#finx writes

[aethersea]

Why don't you suck it up (suck it up) Buttercup, baby Just get over it You're being a pain! And then worst of all (worst of all) You think you're so special When you're really not You're no one at all! I need you (I need you) To shut the hell up And stop screaming that this isn't fair Just suck it up (suck it up) Buttercup Nobody cares

[aethersea]

what power do the stars claim over my soul? I am not the sea, nor they the moon, to think themselves masters of my tides.

[aethersea]

Trick or treat!

At some point when I was writing batfics I sat down to figure out all the kids’ ages at various points in the story. Obviously the idea of comics canon having a “consistent timeline” is a laughable one, but for the purposes of my fics, at least, I could set something up. It’s just a reference doc, so I won’t bore you with the details, but here are some fun little quirks of how the dates shook out:

Steph became Spoiler on the first or second of January. This is because I love the image of her standing in front of her bedroom mirror, wearing the complete costume for the first time, and murmuring to herself – part joke, part hyping herself up, part deadly serious – “New year, new me.”

Dick’s birthday is just a month after Jason’s. This means that for just one month, they could do that sibling thing of “ooooh I’m gonna catch up to you!” Unfortunately, Dick and Jason’s relationship took a couple years to get to the point where they could have that kind of goofiness. By the time of Jason’s fifteenth birthday, they were finally in a place where they’d be able to make that joke—but just a month shy of that, Jason died.

I’d like to think Bruce is 24 when he adopts Dick, specifically because Dick is about 24-25 when Bruce dies and Dick has to take care of Damian. And I think he must have looked at this small grief-stricken boy, who wants to murder all his problems and refuses to be treated like a child, and had this horribly painful realization that Bruce was his age when they first met. He is older now than Bruce was then. I think when that first hit him it nearly took him out right then and there, but it hit him halfway through an argument with Damian so he just swallowed down the hysterical sound trying to climb up his throat and put it away for later. And then I think that once Damian was put to bed that night he curled up in an armchair in the library and just. Sat with that.

Jason had his comeback tour in October. In subsequent years, certain parties never let him live this down. Steph, loudly, to Duke: “and remember, every Halloween the Red Hood distributes severed heads to the good little boys and girls of the Gotham Police Department" Jason: “you decapitate a bunch of people ONE TIME—”

[aethersea]

I have been too busy of late to think creative thoughts, BUT the many turmoils of my life are at last quietening. And I have a few stories that are stuck because they need me to really buckle down and put in the work, mostly to work through plot tangles. The executive dysfunction remains strong, though, so I ask of you, my beautiful followers, please help me choose:

which story should I obsess over through the end of the month?

Strange & Grimm

Thistle

St Elmo's Fire

The Great Merlin Mistake

Conman in a Bottle

Voting ended onOct 19, 2024

[aethersea]

📚 [sorry I didn't know what book to go with so I picked many haha]

You send multiple books, you get multiple fics! Kinda. See, I really want to read the stories that the people of Gotham come up with about their resident vigilante cryptids—rumors, urban legends, wattpad rpf with dubious content warnings, all of it. I have a whole list of increasingly insane theories about what the batfam’s whole deal even is, but I never got any further than writing the frame story for one of them.

Some highlights from the list include:

Batman is a warlock and Robin is a demon bound to serve him. When ten years are up, Robin gets Batman’s soul.

Batman and Robin live in the sewers and can pop up anywhere in Gotham via manhole covers. They’re always fighting Killer Croc for real estate.

Obligatory vampire theory! Batman is a vampire and Robin is the person he feeds from. If Robin dies, Batman will go into a frenzy of bloodlust and drain half the city dry.

Robin is a trickster spirit who helps Batman out because it’s fun, and because the Joker’s bad sense of humor pisses him off. Batman has to keep him constantly entertained or he’ll run off and join the Riddler.

Cass (in her terrifying void-black costume) is the vengeful shade of the previous Batgirl, who finally clawed her way back from the afterlife and is here to take no prisoners.

