#The rabbit is not having a good time

[2-sleepy-for-this]

Run, Rabbit

here it is, the first fanfic I’ve ever written of tadc. I did this pretty quick so sorry if it’s not the best. I just love angst (and if you couldn’t tell, also Jax)

Tw ~ fear, panic, mentions of being prey, unintentional fearplay, grabbing, angst

word count ~ 1.5k

Jax was scared. That didn’t happen often, but he was terrified at the moment.

All because of Caine’s ‘newest adventure’ that he had no say in agreeing to. God, he wished he wasn’t in this stupid circus.

It had all started when Caine had run out of ideas for their daily adventures. The ai ringmaster searched for any possible game to play. He wanted to find something ‘new’ and ‘interesting’ for them to do…

Everyone was confused as he started talking excitedly about hide and seek, tag and all those other childhood games they knew as kids… Jax didn’t know how those were anything new, he couldn’t count how many times they played those games already while here.

Despite his reluctance, Jax decided to question Caine about how those were considered inspiring… that was his mistake.

Apparently, uttering a word in the quiet meant that he volunteered himself for the demonstration.

Caine had levitated over to him with an ‘I’m glad you asked!’ and that’s when his fate was sealed. If he could only keep his lips as closed as his teeth.

So now Jax was running. Fast. Though it wasn’t really doing much for him because at the moment…

He was doll sized.

Caine decided to make it ‘easier for him to win’ by shrinking him. According to the ai, he was much too tall to win at hide and seek…

Well… more like a mixture of rules form the multiple games, hide and seek, tag, etc. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. All Jax knew was that he was being hunted by giants, the others, and he needed to run and hide for his life.

Technically, he wasn’t going to be killed, but… that’s how it felt… some twisted part of his mind told him that if caught, he would die, that he was in danger…

He hated how his digital body was a rabbit. Maybe that was why he was freaking out so much over being the ‘prey’ of this game. Hit too close to home with these new survival instincts he was experiencing for the first time.

Even as the fastest one in the circus, his loss of height made it near impossible to go faster than any normal sized person and he was out in the open at the moment, nothing but the vast area of the tent with nothing to hide inside. 

Jax was jolted out of his thoughts by the sound of footsteps… large footsteps that shook the ground beneath him… there were only a few people in the circus who could actually make footsteps…

Well, at least he wasn’t found by the crybaby. That would be humiliating.

The thudding got louder as the giant got closer and Jax was really panicking now. He didn’t like to panic, and he definitely didn’t want whoever found him to see him panicking…

So he continued to run… but he knew he’d have to face a giant eventually, whether that be getting caught or having to be seen by Caine to be grown back after winning.

He wasn’t paying attention to where he was running until he ran right into a giant building block, falling on his back. The blue letter ‘L’ on it mocking him as he rubbed his head.

That’s when he heard it..

“Jax!”

The volume of her voice hurt his ears as he looked up…

And up…

And up at the gigantic rag doll that was a few feet away, looking at him with a terrifying triumphant expression.

Jax immediately began to backtrack, scrambling back on the hard floor away from Ragatha, not able to take his eyes off her. 

That didn’t stop her from stepping closer, a smirk on her face as she closed the distance between them in just two normal sized steps.

He watched her kneel down, Ragatha’s hand moving towards his tiny body.

Jax felt his ears press down against his head… well.. that’s embarrassing. He looked pathetic at the moment, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was the instincts buzzing around his head, telling him to run and hide. It wasn’t a game for him now…

The rabbit felt the giant hand wrap around his waist, lifting his feet off the ground like he was an actual toy. He hated that feeling, but he couldn’t speak more than a slight whimper that made it past his lips.

Ragatha was talking to him. He could see her giant mouth moving… but he couldn’t pay any attention… just staring wide eyed as his lips were open in a slack jawed frown, his solid yellow teeth on display.

Jax felt his body trembling, his arms stuck at his sides in the fist and his legs limp, held so high off of the ground. 

“H-hey doll face…”

He tried to give his signature grin to save face, but that was much harder than he thought…

“Uh.. Jax?… are you okay? You look a little pale.”

