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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 1 year

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Down the Rabbithole, Part 1

Summary: Damian has been trapped in the body of his infant self. He is not very happy about this. Ladybug, Red Robin, and Chat Noir are also not particularly happy about this, either, because now they have a baby to take care of.

Damian Wayne was having a terrible, no good, very bad day.

Or, at least, he was pretty sure he was.

Right now, things felt surprisingly nice. He felt like he was about to settle down for a nice nap, something warm and heavy pulled over him like a thick blanket that was surely better than the cold outside of his new cocoon. There was something over his head, rendering opening his eyes completely useless. There was a sound somewhere over his head, but it was muted whispering that he couldn’t really bring himself to listen to at the moment. Everything felt surprisingly good, he couldn’t even feel the broken arm he had just gotten from the fight that had ended in a flash of brilliant white light. It was so comfortable…

Oh no. He was going into shock, wasn’t he?

He started struggling within the maybe-blankets, trying to throw them off, but his limbs weren’t working quite how he wanted them to and the blankets were heavy and all he could do was let out a high scream.

The sound that had been lingering on the edge of his consciousness cut off. The world was silent other than what he was pretty sure was a siren in the distance.

And then the silence was broken by a familiar voice murmuring something that sounded like it might have been “What the actual hell?”

His head snapped towards the sound despite the evil fabric that had swallowed him and he raised a heavy arm towards it. He may not particularly like Drake, but they had long-since developed a camaraderie out on the field and he could count on his adoptive brother to help him out whenever needed.

The fabric was pulled away from him and, instead of seeing his brother, he looked up into the surprisingly large face of Ladybug.

Huh. She was bigger than she had looked on TV, he had sworn she was actually short. Definitely not big enough to struggle to fit in an alley. Places in France must have been huge to make her look average-sized.

Also she was wearing sunglasses instead of her usual mask, for some reason.

The more you know.

She stared at him blankly for a moment, her eyebrows just barely pinching together, before she slowly lit up. She pressed her hands to her mouth in a delicate gesture. “Oh my gods,” she whispered, her voice almost a coo.

Damian hadn’t been thought cute by someone in years, not since he had started stabbing people as Robin and they realized that doing so would be to their detriment. He hadn’t missed it. He bristled under her shining eyes. He tried to convey with his face that he would murder her the moment his limbs started working properly again. Somehow, this only made her smile wide enough to peek out from behind her fingers.

Suddenly, she was shoved away in favor of a new, far more familiar face. He might have been grateful if Drake wasn’t also the size of a city street.

He remembered the flash of bright light suddenly and understanding hit him. The meta he had been sent to fight must have had the power to manipulate size! The woman had made Damian small, and had made Drake and Ladybug huge!

(Which was totally unfair, by the way, but that wasn’t the point.)

He smirked over the solved mystery and started looking around for the meta that had turned them. Neither Ladybug nor Drake looked particularly on edge as they stayed staring at him with wide eyes, so the woman must have been defeated… and, yes, there she was, beaten and bloody and tied up in a strange, polka-dotted rope!

He tried to point at her, mouth opening to tell them that they should really start trying to get her to change them all back to normal, only to scream.

Because his hand was small and pudgy in a way that it hadn’t been in years.

He looked down at himself in dawning horror.

The woman hadn’t done something quite as simple as manipulating their sizes, and Drake and Ladybug weren’t all that big.

He was a baby.

He whipped around to look back at Drake and found his own terror mirrored in his brother’s face.

He tried to ask him to confirm what was going on, but his words came out a jumbled, garbled mess thanks to a clumsy tongue that was simply refusing to cooperate despite his best efforts and that was confirmation enough.

His lower lip wobbled, but he refused to cry. He was already a baby, apparently, no need to act like one.

“B is going to kill me,” Drake breathed. “He is going to break The Rule just for this.”

Damian was going to slap him once he was big enough for it to hurt properly again. That was not the most prudent problem here.

But apparently Ladybug disagreed with Damian’s internal monologue, because she didn’t bother to counter Drake in any way as she snickered and said, “Good luck with that.”

Drake’s eyes widened impossibly further, making him look more like an owl than the duck he was named after. “You’re not going to help me fix this?” he asked, incredulous.

