#last time i drew Tim i did him so dirty

[deathbyfalldamage]

HI O-O I wish to pap you. *paps and runs* meow. But seriously XD. What's your favorite candy? Can you even eat? You know....when your dead....

"H-"

"AH-"

"Wh-........ why?? Why did you do that?? Are you a cat??"

"For the.. uhm.. question part, I don't like candy."

(He likes Twix. He just can't bring himself to eat it because it reminds him of when he and Tim would share a pack of Twix before shooting </3)

"Hey, wait, why is a flashback here-? Wait, stop, don't share tha-"

[bigsnzstanacct]

Do y’all want some not actually finished, not-proofread, possibly very wack F/ellow Tr/avelers fic? Well you’re getting it either way cuz I want attention. Will probably revise and possibly extend soon. It doesn’t even have a name, maybe it is just a Drabble that got out of hand but you know what I haven’t read any snzfic for this fandom and that is a crime. Below the cut, violently not-proofread!

“HHHHHEEEEEAAAAASSSSSHHHHHHHhhhhooooooo!!” He announced his presence with a sneeze, a nearly-shouted roar that sputtered out into a quieter, albeit wetter, finish.

“Skippy…!” He called out, faux-anger threaded through his voice. “You’re in trouble now, Skippy!”

Said “Skippy”, also known as Tim Laughlin, peeked his head out of one of the apartment’s bedrooms, chest bare, nostrils pinkened at the rims, face still full of the evidence of the cold he was still getting over—and that Hawkins was just falling into. “Huh, Hawk? Me, in trouble?” Mock-innocence the response to Hawk’s faux-angry call. They both knew this dance, and loved it.

Hawkins was on him suddenly, grabbing the thinner man in his arms and kissing him with intent. “Yeah, big trouble. You heard that sn-sneeze didn’t you?”

“Yeah, me and most of DC, you moose. Last time I heard a noise like that I was at the National Zoo.”

“Me? A moose? You’re just adding to the trouble you’re in, aren’t you?”

“Always do.” Tim said with a smirk, leading Hawkins into the bedroom, where he sat, limbs splayed alluringly. They were silent a moment, just holding each other’s gaze. Until Hawkins’ started to waver, a hand drifting idly up towards his nose. Tim’s smirk widened. “So what am I in trouble for, Mister Fuller?”

“You—snf!—you know what you’re in t-trouble for, you—snf!—y-you dirty little thing you, you gave me your… your hehhhhh… hehHHH…” his broad bare chest leapt with the urge. “your HHEHHHHhhh… gonna…!” The barest flicker of warning, before the inevitable was bouncing off the walls and making the windows rattle in their casements: “AAAEEEEHHHHHRRRSSCHHOOOOOO!” He bellowed. “Damn, sorry about that Skippy… never did figure out how to keep that qui… quiet… here’s a… gotta… notherone…! Huhhh! HUUUUURRRRRSSSCCCHOOOOOO!!!” Tim playfully covered his ears, smiling up at Hawk and sniffing himself.

“Awwww… did big bad Hawkins catch a little cold in his nose?” He teased. “Is that why you’re making all that racket? Just cause of little old me?” They’d been turning the tables more lately, but somehow they always found themselves back in this position: Hawkins towering above his Skippy, Skippy sitting on the bed, looking up at Hawk with at least two contradictory emotions in his eyes. At first, desire and terror. In the bad times, love and hate. In the best times—like now—naked adoration and stubborn defiance. An unwillingness to break and an insistence on being broken. That look stirred the most dangerous parts of Hawkins, in the most delightful ways.

Hawkins drew closer, lifted Tim’s chin, mostly so he could place his big hands near Tim’s neck. “Yeah… you made me sick, you little ball of germs. If you weren’t always sneezing and snotting all over this apartment, maybe I’d still be able to do my very important job.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Seem to recall you not minding that sn-sneezing and snotting at a-all… speaking of wh… which…” Hawk just smiled. Sometimes it seemed like Tim was allergic to the very word “sneeze.” Between the poor guy’s allergies and a cold in his nose, he was always on the verge of a big, messy sneezing fit.

“Hhhhh… hhhettcchhOOO! Hhhh-hehhhh! EEETTttttt-chhooOOO! Wh-whoa bihhh… big one… hehhhh…. hhettschh… ettscchhooo… hehhshhooo… yyeeeEEttschhooo... Ettssscchhhhh-OOO!” God Tim’s sneezes drove Hawk wild. The little wet, itchy, rapid-fire ones that spilled out on top of each other, as though his nose was so crowded with sneezes he could hardly get one out before the next was fighting to escape; the ones that went all cutesy and high-pitched at the end, almost as though he was surprised his nose tickled so much, the pitch raising at the end like a question. And then there was how intensely itchy he looked, his nose wriggling and alive, like it was trying to escape his face, his whole face scrunching in and then suddenly everything wide open: mouth lolling, eyebrows climbing, nostrils flaring and then…

And then it all started over again. And again. And AGAIN. It made Hawk breathless in a very different way than his own sneezes. It made him hunger, it made him want. It made him hard.

“Look what you did to me.” Hawk said, clutching at his thickened endowment, the bulge visible through his slacks. Tim sniffed, eyes still misty, nose clearly note done with him. But he couldn’t help but notice that. “That’s what you’ve been doing to me all day. Making me sneeze, with your cold in my nose. Making me think about you sneezing, losing control, falling apart for me, so pretty.” He was getting greedy now, pawing at Tim, squeezing his ass, kissing at his neck. “Could barely get through work, you want them to find out I’m a double fuckin’ pervert?”

They each froze a moment, their still-precarious positions and the memory of the time when they were more precarious still a nearly-open wound. But then Tim sneezed again, soft and pliant: “hhcchhssss…. huh… hittscchh!” And Hawk’s eyes were on nothing but Skippy.

“Bless you,” he said, soft and dangerous and hungry and adoring.

And then slacks were coming off, mouth on mouth, mouth on neck, hands everywhere, fingers and spit right where they needed to be, and then Hawk was behind Skippy on the bed, pressing into him, his weight on Skippy’s back, his hard length pressing against Skippy’s ass.

“You still gotta…?” Hawk asked.

“All the t-time, Hhahhhh… Hawk…”

“Can you… while you ride me?”

“Isn’t that how you caught my cold in the first place?”

“Don’t care. Need it. All over me, please, Skippy.”

“Need it?” Skippy asked, turning around to look at Hawk.

“Need it.”

“So what are you gonna do for your boy? When he gives you what you need? Are you gonna give me what I need?”

“Anything.”

“Don’t throw that word around Hawkins, you don’t mean it.”

“No fair, Skippy.”

“Life’s not fair, H-hahhh… hahhhhhh…” Tim’s nose chose that moment to act up, but despite his body’s betrayal (his body’s endless betrayals, when it came to Hawk), Tim hadn’t given up the implicitly negotiated upper hand. He put a finger under his nose, pressed hard. “You w-want me to l-let this loose, don’t you?”

Hawk nodded, and suddenly looked so much like a puppy that Tim almost dissolved into giggles.

“A-ahhh… all o-over you, yeah?”

Another nod.

“Stay with me tonight. Let me—snf!—take care of you.”

Another nod.

Tim barely managed a quick “ohthankgod” before the floodgates opened.

“ettscchhh! yyetttschh! hetchhhh! ettcchhhhhh! Huhhhh… eeYYettschhOOO! Heyyyy-SHOOOO! huhhh… eeeeYYESHH-OOOO! Ah!” They started fast and furious, grew luxurious and free and messy as the lingering cold sneezes in Tim’s nose took over. He ended on a sharp exhale, as he sank onto Hawk. It had taken some practice, learning to take dick in the middle of a sneezing fit. But Tim was a very, very fast learner. And seeing Hawk like this. Spread out under him, wrecked and open, more even than he was when Tim was inside of him, Hawk’s pupils blown wide, nothing else in his mind but Skippy, Skippy, Skippy, Skippy’s nose, Skippy’s ass, Skippy’s chest, Skippy’s wet eyes, closing… closing again as his head tipped back and…

“eeYYYYYEETTSSCCHH-OOO! Oh! Shit, bless me.” Tim murmured. It was easy, now that Hawk was inside him. He barely made any effort to move, knowing too much would send Hawk over the edge early. No, he just let his body have free reign. His sneezes always tended to make him double over or bend at the waist, he just gave them a little more free reign to move his body.

Hawk keened beneath him. “Fuck, fuck, big one Skippy, fuck…”

Tim managed to snark around the urge: “is that a rehhhh… requeahhh… AAAAHHTTSCCHHOOOOOOO!!” Tim sure acted like it was, his voice falling fully into the sneeze in a way it rarely did. Hardly a duplicate of Hawk’s beastly roars, but definitely on the loud side for Tim, tearing out of his throat like Hawk’s desire was a physical thing, had reached in and ripped it out of him. It was often like that for Tim, as though the sheer force of Hawk’s wanting made Tim’s body capable of things it had no ability to do before.

“Shit, Skip, I’m not gonna last…”

“Shhhhh… d-don’t… don’t… aapppsshHHHH! Hahhh… ppllleesshhhhh!! EeeYYYYYeesscchhhhOOO!” The sneezes weren’t stopping, and they were only getting wetter, the bursts of spray on Hawk’s torso no sooner cooled than Tim replaced them with another.

Tim recovered with a firm sniff, in control enough to say, “don’t worry, we’ve got a while.”

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

An entry in the tim&steph role swap au. It starts serious then rapidly gets ridiculous. As many things in this AU have been wont to do.

(Also, help me remember to go back and cross post once ao3 is back up, lol)

Then.

Over the last several months, Stephanie had learned how to drop from ten or so feet and absorb the landing so completely that her feet didn't make a sound, even on gravel. This drop was not even that high--seven feet, at most; just a little higher than Bruce was tall--and onto solid concrete.

So it was deliberate, when she landed with a quiet but emphatic thump.

Batman--hunched over so severely that you wouldn't know he was only eight inches shorter than that fence--didn't look up, but she could see the way the muscles along his spine tightened, even through the cape. They'd been working a lot on reading each other's body language, so that reacting to each other's movements in a fight would be instinctual.

She bet he hadn't considered the other ramifications of those drills.

"Robin," he said. A growl; a warning.

She kicked a rock, whistling lowly as she wandered closer, gauntleted hands clasped behind her back. "Damn, this how we're playin' it these days?" she drawled, letting her Gotham accent flow thick and heavy in her own little homage to the boy who'd come before. "'Cause you know there're a few mooks in Blackgate I wouldn't mind payin' a visit to if we're bashin' teeth in."

A muscle twitched in Batman's jaw. "I told you to stay with the car."

"Sure." She kicked another rock, sharply this time. It pinged off the dumpster nearby, leaving a scratch in the paint. "I didn't listen."

She'd circled close enough that she could see the guy Batman was crouched over now. Close enough that she could see the hands fisted in his dirty blue tshirt; close enough that she could see the blood dribbling out of his mouth, and the whites of his eyes as they darted back and forth between her and Batman, too scared to speak in case it drew the Bat's attention back to him.

"Good thing, too," she added quietly.

Batman looked over at her, finally. He was scary, in the mask--all sharp angles and blank eyes and bleach white teeth, somehow sharper than they usually looked--but he was scarier out of it, when he was looking at her like he was disappointed. Like he was angry.

(Bruce Wayne, Stephanie knew, would never do or say the kinds of things she was used to from male authority figures. It didn't stop some part of her from expecting him to, when he got that twist to his mouth.)

Uncowed, Robin stared back at Batman, silent. Present. A couple strands of hair had escaped the vice grip of her hairspray, and she reached up to tuck them back. Then she gestured, expectantly, for him to continue.

Dared him to continue.

Slowly, Batman released the guy with one hand, pulling a zip tie out of his utility belt, and flipped him onto his stomach to cinch his hands behind his back.

(Bruce liked to think he was difficult to understand. That he was enigmatic, mysterious; that no one really understood why he did what he did, or why he did it the way he did it.

But Stephanie did.

She'd also been lost, lonely, desperate, afraid; she'd also chosen to don a uniform of her own making and attempt to change the world with her own bare hands. She understood that this kind of vengeance, the kind that was enacted on behalf of someone else, was still personal.

It was always about the little girls like Stephanie. It was always about the little boys like Bruce.

Stephanie and Bruce; Batman and Robin. They were so angry, both of them, but they were choosing not to give in to it. Helping each other not to give in.

One criminal at a time.)

Stephanie breathed out, as quietly as she could, and clasped her shaking hands more tightly together behind her back. She'd seen what this guy had done; she knew why Batman didn't want to stop hitting him. She wouldn't have wanted to either.

But she also knew that Batman had to draw that line, and not even for any frou frou ideological reasons about honor and ~not stooping to their level~ or whatever. Stephanie had a touchstone that Bruce Wayne didn't, when it came to men like this.

His name was Arthur Brown.

Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. One half of the reason she was on this earth; her dear old dad; The Cluemaster. She hated him so much that she'd become a vigilante just to ruin his plans. She hated him so much that she'd visited him in prison just to kick the shit out of him until the guards had pulled her off of him.

And yet, she'd cried when he'd been sentenced. Wasn't that funny? She poked and prodded at the memory sometimes, trying to see if she could force it into any other shape, trying to deny what she knew in her gut was true, but she couldn't. They'd been angry tears, mostly, but also tears of frustration and relief and--this was the part she got embarrassed about--worry. Sadness. Maybe even regret.

She didn't really think her dad was capable of changing--he'd have to want to do it, to choose to do it, and she couldn't imagine a world in which he would--but if he did... There was a part of her that remembered him taking her to her piano lessons, teaching her how to solve riddles, and putting a bandaid on her skinned elbow. That part of her would be capable of forgiving him.

If he really did change.

(Which he wouldn't.

...But if he did.)

Giving someone the chance to change wasn't about the guy with his face smushed against the concrete under Bruce's knee: it was about the little girl like Stephanie who might be waiting for the day that this guy would come home and be different.

(Maybe there wasn't a little girl; maybe there never would be. It was a metaphor, all right? For all the theoretical people that lurked in this guy's future that he might affect positively.)

Batman finished tying the guy up so tightly he'd be lucky to wiggle his fingers, and then he tucked a note into the collar of the guy's tshirt and pressed a button on his gauntlet that would put in an automatic call to the GCPD to come pick the guy up. Over and done; neat and (mostly) clean.

Stephanie glanced down at the guy as Batman stood and turned--with a great dramatic swoosh of his cape--to walk away. The guy met her eyes through the blank lenses of her domino, and Stephanie pressed her lips together. She wanted to say something; she didn't have any idea what it should be. She settled for shaking her finger at him as sternly as she could, then spun on her heel and chased after Batman.

She leapt onto his back with a whoop, catching him around the neck with both arms and wrapping her legs around his waist. "I want burgers," she said cheerfully, as Bruce grunted, reaching up to support her thighs in a delightfully automatic motion. The Robins before her had trained him well. "And fries. And a reeeeally big orange soda!"

"Robin," he said, and this time there was none of the growl in his Batman rasp--just quiet exasperation.

"I think I'm goin' through a growth spurt," she declared, perfectly straight-faced even if he couldn't see it. She rested her chin on the cowl, in between the ears. "I need sustenance. You're not gonna let me starve, are you?"

"There's perfectly good food waiting back at the cave," Batman told her, similarly deadpan, and Stephanie cackled.

(She'd been working on her Robin cackle. She was getting really good at it.)

"That was a joke!" She beamed, releasing her death grip on his neck to reach up and pinch his cheek. "Jeez, B-man, I'm so proud."

"We're going back to the cave to talk about you disobeying orders," Batman reminded her, because he was a buzzkill like that. Whatever: two could play at that game.

Stephanie snorted. "Yeah, and I'm definitely totally gonna listen to that lecture." She used the ears of the cowl to tilt his head back, forcing him to look at her as they reached the Batmobile. "If you take me out for burgers first."

He could deny it all he wanted, but Stephanie saw the smile that twitched briefly across his face. She let go of the bat ears, smug, and hopped down from his back.

"Besides," she added, as she jumped and slid across the hood to reach the passenger side, "once you're done lecturing me, it'll be my turn to lecture you."

***

Now.

"I thought they weren't dating," Jason said.

"They aren't," Cassandra confirmed, amused, as she gazed down at the cot, arms crossed over her chest. "Think Dick and Donna."

Cassandra always liked watching Stephanie and Tim together. They joked about being soulmates, two halves of a platonic whole, but they really did move like they barely knew where one of them ended and the other began; a result less of divine providence than of having grown up in each other's pockets. Whatever incompatible edges they'd once had, they'd worn them down years before, playing tag on the rooftops and arguing about camera lenses and clues.

Jason made a noise, halfway between a snort and an understanding hum. "If I were a crueler man..." He lifted one heavy boot off of the floor and mimed tipping the cot over.

"Don't even think about it," Cassandra warned, her tone just a little too sharp, and when Jason bared his teeth at her she looked over at him to bare hers back. Frustration crackled along his spine, the violence that he so happily embraced not far behind it, and Cassandra felt her own metaphorical hackles raise in response.

It had been a long week. Too long for either of them to maintain their hard won civility for more than a few minutes at a time.

"Been a while since you took a swing at me." Jason's eyes were heavy-lidded, peering down at her with a panther's nonchalance.

"Waste of my time," Cassandra told him, with flat confidence. "You don't put up enough of a fight."

Jason snarled, jerking like he wanted to step closer, intimidate her with his height, his bulk--but he was smart enough to know moving closer only put him at an even greater disadvantage against her. "You should--"

"Oh my god, shut up, will you?" Stephanie mumbled, without opening her eyes or shifting from her position, spread-eagled across Tim and the big fluffy blanket with her own face on it that she'd given him for Hanukkah the year before. "It's hard to sleep through your ongoing ideological feud."

Tim snored, as contrary as ever despite being passed out with his face smushed against the rough fabric of the camping cot.

"For those of us who have normal human sleep schedules," she added, shifting one hand to pat Tim on the back of the head. She missed, slapping him in the face instead, and he snuffled and squirmed, but didn't wake up.

(Cassandra had always found it a bit rich of Stephanie to make fun of Tim's sleep schedule the way she did when--as a civilian vs a vigilante--he definitely still slept more than she did. But the last time she'd brought it up to Tim he'd just rolled his eyes and said, "That's Steph for you," like it was an explanation in and of itself. She supposed it kind of was.)

Cassandra kept her gaze locked with Jason's for another beat as she folded the furious center of her compassion back down deep, reminding herself that he was her brother and she loved him, even when she wanted to slam his head into a concrete wall. He wasn't as good at compartmentalizing as she was, but he took a step back, breathing out through his nose, and Cassandra knew he was trying.

She looked back to Tim and Stephanie, then crouched down on the balls of her feet as she reached out to brush a strand of blonde off of her best friend's forehead. "Why are you sleeping in the Cave?" she asked, amused.

Stephanie huffed, cracking one dark blue eye to peer back at her with annoyance. "Tim looked comfortable."

"As in comfortable for you to sleep on."

"Duh." Stephanie squirmed deeper into the nest of blanket-and-Tim that she had claimed for herself. There was a nasty cut on the back of her shoulder, visible around the strap of her tank top, and it glistened with the tell tale sheen of Neosporin. On top of the blanket as she was, it was pretty clear she had literally walked over and face planted down on top of him after dealing with her injuries.

"Okay," Cassandra said patiently. "Why is Tim sleeping in the Cave?"

"Y'know he's been helpin' Alfred work comms," Stephanie mumbled.

"Uh huh."

"Week fr'm hell. So li'l sleep. 'N we won. N'more worr." Her fingers twitched, some exhausted simulacra of a "there you go" gesture.

Cassandra snorted. "Right." She flicked Stephanie lightly on the forehead and added, "Some work still left, actually."

Stephanie shoved her hand away, scowling heavily, and hissed, "I will write my stupid reports tomorrow, I promise."

"We need your help convincing Bruce to go to bed."

It took Stephanie a long moment to process Cassandra's words. Then she buried her face back into the blanket to muffle a frustrated scream.

"Remind me again why we need the pretender when we could just drug his tea?" Jason kicked lightly at the bottom of Cassandra's sneaker as Stephanie pushed herself slowly up onto her hands, muttering obscenities under her breath.

One of her palms smushed Tim's face further into the cot, and he snorted himself awake, flailing instinctively at finding another person straddling him--

Stephanie squawked, Tim yelped, and they both went crashing to the floor as the cot overbalanced.

"What the fuck, Tim?" she groaned, pressing tenderly at her nose. "You elbowed me in the face!"

"Whuh? Stephie?" Tim asked, groggily, as he squinted at her.

Cassandra picked his contact case up off the floor from where one of the legs of the cot had sent it flying and held it out to him.

He accepted it, adding, "Cassie?" in an even more deeply confused voice.

"And Jason," Cassandra told him, and Tim's lip lifted in a sneer.

"Jason."

"Riiiight," Jason drawled, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder. "I'm tired of the Three Stooges act. I'm just gonna go throw the old man off the roof; the coma will be very restful. You go back to sleep, Blondie."

"No, shut the fuck up, I've got it." Stephanie clambered to her feet, raking her fingers through her hair as she yawned. "It's been forever since I've had a chance to lecture him, are you kidding me? I just gotta fill in the blanks on my powerpoint."

"Your... what?" Jason asked. There was glee hiding somewhere under the confusion.

"Cool," Tim said, holding out a hand for Stephanie to pull him to his feet. "I've never gotten to see this in person before."

"This is why we need Stephanie," Cassandra told her little brother, jabbing a teasing elbow in his ribs as she slipped around him. She pulled Tim (scowling indignantly) up off of the floor, since Stephanie had ignored him. She tipped her head expectantly, and Tim obligingly leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek.

"I was Robin during a very delicate time in Bruce's life," Stephanie was explaining to Jason, burying another yawn behind her hand as she jogged up the stairs towards the Batcomputer. "We were mutually responsible for each other in a way I don't think any of the rest of you ever really were. I mean, I wasn't his kid; he didn't have that kind of authority over me. Not that him and Dick's whole thing wasn't also convoluted back in the day, but Dick was younger when he started, so Bruce still had more automatic authority." She waved a hand. "Anyway, said mutual accountability had its downsides--"

"Like being the fourteen-year-old emotional support sidekick for a fully grown man who should have been in therapy instead of making his problems a teenager's responsibility," Tim muttered, and Stephanie rolled her eyes and flipped him off--

"But it also afforded me certain advantages." She spread her hands as if indicating a broad vista in front of her.

"Like the right to lecture Bruce," Cassandra confirmed.

"Dick lectures Bruce all the time," Jason pointed out, leaning on the back of the big chair as Stephanie logged into her account.

"Dick yells at Bruce all the time," she corrected. "It's different. And he doesn't really listen."

"Barb lectures Bruce all the time," he said, stubbornly.

Stephanie tipped her head, sending a wave of blonde hair cascading down over her shoulder, to concede the point. "Babs is Babs, though. And he still doesn't listen as much as he should."

"Which is always," Cassandra agreed. "Even when she's wrong, which is rarely, she still has a point."

"I've also lectured Bruce before," Tim added, leaning against the desk. Cassandra watched with horrified fascination as he put one of his contacts in. "Different when he's not your dad or your vigilante--"

"I have told you before, if you keep calling Bruce my vigilante sugar daddy, I am going to throw you off the roof of Wayne Tower," Stephanie said flatly.

"Superboy would probably catch me. He doesn't like me very much, but he respects the bit."

"He likes you fine," Stephanie said, rolling her eyes. "You're the one who thinks he's an asshole."

Tim coughed into his hand. It sounded suspiciously like, "He is."

"Kon's just annoyed that you and Cassie started getting along," Cassandra added. "Making fun of you used to be a traditional Young Justice pass time."

"Oh, it still is," Stephanie snickered.

Tim skated past that revelation with the ease of a man who already knew his platonic soulmate's favorite pass time was making fun of him. "Wonder Girl would definitely catch me, but that plan would have to rely on me successfully reaching her on the phone before I hit the--"

"No, no, go back. When have you lectured Bruce?" Jason interrupted. He looked--and sounded--annoyed. Not everyone appreciated the Tim&Steph Show the way Cass did. "You barely know the guy; what could you possibly have to lecture him about?"

Tim looked over at him, similarly annoyed, with one hand reaching around his head to pull at his eyebrow and the other hovering near his eye, second contact poised on the tip of a finger. "Jason, you were there."

"Tim's literally our union conflict mediator," Stephanie said, at the same time.

("Ah, right," Jason said, awkwardly. He leaned over to Cassandra, whispering, "I got bored real quick at that meeting."

He was lying--he was as tired as all the rest of them were, and forgetful because of it--but Cassandra let him get away with it.)

"Do not say that like it's an actual position I've agreed to accept," Tim said warningly. He pointed his contact at Stephanie. "That was a one time deal."

She snorted. "It's cute that you think you won't crumple like a tin can the next time I ask you."

"I will not," he protested, and Cassandra met Stephanie's amused glance with a smirk of her own. "Oh, fuck you," Tim complained, returning focus to his contacts. "I didn't crumple like a tin can when you asked me."

"No, but it took about ten seconds as soon as I outsourced to Dick."

"Deeply embarrassing for you, by the way," Jason added.

Tim's eye twitched. "One of these days I'm going to snap--" his contact case shut with a loud crack-- "and you're really going to regret the attitude that you have with me, Jason."

"The attitude that I have with you," Jason repeated, incredulous.

"Yep."

"The attitude that I have with you."

Cassandra stepped between the boys, not bothering to acknowledge either of them with so much as a glance; all it took to defuse the moment was the reminder of her own silent presence, despite being too short to even break their eye contact. "How long do you need?" she asked Stephanie, reaching around the back of the big chair to squeeze her shoulders.

"Five minutes," Stephanie told her, as she scrolled through a selection of clipart four poster beds. One of them resembled Bruce's actual bed--the cursor hovered over it for a moment, and then Stephanie deliberately clicked on the next picture down.

"Drawing room?"

"Yep."

"I'll get him there." Cassandra squeezed her shoulders again, pointed two-fingered at her eyes and then at Tim and Jason, and jogged to the stairs back up to Bruce's study.

One of Bruce's studies, anyway. She ghosted her fingers along the edge of the picture frame, holding a painting of Thomas and Martha gazing adoringly down at their bright-eyed son, every inch of their body language telling a story of love and pride and respect. The artist had been talented. Cassandra wondered if they were still working in Gotham--and how many of her brothers she could wrangle into sitting for a portrait.

She filed the idea away for Bruce's birthday as she slipped out of the room.

Bruce was currently holed up in one of his other studies, the one on the second floor with the big blue rug and the ergonomic chair that he hated. It was the one right above the family room and the kitchen--the loudest rooms in the house--which was a dead giveaway that he was having to work harder to stay awake than he wanted to pretend.

Cassandra passed Alfred on the way up the stairs--"Drawing room, five minutes." "Ms. Brown has always worked quickly."--and then drew to a stop outside the heavy oak doors, straightening her shoulders and pulling on her best serious face.

She didn't knock; the door hinges were too well oiled to squeak; and her footsteps were silent on that big blue rug. Bruce looked up anyway. He was making a good show of things, but even if he could have fooled anyone else in the house (which he couldn't have, except maybe Tim), he certainly couldn't fool her. Cassandra saw the sluggishness in his fingers; the bruises forming beneath his eyes; the slump of his spine.

Bruce sighed. "I already told Alfred and Dick--"

"Something's come up," she said, brusque, and Bruce's spine straightened immediately.

"Report," he said sharply.

She jerked her head. "Easier to show you."

Oh, Bruce, she thought fondly. Trusted her so fully that he was standing and moving before she finished her sentence, too sleep deprived to wonder why she had him take the lead. He wasn't a talker--she could relate--but she could see the thoughts spinning in his mind as he strode down the corridors of the mansion, Cassandra on his heels like a wisp of shadow.

She'd feel bad about worrying him, if he hadn't spent the last four hours quite stubbornly forcing her to be worried about him.

Two steps away from the drawing room--which was dark and silent behind its cracked double doors--Cassandra exploded into motion. She caught Bruce's arm, forcing it behind his back and up, throwing him off balance as she drove her shoulder into his side. They crashed through the doors, and a hook of her ankle behind Bruce's heel sent him tumbling downwards into the chair Alfred had left waiting.

In the split second between him hitting the chair and Cassandra spinning it and shoving him into place at the head of the table, Bruce's eyes--betrayed--met hers. She offered him a sunny smile.

Duke released his grip on the lights, and Dick and Damian closed the doors with an ominous click.

"I should have known," Bruce said, resigned.

Stephanie--across the table from him, standing in front of the projector--held up a finger as she finished chugging her americano.

"Yes," Cassandra said, and her hands came down on his shoulders, a gentle warning, before he could do more than consider trying to stand up and walk out of the room. "You should have."

Stephanie set down the coffee mug, sliding it sideways over to Tim--he slid a full one back to her--and wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist. She looked exhausted, outside of the obfuscating lighting of the Cave. Her blonde curls were a mess, half fallen out of her bun, and there were smudges of bruising underneath her eyes. She was also barefoot.

Cassandra met Stephanie's eye and winked. Steph's lips twitched, and she blinked innocently back. She'd had a good nap, on top of Tim on the cot down in the Cave. This air of patheticness was calculated.

"I can skip the pleasantries, right?" Stephanie asked, rhetorical, as she clicked the button to progress the slide on the projector. There was a smattering of laughter from those of them in the room who'd never experienced Stephanie's lecture series before.

The cover of the kids' book Teeth are not for Biting had been edited--poorly, with big red X's and hand written edits--to read "Beds aren't not for Sleeping", with a big clipart picture of a pink Barbie four poster bed slapped over the little girl's face.

Stephanie progressed to the next slide without comment, meeting Bruce's gaze with her best deadpan expression. The slide had the title and abstract of a research paper analyzing the effects of sleep deprivation on decision making. Steph clicked to the next slide. The title and abstract of a different research paper, this one regarding its effect on reflexes. Click. Another paper, another symptom. Click--

"Stephanie--"

"Shut up, Bruce," she said, flatly, and clicked to the next one. And the next one. And the next.

"You've made your point."

"I may have made it, but I doubt you've internalized it."

Click. Click. Click.

"Are these repurposed from the last time you and Harper staged a deeply hypocritical intervention about my sleep habits?" Tim asked, curiously. "I recognize these titles."

"Other way around," Stephanie told him, pausing on one particularly long abstract so she could take a sip of her coffee. "Bruce and I have had this conversation before. Do I need to remind you how that went when you ignored my advice?" she added, her voice icy as she cut her gaze back to Bruce. "Because one of us ended up chasing a moderately homicidal Batman around Gotham for months while the other one underwent treatment for spinal trauma."

"How's Jean Paul doing these days?" Dick asked idly.

"A lot better," Cassandra told him. "We got lunch last week."

"Glad to hear it," Stephanie said, sincerely. "I should thank him, honestly. Operating solo after getting literally thrown by the neck out of the Batcave did set the precedent of independence that allowed me and Tim to get up to just so much bullshit." She and Tim high fived without looking. "Say, Damo--"

"I will found my own unique team of juvenile superheroes on my own time, Brown. Stop pushing." He flicked the nub of an eraser across the table at her, and Stephanie dodged, shrugging.

"I'm just saying, if Bruce is bound and determined to enter another funk, now's your chance to do it with a minimum of hassle." She threw her hands in the air. "Back to the presentation!"

Click.

A screencap of an episode of Jersey Shore, captioned THE SITUATION, with a dramatized tabloid photo of a sleezy Bruce Wayne photoshopped over Mike Sorrentino.

Jason barked a laugh. "I need a copy of that."

"Everyone present will receive a digital copy of the lecture with links to the papers included in the bibliography for their later perusal," Stephanie informed him. Then she turned her gaze to Dick. "Nightwing, report."

"We're all aware that we've been fighting the good fight on three primary fronts for the last week," Dick began, folding his hands in front of himself on the table as he leaned forward.

"Mobs," Jason grunted.

