Is This Anything

stuck in a timeloop called i just have to get through this week

emails with “[AO3] Comment on _____” in the subject line give me a better dopamine rush than hard drugs ever will

There are several beats where no one talks. It stretches. Phantom tilts his head. "Is there a further issue?" He asks.

"Yeah, you're possessing my little brother's fucking corpse. He-fuck!" The red helmeted one (he should probably ask for names) snarled and kicked out at the wall.

"Hood-" the one in black and blue tries to speak, but is ferociously cut off.

"No, don't you DARE tell me to fucking calm down! He's dead! Tim fucking died! Another Robin died alone and in pain in a warehouse, help just a few minutes too late and- fuck! Motherfucking," Hood let out an incensate noise of raise, half cry of anger half sob, "We heard our little brother die, and you ask me if there's a fucking ISSUE?!" It was at this point that Hood turned violently and accusatorily to Phantom.

Phantom paused. He... rarely dealt with the bereaved anymore. He remembered guilt. He remembered grief. He knew that in each moment of intense grief, he imagined that it had felt like dying. Again. He knew better now.

But he also knew it was distant. It had been so, so long since he was human and felt things the way they did. He had long gotten over that, but every so often it panged back into him. The feeling of other. The feeling that though he may command Space, there was still so much between him and others.

Phantom slid off the box he was sitting on and approached Hood. The beings around him scrambled; to get out of or into his way, he didn't know. Hood refused to move. Phantom stopped in front of him.

"I grieve with you," He spoke through still healing vocal cords (deadaloneafraidpainnononoIwanttolivenonoIwantmyDad-) and let the tears he had hardly noticed holding back began to fall. "Your grief is mine, and I grieve with you," And then Phantom began to Sing.

It wasn't in any human tongue. It didn't use vocal cords so it wouldn't strain the child's (a child) body any further.

It echoed and reverberated through the warehouse and heard as others began to sob underneath its weight. It was loss. It was grief. It was despair and pain made into a noise and driven into the soul in horrible, haunting melody.

But there was hope. Of course he added hope, this wasn't the end. Trauma and memories would remain, as would scars, but healing would be found in time. A new joy of lost loved ones coming back because they would not truly rest until they did. It wasn't the end. Not a goodbye, but until I see you again.

Death was not the end.

His Song tapered off in one final warble that rang through the warehouse until silence returned. The people within stared at him. The pretty magic user sniffed heavily before lowering her head. Good, she knew the significance of a Song delivered by one of the dead.

"We are honoured," She spoke tremulously through her own tears.

Phantom inclined his head in return. "The honour is mine," he replied. Then paused. "Hood?" He asked.

"What?" The man asked, voice warbling and broken through his helmet. There was a sharp burst of static that might've been a sniff.

The edges of Phatom's vision through this body was darkening and blurring at the edges. He had forgotten a lot of things about blood loss. Like the dizziness that came with, lightheadedness, and fainting.

"You might want to catch. I don't think adding a concussion to the list of injuries is a good idea," Phantom collapsed in a rush of darkened vision and briefly feeling strong arms catch him and hearing buzzing shouts before he was out.

Danny's Nest

Tim gets sacrificed in a ritual to summon "the ALL powerful conqueror, Phantom". And by sacrificed, I mean Tim really dies and Danny is forced into his body forcefully.

There's no coming back from that. Not even after the cultists are stopped.

Billy: Don't cry don't cry don't cry-

Zeus: HIT HIM. HIT HIM HARDER-

Solomon: You know, I find these alien's syntax quite interesting-

Mercury: Zoom zoom there goes my boy Flash! WOOO-

Achilles: Go left, no the other left!

Hercules: Oh yeah, look at our muscles! Throw that car into the alien, I hope it explodes-

Atlas: I could do this all day, no problem-

The Justice League is concerned.

JL: Do you have to deal with this all of the time?

Marvel: Yes.

JL: Why did that one voice sound like a child?

Marvel: No more questions.

Flash, laughing at a joke Captain Marvel made: Y'know Cap, sometimes you really act like a child haha

CM, smiling strangely: haha oh for sure

Solomon: You have to kill him.

CM, in his mind: No!

Hercules: If you break a hole through the glass of the Watchtower he'll be sucked out and suffocate.

Solomon, projecting the image of nodding inside CM's mind: No witnesses.

