Writing The Fanfic Of My Own Fanfic With Music On Shuffle And Accidentally Hearing The Perfect Song For

When I get a nice AO3 comment or Tumblr reblog I have to force myself not to say "I LOVE YOU PLEASE MARRY ME CAN WE BE BEST FRIENDS FOREVER I'M OBSESSED WITH YOU" and instead say "thanks"

A little gift/ preview for @freezer-bride-your-sweet-divine

(Thank you for your support in navigating tumblr and your endless feedback, I REALLY appreciate it)

This piece will eventually be part of my series,

https://archiveofourown.org/series/4163446

Or maybe it won't, but I felt like it was a waste to scrap it entirely!

Unnamed Grief

Chapter 0, Prologue

It’s not that Bruce doesn’t love his sons.

He does.

Fiercely.

To the point of agony.

To the point of madness.

But they are sons.

They are legacy and reflection and consequence.

Dixie was origin.

Dixie was genesis.

Dixie was the very first moment he knew what it meant to live for someone outside of himself.

The moment that reshaped the architecture of his soul, rerouted the pathways of his cold, calculating heart.

Dixie didn’t make him Batman.

She made him Bruce, in the softest, most staggering ways.

He can explain why the others matter.

Jason needed saving.

Tim needed purpose.

Damian needed undoing.

But Dixie?

Dixie needed nothing from him (except, maybe, understanding, the one thing he was never able to provide her with) and yet she became his everything.

She wasn't the best of them because she was flawless.

She was the best of them because she was HIS.

His In every ugly, broken, radiant piece.

She was never built to be a soldier, even if she learned to fight before she learned to laugh.

She was not meant to carry the burdens she bore, and yet…God, she CHOSE to.

She chose to carry them.

Her brothers.

Their world.

Him.

Always him.

Even when he failed her.

Especially when he failed her.

Bruce knows all of his sons.

He can break them down, read their patterns, identify every fracture in their psyches.

But Dixie? Dixie remained unreadable, unknowable, even being the one he has known for the longest time, even being the one whose bones were shaped just like the ones he has known since before his own birth, his mother's.

She was his daughter in a way the others could never be, not just by blood, not just by name, but in understanding.

She KNEW him.

She knew him in the way a mirror knows its subject.

In the way a grave knows its dead.

None of the boys have ever looked at him the way she did, like she could see every ruin inside him and still believed something beautiful lived there.

Jason rages at him.

Tim studies him.

Damian judges him.

Dixie forgave him (Dixie raged and she studied and she judged too, but in the end she forgave him, she ALWAYS forgave him).

Again.

And again.

And again.

And that was a terrifying, holy thing.

Because forgiveness, real forgiveness, from someone like her…it CHANGES people.

The boys push him.

She grounded him.

The boys rebel.

She resisted.

She defied with love, with laughter, with hands that mended what others destroyed.

She wasn't his soldier (even if he knows she often viewed herself that way).

She was his compass.

He is not a man of poetry, but she made him one in the quiet moments.

Made him remember what lullabies sounded like.

Made him believe in softness.

Made him ache.

And he knows…it’s not that his sons are less.

It’s that Dixie was more.

More Bruce.

More memories.

More mystery.

More herself, in ways that none of them ever dared to be.

His sons always belonged to the world. She always belonged to him, not by ownership, not by right, but by that old, unshakable bond formed in the abyss between his birth and hers, between his grief and her grief, two wounded things clinging to each other like breath.

She was the child he never asked for, the one who became his first everything and the one who saved them all.

How could anyone ever compare to that?

They couldn't.

They never will.

the worst thing that could possibly happen to ao3 is it being put on the app store so please stop asking for it because you don't understand what would happen if that went through. ao3's whole deal is it archives EVERYTHING, while the apple app store's whole deal is keeping everything clean and safe. so if ao3 were to have an app all of the 'bad' stuff, including nsfw in general, would have to be censored at best or would be purged at worse. the google play store is more lax but who fucking knows what GOOGLE would police if they got their hands on the archive. do not ask for an app. do not use third party apps. it's on mobile browser functioning perfectly, just fucking use that before you ruin everything for everyone please.

Me, literally giving a character my (very minor) disability in a fanfic I am writing.

Some person on Ao3:" don't talk about things you don't know, girls aren't colorblind".

(Just in much less civil therms, thus I cancelled it).