Vampire theory v2: This Time With Duke! Everyone’s a creature of night and darkness except Signal, who is the sun incarnate. STRONG teen paranormal romance vibes, heavy-handed metaphors of self-destructive love or something, definitely involves shipping Signal with one or more batkids.

Batman is a professional comedian who got sick of Joker’s bad clowning. Things got out of hand.

Batman & Robin aren’t real. Criminals are making them up. 

One of my favorites, though, is the theory that Robin is the ghost of a murdered child, who wants revenge for his murder but, in the meantime, is willing to help Batman make sure no more children end up like him. This would be a story written by one of Dick’s classmates, maybe for English class. Dick reads it and it’s a whole emotional roller coaster ride, especially the scene where Robin’s ghost looks in on his living parents, as he does often to make sure they’re safe, and wishes more than anything that he could hold them and be held by them just one more time.

[aethersea]

📓!

There’s an atla au of star wars that I have tried so hard to bend into a shape that I can actually write, but alas, all I have are ideas. This is the one that’s in the wips folder as Everything Changed when the Clones Attacked, which is ironic bc I cannot for the life of me figure out what to do with the clones. Maybe they’re being brainwashed at Lake Laogai? Or something???

Anyway. The story has two parts, prequels and sequels. Details under the cut, because this got a bit long.

In the prequels, the elderly Master Yoda of the airbenders is Avatar, and in his old age he’s stopped traveling the world and instead dispenses his wisdom from one of the great Air Nomad temples, nestled deep in the mountains where only Air Nomads can reach. He’s unofficial leader of the council of Air Nomad elders, which is….not great, really, not how things should be, but it’s mostly been okay. He’s been a good avatar overall, and it’s only in later years that he’s leaned so heavily toward the Air Nomads, and really none of this is enough to push the four peoples truly out of balance. 

Our story starts with Qui-gon Jinn, an airbending master traveling with his apprentice, helping a besieged queen from a minor Earth Kingdom escape her city. (I saw a post once asserting that the Earth Kingdom is actually a collection of largely autonomous kingdoms that all loosely recognize the authority of the Earth King in Ba Sing Se, and I like that a lot, so that’s the worldbuilding I’m going with here.) Qui-gon agrees to take Queen Amidala to the Avatar’s council to beg their aid. 

Along the way, they encounter a young boy living with his mother. The boy can do a bit of earthbending—and also a bit of waterbending, and a bit of airbending, and a bit of firebending. Which is impossible, because Avatar Yoda isn’t dead, but there he is, bending all the elements anyway.

I don’t think there’s slavery in the atla universe, but we could probably get away with indentured servitude of some kind, and Qui-gon acquires Ani in much the same way as he does in canon. He takes him to Avatar Yoda—and Yoda rejects him. Says, essentially, “This is weird as hell but it’s also not my problem.” (Frankly I can’t come up with an actual good reason for Yoda to do that, but just go with me here.) So Qui-gon angrily responds that if the Avatar won’t take responsibility, he will, and then gets himself enmeshed in Amidala’s political problems to boot. 

And then he dies.

Something something evil emperor, yadda yadda you know the drill. (Though I think the empire isn’t going to be the Fire Nation, despite the thematic appropriateness of fire spreading unchecked to consume all in its path. Palpatine is gonna usurp the Earth King, I think, and I do feel the prequels’ themes around entrenched systems with deep flaws, which are too big to fight as individuals and too implacable to change, will fit well with atla themes around earth.)

The sequels portion of things is even less plotted out. All I know is that Luke grows up in the same nameless patch of Earth territory his father grew up in, and he doesn’t actually discover he can waterbend until he’s practically an adult. It’s a shock to everyone—except, somehow, weird Old Ben who lives in the desert, who tells him that the next Avatar is supposed to be a waterbender, and won’t explain why he’s so convinced Luke is that Avatar given that he’s pretty emphatically not from the Water Tribes. 

