#but yeah bruce is more than anything defined by the death of his own parents and the decision to become batman right | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

why-this-kolaveri-machi · 3 years

Text

chin fucking up, amigo.

Titans 3.02

... eh?

SPOILERS ahead.

1. you know that music video for billie jean where michael jackson would dance along the pavement and the tiles would light up under his feet in different colours? yeah? me too.

titans hasn’t met a table top or a support arch that it doesn’t want to light up in a headache-inducing blue like the world’s most boring nightlight. i mean, i’m not an expert on lighting or cinematography or just... colour by any means, and the quality of the video i’m watching is poor given that i can’t access hbo max, but all the orange and teal and neon is making it very difficult to really differentiate between say, the batcave and the gotham police department and hell, the titans tower. i feel like there’s oftentimes a gap between idea and execution with titans, with gotham being this almost otherwordly hellscape with an aesthetic pulled from a gothic horror novel, but the colours and design just... leave it flat and dark and dull.

1.5. like what really frustrates me is that titans has a delightful mix of tones--the fights often remind me of schumacher-era batman camp, with the contrived quips and the start-stop rhythm and krypto just sallying in and ending the fight with a fucking SuperBark (tm) but in the same episode you have red hood just casually pulling out severed heads out of a duffle bag and desperate people blackmailed into killing themselves out of drug overdoses. I MEAN. it’s wonderful! but it looks all the same. it sounds Absolutely Bonkers on paper but on screen both Quip and Murder happen in the same washed-out blue and i wanted to be excited about the batcave, dammit!

2. things re: red hood have happened at such a breakneck speed that it feels like there’s so much that’s happened off-screen that we’re not privy to. a real proper mystery!

things that are intriguing about the red hood arc so far:

a) what was that chemical he huffed just before going to fight the joker? is it a regular old performance/adrenaline booster or is it something more lazarus-juice adjacent? if it’s the latter, i can’t imagine he got that much information from a lone chemistry textbook. and where is he getting the resources to set up his little chemistry lab? is somebody else orchestrating things behind the scenes?

b) the red hood persona, costume and mask, plus the elaborate plan he’s putting in place to both string along gotham’s rogues and enact his revenge against the titans seems too... fully-formed and elaborate to have been concocted in just a few days. how long do you think jason’s been planning this? just... stewing in resentment and building rage, dismissed and passed around and underestimated and realising that the power he thought he would get by being robin is no power, no protection at all, but something that’s left him even more vulnerable than before?

c) do we think that the scarecrow is at least partly behind this transformation? because yes, it was batman that set up this whole hannibal lecter-esque situation with him, and he would be irresponsible enough to have jason-as-robin go talk to him regularly regarding “~profiling~” criminals. it’s not too far of a leap to assume that scarecrow could’ve been manipulating jason at a very vulnerable time, and that he could’ve passed along some of his chemistry know-how, too.

d) ... or fuck, i wouldn’t put it past titans to introduce ra’s al ghul in a fucking ten second aside

e) anyway, the thing that won’t leave me alone is jason seeking out the joker not necessarily to fight him, but to orchestrate his own death. the whole thing has to have been part of a bigger plan. he broke batman with it, after all. and he’s starting to break the titans, too.

f) i love it! i mean, it does re-tread some of the storybeats we had with deathstroke last season (turning the titans against each other as revenge, etc) but it’s... tighter, this time, and at least for now seems better-executed. and as a red hood story it’s different enough to be really interesting, and i appreciate the ways in which its reframed the revenge story to focus on the titans rather than just the batman. like fuck everything up, i say! turn it on its head! slash the innards out of that sacred cow and strew it like garlands in the path of the Story You Want To Tell!

(and yes i am fully aware that by the time i post this review, there will be a whole lot more information out but if i come across like a fool then goddammit i will be a fool!)

2. i love how every season of titans starts off with, ‘oh dick, you thought you were settling into a role and a life and a pattern of relationships? well fuck you, here’s a terrible and traumatic thing, tons more responsibility, and circumstances that will lead you to uproot your entire life and move somewhere else.’ and dick’s just like, ‘well, ok. fuck you, but all right’.

can you imagine? the man was just settling into leading a team in sf and smiling for the first time in years, and now he has to deal with jason’s death, bruce experiencing a full fledged breakdown, coming back to a city that represents more bad memories than good, red hood, and a frightening new case that seems to be targeting him and his team. it’s a testament to dick’s growth that he’s not reacting to this stress like he did last year, shutting everybody out, making irrational decisions and experiencing sharp, short bursts of anger. (not to mention a full fledged psychotic episode.)

2.5. but i’ve also talked about dick performing a fair amount of unwarranted emotional labour for his team(s) in that he just lets them take out their frustrations on him and... does nothing. be it his team exploding at him for jericho (both in flashback and present-day) or donna and hank needling him for handling deathstroke poorly or barbara berating him for not handling the bank situation as well as she thought batman would though just the previous episode she had talked about how fucked up it was that bruce just expected dick to step up and replace him in gotham without any real notice. i mean it’s all perfectly understandable and sympathetic from their end--and i’m not trying to bash them here!--but hank, my man, the same chin you’re asking your amigo to keep up is the one that you punched last year and never apologised for. just sayin’.

2.75. @superohclair did a wonderful breakdown of what the ‘fear’ contract could imply here and there’s not too much i could add to that. it’s just really interesting that fear ended up being such a defining feature of their lives, albeit it’s the fear of seeming less than invincible in the face of bigger, more tangible fears. am i making sense? dick feared loss, and abandonment, and the more existential concept of turning into something that he didn’t want to. bruce so feared being alone that he’s scouting kids to replace robin within days of jason dying.

it also goes some way in explaining the tense sort of... restraint that bruce and dick show in the wake of loss and tragedy, like anything less than complete control of your emotions can lead to tragedy. it’s conditioning that dick couldn’t shake off when he was at his lowest in detroit, hating his legacy but unable to let it go either.

2.775. but i definitely appreciate the softness that dick displays with his team now, checking on them after a mission-gone-bad, welcoming back old members with no caveats or resentments (and kory’s delight in seeing hank back! hank and dick hanging out together and hank trying to prop dick up!), and appreciating their teamwork in solving cases. that’s always been the essence of dick as a person, and the beating heart of this show: flawed and traumatised people coming together to a place that will always be open to them, where they can be their worst and be supported still, allowed to make mistakes and grow from them. that’s family.

2.8. coming back to bruce for just a sec, it’s interesting how that gotham rogue was so certain when he said that ‘batman doesn’t kill’ but it’s not a rule that either jason or dick put much store by when they were robins. the ‘no-killing’ rule clearly didn’t mitigate dick’s fears about turning into batman and jason’s never been seeing giving two shits about it. it seems to me of a piece with bruce’s distant, second-hand sort of parenting that we see in dick’s flashbacks from s1 where the fear was never about personally disappointing batman, but taking lessons from him on finding a place in gotham’s hellish ecosystem and surviving.

3. kory having waking flashbacks! i don’t buy the bullshit parasomnia episode explanation from fake!HPG (because c’mon, justin has to be some sort of tamaranean ruse) because for one, you have to be actually asleep for that diagnosis.

(and here i was, hoping against hope that HPG would actually end up as the team’s therapist)

curiouser and curiouser! i wonder if these flashbacks are from the time between kory landing on earth and the beginning of season 1, when she was completely amnesiac? it’d be cool if the show was considering repercussions from that time, and if kory hasn’t gained all her memories back.

4. i just love the vibes between gar and conner and kory. gar Having Things To Do is only one part of my wishlist for him, however: other parts include having an actual story arc, and actually bonding with members who are not conner and kory. (dick! dick! hank! dick!)

anyway. time to move on to watching ep3 and seeing this family bond and nothing terrible and tragic happening at all, nope, nosiree.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #dick grayson #jason todd #red hood #koriand'r #garfield logan #bruce wayne #his name is justin.#a byronic cupcake #a tragic jalebi #badass strawberry truffle #manic pixie pop tart

12 notes · View notes

olivarryprompts · 3 years

Text

Fanfic Friday #10

Welcome to Fanfic Friday! Each Friday I will post a new fanfic here and on A03. Enjoy x

Read and save it on A03 here

{peter stark and a no good very bad day}

Ship: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Tony Stark/Steve Rogers & Peter Stark

Warnings: swearing, fluff otherwise :)

Wc: 3,984

Today, everything had gone wrong. He stayed up way past his bedtime the previous night and had gotten barely three hours of sleep by the time he arrived at school. He forgot his Spanish homework in the lab and that was the one grade he needed to pull from an A- to an A. He chugged a couple shots of espresso, and his usual store on the walk to school was closed. Meaning he had no redbull to sustain him through his classes.

Also, guess which class was straight bangout first, Spanish. So he hadn't done the homework and had no time to do it. Great. Fortunately, he made it through first period Spanish, only getting slightly scolded for not handing in the assignment. Then he had a break, and the kid desperately needed a pick me up coffee and muffin. He went to the closest cafe, one he’d come to love, only to find the whole football team there. Which would have been fine, if he wasn’t so goddamn awkward. He stood there for a solid five minutes before he asked the jock in his way to move so he could order.

Then, when the kid did get to ordering they ran out of fuckin chocolate muffins. What kinda cafe runs out of chocolate muffins at ten am? This one apparently. So coffee and blueberry muffin in hand, he headed back to the student lounge to get some work done.

The next portion of his day went as planned, a welcomed change of pace. Well Flash was a bitch, but what was new there. And his senses were through the roof. But other than that. That was all until the last period. To start, he got a text from his boyfriend, explaining that he’d no longer be arriving this Friday, but instead the following Saturday. Peter wanted to cry. He missed his boy. Leaving Harley on read, he tried to focus on chemistry, but he’d done the stuff they were going over about 100 times with Dr. Banner. He zoned out the entire class.

Finally, the bell rang and put him out of his misery. He quickly texted Ned asking if he was coming in the following day. He had been sick that day. He went to leave, but the class was stopped by the announcement of a test and more homework. For fuck sake.

He did get out, though. And he got straight in the car, barely pausing to say hello to Happy. Noticing the boy's unusual quiet, he didn’t press for more details about Peter’s day. Happy, though he’d never say it, enjoyed hearing about the kids day. He had come to really care for Peter, and his accomplishments made the older man happy. Ironic, he knew.

They had arrived at the tower in almost record time, and Peter was glad to have avoided extra time in the car. What he really craved was a couple hugs from his dads, a chat with his boyfriend, and to get through the stack of busy work that weighed him down.

Happy went round to the private entrance, wished the kid a good day, and headed off to some other errand. Peter exited, scanning his pass at security and being recognized and let through by Friday. So, he’d finally made it upstairs and there the sofa was, filled with a few avengers. Luckily his parents were among them. The two were sitting close to each other, as normal.

Peter simply put his head in his pops lap, and he laid his feet on his dad. Neither Steve nor Tony said anything, but they gave each other the look. Steve ran his hands through his son’s hair lovingly. “Pete?” Tony asked, “What happened kid?” “Nothin’” Peter replied, still buried in his Pop’s lap. “You sure about that?” Steve pressed. “Just a bad day,” Peter mumbled. “What happened паук?” Nat spoke up. She is very protective of Peter. “What didn’t happen?” he sighed dramatically. “Well you mope for as long as you like, Pete,” Tony joked. “Thanks dad,” he said, closing his eyes again in search of sleep. “Teenagers I tell you,” Clint said, rolling his eyes. “Fuck you Barton,” Peter mumbled before falling asleep properly. “He really is your child, Tones,” Clint laughed. “Hey Peter just said a bad language word,” Nat remarked. “God I hate all of you,” his Pops groaned. Then Peter fell into peaceful, safe sleep.

“Pete?” his Pops said, entering his room. He moved around, noticing he’d been moved from the sofa to his own room. He groaned. “Hello to you too.” “Yes, Hi, father, Captain America, Leader of the Avengers, Man of Strengt-” “Ok relax,” Cap rolled his eyes. Peter sat up, smirking. “Wanna tell me what actually happened today?” “J-just everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong.” “Did that start with you staying in the lab way past a normal sleeping time?” “Perhaps. How did you kn-” “You are aware that your dad designed that whole lab situation, right?” “Fair enough.” “Do we have to initiate Insomnia protocol again?” “God no, it was one night.” “Promise.” “Swear. Just an awful day. Spidey senses all acting up, being annoying, no chocolate muffins. Speaking of which, can I have the day off tomorrow? I have basically no classes.” (he wasn’t sure why, but all but one of his classes were cancelled.) Steve thought for a moment. He knew the kid had been through a lot always, and a day off never hurt anyone. Also, he was far too smart to be there anyway. “Yeah. Let me just double check with Dad, okay?” “Thanks.” “We’re eating dinner now so get cleaned up?” “Yep. Coming.”

The next day

Peter awoke at 10 with a smile on his face. He’d peacefully regained energy. He’d finished his school work the previous night, and he was happy to just relax for a day. He pulled on some SI sweatpants and a hoodie he’d stolen from Harley awhile back.

“Hey parentals,” he greeted, still holding his smile. “Morning,” his Pops said as he cooked breakfast. “Morning? Is it already?” I bet you can guess who that came from. “Tones,” Steve said, voice full of its normal concern. Peter just laughed, taking a stool at the bar. “What? I’m fine. I’m having fun.” “You promised you’d at least take a nap.” “Oops,” he smiled, heading back in the direction of the lab. “You’re a great role model to our son!” “You really are dad!” Peter added. “Love you both dearly.” Steve rolled his eyes and Peter chuckled. “Where’s the rest of the team?” Peter inquired. He’d come to realize that saying team was easier than naming all the residents of the tower. “Nat, Clint, Wanda, and Pietro are training. Thor and Loki went back to Asgard last night, and Bruce is in his lab.” “Oh, Loki didn’t tell me he was going back.” “Some emergency. Sorry kid.” “Yeah, i-it’s fine.” “He told me to assure you they’d be back soon.” “Good.” “Keaner getting here soon?” “Nah coming tomorrow now. Something about something, I don’t really know.” “Ok. Made grilled cheeses and tomato soups. It's almost done,” Steve offered. “Thanks,” Peter said. “What’s with Loki leaving that's got you so down?” “I just miss him a lot.” Steve knew that his Kid and loki had come to get on surprisingly well. They were as close as he and Nat. Not even Clint had managed to get that close.

Peter practically inhaled a couple of sandwiches. “I’m going to go work with Dad.” “Have fun!” “I will.” “Love you.” “Love you, too.” He sped down to the lab, where he could hear his Dad’s ACDC blasting as usual. “Heyo, what you working on?” “The suit nanotech. Wanna give your old man a hand?” “Always. Bring up the blueprints. What adjustments have you made so far? “Just the molecule distance and expansion weight. Trying to help stabilize the structure.” “What about the build construction stacking?” So they dove into work, Peter easily keeping up with the genius.

“Nicely done, getting too smart for me. What are you even doing in high school?” “Being bored and failing my humanities classes.” “You're not actually failing your classes are you? Grades are not everything bu-” “Relax father, I’m doing well in all my classes.” “I should probably know that. In fact I’ll actually show up to your next parent teacher conference.” “Please don’t,” Peter smiled. His father was generally very embarrassing. “Friday, make sure I’m at the kid’s next conference?” “Reminder set.” “Thanks, Fri.” “Anytime boss.” “God Fri please remind me to not show up for my next conference.” “Heyyyy,” Tony said, faking offence. “Dad, you can be very overbearing.” “I know, but-” “No.” “Fine, guess I’m not coming. Trying to be a good father and parenthood isn’t for me.” “I beg to differ,” Steve said, coming in to check on us, “realise you're no match for Peter’s intelligence yet?” “No fucking way. I’m a genius. Many PHDs. Kid hasn’t even finished high school, plus he has an A- in Spanish,” Tony laughed. “How did you-,” Peter rolled his eyes. “Friday just sent them to me.” “You’re awful.” “Hey watch it, MIT is still your dream school?” “I fucking hate you so much,” Peter really did loved this kind of banter with his father. “Maybe I do agree that parenthood isn’t for you, love.” “Capsical, you are a traitor. You’re supposed to always be on my side.” Steve kissed Tony’s cheek and ruffled Peter’s hair before saying, “Pepper needs you. Something about important business.” “Really important?” “She says if you don’t come she’ll lock you out of the company.” “That important then. Fri, tell Pepper that I’m coming.” “She has been notified, sir.” “Thank you. Bye then, Peter don’t fuck anything up.” “The same to you Mr. Stark.” Tony left the lab with a chuckle. “You two will be the death of me.” “Almost certainly.” “You staying in here?” “Nah, I have some projects in my lab waiting for me.” “You know your dad was joking about the grades right? Because grades really don’t mean anything, and they don’t define you. Nor does your intelligence. You are so much more than all that. And all these suits and mechanicy genius things-” “Pops. I’m fine. I know,” he smiled at his dad. “I just read in this parenting book that something smart or gifted kids can feel like th-” “Pops, you and dad are the best parents a kid could ask for. Stop worrying too much or you’ll turn grey like dad.” Captain America just smiled at his kid because he was the best. “Right. Good. Have fun.” “Will do.”

He messed with the design for the 100th millionth time but he couldn't get the vibrainim to synthesize with the web fluid. “Fri, get me another cup of coffee, please.” “For fuck sake, why isn’t this working,” he said to himself. He began to mess with the 3d hologram again. He typed in Mock 32 for the design and started trying again. “Pepper Potts is requesting access to the lab.” “Access granted,” he said to Fri. “Hey Pete, how’s it going?” “Badly, but it's fine. IS THAT COFFEE?” “White mocha latte, triple shot espresso,” She said, placing it down on the desk. “Ok..back up. What do you need?” “What, I can’t just bring my favorite stark a coffee?” “Aren’t you busy?” he asked skeptically. “Yes. Incredibly. So it is a peace offering. I allowed a tour access to this lab to look around, and see what a higher ups lab looks like in action. Fri will hide all of the classified things, and I thought you’d be at school. Tony just told me you weren’t so, here we are.” “He actually showed up to your meeting?” “Yes, and it wasn’t my meeting. He just needed to be there, and I didn't.” “I take your peace offering. It’s fine, I don’t care. So long as they don’t touch my shit.” “Good. Greet them, let them look around. Smile your cute smile. They’ll be up in five.” “FIVE MINUTES?” “Yep. Sorry, Hun, got to run. Thanks.” “You owe me one!”

