#lyntergalactic

"Sick," the kid says, his eyes gleaming as he just shy of literally pounces on the pile.

"Why does it speak like that?" Damian asks, looking suspicious.

"Please stop calling him 'it'," Jon repeats in exasperation. Damian shoots him an annoyed look.

"Oh, and 'him' is somehow more appropriate?" he asks dubiously.

"I–how is that even a question?!" Jon demands incredulously, staring back at him.

"Because it is twenty-one hours old and cannot possibly know its gender yet," Damian says. Jon . . . pauses.

". . . 'they', Nightwing," he says finally, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. At least he knows Damian's been doing his allyship research, he guesses. "If you don't know somebody's gender, it's 'they'."

"I'm cool with Nightwing calling me 'it', actually," the kid puts in conversationally as he shakes out–as they shake out a random T-shirt and make a face at it, apparently finding it . . . somehow offensive, Jon doesn't really know how. It's just a plain white T-shirt. "I don't know if I have a gender or whatever but I like that he thought about it. But if anybody in a lab coat ever calls me 'it' again, I'm disassembling them."

The staff all cringes.

That seems like weird phrasing, Jon thinks, trying not to frown. Like–"disassembling"? That's weird, right?

Rating: M Relationships: Niner & Omega Squad, Niner & Kal, Niner & Etain, background relationships, background cloneships Tags: Aroace!Niner; queer themes; coming out; Etain lives; Kal’s A+ parenting; unhealthy family dynamics; homophobia, acephobia, and sexism from Kal Summary: The war is over and Niner and Darman have rejoined the rest of Omega at Kyrimorut. Niner struggles to make sense of why the idea of marriage is so unappealing to him, his place within his squad in peacetime, and his rapidly cooling opinion of Kal Skirata. Read on Ao3

With stunning art from @weatherbane and beta'd by @lyntergalactic

artefacts of Thedas prompts | @dadrunkwriting

Shadows and Tall Trees

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The vhenadahl casts its dappled light over all the memories Eireann has of the alienage. Even as a child, she received no answer for why it was there, why they painted it every spring, or even what it was meant to do. “It means ‘Tree of the People,’” was the most her father could tell her, as he handed her a brush and a little pot of scarlet paint. More of it ended up on her hands than on the tree, but still, he told her she’d done a good job.

Odhrán Surana is dead now. He died in his daughter’s arms, and she cannot ask him anything else.

Eireann stands beside the vhenadahl, in the gloom of approaching twilight. The smell of new paint cuts sharp through the miasma of destruction and poverty, through the fourteen years since she had helped to paint the tree. She is alone, but for that memory. She doesn’t know how to be anything else. She can’t hold her mother, can’t reach out for comfort, can’t cradle the child resting in her womb, because when she looks at her hands now, all she sees is her father’s blood draining through her fingers.

She places a hand on the bark. It’s still tacky. When she peels her hand away, her palm is patched with paint. So she touches it again, and again, and again, until the tree is scattered with the voids of her handprints, and the vhenadahl’s patterns are ruined, and her palms are streaked red, white and pink. Anything to hide the stains of that memory.

Context: DickJay omegaverse set before Red Hood debuts, wherein Dick does not currently recognize this brickhouse of an omega-in-distress that he's just met and is trying not to take advantage of as his scrawny punk dead packmate.

"It's your bed. It should smell like you," Jason tries coaxingly, though of course it's a safehouse bed and Dick's in his suit so all it'd actually smell like would be vigilante-grade scent blockers and artificial pheromones. Maybe Dick won't care, though. Maybe he'll still . . . 

"I am very, very flattered, but I'm not getting in that bed tonight," Dick says, staying faultlessly still where he's leaning against the doorway, like nothing about Jason is affecting him at all. Jason's never tried to get an alpha in his heat nest before. Never had a heat nest before, just the kind of play-nests and practice-nests a curious pup or a stupid kid would make. Maybe he's doing it wrong. Fucking something up. 

Maybe Dick just doesn't want him, again. 

That would make sense.

"Don't you like it, alpha?" Jason can't stop himself from asking in a much too raw voice, and hates himself for every single fucking word of it. "I could do–something different. Something else." 

Dick sighs, very quietly, and knocks his head back against the doorframe. 

"Believe me," he grits out lowly, almost choking on his alpha voice in a way that does genuinely embarrassing things to Jason's . . . everything, pretty much. "That is very much not the problem here, big guy." 

Jason doesn't want Dick to call him that. He used to call him "little". He used to call him–

Jason tries not to remember Dick's alpha voice rumbling around the words "little wing", low and soft and effortlessly reassuring, but there's no way to forget. 

He could never, ever forget. 

Not for fucking anything. 

He thinks he remembered that even before the pit. 

Superboy carts him halfway across town and then lands them on a totally random-seeming rooftop that Tim assumes he has some reason to have chosen, though hell if he can tell what it was. The sight lines are all terrible and there are literally no defensible positions, and there's not even a single decent hiding place or useful perch.

"And does 'Sir' have a name?" Damian asks, the lenses of his mask narrowing. "Preferably first, middle, and last." 

"I guess?" the kid says with a shrug. "Probably. Most people have 'em, right? Like, the real ones, I mean. But everybody just called him 'Sir' when he was here." 

"What did he look like?" Jay asks. 

"An asshole. Which, now that I'm thinking about it, 'Asshole' is a way better thing to call him than 'Sir'," the kid muses consideringly. Jay chokes on a laugh. Damian looks exasperated by the lack of intel. The staff just seems very, very nervous. And Jon . . . 

Jon is kind of comforted, actually. This kid was grown in a tube and force-fed who the fuck knows what kind of information, but he sounds nothing like Jon would expect from someone born and "raised" in a lab environment. Like, he isn't sure how the kid could sound less like he belonged in a lab environment. 

So that's . . . yeah. That's definitely comforting, Jon thinks, and doesn't think about volcanos at all. 

"Here," he says, holding his cape out to the kid and getting a blank look in return. The kid, admittedly, doesn't seem to be all that concerned about standing around naked in a room full of other people. Seeing as he was basically just assembled in a lab in roughly twenty hours and he's literally never worn anything that wasn't life support, Jon guesses that makes sense. 

Definitely another "merits of murder" thing, though. 

.

.

.

"It only works when I'm touching something," Superman says, fidgeting uncomfortably and feeling kind of like . . . well, he guesses his powers not being the same as the original Superman's were yet isn't gonna disappoint the Kents, right? Like, why would they care? "It's tactile-based. But I can always use it on myself. So I can fly and pick up real heavy shit and hit like I've got super-strength and make it look like I'm invulnerable. No heat vision or ice breath or X-ray vision or, uh, eidetic memory, though. Or super-speed or super-senses."

rexwalker! a classic! (aside - the pigeon square on this cracks me up)

Context