Who Ran Your Childhood Alignment Chart Edition

I just watched the Batman 

Crew Swap AU

Commander Lovelace is having one of those few good days on the Hephaestus when Hera tells her that something’s docked at the airlock five

The crew scrambles, something they’ve been getting better at recently.

Those with firearms training head to the armory while Victoire and Kwan and Selberg go to the airlock where Lovelace knows they’ll be doing whatever they can to figure out what’s happening. In under three minutes the entire crew of the Hephaestus is gathered outside airlock five, mostly armed and entirely ready for a fight.

Hera can’t communicate with whatever’s on the craft but she can tell that there’s only one life form on board. Lovelace’s choice is either to let what just docked into the station, or to leave it hanging onto them like a leach on their oxygen.

Throughout her time on the Hephaestus Lovelace has grown to hate unknowns. They always lead to someone dying. It means that they have to deal with whatever’s clinging to them before they’re in the middle of the next emergency. Lovelace tells Hera to open the airlock.

Instead of aliens or monsters, what comes through the airlock is a man. He looks exhausted. His cheeks are sunken in and one arm is wrapped around his waist in an attempt to hold together what he can. His other hand holds a gun, shaking.

For a moment he looks confused, like he’s expecting people other than Lovelace’s crew to be there. Then his eyes lock onto Selberg and his expression turns murderous.

“You.” he rasps.

Lovelace lets herself look away from the stranger and at Selberg for a millisecond, it’s all she needs. Selberg looks scared. He looks terrified. The man that Lovelace can barely get to listen to her is stood, staring in abject horror at a man who’s barely holding himself upright.

“No.” Selberg whispers, eyes wide. “No, you died. I watched you die.”

“Really Doc?” says the man through gritted teeth, “I thought the whole point was that I wouldn’t be able to do that any more.”

And then his eyes start to glow.

Well, Lovelace thinks, cocking her gun as Selberg drops in a dead faint, maybe it is an alien.

“I trained someone once.” Shadow Weaver says, in a rare moment where they aren’t actively fighting each other. “Before you. Before Adora.”

“What were they like?” Catra asks, unsure.

“Powerful.” Of course she says that first, it’s the only thing that really matters to her. She thinks on it a moment longer. “He was a decent student, but sometimes lacked motivation.”

It’s possibly the most personal information Catra has ever learned about about Shadow Weaver and she feels herself grow tense. It must be building to something, Catra has never known Shadow Weaver to do something without purpose.

“You are all the things in him that I hated.” she spits like the words are acid in her mouth and the sudden sharing mood makes more sense now. Hurting Catra is the one thing Shadow Weaver actually does do without purpose.”It’s important to me that you know that.”

Catra nods and keeps thinking about all the ways she can make everyone who’s ever hurt her feel like she does.

this is genuinely just me trying to be @shanastoryteller

From the very first time Adora transforms she feels a power sing through her and knows it will be there till the day she dies.

Then she realises that that might not be true, because maybe she can’t die any more. The concept of mortality seems small now. Something for lesser people, the ones she can squash under her heel like ants. Eternity doesn’t seem like such a long time with the power of the hidden stars that are as old as forever humming through her veins.

She wonders if she should mention any of this to her new friends, how even when she isn’t transformed she can feel the universe revolving around her. She thinks back to Catra turning away from her (because somehow somehow somehow Catra just knew). Instead she just hopes that the life she could spend with these people might last an eternity all on its own.

It all starts in English, as a surprising amount of things in Wirt’s life do. They’re reading poems and eventually come to one called ‘The Beast’ by a woman named Adelaide which is too familiar for Wirt to ignore.

The moment he gets home he starts to research the author. He reads about how she and her sister almost died when they were young, around the same ages as Wirt and Greg are now. He reads accounts about how both of them changed after the accident, how they became estranged but always shared an intense interest in the occult. He reads about the children found in Adelaide’s basement after she died.

That last part makes him cry for a long time.

Even though he hates Adelaide, and he now knows that it’s the same Adelaide as he met in the Unknown, he can’t help but keep reading about her life. Finding out that someone other than himself and Greg made it out makes him believe that a life after the Unknown might be possible, that this isn’t just a dream and he’s going to wake up any moment to fire and heat and smothered in the Beast’s soul.

