The Batman:

Fashion inspo? Oh you mean fan art of cartoon characters where they look Trendy™️

my final piece for @gothamcityunmasked !! thank you for having me on as a mod and contributor!

new fic cause apparently i’m on an absolute roll

Word count: 1,524

Summary:“It’s a conspiracy!” Danny cries, jamming an accusatory finger close enough to Jazz’s face that she has to go cross-eyed to look at it. “You’re conspiring against me with my arch-nemesis!”

Jazz brings her hand up and pushes the finger still pointed between her eyes back down. “Oh no.” she deadpans. “You’ve foiled my evil plot. Whatever shall I do?”

She goes back to reading at her psychology textbook.

Danny lets out a strangled yelp of frustration and stomps out of the room.

dc comics || jodi picoult

“You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?” the Joker says, quiet. When Bruce doesn’t answer he starts to laugh. He laughs so hard and so long that it becomes the only sound that Bruce can hear. He laughs so hard that he has to spit out blood before he speaks next. “You’re actually going to kill me. Aren’t you Batsy?” he grins.

They both know the answer but Bruce says it anyway. For the finality of it.

“Yes.”

It’s an ending.

~

Jason’s death is where it starts.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it starts in a circus where two dead bodies lie broken on the floor and their son breaks in a very different way above them. Maybe it starts when a man decides that to take justice into his own hands is the only means by which his city will survive. Maybe it starts with a different set of dead bodies in an alleyway a lifetime ago.

Maybe it started when the first brick of the city that would become Gotham was laid.

But Jason’s death was certainly a beginning. Not of anything good, of course, but a beginning none the less.

~

Dick doesn’t talk to him anymore.

It hurts Bruce. Touches him in a way that few things since his parents death have. It opens him up to a loneliness he had thought was in his past.

He might have done something about it if everytime he looked at Dick he didn’t see a waking corpse. If Bruce hadn’t watched from the sidelines as his son morphed into a reminder of all the ways the universe is yet to use to make him suffer.

Dick doesn’t talk to him anymore and Bruce lets him.

~

Tim keeps popping up. Trying to convince him that he’s going to cross a line. It seems like he can’t quite comprehend the fact that Bruce doesn’t care anymore.

“Go home.” He says. Tim’s energetic and untrained and very much neither of Bruce’s sons. Bruce is grateful for the way his eyes shine with enthusiasm since it helps him remember that the boy he’s talking to is alive.

Tim smiles as he says no.

“Go home.” Bruce insists and Tim continues to refuse.

The way he sees Tim all the time, the way the boy makes it his business to keep Batman company, feels like the middle of a story. Bruce knows it in his bones. That something was the beginning (Jason’s death or two bodies on the ground or the grate of bricks on bricks on bricks) and this is the middle. He also knows that there’s going to be an ending far too soon.

“People don’t finish growing up and stay near me.” He tells Tim, trying to get him to go away with different words this time. “Your endings are leave me alone or die.”

Tim rolls his eyes. “Says who? You and your grand sample size of two?”

“Go home.” He repeats, returning to his default response.

“No”. Tim repeats. He sounds like he’s enjoying this.

Bruce despises the fact that it only makes him like the boy more.

~

There’s an Arkham escape. The Joker gets out. He’s currently killing people.

None of these facts are surprising.

Bruce fights him and takes him down after he’s only ruined a couple of lives. It’s still far too many but it’s also far fewer people than he would have destroyed without Bruce there to stop him.

On the other hand he wouldn’t even exist if Bruce hadn’t made him. So people are dead and it’s still the Batman’s fault.

Afterwards Bruce watches as the Joker is taken in from a rooftop. He doesn’t even notice Tim sidle up beside him. He takes a moment to be annoyed at how proud he is of the boy for being so good.

“Are you okay?” Tim asks, because he knows how seeing the Jokers smile cuts into Bruce like few other things can.

