Hi 👋 My 🍉 Dear ⚘supporters ❤

i like describing things by how edible they look and the villagers’ heads from the minecraft movie looks very chompable, very mousse-like

el oh el thinking about writing a crossover fic between the artemis fowl and pjo universe with an oc insert

it takes place during the battle of the labyrinth where the labyrinth just kinda yoinks artemis in and meets an oc who’s been stuck down there for a while

and they argue a lot before coming to an understanding with each other or smth idk (all platonic, yay!)

don’t know where it would go, tbh idek how i can make artemis contribute to the plot,,

like it would be very silly but i’ve only read 2 artemis fowl books and it was literally 1 and 3 i need to catch up

need i also mention i haven’t read pjo books 3 and 5

this is a braindump sorry if this doesn’t make sense

me starting out guitar a few months ago:

omg bm is so hard

literally ANY BAR CHORDS

MY BREAD WAS BURNT INTO A CRISP!! | Ft: Kitchen Wizard And Player

just started to read no longer human by osamu dazai. so far, it’s pretty interesting! i’m maybe halfway? through the second notebook

when i was reading the back, the summary mentioned how it was one of dazai’s last complete works and that just suddenly reminded me of a vid i saw of someone basically describing the book as his suicide letter, and i can see why

i don’t know too much about his life. it’s just a bit sad to think that this book was him laying himself bare under the guise of yozo, as if to finally tell people,”this is how it really feels”

that sense of feeling alienated from everybody is personal, and it feels strange to read it out on paper after going on for so long not knowing how to articulate it

the perspective of yozo does have his faults, i know that he’s an unreliable narrator, he does some fucked up things, and his opinions definitely were a product of its time. i just think it shows just how human he really was; he’s flawed.

like when he describes how he didn’t feel like he was loved while growing up, just taken care of. for me that really just illustrates how detached he was, his isolation clouded his judgement. because while yes the people in his life may have just taken care of him and nothing else, there’s also the probability that they really did love him

the writing style is beautiful. i’m not really sure where this will go. i know this is kind of a lot for only the first two sections i just think too much lol

Project: Killcode

batfamily + oc insert

tw: emeto, violence, gore, major character death (ive always wanted to list that)

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

I don't have any words for you guys except I'm sorry and I'm crying too

part fifty-three

❝ DENIAL ❞

MONDAY — OCTOBER 31 — 12:49AM

BENTLEY LED BELLAMY OUT OF HIS CELL AND INTO THE HALLWAY, WHERE EVERYBODY ELSE WAS WAITING IN THE ELEVATOR, HOLDING THE DOORS OPEN FOR HIM.

“Go,” Bentley said quietly, ushering him along toward the doors. Bellamy was still crying softly, (And, honestly, Bentley was just about two seconds away from bawling his eyeballs out, too.) Rockie was just waiting outside the elevator doors for them, fidgeting anxiously with the keycard he had.

Bellamy glanced back at Bentley when they approached the elevator, and Bentley rubbed his back reassuringly. “Go ahead. It’s going to be okay.”

With a quiet hiccup, Bellamy wiped his eyes and moved forward. Koa reached out for him, drawing him into the elevator and resting his hands on his shoulders to keep him there.

“Get off campus immediately. You’re going to get your powers back when you get to the surface, so if anybody tries anything, kill them,” Rockie ordered to the group, reaching into the elevator and tapping the keycard there. “We’ll be up soon.”

“You’re not coming?” Bellamy asked suddenly, his brown eyes lingering on Bentley’s face, wide with dread, with fear.

“I… I’ll be up soon,” Bentley replied. Rockie pushed a button on the inside of the elevator and stepped away, a piercing beep cutting through the air.

“What?” Bellamy muttered, seeming almost startled, his eyes flicking to the elevator’s panel on the inside, then back to Bentley in a panic. The doors started closing and Bentley saw Koa hold tight to his shoulders to keep him from running back out, a few sad sobs ripping their way out of him as the doors slid shut. “No, Bentley! They'll kill you!”

The doors closed fully, and the machine whirred to life, leaving Bentley and Rockie in the white hallway alone.

With an exhale, Bentley looked down at his socked feet, lingering for a moment in the silence. What if that was the last time he’d see one of them? Varian? What if Varian didn’t wake up? What if it was the last time he saw Vera? Or Koa? Or Valor? Or Summer? Or Bellamy?

Bentley flinched when Rockie’s gloved hand came to rest on his shoulder. “You okay?”

Bentley said nothing, but gently shrugged his hand off. “Fine.”

Rockie sighed heavily, turning and starting back down the hall, toward the elevator that led back to the main part of the facility. “Asten and Layla are in the medical wing already — I saw them being escorted in there along with some other kids,” Rockie shook his head. “They're moving so fast I guess they decided to cut out steps of the protocol.”

Bentley blinked at him, turning and following closely behind. “So what you’re saying is-“

“They’re probably already getting drained. The process takes about four hours, they've been in there for maybe thirty minutes. Kids... typically start to die about three hours in,” Rockie explained quickly. He made it to the elevator and tapped the keycard on the panel, summoning the elevator back down to them. “And now that security is looking for us, it’s gonna be one hell of a fight to make it there. They’ll shoot on sight.”

Bentley watched the elevator doors slide open, nodding to himself. “Then let’s... stay out of sight.”

“Yeah,” Rockie scoffed, stepping into the elevator. Bentley followed. “Simple.”

“It is simple, when you have me,” A fluttery falsetto came in Bentley’s head. “Hey. Sorry I’m late to the party.”

“Charlie,” He whispered, settling into the elevator and turning his head slightly away from Rockie. “Where have you been?”

“What?” Rockie asked.

“I kept her distracted for a little bit, but then she realized it wasn’t you there,” Charlie explained with a soft sigh. Rockie pushed buttons in his peripheral. “So I went about screwing with the guys who watch the security cameras and made them see nothing. As well as routing all people away from you in the halls, while simultaneously fighting for my life because the Secret Keeper was trying to murder me inside my own head. You’re welcome.”

Bentley exhaled heavily as the doors slid closed and the elevator dinged. That's why he hadn't seen anything? Anyone? That's why everything had gone so good? Because of Charlie?

“Thank you.”

“Are you losing your mind right in front of me?” Rockie questioned, waving a gloved hand in front of Bentley’s face. “Who are you talking to?”

Bentley glanced over at him with a soft sigh as the elevator kicked into its ascent. “It’s complicated.”

Rockie just blinked at him.

"Go on, explain it," Charlie urged.

Bentley sighed heavily. “The Secret Keeper, the telepath? She's like an alter ego forced into a girl's body, so there’s, like, two different people inside of her. The original girl, Charlie Reins, uses the Secret Keeper’s powers to talk to me,” He explained quickly as the elevator rose up the shaft. “She said she’ll help us, but you have to do what I say.”

"Help?" Rockie scoffed.

"Yes. She can read minds and see the future like the Secret Keeper. She's the only reason I made it through this place last time," Bentley continued.

Rockie narrowed his eyes at him, and a long moment of silence came where Bentley glanced anxiously at the elevator doors. Rockie hummed quietly to himself for a minute, glancing around the tiny room. “Are you lying to me right now?”

“What?” Bentley questioned incredulously, scrunching his face up in Rockie's direction. "No, I'm not lying. I'm not like you."

It looked like Rockie debated on saying something, but decided on sighing instead, looking away from Bentley and crossing his arms. "You can stop with the cheap jabs now, they're getting a little old."

The redhead glanced over at him. “Sorry, I just assumed you stopped caring about my opinion when you walked out on us.”

Rockie suddenly turned, and Bentley didn’t even have time to react before he grabbed him by the front of his jumpsuit and shoved him back against the elevator wall with a thud, standing over him unsettlingly. Bentley'd forgotten how tall he was. “If I didn’t go with them, they were going to kill you all, one by one, until I caved,” He hissed, the damn near most venomous sentence Bentley had heard from anyone since he moved into Redwood. “But if I had known you were all going to be fucking assholes about it, maybe I would’ve let them.”

Bentley wedged his hands up between the two of them, channeling all his currently available strength into shoving Rockie in the chest. He stumbled maybe a foot or two away. “Don’t touch me.”

For a few moments, neither of them said anything — they just looked at each other. Rockie’s green eyes were glowing like they always did, but somehow they were different. Bentley wasn’t really sure how. Almost like some aspect of them had been stripped away, peeled off.

Rockie crossed his arms tightly. “I didn’t even do anything to you,” He mumbled, his voice strangely small, his eyes drifting down to the floor. “You're acting like I shot you in the foot and tossed you in a cell myself. All I did was walk away.”

Bentley crossed his arms tightly, too.

“And that was enough,”

Another moment of silence passed.

“When people are scared, they show you what they really care about,” Bentley exhaled lightly, eyes drifting to the floor, then back up to Rockie. “And you walked away.”

“So I’m the bad guy now, for not wanting to die? For not wanting you to die? Is that it?” Rockie questioned, flicking his hands out to the side. “You don’t seem to understand, Bentley. When they said I would be punished for staying, they planned to kill you all. It’s been the deal since the beginning — if I betrayed them, they’d kill everybody I cared about. It never mattered before, because I never had anyone…”

Bentley didn’t say anything, just watched Rockie look back down at the floor, dragging the toe of his tennis shoe there. “Hate me if you want to... But I saved your life by walking out. And I'd do it again.”

Suddenly, the elevator jolted to a very abrupt stop with the loud sound of metal scraping on metal, knocking both Bentley and Rockie off balance. Rockie stumbled into the wall and Bentley nearly fell into him.

Both of them, eyes wide, looked around in a panic.

“What the hell?” Rockie muttered.

“She had them disable the elevators,” Charlie said into Bentley’s head with an irritated sigh. “But the others made it out before they did. Don’t worry. I’m working on it.”

“They disabled it,” Bentley repeated, glancing around the small white box they were trapped in. “Charlie said she’s working on it.”

Rockie moved for the doors, trying futilely to shove his metal gloved fingers in the crevice between them and pry them open. Bentley glanced up — there was what looked like an emergency hatch there on the ceiling, a square outline among the white, but they didn’t need it if Charlie was going to help, right?

He glanced back down at Rockie, who was still pulling on the doors, almost frantically.

“They won’t open. We’re probably stuck between floors anyways,” Bentley said. Rockie didn’t say anything, but kept tugging and pulling at them, not even sparing him a glance.

“Rockie,” Bentley started, taking a step to the side in a bid to see his face. He furrowed his brows when he realized that Rockie was suddenly breathing in a familiar manner — quick, and shallow, like Bentley when he got too stressed out.

“Rockie?” Bentley questioned, taking another step to the side. “Are you claustrophobic?”

“No,” He gritted out, still prying at the doors.

