#it's a very tiny detail but Tim high key used to care a lot about Dick and vice versa so it was nice to see that rather than him joining in | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dwellordream · 3 years

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“...Because if we want to ask “What was life as a woman like in Sparta?” we really need to ask “What was life like as a helot woman?” because they represent c. 85% of all of our women and c. 42.5% of all of our humans. And I want to stress the importance of this question, because there are more helot women in Sparta than there are free humans in Sparta (as from last time, around 15% of Sparta is free – men and women both included – but 42.5% of Sparta consists of enslaved helot women). If we want to say absolutely anything about the condition of life in Sparta, we simply cannot ignore such a large group of human beings living in Sparta.

...The primary economic occupation of helot women was probably in food preparation and textile production. And if I know my students, I know that the moment I start talking about the economic role of women in ancient households, a very specific half of the class dozes off. Wake Up. There is an awful tendency to see this ‘women’s work’ as somehow lesser or optional. These tasks I just listed are not economically marginal, they are not unimportant. Yes, our ancient sources devalue them, but we should not.

First: let’s be clear – women in ancient households (or early modern households, or modern households) were not idle. They had important jobs every bit as important as the farming, which had to get done for the family to survive. I’ve estimated elsewhere that it probably takes a minimum of something like 2,220 hours per year to produce the minimum necessary textile goods for a household of five (that’s 42 hours a week spinning and weaving, every week). Most of that time is spent spinning raw fibers (either plant fibers from flax to make linen, or animal fibers from sheep to make wool). The next step after that is weaving those threads into fabric. Both weaving and spinning are slow, careful and painstaking exercises.

Food preparation is similarly essential, as you might imagine. As late as 1900, food preparation and cleanup consumed some 44 hours per week on average in American households, plus another 14 hours dedicated to laundry and cleaning (Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness (1993)). So even without child rearing – and ask any parent, there is a TON of work in that – a small peasant household (again, five members) is going to require something like 100 hours per week of ‘woman’s work’ merely to sustain itself.

Now, in a normal peasant household, that work will get split up between the women of the house at all ages. Girls will typically learn to spin and weave at very young ages, at first helping out with the simpler tasks before becoming fully proficient (but of course, now add ‘training time’ as a job requirement for their mothers). But at the same time (see Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) on this) women often also had to engage in agricultural labor during peak demand – sowing, harvesting, etc. That’s a lot of work to go around. Remember, we’re positing a roughly 5 individual household, so those 100 hours may well be split between only two people (one of whom may be either quite old or quite young and thus not as productive).

...Let’s start textiles. Spartiate women do not engage in textile manufacture (Xen. Lac. 1.4) as noted previously, nor do they seem (though the evidence here is weaker) to engage in food preparation. In the syssitia, at least, the meals are cooked and catered by helot slaves (Plut. Lyc. 12.5, 12.7). In the former case, we are told explicitly by Xenophon that it is slave labor (he uses the word doule, “female slave,” which clearly here must mean helot women) which does this.

So helot women now have an additional demand on their time and energy: not only the 2,200 hours for clothing their own household, but even more clothing the spartiate household they are forced to serve. If we want to throw numbers at this, we might idly suppose something like five helot households serving one spartiate household, suggesting something like a 20% increase in the amount of textile work. We are not told, but it seems a safe bet that they were also forced to serve as ‘domestics’ in spartiate households. That’s actually a fairly heavy and onerous imposition of additional labor on these helot women who already have their hands full.

We also know – as discussed last time – that helot households were forced to turn over a significant portion of their produce, perhaps as high as half. I won’t drag you all through the details now – I love agricultural modeling precisely because it lets us peak into the lives of folks who don’t make it into our sources – but I know of no model of ancient agriculture which can tolerate that kind of extraction without bad consequences. And I hear the retort already coming: well, of course it couldn’t have been that bad, because there were still helots, right? Not quite, because that’s not how poor farming populations work. It can be very bad and still leave you with a stable – but miserable – population.

Let’s talk about seasonal mortality. As the primary food-preparers in the helot household, helot women are going to have the job of managing a constrained but variable flow of food through an extended family that may include their husband, children, older relatives, etc. Given the low productivity of ancient farming, this is a tricky operation in systems where rents are extracting 10% or 20% of the farming yield every year, but given the demands of supporting an entirely unproductive class of elites, it becomes even harder. The key task here is stretching one harvest through the next planting to the next harvest, every year. That means carefully measuring out the food consumption of the household against the available reserves, making sure there is enough to last over the winter. If too much food is extracted by the elites, or the harvest fails or (likely) some combination, the family will run into shortage.

Now, the clever helot woman knows this – peasants, male and female, are canny survivors, not idiots, and they plan for these things (seriously, far too many of my students seem to instinctively fall into the trap of assuming serfs, peasants, etc. are idiots who don’t know what they are doing. These people have survived for generations with very few resources, often in situations of significant volatility and violence; they’re not stupid, they’re poor, and there is a difference!) – so she will have strategies to stretch out that food to try to keep herself and her family alive.

