content batfam & male! reader, absolute wonder woman inspired, magic, circe as a complicated mother figure, you have a skeletal pegasus, amazon reader, demons/monsters, blood, grief themes, references to genocide, abandonment, traumatic upbringing, mild body horror, implied child endangerment in backstory
masterlist
wordcount 4k
when gotham’s sky tears open and demons spill into the streets, the batfamily expects another nightmare—but instead they find you: the last son of the amazons, raised in hell by circe and armed with a sword, a crimson lasso, and a skeletal pegasus. you arrive carrying a grief older than gotham itself, but your power is matched only by your refusal to let cruelty define you. suspicious at first, the bats soon realise you are not there to conquer their city—you are there to protect it, and maybe, against all odds, find a family among its shadows.
The first time Gotham saw you, the sky split open.
Not metaphorically. Gotham had metaphors enough. Gotham was built on gargoyles, grief, and tax fraud. It did not need poetry to be dramatic.
But that night, the clouds above the East End tore apart like black silk under a blade.
A red wound opened in the heavens.
And something fell out.
Barbara saw it first. From the Clocktower, her screens flashed crimson. Satellite feed warped. Street cameras blanked one by one, not from interference, but from fear—as if the machines themselves had looked at what was coming and decided, wisely, to close their eyes.
“Batman,” Oracle said, voice sharp over comms. “We have an atmospheric breach over Park Row.”
Bruce was already moving. “Alien?”
“Magic signature,” Tim cut in, fingers flying across his gauntlet. “Heavy magic signature. Like, we-might-need-Zatanna-heavy.”
“Constantine heavy?” Dick asked.
A pause.
Barbara said, “Worse.”
Jason’s voice crackled in. “Cool. Love that. Always wanted to get eaten by a sky demon on a Tuesday.”
“It’s Thursday,” Damian said.
“In Gotham? Same thing.”
Then the thing hit the ground.
The impact cratered the street and shattered every window for three blocks. Cars screamed. Alarms wailed. Birds launched from rooftops like scraps of night given panic. A wave of heat rolled through the East End, smelling of iron, ash, pomegranate, and something older than language.
Batman landed on a rooftop first, cape snapping behind him.
Nightwing dropped beside him. Red Robin followed, then Spoiler, Signal, Batgirl, Robin, Orphan, and finally Red Hood, who landed with both guns drawn and his whole posture saying absolutely not.
They looked down.
In the middle of the crater stood a horse.
Or what had once been a horse. Its bones were black as volcanic glass. Its wings were enormous, skeletal things threaded with ember-red veins of magic. Its mane burned without smoke. Its eye sockets held twin coals, ancient and patient.
On its back sat you.
You were tall, broad-shouldered, and armoured in black and dark bronze, with red cloth trailing from your waist like a banner soaked in sunset. Your arms were bare except for bracers carved with symbols none of them recognised. Tattoos curled over your skin in gold and ink-black lines—spells, maybe. Warnings, probably.
Across your back rested a sword too large to be reasonable. At your hip hung a lasso, not golden, not bright, but crimson-dark and alive-looking, as though it had been braided from sunset, blood, and old promises.
Your face was hidden beneath a helm shaped like something between a warrior’s crown and a beast’s skull.
For one breath, no one moved.
Then Jason said, “Nope.”
You turned your head toward him.
Jason lifted one gun slightly. “Respectfully.”
The horse snorted flame.
“Very respectfully,” Jason amended.
Batman raised a hand, signalling the others to hold.
You swung one leg over the saddle and dropped to the broken street. The ground cracked beneath your boots.
You looked around Gotham.
Not with disgust. Not with fear.
With grief.
Like you had seen worse places. Like you had loved worse places. Like you were already deciding this one deserved saving.
Bruce hated that most of all.
“Identify yourself,” Batman called.
You looked up at him. The helm folded away from your face like smoke pulled into metal.
You were younger than Bruce expected.
Not a boy. Not quite. But not old enough to carry eyes like that.
Your eyes were dark and luminous, reflecting fire that wasn’t there. There was ash in your hair. Blood on your knuckles. A cut across your cheek already closing.
You opened your mouth.
The first language you spoke made the air scream.
