#he tried to join haly's circus to escape and if that's not tragic irony what is?

[theoestofocs]

very battrope at one WIP? 👀👀👀

@pathos-logical also wanted to know about this one! here is another fic i currently have no intent to publish, unless i manage to separate it out into a few different cohesive story-threads, but i keep trying to do that and it just Does Not work as well without all the clashing vibes of storylines i like

in this fic, thus far, damian has gone full murder-child in order to avenge the well-proven death of Nightwing (i still struggle to wrap my head around the "time travelling batman" plotline & fully believe tim got shafted by the batfam in it so i've opted to disregard it entirely for the purposes of this fic. however damian arrived vaguely early in the sequence of batfam canon, and bruce freaked out over the Literal Child Assassin he now had on his hands on top of Everything until dick just like, stealth-kidnapped him off to bludhaven, where he was pretty much living until the whole "disappearance and death" thing went down)

jason is building his crime empire, still unknown to the rest of the family except as an ominously-named minor threat, and has also rescued sasha grimm of the scarred face and sellout father. this is a character in canon that is almost entirely forgotten because the comics dropped her pretty fast (my theory is that DC didn't know what to do with a complex female character who wasn't Pretty. but that's just me) and i care about her. so much. she doesn't even have a canonical last name i made up "grimm" due to the etymology & vibes of it. she is however canonically jason's sidekick who goes by "Scarlet" and sees the red hood as family (because he rescued her when batman & robin promised to do so, and left her behind; because he rescued her when she had a horrific mask glued to her face and enough trauma to kill her own father, and didn't care if she was a monster, because she was also a kid. god i just care so much about sasha)

meanwhile tim is spiralling bc batman is once again self-destructing over a dead child, & this time tim isn't enough to fix it, so he's directed all his focus to solving the mystery of dick's death because maybe that'll help something, somehow. unfortunately he gets in over his head with one of black mask's henchman. fortunately, a begrudgingly moral crime lord is also staking out black mask at the time. robin is summarily kidnapped by the red hood, much to everyone's dismay, including jason's.

over in the increasingly dysfunctional manor, cass is near-constantly accompanied by steph & helena kyle - who was never given up for adoption in a misogynistic storyline that relied on catwoman becoming too much of a woman to be a good criminal when she had a kid. adoption is an extremely valid and loving choice for a birth parent to make but the rationale for these writers to make catwoman choose it was literally "unlike bruce wayne, who has a literal parade's worth of kids in his basement, catwoman can't juggle being a parent & having a (night) job without letting her Emotions and Womanly Irrationality get in the way of good crime work" so. helena kyle sticks around in my canon. daughter of batman & heir to the Cat, u guys, this character is SO underplayed

and duke - duke is just chillin in gotham, livin his life, for the time being. for the time being. the joker's about to break out of arkham again, though, and - well. let's just say i've opted to fix the meter of a certain chilling rhyme...

#now whisper not a word of them / or talon take your head #yknow. yknow the one #also - and this is segueing into the wip that's just a list of why i love the canonical talon characters #but like. like. #jonas no-last-name lost his family to the spanish flu; he loved animals more than anything and worked as a ''lion tamer'' before the court #he carves a feather into his flesh for every person he kills & this is apparently proof that he's Mentally Unstable #the boy whose mother killed every one of his beloved chickens in the heat of her fever before she died too #the boy who is a killer with blood on his hands not of his own will - just like his mother - just like her but he cannot die like her #cannot even trust himself to remember #benjamin orchard was turned into a talon by his own father as punishment for running away #he tried to join haly's circus to escape and if that's not tragic irony what is? #calvin rose was literally locked in a dog crate by his dad for 3 days at the age of 8. broke himself out & ran #became an escape artist in the damned circus. the only half-talon who successfully got out of the labyrinth #got recaptured & on his first mission rescued both of his targets (a mother & child) and fled #the only female talon on record is mary turner who grew up with scars from a bomb attack in wwii that left her sans tongue #she's also the only one (besides calvin) who gets a ''redemption'' arc. saves batgirl & catwoman & ends up joining the birds of prey squad #codenamed ''Strix'' #even some of the sketchier ones - Uriah Boone the eldest Talon is an eldritch creacher from pre-industrial gotham #just kinda lurking in the tunnels #the only ones i don't love are henry ballard felix harmon & of course old billy cobb #but like. justice for the talons that are always treated like monsters batman can just kill & not care. these are people #and they're part of the people i mean when i say gotham saves itself #anyway. thank u for this ask 💜💚💜💚 i Love batman infodumping hhhh #batman #batfam #linden writes #ask linden