#Bruce: Hm.

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XXIV)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

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💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts 💚 (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... PHYSICAL!! THERAPY!! LET'S GET TO IT!! *80s aerobics music is piped in from nowhere* Also Flash numbero two was there.

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

“Green one,” the quickfast one says. The masked teenager groans.

Danny looks down at his cards. He’s got a green eight. He drops the card onto the pile, and waits, perfectly aware that the girl is only down to her last two cards. The card flutters vaguely toward the pile on Danny’s bed cot.

He’s sitting with his legs crossed now, he admires. Holy crap. This is what dreams are made of.

“Bruce two,” the teen in the leather jacket demands, slapping down a—Oh, it’s a green 2+ card. It’s take two. Right.

The blonde girl scoffs, but her two cards bloat back up to four. Quickly though, with a little shuffling, the four become three with a green three slapped down on top of the deck.

Everyone is down to only a three or four cards. Danny is sweating through his medical issue tee and shorts.

Danny has not won a single game yet.

Danny really wants to win.

The masked teen (why is he wearing a face mask?? Like…over his eyes?? Not even his mouth??) opens with a new complication: a red three.

The red-haired quick-kid flicks a wild card plus four down with a smirk, pleased to make this Danny’s problem. “Blue, cnytte four!”

Okay, so what is cnytte?? Danny just got used to ‘take’. What is this new synonym. Why is everyone determined to hurt him like this. Why couldn’t these people just use Esperanto.

Whatever. Danny bites his lip and pulls the trigger: wild card plus four. He quickly points to the leather-jacket teen. “R-red. Br-take eight.”

The kid splutters. “Hey! That’s not the riht!!”

That is for sure how he and Jazz used to play it in after-school. The other kids never complained. “Is.”

“No, it’s not??”

Danny sticks his tongue out. The leather-jacket wearer squawks theatrically; it takes the mask-wearing kid thirty seconds to find the official pdf of the rules of UNO, and a new argument is off to the races.

“Atredde!!” the teen demands, snatching the phone out of the masked teen’s hands to show Danny the screen. “Þær, there!!”

“I can’t read,” Danny points out cheerfully. He can read some things, sure, but not when he refuses to look at the phone.

The phone gets closer and closer to Danny’s face, and Danny looks anywhere else—at the ceiling, the floor, and his bed, all without letting the guy point it out to him.

“Atredde,” the guy demands, the glass of his screen mashed against Danny’s cheek. Danny struggles not to laugh. “Atredde, atreddeatreddelooklooklook, you wearg—“

“No aðs, no aðs!!” the only girl of the group yelps, grabbing the spare pillow from underneath herself to start beating him with. Danny’s assailant shrieks. “Do you want to get in trouble with Wonder Woman?!”

“Wonder Woman wolde take my sid!” the teen hollers. Danny ponders if biting him would solve anything for all of two seconds before the doors smack open.

Everyone looks at Diana. Diana looks at everyone.

“I win!” Danny cheerfully announces, and sets off more yelling.

Danny does not, in fact, win anything other than a late lunch. Still, it is enough that he won, even if he has to sit through a gentle, brow-raised scolding as the nurse cleans his port and replaces his stomach-hole bag.

Lunch is a smoothie with powered vitamins and some pain medication mixed in. Life goes on.

For the first time, though, Danny doesn’t eat lunch alone; since he can, like, keep his bed relatively clean now that he isn’t constantly leaking ectoplasm everywhere, there are four teenagers crammed onto his bed with sandwiches, wraps, and sodas of their own. Danny can phonetically pronounce the brands on the side of the can, he notices. He has no idea what they mean, but sometimes the girl in the blonde bob and the too-fast teen will ask him to pronounce them, and they only snicker sometimes.

The teen in the mask makes a noise. “I want a lið. Wha want anything?”

“Nah,” No,” “Na þancs,” all echo.

Danny sucks on his smoothie straw. It tastes like bananas today. Ew; potassium. “What is… lið?”

The teen holds up a can of soda in his ungloved hand. Danny makes a face. He’d love a Mountainous Dunk right now, but gas in his bag…eugh. More trouble than it’s worth.

