#aaaaa thank you so much for the follow & i hope this works okay!! <333

[aletheialed]

"What do you think, Daddy?"

Trucy's voice sounds so innocent and earnest, but if you look closely, there's strong hint of mischief hidden behind her smile as she shows Phoenix the letter she's holding in her hand. To be precise, it's a love letter, signed anonymously, one that Trucy found mysteriously addressed to her only this morning.

And what would be a better idea than showing Phoenix? Honestly, Trucy doesn't know how he might react at all, but she's sure it'll be well worth seeing his reaction. She is his darling daughter, after all. Though maybe there's a part of her... that's genuinely curious as to his thoughts on it all, too.

"To be honest, I'm not very impressed... but don't you think the effort they put in is worth responding to? I wonder who the writer might be?"

@lawbnd ( starter! )

[susiecarter]

thank you so much for your wonderful reply to my ask about the wips!❤️ please believe me when i say i’m patiently looking forward to ALL of them! (especially the gq/croc eggbaby series omfggg!!! plus the superbat sequels and top gun big bang aaaaa!)

now i can’t lie, i am constantly eyeing ‘bvs was Bruce Wayne’s kinky coma dream’ because that line alone makes me madly curious! so if i had to pick one idea that i’d LOVE to know more about, it’s definitely that one! thanks a lot again for indulging me!!! ❤️

:D And you are too good to me, anon, I can ONLY HOPE they're each worth the wait in the end! <333 (The eggbaby series is totally growing a plot on me, which I'm praying does not careen out of control. :'D And the Superbat sequels will probably take me the longest, just FYI, but I hope the guarantee of the Top Gun Big Bang makes up for that! :D)

... Honestly, I sometimes forget that not everyone in the entire world has been witness to the great struggle that is BvS Was Bruce Wayne's Vaguely Kinky Coma Dream. :'D Basically, it's pretty much what it says on the tin: fresh out of the theater after seeing BvS for the first time, I found myself pretty firmly convinced that the theatrical cut of that movie makes a hell of a lot more sense if it's Bruce having a strangely prescient, kinky dream than anything else.

Consider the following:

The original theatrical cut of BvS had noticeably less of Clark's POV than Bruce's; the Ultimate Edition has several additional scenes of his investigation of Batman + Lois putting the pieces together and realizing he'd been set up to fail at the Capitol. Without knowing that, though, and having only seen the theatrical cut, I felt like Clark's side of the narrative was weirdly insubstantial, and he seemed a little extra distant, uninvolved, arbitrarily deciding to fly around all stonefaced and threaten Batman ... not unlike the way Bruce might plausibly see him/imagine him to be, in other words.

(Except, that is, when Clark's talking to his mother, and suddenly seems genuinely troubled, more real, warmer; as if, even doing his best to strip Superman of any humanity, Bruce can't manage to imagine a son talking to his mother without some whiff of love and meaning and comfort involved. ;-;)

I have no reason that I know of not to like Jesse Eisenberg, and he's a good enough actor that I'm confident he was doing exactly what he was directed to do, as well as it was possible to do it ... but if BvS is Bruce's dream, it makes fifteen times as much sense to me that Lex Luthor is so blatantly Joker-inflected! Like, of course he is; when Bruce's brain has to generate A Villain, naturally it goes straight for "clearly unhinged, laughs too much, desperately obsessed on a personal level", you know?

(Also, Bruce's kinky brain being in the driver's seat makes Lex delighting in having Clark on his knees on the roof actually secretly a matter of Bruce assuming everyone must want Clark on his knees and dreaming accordingly, which doesn't hurt anything. :'D)

Even in a dream, I don't think Bruce could ever go as far as giving himself the chance to save his own mother; that is both too self-indulgent and too implausible, and he'd reject it as unreal in a heartbeat. The best his subconscious can do is put somebody else's mother Martha in danger, and let him rush in and save her instead. ;-;

The blatant plot U-turn of "oh wait Superman was never the enemy! HANG ON, HERE'S A CONVENIENTLY WORSE ENEMY, let's team up with Superman to beat him!" also makes more sense to me if Bruce, like, needed on a subconscious level to beat Superman up, to prove to himself that he could, but never actually wanted to kill him. Therefore, as soon as he'd pulverized Clark to his own internal satisfaction and indulged the desperate urge to drag Clark around by the throat and put his boot on Clark's chest and (nearly) ~impale Clark his subconscious was soothed, and free to say "okay, now that we've worked through that, we can be friends with Superman, no problem :) let's save the day together!"