Everyone flinched except Cass, who tilted her head, fascinated.
You frowned, then tried another.
The streetlights flickered.
“Okay,” Steph said, “that one made my fillings feel haunted.”
You tried a third language.
Damian stiffened.
“That is ancient Greek,” he said.
You looked at him with sudden relief.
Then, carefully, like the words were old tools you had not held in years, you said, “I seek the city’s protector.”
Bruce stepped off the roof and dropped into the crater. “I’m here.”
Your gaze moved over him.
The cowl. The cape. The symbol.
Your expression changed.
Not recognition.
Understanding.
“You dress as a nightmare,” you said.
Bruce said nothing.
You stepped closer. “But you stand between the dark and the living.”
Dick’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay, I like him.”
Jason muttered, “You would.”
Bruce ignored them. “Why are you here?”
You looked past him, toward the alleyways, the rooftops, the trembling civilians peering from behind broken glass.
Then you looked at the sky.
The red wound had not closed.
Something moved behind it. Something with wings. Something hungry.
You reached over your shoulder and drew your sword.
It came free with a sound like thunder kneeling.
“I am here,” you said, “because Hell has misplaced its teeth.”
And then the first demon fell.
You had been born where no child should have survived.
Not born, exactly.
Made. Stolen. Saved.
The truth depended on who told it.
Circe told it like this: “You were a punishment.”
She told you this while brushing ash from your hair with fingers that had turned kings into swine and monsters into men.
“You were given to me by gods who thought they were clever. A child. A boy-child, no less. The last son of a people they had already broken. They dropped you into Hell and commanded me to let you die.”
You had been six years old, sitting cross-legged beside a pool of black water, watching skeletal fish swim in circles beneath the surface.
“What did you do?” you asked.
Circe’s mouth twisted. “I waited.”
“For me to die?”
“Yes.”
You considered this.
“Rude.”
She laughed then, which was rare. Circe’s laughter was sharp and bright and usually meant someone was about to regret a decision.
“Yes,” she said. “Very rude.”
But you had not died.
The Wild Isle had tried. Serpents came first. You grabbed one by the jaw before you could walk and threw it into a thorn tree.
The bone-wolves came when you were three. You bit one back.
The harpies came when you were five. You cried afterwards because one had a broken wing, and Circe found you trying to splint it with reeds and funeral thread.
That was when she stopped waiting for you to die.
That was when she began teaching you to live.
Not gently. Never gently. Circe was not made of lullabies.
She taught you letters by carving them into stone with a knife. She taught you magic by dropping you into dreams and telling you to find your way out. She taught you swordplay because monsters did not care if your heart was kind.
“Again,” she would say, as you spat blood into black sand.
“I am tired.”
“Then be tired and still dangerous.”
So you became both. You learned the names of stars no mortal world remembered. You learned to bind wounds with spider silk and moon ash. You learned to listen to the dead without letting them crawl into your mouth. You learned that kindness was not softness.
Soft things were crushed in Hell. Kind things grew teeth.
Circe never told you what you were. Only what you must not become.
“Do not become a god,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because gods call cruelty justice when they are bored.”
“Am I a god?”
“No.”
“What am I?”
She looked at you then, and for the first time, her face softened. “You are mine.”
For years, that was enough.
Until you found the word.
Amazon.
It was hidden in a book that screamed when opened. Circe had locked it beneath seven curses and one very dramatic skull. You were fifteen, curious, and stupid in the specific way young warriors with healing factors tended to be.
The moment you read the word, the room went silent. Even Hell seemed to hold its breath.
Circe found you standing over the book.
Her face went white.
You had seen her face covered in demon blood. You had seen her laugh in the court of Hades. You had seen her threaten a mountain until it moved. You had never seen her afraid.
“What is an Amazon?” you asked.
Circe closed the book.
Then she sat down as though her bones had become old all at once.
“Your beginning,” she said.
“Not my mother?”
Her eyes flashed. “I am your mother.”
You looked down. “I know.”
The anger left her. She reached for you, then stopped herself, because affection was still a language both of you spoke badly.
“The Amazons were warriors,” she said. “Scholars. Healers. Builders. A people made of defiance. They lived beneath a sky that did not hate them.”