But that in turn often means inflicting a degree of malnutrition on the family unit, in order to avoid outright starvation – stretching the food out. It also probably means a lot of related strategies too: keeping up horizontal ties with other farming households so that there is someone to help you out in a shortage, for instance. Canny survivors. That said – especially in a situation where shortages hit everyone at once – a shortfall in food is often unavoidable.

But, we need to note two things here: first: humans of different ages and conditions react to malnutrition differently. Robust adults can tolerate and recover from periods of malnutrition relatively easily. For pregnant women, malnutrition increases all sorts of bad complications which will probably kill the child and may kill the mother. For the elderly and very young children, malnutrition dramatically increases mortality (read: lots of dead children and grandparents), as compromised immune systems (weakened by malnutrition) lead to diseases that the less robust old and young cannot fight off.

Second – and this is the sad and brutal part – feeding the agricultural workers, meaning the adult males (and to a lesser extent, adult females), has to come first, because they need to make it to the planting with sufficient strength to manage the backbreaking labor of the next crop. If it’s a choice between the survival of the family unit, and taking a chance that you lose Tiny Tim, our helot mother knows she has to risk Tiny Tim.

So in a good year, there is food enough for the entire household. Families expand, children grow up, the elderly part of the family makes it through another winter, imparting wisdom and comfort. But the bad years carry off the very young and the very old (and the as-yet unborn). For children who make it out of infancy, a series of bad years in early childhood – quite a common thing – are likely to leave them physically stunted. It was very likely that most helots were actually physically smaller and weaker than their better nourished spartiate masters for this reason (this is a pattern visible archaeologically over a wide range of pre-modern societies).

The population doesn’t contract, because the mortality isn’t hitting adults of child-bearing age nearly as hard, meaning that in future good years, there will be new children. In fact, societies stuck in this sad equilibrium tend to ‘bounce back’ demographically fairly quickly, because massive external mortality (say from war or plague) frees up land and agricultural surplus which leads to better nutrition which leads to less infant mortality which leads to rapid recovery.

...And so helot women must have spent a lot of time worrying about food scarcity, worrying if their sick and malnourished children or parents would make it through winter. Grieving for the lost child, the lost pregnancy, the parent taken too quickly. Probably all while being forced to do domestic labor for the spartiates, who were both the cause of her misery and at the same time did no labor at all themselves and yet were better fed than her family would ever be. Because peasant labor of any kind is so precariously balanced, we can really say that every garment woven for the spartiates, every bushel turned over, represented in some real sense an increase in that grief. Subsistence farming is always hard – but the Spartan system seems tailor made to push these subsistence farmers deeper and deeper into misery.

The instances of brutality against the helots – the murders and humiliations – which our sources preserve are directed at helot men, but it seems an unavoidable assumption that helot women were also treated poorly. Spartiate women were, after all, products of the same society which trained young men to ambush and murder helot men at night for no reason at all – it strikes me as an enormous and unsubstantiated leap to assume they were, for some reason, kind to their own female domestic servants.

In fact, the one thing we do know about spartiates – men and women alike – is that they seem to have held all manual laborers in contempt, regarding farming, weaving and crafting as tasks unbefitting of free people. I keep returning to it, but I want to again mention the spartiate woman who attempts to shame an Ionian woman because the latter is good at weaving, which in the mind of the spartiate, was labor unbecoming of a free person (Plut. Mor. 241d, note Xen. Lac. 1.4). The same attitude comes out of a spartiate man who, on seeing an Athenian convicted for idleness in court, praised the man, saying he had only been convicted of being free (Plut. Mor. 221c). This is a society that actively despises anyone who has to work for a living – even free people. Why wouldn’t that extend to its treatment of helot women?

To this, of course, we must add now the krypteia and incidents like the 2,000 murdered helots recounted by Thucydides (Thuc. 4.80). While the murdered are men, we need to also think of the survivors: the widowed wives, orphaned daughters, grieving mothers. This must have been part of the pattern of life for helot women as well – the husband or brother or cousin or father or son who went out to the fields one day and didn’t come back. The beautiful boy who was too beautiful and was thus murdered by the spartiates because – as we are told – they expressly targeted the fittest seeming helots in an effort at reverse-eugenics (Plut. Lyc. 28.3).

Finally, we need to talk about the rape. We are not told that spartiate men rape helot women, but it takes wilful ignorance to deny that this happened. First of all, this is a society which sends armed men at night into the unarmed and defenseless countryside (Hdt. 4.146.2; Plut. Lyc. 28.2; Plato, Laws 633). These young men were almost certainly under the normal age of marriage and even if they weren’t, their sexual access to their actual spouse was restricted.

Moreover (as we’ll see in a moment) there were clearly no rules against the sexual exploitation of helot women, just like there were no laws of any kind against the murder of helot men. To believe that these young men – under no direction, constrained by no military law, facing no social censure – did not engage in sexual violence requires disbelieving functionally the entire body of evidence about sexual violence in combat zones from all of human history. Anthropologically speaking, we can be absolutely sure this happened and we can be quite confident (and ought to be more than quite horrified) that it happened frequently.

