The one where everyone finds out Bruce kicked Dick out
I love aging Dick down a bit at the end of yj season 2 so he’s still in high school idk why. Like 15ish. I like the drama. The absolute heartbreak of it all. The punch in the gut everyone must feel when they remember the guy who was leading them through the invasion, who they gave such a hard time to for things mostly out of his control, who was spread so thin he almost snapped in half, was a fifteen year old AP student at Gotham Academy who somehow had the time to cover for Batman, lead the team, go undercover with Deathstroke to backup Kaldur, help Tim with his Robin training, and basically come up with the plans that saved the world all while doing math homework and studying for English tests.
So once all the League members are back on Earth and everything settles down, Bruce and Dick have a huge falling out. Bruce criticizes him for everything he did that wasn’t up to Bruce’s standards. He wasn’t a good enough Batman, he wasn’t a good enough leader, he shouldn’t have gone undercover as Renegade, he should have trained more with Tim, he should have gotten better grades. Dick felt like he was drowning under all the expectations, and he they got into a huge fight in the Batcave while Tim was upstairs with Alfred, blissfully unaware.
It wasn’t a particularly long fight, but it was heated, angry, and bloody - more so for Dick than Bruce. Dick may have been able to get a good few hits in, but he couldn’t bring himself to fight back against his dad. Or at least who he thought was his dad. But Bruce has no problem bringing up that he never adopted Dick, he had given him plenty, and he’ll continue paying for school but Dick needs to leave. Immediately. He can’t have a protege who can’t take orders, who’s subpar.
Dick feels like his insides are covered in ice. He’s leaning against the wall, gasping, sucking in air while blood drips down his face. Bruce has already left, Dick doesn’t know where to. But Dick is told not to be here by the time he gets back. He cleans up just enough to go upstairs, avoid Tim and Alfred, and quickly pack a couple bags. Just the essentials. A few sentimental things. His school stuff. His emergency cash.
Then he goes back to the cave and packs a whole bag full of tactical gear, gadgets, weapons. He takes his Nightwing suit, but he’s not sure he’ll even wear it. Looking at it just makes him sick right now.
He sets up in a safe house and resolutely doesn’t let himself start to breakdown. It will just make things more difficult. He grabs a first aid kit, sits in the bathroom, and is very methodical of how he takes care of any cuts and bruises and breaks.
It’s only a couple fingers that are broken anyway, and they’re in his left hand. It will be fine.
His lip is busted and his nose and left eye are bruised to hell, but he still has a week before school starts back up, that’s plenty of time for it to go down. He can just say he got into a fight, or was mugged or something. No one will care.
He plans on graduating at the end of the next semester anyway. He’s taken extra classes and two years of summer school for a reason. He won’t be valedictorian or anything, but he doesn’t particularly care all that much. He’d rather just be done with it.
Dick spends the next few months totally isolated. He goes to school, he trains in his safe house, and he works his own cases. He stays away from the Bat, from the Justice League, from the team. No one tries reaching out. No one calls him. He tells himself he likes it that way.
He has a night job at a seedy bar around the corner from his safe house where he goes by the name Gray Johnson, the owner not even looking at all the fake documentation Dick put together. And it turns out, he kinda likes being Gray. No one looks at him twice, no one questions him. A couple of the cooks always send him home with extra food because he stopped some rowdier customers from harassing the waitresses, and then a few weeks later stopped a robber before he could even pull his gun.
The other workers like Gray, the regulars like Gray, the owner likes Gray. It’s so much easier to pretend he really is Gray, to pretend Dick never even existed.
And if one of the cooks and a bartender and the owner see right through the shitty alias and recognize him as Bruce Wayne’s estranged ward? Well, no one ever says anything.
A few months later, Dick graduates from Gotham Academy. He’s ranked 8th in the class. He doesn’t attend the ceremony, but he picks up the diploma from the front office instead of opting to mail it to his address on file. He refuses to go back to the manor for anything.
He relocates to Blüdhaven, gets a job at a new bar with a stellar reference from his previous boss, and starts worming his way into the Blüdhaven underground to gather his own intel.
It’s almost a year after the invasion before anyone tries contacting him.
He’d been working all night, going straight into a stakeout after working a shift at the bar. The stakeout led to a fight, which led to a nasty bruise on Dick’s jaw, a busted lip, and only a slight limp. He’ll be fine, he just needs to sleep it off.
