“So, How Long Have You Been On Earth?” Asks M’gann And Kaldur Doesn’t Have Time To Think Of A

New fic: There's a fine line between a custody battle and a bar fight

Part 4 in Stay series

Word Count: 3,261

Summary: There’s a new assassin in Gotham. She’s clever, well trained and utterly ruthless.

She’s also a child.

Batman is, of course, chomping at the bit to adopt her. Too bad for him that Selina’s gotten a taste for motherhood through Tim and Damian.

A little friendly competition never hurt anyone though. Right?

Bournemouth feels like it’s closing in on Jon.

Not in any special sense, merely in the way that anywhere you live becomes a little smaller for every year you spend there. The feeling makes him paranoid, it makes him feel too easy to find.

It’s an odd thought considering that there’s no one looking for him. That there’s no one to look for him. He doesn’t really have any friends and any relatives beside his grandmother are long gone. The only person concerned with Jon’s life is himself.

That isn’t quite right though.

There are people, sometimes. A woman with her hair pulled back into a severe bun who looks at Jon like she’s considering the best way to dump his body. Another woman, similar age, who’s covered in tattoos and smiles at him with too-sharp teeth. A portly man with blond hair and glasses just like Jon’s who stares at him like he’s a laboratory experiment rather than a person.

Jon finds the man particularly distasteful. The feeling his gaze elicits is primal and angry and vengeful in a way Jon doesn’t particularly understand the origins of but grips tight nonetheless.

“You should stop looking at me,” he tells the first woman one day when she has a book in her hands and keeps looking up from it as if to see what effect the thing is having on Jon.

“Why?” she asks incredulously, the word sounding like it’s said more as a reaction to his statement than a true question.

Jon turns his gaze upon her.

“I might start looking back.”

He says it like a threat even if he isn’t entirely sure why. The woman must take it as such because she arches an eyebrow and looks at him less like she’s planning how to kill him and more like she’s wondering if she actually can.

Jon leaves quickly. The words hadn’t felt like his own and he’s left suddenly unsure and self conscious. He tries to focus on the knowledge that’s been keeping him going through the last few months of Bournemouth suffocating him to drown out the unease. The offer is printed on a sheet of paper bluetacked to his wall and Jon feels his feet steering him home just so that he can stare at it until he feels like he can breathe.

It’s odd. He had never doubted that he would go to university, academia had always been where Jon pictured himself most comfortable. That had been until he received the email and was forced to spend a week in crisis over whether this might finally be his opportunity to actually know what happened that day with Mister Spider.

Jon takes a deep breath. Two months until he starts as a research assistant at the Magnus Institute, London.

Maybe then he’ll be able to get away from all these eyes.

After Conner finds out about where the other half of his DNA came from, once he knows that Superman might actually find a valid way to hate him one day, it would have been easy for Lex to slip into the shadows and leave the secrets Conner learned to torment him.

He doesn’t.

Instead he starts to visit. He texts Conner and asks if he would like to go to a diner after school. He calls Conner to ask how his day’s going. He smiles when Conner tells him that he taught Wolf a new trick.

If Conner didn’t know better, he might think that Lex was trying to parent him.

He assumes that Cadmus must have gotten something wrong. He guesses that he misunderstood what it meant when they put the thought that ‘parents look out for you and give you advice and forgive you when you yell at them’ because if he didn’t then-

Then Lex Luthor would be a significantly better dad than Superman. Which wouldn’t make sense. At all.

~

After about a month of visits and kind words and pats on the shoulder that make Conner feel embarrassed but so full of happiness he might burst, he decides to confess to the team. Partly because he hates lying to them more than anything in the world. Partly because he knows this is wrong and he knows that he has to stop before he says something he shouldn’t and screws everything up but if he’s ever going to stop he needs someone to tell him he has to.

So he confesses. And very pointedly doesn’t look at anyone as he waits for them to start yelling.

“But-” starts Artemis, soft in a way Conner’s never associated with her before, “but you’ve been happier.”

He finally looks up and instead of angry they just look sad and understanding and Conner loves all of them so much.

“Conner,” Kaldur says, calm and measured, “If Lex Luthor is your blood, and you want to get to know him, I don’t think that any of us would feel comfortable taking that away from you.”

