#if anyone happens to know where I can find a good timeline of dc I will love you forever
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I had a fic idea and logically the first step seemed to be to make a timeline of canon and. Like. I knew. I knew. But still.
#this is why I write Crackfic#so there’s so much else going on that the timelines don’t even matter#crying inside rn#if anyone happens to know where I can find a good timeline of dc I will love you forever
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Terry's Birthday: Fandom, the Internet, and Citations
Or, a too long, too in depth essay on a fictional character's birthday
If you aren't thinking I'm a total nerd by the time you're done reading this than you didn't really read this. But, let's start at the beginning. Recently I posted a timeline I made for "Batman Beyond" and in the time since I made that post there's been something I've seen pop up in tags which I'd never heard of before. A few people were saying that Terry's birthday is August 18th. I was really interested in the source of this claim because I had no recollection of ever seeing it anywhere before now. I looked it up on google (as you do) and found this date scattered around the internet. Case closed, right? But I quickly realized there was a consistent problem on every site I came across. None of them cited a source for Terry's alleged August 18th birthday.
Just look it up yourself and you'll find that the date is ubiquitous across the internet. Yet, as far as I can tell after all my research, it's also completely unconfirmed. I mean, I may have missed something, but if I have than someone else is going to have to point it out to me. I also made a post prior to this one asking people to cite a source for Terry's birthday and no one has so far. You can have a look at that post if you want to know what I consider a good source on this subject. In any case, if this date or any other had been confirmed in any piece of media or in an interview with any DC creator involved in Batman Beyond than I think I would have found a citation for that source somewhere by now.
Right now it kind of seems like August 18th is fanon that's been recycled into "canon". This seems to have happened through a process of source-less wikipedia edits being parroted across reddit threads, sites featuring profiles of comic heroes, other wikis, etc. The less popular June 27th birthday for Terry seems to have gone through the same process. Here are links to some of these sites: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
As my research continued I came across some possible witness testimony of the first mentions of these birthdates:
a.) In this archived thread from the DCAU wiki, in quotations below, I've copied an excerpt of an exchange between two users that I feel is most relevant to this post (emphasis mine):
"So, I've noticed lately that a lot of different sites have been stating Terry's birthday to be August 18th with various years attached to the date. The earliest mention of which I could find is an edit to his wikipedia page in 2008 (which prior to the change stated his birthday was June 27th). I don't remember a mention of when he was born on the show or tie-in comics, and the third volume of comics didn't come out until 2010, so would anyone here know where these dates originate from? -- ReachingForRevolution (talk) 17:48, September 26, 2013 (UTC)"
"I've done some extensive timeline research, and I never came across a good source for those dates. All I saw was a wikipedia edit war with those two dates, but neither is correct AFAIK. The most cited year of birth is 2023, which is speculation as well, but there's at least some foundation for that. --Tupka217 17:56, September 26, 2013 (UTC)"
b.) A similar claim was made in this thread. The relevant excerpt, written by the user "Yojimbo" on October 16, 2023, is in quotations below (emphasis mine):
"No official birth date was ever given.
There was a wikipedia edit war in the 2000s but no source was ever given for either disputed date, June 27, 2023 and August 18, 2023."
As I've travelled down this rabbit hole, I've begun to suspect I won't be able to find exactly where it began, but this is as close as I've gotten. Allegedly, sometime around 2008, there was an edit war on Terry McGinnis' wikipedia page between at least two users over the birthdates of June 27th and August 18th. Now, how or why that edit war even started, I don't know. Why those dates, I also don't know. What I do know is that August 18th is the birthdate that gained the most popularity in the end and spread across the internet.
I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes with this post or call anyone out, really. If anything, this post exists because the subject was interesting to me and I've found the journey enjoyable. If you want to say Terry's birthday is June 27th or August 18th, then please do. Fandom is about fun, not perfectly sourced and cited dissertations on fictional teenagers' birthdays...unless, of course, that sort of thing is fun for you. I know I've loved every minute researching for and writing this...because I'm a massive nerd...but I certainly don't adhere to a strict reading of the timeline myself which is something I plan on covering in an upcoming addendum to my timeline.
In summary, my own research has produced no officially confirmed birthday for Terry McGinnis. This leads me to believe that August 18th and June 27th are fanon birthdates. It may be that I've just not found the citation for one or the other of these dates so I'm open to anyone who can provide me a good source. But really, none of this matters in the grand scheme of things, although it's interesting to see the way user edited/moderated wikis can sometimes bring less clarity rather than more. I'm sure this isn't the only example of that. Assuming I'm right and these birthdates are fanon, I wouldn't consider this a cautionary tale or anything so dramatic. Instead, I'd say this was a case study in the interaction between fandom collated information about fictional works as it exists across the internet and why the adage, "cite your sources", will never die...or something like that...
#batman beyond#terry mcginnis#dcau#this was supposed to be up like a week ago but I got sick on Jan 5th and haven't felt well enough to post this until now#anyway don't take this too seriously because I certainly don't#Terry's birthday can be whatever you feel like#despite my confidence in my research I'm open to being proven wrong on all this and will happily take the L in a follow up post#I'm honestly embarrassed by how deep I got into this subject it's so unimportant and I'm not sure anyone will find it interesting
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lone wanderer oc vs courier six oc
lore down below, if youre interested:
so im on unoriginal bitch but my lone wanderer and courier six are one person, CourierSix!Fall being 29 years old (i am following the canon timeline of the game as well as the age of the player character, so LW!Fall is 19 when she left the vault)
her lore is based on my first playthrough of the 3d fallout games (my Sole Survivor is related to Fall, being a distant, distant, DISTANT relative 200 years up in the family tree), so here's a rundown.
LW!Fall takes after her father, being studious and looking up to him. she grows up to be smart and was slated to be the next vault doctor under her father's guidance when the events of the start of fallout 3 happen. thrust out into the unforgiving wasteland and forced to learn so much in such a short time, she meets burke in megaton and, after trying so hard to keep her cool with moira and her endless perilous errands, LW!Fall rigs the atomic bomb in the heart of the small town to explode. she blew it up due to burke's offer as well but shh
shes proficient with energy weapons and is surprisingly agile for someone who's led a barely active lifestyle the past 19 years in a vault, sticking to the books and all. she's traipsing between good and evil morals that both the regulators and the talon company constantly jump at bounties put on her head because she can really just flip the switch between being an angel solving all your problems and overall someone you could rely when you need to know something/get something done, to downright apathetic trigger-happy marksman who can clear the entire room in seconds (GRIM REAPER'S SPRINT BABY).
storyline follows the game, as usual, she finds her dad, helps him with the project, everything goes downhill, LW!Fall meets President Eden and fucking short circuits the AI in their first meeting and runs out of the Enclave HQ as its destroying itself as payback for General Autumn killing James after LW!Fall swore she was going to kill the man and made sure he heard it. then she finishes project purity, elects to contain the radiation in the heart of the purifier rather than sentinel lyons, gets radiation poisoning and is saved by the brotherhood, goes to the pitt, kicks ashur's ass and takes the baby for the greater good yada yada.
being an honorary member of the brotherhood and with things looking up for the DC area, LW!Fall really has nothing else to do other than to wait for her to be called on by the Brotherhood for guidance or special missions. there's nothing really left for her there since her dad is already dead and both the organization and the man who killed him are dead. on top of that, she feels EXTREMELY guilty about what she did to megaton, though she never told anyone else she did it other than James who sussed her out from the start.
she left for the Mojave, starting over and working as a courier, where life is quiet and she never had to pick up a gun ever again, though clean water is hard to find, but she gets by.
then the events of new vegas happens and thus starts Fall's emergence to be Courier Six. albeit this time, with experience from her Lone Wanderer days, she's a calmer, more rational, still trigger-happy but at least the energy is now focused on using it for the greater good, loves hacking terminals and snooping around, learning about the old world more and more, being chill with yes man and actually talking it out with people rather than shooting first.
tl;dr: local retired vaultie just wanted to rest only to get bopped in the head. proceeds to let the mojave find out that the person who changed DC has been with them for the past 10 years
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okay so. so this so mild. but the first thing I thought of when i actually started playing this game in like late september/early october. is there is a very similar mindset amongst the many who I had met at the time that they just, didn't need to read the source material.
this can be found in many many fandoms. this isn't a enstars/dc specific thing. DC has a VERY huge barrier to entry and for enstars it way less so.
so you have to find fan translations of the older enstars stories and the way the timeline works it is kind of hard to parse through. where do you start when you weren't there for the whole thing. with enstars there is a (in my mind) objectively good starting point for the whole franchise. ! main story. not like kisaki or the later stuff. like the revolution to ensemble sections. then it's pretty vague. "follow your favs" is the fandom wiki's advice paraphrased and I remember that exact advice when I tried getting into DC. and the confusion when all these pre established characters came in like whhhaat. with Superman there's this image of him. you can get that pretty well if you follow some american pop culture stuff. but if you start to dive into DC with something like, Young Justice (1998) you meet robin and superboy and impulse. and they have all these people they know. and sure you can keep following young justice but you don't really understand what's going on over with say, Robin, who's apparently the 3rd robin? and the second robin. you don't. im off track.
I haven't gone through a decent amount of any of enstars so im incredibly sorry. but The EP:Link and like. the transition to !! it all reminds a bit about Crisis on infinite earths. and post crisis era. except like can i really say that as an exclhsivelt post crisis reader. hmm.
but yeah I'd say the japanese release of !! is the post crisis on infinite earths. and !! to english is having an effect of nu52 to the incoming fanbase (to an extent) but the content is the same... ish. so no where near asbad as nu52. more like rebirth or something. but these thigns are not equivalent.
enstars fans havetrouble finding translations, and after !''s main story it's a lot of "decide for yourself" what reading order if you wanna try and keep track of things happening. DC fans have a hard time finding copies of a decent amount of the older comics, you can't keep track of things no matter what you do. oh and enstars also has a bit of the same problem that dc has about dofferent writers to a tiny extent because Akira doesn't always write the stories, so they sometimes contradict(? don't remember seeing that butI know some say so.)
also enstars english ads are to enstars as Wayne family adventures is to any actual batman stuff.
have a good morning I am so brain dead 👋 thank you for listening ;w; one thousand high fives brigid, one thousand high fives
this is such a cool connection!! when you get really into media like comics and games you start to expect confusing timelines and such but it really isn’t a problem that many other mediums experience you know? they usually always start at chapter 1/episode 1 so attempting to get someone who’s used to that to adapt to enstars or dc would be pretty rough. i’ve already accepted the strangeness of enstars and kinda (?) understand the timeline now but if you asked me anything about how dc works i would not be able to answer. and just because of the nature of how dc comics and enstars stories are created and released, it’s really hard to fix the confusion without a sort of reset—which both of them did—and even then the problem doesn’t go away.
you can’t really think of a definite solution, and neither can anyone on the creative team so it seems, so everyone just gets used to it. it’d be cool to look at other franchises that have similar issues and compare the way each fandom adapts and finds solutions for the other problems you mentioned (finding translations, getting copies of older material that’s out of print, etc). i wonder if there’s consistent methods everyone follows along with, or everyone just does it in their own weird way🤔
#one thousand high fives back!!! this was so cool to read#my knowledge of dc is in the characters and stuff so hearing about the timeline is fascinating#also. the engstar ads being like wayne family adventures 😭😭😭
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a rundown of claire's kids, somewhat canonically, sometimes assumed / implied:
• sherry. this one is obvious, claire bonded with her in an instant that night in raccoon city and became claire's responsibility the same way she was to chris when their parents died. their bond is different because claire and sherry are not actually age to be mother and daughter, but it doesn't mean claire is not there filling the role anyway - always mindful to not step on anyone's shoes, sherry's got a bio mom who cared about her for better or worse and her presence doesn't erase that. claire fought tooth and nail to get her custody before simmons revoked her visit rights, and it was all for nothing since there would always be an excuse for which they'd find her unfit to be a legal guardian. the family claire, sherry ( and leon ) have created is not conventional, some could use a wrong acceptation and say they're trauma bonded - but the point is that claire made a promise to take of sherry and that's what she intends to do for the rest of her life.