He noticed that she didn’t mention the shaking, or the wide-eyed stare, or his ears firmly down against his head…

“I’m fine… congrats. You won the stupid game.

Now, p-put me down.”

Jax tried to convince Ragatha to put him back on solid ground in an attempt to be snarky… honestly, anything was better than being held by a giant, even if it meant having to look all the way up at her.

“Uh… shouldn’t I take you to Caine?”

Right… he forgot about that, he’d need Caine to unshrink him, but the thought of not being on the ground within the next five seconds made him want to curl up and shake more than he already was… he couldn’t do that in Ragatha’s hand though, he’d never hear the end of it. 

Even though Jax knew it was probably easier to just let her carry him to Caine, he still got a feeling of dread about the fact she had turned down his demand… he felt like it wasn’t taken seriously.

“I can walk on my own. "

He grunted while squirming in her fist. She opened up her hand so he was laying on her flat palm. He moved to stand but struggled to balance from the plush fabric surface of her skin.

Ragatha chuckled at his statement.

“Yeah, right, and let you get lost on the ground somewhere? No way. Caine probably wouldn’t even see you down there.”

Jax groaned in irritated acceptance, with a slight undertone of fear from the prospect of being carried for who knows how long since Caine liked to roam around often.

“Fine… take me to him then, and make it quick. I don’t got all day.”

He made a show of sitting cross-legged on her palm and crossing his arms, forcing his ears back up with will power and spite. Jax kept his surprised yelp to a minimum as she started walking with her giant strides again, refusing to look at the floor very far below to him.

Caine was smaller than Ragatha so it wasn’t too hard to look at him, but those giant teeth made him shudder like the first time he arrived here. 

Finally… he was set on the ground and with a snap from the ai he was back to his tall self. Jax relished in his size and internally sighed in relief as the nightmare of being a tiny hunted rabbit was over with. He wanted it all to be put behind him, never thinking about that again until… he realized that those instincts didn’t go away.

He was still… jumpier than before, more cautious with noises… and though he didn’t have one, he bet if he did, his nose would twitch like crazy every time he froze at a loud sound.

Don’t get him wrong, he still showed no fear on his face, talked back to the others and NPCs during adventures and frequently screwed with anyone unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity… but now it was slightly different. He was slightly different.

Something about feeling like small prey in a twisted game of chase, even if it was only in a digital reality, stuck with him… and once those weird new survival instincts unlocked over running from the giant characters he was stuck with… they couldn’t be put back in the bottle that easily.

Jax hated this. Why did his digital body have to be a rabbit?

No one seemed to mention it though, whether they even noticed his strange behavior or not. Though Ragatha gave him some odd glances once in a while that he met back with an unamused glare.

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hope you guys enjoyed! Might do more like this later, please send me asks and such! The brain rot for my fandoms is real :’)

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tag list:

@da3dm @i-am-beckyu @lunar-but-little

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A whole new meaning to Gay Chicken.

(For: Anonymous raffle winner!)

[s0up1ta]

my first attempts at drawing bro

edit: inked the sketch :)

[galaghiel]

two monsters

[tea-cat-arts]

I simply think this fandom doesn't give Wei Wuxian enough credit for the various ways in which he saved Lan Wangji

[venomgaia]

Hey do u think any of the district 23 chefs have ever gotten 'ingredients' from R corp. All that meat has to go somewhere, unless R corp is pulling a soylent green

I'm sure there are plenty of places that could actually manage to use 'ingredients' from R corp seeing as there's absolutely a surplus! Although, anyone who's procuring fresh 'ingredients' for the sake of the culinary arts...may end up with more of a mess than they bargained for...

[sysig]

[the-muffin-master]

"Since the Netherbrain fell, you and Astarion have seen more of Faerûn than you ever thought possible. One night, he tells you that these last six months of happy memories are the counterweight to two hundred years of misery."

idk what's up with my obsession with drawing astarion being happy and cared for but I'm sure it's not gonna come up in therapy. AFFECTION BEAM!!!!

