This is for @nights-flying-fox for the @rottmnt-secret-gifting event!!
We all know that Donnie records everything, but I like to think that he does that with photographs as well as audio.
Also, credit to @/rottmnt-background-screenshots, because the backgrounds for the first, second, and fourth were traced from screenshots I found on their blog.
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I really love the way RF Kuang wrote Rin's relationship to her culture because it's fucking terrible and cruel.
Rin is the last Speerly, and that puts a soul-crushing, unbelievably unfair amount of responsibility on her. She has to be the one to preserve her culture because there is literally no one else. After her, her people will be dead, and they'll be unable to represent or speak for themselves. All that will exist of Speer is other people's interpretations of it, of what they want Speer to be, how they want it to serve their own cultural narrative.
But, god, how could she possibly represent her people? She has no relationship to her culture, any representation she gives it is inherently from an outside, colonized view. Her culture was robbed from her, but she's still burdened with the responsibility of preserving it. She's woefully inadequate for the job, and she knows it. She's literally, physically unable to continue her people because of a choice she made before she knew she was the last of anything. But, even if she had known, it should've NEVER been her responsibility to continue anything, to boil herself down to a reproductive device for a people she owes nothing and everything to.
Rin doesn't dwell on this very often because, oh my god, there's a war happening, and all her friends are dying, and she'll die too if she doesn't keep going, and these lofty ideas of culture and colonialism are for people who don't have to live in a messy, war-torn reality, people have time to think about anything. R F Kuang does a great job of using Rin as an unreliable narrator here. It's clear that she's fucked up about this, but that she will not allow herself to think about it. She's One person, situated and trapped in her One life. She can't be expected to speak for a whole people. So, she pushes her culture aside. She has to live with the fact that this is it, she's the end.
Then, she dies, and Speer dies, and nothing is fair.
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Bruce doesn't dream.
He never has, really - at least, not that he can remember. He never even had nightmares from the night his parents died. Maybe that's why; maybe he just subconsciously trained himself to not dream after that night, in fear of the nightmares that were sure to come. But the point is that he does not dream.
And yet.
The dream always starts out the same, every night, every time he closes his eyes and slips into the embrace of sleep. He's in a pitch-black room, one so dark that he can't see his hands even when he raises them right in front of his face. He knows, somehow, that he can walk for hours without coming into contact with anything - walls, furniture, anything at all to indicate that he was even in a room. Yet he knows that he is, although he's not sure why, as there really is no reason for him to know that.
The dream changes, after a while of walking. He knows that he won't find anything, no matter how far or how long he walks. This place is empty, desolate even. It fills him with dread every time. The change is never consistent, always bringing him to a different place each night.
(Once, it was a dusty old bedroom, one that made his heart ache, although he didn't know why. He had taken notice of the various space-themed decorations, the model rockets and NASA posters and stars on the ceiling. It was clearly a child's bedroom, but it hadn't been used in a long time. Another time, it was a darkened lab, illuminated only by the strange vials of green liquid lined along the many, many shelves. Bruce had wondered, after he had awoken, if it was Lazarus Water, but that felt wrong. It was something else. Something more. It had made him uneasy, and he got the feeling that something terrible had happened there. He didn't get a chance to investigate the gaping hole in the wall before he had been whisked away to another part of the dream.)
This time, he is in a brightly-lit white lab, and he has to blink stars out of his eyes at the abrupt change in lighting and color. He looks around; it seems like a typical lab, but everything is pure white, except for a green stain on the table. He can feel bile rising in his throat at the sight of the cuffs on the table, and though he still doesn't know what the green substance is, he gets the horrible feeling that it's blood. A lot of it.
He uses what little time he has to investigate the lab. There is an abundance of medical supplies, but many look unused, with the exception of the scalpels. The pit in his stomach continues to grow. Why were there so many? He reaches toward a vial of red liquid, wrong wrong wrong this is wrong, when the dream changes again.
Now he's in what is clearly a cell, except even the cells in Arkham aren't this bare. The only thing it contains is a familiar white-haired teenager, who is chained to the floor with cuffs that glow the same green as the vials of Lazarus Water that he's seen before.
Though Bruce has never learned his name, he has been in every dream, the one constant (besides the empty room, of course) in each one. The kid has never spoken, never done more than watch, but Bruce has always gotten the feeling that he was the reason for these strange dreams.
He knows that he should be more worried. If some kind of meta has managed to get inside his head, there's no telling what could happen. But he can't bring himself to be. Something is wrong, and it's not the teenager.
He can't help but think of his own children.
Something feels . . . off this time. The kid isn't looking up, isn't even moving - he seems limp, almost, as he kneels on the ground, weighed down by the chains keeping him there. Green blood - Bruce knows it's blood now, it has to be - drips from his still figure, pooling on the ground underneath him.
Bruce can't move. He desperately wants to, what could he even do? but it's like he's frozen in place. He can only watch as the teenager slowly, agonizingly, looks up at him, his bright green eyes dull and filled with fear and desperation and hope and -
Bruce wakes.
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