#family sold me to when i was born a fucking miracle baby

[bellwitchfaggot]

Oh so everyone knew I was Ella enchanted the whole time except me I see

[ccfstephaniebrown]

Because you forgot how to love me. || Tim  & Steph || Chatzy

Tim and Steph face each other in the Batcave

@redrobinxdrake

Stephanie waddled her way down to the cave as quickly as she could. Baby Drake was getting too big, and she resembled more an apple with legs then her usual self. She was livid. When Conner had told her where Tim was, she hadn't believed it. Bruce wouldn’t just lock him away. He was supposed to be in a room. He was supposed to be able to come and go as he pleased. But what Kon had described was a prison! She moved quickly Tim's Gotham U hoodie stretched wide over her belly and her black leggings doing little to keep her warm. "BRUCE," she yelled, "BRUCE!" He wasn't there. How dare he not be here when she found out what he had done. She was putting an end to this. She didn't care if she had to play the pregnant card. They were exhausting her. She moved down the cave's hall towards the prisons until she could see him. Laying in the glass case like he was a caged animal. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. This is not what Bruce sold us on. I swear Tim. We would never let him lock you up like this.

Tim settled into the warmth of the scratchy wool blanket, his hands prepared to catch the smooth leather baseball. The confines of his room felt chillingly comforting in the wake of his latest sparring session with Barbara. It took every trump card for him to convince the big dog to crank down the homey comforts. He didn’t deserve cable, dressers of grandeur, or the view of the city. He deserved to be a prisoner. His mind no longer a comfortable place to hide or concoct some scheme to harm anyone else. Tim caught the baseball between his palms, a brow lifted to the voice that through his sanctum of sorrow. “You didn’t allow him to do anything. He didn’t lock me up,” he opened his eyes to take on her rounding figure. “This was my idea.”  

Stephanie looked at him, horrified. "Why would you do this," Stephanie demanded, slamming her hands against the glass. She was furious. Furious at everything. The unfairness that Tim had "died" on her after promising to never leave her alone. The fact that they hadn't found him. That it had been Talia, who had found him. "WHAT DID SHE SAY TO YOU? WHAT DID SHE SAY THAT YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD," Stephanie demand anger and frustration evident in her eyes. She was tired of this bullshit. The first thing she would do after Baby Drake was born and she got her body back, would be to hunt down Talia and chop her up till there was nothing to resurrect. She hated the woman. She hurt everyone Stephanie loved and kept hurting them. Jason was right. Some people just deserved to die.

Tim’s jaw set at the continuous pounding of the glass. His expression unchanged but the worry swirling dangerously in his pit. This amount of stress on the baby wasn’t right; she knew this but didn’t care. The underside of her palms was reddening with each wild slam against the glass. The baseball fell from his grasp, rolling beneath his cot, as Tim rose to face her. Her reflection cast in contrast to his own in the mirroring glass. “That I wasn’t worthy of being saved but that I could be.” His words were softer. “You need to calm down, Stephanie. If you keep on, you will push yourself and our child into early labor.” Tim slowly had come to the terms of this new life. With or without all the pieces.

Stephanie sobbed, how dare he talk about their child. It was a miracle every day in her book that she hadn't lost their baby with the amount of stress she had been under the last eight months. Steph chaulked it up to the fact the baby was a Bat. Thru and thru, Baby Drake was a fighter who would survive having her as a mom and their crazy family that was always in trouble but would die for each other. "And you believed her because I wasn't enough. We weren't enough to keep you anchored to this life. You don't get to scold me about the baby Tim. You've made it clear you don't want anything to do with us, and while I'm strong enough to have my heart broken by you every day. I'll be damned if I let you break her heart. Because its a girl, Tim, she needs her daddy. Every girl does, even those of us who have crappy dads like mine. We need a daddy to tell us we're beautiful when boys say we're ugly. To tell us we're worth the wait when boys try to pressure us for more. To tell us its not our fault when we're not strong enough to fight back. We need daddies, and she needs hers. But you're too busy trying to be punished to realized that. You haven't even checked on us. You haven't asked about her. I want to love you and believe in you. I want you back in any way I can have you. But you have to want to come back, and I'm beginning to think it's because you don't want us," Stephanie confessed.

Tim’s features were steeped in the darkness that crowded his soul. He didn’t know what he wanted more. Love or the peace in atoning in the eternal fires of his own doing. Stephanie’s words cut him in places that he didn’t know still mattered. He ached but refused to be derailed by her emotional manipulations. “I believed her because she pulled me out of the grave and I was alone. Alone in my thoughts, and I was scared. I don’t know anything for sure...nothing feels real.” He turned away from her. His hands clenched and unclenching. “Maybe she’s better off without me. Maybe both of you are.” His heart broke silently in his chest. He knew if he pulled the cord now, there was no going back. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be the man you need me to be. I’m trying to figure out who I am because I’m not her tool. I’m not Robin. I don’t know who I am, but I can’t be him. No matter how deeply I wish I could be.”