HOWEVER, Bruce is still Bruce! There are no true happy endings, in BvS!Bruce's head. The best his brain can do is let Superman die a hero, so Bruce a) was right to have changed his mind about him, b) never has to interact with him again or actually deal with/do anything about any of the shit he was working through via a half-hour-long kinky fight scene where he got to watch Superman gasp for breath in the rain on his knees, and c) gets to dedicate himself to doing right by Clark's memory (and he might, might, even mentally allow himself some hope of success, with Diana there to help).

Obviously this still leaves plenty of stuff to finagle! Why is Bruce's dream so long, so involved, and so weirdly accurate on certain points? I decided the obvious answer to this was my favorite answer to everything: the ship.

So BvS Was Bruce Wayne's Vaguely Kinky Coma Dream became an AU premise that approximated a time-travel fix-it, in which Bruce Wayne was badly injured during Black Zero (along with plenty of other people), and the ship detected that and connected itself to him (along with plenty of other people) to keep him suspended in an unconscious state while it repaired him. Bruce's kinky brain was driving, cast Clark as the villain until it didn't anymore, flavored everything with Bruce's impressions and expectations ... but the ship used its own data to supplement and stabilize the coma dream until he was physically ready to wake up again.

Which is to say: the ship knows Clark's name and Clark's mother's name, even though Bruce couldn't. It knows about kryptonite, even though Bruce wouldn't, not right at the end of MoS. And it also knows about its genesis chamber, its ability to create things like Doomsday if required to, and, of course, Apokolips—which means the Knightmare ALSO suddenly makes sense, not as Bruce being precognitive? being sent messages from an alternate dimension? who tf knows! but as the ship, aware of the actual Space Threat out there, trying to insert that Space Threat appropriately into the narrative ... only for Bruce's ridiculous stubborn subconscious to shove Clark right back into the middle of the Knightmare, still the bad guy. :'D

ANYWAY, yeah, so then Bruce was going to wake up from his Vaguely Kinky Coma Dream, having experienced BvS and his whole arc of coming to the understanding that Superman's not the villain inside of his own head, and knowing Superman is Clark Kent on top of it, and knowing the actual Lex Luthor is out there, possibly an issue, possibly intending to steal Zod's body and make Doomsday. And he himself would also have JUST EXPERIENCED Clark's death and Clark's funeral, and would be wanting, more than anything, to try to make sure Clark doesn't die this time. And he'd already be three-quarters in love with Clark, while Clark has absolutely no idea who the hell he is or why he seems to know random things about Clark/Kryptonians/the ship or why he seems so weirdly preoccupied with and sad about and protective of Clark–

I have had several thousand words of this thing drafted for literally years now. However, when I first started working on it, I didn't know shit :'D and all I had to go off of with Diana was BvS + some early WW trailers where her movieverse powerset wasn't totally clear. So I wrote some stuff that turned out to make no sense, and then stalled out trying to decide how I wanted to fix it, and then JL came along and gave me a new angle on where the plot should maybe go, and and and ...

... yeah. I've reworked bits and pieces of the outline several times, I finally have a pretty good idea how I want the full story to turn out, but I still haven't actually nailed all the pieces down in order, redrafted the early beginning sections, or, you know, written the rest of the darn thing. :'D

Anyway! That got super long, I'm so sorry, I don't blame you if you noped out of that about halfway through :D but yeah, for all the time that's passed, I'm still really stuck on the idea and still really enamored of everything I worked out about what to do with it and how I wanted it to go, so. I am definitely hoping to one day finish what is literally the first fic I ever started writing in this fandom. /o\ :D