@ Everyone Who’s New Years Resolution Is To Go To A Professional Abt Their Mental Health: Ur Very Sexy

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.

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.

New fic: Creation Is A Curse

Word count: 1,315

Summary: “I could stop.” Bruce whispers, voice cracking. “I could stop making soldiers and turn them back into children.”

Alfred sighs, the frown lines on his face deepening with grief. “They would never survive it.”

Bruce knows it’s true. First himself, then the Joker and now his children. An aptitude for creating monsters has always been Batman’s greatest curse.

~

Fic under the cut

“You know I still love you, right?” Dick says. It’s not what Bruce had been expecting. At Bruce’s apparent surprise Dick rushes to correct himself. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate you. Sometimes I hate you so much that I don’t understand how I can still love you at all. But I do still love you.”

Bruce looks at him. He’s never been an emotional man and he doubts he’ll ever understand how Dick manages to stay one in their line of work. “I don’t know how you can fit so many feelings about me inside you.” he says.

Dick lets out a sharp bark of laughter. “You created me. How could I not?”

He says it like it’s obvious.

The fact that Bruce understands him completely makes it too painful to look at Dick for a moment so he turns to Tim, utterly focused on his training in the centre of the cave. It makes him think of other, potentially more painful things. “You don’t think I should make another Robin. Do you?”

Dick joins Bruce in looking over to where Tim’s training. The set of his jaw is determined and there are still specks of blood on his face from patrol. “You already have.” he says, the bite of grief colouring his tone.

Bruce wishes that Dick had given a different answer. His disappointment must show on his face because Dick turns to him and smirks, something mean in his expression.

“Don’t look so glum. I might even forgive you one day.”

He says it jokingly. Bruce prays for a moment that it’s the truth.

~

Jason is back. Jason is back.

Jason is back and he’s the Red Hood and his new favourite hobby is trying to convince Bruce just how much he hates him. As if Bruce doesn’t already know.

Jason is holding a gun to a man’s head. It’s a bad man, a man who has caused grief and suffering and hurt people in ways beyond what Bruce finds acceptable. But Jason has a gun to the man’s head and for some twisted reason that means that Bruce thinks the man is deserving of his protection.

The moment Bruce has processed all that, the moment that Jason can see that he’s processed all that, the trigger is pulled and the man drops dead.

“You did that.” Jason says with utter conviction. “You killed that man. I pulled the trigger but I’m only a monster because it’s what you made me.”

Jason is either far more or far less the man he was shaping up to be before he died. Bruce can’t quite tell which.

“I know.” he says, instead of any of that, “I know.”

~

An assassin has a knife at Bruce’s throat and for a moment he thinks that he’s going to die. Then he feels the spray of blood that isn’t his and the body behind him drops to the floor.

He turns to see Cassandra plucking the knife from the hands of the corpse she just made.

“I thought you didn’t kill any more.” he says, voice hoarse.

She shrugs. “Sometimes it’s necessary.”

“Did the League teach you that?” Bruce asks, hating the way disapproval colours his tone.

Cass looks up from the corpse and Bruce sees the frown of confusion between her eyes. “No. You.”

She disappears into the night before Bruce can say anything else.

~

Dick is a more dangerous man than anyone comprehends. Jason’s body count is rising by the day. Cassandra is training in Hong Kong to turn herself into an even better weapon than the League could. Stephanie grows more driven every moment, more set on becoming every bit as dangerous as she has the potential to be. The people Tim loves keep dying and it’s put a darkness in his eyes.

“How do you love creatures so vicious?” Talia asks.

“I doubt I could love anything else these days.” Bruce replies.

Talia hums. The clever part of Bruce’s mind thinks that he might have given her the answer she was looking for.

It worries him more deeply than he would like to admit.

~

“Sometimes I wonder if I would be a better person now if I had never been Robin.”

“I imagine that you would have spent that time with Barbara. So probably.”

Steph looks at him like she’s waiting for him to get angry. She should know better by now. For Bruce to get angry at his kids is an exercise in futility these days, it’s like getting angry at a concept.

She turns away and huffs. “I can’t believe I let you get your feelers in me. I saw how you changed Tim and I still didn’t realise that you can’t talk to a kid without twisting it into a weapon.” Bruce shoots a look at her and she shrugs, like her musings aren’t a dagger in his heart. “Welp. Guess that one’s on me.”

“Yeah.” Bruce lies. What else is he meant to say?