Stephanie screamed and slammed her hands again, unable to reach him to slap him. "You're Tim Fucking Drake. She fucking stole you from Bruce. Cause he found you first. Did she tell you that? Cause Babs told me. Bruce should've but we fucking chalk it up to Bruce can't admit when he's been outsmarted, and he's an asshole by trade. But Bruce had you. Was caring for you. But Talia stole you like she's stealing you from our child. You're not the coward she has made you. You're Tim Drake. You are the man who saved Conner Kent from Cadmus and then proceeded to protect him while he got on his feet. You protected fucking Superboy. You’re Tim Drake who out-witted Ra's Al Ghul when Oliver Queen caved to him. You’re Tim Drake who saved Barbara Gordon when she was possessed by an AI and figured it out like it was a computer virus. You did those things, all on your own. Not with me or Bruce or Babs or Dick or even Jason. You were the man who figured out my father was coming after me when no one else had an idea of it. You're not Robin. You haven't been for a long time. You were never her tool. You made a choice to follow me. To trust me. And DAMMIT I DESERVE BETTER THEN THIS," she screamed. "So get over your fucking self. I'm scared, Tim. All the time. We both know what a fucking train-wreck I am. I can only hold the bullshit persona of the mom who knows what she's doing for so long. I'm susceptible to postpartum depression. I need you to get your head outta your ass and help me as you promised. Because you made me believe I deserved better than to let, people, leave me like I was the street rat that everyone told me I was. And we have rules that only one of us can be broken at a time, and I'm a month away from pushing something the size of a watermelon out a hole the size of a lemon. I need you cause I'm scared I'm going to die and she's going to be alone in this world, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night because you won't get better. You keep hiding away instead of getting the help you need cause I don't want to leave our baby in the world alone. "

The truth steamrolled over him. It felt as if all the air in his chest had been forced out. Tim turned on his heels, all the anger finally surfacing onto his features. Why couldn’t they all just leave him? Didn’t they get that with every new development a part of him broke? “You do deserve better, Stephanie.” His palms flattened against the glass, rooting him back to the calm he needed to get back too. “You aren’t alone. You have Barbara and Jason and Dick. Hell, you finally won over Bruce,” his eyes softened as they tangled up in hers. God, she was even more beautiful when she was fired up. “You are stronger than you think and it’s about damn time you stop hiding that in this relationship. You don’t know what I want or what I have been through. You don’t know how desperately I want to go back. Back to when I had control. I don’t. I’m not afraid of who I was or what I did. I can accept the bad, but I’m afraid of the new me. I'm afraid of hurting the only thing in the world that makes me feel right, and that’s you.”

Stephanie sobbed feeling something in her break Too tired and stressed to remain standing she down the wall and cried in frustration and hurt and fear and anger. Nothing she did was right. She couldn't save Tim. She failed to protect him. How could she possibly raise a baby on her own? "They all will leave. That's what people do in my life. They leave me. My dad left me for crime. Mom left me for drugs. Babs left me over and over again. Jason and Dick both have lives. You left me. It's the one thing I can count on. People leave. She looked up at the bats in the cave. Misery radiated from her. "I can't help you. I can't fix you, because you're not broken, and I think in all of this that's the most frustrating part. You keep thinking you need to be fixed. That we're trying to fix you. But its Kintsugi, the cracks, the damage is what makes me love you all the more."

“I never wanted to leave you, Stephanie.” Tim’s forehead leaned into the frosty glass. “Please take a breath for our little girl and for me.” He pleaded. Tim shifted slightly out of view of the camera perched in the corner. Constant surveillance had a downside. “What if I can’t love the cracks? What if they make me weak and angry all the damn time?”

