New fic up on AO3!

"Stray Dogs"

Frank Castle/Foggy Nelson enemies to lovers fic; 19k & rated E

Things would be easier, if Daredevil and his pair of shadows could find a hobby that doesn't involve getting in Frank's way or being a thorn in Frank's side. Things would be easier, if Murdock could take care of his own. Things would be easier, if Frank could dig the three of them back out from under his skin.

---

There aren’t words for it, what Frank wants. Murdock thinks if he just keeps Page and Nelson at arm’s length, if he doesn’t let himself have friends, then they won’t get hurt. Something taught him early and hard that bad things happen to the people who love him; if he can manage how close they get, they’ll be safer. Frank knows better--they aren’t getting out of this alive any more than he and Red are. They might go out quicker, might last a little longer; at the end of the day, they’re not the sort of people who make it. But if it could just not happen tonight, if Frank could close his eyes this once and know it wouldn’t happen while he slept, that would be a mercy.

How Daredevil could go full comics

(archived from tumblr)

I feel like now that Daredevil has established that Madame Gao is still hanging around, doing her thing, we could actually maybe get some non-racist, perfectly ridiculous goon-swarms going. 

Like, she’s clearly a charismatic leader, she runs a bustling drug-trade empire with lots of cash and a rolodex full of people up to their eyeballs in debt or wanting a free month’s worth of drugs, and she seems to take at least pretending to be polite about shit pretty seriously.  And Matt just will not fucking stop kicking down her doors and beating up her henchmen and being super-rude about everything.

So, you know, just like once a month, she checks her Annoying Vigilante Calendar and sees what he’s up to, calls in one of her more creative lieutenants, and tells him she wants word put on the street about something Daredevil won’t be able to resist investigating. Also, she wants fifty people they can afford to lose to dress up like the cast of Evil Dead and be waiting for him at the bait-address where the fake dog-napping ring or whatever is supposed to be.  Matt shows up, kicks down the door, and suddenly there are guys with chainsaws and people pretending to be zombies and somebody threw pig’s blood (?!) on him and then ran away and he does not understand what’s going on but there are dogs to be saved, so he’s going to fight his way through it come hell or high water or ten guys who appear to be walking trees okay this has got to be a dream.

Meanwhile she’s just watching this on a livestream and laughing her ass off, and it’s almost as good as the time she got a bunch of shriners, complete with miniature cars, to take him on for what they thought was a charity bout.

After half a year of this, Matt’s about to have a nervous breakdown because seriously, what the fuck is even going on in this town, and Karen keeps insisting that no, Matt, I swear on a stack of Bibles that there isn’t a gang of villainous Harlem Globetrotter-wannabes with attacks based on trick-basketball moves carving out territory in Hell’s Kitchen, I think someone besides you would have seen them by now if they were, why would that even be a thing?  Claire hung up on him after the “evil clowns” call, and Foggy told him to stop falling asleep watching the news after the time with the Sexy Avengers, and Madame Gao’s expanding video library of Daredevil’s Greatest Hits is proving surprisingly popular with all the guys he keeps punching in the face because Daredevil doesn’t do doorbells.

I mean, Bat-Cow is a thing

(archived from tumblr)

Given that Bat-Cow is a real legitimate thing that actually happened, I feel like Red Hood needs a goat.  Like, a foul-tempered, vaguely sinister, apparently-completely-normal goat that Damien runs across on some mission, and everybody else calls “Not it” before Jason even knows what’s going on, and suddenly he’s got a goat.

And he tries to leave the goat at the manor, but he gets home and finds the goat in his walk-up, somehow.  All the doors and windows are still locked, security system hasn’t been tripped, nobody will admit to having put it there.

“You’re telling me that not one of you is responsible for this.  That a goat somehow got itself down ten miles of subway, navigated a switchover to the el-train, climbed six flights of stairs, let itself in, and then locked back up afterwards.”

“Goats are very nimble, Jason.”

