Can we get more Oliver!Rob 🥺? Maybe from Mark's perspective 🥺?
As a side note - love your writing! You spoil us far too much with all the extra content you put out, and I love all the sisters and turns and fucked up dynamics your stuff has. Best Invincible writer I've come across!
Sure! This ended up a bit longer than expected lol - I'm oddly fascinated by the dynamic that could form here, with Rob!Oliver simultaneously letting himself enjoy being the kid brother and naturally pushing back against the role. And making some decisions when to him, there's no real reason it has to play out like canon.
And thank you! I didn't at all predict exactly how much would end up on tumblr (I really do wonder what the snippet word count is at lol), but it's been a blast - and I love exploring different scenarios/relationships.
For a few days after- everything, Mark doesn’t see Oliver.
He looks for him. Obviously, he looks - as soon as he leaves Eve’s bedside when it’s all over, he goes to Mom expecting Oliver to be there too. He isn’t. And he isn’t in New York when Mark flies over to help out with…searching for survivors, even though Mom said he should be.
Cecil tells him that Oliver left just before he got there. Went to another city that needs help, and there’s so many, and Mark doesn’t know how he can ever-
He can’t think about it. He can’t. So even though Oliver’s avoiding him, he lets it go, and he shouldn’t. He gets that, of fucking course he does. But Oliver has Mom. He’s better off without Mark making everything worse for him. Making him…
Oliver didn’t look angry when his fist punched through Angstrom’s head. When he reached through to Angstrom’s spine and broke it, and the crunch echo’d out, and Mark just stood there.
“I was…I was about to…”
“You would’ve hesitated, and he’d get away again.” Grim, but not upset. “You should go back to Eve. I’ll stay here and make sure the body is destroyed properly.”
“No, I-”
“Just go. It’s over, Mark. We won.”
He was too slow to kill Angstrom, so his brother had to.
It’s the first time Oliver’s killed anyone, and- they’ve talked about it. Why killing is wrong, why they can’t do it as superheroes, and Oliver agreed with him.
Yeah, he said it was because it made sense - people trust them more if they aren’t killers, so they can help more people, and villains will keep surrendering instead of thinking they need to fight for their lives - but he still agreed.
Despite how worried Mark was about letting Oliver be Robin, it was all going…pretty well? Oliver’s a natural. He’s more serious when they’re up against a villain or disaster, acts like he’s way older than he looks now, even if he’s weirdly determined to be the ‘flashy distraction’ when they fight someone together.
“It’s tactical,” he claimed after Mark suggested maybe not taunting the fire-breathing villain until all their rage focused on him. “If they’re after me but can’t get me, people can get away, and you can take advantage of the distraction. I mean, I could totally have taken that guy down on my own - but this is good practice for the real big bads, right?”
Sometimes, Mark wonders if he’s even teaching Oliver much at all, besides how to use his powers. Now-
God. He doesn’t know. This never should’ve happened, and he can’t even say Oliver did the wrong thing, because Mark was about to do it.
But it was his responsibility. Angstrom didn’t die when Mark should’ve killed him, and he came back, and he hurt so many people. He killed- so many people. He had to die. Mark had to kill him, so everyone would be safe. His family would be safe.
He needs to talk to Oliver.
Finally, he catches up to him when Oliver’s struggling to hold up some rubble. Part of a collapsed skyscraper, and Mark ducks under to take some of the weight. But not all of it, and maybe that’s a bit shitty of him, but he doesn’t want Oliver to run off again. Or, fly off. Whatever.
“We need to talk,” he says, and immediately winces. Really, he had to go with an echo of what Dad said? Great start.
“Now?” Oliver asks, which is uh, fair. A bunch of emergency crew are hurrying through the area they’ve opened up, going to the hole in the ground where they think survivors are trapped on the floor below.
Mark can’t hear anyone down there, and he’d tell Oliver to go but this isn’t…This isn’t the first time he’s been involved in this sort of thing. It’s better for the people who know what they’re doing to get survivors out, because it’s so fucking easy to make it worse, and Mark can’t-
He can’t make it worse.
“Well, I could’ve timed it better if you didn’t keep avoiding me.”
“I’ve been busy.” But Oliver’s scowl drops, and he sighs. “Sure. We’ll talk after this.”
“Great,” Mark mutters, kind of wishing Oliver was more against it.
Oliver’s always been way too mature. He’s nothing like Mark, really.
Yeah, he can act childish, but even when he was a toddler and honestly the scariest thing Mark has ever had to deal with (just as, like, a small, living person he needed to look after), he wouldn’t cry or have tantrums or anything. All the staring was a bit creepy, but after a while it was just an Oliver thing. And he was a cute baby.
It’s still super weird how fast Oliver grows. He’s less than a year old, and he looks- what, twelve? Thirteen? He should be slowing down now, but in another year he’ll probably look Mark’s age. So weird.
“What did you wanna talk about?” Oliver asks once they’re in the sky. They’re above the clouds, because people get- Cecil said it makes people nervous when they see Mark hovering above them. He didn’t need to say the obvious why.
