#askthena

Hey, sorry this took me a while to get to! I'm working through my inbox at a glacial pace rn~

anyways, here's some fic! \(￣︶￣*\))

Supposedly, Red Hood haunts the alleyways of Crime Alley. People swear up and down that their sister’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend actually saw him once. That he appeared in a flash of lightning and was gone before the thunder crashed, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Some unconscious, some dead.

His most frequent spotters are children. Almost every kid from the Alley has a story of how the Red Hood himself helped them get home, get to safety, get away. The grateful parents laugh it off- you know what they say about children and their monsters. Those with something to hide stay silent with fear pooling in their guts.

There are Bat spotting internet forums all across the internet. Excellent photos of Nightwing winking at cameras or Batgirl sprinting away, donut in her mouth. Red Robin with a cup of coffee slung over Batman’s shoulder, Robin trailing behind him. Not a single clear photo of Red Hood. A blurry shot of a building, a flash of red halfway up the fire escape. Nightwing talking to nobody on a rooftop. Muzzle flash out of nowhere in an alley.

The other Bats are an accepted oddity of Gotham. Red Hood? The only people outside of Gotham that even believe he exists are conspiracy theorists and Mothman chasers.

Hell, even the Bats get jumpy around him sometimes. It’s not really anything personal (beyond reasonable concerns), it’s just that Jason can be unsettling to share space with. The air around him is always about ten degrees shy of the ambient temperature. His eyes flash back like a cat’s. No matter how sunny it is outside, he always smells like dirt after the rain. He sets off smoke detectors at ten paces without ever lighting a cigarette.

From this ask game

One of the unexpected side effects of Jason being briefly and publicly the vigilante equivalent of a rabid weasel, is that not a single person expects him to be even remotely capable of subtle. Red Hood is an incredibly useful persona in a lot of ways. He's intimidating. He doesn't have the same fears as regular old Jason. He's dangerous. He's hard to fool. Red Hood is a lot of things that are incredibly useful to Jason.

And the best thing is that people spend so long expecting Red Hood that they forget to plan for Jason.

Red Hood protects the soft parts of Jason. The parts that used to be a straight A student with an interest in literature and detective novels. The parts of Jason that enjoy planning and subterfuge. That are patient and calculated.

And no one expects it. The planning and forethought that it actually takes to be one of the things that goes bump in the night.

Sure, sometimes it hurts. When another Bat implies that Jason doesn't understand a mission briefing. It's annoying when his carefully planned chaos is attributed to brute force alone.

❤️ 

for this ask game

You got it! This is from Steph’s POV, just for fun!

<3

 It’s strangely easy to forget that Jason is dangerous. It sounds silly- the man is the Red Hood, scourge of Gotham’s underworld- dangerous is a bit of an understatement. Still, the drama of it all, the borderline supervillain presentation, somehow makes Jason seem less real. And there are shockingly few chances for any of the Bats to watch him in action. He tends to show up and disappear when he pleases without ever really spending much time except for a passing jab or a convenient bullet. He’s kind of like a strange distant cousin.

 He only ever accepts invitations to the Cave when at least 2 of the younger Bats whine at him. So far the most effective combination is Duke and Steph, who have managed to get him to the Cave a total of 3 times. This is a personal point of pride for Steph, who believes if Duke wasn’t a Bat, she might be Jason’s favorite. Usually he just drops in, raises Bruce’s blood pressure to unhealthy levels, and then slips away like smoke. But today he’s in a good mood. A good mood that means when Bruce jokingly invites him onto the sparring mat he actually accepts.

 Stripped down to a tank top and his tac pants, it’s clear that Jason is bigger than Bruce. Steph had kind of assumed that the jacket he wears as Red Hood has at least a slight shoulder padding, but it is now clear that it definitely does not. She never thought Bruce would look small standing next to anyone but a superhuman, but as the two of them wrap up knuckles and wrists, for the first time Steph notices the several inches Jason has over Bruce in height. On the mat, they both move with easy grace, circling as they size each other up.