“Where are they?”
Circe said nothing.
You understood before she answered.
Hell had many languages. Silence was one of them.
You became still. “All of them?”
“Gone,” she said. “Hidden. Banished. Buried. Depends which god is lying.”
“And me?”
“You were taken before you could know them.”
“Why?”
“Because prophecy is a disease gods catch when they fear losing power.”
That night, you walked to the edge of the Wild Isle and screamed until the dead screamed back.
You did not hate Circe for hiding it. That came later.
Then passed.
Love, you learned, could survive betrayal. It just limped afterwards.
When you were grown, you forged yourself into something Hell could not swallow.
You made armour from the shield of a dead tyrant. You carved your bracers from the gates of a prison that had held innocent souls. You won your sword from Athena’s forgotten altar, not because the goddess gifted it, but because you bled for it and asked politely after winning.
Your lasso came from something worse.
A basilisk’s hide. Prometheus’s stolen fire. Demeter’s grief.
Circe’s hands. Your mother braided it in silence while you watched.
“What does it do?” you asked.
“It shows a soul the weight of what it has done.”
“That sounds cruel.”
“It is honest.”
“Those are not always different.”
Circe’s smile was sad. “No. They are not.”
You touched the crimson rope. It pulsed like a second heart.
“I will use it carefully,” you said.
Circe looked at you then with pride so fierce it almost looked like pain.
“That,” she whispered, “is what frightens them most about you.”
In Gotham, demons poured from the sky.
The Bats moved like a single organism with too many knives.
Batman struck first, explosive gel blasting a winged creature off course before it could snatch a civilian. Nightwing flipped across a streetlamp and drove both escrima sticks into a demon’s skull. Red Hood fired blessed rounds—because apparently he did listen to Constantine sometimes—and shouted, “I knew buying these was gonna pay off!”
Spoiler ducked under a claw. “You bought anti-demon bullets and didn’t tell us?”
“They were on sale!”
“There was a sale on holy ammo?”
“This is Gotham!”
You fought differently from all of them.
Not like a vigilante.
Like a myth.
You moved through the street with terrifying grace, sword flashing in arcs of red light. Each spell you cast burned symbols into the air. Your skeletal Pegasus shrieked overhead, trampling demons mid-flight, its wings beating sparks into the rain.
A demon lunged at Robin.
Damian raised his katana, ready.
You appeared between them. Your bracer caught the demon’s claws. The impact cracked the asphalt. With your free hand, you seized the creature by the throat and slammed it into the ground hard enough to turn the crater deeper.
Damian stared.
“I had that,” he snapped.
You looked at him. “Yes.”
That seemed to annoy him more.
You kicked the demon away and turned. “But now you have it with all your limbs attached.”
Jason barked a laugh over comms. “Oh, I like him too.”
“I do not,” Damian said instantly.
Cass landed beside you, silent as breath.
You glanced at her. She glanced at your sword.
You glanced at the demon behind her.
She nodded once.
You spun left. She spun right. The demon between you did not get a chance to regret its life choices.
When it fell, Cass looked at you again.
“You dance,” she said.
You blinked, surprised.
Then you smiled. “So do you.”
Cass smiled back, small and pleased.
Bruce saw it from across the street and filed it away under dangerous: has already won Cassandra’s approval.
That list was very short.
Another beast slammed into the road near Tim, its mouth opening wide enough to swallow him whole. Tim threw a disc into its throat. The explosion staggered it, but did not drop it.
A massive shape forced itself through the wound in the sky.
It had too many wings. Too many mouths. Too many human hands.
Duke’s light flared gold as he looked up. “That thing has a core.”
Bruce’s voice cut through comms. “Signal?”
“I can see it,” Duke said. “Centre mass, under the bone plating. It’s not just a demon. It’s a gate anchor.”
“Meaning?” Jason demanded.
Tim answered, grim. “Meaning if we kill everything else but leave that thing alive, the portal stays open.”
You stared up at the creature.
Its shadow covered the block.
Your jaw tightened.
“That is a grief-eater,” you said.
Dick landed beside you. “Sorry, a what-eater?”
“It feeds on sorrow. Fear. Regret. Cities like this are banquets.”
The entirety of the Bats went very quiet.
