times, but he was also devoted, protective and genuinely loving. The relationship was complicated and problematic but affectionate.

Rebirth Ra’s is an abusive tyrant who repeatedly murders and belittles his daughter and, when she decides to break from him, attempts to systematically destroy everything she cares about and then have her killed.

Classic Bruce/Talia was a complicated romance between two people who genuinely loved each other, but were always separated by circumstances. He loved her for years, and she loved him unconditionally, and they struggled over that from the day they met until they permanently separated as a result of her being brainwashed.

Rebirth!Talia went in search of someone she considered worthy of her so they could have a genetically perfect child to conquer the world with. Bruce briefly had feelings for her in a moment between romantic rounds with Catwoman.

My point is this: Rebirth Talia has never experienced genuine love or support from anyone in her life, or for anyone in her life. Her relationship with the two men she traditionally loved, and whose love for her has imprisoned, empowered and defined her for much of her existence as a character, was utterly gutted in Rebirth, leaving Rebirth Talia’s life as a prolonged emotional void. Which makes what comes next remarkable in some ways… and predictable in others.

Because this is where we talk about Damian.

III. Olympias to his Alexander

Now, I’m not going to get into the circumstances behind Damian’s conception because what the whole hell, there is absolutely no consistency there. Various people are very invested in one or another of the myriad versions of his conception that DC has repeatedly retconned and revised, generally leaning to whichever one fits their preferred personal narrative, and that’s fine but objectively? Absolutely no consistency, situation unclear. So let’s just go with “Damian resulted from this mess.”

In Batman and Robin #0 we see that Talia basically raised him the way Ra’s raised her… with some major deviations. She used his desire to know his heritage and know his father’s name as the carrot to motivate him to succeed, rather than the fear of death and pain as a stick to punish him for failure.

Talia does not kill her son, whom she duels with wooden blades rather than steel. And she is not shown to physically abuse him… aside from the swordfights, which of course is already bad.

Mind you, I’m not denying that his upbringing is still brutal. What I’m saying is, placed in the context of her own upbringing we can see that she was trying to raise him with more kindness and greater love than her father had her – an improved parental style, but still reflective of the only style she, herself, has ever known.

So it’s predictable that he’s essentially mistreated… because she literally has never encountered an emotionally healthy relationship and wouldn’t know how to raise him any differently even if she wanted to.

But it’s also remarkable because despite that, you can see she is trying to be a better mother than Ra’s was a father, and not let Damian grow up feeling unwanted and unworthy the way she did, herself.

Unlike Ra’s, she never tells Damian he is insufficient – on the contrary, she holds him up as the chosen, a conqueror, and dreams of a future when he will lead with both parents at his back. Remember, this is a woman who was never seen as worthy of inheriting Ra’s al Ghul’s organization, and she wants to make sure Damian knows the world is his to hold. The bit about having both parents is important, too, because per Batman Inc, Talia felt deprived of her mother, whom Ra’s had discarded as soon as she was no longer useful to him.

In short, she does for Damian everything she wished Ra’s had done for her.

But, in so doing, she falls into many of the same traps that Ra’s had fallen into: she doesn’t provide what Damian wants, or even what he actually needs. Instead, she gives him what he asks for, and what she thinks he needs. But for someone who grew up without love, trying to understand how to provide it is complicated, and difficult.

Anyway, when Damian finally defeats her, she fulfills her promise and brings him to meet Bruce. This involves a last ditch effort to unite their family: she offers to reform.

But not only does Bruce reject her, ultimately Damian does, as well. This is, from Damian’s perspective, completely understandable. Who wants to live that kind of life? But from Talia’s perspective she has now been rejected by her own child, in addition to her father and the man she hoped to spend her life with. You can see the raw hurt this causes her clearly, as a woman who had always yearned for family starts having exchanges like this:

And while we’re at it, count Honor as another person who left her.

And to be clear here, I’m not saying they were wrong to leave her. Rebirth Talia is not a good person, not a kind person, not really anyone I’d want to willingly hang around. And yes, she’s clearly manipulating Honor with her affectionate words, although I’d argue this is largely because manipulation is all she's ever experienced and all she knows how to do.

