Okay so I’ve been thinking about rwby a lot recently and one of the things I was disappointed in in v8 (from a long list) was that when Yang fell, I actually believed they might’ve just killed a main character. And then the second the next gal fell, I was so mad because I knew they weren’t actually dead, and some bullshit was gonna go down. If they wanted to end on a “they might die!” cliffhanger, they shouldn’t have axed the whole team. So I wanted to do a little rewrite. Cut bc holy shit this got long
So Yang protects Ruby, having her aura break from Neo’s devastating attack. Neo keeps attacking Ruby, distracting her from using her silver eyes on Cinder. Yang’s being careful due to her aura breaking, maybe she even lost her robot arm to the void. Then Cinder bowls Neo over in her haste to hit Ruby. Yang, injured, sees her chance to remove Neo from the fight. She decides to sacrifice herself and tackles Neo off the edge, both of them falling. The rest of the fight continues (in my perfect version, Jaune heals Penny bc HOLY SHIT WHY WOULD YOU BRING HER BACK JUST TO KILL HER AND ALSO HAVE THE LITERAL HEALER KILL HER JFC) and the rest of them arrive in Vacuo.
We spend three episodes in the kingdom, working through refugee housing, arranging the huntsman to protect the borders against increased grimm, and the vault. Maybe there’s a fun shopping segment where everyone gets new desert outfits. It could be an attempt by JNR to pick up their spirits. Team RWBY (minus Y) is mourning Yang, Qrow is desperately trying to keep everyone’s spirits up despite the fact he just lost a niece. That’d be a cute scene actually, Ruby yelling at Qrow, asking why he’s acting so damn happy. And Qrow yells back “I already lost one niece, I don’t want to lose another!”
And then the fourth episode starts. The camera pans over a sandy landscape. We think it’s the desert, until a wave laps at the bottom of the scene. And then, we see Yang. She brushes herself off, maybe makes some quip about the afterlife being different than she imagined. And then starts exploring.
I think I’d change up the Everafter a lot. The fact that it’s “just Wonderland” is something I’ve seen lots of people complain about. The exact specifics I don’t have worked out yet, but I have a specific scene in mind. Back on the storytelling grind, Yang eventually comes across Neo. She hasn’t upgraded her semblance yet, but Yang is still down an arm. Until the noise brings a Jabberwocker towards them. Neo runs and Yang tries to fight, until she realizes that the Jabberwocker relies on noise. It turns to go after Neo, as in her panic she’s crashing through the landscape. Yang decides to save Neo. Maybe this takes place in the looping jungle, so Yang sets up a noisy trap. She snags Neo and sets off the trap, distracting the Jabberwocker.
Neo pulls away, but doesn’t attack again. Yang sighs, saying “Look, we don’t like each other. But I have no idea where we are, and I’m guessing you don’t either. So until we figure out where we are, and how to get back, how about a truce?” Yang holds out her hand to shake. In response, Neo pulls out Yang’s missing arm and shakes her hand with it.
We spend the rest of the season swapping between Vacuo and the Everafter. We get Ruby angsting about her leadership, since she feels like she got her sister killed. We get the Ozs trying to hold off the merger while working with the Vacuo Headmaster and Council to balance everything. Maybe Blake is trying to act more like Yang to honor her, Weiss is spending more time with everyone because “You never know when you’ll lose them.” More Winter and Penny being friends on the battlefield, as some of the most skilled in defending against the grimm. Yang and Neo trying to work together. I expect a lot of funny (or potentially horrifying) moments of Neo using her semblance to fuck with Yang.
