#dc chaos

[anasthasi]

Young Justice (1998) #22

So many things happening in this one comic panel. First off, what on earth are those shoes Impulse??

[sunnymusingsao3]

won't you open the door, and try me once more?

Words: 3657 Rating: Teen and Up Warnings: Internalized Homophobia, Religious Trauma/Imagery Relationships: Bernard Dowd/Tim Drake, a smattering of Darla Aquista & Bernard Dowd Summary: A Bernard Dowd character study, which focuses primarily on the religious imagery angle, and a possible upbringing for Bernard wherein he struggled with internalized homophobia. Inspired by the song "No Place in Heaven" by Mika.

Preview:

Bernard Dowd couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he’d learned that his sexuality was something to hide. He couldn’t even say it was just one thing that put the notion in his head.

But by the time he’d reached high school, he was well-versed in what people meant when they called something gay. And he knew what happened to guys who kissed other guys. And he could recite homophobic buzzwords as easily as he could blink.

He wasn’t a religious kid. At least, not in the Western Christian way. He believed that gods existed; he just also believed that they walked among them, sometimes putting on capes to save the mere mortals below.

Which—that he could pinpoint: the first time he’d ever seen a god in real life.

He’d been in Metropolis for a class field trip. Gotham’s natural history museum was still under heavy reconstruction after a recent Black Mask heist had ended… explosively.

Unfortunately for them, so did their field trip.

Bernard was ninety percent sure that it was because they were Gothamites. Too many of them in a certain concentration just seemed to beget trouble, even in other cities.

The news called it a failed police drone experiment. Bernard called it “more proof toward there being a secret worldwide oligarchy,” because no way should something like it have passed through the reasonable due process to obtain funding. But he was younger and more hopeful, then, too, so he still believed that politicians wanted what was best for their people. Because his parents were politicians like that, and if they didn’t have good intentions, then what did that mean for him?

Their word was law, not just in city hall, but in his household, too—which honestly could have posed as city hall anyway, with the way they carried themselves, even at home.

He didn’t come to realize how wrong he was about his parents until he was sixteen. They had opened his door to see him sitting on the edge of his bed, lips locked onto the cute brunette boy’s from his math class, and it… hadn’t gone well.

They told him that it wasn’t because he was a boy. It was just that the boy wasn’t good enough for him. Bernard wasn’t sure he really believed them, especially after the boy stopped texting him after that.

Bernard hadn’t told anyone about it. Not even Darla Aquista, or Tim Drake, the two people out of his myriad of fair-weather friends that he considered to be his actual, real friends. His best friends.

They were his best friends, but he didn’t even tell them, because what was he meant to say? That his parents had scared off a possible boyfriend? That they were doing what any parent might do, chasing off someone he’d been sneaking around with? He couldn’t guarantee that either of them wouldn’t freak out—or worse, tell other people—if they found out he liked boys the way he liked girls.

So he kept that to himself, just like he kept everything else that mattered to himself.

It was easy to do, after all. When he felt something bubbling up inside of him, something that he wanted to admit, he’d just slip one of his recent theories into the forefront of his brain instead, because they were distracting in a way that nothing else was. He loved trying to puzzle out the answers to things, and he loved how many possibilities there were for those answers to be something unexpected or exciting or bigger than himself, because in a world like theirs, everything was unexpected and exciting and bigger than him.

The proof was in the god that had saved their school bus from being destroyed by a hulking mass of metal and guns. It was in a god whose eyes were bluer than any sky or ocean he’d ever seen, a god whose skin had glowed with the light of the sun.

A man like that couldn’t be anything but divine.

[Read the rest on AO3]

[der-reisende-lammergeier]

USA 2020

Ottimo

Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images