~

Bruce can’t stop looking at the scar on Tim’s neck. The one he got when a person Bruce created and still loves as fervently as ever decided that a grave would be a better home for him than the manor.

“Does it bother you,” he asks, “That I might be making you into him?”

Tim thinks for a moment. “Only when I’m mourning him.”

“And when’s that?”

He smiles, sad. “All the time, of course. Isn’t it the same for you?”

“Of course.” They grow silent for a moment before Bruce plucks up the courage to ask the question he really wants the answer to. “Does it scare you? That one day you might be someone’s monster.”

Bruce didn’t expect Tim to start laughing, but he does. Deep and whole and uncommon from him these days. Like Bruce just told a joke and hasn’t realised it yet. “Don’t you get it Bruce?” he asks once the laughter’s died down and become a little more manageable. Something about Tim’s expression is inherently wrong and Bruce feels his guard go up but Tim is too amused to notice. “I already am. I’m your monster. We’re all your monsters. You’re Doctor Frankenstein and, instead of sewing together bits of corpses, you’ve found children full of holes and stitched pieces of yourself to them rather than letting them grow.”

“What-” Bruce croaks. Something in his expression must look utterly horrified because Tim’s eyes widen and the good humour drains from his face.

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way!” he says, as if Bruce could possibly have taken that any other way. “I just- Don’t we scare you?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Wait, really?” Tim looks shocked, like Bruce just upended one of his most basic understandings in life.

Bruce worries that he has.

They don’t talk much for the rest of patrol. Both of them have too much to think about.

~

Bruce has a son.

There’s a boy who Bruce has never touched but is made from his flesh and bone and apparently that’s enough because he’s already as deadly as any of Bruce’s other children. It makes him feel sick so he leaps onto the idea that this is the League’s fault, that for once it isn’t on Bruce that a child has been broken and the remains have too many sharp edges.

“I didn’t make you. The League made you.” he says, clinging to a fantasy.

Damian huffs out a breath of annoyance. “Unmake me then.” he scoffs, “Tear me apart and shape me into something more like them.”

Make me into another of your monsters, he doesn’t say.

The ‘no’ is in Bruce’s mouth. He can taste the word, feel his tongue curling around the shape of it. But Bruce has done this far too many times to stop now and making monsters is all he knows.

“Okay.” he says instead.

The cycle continues.

wait if i dont post this now im just gonna forget to do it later. its not finished but LOOK its talia <3

small doodle

other actors: I sent live rats to my costars and drank sewage water bc I’m a method actor

rpatz: I played sonic everyday —but only the dark version— to really get in the headspace

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

This on ao3

There is someone in Duke’s room.

He’s in bed and had the bad luck of waking up facing the wall. He’s sure there’s someone in the space by his window but he doesn’t think he can turn over to try and get a glimpse of them without making it obvious that he’s awake.

“It’s obvious that you’re awake.” a voice calls from the space by Duke’s window.

Well never mind, Duke thinks, then, wait.

Duke knows that voice. He knows that voice significantly better than he wishes he did.

“Dad?” Fuck, he hadn’t meant to say that. That is not his Dad stood by the window.

Duke sits up and turns sees to Gnomon looking annoyingly pleased at the term of address. “Who else would it be?”

“What do you want?” he snarls, the effect likely ruined by the blanket still pulled up to his chest.

Gnomon tilts his head. “The question is more what do you want.” Duke is about to cut in with the fact that the answer is absolutely nothing before Gnomon continues. “There’s something you want to ask me.”

Oh. Duke hadn’t been expecting that. The problem is that he’s right, and Duke is possibly more annoyed about that than the man breaking into his room in the first place.

Duke sighs and comes to the conclusion that there’s really very little he can do about Gnomon being here. He may as well ask the question if the man is in a sharing mood today. “Am I going to die?” he asks.

Gnomon smiles, sharp and cruel and pleased, “No.” he says, and disappears into the shadows until Duke is alone.

Shit. That was the answer he had been hoping against.

~

Gotham is a city that shifts. It’s a city so heavy with cruelty that it crushes itself constantly, never able to settle into one shape or the other before something crumbles and it has to rearrange itself all over again.

It is not a city built with immortality in mind.

Duke wonders if he should leave one day. If forcing a level of change onto his life might make the rest of his existence endurable.

Jason laughs when he mentions these thoughts, loud and brash and maybe a little angry. The noise grates on Duke’s nerves and it makes him glad that he didn’t mention that the rest of his existence might be forever. “This city has had its claws in you all your life kid. You think it’s going to let go now?”