"They're supposed to. I look in the mirror, and I see the girl who nearly destroyed Gotham with a gang war. Who broke Tim Drake and Barbara Gordon's heart when she faked her death. The girl who holds the title for the shortest run as Robin ever. The girl whose own mother would rather be high as a kite then holding my hand when I go to doctor's appointments. The girl who became a statistic. The street rat who came from nothing. I hear the whispers of the girl who sucked every Wayne dick to become the youngest, female VP at Wayne Enterprises. The girl who earned her cowl on her back. The girl who is going to screw her child up like she is. And I hate them. I hate everything that I have seen and done and heard. But then I look again. And I listen again. And I see the girl who picked herself up and stayed calm when her world crumbled when her big brother had to tell her the man she loved died. I see the girl who built the life that her lover wanted for their child. I hear him say I love you, and I'll always find my way back to you. And to trust him. You said we didn't morn you. Its cause I knew you weren't dead and I just had to focus on the goal and take power from it. Because you love me. Cracks and all. I'm strong and weak. I'm beautiful and fragile. I'm angry, but I can still love it. I think you've forgotten how to love your cracks because you've forgotten how to love me. But I'm patient, Tim. I'll wait. I will always wait. Because if it were the other way around, you'd wait for me."

[janiedean]

That line from br just bothered me. replicants are more human than human? That doesn't make any sense! You can't be more x than x.

... it’s the entire point tho? XD also of the first one? I mean....

OKAY GET READY FOR ME FEELS VOMITING

so like, the premise of the first movie is that you have humans and replicants. replicants, being android/robots, are treated as inferiors/disposable/machines, which is inherently a pretty inhumane thing to do, in the sense that treating your fellow human being as disposable/a slave/a machine/something that’s supposed to fulfill your needs but not theirs is outlawed because it’s not ethical.

but, as per the premise: replicants are not considered human, so they’re taken out if they try to come to earth from the colonies and have a life, because they don’t have a right to it, being that they’re machines -

except that they’re sentient, they have feelings, they have reasons, they’re beyond machines - they’re human. like, the more human than human tagline in the first is a way they get advertised/sold because the people who make them promise an exceptional turn-out and that they’ll do what human laborers can just better, but the point is that these androids are people, not machines. and in the first movie, their drive is to live, which is... like, a basic human need. they have expiration dates and they only last four years, and they want more life, which is... a very human thing to want, because who doesn’t want to live as long as possible? no one would like to live with an expiration date or timer. and in the first the more you go on the more you notice that the humans are all more or less greedy amoral assholes (deckard being a partial exception BUT deckard also doesn’t really give a fuck about how ethical his profession is until he falls for a replicant and even then he kills the other two left alive, and then there’s the point of whether deckard himself is a replicant or not which we’ll never know unless they do br three), while the replicants are all relatable - two of them are in love, one harvests pictures because being a machine he doesn’t have memories pre being put into function and wants them like a normal human being, and they all want to live. which is... more human needs and wants than the other actual humans express, and these are the escaped ones, while rachel - the other one we know of - is currently falling for deckard who is also in love with her, which is... again... human. more than any other one has shown until now except for roy/pris (the two escaped replicants in love, one of which is also a pleasure model OOOOPSSS).

and then at the end you have roy (main replicant guy) who got as far as meeting his creator and being told that there’s no way he can have his extra life (and kills him but ngl tyrell had it coming seriously), fighting deckard who has killed his friend and his girlfriend and he almost wins. deckard almost falls off the building on whose roof they’re fighting and roy could kill him but instead he saves deckard’s life just when he’s about to die himself and knowing it perfectly and giving him a lesson in humanity because why the fuck saving the man who tried to kill you and killed the woman you loved out of what, doing his job, when he should know better being in love with a replicant himself? either he does it out of pure altruism or because he wants someone to be with him/witness his death so he doesn’t go out alone, and....

aren’t those extremely human needs and wants?

like, the point of blade runner the first is that the machines/androids are all more human than all the other humans probably including deckard up until the point he watches roy die because before then he really didn’t get it. because all of them are more ethical, relatable and decent than the humans. you can absolutely be more human than human, when you’re a machine and you have feelings and wants and needs and morals that are straighter/more ethical than the actual humans exploiting you.

and the second took back this theme splendidly imo because in the second the replicants are built to last and are actually programmed to not disobey, which is why they’re allowed on earth, and aren’t at all supposed to have feelings - see that their recalibration test is made to make sure the replicant doesn’t have emotional reactions while the voigt-kampff from the first one was meant to find out if they did have emotional reactions. and then you have the protagonist who is not at all supposed to have feelings but ends up developing them anyway, who’s used/abused/left out to dry by about everyone - his bosses, wallace, the replicant army - and programmed to kill his own kind who recoils at the idea of killing someone who was *born* because they’d have a soul and he doesn’t (in theory), which is... way more ethical than what his human boss (who comes on to him ops) has to say on the topic. or what wallace has to say on the topic. or even the replicant army who care more for the replicant-born baby as a symbol than as a person. and like, this guy first thinks he’s a machine, then starts thinking he might actually not have been, which makes him assume he might have the infamous *soul*, then he’s thrown around by about everyone until he’s told rather rudely that no, he actually is not half-human or born, and in the middle of all this the only person who might have ever loved him is a mass-produced AI. like, this dude should not be *human* according to any reasoning BUT INSTEAD he defies all his orders from all side and (supposedly) sacrifices his life so that deckard can see his real daughter, which is.... horribly terribly selfless and kind and would show that he has more soul than anyone in this movie put together, and... even if he wasn’t human, wasn’t ever programmed to be so and was conceived to obey orders and kill his own kind in the end he does the kindest/most humane thing anyone has done in this movie and going back to the beginning... the replicant he takes out in the first scenes tells him he’s never seen a miracle (meaning the replicant baby being born) but I think that in the end he actually was the miracle because he went against programming and orders and everything out of pure human decency and that made him more human than any human we’ve seen in both movies.

