Reluctant War AU Part 2
Part One
...I ended up writing more for that Reluctant War AU...Like. Wrote this before work and started on part 3 with plans for part 4 more.
this was supposed to just be a brain worm what happened
(also thank you @catastrophic-crow for the AU name <3 <3 <3 Also, also: welcome to the cult of Ancient of the Speedforce Elle! Membership includes nonsense, shenanigans and chaos haha)
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Gotham had always been a place for ghosts.
Every corner haunted by death and tragedy.
Every street stained red at least once in its many years.
Every dark shadow holding the faint shadows and shades of the dead.
Gotham was, before all else, a grave yard.
Jason had known that his entire life. Every kid born and raised in the Alley did. Death came fast to Gotham’s streets. Especially for those the rest of the city turned its back on. He did his best to lighten the reaper’s load when it came to the people that called Crime Alley home. Well, mostly. He’d certainly added names to old Death’s list before, when the occasion called.
When the armies of the dead descended upon Gotham, the only surprise Jason could feel was that those white wearing pieces of shit had dared to try and hunker down in his city.
It was a sentiment shared by most of Gotham’s fine citizens. By the city itself - herself? Something to ask later, if there was a later - even if the impossible, living shadow that rose up out of Gotham’s many dark corners was anything to go by. He knew, almost instinctively, that the entity - skin of cracked pavement, mouth a bridge suspended too wide across the face, eyes of CCTV camera lenses and body built brick by grimy, bloody brick of the sharp skyline - was Gotham. Not a ghost but something bigger, greater. Something awfully, terribly alive in all its horrible, noble glory. His city, manifest in the shape almost human beneath the green glow of the torn apart sky above.
Phantom’s armies arrived without warning as they had everywhere else, and their enemies poured out in unforgivably unmarred white suits to meet them. Horrible and garish against the Gotham streets. How they’d ever managed to slink by unnoticed while being so blatantly, clearly not of Gotham Jason wasn’t sure he’d ever know.
If either side thought this would be like the battles they fought before, they were mistaken.
Gotham was a place for Ghosts.
A place the dead piled up, lingered well beyond their deaths. A place where the rules were different from everywhere else in the world. Where crime was rampant and chaos reigned but at the end of the day people said their thanks that they were born to this hellhole and not so cursed to call anywhere else in the world home.
The dead came to fight
And Gotham, a thing so alive it was sickening to look upon, rose up to fight right along side them all.
The agents were ready and prepared for the incursion of the dead. It’d been two weeks since the first volley of attacks. Two weeks spent shoring up defenses and ramping up weapons and strategizing ways to kill what was already dead. They were, as best as they were able to be considering how endless the armies that came for them, prepared.
They weren’t prepared for Gotham.
Weren’t prepared for the city itself to rise up and take spectral, eldritch shape. Jagged building spire and shattered glass teeth bared in a snarl that spanned miles. Screaming rage in a voice made of gunfire and the concussive boom of explosions and the shrieks of a furious crowd.
Weren’t prepared for its people to ignore the gentle ushering of the dead trying to push them away to safety and instead press forward to fight shoulder to shoulder with the ghostly armies.
Weren’t prepared to have brick and bottles and trash and debris rain down upon them from the jeering living. Weren’t prepared for dirty faced children with hard eyes to light up rags stuffed into chipped beer bottles filled with gas and kerosene and throw them with more speed an accuracy than any professional baseball player. Weren’t ready for Gotham’s motley crew of terrifying Rogues to band together with the citizens they so often accosted and worried and bring down wave after wave of chaos and Goons.
Weren’t prepared for Red Hood to swap out his rubber bullets for the real deal and start mowing the fuckers in white down, his own crew at his back, the rest of the Outlaws on their way.
The Justice League was trying to find a peaceful resolution. Trying to play go between to the US Government and the infinite dead. Too wound up in US politics to side with the dead outright, too disgusted by what the American government had done to ever want to stand with them. All it had gotten them was spun wheels and confusion and the slow creeping realization that the time to try and play negotiators had well passed.
Red Hood wasn’t a member of the Justice League.
He had no obligation to try and find a way to talk things out.
What he had was a grave he’d dug his way out of, enough ammunition to arm a sizable country, and a burning need to make things right.
Gotham had always been a place for ghosts, and Jason had long accepted that he was one of them.
Haunting the streets he’d survived as a child, the city he protected as Robin, the family he’d loved and lost a thousand and one times before and after his death.
