For the AU headcanons thing, Southern Gothic Wrathdoll AU
send me an au and i’ll give you 5+ headcanons about it
Both Gotham and Central City are now average sized towns; as each year passes both are steadily sinking further and further into the marsh, and with that everything becomes more and more dilapidated.
I don’t know that Hartley particularly cares, but Mary is incredibly derogatory towards religion of all kinds; the two sit on the porch on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings to watch the rest of the town disappear into the church building, swapping commentary that gets increasingly more cruel.
They share a relatively small house, with a wrap around porch and wide, wide windows stretching across most rooms. There are window panes missing that they can’t afford to replace, and the ground grows soft under the back stairs into the yard in the mornings, like it’s going to swallow the house whole. When the rains come in late spring, the roof leaks and the wood groans a thousand times louder.
Even with their attitude towards religion, they can’t escape the fact that it’s all around them, and find themselves paranoid about ‘omens’. Mary skips town for months to pull off her bank jobs elsewhere if the doors start slamming, mumbling about ghosts she most certainly does not believe in. If the prophesier wanders through the main street, making his rounds through the town, neither sleeps well.
There’s no high class technology available to them. Mary stitches dolls from rags by hand, looks up methods of mixing herbs to poison instead of her bombs and gas pellets. Hartley covers his ears and tries to shut out the sound of bugs, develops high frequency whistles in place of his gloves. They get by as best they can.
