#all fanfic is ripped off

[spoilers-ahead]

okay!! now that it’s not 2am for me, i’m going to post my selkie!jason todd hc’s straight up au apparently! 

(uh. this was supposed to just be a list of hc’s but i got slightly,,,, carried away)

his selkie skin looks like an oversized red hoodie in his human form, and is just warm enough to help him survive new england winters.

when the summer heat becomes unbearable, he slings the hoodie around his waist

alternatively, he just coasts it out underwater. perks of living in a coastal city!

willis todd was a selkie. he used to tell jason stories of what it was like to swim through the big, wide ocean. of how freeing it felt. how different it is, from the smoggy, heavy air of gotham --- different, but both theirs, in their own right.

but to be honest, jason doesn’t remember much about the stories he was told, or really, anything about willis --- he had been in and out of blackgate for most of jason’s life, working for two-face to try and make ends meet, before dying. 

what jason mostly remembers, are the warnings. don’t let anybody know you’re a selkie. don’t let anybody find your skin. they will find it, and they will use it to control you. even decades later, jason would still remember those warnings. 

catherine is the one who teaches him how to swim, who helps him trial-and-error his way into putting his skin on, and learn how to make the transition seamless. 

after she dies, jason spends three months as a seal, to just... exist. forget.   

although jason technically lives on the streets, whenever he can;t find food, whenever he can’t find somewhere warm to sleep, whenever just being human becomes too unbearable, he spends the night as a seal. he ends up spending more time in the ocean, than on land.

that’s not to say he’s very good at being a seal --- he barely knows how to swim, has to learn how to fish the hard way. 

when bruce finds jason stealing his car tires, he marvels over how nice jason’s hoodie is, soft and fluffy even after all of jason’s time on the streets, especially given the condition jason is in, ribs showing from malnutrition, and the worn and raggedy shape of the rest of his stuff.

jason is skittish when he goes to live in the manor, even after a few weeks. he always adopts an expression particularly similar to a cornered wild animal around alfred in particular, alfred, who keeps on trying to take his hoodie away, purportedly to wash it.

alfred eventually gives up on trying to force jason to wash it --- he figures that as jason becomes more comfortable living at the manor, he’ll wind up telling them why he’s so protective over that hoodie, and they can work something out then. 

whenever wayne manor overwhelms jason with how big and how decadently expensive all the decor is, jason runs away, run to the ocean. 

jason doesn’t actually end up telling alfred and bruce that he’s a selkie --- bruce just has a ridiculous amount of motion alarms, which are triggered every time jason ran off. he had followed jason the third night, and saw him transform. 

bruce doesn’t tell jason that he knows, assuming that jason kept this a secret because he didn’t fully trust either of them. he would later learn that he was right in this assumption (a rare win for bruce in terms of emotional awareness)

except jason doesn’t fully trust either of them, even after a few months. bruce impulsively decides to do a few things --- a) tell jason about batman and robin and his crime-fighting secret identity, and b) tell jason he already knows about him being a selkie. 

jason is absolutely bamboozled by the fact that bruce knows, and yet hasn’t tried to take his hoodie to control him, or to stop him from playing in the ocean for a few hours. 

in fact, (under alfred’s encouragement) bruce offers to take him to the ocean during the day, so he can get “a proper night’s rest that a growing young boy such as himself would need”

jason remembers what his father told him, to never trust anyone, never let his guard down. but bruce has known about jason being a selkie for so long, and he didn’t take his hoodie or try anything. of course he can trust bruce. 

and when he tries on the robin costume for the first time, it fits perfectly. just like his hoodie, his second skin. it fits just like magic. 

oh, it’s a little loose in some places, the legacy of dick fucking grayson a little heavy sometimes, but he’ll grow into it. he’ll make himself, if he has to. 

also, jason finds the fact that even though he’s a friggin’ selkie, his callsign is a bird (a robin, no less) incredibly ironic and funny 

being a selkie is actually so useful for vigilantehood. the amount of people who talk freely, openly, and loudly about their drug smuggling plans near the ports is quite frankly, ridiculous.

honestly, towards the end of his robin years, jason remains genuinely surprised nobody catches on to him or his tactics yet. bruce is very proud.  

even though jason is safe, has been safe for three years, and trusts bruce with his life, his skin, and everything, old habits are hard to break. so he has his hoodie on when he goes to find sheila. 

