~Stand down there's a fire in my soul
All out and I'm losin' all control cause
We are ready for a street fight~ Adam Jensen - Street Fight
Uh oh the boys have codenames now, look out evildoers.
I’ve been thinking about ‘Good Boys with Baseball Bats’ again lately, which has resulted in several new ideas as to what exactly goes on in this AU. I’ll put it under the cut.
Chris’s codename comes from the brand of baseball bat he carries around. Martin’s is because he said “let’s rumble” one too many times before jumping into fights, and JZ started calling him Rumble as a joke but it stuck.
They only go after legitimate criminals like shady businesses/companies, repeat animal abusers, and gangs or criminals that commit actual violent crimes against people. They're kind of vigilantes. Some cops don't actually try that hard to catch them because the places they hang out have much lower crime.
They're always careful to never be violent against actual people unless they can’t help it. Fighting in self-defense is a given; if they get hit they'll hit back. Most of the time they just wreck stuff and make a mess so much of a mess that villains will reconsider their actions. (Bashing robots is also not the same as bashing people.) Chris breaks the “no attacking people” rule only once and almost gets caught and arrested.
With the team's help, they almost always have alibis. They avoid linking their fights with home base or friends and family at ALL COSTS. (This once led to Martin hiding in a tree with a dislocated shoulder for two hours.)
They are careful to go out after dark if at all possible; daytime skirmishes are kept to a minimum. If a local needs help after dark, they will willingly jump into the brothers’ protection, as they're fairly well-known locally. Martin's specialty is walking tipsy people home from bars to make sure they get home safe while Chris's specialty is carrying groceries for people and helping old ladies.
Chris also tends to get asked to loiter menacingly near someone who needs protection at their house or work. If someone unwanted gets too close or threatening he does that "heeyyy batter batter, hey batter batter" chant. No one has been brave enough to let him reach the "swing!" part.
They smear that black sports grease under (sometimes around) their eyes and sometimes paint around their eyes with neon paint, to make it harder to identify them. This is pretty much only when they think things out, though, if they get in a sudden scuffle they just try to keep their heads down and hoods up.
They ONLY wear the letterman jackets when out fighting and avoid wearing them in public. If they do wear them in public, they have special logos that only show up in the dark, so they look plain during the day. Also, while Martin is the punchy man, Chris also keeps tape to wrap his hands with him at all times. He can fistfight, he just prefers his bat.
Aka. the boys help out in Aviva’s machine shop sometimes and if customers start acting unruly all they have to do is come and lean against the counter menacingly.
Or Martin walks up and finds a way to casually flex his shoulders (have you seen a professional swimmer’s shoulder and back muscles?? yeah Martin definitely has those puppies)
Also, I’m sure people know, but just in case, Chris basically always has a lollipop in his mouth, so that’s what that is
Also also, it’s 3 am here because I have no self control and this is the first idea in a while that’s grabbed hold of me hard enough to make me obsess over drawing it. (i have a two page paper due tomorrow that I’ve been avoiding lol)
The rest of the crew from my (goofily named) ‘Good Boys with Baseball Bats’ AU
This ragtag crew keep an eye on the guys and help them rescue animals. They can fight, but they avoid it because they have their own reputations to uphold, thank you very much. Of them all, Jimmy is the most reluctant to fight, but beware: he’s much stronger than he looks
Koki - She maintains their private network and handles all the villain watching and data gathering. She also helps to run Aviva’s machine shop, the Tortuga, which doubles as a kind of base for the crew
Aviva - Runs her machine shop full time, and works on her own projects the rest of the time. She builds gadgets and vehicles to help out the guys, but laments having to leave her name off of them (in case the guys get in trouble)
Jimmy - The resident programming expert. He loves video games, lounging around the machine shop, and mother henning everyone in the gang. Besides being the getaway driver (on occasion), cooking filling meals, and carrying around extra bandaids (no one knows where he keeps them all). In a pinch he’s actually a good fighter, but he’s a self-declared pacifist and keeps out of things as much as possible
Decided to digitalize the drawing I did earlier because this one deserved to be in color. Proportions and style are still ??? but I like how it turned out!
A good boy with a baseball bat. He purposefully overdoes the sweetness thing, so people don’t expect it when he kicks them in the shins.
Dug this one out of my WIP folder and basically redid it from scratch. I needed something to play around with and I actually had a lot of fun doing the background!
This time I didn’t stay awake until an unholy hour drawing this!
This and the other piece were both inspired largely by the super chill vibes I get from lofi hiphip; I was listening to ChilledCow on YouTube the entire time I drew them!
There’s a part in this one song (Travelling Light by Daydreamer) that came on while I was doodling this and that gritty sound made me go ‘aw heck yeah’ and make this more intense than I originally intended (more under the cut)
This kind of goes with the two recent neon-pastel/whatever-nonsense-that-was pieces. And now this is some sort of pastel bad boys AU. Those ones were soft and colorful, and I imagine that in this AU that’s really the kind of color scheme the brothers end up in.
However, though they look soft and flowery, they’ll kick anyone’s butt if they find someone mistreating animals. They’re not afraid to start fights in order to bring awareness and protection for animals, and somehow they gain a reputation for being “bad boys with good hearts”. They particularly tangle with a bunch of aggressive people (aka the Villains) who go out of their way to abuse and use animals.
Martin is a real bruiser, fast on his feet and quick thinking with a powerful fist to back him up. Chris is more of a planner, sly and cautious, and he likes to use a baseball bat to bash in robots and occasionally whack a bully. Because tangling with the Villains is a weekly occurrence they carry band-aids and weapons with them at all times, which only adds to their “bad boy” reputation