• rani. i headcanon that she was around 5 when claire first met her. in a way her family situation reminds claire of her own - parents dead and her aunt took her in, just like it happened to claire with the burtons when chris was in the air force then stars. throughout the years after degeneration rani's aunt would drop her in new york during assignments where claire wasn't needed - they'd actually worked a schedule to make sure that rani would always stay with either one or the other. rani also spends most of the weekends over at claire's apartment, not that she minds giving aunt chawla some time for herself anyway. in canon timeline rani would currently be 21 and studying at NYU. her aunt died some time in early 2017 ( aged 60, unknown if it was on the field or natural causes ) and since then lives full time at claire's apartment.
• maalek. ( this one is tricky bc capflop didn't tell us shit, but who cares ) claire met him during her volunteering work in penamstan, his drawings catching her attention and quite literally starting all the chain of events that lead to her finding out about the outbreak. when we first see him, he's on a wheelchair and is declared mute by one of the volunteers even though he actually tries to speak a few words to claire, albeit unsuccessfully. i think claire spent a lot of time in penamstan after the events of infinite darkness, at least a few couple years since as we know of she's seen bsck in DC again only in 2010. claire made sure maleek would go to therapy both physical and for his mental health - taught him asl so that they could communicate with each other though she got him one of those blackboards that can be erased too. he was around 10 in 2006, which would make him 25 in current timeline. he's now comfortable walking with a cane, but still mostly communicate through asl. no need to mention he's one hell of a good painter.
• marilou. she gets an honor mention because claire met her back when she used to give ted talks in schools and they've kept in touch since then. obviously as we know marilou had a life already planned and it got crushed unfortunately, but it remains that she was still pretty young ( compared to claire at least ). though it's not outright specified, it's implied that claire took marilou under her wing after what happened in sonido de tortuga as is helping with the expenses for her college classes through a program with terrasave.
#ɢᴇɴᴇʀᴀʟ meta.#these are claire's kids in every iteration of her life obviously like they're a package deal lmao#other verses might include more kids obviously but that's for another meta 😂
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Would you say the comics industry is rotten to the core? Or that change can happen if implemented? How would you change the comicbook industry for the better? /gen
Rotten isn't the word for it but "Are Marvel and DC fucked (to MY standards) to a point of no return" is a decent question
And... kinda?
I think there's still great runs out there, happening at the Big 2. And I've even tuned in for some of them.
But I do think they are kind of... irreversibly fucked because there's just too many issues at hand. A short list of them being:
The universes are meant to never end, thus never providing proper closure.
Since the universe never ends, you can't reliably follow anyone's story. To fit different marketing quotas or "shake ups," characters will be shifted to new teams, new dynamics, even when it makes them less interesting or removes them from what makes them likeable.
This constant movement to prove a connected universe also means readers are CONSTANTLY bombarded with new characters, teams, backstory that they are expected to know.
The issue with being expected to know things, beyond the basics of "having to do homework," is it's... nearly impossible to find out. Did this character get rebooted? SOFT rebooted? Is this a different universe/timeline version of that character? Did you know this character but then in a run you didn't read or even just in a single issue you didn't read something GAME CHANGING happened nad now everything you're meant to know about them is different?
Accessing single issues is nearly impossible if you do not buy them within 1-3 weeks of release. It's VERY expensive if you do not live near a comic book shop and still relatively expensive if you DO. Last time I went, single issues were $5.
If your character has a guest appearance in another run, you have to spend AT LEAST $5 to know what is going on. Often more. Good luck knowing you need to buy that other issue in time, though.
"Why are you talking about prices, go pirate it!" Comic piracy is actually pretty reliable BUT this is the one case where if enough people odn't buy this shit, they WILL cancel the comic mid run. With ZERO closure.
Also, good luck finding out it's been canceled.
Actually, good luck finding out about most comic book runs if you don't wanna be knee deep in fandom to find out. Information about comic book releases are VERY annoying.
And with aallllll that said, say you put in the work, you actually just get really into digital comics (even though Marvel has fucked around with their data base and moved it way too often, idk about DC)... okay... your fave run finishes. It went great! You wait... maybe a couple months, maybe a couple YEARS for your fave to be relevant enough for a good run... now a WHOLE ENTIRE NEW WRITER AND ARTIST is taking over (potentially mutliple different artists for some runs). That new writer wants to take your fave in a new direction :)
Just an example: Joss Whedon took over the runaways and literally tried to retcon a character's... gender and thus another character's sexuality. That retcon, even if you ignore it, suddenly has to be contended with in EVERY future run until THAT Is retconned.
It's retcons and reboots al lthe way down baby!!!!!!!!
How do you get interested and STAY interested in a story with no consistent author's vision, always at risk of being canceled, comes out slowly, costs $5 a pop, disappears quickly from shops unless you go digital, and then even if it's coompleted it still might be retconned or rebooted if fans dont' like it?
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Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway.
There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts.
In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.
Funny how that happened.
There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die.
Here’s what you need to know:
There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that.
Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.
You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.
I’m barely scratching the surface here.
(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).
There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few).
I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish. God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.
This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust.
There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?
Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.
I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality.
There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.
With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me.
What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.
When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around. Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit.
And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me.
It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him.
Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two.
Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.
That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please.
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life after retirement
a/n: sometimes you just want to write a cute first date fic then start thinking real hard about your favorite character and go somewhere very different.
For someone who had never really wanted to be a Legend, Astra was taking retirement harder than she thought.
Everyone else more or less had something to go back to. Even Spooner had went back to her mother. But here she was, sitting on the pullout couch in Ava's office and staring at the digital clock on the wall.
It had been nice of Ava and Sara to offer her a place to stay, since Ava still kinda had a place in Washington, DC. Nate had offered her a guestroom at his mom's house, which she had gladly passed on, but maybe it would have been less awkward.
(Gideon had asked if she'd want to be dropped off back at John's manor, too. The longer she thought about it, the more she realized she'd matured out of having to stay under his roof.)
It wasn't just the awkwardness. The other three had lives here. They were known for being Legends; Sara and Nate were superheroes in their own right, while Ava had clocked in six years with some government-sanctioned time travel bureau. They had somewhere to pick up on.
In some way, it felt like she'd gotten nowhere since she first got to Earth. She even had to move in with her teammates. And her newfound magic was great, but rarely were jobs looking for witches. Generally, having a background check that listed that was ten years younger than they actually were made it hard to find some kind of footing.
Even if she could, what would she do? Her future had shown her running for president. Astra had always been climbing up, up, up in Hell, so it'd figure she'd be doing the same on Earth. She missed that power she'd had as the queen of Hell, but there hadn't been much of a choice before. Either she could rise to the top, or just be a tool for everyone to walk over. For her own sake, she’d chosen the former.
She knew she hadn't been the only one disappointed with her future. Zari hadn't exactly seemed thrilled with what Gideon had showed her. Although they'd been dropped off before the Tarazis, she wondered how she was taking it. She couldn't even ring her up, or Behrad, or Spooner.
Fuck it. Maybe Ava still had some good booze around.
There was nothing in the office, so she headed downstairs. Astra hadn’t expected anyone, but Ava was on the couch with a glass of wine and her laptop. The bottle was on the coffee table, already half-empty.
She glanced up as she walked in. “Hey. Need anything, another blanket?” she asked.
“No,” she said. “I need you to share that wine.”
“Go ahead. Glasses are in the cabinet by the sink.”
Once she’d poured herself a glass, she joined her in the living room. The whole place was the opposite of the manor; where John’s place was old and already pretty busted, this place was model home new. She was surprised that the couches hadn’t been covered in plastic to make sure they didn’t stain.
“I thought you’d be celebrating with the missus,” Astra said after she’d taken a sip.
Ava set her laptop down beside her. “We had enough of a party on the ship.” When she saw her expression, she clarified, “The actual party, not having sex.”
“Still, I figured even you would be having more fun than moping with your laptop.”
She sighed. “Me too. But retiring means, well, the opposite of retiring and finding a job. I have to pay the bills somehow.”
“Our problems are so boring now,” Astra remarked.
“Yeah,” Ava said. “Have you thought about the whole president thing?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Is this where you break out my ten-year plan?”
Keeping eye contact, Ava clicked something on her laptop. “No.”
Astra finished off her wine and set the glass down. “You’ve been at this time travel thing for a while, right? Do we really know if all those futures will actually happen?”
She leaned back against the couch. “We’ve seen the effect little things can have on the timeline. I think what Evil Gideon showed us was an approximation, but it doesn’t have to be set in stone.” She tapped her finger against her glass and took another sip. “You know, I never saw myself having a kid.”
“And I never saw myself being president,” she admitted. “Power is nice, but running Hell is a different ballgame than running a country.”
“I’d say Hell seemed pretty functional under your rule, but I only went there the one time,” Ava said, setting her empty glass down.
“I’ll take the compliment anyways.” Astra refilled their glasses. “And in your case, I think running a team is different than taking care of a kid.”
“Even if the Legends could act like a bunch of children?” she asked.
“Pretty sure.”
Ava picked her glass back up. “Yeah, I think kids is what Sara wants.” She took a sip and pointed a finger at her. “But you don’t need to deal with what other people want for you. You have to figure out what you want for yourself. Because, Astra, you’ve come a long way since Hell.”