"Riddler," Duke sighed.

"Aggrieved scientists," Damian muttered.

"Actually, it was four fronts," Tim corrected apologetically.

"Aliens," Stephanie agreed. She waved a hand, nearly sending the projector remote flying before she fumbled to catch it. "Don't worry about it; I tapped in some backup."

"There were aliens in Gotham this week?" Bruce asked sharply. He tried to sit forward in his chair as well, but Cassandra's grip on his shoulders tightened, and he relented. "Why did I not hear about this?"

"Don't worry about it," Stephanie repeated. "I tapped in some back up. There was a minimum of property damage and the commish barely even got abducted. Dick, continue."

Dick did not continue. "Commissioner Gordon got abducted by aliens," he said flatly.

"Not that he remembers," Tim said. "It's a long story, but nobody even noticed. Except Oracle. And four blocks of the East End who were woken up by the light from the tractor beam."

Bruce rubbed a hand over his face. "Why were you two the only ones involved with this?"

"We weren't."

"I told you; I called in back up."

They rolled their eyes, in unison, and Cassandra laughed. "Let me guess: Superboy and Impulse."

"I plead the fifth," Stephanie said, straight-faced.

"She gave them free reign of my fridge," Tim complained, throwing his hands in the air. "There aren't even crumbs le--" He broke off into a wheeze as Stephanie elbowed him in the diaphragm.

"Don't worry about it," she repeated, insistently. "Dick, tell Bruce how we did such a good job saving the day that he can stop fucking worrying about the city falling apart if he takes a stupid nap."

Dick rubbed at the bridge of his nose, sighing, but obliged her this time. "The mobs have been settled--"

"That's one word for it," Jason said, and Cassandra bared her teeth at him.

"Please don't start fighting again," Dick said, long-suffering, and then continued. "The Riddler's back in prison, good job Signal and Batgirl--"

(Duke leaned forward, pointing at Stephanie. "Is the alien thing why you just straight up disappeared for like six hours after telling me you were going to the bathroom?"

"Don't worry about it," Stephanie told him. "But the gas station sushi contributed, too."

"Shoulda just got a hotdog like me."

"The relish on that hotdog was glowing."

"Gotham special, baby," Duke said, and he and Jason high fived.)

"--and Robin and Catwoman prevented a general technological apocalypse," Dick soldiered on, loudly. "Plus, apparently, Bruce can sleep well knowing that Superboy and Impulse are here to hold down the fort."

Stephanie face-palmed. "They're in space now, actually," she said, voice muffled. "The aliens were just looking for some help fighting a planetary dictator. Run of the mill stuff." She shook her head, huffing, and clicked forward several slides of the presentation. "Screw it, we're jumping straight to the 'You're almost fifty years old and I'm sick of having to teach you how to act like an adult' portion of the presentation."

Duke whistled. "Harsh."

"Warranted," Dick sighed. "Stephanie deserves a Nobel Peace Prize after putting up with us alone for years."

"If it makes you feel better, the whole time she actually had me available to listen to her complain about you behind your back," Tim offered.

"Bonding," Stephanie agreed, setting her hand on his shoulder, and Tim bumped his temple against her hip with a grin.

"Actually, that kind of does make me feel better," Dick said thoughtfully.

"Does it make you feel better?" Stephanie asked Bruce, tipping her head to the side curiously.

"No."

"Go figure," Tim said dryly. Stephanie flicked him on the forehead.

"You're very bitchy tonight."

"I'm exhausted," Tim said, exasperated. "As is every person in this room, whether they want to admit it or not."

"Funnily enough--" Stephanie clicked onto the next slide. In big black text on a plain white background, it read:

EVERY PERSON IN THIS ROOM IS EXHAUSTED, WHETHER THEY WANT TO ADMIT IT OR NOT.

Click.

YOU AREN'T SPECIAL.

Click.

YOU ARE ONLY AS HUMAN AS THE REST OF US.

Click.

I'M GOING TO LET JASON THROW YOU OFF THE ROOF IF YOU DON'T AGREE TO GO TO BED OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL.

"Fuck yeah," Jason said.

"Who gave you the authority to 'let' someone throw Bruce off a roof?" Duke asked, making air quotes around the word 'let.' "I mean, I'm into it, great solution, but I am curious."

"Batman did," Tim and Stephanie said, in unison and straight-faced--

And the entire table turned, knowingly, to look at Cassandra. She smiled back at them beatifically.

"Bruce is asleep, by the way," she added. She'd felt him begin relaxing as soon as the adrenaline from the alien invasion reveal had passed out of his system; she wasn't even sure he'd actually understood what Stephanie had asked him, so much as responded instinctively to a Robin tilting their head at him like that.

Stephanie tossed the projector remote onto the table, scoffing. "Every fucking time! He never actually lets me get to the good part of the lecture!"

The impact against the desk advanced the presentation to the next slide.

YOU KNOW, IF YOU PARTIED AS MUCH AS YOU PRETEND TO, YOU'D BE BETTER AT DEALING WITH SLEEP DEPRIVATION. YES, I'M AWARE THAT IS NOT A SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE STATEMENT. GET BENT.

"A self-defense mechanism, I believe," Alfred observed drolly. He rose from his seat, patting Stephanie on the shoulder, and turned--beckoning Duke and Jason to open the doors--to help Cassandra maneuver Bruce's rolling chair out of the drawing room. "The excitement has concluded for the evening. Please get some sleep--" He turned back to gaze at Tim and Stephanie, sternly. "Guest bedrooms have been made up for your use. Do not let me catch you on a cot in the Cave again."

"Who, me?" Stephanie asked, innocently.

"Of course, sir," Tim said, utterly sincerely, which was actually ten times as suspicious as Stephanie fluttering her eyelashes like that.

"They're probably going back to Tim's to crash there," Cassandra murmured. She gently lifted Bruce's head to keep it from hitting the doorframe as Alfred steered.

"My young madam, I strongly suspect that they intend to crash in your room. Which is why I took the liberty of placing three sets of sweatpants and tshirts out on your bed, regardless of what I just claimed to Ms. Brown and Master Drake."

Cassandra hummed consideringly. "Also possible."

***

Then.

"So is it my turn yet?" Stephanie interrupted, and Bruce paused, looking down at her.

She was slouched in the big chair by the Batcomputer, her feet hanging down just low enough for her toes to brush the ground, letting her push herself back and forth idly. She was out of costume, dressed now in an oversized purple sweatshirt and a pair of checkered leggings, but with her hair still hairsprayed and the outline of her mask pressed into her skin. The empty wrapper from her burger was crumpled up next to the obscenely gargantuan cup of soda that she'd ordered instead of fries.

"Sorry?" he asked, bemused.

"It seems like you've kind of been saying the same thing over and over in different ways for the last five minutes, so I figured you were pretty much done, and my notecards are getting sweaty," she explained.

"Your notecards," Bruce repeated.

Stephanie withdrew her hands from the front pocket of her sweatshirt, flashing them at him briefly. He only saw enough to be sure they'd been written in glitter gel pen. "I didn't want to forget any of my talking points."

"Such as?"

She raised her eyebrows at him, looking so precociously fourteen years old for a moment that it made his heart do something funny in his chest. "So it is my turn now?" she asked.

He leaned back aginst the railing, folding his arms over his chest and nodding at her. "Yes, I suppose it is."

"Okay." She scooted back in the chair so she could sit upright, although it meant her toes no longer touched the ground. "My public speaking class said it's super important to introduce yourself and your topic whenever you give a presentation, but since it's just us, I can skip the formalities, right?"

"Right," Bruce said, slowly, as he came to the creeping realization that he was in over his head.

"You've been teaching me a lot about where and how to draw the line when we're fighting people," Stephanie recited, her eyes stuck to the notecards in her hand. "So I know that you know you crossed that line tonight. And I also know that you know why you shouldn't, but I thought maybe you could use some reminders."

She flipped to the next notecard, clearing her throat. "First, some people do become better people when they're given the chance to. And yeah, some people don't, but since we aren't psychic, and since actual psychics' ability to predict a single person's future is questionable at best due to the unpredictability of time and the branching nature of reality, we don't have the right to decide they don't even get the opportunity."

She set the notecard aside. "Second, obviously the American legal system is flawed at best, hence our entire existence as vigilantes, but deciding that we alone have the right and responsibility to decide how to 'punish' people, by grievously injuring, maiming, or killing them, is a slippery slope to fascism and just generally driving ourselves to the brink of madness."

She set the notecard aside. "Third--"

"You don't need to keep going," Bruce interrupted gently. "I've gotten your point. But I would like to see the rest of those notecards."

Stephanie looked at his extended hand, dubiously, and then tucked the cards back into the front pocket of her sweatshirt. "No," she said. "I think I'll save 'em for next time. Except--there is one thing I didn't get to, and you need to hear it."

"Okay," he said, certain that his expression was just as dubious as hers.

"I can't 'wait at the car,' Bruce," she told him. "You need me to remind you about this stuff. So every time you tell me to hide, I'm not going to listen."

Bruce shook his head. "There are times--a lot of them--that it is too dangerous for you to be in the middle of things," he told her. "I need you to trust me when I make that call."

"And I need you to make that call," Stephanie told him, her dark blue eyes locked onto his, her jaw tight and determined. "Not the one where if I don't see you do the scary things, then that means they don't count."

Bruce looked at her for a moment--this villain's daughter, this fourteen year old kid, this Robin.

And he said, "Okay."

[alcalexandria]

Grace of The Terminator and Reese of Dark Fate.

Source: Scumlow

In this post I'm going to outline some of the main ways Terminator: Dark Fate deliberately treats Grace as a counterpart to Kyle Reese in T1/The Terminator.

There are plenty of allusions to Kyle as a character with Grace, in some cases with a bit of a twist, and we know those echoes are deliberate rather than accidental for reasons I'll go into below.

I’m mostly just itemising them here and some of it will also crossover with the Sarah Connor stuff posted before, but I wanted to have this together in one place to refer back to. Not least so that in a future piece when I say “Hey, you know how Grace is playing Kyle’s part, well…” I can link back and people can see what I mean if they want, without having to take a huge diversion in-text.

So like I say, I won’t go too deep into the big picture implications of this stuff, but that's something I have got in the pipeline.

Finally, if I’ve missed out on anything obvious, I’d love to know - I will be updating in future if I think of anything else to add.

It's all happening under the cut, baby.

First though, a word -

Word of God.

Before getting into the stuff from the movies themselves, I want to look at what Tim Miller himself says about it.

He drew the parallel explicitly in this interview with EW (and probably others) -

“There’s this new future because of what Sarah did at the end of Terminator 2, and it’s worse than ever,” reveals Miller. “And that gives us the opportunity for these new characters. Gabriel comes from something that is not Skynet, but it’s like Skynet. And Mackenzie comes from something that Kyle Reese and the Resistance did.”

Terminator: Dark Fate director Tim Miller on the new Terminators | EW.com

The context here feels a little garbled, but to clarify I don’t believe he means Kyle’s actions literally, directly brought about Grace, I think he’s framing her as part of the Target/Protector/Attacker triumvirate he mentions here. YMMV, so I've linked both.

Regardless, we know from this that Grace as a successor to Kyle was a conscious thing. That established, more interesting to me at least are the ways that is done by the movie, and that's really what I want to talk about.

1 – Come With Me If…

Source: Scumlow

The first half of T1 is played as a surprisingly straight mystery, and the full bore sci-fi and horror stuff really only takes over pretty late in the day. Who are these two extremely weird dudes tailing Sarah across town? What are their respective goals are in Los Angeles tonight, and how are they connected either to Sarah or each other?

Both are presented as alien and possibly threatening to Sarah in different ways, but it’s mostly Kyle, not the T800, who is presented as the most immediate threat – he’s a strange, dirty stalker, with improvised weapons and unpredictable behaviours, and he's cunning enough to evade the police Sarah still genuinely believes might help her. The T800 is clearly weird and dangerous, but he’s a shadowy, distant ogre of a thing, lurking almost out of view by comparison.

All of this is exploded at last when the T800 catches up with Sarah in a nightclub, and finally gets her in his sights. Reese shows up with his shotgun to save Sarah just in time - “Come with me if you want to live”, he says, and in an instant, everyone’s cards are on the table.

Grace declaring herself to Dani by essentially quoting Reese's opener is how Dark Fate first definitively tells us she’s a goodguy just like him.

Though the trailers spoiled the shit out of it, if you watch Dark Fate in isolation it’s clear we’re not meant to be sure which of the two time-travellers is aggressor, and which is protector, right up until the shooting starts. James Cameron himself talks about this in the “Legend Reforged” featurette, noting that we’re given conflicting clues about which one is which for the first 20 minutes of the movie.

Until then, in fact, people who encounter the Rev-9 are generally better off than anyone who runs into Grace. The Rev-9 shapeshifts, sure - and Taco thinks he’s no good, yeah - but it’s Grace we see actually hurt people and use a digital HUD to fight with superhuman reflexes and speed. Where the Rev-9 is downright personable to everyone it encounters, Davis plays Grace initially as a little odd and… well, mechanical.

Rev-9 even seems to have the inside track on where Dani is. Grace lands in the middle of nowhere and has to find her way across town to link up with her, but he seems to have her home address from the get-go*. He introduces himself as her friend, but Grace is friendly to nobody so far.

By the time everyone does step into the open in the factory, okay, sure you have probably started betting on Grace, but it’s still a little ambiguous. It remains so right up until the moment Dani’s dad pulls a gun, and Grace appears from nowhere to say the magic words and blow his face off.

Grace breaking out her shotgun serves mostly the same purpose as Kyle's in T1 - showing that she’s here to protect Dani, not to do her harm – but invoking the line is what defines her as Reese’s direct successor, as surely as uttering a passphrase or flashing an ID badge to camera.

The contract in it is updated a little this time around, all that said – Grace’s offer is “Come with me, or you’re dead in the next 30 seconds” – the nature of the Terminator they’re facing now means that, unlike Reese to Sarah, she can promise Dani only a half-minute of survival at a time.

[*As an aside – Check out how the Rev-9 calls Dani by her good old goverment name, Daniela, something unusual enough for her father to remark on. Grace, from the get-go, addresses her very directly as “Dani” – an instant clue how well she knows her. The Rev-9’s appearance right on Dani’s doorstep might initially suggest his information is better than Grace’s, but it’s likely he’s just taken the address from the same digitised files now that phone books are a thing of the past. Grace has her info from the source - she has been tipped off to go direct to the factory, because that’s where Commander Ramos knows (and remembers) she’s going to be.]

2 – What’s in a name?

Most Terminator geeks call Kyle… well, Kyle, myself included - but actually we only hear that name for the first time in the last third of T1, almost 200 pages into the script.

Up until then, he is referred to only by his surname - Reese. That’s how he introduces himself to strangers, and to Sarah.

In fact it’s even how the script captions all his dialogue; he is exclusively called Reese in the script notations. He only offers his first name to Sarah eventually, as they finally start getting to know and trust each other.

That’s redundant for Grace, obviously, who both knows and trusts Dani more than she can imagine already. Grace dispenses with the formalities altogether, and only bothers offering her first name.

We never do hear her surname in the movie at all though - she goes only by Grace, and even when we glimpse the rest of her family at the end we never learn what they’re all called. According to Tim Miller, the name is “Harper” - but it’s not clear to me that’s altogether canon, and it’s not in the end credits. Even the Rev-9 has a name in the end credits.

Reese, Grace, the point is they’re both fairly close cousins when you yell that single syllable sibilance across a factory floor, and I think that's very definitely an intentional choice.

3 – She's Got The Look.

“[Reese’s] over-coat is off, draped over the shotgun on the seat beside him. His bare arms are sinewy and scarred.”

- Kyle Reese, as described in the script for T1

Visually, Grace has a fairly unique silhouette for the Terminator universe, but she does take some key character design cues from Reese (to the point that even her hairstyle isn’t a mile off, in some of the Future War stuff especially).

As a more overt example though, she and Reese have both been given prominent scars on their left chin/jaw. Reese’s scar is important enough that it’s actually described in detail in the T1 script’s description of him, so it is considered a character element, and – like Grace’s augmentation scars – is used to distinguish the passage of time between one flashback and another, so it’s no coincidence*.

But the characters also share a thing for more deliberate body modifications.

Kyle has an ID tattoo he reveals to Sarah when he’s still earning her trust, put on the inside of his forearm when he was taken as a Skynet work camp prisoner. It’s described in the script like so –

“He pushes up the sleeve of his jacket and shows her a ten-digit number etches on the skin of his forearm. Beneath the numbers is a pattern of lines like the auto-pricing marks on product packages.“

Compare his code to Grace's coordinates -

Unlike Grace’s, it’s got barcode lines along with the digits - but just like hers, it’s an unusual red colouring.

That's interesting because other post T1 properties tend to retcon Kyle’s tattoo to a more generic black ink, but after showing it, Kyle goes on to explain it was burned in by laser rather than inked - so technically it’s a skin brand rather than a tattoo as such.

Grace does refer to her co-ordinates as a tattoo - and it would make sense if it was ink rather than scarring given her healing factor - but reverting to red even though it’s not super screen friendly marks it as a deliberate decision regardless.

Not for nothing also - both of these tattoos are flashed to Sarah Connor personally in the cabin of a car, in order to convince her skeptical ass to get onside.

There probably wasn’t a ton more thematic significance or whatever on the rest of Mackenzie Davis’ real sculpted-looking stomach there incidentally, but I sure would have loved a really good look. Just to make sure and all.

[*What is probably coincidence, but makes for a fun sidenote, is that both scars suffer some continuity issues - Grace has her scar before the Rev-7s attack the Dragonfly, as seen above, but when speaks to the medic it’s turned back into an open wound. It’s seen as an open wound again when we briefly see her awaiting surgery. From there, it seems to disappear, and it continues to reappear and disappear alternately throughout the modern day scenes later too.

Similarly, Kyle’s scar alternates between being a fresh wound to being a scar, before disappearing altogether through T1, and then reappearing again. It’s a classic bit of nerd trivia about T1 as it happens, but although it’s tempting I can’t imagine a deliberate Easter Egg quite so obscure.]

4 – History Lessons

The starkest difference between Kyle and Grace as characters is probably in their upbringings – Kyle tells Sarah outright he was born after the war began, so he didn't experience it directly, and doesn’t know a time before it. In another mark of how much more urgent the threat is this time around though, Grace does – she has already been born in our time, so her war isn't a lifetime away, it’s right around the corner. Unlike Kyle, she remembers the world of now before it was broken, which is presumably why she’s able to adjust to being dumped backwards into it a lot easier than he does. Even then though the parallels are probably deeper than the divergence. Here's how Kyle describes his childhood to Sarah in the T1 script -

REESE (continuing)

Didn't see the war. I was born after, in the ruins. Grew up there. Starving. Hiding from the H-K's.

We only hear about his childhood like this, second hand - but this is the exact situation we see Grace in this scenario on screen. This scene is part of the reshoot reframing Grace and Dani as familial, so I'm inclined to wilfully ignore it for the most part, but it is interesting in that it show us Grace, as a child starving in the ruins, living out the scenario Kyle has described down to a tee. Indeed the fact Future Dani uses the term “HK” in Grace’s flashback is probably drawn from this conversation - it's a term she could only have learned from Sarah, who heard it in turn from Kyle in the very exchange above.

Both movies also use Reese and Grace’s dreams and nightmares as the means to show us their respective Future Wars. Reese is tired enough from running that he simply falls asleep, and we are shown his nightmarish memories in the meantime; Grace loses consciousness due to an Augment crash and has the corresponding flash back (or forward, if you prefer) to the battle at the South Tunnel.

Cameron has often explained that Terminator’s Future War was inspired by a nightmare he had, and Grace’s sequence is shot appropriately, per the commentaries, to echo that - it's meant to look like a nightmare or fever dream, which is why it's distinguished by woozy camera, muted sounds, foggy colours and the quite Hellish imagery of Rev-7s stalking in front of the fiery horizon line. Kyle’s nightmare-memory of the infiltrator massacre pivots around a moment where he ponders an image of Sarah, a photo that's then damaged in the attack – Grace, more directly, looks on at the wounded figure of Dani herself as a sharp reminder of the stakes.

The details, the nuts and bolts are different, but the dynamic is much the same.

5 – Role Play.

Most obviously of all of course, the two characters play similar protective roles.

Grace shows up from the future, having come across time, to protect Dani from her would-be assassin, just as Kyle protected Sarah. Beyond having her quote him on her reveal and repeating his shotgun intro, the movie makes plenty more visual allusions to really underline the point, and uses multiple shots of Grace to recall shots of him in T1, even outside of action sequences (the shots at the top of this post, for example, as both characters realize their pursuer is once again an imminent threat).

But by the end of T1 of course, Kyle’s destiny is revealed to be far more important than simply Sarah’s bodyguard - he is in love with her.

And he has always been in love with her, before ever he met her.

Indeed he frames his decision to come across time as because he’s in love with her, as you can hear here -

The Terminator(1984) I came across time for you - YouTube

Check out the emphasis there by the way, “I came across time for you, Sarah."

Kyle isn't privy to the grand scheme, but he sure as hell knows why he volunteered - I came across time, not because I was ordered to or to save the world, but for you, because I love you.

Within that grand plan, his role isn’t simply to protect Sarah either; it is to love her, and be loved by her in return, so that together they'll conceive the leader to save the human race in the future.

That this is her predecessor's ultimate purpose is something Mackenzie Davis herself is very much aware of, even acknowledging and goofing around with the extrapolation -

Source: Youtube around 0:45

- so again, it’s not like this is an unconscious parallel either*.

Davis is more than aware the character her own was proxying wasn't simply there to keep his "Dani" physically safe.

In the both movies, Time Travel for humans is depicted as a painful, and dangerous, thing to endure, and even if the mission succeeds these people will die a very long way from anyone else they might know or care about. Kyle speaks of travelling as if it's something he might only consider doing for love; such that only that person would matter.

One distinction between the two depictions - one that Miller himself highlights - is that time travel from Kyle's future is visually associated with fire and the colour red. Time travel from Grace's is associated with ice and the colour blue. Fire as a motif tends to follow Kyle around throughout T1, in a way that ice and water and the colour blue has a funny habit of following Grace.

What is consistent though is that Kyle's arrival, like Grace's, is depicted as a physically difficult thing to endure, something that not everyone could even survive. In an early T1 draft, Kyle arrived with a working partner who didn't; Grace arrives alone, but few others could have survived the fall that greeted her.

When Kyle tells Sarah he came across time for Sarah, he says it as doing it was a self-evident proof of the love he asserts. We can only take the same as true for Grace.

Source: Scumlow

Obviously Grace’s role from there is a little different to Kyle's because, okay, she doesn’t literally impregnate Dani and they don't literally conceive a warrior-saint together in the process - but she does what she does for the same reason he did, and Dani does inarguably love her back.

Whether that’s all platonic or not is an argument for a subsequent post, but the lengths to which Dani goes for Grace throughout the movie - and, it’s implied, afterwards - can only be interpreted as love in some form.

In a message she records for her as-yet unborn son, Sarah wants John to know that in the few hours she spent with his father, they “loved a lifetime's worth”.

Grace, for her part, has known Dani for years - but Dani only knows Grace for a couple of days, and still, for her sake, sets out to change the course of the future. It’s surely love that prompts Dani to make herself Commander, so she has a chance to save Grace from going back later - just as it was love that had Grace offer her life for Dani’s, out loud, at least three times.

In the end, Dani and Grace’s bond, in the short time they spend together, marks the conception of a future saviour every bit as much as Sarah and Kyle’s sexual liaison. They even have that much in common.

**********

Those are the most overt parallels that come to mind to me, and like I say, I'm all ears to hear more, but the obvious question raised by this stuff is how are we to interpret that?

What are we - or were we, at some point in the movie's development - intended to make of it? Well if you're as interested as I am in that question, stick around, because I'll be thinking about that in much too much detail too, someday soon.

I just want to say, also, special thanks to @scumlow for coming through with the immensely useful gifs, I'm really grateful and it's a big help to break up the text walls of doom!

**********

[*This caught my eye btw because Davis said in another interview she’d never actually seen T1 until preparing for the part, so she’s not a lifelong Terminator lore nerd.

You know who is though, clearly, a lifelong Terminator lore nerd, is Tim Miller... so while it’s not impossible this is an off-the-cuff remark entirely on Davis' behalf, it's very tempting to wonder if it was something the two had actually discussed during production. Something to think about, eh?]

[flyingkiki]

We played dangerously (1/?)

Because we need more stories that show us just how much of a dirty boi Timbo is. The more smtty #TimRae the better. So excited for this story and delve heavily into their drama and dirty deeds. Strap yourselves in, bbs. it's a steamy one.