One scene I really want is to change the Herbalist’s smoke. Instead of them confronting their past selves, it takes them back to a moment they felt weak. For Neo, it takes her back to the moment Roman died. But instead of breaking down, Neo gets pissed. And she upgrades her semblance and breaks out of the illusion. Then we cut to Yang. It’s the story she told Blake about. But Qrow isn’t coming. She’s a child, pulling her sister in a wagon, facing down the grimm. She turns and runs, the grimm coming after her. She trips and lets go of the wagon, and the grimm turn towards it. She screams, arm outstretched. Then Raven pops in. She says “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” She effortlessly cuts through the grimm, and picks up Ruby. Yang runs into her arms. They stay like that for a moment, until Yang says “You didn’t save me.” Yang steps back, now an adult. “You never said that. I pretended it didn’t bother me. Pretended to be nonchalant. But I saw what you really were at Haven. Even if I wanted you to be different.” As the rest of the illusion fades, Raven remains. Yang gives her a questioning look. Neo fiddles with her outfit as Raven says “I couldn’t get inside the illusion. But my glass can pass through.”
Yang replies. “Huh, new trick.” She scans Raven. “How did you know what she looks like? And what she sounds like?”
Neo conjures a new illusion of Cinder, having her go on a rant about Raven and her betrayal. Yang giggles a bit. Then Neo has Cinder say “But the only thing I learned from her was that Raven was your mom. I knew her long before that.” In response to Yang’s questioning look, she replies “We all feared the brutish tribe leader.”
Yang responds “I’m sorry.”
Neo snarks back “Guess she ruined both of our childhoods.” she summons an illusion of Roman. “Wasn’t all bad though. If I hadn’t had a reason to leave, I wouldn’t have met him.”
They end up talking more, and Neo reveals she only went after Ruby because Cinder was too hard to kill. Because she had to avenge Roman. Yang points out that if she joins them, she could have help killing Cinder. After some banter about having criminals on the team, and how team RWBY were technically criminals themselves, they settle into an easy alliance. Sharing stories, working as a team, getting to know and appreciate each other.
As for what happens next? I don’t know. Is Neo lying to trick Yang? Is she genuine? Would she try to join the heroes team in earnest, or would she act as a double agent for them? Maybe she opens the door for Yang to go to Vacuo, but decides to stay in the everafter like canon. The possibilities are endless! I just really want a b-plot dedicated to expanding the train fight dynamic, and seeing how it’s changed as both Yang and Neo have grown. Mostly I just want to see Neo be a little shit and expand on her backstory. I don't remember if Neo is from the same area the Branwen tribe raided, but it would explain why she looked so scared when Raven showed up.
a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.
my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.
okay I found it, it's The Best Policy by Randall Garrett
and it has other gems such as "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt what every member of my race thinks of you" (they don't know you exist) and "every human knows exactly as much about the location of your home planet as I do" (nothing)
I always love Evil Religions Of Evil because at some point you have to imagine them as actual religions
Like, sure, we want to slaughter the world for our dark patron below but also when's the next big Chaos God festival and do people complain it's been overly secularised? How does the Cult of Cthulhu do weddings? Is there a cheesy youth pastor giving a bad rap about the Neverborn? Are there cultural Bhaalists?
I'm just saying, these religions tend to have huge congregations and massive temples, so it can't be all murder all the time, you know? At some point someone's going to have to do an Evil Bake Sale to pay to fix the Evil Church's Evil Roof.
no but how much audacity and sheer entitlement do you have to have to tell people they need to stop posting their darkfic and porn fic and any other fic you don’t like to ao3 so you can have a safe space when ao3 was literally created as a safe space for writers to post their content without fear of it being randomly wiped out by pro-censorship assholes with an agenda like what has happened to plenty of other fic archives before?
“but a lot of us see ao3 as a safe space to get away from that kind of nasty content” - lol you can see the middle of a busy interstate as a safe space all you want too but that doesn’t mean that you get to walk into the road and scream at all the cars going by that they’re the ones infringing on your safe space either
ao3 is not, has never been, and will never be a site meant for nothing but children’s stories. you can “see it” like that as much as you want but there’s a difference between fiction and reality and that view of what ao3 is like is as fictional as the stories posted on it.
Caveat your policies and principles, because there’s a mad difference between children’s stories and stories that are harmful across the board.
A lot of writers on ao3 don’t care to tag their stories appropriately, or consider the harm they perpetrate with their stories, or take responsibility for the harm they cause with their stories. It’s one thing to write whatever you want, it’s another to publish it, publicise it, and not take care enough to note if it’s harmful.
