Winner of the other day's mystery poll: have the start of a new WIP wherein YJ animated Clark wakes up alive.
Clark wakes up alive.
Well. That's a surprise.
He sits up. He's in the Watchtower med bay, and it doesn't look right.
More accurately, it looks exactly like it looked after he woke up from the fight with Parasite in Keystone on April 17th at 2:08 PM EST.
In 2010.
The eidetic memory is a lot more useful than people tend to give it credit for. Certainly applicable in a lot more situations, if nothing else.
Clark looks at himself in the reflection on the scanner he's hooked up to. He looks exactly the same as he's looked since turning thirty, but his costume is from 2010, when he was still young enough not to have realized that “thirty” was as old as he was going to look for quite a while, and his hair is half an inch longer than it was the last time he remembers looking at it.
And again, eidetic memory.
For example, he remembers dying with perfect clarity. Such, such perfect clarity.
It's honestly less upsetting than all the deaths he remembers seeing, though.
Which reminds him . . . it's 2:10 PM EST on April 17th in 2010 and he's just woken up in the Watchtower medbay, so . . .
Yes.
Bruce walks in. Clark heard him coming, of course, because even Bruce can't perfectly silence all the little sounds of a living body, but he's currently a bit distracted with trying to figure out if this is a time travel scenario or a death hallucination or the afterlife outright. It seems like a strange afterlife, considering, but he's not ruling it out.
He remembers dying with perfect clarity, after all.
“Took you long enough,” Bruce says dryly, exactly the same way he said it last time. Last time, Clark laughed, and then Bruce debriefed him on what had happened after Parasite got his hands on him. This time . . .
“I have to go,” Clark says, pulling off the scanner’s sensors. Bruce frowns, but it’s April 17th, 2010 and Clark can’t explain. Not yet. Bruce will have questions, if he explains, and he can’t sit through all that Bat-paranoia. Not right now.
Whether he's dead or alive, it’s still April 17th, 2010, and Conner is four weeks old right now.
Bruce opens his mouth and starts to say something, but Clark’s already gone.
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i have so many feelings about young justice (animated) MOSTLY POSITIVE but then there's fucking M'gann and i feel fucking crazy. like i fucking need to rewatch the show and take notes this time because WHAT?
i'll be so fucking honest. she's interesting as hell. you're definitely not bored when she's on screen. you're busy being HORRIFIED? what do you mean she based her entire identity off of a character in a sitcom from the 80s
what do you mean she named her crush after that character's boyfriend?
what do you mean she made people catatonic?
what do you mean she and her crush had their first kiss dressed as twins?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE SHAPESHIFTED INTO THEIR TEACHER AND MADE OUT WITH HIM THE NEXT EPISODE?
and then she married him. what the fuck. what WAS THAT. WHY. theres so much other shit about them i could get into like OH MY GOD? CONNER DID YOU NOT GET FUCKING ANY INFORMATION PREPROGRAMMED INTO YOU ABOUT ABUSE OR TOXICITY OR. OR ANYTHING??
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Beginning of another old YJ animated WIP I just dug back up; cut for length. I had this fic idea back when the first season was still airing (AND IT TURNED OUT TO BE A VERY IRONIC ONE LATER ON, hahaha), and I never got very far with it, buuuuut . . . well, I still kinda wanna write it, so hey, why not revisit the concept!
“We need to talk,” Batman says abruptly, sweeping into the living room like the black crack of night, dark and foreboding and completely out of place during a Saturday afternoon video game marathon. M'gann squeaks and Wally yelps and they both fall off the couch in surprise, taking the popcorn and nearly Artemis with them. Robin startles up so fast anyone who didn't know better would think he was the speedster, Superboy jerks hard enough to make the steel sofa frame creak in protest, and Kaldur stands to careful attention and looks to Batman.
That’s his job, after all.