So, what am I saying?

Interlude and Sum II - Why Is She Like That?

Just to catch it all up, we have a woman who was abused by her father, including being repeatedly murdered and resurrected, treated as inferior and insufficient despite being Ra’s’ equal or superior in many ways, who spent her young life performing assassinations and otherwise conforming her behavior to her father’s demands only to discover he was creating alternate heirs because she’s somehow still not enough for him. She has never experienced love, seemingly has no real understanding of what it is.

When she settles on someone she believes that she loves, she is ultimately nothing to him but a “whoever” - a temporary respite from the yo-yo relationship he has with another woman.

Then Damian happens and, from her perspective, she raises him with all the love, pride and approval that she herself never had. In an effort to unite the family, she also attempts to do what would please Ra’s - conform her behavior to Bruce’s preferences - but he still rejects her.

Meanwhile, she has “adopted” Honor Guest, whom she also shows favor to, but who also wants to leave her, and ultimately does just that, without even saying goodbye.

And then we have some. Quirks in her story - some specifics that really bear looking at in greater detail.

Repeated murder and resurrection: So how bad is that? It’s bad. The first time Talia experiences this kind of thing is in Death and the Maidens, which is probably no longer canon. But okay this was Classic Talia and for comparison, this breaks Talia’s spirit so completely that she essentially becomes Nyssa’s puppet.

She is literally never the same again, even after Nyssa is killed. In fact, it’s this that turned her into the monstrous Talia that we meet in Morrison’s run to begin with, so we already know she can be broken by this kind of treatment… but let’s use another example.

Let’s use… Batman.

He’s got one of the strongest wills in DC, right? Well, lets rewind to a story called Emperor Joker, where the Joker attained Mr. Mxyzpltck’s omnipotent powers which he uses to repeatedly torture and murder Batman and resurrect him every day.

This completely destroys Bruce to the point where the Spectre has to erase his memory of it in order to make Bruce functional as a person again.

So imagine that happening to Talia, as a child, at her own father’s hands. And not for days, for years. And that’s without even considering the method of resurrection, which brings us to…

Lazarus Madness: Let’s talk about the Lazarus Pit. It’s a magical mystical ley line-powered bath that resurrects and heals. We all know that. But the thing is, that’s not all it does: it also drives the one bathed or healed mad. For a short time, they become superhumanly strong, and also overtaken with violent bloodlust. The first Lazarus pit was used to resurrect a sultan’s son, who promptly murdered Ra’s al Ghul’s wife Sora. Since then, Ra’s himself has been the primary beneficiary of its benefits, with interesting results… namely that Ra’s has been slowly going mad for centuries.

Because even though the intensity of the bloodlust and madness fades, it never completely disappears, and cumulative effect eventually twists a person’s nature beyond recognition. In his first life, Ra’s was a good-natured doctor, but over the many exposures he has found himself becoming progressively worse.

A quote from Denny O’Neil, Ra’s’s creator:

“...we gave Ra’s a benevolent motivation. You can certainly quarrel with his methods ... But Ra's is a loony bird. He’s been alive for 400 years and he’s become a maniacal sociopath.”

Dick Grayson concurs, and acknowledges its cause:

Even Ra’s himself is aware of it – this is why he didn’t want Jason bathed in the Lazarus Pit, because he is all too aware of the demons it stirs in a person.

So, what is the impact on Talia, who is quickly and repeatedly tortured and killed, and then resurrected using a method that is known to drive people insane? I’m going with “not the best.” It’s frankly astounding that she still resembles a human, psychologically.

Assassin work at a young age: While there has been a long-standing debate about the effects of exposure to violence on all people and children in particular, in general the consensus is, yes, exposure does cause desensitization. Obviously this doesn’t mean people are going to generally become serial killers because they played a violent video game, but it does have a numbing effect – just think about how people who watch enough horror films are harder to scare with horror films.

Now imagine that, instead of watching people murder and commit violent acts on television or on film, a child is instead expected to perform said acts themselves. How desensitizing would that be?

