Halloween comment fic thing
Oct. 31st, 2011 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorIt's Halloween. Bats are scary, Gotham is a nightmare, good guys blanch when they enter Arkham, villains tell each other Joker stories to scare one another, and criminals are a supertitious and cowardly lot.
Let's do a Gotham-centric comment fic fest stuff. About Halloween or fear or things like that. *handwave-y* Or, you know, not Gotham-based. Wendy the Werewolf Stalker is cool, it's just that this being me, Gotham-creepy is much more likely to ping me.
Rules: prompt stuff in the comments. Fill stuff in the comments. Pimp, don't wank, warn for triggery stuff, have fun.
Let's do a Gotham-centric comment fic fest stuff. About Halloween or fear or things like that. *handwave-y* Or, you know, not Gotham-based. Wendy the Werewolf Stalker is cool, it's just that this being me, Gotham-creepy is much more likely to ping me.
Rules: prompt stuff in the comments. Fill stuff in the comments. Pimp, don't wank, warn for triggery stuff, have fun.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-31 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-31 08:23 pm (UTC)Helena, PG-13, Winter Dark 1/2 [trigger warning for gore, I think] - also, BEST PROMPT EVER
Date: 2011-11-03 04:45 pm (UTC)The city is covered in a white, pillowy blanket of snow. It softens the angles of the city, gives broken buildings the dignity of Germanic ruins, restful, untouched. The city is quiet, still. There’s no sound pollution in No Man’s Land, and ice on the last towers reaching into the sky glitters like a fairytale castle. The air is frosty, and cold, and clean.
Whatever the hour, the city seems mostly empty. The cold chases people inside, tracking after them with its piercing spear, forcing them to huddle together in caved-in houses.
In No Man’s Land forces that man thought he’d domesticated have taken back their rights; cold and darkness have spread back, claiming their silent victory over their spoils of war, and the people have shied back to instincts. It was always survival of the fittest, the most gruesome savagery in a thin veneer of civilization; now they’ve been stripped of the lies that let them sleep at night.
Gotham’s truth is bared, and it’s pitiless and hungry. Helena has known her for long.
The snow sparkles, comfy-looking, and Helena finds it as indecent, cloaking the twisted, rusted metal bones of the city, as a fur coat thrown over the skeleton shoulders of a beggar.
She’s reminded of tales she read as a child, the Old Continent frozen in winter. The books told of woods so deep and so dark light could never touch them, and small villages besieged by winter. Wolves on the prowl merely beyond the edge of the farthest house. The bell of the church would count the hours, keeping evil at bay; taming time, making it into something that could be measured.
It made the eternal nights of winter into instruments of reason, how their length fluctuated over the season. When people noticed the night shortening visibly, they would keep hope.
Helena wishes there were more churches in Gotham, and more bells. The Clocktower, despite its name, doesn’t ring. The silhouette of the building, one of too few still standing, by turns reassures Helena and enrages her. It’s taunting her, promises of security it can never deliver; it’s proof that some things are still standing. It has not, after all, fallen.
The Clocktower marks civilization, and Helena often patrols, for all the good it does, with it in her back. She isn’t certain if she’s turning her back to it or if she trusts it to have her back. But it is here, it is familiar, and it is not one of the things she is interested in fighting.
She figures it makes them as much allies as anything else.
She’s far out where the Clocktower’s shadow doesn’t reach when she finds the scene.
It’s something out of a storybook, from centuries past in Europe. It doesn’t belong in Gotham; not in a place where predator is a word that refers to sexual abuse.
At another time, she would have called it a body. There’s far too little left of it to be called anything but remains. In another time, what she stumbles upon would be a murder scene.
Helena, PG-13, Winter Dark 2/2 [warning for gore]
Date: 2011-11-03 04:46 pm (UTC)Around the corpse, snow has melted into pinkish, queasy-looking mud. It used to be a human being, but now it is only a torn-apart mass of organs. If a good man or woman stumbled upon it, and tried to give it a decent burial – someone like Gordon, who insists on as many of the social niceties as can be arranged, customs to preserve the city’s sanity (Helena could tell him, it’s far too late for that, if it was ever more than a pipe dream) – they wouldn’t be able to. There are too many parts missing.