The history between them ran deep and long, mostly unspoken, messy, and painfully raw. Years later, here they are - older and carrying just a little bit more baggage than necessary. Tim and Raven reflect on their dangerous history and sift through the extra baggage they acquired.

~~~~

“You’re quitting?”

Raven frowned and crossed her arms defensively. She steeled herself as Red Robin stared at her, a look of total disbelief on his face as he processed what she just told him. She ignored how a heavy feeling settled low in her stomach.

“I’m taking a sabbatical,” she said levelly.

“For an undefined period of time,” continued Tim, his voice strained as he drew his eyebrows together trying to process what he just heard five minutes ago. “That sounds like quitting to me,”

She pressed her lips together as she tried to ignore the harsh press of Tim’s emotions against her. She watched him stare at her from across the briefing room, the sound of their computer working on data broke the heavy silence between them. “It’s my life, of course it’s indefinite,”

Tim blinked and followed her stance, crossing his arms as he studied her intently. “I’m not trying to take control of your life, Raven,” he bristled.

Raven tilted her head in challenge. For whatever reason she felt annoyance crawl under her skin. “It sounds like you are,”

“I’m not,” Tim pressed, sighing loudly. With a huff he pulled off his mask and threw it on the briefing table. Raven watched it slide on the flat surface before looking back up at Tim’s confused blue eyes. “Look, I don’t want to fight. You can do whatever you want, Raven. You’re right, it’s your life. I’m sorry if I sounded controlling,”

Raven hummed in acknowledgement. She knew he meant well. She knew Tim well enough that he wanted to understand the situation at hand. She shifted under his gaze and ignored how her stomach gnawed painfully. “When are you leaving?” Tim asked, his tone softer as he slid into the seat across from her. Raven watched him grab his mask and fiddle with it absently. The atmosphere shifted and her stomach churned painfully.

“In two weeks,” Raven replied and sat down in front of him. She watched Tim press his lips together and frown at the news. “I got into a special program. School starts early in August,”

Tim swallowed and threw her a torn look. “I’m glad you’re going off to university,” he began. He paused to inhale as he tried to think. “And this is not something you could do, like part-time online or something?”

Raven frowned at the way he tried to find ways to make her stay. “No,” she said. “Our work is a tight schedule as it is,”

Tim nodded in agreement. He gave a halfhearted smile. “At least I tried,”

Her stomach lurched without her consent and she ignored the jumble of emotions in the room. Her decision was final. This conversation made the move incredibly real. Pain settled low in her stomach. She needed to pack and get things going. “I want a life outside of the Titans, Tim,” she said. “Most of you have lives outside of the Tower. Gar does his stupid acting. Jaime has his family and volunteer work. You run WE, Tim. You all get to do something outside of our uniform. I just want something as close to normal as I can get, whatever that is for Rachel Roth, even if it’s just for a while.”

Tim sighed. The tension was palpable as Tim frowned. His brows furrowed and he nodded. “Yeah, I respect that, Rae,” he said, voice low. Running his hand through his hair, Tim leaned back into his chair with a huff. “Yeah, okay. Yeah,” he breathed and looked deep in thought. She felt the faint press of his carefully controlled emotions. “We’ll make some preparations for your transition and make sure that everything is in order. I’ll let the Justice League know,”

There was a beat of silence between them. Raven was surprised how methodological the conversation was. Then again, was she really expecting an argument for her to stay? There was an inexplicable pin-like pain in her chest she could not shake off. Wasn’t this what she wanted? Sighing softly, she assumed their conversation was done and stood up. Tim probably had to file a report to the JL. She had to pack up and get going with her life – they all did. Raven swallowed a thought.

“Well, thanks,” she said and turned to leave the room. She heard Tim stand up.

“Hey,” Tim called, voice slightly strained. Raven paused and turned back around, eyeing him curiously. Tim swallowed and his brows pressed together and there was a cautious look on his face. “This is not about –”

“No,” Raven cut him off sharply. “It’s not.”

Tim sighed and his shoulders lowered slightly. He caught her blue eyes and Raven watched an expression she cannot quite place cross his face. He offered her a tentative smile and nodded, his brows still furrowed and still looking torn. “Okay,” he breathed. “Yeah, good.” He paused before continuing. “We’ll tell the team after dinner tonight.”

Raven nodded. Her stomach felt heavy, she had enough of this conversation. It was done. “I’m going to start packing up stuff,” she said and made her way towards the door.

“Everyone’s going to miss you, Raven,” Tim said as she opened the door.

She paused at the door, hand resting at the metal doorframe. Her finger tapped the frame thoughtfully as a few stray thoughts ran through her mind, before turning to look over her shoulder, catching Tim’s piercing blue eyes. She sent him a tight smile and buried whatever errant emotions tickled her heart. “Yeah, I’ll miss everyone too. I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

She did not come back anytime soon.

~~

Tim forgot when he was last in the Gotham Public Library – perhaps back when he was still in high school, 11 years ago? He wasn’t all too sure. His high school memories were blurry, given how his vigilante life was far more exciting than high school calculus.

But he was sure that the Gotham Public Library did not look this modern or dazzling since he last stepped into it when he was 15. The large library atrium was cleared out from its usual chairs and tables and instead filled with cocktail tables, round tables with sparkling black and gold table settings, buffet tables lined the walls, upbeat jazz music and heavy conversations filled the usual quiet halls, and every single one of the Gotham’s elite was dressed to the nines.

It was a charity dinner with plates going for the thousands. There was a silent auction too, some collectors’ books were up for grabs. The library was launching a new exhibit with some new codex they found out of Gotham. Wayne Foundation was funding most of the research and restoration work that went with it, and tonight’s event was supposed to help cover costs for the library’s expansion projects.

He idly listened to some politicians talk to Bruce and his siblings, Damian and Cass. Jason had moseyed off somewhere (likely browsing through the bookshelves or bidding on some of the collectibles in the silent auction) – lucky for the asshole. Tim wasn’t really paying attention. There was a lot going on, Tim barely kept up if he was being honest. A business merger was keeping his mind preoccupied, he was flying out to Japan tomorrow morning, and tonight’s dinner was the last place he honestly wanted to be at – but press as CEO of WE was important, Bruce liked to constantly remind him.

“So I was saying to him, ‘Johnny, son, if you don’t pull your pants up, that’s gonna be a lawsuit waiting to happen,’,” said the old man, assistant city treasurer – or whatever – to their small group. The old man heartily laughed, wheezing into his champagne glass. Bruce looked like he just swallowed bad caviar and cleared his throat while Damian and Cass made no effort to hide their bewildered faces. Tim sighed.

“Well, it does sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen, Mr. Peters,” Tim absently fiddled with his scotch glass and wondered if he should get anything stronger to get him through the night.

The man made a wounded sound and said something before slinking off. Bruce and Tim shared an exasperated look. Damian clicked his tongue, absently tapping his glass of orange juice. “This party is terrible, father,” he sniffed and icily scanned the crowd. “May we leave early?”

Bruce eyed his teenage son blandly. “We came here together, we leave together,” he said.

“Tt,” Damian frowned and took a sip from his orange juice.

Tim glanced at Damian, mildly feeling sorry for the 16-year-old gremlin. He remembered how he felt over these galas when he was younger. Internally grimacing at the galas when he first became CEO back when he was 17, Tim hid his displeasure behind his scotch glass while taking a sip.

They milled around more, talking to investors and guests from Gotham’s elite and academe. Tim smiled politely and held conversations where necessary, idly wondering when the night would be over. The crowd soon gathered in the middle of the atrium at the soft chime of a bell, signaling the start of another round of speeches from the library. Tim and his siblings slowly followed Bruce and the rest of the crowd towards the atrium. Tim caught Damian and Cass sharing bored glances.

“We’d like to thank everyone for being with us tonight,” said the Gotham Public Library Head Librarian, a well-dressed elderly man. The man went on with library expansion updates and the latest figures on tonight funds that were raised. Tim barely listed as he checked his phone for his flight details Tam sent him earlier. Ignoring the polite applause that filled the room, Tim continued to discreetly scroll through his itinerary.

“Tonight we’re also delighted to announce the opening of our exhibit, the Life Codex: Ancient Celebrations of Life. The library is honored to house this latest discovery and carry out the research, restoration, and preservation work of these recent discoveries,” the librarian droned on about ancient documents and the restoration work involved. Tim felt Cass nudge him and he blinked, looking up from his briefer. He stared at her quizzically.

“Attention,” she whispered. Tim offered her a sheepish look and pocketed his phone. They both turned their attention back to the stage. He caught sight of Jason’s large built shuffle in next to them, looking utterly bored. Since Jason was ‘legally alive’ again, they had roped him into attending a few events once in a while – much to the older man’s displeasure.

Mr. Tompkins, the Head Librarian, went on to discuss the project details that had gone underway since last month. Documents from Africa had been flown in and the research team had been working on restoring paper and decoding the codex. Tim barely listened as the elderly man droned on and silently wondered if he could still catch some sleep before his flight in the morning. His phone vibrated and he pointedly ignored Cass' look as he pulled out his phone to check an update from Tam.

"Doctor Collins, Dean of Gotham University's history and anthropology department is leading this project and she has built an excellent team for this project. Doctor Collins?" The head librarian welcomed an elderly woman with salt and pepper hair up on stage. Tim drowned out the speech as Dr. Collins started talking about the project, briefly looking at his phone and going through the project document for tomorrow's meeting with the Japanese tech firm. Tim wondered if he could at least get some good sushi while in Tokyo. Perhaps he could ask Tam to squeeze that into his schedule, they could --

"Hey, isn't that…" Jason paused and squinted at the stage. "Huh."

"Tim, look,"

Tim closed his phone and glanced at Cass curiously before turning his attention to the stage. Tim stopped short at what he saw.

Dressed in a flowing halter gown with a modest v-neck and a teasingly stylish slit up her right leg, a strikingly familiar woman walked up on the small platform offering the crowd a tentative smile and a modest wave. Tim watched the small woman carefully shuffle across the platform as a few more members of the research team were introduced. He blinked and stared at the violet-black haired woman and felt his throat tighten.

As if sensing his stare, dark blue eyes caught his light blue ones from across the hall. They zeroed in on him, easily catching him in a sea of hundreds.

There was an inexplicable tightness that seized his chest briefly, as Tim stared back at the woman, watching transfixed as emotions flickered across her face before quickly slipping back into a small pleasant smile and keeping her gaze briefly at him before turning to her colleagues and chuckling at something they were whispering to each other on stage. Tim watched and stared at her, schooling the surprise on his face, and just drinking in every familiar slopes and planes of her face because it had been what? Five? Six? Years since he last saw her.

"That's -"

"Rachel," Tim cut off Cass, blinking away his brief surprise and instead stared intently at his (former?) teammate.

"Rachel Roth leads our research team. Is there anything you'd like to say, dear?" Dr. Collins asked, turning to the group on stage. Rachel looked surprised before shaking her head and waving her hand in decline. "Ms. Roth does excellent work in ancient runes and languages, and restoration work. It's a pleasure to have her on the team. She's a guest lecturer at Gotham U, so if you're lucky, you best sign up for her special lecture series on ancient runes."

Tim watched as Rachel blushed at the praise, ducking her head briefly before chuckling at something a blonde haired woman next to her said. The group on stage shared a laugh and Tim watched curiously at the familiar sight of Raven smiling. There were few more pleasantries on stage before the group had their photo taken

“If we could invite Mr. Bruce Wayne, Mr. Lucius Fox, and Mr. Tim Wayne, to come up on stage for a quick photo with the rest of the team? After which we can proceed with our evening, and hopefully get your support in our library’s expansion work,” the head librarian called.

Tim blinked as Cass nudged him and pulled him out of his thoughts. Clearing his throat, he handed Cass his drink and quickly walked up the stage, following Bruce and Lucius up the small steps. Pulling on his practiced Tim Wayne-CEO-of-WE-smile, he dutifully shook hands with Dr. Collins and the head librarian. He briefly caught Raven’s stare as he moved across the stage to shake hands with people on the stage. Their gaze briefly met and her lips quirked into a small smile before quickly turning away and shuffling to the end of the line and out of reach for any other contact without attracting too much attention on them. Photos were taken swiftly and before Tim knew it everyone was ushered off the stage and he was wrapped up in a rather lengthy conversation on library work and the ongoing renovation projects.

Tim discreetly tried to look over his shoulder, barely catching a glimpse of the familiar slope of Raven’s shoulder disappearing into the crowd.

“Bruce Wayne,” Dr. Collins walked up to them just as the head librarian excused himself. The elderly woman beamed and quickly shook Bruce’s hand.

“Julia, it’s nice to see you again,” Bruce smiled warmly. “You know my son, Tim,”

Tim smiled and shook her hand. “Dr. Collins, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, easily pulling himself out of his thoughts of trying to find Raven in the crowd.

“Mr. Wayne,” The elderly woman beamed and regarded both men in front of her.

Tim chuckled. “Just Tim, please,”

“I worked with you parents, Jack and Janet, many years ago on a few of their archaeological digs, back in their early years. I met you when you were a little boy once or twice. I must say I am impressed at what a successful grown man you've become, Tim,” praised Dr. Collins. The elderly woman hummed and smiled. “CEO of Wayne Enterprises,”

Tim chuckled, pulling on his best boardroom smile. “Thank you,”

“Also, this makes me realize that time certainly flies when the young boy you last saw in diapers has become the CEO of the world’s most successful conglomerate,” Dr. Collins chuckled, beaming up at Bruce with a mischievous smile. “That does make me feel old,”

Bruce chuckled as Tim politely made a face and their small group fell into an easy conversation. “The last eight years with Tim as CEO have been the best years for the company,”

Tim grinned playfully over his scotch. “Careful, is that praise I hear?”

The small group fell into an easy conversation discussing work and the research project. Tim quickly gathered that Dr. Collins was an old family friend of the Waynes, particularly of Bruce’s parents. He kept rapt attention to the conversation, nodding and chiming in where necessary, while occasionally glancing around the room for even a hint of purple or black.

Feeling distracted by tonight’s discovery of Raven, Tim was ready to excuse himself from the conversation and pretend to make a phone call. That seemed to be the best way to try to look around and catch Raven.

“There you are,” Dr. Collins glanced over Bruce’s shoulder and beamed. She beckoned for whoever was behind Bruce to come closer.

“I was looking for you,”

Despite the years that passed, Tim recognized the familiar voice in a heartbeat. He watched as Raven appeared from behind Bruce. He schooled his face, trying to fight away any signs of recognition and familiarity towards the black haired woman. Tim watched in a mix of curiosity and internal surprise as Raven smiled softly at their group and confidently walked up to them. From the slopes of her shoulder, the elegant movements of her hands, to her black-violet hair, deep stormy blue eyes, and that achingly familiar errant dusting of a few freckles just around the hollows of her neck, Raven looked exactly like how he remembered her. Tim blinked and absently tapped his scotch glass as he stared openly at her, a sight he had not seen in years.

“Rachel, please meet Bruce Wayne and his son, Tim. As you know Wayne Enterprises provides extensive funding for our work,” Dr. Collins said, waiving at both men in front of them.

“Mr. Wayne,” Raven began, moving her champagne glass into her left hand and went to shake Bruce’s hand. A smile appeared on her face as she and Bruce exchanged pleasantries. There was no air of familiarity between them, despite the schooled smiles that stretched across both of their lips. Tim knew that practiced look from all the undercover missions he had seen, been with, her. “It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for all your support,”

Raven turned to Tim and he watched as her smile immediately curled up just a tiny bit more in that familiar teasing way he had not seen in the last six years. There was that achingly familiar twinkle in her eyes he often saw back in the day, reserved for rare occasions, and Tim found himself smiling back at Raven and eagerly drinking in her familiar presence. “Mr. Wayne,” she said to him, a small quiver in her voice that no one but him seemed to pick up. She reached out and shook his hand.

Tim gave her hand a brief squeeze and he was pleased to see how the corner of her lips curled into a familiar amused smile he remembered. “Just Tim,”

Raven hummed and nodded, pulling her hand back. “Thank you again for supporting the research and restoration project,”

“What were you busy with before joining this project?” Bruce asked curiously. There were little updates from Raven throughout the years as she left the team for university and eventually work. While in the early years of her sabbatical Tim kept some updates on her, these eventually became less up to date as Raven eventually seemed to do her own thing.

“I was in Iceland,” Raven supplied and explained that she worked on an ancient runes translation project with the local university for six months.

Tim felt a distant memory tickle the back of his mind and he ignored the tight feeling that accompanied those distinct memories. He ignored the whisps of memories that teased his mind. Dark blue eyes briefly caught his stare and he watched that familiar curl in the corner of Raven’s lips appear. Tim smiled in return. “Iceland is a beautiful country,” he commented.

Raven stared at him, dark blue eyes intense as he remembered them. “It is,”

“We’re glad that Rachel has joined our project. She’s a fine addition to our team,” commented Dr. Collins. The elderly woman smiled teasingly. “And we’re definitely hoping she’ll considering staying in Gotham after the project ends,”

Raven rolled her eyes in amusement. “We’re just two weeks into the project. We have a long way to go,”

Tim looked at her curiously. How could he have missed her entering Gotham?. “You’ve been here for two weeks?”

Raven looked at him as if catching the slight jump in his emotions at this little discovery. “Three actually, if you count my moving in week,” she shrugged in amusement.

Three weeks. Tim stored that information for later, for a later conversation, and ignored how it settled uncomfortably in his stomach. He instead smiled at her and titled his head curiously. “I hope the transfer into Gotham wasn’t too difficult,”

Raven made a face. “It’s been interesting,” she said and Tim easily caught her familiar teasing lilt in her voice.

“Let us know if you need any assistance getting you settled, I’m sure we can send over someone to help you with your apartment,” Bruce offered, smiling charmingly at Raven.

Raven waved him off. “It’s just a few more boxes, nothing really major,”

Tim watched as a young woman tentatively approached them and offered the group an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said to the group and quickly turned to Raven. With a quick tilt of her head towards the right, she made a face. “The University Press wants to talk to you,”

Raven made a face. “Oh, Why?”

“Just stuff about the project and the lecture,” supplied the young woman. She offered Raven a wry smile and made a face. “Also one of them asked if you were single,”

Raven rolled her eyes before smiling tightly at Bruce and Tim. “I’m sorry, if you’d excuse me. It was really nice to meet you. Thank you again for all your support. I hope you’ll visit the library again and we could show you around our work,” she said. Quickly turning to Dr. Collins, she nodded politely. “I’ll see you later, Julia,”

Smiling at Bruce and Tim, she tilted her head and there was an amused glint in her eyes as she stared at them. “Gentlemen,” she then turned on her heels, casually drank the rest of her champagne with just a little bit more purpose and seemingly bracing herself for what was about to happen next. Standing a little taller and squaring her shoulders, Raven followed the young assistant towards the press. “So, what did you tell them?” she asked, amusement lacing her voice.

As the conversation between Dr. Collins and Bruce resumed, Tim took a long sip of his scotch and stared at Raven’s retreating form. A million thoughts ran through his mind and he silently wondered just how fast he could get through his business trip in Tokyo. Sushi would have to wait for another time.

[janekfan]

IF you are still taking prompts...would you consider something precanon with Jon and Tim? tim's been trying to befriend an isolated/lonely researcher jon that no one's a fan of, sees him sick or being bothered by someone or any one of our usual terrible scenarios and is immediately like 'is anyone gonna take care of this man??'

https://archiveofourown.org/works/27650999

Tim flipped his pen around in his fingers, internally cheering when he executed the trick shot over his thumb, and kept an eye on Research’s newest recruit. The tiny man, stuffy and pompous and peculiar, had only been with them a little over a week and from day one Tim marked him as a challenge.

He would become this angry and diminutive fellow’s best friend, so help them both.

Currently, one Jonathan Sims was balanced on the tips of his patent leather brogues, stretching up for a volume he could never hope to reach and Tim, seeing his moment of opportunity, allowed his shadow to fall over him as he easily retrieved it for him.

“Tim. Tim Stoker.” He gave over the book along with a beaming grin and an introduction, holding a hand out for him to shake and lifting a brow when all Jon did was glare skeptically at his open palm, arms tightening around his prize.

“Sims.” Imperiously, with the slightest lift of his chin. “Jon. Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Stoker.” If Tim had been quicker on the uptake, he would have replied with the customary that was my father, but as it was he found himself faced with the stiff line of his back as he walked swiftly deeper into the stacks.

He was awkward and prickly, for sure, there was no getting around that, but knowledgeable and worked hard at his job, harder than Tim currently was anyway with this quest to focus on. Jon kept his head down, literally, at his desk he was nigh folded in half for most of the shift, not even stopping for lunch most of the time unless something broke his hyperfocus and he caught sight of the clock. No wonder he was so scrawny, just skin and bone beneath his crisp starched shirts and prim jumpers. So Tim began leaving snacks behind; a piece of fruit, bottle of water, cereal bar, a bit of chocolate, and it gave him no end of amusement each and every time Jon noticed. Feet up on his own desk, Tim would watch Jon glance around, ignoring the irritated looks of their coworkers while he tried to puzzle out who kept doing it and the first time he actually took a bite tasted of sweet, sweet victory.

Time passed, Tim finally convinced Jon to call him by his first name and was soundly told off for attempting to call him Jonny. He learned of his preference for tea over coffee, that he was raised by his grandmother, and feared spiders absolutely, having been the unfortunate recipient of a harmless office prank. It was no secret that Jon was not well liked and didn’t seem to care. He became the butt of many a joke and impersonation. That posh accent, put on or not, was too good to pass up and his lack of social acumen didn’t help his case even though he was smart as a whip and picked up any slack by virtue of staying late.

“Bags under your eyes are looking heavy today.”

“Hm? Oh, Tim.” Jon rubbed a knuckle under the rim of his glasses. “Yes, I. I haven’t been sleeping well.” He dropped into his chair heavily, pressing fingertips against his temples and massaging them.

“Take a sick day. You’ve put in enough over time.” Jon craned his neck, blinked up at him with a confused look, as though he were trying to figure out a difficult puzzle.

“M’alright.” Mumbling, the wood grain suddenly seemed very interesting. “You should get to work though.”

“Whoa! Not my boss there yet, Jonny-boy!” It elicited a familiar, nettlesome response and put Tim’s heart at ease. Jon probably was just tired.

“Oi, you daft twit, watch where you’re going.” Tim turned the corner on his return from lunch to find Jon scrambling amongst a sprawl of papers, frantically trying to collect them up.

“S’sorry, I’ll help--”

“Done enough, sod off.” Jon froze, muttered another apology and handed off the pages he’d gathered together.

“You alright?” Sidling up to him, Tim did him the favor of ignoring the trembling line of Jon’s mouth. “Guy’s just being a prick ‘cause his wife’s leavin’ him.”

“Fine, m’fine, Tim.” And in a moment he was, back at his desk and pointedly thumbing through a file and pretending to cross check his notes.

The next morning was no better and Jon arrived under the wire, hair unkempt and tie just slightly crooked. Very unlike him and this time he watched as Jon let his head tip forward for a few seconds, bracing himself on the arms of his chair before retreating into the forest of bookshelves. If left to his own devices, Tim was sure he’d end up ticking the librarians off again. He tended to leave a mess in his wake when searching for what he needed and when he didn’t reappear by noon, Tim went off in search of him, expecting to find him leafing through some manuscript or another and instead discovering him cross legged in the shadows, eyes closed, head tipped back and resting on a shelf. There was a short stack of books pertaining to his research by his knee but his hands were empty and still in his lap.

“What’s wrong?” Jon made a vague gesture. “Headache?”

“Mm. Didn’t mean to, to...uh.”

“End up on the floor?”

“Mm.

“You should go home.” The very suggestion drew his features into a frown and he cracked open dark lashes just enough for Tim to catch a glimpse of glassy brown.

“I’ve barely worked here a month, I. I can’t. I can’t skive off.”

“You’re ill, Jon. That’s not--Look, look.” Tim crouched beside him. “It’s okay to call off sick.” It had the opposite effect, and Tim had to steady Jon after he struggled to his feet with his armful of books. “Jon.”

“No, no. I’ll be over whatever this is by tomorrow.”

Tim sighed. Jon was, in fact, not over whatever he’d come down with, and was now stifling a series of wet, breathless coughs in the crook of his elbow, unaware of the dirty looks the other researchers were throwing his way. The harder Tim tried to make him see reason, the harder Jon resisted, insisting that he was fine, it was allergies or something else but he wasn’t feeling ill enough to miss work.

“I’m holding you up as we speak.” Sluggish, Jon’s eyes tracked Tim’s arm from where it was attached to his shoulder all the way down to the firm grip he had on his bicep to keep him from listing even further.

“Jus’...bit dizzy…”

“Yeah, that’s not a good thing.”

“I can, I can still do my job.” And Tim wasn’t quite sure who he was trying to convince. “I can.” Tim allowed him his arm back, not commenting on his barely controlled fall into his desk chair or the soft groan of pain that ended in another fit, weaker than the last.

“I know you can, I just want to see you take care of yourself.”

“Why?” Bloodshot eyes narrowed in suspicion and Tim didn’t know what to make of it.

“We’re friends?”

“We’re not.” Tim didn’t let it discourage him or take it personally. Clearly, Jon wasn’t well, was trying to convince himself that he was, that he didn’t need help. Besides, Tim looked on the bright side, Jon didn’t sound completely sure.

“Alright. Well, as your not-friend, I’m advising you to at least make yourself some tea.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“Christ, Sims!”

“I, I’m sorry, let me, let me help.”

“You’ve done quite enough.” It seemed to Tim that wherever Jon was lately he was in some sort of trouble and when he veered into the breakroom to check on the situation his heart went out to the Lilliputian researcher. Jon had dropped and shattered a mug full of hot water, apparently splashing the man currently yelling at him. Tim took in his trembling hands, the flush high on his vacant face, and the unbearable vulnerability, feeling those big brother instincts rise like a tide. He caught him up again by the arm, drawing him away from the mess and the mumbling.

“You’re like a furnace, buddy.” Gently, with a cupped hand, Tim lifted his jaw and tried to catch his slippery gaze. The heat cradled in his palm was scorching.

“M’not.”

“Now you’re just being contrary.” He led him away with his fingers just at the small of his back stopping at their desks long enough to gather up his things and call for a cab. He balked, hesitating before stepping in and Tim encouraged him with another careful push, helping him back out again when his knees threatened to give. Guiding him inside the flat he dropped their stuff by the door and looked around with a pensive hum. “Next time we’ll go to mine.” Under his breath. Jon’s was cold and not well lit, sparsely furnished with a second hand couch and mismatched tables. It was clean if spartan and somehow very Jon.

“Tim?” Thready, tired, sinking into the couch where Tim deposited him.

“Hey, there. Back in a tick. I’m gonna get you that tea.” Assuming he had any. Assuming he had anything at all. But there was a bottle of paracetamol on the kitchen counter beside an open box tea and a bottle of honey. “Take these, drink this down.” Dimly, Jon followed his instructions, tugging at his buttons and Tim shooed him away to change, surprised when he returned in soft, overlarge clothes. For as prim and proper as he tried to be at work, Jon was a complete bum at home. “Should go to sleep.” Petulant, Jon shook his head, flopping back on the couch and wrapping himself up in a knitted throw like a burrito. “Why not?” This side of his coworker was so soft and unexpected and Tim couldn’t stop himself.

“M’not tired.” Soft, unexpected, and childish.

“Uh huh.” Tim ordered in, something spicy and brothy, and praised Jon’s progress before tugging him, cajoling him into lying his head in his lap. Bad telly droned on, half lidded eyes blinked slow, and Tim was reminded painfully of nights and weekends and mornings spent this exact same way with someone else. Someone gone.

“Why’re you doing this?” Tim dug his fingers into unruly curls, grinning stupidly when Jon melted like a scruffed cat.

“We’re buddies, buddy.” Jon laughed, just an exhale between parted lips.

Mid afternoon the following day Tim proclaimed his work done, confirming it when Jon’s cactus like demeanor made a reappearance with all his fussing. After inputting his number into his cell phone himself, he ruffled already sleep mussed hair, smirking at Jon’s futile attempt to set it right.

“Call if you need anything.”

“I will.” Tim knew he wouldn’t, but it made him feel better anyway. It was the weekend. Jon looked miles better, and he was set up for success with all his tea and meds and snacks within easy reach. Leftover soup waited in the fridge for him to heat later. “Stop fretting, Tim.” But he could hear the thread of affection buried under all the exasperation.

And if he was imagining it, well. He was ever an optimist.

Monday. And Tim was sat on the corner of Jon's desk shoving chocolate digestives into his mouth and rifling through his notes having already ignored one request to leave off.

“You don’t have many friends, do you Jon?” Jon pushed his glasses up from where they’d slipped down the bridge of his nose and selected a biscuit for himself.

“Never needed many.”

“Do you have any?” Jon snatched the pages out of his hand and brushed away any stray crumbs, offering Tim a shy smile.

“I’ve you, don’t I?”

[meterokinesis]

No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 12,032

Fandom: Batfamily, DC Comics

Characters: Tim Drake, Ra’s al Ghul, Tam Fox, OFC, Dick Grayson, Damian Wayne, Fasir Nasser

Pairings: Tim Drake & Ra’s al Ghul, Tim Drake & Tam Fox

Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, Chose not to use archive warnings

Tags: Canon divergence, Lazarus Pit, Lazarus Pit Madness, Evil!Tim Drake, Blood and Gore, Psychological Trauma, Survivor’s guilt, Unreliable narrator, Tim Drake is Red Robin, Post-Battle of the Cowl, Bruce is dead, Tim is not having a good time right now

Summary: When Tim Drake leaves to find Bruce, he doesn’t expect to get stabbed. He doesn’t expect to die. And he certainly doesn’t expect to be resurrected. However, the Tim who goes into the Lazarus Pit is not the same Tim who comes out. This Tim is ruthless and unguarded in a way he never was before. And when Ra's starts to take him under his wing... well, what's a disgraced Robin to do?

Author’s Note: This work is part of the Batfam Big Bang! (@batfam-big-bang) I couldn't have done this without my lovely betas, @bisexualoftheblade, @crystalinastar, and @houser-of-stories. There's also some amazing art for this fic that I’ll be posting soon!

Read it on AO3

The desert night was cool, with a breeze that shifted the sand beneath Tim’s feet like waves. The stars gleamed overhead, and for a second he was caught up in how clear the sky was. It had been years since he’d seen stars without a haze of light pollution around them.

Owens and Z were in front of him, his babysitters for the night. Pru was off to his left, fiddling with the safety on her gun. The ride here had been as light-hearted as was possible, given the circumstances, but that jovial tone had ended quickly. Their off-roader had died on them maybe half an hour before, and the small group was still huddled around the machine, waiting as Z checked the engine. Every few seconds, Pru glared at Tim, as if blaming him for the hold up. Though the others had made it very clear that this was a fool’s errand, Tim knew that Bruce was here, somewhere. He had to be, or Tim had thrown everything away for nothing.

That was the issue, wasn’t it? Tim might be the world’s greatest detective, now that Bruce was… out of commission. But his hunches could still be wrong. What if- no. He couldn’t afford to think like that. He would bring Bruce back, he had to.

“Hey, Drake, are you done brooding yet?” Pru’s voice echoed over the empty land. Tim huffed noncommittally and looked up to see the bald assassin twirling her gun on her finger.

“I’m a Bat. We’re never done brooding,” he quipped, before fiddling with the little radio receiver he had brought along. It didn’t do more than give off static when it was on, but having something to do with his hands helped.

Rolling her eyes, Pru gestured over to a precariously balanced pile of rocks. “Wanna see if I can hit the top one off without knocking over the others?”

Tim sighed heavily and dragged himself over to her, Owens trailing behind. Out of the corner of his eye, he even saw Z peek out from behind the hood to watch.

Squaring off, Pru brought up her gun and fired off a shot. To no one’s surprise, the top rock went flying and the others remained still, albeit with a slight wobble.

“Fuck yeah! Z, did you see…” She trailed off, her face blanching. Tim followed suit, only to be greeted with Z on the ground, chest bleeding in a way his medical training told him was too much. His brown eyes were already glassy, and his chest wasn’t moving anymore. It was then that the rest of the image came into focus, and Tim’s eyes finally latched onto the cloaked man holding two bloody swords.

“I am the Widower,” the man said, his voice low and bone-chilling. “And here I was, thinking you’d put up a fight.”

Tim drew his bo staff, eyes tracking Pru and Owens as they rushed toward the Widower, guns at the ready. He had barely taken a step, but they were already on the ground, Pru bleeding from a large gash in her neck and Owens trying in vain to keep pressure on the wound in between his ribs.

Quick--what were his weaknesses? No visible limps or injuries, no issues handling the weapons. He moved like a snake through grass, smooth and precise. The Widower’s blades gleamed in the moonlight, and Pru’s blood dripped onto the sand. Tim lashed out with his staff, catching one of the swords right as it flew toward his throat.

“I guess dead birdies tell no tales,” Widower whispered as he drove the second sword, the one Tim had forgotten about, into Tim’s stomach.

The vigilante staggered back, and fell to his knees, clutching his abdomen. The blade slid out and even through the gloves of his suit, Tim could feel his blood, warm and sticky. Was this how he was going to die? Mission incomplete, estranged from his family, bleeding out into the desert sand? He had never assumed he would survive in this job, but he’d at least thought he’d die as Robin. Oh god, he was never going to be Robin again.

