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lostandlonelybirds · 4 years

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Dick+stumble? He’s always graceful so I would like to see the opposite

Ah!!! Love this!!! I went a lil bit off script, but I think you’ll like the end result!!! Keep the prompts coming!!! I’m loving everything so far lol!!!

(also @dbakeiro wanted a tag for notification purposes, so here ya go sweetie!!!)

Stumble

Transitive verb

a. To fall into sin or waywardness

b. To make an error – blunder

c. To come to an obstacle to belief

2. To trip in walking or running

a. To walk unsteadily or clumsily

b. To speak or act in a hesitant or faltering manner

a. To come unexpectedly or by chance

b. To fall or move carelessly

Dick is, quite honestly, having the worst night of his month.

It’s been hard adjusting to New York, in the aftermath of Bludhaven’s destruction and everything else that has been going on. He’s never felt this lost before, not when Bruce fired him and sent him away, not when Jason died and left a bitter taste of regret and guilt on Dick’s tongue – “Call me, I know how he gets…” – for not being there. He’s only felt this lost when his parents died and no one thought it was murder, or maybe when he had to pretend to be Slade’s apprentice for months on end.

He feels lost, and it’s hard to think when he feels lost, broken defeated.

Tonight it rained, which didn’t exactly help. Rain makes him think of Catalina and her hands, makes him think of Blockbuster and his threats, or the fucking nuclear fire – in and out, he tells himself. Too bad his panic attack doesn’t like listening to him.

He’s never been the clumsy sort, Bruce would kill him for it, but tonight… Tonight he’s off his game. He’s so far off his game it’s not even funny. He stopped a mugging attempt, earlier, with a young woman with almond eyes that made him think of her and a girl who couldn’t be older than fifteen.

“Fork it over!” she’d barked at the teen, lips twisting in some cold mockery of a smile, and the teen frozen, watching helplessly as the woman pushed her against the alley wall.

“Please, no,” the teen had cried as the woman’s hands wandered, squeezing and caressing in areas where they shouldn’t have. “Stop.”

Dick had broken them up, sending the woman to the NYPD, but her flashing almond eyes stuck with him, haunting him. The knife that she stabs into his right side leaves a bad impression, but that’s only part of it.

“Don’t touch me, I’m… poison, numb…please…”

It hit in his weak spot, literally and metaphorically, but still he patrols. The rain feels like tiny daggers as the icy shards cut through his haze, his cloud of numbness and absence. It stings, and it smells a bit like jasmine coated gunpowder. Smokey and sweet, a scent combination that makes him feel ill.

Maybe that was his mistake. He should know better. He should be better.

The cut is shallow enough that Dick feels comfortable not dressing it once he stops the blood flow, and he’s not dizzy enough to worry about it.

Perhaps that is his mistake. Maybe he should have taken greater care of the wound, of the cut.

Either way, when he sees the flash of blue on a rooftop opposing him, he doesn’t hesitate.

Graysons don’t hesitate, and the last time he’d hesitated, someone had died.

He chases the figure as it runs, darting between rooftops with a similar fluidity to his own. It’s more jagged, more punctuated, straight to the point and lacking the theatrics Dick liked adding, but it’s fast. Almost fast enough to lose him, if he didn’t grow up with a speedster that loved playing tag.

He tackles the man to the next rooftop, bracing himself for impact as they crash. His cheek rubs against the concrete roof painfully, and he ends up sprawled across the man. His jawline is square, with hints of a five-o’clock shadow growing. He’s big, too, bigger than Dick by far, maybe as big as Bruce.

But the thing that truly bothers him, the one detail he really notices, is the blue wings painted across his chest.

Dick sets his escrima to stun and puts it to the guy’s throat, glaring.

“Who the fuck are you?!”

“Golden Boy,” an all-too familiar voice calls, sardonic grin just a bit bloodthirsty. “Didn’t think you’d see me, did you?”

Jason Todd rips his mask off with one hand, stunning Dick into silence. His tongue feels like a leaden weight in his mouth – useless, and heavy.

“H-h-how…?” He breathes, dropping his weapons to cup Jason’s cheek delicately. “W-w-when…?”

‘Words, I know words.’

