SWAN SONG / damian wayne

A/N & GOOD BONES

i wasn't planning on writing this book. i think that's the simplest way of putting it. i fully expected no celestial to be a one-off, random project to write when i was out of steam for my original novels (quite frankly part of me didn't expect myself to ever finish writing no celestial in the first place, and i almost didn't: i left the first draft to rot for a year before picking it up again). really, you have the olympics and my inability to be focused on one thing at once to thank for the existence of this book, because i got a lot done sitting before my tv watching table tennis & typing away at my laptop. but then when i was nearing the end of no celestial, i thought to myself, you know what? i want to write something for damian.

and so the character of odile was born. i threw around a lot of ideas for this book, really. i knew it was going to be named after a kpop song (i hadn't at this point decided it would have to be a le sserafim song, though), and bounced around a few possible titles, including midas touch, one spark and run for roses. i wasn't sure what i wanted to do for odile's character, and we might have ended up with something drastically different. she could have been briar, which would have been my idea for run for roses, with some rose-related theme and abilities. i eliminated that one due to a similarity to my character of rhysa jiang (the briar) in where the thorns grow (interestingly, odile shares much overlap with the character of iolanthe mi of ravaged hearts, who also has the nickname of the swan/cygnet). i contemplated recycling the idea of valentina (remiel's name in draft one), or using aurora, but finally decided i wanted to do something different. a character who was a dreamer. who liked pink and was more stereotypically feminine, who was a romantic.

i planned very little for this story. i knew there would be flashbacks and i knew what ages those flashbacks would be, but i had nothing more than extremely loose ideas for the overall trajectory of the story. the idea of odile being an imposter came because i decided her name would be odile, just like her namesake in swan lake. i knew i wanted peach blossoms to feature (you guys have the c-drama eternal love, or more accurately translated from chinese as three lives, three worlds, ten miles of peach blossoms to thank for that) and sprinkles of chinese mythology. the rest, i wrote on the go.

i quite like how it ended up. the plot's messy from place to place (as you'd unfortunately have to expect from my unedited, unplanned first drafts), but i think it's overall still readable. you may find the book overall a little too optimistic and... peaceful considering the world it's supposed to be set in, but i think the comic writers sometimes go a bit too far with the amount of disasters and chaos the poor characters have to deal with every day. i just wanted to give them some sort of HEA in my world.

i was planning on this series being a duology. the idea for good bones had existed in some form in my head even during the earliest days of no celestial ("lol what if i wrote something for all the batboys" - karlie, 2023), but i gave it little credit. swan song was going to be the end of my forage into fanfiction, just a random side project i did before going back to my world of original novels on my hopeful path towards eventual traditional publication, but with the pressure of university apps, exams & just a general lack of idea for what i wanted to write in any original project, i decided maybe that another fanfic was just what i needed. and thus, good bones.

if odile is pink pilates princess and clean girl, callie is, well, brat. or at least as brat as you can get with someone like me writing her. both remiel and odile's love stories were mostly smooth sailing once you got past the initial angst. i wanted callie to be a lot messier.

also i watched a shit ton of character analysis videos on jason and thought it would be really interesting to write about a character whose relationship with jason mirrored that of jason & bruce, but in reverse. also i kinda wanted to explore how damian's existence affected tim's position (which i kind of forgot/didn't have space for in no celestial), which to me kinda reflected how jason prob felt when he realised he'd been replaced by tim???? and since i don't plan on actually writing anything for tim (and unlike the jason thing... tim has generally been my least liked robin so i do not think i'll be writing anything for him, it's literally more likely for me to somehow end up writing a roy harper fic even tho i like him with cheshire), i thought writing a jason fic might let me explore that a bit.

and also i just really wanted to do actual enemies-to-lovers bc i didn't seem to have lots of those done in a pure form... like i have lots of novels that are kinda like that? but not really? also i wanted to write something a little more mature, and i think the character of jason does allow quite a lot of darker topics and messier stuff.

ok i'm just of rambling now. point is, thank you for making it this far. i'm really really really grateful for all of you who've decided to go through all my writing and go on this journey with me. i am eternally thankful. and cannot wait to see you again in good bones :) the prologue is already up, so go check that out if you'd like!

happy reading!

p.s. hello. i've just made a timeline for all three books (dw nothing is spoiled from good bones since the stuff in the timeline from that are basically in the summary/mentioned in this book anyways), and i noticed i'd messed up some of the ages in this book? remiel should be 32, but my own notes for this book stated she was 30, and i think the same goes for most of the other characters except damian and odile who are 21 and 19 respectively. it doesn't really make that much of a difference but i just wanted to mention that. but either way, here's the timeline. i'll probably repost this somewhere in good bones to make things more convenient as well. obviously you can completely ignore this and just neglect the concept of time (which i would honestly encourage bc i had a headache trying to make this between fitting in my own events & canon events in a sensible chronological order), but if you're someone who cares about details...

year one: remiel (16) at gotham

year two: remiel (17) leaves gotham

year three: jason (16) becomes robin and dies

year four: callie's (14) parents die and taken in by green arrow and black canary

year five

year six: jason (19) returns

year seven: callie (17), death of cyrene, destruction of eyu sect, odile (9)

year eight: remiel (23) returns to gotham, damian arrives at gotham, callie (18) heads to the uk

year nine: remiel (24) in hong kong, odile (11) leaves yuannan

year ten

year eleven

year twelve: odile (14) and damian (16) meet at guilin

year thirteen

year fourteen: callie (22) and jason (25) in good bones, odile (16) and damian (18) in shanghai

year fifteen

year sixteen

year seventeen: odile (19) returns to gotham with remiel (32)