But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers. There is a strong reason to believe that these are the same as the mothakes or mothones which begin appearing with greater frequently in our sources. Several of these mothakes end up being fairly significant figures, most notably Lysander (note Plut. Lys. 2.1-4, where Plutarch politely sidesteps the question of why Lysander was raised in poverty and seemed unusually subservient and also the question of who his mother was).”

- Bret Devereaux, “This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women.”

#spartan #greek #ancient #bret devereaux #history #cw: rape #weaving

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thrillliquid93-blog · 5 years

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Plumbing Pipes For Potable Water

When Plumbing Related Problems Strike

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Because this problem typically appears when the toilet is flushed, its generally a nasty one. The very best means to handle it is to switch off the water system to the toilet as soon as you see the trouble. The commode should have a shutoff valve near the back towards the flooring. After that, make use of a plunger or metal snake to dislodge the blockage. If you on a regular basis have this pipes concern, call a plumber to identify why your toilet is not purging as it should. If your waste disposal unit does not function, you likely have food stuck in it. The system most likely featured a key wrench. Utilize this to loosen up the clog. Merely area it on the appropriate factor below the disposal, and also then turn the essential counterclockwise till it can move once again. Before utilizing the disposal, run it while cool water runs down the drain. This will chop up any type of continuing to be food fragments. You ought to beware keenly for addressing the concern prior to they rupture out huge. 3. Yearly inspection of the pipes system is advised for at least houses that are 50 years old. 4. When you do the annual evaluation, it is needed to do it with the assistance of Annandale plumber that will certainly do the evaluation plainly for you. 5. Emergency situation upkeep could put you in a terrific anxiety as well as loss. So when you keep your home and are certain that your pipes are great, you will save even more time and also loan. Watch out on anything you see dubious on your pipes system. Do not take anything easy. Right from brown spots or some little leaks to moisture in an area reach out the very best plumber around to have your system examined quickly. Each day when you begin utilizing water in your house check the quality of the water, its odor, the colour as well as if there is any kind of modification in taste. If you feel or observe to shed water miscellaneously that you are not making use of talk to your plumber, because there may be some leaks which you may not know. Whenever you do your home upkeep do not disregard the pipes system. The writer is an Earlwood plumber who comprehends the demands of his consumers and also uses the very best solutions at a budget friendly rate. He provides budget-friendly prices as well as customised solution.

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morgantakestinder · 6 years

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San Frantastic (or the Longest Date Ever)

This stunning photo of me and Alcatraz is courtesy of Prost and our whirlwind long weekend together in San Francisco. Despite only having known him for a month, I managed to enjoy some of my favourite things with him including Halloween, wine, warm gooey cookies, hotel rooms, Marvel movies, and finally the stunning west coast paradise of San Francisco. Considering that this blog was reignited in this crazy city, I was psyched to come back not too long after, although I can honestly say that until I pulled up to our airbnb I couldn’t believe that I was actually taking this trip with a Tinder date!

Unlike a regular date I’m not exactly sure how to write about this one as I don’t want to bog readers down with the inane details of every uber ride, drink, or sight that we experienced together over 4 days. That sounds terribly boring. So I think I’ll break it down into categories, maybe? An odd way to explain a date/trip but this is uncharted territory for me...

Sights & Adventures

In only a few short days I felt like we covered a lot of ground. Prost booked us Alcatraz tickets before we got there ensuring that I got to see another creepy prison (I’ve got a thing for desolate places...) that I missed out on last trip. This was fantastic and we spent a large chunk of the afternoon wandering the island while I made more than too many Aussie convict jokes. We also did a fair bit of wandering back on the mainland and watched the city get dark on the pier. Also a new adventure for me, is we checked out the Exploratorium which is basically a kickass science museum and I was science fangirling hard. I found it really sweet that Prost was willing to spend $30 to indulge my science teacher desires. (Also, there is a really great observation deck that made for a pretty cute photo of the two of us...) Back out and about we hiked up Lombard St, which has great views if you don’t care about being able to feel your calves the next day - should have known better than to go to a hilly city with a guy who circumnavigated Manhattan on foot. Many of our other moments together I took right out of my playbook from my not-dates with Wino from my last weekend in SF. I know it sounds a bit like cheating, but if I had all these cute, almost romantic moments then, why not have actual cute romantic moments now that I was properly available. So we did sunset at Baker Beach and stayed until well past dark. And we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and all the way to Sausalito until we got the ferry back across the windy but stunning bay. I wouldn’t say it was 100% Hollywood movie material but the whole thing was pretty darn cute.

