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catxsnow · 3 years

Text

HAPPINESS B.W.

Request: Will you do a Bruce Wayne x reader where the reader gets hurt because of his life and he just like super sorry and regretful? If you wanna change the bat boy that'll be okay.

Warning: mentions of blood and injury, fluff, angst

A/N: hello good day one and all, my writing inspiration has plummeted even more but I hope everyone enjoys this.

Word count: 1.9k

Bruce never wanted you to be part of his life for this reason. He didn't want an innocent civilian to get caught up in his life as Batman. Someone who couldn't take care of themselves like he or his kids could. He didn't want you to be trapped in the crossfire of his battles and be the one to suffer the consequences.

You knew the risks of being with him. One night he may never make it home because of his fights. Or maybe that one of his sons or daughter would fall again, and this time never return. You knew that maybe, you would somehow be the one to get the bullet instead of someone that would have known how to dodge it.

Maybe if Bruce would have been faster, or if he ignored his pride and asked for help everything would have turned out fine. Maybe if he sacrificed himself, you would have ended up safe. Instead, you laid in a hospital bed. Cast around your arm, brace on your neck. Cuts and bruises laced your skin from the accident.

Except it wasn't an accident. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time and there was nothing that Bruce could have done to help, no matter how much he beat himself up over it. He was saving the lives of others - you would never shame him for that.

Being Batman was something you had to learn to deal with, but his need to save lives was something you could never chastise. You had your fights over it, the crying and screaming matches that seemed to go on for hours. Your pleads to get him to stop when things were going too far.

The times a young Jason Todd would come into your room with red eyes because he heard you and Bruce fights. An older Jason coming to you for comfort after hearing yet another argument with your husband. Tim crawling into your bed with you as Bruce headed out for a night on his own after yelling at you.

Dick, the child you never got a hand in raising, but being there for you because he knew Bruce's antics more than anyone. All his kids adored you, and they all knew what it was like to be on the other end of Bruce's stubborn Wrath.

Bruce was worth it. He was worth every tear, every kiss, every second. Every moment you spent with him, whether it be love or hate, you wouldn't change it for anything. Even if his love was the reason that you were in that bed.

"It's not your fault, Bruce," Dick stood behind the chair in which his adopted father sat. He came back to Gotham the moment that he heard about what happened. Damian had told him scene by scene what occurred - nothing of which Bruce could have stopped. Maybe not even if he was Superman.

Unfortunately, Dick knew all too well that Bruce would feel guilty for this. He was more protective of you than anyone else in this entire world. He would go to any length to keep you safe.

Bruce held your hand in his. The faint pulse was the only thing keeping him sane in that moment. His hair was tousled, likely from the stress he had been under these past few hours. It wasn't often Dick saw him like this. Then again, it wasn't often Bruce ever let anything happen to you.

"I knew a day like this would come and yet I still agreed to let them into my life," Bruce's voice was hoarse - nearly as much as it was when he was under the cowl. The only difference, was now he wasn't hiding behind a mask, he was forced to face the reality of what could happen to those he loved because of his life.

"Growing up, I never thought I'd see the day that you'd fall in love," Dick sat down in the chair across from Bruce. He refused to take his eyes off you, even with his son showing himself. "And then you met (Y/N). I remember them coming over to the mansion for the first time. I wasn't living there anymore but you wanted me to come to meet them.

"I've never seen you laugh, genuinely laugh, so much in one night. I could tell, from that night that they were different than the other woman you brought home. You cared about them from the start, Bruce. (Y/N) wasn't just some other person that you seduced to uphold your playboy act. They knew what they were getting into with you. You can't just force everyone away because you're scared of potential outcomes - that's part of life. Even for Batman."

"They wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me," Bruce tried to argue. Always the glutton for punishment, even when the hand didn't need to be delivered to him.

"And they might have ended up far worse if it hadn't been for you," Dick spoke, his voice steady. He too hated seeing you like this - but if Bruce wasn't going to be the stable one then he had to take that burden. "If there's one thing in this world that people like us struggle to get... it's happiness. You found yours in (Y/N). Don't lose that because of one accident."

"Father."

It had been days since you had been admitted into the hospital. Yesterday morning you woke up sore, but alive. Bruce was yet to leave your side. Stubble littered his face from going days without shaving. A look that you weren't able to truly appreciate from being asleep half the time.

By this time the next day, you would be allowed to leave, but that didn't make your husband any less worried about your well being. Bruce still blamed himself for what happened, even after you had told him it wasn't his fault in the slightest. You could see the guilt on his face, just as he wore every time something went wrong with you involved.

"I brought you food," Damian held a bag of take-out in his hand. If he knew his father well enough, he'd know that he hadn't eaten anything all day. It was confirmed when he heard the loud growl of Bruce's stomach the moment that he got a whiff of the food in the room. "Eat."

"I'm not hungry," Bruce waved off his son. It was clear he was in need of something to eat, though he was too stubborn to take care of himself while you were in need. Even if it was just watching over you while you slept. Damian shoved the bag directly in front of his face until he reluctantly accepted.

"You need a shower," Damian's nose curled up. He stood looking down at his father. As worried as he had been, he also was acting immaturely. Refusing to take care of himself, constantly under surveillance while you were in good hands as it was. "(Y/N) will be perfectly safe with me. Go home. Get some sleep. We'll be here in the morning and ready to go home."

"I'm fine."

"You're not." Damian eyes the food until Bruce took a bite. It wasn't often that he was worried about his father, but it had been days since he had properly looked out for himself. It was clear how far his love for you went after seeing him like this. Or more so, his guilt for letting this happen. "Do you not trust me to take care of them?"

Bruce's jaw tightened. Truth was, he didn't trust anyone with you. Not even himself. Not even Clark. Damian took his silence as an answer. Of course not. Bruce couldn't trust him for a night out alone on patrol, how was he supposed to trust him with his partner?

"It's my fault they're here, Damian," Bruce sighed. "I've never been so scared before."

This was the first time that Damian had ever seen his father so truly vulnerable. Never in his life did Bruce admit that he was scared, yet here he was completely unscathed and terrified. Dick was right, he found complete and utter happiness in you, and the thought of losing you hurt more than anything else.

He wasn't just scared. He was horrified. Nothing in this world put more fear into him than seeing you suffer, or worse.

"It's not your fault, Father," Damian assured, just as his older brother had. "You always taught me to be brave, to face what scared me most. There's nothing wrong with feeling scared sometimes. It reminds us that we're human, that we're allowed to feel things. (Y/N) loves you, this won't change anything."

"Bruce would you stop hovering over me, I'm fine!"

You thought getting back to the manor would mean Bruce would finally be off your back about your injuries. It couldn't be more of the opposite. He was constantly trailing behind you, ready to give you aid whenever you needed it. Honestly, you weren't even that sore.

The brace on your neck was gone before you even left the hospital. Your dark bruises were lighter in color and the cuts that required stitches were healing just fine. The only noticeable injury was the cast on your arm, and you could still function just fine without it. Bruce was just being his overly-protective self.

"If I would have known that all I needed to do to get this much attention from you was to get myself hurt, I would have done it a long time ago," You tried to joke. He remained stoic about your comment, your health was no joking matter. You placed your palm on his cheek, the warmth of his skin being soaked up by your own.

"Seriously, hun, I feel perfectly fine. I'm just thankful for you being there." He didn't look convinced. There was nothing worse than failing you, and he had done exactly that.

"Except I wasn't there," he muttered. Bruce tilted his head in shame. He wasn't there to save you fast enough, he should have been. "I'm sorry, (Y/N). I'm so sorry that my life put yours at risk."

"Bruce, my love," your fingers caught under his chin. He reluctantly met your eyes. Shame filled his entire body, he was supposed to be able to save the world, and yet he couldn't save the one closest to him. "I will never blame you for anything like this. I need you to know that. No matter what happens to me, It will never be your fault."

"I love you," Bruce's lip trembled. You were quick to bring him into a kiss. After everything that he's done, the last thing that he deserved was guilt. "I can't live without you. You're my happiness, my everything. I was, I was so scared. I can't live without you, (Y/N)."

"And you'll never have to."

Taglist:

@pricetagofficial @mora-miserium @babymango-writes @redrobin-yumm @simp-is-what-i-am @catsofsmoke @subtleappreciation @officiallydarkgeek @spiitfiires @pinkdiamond1016 @childish-kiwi @givetimdrakeacoffee @gunnedrobin @local-fandom-trashcan @bikoncon @foenixphire

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just-someone-who-likes-to-write · 3 years

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hello 👋🏻 i was wondering if you could write different kissing/kisses scenarios with Jonathan? just tooth rotting fluff, maybe a desperate kiss where they feel they might lose one another or something yanno? THANK YOU ILYILY

YES!!!

Note I don't have access to my laptop, that's why this time is a bit different, so I'm sorry if this came out weird because I'm typing it from my phone.

Either was I hope you enjoy!

((LOOK AT THOSE LIPS!!.. I'D KISS HIM!!))

• Morning Kiss

Jonathan groaned annoyingly at the one ray of sun light that was able to escape the dark heavy curtains of the equally dark room. His first instinct was to get up from the bed, move to the curtains ,and close them properly. However, that was all forgotten when her realized the small weight that pressed his arm to the bed, he smiled as he looked down at your sleeping face. Carefully, Jonathan layed back down, ignoring the light that woke him up and focused at you. He has said how he loved the look of fear in people's faces, but when he is with you he wants to see nothing but your smiles and the peaceful look you have now as upu slept. Leaning down, he gently pressed his lips to yours and proceeded to shower you with kiss, when he heard your giggles it encouraged him to keep going, until you are fully up, which would take a while. The master of fear had always preferred the night, but since he met you he started to love mornings even more.

•Angry Kiss

"Fuck You!" You yelled before turning away to leave to your room.

"(Y/n), please wait!" Called Jonathan and he walked after you.

"No!" You said mot stopping as you went up the stairs. "You alway do that, you promise you'd make time for me everytime, and lile everytime I belive you, like an Idiot!"

When you were almost about to reach your room jonathan graped your wrist to stop you. It wasn't a strong hold, a gentle one that you could get free if you pulled your hand away hard enough. But you didn't and just stopped in your place but did not face him.

"I know I have been a terrible boyfriend to you, my love." He started. "I am so sorry,but please know that I am truely trying so hard to spend more time with you, but the Legion-"

"The Legion this, the Legion that, with how much you use them as an excuse you sound like a broken record!" You spat before pulling your arm away and faced him. He looked so guilty but you stood your ground. "I know your reputation as a villain is important, and I was ready to be patient through it all, when you have your all nighters, your meetings, and even when you get send to Arkham."

"My love-"

"7 MONTHS!!" He cut him off. "We haven't been able to be alone in the same room let alone set together for 7 months, I don't even remember that I have a boyfriend unless I see the news to see you in it!"

"I promise to be there more!" He said quickly. "I will take a break from the Legion, I will even take us on a vacation to that place you love so much, even if the Legion called me for assistant I will ignore them, I will be here for you for as long as you want me! "

All that didn't effect you because he said it all before, but what calmed your anger is what he said it next.

"Please...don't leave me."

His voice sounded so broken and lost. there was a pause between you two before you let out and angry groan, and get a hold of his shirt collar, which suprised him, and pulled him to you, where your crashed your lips to his. Jonathan was so lost and confused but he didn't pull away and gave in to you. The kiss was so agressive, heated, and before you pulled away you bit his lower lip making him wince in pain. The bute drew a bit of blood.

"You better keep your promise this time." You smirked. "Or I'll have to punish you~"

• Desperate Kiss

Like the joker you were Jonathan's Harley, but unlike the mad clown jonathan never abused you. In fact, he'd always keep you close to him at all times, you were his lab partner, the first head seek their opinion on his next plan, and whenever they'd face the batman, he'd send the henchmen to fight while dragging you with him to escape. There were couple of times where you were caught and sent to jail, and because you are not insane the judge would always send to spend time in regular jail for women which makes jonathan go into a frenzy, needing couple of guards to hold him down as the others took you away. Of course, the moment he escapes arkham he breaks you out the same night.

It wasn't long for a rumor to break loss of the two of you dating. You ignored it, which was hard considering how Harley and Ivy would poke you around to make you "Confess", which was never satisfying since your answer was always "We are not dating". The rumor became a reality, when jonathan confessed his love for you and asking you out for a date. Least to say, you were lovely dovey, even when your relationship lasted years, you still acted as if you were have become lovers recently. Despite the ups and Downs of being beaten by the bat, and seperated in court, you were happy.

Until that Halloween night, where Jonathan had planned something... really... Very ...bad. It was so bad that after you were caught and sentenced to jail for life as usual you found out from TV that Jonathan was sentenced to death. You felt your face grow pale and body grow cold at the news. He was being guarded by batman himself to assure he won't escape, that same night you had sever panic attack that they sent your to the infirmary to calm you down before you hurt yourself or others. You tried to escape by yourself but it always failed and ended up with you being beaten by the gaird and sent to solitary. One night a couple of guards took you away and sneaked you out of jail, you were confused by the lake of show, jonathan would put as he broke you out, but you were still excited, thinking he had escaped and came to get you. But was disappointed when you handed a letter from him telling you leave to the agreed location, and with it was tickets. The same day you escaped prison you left the country with the confident that Jonathan will come after you. Months past and you heard nothing from him or of him. Every day you'd go to the post office and asked if there was any letters by your "Fake Name" but every time nothing, you'd stay up at night thinking he'd be walking through the door every moment now.

After a whole year had and you broke down crying because by now you believed that jonathan had died a long time ago and you were hanging to a hope that wasn't there. You were crying so hard that you didn't notice the warm arms that wrapped around you until you were brought against a hard chest. You gasped and looked uo only to be met with tearful blue eyes of jonathan. You didn't think, you quickly wrapped your arms tightly around his neck and pulled him to a desperate kiss, he kissed you back as his hand went and and down your back to calm you down. When you stopped kissing you didn't pull away and only hugged him tighter and rested your head on his shoulder.

"P..Please ...don't go away.. " You begged between sniffs, thinking this was just a hallucination. "Don't leave me alone again."

Jonathan hugged you tighter, deeply regretting not giving a sign of him being alive, how he broke out, how he needed to do many favors for other villains to help him retire, obtain enough money to last you a life time,and live the peaceful life you both have ever dreamed of.

"I promise, I won't."

• Distracting Kiss

You came home from work excited. They finally gave you the vacation that you have been asking for and you wanted nothing more than to spend it with Jonathan. You were daydreaming about all the things you had planned for the both of you when you almost tripped and fell over something, you looked down and recognized the item as Jonathan's shos.

You let out a sigh. Everytime he leaves his shoes at the door like that, it means that he had hurried to his lab to work again. Normally you'd just shrug it off and just head off and make food for him so he won't starve himself... Again. However, today you will no have that. You put your things aside and went to the basement where he had set a mini lab for him to work in, his original lab was in his secret hideout, but he still set a lab in your home so he won't have to go back and forth over small things. You stopped at the end of the stairs and just stared at a hunched over jonathan who was writing on paper as if it was his last day.

"Jonathan." You called sweetly. He lifted his head to look at you and give you a tired smile before going back to his work. That didn't set well with you. "What are you doing?"

"I am working on a new formula for the fear toxin." He answered not noticing you coming closer. "It came to me on my way back home-"

He stopped talking, writing, and breathing when you wrapped your arms around him, and pressed your front ti his back. But that wasn't what made him stop functioning, it was the kisses you were placing in the back of his neck and with how your hand were moving around his body. He let out a sigh of pleasure that he couldn't hold in.

"(Y/n) dear... Please stop." His voice struggling. "I need to go back to work."

"And I need attention." You pressed your body on him more to be able to whisper in his ear. "A lot of it."

Jonathan tried to resist you could see it. He took his pen again and started to continue writing but this time slower than before. You held back a laugh at his determination, and decided to do your own testing, you started kissing up and down his neck. You knew all his weak spots and so it was only a matter of minutes before Jonathan gave up and turned around to give a direct kiss, which muffled your laughs as he lifted you up to your shared room where he will give you all the attention you want.

•Chaste Kiss

You and jonathan were setting together in the living room, you were watching whatever was on TV on the wide sofa, while he was reading in his seperated chair. Expect, he wasn't reading at all, he was staring at you while resting his head on his hand. You looked so beautiful, that he knew very well when he first saw you, but your beauty became even greater the moment he knew you more. You were so smart, sweet, kind, and most importantly patient. When he would be sent to arkham, when he would come injured from a failed crime attempt, when he made a lab in your basement. The list can go forever, yet she still stayed with him and when he asked her why she just answered with...

"I love you, that's why."

It bewildered him, confused him, he found no sense to give up all that for someone just because they loved them, but the warm feeling he felt by your words silenced everything else. He never told you those words, but that doesn't mean the feeling isn't mutual. His eyes trailed to her lips, which made him realize how in the past he hated any kind of physical touch, that just the mention of kissing made him feel disgust. But now he doesn't seem to have enough from her sweet kisses, even in their intimate moments he would make sure to ravish her lips the most... Aside from other areas.

"Why are you smiling?" You asked pulling him out of his train of thought, you also were smiling but he could also see a bit of blush obviously embarrassed by the realization that he was staring at her while smiling.

Jonathan didn't answer, he careful closed his book and got up and left to the other room, missing the pout you had, but it was quickly replaced with bewilderment as he came back after putting his book away, and instead of setting back in his chair he went to set next to her. (Y/n) still looked confused but pleased, he smiled down at her before placing his hand on her cheek and leaned in to kiss her. He could feel her tense in surprise before quickly relaxing. The kiss wasn't heated or deep, just a simple and gentl kiss.

"Jonathan, what-" you tried to asked after the two of you pulled away but he cut you off with un expected words.

"I love you." He said as he stared into her wide eyes.

He never said those words for he preferred his actions to speak louder, but those simple words seemed to please his lover quite a lot.

•Unexpected Kiss

"Shit!" You exclaimed as you jumped up from your desk and started gathering papers and other items from your desk. Jonathan who once in a while would visit your office for a coffee break looked confused if not surprised by hearing you curse.

"What's the matter?" He asked as he silently watched you go through your drawers searching.

"I forgot my mother is going arrive to Gotham today!" You said as you put stuff in your suit case. "I told her that I'd pick her up after work, but I forgot it was today!"

That's going to be troubling considering the distant between the airport and Arkham." He said casually sipping his coffee.

"I KNOW!" You yelled desperately.

"Want me to drive you?" He asked and you shock your head as you wore your coat.

"Thanks for the kind offer Jonathan, but I'll be able to handle it this time." You said getting ready to leave, you went to your place which was across from him and drank the rest of your coffee.

"Very well, just be careful and good luck." He said getting up to leave.

"Yeah thanks you too!" You said distractedly, but your next action left Jonathan with a look of pure shock, you kissed him on the lips before existing the office. "Lock the doors on your way out, thanks!! "

Jonathan was still staring with wide eyes at the direction you disappeared to. You had just kissed him and hadn't realized it yet, knowing you, you'd probably realize it only late at night when things had calmed down and you were alone with your thoughts. Now, you and him have only been friends in the work place at Arkham, but from your action just now, which happened because of two reasons, you genuinely wasn't aware of it, or deep down you wanted for them to be more than just friends, who drink coffee together, or go out for lunch after work.

He hoped for the later, but to finally find out he'd have to wait untill tomorrow morning, or later that night when she'd probably call him apologizing while being embarassed.

---

I hope you guys liked this one and sorry for any error, again I wrote this on my phone.

#jonathan crane x reader #scarecrow x reader #jonathan crane imagine #Jonathan crane prompt

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thejudgingtrash · 4 years

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Annabeth is a good person,but not a nice or pleasant one,IMO.

YES.

That’s it. That’s the post. Pack it up everybody, we just cracked the case and cleared up one of the most compelling fights in the PJO fandom since forever. Good job everybody, clap it out and there’s the door! Don’t forget ordering the drinks at Starbucks, Mitch! They’re on me!

Okay, but on a more serious note: YES. YES EXACTLY.

And before some of you roll your eyes or grab your pitchforks – put your biases aside and hear me out for once. I like Annabeth. She’s my in my top three characters only second to Percy himself. I love Percabeth. It’s my favorite ship in the entire series and to be frank, the only ship that I care about PJO wise. Hell, I spend my time creating my own headcanons or writing my own fanfics with Percabeth being the star in them.

But that is not to say that I’m unable to see how certain things have developed over the years or where they stand now in regard to Annabeth. I’m not here to ignore things that have been said and/or done due to or in the name of Annabeth and I’m not here to vilify anyone that doesn’t like her. And I’m here to admit that I’m guilty of some of the things that may be addressed in this meta essay that you will read in just a second. However, I try my best to assure you, that I’m for once able to recognize my own bias.

Warning: a monster essay lies right upon you.

This should count as a paper of its own.

Back to the statement on top: I would go out even further to reframe your claim, anon:

Annabeth Chase is a good character but not a nice or pleasant person.

Annabeth is a wonderful character but she isn’t a nice one. Or at least not nice to everyone. She is (construction wise if I dare say) the best character out of the series. She has her positive traits (she’s caring, she’s emotional, she’s encouraged and volunteers, she fights for what she believes in, she forgives (even if doing so begrudgingly)) but she also has her negative traits (she’s stubborn, she’s brash, changing her mind takes forever, she is prejudiced, she baits others). That balances things out. She is branded as the intelligent kid but does irrational things (like I’ve just said a) she’s a kid and b) she’s not a robot). She should probably know better, but we all make mistakes and hopefully grow and learn from them. The clouds in the sky do blur and cover our visions sometimes.

Annabeth had clashes with other characters or was about to have fights due to her stubbornness or jealousy (Rachel, Reyna, etc.) and has of course her problems with the mortal world and her family but she also found new friends, some things cleared up throughout the narration and she was/is quite popular in Camp Half-Blood.

