Continuation Of This

Stiles Stilinski is just like Lydia in all the wrong ways.

His thoughts move as fast as hers, sometimes faster, and it’s the first time someone else’s brain has measured up to hers. It makes her hate him. It makes her despise him. His existence upsets Lydia’s painstakingly constructed social hierarchy where she’s always meant to be the smartest person in the room.

She is the smartest person in the room. Most of the time. There are just rare occasions, few and far between, where Stiles will do better on a test than her. Or he’ll give a presentation and clearly understand the material better than she does, even if he does do a shit job at presenting it.

Sometimes she’ll look around the room and wonder how everyone can be so stupid. How she can be surrounded by people who think so slowly that they’re actually having trouble comprehending things that are so obvious.

Whenever she does that she always finds Stiles looking straight at her, like he’s thinking the exact same thing.

It only makes her hate him more.

~

Jackson Whittemore is just like Lydia in all the right ways.

He wants to be better than everyone. He wants it like it’s everything. Like to be lesser is death. Like to be lesser is hell.

Lydia has always felt the exact same way.

It’s refreshing, at first. For someone to ache for power like she does. The fact that the two of them are the only people who need control like they need air is probably the reason they actually achieve it in the first place.

She supposes that the fact they’re both beautiful and smart and mean doesn’t hurt.

It takes a long time for Lydia to love Jackson. It’s something that happens in an instant. Even when they started dating it was more an arrangement of mutual convenience, something they did because they both wanted to be the best and becoming a team was simply the next step in achieving that. But after they’ve been dating for a while Jackson looks at Lydia and she feels utterly understood in a way she had always thought might be impossible from the perspective of a mind that doesn’t move as fast as hers.

It puts fire in her bones and Lydia decides that she never wants to stop burning.

~

Far later, Lydia supposes that it isn’t so surprising that she ends up having loved them both.

She always has adored her reflection.

The parallel in the umbrella academy where in ‘I think we’re alone now’ it says ‘the beating of our hearts is the only sound’ and Vanya using the beating of her heart to bust out of the cage thing is god tier foreshadowing and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Damian: Father make them stop

Bruce, fucking with him: what’s got you throwing a hissy? You’re whistling dixie son. Put a kibosh on the gobbledygook it’s time to break

It would be very funny to me if the Batkids started using slang from the eras they were created in. Like this doesn’t change their ages it just makes them all seem weirder than usual

For example-

Dick Grayson: And the old geezer was an eager beaver who helped us find the glitterati who was throwing the party. We all cut a rug but I tells yous clams he may have but Bruce is a dead hopper if I ever saw one. Anything he tells you is floy floy

*Everyone staring at him like he’s lost it*

Jason: Gag me with a spoon. I’m hella done you’re wiggin me out Dickie. Aight imma motor out of here dweebs

Steph: yeah not so much. gonna bounce with Jay.

Tim: That made sense...not. Dick you’re bugging out

Damian clutching Duke’s arm in a death grip: Thomas what is happening should we leave?

Duke: Bet little D we should dip. This is a big yikes

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.

If Mrs. Monroe, head of maths at Gotham Prep, had to describe Dick Grayson in one word it would be ‘prefect’.

If she were allowed two she would say ‘worryingly perfect’.

She didn’t keep up with the media storm around Bruce Wayne’s ward as it happened, but when she heard that the kid would be in her class she decided that she had better catch up with it. She reads about how the boy came from a travelling circus and how his parents died in an accident (or was it a murder? She isn’t quite sure). She reads that after coming from a working class background he’s just been placed with the richest man in the city during a particularly traumatic time. Everything she sees worries her to no end and as she walks in on Monday she braces herself for a boy to turn up made up of grief and fear for being in this strange, strange place that’s nothing at all like the circus where he grew up.

Instead, Dick Grayson walks into class seeming like a perfectly well adjusted young boy who she would never have guessed had endured anything particularly awful in his life.

All lesson she waits for him to slip up, to show that he’s going through something terrible. Then he doesn’t and she waits for the rest of the week. Then she’s left waiting for the rest of the month and, after that, the rest of the year.