Noms & Bevvies

Prost and I went for dinner together right before leaving the east coast and he mentioned that he not only was not a picky eater, but also was quite adventurous with food and loved good food so I was pleased when this was 100% accurate. Nothing to ruin a good trip like someone who can’t find anything on the menu or has bizarre dietary requirements. While my last trip to SF was all about wine, this one was all cocktails! We had lovely drinks on a cool outdoor terrace (recommended to me by none other than Ted Mosby from last trip) but the best drink moment was at this piratey, cramped, dark bar that made dozens of cool and delicious rum drinks. I was in rum heaven and we stayed there for hours looking over all the exciting options, including ones with edible flowers. Vibes 10/10. Drinks 10/10. But the indulging didn’t stop there! We also managed to eat wayyy too much ice cream, empanadas, tim tams, chocolate (for breakfast I might add), pastries, fried chicken and waffles, noodles, toast, fried fish, calamari, and prawns, and really not a whole lot of veg... oops, bye diet. We ate a lot of really scrumptious things but a few stood out to me the most. One was breakfast at Bluestone Lane, an Aussie coffee place, that just opened their first west coast location. And when I say just opened, literally we walked in on opening day! It’s one of my locals back home so I was delighted to get a spot on cup of coffee and just chill out of the rain. Prost doesn’t like coffee, but per usual, he indulged my whim with zero complaints. He does however like hot chocolate so at least he’s not anti hot beverage. His coffee behaviour though is really quite odd for a Melburnian though! Our last day we had another breakfast meal at a Southern inspired joint in the Mission and we both were in full brunch mode: drinks, beignets, and full plates of chicken and waffles. Honestly, I know it gets a lot of hype but brunch is clearly the best meal of the day and I also really just enjoyed being able to spend my last meal looking over the table at this really cute bloke I’d been lucky to spend so much time with. But by far the best meal was at a tiny little fish and chips shop in Sausalito, up the high street, where we sat casually eating fish and chips out of takeaway boxes and drinking beers. I’m not always the “cool girl” but I sure felt like it then and such a low key moment is exactly the kind of date I’m all about.

Moments (The Cute, The Sexy, and The Awkward)

So I’ve talked about the food and the sights and all the lovely things about San Francisco, and that would be enough if this was some kind of mediocre travel blog, but alas instead you’ve ended up reading a shitty blog about a hopelessly romantic pessimist so you get some other weird details added in too. Now one of the best things about meeting someone new is that you get to have sex all the time. You’re both excited, always in the mood, and want to get to know the other person intimately. Prost and I were no exception to this and despite it being a quick trip, managed to push our number into double digits. (This is mainly due to the fact that he was literally waking me up in the middle of the night to fuck, which I had absolutely zero complaints about.) But besides the frequent sex, there was also heaps of hand holding to warm up his absolutely frigid hands, endearing compliments passed back and forth, and those very sweet kisses that tall guys give you on the top of your forehead when you’re wrapped into their arms and flood your brain with dopamine.

Also the first night we got there, Prost arrived in SF before I did and got all checked into our Airbnb. I had wi-fi on the flight so we kept in contact for most of my journey. Knowing that my flight was delayed and I’d be getting in late and exhausted (having been up since 5 am EST that day) he asked me if I’d want to get dinner or if instead there was anything he could go out and pick up so I’d have something to snack on when I arrived. I know it sounds so basic but I was floored by this - what an incredibly thoughtful gesture. Ignoring anything else that happened all weekend, that moment alone reminded me why I’ve been spending all this time with Prost: he’s a really thoughtful, genuine person.

We also had this totally nerdy night in moment on our last evening. It was freezing out and I wasn’t super feeling like staying out and drinking so instead we headed back to our humble abode and had a bit of friendly competition. We both are big Sporcle players (for the uninitiated it’s a trivia website that has every thing!) and as big travellers we’re both well versed in countries of the world. So we went old school version and set a timer for 15 minutes and tried to name as many countries as possible. Now I’d been talking a big game about this all weekend so you can imagine I had to eat a huge slice of humble pie afterwards when I lost... by two countries, at 168 and 166. To be fair I think that’s still pretty impressive on both of our parts. Prost and I also talked about other trivia bits - US state capitals, European capitals, periodic table elements that have symbols that don’t match their names... I found myself laughing wholeheartedly over silly things, happier than many moments I’ve had in recent months.

That carefree relaxed laughter was a stark contrast so some of the revelations that came up during the weekend, starting with Prost admitting that he’d read some of my other blog entries - like my first moment post Not The One where I lament my heartbreak and then meet the Tradie. This would have been all well and good, I’m not shy about the fact that I choose to share my intimate details with the world, but it was how he followed it up: telling me that he too had fallen victim to a recent heartbreak. It certainly broke my notion of this “by chance traveller.” I didn’t push it in the moment but a day or so later followed up and discovered that rather than coming to America to visit his brother and explore as I’d been led to believe, his original intention was to spend the trip with a Midwestern girl he’d met in Berlin. Unfortunately, this went less than spectacularly and once there it didn’t work out and he found himself rocking up to NYC instead. I was (still am) not exactly sure how I was supposed to react to this confession but I know my first instinct was to hug him as tight as possible and not let go. I certainly can’t understand what this flyover-state gal was thinking, but I know that Prost is incredible and the loss in this situation is hers, whether she knows it now or not. Beyond my true empathy for his situation I’ll admit I found myself a bit blindsided and instantly on guard. Am I just a rebound for Prost? Have I simply been serving as a time/bed filler while he nurses his own broken heart? I’d like to think not but I wouldn’t blame him if it was the case, and in the scheme of things it doesn’t really matter.