“No.”

The teen shoots him a pair of finger guns and darts out the door, leaving the rest of them behind to argue over UNO rules in at least two languages and without any expectation of resolving the issue.

Danny peaceably polishes off his smoothie. He’ll have to get the back done again, but eh. As long as no one’s directly looking at the process while it’s going on, he doesn’t super care whether or not anyone’s in the room, per se? Is that weird? Is this weird??

It’s probably weird. But also. Danny has fuzzy memories of roaming the building and leaking goo the entire time he was out and about, so… Suck it, he can do what he wants! He’s sick!! And maybe even dying??

“What is þæt andwlita??” the blonde girl asks, only for the quick-fast teen to poke Danny in what can be assumed to be a grumpy expression. Danny feigns a bite just to be mean. The other teens don’t even pretend to think it’s a threat—the blonde even laughs.

The teenager comes back and sits on Danny’s bed again, mattress barely bouncing as he makes himself comfy. It takes Danny a second to realize that he didn’t come back empty-handed, though—but instead of sodas, the guy brought back a tablet and a weird expression under his mask.

“…Look,” the teen finally says, and flips the tablet onto his lap so that the screen is visible. The teen clicks on a browser, and types in a word Danny isn’t familiar with, and pulls up a stock photo straight out of a photo frame Danny could buy at the craft store. He points to the smiling woman, the man, and the kid in the picture. “Moder. Fæder. Dohtor.”

Danny glances at the photo, and then at the teen. …Okay…?

The teenager bites his lip, and picks a new photo. This one has two men and a child, but it was basically the same. He points to each person as he named them: “Fæder and fæder, and sunu.”

Danny looks at the photo. He looks at the teenager. He looks at the photo again, and the masked teen backs out of the photo he onscreen to pick another one—with a woman and a man crouched around three kids and a dog.

“Moder. Father. Daughter. Daughter. Son.”

Realization breaks over Danny—oh. These are supposed to be families. These are family titles. Huh.

Danny scrutinizes the image. They…you know. They look happy. Danny used to…

…Mom, and…

It hurts too much to look at the photo for long. He knows that it’s fake, and he knows that models just get hired for show, but even the imaginary families hurt. Happy, loving people exist out there in the world.

Danny was in a box. Danny was in a box.

Danny—

The teen makes another noise, and Danny drags his focus out of his melancholy doom spiral with every tooth and claw. He manages. Barely. The masked teenager switches over to a drawing app and pops a tablet pen out of—nowhere, actually? Where did that come from??

The teen hems and he haws and he fills out a stick figure with some red and black clothing details—and a mask, and a bowl cut, which is how Danny figures out it’s a scrappy little self-portrait. It doesn’t look at all like the oversized tee tucked into the teen’s short shorts, but you know, whatever.

Next to him, the dude draws a giant, brick-wall-broad, no-eyed, man-shaped blob with upright pointed ears.

It’s. Uh. It’s sure…something.

“Son,” the teen labels himself, and then draws an arrow to the giant, colorless blob. “Father.”

…Danny squints. Is that normal? To have a huge hulking entity-dad, and then have a short, shrimpy-looking teen waif?

Like you, imaginary Jazz interrupts, since he was thinking about her.

He carefully bats the thought away before it can make him cry.

“My father,” the teenager adds, since Danny probably looks like he’s mostly paying attention. “Stincende.” And then the guy draws a bunch of stink lines coming off of him, just to prove a point.

Danny chokes more than he laughs. The teen’s friends laugh outright, teasing with words that are a little too quick for Danny to parse and snickering under their breath. The masked teen smiles quietly.

“So mean,” the teen in the leather jacket declares, cackling mercilessly. The orange-haired teenager wheezes breathlessly.

“Stincende hlaford of the trask,” the teenager adds mildly, cheerfully without mercy. “Very boring. Very stif. Very grimm.”

Okay, so some of those words were definitely straight-up cognates. Mr. Lancer gave Danny a C in English last semester, but Danny’s going to guess that, based on how their language is pretty much entirely similar, that the stink lines are more of a metaphor than anything.