Frankly, to see all we need to do is look at Damian, who grew up under similar circumstances and, as a result, initially exhibits what I can only call red flag behavior.

The thing is, Damian isn’t so dissimilar from his mother in this regard. Like Talia, he becomes morally twisted, emotionally empty and ultimately tethered not to his own sense of morality or self but to other people’s perceptions and demands of him and who he should be. Before he meets Bruce, he adheres to the League’s expectations, and when he meets Bruce, he instead aligns himself with Bruce’s code of behavior, even though he does not actually believe in it. It takes a good deal of time and work for him to begin developing his own beliefs and boundaries. The difference between Damian and Talia is that he had Bruce and Bruce, despite his flaws, loved Damian enough to try for his sake.

Arguably, this is a defining difference between Classic and Rebirth Talia, as well. Classic Talia also viewed Bruce as her beacon and her path to salvation and hope.

But if, in Rebirth, Bruce never really loved her, and in fact she barely loved him, then there is no catalyst for her to begin seeking another path. Rebirth Talia didn’t have anything but the League, and even Ra’s barely cared for her. As a result, she was boxed into her role by fate, which she acknowledges in Teen Titans, as she wishes better for her son than she had herself.

Anyway, obviously, there are no studies on the effect of taking assassin work as a child, but my general guess here is that she has a twisted understanding of the value of life and the significance of death. Which brings me to another massive issue that permeates the character and may even help explain her choice to put a hit on Damian at one point.

Death as Optional: Death is an inevitability, right? Like taxes. Nothing you do can prevent it, or reverse it, so all you can do is live with it, and make the most of what you have. It’s said that the existence of death is what lends meaning to life, and while I’m not sure I’m quite on board with that, the fact that death is permanent certainly does lend a certain gravitas to it. It’s also the reason we fear death and what lies beyond it.

Unless you’re an al Ghul.

For an al Ghul, death is opt in. Because Ra’s is essentially immortal (which is also a new thing, by the way) and because Talia herself has been repeatedly resurrected, as has her brother Dusan (assuming he’s still in continuity post-Rebirth), to Talia death has no weight to it. No gravitas. It is easily doled out, and just as easily forced into retreat.

Given that, it becomes exceptionally easy to threaten death, even to those she loves, because there’s nothing to say she can’t change her mind and take it back.

Now to be clear, my argument is not that she had the intention of taking it back – she didn’t really intend for Damian to die to begin with for one thing. It’s just that, because of who she is and what she has experienced, Talia would always act with the knowledge that she can choose to endanger someone’s life and think about whether she’s comfortable with the result (their being dead) later.

This is evident in both Ra’s and Talia, each of whom are willing to use death and resurrection as a tool to restructure people they don’t even want dead, as Ra’s attempts to do with Damian and Talia, and as Talia does with Honor Guest.

…as a sidenote can I just say that the Lazarus Pit’s effects are so weird. In some stories it can’t resurrect at all, and in others it can resurrect after decades without a problem. In some it just reduces age, and in some it also heals memories. Here it’s being used to erase memories, which makes no sense since a Pit his how Jason Todd got his memories back. Also, this is the first I’ve ever heard of al Ghuls having especially strong resistance to the Pit’s corrosive effects on personality. Considering it’s just a bunch of chemicals on a ley line, I’m not sure how that would work, but now I’m just imagining Ra’s with a book of Lazarus recipes like, Well, I’m needing one that restores memories today so Ima add an extra pinch of ginko.

ANYWAY.

V. “R” Stands for Redemption

There was a time, a few years back, when Damian had his own series, Robin: Son of Batman. And therein, you see one of the few efforts to explain and redeem Talia’s character. There, while she was still presented as colder and more aggressive than her Classic counterpart, she was still capable of compassion, protectiveness and love.

It was essentially explained as a result of her being cleansed of the toxin that was Ra’s al Ghul’s influence, via having darkness physically removed from her body.

Now, to be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about that particular route – I feel like it would have been more honest to have her resurrection heal the Lazarus damage, for example, but it’s a start. And, in the end, Damian left her with the chance to redeem herself and earn back his and Bruce’s trust.

