“I only wanna fight if its for your life”

[eyellusionist]

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[cherryysunshine]

Just Between Friends

Pairing: Wally West/F!Reader

Word Count: 5.2k

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: best friends to lovers, mutual pining, idiots in love, jealousy, oral sex, fingering, vaginal sex, unprotected sex, creampie

Summary: You and Wally have spent years insisting that the two of you are just friends. That changes when Wally develops a serious objection to your third date with another man.

Author’s Note: written for @mxyrose’s request for my 1k celebration!

Wally let himself into your apartment while you were standing in front of the bathroom mirror with one earring in and the other clenched between your teeth.

The lock turned, followed by the familiar scrape of the door against the section of hardwood you’d been meaning to sand down for six months. Wally had offered to fix it approximately sixteen times. You’d refused every offer because letting a speedster loose with power tools sounded like the beginning of an insurance claim, which had never stopped him from reminding you that the door was eventually going to ruin the floor.

“Before you yell at me,” he called, “I knocked.”

You pushed the earring through your lobe and leaned closer to the mirror. “You absolutely did not.”

“I knocked in spirit.”

“That isn’t how knocking works.”

“It is when you have a key.”

A paper bag rustled somewhere beyond the bathroom, and you paused with your fingers at the clasp. “Did you bring food?”

“I was already out.”

You stepped into the hallway and found Wally standing in your kitchen in jeans, sneakers, and the dark blue sweatshirt you’d given him two Christmases ago. A familiar takeout bag sat on the counter beside him, the restaurant’s name printed across the side in large red letters.

“That place is forty minutes away.”

Wally glanced at the bag as though he’d only just noticed where it came from. “For you.”

“You live twenty minutes in the opposite direction.”

“Geography is complicated.”

“You can run across the country in minutes.”

“Exactly. Really messes with your sense of distance.”

His mouth twitched when you folded your arms, and you had to fight your own smile. Wally had always been able to talk his way through being caught doing something ridiculous, but bringing your favorite takeout from across the city on the night of your third date with Jacob was particularly shameless.

“I have dinner plans,” you reminded him.

“I know.”

The answer came quickly enough to make you narrow your eyes.

Wally opened the bag and busied himself arranging your usual order and the dumplings you always claimed you wouldn’t finish. “You told me.”

“I told you I had a date.”

“Right.”

“My third date.”

“I wasn’t keeping count.”

You stared at him.

He lasted three seconds before looking away.

“Wally.”

“What?”

“You hate him.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“You called him boring.”

“I said architecture sounded boring.”

“You asked if he designed parking garages and then sent me seventeen pictures of ugly ones.”

“That was research.”

You finally laughed, and the satisfaction on his face suggested he’d been waiting for it. He nudged the dumplings toward you, apparently deciding that making you smile meant he’d won something.

“At least eat one before you go.”

“We’re getting dinner.”

“Fine. But if the portions are tiny and pretentious, these will be in the fridge.”

There was enough genuine concern beneath the joke that your chest softened despite yourself. Wally had always taken care of you in ways small enough to dismiss individually. He remembered what you ordered when you were sick, noticed when you were almost out of cereal, and could tell the difference between the silence that meant you wanted company and the silence that meant you wanted to be left alone.

It was what best friends did.

At least, that was what the two of you had been telling people for years.

Whenever someone mistook you for a couple, one of you corrected them and the other agreed. You were “just friends” when Wally started keeping a toothbrush in your bathroom. “Just friends” when you became the first person he called after missions. “Just friends” when he stopped asking before putting an arm around you or resting his hand on your thigh because casual affection had become so ordinary between you that neither of you seemed to notice it anymore.

You’d believed the explanation because examining the alternative had always seemed more dangerous.

Then Wally looked up and saw your dress properly.

His gaze caught somewhere below your face. The dress wasn’t particularly revealing, but it followed your waist and hips closely, with a neckline low enough that you’d spent five minutes debating necklaces before deciding against one. You’d worn it before. Wally had certainly seen you in less.

He’d never looked at you quite like this.

“What?”

His eyes snapped back to yours. “Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “You look nice.”

There was nothing unusual about the compliment. Wally told you that you looked nice when you’d spent two hours getting ready and when you were wearing stained sweatpants with your hair barely brushed. He’d once called you beautiful while you had the flu, immediately followed by a warning not to sneeze in his direction.

Something about the careful way he said it now sent warmth creeping up your chest.

“Thank you.”

His gaze dipped again before he caught himself. “Really nice.”

“For my date,” you said, because apparently you enjoyed making him uncomfortable.

Wally’s expression tightened for an instant. “Yeah.”

Your phone buzzed from the bathroom counter before you could decide whether you’d imagined it.

Jacob was downstairs.

By the time you were ready to leave, Wally was sliding the untouched food into your refrigerator. He knew where everything went without asking. Of course he did. Three of his shirts were in your dresser, a charger for his phone had lived beside your couch for over a year, and he’d somehow become the emergency contact at your dentist after driving you home loopy and miserable from getting your wisdom teeth removed.

“I might be home late,” you said.

“That’s okay.”

“You don’t have to stay.”

“I know.” His gaze moved toward the television, where he’d already queued one of the movies the two of you kept meaning to watch. “I figured we could start this if you got back early.”

“Movie night is Thursday.”

“It was an optimistic assumption.”

The joke landed more quietly than the others.

You studied him for a moment before reaching for the door. “I’ll text you.”

His expression brightened before he managed to hide it. “You don’t have to.”

“I always do.”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. “Have fun.”

You made it halfway through the doorway before he called your name.

When you turned, Wally looked like he’d almost worked up the courage to say something else. His attention dropped briefly over your dress before his smile softened.

“Seriously,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

Your heart stumbled hard enough to annoy you.

“Thanks, Walls.”

You left before it could do anything stupider.

The date was fine, which was the problem.

Jacob was nice. He remembered that you’d mentioned liking the restaurant, asked questions without turning dinner into an interview, and made you laugh often enough that you stopped checking your phone after the first hour. He was attractive, thoughtful, and plainly interested in seeing you again.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with him.

You should’ve wanted him to kiss you.

When he walked you back to your building and leaned in, you let him. His mouth was warm, one hand resting lightly at your waist as the kiss lingered for several pleasant seconds.

Pleasant should’ve been enough.

Instead, your mind supplied the memory of another hand settling in that exact place as Wally guided you through a crowded room, his palm familiar and careless against your side because neither of you had ever thought twice about touching each other.

Jacob drew back with a smile. “I had a really good time.”

“So did I.”

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

You hesitated only long enough to hate yourself for it. “Yeah.”

He wished you goodnight and walked away, leaving you with the uncomfortable realization that you were comparing a perfectly decent man to someone who had never actually asked you for anything more than friendship.

By the time you reached your floor, there was a thin strip of light beneath your apartment door.

Wally was still there.

You unlocked the door and found him stretched across your couch with the movie paused on the television. He sat up almost immediately, his eyes moving over you with a speed that had nothing to do with his powers.

“You’re home.”

“You’re still here.”

“I got invested.”

“You paused it less than a quarter in.”

“I got moderately invested.”

You set your purse beside the door and slipped out of your shoes. Wally’s gaze lingered on your face, and you knew the instant he noticed your lipstick had been smudged.

His expression changed.

“Don’t,” you said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

His jaw shifted before he tried for something casual. “Did you have a good time?”

“You want to ask if he kissed me.”

Wally’s eyes dropped to your mouth before he could stop them.

You touched your smudged lipstick. “That obvious?”

His expression tightened. “A little.”

You watched him for a moment. “You’re jealous.”

Wally gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “I’m not jealous.”

“You showed up with my favorite food before my date and then stayed in my apartment until I got home.”

“I’m here all the time.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

His smile faded.

You hadn’t meant to say it like that. Maybe you hadn’t meant to say it at all, but now that the words were out, everything you’d been deliberately ignoring for years seemed to crowd forward at once.

Wally pushed himself upright. “What does that mean?”

“It means you do this all the time.” You gestured helplessly around the apartment. “You let yourself in. You keep clothes here. You know when I’m almost out of groceries and when I haven’t answered my phone for three hours. You sleep in my bed when you don’t feel like going home, call me the second you get back from missions, kiss my forehead when you leave, and touch me whenever you want because we decided years ago that none of it means anything.”

His brows drew together. “I never said it didn’t mean anything.”

“You say we’re friends.”

“We are.”

The answer hurt more than it should have.

You laughed under your breath and looked away. “Exactly.”

Wally stood. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

He took a step toward you before stopping again. For someone whose entire life happened faster than everyone else’s, he looked strangely lost.

“You don’t get to act like my boyfriend every day and then remind me we’re just friends whenever it gets inconvenient,” you said.

Wally stared at you.

The silence stretched long enough for regret to begin curling in your stomach.

Then his expression shifted from confusion to something almost wounded. “Is that what you think I’ve been doing?”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

“I thought you didn’t want anything else.”

You blinked. “Why?”

“Because every time somebody thought we were together, you told them we weren’t.”

“So did you.”

“Because you did it first.”

The ridiculous simplicity of the answer stopped you.

Wally dragged a hand through his hair. “Do you remember that party at Dick’s four years ago? Somebody asked how long we’d been dating, and you nearly inhaled your drink trying to explain that we were friends. I thought you were making it clear.”

“That was four years ago.”

“I know.”

“And you decided that one conversation meant I could never change my mind?”

“I decided I wasn’t going to risk losing you because I wanted more than you did.”

The anger drained out of you almost immediately.

For years, you had each apparently been taking the other’s caution as rejection and responding with more caution of your own.

A helpless laugh escaped you.

Wally blinked. “What?”

“We’re idiots.”

His mouth twitched despite himself. “I was going to say victims of poor communication.”

“You’re supposed to be faster than this.”

“That was mean.”

“You earned it.”

His smile lasted only a second before his attention dropped to your mouth.

The air between you shifted.

“Did you want him to kiss you?” he asked.

Your breath caught.

“That isn’t fair.”

“I know.” Wally didn’t look away. “And I know I don’t get to be mad at you for going out with somebody when I’ve spent years pretending this is enough for me. But I am jealous. So fucking jealous, actually.”