Let’s be honest, a lot of supposed “dark fic” is generally just exploitive masturbatory fantasy. It’s often written by ppl who don’t care what bigotry they perpetuate, what harmful tropes they use, any of that, as long as they get their kicks.
You can write what you want, but if you choose to post it publicly, you need to be prepared for an audience that has its own opinions. And the audience might say, “This archive needs a better policy”.
The audience might - but AO3 wasn’t created for the audience. It was created for the authors, so they’d have a place to post their fics that kept getting thrown off of other sites.
You might think those sites were correct and some kinds of content shouldn’t be allowed in public anywhere. In which case, you might want to stay away from AO3, because it was explicitly and directly created to host stuff that was unacceptable elsewhere. That’s its core purpose.
Fics that aren’t tagged according to the archive’s rules can be reported. However, there’s not much tagging that’s actually required: Just the warnings (including the option of “choose not to warn,” meaning “not telling you if any of these things are here”) and a fandom. They can leave off the rating, and it’ll be sorted as if it were explicit.
AO3 was meant to be supportive of both “authors who want to tag major and minor pairings, every notable trope in the story, and several types of relationships” - and authors who tag NOTHING but the fandom and maybe a pairing. The “what tags are required?” debate was not new when AO3 was founded, more than 13 years ago. So they opted for a bare minimum of safety tags, added the option of adding a bunch more, and said “Reader Beware: We don’t require that tagging be complete.”
Bitch, if AO3 was just for authors, it wouldn’t exist, because we all would have gotten off our own dicks years ago and realized we didn’t need public acclaim to enjoy writing.
It wasn’t created “just” for authors. But it was created for authors first, with the for-readers features being most focused on, “hey authors - how do you want your readers to find you?”
There’s a difference between wanting to share writing with a community and “needing public acclaim.”
We knew damn well when we set up AO3’s terms of service, that there would be people who decided, “I am NOT putting my writing on a site that hosts THAT AWFUL STUFF.” (At the time, we kind of assumed “That Awful Stuff” was “Voldemort victorious; Death Eater orgies abound” fics, not “Harry/Draco underage” fics, but we also knew that what’s considered “wrong” changes over time.) (Some of us remember when just saying you read slash could get you kicked out of a fandom’s locked email list.)
We weren’t really expecting demands that AO3 change its policies, because… those weren’t after-the-fact decisions? It wasn’t, “hey, let’s build an archive, and oh, I guess we’ll let the icky smut in too.” It was, “The icky smut keeps getting banned/ deleted/ forbidden/ removed because the mods got into a fight about what to allow…. what can we do about that? How about… an archive?”
Complaints that AO3 allows the stuff that AO3 was created to host will get zero results. No changes in policy; no open consideration; no public discussions.
AO3 is now one of the busiest fanfic sites on the internet, because it turns out, a LOT of people like a no-censorship approach. But if popularity wanes and only the ultra-kink-friendly people are still active… that’s fine. That’s what it’s for. Everyone else has a whole internet that will host their content.
If you do not like AO3’s no-censorship policies, you are welcome to create your own site with heavier content restrictions. I believe the code is open source, so have at it.
Was listening to the Silt Verses and got the idea for a dnd storyline with a religious character where either they're named Paige or their organization has the title "Page". And the character refers to their deity as "My God" and the deity responds "My Page".
And eventually the God goes "You're finally ready for the next step"
"My God?"
"My Page."
