After the Supernova Chapter 2
Link to Ao3 Here
Look, if I was Nova I would need to do a lot of yelling and crying to process everything that happened. And I like the idea of after everything Nova actually WANTING to sleep. Like she's mentioned in the books before that she wished she could be unconscious for 8 hours like everyone else. And I feel like after the couple days she's had, that would be more true than ever.
I also really want to (eventually, later this fic) write a scene (or a few) where it's Max, Adrian, Hugh, Simon, and Nova cooking together in the kitchen. Just the sheer domesticity of it makes my chest hurt. Maybe Simon lets Max wear his stupid black and white checkered apron. Maybe they actually move the superhero stuff down the hall and the food into the closet in the kitchen. MAYBE THEY ALL MAKE LUMPIA TOGETHER. Or they surprise Nova with it! Either way! All of the above! Anyway, uh, I'll write that at some point.
Also, Simon and Hugh can't replace the family Nova had with the Anarchists, but I do think they can add to it. Like Nova will still have Leroy and Winston. When, in this chapter, Nova is upset about the Anarchists I don't think she's necessarily talking about Leroy. Leroy was the only one who ever suggested that Nova NOT be an Anarchist. He gave her that out in BOOK ONE. And I thought that was a really interesting distinction from all of the other Anarchists.
Like we all saw Ingrid using Nova to get back at the Renegades. I never suspected that Honey would turn out like that, but in retrospect it isn't entirely surprising. Like Honey told Nova how to flirt with Adrian but looking back on it, I don't know that it was ever for Nova's benefit. I think the expectation was ALWAYS that she would betray Adrian and everyone else in the end.
And I don't think Leroy was perfect because he did go along with Honey to change the plan at the arena to rescue Ace and obviously they've all made a lot of mistakes. But I don't think he ever would've pushed back if Nova said "No don't chemically burn my fingerprints off" or "I will take you up on the offer to go make a better life for myself." And I FULLY plan to address that later in this fic. I have so many ideas, y'all.
Also, I LOVE the idea from @honey-harper-official (I don't have the link, sorry!!) that Winston basically sabotaged the plan to kill the Renegades at the parade. Like that is canon to me. I really really like the arc that Winston went through and he was one of my favorite characters from book one because he clearly actually cared about Nova?? He could've betrayed her to make things better for himself but he didn't. I don't even think he really considered betraying her.
And I can't have him be dead in this fic because I NEED him and Nova to actually talk. And I need Nova to have someone from her childhood who fully didn't emotionally abuse her or see her as a pawn or a tool to regain power. I think, narratively, Winston dying didn't add much except the reconciliation with Nova, and if I go back and retroactively say that a (magical prodigy) healer actually got to him soon enough (even though Nova thought he was dead dead), I don't think it takes anything away from the story.
Anyway an excerpt from Chapter 2 under the cut :)
“So, Dad and Pops said probably won’t be back here tonight since they’re trying to get ahead of…whatever happened at the cathedral,” said Adrian, “But, there’s four empty guest rooms in the house, so you guys can have your pick.”
Nova considered briefly whether it would be inappropriate to ask which rooms were where the murders had taken place, but she thought better of mentioning it in front of Max and instead said, “I was actually hoping to take a shower. It’s…been a long day.”
“Oh, right. Do you just want to use my bathroom downstairs? I don’t think any of the guest bathrooms have, well, anything in them. There are a couple extra towels down there, though, and soap and whatever else you need. Or I could draw something, I guess. If you want.”
“I’m going to choose my room!” Max said, already halfway up the stairs. “But I need to know which ones might have ghosts, first.”
Nova could use Adrian’s bathroom. She didn’t know why she had made a big deal of it anyway. It felt strangely intimate, but so did all of this. Staying here, imposing on their family.
“I’ll find what I need,” she said. “It sounds like you have to give the official tour.”
He shot her a grateful smile, and bounded up the stairs after Max.
Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to remember which of the dozen doors on the first floor led to the basement. She made her way down the stairs, remembering the last time she was here. The entire house had smelled like cinnamon, and Adrian had shown her the dream she told him about. He drew her a jungle, and birds, and headphones, and she had fallen asleep for the first time in ten years.
Part of her wanted to see the studio again, but she knew nothing would be left. It all would’ve vanished when Adrian neutralized his own powers. So instead, she opened the door to the bathroom and peeled off her sweaty, dirty clothes while the water ran.
When she stepped under the water, Nova realized it was actually hot. Since the Anarchists had moved to the subway station on the Day of Triumph, hot water had been a rare luxury. Even at the row house, the water had been tepid, at best.
As she stood there, the water running in rivulets down her body and the heat melting the tension in her muscles, she couldn’t help but begin to think, again, that she didn’t deserve this.
She might as well have been the one to kill those people in the arena. To kill Callum and Winston, and who knew who else. She was the one who helped the Anarchists and the Rejects get inside. She had given Ace his helmet.
And here she was, as though she were any other house guest in the mansion where Ace himself had slaughtered a family only a decade prior.
How could Simon and Hugh let her into their home? How could Max joke with her and Adrian as if nothing was different? How could anyone think she deserved any help or affection after everything she had done? Everything she had not done. All for the benefit of a lie she had believed for ten years.
There was a knock on the bathroom door.
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DP X DC WRITING PROMPT #15
(#) = Notes at the end of post
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A Lonely Star Shines in the Night
The Guys in White have gone too far. So far that the Danny's universe as they know it is collapsing into itself as a result of the agent's foolish attempt to rid the land of the dead, undying, and neverborn. They tried nuking the Infinite Realms and all it got them was their dimension erased with the Infinite Realms only suffering minor damage.
