[fic] for thete1: The Triple-Cross (World's Sleaziest OT3)

[glossing]

Title: The Triple-Cross
Characters: World's Sleaziest—Gary Glanz, Matches Malone, & Pete the Penman
Summary: The con is complicated, but not half so much as the geometry among these three.
Rating: Adult Filthy
Disclaimer: DC, not me.
Notes: I ignored Waid's Birthright, in that Clark's not a vegetarian. Enormous thanks to romanyg for bringing Pete the

Comments

[solvent90]

It isn't as if either of them have anywhere else to go. This brownstone is their world; there is nothing else. Pete can no more rescue this child than he can *fly*.

I really want to sit down and unpack every single line of this - that one up there is the first one I had to reread more than three times, but then nearly everything was like that. Just. Wow.

Pete copies originals until they're better than they were. He forges the appearance of truth from miscellaneous materials; his work depends on the fact that people want to believe what they see.

Oh. I have no idea how you do that, pack so much suggestion and almost-metaphor and theme into a single clean line.

And then the story, ohmygod. The way in which Gary and Matches and Pete are like a harsh parody of Tim and Bruce and Clark and then again maybe just more primal/basic/different versions of them - that conversation between Gary and Pete just made me ache with its hopelessness, its patternedness - and how Batman and Superman and Robin are something else again but shadow everything, that last line adjkdfjdkgjfk. That. I can't quite work out how it intersects with the running theme of creation and limitation and possibility - the unwritten page, the uncarved plate, oh, that image - but I know it does in ways which my head can't quite contain. And I haven't begun to grasp the class implications of Bruce and Tim choosing to play this way. I. You just take my mind apart every time you do this, you know.

[glossing]

Wow, thank you so much. This story kept veering back and forth between utter absurdity and the urge to take it a little more seriously, and your comment's telling me that I managed to do both.

its hopelessness, its patternedness
I can't get over how *right* "patternedness" is for all of this. Thank you.

the class implications of Bruce and Tim choosing to play this way.
I know. It's one thing to say they love their costumes - that's just *true* - but the content and context of those costumes are something else altogether.