and anyways, he wants to see if sheila is a selkie too. he’s taking biology right now, and they’re learning about punnett squares. jason’s never met another selkie before, other than willis who he barely remembers. there’s a possibility that sheila knows something, anything, so he has to try. 

sheila gets a glint in her eyes when jason mentions that he’s a selkie, tells him that while she’s not one herself, she’s familiar with the myth. she has long suspected that willis was a selkie, she tells him, and she’s glad to have confirmation. 

jason positively vibrates with excitement, can’t wait to ask, to pester his mother (mother!) with questions upon questions until. 

until. 

sheila doesn’t do anything after she gives him to the joker. she just smokes and smokes. and she doesn’t tell the joker about his hoodie, despite how it would have been much easier for the joker to destroy him that way. much more painful too.  

small mercies, he supposes, in between hacking coughs that brings blood bubbling up his lips. 

after he dies, his hoodie is ripped and in tatters from the crowbar, with burns along the edges from the bomb. bruce has to carefully peel it off his body. 

when jason was alive, his magic kept the hoodie in perfect condition, always. even when the rest of him was covered head-to-toe in mud, or dripping sludge from the nasty gotham sewers. 

bruce stares at the same hoodie, blood-soaked and mangled, so incredibly dissonant from how he remembered it on jason, when he was bright, whole, and alive. 

he can’t stand it. the hoodie that was so precious to jason, that was jason, at the core of him, in this state. dirty and ripped and devoid of the magic jason had exuded. 

in a moment of desperation, late at night, bruce asks alfred to teach him how to sew. he doesn’t dare to practice on jason’s beloved hoodie --- instead, he starts with the suits in his closet, grabbing the first one he sees, regardless of price. rips a hole and sews it back together over and over until he perfects his technique. 

and then he washes the fabric gently, using baby fabric cleanser and scrubbing for hours upon hours until the last traces of the deep-set brown stain from jason’s blood washes down the drain.

he painstakingly sews the scraps of fabric back together with a red thread, carefully sourced to match the hoodie to try and make it flow seamlessly like it used to. 

it doesn’t work, not exactly. despite his best efforts, the creases bruce had carefully sewn together are prominent and thick like scars, littering the  soft fabric.

so he gives up. he hangs it over the grandfather clock entrance to the cave in his study. brings it with him every time he visits jason’s grave, because he doesn’t ever want to keep jason’s hoodie away from him, but he also can’t bear for it to get ruined. 

dick visits him. a rare occurrence, these days. 

dick yells at him, as he is wont to do. 

these days, it feels like they spend more time angry at each other than not. dick says that this isn’t right. isn’t fair to anybody, not to alfred, not to himself, definitely not to jason. he rants, jason deserves to be remembered as he was in life, not frozen in death. 

perhaps he is right. bruce is not unaware of the state of violent, cutting stasis he is in, this putrefaction of his life. and he is certainly not unaware of how it is affecting the people around him. dick. alfred. the neighbor’s kid, the one who wants to be robin.   

bruce tries. not for himself, but for tim. for alfred, for dick. even for stephanie brown, who sometimes, when she smirks just right, or says something with just the right twang, he swears he can see jason in her. 

he still can’t bear to put the hoodie away, because jason deserved better than to be forgotten, so he folds it gently and places it in his closet instead. 

he also can’t bear to look at it for very long, so he forces himself to every single day. 

it’s different from the glass case that houses robin’s tattered suit in the cave --- that, is a reminder of how he failed robin. this, this is salt in a constant, stabbing, festering would, reminding him of how he failed his son. 

it was stephanie, that eventually helped him figure out what to do with the hoodie. when she was young, young enough to cry at ripped pants and skinned knees, young enough that her mother hadn’t touched the drugs yet, her mother would dry up her tears, give her a hug and a kiss on the forehead, before patching her pants up. 

what not many people know, is that before crystal brown set her mind on becoming a nurse, she wanted to be an artist, first. and so she grabs her old set of embroidery needles, and stitched little designs. dogs and cats. stars and planets. tools and gadgets. 

bruce doesn’t react, doesn’t even move, even as stephanie finishes her story. she hangs there awkwardly for a second, stares up at jason’s suit, waiting for him to respond, before shuffling towards the exit of the cave. 

thank you, spoiler, bruce manages to croak out. 

