closed starter for @cxpedcrusxder and amnesiac!bruce
It's something they all quietly live in fear of. That one night, someone won't make it back. That some day The Call will come through and they'll be left with one less name in their lives, one less voice to hear. It's a fear, but it's a given. What they do is dangerous, and every night there is always the risk that they won't make it back. Dick knows this. He's known it since he was nine.
That hadn't changed the sudden ice-cold rush of panic he'd gotten when Alfred had called him over a week ago.
He'd just been finishing up his own patrol when the call came through over his comms. The Bat had fallen, badly. Possibly permanently. Dick hadn't hesitated - hell, he hadn't even stopped to pack; he'd just thrown a long coat on over his costume, hopped on his motorcycle, and raced to Gotham with his speedometer pushing 200mph the whole way. By the time he'd arrived Bruce was already in the hospital and Alfred - bless Alfred - was in the waiting room with a cup of coffee and a worrying grave expression.
In the days that followed Dick refused to leave the hospital. It was only at Alfred's insistence - and with his help - that Dick even bothered changing into proper clothes rather than remain in his working gear. Bruce wasn't dead - yet - but he was hardly out of the woods and there was no power in this or any other universe that could pry Dick away from his father's side. Sure their relationship hadn't been the best over the past few years, but none of that mattered. Not now.
At this point the nurses seem to have realized the family is not going to leave, given they've stopped bothering to remind Dick and the others about visiting hours. Only discussion - okay, an argument - between himself and his brothers pulls Dick from Bruce's bedside, and that only occasionally; they've set up a patrol rotation, picking up the slack while Batman is incapacitated to ensure that neither Bruce nor Gotham is left untended.
Tonight it's Dick's turn at Bruce's side, Tim and Damian having charge of the city under Alfred's guidance - and with some quiet help from Jason, not that anyone will openly say so. Dick's pulled his chair right beside Bruce's bed, a book open on his lap as he reads quietly aloud. Maybe Bruce can hear him, maybe he can't, but either way it's something, isn't it? It's at least doing more than just sitting there worrying and praying Bruce wakes up.
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Trimax vol2's emotionally damaging parallels
Right off the bat this vol pulls no punches swerving into darker seinen territory, but the framing of these scenes in particular probably hit me the hardest.
Wolfwood's dreams vs Vash's reality on returning 'home' to greet the kids...
Where Wolfwood dreams believing his hands are far too stained with blood to have the right to hold the kids from his orphanage anymore.....to watching Vash return home only to have that right to hold forcibly taken from him. (What a nightmare...) As the lives of all those innocent people and children Vash cares for literally slip and crumble through his fingers. Shattering...
You can take this moment even further by comparing it to the vol's disturbing opening scene of Legato contorting countless live men into meat puppets against their will to kill them...vs Leonof's method of dissecting (killing) his live subjects to transform them into literal puppets. Oh yeah, it's that fucked up. That Wolfwood immediately opens fire on the puppetmaster, appalled that his way to emotionally torture Vash, by turning his home family's innocent lives into literal (weaponized) playthings, is this foul.
I'm glad Wolfwood took a stand here when it crossed a personal line (involving kids) he could not tolerate! But Vash's reaction? ohohoho.......
Because remember when Wolfwood confronted Vash earlier this vol, accusing him that he's a coward who refuses to kill anyone because he doesn't want to get his hands dirty? But Vash completely turns it around, saying he's the coward who gives up hope so easily, that he sees 'a (pained) man who forces himself to play the devil while his heart cries out.'
Now what does Wolfwood see in Vash once his broken heart cries out blood...
He's confronted with the fearsome gravity and magnitude of a non-human who forces himself to contain the devil while he cries out in pain!
Now how can just a human like Wolfwood, who only plays the devil to pragmatically kill, contend with that? (Oh what a crisis...) With the level of oppressive death and inhuman power this [monster] normally suppresses (for telling reasons!) it's almost a miracle Vash mercifully chooses not to kill while playing the pacifist who protects and strives for humanity's hope instead.
