#𝙸𝙳 : [ character study . ]

[bruz3r]

also please talk about him losing jason! and getting jason back!

How do you call yourself a father without a son? 

To me, this is kind of the biggest struggle for Bruce in, let’s say the GOLDEN AGE to SILVER AGE storylines so to speak. Because there is this conflict between the editorial of wanting BRUCE to remain unburdened both romantically and narratively WHILE also being deeply aware that what sells these stories is the child fantasy. The escapism. And how are you going to do that when your hero exists in a world like Gotham? 

But for me, the way I read it, is that Bruce sense of family, in both the ltieral sense and the figurative sense was destroyed the night his parents died. His whole world became a haunted memory and an empty house overnight. And for the next decade or so since then, he becomes less “person” and more “promise.” He becomes singularly devoted to his cause ; everything, even Alfred to some extent, be damned. 

And then you jump to Dick. 

This is a boy whose grief mirrors yours but he isn’t weighed down by the same loss as yours. Dick, unlike him, has this fully realized picture of his parents. They’re not as idealized as Bruce who didn’t live the same life as you know a family with a son in a traveling circus. And his family wasn’t just two people and a home. It was the circus. A circus he could still come back to with the same people and that almost facsimile of a life before. Bruce’s was an empty manor with graveyards. 

And I think there’s even this explicit line between them that he is not here to be his Father, because he isn’t. He’s just a young man. What does he know about being a Father? And who is he to take away that memory – that role – that concept from the Father that did raise Dick?

And I think that’s something people need to really understand with Bruce. Is that the role of Mother and Father ─ that title ─ it’s not something that’s not just a word. It has weight. It has meaning. It has history. It’s ghosts that live in his head and just phantoms he can’t run away from. And it begs him to ask ─ if he was that ─ what if he’s not as good as how he remembered his Father?

He is 30. So close to being older than his Father ever was. And like a self-fulfilling sacrifice, he is not a Father. He has no son. He only has a partner that he has pushed away to build him up as a pedestal of resentment. And like the folly of any god, he has made himself maker and destroyer. 

He can’t be. He is nothing like Thomas Wayne. 

And it’s self-hate hiding as acceptance. 

Your family died in an alley. The resurrection of another is a desecration of their name. 

And if you meet a boy from the streets. And it’s all that rage, all that anger, all that anything and everything good and bad, compounded into a little boy that reminds you too much of yourself. And he knows where it will take him if he loses his way. And he knows what will happen if he doesn’t do anything. And he knows it’s the best and worst decision he’ll ever make in his life. But he takes the boy made of gotham and promise. 

He makes the best and worst decision of his life: he loves this boy. 

And again, for a moment, he thinks that the ghosts will leave him. Because there can’t be room for more, right? The world wouldn’t be that cruel. He loved this boy that thought being robin was magic. 

He promised him the world. 

And then it happens. 

The murder of a boy that isn’t your son. The murder of a child who just wanted to save his mother. The murder of a hero you would never see grow up. And this time it’s worse. The ghost is a boy that was your whole world. And all the horrors and all the magic in the world could not stop it, could not take it away from you, could not bring him back in your stead. It only knows how to place the grief in your bleeding and bruised hands ; feel it beating where his heart must have been and hope and pray to whatever god would listen to make it go away. 

But you’ve been here before. 

The grief has never left. It lives in you like a promise. Never again. No more. And it becomes a loaded gun in your hand. Never means never. No more is no more. And if blood is for blood, then so be it. 

But there’s still the boy from the circus. You’re still a Father where it counts. You are still that boy’s whole world. And the darkness lives in you forever but the sun does come out. You still have a son. You still have your whole sky but you take the ghost with you. You never let him go.  You make him into a statue. You make him into a scar. You make him the promise you kept right over your chest, dictating every breath of oxygen. And you survive. 

You live. 

And the statute becomes a shadow that hangs over your head. A nightmare that you punch into every broken jaw and broken teeth of strangers that had put him in that place out of your reach. You stare them down. You build up a new myth. Never again means something close to death but not quite. And sometimes its his eyes that stare up at you. It’s his weight that you carry in your arms when there’s nothing there. 

And it’s always followed by this silence. 

Until finally a new bird comes along. 

And the shadow becomes a noose. A reminder. A threat. One wrong move and never becomes again and again and again. 

And it haunts every waking decision. 

Every moment. 

And the world just keeps moving on. Along and along. With new birds and new hopes and new dreams. And some nights the noose is loose. It hangs around your shoulder instead of your neck. But most nights it’s every hitched breath. Its that hiss between your teeth. It’s the growl that rumbles in your chest. It’s living knowing how it feels to carry the weight of a lifeless child in your arms. 

So when it happens ─ you hear his voice again. 