As promised, the class showed up in five minutes. He was fine with the concept of a class showing up, he was not, however, good with his class showing up. “Is that Penis Parker?” He heard Flash. “Holy hell that is Park?” “IS THAT PETER?” “Did Peter break in?” “How is Peter here?” He couldn’t exactly kick them out. So, embracing his inner Tony Stark charm and Steve Rogers kindness, he opened the lab door, stepping into the corridor.

“EVERYONE PLEASE BACK UP AND BE QUIET!” The tour guild, Aliah, yelled. They were a kind person who Peter knew a bit. The classes quieted down.

“Hello, Aliah.” “Hi Peter,” they greeted, “Sorry, I hadn’t realized you’d be in today. I’ll just take them to our next stop.” “No, no it's fine. If it’s alright, I’ll give them a little tour sorta thing. I don’t mind, plus I kinda promised Pepper.” “That’d be really cool. Thanks.” “Yeah. Call ‘em over.” “Yeah. We’re just waiting on their teacher, he’s in the restroom.” “Course.”

Mr. Harrington showed up, questioning Aliah about the next stop. Then, he saw Peter. “Mr. Parker!” he exclaimed angrily, “How dare you show up here without a permission slip and claiming to be sick. What is this? We will be speaking with the principal and your parents about this! I am so sorry Aliah. Peter shot Aliah the “I got this” look. “Hi Mr. Harrington, I was unwell this morning, but I felt better so I came into work. Yes, I do have an internship here,” he said, loud enough for the class to hear. “The next stop on your tour,” they said, “is to Peter’s lab. He’s been so kind to give us a run-down.” Peter simply point at the door which read “Lab #55: Peter Parker.” “Right, uh, um, sorry Mr. Parker, please let us continue.” Peter smiled through his nerves. “Right, hello there class! I will be giving you a tour of my lab. I do some pretty important work, so I’m going to ask Friday to activate the ‘Guest Protocol’ to hide the classified stuff. It’s also very dangerous, so please do not touch anything.” There were nods from the class. “Right, Fri complete guest protocol and allow tour of Aliah to enter.” “Yes miniboss.” He re-entered his lab. “So, most of the time I work here,” he said, pointing to the biggest holograph table, “I work on designs, changes, and any mockups that need to happen. I then make them a reality. I can also run simulations on any formulas to see if they would be successful.” “Fri, please pull up the WFV project I was just working on for Spiderman.” “Right away mini-boss.” “So as you can see I’m trying to get the vibranium intertwine itself with Spiderman’s web fluid. This would allow the webs to be almost 47 times stronger, and also would allow them to conduct electricity, which has many uses. Anyone have any questions?” Ava raised her hand and Peter nodded at her, “Hey, so how did you learn all this? Like, it seems really complicated and you're in my chem class, so.” “I’ve worked a lot with both Mr. Stark and Bruce Banner, who’ve taught me most of what I know throughout the years. I also took a few online courses to solidify some subject matters I didn’t quite understand,” Peter, satisfied with his answer, asked if anyone else had inquired. “How did you get an internship here?” “Mr. Stark found me on the internet and took a liking to my projects. He met me and decided I’d fit right in here,” Peter explained simply. It was a lie of course, but it functioned as their cover story. “Anyone else? No. Cool, so moving onto some other sections in the lab. Over in that corner are the testing rooms. I have some more equipment scattered around for certain projects or just overall help on making things. Feel free to look around for 5-7 minutes and ask any questions you may have.” Some kid, Peter wasn’t sure of their name, raised his hand. “Why do you have cars in here? Are they yours?” “Some of the cars are mine, courtesy of Mr. Stark, who claims no lab is complete without some collection of cars. I can’t even drive them, to your point, but I guess I will when I’m eighteen. Some of the cars are Mr. Harley Keener’s, who I occasionally share my lab with. He doesn't do Avengers related projects, but he does love to tinker here and there. ‘Specially on the cars. See that red one, yeah he bought it for 5k and fixed it up. It’s actually an electric car, he just likes the old timers look. Guess that’s on him and da-Mr. Stark.”

No one seemed to have any other question, so he allowed them to look around. MJ nor Ned seemed to be in this class. He guessed they were in another group that wasn’t coming up here, or they went to a different location.

The tour went smoothly, and Flash seemed too shocked to say anything. “Peter! Peter!” Bucky came in yelling. Peter ran over to him. “Please keep it down uncle Buck.” “Oh shit your class is here!” “Yes now please don’t embarrass me.” “Won’t do! Just wanted to ask where Loki went.” “Asgard official business,” I said with a frown. “Really? He didn’t say a thing!” “I know.” “That little shit.” Peter laughed alongside Bucky. “Did you need anything else?” “Yeah, my arm's a little fucked up. Need a hand.” “Happy to give it a look. Dad in a meeting?” “To all our shock, yes.” “Ha. Give me a sec to get my class outta here.” Bucky nodded. “Right everyone, thanks for visiting. Please head towards the exit. The lovely Aliah will take you to your next location. They are awesome!” A murmur of “thanks Peter” and “is that the winter soldier” spread through the room. “See ya round,” Aliah said to him personally, “And thanks for this.” “Anytime. Bye!” They smiled a warm smile before leading the class out.

“What’s not working so well?” Peter asked. “Just some tightness in the finger motion. “Alright, okay. Fri, get me an update of the schematics, please.” “Yes, sir.” They appeared on the holographic table Peter was working at. “Right, can I please get a current scan of Uncle Bucky’s arm?” “Yes. Shall I place them next to the schematics?” “Yep. And highlight all differences.” “Yes miniboss.” “You gotta stop with that Fri.” “Name unable to be changed under the authority of Tony Stank, Badass Boss, God of Mischief, and Fiance.” “Glad the whole team is against me living a good life,” Peter remarked with an eye roll. “You drama queen.” “Thanks,” Peter smiled. “You know what’s wrong yet?” Peter opened up the schematics, looking at the highlighted section of the 3d arm model. He didn’t speak for a moment. “So I reckon, you fucked up the wiring and section T4’s minigears. None of the important tech is messed up, it’ll be fine. Maybe a half an hour fix. Max.” “Good, good. Thanks kid,” Bucky said with an appreciative smile. He nodded, disconnecting the arm carefully. He placed it onto his table next to the holographic model. He gave a skeptical look. “Something bad?” “No, no, I was just thinking. Thinking, hmn.” “Care to share with the class?” Buck said with a sense of humor lingering in his voice. “Well, you’re not on mission all that often, and this is quite a bulky arm. Ever think about getting one that’s your skin colour, lighter weight, more, I don’t know, arm like. Less hydra murdery vibes. Help get rid of that, that time.” “I have…” “So can I make it?” Peter said excitedly. “You mean it?” “Of course Uncle Buck! No clue why dad hasn’t offered before!” “Guess he never thought of it. Maybe thought I liked the scary metal thing,” he suggested weakly. “Well that’s stupid,” Peter said casually. Bucky never understood how the kid could be so compassionate so easily. “Thanks. Really.” “No worries. I’ve been looking for a new project to throw myself into. It'll be fun. And as much as I hate to admit it, I need to work on my smaller scale mechanical work.” All Bucky could do was smile his beaming smile. “Bucky!” the voice of the Black Widow shouted. “Hey Nat,” Buck replied. “Wanna train?” she asked. “As much as I want to,” he said, pointing towards the area his arm would have been. “Oh, what happened this time?” “Nothing to major, some gears and wires,” Peter filled it, “Give me twenty minutes I’ll be done.” He’d already opened the arm and gotten to the section where the wires were screwed up. “DAN-E get me the soldering kit, please,” he asked the robot, “Oh and some new T6YU wires. Red and purple.” The robot gave a vaguely human nod. “Right, I'll be waiting. Test the adjustments out on me?” She suggested. “Alright,” Buck said. “Oh and I’m in charge of ordering food. What do you want?” “Burgers?” “You boring, bland little boy,” Nat scolded. “Thai?” Buck requested. They looked over to Peter, “Sure, yeah.” Nat headed out, greeting Tony with a “Hey Stank” on the stairs out of his lab. “Yours is so much smarter than mine, why is yours so much smarter than mine,” Tony fake (real) whined. “I’m the superior mechanic, father, deal with it.” DAN-E, almosting proving his point, dropped the materials on his desk, and he continued to work. “I’m donating DUM-E,” Tony glared at him, “What happened to the arm Buck?” “Stiff fingers isall.” “Oh, ok. Pete, need a hand?” “Nah, I’m good. Not much to do. Some wires got fucked up, just replacing them now. Going to look at the minigears in the palm too, just to make sure the oil regulation and gear’s aren't broken. I think one of the gears is, but it's one of them that's easy to replace,” Peter replied, not looking up from his work. “Right, sounds good. Your pops and I are going out for the night. Be back around 12 let’s say.” “Cool. Can I borrow some vibranium from your lab?” “Sure thing kiddo. Call us if you need anything. Fri, give Peter access to vault B3 in my lab.” “Thanks,” Peter smiled. “Anytime. Good luck with ya know.” “Shouldn’t he ask you what you're going to do with a substance that costs 10,000$ a gram?” “Something about trusting me.” “Parents trust their kids with going out later or or doing their homework not fucking multimillions of dollars.” “Uncle Bucky, my parents are Iron Man and Captain America. There was never a shot at normal.” “Fair enough.”

Peter finished up the adjustment on the arm by changing a gear. “Thanks a lot kid.” “Of course. I’m going to work on your new arm now.” “Alrighty, I’ll get out of your way.” “Oh could you ask Auntie Nat what time she’s ordering dinner for? So I know when to head up, just get Fri to tell me.” “Will do.” “Thanks.”

So Peter was left to making some blueprints and drinking many red bulls. The red bull mini-fridge was actually a gift from Shuri, and his fathers had many words with him about it. He managed to convince them that he should keep it, god knows how. Well, he used the whole Princess of Wakanda and making peace and Stark Industries relationship with Wakandan products and companies as well as international relations and blah blah. It worked, who cares.

After a few hours he was called up for dinner, and he sat there and enjoyed the absolute chaos of his family.

Save/comment on A03 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/33320938

#peter parker field trip #peter parker #iron dad #stevetony #tony stark #Steve Rogers #natasha romanoff #Bucky Barnes #avengers fanfiction #avengers fanfic #found family #domestic avengers #ironfam #harley keener

11 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 4 years

Text

Dick Grayson Juvie Headcanons (Leading Into Any Form of Not-A-Cop AUs, they don’t make a ton of sense for a version of Dick who ever grows up to be a cop, but y’know, that origin story is why that career for Dick never made any sense to me anyway, so its all one and the same to me, lol. Just clarifying).

1) Bruce Wayne’s greatest regret with Dick is that he realized too late, years later, that in his eagerness to bond with Dick over their shared experiences and the experiences they shared as Batman and Robin, he’d underestimated the potency of their divergent experiences, and he’d fallen for the Dick Grayson performer mask as much as anyone whenever Dick assured him that month in juvie was only thirty days and he was well past it and had no real issues or lingering trauma stemming from it. How could he not though, Bruce ultimately admitted to himself years later. Dick was just a kid who had just lost his parents and done literally nothing wrong, and it wasn’t just thirty days. It was thirty whole days.

2) Dick spent his entire first year at Wayne Manor secretly convinced that if he did anything wrong, he was going back to juvie. It didn’t make sense to him, but being there in the first place didn’t really make a lot of sense either, so better to err on the side of caution, and just be perfect instead. He got a little more relaxed as time went on, but it was a slow curve. By the time he ran away at the end of Robin: Year One, which was actually more like the end of his second year at Wayne Manor since he’d trained a lot before officially debuting as Robin....by that time, Dick didn’t THINK Bruce would send him back to juvie just because he’d fired him as Robin and was clearly done with him now.

He wanted to believe after everything they’d been through this past year alone, Bruce would at least make sure he ended up in a good foster home, which Dick by now knew at least existed, and that juvie wasn’t actually the only inevitable destination for orphaned kids who weren’t perfect.....but again...he didn’t THINK Bruce would do that. But Dick didn’t KNOW, not for sure, and he couldn’t afford to lose both Robin and his belief in who Bruce really was and what their time together had meant to Bruce as well as Dick, so Dick decided to err on the side of caution and run away instead. That way, at least, he’d never have to find out if he was wrong.

3) Dick’s first real friend at school was actually a boy who started a fight with him, a few months before Dick debuted as Robin. When they were both sent to the principal’s office together, Dick pulled his antagonist of ten minutes ago down a side hallway with him and hastily engineered an escape plan off the grounds where Dick called Bruce and assured the bewildered other boy he could help him. When Bruce arrived and asked Dick what he was doing, Dick told him the other boy had started their fight, but Dick didn’t think what he’d done had been that bad really, and it was definitely nothing he should go to jail for and he wanted Bruce to intercede on his behalf and make sure he didn’t end up there by doing whatever he’d done to get Dick pulled out of there in the first place.

As Dick didn’t like talking about that time much, and Bruce didn’t like making Dick talk about things he didn’t like to talk about, this was the first real inkling Bruce had of how much that experience had skewed Dick’s perception of ‘how things work’ and he assured him that wasn’t going to happen here. It also contributed to the reasons Bruce was stockpiling for actually letting Dick go out as Robin instead of just training him to appease him and hope he grew out of wanting to: among other things, Bruce felt that letting Dick be a part of what he did as Batman and get another viewpoint from which to view the system and what it really did and didn’t do, would help Dick get past his lingering issues with the system and his time in it and thus eventually grow into a more healthy, broader view of it rather than one defined solely by his terrible experiences with it as a child.

4) Bruce’s miscalculation in this regard was that he was so focused on getting Dick to view the system from Bruce’s perspective, and thus come to similar conclusions and views of it on his own....he failed to ever properly attempt the reverse, putting himself in Dick’s shoes and trying to view all of that from his perspective and thus perhaps come to similar conclusions and views of it on HIS end. This divide ended up diverging their viewpoints on all things criminal and justice more and more as the years went by, with Bruce lost for what he was doing wrong, because he was too centered in his own view of himself as the adult, the one who had to teach and guide and HELP Dick, his child......it simply didn’t occur to him there was any possibility he was trying to teach Dick to view things from a vantage point that was just as skewed in its own way as Bruce felt Dick’s was skewed. That he wasn’t actually anymore impartial on the subject than Dick was, its just while Dick’s ‘bias’ was born of an actively negative experience with the system-as-antagonist, Bruce’s was born of a complete and total lack of negative experiences with the system-as-antagonist.

Because ultimately, the divide that put them more and more often at odds, was that at the end of the day, Bruce believed that the system worked. He believed that his place, his role as Batman, was to supplement the times when the system failed to work as it was supposed to. To fortress it and weed out corruption and clean out the muck gumming up the gears, and let it do what it was supposed to do.....which was give more kids lives and opportunities like Bruce had before his parents were murdered.

And that simply wasn’t Dick’s experience, not just initially, but given more and more evidence as he grew. He just didn’t know how to get Bruce to see it from his POV, get him to consider that the things Bruce was basing his own view of it all from were not as universal as he’d convinced himself they were. Because Dick became increasingly aware, between his own experiences, his time at juvie, that time he ran away, things he saw at school and things he saw as Robin....they were not the same, not even while living in the same house and being chauffered around in the same car. He saw evidence of it every time he tried to confide in Bruce about the things people said about him, and Bruce tried to relate by sharing his own experiences with people saying nasty things about his parents’ death and the way he acted after that.

Dick knew how hard it was for Bruce to share personal details like that and was appreciative of the effort, so he passed up opportunities to try and impress upon Bruce that those stories, while tragic in their own way, were not the same thing as what he was talking about......those kids had been making fun of Bruce because of something terrible that had happened to him, and yeah that sucked.....but these kids were making fun of Dick because of something that he was. They weren’t interchangeable. ‘Taking the high road’ and letting what people said bounce off of him might have been one thing when you knew the thing they were mocking was just a tragic situation that could have befallen anyone. But when the thing they were mocking was who and what you were, and how you weren’t just anyone, and never would be, how they were always going to point out first and foremost the ways you were different and always would be.....’taking the high road’ sounded a lot more like ‘just accept that people are always going to say these things and you’re not allowed to fight back.’

And as time went on, their differences in experiences seemed more and more prevalent than their shared ones.....but because Dick didn’t know how to explain this, was still just a kid who lived with a genius who was always right and needed just the right words if he was going to be convinced otherwise, and Dick just didn’t have those words, didn’t know what they were, not just yet.....Dick stayed silent through too many of these times when Bruce saw things one way and Dick the exact opposite. Until the time when he couldn’t stay silent anymore, and so he just erupted with his voice full of all the frustration of not just that one occasion, but all the other ones before it that he’d held back on countering Bruce’s view with his own. Making Bruce instantly defensive and unsure where all of this was coming from, not understanding or being aware of just how long all of this had simmered under Dick’s surface, unvoiced but not unpresent.

And so they began to fight more and more about the criminals they turned in and the ones that they didn’t.....Dick of the opinion that if they were already breaking the law by being vigilantes, it shouldn’t matter if it was breaking the law to let a criminal go free if they were as much convinced they deserved a second chance as they were that the city needed Batman and Robin. And because Dick still didn’t quite know how to put what he felt and thought into words, and because Bruce had considered that just thirty days in juvie long behind them and something Dick was past and thus certainly nothing that might be present in this argument, in Dick’s thoughts here and now.....Bruce tended to think this was just youthful optimism overriding common sense. That Dick was just too eager to see the best in people, to hope anyone could turn things around if given the opportunity, that he wasn’t willing to let the system do its job.