The admission sent heat rushing through you despite the conversation that had produced it.

He stepped closer, leaving barely a foot between you.

“If you want me to back off, I will,” he said. “But if you’re telling me that I’ve been acting like your boyfriend, I need to know whether you actually want me to stop.”

You swallowed. “What if I don’t?”

Hope appeared so quickly on his face that your chest tightened.

Wally stepped closer. “Then I need you to tell me what you do want.”

This time, Wally didn’t fill the silence. He simply waited while you looked at the man who had been woven so thoroughly into your life that you’d stopped noticing where friendship ended and everything else began.

You reached for the front of his sweatshirt. His breath caught when your fingers curled into the fabric.

“Kiss me.”

He did.

The first press of his lips was softer than you’d expected after years of yearning. One hand settled carefully at your waist while the other cupped your jaw, and for several seconds Wally kissed you like he was still afraid this might disappear if he moved too quickly.

You leaned into him.

Whatever restraint he’d been holding onto broke.

His mouth opened against yours with a quiet sound that sent heat through you, and his arm slid firmly around your waist as he pulled you closer. You knew the warmth of his body and the fit of his hands around you, but you’d never known what it felt like when those same hands tightened because he wanted you.

Wally drew back just far enough to breathe.

“Holy shit.”

You laughed softly. “Romantic.”

“I’ve wanted to do that for years. Give me a second.”

“You stopped kissing me for that?”

His eyes flashed with sudden amusement before his mouth found yours again.

This kiss was harder.

Your back met the door as Wally crowded closer, his hand moving into your hair while his thigh settled between yours. Your hips shifted instinctively against him, and the groan he gave into your mouth made every familiar touch abruptly feel new.

His lips moved along your jaw toward your throat.

“You’ve sat in my lap wearing those tiny sleep shorts,” he murmured against your skin. “Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

“You always acted fine.”

“I was fighting for my life.”

You laughed, though it dissolved into a breath when his teeth grazed lightly below your ear. His hand slid lower to cup your ass through your dress, bringing you more firmly against his thigh.

“That wasn’t very friendly,” you whispered.

“Thank God.”

You kissed him before he could say anything else.

Wally lifted you easily, and your legs wrapped around his waist as he carried you toward the couch. The movement drew a startled laugh from you, but he only smiled against your mouth before sitting with you straddling his lap.

The position should’ve felt ordinary. You’d landed in his lap before while wrestling for the remote, stealing his phone, or laughing hard enough to lose your balance.

You’d never felt him hard beneath you.

Your first slow roll of your hips wiped the smile from Wally’s face. His hands tightened around your waist as his head tipped back against the couch, a rough breath escaping him.

The reaction made you do it again.

“Careful,” he murmured.

“You’ve waited four years.”

“Exactly. I’d like to survive the next ten minutes.”

You leaned down and kissed his throat, smiling when his hips shifted beneath yours. Wally’s hands slid under your dress and along your thighs, but the humor gradually left his expression as his fingertips moved higher.

“Can I touch you?”

“Yes.”

He looked at you for another second, giving you time to change your mind, before his hand slipped between your thighs.

The first press of his fingers over your underwear made your breath catch.

Wally’s eyes darkened. “You’re already so wet.”

“You’ve had your thigh between my legs since the door.”

“Still taking the win.”

You rolled your eyes, but any response disappeared when he stroked over your clit through the fabric. Your hips followed the movement before you could stop them, and Wally watched you with an intensity that made your face warm.

“I’ve wondered about this so many times,” he admitted, slipping his fingers beneath your underwear. “What you’d sound like. What you’d feel like.”

His fingertip circled your clit directly, pulling a soft gasp from you.

“You could’ve found out sooner.”

“I’m painfully aware.”

You caught his lower lip between your teeth before he could make another joke. Wally’s fingers pressed more firmly against you, and your thighs tightened around his hips as heat gathered low in your stomach.

He kissed you again, slower this time.

“Bedroom?”

You glanced toward the hallway, then back at him. “What, getting tired already?”

The challenge had barely left your mouth before Wally stood with you still wrapped around him.

You laughed against his shoulder. “Show-off.”

“You started it.”

He carried you into the bedroom without using his speed, giving you time to feel every step and every shift of his hands against your thighs.

Your back met the mattress gently.

Wally followed you down, braced above you with an expression that had lost almost all of its usual mischief. His fingers found the zipper at the side of your dress.

“Can I?”

You nodded.

He pulled the zipper down slowly, kissing the newly exposed skin as he worked the dress from your body. When it finally slipped away, Wally went still.

His gaze moved over you with such open want that self-consciousness prickled beneath your skin.

“Say something.”

His eyes returned to yours. “I’m trying very hard not to embarrass myself.”

“That bad?”

“That good.”

Your smile softened.

Wally bent to kiss the center of your chest, then lower, his mouth following the curve beneath your breast as one hand settled over your hip.

“You’re beautiful.”

The quiet sincerity of it hit harder than any of his teasing had.

You touched his hair and let yourself feel the weight of what was happening. This was Wally. The man who knew how you took your tea and which side of the bed you preferred, who had seen you sick and exhausted and furious, who’d already been present for so many ordinary pieces of your life that there was almost nothing left to learn except this.

When his lips returned to yours, you tugged at the hem of his sweatshirt.

“Your turn.”

Wally sat back long enough to strip, using just enough speed to make you blink. His sweatshirt and jeans appeared neatly over the desk chair before he settled between your thighs in his boxers.

You stared.

He gave you an unapologetic grin. “Efficient.”

Your hand closed over him through the fabric.

The grin vanished.

A strained sound left his throat as you stroked him slowly, the hard length of his cock pressing into your palm.

“That’s going to become a problem very quickly.”

You smiled. “Good.”

Wally caught your wrist gently before you could speed up, then kissed your palm.

“Later.”

Before you could protest, his mouth moved down your stomach.

Understanding arrived when his fingers hooked into your underwear.

Your breath caught.

Wally glanced up. “Still okay?”

“Yeah.”

He drew them slowly down your legs.

After years of wanting this, you might’ve expected him to rush. Instead, he settled between your thighs and kissed the inside of one, then the other, his hands spreading them wider before his attention dropped between them.

The anticipation alone made you squirm.

“Wally.”

His mouth twitched. “I know.”

Then his tongue dragged slowly through your folds.

Your head sank back into the pillow.

Wally groaned as though he were the one being touched, his tongue circling your clit before flattening against it. He lingered whenever your breathing changed, quickly finding the pressure that made your hips lift from the mattress and your fingers tighten in his hair.

“Fuck,” you breathed.

His hands tightened around your thighs, and you felt his smile against you before his mouth returned to your clit. One finger slipped slowly inside you and curled.

Your back arched. “Oh.”

His eyes lifted to yours before he repeated the motion, adding a second finger and stretching you carefully while his mouth returned to your clit.

The combination drove coherent thought out of your head.

Your grip tightened in his hair as he worked his fingers steadily inside you, finding the spot that made your stomach clench and refusing to lose it once he had it. Pleasure built quickly, sharpened by the intimacy of knowing exactly whose mouth was between your thighs.

“Wally.”

His gaze met yours, and that was enough to send you over. Your orgasm rolled through you hard, your hips lifting as your body clenched around his fingers. Wally held you through it, keeping his mouth exactly where you needed him until the tension broke into trembling aftershocks.

He finally eased back and kissed the inside of your thigh.

The pleased look on his face was almost unbearable.

“Don’t start.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You look smug.”

“I just made my best friend come on my tongue. I think I’m allowed an emotion.”

Your face heated. “Just your best friend?”

His eyebrows lifted.

You caught his shoulders and dragged him upward before he could turn that into another argument.

Wally laughed into the kiss, but the sound disappeared when you tasted yourself on his mouth and pulled him closer. His hips settled between your thighs, the hard length of him dragging against you through his boxers.

You reached down and pushed his boxers over his hips. Wally kicked them away before your hand wrapped around his cock.

The first slow stroke drew a rough breath from him and made his eyes slide closed, while the second sent his hips bucking into your hand.

“You’ve been hiding this from me?”

He opened one eye. “I feel like there are flaws in that accusation.”

You laughed and kissed him before sliding your hand down again.

Wally caught your wrist after another stroke. “If you keep doing that, this ends before the part I’ve been fantasizing about for four years.”

Heat curled low in your stomach. “I want you inside me.”

His entire expression changed.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

You reached toward the nightstand, but Wally paused.

“Do we need a condom?”

“I’m on birth control, and my last screening was clear.”

“Mine too.”

You searched his face. “You’re comfortable without one?”

“Yes.”

“Then come here.”

He kissed you as he settled between your thighs.

The head of his cock pressed against your entrance, and both of you went completely quiet.

This felt different from everything else.

Wally looked at you, checking one last time.

You wrapped one leg around his waist and drew him closer. “Fuck me, Wally.”

He pushed inside. The stretch made your breath catch, and Wally stopped immediately.

“You okay?”

“I’m good.” You ran your fingers through his hair, keeping his forehead against yours. “Keep going.”

He sank deeper with deliberate care until his hips finally settled against yours.

The fullness stole your breath.

Wally stayed still for several seconds, his eyes closing as he exhaled shakily against your cheek. “You feel incredible.”

You shifted beneath him.

His hands tightened against the sheets.

A laugh escaped you. “You planning on moving?”

“I was having a moment.”

“You can have it while moving.”

His smile returned, softer than before.

Then he drew back and thrust into you.

The first few strokes were slow, giving you time to adjust before the stretch settled into pleasure. You pulled him closer with your legs and met the next movement of his hips, and Wally’s control loosened.

His pace increased gradually.

Your hands moved over his back as he fucked into you, each deeper thrust pulling another sound from your throat. He kissed your mouth, your jaw, the side of your neck, never staying away from you for long enough to make the closeness feel accidental.

“Tell me if it’s too much.”

“Keep going.”

His next thrust was harder.

Pleasure jolted through you.

Wally watched your expression before doing it again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His hand slipped between your bodies and found your clit.

Your legs tightened around him. 

“Fuck, Wally.”

He groaned at the sound of his name, his mouth brushing your ear. “You feel so good.”