Luke is finally convinced when he manages to airbend, under Old Ben’s suspiciously skilled tutelage. He can’t pull off any other elements, though, so they go off on a road trip to that swamp where you see spirits, to try to reach the past Avatars and get some guidance.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to both of them, Leia has grown up knowing she can firebend. This is kind of an alarming skill for the princess of an Earth Kingdom to have, and even more alarming given that she’s already an earthbender. So she’s kept it secret, and no one but her parents has ever known.

They can meet in some way analogous to the Death Star raid in A New Hope, idk I have zero plot in mind here. The point, as far as I’m concerned, is that the Skywalkers have fundamentally broken the Avatar cycle. Anakin shouldn’t exist, and yet he does, and he was born while Yoda was still alive. If he hadn’t existed, the next Avatar would be a waterbender, and that’s Luke—except he’s from the Earth Kingdom. If Anakin is a true Avatar, then the next one would be an earthbender, and that’s Leia—only then she shouldn’t have been born until after Anakin’s death. Nothing makes sense! Even Yoda and all the other past Avatars together have no goddamn clue what is going on!

Imagine their consternation when they discover that neither Luke nor Leia is the Avatar: it’s actually both of them together. Luke has air and water, Leia has earth and fire; Luke can visit the spirit world and be the bridge between humans and spirits, and Leia can speak to kings and maintain the balance between the four nations. The two of them, together, can defeat their father, defeat the emperor, and restore harmony to the world.

[aethersea]

📓

I definitely played myself here, bc this post spat out when I was in fact too busy to answer asks :P but! I have some time today, so here we go!

So Leverage ot3, right, and it starts with Eliot. Eliot Spencer is a soldier, he’s one of the best soldiers out there, and one day he does what soldiers so often do: he dies. And death, he finds, is a strange country. He wanders the eerie disjointed landscapes of the afterlife, searching for…something. The truth of this place, maybe. 

What he finds is a man in a cage. The cage is of a metal as black as a starless void, and so cold that even Eliot's dead hands ache to touch it. The man, by contrast, is warm, his dark brown skin so flushed with life that it draws Eliot nearer like a moth to flame.

The man is asleep, or seems to be, though he stirs as Eliot nears. He’s wearing a strange draping garment of deep green, so vibrant a green that it seems wrong, alien, in this shadowed place, but the warmth of that green is nothing compared to the warmth of his face, even as it pinches and frowns with waking. He blinks open dark eyes, and they’re warmer still, like the sunshine Eliot knows he will never see again.

He sees Eliot, standing there at the bars of the cage, half reaching for him without having consciously chosen to. He smiles. Eliot’s dead heart squeezes in his chest.

The man coaxes Eliot into conversation with such casual good humor that it takes Eliot several minutes to realize he has no idea what’s going on. But although the man answers his questions willingly enough, it doesn’t really clear anything up. “Who are you?” gets him a name, though not one he recognizes; “Why are you here?” gets a sigh and a rueful, “Communication issues.” The man refuses to elaborate, claiming it’s not entirely his business to say.

Eliot is charmed in spite of himself. Charmed enough that, against his better judgment, he helps the man escape.

So yeah this is a Hades & Persephone au, where the goddess of Death can’t explain to anyone, much less herself, why she keeps kidnapping the god of Spring, who’s surprisingly good-humored about the whole thing. Eliot is just a random shade who gets dragged into their bizarre courtship, and somehow all three of them fall in love. At the end, when Hardison has eaten six pomegranate seeds and bound himself to half the year in sunlight and half in the dark, Eliot goes back and forth between them in the six months of summer, carrying messages and helping them weather the time apart.

[aethersea]

hey, what about conman in a bottle? <3

wip wednesday game

Elizabeth Burke, née Mitchell, was from a minor branch of one of the oldest families in the kingdom. Her marriage to a merchant’s third son had been something of a small scandal, but even when he’d had nothing to offer her but promises, she’d never hesitated in her choice. 

So Neal liked to believe, anyway. By the time he’d had reason to look into the Burkes, Peter had already been a rising star of the [magic crimes division], and everyone agreed that Lady Elizabeth had been either very shrewd or very lucky.