The ground rushed up to greet him, sand in his mouth and eyes and hair. He supposed that it didn’t matter--it’s not like corpses care anyway. With his last ounces of strength, he rolled onto his back. Somewhere, some last shred of knowledge told him that this would keep him from bleeding out, but deep down he knew it was too late. Tim just wanted the stars to be the last thing he saw.

As darkness encroached on the corners of his vision, his mind drifted back to Bruce. This was it. The only father figure he’d ever had, or at least the only one who liked him as he was, would be doomed to never return. And it was all Tim’s fault.

The afterlife was dark. And cold. Tim had never been religious, aside from that year of Hebrew school his parents insisted he take in middle school, but even he knew that this wasn’t right. It took a second, but the cold and dark sharpened into something Tim knew well, his kitchen at home. Well, at Drake Manor.

The marble countertops gleamed, as did the floors, and Tim recalled tiptoeing around in his early childhood, so not to dirty them. The kitchen--really, the whole house--had always felt like a mausoleum. Cold, impersonable. Lonely. In some ways, a lot like Tim.

He drifted through the house, looking pointedly away from the family portrait that hung above the fireplace. It had been painted a few months before his mom was killed, right after he became Robin. They all looked so stiff, like actors playing a family in a movie. Actually, actors would probably do a better job than they did. That portrait had been the first thing Tim had put in storage when his dad died.

The curtains were drawn, letting in the gray sunlight Gotham was so well-known for. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted his lawn, except… not. Gravestones dotted the otherwise pristine lawn, some new and some old and worn. He hesitated at the door, fingertips just brushing the doorknob. He was dead, it wasn’t like he could get hurt. Maybe this was some kind of purgatory that he had to deal with before he could move on. He pushed against the door, anticipating the old hitch in the hinges that had been around for years.

The air held the same chill as the house, pulling at Tim’s breath. Front and center, practically in the doorway, was Bruce’s grave, the one they’d buried him in just over a month ago. But now the death date was scratched out, in its place a sticker like the ones Tim used to put on his skateboard. It read: Eternally Damned To Disappointment. It’d sound like the name of a band Tim might’ve listened to, if he didn’t know that the disappointment was in him.

The next grave was older, cracked and crumbly. The ground in front of it was disturbed, and dried blood streaks marked the bottom of the headstone. Here lies Jason Todd. Well, that didn’t last long. And unlike Jason, Tim knew he wasn’t coming back. He wasn’t that lucky.

Next was Steph, or at least the grave she pretended to fill. It was covered in flowers, some of them bouquets Tim had left himself. Tim had spent hours in front of it, telling her how much he missed her and loved her, praying for the first and last times. When she came back… well, they were more distant than he would’ve liked. That wasn’t Steph’s fault, at least not entirely, but it did make him wonder. What if he never took back the mantle? Would this have been easier? He could’ve been a semi-normal teenager, living with his dad and stepmom, mourning his girlfriend and being blissfully unaware of the shitshow that was heroism. But he wouldn’t have been happy.

And speak of the devil, there’s his parents’ graves, right next to each other. It was almost funny how they were closer in death than in life. A boomerang was lodged in his father’s gravestone, with an old flip phone opened at the base. It listed Tim’s number as the last call. His mother’s had a sticky substance that a voice deep inside Tim told him not to touch. He lingered at these graves for a moment, breath caught in his throat. It’s not that he didn’t miss his parents--he did. But he had only known a piece of them, only just deeper than surface level. They weren’t parents as much as guardians with high expectations. And for the most part, he had met or exceeded every goal they gave him. But it never was enough. There was always another class to ace or language to learn or party to schmooze at. Worst of all, they were cold. If Tim was the chill night air, his parents were Antarctica.

The next grave stopped him in his tracks. Bart. One of his best friends, his ally in all things. Gone, but not in the way Bruce or Steph were. Bart wasn’t coming back. There would be no more Hawaiian pizza and donuts shared over a comic book, or sleepovers on the floor of Mount Justice. No more Wendy the Werewolf Stalker Marathons. There was no more Bart, and it stung in a way that Tim didn’t have a name for.

He turned around, expecting that to be the end of it, but there it was. Conner. All at once, the weight of the world fell on Tim’s shoulders, like his own personal Kryptonite. His best friend, someone he had been more than a little in love with once upon a time. He knew Conner was safe now, alive and saving people once again. Without Tim. Conner’s death had been the one that broke him, more than any of the others. Because if Conner Kent, Superboy and heartbreaker extraordinaire, hadn’t made it, what chance did Tim have? Well, obviously not much. How was Conner going to take this? He wasn’t like Tim, this was the first time he’d be alone.

Aren’t you tired of losing the ones you love? Aren’t you tired of being the one left behind? A quiet voice murmured in the back of his skull.

Yes. No. Yes. A sob tore from Tim’s chest, and his hand flew to his mouth. This was so stupid. He had dealt with loss before. Hell, the past year had been one unending funeral. Of course he was tired, who wouldn’t be?

This had to be Hell, but that felt like even more of a betrayal. Even Jason had made it to Heaven. Was this his punishment for toeing the line? Had he not suffered enough? Biting back another sob, Tim ran blindly toward the door, slamming it shut behind him in a way that would’ve made his mother shriek. When he opened his eyes, he wasn’t in his living room anymore, but the Batcave. Even with his eyes full of tears, he would know it anywhere. And there was Dick in the Batsuit. And the demon in his Robin gear. Tim opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Dick looked up, expression weary.

“Tim, I already told you. Bruce isn’t coming back. I’m Batman now, and that means I get to choose the Robin. It’s about time you accept that.” It sure sounded like Dick. “Besides, it’s not like you were doing a great job anyway. You let Batman be killed on the job.” Damian sneered, leaning against Dick’s chair like a bully in a high school rom com.

“That-That’s not my fault!” Tim cried, heart pounding in his ears.

“Look, there’s an heir and a spare. There’s a new Robin now, you can be whatever you’re calling yourself now. Go do whatever you have to on this suicide mission, but leave Gotham out of it.”

Damian smiled like a demonic cherub. “Yes, Drake. Not even Grayson wants you anymore, if he ever did.”

Tim stood in shocked silence, unable to find words. Sure, Dick was focused on Damian, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t care anymore. After all, they were brothers, right?

He’s taken the only thing you had left. Don’t you want revenge? He took your mantle, you should take it back. The voice sounded like Tim, but contorted--like it would on a recording.

Tim--no, not Tim, something else--reached back for the bo staff. As his hand gripped the metal, something flew toward him, hitting him directly in the stomach where he had been stabbed. It clattered to the floor, and through his pain, Tim realized it was a Batarang.

Don’t you want more, Timothy Drake-Wayne? It coaxed.

Yes.

The new Timothy Drake-Wayne took his first breaths in a cave deep in the Iraqi desert, hundreds of miles away from the house and the graves that had haunted his dream. It was cold here, nearly as cold as that dream had been. If he was in Hell, it would be hotter, wouldn’t it?

Tim swallowed hard and pushed himself up. His stomach, where he was pretty sure he had just been stabbed, was free of wounds or scarring. If anything, he felt stronger than he had before. As his feet touched the stone cold floor, he took note of the ninjas scattered around the room. Okay, so he was back at the League. They must have… The prior strength he had felt disappeared as his legs gave out. Normally he would have rolled or caught himself or something, but his gaze was fixed on the other side of the room, where a glowing green pit resided.

Oh, no.

No weapons, outnumbered, barely able to stand. The disadvantages stacked up before his eyes, screaming that there was no hope of him getting out of this one. Not to mention that he was probably already on his way to insanity. Fuck, the last time he’d seen Jason, the former Robin had almost killed him. Would Tim end up like that, homicidal and cruel?

He struggled to his feet, clutching the stone table for support. He could take out two, maybe three, if he just stopped thinking. He was trained for this, he could--

“Hello there, Detective,” a cold voice purred, quiet but deafening in the silent room. A chill hovered under Tim’s skin. It had been a long time since he’d last heard that voice. Detective? Isn’t that what he calls your mentor? There was the voice again, the only remaining fragment of the dream.

Ra’s al Ghul was one of those people who intimidated you just by existing in the same space. He reminded Tim of every strict teacher and cruel board member and snotty dinner party guest all rolled up into one. Oh, and he was the leader of the world’s largest assassin guild. That was important too.

“Did you find what you were looking for, Timothy?” Ra’s said in the same tone.

The teenager opened his mouth, then closed it again, searching for words. “No,” he managed to force out. “No, I didn’t.”

Are you sure?

Ra’s smiled, like a predator that had just gone for the killing blow. “Well, I suppose that you will have more than enough time to complete your quest during your stay with us.” And just like that, he turned, a group of ninjas peeling off to escort him back to whatever pit of Hell he’d crawled from. “If you need anything, ask for the White Ghost. Welcome to the Cradle, Detective.” And just like that, he was gone.

Tim was only alone with his thoughts for a minute before a tall man with alabaster skin and medieval-style chainmail entered the cavern.

Okay, so this was the White Ghost impersonator. The League wouldn’t kill someone they’d just resurrected, so maybe once he was alone he could escape? Go back to Gotham and see Dick and Sebastian and Zoanne one last time before he truly went insane, then start going to that therapist Dick recommended. He could make it through this, he wouldn’t end up like Jason--

And then in walked Tam Fox, looking terrified but for the most part unharmed. And all of Tim’s plans came crashing down.

Tam was a civilian, and a Wayne Enterprises employee to boot. Her life, and his identity, were in danger now. He was both her only savior and her greatest danger. New plan: listen to this knockoff White Ghost, do whatever it takes to gain their trust, then make it out with Tam at the first possible chance. And do it all without going off the deep end.

Easy. Not.

“I am the White Ghost,” the shitty cosplayer said, his chainmail clinking as he moved.

“Isn’t he dead?” Tim murmured under his breath. He’d definitely seen Dusan die. But if Tim was still alive, then maybe…

“There has always been a White Ghost,” the older man responded, as if that answered anything. “Now, it is time you and your guest retired to your quarters.”

Tam looked over at Tim, big brown eyes wide with fear. He nodded once, tried to conjure a press conference smile, and allowed them to be led to lavish bedchambers. They looked like beautiful, windowless prisons.

The next few weeks blended into their own lethal monotony. Tam stayed in her room all day and Tim went to meetings with various members of the League’s regime. It was a little like working at Drake Industries or Wayne Enterprises, just with more murder. A lot more murder. But the meetings were easy enough, and Tim soon found himself getting to know the people he once despised. He didn’t like them by any means, but he wasn’t terrified anymore.

He kept looking for Bruce. The desert gave no answers.

Tam didn’t ask questions. She didn’t push too hard. She had to know everyone’s identities by now, didn’t she? Tim was just one Robin-shaped piece of the puzzle. Here he was, in the desert, yet another failed Robin. His whole tenure, he’d been trying to live up to Jason Todd, and now in a sick way he had. Wearing Jason’s uniform, having been resurrected the same way, he now dreaded catching up to the boy who had once been his hero.

On nights when he cried silently into the silk sheets, trying to forget the way Jason had looked when he first came back to Gotham, the voice soothed: You can be greater than he ever was. You can outshine all of the others. You will be remembered when they are dust.

The desert was cold. There was no comfort here.

His bedchamber was nice enough. There was a large bed with silk sheets and gold accents and an ensuite bathroom. A large mirror took up the space where a window might have once been, like some sort of philosophical conundrum that Tim was too tired to try to unpack. There was a small passageway between his room and Tam’s, and if Tim was just a little more naive he would have believed that the League forgot about it when they placed him in this room. But he knew better. The League never forgot a thing.

Sometimes Tim caught himself in the mirror and for a second he swore his blue eyes looked green. Tam came in the next morning to glass littering the floor and cuts covering Tim’s hands. She said nothing while she helped him wrap up his knuckles.

Tim had always been adaptable. It’s easier than the constant push and shove of rebellion. When his parents told him to take those classes and join these clubs, he did. When he was instructed to give impromptu speeches at galas, he did. He put in the effort, he always had. He was never the best fighter and never would be, but he was smart and quick and brave. That had to mean something, right?

Maybe that’s why Ra’s al Ghul liked him so much.

The first time Ra’s al Ghul asked for a private meeting with Tim, the ground seemed to tilt under him. The well-trained vigilante tried not to show the fear in his eyes as his vision blurred and his heart thundered in his chest. But he went, because one did not say no to the Demon’s Head.

“Detective,” Ra’s began as he sat down at a large, stately desk that seemed out of place in the rest of the Cradle. The voices--he had taken to calling them whispers--that had been clogging Tim’s thoughts preened at the nickname, ignoring its former bearer.

“Tell me what you know about my grandson,” the assassin drawled, his fingers tapping on the desk rhythmically.

“Don’t you have spies for that?” Tim responded, not quite a retort but not an innocent question either. He’d seen enough of the League’s intel that it was clear how much they truly knew about the world outside the Cradle.

“Yes, but I’d prefer to hear it from someone… familiar with him. My eyes can only do so much from afar.”

Tim had no doubt that Ra’s knew everything about Damian: from the route he took to school to the cereal he ate for breakfast to how many times he pet Titus when he got home from school.

“He’s a brat.” Tim’s chagrin even took him by surprise, like it wasn’t really him talking. “He’s rude and inconsistent and incredibly immature. He’s aggressive and undisciplined. A sorry excuse for a Robin.”

And there it was, the green monster of jealousy rearing its head again. Yes, Damian had taken Robin from him unfairly, and yes, he was all of those things. But why did Ra’s care?

“I see. Would you describe him as a leader?”

“No. If anything, he’s a bully and a mama’s boy. Leaders need to be able to listen to others.” Where was he getting this? Damian was a kid, he could learn. He still had time.

“Interesting.” Ra’s rose from his chair and paced the edge of the room. Tim refused to look back and follow his movements. That would be a show of weakness, a drop of blood in a shark tank. “Detective, what do you have in Gotham? What do you have there that keeps you from dedicating yourself to your cause?”

Nothing.

Tim stifled a gasp as he thought of the instant response. Dick and Damian didn’t need him. Stephanie hadn’t called in months, even before Bruce died. Jason had tried to kill him, last they’d spoken. The Teen Titans were getting along just fine without him. Truthfully, the whispers were right. There was nothing left for him in Gotham. If there was, he would have stayed.

“Nothing.” The anymore went unsaid.

“Then I may have a proposal for you.” Ra’s eyes glowed a dangerous green. A pit formed in Tim’s stomach, as the last few vestiges of him that hadn’t sided with the voices screamed at him to just escape.

“Oh?” Tim responded, mouth bone-dry.

“Stay.”

And Tim’s world crumpled.

“Learn under my agents. Train to become better than you are. Continue your quest with my resources behind you. All you have to do is stay and work for me,” Ra’s smiled like a hunter who had just shot big game.

This was a terrible idea. Tim didn’t kill people, he refused. He was supposed to help people, not hurt them. But he couldn’t deny that feeling like he belonged again was incredibly enticing.

Tim opened his mouth, but Ra’s cut him off. “Your friend will not be harmed. I won’t even think about putting you on an assignment until you’re up to par with my best ninjas. I will not make this offer again.”

The voice that responded was not Tim’s own.

“Yes.”

Tim thought that six months of training with Bruce was brutal. Ha hadn’t known brutal until now.

His first day of training, he showed up in his Red Robin suit, now patched and reinforced where he had been stabbed.

The tall ninja that seemed to be in charge scoffed, then sent him away. Not fifteen minutes later, a tailor descended on Tim’s quarters with a tape measure and a face made of solid stone.

“Can’t have you looking like a target, all in red. What was Batman thinking?”

Maybe he wants them to be targets, Tim and the whispers thought in tandem. He balked at the thought, but the tailor’s firm hands kept him in place. What was he doing? Bruce had loved him, did love him. He had taken care of Tim when no one else would. Bile crawled through the back of Tim’s throat, but he swallowed it down.

The tailor finished her measurements and scanned Tim up and down.

“It will have to be black, of course. Reinforced joints, kevlar, the whole nine yards,” she stated in a lilting accent. “Maybe some green accents, dark ones. Classy. Half-mask, no more cowls or dominos.”

Red, yellow, and black were his colors and had been for years. A tribute to a boy he loved and lost then loved some more. But Conner was back now. And Tim was tired of mourning, especially when no one was dead. Well, except him.

“Green,” he agreed, swallowing thickly. He wasn’t Red Robin anymore, not really. And he could always wear the suit again. This wasn’t a finale, just a hiatus.

She nodded once and then swept away, leaving a teenager clutching the last thing he had of his old life. Tim folded the suit, the way Alfred had always chastised him for, and gingerly placed it in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe. He wouldn’t need it anytime soon.

The next day, a precisely wrapped package sat outside Tim’s door bearing no signature. He knew exactly what it was.

Upon peeling back the paper, he saw the full glory of the new suit. It was midnight black, with dark green stitches that were beautiful up close, but would be near-invisible from far away. It looked like a cross between the ninjas’ garb and body armor--sleek and sure of itself. A hood was attached to the back of the neck, with the green stitching spelling out something Tim couldn’t discern. A half-mask with built in air filters covered the rest of the face. As he patted the suit down, he felt where all the separate compartments were for weapons and utilities. It reminded him a little of the costumes from high-tech spy movies.

Sitting on the floor with his new suit in his lap, Tim added another item to the long lists of debts he owed Ra’s al Ghul.

His first real day of training, Tim was beaten so badly he could hardly drag himself to his room.

It wasn’t that they had intended to hurt him, but he had gone almost a month without training. Bruises laced up his cheekbone like their own little domino mask, a little memento of times gone by. His joints screamed out in pain as he collapsed onto his bed. At least he hadn’t broken any bones. Or been stabbed. Or died.

Tim only had a few minutes to contemplate the stuntman funniest fails video that was his life when a gentle knock came from the door.

“Come in,” he groaned, flopping over onto his side so he could see his company. His mother would have scolded him for not standing up to greet a guest, but she didn’t have much sway from six feet under.

A girl with olive-tan skin and a brunette bun stepped into the threshold, her smile the gentlest thing he’d seen in a long time.

“Hello, my name is Aminta. I figured you could use some help with your wounds.” Her voice was lower than he expected, but pretty nonetheless. A dark, untraceable accent threaded through her words.

He peered up at her, frowning.

“Is this a hazing thing? Am I being hazed?”

She chuckled, then sat on the ottoman at the edge of his bed.

“Not hazing. The new recruits tend to help each other through the first few months. Safety in numbers and all that. I thought you might want some assistance.”

“So, you’re all friends?” That didn’t sound right.

“No,” she hesitated for a moment, “not exactly. Friends is too... common. We are assassins, but we have honor. When we need to, we take care of our own.”

Ah, so he was one of them now. For some indescribable reason, that didn’t fill him with as much dread as he thought it would.

You have no friends. You never did. Just those who you will rule and those who you will crush, the whispers added.

Tim smiled, the shy grin he used when he wanted teachers and Wayne Enterprises board members to underestimate him.

“Thank you, Aminta. I’d appreciate that. My name is Tim.”

She winked at him, clearly a joke.

“Believe me, I know.”

The League had a mole.

Or at least, they were going to. Tim had known enough corrupt businessmen in his time in Gotham’s upper echelon that he was well versed in the signs of someone double-dipping. At first it was little things: missing pieces of inventory, strange new guard shifts, incorrect mission intel. By the time it escalated to money being skimmed off the top of jobs, Ra’s was furious.

When he called Tim in for a meeting, something that was becoming increasingly normal these days, Tim was expecting fiery rage. Instead, there was steel-sharp cunning. It was a little like looking in a funhouse mirror.

“Detective, it appears that we have a liability in our ranks,” Ra’s began, his fingertips caressing a blade. “I assume you’ve read the data I sent to your quarters, and I’d like your thoughts.”

Tim cleared his throat. He had spent the night before reading the reports, putting together the pieces. If this was a test, it was a wicked one.

“The incidents began shortly after the attacks by the Widower. It’s a piece of misdirection intended to frame either Pru or I as a mole. However, neither of us has any reason for betrayal. Pru is, and has always been, loyal to the League. And you are well aware that I have nothing left for me in Gotham, nor would I be stupid enough to allow myself to get caught.” His voice was smooth, the prince of Gotham giving yet another speech.

“There is someone who has means, motive, and opportunity. After reading your files, it is incredibly clear. He has a family of his own that he is loyal to, and during my resurrection, he was not in the Cradle. His computer prowess would allow him to mess with the system in a way few others could. It would have been a very clean job, if he had spread it out over months or years instead of a few weeks.”

Ra’s stroked his goatee.

“You mean the Expediter.”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” Ra’s rose from the desk and clasped his hands behind his back. “Now that we’ve established the perpetrator, it is time to establish the punishment.”

Ah, so here was the test. Ra’s wanted to see how ruthless Tim could be. It was a very good thing that Tim never failed an exam.

“Kill him. It will send a message to our other agents and whoever he worked for that we are not to be trifled with.” Tim’s hands shook, but his voice was full of conviction. He had always been a good actor, but it wasn’t clear how much was truth now.

“And his daughters?”

“Bring them to the Cradle. They’re young enough that they likely won’t remember him, and we’ll be able to shape their childhood. Perhaps one will become just as intelligent as her father, and wiser as well.” The whispers hissed wordlessly in disappointment, but it was worth it. Tim refused to order the execution of a child, no matter how loud the shrieking in his skull became.

There was a beat of dead silence, then Ra’s nodded sagely.

“Wise choice, Detective. I’ll put those orders into effect at once.” He smiled, his teeth gleaming as his dagger had. “I’m looking forward to the rest of our partnership.”

Oh, how the whispers laughed.

Life in the Cradle was, well, nice. Tim was training harder than he ever had, under much more strenuous conditions, yet he felt better than he ever had. He was stronger, for one thing, but for the first time since he’d discovered Batman and Robin’s identities, he was able to rest. He didn’t need to be up until dawn chasing people across rooftops or finishing reports or writing an essay for English class because he’d been too busy on patrol. Even in a den of killers, Tim felt almost safe.

That said, he refused to let his guard down. He’d sat in on meetings with the inner circle of the Cradle for months now, trying to use his famous brain for something important. Which for his purposes, meant destroying the League as best as possible.

That was the only reason he’d stayed, or at least that’s what he told himself during nights where he twisted and turned trying to justify his choices. He’d exploit the League’s generosity to train himself and find Bruce, then take it down. Bruce would have to be proud of him after that, they all would. Maybe he’d even be Robin again.

He’d already taken out the Expediter, Ra’s’ guy in the chair. The guy confessed to the mistake of having a family and trying to work for the League at the same time. Good thing Tim didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

This is good, but it is not enough. You crave more. Do not be a coward, take it.

Now Tim was the techie for an international assassin guild, which would look moderately impressive on a college resume. Maybe it could count as an internship. Ra’s seemed like the guy who would make a relatively okay reference when Harvard came calling.

It always felt strange when he had lunch with Ra’s. It was eerily similar to the fancy lunches his mom used to drag him to, or the etiquette classes he was forced to take where he learned how to properly use a melon baller. Of course, it wasn’t like he was going to be killed for using a melon baller wrong then. Now, he knew that any wrong move could result in death.

Not his own death, of course. There was no point in Ra’s bringing back Tim, just to kill him again. Tam, however, was expendable. And that made the marrow in Tim’s bones shiver.

This particular lunch was more focused on memory lane than shop talk.

“So, Detective, tell me: what did you want to be when you grew up?”

Tim swallowed hard around his tea sandwich, his throat suddenly painfully dry.

“When I was little, I wanted to be a clown. Not a great career path in Gotham,” he began, attempting to keep his voice light. Ra’s looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue.

“Then, I wanted to be a photographer. Then, my father said I would be a CEO or I’d be disowned, so I wanted to be a CEO. I could always do photography on the side, you know?

“And then I became Robin.” He let the weight of that sentence sink over the pair.

“So? What happened after that?”

Tim resisted the urge to stare at his sandwich, instead choosing to meet Ra’s’ bright green eyes.

“Then, I stopped thinking I would grow up.” There it was, the thing everyone had been trying to pry out of him for years.

“I mean, Dick barely made it out. Jason died, came back, went crazy, and now murders people for shits and giggles. Stephanie died, but only kinda. Damian’s got a stubborn streak a mile wide. In the wild, robins live for a year, maybe two if they’re lucky. I don’t think anyone realized how similar we all are to those stupid birds.” Tears pricked at the backs of his eyes, but he didn’t need to cry. All that pain was gone now, replaced by something else. He couldn’t name it, but it kept all the sadness away.

Tim had been sad for his whole life. It was a relief when the roiling ocean inside him froze over. Numbness was an improvement.

Ra’s leaned across the table, his face barely a foot from Tim’s.

“You know, Detective, you remind me of myself. Not when I was young, of course, but when I had just begun to build my empire. All your life you have been told to quiet down and listen instead of speaking. You’re a fine leader because of it. You adapt when others are stubborn. You make plans while they push through without a second thought. You are a snake lying in wait, anticipating the right time to strike. I admire that.”

The air hung in silence as Ra’s stared directly into Tim’s soul.

“You know,” Ra’s finally said, “I think you could be truly great one day.”

Tim barely breathed as he nodded his thanks. When Ra’s finally leaned away, his first breath felt like the first gasp of air from a drowning victim.

“Before our lunch concludes, and I do so enjoy our lunches, I have a query for you.” This wasn’t out of the ordinary, Ra’s liked to give him riddles to keep him on his toes. “Some of our ninjas, though I will not say who, have gone rogue. A year or so ago, they got themselves caught up in some nasty business. My current intel places them here, in this compound, where they’re using innocents as collateral, should they not get what they request.”

“What do they want?”

“My head on a platter.” Ra’s’ smile was bloodchilling. “Oh, Detective? I feel it’s important to note: international news stations are currently reporting you and Ms. Fox as having been kidnapped by these rogues. Any advice on how to fix that?”

So this was the second test. Another chance to prove his loyalty. Let Ra’s’ enemies go free, or kill them and forfeit his old life for good in return.

“I assume extraction is not possible?”

“I’m afraid that those deserters are incredibly well trained. The special units from any nation’s army wouldn’t even make it into the compound. My ninjas could make it in, but there’s no way they could take out the traitors and save the civilians.”

Tim nodded, pretending to contemplate. He already knew his answer.

“Bomb the compound, kill everyone inside. It’s better to cut off the rot now than give it the chance to spread.”

Ra’s did not smile, but his eyes glimmered with pride.

“My thoughts exactly, Detective.”

And just like that, the death warrant was signed.

Tam was waiting in his chambers when Tim got home from a long day of training, his body littered in bruises and cuts that would sting tomorrow. Her crossed arms functioned as a hug, like she was the only thing keeping herself together.

“Tim,” she whispered when he came into view, the word like a prayer.

He glided across the room wordlessly, and she wrapped him in a tight embrace.

“I managed to get someone to sneak me a newspaper. Th-They think we’re dead, Tim,” she said into his shoulder, words slightly muffled by the fabric.

His hand came up to stroke her hair, the way he used to comfort Cass after a particularly long day. Tim didn’t respond, and instead let her tears soak into his shirt.

Good. Now you have the element of surprise.

The Council of Spiders had a worthy namesake, as they were just as quick and deadly as any arachnid. Somehow they had crept past the League’s defenses, disabling the ninjas that got in their way. True to form, the assassins’ deaths were just as silent as they were--shadows fading out as dusk began to form.

Tim was preparing for another day of strategy and mind games when Aminta burst into the room.

“The Spiders are here. They managed to sneak in--no one knows how. You’re needed,” she gasped, as if she’d ran a marathon to deliver this message. Judging from her state of disarray, maybe she had.

“Tam?”

“I’ll protect her. Go!”

Tim didn’t have time to question these motives or worry about much more than tugging on his cowl and pulling out his bo staff. He sprinted out the door and into the madness, moving in a dangerous dance with the assassins he had trained alongside for the past few months. The League was good, great even. But with the element of surprise, the Spiders were better.

He couldn’t afford to think about what could happen if they lost. Failure was not an option, not anymore.

A shadow glided toward one of the empty hallways and away from the rest of the frenzy, a sword glinting in its hand. Something that had dug its claws deep in Tim’s bones pulled him toward the figure, urging him to follow. To finish the job.

If others saw red when enraged, Tim saw green.

The figure purposefully stalked toward the large office Tim had started to spend increasing amounts of time in. The footsteps were near-silent, but in his mind they echoed almost deafeningly loud.

The shadow had to know he was there. It had to. Tim was good, but a few months of training could never rival lifetimes.

The shadow glanced over its shoulder, a feline-esque smile on its face. It said something, probably a witty yet scathing remark, but it was drowned out by the cacophony of whispers in Tim’s mind.

Do it.

Finish the job.

Show them who you are, who you can be.

Prove yourself.

You are not a bird, you are not a bat.

You are a demon, and you do not know weakness.

Not a Robin, not Red.

You are Green, Green, Green.

Become who you were always destined to be, Detective.

Tim struck out with his bo staff, right into the shadow’s skull. It faltered, just for a millisecond, and that creature that was both Tim and not lashed out, quicker than it had any right to be. A dagger in his hand, sharpened to a razor-thin edge. He did not remember doing that. That same dagger, buried into deep tan flesh.

Then he was across the room, bones aching from being thrown into the stone wall. If he was still human, still able to rein in whatever was drowning out his senses, he would know to expect pain tomorrow. But he didn’t, and all he felt was the adrenaline rushing through his veins.

And he was up again, throwing himself at the shadow with the conviction of a greek hero who knew that this fight would be his last. A fist full of rings connected with his cheek, and he could feel the skin tear beneath the metal. Maybe it would even scar.

The shadow leaned heavily to one side, though whether it was from the stab placed between its ribs or a prior injury, Tim didn’t know. It lurched toward him, and he stabbed it again, this time twisting the dagger until he felt the give of a lung. The shadow was down now, and deep down Tim knew that he never should have beaten it, never should have landed a single blow. In a logical world, Tim would have lost ten times over. But in a logical world, Tim would have been dead for the past six months.

As if time was in slow motion but he was at normal speed, Tim glided through the seconds, pushing pressure points with the tip of his blade. The shadow’s sword lay across the hall, too far out of reach for retaliation. This wasn’t torture, but it was revenge--for pain and sacrifice and nights spent clawing at his own skin, wishing it still felt like his. Payback for months of sins he never would have committed, for the green that clouded his vision. But most of all, it was a promise.

After minutes that held years of heartwrenching pain, Tim delivered the killing blow, straight under the shadow’s chin and into its brain. He was covered in blood, tacky and rust-toned, but where a past Tim--a lesser Tim--would have balked or vomited at the sight, this Tim stood, cleaned off his blade, and hefted the cooling corpse onto his shoulder.

They can try to revive it with the Lazarus Pit. You cannot allow that to happen. You cannot fail, the whispers urged, but he no longer needed them. They were him and he was them. Green in every breath and thought.

Tim escaped into the desert and finished the job, just as he had always been taught to do. Ra’s would have been proud. Bruce would have been proud.

That night, after the Spiders had been exterminated and the mess cleaned up, Tim sat at the foot of his bed, staring at his hands. The ninjas had looked at him with what could be called pride when he staggered back into the fray, his face bruised and bloody and sporting a wound on his thigh. His silky clothes brushed past the injuries every few seconds, but he couldn’t muster the energy to wince, even though he knew he should.

Tam had managed to hide during the clash, and Aminta had kept her promise. Tim liked people who followed through.

After being given the all clear, he stumbled back to his room to wash out his wounds and scrub the smell of smoke off his skin.

He had only just changed into his silky clothes when a knock came at the door. Without waiting for a response, the White Ghost was in Tim’s room, staring down at the teenager with an unnameable expression on his face.

“Timothy Drake,” the man said by way of greeting.

Tim glanced at him and blinked owlishly, but did not respond.

“Ra’s al Ghul is dead.”

This gripped Tim’s attention, and he finally made eye contact with the assassin, his brow creasing in concern.

“You’re going to revive him, right? He told me that you have more Lazarus Pits near here, he can use one of those. How did he die?” A million scenarios raced through Tim’s head, films of the death of the Demon.

“They burned him on a pyre and left him in his study. No trace of cause of death, and we can’t revive him. Any DNA has been destroyed.”

Tim stared blankly, processing. The Demon’s Head, the invincible Ra’s al Ghul, was dead. Gone forever.

“Ra’s made plans, should he die,” the White Ghost continued. “Those plans include a new leader of the League of Shadows. And that leader is you.”

Tim sputtered, “What? You can’t be serious. I’m seventeen years old. Why not you? Or Talia or Nyssa? Or Damian?”

“I do not make light of these things. He said you, so it is you. I am the White ghost. He had not contacted his daughters in years, and his grandson is too unpredictable to be suited to the position. You are the Demon’s Head, Timothy Drake.”

