#i KNOW he donates to charities or whatever probably owns a few && doesn't just sit && squander his wealth

[onbearfeet]

As requested, here are a few Monster Mash asks based on the "oc asks: not-so-nice edition" list. You decide which characters they're for.

What is a surprising thing your character hides?

What does your character do when they should be sleeping but can't?

What's the worst wound your character has experienced? It can be physical or emotional.

Mwahahahahahaaaaaaa. I think I'll do multiple characters. WARNING: There's mature content in this one, and it's not just canon-typical violence. See the tags if you're worried.

What is a surprising thing your character hides?

Ted has a really beautiful singing voice, even in Man-Thing form. He no longer has the physical equipment to form words in any human language, though, so he's sensitive about it and doesn't let on that he still enjoys singing. But he's sung more than a few lullabies to Jack when he's been asleep or in a coma or whatever. And Alpine gets funny little children's melodies or goofy love songs when it's just the two of them. She accepts this as no less than the worship she deserves, of course.

Elsa is shockingly generous and tells no one but her accountant about it. She inherited an absolutely stupid amount of money from her father's estate, and she IMMEDIATELY stopped using his fortune to fund his "crusade", so she's essentially sitting on a dragon's hoard. She took almost nothing with her when she ran away, so she's lived poor for most of her adult life and is deeply sympathetic to other people in that situation, not that she'll admit it. She had her finance pro shut down the murder-cult fund and set up a clean new fund to support whatever charity she damn well pleases. She's still trying to think of ideas and will probably ask the boys eventually, but just for a start, every public library in the state got a healthy donation, and every shelter she stayed in that treated its inhabitants halfway decently got a bigger one. She's also looking into funding--founding, if she has to--an organization defending the rights and interests of homeschooled children, especially those in high-control environments. Elsa was homeschooled for much of her education according to Ulysses' rather eccentric tastes, and she had to teach herself an awful lot of actual education out of the library. And that's before all the trouble she had as a non-emancipated minor who didn't have her own copies of her identity documents.

God, what DOESN'T Jack hide? He's been alive long enough that there's a huge gray zone of stuff he might have failed to mention because he doesn't want people to know OR because it just never came up. He obviously hasn't discussed his family of origin in detail, at least not with Elsa or Bucky, but I don't consider that surprising. I'm tempted to say his hidden side is something sweet and wholesome, but that's not surprising either. If I said he was hiding something terrible he or the wolf had done, that probably wouldn't surprise most people at all. If I had to guess ... the only SURPRISING thing I can think of is his spirituality, which is complex and deeply personal to him. His family might have been Orthodox, but he's got a lot of Catholic guilt written all over him, and the curse only complicates that more. I don't think he's talked to anyone about what he does or doesn't believe in a hundred years or more. He certainly hasn't talked to me.

Bucky was a sex worker in a time-displaced brothel. Okay, that's both a joke AND an oversimplification, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this question was that Bucky had the same problem as Jack: old, complicated, obviously full of both good traits and horrible trauma so nothing is SURPRISING. Then I remembered that around 2016, I handwrote a story establishing that Bucky had worked for a while as an artist at Lady Sally's. If you've never read Spider Robinson's Callahan books, they're a series of short SF stories and novels centered on a bar run by (spoiler alert) a time traveler who's trying to save the world retroactively by preventing the Cold War from going hot. They are brilliant and hilarious and they formed me as a person. There is also a spin-off series focusing on Callahan's wife, Lady Sally McGee, who does the same thing but with a brothel. The reasoning is complex, but the stories are delightful and some of the first positive, sympathetic, relatively clear-eyed depictions of sex workers (or artists, as they're called here and who am I to disagree?) I ever encountered. So it is my headcanon that young Bucky Barnes started washing dishes at Lady Sally's as a teenager, and she kept an eye on the kid because he had a lot of history ahead of him. He worked as an artist for at least a year before the war, not least because it was the only job in the late 30s that paid well enough to let him afford Steve's medicines. (Sally was keeping an eye on Buck's "roommate", too.) Bucky never told Steve, but he was actually quite a talented and popular artist, and he liked working there. He gave notice when he and Steve finally admitted their feelings for each other, wanting to be monogamous with the man he loved, but Sally insisted he come to her if he or Steve ever needed anything in the future, and she slipped him money from time to time via his former coworkers--who, as far as Steve knew, were just girls Bucky dated to keep up appearances. The connection came in handy, too, when the Winter Soldier was sent to kill a man at Lady Sally's and the staff were able to send him away again thanks to his half-remembered connection to the place. Lady Sally's is closed in our time, but you never know when Bucky might get a phone call from the Lady.

