[Meme] DC with daemons
Jan. 25th, 2012 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorI think that given all the layers and layers of idendity in canon, it can be done about a gazillion ways and all be interesting. I kind of really really want this to be a thing that happens and I have no idea where to start, so.
The setting: Gotham. (or, well, the DCU.)
The fusion: His Dark Materials's daemons.
Give me one (or two) characters, and a prompt if you're so inclined, or a canon event/moment, or tell me what form you think a character's daemon would take, and I'll write you something short about it. Give me several prompts if you'd like! Go wild! No promises but I want to write it so very badly.
The setting: Gotham. (or, well, the DCU.)
The fusion: His Dark Materials's daemons.
Give me one (or two) characters, and a prompt if you're so inclined, or a canon event/moment, or tell me what form you think a character's daemon would take, and I'll write you something short about it. Give me several prompts if you'd like! Go wild! No promises but I want to write it so very badly.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-25 02:48 pm (UTC)Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 12:03 pm (UTC)“She didn’t like us,” she replied. “And beside, Zorel was the one you liked.”
He stretched, turned, and finally jumped on the desk. Not directly on the keyboard, thankfully. “Flying lion. What’s there not to like?”
As Babs had already debated with Jehuti regarding the advantages of subtlety – and how a flying lion, no matter how far away from their human it could go thanks to their being meta, was decidedly not it – she chose to disregard his intervention. Clicking onto the next photo on her screen was a deliberate choice.
The ermine peered at the screen in a sort of detached inspection, threw his neck back as though recoiling, and inclined his head to glance at Babs. “You can’t be considering the Marvel girl,” he said, condescending. “Has her daemon even settled yet?”
Babs grit her teeth. “Yes, thank you, Jehuti.” Worse than a goddamn cat.
“Or, well, you could ask Huntress,” Jehuti suggested, who seemed to take perverse pleasure in the charade. “If I can last two minutes in the same conversation as Asper, you can surely do the same. For the sake of professionalism.” He was immobile, staring at the footage of Huntress and Asper with a stillness that suddenly told Babs he was imagining fighting them. They’d been denied the opportunity, recently, and they’d had to swallow the insult like the bitter pill of necessity, but long draining nights never were draining enough to stop them from thinking. Today, they’d go for the throat if needed.
Forcing herself to break the train of thought – she was already imagining the patterns, planning the way she’d lure Helena into taking Oracle’s offer – Babs rested her hand on Jehuti’s white back. After a moment, the tension left his slender body.
“Right. Who’s next?” He snorted when the next picture to appear on screen was Big Barda’s, in time with Babs’ wistful sigh. They watched Barda make small work of the monstrous creature some puny man in a lab coat was attempting to control, while her daemon, a great African buffalo, grunted menacingly at the rest of the scientists. “If you wanted subtlety, this is not it,” Jehuti finally remarked, when Babs sighed for a second time.
“I know,” Barbara said. She lingered mournfully onto the shot of Barda’s daemon rising into the air before smashing into the locked door, and changed channels with a last sigh. “But still. You were the one who wanted strike forces, weren’t you?”
“We have to be realistic.”
The next picture to appear was that of a leather-clad woman dismounting from her bike, and shaking her blond hair free as she took off her helmet. Black Canary. Where was— Babs’ breath hitched when Canary’s kestrel daemon dove from the skies and came to rest on her shoulder. The camera Barbara had hacked didn’t convey sound, so she could only guess at the dialogue. The angle—she tried to focus, but the angle wasn’t good enough that she could accurately read Canary’s lips.
She startled when Jehuti’s leg came to rest on her hand, and she looked down, surprised. She was expecting him to be restless, perhaps, or to start rattling the objections she knew existed: Canary had been wounded, she’d been aimless, her days of glory dated back from her time in the Justice League. Instead, his gaze at her was profound and weirdly non-confrontational. “Do we really want to work with fliers again?”
He didn’t speak Batman’s name – or Dick’s. He didn’t need to.
