Drink Responsibly! Prologue
ABO!Vampire!Batfam x reader
Minors! Do! Not! Engage! +18 only.
Platonic! Alfred, Bruce x reader, Possessive! Batboys x reader
Warnings: Alcohol, bad choices, stupid choices, possessive behavior, a/b/o fic, there is slight blood and gore, it's a vampire au, age gaps, because they're all significantly older, it's going to get suggestive from here on out, reverse harem, slight proofreading
Writer's Note: I want to thank @sophiethewitch1 for inspiring me and talking me through posting my writing. I hope it doesn't let you down! This is also my first time posting my writing on Tumblr, please be gentle. English is not my first language. Also, this is a why choose fic. So, it's Dick, Jason, Tim, Damian x reader. Maybe even Duke. I think four is a lot. Got to draw the line somewhere. Chapter 2 will be posted tomorrow.
It was midnight when you finally stumbled out of the latest club. Your heels were long gone, as you had taken them off the first time they got stuck in a grate. You’re pretty sure you handed them to a nice girl in the bathroom while her friend held your hair as you threw up copious amounts of alcohol and bar food. She had been super nice, you liked the way her short black hair was spiked, and her blonde friend’s eyeliner was superb. Anyways, now you are shoeless and desperately looking for the next bar on your crawl.
Gin’s. Ooh, that’ll do. You reach out and grab your friend’s bicep, point at the neon sign, and do vague gestures. Of course, your friend is not as well off as you are, so it takes a while to get your point across. Only they start crying again over their bullshit bar fling, and the fact you have no shoes.
It didn’t matter, none of it truly mattered. Not a single thing. This was your one night off after weeks of back-to-back grueling shifts at a job that doesn’t care whether you live or die. Yesterday you even took a quick unintentional power nap on the toilet. All of this resulted in you being slightly crazed and a little deranged as your night progressed.
But hey, Gotham just brings that out in people. In your job's defense, no one could take any more sick or inclement weather days thanks to all the random villain attacks next to or at your office. You blame the monthly rut.
At least you didn’t get stuck on the subway taped to a bench by the Riddler this week as he awkwardly rifled through a notebook of pickup lines. Life was certainly looking up.
See, unfortunately, or fortunately depending on the propaganda you consumed, you were born an Omega. Which had never truly been an issue. Except for the fact that thanks to a few foul choices from the government, it was getting harder and harder to get access to affordable pheromone blockers. You wouldn’t have even chanced this outing if you hadn’t found that one pill that rolled a little under your cabinet. Hey, you were desperate for a night out.
“I’m going there”, you slur.
Yes, this was asinine, but you still managed to wheel yourself and your friend to Gin’s. You hardly noticed the dark shadows following you as your friends from the bathroom quietly herded you. As you and your friend jaywalked across the street, you didn’t notice the red-headed woman standing in the middle of the road, blocking traffic from actually hitting you. It also barely registered when the nice boy with flashing gold eyes took your hand and led you past the line and directly to the front. This. Was. Your. Night. Out.
“Hey man, she can’t come in here with no shoes”, the bouncer at the door complains.
He was going to say more until he looked at the man holding your hand so nicely. You could hear the slight choking noise, and in your drunken stupor, you stumbled a little into your guide.
“He’s going to shit himself”, you stage-whisper. Or what you think was whispering. You were screaming over the pounding bass spilling out of the door.
“Shhh, Jackson, she’s with me”, your guide replies.
“She can come in, her friend can’t. Sorry Duke, they’re way too fucked up”, the bouncer swears.
You gasp and let go of Duke’s hand, instead reaching for your friend and pulling them tight into your embrace. While smashing their face into your chest. Even though you were the most drunk you’ve ever been, you didn’t miss the spike in pissed-off Alpha vibes that happened around you. Still, you smacked a hand against your friend’s ear in an effort to protect them from what was said. Then you got sidetracked by their hair. It reminded you that you wanted a pet. Although with your work and class schedule, it would probably die in a week. Three days tops. At least you had your emotional support friend.
