#also steph-centric fics? HELL YEAH!!

[were-wolverine]

last line challenge wooo

rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you feel like).

thanks to @lesbian-cowpoke for the tag !!

No, he wasn’t jealous. Shut up.

lmao this is from my recent crack fic (clearly). wish i had smth more poetic but eh

tagging @ummrys hi bestie :3

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

AND A TIMELOOP AU??? oh? I am. Intrigued.

apparently I have a LOT of Steph-centric WIPs right now bc this is yet another one! Steph gets caught in a time loop where the only constant is that Bruce/Batman dies. to break the loop she has to keep that from happening. BUT. she can't do it alone. and it might take her a liiiiittle too long to figure that out. long enough that by the time she starts going to the others, she's exhausted, and by the time she has any kind of real support within the 24-hour confines of her own personal hell, she's about at her breaking point. I once saw someone with a timeloop fic tag "Trope-Typical Suicide". yeah. and, predictably, I made it hints of Jaysteph. :)

It's 11:40 and B is going to die at 11:45 and the loop is going to reset at 11:47, and she's standing on a roof in the Narrows and wondering if there's anything left to try to change it. She's tried everything she can think of alone and even more with help but it's 10:41 and she wants it to be over. She just wants it to stop, wants to be anywhere but here, on a roof with the Red Hood because of all the geniuses in their team, the one person who's quickest to believe her claims about a timeloop is also the one other person who's died before.

Tim watches Doctor Who, sometimes, because he's a nerd and time travel, even the campy BBC kind, fascinates him. Stephanie thinks of stone statues and paradoxes and tops of buildings and- she doesn't think about what she's doing, stepping confidently, or as confidently as she can this exhausted, this desperate, this frustrated and tired and deprived of hope, to the edge of the roof. Normal, everyday chatter feeds through her comm.

"Hey Tim," she says abruptly, without activating her voice channel. Only Babs can hear her right now and she doesn't care. "Remember that episode of your stupid time travel show where the nurse jumps off a building to save everyone?" She feels, utterly and completely, like she's going insane.

"Spoiler," comes Hood's mechanized voice behind her. She ignores him and then feels bad about that but she's too worn down to care enough to change her mind. "Steph."

She steps one foot onto the raised lip of the roof and suddenly wonders if she even has the strength to lift herself all the way up, to push herself over the edge. She doesn't have to, though, because just as she steps into open air, something — someone — slams into her, strong arms coming around her and dragging her back into the middle of the roof.

"What the hell," growls Jason's voice from directly above her. He says something else, but she's not listening.

"Just let me go," she mumbles, even as she sags against him. "Please."

"No way, Sunshine," Jason replies, voice shaky even through the helmet. "It's gonna be okay. Just... stay with me, okay? Stay with me." His arms tighten around her and Steph leans into his solid form, rocking her carefully back and forth. "I've got you."

In one loop, not the last one but the one before that, Steph had climbed through the window of Jason's safehouse and explained the timeloop and he'd asked "Have you tried doing nothing?" And then made her sit down on his couch and eat something and sleep for awhile, because waking up in her bed every morning on the same morning doesn't count for real sleep, and when she'd woken it had been 11:44 and she'd held her breath, figuratively speaking, for two minutes before the phone call came. Tim, weak-voiced and in shock, calling Jason because their dad was dead. Steph had stared at her hands helplessly as Jason sat there in shock, then turned to her and asked, "How long do you have before it resets?" She'd told him, two minutes, and all he'd done was hold out his arms in an offer of comfort and then he'd just- held her, until she woke up again at the start of a new loop.

This is like that, and some small, not suicidal part of Steph's brain registers that even considering all the body armor, Jason is a really good hugger. "What time is it?" She manages, finally, after she counts out thirty seconds of silence through the comms and steady breathing from Jason.

He stops rocking her. "11:47," he says, and Steph stops breathing.

"Really?" She asks, barely daring to hope, but it's the first flicker she's felt in so long that she can't help it. It's in her nature.

"Yeah. I'm gonna let go of you a second, take the helmet off, 'kay?" Steph nods, misses the security of his hold on her for the few seconds it's gone. "Hey," Jason says, helmet and voice modulator gone. He says it like a greeting even though they've been together all day. It's a day, now, not a loop. It's a day.

"Hey," Steph whispers back.