Dick Grayson never slips up. He has plenty of friends, even though he never seems that close with them, he’s the best in her class, even though he never had formal schooling before, and he never seems at all out of place at Gotham Prep.

She’s mentioned it to the other teachers, that something about how good the kid is bothers her, but none of them seem to pick up on it. They all just offer testament to how well Dick’s getting on at Gotham Prep and how it just goes to show how much potential the boy has.

So Mrs. Monroe waits for Dick to slip up and tries not to worry too hard.

~

During the summer after Dick’s first year of school (having placed first in all his classes, naturally) Mrs. Monroe sees him outside of school for the first time.

It’s a nice day and her husband is away on business so she decides to take the time to go on a walk by herself. As she’s turning onto one of Gotham’s nicer streets she almost runs directly into Dick.

He’s with three other boys. They all seem older than him but it only surprises her a little since one of the many things on Mrs. Monroe’s list of ‘reasons why Dick Grayson is a very worrying boy’ is that he’s oddly mature for his age.

When Dick sees her he stops and smiles, and Mrs. Monroe can’t help but smile back.

“Hi Mrs. M,” he says. She notices that he’s leaning closer to the boys than he does with any of his school friends.

“Hello Dick. I hope you’re having a good holiday.”

“Totally Miss-” he starts, but then one of the boys, with brown hair and a confident gait, stops him by landing a heavy arm around his shoulders.

“Sorry to interrupt, but we’re having a boys night.” he says, “So we’ll just be on our way.”

The other three let out long-suffering sighs and Mrs. Monroe feels like she’s missing out on something.

“One, it’s daytime.” says another of the boys, black with close cropped blonde hair, “and two, the only reason the others aren’t here is because they’re actually having a girls night and kicked us out.”

The only one who hasn’t spoken yet nods seriously.

“Well I wouldn’t want to keep you,” answers Mrs. Monroe, not quite sure what else to say, “I’ll see you again when school is back in session, Dick.”

Dick nods happily while the rest of the boys wave goodbye to her and make their way onwards.

As Mrs. Monroe walks home she thinks about the encounter. She knows that none of those boys go to Gotham so they must be friends from something else. The way they had acted around each other though, well, she doesn’t think that she’s seen Dick that close with any of his friends at school.

Thinking about it, he’d seemed a little more human in that group. Less like the perfect student and popular kid he always was at school.

Whatever it was seemed good and after that encounter, Mrs. Monroe worries about Dick Grayson a little less.

part 1, this on ao3

~

It’s a normal night, until it’s not.

Dick had been purposeful when he had said that Damian could make mistakes. He remembers the way the necessity of perfection had eaten at him when he was younger. He knows that Damian is even more susceptible than he was to that burning self-disgust at anything less than a flawlessness. Upon taking over the mantle of Batman, Dick had decided that Damian needed to know there was at least one adult in his life who wouldn't disown him for delivering anything less than perfection.

He hadn’t thought so much about what would happen when Damian actually did make a mistake.

It happens when Dick is in the middle of congratulating Damian on a particularly impressive move, one with a more gymnastic slant which Dick is sure is based on one of his own trademarks. He’s telling Damian what a good job he’s doing and Damian is puffing up with pride, a smile playing around the edges of his expression. Then Dick catches the glint of the sniper rifle scope.

The ability to dodge bullets is a trademark of members of their family. Damian should feel the whistle of the bullet coming his way, he should jolt back from the air parting in front of him. But Damian's too caught up in his pride to do any of those things quickly enough so within a moment of Dick spotting the rifle scope there’s a bullet in Damian's leg.

Dick is so used to falling that he doesn't remember a time when it didn't feel like flying. The way his stomach drops now though, it doesn't feel like flying. It feels like the kid he said he'd take care of has blood spurting from his leg and it's all Dick's fault.

To his credit Damian is very calm about it. Dick knows he’s been shot before although he doesn’t know if it was a purposeful part of the boys training or not. His blood boils at either prospect. Even as the crowd is still screaming for their heroes to come save them Dick grabs Damian from the blood soaked ground and rushes to the batmobile, putting it on autopilot as he tries to stabilise the patient.