And the god pulls out a glowing quill and begins writing on their skin
can I be so real with you. can I be honest. totally aside from the moral panic about women on booktok being """porn addicts""" because they're reading erotica, I think it's so fucking goofy when people act as if there needs to be some kind of societal reckoning with how tiktok books "aren't very good." like, okay? they're commercial products mass produced for entertainment. tiktok didn't invent that; you're going to have to take it up with pulp magazines and dime novels and comic books. you guys would throw up if you found out about Fanny Hill.
a year or so ago I was lucky enough to attend s talk by Dr. Emily Knox, a brilliant researcher and author with degree in both library science and religious studies, and she had this theory that both leftists and the right in America have this baked in reverence for books that's a holdover of ye olden days when very few Europeans could read and most people primarily interacted with the written word in a religious context, as a means of learning about the Christian God and means of salvation.
the subject of Knox's talk was mainly how, on the right, this deep belief in the innate power of the written word is a large part of what drives efforts to have books removed or banned from public libraries, as if good "normal" white children are going to instantly become polyamorous atheist antifa supersoldiers if they're exposed to degenerate filth like And Tango Makes Three.
meanwhile on the left we're broadly ideologically opposed to book banning but still have this weird reverence for something that is, ultimately, a mass produced consumer good. which is why you get people developing beef with books that don't pass the vibe check re: being intellectually and morally improving literature and acting like it's a societal ill that women on tiktok are ready dorky erotica. sure, you're not saying out loud that these books should be banned, because you know it sounds fashy, but if you're arguing that they'll have a deleterious effect on women too dumb to know better then the subtext is still pretty readily apparent.
"He glared at him with anger in his eyes, but behind that longing and sorrow over things left unsaid, a subtle but desperate yearning for things to be different, and with just a hint of roasted nuts right at the end."
This has recently gotten to 200,000 notes, and though I’ve tried to talk about my opinions on this poem, the poems meaning, and its popularity before I’ve always ended up deleting out of anxiety or whatever other reasons I’ve had.
Okay so my brain just got caught on an idea for villain Bruce Wayne. Not Batman. Bruce.
Like, imagine Gotham without Batman. All these psycho supervillains running around, the police useless, and the only thing stopping their plans from succeeding is infighting. In comes a man with more money than you could spend in 5 lifetimes. Never having experienced the horror of losing your family to senseless violence. Imagine the temptation of gaining control of that immense chaos and power. Rationing funds and equipment to pick when the next attack is.
Joker maybe be the clown price of crime, but he pales in comparison to the King.
why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?
Danny had just started to feel like he was settling in with the Waynes. It had been... not ideal circumstances that brought him to the family in the first place, so getting used to not having to deal with all that mess was the first hurdle. The second being getting used to dealing with an entirely new- if more pleasant, mess. The Waynes, and Gotham by extension, were- to put it lightly- fucking crazy. He wasn't in Amity anymore and however much he'd thought it was the weirdest place on the planet before- he was absolutely rethinking that now. Where he had been one hero against a handful of villains, Gotham had a whole brigade of vigilantes against an army of villains. And they were... Bat-themed. For the most part. He'd yet to meet any of them, so he hadn't gotten the chance to ask what all that was about.
None of that was the point though. The point was that Danny had only recently stopped feeling like a fish out of water around his new foster family, and now the Holidays were coming. The Holidays that always served to put him in a sour mood. The Holidays that made him more prone to lash out and snap at those that didn't deserve it. The Holidays that, despite being Jewish by heritage, Bruce seemed oddly enthusiastic about celebrating.
(It reminded him, painfully, of Sam. He'd yet to be able to see here since everything went down and he missed her and Tucker something fierce. Which was maybe also putting him in a bad mood.)
So you really couldn't blame him for feeling a little tense about the whole situation. Not only were the Christmas decorations that smothered the Manor making him grouchy, but his grouchiness was also making a guilty pit form in his stomach. He was a moody teenager and adding trauma on top of that didn't help how caustic he could be- and adding fear on top of that made it all the worse. What if he saw Dick in his Santa hat, grinning and innocent, and he snapped? What if he saw Damian, stoic but loving, give Titus a shiny red bow-tie collar for the season and he made a caustic comment that went too far? What if he saw Bruce so much as smile at him while standing near the giant tree in the foyer and he saw green?
What if he ruined Christmas? Again? For people that didn't deserve it? Again? What if he hurt the people he cared about that had only ever shown him care and consideration? Again?
