Survivor’s Guilt AU, Chapter 1
i’m really nervous to post this but fuck it here we go. i wrote this back in july and never posted it until literally right now but kept thinking about it and i am going to write a chapter from adam’s perspective of what happens with him after this cause the story isn’t finished obviously. also this was before volume 4 when we found out that adam was an alternate all along so this was going off of the assumptions about adam’s nature that were kind of prevalent at the time. anyway here we go
Winter Break, 2009.
Jonah’s head hurt. He felt the throbbing at his temples along with a red-hot sensation in his swollen eyelids as acrid tears irritated his eyes and dripped into his open mouth through gritted teeth. Wordlessly screaming internally against the incessant whispering in his mind, he pulled the car over with a jolt of the brakes and grasped at the door handle, half-falling out of the open car door onto the pavement.
The road smelled freshly paved with pungent asphalt, reflecting an unwelcome white light into Jonah’s stinging eyes: the headlights of an approaching truck. Jonah felt a spike of terror as he rolled himself underneath his parked car, narrowly avoiding the front wheels of the large pickup truck as it crushed sticks and pebbles of asphalt inches from Jonah’s soft hands pushing his body out of the lane. Scrambling out from under the mechanics of the car onto the side of the road, his hands clawed into coarse dirt and grass, digging rough particles of cold sand into his nail beds as he pulled himself out and away from the street.
Dehydrated from crying and dizzy from the adrenaline, he allowed himself to crumple onto the ground. The blood rushing through his ears raced through his head with an audible hissing noise, like static, putting a loud pressure on the inside of his head, like he’d just sprinted a mile with no water. Louder still was the rapid echoing and amplification of thoughts ricocheting off of the sides of his brain: you left him behind, you left him to die, you’re going to hell. He let out a strangled sob at the thought of Adam still in that house with no way out. If Adam hadn’t already been killed, the only other option was that his death was happening right now, at this very moment, with his only means of escape collapsed on the side of the road miles away. The worst best friend in the world.
Jonah lay face down in the cold grass, heaving sobs past the lump in his throat. He felt like throwing up, tasting bile that wasn’t there. After a long time, he was too exhausted for the frantic racing thoughts to continue, explosive whispering transitioning to morose silence and a painful kind of brain fog. A split second later, through this despondent haze in Jonah’s mind, the voices cut sharply from inside his head to outside. Outside, and right in front of him; emitting like radio static from a figure that came into focus as Jonah lifted his head.
The figure was tall, and proportioned in a way that made Jonah go cross eyed trying to piece it together. Dressed almost angelically, with starkly pale skin and long blond waves of hair, it seemed to shudder in and out of focus. Its eyes looked drawn onto its face; the shapes of eyelid, iris and pupil geometrically aligned with each other. It was staring at Jonah, and emitting the same whispers that had haunted Jonah since he left Adam less than half an hour ago. It arranged its teeth in a smile, and spoke to Jonah without moving its mouth.
“You left him to die.”
Coming from the unmoving lips of this alternate, the phrase sounded less like an accusation and more like a sentence from some terrifying holy court. You cannot un-abandon a friend.
Jonah stood up sharply, only to fall once again on his knees before the angelic alternate. He couldn’t stop himself from crying out, at first just a guttural scream, which made the figure take a few steps back. Slowly at first, Jonah’s wails changed into something more recognizable as “Is he alive? Is Adam dead? Is he dead?”
The angel said nothing.
Jonah had never been religious, but out of something analogous to complete desperation, he clasped his hands together so tightly that his nails drew blood, and he prayed in front of this mockery of an angel, and his prayer was a scream that tore its way through the raw tissue of his voice box: “Please, fucking please, bring him back! Let him come back alive!”
The angel took a step, barefoot in the sparse grass, towards Jonah.
“I’ll do anything! Anything you want me to do! I don’t fucking care! Kill me if you want, but bring Adam back!”
The angel tilted its head to one side, like a curious nocturnal predator. It took another step toward Jonah, and then suddenly, like it was ambushing a small animal, it made a swift motion downwards. Jonah closed his eyes and flinched away, preparing for the worst.
Nothing. Cautiously, he opened his eyes to see the angel kneeling on the ground inches from Jonah’s own kneeling position, grass staining its white robe where it touched the soil beside the road. Jonah’s dizzy gaze met the angel’s, and as his vision evened out to match the angel’s unwavering stare, the eyes looking into his own melted from pure black irises and uncannily wide eyelids to the same dark shade of umber as Jonah’s, sparkling with the same swollen redness of tears. Jonah gasped sharply, the cold air hitting the back of his throat like ice water, and fell back, hands against the rough soil. He tried to wrench his eyes away from the gaze that now matched his own, but found the eye contact impossible to break, as if it were a physically locked bond between them.
