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Batman Beyond: I went looking for some writing
Normal FFVII fic will return when I have more time to think - all the stuff I'm putting out in this time period is like, I don't know, stress relief or something. I sit down, my fingers move, I wake up, and the fic's gone and written itself. 8D
I went looking for some writing
Fandom: Batman Beyond
Rating: PG
Characters: Bruce, Terry, mentions of Dick
Warnings: Universe smashing - replacing toon!Tim with comics!Tim backstory, because, um, comics!Tim is more adorable. Assumes that Return of the Joker has already happened.Ripping off some words from Gotham Knights #10-14.
Summary: Day one was warm-ups and history lessons; day two is about genealogy, and maybe just a little bit about how the entire damn family must have once needed psychiatrists.
Arc: Counting down the hours
1440 words and a lot of Terry wondering just how sane he's going to turn out at the end of all of this. Oh, and a guided tour of, you know. The Ones Who Were.
It's inevitable that Terry starts discovering things that he would otherwise have left untouched now that he's at the manor more often. Should otherwise have left untouched, a small part of his common sense points out, but if he listened to it all that often, he wouldn't be here in the first place.
Sometimes, at home, he wakes up to the sound of Matt being a twip, and the whole of his life kind of flashes before him in two halves, and Terry isn't sure which one is more real than the other. It's the kind of identity crisis that he doesn't subscribe to, on principle. He's Terry McGinnis. His job is being Batman. The two aren't mutually exclusive, or they shouldn't be.
Lose the cape, kid, he remembers Gordon telling him. The commish is a nice piece of work, for a lady who's probably been past menopause for half a decade now.
Terry brushes his fingertips over the edge of one of the real photo frames that Wayne keeps about the house: physical, print-based, nothing so crude as pixels and liquid display. He wouldn't have known it otherwise, but Barbara (Batgirl) had red hair. It stands out bright like a flame, even though the paper behind the framing glass is yellowing. Barbara Gordon, a la nineteen-ninty-something: she (the old one) seems diametric to her (the new one, who's actually the old one--).
Were they all so fiery, once? Whoever they were? Were they all this messed up?
There's this guy, Terry knows.
Not Drake, because Drake only appears once or twice in Bruce's above-ground mausoleum, usually with a cardigan over his shoulders like he'd just been dropping by for a visit. That, or he must have been the preppiest guy on earth. He looks entirely different from the forty-year old engineer version of himself, the one with two kids and a wife. Terry doesn't know what he'd ever get out of being a "communications expert", unless the job description's actually code for "inventing really cool toys".
There's this guy.
It's not the anonymous third party, either, the one who's there by not being there. Terry'll be the first person to admit that he's not the sharpest tool in the box (half of Gotham's criminals must think that Batman is a schizo, with the way he talks to Wayne) - but you aren't Batman for too long before some of Bruce's stop-asking-stupid-questions attitude gets to you. Terry finds himself thinking when he walks through the manor: thinking about the glass case downstairs, the only one with a name, and the one without the face. Jason Todd. A good soldier.
Every war has its casualties. Bruce's old one went and robbed Wayne Manor of all evidence of the one he'd lost. No one really positions photographs like that, with gaps in between, like history falling through the cracks.
So, there's the guy.
Terry knows he's the one because there are versions of him hanging around the house. The rooms. They cave. If you're measuring proximity to the Bat by the general level of weird, then this has to be him. The one guy who was probably as dedicated to Bruce as Batman was to the mission. The one that's an eight-year-old in one photograph, and an eighteen-year-old in the next, each in formal --
'Family portraits never go out of date, huh?' Terry asks the empty air, which resolves itself into Bruce a moment later. There's always a different kind of quality to the silence when the old man's around. He makes it thick, even though you don't ever hear him coming.
'Shouldn't you have better things to do, McGinnis?' Bruce asks, but it's one of those cutting rhetorical statements, more to let Terry know that he disapproves than any real attempt at dissuading things.
