#idk i might delete this later bc I'm reading it and my tags

[plusultraetc]

I'm so sorry but ever since that teen Hawks page was translated on twitter I can't stop thinking about it. like. Mera treated him like a person. he was assigned to Hawks when he was already a teenager. did no one treat him like a person before then? was it such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed special when someone did? I mean, they didn't even let him have a person's name. they gave him a hero name, and to the HPSC, that was the name of a tool. of a product. they basically bought a child and treated him so coldly that Mera stood out to him because he treated him like a person. the bars of my enclosure.

[coridallasmultipass]

(This is just an apology I owe someone I will probably never see again. Please ignore, I just needed to get it off my chest 16 years later. I'm not a good person, and I was very cruel as a teen.)

Hi. I'm sorry I wronged you. I treated you terribly when you gave me that letter. It was my fault, obviously. You were such a kind person to me, and we could have been great friends. You shot your shot, and that was totally normal and fair. I just want to explain why I reacted that way, because it was completely uncalled for.

I was living as a girl then, and had no idea that I had this trans man living inside me all along. I didn't know it, but my friendships with men felt so important and validating to me. I felt like I could be one of the bros without realizing that there was an actual personal reason why I needed that validation and mirroring. I guess, at the time, I would have chalked it up to 'daddy issues' from having a continually absent father figure,' which is incredibly reductive and dismissive, and was never genuinely my issue. I felt safe when it was me hanging out with some guys, especially when we often had more interests align which was rare to find in female friends. It's not easy being a kid into metal, alt fashion, art, and nerdy things, when you live in a rural small town where sports is considered the 'ideal' for teens. But you already know that. You lived it, too. You just didn't have the societal pressure to perform femininity, when you're not a girl, on top of it. ((But who knows, you could be a trans woman right now and struggling with your own issues from the other side, I really don't know you.))

But boy, did I PERFORM femininity. The metal scene wasn't the best inspiration for women. You had to be a hot sexy metal babe or you wouldn't get dick. No love for the androgynous women (except lesbians. Go lesbians, I love you.) At least that's what it felt like to 14-year-old me. I had to struggle with the fact that I wanted to look like the band members, not the women they were pictured with. I showed my hairstylist pictures of band men and short-haired Rihanna so I had at least one girl on there. I don't know where I'm going with this. I tried to do both perform the femininity, and doing small things to look more like the band guys I idolized, finding excuses to portray men in acting/roleplay/costumes. 'Because I had a crush on them, right?' No, because I wanted to BE them. Iwanted to be wanted as a man. Not as some metal babe. Being desired as a woman felt horribly invalidating, and I couldn't have ever explained why until now.

It's not a valid excuse, but I reacted that way because I felt safe around you. So safe. You were a dude, my bro, and I could be myself without feeling like I'm being 'tested' for performing human femininity like I did around girls. Like I walk into a room and everyone stops and glares at me. That's what I felt like, that hypervigilance, without knowing what that word meant. You were a good friend, kind, interesting, naturally attractive, and cool. I can't explain it, but it felt like betrayal when you gave me that letter. Suddenly, I was a 'love interest' and not 'fellow bro' and it hurt me so badly to believe that our friendship was built on you viewing me as a girl, not an equal. (That sounds absolutely horrible, I'm not implying that women are 'less," just that it made me feel like I was being unseen, that your feelings were for someone i was not.) I felt like our friendship was built on a lie. I felt disgusted at myself for reasons I didn't understand.

I reacted horribly. I wrote you that shameful e-mail in response. I tried burning that letter because I'm a dramatic hoe, but couldn't get the fireplace open, so I had to blow it out and instead melted and shredded it into the sink disposal. My mom came home and smelled the smoke and thought I was trying a cigarette. (I didn't try a single drug until I had a cigarette in fall of 2017, age 23.) Do we address the situation like an adult with calm words and ponder why we feel all these negative emotions, or do we SINK GO BRRRRRRRR DESTROY THE EVIDENCE?

14-year-old Cori go BRRRRRRRR, apparently.

I mean, I was a KID. Kids are mean as fuck.

It's no excuse, but I can look back on that now and say definitively that it was a result of not understanding my gender identity. I know I'm gay (not to mention, aro), but I did things counter to that, like have a phase of being a lesbian/bi/pan-preferring woman. if being attracted to women made me feel more butch and manly, then 'hey, look at that chick's thighs, bro…' I was gonna play it up.

Anyway, my point, discovering gender was like, literally taking off a suit of armour that never fit right because it was too small for me. I took off that suit of armour at age 19. It felt freeing to have no gender at all. I could do anything I wanted to find what fit me, trying on anything and everything. I finally found that fit in 2015. I'm a dude. This armour fits me perfectly now, and it flexes with my movement. But i still have the chafing and bruises from wearing the wrong armour for so many years.