So naturally that’s when he finally receives a message on the JL communicator he doesn’t even know why he keeps. It’s a single world message. Watchtower.
He gags over the toilet for twelve minutes, tries using mouthwash only to immediately spit it out when it makes his lip sting, and then uses a handful of sink water to swallow down some painkillers before leaving.
The Watchtower was a shit show when he arrived. People running around, shouting at each other, monitors flickering between different security camera pictures and videos. Dick thinks the world must be ending or something, he’s immediately on edge and pushes every emotion into a box in his head and locks it up tight. He refuses to be a liability.
“What’s going on?” He asks when Artemis almost walks right past him. And the room freezes.
“Oh my God, Dick!” she cries, and she launches herself at him, hugging him tight. Everyone turns to them, and Dick feels like a bug under a microscope.
“Hey,” he greets her, a hand patting her back awkwardly. “What’s - uh - what’s happening? I got a message to come here?”
“What’s - what’s happening?” she repeats, pulling back from him to stare at him. Then she hits him in the chest, and he tries his best not to think abt the way his ribs were stomped on not an hour ago. “You’ve been missing, you asshole! No one has seen you in months!”
He winces a bit when she hits his chest again, and he takes a step away from her, just barely catching the way her face falls.
“I’m confused,” he admits. And several others are inching closer to him now, he feels like he’s being boxed in. “I didn’t - I wasn’t hiding or anything. No one called me until today.”
“That can’t be true,” someone - maybe Conner? - says. “Your last log is from the day of the invasion. That was a year ago.”
“Yeah.” Dick feels a little breathless. “So?”
They’re all quiet, and he hates the way he can feel them staring at him. At the bruising on his face. At the way he’s favoring his right leg. At the way the Nightwing suit is a bit looser than it had been a year ago, his hair a bit longer and messier. He knows he looks like shit. He doesn’t need them to point it out.
“Dick?” M’gann asks. “What happened?”
Dick doesn’t speak for a moment, trying to figure out what exactly she’s asking. He hates the way everyone is still staring at him. He hates the way Batman is lingering in the back.
“What do you want from me?” His voice is soft as he asks, almost afraid of what their answer will be. He’s suddenly so tired. He just wants to go to bed.
“We want to know why you dropped off the face of the Earth,” someone says harshly. “Batman said he hadn’t seen you since a couple days after the invasion. Wanna tell us why you left?”
“Why I left?” Dick repeats, the words bouncing around his head. Then he snaps his neck to glare at Bruce and spits out, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“What, you guys had another fight so you disappeared for a year?”
“Fuck you, Tim,” Dick snaps. “You have no clue what you’re talking about, so just shut the fuck up!”
The anger, the rage, the despair, the abandonment that he’d buried since he left the manor all comes crashing back, and he feels like he’s drowning, like he can’t catch his breath.
“You all think I look bad now? I’m practically peachy compared to how he left me last time!”
“Dick, this is not-“
“Fuck you!” Dick’s chokes out, his voice cracking. “If you didn’t want them knowing, you shouldn’t have let them call me up here! What, did you not want them to know that you beat the shit outta me last time we talked? That you pointed out that you conveniently never adopted me and then kicked me out while I was still bleeding on the fucking floor? Was that a secret?”
The gasps from around the room don’t register in his head, he doesn’t see the shocked faces from everyone around him, all he can see is the way Batman’s expression grows darker and darker under the cowl.
“Sorry to be such an inconvenience for you,” Dick drawls out, backing up towards the zeta tubes. “I know you were so embarrassed to have such a subpar protege, but don’t worry, I won’t get in your way ever again. Not like anyone here actually wants me around anyway.”
He hates the way his voice shakes with that last sentence. He hadn’t actually meant to say it out loud, but his arms are tingling and his lungs feel both too full and too empty at the same time, and he just wants to leave before Batman decides to come any closer to him.
He turns back to the zeta tubes to go back home before any of the several voices from behind him can finish what they’re saying. His head is swimming and his eyes can’t focus on anything. He rushes home, tearing off his suit and scrubbing the rest of the dirt and blood and grime off before he remembers the JL communicator still sitting on his couch.
He chucks it across the room. Twice. Then stomps on it for good measure.