“Can’t. You knocked out that lady before I got here. Magic has rules and the rules say I can’t interfere with something that’s already happened.”

With that, she stood and brushed off her bodysuit. She flicked her wrist and Damian’s eyes were drawn to a ring of blue light that appeared on a nearby wall. If he wasn’t so caught up in the fact that he had been un-teenager-ed he might have thought it was cool, but instead he just made a quiet, sad noise as his only hope of being fixed started to walk her way across the world in seconds… only to get stopped by a hand latching around her wrist. She raised an eyebrow at Drake behind her sunglasses.

“Help me fix this.” He was no longer asking.

Ladybug’s eyebrow crept higher. “And how do you expect me to do that?”

“I don’t know, but I am not bringing him back to B until he’s back to normal and if you try and make me I will blame all this on you.”

Her expression darkened somewhat. She wrenched her arm from his grip, but made no move to leave as her hands balled into fists at her side. “You can’t do that.”

“Can and will,” Drake said, somewhat petulantly. Damian could see the nerves just barely tugging the corners of his mouth down, though, and he could see that his brother was simply desperate. It was unlikely that he would actually make good on his threat.

Ladybug didn’t know him nearly as well as Damian did, so it was no surprise when she took him seriously. She gritted her teeth and the glowing blue portal snapped out of existence. “Fine. I could try Bunni —.” There was a ringing sound from her belt and she detached a yoyo from her hip. She muttered something under her breath that sounded very rude as she pulled the yoyo open and pressed it to her ear. As if it were a flip phone and not a children’s toy. There was a beat as she listened in to what had to have been imaginary voices, and her expression soured as she snapped it closed. “Right, well, that apparently isn’t happening.”

Drake gave her a confused look.

“The cryptic bit—…” She trailed off halfway through her swear, glancing at Damian. He scowled at being babied, even if he was, technically, a baby. She didn’t seem to notice nor understand, because he could see the gears turning in her head as she tried to play it off. “Er… bunny just called to tell me that ‘everything is as it should be’ and then hung up. I don’t think that they're going to be of much help. Do you know anyone?”

Drake shook his head. “Not anyone that wouldn’t tell B.”

Damian didn’t care that Father would definitely have an aneurism and might finally snap, he just wanted to be the right age again. He tried to communicate this to his brother, but his mouth still refused to do anything other than babble.

“What do you think are the chances that she’ll willingly fix this for us?” Ladybug said with a bitter smile.

“Probably pretty low. Would you want to help out a person that just beat you half to death?” Drake said.

She sighed deeply and sunk to the ground next to Damian. “Well then what do you suppose we do? It’s not like we can just wait fifteen years for him to grow up when everyone else ages, too!”

It was silent for a moment.

And then a wide smile began to break its way across Drake’s face.

“What if we can?”

Damian went to facepalm, but his stupid arm didn’t cooperate and he ended up just hitting himself in the nose with his even stupider chubby fist. He scowled.

Drake snickered at him. Damian was going to strangle him. Drake would get killed by a baby and he deserved all the embarrassment that would come from that.

Ladybug raised an eyebrow again. “Oh?”

“You miraculous holders don’t age, right?”

“We do, it’s just very slow,” she said, her words just as slow as her aging, apparently. “But it’s not like we can give everyone in the world a miraculous.”

“No, no, just for the two of us. Think about it, we can go hang out in another dimension or something for fifteen years to age him up, and then we can come back, like, tomorrow or something with him all fixed up.”

Ladybug stared at him. She looked incredulous. At least someone else agreed that Drake’s plan was stupid.

But then she said, “We couldn’t come back tomorrow, they would notice any differences in his behavior and there wouldn’t be an excuse for it. We’d need at least a year,” and all hopes of having someone be the voice of reason were quickly dashed.

Damian tried his hardest to become the voice of reason, but his actual voice did little more than string random syllables together despite the fact that he was supposed to know how to speak. He growled in frustration. Ladybug cooed, which did not help.

Drake hummed thoughtfully. “Okay. Can you take care of Robin and the meta for me? I’m going to get supplies and come up with an excuse for why we’re leaving. Might just go with the classic ‘we’re trying to find ourselves’ routine, it worked for Black Bat back in the day.”