I had a San Frantastic weekend and for a change I got to share my travels, with someone I found particularly endearing! And like every other time I’ve found myself at the airport with someone, I was once again terrible at saying good-bye.

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unavenged-robin · 7 years

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Juxtaposition

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Juxtaposition (n) the state of being close together or side by side.

Or the one where Jason reminds Tim that sometimes Damian takes jokes all too seriously.

Characters: Tim Drake & Jason Todd & Damian Wayne Additional Tags: Swearing, Minor Violence, Dysfunctional Family, be warned I like to make Jason suffer, Timeline What Timeline, Not Canon Compliant, and dont even let me start on that whole amnesia thing

He had planned the details of this operation for two weeks straight, with great care and no little caution for his normal standards, and up until half an hour ago he was actually pretty damn pleased with himself for the results of his hard work. That’s why, if someone asked him right now how could he screw it all up so badly, Jason honestly wouldn’t know what to say to them (apart from fuck off, that is).

So, he’s trapped in a corner, he’s bleeding and he’s angry, and he’s so ready to kill anything that even looks at him the wrong way, let alone shoot at him like the thugs in front of him have been trying to do for the last half an hour, and of course - of course - that’s the moment when things get even worse.

He doesn’t see Damian. He doesn’t hear him either. Shit, he wouldn’t even know it’s Damian - what with the kid not wearing his Robin costume but just normal baggy teenager clothes - if not for the fact that there aren’t so many kids around Gotham who would willingly jumps in the middle of fights they so obviously have no business to do with. (There are a few others besides Damian, yes, but they’re all taller than this kid is) (and on top of that, Damian is kind of, you know, Jason’s brother).

So he’s trapped in a corner, he’s bleeding and he’s angry, and he also gets to watch a fucking kid - his fucking kid brother - jumping in the middle of his fight with no weapons, no kevlar protection and probably - because he knows him well enough at this point - not even the hint of a plan on his mind.

His adrenaline levels rise, instinct kicks in, and Jason gets back on his feet without even thinking about it. He starts shooting bullets, curses and swears indiscriminately at everything that moves - and let’s be honest, that should’ve been the preferred course of action all along, screw the planning thing, it never works anyway.

He’s going to kill Damian. Save his short ass first and then beat it black and blue. Tie him to his bed and let him watch while he burns everything the brat owns, clothes, knives, videogames, art supplies and carefully hidden toys (because Dick had spilled the bean about those, yeah). Take his pets away from him and give them to the local zoo.

His mind only stops rambling when he notices one of the snipers he was trying to distract turning his attention and his rifle away from him and towards Damian, and a thought - no, not even a thought, but an unavoidable certainty - freezes him to the bones.

Damian is going to die. Again.

And since Jason wasn’t there the first time, now he gets a front row ticket to the show. The best tickets you could get, ladies and gentleman!, a voice inside of his head starts screaming, a voice that sounds sickeningly similar to the Joker’s. And if you’re very very lucky, you’ll be even getting some of the blood on your faces! That’s how close you get to be! Isn’t this what family is for? Ah ah ah.

Jason’s panicking. He knows that. But knowing isn’t helping, and the split of time he was given to actually do something about it is already running out.

Meanwhile Damian delivers a mid-air kick to one of the thug's face, jumping closer to the sniper’s position and stepping even more clearly in his line of fire. Jason’s out of batarangs and the angle would be wrong anyway. Same goes for shooting first, no way he’s gonna hit the guy and that would probably just prompt him to shoot right back at Damian. So Jason does the only thing he can think of and dives for his brother, but he doesn’t have enough momentum, and the bullet goes off while he’s still too far away to shield the kid.

Jason’s heart skip a beat. Damian merely flips on his side and rolls on the ground. The bullet doesn’t even brushes him. He probably saw the sniper too, Jason realizes while he shifts on his feet to charge at the shooter without losing a beat. He’s going to kill him anyway. The thug first, Damian later.

He avoids two bullets fired at him in quick succession, then lands a good round of punches on the guy’s face. He’ll probably survive, but he’s gonna need a lot of reconstructive surgery to look as a human being again. Behind him Damian keeps drawing shouts and cries of pain, so Jason knows he’s doing okay. Still, his pulse doesn’t slow down. He can still taste the aftertaste of the fear in the back of his throat. He’s not gonna sleep well tonight. Or tomorrow. Or any night soon, probably.

Yes, Damian’s most definitely dead. Again.

Even with the newfound energy and Damian’s help, it takes them almost an hour to clear the docks, tie up everyone who’s still moving and retrieve the crates of weapons that were Red Hood’s primary purpose for this escapade.

Once everything’s done and the police’s sirens are on their way, Damian turns towards him with a smirk. It’s the first time that night Jason gets a good look at his face and he notices that he’s wearing the Robin domino mask. He’s unscathed, not even a scratch or a rim of sweat on his forehead. He actually looks quite content, and ready to start all over again.

