#jhscdood

[lorata]

what's this??? a mystery envelope awaiting me upon my return from work???? what could it be???????????????

truly a masterclass. you all horrible, i love you, i'm sending glitter to your houses <3 the card lives on my nerd shelf now

[eggmacguffin]

for the WIP Game, please please tell us about "time travel baby"

time travel baby

Tim is hit with a spell that swaps you through time with the version of yourself that in your lifetime has come closest to death.

Rather than being replaced by a Tim who was bleeding out in the desert, or a Tim who was dangerously unstable after Bruce's death, Batman, Nightwing, and Robin are presented with a seemingly perfectly content and healthy ten year old boy and a mystery to solve.

~~~

lots of sweet family moments, lots of hurt comfort and necessary outrage, frank discussions about abuse and neglect, and a good dose of Tim Drake as an adult looking at the life he was leading at ten years old and truly confronting what it meant about him, what it didn't mean about him, and the ways it still affects him even with both of his parents having been dead for years.

time travel baby is not the title, of course, it is not even the working title, but it is what the document is called. so. time travel baby!

[barbarawilson]

[strawberry emoji]

everything you write drives me absolutely bonkers (and makes me want to work harder on my own work to be Worthy of u reading it). i feel like i say that every time you post something but it Cannot be emphasized enough how intensely your writing makes me feel every emotion ever. anyways batman & robin au where dick hires pam as a consultant WHEN

[barbarawilson-moved]

If one were to write a no-capes AU, what would be a reasonable/realistic scenario thst could take place instead of Jason's death/resurrection that would engender the same emotional ramifications for all involved?

i feel like. there's so many ways to go for this but they fall under two major categories of interpretation, neither of which is really incorrect? but what it comes down to is if you think jason's violence is about punishing others, or if it's about punishing himself. tw for self harm/suicide/abuse/etc under the cut

the version of jason that matters more to me is the version that's punishing himself—so for me the no capes answer needs to finish an equivalent story: a naive kid ends up in a bad situation, and when he gets out, he reorients his life around punishing himself for getting into that situation in the first place. (see: red hood as a complete rejection of any chance at reaching a happy civilian life)

my heir apparent timsteph au is the closest i've gotten to writing a no capes au, and jason's irl counterpart is only loosely mentioned, but in that case i decided that he had survived a suicide attempt, and struggled with recovering and returning to society afterwards. the disconnect with family, the self-hatred, the dying, all are accounted for, but it does lose that bit of retribution and reckless blame placed on others.

one option i haven't seen explored much but that i think could serve jason well in a no capes setting is the process of escaping an abuser. i think people jump to bruce as this abuser because jason sometimes blames bruce for his death, but i think more accurate would be a teacher or his birth mother (altho i don't know that id love to see more stories perpetuating the idea of foster parents as inherently better than birth parents or of reconciliation as a farce). suicide and abuse both let everyone share as much misplaced guilt as you like, but abuse gives more of an outward target for jason.

the violence as punishment for others direction is really just like. murder i guess? like. people do commit murder irl! i think maybe that's a case where a felipe garzonas inspired situation where jason killed a bully and no one's quite sure if it was self defense or not would do fine on its own without a death-like event. i think at the end of the day it's kind of like death as a major arcana card? jason doesn't necessarily need an exact civilian-life equivalent—just a justifiction for an emotional self-reinvention

[shadowen]

Fic meme: I want #2 but if you're Having A Day, i will accept #5 and a smooch

Because you are one of my favorite people, I will give you both!

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

Aside from my early forays into fan fiction, which are thankfully now lost to the depths of the internet, the only fic that makes me a little self conscious is say your prayers and light a fire, both because it falls into the “all lowercase song lyric title” trope and because it is just so fucking filthy.

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

I mean, the entire Clint/Coulson ship came directly out of left field, so I was shocked as shit to fall right into that and proceed to write... *checks AO3*  412,867 words for it. 0_0

And I will add one smooch to the tab of smooches you’re going to get when I see you. <3 

[goldkirk]

bc you wrote Jewish Tim Drake (and Jewish Bruce Wayne) so flipping well, I am wondering if you would be amenable to, occasionally, receiving asks excitedly exclaiming "IT'S SHABBAT" ?

100% YEAH GO FOR IT PAL 💛

[intosnarkness]

jhscdood replied to your chat “endocronoloist who looks like griffin mcelroy: you've lost a lot of...”

OMG I LOVE HIM. AS A PUBLIC HEALTH PROFESSIONAL I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. OMG.

I’ve got a really good network of awesome doctors in the southern Baltimore suburbs, all thanks to my GP who i would follow off a medical cliff

here’s my secret test for every new doctor I see:

the first time i meet them, i ask them for two things. first, i ask them to take off the white coat, because white coats freak me out. the response to that tells me fucking everything about a doctor that i need to know. if they take it off immediately, this is a doctor who will listen and care about my comfort under their care. if they ask questions or fight me over something that is a very, very minor request (unless they say something like ‘i can’t, the back of my shirt has baby vomit on it’ or some other good reason) then i know they’re not always going to listen to me.

