#they get to have a hostile relationship while doing league of assassins stuff

[havendance]

Reborn era in the helena dick roleswap au I think Tim probably gets Morrison-ified in Batman and Robin because he's the one who becomes Batman (see themes of primogeniture (firstborn son kind)) while Dini writes Helena as part of his rich gotham family history/politics storylines because she's filling Bruce's shoes in the roles of society darling and butting heads with Tommy Eliot while Tim's having a million and one breakdowns about taking on the Batman mantle and being a mentor to Damian (who respects him not at all) and also probably having a very awkward relationship with Stephanie Brown because I don't know if everything that happened at the end of the Robin run happened in this universe, but at minimum, he's Batman which is going to put in cramp in anything. I kind of think it shouldn't have happened so that the number one issue that's causing a cramp in their relationship is not 'Batman told me to blow you up and now you're upset and don't want me to be a vigilante' but 'kissing Batman is really weird and also you're dealing with your grief poorly and we're both different in these new mantles and its' hard to navigate.'

[lookatthisdork]

Case Study: Cassandra, Damian, and Tim

I read Batman: Gates of Gotham just now because my library happened to have it and it actually includes Cassandra (!). It might also be the last substantial appearance of Cassandra/Black Bat in the Post-Crisis canon (!!!). Naturally, I have to wax poetic about it with panels and long diatribes concerning batsibling relationships.

Context: Gates of Gotham (GoG) is a five-issue limited series published in May 2011, making it a very late addition to canon before the New 52 launched around September. At least, I’m pretty sure this is a canon story. Scott Snyder got first billing on the cover, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this story was prototyping some of the stuff for the Court of Owls.

But who cares about canonicity when we get Cass, Damian and Tim all interacting in the same book?!

(Quick shout out to renaroo who did a breakdown of Cass and Damian in GoG back in 2016. Go look at it! I’ll be reblogging it before this post as well.)

(TL;DR at the bottom.)

For clarity, our main cast is Dick as Batman, Damian as Robin, Tim as Red Robin, and Cassandra as Black Bat. Stephanie, Jason, and Barbara do not appear; Bruce puts in a very brief cameo at the end.

GoG immediately establishes that Batman and Red Robin are working on an explosives smuggling case together, and within a few pages elaborates Red Robin’s also in close contact with Black Bat. Dick admits he didn’t even know Cassandra was in town until she pops up at home base, which makes sense; Cass at this point in canon operates out of Hong Kong, so Dick has no immediate reason to know what’s she’s up to. Tim, on the other hand, is completely unsurprised; apparently he’s been working the case with Cass before he brought it to Dick’s attention.

So in the very beginning of GoG, we have a three-way team-up that started as Black Bat reaching out to Red Robin, who then contacted Batman. Which, honestly, I think is cool? Cassandra went to Tim first when the smuggling left her territory - I’m already getting warm fuzzies about the implied working relationship.

In the same page as Cassandra’s entrance, we get Damian and this super telling panel:

Now, I’m pretty sure that the way Dick is saying “I’d recommend minding Damian” is implying that this is Cassandra’s first real encounter with the kid. We are seeing history in the making here, folks. Or we would be if Cass hadn’t been reset in the New 52.

Then we get the next page:

Notice all that visual distance between Damian and his siblings in the first panel as well as the way he’s rendered creepily in shadow in the second. It’s a rather isolating composition choice, portraying Damian as the outsider while his siblings are comfortably close together, enjoying a dynamic that existed before he joined the family. No one told Damian to stay back, but no one’s encouraging him to come forward either, so the distance kind of settles in.

I would also like to point out that when one of his siblings does look back towards him, it’s Cassandra, not Dick.

Skipping forward through plot and stuff, we next get Black Bat and Robin watching over the Iceberg Lounge. Whoo, team-up! There’s a lot to parse here.

Robin makes it clear he’s not thrilled with being on the Penguin Protection Detail (makes sense in context) before we get all of this:

Wow, okay, Damian, calm your jets.

