#Batman come get your fucking children your useless middle age man

[qcomicsy]

Do I find Damian incredible annoying? Yes Will I fight every single motherfucker who resumes his entire character to violent and 'bad'? Also Yes.

#I don't know how many times I'm going to repeat myself but this is a goddamn child soldier getting repeatedly traumatize #in a family that has so many chaos that he always feels the need to prove himself in the terms he was taught #i didn't give a fuck what Damian does thats the responsibility of his father until he actually becomes responsible to his actions #and dc comics literally bought him out of nowhere just to shit on him and then repeatedly try to get rid of him for no fucking reason #Damian goin off as a way of getting Batman emotional damage it's actually very stupid dc you tried the same shit with jason in this last #ten years and not even then anybody liked #few things makes me more unreasonable piss off than batman letting his kids get away from him and then act like they don't need him #he did te same shit with dick but at least dick had the titans #this whole shit with Damian is making me read with my eyes while my hands are dialing the cps #Batman come get your fucking children your useless middle age man #bruce hate hours #damian wayne #damian al ghul #damian al ghul wayne

[ash818]

hi ash, how are you? Was wondering what Jon and Tish were up to these days?

It is not possible, as it turns out, to involve yourself with only one Queen.

They are all hopelessly tangled in each other’s lives, and to love one of them is to surrender to the rest, who will adopt your troubles as their troubles and your triumphs as their triumphs. Aunt Thea settles in next to you, swirling a glass of wine, and smiles as if she knows your secrets just before deftly teasing them out of you. Mrs. Queen tiptoes up to the edge of her children’s boundaries, but she can’t resist peeking over; mostly, she is too sincere to refuse. Abigail doesn’t even bother to tiptoe. Mr. Queen is the most hands-off, but even he quietly smooths over little difficulties behind your back. You don’t find out that he’s done it until months later, if ever.

So when Mrs. Queen was struggling to find an administrative assistant not long after my graduation, I suppose she found it perfectly natural to ask me.

“I can’t exactly post ‘occasional vigilantism’ as a requirement on LinkedIn,” she told me. “But the secret is safe with you, and you have the requisite skill set. I think you’d be perfect. Ideal. Sans pareil.” She tilted her head faintly. “Did I say that right?”

I tried to be gentle when I pointed out, “My boyfriend’s mother would be my boss.”

“Is that weird?” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m Jon’s boss, and it’s not weird. You know if you get tired of him, you still get to stay. I hope that’s not your concern. You can keep coming to family dinners and everything.”

That honestly had not occurred to me. “Wouldn’t the rest of the office consider it blatant nepotism?”

“With Jon, they got over it as soon as they realized he wasn’t useless. You’ll be fine too.” She leaned closer to me and said earnestly, “Look, I could really use the help.”

I knew as much; Jon had been complaining for months that she shouldn’t be going it alone anymore.

“I know you’re looking for something in your field, but it seems like that might take some time. This is only a first job to get you started and build a little work history, just until you find something better.”

As I said, Mrs. Queen is too sincere to refuse.

When I came into the office to formally accept her offer, she shook my hand across her desk and said, “Don’t breathe a word to Jon. I want to surprise him.”

My first morning at Panoptic, she called Jon into her office to meet her new admin, and she had a good giggle at the look on his face. But the shock wore off in about five minutes, and at the first opportunity, he tried to back me against a wall and put his hands up my shirt.

“This was nowhere in the job description,” I said, once I had worked up some self-control.

“Nope.” He bent down to kiss my neck. “This is just perks.”

It took me longer than it should have to push him backwards, but eventually I managed it. “Your mother did not hire me to make your life more fun.”

“Of course she didn’t. That would be messed up.” He sighed theatrically. “So no bending you over my desk.”

Heat washed through me, and I closed my eyes and let myself imagine it for just a moment. With an effort, I shook my head. “No inappropriate use of any desks.”

In my first week as Felicity Queen’s admin, I learned to navigate her unusual scheduling software, the source code of which she had modified heavily to suit her preferences. I learned to document meetings in her idiosyncratic system, to recognize her frantic hand signal for, “Tell them I’m busy,” and to brew coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

A few of the employees - mostly protectors who had guarded me in the past - welcomed me enthusiastically. The others reserved judgment, and I overheard at least one joke in the break room, speculating on what I had really been hired to do here, which cemented my resolve about desks and the uses thereof.

On my sixth day at Panoptic, I met Jeremy Price Longwood.

“I’m sorry, who?” Mr. Queen asked at dinner the previous night.

“Think Chris Hemsworth,” Mrs. Queen explained. “Or Pratt or Evans or Pine. Really, any of the Chrises.”