Then he finally falls into bed just as the sun rises. And if his pillow is getting damp beneath his face as he tries to block out the light, well, he’ll just flip it over and pretend it’s fine.
okay but like think about if drarry was a thing before the golden trio kiddos went hunting horcruxes and draco went with them– yes i know this has been talked about before– and the snatchers still brought them to malfoy manor. firstly, without draco’s gay ass there to identify him, nobody can be sure it’s actually harry.
secondly… lucius and narcissa immediately recognizing their son, even if hermione put a stinging jinx on him or not. they know it’s draco, and narcissa can’t bite back her sobs, and lucius is staring at him like he’s never seen him before– everyone in the room can tell this isn’t because lucius is pretending not to recognize draco to protect him. no, he honestly never suspected his son would switch sides, honestly never recognized the good in him.
and when lucius says ‘draco’ in that warning tone that he knows so well, and draco growls ‘go to hell,’ narcissa loses all hope of not crying. she’s been crying since they got here, since she recognized her son, but there’s no hope of stopping now. not for a long time.
she expects them to kill her son soon, she’s prepared to beg for them to kill her first, but what she doesn’t expect? she doesn’t expect her own sister to point her wand at her nephew and scream ‘crucio!’
narcissa screams.
draco screams.
hermione screams, begging bellatrix to stop, because even if she hated draco from eleven to sixteen, he’s her friend now, and she can’t stand to watch her friend going through this pain.
ron’s struggling even more now, because even if he wont say it out loud, he’s friends with the ferret.
and harry?
harry fucking roars.
the chandelier bursts into a million pieces, the windows shatter, and every single one of the death eaters is fuckin THROWN against the wall.narcissa, ron, hermione, draco and harry are the only ones standing, completely unharmed by the flying glass. ron, hermione and narcissa are all staring at harry in AWE and draco’s on the floor, gasping harry’s name over and over again.
and then narcissa is rushing to her son, kneeling next to him, trying to get him to sit up, calling house elves to get him soup and water and trying to pick him up so he can get to bed.
but harry takes draco into his own arms, and says ‘i don’t know how long they’ll be asleep, and we can’t risk them calling voldemort here.’ narcissa’s staring at him in disbelief, and hermione takes over. ‘mrs. malfoy, we’ll take containers of soup and water for him, and i promise he’ll get the rest he needs, but harry’s right, we need to go.’
it takes a couple of minutes, but narcissa agrees, and harry tells her to go to the wall and pretend she was knocked out too. she tells them about luna being in the dungeon, because she’s been against imprisoning a child from the beginning and if there’s a chance they can get luna out, she’s taking it. narcissa casts a glamour over herself to make it look like the glass hit her, and goes to slump next to her husband. the kiddos get all the soup and such, and hurry down to get luna and the others out of the dungeon, before apparating to the beach house.
and then harry spends days attending to draco’s every need, even though draco repeatedly insists he’s fine, and it isn’t necessary, because harry’s Very Gay For This Boy And He Has To Make Sure He’s Okay It’s Very Important.
I think one of the most under rated things about kaz brekker is that...he's funny
like so many dark edgy ya boys are brooding loners who aren't good with people but kaz is such a subversion of these traits
in the first scene we see him through inej's point of view he's cracking jokes with the dregs, he makes smalltalk about weather with the black tips, like Inej makes a point to note when he changes from being Kaz to being Dirty hands, who is all those edgy tropes but kaz isn't always Dirtyhands
"you're passable at demo you're excellent at hostage"
"why don't you pay someone to burn your Kruge for you thats what the big players do"
literally anything he says to Matthias when he's trying to goad him
like kaz is not some humorless sad boi, even his eternal monolog can be funny
"I definitely didnt tell them to blow up the lab"
"maybe I'm finally going to pay for all those tree spirit jokes"
also the entire scene with Van Eck when Van Ecks like "the best thief to send would be the guy who stole my deKapple" and Kaz just straight face saying "yeah. too bad we don't know who took it huh?" and then a scene later telling Inej to move it from its UNDER HIS BED cause he didn't even care enough to sell it
like please appreciate that for all he can be cruel, go too far, or cross lines like...Kaz Brekker is fucking funny
some of you guys will find ANYTHING to nitpick re: macgyver either because your favorite ship isn't front and center or because a certain actor (whom i love dearly) isn't on the show anymore and i'm done with it. i know i'll get unfollowed for this but i have to speak my mind or i'll go insane.
i miss jack too (every damn day, clearly since i write fanfic with him in it) but like holy crap... if it bothers you that much stop watching and let people enjoy it even if you don't enjoy it anymore. also it was l*nkov who killed off jack, leanna, jill, charlie, james etc, didn't give desi any character development and started the codex story/the stupid love triangle.