“Sure, sure,” she said, getting to her feet. She reached for Damian, but he batted her hands away as best he could, giving his brother a betrayed look. He was leaving him with her? She could kidnap him for all they knew!

But both adults ignored his protests. She picked up the blanket that had been smothering Damian — apparently it was his cape — and swaddled him in it, which made fighting back much harder than he would have liked.

Damian glared at her as she cooed at him, just barely combing his hair out of his eyes before tucking him under one arm. She opened the yoyo again, and from this new angle he could see a proper phone interface on it. She pressed a few buttons until she found a contact named Chaton and then pressed it to her ear.

“Hey, Chaton,” she said brightly. There was a beat where Chaton assumedly said something back and she sighed. “Okay, worth a shot. I’ve got a meta here and I need you to deal with them.”

The meta barely stirred, picking their head up. She looked around, squirming in her bindings… and then she stopped cold when she saw Ladybug. She made a high sound behind her gag that might have been a scream. She was ignored.

There was a flicker of blue light as a portal opened up on a wall again, but this time Ladybug made no efforts to walk through it. No, instead someone walked out.

Damian stared at Chat Noir as the man gave a lazy stretch, very much seeming like the cat his theme was based upon. Slitted, pupilless green eyes flitted around as he got his bearings before narrowing in on the meta. The meta, apparently, wasn’t particularly happy about this as she screamed through her gag once again.

Ladybug reached over to ruffle the man’s hair. He leaned into it, practically bunting his head against her fingers.

“Thanks for showing up.”

“Last time I didn’t and you opened a portal underneath me. I dropped out of the sky. Of course I showed up,” Chat Noir deadpanned, but there was an undeniable fondness lining his signature grin.

Something that quickly disappeared when he turned his sharp gaze back onto the meta. “So, this the one?”

“The one that keeps messing with people’s ages? Yep!”

Chat Noir tipped his head to the side just slightly. “She gonna fix it?”

Ladybug shrugged and walked over. “We should probably ask.” She pulled the gag from the woman’s mouth.

The woman immediately started screaming curses at the pair. Neither of them looked particularly perturbed by this new development.

Ladybug even sighed like this was a minor inconvenience at best. “C’mon, Ma’am, if you cooperate we might go easier on you. Lighten your sentence.”

The woman gnashed her teeth like she was going to bite her. A valiant effort that got nowhere because Ladybug was several feet away.

Chat Noir hummed. “So, which should we do?”

Ladybug brought the hand that wasn’t holding Damian up to yawn. “Give her time to think about it, I guess. Maybe five or so attempts? It seems all of her victims’ families are willing to take care of their afflicted family members either way, but it would be nice to actually fix it if we can.”

Chat Noir nodded his agreement. “That sounds good.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at them. It didn’t quite hide her nerves. “What are you going to do with me?”

“Put you in solitary, obviously,” Chat Noir said, his tone bright and cheery. The shadows in the alley seemed to move, getting deeper and darker as if to contrast the bright smile on his face.

The woman’s eyes widened to an almost comical degree and she started straining against her bonds in earnest. Damian frowned confusedly. Solitary wasn’t that bad.

But even as he thought that, he watched Chat Noir press his boot to the woman’s chest and push her backwards.

She disappeared into the shadows behind her like she had never been there at all. There was nothing but a cut off scream and the faint smell of perfume lingering in the air to prove she had even existed. Soon, even that would be gone.

Damian stared in stunned silence. Chat Noir and Ladybug chatted in low tones above his head, conversations about ‘guardianship’ and ‘Bunnix’ and ‘the box’ buzzing past his ears, but he couldn’t bring himself to concentrate on that. He doubted they would be talking about it at all if they had known he was fully aware and, though that would usually make him want to listen in more, he was suddenly very tempted to do what the pair wanted. It probably had something to do with the fact that an entire woman had simply disappeared into the shadow realm (or whatever the hell that was) and they had acted like it all was perfectly normal. Which it might have been, Damian had never been too interested in looking up the punishments that metas doled out for each other, but it was horrifying to watch.

Speaking of horrifying, all three people left in the alley were experiencing abject terror. Because Damian had started sobbing.