Let’s break this down. Damian starts with saying he’s heard about Cass specifically as “Black Bat” and as the one “destined to lead the League of Assassins to glory.” I find it super interesting that Damian focused on Cass’s League connections rather than her career as Batgirl here; is Damian still using the League as a marker of quality and ability like he would have before he was Robin? Or is Damian making an indirect link between himself, the other League kid, and Cass? Could be both...personally I’d say both.

There’s a beat panel of Cass after Damian says that first bit - I included it here because the timing seems intentional. I doubt Cass is super proud of her reputation in the League, so I think the beat is a bit of hesitation, a bit of her wanting to avoid this becoming a proper conversation.

Then we have “I have to admit -- I’m not impressed.” And Cass specifically looks over at Damian rather than ignore him (contrast the beat panel).

The thing where Damian says Cass should stop giving him condescending looks...oh boy. I’m 98% sure Damian is barking up the wrong tree here. Actually, 99.9% sure. He’s reading condescension and hostility where there really isn’t any to be found, and the ensuing defensiveness is causing him to lash out with his own condescending remarks. “I’m not the one Father relegated to Hong Kong. Maybe there’s a reason.” This is both super rude and greatly undersells Cassandra’s skills, but it’s more a reflection on Damian’s own insecurity with his position that this is the insult he throws at a fellow Batsibling.

Cass, for her part, does not engage with the insult. She turns the other cheek, reminding Damian without explicitly reminding him that they’re on a job. That said, her stoic reaction doesn’t necessarily mean that Damian’s dig doesn’t bother her. In fact, I think her next conversation with Tim indicates that it does bother her.

Think about the context - what Cass would have said first - that Tim’s response was “Trust me -- I’ve wanted to kill him more times than I can count.” Granted, Tim is taking his dislike of Damian to it’s logical extreme here, but it sounds like he’s commiserating with a Cass that is more than a little put out by an unwarranted attack on her person. 

Which, leads us right into Tim and Cass in this arc. I’ve only read a little bit of Tim, but I’m getting the impression that he’s the type of person that shit-talks about people he or someone else is angry with (eg Damian) in the company of people he trusts (eg Cassandra). Since Cass is kind of pissed at Damian, Tim shit-talks about him on her behalf - like when one sibling has a bad breakup and the other sibling goes off on a “why I never liked that person” rant. Not the best coping mechanism since it can easily turn into nasty gossip (and that’s still your little brother, Tim), but that’s what he’s doing in this panel. 

And rather than correct him and dismiss Tim’s own very real frustration OR agree with him and feed into the unhealthy dynamic, Cassandra listens without passing a final judgement. Maybe I’m reading too much into her “hm” here, but I’m translating it as “I see what you mean, thanks for sharing” - not a “yes”, not a “no”. Good older sibling middle-ground, basically.

Right after that, we have Cassandra complimenting Tim’s problem-solving skills.

Which? This is so sweet? “It’s what you do. You’ll figure it out.” “It’s part of your niche. And they all know it.” Cassandra has this easy faith in Tim to figure shit out, and Tim’s not quite grasping how deep her faith goes. I will never get over my positive Cass-Tim relationship, okay? More fanworks need to capitalize on this. 

After this there’s some bombs. While Batman deals with his own elsewhere in the city, Robin tries to disarm the bomb in the Iceberg Lounge while Black Bat evacuates. 

He doesn’t succeed, which leads to this:

(Middle panel is Batman - ignore that one)

Two things here: 1) Robin does not want to give up, even when it’s very clear that he’s completely out of time. 2) Black Bat gave him as much time as she possibly could (there’s one second on that clock, guys) before picking up her little brother and bodily removing him.

Aftermath:

This might be my favorite scene with these two. Damian is angry, frustrated, and he feels like Black Bat forced him (allowed him) to fail. Meanwhile, Cassandra reminds him that she doesn’t care about failure because what matters is Damian is still alive. Here’s Damian who had a chance to prove himself, apparently blew it, and is now getting huffy with his rescuer. And here’s Cassandra pinning him to the roof, making him listen as she reminds him that he doesn’t have to prove himself, she loves him and just wants him to live.