“Gross,” Danny decides. He’s not sure if the word actually means gross or if it’s more of a medical-trash-and-waste-disposal sort of word, but his audience of four snicker and bump his shoulder and that’s good enough.

“Mmhmm,” the masked teen agrees. He clicks on an eraser tool, enlarges it, and wipes himself clean off the image. In his place, he puts a little white-haired figure in a white medical gown.

…Oh.

Between them, the artist puts speech bubbles, giving both the drawn Danny equal part in the imaginary conversation.

“Talking,” the teenager says without looking at Danny. Eventually, when the speech bubbles are done, he lifts his head. “Yes? No?”

…Is this a request? Is this a demand? Danny fists the sheets between shaking fingers. Nowadays, they always shake at least a little. There are no perfectly still days.

“Have to?” Danny asks, hesitant. It’s a common enough clarifier to use when he doesn’t want to do something. They try to explain what they can to him here, but the language barrier is thick and impenetrable in many places.

“No. He just wants to.”

“…Why?”

The masked teen frowns. He takes the tablet back from his lap and begins to draw something way more complex.

Everyone else slowly works on their food, but the masked teen doesn’t return until he has, from what Danny can tell, a thickly complicated organizational tree chart.

He recognizes a few headshot photos in the middle. The green guy. The human-looking guy in red that Danny does PT with sometimes.

Towards the bottom are the teenagers—both ones Danny does and doesn’t recognize, and some of the teens around him are photographed in different hats and outfits and masks. The quick-fast-red-haired teenager Danny’s come to recognize used to have shorter hair, apparently? Now it’s down to the teen’s neck. Meanwhile, the blonde girl’s got a haircut; her new look has a shaved undercut and a body too short to prop back up into her photographed pigtails.

The guy in the leather jacket looks the same.

…Danny holds up the tablet to compare to the teenager himself, who kindly poses the same way as he does in the picture in the same way: suns out, guns out. Yep. That’s him alright.

At the top of the organizational tree are three people—a dark-haired guy who Danny’s seen in passing, Diana, who is both a superhero and a super-minder, and some scary lookin’ dude who looks exactly like the doodle Danny just saw absolutely smothered in stink lines.

The tablet falls out of Danny’s hands. He’s not mad or anything, but he tends to drop stuff when holding it becomes too much of a burden.

So.

The masked teen’s dad, is, like…one of several bosses. One boss is the person watching Danny at all times, which is…weird. Danny isn’t sure he warrants, like, constant security from a high-ranking super-someone. He mostly just sits around all day. Sometimes he gets his stretches in. Sometimes he gets wheeled out to look at the stars, and then he just…sits some more.

Danny shifts in his seat. So maybe he. Maybe…

…Okay, so even if talking isn’t good, per se, at least maybe he’ll figure something out? Maybe?

Like. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out, like…why he’s here. Why he’s in space. Why they’re taking care of him.

Danny doesn’t look forward to talking. But it’s. Fine.

Probably.

He nods.

“…Yes?” the teen asks again, double confirming that this is what Danny wants. Danny doesn’t want this, but he wants answers, so he nods again, more firmly. But still. Staring. At the sheets underneath him.

“Okay.” The teen opens up a messaging app, and types something into the address bar. “Now? Or later?”

“Later.” Danny’s got to rest and digest lunch first.

“Okay.” The teen types into the tablet with the little pencil. Danny sees verbatim what the masked teen wrote when he turns it around: very literally, “Yes,” and “Later.”

There’s a little spot for Danny to sign his name. The teenager gives Danny his pen.

…Danny just hits the send button and is done with it.

[waveoftheocean]

late and very much still a wip but happy superbat week day 4: on a case/undercover!

[frownyalfred]

"Holy shit, there's a whole army of injured people lying on the floor in here" / "Why is the Bat fighting so hard to protect that one door?" / "He can't keep this up forever" / "Oh shit, his Robin is in there, isn't he?"

-- a GCPD patrolman making a decision to walk into an active crime scene he is about to regret so, so much (he pulls a gun and helps scare off the last 3-4 goons before Bruce basically collapses in front of the door, covered in blood)

[ghost-bxrd]

Prompt:

It’s not that Jason forgot, per se.