“I can’t leave them alone”, you say.
“Hun, how about I call them an Uber, they look like they’re ready to pass out. They definitely can’t handle it anymore”, Duke replies.
He gestures towards your friend, and you notice how they’re slowly swaying on their feet. Eyes half closed. Shit. It would be shitty if you left them passed out somewhere in the bar as you danced and drank. They were already on their fourth wind and fading fast.
“Look, you see this nice car”, Duke continues.
He turns you three, and suddenly you notice the nice black town car next to the road. You vaguely register the fact that it’s one of those high-roller cars. Ones that only the richest in Gotham could afford.
“See, this is Killian, he works for Wayne Enterprises. He’ll make sure your friend makes it home. I’ll even have him text you when they get there. Won’t that be nice? You don’t have to worry at all (y/n).”, he tells you.
You nod, and it all makes sense somehow in your drunken brain. He knows your name, so obviously you know him. He also knows your friend, since he rattles off their address and gently pries them from your clutches before handing them off to Killian.
You pay no mind to the mention of a name that would have sent shivers down your spine normally. Wayne. Mysterious and dangerous to all who get involved.
“I need them back, don’t sell their organs”, you warn.
Then he gives you a tight brisk smile as he turns away from you. A persistent thought is starting to nag its way through the cotton in your head. The slightest unsettling feeling. Maybe there was something wrong with that blocker pill you found on the floor of your kitchen. You were certainly feeling as though there were a lot of pissed-off Alphas near you. The undercurrent of anger was a tang you couldn’t escape. More and more you felt the need to run somewhere dark and quiet to hide.
You ignore the persistent tugging by Duke as you watch your friend get loaded into the car and driven away. Well. That ends that.
The next time Duke tugs on your hand, it causes you to slightly stagger. He easily catches you and spins you around and through the door before you can protest.
“Can I have a Rum and Coke?”, you shout over the music.
“Yeah totally”, Duke shouts back.
It’s only until you are tugged past the bar that you realize that everything is not all sunshine and daisies. No. No. This is wrong. You want to go back.
You put your heels in. Duke was not ready for resistance as your hand slid out of his grasp on the way to the V.I.P. section. He turns around to get a better hold of you, only to watch you slip into the crowd and get lost in the sea of swaying bodies. Fuck. He was told to bring you to them. You still had to be here, there’s no way you could have bumbled off far. Shit. One job.
Duke ran a palm over his face as he scanned the crowd. There’s no doubt in his mind. Bruce was going to be pissed. He wasn’t supposed to know about your little excursion out. Everyone had agreed, they would watch over you as the day turned. You still weren’t used to Gotham; you didn’t know the sort of creatures that came out during the night. While the rest of the world was happy and filled with normal and meta shifters, Gotham was overflowing with the less-than-stable. All more than happy to take a bite out of the innocent. The only thing that kept it in check was the unspoken King and his disgraced hellions.
If you had been sober, you would have noticed the people slowly disappearing from the crowd. You would have noticed that tonight was absolutely not a good night to be out. One by one, shrieks of fear and pain were mistaken for fun. Jostling in the crowd was hardly registered as the violence spread. The whole night, you were in a sea of sharks feeding. Now you had finally ditched what you didn’t know was your only protection.
Not to worry, fear splashes hot and cold against your nerves as sharp claws grip your arm, your back slamming into the bar as a distended jaw hisses open in front of you.
Yeah. Maybe you should have been drinking responsibly.