Suddenly, a stab of pain ripped through Bentley’s skull, and he reached a hand out, resting it on the elevator wall to support his weight.

“You think you’re so clever, getting Charlie to distract me. Who’s to say this isn’t all part of my plan? That it’s not all supposed to happen like this?” The Secret Keeper’s voice came in his head, and she laughed; a bubbly, sinister sound. “The babybird’s stuck in a cage while his friends are dying. You’re playing right into my hand, Bentley.”

“Get out of my head,” He ordered softly, bringing his hand up to his right temple when a spike of pain stabbed him there. He didn't see Rockie look back at him.

“It isn’t that easy,”

Suddenly, the elevator melted away around him, replaced with the white abyss he’d grown so accustomed to. With an irritated exhale, he crossed his arms over his chest and looked around at the nothing in the room.

"Well? What're you gonna show me?" He questioned, throwing his hands out to the side. “Get it over with already.”

The Secret Keeper laughed. "Eager, are we?"

“I have somewhere to be,” He replied with the shake of his head. “So, what is it? Asten bleeding to death? Layla with a flatline?”

“Look at you! Growing a spine!” The Secret Keeper chided, fizzling into view only a few feet away from him, giggling and beginning to circle him, slowly, like a vulture. “Baby Bentley isn’t such a baby anymore! It’s a far cry from that ten year old I met four years ago who vomited when I first showed myself.”

“What the hell do you want?” Bentley asked, turning in a circle as she rounded behind him, following her with his eyes. “Why do you insist on being a constant pest?”

A separate voice suddenly came, a whisper among the white; a familiar whisper — Charlie. So faint the Secret Keeper didn’t seem to hear it. “Bentley, don’t believe what she shows you. She can’t kill me if weren’t not in the physical world.”

“I think you should ask yourself that question,” The Secret Keeper sneered, reaching out and dragging her fingers across Bentley’s jawline and chin as she walked. He brought a hand up and whacked hers away; he didn’t really know what he’d expected, for it to feel real or for him to phase right through her, but to his surprise, he was able to slap her hand away from him.

She chuckled at him. “You’re welcome. I’m the one who brought this out in you, you know. I made you this way.”

“You have nothing to do with who I am,” Bentley scoffed, turning as she rounded him. “My family made me who I am.”

“Your family?” She laughed. “You finally stepped up and became brave when you were facing me eye-to-eye on that rooftop. You only grew a spine to defy me. You don’t need a spine to live with the perfect little family — you don’t grow one that way. You grow one through trials. Fighting.”

“I-”

“Even if you were to win, Bentley, you would have my scent all over you for the rest of your life. I’ve left my impression on your personality — you’ll never, ever, ever be able to get away from it,” She explained, not even allowing him time to speak. “I’m part of you now, Babybird. My memory will always be there, crawling across your skin, running through your veins. After all, we’re both just villains, aren’t we? Puppeteer?”

Bentley felt himself tense for a second, but he shifted his weight in an attempt to hide it, blinking in a bid to rid his memory of the name.

“Ooh, struck a nerve?”

“Don’t call me that,” Bentley ordered, his gaze drifting down to the white floor.

“Why? It’s who you are. Pieces of your father, pieces of me — you could be unstoppable, if it weren’t for all of those dreadful emotions you can’t seem to contain,” She chuckled. “I show you the simplest things, and you crumble completely.”

Bentley just watched as she slowed to a stop in front of him, twisted stitched and bleeding smile still stretching wide across her features. “By the way — I have someone for you to see.”

She held a hand out by her side, and smoke swirled under it. Charlie materialized there. She was on the floor on her knees, no longer in her purple dress, but a white jumpsuit like the one Bentley was in.

Bentley inhaled at the sight of her. Her blonde hair was red at the ends with blood, and her jumpsuit, once solid white, was now three quarters crimson. Her face was busted up and scraped and bruised so bad she hardly looked like herself, shallow, precise cuts from a knife arcing up from either side of her mouth to imitate The Secret Keeper’s signature smile. The cuts made almost half of her face red with blood, and it was still coming, running down her neck and all over the rest of her. Her blue eyes were dull, and she wasn’t really looking at him. Or anything. She was just kind of… staring off.

She can’t kill me if we’re not in the physical world.

Bentley, though the sheer amount of blood threatened to make his world swirl out of focus, merely drew in a breath.

The Secret Keeper held out her opposite hand, and the same dagger she’d tried to stab Bentley with appeared in it. Chains came from the abyss above them and latched onto Charlie’s wrists, jerking her arms up above her head.

She can’t kill me if we’re not in the physical world. Bentley forced himself to remember her words. She couldn’t kill her. She couldn’t kill her. She couldn’t kill her.

The Secret Keeper stabbed her in the chest directly in front of Bentley and twisted it with a sickening laugh.

Bentley’s stomach lurched at the explosion of red that immediately stained her jumpsuit even more than it already had, and the blood-curdling, strangled sounding scream she let out made something writhe beneath his skin.

“Don’t react!” Her voice came, a whisper, but he was already snapping a hand over his mouth in a bid to quiet the sudden and intense wave of nausea that made him feel really sick. The Secret Keeper was just laughing. At Charlie. At the knife. “Put your hand down! Be unbothered!”

Bentley snapped his hand down by his side, keeping his lips pressed into a firm line — the last line of defense should his body actually decide to make him throw up. Could he even throw up in the white place? Or would he just be throwing up in real life?

The Secret Keeper pulled the knife out, splattering blood on her face in the process, and she looked over at Bentley. Charlie had gone slack and nearly unconscious in the chains.

Bentley swallowed hard, forcing the nausea down, forcing the terror off of his face and out of his head so maybe she couldn’t feel it. He replaced it with hatred and disdain instead.

She couldn’t kill her.

He crossed his arms over his chest, trying really, really hard to keep his body language natural and free of tension while she was looking at him. With blood all over her face.

“If you react, I’ll kill you myself!” Came Charlie’s whisper, and then a second later: “Okay, inappropriate joke. I won’t. But you get how serious I am! I’ll work to keep her out of your head, but you’ve gotta keep all that disgust off of your face.”

Bentley drew in a breath, trailing his eyes across the blood on her face and pretending it didn’t make his stomach churn unsettlingly. “Are you finished?”

“Oh my God, Bentley!” Charlie whispered, sounding pleasantly surprised. “You’re such a fucking savage.”

I’m literally about to vomit, he made himself think.

“Yeah, well, don’t!”

The Secret Keeper, evidently still hung on his, quote-on-quote, savage question, stepped forward. Her eyes went colder than Asten’s old cell, and she dropped the dagger, the weapon exploding into a puff of smoke when it hit the floor, disappearing entirely. “Excuse me?”

Bentley lifted his brows at her. “Are. You. Finished? I have shit to do.”

The Secret Keeper cocked her head at him like a dog, taking a step forward, without a word.

“Get out of my head,” Bentley demanded, taking a step toward her. She creased her brow at him, almost like he’d… done something she hadn’t expected.

“What?” She growled, her cold gaze turning sinister very, very quickly. She started inching forward; dragging her feet across the floor toward him.

Bentley didn’t move. “I said get out of my head.”

The Secret Keeper didn’t speak; she only twitched. One of her eyes, and her left hand, like she was feeling for something that didn’t exist. A knife, Bentley assumed, since he was so royally pissing her off.

“Get out of my head!” He repeated, stepping forward again. The Secret Keeper looked down at his feet, like she couldn’t believe he was getting closer to her.

She stepped forward, too. “Who do you think you are, speaking to me like that? Why-”

“Get out!”

On the second word, Bentley gathered all the courage and bravery he could muster to step forward and shove her as hard as he could. She wasn’t very big, so she actually staggered maybe a yard away, and stumbled over her own feet, and then fell, and when she hit the white floor-

He jolted back into the real world with a gasp, standing in the elevator, one hand braced on the wall, the other laced in his hair.

At once he remembered the literal stabbing he had witnessed, and the bloodcurdling scream. He’d watched her stab Charlie straight in the chest. Like, stab.

He turned on his heel, dug his fingers into the stomach of his jumpsuit, and threw up a rather pitiful amount of bile in the corner of the disabled elevator.

Rockie, who had been sitting in the corner near the door, diagonal from him, moved with a soft: "Oh, shit."

Bentley's head was throbbing with the same murderous migraine he'd forgotten in his panic earlier; but it was a newer, worse pain. The room threatened to spin with every attempt to open his eyes, and his adrenaline began to be replaced by a toxic exhaustion, clawing up his ankles and making it hard to focus.

Rockie was suddenly touching him, one hand on his back and the other holding tight to his left arm, keeping him from swaying.

"You don't look very good," He oh-so-helpfully stated.

"Don't feel very good," Bentley murmured back, screwing his hand up in the stomach of his jumpsuit when it threatened to lurch again. He kept trying to open his eyes but everything just kept swirling. "I think I might faint."

"What? Please don't," Rockie begged, his head dipping down so Bentley could've seen him if his eyes were open. He could've swore he sounded... desperate, or afraid, or something. He couldn't tell just then.

It was about at that point that Bentley's legs decided that they didn't want to work, and they gave out beneath him; the only thing keeping him from hitting the floor was Rockie's grip, grabbing him firmly by the shoulders.

"Okay. Okay," Bentley vaguely heard him mutter. Rockie moved Bentley carefully, until his head came to rest on something that felt suspiciously like his shoulder, his arms looping around his back gently but tight enough to keep him from falling. "Okay. We'll just stay like this for a minute. That's cool."

Bentley managed to peel the hand that wasn't tangled in his jumpsuit away from his side and bring it loosely around Rockie in return, his eyes suddenly stinging like somebody had sprayed lemon juice in them.

"I wanna go home," He whispered, voice thick and sort of slurred from the strange half-conscious state he was in.

Rockie just sort of rubbed his back. "I'll get you home."

Bentley was conscious for just long enough to feel a couple of tears fall down his face, before the pain and the sound and the emotions all became one big blur of something, and he let the darkness take him away with open arms.

--

When Bentley came to, he was laying on the floor of the elevator, knees tucked up to his chest, his head situated carefully on Rockie's balled up sweatshirt.

"Hey,"

Bentley glanced up to his right, where Rockie was sitting, now only wearing a white t-shirt with his sweatpants. He looked different -- more tired, maybe? He was just sitting against the wall of the small elevator with one leg tucked, the other outstretched, looking at nothing in particular.

Bentley sat up and rubbed at his eyes, cringing at the weakness he could already feel taking hold of him, grimacing at the taste of bile that still lingered in his mouth. How long was he out? Had they moved at all?

Despite his questions, a small: "What?" was about all he could manage to say.

"You threw up," Rockie stated. "Then passed out. I think you might have a fever, too."