 When Jason moves, Steph almost misses it entirely. He’s like lightning as he strikes right into Bruce’s personal space, delivering a hit that if it hadn’t been blocked might have lain Bruce out flat. Steph can’t even turn to greet Cass when the other girl sidles up next to her because she’s too busy watching Batman get his ass kicked. It’s incredible. Bruce is smart and fast, one of the best fighters in the world, disciplined to a super human level. And here’s Jason, putting him on the defensive. Jason who everyone knows is good, but no one thinks is Batman good. Jason who she had kind of assumed Dick could beat in a fair fight.

 He’s brutal and it’s incredible. Jason’s technique is incredible, he’s well trained and he’s been in the game for a long time. But beyond that, he has a way of moving that borders on unnatural. There’s not a single wanted motion. Every movement is precise. Jason is there, and then he isn’t, the movement almost instantaneous and entirely unpredictable. Steph has always thought that Bruce moved with a liquid grace, like a shadow. But Jason moves like lightning jumping from cloud to cloud before it strikes the ground, decimating anything in its path. The unstoppable force to Bruce’s immovable object.

❤️

for this ask game

This one is a bit shorter but still fun!

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It’s not necessarily a secret, but Jason also doesn’t advertise his magical abilities that often. Cards close to the chest and all that. He quietly takes care of any magical disturbances in Gotham and in exchange, no one brings it up. Jason’s really mainly good at using the All Blades and some really inconsistent mystical foresight anyways, so it’s not like his abilities really come up all that often.

But oh god is it funny to drop a minor prophecy on a sleep deprived Tim and leave. 

It’s not so funny when John fucking Constantine shows up on Jason’s doorstep. It is in fact, extremely inconvenient because Jason had plans tonight. Still, he lets the guy in because where Constantine goes, bad news follows and Jason has enough sense to at least want a heads up.

“Zee told me you had a pretty powerful aura, but I still didn’t expect this.” Here John gestures with his lit cigarette at Jason. The smoke gathers unnaturally, pulled between the currents of magic that surround them both like magnetic fields.

“Just cut to the chase man. I haven’t got all night.” As the last word of his sentence trails off, Jason finds himself tipping backwards, a familiar green overtaking his vision. He jerks back upright suddenly and when he speaks this time, the voice is not his own. It slithers from between Jason’s lips like smoke.

love the concept!

<3 part of this ask game

this got kinda long~ I love the Sandman series and so I went a little ham~

Also. Hear me out, it’s canon that Destruction of the endless looks a lot like Roy Harper. So for our purposes here, Roy Harper is the identity Destruction took on when he went to wander the world bc he didn’t want to be Destruction any more. 

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Destiny is the second of the Endless to touch the life of Jason Todd. This is true of most mortals, who always feel the briefest touch of his older sister at birth. Destiny is especially intrigued by this mortal though. This child whose name is written so often in his Book of Souls. He touches the child briefly, just enough to ensure his heart will continue to beat until the time comes for his fate. Then it is back to the garden, back to the Book, back to the duty of oiling the ever turning gears of the universe.

Death meets him again after that crucial moment of birth. Not once, but many times. Little moments where a sickly baby’s heart stutters and she appears. Destiny’s own touch on the child ensures that these moments of contact are brief. Still, it is enough to ensure that when the time comes for Death to cradle this child against her, she will be fond. And when the time comes for her to let him go, she will mourn the tragedy of a first life cut too short and a second life spun out too wildly.

So does Jason as it happens. Despair is ever present in his young life. She sits on his chest as he listens to his parents argue in the living room. She is a constant companion at his mother’s bedside. She will not leave him alone as she rends at the flesh of Jason’s soul with her hooked ring. He’s somewhat of a favorite amusement of hers until the Batman takes him away.