The words went straight through you.

You’d known Wally’s voice in almost every circumstance imaginable: breathless with laughter, exhausted after missions, quiet on nights when whatever he’d seen wouldn’t leave him alone. You had never heard it like this, low and strained against your skin as he told you how good you felt around him.

You kissed him because the intimacy of it suddenly felt overwhelming.

Wally groaned into your mouth. “I love you.”

Everything inside you seemed to stop at once.

His hips did too.

Wally’s eyes opened.

The realization on his face might’ve been funny if your own heart hadn’t started pounding.

“I didn’t mean to say that right now.”

“Right now?”

“I mean, I meant it.” His words began coming faster as panic set in. “Obviously I meant it. I just had a whole idea about eventually saying it in a situation where I wasn’t actively inside you, because this is maybe not the most dignified—”

You kissed him.

Wally made a startled sound before his hand came up to cup your cheek.

“I love you too.”

He went completely still.

When you pulled back, the expression on his face made your chest ache.

“Really?”

You smiled. “Really.”

The joy that broke across his features was immediate.

You tightened deliberately around him.

Wally’s eyes widened.

“That was evil.”

“You stopped.”

“I was having the most important emotional breakthrough of my life.”

“You can have it while fucking me.”

A disbelieving laugh escaped him before his hips drove forward.

“God, I love you.”

This time your laugh became a moan.

Wally buried his face against your neck as his pace turned deeper and rougher, one hand gripping your hip while the other continued working steadily over your clit.

The pressure climbed quickly. You held onto him as your orgasm gathered low in your stomach, each thrust pushing you closer until your body tightened abruptly around him.

Your second orgasm hit harder than the first.

You cried out against his shoulder as Wally fucked you through it, his rhythm faltering when your cunt clenched around him. “Fuck.”

He lifted his head, breathing hard.

“Can I come inside you?”

The question sent another pulse through your oversensitive body.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, Wally.”

His mouth found yours as his hips drove forward again.

A few strokes later, his body tensed above you. Wally pushed deep with a broken groan, his cock pulsing inside you as he came.

For several seconds, neither of you moved.

His breathing gradually slowed against your cheek before he lifted his head and looked at you.

A smile tugged at his mouth.

You narrowed your eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.”

“I was only wondering whether this is still covered under friendship.”

You covered your face with both hands.

Wally laughed softly and kissed your fingers.

“You’re insufferable.”

“You love me.”

“Unfortunately.”

His smile softened.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “You do.”

You lowered your hands and kissed him.

Wally eased out of you carefully before disappearing toward the bathroom. He returned with a warm washcloth and a glass of water, cleaning you gently before climbing back into bed.

You settled against his chest without thinking.

That was when the strangeness of everything finally caught up with you. You’d slept like this hundreds of times. Wally’s arm curved around your waist the way it always did, and your cheek found the familiar place over his heart.

Only now, you were naked, pleasantly sore, and his come was still inside you.

You started laughing.

Wally looked down at you. “What?”

“We’ve been ridiculous.”

“Extremely.”

“You’ve had a toothbrush here for three years.”

“And?”

“You bought me a vacuum.”

“Your old one was a fire hazard.”

“You went to my cousin’s wedding.”

“You needed someone to dance with.”

“You told everyone you weren’t my date.”

Wally sighed. “Okay, that one looks bad in retrospect.”

Your laughter softened as his fingers moved lazily over your back.

The absurdity of it all had hidden something more frightening underneath. You’d crossed the line the two of you had spent years carefully avoiding, and there was no pretending it hadn’t changed anything.

“Wally?”

“Hmm?”

“What happens now?”

The humor left his face.

He looked at you properly before brushing his thumb along your side. “What do you want to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay.”

“You’re not worried?”

“I’m terrified.” He smiled faintly when you looked up at him. “I’m just also pretty sure I’ve been accidentally dating you for years already.”

Warmth spread slowly through your chest.

“You’re very confident for someone who didn’t realize he was in a relationship.”

“I knew I was committed.” His hand settled at your waist. “I knew I wasn’t interested in anyone else. I just thought this was all I was allowed to have.”

That quieted you.

“I have to tell Jacob.”

A flicker of jealousy crossed Wally’s face before he grimaced at himself. “Right.”

“We weren’t exclusive.”

“I know.”

“And he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know that too.”

You rested your chin against his chest. “You still think architecture is boring?”

“I’m willing to admit that the parking garage thing was beneath me.”

“Seventeen pictures.”

“I was going through something.”

You laughed and tucked yourself closer.

“I’ll call him tomorrow.”

“Good.” Wally kissed your forehead, then seemed to realize what he’d done.

The gesture was exactly the same as it had always been.

That made it feel entirely different.

His eyes met yours.

“So,” he said carefully, “boyfriend?”

You pretended to consider it.

Wally looked offended. “Seriously?”

“I’m thinking.”

“I brought you dumplings from forty minutes away.”

“You tried to sabotage my date with carbohydrates.”

“I respected your right to make terrible romantic decisions.”

You smiled and shifted over him until you were straddling his hips again. “That’s a generous interpretation.”

Wally’s hands settled automatically at your waist. “I’m choosing growth.”

His own smile faded into something warmer when you leaned down and kissed him.

“Boyfriend,” you agreed against his mouth.

His entire face lit up. “You’re my girlfriend.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I’ve spent four years telling myself you weren’t.”

You kissed him before he could get sentimental enough to make your chest hurt, smiling when you rolled your hips and felt him beginning to harden beneath you again.

His hands tightened around your waist.

“Friends don’t do that,” he said.

“Good thing you got promoted.”

Wally rolled you beneath him, laughing as he kissed you again.

For once, neither of you bothered pretending you were just friends.

credit to @uzmacchiato for the cherry divider ❤️💛

Taglist: @twentytomidnight

[the-darklings]

SHUTTER SPEED — BOBBY FRANKLIN.

pairing: camboy!bobby franklin x f!reader summary: you're two months behind on rent and terrence knows a guy. the said guy is annoyingly pretty and cocky. it's only downhill from there. contents/warnings: 18+, explicit smut, discussions of sex work/adult film industry, financial desperation, power dynamics, oral sex (f receiving), breast sucking <3, spitting, vaginal sex, dirty talk/praise, hair pulling, filming during sex, bobby franklin's mouth (this is its own warning lol). notes: Inspired by this ask, and the 20+ of you who flooded my inbox asking for more. Can be read as a standalone but could also be read as alt universe to my better bobby series.

✶ better bobby series.

"So Terrence told you what I do."

It's not a question.

Bobby Franklin sits across from you in a vinyl booth at Moreno's, which is the kind of diner that serves coffee the colour of motor oil and bacon that's either raw or carbonised and nothing in between. It's 9 AM on a Thursday. You're eating eggs because eggs are cheap and the rent was due six days ago.

He'd walked in with a swagger that bordered on offensive. Bobby Franklin doesn't strut. Because that would require effort and effort would compromise the relaxed swagger.

He moves through space like it's already made room for him. Like rooms rearrange themselves slightly when he enters. Leather jacket despite the California heat, sunglasses pushed up into sandy hair that's a mess in a way that probably took zero minutes to achieve, a thin chain necklace catching the light at the hollow of his throat, and—you'd spotted this immediately, against your will—a small silver hoop in his left ear. He'd slid into the booth across from you with the ease of someone who's never once wondered whether he belongs somewhere.

You'd been here for twelve minutes already. Sitting. Sweating. Running through a mental list of reasons this was a terrible idea and arriving at the same conclusion every time: the rent. the rent. the rent.

"He mentioned it." You push the eggs around the plate. They're overcooked. Everything at Moreno's is overcooked. "He said you were—that you make films."

Bobby's mouth twitches. "Films." He takes a mouthful of the motor-oil coffee. Doesn't flinch. "Yeah. I make films."

He's watching you. You can't help but notice that Bobby doesn't stare the way other men stare, heavy and obvious.

He watches. There's a difference. Staring is passive. Watching is a skill.

You can see it in the way his eyes move: cataloguing, framing, composing. Those eyes. Pale blue, sharp, amused in a way that suggests he's always in on a joke nobody else has heard yet. They land on your face and stay there with an intensity that makes you want to look away and also makes you want to never look away and you're not going to think about that right now. Even in a shitty diner booth with fluorescent lighting and a crack running through the formica, Bobby Franklin is looking at you like he's already thinking about angles.

"And you're—Terrence said you do everything yourself? Shoot, edit, all of it?" you croak out, forcing yourself to swallow a mouthful of coffee.

"I don't trust anyone else with the camera." He says it the way other people say they don't trust anyone else with their car keys. Flat. Non-negotiable. His fingers are wrapped around the coffee mug and you notice—you're noticing too much, you need to stop noticing—the veins on the back of his hands, the way the leather jacket sits on his shoulders like it grew there, the silver hoop catches light every time he tilts his head. "It's a one-man operation. Well." The twitch again. Almost a smile. "Usually two-man. One behind the lens, one in front."

You nod. Push the eggs. Your fork makes a sound against the plate that's louder than it should be because neither of you is talking and the diner is mostly empty. The jukebox in the corner is broken and has been broken since Reagan. Your knee is bouncing under the table. You press your palm flat on your thigh to stop it. It only partially works.

"How behind are you?" Bobby drawls.

Your head snaps up. "What?"

"On rent," he clarifies patiently. "Terrence said you were in trouble. How behind?"

He leans forward when he asks it and the chain shifts against his collarbone and you catch a breath of him leather and something underneath, warm, clean, just skin—and your stomach coils.

You're nervous. You're nervous and attracted and the two are braiding together into something that makes it hard to hold your fork steady.

This would be easier if he were sleazy. If he looked like what you'd imagined when Terrence first explained the arrangement. Some greasy guy with a moustache and a waterbed. Instead he looks like this. Sharp jaw and piercing, amused eyes and an earring, a chain and a full mouth that does that little twitch and you're in so much trouble.

You put the fork down. Two months. You're two months behind because the temp agency dried up and the waitressing gig fell through and you've been living on ramen and the leftovers your neighbour leaves outside her door in tupperware containers that you're pretty sure are meant for the stray cats but you're not proud enough to care anymore.