secondly, i ask them to tell me before they touch me, and to tell me what they’re doing when they do. if they can’t do that, they’re not allowed to touch me. i am trusting this person with my body, and they have to acknowledge that it is mine. doctors who violate that are not to be trusted.

i’ve developed this over a lot of years of being a traumatized little bird. the hardest part for me is that i have to remind myself every time that this is a person, and though they may know more than me, they are currently in my employ, and i am allowed to fire them for any reason. they are not an authority. they are not a god. they are working for me. and that means i’m in control.

[osinyy]

Never have I felt so very JEWISH as sitting in the kitchen reading the end of @jhscdood‘s For You Have Returned My Soul Within Me over my breakfast of a bagel and schmear with maple-flavored pork sausages. I struggled to read the right-aligned font with my lapsed day-school Hebrew. I sang the prayers under my breath. I said the shema before bed last night after reading the first chapter. 

I cried so much reading about Big Brother Bucky ‘saving’ Becca at the dance hall. About Yaakov bar (ben?) George v’Yocheved going to the mikvah before shipping off to the front. About him meeting Gabe and sharing their Hebrew names and finding the shul in Europe and making Shabbos even without challah or wine, just two stumps of candles burning for maybe ten minutes.

I wept reading about Rabbi Linda and Bubbe Becca and their flat out acceptance of Bucky and his trauma. I wish Linda was my Rabbi, truth be told.

Under the cut are just a few of my favorite bits. (Which, actually, got a lot longer than I thought it would. There are also spoilers below.)

“Soldat!” the Commander barks. “What are you doing?”  (...)   He says, “I was resting.”

“Of course Steve called me, boychik. He has me on speed dial.”

The melodies have changed – of course the melodies have changed, it's been 70 years since he last went to temple, they're allowed to write new music for ancient words if that's what makes them happy, but–

The shema is the same.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד

His breath hitches.

Rabbi Linda laughs, and gets up out of her seat, extending her hand for him to shake. He takes it, and she cups his in both of hers, gently. “We have a good community here, Bucky. There is so much we have been through, but we made it out by joining hands and moving forward together. I believe you can do that, too.” 

He reads Eli Wiesel and Harold Kushner.

He reads Primo Levi and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

He says, “I feel like I am back at yeshiva.”

Becca says, “Good God, that's depressing. You're coming over tonight, The Producers is on at six.”

“A lot of those Torah scrolls were lost when the Nazis came,” Rabbi Linda confirms.

Then she says, “But many were also hidden away and kept safe, or transported to England or the US, or later to Israel.”

She looks at him steadily for a long moment. She says, “And some were taken by the Nazis. Locked away in basements and vaults as trophies of war, meant to be kept from us, never to be read from again.”

She leans forward. “But we keep finding them. These little troves of Torahs. And we recover them, we repair them, we restore them, and we bring them back into our communities, to be used again in the way they were intended. The Torah from your temple could very well be one of those, could be somewhere in the world being read from this Shabbat.”

“We, the Jewish people, are more than what happened to us during the war. It still hurts us, yes, but it doesn't define us.”

She puts her hand on his, gently. She does not seem to mind the metal. She says, “It was not the end of our story, and this is not the end of yours.”

On the way home, he stops at a store that doesn't have the word “mart” in its name, and he buys a dress shirt that won't make his sister tease him.

She teases him anyway.

“I think I want to go to the mikvah,” he tells Rabbi Linda. “Is that something people still do?”

Linda's eyebrows rise. It's rare for him to state a desire so plainly. Bucky thinks he likes the freedom in doing so. He should do it more often.

“There are a few formal mikvot in the area,” Rabbi Linda says. “But personally, I prefer to use the ocean.”

She hands him an envelope. Inside are a Social Security card and a Florida State driver's license. The name reads, Jacob Elijah Barnes.

“You've been spending too much time with my sister,” he says, rolling his eyes at the joke. We’re always waiting for Elijah to return.

It takes a couple weeks of poking around Brooklyn, venturing out from his new room at a new shelter in the old Jewish section of the borough, to find Steve. And of course, when he does, it's at Friday night services at a little temple prominently displaying a rainbow flag on the front gate.

He slips inside just after services have started and takes a seat a few rows behind Steve, who has placed himself two-thirds of the way back, on the far right next to the aisle. He's wearing a kippa that's dark blue, and embroidered with the tree of life in silver thread.

Bucky follows along with the service, singing Lecha dodi and all the rest, and he sees the exact moment that Steve hears him and realizes he's there: his head lifts, alert and on guard, while at the same time, his shoulders relax and drop a good two inches.

“C’mon, Becca, it’s–”

“Ugh, I hope I have another stroke tonight and forget this entire conversation,” she says, and then hangs up on him.

“Hanukkah starts Tuesday night,” Steve says, because he's always been bolder than Bucky, if not braver. “If you want to come over, we can light the candles together.”

“I think,” Bucky says quietly, “I think I'd like that.”