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fancyfade · 3 years

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so ive been debating editing chapter 3 on my fanfic to make 1 scene line up more from canon. (chapter 3 is this one, where the characters deal with the aftermath of battle for the cowl, Tim finds out Damian’s Robin, and Dick and Damian move to the penthouse)

I’m debating making the Tim finding out Damian’s Robin scene a little more canon compliant along what happened in Red Robin (link) for a few reasons, the main of which is in the scenes that I’m writing next (like... chapter 47 lol), Tim and Dick do have to talk about what transpired when Dick made Damian Robin. Potential reasons for change

In my fic Tim kind of just left on his own without a push, but I’m not sure if Tim would have left on such bad terms if there wasn’t the complication of Damian antagonizing him and him feeling as if Dick was picking Damian over him (even though in the comic we saw Dick trying to de-escalate and get Tim’s back, it still felt that way to Tim)

I dislike the way some of this was handled in the comic and I can’t really comment on it in my fic if I just retcon it out

it seems fair-er I guess if Tim is allowed to have flaws just like Cass and Damian and Dick all have flaws in this fic. i know many tim stans think otherwise, but punching a ten-year-old victim of child abuse in the face out of anger is wrong.

the con side is obviously this involves Damian getting hit and that kid has been through so much already. I’m really trying to figure out how it works with character dynamics vs like. give the poor kid a break-ness.

anyway if I did decide to replace the current chapter 3, this is what it would be replaced with (only the first scene, the second would be the same). If you are a reader of the fic feel free to leave your comments. I would do an “oh and I edited chapter 3″ note before the relevant stuff was mentioned if I go through with this, I wouldn’t like expect everyone to know what happened. Some of the dialogue is not like exactly like in canon (cuz thats boring and also to match with what I wrote the first time) but the feeling/ beats should be similar

Gotham’s finally had a bit of lull in the violence, and Dick is just wondering how he’s going to do this.

He’s accepted that Damian’s his responsibility – seeing the kid shot in the chest made that perfectly clear, as much as he would’ve liked it to be otherwise. He felt like he was way too young to be watching out for a kid in any capacity other than cool older brother, especially a kid who’s as difficult to get along with as Damian. He was a great fighter, of course, and he knew it – Dick’s not sure he’s ever heard the kid be humble about anything. To make things worse, Dick feels like he’s constantly stuck in the middle between Damian and the kid he actually views as his younger brother – Tim, who Damian tried to kill. Evidence in point:

“Robin?!” Tim asks once he’s gotten back on his feet and Dick's explained his plan – away from Damian, who's still recovering from surgery.

“You made Damian Robin?!” Tim asks again.

Dick sighs. He’s in the cave, in a Batman costume he feels doesn’t fit right at all with the cowl off, and Tim’s still in his regular clothes. He has no idea how to explain this to Tim – no idea how to make him feel like he’s not being replaced. Dick never wanted to be the one doing the replacing – he remembers how much it hurt to find out that Jason was Robin from the papers, and that was after he officially stopped being Robin. Tim never quit – and Dick’s not about to make him – but he has to come home to the guy who tried to kill him getting his name.

“Tim, I know this looks bad, but Damian needs this.”

“Remember when we thought Bruce was going to retire after Crisis?” Tim asks. “Batman and Robin was supposed to be us. You and me. Not you and the psychopath that tried to kill me.”

“Tim, you’re not my sidekick, you’re my partner – ” Dick takes a step towards Tim with his hand out, prepared to offer sympathy, but Tim shakes him off angrily.

“Obviously not!”

“And Damian needs me way more than you do. If we don’t keep an eye on him, he’s going to kill again.”

Tim scowls intensely. “That should really not be an endorsement for being Robin, Dick! He’s a killer! He belongs in jail!” Tim swallows a little and then lowers his voice out of shouting range. “Dick, he didn’t try to kill me because he for some reason thought it was the only way to stop me from doing something bad, as far as I can tell he just wanted to replace me. We’re talking about someone with absolutely no sense of right or wrong.”