J'onn, sitting next to them, no longer feeling very safe in his workplace: Pardon me as I go have an unimportant conversation with Batman.

rereading my own fic and every single line is hitting because i wrote it specifically to cater to my extremely particular interests

When will AO3 be back from the war

You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

"Before we start the meeting," Superman said, "Is there anything anyone would like to address first?"

Phantom stood up, chair rolling softly against the carpet as it was pushed back. "Yes, actually," He reached into his utility belt and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "This is my resignation from the Justice League,"

A beat of silence.

"Oh," Wonder Woman said. "Has something occurred in your personal life?"

"Yeah, I guess you could call it that," Phantom snorted, sounding remarkably bitter, a stark difference from the cheerful young man they knew.

"Is there nothing we could do to help you?"

"No. There isn't. Because it happened ten years ago,"

"Is there something wrong with your powers?" Flash, who was very quick at mental math and quickly aligned it to a fourteen year old metahuman gene activation, said.

"Yes. There is something wrong with me," Was the meeting room getting colder? "Because I'm not a metahuman. I'm a ghost,"

Incomprehension flitted across many Justice Leaguers' faces, while a dawning horror alighted on others.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Green Lantern, freshly back from a trip to Oa and in no way up to date on recent politics, asked.

"Why. Didn't I. Tell anyone?" Phantom said softly, and yes, the room was definitely getting colder. "I don't know. Why didn't I, fourteen and freshly dead, tell anyone about what killed me? Why didn't I, the son of ghost hunters, tell my parents I was what they hated most? Why didn't I, the hero of my hometown, tell people I was the same kind of 'thing' that attacked the town on the regular. Why didn't I, in an increasingly hostile environment, tell people I was the same kind of being they made effigies of to burn and laugh at. Why didn't I, the person whose existence was just made illegal, tell anyone?"

Silence. Their breaths wafted in front of their faces. There was frost spiralling up the wall behind Phantom like an aura of dread.

"Because. I. Was. Scared. I was scared of exactly what's happening now with the Anti-Ecto acts. I was scared of being hated. Of being treated like a monster. Of being held down by my parents, my town, the government, and ripped apart molecule by molecule just like they said I should be,"

Phantom breathed in deeply and exhaled, temperature slowly rising and icy crystals dissolving.

"I became a hero to defend humans from invading ghosts. And now the roles are switched. Humans are the ones invading ghost towns, their homes, kidnapping and enslaving them, sneering and laughing all the while. I am half human. And I am half ghost. I am a hero to the people that need me. Not just in name or words or membership cards," Phantom waved a hand to the paper he had put on the table, "But in deeds. I am not a metahuman. I am not a human hero. I am not human. And I would not be a hero at all if I didn't do what was right,"

Phantom planted his feet on the carpet, shoulders rolled back and head held high. His bearing was regal. They had never seen Phantom like this before. "The Justice League is beholden to the governments of this mortal world. But as someone who has known you, fought beside you, and prevented you from becoming part of my Realms too soon, I hope you are first and foremost beholden to your conciouncess,"

And without another word, Phantom turned, clawed a hand through the air, a portal ripping into existence at his fingertips, and stepped through. The swirling green portal closed behind him, like he was never there.

A beat of silence.

"First on the agenda-," Batman began.

"What the fuck?!" Green Arrow snapped. "Bats, you are not telling me we are just going to ignore-,"

"-we will discuss the Anti-Ecto acts and how we will best prevent the egregious sentient rights violation the United States Government has passed into law," Batman continued.

"We were planning to bring this up even before Phantom revealed himself," Superman interceded peaceably.

"You knew, didn't you," Wonder Woman said accusingly, gaze fixed on Batman.

"Yes," Batman said. "It was obvious if you were looking,"

"Well then why didn't you tell any of us?!" Green Lantern demanded.

Batman fixed a flat stare on Green Lantern. "It has been made expressly clear to me," He said slowly, "On multiple occasions, that sharing my knowledge of others' secret identities, up to and including the sources of other people's powers and/or training, was expressly forbidden as an invasion of privacy. Including revealing my knowledge to the individual in question as it was 'creepy' and 'honestly better off not knowing you knew',"

Silence.

"Any other objections?"

Silence.

"Good. Let's get started,"

Dark Secret

So! Danny was discovered pretty quickly after his first battle against the Lunch Lady. His hair turned white, and his body shape was a little different, but he largely looked very similar to his Human Form, so it was only a matter of time really.