Cass is best big sis, is all I’m saying.

And when Damian is at a loss, his default MO is to take parting shots at whoever’s around.

And hey, having Dickbats in this last panel, let’s mention a few things about him.

Here’s his thoughts about the whole bomb situation:

“When I was Robin, I always thought I could be as good as Bruce was. But now...I’m standing in the debris of his tower and I can’t help but thing -- he would never have let it get this far.”

(Dick has a problem with holding himself to impossible standards and building Bruce up in his head.)

And Dick’s thoughts on Tim:

“Even as Tim explains what he found, I can’t stop thinking about how much I rely on him. He’s a better Robin that I ever was. He’ll probably end up being a better Batman, too.”

(Dick’s still putting himself down, but at least we get Dick also having a lot of faith in Tim. Lonely Place of Living disagrees with the Tim-Batman assessment, though.)

Next up, Tim-Damian team-up! They both sound super excited about it [/sarcasm].

Yikes.

In defense of Tim, Damian is in full Undeserved Insult Mode here. We start with Tim’s refute of Damian calling Cass useless, then Damian calls her “spineless, naive and fragile”, and finally we have him calling Tim’s “eagerness to trust” a weakness. That’s three insults in as many sentences, two of which were aimed at a shared sister who Tim trusts and admires. Not to mention Cass saved Damian’s butt not very long ago while reassuring him that his “failure” to disarm the bomb was not his fault.

Damian is a kid, yes, but he’s also mature enough to run around Gotham and exercise judgement about how to balance lives as a vigilante. He really should be held accountable for the stuff that comes out of his mouth, and I can’t blame Tim for losing his cool.

That said, Tim is savage as fuck, holy shit.

“Well, deny it all you want -- but I think we both know the only real reason you don’t like her...is that she’s just one more person your father picked over you.”

Tim has a talent for discerning weakness in a person and exploiting the shit out of it to maximum effect. With Damian, this means using well-placed words to emphasize his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy next to his adopted siblings. It’s fucked up and not constructive at all - pointing out flaws like this doesn’t encourage Damian to change. But Tim doesn’t want Damian to change - he wants him to shut up.

Just look at his responses: a simple denial that Cass isn’t useless, a dismissal of Damian’s mistrust, and a piercing comment on his daddy-sibling issues. The first two responses are not necessarily rude - a sign that Tim’s not actively picking a fight - but they’re not invitations to talk or well-meaning corrections. When Damian says rude shit, Tim shuts him down and isn’t afraid to get nasty back. He has no interest in playing the part of the patient older sibling.

(Cue arguments about whether the onus is on Tim to give a damn, Damian to chill the fuck out, or Dick/Cass/Bruce/an actual adult to sit these two down and reach some understanding. Personally, I think these two need a proper adult.)

That said, both Tim and Damian look out for each other while fighting, so their relationship could definitely be worse.

Coming up to the final issue of this miniseries, Cass and Damian work together to deal with a bigger version of the bomb from last time. The plan involves moving the bomb instead of disarming it. Importantly, Cass asks Damian to trust her and he does, without dissent or hesitation. I see progress!

Finally, Cass visits Tim, who was out of the climax due to a concussion. They have a short heart-to-heart thing, during which Tim kind of blames Damian for blowing up the Batboat while Cass defends that “we kind of did that together.” I don’t feel like posting panels of this scene, but it’s nice enough.

TL;DR: GoG features a rocky but promising start to Cassandra and Damian’s relationship before the New 52 erased it. Damian makes a bit of an ass of himself, but Cassandra has sufficient chill that they end this arc on a good note. I would be looking forward to more if not for the Orphan reboot, I will never not be salty about this.

Cassandra and Tim continue to have a strong relationship, trusting each other both professionally and personally. More people should explore this dynamic, and I’m looking forward to catching up on the canon between GoG and early Batgirl (aka where I actually am in my comic reading).