Tim stared back numbly. He was the Demon’s Head. The Cradle was his, these assassins were his, the world was his. He wanted power, and now it had fallen into his lap. The White Ghost kneeled before him and bowed his head. “I will serve you, Timothy Drake, in whatever way you see fit. I will be your eyes and ears and hands. I will obey you and carry out your orders. I pledge my allegiance to you, and only to you.” Satisfied with his vow, he rose to his full height.

Tim swallowed hard, then looked back up. “I accept your vow and thank you for your loyalty.” Then, “When… When will the rest know?”

“Tomorrow, at noon. I thought it might be best for everyone to rest, and for you to know first. We can discuss further details tomorrow morning, but for now, know who you are.”

Tim nodded stiffly and pushed himself to his feet, straightening his spine the way his mother had taught him to. He had been raised to become a prince of Gotham, one of the pretty boys that graced magazine covers and made headlines at charity events. Now, he was a king of assassins, an emperor of the underworld. If only she could see him now. Maybe she’d even be proud of him, for once.

“Thank you, White Ghost. We will speak again tomorrow. Should there be any issues during the night, I would like for you to inform me immediately.” He may be clad in silk pyjamas, but there was leadership in every fiber of his being. The whispers hissed in agreement.

“Fadir Nasser. My name is Fadir Nasser. Long live the Demon’s Head,” the White Ghost--Fadir--said as he left the room, the last remark stinging with a hint of a joke.

The door locked shut behind him, and Tim flopped backward onto the bed, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips. His gaze fell to the closet, where his suit was stuffed in the corner, smelling of smoke and burning flesh and the irony tang of blood. The whispers quickly supplied a description of the events, but Tim could picture them clear as day--carrying Ra’s to the desert, building and lighting a pyre, then bringing the body back and placing it in Ra’s’ study for someone to find. It was incredibly simple, almost too simple for no one to have done before. But Tim was Green, Greener than anyone had ever been before. And no one would ever know.

He’d need to invest in a new suit befitting his new role, maybe bring back some green accents. He no longer needed to mourn Conner. He no longer needed to mourn at all. He was the Demon’s Head, and he would never die.

The whispers laughed cruelly, like the audience of a poorly-written tragedy.

The transition of power wasn’t smooth, but it was quick. Assassins weren’t particularly known for their loyalty, and Fadir made it clear that any dissenters wouldn’t even make it to the door. They only had to clean blood off the stone floors once before that lesson sunk in.

As far as coups go, it was pretty successful. The whispers had quieted, just a little. Tim could sometimes make it hours without the hissing in the back of his mind, reminding him that he couldn’t rest. With power comes paranoia, and Tim was intimately familiar with both.

Now to rid himself of liabilities.

It had been a particularly lucid day, and Tim’s near-silent footsteps were the only hint of noise in the hallway. Tam had been given the option to move her room closer to his, but had refused. He didn’t blame her, it was hard being the civilian favorite of the assassin king. Tim knew this well.

Tim knocked on the wooden door, two quick raps. Somewhere deep in his memory, he wondered if this would have been his life, had everything been different; maybe he’d be knocking on Tam’s door before picking her up for a date. Instead, he straightened his shoulders, put on the shy smile Tam thought was his true one, and waited for her. Shuffling on the other side of the door, then a creak as it swung open. Tim glided in, and Tam looked at him with those big brown eyes, her expression tainted with a touch of fear. He didn’t remember her ever being afraid of him before.

“Do you want to go home?” Tim asked. No preamble, just his soft question in the quiet room.

Tam didn’t even think about it first.

“Yes.”

Tim nodded, then drew out a one-way ticket to Archie Goodwin International Airport, leaving tomorrow night. He held it out to her, that soft smile on his face and a promise in his eyes.

Tam tentatively took it, but kept looking at him. “Are you serious?”

“You’re not a prisoner. I’m sorry I couldn’t let you leave earlier, I just wanted to make sure the League was stable first. My intention was always to get you home.”

“Thank you, Tim.”

Tim slipped his hands in his pockets. “You’re my friend. I just want you to be happy.”

Tam pulled him into a hug, and for a second it felt so nice it almost hurt. Then it was over, and he could be comfortably numb again.

“Aminta will be coming with you, just to make sure you get home safe. Once you’re with your family, you won’t have to see any of my… agents ever again.”

Tam nodded, her face screwed up in an effort to keep from crying. He turned to leave and give her privacy, then paused.

“Tam? Thank you. For being my friend.”

Then the king of shadows disappeared into the night, yet again.

Tim frowned at the wall, a small comms unit tucked in his ear. He hadn’t moved from this room in a day, not since Tam and Aminta left.

“Okay, Aminta, I need you to keep close. You said that it’s just Batman and Robin? No Batgirl?”

“Just Batman and Robin. They haven’t spotted me yet. Robin’s really fallen behind since leaving us.”

Tim growled under his breath and carded a hand through his hair. It was getting long again. Who did Ra’s go to for haircuts? Did he just do it himself?

Focus.

The facts were these: Tam had been contacted by Batman and Robin immediately after Lucius Fox gave word that she was home safe. Tim had been expecting this, and Aminta was sent to follow Tam and ensure that the interaction went favorably. Which is to say that no one killed Tam because of what she knew. Aminta was currently hidden on the same rooftop as Gotham’s favorite heroes, listening in on their rendez-vous.

“What’s happening? Report.”

“She’s telling them--why don’t I just play their conversation? I have the capability.”

“Do it.”

A crackling came over Tim’s comm unit for a few brief seconds before it shifted to three familiar voices.

“It’s okay, Tam. Just tell us everything. From the beginning.” That was Dick. He sounded the exact same way he had when Tim left, tired and a little pained. Serves him right. “Yeah, okay,” there was Tam’s voice, slightly higher pitched than normal. “So my dad sent me to find out where Tim Drake was. And I managed to track him down to Iraq. So I’m in my hotel room one night, and I wake up to someone putting a cloth on my nose. Then everything went black, and the next thing I knew I was in this cold stone room. Then this albino guy tells me to stand up and we walk into this big hallway and there’s Tim. And he’s all sweaty and looks super freaked out. Then they brought us to these bedrooms and told us that we’d be staying a while.”

“Why would they take you?” A third voice asked, the snobby tone immediately registering as Damian. The brat.

“I’m not sure. Maybe my search for Tim sent up some flags? No one ever told me.” Her voice cracked a little, and maybe once upon a time, Tim would have felt sorry for her. Not anymore.

“It’s okay, Tam. After you moved into the Cradle, what happened?”

“Tim spent a lot of time training or with Ra’s. He couldn’t tell me much, but apparently Ra’s took a liking to him. One of the inner circle guys turned out to be a traitor, so Tim took his job. I didn’t see him a lot.”

“Who was the traitor?” Damian again, with a hint of anger in his voice. Or was that fear?

“Some computer guy. The Executioner or something.”

“The Expeditor?” It was definitely fear in Damian’s voice. He sounded like a child when he was scared.

“Yeah, him. I just hung around for the most part. They had books. They gave me makeup and nail polish when I asked for it. I was bored, but never threatened.” Tim snorted. Tam knew more than anyone that just because she didn’t have a knife to her neck didn’t mean she wasn’t in danger every moment of the day.

Dick cleared his throat, then spoke again, “Why did Ra’s let you leave?”

Tam went quiet, just for a second.

“Ra’s al Ghul is dead.”

A beat of silence. Tim would have paid millions to watch them right now.

“How?” Damian, his voice filled with fear, and maybe a little pain.

“I-I don’t know. There was an attack by the Council of Spiders. Tim had them lock me in my room with a guard. Some of the girls I talked to said that Ra’s was burned afterward so they couldn’t revive him. No one knew until the day after.” Tam’s voice was shaking now.

“Then where’s Tim?” Dick asked, finally caring about his younger brother after all this time. What a joke.

Tam stuttered a few times, but eventually got the words out. “Tim… Tim’s the new leader. Ra’s named him his heir before he died.”

A hiss sounded over the comms. That had to be Damian.

“Thank you, Tam. I appreciate you answering our questions. You know where to find us if you remember anything else.”

Some shuffling obscured any new words, then Aminta’s voice appeared. “They’re leaving, do you want me to follow them?”

“Yes,” Tim responded, massaging his temples. The whispers were getting louder now, to a point where it was impossible to understand any one message. It was hard when they got like this, harder than when they teamed up. At least then he didn’t feel like a helpless teacher in a rowdy classroom.

Maybe a minute ticked by before Aminta was back. “They just went a few rooftops away. Robin’s clutching Batman’s cape and crying, but it’s like angry crying. He’s mumbling something, but I can’t understand it. Batman’s rubbing his back, but he looks miserable too. Less angry, more sad.”

“That’ll be all, Aminta, thank you. You can return home tomorrow,” Tim sighed. “Our dear friend Tam has done us a favor, so we should be ready for the consequences.”

“What favor? Telling them everything?”

“Not everything. We still have an ace up our sleeve.”

“What advantage could we possibly have, other than knowing that they know?”

“Tam didn’t tell them about my little swim.”

Somewhere, there was a universe where Timothy Drake-Wayne woke up on the morning of his 18th birthday and put on a suit, ready for a day of meetings at whatever company he was interning for before he started college. Maybe he had a party with his family or a date that night. This is what Tim thought about as he busied himself getting ready. He had never been one for birthdays. Jack and Janet were rarely home, and even when they were in Gotham, they had better things to do than celebrate a child. He didn’t blame them. Before he came to the Cradle, he wasn’t worth celebrating.

The ornate mirror in his bathroom showcased his attire: a loose-fitting white shirt, tailored brown silk pants, and a dark green cape that almost resembled snakeskin. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, but he left them. They made the blue stand out. Here was the heir Ra’s had craved so badly. The old Tim would have made a joke about how he looked like a dark prince from a young adult novel, but not anymore. He was the Demon’s Head now. No, not just its head. He was its hands and heart as well. Tim Drake was a demon through and through.

His guests had landed in Iraq the day before, and he had it on good authority that he could expect them that evening.

Tim drifted around the room, preparing for the meeting as one would prepare for battle. His fingertips lingered on the rings he had inherited from his predecessor, and with a deliberate movement he chose the signet ring Ra’s used to wear. He slipped it on and smiled to himself, a snake poised to strike.

Carefully, he patted his wrists, hips, and ankles to ensure his knives were still there. He had always favored batarangs, but he was no longer a bat or a bird. He had left them behind, just as they had left him.

The White Ghost was waiting at his door, ready to escort him to his study. As they walked, Tim absentmindedly ran his thumb over his knuckles. The whispers hissed inaudibly in his ear, wailing for attention.

“Has the room been secured?” He asked, face neutral.

“Yes. I have placed ninjas along the walls and at every access point. Any familiar with the al Ghul child have been sent on missions abroad, though they remain loyal to you.”

“They leave here alive. If they attempt to attack, I want them subdued but not killed.”

“That’s not wise. It will be seen as a show of weakne-”

“Do you think I am weak?” Tim’s voice was as ice cold as he felt.

“No, of course not,” Fadir backpedaled. “But how can you justify it?”

“By the time I’m done, there will be no need to kill them. This is just a courtesy call, a reminder that my prior allegiances are no longer viable.”

Tim swept into the study, his back straight and his jaw square just the way he had always been taught. From birth, he had been raised to be a prince of Gotham, one of the many pretty boys in suits who graced Forbes covers before they could legally drink. He had been bred for greatness, and he achieved it in his own way. Here, no one would ever best him. He was finally free.

Soon you will have everything. All you have to do is make one order.

Tim’s hands shook slightly, but he tightened his grip on his fountain pen as he sat down. The day was full of reports, requests for missions, and invoices. He had been doing most of this paperwork anyway when he was just a lackey, so it wasn’t an inconvenience. It was methodical in its ruthlessness. $750k for a political assassination in France, 40% taken for the League, the rest wired to a private bank account in the Cayman Islands. $25k to kill a cheating spouse in South Africa, the same 40%, and this time headed for a Swiss bank account. A request for a league member to “take care of” an abuser, which Tim set aside. An invoice for new training blades, as the older ones had been dulled. A new Lazarus Pit that was discovered in Iceland.

The sun began to sink outside of his window, and Tim collected himself, drawing the last shards of who he used to be away from the surface. That Tim was dead and gone, and in his place was someone who was finally worthy. If the old Tim was a bleeding heart, this Tim was the knife that stabbed it.

Fadir knocked on the large oak door to signal that their guests had arrived. Tim pushed himself out from behind the desk, pulled back his shoulders, and stalked out of the room, refusing to look back. It wasn’t that he couldn’t show any weakness--it was that he wasn’t weak at all. Not anymore.

Tim walked down the now-familiar hallways, the whispers humming in happiness as others averted their eyes respectfully as he passed by. Aminta stood at the left hand of the large stone throne in the formal hall, and dipped her head in greeting when he approached. Tim took his place on the throne, relaxing into the smooth stone. Fadir took the right-hand side, his hand on his sword’s pommel at all times.

Ninjas lined the walls, all ready for battle at a moment’s notice. Most had been training for decades, long before Tim was even a thought. And now they served him. One lone ninja entered the room, first bowing to Tim and then scurrying up to the throne.

“They have arrived, sir.”

Tim grinned darkly.

“Bring them in.”

Dick looked older than he had eight months ago. His cowl was pulled up to hide his face, but Tim could see it in the set of his jaw. For a man in his late twenties, Dick looked positively weary.

Serves him right.

Damian was stiff, both an heir and a stranger in a child’s body. He glanced at the ninjas placed around the edge of the room, as if searching for a familiar face. He wouldn’t find one.

Tim did not smile when the man he had once considered his brother approached.

“Hello Dick. Damian.” His voice was colder than he ever thought it could be. “You can remove your masks, everyone here knows who you are.” Or they did now.

Dick hesitated for a fraction of a second, then pulled off the cowl. Damian followed suit with a grumble, peeling off his domino.

Satisfied, Tim smoothed a neutral expression onto his face.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” He asked, the words pleasant but the tone as sharp as a blade.

“Is this where you’ve been all this time?” Dick burst out without preamble. It was a shame that he couldn’t exchange pleasantries, even after all of Alfred’s lessons.

“Not exactly. I was in Paris for a bit, caught up with some old friends.” An old friend, one who probably hadn’t even noticed he was gone. None of them had.

You are powerful because you are alone. Others would betray you. You can trust no one. The whispers chimed in, though they were merely repeating what he already knew to be true.

Damian hissed his displeasure, which earned him an evil look from Dick. Look, he’d already been replaced.

“Tim,” Dick began in a gentle voice, the one he used for scared kids. “Come home. We can figure this out. We’ll get you help, maybe even try that therapist I told you about. Or we can shop around, it doesn’t matter. I miss you. I miss my little brother.”

How pathetic.

“Oh, I believe you misunderstood. This is a business meeting, not an intervention,” Tim hummed, examining his fingernails. The cold steel of the knives tucked in his sleeves was a delicious reminder of who he was, who he had always been destined to become.

“In that case, I believe some clarification is in order. Following the death of Ra’s al Ghul, I became the head of the League of Shadows, a position I am very proud of. I will not be returning to Gotham, unless it is for League business, and I will certainly never fight at your side again.

“In truth, Dick, I have not thought about you or your brat once since coming to stay at the League. I understand that our previous relationship may have led you to believe that I would be a naive fool forever, but that is not the case. I have found meaning now more than you could ever dream of achieving.

“Here is my proposition: I will cease training of any assassins younger than age sixteen immediately. I am also currently updating how the League accepts jobs to minimize the amount of innocent casualties. I will waive all rights to Wayne Enterprises, though anything Bruce willed to me will remain mine. In exchange, you leave me and my assassins alone. You will not contact me unless seeking my services. You can keep your Robin, but he lost his birthright a year ago. These are my conditions, and they are non-negotiable.”

The chatty Dick Grayson was speechless. Instead, it was Damian who spoke.

“You stole my birthright.” For a child, he sounded downright murderous.

Tim smiled. “And you stole mine. I believe that makes us even.”

The child nodded, then drew his sword. Along the walls, ninjas drew theirs as well.

“Damian, no!” Dick hissed, glaring at his brother-ward. “Tim, you can’t be serious. We’re family. This is insane!”

Tim’s expression did not display the glee that bubbled in his chest.

“We were family. But you know what they say, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” He dismissed Dick’s other accusations with a wave of his hand. “I have given you my terms. You have forty-eight hours to make your decision. Until then, I believe you have overstayed your welcome. You should leave.”

Green pulled at the corners of his vision as the whispers shrieked, begging him to go ahead and kill them. He couldn’t, of course, that would just invite more prying eyes to the League. But he could think about it, and that was enough.

Dick and Damian were almost at the doors when Dick stopped and turned to face Tim, his posture teenagerishly defiant.

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he spat, as if Dick Grayson had ever truly known Timothy Drake.

Instead, Tim smiled. “I’m the Demon. And you should leave before I make you see Hell.”

A second later, they were gone. Watching them go felt like getting an injection--the pinch lasted for a second, but afterward there was no pain at all.

Demon Demon Demon Demon Demon Demon Demon, the whispers howled as Tim’s blood sang, welcome to your kingdom come.

His hands had always been cold. Ariana used to comment on it all the time--how his touch was borderline freezing. At the time, it had been a running joke: Tim Drake, the boy made of snow, with eyes made of ice and snow-pale skin. It seemed now that even in the heat of the desert, his heart had frozen too.

Nighttime was comfortable in the desert, at least for someone accustomed to Gotham’s climate. Still, the breeze that danced across Tim’s skin left goosebumps in its wake. He couldn’t remember when he’d come out here, let alone what for. He barely even noticed how he gripped the banister of the balcony until his knuckles went stark white.

A little prickle of emotion prodded at his subconscious, but he couldn’t identify it even if he wanted to. There was no room for feelings anymore, if there had ever been. If anything, feelings had gotten him into more messes than out of them.

He had become a vigilante because he felt that Batman needed a Robin. He worshiped the ground Bruce walked on because he felt like Bruce saw him as a son. He broke the rules for Stephanie because he felt as if she could love him. He wanted to be with Conner because he felt that someone finally saw him for who he was. He rejected power time and time again because he felt that it was the right thing to do.

But feelings meant nothing. All that truly mattered was knowledge and wanting. And Tim knew more than ever. And he wanted it all.

Once, he had considered them his family. They had loved him, maybe, but they had never known him. He used to believe in a future spent fighting by their side, but he knew that was a child’s dream now--the same child who believed that he wouldn’t live to see twenty-one. Tim had no such concerns now.

He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that the League was his new family, nor did he need one. But they would not underestimate him or take him for granted. Here, he had respect and power, and that was enough.

The lights of the nearest city glimmered far on the horizon, promising happiness and gaiety somewhere in the night. He smiled, a secret only for him.

One day, you will rule it all, the whispers promised. One day, you will be king. And you will destroy any who stand in your way.

Long live the Demon.

[quillsareswords]

Coping

Damian Wayne

(angst)

Vampire Reader, because I have a problem.

Coven: for all purporses of this fic, a Vampire coven is an organized underground society of Vampires. Often take pleasure/amuse themselves by partaking in violent and cruel acts toward Humans.

WARNING: USE OF UNIDENTIFIED DRUG AS A COPING MECHANISM (ESCAPE).

Prompt List // Masterlist (in bio)

When Bruce had told you what happened, it'd knocked the breath clean out of you.

When you'd tore off on your bike, helmet strapped on, eyes glowing a dangerous shade of red behind a dark visor, no one had moved to stop you.

When you cut all communication, they started to worry.

When the waterfall parted and the doors drew open, everyone had sucked in a breath.

You wouldn't look at them. You couldn't. Your eyes remained on the cement floor before you. Your tongue locked behind fanged teeth.

You could feel their stares. Bruce, Dick, Alfred, Barbara, Tim. All of them staring at you with horror, disappointment, and fear in their eyes. Dick's eyes were glistening with tears—you could see the shine out of your peripherals.

Your grip on the rear gasket of your helmet tightened, nails digging into the plastic. Not that it particularly mattered, anyway. The bloody crack down one side, peppered dents, and shattered visor put it beyond repair.

Heavy footsteps echoing angrily through the otherwise silent cave, you marched right through the small cluster they'd formed. You still couldn't bear to see their faces.

Bruce called out to you and stormed toward the elevator. At the wide doorway to the Medbay, Alfred waited dutifully as you passed. He would have treated the many cuts and bruises newly littering your skin, or stitched the holes in your jeans, your jacket, or your shirt, had you stopped. But you didn't.

Again, Bruce called you. He called you by a moniker you no longer deserved. This time, you could hear his boot steps gaining on your own.

Then, his hand his on your shoulder, and you're stopping abruptly to spin on your heel. You smacked his hand away, fury burning red-hot in your eyes. "Don't fucking touch me," you snarl.

His mouth hangs open for a moment. He recovers quickly. "Where is he?" He sounds breathless, and he looks tired. Terrified.

You all but leap away from his touch as he reaches to grasp your forearm. The rest of his family gather behind him, all anxious eyes and shivery hearts. You look away. Hurl your helmet across the cave with as much rage as you can pack into the motion. It shatters like glass and leaves an indentation where it hits the wall. "Gone."

Bruce let's out a breath that shakes as hard as your hands. "Gone?"

Dick braves a few steps forward. "What do you mean, gone?"

You bear your fangs and shout your answer, "Dead, you idiot!" It's angry and raw and pained. The word reverberates off the rock walls, echoing back in your ears like piercing needles.

You can't stand the look on Bruce's face, or the pain in Dick's eyes. You turn away, crossing the short distance to the elevator back up to the Manor. You punch in your code and slide in before the doors are comple open.

You should have known better. You should have been there. You should have seen this coming.

You'd warned him about that damned building at least a hundred times. You'd warned all of them. As unassuming as those dirty brown and red bricks looked, the horrors they held were beyond their pay grade.

You knew, though. You'd seen it.

It was a nest, you explained. An old, multipurpose building bought by a suspicious little group decades ago. Likely by the founder, but you weren't sure. A Coven, you'd said. Nothing to play around with.

You'd seen the spark in his eyes. A challenge. You did your best to stomp it out as quickly as you could, and you succeed. You made him promise that he'd stay away from it. And he never broke a promise to you, as cheesy as it seemed.

You had been keeping tabs on them since you'd moved to Gotham, a few years back. It was after they'd approached you, knowing you had a few strings to pull inside the circle of local vigilantes. You'd never liked Covens, but you were fairly new in town and decided that it was worth seeing how others like you acted around one another here. When you'd seen the horrors within those brick walls, you'd turned down the offer for a place among their ranks on the spot.

You should've known they'd turn their eyes on your partner. You just hadnt thought they'd be so bold.

They knew you, after all. They knew what you were capable of. That's why they invited you. They knew your power.

Or at least, now they did. With a building of bodies and blood and flames licking at those filthy bricks, you were sure they knew.

The steel doors pulled apart, a grandfather clock sliding to the side. You moved out and down the hall as quickly as you could with a new limp.

Hours later, you're locking a deadbolt to a dingy door in a dark apartment.

The first thing you did was shut off the heating. You didn't mind the cold—you hadnt since you were Turned—but Damian did. The warmth only reminded you of him.

Next, you unlaced and kicked off your boots, then tossed your jacket toward the kitchen counter on your way through the doorframe.

Then, you find yourself staring blankly into the freezer.

A to-go box, a tub of ice cream, a shelf of tofu, six ice packs, and a bottle of rum.

All of it his.

You slam the heavy door and growl. You growl, because if you don't, you'd whimper.

Finally, you're relacing your boots and marching back out to the city in a different leather jacket.

• • •

Even from across the street, the strong scent of alcohol burns your nose. Red eyes hide behind dark glasses, picking carefully through a steady stream if exiting patrons.

In such a bad part of Gotham, you aren't questioned about such dark glasses so late at night, nor your lonesome leaned against a brick wall in a dim alley.

Finally, your eyes find one man, stumbling about like a newborn fawn, dopey grin, and sloppy words spoken to the breeze.

You push off the wall and cross the slow traffic on the street.

For nearly three blocks, you tail him. Waiting for a buddy to catch up, a phone to ring. Your suspicions are confirmed when no such thing happens.

At last, he all but collapses against the cement wall of a building, obviously fighting for consciousness.

You move in.

As he begins to fall to the ground, you catch him by the collar of his shirt and swiftly haul him into the nearest alley. You slump him behind a dumpster and crouch next to him.

"Sorry bud," you grumble, ripping the collars of his coat and shirt from the base of his neck, "but I could really use a pick-me-up."

Teeth sink into flesh with a sickening noise. Blood draws immediately, spilling out just a little faster than you can drink it. You gulp it down with a desperation you haven't felt in years.

Eventually, the intoxication hits you. Your mind grows fuzzy at the edges, and thoughts become sluggish and tired.

When you've had your fill, you brace yourself against the wall for stability to stand.

You breathe deeply, taking in all the wild, horrid smells of this wretched city.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Your head turns slowly, to peer over the arm still braces against the wall. You arch an eyebrow, glasses slid lazily down your nose. Tim Grayson. No, no. That's not right. Tim. Tim Bake. Drake. Tim Drake. You snort. "What does it look like, Red?"

You can imagine the horror in his eyes as he stares at you from the other end of the corridor. His quiet for a long few seconds. "I thought you laid off the, uh . . . live feeding."

You pushed off the wall, found your balance with little difficulty, and whipped the excess blood from your mouth with the sleeve of your jacket. "Yeah. I did." You stalked closer, hands shoved deep into your pockets. "About the same time I took up the whole hero gig." You waved your hand around in a general sense, before returning it to your pocket. "For obvious reasons."

You stopped a few feet in front of him.

His grip on that bo staff loosened. The sneer of disgust at his mouth softened. You wonder if he can see it in your face.

You're both very quiet for a very long time.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. "You know," Tim started, voice timid and soft, "he really loves you." He'll be back. For you, if nothing else."

You rolled your shoulders. Shifted your gaze. That rock is awfully neat.

"Did you . . ." Your eyes meet his, briefly, before he continues. "Did you see it happen?"

And just like that, whatever buzz you've built up off drunk man's blood subsides. You go rigid again, and your hands are shaking again.

He deserves to know.

"Yeah," you whisper, voice curling like smoke in the air, but it's not in the same way Tim's breath does. "I was so close I could have touched him."

He doesn't reply.

You shrug off the chill that runs down your spine. Your eyes glow a little brighter. "Shouldn't you be patrolling?"

Tim glances back down the alley, the way he'd come. "I was. Then I heard there was some shady person hanging around a bar down the street . . . I'm guessing that was you?"

You nod.

"Right." His eyes drift back to the man slouched beside the garbage. "Is he, uh–"

"No." Liar.

He nods stiffly.

You blow a hard breath through your nose. "I'd better be on my way."

"Uh, hold on," he grabs your arm before you turn away completely, but the look you throw him has him shuffling a step or two back. "Bruce wanted me to tell you, if I saw you, that he wants to talk to you."

You roll your shoulders higher, turning back down your side of the brick passage. "Tell him to shove it," you growled.

"You aren't the only one who lost him, you know," he says suddenly.

You try hard, you really do. But in the end, you've already got him pinned to the wall. When you speak, it's dangerously low and he can't tear his eyes from yours, gleaming threats under moonlight. "You weren't there. You didn't have the chance to stop it." Your teeth were bared, pink-stained fangs on full display and you snarled. "It wasn't your fault."

Forcefully, you released him. Hands shoved back in your pockets, a silent promise to your lover lingering in the back of your mind, you stalk off again, vanishing around the corner and into the shadows.

Tim watches you go.

• • •

Your head is absolutely spinning. You feel dizzy, despite laying perfectly still on your beat up sofa. Colors and shapes swirl behind your eyelids, entertaining you easily in the silence. Your mind is numb, vague thoughts blurring around the edges.

God you love this. You'd never done drugs like this before, partly because you were young and partly because it wasn't who you were. But you needed something stronger than second-hand drinking. You couldn't keep seeing his face. You couldn't keep hearing his voice.

So here you were, half asleep on your empty, dark apartment, exactly a week after that night. You didn't know that, though. You were blissfully unaware of the date, the time, and the dimming sunlight creeping beneath and above thick, drawn curtains.

Your jacket is still half on from the night before, boots still loosely laced on your feet, one flat on the floor and the other tossed over the arm rest opposite your head.

Your lips are parted in a dopey smile, fangs only barely visible through the crack.

You jolt at the knocking.

Red eyes snap open, lips clamp shut. Colors and shapes just barely line you vision and you silently search for the source of the noise.

Your eyes hit the door, finally, and you see the shadow shifting in the crack of yellow light beneath the door.

Standing from the couch is a task of it's own, as you have to take a good minute to find your balance. Whoever it is knocks again. Boots barely leaving the floor as you cheat steps, you make your way to the door and flip the deadbolt, before you haul the door open.

Dick stands before you. His clothes are rumbled, and he looks as though he'd rather be absolutely anywhere else.

You have to squint against the buttery hallway light, using a flat hand to shield your eyes from what seems to you like a bare bulb. "What?"

He looks a little startled. You aren't sure why.

(In reality, he hadn't anticipated your eyes to be do dark around the edges with days old makeup, or your complection to look so sickly.)

Your jacket has fallen down on one side, now bunched around your elbow. You make no move to fix it, obviously leaning against the door for support.

He stammers before he answers. "Are you okay?"

You know there's a reason he's asking you. There's something big that happened, but you aren't sure what it is. Was it recent? What's it about? "Yeah?"

He blinks at you dumbly once, twice. "Really?" He runs a hand through uncombed hair. "Nobody's heard from you since the, uh . . . since last week. I thought I'd check on you." He doesn't meet your eyes.

You rest your head against the door, too. "Uh, thanks, I guess." Your eyebrows slump together.

Now his gaze flickers to yours. "Are you sure you're okay? You seem a little . . . out of it."

You nod, wood scratching your scalp. "No no, yeah, I'm totally good. Little high, is all." You shrug, as if you've said nothing out of the ordinary.

His eyes blow wide. "You–You're–? High?"

"Mhmm."

Again, he stares. "Are you serious?"

"Well," you make a face, "yeah. What do you do when you wanna, uh . . . I don't know. I had a reason, but I kind of forgot it." Your head raises from the door and you snap your fingers. "That's it! I wanted to forget something."

A blank stare hits you. His jaw is left slack by astonishment. Shock? You aren't sure.

"Anyway," you scratch the back of your head, "what did you come here for?"

This seems to rouse him from his daze, but the expression that replaces it pulls at your heart. He seems disappointed, maybe even a little sorrowed. "I, um. I wanted to check on you after what happened to Damian."

There it is.

Your mood sours immediately, stills and snipets if memories flashing through your mind like a messy animation. Your eyes hit the floor as his screams rip through your subconscious. Eyelids squeeze shut.

Your thoughts are still muddied. It feels like trying to pull something free of tar.

"(Y/N)?"

"You should leave."

"But–"

"You should leave," you repeat, eyes cracking open just enough to see his. You ignore the blurriness and the knot in your throat. "Now."

He nods silently. He understands. "I'll come back in a few days," he warns. You nod.

Your deadbolt is back in place before he's to the elevator.

Peering around the apartment, at the dark shadows lining every wall and outlining every piece if furniture, the mixed drink on the coffee table, the empty vile beside it; your press your back against the door.

Your gaze turns to the bedroom door, still closed from the night you left. You haven't had the strength to even near it.

A dim, deep red light casts odd shadows over his face, especially from where you lay beside him. His eyes look odd, too. You aren't sure if you like the way his features appear, bathed in red.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks you, eyes meeting yours in the semi-dark.

You continue to trace careful patterns into the back of his hand the nail of your middle finger, cradling it in your other palm. "Nothing worth talking about," you assure quietly. "Just you."

"Are you insinuating that I'm not worth your words?" He cracks a grin, though it's lopsided and tired. He's been out all night. The sun is coming up, and yet he's only just going to bed.

You opted to call it an early night. The shine in his eyes had you sure he needed the company.

You'd always been good and weeding out the good night's from the bad. Maybe it was just because you'd experienced them yourself, or maybe you were just more observant than you should be.

You chuckle softly. "Well obviously. Why do you think our schedules contrast do much?"

He smiles at you directly. He's silent for a moment. It's long enough that your gaze moves away from your hands and his to his eyes, to see if he's fallen asleep. You find his eyes staring deeply into yours.

"I love you so much," he states, voice all velvet and honey, every syllable dripping adoration.

You scrunch your nose. "And I love you more than the stars and the moon, but what's got you saying it now?"

You only ask because he isn't typically so forward about it. You've always had to look for it, seek it out between lines of poetry or small favors or little gifts. His love is always coded and complicated, and it's part of why you love him so dearly.

He doesn't answer you. Instead his eyes refocus on your hands. He focuses on the shapes you're drawing. He listens closely to your breathing.

He's never going to tell you that he came so close to death only two hours before hand. He'd felt the icy grip on his heart, threatening silently to freeze it completely.

You enjoy the quiet moments before you both nod off.