'Did my runs, finished my homework, made my bed, fed the mutt, and lunch means I've got thirty minutes of idle time scheduled, unless you want me to throw up all over the gym equipment,' Terry replies without turning from his discovered loot. Bruce follows the trail of discarded drapes to come up just behind him. Terry tries not to make it too obvious how tentative he really feels about doing this. 'Thought I'd do some dusting, top it all off.'
It's a lame excuse, but Bruce is probably the champion of taking those for what they really are; Bruce probably invented the need for them in the first place.
("This bruise? Fell off my bed, yeah, it was really funny." "Tried helping mum in the kitchen. The knives are really a lot sharper than they seem, ha-ha-ha.")
Bruce responds to him by not responding. That's probably one of the tactics from the Art of War.
It's day two and the old man looks a little greyer, but not grey enough that he's stooped down to shorter than Terry's height, physically. It's just really weird to have Bruce reaching over his shoulder, as physically tall as Terry's always imagined him to be, in his head.
The picture he pulls down is the oldest (most recent?) one of the guy; he looks twenty-fivish and spectacular. Terry feels a clench in his gut at the way Bruce looks at the man, all sorts of pain and memory and maybe even fondness wrapped up in an old man's eyes, eyes stuck in a young man's head.
Terry gets the feeling that Bruce hasn't always been this warm and fuzzy, for a given value of "warm and fuzzy". There has to be a reason why all these people left, and even better reasons for why they didn't come back.
'So,' he says, before the silence can go from awkward to lethal. 'Is this the famous D.G?'
'His name is Richard Grayson,' Bruce says, giving the picture one more passing look before replacing it, precisely, on the mantelpiece Terry excavated. 'Dick Grayson. D.G.'
Terry looks at Bruce. 'Dick? You actually called a twenty year old guy Dick?'
The expression on Bruce's face is cutting, amused, smug. '"Richard" never suited him.'
'And Dick did?'
'Say what you want, Terence,' Bruce replies, which is a really good way of driving the dagger in and twisting it a lot. But at least he hasn't killed Terry for asking.
So Terry asks a little bit more. 'Which one was he?' (Maybe he should've asked who, but he's just that slightest bit afraid of how many answers that question might have, and what it might mean, for Wayne, for Grayson, for himself.)
'He was the first Robin,' Bruce shrugs, picking up the drape from the floor and replacing it over the mantelpiece. 'Before he left.'
'Fled the roost?'
'I fired him,' Bruce says.
Atomic bomb #3. And what do you say to something like that?
'Uh,' Terry manages.
'I adopted him eight years later,' Bruce mentions, as an afterthought while waiting for the younger man to recover.
'Now you're just screwing with me,' Terry accuses, knowing that that is just about fucked up enough to be true. 'He's your son?'
'I think the word he used was legacy,' Bruce corrects, and he when he looks at Terry it makes Terry feel like he's both burning up and freezing. If you could zoom out on the whole world, Terry thinks, you'd see him right there, Terence McGinnis, in the middle of Wayne Manor, out of place and exactly where he wants to be and such a stranger.
He has to ask. It's suicide pushing into Wayne's private affairs, but sometimes you just have to know why everyone (important) thinks that Bruce Wayne is a man who deserves the kind of bitter ending he almost had. 'If he's your legacy,' Terry asks, 'then why am I the one wearing the suit?'
'Do you know what they say about parents and their expectations, Terence?' Bruce Wayne asks him. It creeps Terry out, the way he can shift, just like that. The look in the old man's eyes is a hundred percent Bat. It makes the dissonance worse. 'They say that you should never try to make your children be what you were not. Live the life you wanted but couldn't have.' Bruce finishes with the drapes, and Terry knows that it's time to exit, stage right.
He's - they're - almost out the door when Bruce (Wayne?) says, quietly, steely, with pride and regret like Promethean fire: 'I never had to tell Dick that. He was fearless, even as himself. Especially as himself. Effusive,' Bruce says, like it's a script, or an epithet, or scripture. 'And full of grace.'
