Story prompt
Partner in crime: "Hey, why do you always say that weird thing whenever the police catch up to us?"
Criminal: "Here, let me show you." *rolls up one sleeve and holds their arm out, revealing a common phrase said to someone who is being arrested*
Partner in crime: "You mean to tell me that you got into this business because that's how you're going to meet your soulmate?"
Criminal: "And then it turned out to be fun, too!"
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me and ollie reeder used to sit by the climbing wall at lunch time and hang out with the woodlice. me and ollie reeder used to watch the tree leaking sap in the playground and marvel over how much like blood it looked. me and ollie reeder used to go down the field and deliberately sting ourselves with nettles. me and ollie reeder used to pick up bits of twisted metal left over from the old railway and document them. me and ollie reeder used to look for bats in the tunnel
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The thing about having read our way through two previous books full of necromancers and weird eldritch shenanigans is that the absolute horror of what happens to John as a person doesn't quite register.
John's own glib, matter of fact narration tells the story as an apotheosis. He was doing great. He'd have fixed everything if only people had listened.
But reading between the lines in the John chapters, you glimpse something rather different.
John basically spends the first half of the Jod chapters sitting in the dark with his creepy yellow eyes, not eating or sleeping, literally stroking his favourite corpses and coming out with chill and fun statements about how he can feel their skin when he's away from them and he's 'waking up'. Cool, cool.
Passing swiftly over the cow dome, Presidential Puppet Pals, and the suitcase nuke, day to day life in the cow dome must have been fun... You're all on the Interpol watchlist, the Vatican is asking a lot of questions, the police are outside and John - who hasn't slept in a week and doesn't eat anymore and is probably wearing some kind of weird novelty tshirt - comes wandering past while you're eating breakfast, followed by a dozen silent, dead-eyed corpses like some kind of mother hen. He makes a cow joke, and then zones out because he got distracted by listening to the bacteria in your gut.
And then some guys die accidentally and it turns out he can eat death energy. So now he's got creepy Twilight eyes, an entourage of corpses, a cape, some very dodgy eyeliner, and he's barely breaking a sweat as he instantly kills over 100 people, says it was an accident, and then, dead serious, tells his followers to drag dead UN peacekeepers inside to add to his 'skeleton army'.
By the end, he's not slept or eaten in weeks, is tweaking his own bodily processes on the fly, is puppeting the dead US president and possibly an army of over a hundred corpses, monitoring G- in Melbourne, carrying on at least two conference calls, and helping to build barricades out of chairs.
And I just keep thinking how weird it must have been for his friends. How sometimes he would have seemed like the man they'd known and loved for so long, and sometimes he would seem different. Did they ever find themselves mourning the man he was? Did they ever stand there as he tuned into something they couldn't fathom, staring at them with those yellow eyes, and feel some awful, uncanny valley terror? Did he ever feel like he was losing himself? At what point did the cow jokes stop feeling like oh, classic John and start to be a reminder that his desire for vengeance and the scope of his powers were outstripping his remaining...perspective?...restraint?...humanity?
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I've read a bunch of fics, especially some crossovers, where Red Hood is or was on the FBI's most wanted list. A couple where he's on like the CIA's or Interpol's or something. But do you know what I'd find hilarious?
He's on absolutely none of them.
A big fanon thing, and sometimes canon (looking at you, No Man's Land), is that the federal government just kind of... doesn't get involved in Gotham? It's just left to it's own devices.
So combine that with both Gothamites-hate-outsiders and the idea that there are so many more/worse people to deal with than the crime boss who's somehow been bringing crime down, and, well. Sure, they have a file on the guy, but it's bare bones and nowhere near the top priority list.
Even funnier is if this is pre-reveal, so Batman doesn't know it's Jason that's running around taking over crime and whatever, he's just busy trying to find out who this guy who put a bunch of heads in a duffel bag is. He makes some small comment about it at some JL meeting and everyone is like, whomst?
Like sure, people outside of Gotham who do hear about Red Hood are horrified, but also it's... normal? Isn't that normal for Gotham? They all hear so many crazy stories coming out of Gotham that who knows what's exaggerated or not, but that's not even... that weird? Like, gory, sure, but... it's Gotham.
Just every outsider's views of Gotham being so skewed and/or biased that hardly anyone blinks an eye at some rising crime boss in the most crime-ridden city on the planet.
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