You tear your eyes from the door. Focus on the floor. Focus on breathing. Focus on the sound of blaring horns and roaring engines outside. Focus on anything but the laughing silence.

And laugh it does. It cackles at you, howling with a malicious roar, hell-bent on pounding the understanding into you: you're all alone now.

No one is coming for you now. No one is going to pick up the phone now. No one is going to be sliding into your bed at noon. No one is going to surprise you with hand crafted chocolates you can actually enjoy. No one is coming home.

You squeeze your eyes shut again. You can't go in there. You've been sleeping on the couch for the past week, blankets thrown over every curtain hanger to keep out the sunlight. You've done it to the entire apartment. The second bedroom, the bathrooms, the living room, the attached kitchen. You'd come to associate the sunlight with him.

From sunkissed skin to stories of life before cloudy Gotham, your mind thought sunlight and Damian was never far behind.

You can't take it.

You cross the room in a blur, picking up the glass from the table and hurling it at the opposing wall.

It shatters on impact, splattering dark red liquid down the wall and splintering glass all over the wooden floor.

• • •

Your posture slouches as you trek down a wet sidewalk. You don't know exactly where you are, which isn't the best idea, but then again, you haven't been having many of those lately. You aren't even paying attention to anything around you. Music playing through your headphones, eyes trained straight ahead.

The people around you don't spare you much attention. Some darkly dressed seventeen year old shuffling around in a hoodie is the least of anyone's concerns, this time of night. You know this. You use this.

At the sound of a particularly sharp car horn, your eyes jolt sideways, mostly out of instinct. Just some bastard too impatient to wait for the light to change.

You take the moment of broken concentration to look around some. You're a few blocks from that building, you realize.

You turn immediately. Start walking the other way, keeping your distance from the buildings and the main stream if people by walking right next to the road. Sure, you're gonna have to dodge a few street signs but–

"Josephine!"

Your eyes jump again at the shriek. Your body goes rigid, your mind recognizing the panic in the man's voice instantly after patrolling for too many years.

You haven't been out properly since that night, and you aren't sure if you ever want to out again. But those instincts never seem to leave. There's no off day once you've gotten into the swing of things.

You see it before you realize it. Across the street, a little girl, about seven or eight, with dark hair and brown skin, chasing after a robotic dog as it turns and rolls right into the road.

Before your even have the chance to regard the situation, you're charging into traffic. You hoodslide a towncar as the horn blares, and then you're leaping out if the way of a Ford. You race through the temporarily empty lane, and then you're bringing down and scooping the little girl and her toy up and ducking off the road completely.

You set her down in front of the stricken looking man, who proceeds to thank you profusely. You forge a tight lipped smile and tell him it's not a problem, that you're just happy to have been fast enough.

And once again, you're on your way.

By the time you make it home, the sun is starting to think about rising, and your playlist has cycled through twice. You unlock your door with a dry throat, a blank white plastic bag in the crook of one arm.

The room is dark when the door opens, but you smell a person the second the hallway light spills in.

You don't tense. You recognize the remaints of expensive calogne before you even get in the door. "Morning, Bruce." You lock the door behind yourself and flick on the kitchen light.

He still stands in the shadowiest part if the large room, behind the armchair by the window. "We haven't heard from you in two weeks."

"Dick came by," you stated. You kept your back to him, pretending to be too busy putting away two pints of A Positive.

You can't look at him.

You can't look at his face, especially. It's too similar.

And besides that, you already know why he's here. His son is dead, and you are the only one who knows what happened.

"That was six days ago." You hear the give in his tone. He doesn't want to talk about this any more than you do, but he has to know. He moves toward you. "You were supposed to come back. Tim said he told you."

"He did," you assure, getting a glass down from the cabinet by the refrigerator, mostly empty plastic sack in your other hand.

You hear anger seeping into his voice. "Do why didn't you?"

Hesitance. The glass is on the counter, but you aren't pouring yet. Your eyes are on the splash back in front of you.

"(H/N)–"

"Don't call me that," you growl. His steps stop. "Don't call me that."

"(Y/N)," he corrects, "I have to know what happened to my boy."

Your shoulders slump. You have to flatten your hands on the countertop to ground yourself. The bag of red liquid lays on the counter beside the glass, waiting to be poured. You stay that way for a good minute, weighting your words carefully. You reach back into the fridge, but your hand hesitates over the bottle.

Fuck it.

You grab it by the neck and twist off the cap. You half off your glass, and leave the bottle open on your counter. You open the bag and add it's contents to the glass, emptying the bag and filling the cup.

You aren't even sure you'll get a buzz off of this, but you're more than willing to try.

Bruce watches you carefully from the end if the counter on the other side.

"Drink?" you offer, holding out the bottle of rum where he can see it. It almost feels wrong, to offer up something of his so freely.

He pauses before he answers. "No."

You bob your head. Turn around. Lean against the counter. You swirl the concoction idly. You still don't look at him. You keep your gaze on the painting in the living room, through the wide gap in the wall between the counters and the cabinets.

You remember when he was still painting it.

"I told you all not to go around that place," you begin. Your voice is gravely and sharp, a hardness he hasn't heard from you in a long while guarding your words. "This is exactly why."

"What is it?"

You take a long drink. You revel in the burn it leaves. Your eyes glazed over. "A Coven nest. They gather there, live there, thrive there. It's like a church for a particular group." He crosses his arms and leans against the wall. "They do things there I hope you never see.

"You see, a lot of vampires like to believe they're above humans. That they're inferior. Some Covens use them like animals. Bull fights, gory plays and musicals. You've seen Interview With a Vampire, yeah?"

He nods.

"Kinda like that. Sometimes worse, sometimes not as bad. I've been watching that particular Coven since I got to Gotham. They approached me shortly after I started the gig, wanting to know if I'd join them. I turned them down, obviously." Another long drink.

"I told Damian and the rest of you to stay away from that block. It's crawling with Vampires like that. I didn't want to see any of you getting snatched or worse. I should have wiped them out then and there, looking back. But I didn't. Just watched. Kept tabs.

"Then you called me. Told me he was gone without a trace, and you said he'd been down at that old car rental place. I knew the area. That's why I didn't wait for details.

"When I got there, they already had him tied and ready for something. I still don't know what they were planning on doing with him. I didn't ask questions, because I didn't have time. They jumped me the second I got inside. I had most of them dead or dazed by the time I got to the Big Kahuna."

When you didn't continue, Bruce prodded. "And?"

Your voice came back quiet. "And I wasn't fast enough." You downed the rest of your drink and slid it towards the sink. You misjudge the trigectory, and it slides off the edge and crashes to the floor. You stare down at the chunks and splinters of pink stained glass darkly. Emptily. "I couldn't get to him fast enough, and Regdoral killed him right in front of me."

Bruce was silent for a long time. Neither of you moved to clean up the mess you'd made. "When we went to check the building–"

"I know."

He follows your gaze. His words are softer than you expect. "What happened next?"

You chuckled, but there was no humor there. "I snapped," you shrugged. "I slaughtered every one of them where they stood. Burned every one of them in the Crypt."

Bruce doesn't speak.

Your next words are hardly a whisper. So light and airy that Bruce has to strain to hear them. "Did you find him?"

He goes quiet as well. Then, "Yes."

You close your eyes. Bite your lip. You pinch your palm. Anything to jolt your mind away from him. The memory of that silver sword gliding through him with a sound that still turns your stomach.

"Why did you leave him?"

You pick at a spot on the lip of the counter. "I dunno. I guess, maybe, some part of me hoped he'd beat me home. Maybe he'd been faking his death for one reason or another. Maybe I thought if��if I didnt–"

You sniffle. Your teeth sink into your lip and red spills down your chin and over your tongue.

Bruce shifts his weight. He wants to comfort you, but he doesn't know how, or if you'd let him. He doesn't what to do.

Your legs are shaking as hard as your hands, but they don't last as long. Your knees give out, and you go sliding to the floor, tears streaming freely down both cheeks.

Neither of you move for a long time. Neither of you speak. Not until you stand, shakily, supporting yourself with the counter.

"Bruce," you all but croak. He turns his eyes on you. "I miss him so much."

"I know," he replies quietly, risking a few steps toward you. "We all do, (Y/N)." He rests a hand on your shoulder. He's testing.

You slip forward from the counter, wrapping shivering arms around him in a desperate pursuit of comfort.

He gives it willingly, hugging you tightly.

You cry. He cries. All in a dark, bitter silence that traps you in a place you once knew as a home.

PART II COMING SOON

[artisticestheticreads]

ROXANNE: Chapter Two

 A/N: Y’all won. Y’all got another series out of me. Happy? Anyways, here in the second chapter of ROXANNE. In this chapter, Erik gets to see Roxanne in action and they get to know each other a little better.

TO CATCH UP, PRESS THIS.

For Character Face Claims, PRESS HERE.

WARNING: Street racing, weaponry, drinking, smoking and gambling with cursing. Also, I used Google Translate so dialogue may not be accurate and the English translation is in bolded.

SONG RECOMMENDATION: The Box by Roddy Ricch

WORD COUNT: 4660

“RayRay, where my Nikes at, cuh”, Roxxx hollered down her hall of the one story home as Nipsey Hussle’s Question #1 played loudly. She wore her natural red hair in a high puff with curls tucked behind her ear. RayRay was in his room smoking a blunt and playing Call of Duty on PS4. The air was filled with the smoke making it gush under the door. Roxxx knocked on her little god brother’s door loudly. “RayRay, you seen my Nikes around here?”

“Which ones?”

“Negro, the one with the baby blue drip on the check sign. You already know what day it is, bro.”

“Nah, I ain’t see em. Sorry, sis”, he said in a nonchalant tone. Roxxx smacked her lips as she folded her arms. “Muthfucka, yo hood rat ass bitch better not have them or I’m rippin’ her fucking spine out that loose ass pussy of hers. And I know it’s loose because whenever y’all fuck, all I can hear is air and shit.” RayRay rolled his eyes still looking at the game and said “check the backdoor.” Roxxx placed her hands on her hips and said “why would they be there?” All of a sudden, a 6’2 sixteen year old with a goatee opened the door with a white shirt and basketball shorts on stood there. His hair was short and tapered around with bleached tips. “Because you asked me to wash them for you along with ya other sneakers, remember”, he said before pointing to the back door. There were her sneakers she had been looking for all day and more. Roxxx looked up at her brother as he smiled and said “don’t make me smack you.” She pulled him by his shirt to kiss his forehead and push it back. “Thanks, cuh. I’m about to head out to handle some business but I want you to look out for my package. I got some more sneakers and paint coming in. You know what to do when it hits the porch.”

  Roxxx gave RayRay dap and went back to her room to finish getting ready. She fluffed out hair before putting half up with curls by in front of her brows. She filled in her brows with her Fenty brow pencil and glossed her lips from the same line of cosmetics. She placed on her baby blue halter top with matching biker shorts and fanny pack, pushing it to the back. She stood in the full length mirror admiring the fit and her curves. She grabbed her money, gloss, and license in her fanny pack before putting her Swiss army knife in her tube sock. Roxxx stepped into her sneakers and her small leather bag before knocking on Ray’s door and leaving.

  Roxxx hopped in her Angel and fixed her hoop earrings. She drove through the Baldwin Hill streets and made her way to the local hang out for her street team, the Jungles. Every Sunday was the time to meet and talk about where to meet for and after the races. Also it was how she got her pay without any one trying to take her out in the process. She pulled up into the parking lot and noticed all the flashy cars, smiling to herself. She was the only woman in the group which meant she had to prove her title of the triple threat; Sexy, Smart and Speed racer. She was also one of the youngest at twenty six years old which meant people would try to get in her but she was too smart for that.

  One man with onyx skin looked her way. He had gold caps on his teeth, with all black on and fade haircut. “There she is. What it do, little sis”, he said with his arms out to the side and smile on his face. She hugged and they did their own handshake/salute. “What up, Chi? What’s the move for today?” They walked back to the group and she gave the others dap. “Nothing, really. But it’s time for y’all pay day. First up, Roxxx. You did well, girl. Proud of you as always. Minus my cut, you got a cool 450 thou.” He handed her stack of money and she placed the rolls in her bag. Chiron looked over at Deeno and said “aight, bruh. You and I already talked so you know how I feel about you placing 3rd, so you only get $45,000.” He handed the brown skin man the money, watching him stuff it in his duffle bag. After he gave everyone their cut, Roxxx began to speak. “Aight, y’all. Go ahead and handle y’all business and make ya way to my place.” Chiron added “and bring whatever y’all need. We gonna be there for a while.”

“Yeah, I gotta make sure y’all muthafuckas don’t embarrass me”, she said laughing.

 It was a basic Thursday afternoon when Erik was at the gym. He was working on his chest and triceps while wearing only black sweats and an old pair of off white Chuck Taylors. His scattered keloids always drew attention but he didn’t care; he was simply just say “keep staring and you’ll become one.” He stared at his reflection watching all the veins push up under his chestnut skin, muscles flexing.

  He began to do a few sets of sit ups to further chisel his abs as he gained the attention of a few women but he made them no mind. As he stood, to drink his water he couldn’t help but think of Roxanne. That woman was like no other. She lived life to the fullest, independent with an intriguing taste in cars. He wiped the sweat from his lip, just thinking about her made him get hotter every second; he had to focus so he can finish his last set.

  He stepped away from the machine with Bluetooth headphones in about to change the song but his fingertips had another idea. His thumb hovered over the car text from Roxxx. They had met last Saturday night but something was stopping him from texting her. He looked to the text again and leaned against the machine.

Across town, Roxxx was there on the porch of her one story home with surrounded by the other racers. They all sat around her as she had Deeno in between her thighs, braiding his hair in neat cornrows. She had a blunt hanging from her lips before passing it around.

“Alright, y’all. As we all know, tomorrow night is like any other. So, we got a bunch muthafuckas who sneak dissin and I ain’t with that shit at all so it’s time to put their money where they mouth is”, said Chiron in a serious tone. He looked around as licked his gold caps and continued. “Y’all already know the line up. Deeno, Big Tim, Justin and of course Roxxx”. Roxxx nodded her as she continued braiding.

“So, Chi. Where the meet up at? Is it still at the bridge in Inglewood?” Chiron nodded his head while smoking his blunt and said “these old cliche ass muthafuckas. Think this is Grand Theft Auto or something.” The group laughed as Roxxx shook her head. Before she knew it, her phone vibrated against her thigh. She looked down to see the text and rolled her eyes with a smile. She finished up the last braid on Deeno’s head.

Back at the gym, Erik was busy doing his chest press when the sound of his ringer went off. He placed the 300 lb bar back and sat up, picking up his phone to respond. Deeno tilted his head towards his teammate and rolled his eyes as she giggled at the screen. Erik stared at the text with a smirk and found himself typing.

    Roxanne placed her phone back down on the porch as she finished up Deeno’s last twist. She pushed at his shoulders for him to get up and Chi replaced his spot. As he sat, he stated how her phone was being blown up. She began cutting his hair, clippers and bent down in front where the member can see her thick bottom; Chiron noticed and gave them all a dirty look. “Don’t trip. It’s a dude that I met while racing.” The men all stopped and Justin asked “yo ass talkin’ to the competition”.

“Nigga, no. The fuck I look like trying to get wit them weak ass niggas. What y’all think I am? Some street car ass hoe”, she looked to them as she lined up the back of his head. They all said their nos except for Deeno...of course. “I mean I wouldn’t be surprised. Probably why you always winning.” Justin looked to Chiron and Roxxx shaking his head. Roxanne cracked her hand as she turned the clippers off to hand them to Chiron. “What did you just say”, she asked slowly walking to him and she stood in front of him.

“Man, don’t be like that Roxxx. I’m playin’ with yo cry baby ass.”

“Nah, it sounds like you got a problem because ya ass don’t know the difference between the gas pedal and brake.”

  Justin snickered but seized when he noticed Deeno looking at him. Deeno looked at her up and down and said “you lucky you a female because if you wasn’t-.” All of a sudden, Roxxx pulled out the glock she had hidden from the back of her waist band, holding it under chin while pulling his head back; they were eye to eye. “What ya gonna do, D, hmm? Beat me up like a nigga? We all know ya punk ass can’t fight for shit, cuh. You see the difference between you and I are, is that you all bark and no bite while I can talk the talk, walk the walk, and still kick a nigga’s ass or two. I can back up my shit talking and you can’t. How come I’m the only bitch in the group but got bigger balls than you?”

   Chiron nodded his head while drinking his Henny, watching and smiling. Roxxx made her way back to Chi with the gun still in her hand but stopped when he heard “yo ass wouldn’t shoot me no way.” Roxxx held the gun pointed to his, pulled the trigger making him flinch but he then realized, when he heard the click, the safety was on. Tim shook his head, chuckling and said “ol’ scary ass. You know Roxxx wouldn’t hurt her fam. She too sweet on us. She rather shoot niggas who fuck with us.” Roxxx gave her big brother, Tim, dap and went back to cutting Chi’s hair when she decided to check her messages.

   ______________________________________________________________

SATURDAY NIGHT

  Erik pulled up in his camouflage joggers, jean jacket, white tee and white All Stars when he noticed all the edgy yet expensive automobiles parked around; they even made his Jaguar look like a busted 2002 Nissan Altima. He also noticed the sea of people that stood around smoking, drinking and placing bets with huge wads of money. He looked around to see if he can spot Roxxx but she was nowhere in sight; he stood with the crowd as they all heard the siren on a megaphone go off.

There stood an albino woman who had a big, black fro, dark brows with slits in both and freckles. She wore a yellow jumpsuit with black combat boots and a matching leather jacket. “Good evening, everyone! And welcome to the best muthafucka night ever made. IT’S-“

“BET NIGHT”, the crowd, beside Erik, screamed before barking like dogs then seizing when she held her hand up. “Now, before we get started just know the rules. There is no rules except for no crashing into each other.”

Everyone cheered and she began to announce the racers. A few racers later, Mickey said “aight, this young lady come from the Jungle. Coming straight out of Inglewood, give it up for Roxxx a.k.a Lion Babe.” Roxxx drove her Lambo slowly as the guys followed behind on foot. She stepped out of her car standing and looking at the huge crowd; it looked as if she had on golden cat eye contacts. Her hair was blown out with braids on one side of her head going into the puff. She wore a white halter top, blue and black plaid shirt around her waist and black biker shorts. She also had on her white Air Force ones with the check sign dripping blue.

Erik clapped for her slowly as she flashed her golden fangs to the crowd once she used her pinkies to hold her bottom lip down. They chanted her name as the competitors all huddled up for the course plan. Chi looked over at Erik who watched and rose his brow once he noticed she was being watched. Chi leaned into Roxxx’s ear and said “we being watched, Roxxx.” She looked up at him to see his head tilted towards Erik.

Roxxx nodded at Erik and leaned onto Chi’s solid chest and whispered. “Don’t trip. He cool. That’s the same dude from night’s ago that I raced. Seems chill.” Chi nodded once as the huddled separated. Roxxx made her way over with hands in her pockets, standing in front of Erik. “I see ya found the spot.” She looked him up and down with a grin saying “ya look good.”

 “You do too”, Erik grinned back until he saw the group of men approaching them. All dark skin, tall and intimidating but to Erik; Roxanne liked that. She cleared her throat and said “Erik, these are my bros. Chiron, Tim, Deeno, and Justin. We all known each other for a while. They knew D’Angelo before he got murdered.” They all made a cross while closing their eyes and looked back at him. Erik nodded to them and said “nice to meet y’all, man. D and I went to school together. He was cool people.” They all nodded until Chi said “alright, Roxxx. The cameras are all set up and we got ya on mic so we can see ya feeling.” 

  Tim passed around the Henny bottle and Roxanne took an extremely long sip of it before passing it to Deeno; Erik was impressed. Roxanne did her salute to the group and made her way to the car, getting in and buckling up. The drivers began to take their places as Mickey took hers, holding the long yellow flag in the air. Everyone revved up their engines as they waited. Roxanne looked over at her group who nodded at her then she looked over to the cross dangling from the review mirror and finally at the pictures on her dash board.

   One had a smaller girl, about four in a fluffy dress and a pair of afro puffs her hair color. But that wasn’t the only person in the picture; there were two others. An older man held her left hand, with dark skin and a wide smile. His hair was in ginger toned dreads and the same cross was on his chain. The other child’s hand was held in the hand of a curvaceous woman. She was a plus size beauty with a huge fro that covered her forehead and she also wore a white smile; Roxanne smiled remembering them and kissed her fingers to place over their faces. She looked to the the other side and saw the huge faces she and a younger man wore. They were at the community pool after playing in the water all day; they were at least eighteen and a half in that picture. “This is for you, D’Angelo. Let’s get first place in this one, baby boy.” Her face harden as she watched the flag move in slow motion while she said her prayer.

“Your love and faithfulness, 

along with Your goodness and mercy, 

surround me daily, 

so I will not fear whatever might come against me. 

My trust is in You, God, 

and I give thanks to You for Your love and protection. In Jesus' name, 

Amen. Grant, O Lord, 

thy protection and in protection, strength.”

   The flag flowed and the race was off. Mickey watched as they were off and ran to the guys, crouching beside Chiron. “She looking good tonight”, she said and Chi agreed Erik watched Roxanne’s camera to see how she was doing, she was passing all of them up. “Roxxx, how you doing”, Tim asked and she responded. “Good so far. This muthafucka from the latin gang is on my ass though, bruh. Look like he tryna crash into me”, she sound a tad frustrated but couldn’t let it show. Justin shook his head and said “yeah, one of them niggas tried to get me during the bike race. They grimy as hell, man, but you got this shit, Roxxx.”

   The camera on her face showed her smile with the fangs and it made Erik smirk a tad. Roxanne began maneuvering in  moves that the other guys couldn’t catch on to. All she could hear was her God Mother’s voice saying, “keep it clean, baby girl, but make them fall.” She did just that as she turned a sharp turn on the course. Mickey hollered and said “so far, The Latin kings are last with Money Talks at fourth, Elm Street in Third and The Jungle in second and Crenshaw in first.” The crowd roared in cheer with a mixture of curses from people they were slowly losing their money.

   Roxanne kept her hands still when she heard the announcement as she kept her eyes on the winner so far. He was a few cars away but that wouldn’t stop Roxxx from getting to him. “Mickey, you gonna be saying The Jungle in first in a sec, love.” She began moving in between cars at ease and, right when the light turned red, she drove through traffic, losing the others. She was about to pat herself on the back when she heard the police driving behind the winning car. “Shit, you gotta get outta there before 12 call they niggas in”, Chi said. She had to make a move and make it fast. 

  That’s when Erik saw an alley coming into view. “Roxanne, take the alley. They won’t find ya in there and it’s on course. Take that and you would remain in the lead”, he said as he pointed at the screen. She took his advice and began driving back on to the course, in a different route. Chi looked to Erik and nodded before he went back to the screen. “Erik, how did you know that would work,” she asked and he said “trust me, I have had my share of hiding from the pigs”; that made her laugh. Before she knew she was back on course and ahead of the other drivers; they all soon pulled back in to the meet up at the Bridge and they crowd went off. Mickey grabbed her megaphone and said “THE WINNER IS ROXXX”; the crowd cheered but the Latin Kings were upset. “Man, fuck this! She cheated!” Mickey rolled her eyes and said “ok, how did she cheat?”

“The nigga with the dreads told her where to go.”

   The Jungle group looked to the other and said “man, fuck outta here. Every muthafucka in dis bitch help one another for one and two, you better be careful with that word”, Tim said wrapping his arm around Roxanne’s shoulders. One of the girlfriends from the rival team said “no, eso no es justo. Esa perra hizo trampa y todos lo sabemos. Probablemente esté chupando todas estas pollas negras y le dejaron ganar el culo. (No, that ain't fair. That bitch cheated and we all know it. She probably sucking all these niggas’ dicks and they let her ass win.)” Chiron looked to Roxanne who cracked her neck slowly walking to the group as the others watched. Roxanne stood in front of the girl with her knife in hand, slowly waving it as she said “en primer lugar, mi nombre es Roxxx. No perra En segundo lugar, no hice trampa porque ese callejón estaba en el camino y tercero, si escucho a alguno de ustedes decir nigga nuevamente, cortaré una herida tan profunda en su garganta, cualquier hombre que ponga su polla en su boca tendrá La mejor experiencia de garganta profunda que hayan tenido en su vida (First off, my name is Roxxx. Not bitch. Second, I did not cheat because that alley was on the course and third, if I hear any of y'all say nigga again, I will cut a gash so deep in your throat, any man who puts his dick in ya mouth will have the ultimate deep throat fuck experience they ever had in their life)”. Roxanne used her blade to cut a huge chunk of the girl’s hair with just the blade itself and that made the girl cry. 

   The crowd chuckled as the losing team left and everyone congratulated all the competitors; that was the ending. Roxanne looked to Erik as Chi talked to the other men. “What you doing now”, he asked and she shrugged. “We usually go out to our hang out spot and eat. You can come if you want. That’s if ya don’t have a dick appointment waiting for you.” Erik chuckled with his hands in pockets and said “nah, beautiful. I’m free tonight.” She rolled her eyes, smirking before they all met up at the diner.

   At the diner the guys all sat at one booth while Roxanne and Erik shared another. She sat across from him with her contacts out, back to their original oak wood color. Her eyes were on the menu but Erik’s were on her. Noticing how her plump, glossed lips looked in the dim light. He couldn’t help but to stare. Even if he tried to keep them away, they always fell back to her.  “Do you always like staring”, Roxanne said still looking at her menu. Erik’s eyes went for his and back to her face to see that she was looking at him. “Nah, you had something on your face.” She laughed once saying “I had something on my face?”

“Yeah, it’s gone now.” She rolled her eyes with a smirk as she folded her hands on the table and said “must have been real interesting because you were surely staring for a while, Erik.” Erik placed his menu down, still looking at her and said “it still is interesting.” Roxxx licked the inside of her cheek to hide the blush she gave. “Such a charmer, I see. I bet ya make females panties drop, huh?” She closed her menu and placed it to the side. Erik rested his arms on the booth and leaned back. “Not saying. Just know that no one claiming and neither am I.” She placed her leg on the booth and leaned her back onto the wall. Erik bit his lip as she looked at her and asked “why you single, hm? No niggas wanna be with someone as beautiful as you?”

“Because I don’t need a nigga”, she side eyed him and went back to her phone. Erik chuckled nervously, saying “I didn’t make you mad, did I?”; she shook her head. “Nah, I get that question a lot. But I just ain’t looking at the moment.” He nodded as the waitress came to their table with fries as their appetizers and took their order. “Can I get pastrami burger, well done with grilled onion and a lemonade with onion ring on the side, please”, Roxanne ordered after handing her the menu. “Sure, doll. And what can I get for you handsome”, the waitress asked Erik; Roxanne smiled while biting her bottom lip and shaking her head slowly. 

   Erik told her “I wanna get the breakfast special, steak medium rare, with wheat toast, scrambled cheese eggs, grits on the side and hash browns as well” before handing her the menu to her with a wink and smiled to the side. Once they lady walked away with heat rushing to her unknown place, Roxanne held a hand to her ear. “Do you hear that”, she motioned her hand going down and said “panties dropping.” Erik threw his napkin at her as she laughed. 

   Their food came out minutes later and he asked “so, where ya from? When you talk, I hear a slight accent in there.” She looked up at as she cut her burger in half and looked back at her plate. “You are very curious person.” He ate a piece of his steak and said “nah, just very observant.” She bit into her burger when she felt the other guys watching them as they ate. She sipped her drink and said “Jamaican. But I was born out here.” Erik can tell something was wrong when she looked around and saw that her leg was shaking a little. “Roxanne, you good”, Chi asked once he stood by the booth; she nodded and he said “Aight, I’m finna go finish this blunt with Tim outside.” Deeno and Justin watched from across the way and Roxanne felt all eyes on her as she ate. She cleared her throat before asking “so, Erik... why ya nickname Killmonger?”

  Erik looked up at her and saw that she was looking at him as she ate. “Well, that was my code name in the army. One of the boys at the platoon gave me the name. It was a joke a first because I would be getting all types of goo goo eyes from the ladies anywhere we went but then it became more.”

“What you mean?”

  Erik looked at the guys then at her and finally said “I killed a lot of people. Innocent or not, they were gone. You see every mark on me”, he asked and she leaned back, nodding. “Well, they are basically a mark for each person I murdered.” Her eyes looked over his arms and part of his chest that showed. Erik watched as her fingers got closer to his hand. “Can I touch them”, she asked with curious eyes; he nodded and her fingers danced up his arm slowly. She utter out loud “they’re really...”

“Weird?” She looked up at him and shook her head. He saw the warmth in her eyes, like a star trying to get through. She looked down at her hand, caressing the skin and said “soft and amazing.” He could only smile at her as she leaned back and looked to the guys. “Eat before y’all food get cold.” Deeno kissed his teeth and said “you can’t tell us what do.” As she ate, she pulled out her blade and placed it on the table close to the edge; the other men began eating as Erik chuckled.

   After the night meal, her group was all gone, leaving the pair alone. “So, what ya doing tomorrow? You trynna hang again”, he asked and she folded her arms. “I see someone is feeling me”, Roxanne said. He rolled his eyes and said “ha ha, funny.” She giggled and said “well, to answer ya question. I’ll be busy making moves and what not. But we can hang sometime next week. If ya up for it.”

“I got you. I’ll text you.” She nodded, held her hand out for him to shake and he accepted it. They shook hands but then all of a sudden, she kissed his cheek. “Good night, Erik. Stay black”, she said making him laugh. “I wouldn’t want to be anything else but black.” She let the door down and watched as he got into his car. Roxanne began to drive off when she got a call, and smiled. She placed her airpod in and said “I see someone missed me already. Of course, I miss you. You know that. Yeah, I’ll be home in a few. Aight, baby. Love you too. Bye.”

*𝕋𝔸𝔾𝔾𝔼𝔻 𝕃𝕆𝕍𝔼𝕊*

@muse-of-mbaku @im5ftbutmythroat66 @chaneajoyyy @melanin-samii @theunsweetenedtruth @doux-ciel @unicornluvin8765 @vikkidc @wakandantings @thadelightfulone @mzamethystp @simbiann @tropicalsun10 @babydoll756​ @notoriouslynay @vminax @quinsly @pinkdemolition @quietstorm-73​ @chaoticcashfancroissant @bugngiz​ @chocolatedippedinhoney​ @yafavcocoa @lostgalaxies​ @mbakuwife @youreadthatright​ @babygotl01292003 @acceptyourselfloveyourself @madamslayyy​ @yoyolovesbucky​ @theogbadbitch @wakanda-inspired @bitchacho25 @toniilaney @wakandascrystal​ @girlsneedlovingfanfics @raysunshine78​ @melodyofmbaku @hearteyes-for-killmonger @silenceisplatinum @thickemadame​ @shookmcgookqueen​ @heykillmongerluhme​ @fonville-designs @cutewylie @allhailqueennel @10bsatatime @nickidub718 @lildashofmelanin @allhailqueennel @amirra88 @hakunalive4eva @thickemadame​ @ghostfacekill-monger @cherrystainedlipsbaby​ @nahimjustfeelingit-writes​ @fd-writes

[glitterdreamsz]

A Penny For Your Thoughts (Part 1)

BoRhap!Roger x reader  Summary: The Reader and Roger have been a couple since they were sixteen. But what would happen to their relationship now that Roger’s dream of being a rock star is becoming reality? A/N: I know, I know you’re all waiting for the new chap of Scandalous. But I had this fic in my mind for a while and I really wanted to write it down. The story will be characterised by flashbacks about their relationship to show how it evolved. I know that some times years won’t coincide, sorry for that. I wrote it having BoRhap!Roger in mind but it also works with real Roger Taylor And sorry for any grammar error, English is not my first language. I really hope you like it and don’t be afraid to let me know what you think! Have a nice day xx Words: 3.5k

March 1971

“Good morning pretty face” you said walking inside the biology lab. It was empty except for your boyfriend Roger who was picking his stuff scattered on the desk at the end of the room. As a usual Wednesday morning, you both had early morning classes which meant that you couldn’t see each other before going to the university, so as a ritual you would go to the lab after your photography class and you would find Roger there waiting for you. “How was your class?” he asked putting his last book in his backpack “Just as any other Wednesday but still interesting” you replied as you sat on the desk “What about yours?” your legs were swinging back and forth as you looked at your boyfriend. “Boring, as always” he walked to you, his hands on your bare tight as he made you open your legs so that he could move closer to you and kiss softly your lips. “The only thing I was caring about was that you would have been here at the end of the lesson” You sighed softly “Rog, you need to pay attention during classes, this is our last year.” He always said that what he wanted to do in life was music and was sure that now more than ever he was close to achieving his dream. But he was already sure that he would have made it with Smile and then Tim left them. Now he was in Queen, they were good but still had problems with finding a new bassist, and even though you really wanted to be supportive about his dream, at the same time you wanted him to focus a bit more on university just to be sure that if it didn’t work with music at least he had a backup plan. “We are going to hear this new kid today, he plays the bass and I have a feeling he might be the right one.” You chuckled seeing his facial expression, full of hope.

“Have I already told you how hot you look in this skirt?” he suddenly changed the topic as his hands moved back to your tights. “Rog” you tried to stop him as you already knew what he had in mind, and your thoughts were confirmed as his lips started to leave wet kisses on your neck. “Rog, we’re in the university lab, anyone could walk in at any moment.” “Do you see someone?” he asks with an ironic tone as his finger started to unbutton your blouse. “Only boring people come here to spend their time.” His lips were travelling down your now naked torso. “Still they could come now” You bit your lower lip closing your eyes and running your hand through his hair. “Boring people now are attending other classes” He was down on his knees, his lips on your tights and you tilted your head back, Roger smirked at your reaction. “We both know you want this as much as I do, Penny” and his head disappeared in your skirt.