Wordlessly, Barbara moved her hand holding the mouse from under Jehuti’s paw, to enlarge the image.
“We have to be realistic,” she mirrored his earlier words. “Flying makes things easier.”
Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 02:07 pm (UTC)(what's Helena's daemon then?)
Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 02:18 pm (UTC)Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 02:23 pm (UTC)Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 02:30 pm (UTC)PG and Barda were the easiest choices ever.
Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 03:50 pm (UTC)Re: Socratic wisdom
Date: 2012-01-26 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-25 03:12 pm (UTC)So, Tim. Tim, in my head, is one of those people whose daemon is the same sex, but it's OK if you don't agree, because mostly I just really want to read something about Tim and his daemon imprinting on Dick and his daemon that time at the circus. Or Tim and his daemon stalking Batman and Robin and figuring out who they are. Or Tim and his daemon and Shiva and her daemon. Or or...anything with Tim, really, will making me delirious with joy.
And Cass. I always thought that is Cass had a daemon, he would have settled the day she murdered that guy when she was eight. So something about that? Or, hell, anything about Cass and her daemon, like how do they communicate (with each other and with others)? Does the daemon talk or is he like Cass?
And about layers and layers of identity. Batman/Bruce/Brucie and his (their?) daemon. Talk about a mindfuck. How does the personality affect the daemon? Is there shape-changing going on? Sure, it's not supposed to, but the daemon is supposed to settle when a person grows up and Bruce will always be that kid in the alley, so maybe his daemon didn't settle the way she (or he) was supposed to.
Or Dick and his daemon, flying through the air, from the circus to the streets of Gotham.
Or Babs and her daemon, after the shooting, deciding to remake themselves and become Oracle. And all the differences between Batgirl and her daemon and Oracle and her daemon. And all the ways in which they are the same.
Kate Kane and her daemon, deciding to tell the truth, no matter the consequence. And her twin sister Beth and her daemon, what were they like?
And and and...
Any of those, or just anything with Tim and/or Cass would make my day like you wouldn't believe. :)
Tim and his daemon imprinting on Dick and his daemon
Date: 2012-01-25 04:10 pm (UTC)They were waiting for Tim to grow and Galenos to settle. It would’ve been a lie to say that they found no enjoyment or no use in Galenos’ ability to change. But the changes. The shifts. The sudden bursts of dramatic colors, the theatricality of feral predators, the endless playfulness of four-legged comrades, those were never theirs.
Up until the moment Tim and Galenos see Dick and Zitka, the appeal somehow eludes them.
Galenos is snuggled on Tim’s lap and his breath catches as the same time as Tim’s. “Beautiful,” he whispers.
Tim agrees, mindlessly, because he has even less words than Galenos at that moment.
Beautiful, is always Galenos’ first memory of that night. Even with what happens afterwards – the fall, the screams, the silence. Tim’s mother hiding his face against her side (warm and shuddery, Tim could hear his blood beating in his eardrums) and Verand attempting to do the same with Galenos.
Even with all that, even with Tim’s nightmares afterwards. When someone talks about that night, even when Tim does, Tim knows Galenos’ first thought is always for Zitka’s glorious flight.
They’re still waiting for Tim to grow up, after that night. Still discuss – gravely and without a hint of the self-aggrandizing fantasies other children entertain – what form Galenos might settle into. They still agree something small and quiet would be best, and Galenos still spends most of his time as small and quiet animals.
But sometimes Galenos takes an incomprehensibly brightly-colored shape, and he flies and flies, doing quite unreasonable dives, while Tim watches.
“I want to take pictures when you do that,” Tim finally confesses one night, stroking Galenos’ mouse fur.
“It wouldn’t be as good as the real thing,” Galenos replies, but there’s none of his usual wistfulness when talking about Zitka, only a sort of clinical detachment.
When Tim discovers Peter Pan, Galenos is the only one to know it becomes Tim’s favorite story.