So Danny was just a bit tense. A bit on edge. And he was trying. Oh Ancients was he trying. To not be such a little bitch about all the Christmas stuff. But he had a limit. Bruce, being the rich socialite that seemed far too enthusiastic about family-centered holidays, did not have a limit. Every inch of the manor was covered in tinsel and holly and blinking lights and fake snow. Every spare moment was filled with different siblings being coerced into doing cheesy holiday activities, with Danny being the only one to attend every single one of them. (Cutting down a Christmas tree with Jason. Buying presents at the mall with Tim. Decorating while hanging from the chandelier with Dick. Caroling very badly with Stephanie. Making snow angels with Cass. Watching Christmas movies with Duke.) And he attended them all with a barely restrained snarl and a badly bitten tongue. The one time, one time, he'd told Bruce no- the guilt had eaten him alive (and dead) at seeing the man melt into the most pathetic kicked-puppy look he'd ever seen.
No grown man should ever be able to do that with his face. Danny never wanted to see that again.
In return, though, he had to face the Horrors.
The latest Horror being the worst he'd ever faced to date. A Horror that he thought he'd never have to face. He thought he'd slipped past this particular one by aging out. He was too old for this. He shouldn't be there. Damian, scowling and eyes filled with murderous intent, shouldn't be there. Dick and Bruce seemed to both be having the time of their lives. It was far too disturbing- and the continuous blasting of Christmas music and the overheated crush of a restless crowd only made it worse.
They were in line to see Santa at the mall.
It made his skin crawl. He was fifteen! Damian, the poor bastard, was also fifteen!
He could practically feel Ghostwriter laughing his ass off at his predicament. This was worse than getting stuck in a rhyming Christmas cautionary tale. He would 100% rather be stuck in one of Ghostwriter's cheesy poems than be stuck in the stupidly long line to see the fake mall Santa that probably didn't want to be there just as much as Danny.
But Bruce looked so fucking happy. Genuinely happy.
It was something he'd noticed early on about his foster dad. He smiled a lot and smiled big, but he rarely ever meant it. Now, Danny wasn't usually one to notice things like that. He got pretty wrapped up in his own problems and just- didn't have the skill to notice these things. Usually. But, well, being ghostly gave him a bit of an advantage. He could get a pretty good read on a person's emotions, regardless of what expression they wore. If he felt close enough to them. Frostbite had compared it to, like, family pack bonding. And he really, really didn't want to think about that further (why had it never worked for his parents? why did he feel so close to Bruce so quickly? why?) But, more importantly, he could tell that while Bruce smiled a lot, he rarely meant it.
But whenever Danny or his foster sibling begrudgingly participated in "family holiday activities" he smiled and he meant it. Bruce, fundamentally, was a sad man. Always grieving something. But here and now? In line to see his teenage children visit fucking Santa in the mall? He was smiling from ear to ear and his emotions, for once, matched. Yeah, there was a hint of mischief there, but it was overwhelmed by the giddy joy and excitement.
A suspicious amount of excitement... Like he was expecting something.
And then Bruce was leaning down between him and Damian and with a bright grin, he muttered, "I have a surprise for the both of you."
And even Dick, who had not stopped taking a stupid amount of pictures the entire time, paused to look at Bruce curiously.
"As I've told you both before," he said, looking over at Dick and back to Damian, "I know the real Santa. Met him a few times, saved Christmas with him a few others, and he owed me a favor for the last misadventure we had. So, I asked him to be here, for this one afternoon, for you guys."
Danny barely caught a glimpse of Dick rolling his eyes in the background. Oh, okay, so this was bullshit that has long been established. Nothing new on his account. That was something at least.
"Father," Damian interrupted with scorn and a promise of violence in his voice, "you are aware that this- Santa Claus creature- is fictitious, are you not?"
"Damian, chum," Bruce responded carefully, sincerely saddened, "why would you say that about an old family friend?"
And, poor Damian, looked two parts baffled and three parts murderous. Nonplussed and unable to even fathom a response to his father. He just stared the man down.
Dick huffed in exasperation behind them. "C'mon, B. Will you let that go already?"