“Is there a problem with last night's reports?” he asks reflexively, but the aura Batman is cloaked in . . . no. That feeling is not about reports, or their last mission, or anything less than utmost disaster. Robin's fingers scrape along the part of his glove that his computer's holographic screen pops out of in an obvious nervous tic, which Robin is not supposed to have–which Robin goes to great lengths to never have, especially in front of Batman.
But Batman is looking at them with a chilling expression and Kaldur understands that tic better than he wants to, because Batman and bad news that makes him wear an expression . . .
“I'm so sorry,” Batman says as he steps forward and crouches down and sweeps Robin into an embrace, and that fast Robin looks shocked and terrified, and Wally falls right back off the couch he'd just gotten back onto, and M'gann's shaking hands clap over her ears like she's trying to muffle a sound–or trying to block something out of her head, some distant and clinical part of Kaldur thinks. And with Batman out of the way, he sees his king standing in the hall just outside the doorway with the Flash, his own expression tight and just barely pained.
Kaldur’s heart sinks like a stone.
“Who died,” Robin says, panic in his voice, small and just thirteen, fingers digging in against Batman's shoulders. The Flash darts into the room and looks down at Wally with this horrible, sorrowful look on his face and pulls him to his feet, gripping his hands tightly in his own.
King Orin does not move from the hallway and does not change that blade-sharp pained expression that cuts into the core of everything that Kaldur has ever served or believed in, and does not stop looking at him with it.
It is not difficult to understand Robin's reaction, with his king looking at him like that.
“Batman?” Robin says, young and afraid, and Batman is still holding him smother-tight and does not speak. “Batman, what–Br–say something!” he yells, but Batman just shifts and drags him even tighter against himself, tight enough so Robin vanishes inside his cape. If not for the low whimper he hears from beneath its dark folds, Kaldur would almost think he wasn't there at all; that Batman was simply injured and curled in around himself to protect the wound.
And Batman still does not say anything. Neither does the Flash, even as he grips Wally's hands tighter in his own, even as he stays horrible and sorrowful, and Kaldur can only look to his king because there is nowhere else.
But his king says nothing either.
“Guardian called from Cadmus,” the Flash says finally, quietly, watching Wally as he speaks. Kaldur feels very young, suddenly and irrationally; as young as his teammates all look right now, as young as Robin sounds. He has enough time to feel a flash of alarm for Superboy–what if there was a flaw in the cloning process, what if something is wrong with–“They found something on sublevel 53.”
“There wasn't a sublevel 53,” Robin says, voice cracked and sharp like a broken toy, and Batman . . .
Kaldur will swear it on his own life: Batman flinches.
“There wasn't!” Robin snaps, struggling in Batman's grip and breaking out from beneath his cape, defiant and still terrified and oh, he is so small, Kaldur thinks as he watches the other boy stumble back, hit the sofa and try to disappear into his own much too small cape. “I would've seen it, I would've found it–”
“Most likely Desmond had that memory adjusted,” King Orin cuts in shortly, and Robin grins in horror.
“Wh–but Supey got the G-gnomes to let us go, they were barely in our heads at all!” Wally protests, yanking his hands out of the Flash's. His edges look blurred–Kaldur thinks he might be trembling. He feels as if he should be himself. They have faced terrible things in their lives, all of them, but the way that his king is looking at him in this moment . . .
It’s a very, very terrible thing, that look.
“Superboy lost line of sight on the targets before acquiring them,” Batman says, short and sharp. Kaldur blinks, slowly, thinking, that's strange, why should that matter? Thinking, WHAT targets? Superboy didn't have targets in Cadmus. The only thing he had to do was help them fight Desmond and help them . . . get . . .
“I don't get it,” Artemis says, frowning warily, and Batman's lips thin and M'gann covers her too-pale face with hands that won't stay quite the right shape.
“The source material for Project Sidekick was put in stasis and transferred to storage. There was a power surge this morning that interrupted the sedative dose,” King Orin says as he finally steps into the room, quiet and grief-sharpened. “The genomorphs heard Kaldur'ahm trying to wake up half an hour ago.”
“Oh,” not-Kaldur realizes, and sits back down.
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