But between smuggling a toddler out of the League of Assassins, trekking halfway across the world, and finding a suitable hiding place that’s also child friendly… well, it kind of slipped his mind that he’s supposed to be… dead.

Something that comes back to bite him in the ass when he takes Dami out for some ice cream and just so happens to run into non other than Brucie-fucking-Wayne

[erinwantstowrite]

jaybin bear cub,,,,

i literally couldn't stop myself from doodling this

[iguessthisisanewobsession]

Just once I would like a Peter stuck in Gotham story where Tony gets dragged along with him for the ride.

Like they drop down and Tony is like

“Not an ideal situation, good news is we’re not dead. Bad news that looked like a one way trip for us. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Now we should focus on short turn goals: food, water and a place to stay, everything else can wait.”

I want Tony to be out there working his ass off from helping people with broken items then getting a job at wayne enterprises and starting a technology revolution in this dimension because he just can’t stand how out of date everything is and then running to pick up Peter from the rich kid school and the two of them trying to do reconnaissance and failing miserably.

Peter for his part is having a great time with school and his new vigilante gig.

Peter’s vigilante friends in school are worried about how bruised Peter looks sometimes and think that Tony is abusive before breaking in and just hearing Tony being a mother hen.

Then one breakout things are not looking too good and Spider-man just says

“Karen, activate Papa Protocol.”

And then like ten minutes later in comes Ironman with a bone to pick with the rouges.

Bruce doesn’t know if he loves Tony or hates him but his kids find him hilarious.

[bruciemilf]

Kinda really want an AU where Krypton survived and Clark still came to Earth, and the Justice League is established.

Naturally, everyone wants a smiling, helpful, God Made Man on their team. But it's safe to say Batman isn't everyone. Not when he knows sunshine both burns and heals.

Regardless, he can't deny Clark is a huge help (literally. The guy always has to slightly bend down when talking to him, and that beard frames a starshine smile too well, and why is he smiling around Bruce for? No one's happy around Batman)

"Thank you for your help. But we're not looking to expand the team at this time, --"

Surprise is clear and concise on those baby blue eyes. It makes Bruce bite the inside of his cheek. " Team? Oh no no, I'm trying to court you! Do they not have mating rituals on earth?"

Bruce does the mature thing and vanishes with a smoke bomb. Only slighting tripping over his cape.

[pocketramblr]

fun as all the various other quirks-in-ofa manifest first are, i am now musing on a "the first power to manifest is the vestiges" au where Izuku, still functionally quirkless, is in the middle of the entrance exam when he uhhh summons seven and half ghosts who were not prior to this fully aware and/or paying attention.

[aingeal98]

Bruce and Cass conversations are just Autism to Autism communication

One time they're going over a case together in the batcave with Dick and they keep getting more and more distressed despite the case being relatively straightforward until Dick with his years of Bruce deduction recognises the signs of electricity in the walls being too loud and goes to fix it. They both immediately relax and he's like "... You guys could have just SAID there was a high pitched sound bothering you." to which he receives matching looks of Bat:

He gives up, grumbling about how he should have just stayed in Bludhaven.

[honeyhoneyplskillme]

[martyrbat]

rip to bruce but if i fumbled her i would literally kill myself

[kk-cats]

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

It's a running joke, really.

And it helps. It really does. Because Alfred is a constant, and the thought of losing him is a terrifying thing, isn't it?

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

It's a running joke, really.

When Bruce's hairs start going grey. When his bones ache just a little more than they normally do. Alfred's still there. And so they laugh over it, just a little. They joke that he's going to outlive them.

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

Isn't that a good thing, this little joke?

He's got contingencies, after all. Preparations. So the family can take care of themselves when he's gone. Notes and books. Reminders. He worries, after all. What they'll do when he's gone.

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

Isn't that a good thing?

Generations after generations of Waynes. And he'll be there. To watch over the children. To be a steady constant.

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

But Bruce Wayne is not.

What does it mean to outgrow your young charge? To watch him go into danger. To watch him don a suit and fight.

No parent should watch their child die of old age.

But you do anyway.