“Of course he doesn’t have a sense of right or wrong. He’s a ten-year-old child who was raised as an assassin from birth!”

“Lots of our villains have really sad or sympathetic reasons for doing crime, that doesn’t mean we team up with them.”

“Are you serious?” Dick asks. “This isn’t the same, Tim.”

“How not?”

“Well for one,” calls Damian's voice from the stairs, and Dick can't help but cringe and think not now – “I'm a lot better than them.”

Dick's cringe only intensifies when he turns around to see what Damian is wearing. His new Robin costume.

Tim's hands clench into fists the instant he sees Damian. Dick knows he has to de-escalate things quick before Tim and Damian have another fight.

“Damian,” Dick says, trying to keep himself carefully neutral-sounding. “Shouldn't you be resting?”

Damian lifts his head up slightly so his nose is in the air, and walks down the stairs almost normally. There's only a little hesitation in the twist of his torso, a little stiffness of his right arm.

Either he's zoned out of his mind on painkillers or depressingly good at masking his pain for a ten-year-old.

“Please,” Damian says. “I was trained in the League of Shadows. Do you really think an over-the-hill ex-Robin could put me down?”

Tim's fist clenches further, and so Dick says, letting a bit more urgency slip into his voice, “Damian, shut up. Now.”

Damian puts his left hand on his hips and looks intentionally at Tim. He adds, “I'm not Drake – ”

He's barely got the word out before Tim leaps forward and punches him in the face. Dick's out of his seat, grabbing Tim to hold him back, who is still distressingly struggling against him, like he wants to keep up the assault despite the fact that Damian fell to the floor.

“My name is Tim Wayne!” Tim shouts as Dick is still holding him back.

Damian gingerly sits up. Dick prepares to release Tim, prepares to stop Damian if he has to, if he decides to get revenge. But he doesn't. He just briefly braces his right side with his left hand before wiping the blood off his face.

“I let you get that shot in, Drake,” Damian says, again dropping intentional emphasis on Tim's original last name.

As he does, Tim struggles forward.

“Tim, back off!” Dick says, because Tim still isn't cooling down –

“I want you to feel good about yourself,” Damian continues.

Tim seems to relax his stance slightly, so Dick, possibly in an error of judgment, lets Tim go. But Tim doesn't try to attack Damian again, he just shakes Dick off and starts stomping away. “You want me to back off? Fine.”

He's going for the exit.

If he leaves –

Dick can't chase him. He's not sure that he can leave Damian alone –

“Tim, wait!” Dick says, taking a step forward. “Bruce is gone. But I still need you.”

“For what?” asks Damian and damn it is there anything this kid isn't going to try to ruin?

“Shut up, Damian,” Dick says again, even though as far as he knows he's just going to wind up pushing Damian away too –

And Tim leaves.

Dick turns to look at Damian. The kid's already back to his feet, like nothing happened, and Dick takes a step forward to inspect the injury – though he's really more worried about the gunshot wound than Tim's punch. Both Tim and Damian had wound up injured pretty badly during the chaos that gripped Gotham in the rumors of Batman’s death. As his new and not-improved version of Batman, Jason had tried to kill them both, which Dick is way less than pleased about. He’d been kind of hoping that they could talk Jason down, but this seems like a line he doesn’t know if Jason can ever un-cross. He shot a ten year old in the chest.

Damian grabs Dick's wrist as he reaches out.

“Are you all right?” Dick asks.

Damian scoffs. “You're worried about Drake? I've been hit harder sparring my mother.”

“I was thinking about the gunshot.” Alfred had said the primary damage was blood loss and a punctured lung (well, traumatic pneumothorax, but Dick knew what he meant) and given the kid a minimum of four weeks downtime to heal.