It’s older. It’s grittier. It’s angrier than he remembers. And you recognize it in some deep intrinsic level where logic dictates it can’t be true, you have to fight every single cell in your body that tells you its him. Because it can’t. You buried the body. You listened for the heart beat. You have his ghostly hands wrapped around your throat. You can’t let him live. 

But he does. He’s alive. It’s your boy. 

It’s your son. 

It’s your son and you're not his Father. Because you failed him where it counts. It’s your son and you’re not his Father because he lives and you want him dead. It’s your son and you’re not his father and the man that put him six feet under is nowhere near the ground. 

How do you call yourself his Father then? How do you dare call him son? 

But he is and he isn’t. 

You’re a father. And you’re not a thing. Just a failure in lieu of the name. You’re nothing like your own. 

But here is your boy ─ how could anyone ─ anyone think you don’t want him home? 

[bruz3r]

[bruz3r]

thinking tonight about how much more fond broose gets of damian because of how much he reminds him of talia and martha

[bruz3r]

caught up again thinking of how broose would not be alive without dick, how broose would be hopeless without dick, how broose would lose his way without dick, how so much of his optimism and heart survived everything because dick has been with him, all this time, how even at their worst, dick's faith in him sustains him, and how dick is everything he isn't and shouldn't be and how much he loves him for it

[bruz3r]

please talk to us about bruce during and after damian's death in the comics (and getting him back).

You meet your son and he has his mother’s eyes. You meet your son and he has his mother’s frown.

You meet your son and all you see is his mother. 

Her delicate hands. Her sharp stare. The bruises and the scars. 

You see your boy and all you see is the horror of a man turning innocence into havoc. Of bathing him in blood instead of jasmine and chamomile. Of weaning him on violence and the promise of war. 

And you see a child ─ with all those aches, and all those scars, and all that horror in the lines of his palm, with everything that is his mother’s ─ her dreams and her father’s ─ and again it’s still only just a boy. 

But you’re no better. 

You were never a boy. You’ve never been a Father. The title has drowned in the blood of your sons and daughters. You’ve never been a Father. You weren’t there. You didn’t know. The world’s greatest detective and you didn’t know. You’ve never been a father. You’ve been an orphan. You’ve been a son. But you’ve always only been a soldier. A man with a crusade. The Knight in BAT and Kevlar. A prince to a city that makes monsters out of men. 

But Martha had green eyes. 

She had delicate hands. She had that frown and that stare. And she reached for you in her dying breath in the same way your son does in his next. 

And all you hear in your head is the last breath of your father, whispering your Mother’s name. And all you see is a boy you’ve never known. And all you know is to take him home to the house built on the memory of ghosts. 

It’s nothing like the promise of stars. It’s nightmares and whispers. It’s cold nights and warm tea. It’s a portrait of a boy hanging in the foyer with his blue eyes staring into nothing. And it’s the murmured “Welcome home, Master Bruce” from the man that built you up from nothing to almost. 

Almost a man but not quite. Almost a Father but not quite. Almost everything but still nothing. 

And this boy made of daggers and barbed wire is looking up at you to hold all the secrets to the shadows and the universe; whose lived on stories and promises of THE DARK KNIGHT; whose only known the burden of the demon and the cowl and the legacy that his name has entitled him to. 

And he thinks he’s too much like him. 

Too much of the boy that made a sword out of sticks and fought Alfred in the corners of their home. Too much of the child that would match parry for parry with an old man whose years are beyond him. Too much of the boy he was before the horror of a few gunshots had taken it all away. 

So you keep him at arm’s length. You train him like a soldier because that’s what you do best. You’re barely a father. They’re not your children. You’re just a man on a mission and they’re your accomplices. And its the promise of never again. The ghost of another boy, another son and other daughters that still feel like chains around your limbs. You’ve lost too much. And he has nothing. And you can’t take away what you can’t give. 

But he is your son. 

He is your boy. Those eyes are unambiguous. The definition is incontestable. Blood calls to blood. And all you want to do is to give him the world. And all he wants is to make you his. And he’s everything that you’ve dealt with before. 

He is violence. He is blood lust. He is war. 

And you don’t know how to tell him that he’s just a boy. He’s just your son. And everything else is noise. 

And he thinks it’s Alfred ─ he thinks it’s Dick ─ the world heals when they’re around. And it’s simpler to think of it that way. The noose loosens. And amidst all of it, there’s still just a boy with his mother’s eye and Martha's smile. 

His boy. 

And everything else is just noise. 

And then the noise stops when you watch a knife go through his chest. The noise becomes absolute silence. And again you feel your heart drop out of your chest. You watch as the life fades out of his eyes. His mother’s eyes. And where moments ago he was taut and fraught with violence, he is tender. 