Bentley wasn't quite sure how Rockie would've checked his temperature without taking his gloves off, but he also didn't have the willpower to ask. He just hummed, sitting up and tightening his knees against this chest.

"We've been in here... probably another hour or two. If Charlie doesn't get the elevator up, I'm not sure we're going to make it in time," Rockie stated, still refusing to look over at Bentley, staring down at his hands instead.

Bentley didn't say anything. And then, for a second, his brain drifted off to something completely unrelated -- the fact that earlier, Rockie had been prying at the elevator doors like they were going to kill him.

"Rockie?"

"Hm?"

"Can I ask you something?"

"If you don’t intend to insult me after, sure,"

Bentley blinked for a second. "Why were you so scared earlier? Of the elevator?"

Rockie sighed lightly, glancing down at his hands. Fiddling with his fingers.

“I…”

He heard Rockie exhale heavily. He thought at first that he wouldn't respond, and he didn't blame him. They weren't friends anymore, were they? Not-friends didn't tell each other stuff like that; they didn't answer those kinds of questions.

But finally:

"They started locking me in a six-by-six white room when I was eleven, trying to determine if my powers fluctuated based on... heightened emotions. Fear," He replied quietly, absentmindedly fiddling with his glove. "They locked me inside every day, for four hours. Three years straight. With her."

Bentley kept silent.

"It didn't even end up working," He mumbled. “My powers never changed. I guess the elevator just... reminded me of that room.”

Bentley didn’t say anything for a moment.

“But I’m fine. You deciding to puke your guts out distracted me,”

And suddenly, the elevator kicked back on, jostling them in the floor as it continued its ascent.

Bentley blinked, and Charlie’s voice came: “Finally!”

Rockie popped off the floor, wiping his hands on his pants. He turned to Bentley and held a gloved hand out to him. “Can you stand?”

“Yeah,” Bentley replied, reaching up and taking his hand. Rockie tugged him off of the floor and, after a second where he gathered his footing, he let go again. The world threatened to spin, but he blinked and shook his head and didn't let it.

“Are you sure you’re okay enough to-“

“Yes,” Bentley cut him off, despite the fact he felt mere moments from death. “I’m okay. Being passed out for a little while helped.”

“You shouldn’t have to be in a position where passing out helps,” Rockie exhaled, running a hand through his hair. He grabbed the keycard out of his sweatpants pocket and held it over to Bentley. Bentley was pretty sure he was supposed to have one on his person, but he didn't, and he wasn't sure where it went. “Here; just go back down and head out through the elevator we sent the others up in. I’ll take care of everything down here.”

“No,” Bentley was quick to reply, shaking his head lightly and looking back up at Rockie. “I’m not leaving.”

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open right in the midst of their conversation — immediately, both Bentley and Rockie all but threw themselves backwards, thudding against opposite walls on either side of the door so they were out of sight. The sudden and panicky movement made Bentley’s vision swim and headache rage even harder than it had been, and he wanted to groan about it, but he didn’t. He wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

“Stay still. Don’t move,” Charlie’s voice came.

Bentley caught Rockie’s eye, and mouthed: Don’t move.

Bentley saw Rockie’s fingers twitching as a pair of footsteps grew near to the elevator door. Bentley just pushed himself hard into the corner and kept his eyes laser focused on Rockie's green ones, hoping his gaze would pin him down just enough to keep him from moving. Just for a second.

A man in white armor stepped onto the elevator.

He stood idly in the threshold and glanced around, quickly. His armor looked like metal — Bentley hadn’t noticed that before. He had a huge black assault rifle in his white gloved hands, and a helmet that reminded him of a welding mask. 

The man looked around the small room, taking in every corner and crevice of white, nearly looking Bentley straight in the eye. He did a few passes of all the corners, his gaze not seeming to stick on him, or Rockie, not even on the sweatshirt sitting in the floor.

He huffed and stepped back out. Bentley heard the crackle of a walkie talkie coming to life. “They’re not here, boss.”

Rockie looked over at Bentley with this absolutely flabbergasted look on his face, and Bentley mouthed: “Charlie.”

With the shake of his head, Rockie reached over ever-so-slowly and pushed in the open door button, holding it down tightly.

“I’m keeping the Secret Keeper locked out of your minds, for now. She can’t see into them. Which means she can’t get your location,” Charlie said. “But she knows where you’re trying to go. So we’re taking a back way.”

Bentley merely nodded, even though she couldn't see him. 

“Go out of the elevator now. Immediately go right. There’s a guard, but I’ve got him,”

Bentley gestured for Rockie to follow and hurried out of the elevator, taking an immediate right. There was a guard there, the same one, back facing them, holding his gun tight in his hand. Almost like he was guarding the elevator, waiting for something suspicious.

Rockie wordlessly grabbed Bentley’s arms from behind in an attempt to pull him the other way, but Bentley merely shook his head, quietly wrenching him arms from his grip.

The guard fell.

Rockie paused and stared, and Bentley moved farther down the hall, past the guard. There was blood running from his nose, ears, and eyes. Bentley looked away with a grimace, taking a few more steps and glancing down the halls.

“There’s a-"

Chi-chink.

Bentley turned at the sound of an assault rifle being chambered behind him.

Much to his relief (and slight terror?) it was Rockie. He'd grabbed the guard’s giant assault rifle despite his metal gloves, and was now scouring his limp body... for ammunition, Bentley guessed.

“What are you doing?” He whispered, glancing anxiously down the hallways around them. "Someone might hear you. We need to go."

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Rockie muttered. He pulled something out of the man’s waistband and slid it across the floor to Bentley.

A pistol. An actual, real pistol. 

The thought of picking it up made his head spin.

A second later, the man’s keycard slid up beside it. And then a pistol magazine.

Bentley swallowed thickly. “Charlie’s gonna get us there in secret, Rockie... we don’t need-“

“I’m not going with you,”

Bentley furrowed his brows, his mouth going dry. “What?”

“You can listen to her if you want, but I don’t trust her. She’s part of the Secret Keeper,” He replied nonchalantly. “I’m going for Layla. The girls are drained in a separate room than the boys, so we aren’t going to the same place anyways.”

Bentley inhaled sharply. “But-”

“If she lies to you, the medical wing is at the very right end of the main hall with the siphoning rooms. It’s absolutely massive. The draining rooms have windows. You can’t miss them.”

“Please don’t leave,” Bentley mumbled, taking a step toward him as Rockie rose with the gun, putting a few full magazines in his sweatpants pockets. His hoodie had been long abandoned in the elevator.

“Bentley-”

“I don’t want to be alone,”

Rockie merely looked at him for a few moments. “Then come with me.”

“No! Bentley, you’ll die!” Charlie ordered frantically.

“No,” Bentley half-whispered. “If you go and try to shoot them all, you’ll... die.”

“If I’m going down, I want to take as many of these bastards with me as I can,” Rockie replied, turning on his heel, and heading for the main hall that was shining bright in Bentley's eyes. “Good luck, Bentley.”

“No, Rockie!” Bentley took a couple steps to follow him, but stopped short, a gnarly burn surfacing behind his eyes. “Charlie? Is… is he the one?”

Charlie resigned to silence.

And then, a few quiet moments later, after the burning had turned into watery eyes as had then turned into tears that fell down his face, Charlie whispered: “Don’t follow him.”

“Oh my God,”

Rockie disappeared around the corner.

“Bentley, focus. Don’t follow him. Keep going straight,”

“Was that the last time I’ll see-”

“Bentley, listen to me. There are guards coming. You have to move, now,” She ordered in his head. “You don’t have much time. Thirty minutes tops. This place has a filter and distribution system created for widespread use of sedatives integrated into the air conditioning, but the system was disabled years ago when they decided it would be a danger to personnel. The system goes through the entire facility, and the vents needed to be large enough for repairs throughout the whole thing. So the answer is, yes. You’re going to be crawling through the vents like a spy movie.”

Bentley said nothing, his mind still utterly stuck on the fact that Rockie was going to... die.

“Get the keycard and go into the next cell closest to you. Now!”

Bentley did as he was told, numbly heading to the next metal door, opening it, going inside, and closing it behind him. There was no one in it.

Rockie was already dead.

“I’ll tell you when it’s safe to leave,”

Bentley didn’t say anything, but just focused on keeping himself together, for Asten’s sake. What if Rockie didn’t make it to Layla? Would she die, too? Had they messed up somewhere? 

“Stop thinking about it, Bentley,” Charlie ordered. “The guard passed. Go now.”

Bentley forced himself up and tapped the keycard again, the doors sliding open. 

“Go back where you came from, near the elevator. There’s a mechanical room right next to it where you’ll have access to the vents,”

Bentley made his way back into the dark hall, the one with the elevator, scanning the walls for the doors she'd mentioned.

Suddenly, the loud, terror inducing, horrendous noise of several assault rifles plagued his ears from the main hall.

He stopped right after he'd passed the elevator, just short of the next door, the one he was meant to go in. The hall spun and he put his hand against the wall there to hold himself up, clinging tight to the keycard to keep from dropping it.

“Rockie…”

“Don’t go back for him, Bentley. Don’t,” Charlie ordered in his head, solemnly. “I’m… helping him where I can. Open the door, inside there will be lots of machines, and a vent large enough for you to fit inside.”

Bentley didn’t say anything. Instead, he kept his hand planted firmly against the wall and stayed exactly where he was, poorly fighting away a very sudden urge to vomit again.

“Bentley,”

He shook his head. “I don’t… feel good.”

“I know. I know. You can push through it. I know you can,”

Bentley exhaled heavily. He wanted Bruce. He wanted to go home. He didn’t want to be sick with a fever alone in the hallways of a facility where they were trying to kill his friends. He didn't want to listen to the gunshots that were probably tearing through Rockie's body, aiming to leave him nothing more than a lump on the floor. He wanted to go home.

He threw up on the facility's white floor instead.

By the time his stupid muscles stopped spasming and his stupid stomach stopped evicting everything from inside itself, he was crying, fully. Most of it was thanks to the fact that he'd probably just heard Rockie die, but there was a little bit of it, too, that came from how badly he wanted to go home, how terrible felt, how hopeless he was. How was he supposed to save everyone like this? Falling apart? Alone? Sick?

“I can’t do it,” He sobbed, his full weight still resting on the wall next to him. Tears were streaming down his face but he didn't see the point in wiping them off. “I can’t… I won’t make it in time.”

“You definitely won’t if you don’t try,” Charlie replied softly. “It’s not like you to give up. You can do it. You’re so close.”

Bentley exhaled, and then inhaled. He thought about Asten.

Without another word, he pushed himself on. To the next door, through it, and into a large room that had a bunch of machines, consoles, and a large air vent close to the floor.

He closed the door behind him and went over to it, ignoring everything else. It had a grate, but it wasn't screwed in like normal -- it was latched, and had hinges so it could be opened easily by workers.