Except, see, the thing is that Bruce, for whom the system worked when it was allowed to, who always viewed it through the lens of his own optimism that it was the right path, the best option, so long as it was just used properly.....in Bruce’s eyes, the system was meant to be used for rehabilitation.

In Dick’s eyes - and experience - the system was only ever useful for punishment.

For things done wrong, and even worse sometimes, all too often....for when the only thing a person did wrong was not being born a boy TRULY like Bruce once was before his parents died. A boy who had the life and all the opportunities that only other boys just like him were ever guaranteed.

Because those just thirty days had been thirty whole days, Dick’s first introduction to Gotham was a lot more thorough than Bruce ever realized, and a lot more of an honest view of Gotham than Bruce could ever really admit.

Juvie, in Dick’s experience, wasn’t just a place of rehabilitation - could never be a place of rehabilitation - not for a kid like him, who had no need to be rehabilitated. And Dick couldn’t just pretend it was one mistake, one person’s bigotry, one office’s corruption, that led to him being there, to him being the only person who was there when he shouldn’t have been there......when Dick’s just thirty days were really thirty whole days where he didn’t see a single moment of rehabilitation for anyone there.

When it was all just pain and suffering and violence. Kids being awful to each other to distract themselves from how awful they felt, and the guards doing nothing to stop it because they were too busy laughing like it was entertainment. There was nobody being made better by being there, just everyone being made worse before they left. To this day, Dick honestly couldn’t say if he’d have been as eager to go after Zucco with the initial intention of KILLING him to avenge his parents, if he’d gotten the chance without ever going to juvie first....if the Dick he’d been before those thirty days would have been as eager to repay violence with violence, as hungry to share his pain. Those thirty whole days had left their mark, had been so full of the promise of spreading around the hurt to lessen the hurt inside of you, been so full of the evidence that justice was meaningless in a place that also said justice was punishing the victims of a crime as often as the perpetrators.....Dick’s honestly not sure if before all of that, without all of that, if it would have been enough for him to just seek out Zucco with the intention of turning him in and trusting the police to take him to where he belonged to get what he deserved.

All he knows is those thirty days did happen, and by the time he did get out, did get his shot at hunting down Zucco, he knew all he needed to know that trusting the police wasn’t the be all and end all Batman kept trying to convince him it was.....not when trusting the police had led them to taking Dick to where he never belonged to get what no one ever deserved.

All he knows is he’ll never confess to Bruce that he’s not sure if the real reason he spared Zucco’s life was because Bruce got through to him, convinced him it was the right thing to do and what his parents would want....or if it was just because he was too afraid that if he did kill Zucco, Bruce would believe the right thing to do was take him back to juvie, and this time, he would belong there.

The ironic thing about Bruce and Dick, Dick often thinks, is that everyone looks at the pair of them and sees Bruce as the eternal cynic, the one who sees the world through pain-colored glasses , the one always quicker to assume the worst. In Dick’s personal experience, its Bruce who’s the one who thinks the world is a little brighter, a little more honest, a little BETTER than Dick knows it to be.

Dick doesn’t offer up the optimistic views as often as he does because they’re what spring most naturally to his mind.

They’re not.

They’re just the ones he’s fighting for, to see them made real, to turn them from just hopes he voices to outcomes he’s championed.

So they end up fighting and clashing more and more because Dick doesn’t know how to say all of that, doesn’t know how to rewrite Bruce’s view of Dick’s own childhood and early years in Gotham with the reality of how things looked and still look from his end.

How to tell him with the surety of only someone who’s actually BEEN in those shoes, LIVED those thirty whole days, someone who KNOWS.....there is no rehabilitation to be found in a jail for children. Just punishment for crimes both warranted and unwarranted alike. There was no hope anywhere in there, for second chances, for turning lives around. Just the pain they brought with them, the pain they found there, and the pain promised if they ever returned.

There’s not much incentive to make a change when the end result is always going to remain the same.

If rehabilitation is the point, Dick wants to say but never quite figures out how, if the goal is for the punishment to fit the crime.....then how can a year in juvie be a just punishment for some crime, when nobody ever mentions the additional punishments that year will inevitably contain? The near daily beatings from other inmates and sometimes the guards? The loneliness of being separated not just from family and friends, but any kind soul who might give that kid reason to think not everyone is like everyone you see around you, there are people who are better, people who give you REASON to be better? The feelings of worthlessness brought about by being fed gruel and given ratty clothes and forced to sleep on bunks not much better than the floor and told “this is what you deserve, this is ALL you deserve, whether you’re violent or deceitful or just misguisded or just hurting - you’re no different to us than the kid who pushed his burning cigarette into his foster brother’s arm, and thus there’s no reason you should see yourself as any different from him either. No reason you should be. No reason to try.’

What about the punishment of going that whole year without hearing a single kind word, seeing a single smile that wasn’t tinged with cruelty, taught a single lesson that was meant to give you tools for the future rather than tools to pass the time or make someone else’s time more miserable than yours? Or the punishment of being guarded by adults more sadistic than your fellow inmates, at least until they inspired kids to up their own sadism and try harder? Of being spit on, laughed at, looked at as those you’re an animal in a cage, the dirt beneath someone’s feet, the inevitable disappointment that was apparently all a kid like you was ever going to turn out to be.....

And all the while told by the police, by the guards, by the other kids, ultimately even by yourself.....

All of this is what you deserve, what you earned, where you belong. This is who and what you are and all you’ll ever be. Don’t waste your time trying harder to be something you’re not....just use it to make the most of your time here for as long as you’re here, until you end up here again.

How can the punishment EVER fit the crime, Dick wants to ask Bruce, Commissioner Gordon, everyone who tells him he’s too young to know what he’s talking about even though he apparently wasn’t too young to deserve to go to jail for the crime of being orphaned in the wrong city....how can the punishment fit the crime when whether the crime is property damage or vandalism or possession of an illegal substance or assault and battery and grand theft auto and soliciation....whether the crime was what you did or who you were or what someone else said you did or just you doing what you had to just to stay alive.....when the crime is always different but the punishment is almost always the same, when the punishment doesn’t CARE, when the punishment is anything and EVERYTHING everyone in the places ‘where bad people go’ is to make each day as miserable for everyone else as they can manage, all in the hopes of making their day just a little bit less so.....

How can you possibly say ‘let the punishment fit the crime’ and honestly believe that its TRUE? How can you say its where you take bad people go to try and make them better, when time and time again you just see them come back out even worse? How can your conclusion always be a certainty that its just them, its just ALL those people, with ALL those different crimes, ALL those reasons why, and just ONE place, ONE punishment-fits-all, ONE penalty meted out in words but with a hundred unspoken add-ons tacked on in the fine print.....its never that ONE place that might be the reason, might be the problem....might be why a thousand misguided souls go into a rehabilitation center and a thousand hardened hearts are all it spits out on the other side, no change, no real difference, no variation between people all now united by one singular truth:

“No matter what we did to end up here, its all the same in the end, and when in the end this is all anybody will ever see when they look at us now, all anybody will ever believe is where we’re destined to end up, no matter how hard we try....what’s the point in going against the grain? Standing out in a place where nothing’s more dangerous than that? Why BE BETTER, when the only rewards are for being worse?”

All of this and more is what Dick wants to ask Bruce, demand an answer for in the form of something other than “you’ll understand better when you’re older” - because Dick understood all he needed to understand from his very first week there, and age hasn’t lessened that any. Just cemented it. Made it firm.

How can you be so sure you’re right, be so sure that I’m wrong, when I’m the one that’s been there and you think the fact that I was so young when I was is proof I can’t be right when I say “THE SYSTEM YOU BELIEVE IN DOESN’T WORK THE WAY YOU THINK IT DOES” when the fact I was ever there at all is literally just proof I’m not wrong?

“How can you tell yourself I’m wrong to want to give the kid we caught in the criminal act of defacing public property a second chance, that it might have more of a positive effect on them than any number of nights in jail ever will.....when probably the only reason I’m here at your side right now instead of the one being put in handcuffs, is you saw an escaped criminal and thought ‘they deserve a chance’ instead of ‘they belong in jail?’“

“You weren’t an escaped criminal - “ Dick always imagines would likely be the first protest out of Bruce’s mouth, a missing of the mark that’s sadly all too predictable and all too much of the reason why Dick’s never pressed the button on this particular conversation.

“But I was!” He’d try to point out next. “At least according to any and all information that matters! I was sent to juvie, I was wearing the clothing of an inmate, I was on the roof of a building across the street from the detention center I’d just literally escaped from....when you came across me that night, that’s EXACTLY what I was! At least to anyone that mattered! If you’d escorted me back to the center yourself, that’s all anyone would have told you, the guards, the warden, the other kids, that’s all I was ever told myself: that’s where I belonged. That was where I was supposed to be. If it had been someone OTHER than you that I ran into that night, if it’d been any cop whatsoever, even one of the ‘good cops,’ even one of the honest cops who plays by the book and believes in the law and doing what’s right.....even they would have taken one look at me and seen a kid escaping from juvie and said to themselves IM DOING THE RIGHT THING TAKING HIM BACK TO THE FACILITY HE ESCAPED FROM, THAT’S WHAT THE LAW SAYS I SHOULD DO HERE AND NOW......and would they have been wrong? Technically? By the book? Would they have been upholding the law, escorting a kid who never did a damn thing wrong in his life at that point, back to the jail where he was being PUNISHED for watching his parents get murdered in front of him?”

He likes to think Bruce wouldn’t have an answer to that, at least. Its better than the alternatives.

But you didn’t send me back and just abandon me there because you KNEW better, Dick argues in his head. Wants to believe. Whether it was because you recognized me from that night at the circus or because you just couldn’t believe that in thirty days I could possibly have done something that warranted a kid like me being in a place like that, couldn’t have done something that justified the bruise you saw beneath my eye or the fact that I was so desperate to get away I was barefoot on a freezing rooftop at 2 in the morning.....you KNEW the law wasn’t right, the system was WRONG, and that there was no justice to be served in serving me back up on a platter to people who SIMPLY DIDN’T CARE.

And as the years go by, he adds to it in conviction and evidence, but still no closer to the words and still just as far from Bruce as ever......”And what about Jason? Jason literally WAS a criminal, by any technical letter of the law, the night you met him. He was stealing your tires. He was committing a theft. Not because he was bad, not because he didn’t know any better, but because HE WAS TRYING TO EAT. His only crime was he was a kid who WANTED TO NOT DIE, but that was still a crime, wasn’t it? As the system tells us? If he really wanted to eat that bad, he should have done it the right way, like by going to a shelter - that would have turned him into foster care - where he would have been safe - unless he’d already had bad experiences in foster care that were the literal reason he felt he’d be safer starving on the streets instead - come on, what punishment would have fit the crime if you’d taken Jason to be locked up in juvie that night instead of taking him home?

What’s the appropriate sentence for being a kid stealing so he could get food he didn’t trust to get safely anywhere else? A week in juvie, maybe, two weeks? Does that include all the unwritten extras that go with that? All the beatings bigger kids would dish out just because they could? All the nights he couldn’t sleep because he was afraid of the way the guards looked at him and didn’t think he’d be safe if he did? All the times he ended up going hungry anyway because nobody cares if you can’t stomach the slop they dump in front of you, it’ll just go to someone else? Is all of that what Jason deserved for wanting to eat while having the nerve not to be born a Bruce Wayne or one of his peers?

Because if any cop had come along and arrested Jason that night, before you got to him first, even the ‘good cops,’ even the ‘by the book I’m just doing this because the law says I have to and I trust the law, that’s my excuse’ cops....if you never got EITHER of your first two sons, because GOOD HONEST COPS JUST DOING THEIR JOBS THE RIGHT WAY sent them both to jail like the law says they belonged for the crimes of stealing (even just to eat) and escaping a reform facility (even if they were never supposed to be there in the first place)......if that had been our fates.....does it matter to you that you wouldn’t even know any better, that you’d have NO CLUE if five years later, you arrested one of us for something as simple as defacing public property, because we just had so much fucking RAGE and PAIN in us that ironically we didn’t have before we ended up in juvie but damn sure had before they finally let us out....

Would you have batted an eye, or felt even a second of doubt or guilty for handcuffing us and dropping us off in front of the police precinct to be processed, would you spend even a single day wondering what would happen to us now, or happened to us since, would you be able to justify doing anything the thoughts you have right now about me or Jason suffering because of those good, honest cops starting that chain of events, could you actually make a case for going after those hypothetical cops, ‘avenging’ those versions of us on cops who aren’t corrupt, didn’t hurt kids or put them in harm’s way because they WANTED to but just because being supposed to mattered more than looking at us and seeing a reason not to? Would none of that suffering we might have endured in the system matter, would none of it be objectionable, would none of it be a fucking CRIME because the system works, and if that’s what the system says we deserved for our crime and if nobody ever says anything about the ‘extras’ packaged in with each sentence then obviously they’re not worth mentioning, let alone worrying about?

“Why am I here, instead of there?” Dick wants to ask Bruce one night, two nights, a thousand nights. “Why am I a superhero instead of just another nameless thug? What was different? Was it just because you recognized me that night? If I’d been just a little more bruised, a little more unrecognizable, would you have sent me back anyway? Was it just because you saw a kindred spirit in me, you saw too much of yourself in the kid who’d lost his parents the same way you did, that you couldn’t bear to see hurt more when you were sure you could help him instead? Help him BE more?”

“Cuz if its the latter.....why doesn’t it matter more than ‘your years of experience, your book learning, your faith in a system that’s never hurt you except by letting you down’....why doesn’t it have more credibility with you that I see so much of myself in so many of THEM, more even than I see of myself in YOU? Why do you dismiss it as naive optimism in total strangers when I tell you night after night there’s no WAY that every single one of these kids, these specific criminals, all deserve the violence and fear they’re inevitably going to face in jail? That there’s no WAY they’re all going to be rehabilitated, because most of them I bet already KNOW what they did was ‘wrong’ and the fact that they did it anyway isn’t because they need to be taught otherwise or needed behavioral correction....its because they didn’t have a choice! And yes before you say it, I KNOW there’s always another choice, but that doesn’t mean all the other choices don’t suck just as much if not MORE, and that’s what you never get! There’s not a mansion at the end of the road every time someone turns away from the ‘wrong path’ and gets on the right one. Its not a matter of just making better choices when your only choice is steal and eat or don’t steal and don’t eat. What rehabilitation is there for kids who were like me and never belonged there in the first place? What lesson were we supposed to learn there? “Don’t exist?” Jason knew stealing was wrong, he didn’t need to go to PRISON to teach him that.....what was he ever going to learn from going to juvie if a cop sent him there instead? “Don’t steal just because you don’t have money, starve instead?”

That’s what you never seem to get, Dick wants to say, to scream, to ignite the fucking atmosphere with his words so the people who matter, who need to hear him, are at least forced to SEE. You look at them and just see criminals, but I look at them and see ME. I see Jason. I see who we were. I see who we might have become. And then I see us standing in our costumes like the pair of actual superheroes we are, fighting the Joker with you, the likes of the Penguin, and Black Mask and all kinds of people who ACTUALLY hurt people, who RUIN lives just because they can, not because they have to, I see us SAVING lives each night thanks to you, thanks to you taking a chance on us when others might not have, even people who are supposed to be good and just, I see what we became just because someone with the right skills and the right resources was in the right place to offer us an alternative, one more to our liking, one we ended up devoting our whole LIVES to.....

And I think.....

How many of those kids sent to prison instead of an ACTUAL safe and loving home, how many of those kids who will go to sleep tonight hearing adults backed by the law tell them they’re worthless and that’s all they’ll ever be, instead of being told they’re loved and believed in....how many kids who could have done more for the world if only they’d been given a second chance than has cost the world because they were given no chances instead....

How many of them are actually superheroes the world will never get to be saved by, because the world gave up on them when they were still just kids and never imagined they could be anything more? How many of them are the sons that foster and adoptive parents will never have, SHOULD have had, if the people responsible for shaping those kids’ futures had invested as much time and energy and resources in FINDING better homes, loving homes, SAFER homes, as they did in locking those kids up every time they lashed out because the better environment they were promised happened to be with a pedophile who looks good on paper?

“If I didn’t have to end up like them, if my fate didn’t have to be a life of crime - why does theirs? Why aren’t they just as likely to end up like me instead....the only variable that’s missing is they need a BRUCE standing in their corner more than society needs a BATMAN standing there in judgment?”

“Bruce, you took in two separate kids who both came from nothing and were headed nowhere, as far as everyone involved with ‘the system’ said and believed,” Dick says to himself, practicing in the mirror for when he finally says what he needs to say, with the right words, the ones that might be HEARD instead of dismissed. The ones that might actually make a difference and change things. “And you raised both of those kids to become superheroes instead. Both of whom have saved more lives than we can count. Done more good than can probably ever be listed.

“What more proof do you need that the system you value so much doesn’t know shit? How can you say you value it, you value its role in society, when its only role in my life has been to constantly invalidate my value? How can you turn around and in the same breath assure me that you DO actually value my life anyway, and always would have? Because my life actually has more in common with most common criminals than it does with yours, and if the only thing that gives my life real value is the fact that at the right place and the right time, it coincided with yours in just the right way for you to see you had something in common with me.....”

“That doesn’t speak highly for how much you value any parts of me that you don’t see yourself in. Maybe that’s why I’m driven so hard to make myself as different from you as I can, as distinct as a hero. Make an identity that’s all my own, that you’re only a part of instead of the other way around. Maybe its so I can finally ask you, would you still love me if you couldn’t recognize me anymore? If there was nothing that looked like me when you look in the mirror? Was my life still worth saving, still giving a second chance....if my life isn’t actually what you say it is?”

And then Dick closes his mouth, turns away from the mirror, and boxes his questions up for another day.

One where maybe, finally, he’s ready to hear the answer.