“You killed someone, Oliver,” Mark says, trying to sound gentle because he isn’t angry at Oliver. But it comes out too weak, and he folds his arms as he takes a deeper breath. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I told you, you were gonna hesitate-”
“You can’t have known that-”
“I did,” Oliver says firmly, rising until his eyes are level with Mark’s. He always does that when they’re flying, if he isn’t playing around with flight. “I knew, because you’re a good guy, and you don’t want to kill anyone. But I couldn’t let him come after you again, so I dealt with it.”
“It isn’t your job to deal with it,” he snaps, and shit, he needs to dial it down. “I’m your older brother. You’re a kid, and you can’t- You can’t just kill someone. Even if they…Angstrom needed to die, but you didn’t need to become a murderer.”
Confusion crosses Oliver’s face. “But I already was one?”
Mark’s breath seizes in his chest. “What?” he rasps, and flies forward, grasping Oliver’s shoulders. “Who? What happened, how did- Why didn’t you tell me?”
Was it an accident? Oliver doesn’t always know his own strength, and there’s been some fights he did on his own in the last few weeks, and maybe he hid it? But why would he? Oliver’s smart, he could probably-
But no, he wouldn’t. He told Mark if he was allowed to become a superhero, a sidekick to Invincible, he’d do what Mark said. And Oliver isn’t a killer, he isn’t like Dad, he’s-
“One of the variants,” Oliver says, and oh. “I thought you knew.”
The variants. The other him’s. Oliver…fought one of them?
He- of course he did, Mark knew that. He knew Oliver was brave, and he went out and fought when the world needed him, while Mark did nothing because Eve needed him. He thought Eve needed him. But none of the variants ever showed up, and they were out killing people while Mark refused to go back out and face it all, so Oliver had to…
Again, Oliver had to kill because Mark wouldn’t.
“Did he hurt you?” he asks desperately, fighting the urge to check Oliver for injuries. It’s been days, he’s clearly okay, but he would’ve healed, right? He would’ve been hurt and then he healed up, and Mark never even knew. He wasn’t there.
God, how could any version of him hurt Oliver? But he’d have thought the same thing about Eve, and the one dressed like Dad didn’t hesitate.
They’re nothing like Mark. They’re still him. What he could’ve become - what he could still become, if he isn’t careful, if he can’t keep everyone safe.
“A bit?” One of Oliver’s shoulders shrugs under Mark’s hand, and he’s tiny. He’s just a kid. Someone who looks like Mark hurt him, and he isn’t flinching away from Mark now. “But he underestimated me, so I took him down.”
Oliver grimaces, looking down for a moment before his gaze fixes back on Mark. “I didn’t want to. It felt…bad. But he wasn’t you, and if I didn’t do it, he wouldn’t stop killing people. He’d wake up too quick if I knocked him out, and we don’t have a prison that’d work, and there was too much going on to just, I dunno, keep him distracted until help showed up. I wouldn’t kill just ’cause it’s easier.”
“I know,” Mark says, and he does. He believes Oliver. “I’m sorry you…you had to do that.”
“Yeah, it kinda sucks,” Oliver says so casually that Mark chokes out a laugh. Oliver smiles at him. “But people are alive because of what I did. That guy, he chose to come to our world, and hurt people. He didn’t have to. He could’ve stopped, and I gave him the chance to, y’know? Just in case.”
“You didn’t give Angstrom a chance.” Mark can’t manage to make it sound condemning. He guesses he’s still reeling from the fact that was Oliver’s second kill.
“Angstrom isn’t my brother. Okay,” Oliver adds hastily, holding up his hands. “I’d have asked if you didn’t already fight him? So he had his chances then. And he planned all this, so that’s like, at least a few dozen opportunities right there. If his portals needed, I dunno, his hands or whatever - I definitely would’ve just cut those off instead. Killing as last resort for the biggest, proven threats with zero intent to redeem themselves.”
Mark scrutinises him. This is why he hates arguing seriously with Oliver - he always has a bunch of reasons to back himself up, and even though Mark knows it’s wrong to kill, it doesn’t feel as convincing when Oliver can rattle off all that.
“How much did you think about this before killing?” he checks instead, not sure whether to be more worried, or relieved that it wasn’t an impulsive choice.
“It was part of my hero studies. If you look at the track records, most heroes have killed at least one person. The average is actually waaaay higher, even after accounting for the usual Murders Georg in the mix.”
“Who’s Murders Georg?”
“…If you’re serious, I’m disowning you.”
“You can’t disown your big brother-”
“I definitely can - I have leverage.”
“What leverage?”
“Mom likes me better.”
“Dude.”
“It’s the God’s honest truth. You were such a fussy crybaby, and I was an angel.”
“You needed us to chew your food for you!”
“For like, a few weeks. You woke Mom up every night for months when she brought you home, and you drew all over the walls in crayon, and you were in diapers for ages. Not cool, man. Have some consideration.”
For people(noone fucking ever) wondering where my apathy issues come in
Right fucking now, few days ago I just stopped caring about everyone and everything and I wanted to go back to the times before I wasnt anyone worth noticing is gone