Alfred Pennyworth is immortal.

But none of his children are.

[ghost-bxrd]

Jason will be ecstatic when he finds out how Fae! Dick avenged him.

Hooo boy absolutely!

If we go with the “Dick knew the second Jason got resurrected” scenario, then it would probably happen after a nightmare where Jason has a panic attack about the Joker and Dick comfort him, telling him that it’s very hard for people to hurt others anymore when they’re currently spread over several acres of land as fertilizer for the trees. :)

Jason just kind of blue screens for a while until he realizes what Dick is trying to tell him and then he starts sobbing even harder and clinging to Dick, whispering thank-you-thank-you-thank-you over and over and over again.

Dick is very confused because?? “Little wing, did you truly think I’d let him walk away after what he did to you? If I hadn’t been on a time schedule i would have done worse.”

And Jason realizes that Dick is absolutely fucking terrifying but that’s ok. Dick promised years ago that he’d always protect and never hurt him. And Dick’s never broken a promise.

Ever.

[faeriekit]

Touch deprived

Kind touches stop after Damian is two.

He does not know this, because at the time, he is two.

The next time someone touches him without the intent of harming him, it is Richard, and it is a surprise. Damian can't help lashing out; he can't help how his heartbeat races, how his breath quickens, how he can't let go of the dagger he drew out of his boot, how he has to leave. Immediately.

The next few touches are equally as kind, if less of surprise.

Damian hates them. He flees from them equally.

He cringes when his father reaches out to touch his shoulder; he dodges Richard's loving tackle-hugs. Cain is impossible to dodge, and he hates her hair-ruffles in equal measure. Todd occasionally invades his personal space and Damian flees before contact can be made. Brown will attempt "fraternal punching", which is just regular hits aimed at his shoulders and arms, and Damian refuses to let those land out of pride in his skill.

Drake, however, does...nothing. Until he invades Damian's room one afternoon.

(Damian does not get off his bed; if Drake is to attack him, Damian could easily subdue him from his reclined posture.)

"What," Damian snaps. He owes Drake no etiquette.

Drake rolls his eyes; the teenager holds up a gray mass as large as a common pillow, arms straining under the weight. "Got you something, your highness. Here."

Damian ignores the incorrect address. "I do not want it."

"You haven't tried it."

And then something heavy falls on top of him. Damian's eyes widen; he scrambles away, prepared to free himself from...

...A blanket.

Damian stares down at it. The blanket sits on his bed, threatening in its mere presence.

"Try it," is all Drake says, eyeing Damian as if the boy is prepared to attack him outright. (He is.) "It's good for anxiety and stuff."

"I do not have anxiety." Damian would never fail deeply enough to have his mental state affected thusly.

"Sure, kid."

Damian is not a kid. But Drake leaves before Damian can correct him on his misinformed opinion, and then Damian is alone with a...blanket.

And. Damian does tests on the fabric, of course. It comes back clean of touch-based toxins, air-diffused toxins, and anything that isn't cotton fiber and cheap plastic pellets. It's only a blanket.

Only...it's a heavy blanket.

...Out of curiosity, Damian uses it one evening. He looks forward to rubbing its ineffectiveness in Drake's face in the morning, but...

...Damian takes the blanket downstairs for movie night the next week. When Richard doesn't reach out to touch him, Damian dares to lay on Richard's shoulder. The blanket presses down against him the way a hug probably ought to.

He is comfortable through the entire event.

[amaranthdahlia]

[chapter 408] extended cut - sewer chase scene

[bruciemilf]

in your jacob fic, will you write a lil timeskip to the future? it would be so wonderful to see the batkids observing bruce and jacob's fucked up dynamic

possibly!! I really wanna focus on Bruce’s apprenticeship and his dynamic with his (rather harsh) mentors. Specifically his uncle!!! Can a bad thing be a bad thing if it loves you? Do they love you, or are they just not killing you? Are you worthy of love, even? Loved children have parents.

But I so agree. I’ll say it once I’ll say it twice and I’ll say it 100 times more, JASON NEEDS TO SET THAT MAN ON FIRE. Not that Bruce would let him. You know.