I Got These Knockoff Boots Online And Instead Of The Brand Name On The Tag They Have The Name Of An Apparently

Nightwing #122 variant cover by Babs Tarr

We have become a 200K word fic. Is this a feat, or a symptom of me simply not being able to shut up?

The world may never know.

Come join us for some miserable end of the world multiverse turtle fun! This chapter has been graciously beta read by @shyalia who is amazing thanks a billion.

NOBODY FUCKING MOVE.

Sometimes I feel like us as the bat family fandom forget how starry eyed people get about Nightwing canonically.

Because with the exception of early era Tim most of the Batkids are like. lol that’s my loser older brother or some variation of yeah…he’s some guy I guess? He helps me with homework?

And Nightwing is the canonically a center of multiversal light.

When Heroes meet Nightwing they do the vigorous handshake and the “it’s an honor to meet you sir, I have heard so much about you oh my god”

There are so many character where they are literally shown giggling and kicking their feet whenever Nightwing talks to them.

Even the people who don’t have the celebrity level worship of him respect the hell out of him and call him as soon as they need help.

From raven to Starfire to Superman to Superboy to all or the flashes there is so much respect and awe given to this one dude.

And it is deserved

But imagine you are Damian Wayne and you’ve been working with what 90% of the people you’ve met (all bats) have been calling an embarrassment to your father’s legacy.

Your mother hates him and your Grandfather doesn’t feel that strongly about him.

The red hood calls him an embarrassment and a coward and he couldn’t even keep Red Robin from running away.

Your father tells him that he never should have been Batman

And you’ve worked with him and you know what you think everyone is full of shit about him and you and him the new Batman and Robin are the best no matter what anyone says.

And fuck it the fact he keeps going in a suit that everyone tells him he’s not good enough for is scratching something in your brain that you’re refusing to acknowledge because why would you feel that way? You are the circus freak have nothing in common (shut up)

And then you meet the justice league and all the extended teams.

And people are falling over themselves to listen to a word out of your brothers, your Batman’s mouth. They wait for a nod or headshake and dictate decades worth of planning on it.

Both Drake and Todd’s hero teams ask him for advice with or without their designated bats presence.

The man of steel asks for child rearing advice and wonder woman cracks a joke about a spar

Newer heroes whisper about him in the halls

He’s literally your favorite hero’s favorite hero

And it’s breaking Damian’s Brain

Because well… he kinda gets slapped around in Gotham. He’s the butt of half the jokes the other Batkids make and Dick just smiles and takes it.

The rogues have a bounty on nightwings ass and he gets leered at by goons, rogues, civilians and anti-hero’s alike and he doesn’t say anything.

He lets oracle crack jokes about a pretty face and having to do everything herself

Let’s Jason run the alley despite the fact that apparently he knows how to take it back

Apparently he’s had 12 people tailing Drake since Paris and despite being the man Ra’s Al Ghul calls detective has yet to notice. (Because you can’t tell me Dick was just magically at the right place to catch Tim falling to his death on coincidence)

And necessary to peace talks because he’s the best they have at deescalation

Like imagine you are a child who was raised to believe power is this obvious, all consuming thing. That the ones who control the board are visibly larger than life figures who fought their way to the top and cling to power by even the thinnest hangnail if they had to.

People who ignore simpler morals or an overall greater goal or good

And then you’re taken in by the man who whispers the correct answers into the larger than life figures ear.

Like I feel like that would have such an impact because Dick didn’t take power from anyone to reach his goals, it’s why his siblings don’t really defer to him unless in crisis.

Dick didn’t take power, no people just looked at him and decided he was the best option to give it to.

Everyone basically looked at this kid and went, yeah you’re the future of all heroism.