Re: Tim and his daemon imprinting on Dick and his daemon
Date: 2012-01-26 07:29 pm (UTC)This is wonderful! Tim imprinting on Dick is one of my favourite bits of canon and this is a fantastic look at that moment in a universe with daemons.
Galenos is snuggled on Tim’s lap and his breath catches as the same time as Tim’s. “Beautiful,” he whispers.
Tim agrees, mindlessly, because he has even less words than Galenos at that moment..
Yes, yes, perfect!
But sometimes Galenos takes an incomprehensibly brightly-colored shape, and he flies and flies, doing quite unreasonable dives, while Tim watches.
Oh, Timmy!
All my love for this. It is lovely and and painful in the best way and it works so very, very well. ♥♥♥
Re: Tim and his daemon imprinting on Dick and his daemon
Date: 2012-01-27 03:28 pm (UTC)Tim is in loooooove, what can I say. (I have no idea why these memes keep making me write stuff I don't even ship. This, the obvious Babs/Dinah above, Bruce/Steph... maybe it's because Bruce and Babs and Tim yearn in such a focused way.)
Thank you, I'm very glad you liked! :D
link to a Cass snippet on the lj meme
Date: 2012-01-25 04:12 pm (UTC)before I run and start on the rest to be posted at a later time.
What makes you think I was alone (version 1)
Date: 2012-01-27 11:15 am (UTC)*
When the mugger shoots, puts down his mother’s lynx and erases his father’s bee, Kiviv lets out a tiny, silent scream and goes up. Up, small black wings flapping wildly in the dark, hiding, fleeing and feeling her way blindly through echolocation. And up while Bruce has fallen to his knees, small and frail and his vision blurry with the stark still shapes of his parents’ bodies. Up. Away.
There’s the sensation of a sting around the area of his heart, then nothing.
The rest of the night happens in a camera quality, without the faintest scratch on the tape. Something that happens to other people on a movie screen, even when a name that sounds like his is repeated. The glaring lights of the police cars finish blinding him. Leslie Thompkins’ voice reverberates around, but dies out before it reaches him. He is in her arms, but he doesn’t feel the pressure of the embrace or the warmth of her coat.
Kiv flies back in when Alfred is closing Bruce’s window while Mattie waits by the door, watching Bruce, and Bruce looks up, blinking. She’s still wearing her ugly little form as she half stumbles, half crawls up the sheets, and mechanically Bruce takes her in his hands and brings her closer to his face.
At rest a bat is something very small, small enough that a child can hold it in his hands. Her form is one that used to stalk nightmares, but he feels no disgust and no fear.
Her mouth opens, full of small selfish white teeth and great ears gaping wider than her wings, as though she’s going to speak, but not a word comes out.
Without a glance Alfred's way, Bruce empties out the drawer of his bedside table, grabs a red piece of fabric he used to play cow-boy with and puts it on the bottom of the drawer, crumpled. Mattie gives Alfred a meaningful look, her wrinkled neck retracted under her shell, gleaming eyes barely emerging amidst the scales. Bruce ignores the turtle and doesn’t look up at Alfred.
Delicately, he settles Kiv on the makeshift nest.
He doesn’t close the drawer all the way, in case she wants to leave again.
Re: What makes you think I was alone (version 1)
Date: 2012-01-29 01:17 pm (UTC)Ahaha, yeah, I know how that is. One of the things I love about Bruce is that I am perfectly able to believe 90% of the mutually exclusive ideas I (and other people) have, at the same time. And this is definitely a version I can believe. :)
He doesn’t close the drawer all the way, in case she wants to leave again.
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce! That line is just so unbearably sad to me.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-25 10:13 pm (UTC)Robin.
Date: 2012-02-03 04:18 pm (UTC)It struck Laylah that the boy’s daemon didn’t act as look-out, but when she was mistrustful in the beginning, Bruce was delighted; and after that, she was as taken with Del as he was with Jason.
“The boy is older than all of us,” she affirmed when Jim voiced objections. Doubts. She’d puffed to make herself look bigger and had looked Elou right in the eye.