She knew that well enough - from her growing magic, from her time on the team, even from dealing with Harris fucking Ledes. But it put into context why that wasn’t what she needed. Or really, why it wasn’t about her at all.
“I wanted power in Hell to survive. But being president isn’t about power,” Astra said. “It’s about making things better for other people.”
She couldn’t tell how much Ava had actually drank from the bottle before she got down there, but she heard her mutter, “Man, maybe I should be a therapist.”
“Okay, if you were more sober, I’d ask you to be my campaign manager,” she joked.
Setting the glass down, she said, “Yeah, I’m not trying to celebrate my retirement with a hangover.” She met her eyes again. “I’ll be your campaign manager when you have a campaign to manage.”
“Deal.”
“And if you find that that isn’t what you want to do, then there’s a world full of choices out there and a new future to find.”
“And a new ten-year plan?” she asked.
Ava chuckled. “Okay, I can’t make any promises there, but I can come up with a five-year plan for any wild idea you wanna try, at least.”
“Maybe not every wild idea.” Astra glanced over at her laptop. “Hey, do you know anyone who can hack into personal records? Because if people keep thinking I should be sixteen, I think that ten-year plan is going to go off the rails.”
“Oh, you could probably ask Flannel-Zari when we all meet up in the manor. She’s definitely hacked into some wild shit,” Ava told her.
For a moment, she wondered if dating Behrad could help get her more on her good side. “Mm, I’ll keep that in mind.”
Ava shut her laptop. “I think I’m going to head to bed.” She picked up her glass as she got up. “You know, you should join book club.”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
She shrugged. “Just consider it.”
Astra watched her drop off her glass in the kitchen, then go upstairs. She was feeling a little better about retirement - just not good enough to get talked into book club.
#alli writes shit#legends of tomorrow#lot spoilers#astra logue#ava sharpe#how did i go from trying to find someone for astra to ask for clothing advice to THIS
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Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?
I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s).
I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.
Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.
He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth?
That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-
Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.
The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).
Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -
Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:
Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914).
Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.”
He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.”
Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.
The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins
And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,
Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion
One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day.
I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”
They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth.
You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.
Whoops!
Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.
The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm.
He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.
The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel
I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.
Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC.
So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?
Just until he gets his full powers back of course.
I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.
#replies tag#marvel comics#marvel#dc comics#dc#pulp heroes#pulp villains#martian manhunter#plastic man#kraven the hunter#two-face#shuma-gorath#marvel vs capcom
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'Sorry Wrong Ed' Alternate Ending Storyboard Sequence
Check out Al Kang's Ed, Edd n Eddy portfolio!
Al Kang worked on the show during seasons 3-4 and had roles on the storyboard and prop teams apparently. (IMDb says he was credited as Al Choi at the time, but it also says he worked on season 1 episodes, which doesn't line up with the timeline he mentioned.. anyway.)
I discovered his portfolio a few months ago after seeing fandom discussion of the alternate 'Sorry Wrong Ed' ending. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few other treats as well! But yes, I even sorta liked what I learned about 'Sorry Wrong Ed' in the process... (I threw in a little analysis comparing the two endings at the bottom)
I noticed Al seemed to mix up the order on these, so I thought I'd try my best to figure out the right order. This was the most confusing one for me to try and figure out the order of since almost all 8 pages were out of order. I think I finally figured out what's going on in the original ending.
So this alternate ending starts at an unknown point with Eddy flat on the ground, presumably injured, picking himself back up. At this point in the final cut of the episode, Eddy has just been squashed by a tree, but this seems more like a different injury, and he's not even retaining his injuries from the truck scene... The scenes with Jonny and Plank from the final cut of the episode seem to not exist at all here, Jonny and Plank don't appear in this sequence.
Anyway, Eddy picks himself up in the middle of an on-going scene, sees Jimmy drop a coin in a jar for Ed, who has inexplicably turned the cursed phone into a scam on his own. Edd is glaring at the off-screen kids, who have somehow learned about this phone and are excited to kill Eddy with it.
Eddy: "Jimmy! No!"
Jimmy answers the phone: "Hello?"
Ed: "HA HA HA"
Edd: "You people don't seriously believe--"
Then we sync up with gags that did happen in the ending of Sorry Wrong Ed, with context that makes its tone a little more sadistic than random. Jimmy's paid phonecall drops the sandbox on Eddy.
This page has the most skeletal dialogue...
Kev: "Yes." (I think he's meant to be fist pumping because Eddy got hurt, more of a "Yes!")
Jimmy: "BAD LUCK EDDY PHONE." (this dialogue must have been a placeholder)
Edd: "HA HA" (sarcastic ha-ha or did Al mean to write "Ed" for this?)
Jimmy seems to offer the phone to Edd.
We sync up again with Edd's denial from the final cut of this episode, except now it actually makes sense that he's so one-track-minded, because there are people actively arguing with him and keeping him disengaged from the victim.
Edd: "There must be a cargo plane overfilled with playground supplies..."
Sarah interrupts him.
RING RING
Sarah: "Oh, that's for me."
Eddy at this point holds Ed responsible, as he should, and starts running to stop Ed or Sarah. Ed offers no explanation for his betrayal.
Eddy: "Ed! What are you doing!?"
Sarah: "Hello?"
Sarah's paid phonecall summons the hippos, the most random moment in the final cut of the episode. Note how both of these slapstick gags were storyboarded on the same generic background, seems like the lane or an empty lot, but clearly a different location than Eddy's front yard from the aired ending.
And that's all we have to go off of!
I'll put my updated opinions below the cut, but suffice it to say, I like the episode a little better now! Knowing what the ending was going to be and trying to figure out the choices that led to the ending we got, I feel more appreciative that it didn't end up a lost episode or something and less annoyed that it was 11 minutes of one joke.
I know I have a reputation for not finding slapstick funny and disliking this episode, but violence was never my only issue. Lots of episodes have lackluster slapstick that I just let wash over me. My point that never gets as much focus is that this episode never felt FINISHED to begin with. It's just a slapstick vacuum with no ending and no point, and it used to be frustrating to me not knowing for sure if my hunch was right or not that it felt like the episode just wasn't working and they had to cobble it together from the scenes that almost worked.
I am surprised to say I like the episode more now that I know that is pretty close to the truth. Judging from this peek into the episode's development, this episode seems to have reached Danny Antonucci's and/or Wootie's (the episode's lead board artist) limit for being mean-spirited with the characters without a reason. I'll still probably avoid rewatching it, but knowing the episode has no ending specifically because it's been trimmed to bare bones is somehow reassuring.
The most obvious flaw to this original ending is the lack of motivation for Ed's or the kids' actions. The kids presumably still weren't in the rest of the episode, so there's really no reason for them to be here other than reiterating the same idea from 'Your Ed Here' and 'The Good Ole Ed' that the neighborhood kids are always looking for a reason to gang up on Eddy, something that isn't really true of those characters in earlier seasons.
I think I can imagine how, on paper (in the writers' outline), this episode sounded funnier. Trying to imagine this ending as part of the whole episode, I think the script's idea of the final joke is that Ed is not satisfied with ending the tests at the point where they tried to return the phone to Rolf. I think Ed converts the curse-testing process to a scam at that point, building off of how Ed already wasn't processing Eddy's safety in anything so far, and is probably more focused on proving to Edd that curses are real (as Ed was previously in league with Evil Tim). The addition of Ed running his own tests and the kids arguing Eddy's point against Edd's while Eddy's busy, does sound more like a complete manic cartoon boiling point than the way the finished episode just petered out with Edd as the sole antagonist. But unfortunately, in visual execution, suddenly piling in so many aggressive characters and so much random violence at once, would only really result in it petering out at a higher volume.
Meanwhile Edd's characterization is made much more structurally sound in the original ending. He's annoyed FOR Eddy's sake, and the only reason he's not actively helping Eddy is because like 3 other characters were supposed to be arguing with him while this was happening. It seems extremely apparent to me that the cuts made to this ending were for the sake of mitigating Ed's reputation in the fandom, as well as the kids', and I think it's really unfortunate that Edd's characterization was the cost for salvaging everyone else's. I'm glad I already considered his behavior in 'Sorry Wrong Ed' non-canon, because now it feels like the reason the aired ending is so out-of-character is just because Edd is basically arguing with the ghost of the original scene. I formally forgive 'Sorry Wrong Ed'. Production turnarounds are tough and AKA did their best to not turn this into another forgotten 'Special Ed' episode that simply wasn't working.
I think ditching the original ending was ultimately the right call. It was not an exemplary episode, but I can admit it's less out of place to have a pure "vacuum of violence" story than it would've been to essentially give the kids a supernatural revenge plot like this. That would've been really weird to have to accept-- Eddy definitely wouldn't want to be friends with anyone at the end of the movie if THIS was their past. Changing it to an unaware Jonny and a questionably aware Plank being responsible, indeed, was a vibe that landed much more like standard EEnE fare. It was weird enough that the kids all saw Santa in JJJ, can you imagine if they all knew curses were real AND participated in attacking a neighbor with one??
If there was a silver lining for me the first time I saw this episode, it was that none of the kids were directly involved in Eddy's suffering. It made the questionable reality of the cursed device slightly more acceptable that only the Eds and Rolf know about the curse. If this ending had happened, I would've reacted the same, but I would've rejected its continuity even more than I do now, because it would just feel like they animated one of the DC Comics (where the kids can blow the Eds up with fireworks at the end or the Eds can randomly be crushed under an avalanche of anvils)-- the art could end up gorgeous but the characterizations don't exactly land as real human beings, the balance this show strives for typically.
And I think that's all I wanted to say! In the end, I found myself liking 'Sorry Wrong Ed' slightly more than I used to, all thanks to this glimpse into how the animation production system morphs the outcome of a cartoon. Thanks so much to Al Kang, for sharing your art and this insight into the industry! I don't know whether he did both the gesture drawings and the revised art, but judging from his other boards I think the cleaned up art is his, and I liked seeing the poses that almost were!
#ed edd n eddy#sorry wrong ed#al kang#storyboard#concept art#alternate ending#deleted ending#alternate sequence#analysis
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My Spy - Chapter 2
A/N: I had a couple of things I wanted to mention but forgot to put on the first chapter: First, I've taken some liberties and had Beca and the freshman Bellas living in the Bellas House since they were officially Bellas. Second, I have loosely followed the timelines set out in each of the PP movies, with some literary license on some of the events. Third, I will be using flashbacks to tell some of Beca and Chloe's history from when they were together and from their individual lives; flashbacks will be in Italics.
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The Bellas walked out of the diner to see Beca sitting on a bench, with her head down. Stacie and Aubrey broke away from the group and went over to her. The other girls stayed back to give them some space.
"What happened, Beca?" Stacie asked as she sat on the bench next to Beca.