“Well, that was easy. Is this how you usually spend your weekends, Hood? Being a living target practice for half-witted goons?”, he taunts.

Jason barely register he’s even speaking. He loads the last crate on his van and secures it with a lock, then gets up on his feet and takes off his helmet in one swift movement. When he finally turns to look at his brother, quickly and without even the hint of a warning, he grabs him by his wrist, pulling him toward himself. He peels the domino mask from his face and throws it away before Damian has even the time to understand what’s happening to him.

“What the fuck were you thinking?”, he growls in his face, all the adrenaline of the night still pumping his blood, loading his voice with a low key promise of violence and pain, and Damian’s so startled by his reaction he actually tries to take a step back, eyes widening in alarm. “What the fuck are you even doing here without your costume? Are you fucking suicidal?”

“Release me!”, Damian shouts back once the surprise fades away. He struggles uselessly against him, and for some reason that only serves to fuel Jason’s fury. He catches the flailing fist the kid’s trying to hit him with and uses his grip on him to shake him like he’s nothing more than a ragdoll until he actually hears the rattling of his teeth.

“I said. What the fuck. Were you thinking”, he asks again, voice like a thunder, fear and anger numbing him to everything else.

“I saved your sorry ass, you simple-minded ruffian!”, Damian screams.

“You almost got yourself killed again, you fucking minikin!”, Jason screams back.

Damian does his best interpretation of a feral growl and tries to headbutt him in the stomach. Jason shifts just in time and his hipbone promises him revenge in the form of a big, fat bruise. Jason can almost feel it blooming on his skin already. He loses his balance for the split of a second and Damian, relentless as ever, takes the opportunity to bite his hand too. Jason snarls, blocks a direct kick to his knee, and having finally had enough, he straightens up in his full height.

And Damian may be a high skilled assassin baby with the equivalent of twenty years or more of hard training on his little shoulders, but he’s also a tiny eleven years old kid, and Jason is the size of a mountain compared to him. So when he grabs him by the collar of his shirt and lifts him up in the air to slam him against the nearest wall, Damian can’t do anything else but yelping in pain and looking completely stunned for a moment, just like any other regular kid would.

Then again, this is Damian, so the moment passes and he quickly resumes his fight by jerking into his grip and digging all of his ten nails into the skin of Jason’s wrist, while also loading a kick that will do no favor to his ribs - that if Damian actually gets to land it, of course. But he doesn’t.

He doesn’t because, again, Damian may be angry, but Jason is angrier. Furious. And for a white hot moment he wants nothing more than to stop defending himself and actually hit the kid back. He wants to beat him until he's crying and fucking apologizing for this entire mess. Which… would be unfair, considering that most of this mess is definitely Jason’s fault.

He closes his eyes. Breathes. Counts to five. Opens his eyes again.

“Damian”, he calls, more calmly.

Damian keeps squirming, still trying to kick him. Jason counts to five again.

“Damian, that was a show of monumental stupidity and you are smart enough to know it”, half a praise, half an insult. That was Dick’s advice on how to deal with the kid (except Dick may have said scolding instead of insult. But whatever).

Anyway, it works - of course it does - and the kid actually looks up at him. Jason doesn’t let go of his shirt but shifts his grip so that he’s not leaning all his weight on the kid’s chest anymore and Damian can take a deep breath too. They look at each other for a long, uncomfortable minute, then Damian finally caves in.

“You needed the help”, he reproaches Jason, who’s not hypocrite enough to deny it.

“I could’ve used Robin’s help, maybe, not Damian Wayne’s.”

“Tt. I had my mask on, there’s no way any of them could identify-”

“Not the goddamn point, kid.”

Damian pouts and looks down at his feet dangling well above the ground. He looks… deflated. Like he’s actually offended at Jason for getting angry at him.

“Put me down”, he orders, kicking him lightly in the stomach.

Jason eyes him for a moment before complying. Damian straightens up and adjusts his clothes with as much dignity as he can muster - which is still a lot, all things considered. Jason gives him some space while he recovers the green domino mask and pockets it.

“Now, do you want to tell me what the hell are you doing around Gotham in your civvies? And no smartass answers, you stepped on the limit of my patience two years ago.”

Damian doesn't look at him. He’s still pouting and the tip of one of his sneakers is aggressively pounding the ground, and if Jason didn’t know any better, he would say that the kid’s fidgeting.

“I was taking a walk”, comes the grudgingly answer.

Jason’s mouth twitches and he has to remind himself that swatting kids is a bad thing to do, even when you are the Red Hood and the kid is Damian.

“...you were taking a walk. In the middle of the night. On Gotham’s docks.”

Damian scowls at him.

“It’s not like I can go home”, he sputters, and oh. Oh.

Jason runs a hand over his face. He never thought about that. Fuck Bruce. Fuck Dick, too.

“Please tell me you haven’t been roaming around Gotham’s streets since that shit with Bruce went down.”

Damian looks at him like he’s a crazy person.

“Of course not, Todd. Do I look like a street rat to you?”

Jason wisely decides not to answer that.