Terry doesn't open the door to that room again.
I went looking for some writing
Fandom: Batman Beyond
Rating: PG
Characters: Bruce, Terry, mentions of Dick
Warnings: Universe smashing - replacing toon!Tim with comics!Tim backstory, because, um, comics!Tim is more adorable. Assumes that Return of the Joker has already happened.Ripping off some words from Gotham Knights #10-14.
Summary: Day one was warm-ups and history lessons; day two is about genealogy, and maybe just a little bit about how the entire damn family must have once needed psychiatrists.
Arc: Counting down the hours
1440 words and a lot of Terry wondering just how sane he's going to turn out at the end of all of this. Oh, and a guided tour of, you know. The Ones Who Were.
It's inevitable that Terry starts discovering things that he would otherwise have left untouched now that he's at the manor more often. Should otherwise have left untouched, a small part of his common sense points out, but if he listened to it all that often, he wouldn't be here in the first place.
Sometimes, at home, he wakes up to the sound of Matt being a twip, and the whole of his life kind of flashes before him in two halves, and Terry isn't sure which one is more real than the other. It's the kind of identity crisis that he doesn't subscribe to, on principle. He's Terry McGinnis. His job is being Batman. The two aren't mutually exclusive, or they shouldn't be.
Lose the cape, kid, he remembers Gordon telling him. The commish is a nice piece of work, for a lady who's probably been past menopause for half a decade now.
Terry brushes his fingertips over the edge of one of the real photo frames that Wayne keeps about the house: physical, print-based, nothing so crude as pixels and liquid display. He wouldn't have known it otherwise, but Barbara (Batgirl) had red hair. It stands out bright like a flame, even though the paper behind the framing glass is yellowing. Barbara Gordon, a la nineteen-ninty-something: she (the old one) seems diametric to her (the new one, who's actually the old one--).
Were they all so fiery, once? Whoever they were? Were they all this messed up?
There's this guy, Terry knows.
Not Drake, because Drake only appears once or twice in Bruce's above-ground mausoleum, usually with a cardigan over his shoulders like he'd just been dropping by for a visit. That, or he must have been the preppiest guy on earth. He looks entirely different from the forty-year old engineer version of himself, the one with two kids and a wife. Terry doesn't know what he'd ever get out of being a "communications expert", unless the job description's actually code for "inventing really cool toys".
There's this guy.
It's not the anonymous third party, either, the one who's there by not being there. Terry'll be the first person to admit that he's not the sharpest tool in the box (half of Gotham's criminals must think that Batman is a schizo, with the way he talks to Wayne) - but you aren't Batman for too long before some of Bruce's stop-asking-stupid-questions attitude gets to you. Terry finds himself thinking when he walks through the manor: thinking about the glass case downstairs, the only one with a name, and the one without the face. Jason Todd. A good soldier.
Every war has its casualties. Bruce's old one went and robbed Wayne Manor of all evidence of the one he'd lost. No one really positions photographs like that, with gaps in between, like history falling through the cracks.
So, there's the guy.
Terry knows he's the one because there are versions of him hanging around the house. The rooms. They cave. If you're measuring proximity to the Bat by the general level of weird, then this has to be him. The one guy who was probably as dedicated to Bruce as Batman was to the mission. The one that's an eight-year-old in one photograph, and an eighteen-year-old in the next, each in formal --
'Family portraits never go out of date, huh?' Terry asks the empty air, which resolves itself into Bruce a moment later. There's always a different kind of quality to the silence when the old man's around. He makes it thick, even though you don't ever hear him coming.
'Shouldn't you have better things to do, McGinnis?' Bruce asks, but it's one of those cutting rhetorical statements, more to let Terry know that he disapproves than any real attempt at dissuading things.
