The entire Batfam has just finished fighting a witch whose magic operates on weaponized desire. Not illusion. Not mind control. She grants exactly what you want — but never in a way that stays benevolent. The fulfillment curdles over time. The wish rots from the inside out.
It’s subtle. That’s the horror.
People don’t fight it because technically… they got what they asked for.
Security turns into isolation. Love turns into obsession. Success turns into dependency. The distortion is gradual enough that by the time you notice, you’re already complicit.
They corner her. She’s exhausted. Outmatched. Desperate.
Tim moves in to disable her.
She grabs him and hisses a final incantation — not carefully woven, not ritual-anchored. Just raw, drained magic flung like a flare to buy time.
Tim feels it hit. Cold. Direct.
No visible transformation. No immediate effect. No detectable curse signature that Zatanna can trace. No behavioral shifts. No symptoms.
Because the Batfam knows her specialty.
They know it won’t be obvious. They know it won’t be immediate. They know it will twist.
And they don’t know what Tim would wish for.
That’s the part that unsettles Bruce the most.
Tim, meanwhile, spirals quietly.
Because what would his deepest desire be? Control? Stability? Being indispensable? Not being alone? Being understood?
Any of those could become catastrophic in Gotham.
So he starts monitoring himself. Sleep tracking. Behavioral logs. Contingency files in case he becomes compromised. He pulls back emotionally, terrified that attachment might be the vector.
New bartender at the coffee place Tim basically lives in.
The place Tim goes when he hasn’t slept in 36 hours. The place where he camps with three laptops and pretends it counts as “taking a break.”
Danny isn’t flashy. He’s just… there.
Sharp blue eyes that linger a little too long and a smile that feels like he knows something but isn’t weaponizing it.
The first time their eyes meet, Tim feels it.
Immediate. Clean. Uncomplicated.
Because the witch grants desires.
And Tim’s brain supplies the worst possible conclusion instantly:
This is the spell unfolding.
He meets someone who feels like inevitability.
Someone who laughs at his dry humor. Who hands him coffee before he orders. Who somehow always shifts conversations away from self-destruction and toward something almost hopeful.
It’s everything Tim never lets himself want.
Which means it’s dangerous.
Because if the spell is granting him what he desires most — connection without abandonment, someone who sees him without needing him to perform — then eventually it will twist.
Danny will become dependent. Or obsessive. Or fragile. Or doomed.
That’s how these things work.
So Tim does the only rational thing in his sleep-deprived, curse-anxious brain:
Tim is falling in love entirely on his own.
And that’s so much scarier to him than magic ever could be.
