strap in for this week's fic flavor: the failsafe episode of season one of the young justice cartoon except the simulation just won't. fuckin. end.
(fics that inspired this at the end)
If I ever did sit down to make my own fic, I'd split it in 3 parts:
The Simulation: bits and pieces of the 40 years Dick lives after most everyone he knows has died
The Return: the immediate aftermath and healing from the trauma of having not-quite-actually lived a whole life only to wake up and find out it was all fake. nothing traumatizing about that whatsoever.
The Unintended Consequence: aka the twist I'd love to add and would hint to in the second part - finding out the simulation, through martian mind fuckery, pulled from the real world (and in many cases, from real minds). Dick meets a bunch of people he didn't think were real outside the confines of his simulated life. A bunch of rowdy, heroism-inclined teens across the years get to meet the sibling/friend/mentor figure they all dreamed up one night.
(actual idea snippets under the cut)
.
Dick Grayson is 14 and most of the world's heroes have died. He planned a suicide mission that left him the sole survivor of a doomed team he helped found. The invasion may have been stopped, but is this really the price he wanted to pay?
The first face he sees in the infirmary is Roy's, and he has to close his eyes and just breathe for a few minutes because for one painful moment he'd thought it was Wally. But this isn't the world where his best friend miraculously survived alongside him. This is the one where he got his best friend killed and didn't even give him the courtesy of following behind him. Behind them.
.
Dick Grayson is 27 and has lived longer without Bruce than with him. The invasion's anniversary is always a tough day for him, but that morning seems especially harrowing. He'll get shit for it later, but can't resist stepping out onto the balcony of the manor's master bedroom (Bruce's old bedroom) for a smoke -- his first since he'd promised to quit if Jason, just 15 then, did too.
"Bad habits tend to pile up," he'd said, a rueful quirk to his tired grin. He'd tapped the cigarette twice on the railing and added, lower, "and this one's especially nasty, huh."
He inhales, watches the sun creep across the horizon, and lets acrid smoke burn through his lungs for a long moment before blowing it out in a small cloud. His eyes water, but he doesn't cough. It tastes just as bad as it did the first time he smoked one, not even a year after the invasion and treading water as Robin proved insufficient.
There hadn't been enough heroes to go around then, and Dick had been trained by one of the best. It hadn't been fair, but it had been his plan that had ultimately stopped the invasion. His shoulders everyone's expectations fell on.
He takes another drag, then smudges the lit end against the rail he's leaned on when he hears a boot scuff purposefully against the roofing above him.
"Todd and Pennyworth will be upset with you."
He doesn't turn around. Damian doesn't jump down to join him.
.
Dick Grayson is 54 and wakes up in a room full of ghosts. He hears his long-dead father-figure tell his long-dead team about a simulation they weren't meant to win. A training exercise gone wrong and only half a day spent under their mentors' careful, if slightly panicked, supervision.
He looks at his hands, watching the way his gloves crease when he flexes them in and out of tight fists. He looks at his team, their eyes a little haunted but shoulders slumped with relief even as they grumble. Batman's heavy, gloved hand settles on his shoulder and the weight of it is a nauseating mix of foreign-familiar.
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
Tears prick his eyes behind his domino mask, and he tells himself the suffocating, acidic void building in his chest is just some leftover side effect of the ordeal and not the grief-guilt of outliving yet another family (no matter that they hadn't been real in the end).
.
Dick Grayson is 16-going-on-56 and well used to the coincidences piling up between his simulated life and the real thing. Some of it -- missions and villains he remembers cropping up -- he's marked for Bruce to review and sort as he pleases. Some -- security for the cave, team building anecdotes, and training regimens -- he's shared with the team. And some he keeps only for himself.
Tim is one of those. He knows it's not fair to the kid (so much smaller now than he ever was when Dick lived his simulated life), but he can't help being selfish just for this. Tim is the one kid he's sure he didn't make up, and if Dick's taken to babysitting the kid just to be near at least one member of the family he built for himself in the wake of the worst days of his life .... Well, anyone who says shit about it can happily stand in line to have their teeth kicked in.
Despite this, it still catches him off-guard when he sees a familiar face pop up in one of Bruce's reports.
Jason Todd, caught boosting tires off the batmobile, is nearly the same age now as he was when Dick met him. He stares at the words, but none of them really sink in beyond the kid's name and address. He's moving before he's even made the decision.
He's used to the world kicking him when he's down - lived it for 40 frustrating years. But he has Bruce again. And things with Tim have been so good. And he's always been selfish when it comes to family. If he could just see Jason. If he could just meet him. If he could talk to him.
If if if if if--
.
Inspirations:
Circles in Shattered Mirrors by InfinityIllusion
Fine (But Not Okay) by CharlotteDaBookworm
Verisimilitude by mutemelody
25 notes
·
View notes
Dahin sighed, and shrugged, as if committing himself to a course he wasn't sure he wanted to traverse. "I don't know if you remember, but we saw a map engraved on the wall of that court, the one where the Hierarchs lived."