He unlatched it and pulled it open, looking into the vents beyond.

There was maybe a six foot drop before the vent turned out of his sight. There were various pipes and tubes and ducting curling and swirling around in there, probably the systems Charlie had talked about.

With an exhale, he pushed himself inside.

—

He was in the vents for a good fifteen, twenty minutes. Thumping around like an elephant in heels, stopping occasionally to flinch at a myriad of gunshots he heard from above, to panic about Rockie until Charlie calmed him down enough to go on. He stopped once because he needed to throw up again. He was pretty sure he really was sick.

By the time Charlie told him he was ‘there’, he was pretty sure he was five seconds away from actually dying. But then he had to not, because he was there.

He had to climb up a maybe six foot span of vent that went straight up — much like the vent he’d come in. It wouldn’t have been so hard on a normal day, but today wasn’t a normal day, so it was hard. He managed to use the pipes and ducts for the whatever system organized around the vents to get him up there. And it was only when Charlie said ‘now’ that he managed to use every bit of remaining strength to kick the vent grate out.

He climbed out into a very, very white room. He couldn’t see all the way across it because there were privacy curtains everywhere, like the curtains in s hospital. But, from what he could see, it looked big. He’d come out in a spot that seemed like he was in a corner, surrounded by shelves full of medical supplies and boxes.

“Go out. Put the grate back as best you can,”

Bentley followed her orders, climbing fully into the room and grabbing the grate, propping it where it had once been in a bid to make it look normal. The alarms were still blaring, and he could hear people talking, footsteps pounding across the floor. He could hear the sound of nearby chaos — gunshots, hundreds of them somewhere outside the room.

“Bentley, the room is set up like stripes. There’s rows of medical beds surrounded by these privacy curtains that have kids in them. Right now, you’re in the corner directly across from the corner with the door,” Charlie explained. “You see that privacy curtain to your right?”

Bentley turned and looked at the large, bluish-green plastic curtain to his right, past a few shelves. “Yeah?”

“Go in it. Get in the bed. Grab the IV tube and hide it under the blanket near your arm. Now,”

With a sharp exhale, Bentley squeezed himself between two shelves and ducked under the plastic-ey curtains. There was a large, white stretcher on the other side, and a big, white machine with buttons, dials, and a few different long tubes sticking out of it.

Bentley all but tossed himself at the bed, squirming to get under the covers and grabbing the bundle of tubes from the machine, shoving them under the blanket and playing dead there.

As soon as he stopped moving, the curtain whipped open with a whoosh.

He held his breath and made his whole body still, trying his hardest not to actually pass out in the presence of a blanket and bed. He heard a few footsteps come into the tiny space, and then a hum. “Looks like someone forgot to start you up.”

There were a few beeps and a whir from the machine next to him, and he heard the person leave, the privacy curtain whooshing shut behind them.

There was a moment of silence that ensued before Charlie said: “Go.” 

Bentley shoved himself out of the hospital bed, fighting off a wave of vertigo from standing so fast that was dutifully accompanied by a wave of nausea. He swallowed all the sickness down and pushed himself through the curtain and back into the empty space between them.

“Go right. Then turn right again — there’s only one walkway up here against the wall, you can’t miss it,”

Bentley merely went, his legs pushing him along with more willpower than his actual brain. He turned right, met with a long walkway, the left side lined with privacy curtains, the right with the wall. There was a break in the curtains every dozen feet or so that indicated a row.

“Walk ten paces, then go into the privacy curtain on your immediate left,”

Bentley started down the hall, counted to ten steps. On nine, he saw someone turn into the walkway from one of the rows ahead of him, so he practically threw himself to the side and through the next curtain.

“Feet up!” Charlie shouted. 

The nearest thing Bentley could actually use to get his feet up was the hospital bed, but this one had a person in it. A boy he didn’t know, maybe eleven or twelve, with bright blonde hair and long eyelashes that reminded him of Dick. He was connected to several large whirring machines, and an IV tube was coming out from under his blanket, filled with something suspiciously crimson.

Sitting on the edge of the bed next to him just to get his own feet out of sight made Bentley feel a little sick again.

The person padded by without suspecting a thing.

“You can go now.”

Bentley climbed off the bed and turned back, looking at the boy. He whispered: “How do I shut them all down?” 

There was a moment of silence. “What? No, Bentley, you’re here for Asten.”

“No, I…” He glanced at the whirring machine. At the evil, evil machine. “I can’t let them all die. Just tell me how to shut them down.”

“Bentley-”

“Please! It’ll stop draining everyone and I’ll still be able to get him,” Bentley begged. “I can’t leave them, Charlie.”

“Hold on! Hold on, just let me think,”

A few moments of silence passed, and Bentley merely stood there.

“Okay,” Charlie finally breathed. “Okay. Okay. Listen to me. There’s a main pump that controls all the smaller pumps in here, carries all the blood to another room where it gets filtered and stuff. You’re going to cut power to that pump. But you only have five minutes.”

“Okay,”

“Go back in the vents. If you run now, you should be able to slip in unseen,”

Numbly, Bentley listened to her. He climbed back in the vent and went to the next room over, (a control room, she said.), where his job was to beat the absolute hell out of some control panel and rip wires out of it until it stopped making noise. So he did.

After that, she claimed that he’d done it. She said something, told him a number of how many kids he’d saved, but he didn’t hear it. He threw up again in that room.

He blindly followed her orders back to the medical room he’d been in, and switched from curtained area to curtained area, narrowly avoiding all of the scrambling doctors and scientists who were trying to figure out why everything had stopped working. He was numb, blank, and he didn’t feel much of anything until Charlie directed him into one of the privacy curtains — the fourth one on the seventh row.

And when he opened it, all the feelings and stuff he’d been trying to keep an arm's length away slammed back into place inside of him.

Because Asten was laying in the bed.

He was hooked up to all the same machines as everybody else, but his blood wasn’t moving through the tubes anymore. His chest was rising and falling; somewhat quickly, but it didn’t matter to Bentley, as long as it was. He looked almost as white as a sheet of paper, and his lips were slightly blue from the loss of blood. But he was there.

Bentley made a sound akin to a wheeze as every emotion he'd ever felt in his life washed over him. He wanted to cry and scream and smile and kill something and dance and all kinds of things that, when he felt them all at once, simply resulted in him standing there.

“Through the curtain to your left, Bentley, there’s a tray with a few syringes on it; it’s a reversal drug. It will wake him up from the anesthesia. You can do it, okay?”

With a few poor excuses of breaths, Bentley swiped open the curtain next to him, trying hard not to look at the teenage boy in the bed. He scoured the small space for syringes instead, and he found them, on a small cart next to the quiet machines.

He grabbed one, turned around, and jammed it into Asten’s arm.

It took a little bit — maybe two minutes or so? — before he groaned lightly, his green eyes fluttering slowly open.

“Asten,” Bentley whispered, heading to the other side of the bed and starting to pull all the needles and tubing out of his arm. Asten stirred more, probably at the pain, his green irises flicking around until they finally landed on Bentley’s face.

“B’ntley?”

“Asten,” He breathed, a sense of relief washing over him that nearly made him bawl again. Asten went about sitting up, but proved to be really weak, so Bentley had to help him by hiding his back off the mattress. As soon as he was sitting upright, Bentley hugged him as tight as he dared. 

“Bentley,” Asten continued. His arms came up very vaguely, and Bentley felt him grab onto his jumpsuit gently, his head lolling down onto his shoulder seemingly by itself. “M’ feel like shit.”

“Me, too,” Bentley muttered. “But we have to get out of here, okay? We have to get out of here. We have to leave.”

“You’ve created a distraction with the pump failure, and Rockie’s creating a massive diversion himself. If you go now, toward the exit that goes to your building, I can keep all the stragglers off of you. You’re home free.”

Bentley, as badly as he wanted to hold onto Asten and never let go ever, pulled away after a few seconds. “Can you stand?”

Asten didn’t say anything, but he did push himself off of the bed and onto the floor; which was immediately followed by the buckling of his weak knees and Bentley having to muster up strength enough to catch him himself. 

“I’ve got you, buddy,” Bentley mumbled, trying his damn hardest to bare Asten's weight with his weak body. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Asten merely whined: “Bentley.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got you,” He continued, pulling one of Asten's arms around his shoulders in an attempt to keep him upright. "Just try to walk as best you can okay?"

"Okay..."

"All you have to focus on is getting out, I promise. I'll keep everything else away. All you have to do is walk," Charlie said in his head. "You're going to come out of his privacy curtain and go right, down the walkway -- then left. The door is there."

Bentley, with some sort of strength he had to be getting from a place he didn't even know of, pushed himself and Asten out of the makeshift hospital room and out into the walkways, following Charlie's directions as best he could. After the right and left turn, and a little bit of a walk, the door to the room was there -- it led back to the main hallway. The bright one, that led all the way back to his building.

One long hallway, and then they were out.

"Only focus on walking, Bentley," Charlie reminded. "You're done fighting. I've got you."

Bentley didn't do anything but obey her. He opened the door with the keycard and went out into the hall. The gunshots were still audible, but had faded further away, so much so that they sounded like something different. Or maybe that noise was his ears ringing.

With every single step, Bentley was pushing towards complete failure. He could feel his strength slipping away like someone had shot a hole in the tank -- everything that had been bearing down on him for the past month; the stress, the sickness, the lack of self-preservation, the fear, the neglect; it was all coming back to haunt him at the worst time in the worst way. Asten's life depended on him, and here he was, sick and weak and hardly able to think a coherent sentence through the absolute agony that he was embodying.

Still, somehow, he kept walking. He wasn't sure what it was that was pushing him on; determination, or willpower, or spite, or fear, or hope. He couldn't decide what feeling was most prominent in the tornado that was him. He merely focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and holding Asten up, for a long, long time.

Until they made it a mere ten yards from the stairs and exit, so close he could see it, so close he could practically feel the EM field begging to give him his power back...

Asten said something.

"B, I'm... about to pass out,"

And then he did.

It took every ounce of strength left inside of Bentley to keep him from hitting the floor when he fell. The second pair of legs that had been somewhat spurring him on turned into dead weight in a split second. Bentley managed to grab him under the arms and pull him off to the side -- into a small hallway, the last small hallway before they made it out.

"Asten," He mumbled as he laid him down on the floor. He was still pale as snow, and still breathing, but completely unconscious.

Bentley grabbed at his shoulders and touched him, tried to poke and prod him back into consciousness, fighting off a horrendous migraine and the urge to vomit. "Asten, we're almost out, come on. Please. We're almost done."

Cli-click.

"Get away from him. Hands up in the air,"

Bentley drew in a sudden breath and grew eerily still at the sound of a gun being chambered behind him.