[abirddogmoment]

Rory has been trending a little bun-obsessed lately, probably because we have lots of bunnies in our condo complex and she has to practice a lot of impulse control as she can't chase or really fixate on them, so I've been looking for ways to help her fulfill her bunny-murder urges safely.

Unfortunately we don't have a ton of areas I comfortable coursing her (letting her chase buns until she can't see them or catches them) because our bunnies are mostly urban animals BUT I was at the bougie pet store for unrelated reasons and they had dried rabbit feets which gave me an idea!

I bought a few and got some paper bags and put Rory in another room while I hid them around the apartment to sniff out, destroy, and eat. I figured it would satisfy some of her murder urges, even if it's not the whole predation sequence.

She was pretty happy about it! I'll try to add this to our rotation of enrichment activities and maybe get a few rabbit feet to chuck at her outdoors sometimes. Hopefully it'll help vent those bunny frustrations so they don't build up and hurt my good dog behaviours.

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

I am not a psychologist so I have no clue if this is just my own crackpot theory or what. And my apologies if I’m speaking out of my ass here.

We were not made for a fallen world. We were made for Eden. Since we have to live in this world corrupted by sin, the brain does what it has to in order to survive.

A toddler doesn’t know what “hot” means, until one day you warn the child not to touch a plate because it’s “hot,” they touch anyways, they feel the sting, and now they understand what “hot” means. The brain, now acknowledging this is something that can be a threat, has an immediate response to “hot.” Anytime someone says “hot,” we immediately recoil and make sure we don’t touch whatever is believed to be hot. The brain is simply trying to survive.

I think there’s a similar thing happening with trauma response. It’s the brain doing the same thing, but to such an extreme degree that it’s almost impossible to function. If someone survives a near fatal car crash, they may panic when they go near a car. Why? Because the brain has learned this thing to be an immediate and serious threat. The brain is now trained to fear and recoil. If you lived in a war zone and learned to sleep with one eye open so to speak, the brain is now trained to sense danger at every turn, especially when you’re in such a vulnerable state as sleep. You’re living in a constant state of anxiety because you expect a fatal threat. It’s why sudden noises and movements can trigger anxiety.

The brain is doing what it does. It adapts to perceived threats for survival. This heightened state of anxiety is deemed necessary by the brain, but we were not made to live in such a state. We cant. So the brain is, ironically, slowly killing itself. The brain is rewired and burned out and always looking for that next serious threat. It’s always reminding us that the threat looms. It’s where the subconscious lives. It’s why there’s constant anxiety, why there’s nightmares.

Of course, this can be exacerbated if the trauma is accompanied by severe grief or guilt.

This brings me to my point. If you would not tell someone to just pray the cancer away, I don’t think you can tell them to just pray the trauma away. We’re talking about a real physiological problem happening.

I think grief and guilt can be assuaged by the gospel. But the brain’s inner working itself? It’s a medical problem the same as any other. God absolutely can heal trauma same as cancer, but sometimes he doesn’t. Faith can absolutely bring about peace in hardships and give us the strength to carry on, but it’s not a guarantee that God will remove the hardship. That would be prosperity gospel.

And with all of this we can also recognize that certain treatments or habits may help relieve symptoms without fully curing, it exists on a medical spectrum.

And I think this is true about a lot of mental illness.

For the record, I think most mental illness in modern America is actually spiritual illness. And I think most psychologists are looney tunes. But people abusing a certain field of study and being stupid and misdiagnosing doesn’t negate the field of study as a whole.

If every sick person who walks into a doctors office no matter the symptoms gets diagnosed with cancer, it means the doctor is a quack and we have a problem of over diagnosis of a disease. But it doesn’t mean the disease isn’t real and that a certain percentage of the population doesn’t actually suffer from it. That would be a downright foolish thought.

Hormones, brain function, all of it can affect the mind. The brain is a complex organ. We still can’t fully understand it. And I don’t think we ever will. We know the brain can affect the mind. If it didn’t, people with TBIs would never suffer from sudden mental illness or personality shifts.