"Two months," you admit, staring down at the eggs. Not looking at him. Looking at him is becoming a problem.

Bobby whistles. Low. Through his teeth. "Well shit. Landlord breathing down your neck?"

You scoff, swallowing down the bitterness. "He's past breathing. He's at written notices."

Bobby leans back in the booth. The vinyl creaks beneath him. He's got one arm stretched along the back of the seat and the other hand wrapped around the coffee mug and the morning light from the window is hitting the side of his face and you think, abstractly, the way you'd think about a painting in a museum: he's beautiful. Sharp angles. Pale eyes. Cali tan and an ease in how he slouches in his seat.

"The money's good," he says suddenly, tongue poking his cheek as he drags his attention back towards you. "That's the first thing. I'm not gonna bullshit you. It's not Hollywood money, obviously, but for Santa Clara? For a couple hours of work?" He tilts his head. "It'd cover your rent. Easy. One shoot."

You stare, unblinking. Sceptical. "One shoot."

"One shoot."

You pick up the fork again. Put it down again. Your fingers won't stop moving.

"Look—" Bobby leans forward. Elbows on the table. The leather jacket he's wearing creaks with the movement, and he's closer now and the watching has intensified into something that feels less like a camera and more like a hand on your skin. "I'm not trying to pressure you into shit. Terrence vouched for you because I asked him if he knew anyone and he said he knew a girl who was real smart and broke and—"

He stops. Mid-sentence. The watching goes still. There's a shift in his expression. A loosening, a slip, the mask of professional detachment developing a crack.

"Shit," he says softly. Almost to himself. "You're pretty. Real pretty."

You bristle. The flinch is automatic. A full-body tightening that starts in your shoulders and works down, because you know this game, you've played this game, the compliment that's actually a crowbar, the flattery designed to pry you open. Men in diners don't tell you you're pretty because they mean it. They tell you you're pretty because they want something and that something is usually between your legs.

"Don't do that," you say sharply. Your voice is harder than you intended.

Bobby blinks. The crack in his expression widens and what's behind it isn't a game. It's surprise. Genuine, unperformative surprise, the kind that creases the corners of his eyes and makes him look younger than however old he is.

"Do what?"

"The—flattery thing. The buttering up. I don't need you to tell me I'm pretty to get me to agree, I already—" Your throat tightens, and you knot your fingers in your lap, setting your jaw. "I'm already here. I'm already desperate enough to be sitting in this diner talking about—so you don't need to—"

"Hey." His hand comes up. Not touching. Just a gesture. A pause button. "I wasn't buttering you up. I was just—" He runs a hand through his hair, clipping his sunglasses. He looks, for a half-second, almost flustered. "I was looking at you and it came out. That's it. That's the whole thing. You're pretty and my mouth moved before my brain did and I'm—" He picks up the coffee. Takes a long sip. Sets it down. "Sorry. Professional hazard. I notice faces."

You stare at each other in silence.

He wasn't mocking you.

The realisation lands with a warmth that starts in your chest and spreads to places you weren't expecting.

He wasn't mocking you. He was sitting across from you in a vinyl booth and the light caught your face and he thought you were pretty and he said so because his mouth was faster than his filter. And now he's drinking burnt coffee to cover the fact that he's embarrassed about it.

"Okay," you say quietly.

He pauses, cup halfway to his mouth. "Okay?"

"Okay, tell me the terms."

Bobby sets the coffee down. The professionalism clicks back into place but the tips of his ears are still pink and you file that away somewhere warm and private.

"I shoot everything at my place. My equipment, my setup. VHS. I've got two cameras, one static, one handheld. The handheld's the one that matters. That's the one I operate." He taps the table with his index finger. Rhythmic. A habit. "I edit everything myself. I distribute through a guy I know in the valley who handles the duplication and the mailing list. You never have to talk to him. You never have to talk to anyone. Your face, your name, none of it goes on the packaging unless you want it to."

"What name do you use?" you ask, curious despite yourself.

"For me? Bobby." He shrugs. "I'm not creative about it."

"And for—"

"Whatever you want. Pick something. Pick nothing. Some girls just go by a first name. Some make something up. One girl I worked with went by the name of her landlord's dog. Said it felt like revenge." The almost-smile again. "Point is: it's yours. The whole thing is yours. You say stop, I stop. You say no to something, it's no. I don't push. I don't coerce. I don't do anything you haven't agreed to beforehand and if you change your mind halfway through, the camera goes off and we're done. No questions. No attitude."

He says all of this in the same tone he'd use to explain how a camera works. Methodical. Clear. Like he's said it before and means it every time.

"How much?" you ask.

He tells you.

You put your fork down carefully because the number he just said would cover two months of rent and groceries and the electricity bill that's been sitting on your kitchen counter turning into a small paper monument to your failure.

"One shoot," you say again, making sure.

"One shoot," he echoes with a nod. "Couple hours. You walk out with cash."

Hope and desperation surge up your spine, working your tongue. "Cash?"

"I don't do checks. Checks leave paper trails and paper trails make people nervous." He drains the last of the coffee. Grimaces. Apparently even Bobby Franklin has limits and Moreno's coffee has found them. "You don't have to decide now. Think about it. Call me."

He pulls a napkin from the dispenser and writes a number on it in handwriting that's surprisingly neat for someone who looks like he's never filled out a form in his life. Slides it across the table.

You look at the napkin. Look at him. then back at the napkin.

You pick it up, folding it neatly.

"Tomorrow," you say. "I can come tomorrow."

Bobby's eyebrows rise. Just slightly. Then he nods slowly. "Tomorrow works."

He pays for your eggs. You don't argue. You should argue but the rent was due six days ago and the eggs were $2.15 and the pride you'd normally spend on "I can pay for my own breakfast" has been liquidated to cover more pressing debts.

At the door of the diner he holds it open for you. Not performatively. Just does it. And when you pass him your shoulder brushes his chest and he smells like that warm thing again, the underneath thing, and his pale eyes track your face one more time and he says "See you tomorrow" in a voice that's dropped half a register and the warmth in your chest migrates south and you walk to your car thinking fuck, fuck, fuck, what am I doing?

You're covering rent. That's what you're doing.

That's all you're doing.

His apartment is above a furniture store.

You stand on the sidewalk for four minutes before you go up. The building is nondescript. Beige stucco, iron railings, a set of stairs on the outside that lead to a door that needs painting. There's a cat on the landing that looks at you with the serene judgment of a creature that has never once had to worry about rent.

You envy the cat greatly.

You're wearing a sundress because you didn't know what to wear and the sundress felt like a compromise between "trying too hard" and "not trying enough." You changed three times.

The first outfit was too casual. The second was too much. The sundress is yellow and you hate that you care what colour it is.

You knock.

Bobby opens the door and the first thing you register is that he's not wearing the leather jacket.

T-shirt. White, thin, cropped in a way that shows the shape of him underneath and is making it difficult to maintain eye contact. Jeans slung low on his hips. Bare feet on the hardwood. His hair is damp from the shower and pushed back off his face and without the sunglasses holding it up you can see the full architecture of him.

The jaw, sharper in natural light than in the diner's dimness. The earring. The chain, sitting in the hollow of his throat, rising and falling with his breathing.

He looks good in his own apartment. Relaxed in a way he wasn't at Moreno's, the professional edge softened into something more lived-in.

He leans against the doorframe and says, "Hey. Come in" and the drawl is thicker in the morning.

You're going to be professional about this. You're not going to think about his forearms, which are now visible because the t-shirt sleeves are short and his arms are lean and tanned and there's a vein running from his wrist to his elbow that you're staring at. Stop staring at it.

The apartment is small and clean and full of light. Not the fluorescent light of the diner but real light, California morning light, pouring through windows that face east.

There are photographs on the walls, black and white, and you realise after a second that he took them. They're good. They're better than good. A bridge in fog. A woman's hands. A street at night, wet, reflecting. He has an eye. You knew that from the diner, from the way he watched, but seeing it on the walls makes it real.

Bobby Franklin has an eye and he uses it for this and also for what you're about to do and the cognitive dissonance of "artist" and "adult filmmaker" is something you're going to have to sit with.

"Coffee?" he asks, padding toward the kitchen. Bare feet on linoleum.

The t-shirt rides up slightly when he reaches for a mug on the top shelf and there's a strip of skin above his waistband and the muscle that cuts along his hip and you look away so fast you nearly give yourself whiplash.

"Please."

He pours you a cup. You stand in his kitchen and drink it and it's good. Your hands are shaking and the cup rattles against the saucer and you set it down before he notices except he's already noticed.

"Hey," he calls out, leaning against the counter. Arms crossed. The t-shirt pulling across his chest. His stare is piercing, amused, reading you the way they read you at the diner except now there's nowhere to hide behind a menu and a plate of eggs. "We don't have to do anything today. We can just talk. Get you comfortable. No pressure."

"I'm fine," you force out.

He gives you a sceptical once over. "You're shaking."

"I'm fine and I'm shaking. Both can be true."

His mouth the twitches, the almost-smile that you're beginning to understand is Bobby's version of a laugh. A contained one. Controlled. Like even his amusement is something he runs through a filter before letting it out. But his eyes crinkle at the corners and the amusement reaches them and it's warm, genuinely warm, and some of the tightness in your chest loosens.

You talk.

He asks you questions. Mercifully not invasive ones, not the peeling-back kind. Surface questions. Where you grew up. How you know Terrence. What music you like. And you find yourself answering, not because he's charming (he is) but because he's easy. Bobby Franklin is easy to talk to in a way that contradicts everything about his sharp jaw and pale stare and the fact that there are two video cameras set up in his bedroom that you can see through the half-open door.

He listens the way he watches: completely, with his whole attention, like whatever you're saying is the only thing happening in the world. And he's funny. Dry, quick, a deadpan that sneaks up on you.

You laugh at something he says about Terrence and his face creases in a way you haven't seen before. Surprise. Pleasure. Like your laugh was an unexpected pleasure.

He tucks it away fast, smooths the expression back to amused neutrality, but you saw it. You saw it and it made your stomach warm.