The thing is: she doesn’t have to be nice or pleasant (as a character). Or at least not all the time. Her character is humanized. That is what or who she is. Human. She does stand out as a character, not just because she’s the (future) love interest. She feels like someone you could meet in real life and either adore from the top to the bottom or declare as your biggest enemy. And that’s totally okay if you lean either way – liking or disliking her. Or even feeling indifferent about her. Also great!

To say that she has been the best character that Riordan has crafted is easy to say, because she has been sculpted after Riordan’s wife. He had a model he could rub some of real-life events or traits on. That’s not the problem. The problem truly doesn’t lie on Riordan’s side for the most part for once.

The problem is inherently on the fandom’s side. What the fandom does, how it acts and how it treats Annabeth as a character is the problem. The problems vary but it’s mostly the mischaracterization of Annabeth, starting fights and fan/ship wars, internalized misogyny (in some cases) and how some of the Annabeth stans lash out (ha, got firsthand experience in that field among many of my friends and mutuals!). There is a reason why many people are wary of people that have Annabeth or Percabeth related URLs.

The fact that we see Annabeth mostly through Percy’s lens and (until the Heroes of Olympus saga hits) we never really see her in chill everyday situations is essentially Riordan leaving the back door of the house open, ready for all of you asshats to rob his mansion in Boston. Because a frame on a character means that we don’t get to see the character in its entirety (unlike we do with Percy in PJO for the most part). That means a bunch of stuff is left open for interpretation which is the reason why Annabeth gets so many polarized headcanon and opinions tossed around. I think that is one of the true appeals of Annabeth. You can add on stuff and it necessarily doesn’t have to contradict itself.

We have people calling her abusive due to a (n admittedly stupid and unnecessary) judo flip and we have people that act like she’s never done anything wrong. People sorta use this excuse to form and shape Annabeth however they want and distort her characterization.

People in the fandom act like Annabeth is some weird prized possession. We perceive Annabeth mostly through the eyes of others (Percy, Apollo, etc.) and when we had some sort of insight in her ways (MOA, HOH) it felt… weird? Somewhat? Like Riordan left two bullet points of her characterization and told the ghostwriter: aight, fuck it up, gringo, see you on Tuesday and greet Fred the next time you see him for me.

There have been many posts lately (by Tharini, Simi, Sawasawako, Jewishpercy and Annie I believe?) that HOO Percabeth felt weird. That they felt weirdly constructed, that there was no conflict, no growth. It felt stagnating, like we’re turning back. We had five books prior where we had Annabeth and Percy slowly shifting from disliking to liking and crushing each other. True development. And when we finally got the cake it felt… dissatisfying. Like the cheap box stuff and not the delicious exquisite taste that we were promised.

I said it previously in my Percabeth ship roast, but let me repeat myself: many Percabeth related things are straight up fanon. Some of it is very old fanon so that’s been unable to distinguish unless you’ve read the books recently and subtract nearly 99,9% of things you see on Tumblr (and occasionally the other shitty parts of the fandom like Reddit, IG, Twitter. Although they mostly steal and recycle tumblr stuff oh well. But back to the topic).

The way people treat Annabeth is so strange. She’s either an innocent fluffy smush baby that’s never harmed a fly and all that she wants for Christmas is being Percy’s lapdog or she’s the devil incarnate, broke into your house, killed your parents Batman style, kicked your puppy and didn’t flush the toilet on the way out. I think this is what mostly makes people hate her or the ship Percabeth. And both extremes are wrong and right at the same time? She is multifaceted so both stereotypes are true and untrue and sorta cancel each other out in the same way.

The true reason why people dislike Annabeth is because the stans are doing the most. (The haters as well, don’t get me wrong, but oh boy. Piss of a stan and you’ll know what I mean). That isn’t inherently new. Are you guys old enough to remember the ship wars that have happened cross platform? Perachel vs. Percabeth? Oh boy, oh boy. I saw some kids on tumblr a few months ago trying to infiltrate both tags and start shit (and also fail). The fact that Rachel still gets used as the bitchy (ex) girlfriend in fanfics? It’s 2020 guys. I know this apocalyptic year is far from perfect and over but I think we can let this trope die, right? Right? I thought we’ve established that Rachel is a pretty chill charcter by now… right?

If you posted your stuff on FFN back in 2010-2013 and it wasn’t the typical cutesy Percabeth story (Goode High, the gods read TLT, punk/prep Percabeth, college AU, etc.) people would’ve come for your fucking throat. Not because the story or the narration was shit. But because the pairing wasn’t Annabeth and Percy (in the sense that Annabeth had to be paired with Percy. I mean Percy gets shipped with everyone and their mother but for Annabeth it was strictly Percy. As annoying as this whole Connabeth thing is – the people behind it actually had a point. She never had a different love interest unless it’s a Percy centered story and he goes off dating Athena, Artemis and Zoe at the same time for some odd reason. Yeah, FFN Percy ships are something). Or it wasn’t the action filled canon compliant story or it wasn’t an AU that was popular.

People were really stubborn, snobbish and wanted their stuff in the four five boxes that were the most popular ones and that’s it. People have been bullied off the site in many fandoms, so it’s not a PJO-only thing but it’s still sad that it happened. (Off-note: most of these FFN tropes are still alive and well and thriving on AO3. Don’t be so snobbish and pretend that every piece you’d find there is a holy grail. There’s a lot of trash you have to waddle through. Same with Wattpad, Tumblr or anywhere else where fanfics get posted. Also had this discussion with Annabeth stans. Sigh).

And Tumblr back then? Forget it, wasn’t much better.

That view has sorta changed (at least for people that have been in the fandom for several years or have managed to find a way to navigate through it) but some of the negative sentiment from back in the day has survived. Be it by new fans coming in or from old fans that never let their stance die. The aggression feels differently and somewhat not. (I don’t know if the anon function had been abused that much back in the day. I was an observer not a participant in the fandom).

Crack a joke at Annabeth’s expense (Kal’s famous “Annabeth is a Republican” post or Dee Dee’s and many others “Annabeth has the education of a second grader, chill with the college plans, girlie” stance) and you have people insulting you, making callout posts, unfollowing and blocking you (based on only that? Okay, honey), making aggressive counter-posts, etc. in a minute. If you respond with “It’s a joke, it’s not real” you have a 50/50 chance of either getting blown off or embarrassing them so that they apologize for once.

This isn’t just about jokes. You can make a headcanon that’s not the cozy cute convenient mainstream saga and people would react the same way. Or art piece (no, not including the whole Tannabeth Blackchase shtick done by Viria and others) or fanfics.

People project so much onto the unfinished canvas that is Annabeth Chase that any form of negative sentiment as little as someone not liking her to straight up criticism, regardless of how tiny it may be, seems like an affront. Like an invitation to a fight. Like an insult to them, their character, everything they believe in. Let me state something:

You are NOT Annabeth Chase. Annabeth Chase IS NOT you. Annabeth Chase is NOT real. Her feeling cannot be hurt. Someone criticizing, disliking, joking about her or even insulting her will not bother her. Someone making a statement about her is not an insult to YOU.

Let me repeat that:

Annabeth Chase isn’t real. Annabeth Chase isn’t you.

So think a little before you act? I get it when you’re a kid and new to fandoms or haven’t been up with fan cultures in the past and are back in the scene. But if you’re in your late teens or even older as an adult and you’re unable to understand that you aren’t what you like – you aren’t the extension of a fictional character – I feel incredibly sorry for you. Because that’s just incredibly sad. Someone disliking something you like isn’t an attack of your character. It shows you that you are you and the other person is a human just like you. That they just have different taste. Disliking something you like isn’t a crime, you know? But me feeling sorry for the way some of y’all act won’t mean that that’s even remotely okay. Especially if you’re no longer in the intended audience for PJO age wise and should know better.

This isn’t a “white stans” only thing. I’ve seen and witnessed firsthand how people of color, mainly women of color, act the same or not even worse when it comes to her character. People have projected their problems and real-life occurring events into her character (I’m sure that she isn’t the only character nor that this is the only fandom where this is happening) and in some cases like I’ve said cannot separate their own personality from the fictional world. Fights with woc happened because of Annabeth fucking Chase. So many things have happened in the fandom the past few months, mostly due to people being forced staying at home because of the quarantine but I’d say it’s 10% on quarantine and 90% on people for acting up like this.

So here’s a little story: There was the act of Riordan blowing the fandom up because of his own stupidity and being unable to apologize for his mischaracterization and lack of research (the whole Piper fiasco) back in June (?) and admits the upset fandom, people on Twitter, Tumblr and Discord legit thought that none of that mattered and that the outcry was destroying Annabeth Chase’s birthday. That’s right. People thought that Annabeth Chase’s non-existing birthday because she’s a fictional character had a higher priority than the rupture and prevalent racism in the fandom. Okay. This isn’t a great look, Annabeth stans. And this of course pissed a lot of people off. I made a post about it and someone not only berated three other people on said post but no, we had a mighty argument which had disrupted many friendships in our circle which haven’t recovered until this very day. We both had our parts in it and no one is innocent. But the cause of this still remains Annabeth Chase or how people prioritize her non-existing well-being. Anyway. I’m getting agitated just thinking about it.

Let’s go back to the characterization thing with Annabeth. Let me remind you:

Annabeth Chase is an asshole. There I’ve said it in a post ages ago (too lazy to look it up, sorry) and I’ll say it again. And that’s not me insulting her. That’s me actually loving that about her. Annabeth is one of the very few unapologetic female characters that really showed all young readers across the world that you can be a girl, a badass, smart, strong, standing up for yourself and what you believe in. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to hide your feelings. You don’t need a man in all cases but it’s also okay to accept help and defeat.

A large reason why I think she’s an incredibly important character in children’s literature/YA because many other novels (mostly (sadly)) have the “Oh, I’m a white skinny dark-haired girl that likes unconventional things like READING. I’m not like the other girls, that take care of themselves and pamper themselves by enjoying shopping and wearing make-up. No, I’d rather be one of the boys but a sweet cute little boy and not the jock fuck that drank vodka shots out of a filthy shoe once. Despite me calling myself hideous every man in a 10-kilometer radius falls in love with me and tells me I’m oh so sexy and by the way I’m only 16 years old” shit going on for no goddamn reason.

Yes, I do blame Twilight for this mostly in recent years, but this trope isn’t by any means knew. Pretty sure that you could even use classics as Pride and Prejudice and dissect them in the same manner (Bold statement: Lizzy Bennet is the OG Bella Swan. There. Go fight somewhere in the corner, people). The new wave of YA focuses on girls belittling themselves and only starting to believe in themselves because someone else (mostly the male love interest) tells them they’re worth it. And these books hit the mainstream because they’re incredibly bland and picture perfect white.

With Annabeth it’s different. She shows up for the job and is done with it. (Brie Larson would probably be the perfect in real life version of her. You either like or dislike her. Or you really don’t care). That is what is so refreshing about her. Her unapologetic nature. Can it be off-putting? Yes. Is it annoying? Yes! Hell, every time I read The Lightning Thief, I want to rip her goddamn head off. And it’s just so well written. Her shift from mistrusting Percy but secretly still believing in him to her opening up. Wow, Riordan did something right there.

Annabeth Chase isn’t a young character. She has existed along with PJO for 15 years. She’s on her way to the second decade. I’m pretty sure that with the success of Percy Jackson (and Harry Potter) many lives have been warped and shaped.

But when I say the problem lies mostly in the fandom, it doesn’t mean that Riordan’s completely innocent. The only problem that I have with Annabeth lies not truly with her but the fact that Riordan is only able to produce three variations of female characters:

The sweetheart (Hazel, Silena, Calypso, Hestia)

The strong feminist (Annabeth, Piper, Thalia, Reyna, Artemis)

The bitch (Drew, nearly every female goddess in the goddamn Riordanverse next to every female monster)

And these female characters only know three endings:

End up married with a mortgage, three kids, two dogs and a cat somewhere in Connecticut by the age of twelve

Get dumped into the hunt

Chill on Mount Olympus and only come down to be a nuisance and/or give a cryptic message before going back and doing a godly rave party or something

We know Annabeth as the badass strong female first (or the bitchy character we’re supposed to actually like. Choose your approach), the blueprint so to speak, so some of the other characters feel almost pale in comparison and almost not needed? Doesn’t mean that other characters can’t behave similarly, but it feels kind of redundant especially if their character arcs end in a rather anticlimactic way (Thalia, Reyna). The new additions are the much needed woc as the main story with PJO was inherently white (anyway stan black!Percy and Grover, folks). So it’s not to bash on the new characters, it’s more Riordan’s fault more than anything.

Since Riordan only knows three female character arcs it feels like he tried to copy the formula several ways with different nuances. Some more or less successful. This is where fandom actually comes in handy and helps create more distinguished and fleshed out characters in form of headcanons or fanfiction.

But even in these cases people still make it about Annabeth when it’s time for characters of colors to shine. Remember that whole spiel and discussion that broke out when people (Kal, diver-up, Caitlyn, Bee, reynaisalesbian, etc.) joked about or criticized that Annabeth thinks that she’s having it harder because she’s a blonde? In front of Hazel and Piper? If she would’ve been a real person that’s an invitation for getting decked. And then all hell broke loose because Annabeth stans couldn’t accept the fact that in the real world and/or in fictional worlds the woc/coc have it harder? That the white woman wasn’t the victim that needed the coddling? Yeah, that was mad pathetic.

I hope you people get my point?

Well fuck. I wrote so many things and have the feeling I’ve said nothing. Anyway, I hope I made sense. This is way too long.

TLDR: Chill about Annabeth please. She’s an important character but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to like her, regardless of being a character in the books or a reader/fan of PJO in real life. She isn’t nice or a sweetheart all the time. She also isn’t the monstrous asshole that some try to make out of her.

Peace out.

#Mel answers #pjo #percy jackson #Annabeth chase #percy jackson and the olympians #Percabeth #pjo Meta #Heroes of olympus #hoo #trials of apollo #toa #hazel levesque #piper mclean #reyna avila ramirez arellano #rachel elizabeth dare #pjo fandom #coc #rick riordan #riordanverse

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themonotonysyndrome · 3 years

Text

REDACTED verse - When Lovely meets Angel

Summary: When the boyfriends are away, their partners try their best to be functioning members of society. Spoiler alert: they failed.

Tw: [Mentions of Adam], [Profanity] and [Very, very brief mention of drugs. Like, half a sentence]

I shared this oneshot in the Discord server and I thought to share it here too before uploading it on AO3 later this weekend.

You smile as your eyes do their best to track Vincent’s every move. Your head spins as your boyfriend flits from one room to another, never pausing for even a second. His duffel bag is lying beside you on the couch, gradually full of clothes, toiletries and other travelling necessities as he chucks them in Mach speed.

You pick up the clothes that didn’t make it into the bag. You fold them nicely before placing them in with the rest.

“Alright, I’ve stocked up the pantry to last at least for a few weeks, b-but I’ll be back by Sunday so don’t worry.” The blur that was Vincent said as he ran from their shared bedroom to the kitchen. With a fond shake of your head, you observe the Vampire made one last round.

Letting Vincent fuss is your way of helping him calm down. And sure enough, it only takes a few minutes until your boyfriend is satisfied with the apartment - from the wards that he erected to the well-stocked kitchen and rows of laundry detergents. With the way he prepared for his departure, you couldn’t help but want to remind Vincent that he’ll only be leaving for three days; not three months.

“Do you have Alexis’ number, Lovely? Sam’s?” Vincent asks - again - in concern as he pad towards you and the duffel bag. “Hang on, I’ll forward them to you now -”

You grab his hand before he could reach for his phone and force him to sit beside you on the couch. You peck him on the cheek to startle him. No matter how many times you’ve done this; Vincent always reacts the same. Startled with a tinge of red dusting his pale cheeks. A simple kiss is enough to leave him speechless and it never fails to make your heart skip a beat at how precious he is.

“Yes, you gave them to me this morning. I have their numbers on speed dial for any emergency of the Adam kind.” You easily assure him, only to backtrack quickly when you see how wide his eyes went. Oh yikes, bad move! Bad move! “N-Not that there will be any problem! Haha! I mean, you’re only going away with Will for three days, right? I can hold the fort, don’t worry!”

Vincent bit his lower lip, still hesitant. “I wish I didn’t have to go, Lovely. It hurts to be away from you…” His head tilts down and holds your hand tight, yet always mindful of his Supernatural strength. “Sometimes… sometimes I could still see you in Adam’s arms, so pale and sick… your blood on his mouth - ”

“Hey, hey, Vince? Look at me please.” You gently tilt his chin using your hand that wasn’t captured by your worrisome boyfriend. You made sure to properly look him in the eyes before smiling softly. “You got me in time and for that? I’m forever grateful, but that’s in the past, OK? I’m here now with you! We both have been making good progress at D.A.M.N so that has to count for something, yeah? We’re both stronger than we were before.”

That earns a tiny smile from Vincent and you mentally cheer in victory. “You always know what to say, huh, Lovely? And yeah, we’re pretty badass now, huh? A Vampire and an Electro Energetic? We’ll conquer this city in less than a month.” He joked.

You try to picture it: you and Vincent - the King and Queen of Dahlia. The first thing you would do is declare PJ Friday - where everyone must wear PJs every Friday and those that wear the silliest PJs get brownie points. Collect enough of them and they’ll get a free meal in the most expensive restaurant Dahlia has to offer. Vincent can handle the boring stuff like, governing and health care.

...Now that’s a thought; Vincent as a politician.

Ah wait - Will would probably be disappointed in them if they tried to do a hostile takeover of this city and you couldn’t bear to disappoint him. After all, no one can pull off the perfect sad dad look other than Vincent’s Sire. Not even your own dad!

“ - Lovely? Uh, Earth to Lovely? You there?”

Vincent’s warm voice broke you off from your mad train of thoughts. You flash a sheepish grin when he realised that you haven’t paid a single word he said. Vincent wants to appear annoyed but his lips are twitching, as if he’s holding back from laughing at the dumbfounded expression on your face.

“Sorry, babe. I spaced out because Will was disappointed in us.”

“...What? Will? Lovely, what the - ”

“Anyway, don’t worry about me.” You quickly interject before you have to explain yourself. “You got me food, Alexis’ and Sam’s numbers are on my speed dial and my powers have been growing nicely over the last few classes. I got this; you got this.” To seal the deal you added, “And I promise to call you twice a day; in the morning and before I go to bed. Sounds good?”

That finally assured Vincent. The tension melts away from his taunt shoulders and when he kisses you, it’s slow and sweet. You would’ve loved to wrap your arms around his shoulders and pull him on top of you and turn this into something more, but Will would surely call him if Vincent is late.

Vincent moans when you pull away; disappointed and slightly frustrated. “Easy there, Vince. I’ll make sure to give you a very warm welcome when you get back.” You purr, loving how his eyes lid at your promise.

But alas, as much as you love to drag Vincent to the bedroom, work comes first. So you allow Vincent to fuss around a little more before he slings the duffel bag over one shoulder, kisses you goodbye and leaves.

Now, you planned this. You have a whole itinerary in your head for the days that Vincent is on a business trip with the King of the Solaire Clan. Assignments that need to be done, Despacito to learn on the piano (neither of them knew why Alexis dropped off an upright piano in their apartment on a random ass Wednesday night and when asked, she just cackled before pulling off a Batman and vanished into the night. So Vincent gave up trying to pester the answer out of her. You still think it’s some sort of an elaborate prank), boba pizza to cook for dinner tomorrow and a list of video games to pre-order so really, you would be so busy for the upcoming days that you wouldn’t even have the time to miss Vincent.

If you repeat that long enough, you hope that’ll become true.

Glancing at the clock hanging on the living room wall, you sigh at the time.10.30 PM. A little early to get ready for bed but hey, it’s not like there’s anything else that you want to do now.

With little fanfare, you make sure that the apartment is locked and secure, switch off the lights before heading to the bedroom for your nightly ablutions.

Ok, that part about the itinerary? Yeah, that’s completely out of the window the moment you wake up missing Vincent’s arms around you.

The gentle and warm sun rays pierce through the sheer curtains, promising a bright day ahead of you, but all you could think about is the space in this bedroom. Was the bed always this big? Was the bedroom always this quiet? Those questions rattled in your brain and it really doesn’t help that you can smell Vincent’s faint cologne lingered on the pillows. Soothing vanilla that never fails to clear your mind as opposed to sandalwood and bergamot. Vincent once claimed that the scent is too fancy for someone like him.

Right now though? His cologne sends a pang of longing in your heart in his absence, and it’s only the first day!

“I can’t stay here.” You decided out loud when the tangle of sleepiness ebbed away. Kicking the thick duvet off your body, you stomp to the bathroom to shower, dress up and quickly leave the apartment with nothing but your phone and backpack.

You didn’t want to return to an empty apartment, so what better than walking around the city to distract yourself? Grab some breakfast at a new cafe, maybe do some window shopping afterwards… yeah, that sounds way better than anything you’ve planned before.

Joggers pass you by as you walk through the park and the city slowly comes back to life. People are out and about, going through their monotonous day. Some are catching the bus, others are like her, eager to find something to eat.

You recall that your classmate mentioned that they and someone named Damien found a Taiwanese bakery/cafe that recently opened up near the city’s library; a quaint little shop, squeezed between a hardware shop and a health & beauty care chain store. You can still remember how their eyes lit up as they excitedly described the brioche and the strawberry tiramisu they ate with vivid details.

So that’s where you’re headed off to now.

Apparently, the bakery is closer than you thought when you cut corners and jump through the shortcuts. Being born and raised here in Dahlia like so many others, you knew this city like the back of your hand. Though the existence of Shifters, Vampires, Daemons and more were a slap in the face to you.

Oh, that reminds you, be sure to ask Vincent if the Vampires have anything similar to Fangtasia here in this city.

The bell above the door chimes when you enter the bakery. The sign outside says ‘OPEN’ but since it’s still quite early in the morning, you and a couple sitting at a table near the corner are the only customers currently. Manning behind the cashier is a young woman and her co-worker setting up freshly baked goods behind the display glass.

You made a beeline to the counter.