And then there’s the witchcraft. As far as Wirt knows, Adelaide and Auntie Whispers are the only people in the Unknown who could do magic. Finding out that they went there when they were younger makes him wonder if maybe having escaped the Unknown in the past is what gave them their abilities. He wonders if the same rules apply to him and Greg.

So Wirt looks into the occult. He tries not to get too interested in it, he doesn’t want people to think he’s some kind of weirdo, but he likes it. He likes the patterns and the sounds and the way that when he reads the words out loud they make him feel powerful in a way he never has before.

Wirt asks Greg if he wants to read the words as well, once. When he repeats the same words that Wirt has said to himself a thousand times his eyes go watery and he has to spend the next hour hugging Jason Funderburker close to his chest.

Because of this, along with a thousand other things, Wirt worries. He worries because his brother is the best person he knows and he wonders what it says about him that something that makes the best person in the world cry makes him want to shout out in exultation.

Wirt worries so much that he thinks his head might explode and leave everything dripping with the black sludge of fear and unease and worry that lives in his head.

But he doesn’t stop.

~

Wirt is in his room, alone in a sea of hand-written notes and books on the dark things in the woods that he used to be more afraid of. He sits in front of a mirror covered in sigils drawn on in whiteboard marker and encircled in candles.

He waits for the clock to strike midnight and recites the same words he’s said a thousand times before.

The air in the room gets warmer as he speaks. The air twisting and writhing with the forces upon it. It’s all confusing and chaotic and not at all how things in the real world tend to be.

It’s how things in the Unknown tend to be.

Wirt tries to keep his focus, he tries so hard to make the words do what he wants them to that for a moment he forgets to be scared or nervous or worried at all.

The candles burn brighter. The mirror cracks.

Wirt smiles, and manages to picture a life for himself after the Unknown for the first time since he got back.

happy pride from your local queer robin :]

Anyway, happy birthday, Timmers

Carpenter walks up to a near complete mark of the wither tide, Faulkner muttering incoherently at its centre, and scuffs it with her boot.

Faulkner looks up with crazed eyes the moment she alters his masterpiece. Carpenter grips her shard of glass tighter and feels it cut into her hand. Blood drips to the ground and Carpenter suppresses a bitter laugh.

One last offering to the Trawlerman.

“You should run, Carpenter,” Faulkner warns, his voice quavers but not with anything so mundane as nerves. His body can barely contain his excitement, the fervency of his devotion. His gaze sharpens and Carpenter balks as she feels the water surrounding the pier pulse in rhythm with his heartbeat. “I’ve told you before that it would be unwise for you to test which of us our god loves more.”

Carpenter's pace as she walks through the wither mark, bad leg dragging against the floor and destroying all Faulkner’s hard work, does not change. She remains steady and is rewarded with a voice that does not quaver as Faulkner’s does. “You know as well as anyone that I have never proclaimed myself to be wise.”

Faulkner huffs out a laugh and Carpenter smiles a familiar smile. It drops as she remembers what she’s about to do. Faulkner must see it and mirrors her expression before his eyes go distant.

“I suppose we’re soon to part ways then?”

Carpenter pauses for a moment. “That would not be an unreasonable assumption,” she allows.

Faulkner nods as if this is the only answer he had been expecting. “Well then, I suppose if we are to end this as enemies, we’d best do it as the sort who love each other.” As he speaks Faulkner daubs himself in the marking of the Trawlerman once again. The mud from the last time he did so still stains his skin but the marks he paints now lose no clarity because of that. Once he appears to be finished he turns away from the prayer marks that have been gradually consuming his body to meet Carpenter's eyes. “May your peace find you on a lonely road."

Carpenter swallows dryly, suddenly very glad of the reminder Paige’s parting words had given her. “May your peace walk on with you for a while.”