I should have gently told you that I wanted to stay just friends. Instead, I was spiteful and mean for something that was my own fault. I refused to address my own gender problems, avoiding them entirely and dumping them onto you. I should not have been so immature as to do that and then entirely avoid you forever after.

So, I am deeply and truly sorry. I have regretted it every moment since I clicked 'send.' I hope you've entirely forgotten me by now. I hope you're doing well and still playing music and being your own creative self. I hope you're making mad bucks doing whatever the fuck you love. I'm sorry.

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

3. What are your top three most commonly used tags on AO3?

10. Is there a character or ship you'd love to write for, but haven't yet?

and 31. What fic meant the most to you to write?

-mel 💜

A wild @melodyatlas appears :3 !

Oooh let's see...

3.

S&M, Humor, Fluff <- yeah that tracks!

The only reason "crack taken seriously" isn't on there is bc I decided that the coke was being taken too seriously to be labeled coke in the first place lol, but 99% of my stuff starts with a goofy non-sense premise that I proceed to take way too fucking seriously heheh

10.

If we're counting stuff that I've only kinda outlined and never published, then JaySteph, I've been wanting to write a specific story for them called Four and Twenty Blackbirds for a while now - but like since I have written some of that out I'm not sure I should count it, yaknow?

Other than that, though, idk, I might like to write a Boostle fic! That is really the pairing that got me into writing and comics as a whole, so like, idk it'd be nice to revisit that and give something back someday

31.

Falling Into the Night (not to be confused by the three other AO3 works sharing the same title lol)

Holy shit did this fic genuinely change my life. Like, writing it down and sharing bits of it is basically the reason I have a good relationship with my Father and the capacity to process my own feelings??

It's also finished, even though it isn't done, and I deleted what little I published off of AO3 years ago.

The plot is far from complete, I never got further than a certain point with it, and I lost my favorite scene of Jason walking through shoulder high grass in the wind up to the hill to visit a mausoleum to speak to himself and the stone - but it's still done. It did what it needed to do, and I'm done processing what it was written to process. It's not done for all intents and purposes, but for my own it is.

It's also possibly the world's most spectacularly bizarre soulmate AU???

Honestly, some of the scenes in it are still powerful and delightfully invocative even on their own - and, ya'know what, go ahead and have the first couple scenes and maybe I'll end up reposting the rest of the damn thing too sooner or later

Warnings for body horror that was written by a profoundly unwell teenager who had read basically zero comics other than nu52 Red Hood and the Outlaws lmao

A baby, swaddled in something blue. They would have been cute except for the fact that instead of eyes some one seemed to have drilled tiny holes out of their skull. Each one was slightly larger than their little eye sockets should have been. Jason thought that filling the holes with darkness would have been a mercy. As it was, he could see every bit of skull and viscera that lined the rough cut-outs. They didn’t bleed much either and that was horrible too. He wouldn’t be able to articulate why it bothered him so much until he was years older but it all seemed so much more real without the excess that would have accompanied a Halloween decoration or horror movie.

He knew in the very pit of his soul that the baby was watching him. It seemed content, almost happy.

4-year-old Jason Todd woke up like a man being dragged behind a horse. He clutched, trembled, and cried until exhaustion brought him back to reluctant sleep. The baby writhed in silent laughter when he returned.

At 14 Jason was a proud, grade C-, delinquent hoodlum in an under-funded public school. He had all but begged Bruce to let him come here and not an upper crust private school. The way Jason saw it, schools weren't much more than brain washing, regardless of how rich they were. He’d either get taught to sit down and shut up in disgustingly sanitized white florescent halls, or he’d get taught to sit down and shut up in the comfort of a gutter where everyone knew what kind of scam they were in. Besides, he figured that if he could only barely get through a gala without committing arson, then spending every day with a bunch of snobs would drive him straight to supervillainy. So, during school he sat in desks and made them his by carving cool S marks and dicks into them. Then he went home and learned calculus, bio-chemistry, forensics, acrobatics, pyrotechnics, anatomy, and martial arts from Bruce and Dick at break neck speed.

He was currently in health class doing his level best to tune out a slide show about "Soul Mates, and how to find them!! :D ". The font was inevitably comic sans. The colour scheme was obviously supposed to evoke thoughts of joy, but accomplished that about as well as a hamburger made with moose-shit.

Jason absently mused, <em>"It's pink-on-yellow lies are hollow, and scorch the retinas of its audience."</em> He filed that line away with all the other cool lines he would never write because he absolutely refused to become some edgy emo loser who wrote angst poetry. It was bad enough that he lived with a guy who regularly got accused of being a vampire.