"What did Chloe say?" Aubrey asked as she, too, took a seat on the bench.
"I didn't talk to her," Beca mumbled.
"What do you mean you didn't talk to her?" Aubrey asked.
"I called and got one of those messages stating the number was no longer in service," Beca said, wiping her eyes.
"I'm so sorry, Beca," Stacie said, pulling Beca into a hug.
CR started walking over to the bench; the rest of the Bellas followed.
"Beca, can we do anything?" CR asked.
Beca just shook her head.
"I guess we'll just have to wait to see if Chloe reaches out to you," Aubrey said.
"I don't know if I even want to talk to her anymore," Beca blurted out.
"Don't you want some answers?" Jessica asked. "Answers that only Chloe can provide?"
~~ My Spy ~~
Later that night, instead of being on her way home to Portland as she had planned, Chloe was on a plane with other agents bound for Washington, DC. Her bosses decided that all the undercover agents involved in the drug bust needed to fly to Headquarters for a debriefing.
Chloe stared out the plane's window, wondering what Beca was doing now.
"She probably hates me," Chloe thought as an unwanted tear rolled down her cheek.
Chloe discreetly wiped the tear while glancing at her partner and seatmate to make sure he hadn't noticed. She was lucky; he was talking to another agent across the aisle from them.
Chloe looked up when one of the agents in the seat in front of her got on his knees and leaned his arms on the back of his seat. He looked at Chloe and smiled.
"Nice tackle on that guy, Beale," he said.
"Um, thanks, Davidson," Chloe responded.
"So, uh, some of us are planning to get a drink once we get situated at the hotel," Davidson said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I was wondering if you would like to join us?"
"No, thanks," Chloe said. "I'm kind of tired. I think I'll just spend some quiet time in my room once we get there. Thanks for the invite, though."
"Sure, no problem," Davidson said before turning and sitting back down in his seat.
Chloe went back to staring out the window at the night sky. She was overthinking everything.
"I should call Beca and see if she's ready to talk to me. God, I hope she still wants to talk to me."
For the second time in ten minutes, Chloe tried to discreetly wipe a tear away, surprised to find both cheeks wet as more tears streamed down her face.
Chloe's partner, Jason, saw this and was momentarily shocked. The ever-stoic Agent Beale does not show her true emotions to anyone. Ever. He always admired that about her because it's a large part of what makes her a good agent.
Jason knew Chloe would be teased and bothered by the other agents. So he did what any good partner would do. He put his arm around her and sat sideways while wrapping his other arm around Chloe's shoulder and putting her face into his chest, essentially hiding Chloe's face from everyone's view.
"You look tired, Beale," Jason said loud enough for others to hear. "Feel free to lean on me and get some sleep."
Chloe nodded into Jason's chest and whispered a teary thank you.
~~ My Spy ~~
It had been four days since Beca last saw or spoke to Chloe. It had also been four days since her dad and the others had been arrested. Her father being arrested is still something she was having trouble wrapping her head around.
Beca's mother sent her money so she could replace her broken phone, with the promise that Beca would get a new number so Chloe couldn't contact her. Beca couldn't keep that promise, so she sat with her brand new phone with the same old number, staring at texts she and Chloe had shared over the past year.
Beca had gone back and forth about whether she wanted to call Chloe and would then remember that the number she had for Chloe had already been canceled. She was pacing around her room when her phone rang.
"Hello," Beca said, answering the call without looking at the caller ID.
"I was wondering why you hadn't called to give me your new number," Beca's mother, Sarah, said.
Beca swallowed. "I'm sorry. I'm still hoping that Chloe will call so that she can explain everything."
"Hmm," Sarah said. "I don't know if I would believe anything she had to say."
"I still need an explanation of some kind," Beca said as tears stung her eyes. "I love her, mom."
"How can you still say that?" Sarah asked. "She obviously was using you to get to your father."
"Is that what you think?" Beca scoffed. "Well, you're wrong. And stop blaming Chloe or anyone else, and put the blame where it belongs. Dad wouldn't have been arrested if he hadn't been involved in a drug ring in the first place."
Sarah sighed into the phone. "I didn't call to fight with you."
"Then why did you call?"
"I called because you've only got a couple of weeks until Spring Break, and I want you to come home. You don't have to worry about the cost, I'll pay for your ticket."
"Oh," Beca said. "I was, uh, kind of planning on coming home and bringing Chloe to meet you. I guess I can still come, but it will just be me."
It hurt Sarah's heart to hear Beca sounding so emotional and defeated.
"Baby, I know you're hurting," Sarah said. "Come home and you can forget about Chloe, your father, and everything else. At least for a little while."
Beca sniffled. "I already said I'd come."
"Good," Sarah said. "I'll buy your ticket and send the confirmation to your email. Keep an eye out for it; I know how you are about reading your emails."
"Text me when you send it," Beca said. "That way I can't miss it."
"I can do that," Sarah said. "I love you."
"I love you, too," Beca said. "Talk to you later. And, mom?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks."
~~ My Spy ~~
After four days, the debriefings were done and everyone was told they could go home.
"I'm beat," Chloe thought as she entered her hotel room. "It's been four extremely long and tiring days. The debriefings we had to suffer through for four days, could have been accomplished in a few hours."
Chloe threw her laptop on the bed and sat down. Her thoughts took over again.
"It's also been four days of no responses to texts I sent to Beca with my new number. Four days of phone calls going unanswered. Four days of missing Beca more than I've ever missed anyone in my life, even my parents. Four days of suffering the uncertainty about where my relationship with Beca stands."
"Who am I kidding?" Chloe mumbled as she fell back onto the bed. "I'm sure there's no chance of there even being a relationship anymore."
"Go home," the Director had told them before dismissing them for the day.
"Home?" Chloe questioned as she laid there wondering where "home" even was. Barden had been her home for almost four years. She was still enrolled as a student, and she only had a couple of months before she graduated. It was probably for the best if she went back and finished out the year. And if she happened to get to see and speak to Beca, even better.
Chloe's thoughts moved on to her Aunt Peggy and Uncle Matt. Her uncle is the one who got her involved in the agency to begin with, and she definitely didn't want to go to Portland and hear how she screwed up by falling in love while on the job.
Even as she thought this, she knew that no matter what anyone told her, she would never regret falling in love with Beca. She had tried not to let it happen; God knows she had tried. But, she finally accepted that it was meant to be and let it happen. And it was amazing.
Chloe quietly laid there with a plethora of thoughts running through her head. Her last thought fell back to her Uncle Matt, the man she held responsible for everything, good and bad, that had happened since he recruited her. It wasn't long before Chloe had fallen asleep and her thoughts invaded her dreams.
Chloe was a month into her Junior Year at Barden when she was surprised to see her Uncle Matt's name on her caller ID; he rarely called. He usually communicated with her via text.
"Hello, Uncle Matt," Chloe said, answering the call. "Why are you calling?"
"Chloe," Matt said. "I have an opportunity that I think you'd be wonderful for."
"What kind of opportunity?"
"I want you to help us with a case I'm working on," Matt said. "It has to do with Barden University and since you're already a student, you're the perfect person to help.
"What's the case?"
"We've been investigating a drug ring that's operating out of Mexico," Matt said. "They are moving the drugs up the East Coast and we have evidence that Barden is a major hub. We believe there are professors and students involved in the buying and selling of those drugs. We need an agent on the inside to help us gather more evidence about the drug ring and how it operates."
"But, I'm not an agent," Chloe said.
"You will be," Matt said. "We'll train you during your Winter Break. Six weeks is plenty of time to get the minimum training needed to do this. And then, if needed, we can give you more extensive training during the Summer Break."
"Can I think about it?" Chloe asked.
"Sure," Matt said, smiling. "Just don't wait too long. In the meantime, keep your eyes open around campus. If you see anything suspicious, call me."
"I will, Uncle Matt," Chloe said. "I have to go. I have a class."
A week later Chloe had seen a drug deal going down so she called her Uncle Matt to tell him about it. Agents arrived within minutes and she watched as the guys were arrested. She got such a rush from it that she immediately called her uncle and agreed to work for him on the case from that moment on.
Chloe woke up with a start when someone knocked on her hotel room door. She sat up and looked around.
"Chloe? It's Uncle Matt," Matt's voice called out from the hallway.
Her Uncle Matt coming to see her was not a surprise considering he was kind of her boss and it was his case. Chloe jumped up and ran to the door, opening it.
"Come in, Uncle Matt," Chloe said to the man.
Matt entered the room and turned to Chloe.
"Have a seat," Chloe said, motioning to the chairs around a small table.
Chloe walked over and sat down, expecting her uncle to do the same. Instead, Matt remained standing and was pacing back and forth. After a few minutes of him not speaking, Chloe became fidgety.
"So, what's up?" Chloe finally asked.
"I've been hearing some rumors that there is something going on between you and Beca Mitchell."
"Was," Chloe said.
Matt stopped pacing and looked at Chloe.
"I'm sorry, what?" Matt said
"There was something going on between me and Beca Mitchell," Chloe said. "But, thanks to you having everyone arrested on campus instead of waiting to catch them receiving the drug shipment, it's no longer an issue. My cover was blown and now she hates me."
Matt ran a hand through his hair. "We had to do it, Chloe. We got word that the Mexicans knew about our planned raid and had the shipment delivered early. We weren't prepared for that, so arresting the sellers was the only way we could keep most of the drugs off the streets. You should be proud; the agency considers this a success."
"Good for you," Chloe said, standing and facing Matt. "Is that it?"
Matt sighed and said, "Your Aunt Peggy wants to know if you're coming home."
"Home?" Chloe snorted. "I don't even know where home is anymore. My plan is to go back to Barden to finish the year so I can graduate."
"You do know you will always have a home with us, right?" Matt said. "You're like our own daughter."
"Would you have recruited your own daughter to be an agent?"
Matt swallowed and looked down. "Probably not."
"That's what I thought," Chloe said, walking over to the door and pulling it open. "I think you should go now."
Matt looked at Chloe and walked to the door.
"Please think about seeing your Aunt Peggy at some point," Matt said. "She misses you."
Chloe looked down at the floor, not saying anything. Matt kissed the top of Chloe's head before stepping through the doorway and walking away.
Chloe let the door close and went over to her suitcase. She started throwing her clothes into it.
Once everything was packed, Chloe got on her computer to book a flight to Atlanta. After confirming a flight for the next day, she bought a used car through an online car dealership near campus. She also put a down payment on a furnished apartment, sight unseen, just off Barden's campus.
~~ My Spy ~~
The next day, Chloe flew to Atlanta. She took an Uber to the used car lot and drove her 'new' car to her apartment.