It's hard to tell due to the domino mask, but Damian adopts the position of a kid who's rolling their eyes, head slightly tilted to the side with a loll. “It's not enough to impersonate Batman, now you want to impersonate my mother?”

Dick doesn't know how to approach the mother thing, so he doesn't even try. He just explains the logic for being Batman – (and there is logic behind it. It's not like he wanted this). “Someone has to step up and convince Gotham things can get back to normal,” Dick says. “And serial killer Batman wasn't going to cut it.”

“Did you at least take care of him?” Damian asks.

Dick knows that Damian isn't actually worried about Jason's wellbeing, so he says, “Do you mean 'did I kill him'?”

“Tt. Obviously.”

“Obviously not.”

Damian presses his lips together in a thin line.

Dick might as well get this out of the way now. He's going to have to sometime. “Alfred wants you out of the field for four weeks.”

“That's preposterous!” Damian shouts, and as he shouts, he coughs. He rubs his chest quickly and then glowers at Dick when he sees him staring.

“Damian, you could have died.”

“I didn’t.”

Jeez, doesn’t this kid have any sense of his own mortality? Though, Dick supposes, growing up around Lazarus Pits and a centuries old grandfather might make that impossible.

“I’m not a fool, Grayson, I know I’m not capable of healing instantaneously. I’ll take a break for one week,” he offers, like it’s a huge concession on his part.

“Four weeks,” Dick says.

“What about you?” Damian asks. “Didn’t you get injured?”

“Not as badly.”

“Are you taking a break?”

“Someone needs to convince Gotham that Batman’s not dead,” Dick says. Also, he doesn’t want to take a break. He doesn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. Losing Bruce. Failing Tim.

“Tt. Then I don’t need one either. I’m younger. I heal faster.”

Dick actually has no clue whether that’s true, because he’s not a doctor, but he knows that people usually say kids heal faster.

Dick swings his arms a little, trying to feel them out. They’re still stiff, and as they move, a jolt of pain shoots through him. Even when he’s not moving, his shoulder is still sore. He knows that he might get injured going into the field like this and that it’s not a smart decision – last time he went into the field while still healing, he wound up blowing his secret identity to Blockbuster.

He decides that at least if he’s going into the field, he won’t tell Barbara and Alfred about it. Okay, so that’s probably not the smartest of his plans. Most plans that you have to hide from people who care about you aren't smart.

“I’ll take a week long break with you,” Dick concedes. “And we can see how fast you’re healing.” The second part is a lie, of course. He's not going to supersede Alfred's orders on medical matters.

Dick sighs a little. He figures that while they’re both on bed-rest duty, though, he can try to figure out how to set things up so they can operate effectively once they get a clean bill of health.

“How do you feel about not living in the manor?” Dick asks.

“Kicking me out already?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I wouldn’t be living here either,” Dick says. It’s true. He’d rather not feel like he’s living in all of Bruce’s old places, wearing Bruce’s old costume, … replacing him, essentially. He needs a place he can clear his head.

“Where would you live then?” Damian asks skeptically.

Dick shrugs. “The penthouse, maybe. Bruce already made a bunker nearby, so we could operate out of there pretty easily.”

Damian narrows his eyes. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’?”

Because you are ten and not ready to live on your own. But Dick just says, “Well, you’re Robin now, right? That means you’re pretty much obligated to team up with Batman.”

“Batman isn’t here, Grayson. He never will be again, no matter how much you play dress-up.”

Charming kid. Like Dick didn’t already know that.

“You know I operate effectively alone, right?” Damian continues. “I don’t need to be hand-held and babysat like all of Father’s previous partners.”

Dick figures that it’d be a jerk move to remind Damian he just almost died and therefore really shouldn’t be on his own. Instead, he says, “Well, Alfred’s staying with me, so unless you want to get all your food and clean the house by yourself, you have to put up with me.”

“Tt . I don’t need a servant. I’ll just eat at restaurants.”

“On who’s money?”

“In the event of his death, my father’s assets should have transferred to me. His blood son.”