There were always rumors surrounding their strange little family, and to be honest, Bruce deliberately cultivated a sort of urban legend status. The latest version of the vampire rumor held that Batman was using his dark powers to summon fiendish and colourful Imps. It was an unfortunately reasonable conclusion, all things considered. The batclan knew better, of course, and so their hairbrained rumors were much more nuanced. Every member had long ago concluded that if <em>anyone</em> around the manor was a vampire, it was Alfred Pennyworth.

Batwoman had tasked Jason with gathering evidence of Alfred's ‘true nature’. He was pretty sure she didn't expect him to find anything, and it was just a way to hone his detective skills. Vampire hunting was way more fun than reading endless cold case files though, so he took it without complaining and resolved to give it his best effort lest someone decide he had too much idle time.

Speaking of that, he had heard Alfred and Batman talking the other day. Bruce had turned to him and said, "It feels like we've always been old." And then Alfred made that funny little hmph sound of gentlemanly displeasure and replied, "Speak for yourself, Sir. I've always been a youthful man at heart." It was still only circumstantial <em>but-</em>

"Jason!"

"Huh, what?"

"Jason, can you tell us what this presentation was all about?"

Jason rolled his eyes and replied completely deadpan, "Everybody meets their one true love in prissy little fairy tale dreams and if we ever look at anyone else The Devil will eat our slutty asses."

He took a <em>very</em> long smoke break on his way to the administrator's office.

Honestly, Jason already knew that thing slowly growing up in his dreams was his soulmate, and that stung more than he would ever admit. He wondered what having an abomination for an “other half” said about his half. Did it mean he was going to end up lovesick, addicted and dead like his mother? Did it mean he was going to end up a puppy kicking piece of shit like his father? Was he, deep down, just as horrifying as it was? He ended up chewing on these thoughts like a swollen tongue that grew more inflamed every time he bit it until it filled his mouth and every move he made scrapped painfully against it.

During a brief lull in his ruminations he realized that he’d absentmindedly bitten through the end of his cigarette. He spit it out, grimaced at the bitter taste, lit a fresh one, and kept on walking.

Soulmates are only supposed to meet in dreams when both of them are asleep, but that thing never seemed to dream. He was convinced by this point that it didn’t even exist outside his head. It just perched in the corner of his mind and watched and stared and looked with its empty gaping holes.

Eventually, his smoke break took him all the way back to the manor.

"Hey, how's it goin'?" Jason gave a wave to the butler as he strode across the hall.

"It’s a fine day, young Sir. I daresay you couldn't have picked better for your afternoon stroll. Though, I must ask after your reasons for taking it when you should have been in school."

"How do you do that?! " He was certain he had been out of sight of the manor while he waited for the bus to roll by.

"I am the caretaker of three generations of over dedicated, self-taught ninjas, Master Jason. I have had no choice but to out-match my wards. Now, enough stalling. What happened?"

"We had a stupid fuuh-uurducken presentation on soul mates and it was so useless. Like, the health teacher doesn’t even care and it just kept talking on and on about how perfect and <em>normal</em> you <em>have</em> to be. And it’s totally useless! Because it’s not like they’re saying anything we haven’t heard a million times before, and they’re getting most of it <em>wrong</em> too! Like they took a whole 30 fuggin minutes to do some nasty comparison about a girl being like a chewed piece of gum and how nasty they’d be and how a soulmate wouldn’t want their love being gum as though humans are fucking pieces of gum! And I know that frickin coach tells kids their dreams aren’t real if they don’t <em>perfectly</em> match what hers were like, and- and- I mean it’s screwed up and I told them so and obviously they sent me to the administrator’s office, ain’t <em>no way</em> I’m gonna talk to that bi-ugh!” He shook his head and shrugged in tight, closed off movements, “Whatever. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Am I grounded or not?”

Alfred put his hand on Jason's shoulder and gave him the gentlest look his titanium reinforced upper lip allowed for. "You have a wonderful moral passion young Sir. Foul language, undignified as it may be, does not change the fact that you were only standing up for what is right. Go get some rest, dinner will be ready in a few hours, and you'll need your strength for tonight's patrol."

"Thanks, Alfred."

"Of course, Master Jason."

As he flopped down onto the comfiest couch in the living room, black, guilty bile rose at the back of his throat. It felt wrong to be called ‘Master Jason’, same way his old neighbor Rosa had said ‘Sir’ to the man whose house she cleaned. Jason could still remember how that man had fired her when she got too sick to clean. Rosa had decided to just let the sickness take her rather than leave her daughter with nearly a million dollars in debt. He never learned what she was sick with, but he knows her daughter makes a half decent living working as a maid.

He wanted to hope that Bruce wouldn’t ever do that to Alfred. That Alfred means more to him than Rosa had to her employer. But as a dozen other suffering friends and family who worked serving others cascaded through his mind he found himself incapable of imagining a happy ending to Alfred’s life. Or his own for that matter.