Either way, Danny's home is gone.
In the struggle to gather his family and spirit them away into the Ghost Zone, he was separated from them when the GIW blew the portal to smithereens with him on the other side and his family still in the living realm. Overtaken by grief, his core cracking from his failure to protect those precious to him, he scoured the Realms for a natural portal back, to no avail.
In his search, he is nearly driven mad by his desperation. Unable to see their King in such pain and slowly unraveling into a second coming of Pariah Dark, Clockwork, Frostbite, and Pandora gather their strength and force him into an entirely different universe to grieve and heal. A universe full of heroes. He won't know this for a while, however, because where he ended up was the old Gotham observatory.
With his obsession of protecting--his friends, his family, his town, his entire world--torn to shreds, his damaged core magnified his secondary obsession: the very cosmos itself. His core latched onto the remaining obsession and inadvertently temporarily tied Danny to the very foundation of the old observatory. That is where he lingers for years, unable to leave and unable to stop crying for his lost family and friends, repeating their names over and over in a neverending mantra.
It isn't until much later that people start to notice his presence, due to the observatory having been unused for decades. What use was an observatory if you couldn't even see the stars in the perpetual smog that blanketed the city? At some point, however, a couple of daring teenagers snuck into the observatory one night and had a first hand encounter with a strange being. Needless to say, they didn't stick around for much longer. The reports they made to the police and what they posted on social media the next day were nonetheless wildly interesting.
Each of them described relatively the same thing. Of first seeing a bright, sliver star shining in the dark(1) of the empty building but then quickly noticing it was set in the center of the chest of a being that might as well have been made from the black void of the night sky itself. They described a being with hair that faded into white, glowing mist that was circled by a crown of ice crystals and star dust. Most notable of all to them, however, were the low humming whispers coupled with the mercury tears leaking from aurora green eyes in a neverending stream that dripped and echoed hauntingly across the marble floors below.
Of course, no one really believed their wild tales at first. Then it became a game among high schoolers and college students to wander the old observatory just to see if they would catch sight of this mysterious being. If not, no harm done. That is until one student accidentally injured themselves trying to find this ghost they've been hearing rumors about. (2)
Regardless of whether or not the being inhabiting the observatory directly caused this student's injury, he's gained the Batclan's attention.
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Notes:
(1) The star in his chest is his core. The black/night parts of his ghost form are slightly translucent even when not intangible/invisible. You can literally see straight through him to his core, which basically looks like a condensed white dwarf star. Also, due to the damage his core has taken and his grief, it's cracking and looks like it's going to go supernova.
(2) Danny didn't directly cause the student to get injured. The student literally just turned the corner and nearly ran right into Danny as he was wandering in his grief-stricken stupor. This caused the student to freak out, run the opposite direction, and fall down a flight of stairs cause they weren't watching where they placed their feet. Danny is not violent or territorial here. His mind has literally checked out and left because trauma, grief, and a fractured sense of ghostly self are one hell of a combo on a halfa.
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Y'know looking back on my time in the NSR fandom it's weird how victimized people tend to make the NSR elites, which I really don't think is warranted beyond Sayu's team and Yinu who are MINORS that were employed into a fascist government system under the guise of success. Yes, NSR was a fascist government, or at the very least an authoritarian hand over a dystopian society.
Even if its general tone is light-hearted and silly, the game tackles themes of propaganda, scapegoating, wealth inequality and planned obsolescence, environmental destruction, media control, saving face for tourists, authoritative voting and more, yet most of them aren't the player's main gameplay focus; a lot of lore and context clues are in the background like the town's layout, interacting with certain objects and talking to NPCs. But those themes are a core message of the game and by only treating the members of NSR as regular old musicians you take out all the nuance.
(Plenty more under the cut. TL;DR: No Straight Roads is a relevantly socio-political game and I wish fans would utilize that side of the characters more)
Both halves of the "music war" as I'm gonna call it for lack of an official term had their faults, and I do like that there is no 100% right or wrong side; no straight road, if you will. BUT ALSO. BBJ realized the entire city was suffering in some way under NSR's leadership and had nothing to lose by challenging the status quo (they literally live in a fucking sewer, I'd be full of rage too). They didn't benefit from initial fame, wealth, or military protection like NSR did; not to mention they were also egged on and decieved by one of their closest allies. When voices don't work ala DK West's attempt, then you turn to action. Action can include smacking the shit out of government officials, as a treat (I enjoyed every second trying to get an S rank in Supernova's level <3)
On that note, the woobification is ESPECIALLY bad with DJSS, Neon J and 1010. I love the silly object heads and smexy robots as much as anyone else but they are specifically meant to be critiques of self-absorbed billionaires (sorry to tell DJSS fans this but he's supposed to be Elon-Musk-adjacent) and the k-pop industry with its military involvement, plus the use of militial force to keep rowdy citizens in line. I'm begging people to PLEASE handle them with more care.
Thankfully, it's clear that NSR reduces its chokehold by the end of the game and all the artists put in a lot of work to improve thanks to BBJ's push. Whether the game's writers made that decision to appeal to their own government's approval or was a genuine end to the story, I like that Tatiana has a moment of reflection and does a complete 180 to make the city better in the end (beyond the threat of the city being destroyed ofc). Even if it's unrealistic, it's a hopeful message and shows that anyone can be corrupted by the right circumstances.
Just PLEASE don't forget the characters' actions and choices along the way for the sake of ship fics and cute art. There's a lot of complexity and angst you can add to the characters with that authoritarian history!
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