Kai shook his head, baffled. He had no idea what Dahin was talking about. "What court? When?"
"It was when you killed the expositor and put the Cageling Demon Court intention in the water, and we swam to the wall of the room and were drowning," Dahin clarified hopefully.
He was talking about a mortal lifetime ago, the day they had all escaped this place. "I remember there were walls," Kai said. (Witch King, p. 272)
ah yes, the two genders: Nerd and Person trying to save nerd from dying.
44 notes
·
View notes
pssst why is false's data weird?
oh yeah…
false backstory time: when the universe was trying to create her hels, it glitched, and she became false’s twin instead. surprise! it’s empires false.
here’s how a twin differs from a hels: twins are totally identical players, both in terms of base physical appearance and player data. they spawn together on their homeworld. neither twin is the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one; they’re both a bit more complex than that.
making a hels is like, taking all the ‘bad’ stuff out of a bottle and dumping it into its own bottle, amplifying it in the process so it can fill the whole bottle. so you started with one bottle that had an even mix of good and bad, and ended with one bottle that has no bad stuff and one bottle chock full of bad stuff, way more than was in the original bottle (this is a generalization ofc and doesn’t apply to all hels situations).
BUT now imagine that after the bad bottle was made, there was an accident, and half of each bottle spilled into new bottles. so you have two bottles that each have half good and half bad. this might seem similar to the original bottle you started with, except remember that when the bad stuff got pulled out, it got amplified. so both bottles end up having more bad stuff than the original source, but not as much bad stuff as a true hels would.
if none of that makes sense, hopefully this shitty illustration on some scrap paper will make it more clear:
so like, instead of being one overworlder and one hels, they are two half-overworlder half-hels players. both false’s have the same data, here’s how u get it.
start w the original (what overworld false’s data would’ve been):
87d91548-6f18-491f-a267-7833caa5d7d8
make it hels (what her hels’s data would’ve been):
-8d7d5ssc3387-762a-t194-81t6-84519d78
combine first part of second one with second part of first one and stick the minus sign on the other side. now you’ve got twins:
8d7d5ssc3387-762a-t194-87d91548-6f18-
so yeah that’s false’s data. also assume i’m talking abt hermitcraft false when i say false, empires false will be e!false.
52 notes
·
View notes
One of my favorite semi-crack headcanons is that Narcissa actually does look like her relatives, she’s got naturally black hair and gray eyes, but she initially started wearing glamor charms/charms to change the color after the war to avoid the number of people giving her suspicious looks for her resemblance to two notorious Death Eaters and her husband who’d only avoided a conviction through Ministry ineptitude and legit everyone suspects him of lying or also lied but knows the truth, but then she just fell into habit of doing this (and uses relatively permanent charms. They can be undone, but they don’t need to be constantly reapplied). Bella escapes from prison and says “what the hell happened to your hair—and your eyes” straight away, first thing she says to her sister after over a decade; Narcissa shrugs and says looking like her convicted criminal cousin and sister wasn’t winning her any favors, better swing the opposite direction to see if that helps. Andromeda, who looks like Bella’s twin, still got suspicious looks but marrying a Muggleborn and having his kid went a long ways toward making people trust her; she has a scathing commentary on her sister deadass changing her appearance to try to dodge the DE allegations and it is one of the first things she says to Sirius after meeting him again. Draco genuinely cannot recognize younger photos of his mother and fully thinks this is her natural appearance; he gets a nasty shock when he learns otherwise and he only discovers the truth because Rabastan was telling his sort of nephew stories of what they all used to be like and found a photo album that had their old pictures. Rabastan watches the kid stare at 16 year old Narcissa Black with her little cousins at her side—all three looking near identical and laughing together—and wonders if he broke the kid and if so, can he fool Narcissa into thinking he didn’t play a role in this; he sadly decides he can’t and frantically tries to calm Draco down, because if Narcissa doesn’t hex him into next year, she’ll just tell Bella and Bella most certainly will. Sirius once saw a recent photo of Cissy and choked on his breakfast, pre-seeing Andy again, asking who the hell that woman was because it sure isn’t his cousin. Upon the younger lot confirming that’s just how she looks now, he hollers for Tonks to go get her mother, Sirius needs to find out what the hell her sister is up to. This is the first time the younger kids meet Andromeda and she makes a hell of an impression
ok but why is this actually hilarious lmao
i think i’ve seen something adjacent to this in a fic where someone (sirius?) makes a crack ab narcissa partially dying her hair blond a la the movies to try and fit in better w the maggots and the thought is honestly too funny.
some teenage girls get a tattoo of their bfs, some teenage boys carve their crush’ names into their hands, and narcissa black permanently colors her hair blond and staunchly stands by that decision well into her adult years (while resolutely cursing her fair skin for betraying her embarrassed flush)
20 notes
·
View notes