Cheers To The “bruce Wayne Is Not Batman” Tag On Ao3

^^^ the good shit

Once back on Earth, Doug starts his radio shows with “Hello, humans,” or maybe “Hello, humanity,” but he can’t bring himself to address the audience as “Dear Listeners,” anymore

I don’t even blame Luther for the apocalypse but I do have two hands so I can’t deny that the option is there

Carpenter walks up to a near complete mark of the wither tide, Faulkner muttering incoherently at its centre, and scuffs it with her boot.

Faulkner looks up with crazed eyes the moment she alters his masterpiece. Carpenter grips her shard of glass tighter and feels it cut into her hand. Blood drips to the ground and Carpenter suppresses a bitter laugh.

One last offering to the Trawlerman.

“You should run, Carpenter,” Faulkner warns, his voice quavers but not with anything so mundane as nerves. His body can barely contain his excitement, the fervency of his devotion. His gaze sharpens and Carpenter balks as she feels the water surrounding the pier pulse in rhythm with his heartbeat. “I’ve told you before that it would be unwise for you to test which of us our god loves more.”

Carpenter's pace as she walks through the wither mark, bad leg dragging against the floor and destroying all Faulkner’s hard work, does not change. She remains steady and is rewarded with a voice that does not quaver as Faulkner’s does. “You know as well as anyone that I have never proclaimed myself to be wise.”

Faulkner huffs out a laugh and Carpenter smiles a familiar smile. It drops as she remembers what she’s about to do. Faulkner must see it and mirrors her expression before his eyes go distant.

“I suppose we’re soon to part ways then?”

Carpenter pauses for a moment. “That would not be an unreasonable assumption,” she allows.

Faulkner nods as if this is the only answer he had been expecting. “Well then, I suppose if we are to end this as enemies, we’d best do it as the sort who love each other.” As he speaks Faulkner daubs himself in the marking of the Trawlerman once again. The mud from the last time he did so still stains his skin but the marks he paints now lose no clarity because of that. Once he appears to be finished he turns away from the prayer marks that have been gradually consuming his body to meet Carpenter's eyes. “May your peace find you on a lonely road."

Carpenter swallows dryly, suddenly very glad of the reminder Paige’s parting words had given her. “May your peace walk on with you for a while.”

She and Faulkner exchange sad smiles. Then Carpenter is raising her glass and running towards Faulkner as fast as her broken and bleeding legs will carry her. Then Faulkner is readying his stance and screaming his prayers to the river with more conviction than Carpenter knew a human voice could contain. Then Faulkner is raising his hands skywards and then-

~

The river rises

The river rises and it is not a flood as was written. As Nana Glass told stories of. As Carpenter dreamed would seep upwards to drench and drown her doubts in silt.

The river rises and it is a tsunami.

~

Carpenter, limping and shattered and shaking, is faster than her river.

She reaches the centre of the wither mark, reaches Faulkner. His eyes widen a bit as she does so, as if he can’t quite believe that his river would fail him in his moment of triumph.

Carpenter has known her god far to long to think it reliable.

She plunges the shard of glass into Faulkner’s left eye. He screams in pain and Carpenter mutters a quick prayer that his death will be quick, there is little else she can do for him at this point.

Then Faulkner manages to stop screaming, keeps his cries of pain trapped in his throat and lets something different flood out.

“You should have aimed for the prayer marks,” he hisses, teeth bared as blood drips down his cheeks in a crimson tide.

Shit.

There isn't much she can do after that.

~

-crashing waves full of weeds and bracken and crawling angels of the river. Water filling her lungs and mud wriggling into her eyes.

Something twists her leg. A thing with claws that are too huge to be any crab or lobster that Carpenter can't see through the filth of her god.

The pain is huge and impossible but even as tears fill her eyes Carpenter finds it in herself to be grateful. Of all the ways her river knows how to do harm this is perhaps one of its least awful.

She wonders if it’s a boon. A final thank you after her years of faithful service. Considering what she’s done for her river Carpenter finds this to be a rather weak acknowledgement of her efforts and stops feeling grateful.

Then she’s crashing tumbling through dodgem cars and her river is a whirlpool with her at its centre and if she could just breathe then-

~

When Carpenter wakes up, it’s to her shock that she’s still alive.

This is better thanks of my service, she thinks in the direction of her river. She sits up with a grunt of pain and begins to inspect the damage.

Her leg is fucked. It’s no longer bleeding but in a cruel twist of fate it’s been sanctified. The flesh is hard and rough. Calcified. Carpenter can feel layers upon layers and limpets, with other squamous things sandwiched in between, clinging directly to her bone.

Where her new flesh meets her old she itches.

There’s also the fact that she has no idea where she is.

Or, maybe she does. That patch of bulrushes looks sort of familiar and she’s sure she heard this same bird song she's hearing now at some point during her and Faulkner’s pilgrimage.

She drags herself upright and finds that she can put weight in her new leg even if it makes her somewhat unsteady. She hobbles about the bank, moving inland.

Then she sees the body.

It’s not much of a body. More like a skeleton, picked clean by birds and angels of the river alike. Despite the fact that it’s lacking most of its distinguishing features, Carpenter knows in her soul that this is the body she and Faulkner saw near the beginning of their pilgrimage. Right before everything started to go to shit.

Carpenter let’s out a harsh laugh as she realises this, the sound of her torment echoing across her still and silent river.

“You’re telling me that was all the god damn exposition?” she screams at her god, angry tears blurring her vision.

Her river doesn’t answer her.