The angel spoke again, and it spoke with Jonah’s voice and its own, two voices merged into one: “Do you blame yourself?” and, simultaneously, “You should blame yourself.”
Jonah tried to push himself backwards again and broke the eye contact, tears crashing back in a tidal wave to the corners of his eyes, but the angel reached out to him out of the darkness with a birch-white arm and grasped his face with a pale platinum hand that felt strangely warm against Jonah’s skin, the way metal gets warm after immense friction. The angel guided Jonah back towards it, tilting his head with its hand and holding his jawline in a way that was almost comforting.
Jonah wanted to scream, but his voice broke with a sob as his eyes were fixed into the angel’s eye contact once again. Completely exhausted both mentally and physically, he gave in to the angel’s control.
“It should have been me,” he whispered.
Softly, almost kindly, the angel concurred, “It should have been you.”
The guilt that Jonah felt was strong, but stronger than the acidity of guilt was the gravitational pull of acceptance. Jonah’s body went slack, and the angel took him into its arms and laid him down in its lap as it sat cross-legged on the short grass.
“Do you wish to take his place, Jonah?”
Jonah, for reasons unbeknownst to even himself, nodded.
The angel sat silent for a while, then held out a closed hand to Jonah, who opened it. Inside was Jonah’s pocket knife, the small one with the faux pearl handle that he kept in his glove compartment for emergencies. Adam had bought it for him at a flea market in Mandela County several months ago.
Jonah took the knife from the angel’s palm, and regarded it for a long moment through bleary eyes. Finally, he raised his head to meet the angel’s eyes, and this time it was him holding the eye contact.
“Give me your word,” Jonah said, “that you’ll bring Adam back. The real Adam. Alive.” He pointed the knife forwards towards the angel’s chest in a final attempt at a threatening gesture, knowing full well he could do nothing, that he was harmless.
The angel, holding the eye contact, melted its eyes from the velvet brown that matched Jonah’s irises to the slate blue-gray of Adam’s shining eyes. “I give you my word.”
Jonah sat up, slowly. There was a strong flavor of dread in his mouth and an even stronger conviction of what he was doing solidifying itself in his mind, like iron filings clinging onto a magnet. The rest of the world started to fade from his view into mist, matching the gray-dark of the night and the road. He felt a sense of clarity, seeing himself from the outside, silver-blonde hair soaked with tears trailing over soft mahogany skin, a trembling hand deliberately being raised as if by a crane operated in Jonah’s conscious mind, bearing the bright silver blade as cargo to its intended target, and he didn’t want to do it but at the same time he did. He owed it to himself and to Adam, of course to Adam.
For Adam’s sake, he pushed his train of thought away from the memories of little Jonah eating raspberry lime popsicles in the backyard, hugging his parents at his fifth grade graduation, holding on tight to his favorite stuffed tiger and running around in the grass. For Adam’s sake, he refused to give himself the time to let his life flash before his eyes and to regret what he was about to do. For Adam’s sake, he ignored the mental image of little Jonah crying and afraid as an older version of himself taught him to fear the end of his life, blade pressed against little Jonah’s neck.
With a lump in his throat, Jonah turned away from his childhood self, and he looked into Adam’s blue eyes. They looked back at him, kindly, from the porcelain face of the angel.
“I’m coming back for you, Adam,” he choked out, and pushed the knife into his neck.
Jonah woke up – wait, woke up? – on the grass, with a warm hand on his forehead. It felt like the only source of warmth in the world, pouring heat into his freezing body. Save for this feeling of heat on his forehead, he was completely numb head to toe, his lips and fingers blue and his face bloodless. As the warmth spread from his forehead to the back of his head, he felt that his hair was cold and wet, sticking to his scalp like red metallic mud. As he regained his sense of smell, the stench of iron and dirt gradually registered in his brain as the smell of blood, lots of it. He knew that this blood had to have come out of a living thing, and before it could dawn on him that he had been that living thing, the warmth spread to his neck.
It intensified in a split second, becoming a white-hot scalding, burning heat, and Jonah screamed. The scream broke the fragile flesh that had already been split open, letting loose a flood of choking hot liquid into the boiling agony of his throat. He took a sharp inhale, a million tiny swords and knives embedding themselves into his vocal cords, and as he tried to restrain himself from screaming again, another hand clamped itself over his mouth. In total shock, Jonah froze, eyes widening in a stunned and agonized state of suspended animation. The hand that had been on his forehead moved quickly down to his neck, applying pressure from its palm onto Jonah’s throat, and the pain vanished, like a candle being blown out. He felt the sensation of his skin shifting and reattaching to itself, closing the wound that had been inflicted there.