He wailed in Ladybug’s arms, squirming in the cape that held him down, and both of the miraculous holders looked at each other with wide eyes. Damian would join in if he could open his eyes and see through the tears that had unwillingly gathered there. He didn’t know why it was so horrible, but now here he was bawling his eyes out like the kid he appeared to be and his emotions refused to be wrestled back under control when Damian’s hands were the pudgy, clumsy ones of a baby.

Ladybug mumbled a curse before bouncing up and down on her heels, a motion that was, frustratingly, soothing despite the terrifying thing he had just witnessed her and her partner do. She cooed lightly, combing her fingers through his hair, and Chat Noir hummed a little tune.

Within minutes, his wails devolved into hiccups. Soon after, he finally managed to pull his breathing back under his control.

His eyes felt heavy, though.

Chat Noir’s hands came up to rub along his back and the bouncing shifted into rocking, which really wasn’t helping him stay awake.

“Go to sleep, little Robin.”

Ladybug nodded her agreement, something he wouldn’t know if his face wasn’t currently tucked into the crook of her neck.

He grumbled curses at them, but they were half hearted and unintelligible and he drifted off halfway through anyways.

~~~~~

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gale-in-space · 1 year

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Just stream of consciousness things (tw for like, everything, I'm so fucking mentally ill lol)

It's been three years since I've been hospitalized and I think I might need to go back

I don't want to go back. Being there just made me want to kill myself even more. Bare white walls, no phone/internet, uncomfortable bed, no outside time, minimal outside contact, no personal belongings (they wouldn't let me keep my pencils or pens), etc. I was stripped of all my humanness and I isolated all day, for every day that I was there. The food was terrible. I couldn't sleep because every 15 minutes the nurse would open the door and check on me to make sure I was still alive. I was a complete zombie and I cried every day.

I don't want to go back.

But I feel like I am so close to the end of my rope. I hate my art. It makes me angry and sad because I can't create anything beautiful or worth being looked at. And no one cares about it either. Especially the people that matter the most, like my mom. She wanted me to be a musician or a therapist. I'm going to pre-med instead after wasting four years on a degree that everyone on the internet hates.

She doesn't think I'll ever be a doctor.

(I don't think I'll ever be a doctor, either, but it's a nice thought).

I see a therapist but I just lie to her all the time. I lie about having DID. I lie about the things that get me excited. I lie that I'm doing okay because I don't want her to commit me again. I'm not doing okay

The only things that keep me alive are knowing how fucking selfish I'd be for following through. My family would be devastated, but honestly, I don't really care what they think. My partners would be so traumatized, and I do care what they think. But they can't help me. They try so hard. Everyone has tried so hard. No one can fucking help me

I don't belong here, probably. I've never really fit in and I've always been an outcast. I don't like people, and I don't have friends. If I could die alone in space I think that would be okay. I think that would be very fitting (and hey, at least I'd be in space).

I'm posting this because I need to get it out. I can't just say this to people, I can't talk to people and let them know how I'm really feeling, because I just break down and lose the ability to verbalize my thoughts otherwise. And they are not equipped to handle that, it is not their responsibility to handle that. So if I post this people can just ignore it and move on, and I'll keep the feelings right here, contained.

I'm sorry for all of this. I'm so rambly and I make people so uncomfortable. And that's why I need to go, I think, but honestly I don't have the courage to do it. Cowardice is the other thing holding me back - cowardice and the fear of being selfish. I can't go through with it, and so other people have to suffer through dealing with me.

This is embarrassing. I really hope no one is fucking reading this, because holy shit, it's embarrassing. Part of me likes living under the illusion that if I post this as a cry for help, someone will come and console me, but the other half of me recoils just thinking about that. I don't want to be a burden on people. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable. I just want to fade into the ether and never bother anyone again.

I don't know.

Yeah.

#d0n-t rb #um. anyways #idk #i'm sorry #oh you know what the worst part about going on t is?#i was never really a crier #but i can't cry for fucking shit these days #if i'm lucky i manage a single tear #i'm like. aching for that release #it's made me so emotionally stunted i can't stand it #hahahaahahaha anyways. ignore me #tbd

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