“I’m sorry.” he whispers, “I’m sorry. We’ll be back at home in no time and we’ll get you all fixed up, okay?” Dick blinks away the tears at the sight of Damian bloody and pale in front of him. Impediments to his vision will only make it harder to get Damian stable.

“Okay.” Damian replies, voice remarkably steady.

Now aware that someone he trusts is going to make it all better, Damian promptly passes out.

“Shit.” Dick says, young ears now unable to hear him. “Shit shit shit shit shit. Fuck.”

He swears to his heart's content for the rest of the ride back to the manor and it does very little to make him feel any better.

No, the swirling sea of worry-guilt-anguish in his stomach only begins to abate at the sight of Alfred in the bat cave, perfectly calm and with all the necessary medical supplies ready. They get Damian to a bed and Dick tries to make himself useful as Alfred treats the bullet wound.

He isn’t particularly useful and spends most of his time fretting.

“He’ll be fine, Master dick.” Alfred says once he’s finished up and washing the blood from where it had stained his skin.

“Of course he will.” Dick replies, attempting to sound a little more nonchalant than he actually is. From the look Alfred gives him he doesn’t think he succeeds.

He’s spared the indignity of having to say anything else by the rumble of Tim’s motorbike pulling into the cave. Tim gets off with an urgency Dick isn’t sure he expected and when he takes his domino off there’s genuine worry in the frown between his eyes.

“Is he okay?” he asks, his tone frantic.

“He’ll be fine.” Dick's grateful to find that his voice is far more level now than it was ten minutes ago.

Tim tilts his head to the side, looking at Dick. His expression narrows into something slightly more analytical than concern. “Are you okay?”

Dick tries to say yes. He really does. He's Tim’s big brother, he’s Batman. Of course he can tell his little brother that he’s okay. But after a moment of silence Dick glances towards where Damian lies far too still on their operating table and feels the tears he's been fighting off resurface in his eyes.

Tim nods as if this is confirming something. “Come on.” He says. “Let’s get out of here.”

Dick tries to protest that Damian needs someone to be here when he wakes up but Tim just continues to pull him gently out of the cave.

“He’s going to be out for the next few hours. I can make you hot chocolate in the meantime.”

Dick wants to keep protesting but he’s been left tired and weak by the nights events. He allows himself to slump as his little brother leads him out of the darkness.

~

Dick talks. Significantly more than he had intended to.

He talks about how he can’t balance this awful dichotomy of guardian and commander. He talks about how he’s still not entirely sure how to be Batman, let alone a parent. He talks about how he can’t keep doing this without something breaking.

Probably him. Possibly Damian. Both answers are unacceptable.

“I’ll to fix this” Tim says. The determination in his expression reminds Dick of when he came to his bludhaven apartment all those years ago and demanded Dick reprise his roll as Robin. “I’m going to make a call, we’ll sort this out.” he promises.

Tim’s always been good at that. Tugging on the fraying strings of their family tapestry until it resembles something whole. It’s how he came into the family in the first place and Dick has always been grateful for that.

Tim leaves, already dialing a number into his phone with a look of intense concentration. Dick wants to go check on Damian but Alfreds got that handled so it’s not like he’ll actually help. Sitting idle at the boys bedside will probably just make him feel worse.

So Dick hangs his head and waits for someone to save him.

~

“Give me a lift to the airport?” Tim asks far too sweetly. The tone of voice doesn’t suit him.

“You can drive.” Dick points out, suspicious.

Tim gives him a look, like Dick's being difficult on purpose. “It’ll be a bonding opportunity.” he says, his tone lowering to something closer to his usual cadence. Dick still feels suspicious but there’s a million things he has to do today that are more important than arguing with his only sane brother, so he nods. Tim grins in response and gets up with a lot more energy than he tends to these days.

Dick decides that there’s little use in thinking on it more. He’s in charge of far too many things at the moment, he’ll let Tim control this one.

~

Cass appears in the collection area, suitcase in hand, and Dick feels the weight of the world become significantly lighter.