Once she had the apartment keys in hand, she checked out the apartment and unpacked her clothes. Looking around she decided to drive to a nearby store to purchase a few groceries.
After a light dinner, Chloe pulled out her laptop and opened the email she had sent to herself with the phone numbers of all the Bellas. She picked up her phone preparing to send a text.
Chloe chewed on her lip, trying to decide which of the Bellas would be the most receptive to her. She smiled as she looked through the list and made her decision. She put in the number and started typing, hitting send when she was satisfied with what she had written.
UnknownNumber: Lily, this is Chloe Beale. I know you and the Bellas are angry with me, but please hear me out. I've tried calling and texting Beca but haven't received a response. I know she's angry and hurt but would you give her my new number and ask her to call me? I really need to speak to her. My number is (555) 809-1985. I'm really sorry about everything. I hope one day you can all forgive me.
Lily was shocked when she saw the text from Chloe. She was torn as to what to do. She didn't tell anyone about the text, but she did respond.
Lily: Beca busted her phone the night of the arrests. I will give her your number, but I can't promise she'll use it. And, for what it's worth, I understand you were doing your job so I forgive you. Good luck to you.
Chloe was surprised to receive a response so quickly. She knew that Lily was different and the rest of the Bellas wouldn't be so quick to forgive her. She had to admit, it felt good to have at least one of them forgive her. It also made her hopeful for the first time since she and Beca last saw each other.
UnknownNumber: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
After sending the final text, Chloe put all the Bellas' numbers back in her phone, hoping she' be using them one day soon.
~~ My Spy ~~
Chloe knew that if she was going to resume attending classes she would need her textbooks. All of which were still in the room she had shared with Beca in the Bellas House. She thought about asking Lily to get them and bring them to her. She quickly dismissed that idea because it would mean telling Lily she was in Barden, and she wasn't ready to do that just yet.
An hour later, Chloe was dressed all in black, sitting in her car parked down the street from the Bellas House. She knew the Bellas had a rehearsal and would be leaving soon.
Chloe felt bad because the Bellas would have to change the choreography to accommodate her absence. Aubrey would also have to give her solo to someone else. Chloe had loved singing with the Bellas and especially with Beca.
Chloe checked the time and sat up in her seat to watch the front door of the Bellas House. It was less than a minute later the door opened and the girls were coming out. Chloe watched and started counting so she would know when they had all vacated the House.
Chloe's breath hitched when saw Beca walking out after Stacie. It took everything she had not to jump out of the car and run to Beca and pull her into a hug.
As soon as the group rounded the corner at the opposite end of the street, Chloe got out of her car. She looked around and all was quiet.
Chloe stuck her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and kept her head down as she made her way to the house. She was able to enter with no trouble.
Once inside, Chloe stood and listened to ensure the place was empty. When she was sure, she made her way to Beca's room, stopping outside the door for a moment as memories of the intimate moments she shared with Beca in the room, rushed into her head.
Chloe took in a deep breath and opened the door, scanning the room before quickly gathering her books and stuffing them into the backpack she was carrying. She saw Beca's favorite hoodie lying on the bed and picked it up. She put it to her nose and inhaled deeply; it smelled of Beca. She shoved the hoodie into the backpack and took it with her, quickly making her way out of Beca's room and the Bellas House.
Chloe didn't breathe again until she was safely back in her apartment.
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My HxH ships
Disclaimer: These are my thoughts on my ships to share with my Tumblr friends. If you’re some stranger who disagrees with it and it evokes negative emotions on you, kindly exit. I know the internet has a bunch of trolls/idiots that has a habit of harassing people because the ship is “wrong” or it doesn’t suit them. Well, honestly, I don’t really care if you agree with them because I don’t know you personally? And this is fictional so it’s not something to be taken personally or even seriously. Don’t confuse my personal values with what I like with the ships.
I can’t believe I even need to make a disclaimer on this because a bunch of people don’t know how to be civilized once they are anonymous on a social media platform. I will just block lol; BYEEE.
HxH I love:
Defintion - Actively ships them, willing to make fanfics of them if possible
1. Kurapika x Neon
This ship is so underrated it hurts. They may not be similar in terms of personality and views of the dead: Neon focuses more on the living and the present (that’s why she doesn’t have sympathy for the dead and tells Chrollo her fortunes are for the living), while Kurapika focuses on the past and mourns for the dead (his mourning for his clan). But I think both of them are very similar in terms of loneliness. Neon doesn’t have friends and lacks affections from her father; Kurapika is lonely because all of his clan members are dead.
I know the common barrier is Neon’s hobby for flesh collecting, but I think this difference is what makes it more complicated and interesting for me. Especially when Kurapika has been in many seasons under the Nostrade Family... it makes me wonder what kind of interactions they had since it was all Killua and Gon on-screen.
2. Hisoka x Machi
I actually had always liked Hisoka with Machi together. Hisoka seems to really like her and enjoys her company. Machi may seem irritated by him but I think she’s more of a tsundere? She still decides to patch him after the fight against Chrollo, and their relationship got a bit more complicated after the Hisoka vs Chrollo fight.
3. Tserreidnich x Theta
Okay, I LOVE this ship. This is right out love-hate kind of relationship. It lowkey reminds me of Clarice/Hannibal and I find this ship so fascinating? I don’t see a lot of fanfics of them unfortunately. So Legacy by Alltagsabenteuer is a blessing from heaven because it’s the only TsexTheta tag in AO3.
So far I haven’t found anyone else who loves this ship, so please identify yourself if you do.
I’m starting to think I like those complicated love-hate dynamics....
HxH ships I like:
Definition of like - Actively ships them, may make fanfics of them or not. But doesn’t think of them 24/7.
1. Pokkle x Ponzu
This was like, a ship that never really sailed because Togashi decided to kill them both. I think this ship had potential and I’m hoping they find happiness in the afterlife.
2. Chrollo x Neon
I actually really liked how they vibe together during this one scene (although Chrollo targetted to meet her for her fortune-telling abilities). I am a KuraNeon shipper but I like the idea of Chrollo being a 3rd party because I think it fits so well? Chrollo and Kurapika are enemies and I had always found it fascinating how both of them got entangled with the same woman.
Also, people be like “Neon is 16″ uhhh... Hunterpedia states she’s born in 1982, along with Kurapika and Milluki. She’s the same age as Kurapika and Milluki; and Kurapika is widely accepted as 19 now; and it does tally if you see the Hunter x Hunter timeline (although there has been several discrepancies and dubious canonity when it comes to the Official Hunter x Hunter database and the HxH manga timeline). I’m not sure why people falsely remember Neon as a year younger than Kurapika and use it as a common argument to not support Chrollo/Neon when people have no problems (except for some) when it comes to shipping Kurapika with Chrollo.
So... Chrollo be that Mr. Steal Yo Girl and Kurapika’s posessive reaction to it will be astronomical.
I am also hella gonna support the upcoming #kuroneoweek2021 in May! @kuroneoweek
So you bet there will be more fanfics of KuroNeo from me!
HxH ships I support:
Definition of support: Does not actively ship them, but definitely likes the idea of them
1. Killua x Canary
I love how Canary tries her best for Killua and she does care about him. I realised that Killua seems to have an issue with older women (e.g. Bisky, Elevator girl), but I think for girls who are about his age, he’s okay with them. There is a misconception that he can’t communicate with women well (probably because he has issues with his mother), but I think that’s just for old ladies - Canary is cool with him.
2. Hisoka x Illumi
It drives me nuts how these two have matching outfits. I know that they have a more of a give-and-take transactional relationships rather than purely friends, but this is fab best friendship goals. My friend loves this ship and I absolutely support it.
3. Retz (with either Gon or Killua)
The unreasonable hate on Retz is insane because “she’s ruining KilluGon”. I think it’s really refreshing to see Killua and Gon hang out with another girl their age. You can see that Gon is really sweet towards her. Killua is more suspicious of her for a good reason but he never hated her. Remember that Killua is not used to interacting with people due to his family background. In fact, as @u-named mentioned, Killua and Retz shares similarities in terms of wanting to be free from their family.
4. Alluka x Gon
I would love to see a fanfic where Gon starts to woo Alluka and Killua will be that overprotective brother, knowing that his best friend is a player. Alluka/Nanika healed Gon anyway, so she’s technically his saving angel.
5. Ging x Gon’s unnamed mom
Okay, this is a bit weird cause we don’t know who Gon’s mom is... (and screw that Pregnancy Stone theory, I just think it’s weird how Ging mentioned Gon’s mom in the tape if he never had a mom lmao; is he gonna say “which you don’t have” like ???).
I actually like fanfics that explores Ging’s life before Gon and various interpretations of who Gon’s mom is.
What Lies Beyond by Thatsoneperson is one of the best fanfics I’ve read when it comes to Ging’s life before Gon. The ending was really heartbreaking and I had always loved the “Gon’s mom was from the DC” theory because Yusuke’s ancestral father came from the Demon World and there were hints of Gon’s dark aura throughout CA and Election arc.
Somehow in my headcanon, I had always envisioned Gon’s mom to resemble Usagi from Sailor Moon but with Gon’s hair colour. Gon also has certain personality traits that are very different from Ging and I believe that came from his mother.
6. Meruem x Komugi
One of the most unexpected, beautiful, saddest, semi-canon pairings in the entire series. It highkey reminds me of Beauty and the Beast. It was beautiful how Meruem, a Chimera Ant that was supposed to be destined to rule the world above humans, became gradually attached to a blind human girl.
7. Killua x Machi
This is fucking weird; because of the age gap but I like to think Killua meets her again one day when he grows up, and they had some sort of flirtation because he needs to be on par with Gon when it comes to dating women.
There was actually a cute fic about that called A Series of Pick Up Lines by Yandere Shoujo where Killua was trying to use pick up lines on a woman because he wanted to try it out after knowing that Gon dated women prior and just so happens to bump into Machi.
#kuraneo#kuraneon#kuroneon#kuroneo#tserreidnichxtheta#tsextheta#hisomachi#hisoillu#killunary#killuaxcanary#retzxkillua#retzxgon#retz#allugon#meruem x komugi#meruemxkomugi#killumachi#tserreidnichtheta#ponzukkle
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(ONE SHOT) I tried hating you but the anger is gone DC COMICS
A03
Barry remembers what it's like to be in love. He remembers the fluttery, soft feeling in his stomach when their hands brushed, the warmth in his cheeks when their eyes met across crowded rooms. He remembers gentle words and whispered promises, and he remembers holding his whole world in his hands. He remembers thinking to himself that they'd always have each other, that they'd be together through thick and thin.
Barry remembers being in love, and he remembers learning that love wasn't always good enough. Love wouldn't survive everything, and people wouldn't either.