Once upon a time, she’d have called it a massacre. Today…
There’s a single line of dragged-down steps leading to and from the naked remains, buried in the snow like it’s been walked several times, by several different beings. And the traces of the running steps of the victim, disordered and panicked.
Lots of parts missing. Cut and stripped down like a animal, very clean. Precisely like an animal. Lots of meat, missing.
Wolves, Helena thinks. The horror of being shut in with the wolves all around grips her, like the villagers in her storybooks, freezing her to her core.
In that moment, she knows: should they survive No Man’s Land, she doesn’t think they will truly live through it.
Re: Helena, PG-13, Winter Dark 2/2 [warning for gore]
Date: 2011-11-03 05:23 pm (UTC)Renée, PG-13, Wake me up 1/2 (Spoilers for Gotham Central & Pipeline)
Date: 2011-11-04 01:20 pm (UTC)Over the past couple of years, Renée’s been not-a-cop, and she’s lived not-in-Gotham; she hasn’t yet managed the trick to do both. Only Gotham. Only in Gotham it would be easier to quit drinking than to quit—she still thinks of it as home. She protests when someone else does, it was a long time ago and she was a different person then. That’s a half-truth at best; she’s not sure she’s different enough. The question is: can she ever be enough of a different person that Gotham doesn’t eat her up?
Vic and she talked about these things, once; he told her he was from Hub City, and she tried to tell herself she was surprised. He’d left when the city had gone to hell, but Renée never had been able to.
She’d stuck around for all the crises in Gotham, the Clench and the quake, she’d been promoted during No Man’s Land, and she’d stayed when the OMAC struck. Gotham was only part of the rest of the world when it seemed like it was the end of the world, typical.
She’d been a teen and a beat cop and a detective, a drunkard and a lover, she’d fought all of Gotham’s battles and when the Religion of Crime finally got her, she’d put down money on their finding city blocks in the place of her lungs.
There were always teeth in her dreams.
Laughing teeth and green hair; Detective Montoya worked Major Crimes. Romy joked about it once, said it was hard to go wrong with Joker nightmares. Course, that was back before she lost her partner and took a shot at Batman. She probably wouldn’t find it so funny these days. Then again, she might. Everyone can change over two years. Renée doesn’t have the answers.
Others are more personal. Back in the MCU, Renée got nightmares about Harvey.
Her life falling into pieces around her; people looking right through her; beating Lipari into a pulp and shooting Daria; looking into the mirror and seeing half her face was scorched away. Batman swooping down behind her. He looked disappointed as he drove her to Arkham, and when they arrived, he handed her a business card.
“Call my lawyer,” he said with Bruce Wayne’s voice.
It was always Harvey who showed up to defend her on her trial, and Two-Face stood as the judge. No Man’s Land all over again.
Or, more simply, her struggle with Harvey. After he’d kidnapped her and he – sweet mother of mercy, he expected her to dine, and it made her roll her eyes in cheesy movies, but it had been her life and it had felt unreal.
They’d struggled for the gun and she was going to shoot him. It would’ve been self-defence, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. Struggling for the gun, and when she got it she was going to kill him. Kill him before he hurt Daria.
Kill him for threatening Daria.
It was the second time she would’ve murdered someone if given the chance. Batman would’ve looked so disappointed.
Renée, PG-13, Wake me up 2/2
Date: 2011-11-04 01:20 pm (UTC)She missed Gordon. She would’ve talked to Gordon. She’d always told Gordon stuff she didn’t tell others. Captain Sawyer reached out to her, but come on, Renée couldn’t. The Metropolis and Gotham issue again, maybe. Cris. Cris wouldn’t have turned her problems into squad room gossip. But her partner was kind of an asshole.
And again, Metropolis. She wasn’t sure what she’d done to be the one saddled with the shining people from the city of tomorrow. On the whole, she had nothing against them. At times it made things awkward. They’d crash into a wall of mutual incomprehension. Metropolis methods didn’t work in Gotham.
She has nightmares of the Clench, still. They went away for a while, but they’ve started back. After Vandal Savage.
Maybe it’s because she’s back in Gotham. It’s not that many months since she left, but it was a lifetime ago. She’d hoped she was a new person, as blank as her mask promised. Turns out she can’t leave Gotham behind.
Her nightmares are about the fanged skyline of the downtown skyscrapers sinking into her, and the sturdy molars of squatter buildings crushing her up, now. She wonders if Gotham will swallow her whole, or chew her out.