Mr. Queen blinked, just once, where a man less stoic might have grimaced in distaste. “Ah.”

“We’re guarding his face,” Jon said. “Specifically his face. It’s insured for half a million.”

“Much more than that, certainly,” I said.

He gave me a look.

The next morning, Mrs. Queen called together the team delegated to Mr. Longwood’s case. “He’s in Starling to shoot a Romeo and Juliet ‘reimagining,’ as if we needed another one of those. Ever since that werewolf movie, he’s been seeing an uptick in creepers. Nothing he hasn’t handled before, but we’re going to keep somebody nearby. We don’t want some poor deluded soul running on set and shoving a bundle of love letters down his shirt. It’s embarrassing, and he’s had enough of that this year.”

“Enough love letters down his shirt?” said Ms. Ramirez.

“Enough embarrassment.” Mrs. Queen gave a little shudder. “The werewolf thing. Poor guy.”

He had his shirt off for half the movie. Personally, I thought he had nothing at all to be embarrassed about.

“Sounds pretty standard,” Jon said, getting to his feet. “Who wants the first evening shift?”

Not half an hour later, the man himself came striding through the front doors with a small styrofoam cup in his hands, and he came straight to me at the front desk. “Hey, sorry I’m late,” he said. “Y’all know the numbers have rubbed off the elevator buttons?”

On film, he was lovely, but in person, he was devastating. It took me a moment to answer him. “I apologize for the confusion. Can I get you anything? Water or coffee?”

He raised the styrofoam cup. “Your neighbors one floor up - the divorce law firm? - they hooked me up.” He gave me a conspiratorial smile, and my heart skipped a beat. “No one tell my wife I walked in there.”

I would have loved to joke right back. All I managed was, “Of course not.” Hopefully my cheeks weren’t visibly pink. “I’ll show you to the conference room and lets Mrs. Queen know you’re here.”

“How did you find out about us?” was among Mrs. Queen’s standard battery of questions for new clients.

“A friend gave me your name,” said Mr. Longwood. “You came recommended by Bruce Wayne, so he figured you must be the real deal.”

Mrs. Queen looked unduly pleased by that, considering.

By the time he left an hour later, half the staff was as charmed as I was.

“Aw, he’s gonna be easy,” Darius said. “I can already tell. No clubbing, no foolishness, no babysitting his drunk ass. This dude lives in the gym and eats unsalted chicken breast.”

“Certainly looks that way,” Ms. Ramirez agreed. “Did you hear he called me ma’am? I love when these Southern boys do that. It means they’ll fucking listen.”

Once everyone else had cleared out, I turned to Mrs. Queen. “Didn’t Mr. Queen and Mr. Wayne have a bit of a falling out?”

“They did, but he never fell out with Panoptic. Bruce used to have Dig guarding him every time he was in Starling.”

“Was that, ah, strictly necessary?” I said delicately. “For Batman?”

“Of course not. Bruce just thought it was funny.”

Within a few days, Mr. Longwood left us all utterly disarmed.

Except for Jon. Very few people can disarm Jonathan Queen, and Jeremy Price Longwood is not among them. After a week of protective services and one more office meeting, Jon’s ultimate assessment was: “What a cheeseball.”

“I think he’s sincere,” I said.

“That’s because he’s a skillful cheeseball.”

“Ah, of course, he fooled the silly little girl,” I said, crossing my arms. “But you see right through him with an unbiased eye.”

“He makes you all fluttery. Admit it.”

“Darius and Ms. Ramirez also found him courteous and friendly, and you can’t accuse either of them of getting fluttery.”

“Jones likes anyone who pays for lunch, and Ramirez likes dumb golden retrievers who sit and stay on command.”

“You weren’t this mean about the oil exec making business trips to Angola - the one who almost definitely had a genuine personality disorder. But this one, you can’t stand.”

“This one expects me to like him. The BP guy had the decency not to give a damn.”

I sighed. “All right, Jonathan.”

It’s not difficult to understand, in the end. Jon is a good-looking man, if I do say so myself, and he is in fantastic shape. But he lives in a permanent state of three-day scruff, and he will always look more boyish than debonair. He is in the kind of shape optimized to slam into you like a hammer, not the kind engineered to look good on camera.

Perfectly gelled and professionally dressed Jeremy Price Longwood is standing right there, and of course Jon is supremely irritated by him. It’s like when I have to stand next to willowy Elaine Diggle, magnified severalfold.

“Tell me something,” I said, mostly as a distraction. “What was so funny about asking Mr. Diggle to guard people who didn’t exactly need guarding?”

“Oh, that.” Jon shook his head. “My dad spent years pretending to lose sparring matches to Dig, just to make sure everybody knew what a helpless marshmallow he was. Drove Dig up the wall.”