Once, Barry had held his whole world in his hands, but that had made it all the more painful for it all to be ripped away. One thing after another, until there had been nothing left but tears, and rage, and suffering - his own, and that of others. It hadn't filled the gaping hole in his chest, hadn't made him feel better, but he had told himself no one else would feel that pain again if he could help it.
No one else would lose their child. No one else would have to see the boy they'd raised and loved like their own turn to dust in front of their eyes. No one else would have to sacrifice themselves.
No one else would have their mentor, the closest thing to a father they’d had for a long time targeted because of who they were connected to.
No one else would see a city reduced to rubble, and then learn afterwards that a member of their own family had burned with it, unable to outrun the blast.
No else else would have to want so desperately for the little life inside of them to grow up big and strong, only for it to be taken away from them because some bastard wanted them to hurt.
So Barry had stood back. He had stepped aside and stayed quiet and done as he was told because it meant that no more innocents would have to suffer. He'd beaten down his own morals and ripped away everything that made him a hero, because he'd sacrifice himself so that no one else would have to.
He'd turn himself into a monster if it meant that the fighting would end.
He could understand Superman's pain, his rage and anger, because Barry had felt them both, first when Wally had died to save the world, and again when Zoom had stolen that little blossom of hope he'd held inside of him. He could understand why Joker had to die, he could understand the leap in logic Clark had followed, because Lois and her baby had been innocent.
Innocence hadn't saved them, but Superman had promised them a world where it wouldn't happen again, if only they followed him.
Barry had always been a follower.
A follower, and a coward.
So Barry had followed. He’d followed Superman, he’d followed Hal; he followed them so far that he almost doesn’t recognize himself anymore. He’d once thought to himself that he’d follow them into hell, but he’d never thought it would be a hell of his own making. Barry had walked himself into failure, all while telling himself that he was trying to make the world a better place.
He’d lied to himself. He lied to himself after every death, after every injury and cruelty. He’d kept lying to himself, unwilling to see past his own suffering to see others hurting just as much because of his own actions. He’d clung so tightly to the illusion of peace that he’d ignored the bodies he was stepping over to get there.
He’d already lost Wally, he’d lost Jay, he'd lost Bart, he’d lost the baby, he'd even lost the Rogues, and he hadn’t wanted to lose anyone else.
But then he lost Iris.
Barry’d been in love with Iris for so long that he almost didn’t remember how not to love her, but she’d seen him for what he truly was, what he had been trying so desperately not to look at; a monster and a coward. She looked him in the eye and laid it all out, every single one of his failures, and then she walked away, and for once in his life, Barry hadn’t followed. He’d been angry, and hurt, and it had been a painful knot in his chest that made it hurt to breath as all those soft fluttery feelings turned caustic and poisonous.
Barry had been in denial, but his eyes had begun to see past the illusions he’d made himself.
Nothing she had said was a lie.
When Iris had left them, Barry had turned around and clung so tightly to Hal that he’s surprised he hadn’t choked the Lantern. He knows now that Hal had been struggling just as much as he had been, had been floundering after the loss of Wally, their child, and then Iris, but all Barry had seen at the time was someone to hold onto. He’d been grabbing for any stability he could, and Hal had been there. Hal had always been his rock, just as Barry had always been a beacon to guide him home, but loss had sent them both into free fall, and neither of them knew that they didn’t have a safety net until they hit the unforgiving ground.
This time, it was Barry who walked away.
Shazam - Billy’s death had been the last straw. He had been the one to finally shatter the world Barry had built for himself.
Superman had killed a child.
Barry couldn’t look away anymore, he couldn’t avert his eyes or plug out the sounds again.
So he had started to listen again, he started to act instead of follow.
Barry saves people again, and it had started with Batman, back even before Billy. It had started with Bruce; Bruce who was Barry’s friend, Bruce who Barry was supposed to hate - but Barry’s too empty for hatred.
He had been angry for so long that he wonders if he’ll ever feel anything again.
Changing sides isn’t easy, but Barry never thought it would be. He turns his back, he walks away from Hal. He asks Hal to come, to leave Superman behind and become a hero again, and when he refuses Barry ignores Hal pleading with him to stay with him. It hurts to leave Hal, it’s agony to hear the terror in his voice when he’d told him there was no leaving Superman, but Barry can’t stay anymore. Hal won’t come with him, and Barry walks away. He knows he’s not going to be welcomed among Batman’s rebellion with open arms, he’s spent too long following behind Superman for that to happen, but he doesn’t let the cold reception get to him, doesn’t let the ache in his jaw stop him.
He needs to make it right after all, even if it’s likely none of them will ever trust him again. Even if it’s likely he’ll never wash the blood from his hands, the least he can do is try to prove to them that he’s genuine. To prove that he wants to repent for what he let happen, for what he did, and the people who died because Barry was too cowardly to make his voice heard, or too blind to see.
Bruce’s people don’t trust him, but Barry doesn’t blame them. He doesn’t even trust himself anymore. He lets them put the monitor on him, he lets them glare and whisper. He can feel them watching him, he sees the way they shy away, he knows the doubt. He doubts himself too, he wonders, sometimes, that if it starts getting too hard, will he fall back into the habits he’d developed? Will he kill again if things get too slow, too irritating?
Who will suffer if Barry has a bad day?
They’re afraid of him.
Barry’s afraid of him too. He’s afraid of what he could do, he’s afraid of what he’s done. He’s afraid that someday he’ll go too far again, and he’s afraid that once he starts on that road again, he won’t be able to turn back. He’s already lost everything, and he’s afraid that someday, he’ll decide to throw away whatever is left.
Some days, all that fear gets to be too much for him to handle. Everything gets to be too much. The memories and the what-ifs rise in a tidal wave that not even he can outrun, and they sweep him back out to the sea of misery. He drowns in it.
He just wants it all to end.
It’s during one of these episodes that Batman finds him.
Barry’s folded himself into a dark corner, his head buried in his knees as everything gets to be too much. Sometime, in between the moment his heart and started hammering in his chest and the world had started to get fuzzy, he’d ripped off the helmet, and his hands had found their way into his hair where he’d started to pull as the weight on his chest grew to be crushing. He’s probably vibrating, a distant part of Barry knows, and it’s probably set off one of the many alarms Batman has linked to him, but Barry can’t bring himself to care. All he can think of is the empty yellow and red suit, the warped helmet, the hole where Metropolis used to be. All he can hear is the ragged sound of his own breathing and the voices of the doctors telling him the baby hadn’t survived Zoom’s attack.
He remembers that kid, the one who had thought he was strong enough to fight back, the one who had wanted to do the right thing, and the sound of his back breaking when Wonder Woman and Superman put him down with the intention of keeping him down.
Barry could have stopped them.
But he didn’t.
All he did was watch, and then run away when it got too much and he’d seen the face of a kid who learned that his idols weren’t heroes any more.
He wants it to stop.
“Flash.”
He’d go back if he could. Bruce had told him to restart everything, but Barry had been too scared then, that he’d just make everything worse.
“Flash!”
Why shouldn’t he? It would be easy to just start running. He’d erase himself from the timeline, and maybe the next Barry would be better . Maybe the next Barry wouldn’t fail everything and everyone.
Maybe the next Barry would be fast enough.
“Allen!”
Better yet, maybe the Speed Force would decide that he was unworthy, and Barry Allen wouldn’t survive the lab accident that had given him his powers.
“God dammit - Barry! Snap out of it.”
Barry comes back to himself with a stinging cheek and a gasp. He feels like there’s cotton stuffed in his head, like there’s a vice in his chest and a knife in his guts. Batman - no, that’s Bruce, the helmet is off - is kneeling in front of him, hands on Barry’s shoulders and expression drawn with stress, making the premature age lines all the more obvious around his stormy eyes.
“I-” Barry wheezes, blinking tears out of his eyes as he stares at Bruce in shock, then at where the vigilante’s hands are resting on his shoulders. The warmth of the touch is seeping through his costume, it makes his skin tingle even with the layers between them, and Barry wonders almost hysterically how long it had been since someone had willingly touched him without intending to hurt him. “Bruce?” His voice is a choked rasp, and with a panic dissipating, the numbness starts to set in again.
The touch, however, stops it from settling in.
Bruce is frowning at him. When was the last time he had smiled? When was the last time any of them had had something to smile about?
Barry used to like it when he smiled.
“What just happened?” Bruce demands, but despite the harsh tone, the hands on his shoulders are still gentle, and Barry can only blink at him, a little dumbly. He’s a little too busy thinking about how nice the warmth of another person’s touch is to really give Bruce’s words much thought. “Barry.”
Barry jolts, “I - uh-” he stutters, “-sorry.”
Bruce’s frown is easing slightly, back into that emotionless mask that he’d been wearing for - how long had he been wearing it? He’s studying Barry now, like he’s trying to gauge how much of a threat he is now that Bruce had seen him panicking. “Does that happen often?” He asks blankly, and Barry shakes his head, a little frantic.
“No!” He says desperately; he needs to stay on Batman’s good side. He needs to put his best foot forward, after all the shit he’s put Bruce through over the years. He just wants to do at least one thing right in his life.
Hal and Iris aren’t here to guide him through his attacks. He doesn’t have a lightning rod to draw him back anymore.
“No - no, it’s just - I’ll be fine once the shaking stops.” Barry tells him, “I’m sorry.”
Bruce is still staring at him, “How long has it been happening?”
Barry lets out a bitter, shaky laugh, “Years.” He says, arms moving to curl around his stomach, and he sees Bruce’s eyes follow the movement, sees the moment Earth’s greatest detective connects the dots. He’d had a front row seat to what state Barry had been in after Zoom’s attack had almost killed him. Barry knows he’d been in the Watchtower when Barry had been brought in, covered in blood and barely hanging onto consciousness because he hadn’t been able to fight back against the other speedster. Batman would have seen the medical reports when they’d been added to his file, would have known the extent of the damage Barry’s body had taken.
He knows what Barry had lost. He knows just how much Barry had personally related to Superman.
Bruce is quiet for a long moment, studying Barry as the shaking slows, and his hands stay on his shoulders, a grounding influence that helps the speedster drag himself out of the storm of emotions he had fallen into. Bruce has always been good at it, helping Barry slow down; it’s always been something that Barry’s been grateful for, and he’s been missing the other man’s influence and presence in the last years.
Back when he’d first noticed that Superman wasn’t listening to them anymore, he’d wished that Batman were there, because Bruce had always been the one that Superman would turn to. The one they’d all turn to if they needed someone to talk them down from something, to point out when their logic was flawed; Bruce had always been the best of them, no matter how much the man hadn’t believed them when they’d said it.
None of this would have happened if they’d just listened to Bruce.
“You told me once to change the timeline.” Barry says helplessly, staring up at Bruce with pleading eyes. What he’s pleading for, he doesn’t know; condemnation? Permission? Just someone to hold him?
