Pit Magic

Pit Magic

This one…This one is going to start a little strange, and with a bit more world building than I let myself indulge in for my Tumblr ideas, but the set up is a bit necessary. As always there is no Canon to see here.

The first important note here is magic and how magic works. Magic here is both sentient and not. Magic does not necessarily have thoughts, but does have opinions about who and how it is used.  With Spells powerful enough to leave remnants behind, those remnants do not work well going against their original purpose or used by people whose intentions are too different from their first caster. All magic, after enough time, can be corrupted (made to work against its original purpose- so remnants of a spell made to kill used to heal would also be a corruption) but even corrupted magic is, for lack of a better term, protective of anyone or anything that matches the vibe of its pure form. 

This brings us to the Lazarus Pits. There is no recorded history of the Pits, with its mystical water that cures the sick and kills the healthy.  No one ever recorded its true origin. The truth is the original Lazarus Water was a non magical spring in a cave system in what is present day Turkey, a location that was long lost even before Ra’s Al Ghul began using the Pits.  This cave was the home to a small tribe in the middle of the last ice age. An illness struck this tribe, nearly wiping out the entire tribe in a matter of hours. All except the daughter of the tribe's leader, who had a natural magic. Though grieving, her main intention was to help, to save those she loved no matter the cost to herself. Her magic reacted creating a powerful spell to revive her tribe and kill the illness that afflicted them. She gladly gave her life so that they would live. 

The spell was so powerful it left long lasting remnants that sunk into spring water, turning the water of the spring into a healing elixir, the predecessor to the Lazarus Pits.  The spell also changed the tribe irrevocably, making them heartier, slower to age and more resistant to illness and infection; these resistances and the healing that came with them passed through the blood of the tribe, which then passed to most of humanity as the generations flew by.  Though no one had ever had cause to make the connection, the more of that lost tribe's blood that flows through a person's veins the better the Lazarus Pits work for them, the less the madness affects them.

By the time Ra’s Al Ghul took control of the Lazarus Pits, the original spring was lost to time and the remnants of the original spell were hopelessly corrupted.  

This brings us back to what this is setting up for.  Due to the nature of the League of Assassins, who their clients are, who their victims are, no one in living memory who had been exposed to Lazarus Water had come face to face with someone whose vibe matches the love and need to help of the original caster. This vibe check can only be done in person, not through surveillance equipment, or photos or reports. 

Until Jason Todd attacks Tim Drake at the Titans Tower.

Stubborn, self sacrificing, loving Tim Drake. Feral, protective, willing to do anything for his loved ones. And he loved so deeply, so desperately.

The exact match of a girl so long ago who poured everything she was into a spell to heal the people she loved. Who died gladly, with no regrets, creating a healing spell so powerful that it changed humanity itself.   

Jason Todd had broken into Titan’s tower, mind drenched green with Pit Madness, intending on hurting the little Replacement Robin. That is until he entered the room the Robin in question. The madness did not clear, instead it switched from Anger to ‘Mine! Protect!’.

The Pit Madness in Jason’s head screams that this is not a safe place for Tim (someone intending to hurt him had just broken in).  Running on adrenaline, madness, and an overwhelming protectiveness, Red Hood scoops up the little Robin and exits the tower stage left to get somewhere safe (depending on which is funnier, he either manages to escape with a struggling Robin over his shoulder-no knocking out Robin, that would be hurting him- , or said Robin figured out that Red Hood was Jason Todd and went quietly for ‘It’s Jason’ reasons).  Somehow Jason runs with his captured Robin straight back to the only safe place he can think of, Nanda Parbat. 

Later, after he is not running so fully on strange instincts, Jason would not be able to say how he got from San Francisco to the League of Assassins in the middle east, but somehow he did.  

While not every Assassin in the League has had a dip in the Lazarus Pits, most have and every single one of them, from Ra’s Al Ghul to Talia to Damian to the lowest Assassin who had been dipped in the Pits takes one look at Tim Drake and go ‘he is our precious cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure’.  It should also be noted that they do not want Tim to become an Assassin, not even Ra’s; this really is a ‘we must protect the innocent boy from all the evils of the world’ kind of situation (Which is hilarious given the age difference between Damian-who has declared himself Tim’s personal bodyguard- and Tim).

So now Tim Drake has been abducted by the League of Assassins and they all want to give him…hugs? Like Tim knows he’s a bit touch starved, ok, but he didn’t realize it was so bad that an actual villain organization would get concerned.  And there is talk about how he needs to be protected. Yeah, they are not letting him contact anyone or leave, but they are also not torturing him or trying to kill him. It is a little strange that he is getting more maternal affection from Talia Al Ghil than from his own mother, who he is not even sure knows he is missing yet.  AND Jason Todd is there, which means Jason is alive, so Tim is trying to get Jason to come home. Tim is also trying to figure out if this made his life weirder or not.

