#has to be presentable

[superat626]

Wanted to draw some blorbos today. So I did.

[otherside-picnic]

the way "steal" seems to have shifted in people's minds from literally taking an item to depriving someone of potential profit is genuinely kinda sickening

[soapbbox]

I like that Megatron is essentially leading a bunch of senior citizens

[technically-human]

First meeting

[meziniart]

Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves

[wltsquareih]

Reshirement au... save me... save me reshirement au

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The squad of all time has arrived on scene.

[starry-bi-sky]

I am loudly pushing the batdad agenda i am loudly pushing the— DPxDC Prompt

��Woah. You look like shit."

Granted, that’s probably not the first thing Danny should be saying to the guy that just bit the curb, but in his defense; he’s not running on 100% right now either.

The man -- tall, towering, and broader than Danny is tall -- whips around on his heel, black frayed cape flaring out impressively. Danny would've whistled in appreciation, but he takes the time instead to wipe the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing the blood running from his nose across his cheek.

"Sorry." He blinks widely, not even flinching as the man with the horns zeroes in on him. "That was rude of me. I have a really bad brain-to-mouth filter; Sam says its what always gets me into trouble."

And she's not wrong either, per say. His smart mouth is what landed him in this situation -- with blood blossom extract running through his veins and cannibalizing the ectoplasm in his bloodstream. Thanks Vlad.

The man grunts at him; a short, curt "hm" that shouldn't make Danny smile, but he does because he's somewhat delirious and probably concussed. The man keeps some kind of distance, sinking towards the shadows of Gotham's alleyway like he dares to melt right into it.

If it's supposed to scare Danny, it doesn't work. Danny's never been afraid of the dark; he's always been able to hide himself in it. He blinks slowly at the mass of shadows.

"You look hurt." The shadows says, blurring together around the edges. Danny squints, and licks his lips to get the blood dripping down his chin off. Ugh, he hates the taste of blood.

"I am." He says, "My godfather poisoned me. M'dying." The agony of the blood blossom eating him from the inside out looped back around to numbing a while ago, so all he feels is half-awake and dazed.

"Hey," Danny stumbles forward towards the man, a bloodied hand reaching out to him. "You-- you're a hero, right? You're not attacking me; which is more than I can say for most costumed people I've met." Maybe it's a poor bar to judge someone at, but he's already established that Danny's not in his right mind.

The man makes no change in expression, but Danny realizes blearily that it's hard to tell with the shadows on his face. He stays still long enough for Danny to latch onto the cape -- stretchy, but almost soft under his fingers.

He looks up blearily into the whites of the man's eyes. "Can you help me? I don't-- I don't wanna die." Again. He doesn't wanna die again. He blinks slow and lizard-like. "I mean- I'll probably get to see mom and dad again, but I told them I'd at least try and make it to adulthood."

There's a clatter down the street, and Danny's ghost sense chills up his spine and leaves a bitter, ashy taste in his mouth. He immediately knows who it belongs to even before the deceptively gentle; "Daniel?" echoes down the way.

"Daniel? Quit your games, badger, Gotham is dangerous for children."

Danny's mouth pulls back, and blood spills against his tongue. "Please." He rasps, and grabs onto the shadow's cape with both hands. "Please. He's going to kill me. Please--"

"Daniel? Is that you?"

His lips part, dragging in air to plead with the darkness again. He doesn't need to, the whites of his eyes narrow, and the cape whirls around him before Danny can blink. Soon swaddled in shadows, the Night lifts him up, and steals him away.

[star-anise]

I really wonder if trauma theorists who say things like "Humans are the only animal that will be in a fright state when physically safe" or "the rest of the animal kingdom doesn't get PTSD" have ever, like

Do you think they've actually ever met an animal?

[daydreamerwonderkid]

Somebody rescue Tim. He's seen too much.

You do NOT have permission to repost my art.

Meme reference under cut:

[monstrousproductions]

OK so I don't usually bring personal stuff to this blog but I am being hunted for sport by my book club for the way I read my books and I just want to check how badly I have misjudged what is "normal" in this situation lol

So far I have been called "unhinged", "profoundly disturbed" and a number of variations thereupon for my habit of just... closing the book. Which I guess isn't what everyone else is doing. Apparently.

Also please, if you have very strong feelings about this, yell to your heart's content - I can direct you to an entire book club of people who will yell right along with you 😅

[asmimir]

small comic I made mid storm last night

[livinghalfway]

Mini Prompt: Adoption Day!

Damian meets Danny at the animal shelter we’re they’re both volunteering at. The two slowly becomes friends with each visit. Eventually they’re doing all their tasks purposely together. Feeding, walking, and bathing the animals as they talk.

With them getting to know each other Damian learns that Danny, despite being the same age as him, lives alone in an apartment in Crime Alley.

This greatly displeases Damian, and he’s honestly not sure what to do to help his friend. Especially, when Danny refuses any monetary assistance.

That is until the animal shelter announces their annual adoption day event.

Bruce when Damian first started volunteering at the shelter said that he wasn’t allowed to adopt any of the animals. He never said that he couldn’t adopt a sibling.

[sidewalk-cracks]

Bruce would give up the mission if Dick ever died. And not in the angry-grief way of "this is the last straw on the camel's back" aka the way he sorta kicked Dick out, but in the "hasn't set foot in the Cave in over a month because the last time he did he kept hearing Dick's laugh echoing across the stalactites" way. He literally cannot bear to put on the cowl, to be Batman, because Batman has existed longer with Robin than without. Bruce doesn't remember being Batman without Robin (without Dick) anymore. He can recall his first meetings with a few of the Rogues, but beyond that? It's been so long that those first 2-4 years are all just a haze of self destructive grief. Dick flipped his entire life in a 180 to the total opposite direction. He showed him how to hope, to love, to live. If Dick dies as an adult, Bruce would've spent half his life with his first son. No matter what age Dick dies at, Bruce will have always spent more time being Batman with Dick Grayson as a son rather than without him. Dick changed Batman, changed Bruce so irrevocably that Bruce wouldn't ever be able to wear the cowl without remembering him.

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time⁴.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[morganbritton132]

Steve is just so enamored with Wayne and Eddie’s relationship but doesn’t have the language to express it. He tries anyways with varying results.

One time Steve is over at their house and is just marveling at how cozy and warm it is. He loves how safe and how it feels like a real family lives there.

Steve who has to spend at least an hour a day cleaning to avoid feeling like he’s going to get yelled at, tries to tell Eddie this he saying, “I like that you don’t care if your house is clean.”

“What?”

Steve, who lives in a house that feels like a catalogue stock image, “I think it’s great you guys don’t care what your house looks like.”

The next time Steve comes over, the house is scrubbed spotless. He literally doesn’t notice because he wasn’t saying it was dirty, just lived in and loved.

Another time, Steve is over at Eddie’s and they’re smoking weed in the living room when Wayne unexpectedly shows up.

Steve’s entire soul leaves his body but Eddie just says hi and offer him the joint. Wayne waves him off because he has to get back to work, but wow.

It catches Steve off-guard every time he realizes that Wayne loves Eddie. Unconditionally. As is. Steve’s parents would’ve killed him but Wayne just, accepts.

Later, after Wayne is gone, Steve turns to Eddie and tells him, “It’s so cool that your uncle doesn’t care about you.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him so Steve explains, “I mean, like. It’s cool that he doesn’t care that you never accomplish anything in life.”

“Ouch.”

“In a good way.”