It took far longer than Jason wanted for sleep to pour those thoughts out of his head.

He knew that sleep had finally overtaken him when, once again, Jason found himself in the dreamscape that held only him and his soulmate. The space held no indication that it was anything other than infinite empty void, but Jason knew, in the certainty of dreams, that it had a shifting, hidden geometry. One of the few constants was the distance between him and it.

That distance was measured in: three small steps, five seconds of sprinting, one scream, four bouts of being dragged by the ankle as his mind fought between the standing dream and lying body. Two more small steps.

Maybe that meant something? Maybe it was bullshit.

He stayed still, and just stared into the nothingness. Looking into absolute blackness was much easier than looking at it. He could tell it wasn't a baby anymore. It just wore a baby's swaddle and skin and fat, and the head didn't fit right anymore. It was like the skull just kept growing even though the rest of it had stopped.

The way this space screwed with his vision didn't help either. The problem was, Jason and it weren't illuminated, or even glowing. They were just perfectly visible; utterly without shadow. The subtle wrongness of that just made everything worse.

Suddenly, every fiber of his being tried to pull itself inwards at the disgusting sound of fingers being bent until they snapped. That wasn't supposed to happen, it wasn't supposed to move, WHOSE FINGERS-

He whipped his head around to face his 'other half'.

The eyeless baby wearer had managed to pull its tiny arms out of the swaddling and was now moving it’s fingers like a nefarious villain in a cartoon. It was still watching him. The little fingers crackled, bending right bending wrong *SNAP* bending right bending wrong *SNAP* out of sync and mesmerizing.

Jason screamed. It just seemed like the thing to do, really.

He watched, transfixed, as the fingers stopped, and its right hand reached over to the left fingers and tugged. The flesh slipped off smoothly, like a satin glove that was just a bit too big. There were no bones underneath. Only a loose structure of needles in almost the same shape one expects bones to be in.

Those needles looked so dainty. Pin, sewing, hypodermic, all moving with a grace that didn't fit. They were, of course, far, far too long to have fit in the little sleeves of its baby coat. With the very tips of the needles, it delicately pulled the flesh off its other arm. Same easy glide to remove. Same needle bones beneath.

For the first time since it had appeared Jason felt it's gaze shift off of him to look at it's new hands. The relief of regaining some small privacy washed through him while the disorientation of losing a life-long constant punched him in the gut. Under its gaze he had felt raw and exposed, scorched by its constant unceasing gaze. Now he thought that maybe that constant watching was all that had been keeping him upright and there was a gut-wrenching sensation of being dropped from an obscenely high cliff.

He hardly noticed that it had lowered its fingers down to the surface of the dreamscape until it started moving towards him. It definitely wasn't <em>walking</em> on its new fingers. It was more like the little baby body was a balloon bobbing on the end of needle covered strings. Rather than supporting its weight, the hands were tugging it along as they crawled across the floor.

As it began to explore the empty space anew, it seemed unable to decide whether it wanted to look at its novel and silvery limbs, or return to looking at Jason. This was obviously a time of wonder and excitement for it.

His last thought before waking up was, "It's like the world's most sick, fucked up chicken."

[saturook]

rip to people who constantly pit Bernard and Jay against each other but I'm different. Sorry you don't have the range to love and appreciate them both

[parcai]

hmm i think the reason i feel weird when people ik read my stuff is because it's very intimate to read someone's writing, or at least a lot of mine are.

and i suppose on another level, i also don't want it to be disappointing. like it's one thing for strangers to read your work and maybe become your friend after, and it’ll another thing for your friend to read your story and be off put.

and i think that's why i kinda freaked out earlier lol. like disappointment is just mm different. it's not anger. it's like you expected better of someone, and that's a difficult thing to stomach as the disapointee.

then ofc there's also the fact that a lot of writing is outdated. a lot of my ideas, personally, came from when i was much younger even if they were published within the last year. a lot of my critical thinking was half baked, like only for one topic but not at all for another, and other variations. like there are prob some ships i don't agree with anymore, some plot points, shoddier writing, styles, etc. and i don't want old writing to influence current perceptions of me, but i also don't take it down because it induces nostalgia in other people, and who am i to rob people of stories they found connections with?

but it's also shameful, just like how when you think about bad things you did as a kid or something like that. and that's another piece of not erasing writing because, as uncomfortable as it is, you have to acknowledge who you were and what you used to think to become who you are.

regardless, it feels extremely invasive to a certain degree, and idk it makes me feel weird lol. it's like sharing a piece of you that you weren't ready to share yet/never planned to share. especially when your story is more than like a simple, cheesy, fluffy rom com, coffee shop, high school au or something, it tells you a lot about the person who wrote it, and maybe the message isn't the same message i'd like to express if given another chance, or maybe it's just a more personal part you want to keep to yourself going forward.