An hour passes. Your hands stop shaking. You've stopped noticing the cameras through the doorway. You've started noticing other things.

The way he gestures when he talks about photography, loose and animated, the only time his cool composure fully drops. The way he licks his bottom lip when he's thinking. The way the chain shifts against his throat when he laughs. The pale eyes that keep finding your face and staying there a beat longer than conversation requires.

You're attracted to him. This is no longer a thing you can file under "irrelevant." This is a thing that is happening in your body, in the kitchen, in the warm light, and it's making the prospect of what comes next feel less like a transaction and more like something you might actually want and that's more frightening than the cameras.

He shows you the bedroom eventually.

It's not what you expected. No red lighting, no satin sheets, no sleazy backdrop. Just a bed—queen, white sheets, a quilt that looks like it came from someone's grandmother—and two cameras. One on a tripod in the corner, aimed at the bed. The other on the dresser, smaller, a different angle. Both VHS. Both off.

"The one in the corner is the wide shot," Bobby explains, standing in the doorway behind you. Professional. Tour guide. "It runs the whole time. Catches everything. The one on the dresser is for close-ups. I adjust it as we go. The handheld—" He nods toward a third camera sitting on the nightstand. "That's the one I use. That's the one that makes the money."

You nod, staring at the bed. The white sheets. The grandmother's quilt. The two dark eyes of the cameras. Your pulse is loud in your own ears.

"I'm sorry," you blurt out, not looking at him, still staring at the bed. "I'm being weird about this. I've obviously never—I haven't done anything like this before and I don't know how to—"

He kisses you.

His hand is on your jaw first, angling your face toward him. Gentle but sure, the confidence of someone who knows the effect he has and is choosing to use it kindly. And then his other hand comes up. Both hands cupping your face now, his palms warm against your cheeks, his thumbs resting along the line of your cheekbones, and his mouth finds yours.

The first press is soft. Almost chaste. Just the warmth of his lips settling against yours, testing, asking. You inhale sharply through your nose, and he catches it. Absorbs it. Tilts your face up with those hands and kisses you deeper.

Bobby's mouth opens yours. Coaxing, slow.

His bottom lip drags against yours, the faintest graze of teeth, and then his tongue follows. Warm, unhurried, curling against yours in a way that makes your knees actually weaken.

You've kissed people before. This is not that. This is Bobby Franklin kissing you with both hands cradling your face like you're worth holding and his tongue moving against yours with a patience that suggests he could do this for hours. Just this. Just the wet slide of his mouth on yours and the taste of good coffee and the way your breath mingles when he tilts his head and changes the angle and finds something deeper.

His thumb strokes your cheekbone. Back and forth. This light, rhythmic brush while his tongue curls against yours, while his bottom lip catches between your teeth and he makes a sound—small, low, a vibration you feel more than hear—and your hands are on his chest. When did your hands get on his chest?

You can feel his heartbeat through the white t-shirt, fast, faster than his relaxed composure suggests, and the knowledge that Bobby Franklin's heart is hammering while he kisses you makes you dizzy.

He tilts his head the other way. Your noses brush. The tip of his against the side of yours, a small warm nudge, almost playful.

He kisses the corner of your mouth. Your bottom lip. Takes it between his and sucks, gently, and your fingers curl into the fabric of his t-shirt and pull and the sound you make is swallowed by the warmth of him.

He pulls back.

Not far. An inch. Maybe two. His hands still on your face. His thumbs still on your cheekbones. His forehead nearly touching yours and you can feel his breath on your lips and his eyes are right there. Those pale, watchful, bright eyes, scanning your face. Reading you. Making sure.

Your lips are tingling. Your whole body is tingling. You're standing in a stranger's bedroom being held by the face and kissed like you've never been kissed before.

"Was—" Your voice is thin. Wrecked. He kissed your voice right out of you. "Was the camera rolling?"

Bobby smirks.

Up close, from two inches away, with his hands still warm on your face. One corner of his mouth lifting in that lazy, crooked, insufferable way. His eyes half-lidded. And it goes trough you like wildfire, flooding your nervous system with liquid heat.

"No," he answers huskily, his thumb tracing your cheekbone one more time. "Just felt like doing that."

He holds your gaze. One beat. Two. Three. Letting the smirk settle. Letting you feel the weight of it—the fact that he kissed you off-camera, off-clock, for no professional reason.

The fact that his heart is still hammering under your fists and his pupils are blown wide and he kissed you because he wanted to. Because you were standing in his bedroom apologising for being nervous and he looked at you and his mouth moved before his brain did. Again.

"Still okay?" he asks, softer now. The smirk gentling into something warmer.

"Yeah." Breathier than you want it to be. Your hands still in his t-shirt. "Yeah, I'm okay."

"Good." His hand drops from your jaw. Trails down your arm. Fingertips only, light enough to raise goosebumps, tracing the inside of your wrist where the pulse jumps. "I'm going to undress you now. Slow. Before the cameras go on. Just us. That alright?"

You nod.

He starts with the straps of the sundress. Easing them off your shoulders one at a time. Not pulling, guiding. His knuckles graze your collarbone and you shiver, his eyes tracking the shiver down your body with an attention that makes you feel like the only light source in the room.

"You wore yellow," he notes conversationally. Like he's remarking on the weather while his fingertips trace the neckline of your dress. "Looks good on you. Warm. Shows off your skin."

The dress pools at your feet. You're standing in his bedroom in your underwear and the morning light is on you and Bobby is looking at you the way he looked at you in the diner when his mouth got ahead of his brain.

"Pretty," he murmurs. Like he can't help it. Like the word just falls out of him when he sees you. His thumb traces your hip bone above the elastic of your underwear. "Real pretty."

This time you don't bristle.

He reaches past you. Flicks on the tripod camera. A tiny red light. Then the dresser camera. Another red light. Two eyes, open, watching.

"Don't think about them," Bobby says, his mouth near your ear. His hands settle on your waist, warm palms on bare skin. "Don't think about the cameras. Don't perform. Just feel me. Can you do that?"

You jerk your head. "I can try."

"That's all I'm asking." His lips brush your ear. Down. Along your jaw. The corner of your mouth. His hands slide up your ribcage and his thumbs trace the underwire of your bra and you exhale, shaky, and he catches it. "There you go. Just like that. Stay with me, yeah? I got you."

He unclasps your bra with one hand. Practiced, efficient, but the way he peels it away is anything but. Reverent, almost, easing the fabric off like he's unwrapping something valuable. The air hits your skin and your nipples tighten. Bobby's gaze drops and his jaw flexes and for a moment, just a moment, the professionalism wavers. His throat moves on a thick swallow.

"Lie down," he instructs, a little rougher than before. "On the bed. On your back."

You lie down. The sheets are cool beneath you, the quilt soft. on your skin

The light from the window falls across the bed in a warm band and you're naked except for your underwear and Bobby is standing over you still fully dressed and the power imbalance should feel wrong but it doesn't because his eyes are eating you alive and his hands are clenched at his sides and you realise, with a jolt that goes straight through you: he's holding himself back.

This is Bobby exercising control. This is what it looks like when he wants to touch something badly and is making himself wait.

He picks up the handheld camera. Lifts it to his eye. And something shifts in him. Visibly. The control locks in, the professional takes over, and he's Bobby-behind-the-lens. Steady. Composed. Seeing everything.

"Touch yourself," he says. Director voice. "Just your skin. Nothing heavy. Just run your hands over yourself. Get comfortable."

You do. Your own hands on your own body, palms skating over your stomach, your ribs, the swell of your breasts, and it feels strange and exhibitionistic but then Bobby says "gorgeous, just like that, you're doing so good" and the praise lands in the pit of your stomach like a lit match. Your back arches. Barely. Just enough.

"Yeah," Bobby breathes from behind the camera. "That's it. That's perfect. Look at you."

He films you touching yourself for what feels like hours and is probably three minutes. Then he sets the handheld down on the nightstand. Red light still blinking, and he crawls onto the bed.

Not between your legs. Beside you. Lying on his side, propped on one elbow, his face level with yours. Close enough that you can see the flecks of darker blue in his irises and the faint scar on his chin and the way his throat moves when he swallows. Still dressed. T-shirt. Jeans. Bare feet.

"Keep going," he murmurs, watching your hands on your own body. "Don't stop on my account."

Your hands move. Over your stomach. Up. And Bobby's hand joins them. One warm palm laid flat against your sternum, between your breasts. Not groping.... just resting. Feeling your heartbeat through your ribs.

"Fast," he notes. His thumb strokes the valley between your breasts and you shiver. "Slow down. You're rushing."

You do as he asked, your hands sliding over your skin with less urgency and more intention. Bobby's hand follows, learning new terrain, the dip of your waist and the flare of your hip and the soft give of your stomach where you've always been self-conscious and he presses his palm there like he's making a point.

Like that spot, specifically, is worth his hand.

Then his mouth replaces his palm.

He starts at your throat. A kiss. Open-mouthed, warm, the press of his lips and the faintest edge of teeth. Then your collarbone. The notch at the base of your throat where your pulse is hammering. Down. The flat of his tongue dragging along your sternum, tasting the thin sheen of sweat that the California morning and your own nerves have produced.

His mouth is unhurried. Exploratory. He's not kissing you so much as he's mapping you with his lips, charting the terrain the way he'd scout a location before a shoot. Finding the light, finding the angles, finding what works on you.

His mouth finds your breast. Kisses the swell of it. The underside, where the skin is softest. And then his lips close around your nipple and he sucks—not hard, not gentle, somewhere in between, a warm wet pressure that sends a bolt of sensation from your breast directly to your cunt and your back arches off the mattress.

"Oh."

Bobby hums against you. A sound of satisfaction. His tongue circles your nipple, flattens, flicks.

His free hand slides up your ribs and cups your other breast, thumb rolling across the peak, and the dual sensation—mouth and hand, wet and dry—makes you reach for him. Your fingers find his hair. Sandy strands, still slightly damp from the shower, thick between your fingers. You grip. Pull.

Just... needing something to hold onto while his mouth does this to you.

The pull makes Bobby groan. The sound vibrates through your nipple and into your chest and your hips lift off the bed involuntarily, pressing into nothing.

