When is a person not a person?
It’s a question that plagues Zatanna. Or, maybe not even that. When does a person become a different person? When does the helmet on your head twist and twist you into someone new and old and different who doesn’t have a daughter at all.
Zatanna wonders if the word orphan applies to her. She wonders if she’ll ever figure it out.
“I don’t know.” Robin says when she asks, because during one of their chats he let slip that he really is an orphan. Two whole parents buried in their graves, no waking up. The whole shebang.
“I want to know.” She answers. It feels like a big question, the kind you need someone to answer before you can move on and do anything with your life. “I want things to start making sense.”
The word orphan makes sense. She even looked it up in a dictionary, all very clear cut.
“Whatever the answer is, you have family.” He smiles and Zatanna thinks about how sweet he is.
“Wally’s a lucky guy.” she says, half because she wants the conversation to turn a little less serious, half because it’s the truth. Robin turns a bit red and Zatanna absent mindedly starts thinking about what colour bridesmaid dress she would like.
“Shut up.” he groans, before turning serious again. “I don’t know what the right thing to say is, Z, but you’ve got to know that you’re one of us.”
Zatanna’s heart breaks a little even as she smiles. She does love the team, really she does. They’re bright and fast and beautiful and kind. They’re strong and clever and righteous and she does love them. It’s just that before she didn’t only belong with them. She had two places. She had a room in the mountain and a place by her father’s side.
It had made her feel whole, the duality of it all.
Maybe that’s why she packs a bag the next morning and conjures up a means of escape.
Every day with the team her soul shatters again. Every time she sees her father’s body, reduced to a vessel for a being that isn’t even kind, her heart breaks in two. Staying so close to reminders of all the things she’s lost isn’t doing her any good so she decides to leave.
Where’s the line between running away and escaping? she thinks, and finally there’s a question she doesn’t want the answer to.
Bruce I swear to god call them your fucking sons
Watching young justice and nothing is funnier than the justice league telling off the kids and captain marvel standing in the background trying not to act sus
DID YOU HEAR ABOUT TIM
Asdhovhoigdittekbbknc
Ren has been in love with Nora for as long as he can remember.
He’s aware that there must be a point when he wasn’t in love with her. Some point before the streets and the orphanages and their first school. A point when he was small with two living parents and not at all sure of himself like he is now.
It’s just that that time seems hazy. More like a dream than something that he lived through. Then he thinks back to being in love with Nora and suddenly his memories are in sharp focus, always with her at their center.
Ren has been in love with Nora for as long as he can remember and he’s been trying to figure out how to tell her for just as long. Nothing’s come to mind yet but, hey, it’s not like either of them are going anywhere.
Morgana and Merlin are in a cave together and they’re not fighting.
Neither of them are quite sure why. They’re definitely supposed to be fighting, but maybe that’s a reason in and of its self. Both of them have always been terrible at doing what they’re supposed to.
“We used to be friends.” Merlin says.
“You used to have a crush on me.” she snorts.
“Well you had a crush on me too.”
“I did not!” Morgana snaps. She manages to inject just enough offence into her voice that Merlin smiles at her a little like he used to before she learned how to hate.
“Well you would have if you’d known me.”
And, well, Morgana can’t say that he’s wrong exactly.
They keep not fighting. Morgana wonders if flirting is another word for truce.
Gwen would be characterised by anyone but herself as a prodigy with a sword. That would be, if she let anyone see what she can do.
She started beating Elyan when she was six. It took her far longer to beat her father for the first time but whenever she lost he would tell her that she just needed some time to get a little stronger. Some time to grow up.
Gwen beats her father for the first time when she’s fourteen. He smiles from where he’s lying on the floor with a knowing look.
“I told you so.” he manages, despite how winded he is.
She rolls her eyes and let’s the glow of pride set a fire in her chest.
~
Gwen is twenty-two years old and has been the Lady Morgana’s maid servant for a little under a year. She’s a prodigy at it and this time she does let people see. She spends all the time she has with Morgana and all the rest of it practicing with a sword in the forge’s yard.
It takes longer for anyone to notice than she thought it would.
She’s practising behind her father’s forge. Moving through the same jabs and cuts she’s repeated a thousand times before. It feels good, like it always does. It feels powerful.
“Well aren’t you full of surprises?” Lady Morgana calls wryly from the forge and Gwen almost drops her sword.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” she hisses, forgetting just about everything she’s ever learned about how to treat those of higher stations than hers. “Sorry.” she tags on the end, like that would stop a regular noble from having her beheaded for such words.
“Don’t be.” Morgana smiles slyly. “You could probably put Arthur on his arse with moves like those.”
Gwen is immensely lucky that Morgana isn’t a regular noble. “I’m sure that he would be a formidable opponent.” she says diplomatically.
Morgana grins, because she loves Arthur just like Gwen loves Elyan, but she isn’t meeting Gwen’s eyes and seems hesitant in a way that’s unlike her.
“Yes, milady?” Gwen prompts.
“I don’t suppose-“ Morgana’s eyes dart to the sword rack in the corner of the yard. “I don’t suppose you could teach me?”
Gwen smiles, relief flooding her. “Of course”
After all, it would hardly be proper for her to refuse a request from the Lady Morgana.
NEW FIC IS UP
Word Count: 21,432
Title: The Path to Being Known
Summary: When Tim and Cassie are still normal kids and Bart and Kon don’t even exist, the Justice League is defeated. The world that’s left has no alternative but to become something dark and twisted enough to defend itself.
Somewhere within the veritable hellscape that remains: Tim Drake finds Batman; Conner is informed that he has been created to kill Superman; Cassie Sandsmark is just trying to survive; Bart Allen opens the doors of his time machine to find himself somewhere a little later than he had been expecting.
I watched the Snyder cut and all I could think abt the whole movie is the concept of victor and barry going to uni together
I’ve been a fan of wolf 359 for YEARS and you have the AUDACITY to tell me that they put out Eiffels version of the lords prayer and NO ONE TOLD ME?!!!?!
The link
Blue Beetle | Gabriel Picolo