“Good morning. Uh, can I please have one sea salt coffee - regular size - one red bean mooncake and, umm…” You paused to scan the menu laid before you. “And a marble taro.”

There. That's sort of a healthy breakfast, right?

The young woman hardly bats an eye at your order. She drawl out the total amount of your food and drink to which you hand her some cash before choosing a table beside the large window so you could see the city and her people go about their lives. The scent of freshly baked pastries, hot chocolates and brewed coffees wash over you pleasantly.

You couldn’t help but wonder if Vincent would love this place as much as you do…

The cashier came over with a tray of your order before your musing could spiral down further. You thank her, snap a picture of your food and coffee for Vincent before enjoying your breakfast. It’s a perfect morning, well, almost a perfect morning…

Halfway through your coffee, your phone vibrates. Vincent had texted back:

‘Looks delish, Lovely! Make sure to finish your meal, OK? My flight was a nightmare - I’ll spare you the details - but Will and I reached the airport safely. I’ll call you soon, Lovely. I love you, always.’

Vincent’s text helps to fill his absence, somewhat. You polish off the last bit of your coffee and exhale loudly; there’s no use moping around. Adventure awaits! After all, there’s never a dull day here in Dahlia. For all you know, something is right around the corner just for you!

Tummy warm and full, you bask in the morning light for a few more minutes before exiting the bakery.

...And promptly collide with a walking furnace. Because seriously, the moment your chest hits them, it feels as if their body heat lunges at you.

“Ow!” You fell and landed hard on your ass. Whoever had the misfortune to collide against you, they were a tad taller and seemed to be in a rush to be able to hit you with an impact.

“Oh fuck! I’m so so sorry! Are you alright!? I ran too fast because I always missed out on their marble taros! Oh gosh, oh gosh; can you hear me? Shit, I really hope I didn’t hurt you too badly…” The stranger rambled worriedly.

“I-I’m fine. Just got the wind knocked out of me.” You assured them and gladly grabbed the offered hand. They gently pull you up from the pavement.

“You sure? I can take you to the hospital right now if you want!” They pressed on, eyes checking for any sign of injuries on your body. “Just after I buy my pastries though.”

You didn’t expect the blatant honesty; the idea that some loaves of bread are this person's top priorities crack you up. You couldn’t help it, so you burst out a giggle.

“I’m good, I’m good; don’t worry.” You hiccup and wipe a stray tear from the corner of your right eye. You can’t believe this. “Go get your bread and oh, for the record? I totally get why you rush here. Their marble taro is really something else. You better hurry up; I heard the cashier said they’ll be making the last batch for the day.”

You smirk when the walking furnace’s eyes widen in horror. They darted into the bakery without a single word. The bell chimes loudly when they rush to yank the door and scramble towards the counter.

Just for the fuck of it, you lean against the window and decide to wait. Snippets of frantic conversation can be heard inside and it wasn’t long before the bell tinkle once more.

The stranger that bumped into you pout, clutching a huge paper bag of pastries close to their chest as if they feared you would snatch it. “You lied.”

“Shocker, I know.” You tease and then you feel your blood froze despite the warm morning. You suddenly recalled where and from whom you heard those words before and quickly stomped the image out of your head.

“Uh, dude? Are you sure you’re alright? You look super pale.” The stranger narrowed their eyes on you. Despite the blatant concern on their face and how genuinely friendly and cheerful their voice is, you get the feeling that they’re trying to pull you apart by the seams to see if you would lie or not.

So you opt for the honest option. “I will be.” You assured them. “Just some… bad memories pop up.”

“Huh, well that sucks.” They glance at the bag of pastries for a moment, silent and contemplating. They then thrust it practically in your face before you could do so much as flinch. “You want some? Food always helps me feel good when I’m sad.”

The loaves of bread smelled really good but for the second time, you giggled. “No, no, I’m full. Thank you though; that’s very kind of you to offer.”

“It’s only the right thing to do.” They reply with an easy shrug. You get the feeling that the stranger’s kindness is something remarkable. “The name is -”

Across the street, a truck driver pressed the horn when the car in front of him refused to budge despite the traffic lights having switched from red to green for ten minutes now.

“ - but you can call me Angel; all my friends do. Now that we’ve bumped into one another, your destiny just altered. Our fates will forever be intertwined once you give me your name.”

Oh, you like where this is going.

“I’m - ” The driver in front of the truck kicked open his door and proceeded to shout at the truck driver. A line of cars gradually formed behind the vehicle and horns began to blare as a brawl broke out in the middle of the road. “ - nice to meet you!”

“A lovely name…” Here your new friend - Angel - trailed off, their eyes appraising your body. “For a lovely soul. Lovely. Huh. Can I call you that?”

Gorgeous, brimming with moxie mix with a spoonful of friendly flirting? Oh, you like them more and more by the second.

Also, you idly wondered if there’s some weird magic attached to your name or else this is going to be a pattern every time you introduce yourself.

“Sure.” You answered, and the two of you shook hands.

“Say… who do you think would win? Godzilla or King Kong?”

“Psh, is that even a question? Godzilla, obviously. He’s the king of monsters for a reason! And grandpa got his Atomic Breath; what does Kong even have?”

“You. I like you. I have a feeling that this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

When there’s no escaping from Angel’s octopus arm of love and friendship around your shoulders, you let yourself be swept away.

“So you’re an Electro Energetic?”

“Yup.”

“Got any plans on what you’re going to be in the future?”

“To shed my mortal body and transform into King Ghidorah.”

“...Can I be the left head?”

“I was hoping you’d ask that. We need the right head, though.”

“I’ll give my friend a call; they’re a Freelancer studying at D.A.M.N too. Maybe you’ve seen them around?”

“Wait - you said your boyfriend is a Vampire?”

“He’s more of a dork than a Vampire, but yeah.”

“Cool, cool. Hey, my boyfriend is a Werewolf. Do you know what this means?”

“...Twilight marathon?”

“Twilight marathon! We have to do it. Let’s go, Lovely; you’re going to crash at my place for the best movie night of your life!”

“I’ll grab some food and drinks from my place. Will be there in twenty minutes.”

“This is the third time I’ve watched these movies and I think they just got worse over the years.” You complained, chugging down your fourth can of Red Bull. You don’t drink, so you wondered if this is how it feels like to slowly go drunk. Or high.

You’re in your sleep wear - a simple black shorts and one of Vincent’s t-shirts. Exhausted, stomach bloated with snacks; you feel like shit. Your body is seconds away from saying fuck it and crash down.

And yet you’ve never felt so alive before.

The time on your phone says it's 3.23 AM; you and Angel slough through the first two movies and now finally, the end credits for Eclipse roll down on the TV screen. Angel lives with their boyfriend - who was on a business trip, coincidentally - in a very homely apartment. When you first entered, you could tell just what sort of couple they are.

The place looks as if a small tornado tried to turn the apartment upside down but was fended off just barely - little knick knacks such as rainbow beaded bracelets were carelessly thrown on the kitchen counter behind a microwave, a crop top with printed bongo cats floating within a glittered galaxy is drape over a dining chair, three heart-shaped balloons knock against one another from the living room’s ceiling and for some reason, the USB stereo is on the floor playing Black Pink’s Pretty Savage.

The other half of the apartment - the more organised side - are filled with neatly shelved books of all genres, an untouched bowl of fruits are on the coffee table and most of the expensive-looking dishes and silverwares are displayed behind a glass cabinet. Those were probably gifts from family and friends.

You spend an entire day here, engaging in stupid but fun conversations with Angel, painted each others’ nails and even shop online for the sluttiest outfit that you two could find just for the hell of it before binge-watching the entire Twilight series.

Unlike you, however, Angel is buzzing around like a hyperactive bunny on crackhead energy. Halfway through New Moon, she busted out stacks of colourful sticky notes, some thumbtacks and a huge yarn ball. You watch with utter fascination as they begin to furiously write down every little thing about the Vampires and Werewolves representations from the movies to your and their boyfriend.

It’s 3.25 AM now. The entire living room wall looks like an abstract form of an art piece, made of common stationeries.

Hair in a messy bun, a stick of strawberry pocky dangling from their lips like a lit cigarette, a black sharpie in one hand and dressed in black cat onesie, Angel tapped on the piece of red sticky note that wrote ‘culture appropriation or nah?’

“So what have we learned so far?”

“Vampires don't sparkle.” You immediately piped up and this time, cracked open a can of black coffee. A brand name from Japan, but the bitter tang immediately zolt your already fried nerves to maximum level. You love it. “Period.”

“Noted! Now, does this make Stephenie Meyer racist!?”

You actually had to pause and consider that. “Will need to get you back on that one.”

Angel hurried to scribble ‘remind Lovely for feedback’ inside the same note. “Very well. We shall move on to the Werewolves.” They start to list down the characteristics of the Werewolves portrayed in the movies and then compare them to their boyfriend; but the thing is, they didn’t realise that they verbally list down the quirks of their Shifter lover instead.

You find it cute that Angel rambled on and on about someone named Davey, so you didn’t interrupt them. Hell, you’d be the same with Vincent.

It wasn’t long before the two of you got sidetracked from comparing your lovers to spilling the tea about your relationships.

“After we first slept together, I said to Davey, “Thanks for the sex, bro” complete with a peace sign and a wink. He got so mad that he refused to let me off the bed until I promised to stay.” Angel laughs fondly. They tear open a bag of Cheetos Puffs and throw one into your open mouth. The two of you celebrate with a high-five.

“Vince freaked out when I told him he was my first.” You chewed, swallowed and washed the after taste of the junk food with even more coffee. Who needs sleep when you could reach divinity with cans of Red Bulls, Kirin Fire coffees and junk foods. “He was extra sweet to me the next day as if he was trying to make up for how rough he was. You could totally see how precious he is from Pluto.”

“That’s so cute!” Angel cooed. “You’ve landed the golden D, dude. Congrats.”

“Sounds like you’re the same. To us!”

You clink your can of coffee with Angel’s bottle of Mountain Dew.

Eventually, the night made way to the rising sun and the final scene of Breaking Dawn came to a close. The living room is a total mess - blankets and pillows are strewn all over the floor, empty bags of chips, cans and bottles are underneath the coffee table and you swore that one rolled underneath the couch and the wall is still a sad, modern version of cubism with strings.

“So…” You tilt your head to stare at a wide-eyed Angel, still buzzing with energy. “Want to play Mario Kart? Loser has to let the winner dress them for the day.”

“You’re on! I hope you like crop tops”

Vincent couldn’t stop bouncing his leg. The airport is bustling with people rushing for their early morning flights despite dawn barely peeking from the horizon. Like most of the humans around them, Vincent and Will are waiting for their boarding gate to open.

Speaking of Will, he had wandered off to inquire about their time of arrival to one of the help counters somewhere near the vending machines that they passed.

These past three days felt like three years without Lovely at his side. Vincent was an idiot to think that a few simple phone calls were enough to chase the yearning of his undead heart for his lover. His sweet and strong, Lovely.

How are they right now? Judging from the different time zones, Vincent reckoned that it’s nearly midnight where the city of Dahlia is right now. Is Lovely getting ready for bed? What did they have for dinner? How was their day?

An amused chuckle startled Vincent from his musing. “Oh Vincent, did your phone somehow insult you? You’ve been glaring at it for at least five minutes since I’ve returned.”

“G-Geez! Don’t sneak up on me like that, old man.” Vincent mumbled, he nearly dropped his phone from his Sire’s sudden and silent appearance.

“Apologies. Perhaps you should give them a call?” Will suggested as he took a seat beside him. He offers a warm, knowing smile at Vincent’s confused expression. “You wore a lovelorn expression when you stared at your phone. Do us both a favour and call your Lovely, hmm?”

“...I shouldn’t. They’re probably sleeping - ”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. For all you know, they might still be up, waiting for you to call them.”

Vincent gave in. He desperately needed to hear Lovely's voice. Besides, their sleepy whines are so adorable and he misses them terribly.

Will occupied himself with a John Grisham book while Vincent pressed familiar numbers and held his phone up to his ear. Lovely answered in less than a minute.

“Hey, Lovely.” Vincent greets, feeling the uneasiness and longing untangled themselves from his chest. He can’t wait to return home and have them in his arms again. The next time he has to go on a business trip again, he’ll bring Lovely along. If Will has a problem with it, he could take Alexis. “Sorry for calling you again so late at night. I… I just need to hear your voice again. Anyway, are you on the bed - ”

“Oh my god, did you just throw your underwear at me!?”

“Uh, Lovely?”

Vincent immediately pull the phone away when his ear is assaulted by a cacophony of K-pop music blaring in the background, accompanied by an obnoxious laugh of glee and Lovely’s mutterings of “That slut is going to get it now”, “300% sugar in your boba tea? Dude, just do cocaine instead!” and “Oh, Dilf alert! He has a French accent too? A solid 8/10 from me, definitely.”

Beside him, Will snorts. He happily ignores the glare Vincent threw at him and flips a page.

But for a brief, crazy moment, Vincent was struck with fear at the thought of his lover harbouring a secret crush on his Sire. He still remembers how freely Lovely blush and giggle whenever Will was around.

“Lovely? Is everything alright?” Vincent tries again, straining to hear through the music and someone’s chattering. Who is with his Lovely past midnight? He starts to worry and feel… a little uncomfortable.

“Vincent? What’s up, baby? You don’t usually call me so late.” Lovely reply, sounding a bit distracted. Suddenly, Vincent heard a crash, followed by a, “It’s not broken! It’s all good!”

“Where are you? What’s going on? Are you at a party?” Vincent didn’t demand, he inquired as firmly as possible. Flashes of his Lovely dancing at a club or hanging out with some faceless man and woman keep popping in his mind. It stirs his bloodlust.

Will idly pat his hand to calm Vincent down, eyes still glued to his book.

“I’m at home; had a friend over for the night. The apartment is just… too quiet without you.”

Lovely’s easy and genuine admittance settled something feral inside of Vincent. He guessed that his lover and their friend must be having a sleepover.

“I’m sorry that I had to leave, Lovely.” Vincent murmurs. “Will and I are at the airport right now. We should be boarding in thirty minutes.” Here, he paused and continued in a quieter tone, “I’ve missed you so much, Lovely. I’ve left my heart with you and… well, it’s just not the same without you.”

“See!? Prime example of a golden D there, Lovely!” Someone - Vincent assumed is his lover’s friend - shriek in the background.

Their sudden shriek didn’t surprise him. What did, however, was another, stranger’s voice joining in their conversation.

From a couple of seats, right in front of Vincent. Right here in the airport.

“Don’t shriek into the phone, Angel! Are you trying to make me go deaf in one ear!?”

The man - no, Shifter, grumbled. Vincent could smell the scent of lush forest and dirt around him; a Werewolf, then. But his nature wasn’t the reason why Vincent’s jaw is hanging open.

Will, who had given up the pretence of reading his book, couldn’t hold himself back from grinning widely. He already connected the dots, unlike Vincent. “Oh my, isn’t that Alpha Shaw? He must be on a business trip as well! What a small world.”

Luckily Vincent was clutching his phone tightly or not he would’ve dropped it in shock. Alpha Shaw? No way… David Shaw!? The Alpha of the Werewolf’s pack in Dahlia!? What the fuck -

“Turn down the volume, Angel, before the neighbours call the police!” Lovely shouted back.

In front of him, Vincent and Will watch the impressive scowl on David Shaw’s - the Werewolf King of Dahlia, himself - face. “Uh, excuse me? The fuck? It’s way past midnight, Angel. Where are you; who are you with?”

“Looks like your lover made a new friend.” Will said in mock-whisper. Even though both of them knew full well that the Shifter wouldn’t be able to hear them from where they are in his human form. “I have a feeling that the Shaw pack and the Solaire clan will be closely in touch in the coming days.”

Vincent shakes his head; truly, his Lovely is something else. Without hesitation, the Vampire Prince got up to introduce himself to the annoyed Werewolf. He didn’t take it personally when the Shifter shot him a glare for interrupting his phone call. If looks could kill, well, let’s just say that Vincent is thankful that being a Vampire means that he’s not about to be a Werewolf’s chew toy anytime soon.

“Hi. I’m Vincent Solaire - yes, you heard that right - and before you ask, I’m pretty sure our lovers are currently hanging out at my place right now.”

That got the Alpha to do a wonderful imitation of a statue. He wouldn’t look out of place at the Louvre, Vincent thought.

David exhales loudly - as if he damn close to being done with everything that this world has to offer - before addressing his lover on the other side of the phone. “The things you got yourself into, you damn troublemaker.” No doubt that David probably isn’t too keen to know that his mate is friends with a Vampire’s lover, but Will has a knack for turning enemies to allies; he’ll let his Sire deal with the politics once they get back to Dahlia.

“You love me!” Angel smugly replied. “Oh and guess what? We binge watched the entire Twilight movie series and we got some questions!”

“And uh, just a heads up.” Lovely’s voice hesitantly chimes through Vincent’s phone. “We haven’t slept since you guys left. I mean, I slept the day you left Vince, but, uh...”

Vincent winces and politely ignores David’s flow of cursing under his breath.

They left home for only three days, surely their apartments are still standing and their lovers aren’t drunk, high or planning to commit anarchy!

...Right?

#redacted asmr #fanfic #second pov #they/them pronouns #gender neutral s/o #lovely (listener)#angel (listener)#vincent solaire #will solaire #david shaw

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willow-salix · 3 years

Text

Ok, so, here's the next chapter.

It's a wee bit weird, so feel free to skip most of it, it won't affect the story at all. It's just there, doing it's thing.

Here's the first part, you can follow the link to read the rest of dip out here if you don't want to read a full ritual.

---

“What do you mean Lin is in the hospital?” Selene gasped, unable to believe her ears. “I just saw him no more than...” she glanced at her phone, “four hours ago.”

“Yeah, well, that was before the arrow hit him,” Vera snorted, tugging at Selene’s dress as she unzipped it and yanked it down.

“Arrow? What arrow?” Selene asked, her voice muffled as a new dress was slung over her head.

“The one that hit him in the leg,” Alegra answered as she bustled past with an armful of candles, clearly heading outside to the circle clearing.

“What the hell was he doing to get shot in the leg?”

“Teaching an archery class, it appears someone had very bad aim. One legged Linden strikes again,” Alegra replied.

“That name is because he is the master of Tree pose, not because he only has one working leg!" Selene argued, starting to feel more than a little stressed. “Who the hell is going to be my Priest if Linden is out of action? There’s no one else I’ve worked with enough to even have a connection with let alone one enough to raise the power needed for the circle.”

“Don’t you worry your head about it,” Vera snapped, tugging violently on Selene’s arm, yanking her down in a chair where she sat as still as a statue, allowing the old lady to attack her hair. “Tanzi said she had a plan, so give her some time to see what she can pull out of her arse before you start your panic flapping.”

“But there isn’t anyone here,” Selene argued. “Why don’t we let Tanzi take my place, she’s worked with far more people than I have, she'd know how to work their energy better than me.”

“Because it’s your role, that’s why.”

“But I- OW!”

Vera pulled the brush back like she might donk Selene on the head again.

“We’ll have none of that negativity, my girl, I taught you better than that. You know negativity before a circle is a no no. Just trust the Gods, trust they have a plan and a reason.”

“Linden won’t like that he was part of whatever plan they supposedly had,” Selene grumbled but stayed still as Vera slapped a flower crown on her head and set to work curling her hair around it.

"Well, it's not like he has a say in it now, is it?"

-x-

“I feel ridiculous,” John complained as Tanzi straightened his tunic, giving him the once over.

“Oh hush, you look gorgeous, she’s gonna shit a brick when she sees you.”

“I swear, if anyone even dares to take a picture I’ll make sure that they never get an internet connection again for the rest of their lives,” John threatened, wincing as Tanzi grabbed a comb and a pair of scissors to start attacking his hair. "Are you sure this is completely necessary?"

"Oh yes, very necessary, you have to dress the part, besides, it'll be worth it, you'll thank me later," Tanzi grinned admiring her handiwork. "That bitch is gonna send me a gift basket for making you look so good."

"And there's really no one else to do it?"

"No, I already told you. Linden is out of action and it's been years since she's worked with anyone close enough to lead a ritual with them. You're bonded to her, you're basically her familiar, you're the perfect solution. Don't worry, it'll be fine, believe it or not she does know what she's doing, she won't let you mess up."

"I never thought for a moment that she wouldn't be completely capable and in control, she always is. She may seem flighty but-"

"You don't have to tell me," Tanzi interrupted, patting his shoulder. "I've known her since she entered the craft, in fact I think tonight will be quite eye opening for you. You've never seen her in a ritual before, have you?"

John shook his head.

"Then you're in for a treat, she's a natural performer as well as a talented witch."

"My wife with a penchant for dramatic performance? Never."

Tanzi sniggered under her breath but declined to comment, focusing her attention on the back of his head as she worked.

"Are you sure this is all I have to do?" John asked, unfolding the instructions he'd been given and reading them through again. They seemed simple enough, follow Selene, stand where he was told, do as she directed and only speak when she spoke to him first or asked him a question, it sounded like a standard social event to him.

"Yep. You've got your part of the performance there too, just make sure you give Sel her part."

"Tell me again why we aren't warning her about this?"

"Because I want to see the look on her face," Tanzi shrugged. "I'm old, I have to get my kicks somewhere."

John snorted out a laugh. "Don't let my Grandma hear you complaining about being old, she gets very defensive when anyone under sixty even dares to mention they have a wrinkle."

"Good job I'm over 60 then," Tanzi answered distractedly, tugging at the side of his head as she tried to wrestle his hair into submission. He resisted the urge to flinch and instead focused on her words.

"Sure you are, and I'm planning a career change to become a game show host." The woman didn't look any older than he did, let alone old enough to appease his Grandma.

Tanzi grinned evilly. "Look me up if you don't believe me, but sit still while you do it."

For want of anything better to do John pulled out his phone and did as he was told. It took him less than two minutes and a tiny bit of government file delving to find the truth.

"There's only one Tanzanite Summerland, who is apparently seventy-eight years old."