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it's so fucking odd to me that apparently people just. believe me? when i tell them stuff about myself?
i showed up to my first psychiatrist appointment ready to fight just to get something and he listened to me talk, took notes, occasionally asked me a question and then asked what i need. and then gave it to me. every single time.
same with my therapist, i've been with her for over a year and it STILL catches me off guard every single session that she fully believes what i tell her. same with the accommodations appointment today.
it's not that i lie, the opposite, but after twenty years of being told "you don't have x you are lying" "you're lying" "you are just lazy" whenever i expressed pain or a need for something this is mind-blowing. a doctor could tell my mother hey ur child has this problem and you know what she'd say the second we left the office?
"oh you are fine you don't need any of the things they prescribed."
and now people listen and help without accusing me of being a liar. fucking wild.
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Concept: Ghost Empathy and why Vlad is Emotionally Invisible
So, in the DP fandom we all play around with ghost abilities and characteristics, but one of the main fanon things is that ghosts are emotion, they are empathy. Ghosts are ectoplasm which is emotion manifest.
Why, and in fact how, then would Vlad be Emotionally Invisible?
Simple! Repression.
Vlad's half human (at least, personally I love the fanon that Vlad's not a full halfa because he didn't die in one shot) which means that he has more ability to emotionally regulate than beings that are made entirely of emotion. Vlad's also an adult, a billionaire, a politician, and a business man; all things that require emotional control and compartmentalization. Why would that not carry over to his ghost side?
I like to think that Vlad started to feel the ghost empathy, and he was like "cut that shit out" immediately. He walled himself off from feeling anything from other ghosts, which dampened his own emotional signature/projection.
Ghosts, who are beings of empathy, don't feel Vlad. He disappears from their perception if he's not within eye/ear shot or just close enough for his cut off trickle of empathy to reach them, because all ghosts rely on emotions for spacial awareness. The empathy is probably how they can tell if they're getting too close to someone else's haunt.
Danny does the rest, not that he realizes that he's masking Vlad from the rest of the ghosts.
Danny's a teenager and a ghost, i.e. the Most Emotional Being possible. Danny's projecting his feelings everywhere, all the time. So, whenever the ghosts come to Amity to blow off steam and stuff, they come across this fountain of frustration and their empathy goes "ah, upset baby, a good fight will help him calm down." Of course, not realizing that they are the cause of a lot of that frustration.
Once Danny learns what ghost speak/ghost empathy is and what it feels like, his relationships with his rogues get a Lot better, because now he understands! These guys are just looking for enrichment/ a way to let off some steam. Meanwhile the ghosts feel accomplished that the baby has calmed down and started using his words.
But what Danny doesn't understand, at least at first, is why the ghosts seem to believe Vlad, even when his lies aren't that great. Especially when it seems like he never gets anything past them.
It isn't until the next time he fights Vlad and feels how-- empty-- Vlad is that he gets it. Then he catches on, his emotional signature is giving him away.
None of the ghosts take the time to think that Vlad would lie to them, because what's the use lying to the dead? The living, sure, they're easy to mess with because they can't sense emotions, but none of the ghosts ever think that Vlad would cut himself off from the rest of them. He's just got a weak emotional signature, right?
That's also why Skulker doesn't hunt Vlad. He doesn't think that Vlad is a halfa, or if he knows, he thinks Danny is the stronger halfa due to the difference in their emotional signatures, so of course he'd go for the more difficult hunt. (he's right, but only partially because of the empathy)
I also like to think that the empathy is the reason that Danny gains so many new powers and control so quickly (compared to Vlad, anyway, he had 20 years to learn and he's still got fewer powers than Danny.)
Oh! It would also be fun if Danny had, like, a Resonant Core. Like, because he's so empathic he can alter his core to Resonate with the cores of the ghosts around them and copy/borrow their abilities. He's a halfa, and still growing, so his core hasn't settled and won't settle fully until he's Full Dead. (at which point the boy has an Officially Recognized Resonant Core, which means he is Certified Terrifyingly Powerful and it's a good thing for the Infinite Realms that he doesn't want to be a despot.)
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