ah, yeah, she says, shrugging lightly while slouching in on herself, any time, boss. she walks out, and bruce watches her go from the reflection on the darkened computer. 

that night, he takes out jason’s hoodie, smooths it out, grabs his threads, and stitches. 

he stitches on constellations, argo navis, for jason’s namesake in the greek myths he had loved so much. a tiny seal, playing with beach balls. little books, with quotes on the sides. a robin, big and bold. 

he tries to make it as true to jason as possible, not just in death and in bruce’s memories, but as he was in life.

jason wakes up abruptly.  

he wakes up in a coffin, cold, alone, and with a gaping hole in his chest. getting dipped in the lazarus pit only made it worse, only made him all the more aware of what he was missing, all the more conscious of it. 

he doesn’t bother trying to learn how to swim with two arms and two legs, instead of two fins and a tail. it doesn’t feel the same. it only reminds him of what he’s lost. 

sometimes, on sleepless nights that happen more often than not, he wonders what would have happened if he still had a hoodie, still could swim. 

if he still was robin. 

and he doesn’t have access to the cave anymore, or to the titan’s tower, or the watchtower, and his memory of the past is still patchy and shitty in some places. 

so in a burst of impulsivity fueled by the person he no longer is, he prints out photos of robin’s costume from the internet and recreates it on his own. 

if his skin is gone, then fine. fine! he’s perfectly perfunctorily aware that nothing about this resurrection of his is natural. if he doesn’t think too much about it, he’ll be alright. his hoodie, his skin, that was something he was born with, a birthright that died with him. 

but robin, robin was something that he helped shape. robin was something that he worked for, changed himself for. 

and the makeshift robin suit --- it doesn’t fit him, not anymore. no, it feels wrong, like a child playing with their parent’s suit. or --- he realizes, perhaps more accurately, like an adult realizing they no longer fit in their favorite clothes. 

and --- and --- what was the point of it all? what was the point, of trying to make bruce proud of him, of getting dick’s approval, of trying to futilely save people over and over again from the same gallery of supervillains who keep on escaping from prison?!

and what was the point of carving out a space for himself if the joker was just going to beat him out of it, and if tim drake was going to insert himself in the hole he left behind?

and then the next thing he knows he’s in titan’s tower hitting tim drake over and over again because who let him? who let him take jason’s role as a son, as a brother, as a hero? how dare he?

but when he’s slit tim’s throat and torn the ‘R’ off his chest, jason doesn’t feel any better. the robin suit still doesn’t fit. his hoodie’s still gone. 

he’s starting to think it never will, not again. 

sometimes, when he gets tired enough to let his mind wander, he wonders what happened to his suit. 

he’s pretty sure he died with it, so either the hoodie is with the joker, batman, or... gone entirely. (it’s not like they found willis’ skin after he died. maybe selkie skins just disappear in a cloud of sea foam once they die, or some little mermaid shit like that)

it’s a cold comfort, that nobody can manipulate him now. nobody can control him --- not even batman. 

(bruce had thought about it. when he first had his suspicious regarding who the red hood was, before he knew there was any trace of the son he once had left. he thought about using the hoodie, using jason’s selkie skin to coerce him, at least to stop murdering people, to stop hurting their family.) 

(he would never go that far, in retrospect, or at least, he doesn’t think he could ever. to do that to jason, betray his trust so thoroughly and completely... but it would be a lie to say that he didn’t consider it.)

bruce reflects on this as jason reveals himself, the joker tied up at his feet with a gun pressed to his head, and venom spitting from his son’s mouth.  

but when he lifts the batarang to hit jason’s gun, or wrist, or anything that’ll force him to drop the gun, he realizes that his hands are shaking. 

and when he throws the batarang, he knows a millisecond after he’s let go, that he’s miscalculated the ricochet. 

so when jason escapes that night, bruce knows he’s fucked up. 

jason goes off the maps, completely. bruce doesn’t know where he is, if he’s safe, if he even made it out of the explosion that night. 

it takes weeks. weeks for bruce to track jason down, from meticulously documenting the dropped threads of where the red hood was pulling strings in the gotham underworld behind the scenes, to tracking security cameras with facial recognition. 

once bruce manages find where he’s staying, make sure he’s safe, he knows what he wants to do. and, he knows what he needs to do. 

jason gets a package in the mail, five weeks after his disasterous meeting with batman and the joker. unmarked, unsigned, no return address. 