Slowly, Bruce nods his head, an acknowledgement of the statement, “And you told me that it was something you’d only consider once we’d already exhausted all of our options.” He points out.
Barry’s laugh is almost hysterical in response, “I could just make everything worse.” He says shakily, “But what difference would that make? Everything’s already fallen apart.”
“True.” Bruce agrees, “But there’s still hope we can do better. That we can fix this. We can’t give up that chance just yet.”
It’s almost ironic hearing this from Bruce, a known realist. Barry had always been the hopeless dreamer, the one who always tried to see the bright side in a situation, the one who always urged the others to do the same. But now? After everything that had happened, everything he had lost, everyone who had suffered? Barry can’t see any possible light in their dark world.
“We’re not just fighting for ourselves, Barry. Or the people we’ve lost.” Bruce’s hands tighten on his shoulders, “We’re fighting for a future for everyone else on this planet. A future where they can make their own choices and no one has to live in fear of being heard saying the wrong thing.”
“I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore.” He admits, “I don’t know how I can fix what I’ve done.”
“All any of us can do is try.” Bruce tells him quietly, and Barry meets his eyes, blue to blue. He sees the sadness there, the numbness and helplessness that he knows all too well. They’d both lost everything; their children, their friends, their futures. Anything they had planned for themselves had fallen apart. They’d lost love and friendship to anger, and to hate, and then they’d lost that too.
What more could they lose?
When Bruce starts pulling away from him, Barry rocks forward almost desperately, not wanting to lose the tiny connection they had made, not wanting to let Bruce slip away from him again after getting a glimpse at the man he had cared for after so long of nothing. He stops at the last second, however, and he stays where he lands on his knees, staring up at Bruce as the man slowly offers him a hand.
“Come on.” Bruce’s voice washes over him, “We’ve got work to do.” Bruce is watching him with a quiet seriousness, the same loneliness Barry feels echoed in his eyes.
He’s offering him a choice.
And Barry?
He takes the hand, and he chooses the future Bruce sees.
#cole writes#DC comics#injustice: gods among us#brubarry#bruce wayne#Barry Allen#trans barry allen#halbarry#westallen#bruce wayne/barry allen#barry allen/bruce wayne
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okay. this sucks, but here are some things you need to remember.
(tl:dr. I'm in very bad shape. just exceptionally bad shape. I do not think I am in danger of committing suicide on a timeline that means I need to wake my sleeping friends up at 1AM, but also, I do talk pretty clearly about suicidal ideation in here, so, you know, be advised.
-three weeks ago, your therapist was worried. two weeks ago, she said she thought you were doing better than three weeks ago. last Tuesday you both agreed you were doing about as well as the week before, if not actually better.
-right now you are backsliding.
-this scares the shit out of you but pretending it is not happening will not make you stop backsliding.
-you're still not eating. you're also sleeping worse, about six hours a night, sometimes more, sometimes less.
-you haven't actually done laundry since July. you have nothing resembling a clean item of your own clothing that fits you.
-you have not taken a bath or shower in two weeks.
-you are very behind in school and sliding further behind. probably you should have taken the whole semester off, but that seemed drastic three weeks ago.
-school feels like a worse emergency than the laundry or the bathing. actually it is not, probably. but it feels like one, so on the infrequent days you manage to do a thing besides eating inadequate food, that thing is usually school.
-you are completely checked out at work, but you probably would not be able to actually do things there either, if you cared. occasionally you try to do something and don't and then tell yourself it's because you don't care.
-you're not depressed, exactly. you're not sad. you're just not doing a goddamn thing. two weeks ago you felt hopeful sometimes, now you are starting to feel scared again.
-you absolutely need to acquire a phone charger and fight your pharmacy. can you do either of those things? I don't know.
-what will happen if you run out of mood stabilizer entirely? bad things, for sure.
-can you leave the house to go to the pharmacy or a place that sells phone chargers, or even to go on a walk?
-all of your clothes are filthy and don't fit. you don't want strangers to see you. you don't know where your housekeys are and haven't known for at least a week, so you've just been leaving your door unlocked when you're out at friend's apartments.
-your friends are not usually the kind of people who are too polite to tell you when you smell, at least Zoe definitely is not. it seems like you must, though, at this point.
-your goddamn fucking parents are coming to your house in a month. even if nothing gets worse, they will call you and your friends irrational. your mother will trigger your eating disorder. you will have to eat in front of them. you might start stress-gagging in front of them.
-they will call the way you talk "babbling" and they will be more concerned that your "babbling" has gotten worse lately than they will be about any of the symptoms you've told them about. this might be because you're trying to soften your symptoms for them, and you did tell them not to ask about your depression, but also, you feel this way, you are crashing and frightened, and their main concern is that your speech patterns are annoying. you hate this! sometimes you hate them.
-you do not feel necessarily depressed, but you keep thinking that you're dying. not in the panic attack way, just this intermittent certainty in the back of your head that you can't do anything anymore because you are dying, that the end result will be your death here. you will fail out of school and lose your job. your parents will make everything worse and eventually they will take some kind of control of the situation because you can't.
-if your parents get control of the situation, it will be bad. you will be made to live with them, at best. if they stop paying your rent, or if they show up in DC with their car, what can you do about it? nothing, realistically. you couldn't even stop them from visiting.
-you're not suicidal now, but you think you will probably kill yourself before you let them send you to an inpatient place they have chosen, in Philadelphia, far from your friends. that seems like how you die. you will kill yourself to get away from them.
-you didn't give them your power of attorney, but also, you didn't get a lawyer to help you sign that over to Zoe or anyone else, so they will, eventually, notice this situation and then you will have to kill yourself.
-probably when you do go to the pharmacy, assuming you ever get your shit remotely together enough to get your mood stabilizer prescription to go through, assuming you don't just backslide in your apartment, you should probably get someone to go for you or go with you.
-this is because you keep thinking you should one way or the other make a suicide plan, so that if it looks like your parents will get you, you can kill yourself first. you are thinking you should acquire some OTC stuff, maybe do a couple of google searches first.
-those thoughts mean you have to email your therapist immediately and probably also your psychiatrist. maybe she can help you fight the pharmacy over your mood stabilizer.
-if you tell your therapist that you are scared that you will kill yourself if you have to interact with your parents too much right now and she tries to tell you that you need to let them in so they can help you, you will have to get a new therapist somehow, but Dr. Jessica is pretty smart and might not tell you that if you are clear.
-also, she does not have either of your parents' contact information and you are almost thirty. she can't tell them you are dying or whatever. legally, she can't. nobody can without your permission.
-I guess maybe your boss or your pastor could, but your pastor would have to find their contact information first.
-(technically, your boss has their phone number because of when he took you to the hospital and your phone didn't work in the hospital but his weird dumb phone worked, so you used it to call them. but you probably shouldn't tell your boss this stuff either).
immediate steps: don't make a suicide plan. tell your friends, tell your therapist (maybe just email her the text of this whole post?).
nobody has a lot of bandwidth right now, but your friends will be more upset if you just rot until it gets worse than if you tell them now. also they will definitely be more upset if you buy a bunch of OTC medication that seems plausibly overdose-able without telling anybody that this is where you are. everyone will be very upset if you die in real life, so try not to do that.
it doesn't actually feel appealing right now, to die, which is probably good. it just seems like a better option than allowing this to continue long-term and it's one big task rather than a thousand impossible ones.
maybe check in with your good friend the suicide hotline
when you are a little more lucid, probably you should start referring to your parents' whole deal as "trauma" and attempting to... something about that.
you aren't entirely rational here, but also you are so afraid of what your parents would do if they tried to direct your medical care that you would rather be dead in real life and you've cried at least twice this week over things they did when you were a teenager, so that's.... where you are on that.
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I like Barbara just fine, way more as Oracle than as Batgirl, but for some reason I just find DickBabs so... /boring/ tbh. I don’t really know why? Are they cute? Kinda, I guess. Pretty melodramatic usually it seems though. They just don’t interest me as a couple, or resonate with me. I also think there comes a time, especially with a medium as long living as comics, where the will-they-won’t-they thing goes on for too long. You have to get characters together before fatigue sets in
Same here! I like Babs as a character a lot, and definitely prefer her as Oracle to Batgirl (I’m not sure there’s anyone in fandom who doesn’t), but when it comes to DickB*bs... hm, I think the best way to explain is that in all the canon of them I’ve read, their relationship always felt a bit forced to me? Like I can practically hear the writer chanting “Look at how in love and all they are” in my ear, which I never had with DickKory. I also dislike how much writers of DickB*bs felt to the need to downplay the significance of Kory’s role in Dick’s life as well to justify it, usually with the excuse that DickKory was just about physical attraction, ignoring the 10+ years of comics canon that exists with them together in the process. Obviously, that’s not the same for everyone. DickB*bs has a huge following but idk, it just never worked for me to the point where I was like “These characters belong together”.
Plus, alongside the character personalities and such, ‘boy falls in love with alien princess who falls from the sky and theirs is a relationship spanning both space and wildly differing cultures’ is just so much more interesting to me than the ‘boy/girl next door’ thing that Dick and Barbara have going on XD
And honestly, yeah you have a point with the fatigue thing as well. But before today both DickB*bs and DickKory had been over for a good long while. Pre-52, it felt like each character involved was being allowed to move on, however slowly, and then the New 52 and Rebirth happened and reset that. I honestly really would have preferred Dick to stay with Bea, because as I said in another post, she’s the first relationship I’ve read him in since DickKory that actually hit that same note of feeling natural and real to me.
But again, I don’t expect DickB*bs to last forever here. Or if DC goes ahead with their rumoured ‘just telling good stories’ and ‘everything both did and didn’t happen, screw following a strict timeline’ approach to storytelling after this we could very well get different stories with all the pairings 🤷♀️
#sorry to everyone who's following me for the gay and is suddenly being hit by the hetship feels#I'll be over it soon#probably#asks#I'm not even going to go into all the retcons that were done to make DickB*bs work#just... gah#write things better DC#you want me to buy into something then you gotta put the work in#Anonymous
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Miraculous Ladybug/DC - Adoption AU
There seems to be a lot of Miraculous/DC crossover ideas, often with Adrien and/or Marinette getting adopted into the Batfamily.
Here is my take:
So it turns out that apparently Gabriel had family he tries to avoid and altogether pretends don’t exist.
And it turns out the family in question he’s particularly wanting to keep out of his life and away from his family is Harley Quinn.
To be fair, they weren’t close to begin with. Then there was the whole thing with Joker and her stint as a villain. After that, Gabriel cut off all contact and moved to Paris.
