Scars, India Lawton / Becca Stadlander / This Party Never Ends, Diana Zhuk / Burning House In Winter,

Someone draw talia wearing this I beg

MILF

man i love friday

First Meeting

Ann froze.

She was right in front of the door. All she needed to do was to reach out and knock, but to cross the gulf of space those few feet had turned into seemed nigh impossible.

As she’d walked to the address scribbled in magic on the back of her hand she had considered the possibility of freezing up. It had been one of the worries that were distinctly more real than the others that had crossed her mind, but perhaps due to its mundanity Ann had pushed it aside. It was easy to argue that she’d faced far scarier things that were far more likely to kill her in the past and the fear she felt now wouldn’t be anything like that.

It turned out that those thoughts were wrong and this fear was exactly like that. Ann wasn’t one to freeze at danger anymore though.

The reason that Ann was trapped inside her own mind at that moment was, when going through all the possible emotional dangers of this visit, she hadn’t thought about the physical ones. Namely warding to stop anyone too powerful from attempting to breach the threshold.

She started to reach out with her mind a little, trying to feel for any cracks in the warding without alerting the person who set them she was doing so. Any shapes that weren’t perfectly regular, any lines that didn’t quite connect, any place where the magic wasn’t quite strong enough. She tried to extend her arm and found she could stretch it about halfway to the door. She smiled at that with it quickly turning into a grin when she realised that there was no resistance when she moved her mouth.

Ann could feel a little of the shape of the power when she reached out. It was unwavering and secure, exactly how warding magic should be, but she knew that if she felt a bit deeper there would have to be some way to make it crumble and

Huh. It feels like me, she thought. That’s weird.

And with that her ever so careful prodding of the house’s defences lost all subtlety while her subconscious took over in its ravenous hunger for answers.

She tried to reign it in as quickly as she could, take back control of the feelers she’d woven through the warding network, but if there are two things that don’t often work well together they are emotions and control.

A moment later a man was opening the door. He was about a head taller than Ann, in his mid thirties with bags under his eyes, accompanied by an air of annoyance which didn’t quite match a man greeting a dangerous fellow magician he’d warded his house to protect against.

Ann was frozen again but this time it wasn’t anything to do with the warding. There were a thousand versions of everything that could happen next filling the uncrossable space between them. Ann could see in the way the man’s eyes widened that he saw the impossibility of reaching out across that void of possibilities as well as she did. The movement drew attention to his eyes and away from the bags underneath them.

The irises were the same shade of blue as Ann’s own.

“Huh. You look like me.” She said, forgetting for a moment how inconceivable it was less than a moment ago to cross that chasm. “That’s weird.”

Selina & Talia

1 2 3

The first time Talia meets Bruce’s new lover, they stab each other.

Talia tries to ignore the fact that she’s a little impressed. It had been her understanding that the woman had no formal training and Talia hadn’t really expected her to get a hit in, let alone a stab wound. “You should leave my beloved alone. This will not end well for you otherwise.” she informs the woman.

The woman looks surprised. It makes Talia pleased until she speaks. “We literally just broke up.” she says and it’s Talia’s turn to look shocked now.

“Oh.” Talia wants to shift her weight but there’s still a dagger in her side. She supposes she can’t exactly complain since there’s a sword in the woman’s. “I apologise. It seems my intel is out of date.”

The woman, Selina she supposes now, looks at Talia like she’s never seen another person before. “You think?”

A far away corner of Talia’s mind notes that the splatter of blood on Selina’s face and the arch of her eyebrow make her look the exact kind of pretty Talia likes best.

She wishes she could shake herself. This encounter isn’t going how Talia had planned it. “I suppose we should both seek medical attention now.” she says, half to change the subject and half because it’s a valid point.

“I know a place.” Selina gets up, impressively steady considering how she has to keep one hand fixed on the sword in her to stop it moving around too much. Ones she’s on her feet she looks at Talia like she’s assessing her. Talia glares right back at her, back straight and eyes narrowed. Selina must like what she sees because she cocks the corner of her mouth into something a little like a smirk. “And afterwards you could come back to mine.”  she says slyly, “Just to rest, of course.”

Talia hadn’t quite expected that. She can’t say that she’s unhappy about it though. “Of course.” she echoes, “Not to dissuade you, but it is my understanding that you just broke up with someone?”

“Psh,” Selina waves the hand that isn’t holding Talia’s sword steady inside of her, “I’m not one to dwell on the past.”

Talia allows herself a smile. “Well then, how could I object?”

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.

His every interaction with cat woman was him asking “is this how people make friends?” and her answering “I want to peg you”

Never witnessed a more aro ace man than Bruce Wayne in the Batman movie in my life

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

Mha au where bakugou is replaced by catra and kirishima is replaced by adora

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.

Balancing Act

Talia al Ghul has always lived a precarious life.

You would think it would have been the training that had pulled at her in those early years. That tore at her. As soon as she was capable of critical thought it had been made clear to Talia that anything less than perfection was not an option.

This had suited her well enough though. Perfection had always come naturally to Talia.

No. It was the deference that had turned survival into a balancing act.

‘Yes, Father’ ‘No, Father’ ‘Of course, Father’. Talia is loyal to her bones, but did it have to be so performative? Did they really have to pretend this hard that her father’s better than her?

Even as a teenager she scoffs at the thought. It’s hardly like anyone could be foolish enough to believe such a lie.

~

Later she meets Bruce. Then the balancing act begins to concern loyalty rather than pride.

Talia has always been perfect and loyal and gifted at living on a knife edge; her father’s blade on one side and some different oblivion on the other. But knowing Bruce brings challenges she hadn’t foreseen.

He’s good. She thinks.

Talia isn’t sure if she’s ever thought that about anyone before.

The pull she feels towards him is something she can’t ignore. It causes the bonds she holds with her father to fray, to weaken. She won’t cut anything yet but Talia is beginning to think that the current situation is untenable.

She has always despised weak things. She will not hesitate to rid herself of such ties.

~

There’s a baby growing in Talia’s stomach.

It’s Bruce’s. She knows it’s Bruce’s. This fact makes her feel a warmth she hadn’t thought herself capable of but it brings with it danger.

She can feel the weight of the child’s legacy pulling at her. It’s a heavy thing, to join the bloodline of an al Ghul with the monster that lurks in Gotham City’s shadows. It’s something Talia thinks might hold greater weight than even her own legacy, if that’s possible.

As her stomach grows and the life inside with it, Talia starts to feel that weight. The heaviness of the body inside her own.

She thinks that this wonderful burden might be what stops the balancing act. What pulls her down from the sharp place where she’s managed to survive for so long.

Talia decides that it’s a change she’s going to embrace.