Gotham, G, Pathetic Fallacy
Date: 2011-11-04 04:49 pm (UTC)-
There’s a whisper in the streets, tonight, and a shiver of unrest among those most concerned. They look at the sky in unease, cops and crooks both. The sickly yellow of the Bat signal flares like a holy symbol on the polluted sky. At various places in the city, some people are breathing a little easier; in Arkham, two of the psychological personnel turn in their resignation letters, and shrieking laughter pursues them out the door.
Nothing’s changed since yesterday, but everything is different. Tonight a Robin will fly through the city for the first time in too long, and everyone can feel it. A couple ushers their child into a darkened street, the street lamp busted while they were at the theatre, hurrying before the rain tears down the clouds, but they can’t silence the child’s laughter, immodest and carefree.
Gotham smiles a bloody smile. She was looking for a proper gift.
Re: Gotham, G, Pathetic Fallacy
Date: 2011-11-05 02:38 am (UTC)(am so glad you loved this prompt.)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-31 09:24 pm (UTC)Tim + Bruce, G, dressed as each other
Date: 2011-11-04 01:49 pm (UTC)Bruce was turning slowly in front of the foot-length mirror, a corner of his cape clasped in his hand. Unbidden, Tim recalled images of little girls trying on princess dresses and clutching the fabric as they swirled.
Tim’s brain wanted to curl up and die.
“It could be worse,” Bruce said.
That it could’ve been the original Robin costume didn’t bear contemplating.
“You let Barbara choose our costumes,” Tim pointed out, in a futile attempt to stall. Either the moment he run away screaming, or the one they had to go and face the others.
Stephanie and Cassandra had both been in the Cave when Barbara had informed Bruce.
It was a sign of how unfair the world was that Tim hadn’t been there, and so had had no hopes of changing Barbara’s mind, but had still been subjected to their mocking. When Tim had arrived in the Cave, held back by a family dinner with his father and Dana, the girls had laughed.
They hadn’t let it go for two weeks. Sometimes they’d be on patrol, and Steph would look at him and chortle. It was disturbing enough when they were running across rooftops; it was worse when they’d been interrogating one of Penguin’s henchmen, Tim laying down the menacing aura, and Steph had had to turn away, in a fit of giggles as sudden as it was deadly, her shoulders shaking.
And that was just Steph. Tim has been going out of his way to avoid Cass. Batgirl’s quiet mirth was more than he should be asked to endure.
Bruce looked at him, like Tim had just proven his point. “Yes.”
Tim had also been doing his level best to avoid Barbara, this past two weeks. Of course, avoiding Oracle was hopeless. She’d been particularly gleeful. Tim was seriously considering begging for forgiveness, whatever it was he’d done.
He was not looking forward to mixing with the other guests. He’d been given to understand that the Daily Planet might send reporters; and if Lois Lane was hunting after the same drug dealers they were, she might be the one present.
“I think Dick might get a laugh out of it,” Bruce said in a light tone, finishing to gel his hair into two curls over his brow.
If confronted, Tim would deny that he’d whimpered. Any audio evidence implying otherwise had been tampered with.
He caught the thinnest curl of Bruce’s lips as Bruce turned around, and glared. Bruce had no right to be so undismayed about the whole affair. He was wearing a green and red and yellow nightmare of a costume, split-toe boots and reversible cloak included. It looked the very opposite of dignified, and Tim wondered if Bruce wasn’t somehow doing something to achieve that effect. Certainly Tim didn’t look quite so much of a dweeb in his costume.
“You’re taking this way too well,” Tim accused, aware that he was rapidly squandering the awesome points the Bat suit automatically awarded its wearer.
Bruce raised an eyebrow. The domino didn’t make interpreting his expressions any easier. Tim hadn’t expected it too – the mask Bruce relied on the most was his own bare face – but he’d thought maybe. There was a rule that Robin’s mask highlighted emotions. Maybe if Bruce had worn the original costume that might have worked; Tim had never fulfilled that criterion.
“Holy role reversal, Batman,” Bruce deadpanned.
Tim closed his eyes and wished for the floor to open up and swallow him.
Re: Tim + Bruce, G, dressed as each other
Date: 2011-11-04 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-31 09:37 pm (UTC)Dick's first sluty halloween costume