Jason drops his grin, frowning slightly as Dick remains frozen.

“Bats told you, I know he did. I just tried to blow him up, like a month ago! Why wouldn’t he…”

His eyes seem to laser in on Dick’s own suit, and the areas it hung off his frame loosely. So Dick hadn’t been eating properly, sue him. Hard to eat when all you can smell…

All you can see…

“He…I…” Dick looks down. “I haven’t been on speaking terms with him for a while. I’m…”

“Dick?” Jason asks, sounding concerned.

There’s the sound of a gun ringing loud in his ears, a roar of thunder and a loud thud.

He hears a scream, and it isn’t until a minute later that he realizes it came from him. There’s red spilling from his side, pouring out faster than he can stop.

“Dick!”

He stumbles, smelling jasmine and gunpowder and blood, falling to his knees.

Arms try to lift him up, but he fights, feeling her hands pulling, taking, demanding as his back reaches the rooftop edge and she corners him…

And he must succeed, because no hands catch him when he falls.

#dick grayson #my writing #fanfic #requests #angst #depression tw #Jason todd #rape tw #dc #batfamily #nightwing

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makeroomforthejolyghost · 4 years

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ok well i originally drafted this while thinking about this post, but it’s relevant to what i wanted to say about (my tags on) this one too so i’ll just post it now, how ‘bout that.

i mean, Getting Used to It (and thus expanding your definition of “i’m fine”) isn’t always as dramatic as your brain completely turning off its pain response to an event, so that you don’t realize you’ve injured yourself until some other clue tips you off. that’s certainly happened to me? (and w/ smaller injuries it happens to healthy people too, as when you cut yourself on paper without noticing, and it doesn’t start to hurt until you see it bleed.) but the more everyday/pedestrian forms of this phenomenon are, like. that the level of pain i rated as an 8 in 2016 now reads to me as, like, 5. and that when you’re depressed (or at least when i am), pain goes up but interest in that pain goes down, because of depression’s tendency to normalize negative stimuli.

i think these are two manifestations of the same thing: your brain removes fear from the equation, and since fear makes pain more intense, most pain experienced in fear’s absence seems like no big deal. and that goes double for painful stimuli you once associated with fear but no longer do? in a sorta feedback-loopy way. or at least it does for me. less fear-->less pain-->even less fear the next time something similar happens.

if i sit in nearly any given position too long, one or more of the joints in my legs will sometimes... well, i think subluxate is technically the right word?* but it’s not like a sudden pop: it’s like, as the muscles around them relax my joints slowly slide out of place. as you can imagine (given the low bar required to achieve it), this happens A Lot; i don’t keep track, but probably once a day on average? i know it’s not every day, but also that some days it happens many times, and that both these latter and the days when it doesn’t happen at all often strike me as a change from the norm. so, yeah, probably a mean of once per day. but until sometime in 2019, it used to freak me out—a lot—every time.

it’s often one of those above-mentioned doesn’t hurt until you notice for other reasons scenarios, too, like the paper cut. so i’d be like innocently sitting there, then look down or attempt to adjust position and suddenly OH GOD MY LEG(S). and every time it happened i’d think, “oh god, is this the time i really and truly get stuck and have to be scooped out of this position on a stretcher. fuck, please, no, that would be so humiliating, there’s no way the paramedics would believe me, strangers must not see me like this,” &c., and the more determined i got to prove to myself that i could move, that i wasn’t stuck, that i could get myself out of this, the more horrifically painful these attempts became—partly because fear of pain leads to greater pain, and partly because when you’re panicky you don’t tend to move with much patience or care.

but, of course, every time i would eventually get out of it. it’s hard to say how long it took, because, again, i never timed it, and also because time does weird shit when you’re freaking out. (plus i have adhd, so my estimates of how long things take aren’t the greatest to begin with.) i want to say though that the longest i ever took unpretzeling myself in this way was an hour and a half—and i usually took way less time than that. (it’s hard also to estimate because these days exceeding ten minutes marks an especially long battle of this kind.) iirc, the ~90-minute incident was like, my right hip already felt not quite right, and someone on the internet recommended W-sitting as a way to reduce a subluxed hip, and i tried it because i either didn’t know at that time or had forgotten that when i W-sit for more than a few seconds i often misplace several toes, up to two joints per knee, maybe an ankle, and/or at least one hip. some of these will reduce themselves automatically as soon as i move; others i can only move passively until after i’ve reduced them. so like, that endeavor was a fucking jigsaw puzzle, and good luck figuring those out when a. every wrong move doubles the pain and panic you’re in, but b. leaving the puzzle unfinished is also agonizing. most of the time it was not that bad.