And he keeps trying to leave it with petting zoos, but it’s the same thing every time, it always winds up back at his place.  Maybe he eventually grudgingly accepts it because it is kind of nice to come home to someone, even if it is just a goat, and it is kind of helpful.  He’s lost count of the number of times he’s come home to find that somebody’s clearly broken in--maybe just a thief, maybe someone after him specifically, but whoever they were they got headbutted right back out a window for their trouble.

The goat’s never the worse for wear.

Then he winds up in serious trouble, and in swoops the whole rest of the family at the last second, and he’s like “How’d you find me?” because he’s an independent vigilante who is not wearing a bat-tracker, dad.  And Bruce just looks pained and says it doesn’t matter, and Dick does his best to be very serious and tells him that Hood-Goat told them Jason was in trouble, and Barbara’s just like “We’re not calling it that.”

(They are totally calling it that.  Turns out it’s really hard to come up with good nicknames based off “Red Hood,” and neither Bruce nor Jason will accept Bat-Goat.)

Jason doesn’t believe them.  Tim and Steph immediately whip out their phones and show him videographic evidence, which in this case amounts to the goat jumping around the cave and waving his favorite leather jacket--now half-eaten--around like a flag.  Which, okay, is one of the weirdest things he’s seen in a month, and doesn’t explain how the fucking goat got from his apartment to the batcave, but he’s like “Okay, sure, but how’d you find me?”.

Steph fast-fowards to the part where the goat headbutts a map case open and stamps its hoof on the warehouse they’re all standing in right now, and Jason’s just looking at the goat, who is of course now loitering in the background like there’s nothing unusual about this at all, and going “You guys didn’t bring it with you, did you?”

And then Jason’s looking at Bruce, because of course they didn’t bring the goat with them, and going “Do you think maybe Zatanna could...?”

And Bruce is like “It’s your goat, Jason.  Part of being a responsible adult is arranging for its exorcisms yourself.”

Meanwhile Damien’s assuring the goat that it’s just perfect the way it is and probably doesn’t need the devil cast out of it.

Then the outlaws phase hits, and Roy is just so unbelievably stoked about the goat, and Jason realizes that he's stuck in a live-action reenactment of Goat Simulator.  And he is so 1000% done with life. Every time one of the other Robins or Bruce asks him for help, he just texts a picture of the goat in yet another Arsenal-provided get-up and tells them that they did this to him and he's never helping them again.

Gotham's just a state of mind

(archived from tumblr)

I know everybody in the DC fandom likes to bag on Gotham like “Why would anyone still live in a town that gets gassed by a clown once a month and has to dodge an entire colony of man-bats and probably has to measure crime rates in terms of how many people made it home from the office without getting mugged or stabbed this week?”

And this is a completely valid question, because like this is a city that thought  stuffing their aged police commissioner in a robot and saying “This is the Batman now” was a reasonable response to losing their normal unlicensed vigilante.

But then we live in America and have like

• Donald Trump legitimately running for president
• clowns hiding in the shrubs is a nationwide thing and the police would like to remind you that it’s probably not legal to shoot them
• Flint is probably a month away from having a cholera outbreak
• Florida’s being overrun by giant pythons, and someone's actual-facts solution was to put a bound on dead pythons, at which point a state herpetologist had to explain why it was a bad idea to encourage random citizens to go fight massive apex predators in the swamp.
• the justice department is trying to figure out how many people the police face-shoot to death every year and it turns out that’s not something anyone keeps records on
• every big city has that one hospital where you don’t go if you can help it because you could legit die in the ER waiting room and the janitor will just mop around your corpse
• California’s always both on fire and under water, somehow
• the news is like “hurricanes as a zika-fighting strategy: what could go wrong?”
• Georgia has an entire police department that doesn’t seem to do anything but have cybersex with pedophiles
• civil forfeiture is a thing
• the number of times people get shot with arrows in this country every year is genuinely astonishing
• Texas just blows the fuck up every so often because EPA and OSHA regs are for commies
• Worse Virginia’s been on fire for a century in some places because samesies
• like six people got shot (with guns) in one day in Minneapolis and their unanimous response to police was “fuck off I’m not a snitch”

and everybody’s still like “lol love it or leave it buddy."