Bruce furrowed his brows, eyes already taking on that faint sheen of kicked-puppiness, and looked back up at his eldest. "You don't believe me, Dickie? After all these years?"
Dick responded with a flat stare. Danny kind of wished he had popcorn for this moment. It was like witnessing a mild car crash. Nobody got hurt and it was still wicked to see parts flying everywhere. There was even a chance of things catching fire. Man was he glad he could just watch.
"Danny?" Bruce pleaded, turning to him with those sad, sad eyes. "Do you believe me, chum?"
And fuck how was he supposed to respond to that?
"I have it on good authority," he said, thinking of yearly fight, after fight, after fight, "that his existence is very hotly debated in the scientific community."
He could feel the questioning stares from Damian and Dick but he refused to look away from the innocently tilted head of his unfortunate foster father.
"Is that a yes?" and he sounded so sincerely hopeful. He couldn't crush the man's spirit. He couldn't.
But he also refused to lie and say he believed in Santa. At fifteen.
He clenched his jaw and gritted his teeth, but eventually replied. "It's a hotly debated topic."
And Bruce just smiled that empty smile and patted his shoulder. "Thanks, chum."
He, again, ignored Damian and Dick's stares. If he looked at them, he'd break. If he so much as made partial eye-contact, he was gonna fucking lose it.
"Oh look! We're almost at the front!"
Danny was living his worst life. Officially. This was the bad time-line. Dan's future didn't even come close. He was going to go mega evil any second now and kill everyone in the vicinity and then himself. This wasn't happening and it wasn't real and Santa Claus can't hurt him because he isn't real.
But Bruce, the saddest man in history, utterly and sincerely believed that he was.
So Danny was going to sit on some random old dude's lap and pretend to care about what he wanted for Christmas and whether or not he'd been a good boy this year and he was going to force a smile the entire time and his soul might shrivel up and die all the way inside, but at least Bruce would be happy.
What the fuck kind of afterlife was he living.
And then it was their turn and Danny was forced to go up first because the alternative was Damian committing homicide in the middle of the mall while Dick and Bruce cheerily took pictures.
Okay. Just sit down. Spit out answers to any inane questions. Pose for picture. And leave. Simple and easy and completely unbearable. But- for Bruce- he would bear it.
But, damn it all, a chill went down his spine as he approached.
No. Absolutely not.
There was no way. But he examined the man sitting in the chair and the more he saw the more the sinking pit in his stomach grew. Full thick beard of snow white hair. Brown eyes filled with smug mischief and magnanimity. Thick red velvet jacket made for trapping in heat in extreme cold weather, lined with white fur that looked suspiciously close to trim on cloaks he'd seen in the Far Frozen. A not-quite-ghostly-not-quite-magic-but-something-in-between aura he often got around Gods and Ancients.
Fuck, but Bruce actually knew the real bonafide Santa Fucking Claus.
What, and he means this with a great amount of emotion, the fuck.
He sat down in a stupor and the man just placidly smiled at him, a twinkle in his eye letting him know that he knew Danny was currently experiencing new stages of grief not yet known to man and was just gonna let him ride it out. How nice of him. Because of course he was being nice. He was Santa.
Fuck.
He looked up at the man. Ghost. God. Whatever. And for a good moment that's all either of them did. Just. Stared.
Sorry, Santa, Danny's brain has suddenly gone on vacation. 404 not found. Please leave a message after the tone. Error. Sorry, there's nothing there. Please try again.
After a few agonizing moments he asked, "how? Do you know Bruce?"
And Santa laughed at him, the sound working its way into his bones and filling him with a warmth he hadn't felt in a long time. It tasted just a bit like egg nog. Gross.
"Well," the man started, voice deep and rich like a good cup of hot chocolate, (whatthefuckwhathtefuck). "Why wouldn't I know a man like Bruce? Honorable, righteous, and very skilled. One of the best the Justice League has, if I'm being honest."
And then Danny's brain stopped completely. Because there was no fucking way Santa (FUCK) was implying what he thought he was implying.