Tim and Damian continue to bring out the worst in each other. Swear to god, someone needs to just shove them in a closet with a counselor or something.

Generally, GoG was a fun read. Cass is mostly in-character, and I’m a sucker for self-contained Gotham stories with no crossovers and no weird magic/alien shenanigans. I’d recommend it.

[rorykillmore]

this next gift is for my friend jay! who is no longer on tumblr (the augers got him,) but i’m posting this here for him to save however he wants. jay left his request open and so i thought for awhile about what i wanted to do and settled on -- what better than a fic about our first important rp dynamic? naruto joining the legends may still be a plot in progress, but i wanted to explore a few snapshots of his relationship with them and sara specifically. so this is kind of? future-set? as will become apparent the more of it you read.

merry christmas, jay!!! idk if there are words to properly express how grateful i am to have met you and gotten to know you so well this past year. and i know it’s only been a year, so it really speaks to your character how quickly you’ve become one of my very best friends. you’ve always been there to support me and listen and be validating when i’m upset or frustrated, or just make me smile by linking me to some silly (or terrifying, CLICKHOLE) video. the trust we’ve built up is very rare in my life and important to me and i feel so lucky to know you and be able to share all our varied interests with each other (from saw to borderlands to cry of mann to dctv -- and of course, cube!). never forget that you’re a wonderful person and friend.

Child soldiers, Sara thinks dryly, great.  She supposes the League wasn’t much better, but at least she’d been old enough to vote before they started training her to kill.

“Wow,” Naruto says the first time he’s ever aboard the Waverider.  “Does this thing have a kitchen?”

Sara feels like that’s the point at which she should have realized she was in trouble. 

Honestly, the team doesn’t exactly need any more teenagers. They already have Gardner, and Maive pretty much counts, and Ratchet is along for the ride at least some of the time. It’s not that they can’t fend for themselves in their own respective ways, but they’re still teenagers, questionable judgment and poor impulse control and all, and looking out for all of them can be a little bit stressful especially when it’s just her and Newt.

Except Naruto, whatever else he might be, is brave, with a genuine sense of compassion and a desire to help other people. He gets along well with the other Legends -- Maive especially, which is a big plus in Sara’s book, all things considered. Worst of all, he’s eccentric, one-of-a-kind, a bit of a disaster -- just odd enough to not quite fit with the rest of the world, in spite of all his friendliness and easy charm.

In short, he was practically a Legend in the making even before she met him. She supposes she never really stood much of a chance.

The first time they bring him along, it’s to put a wrench in the plans of some time traveling rifter who wants to fuck with World War II (Why do they always pick World War II? Are there that many people running around who want to see the world overrun by Nazis? It’s discouraging, honestly). Maive suggests Naruto might be useful, and Sara can’t turn down the extra firepower.

So they go -- right into the thick of it, which means Ratchet has to come up with these bullshit holographic disguises for him and Maive. Sara tries not to laugh as Naruto lines them up for a picture with ‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ and ‘Winston Churchill’. It’s silly and dumb and out-of-this-world, and somehow, they all have fun. Even Maive seems happier and more at ease with the group when Naruto’s around.

And so, Sara relents, maybe it won’t kill her to keep him around.

Or (knowing the Legends in any universe) maybe it will -- but it just might be worth it.

“Is it normal for kids to learn to fight like this, where you’re from?” she asks her one day after Naruto’s talked her into some light sparring. He seems to like to make a game out of it -- his sparring style is eager and fun even compared to the non-hostile practice she and Rkorya do. It’s not that he’s not skilled, because he undeniably is -- it’s just that his attitude is different from the people Sara once trained with.

“Well, I mean --” Naruto pauses to scratch behind his head, and Sara clamps down on the instinct to take advantage of the casually given opening.  “Kinda? Most of the people I know have been training since they were...”  He seems to lose count, and shrugs.  “I mean, I guess it’s like -- how else would our villages protect themselves?”

Child soldiers, Sara thinks dryly, great.  She supposes the League wasn’t much better, but at least she’d been old enough to vote before they started training her to kill.