He feels it and his mouth tightens. Pulls harder. His teeth graze the sensitive peak and your fingers clench in his hair and you tug, genuinely tug, trying to pull him up, pull him to your mouth, because you need to kiss him, you need—

He doesn't let go.

His mouth stays locked on your nipple, sucking with a focused intensity that borders on stubborn, and you're pulling his hair and he's groaning and he will not come up, will not release, and the wet heat of his mouth is making you clench around nothing.

Your thighs press together, your hips rocking against air, seeking fullness, friction, anything, and Bobby—Bobby, who is supposed to be a professional, who is supposedly in control of this situation—reaches down with his free hand and cups you between the legs.

Just cups you. His whole palm, warm, pressed against the soaked cotton of your underwear. Just holding the heat of you in his hand while his mouth works your nipple and your fingers twist in his hair and the sound that comes out of you is breathy and too high.

"Bobby—please, I need—"

He releases your nipple with a wet pop that you feel in your spine. Glances up at you, his lips swollen. His eyes heavy-lidded and dark and his hand still cupping you, pressing against the damp fabric, feeling the heat seep through.

"Need what, baby?" Low. Rough. His fingers flex against you, palm grinding just slightly against your pulsing core, one small movement of pressure through the cotton. "Tell me."

"Touch me," you plead, trying to press closer. "Actually touch me."

His fingers slide under the elastic. Find you bare. Find you soaked. And the sound he makes—a sharp exhale through his nose, almost a hiss—is the sound of a man who knew what he was going to find but is still wrecked by the reality of it.

"Jesus." Barely a whisper. His fingers parting your folds. Not penetrating yet, just circling your clit. Just petting. Long, feather-light strokes through the slick of you, up and down, spreading the wetness with an aching patience that makes your hips chase his hand. "So wet, baby. This all from—was this from my mouth? From me sucking on you?"

You nod. You can't speak. His fingers are petting you like he's got all the time in the world and no intention of giving you what you need. Long strokes. Root to tip. Parting you with two fingers and letting the middle one drag between, barely touching your clit, just enough to make your thighs shake.

"Pretty little pussy," he murmurs, and the words shouldn't work.

They're filthy and crude and you've heard variations in the tapes you've watched that made you cringe, but Bobby says them the way he said "you're pretty" in the diner. Like a fact. Something he can't help observing. Like your body laid out in morning light is a view he needs to narrate. His fingers keep petting. Lazy. Wet with you, making you drip onto his grandmother's quilt.

Then his mouth starts traveling south.

He kisses down your stomach. Your hip bone. The crease of your thigh. Hooks his fingers into your underwear, drags them down, tosses them off the bed without looking. Parts your thighs with both hands, spreading you open, and the sound he makes—not a groan this time, something lower, something guttural, a sound that vibrates in his chest—is not for the camera.

You know this because the camera is on the nightstand and he hasn't touched it and he's not angling for a shot. He's just peering down at you. Spread open in the morning light. And that sound is coming out of him because he can't stop it.

"Fuck," he whispers, his thumbs pressing into the crease of your thighs. "Okay. Okay."

He lowers his mouth to you.

Bobby eats you out the way he kissed you earlier. Unhurried, thorough. Long strokes of his tongue that start at your entrance and drag upward, tasting the length of you, and you feel his groan against your cunt when the flavour hits and your whole body shudders.

He circles your clit with a pressure that's devastating in its patience. He's not trying to make you come fast. He's tasting. Exploring. Learning what makes your hips jerk and what makes you gasp and what makes your fingers find his hair again.

You fist both hands in those sandy strands and pull and the sound he makes—rough, grateful, hungry—vibrates against your clit. Your hips buck and his hands tighten on your thighs. Holding them apart, his thumbs stroking the soft skin in counterpoint to the filthy things his tongue is doing.

He's found a rhythm now. Flat, wide strokes punctuated by the pointed tip of his tongue flicking your clit in a pattern that your hips start chasing, lifting off the bed, grinding against his mouth, and he lets you. Lets you ride his face with his hands gripping your thighs and his eyes closed and his entire world narrowed to the taste and the sound and the wet.

"Bobby—oh my god—"

"Mm." Against you. His mouth full of you. His tongue pressing flat, licking you open in a broad swipe that makes your vision swim. "Taste incredible. Could stay here all fuckin' day."

He could. You believe him. He looks like he means it. Settled between your thighs like he's found the only place in the world he wants to be.

You tug his hair again and his moan is muffled against your cunt and you feel it everywhere, the vibration traveling through your pelvis and up your spine, and you pull harder and his tongue presses harder and the feedback loop is building. Your hands in his hair and his mouth on you and the wet sounds and the moans and you're close, you're getting close—

He pulls back with a wet, slick sound.

You whimper. The loss of his mouth leaving you throbbing, aching, empty.

"Not yet." His chin is wet, his lips swollen. Bobby's eyes are glazed and dark, the professional gone, replaced by something feral that's been living underneath the cool-boy surface and is now looking at you like it's deciding whether to devour you. "Not yet, baby. Want to be inside you when you come. Wanna feel you, yeah?"

You moan in response, dizzy. And your moans are real. That's the thing that's changing the temperature of the room.

You're not playing them up, not pitching them for any microphone, not performing the breathy exaggerated sounds you've heard in the tapes you've watched out of curiosity and mild horror. You're just reacting. And it's affecting him. His breathing has changed. His hips are pressing into the mattress in a grind he can't seem to control and you realise he's hard.

He's been hard for a while. He's been eating you out with his cock straining against his jeans and he hasn't touched himself once.

Bobby sits back on his heels. Pulls the t-shirt over his head in one motion. His chest is flushed. Lean, not bulky, the body of someone who lifts camera equipment for a living and forgets to eat regularly. The belt buckle. The zipper. The happy trail of hair dipping dangerously beneath the belt buckle. He pushes the jeans down and kicks them off and he's—

your mouth goes dry.

Bobby Franklin naked is a problem. Bobby Franklin hard is a crisis.

He sees you looking. The smirk returns. That lazy, insufferable lift of one corner of his mouth. "See something you like?"

"Shut up."

You sit up. Grab his hips. Pull him toward you and the surprise on his face—genuine, unperformed, the mask cracking again—is worth everything.

He stumbles forward on the mattress, knees sinking into the sheets, and your hands are on his stomach, his ribs, dragging your nails lightly down his sides and he hisses. His cock twitches and you feel powerful in a way that has nothing to do with cameras or money.

"How do you want me to fuck you?" His voice is gravel. Wrecked. He's peering down at you with his hands cupping your face, thumbs on your cheekbones, and the professionalism is a memory. "Tell me."

"From behind." No hesitation. The words tumbling out before your brain can edit them. "I want—on my stomach, I want you behind me, I want—"

Bobby's eyes go wide. His whole face flushes harder. Cheeks, ears, the V of his throat. He drops his head against your shoulder and laughs. A real laugh. Rough and bitten-off and disbelieving.

"Shit, baby." Muffled against your skin. "Can't say stuff like that to me. Can't just—" He lifts his head. The flush is gorgeous on him, spreading down his neck. "Yeah. Fuck yeah. Turn over."

He flips you. Firm and purposeful. His hands on your hips guiding you onto your stomach, lifting your hips until your ass is raised and your face is in the pillow and you feel exposed in a way that's terrifying and thrilling.

"Look at you." His hands on your hips, sliding up. Over the curve of your ass. Both palms cupping you, squeezing, spreading, his thumbs tracing the cleft while he breathes hard through his nose. "Every angle. Every fuckin' angle. 'S not fair."

His hand draws back. Comes down on your ass. Not a slap, not quite, a firm pat that's more proprietary than punishing and the sound it makes in the quiet bedroom is obscene. Your hips jolt. He does it again. Lighter. Smoothing his palm over the spot after, kneading with a hum.

"Could cover you like this," he mutters, stroking the curve of your ass with both hands, spreading you again, looking at you from behind with an expression you can feel even though you can't see it. "Just—stay right here. Just like this. Prettiest goddamn thing I've ever shot and I haven't even started the camera yet."

He reaches for the handheld. Turns it on. Red light. Frames the shot—you on your stomach, your hips raised, the curve of your spine. His hand still on your ass. Claiming. Warm.

He sets the camera on the mattress, angled up. Reaches for himself. You hear it. The wet sound of him spitting into his palm, the slick stroke of his fist over his cock, and then he's behind you. The hot thick length of him pressed against you, nestled between your folds, and he groans and you groan, and he doesn't push in.

He rolls against you.

Long, grinding strokes, his cock sliding through the slick mess of you, dragging across your clit with every thrust. The head catching at your entrance and pulling away. Over and over. Using the length of himself to stroke you, to tease you, to coat himself in you until the sound of skin on wet skin fills the room and your fingers are clawing at the sheets.

"Feel that?" His chest pressed against your back. His mouth against your ear. "Feel how hard you got me? Been like this since the diner. Since you sat down in that booth and looked at me with those fuckin' eyes. Thought about this. Thought about what you'd feel like."

His hips roll. The head of his cock catches your entrance again, presses, almost, almost—

"Bobby, please—"

His cock throbs against your core. "Tell me."

"Fuck me. Please." You suck in a shaky breath. "I need you to—"

He spits again. You feel it, warm, landing where his cock meets your cunt. His hand stroking himself once, twice, spreading the slick. And then he notches himself at your entrance and pushes in.

One long stroke. All the way. Your body opening around him and his groan matching yours. Colliding, two raw sounds meeting in the air and becoming something bigger than either. He bottoms out and holds you in place, and you feel every inch of him, the stretch, the heat, the fullness, his forehead dropping against the nape of your neck and he breathes "oh fuck" against your hair and his whole body shakes.

"God—you feel—" He can't finish. His hips twitch, involuntary, the tiniest thrust that pulls a gasp from both of you. "Baby. Baby, you feel—"

He starts moving. And the control lasts about thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds of measured strokes. Finding the angle. Professional. Thinking about the shot, the camera on the mattress, the red light.

And then you push back against him with a greedy sound, meet his thrust with your hips, grinding onto him, taking him deeper, and you moan. Really moan, the sound that's been building since he put his mouth on your nipple and refused to let go, and something in Bobby snaps.