156 notes · View notes

clean-bands-dirty-stories · 4 years

Text

The Best Things ~ J.V. (Part 6)

A/n: Things boutta get bad so like... I'm sorry. Practically nothing but angst this part won't lie. Side note: I know I don't actually have a lot of Jerome x reader content yet, but I wanted to show the reader's descent into madness before they're officially a thing. I promise you it's coming, and very soon :)

Word Count: 4300+

Playlist

MASTERLIST

Y/n shot to his feet, only for the guards behind him to draw their guns. Alfred held up a hand. "Is he alive?" Y/n demanded. He might have lost his mind just a tad, but Bruce was still one of the very few things Y/n Wayne cared about and no one was about to put that boy in danger.

"Yes," Alfred soothed. "I said he WAS kidnapped. We have him back now." Y/n calmed and Alfred seemed to almost smile, as if seeing the amount Y/n cared was very reassuring. That tracked. "He's been brainwashed or something though, and I've gotten special permission from Commissioner Bullock himself to let you out to help me bring him back. If we play this right, we might even get you released permanently. We can figure this whole thing out. You can come back to us. We can be a family again." Y/n thought about that. Seeing Bruce again. His brother meant everything to him. He cared about Alfred too, honestly. The man had been a good father figure to both of them, and a good friend even when their father was alive. Y/n would have a real home, without killing or chaos. He'd be working for the good guys.

Right?

He thought about that word. Good guys. Cops were supposed to be good guys, weren't they? But he'd gotten locked up in Arkham just for being associated with Jerome, and then gotten the shit kicked out of him when he'd simply been himself. He hadn't killed anyone, or hurt anyone. He'd shown affection to another man and had nearly gotten beat to death for it. He'd leave Arkham, the only place he'd ever really been accepted for being gay. Maybe not by that one guard, but everyone else seemed to not care since no one cared about him at all, except maybe Jerome. Oh god Jerome. Y/n would have to leave him. And Harleen as well. The new friend who really got him and had his back the best she could in a place where her words practically had as much affect as Y/n's did. He had a boyfriend and a potential best friend and room to be free... except that he wasn't free.

Why was this so hard?

"Y/n," Alfred interrupted, eyes wide and pleading. "Bruce needs you."

The last time Alfred had said that, Bruce had just witnessed their parents' murders. Y/n pushed down the boy he used to be that was fighting to resurface, trying to find at least a. Middle between then and now. They were so different... there was suddenly a battle again himself, and he was losing.

Finally, he just shut it all down. Everything else could wait for another time. "When can we leave?" Alfred smiled at his words, but Y/n suddenly had a terrible feeling in his gut. Why did he get the sense that everything was about to get really, really bad again?

"Penguins alive?" Y/n relaxed in relief.

Alfred frowned. "Yeah. Um-" He swallowed. "You've kind of really been involved with all the worst people recently, eh?"

Y/n actually scoffed at that, his lips curling in amusement. "I've met far worse people than Oswald, Alfred." He looked the butler in the face. "You might not like to hear this, but that redhead everyone in town hates so much? He wasn't the one who did this to me." Y/n motioned to his own face. "But the officer who did, did it for no other reason than because I'm gay." He let that settle for a second. Alfred seemed shaken a bit. It seemed to finally be dawning on him just what Y/n had been going through since his parents had died. "Now, enough about me." They'd finally pulled up to the GCPD building. "Let's get inside. Like you said: Bruce needs us."

Y/n had been required to be handcuffed, though he hadn't been put in a straight jacket and had been allowed to change into normal clothes as not to upset Bruce upon seeing him. He was still beat up pretty badly though, and had developed a limp as the adrenaline wore off and as his beating really sunk in. Alfred had to keep him handcuffed as they walked in, and the whole place went quite. It was becoming a habit that Y/n could walk into any room and immediately bring silence with him as he did so. All of Gotham had gotten to the point that they couldn't exactly make an opinion on Y/n Wayne. How did someone like him get born into a family like he had been, and turn out like this?

Gay and insane.

It had been in the newspaper. Someone, somewhere had gotten hold of the news that Y/n Wayne was gay and it had been released everywhere. Y/n had read the article a while ago. It's what had prompted Jerome to finally be more affectionate around other inmates, instead of just at night when they were in their cell together. People might give Y/n shit for being into dudes, but no one was going to mess with Jerome. He'd put his neck out for Y/n... It was becoming clear that few others would do the same. Maybe it was the insanity.

Y/n was brought to a room that was a different color than the walls at Arkham. The color outside had been overwhelming after seeing muted versions from a distance through windows that now, the dull color was kind of refreshing. Inside the room was Bruce, but he looked different. Y/n couldn't imagine the last time his younger brother had worn a turtle neck. His father used to try to get the boys to wear them all the time, but, especially in their youth, the boys had hated them and eventually their father had given up. Bruce hadn't worn one since they were both seven, when he used to just do whatever their dad told him to. And since when did he wear anything other than dark blue or black? Y/n found all his usual jokes about Bruce being a casual emo slip from his mind. He didn't know how to approach this new boy. He didn't know him.

To be fair, Bruce didn't really know him either.

"Hello, brother," Y/n greeted, unsure of how to go about this after all that stood between them.

Bruce narrowed his eyes. "Why are you here?"

Y/n sat down, scooting over as Alfred joined him with a second chair. "Just checking in," Y/n responded slowly. "Alfred told me about what happened. Getting kidnapped. Been there, it's not too fun."

Bruce rolled his eyes."You got kidnapped by a brainless psychopath. I got taken by someone who was trying to help me."

Y/n scoffed. "Help you? Bruce look at you. You're not yourself."

"I'm better," Bruce shot back. Y/n went quiet at that, looking at Alfred with raised eyebrows.

Alfred ignored the look. "Now we can talk all day, but what really matters is that you tell me what you meant when you said someone else was coming to Gotham. I thought that old fellow was the leader of the Council of the Owls, who else would be coming?"

An expression rested on Bruce's face. Far too complacent and calm. The Bruce Y/n was familiar with had the tendency to brood- this Bruce seemed to have no tendencies at all. No cares or anything. It was disturbing to say the least. "I want you both to leave."

"Well that ain't gonna happen, is it mate?" Alfred immediately matched. The butler crossed his arms. "You can't get rid of either of us that easy. Your brother here found time around being locked up to be here for you. Not much is getting us out of here."

"Especially with the city in chaos," Y/n cut in. "Not even your pals in the GCPD will be here to drag us away. Might as well end it now."

When Bruce didn't respond, Alfred leaned forward. "You have to remember who you are."

That seemed to set Bruce off. "I know who I am." Y/n scoffed. "I have a destiny," the younger boy continued, his volume raising as Y/n's mocking noise irritated him.

"Now you listen to me." Alfred had gotten very quiet. "That man that wanted you to detonate that bomb, whatever he promised you- freedom from pain, power - none of it, none of it was real. I want you to remember what is real."

"I know what's real!" Bruce yelled over the end of Alfred's sentence. Y/n tried not to smile. He really did. Bruce glowered as his older brother grinned at him. Mocked him. "You come in here and mock me? You're the crazy one. Don't you dare laugh at me like I'm the one who's lost my mind! I got vengeance for our parents' murder. That's real, and better than running around like an idiot with a lunatic murder!"

"You know NOTHING about lunacy," Y/n interrupted. "I've seen crazy. I've seen grown men beat on teenage boys and call it power. I've seen cops chase bad guys to predictable set ups and act like it wasn't the most obvious thing in the world. I've seen so called heroes save to be said innocent people, and then those evil little shits turn on those same heroes the first chance they get. I've seen love get ignored and then twisted. I've seen people laugh at pain and enjoy the suffering of others and then call themselves sane because that person who was dying was a bad guy, so who cares, right? I've seen people define good and bad like it's a dictionary entry and then immediately break the rules they lay down and still try to pass off as the victim of the story. THAT was real Bruce." Alfred put a hand on Y/n's shoulder, and it was only then when he realized he was crying. "I've seen stories about how evil and corrupt men are and how much women are victims, and then looked at Gotham and seen women in charge while I, a child, was raped by a woman again and again who was only using me for power." He cleared his throat. "Not to say that other people don't suffer, I just mean that everything is a grey area. What's real is bullshit and what's fake is seemingly the most honest option of those presented. Not everything is as clear as it pretends to be, Bruce. I'm supposed to be the crazy one. I was supposed to be the one who failed. I was supposed to be the screw up, but we're both in handcuffs and you were the one who was trying to ruin the lives of thousands of people just minding their own business. What was my crime, huh? Trying to be happy? Trying to be true to myself?" Y/n scoffed. "If only mom and dad could see you now."

"YOU SHUT UP!" Bruce screeched.

"Both of you calm down," Alfred snapped. "I was there when your parents had both of you. I took care of your mum and was there as you grew up. You used to be inseparable. No matter what anyone else did or said or thought, the Wayne brothers always had each others' backs. Good and bad is clear. Everyone is capable of it. Everyone does it. No one is innocent of evil, even in small amounts. Both of you have been idiots." He took a breath. "But you're also both my idiots." He looked between the two boys. "You're both my boys, even if I haven't been there for both of you." He looked at Y/n as he said that. "You want to talk about what's real? What's good?" He looked at bruce. "What's real is when you were sick as a kid, and your mum used to sit up with you every night and read to you when you fell asleep. That's real. Or when you were seven and you took that rowboat out and you got lost in that storm. Me and your dad were out, shouting and screaming, losing our minds, and when your dad found you, how he cried. That's real." He looked at Y/n. "When you were twelve and you came to your parents in tears because you couldn't understand why all the girls your age were talking about kissing you and you couldn't stop thinking about kissing the other boys. Your mum calmed you down and your dad told me that no matter what, they'd love you and you thought I didn't know but I did- all this time, I knew." Y/n felt his chest tighten. He felt terrible. "That was good, Y/n." Alfred gripping Y/n's shoulder. "When everyone came to your dad talking bad about you and they thought he'd laugh along, but he put an end to it immediately because you were still his son and he loved you. He was proud of you. When the news people came after you for secrets and they were nosey and pushy. When they crowded and stalked you because they'd caught wind that you had a dark secret and everyone wanted to know what the oldest Wayne son failure was hiding, and your dad nearly lost his mind on all of them, if your mum hadn't stepped in and stopped it cordially. THAT. Was. Good." Alfred returned to looking at Bruce, keeping his hand on Y/n's shoulder. "Your parents died in that alley four years ago, and maybe that man took away the pain of that night." This time he looked between the two boys. "Life has been hard since then, but there is no life, no love, without pain." He squeezed Y/n's shoulder and when the boy nodded, he returned his attention to Bruce. Bruce was the main focus right now, but Y/n had gotten the message. "He could not take away the love that your mum and dad gave you, that you still have in you- that you still have-" his voice broke as he reached over, pressing his hand against Bruce's chest, right over where his heart would be. "Right here." His hand finally dropped after a pause as he continued, "The same love I have for you. For both of you." His face flecked with. "I love you, Maser Bruce. Master Y/n. I would do anything for you. I would die for you. You must-" he cut off, focusing on Bruce. Y/n kept thinking Alfred was done focusing on him, but then Alfred would look at him again, and he hadn't felt so cared for or looked after since his parents had died. It all felt silly now... "You have to find that love again."

Every word hit home. Alfred was speaking to Bruce, but it was becoming more and more obvious that he was talking to Y/n too. Y/n reached over, his hand resting over Bruce's. "We both have to," he whispered softly. "You don't have to do it alone. I know it's been hard and chaotic, but I'm still your brother, Bruce. You're still my brother. And no matter what, you always have me."

Alfred leaned forward. "Come back to us, Master Bruce." There was a commotion outside and Alfred sighed before telling Y/n, "I'll be right back," and then leaving.

Bruce looked to his brother. "Did you mean what you said? I can depend on you?" Y/n nodded immediately. "Then get me out of here." Y/n went to argue but Bruce interrupted. "You can come with me and make sure I'm safe. But I HAVE to do this. I need to finish it. I need to see it through. I need to know if this really is my destiny. I need to understand-" he cut off, choked with emotion. But Y/n knew what he meant. The same thing that had driven him to follow Jerome Valeska of all people. That had gotten him to follow Penguin and ditch his family to begin with. There are just some things you have to do. So Y/n looked around, found a pen, and Bruce pick the locks on both of their cuffs before they booked it, side by side and headed for... something. Bruce hadn't cued Y/n into the plan this far.

In all honesty, it was just nice being by Bruce's side again.

They made their way through the city streets of Gotham at night until they got to a red door with the word "Yuyan" on the front. Bruce went in. Y/n followed. Inside was the statue of what looked like some kind of demon. There was a lot going on. Bruce didn't hesitate- he stepped up and began analyzing it. Y/n was still taking it in when he pulled something and the wall opened up, revealing a hidden passage. The brothers went inside, Bruce having to take Y/n's hand to get the older boy to follow him now.

The two walked down a staircase and through a tunnel. It seemed eery. Weirdly light and far too silent and empty. When people appeared, Y/n regretted his lament about there not being anyone around- they immediately attacked him. "No." Bruce said firmly. They stopped. Y/n looked at his brother with shock. Bruce's expression remained calm. Y/n's would be attackers simply pointed Bruce onward, making way for him to follow their direction.

Y/n hadn't been this scared in a long time. Surely he wasn't in danger. This was Bruce he was talking about. Golden Boy Bruce Wayne who used to cry when they were really little and Y/n would step on a bug. Who shut down after their parents died because he loved them so much that seeing their murder changed him... except that his heart of gold kept him from corrupting like Y/n had. He was driven by justice and refused to let up until evil was destroyed. Bruce Wayne was a hero.

And yet, when Y/n looked at the back of Bruce's head now, he didn't see his younger brother. He saw a man in a child's body. He saw a straight back that was well trained and perfectly postured. He saw clothes Bruce would never wear and a silence Bruce would prefer not to bear, especially with Y/n around to talk his ear off. He saw Bruce leading them down a tunnel of doom, being completely docile after someone tried to kill him. After he almost poisoned maybe hundreds of people with just the press of a button. After, of all people, he had chosen some random old dude weirdo over Alfred and almost killed one of two family members he still had left.

Very suddenly, Y/n realized that he hadn't realized how bad Bruce was. How dumb it was to follow after him right now. And he was more scared than he'd ever been. More scared than even when he looked in the face of a cold blooded, sadistic murderer who had completely lost his mind and only saw an endless world of things to fascinate him. More scared when the doors would close and all he saw was red lips curled in a devious smile as the one person he trusted the most took advantage of him. More scared than when that stupid guard had locked him in that room and he had really thought he was going to get beaten to death for being gay.

Bruce pushed two double doors open with each hand. They creaked as they opened slowly, revealing a room with a green pool in the middle. Bruce leaned over and Y/n stepped forward, reaching out to stop him. Then he felt a pain at the back of his head and everything went black.

Y/n woke up alone.

It was dark, but it only took him a few seconds to remember everything and realize where he was. He looked around- the pool was still there. Otherwise, the room was empty. Y/n groaned as he sat up, looking around again for signs of those people that had attacked him earlier. When he still saw no one, he stood and began walking back the way he'd come. It was even scarier now that he was alone. "Bruce?" He whispered into the empty hallway. He jumped at every noise, resulting in him eventually misstepping and tripping. He would have face planted if his scrambling abilities hadn't improved recently due to all the running away from cops and other crazies alike in his days by Oswald's side. Thankfully he didn't fall because, as he was noticing while trying to get his feet under him, there was blood on the floor.

Oh my god there was blood on the floor.

He sucked in a breath, beginning to look around again. "BRUCE?" His heart picked up and he felt the back of his eyes burning with tears. "Bru-" his shoulder hit a wall and he screamed. Shaking his head to calm himself, he pressed his lips together and retraced his path that he'd taken with Bruce to get in here. Eventually it lead him outside. Weirdly enough, the wall was open again. Which meant that he didn't have to figure out how this side of the trick worked... but it also meant he wasn't alone.

The night air outside was cool, the sun rising in the distance. He looked down at himself- he was filthy. He took a second to think. To remember. The last thing that had been clear to him was that he was absolutely terrified of Bruce.

That's right. Bruce wasn't... right anymore. Well, that meant he couldn't go home. He also couldn't just walk back into Arkham. They might think he'd done something if he came back, dirty and hysterical, without Alfred. So he went to the GCPD department instead, because where the else was he going to go?

He was inside for maybe a second before he saw a familiar face. His eyes went wide and his heart nearly stopped- in his vulnerable state, of course it would be the guard that almost beat him to death that would be there to greet him. The man smirked, tilting his head. "There you are. We were wondering when you'd find your way back." He approached the teenage boy, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Someone else approached. Y/n almost melted in relief to see Harvey Bullock. "What's going on here?" His eyes laded on Y/n. "What... I thought you were in Arkham."

"He was," the officer responded. Y/n had already forgotten his name from when Harleen had said it before. "Alfred Pennyworth came and got him out for the day. Needed him for some Wayne business. I'll be taking him back now."

Harvey looked confused by that. "Why? We were already debating letting him go. Now he's out, there's no reason to immediately put him back in." The guard seemed horrified by that idea. Harvey put his hands on his waist. "He didn't do anything wrong."

"Do you know what this boy is?" Y/n's heart sunk. "He's a homosexual."

Harvey's eyebrows rose. At first Y/n thought it was in surprise, but then he said, "So what?"

The guard looked stunned. "He needs help, Bullock. He was canoodling with Jerome Valeska in Arkham. In public. Like there's nothing wrong with that."

Now Harvey was surprised. Y/n swallowed his emotions and met the older cop's gaze evenly, sticking his chin up. Harvey sighed. Y/n didn't even have to say anything- the old man just seemed to... immediately understand. "He turned to someone who accepted him in a world of people who hate him." It was Y/n's turn to be surprised. "That's not punishable."