Thankfully he was assumed to be a Metahuman.

He didn't look like any other Ghost, the closest resemblance was his hair and eye color, but even that could be explained away. Also his parents were adamant that he couldn't be a Ghost because he was still Sentient and not Evil, so he must just have powers that just looked similar to Ghost Powers esthetically. Probably as a result of the Portal Accident, which he used as an explanation for how his powers awakened.

Danny also avoided using the more obvious Ghost Powers like Intangiblity and Invisiblity, sticking mostly to the most basic Flight and Energy based Powers he got to be as generic as possible. If anybody saw otherwise, it was a trick of the light or a trick of the Ghosts.

Danny became the Hero of Amity Park, always pretending to be something else. It was his darkest secret.

Unfortunately because the public never saw a Ghost like Phantom on a positive light, their perception of Ghosts never changed. Nobody believed that Ghosts could be anything aside from Evil, and as the knowledge of Ghosts and the Ghost Zone began to spread around the world that perception became more and more commonplace.

If Danny had been revealed in the early days, it could have been salvageable, but nowadays if his secret was revealed he would have to convince the entire world that everything they knew about Ghosts was wrong. It would practically be impossible.

Even when he joined the Justice League when he became an Adult, he still had to hide his secret. Years of hiding made sure he could conceal his true Nature from the magic users on the team, but he still had to be distant from the team just to be sure.

While all this was going on in the Living Realm, his adventures in the Ghost Zone still happened as normal. He saved Pandora and the Acropolis, dethroned the Tyrant King Aragon, managed to defeat Pariah Dark in Single combat, and even became recognized as a Great Warrior by the Far Frozen.

After years of hiding, he actually felt more at home in the Ghost Zone than in the Human Realm. There he could be his true self without having to hide a huge part of his identity, and people accepted him for who he was. Sure he had enemies there, but he also had more real friends outside of Tucker and Sam.

He was content with his double life, acting as a Hero to the Public while hiding his true self, and secretly going to the Ghost Zone to be himself among his friends and even his enemies.

Of course it all came crashing down when he Anti Ecto Acts finally passed.

Now there was a Legal Path for Humans to enter and profit off of the Ghost Zone. Beyond just being able to legally kill and experiment on Ghosts, the Acts also allowed Humans to claim parts of the Ghost Zone as their own Property, enslaving the Ghosts residing there, and destroying the Ecosystem of the Zone because there were no laws preventing it.

And now Danny had a choice.

He could either side with the Humans to which he was a Hero, allowing them to destroy the Ghost Zone and Enslave the denizens living there with the full support of the Government, or he could side with the Ghost Zone, betraying Humanity and the people he had been protecting for years, but trying to save those who had accepted him for his true self years ago.

To him the answer was obvious.

Tim, a teenager, and full of self deprecation: It was taken from my greatest enemy. The one who has caused me the greatest pain and strife.

Literally everyone else: ?!!?!

Talia should swagger into the Batcave without warning and slam down a jar on the table in front of Tim. The jar, of course, contains his spleen. Tim is relieved to see Talia went on the mission he sent her on and thus was not blown to pieces. The spleen jar is both a sort of truce offering and a ‘you are a large threat and I want to stay in your good graces’ gift. Everyone else is confused but Tim refuses to elaborate or even tell them what’s in the jar.

Crab Day

okay, so here's a new info post from the top.

the problem: tumblr is extremely extremely in debt. the current model is not profitable. this is why they are trying to turn the site into a shit clone of every other social media site, so they can attract new users and their money.

solution: not a ton of people can afford a long-term subscriptions like ad-free. however, many of us CAN afford $3 to inflict crabs on another unsuspecting user. (and those that can't, can still enjoy crabs everywhere)

the idea: in the grand traditions of mishapocalypses and goncharovs and tumblr users' obsession with [random inconsequential thing] Days, we create a fund drive/holiday on July 29th, dubbed Crab Day. buy your friends crabs. buy your enemies crabs. blaze posts. post memes. change ur icon. whatever. actually put your money where your mouth is and show @staff that there actually IS profit motive to listen to the current users about what we want this site to look like. (and yes, that means accessibility features too. we currently have zero leverage to demand these features. let's change that.)

i don't know if this will actually go anywhere. worst case scenario, a few of us have fun, tumblr gets a small amount of money, and nothing changes. best case though, we actually provide incentive to keep our stupid hellsite unique.