Tanzi hummed a little sound of acknowledgement as she worked on his parting, trying to force his hair to lay in a way that didn't come naturally to it. "Why won't your bloody hair stay where I put it?"

"Selene asks the same thing, I gave up trying to change it years ago and just work with it, but don't think I don't know you're trying to change the subject," he retorted, on to her game.

She huffed, giving up on the parting, deciding to work with what she had, smoothing it back into place instead. "I'm mated to a full bloodied Shifter, Nikos is 297."

"He's what?" John spluttered, turning to look at her. "That's impossible."

"Dude, you turn into a cat, nothing should be impossible to you," she drawled, her tone implying she thought he was being particularly dense as she grabbed his head and turned it to face forward. "Avery is 413."

"Avery too? What does he turn into?"

"Nothing, though I'm sure he'd love to embrace the bat cliché if he could."

"Bat? Why would h-"

Tanzi raised her curved fingers to her mouth in a crude depiction of fangs and hissed.

John's eyes widened.

Tanzi nodded. "Yeah, and he's still not matured into a fully functioning adult, he'd be lost without my sister, I swear. Now, you've got your words, I've done the best I can with your hair, I think you're good to go."

"What? No! I've got questions, you can't just dump this kind of information on me and expect me to just accept it. I need answers."

"No time my friend, chop chop, it's getting dark, move your arse, your wife's waiting."

-x-

"Seriously?"

Selene couldn't have been more shocked if Tanzi had produced a monkey from her pocket to slap her around the face.

"You think John is the solution to our problem? How? Why? He hates people!"

"Oh hush," Tanzi soothed, brushing away her concerns. "He'll be fine, it's only a little ritual-"

"Little? There's a hundred and fifty people out there joining in!"

"In at the deep end," Tanzi shrugged, "he married a witch, he's gotta learn sometime. He said he'd do it."

"But why him? Is there really no one else?" Selene fretted, more worried about her husband's social anxiety than the ritual itself. "Can't you do it?"

"Nope, you're our poster child, you're the one they came to see, we can't let them down. He's the only person here with a connection to you that won't dull your energy. You know a Priest is supposed to enhance it, not drain it."

Selene wanted to argue, but her friend did make a good point, not that she wanted to admit it. She had worked with John in little ways before, working on his intuition and raising his personal power quicker and easier before each shift he attempted; it really wouldn’t be that much different for him, you know, apart from all the people staring at him.

“Fuck it, we’ll make it work,” Selene huffed. “Did you at least prepare him, even a little? Gods, he’s never going to leave my side again after this. I walked away for an hour and he was drafted.”

“Of course I prepared him, I gave him a script and everything,” Tanzi promised her, crossing her heart.

“Which script?” Selene asked suspiciously.

“This one,” Tanzi grinned, handing Selene a book of Shadows already opened on a page.

Selene quickly scanned through the pages, recognising the revised ritual instantly.

“I’m going to make a few adjustments,” she stated in a tone that allowed no arguments.

“Wouldn’t expect anything less,” Tanzi assured her, knowing that she had won that round.

“Fine,” Selene sighed, checking the time. “Then I guess I'm ready.”

“Good, let’s go,” Tanzi said, draping a cloak around Selene’s shoulders.

“Hang on, where’s my chapstick?”

“Do you really need it?” Tanzi asked, desperate to get the other woman moving.

“Yes, I do, especially as I have a lot of foreheads to kiss out there,” Selene answered, already scrabbling through her bag looking for the elusive little tube.

“Where the hell is the bloody...Oh, thanks, babe,” she said in response to the chapstick that appeared in her line of sight, recognising the ring on the hand that held it. She took the stick and slicked on a generous amount, making fish out of water noises at her reflection in the mirror before turning around. She stumbled, reaching blindly behind her for something to hold on to, because praise be to every single deity for the God that was her husband.

“Holy shitballs Batman!”

“See, I look stupid!” John huffed, his cheeks burning. He should never have let himself be talked into it.

“Rubbish,” Tanzi scoffed.

“Wow,” Selene breathed, seemingly unable to form any full sentences.

“Told you she’d like it,” Tanzi grinned.

“What...I mean...how the...my Gods,” she breathed, unable to tear her eyes away from the pure gorgeousness she was seeing. Her eyes kept darting to a new part of him, there was simply too much beauty to take in in one go. “Wow.”

“Yes, I am a miracle worker, I know this,” Tanzi preened, brushing a non-existent speck of dirt off his shoulder.

“Is that a wig?”

“Clip in extensions.”

“My Gods,” Selene whispered again. John’s hair was now brushing his shoulders, falling in shimmering red waves that perfectly matched his own colour. His usual side parting had been maintained, the extensions having obviously been trimmed to blend in with his forelock, which somehow made it look less alien on him. Her fingers itched to run through all that silky looking hair and she actually reached out a hand but Tanzi slapped it down.

He was dressed in a black shirt with loose fitted sleeves that laced up across his chest under a dark forest green tunic. His legs were encased in black leggings and dark brown lace up boots that came up to just below his knees. He had a black cloak over one arm and a metal headpiece that encircled his head looking rather like a crown. But it was the pointed ears that peeked out from his hair that really pulled the whole look together.

“Fuck...me,” Selene was absolutely stunned, taking a few steps towards him, wanting to be close, to touch, to kiss...

“Later,” Tanzi ordered. “You two have to get moving, I can hear the drums already.”

Snapping out of her dazzling husband induced daze, Selene grabbed a sword that had been laying on a table in one hand and reached for his hand with the other.

If John felt nervous dressed in his ridiculous costume, it was nothing compared to how Selene seemed to be feeling. He could feel her hand shaking in his and hear the way she kept sucking in a deep breath before letting it out slowly.

He wanted to say something to make it better, but knew that in times like these words made very little difference to her. Instead he repositioned her hand in his, linking their fingers and giving it a comforting squeeze. She looked different tonight, he’d seen her in ritual robes before, but this time she had replaced the dramatic makeup she had been wearing earlier with something much more subtle. She looked younger, less sure of herself, with pale golden eyeshadow, pink blushed cheeks and no lipstick, maybe that was part of the reason that she looked a little less confident than normal.

They waited just outside the perimeter that had been marked out for the circle, around which a ring of people stood, others seated in little huddles on blankets, obviously not part of the actual ritual but wishing to observe. The whole clearing was lit up by the crackling flames of a large bonfire, which warmed the chill air to a more pleasant temperature now that the sun had gone down, taking its heat with it.

The drumming that had been growing louder with each passing moment reached its crescendo and abruptly stopped. He felt her stiffen and heard her inhale deeply once more, holding it for the count of five before letting it out slowly.

“Show time,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. “Just follow my lead, babe, I won’t let you down.”

“I know,” he assured her, bringing her hand to his lips and placing a gentle kiss on her knuckles.

Link to Ao3

#john tracy #selene tempest #thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds 2015 #witch #thunderbirds fanfiction #paranormalromance #thunderbirdsarego

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prettyyoungandbored · 4 years

Text

Becoming Mrs. Wayne [The Dark Knight] Four

Pairing: Christian Bale!Bruce Wayne x OC

Summary: Demetria Gallagher knew her cozy life would change the second she became engaged to Bruce Wayne. But what she doesn’t know is she’s getting more than what she agreed to. (I am trash at summaries.)

Warning: None

Taglist: @dragonballluver (Let me know if you want to be tagged in this!)

“27 down is ‘falafel.”

Alfred looked up, shooting a glare at Demetria. Her lips curved into a childish grin.

“The bloody hell is a falafel?” he asked, unamused at the word.

“It’s a fried ball made up of chickpeas and beans. It’s actually delicious.”

He shook his head. “You Americans and your fried food.” He returned his gaze back down to the Gotham City crossword. Demetria snuck another glance at the crosswords, looking for another one she knew right off the bat.

“14 across is ‘David Cassidy.’”

The old man shot her another dirty look. She shrugged her shoulders, desperately trying to hold in her laugh. “I’m sorry.”

Across the yacht, Bruce shifted his attention from the newspaper he was reading and watched the two with an amused smile on his lips. None of the girls he ever brought home acknowledged Alfred (with the obvious exception of Rachel) and if they did it was to ask for something. Demetria had made an effort to get to know and befriend the old man, knowing how much Alfred meant to Bruce. Their friendship and playful banter was something Bruce could get used to for years and years to come.

Demetria made eyes with Bruce and walked over to him, her white babydoll dress blowing with the wind. She pat his legs, motioning him to scooch over. He obliged and she curled up against him, propped up on his lap.

“You looked a little lonely over here,” she said.

He smirked. “You pushed Alfred to his breaking point, didn’t you?”

“I forget how seriously that man takes his crossword puzzles.”

The couple chuckled as Demetria played with Bruce’ slick back hair. The salty aroma filled her nose as the noise of waves crashing against the yacht filled her ears.

“Feels so good out here,” she sighed. “Definitely one of your better ideas.”

“My better ideas? Since when did I ever have an idea that wasn’t good?”

“The one time you took me to that new restaurant and I got food poisoning.”

He laughed, the memory coming back to him. She refused to let him see her in such a state, but he came over anyway to make sure she was hydrated and functioning.

Needless to say, they never went back there and he owed her big time.

Bruce lifted the newspaper up and continued reading, Demetria reading along with him.

“Anything interesting going on back home?” she asked.

“Nothing but the usual mobster activity and an editorial piece about the overwhelming amount of Batman copycats.”

She hummed. “I can’t help but wonder if Batman feels bad about the copycats.”

“I’m sure it gets annoying after awhile.”

“Do you think he feels responsible for them?”

There are times he wants to tell her he’s Batman, but he wants to keep her away from that part of him. He’s been successful so far, why bother bringing her into it now?

Then she changed the subject.

“What’s this?” She pointed at a section of the paper. “‘Witnesses say clown robbed downtown city bank?’”

Bruce took a quick glance at it. “Must be about that bank robbery downtown from yesterday.” He looked over at her to find a disgusted look on her face. “What?”

“I just...clowns...ugh.” She shivered. “Doesn’t sit well with me.”

“You’re afraid of clowns?”

“How could you not be? They’re creepy. Didn’t you ever see ‘It’ or ‘Poltergeist’?”

He chuckled. “They’re not that bad.”

“Well they scare the shit out of me.”

“So I should cancel the clown I hired for our wedding?”

She slapped his arm. “You’re an ass.”

Bruce set down the newspaper. “Speaking of the wedding, I was wondering if you had any ideas or preferences in terms of location?”

She shook her head. “Zero. You?”

He cleared his throat. “I was thinking Wayne Manor.”

Her eyes lit up, a huge smile slapped across her face. “I would love that!”

“Really?” He cocked his head back.

“Yeah! I mean the property is beautiful, plus it’s something that would be comfortable and simple for us.”

“You’re sure you want to do it at Wayne Manor?” Bruce asked.

She ran her fingers through his hair. “Babe, we could go to city hall and get it done and I would still be the happiest woman alive. I don’t care how we get married, I just want to be with you.”

While he never needed a reminder of why he loved her, it was times like these that did. He’d never come out and say it, but underneath the wealth and the vanity he used to mask an protect his true self, he valued the simple things that money could never buy. Demetria shared those same values. Both longed for a quiet and intimate life together which was more than enough.

“I only ask two things,” Demetria said.

“Anything.”

“One, we plan this together. This our day, not just mine and not just yours. It’s ours.”

“Not an issue at all.”

“Two, this wedding is as small as possible.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “It’s done deal.”

As they leaned in for a kiss, the sounds of the helicopter landing drew their attention from each other. They watched as it made a graceful landing.

“The plan has arrived for you sir!” Alfred called out.

Demetria pat Bruce’s knee as she got up. “Have fun breaking off this deal in China.”

Bruce threw off his white shirt, handing it to her. He grabbed the duffle bag and threw it overboard.

“Please be careful, Bruce.”

“For you, I will.”

He gave her a quick kiss before diving into the water. She watched as he swam over to the helicopter before climbing aboard.

She watched as the helicopter flew away before turning to Alfred.

“What number are we on, Alfred?”

“Eighteen across. The clue is ‘Get your own bloody crossword.’”

_____________________________________________________________

A couple days later, Demetria found herself at the entrance to St. Swithin’s Home For Boys. She was grateful the orphanage had taken her call and allowed her to come visit.

She made her way to front desk area, smoothing out her pants. She smiled at the elderly nun at the desk.

“Hi, I’m Demetria Gallagher,” she greeted.

The nun smiled back. “Hello there! We’ve been expecting you! My name is Sister Agatha. You’re here for the tour, correct?”

“Yes! I was hoping to speak with the Mother Superior or Monsignor O’Malley.”

“Unfortunately both were unable to make it due to prior commitments; however, they asked that Sister Mary Ellen give you the tour.”

“Sounds great!”

“Please a seat while I phone her.”

Demetria sat in the bench across from the desk, eyeing around the orphanage. It’s old age was definitely showing. She made mental notes of the broken down wood, the cracks in the wall, and the lingering dust. Her mother would love a project like this.

“Miss Gallagher?”

Demetria looked up to find a nun in her late thirties with kind brown eyes and a welcoming smile. “My name is Sister Mary Ellen. How do you do?”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Demetria said reaching out her hand.

Sister Mary Ellen shook it. “A pleasure to meet you as well. We’re so excited you’ve taken an interest in the orphanage.”

“Bruce has told me so much about this place and I’ve always wanted to come see it for myself.”

“The Wayne Family is such a big part of the orphanage’s history. Bruce has been so generous to us in the past.”

Sister Mary Ellen first took her to the library, named in memory of Martha, Bruce’s mother. Despite it’s broken state, the walls were covered in old books stacked in the shelves.

“Not a lot of boys spend time in here,” Sister Mary Ellen said. “We’ve been trying to get them to, but some are harder to persuade than others.”

“Understandable,” Demetria assured.

Next was the kitchen, then the chapel, and then some of the dorms. While the building was historic, its structure and the components inside were out of date and almost out of function.

There were a a good amount of kids staying in and they deserved a better home.

“May I ask you something?” Sister Mary Ellen questioned.

“Of course.”

“There’s been a lot of talk amongst the nuns about what it is you plan to do and I just...well...what is your intention exactly?”

Demetria chuckled. “It’s ok. I can completely understand the curiosity.” She sighed. “Bruce has always told me how much this place has meant to him, especially after the death of his parents. I know it’s hard for Bruce to give attention to this place and so I wanted to step in and make sure you’re getting not only what you and the boys need, but what you deserve. You all deserve to be living in better conditions and I can guarantee you Bruce agrees with me.”

“What is it you can do for us?” Sister Mary Ellen asked.

“My mother works as an interior designer and would be more than happy to help redecorate. I also know a lot of people who can help make sure this place is functioning properly and is up to all health code standards. I want to make sure you all are taken care of and are given the attention you all deserve.”

Sister Mary Ellen couldn’t help but smile. “What about finances? I know the monsignor and Mother Superior would ask to be kept apprised.”

“They would be. That’s something I’m currently working on, but I want to know what I’m at least working with here.” She smiled. “Although, my mother would do this for free. I know that for certain.”

Sister Mary Ellen chuckled. “Let me take you outside.”

She led Demetria to playground where Demetria noticed four boys playing basketball. She couldn’t help but notice that no matter how hard they tried to dunk the ball in the chain basket, they kept missing.

“May I?” Demetria asked.

“By all means.”

Demetria made her way over to the boys. One boy had black hair with blue eyes, another was African-American with glasses, another boy had blonde hair and freckles, and one with brown hair with glasses.

“Hey guys!” Demetria greeted.

The boys stopped and looked at her. “You guys playing basketball?”

They looked at each other, confused and unsure what to say. She cleared her throat. “My name’s Demetria.”

“I’m Travis,” the boy with black hair said.

“I’m Jonathan,” the African-American boy said.

“I’m Reid,” the boy with blonde hair said.

“I’m Harry,” the boy with brown hair said.

“Nice to meet you all,” Demetria said. “So what are we playing here? One-on-one or Horse?”

“Just some one-on-one,” Reid answered with a shrug.

“You know how to play?” Harry asked.

“A little. My dad was a high school basketball coach so he taught me a few things. Can I see the ball?”

Travis passed her the ball. She dribbled it for a bit before shooting the ball into the basket. The boys stared in amazement, letting out some “whoa”s.

“Alright, so who wants to be able to dunk a ball?” she asked.

They all raised their hands. “That’s exactly what I thought. Ok so watch my hands.”

She picked up the ball and demonstrated the throw with her hand. “See the way my hand curves, like I’m flicking my wrist? Try that.”

Reid took the ball first. He dribbled the ball before throwing it up. The ball went through the basket. The boys cheered.

“See? That was awesome!” Demetria said. She held up her hand for a high five which he reciprocated. “Alright, who’s next?”

Harry went up and threw the ball, making it into the basket.

“Way to go dude!” Demetria cheered, the two high diving. “Who’s next?”

Jonathan went up and threw the ball, the ball circling the basket before falling off. Demetria caught it and threw it back to him, seeing the dejected look on his face.

“You almost got it. Try again.” She smiled at him.

He gave her a nod. He tossed the ball up, this time the ball landing into the basket. The boys and Demetria cheered.

“See! You got it!” she said.

They high fived and Jonathan passed the ball to Travis. Travis dribbled before the ball hit the back of the basket. The ball came back toward him as he caught it, tossed it again and then tossed the ball inside the basket.

The other boys and Demetria cheered.

“Ok, ok,” Demetria said. “Now you guys trying playing.”

The boys then began playing one-on-one, Demetria coaching them and cheering them on. She couldn't help but feel her dad would be proud of her. Sure, she wasn’t an athlete, but she learned a lot from watching him coach from the sidelines all these years.

She then saw Reid pass the ball to her. “Your turn,” he told her.

She smiled. “Alright.”

She dribbled the ball before tossing it into the basket. She grabbed the ball and said, “Who’s next?”

“What’s going on here?”

Demetria turned around to see Bruce walking over. Her smile grew. “Just playing some basketball.”

She watched as the boys’ eyes stayed on Bruce, wide in amazement and wonder. He acknowledged them with a warm smile before gazing at Demetria.

“Tell me, boys, how she doing?” he asked.

The responded, each voice overlapping the other.

“She’s pretty good.”

“She’s good.”

“Pretty good.”

“Good.”

Demetria tossed the ball to Bruce as he caught it in his hands. “Let’s see you’ve got, Wayne,” she challenged playfully.

“Those are fighting words,” he responded, dribbling the ball a bit.

He turned his back to her and tossed the ball as it went into the basket. The boys cheered and clapped as Bruce turned to her, throwing his hands up.

She folded her arms across her chest. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Bruce looked over to one of the boys. “Can I have the ball, please?” They tossed him the ball. He showed it to Demetria. “Why don’t you try and steal it, Gallagher?”

Demetria went over to him as he lifted the ball from her. She jumped, spiking it from his hands. Jonathan caught it and tossed it back to her. She went to shoot it into the basket when Bruce spiked it out of her her hand and picked her up swinging her around.

“Are you kidding me?! I almost had it!” Demetria screamed.

It was then something caught her eye. A figure watching them from across the street.

“Hold on, hold on,” she told Bruce.

He stopped, eyebrows furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

“Give me a sec. I think I see something.”

She walked toward the gate, getting a closer look at the figure. It was a caucasian male with a black baseball cap that said ‘Gotham Times’ on it and a tee and jeans with a bulky vest. Across his neck, a camera.

“What the hell are you doing?” she called out to him. “There’s kids here!”

The man reached up to his camera as she continued to get closer.

“Stop it!” she growled. “Stop!

Bruce rushed over to her, pulling her away. “Demetria, don’t.”

She turned to him. “He’s photographing the kids! He can’t be doing that!”

“Listen, we’ll take care of this when we get home,” he told her. “Right now, just ignore him. The more you go after him, the worse it’s going to be.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “There has to be a line drawn, Bruce.”

“We’ll take care of it home, alright?”

She nodded her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He kissed her forehead. “You were protecting the kids. It’s gonna be ok. We’ll fix this.”

He rubbed her arms. “Let’s go back, ok?”

“Ok.”

She took one more look at the photographer before walking away. Bruce had a point, they were going to take care of it.

She was going to take care of it.

#bruce wayne x oc #bruce wayne imagine #batman #batman imagine #batman fanfic #the dark knight #the dark knight fanfiction #the joker #christian bale

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black-streak · 4 years

Text

Little Pistol - Where is my Mind?

Chapter 3

First Previous Next

The song is by The Pixies. Did I mention this is going to take a while? Because it's going to take a while. Burner is turned way down to warm. Not even low heat. Here we are. By the way, would you guys be interested in the playlists I make for when I'm writing? Let me know.

Reminder kids, I tend to write more when y'all interact with my work (comments, asks, ect.) Please fuel me.

LP Taglist

@zalladane @moonlightstar64 @amayakans @elmokingkong @queen-in-a-flower-crown @karategirl119 @dreamykitty25 @danielslilangel @melicmusicmagic @xahriia @sassakitty @yin-390 @zotinha456 @indecisive-mess-named-me

Permanent list

@naoryllis @throneoffirebreathingbitchqueen @my-name-is-michell @maribat-is-lifeblood @dast218 @novicevoice @shizukiryuu @princess-of-fangirls @bigpicklebananatree @pirats-pizzacanninibles @abrx2002 @breemeister @darkthunder1589 @thestressmademedoit @severelyenchantedwonderland @isabellemasen @multi-fandom-freak0221 @fantasyloversblog @bzz75 @cloudiedraws @jardimazul @orbitsvt @gingerdaile @sotheresthatthought @kadmeread @novaloptr @unabashedlyswimmingtimemachine @crazylittlemunchkin @18-fandoms-unite-08 @tiny-goddess-of-chaos @ladybug-182 @toodaloo-kangaroo @the-alice-of-hearts

~---~

Over the following weeks, everything shifted slowly but steadily. Chat became more and more focused and professional during attacks and so very desperate for reassurance of his good work afterwards. Normally, they had very little time for such things due to the timers on their miraculouses, but with each thing he did to please her, she offered a bit more of her time and softened ever so slightly. It seemed the perfect little reward to drive him further in the right direction. Akumas were simply an inconvenience if annoying now, or if she were lucky, a fun little puzzle to figure out. A major improvement on the terror and stress and anxiety they induced before.