You were on your way back home to your house, riding through Truro’s street with your bike when the bike chain decided to fall off, cursing you got off from the saddle and sat on the ground trying to figure out how to fix it. After five minutes of cursing, someone approached you “Do you need help with that?” you lift your gaze up and your heart stopped, it was Roger Taylor. He was sixteen just like you and went to the same school as yours, but life was always a bitch and he was in a different class. It wasn’t necessary to say that every girl in the school had a crush on him, even the older ones. “I-I yes...I don’t know how to fix this damn thing” you stuttered, the young boy chuckled and kneeled down and you moved to let him the space to work. “We go to the same school, don’t we?” he asked as he focused on the chain. “Hmh” you simply replied as your eyes focused on his hands. “Here you are, all fixed” he said getting up and rubbing his hands trying to get the chain grass away. “Nice record” he said nodding toward The Who vinyl in your bike basket. “Yeah, I just got it at the record shop.” You replied putting your hands in your skinny jeans pocket. “The one down the street? That’s the coolest one.” “It’s actually my dad’s shop.” “No way.” His eyes widened. “I always go there, how come I never saw you in the shop?” “Because I’m always on the back listening to the new records.” “Makes sense” he chuckled “I’m Roger by the way.” He reached his hand out but seeing how dirty it was he quickly took it away. “I’m Penny” you smiled at him. “Penny? Is that your real name?” He asked at the unusual name. “No” you shook your head chuckling. “I’m (Y/N), but almost everyone calls me by my nickname, Penny.” “How come that nickname?” the boy giggled. "Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck." You simply answered, just as if it was the most obvious thing, but you got a frown as an answer “I still don’t get it.”  “When I was four my dad took me with him to see a football match and his team won. He then took me another time and they won again so he started to think I was his good luck charm. That’s how the name Penny was born” Roger laughed looking at you. “Well, let’s hope that you’ll bring luck also to me and I will be able to see you at the record shop next time I’ll come around.” “You see me every day at school” you bit your lip. “Then I guess you have no other solution than coming out on a date with me.”

You have to bite hard on your lip as you feel Roger’s fingers on your clothed centre. “Already so wet” he wanted to sound sexy but you couldn’t help but laugh “What’s so funny?” he asked as his head popped out from your skirt. “Nothing, just get back down there” you grinned as your hand went back through his hair pushing him gently back down. “Someone is impatient here” he smirked as he took your knickers off and his head disappeared once again between your legs, once you felt his tongue on your wet folds you had to put your hand over your mouth to keep your moans quiet.

“Happy anniversary love” a seventeen years old Roger looked down at you. Your naked bodies tangled together on your small one sized bed “Are you implying that this was your anniversary present?” you frowned as your fingerprints drew some circles on his chest. “What? This was an amazing shag, aren’t you happy with your present?” he grinned not taking away his gaze from you. You pretended to be offended and slapped softly his chest “Hey, hey calm down lady” Roger chuckled as he got up from the bed earning a whine from you “I thought you wanted your present” a big smile appeared on your lips “You really got me a present?” “Which kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn’t?” he said as he looked for his trousers, you sat on the bed covering your naked breast with the bed sheet and bit your lip while looking at Roger’s naked figure walking around your room. “Here it is” he walked back to the bed giving you a small package. You took it smiling widely and, as you started to unwrap it, Roger sat behind you laying his chin on your shoulder. Once you took all the paper off you found a black box which once you opened revealed a necklace with a circular pendant with yours and Roger’s name initials engraved on it. “Do you like it?” You nodded “I love it” you could feel his smile against your bare skin “May I?” he asked and you let him take the necklace, your hands went to your hair holding them in a ponytail as your boyfriend put the jewel around your neck. “You know” Roger said as you were cuddled, his hand running up and down your back as your head laid on his chest, your eyes looked up at his breathtaking blue ones. “I found a new meaning to Penny” “Did you?” you chuckled and he nodded proudly “A Penny for your thoughts.” “That makes no sense Rog” you had to hold a laugh. “It does indeed. Because you are what I always think about”

Your grip on the edge of the desk became tighter, your knuckles were almost white as you could feel you were getting closer to your climax. And as you were on the edge the door swung open. “Hey Rog” you immediately recognized the voice and even if your back was facing the door your hands went to your blouse quickly covering your exposed chest. “Fuck Brian!” You almost screamed. “Sorry, sorry… I didn’t mean” he started to stutter seeing the scene in front of him. “Shouldn’t you fucking knock?” you asked, still not facing him as you were buttoning up your blouse. “It’s a lab, I didn’t expect to find this scene in front of me.” He was right. “Is Roger somewhere there?” he asked not being able to see the drummer. “I’m down here mate” your boyfriend said as his head left your skirt and he stood up and smirked at Brian once he saw him. God, did that man had any decency? “Roger, we have to go and listen to the guy. Did you forgot?” “No, I was just a little busy here, but I would have shown up, don’t worry dad.” Roger chuckled while looking at Brian. “Come on lover boy, get yourself in an acceptable look, I’ll be waiting outside in the car.” The guitarist told him while looking at his uncombed hair by your hands. Once Brian left the room and closed the door you jumped down from the desk pushing down your skirt. “I’ll go back home then” you said kneeling down to pick up your panties that laid on the floor but before you could reach them Roger stole them from you and put them in his pocket. “Oh no lady, you are coming with me.” You groaned reaching for his pocket and taking your knickers. “Come on, I’m a mess.” You pouted at him as you put back your underwear and when you looked up he was smirking “A hot mess though” you closed your eyes as his lips left a kiss on your forehead. “Why can’t I wait for you at our flat so that when you come back home you can continue what you left unfinished?”

“I mean, do you see yourself still living here in ten years? Because I don’t. I don’t want to end up working in my dad’s record shop while dreaming about being a photographer” you watched the small rock you just threw on the river making some hops on the water surface. “Your dad’s shop is cool” Roger said nonchalantly, you turned around and he was laid on the blanket while smoking, his hand supported his head as he was looking at you. “Come on Rog” you groaned as you walked to him and laid on the cover by his side. “Are you really saying that you would find cool working at my dad’s shop for the rest of your life?” He smiled softly putting a lock of your hair behind your ear. “You know how much I want to leave this place, I’m not made for small towns, I have to make it big.” He chuckled blowing out some smoke, “I don’t know” you said reaching for the cigarette packet. “It’s just” you stopped as you lite up the cigarette that was between your lips. “It’s just that we are at our last year of high school, we should do something about our future and  sometimes I feel like I will be stuck here forever.” You were looking up at the sky, thinking of what your life would be if you’d stay in Truro. “Then let’s go away” Roger’s voice took you away from your thoughts and made you looked up at him. He was now sat up and his eyes never left yours. “Let’s go to London, let’s go study there. You will study to become a photographer and I, I think I will study to become a dentist, my parents keep saying it’s a good job.” He shrugged and you smiled as you sat up too, his arm around your waist pulling you to straddle his lap so you could face him. “Let’s go there, let’s move in together in London.” Words failed to come up from your mouth so you just nodded as tears were starting to form in your eyes. Roger kissed you as his hands laid on both sides of your neck and your hands found their way through his hair “We’re going to live together” you mumbled against his lips “We are” he confirmed smiling.

“Hey Freddie” you greeted as you got into Brian’s car. “Hey Penny” he looked at you with a smirk on his lips, making you understand he knew exactly what you were doing in the lab, of course, Brian had talked. “How’s Mary?” you asked while looking for your compact mirror and your lipstick in your bag. “She’s good, she had to work today so she couldn’t come to the rehearsals. “Well, we could swing by later” Rog said grinning, you knew about the guys going to Biba just to check the girls, that didn’t make you jealous, yes, he was your boyfriend but neither of you were blind, you also checked hot guys with your friends. Still, that comment made him earn a light punch on his stomach “Is someone jealous here?” he laughed looking at you, you shook your head as you started to fix your red lipstick while looking at yourself in the small mirror you were holding in your other hand. That’s when you felt a hand moving up to your tight, smirking you looked at Roger with the corner of your eye, he was grinning as his hand moved dangerously to the hem of your skirt. “Hey you two, not in my car” Brian warned you looking at you through the rearview mirror, both you and Roger chuckled as the drummer put his hand down to your knee and you blew a kiss to Brian who shook his head and tried to hide a grin. He was the person you were more close to in the band, you met him when Roger auditioned for Smile and by everyone’s surprise, you almost immediately became close friends. It wasn’t hard for you to understand why people found your friendship unusual, he was always so calm, polite, he knew always how to behave in any situation and he was a nerd for astrophysics, while you, well, you were a feminine version of Roger. “So, me and Roger met the guy at the disco a few days ago. His name’s John and he seems pretty shy, so behave. Okay Freddie?” he asked looking at the singer who nodded while getting off from the car. “Roger? Penny?” “Hey!” you sounded almost offended “I’m always nice with people. Talk to Mr Taylor here, who likes to make comments about people teeth.” You chuckled taking all your stuff while joining the other members. “You can be pretty mean too.” Roger argued. “Only with people that annoy me, I still don’t know this guy. Maybe I will like him, I mean, he’s a bassist, they say they’re pretty good with their hands.” You grinned looking at Roger who rolled his eyes as the other two guys chuckled. “Well,” the blonde said wrapping his arm around your waist so you could get closer to him and he could whisper in your ear. “Drummers are better at banging.” He smirked and slapped your bum as you got into the building. “You must be John.” Freddie said walking toward the guy who was sat by the door of a classroom. “It’s me” he nodded pulling his hand out so Fred could shake it. “Well, I’m Freddie, you already met Brian and Roger.” The guys nodded to him. “And she’s Penny, she’s Queen’s first groupie” Freddie smiled looking at you. “I’m (Y/N)” You said greeting him. “Penny is my surname, you can decide which name you like more” you chuckled. “And I’m not a groupie, I’m Roger’s girlfriend.” “You come to every concert and you shag him after each of them. That makes you a groupie” Freddie declared putting his arms on his hips. “And I take him back to our home after every concert. That makes me his girlfriend.” “Can we please stop arguing about our roles and listen to John, please?” Brian asked almost exhausted by your squabbles. You sat down on the couch between Roger and Freddie, your fingers tapped against your tight while listening to John playing. There was a feeling inside you that made you think that they finally may have found their final bassist, there was something in him, the way he talked and how he behaved that made you believe he could be a perfect fit between the three of them. You could already imagine Rog, Fred and Bri arguing about a song and then John would have jumped in and clear the air.

“John, he seemed really good.” You said while opening the door of yours and Roger’s shared flat. “I think he’s the one you may have been looking for.” “Hmmh.” Roger mumbled as he threw his jacket on the couch and laid down. You sat down on your bed, which was a mattress laid on some pallets, and looked at Rog while you took your shoes off. Your flat wasn’t really big, as you opened the main door there was a room big enough where you managed to create a living room and a bedroom, in another small room there was the kitchen with a small table where you could eat. The main problem was when the guys decided to show up for lunch or dinner and you all ended up eating on the couch and sat on the carpet, all gathered around the coffee table. And of course, in the flat, there was another room for the bathroom. “You don’t seem so excited about him.” You said getting comfortable. “I really think he’s the best bassist you ever had, you’d better keep him.” “Are you done talking about him? You haven’t shut up about him since he left the building. A smirk grew on your lips as you got up from the bed and walked toward the couch “Is someone jealous here?” you asked sitting on Roger’s lap, straddling him so you could face him. “Oh, shut up.” He groaned rolling his eyes.  You chuckled softly, he always liked playing with you when it came to making you jealous. But that only time that you talked well about a guy he immediately acted like a child. “The man who always talks about the Biba girls is now envious over a bassist?” “Well, why don’t you go to ask him to use his fingers since bassists seem so good at him?” he muttered not even looking at you as he quoted what you told him before meeting John. “I don’t know” you shrugged as you laid your hands on his neck “I heard that drummers are better at banging.” You almost laughed at his behaviour changing so quick. Roger looked at you while biting his lip and in a matter of a few seconds you were already taken to the bed. Your sexual life with Roger could be divided into two moods: there was love and there was sex. There were times when you two needed to show the other how much you loved them, and it was slow, sweet nothings whispered while your bodies were closed, fingers intertwined and kissed all over your skin. Then there was sex, the one where you needed each other,  it was rough, loud, there were hickeys and bruises and today it was like that. The aftercare though was always equal, your head was on his chest and his arm was wrapped around your shoulders as his fingers drew some figures on your skin. You were still trying to catch your breath as you left some sweet kisses on his bare skin. “You know, after today I have a good feeling, I feel like this time it’s the right one.” Roger said while looking at the ceiling as his fingertips never left your skin. “And I promise you that once we’ll make it I will buy us a nicer flat, one where our bed won’t be seen by anyone who will come inside.” He chuckled softly. “I don’t care where we’ll live as long as long as I know that you’ll always be next to me.”

[bigsnzstanacct]

I revised that F/ellow Tr/avelers fic so I’m reposting it AND I reserve the right to re-re-post it when I add more to it, because I want a prologue with Hawk at the office trying to work and sneezing loud as fuck in his office (and then eventually part two with Hawk and Tim’s day as Hawk’s cold settles into his nose and they sneeze and fuck all day, basically.)

“HHHHHEEEEEAAAAASSSSSHHHHHHHhhhhooooooo!!” He announced his presence with a sneeze, a nearly-shouted roar that sputtered out into a quieter, albeit wetter, finish.

“Skippy…!” He called out, faux-anger threaded through his voice. “You’re in trouble now, Skippy!”

Said “Skippy”, also known as Tim Laughlin, peeked his head out of one of the apartment’s bedrooms, chest bare, nostrils pinkened at the rims, face still full of the evidence of the cold he was still getting over—and that Hawkins was just falling into. “Huh, Hawk? Me, in trouble?” Tim’s mock-innocence the response to Hawk’s faux-angry call. They both knew this dance, and loved it.

Hawkins was on him suddenly, grabbing the thinner man in his arms and kissing him with intent. “Yeah, big trouble. You heard that sn-sneeze didn’t you?”

“Yeah, me and most of DC, you moose. Last time I heard a noise like that I was at the National Zoo.”

“Me? A moose? You’re just adding to the trouble you’re in, aren’t you?”

“Always do.” Tim said with a smirk, leading Hawkins into the bedroom, where he sat, limbs splayed alluringly. They were silent a moment, just holding each other’s gaze. Until Hawkins’ started to waver, a hand drifting idly up towards his nose. Tim’s smirk widened. “So what am I in trouble for, Mister Fuller?”

“You—snf!—you know what you’re in t-trouble for, you—snf!—y-you dirty little thing you, you gave me your… your hehhhhh… hehHHH…” his broad bare chest leapt with the urge. “your HHEHHHHhhh… gonna…!” The barest flicker of warning, before the inevitable was bouncing off the walls and making the windows rattle in their casements: “AAAEEEEHHHHHRRRSSCHHOOOOOO!” He bellowed. “Damn, sorry about that Skippy… never did figure out how to keep that qui… quiet… here’s a… gotta… notherone…! Huhhh! HUUUUURRRRRSSSCCCHOOOOOO!!!” Tim playfully covered his ears, smiling up at Hawk and sniffing himself.

“Awwww… did big bad Hawkins catch a little cold in his nose?” He teased. “Is that why you’re making all that racket? Just cause of little old me?” They’d been turning the tables more lately, but somehow they always found themselves back in this position: Hawkins towering above his Skippy, Skippy sitting on the bed, looking up at Hawk with at least two contradictory emotions in his eyes. At first, desire and terror. In the bad times, love and hate. In the best times—like now—naked adoration and stubborn defiance. An unwillingness to break and an insistence on being broken. That look stirred the most dangerous parts of Hawkins, in the most delightful ways.

Hawkins drew closer, lifted Tim’s chin, mostly so he could place his big hands near Tim’s neck. “Yeah… you made me sick, you little ball of germs. If you weren’t always sneezing and snotting all over this apartment, maybe I’d still be able to do my very important job.”

Tim just held Hawkins’ gaze. “Seem to recall you not minding that sn-sneezing and snotting at a-all… speaking of wh… which…” Hawk smiled. Sometimes it seemed like Tim was allergic to the very word “sneeze.” Between the poor guy’s seemingly omnipresent allergies and the lingering cold in his nose, it seemed like he’d spent all of the last week either sneezing or on the verge of a big, messy sneezing fit.

“Hhhhh… hhhettcchhOOO! Hhhh-hehhhh! EEETTttttt-chhooOOO! Wh-whoa bihhh… big one… hehhhh…. hhettschh… ettscchhooo… hehhshhooo… yyeeeEEttschooo... Ettssscchhhhh-OOO!” God, Tim’s sneezes drove Hawk wild. The little wet, itchy, rapid-fire ones that spilled out on top of each other, as though his nose was so crowded with sneezes he could hardly get one out before the next was fighting to escape; the ones that went all cutesy and high-pitched at the end, almost as though he was surprised his nose tickled so much, the pitch raising at the end like a question; the outright violent ones that seemed to hint at the strapping young man the army had made Skippy, the man the army sent home to Hawk.

And then there was how intensely itchy he looked, his nose wriggling and alive, like it was trying to escape his face, his whole face scrunching in and then suddenly everything wide open: mouth lolling, eyebrows climbing, nostrils flaring and then…

“EETTTsssscchhhh! EETTTSSsscchhh!! hehhhh… hahh-SHOOO!!”

And then it all started over again. And again. And AGAIN. It made Hawk breathless in a very different way than his own sneezes. It made him hunger, it made him want. It made him hard.

“Look what you did to me.” Hawk said, clutching at his thickness, the bulge visible through his slacks. Tim sniffed, eyes still misty, nose clearly note done with him. But he couldn’t help but notice that. “That’s what you’ve been doing to me all day. Making me sneeze, with your cold in my nose. Making me think about you sneezing, losing control, falling apart for me, so pretty.” He was getting greedy now, pawing at Tim, squeezing his ass, kissing at his neck. “Could barely get through work, you want them to find out I’m a double fuckin’ pervert?”

They each froze a moment, their still-precarious positions and the memory of the time when they were more precarious still a nearly-open wound. But then Tim sneezed again, soft and pliant: “hhcchhssss…. huh… hittscchh!” And Hawk’s eyes were on nothing but Skippy.

“Bless you,” he said, soft and dangerous; hungry and adoring.

And then slacks were coming off, mouth on mouth, mouth on neck, hands everywhere, fingers and spit right where they needed to be, oil and fingers and opening and then Hawk was behind Skippy on the bed, pressing into him, his weight on Skippy’s back, his hard length against the crack of Skippy’s ass, teasing his entrance. They were breathing heavy. For more reason than one.

“You still gotta…?” Hawk asked.

“All the t-time, Hhahhhh… Hawk…”

“Can you… while you ride me?”

“Isn’t that how you caught my cold in the first place?”

“Don’t care. Need it. All over me, please, Skippy.”

“Need it?” Skippy asked, turning around to look at Hawk, that soft-and-steel look in his eye.

“Need it.”

“So what are you gonna do for your boy? When he gives you what you need? Are you gonna give me what I need?”

“Anything.”

Tim turned around completely, facing Hawk, sitting back on his heels and wrapping a loose fist around Hawkins’ dick. “Don’t throw that word around Hawkins, you don’t mean it.”

It was all Hawk could do to keep himself from bucking into Tim’s fist. “N-No fair, Skippy.”

“Life’s not fair, H-hahhh… hahhhhhh…” Tim’s nose chose that moment to act up, but despite his body’s betrayal (his body’s endless betrayals, when it came to Hawk), Tim hadn’t given up the implicitly negotiated upper hand. He put a finger under his nose, pressed hard. “You w-want me to l-let this loose, don’t you?”

Hawk nodded, and suddenly looked so much like a puppy that Tim almost dissolved into giggles. Instead, he took his free hand from Hawkins’ dick to Hawkins’ chest.

“A-ahhh… all o-over you, yeah?” He pushed, and Hawkins fell back onto the bed.

Another nod.

“Stay with me tonight. Let me—snf!—take care of you.” He crawled over him, one finger still pressing underneath his itching nose.

Another nod.

Tim barely managed a quick “ohthankgod” before the floodgates opened.

“ettscchhh! yyetttschh! hetchhhh! ettcchhhhhh! huUUUHHhhhh… eeYYettschhOOO! Heyyyy-SHOOOO! huhhh… eeeeYYESHH-OOOO! Ah!” They started fast and furious, grew luxurious and free and messy as the lingering cold sneezes in Tim’s nose took over. He ended on a sharp exhale, as he sank onto Hawk. It had taken some practice, learning to take dick in the middle of a sneezing fit. But Tim was a very, very fast learner. And he had an excellent motivation: seeing Hawk like this. Spread out under him, wrecked and open, more even than he was when Tim was inside of him, Hawk’s pupils blown wide, nothing else in his mind but Skippy, Skippy, Skippy, Skippy’s nose, Skippy’s ass, Skippy’s chest, Skippy’s wet eyes, closing… closing again as his head tipped back and…

“eeYYYYYEETTSSCCHH-OOO! Oh! Bless me.” Tim murmured. It was easy, now that Hawk was inside him. He barely made any effort to move, knowing too much would send Hawk over the edge early. No, he just let his body have free rein. His sneezes always tended to make him double over or bend at the waist, he just gave himself over to them freely, letting the urges in his nose move his body.

Hawk keened beneath him. “Fuck, fuck, big one Skippy, fuck…”

Tim managed to snark around the urge: “is that a rehhhh… requeahhh… AAAAHHTTSCCHHOOOOOOO-UHH!!” Tim sure acted like it was a request, his voice falling fully into the sneeze in a way it rarely did. Hardly a duplicate of Hawk’s beastly roars, but definitely on the loud side for Tim, tearing out of his throat like Hawk’s desire was a physical thing, had reached in and ripped it out of him. It was often like that for Tim, as though the sheer force of Hawk’s wanting made Tim’s body capable of things he didn’t know it could do.

“Shit, Skip, I’m not gonna last…”

“Shhhhh… d-don’t… don’t… aapppsshHHHH! Hahhh… ppllleesshhhhh!! EeeYYYYYeesscchhhhOOO!” The sneezes weren’t stopping, and they were only getting wetter, the bursts of spray on Hawk’s torso no sooner cooled than Tim replaced them with another.

Tim recovered with a firm sniff, in control enough to say, “don’t worry, we’ve got a while.”

[acnhplayertwo]

Player Two's Diary.

Entry 1.

Dear diary,

Thanks Bobness I have this phone with me. Not gonna lie, I'd totally be going cuckoo without an outlet by now.

Why, you ask? Well, it's simple! Let me explain.

This utter mess began something short of one week ago, when my partner, let's call 'em S, presented me with an idea.

"Let's go away, buddy. Let's just toss this boring life behind and go somewhere new. New and fresh. Like... like the Outskirts, or-- or an island. A deserted one, maybe. Somewhere nobody knows us and none of our problems would ever be able and find us. Come on, buddy. Let's do it."

And, pal, I know not whether it was their enthusiasm, or the fact I was starting to resent my life as mayor of a lethargic town, or that we both had a glass too many of Wolfgang's homemade apple wine, but... I accepted.

I said yes.

Actually, I may have said something more than that. In my drunken haze, I remember yelling something like "OH MY BOB, THAT'S AN AWESOME IDEA AND I ALSO HAVE A FRIEND WHO TOLD ME HE'D TAKE ON A DEAERTED ISLAND BUSINESS AND CAN YOU BELIEVE THE COINCIDENCE HAHA, LET ME CALL THAT OL' RASCAL NOOK!"

And that was it, dear diary. In the span of an our we had traded our entire life's savings for a couple tickets to Nowhere.

But it wasn't that bad at first. I was actually psyched. "You go first, S!", I said. "You go and prepare a cozy spot for us. I'll reach you in three days tops."

And so we did. The next day, S kissed me goodbye, nothing but a backpack on their shoulders and hope in their eyes. "Plane's departing soon. I'll be waiting for you in our lives' next chapter, buddy."

So they went, while I stayed. I had too much stuff to do still, what with signing my temporary resignment as town mayor, packing up, saying goodbye to my citizens.

Then, 48 hours later, there I was, waiting to hop aboard on one of Dodo Airlines' rickety machines.

"Oh my, you won't believe how perfect it is here!" S' voice crackled assaulted my ears with a mix of squawking happiness and bad reception through my phone's speaker. "Weather is marvellous, and Sakura's are bloomin' and and and everything is just SO PERFECT!! There's so much stuff to do, and things to craft, and everyone is just SO DEAR!! They even threw a welcome party for the first residents, and there were confetti, and juice, and even a BONFIRE!!"

I found myself smiling as I left my old life behind and flew through the skies that would lead me to a brand new one. But my smile soon faltered as I stepped off the plane and onto Sleepwalk Island's wooden dock.

"Oh, you here. Finally. Fearless Leader's waiting for you."

"Allright," I thought as I followed Tim ad Tommy’s fuzzy shadows across the island and into a green tent, “they have never been the friendly type, but... is a hug really too much to ask?” I ignored my disappointment, telling myself that they must have been busy, like they always are, and let my face melt in a huge smile as I breathed in the familiar musk of wood and tanuki fur. 

“PT!! Such a pleasure to see you here, yes yes!“ Tom rushed towards me, paws extended, his eyes nothing more than a couple happy slits. “I heard of your arrival and boy, I couldn’t wait! Here, drink something and make yourself at home...“ He slapped a can of soda in my open hand and began explaining me the hows and whys of his new business venture, nodding with his usual verve. “... and from this terminal here you can order anything you want and have it shipped right at your door-- ahem, tent step! Isnt’ it great??“

I smiled, knowing full well there was nothing I could say or do to stop his tirade. “And look! This is my new workbench! You can use it anytime, and-- let me show you how it’s done!“

Twenty minutes later, I stepped back out into the morning sun, arms heavy with Nook’s patented survival bundle, head buzzing with info. 

“Awesome! I will repay this trifle of a loan by nighttime, and after that, this island will be mine! Oh boy, I can’t wait! It’s gonna be so rad!“ 

Or so I thought. 

Reality, in fact, was soon to smack me in the face. Hard.

You see, S had told me all about how they had been able to trade bugs and fish for much-needed DiY recipes. “And you’ll be able to craft lotsa useful stuff, like axes, and you’ll need those to find wood and get stones and iron from rocks and build so much amazing objects-- I just can’t even!!“

So, understandably, I was all set to seize the occasion and do the same. 

That afternoon, I stepped into Nook’s headquarters with a bucket of fish, looking forward to my bright future as Sleepwalk’s craftmaster, when...

“Oh. I see. well, buddy, I’m afraid I can’t help you at this time,“ Tom said, avoiding my gaze and preferring to stare at one of my flapping mackerels instead.

“What d’you mean?,“ I asked, wiping the sweat from my surprised face.

“Well, it’s kinda embarrassing, but...“ Tom scratched his head before continuing. “You see, every other person no this island came in here, trading their critters for recipes, and... there were more people than I expected and I didn’t take into account this possibility and...“ He sighed. “...I’m all out. I have no more recipes to give you, buddy. Sorry ‘bout that.“

I blinked more times than needed. 

“But... what am I supposed to do now?“

Tom shrugged. 

“You can still sell your catch to scrounge up a few bells, I suppose. Or you could keep some fish as pet, I dunno.“

“Yes, no, what I mean is...“ I looked around and gestured to the outside world.

“What am I supposed to do?!“

Tom cocked his head and bit his lip. Then, unexpectedly, he flashed me the biggest smile in the universe.

“It’s simple! ENJOY LIFE!“

He slid an arm around my shoulders and began dragging me towards the exit.

“You can fish some more, gather branches and craft a bug net, or-- or or, ehm, take pictures! Yes yes, pictures are nice, you can post them on Twitter and make all your friends jealous, and then Ireallyhavenoideaso GOODBYE FOR NOW!“

And just like that, he shoved me and my broken heart out of his tent and back into Sleepwalk Island’s untamed wilderness. 

Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. 

Still, I couldn’t stop now. I still had a debt to repay.

So, I took a deep breath and lunged into my activities. 

I spent the entire day fishing, and fishing, and catching bugs, and picking fruit, until the sun set, and the fresh night breeze began freezing the sweat on my skin.

I was beyond exhausted, dirty and disheartened. But I was ready, and, most importantly, furious.

The moon was high in the sky when I stepped into Tom’s tent, and found him alone, beer in hand, a stack of paperwork under his muzzle.

“Nook,“ I announced, voice low and gravelly with rage, “check your phone.“

“Oh, PT! I didn’t see you the--“

“Check. Your. Phone.“

I stared at him as he obeyed.

“Ah. Your debt is settled, I see! Now we can think about building you a home proper, yes yes!“ He was trying to hide his embarrassment behind a thin layer of businesslike enthusiasm, but I wasn’t having it.

“Yes, I want my roof blue, thank you. But that is not why I am here.“

I sat on a stool beside him and spread my fingers on his desk.

“Now listen closely, Nook. I did everything you told me. I spent the entire day chasing bugs and I caught so much fish I will stink like one for a month. Then, I took pictures. I took so many my thumbs are sore, and people are wondering wether I am planning to become a professional photographer. And now, here I am, same as when I started, doing ZERO progress cause guess what?!“ I could hear my voice raising in volume, but could do nothing to stop it. “There is nothing to do on this island. Nothing. I can’t craft anything, cause there’s no recipes. And even if I did, I couldn’t craft, or build anything, cause there are no materials for me to gather. But tell me the truth, Tom. This isn’t the same for everybody, is it? No... these things are happening to me and me only. Cause there is nothing for me to do on this island. Ain’t it the truth, Tom?“

When the raccoon looked at me, he did it with his saddest eyes.

“Alright, PT, yes. You want the truth, you shall have it.“

He drew a long, shaky breath and tossed me a beer.

“You see, bud, Sleepwalk is an island. And until not long ago, a deserted one at that.“ He cleared his voice before resuming.

“So, yeah. There isn’t much here. Literally. Resources are awfully scarce. And in order to thrive, you need as much as you can get your paws on, and at times, even that isn’t enough. Sure, people here might seem kind and friendly. But truth is, we’re all locked in a constant fight for survival. Every single one of us. Never forget that.“

“But... But I...“

But I am the mayor, I wanted to yell.

“You are the second human relocator, my friend. It’s a first come first served world, buddy... and you, I’m afraid, arrived a bit late.“

I do not remember walking out of that tent and into the darkness. 

I don’t even remember how I ended up on the beach.

All I know, is that I did not sleep last night, busy as I was hugging my tear-soaked knees, wrestling with that crushing realization. 

The realization that, on this island, I will never be anything more than... Player Two.

[bat-losers-inc]

Too Close for Comfort (Pt: 2)

Summary: Black Mask makes a house call to Jason and Tim’s apartment after Jason’s newest stunt against the False Facers. Jason realizes his actions now have greater consequences than before. A what-if fic set after Black Mask learns Jason’s real identity during Red Hood and the Outlaws Rebirth.

Pairings: Jason Todd / Tim Drake, Jason Todd / Roman Sionis (one-side), Jason Todd & Dick Grayson

Dick let himself into Jason’s apartment through the window off of the fire escape. Jason and Tim were on the floor, and at some point it looked like Jason had stripped the shirt off his back and bundled it up as a makeshift bandage. Now his leather jacket hung loosely off of his naked torso with one of Tim’s hands keeping pressure on the bandage at his ribs.

“Seriously, guys? Both of you?” Dick crouched next to Jason and categorized the various wounds between the pair based on their severity.  “I swear you guys do this instead of getting matching tattoos.”

He slipped the backpack around to his front and started laying out the first aid supplies on the floor next to him. Dick decided it was best to do the quick job first and deal with Jason’s injuries.

Jason flinched away from him, however, when he reached out with an alcohol soaked gauze wipe.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Jason.

He jerked his head towards Tim. “Do him first, idiot. I didn’t call you to dab at my scratches. He’s the one with the real wounds.”

“It looks worse than it feels, to be honest,” said Tim.

Dick took in Tim’s wounds and shared in Jason’s skepticism.

Jason grimaced. “Pay no attention to anything he says. That’s the bloodloss talking.”

“He has lacerations all over his torso. I’m going to need a second set of hands if I’m going to wrap his wounds. I know you’re worried about him, but this is how it has to go. You first, then him, sound good?”

Jason’s affirmation was less actual words and more of an apprehensive rumble. That was enough confirmation for Dick to get to work. If he got into the habit of waiting around for Jason to give him a real answer to any of his questions he’d be waiting all year. He’d come to learn that Jason was only ever comfortable enough to meet him halfway.

Dick shooed Tim’s hand away from where it was pressed to Jason’s side, noting the way that Tim’s thumb stilled its stroking motion against Jason’s ribs before he dropped his hand to the floor. Without the pressure of his hand to hold it up, the bandage over Jason’s ribs fell to the floor with a sodden thwap.

In the end, Jason was right. Once Dick cleared away the blood, Jason’s injury was nothing more than a few glorified cuts left to bleed out unattended while on patrol. It was an easy patch up job, and before long, Jason had one hand propped up between Tim’s shoulderblades to keep his upper body off the floor while Dick wrapped his stitched-up torso in clean bandages.

It was only later, after Tim was helped gently to the couch and Dick had joined Jason in scrubbing the blood off of the floors and walls, that Jason confessed to him what had happened to cause all this carnage.

Dick’s first instinct was to grab him by the shoulder and shake him hard enough to jar some sense into him. Jason must have sensed the anger that Dick was trying to keep in check, since he watched Dick with an intensity that stilled his other movements. Dick hadn’t seen Jason act this way around him in awhile. Not since the first time Bruce had brought Jason to live at the manor. Back when the wariness permeated his every action and spoken word, with Jason forever unsure of what the consequences would be if he said or did the wrong thing.

Dick had to stare hard at the floor, tinted pink from the watery mess that remained to be cleaned, to rein in the extent of emotions that washed over him in that moment before he could stand to meet Jason’s eyes again.

“How could you be so— so—” He stopped, trying to find the right word that would cover thoughtless stupidity taken to this extreme. Finally, he gave up.

“If you’re resisting the urge to punch me right now, don’t,” Jason reassured. “I deserve it.”

Dick glanced at him, considering his proposition, and stood up, tossing the dirty brush back into the bucket. “No, Jason. You want it, there’s a difference. You want it because it means you feel like you’ve taken your beating for your mistakes and can move on from this. But I’m not going to play your father with his belt reprimanding you for doing without thinking.”

