your grip on the bat tightens, angling it toward the direction of the noise. you brace for jason todd—or worse, some low-profile criminal picking the wrong night, and sure as fuck the wrong door.
break-ins aren’t uncommon in this city, but after the week you’ve had? this is some kind of cosmic joke. to your surprise, it isn’t the former, nor the latter.
it’s worse. far, far worse.
“richard?”
“he gets ‘jay’, but i get full government?” richard grayson, in the flesh, all but stumbles into your apartment, barely a leg to stand on both literally and figuratively. “that’s cruel, doc.”
the sheer cheek of this family.
“is bruce planning to chip in,” you cross your arms, ignoring his statement along with the fact that he’s actively bleeding out on your carpet. “or am i expected to keep restocking gauze out of sheer goodwill?”
he laughs. “you can mail him the invoice.”
“you bet your ass i will. stitching you idiots back together isn’t exactly cheap,” you tug him into the kitchen, onto the counter. “i have loans to pay.”
he’s looking down at you in half wince, a twinge apologetic. you tamp down the sudden urge to grab him by the cheeks and kiss him right then.
that’s the problem with it being this brother.
there is no temptation to do things like that to jason, because he’s your friend. tim is enough of a nuisance to begin with, and damian is your nephew’s age. the other robins have yet to show up on your doorstep. you’re unsure where you stand with dick.
you settle with believing that he chooses you for the same reason the others do. a blundering med student with a dingy apartment can’t possibly be better than the average hospital bed in gotham.
the batboys have their secrets, and you keep them in exchange for the company. simple as that.
loneliness will take you to places you’d never go with your own two feet.
he seems to know what you’re thinking, if wrapping gauze around the wrong arm is any indication. his mouth twists, familiar, into a joke.
“a kiss to make it better?”
an attempt to lighten the mood. he’s just as skittish as you are, somehow. you appreciate it though. no matter how annoying they are, they’re good people. you chew down your smile, “that’s gonna cost you, grayson.”
he mirrors it, crooked. “put it on my tab?”
“sit still,” you scold instead, half a laugh.
he obeys, tilting his head where you direct and lifting his arms when you ask, helping in his own way.
“thank you,” he says, genuine, at the last bandage. “fresh new first aid kits by tomorrow morning, i promise. no more paying out of pocket.”
“i would hope not,” you tease.
he hops down from the counter, graceful despite his injuries. you’re starting to think these people are superhuman. on top of being superheroes, that is.
on his way out, he turns toward you, flashing the toothiest grin. “let’s do this again sometime?”
Like everyone else, I've been aware of Kirk for a while but hadn't watched any of his videos nor videos of him basically ever. The exception was his appearance as the debut guest on Gavin Newsom's podcast half a year ago (I then also listened to the Bannon ep. - mid). Any talk of this being due to what he believed is immediately dismissed on the grounds that among his peers he was criticized for being a moderate. His ideas were hardly radical, and his ability to affect change directly was minimal. He was the republican David Hogg. The plethora of "you people would have mourned when Hitler killed himself" comments serve to conflate "trying to dunk on college kids" and "the Holocaust" which may not actually be equivalent to one another, but I'm no Anubis.
Many have invoked his gun rights advocacy as having karmically resulted in his death. To my memory, the right to own a gun and the right to kill someone unprompted are not a package deal. Gun control advocates rarely also advocate for actually enforcing the laws already on the books when it comes to reducing gun crime, and even are often against it - stop and frisk, three strikes, etc.. Literally two days ago a woman was killed unprompted by a guy with fourteen prior convictions for violent offenses. Kirk's death is obviously getting disproportionate media attention because he was a public figure and I'd wager the shooter, despite being a very good shot and politically volatile, will probably have a clean criminal record. By total count, this, and school shootings, are a minority of the actual gun-deaths that happen, that could be prevented much easier.
Words are not violence, making an Instagram reel is not violence. Someone's answer to a bad-faith hypothetical question that you disagree with in a YouTube video is actually not violence against you. When you broadcast your support for this sort of retribution for those things, there is no reason others shouldn't perceive and treat you as a threat.
Canonly? No. He's just willfully lazy and self centered. While he can be polite and mannerly, it's usually for a reason (wanting something from someone, in a good mood bc something happened that he liked, etc). His past isn't so much as hinted at, beyond that he was a mortal many, MANY years ago.
While I've not really tackled his past at all, I'd brainstormed some ideas, one being it's because he had to struggle his whole life to get by, and craved the idea of strength not only to survive, but also lived on a world where the weak were cast aside and left to die.
So struggle after struggle made him stronger, but it also made him more cynical, selfish, and untrusting of basically anyone else. But perhaps that there were few he cared for, and believed being a destroyer would help shape the universe in a way that benefitted those select few from suffering unnecessarily.
So he craved power for a few reasons, mainly that he thought it would be what he needed. And for a while, he did do his job properly. But that pittered out and instead he became immature, lazy, largely apathetic and gluttonous as he now known.
It's just one idea, so take anything I say now with a grain of salt. Idk how I'd tackle it, other than he used to be a better person (though not a good person) than he is now.
(though I may do something with younger, mortal Beerus for a starter in the future, it's gonna be something I have no plans on doing atm until I get a solid grasp what I want)
i don't like talking about my experiences with academia, but tbvh, my master's involved writing a lot of essays where I and others who were international students struggled so much more because we hadn't had the knowledge or tools to develop academic writing (a very specific skill set) the way others who had gone through the british education system had, so naturally they were much better at it. And I wanted to improve, I wanted to learn, I asked classmates to review my thesis before submission, I borrowed their thesis to study how they formatted and wrote it. I took a small class in writing essays along with all of the stuff I already had to do for my masters but, I still got lower grades compared to my peers even though I followed all the rules as best as I could figure them out.
All through my master's I blamed myself so much for having issues with being not smart enough when the others in my cohort were being so effortlessly good at this. And it was a consistent pattern too, kids from international backgrounds struggled, I saw it all the time. And we were expected to figure it all out ourselves.
I'm sorry but, i have no patience for treating academic writing and academia as this hallowed ground. fuck that actually.
i know i made fan art of pokemon scarlet and violet and all but i have no real intention of picking the game up. why is the entire region school themed. why do i only have 4 clothing options. why does the game run at negative 24 fps. how is this the third mainline pokemon game to come out within a 12 month span? why is this the best a billion dollar franchise can put out?
this dev cycle sucks and is unhealthy and frankly i think game freak, the pokemon company, or whoever is in charge of putting out mediocre ass video games like this for $60 deserve to be ridiculed. and honestly... so do people who consume this shit without 0 criticism or thought
This is essentially just me shouting into the void of the internet like Midas’ barber, but I’m currently tearing my hair out over students who, having paid or borrowed goodness knows how many thousands of dollars in tuition, are balking at paying *checks notes* $15 for a required course text. The book list for the entire course comes out at under $100, by design. And yet.