Aaaand she has failed. Or more precisely, writers have failed to follow up on this thread, and have instead doubled down on her as the evil Dragon Mother. I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what’s going on with DC’s fixation on evil Asian ninja moms but I’m just going to… pretend that isn’t a thing in order to suggest some paths that could salvage her character.

I’ve seen it said that she’s been too evil for too long to be redeemed, but honestly that’s pretty silly. First of all these are comic books, anyone can be redeemed. The same writer who wreaked havoc on Talia also had Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, going full Nazi on humans, which was incredibly out of character, and Marvel basically fixed it by saying “guess who that wasn’t? Magneto. It wasn’t Magneto.” Technically DC could just Hal Jordan her, or let the rumored upcoming continuity shuffle bring her previous history back. As for the “been this way too long” argument, I mean she was Original Flavor Talia for more than twice as long and that wasn’t too long for DC to flip her entire motivation and personality. Catwoman was a villain for decades, and yet here she is, protecting people, making out with Batman on rooftops and leaving him at the alter for altruistic reasons. Same with Ivy, except for the parts about Batman, soooo… you know….

Anyway. I’m going to work with the assumption that we have to use what we have, and that we’re trying to get her to something like her pre-Morrison personality.

The first thing she would need is the experience of love. Someone to anchor her, who won’t judge her or abandon her even when she’s in a dark mood. Even when she’s showing her pain and her anger. Someone who recognizes how broken she is, but decides to try to help her rather than rejecting her. Someone who, in essence, will do for her what Bruce did for Classic Talia, and what he does for Damian in his flawed way.

Now, I’m a massive Bruce/Talia shipper, no lie. However, I do not think Rebirth Bruce and Talia have the kind of connection that could provide her this essential first need. Someone like Superman or Wonder Woman would probably be a better choice, simply because they have greater warmth of character and a drive toward helping lost souls.

After that, she would need some good old fashioned redemption time. Maybe a miniseries where she goes Xena on the world: a redemption quest. Maybe joining a team like the Outsiders or the Suicide Squad where she can earn her way back from the brink. The Outsiders would be cool, especially, because it would allow Bruce and Damian to monitor her and judge her as she progresses.

…and I mean, from a character perspective that’s all she really needs. From a writing perspective, she needs a writer who will nail down things like where Damian came from without going back to the drug-and-rape well, which was a retcon to begin with and has been retconned out and then back in over and over again. And most importantly, she needs a writer who has the interest in exploring her internal world to the point where they can actually draw these things out of her instead of just ignoring the fridge-horror implications of things like… the way she was raised.

If we could get these things to coincide, then Talia, too, can be saved!

Or we could just reboot the timeline again, whatever.

Anyway, that’s all folks, thanks for reading this far, I have no idea how you did. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, feel free to drop me a line and ask me… whatever, because God knows I have plenty to say about Talia and about comics in general.

In closing, something to remind us of the character we’ve lost.

Until next time!

#talia al ghul #meta #dc comics #dc rebirth #batman #damian wayne

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bigskydreaming · 5 years

Text

And another thing!

Can we like, just collectively fuck offffffff with this whole ‘the natural opposite to Bruce’s abusive relationship with Jason is Jason having a warm, nurturing relationship with Talia after she adopts a pseudo maternal role with him when she dumps him in the Lazarus Pit’?

This trend has kinda been around forever, but I feel like its been popping up in like, every Jason-centric fic I read lately, and uggggh, dislike. Look, I actually feel no desire to defend Bruce and his parenting, ever. I try and go with AUs and canons like Young Justice where he’s like, Bad At It, but not to the point of the absolutely toxic abusive shit he’s guilty of in various writers’ runs in the comics, but that’s just because I want his kids to have nice things and his kids all at least WANTED Bruce to be a good father at one point. But if your take on Bruce is that he’s abusive despite his best intentions and the best thing for any one of his kids is to move on and get the hell away from him, I’m not gonna argue with you, or try and defend him in the slightest. I will read the fuck out of that, happily.