“Now?” Duke asks, hoping his calm might balance out Jason’s agitation. “What’s different about now.”

“You’re one of us now.” Jason cackles. He slaps his arm around Duke’s shoulders and the overfamiliarity of the gesture makes him tense up. He wonders if Jason is drunk right now. “You ever hear about a bat leaving Gotham for long and surviving?”

“You ever hear about a bat surviving Gotham for long?” Duke snaps. He had kind of hoped that it would make Jason back off with his crazed eyes and too loud laugh but it just sets him off again.

Jason wipes some dampness from the corner of his eyes. “You’re a riot, kid.” he says before leaving, despite the fact that Duke has said literally nothing funny this whole conversation.

Definitely drunk, he concludes, before deciding never to talk to any of the bats about leaving ever again.

~

After his talk with Jason, Duke starts having nightmares about how tangled he is in this city.

He’ll be running over rooftops just like every bat before him has and every bat after him will. He’ll be running and the rooftops will start shifting beneath his feet. It makes sense, at least within the dream. Duke will last forever and it’s clear that Gotham won’t so it’s only to be expected that at some point the ground that’s held him up all his life will be forced to crumble beneath his feet.

Duke is running over rooftops and things start shifting. At some point he trips as the ground sags beneath the weight he carries on his shoulders. The floor twists around him then, parts of it melting away like quicksand while the rest takes on a life of its own and wraps around Duke’s waist, trapping him so that he can’t get up and keep running.

Then what he was running from arrives.

They’re the same gargoyles that he was taught to sit among by the other bats. The same gargoyles he’ll nod hello to if he’s in a good mood and listening to the right music, feeling far more at home than he should in a place that haunts him so deeply. Only now the faces of the gargoyles are twisted into something even angrier than what they were carved to be. They screech and wail as they fly up to Duke’s trapped body and sink their talons into him, all for the sake of burying Gotham as deep into his flesh as possible.

Those dreams never end with Duke dying. He understands why.

~

Duke looks at Bruce differently now.

He knows Bruce can tell. Bruce can see that Duke doesn’t see something that verges on the otherworldly when he looks at Batman anymore. He just sees a man.

Duke thinks it might break Bruce’s heart a bit, but he understands that it isn’t for the wrong reasons. With all his other children things only started to go wrong when they stopped looking at him like the only thing between Gotham and oblivion. When they started to care more that he was a mediocre father and less that he was a perfect superhero.

“I’m not going to start hating you.” Duke tells him one night on patrol, because he thinks it might be something that needs to be said.

Bruce gives a sad half-smile. “I know. I just worry sometimes.” He pauses. “You haven’t been sleeping well.” he states.

“No.” Duke thinks for a moment about how Bruce has lived in Gotham for longer than anyone else he can talk to who knows enough about death that he might care about their answer. “You ever think about how you’ll be here forever?” he asks.

That sad half-smile stays glued to Bruce’s face. “All the time.” he answers, looking out across Gotham’s skyline with an expression that could only be described as grief.

Duke nods in understanding, it’s the same answer he would give.

Someone draw talia wearing this I beg

MILF

man i love friday

Gertrude Robinson is decisive.

She makes her choices and she backs them up with every action she takes. She does not hesitate. She does not question herself. She does not regret.

This was good for a while. It made her move forward faster than anyone else she’d ever met and Gertrude likes being fast. Overtaking peers who’d figured out far later than her that they simply were not in the same league brought her a special kind of joy. Then there was that look her teachers and professors and so-called superiors would give her when they realised that she was destined to surpass them. That was an even better kind of joy. The sort she could sink her teeth into and let fill her belly like a warm meal.

Then Gertrude was twenty five and a man she thought was called James Wright asked her if she would like to be head archivist and she said yes.

Then things started to try and kill her. Then she started to try and kill those things back. And, hey, what do you know? It turns out that killing monsters is just another thing Gertrude Robinson excels at.

It’s not like she had another option.

Gertrude Robinson is decisive and unwavering and has never doubted herself in her life. So when she looks back on the choice she made at twenty five all she sees is the inevitability of it. The way the path of her life had no side roads, there was always only one route she could ever take.

You’re wrong, the eye tells her, your choices are yours, yours, yours and you could have done all the other things you were planning to do with your life. You’re the one who blinded yourself to the other paths you could have taken and I would never presume to hide such knowledge from my beloved archivist.

Gertrude Robinson never regrets her choices. Not even when she should.