welcome to writing purgatory

The narrative says: yes, it was worth it, because one child survived, and thrived. Look at that lovely, loveable young man! He is the reason all this was not for naught.

But what I find interesting is, Lan Sizhui is not even that exceptional, he doesn't make a big difference in the world, does he? He's still young, but despite his really good character and keen mind and aptitudes, he's not a genius, he's not renowned, he's not a Hanguang-Jun or a Yilling Laozu. He's just a kind, good-mannered, well brought up young man. Anyone would be happy to claim him as a son or a disciple or a son-in-law. But he's not some big game changer. Even though being a cultivator sets him apart from a good chunk of the normal population already, in his habitual context he's a normal kid. He makes friends, acts silly sometimes, hasn't slayed any Shuanwu of slaughter, got easily led into a trap by a trail of beheaded cats. A normal kid.

And that's important, because this reward is as the sacrifice Wei WuXian made. He didn't make some grand gesture for important people. He did what was right in his view, no more, no less. It wasn't for some greater good, even less for fame. It was simply what was right. And if you do what's right you're not really adding up and subtracting the wins and losses as in a giant thought experiment of the trolley problem. There probably would have been ultimately less death and suffering had Wei WuXian let the Wens to their misery and death quietly. There wouldn't have been a Lan Sizhui, but there would have been a Jiang YanLi, a Jin ZiXuan, and many people that got killed when they attacked him would have lived. But it wouldn't have been right, and so Wei WuXian doesn't think about it that way, and the narrative doesn't either. It tells you life is complicated, and sowing violence reaps more violence, and you can't always "win". But if you do your best, if you keep doing what's right, even if you are only human, and make mistakes, and everyone is against you, it still counts.

It’s just a regular Tuesday morning for Derek. He posts some letters, picks up a bolt for the bathroom door, and pops into the bank. He’s busy planning dinner in his head when there’s a loud pop, followed by several more, and three men in ski masks jump up onto the tables between the queue Derek’s in.

“Good morning everybody, this is a robbery! Now if nobody loses their head, nobody will lose their head. Simon says everybody lay down on the floor, right away, right away.”

Derek feels his mouth fall open in shock. People are shouting and starting to cry as they fall to their knees. A woman in front of him begins screaming, and the man in the mask that had been talking jogs over, “No, no, ma’am, try to stay calm, you’ll have a story to tell your friends at the end of this. People’ll invite you to dinner for weeks to hear about it.”

"Please—”

“Just get down on the floor, ma’am, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Despite the mild panic creeping up his spine, Derek snorts, and the guy hears it. 

Oh, fuck, he shouldn’t have done that. 

“Sir!” He moves to stand in front of Derek, claps a hand on his shoulder and Derek flinches. “Hey, number two, we got ourselves a standing volunteer!” Another man with a mask comes bounding, bounding, over, and half waves his machine gun in the first guy’s face. 

“Yeah?”

“Uh huh, he’s not impressed with our behaviour at all.”

“Melissa, what am I -?”

Derek stopped for a moment, feeling the pull of bandages around his shoulder as he sat up. That was when his brain fully woke up and the memories of last night came flooding in. His expression darkened and he sat up.

“Where is he?”

Melissa’s face went from concern to exasperation and she firmly pushed him back against the headboard, placing the tray across his lap so as to prevent him from getting up.

“Unlike yours, my ward’s bandages are for more than just show, And so help me, Hale, if you wake him up to argue after I finally got him to leave you to go to sleep, I will find the largest hunk of aconite possible and chain you to it.”

The two stared for a moment until Derek finally caved under the judgment of what Stiles would have called Melissa’s “best Mom eyebrow.” He sank back into the bed and grudgingly took the fork Melissa handed him.

“I’ll tell you when he wakes up, until then eat up. Scott’s wrapping things up in the city, but he said he should be home by dinner, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll join us as well. You obviously have free reign as long as you don’t ruin the landscaping.”

Derek faked a pout at the reference to the one time he took off from the back yard and left a mini crater in the lawn. Nevertheless, he followed her instructions.

As the morning wore on, pieces of the day before slowly fell together in Derek’s memory and he became increasingly consternated with the fact that he was perfectly fine, and Stiles seemingly was not – because he had come to rescue Derek. The alien remembered getting knocked out on his way home from the office and then waking up to a groggy picture of Kate’s grinning face. She had him chained to a fence, the cuffs encrusted with aconite gems and the fence with a constant flow of electric current running through it to keep him from shifting or using his strength to break free. The rest of the evening blurred together into a mess of fading in and out of Kate’s rants, boasting and harassment.

And then Stiles showed up. Or rather, Batman did.