The guard scoffed. "Son, have you ever killed anyone before?" Y/n looked away. He thought about the first time he'd ever killed someone, and then thought about all the many times after that he'd done it himself or helped. Another experience he'd picked up while hanging with Oswald. "The thing won't even deny it. And he's proud to be with that redheaded psycho. There's something wrong with him, Commissioner. He needs to be detained and get some help."

Harvey and Y/n both knew that was not the reason the guard wanted Y/n back in Arkham. The two men looked at each other, both put down at the fact that they couldn't stop anything happening. Maybe Y/n should have lied. Maybe he should be fighting. Unfortunately, he'd just lost his little brother and he had no idea what kind of shape Alfred was in. Currently, he had to assume that Alfred was either dead or would be soon, if Bruce could help it.

The guard tugged Y/n's arm and they were headed back outside toward his car. "Thought you were gonna get away from me that easily, did you?" The guard growled under his breath, leaning close to Y/n so the Wayne boy would be the only one to hear. "I finally have a reason to get at you, you little shit. Things are only gonna get worse for you from here. Now I can say you've killed people. No one will stop me from knocking you now."

Y/n looked at the city one more time before he was shoved into the car. The guard pulled out a pair of cuffs and put him in them. He looked at the city the whole time. The entire ride, he took in every inch of it. Every dirty corner. Every dirty human. Every inch of the buildings- no matter how close, far, tall or small they were. If he could see it, he took it in as much as he could. Above everything else, he took in the sunrise.

Maybe it was the fact that Y/n might never see it again outside of Arkham, but it wasn't overwhelming this time.

It was beautiful.

67 notes · View notes

mollyamory-again · 5 years

Text

And then I wrote a really long reaction post for Endgame...

Here’s the short form: <3 <3 <3... ?? @#(*$A)(@#*!?! <3.....<3 ....?<3? <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 !!!

The super long form is below the cut...

So, I went into this movie with a lot of feelings, and I came out with a lot of feelings, and it's taking me some time to process them.

The first, and maybe the most important thing I want to say, is that regardless of my personal fannish/emotional reaction to some of the events -- the film itself was an absolute triumph. I mean - it was amazing. There were a great many things to love - and that is a list that includes some things I hated. Love/hated. Both! The fact that they could bring a series of films that spans over a decade together in a way that had people laughing and crying in the theatres, often both at the same time - it's just truly, truly awesome. It says something that they were able to build these real and true characters who feel important enough that their fates can actually break our hearts.

So I applaud that, and I hope the film industry takes a good long look at these films and learns from them. Audiences are willing to wait for the pay-off, we're willing to tackle difficult things, we're willing to fall in love with what we see on the screen if the writers and producers and directors put the effort into allowing it.

That said...

I really liked this movie overall, but I went into it really wanting two specific things for myself, and I didn't get them. In fact I kind of got the opposite of them, and a lot of my coming to terms with the movie has been coming to terms with just... not getting what I wanted. And finding a way to be okay with that.

I wanted Tony to live - and if you're back here behind my spoiler cut, you know I didn't get that one. It was really hard to lose him. He was my favorite character in this whole crazy cast. I loved that he could be so wrong sometimes, and with so much utter conviction. I loved that he could be terrified out of his mind and then just do the terrifying things anyway, because somebody had to, and he could. I loved how smart he was, and how vulnerable he was, and how he built walls of words to defend himself and define himself. I loved how hard he loved the people that HE loved, and how much he was willing to do for them. I loved how great he was with kids (and I love that he got one of his own!) and I love how that seemed at least in part because he never finished growing up himself.

So while I am wrecked that this is the end of Tony in this particular strand of the comics universe, I can't deny that it is 100% true to who he was. He was always going to be the guy who would do this, if it needed to be done. And it did, so he did it, and it broke my heart - but in the end I have to be okay with it, because yeah. That was Tony Stark, distilled down to his purest self. I hated it, but I also loved it, and more importantly I think, I bought it.

I also really would have loved to have a kind of on-screen farewell to my pairing, and I didn't get that, either. I'm a Science Boyfriends kinda gal, and there was almost zero interaction between Bruce and Tony - there was zero relevant interaction. But it is what it is - this was never going to be everything to all people, and that's one of the relationships that didn't get priority. I'm okay with that, too - mainly because its absence means they didn't do anything TERRIBLE to it, either! When it comes to my pairings, I'd far rather TPTB leave them alone than do something I don't like. That said - it would have been nice if they'd you know, exchanged a couple of lines? And it would have been SUPER nice if Bruce had been around to react to Tony's death. Getting past it, getting past it.... ;)

My biggest fear going into this movie was that it would kill my fannishness about the Avengers. I just recently rediscovered it, and I've been writing like a MAD thing. I've stayed up too late writing, I've gotten up way to early to write... I've written through nights when I was supposed to be raiding with my online pals, or watching stuff with my housemates. I've definitely done quite a lot of writing when I was supposed to be working! And it's been fun, and it's felt really good, and I just didn't want to lose it. I missed fandom and other fans, and I missed caring so much about characters and pairings. Having it all back again these past couple of months has been a blast -- so I went into Endgame a) pretty sure they were going to kill Tony and b) pretty sure that killing Tony would kill my fannish joy.

I am happy to report it did not. I'm still in love, and I'm still writing like crazy. I gave myself some pretty stern talking-tos in the lead-up to the movie, along the lines of "Are you really going to let a couple of rich white geekboys decide what happens to YOUR Tony Stark?" and in short form, "CANON IS NOT THE BOSS OF ME!" I think it helped. I'm still here, anyway!

There are a few other things I really didn't like. One - the CGI for Bruce was a horror show for me. It landed right in the Uncanny Valley, and I could barely stand to look at him on screen. Every time he showed up, it was like a cartoon character appearing in my live action show. I think that actually may have helped me with the Tony thing, though -- because it yanked me out of the movie when Bruce was onscreen, and that gave me the distance I needed to not become a puddle of shivering misery on the floor when Tony died saving the world.

Don't get me wrong - I really do like that he's able to integrate now. I like that he has control. Still, I'm not sure this is a road I ever really want to go down in my writing. I like Hulk too much to want to see him essentially killed by Bruce (which is kind of how I'm reading this.) I get that Hulk IS Bruce IS Hulk and if I were his therapist I'd be all over it. But I'm not his therapist - I'm one of his slashfic writers. And as such, I prefer him splintered and angsting over it. :)

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Natasha, and I'm not sure they're particularly coherent. I think if Endgame had happened exactly the way it did, WITHOUT the disgusting Ultron lines about how she's a monster because she can't have kids, I'd be fine. As it is, Ultron happened and then Natasha gave herself up for a guy with a family, and from a purely Doyle-ist perspective I find that sequence of events suspect, and deeply gross.

On the other hand, from a purely Watsonian perspective, I fully agree with what <a href="https://cesperanza.tumblr.com/post/184622436895/i-cant-believe-that-as-a-prominent-woman-in">cesperanza had to say about Nat</a>, so I'm just going to let that stand for me, too.

Probably the final thing I didn't like was fat!Thor. I do get the arguments on the other side of this, that it's cool to show even a super hero can get depressed and live off cheez whiz and get fat and disaffected. But I also think that's not all there is to this; I think you don't make Chris Hemsworth run around in a fat suit without on some level doing it for the point-and-laugh. And I find that kind of "joke" toxic and disgusting. I'm not going to go on and on about it here, but in short just - a world of no from me on that.

So what's my score so far? 2 things I wanted but didn't get, 3 things I didn't like? But on the bright side...it's now time to move along to the bright side! And the bright side is pretty damn bright.

I was incredibly happy that Tony and Steve were able to repair their relationship. Civil War was such a tough movie to watch, and while there was at least a thread of hope for them at the end of it, this resolution was a long time coming. They're so very different in their worldviews and methods, but so very alike in their absolute dedication to protecting people and doing the right thing - the friction has always made perfect sense, but getting to see them come to terms with each other ... that's something I have really wanted for a long time. I was extremely sad watching Tony just chew into Steve at the beginning of Endgame, but not at all surprised - Tony was completely done in, physically, mentally and emotionally. Just seeing Tony that physically wasted and weak was hard. Steve's reactions to it were perfect, though, just perfect. I don't think I could have asked for any more than I was given for the two of them.

I loved Tony's relationship with his daughter - in fact, I love Tony's relationship with every character below the age of majority that he's ever been on screen with. Tony may be my OTP (One True Parent) in fact - he's just so deeply interested in these kids (Harley, Peter, Morgan) as human beings. And he treats them oddly as equals, while still somehow managing to parent well for each of them. He's hilarious and snarky and caring and he connects. I don't know, I just adore it. We didn't get to spend a lot of time with Morgan, but it was obvious she adored Tony and was well on her way to growing up to be just like him, and I wholly approve.

And before I leave the topic of kids - Tony mourning Peter broke my heart, and his love for Peter when he came back knitted it back together again (that hug omg, </3 -> <3) and then Peter's breakdown when Tony was dying, finally calling him "Tony" instead of Mr. Stark or sir...there it goes, heart broken again. BROKEN.

I and the rest of the universe loved Steve wielding Mjolnir (and Thor KNEW it!). We all saw this coming from way back at the party in Ultron, and a part of what this series of movies has managed to do that I love is take moments like that, a billion movies ago at this point, and pay them off one by one. Sure, it's fan service, but because they were patient, it feels earned. I adore it.

I'm going to wrap this up for now because if I don't, it's never getting posted - I have a ton of thoughts and even MORE feelings about this movie, and I'll be posting more of them because how can I NOT. But I do want to talk a little about one of the major things that literally filled me with joy:

The return to Avengers 2012!!! <3 <3 <3

I just want to go back and live there - like, I want to build a tinyhouse with a telescope in the window and just stare at it all from the shadows forever. I could literally sit for days upon days of "what happened in Avengers 2012 around what we saw on the screen in Avengers 2012" - that could be an entire TV series and I would tune in for every freaking episode. It was SO. MUCH. FUN! From "feel free to clean up..." to "take the stairs" and "SO MANY STAIRS" to Loki pretending to be Steve and Loki stealing the tesseract and poofing out to Thor saving Tony with his hammer and both of them so jazzed about it... OMG. I just love it all, and I'm so happy they did it. I loved everything around it - I loved Bruce trying half-heartedly to smash, I loved the Sorceress Supreme up on the rooftop fighting the Chitauri, I loved Bruce getting smacked out of Hulk and Hulk on a lounge chair with a sunhat over his face. EVERYTHING. I just. <3

I went into Endgame expecting the worst for my favorite character, and I got the worst for him. But the more I think about this movie, the more I find that it's a happy place for me. It gave me what I didn't want and it made me like it. Like - a LOT. I went into it expecting/fearing that it would kill my fannishness about Avengers, and it's done the exact opposite - it's brought me back into fandom, back into contact with fans, back into thinking all the thoughts and feeling all the feelings and wanting to share them with other people who are thinking and feeling about the same thing.

I feel like this entire series of movies, this slate of characters, this universe they've built - it's a gigantic wonderful amazing heartbreaking heartmending accomplishment, and I'm just super glad it's all here, and that I got to experience it all.

(And I can't wait to write a metric fuckton of stories that ignore it! Tony may be gone in this timeline, but he's never going to die in mine, damn it!)

#avengers: endgame #spoilers #all the feelings #ugh my heart

108 notes · View notes

davidmann95 · 7 years

Note

Where does Robin stands nowadays in the Batman's world in your opinion? How different is it from where it started in the DCU?

Over 78 years and at least 4 ‘main’ versions, yeah:there’ve been some changes.

The thing about Robin though, in terms of how he grewalongside Batman? For the first 30ish years of his existence, he’s not actuallya character; he’s an accessory, another item on the utility belt, albeit oneBatman cared about a lot more than a grapple gun or flashbang. Past that greatpage with him and Batman swearing the vow by candlelight, providing valuablesymbolism and context for (much) later on - and even there, Batman’s emotionsand motivations for bringing this kid into his world amount to “Well, Iguess you and I were both victims of a similar trouble.” - Dick’s just*there*, the junior crimefighter, thrown in to add variety to fight scenes andgive his partner someone to bounce dialogue off of. As little as the comicsbrought up Batman’s parents dying in a filthy alley back then, it at leastoccasionally merited a mention, whereas I could almost believe you if you toldme Robin’s origin was literally never brought up again for the first 20 yearsof his career.

To be clear, that’s not at all a failing of those stories. Robin’s great even then, a fitting splash of color into Batman’s world thatpaved the way for further weirdness down the line and a great design in his ownright (even if the lack of pants hasn’t aged as well as Superman or Batman’slooks at the time), as well as a reader-identification figure in a time whenhanging out with Batman still seemed like a fun prospect. But compared to itsbig rival in Superman, which silly as it got still often dove intobig, primal emotions children could relate to - at least in the Silver Age- Batman was mostly rooted in process: here’s how Batmanfights his way past the goons/escapes the deathtrap/figures out the mystery.The closest there was to an ongoing emotional conflict was Batman wonderingwhether or not he should settle down with Batwoman. As a result, despite reamsof pagetime and plenty of solo stories, Robin himself had less characterizationthan, say, the likes of Jimmy Olsen, or even Lori Lemaris. Even stories zeroingin on their relationship like Robin DiesAt Dawn are based on Batman’s guilt, not anything substantial on Robin’send. He’s not even a tonal contrast yet, since Batman himself is pretty chipperby now, and will be for the next few decades.

The turning point is in 1969 when Dick leaves for college aspart of a general attempt at streamlining Batman’s operation; while the O’Neil/Adamsteam hadn’t come onboard yet, the Adam West and Burt Ward show had ended theyear before and I imagine DC was already feeling the backlash, so it marked thestart in earnest of trying to get everybody to take Batman a bit moreseriously. The unintended result being that Robin, while appearing on occasionin the main titles, was for all intents and purposes hermetically sealed awayin his own corner of the DCU away from what was happening to Batman, first insolo adventures and then with the New Teen Titans. And eventually,inexorably, that meant that Robin shifted to not really fitting with Batman’sworld as we knew it anymore, and that’s therefore what came to define DickGrayson: he’s not like Bruce Wayne, and moreover he doesn’t especially want tobe, until him even nominally being Batman’s sidekick anymore doesn’t work oncehe grows up and realizes he doesn’t want to sit in a basement scowling for therest of his life.

Of course, taking Dick Grayson out of the picture meantthere wasn’t going to be a Robin period, and the rejection of the fun Robinrepresented wasn’t complete enough to deny the value of his iconography, soalong comes Jason Todd, The Robin Who Makes Sense For Grim Batman once he getshis Post-Crisis origin. He’s got a dark backstory (one that even doesmarginally more than Dicks’ did to justify the conceit of Batman taking on ayoung aid - after all, if Jason wasn’t Robin he’d possibly be doomed to a lifeof crime), and a personality that lets him trade jokes with the bad guys inclassic Robin style, but as fueled by a rage at injustice that meant he didn’tcontrast that harshly with a post-Miller Batman. There’s a bit more of adeliberate contrast with how Batman himself functions - something that becomesimportant later - but it’s subdued in the face of Jason’s anger boiling over,until his presence becomes untenable both in-universe and among the fanbase,and what happens, happens. Because goodness knows that if there’s one thingBatman was lacking, it was a defining tragedy to motivate him to fight crime.

So you have a company that recognizes that Robin probablyshould be a thing, but their attempt at making him mesh with therough-and-tumble modern world of the 1980s failed so spectacularly that havinga child beaten to death by a clown was preferable to having to continue to putup with him. So they were going to have to work with something a little morefamiliar, while at the same time finding a whole new way to make the ideapalatable, especially now that the obvious dangers of bringing a powerless kidto fight supervillains were right at the front of everybody’s minds.

And that’s how you get the most important Robin story of alltime past his debut in A Lonely Place OfDying.

Not the best,mind you; later stories explored the idea introduced here in far moreinteresting ways. And for that matter, I’mon the record that Tim Drake is by far the least interesting Robin, ageneric grab-bag of traits from other characters who never remotely approachesthe sum of his parts (and that disappointing streak in fact starts right here,where the question of “how do you justifyendangering a child after what happened to Jason Todd?” is kicked under therug by having a new kid show up out of nowhere who happens to be amazing andperfect for the gig both physically and mentally). But what happens here iswhere the idea hinted at now and again in the likes of The Dark Knight Returns finally clicks into place, where Robinactually becomes Robin as we now know him with the idea that his contrast withBatman isn’t a bug, but a feature.

That’s what Robin brings to the table, retroactivelyexplaining why Dick worked and Jason didn’t, why he makes sense in Batman’sworld, and why Bruce in fact needs him: because there needs to be a light inthe dark, someone to remind Batman just what it is he’s fighting for and keephim from losing himself entirely to his mission. That Robin saves Batman justas much as the other way around, and that having a laughing young daredevil outthere alongside him will keep Batman’s head in the game, keep him alert andengaged and alive now that he has someone else to look out for. In short, Robinbeing around forces Batman to be an adult, rather than the kid still crying inthe alley all these years later. And in so doing, he has the chance to showthese kids a better way, just as he once found one. It’s a take that sticksright away, since that’s the contrast they went with a couple years later for Batman: The Animated Series, setting instone how those two related to each other in the public eye to the point whereit’s hard to remember it any other way (especially since flashbacks to Dick’s period as Robin now retroactively cast him as the upbeat good cop toBatman’s hardass).

It doesn’t quite hold in the comics among the creatorsthough, and the result was an odd period where things were thrown in twodirections at once; some writers it was becoming obvious actually did dislikeor even hate Robin, or at minimum had no use whatsoever for him, and he startedto get kicked to the side at every available opportunity since now not only washe silly on his own but he actively represented the idea that Batman shouldhimself lighten up. Others clearly started to like Robin as a figure more thanBatman himself, hence getting storieswhere it turned out Nightwing was called into Gotham on the night of Jason’sdebut so Bruce could rub it in his face that he was replaced, or Brucereplacing Tim with an inadequately-trained young woman who eventually gotkilled to try and bait him into resuming the role himself. And by the timethings returned to some sort of equilibrium, it was already just about time forthe next big shift.