“Where’d you learn to fight?” Naruto’s question breaks through her thoughts, and she pauses.

“It’s complicated.” Somehow, she knows that answer won’t satisfy his curiosity. “The organization that trained me -- most of them weren’t very good people.”

And yet that part of her, the assassin trained by the League, still sometimes feels like the part she knows best. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that she’d gone running back to them when she’d felt she had nothing else to do with herself.

Naruto’s expression falls, and Sara tries not to grimace. “Look, there’s no reason to worry about it. It was a long time ago.”

“Still...” He frowns at her without trying to hide his reaction. “I’m, uh. I’m really sorry, Sara.”

The thing is, he doesn’t even know what he’s expressing sympathy for. The thing is, it’s not just what happened to her, it’s what she’d done. 

The thing is, even if Naruto knew all of those things, Sara gets the feeling he’d be no less shy about reaching out to her.

“Well.” She shrugs, because she’s still not very good at taking sympathy, but she doesn’t want to brush him off either.  “Whatever happened to us before -- it’s not an excuse not to move forward now. Right?”

“Right!”  Naruto breaks into a grin just as quickly as he faltered a moment ago. “I mean, hey, look at you now -- you’re a superhero!”

Sara scrunches her nose, but it’s half-playful. “Don’t use that word.”

Inaccurate though it may be, she can’t help but appreciate his sincerity. Naruto might belong with them because of his general ragtag misfit nature, but the reason he makes a difference -- it’s moments like this.  He doesn’t seem to have it in him to ever stop caring.

She gives him a brief, friendly nudge, and raises her bo staff. “Let’s get back to it.”

Leery as she may be of taking her team to the 80′s after the chaos emeralds incident, Sara will concede that they could all use a holiday vacation. That means picking a ‘fun’ decade, and it generally doesn’t get much more fun than the 80′s (well, okay, the 70′s, but a good portion of her team is underage). She lets them pick a few things they want to do - namely things that don’t involve too much more of Ratchet and Maive hiding, although Ratchet insists he can pull off a killer Madonna - and one of those things happens to be attending a real, authentic, 1980′s drive-in movie.

Their movie of choice? One of the original showings of Aliens.

Newt spends most of the time being concerned over the extinction risk to a foreign species ( “You’re thinking too much about it,” Sara keeps telling him, “They’re supposed to be evil aliens.”) while Gardner seems more intrigued with the technological aspects ( “Pretty inaccurate for the time period this is supposed to be set in. But cool.”). Maive, for her part, has found a new hero in Ellen Ripley, which Sara can’t help but consider to be the best thing in the world.

“Does she die?” she keeps murmuring. “Don’t tell me if she dies. She can’t die. She’s unkillable.”

“I’m... pretty sure she’s in other movies in this franchise?” Ratchet ventures. “So she probably doesn’t die. In this one, anyway.”

“Just so you know, Alien 3 isn’t worth watching under any circumstances,” Sara shoots back at them. “Ripley or no Ripley.” Her gaze catches on Naruto, and she tilts her head, amused. He’s sitting there in uncharacteristic silence, squashed between Ratchet and Maive, sporting one of the goofiest grins she’s ever seen. Sara’s not sure she wants to interrupt his experience, so she doesn’t say anything.

Maive, on the other hand, has no such reservations. “What’s with you?” she asks teasingly, nosing him.

“Huh?” Naruto’s eyes barely move away from the screen.  “Nothing! It’s just --” He pauses to soak in a particularly detailed action sequence, then finally steals a glance at Maive. “This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.”

It sounds nothing short of sincere, for all that Naruto is a trained ninja with a lifetime’s worth of experiences that Sara is certain are way flashier than this. She has to admit, it’s a little bit sweet. Even Maive pauses for a moment. Then --

“Wow. You really need to get out more.”

“Hey!”

“As if watching Ripley kick alien butt isn’t one of the coolest things Maive’s ever done, too.” Apparently confident in the distance Naruto’s currently putting between them, Ratchet calls her out. Then he looks at Naruto, and ears wiggle in a way Sara recognizes by now to mean that he’s a little apprehensive. “Anyway, I... kinda get what you mean. I never really got to do stuff like this, back on Veldin.”