Because Gotham was many things. A banquet of grief was definitely one of them.
The creature shrieked.
Across the street, civilians collapsed to their knees. A woman began sobbing. A man clutched his chest. A child screamed for a mother who was right beside him.
The sound clawed inside everyone’s skull.
Bruce staggered. Jason went rigid. Dick sucked in a breath like he had been punched. Tim’s hand flew to his bo staff, white-knuckled. Damian’s eyes widened for one terrible second before fury covered whatever memory had surfaced.
The grief-eater was not attacking their bodies.
It was opening doors.
Every loss. Every failure. Every grave.
You saw it happen. And something ancient inside you answered.
You wrapped the crimson lasso around your own wrist.
Circe’s voice echoed in memory.
Do not use it on yourself unless you are prepared to meet everything you are.
You pulled tight.
Pain hit you like a god’s fist.
Hell. The island. The first serpent. Circe turning away so you would not see her cry. The word Amazon burning behind your eyes. The empty history where your people should have been. Every monster you had killed. Every monster you had spared. Every time you wondered whether mercy was just another blade you had not learned to sharpen.
You dropped to one knee.
Jason saw.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Big guy’s down!”
“I am not down,” you snarled.
The lasso burned brighter.
Your Pegasus screamed.
You rose.
The grief-eater turned all its mouths toward you.
You looked up.
“You are hungry?” you asked. Your voice carried through the street, through the storm, through the open wound between worlds. “Then choke.”
You launched yourself upward.
Not jumped.
Launched.
The street shattered beneath you.
Your Pegasus met you halfway, and you landed on its back as it climbed into the storm. Lightning wrapped around your sword. Your armour burned with red sigils.
Below, the Bats moved.
“Red Robin,” Batman said.
“Already on it.” Tim’s voice shook only slightly. “Signal, mark the core.”
“Marked.”
“Oracle?”
Barbara’s voice came through, fierce and clear. “I’m mapping the portal frequency. Spoiler, Batgirl, herd the civilians south. Nightwing, Hood, clear the rooftops.”
Jason reloaded. “With pleasure.”
Dick swung toward a fire escape. “Try not to flirt with death too hard.”
“Death flirts with me.”
“Unfortunately true.”
You heard them. These strange warriors in black and yellow and red. These children of a man who dressed as fear but gathered broken things around him like stars.
You had known many kinds of family.
Blood family stolen before memory. Chosen family built in Hell.
Now this.
A battlefield family. Brief, bright, immediate.
You drove your sword into the grief-eater’s side.
It screamed.
Its memories poured into you.
Not thoughts. Wounds.
You saw gods laughing. Cities burning. Children abandoned. Soldiers dying afraid. Mothers bargaining with empty skies.
You saw Gotham too.
An alley. Pearls. Blood on pavement. A crowbar. A warehouse. A small body in bright colours. A father too late.
You nearly fell.
Then Batman’s grapple hooked onto the creature’s bone plating beside you.
He slammed into its back, cape whipping around him.
“You’re carrying too much,” he said.
You looked at him.
Rain streaked down his cowl.
You laughed once, breathless and bitter. “You would know.”
Bruce did not deny it. Instead, he planted a charge against the creature’s spine. “On my mark.”
You tightened your grip on the sword. “I can hold it.”
“You don’t have to.”
That hit harder than the grief-eater.
For one second, you were a child again, standing on black sand, asking Circe what you were.
You are mine.
Now Batman, impossible man of shadows, stood beside you on the back of a demon and told you without softness, without poetry, without even knowing you: you are not alone in this fight.
Below, Duke fired a beam of light directly into the creature’s chest. The bone plating turned translucent.
“There!” Tim shouted. “Core exposed!”
You and Bruce moved at the same time.
His charge detonated. Your sword came down.
The grief-eater split open in a storm of ash and red lightning. The portal screamed.
You threw the lasso. It caught the edge of the wound in the sky.
Every muscle in your body strained as you pulled.
The portal resisted like a living thing. Hell did not release what belonged to it easily.
Then Jason’s grappling line shot up and wrapped around the lasso.
Another line followed.
Dick. Then Tim. Then Damian.
Steph. Cass. Duke. Bruce.