I never quite understood the dynamics of combat sports. “Why would he care, if it was all part of their cover?”

“You know when you get old enough to realize your dad is letting you win at Battleship or whatever?”

No, I couldn’t say I knew how that felt.

Jon cleared his throat. “It’s condescending as hell. Especially when he thinks it’s hilarious, and you can’t make him stop laughing, because if you try he’s just going to lay you out on the floor again.”

“He did this to you as well,” I surmised.

“He wears ties and reading glasses,” Jon said, rolling his eyes. “He’s just a boring middle-aged public servant, play-fighting to stay in shape. He doesn’t even know how to break someone’s neck. Honest.”

“You Queens are a strange tribe.”

Jon shrugged. “You joined. What does that make you?”

What, indeed?

That summer, I learned Panoptic inside out. I took notes on Mrs. Queen’s consultations with a businessman who traveled extensively in Mexico, with one of Laurel Lance’s attorneys recently assigned to an organized crime case, and with a woman who wore a cast on her left wrist and who had recently procured a restraining order against her husband.

Most of the people who came through our doors were terrified for one reason or another. Mrs. Queen coaxed information out of them with a practiced cheerfulness that should have felt inappropriate, but which they mostly found comforting. Jon did it much more bluntly, which occasionally rubbed people the wrong way, but more often inspired shockingly unreserved trust.

“That’s one of the upsides of a runaway mouth,” Mrs. Queen said ruefully. “People notice you’ve fumbled the reins, and they assume that’s the same thing as honesty.”

I shook my head. “I think it’s because they can tell he’s genuinely listening. Most people wait for their turn to talk.”

“You know,” Mrs. Queen tipped her head at me, “not one of his teachers, through twenty-ish years of school, ever singled out listening as one of his strengths.”

“Mr. Queen is the same way,” I pointed out. “He looks you right in the eyes, and you feel like you have his complete and undivided attention.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Even when he’s actually thinking about the fastest way to get you out of his office.” She grinned, swiveling back to her computer. “Oliver worked hard at his politician face.”

By September, I knew more about my boyfriend’s mother than anyone reasonably should.

I knew that she could only stare at a screen for three hours before she got a headache. She took her disgusting coffee with a disgusting amount of artificial sweetener. She got anxious before Skype meetings with Dig and Lyla, because this was their baby she was raising. She wore a size six or eight, depending on the brand, and a nice man named Warren dyed her hair every seven weeks.

“I suspect Thursday nights are date nights,” I mused out loud to Jon one afternoon. “She rarely leaves after five, and she sometimes sends me to Martin’s Wine Cellar first.”

“That’s nice,” he said vaguely. “Thursdays are Bordeaux sex. Everybody loves Bordeaux sex.” A few moments later, he looked up from his glassbook to frown at me. “Do you think my family has boundary issues?”

I shrugged and went back to my backlog of emails.

Over the course of Romeo and Juliet’s shooting schedule, Panoptic intercepted a few cringeworthy letters to Mr. Longwood, and our protectors turned away the odd paparazzo or pushy fan, but altogether the job was as easy as Darius predicted.

“Longwood’s got a solid right straight too,” Darius said. “Apparently stage fighting isn’t complete bullshit.”

Mrs. Queen narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ve been beating up your principal?”

I glanced at Jon, who looked both annoyed and intrigued.

“He’s gone to work on some strike mitts with me, that’s all,” Darius said. “I told you, this dude lives at the gym.”

“Just don’t mess up his face,” Jon advised with mock seriousness. “Be very careful with the face.”

“You want to take a swing at him,” I said, as soon as Darius left the room. “Don’t pretend.”

His shrug was not denial.

“He’s an excellent client, and you may not hit him,” Mrs. Queen said. “No matter how annoyingly pretty he is.”

“That’s not the - “

“Yes, it is.” On her way out the door, she patted his cheek, and then she nodded meaningfully at me. “She thinks you’re adorable. Good enough, right?”

She winked at me, and then she headed for her office.

Jon rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily. “I think the boss just gave us permission to flirt at work. I don’t like it.”

I gave him a couple of consoling pats. “It’s just perks, darling.”

When Romeo and Juliet wrapped, there was no call for Mr. Longwood to return to our office, but he dropped by to say thank you and sign autographs. He had that kind of class. For Jon, he offered an especially strong handshake and his most sparkling Southern smile - “Thank you for all you do” - and Jon returned it warmly.

As soon as the door closed behind Longwood, Jon muttered, “Extremely punchable face, though.”

Mrs. Queen and I exchanged a smile, and we went back to work.

#arrow #olicity fic #legacy verse #jon and tish #felicity queen #jonathan queen #laetitia cuvier #Anonymous