Carpenter sighs, it’s not as if she expected anything different. She picks herself up and starts trying to figure out what to do now.

She laughs again, gentler this time. She bets that Faulkner is doing the exact same thing.

@elowenp hands over 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♂️ demoncat is actually my greatest weakness and this piece referencing this part (below) of their fic!!

the outfits r kinda generic but i was rlly happy how selina turned out. i will make more pieces based on their series “stay” but drops this n runs for now! this is my first time trying this layout, i didn’t rlly enjoy it but i was too deep to not not finish it 🫥 but i hope it is still not too bad!

fic is linked here, please give it a shot!! damian is rlly cute there but the demoncat dynamic hits like … rlly good.

Watched Batman ninja and what an absolute fucking masterpiece would highly recommend

AU where Jason gets his revenge by becoming a lawyer and getting joker sentenced to the death penalty

Bruce is conflicted about it but any time he tries to say anything on the subject Alfred just talks over him like "oh we're so proud of you master Jason you finished college and you didn't even use your father's extensive resources that could've easily gotten someone in this family a degree aren't we so proud master Bruce that Jason got himself a respectable profession--"

“Did you hear that?” whispers Callum to the more hardened criminals around him. They snort in derision at his caution, just the new guy being on edge about the job, but he keeps his gun held tight in his hand.

“I heard it too.” says Tony, the other new guy. He doesn’t look as worried as Callum because fine maybe Callum is a bit nervous about this whole ‘becoming a criminal’ thing but he can see that Tony holds his gun with just as tight a grip. “Sounded a bit like laughing, yeah?”

The rest of the gang goes very still and Callum feels like he might be missing something.

“Yeah,” Callum agrees cautiously, “like a little kid.”

Someone swears. Everyone turns so that someone else is defending their back.

“What’s the problem?.” Callum asks, also turning to keep someone at his back.

The laughter sounds again, clearer this time and that’s definitely a little kid. It makes even some of the more hardened men in the room flinch.

“Anyone here got a problem shooting a kid?” asks the member of their group that Callum thinks might be in charge.

What he really wants to say is yes I do have a problem shooting a kid that really isn’t what I thought I was signing up to here but Callum thinks that saying any of that would be a very good way to have the guys shoot him instead of the kid. He doesn’t want that either so he stays silent and pretends that he’s cool with everything that’s happening here.

Turns out that he doesn’t need to worry about shooting any kids.

Turns out that kids are more likely to shoot you.

They don’t even see the boy before there are sharp things knocking the guns out of their hands and, just as Callum tries to pick his up, tiny fingers are around his neck and he’s blacking out before managing to put up even the imitation of a fight.

~

Callum wakes up he doesn’t know how long later. He’s in the ally behind the warehouse he’d been in when he got knocked out. A kid in a domino mask is perched on the street light across from him.

“You should get a different job,” the kid says to him, “you’re too scared for this one.”

Callum would have loved to have said something cutting back, the kind of one liner the real bosses can come up with in an instant, but his throat is sore from being squeezed shut and his head is swimming so all he comes up with is a raspy, “am not” as he tries not to puke.

“Your hands are shaking.”

Shit, they are. Callum sends as scathing a look as he can at his traitorous hands. The effort of that actually does make him puke and he’s forced to ignore the somewhat pitying look the kid is sending his way.

“Yikes, you really aren’t suited to this kind of thing, are you? Maybe you should try and get one of those construction jobs going at that place round the corner. Oh! Or you could be a chef! I think you’d make a great chef.” The kid looks behind himself at something Callum’s vision is too blurry to see. “I’ve gotta go, but it was nice meeting you. Hopefully see you never, yeah?”

The kid backflips off the street light for no discernible reason.

Callum lies on his back and stares at his hands for twenty minutes until they stop shaking. For the whole time he thinks about how the construction place round the corner already rejected him and there aren’t any jobs for chefs in this part of town.

Tim is walking to his house after school when he spots his parents car in the drive and feels a flash of panic. He runs through a checklist in his mind of how he left the house and whether he’s done anything lately that his parents could be here to pick him up on. After a moment he’s certain that everything should be fine and the worst thing that’s about to happen is a far too formal conversation about whatever areas his parents feel he’s slacking in and he opens the door. When he doesn’t see either of them waiting for him he heads up to his room, dismissing the unease he feels when his door is slightly more ajar than he left it.

His initial flash of panic is nothing compared to the alarm he feels when he walks in to find his mother holding the robin costume in a perfectly manicured hand.

The look on her face is a sight to behold. Her normal expression of mild disdain suits her, it turns a face that would normally be described as pretty into something beautiful. Something that could be carved from marble. Now her face is twisted with enough anger to make her ugly.

Tim is struck for a moment by how this might be the first time she’s cared enough to look at him with real anger since that night at the circus when she told him to stop crying and he couldn’t deliver, no matter how hard he tried.

“This was not the plan Timothy.” she hisses through gritted teeth.

Tim takes the subsequent verbal thrashing with all the grace expected of him as a Drake. By the time it ends he thinks there might be a couple of cracks in the facade but he manages to keep it under control.

The only reason he doesn’t break down is because during her whole scolding Janet never once tells him to give up Robin. He can tell from the curl of her lip, the set of her spine, that she wants to. That she aches to. But Janet Drake has never once entered a battle knowing she would lose.

So she doesn’t tell him to stop. And in the face of such favour? Tim can handle anything.

The rawest line to ever be conceived, honestly.

Batman unburied is fucking sensational let no one tell you otherwise