One by one, the Bats anchored themselves to the street, rooftops, broken cars, and each other.
Jason grunted. “This is the dumbest tug-of-war I’ve ever been part of.”
Steph strained beside him. “You’ve been in multiple?”
“It’s Gotham!”
You pulled. They pulled with you.
The sky stitched itself shut.
When the wound finally sealed, silence fell so hard it felt holy.
You dropped from the sky. Your Pegasus dissolved into embers before reforming behind you, offended but intact.
You landed on one knee.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Damian marched up to you.
He looked furious.
“You are reckless,” he said.
You blinked.
Jason wheezed. “Oh, that’s rich.”
Damian ignored him. “You used an unknown magical weapon on yourself while engaging a superior enemy above a civilian population.”
You stared at him.
Then, slowly, you smiled. “You were worried.”
“I was tactically displeased.”
“Worried.”
“Tt.”
You bowed your head slightly. “Thank you, little warrior.”
Tim nodded. “Damian’s going to pretend to hate it.”
Cass said, “Already is.”
Jason holstered his guns and looked you over. “So. Hell prince. Amazon guy. Demon cowboy. What’s your deal?”
You considered the question.
You told them your name. “I am the last son of a murdered people, raised by a witch in Hell, bound by old laws to return there one month each year. I came to this world because monsters followed a path they should not have found.”
Silence.
Dick blinked. “That is… a very complete answer.”
Jason looked at Bruce. “See? Communication. Wild concept.”
Bruce ignored him again, with the practised strength of a father of many annoying children.
“You said monsters followed a path,” Bruce said. “Who opened it?”
Your expression darkened. “I do not know.”
Barbara spoke into their ears. “I might. The portal signature left residue. It’s not random. Someone in Gotham was calling it.”
Bruce’s mouth tightened.
“Of course they were,” Tim muttered.
You looked toward the city.
Gotham looked back. Broken windows. Sirens. Smoke. People helping strangers stand. A child hugging their mother. A man giving his coat to someone shaking. Night blooming over everything like a bruise.
“This city,” you said softly, “is wounded.”
Bruce followed your gaze. “Yes.”
“But not dead.”
“No.”
You looked at him. “Then I will help.”
Bruce studied you.
Everyone expected suspicion. Interrogation. Contingency planning so loud it could be heard from space.
And yes, Bruce was already thinking of weaknesses. Magic. Lasso. Possible divine origin. Emotional volatility. Loyalty to Circe. Unknown political relationship with Hell.
But he was also looking at the blood on your hands, none of it civilian.
The way you had thrown yourself between Damian and danger. The way Cass stood near you without fear. The way Duke’s light hadn’t recoiled from you.
The way you looked at Gotham, not as a battlefield to conquer, but as a wound to bind.
Batman nodded once. “Then we talk.”
Jason groaned. “Translation: Cave interrogation.”
“Medical evaluation first,” Alfred said over comms.
You froze.
Another voice. Calm. British. Terrifying in a way no demon had ever managed.
“Who is that?” you asked.
Dick grinned. “That’s Alfred.”
“Your king?”
Jason lost it.
Bruce sighed.
Damian looked deeply offended. “Pennyworth is not our king.”
Tim said, “I mean…”
Steph added, “Spiritually…”
Cass nodded.
Duke shrugged. “He does rule.”
Alfred’s voice remained perfectly composed. “I am merely the butler. However, if you are bleeding on Master Bruce’s pavement, I must insist you come inside.”
You stared.
Then whispered, “Your butler commands warriors?”
Jason clapped you on the shoulder. “Welcome to the family dynamic, Hellboy.”
You looked at his hand.
Jason immediately removed it. “Sorry. Boundaries.”
But you smiled.
It was small. Tired.
Real.
“I have never met a butler,” you said.
Dick slung an arm around your shoulders like you hadn’t just fallen out of Hell riding a skeletal Pegasus. “Oh, buddy. You’re about to meet the butler.”
Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You are all impossible,” he said.
You glanced at him.
“No,” you said, voice quiet as ash settling after war. “I was told that once.”
The family went still.
Your eyes lifted to the sealed sky.
“Impossible things survive,” you said. “That is why the gods fear them.”