…what was my point? oh yeah: this sat-wrong-now-my-leg’s-stuck business still happens a lot, and it’s n o t like sitting on a pen, where your brain eventually gives up on signaling your discomfort.** nor like when you’re running on adrenaline and your brain doesn’t bother to tell you you’re hungry. nor like what tumblr user bibliosphere described, where her brain evidently just… prioritized other tasks over the “hey please fix this leg” alarm that pain would have signified. but incidents like this do, literally, hurt less the tenth time they happen than they do the first time, and it’s not because your body Toughens Up or whatever either (that only works w/ exercise-related muscle pain); it’s because your brain learns that this event does not pose imminent danger. a subluxation you know how to reduce will hurt less than one you don’t.

that’s what the “i’m always subluxing” version of the hulk meme means. most chronically ill people describe this whole phenomenon as more like the argument from “shot in the knee theory.” as like, you stop screaming because you learn screaming doesn’t help. and i mean… yeah? but ime it’s more that you stop screaming*** when you learn what does help. the OP in that post asks rhetorically,

Are you going to scream and cry the entire time, or are you going to come to grips with reality and accept the fact that freaking out isn’t going to make the ambulance come any faster?

and jesus christ, OP, are you kidding? in real life? definitely the first one! if you literally got shot in the knee, you wouldn’t just scream because it hurt—you would scream also because holy shit, am i gonna die of blood loss? why did they shoot me? are they going to shoot me again??? and pain you’ve had for years, or an injury you’ve sustained many times before, is nothing like that. if it scares you at all, the content of your fear is more like, oh, crap. what’s this gonna feel like tomorrow. will i have to cancel my plans again?

*n.b. i’ve never had this confirmed by a doctor. i just assume that’s what’s happening because 1. the sensations’ non-pain components are very similar to what the subluxations i have had confirmed feel like; 2. if it’s a joint i can see from my position (e.g., the ankle pressed against the floor when criss-cross-applesauced), it usually looks a little fucked up; and 3. it behaves quite differently from regular stiffness, joints in this scenario feeling not so much too tight to move properly as like i keep aiming for and missing the lever that moves them. (and each failed attempt HURTS like my soft tissues are pumpkin guts and my bones are knives trying to scoop them out.)

**i’ve never actually tried this experiment, though, and i’ve heard it doesn’t work on some autistic people. hopefully this goes without saying lmao but my sensory perceptions are Weird in General, so, any hypotheses i build upon them should be salted liberally

***well, whimpering, anyway. for me at least, if i literally scream at an injury it’s not from the pain, it’s from the surprise. i’m more likely to scream when i stub my toe than when i try to bite and my jaw crunches sideways, because the latter is a possibility i sign up for every time i put food in my mouth, whereas like. ob…viously you wouldn’t have stubbed your toe if you’d already known the object you accidentally kicked was there. (except i guess in movies when people kick objects to express rage, forgetting that this will hurt them. in that case i suppose they scream partly from surprise and partly because negative stimuli encountered in “fight” mode reinforce preexisting anger. wow i digress lmao sorry.) but reactions like whimpering, clenching your teeth, &c. only partly come from surprise; they’re also stims, i think, tho clearly not ones unique to ND people. the woman who pierced my ears when i was a kid told me to focus on tapping first one foot and then the other, so i wouldn’t shrink away. i think it’s kinda like that: it releases nervous energy, gives you a competing stimulus to focus on.