The hand returned to Jonah’s forehead, and he fell into a black anesthesia.
Jonah woke up again, still on the grass, entirely paralyzed. Not even his eyelids would move, completely still across his eyes like two heavy weighted blankets. He tried to sit up, to open his eyes, to open his mouth, but it was as if the cord between his mind and body had been cut, like trying to flick on a lightswitch when the power is out.
The angel– the alternate– was standing over him. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel its presence there, an obelisk of radiant horror. Acknowledging its presence formed a pit in his stomach, but he also felt an unfamiliar draw towards it that he couldn’t rationalize. He fought against this pull, struggling to breathe with the stiffened muscles around his lungs. A pained sound escaped him as his ribs cramped, sending a spike of discomfort through his chest. The angel reacted frighteningly quickly, stooping down to place a hand on Jonah’s upper torso and releasing the paralysis in his lungs, allowing him to intake a sharp mouthful of air. As Jonah’s breathing stabilized, he scanned his body for feelings of any injuries. He focused his attention onto his chest, trying to gauge how fast his heart was beating. It wasn’t.
Before Jonah could even register this, he felt the angel settle down next to him, the hem of its robe rustling his hair as it folded around the side of Jonah’s head. It placed two fingertips, still strangely warm, on each of Jonah’s eyelids, and opened them.
Jonah felt the sensation of being pulled through thick cloth, like he was being forced through the very fabric of spacetime.
When his eyes opened, he found he could move again, and he dug his fingers into warm, dry carpet. Confused, he sat up, feeling the solid surface of a floor where a moment before there had been dirt and grass and frost. Breathing heavily, he scanned the space– small, with gray walls and a beige carpet– for the angel, for any other sign of life, alternate or otherwise. Although he still felt the imprints of the angel’s fingertips on his eyelids, there was nothing and no one to be seen.
There were no windows in the room. The air was stifling, with no circulation, dry and warm, and Jonah got the distinct feeling of being enclosed by the earth. Sitting up on his knees, he struggled to hear a sound in the cloying silence of the room. The quiet was deafening, like white noise. Like static.
The silence was suddenly broken by a wail that made Jonah’s stomach drop. Though distorted beyond its previous quality, it was all too familiar to him. It repeated again, a few seconds later, and again, and again: the warped sound of a cat’s cry. He was in the basement.
“Oh no, no no no no,” Jonah’s voice quavered. He spun wildly, standing up too quickly. “Adam? ADAM!!”
The recording of the cat resonated like a foghorn in Jonah’s brain, only causing him to panic further. It wailed again and again, like a broken alarm, low and threatening and pervasive. Jonah stumbled and fell, his body hitting the carpet with a thud, flinching as the wind was knocked out of him. He opened his eyes to a staticky white light, directly in front of his face, emanating from a box in the darkness ahead of him. With a startled gasp, he scrambled backwards, away from the TV. As he watched in horror, the cat sound lowered in pitch and stretched out, one continuous droning of absolute terror. And suddenly, the TV shut off, plunging Jonah into darkness, the tenor siren of the cat remaining, dropping sharply in pitch and quality once again, one long screaming sound in the dark basement.
The panic in Jonah’s lungs drained the air from every part of his body, grasping hands of vacuum pressure forcing their way through his torso and out through his mouth in a sharp spasm of air. The pressure of his fear was palpable and all-consuming, painfully crushing his body into the carpet and digging nails into the crevices of his subconscious mind. The atmosphere itself had him pinned to the ground, rendering him absolutely helpless against the sentient, ambient terror enveloping him. He struggled in the gravitational restraints of his own form, a last desperate effort to escape the feeling that was overcoming him. Hot tears streamed down his cold face, flowing over the surface of his skin like warm water from a tap, generating a sharp tingling sensation like pins and needles that spread over him entirely. Nothing hurt anymore, but Jonah screamed for his life, writhing against the visceral shifting feeling spreading throughout his body, fighting the strange comforting lull that had started to seep into his consciousness.
For as long as he could, Jonah resisted the change, but finally, all at once, he felt the last bit of his strength slip away. The pressure pulled him under and covered him completely, and it dissolved him until he was unrecognizable.
.
.
[author’s note: fuck]
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Am I the asshole for getting my best friend killed?
I swear to God, it was an accident.