Things at school were shifting as well. She'd long ago given up on remaining friends with everyone, especially with the classroom changes over the last few years. She was entirely too busy to keep up with people who no longer shared a classroom with her or put in the effort to seek her out. She would've loved to remain close to them all, sure, but the reality was that without the ease of having the same homeroom, it just wasn't possible. Alya and Nino sometimes sought her out, luckily sharing a class still and willing to work around her own schedule.

As did Chloe, though normally for something regarding a school function. Chloe was an interesting one. She still had her lapdog and turned her nose up to her peers, but she no longer hunted Mari down to bully her. They weren't friends, but they had found a level of respect and civility between them. That worked just fine for them.

The part that shifted lay more in how she interacted with her peers. She never lied. She also stopped hiding though. Her honesty began to extend to her emotions and reactions. She stopped pushing herself aside for others. Really though, if she expected decency and a level of care for her from Chat, surely she should expect the same of those she surrounded herself with, right?

Marinette still spent spare moments considering how to help people around her. What to say or do to push them into adjusting their own actions into something more acceptable. Less cruel and inconsiderate. Still, it wasn't her place, so she left it be. They'd figure it out, she hoped.

…

"M'lady? I've been thinking and… I had a thought about the whole Hawkmoth thing."

"Oh? What's the thought?" She turned to offer Chat her full attention where the boy squirmed.

"Well, what if he's been an akuma? We keep crossing off anyone who's been akumatized, but what if that's what he wants?" He asked, sounding more and more unsure of himself under her watchful gaze.

Considering it, she nodded, "That could be dangerous, how do you think he did it though?"

"Well. Couldn't he just conjure the butterfly and send it out to hunt out negative feelings and then detransform? Certainly he must feel negative feelings constantly, so the butterfly would be attracted to him before it even got far enough to feel someone else's?"

Marinette, looked out to the Eiffel tower, the structure making a perfect focal point to zone out on to think over his suggestion. To detransform without deactivating anything you created was possible, she knew this due to lucky charms remaining in the past. But how would he control it if he was the one akumatized? Well she supposed his motives would remain the same, akuma or not, so he wouldn't need to worry about it. To deakumatize though, how would that work? Would catching their miraculouses be enough of a relief to release the akuma on its own? Or maybe Hawkmoth just didn't think that far ahead to begin with. Either way, it's entirely possible he could've been an akuma, now that she thought about it. Turning to face the cat, she let a small smile show, "That's a very good observation. You're right, he could do that, couldn't he? Good kitty cat," she watched him perk up and straighten, making her smile a little wider. A stray thought turned her lips back down though, "This means we're back to square one though, with everyone in Paris as the suspects. And just as we'd started to knock some off."

Char shrunk slightly, only to perk back up, "That's not entirely true, we could always take off anyone who we've seen get akumatized?"

"Without revealing the places we frequent and possibly our identities?" Her eyes cut to his own, in a disapproving manner, "Sure, I can cross off my own, but your experiences are useless to my mental list since you can't tell me. And don't you dare suggest that you could tell me who you are. You know how I feel about that."

That seemed to take the wind from beneath him, and as much as she wished she could assure him it was okay and they'd just keep brainstorming, she didn't want to encourage the idea of being more open to each other. Suddenly, he perked once more.

"I'll start looking into past akumas. Maybe we can recross them from our lists?"

"And how would we go about that?" Her voice betrayed her weary feeling.

"I'm a black cat. I'm very good at observing others without being noticed. I can spy on them until there's an akuna without their making it so."

That was kind of a breach in privacy and meant he'd waste time on people she knew were innocent. But then, it wasn't her idea and she wouldn't take part in it and he looked so eager. If he felt it was a good idea… well he's never listened when she told him not to do things before, once he got it into his head that it was a good idea. Might as well have him report the results to her if he was going to do it anyways.

"Okay, let me know what you find out. If I get an idea for who to look in to next, you'll do that for me though, yes?"

"Of course! I'll start right away. I won't let you down, bugaboo, I purromise!" He shouted as he took off across the rooftops.

Uh, she hated that petname. That's okay, it'll stop soon enough. She'd make sure of it.

…

"So now we're stalking people? Treating everyone as suspect?" Tikki ground out upon release.

"Of course not. He is. Of his own volition."

"You could've told him not to."

"We both know when Chat gets an idea in his head, he doesn't let up until he's seen it through. At least with my approval, he won't hide it from me. Since when have you had issue with my invading others' privacy, anyways? You insisted I stalk Adrien back when he had the book. Which reminds me, he's given me a thought."

"You still could've tried! It's the intention of it that matters," she pouted.

"Enough Tikki, we both know we won't agree on this. It'll be fine, anyways, I'm sure. Back to my thought," she spoke right over the goddess's complaints, "Adrien had that book. His father's book. And with Chat's idea, that puts Gabriel back on the suspect list, right?"

Tikki seemed to perk at this, "You think we knocked him off too soon?"

"Yes."

"... Well I suppose if you had Chat look into it, it could be acceptable."

"Oh, so now you're okay with it," she teased, dropping the subject at the glare she received.

…

Her Robin sent someone into Arkham Asylum that night. It wasn't of much note, except they were begging to get away from him. To be put up and never let out again.

The video displayed a manic man, clutching the arms of a police officer to protect him from the man in red and black. The officer asked if the guy meant Red Hood, who apparently was the one seen last with her lovely Robin. But the man only gave a hysterical laugh, pleading, "Hood would have the decency to kill me and be done with it. Please, help me."

The clip ended with the guy being placed in restraints and driven away. She vaguely recognized him, but couldn't quite place who he was. The reporter closed up the case, wondering at who this new menace to Gotham was under the mask.

Her Robin… her Robin drove someone insane. Terrorized some man into fearing him more than Batman, to the point of begging for confinement. To pleading for death over another encounter. Just who had her Robin become?

Perhaps, maybe, her hero had fallen. Maybe she'd need a new inspiration, a new hero. Maybe she should quit while she was ahead.

#maribat #ml x dc #timinette #Dark!timinette #I hint at it here but she's in her final year of schooling here #i have no patience for writing her in school

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soyouareandrewdobson · 4 years

Text

Dobson’s favorite cartoon reviewed: The adventures of spandex girl in New York aka the Miraculous Ladybug movie

So THIS is not going to be about a Dobson comic, but rather with the lack of Dobson posting shit out here, I thought I give my opinion about something Dobson would have likely sperged out within the last few months. What could it be I want to talk about? The riots? The death of RBG? Cuties?

Are you insane? My brain may function better than Dobson’s, but even so I am not touching those subjects with a tong, seeing how I myself am lacking detailed knowledge on such subjects. No. I am talking about the cartoon that makes Dobson’s little brain (and dick) all tingly: Miraculous Ladybug.

For starters, let me just say that despite being an animation fan myself, I am not really into this show at all. For a magical girl show that goes on for over three seasons at this point, I just feel like nothing happens in it. Sure, A LOT of tokusatsu and magical girl shows run on repetitive monster of the week formulas, but overall they will still have some progression to themselves. Growing up with Sailor Moon, I always loved the first season and how it actually made me feel like things are increasingly at stake as the story progressed. Especially in the final episodes when the Senshis actually died protecting Sailor Moon and it was only thanks to a Deus ex machina everyone was reincarnated again. As melodramatic as Sailor Moon could be, at least each story arc had a beginning and ending that did not overstay its welcome. Ladybug meanwhile can be summed up as followed:

Teenage girl is thirsty for obvious blond boy whose dad wants to get magic jewelry to necromance his comatose wife. Teenage girl gets magic jewelry and turns into heroine in ladybug mustered spandex suit that makes rule34 artists all tingly. Same goes for boy she has the hots for, only he becomes gimp catsuit shota bait. Bad guy transforms random citizens who feel down for some reason (often times connected to a blond whose family name Dobson can’t write) into action figure like super villains. Ladybug and Cat Noir defeat them, the damage is reseted, Ladybug and Cat Noir never figure out who the other one is despite things being so obvious Ray Charles could have seen that shit coming. Repeat not just for one, but ALL seasons so far and add as little as possible storywise to increase the roaster of characters, but not progress the plot.

All that said, I can say that there are worse shows out there and for a show meant to sell toys to girls and be about a female hero, it is not THAT bad. But a) the creator is an asshole (think of functional Dobson) and b) there are still better shows to watch, even within the preteen magical girl genre, than this. Not to forget that this thing may be the indirect successor of Totally Spies and give certain people internet related fetishes within the next few years.

So, why am I believing Dobson would talk about the show at least for today more than he already tends to do on average? Because Ladybug actually got now a movie.

Well, it is called a movie, but in reality it is more of a 3 parter to start the fourth season if you really look into it. The thing is called Miraculous World: New York – United HeroeZ. It clocks in around 65 minutes and focuses on Marinette and Adrien in New York, teaming up with new heroes that are so unsubtlety promoted in this movie, I expect them to get their own spin off series by the end of next year so the showmakers can milk the cow even drier.

Let me try to elaborate in what is going to be a less than just a bit snarky summary with a few critical points and jokes at Dobson’s expense thrown in here. In other words, the typical biased youtube reaction channel/movie review. Spoiler warnings are obvious and I promise than unlike certain pedos on youtube I am not going to focus on the assets of underaged French girls. I do warn however for increased levels of making a fool of myself by writing a multi page “mock summary” of this thing.

So because the movie is based on a children show, it has a very basic set up; Adrien and Marinette’s class is invited to spend one week in New York, because of a pointless international collaboration thing referred to as French-American Friendship week. The sheer existence of this showing that a) we needed any reason to get them there and b) this special was worked on LONG before COVID19 hit us all. And yes, I know animation takes its time to be done, I just think it is funny how in today’s international political climate and health situation this thing has become outdated already, when it is hitting the tv just now.

At the same time, Adrien’s dad suspects that an artifact currently shown at a museum in New York may be a missing Miraculous that was owned by the Marquis de La Fayette and gifted to George Washington during the American Revolution. And yes, we are going there and you can guess what Hawkmoth’s goal this time is, while at the same time history gets fucked up the butt.

But before we can get to any action in New York, we have to deal with the one thing Ladybug is known for best: Cringy shipping bait.

Look, I know that shipping is a part of magical girl shows in general, but the shit going on in this cartoon is not only drawn out tediously even for children tv standards, I find it makes some characters outright dumb and unlikable. We get it Marinette, Adrien makes you tingle. But can you stop cringing your way through life around him in a manner that would make Tomoko Kuroki say that you are freaking pathetic?

I don’t want anybody else. when I think about Adrien I...

Just three minutes into this movie she essentially melts away at a poster of Adrien and throughout the first 15 minutes she just simps away in the big blue yonder. For example by asking Adrien’s dad to allow his son to travel with the others to New York, obviously stumbling upon her words when she needs to remind herself that she can only see Adrien now as a friend and not love interest (because this is supposedly set after season 3, when she decided to go for the second price in form of the guy who plays guitar), insisting that she is only “friends” to the point even her best friend Alya gets fed up. Or when Marinette gets more than just “a bit” nervous at the chance of sitting on her flight to New York next to Adrien, resulting in her fucking that chance up so badly, I felt an headache approaching.

Not gonna lie, I had to pause a few times because it got so cringy for me, I wondered why Dobson makes primarily jokes on Adrien’s expense when Marinette herself is female thirst personified. Even the movie seems to point out how the two are so obvious to each other, when Alya has the following to say about them: I can’t decide if they are the most cutest people I know, or the most embarrassing.

Thankfully it is at 18 minutes into it, we FINALLY get something of a conflict. While still on the plane (And Adrien and Marinette watching a sunset through a window) a villain shows up, trying to steal the jet engine midflight.

Just roll with it

Thankfully, before the plane can go down thanks to a Gremlin on the wing- I mean TECHNO PIRATE, the real stars of the movie show up.

Wait, you thought this thing was going to be about Ladybug and Cat Noir being the primary heroes? WRONG!

Okay, to put the summary on hold and explain what I mean: This “movie” introduces us to “United HeroeZ”, a group of American superheroes. Yeah, turns out Miraculous is essentially set in your average “Superheroes are everywhere, but primarily US dominated territory” world and this story is meant to introduce us to them and have Ladybug and Cat Noir team up in order to save the day. And while I don’t necessarily HATE the characters, I have to admit that I can’t help myself but snark quite a bit about them. Not only are they for the most part just expies of well known superheroes, the way how prominent two of them in particular are featured in this movie makes it very, VERY obvious that (As I stated earlier) this thing aims just to create a tie-in show for the creators to make more money of the property. Not just that, but their presence in a way reduces Adrien and Marinette’s importance as characters, even though the new ones at best would count as supportive characters overall. Which again makes me wonder, what does it say about Ladybug and Cat Noir’s “impact” in their own franchise when I actually find myself more interested in the side characters made to promote new toys, than the actual leads?

Anyway, United HeroeZ defeats Techno Pirate and in doing so we are introduced to the main members of the group which are relevant for this movie:

So please, give an applause for…. MAJESTIA (aka actually decent Powergirl redesign/Non Superman)

SPARROW (Aka yet another Robin that may get hit by a crowbar)

UNCANNEY VALLEY (aka The Shipper on Deck/Cleopatra in Tin Foil/Vision as your Waifu/the dumbest name you could have chosen for a character!)

NIGHT OWL (aka Alan Moore is going to be pissed!/Oh look, it’s Batman!)

You get where I am coming from when I call them expies, right?

Anyway, with the plane safe the class finally gets to New York. Both Sparrow and Uncanney Valley get tasked to go undercover with the students and assure they are save during the trip, because plot reasons and New York is supposedly enough of a safe place that their services aren’t needed to fight bigger threats currently. Which confirms at the very least that a) this is not the Marvel Universe cause at this point the town may be ground zero yet again and b) a way more enjoyable version of the Big Apple than the real deal.

By the way, these are Uncanney (left) and Sparrow’s (right) civilian identities :

I can now imagine Dobson wanting to proclaim how problematic the character is for being a native American who looks the way she does. But believe me. It gets kinda worse in all the right ways.

Also, we are 28 minutes into the movie and we are introduced to the dumbest thing in the movie yet. The arch enemy of the Condiment King; Hot Dog Dan.

A superhero hot dog vendor seller with a flying hot dog truck, whose hot dogs give you temporarily some random superpowers when you eat them. And it seems he uses hot dog tongs as weapons.

I don’t know what the people making this show take, but I am torn between wanting some of that myself and putting them into rehab.

I really bring the character just up because he is as a concept in itself so ridiculous that part of me thinks he is a fever dream of Dobson. Otherwise he has no real bearing on what is going to happen on the rest of the movie. He is just relevant for a three minute long scene of a house roof party during which Adrien and Marinette dance for a bit.

Speaking of relevance, the next day the class finally gets to do something on the trip that leads into conflict for our heroes to face. During a visit of the museum where the La Fayette related Miraculous is hold, Uncanny and Sparrow decide to play shipper on deck by forcing Marinette and Adrien in a room and attempting to set a really stupid plot into motion (and no, I don’t mean they enforce a reenactment of Steven Universe or something). At the same time the villains finally do something, when Hawkmoth (now in New York) turns Techno Pirate into his latest minion and have him attack the museum to steal a saber by La Fayette as distraction, while he takes the charm he is out for. Long story short: Our heroes FINALLY transform and have to fight with Uncanney and Sparrow against Techno Pirate on the roofs of Manhattan.

And while I don’t think it is all that great of a fight, it still means something aside of Marinette cringing her way through the plot is happening and the heroes are actually in decent peril. Plus during the fight the movie gives me one of the funniest moments possible. You want to know what it is?

Well, while fighting the bad guy, Cat Noir and Ladybug obviously trigger their miraculouses. And what does Ladybugs miraculous turn into this time, to help her develop a strategy to defeat the villain and save the day?

A bikepump.

... yeah, I am going to give all of you now 5 minutes to laugh it off. Believe me, I needed them too.

Sure, it is a cartoon and I doubt anyone working on the show is even aware of our favorite uncare bear, but come on. At this point the universe itself is either mocking Dobson or tries to set up the perfect opportunity for an obvious joke from my side.

Not helped by the fact that once the bike pump shows up, the dialogue between characters that follows is, and I quote:

Cat: A bicycle pump? What are you going to do with that?

Ladybug: I may have an idea, but you wouldn’t like it

Anyway, believe it or not, the fight actually ends with a surprising shock moment. Cat Noir, while having his cataclysm powers active (you know, the powers that make him decompose anything he touches), being thrown by Techno Pirate at Ladybug, resulting in Uncanney protecting her and being turned into scrap metal. Which in turn causes Techno Pirate to make the acquaintance with Majestia’s fist, as Uncanney is more or less her adopted daughter and I guess she has seen what was going on (but did not interfere because the plot says so) until now, pummeling him so hard he flies through a few buildings and causes at least three 9/11 to happen on this day in New York.

So, yeah. Uncanney is dead. The heroes experiencing their darkest hour in the movie.

… welp, can’t have that for long, so less than 2 minutes later Ladybug uses the Magical bikepump…

5 minutes of laughter later

Got it out of the system? Good. As I was saying; She uses the fetish toy to reset all the damage done by the akumatized villain and in doing so fixes Uncanney too.

Welp, that was a waste of tension. Guess someone watched the entire Lars dying thing from Steven Universe.

So, damage undone, but Majestia and Night Owl pretty pissed at what happened, want Ladybug and Cat Noir to give up their miraculouses (I assume that is the correct plural) until they leave New York. You would expect this to result in some dramatic chase scene or confrontation with the older heroes, but because this movie has just like 22 minutes left and we need to close act two now, our heroes instead flee and end up in the sewers of New York.

There they do NOT team up with a group of mutated reptiles, but have a heart to heart talk (I never thought I would agree with Dobson on something, but I have to agree on this: The show is kinda fixated on having important stuff happening in sewer channels) that is sort of an argument Cat Noir and Ladybug also had during the fight. You see, because those two idiots haven’t figured out their respective civilian identities yet (something even Sailor Moon would have figured out AFTER THREE SEASONS!) Marinette assumed that Cat Noir would be in Paris while she is in New York to keep the city save. And Adrien/Noir was okay with making the promise of keeping the city initially save, because his dad only allowed him on the trip the day after he made the promise. So when the two transform out of sight of the other in New York and meet, instead of asking some logical questions (like “where is Marinette/Adrien and why is Cat/Ladybug here?”) they kinda argue wtf Cat is doing here while Paris may be in danger.

Long story short, she is angry at him, he feels guilty for having disappointed her and the thing with turning Uncanney into scrap, Paris was attacked by Hawkmoth’s secretary unleashing temporarily some monster clone because Hawkmoth thought that distracts the heroes in Paris (and really just results in damage that makes a city that experienced the destruction of Notre Dame the year prior just feel numb) and because this is the turning point in the plot, our hero needs to do something just a bit too melodramatic. Which is that Adrien gives up his powers and runs away.

… so, up to the final part in which things to care about start to happen.

Hawkmoth now has the Miraculous and unleashes its Kwami who is this eagle themed little thing referring to itself as the “Kwami of Freedom”.

… Yeah, this thing was NOT around for the last 200 years, wasn’t it?

Anyway, it states that its powers are based on “freeing” people of limitations to achieve their full potential. What does that mean practically? It means that when Techno Pirate holds its powers on top of his regular powers increased by being akumatized, he can unleash some energy attack that removes moral inhibitions when getting hit by it.

… So it basically unleashes the Purge.

Which is exactly what happens to Majestia and Night Owl, turning one into Man of Steel Superman causing nine additional 9/11s on top of the three prior (how the fuck did this movie manage to turn an American tragedy in a measuring unit?) and the other into All Star Batman.

Oh and it turns the President of the USA into a worse war monger than people accuse Trump of being.

Oh, this is NOT going to sit well with anyone...

… Yeah, sidenote: The president of the USA in this movie is essentially Michelle Obama who ALSO is a superhero with an American flag theme and besties with Majestica and Night Owl, trying to protect the exchange students. Because supposedly NOTHING better needs to be done. Once she gets hit by the “Freedom Feathers” or whatever you want to call the Kwami power, she pulls out the Football and activates turrets all over the USA, ready to blow up anything that moves into smithereens. Including at least 10.000 such turrets on the roofs of New York and a nuclear missile in the bay near the Statue of Liberty.

I’ll take it to the people with the eagle not the dove. If there is one thing that obedience is symptomatic of, it’s W-E-A-P-O-N-R-Y... WEAPONRY, from above!

(BTW, the rocket is animated like shit!)

I get the feeling someone on the production team is not the biggest fan of America.

Anyway, with the heroes being useless and Marinette and Adrien mopping around for what happened during the battle (and Adrien being tricked by his dad to leave New York and get back on a plane cause this town is not save and Adrien can’t fucking stand up to his emotionally abusive father), Uncanney and Sparrow have to get the ball rolling so the day can be saved. Which means that Sparrow and Ladybug try to fight and distract people for time (off screen mostly), while Uncanney hijacks Adrien’s plane and brings him back to take up the gimp suit of Cat Noir again. Oh yeah, almost forgot, Uncanney, cause she is a robot, has figured out easily who Ladybug and Adrien really are cause scanning. Making our heroes literally dumber than a walking toaster.

So the four finally together, fight Techno Pirate on the Statue of Liberty a second time (after some hijinx with another corrupted hero whose power is literally to create portals through doors, but he is irrelevant for anything so I skipped him up until now) and defeat him. He loses the Miraculous, Sparrow takes it on and becomes its next official owner, resulting in her costume turning into THIS

So now we have the native American girl turn into an eagle based superhero with a costume that looks like out of a western based Lego set.