After the first moment, Laylah never had any doubt.
Bruce didn’t understand at once that Del didn’t shift. The shape she’d settled on was— “convenient” or “practical” missed something; “fitting” might be better— such that it didn’t seem strange at all to see her keep it, even when Jason got into the car, with a slight smile on his features, and the shrike perched on Jason’s knee and shook itself, beak cocked in the air. Laylah had shifted back to a bat and was clinging to the car’s roof, watching the bird.
It was Laylah who told him, later. If that was a surprise to Bruce, he could never remember it; afterwards, it felt as though he’d always known.
“Your daemon’s shape is supposed to say a lot about you. When you’re a kid, it mostly says a lot about how you live,” Jason said once, later, and that, too, made sense.
Small, winged so it was never an issue to disappear over the rooftops, and dangerous, Del was perfectly suited to the Mission. To Robin. Laylah startled when Alfred commented, half-joking, that it sounded like Jason and Bruce had been fated to meet.
Maybe it explained Laylah’s fascination for Del. Laylah herself had never settled, and in the streets – off the streets, more and more often – she’d take a form that could accompany Del.
His fault that he wasn’t there to stop Garzonas from falling. Her fault for not alerting him that Jason had gone.
Bruce tries not to discuss it with Laylah.
“I think he’s right,” Laylah says, quiet, when Jason has slammed the door shut.
Bruce closes his eyes and tries to cling to the shreds of control he can feel, sliding from the grip he still has on his soul.
(Lost)
Date: 2012-02-03 04:18 pm (UTC)And it’s true that in the unnatural stillness of Jason’s eyes Talia can find nothing of the pale passion she’s learned to read in Bruce’s: no flames or ice, or the roiling trouble of deep seas. He bears on the world eyes dull like sea-glass, and when she allows herself doubt Talia fears the boy she’s rescued maybe be gone after all, only a flesh puppet left behind.
“He has no daemon,” Shywar points then, the only time Talia will permit him. He’s been ill at ease around Jason since the beginning for just that reason, as have all the daemons of her father’s men. She hasn’t been able to obtain the response whether it’s because it’s something they feel, or something they know. Shywar has been unhelpful.
And yet, when her father turns his attention Jason’s way, Shywar puts himself between them, slides to Jason and curls by his side, protective. He disapproves, but Talia made Jason something of her own, and so he should be treated.
“Why let him touch you, if you find him so offensive?” she asks, and the fennec’s wide, expressive ears flick in angry response.
“I thought we were doing everything we could,” he retorts. “I touch him because if he is alive, he needs to be touched. He reacts to it, at least. I think he likes it.”
Jason does. His hand strokes down Shywar’s fur, and if it is mechanical it’s not necessary, not the way the training her beloved embedded in Jason’s limbs and skin is, that has him putting down quickly and bloodily (if not lethally) anyone attempts to harm him. Those are not the actions of the self-defensive shell her father thinks he is.
“Do you have an idea why he’s a statue when you’re the one touching him?” Shywar asks, one day when they’re on the cliff, and he’s put himself in Jason’s lap, eyes half-closed.
Her hand may be on Jason’s shoulder, or her arms around him, and still there is no sign that Talia is embracing a live human being, only the warmth of his body and the silent rhythm of his breathing to tell her so.
Talia thinks of Bruce, and smiles without humor at Shywar. “Yes. I do.”
“Beloved screwed him but good,” Shywar says, non-committal, and Talia doesn’t rebuke him.
Jason cries when Talia tells him about Bruce, face damp with tears and sea sprays, salt on salt.
Shywar shifts.
“Even your father has a daemon,” he says. Pensive.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” she echoes her father’s words, “but maybe the Pit can.”
Red Hood.
Date: 2012-02-03 04:19 pm (UTC)They see there’s no daemon by his side, and they assume whatever is eating at Jason comes from that place – like there’s a gland missing inside his head. That can’t keep the emotions down and regulated and nice and in order any more, like it’s all always rumbling just under the surface, and at the slightest shift in the atmosphere it’ll erupt out of him.