Until you try and pretend Talia’s not...just as bad?

Like, okay, I have complicated feelings on Talia, mostly because the shared universe nature of comics makes it impossible not to. She’s an extremely nuanced and complex character and has been for decades, which means I really enjoyed her and found her every bit as compelling as Bruce, until....Morrison happened. And I loathe Morrison’s dumbass writing and try and pay it as little heed as possible, so wherever possible, I go with one of the takes or canons or AUs where Bruce and Talia had fully consensual sex and she just never told him about Damian til later, because I will never ever ever excuse the date rape interpretation of Damian’s conception. And I’m fully aware that it was written that way largely BECAUSE Morrison’s a dumbass and most likely didn’t think through the full implications of what he probably just saw as an expedient way to give Bruce a longlost kid he knew nothing about, or how it would throw Talia’s character under the bus. It’s different with Dick and Tarantula, because Catalina didn’t have those decades of prior characterization and attachment, her agenda was pretty clear from not long after she debuted. (Although, we gotta talk about how just like with the aggressive man of color stereotype, the only times comics show a man being raped by a woman, its a woman of color. Pin in that for now).

So I mean, I don’t automatically write off Talia unless we’re dealing with a fic, AU or run in canon that clearly expresses its going with the version of events where she date raped Bruce. I vastly prefer being able to still enjoy her as the compelling equal and foil to Bruce that she was for a long fucking time before that.

But even with that, the idea that she’s a superior parent to Bruce and a convenient candidate to step into the void he leaves in any of his sons’ lives, let alone Jason, and just...Do Better....umm...how about could we not?

Like, YMMV obviously, but to me the entire point of Talia in the context of her relationship with Bruce has always been she and Bruce are as alike as they are at odds. Selina and Bruce, the appeal of their romantic dynamic is they’re opposites. Talia and Bruce....they have far more in common than they don’t. They have different goals, different lengths they’re willing to go to, they’re not the SAME by any means, but they understand each other in a way few other characters do, because deep down, they always GET why the other one does what they do.

So I mean, I’m not saying Talia is inherently WORSE than Bruce, I’m just arguing that even with all of Bruce’s flaws, she’s usually not any BETTER. Like...its pretty much a lateral move.

Sure, you could easily WRITE Talia as being a loving maternal figure to Jason or Damian or anyone....but just the same as you could write Bruce being a healthy paternal figure to them. The potential is there in either character, depending on what takes in canon you choose to focus on and you clarify where and in what ways you’re diverging from any takes where they both devolve into outright abuse of their kids. Because both definitely have, and thus, you don’t get to just....handwave away any problems with Talia’s character (and parenting) and default to her as this superior parental figure on the basis that hey, she’s not Bruce.

Like, okay....you want to write Jason moving on from Bruce and rejecting his attempts to reconcile because he’s come to view Bruce as having essentially raised them all to be child soldiers? I WILL TOTALLY BACK YOU ON THAT. I mean, the dude’s memorial to his SON, was a case containing his uniform and a plaque that said A GOOD SOLDIER. Case made, you know? Not one fucking argument from me. Your take is valid, and Jason’s complaint has my full backing.

But here’s the thing....if your fic does NOT significantly diverge from canon prior to Damian’s joining the rest of the Batfam, if it does NOT show Damian having a WILDLY different upbringing than he did in all versions of canon, and by extension, resulting in Damian having at least a somewhat different approach to interactions, worldview, mannerisms and ideology.....

Then no matter what relationship you craft between Jason and Talia, you are STILL swapping out his parental figure - who he resents for raising him as a child soldier - for another parental figure, who LITERALLY RAISED HER KID AS A CHILD SOLDIER.

Like, hellooooooo? Any take where Damian grew up in the League of Assassins without Talia objecting to him being trained with them or getting him the hell out of there, is a take where Talia literally does the exact same thing you’re holding against Bruce on Jason’s behalf. (While, I might add, ignoring that while Tim at least was well into his teenage years by the time Bruce became his mentor, Dick, Cass and Damian ALL have this child soldier upbringing in common with Jason. It really doesn’t work to single Jason out as the only one who was victimized by their parent in this way).