Derek hadn’t even thought about the fact that Kate had kidnapped civilian Derek Hale, not Superwolf, until Stiles had pointed it out to the deranged CEO keeping him captive. He hoped she’d been stupid enough to take him somewhere outside of Metropolis to make his own superhero absence less conspicuous, but he doubted he’d get that lucky. Honestly, Derek isn’t even sure he really remembers much more about how the whole thing ended than that there was definitely a fight, an explosion and a kiss. After that, it was just flashing lights, the inside of an ambulance and darkness.

The memories alone had Derek freaking out enough to almost run and start digging through police and hospital records. What if someone had noticed that he’d started to heal right away? Stiles was a good liar, but Batman wasn’t known for more than just a few snarky retorts and well-timed punches. And neither of those would do much good to hide a supernatural healing factor. Then he remembered with a sudden burst of clarity that Scott had been one of the EMTs to pick him up. Stiles must have radioed him to make sure that Nightwing was the closest available unit. He’d have to thank the man later (lying was not a thing Scott did often, secret identity notwithstanding).

But eventually Stiles woke up and curled up with him on the large, cushy couch no one would believe the billionaire of Gotham owned. They argued at first. It had been stupid of Derek to not fight back, it had been even stupider of Stiles to risk coming after him (they both agreed that Kate won the stupidity award for kidnapping him as a civilian in the first place). Eventually though, the battle of words turned into a battle of tongues and they probably would have gone even further had Stiles not remorsefully reminded him that sex was bad for human injuries and while alien pain drain was great, it didn’t actually help heal anything – nor did the body worshiping Derek gave him after that with his tongue, but Stiles refrained from pointing that out.

Things seemed pretty par for the course until dinner time – or rather, until Scott came rushing into the living room looking harried and immediately turned the TV on to the news.

Lazy cuddle time came to a fairly abrupt halt.

Scrawling across the bottom of Stiles’ 100 inch TV and shown in grainy, but fairly accurate cell-phone footage in the corner next to the news broadcaster’s head was the public death of Derek Hale’s life as a well-loved, but homely reporter.

The Dark Knight’s Damsel in Distress

Batman: Trading Bachelor for Bisexual?

Daily Planet, Half-News Reporting, Half-Hero Dating Pool

Derek Hale v. Paige Lane, Who has the Best Super-Boyfriend?

It went on for weeks.

Every time someone showed up at his door or the office or sent crazy story proposals (or death threats for “stealing their boyfriend”) he had to resist the urge to pop a claw and shred them right there. There was a reason he chose the profession of a reporter. He had a reason to be nosey about things in the city, to pop up wherever there was trouble, but no one really cared about who he was, what he was doing or if he wore a certain type of cologne that attracted superheroes. In the last three hours alone, he’d had to smack down three separate attempts to ask if the Daily Planet had a pheromone factory or if he’d divulge the identity of the man behind Batman’s mask.

Stiles, of course, was no help.

The first time Derek came over looking harried and carrying a trash bag of fan/hate mail, the billionaire had literally fallen on the floor because he was laughing so hard.

Derek made him sleep on the floor.

“Hey, you know I’m just laughing because I have to deal with this all the time, right?”

Stiles whispered later that night when Derek gave up on getting drunk and finally relented and let him back onto his own California king. The human nuzzled into his chest and Derek watched his head rise and fall slowly as he let out a forlorn sigh.

“Yeah. It just sucks. When I first came to the city, I was so scared that people would recognize me as Superwolf right away. But then they got all the facts about Cal El and no one cared about the beat reporter who shared desks with Paige Lane. Anytime my resemblance was brought up, it was like some kind of inside office joke. Now though…”

“People are looking at you again.” Stiles finished for him. “Really looking.

“I get it. I mean, it was like that a lot for me when I first came back from the Hunters. I’d been the poor orphan rich kid playing in his mansion for so long, and suddenly I’m back from a sabbatical ready to run my mother’s empire – oh and also there’s this really cool guy dressed in black, kicking ass? You don’t think people wanted to look into that?

“So Kate’s got you figured out. She’s a megalomaniac with nothing to do but waste her family’s money researching and trying to kill you. Most people don’t have that kind of time, dedication or resources. Besides, you’ve got Paige as a resource. She’s been doing fine right?”

Derek grumbled at that, sinking further into the bed and dragging Stiles with him.

“Sure, but Paige has nothing to hide. I can’t just tell people I’m not an alien and expect them to stop digging.”

“What?” Stiles poked him in the cheek with a mischievous grin. “You don’t fancy yourself as the “I am Superwolf” type of guy?”

“Shut up.”