First of all we are in the DC comic universe, people come back to life every other day, and you are telling me girls can't be color blind.

Second of all, girls can be colorblind or have various types of color deficency, you can trust me and my Tritanopia

Signed: a tired fanfic writer who won the genetic lottery and who has to video-call one of her brothers (who actually won in a non-sarcastic way) every time she is alone at home and she has to properly coordinate her own laudry.

Me, ugly crying on a fanart because it fits perfectly one of my fanfic even if it is just a coincidence.

(The fanart is objectively stunning tho)

TOApril Day 17 - Lamentations of Broken Fathers

I'm not comfortable enough with dramatic lighting to be able to say that this is my best work but oh well

"Who's under the shroud?" you may ask. Well if you reject the bounds of PJO's timeline and use enough imagination it could be literally any of Apollo's children :))))

Had this strange really lucid dream about yet another AU of my AU (that I am never getting around to write) in which Bruce “died” like in Final Crisis # 6.

Now, for obvious reasons, Dixie can't really stand in for him, because the kind of work it would take to make her look like her dad would be enormous, but Jason (who has a really good, really strong, relationship with Dixie) can.

And it's very traumatic for him, but both him and Dixie know that it is what ‘must be done’, so he does.

But the end result? Hilarious.

Because Nightwing follows Batman around like a concerned mother hen and Robin (Damian) just REFUSES to listen to Batman (he can occasionally be reigned in by ‘Wing).

It's obvious and yet no-one ever figures them out, up until Joker escapes from Arkham and has a face-off with Batman and the Dark Knight has a full-blown panic attack.

And yes, Jason is trained, he is capable, he craved a confrontation with his murderer ever since he came back, but…but doing it wearing his dad's suit, his dad's skin, feels wrong. Hence the panic.

And Joker is convinced to have finally bent the Batman, until Nightwing just pummels herself from the darkness and bashes his head out with her escrimas, all the while laughing like she did as a kid: bright, joyful, just shy of manic.

Crooks are terrified.

Utterly paralyzed in horror.

And that horror only amplifies when Nightwing, once again more like Nightwing and not the horror dressed in a traffic-lights suit she once was, hugs Batman and manages to calm him down, all the while she is completely drenched with Joker's blood and brain matter.

Some witnesses say Robin critiqued her technique but gave her praises for her brutal efficiency, but those witnesses also checked themselves in Arkham spontaneously, so who knows.

Tim still went on his world travels trying to prove his theory, so I guess that's why he didn’t appear.

It's strange working on the same series for over a year.

It's strange because the protagonist slips into your bones (she already has my soul, that pours into her with my very breath).

Dixie by now is almost flesh for me.

I guess it's fair.

I made her haunted and she haunts me in return.

I guess it's fair.

Apparently people who don't have executive dysfunction think that actually working on something is the hardest part of doing something. And that's why they get mad that you call the rest of the project "easy" after you've finally worked through doing the plan and know what to do when you're working.

So when you're through with the epiphany of how to make it physically possible to make the thing you're making, and you're sharing the plan with excitement, because the hard part is over, and now you only have to get your hands moving and do it, they get mad at you like

"it's not that easy! It's a lot of hard work! >:C"

they mean it, because

to them, working is the hardest part.

They don't have to fight their brains to get started. They don't have to fight their way through making the choices, making the plan, making yourself make the thing. People who don't suffer from executive dysfunction think that the hardest part is actually doing the thing.

Writing the AU of one of my own AUs, I discovered that, in my mind, Wally West enjoys the musicians of the summer of love.

Idk why, it just kinda fits, expecially because I dare you to look me in the eyes and tell me that Wally West wasn't made to belt out at the top of his lungs " With your love" by the Jefferson Starship (I know, back in the '60s they were the Jefferson Airplane, but alas) half-jokingly serenading the love of his life.

I actually wrote a fanfic centered around cabin 7, in which one of the main characters is Lee Fletcher. I already made a post about it, because the fanfic itself spawned from a tumblr prompt whose author I can't find (the post was on Pinterest and it was cropped).

The fanfic is called "Cabin seven's tango" and it is on Ao3, here is its link!

ALSO ALSO

THERE SHOULD BE MORE FANFICS ABOUT THE SILLY BACKGROUND CHARACTERS

CASTOR, POLLUX, LEE FLETCHER, MICHEAL YEW, ETC ETC!!!!

please