when jason opens the box gingerly and carefully, he holds on to his skin for the first time in years. and then, and then, and then --- something right slots into place. his fingers brushed gently over the tiny spotted seal he knows he used to look like, the books he remembered ranting to bruce about for hours on end. 

the robin, on the top left, over his heart, big enough to have changed him, yet small enough to not define him. 

it’s not perfect. it doesn’t even fix anything, not entirely. he still fights with bruce most times he sees him, tries to punch dick in the face, steadfastly ignores tim and steph the entire time. 

but it’s something. it’s something, and the next time nightwing, batman, spoiler, and robin fight a gang on the docks, the red hood gives them a helping hand before jumping back into the ocean and swimming away.

fin!

wow this got long

[autumngracy]

Not me creeping up to the wordcount of the fourth longest book ever written

[thatuselesshuman]

I'm rereading one of my absolute favorite SoC fics (One for Sorrow by endoftheworld) and reading this line after reading the most recent fic in the series gives me foreshadowing tingles

[ricemilkyart]

Y’all are not ready for this

I was thinking of giving him a tail and piercings and a different hairstyle but I kept it simple.

Oh and more info in tags <3

[rhineposting]

“So you’re telling me that this war-horse stallion you purchased not that long ago not only isn’t a stallion, but it’s also not even a horse to begin with?”

Capitano nodded idly to the question, otherwise occupied by the task at hand, which had been thoroughly brushing the mane of the animal ; a beautiful gray and white pony, in height barely reaching to his chest. Truth be told, he never quite intended on getting a horse to begin with, he could march fast well enough on his own, and it was good for keeping his condition in check. However the Jester insisted, and so, a few years back he went searching for a travel companion. People from all over were offering their steeds as soon as they learned of the Harbinger’s search, desperate to strike gold. Though he was no business man or dignitary, the Captain was well aware that a single purchase of his was akin to a whale-fall in the ocean of markets and trades. Therefore, he did not make haste in purchasing a horse - deliberately picking where the whale would be best off falling.

That, and of course, he didn’t want just any horse.

Those already grown had their own personality, especially those who had already been in a conflict. As such, the likelihood of one such veteran cooperating with him was low, same could not be said about the likelihood of accidents occurring. He truly would not want to fight with a horse over a minor disagreement in which there were none to blame, that would have been just unfair to the animal.

Therefore, he chose to raise one such steed for himself from a colt. That way, it ought to have been attuned to him from the very beginning, he thought to himself. Thus he had went on an even longer search for a colt befit of military activity, one that would be able to support his weight in the battlefield should the need ever arise. Of course, as he soon after learned, that was a task as easy as finding a needle within a stack of hay, for none matched his requirements. Perhaps it was doomed to fail, Capitano would think, and that was in truth the preferable outcome for him. That way, the Jester would per chance leave him be to keep walking on-foot to whichever his destination may be. A horse may be moody, but his own body fell to no such weaknesses, after all.Then, during one visit to a particular farm, he had been shown a colt - larger than most of it’s peers, nimble yet strong and capable, and with a gorgeous coat too. Its first owner couldn’t find enough words of praise for the animal, constantly listing seemingly endless good qualities whilst Capitano fed it with before provided snacks. As expected, the price was twice as large as that of a regular colt, but for a man his status few were things he could not afford, and a horse was not one of them. So he paid everything upfront and returned to the capital with his finally obtained steed.

Alas, as the years passed, it scarcely grew until eventually it stopped growing entirely - tall enough just to nibble on his coat every now and then, and that’s where it occurred to him that perhaps there was something wrong with the horse.

But of course, there was nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t a horse.

The Jester sighed, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, “At the very least, do you still have the name and location of that merchant? This kind of transgression cannot be forgiven or forgotten. Otherwise, you’ll send word far and wide that Harbingers can be tricked and cheated with absolutely no repercussions. Surely, neither you or I desire that?”

To that, Capitano only kept combing the pony’s mane, his time-off pants and shirt long since covered in coarse gray hair. Every now and then, he’d spare a gentle caress to her side, and she seemed most pleased. So was he, in turn.

“If you wish to put the merchant on trial for deliberate misinformation, I’ll make no arguments against it,” he answered, quite plainly - before continuing- “However, I do think Siobhan had fulfilled her role as my companion rather admirably. I can count on one hand the number of men more loyal than her. Regardless of the kind of sentencing her first owner will receive, that won’t decide whether I shall keep her or not.”