Naruto gives him a friendly nudge. “Weren’t you a superhero even back in your world? Saving people and getting to visit different planets in a cool spaceship is still pretty awesome.”

Ratchet looks even more embarrassed, and Sara turns around again to hide her smirk.  Suddenly, she’s pretty sure it’s a kindness that Maive isn’t the one sitting between them.

They seem happy, she reflects as the banter fades away and they all get caught up in the movie again.  Happy is a concept that still seems a little too far out of her own reach, but if holding this team together means that these kids get to have something like this -- well, it’s worth it.

She really is glad they picked up Naruto, after all.

But things like this don’t last forever. No matter how important they are, or how much she wants to protect them. Sara knows this by now.

Maive is dead. Sara can’t get her lifeless form out of her head -- so starkly contrasting, so unreal compared to the energetic, alive Maive they all knew only days ago. She steels herself, in spite of everything, and gives her team what she knows they need to hear. That it’s going to hurt for awhile, but that they have each other. That they can come to her if they need anything. That she’s going to lead them through this, that they’re going to find Maive’s killer, and win her some justice (because they need something to drive them forward, and Sara knows from experience that revenge is an excellent motivator).

It feels hollow to her own ears. The strength she tries to lend them feels like a lie, because the moment she retreats to her office, she has a hard time believing any of it.

There’s just the loss. Another hole in her heart. She’s used to it by now, or she should be, but it’s different now that she’s captain. That she’s responsible, that there are a million things she’s telling herself she could have or should have done.

If she’s being honest with herself, well -- the big speech she called the team together for was as much to shield what she’s really feeling from them as it was meant to be a reassurance. They have each other - they have her, if they need her - but she’ll deal on her own.  She always does.

Still, she knows them by now, so she’s not entirely surprised when she hears a knock at the door.  She’s fully prepared to brush whoever it is off, to tell them to go get some rest --

“Sara?”

But somehow it isn’t Naruto that she expects, and it stalls her a little. She makes the mistake of looking at him -- she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him look so tired.

“What’s up?” she asks him dully.

He hesitates uncharacteristically.   “I’m... not gonna ask if you’re okay. ‘Cause I don’t think anyone is.”  He shifts slightly in light of her lack of response.  “But there’s something else I wanted to ask.”

Sara straightens from where she’s leaning against the desk, trying to look a little more attentive.

“I wanna -- help you guys find who killed her.”

The statement hangs there for a moment. She blinks. It takes a moment to process.

“I know I haven’t been hanging around with you guys for very long.” Naruto continues a little more quickly. “But she was my friend - she was all of our friends - and I’m not gonna let whoever did this get away with it. I know you have a lot to deal with right now, but I -- I just wanna help. I wanna help all of you.”

She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him sound so serious. She swallows, mulling over a response slowly -- more how to word it, because she already knows how she feels.  “I know.”

Naruto opens his mouth, closes it again, then blinks. “You do?”

“I’d already figured you weren’t going to stand by.” She shrugs, giving him a thin smile (or as much of one as she can manage). “And why wouldn’t I let you help? You’re part of the team.”

It’s Naruto’s turn to go quiet for a moment “I am?” He frowns, dissatisfied with his own uncertainty. “I mean, uh -- I just... didn’t know if it was official, I guess.”

Sara guess that somewhere amidst everything that’s been going on lately, ‘official’ has kind of slipped through the cracks. But the truth is, she accepted Naruto a while ago -- she’s pretty sure most of them have.

Moving almost makes the ache in her chest a physical ache, but she crosses the room and rests a hand on his shoulder regardless.  “You are,” she tells him, meeting his gaze levelly.  “And we’re going to get justice for Maive. I can sure as hell promise you that.”

The determination that flares in Naruto’s eyes is as good as an agreement, and this time, Sara thinks her own words don’t feel like quite as distant from the truth.