But it all made so much sense now. His ears were ringing suddenly and the world was greying out but he was Seeing the Light.
"-nny?" Santa (FUCK!!) was saying. "Are you alright? Want to tell me what you want for Christmas now?"
"Hm," he said airily, still not all the way there, "I'm good, thanks."
And then he slid off the man's lap and walked back to his foster family in a daze. And he looked at Bruce (BATMAN!! FUCK!!!) and he slid a slow hand down his face, attempting to take the skin off it in the process.
"You alright, Danny man?" Dick asked, only half paying attention while he gleefully snapped pictures of a sullen Damian barely restraining himself from committing violence while stubbornly standing next to Santa instead of sitting on his lap.
"That's the real Santa, Bruce is Batman, and I'm half-dead," he replied bluntly.
Dick fumbled his phone in response and Bruce merely raised his eyebrows.
"That's an odd start to a 'three guys walk into a bar' joke there, chum," he said amiably. And Danny wouldn't have noticed the tension in his voice if he weren't ghostly. But he was and unfortunately for them all, it was now everyone's problem.
"Not a joke," he said. "I'll explain the dead part later but Santa outed you on accident."
"Okay, no," Dick interrupted, "we are not leaving the dead part for later, Danny, what the fuck."
"Listen," he said flatly, slapping his hands on either side of Dick's face and smooshing it to convey his seriousness while he spoke. "Santa is real, he's a God, and he's sitting right there." He emphasized with a sweeping wave of his arm in the direction Damian was stomping back towards them from. "We're leaving the dead part for later."
"What is all this about? Dead part? What is going on?" Damian demanded in rapid succession, growing more aggressive and persistent with each question.
Danny, already on his last fucking nerve, was gonna lose it. For real.
"Apparently," Dick drawled, disbelief and an unfair amount of derision in his tone, "that's the real Santa, he told Danny B was Batman, and Danny's now saying he's dead."
"What-"
Damian did not get to finish his sentence because that was the exact moment Danny finally snapped. Every bit of pent up tension and hostility, every bit of restrained Holiday fueled fury he'd been bottling up. Unleashed all at once because Dick decided to be an asshole about not believing him.
Danny snatched one of the giant plastic candy canes that lined the aisle of the queue to see Mall (but actually Real) Santa and gave a good swing in Dick's direction. Dick who had unfairly good reflexes and was able to dodge by jumping over the swing and landing back neatly on his feat.
"Danny?!" he cried, incredulous.
But Danny was no longer listening. Only reveling in the wild swinging of the candy cane and attempting to land a hit on Dick for being an absolute dick and finally unleashing hell upon the world and specifically his asshole foster brother. And maybe he put a little bit more ghostly strength in his last swing than he meant to, because when he finally made contact- he heard a pained off as Dick went down hard.
"Danny, please," he wheezed from the soft bank of fake snow he'd fallen into, "it's Christmas."
He screeched and continued his assault. "It's December 10th!"
And then, promptly; Bruce wrangled the candy cane from Danny's grasp, Damian pulled Dick from the floor, and they were all calmly escorted from the mall and asked politely to never return.
Danny really, truly, hated Christmas. And it looked like that wasn't going to change any time soon.
While having a impressive lexicon might seem a floccinaucinihilipilification, you will impress others with sesquipedalianism. They may even see you as honorificabilitudinitatibus. However, you will have several difficulties inserting pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into everyday conversations. It does make it enjoyable to torment those with hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia!
There once was a man from the sticks
Whose limericks stopped at line six.
They were fine till line five
Then they took quite a dive —
But the problem is easy to fix
If you just ignore the last line, it doesn't even follow the rhyme scheme oh god I've really lost control of this thing I'm so sorry...
There once was a fellow named Dan,
Whose poetry never would scan.
When told this was so,
He replied, "Yes, I know--
It's because I try to squeeze as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can."
On Tumblr did lasses and lads
Their way with fail poetry had.
You're having your fun
But you're fooling no one -
It takes skill to do something this bad.
Rina's Writings @rinaswritings - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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