My (27) BF (34) has a reputation for getting himself out of any jam you can imagine; and at first it was just a fun little thing the friend group noticed: there goes Oily J wiggling his way out of trouble again. but as the meme evolved in the group, it got to the point where we'd loykey started getting him into situations just to see how he'd get out of 'em, and he akept getting out of em. He was having fun with it too same as us. "Oh you guys," he'd say, "getting me into situations again," before laughing it off and getting out of it, so it was enrichment for our shared enclosures, and as time went on, the situations got more intense.
The trouble is, it turns out that putting a man in too many situations eventually gets the police interested. And not local hobsknockers cops either; they was like, proper three-letter FEDs. They put out a bounty on any information pertaining to his capture and everything. It was good money too so I thought, hey why don't I put J in another situation he can wiggle out of like always (and he'd wiggled outta worse before, so I thought this one'd be relatively mild), and at the next boardgame night (cause it was too late to do anything special for this one) we can buy some extra strong booze and get absolutely blitzed while having a giggle about the situation.
Boardgame night, and we were playing some social deduction nonsense or another and he says: "One of you is gonna betray me tonight." and I can't help but think, looking back on it, that he knew. It's stupid, I know he was talking about the game, but the way he said it, it was like he knew. We all felt it, and we had a big round robin round the table taking turns promising that we'd never betray him. And I said it so easily cause I thought it was true. Sure, I was gonna talk to the feds about a bounty; but, I fully expected my big beautiful oily boy to wiggle his way out of the trouble I was 'bout to cause, and that's not a betrayal. I wasn't lying. I didn't think I was lying.
My big beautiful oily boy didn't manage to wiggle his way out of it. They killed him and I got my blood money. He's gone.
He's gone and I'm devastated, crying, mourning. I loved him so much. We all did. And I can't stop thinking that it's my fault: that I'm the reason he's gone. and it is. and the guilt is eating me up inside. and I just need to talk to someone about it. So, I tell the rest of the group what happened in the group chat, hoping they'd understand that I didn't want this. I didn't want the government's blood money. It was supposed the be a prank. some joint enclosure enrichment. He was supposed to wiggle out of it like he always does... did, i mean.
They call me, among worse things, the asshole and kick me from the group chat. And, I know it's my fault he's dead: I know that. If I didn't do what I did, he wouldn't be dead right now. But, I didn't mean it for it to end up this way. He was supposed to be okay, damn it. I loved him. AITA?
What are these acronyms?
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What if....
Damien and Danyal Al Ghul are twins. Danyal takes heavily after Bruce but Damien is a perfect mix of their parents, and he came out of the artificial womb first, so Damien is decided to be the heir.
Growing up in the League is hard, but Damien excels in a way that Danyal doesn't, because for all the potential Danyal has, he hates the killing and there is a rebellious streak evident even as young as they are. A rebellious streak is a...very dangerous thing to have. Grandfather won't kill Danyal, for as ruthless as he is he doesn't kill his own lineage. But that is not to say that the additional "training" Danyal goes through is merciful.
Damien and Danyal love each other, not just as brothers but also in the way partners do when they don't even have to blink to anticipate the others actions in the midst of action. Which is why Damien, not even yet six, can see the way Danyal is being broken down under the burden of their joint legacy.
So many times, in so many of the universes in which he exists, Danyal Al Ghul is or is seemingly killed, of which is the catalyst for his escape from the League of Assassins, and his brother is left behind thinking him truly dead.
In this universe, when the Demon Twins are out on a training mission (an assassination of a target so easy it's beneath the League for anything other than the simplest of first training missions) a massive earthquake occurs.
They are alive at the end, but both their communication devices are beyond repair. Damien is more roughed up than Danyal at the end, but both are dirty and bloodied.
This is an unprecedented opportunity, of which Damien knows deep down he will never get again.
He loves his brother deeply, but Danyal is weak, always hesitating before the kill, hands shaking. Damien loves his brother and fighting side by side, but he values more the quiet moments when Danyal is looking at star maps and trying to match them up with the sky above their home or making snarky comments about their trainers under his breath. (After when they can't hear Damien doesn't laugh but Danyal always knows he agrees and is amused.)
Grandfather's and Mother's additional training to bring Danyal up to Damien's level is making Danyal go quiet and emotionless and Damien is selfish.
(Damien convinces his twin brother to leave the League of Assassins.)
Damien drags himself to the rendezvous point and returns home alone, reporting the target dead and his brother lost under rock in the quake, body unable to be recovered. He is colder, furious at the world and himself. He pushes and pushes and PUSHES himself. He is the last remaining of a set and he will prove himself perfect to carry the title of Heir perfectly and without reproach. He is more loyal day by day, the guilt his selfishness and betrayal of his family a deep sting he can't ignore.