The sky cracked open above his home, and it was not an invading army that came rushing out but a native one. Friends, neighbors, strangers on the street you caught from the corner of your eye. The people of Gotham knew their own and fought for them. Only Gotham was allowed to fucked with Gotham and they’d been screwed over enough by the government themselves to know what side they were on.
He lifted his guns and fired, teeth bared in vicious satisfaction beneath his helmet as white was splattered bright red.
A hissing electric whine of a weapon, a flash of green from the edge of his vision.
“Down!”
He was thrown bodily to the cracked and ruined street beneath him, the body shielding him warm and living as one of the agent’s weapon fired a blast of energy right where he’d been a second before. He’d seen that same weapon reduce one of the raging dead to dripping green and screams of agony the dead should not be capable of making.
Before he could shove himself up and respond in kind, the body above him was in motion and the air above him cracking with the snapping-popping-roar of a gun of a much higher power than even what he had. The fucker in white that had shot at him dissolved into a mist of red viscera, body seizing and shuttering in the briefest moment it had before it was obliterated completely.
“Watch yourself.” He looked up - and up - and wondered at the lovely, fierce face he found staring down at him. “Even without shooting at them you’re Liminal enough to trip their sensors.”
She was tall enough to be an amazon, six inches in height on him at least. Body strong beneath the pitch black armor she work - as deep and dark as the depths of space, etched with starlight, a familiar crest upon her chest in the dizzying burst of a supernova - she held herself with confidence. Strands of hair the color of a warning sunrise escaped out from beneath the helm she wore, bright against her pale skin, warming the glass-sharp teal eyes that had pinned him in place.
The hand not holding the gun she’d just used to delete the asshole that had just tried to shoot him - a strange, impossible thing that made him taste lightning at the back of his throat to look at it - stretched out to help him up.
He accepted it.
Something pulsed to life in his chest. A piece forgotten where it’d been left behind, half buried in grave dirt and broken pieces of a casket he’d clawed his way out of. It burned like a hot coal in his chest, froze him with the same aching cold of a blizzard, crackled his nerves to life with lightning even as his brain popped and fried with the same sizzling energy.
On his feet, hair on end and body and Core pulsing with the need to fight, to rend and tear and scream for all done to him, his people, his home, he met the eyes of the woman before him. Her cool gaze softened, just a moment, just a second as she seemed to realize what had happened. Her hand, lighter than the armor she wore should allow it to be, tightened on his just a moment, mouth tilting from determined frown to soft understanding.
Gotham had always been a place for ghosts.
Jason had long accepted that he was one of them.
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Part Three
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@jonmartinweek Day 5 - cryptids | webs & weaving
when i saw the prompt webs & weaving i immediately thought about web!martin weaving spiderweb into jon's hair -- unbeknownst to jon who is just too blissed out by getting his hair touched, and apparently too asleep to notice his boyfriend has four hands (and also the, uh, spiders). the progression of gray in his hair is just subtle enough that jon can't make the connection which is perfect for martin who needs to keep track of him
bonus:
[START ID: Two drawings in purple hues of Jon and Web!Martin from a Web AU of The Magnus Archives. Jon is a thin Persian man with medium length, curly dark hair and a beard, all hair streaked with gray. Martin is a fat mixed Polish/Korean man with shaggy dark hair, a streak of white in one of his bangs, and several beauty marks on his skin. 1st image: Jon lays asleep on top of Martin's chest, his head nuzzled into the crook of Martin's neck. One hand is curled to his chest and the other rests behind Martin's head. He smiles blissfully, feeling perfectly safe while asleep. Martin looks down at Jon with a smile, one eye a bright magenta with a slit pupil. The other side of his face is obscured by Jon's head and shadow. One of Martin's hands holds Jon's hand on his chest, the other draped around Jon's low back. His other two hands have spiderweb wrapped around his fingers, the fingertips pointed into sharp claws. One is close to the nape of Jon's neck, the other held above Jon's head, both with shining white web pulled and connected to the greys in Jon's hair. Jon's hair lifts slightly in the back with the pull of the webbing, other parts curled around Martin's fingers. Several spiders crawl around Martin's skin, notably one across his cheek. Martin says in multiple speech bubbles, "Jon...Jon? Are you asleep? There's spiders in your hair...I'll take that as a yes" with a heart at the end. 2nd image: A simpler drawing, Jon looks into a mirror aghast at the amount of white in his hair, three exclamation points by his head. His arms hover around his hair, and he frustratedly shouts, "Where do all these grey hairs keep coming from?!!". An arrow points to a small drawing of Martin's head, looking to the side with a W smirk, now with eight eyes, says, "I dunno...hehe". End ID.]
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