Ever so slightly amused, the Jester chuckled and took a seat. Far, on the other side of the room, away from the pony. While her quarters had been regularly scrubbed clean, the smell of an equine was still one of Jester’s least favorite smells. His sense of smell had been decaying well enough on it’s own for the last few decades, no need to hasten the process of completely losing his scent.

“Why, are you not worried that should the time arrive, she’ll be rather vulnerable to harm?” the Jester asked, most curious. To which the Captain momentarily paused the combing and proceeded to march off to the side where something akin to a wardrobe stood, from which the man pulled out a mesh of metal plates and leather straps - the contraption soon being carefully secured atop the animals head ; revealing itself to be a tailored helmet with a sharp, metal pike sticking out from the helmet’s forehead. Siobhan seemed most pleased.

“She headbutts things and people when she’s stressed,” the Captain explained calmly, unaware of the absurdity of the image he created with that one act alone,“And as of recently, I’m trying to teach her how to carry a weapon with her teeth, though I haven’t yet decided what kind of weapon it should be. Safe to say, sooner or later, she’ll be more than safe from lethal harm.”

Once again, the Jester chuckled - barely restraining an undignified bark of laughter from pouring out as the makeshift war-unicorn looked between the two of them, it’s gaze yearning for brain cells to spare. It had gotten to the point where the Jester, usually immovable and stern, could not bear to look at the animal no longer, least he’d risk his dignity once more.

“…So be it. You may keep her, but don’t say I did not warn you, Captain,” he eventually coughed out, his back turned to the man and his companion both. “Is there anything else you wanted to speak of before I ask Ajax to fetch us the thief?”

“One thing, yes : I would like Siobhan to be added to the portrait you commissioned for me when I first joined. She earned it.”

[the-acid-pear]

This is a very small thing that still drives me insane and yet I see no one bring up but it's one of my favorite parallels. This is the only image where Jack is looking directly at Dave and it perfectly parallels the only picture of Henry we have (not counting the art from 3). Too drunk to draw a conclusion but it's worth pointing out too the way Dave holds Henry perfectly parallels how he holds Jack in the normal radical ending.

[going-to-superhell]

I’m trying to sleep and I randomly remembered that when I was 13 I wrote and submitted fnaf fanfiction for an English project

[hauntingblue]

Throughout jojos there is this narrative with jotaro about how being emotionally closed off and traumatized makes him emotionally unavailable and unable to care for his daughter and he much he regrets it before he inevitably can't do anything about it before they both die and it's so tragic and compelling but it is mostly coincidental and hangs on by a thread...

[secretmellowblog]

Random, but. It’s fascinating how “Valjean and Javert written by someone who thinks cops are Good” is so radically different from “Valjean and Javert written by someone who thinks cops are Bad.”

Like, for me the number one Thing that will determine whether I enjoy someone’s take on Valjean and Javert are whether they realize that the police/prison as an institution destroyed both of their lives, and is the villain of both of their stories XD.

But yeah it’s really fascinating! Both in adaptations and in fanfiction, the tone/interpretation with which the plot beats are handled can change so much about the characterization. All the adaptations/fic start off with the same basic plot beats but so much can be changed and colored (for better or worse) by the way the author chooses to interpret them

[shadezilla-writes-stuff]

I'm posting my original fiction one shots on a03 now : ) hope you enjoy my silly OC stories

[ivanpahdrylakeracer]

having an idea i think is unique and my own: 😀

reading my favourite fic again: 😦

[jazzedpunk]

me: it’s so sad what happened to my character. no one could have forseen this tragedy.

my brain: you’re the one who did that to-

me, louder: so sad, that’s their fate, no way to change it

[mugetsupipefox]

After 10 long years, my beloved little laptop seems to have finally kicked the bucket. Thank you for your service, old friend. You will be missed

[seilon]

kind of impressed I’ve managed to space out watching an 8-episode show over the span of several days instead of binging it. it has not been easy but I think it was worth it to give me an incentive to get through work the past few days

[the-acid-pear]

Okay. Today was so long I barely remember what happened. I think I'm going to bed

[ecle-c-tic]

wbd is cancelling things left and right!! Ngl makes me hopeful for an eventual ofmd return 👀