Finally, we come to the star of the show if we’re talkingabout how Robin works and where he stands today: Damian Wayne. The son of Batmanasopposed to the brother, and therefore probably why Bruce catastrophically fails at every turnwhen trying to raise him (outside maybe a few so-so Tomasi comics) - he’s acesat barking orders at partners, but not so much at emotionally connecting with achild who’s for a change actually immature compared to him, rather than beingnoticeably emotionally healthier. He couldn’t even properly help Jason; what hope didhe have at reaching a 10-year-old assassin raised from birth with the promisethat his destiny is to one day wreak bloody revolution and seize the world inhis grip? Bruce fights crime; what’s he going to do with a kid essentially raisedby the platonic concept of capital-C Crime? Hence why he’s not Bruce’s Robin, andnever really could be. Even if they could work together without findingthemselves at each other’s throats, it’d be two terse efficient warriors cooperatingsmoothly, with none of the spark that makes Batman and Robin thrive as apartnership in an emotional sense. He’s Dick’s.

He has to be Dick’s,because as Dick’s grown since his years in the speedo, through Nightwing toBatman and back again, he’s become the official adult in the room of the BatmanFamily (at least as far as the members in tights go). He’s the one who smiles,who has at least semi-stable relationships, who Bruce saved and who thereforegrew up not being afraid and vulnerable in the same way as him. And because ofthat he’s the one who’s able to talk with Damian as a human being to beunderstood and guided rather than an apprentice to be disciplined - just as hewas retroactively the one to make the effort to connect with Bruce, he’s ableto do the same thing here, except this time the power dynamic favors him - and becauseof that Damian eventually comes to understand there’s more to crimefightingthan punishing ‘degenerates’, but in protecting the innocent and serving ahigher ideal of justice. To the point where the privileged little brat whooriginally thought blood alone made him worthy of being Batman not only turnshis back on the crime that defined his life, but joins the Bat-Family inearnest by essentially orphaning himself with the rejection of hismother.

It’s the completion of a circle, where Dick proves hisworthiness as Batman by succeeding in saving Damian where Bruce failed to saveJason. They have the chemistry that defines Batman and Robin as a modernpartnership, able to bounce off each other with the wise snarking veteransuperhero always able to needle the self-important teen samurai billionaireuntil the kid comes out, whether to laugh along with him or show how deep hiswounds go. And the reason this truly works as a reconfiguration of the Batmanand Robin relationship rather than a new one altogether became clear in Nightwing Must Die!, where we see whatDamian brings to the table in turn: Dick as a well-adjusted person doesn’t havethe diamond-solid certainty in his identity or mission that Bruce did, butDamian most definitely does, and can bring the fire to Dick when he needs itthe way Dick could with Bruce. He’s the one who believes in Dick as Batman evenmore than he believes in Bruce. Hell, probably even more than Dick believes in Bruce.

As is that’s the issue with Robin, at least as far as thecomics go - he’s not working with his partner, and you can’t especially shove himtogether with Bruce without either killing the drama or going endlessly back tothe “You’re not my real dad, man!” well (yetanother reason Dick should absolutely still be Co-Batman), and while he’s honestlya strong enough character to work on his own, that’s not his situation at themoment. Thankfully we’re still getting a pretty effective contrast with JonKent in Super Sons, along with whatever they’re doing in Teen Titans right now,but as Robin specifically rather than Damian Wayne he’s kind of inevitablysidelined until Dick either takes back the cape or just takes Robin as hissidekick even while he’s Nightwing. Bruce himself seems to have moved pastneeding a Robin truly all his own at the moment, instead cycling through thelikes of Bluebird and Signal and Gotham Girl. The honest answer to what Robinmeans in the DCU right now is probably “identitythat’s going to remain in a holding pattern until the DCEU Batman and Nightwingmovies come out, and then they’ll do whatever lines up with those”. So, uh,come back to me in 2019 or thereabouts. But on the whole? Batman and Robin arethere to save each other. It’s that simple.

#Robin #Batman #Nightwing #Dick Grayson #Damian Wayne #Jason Todd #Tim Drake #Analysis #Opinion

182 notes · View notes

camsthisky · 7 years

Text

Teach Me to Dream - 2

Determine Your Reality

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Summary: Dick’s eleven. Not thirteen and eager to prove himself. Not seventeen and mourning a brother. Not nineteen and wishing his best friend wasn’t dead and Bruce would look him in the eyes. He’s only eleven. So why does he remember all of that?

ao3 | ff.net

Some warnings for this chapter:

Graphic descriptions of violence and psychological trauma

It takes more than a while for Dick to calm down, and by the time he doesn’t feel like he’s going shake apart with the force of his emotions, it’s almost 8:30. Bruce has work soon, they all know, but no one seems ready to do anything about it just yet. Bruce keeps holding him, Alfred stands at the end of the bed, a carefully controlled expression on his face, and Dick is too exhausted to do more than lie there.

He feels numb. It was too much at once, and now he can’t imagine how he’s supposed to feel anything ever again. He wants to stay here in Bruce’s arms forever, leave the world and the memories behind.

Of course, Dick should have learned by now that life always seem to have something in store for him.

Alfred clears his throat after a little while, and he looks apologetic. Dick knows that time’s up, no matter how much he doesn’t want this frozen state they’re in to shatter. “Master Bruce, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you about the contract signing with Mr. Lauridsen’s company today at ten o’clock.”

“Cancel it,” Bruce says, and he seems to be just as much against leaving the bed as Dick is. Dick, still not up to feeling much at the moment, doesn’t say anything for or against this. Alfred’s word is law, and Bruce does have work, even if Dick really doesn’t want to be alone right now, but he won’t get in the middle of this. “Lucius will understand.”

“Mr. Fox informed me that it was crucial you attend this meeting, Master Bruce.”

“I’m not leaving Dick like this,” Bruce argues, even as Alfred sets out a suit with a funny tie—the one Dick had gotten Bruce for the Father’s Day a couple months ago. It’s a silly little thing with smiling cupcakes, and most people probably wouldn’t be caught dead with that thing around their neck. But Dick thinks that Bruce secretly loves those silly ties, because every time that Dick gets him a new one, he wears it, and not just because Alfred sets them out.

Except—that’s not quite right, Dick thinks. Because that cupcake tie is the first one that Dick’s ever gotten Bruce, and yet he remembers the one with the bananas and the one with the zebra and definitely the one with the little Superman logos all over it that Dick had only gotten Bruce for Christmas because he had been mad at him for—for something.

Dick pushes his face into Bruce’s chest, his eyebrows scrunching up as he tries to remember something that’s never happened. It’s a weird experience, and Dick isn’t sure he isn’t crazy, yet.

“I’m afraid that if you miss this meeting, your relationship with Mr. Lauridsen will deteriorate,” Alfred says, his face revealing nothing, “and I am sure that many people will benefit from both companies signing this contract.”

“I don’t need this contract, Alfred.”

“Mr. Fox might disagree.”

“Then Lucius can handle the signing,” Bruce snaps, his arms tightening around Dick, and Dick looks back up to see that Bruce looks pretty pissed off. “I’m not leaving him by himself.”

“What am I?” Alfred asks, raising an eyebrow. “Chopped liver?”

“No, but—”

“Master Dick will be fine for a few hours while you attend the meeting,” Alfred says with a tone of finality. “Now, breakfast will be served in ten minutes. Please dress yourself and prove to me that I’m not dealing with a child.”

And with that, Alfred’s out the door. Dick winces at the sharp click. It’s not like Alfred slams doors in anger, but it’s also not a good thing to piss him off. This whole thing is Dick’s fault, he knows. He doesn’t regret going to Bruce, but he also doesn’t like that he’s driven his two favorite people to arguing with each other.

After a moment of staring after the butler, Bruce sighs.

“How are you feeling, Dick?” Bruce asks instead of getting up. “Any better?”

Dick frowns. “I’m not sick.”

“I didn’t say you were.” There’s a pause, but Dick isn’t looking at him anymore, so it’s anyone’s guess what his expression is like. “But that was a nasty dream, and last time you had a nightmare that bad you ended up with a fever.”

Dick remembers that, and it’s one of his memories. The real, eleven-year-old Dick Grayson’s memories. But it’s tinged with this haze, like it’s years old, not months, and Dick doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like how the new memories are getting in the way of the ones that he made.

So, even though it isn’t one of his nicest memories, Dick hangs onto it with a death grip, replaying it in his head.

He’d had a dream about his parents falling, he remembers, but this time they were dead before they hit the ground, shot dead by Tony Zucco. And then Zucco had turned and Bruce had been standing there, and Zucco shot him dead, too. Dick had screamed himself awake, and Bruce ran into Dick’s bedroom just moments before Dick could be sick all over the floor.

Dick hadn’t let Bruce out of his sight for the rest of day. He’d been so sick that he hadn’t been able to go out as Robin that night, and Bruce had decided not to go out, either. Instead, he just held Dick in his arms until they had both fallen asleep.

It’s nice to remember something that’s already happened to him, something that’s defined him and shaped him already, Dick thinks. But it’s not enough to push away the numbness that’s dug its sharp claws into him.

“Dick?” Bruce asks, and Dick startles, blinking up at Bruce’s worried eyes. They search his own for a moment, and Dick doesn’t know what Bruce sees. He doesn’t know if his face is blank or dazed or whatever. He just feels—cut off. Emotionless. “You look way too pale, kiddo. Are you sure you don’t feel sick?”

“I’m fine,” Dick lies, and the words burn his tongue. He knows he isn’t convincing anybody, but he’s not ready to try to explain this when he doesn’t understand it himself, just yet. And maybe, maybe, as much as it terrifies him, Bruce being away for a few hours will give him the time he needs to figure out what’s wrong with his head. So, yeah. He lies. “You should just—just go to your meeting.”

Bruce purses his lips. “Fine. But if you still look this bad when I get home, I’m calling Leslie.”

Dick ignores the something that whispers in his head, and says, “I’m fine, Bruce. You don’t need to call Dr. Thompkins.”

Bruce so obviously doesn’t believe him, but he also seems to understand that this isn’t an argument they should be having right now, so he drops the subject, plants a kiss onto the top of Dick’s head, and then lets go. Bruce rolls out of bed and starts getting dressed.

Dick, his heart pounding now that Bruce isn’t holding him anymore, curls back under the covers and wonders if he’s just made a terrible mistake.

Dick walks around like a ghost for the rest of the morning. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t see Bruce off when he leaves for work, doesn’t go to school. He just wanders through the halls of the manor in his pajamas, tracing the walls with his fingers, his mind snagging on half-formed memories every now and again. Most of them are filled with happy days of Dick growing up loved by Bruce and Alfred, but a few are tinged with darker emotions. Both types, happy and sad, start to creep in past the numbness.

Images flash in his head as he passes rooms and objects. The study, where Bruce had kept Dick from falling apart after Jason’s death. The balcony overlooking the foyer, which Dick had jumped from to hang from the chandelier, only to crash to the ground and break his arm. The bedroom that would eventually be Tim’s, where Dick had broken his hand on Bruce’s jaw for—for something.

It’s hard to pick out details sometimes, Dick notices as he starts down the staircase to the first floor. If he’s not fully immersed in the memory, just skimming the surface, then it’s easier not to feel the emotions behind it, but it’s hard to understand the full context of any of it. If Dick had to pick an analogy, it’d be like browsing through a book.

Having a bunch of half-formed stories in his head is making Dick a little dizzy, though, so he decides that he’s had enough of wandering.

It’s sometime after eleven when Dick finds a nice chair to settle on in the library, and he just sits there for a while, staring at the wall.

He isn’t sure what’s happening to him, or why it’s happening to him. Assuming he isn’t crazy, where did these memories even come from? And why is it only him that seems to be able to remember horrible events of the future?

Bruce had had no idea what had happened to Dick, and Dick still isn’t sure how he’s even supposed to explain something like that when he doesn’t understand it himself. Maybe, if he can work out the why, then Bruce can help him not be overwhelmed by all these things he keeps seeing.

But it’s like an adventure novel, except Dick’s eleven. He doesn’t feel like this great action hero, ready to save the day. He’s not even a teenager yet, and everything is way too confusing to work out. What’s the purpose of all this? Is he supposed to change the future? Try to prevent some catastrophic event down the line that he hasn’t remembered yet? Is he supposed to save the world?

The only way he can think of to answer any of those questions would be to dive back into the memories, and he’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to do that again. Last night had been a nightmare, and Bruce had been there for most of it. What happens if Dick slips into the wrong memory? What if Dick can’t bring himself out of it? Bruce had had to literally pin him down in order to shake him out of that last one.

But he does need to figure this out. And as terrified as he is of what can happen, he doesn’t want to stress Bruce out more than he has to because of this. Maybe, maybe, if he can find the right memory, then he can figure out the why and he’ll never have to dive into the memories ever again.

Something in Dick’s head that sounds so much like him—the real him, and he thinks that it just may be what was left after the memories had taken their toll. It tells Dick that this is the stupidest idea that he’s ever come up with. Stupider than taking out his unitard and hunting down the guy who’d killed his parents.

But that had led to Batman and Robin, so Dick isn’t sure how worried he should be.

Dick swallows and tries to prepare himself for what he’s about to do to himself. That last memory, the one of poison rushing through his veins, of knives carving into his skin, it had felt the worst out of all of them, and Dick thinks that maybe that’s where he should start. At the end.

Before he can talk himself out of it, Dick takes the plunge, and he hopes that he doesn’t come to regret this. He needs to do this. So Bruce won’t worry. So he can be normal.

He’s mid-air, swinging from one rooftop to the next, and the cuts on his arm seem to burn. He winces as they pulse with pain, and grits his teeth against it, because they don’t have time for this. They need to get to Clark before it’s too late, and Dick can’t become the weak link here. The world depends on them.

“Nightwing? Are you alright?” Batman—Bruce—asks as they swing. It’s super weird that Bruce’s words are coming out of Batman’s mouth, though, and Dick is going to tell Batman that, but only as soon as he catches his breath, and if not then, then definitely after they find Clark and save the world.

They land on the next rooftop, and Dick’s knees buckle underneath him. He’s lucky he knows how to fall, though, so he doesn’t hurt anything else other than his dignity.

“Nightwing!”

Batman’s at his side in an instant—he actually stuck the landing—and Dick’s finding it hard to stay awake. Man, Vandal Savage hadn’t been kidding when he said that most people weren’t lucky enough to survive if this is what happens after only a few nicks from that blade.

He’s on his back, watching groggily as Batman rips off a glove to press two fingers just underneath Dick’s jaw, feeling Dick’s racing heartbeat. Then Batman feels his forehead. Dick can guess he’s probably too warm from what little he can see of Bruce’s face.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Bruce pleads, all soft and gentle as he runs a thumb across Dick’s cheek, and it would almost be a comfort if it weren’t for the fact that Dick feels like he’s about to burn from the inside out.

“Savage’s knife,” Dick breathes, his head spinning.

Bruce inhales sharply. “Poison?”

“Or maybe a curse,” Dick says, closing his eyes and trying not to let himself think about how stupid it was to ignore the evil guy’s warnings. His words are starting to slur, and he’s on fire, and this is so stupid. They need to save Clark, and the last thing Bruce needs to worry about is Dick.

“I’m taking you back to Leslie,” Batman says, and even though Dick is twenty years old now, Bruce still somehow manages to cradle him in his arms. Dick blinks and they’re not on top of the roof anymore. Bruce is lowering him into the sewers, dropping down next to him and scooping him up after only a moment to regain his footing.

They’re headed towards the bunkers, Dick realizes. Not to the Cave—which doesn’t exist anymore, Dick remembers after a moment of confusion—but to the closest safehouse. Leslie and Alfred should be there.

“Clark,” Dick manages to murmur after a while. “Clark still needs help.”

“Clark is Kryptonian,” Bruce argues as he sweeps through the sewers with grace no one else could match ankle-deep in filth. “You’re human. Once Leslie and Alfred treat you, then you can come find me. You know where I’ll be.”

He does, but Dick doesn’t answer. It’s all becoming too much, and at some point, he passes out. When he opens his eyes again, it’s Leslie holding his hand and talking to him.

“I need you to stay awake,” Leslie Thompkins tells him, shining a penlight into each of his eyes in turn. Dick blinks away the black spots and turns his head to look for Bruce, who had just been there. Leslie recaptures his attention with a tap to the cheek. “Look at me, Dick.”

“Where’s Bruce?” Dick rasps. “Did he leave already?”

“You’ve been out for almost ten minutes,” Leslie says. “He left while I was analyzing your blood samples, and if you even think about going after him right now, I will restrain you.”

“But Bruce and Clark—”

Leslie starts to fit him for an IV. “Will be fine for now, but you’re in no condition to fight me, let alone a Kryptonian and an immortal.”

“Hurry and treat me, then,” Dick tells her. “We don’t have any time.”

“I don’t have the antidote synthesized yet.”

“Then I’ll go without it. I can last that long.”

“Will you just trust him to do this?” Leslie asks, looking haggard, but Dick can’t find it in him to care right now. The whole world depends on whether Bruce and Dick can get to Clark and stop him before Vandal Savage destroys everything in his path. “Bruce can handle this without you for the moment!”

“We’re the only ones left!” Dick yells, trying to push himself upright, but Leslie presses down on his chest and overpowers him easily. Dick tries again. “Leslie, he’s going to die if he’s by himself! And what am I supposed to do then? I can’t save Clark by myself!”

“Worry about living that long!” Leslie snaps, but her gaze softens after a moment, and she sighs. “Dick, Bruce knows what he’s doing. Just concentrate on getting better so you can go out there and help him, okay?”

Dick stares at her. She’s right, of course. Dick’s not any good to anyone half-dead. He’s on fire right now, and until Leslie can put it out, Batman is without a partner, and Dick hates how useless that makes him feel.