Real talk here: Unlike Dobson I do not believe that everything is political or offensive or some other shit. In fact I hate his comic where he talks about “skin color changes” of the black characters in Ladybug, because he essentially tries to create a race issue and tension where there is none, just because he is a social justice moron. Which gets especially funny when his ideas for a progressive female results in characters like the black rat pirat who kicks you in the face for being hetero or infantilizing the characters of Patty to make them visually more appealing to Max Karson.

That said, in this day and age, doing a character like that… kinda yaiks.

Like, on one hand I think the girl has an enjoyable personality and the design of her hero outfit is okay for a kids cartoon. It’s not like she also talks in some cartoonishly native way or has suddenly a tomahawk as a weapon.

On the other hand, it is kinda stereotypical from multiple ankles and unfortunately there is nothing to the character past this point. Oh sure, Sparrow has now Miraculous powers, but really, all she does now is just use her powers to nullify Techno Pirates influence on the adult heroes before Majestia manages to reenact the bad ending for Majora’s mask and that is it.

Granted, there is Hawkmoth also almost starting World War 3, but that is really just happening at the site and dealt with almost instantly. To be more specific, because Ladybug and Cat Noir did not hand over their Miraculous, he lets Techno Pirate launch one of the missiles near the Statue of Liberty (worse president than Trump, honestly) but before the thing can hit anything, Majestia sweeps it away and throws it into the sun.

You know, if the show writers want to make Adrien’s dad even remotely “sympathetic” or interesting/intelligent, they increasingly fail. Cause I don’t know about you, but causing World War 3 does not really feel like it will benefit in bringing your comatose wife back.

Bottom line: Nuke has been burned, Techno Pirate gets defeated, all the damage reseted, Sparrow is now the official owner of the latest Miraculous and renames herself Eagle, everyone is happy, there is a big celebration for the class and Hawkmoth is convinced there might be other missing Miraculous all over the globe he wants to get his hands on, meaning season 4 may have more globe trotting Miraculous “action” once it starts.

And also the last scene of the movie shows Eagle and Uncanney meeting some other guardian of the Miraculous box who wants the Eagle charm, but she seemingly convinces him to team up, solidifying that this one hour “movie” was really just a backdoor pilot for a tie in series about an American centered heroine that is so big, a freaking monster truck could pass through this backdoor.

Yeah, if you can’t tell, I am not a big fan of what I saw.

Look, I will openly admit that my opinion on this is in large parts already tainted by me not being part of the demographic which enjoys the show. So this was never going to be considered “good” in my opinion. That said, I tried to be neutral to it for the sake of fairness. And I kinda failed.

Sorry, but I genuinely do not think this is a good “movie”. First, with barely 65 minutes I don’t really consider it a movie and more of a tv special meant to lead into the next season of the show. Second, I expect of a movie based on a tv show to have slightly higher stakes and presentation value to it than what you would expect from any average episode it has to offer. Which this thing doesn’t. Oh sure, the animation is slightly improved in some scenes, but overall just the same. And frankly, the writing is just still as “bad” as in the original show, if in parts not even worse. Aside of the typical stables, such as the cringy romance that does not move forward but is kinda on the forefront, the main heroes stumbling more or less into the situations instead of being more active in their duties, Hawkmoth not even in a movie having a genuine plan aside of “get this, see how it will help me defeat two kids and fail”, the movie also just never manages to induce a proper escalation of conflict to make it feel like something “special”. For example, we have a shitton of temporarily corrupted heroes. Do Ladybug and Cat Noir ever properly face them off at one point or have meaningful/fun interactions with Sparrow and Uncanney or each other outside of the first three minutes of the movie? Nope! I can name a few movies based on animated shows that gave me enjoyment, even those following basic shonen anime rules. But this one isn’t really among them. And taking into account that I consider at least the Steven Universe movie enjoyable in a dumb way, that says something.

There is also just the fact that it takes away from Ladybug and Cat Noir too much. Sure, I don’t like the romance stuff with them because I think it plays out in some of the cringiest way possible. But I would have been okay with them or other already established sidecharacters doing other stuff and having to face some conflict that is centered more around them.

Instead the movie finds this bizarre disbalance where it focuses too much and yet too little on completely new characters, that feel shoehorned in to create a starting point for a spin off, making Cat Noir and Ladybug secondary characters in their own movie.

I mean sure, I have seen many shonen anime based movies where there is a set of “movie only” characters interacting with our heroes, but they don’t take too much away from the heroes being heroes. Say what you want about the 13th movie of any long running shonen anime, at least Luffy, Naruto, Son Goku etc. are still the central characters of their respective franchise affiliated flic. Here however we take too much away from Ladybug and Cat, while at the same time focusing also too much on their “struggle” as Marinette and Adrien (or rather just Marinette making a fool out of herself while Adrien is utterly obvious to her behavior) while the major heroics are reserved for the movie characters only, that this entire thing should just be renamed “The Adventures of Mummy Robot and Not Robin, also starring two underaged kids that Dobson is obsessed about!”

All that said, I will give it a few things.

1) Uncanney and Sparrow/Eagle, despite my jabs, are kinda enjoyable in terms of personality. So are their partners/parents (Majestica and Night Owl are actually the (adoptive?) mothers of their sidekicks and also a couple openly caling themselves love, so yay, L(GBT) representation) and if the show would ever decide to focus also a few episodes on other characters aside of Ladybug and Cat Noir, I wouldn’t mind to see them. I just don’t think they are the most original characters out there and I think I may speak for some fans of the show when I say it sucks, that when it comes to the “action” within this “action adventure show”, they take up the spotlight from the actual main characters.

2) The fight scenes against Techno Pirate were okay overall. Nothing mind blowing animation wise but okay for the standards of this franchise.

3) Eagle’s costume design is not the worst despite my jabs at it being “stereotypical”, at least under consideration of cartoon designs (again, I can think of more offensive shit from the 90s or the Dobbear himself)

4) Well, it wasn’t for me, but I can say it was at least still on the same level of quality as the show. Make out of that comment however whatever you want.

My verdict: Three out of five Dobson’s would approve this movie. The other two would rant about stereotypes and be too busy incest shipping Majestia with Uncanney based on one shot of the movie. And none of them would acknowledge the flaws that make the “movie” a badly disguised jumping point for a spin off that makes the Equestria Girls look subtle.

Hope you got some enjoyment out of this rant that ironically may have been overall more retarted and detailed than anything Dobson may ever say in regard of this movie.

#miraculous ladybug #movie #marinette dupen chang #andrew dobson #so you are a cartoonist #syac #movie sperging #animated movie #sucks #mock #review #adrien x marinette

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mst3kproject · 4 years

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Atomic Rulers

So 2020 fucking blows. We’ve got Death and Pestilence all over the place, War is waiting in the wings licking her chops, and I’m sure Famine is only a matter of time. You know what we need? A hero. Operator, put me through to the Emerald Planet! After fifty-five years, the Earth must once again call upon Star Man.

(I apologize for the poor quality screencaps in this review. The WiFi at sea is not great, so I’m watching movies on YouTube in decidedly low definition. I’ll replace them with better ones if I ever get out of here.)

Atomic Rulers, also sometimes known as Atomic Rulers of the World, is actually the first Star Man movie. Does that mean we get an origin story for our brave hero? Of course not. Instead, we learn that the evil nation of… uh… a sign in the movie says Merapolia but the dubbing sounds like Magolia... whatever. Their nuclear testing is starting to contaminate Outer Space and the Emerald Men don’t like that – they send Star Man to Earth to do something about it.

This movie gives us two things none of the other Star Man movies do. First of all, there’s an actual purpose to that ‘globemeter’ watch thingy he wears. The opening of every movie explains that the globemeter allows Star Man to do three things: travel through outer space, speak and understand any language, and detect sources of radioactivity. The first two functions have proven to be very useful, but neither the Salamander Men nor Ballazar’s Brain were radioactive, so the third just sat there like the stocks app on an iPhone. Now, with the threat of concealed Magolian nuclear weapons, he finally uses it!

The second is, holy shit, a plot. The Magolians want to rule the world, and aliens from a dozen different Godzilla movies have assured them that when conquering the Earth, you have to start with Japan. To that end, their agents are sneaking atomic weapons into the country. Star-Man tries to confiscate these, and in the midst of the lame-ass fight scene that follows, the Magolian Bag-O-Nukes is carried off by a bunch of annoying little kids! The Magolians kidnap one of the kids and try to force him to tell them where their bomb is. Star-Man rescues the boy, but it’s too late – they’ve already retrieved the bomb. There’s just a few hours left before Japan must surrender, or be blown to bits as an example to the rest of the world!

There’s actually even more to the plot than that. It’s full of wild twists and turns, with Star Man and the Magolians taking turns looking like they’re about to win the day. Yet at the same time, unlike the other Star Man films, the story is not obviously bifurcated! You can tell where Movie One ends and Movie Two begins (with the rescue of the kidnapped kid), but the same characters are involved throughout rather than changing from reel to reel. Even the gaggle of nameless kids in short-shorts kind of play a role in the plot, helping Star Man and giving information to the police whenever they can. The plot unspools in a single main storyline from beginning to end, and events usually make enough sense that you can figure out where they fit.

Even more shockingly, Star Man himself actually has some personality in this film, even a bit of a character arc. In the other movies he just ran around punching aliens and smiling at children, but here we see him as a bit of an arrogant dick, confident in his ability to beat the mere humans who represent the threat to the universe. When he is nearly beaten instead, he is forced to learn a little humility, and nearly sacrifices his life to save a hostage.

By leaps and bounds, then, this is the best Star Man movie I’ve seen. There’s a couple more out there, but they’d have to work hard to be better than Atomic Rulers. At the same time, as praise goes ‘the best Star Man movie’ is almost as faint as ‘the best Coleman Francis movie’. It still sucks big-time, and Mike and the bots would have had riff material to spare.

I mean, this is a movie where the bad guys have a giant cartoon demon face on the wall of their lair for some reason, and when they’re not disguised in blazers and ties they wear coronavirus suits with the same face on the chest. There’s a bit where Star Man swordfights with a bunch of them, using fencing foils that were just lying around in the room for some reason. Other fight scenes are mostly things like Magolians frantically shooting at Star Man while he just stands there looking smug. The ‘atomic core’ MacGuffin is just a plastic tube full of glitter. The back-projected ‘flying’ effects are dire. There’s a bomb that has a literal clock on the side ticking down the minutes like in an old cartoon. There’s a pretty girl strapped into a death trap that I can only describe as the world’s slowest guillotine.

There’s a fairly extended sequence in which we see the Magolians’ car driving down a road, then cut to Star-Man flying, then back to the car, then back to Star Man, then back to the car, and on and on until I could almost hear Crow shouting “he’s following them! We get it!”

The Magolians themselves confuse me a bit. People refer to their embassy and their ambassadors, and there’s a flag on their car and so forth, so I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be from a country on Earth… and yet they behave exactly like the villains of a Japanese alien invasion movie. They have dumb costumes, they call the guy in charge ‘supreme leader’, and most distracting of all, they refer to conquering ‘the Earth’. Maybe this is just an artifact of the translation, but I would expect humans to talk about ruling ‘the world’ rather than ‘the Earth’. It left me expecting a big reveal at the end, and when there wasn’t one, I had to go back to the beginning to see if they’d been established as aliens and I’d missed it.

Speaking of possible artifacts of translation, there’s another thing here I’m not sure about. A lot of Japanese ‘no nukes’ movies have American antagonists, or at least, white guys who are clearly a stand-in for Americans. My favourite example is the belligerent country of Rolisica in Mothra, which is an absolutely hilarious summary of what 60’s Japan thought the West was like. Magolia, on the other hand, appears to be a stand-in for the USSR. The actors playing the Magolians are mostly white, and we only ever hear two of their names: the supreme leader has a nonsense name, but the ambassador is called Boris Zedenko. I wonder if this is original to the script, or whether it was changed when the movie was dubbed for American release.

The thing I find most interesting about Atomic Rulers is that while Star Man does save the Earth, that’s not really his goal. The Emerald Men sent him here to prevent a war because Earth’s radioactivity was leaking into outer space, threatening other planets. Star Man isn’t here to save humanity, he’s here to save the rest of the universe from us; saving us from ourselves is merely a side-effect.

This makes Star-Man a little different from his imitators, Space Chief and Prince of Space. Despite their space-themed code-names, they are humans from Earth, with a specific interest in protecting this planet. Star-Man seems to have the broader responsibility of protecting the civilized galaxy in general, and this is reflected in the premises of his movies. In Evil Brain from Outer Space, Ballazar’s Brain is using Earth as a place to launch a general takeover of the universe. Invasion from Space was a little less clear about it, but I’m pretty sure there was something about the Earth being ‘the richest planet in the galaxy’ and the Salamander Men would presumably use that loot for nefarious purposes.

A side implication here is that Star-Man probably has other adventures, too – we’re only seeing the ones that happen to bring him to our particular planet. Considering how strange Star-Man movies can be anyway, and how trippy the brief shot of the Emerald Planet, with its crystal-headed creatures and robots and even a couple of what appear to be the Pairans from Warning from Space, one has to wonder about these potential non-Earth storylines. How fucking weird would those be? I’m imagining something like an entire movie about Krankor’s pet giant.

Another thing that distinguishes Star Man from the other space dinks is that he has actual superpowers. Space Chief and Prince of Space are basically just normal guys in stupid outfits. Prince of Space claims that Krankor’s ray guns have no effect on him, but really we see he’s using his wand-thing to deflect them. Star Man, who is from another planet, can fly and has super-strength. This kind of makes me wonder if he was intended as a Superman imitator… but that would make Space Chief and Prince of Space the equivalent of Batman, and I just can’t insult Batman like that.

I am developing an honest affection for Star Man movies. Their desperate cheapness is more than made up for by their over-the-top absurdity, and the result is not at all ‘good’ by any reasonable measure and yet is always entertaining. Camp like that is all too rare to find, and even rarer to find a franchise like Gamera or Star Man that can do it dependably. I don’t know why the Japanese are apparently so good at this, but I’m glad somebody is.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #atomic rulers #60s #starman and friends

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notforgottcn · 4 years

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⧼ sophia bush, cis female, she/her / when the bell tolls by anthony ramos + taking a leap even though you don’t know how far the fall is, hot coffee and ballet shoes, filling out late night paperwork because you don’t want to go home yet ⧽ ━━ let me tell you a thing or two about ADELLA ROBBINS. the THIRTY SIX year old daughter of BRUCE WAYNE is a POLICE OFFICER in town, and has sometimes been referred to as THE PHOENIX. they’ve always seemed very DRIVEN & PHILANTHROPIC, though i’ve heard that they can be pretty ALOOF & UNFORGIVING, too. it’s common knowledge that they have NO ABILITY ; guess we shouldn’t get on their bad side, huh?

tw: death,

BIOGRAPHY ::

you’re more alike to your birthmother than you will ever know, you have her smile, her walk. that’s what bruce would tell you if you were to ever ask him. you don’t. you feel enough of her ghost on your shoulders without having more information about her. you know a name that is all you want from the woman who left you first.

you are left on the steps to wayne manor. sometimes when you’re sad you like to picture what alfred’s face looked like when he found you out there in january cold. you stay with there for two months. there are photos of you with your siblings. dick kept one for years it would seem. still even here where you’re supposed to be safe, you only last for so long before you’re sent away again.

mr and mrs robbins gave you the best childhood that they could, and for awhile the pain of your origins are tucked away neatly in a draw that you don’t open very much. instead you excel at your education, throwing yourself into dance lessons enjoying the moments you could snag with your parents (they were busy people, you learnt very quickly not to hold it against them).

still things become harder as you get older, you’re the odd one out at that fancy school you attend. thought you’re not sure how they first found out. here is the first appearance of the fighter inside of you. it will be harder for you to ignore things now. your parents are called several times because you had lashed out at the people who had refused to leave you alone. you are told that were it not for your parents standing in the school community you would have likely been expelled. you are still incredibly proud of that black eye.

you take up martial arts as a compromise, with the understanding that you will behave in a manner more befitting your station in public. the fighting doesn’t really stop you just learn to mask your behaviour. a real sign that you are your fathers daughter.

at sixteen you’re sneaking into clubs making a name for yourself in the new york club scene. you only learn later that photos of you drunk and throwing up into a gutter are only going to undermine you later.

your parents passing in a mutant rights demonstration changes everything, throwing you into a world you’re not ready for. people want you to be an adult, but your nothing more than a child in your mother’s shoes. trying so hard but failing so fast. you easily see the bad sad of humanity, despite the fact that you come out relatively unscathed. it changes you, your angry and most importantly lonely. feelings that really wouldn’t go away.

the loneliness of being alone opens up things you had tidied away years ago. who were your birth parents? why did they give you up ? stupidly it would seem in hindsight you were trying to fill the space left by your parents with people you didn’t even know.

when the name on the test reads bruce wayne it stops everything. the first emotion you really remember is confusion. it was supposed to be someone you didn’t know, someone you could put behind you rather than someone who had been in the background for your entire life.

the first time you go to the mansion after the reveal you yell and scream as loud as your lungs could manage. how could he do this to you?? give you up to people who would manage to rip you apart. he hadn’t known, he couldn’t have, but you blame him for it anyway. him and them, the mutants that cause the accident, they’re the only ones you could, even as your brain tells you it’s stupid.

you remember telling him that you want nothing to do with him but even that doesn’t last too long. you move into the manor eventually, after digging your heels in and demanding to know everything. you find out about batman around the same time. the truth about your father, and as much as he knew about your mother.

that first year is hard, you are ripped from your life in new york and placed in a home that isn’t yours. the people in it are aching doing their best to heal from things that don’t involve you, and yet again you are unwanted by the majority a complication they don’t need.

still not everything in your life is bad, you are alive and for what it’s worth you have more family then you’ve ever had before. jason is the first to really make you feel at home. alfred assures you that the others will come around in time, you aren’t so sure.

taking up the cowl was technically dick’s idea, though you couldn’t become batgirl without permission from babs. just like everyone else in your family the bat becomes an outlet for your anger, a way to enact change and for a year you love it. you make the mantel your own and in some ways you’ve never felt more alive then you do in gotham at night.

just like everything else in life however it is possible to outgrow the hero antics and at nineteen you are more than ready to be something more than just batman’s sidekick. so you follow your heart and you leave. the next few years are a bit of lost time. you travel a lot (you parent’s money lets you) never really staying in one place for too long. still that doesn’t mean you don’t try for some form of stability. england is your favorite, grey skies and cups of tea, but somehow you always end up back in the states. especially after things there end badly. you get your heart broke and you can’t see the direction your pointing in anymore.

how predictable that you’d end up in new york again, some days feeling like you’d never even really left at all. still this time your not some wealthy girl. you’re enrolled in the police academy, you work your ass off and you’re on the streets by the time your twenty seven. it’s the perfect balance for you between the rush you used to get as batgirl but also working within the law. you can’t help but enjoy the fact you don’t need to cover your face.

still you’ve picked up a habit of moving on: new york, star city, gotham you’ve worked in each of them. paragon was an odder choice, after so long running from your family, your birth father’s legacy, but at the same time it feels like a good way of touching base for a while. besides, with everything that goes on in town, it’s probably a good idea to have a cop on hand who actually knows how the hero gig works.

FACTS ::

addy still dances but it’s more as a stress relief than anything close to professional.

her entire life goal (when it comes to the batkids) is to be considered the cool aunt though the extent to which that actually is questionable.

she has two cats toodles (x) and watson (x) and they’re her favorite thing in her whole world.

she functions entirely on caffeine, yes she knows it’s bad but it’s not a habit that she can see herself breaking.

a massive disney nerd!! she’s not sorry for it.

RELATIONSHIPS ::

family ;;

bruce wayne - father/ sperm donor. she doesn’t want this thanks.

alfred pennyworth - grandfather figure / secret keeper. they’re very close.

dick grayson - adopted brother / mentor. brings out the best in her.

jason todd - adopted brother / best friend. jason understands more than most.

tim drake - adopted brother / confidant. they go for coffee it’s cute.

cassandra cain - adopted sister / favorite batman. strong girls supporting strong girls

damian wayne - brother / terror. their dynamic is interesting at the best of times.

important ;;

adrian trevor - lost love / once in a lifetime. think luke and lorelai with extra angst.

friends ;;

andrea hill - close friend / ride or die. the person addy would call with a body.

ziva mizrahi - work friends / . someone addy trusts to have her back.

wanted connections ;;

travel buddies!! - anyone that she could have traveled with or met when travelling.

all the brotps: honestly give her friends.

anyone she could have interacted with as a cop good or bad.

league kids she’s keeping an eye on.

league kids her own age she likes to get a drink with.

any other kid she might feel protective of because lbr that’s all of them.

#sidekick.intro

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jurakan · 5 years

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Assassin’s Creed: Unity Review

Did I ever post my Unity review? No? Well here’s my Unity review.

The game is bad.

I think that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is quite frankly the most infuriating game I’ve played in years.

When I’d gotten a PS4 I decided I was going to get one of the AC games that was on PS4 that wasn’t Odyssey (because I already had obtained it and loved it). And I got Unity because I’d heard the free-running was better, and that when played well it was quite good. And while traversing Paris is fun, this game also sometimes plays as garbage and I’m kind of baffled about some of the decisions they’ve made designing it.

You see, this is my experience in playing just about every Assassin’s Creed game: try to be sneaky around the guards, but when that inevitably fails I kill them all. I was starting down this path in Unity when the game stopped me.