“Okay, look, if you need a place to stay-”, he’s not sure about what he’s going to say next because his plan for the night didn’t include adopting homeless little brothers. Then again, there were obviously a lot of things that his initial plan for the night didn’t included at all.

“I have a place to stay”, Damian interrupts him. “It doesn’t matter. He's going to send me back anyway.”

Jason blinks, taken aback by that.

“Who's going to send you where?”

“Drake.”

“What?”

“He's going to send me back to Grandfather. He’s my legal guardian now, so it is in his power to do so, since Father can’t stop him.”

Jason blinks at him again, but Damian’s only reaction is crossing his arm over his chest and sheepishly look at his shoes, like he’s embarrassed to have confided that much to Jason. Which means that he actually believes in what he just said.

“Tell me you are kidding”, Jason pleads, but he already knows Damian’s not kidding at all. It’s all in his posture, in the way he’s angrily chewing his bottom lip and avoiding Jason’s eyes. And suddenly Jason has a sneaky suspicion that Damian had seek him out on purpose tonight, and that helping him deal with a bunch of thugs was his… Damian-esque way to ask Jason to help him back with this crazy deportation theory thing with Tim.

“Oh for the love of-”, he sighs, kneeling in front of the kid. “Okay smurf, just tell me the story from the beginning, yeah?”

It’s 3.00 AM, Tim Drake is wearing the top half of his best suit over his pajama's trousers and he's not even ashamed of it. He doesn't mind having a conference in the middle of the night to accommodate a client calling from the other side of the world, and he's not hypocritical enough to mourn the loss of sleep that he wouldn't be having anyway, but it's been a long, long week, and he's tired. So tired that he barely reacts when his front door opens with a bang and Jason Todd bursts into his living room, tugging along with him a reluctant Damian Wayne by his hand.

“As for the results of the second semester-”, Tim's saying, and then he glances up from his laptop to stare at the two figures standing in the doorframe. Jason’s in his costume, Damian is not, but they both look tired and ruffled, like after a patrol gone wrong. He looks at Jason's face, then at Damian's, then at the way Jason's holding Damian's hand. He closes the ledger in front of him and smiles politely at the computer's screen.

“-They are not ready yet, but I'll inform you as soon as the numbers come in. Thank you”, he finishes, closing the laptop. Bit rude, but as previously stated, Tim's tired. He looks back at his brothers, who – quite surprisingly, to be honest – have yet to spoke a single word.

“So... what happened?”, he asks, bracing himself for the answer. He doesn't know what else could happen, what with Dick gone and the whole Bruce's amnesia affair and the demon brat now living with him, but he learnt long ago to not underestimate the amount of shit his life can manage to throw at him at the same moment. Besides, this is Jason and Damian holding hands. That's an alarm bell of its own.

Jason gives him a hard stare. He’s standing tall and angry, and looks like he wants to punch someone (probably Tim). Which is not his worst mood, because at least he doesn’t look like he wants to kill someone (again, probably Tim). Maybe the situation’s not so bad. Maybe.

“Kiddo here crashed my operation”, Jason starts slowly, shaking Damian by his hand.

“I did not-”, Damian tries to interject, but Jason doesn’t pay him any attention.

“Almost got both of us killed.”

Damian looks up at him angrily and Tim knows that the grip of his little hand must be bone-crushing by now, even if Jason looks totally unbothered by it.

“Your incompetency at doing your job is not my problem, Todd. Beside it was you who-”

Again, Jason completely ignores him.

“I was going to give him a piece of my mind about that, but turns out this entire mess it's actually your fault”, he concludes, still looking at Tim.

Damian doesn't add anything to that. Which is surprising. And honestly worrying.

Tim just sighs, fingers rubbing his temples. He looks again back and forth between his two brothers and for a moment he finds himself at loss of words.

“How- how it is my fault?”

Jason raises an eyebrow, and Damian suddenly finds a very interesting spot on the floor to stare at.

“Apparently you told him you were going to send him back.”

Tim tilts his head to the side.

“I told him…”, he slowly repeats. “What? Back where?”

“To Ra's”, Jason quietly growls. And if looks could kill, right now Tim would be dying in a very horrible way. But it's Jason the attempting eye-murderer. Damian's still busy studying the pattern of his floor tiles.

Tim doesn't understand. Yes, he and Damian had an argument today, one that ended with the littlest Wayne stomping out of his apartment in a cloud of holy rage, but that was hardly news to anyone. And yes, there were insults and threats thrown back and forth between the two of them, but again, no news there - if anything their squabbles were getting kinda repetitive and boring. So no, he doesn’t understand. Not right away.

“I never told him-”, he starts, then something clicks and he pauses, sighs again, and barely refrains himself from banging his head into the desk. “Oh my god- it was a joke. I told him that if he didn't behave I would send him back to where he came from- and I didn’t mean Ra’s. I actually meant, you know, Hell. But it was a joke! Like, telling your siblings that they've been found in a trash-can and adopted out of pity joke? Or that you'll sell them to the circus joke?”