But okay. Let’s say you’ve got an explanation for Damian’s upbringing or have written that differently. If you’re going with the take that Jason has a connection with Talia now because Talia’s the one who put him in the Pit and either brought him back to life or restored him to full coherency, then almost inevitably (because you COULD do this differently, but I’ve yet to see a take where a writer DOES)....you’re also going with the take that before coming back to Gotham, Jason trained with the League of Assassins, and this is how he was so competent by the time he went up against Bruce and the others, given that he wasn’t nearly as skilled back when he died at age fifteen.

And it really, really, REALLY bugs the fuck out of me that people so rarely spend much time or focus looking critically at Jason’s time with the League of Assassins, and how that contributed to his ideology and methodology as the Red Hood.

And this is a complaint I have both with fics/writers/headcanons that are pro-Jason and anti-Jason.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I honestly don’t have a problem with Jason’s initial return to Gotham. Like, he can murder the fuck out of every rapist and crime boss he wants, I’ll be in the stands holding the OMG LOOK AT MY BABY, LOOK HOW GOOD AT MURDERING ASSHOLES HE IS sign and doing high kicks up and down the bleachers.

But ESPECIALLY if your take on Bruce and his raising of Jason is that he was abusive and trained him as a child soldier.....it absolutely IMO does not work to overlook the role the League of Assassins...and by extension Talia....played in shaping the man he was when he first returned to Gotham.

And they abso-fucking-lutely played a role.

Because Jason is not Bruce, was never going to be Bruce, was always going to clash with Bruce’s ideology in ways even Dick never did, especially when it came to killing. Even before Jason died, it was very well established that they did not see eye to eye there and likely never were going to. It IS part of Jason’s core characterization that he fundamentally disagrees on the subject of killing criminals, the worst of the worst. Whether you think he actually killed Felipe Garzonas before Bruce benched him, or whether you think he didn’t, or that it was an honest accident...this was a hard line they were always going to end up on opposite sides of, and that inevitably was destined to create at least SOME kind of divide in the family.

But thing is, arguing that its okay to kill a serial rapist they have evidence that should convict him, but who keeps getting away with it because of diplomatic immunity and legal loopholes that show how ineffective a corrupt justice system is.....is NOT the same thing as arguing even to kill a murderer in the name of avenging your son that he murdered.....and even THAT is still along way away from.....

tossing eight heads in a duffel bag down onto a table in the middle of a meeting of local crime bosses as an intimidation tactic.

Felipe? That was Jason’s own personal thoughts and morality, his own perspective on right and wrong at work there, 100% him. The Joker? That was a natural, easy to follow extrapolation of those same thoughts and perspective and how they might change and grow as a result of the trauma of what the Joker did to him and how it affected him.

But Jason’s tactics when he first came back to Gotham weren’t either of those things. They were textbook League of Assassins methodology and justification.

And its just fucking WEIRD to discount that when examining his character and how he changed from the Robin he was to the Red Hood he became.

Like, even with varying canon takes, the youngest Bruce took Jason in at has him at about twelve. He wasn’t a trained acrobat like Dick, he was a malnourished street kid with none of the head start on his training that Dick came to Bruce with, already having it under his belt. Everything Jason knew how to do as Robin, the detective work, swinging around Gotham on grappling hooks, various martial arts forms and mastery of weapons....Bruce had to train him in all that from scratch, and that took time. Jason was at the earliest still only like 13 or so when he became Robin. And pretty much every take I’ve ever seen on his death has him at around fifteen when the Joker killed him. That’s two, at most three years of time spent training and being Robin, under Bruce’s tutelage.

Then things split into two takes....some go with the sequence of events where Ra’s or Talia take Jason’s body right after his funeral and put him in the Lazarus Pit, others go with the sequence where he was resurrected on his own, and was found by Ra’s or Talia a year or two later, still largely catatonic, with them putting him in the Pit to heal his mind the rest of the way.

But either way, by the time Jason comes back to Gotham he’s put at around nineteen or twenty, with it usually said that it was five years after his death, and AT LEAST two or three of those years were spent training with the League of Assassins, or with other teachers thanks to Ra’s or Talia’s patronage.