She's more muscled than she was when she left. Her footsteps are more confident. It makes pride rise in Dick's throat as he realises how brave his little sister is for growing so much all by herself.

She picks up her pace once Tim and Dick are in view, almost breaking into a jog as she approaches. She wraps an arm around each of them and Dick can feel her smile pressing against his cheek.

Dick realises that his own smile is pressing against Cass’s cheek. His chin is somehow resting in Tim’s hair.

He savours the moment and feels more full than he has in a long time.

“Welcome home.” He says into Cass’s neck. He feels her smile even wider in response.

~

That night as Dick is about to go on patrol Cass taps his shoulder.

“I can do it.” she says, pointing at the Batman suit Dick had been about to start putting on.

Dick frowns, pushing away the golden hope bleeding into the edges of his soul. “It won’t fit.” he says.

Cass shrugs. “I won’t wear it. But I can do it.”

Dick feels his frown deepen. Cass is younger than him and she hasn’t been in Gotham for so long. It’s not a good idea for her to take on the mantle. She’s already got far too much weighing her down without adding another impossible burden for her to bear.

Dick looks past Cass for a second to allow his eyes to rest on Tim, busying himself with sorting his own gear out but none too subtly watching the exchange between Dick and Cass. He gives a slight nod. An endorsement. Dick looks back to Cass who is smiling very gently at his indecision.

“Okay.” he says, and the room releases a sigh of relief.

~

Cass has been Batman every night since she got back a week ago and Dick hasn’t felt this light since Bruce died.

She was always the best fighter out of them. Always a little faster, a little more cutting, than any of her brothers. She isn’t as used to the detective aspect of things but she's surrounded by enough people trained in that aspect of the job that it isn’t a problem. Dick wears the Nightwing suit and flies higher than he has in months. Damian tends to work with Cass, Batman needs a Robin after all, but will pop up on Dick's patrols with silent requests for ice cream and a shoulder to lean on.

Cass can be Damian's Batman. Dick can be his guardian. It was always too much to ask of Bruce, for him to be both. For him to be their teacher and their hero and their father. Splitting the load seems to be going far better than anything Bruce used to try.

~

Sometimes Dick will catch Tim smiling at him the same way he does at a problem just solved. He wants to say thank you. Thank you for letting me outrun that awful burden for a little longer. Thank you for saving me. But he supposes that’s just what brothers are for.

Instead he asks Tim if he wants to go train surfing. They haven’t since before Bruce died. Dick was far too busy trying to keep the world from collapsing in on itself and Tim was too busy trying to find a way to stop Dick from crumbling under the pressure of it.

“Yeah.” Tim says, his smile twisting and morphing until it goes from analytical to soft and relieved. “Yeah I’d like that.”

~

"Do you miss him?" Damian asks one day. Dick doesn't need any clarification on who he's talking about.

The two of them are sat on a rooftop, legs swinging over the side. Damian is holding a rum and raisin ice cream Dick had pressed firmly into his hand. Dick decided a while ago that Damian should be offered the opportunity to try all the flavours he missed out on in the earlier part of his childhood and he thinks they're making some pretty good progress.

Dick considers for a moment. It's a complicated question. "Yes," he starts, because of course he does, "But it doesn't hurt like it used to. Not now that I can focus on being myself instead of squeezing myself into the shape of the person I'm mourning. And you?"

"Yes." Damian starts, because of course he does. He pauses for longer than Dick did but that makes sense. Damian's thoughts are complicated enough that Dick can't help but be proud of the kid for being able to untangle even a few of them. "But I know a lot of people who've died. And at least this time I gained what I came searching for regardless of what happened to Father."

It's not a thank you. Dick knows that it's going to take a little more time for Damian to learn how to shape his mouth into those words. But it's a start.

Dick looks at all the life surrounding him and smiles.

variations on a theme

new fic!!!

word count: 3,360

summary: Tim Drake is excited to go to school with someone else who knows Batman and Robin's identities.

Damian Al Ghul makes it incredibly difficult to stay that way.

OR

Damian tries to recruit the only boy at his new school with a brain to spy on his father.

It's trickier than he expects.

SPOILER ! ! ! >:)

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