And if that dude can’t even get Bruce Wayne’s respect what chance does Damian Wayne have

tfp optimus: is so consumed with grief and guilt. feels guilt for how things were on cybertron. feels guilt for becoming a prime. feels guilt for abandoning his friend. he grieves so much, countless lives, so many names, so many faces. mourns the fact he can't visualize them all. he grieves the loss of cybertron, grieves for the deaths of his fellow autobots and even decepticons alike, grieves the past allyship and friendship he once had with megatron. he wishes it never had to turn out this way. he loved him so much. he doesn't want to do this anymore but now its too late to change anything. he knows what he must do. he lost the person he called his brother. he has to tell himself its not him. he feels desperation creep up on him. ruthlessness too. part of him still hopes he doesn't have to do the deed. part of him wants to.

bayverse optimus: anger. has been fighting so long he doesn't know anything else anymore. turned into a violent person eons ago. forgot who he was before. imposter syndrome. forgot what life was like not being at war. forgot what his home looked like before the war. has so much hate in his spark. is becoming vindictive and cruel. is becoming what he originally fought against. can't tell. can't see it. all he feels is anger. all he feels is wrath. fury incarnate. he doesn't know anything else anymore. keeps fighting, keeps killing. he doesn't know how to do anything else anymore. can't stop either. sometimes thinks he doesn't want to. sometimes thinks he enjoys it. the thought's starting to scare him less and less. what is he becoming?

tfa optimus: he feels too young for this. too inexperienced. no one asked if he knew what he was doing, no one asked if he'd be okay with this. has too much responsibility. the weight of expectations. he can't let anyone down anymore. not after elita. has to protect his friends, has to keep everyone safe. so many people rely on him. frantic. guilt-ridden. feels alone in it all. takes the brunt of every issue, every problem. wants to forsake his rank. would give anything to keep his team safe. doesn't know if he's doing it right. how can he live up to the ideals people see in him? he doesn't know. he has the world on his shoulders, two worlds, the universe to be precise. why did it have to be him? he feels selfish to admit it doesn't want the power. he doesn't want to save the world. no one else can.

The person I reblogged this from deserves happiness and love

it's a fun hc of mine that during dick's robin days, he went through the "omg i wish i had a cool secret language so i can have secret conversations with my friends" phase all kids go through. but one of his closest friends at the time also happened to be the batman, a guy with possibly the most bizarrely diverse arsenal of skills in the world. bruce sees the merit in the entire idea of a coded language to communicate rudimentary information when they can hear but not see each other. so why not make a code built on bird vocalizations? it's pretty much incomprehensible to anyone without a trained ear or comprehensive knowledge of birding and impossible to even passably mimic without proper training, so while the chances of interception are high, the chances of someone understanding it enough to interrupt during the middle of a bird-convo and feed false information are not.

it also, batman and robin come to realize, feed into the "holy fuck our vigilantes are cryptids" idea. bird sounds that come from seemingly no determinable location (ventriloquism) come to mean batman and robin are nearby. to the goons of gotham, bird song becomes inextricably connected to getting your ass kicked by the dynamic duo. the real reason why criminals don't operate during the day is because they get skittish and jumpy about if the sounds of birds chirping are real birds or some masked vigilantes lying in wait to rock your shit, and it's just easier to commit crimes during the night when all the birds are asleep so you know for sure.

ornithologists have boards on their bedrooms dedicated to the bird-bats of gotham. they've written dissertations.

the bird language becomes a bit of a batfamily bonding connection. teaching each other how to do different clicks and whistles, making up slang so bruce and barbara can't complain of clogging up comms with non-mission relevant talk, searching up birds to associate them with different people, psychologically terrorizing the criminal populace of gotham by chirping at them...

how the bird code works is that there's a bird assigned to each one of gotham's major heavy hitter criminals and vigilantes, and a few assigned to heroes out of the city (by which i mean the ones the bats associate with often enough to have a sign to address by). the only birds i've got so far are the robin (for robin. self-explanatory) and the glistening-green tanager (for the joker). i only have one for the joker bc i wanted to reference this hc in one of my fics and so searched up green birds to find the most eye-searingly annoying-to-look-at green bird i could find, and the glistening-green tanager was the closest one to fit the bill.