He knows Bruce will think the same, and take it upon himself. Majestic rags of guilt he wraps around like he’s the only one with a right to them, arrogant like a Catholic monk who’s forgotten about humility, taking comfort in the brands of his self-castigation.
They’re wrong. Jason does miss the way Del would rest on his shoulder, or pipe right back atcha. He misses the strident laughter that used to echo his, and the way she flew, sharp and rapid strokes of wings. But he can still feel her as if she was here, Del’s certitude added to his own: like when he died she returned to his body, and when he returned to life she didn’t leave him.
Talia told him of the state he was in when she found him. Months lost to a zombie-like nothing. “Empty,” she said, and Jason hardly needs to have been trained by the world’s greatest detective to know that’s what she thinks it means, that Jason doesn’t have a daemon even after the Pit.
It isn’t. It’s something older – practically ancient for how long Jason’s known it.
He used to mutter things of this void to Del, once upon a time. When he was still Robin and it felt like there was this huge, gaping thing growing inside him. Tearing at things, things like his heart, or his lungs, or other things that you can’t measure so easily – like maybe his patience, or—or the distance between him and the line.
The line.
But it’s not Del. He should know; he’s the one who doesn’t have a daemon. Talia’s not convinced, but it doesn’t stop Shywar from climbing on Jason’s lap when she visits.
Of all the people Jason’s met there’s only the Joker who doesn’t have a daemon. That’s not really why Jason chooses to become Red Hood, but it’s still funnier than any joke the Joker’s come up with in the past decade.
That Jason’s going to put him down, that’s not supposed to be funny: that’s poetic justice.
Re: Red Hood.
Date: 2012-02-04 01:34 am (UTC)OF COURSE LAYLAH NEVER SETTLED.
Because Bruce is a deeply traumatized eight year old forever.EVEN IF HE WEARS THE BIG BOY CAPE NOW.Also her name reminds me of the song which is totally running through my head, except for "Laila o Laila" it's "Bruce oh Bruce", so basically how I always am while reading Batman fic ANYWAY.
I googled shrike, and that is one tough looking little bird, and thus perfect for Jason.
Also I love that Talia's daemon in a fennec fox. Because oh god, so beautiful and also, obviously Talia herself is superfoxy.
“Beloved screwed him but good,” Shywar says, non-committal, and Talia doesn’t rebuke him.
FLAILING MADLY.
HE SO DID. But to be fair the messing up was mutual. But, like, who was the adult there. (Not Jason!)
The idea that only Jason and the Joker lack daemons just ... Oh man. THAT JUST MADE ME CLUTCH MY FACE AND HOWL.
That Jason’s going to put him down, that’s not supposed to be funny: that’s poetic justice.
JAAAAAASOOOOOOON.
repost for html phail
Date: 2012-02-04 09:29 am (UTC)Laylah gets her name because it's the name of an angel midwife in Jewish tradition, and no matter what Morrison can say about Bruce being WASP, no power on Earth is going to make me believe that Martha Kane of the Gotham Kanes wasn't Jewish. (I also like the song, which doesn't hurt anything. And "Laylah" means "night" in Hebrew. All kinds of predestination here.)
Bruce's daemon has a moment of thought, and then she gets to agreeing with Jason and Del on practically everything (WHO CARES WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BAD GUYS THEY DESERVE IT), leaving Bruce to be the voice of balance.
But, like, who was the adult there. (Not Jason!)
That gets... special when you think about the issue of daemons settling. Because technically, in this world, Bruce isn't one hundred percent off his rocker when he considers Jason older.
Joker not having a daemon: my one original good idea. *toothy grin*
Re: repost for html phail
Date: 2012-02-04 05:30 pm (UTC)Also I like the idea that Bruce and Kate are related.Although, tbh, I don't think he'd be practicing.
The Joker not having a daemon is a stroke of genius. *___*