Harley gets why. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it. She’s made mistakes and is trying to do better. She understands if Gabriel isn’t feeling all that forgiving or willing to reconnect. And she is fine with that, really.
What she is NOT fine with is discovering Mr. No-fun lost his wife in mysterious circumstances and has responded by not only isolating himself, but his son as well. His son who is a genuinely sweet and wonderful kid, and deserves so much better than being kept trapped in a quiet and lonely old mansion every day.
So she does what any good aunt would do if they’re a psychologist who used to be an underling and abuse victim for a psychotic clown whom she’s recently escaped from, found herself a girlfriend, and is past the point of having kids of her own.
She steals Adrien.
Well, from the mansion at least. Only from there. Not wanting to take him away from what little social life he’s managed to make so far despite Gabriel’s best efforts, Harley has them all stay in Paris. She even buys a nice house in a good district with money that was totally not stolen from Gabriel on her way out *coughcough*. Once set up in the new home, she proceeds to take Adrien there where she can dote on him like proper family and give him some of that affection he’s been so desperate for.
The wax figure of Adrien has been left in his place in the mansion.
Gabriel has yet to notice.
As has anyone else. (They’ve had at least 3 photoshoots so far with just the wax figure.)
Ivy finds the whole thing questionable but comes to see that Adrien is a sweet boy with a desire to do good even if he doesn’t necessarily know how or the best way to do so. She decides she can “raise him right” and mold him into a proper young man who uses his resources to help the environment. So she starts having him do gardening with her.
Adrien is...actually okay with this whole setup. Plus he went from no mom to TWO moms! Who spend time with him! And are involved in his life! And let him see his friends! And he actually gets to leave the house without a bodyguard tailing his every move—which turns out to be because Ivy is able to use her plants to keep an eye on him in a much less obtrusive manner, but eh...details. He’s essentially not-so-reluctantly kidnapped. He COULD escape at any point. He’s Chat Noir after all. But even if he wasn’t, it wasn’t like Ivy and Harley were going out of their way to keep him locked up or anything. The worst they did was give him a curfew—which when comparing a few hours of free time with an expectation to return by a set time vs a set schedule with only one hour of free time maybe worked in somewhere, was hardly something he was going to fight.
The fact is that he’s doing well under their care. Harley shares his sense of humor. Pamela nurtures his creativity. He gets support and encouragement to be more assertive. They actually WANT to talk to him and hear about his day. They WANT to be affectionate with him and have dinners together. And he just soaks up their attention and affection like a sponge and responds in kind.
Under their care, Adrien changes a bit. He speaks out more and makes it known when he’s unhappy or uncomfortable with something. He does not let people just touch him when he’s uncomfortable. If anything, he’s doing more touching and initiating conversations without fear of appearances. Nino gets bro hugs. Kim gets bro hugs. All the guys in class get bro hugs. Marinette also gets bro hugs—though he doesn’t hug her for too long since she seems to overheat easily.
Adrien is really enjoying this.
Even better, his moms somehow get jobs in the area.
Pamela either becomes a biology teacher at the school or opens a nursery. If she does open a nursery, Marinette becomes a regular customer on principle. She and Ivy bond. They trade gardening tips. Marinette is surprisingly helpful in keeping pests away from her plants for reasons Ivy doesn’t quite know. All around, Paris suddenly starts becoming a bit more green…and without the eco-terrorism. It helps that Adrien’s social media starts featuring him planting trees and taking care of plants, which is encouraging other people to follow suit.
Harleen becomes a school counselor. At Adrien’s school. Where she takes full advantage of the opportunity to embarrass him in full “overly affectionate mom” mode. Adrien is too happy to be embarrassed. Anyone who actually ends up laughing at him comes to regret it when Harley picks apart their psychological issues.
The new moms evaluate his friends.
Nino passes. Flat out. He got akumatized trying to throw their boy a birthday party? He also arranged an impromptu house party for Adrien the one chance he got? YES. THIS is someone he needs in his life!
Alya gives them concern given her Lois Lane levels of getting into trouble mixed with sheer lack of self preservation. Her tendency to jump into matters and reveal things or trust things without thinking also has them concerned.
Chloe has potential, but needs a good few months of therapy as far as they’re concerned.
Lila is banned from coming within ten feet of Adrien. It would have been fifty, but Adrien refused to take a killer plant that big and risk anyone thinking it’s an akuma.
Marinette passes after they have a sit down talk with her to get to know her better. Harley notes her anxiety issues and helps her to be able to avoid panicking. Ivy likes Marinette’s energy, and her garden is impressive. She gives her approval of Marinette courting their son.
Marinette: Wait—what?
And because they’re actually good moms, they figure out fairly quickly that their new son is the leather-suited catboy running around protecting Paris.
Harley: HOW DO PEOPLE NOT KNOW THIS?!
Adrien: Magic?
They have a bit of difficulty for the next few fights with the rather overprotective mothers trying to interfere in akuma fights, causing more confusion than anything until Adrien asks them to stop. They don’t, of course, but they at least let him try to handle things.
All in all, they make for a nice little family.
But there’s only so much two moms can do. And with Gabriel pretty much not involved, they’re limited in options. So after a while, they decide that Adrien needs a good father figure.
Adrien: But I have a father...
Harley: I said a GOOD father figure.
But who to choose?
Bats? “Oh god, no! Why would you inflict that level of broodiness in our child?”
Joker? “Sure! The best way to teach him important life skills is to have someone to test them on as an example. Like the best weak points! And the effects of blood loss! And how to hide a body!” “We could just use Gabriel for that and save on travel time!”
Superman? “The world isn’t ready.”
They finally come to a decision.
Which is how Nightwing finds himself tied up and dragged off to Paris to be made part of this weird little makeshift family.
Pamela: Why him?
Harley: He got the killer Robin from ‘murdery’ to some semblance of being an actual semi-healthy child with only some violent tendencies. He’d make a good father figure!
Pamela: But wasn’t that an alternate timeline—
Harley: A GOOD father figure.
Pamela: ...fine.
Nightwing: Wait—what?
Naturally, he’s confused. He tries to contact Batman to let him know what’s going on and what Ivy and Harley are up to because they’re in Paris for some odd reason and they have a kid he’s pretty sure isn’t theirs. Batman, on the other hand, is more concerned with all the crazy magic shenanigans in Paris that the League somehow doesn't know about and can’t get any accurate information on. So he pretty much tells Nightwing to stay with them since he’s already there and they have room for him anyway so it’ll be easier.
Nightwing: I'm telling you, they've captured me, dragged me off to Paris, and they have this little house with a kid—
Batman: Good, then you have a place to stay while you investigate the anomalies in Paris.
Nightwing: Bruce, I don't think you're hearing me...
Adrien: (Just pats him on the arm sympathetically)
Harley: (Hugs Nightwing) Looks like we've got Batdaddy's approval! You're part of the family now!
Nightwing: I will do whatever you want. Just don't call him that again.
To be fair, it is Batman, so he probably knows Harley and Ivy aren’t an issue at this point, but still!
…At least he gets his own room…
Nightwing isn’t sure what to think. On the one hand, he knows he shouldn’t be encouraging this. On the other hand, Harley and Ivy aren’t actually doing anything bad. And if anything, taking care of the kid has been good for them. Plus the kid seems happy with them, at least. It’s...weird, certainly, but he goes along with it. (Read: He folds to the kitten eyes.)
Then he finds out said kid is a superhero in a city regularly attacked by a supervillain who transforms and controls people by manipulating their emotions—which the League somehow has not been aware of despite it happening in PARIS.
Needless to say, he isn’t pleased.
I'm just imaging Dick Grayson interacting with other adult figures in Paris. And really, just Dick's response to everything in Paris and how things are being handled.
"So...you're telling me no one has tried to track down where the magic butterflies are coming from?"
"Um..."
"The governmental body hasn't initiated any policies to try to prevent akumas?"
"Well..."
"Set up an alert and evacuation system so people know where to go or not go?"
“…”
“Do I want to know what you people actually do in case of an emergency?”
“Probably not.”
Much like Ivy and Harley, he gets a day job to help out. There are two potential options for him.
He becomes a teacher at the school and takes over running gym class, which he uses to keep the kids in shape, teach them self defense, and help them work out some of their tension and emotions through physical activities and a good listening ear. His interactions with the kids would be something to see. Even better for his interactions with Damocles and Bustier. Because no, the events of the Ladybug episode would NOT have happened if he was there.
Lila: (Sobs) Ow! Ow! The pain! How could Marinette do this to me?
Dick: I’m not seeing any injuries.
Lila: I don’t bruise easily. They just haven’t appeared yet.
Dick: Even so, there are no abrasions. No swelling. No indications of a broken bone or sprain. Not even any marks to show where you fell.
Lila: It’s internal!
Dick: Then you need to go to a hospital to be checked out and have the extent of your injuries noted.
Lila: I wouldn’t go that far—
Dick: And your mother will be contacted and told to meet us there.
Lila: Well—
Dick: And of course we’ll be holding off on any punishment until we have a list of your injuries and a thorough investigation is completed.
Lila: But—
Dick: And just to keep you safe, I’ll be staying with you the whole time. We wouldn’t want anymore “accidents”.
Lila: ….Dammit.
OR
He joins the police force. Just for shenanigans in his interactions with Roger. Maybe helping the force to be more effective so they can actually HELP during akuma fights instead of simply serving as a temporary distraction.
Either way, he’s a positive role model for Adrien. The three of them working together help Adrien to maintain a positive and altogether healthier state. They give him more jokes and puns to work with—because that has long since been Nightwing’s area of expertise. They give him advice in wooing his lady love. They address the “just a friend” issue. They teach him self defense and helpful fighting techniques. They curb the “self-sacrificing” tendency he’s developed. They encourage him in his goals and self discovery now that he has the freedom to actually try.
Despite the weirdness of the situation, Adrien is actually happier than he has been in a long while.
Which is made ever more clear at a particular moment when he’s leaving for school one morning.
“Bye, Mom! Bye, Mom! Bye, Dad!”
Harley sniffles and wipes a tear with a tissue she pulled out of her sleeve. “It feels like just yesterday that I stole him away from the mansion.”
“Then what does that make your kidnapping me?” Dick asked, sardonically. “This morning?”
“Don’t act like you’re not proud.” Ivy snarked.
Oh, he was. Immensely so. But of course he wasn’t going to admit it and give them the satisfaction.
#ml au#ml crossover#crossover#adrien agreste#nightwing#harleen quinzel#pamela isley#poison ivy#dick grayson#richard grayson#batfamily#adrien is adopted#adrien is okay with this#SOMEONE PLEASE ADOPT HIM#marinette dupain cheng#nino lahiffe#lila sucks#gabriel is an idiot#bad dad gabriel agreste#gabriel is a bad dad
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