It seems wholly unchristian to deny the reality of both our body and the fallen state of the world.

[jackdaw-and-hattrick]

Stand at the Edge

Prologue- Next

Ao3

Damian was irritated. This was not uncommon, surrounded as he was by idiots, but today especially he was, as Todd would so eloquently put it, pissed. This was because, for reasons utterly unknown, Greyson had gone insane, obsessively cleaning the spotless mansion (until Pennyworth ordered him to stop) and incessantly bothering him about his appearance, all because of an interrogation. Why Father had decided to hold this particular interrogation within the Manor itself was yet another source of Damien’s irritation. Apparently, the suspect’s emotional involvement with Todd justified the clear risk posed by allowing this stranger into their home, despite the fact that all background checks and past interviews showed him to be a clear and dangerous unknown. If anything, Todd’s involvement with the suspect only increased the likelihood of this “Danny Nightengale” being a danger to the family. Damian did not believe that Todd was an irrational madman in constant need of supervision Father seemed to think he was, but he did not pretend the man did not pose a possible threat. There was also the possibility that Nightengale recognized how deeply compromised Farther was when it came to Todd and was using him to gain access to the family, be it as the Bats or the Waynes. If that was the case, then Damien was sure Father would not mind granting a temporary reprieval of the No-kill rule. For the family’s safety, that is. Not because he cared about Todd or any of his other siblings or their feelings, thank you.

The main area of concern surrounding Nightengale was not what they had learned, but what they hadn't. So far, he had avoided all interviews with concerning success. Furthermore, no family member had actually managed to get a photo of him. Attempts to look him up showed only that he was a student at Gotham University studying Astrophysics and Aerospace engineering, that he had a sister named Jazmine who worked as a counselor within Arkem, which was concerning within it's own right, and that he had lived with said sister until moving in with Todd three months ago. Footwork provided a few more details, such as that he worked at the Iceberg Lounge as part of the band playing the violin and that he seemed to have a number of pet birds, specifically ravens, though these birds seemed to come and go as they pleased. Neighbors reported that he was pleasant enough, though there were a number of noise complaints regarding both the birds and his apparent activity as an engineer. What was truly concerning was the total informational whiteout predating his arrival in Gotham. The transcript he had used to get into university was a forgery, as was his social security number, birth certificate, and driver's license. He had no social media presence of any sort and there was no one they could talk to who had any idea where he was from. The same went for his sister, they were both complete blanks. What was most interesting, at least according to Drake, was that the photo used on the fake driver's license looked to have been doctored, as if someone had taken an old photo and artificially aged it. None of them could think of a reason someone would need to do that.

“I still do not understand why we are bringing Todd and Nightengale here.”

Damien said, doing his best to tie his tie himself with mediocre success.

“Because,” Bruce explained, stepping in to help and rescue the tie from Damien’s increasingly frustrated attempts, “he is dating Jason, and as his family, we have every reason to want to meet him.”

Damien raised a brow. That seemed unusually irrational of Father. Perhaps the presence of Todd in the equation was interfering more than he had expected.

“Given how slippery he has proven in the past,” he continued “this is our best opportunity to engage him while minimizing both his suspicion and his likelihood to run. Furthermore, he is far more likely to be forthcoming than he would be if operating on his own turf. This gives us the upper hand more than if we attempted to meet him elsewhere.”