"Now. Get up,"

He knew that voice. He knew it, and he'd known it would come back to haunt him.

Slowly, hands raised in the air, he stood up, leaving Asten's limp form on the floor -- a silent hope that he would be left alone.

Bentley looked up. Back into the bright main hallway.

And there stood Mr. Keene. His math teacher. Dr. Keene's little brother. With a big, shiny pistol, aimed right at Bentley's head, and big, amber eyes instead of grey-blue, visible behind big glasses.

He flicked the gun to the left. "Well? Come into the light. Don't make any sudden moves."

Bentley stepped gingerly back into the main hallway with his hands up near his head, keeping his eye trained on the barrel of the gun as it followed his every movement, puppeteered his direction. He could feel his heart pounding out of his chest. His breaths were trying to force themselves in and out with a violence, but he didn't let them.

"Please," He mumbled. "Please. Just let us go."

"You destroyed my family. What are we supposed to do now? Let our legacy die because one kid couldn't follow the rules?" He asked; though Bentley realized it was probably her talking more than him. "I can't let you leave. Your story ends here, now, Bentley Whittaker."

"Bentley Wayne," He corrected. The gun was shaking in the man's hand, but stayed pointed at his head anyway, hovering probably eight or ten feet away from him.

"You ran from me, you cried because of me, you fought me, and you deceived me," The man mumbled, a look of relief, of contentment crossing his features. "And now... you'll die by my hand. It's the only ending. The only true way this story can end."

"Charlie-"

"THAT'S NOT MY NAME!" She roared through the man's mouth, the gun trembling vigorously in his hand. "I have no name. I am no one. I am everyones worst nightmare, and their perfect dream. And you, Bentley Wayne," He spat, she spat. "Are going... to sleep."

Bentley watched the barrel of the gun tremble as his grip tightened on the weapon, to pull the trigger, and-

Someone stepped in front of him.

"No,"

It was Asten.

"Get out of the way, boy," The man with the amber eyes ordered.

By the looks of it, Asten was having a hard enough time keeping himself up as it was. With his own head settling right between Bentley's and the barrel of the gun, his body begging to give out so badly Bentley could practically hear it. He was mere moments from collapse. They all knew. But even then, he didn't move.

Bentley stepped forward. "Asten, move."

"...No,"

"Asten,"

"No,"

"Get out of my way," The Secret Keeper growled through the man's mouth. "Or I'll shoot through both of you."

"Asten, move," Bentley ordered, his eyes burning, heart slamming around in his chest. "Asten, please, move."

"No,"

"Asten!"

"No,"

BANG!

Bentley and Asten and even the man with the gun flinched when the shot sounded, so loud and deafening it seemed to reverberate through the facility halls. Bentley's world spun, and his vision suddenly had dots swimming in it, though he didn't feel any pain.

Thump.

He forced his body to work. Forced his vision to return. Forced his brain to come back on.

The man with the gun was laying on the floor, the back of his head blown wide open, coating the white floor with crimson.

Red Hood was standing a few meters behind his corpse, pistol outstretched and smoking at the barrel.

"Jason," Bentley mumbled, taking a few steps forward in disbelief, settling just in front of Asten. "Asten, its Jason."

Chloe had done it.

They were going to be okay.

Bentley took another step toward the vigilante, but his socked foot nudged something that dinged across the white floor.

Bentley glanced down at it.

A bullet casing.

A gold bullet casing, right near his foot, rolling lazily across the floor from where he'd kicked it.

His eyes trailed to the dead man, from his exploded head to his hands, to the pistol on the floor a few feet from him, which had smoke slowly seeping from its barrel.

"...Bentley?"

Bentley turned around, his gaze catching on Asten's face. It was whiter than before; his green eyes were blown wide and glistening with something he couldn't place. His mouth was hung open in shock. His hands were hovering in the air near his torso, uncertainly, and-

There was a really, really large stain of crimson growing there.

Bentley's entire world came crashing down on his head as soon as he realized.

He lurched forward just in time to catch Asten before he hit the white tile, all but falling with him, keeping him from hitting the floor. He tried to make words but he couldn't; the only coherent noise that managed to escape him was a desperate scream:

"Jason!"

A mere second and the vigilante was by his side. Red Hood all but ripped his helmed off with a thunk, uncaring, tossing it to the side and letting it bounce across the floor with the sound of metal on tile.

"Talk to him," Jason ordered, his black and white hair frazzled and damp from the helmet, his face trained into neutrality even though Bentley knew him good enough to see the panic through it. "Talk to him, Bentley."

Bentley looked down at Asten. He was sort of laying across his lap, and Bentley had his head gathered in his hands, cradling it close to his chest, keeping him from looking down at the wound Jason was now putting pressure on. Jason spoke to someone, but it wasn't him. Did he have an earpiece in?

Asten kept taking quick, ragged breaths, and his hands, soaked with blood, came up to hold onto Bentley's arms that were around his head. "I guess..." He sort of gasped, sort of choked. "I guess that... plot armor isn't so thick a...anymore, huh?"

Bentley could feel the way his entire body seemed to be buzzing and trembling, and so he held his head higher to his own chest, brushing a couple of fingers across the hair near his forehead in a means of comfort. "It... It, it isn't... Its..."

"It's okay," Asten mumbled, his green eyes staying trained on Bentley's, his hands gripping harder at his arms. "It's okay. I'm okay, B, don't.. don't be scared. I'm okay."

Jason was talking. Bentley didn't hear it. Someone skidded into Bentley's view, a little ways down the hallway. A quick flinch and glance up revealed that it was Rockie, bloody and looking suddenly sick, with Layla wrapped tightly around one arm. His inhuman green eyes were scouring Asten's frame and when they met Bentley's, they were brimming with tears.

"It's okay," Asten continued to ramble shakily, grabbing and gripping at Bentley's arms sort of frantically, leaving blood everywhere. "It's okay. I'm okay."

His entire torso was red. Jason's hands were red. Bentley could see it in his peripheral.

"Asten..." Bentley said, vibrating from terror and adrenaline, unable to produce any real sentences. "Asten."

"It's okay. I'm okay. Don't look at it. It's okay," Asten continued to ramble, balling up Bentley's sleeves in his hands, keeping his eyes trained solely on Bentley's. For some reason, the corners of his mouth twitched up into a smile. A moment of silence passed.

"That's funny," He snickered quietly, his green eyes building with tears that fell over, down the sides of his face not a second later. "It... It doesn't hurt. Is Summer here?"

Bentley tried to ignore the fact that the entire right side of his peripheral vision was red. "Jason is," Bentley gritted out.

"Jason," Asten seemed to snap into reality a little bit more at the realization, and he tried to look down at Jason, at his torso, but Bentley's grip around his neck and head wouldn't let him. "Jason."

"I'm right here," Jason said. It sounded well-trained and vigilante like, but it wobbled at the end, and Bentley caught it.

"Jason," Asten seemed to relax his struggling to look for him, instead, just turning his gaze back up into Bentley's eyes. "Jason. I'm scared."

"It's going to be alright, okay? Just keep talking to us," Jason ordered.

"Jason. I'm scared," He repeated. "Is it... dark? I don't like the dark."

"Asten-"

"What is it like?" He asked, though his eyes were trained solely on Bentley's. "Is it dark?"

"Don't be afraid," Jason continued. Bentley realized that he'd stopped moving so much. Not a few seconds later he was on the opposite side of Asten, leaning forward so Asten could see his face. Why wasn't he tending to the wound anymore? "It's just like falling asleep."

Asten blinked, a few more tears falling down the sides of his face. "I don't wanna fall asleep."

He reached numbly for Jason with bloody hands until Jason peeled his crimson gloves off and grabbed them, holding them tightly so the three of them were just a tangle of arms with Asten's head in the middle.

"There's... something you need to tell Bruce," Asten said, his eyes flicking over to Jason, then back to Bentley. "You... you have to tell him I changed my mind, okay? He asked me, but... but I told him no, I don't... I don't know why I did that..."

"What is it, buddy?" Jason asked softly. "What do you want us to tell him?"

"That I changed my mind," Asten suddenly coughed, a little bit of blood splattering from his lips onto his chin. "That I do want... I do want to be..."

He gasped strangely, and an unidentifiable expression crossed his features.

"That you want to be what?" Jason pressed.

Asten looked over at him, and smiled slightly, with crimson stained teeth. A few more tears slipped from the corners of his eyes. "A Wayne."

Jason choked.

Jason choking was the last thing Bentley heard before Asten's arms, tangled up in both of theirs, went slack, and he went completely limp in his grip.

Silence ensued.

"Asten," Bentley muttered, cradling his head closer to his chest, lifting it up, higher. "Asten."

Asten's eyes were looking at nothing.

"Asten," Bentley tried again, softly, holding tight to him and blinking. He looked down at him and brushed his hair away again with a few fingers. "Asten."

Asten never moved.

Bentley stopped saying his name. Instead, he just pulled him closer, and Jason held his hands, and Bentley let his own head fall until his face was hidden in his black and blue hair.

And he didn't move.

Asten Evans...

was dead.

--

HOLY SHIT

tag list that KINDA works

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy @bookwarm0-0

@custommadeazula

why am i crying at 6 in the morning

Project: Killcode Drabbles

tw: mentions of major character death, angst, cursing, maccreadysbaby’s first f bomb im so sorry

wanna read the extended fic? here’s the table of contents!

⚠️ THIS IS NOT PART OF BENTLEY’S MAIN STORYLINE, THIS IS THE NEXT SEGMENT OF BENTLEY’S ROBIN AU CREATED HERE

I’m so excited about this andnksndnxjxjd

JASON WAS GETTING REALLY SICK OF THE ANGRY BROODING FAMILY BULLSHIT.

Yeah, that was rich coming from him, the king of all bullshit angry and brooding. But it was different this time, somehow. Different because it wasn’t just him who was off the rails; because now he — Jason Todd: appointed-psycho, murderer, and actual crime lord — was the only one who gave a single shit about maintaining at least a semblance of togetherness within their bad excuse for a family. 

His job was to be the black sheep — it always had been; that was who he was. That was Jason. That was what he was and what he would always be.

And now, living in a time when it was backwards, like they were all black sheep or something, was only working to piss him off all the way to hell and back.

Life had been good. Hell, life had been the best it had ever been for any of them. So good Jason often wondered if he’d wake up in the cave dressed as robin with a mortal wound only to be told he was hopped up on the good drugs. Like a nasty routine of disbelief and pinching himself to prove he was real, life was… life had been… amazing.

And then Dickwing went and got himself killed.

(Yes, Jason would always be passive aggressive about it to keep everything else that came with those thoughts at bay.) 