Back in Gotham, Batman is losing his whole mind. He has video from Titan’s Tower of The Red Hood abducting Robin, now one has heard from either since. It has been weeks.  In addition no one has reported Tim Drake missing. It has been weeks and there is no one outside their nightlife that would notice if Tim disappeared? Bruce has been trying to get in contact with Drakes for all of those weeks (in between his frantic searching for Tim himself). The messenger he sent to find them, one of the Justice League undercover, was told essentially not to bother them about Tim, just talk to him directly and refused to listen when being told he might be missing. 

Listen when Bruce gets Tim back from wherever he has been abducted to, he is going to be concerned about the implications of his parents actions. Right now he and Dick are scouring all of their contacts to find their missing Bird. Crime is at an all time low in Gotham, in spite of the Bats not patrolling. 

There was precisely one(1) Arkham breakout since Robin went missing. Instead of the normal round up, where the various Rogues all had time to get to their preferred battlegrounds before being gently (and until that breakout none of them would have ever considered that the Bats were actually being gentle with them) recaptured, with fights that served as enrichment in all of their enclosures the four rogues that escaped that night were all put down fast, and with broken bones to would put them out of commission for months, by an impatient Batman or Nightwing.  Neither have time for the normal crime fighting until they bring Robin home, they are on a Mission.   And everyone knows not to bother the Bats on a mission.

Arsonist

Liberationist

Socialist

ASL SWEEP ‼️

I'm searching ao3 now 😭

tired: ace is set for execution at marineford

wired: luffy is set for execution at marineford

inspired: sabo is set for execution at marineford

😭

Tim Drake: Throw my decaying ass body in Chernobyl so I can finally achieve my lifelong dream of becoming Shrödringers bitch

Bruce Wayne staring in horror: Tim-

Darn. Thalia is a single mother with two kids.

Both her kids so happen to be her siblings

Okay, but Thalia, Jason G., and Annabeth have a team up in Gotham in the Annabeth Wayne verse. Thalia got leave to go on a solo hunt for something big and nasty, took Jason with her in an attempt at bonding, then found out that not only is the monster headed for the unholy cesspool that is Gotham, for some reason Annabeth is back in Gotham.

She is not happy that Annabeth went back to Gotham. Jason allows himself to be dragged further into the mess when Thalia shows up to check on Annabeth and Annabeth invites herself on the hunt. Thalia now has both her kids present to worry about, and it's making her more than a little twitchy.

Anyway, it's a short, but very nasty, very brutal fight against something deadly and good at large scale damage.

The latter means Nightwing ends up on the scene, not understanding what is happening but deciding that whatever it is his brain couldn't seem to process had just thrown his little sister into a car, so he could figure out the rest later.

It eats one of his escrima sticks.

Annabeth jumps on the monster from above at some point and stabs it directly in the eye with her knife. He wasn't aware she knew how to do that.

As the monster explodes into golden dust, there are sirens going and the dust from the destroyed brickwork and the monster corpse combined with the lack of moonlight makes it hard to see. Thalia calls out to her kids to make sure everyone is in one piece.

Except the words that come out of her mouth have skipped straight over any of her normal filters ,so what comes out is:

"Jay!!! Annie!! Are you both still alive?"

Dick Grayson hears her and freezes on the spot, blood rushing in his ears even as the teenagers reply in the affirmative and Thalia surges forward with a grin to wrap an arm around them both.

okay, so this is 100% based off of a line from one of the DCAMU films. I don't quite remember which one- possibly Batman: Bad Blood or Son of Batman, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, so Dick has a line in that film about "if you take the cut, you can take the stitch" and at least one other person says it to him at some point in the film, annoying him. Or something like that; again my memory is foggy. THE POINT IS, I have now applied that to Annabeth because of course I did.

Annabeth remembers everything or almost everything she hears in canon. Apply that to this situation: she 100% either overheard Bruce telling Dick or Jason: "if you take the cut, you can take the stitch". OR Dick or Jason said that in a somewhat joking/exaggerated manner to comfort her over a minor injury by convincing her to act "like Robin".

Dick and Jason would be Annabeth's model for "big siblings" before Luke and Thalia, Dick especially given his age. Consciously or not, when she became the "big sister" of the Athena cabin, there were things she modeled after Dick, as well as Jason, Thalia, and Luke.

So imagine before they know Annabeth is alive and a demigod, somehow one of the younger bats meets one of the younger Athena kids in one of the many infinitely weird situations the DC verse finds themselves in. Malcolm maybe, maybe someone else.

The younger bat is in civilian clothes and trapped with the Athena kid, who is attempting to give them first aid. The bat has to endure it because they're trying not to give the civilian persona away, and they have no idea the Athena kid also is trying very, very hard to pretend to be a civilian. Until-

"if you take the cut, you can take the stitch"

says this grey-eyed stranger, half-joking, with the EXACT same inflection and tone as Dick Grayson.

"What did you say???" the bat-kid demands, half-convinced they're hallucinating.

The Athena kid smiles.

"Something stupid my big sister always says. Gods, it drives us crazy."