As the life bleeds from his body in a warehouse, Death and Despair are both by his side. One squeezing at his heart and the other cradling him close to her chest. In the end, Despair extinguishes his last heartbeat with her own two hands before turning him over to Death. Jason thinks he might love Death almost as much as he had loved Catherine Todd. Almost as much as he could have loved Sheila Haywood. She reminds him of the moms and big sisters on TV and in books. 

Death’s patience with him is seemingly endless. She holds his hand as they wander. She wipes his tears when he cries. Explains when he does not understand how he wanders with her. He is waiting, she says, until it is time for him to go back. When that time comes, her little brother will come to take him away. Jason does not know how long he walks with her, standing behind and to the left as she guides souls away. He goes with Destiny when he comes and bids her a temporary goodbye.

Jason wakes in the arms of Delirium almost a year after Destiny took him from Death’s side. The youngest of the Endless is quite taken with him it seems. She whispers in his ear with no ill intent. In Jason’s other ear, Desire spins those words into poison. Delirium whispers that Jason will take her to Destruction- Desire obfuscates the meaning. Jason will take well to destruction- he’ll be the one causing it after all. Between the two of them, intentional and not, they wind him up to new heights of madness. 

In the wake of his big showdown with the Joker, Desire departs with a laugh, satisfied with the conclusion of their game. Delirium still clings, warping Jason with her mere existence. Insistent that he will take her to her big brother. He speaks to her face to face now that he has become somewhat immunized to her maddening presence from long exposure.

If she does not disappear to cause havoc in the night, Delirium’s presence is sometimes enough to call the older brother she does not seek. Jason kind of likes the guy. There’s a ruthless sort of practicality to him in spite of his tendency to riddle. His coolness reminds Jason of Bruce in a way. That and the constant self absorbed pity party. It’s almost comforting to think that even the undying personification of Dreams can be prone to wallowing in his own misery. It certainly makes Jason feel better for doing it himself.

Jason never expects to meet Destruction. He doesn’t even know that he has for a while actually. Delirium has gone off to do god knows what and Jason has gone off to rescue his almost-big-brother’s former best friend from a prison compound in Qurac. Roy Harper smiles up at Jason like no one ever has when Jason breaks down the walls of his shitty little prison cell. 

It’s shocking how quickly Jason falls a little bit in love with Roy Harper. It’s mesmerizing to watch him take things apart and rebuild them as something else. The man is a force to be reckoned with, breaking down and rebuilding Jason’s walls with himself inside. And it’s easy to let Roy help Jason rebuild himself.

Delirium comes crashing back into Jason’s life and nearly destroys it when she runs to Roy.

Hi anon! 💌

from this ask meme

I don't think it's too much of a surprise for me to give this a pretty high grade considering that I've written quite a bit of it 😅

I'm more partial to the fluffy stuff and there are some tropes that frequently show up in AOB stuff that I'm not a big fan of, but overall I like it. It's pretty easy to avoid the stuff I'm not so into, so it's really no biggie.

From this ask game

Thank you so much for asking Nym! <3

Oddity in the Room was really fun for me to write! I think it's actually the first omegaverse fic I ever wrote and so I was really kind of nervous to post it up.

The secret of this fic is that I almost had Jason end up with Slade! This almost became a very different piece, but it would have been just as fluffy. The original plan was for this to be more about Slade learning not to be a condescending bastard and Jason learning that not every ulterior motive is sinister.

Hey Anon!

Thanks for checking in with me! I know I've been kind of AWOL lately ( I have a pretty big backlog in my ask box and my WIP folder 😅)

Recently, I've been dealing with some issues with my eyesight that make it difficult for me to look at a computer screen for long periods of time. This has made it difficult for me to keep up with tumblr as well as my writing which is why I haven't been posting as much.

The good news is that I am improving! I'll probably still be pretty absent for a while, but I do have some stuff that I've been working on that I'm excited to share relatively soon!