What does your character do when they should be sleeping but can't? I'll leave Ted out of this one on the grounds that his biology is different enough that "should be sleeping" may not apply.

So, on a sleepless night at Bloodstone Manor? Jack bakes. He's got access to a well-stocked kitchen now, anything he makes WILL get eaten, and baking is less likely to wake anyone else than playing his guitar or running endless zoomie laps. He also feels a little better when he can do something kind (and profoundly human) out of his emotional turmoil. Helping people helps Jack, and if there are no monsters to rescue or curses to break, he can at least make sure his people have something delicious for breakfast. (Or a midnight snack. Let's face it, somebody else will wake up from a nightmare in an hour.)

Elsa is currently the queen of maladaptive coping mechanisms. She's cut down on drinking since the boys moved in, much to everyone's relief, but she's still in rough shape emotionally. Although she sleeps better than the others thanks to her sleep-anywhere hunter training, she does occasionally have nights when her brain won't shut up, and her solution to that is to run herself into the ground. She'll hit the dojo for as many hours as it takes, usually. Bucky is trying to coax her into something less destructive in his unique sergeant-y way. The sentence "Your magic rock is not an excuse to bust your knuckles again, so wear some damn gloves!" has been uttered.

Bucky is actually the best adjusted on this front, mostly because his sleep disturbances are the worst. (Jack has more traumatic memories overall. Bucky’s are more concentrated, and he's had to heal brain damage on top of it.) Thanks to his time in Wakanda, he's learned some basic meditation techniques and some therapy exercises to help himself calm down a little. Alpine has some kind of extra sense for when Bucky is in distress, so on the rare occasion she's not already in bed with him when he wakes up screaming, she'll come running in immediately. He usually ends up either curled around her, doing breathing exercises, or settling down in bed with a book while she purrs on his chest until the tension finally melts out of him. Bucky isn't healed by any stretch of the imagination, but by God he's trying.

What's the worst wound your character has experienced? It can be physical or emotional.

Ted Sallis died of his injuries from a horrific accident, drowning in a swamp while his super-soldier serum burned him from the inside out after the so-called love of his life betrayed him. That's the worst for him. Only Jack knows about it, and even he doesn't know it all. Nothing else comes close.

Jack is pretty good at toughing out physical pain by now, so his worst wounds are definitely emotional. I think the worst one was finding out that his sister, Lissa, had died. It was a natural death, but he didn't find out until years later, and she was his last connection to who he was before the wolf. The wound has never fully healed.

Elsa's worst wound is what she told Bucky about in "Bucky Meets the Legion of Monsters": realizing that the monsters she'd been hunting, even without her father's input, had mostly been people. That's an identity-shattering experience that has fundamentally changed her.

Bucky’s worst physical wound was losing his arm. His worst emotional wound was either when he realized Steve wasn't coming to save him from Hydra a second time or when he realized Steve wasn't coming back from his time jaunt. Bucky is profoundly loyal and loving, and he is constantly disappointed by other people's failure to meet him where he is. Thus, he doesn't trust easily, but Steve has always had Bucky’s entire heart, and Steve's broken it twice now. It wasn't intentional the first time and we don't yet know what happened the second, but like Jack, Bucky is walking around with an unhealed wound in his soul. If Steve ever reappears in Bucky’s life, there will be Consequences. Even if Bucky will always forgive Steve and would take him back without hesitation, the rest of the squad will have serious concerns about a fella who'd abandon Bucky Barnes two whole times.