like, just the fact that you could hear the same music in the end as when roy dies in the first one is really telling because roy died doing a very humane thing and having very humane needs and k laid down/possibly died (I want to believe he survives for the sequel :P) having done the most humane thing out of very humane needs (being wanted, having a family, wanting parents? I mean, what’s more humane than that?) and both of them were definitely - more human than human.

that’s the point imo and why it makes perfect sense and actually why I am a mess of fucking feelings over this franchise since I was twelve, most probably. /o\

[lachouettification]

Please talk to me

But I guess it wouldn’t help, anyway. I can talk all I want to; the problem isn’t changing or evolving quite yet. I need to sit still in an empty room for an hour and think, but motherhood doesn’t often present me that luxury. So since I have a little bit of time right now, let me use it, before it’s gone. I’m going to talk. You’re going to listen. I have a lot to get out of me.

If I had to imagine my perfect world going forward, I have no idea what would be in it. I’ve given up so much to get to this point that I barely remember what I enjoy doing anymore. 

I remember when I found out I was pregnant. So many things were supposed to be different right before it happened. I was going to move to Texas but chickened out. Then I didn’t get into the college I’d been secretly praying would send me to Texas anyway, and I was crushed. I sobbed. I was then going to move to Thailand (I got the certificate to teach English finished one month before I found out I was pregnant, which means I finished it one week before I got pregnant) to get some perspective and understand myself better and try to get some distance from and time to process the intense feelings I chickened out from. I was dating several people, all of whom were unimportant distractions from reality; see “chickening out.” 

Then, of all the things that could have mattered, I started dating this kinda crazy guy who had some potential to be a little less crazy, but I didn’t really care that much because I had other things going on. He wasn’t supposed to be the future father of my child. I barely even knew him. And I talked on the phone to the person who did matter, and he pointed out that staying with someone just because you’re procreating with them is a bad idea. And I didn’t listen. I wanted to try because I didn’t have two sets of parents. I saw my dad like maybe 10 times in my life, all but two being before the age of 5. 

Shortly after finding out I was pregnant, we decided we were in it together. He was going to be there for me. I wasn’t going to be abandoned. We started going to couples therapy, paid for by the big bad sexist/racist/homophobic/history-revising/repression-inducing (but it reminded me of my most recent shrooms trip at the time, so I didn’t care about that list) Mormon Church. 

She was a great therapist. Getting her grad degree. Divorced. Not some crock religious counselor who tells you that you’re loved by angels and that Jesus will wash away your tears, amen. She was great. But she believed in us making it work. Because that was the reality she and the father of my fetus understood and had been sold their entire lives. Meanwhile, I was frustrated with myself for my issues (re: chickening out) and wanted to believe I could escape the weird life I’d been led into by my mom and my aunt that fast forwarded to this terrifying image of me becoming an old maid who never could loosen her grip on the reins long enough to know what love even was. Except maybe when drunk, but then that was like, “Hey, there aggression. Nice to get acquainted. You’ve got a lot of pent up shit in here, and alcohol is sort of exacerbating that.” Nevermind that I’m starting to learn that my inability to love unabashedly and compulsive behavioral fixes have something to do with being the adult child of an alcoholic. I didn’t have any idea about that then. I barely have an idea about that now. I told the therapist in our first session before I was pregnant that I thought maybe I wanted to get married and have a family of my own one day, and then BAM it had happened. It had to be fate, right? So, I started pregnant-waddling down this path to “healthy marriage” and family. I slowly stopped working and started letting him pay the bills. I slowly/quickly (depending on how you look at it) stopped talking to any and all straight/male friends and many of my straight/or-gay/female friends, no matter how important they were to me. I slowly got huge (I gained a lot of pregnant weight) and miserable and regretted the decision to stay pregnant half the time. I considered running away and making it on my own, but I felt trapped by my lease and all of the sacrifices I had already made to try to make this fucking work. I considered going somewhere else and not telling him when I had the baby and just hiding away almost every time we got into another one of our huge blowout fights. But then he would help me. We lived in this teeny apartment, and he rearranged the furniture just how I’d wanted while I was out of town for a week. He would put my socks and shoes on, rub my feet, sacrifice his place on the bed when I was uncomfortable, help me shave my legs, go to therapy with me each week. He tried so hard. I sobbed alone on long drives around the city and hated myself for the one brief moment that had conceived my son.