That's enough to spark Damian's anger. Tim tones out his snarky remarks at being the only blood son because he’s heard them quite enough, thank you very much. But for all the insults and angry shouts, there’s still something off about Damian. Something that says he’s defensive, and insecure and… scared. The idea that Damian - Jesus, Damian - could be scared of him is… Tim doesn’t have a word for it. It’s just not something that makes sense.

He looks up at Jason again, almost gaping.

“It was a joke, Jason”, he repeats weakly.

“Good thing that you remembered that the kid here has a good sense of humor then”, Jason retorts. And well, he’s not wrong.

Tim looks back at Damian’s scowling face. He wants to remind the brat that when he needed a place to stay he had took him in without batting an eye and despite their conflicting relationship, but he doesn’t know how to say it without making it sound like Damian owns him for that, which is not the point Tim wants to make.

“I fought Ra’s when he tried to take your body”, he reminds him then, because it’s the only thing he can came up with at the moment.

“Father made you do it”, the kid promptly snarls back.

“No, he-”, Tim starts, then bits his lips. “No, I would’ve done it anyway.”

Damian doesn’t answer, but he has this look of mighty disbelief plastered all over his face, and Tim instantly knows that there’s no convincing this kid. And maybe he’s right anyway, because back then Tim had been in a very dark place and yeah, Damian was not exactly on the list of his good actions. But that was then, and this is now, and things have changed. They may not be friends yet, but he can’t think of Damian as anything else but his younger brother (and an annoyance, of course, but that kind of goes with the word).

Yet it's pretty clear that with Bruce and Dick gone, Damian thinks he doesn't have a family anymore. And well, it's not like he doesn't have his own right reasons to think so. But.

“This is so stupid”, Tim mutters, closing his eyes and hiding his face behind his hands. He wants a coffee. He wants to sleep. He wants to never tell a joke again in his life.

When he reopens his eyes Jason and Damian are still standing in front of him, looking as much tired and angry as he feels. Tim sucks in a breath, realizing that he’s going to have to apologize, and even if he kind of see the point of it, he still doesn’t like it.

Jason's not going to help him either, that's pretty much clear. Even if he's not butting in, he's still standing beside Damian, and he has still not let go of the kid, even if the back of his hand is a battlefield of scratches and- yes, those are definitely bite marks. Jason knows how to make statements without a single word being spoken, and in any other situations Tim would probably laugh at the ridiculousness of all of this.

He stands up and walks around the desk to kneel in front of Damian, close enough to touch him but also leaving enough room between the two of them to shield himself from an eventual attack. Caution is one of the first things you learn when you’re around Damian Wayne.

“Look, I know things are complicated right now. And I know that complicated is the understatement of the century”, he quickly adds when both Damian and Jason click their tongues at him - and oh my god, is that a family thing now? “But they had been complicated before, and honestly, I don’t think they’re ever going to be not complicated, because we are who we are and all of that, but. But you’ve been around enough to know how this works now. We take the hit, we regroup and we go on. And we always, always, protect our own.”

Or at least what’s left of them, he adds mentally. And it’s not the best speech of his relatively brief and not really brilliant older brother’s career, but Damian’s frown lightens a bit, and the kid doesn’t look so angry and hurt anymore.

“No one will send you anywhere, Damian. I’m sorry if I said something that made you think so, it wasn’t in my intentions”, Tim adds anyway, just to be crystal clear about the entire affair, since Damian’s not one for subtleties. “And if Ra’s ever tries to take you back, we’ll kick his ass again, Bruce or not Bruce. Okay?”

Damian just clicks his tongue again.

“Tt. Like I would require your assistance”, he retorts. Then he seems to realize that holding his older brother’s hand while saying so kind of ruins the aesthetic of it, so he gives Jason an annoyed tug, and this time his brother allows him to free his hand. He doesn’t spare him a teasing smile and a quick hair ruffle, though.

“Well, you have it anyway, smurf”, he adds, butting into their discussion for the first time. “Besides, Timbo wasn’t talking about just the two of us, you know?”

“Yeah”, Tim cuts in. “Steph and Cass would love to take a swing at Ra’s, and Barbara always had some sort of personal grudge against him. Oh, and Alfred will probably put on the cape and the cowl himself- and let me tell you, he's going to be ten times more terrifying than Bruce or Dick ever were.”

Jason laughs, loud and clear. Damian scrunches up his nose in that funny way he does when he's trying not to smile.

“Pennyworth would make a worthy protector and a mighty opponent”, he concedes, and now it’s Tim’s turn to hide a smile.

“Glad we can agree on something.”

“Tt.”

Jason yawns and stretches his back, producing an annoying sound of crackling bones first and then a wince.

“Alright nerds. Now that the crisis has been resolved, and before I ground your ass and kick yours”, he says, pointing at Damian and then at Tim respectively. “I need food, alcohol, disinfectant and a forceps. In this exact order. I forgot I was bleeding out and after all this sweet talking about family and whatnot I think I’d definitely feel guilty if I died again.”

#damian wayne #jason todd #tim drake #robin #red hood #red robin #batdictionary #my fic #series: juxtaposition #shari writes

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