Soft. Pliant. Gone. 

And the rest of the world is gone with him. The light fades. You can’t breathe. There are no words in your head. It’s only absence. It’s worse than the first time. It’s not an alley. It’s not a dessert. It’s nowhere with the weight of your son’s lifeless corpse the only thing you can comprehend. 

Others have words. Condolences. Comfort. 

He can feel it like dangling from livewire but the electricity doesn’t catch. His skin doesn’t burn. There is no combustion. It’s just the doom – the terror – the emptiness. 

Unfathomable silence to the point of suffocating. But he can’t breathe. He doesn’t. His boy doesn’t. He is still here and Damian isn’t. He was just a boy. A boy.  He couldn’t. He’s been here before. He’s lost too much. There is no more moving forward. No more Never. 

Just no more. 

How could he be a Father now? With nothing? No voice. No heartbeat. Not anything. 

It’s denial. He knows. It's a refusal. It’s ignorance. It’s unreasonable and illogical. But if he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t move, if he does nothing, then the world won’t move. And it’s darkness. The world cannot see what the light can’t shine on. And he wallows. And he persists. And he drowns and he drowns in it like it’s the only way to breathe. Keep digging the depths. Keep burrowing under. Push further and further away. Ignore the burning in your lungs and forget that gasp for air. He needs to drown. He needs the pain to be absolute. 

Because never again became a promise of again and again and again. 

And grief turns into rage. It’s biting and hissing and hurting everything that moves. It’s making words out of fists. It’s making promises out of death. It’s kicking, biting, screaming until something shifts. And all you can do is scream into an empty cave wanting for nothing and begging for everything. 

The next stage they say is bargaining. It becomes violence with a direction, a plan. He becomes a freight train, running needlessly into every wall and every deterrent. It’s waking up and knowing there’s a way. 

If the prodigal son can come back why can’t he? 

But he’s not a god. He’s not even a man. He’s not even a Father. But this is his boy and again and again and again has to be Never.  He’s lost too much. The world has told him life isn’t fair. The universe is absolute. But so is he. 

He is Gotham and Violence. He is fire and brimstone. He is promise and consequence. 

And if what it takes is to fight god to bring him back ─ then so be it. 

It’s a suicide mission. It’s gaining everything at the risk of losing everything. And it didn’t matter who he stepped on along the way. He’s never been a Father but he’s lost his son. And never again means never again. 

And perhaps it's only with the resolve of a man that has lost his sons, already one too many, that he doesn’t stop. Not until his boy is back in his arms. And it's his first gasp of breath again when he cups his cheek and says his name like it was his. 

His son is home again in his arms. 

It’s the only real thing that has made perfect sense to him. 

[bruz3r]

math tutor hot

you're really not here for romance, at all. but whenever you actually interact with people, they're smitten with you. you might be usually overlooked, but for some reason whenever you're helping a peer who likely wasn't responsible enough to study like you told them to before the session, they're always paying rapt attention. you roll your eyes and lecture them whenever they seem distracted, staring at you or the floor instead of the textbook. but it's the moments where you raise an eyebrow, half impressed, and give them a quiet "good work" that makes you such a successful tutor. your praise is hard to come by, and people are certainly going to work to hear it again.

𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐃: @halfdent ty! 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐆: @am4zon , @te1epath, @perditos, @kurjaks, @detectivewoof, anyone else who wants to!

[bruz3r]

me: his bed fits 3 also me: that means broose, his ass, and his giant ego

[bruz3r]

I like the thought of Broose learning ASL during his selective mutism phase post his parent's death and still using it with Alfred and Leslie the most during those moments when he just gets so overwhelmed that its easier for him.

[bruz3r]

[bruz3r]

FILE : INCIDENT REPORT -- [ GALA NIGHT ]

[bruz3r]

broose, a technical engineer: does complex math just to make bat shapes.

[bruz3r]

broose and his weirdly unspoken homoerotic bonds with men and his passionate toxic relationships with women

[bruz3r]

please talk about how Bruce was after sending Dick to spyral.

He’s tasted chaos on the tip of his tongue for all his life. He’s felt it in his angry fists. He’s felt it in those sleepless nights. He watched it happen with two gunshots and beads of pearls drowning in a gutter. 

So it would make sense that it's a language he could speak so fluently ─ so easily ─ when the people he cared about gets snatched right out of his grasp. It would make sense that with everything he’s gained and everything he’s lost that he knew it all too intimately. 

To speak the language of the enemy without getting lost like one however has always been the hard part. 

You live long enough drowned in the stench of blood, you forget the smell of the air without it. And the blood in Gotham has been there far longer than he has. It’s been baked into the asphalt and the cement. It’s in the water. It’s in the people. 