'Did my runs, finished my homework, made my bed, fed the mutt, and lunch means I've got thirty minutes of idle time scheduled, unless you want me to throw up all over the gym equipment,' Terry replies without turning from his discovered loot. Bruce follows the trail of discarded drapes to come up just behind him. Terry tries not to make it too obvious how tentative he really feels about doing this. 'Thought I'd do some dusting, top it all off.'
It's a lame excuse, but Bruce is probably the champion of taking those for what they really are; Bruce probably invented the need for them in the first place.
("This bruise? Fell off my bed, yeah, it was really funny." "Tried helping mum in the kitchen. The knives are really a lot sharper than they seem, ha-ha-ha.")
Bruce responds to him by not responding. That's probably one of the tactics from the Art of War.
It's day two and the old man looks a little greyer, but not grey enough that he's stooped down to shorter than Terry's height, physically. It's just really weird to have Bruce reaching over his shoulder, as physically tall as Terry's always imagined him to be, in his head.
The picture he pulls down is the oldest (most recent?) one of the guy; he looks twenty-fivish and spectacular. Terry feels a clench in his gut at the way Bruce looks at the man, all sorts of pain and memory and maybe even fondness wrapped up in an old man's eyes, eyes stuck in a young man's head.
Terry gets the feeling that Bruce hasn't always been this warm and fuzzy, for a given value of "warm and fuzzy". There has to be a reason why all these people left, and even better reasons for why they didn't come back.
'So,' he says, before the silence can go from awkward to lethal. 'Is this the famous D.G?'
'His name is Richard Grayson,' Bruce says, giving the picture one more passing look before replacing it, precisely, on the mantelpiece Terry excavated. 'Dick Grayson. D.G.'
Terry looks at Bruce. 'Dick? You actually called a twenty year old guy Dick?'
The expression on Bruce's face is cutting, amused, smug. '"Richard" never suited him.'
'And Dick did?'
'Say what you want, Terence,' Bruce replies, which is a really good way of driving the dagger in and twisting it a lot. But at least he hasn't killed Terry for asking.
So Terry asks a little bit more. 'Which one was he?' (Maybe he should've asked who, but he's just that slightest bit afraid of how many answers that question might have, and what it might mean, for Wayne, for Grayson, for himself.)
'He was the first Robin,' Bruce shrugs, picking up the drape from the floor and replacing it over the mantelpiece. 'Before he left.'
'Fled the roost?'
'I fired him,' Bruce says.
Atomic bomb #3. And what do you say to something like that?
'Uh,' Terry manages.
'I adopted him eight years later,' Bruce mentions, as an afterthought while waiting for the younger man to recover.
'Now you're just screwing with me,' Terry accuses, knowing that that is just about fucked up enough to be true. 'He's your son?'
'I think the word he used was legacy,' Bruce corrects, and he when he looks at Terry it makes Terry feel like he's both burning up and freezing. If you could zoom out on the whole world, Terry thinks, you'd see him right there, Terence McGinnis, in the middle of Wayne Manor, out of place and exactly where he wants to be and such a stranger.
He has to ask. It's suicide pushing into Wayne's private affairs, but sometimes you just have to know why everyone (important) thinks that Bruce Wayne is a man who deserves the kind of bitter ending he almost had. 'If he's your legacy,' Terry asks, 'then why am I the one wearing the suit?'
'Do you know what they say about parents and their expectations, Terence?' Bruce Wayne asks him. It creeps Terry out, the way he can shift, just like that. The look in the old man's eyes is a hundred percent Bat. It makes the dissonance worse. 'They say that you should never try to make your children be what you were not. Live the life you wanted but couldn't have.' Bruce finishes with the drapes, and Terry knows that it's time to exit, stage right.
He's - they're - almost out the door when Bruce (Wayne?) says, quietly, steely, with pride and regret like Promethean fire: 'I never had to tell Dick that. He was fearless, even as himself. Especially as himself. Effusive,' Bruce says, like it's a script, or an epithet, or scripture. 'And full of grace.'
Terry doesn't open the door to that room again.
no subject
Though Cass's ghost would make the most awesome hand signals.