His hand grabs your hip. His other hand braces on the mattress beside your head. And he fucks you.

Not the controlled version. The real version. The Bobby Franklin that exists underneath the smirk and the camera and the professional detachment. Hips driving into you with a force that shoves you into the mattress, that punches the air from your lungs, that turns your vision white around the edges. Sweat beading on his chest and dripping onto your spine. His breathing ragged, broken, gasping against the back of your neck in hot bursts.

And you're both gasping, coiling, pushing into each other blindly. Your hand reaches back, finds his hip, his thigh, pulling him deeper, harder, your fingers digging into the muscle and he groans like you've wounded him.

His hand finds yours, laces your fingers together beside your head, pressing your joined hands into the sheets, and the intimacy of it cracks something deep in both of you.

"So good," he's babbling against your spine. His mouth open, dragging wet kisses between your shoulder blades. "So fuckin' good, squeezing me so tight—can you hear that? Hear how wet you are? Hear what you're doin' to me?"

You can hear it. The obscene wet sound of his cock driving into you, the slap of his hips against your ass, the creak of the bed frame that he's going to have to explain to the furniture store below.

"Bobby—" Your voice is gone. Shattered, croaking. "Bobby, I'm gonna—I can't—"

"Yeah you can." Growled against your ear. His teeth grazing your earlobe. Biting down. "Cum for me. Wanna feel it. Wanna feel you squeeze my cock so tight I can't fuckin' think—"

He lets go of your hand. His fingers fist in your hair. Gathering the hair, wrapping the strands around his fingers. And he lifts your head from the pillow, arching your neck back, turning your face toward the camera on the mattress that's still rolling, red light blinking, catching everything.

"Show them," he murmurs against the shell of your ear. "Let 'em see how pretty you look when you cum for me."

You fall apart.

The orgasm rips through you. An earthquake, seismic and structural that starts where he's buried inside you and radiates outward.

Your mouth opens on a moan that you don't recognise as your own voice, wanton, cracked, genuine. There's no performance, no production, it's pulled from somewhere primal and raw inside you. And Bobby feels it. Feels the clench and the shake and the sound and his rhythm breaks, shatters, his hips slamming into you without finesse, chasing his own end through the aftershocks of yours.

He comes with a loud, greedy moan, a gruff sound of laughter caught in his throat. This breathless, incredulous sound, muffled against the back of your damp neck, like he can't believe what just happened to him. His hips jerk again, pressed flush against your ass. His hand loosens in your hair, fingertips grazing your scalp.

His body shudders against yours in waves that slow and gentle and eventually still.

His lips find the shell of your ear. Warm. Spent. Still inside you.

"With a moan like that," he rasps, kissing the curve of your ear, "and a pussy that grips me that tight?" He laughs against your skin. Loose. Golden. The real laugh, the unfiltered one. "Shit, baby, you're gonna be famous."

You laugh too. Into the pillow. The sound surprising you. The lightness of it, the ease. The fact that you can laugh, right now, naked and sweating and thoroughly ruined in a stranger's bed with two cameras rolling.

You're laughing because he's funny and because the sex was extraordinary and because you came to this apartment expecting something transactional and clinical.

Instead you got Bobby Franklin's mouth telling you you're pretty like he couldn't help it and Bobby Franklin's hands holding yours while he fucked you and Bobby Franklin laughing against your neck like making you come was the best thing that happened to him all week.

He pulls out, slowly, carefully, making you shiver at the loss, and collapses next to you. Reaches over and clicks off the handheld. The red light dies. The static camera in the corner is still running and neither of you moves to turn it off.

Bobby lies on his back, chest rising and falling. Staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man whose professional boundaries have just been comprehensively violated by his own want.

"So," he says to the ceiling. "Same time next week?"

You turn your head on the pillow. He turns his. Pale eyes. Flushed face. Hair wrecked. That almost-smile.

"Same time next week," you agree, still breathless.

The static camera runs for another four minutes before Bobby remembers to turn it off.

In the footage—which he will watch later, alone, ostensibly for editing purposes—you can see two people lying side by side on white sheets, not touching, not talking, just breathing, and at the 2:47 mark the girl in the yellow sundress starts laughing again and the boy with the camera reaches over and takes her hand and doesn't let go until the tape runs out.

He doesn't use that part in the final cut.

He keeps it anyway.

[froggibus]

— The Three Times Wally West comforts you (and the one time you comfort him)

Pairing: Wally West x gn! reader

Summary: the first time you meet Wally West, it's with tears, and every time after that seems to go exactly the same, until it's Wally himself coming to you

Word Count: 2.7k

Content/CW -> gn! reader, emotional scenes + lots of crying, reader is dick's bsf, robbery + scary moments

froggi yaps -> needed me some wally after the weekend i had and this simply came to me in a dream...basically a much longer version of this but i hope you guys enjoy nonetheless <3 also totally not posting this from work on my lunch break >.<

You’re already in tears by the time you’re turning the key to Dick Grayson’s apartment. The clicking of the lock brings relief, the promise of your best friend on the other side. After the day you’ve had, he’s the only person you want to see. 

You swing the door open only to be met with a tall, red haired man on the other side. He blinks at you, brilliant eyes framed by a smattering of freckles and a handsome jawline. 

Jesus, Dick really needs to stop giving a spare key to everyone. 

You find yourself self consciously rubbing away the fat tears on your cheeks. “You’re not Dick,” is all you manage to say. 

“Funny,” he cracks a smile, crossing his arms over his old band t-shirt. “I was gonna say the same to you.”

You nod, tight lipped and awkward. “Do you—“ Your voice breaks slightly, “do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No clue, I just got here.”

Your heart sinks further in your chest, more tears burn at the back of your eyes. You scrub a hand over your face, pinching the bridge of your nose and taking a deep breath. 

You speak quieter now, words muffled by the lump in your throat. “Can you just let him know I stopped by?”

“Sure thing.”

You turn around to leave, taking another deep breath to compose yourself, when he speaks again. 

“I know it’s none of my business but—“ He pauses, like he’s struggling to find the right words. “Are you okay? It just—you seem like you’re having a bit of a rough day.”

You look back at him, “that obvious, hey?”

He nods solemnly. “I heard I’m a good listener, if you want someone to talk to.” He laughs slightly, “well, no, that’s not exactly true but you don’t need to know that.”

Your heels spin back towards him. He gestures towards the big sectional in Dick’s living room, plush and inviting. 

You give in. “Alright, Mr. Not-so-good-listener.”

He flashes you a toothy grin, “just Wally is fine.”

He reaches out a hand and you shake it, offering up your own name. Something glimmers behind his eyes like the start of something new. 

It’s hours before Dick finally comes home, his arrival going unnoticed by the two people sitting on his couch that he very much did not invite over. 

He’s not sure he’s ever seen a more confusing sight than you and Wally West sitting on his couch, talking like you’ve been friends for years. 

“I guess I missed my invite to the party,” he calls out, setting his backpack down on the chair. 

Your head snaps up, looking at him like a dear in headlights. Wally barely reacts, more than likely having heard Dick’s arrival and just choosing to ignore it. 

“You’re late,” Wally calls back, looking him up and down. “And not even fashionably.”

That draws a laugh out of you, a little colour coming to Wally’s cheeks at the sound. Dick frowns, tugging off his coat and giving his outfit a once over.

“What’s wrong with my outfit?”

Wally shrugs, a perfect picture of nonchalance, and turns back to you. You’d stopped crying hours ago, your conversation shifting away from your terrible, no-good day to casual conversation with Wally.

Dick shuffles off to his room to change out of his outfit—a plain t-shirt and jeans, not dissimilar to what Wally’s wearing—and Wally thrusts his phone at you.

“Here,” he says, “so you can call me next time you have a bad day.”

You offer him a coy smile, “you know for being a not great listener, you actually listened pretty good.”

“It helps when the person speaking is good looking.”

You snort, fingers pausing on the keyboard of his phone. You glance up only to see he’s being dead serious, not a hint of nervousness on his face. You go back to filling out your name and number for him, sending yourself a quick message from his phone before handing it back.

He grins when he sees your contact. “Alright, Good Looking, well played.”

You and Wally text regularly after that, just quick messages to see how your day’s going, or little things that remind you of each other. 

There’s a few things you’ve learned about Wally West since you’ve met. One being that he’s an incredibly disorganized person, his texts coming in sporadic bursts rather than consistent conversation. The other being he has the most unusual sleep schedule known to man, seemingly asleep and awake at all hours of the day.

Unfortunately for you, you’ve come to find both endearing.

It’s at a party you see him next. A small mixer held on the roof of Dick’s building, a group of friends you’d never met before all talking like they know each other.

It should be fun and yet, here you are, tucked away on the fire escape, sipping on a glass of water in the hopes it’ll stop the simmering under your skin. It doesn’t, and does nothing to quell your thoughts going a million miles an hour.

Dick had been too busy chatting with Kory—a tall woman who was also probably the most beautiful person you’d ever seen—to notice you slip out of the party. A different set of eyes, however, had noticed.

You’re sitting with your eyes squeezed shut, taking deep breaths when you feel a sudden warmth settle in next to you. Your eyes snap open only to find a familiar pair of brilliant ones staring back at you. Wally.

“And here I thought the party was upstairs.” He nudges you slightly, and despite his joking tone, his face is a perfect picture of concern. “What’s going on, Good Looking?”

A sigh passes through your lips. “Just…a little overwhelmed. Lots of people I don’t know and—” You play around with a frayed string from your pants, twirling it around your finger, “it’s silly, really.”

“Hey, I love silly.”

It’s like a bucket of cold water over your head, clarity washing over you. For the first time since you stepped away from the party, you take a deep breath. You go quiet for a minute, letting the silence of the night fill the cracks between you.

“I hate parties,” you say finally. “I always end up following Dick around like a child, hoping he introduces me to people.”

Wally hums, “why’d you come then?”

Another beat of silence, comfortable but stretched a little too thin. 

“I was really hoping you’d come,” you admit quietly.

“Yeah,” he says, that playful demeanour gone for the moment, “so was I.”

