Other Actors: I Sent Live Rats To My Costars And Drank Sewage Water Bc I’m A Method Actor

The Path to Being Known by elowen_p

3 Chapters - 21432 words

When Tim and Cassie are still normal kids and Bart and Kon don’t even exist, the Justice League is defeated. The world that’s left has no alternative but to become something dark and twisted enough to defend itself.

Somewhere within the veritable hellscape that remains: Tim finds Batman; Conner is created to kill Superman; Cassie just tries to survive; Bart opens the doors of his time machine to somewhere a little later than he had been expecting.

(@elowenp)

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.

Disillusioned

Batman by Sanford Greene

bruce wayne journaling after he realized his whole “I am vengeance” routine inspired the riddler and similar minded criminals

Lucius Fox doesn’t really know Tim Drake.

Sure, he’s had an awareness of the boy’s existence for a while, but Lucius has an awareness of most things that happen in Gotham. That doesn’t mean that he needs to look into all of them.

Now Tim Drake is stood in Lucius’ office on slide thirty-two of a powerpoint on all the things Wayne Enterprises should be doing to improve their profit margins. Lucius takes a moment to regret not looking into Tim Drake.

How old is the boy? Ten? The suit makes him look adorable and tiny, the seriousness with which he discusses the company only heightens the effect. It all contrasts rather awfully with the hard logic coming out of the boys mouth and Lucius would consider putting his head in his hands if that wouldn’t mean missing some of the show.

His mind flashes to all of Tam’s pleas for a little brother and he wonders for a moment how much Jack and Janet Drake would miss their tiny genius.

“You’re not paying attention.” Tim snaps with a severity that he must have learned from Janet.

Lucius leans forward and makes sure he looks properly chastened because, really, he could have missed some good points.

“My apologies, please proceed.”

Tim gives a curt nod and launches into slide thirty-three.

Anyway, happy birthday, Timmers

Oscar Pine is a good kid.

He has the best grades in his class, he helps out on the farm, he even listens to all of his aunt’s lectures about distant lands and monster slayers (although the last one isn’t hard). Oscar Pine is a good kid who wants to do great things in the future and, despite the fact that he comes from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, he has just enough drive and intelligence and eagerness that he might even accomplish them.

Oscar Pine is a good kid with his whole life ahead of him. So when a voice in his head asks to merge their souls together, Oscar’s answer is a fairly emphatic ‘No’.

“Oh,” say Ospin and Osma and a thousand other lives. “Well that’s new.”

The gods did give humanity choice after all, and they’re hardly going to take it away now.

Enemies-to-lovers, but instead of featuring a villain redemption arc, the heroic one is getting progressively more corrupt, unhinged and fucked up, and the one who was originally the clear-cut villain out of the two is just like "well mark me down as scared and horny"

Gwen would be characterised by anyone but herself as a prodigy with a sword. That would be, if she let anyone see what she can do.

She started beating Elyan when she was six. It took her far longer to beat her father for the first time but whenever she lost he would tell her that she just needed some time to get a little stronger. Some time to grow up.

Gwen beats her father for the first time when she’s fourteen. He smiles from where he’s lying on the floor with a knowing look.

“I told you so.” he manages, despite how winded he is.

She rolls her eyes and let’s the glow of pride set a fire in her chest.

~

Gwen is twenty-two years old and has been the Lady Morgana’s maid servant for a little under a year. She’s a prodigy at it and this time she does let people see. She spends all the time she has with Morgana and all the rest of it practicing with a sword in the forge’s yard.

It takes longer for anyone to notice than she thought it would.

She’s practising behind her father’s forge. Moving through the same jabs and cuts she’s repeated a thousand times before. It feels good, like it always does. It feels powerful.

“Well aren’t you full of surprises?” Lady Morgana calls wryly from the forge and Gwen almost drops her sword.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” she hisses, forgetting just about everything she’s ever learned about how to treat those of higher stations than hers. “Sorry.” she tags on the end, like that would stop a regular noble from having her beheaded for such words.

“Don’t be.” Morgana smiles slyly. “You could probably put Arthur on his arse with moves like those.”

Gwen is immensely lucky that Morgana isn’t a regular noble. “I’m sure that he would be a formidable opponent.” she says diplomatically.

Morgana grins, because she loves Arthur just like Gwen loves Elyan, but she isn’t meeting Gwen’s eyes and seems hesitant in a way that’s unlike her.

“Yes, milady?” Gwen prompts.

“I don’t suppose-“ Morgana’s eyes dart to the sword rack in the corner of the yard. “I don’t suppose you could teach me?”

Gwen smiles, relief flooding her. “Of course”

After all, it would hardly be proper for her to refuse a request from the Lady Morgana.