After that, the world fell off of whatever pinpoint it balanced on, the celestial energies of the stars or whatever that kept life going the way it was supposed to vanished out of thin air, and all the remaining Waynes collectively became a not-so-merry band of living, breathing disasters. 

Bruce had turned back into the man he was a long time ago. This cold, distant presence that lurked in the shadows of his own home and carried an aura around menacing enough that it could probably scare off a pack of rabid wolves. It was strange — the change between the man Bruce was and the man he had reverted to. He gave up the cowl and handed it off to Tim with nothing more than an exasperated sound and a look of distaste. He handed off everything he was in a moment's notice with no remorse, without a single thought toward the people that needed him, or the empire he built, or the morals he put in place. It was almost frightening, in a way. Jason would rather him be a ball of absolute hellfire and rage as opposed to the cold, absent, shadowy figure he’d become, because at least hellfire and rage was something he could work with.

Alas, Red Hood found it in his own best interest to stay the hell away from him. 

Tim was also changing, though into something both new and old. With the name of Batman now looming over his head, he became nothing more than an archive for casefies and a living, breathing machine. He drowned himself in work, nightlife work and WE work, just to ignore everything else. And yeah, the kid was good at being Batman — he was good at getting the jobs done, at hammering out plans and calculating routes and taking down rings and disarming threats and all the things Gotham would always need. Scarily good at it. He always had been, but now, he did it, not out of passion, but necessity. He did it as a routine, a ritual, to keep himself distracted. Yeah, Jason saw something new in him, but he also saw that kid from Bristol who told all the adults to screw off because he could take care of himself, of that teenager who worked himself sick at Wayne Enterprises just because he knew he could. A volatile kind of self-hatred-fueled independence they’d worked so hard to train out of him. 

He didn’t rest. He didn’t eat. He didn’t talk to anyone. If he ever crashed, it was in the cave where he got a few measly hours of sleep, and all the worrying signs of the habits Tim had long since overcome were all back in full force. Isolation, dissociation, anorexia, depression, and a slew of new ones, too.

And why the hell was Jason the only one that could work himself up enough to give a damn?

Cass vanished. Stephanie went off on her own to think. Duke went to be with his uncle, because his uncle had common sense, not a popular trait among Wayne’s. Barbara retreated to her own family. Alfred was still around, and still doing what he always did, perhaps the one taking Dick’s death in the most normal, typical way. He didn’t dare leave the manor, though the change and grief and age and stress of everyone else was starting to catch up to him, and nobody but Jason cared to talk to him or ask him anything anymore. He was getting less lively, less determined.

Of all the family, though, Damian’s reaction to Dick's death was the one that surprised him the most. The kid was close to him — everyone knew it. They’d Batmanned and Robinned together and everything. Jason had mostly expected him to go into a fit of homicidal rage — y’know, fall back to his roots, like they all had, but he didn’t. He did the complete opposite. 

He was only seventeen, and the day Dick died was the only time Jason had ever seen him act his age. Instead of murdering everyone in his immediate vicinity, or maiming his family to expel his grief, Damian had…

Cried.

Which was kind of scary, if Jason were being honest, because it was Damian. Damian didn’t just do that kind of thing. But while everyone else was busy reliving old habits and turning into nineties emo boys, Damian just… cried. And cried. And grieved. And cried. And the world was falling apart and Bruce stopped being Batman and Tim took on the cowl and Damian just cried and of course Jason was the only one who gave a damn then, too. And maybe he was in the wrong for not doing anything, or trying to help. But nobody else had done anything, either, and Jason wasn't exactly in a stable enough headspace at that time to play Dickiebird.

Then, Damian passed the mantle of Robin down to the youngest Wayne in circulation.

Bentley.

Who also had a reaction adverse to what Jason had expected. He’d expected Bentley to be the one to cry and seek comfort and fall into pieces on the floor in front of everybody, because that's how Bentley was. Bentley always broke and fell apart and spilled the truth and cried in people's arms because that's what was healthiest for him, because that's what the kid needed. (Jason was starting to think maybe thats what they all needed, really.) But Bentley didn’t do that. Bentley hadn’t shed a single tear for Dick Grayson since he got the news -- not in front of anyone, anyway. Bentley didn’t break in the way Jason was prepared for him to.

Instead of shattering, Bentley became the most insufferable little shit of the whole damn century.

If Jason thought Damian or Tim were bad, a sixteen-year-old Dick Grayson-less Bentley was a whole new level of bad. He’d sort of become a mix of them all, like he’d adopted the worst of their traits and turned himself into some kind of nightmarish Wayne family chimera.

He took on Tim’s reliance on work to keep himself busy. He took on the disassociating. He took on the constant rage that had always boiled under Jason’s skin. He took on the coldness Bruce carried around with him. He took on Damian’s newfound hopelessness, this sort of empty feeling that was almost tangible anytime Jason got within a thirty foot radius of either of them. He slid back into the Puppeteer way of being cryptic and detached. And on the worst days, the days where he was notably thinking of Dick, or the days he was having it rough working with Tim, he…

He took on the way Dick used to fall silent and just stay that way for a while. Which irked Jason to the moon and back at the same time it dredged up feelings he didn’t want to feel ever again. Feelings so strong it reminded him very unpleasantly of the phone call he’d gotten from Bruce telling him that Dick had…

Anyways, what else would Bentley do, right? He couldn’t blame the kid. They were his first family and now one of them was dead. Jason was surprised he was upright enough to do anything at all.

He thought that Dick’s happy-go-lucky, loving memory would help them heal. Hell, the only thing Dick would want them to do was keep going. He could nearly hear him saying it -- for them to move on, to keep going for him, to live their lives to the fullest and have families and have futures because that's what he would want. Jason knew that's what he would want. Dick had told him that on a few occasions when Jason found himself too close to the edge of a roof, and of course, Jason’s fatal flaw was clinging to the words of Dick Grayson at the vitalest of times.

And now, nine months after the death of their oldest brother, the Waynes were still a skeleton of a family, everyone mere shadows of who they used to be, and Jason was effing pissed about it. Sort of because he wanted his family back. Sort of because they were shitting all over the memory of Dick Grayson by being all stupid and emo on his behalf. Sort of because he was really freaking tired of being his own support system and the only one who’d ever really known how to do it properly had died in a fiery explosion. Jason wasn’t weak, and Jason was stubborn as a mule. But Jason also knew when the pit was getting to be too much, and the fact that he’d been having night terrors again, that he’d started having to chain himself to his bed every night again to avoid waking up drenched in blood was a bad sign. And Dickwing wasn’t here to be his typical annoying self and do things like check on him. Maybe, if he could talk some sense into somebody, they’d care a little in return. Which would be, well… good. For him. He guessed.

So, to honor his big brother’s memory and whatever, Jason was going to have to try and do all that big-brother Dick-Grayson shit himself.

And who better to start with than his own narrative foil and the bane of his entire existence, Timothy Jackson Drake?

It wasn’t hard to get into the cave. Even though Batman and Robin (Tim and Bentley, which was still taking some getting used to even after nine months.) mostly patrolled alone, with everything planned down to the number of breaths they’d take and their uncanny, frightening ability to execute it near flawlessly, Jason still managed to weasel his way onto their route from time to time. Only for Wayne family recon, of course, and maybe a little mayhem, too. They hated when he showed up. They’d told him that. But he was able to make himself useful enough that, now and then, Tim would call him back to the cave for a debrief.

He was lucky that September twenty-fourth ended up being one of those nights.

Red Hood, Batman, and Robin squealed into the cave on their motorcycles at almost four in the morning that night. They’d just busted a weapons smuggling ring based out of a freighter in Gotham Harbor, and Jason had made himself just useful enough (by manhandling the owner of the ring and doing slight damage) that Tim declared his information just important enough for the logs of the batcomputer.

He couldn’t deny that the cave felt different now, with different bird and a different bat, with a new glass case holding an all too-familiar black and blue suit that not a soul in the house had looked at since Alfred put it up. It felt more like a real cave, in a way. Empty. Expansive. Cold. Lonely.

The engines died and the three of them climbed off of the vehicles in tandem, sharing exasperated sighs, each for different reasons.

“That bust was shit,” Was the first thing any of them said, and it had come from the red-haired-black-dominoed-menace-to-society that had parked to Jason’s left, the Bentley Whittaker who decided he wanted to burn the planet and everyone on it. His Robin suit was almost solid black, with only small splashes of yellow here and there, but even that seemed too bright for his current demeanor. “Do neither of you know how to follow a simple string of codes? Codes that we came up with because they were easy to understand and act quickly on?”

“I don’t care about your seven-step-patrol-authentication-cypher, asshole,” Jason muttered in response, pulling his helmet off with a thunk and hanging it on the handle of his bike. “I’m not waiting for a bunch of numbers to tell me where to move.”

“If you did, maybe we’d have gotten the buyer’s name before you went and shot the guy in the head, asshole,” Bentley mocked, ripping his domino off with a shwip noise, uncaring that his face would probably still be red from that in the morning. He looked normal enough; older than when Dick had found him, sure, but normal. Everything but his eyes, which had turned into something so cold and mean and not-Bentley-like that Jason had a hard time looking in them for long anymore. (Sometimes he really thought the boy that used to sleep next to him on the couch during thunderstorms, that used to come to him for comfort with big brown eyes full of fear but also so full of love and kindness and an eagerness to have a family, was nothing more than a fleeting memory that Jason would just have to keep safe in his mind.)

“Maybe if you two would shut up and follow Batman’s orders, it wouldn’t have been such a trainwreck. Bruce picked me for a reason,” Tim added, jerking the cowl off of his head and moving across the room toward the computer, where he spent the majority of his days. And nights. And life. Jason, a long time ago, may have laughed at the way taking off the suit made his hair stand up. Now it was just another thing he sort of despised. “Robin, I need you to debrief.”

Bentley was already moving for the lockerroom. “I told you, the whole thing was shit because you’re both stupid. Debrief over.”

Tim blinked, huffing out a dramatic breath. “Robin.”

“Piss off,” Was what Bentley said, before he disappeared out of their sight.

Jason sighed lightly, rubbing his forehead with his pointer finger and thumb. The Jason Todd part of himself wanted to deck them both and then laugh at them for getting a nosebleed, but the part that knew Dick would hound him for it kept him quiet. He just stood sort of off to the side, a few good yards away from Tim, who was settling at the Batcomputer, mumbling incoherent but definitely ill-intended things to himself. (He was only twenty-four, but the way he sat in the chair and hunched at the computer made him look like Bruce.)

“Hood?”

Jason sighed again, just for good measure. “He said his buyers were a high profile family from Bristol using the weapons to expedite their greed. Taking them and selling them on for more. Didn’t give a name. Manufacturer was some kind of undercover factory in south Austrailia under the guise of a paper company.”