“I’m fine.” Bruce says. It’s sort of the truth. Pain like this has become routine for him since Jason died. It’s just a byproduct of his existence. It’s just the price of his failure.

He looks over the crime scene, taking in the blood and the bodies and the relatives crying just like he did over his boy. He takes in the Joker as he’s tied back into his straight jacket. As he’s looking, the Joker tilts his head up. Bruce knows that the man is searching him out.

Instead of leaving or moving or doing anything useful, he freezes.

The Joker’s gaze alights on him. Pausing in its scan of the roofline. Then his eyes move a little down and to the left and Bruce feels Tim take a step back as he meets the Joker’s eyes.

Bruce is no longer fine.

He unfreezes and takes Tim in his arms, swinging them as far away from the scene of the crime as he can. He hears the Joker’s laughter behind them, starting out quiet but growing loud enough that Bruce doubts he’ll ever be able to outrun it.

“It’s fine.” Tim says from where he’s held tight in Bruce’s arms. “Bruce, I’ll be fine. He doesn’t even know who I am. I’ll be fine.”

He sounds scared and hopeful and absolutely certain that nothing will be able to hurt him while he’s under the Batman’s protection.

Bruce doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s wrong.

~

The body of Tim Drake is buried two weeks later.

Bruce spends the whole funeral thinking about how this is going to keep happening. About how children are going to keep finding him and squirming their way into his heart until he can’t bear to push them away any longer.

He realises that he can’t take a third tragedy of this magnitude. And if he can’t take it then Gotham certainly can’t. Batman is the only thing propping the city up as it attempts to crush itself under the weight of its cruelty.

Bruce makes a decision. As he does so he realises that they’re almost at the finish line.

~

There’s an Arkham escape. The Joker gets out. He’s currently killing people.

The relief Bruce feels when he hears what’s happening is extraordinary.

“You’re gonna do it, aren’t you?” The Joker says once Bruce arrives and they look each other in the eye. He laughs hard enough to gently choke on his own blood. The wheezing sounds like victory. “You’re actually gonna kill me. Aren’t you Batsy?”

Bruce shoots his grapple gun through the Joker’s chest. It punches right through him, filling the room with an awful cracking squelching noise, and lodges in the wall. The sound the Joker makes as his throat fills with blood is more of a gurgle than a wheeze now.

“Yes.” Bruce replies.

It’s the ending.

compilation of quotes i have saved on my phone that make me lose my mind

Jenny Slate, Twitter

Maggie Smith, Good Bones

Unknown, Untitled

Christopher Citro, Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks

Anne Carson, Euripides

I.B. Vyache, Conversations Over Sanguinaccio Dolce

@bipeds, Tumblr

Natalie Wee, Our Bodies & Other Fine Mechanics

HBO Succession

Richard Siken, Landscape With A Blur Of Conquerers

catra and bakugou are the same character in different fonts in this ted talk-

the most iconic squad on the entire boiling isles, actually

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

She looks out across a world in chaos and frowns.

“It was brash”

“It was bold”

“It was impetuous”

“It was inspired”

They grow silent. An acknowledgement that no agreement is to be found in this place.

~

She says that she should kill him. She says so often, without humour. She says so as a woman who has killed hundreds across her lifetime and will no doubt kill hundreds more.

“You know more of me than anyone else does.” he confesses.

She hums.

“I could say the same to you.”

He grins and she can’t help but pity him. Connection was never necessary for her, but to watch this child suffer without it must be a tragedy beyond measure.

~

She tells him that she put poison in his drink. He sighs, tired, and walks outside. She hears him throwing up in the ally behind the abandoned building they had chosen for their meetings.

He comes back in with clothes just as clean and hair just as neat as when he left. He frowns at her but is happy to continue their conversation as it was.

“I’m going to hurt you one day.” she informs him. He rolls his eyes.

“You hurt me constantly,” he gestures to some bruises for effect, “At least this way I might be tough enough to survive what’s to come.”

She nods. With the sorts of enemies the boy tends to make he has a point.