Talia does search, but so many bodies were lost or unidentified inside mass graves. She grieves and then refocuses on her remaining son without looking back. Grandfather laments the loss, but cares little for the spare in the long run.
Meanwhile, Danyal hid himself long enough to sneak onto one of many transports filled with foreign aid. He is small and sneakier than any average stowaway, and remains undetected all the way to the US.
He doesn't go to Gotham to find his father, but picks a direction at random and leaves, until eventually he's picked up and put in the system. Bouncing around until one day, not long after he turns seven, the Dr.'s Fenton and their young daughter are visiting in their search to adopt their second child. (A combination of genetics and radiation from their earliest experiments in college leaving the pair with low fertility rates and very high risks if they ever did get pregnant. The two get procedures early on and adopt Jazz when she is still fairly young, but wait until she is a bit older before adopting again.)
Danyal Al Ghul had an older twin brother.
Daniel Fenton doesn't think he could handle having an older brother again, but an older sister is acceptable.
Danyal left to go full civilian, and when Damien had sent him off decided he would carry that knowledge to his grave if he must. He tells no one, and does not even mention ever having a twin when he goes to live with their Father in Gotham. If Mother did not tell Father of the deceased son, then neither will Damien.
Danyal Al Ghul is dead, and Damien will keep it that way.
.
.
.
.
(The greatest secret is this: The two have never lost contact. It is very easy, during a natural disaster, to steal a pair of burner phones, each with one number only on them and prepaid with enough stolen funds to last years. Danny smuggles his with him in one piece, Damien smuggles his in pieces, ready to be hidden and repaired when necessary. He checks it scarcely, but every few months is enough to make sure his twin is alive. When he goes to live with Father in Gotham, they communicate a bit more frequently. This remains his most fiercely protected secret.)
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[Shut off last version of this post to avoid possible continual spread of misinformation that was corrected by staff. Reposting clean with corrected info]
So I'm sure almost everyone knows about the porn bot problem by now, so here's a post detailing why it's a problem, and what we need to do about it.
First off, yes, always block the porn bots. Don't be mislead into thinking they're ok to keep around because they 'inflate your follower count.'
Firstly, no one cares about, nor can anyone even see, your follower count. Be free from the shackles that are the bullshit other socials told you was important. Don't let your ego be tied to a number. Having a lot of followers won't earn you any clout here.
Secondly, bots only follow blogs to try and legitimize their malware (and other dodgy) links. This post goes into more detail about that.
Now that that's out of the way, you'll need to know how to recognize a porn bot. This round the template seems to be:
A profile photo of a pretty lady or guy, usually in their underwear, with a similar header photo.
A bio with some combination of: [Age] // [Name] // [Location] // [Emoji] // [Top Bullshit% OnlyFans]
URL consisting of a name followed by a number (i.e: firstlast999)
Typically an empty blog, or if there is content, it's all dodgy links. Visible, but empty, Likes Tab, & occasionally a visible Following Tab.
You likely recognize the pattern.
So, what you want to do is, first, report the blog as spam On mobile it'll look like this:
On mobile you'll need to report spam first, and then go back to the menu again to block.
On desktop it will look like this, and unlike mobile, you'll be able to report spam and block in the same motion:
If I remember correctly,* be sure to "Report Spam", not "Report sexually explicit material" to feed the bots to the proper channels. Because the blog is empty, they haven't posted anything explicit that would violate TOS. However, staff can recognize a bot, and if you report the blog for spam (the actual problem) they'll take a look, more than likely find that the blog is posting or DMing dodgy links, and dispose of it.
And I think that's it. Here's wishing you all a happy and safe blogging experience!
[UPDATE: It was suggested on another post that the bots track your IP if you click on them to send more your way. However, someone from staff corrected and said this is incorrect. They also corrected the 'guilt by association' myth that bots following you can get your blog flagged by tumblr.
That said, that trail all led to another, easier, way to report/block the bots all from your Follower Tab instead of visiting each blog separately, unfortunately it only works on desktop:
(For newbies, click on the little person icon at the top right of your screen and scroll to find the Followers tab under the blog/sideblog you need to block a pornbot from.)
*I remember this information from a blog that used to be all about taking down the pornbots. Unfortunately I do not know if that blog is still active, nor can I remember the URL. If anyone knows what blog I'm referring to, and/or if they're still active, please feel free to tag them so others can follow them for more tips!
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