#existential fart chart #screalth tag #icee straw kazoo

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pippki-writes · 3 years

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An Ill-Fitting Name: Snippet 7

NOTES:

Snippet 1; Snippets 2 & 3; Snippet 4; Snippet 5; Snippet 6

Going off into another POV now, but since it’s part of Isaiah’s story I’ll throw it under the same tag. Eventually Isaiah learns to make a friend. I am mostly posting these in the order my deranged mind wrote them, so if you were expecting coherence? An overarching narrative structure? I’m so sorry, you should recalibrate those expectations.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&

I have been in exile before. Some more beautiful than others. The first thing I learned is not to hope. Others may find it sustaining, but for me, hope served as a reminder of the things I couldn’t have in exile, and the contrast of it would always threaten to break my heart. It’s bad enough to see a human heart broken, but ten times worse for one of my kind.

So. I do not hope.

The second rule of exile is knowing, invariably, that this is the worst one yet. Even if this is not objectively true, the exile one must presently endure is always worse than one that’s been completed. It does me no good to think of exiles past, whether they were much easier or far more torturous. They are not the existence I must suffer now.

A tolerable exile is full of knowns. What I can and can’t do. Where I can and can’t go. Much less preferred is the exile I’m in now, and not simply because it is the one I must live through. It’s an exile without a definite end. It will end eventually—they all, eventually, end, when you live as long as I do—but the conditions that would set me free? The infuriating sort: you’ll know when you know. When you see it. When you feel it. I’d rather be sentenced to a thousand years cast away from every life before, at least knowing I can count the days, can know where I stand, than this.

This is a most unusual exile. I can spread night-black wings and take to the skies, wherever I want to go, but I am trapped. Heard, but not understood. Seen, but never known. I cannot speak—only sound the call that comes of a sharp beak.

Hell, I can’t even understand the other crows.

At least, not in the meaningful ways they understand each other. And not in the ways I understand people. Nor do the crows understand me—I confuse them, I think. It’s not just that I can’t communicate properly. Nor is it because I’m quite obviously bigger than they are. I wonder if they can tell, somehow, that I am more than this shape, that I’ve been twisted and reformed, and bound down from a mischievous too-big existence into the body of a crow.

He wouldn’t tell me why a crow. Angry gods don’t need reasons. That’s the sort of thing that angry gods say, when they do things for no reason at all.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, when you’re lost in the thrill of pushing someone else’s buttons, that the someone in question is an angry sort of god. That the power you wield is NOT the same. That a mood can turn faster than a breeze and cut you down very quickly.

He’s not the only reason I’ve ever been exiled, but his are always the worst. And as I seem to have trouble learning, doubt it’ll be the last time he does this to me. Doesn’t matter now. I pissed him off good, and lost a lot for my trouble.

It’s been—let me count, hm, the numbers of the years don’t exactly line up nicely for easy math—seventy four years now. Seventy four years of carrion and French fries snatched from parking lots. Seventy four years of learning what polite puzzlement looks like from a corvid. Seventy four years and counting, accepting the facts that define my current fate.

Sometimes, he’s told me the terms of an exile. “You will stay among these islands until the last fogs leave for the season.” Or, “you will stay with this doomed cause until it drives you mad.” Sometimes he would even say why. “You don’t appreciate beauty,” or “your indecision damns you,” things like that. What had he said this time? “You’re so insufferably selfish. You think you’re clever, but all you do is think of yourself. You don’t care about others, and if they knew better they wouldn’t care about you.” Yes, it had been about like that. As good as I had gotten for a why.

Crows are social creatures, which is why seeing just one is a bad omen. But most people these days have forgotten what signs portend ill and well. Or maybe the signs have shifted. Whatever the reason, the young man (all men are young, when you’ve lived as long as I have) didn’t seem concerned by the presence of a crow all on its own perched on the back of a truck in the parking lot. He pulled out his phone, not daring to approach, his fingers spreading the picture on the screen, trying to get closer with a camera that no doubt couldn’t. He is strange, though I am stranger, and I watch him concentrate, his one good eye flitting from the screen to look at me, and back to the screen again. One good eye, the dark brown of rich soil, and the other eye missing, a ruined starburst of scar tissue radiating out from an unseeing sliver of white. An old wound, by the look of it. He straightens up, tapping on the screen, and takes one last look at me before going into his motel room.