That was better. If there was one thing Damien appreciated about Father, it was his direct, analytical nature. Meanwhile, Greyson shouted something about needing to hide all of the chairs. Suddenly there was a knock at the front door, and a loud bang as Greyson tripped himself attempting to open it. Pennyworth, appearing suddenly at the door when Damian could have sworn he was in the kitchen, opened it before Greyson had a chance to right himself. Standing there was Todd and, assumedly, Nightengale. It suddenly occurred to Damian that he had never actually seen the man up close before. He was tall, with dark hair and brilliant blue eyes. He was thin as well, concerningly so, his joints sharp where the bones shone through. His skin was so pale, like freshly fallen snow or bleached bone. There was something terribly familiar about him, but so was probably any other pale man with black hair and blue eyes. As he grew closer, Damian noticed, snaking up Nightengale’s right arm and peaking up from the collar of his turtleneck, a Lichtenberg scar. Something in the back of his head stirred, but he couldn't think what it could possibly be. Greyson was shaking this man’s hand, offering some kind of greeting, but Damian couldn't hear it. Suddenly, Nightengale’s head snapped. Now he was looking right at Damian, his blue eyes boundless and staring as a grin stretched far wider across his face than should have been possible, wider even than the Joker and with teeth like a cat, sharp and predatory. He thought he maybe should have been frightened, though he wasn't sure why.

“Little Prince!”

Nightengale embraced Damian tightly, lifting him slightly off the ground. He wasn't sure how he had gotten so close so quickly. His skin was cold, but as comforting as an ice pack on an injury; the relief of a cold shower in the height of summer held in sharp and narrow arms. Something about this situation seemed wrong but he couldn't pin down just what it was.

“It's been so long! Look how big you’ve gotten. Ancients, the last time I saw you, you were just a shade!”

Wait. That was it.

“What do you mean, ‘last time’”

Damian willed his muscles to tense, his hands to clench into fists but they remained stubbornly relaxed.

“Dami, little light, ya sitti, don't you remember me?”

Nightengale gently set Damian and for a second he was blinded as the man was wreathed in rings of light bright as the sun. When the light faded the man had... changed. The most obvious shift was his hair, once black and now so blindingly white that it made his face shadowy and difficult to see, as well as luminescent, Lazarus green eyes, the sclera black as night. Rather than the simple black turtle neck and slacks he had come in, he was now wearing a black hazmat suit with a white belt holding what looked like an old-fashioned radio and, oddly, a thermos. He had white gloves, though they became sharp and claw-like at the tips. There were other, more subtle changes, such as how his skin grew grey, like someone who had been dead for hours, and the faint glow of the fractal Lichtenburg just visible through the suit. Damian became aware suddenly of pressure that had been building in his ears and only just released.

“No.”

“Oh...” the Man, he was not Nightengale, seemed to deflate.

“No... I... It's not... You can not.”

Damien was faintly aware that he was not making sense, but seeing that this made two of them, he felt little need to correct it. Finally, enough of his brain cells managed to collide for him to form a sentence.

“What are you doing here?”

“Damien,” Father said, careful to insert himself between his son and whoever, whatever, was floating just slightly off the ground before them, “who is this? How do you know him?”

“His name is Phantom. When I was a child, I would make up stories about him and the strange land he ruled.”

Hearing his name, Phantom smiled a much smaller, more hesitant smile than his Joker-esque grin from before. He waved slightly. Meanwhile, Father looked as if he were about to have an aneurysm. Looking about, that seemed to be the consensus amongst the onlookers, albeit Todd who laughed. Hard.

Tag Cultists

@mur-ururu @krzys2000 @soren1830 @fisticuffsatapplebees @emergentpanda-blog @heirxofxtime

[skwtches]

redraw of the love confes- i mean friendly exchange from that one episode of The Book of Pooh + more

[radlegowaffle]

heaven help her

[spindle-and-nima]

Hiii it's @bestboymolly :)

I'm curious. Do/did you have a cat? I'm asking because there was a cat tree in the background of one of your recent spindle photos. Have a lovely day 🐇���

Nope! The cat tree is simply for spindle to perch on.

[layzeal]

i absolutely eat it UP that one of the reasons wwx is so hesitant to believe lwj has feelings for him is that he can't tell if lwj treats him with so much goodness and kindness because he's simply that good of a person or if there's ~something more to it~

and!! here's what gets me: he's 100% right to question that. because from all we know, lan wangji would still have protected and done everything he did even if he wasn't in love with wwx. it all comes down to his beliefs, and standing up to them by protecting him. wwx is afraid to jump to conclusions because his fears are genuinely very well based!

[spoiledmilks]

Cooking yay or nay?