When Dick surfaces from the memory, it’s almost like blinking. One minute he’s lying in a medical bed in a bunker deep below Gotham, and the next he’s back in the library, the old clock chiming noon. Lunch will be done soon, and Dick is breathless at the sheer mundaneness of it all.

He’s just remembered something that no one else knows, and the world just keeps turning around him. At least he sort of has an idea of where things went wrong. It isn’t the right memory, but he’s close—

Another memory slams into him full force, and Dick can’t breathe.

For some reason, they don’t kill him. They carve into him, but they don’t kill him. He’s so weak with poison and blood loss that they probably don’t need to, anyways. He’s dragged through the sewers, away from the bunker, away from the bodies of his friends. Away from any chance he possibly had at staying alive past tonight, probably.

He pushes away his grief, even as it threatens to swallow him whole. The feeling is familiar enough that Dick doesn’t pause to feel it. He’s got other things to worry about, and he’s learned the hard way that if he wants to be able to mourn, he needs to stay alive.

He passes out more than a few times throughout the journey, and when he opens his eyes for what has to be the dozenth time, it isn’t the knife-wielding maniac that had carved into his arms that’s staring down at him. It’s Vandal Savage.

“Well, now,” Savage says. “Looks like I finally found the last ant beneath my feet. You’ve been too much of a nuisance lately. You and Batman.”

The last—no. NO.

“What did you do to him?!” Dick roars. He’s maskless and beltless and gloveless and he can barely do more than drag himself forward an inch, but he doesn’t care. “What did you do?! TELL ME!”

“To Batman?” Savage asks, raising a scarred eyebrow. “Nothing. He’s alive.”

And Dick almost sobs in relief. After losing everyone else, he doesn’t think he can survive losing Bruce, too. As long as he has Bruce, he thinks that maybe he can try and live on. Even if it’s not going to be for very much longer. Dick can feel the poison flowing through his veins, and with Leslie and Alfred dead, with Bruce going after Clark, he isn’t going to make it past tonight.

It’s only then, when he knows that Bruce is alive, that Dick realizes where he’s been dragged. He’s in an open room with a vaulted ceiling, and he’s lying in a pool of his own blood in the middle of some kind of circle in the very center of the room. Ancient glowing symbols surround him, and Vandal looks way too smug for this to be a coincidence.

“With Superman as he is, though,” Savage continues, “I doubt he’ll stay that way for very much longer. I give it only a few hours before Superman crushes the life out of him.” One of Savage’s men hand him a knife—the same one that Savage had cut Dick with before—and Savage points it at Dick, a smirk playing across his lips. “You, however, you only have minutes.”

“The poison,” Dick gasps out.

“Not poison,” Savage tells him, crouching down next to where Dick can barely move. “It’s blessed with dark magic, and whomever the blade touches, they are doomed to lose their soul.”

Dick gives his best glare. “What does that even mean?”

“It means I can use you. I was going to let you suffer for the rest of your sad, pathetic life, but it turns out I need a sacrifice for this ritual,” Savage grins, “and you are the perfect candidate.”

Savage plunges the blade down, and for a moment, Dick can’t believe what’s happening. This is it. So many times in his short life, since he was nine years old donning the Robin suit for the first time, he’d known that the only way he was ever going to die was saving people. And now? Now everyone he loves is dead, and it’s all been for nothing.

The knife sinks into Dick’s stomach, and he can’t breathe. He’s dying. He’s dying, and there’s nothing he can do about the red that flows out of him and seeps into the circle. Savage murmurs something in another language, but Dick can’t breathe. Bruce isn’t here, and he’s all alone, and tears pour from the corners of his eyes.

Savage roars something else, and agony races up Dick’s spine. He screams incoherently as the pain consumes him. Light blinds him, and the last thing Dick Grayson remembers before he dies is Vandal Savage’s laughter ringing in his ears.

And then it’s dark. And he knows no more.

Dick screams and screams, scrabbling at his shirt. He tugs it up with a sob as phantom pain flares up in his stomach. He has to stop the bleeding before he dies here alone on the floor. His shaking fingers run over nothing but smooth skin, though, and Dick doesn’t understand what’s happening anymore. He’s caught halfway between past and future. Everything’s blending together, and Dick can only sob into the chair beneath, chest heaving with each hitched breath.

He can’t remember. He’s Dick—but he isn’t. He’s dying—but he isn’t. He’s supposed to be bleeding, he’s supposed to be lying on the floor, just another corpse for Bruce to find and grieve, but he isn’t. And he doesn’t understand why.

Is he real? He needs someone to tell him, needs Bruce, because he just can’t remember.

#dick grayson #bruce wayne #alfred pennyworth #dc #young justice #teach me to dream #ngl it's hard to keep writing in dick's perspective in this style #but i do like the way it's turning out #camryn writes

25 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 4 years

Note

Do Boone and Dick ever like, fully settle together or are they both just constantly stuck in a limbo where they occasionally meet up but never actually solidify anything

The latter! Not really just because of the angst factor, lol, they’re just one of those ships for me. Similar to what I said about how I view a Dick/Tiger ship in a post I made about them….I tend to think Dick’s best shot at a longterm, healthy functional relationship is with a partner who’s more similar to him than not. Its a large part of why Dick/Kory is my preferred canon ship, as I think they have a ton in common and value the same traits in each other, and why Dick/Kyle is my go-to noncanon ship for a happy ending.

Like, I talk a lot about how imo Dick is a lot more morally flexible and willing to work and even be friends and allies with people he doesn’t agree with on even very important topics….but things are a little different when you throw intimacy and emotional commitment into the mix. Because one of the most important characteristics that make him who he is, to me, is how much he is a self-made man. As in, he is the man he is with INTENT. He believes and values everything he does for very specific reasons, and not because of Bruce’s influence or a lack of alternative viewpoints…..some of his most formative, definitive years were in his early career as Nightwing or leader of the Titans, when Bruce was barely a presence in his life, and far more people than just Bruce have tried to influence or shape Dick in some way or another.

But he’s fiercely independent and not just for the sake of being stubborn….or maybe yeah, for that reason….but its not about just being contrary, its about standing up to the sheer volume of people and forces who have tried to mold him in specific images. The way he was forcibly derailed from the path his life was on not even because of his parents’ death, but because everyone AFTER that point ensured that wasn’t even an option….the way Cobb and the Court of Owls had a master plan for him since before he was even born, that he apparently doesn’t even get a say on….the way Deathstroke and multiple others have tried to make him their apprentice or turn him to their side or school of thinking….the many times he’s been brainwashed and made into a literal pawn like by the Church of Blood or had his agency violated physically and sexually…his core premise, to me, is that of a man trying to be himself, with intent, be the master of his own destiny and the one who chooses his own path in a world that repeatedly insists on trying to choose for him.

To me, the times he’s tried to get out from other Bruce’s shadow and build his own reputation and not be defined as just Bruce’s son or Batman’s sidekick, like….these are just one small aspect of what IMO is the greater issue for him and what truly motivates him at these times, why this is so important to him.

My point being….everything Dick is and that he holds dear to him is the result of deliberate, conscious choices made on his part….he is who he is and fights for the things he fights for BECAUSE he’s had options and been presented with alternatives and ultimately he’s decided that no, this is what he believes, this is who HE wants to be.

And because of that, as much as I fully believe he’s capable of empathizing with even extremely opposite viewpoints and understanding where other people come from, as much as he’s willing and able to get along with them and work with them and respect them in a variety of ways…..there’s only so far that could ever go, romantically speaking.

So for me, all my headcanons and views of Boone and his history with Dick, even expanded upon beyond what we saw in canon…I think Dick could easily be written as viewing the two of them having a fundamental connection that he doesn’t have with others, and understanding and relating to him in ways he doesn’t even with his canon romantic partners. He GETS where Boone comes from, he gets why he made the choices he did….and he does so BECAUSE he was literally there too.

He literally held a gun on Two-Face before he was even a teenager, with Boone being the one standing RIGHT THERE AT HIS SIDE, urging him to give into darkest impulses and by extension validating them, promising not to judge him for them or ever leave him because of them even at a time when Dick felt Bruce had already abandoned him or cast him out BECAUSE of Dick’s inability to make the right choices and live up to what Bruce wanted him to be. In a lot of ways, pulling that trigger that night would have been the EASY choice for Dick, and by extension, choosing Boone and the choices Boone makes and wanted Dick to make too….would be the EASIER choice for Dick, a whole lot easier than constantly trying to live up to (and feeling like he’s failed to live up to) the expectations so many other people in his life heap on him.

I think no matter how much they clash in any given scenario, Dick will always understand and relate to Boone and all the choices he’s ever made, because he could see himself having made the same choices. Because at many times, I actually think, he’s wanted to make the same choices.

But ultimately, each and every one of those times, Dick has chosen not to. And that doesn’t just happen, it happens with intent. Deliberately.

And thus, no matter how much Dick relates to people with extremely opposite stances in a lot of ways and even could have a deep and emotional connection with someone like that…..I don’t think he could ever commit longterm to an intimate relationship with one of them, like Boone….because doing so ultimately is a tacit acceptance of every one of their choices, every time they also quite deliberately and with intent chose the opposite of Dick. And thus, by extension…..acceptance and condoning of these various choices in order to accept THEM as an equal romantic partner….is in a way, a kind of implicit rejection of Dick’s own choices in similar times and circumstances. It would kind of be like….Dick taking back the times he’s consciously made the opposite choice, and thus suggesting maybe he’s not actually okay with the choices he actually made at those times.

Or at least, I feel like that’s how Dick would see it, at the end of the day, given how much he values and prioritizes his own decision-making and his freedom to make his own decisions at all AND have those decisions respected and valued.

So dramatic as it may sound, lol, in the end I think despite or even because of how much he may be drawn to a mirror image of himself like Boone, the person he could have ended up being or be very similar to if he’d chosen the path they chose back when their paths ultimately diverged…Dick would always view settling down with one of these particular potential partners as kind of settling for being less or even just other than the man he’s sculpted himself to be, by his own choices.

And I don’t think he can or is willing to do that. In fact, I think its completely anathema to everything that makes him so fundamentally Dick Grayson….moreso than even just killing someone would ever be. Because ultimately I think Dick’s views on killing and general resistance to it is just ONE aspect of his overall character, whereas his insistence on his own personal agency and choices is at the core of EVERY aspect of his character.

Related to all of the above, but something of a separate matter….I think in his heart of hearts, Dick’s dream is to someday have children of his own, whether biological or adopted, and to build a family that’s fully of his own choice, with intent. I think he accepts his second family for who and what they are, but who and what they are will never be all that similar to his first family and the dynamics he shared with them….and I do think he misses those specific dynamics and craves having new versions of them in his life. And that he likely figures the only way that will ever happen is with a family he’s the patriarch of himself, and in the position of laying the foundational dynamics for.

And given that, for as much as I think Dick’s able to work with and even respect and appreciate people with extremely different ideologies and values….I can’t imagine him ever being willing to start a family with someone who ultimately doesn’t value the things Dick’s chosen to uphold as most important to him. Because which set of values do they pass down to their children then? We’re talking about fundamentally divergent views of right and wrong. The kind of things that Dick might be willing at times to compromise himself or his own values for in specific contexts, or for some bigger picture….but to compromise his own views in terms of supporting a partner passing down completely opposite views on right and wrong to his own children? That, I can’t see Dick ever being alright with, and so much like being with someone like Boone longterm would require him settling in other respects, I think it would also cost Dick the chance to ever build his own family, as I don’t think he’d ever fully be comfortable doing that with someone who wasn’t willing to settle or give up their own values to uphold Dick’s.

And for the very same reason Dick feels so strongly about making his own choices and being the man that results from them, I don’t think its in character for him to ever ask someone to abandon or betray their own choices or ideologies specifically to be with him. If they did that of their own volition, without his prompting or him making some sort of an ultimatum, sure. Its not like he doesn’t have a hugely influential presence himself, and there’s no reason someone like Boone couldn’t be written having their own doubts about their own choices and be predisposed or just willing to be ‘brought over to the good side’ or whatever. But I can’t imagine Dick ever ASKING that of them, any more than he’d be willing to do that himself if they ever asked it of him in order to be with them.

Thus, more often than not, I think a Dick/Boone relationship is one of those that will always be ships crossing in the night, unrequited or bittersweet…..two people who understand and relate to each other, respect and get each other….but are too fundamentally opposed to make the choices they’d need to be willing to make, in order to choose each other in the long run.

#boone aka shrike

24 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 5 years

Note

Um... /post/188248925631/dick-and-damian-dont-love-each-other-more-than Explain, please. Also curious about your opinion on the Dick and Damian being the mirror of Bruce and Dick, especially things like That scene in Nightwing #20 and fanon's heart nut material that is Dick being Damian's father figure along with brother.

LOL that was a goof post that basically is just another way of me saying “stop making the Batkids have favorites, let them all love and appreciate each other just in different ways.” With the fact that Dick and Damian tend to interact with each other more comfortably than with their other siblings not being proof of favoritism, but rather just...a lot of the same things and experiences appeal to them in very similar ways, so they have plenty of available bonding activities at any given moment.

Like I see them both as adrenaline junkies in a way that say, Tim perhaps isn’t....like Tim isn’t afraid to do any of the things he does as a vigilante, of course, but he’s a more cerebral character, more of a thinker, happy surrounded by computers and data and investigation files as much as anything else...whereas Dick and Damian I both see as very physically oriented people, they like action, danger and excitement that gets their blood pumping and adrenaline going, like....on its own merits.

So they’re like “HELL YEAH, LET’S DO THE THING” when the thing isn’t always the most....logical course of action, but hey, at least they’re not gonna be bored, lol. Y’know?

As far as Dick and Damian mirroring Bruce and Dick....I both agree and disagree with it.

I disagree in the sense that canon and fanon frequently views them as an INVERTED mirror of Bruce and Dick, with Dick as the happy Batman trying to cheer up the brooding Robin Damian, as opposed to when Bruce was the brooding Batman cheered up by his happy Robin Dick.

Because I think that devalues Bruce and Dick’s VERY early relationship, the inception of it, the foundation of their bond....and perhaps ironic given how critical I am of Bruce and his badly written or acted upon parenting a lot of the time....I think this perception of Bruce and Dick undercuts some of Bruce’s BEST times as a parent to Dick, specifically.

Because Bruce WASN’T just a dark, brooding Batman for most of the time Dick was Robin, historically speaking. Before the late 70s/early 80s, which was also around the time they started transitioning Dick out of Batman’s sphere and into his own role as Nightwing and most associated with the Titans, like....before all that, Batman tended to be as silly, tongue in cheek, and yes, even cheerful, as he was at times dark and brooding. Like, in pre-Flashpoint stories that trace back to Dick’s early years, Bruce SMILED, even when in the cowl. He laughed, he joked, he called Dick by personal endearments. He was PATERNAL and affectionate.

And given that in pretty much every version of his origin story, and like....in logical view of the events that unfolded in it....Dick himself did not START as a cheerful, happy go lucky Robin without a care in the world. He was traumatized, he was grieving. Depending on which origin you go with, he had massive trust issues, in all origins he has abandonment issues....early Dick Grayson had a darkness every bit as much as anyone else, because he was a lost and grieving child trying to find his way in the world with his usual support, lifeline, the familiarity that had defined so much of his early life in the form of his parents, his friends, his circus....like all of that was gone, and he had to start over in terms of finding things good and worthwhile in a world that had taken all of that away from him.

And it was Bruce who helped him do that. Who was HIS light, HIS brightness every bit as much as people tend to credit Dick with being his, if not more. Like, I would argue that it was NEVER that Dick made Bruce lighter and happier by simply being himself and always being cheerful and joking. More accurately, I’d suggest that it was more that Dick made Bruce lighter and happier by giving him reason to make a conscious CHOICE to be those things...for Dick’s benefit, specifically, so as to help steer Dick away from becoming a replica of his darkest and most brooding self, by setting a more carefree, light-hearted example for Dick to look at and use to help decide how he wanted to shape himself and what he wanted to shape himself into.

So the irony is, I think Dick and Damian are MORE of a mirror to early Bruce and Dick than people actually deem them to be. That they weren’t actually an inverted mirror, with Dick always playing the role of the cheerful inspiration that brightened his counterpart’s demeanor. I see it as Dick occupying the exact same role Bruce did in Damian’s life, leading him by example, out of his own personal darkness, the way Bruce had once done for him...no matter what differences came between them later in life.

The part where I DO think they’re actually an inverted mirror of Bruce and Dick, is in the paternal bond between Dick and Damian, that fandom highlights so consciously. Its not that Bruce wasn’t paternal, as I said earlier. Its more that like....there was always that slight distance or buffer (that grew as Dick grew older) that came about because of the uncertainty between Dick and Bruce as to what they actually were to each other, what label to use for each other....friend, brother, partner, father/son? And I do firmly believe that as the adult and guardian, it was Bruce’s responsibility to take the lead in establishing what they were to each other...or at least, what they COULD be, if Dick wanted it to be.

Like, I mean, the popular take is that Bruce never adopted Dick as a kid because he didn’t want to replace Dick’s father in his eyes. But like, there’s all of one story in pretty much their entire history when Dick ACTUALLY says anything like that himself...and its back when he’s like, ten or eleven, and they’re trying to keep him in Bruce’s custody and so like, a judge is forcing ten year old Dick to like....put a label to them himself. And Dick is many things, but presumptuous on his own behalf has NEVER been one of them, so I have super negative feelings towards that always being pointed at as why Bruce didn’t adopt Dick as a kid and saying see, it was for Dick’s benefit because he was just doing what Dick wanted....like, no. An orphaned kid who lost everything once, has massive abandonment issues, and ended up taken in by a billionaire who gave him more than he could have imagined....like that kid is NEVER going to be the one to push the envelope and say “hey this isn’t quite enough for me, could you please also adopt me, Bruce, even though you’ve never given me any clear indication that this was okay with you or something you even wanted?”