So.....any way you cut it, if you’re going with a take where Jason’s skills post-Robin come from training with the League....he spent at LEAST as much time being trained by them, with their perspective, in their methods, according to their philosophies....as he spent being trained in all that by Bruce.

There is no angle here in which they didn’t play EVERY BIT as much of a role in shaping him as the man he resents for raising him as a child soldier! With it also largely unacknowledged that even WITHOUT the effects of Pit Madness from the Lazarus Pit, you’re talking about a KID, someone who was either fifteen or at most seventeen by the time the League started training him....who is recovering from a trauma the likes of which pretty much nobody can even comprehend. While nursing a massive grudge and resentments born of insecurities and issues that carried over from his fucked up childhood from even BEFORE he met Bruce, and that Bruce absolutely failed in addressing.

Again, no matter how you look at it, we’re talking about an extremely traumatized and impressionable and suggestible minor, desperate for anything to hold onto, any ideology to grasp hold of, any justification to make sense of all the shit that’s happened to him and where he goes from here, a purpose, a way to move FORWARD.

Like.....I’m all for Jason resenting Bruce raising him as a child soldier. What I DON’T get, is neither him nor anyone writing him in this way displaying the same awareness of the fact that....the League literally raised him to be a child soldier after he was brought back.

Same shit, different generals. That’s it. But again, that’s not an upgrade! That’s not better for Jason! That’s not an improvement over Bruce! It’s literally a lateral move!

And if your take includes ANY aspect of Talia training or overseeing Jason’s training to help him get back at her ex, someone she definitely has issues with at the time, no matter what canon or existing adaptation you’re going with.....you’re talking about someone literally weaponizing a traumatized teenager against her ex.

Ummm. Yeah. We’re just....not gonna call that better for Jason, or healthier for Jason, or in any way, shape or form to JASON’S benefit, okay? Cuz its not. No matter what his issues with Bruce, no matter what your issues with Bruce as a reader or writer, no matter where you fall on the ‘is killing bad people bad, y/n’ spectrum.....it is just deeply WRONG to just generically write Talia as forming a maternal bond with Jason WHILE he’s being trained by the League she holds enormous influence over, even if not as much as her father.....and act like this is the opposite of Bruce and how he failed Jason. Instead of just more of the same.

Like sorry not sorry Talia, but if you actually give a shit about Jason when he comes out of the Pit all traumatized and chock full of issues....you put him in fucking THERAPY, not How To Be An Assassin and REALLY Get Back At Your Dad 101.

And it doesn’t have to be that way, to be clear. You can write Talia taking off with Jason and toddler Damian in the middle of the night, abandoning the League of Assassins to take both of them far away and hide them so Jason can heal and cope and find himself and Damian can grow up not learning how to poison people by age five. You do that, all my objections vanish, THAT is infinitely superior to Bruce’s parenting, and that’s a parental bond with Jason I can happily stan as being for his benefit and to his betterment.

But no fic where he debuts as the Red Hood with years of League training under his belt has that. And this oversight is realllllly starting to get on my nerves, lol.

Again, from both sides of the Jason camp, pro and anti alike.

Cuz if you’re a Jason fan for any reason, no matter whether you’re in favor of him reconciling or bonding with any or all of the Batfamily or not, why WOULDN’T you want them acknowledging that who he is now and what he’s done as the Red Hood has every bit as much to do with the skills the League gave him and the philosophies the League taught him as it does with what he learned from Bruce? That he was conditioned in these things while in a highly vulnerable point in his life?

And if you’re not a Jason fan, no matter the reason, it is again, STILL a massive oversight not to acknowledge that his actions and agendas as the Red Hood stem from years of being trained as a teenage assassin while in a highly vulnerable and thus suggestible state and with a clear lack of other options or support systems to counter anything they taught him.

