Robert Pattinson In Interviews: Bruce Wayne Is A Slimy Worm Man. A Stinky Dirty Bat. A Mess. Emo. Greasy

Y’know that morality thing where you’re a doctor with five dying patients and one healthy one and you’ve got to decide whether you harvest the healthy guy’s organs or let the five people die? The fact that Hilbert is the guy that would harvest the healthy person’s organs is a summary of everything that’s wrong with his sense of morality thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Blue Beetle | Gabriel Picolo

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.

Selina & Talia

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Selina quite likes this thing she’s had going on with Talia, it’s far better than whatever was happening with Bruce at least.

‘Stop stealing things’, ‘Move in with me’, ‘Don’t team up against me with the Sirens’ nag, nag, nag. That’s all it had been with Bruce. Talia actually understands the things Selina does and she couldn’t give less of a shit about them. Well, she sort of does. Selina imagines that if Talia saw her pull something as boring as your standard bank robbery she’d break up with her. That’s understandable though, Selina would break up with someone who would pull a job that unfashionable.

“Why do you keep leaving?” Selina asks, stretching as she looks over to Talia packing her bag. It’s an honest question.

“Some of us have jobs.” Talia replies, no heat behind it. She leans over and kisses Selina before shouldering the bag. She walks to the door but hesitates before turning the handle.

Selina freezes from where she was still stretching. Talia never hesitates.

“What if I work was not the reason I was leaving?”

“Then I’d be ashamed of myself for not having you caught you in a lie sooner.” Selina replies, keeping her tone casual despite the fact that this is probably the most serious conversation they’ve had to date. “I don’t suppose you’re cheating on me? Because I thought you had better taste than to do something so class-less.”

“I would never.” she declares. The severity of the statement doesn’t match the conversation’s previous tone and Selina realises quite suddenly that they aren’t trying to be light-hearted about this any more. “I’m going to bring someone next time we see each other.”

“Oh?”

Talia opens the door and for a moment Selina thinks she isn’t getting a reply. Then Talia turns back, looking at Selina with an expression that could mean absolutely anything. “I hope that the two of you will mean something to each other.” she says, before walking out and closing the door softly behind her.

Selina doesn’t move for a while after that, thinking about what might be coming. She hopes it won’t change things too much, her and Talia really do have something special.

~

A couple of weeks later Selina gets back to her apartment to find Talia inspecting the blueprint she had set out on the table and a boy, perhaps eight years old, playing quietly with a couple of Selina’s cats.

Talia looks up from the blueprints. She doesn’t smile like she usually does when Selina enters a room. “This is my son. Damian.” she declares.

The boy looks up and cocks his head to one side. A part of Selina’s brain that she isn’t paying much attention to right now decides that how similar the boy looks to Bruce probably isn’t a coincidence.

In an instant Selina’s hopes that her and Talia’s relationship could continue unchanged are dashed. But as she looks at the boy being oh so careful with her kittens, she thinks she might not mind such a change after all.

I’ve been a fan of wolf 359 for YEARS and you have the AUDACITY to tell me that they put out Eiffels version of the lords prayer and NO ONE TOLD ME?!!!?!

The link

Disillusioned

You scream. Obviously. Then you run into the bathroom because you’re an idiot and that was the closest door to your bed.

You stop screaming. The coarse-rough voice of that horrible thing lets out a quiet “Shit.” through the wood of the door. Then heavy breathing and the drip, drip, drip of the tap maintenance never fixed is all you can hear.

Why is it here? What did you do? Some part of you had always thought that monster to be some demon. An agent of the devil that came after you for breaking your little brothers nose just because you could. Or for not calling an ambulance that time your grandma fell down the stairs. Or for tearing out Becky Pritchard’s earrings through her flesh for saying that yours looked ugly.

You may have been a slightly sadistic child.

That monster, that demon, had been the only thing that left you scared. The moment it shifted beneath your bed you would feel all the bubbling anger that flowed through your veins turn to ice. The moment it started whispering, promising you all the awful things it was going to do to you, that constant hunger to make others hurt would be drowned out by the tidal wave of fear that gripped you.

Well, old habits die hard, you think as you try to get your breathing under control. But now you’re twenty-five with six years in private security under your belt, so maybe they can be killed a little faster.

You remove the head from the toilet brush to turn it into a baton. The shape of it, the weight, is familiar to you. You’d always been good baseball. At least until you’d used the bat to take out a player's knee caps. You don’t think the coach would have minded so much if the kid had been on the opposing team.

You’ve never actually seen the monster and so find yourself hoping it has knee caps. It would be satisfying, you think, to feel the solid thunk of the strike and the sickly crack that would follow it.

Already lining up the shot in your head, you open the door.

Coming back to your apartment you prepare for a good night’s sleep. Upon laying on your bed you suddenly hear noises coming from underneath it. Carefully looking under you’re surprised to see the monster that lurked under your bed as a kid staring back at you. “Look man, I need a favor.”

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.

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.

cheers to the “bruce wayne is not batman” tag on ao3

or alternatively, au where dr wayne moonlights at doc thompkins clinic where he keeps meeting these teen vigilantes….. WHOSE kids are these? who let these INFANTS out to fight crime? anyway he uses his sleeper detective skills to track down the vigilantes and…??? be their dad??

omg wait. the drake estate also has a cave system underneath that tim finds and opens it up as a base of operations and thats where the bat theme came from. i TAKE your batcave and i SHIFT it one plot of land to the left.