And this is a violence that’s all too familiar until it isn’t. 

His son’s name is all over the news. Richard Grayson died. And the price of the safety of all their precious heroes and his family is all on the shoulders of his first son. It’s a tremor in his clenched fists. It’s the tightness of a tendon in the line of his clenched jaw. It’s his heart clenched around the oxygen. 

Withholding. 

When he dies, the media would have rolls of footage of his life as this grand story of debauchery mingled with little tragedies. But the film that plays in his head is blood after blood after blood.

And the frozen moment of when he heard their last breath. 

He could bring rats out of the sewers. He could bring demons out of hell. He could bring down the walls that kept this planet safe with a few boxes in his cave. But he couldn’t bring back those moments. 

He couldn’t take away the memory of seeing that running line stretch into a straight line. He couldn’t take away the twist in his muscles fighting the adrenaline, trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed. He couldn’t take away the anger, the loss, the words that exploded in his lungs and died in the relief of getting him back. He couldn’t take away that even in the impossible victory the words couldn’t come to him. 

How do you tell your son you love him when you couldn’t even save him? How could you call him your son if you couldn’t even bring him back? 

A flash of blood dripping in the gutter. A flash of a clown with a gun. A flash of a boy in front of a lifeless father. A flash of a hospital bed. A flash of a sword through a son’s chest. 

He’s not his son. They’re not your children. 

He’s not their Father. 

But he clutched him like he was. He crushed him against his chest like it was the only thing that mattered. He held him like he could break his bones if he tried to leave. To disappear. To burden him with life where his body is getting dragged down by it. 

And he rattles him in his head. 

He shakes the death off him as if that would take away the image of him plastered in screens in the walls of his skull. The running line coming to a stop. His eyes closed. The stillness. 

The nothingness. 

You can’t die. You can’t die. You can’t die. 

No. 

The never becomes again and again and again in a moment. 

And he hates that the thought is never ending. That time and time again his paranoia proves him right. And THE BAT is a poison that seeps and seeps and corrodes the moment from the inside out. Because his boy had died but he had to live. 

He was always going to be the best of them. 

He’d known it since he was a boy. 

And now he must burden him of proving his mentor right in the worst way imaginable. And it’s through bloodied fists and gritted teeth. It’s through sharp words buried like knives in their ribs and their gullets. The poison seeps and the meaning spews, staining skin, staining pores, staining the meaning of service, of family, of Father, of mentor. 

A promise drenched in blood and unspoken. 

No one else has to die. No one else has to suffer. No one else needs to do the impossible. 

Only him. Only them. 

Only a boy and his Father. 

Because he asks him to. 

And it's like poison on his tongue. Bitter. Scalding. The only kind of truth he knows is to speak without burden. The cowl is a crown of thorns and he feels light-headed. But the mission is lead. It’s dragging. It’s steady. It’s concrete. And he buries it in needles in his boy’s skull as if that would add gravitas, as if that would add purpose, as if that would make comprehension of the herculean task more tolerable. 

But the crown says there’s no other way. 

The WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE has come to no other conclusion but this. THE BAT is the law ; their misfortune ; their punishment. 

Spyral needed to be taken off the board. 

And they’re taking his son with them to places he can’t follow. And he’s leaving him with the burden of an impossible ask. 

For the world. For their family. 

For him. 

And it gnaws away at his veins in his absence.

And the poison festers. It bleeds into every broken jaw and dislocated shoulder. It burrows in batarangs that dig a little too deep. It’s in the blemish and the blur of letters woven too fast for headlines you can’t read without the light. It’s the looks of your own children. The lies kept from the awake and the nightmares you fall asleep to. 

It’s just suffering without naming it. It’s the silence of nothing and everything in a world that you can’t go to. 

You can’t mourn what’s not dead after all. 

And regret is second to misery. 

And what is a father without a son after all if not that? 

The world was too large to make it too small. But in the silence he keeps going back to a night in the circus ; what it must have felt to have this stranger’s hand on his shoulder after he watched his parents die. He keeps seeing the boy. 

Dick Grayson was the boy that changed everything. 

He brought in the light.  

And it’s too easy ─ always too easy ─ to feel his absence like a chain around his neck ; like a gun pressed to his temple ; where one wrong move and the mine under his feet goes with a bang. 

And the world is dark and he’s lying bloody in a gutter. 

[bruz3r]

Broose to literally anyone that would listen, "Actually I take 2o to 30 micronaps in between a 24 hour period." And then if he sleeps more than 8 hours he feels like death.

[bruz3r]

[bruz3r]

broose always looking for the reflection of his father in him while all the people that knew his parents see his mother and broose always finding reflections of his mother in the people he adored while they see his father