But then he was born, and all of that changed. I can’t explain that love to you. Even my issues couldn’t stop me from loving this magnificent human. He’s a miracle. He’s the only thing I’ve ever felt I was meant to do. And I had no clue till he came out. But now I know. 

His dad stepped up again. He tried again. He set me up every day with food and water so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed. He cooked and cleaned and worked so that I could stay in bed with my postpartum pain and the baby. I needed him, and he did everything I needed. There were still outbursts sometimes, but we were stressed. Who wouldn’t have outbursts with a life that hard and cramped? Then our son started getting a little older, and it wasn’t getting any easier. He wanted to have sex, naturally. He’d quit being Mormon, and we’d eloped so that we could explain to the government how many people were really in our household. He wanted to have sex and reconnect with me. But we spent the first year and two months of our relationship trying so hard NOT to have sex (because Mormon) that we’d wasted any chance we might have had to build that intimacy. Now, I was in excruciating pain and honestly really turned off by the thought of sex. I was exhausted. I still am. I rarely get a chance to shower. Some days, I forget or don’t get the chance to eat more than once. Back then, I never ate unless Zac allowed me to. If he was tired and cranky and didn’t feel like helping, I didn’t get to go to the bathroom or eat food or shower. I just had to deal with it. So when he was tired and at his limits, he pushed me way past mine. And honestly, I think I started to hate him for it. I may not have meant to, but I think the resentment was incredibly deep, and I loved Montgomery too much to feel it toward him. I know Zac had every right to be tired. We were working so hard. But as he got more tired, he woke up less to help me at night. As he got more tired, he changed fewer diapers and walked Montgomery to sleep less. As he got more tired, he gave me fewer breaks. And I started to lose my fucking mind.

Then my mom split her house in half to give us some privacy, and we moved in with her. My literal worst nightmare mixed with my wildest dreams. Montgomery could have a yard to learn to run and walk in that we could afford without me going back to work (since at that point, he couldn’t be away from me for more than 10 minutes without losing his shit anyway, I couldn’t even fathom working) but at the price of living alongside my mother again. I love my mother. I need her help with my son. I’m very grateful for this living situation. The rent is affordable, and the babysitter is free. But we still have a very complicated past and dynamic. Mixing the things I had to constantly give up to be with Zac with the things I have to give up to be with my mom finally sent me over the edge. Zac and my mom started to have this silent battle for control over my actions, and Montgomery is a baby, so he needed/needs me pretty much at all times. Zac’s anger kept getting bigger, despite mine being totally under wraps with the addition of motherhood as a part of my personality and the total absence of alcohol for almost two years (thanks, pregnancy and breastfeeding). He quit his job to go back to school, and we decided to live on loans–something that’s just the opposite of what I’m naturally comfortable with. He was home for six weeks. During those six weeks, most days, he was still tapped out. He cooked quite a bit, cleaned a little off and on, and didn’t do any work, but I still had to ask for showers and cut my time short because meltdowns were my job. Night wakings were still predominantly dealt with by me. I still felt unhelped. And while he was home, the jealousy kept peaking. It’s hard enough to talk on the phone with a baby present. Forget it when we’re all home. My only reality was the house. Not to mention that in that house, I would go into the dark with Montgomery for 12 hours each night. I would lay down with him for 30mins-2 hours every time he napped. During those times, Zac would sit in the living room getting alone time. Alone time I desperately needed and was asking for and still wasn’t getting. 

Seriously, after all of that shit. No wonder it broke. After having so little time for myself in 8 months that it’s literally quantifiable (in hours) on my hands, it’s no wonder. 

So I accepted a job. I needed some excuse to be alone for a minute. It was only 8-10 hours per week, condensed into two days. Good hourly pay rate. Good company. Room to move up in the future and get more work/hours/pay. And the kicker? From home. Literally my dream. Work a legit job that I can have anywhere. Hello, travel. I’ve been missing you. Unfortunately, that was the breaking point for Zac. Something about him having to help me watch Montgomery during those hours of work just wouldn’t click. And he snapped. But I’m so tired and so at my own breaking point from the zero time I’ve had to myself that I also snapped. 

And now we’re here.