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because i'm seeing it come up again, a quick "mod thoughts re: all the voter fraud" discussion:
okay so like. in a perfect world, tumblr would have email verification that actually mattered, and we, the mods, would have some more effective way to prevent voter fraud than saying "oh no don't do fraud that's bad". however, we have neither of those things, and doing fraud on our polls is... ridiculously, laughably easy.
so, imagine our distress when during the techno/scar round, a lot of scar fans started getting very, very angry about fraud we weren't sure was even happening? that, indeed, we had absolutely no reason to think was happening at the time, and no way to do anything about it if was?
well. there were two options. and we took the one that would lead to everyone having more fun and things being less toxic overall in the community. the thing is: if we'd said "voter fraud is entirely unallowed, this thing we can't prevent and can't moderate", then the toxicity of fanbases blaming each other for "breaking the rules" would have gone through the roof. full-stop. and we... didn't want that. this poll did not matter. it still doesn't matter. it had grown wildly, wildly bigger than we'd expected, and we had basically no way to control the way everyone was acting about it, but we didn't want to make a statement that would cause people to be even meaner to each other.
so instead, we took the funny option. we said "yeah do whatever voter fraud you want we don't care". SLIGHTLY regret that we didn't know tumblr tried to make you follow random strangers' blogs when you made a new account otherwise maybe we would have been a BIT more clear about 'don't do that', but listen. by saying "voter fraud is totally fine" we made it funny that people were cheating. we made it so there was basically no such thing as "cheating". we made it so, and this was key, the growing toxicity about "but they're BOTTING" was stupid, because like... everyone's doing it now. openly and blatantly doing it. voters fraud is a beautiful name for a baby girl, and this poll doesn't matter and isn't worth getting worked up over, and you can't cheat if it's not against the rules and everyone's doing it anyway, is the idea here.
like, in an ideal world, would we have rampant voter fraud? nah. in a world where we can't stop it if it happens, though... may as well make sure both sides have equal opportunity to fraud, right? like, that makes it even again, right? and more importantly, it reminds people that this shit really, really doesn't matter.
anyway all of this is to say that if you all start coming into our notes and inbox again to start being really toxic about the other side of the poll and make me cry again i will be pissed.
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Finding "the meaning" to a show that could have had up to five or seven seasons but was cancelled after the second is somewhat like trying to understand a novel composed of seventy chapters by having read only twenty — there is a whole wealth of information which we do not possess that could alter our reading of any given element or of the entire thing in itself.
Still, there are always patterns that weave a story into a cohesive unit and they can help us to better grope in darkness towards comprehension. One such pattern in Warrior Nun appears to be how the consequences to mistakes, "sins" or evil deeds committed by characters manifest.
Basic storytelling usually requires characters to act on something so that complications or resolutions may arise from their choices and move the plot forwards. In Warrior Nun, many of these actions are quite tragic in nature: Suzanne's arrogance and pride lead to the death of her Mother Superion; Vincent's allegiance to the higher power he believed Adriel to be inspired him to kill Shannon; Ava's flight from the Cat's Cradle ends up damning Lilith as she is mortally wounded and taken away by a tarask... All of these events have negative outcomes and heavy repercussions on all characters directly or indirectly involved. Something changes permanently because of them, be it in the world around them or within the characters themselves.
And yet, it would seem that all of these dark deeds not only move the story forwards but might also have overall positive results. We would have had no protagonist without Ava — and she would arguably never have received the halo to begin with had she not been murdered. What's more, on a personal scale, the horrifying crime she suffers is, in the end, the very thing that allows her a second chance in life, a new life.
An act of outside evil permits Ava to grow and develop, shows her a path she would not otherwise have found. Without her own season in some sort of hell, Lilith would not have been able to advance towards other ways of being and understanding beyond her very strict limitations. Vincent and Suzanne would not have embarked on their own journeys of enlightenment without having caused the pain they are responsible for.
Beatrice might have been paying for someone else's mistakes, but she, too, is given the chance to grow into herself through it. The afflictions that torment these characters advance the overall plot, but they also advance them, as individuals, as long as they are willing to learn and keep going despite the calamities large and small that they are faced with. Beatrice keeps going after parental rejection, Mary keeps going after losing Shannon, Jillian keeps going after losing her son (in part through her own actions, adding insult to injury)... Trouble and the adaptation that follows it, if one is open enough to learn from the experience, motivates the characters, propels them forward, teaches them.