Jason dropped his brush and stepped towards him, anger flashing across his face. Dick couldn’t tell what the cause of it was. The mention of Jason’s dad? His own instinct to defend his actions? Or a last ditch effort to provoke Dick to violence? Whatever the reason, Dick halted him with a shake of his head.

“I get it, you made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But, what happened here tonight? Make sure you never have a repeat incident because I refuse to come here and patch up wounds inflicted in your own home. The secret identities, the safe houses, the security systems… all of those things are in place so that those villains we fight in the streets at night don’t follow us into our own homes.”

Dick gestured sharply at Tim who was silently taking in the scene from the couch with one hand resting against his bandaged chest. “Tim could have died tonight. You could have died. I could have lost two brothers in less than an hour because you didn’t think it was necessary to tell us your identity had been compromised.”

Jason’s hands fell open at his sides. “What do you want me to say, Dick? Do you really think any words that come out of my mouth now are going to make it better?”

“I do,” Tim’s answer drew Jason’s undivided attention, though his eyes were on anything but Tim’s face.    

Dick shook his head again. “I’m gonna go take a walk. Try to sort out this mess while I’m gone.”

The slam of the apartment door seemed incredibly loud to Tim in the newfound silence of their apartment. Tim chewed at his bottom lip, minding the cut on one side, and looked at Jason who now stood with his back to him, scratching at the dried blood on the wall.

“You know,” said Tim, “he’s angry at you because he knows you aren’t stupid. You’re rash at times, but you’re smart enough to evaluate a situation before jumping into it. I know this, and he knows this, which is why he can’t figure out why this shit show happened. But, I have a feeling this would have happened whether you’d told me about Black Mask or not… and I don’t blame you, Jason.”

Jason’s palm struck the wall. “Well you should. I should have told you about Roman.”

“Yeah,”  said Tim. “you should have.”

“So, stop with this Mother Teresa bullshit and tell me how you really feel. Be angry.”

“I was angry before,” replied Tim, “when Roman showed up here, when I realized you and he had a whole fucked up history that you never spoke a word about to me. When Tony was throwing me across my own home… I was fucking angry. But, what I’m feeling now isn’t anger. Not when you look like you’d rather die than look me in the eyes.”

“So, what then? Pity? Is that what I get from you?”

“Honesty.”

“What?” Finally Jason’s eyes found their way to Tim’s face as confusion flickered across his features.

Tim rephrased himself, honing in on the newfound calm he felt in the wake of his previous anger and panic. “You want to know what I’m really feeling right now? I feel like I want an honest answer from you. Besides those one hundred apologies that you promised me earlier. I think that’s the only meaningful thing you can give me right now.”

He waited a beat before asking, “So, why didn’t you tell me that Black Mask knew who you were? Why didn’t you tell me he might come after me to get to you?”

Jason opened his mouth ready to answer and hesitated. “You’re not gonna like my answer.”

Tim wasn’t sure if that was a preamble to his big confession or a last ditch effort to avoid answering. He couldn’t tell what Jason was thinking at the moment.

He nodded slowly, taking that comment in and attempting to prepare himself. “I’m almost positive that I won’t. But it’s obviously important if you felt you couldn’t tell me.”

You’d think he was asking Jason to chop off his pinky finger or something with the way he was obviously psyching himself up. It made Tim uncomfortable enough that he almost wanted to put an end to all of this. Forget that it had ever happened. Then he remembered he was laid out with a collection of new stitches and stamped down on that urge. Jason could handle a little more discomfort.

“That’s the thing… It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell you, it’s just that I shouldn’t have had to.”

Tim blinked at him, his calm demeanor evaporating in an instant. “I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time figuring this out. So, either you’re saying you didn’t care enough to tell me there was a threat on my life, or you, what, thought I was fucking psychic?”

“Neither, Tim. Fuck, see now you’re pissed at me again! Let me try to explain—”

“Please do.”

Jason perched himself on the couch cushion adjacent to Tim. He steepled his fingers and Tim watched the way he rubbed one thumb against the other while he spoke.

“You’re right to say that Roman and I have history, and yeah it’s fucked up. But his interest has only ever been focused on me. For a long time I thought we had an unspoken agreement that, whatever moves we made against each other’s operations, we wouldn’t bring other movers into the mix. If one of us was going to be killed it was going to be by the other’s hand and it would be done properly, without all those ploys and games that the Joker likes to play with Batman.”

Tim’s sudden spike of anger was dwindling again, but it wasn’t quite out of his system enough to stop his next comment from slipping out. “Well, whoopie for you. You’re stalker villain has rules for how he’s going to beat you. Don’t rub it in.”

Jason didn’t look too haughty at the moment.“Don’t worry, I’m not. Since it seems like he’s thrown out the rule book now and is playing dirty to get back at me.”

“He had to come here and beat me up to even the score?” asked Tim, “What kind of logic is that?”

“I left him for dead,” responded Jason. “The last time we went up against each other, I had the chance to kill him and I didn’t take it. I left him there to rot and I think that by coming here tonight he wanted to make me feel just as helpless as when I left him lying there paralysed.”

That uneasy feeling that had been gnawing at Tim’s insides made a sudden reappearance. “He was in our bedroom, Jason. And you should have heard the way he talked to me about you. Kept calling you ‘our boy’ like he was proud to share you with me…  I don’t think you pissed him off, Jason. I think when you didn’t take the easy way out… didn’t kill him… you piqued his interest and now he wants to make the game a little more interesting by bringing me into it.”

“Oh God.”

Tim could see the moment when the full weight of what that entailed sank in for Jason as he pressed his face into his hands. “Roman… He said I kept you from him. Like he owned you now. I’m going to have to kill him, aren’t I? That’s the only way to keep him from going after you.”

Tim hadn’t even heard anyone enter the apartment until the door closed. Dick pressed his back against the door behind him, but it was clear from his thoughtful expression that he’d been standing there listening to the end of their conversation.

“No, you won’t.” He replied from across the room.

“Oh, yeah genius?” snapped Jason, “Why’s that?”

Dick crossed his arms. “Because, someone else is going to make sure this never happens again.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jason snapped. “I know you can’t be offering to take out Black Mask for me. You don’t love me that much.”

It took Tim a stupidly long time to catch on, for while Dick was speaking Tim was busy envying his older brother’s ability to keep his composure under trying circumstances and wishing he also possessed such a skill. Even after Tim repeated Dick’s words in his head, he peered closely at Dick, not entirely sure he was suggesting was Tim thought he was suggesting.  

Dick’s confirmation was sealed with a small smile and his searching glance up at the ceiling and the tops of the bookcases.

Tim shook his head and turned to Jason with a fond smile. “You’re stalker villain has rules and boundaries. Mine doesn’t.”

Jason’s brow crinkled. “Why are you smiling like that? Is this like… late onset stockholm syndrome?”

“I know you’ve got security video feed for this place,” said Dick, stepping further into the apartment, eyes still hovering around for hidden cameras. “Send it to Ra’s, pack up your bags, and find a new place to crash before shit hits the fan.”

Jason glanced between Dick and Tim, unsure. “Are we really gonna do this? This is inviting a shit load of trouble for us down the road.”

There really wasn’t anything like the prospect of unleashing one Gotham villain onto another to help move people past their previous disagreements. It was almost impossible for them to stay mad at each other, even Dick was grinning when a few minutes ago it looked like he wanted to punch Jason’s face in.

Tim shrugged. “Who’s to say Ra’s wouldn’t have found out about this anyway and acted on it. He’s horrifyingly possessive when it concerns things he has a personal stake in.”

Jason gave a startled laugh. “Oh man. Roman’s never gonna see him coming. Say ‘hi’ to Ra’s for me, yeah?”

“You really don’t want me to do that,” said Tim. “He literally called you a curse upon this world.”

Jason was already up off the couch, tossing belongings into an empty duffel bag. He stopped to address this issue, gesturing broadly with the hand that clutched his bloody shirt. “I don’t know what his problem is. Honestly, I’m a delight.”

Tim rolled his eyes and pulled up his security feed on his phone.

[lilred-fighting-hood]

Battle Buddies (1/3)

I really liked writing the last BBAU so I wanted to write another! Hope you like it ♥♥♥

Original - 1/3 - 2/3 - 3/3

“Battle Buddies,” Jack greeted the pair, using their newly christened team name, “your mission today is to infiltrate the Funhaus gala, locate their arms dealer, and take them out, covertly.”

Jeremy and Ryan shared a grin and Jack smiled proudly. “Do your best to stay undercover; a good alias is reusable because the more you make up, the harder it is to keep track,” Jack warned. After both men nodded in agreement, Jack saluted them, prompting them to stand and salute back. “Come back alive,” he said, dismissing them.

On the walk back to their dorm to pack their stuff and get ready to head out, Jeremy ran a self conscious hand through his hair - colors at odds with his olive green uniform. “Is it too much?” he asked, frowning. “It looked good on paper and I think I look good, but it’s not the most covert of styles.”

Ryan shook his head. “You do look good, but maybe not a repeatable look.” He ruffled the younger man’s hair. “How about after this mission, you shave your head?”

Jeremy laughed, chest unclenching and self doubt lifting a little. “I’ve always wanted to try it, so best of both worlds.” Jeremy turned to his partner. “Thanks, buddy.”

Packing took less time than they thought, and they were on the road to their hotel within the same day. After checking in and doing a sweep of their room, they changed back into their flight suits, too used to the loose fitting clothing and not keen on getting their gala outfits dirty as they prepped their weapons.

“Silencer?” Ryan reminded Jeremy as he locked his own onto his pistol.

“Got it,” Jeremy replied, double checking that his was on correctly. “Knife?”

“Knives,” Ryan corrected, sheathing them at his lower back. “Let’s go.”

---

They arrived in separate cars to move more independently. Despite their long history of successes, Jeremy felt the pre-mission jitters set in. He flashed an invitation to the doorman, who welcomed him in and motioned to the wet bar. “Enjoy the party, Mr. Tim.”

“Please, my name is Rimmy,” Jeremy responded, tipping him a $20 and a wink. As he walked down the steps to the main floor, he grabbed a glass of whisky from the bar. He took it with him as he walked the length of the first floor.

The target was a blonde woman, code named BlawnDee. Not only did she have an international weapons cartel called Rooster Teeth, she herself was a boxer, so going toe to toe with her would be unfavorable.

“Anything yet?” he asked into his comm, raising his glass to his lips to cover the movement of his mouth.

“Nothing,” came Ryan’s immediate reply. He was leaned on the fifth floor’s railing, looking down at the presentation stage which was currently empty. The main event would happen in a few hours, so they had until then to take BlawnDee out. “Do you see any of the main crew?”

There was a brief pause when Ryan took a sip of his diet Coke and waited for a response. “Rimmy?”

“Found her,” Jeremy whispered, downing his drink in one swoop and leaving it at a waiter’s table. “She’s going up the stairs to the second floor.”

Ryan looked at the main staircase and spotted her. As he began walking to intercept her as well, she turned to the side and whispered to another woman at her side. “She has bodyguards,” Ryan said.

“Aw shit,” Jeremy said, catching sight of a stern looking woman with black hair. “They weren’t in the mission report.”

“Meet me at the bar to figure out how we’re going to do this,” Ryan decided, making his way to the elevator.

The doors began closing and an elegantly manicured hand stopped it. “Sorry, going down too!” The woman had bright red lipstick and a catlike grin. The doors closed behind her and she remained in her spot next to the button panel. “Are you enjoying yourself so far?” she asked politely.

Ryan smiled, channeling the personality of his alias, James. “I am,” he said.

“Hope you’re ready for the main event,” she mirrored his smile before slapping a hand on the STOP button. The elevator jolted to a stop and Ryan nearly lost balance. The woman slammed a fist where his head was, brass knuckles collapsing a panel of the wall.

Her knee came up right after and Ryan managed to block with his forearms. Something shiny caught his eye on the floor; the bronze name tag read Ruby. She stepped back to grab Ryan by the collar and he just barely managed to twist out of her grasp.

“Do you always assault party guests?” Ryan asked, reaching behind himself to draw a knife.

“Only the ones who are going to cause trouble.” She squared up to him and threw a right hook. The brass knuckled sailed by Ryan as he ducked to get into her space and throw off her rhythm.

His hand to hand training kicked in and he swept his knife up in an arc that cut the front of her shirt. A thin line of blood sprayed up between them and she knocked his hand away and headbutted him. Ryan saw stars and the knife clattered to the floor.

“My shirt,” Ruby complained, teeth bared. Pressing her leg between Ryan’s, she shoved him backwards and used her foot to stop him from being able to catch himself.

The back of his head hit the elevator hard enough to make his teeth click together. Thoroughly disoriented, she moved to make the killing blow, picking up the knife he used on her earlier. Ryan’s vision swam and his eyes focused on the button panel to his left. “Nothing personal, man,” Ruby said crouching to press the knife to his jugular.

Before she could make contact, he lunged and hit the STOP button to jolt the elevator again. As she lost balance, Ryan swept her feet from under her and drew a second knife to stab into her stomach. She gurgled and spit blood at him, stabbing the knife in empty air. Her eyes darkened and she threw the knife in a last ditch attempt to hit him.

It sailed true, nailing Ryan in the shoulder. He hissed in pain, ready to strike back when he saw her slumped on the floor, dead. He pulled the knife out and re sheathed it at his back. Thinking on his feet, he opened the service hatch on the back wall and pushed her body through. Just as he reclosed it, the door dinged open and he quickly walked out, thankful no one was waiting for the elevator. He power walked directly to the bar, snatching Jeremy by the back of his shirt and dragging him to the restroom.

“We’re compromised,” Ryan said as they went in and locked the door behind themselves.

[dipulb3]

How Trump allies stoked the flames ahead of Capitol riot

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/how-trump-allies-stoked-the-flames-ahead-of-capitol-riot/

How Trump allies stoked the flames ahead of Capitol riot

As 2020 faded into 2021, some of President Donald Trump’s most influential supporters — among them members of his inner circle who were in direct contact with the President — spoke in ominous and violent terms about what was coming on January 6.

Even as anxious eyes turn toward the Inauguration Day on January 20, the words of these firebrands in the leadup to the riots at the Capitol raise crucial questions about the relationship between the rhetoric of far-right figureheads and the violence that unfolded on January 6.

“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon, Trump’s former top White House adviser, promised listeners of his podcast — called “War Room” — on January 5.

“We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” he added, “and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you will never take back our country with weakness.”

Soon after, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, killing a police officer and assaulting others before charging inside — some carrying weapons and zip-tie handcuffs.

“What we have is influential, powerful people influencing the President and pushing out messages that are radicalizing large chunks of the population,” said Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer for the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit organization that monitors extremism around the world. “It’s very dangerous.”

To be sure, as a rule most speech that doesn’t convey a direct threat or incite “imminent lawless action” is protected under the First Amendment.

But experts told Appradab they believe Trump and his most visible allies bear a great deal of responsibility for stoking the flames that led to the January 6 uprising.

“When you are an adviser to a President, formal or informal, you need to think about the impact of anti-democratic rhetoric,” said John Hudak, an expert on governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “And the President himself, and a lot of the President’s supporters and certainly his children, seem to believe that it is responsible for a President and his advisers and family to be anti-democratic. That’s a real problem. And we haven’t really experienced that in our history.”

Trump has already paid a historic price for his words, with the US House on Wednesday voting to make him the only American president to have been impeached twice — this time for “incitement of insurrection.”

But while much attention has been paid to Trump’s words in the run up to the breach of the US Capitol, less talked about is the fiery rhetoric of his most high-profile champions.

Bannon and Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. Stone rejected Appradab’s questions as “defamatory attempts to say that my belief in God and my view of the last election in apocalyptic terms is somehow inciting violence.” Alexander argued he had “no involvement in the breach of the US Capitol.”

Flynn attorney Sidney Powell, who herself is facing a defamation lawsuit over her claims about the election (she’s denied the allegations), insisted that Flynn “encourages patriotism and lawful political action,” and to suggest otherwise is “absolutely ludicrous.”

Bannon’s menacing metaphors

In the weeks between the election and that day, Bannon and his guests and co-hosts on his “War Room” podcast relentlessly promoted conspiracy theories of election fraud and cast the fight to overturn the election results in war-like and often apocalyptic terms.

Bannon’s menacing metaphors first landed him in hot water a few days after on Election Day, when he suggested in a video that posted to several of his social media accounts that, if he were in charge, he wouldn’t merely fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and Anthony Fauci — the US government’s top infectious disease expert — but would put their heads on pikes “as a warning to federal bureaucrats.” Twitter permanently suspended his account.

In December, Bannon’s co-host tweeted a video of Bannon speaking on “War Room” overlaid with cinematic music and dramatic images from the famous D-Day battle scene of “Saving Private Ryan.” In it, he spoke of the “moral obligation” Trump supporters have to “the kids that died at Normandy.” He added that if they allow Biden — “that feckless old man” — to win, “I want you to explain that to the 20-year-old kid in the first wave on D-Day.”

On December 28, Bannon insisted that patriotic Trump supporters had to be ready to fight in the spirit of George Washington’s soldiers during the American Revolution and American soldiers on D-Day in World War II. “That’s our DNA, that’s where we come from,” Bannon said.

Bannon began promoting the upcoming DC protests of January 6.

“l’ll tell you this,” Bannon said the day before the riot. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is, strap in … You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”

The podcasts also pointed to close coordination with Trump’s team. “You and me were talking almost every day, many times, you know, 10 times a day,” Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn said to Bannon on December 28.

Meanwhile, a senior Trump adviser confirmed that the President and Bannon have been in communication in recent weeks, discussing Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election.

‘You either fight with us or you get slashed’

Just before Christmas, Alexander — a political activist who has organized pro-Trump rallies, including one of the demonstrations that converged on the Capitol lawn on January 6 — used violent metaphors to hint at what was to come in January when speaking to followers of his livestream channel on the social media platform Periscope. In his freewheeling monologue, Alexander credited Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster” whose 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump’s commutation in July. (He was given a full pardon in December).

“This is something Roger and I have been planning for a long time,” Alexander said. “And finally, he’s off the leash. So, you know, it’s a knife fight and your two knife fighters are Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, and you either fight with us or you get slashed. So I’ll let you guys know more about what that means as we evolve.”

Alexander has helped turn the “Stop the Steal” slogan that Stone launched on Trump’s behalf during the 2016 primaries into a rallying cry for conservatives around the country.

At a DC rally on the night of January 5, Stone took the stage clad in one of his trademark pinstripe suits as a dance track titled “Roger Stone did nothing wrong” blared from the speakers.

After repeating the falsehood that the election was stolen from Trump, Stone, 68, rallied the faithful with an us-versus-them battle cry.

“This is nothing less than an epic struggle for the future of this country between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil,” he said. “And we will win this fight or America will step off into a thousand years of darkness. We dare not fail. I will be with you tomorrow shoulder to shoulder.”

Stone also has bumped elbows with extremist groups, most notably the Proud Boys. In September he endorsed the congressional candidacy of Nick Ochs, who founded the Hawaii chapter of the far-right organization. Ochs, whose bid for the US House came up short, was arrested for his role in the Capitol siege. Law enforcement was alerted to it by the photo Ochs posted on Twitter of himself enjoying a cigarette in the building, and by the comments he made to a Appradab reporter.

Long a dispenser of supercharged rhetoric, Stone was not muted by his recent run-in with the law, and was talking about election fraud even before November.

In September, he went on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, InfoWars, and the two mused discursively about “fake ballots,” Big Tech and the Clintons.

“If someone will study the president’s authority in the Insurrection Act in his ability to impose, impose martial law,” Stone said, “if there is widespread cheating, he will have the authority to arrest (Mark) Zuckerberg, to arrest Tim Cook, to arrest the Clintons, to arrest anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

War analogies abound

For his part, Jones has joined “Stop the Steal” efforts since the November election and used inflammatory, dark rhetoric to bolster the movement’s false claims.

Two days after election day, Jones said, “We are in the attempted overthrow of our country.” When a guest on the show mentioned people showing up in person to protest the counting of votes, Jones drew a comparison to World War II.

“It’s like when Hitler was bombing London, most Brits were against a war because they had World War I. But once Hitler bombed them, over 95% said let’s go to war,” he said. “This is a war. This is not regular times.”

Jones did not respond to Appradab’s request for comment.

Also employing war analogies is another beneficiary of Trump’s pardon powers — Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

Speaking to a fired-up crowd at the DC rally on January 5, Flynn — who was pardoned by Trump in November after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian diplomat — managed to pack election-fraud conspiracy theories, violent innuendo and a call to action into a couple of sentences.

“In some of these states, we have more dead voters than are buried on the battlefields of Gettysburg, or the battlefields of Vicksburg, or the battlefields of Normandy,” he said. “Those of you who are feeling weak tonight, those of you that don’t have the moral fiber in your body, get some tonight because tomorrow, we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.”

Much of the rhetoric leading up to the riot has been draped in the language of existential threat.

Speaking at a January 6 rally just before the siege, Rudy Giuliani — Trump’s personal attorney — spoke in grandiose terms about the stakes at hand.

“This is bigger than Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s bigger than you and me. It’s about these monuments and what they stand for. This has been a year in which they have invaded our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom to move, our freedom to live. I’ll be darned if they’re going to take away our free and fair vote. And we’re going to fight to the very end to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

His mention of “trial by combat” was cited by the New York State Bar Association, which has launched an inquiry into Giuliani to determine whether he should be expelled from the group.

“Mr. Giuliani’s words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election’s outcome to take matters into their own hands,” the group said in a statement. “Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power.”

Experts concerned that incitement is far from over

John Scott-Railton, a researcher at University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who now works with others to identify extremist groups who were part of the Capitol mob, said the rhetoric plays into the fantasies of armed protesters who have been gunning for a civil war.

“They’re ready — it’s what they’ve been prancing around in the woods, playing dress up, preparing for,” he said. “I’m just terribly worried that they weren’t satisfied with what happened on the sixth, and they’re going to come back for more.”

As for Bannon, the tenor of his podcast took a turn once the violence started unfolding.

On the morning of January 6, before the rally and march on the Capitol, Bannon echoed Stone’s words by saying the day would be a battle between “the children of light and the forces of darkness.”

But the podcast’s tone shifted sharply as footage of the violence at the Capitol was broadcast nationwide. Even as Bannon and his co-podcasters continued to describe Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor, they absolved Trump and themselves from any responsibility for fomenting violence.

“What’s going on right now was choices made by individuals who are fed up with what they’ve seen happen,” said right-wing activist Ben Bergquam on a War Room episode later that same day. “When I’m talking to people on the ground, that is what I’m hearing over and over and over again, it has nothing to do with President Trump’s words.”

Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said anyone paying attention knew the events on January 6 would be a magnet for angry people. The violence of extremists, he added, has historically been sparked by a fear that something is being taken away — be it a White majority, guns or a way of life.

“Whether it’s illegal or not, people have gotta know better,” he said. “You don’t have to be a genius to know how people are incited by words.”

Appradab’s Nelli Black, Scott Bronstein, Bob Ortega, Benjamin Naughton and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.

[chronicbatfictioner]

Fast Car - Chapter 16

Damian Wayne, Bruce's son, was a... well, as far as Jason was concerned, Damian was the kind of kid Jason's grandpa would wash his mouth with soap with. Only Damian did not know cusswords so much. Apparently, he was raised until he was 10 by his mother in the Middle East in a royalty-like environment, in which he was taught that he was a royal. Like Bruce, he was bestowed with intelligence and quick wit. Unlike Bruce, who was raised in the US, he has no notion of congeniality and could come across as a bully.

Jason understood how he and Tim would clash spectacularly. Tim has no patience for those who has no empathy.

"Todd," Damian greeted him as he walked in to the garage. "why are you bringing Drake into this? He is of no use for anybody." he added.

"Because, Damian," Jason started, ushering Tim into Dick's hand as the latter started to open the boxes of Chinese food they'd ordered, before Tim could snap back at Damian. "I loved having him around, even if he doesn't like to get his hands dirty. I loved having him around to remind me of things I might overlook, even if he doesn't know a thing about cars." he said, spreading his tools around the car. "Now, Tim and I, we go way back. Right now, he's here to feed me spring rolls and dumplings." Jason glared at Damian, partly challenging the boy to argue, partly closing the argument.

Damian's scowling face morphed to that of slight confusion, then to a more confusion, then - apparently - he had an epiphany. "You're lovers." he stated.

"Yes. Problem?" Tim retorted.

"None with Todd, just with you." Damian shot back.

"Oh nooo, no, no, no. It's lunch time, and I don't want problems until-- oooo... next century. Preferably after I'm dead or apocalypse happened or something." Dick interjected, walking between the two warring factions blithely. "If you two won't get along - or at least be civil - I'm sending you both to the corners. Separate corners!"

"That's one in Manhattan, one in French Quarter - corners. And I'mma be helping him impose order." Jason quipped. "Now come on over here and give me my dumpling, Timbo," he added as he removed the car's AC compressor. Tim scowled at Damian. Hard. Damian responded with a spectacular scowl that would've sent lesser man running the other way. But Tim just sat on the car's roof, which put him roughly at Jason's head's height, and started feeding the dumplings to Jason. Both Jason and Dick warily eyed Damian, who crouched on the toolbox that Jason was using; and neither would admit they'd respectively released sighs of relief when no further battle cries uttered and/or acts of sabotage insinuated.

Within an hour, the service work was done. Damian questioned a lot, and actually didn't protest when Tim answered some of the questions instead of Jason. Food was had, and somehow, Damian and Tim ended up bickering quietly - with no signs of actual battles - over a tablet, researching for components of air conditioners for the car.

"That--" Dick thumbed them. "--should we get ahead of ourselves and call 911? You know, they could still end up killing each other..."

Jason chuckled. "Naaah, they'll be good. Neither would have the last say on the component, no? I would." he pointed out.

"Yeah, I hope so." Dick smiled ruefully. "They're actually pretty similar."

"Actually, yeah." Jason agreed. "Just... less drama and tragedy for Damian, I think - knock on wood. But they are. I'm quaking at the thought of them getting along and plotting to conquer the world."

"Dude, you and me both. I think Bruce would, too." Dick chuckled. "Anyway, fun day, on Bruce's credit card. You think you have it in you to bring those two to the skating rink?"

Jason looked at Dick contemplatively. "I'd first asked him out at a skating rink." he confessed quietly. "I was working there. It was closed about a few months later. Haven't been in one since then."

"Welp, I don't see what would go wrong with reliving the memories, no? He's okay, you're okay."

"Yeah, okay. Let's." Jason decided, couldn't find the argument to that logic.

It took forty minutes in the rink to make Jason remember why he wasn't at all sad that the ice skating rink he'd worked at was closed.

He was on the ice, sliding easily while most people who'd seen him coming would give a wide berth. Tim hung on to him, laughing merrily as they made their way toward Damian. Dick was at the concession stand, ordering them hot chocolate. Damian was mostly sliding alone, a little carefully as he got used to the rented shoes.

"Watch it, kiddo!" Jason shouted instinctively as Damian veered into his way. He barely managed to swerve to avoid crashing into Damian and/or make Tim crash, too.

"Eyes on the road, man!" Tim scowled as he passed Damian, too.

Somebody else commented something that made Tim skidded to a halt and released Jason's belt, nearly catapulting Jason to a faceplant for the sudden lack of weight next to him. As he turned around in confusion, Tim was already face-to-face - almost literally - with a rotund man with shaved head. "Take that back!" Tim snarled. "You goddamn take that back and apologize or I'll send you home cryin' to your momma!"

"What." Jason breathed as he approached Damian.

"He wished me and 'my people' to go home," Damian huffed, his face stern, but there was an air of resigned dejection in his pose.

"He said all immigrants should go home." Tim elaborated, snarling. "I think he's right, all of you immigrants should go home. We Miagani people would really like to see a loser 'immigrant' like you white boy to go back to your caves, stop soiling our lands."

"You're not.. you're not..." the man spluttered, uncertainty creeping up to his expression.

"Oh yes I am, boy. My father's name is Drake. But my mother's maiden name is Galavan. Remember? If you're a true Gothamite you'll know that name well. The last Shaman of the Miagani tribe who was never sent to a reservation. Oh, and this boy. His great grandma happened to be one Catherine Van Derm. Know who she was? No? Well, she was the granddaughter of the last Chief of the Miagani tribe. That makes this boy the actual true native of Gotham. For your info, Miagani people, like most native tribes, are matrilineal. 

"You, buddy? You're just a sore loser who can't see those with different colors than you thrive and be happy. We don't need people like you here. So why don't you go home, from where your ancestors came? Oh what's that? You don't know because your ancestors were outcasts? Yeah, I figured as much. Those whose ancestors came here to look for a better life usually aren't as petty and repugnant as you are - picking on a child..."

The other man's face was, in Jason's opinion, showing some very interesting shades of red. Tim's mouth was merciless, Jason knew that from a good long while ago. But the other man definitely didn't look like someone who'd give up without physical violence. So Jason started to shift - he could step in, if needed.

Dick approached from behind the man, and waved a badge right over the man's face. "No property damage is done here, yet, buddy. So I suggest you leave." he said, almost sweetly. "Unless, of course, young Mr Wayne wishes to file charges of hate speech?"

Damian glared at the man, then at Tim, and drew himself up. "No need, Officer Grayson. I reckon this man has experienced enough enlightenment via Mister Drake's history lesson to repeat his behavior; or to experience further enlightenment through my lawyers."

Jason almost smirked when the rink owner, previously hovering around, pretending to be invisible in the face of imminent ruckus, promptly made his way toward Damian, cooing, "Oh, Mister Wayne! That is so generous of you! I'd say it's time for you to leave, sir," he glared at Tim's opponent. "If you do not leave on your own, I might have to ask Officer - what was your name again...? --Grayson here to escort you out, and I will file a complaint against you."

Jason watched as Tim sidled toward him, half dragging Damian along with a tug on his sleeves. Damian followed, haughtily thanking the rink owner. Dick approached them about five minutes later with glasses of hot chocolates. "Courtesy of the rink owner, Mr Wellesley, for 'that lovely young Mr Wayne. My! He looked like his father!'- quote-unquote." Dick said, grinning.

Damian looked a little subdued, still. But after a gulp of hot chocolate, he turned to face Tim. "Thank you, Drake."

Tim blinked at him. "No need," he shrugged. "I hate bullies."

"I concur." Jason said. "The first time I met him, he chewed the asses of the teachers who were bullying me."

"Really?" Damian asked, looking interested.

"Oh yeah, they were calling me learning disabled because I'd been living on the street for a few years and didn't catch up on schoolwork, see. And Tim just like, 'no he's not and you teachers were stupid wrong' - only with longer words. Needless to say, I didn't end up in the Special Needs classrooms, and eventually graduated with 3.70 GPA."

"I don't believe people are stupid. Just either disinformed or misinformed." Tim scoffed.

"That's the same thing." Damian said.

"--or uninformed. I'm not done." Tim scowled at him.

"Regardless, I'm just amazed you'd stand up for Damian." Dick interjected.

Tim glared at him as if he was the stupid one. "I stand up for injustice. I may and will forever fight Damian over intellectual matters, but not because his skin is darker than mine. Besides, my skin is like, twenty shades lighter than even Jason's." he pointed out.

"...and that you were both Miagani descendants." Dick chuckled. "You're like, tribe-brothers, then."

"Oooh... might want to stop right there, Grayson..." Jason warned, suddenly having an epiphany on how the war between Tim and Damian would continue.

"Technically, I would be a closer descendant because it is from my father's side." Damian intoned.

"Ooooh, no, no, no... you're wrong!" Tim scoffed. "You see..." he started, and glared as Jason groaned out loud, and Dick face-planted onto the table. "what??"

"Stop." Dick groaned. "Just. Stop."

"I agree. Joy and goodwill to mankind, boys." Jason agreed, lifting his cocoa mug. "If either of you continue this argument, I'll pour this cocoa to your head."