Later, scattered carefully in the mulch near the door he went in, I find a few handfuls of crunchy cat food. I have had many forms, have eaten many unusual things suited to those forms. Crunchy cat food is pleasing to the body of a crow. I wouldn’t have eaten this sort of thing in times before, but now I gladly do.

The next day, I am on the roof, and the young man is focused on me, waving and pointing at something in his hand. A peanut. More of them, scattered in the mulch, and he deliberately tosses the one in his hand among the others. I top my head to the side, and wait for him to leave before collecting the offering. The peanuts are unsalted. I think I prefer the cat food.

Somehow, it seems I’ve gotten my preference across to him over the course of several days. I glide down from the rooftop to the little pile of kibble at my spot next to the shrub, and I do so before the young man has returned to his room. I tolerate his presence, not too close but not as far as before. As I grab a piece of my little snack, I see over to the side, he’s holding up his phone, slowly and carefully, camera open, to frame us both in the picture. He aims his other hand so that it points to me in the image, and even from this distance I can see mirrored on the screen of the phone, he is smiling. A genuine smile. Hesitant at first, like maybe his face had forgotten how to express excitement. I’m sure that’s how my face will look again one day, when I get it back, the memory of emotions having slipped away to the rhythms of weathering decades of avian existence.

Most immortals have tried to kill themselves at some point, and I’m no exception. Usually at least once per exile. I thought maybe this time I’d succeed. Surely, as a bird—

But no. There I was, broken wings, blood spilling, neck wrong-angled, thinking this time I’d won, like an idiot let down my guard and closed my eyes, waiting for death to come—

And there he was instead. Snapping my wings back into shape. Putting my neck back in alignment with uncaring, clinical precision. Gathering my blood from all its spilled places and returning my vitality. I was angry, and tried to tell him, and hoped he could understand every four-letter word when all it sounded like was a shrieking string of “CaaW”s.

He tsk-tsked and wagged a finger at me lightly, no indication on his terrible face that he could understand what I’d tried to convey. “Not allowed,” was all he said before he disappeared again.

The young man is even closer. Not close enough to touch, but he puts the cat food in the usual place and then sits on the curb in front of his room. I glide down from the rooftop and flutter to my feet. He has a nervous energy about him—I usually see him pacing the parking lot, opening and closing a pocket knife in his hands, or whittling sticks down to nothing, but for now his hands are empty and he simply taps the tip of his shoe up and down on the asphalt. I get the feeling he’s resisting playing with the knife because I am so near.

“I’m calling you Cat,” he says softly, “since that’s the food you seem to like the most.”

I turn towards him and top my head to the side. I have had many names in my time. Some better than others. This one feels appropriate.

“You can call me—“ he stops himself and chuckles quietly. “Whatever birds call people, huh?” He lapses into a thoughtful silence for a bit, watching me, before resuming. “Will you be my friend, Cat? I don’t...exactly have a good track record, with making friends...but I’m trying. Trying to be different this time.” He’s talking to his shoes now, staring at them intently, a crease formed in his forehead. “I’m not a good person—I wasn’t, I’m still not, I’m not going to be...but I am different. Not good, but...better.” He gives a little sigh. “And I think I’d like to make friends. Starting somewhere. Whaddaya say?”

I do what I can. A soft call in response—low-high-low, with a little hop and flutter of my wings. His expression brightens.

“All right! I’m gonna find you the best cat food I can.”

I do not name the bastard god I’m beholden to, because it would give him satisfaction if I so much as even think his name, but I admit with great hatred in my heart and coursing through my hollow bones that he was right, the bastard, that I would know. It is no certainty, but I can feel the possibility that the young man who calls me Cat and who would be my friend could bring this exile to an end.

But I’ll be damned if I know how that’s supposed to happen.

So I take to the air and decide to go find a shiny button to give my new friend instead. This could just be one of the bastard’s tricks, that I’ll know who can help, but never be able to figure out how to free myself from this exile. And then I realize my latest mistake—deep down, rather than just take each day as it is, this realization has given me cause to hope. To hope for something different. That bastard really does know how to cut me, I think, with an angry flap of wings. This is undoubtedly my worst exile yet.

- NEXT SNIPPET -

#an ill-fitting name #My writing #original story #original work #original writing #original fiction #magic fiction #Fictional gods #Snippets

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