and speaking of love triangles they're always stupid and you can't change my mind. i don't ship macriley or macdesi, but i can tell you from experience that ship wars destroy shows. if you stop watching the show because your ship isn't featured in every episode there won't be a show to watch.
i believe this new group of writers is trying to right the wrongs caused by l*nkov but between a literal PANDEMIC and being obligated by CBS to use old episodes it's been slow. the episodes they've managed to show us have been awesome, and the cast and crew have worked their asses off to make them. it would be nice to see a little appreciation for that instead of complaining about what you wish the show was instead, or because what you want isn't happening fast enough.
Me: *screams* Leave Baz alone and let him be happy because this boy has gone through so much that he really isn’t a boy anymore and he’s been watching his boyfriend suffer and thinks it’s all because of what he is doing and wants to reach out to his boyfriend but doesn’t know how because they are both struggling so much but they want and love each other so much and can we just let them be happy please
Me: *calming down but still distressed* Additionally, leave Simon alone, too, he’s been through just about as much and doesn’t deserve to suffer like this, can we just let him be happy please because he and Baz deserve the world and Simon also thinks his boyfriend suffering is his fault, but really they’ve been so fucked up by the people who have abused and mistreated them their entire lives.
Me: *going to pick up Wayward Son and placing it lovingly back on my bookshelf* Let’s let Penelope have a happy ending, too. She’s been through so much as well, it cannot have been easy being friends with the Chosen One at Watford because being in the direct line of Simon’s magic is akin to standing near an H-bomb when he goes off. Penelope has also spent so much of the series helping and worrying about her friends that she really needs to take some quality time for herself.
I missed Mac in hospital gown smh, when is he gonna stay in hospital again where is my sweet whump and hurt/comfort? I mean he got hit by a car, murdoc beat the shit out of him and he just got that plaster thingy? Where is the aftercare? Give me my MacInHospital2k21 please
Don't get me wrong, I love Mac, Riley and Desi as a character but the romance sideplot lowkey irked me. I love the Harcore-badass-terrifying woman with a soft-kindhearted-warm guy otp so much but MacDesi, it just doesn't really worked. In S3, I almost got hooked because they got their cute moments and the trying to get to know each other phase although the feelings itself came out of nowhere but it got railed in S4. It looks too forced, too sudden and too much unnecessary drama. Desi was reduced to Mac's love interest and bodyguard with no actual personality. The relationship is too hurried thus there's a very thin layer of trust making the catastrophe in S4 and resulting in her being a hated character. She didn't get her chance to grow, and I feel like they're trying to cover it up by giving her lots of screentime in S5. And now Riley, who's dating Aubrey at the start of S4 and suddenly realized her feelings for Mac? No, I have always seen them as sorta Spy Siblings y'know. It just feels weird and I know for the fact that Jack will find it weird too at first because they are his kids? His Kids dating each other? Maybe he'll come around to it but I don't think he'll agree that much because dating with people who you work with always got disastrous result. Riley is very dear to me and I don't like seeing her hurting and pining for Mac like that. We all love a slow burn romance but I just want Riley to be happy you know. She went through a lot too, shitty father, her time in prison, her traumas and they didn't really address it. She deserved better. Also, remember in 3x20, when Bozer said, Mac's head is always a little bit messed up when he's dating someone, like Nikki and that girl in 7th grade. Bozer is someone who knows Mac since he was a kid so I'm gonna trust his judgement in this. Mac is someone with a big heart and an emotional person, when he love, he love big. The stoic exterior is just a facade that was probably ingrained in him bcz of James and him being a spy of some sort. I'm sorry for ranting but the show is playing with me, I rather they just focus on found family trope instead of trying to force romance into it like this. The conclusion is, Macgyver deserved better, Riley deserved better and Desi deserved better.
As happy as I am that we are getting macriley pining scenes, I lowkey really miss seasons 1-3 where they were unaware. Like, I would rather watch that than watch Riley get fucked over for the thousandth time while Desi lowkey emotionally abuses Mac and calls it love.
If you receive this you make somebody happy. Go and send this to ten of your followers who make you happy or somebody you think needs cheering up. If you get it back even better.💗💫
I just saw this and you have no idea how happy you make me ❤😭 even better that it's my birthday today. I LOVE YOUU 💕