She and Faulkner exchange sad smiles. Then Carpenter is raising her glass and running towards Faulkner as fast as her broken and bleeding legs will carry her. Then Faulkner is readying his stance and screaming his prayers to the river with more conviction than Carpenter knew a human voice could contain. Then Faulkner is raising his hands skywards and then-

~

The river rises

The river rises and it is not a flood as was written. As Nana Glass told stories of. As Carpenter dreamed would seep upwards to drench and drown her doubts in silt.

The river rises and it is a tsunami.

~

Carpenter, limping and shattered and shaking, is faster than her river.

She reaches the centre of the wither mark, reaches Faulkner. His eyes widen a bit as she does so, as if he can’t quite believe that his river would fail him in his moment of triumph.

Carpenter has known her god far to long to think it reliable.

She plunges the shard of glass into Faulkner’s left eye. He screams in pain and Carpenter mutters a quick prayer that his death will be quick, there is little else she can do for him at this point.

Then Faulkner manages to stop screaming, keeps his cries of pain trapped in his throat and lets something different flood out.

“You should have aimed for the prayer marks,” he hisses, teeth bared as blood drips down his cheeks in a crimson tide.

Shit.

There isn't much she can do after that.

~

-crashing waves full of weeds and bracken and crawling angels of the river. Water filling her lungs and mud wriggling into her eyes.

Something twists her leg. A thing with claws that are too huge to be any crab or lobster that Carpenter can't see through the filth of her god.

The pain is huge and impossible but even as tears fill her eyes Carpenter finds it in herself to be grateful. Of all the ways her river knows how to do harm this is perhaps one of its least awful.

She wonders if it’s a boon. A final thank you after her years of faithful service. Considering what she’s done for her river Carpenter finds this to be a rather weak acknowledgement of her efforts and stops feeling grateful.

Then she’s crashing tumbling through dodgem cars and her river is a whirlpool with her at its centre and if she could just breathe then-

~

When Carpenter wakes up, it’s to her shock that she’s still alive.

This is better thanks of my service, she thinks in the direction of her river. She sits up with a grunt of pain and begins to inspect the damage.

Her leg is fucked. It’s no longer bleeding but in a cruel twist of fate it’s been sanctified. The flesh is hard and rough. Calcified. Carpenter can feel layers upon layers and limpets, with other squamous things sandwiched in between, clinging directly to her bone.

Where her new flesh meets her old she itches.

There’s also the fact that she has no idea where she is.

Or, maybe she does. That patch of bulrushes looks sort of familiar and she’s sure she heard this same bird song she's hearing now at some point during her and Faulkner’s pilgrimage.

She drags herself upright and finds that she can put weight in her new leg even if it makes her somewhat unsteady. She hobbles about the bank, moving inland.

Then she sees the body.

It’s not much of a body. More like a skeleton, picked clean by birds and angels of the river alike. Despite the fact that it’s lacking most of its distinguishing features, Carpenter knows in her soul that this is the body she and Faulkner saw near the beginning of their pilgrimage. Right before everything started to go to shit.

Carpenter let’s out a harsh laugh as she realises this, the sound of her torment echoing across her still and silent river.

“You’re telling me that was all the god damn exposition?” she screams at her god, angry tears blurring her vision.

Her river doesn’t answer her.

Carpenter sighs, it’s not as if she expected anything different. She picks herself up and starts trying to figure out what to do now.

She laughs again, gentler this time. She bets that Faulkner is doing the exact same thing.

of course he’s the kid you wanted, dick thinks, he says, he yells because he is eighteen and so full of hope for life that he forgot about the chains he put on himself that drag him back to bruce’s stupid fucking cave no matter how hard he tries to break free of them. and he’s tried to run away, he’s tried and tried and tried, from the very first fight he had with bruce when he was a burnt-out cluster of stars in the shape of a nine year old boy to two weeks ago, when he realized that there are papers that turn jason peter todd into jason peter todd-wayne. jason peter todd-wayne likes going to school and helps alfred cook and actually enjoys doing weapons inventory and reads books curled up in the big armchair next to the mahogeny desk in bruce’s chamber of an office. dick did backflips on the chair for all of ten minutes before bruce’s quiet scribbling and the walls full of books felt like they were closing in on him, and he had to tumble down the steps of the batcave and throw his body around the parallel bars just to keep his soul from ballooning out of his body with the need to move. jason made bruce smile the day his parents died in the alley his parents died in. jason is quiet enough to put bruce at ease but loud enough to fill the space and bruce loves him like a son. maybe bruce loved dick, but dick made him rub his forehead in exasperation and look over dick’s prescriptions every couple of months and slump with exhaustion after they spent a day together. dick made bruce tired, but jason made him smile, so dick bent his neck in submission and let the kid wear robin on his chest with pride. 