Oh boy. Dick rubs his face. “Does this have to be a thing, Damian? No one’s doubting your capacity to take care of yourself but I think it’d really be easier if we were operating out of the same building. “

A long silence on Damian’s part. “Fine,” he says eventually. “I’ll allow you to stay at my penthouse.”

My penthouse. Of course. But Dick takes it. “All right,” he says. “Let’s move in.”

#idk even #to my followers #my fanfic #dc comics #dc fanfic #tim drake #damian wayne #dick grayson

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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I felt the love finally at the Women’s March, but what do we do tomorrow?

Fear for the world my unborn daughter would inherit spurred me to join the march but on the day I wanted to see more rage, more action, more chanting

The night before the Womens March in DC, my best friend McKetta and I lay on the floor with her hand tucked under the waist of my maternity jeans, waiting for the baby to kick.

Five months earlier, Id gotten pregnant on purpose, and the nausea of my first trimester had coincided with the election. My husband and I found out it was a girl just in time to watch Hillary lose at which point the usual pregnancy neuroses (Will she survive gestation?) spun out into broader, abstract fears about the new world order (If she does survive, then what?).

Like any desperate, lazy person, I turned to the internet for answers, eventually Googling something along the lines of, What the hell do I do now? Various listicles popped up, a mix of sarcastic and sage advice on how to best expend ones energy in the wake of Trumps triumph, and one said to sign up for the Womens March. So I called McKetta, who was skeptical but said shed meet me, and now, here we were.

I dont feel anything, she said.

I shook my head. Me neither.

The next day at the Womens March rally, I waited to feel something. And when Ashley Judd gave her speech a mangled, rambling, beat poetry thing, where she amped up her southern accent and likened modern-day microagressions to black slavery and the Holocaust I felt a little like Id taken acid (bad acid).

McKetta and I wondered what was wrong with us. Had all those conservative takes about the march being a hysterical white woman thing soured us against the catharsis wed promised ourselves? There were so many things to feel glad about: we were here, other people were here, the place was packed, it was glorious. People estimated that at least 500,000 had shown up. Yet we felt frozen. It was as if our emotions had petrified at some point after the election.

Earlier that morning, our hosts (who work in government and wished to remain anonymous), reminded McKetta and me to write our blood types and medication allergies on our arms in Sharpie. People were saying the march could turn ugly, and if we arrived at the hospital unconscious, the doctors would need to know certain things. I reached for the pen and wrote PREGNANT on my wrist, along with everything else. Now I felt stupid about it. Nothing really crazy had occurred. The most dangerous thing Id encountered so far was the slippery bathroom floor at Fudruckers, where a woman had fallen into my arms, and I had held her like a baby.

En route to the march, we had passed a clothing store display window, in which mannequins had been dressed and positioned as protesters, holding placards to advertise mens wrinkle-free dress shirts. (FIGHT THE POWERS THAT CREASE!)

And I felt a little like that now: an automaton, holding a nonsense sign, trying to sell something. I wanted to see more rage, more action, more chanting. Perhaps I was hoping that with more anger on display, whatever Id been holding inside since the election whatever emotions had petrified would finally thaw.

Personally, I feel dead inside, McKetta commiserated. Like, I wish I could open my cold dead heart to this, but maybe part of the reason Im so closed off is because this feels really good, and Im not allowed to feel good because nothing is fine. She looked up at me. You know what this is like? Its like those uplifting photos of veterans coming home to brand new golden retrievers, and you feel so moved, because theyve got this friend but then you catch yourself, like, wait. Thats not the war.

While we waited to march (there was some down time between the rallying and the actual marching) we killed time on Pennsylvania Avenue, where men shook Womens March T-shirts in our faces, hassling us to buy feminist souvenirs. One guy tugged my coat sleeve. Buy one shirt, get one hug, he leered.

I feel like this is a really complicated instance of sexual harassment, mumbled McKetta.