“And I’ll put the ring leader in the report here as dead, because someone can’t take his finger off the trigger to save his own life,” Tim mumbled in response, a few files opening up on the computer before he started typing up a debrief that sounded all professional, using far more detail than Jason even remembered.

“Obviously I got useful info, or I wouldn’t be here,” Jason replied, crossing his arms and leaning back against one of the pillars that stood in the midst of the cavern. “I know you’d rather swallow a cheese grater than exist within a mile radius of me, but you brought me here. So you can get over yourself and go to hell with your degrading bullshit.”

“We could’ve finished the bust much more efficiently and completely if you hadn’t shown at all,” Tim shot back, not even sparing a glance in his counterpart's direction, just typing at lightning speed. “You’re the reason everything got so screwed up in the first place. We didn’t need you.”

Jason shifted, propping one of his legs up on the pillar. Somewhere he wasn’t quite sure of, deep inside, that statement sort of stung -- but it mostly just worked to irritate him more and make him rethink trying to talk to any of these insufferable people.

“I didn't-”

The locker-room door closed with a wham, and Bentley came out in a t-shirt and sweats, his red hair floppy and wet from the fastest shower on planet earth. He had a full duffel bag thrown over his shoulder.

“Robin, debrief, now,” Tim shot in his direction, more stern this time, as if testing the waters, gauging the reaction he’d get.

“Go to hell,” Was Bentley’s response, and he disappeared upstairs before anyone could say anything else.

Tim huffed, long, and dramatically. “He makes me want to throw myself out of a moving vehicle."

Jason hummed. If he was going to attempt a serious conversation, he guessed now would be an okay time, since Bentley had gone upstairs. There weren’t many other times he was alone with Tim anymore anyways.

“Well, we’re not exactly being great examples,” Was what he decided on saying. Not exactly the hey-get-over-yourself-and-shut-up-so-we-can-be-a-real-family-again rant he had planned, but it’d work, for now.

Tim glanced back at him, a sort of confused look crossing his face. Then he turned back to the computer with a sigh. “That’s not a new development, Hood.”

Jason said nothing for a minute, because, well... Tim was right.

“No, it isn’t,” He replied, glancing at the stairs up which Bentley had vanished. “Everyones… separating, again. Like what happened when Bruce disappeared. It took a long time for the family to recover from that.”

“Yeah, well at least one of us knew we could get him back,” Tim spat sharply, and Jason could imagine the cold glare that went with it even if Tim didn’t turn around. “Why are you talking about this, Hood?”

Jason glanced down at his boots that were crossed over each other, rocking the toe of one back and forth. “I dunno. Maybe we-“

“Look,” Tim sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with a soft sigh. “If you want to have a therapy session, go find someone who cares to listen. I have too much work to sit here and listen to you ramble on about nothing.”

Jason had an urge that made him want to punch Tim in the face again, and he clenched his jaw to try and stave it away. 

“Okay, well next time a goon is about to snipe you in the head from a rooftop half a mile away from the bust, remind me not to get involved,” Jason muttered, pushing himself off of the pillar and strolling back through the cave.

Tim made a snort sound. “There were no snipers.”

Jason dipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a .308 bullet he’d swiped from the magazine of a sniper earlier that night, flicking it so it dinged on the desk next to Tim’s keyboard. “You’ll see him if you check surveillance cams north of the Whitehouse Library. You’re welcome.”

Tim glowered at him from his seat, but pretended not to be doing anything as he started typing in codes to pull up the Gotham surveillance cams.

Jason moved for the locker room (he thought he still had some sweatpants in there, and they sounded heavenly right about then.) but when he stepped inside, it was clean.

He scrunched his face up. Typically, as of late, Bentley had taken to tossing pieces of his Robin suit around the room as he changed just to, like, claim territory or something. (Maybe it was a depressed teenager thing? He wasn't sure.) But now, there wasn’t an arm-guard or cape in sight.

The duffle bag on Bentley’s shoulder was starting to seem more and more suspicious.

Jason sighed again. "Bird-brat went to patrol by himself," He called over his shoulder, through the door.

"Again, Hood, not a new development. He hasn't been coming in from patrol until eight or nine in the morning since he started doing school online," Tim replied with a nonchalant, sort of bored tone. The sound of computer keys clacking floated around them for a moment.

Jason, without checking for the sweatpants he desperately wanted to change into, walked back out to the main cave and eyed the too-small-Batman. "And you let him? Last time I saw him on a patrol alone he got fear toxined and tried to murder me."

Tim shrugged. "And he got benched after. He hasn't shown up injured or drugged since. He isn't stupid."

"He's sixteen, of course he's stupid," Jason shot back, crossing his arms over his chest. "I thought you kept a tighter leash on your bird."

"You try restraining him. Last time I tried to enforce anything on the kid he cracked two of my ribs in training. I'm not going to do all the casework, CEO W.E., and try to fix his shitshow attitude," Tim shook his head. "If he wants to live like hell, I don't care, as long as he shows up for patrol and graduates on time."

Jason inhaled and exhaled, and this feeling passed over him that made him want to throw Tim out of an airplane, because everything he just said would've been unacceptable the day before Dick's building went down in flames.

He clenched his fists, and then he released them, and he did that a few more times until he felt he could open his mouth without verbally murdering the current Bat.

"Next time you plan on getting sniped, don't bother calling," Jason said, with just enough nonchalance and just enough venom that it sounded like him. (Tim didn't have to know he turned his comms on every night during patrol and laid in bed with his helmet next to him so he could listen to it. Just in case they should ever need a third party who wasn't afraid of killing. After all, if they died, Dick would never forgive him.)

With that, Jason grabbed his helmet and left the cave without another word.

He didn't look at the black and blue suit on his way out.

-----

Jason found Robin with his legs dangling over the edge of Wayne Enterprises' rooftop, with his bow on his back, something glowing between his lips, and a large bottle of something wrapped in a brown paper bag sitting next to him. The Gotham lights were shining ahead of him, and the stars above, making what would've been a pretty nice picture if there wasn't a buzzed Robin in it.

Jason watched him sit in silence for about twenty minutes. It didn't take a genius to realize the thing glowing between his lips was a cigarette -- Jason watched him grab another one out of a seven-eleven bag after the initial one was gone. He kept taking long drinks from the massive bottle and wincing afterwards, like whatever was inside burned on the way down.

He let that go on for a while, before, finally, Jason landed on the rooftop behind the red-haired nightmare, careful to make his footfalls audible so his brother wasn't startled.

There was a long sigh. "A damn tornado is stealthier than you, Hood," Bentley grumbled from where he sat, not even glancing back at his counterpart. He picked up the bottle and took a long swig of it, suddenly not wincing at all now that Jason was there. It didn't take many steps forward for the telltale smell of booze and cigarettes to whack him in the nostrils.

Jason huffed, settling a good ten feet behind the teenager and crossing his arms. "You're going to give yourself cancer."

"That's what I'm going for," He replied smoothly. Jason saw him flick the ashes off of the cigarette that sat between his fingers, then take another long drawl. “Th’ hell are you doin’ here?”

Jason shrugged even though Bentley wasn’t looking. “Saw a sad little bird on the edge of a roof. Thought I’d drop by.”

“I’m not gonna kill myself, Hood. That’s what the booze is for," Bentley mumbled, smoke falling from between his lips and dancing away in the breeze.

Jason watched the smoke fade away. He sort of hated that he understood what Bentley was saying -- it'd happened to him several times before, where he was too much of a wuss to jump or pull the trigger, so he'd kill himself a little every day by drinking or doing drugs or smoking instead.

Jason huffed out maybe what was supposed to be a laugh, but it fell flat, his eyes drifting to the bottle. “Where did you get that, anyways?”

“I’m Robin. I could ask for someone’s liver and they’d probably give it to me,” Bentley replied with a nonchalant shrug, taking another drink of whatever he had, then a drag of the cigarette. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” Jason lied, blinking at the back of Bentley's head. “Just thought I deserved a little info, since I’ll be the one carrying your scrawny hungover ass back to the manor after you drink all that.”

(And maybe so he could break a few bones over cigarettes and brown-bag worthy alcohol being sold to a vigilante everyone knew couldn’t be over eighteen, let alone twenty-one.)

“My legs’ll still work. So will the grapple,” Bentley replied, but Jason could hear in the way his words were starting to run together that that most likely wouldn’t be the case. 

Jason shifted his weight, watching Bentley take another drink of the stuff. “You’d kill yourself with a grapple if you tried to use it drunk.”

“Done it before,” Was the unsettling statement that came next.

Jason sighed and brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose, but upon realizing he still had his helmet on, let it drift back down. If he had known Bentley went on patrol just to get drunk...

“So this is what Robin does when he goes to patrol on his own, huh?” He questioned with a faint, empty snicker. Just to make the sentence sound right.

“No,” Bentley replied. At least Jason could tell that much was honest. “You just caught me on one of the good nights.”

Jason didn’t say anything to that, just watched as Bentley lifted the too-big bottle to his lips and took another long drink. The thing had to have been past half empty now. Unless it was just a really huge bottle of really cheap beer, Jason pretty much knew that the kid was going to be utterly done for in a few minutes time. (Bentley wasn’t good at holding liquor. Jason knew because he ended up being the very first hangover police Bentley’d ever had.)

(If he didn’t want to deal with Jason, maybe he should’ve drunkenly mistaken some other safehouse for the manor. Not to mention that the kid was one of those sad drunks, so Jason had felt almost contractually obligated to stay with him. Hence why he decided not to let him hangout on the roof alone.)

“Y’know, being all broody and pessimistic is kind of my thing,” Jason started, glancing off the rooftop at the few cars that were passing in the dark below them. “Not gonna lie — it doesn’t look great on you, kid.”

Bentley breathed in, and then out. “Charming, Hood. As usual. I thought you were debriefing,”

Jason breathed in and out, too. Then he tapped his fingers against his own arms. “I was. Then I wasn't."

"Very detailed analysis," The teenager mumbled, and Jason rolled his eyes. "You should teach me how to do that."

"Could you stop being an asshole for, like, two seconds?"

"Nope,"

Jason watched Bentley stare off the roof, taking a sip or drag every now and then. He didn't want to punch him -- he didn't.

“Y'know..." Bentley mumbled with a sudden shift in tone, taking a long drawl of his cigarette followed by a swig of alcohol. "When I first moved in, you made a joke that I was the Waynes’ to destroy. Nowadays that joke checks out. I'm Bentley, the asshole."

Something inside of Jason seemed to tighten. “Kid-“

“Don’t get all weird. It’s not like you could control it. And… it’s not like I wouldn’t let you do it again,” He muttered with a shrug, his words starting to meld with each other at a suspiciously quickening rate. “At least destroying me again would mean you guys still cared enough to do that.”