[vigilaent]

a fatal flaw of dick’s robin was projecting his own self - inflicted sense of innocence onto the rest of the world.     the judgement he wielded was very much black and white and didn’t leave much room for shades of gray.     there’s good and there’s bad,  murderers and the murdered,  the guilty and the innocent.     a lot of this thinking came with being batman’s sidekick,  but a lot of it was just dick’s mind trying to cope with the injustice of his parents’ death as a child.     watching them plummet to the ground just out of reach and learning someone did that on purpose.     their deaths were just a blip on someone else’s radar,  and years later when he finally gets to avenge them,  bring this learned idea of justice to the unjust and finally reap the satisfaction,  the repercussions wind up killing more innocents in an endless cycle he thought he could bring to a close.     violence has never truly provided a sense of fairness for him,  despite all his trying.     it only ever seemed to beget more violence,  and the feeling of guilt he carries for his portion of it is something he imposes on anyone else who makes similar choices he did. 

living in gotham gave dick a bird’s eye view of some of the worst humanity has to offer,  the deplorable and irredeemable,  the desperate,  senseless kind of living.     in a city like that,  there was no room for shades of gray if you wanted to survive.     anything less never felt like it would even the odds,  never felt like it could keep you alive and separate from the evil that devoured everything around it.     ‘  all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men and women to do nothing.  ’     you either fight against the evil or you become it.     or worse,  as dick would discover,  in fighting against it,  you become the very thing you fought to destroy.

the kind of justice batman and robin dish out in gotham requires a level of arrogance to exist.     it’s in the definition of justice when you believe you can embody it  ;  if you're the hand of justice,  there’s a stock you have to put in your very own ideas of right and wrong,  that you know what’s unfair and what’s not,  and what the correct course of action is for making it fair is.     you’ve imposed an ideal greater than a single person can conceptualize onto yourself—  you’re the judge,  jury,  and executioner in every way but the actual finality of death.     living this way leaves no room for things like redemption.     you’re either guilty or innocent,  savable or irredeemable,  evil or prove yourself righteous enough to judge what is.     being robin showed dick most evil can’t be redeemed,  only punished before it can do any more harm.     it’s a reactive sense of justice that leaves no room for confronting why it exists to begin with.     it’s animal,  base survival,  asking the bare minimum of what life is willing give.     begging god to throw you a bone and get you out alive long enough to squash your enemies before they can hurt anyone else like they did you.     no bargaining,  no fixing the circumstances that pumps these perpetrators out like a factory,  just a clinging to the life rafts left in the wake of them.

in a way,  the world is safer like this.     it’s an easier pill to swallow,  especially once dick considers himself irredeemable.     the only option is to stop trying to fix the world altogether,  all or nothing,  playing judge or complete abstention.     the pressure to try and fix evil is too much to even think about,  too heavy if he himself is un - fixable.     dick either swoops in to save the helpless or punish the guilty,  and after all the punishing he’s enacted,  it’s a dangerous question to ask,  if something could’ve been done to reach someone before he cracked their skulls in,  maimed their bodies.     when he himself crossed the imaginary line of morality he created as a symbol of justice by abandoning tony zucco to die,  he did it because he was embittered and volatile,  out of control to even himself and reveling in the damage he dealt.     when he learned the world was corrupt,  he was too young and the event was too traumatic to be anything other than senseless to him,  and bruce’s own grieving process only kindled this.     there was no mercy,  no room to understand the brutality,  just an equal and opposite reaction.     and when he felt like he fell from grace,  he extended the same capacity for understanding to himself.     when confronting the rest of the evil in the world,  it’s easier to project this onto the people he hurts in a new kind of never - ending cycle that does nothing to try and cure harm,  but simply judge it.

it requires a level of kindness for oneself,  to consider that the worst parts of him were born out of the desperate need of a child for the world be fair when it just isn’t.     that maybe anyone can be turned into a weapon like he was,  just without billionaires willing to take them in and give them direction.     and if even with that,  dick turned out the way he did  ;  all serrated edges just waiting to cut into someone,  surely the worst of gotham alone is elementary.

robin,  much like batman itself,  is a symbol donned by orphaned vengeance.     it’s only once dick burns his bridges with robin that he’s able to create something new from it’s ashes that allows a greater purpose,  and furthermore a greater understanding of it  ;  one that allows shades of gray to come out of his black and white world.