[Changing Tides]
"So tell me how it all began, if you please." Walking into this place, I'd half expected them to have a stereotypical chaise lounge to lay on, letting me lay and stare up at the shitty popcorn ceiling while rattling off a story I've told a hundred other shrinks a thousand times.
Supposedly this one was better than the rest, one more suited to the real nut jobs, like myself. Able to unpick even the most twisted minds and work out the knots in the head. I didn't believe it, of course. As people say, when something seems too good to be true, chances are it is.
I stare at this man, this supposed miracle worker, and exhale through my nose. I don't want to tell this story again, I've told it a million times before. And every time I have, I've relived every painful, shitty moment in extreme detail all over again.
"I wasn't born, like most these days." The classic opener, one I've used so many times now that I've lost count. "I was grown, like the other clones. A freak of nature from the get-go."
"I see you weren't best pleased to be brought into the world that way." He hasn't started making notes yet, nor has he even opened my hefty file to skim over whatever scrawling the last worm wriggling in my apple left behind.
"No shit." I answer curtly. "Nobody asks to be born, but I think it's an insult to be some bastard's sloppy seconds. I don't even know if the guy I came from is even alive, or dead, or some other worse third thing."
The doctor eyes me, sizing me up and ripping me apart, silently simmering over my bitterness. I fucking hate it when they do that.
"Do you resent the man you came from?" I scowl at him, what kind of question is that? "I didn't know him. I can't say. But I resent the fact I'm alive because of him. But if not him, it'd just be someone else, wouldn't it?"
He didn't seem put off by my hostility, in fact, he seemed to welcome it. Negative emotions need unpacked too I guess. "You're right, it could've been anyone. They kept everything about the original secret from you?"
"We're clones." I look in his eyes, hidden behind those red glasses, the deep crimson irritating me already. "We're not built to think, not built to learn, we're built to kill and slave our lives away, until we die."
He nods, a grimace on his scarred face. "I see. That does reflect what I've been told about the Agency before from other ex agents."
"Others? I guess I never figured you'd had others like me before." I frowned and drummed my fingers on my legs.
"Mmhmm." He nodded again, tenting his fingers as he thought, assessing in his mind if he should indulge more details. Technically speaking, he wasn't a licensed therapist, so he wasn't really bound to doctor-patient confidentiality. "Things are awful for those in the agency, but those who get out can begin the healing process."
"You think monsters like me really deserve to find peace?"
He chuckled, and leaned forward in his seat, his eyes glinting under his mask. "What I think is irreverent here, you came to me to find healing, and if it's what you want, I will help you."
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Dp x dc twin au where Danny and Damian were in fact conjoined/siamese twins, but the most dangerous type - one head, two bodies.
Their early removal from talia being because their shape would not have allowed for natural birth, they were written off but talia begged for the chance to send them off in the lazarus pit.
By some bizarre miracle, before she turned to leave, two small bodies bobbed to the surface - identical in every way, except for the eyes. The previous blue eyes now split in two, one left, one right, and the new eyes, pit created, a bright green.
She took her child, her two children, and together, they survived.
Being removed prematurely, their early years were tough, but soon they blossomed into promising heirs for the league. In sync with every step, the closest of brothers, the league was certain the old fairy tale of twins being telepathic had been granted by the pit that separated them, the remnants of being born as one mind, one brain, one skull.
But then Danny had to flee, and leave his other half behind. Stretched by distance for the first time, the bond grew thin and stretched, and Damian grieved his brother as dead. When he started being sent on public missions, he hid his distinctive heterochromia, choosing the green in memory of the pit that had given him and his brother life.
Danny, hiding his pit aura in the ocean's worth that was Amity park, took to blue, the colour that he and Damian were born with.
Damian moves to Gotham, and continues to mourn his brother as dead, right until one day when he is twelve, when he learns what the death of your other half truly feels like.
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Their reunion is a thing of family legend. Violence runs hot in both bloodlines, ghosts are highly emotional and prone to fighting a the drop of a hat for bonding, playing, testing, every reason under the green sun. Their training and play often consisted of friendly spars, competitive spars, furious spars, venting spars. Both have been exposed to unhealthy amounts of ecto since before their birth.
There is a long, long minute of staring, before they rip themselves away and lunge at each other like wolves.
The bat family are horrified by their brutally efficient youngest suddenly barreling towards a clone (?) and trying to claw his throat open with his bare hands while openly sobbing.
It ends with them wrapped around each other crying into the others shoulder as their minds finally meet again and relax from the painful stretch for the first time in years.
But nobody else has any idea what to do.
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I like to think that when Jason was resurrected and was a part of the family again and what not, when he found out that Dick was a cop he would simply ignore him whenever work was brought up. Like full on, middle of conversation, would just get up and leave. It was infuriating! But Jason stood on BUSINESS.
Like Jason grew up in Crime Alley, and was a child criminal because that was just survival. There’s absolutely no way little baby Jason didn’t call a cop a pig at some point, right?
And of course he wouldn’t call his big brother a pig, but he made it very clear he didn’t approve of his career. When Dick quit the BPD, Jason made it a big deal. Bought a cake. Threw a party. It was a big deal to him, even if he had a shit-eating grin the entire time.
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Writing Accessibility PSA
Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!
Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?
A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.
Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!
I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]
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