Like I said, I’m pro Red Hood, I love Jason, I agreed with him back when he was arguing with Bruce about Felipe Garzonas. Jason’s never targeted anyone but the worst of the worst and he’s always displayed an ability to see reason and back down, he’s not some mindless killing machine. I lean way more towards his philosophies than I do Bruce’s, even if I don’t always agree entirely, and part of my point here is like...this isn’t about judging Jason for his actions or like, ugh, I really like Jason but I think he’d be even better if he was less murder-y, you know, more like Dick.

But like...the rest of my point is that I just honestly don’t see Jason’s actions and professed ideologies as one hundred percent HIS natural perspective, not influenced to an unhealthy degree by others in a position to take advantage of him at more vulnerable times in his life and sway him more to their positions. And THAT’S my problem with how little people reflect on the role the League played in who he became, AND with the insertion of a maternal and nominally supportive bond with Talia that’s written as being superior and more to Jason’s benefit than anything he shared with Bruce.

LOL even when I don’t mean to, like I definitely didn’t when I started this post, I always seem to keep coming back to how alike Dick and Jason and their stories are and how well and how often they parallel each other, because its the exact same issue I have with Dick. They’re just a very easy way to point out certain things about the other.

Like, I’ve talked before about how I think Dick’s aversion to killing, not when others kill but when HE himself is presented with killing as an option - its really just him being terrified of disappointing Bruce and being abandoned by him if he does so, no matter that he’s an adult now. Because I DO agree and always have, that at the very least, Bruce was at times emotionally abusive with Dick and Jason at least, with a strong case to be made for Damian as well. (Tim’s harder to gauge given that most of his time under Bruce’s direct care was at a time when Bruce was overcompensating for all the things he missed with Jason and blamed himself for, and ever since Jason’s return, Tim’s written as being so independent and removed from Bruce’s influence that its more like Bruce rarely has the OPPORTUNITY to fuck things up with Tim to the degree he has with his other sons.)

Sorry. Digression. Point being, like, I do fully agree with the interpretation that Bruce’s rigid moral code and how forceful and insistent he was on imprinting it on Dick, Jason and Damian has at times been emotionally abusive, and I think the effect of that is most clearly demonstrated with Dick, due to the simple fact that Dick has spent more time under Bruce’s care and tutelage than all the others combined.

So my problem with Dick’s aversion to killing and how its so often hyped up in canon and in fanfics as him being so like Bruce in this regard, or just a Boy Scout, or ‘too good’ or ‘too pure’ to ever kill, at least not without it ‘breaking him’....that’s got nothing to do with me wanting Dick to suddenly go all trigger happy and kill his enemies with no problem. It’s just because.....I don’t think its Dick’s moral code at work there. I think its Bruce’s, and the way Dick’s written sticking to it without any self-analysis of where it came from and WHY he clings to it so rigidly, I view as evidence of conditioning due to how he was raised. With Dick so focused on other areas where he pushed back against Bruce he’s never really realized that how thoroughly Bruce influenced him in this regard flew completely under his radar.

It’s not that I want Dick to kill more, its that I want his choice to kill or not to be based on HIS choices, HIS morality, and not just a kneejerk response to conditioning he’s never recognized as such because who doesn’t have blinders on in regards to parts of our childhoods, you know?

And then circling back to Jason, I went on that tangent to emphasize its the exact same thing there, just in reverse. It’s not even that I DON’T want Jason to kill his enemies, to have the same philosophy or ideology or methods as Bruce or Dick or Tim. It’s that I want his choice to kill or not to be based on HIS morality, as the result of conclusions he came to after having the time and space and distance to separate himself from his various teachers and surroundings and decide for himself just what it is he believes, what choices and instincts are his naturally, organically, and which ones are leftover from his training by the League, drilled in by his instructors - just as he’s taught himself to recognize when his old training and lessons from Bruce are kicking in.

Anyway.

tl;dr - Bruce sucks and is a terrible parent but lolololol unless you’re going well off the beaten path from canon and faaaaaar away from where the League of Assassins can get their hooks in Jason to any degree, like...Talia is not better. Let Jason be Jason, not just a child soldier raised by your general of choice and aimed in the general direction of philosophies you agree with more than their opposite.

#abuse cw #rape cw

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