“Hang on a sec, you can’t do that,” the game said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’ve designed the combat to be utter garbage!” the game joyously exclaimed, laughing maniacally. And it wasn’t lying. The combat is utter garbage and I got killed pretty quickly. The parry is too clumsy for the careful timing it sometimes requires, you’re practically defenseless against guns, and counter kills have been removed. I get the point, of course: the game wants you to try more stealthy approaches, and so if you get detected you’ve got to retreat and rework your approach. But it was just completely at odds with how I played these games. I felt as if the previous games went out of their way to make you feel like a badass warrior and then Unity goes out of its way to make you feel as weak as possible. And for a game that makes you want to avoid combat like the plague, it keeps putting you in it. “But stealth!” the game and its fans reply. Which doesn’t work for me, because the Batman: Arkham games had amazing stealth sections that rely on not getting caught, but the combat isn’t utter crap. If there’s a part of the game you’re hoping people will avoid, maybe you should realize that it’s because that part of the game is terrible and need reworking, not that you’re clever for designing it so. “I actually really liked the combat,” says Unity fanboy #463 on Reddit. Alright, but you do know you are admitting to enjoying something deliberately designed to be unpleasant? It’s a bit like telling everyone you enjoy the smell in gas station restrooms. It isn’t something you should really brag about. Unity fanboy #149 scoffs haughtily. “Well I want my games to be challenging, unlike a casual gamer,” he says. Good for you. But that defense doesn’t work with this game because I’m not just being challenged by the game’s combat difficulty, which is aggravating by design, I’m being challenged by the fact that the game doesn’t work. What makes the stealth and combat so aggravating is how glitchy the game is. At one point in a story-scripted fight Arno wouldn’t attack, block, dodge or shoot, and the only actions he could perform were walking around and dropping smoke bombs. Sometimes Arno refuses to shoot when prompted, as if the targeted enemy was just too cool to die. Sometimes enemies aren’t hurt by being shot. Once Arno refused to start sneaking. I accidentally got into conflicts because I shot guards in the back of the head and instead of dying they turned around and saw me. Every so often, a civilian will walk in front of the barrel of your gun because he or she is suicidal I guess. I bumped into a guard on the other side of a wall. Guards spawned from nowhere to fight me and then when I hid they went back across the street on the other side of a wall. A guard with his back turned saw me on top of a rooftop. Sometimes when you’re detected you have to fight the one guy who saw you, and sometimes you have to fight all of his buddies who also apparently know where you are as they run from all over the block. And on some occasions the guards on the first floor won’t notice if you fire a gun on the second. At some points smoke bombs work to make your enemies lose track of you; at others they won’t. Frequently I’d aim to air assassinate a guard only for the game to switch which guard I was targeting as I’m pressing the button. In short, even if the stealth and combat were fun, the fact is that when you begin either you never know what exactly you’re signing up for because it doesn’t work. And not in a good way, like the game surprising you with extra fun; it’s exactly the wrong sort of way, where you think your mission is to defend an army officer against royalists and because you make too much noise fighting the royalists then the army soldiers decide to kill you too. [Also, you’re encouraged to use smoke bombs a lot. Which doesn’t really sound that stealthy, if you think about it, because a giant cloud of smoking spontaneously erupting around a group of guards is the exact opposite of stealthy.] I’m sure some fanboy will try to assure me it’s my fault that the game doesn’t play well, and that it’s actually pretty well designed. To that, I answer: Cherry Bombs. See, the game gives you this stealth tool called the ‘Cherry Bomb’ which is essentially a firecracker that acts as a noisemaker--you throw it somewhere, it’ll make sparks and noise, and the guards will be distracted and go investigate. This replaces the ‘whistle’ function the past two games had to draw guards over to where you are. What the game doesn’t tell you is that the Cherry Bomb has to be within a guard’s line of sight. Which means if you’re hiding in a hallway and are trying to lure a guard from an adjacent room into the hallway, then the Cherry Bomb won’t work unless the guard can turn around and see it from his position. Otherwise, they may turn around in the direction of the noise, but won’t move towards it. It doesn’t matter if it’s right behind them, or right around the corner; if they can’t see the Cherry Bomb, it won’t work. Essentially, one of the key stealth tools you start out with is a noisemaker that only works if enemies can see it. A noisemaker that works by line of sight! No one can tell me that a competently-designed game would include that! What makes stealth and combat even more difficult is that the game has what it calls “Crowd Events,” which are things that happen in the streets of Paris that you can interfere with, like someone getting robbed, or mugged, or bullied, or whatever. But in crowded areas this happens every minute or so, and even if you don’t interfere in the Crowd Event then the surrounding guards might take notice of someone in the street getting run through, and then a fight will break out and your stealth will be ruined because if you go anywhere near it the guards will detect you and the game will act like it’s your fault for not being sneaky enough. During one stealth mission three or four Crowd Events occurred within seconds of each other, with two spawning at once. They’re optional yes, but call me a moron because I always try to help when someone’s getting gutted on the pavement, which often leads to me being gutted on the pavement. There are times when the game doesn’t tell you what to do in specific situations and then acts like you should have known it all along. In Assassin’s Creed III it gives you specific instructions on what to do in combat when someone points a gun at you. Unity gives you no such help. I didn’t learn until I looked up combat tips for the game that you’re supposed to hit the dodge button at just the right second. Sometimes the game doesn’t give you enough time to realize that someone is shooting at you. If Arno is not in combat mode and someone’s aiming at you, you’re just out of luck, as the dodge button isn’t an option there. There’s an eye that appears next to the minimap, I think to tell you that you’re in a guard’s line of sight, but the game never tells me, so that’s just a guess on my part. The boss fight with Bellec has him disappear with a smoke bomb, and then he will try to jump on you and stab you, which the game doesn’t give any hint as to what you’re supposed to do about and it sucks because if he hits you then you die in one hit. There are skills and abilities that you have to unlock that you really shouldn’t. Double assassination is an ability that takes much too long to unlock; wisely the following game made this unlockable in the tutorial section. Guns have to be unlocked with skill points, which is downright weird; no other game in the series gives that limit, except as being a point of story progression. That you have to spend skill points to use one of the game’s basic weapons is downright offensive. The most infuriating thing is the admittedly rare occasion when the game punishes you for being smart. When you go to assassinate Marie Levesque, for instance, it took me a couple of tries, but I managed to sneak into the palace and take out key guards, noting the escape routes as I went. Only when I actually performed the assassination, all the open windows had been closed and all the guards I took out had respawned. Essentially, I had carefully planned an escape route and the game slammed that door in my face, saying, “Nope! For all our talk of doing it your own way, you have to get out of this situation the way we say you do, okay?” What kind of game punishes you for doing your homework? What is that supposed to teach me?

Customization is cool, in theory, but it’s also a major hassle. Because I just wanted to look cool, but instead I’m constantly juggling a bunch of statistics on how to be stealthy but also carry enough ammunition and supplies. It’s not helpful that if you want to be stealthy, the way the game wants you to play, the outfit most suited to that is the stupidest-looking one of the bunch. I didn’t experience any of the horrifying glitches of people missing faces, the way a lot of people did at the game’s launch. However, NPC bystanders would often walk through cutscenes, including duels and chase scenes, leisurely waltzing right through running characters or in front of enemies as they’re getting shot. There were a couple of scenes where the camera is at an extremely odd angle of someone’s face, with the corner of someone else’s character model in the way. Traversal is far better than previous games; at least, in theory. Most of the time it works, but when it doesn’t, it does so in the most rage-inducing way possible. Often Arno will climb up when you tell him to climb down. It’s not uncommon for Arno to refuse to climb up for no reason at all. If you’re running and you happen to dash past something that would realistically bump him in the shoulder, Arno will start climbing up it and refuse to get down, hopping from table to barrel to chair, including chairs that there are already people sitting in. More than once I was perched on a ledge and then Arno would just fall, arms flailing as he descended into a horde of angry enemies. When sneaking sometimes he just refused to take cover where I tell him to, and will instead just sort of rock back and forth on his heels like a moron or stick to a surface further away from him than the one I told him to take cover behind. “Just wait ‘til you see what we did with Eagle Vision!” the game says, clapping like a madman. I am very tired at this point. “How did you screw up Eagle Vision, that one button that makes it easier to see enemies and detect important elements around you?” I ask. “It’s on a short timer!” Unity is cackling now as it practically explodes with malicious glee. “And it has a cooldown period!” Yes, that staple of the series, Eagle Vision, is now only meant to last a few seconds. Certain types of gear will enable it to last longer and give it more range (WHY WOULD CHANGING YOUR CLOTHES ENHANCE YOUR SIXTH SENSE?!?), but it’s still on a timer, so in order to know where everyone is, you have to keep switching it on. You can see enemies through walls though, which is new and actually good. Optional objectives are back, and aren’t quite as bad as they were in previous games; they don’t have ridiculous conditions in order to get full credit, usually just things like “Do two double assassinations” or “Stun three enemies.” They’re still not great, because again, any idea of freedom is limited in that you won’t get 100% on a mission unless you do it a certain way. The worse is always “Don’t get detected” because this is always followed by throwing you into large spaces filled with half a dozen guards and no cover. You’re better off ignoring them. Hey, did I mention that the game never shuts up? Notifications float up in your face on the right side of the screen, and there is no way to dismiss them; you must wait for them to go away. Black Flag had this too, but those were always small enough that they didn’t get in the way of gameplay, and you could check the past few messages in the pause menu. In this game they’re constantly popping up to tell you tips, location, and useless information, along with a quick sound that pings every time to make sure you stay pissed off. They’ll often pop up on top of each other, so if you’re working on one of the Murder Mysteries and you look at a clue, a notification will pop up on top of the clue information to tell you information you already know and you just have to wait for it to fade away. And when you break a lock in the lockpicking minigame, the popup will helpfully tell you that if you don’t want to break locks, press the button at the correct time. Or, in short, if you don’t want to mess up, then don’t mess up. Thanks, Unity. Speaking of lockpicking, who’s bright idea was it to make it so that of the treasure chests littered across the map, two-thirds of them are locked? I get that in theory it means that there are collectables that you can’t unlock until you’ve progressed, but what it means is that not only do you have to wait to a certain part of the game where you can buy that skill, you have to do an annoying little minigame every time you just want some treasure. It turns the task of collecting into even more of a chore. There are also collectables called “artifacts” which are coats of arms on the walls in random places. They’re not so bad, except in the Helix Rift sections, in which whether or not they show up in their place depends on the alignment of the stars or something. It makes it difficult to even care about trying to collect them all if the game sometimes refuses to let you do so. “So you hated this game?” you, the reader, asks me. That’s the thing though--I wanted very much to like it! There were parts I liked very much, in fact. When the game worked (and I must emphasize it wasn’t often), it was incredibly cool to feel like a stealth Assassin, taking out enemies and disappearing without a trace. This was utilized well in the missions that the game called Black Box missions. Basically, the developers realized that the assassination missions of the past games were too scripted, so they put in situations where you’re given a target and a location and you’re given much more freedom on how to take them out. The Murder Mysteries were, for the most part, excellent and allowed you to use your deduction skillz to put together the clues you’d been given and point out which person was the murderer. They were stressful, but not in a ‘wow-this-sux’ kind of way, more like the rewarding sort of way when you got it right. I liked them a lot. But they were frustrating when popups kept getting in the way of the clues. The Nostradamus Riddles were similarly excellent! They involved solving riddles by finding glyphs all over Paris, given clues that refer to the history of the places. The only criticism I had was that it would have been better if the in-game database had a search engine, sort of like the one in Carmen Sandiego: Treasure of Knowledge to make it easier to find what you’re looking for instead of scrolling through dozens of location entries. But yes, I think I hated it, at least a lot of the time I was playing it. I never thought I’d say that about an Assassin’s Creed game, but I cannot in good conscience tell someone that I liked this game or recommend it to anyone. It was not fun to play. The more time I spent with the game the less I liked it. Often enough I’d have fun, but that would soon be dashed by something stupid like being spotted by a guard through a building or Arno falling off a ledge. This should have been one of the greatest games in the series, and instead it’s undeniably the worst. Do not play this game, do not spend money on this game; every other game in the series is a more rewarding experience than Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Maybe some morbid curiosity is driving you to picking it up, but I urge you: do not listen! I had this whole section planned to talk about the story too! I had a thesis that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is trying to tell the story of France! I was going to talk about character models and history and all! But it doesn’t matter because nothing I say will change the simple fact that this game is not fun to play. Not even in a ‘If you like a challenge’ sort of way. This game is a broken mess that doesn’t work as intended. No. Don’t play it.

#Assassin's Creed: Unity #AC #Arno Dorian #Elise de la Serre #reviews #video games #Jurakan Writes

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forthemultiverse · 6 years

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See Me, Hear Me (love me) - Bruce Wayne x Reader

Anon: It's a Soulmate AU where once you see or hear your soulmate (even at a distance) you can hear their thoughts from there on. My idea is that Bruce is on patrol and saves his soulmate without realising it. His soulmate is continuously confused at the different thoughts until she figures out Bruce is Batman and confronts him in a super sassy way. What do you think? If you like it, feel free to use it!

- I’m a sucker for Soulmate AUs <3<3 I didn’t really do that much of a sassy confrontation but I actually quite like what I’ve written. Thank you for a good burst of inspiration.

“We’ll be back in town soon,” Dick assured Bruce.

“You’re chatting like I can’t handle this city on my own.”

“I’m not saying you can’t handle it on your own, I’m just saying it’s been awhile since you’ve had too, and Batman needs a Robin. A sunshine.”

“Did you just say that sentence, Dick?” Bruce landed to roll his eyes at some of the things his eldest son would say.

“I’m busy, Damian’s busy, Tim’s busy, Jason’s who knows, and you don’t have a Batgirl right now. Babs can only do so much from a computer.”

“If you’re busy, why are you still talking to me.”

“We’ve decided as a group that if you don’t have healthy communication, then you’ll become a hermit and do something stupid.”

“I’m an adult. I’m your dad!”

“Occasionally.”

“Shade, Dick!” Stephanie joined the conversation

“You’re supposed to be revising or sleeping, you have an exam tomorrow.” Bruce quicked into parenting mode.

“Don’t remind me.” she groaned, signing off. Bruce went back to being Batman, gliding through the city as Dick chatted with him. It was nice to have someone to talk to.

“I thought you were gonna take tonight off anyway?”

“My plans changed.”

“Selina ditch you?”

“Having plans doesn’t mean I’m meeting Selina.”

“Who else?”

“No one else! Just changed plans.”

“You can tell me you know...” he paused, “If she’s your soulmate, we’d all get it.”

“She’s not my soulmate.”

“I just figured...”

“Would my life be easier if Selina was my soulmate? Probably, but she isn’t, so that’s the end of that discussion.”

“Did I strike a chord?”

“No.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Why are you suddenly interested in my love life?”

“I want you to be happy! I’ve always been interested.”

“I don’t need a female friend to be happy.”

“Just say, girlfriend. I’m not a teenager, I’m literally nearly thirty.”

“I don’t need a girlfriend to be happy.”

“You’re a strong independent man.”

“I feel like you’re making a joke.”

“No!” he snickered, “I just thought I’d ask.”

“Well, I have things to do and so do you, probably.” Bruce cut the comm out.

“Female friend,” a female voice started laughing

“Stephanie.”

“Leaving.”

His something to do was an abandoned building, where lots of voices were yelling inside. No lights or decorations to suggest it was some teenagers having a party. He tried to find the best side entrance - an easy to open window or door.

A part of him still didn’t understand how Selina wasn’t his soulmate. It just felt right with her, and her lifestyle worked with his. She stole because she always had and because the rush was a drug, but if they were soulmates, he could probably convince her to find that rush in helping him. She knew both sides of him. The pair of them just worked. But they weren’t soulmates. Bruce had to accept that. Someone else was destined for him, someone else out there was gonna be cursed with his thoughts every second of the day. God. That poor person. Maybe, he just didn’t have one. Maybe, Selina was his perfect match, but she was an even more perfect match for someone else, so he was the spare. There was probably just an odd number of people in the world. He would be left out.

There wasn’t any point moping about Selina. Their relationship was so flawed, and as much as they had passion, it wasn’t love. He just didn’t like to admit it. It was just fire, and eventually, they would burn out. He might as well put them out before they caused to much damage to everything around them. He’d made the right choice by blowing her off tonight.

But could the universe really have someone out there who matched him?

He peeked through the window, and a room full of panicking civilians were causing all the noise. He dropped to the floor, and the room went silent. Bruce could count about four grunts, and two guards knocked out across the floor, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what happened.

“Took you long enough!” A woman snapped from above the chaos. She was sitting on a table and had stood up to glare at him.

“What?”

“We’ve been here for eleven hours, waiting for whoever they were working for to show up or kill us and we’re all tired, hungry, and a little bit annoyed.”

“Eleven hours?”

“I have a watch. Eleven hours.”

“What happened?”

“I stole a baseball bat and knocked them out. All our phones were taken off us, so we had no way to get help but yell. You gonna do something about this or just stand here?”

“Oracle?” he summoned the police to get everyone home before getting Babs to look into what might’ve happened to get this man people here without raising any alarms. Surprisingly, it wasn’t some giant scheme, just some low-level grunts trying to be big and messing up.

Lucius needed to talk to me, Babs is covering security for me, Dicks coming home, I need to check in with Clark and see if he’s been spying on Jon and Dami or not.

You slammed your face into your pillow. You’d known your soulmate’s inner monologue for about a week now, and you were ready to throttle whoever it belonged to if she ever managed to meet them again. They could not make up their mind on who they wanted to be, or maybe they had some multipersonality disorder. If it was that, then she could maybe deal with it, but if they were just weird, then she might scream. One second they're working out how to eat a burger with a fork, another second they’re eating it like a normal person, then back to the fork. They never seem to sleep, and they do stupid detective puzzle’s every day - which might have been fun if you could see the puzzle and do it too. Now you were just focused on not thinking anything.

It’s extremely hard to function in the world without thinking. You had no clue how some of the people you knew managed it.

Keep calm, think about puppies, think about your favourite shows, no, don’t do that. What if you think something weird. God. The universe is such a little bitch. Who thought mind reading was a good idea.

Bruce was freaking out a little bit. He’d learnt to clear his thoughts as part of training, he could filter out some of the things that might give his identity away. Alfred had laughed at him for being scared of a soulmate, but Bruce wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to be. He didn’t know who it was, he just knew it was after a patrol night. What if it was some thief he’d stopped. He couldn’t help but agree with the voice. Mind reading was stupid.

I could just think the puzzle aloud if you’re that desperate to be involved

Oh, my god, we can just chat like this? Crap, crap, crap, you’ve heard everything I think. I’m so sorry. I feel so invasive. I’ve just been eavesdropping your life, and I don’t mean to! I promise I’ve tried zoning out.

Were you a hostage?

Straight to the point. I could just tell you who I am.

...

Why not? Are you scared or something? If I’m one of the hostages...do you know something I don’t? The police told me that it was nothing.

It was nothing just-

How do you do that? I should be able to read your thoughts, but you keep shutting me out. How?”

It’s a skill.

...

Where’d you go?

So you would be panicked if I just disappeared...you want to know if I’m a hostage because...oh my god please be Batman.

Why would you want me to be Batman?

Because it’s Batman or a kidnapper.

Or another hostage.

Nah, if you were another hostage, you would’ve thought about it more.

Are you the girl with the baseball bat?

Yeah.

Why did you have a baseball bat?

So you are Batman.

...

That would explain the sleep schedule. It’s keeping me up you know. Having your brain so active means the second mine switches off I get yours.

Sorry

beat

I had the bat because one of them dropped it while trying to grab my ass. He touched me, so I smacked him around the head. The others came to try and detain me, but I was in a bit of a state. You saw the end result.

They touched your butt?

Yeah. I tried asking what was going on, he said some sexist crap then tried to ‘show me who’s boss’. Bit scarring. Not something a girl in this town isn’t used to. Not everyone gets to be a princess.

I’m sorry I’m keeping you up.

It’s okay. I mean, it’s for a good enough cause right. Making Gotham a better place, giving kids something to look up to, but where’s Robin? I miss seeing the red cape at night.

He’s...making friends.

I have to go, my friend needs me to cover her shift at work. Get ready for a few hours of me repeating things over and over again.

What’s your job?

I’m a bit of an artist, work in advertising for a few companies - design websites, run social media accounts, make videos and billboards and unique displays. I’ve illustrated some books. Those graffiti billboards for the main cinema’s are all me. The inspiration art round the town’s me too. My friend’s sick, works at a restaurant. We look alike so I can get away covering for her.

You couldn’t sleep that night. Too many thoughts. Too awake.

If I’m going to adapt to your sleep schedule, do you want to chat or would that be too much of a distraction? Don’t want to put you at risk.

I can talk.

So...all your side kicks...are they all your kids? Cos I’m not judging, but that’s a lot.

Is that really the first question you want to ask?

Yeah?

One of them is my biological child, my son, the others are all my family though.

How old is he?

Thirteen

Fun age. Is he a rude teen yet.

He’d been a rude teen for a while now.

The others?

It’s kinda a long list.

I have all night.

Five boys total, one girl legally mine but two of my son’s girlfriends are basically members of the family.

All of them are heroes?

Yes

Real good parenting.

I’m a cool dad.

You didn’t just say that.

I didn’t know what I was doing with the eldest one, and once you let one kid do something you have to let them all do it!

That’s more understandable.

Large or small family?

Small, my brother moved abroad, and my parents are not part of my life. A big family sounds fun. So does that mean your kids found their soulmates before you? That's gotta hurt, no offence

It only hurts if you weren't worth the wait

Harsh!

You seem pretty worth the wait.

Won me back.

You opened your apartment door to find a basket of art supplies, a new laptop and drawing bag sitting on your desk. Your window, which had been open when you left, was now closed.

How did you find out where I lived?

I’m -

If you say, Batman,

Batman

Can you hear me sighing

You sound very dramatic, much disappointment, and now you’re laughing

How’d you even know what to buy?

My son’s very into art, I asked him what the best supplies were then researched most useful digital tablets.

So you’re rich. I figured since you fund all this Bat stuff, but like you must be so rich to support that many teens on top.

I’m comfortable

That’s what rich people say to seem less rich.

It’s polite

Thank you

Something’s bothering you.

You managed to surprise me when I can read your mind. You’re hiding things from me.

It’s hard for me to be open.

Yeah, that’s not an answer.

I barely know you, you can’t just expect me to open my entire world to you.

Why not? Isn’t the beauty of this. Someone who is perfect for you, who you can trust completely, who you have nothing to hide from, who you can’t lie to. Someone who keeps you honest and good, and complete. They get you. And don’t give me the barely know me crap, I’ve been one hundred percent readable. You’ve heard everything from movie reactions to my internal monologue when I walk to a job. You know my opinions on everything.