The problem of evil has occupied the minds of many a thinker throughout the ages, given how the very existence of it, evil, might call into question that of God (a good, omniscient, omnipotent one, anyway). A common way of justifying suffering (and also God), then, is by claiming, as Saint Augustine, that "God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist".
Now, it would be rather ridiculous to say of Warrior Nun that it follows in Leibniz's footsteps, also because this philosopher, expanding on the augustinian concept, attempted to defend the goodness of a real God with his "best of all possible worlds" while all we have is... Well, whatever/whoever Reya is.
But there seems to be an inclination towards some sort of optimism as a worldview nonetheless.
Betrayals reveal truth and grant knowledge (Vincent's culminates with the coming of Adriel, which allows us to know of the threat of a "Holy War" and thus prepare for it; Kristian's gives Jillian much needed insight, William's lights up the fuse for the fight to be taken more seriously...), crimes committed willingly or not open the way for Ava (Suzanne's killing of her Mother Superion causes the loss of the halo, which is transferred to Shannon, whose death opens the gates for Ava to walk through after being herself murdered by sister Frances)... The magnitude of these positive outcomes is perhaps not "balanced" when compared to the evil that brings them about, but there is still something to take out of the catastrophe.
However tragic the tones of a given event, the show itself appears to shun the predetermination that makes tragedy as a genre; if everything is connected, here it at least appears to not necessarily drag everyone into their horrible dooms.
What's more is that this lurking "optimism" matches really well with our own protagonist's personality.
And it makes perfect sense that Ava would do the best she could with whatever she is given.
Life for her, in the conditions she experienced after the accident, would have been unbearable without some sort of positive outlook on life. However deadpan, the joking and the "obscene gestures" and whatever other forms of goofing around beside Diego are a way of turning a portion of the situation in her own favour. Proverbial eggs have, after all, already been broken right and left — might as well make an omelette of whatever remains.
Humour is just another way of looking at the bright side of something, or, at the every least, of mitigating the utter horror it might bring. If the show allows for moments of lightness, if it lets us laugh, if it takes us through a perilous voyage which still bears ripe, succulent fruit instead of the rot of pessimism and its necessary contempt for humanity, it is because Ava herself sees things in this way. It isn't gratuitous or naïve in this case, but a true survival strategy, especially as it is confronted with the morbidity of Catholicism.
Here is a religion that soothes its faithful with the promise of reward in the afterlife — how else does one charge into battle against the unknown, risking one's own death along with that of one's sisters, without the balm of believing that we shall all meet again eventually, "in this life or the next"? How else does one come to terms with the ugliness and the pain of this existence if not by looking forward to a paradise perfect enough to make all trials and tribulations here worth it?
True nihilism would have annihilated Ava. Her present perspective is what avoided the abyss.
And there is nothing Panglossian to her attitude or what the show might imply by giving us her view on things. This isn't about "the best of all possible worlds", but of making the best of whatever situation we're in, of taking what we have and doing something with it, something good, something of ourselves. It isn't God making good out of evil, but our choices.
Killing innocent people and feeling no remorse will never be the best someone can aspire to do. Sister Frances, cardinal William, Adriel all learn this the hard way.
Those who do their best find that, somehow, they can move on from whatever it was that paralysed them. Ava, most of all, knows what it is to be stuck, frozen in place; she can never be the character who refuses to grow, even through pain, lest she condemns her spirit to the same fate her body is all too familiarised with. Those around her wise enough to let themselves be touched by her, by the dynamic power she carries, walk forth with her and live.
It says very little about "God" that Warrior Nun should adopt its heroine's views and seem "optimistic" as it progresses — but it speaks volumes about the values it presents for pondering, of the inspiration its protagonists provide, and of the multiple reasons why this is a story unlike most others.
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