of course he’s the kid you wanted, jason spits out bitterly, the winds whipping past him and bruce on a rooftop like riptides carrying people to their deaths. he can pinpoint the minute his rage turned to hopelessness, because this new robin ran to the edge of a cliff and jumped off without a hint of fear, flying higher and higher until he reached the moon, until he reached the stars, until he reached the outstretched hands dick motherfucking grayson held out for him. dick held his hands out for jason too, but jason’s wings melted with the heat of dick’s stupid stupid stupid perfectness, and no matter what he did, icarus always fell. jason wasn’t an idealistic little annie with stars in his eyes; he braced himself for the burn the minute bruce took him into wayne manor, because rich white men always want things and jason spent months waiting to find out what bruce wayne wanted. the answer was companionship, the answer was someone to protect and care for, the answer was a child to love as his own, which was so hopelessly pure that jason’s skin felt bleached by it. tim’s skin didn’t have to be bleached by it. tim had skin as white as porcelain and eyes like shattered diamonds and an aristocratic little accent that jason could practically see jewels and precious metals dripping off of, his wealth and privilege locking jason in place like the midas touch. jason was a kid bruce picked up off the streets, and even though he’d spent his life knowing that he was smart and strong and clever enough to earn robin, to survive the league, to be red hood, there would always be someone better, someone worth more, someone who fit the robin mold like they were melted and poured into it. so jason snarled and screamed and broke down as loud as he could, because he thought he meant the world to bruce, thought he was his son, but tim was a much better son than jason could ever be, and jason didn’t just outgrow those pixie boots, his feet grew so big they tore them to pieces, and he’d never be able to wear them again.

of course he’s the kid you wanted, tim says to himself, on the precipice of turning his entire body into an ice-cold sculpture near unbreakable with the fire of emotion and letting the tears that had bubbled up into his throat burst out with all the fury of a supernova. tim had chip, chip, chipped away at himself until he’d become the perfect partner, the perfect robin, because that’s all he ever wanted to do. he wanted to be useful, he wanted to work for something with his own two hands and have earned his victory, he wanted someone to tell him they were proud of the work he had done. but tim had fucked it up, he’d fucked it all up, because he hadn’t been able to accept nearly everyone he loved being ripped from his greedy fingers, and all of the satisfaction he got from crowing about how he was right and how bruce was alive and they brought him back because of him turned to acid in his mouth because of the things he’d done to get there. damian was broken too, damian was shattered into so many little pieces that the shards pricked dick all over and made him bleed until damian was seeped into his skin so deep that dick didn’t have any other choice but to love him. tim was just fractured. he had bold lines running across his skin, a map of his strengths and things he overcame and survived turning into a map of his failure, and splinters running across his soul. a streak for trying to clone conner, a streak for mutilating the robin costume with his own grief, a streak for letting ra’s come as close as he did to compromising tim, a streak for not being able to convince cass to stay, a streak for getting kicked out the window and letting himself fall, letting dick believe he’d known he was there and quietly wishing that dick hadn’t gotten to him in time. damian, for all his faults, had only ever tried to claw his way up with bloodstained hands to morality and kindness and good, somehow ignoring the siren call that was the league at his back. so, with a silent and motionless tantrum as violent as someone locked inside arkham, tim screamed at the unfairness of it all, at the audacity of it all, but let himself become accustomed to the r sitting on damian’s chest.

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Why don’t tumblr people watch robot wars? Like a bunch of homemade scrap metal death machines beating each other to pieces? There is both a flame pit AND a catapult? People watching their creations being absolutely MAULED and then having to completely rebuild this complex robot in like 10mins before their next fight? I thought you people would be on this already smh