Women were all shaking their signs, and cheering with and for one another women of all ages and colors and shapes, women who drove forward side by side in electric wheelchairs, or strollers, or on rollerskates and we marched with our sisters straight past a begging homeless woman, who was hungry, and whom everyone ignored.

Kathleen Hale and McKetta at the Womens March in Washington. Photograph: Jason Hornick for the Guardian

Almost everyone around us, including me, was wearing a pink handknit hat with little ears, or pussyhats. Someone had gifted me one for the march, enclosing a little pamphlet that explained pussyhats would be a way to reappropriate the language Trump had used to shame us, while also aesthetically uniting the rally. I wondered whether the pussyhats, as a visual unifier, were in some ways compensating for a lack of coherent ideological agenda. So far, the prevailing criticism of the march had been that it touted no clear message, no clear demands.

Sure weve got different signs, different agendas, one woman reassured me, when I asked her about this. But that doesnt point to an overall fractured agenda. Its because Trump has hurt us in so many different ways, so were reacting in different ways.

The Republicans have done a better job of consolidating issues, she continued. What works against [the Democrats] is our inclusivity weve got a huge diversity of thought that could be misinterpreted by some as discrepancies. She jutted out her chin, nodding at an ugly Trump effigy that someone was holding. But Id rather be inclusive and too nice than hateful and bigoted, like him.

I guess thats what is so great about women: we were peaceful. We would not play into negative presumptions about us by sidetracking our cause with violence.

Underneath the cheering, you could hear endless compliments of one anothers clothes or choice of signage, and thousands of muffled apologies issued between women as they pushed through the tide of the march en route to meet friends or find port-a-potties because thats what women do when they need to get in your way and have no reason to hate you: they apologize.

Its part of the problem, but its also what makes being around them feel so safe.

Next to me, a daughter climbed on her mothers back for a better view and laughed, squealing at the sight of so much pink.

Something in me shifted. I felt tears prick my eyes. A teenager turned to me, her eyes haloed in glitter, and said, I cried too, when I saw everybody here like this, together all of us, and looking so, so strong.

Are you OK? McKetta asked, taking my hand. A few people noticed the gesture and started to cheer, waving rainbow flags in ecstasy.

Just pregnant, I said.

But I felt something not just my daughters feet on my bladder (which was also happening) but a sense of re-engagement. Like maybe if I could stay close to other women, not necessarily 500,000 at a time, but close to a few at all times, my daughter would be OK, and learn to love and defend and champion other daughters, no matter who they were, and no matter who was president. I cared about these people. I didnt know them, but I cared. And I felt that, even if some of their current excitement about McKetta and me had to do with their thinking we were lesbians, they cared about us too, and that together, we were better, and that the world, or at least our communities, might become better, too, because of us.

Hours later, as the march petered out, moods were high. Police allowed our crowds to walk directly down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, which is called Americas Main Street, even though it had not been permitted for our march. We stopped to boo outside the Trump International Hotel, taking breaks to commiserate about our lives and political beliefs and hopes for the future.

Suddenly, the only Trump supporter Id seen all day yelled down from a flight of stone steps, Welcome to Trump Land! He laughed at us, this big, performative, maniacal laugh, eyes shaded by the red hat. And in response, a man leapt from our crowd and attacked him. It was horrifying, these two fat men, punching and tearing at each other. And all of us, all the women, in unison, began screaming at them, chanting, Stop, stop, stop!

They heard us. The dudes stopped. We shamed them into stopping.

On this one corner our peacefulness had produced tangible results. Thousands of us had shown up, for ourselves and each other. It was amazing. We all agreed. I returned to our hosts apartment feeling full of hope. But later that night, at dinner, one of our hosts told us a story that made me pause about how when they were young, they used to sit with their friends around this big, spool table, high on acid.

And wed figure out the universe. Wed figure out the whole universe! But I was always the one who said, Wait, guys what do we do in the morning?

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