Wally steps forward like he wants to reach out. “We all have adults we can talk to about all of this, it’s not fair that you don’t. We won’t tell on you man.”

Conner squeezes his eyes shut because if he keeps looking at all their earnest faces he might start crying.

“I’d never-” he struggles to get the words out, “I’d never choose him over any of you. I like him and sometimes he feels important to me in a weird way. But he’s nothing compared to you guys.”

“We know.” M’gann says.

‘We know’, they all say with their trust and their kindness and all the ways they’ve tried to make him feel at home since they came together.

Before he can leave to calm down somewhere with fewer people and more things to break he’s swamped by a tangle of limbs and reassurance and forgets why he wanted to leave anyway.

He really does have the best family.

Wirt and Greg learn magic: 1

~

After speaking the words of his first spell, Greg decides that he doesn’t like magic.

It’s a hard decision for him to make, because magic makes Wirt happier than almost anything else and Greg’s fairly sure that all the things that make his brother happy are good, but Greg doesn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. When he says the same words that he’s heard Wirt mumbling under his breath for the past few months something in his gut stirs with a feeling of wrong which makes his brain go fuzzy and scared until there are tears in the corners of his eyes.

Wirt doesn’t talk to him about magic after that. It makes Greg a little sad, because he worries that he’s ruined one of the only things that Wirt’s enjoyed since getting home, but he’s also very relieved. As long as Wirt keeps all of his magic away from him then maybe Greg won’t ever have to feel that awful feeling of wrong again and everything can go back to normal.

~

Things change a month or so later when Wirt asks him to read a spell.

“It’s different from the last one.” he says, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand he probably doesn’t realise still has sigils smudged across it, “I found it when I was looking into Auntie Whispers, not Adelaide, and when I read it I felt-” He shudders.

“Did it feel wrong? In your tummy?” asks Greg, so his brother doesn’t have to say it.

Wirt nods. He still looks worried even though he really shouldn’t and Greg takes the paper.

“You don’t have to!” says Wirt, panicked, “this was a bad idea, I shouldn’t have shown you this, I don’t want anything to-”

Greg starts to read.

He reads and instead of feeling something in him turn foul like he’d half expected, he feels… good.

As he speaks something that had been shaken out of place when he read that first spell slots back into place, something he didn’t even realise he’d been missing. He speaks the words and he likes the way they taste in his mouth and the way that as he says them he feels braver. He finishes reading and looks up at Wirt who’s smiling broader than Greg thinks he might have ever seen before.

“I’ve decided that I like magic.” Greg says with finality and it make Wirt smile even wider.

Batman by Sanford Greene

sketch batman ninja.

Head Archivist Sasha AU:

- You’ve heard of Sasha’s head archivist with Tim Martin and Jon as her assistants, but have you heard of Sasha’s head archivist, replacing Jon, with Tim and Martin as her assistants?

- Gertrude got killed ~4 years earlier than in canon. Elias gave Jon the job of head archivist almost as soon as he started working at the institute in a move which everyone, including Jon, found Very Weird.

- Elias thought it might be funky fresh to make Jon very isolated to make sure it would be easy for the lonely to get him in the future and hence gave him zero (0) assistants.

- Jon spends the next 4 years getting up to hijinks, becoming more and more isolated, gaining more trauma, and just Not having a good time.

- Jon stops being head archivist/disappears for reasons I am yet to decide on and Sasha gets promoted.

- Elias doesn’t have any particular plans to make Sasha The Archivist since he still reckons Jon is going to fulfill that roll and decides to give her some assistants when she starts running the archives. As a Treat™.

- Sasha is an excellent head archivist and her Martin and Tim are all Besties.

- One of them discovers a tape Jon made when he was Archivist. It implies some very spooky things about the institute as well as some of Jon’s fears about what Elias and the dread powers have planned for him.

- The gang collectively goes ‘oh shit’

- Shenanigans ensue.

yeah i love romance (the insatiable longing for god)

Robert Pattinson in interviews: Bruce Wayne is a slimy worm man. A stinky dirty bat. A mess. Emo. Greasy and gross. Seconds away from going feral and biting someone’s ear off.

Me, a Bruce Wayne fan: Yes, yes, this man gets it

people arguing over fanon vs. canon batfam is so funny considering the comics wouldnt know character consistency if it hit them over the head with a steel bat