I don’t really want to have this conversation.

You don’t have the option not to. I mean, am I ever going to meet you again. Do I ever get to see the face under the cowl? Do your family even know you have a soulmate?

You can’t just ignore me

It’s complicated

You’re making it complicated

What have you got going on tonight that’s making you so stressed? You thought about sitting on your couch and watching a movie

Work Event

Batman Work or Real Life Work

Batman is real life

That sounded like such a bratty teen response. ‘It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle mum - you just understand my passion!’

Are you trying to compare being Batman to a gamer guy?

Lil’ bit, don’t take it to heart.

Do you want me to tell you who did it?

Can you hear what I’m watching?

No, you’re just thinking about it a lot.

You've seen it before?

Watched half of it, stopped.

Figured out the murderer?

Maybe.

Just say yes, don’t pretend to be modest.

I am modest.

Yeah, wearing a mask all the time must get tough. Never getting the praise, the thanks...Have people ever claimed to be you?

I can still hear you trying to work out the murderer before half way.

Give me this one win.

Maybe you were playing with him a little bit. You’d been working on learning to tune your thoughts out. Thinking about things in codes so he couldn’t work out what you were doing. Really, you didn’t care who the murderer was - you were about to work out who he was.

After three months of conversations like this, you really did like him. Small details, he was trusting you more, it felt nice. Listening to him rant about some of the people that worked for him had helped you connect the dots. Now you just wanted to see if he was impressed with you.

A soulmate was someone who connected with you on a level more than the rest of the world. They’d love you, and you’d love them. You wanted to be loved, but talking through amind connection was getting a bit old, nothing could beat sitting somewhere quiet and chatting with someone, seeing how their face changed and moved during the conversation. Little talks, face to face. Seeing a real person, a person to fit the voice.

You were wearing a homemade dress. You were good dressmaking though. It was gold and shiny, and when you wore it, you felt like a princess. You had a feeling Bats was on to you. He had left you the mask after all. A black masquerade mask that contrasted your bright colour choice. You were getting a bit sick of hearing his love isn��t the part of the job, I don’t deserve love monologues too. He was the Knight, but you weren’t, and you’d be the day for as long as he needed if it meant you got to see him face to face.

The large family, large amount’s of money, training to become Batman. It all made sense really. Bruce Wayne. Busy lifestyle with connections to the GCPD through the Gordon family, and Lucius Fox working with him a lot. It all made so much sense.

Bruce Wayne.

(Y/N) Wayne.

You were kinda lucky. A superhero, billionaire, who’d buy you art stuff and talk puzzles - even if he already knew the answer.

You didn’t want to filter your thoughts anymore, you didn’t want him filtering his.

“Name?” the bodyguard asked at the door

“Bruce Wayne’s plus one.”

“He doesn’t have a plus one listed.”

“Give me a sec.” You could see him.

Where are you?

Look up

What?

Look up.

Where?

Just look up Greatest Detective, I’m hard to miss. Gold dress, mask you left.

Where!

See me, Bruce. You can hear me, see me.

He made eye contact with you and started laughing slightly. You’d been worried he might get mad. He might not want you here. He might not even be your soulmate. You could’ve made a huge mistake somewhere in your detective process.

I’ll give you this one.

You started laughing now

What was that you said about ‘not everyone gets to be a princess?’ You definitely look like a princess to me.

Come let me in.

The bodyguard could tell something was up. Bruce’s sudden attention towards the door, and the laughter. You suddenly blushing.

“She’s with me.”

#bruce wayne #bruce wayne x reader #batman #batman x reader #bruce wayne one shot #batman imagine #bruce wayne imagine #batman one shot #bruce wayne headcanon

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them?

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With an announcement from collectible maker VeVe, the world was introduced to the first officially licensed DC NFTs. “What is VeVe?” you might ask. Or possibly “What is an NFT?”

Excellent questions, friends! We will do our absolute best to explain them in clear, concise terms to you right now.

Here are simple answers to complicated questions: NFTs are ecologically devastating vaporware created to part very dumb, very wealthy collectors from their money, made by stoned libertarian math nerds trying to prove a point they think is profound but is actually just very banal. Veve is no different than any other secondary huckster that springs up around a particularly successful snake oil economy.

As for why DC is getting in bed with them, it’s hard to know if the company is trying to just be cutting edge or if it’s because AT&T took on a shitload of debt buying Warner, and like anybody with creditors breathing down their neck, they need to make several quick bucks or else.

THE NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMICS HUCKSTERISM

Two full decades after Metallica teamed up with record labels to make sure we didn’t own anything we purchased digitally, a group of rejected Captain Planet villains came up with a workaround: NFTs.

NFTs use blockchain, a distributed AI accountant that requires ENORMOUS amounts of processing power to work properly, to assign certificates of ownership and record transactions. Accepting the pitch behind blockchain technology requires one to step back to an absurdly abstract level, then a zoom back into the extremely micro.

Every transaction between two people is built around trust: I trust that you are giving me the thing I’m paying for, while we both trust that the currency I’m handing you has a (relatively) absolute value which will allow it to be traded for other things. Blockchain purports to eliminate that trust: it uses a distributed ledger that anyone can see and confirm to record our transaction; it uses an algorithm to make sure every copy of the ledger is the same; and it assigns tokens to each transaction that can be given a value.

NFTs add in an absurd additional abstraction: ownership of digital media. I have always had the ability to, for example, produce an animated reaction gif from a television show and sell that animated reaction gif to you for a fixed sum of money. You would be an idiot for purchasing that reaction gif for several reasons: anyone else could make the exact same gif and you could find it in iMessage’s search engine, for one. But nothing in the past has ever prevented this transaction from occurring.

The “innovation” around NFTs is that it uses blockchain technology to “prove” “ownership” and “authenticity,” a sentence that is so heavily caveated that to express it correctly in writing makes the writer look like a conspiracy theorist. The NFT assigns a ledger value to the piece of digital artwork, and then that ledger value is what is sold between parties. It is a non-fungible token – unlike Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, the idea is these art pieces’ tokens’ inherent value doesn’t change (hence the non-fungible), while cryptocurrency is a token whose value is relative to other less imaginary currency.

This has led to some frankly embarrassing sales online. Jack Dorsey, the vacuous and bizarre founder of Twitter, is auctioning off his first tweet, something that already happened, that you can find with one simple Google search, for millions of dollars. Beeple, an artist the internet assures me is real, auctioned off a digital JPEG collage of all their previous works for $69 million. Jose Delgo, a comics artist from the ‘70s that very few people remembered until this happened, has made almost $2 million selling NFTs of his own artwork, spurring DC to email freelancers to remind them that they should not be using DC characters to try and skate atop this obvious bubble. Not because of the catastrophic environmental impacts caused by the blockchain algorithm, mind you. No, it was because AT&T needed to get some of that sweet, sweet tulip money.

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS MOSTLY POOR PEOPLE

Joanie Lemercier, a French artist and climate activist, has sold six NFT pieces so far. The act of accounting for those sales – assigning a token, then transferring ownership of that token from Lemercier to the purchaser – was 8.7 megawatt hours of energy. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of his studio for two entire years.

The algorithm used for NFTs, like the one used for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency, and all blockchain transactions, requires computers perform a certain volume of complex activity to access the ledger. That’s how it prevents fraudulent transactions – by making the barrier to writable access so high that it’s functionally impossible.

Of course, as demand for these transactions increases, so too does the computing power needed to record them. Hence the massive power consumption from Lemercier’s sale. Bitcoin transactions, especially since Elon Musk invested heavily in them to drive up their price (presumably the “pump” part of “pump and dump”), now use more energy annually than the entire country of Argentina.

Here’s the catch: in a perfectly green, zero emission energy environment, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Unfortunately, as anyone who has gone outside in the past 18 months has noticed, we’re not quite there yet. And while adding another Argentina to global power load isn’t the same as adding another China, it is still a significant drain on existing grids, and if it’s not timed and sited right, it’s using very dirty power (it’s fairly complicated, but the short version is electricity generation generally gets dirtier as demand increases).

So when Grimes auctions off a certificate of creation for her digital artwork, she’s triggering a set of computer actions that put a massive stress on the power grid that churns out oodles of negative environmental consequences, which according to study after study fall disproportionately on poor people and people of color.

Or! Instead of auctioning off something that clearly doesn’t exist, maybe she’s just using fracked natural gas as laundry detergent for mafia cash.

DIGITAL MONEY LAUNDROMAT

Let’s say I was a certain very sadistic, very fictional, black mask wearing crime lord of an American city and I have $1 million in cash lying around that I made from my operation’s drug business. If I suddenly bought a house with that million dollars, the authorities would notice that large transaction (probably through transaction reporting from the bank handling the sale, or the property exchange paperwork that runs through City Hall) and start sniffing around to find out where that money came from.

The same goes if I were to purchase IRL fine art through an auction house. The auction house would ask questions about where that money came from, and if it didn’t like what it found, it would report it to the authorities. Same for buying cars, or businesses, or lots of other real life transactions.

Now replace bank, city hall, and auction house with “a bunch of computers playing tic tac toe against each other on a 1025 square board” and try and guess where the reporting comes in. We don’t have to wait for an answer, that reporting doesn’t exist.

NFT transactions are the perfect confluence of the shadiness of art dealing with the shadiness of off-book dark web money-moving. They’re not all money laundering, but they are easy enough to use as money laundering that the authorities are getting concerned.

PRECARITY, PANDEMICS, AND COMICS ART

So why are comics people doing this? To start with, we mean actual people, and not people in the legal sense of the word (corporations).

It’s not hard to see the eye popping amounts of money changing hands and understand why at least some of them are getting involved. But it’s equally easy to look at the economics of the pandemic era of comics creation and at least sympathize with the pull. Comic page rates have been largely stagnant since the 1980s – penciler page rates in recent years are actually lower than the modest demands made by creators during the abortive effort to unionize in the 1970s.

With that money being so limited, most artists relied on the sale of original art, sketches, and sales at conventions to help make ends meet. So the last year has been exceptionally tough on them. Add to that the trend towards digital art, where there’s no actual physical page produced for the comic, and it’s not hard to imagine a hard up artist, one year into not seeing another living soul except for when the grocery clerk brings a bag of food out to their car, seeing someone coming along waving a conservative five figures at them and not explaining the extremely convoluted yet catastrophic environmental impact of the proces, saying yes to the quick cash.

To their credit, many comics creators are repulsed by the idea. Several have expressed serious concerns with NFTs on Twitter, with Doomsday Clock artist Gary Frank expressing “bewilderment” at the idea of his art being used to sell one of these things, and Marsha Cooke, widow of New Frontier great Darwyn Cooke and manager of his estate, going so far as to ask DC to stop using his art in them.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Hopefully the companies involved (or thinking of getting involved) with NFTs listen to their creatives. Nothing more honors the spirit of Batman than using his image to help give a pallet of Bratva money a quick scrub.

The post What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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renaroo · 7 years

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Chip Off the Old Block

Disclaimer: Batman, Superman and associated characters are the creative property of DC Comics. Warnings: Canon-typical violence & language Rating: T Prompt: ( @amariemelody ) YAY! Then, when you have time? Can you do Clark staying home with and caring for Jon b/c Jon caught the Kryptonian-version of a cold and so he has to stay home from school? OMFG, it'd be so cute!!!

A/N: This was fun to write so thank you so much for the prompt

Standing nervously in the doorway, Clark did his best to stay out of Jon’s peripheral vision. A task made only more difficult by the fact that the entire time Lois was sitting on the boy’s bed and trying to keep his attention, Jon was staring directly in Clark’s direction.

Jon did that a lot. Looking to Clark for an emotional baseline, as if he knew that Clark was the weaker link between the two of them. Lois could remain guarded and tough no matter what.

Clark was wringing his hands.

“Well, you’re not going to school today,” Lois decided at last, sighing and taking a thermometer from their son’s mouth. “You are definitely running a fever and your coughs and sneezes almost blow a hole through the ceiling.”

“Aw, Mom, you were never going to let me go to school,” Jon whined with a crackling, hoarse voice. “You said from the start. Why’d you even take my temperature?”

“Because empirical evidence is always good to have in your arsenal,” Lois replied before leaning forward and putting a firm kiss on Jon’s forehead. “Finish your orange juice and get some sleep. When you feel better you can go watch some tv, but I don’t want you pushing yourself.”

“I’m Superboy,” he whined even as he settled into his cocoon of blankets and duvets.

“No, you’re Sickboy and you’re staying home today,” Lois replied, walking out of their son’s room and looking toward Clark with a raised eyebrow. “You doubted my mother’s intuition.”

“No. Maybe,” Clark said, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s just.. I never caught the flu or got sick when I was growing up, Lois. And Jon’s…”

“Only half Kryptonian and has only had his powers developing recently,” Lois reminded him. “He’s a kid. They get sick sometimes. Germs and whatnot. Not to mention we let him fly to Gotham… who knows what’s in the smog over that city…”

“Lois,” Clark admonished.

“Oh, I’m kidding, Smallville,” she assured him, leaning against the hall wall and crossing her arms.

“I know you are,” Clark replied, exasperated. “I just don’t know how you can! I mean… Jon’s sick and… And that’s…”

“Scary,” Lois replied.

“I’m terrified,” Clark replied with a forced smile.

“That’s being a parent,” Lois assured him. “I’d be more worried if you weren’t being your over protective, worrywart self, Clark.”

He smiled fondly at Lois, still so taken aback by how strong and inspiring his wife could still be after all the years they had been together.

“Which is also why you’re the one staying home today,” Lois said, pushing off the wall and heading toward the bathroom.

“What?” Clark asked critically.

“I’m going to work, you need to stay and take care of Jon because one, Perry’s going to notice me taking off more than you taking off, two, I am not staying at home so that you can text me for updates every twenty seconds, and three, my son’s sneezes can knock me over but you’re more wind resistant.”

Clark suddenly felt less inspired. “Lois, I told you, I’ve never been sick before. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Chicken noodle soup, cough syrup, hydrate him, and, pretending that you’re doing it behind my back, give him a little bit of ice cream when he’s feeling better,” Lois listed off. “It’s real kitsch — you’ll love it.”

“You’re overestimating my abilities here, honey,” Clark replied.

“Oh, I definitely am,” Lois agreed with a laugh.

“Do you want me to text you with updates?” Clark asked, half joking.

Lois looked up dully from getting her clothes together and she pointed warningly at him. “I want only messages of dramatically better or worryingly worse. Anything in between and I’ll block your number, Clark. I can’t worry about my baby while I’m trying to remember how to spell without my main spellchecker there.”

“Curious only has one ‘r’,” Clark joked.

“I love you,” Lois said, leaning up and kissing him. “Don’t let our son’s temperature lead to some sort of nuclear meltdown of our new apartment.”

“Can that happen?” Clark asked seriously.

“Guess we’ll find out!” Lois joked in return.

Clark actually took quite a bit of pride in the fact that he didn’t give into temptation and call Lois until nearly noon. To which he was told yes it was normal that a sickly Jon was still sleeping.

“It just seems like it’s a lot of sleeping,” Clark attempted to explain.

“And that would be considered a good thing by most people’s standards, Smallville,” Lois joked over the phone. “Nothing takes care of a cold quite like sleeping it off.” She sounded distracted and distant. Clark wondered how she knew so much without even being in the apartment. He really had married a true Super Woman. “Have you made chicken noodle soup yet?”

“No,” Clark answered, looking in on Jon one more time.

“Then you should get started on that instead of calling me,” Lois informed him. “Jon’ll need to eat something shen he wakes up, and you obviously need something to distract you that isn’t some kind of world-threatening calamity.”

“I can handle world-threatening calamities,” Clark grumbled, mostly to himself.

“I’m in a writing groove, hon, just relax. You’re my Superman after all, I think you can handle a common cold. Just make sure Jon doesn’t break anything with his sneezes,” Lois warned. “I won’t blame him but I’ll definitely blame you in every argument for the rest of our marriage.”

“Got it,” Clark sighed as Lois hung up.

After getting one last look at his sleeping son, Clark headed to the kitchen and had a good look around. “Alright then,” he said, hands on his hips. “Let’s make chicken noodle soup.”

Perhaps it was a function of Clark having never been all that sick when he was growing up, but the association between soup and sickness always seemed strange to him. Ma never spared an opportunity to make a good soup for them back in Smallville, and like everything else she made it was perfection regardless of the time of year.

Still, he had seen enough Campbell’s commercials to at least know it was a concept that existed.

So he got the pot out, some chicken broth, salt and pepper, debated on noodles for almost five minutes before settling on angel hair, cracked an egg in, diced canned chicken and prayed that neither Pa nor Ma were looking down on him for using canned chicken of all things, and he began making the soup.

Of course, all of that was easier done than said when one had super speed and heat vision moderated to the perfect temperature for the pot.

Standing by the stove with a finished pot of soup, Clark rubbed his chin and wondered what would be best to do with the soup — put it in the oven? Put it on simmer? What would Ma do?

“Is that soup?” a scratchy voice asked from behind Clark.

“Jon, you’re out of bed,” Clark pointed out, turning to look at his scraggly headed, hunched over son. It just about broke his heart, even if it was a ‘mere’ cold. “Yes! I have some soup for you, if you’re feeling up to it.”

Using his full sleeve, Jon lazily wiped at his nose and mouth, making his already red cheeks and nose redder before he sniffed heavily again. “Mmkay,” he responded before sluggishly dragging himself up to the kitchen table and plopping down.

As soon as he was sitting, Jon laid his cheek on the table, facing Clark. He watched as Clark got a bowl from the cabinets and began to pour for him. “Do cities have more germs?”

Clark hesitated before pouring the rest of the chicken noodle soup in the bowl. “More germs than…?”

“Than Hamilton?” Jon asked, lifting his head up lazily when Clark approached with the bowl. “I need a spoon.”

“Right,” Clark replied, putting down the bowl and heading to the utensil drawer. “I believe germs are everywhere you go, Jon. But cities do have more people, which sometimes means they can pass more germs to one another quicker.”

“I knew it,” Jon groaned, laying his head down beside the bowl even when Clark came back with the spoon. “Metropolis is trying to kill me.”

Cracking a smile, Clark forced the spoon into his son’s hand and then took his seat across the table. “Metropolis isn’t trying to kill you. And there probably aren’t more germs per person here either. The problem is… human immune systems need to… adapt. There might not be more germs, but you’re probably exposed to new germs. Which means your immune system was caught off guard and just needs some time to deal with it.”

“Because Metropolis isn’t Hamilton,” Jon concluded, pulling his head off the table and letting it roll back loosely as he looked down at the soup.

“Sounds to me like you and Metropolis need to spend some more quality time with each other,” Clark joked. “Pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate all this ire directed her way.” He then looked down to the soup and back up to Jon. “If you’re not really feeling hungry, you don’t have to eat right now, Jon. I can just get you some water or orange juice or maybe sprite if your stomach’s upset?”

“No,” he said as he grabbed his spoon and began to stir his soup. He lapsed into silence for a moment before looking to Clark almost mournfully. “Hey, Dad?”

“Yes, Jon?” Clark replied, tilting his head just slightly.

“Will I get used to Metropolis?” Jon asked. “I mean… to its… germs?”

Clark hummed to himself slightly, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Well, I never got sick when I moved to the city for the first time, mind you, but I also moved from a small town where I felt like I knew everyone and every thing there was to know around me. And I came here the first time and… well it was like living in an entirely different world. It was as alien to me as the holograms and recordings the Sunstones showed me of Krypton. And for the first few weeks, well, I didn’t even know where to put my foot down to find a footing,” he admitted. “I wasn’t sick, but I was definitely not used to the needs and calls of a city.”

“How did you get used to it?” Jon asked, voice sounding a little stronger as he took his first spoonful of soup into his mouth.

“Well, the lucky thing about us, son, is that when I didn’t find my footing… I remembered I could fly,” he said, thinking back on the early years with a fondness he hadn’t realized he still held for the City of Tomorrow.

“Mom used to move around all the time ‘cuz of Grandpa Sam, right?” Jon asked, continuing to eat. “How’d she get used to Metropolis?”

“I don’t know, she was here winning Pulitzers before I ever came onto the scene,” Clark laughed. “But I know one thing about your mother, when she sees something she wants, when she settles on something she wants to achieve, neither hell nor high-water can keep her from it.” He paused. “Including wanting to get Superman for an exclusive.”

“How’d she do that?” Jon asked.

“She jumped off a roof so I’d catch her,” Clark replied before realizing he was perhaps being a little too honest with their son. He glanced over to Jon’s shocked face. “Um. You should do as your mother says and not as your mother does.”

“At least I can fly,” Jon said, amazed. “Mom can’t but she did it anyway—“

“I didn’t say she was good at risk assessment, Jon, I’m glad you inherited some of my reservations,” Clark laughed, trying to switch subjects as he heard a familiar rhythm from the hallway. “How’s your soup?”

“Okay,” Jon replied.

“Only okay?” Clark asked, trying not to show his surprise.

“Mom’s is better,” Jon informed him.

“Your mother warms up a can of soup. This is homemade,” Clark tried to defend.

“No wonder my ears were burning at the office,” Lois’ voice called from the door as it opened. “Sorry to just drop in. I kept writing the same sentence five times and realized that I couldn’t get any work done knowing my little man of the house was in bed sick.”

“Hi, Mom,” Jon greeted her, melting into her side as she pulled him into a hug against her waist.

Lois then looked perturbed toward Clark. “How else do you make soup if it’s not from a can?” she asked. “Never mind, don’t tell me. It’s in the can because someone else has already perfected it.”

Clark sighed and got up, pulling both of his family into an embrace. “Jon, you might miss Hamilton, but let me assure you, you are every bit the tasteless city slicker that your mother is.”

“Hey!” both Lois and Jon yelled back, half in jest.

#writing #Super fic #Clark Kent #Jon Kent #Lois Lane

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