Like. Its just not realistic. Or fair to put that on the kid, to be the one to open up that avenue for exploration. This is why people who foster or adopt older kids are HEAVILY stressed to make clear to the child like....what their OPTIONS are. Like if they foster them initially, its not presuming anything about the child’s wants to just....make it clear that hey, if this is ever something YOU want, we would be very much open to adopting you and changing our dynamic accordingly, but if not, that’s fine too.

Kids just aren’t going to have the confidence to ASK for that. They’re just not. Especially when they come into the relationship with the kind of emotional baggage and familiarity with total upheaval that Dick had.

So my point being....I don’t think it was ever truly that Dick wanted to not be adopted, or expressed or hinted at that in any way. I think its more likely that Bruce projected his own wants on Dick, based on the fact that he initially identified with him and his circumstances so much, seeing himself reflected in Dick’s tragedy when losing his own parents. I think Bruce’s hesitancy to raise the issue of adoption when Dick was a kid was far more likely to do Bruce assuming Dick wouldn’t want that....because Bruce projected himself into DICK’S shoes, and based on THAT, operated off of what HE would have wanted as a kid....which was to NOT see his parents replaced in any real way, even though Alfred of course was very much a paternal presence throughout his later childhood.

So its not even that Bruce didn’t want to adopt Dick either - I think he very much did. He just told himself that Dick wouldn’t possibly want that, because Bruce couldn’t imagine have wanted that himself when he was Dick’s age, in Dick’s situation. And so Bruce held back from ever really raising it while Dick was a kid, because he was afraid he’d only get rejected if he did....again, just based purely on his personal assumptions and history.

The irony, for me, and why I see this as an inverted mirror to Dick and Damian’s bond....is that I think once Dick was in Bruce’s shoes....he did the EXACT SAME THING BRUCE HAD DONE....just in the other direction. He, just like Bruce had with him...projected himself into Damian’s shoes, and based his decisions off his assumptions about what Damian wanted or would want....which were in turn, based on his memories of what HE had wanted when he was the one in Damian’s position. Which was for Bruce to fully act like a father to him, to not hold back or hesitate or be afraid to step into that role.

So because of that, Dick tried to avoid what he saw as responsible for so much of the distance between him and Bruce - that hesitancy to establish a clear relationship and bond that left no real doubt how either felt - and so he in contrast all but threw himself into the paternal role with Damian...also using it at the same time to hide from his own grief and other issues stemming from Bruce’s death as well as having to be Batman. He EMBRACED being there and available as an actual father figure to Damian, if Damian made moves in that direction - which of course Damian inevitably did, because he was a kid desperately in need of affection, and here Dick was offering it freely and openly.

I think this additionally played into why Dick was so resistant to believing Tim about Bruce - it wasn’t that he didn’t WANT Bruce to be alive or that he didn’t trust Tim or WANT Tim to be right....it was that on some level, because of what he saw as so crucial to being for Damian’s benefit, and to avoiding making the same ‘mistakes’ with Damian that he felt Bruce had made by holding himself back from him at times, emotionally....Dick couldn’t afford to see himself as a placeholder in Damian’s life. Especially not without any guarantees that Bruce actually was alive or could come back....let alone how long that would take to happen. If he did that, accepted that, it would be all to easy to put off establishing that firm presence and role in Damian’s eyes for longer and longer....until one day he might look up and years might have passed and Damian was sixteen and pissed off and moving out because he didn’t know what he was to Dick and Dick was afraid to tell him, because he was afraid of replacing Bruce in Damian’s eyes.

So I think on some level, Dick just couldn’t allow himself to believe Bruce might come back, because if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to commit to what he truly, honestly felt Damian needed him to be, for Damian’s sake.

With the end result being that strong father/son seeming bond between them....and Dick not having ANY clue how to handle it when Bruce DID ultimately come back, and he probably went in his head....oh shit, I fucked up, I replaced Bruce in Damian’s eyes, or at least made it weird or difficult for them...I gotta get 1000 miles away from here STAT, otherwise I’ll fuck things up for them more and they’ll never have the father/son relationship I want them to have and they deserve to have, and it’ll be all my fault. And PS no this does not have anything to do with my devastation that I went all in on this whole ‘treating Damian like my own son’ thing and now I can’t do that anymore, I have no real claim, that’s not my place and I gotta just make my peace with Bruce occupying the role I came to want and love having myself.

*Shrugs* So yeah. All of that.

Oh and also....it does feed my ire on the ‘treating Dick like he’s only sorta Bruce’s son because of the smaller age gap between Dick and Bruce and how young Bruce was when he took Dick in’ front. Because Dick and Damian have just as small an age gap and Dick was pretty much just as young and Damian just as old as Bruce and Dick had been, originally...

And yet notice how fandom has NO trouble characterizing Dick and Damian having an almost father/son dynamic even WITH Bruce still present and even WITH them only having occupied those roles in each other’s lives for a year.

But meanwhile, Dick raised solely by Bruce from ages 8 through the end of his childhood, and some people still can’t wrap their heads around how they could possibly be TRULY a father and son to each other because this reason or that one?

Meh. Sounds fake. Hard pass. LOL.

36 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 5 years

Note

dick's backstory gets so frequently gets brushed under the rug and sterilized into "parents died, adopted by a rich dude" and subsequently ignored because then it's assumed his life is then perfect. this is a boy who watched his family die gruesomely. who was then removed from the only home he'd ever known and put in juvenile detention. who then became a vigilante before he ever turned 10. who was never adopted. who was fired and kicked out and hurt by bruce. no trauma there! perfectly happy!

Preaching to the choir my friend!

One of my greatest frustrations in DC comics fandom for yeeeeears was always how often Dick and Jason get pitted against each other in trauma olympics, and other assorted wtf-ery. Because just like Bruce ended up pitting them against each other like I described in that post, the comics did too, at least in the beginning. Not AS much since Jason came back with his own clearly defined niche, more…holdovers from that original time. And so there’s this tendency with a lot of Dick fans and a lot of Jason fans to act like its gotta be one or the other, that its impossible to stan for both. And I’m just sitting over here like NOPE, I stan them both and always will, every single one of their problems and any and all canon shitty things they’ve done to each other were really the result of dumbass writers and dumbass characters forcing them into situations where like….they did what they did. I very much reject the idea that they HAVE to always be at odds, and that one HAS to be better than the other (Dick) or have had it harder than the other (Jason). Its just like…..why tho?

So for me, that tends to manifest a lot as in, when focusing on Dick, I really push back against the myth of him as the ‘pure/too light/too good to kill’ golden boy of the Batfamily, because….no. He’s not. He is who he is because of circumstance and as a result of growing up in an emotional minefield of a house where he felt pushed to perfection. With perfection having clearly defined parameters, as established by Bruce and his expectations. Not because he’s innately incapable of killing or just on some core level ‘too good to lower himself to that’, which is unfortunately something that’s also put forth a lot. But the thing is, putting Dick on that kind of pedestal unintentionally says some pretty shitty things about Jason, as well as Damian and even Cass, and I don’t think people fully realize they’re doing that when they talk about Dick “Too Good to Kill” Grayson. Implying that he is such a thing, that there IS such a thing, at the same time implicitly states that his brothers and sister who HAVE killed, even when they were children and it wasn’t their fault, they were coerced…..this basically suggests that there HAS to be something innately….’worse’ about Jason, and Damian, and Cass, or else they never would’ve been able to do that at all.

Like, I read a fic awhile back where a big theme was the rest of the family talking about this idea that like….Dick couldn’t handle it if he did end up killing someone, that it would break him, tarnish him in some irrevocable way. Like they were saying it in a way meant to be complimentary to Dick and his character, even as Jason and the others were the ones putting forth this idea, the impression was meant to be they wanted to protect Dick from this, preserve that ‘goodness’ about him, but I was just like….No. God no. Hard pass. Because the idea that Dick would lose something fundamental to him, like he’d be forever lessened as a character and a person if for whatever reason he ended up killing…..like, there’s really no way to look at that without reading into it the implication that Jason and the others are damaged goods, forever tainted. And like…no thank you. I really really have issues with that line of thought, especially when it includes Cass and Damian who were forced into being child assassins. Like, whether you mean to or not, when you apply that logic you end up writing them off before they were even like, ten. Beyond saving, even then. I find that very troubling and insidious, even. And thus I push back heavily against this take on Dick, but really, its more in defense of Jason, Damian and Cass.

Like, of course he’d be forever affected by something that huge, just like they are and always will be, but to clarify I mean - its this idea that Dick could never be HAPPY again, even if he was forced to kill someone, or put in a position where he made that choice…that’s what I really objected to. Because that’s the part that suggests that Damian and Cass will never TRULY know happiness as a result of their childhoods, and that’s very destructive thinking, to my mind. The reality of someone forced to grow up too fast, having their innocence stolen, being pushed into doing something no one should have to live with….these are harsh, stark realities, they have merit, they have weight - but they do not mean, and should never be assumed to mean, that a child, or even that a character, who fits these circumstances is somehow beyond repair, or salvaging, or just being happy someday.

And then the flipside of that is I equally push back on takes that crown Jason the King of Trauma, not because he hasn’t endured a ridiculous amount, but because in defense of Dick, Tim and the others, I object to playing into the idea of ranking the Batkids’ traumas at all. The stuff Jason’s been through is horrific, but its not negated, or watered down or lessened by acknowledging that Dick and the others have been through extremely fucked up stuff too. And similarly, I’m very bothered by pointing to how much rougher and more aggressive and ‘darker’ Jason is as a character than Dick, as a way to kinda backdoor prove that Jason’s been through more shit than him, because that again leads to a very troubling implicit line of thought that like, there’s only ONE right way to respond to trauma. That if you aren’t visibly hardened by it, darkened by it, the way Jason has been by his, then whatever you’ve been through obviously couldn’t have been THAT bad, or as bad as someone like Jason has had it. And again, I gotta just give a big HARD PASS to that, because that’s just not how it works.

The fact that Dick is for the most part a far more light-hearted character than Jason isn’t proof he’s had it easier or hasn’t been through as much or seen as much bad stuff - that last bit is especially laughable. You can’t entertain the idea of a guy who’s been fighting the worst kinds of criminals since he was ten, in the most notoriously corrupt and crime-ridden city in the DC universe, and honestly believe that there’s anything he hasn’t seen or been exposed to. It just doesn’t track. BUT, that kind of awareness of the darkness Gotham is mired in isn’t as easily reconciled with the bright, cheerful personality Dick usually sports…unless you acknowledge that Dick WORKS at being that person. This is his reaction to the trauma he’s lived and been surrounded by, not because its just innately who he is, but its because its who he CHOOSES to be, its the response he’s DECIDED on.

Jason copes with stuff with anger and outbursts. Dick copes with stuff with laughter and mockery. Neither is better or worse, more right or wrong than the other, they’re just DIFFERENT. Different coping mechanisms, trauma responses, for different people. Like I’ve always said, I see Dick and Jason as very similar people at their core. Their differences are largely superficial. But both of them respond to trauma with defiance. By refusing to be beaten down by it. The only difference, is with Jason, that defiance looks like swearing and spitting and cursing, even when faced with an opponent much bigger or tougher than him, a situation that should be too much to survive. Whereas with Dick, that defiance looks like laughing and smiling and joking, even when faced with an opponent or a situation about which there’s nothing actually funny, nothing naturally bright or cheerful. Dick has to conjure that appearance of brightness as an act of defiance, just like Jason has to conjure that appearance of strength.

And once you stop trying to compare Jason and Dick’s traumas, stop trying to rank one as more or less than the others, and just acknowledge and accept hey, they’ve both been through fucked up shit, they’ve both been traumatized - then you can look just at the stuff Dick’s been through, isolated and independent from everything else, and then you can see just how shitty it actually is, and thus what an act of defiance, what a testament of strength it is, that he is able to go through life acting as cheerfully and bubbly as he often does. And yeah, like you said, its his parents being murdered when he was eight, its being thrown in juvie because of a corrupt system when he’d done nothing wrong, its being beaten nearly to death and shot by Two-Face and Joker and dozens of other villains throughout Dick’s childhood, its the time he was tortured by Brother Blood trying to break him in every way possible and its the shit with Mirage and with Tarantula….and a ton of other stuff that never really gets acknowledged for how bad it actually was, because comics are notoriously bad at actually LOOKING at the trauma they heap on superheroes, and what it actually MEANS and what the realistic fallout would be from it, the emotional toll actually taken.

One of the biggest instances of this IMO is with Blockbuster. Like lots of people know the basics about Blockbuster’s death in the comics, and how it ties into what happened with Tarantula….and because that’s so ‘visibly’ traumatic, because that’s an event that’s easy to associate with a trauma that most people have a ready made image and RANKING in mind already when they think of it - like they think of what happened with Tarantula and they’re like oh yeah, okay, that’s a type of trauma I recognize as TRAUMA, thus I get just from the mention of it that was definitely bad and traumatic and had an impact on Dick….so that becomes the go-to when people talk about the stuff with Blockbuster. That’s what people hone in on….so focused on what pings their radar as Obviously Traumatic, they forget to look around at everything else involved and look at the possible impact and potential fallout.

And thus people forget that what happened with Tarantula happened when Dick was ALREADY at the lowest point in his life, and WHY that was so. Like, they acknowledge it, but in a cursory way, like okay yeah, that’s the buildup, now let’s get to the actual trauma and talk about that. Which ignores like….the trauma that was the REASON he was already in such a state to begin with. Like, Blockbuster systematically hunted down every connection he could find to Dick Grayson’s civilian life, and murdered them and burned all traces of them to the ground…JUST because they knew him. Just as a way to hurt HIM, Dick Grayson.

And because that doesn’t ping on our Preconceived Trauma Scales as immediately as something like Jason’s death or Dick’s parents’ murder or similar iconic traumas….we tend to gloss over that, but like….think about it. Think about what something like that would mean for a character that’s known for both his sense of responsibility, and for being one of the most openly empathetic superheroes out there, an emotional caretaker whose entire reputation is built on how much he FEELS for other people and how deeply.

Imagine the kid who was orphaned at age eight, watching his parents fall to their deaths and in the immediate aftermath taken away from everything else he’d ever known or found comfort in - the circus…..and now imagine that same kid fifteen years later watching that same circus burn to the ground, the last memory of his treasured childhood, when things were GOOD, when he was unconditionally happy, the last connection he had to his parents and all the extended circus family he’d grown up happy among…..all of them now dead too, all of those memories physically burned to the ground until nothing was left. All of it gone, for good. And with this villain saying - that happened because of you. I didn’t care about them, I only killed them, only did all of that, because I KNEW how much it would hurt you. And then that same guy did it AGAIN - blowing up Dick’s apartment building and everyone in it….just because he lived there. Having a sniper kill a reporter he was talking to, while he was sitting across the table from her…JUST because she was talking to him.

Like, that’s trauma on top of trauma, that’s trauma on an unimaginable scale. There’s a reason in that infamous scene with Tarantula, Dick was mumbling about being poison….because he honestly, truly believed it at that point, because it was TRUE. Because Blockbuster had made it his personal mission to make that true, to make it a reality that anyone close to Dick Grayson would die. Because of him. Dick was entirely right in feeling that way, he was simply acknowledging what Blockbuster had very deliberately set out to do..it wasn’t Dick’s FAULT that everyone around him was dying, because of their connection to him….but that didn’t mean it wasn’t TRUE.

And that’s just….mind boggling to contemplate, to picture the toll that has to take, but the thing is - it barely ever gets contemplated! Purely because there’s not a simple, neat, easy way to sum it up and label what Trauma specifically it is. The way we can with his parents’ murder, or his rape, or various things that have happened to Jason or their other brothers and sister. And so it gets swept under the rug because we’re in a hurry to get back to the traumas we DO have an easy vocabulary for, with ready-made pictures all queued up in our heads. And then on top of all these traumas (because there’s more too, like think about the impact of realizing that the circus owner you regarded as a grandfather was someday planning on handing you over to people who were going to turn you into an assassin, make you everything you hate, like imagine the BETRAYAL of that discovery and how it would shake your entire view of reality and everything you knew and believed in about your childhood and the time you spent around that man). But yeah, like, on top of these traumas that don’t have a neat and easy logline to describe them, or that don’t quite look like we expect a REALLY traumatic trauma to look like….then add on top of that a trauma response that doesn’t look like our preconceived notions of what trauma response looks like, a guy laughing and joking and SMILING in the aftermath, rather than growling and shooting and drinking.

And you wind up with the idea that nothing THAT bad has ever happened to this character, not like the stuff that’s happened to this other character who ACTS the way we expect someone to act after they’ve been Through Some Real Shit. Even though nothing could be further than the truth. But that’s what happens when we try and boil things down to easy and simple and quick ways of thinking and processing stories and events and traumas. We end up skipping right over the evidence of trauma that falls outside our initial assumptions, and drawing the conclusion that means no trauma was actually ever there…..instead of the proper conclusion which is just we weren’t looking in the right places. Or were just in too much of a rush or too busy looking elsewhere or for something more obvious, and thus missed acknowledging what was actually there.

Anyway, lol. Lots to unpack there, obviously, but yeah, my point being, this tendency we all tend to have in society, this need to artificially impose ranks and hierarchies and award gold, silver and bronze medals even to something as arbitrary as the kinds of traumas we’ve endured - its fucked up, and self-defeating, and does nobody any good. Because its like trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Trying to FORCE comparisons that aren’t possible, because no two traumas are alike, no two traumas are interchangeable, and thus they inherently CAN’T be measured against each other, ranked, because….there’s no actual measurement system for trauma! There’s no way to actually JUDGE ‘this event was worse, this had more of an impact’, and yet we always try anyway, instead of just accepting….an impact was had. Instead of just worrying about the RESULT, focusing on THAT - which in this case is the person left behind in the aftermath of the trauma, the one actually traumatized….instead of spending so much time and energy focusing on the TRAUMA itself, as though that’s what matters and is important.

#Anonymous

13 notes · View notes