Quietly, Jason concluded that the sixteen year old was drunk enough to have a hard time holding his tongue. Because murder-death-rage Bentley hadn’t said anything so close to a please care about me since Dick died.

Jason took that and decided to go with it.

“You snap at everyone who gets close to you like some kind of rabid little creature that lives in a hole and comes out only to bite ankles,” Jason replied, crouching down on the rooftop with an exhale, somewhat behind him. “It was your choice to shut everyone out.”

“Tell me what the hell I was supposed to do, then, Jason!” Bentley was suddenly on his feet, so Jason was, too. One, because he knew the kid was drunk and could pull his bow on him if he really wanted, and two, because his balance wasn’t exactly trustworthy at the moment. He realized it was mostly the latter when he found himself inching forward as Bentley’s balance wavered.

“What the hell was I supposed to do, huh?” Bentley shoved him, and Jason stepped back. “The very second Dick Grayson died, every human being in the entire damn manor built walls up to the ceiling. Five people outright vanished, including you-“ He narrowed his eyes incredulously. “-Bruce became some kind of storytime bogeyman, Tim turned off his feelings like a Netflix psycho murderer and you all just left me there. So sure, you can accuse me of whatever you want, but I ended up the way I am because no one was there to help me. So I had to help myself.”

A moment of silence filtered between them. That fine sentiment seemed to dredge up a well of feelings that Jason hadn’t really let himself feel in a long while. He just sort of watched as Bentley shuffled back over to the edge and grabbed the bottle, only to turn it up and completely drain its contents, and for the first time, it sort of made Jason feel sick. Bentley was sixteen, and his big brother died, and instead of being a damn family, the Wayne’s did what the Wayne’s did best. Everyone scattered, and…

Well, just like he’d said. They’d left him there. 

It was the same vicious cycle that Jason was living in — the resentment toward the rest of the family for shutting up, closing them out, pretending they didn’t know each other. Closing up, too, because he knew he’d get no help from anybody else, even if this was considered too big to handle alone.

Bentley puffed on the cigarette again, flicking the red ashes off the rooftop. “Sometimes I hate it here.”

Jason hated it when his siblings started to sound like him.

With no words, he lifted his helmet up and off of his head, the September breeze biting at his newly exposed skin. At the sound, Bentley turned to glance at him and scanned his face with brown eyes weary enough Jason could see it through the domino.

“I’m sorry,” Was what he said. He wasn’t sure why.

Bentley snorted at him. “Sorry that I hate it here? You didn’t make this hellhole.”

“Sorry that we left you,”

To that, Bentley’s mouth closed, and every trace of feigned amusement left his features. He just turned back to the city and… stood.

Jason didn’t say anything. He just sort of stood there, too, in silence. Bentley dropped his cigarette on the rooftop and stamped it out with his toe. And a few minutes after that, he pulled his domino off and dropped it on the roof, too.

Jason heard him whisper: “Shit,” Then he brought a hand up to his forehead and just let it rest there. “Breaking things that’re barely together in the first place is a specialty of yours, Hood.”

Jason didn’t say anything. Because there was a certain thickness in Bentley’s voice that he hadn’t heard in a long time, and he wasn’t sure if it was the booze or not.

Bentley sighed heavily and crouched down on the edge of the rooftop. “What? Did you just come here to torture me?”

“I came here because I’m sick of this godforsaken family pretending they don’t know each other every time something bad happens. They did it when I died. We did it when Bruce went missing. Tim’s gonna work himself to death, you’re gonna drink yourself to death, Damian’s gonna cry himself to death and I’m gonna pit myself to death. If Dick could see us right now, he’d be pissed,” Jason rambled, running an annoyed hand through his black and white hair. He noticed his fingers trembling with some kind of underlying adrenaline. “I came here because you might be the only one who’ll listen when I say I don’t want us to live in this hell anymore. All it does is make shit worse for everyone. And you know it’s bad when I’m the one having to bring it up.”

The only response Bentley had to that was another soft, breathy: “Shit.”

Jason huffed, glaring at the back of his head. “Shit? Is that all you know how to say?”

“I could say go to hell, if you prefer,”

“Already here, kid,”

Bentley breathed in and out deeply, rubbing his eyes with a fist. “A world without Dick Grayson is just a living hell, isn’t it?”

Bentley’s words hung in the air like smoke, so heavy even the breeze wasn’t able to carry them away. Jason just stood.

Yeah, it was.

The pair just existed in silence for a long while, and neither of them moved. Bentley stayed precariously perched on the edge of the building until he didn’t anymore — until he sat back on the rooftop and groaned: “Shit,” And then wiped at his eyes, because he was-

Oh. 

Jason took a step forward. “Kid?”

“Piss off, Hood. Don’t you have someone to go shoot? Or something?” Bentley hissed, his tone lacking its usual bite despite the sharp words. “Surely coming here to make me feel like complete shit isn’t the only thing on your schedule.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel like shit. I came here because I don’t want us to feel like shit anymore,”

Bentley didn’t say anything. And while the teenager was utterly silent, Jason picked up on the telltale little hitch of his shoulders and wipe of his eyes. And it reminded him of the little kid that cried when it thundered, that woke him up in the middle of the night with tear-streaks on his face just to ask if it was okay if he slept on the end of his bed, and it all made his heart clench.

And then Bentley spoke. It was quiet, and broken, and sounded more like the ten year old Bruce had taken in than the Robin Jason had grown accustomed to.

He whispered: “I miss him so much I think it could kill me.”

With an inhale, Jason was suddenly moving, and he didn’t stop moving until his gloved hand came to rest on Bentley’s shoulder. But as soon as it did, the teenager shot to his feet and whirled on Jason in a split second, with streaks of wetness glimmering on his cheeks in the Gotham lights and a strange emptiness in his eyes. “Get the hell off of me, Hood.”

For a split second, he almost thought a flash of fear passed through Bentley’s brown eyes. He seemed to be struggling through conflicting emotions — because one second he looked pissed, and the next like he might throw up, and the next like he was about to break down crying, and next, like a kid who’d been shut somewhere alone for way too long. He was drunk, Jason remembered. Did it matter?

“Jason,” Was what he said next. His eyes were welling up again without his consent, but he kind of looked like he wanted to stab Jason in the face with a knife instead, and he was looking down at the rooftop instead of at his brother. He brought his arms up and around himself and gripped his own sleeves until his knuckles turned white.

(Just like he used to when he was little.)

“Bentley,” Was Jason’s reply. He inched forward and raised a hand toward him again.

Bentley flinched away.

“Don’t touch me,” He muttered. Jason disobeyed and rested a hand on his shoulder again, and as soon as he did touch him, Bentley sobbed and brought a hand up to hide it.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me!" He shouted, slapping Jason's arm away with a thwack.

"Kid,"

Bentley sniffed. "I’m so fucking cold.”

I’m so fucking cold.

Jason didn’t waste a second disobeying the kid’s previous orders by grabbing him by the head and and jerking him forward into his chest. He may not have been Dick, but Bentley hugged him back twice as hard anyways, and Jesus, had the kid even touched anybody since Dick died?

Jason didn’t think about it for long, because he only had approximately a millisecond before Robin was losing his absolute shit, drunk breakdown style. It was that kind of crying that made you try and cough your lungs up, and the kid kept saying stuff but he couldn’t tell what it was. Bentley was squeezing around Jason’s back so hard it actually kind of hurt, and that’s when he realized that Bentley ever actually cried when Dick died. That he’d stifled whatever reaction he would’ve had and shut it away for self preservation.

Bentley was reacting to Dick’s death right now.

Jason just did what big brothering he had learned over the years — he held his baby brother and kept his own feelings closely bridled, for both of their sakes. And they had to stay like that for a while. At one point Bentley’s knees buckled, and Jason had taken on most of his weight, but he didn’t care.

Then, almost an hour later, Jason took on all of his weight very suddenly. And that’s when he realized he'd blacked out.

Jason sent a withering glare to the bottle wrapped in the brown bag and picked Bentley up. 

“You’d better remember this shit when you wake up,” He mumbled. He tried to glare at the unconscious boy in his arms, but he couldn’t, really — Bentley looked less sixteen and more twelve, with a faint expression of discomfort splayed across his reddened features. His face was wet from crying and glistening in the city lights. 

Jason managed to pick up his helmet and Bentley’s domino with one hand, then he made for the nearest safe house.

(Maybe, if he was lucky, Bentley would remember their conversation when he woke up.)

--

tag list that never works lmao

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

@xiaonothere

@skylathescholarly @flyrobinflyy

Moth! 🕯️

Do you accept their candle?

currently reading Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie! here are my current thoughts in a nutshell:

it’s kind of giving conservative grandma??

like, yeah, this was written in the 30s; pretty self explanatory.

i really like christie’s storytelling, i do. it’s just this book feels like her shading on the younger generation for,, idk, not being traditional or something?? which really does feel like something every younger generation faces (times really don’t change)

for the last 12 chapters i read, im just being constantly reminded about how emily arundell’s niece married a Greek doctor and how dreadful it is. like my bad, sorry this dude isn’t ENGLISH ENOUGH FOR YOU?? yall are just jealous they got good food okay

and let’s not forget there’s a slur in the book💀

literal jumpscare when i opened the table of contents.

but then again, just looking at my older copy of And Then There Were None makes me wonder why i’m surprised

UPDATE: Just finished the book! i’m surprised i got through it that quickly. anyways, here are my thoughts!

i thought the plot was interesting. i thought it was pretty cool how upfront everyone was abt how they wanted emily’s money since it shows that none of them can be completely trusted.

like everyone was after the same thing, for different reasons, but only ONE of them actually committed to it.

and let’s not forget the constant reminder of good old “english-breeding.” it’s not said a lot, but it’s something i notice popping up in the book from time to time.

like goodness gracious woman, please stop. describing others as “well bred” makes them sound like a horse freshly groomed

anyways, i think this is the first time i got introduced to hastings? i didn’t even know he was a reoccurring character and a friend of poirot since i’ve only read Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None.

so you can imagine my confusion when i skimmed through random pages and noticed it was from someone else’s perspective.

but their dynamic is pretty cool! i kind of see it as like poirot doing his usual detective stuff and it going like:

poirot, lying to get some answers:

hastings: you are crazy, y’know that?

poirot: not crazy enough to kill, though!

well that’s how i see it anyways. i do think it’s cool that seeing through the lens of hastings does make things more fun. like this silly guy is as clueless as me

and he kind of vocalizes the audience? kind of? that’s how i saw it during the times he tried convincing poirot that the ball incident was genuine

but yeah it was okay. i might read the first book of the series because i just found out poirot is a refugee or smth?? like i need to know what’s up with that

so yeah, that’s my thoughts!

maybe i shouldn’t have watched that documentary