No one had a joke for that.
Not even Jason.
Then your Pegasus nudged Damian with its skull.
Damian stared at it. The horse stared back.
“…Father,” Damian said stiffly.
“No,” Bruce said immediately.
“I have not asked anything yet.”
“No.”
You tilted your head. “The steed likes him.”
“I do not like it,” Damian said.
The Pegasus lowered its flaming skull until its forehead touched Damian’s chest.
Damian went rigid.
Cass smiled.
Steph whispered, “Oh my god, the Hell horse adopted him.”
Jason whispered back, “This night rules.”
Damian, very carefully, touched the Pegasus between the eyes.
The flames did not burn him.
Your smile softened.
Bruce watched the moment with the weary knowledge that his life had just become at least thirty per cent more mythological.
Then he turned toward the Batmobile.
“Everyone, back to the Cave.”
You followed, sword on your back, lasso at your hip, ash in your hair, Gotham’s rain washing Hell from your armour but not from your bones.
You had been raised in a place without stars.
Now you walked among a family made of them.
Broken stars. Angry stars. Lonely stars. Stars that bit.
But stars all the same.
And for the first time since leaving the Wild Isle, you wondered if maybe survival was not the only impossible thing you were meant for.
My first Grumley request!! I've always wondered if people wanted me to write for him -- I took this on a bit of a silly path, (work kind of bled through into this prompt, lol), but I'd absolutely be down to write serious stuff with him. Regardless, enjoy!!
"Grumley, you've gotta take the medicine, it'll make you feel better."
Ah, Spring. Its a beautiful time for much of the world, full of life and rejuvenation, but for Grumley? It's anything but. Alas, it's simply the life of a pug -- his body doesn't quite agree with the influx of pollen and rain, and it certainly doesn't help that he's constantly traipsing through the woods in that hot and stuffy armor of his. All in all, springtime makes for one very itchy, very fussy pug.
He whines, hiding his face in your hands -- he's all but laying in your lap at this point, having been at this battle for the better part of a half an hour. You're glad he's taken off his armor for the day, at least. Its funny in a way, to think that such a brave knight such as he could be defeated by a tiny little pill. You've considered getting him on an injectable medication so you two don't have to go through this every day, but with his fear of needles, even going to the doctor once a month would be a nightmare.
Besides, with you all constantly moving, the new patient fees would probably put Booker six feet under.
"But it tastes so horrible! I don't like it!"
"Which is why you take it with food and water, so you don't have to taste it," you sigh, "Come on hun, you're a grown man. Don't make me wrestle you."
A scratch behind the ears nets you a happy little tail wag, and its just then that a thought blooms in your mind.
"Can you do it for me?" You ask.
He whines, and you press further.
"My knight? My strong, brave, fearless protector?"
That makes him pause, and while he nuzzles into your hands one more time, its just a moment more before he takes a deep breath and rises.
"Yeah, yeah, I can do this! Knights aren't afraid of medicine!" He outstretches his paw, and you place the pill in his palm. "I need to stay strong, and if that means taking my medicine, then so be it."
He breathes deeply, and raises his paw to his face… before reconsidering: "…can you hide it in a meatball for me?"
"Sure, Grumley."
"…And can we cuddle afterwards?"
"Always. You've gotta let me put your Animax on first, though."
"Deal."
Prompt: Orange - Healing
Future orange requests might connect to different prompts! <3 Thank you for reading, and happy pride! <3
Firstly I wanna say sorry for taking so long for the people who saw my original post 😭 Ive been mostly procrastinating (so much so that my artstyle changed like 4 times LMFAO).
Here is the original post I made about this concept
So basically this is just an idea of how i'd make a DLC about the RE8 lords cuz lets be honest THEY DESERVED ONE. So in my concept, instead of playing as the lords, you'd play as one of the people in their lives (whether significant or insignificant) and experience the lords in a different perspective. Some are actual characters in the RE8 lore based off of the files, and some are just ocs i made
The Maid (The Dimitrescu Storyline)
The Gardener (The Beneviento Storyline)
The Experiment (The Moreau Storyline)
The Assistant (The Heisenberg Storyline)
I'm going to have to put Miranda's section in another post because it's way too long 😭