You shift closer to Wally, absorbing his body heat through the cold night air. He drapes an arm over your shoulders, inviting you in. 

“You could always follow me around, you know.” He rubs a hand up and down your arm, “I know people, too. And I’m better company than Dick.”

“You know people here?”

“All kinds of people,” he flashes you a grin, “Dick and I go way back, I pretty much know all his friends.”

“You didn’t know me.”

“Touché.”

You giggle slightly, and sometime during your conversation, you’ve come to rest your head on his shoulder. 

“I think Dick was hiding you.”

You shift your head just enough to meet his eyes. “Oh? Why’s that?”

“I have a bit of a—“ He cringes, “reputation, I guess.”

“A reputation? Anything I should be worried about?”

Wally takes a minute to think, weighing his own history with the dozens of people he’s lost and regained over the years. In the short time you’ve known him, this is the quietest he’s ever been. 

“No,” he says finally, resting his head over yours. “Nothing at all.”

Wally’s just finishing up stopping a bank robbery when you call, pausing on top of a building to answer the call. 

“Hello?”

“Wally?” Your voice sounds shaky. 

“Hey, Good Looking.”

“I think—“ You let out a sound of surprise, your voice coming through slightly more muffled, “I think someone’s trying to break into my house.”

Wally’s heart rate picks up. “Why are you calling me and not the police?”

“I live in Bludhaven.”

“Shit.” He hates that you have a point. “Why aren’t you calling Dick?”

“He didn’t answer.”

Wally would be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a little disappointed at that, hoping you’d come to him first and not his smoking hot best friend. 

“What do you think I’m gonna do? I live in a different city.”

“I don’t know,” you trail off, a rustling noise coming in the background. “Just…stay on the line with me while I check it out?”

Wally’s breath catches in his throat. “Check. It. Out?”

“Yes?”

“Okay, absolutely do not do that.”

“I have a bat.”

“You have a—” Wally groans and pinches the bridge of his nose, already planning his route to Bludhaven. “Do not investigate.”

“What, and let them just rob me?”

There’s shuffling, sounds of movement, and Wally curses. You’re going to get yourself killed. 

There’s silence on the line while you case your apartment, slowly pushing open your door with the tip of the bat. You’re braced and ready, the banging you’d heard on your front door having ended as soon as you called Wally. 

Either someone got in, or someone gave up. You hope for the latter. 

It must be your unlucky day because the minute you turn the corner to the entry, a tall figure dressed in dark clothes greets you. You cover your mouth with your free hand, stifling a gasp as you duck back around the corner. 

“What is it? What’s happening? Are you okay?” You scramble to turn down the volume on your phone. “Are you there?”

In your panicked haste to mute Wally’s voice, your phone slips from your hand and clatters to the ground, sliding out from around the corner. You press your hand tighter against your lips and flush yourself to the wall. 

There’s a clicking sound, followed by heavy footsteps coming closer. You’re so fucked, you’re so fucked, you’re so—

There’s a flash of lightning, all of the hairs on your arms standing up. A blur of red races through your living room. One minute, there’s a shadowy figure and the next, it’s gone, replaced with the Flash.

The Flash is in your living room. 

He’s breathing heavily, hands on his hips, face slightly red under the mask from exertion. “Are you—“ He clears his throat, “are you okay?”

You blink, suddenly lightheaded. “You’re…The Flash.”

“I am.”

“You’re in my house, I—why are you in Bludhaven?”

“Are you,” he says slowly, moving to rest a hand on your shoulder, “okay?”

“Where did the—the robber go?” 

He says your name, loud and familiar. You stare at him, brows furrowed. The Flash knows your name. 

“How do you know me?”

And Wally sighs, because he shouldn’t be here, because he shouldn’t have come back to check on you, because he’s completely screwed himself. But he couldn’t help it. Not when he thought you might be in danger, not when he could hear your time running out. 

“Don’t freak out.”

“Why would I—“

Your words die in your throat when the Flash rips off his cowl to reveal Wally West, eyes concerned and face void of his usual smile. You stagger slightly, head spinning as you take in the sight. 

“I said,” he catches you against him, walking you down the hall to your bedroom to set you on your bed. “Don’t freak out.”

“You’re the Flash.”

“I am.”

“You—you saved me.”

“It’s what I do.”

You sigh, shaking your head. “You…you got here so fast.”

“They don’t call me the Flash for nothing,” he laughs awkwardly. “You never answered my question.”

“Question?”

“I asked if you were okay.”

You swallow, nodding. “I’m fine, I just—I don’t think I’ll get much sleep after that.”

“I could stay,” he offers just a little too quickly. “If you’re scared.”

Wally’s grateful you don’t seem to notice his sudden eagerness. 

“Really? You don’t have bigger, more superhero-y things to do?”

He laughs, cheeks flushing slightly. “I think I could spare a few minutes to make sure you sleep easy tonight.”

And true to his words, Wally steps away for a minute to change, coming back in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt that definitely came from the Flash museum. You raise an eyebrow at his choice of attire, no longer self conscious about your own pyjamas he’d caught you in. 

Wally climbs into bed after you, keeping a respectful distance despite how badly he wants to pull you into his chest. He lays perfectly still, counting his breaths. 

“Are you sure I’m not like,” your voice is tired and thick with sleep, “dooming someone to a horrible fate by keeping you here?”

“You’d be dooming me to a horrible fate by sending me away.”

You drift off soon after that, Wally like a furnace next to you.

At some point in the night, you wake up to a pair of arms around you and Wally’s face nuzzled into your neck. He snores softly against you, body pressed flush to yours. 

You can’t help but push yourself closer to him, greedily drinking up his presence.

Things with Wally become routine from that night onwards. He comes over a couple times a week, checks in on you, occasionally stays for dinner. Sometimes, after a particularly bad night, you’ll even wake up with him in your bed, curled around you. 

He never talks about the bad nights, at least not to you, but you can always tell. 

The last thing you’re expecting on a Tuesday at well past midnight is for the Flash to be standing in your doorway. You flinch when you notice him, sitting up quickly in your bed and flicking on the lamp. 

“Wally?”

His head is hung low, his cowl off and red hair covering his face. He doesn’t respond, only stands there like a zombie. 

“Wally, are you okay?”

You’re on your feet in an instant when he doesn’t respond again, bare feet against the cold floor as you rush to his side. You cup his chin in your hands, lifting his head so you can look at him. 

“Walls?”

A tear slips from his eye, his hands shaky as he brings them to rest on your shoulders. You swipe away his tear, the concern in your throat growing thicker. 

“Wally, are you—“

You’re cut off by his lips pressing to yours, a messy desperate kiss connecting him to you. His hands meet at the back of your neck and clasp, pulling you tighter into him while his tongue swipes at the backs of your teeth. 

You pull away, stumbling back from him like you’ve been burned. “Wally?”

“Let me pretend,” he mumbles. 

“Huh?”

“Let me pretend,” he repeats, stepping towards you. “Just for tonight.”

“Pretend what?”

His hand catches your hip. “That you’re mine, that this—this is okay, that things aren’t terrible.”

“Why are things terrible?”

He steps closer, chest touching you now. His grip on your hip tightens. “I fucked up tonight,” his voice catches in his throat. “People got hurt, I—I couldn’t help them and—“

“Shhh,” you cup his cheeks, looking at him seriously, “it’s okay.”

He shakes his head, more tears coming. “It’s not, it’s really not.”

“You’re a hero, Wally, through and through.”

He brings his head to rest on your shoulder, wet eyes rubbing against the side of your neck. You stroke his hair, rubbing soothing patterns into his scalp. Somehow, you manage to walk him back towards your bed. 

He flops backwards onto your mattress, tugging you after him and pulling you into his chest. He breathes in your scent, rubs his hands up your sides, memorizes your shape. 

“Wally?”

“Hm?”

“We don’t have to pretend,” you say quietly. 

He lifts his head just enough to look at you, confusion written all over his features. 

“Earlier,” you say, “you said you wanted to pretend that—that we’re together.”

All of the breath stills in his body.

“We don’t have to pretend,” you repeat. “We can—I can—“

Wally saves you from your own embarrassment by leaning in and pressing his lips over yours. It’s less desperate than before, less messy, but he burns for you nonetheless. 

“Let me stay tonight?” He asks softly. 

“Always.”

And Wally knows you mean it. 

dc masterlist | navigation

thanks for reading & have a wonderful week /ᐠ > ˕ <マ ₊˚⊹♡

[dumdogs]

i want to interact with people more but what if they kill me

[oncasette]

where we lie.

fwb!dick grayson x fem!reader

summary: 4.1k

“What? You’re still seeing other people, aren’t you?” you ask quietly. Ice crawls up his neck. Why? Does he need to be?

or the one where dick doesn't want you looking at his tinder.

content: nsfw, piv, oral (f!receiving), miscommunication, but then lots of communication, it won't let me upload this normally so trying something else ?

masterlist

“C’mon, just let me swipe for you,” you laugh, trying to snatch Dick’s phone from his hand. He’s currently holding you back with one arm and holding his phone as far out on the other end of the couch as he can. 

“No, stop,” Dick grunts, less playful than he had been earlier in the night but still laughing. “Why do you want to see it so bad?”

For some reason, in the last few minutes, you’d become desperate to see Dick’s Tinder. You’d said it as a joke, at first. On a whim. And, really, you weren’t even planning on swiping on his account, but then he’d said no.

“I just want to see what the women of Bludhaven have to offer for my best friend,” you say. To the outside eye, it might look like you’re trying to climb Dick with how deadset you still are on grabbing his phone. 

Dick’s jaw clenches tight. 

This wasn’t what the two of you did. Ever since… that night… and the night after that, and the night after that… it’d been different. You didn’t wingman each other, in person or on dating apps. You didn’t try to set each other up. Sure, before you’d started sleeping together it wasn’t unheard of for you to talk about your relationships, or random dates you went on, but neither of you asked further than the polite, cursory questions. Even for the first few weeks of this new relationship, each of you made the odd comment about a guy you were texting or a girl that Dick had met at a gala, but those had slowly fizzled out, too. The only thing you had to share with each other was if you hooked up with someone else–to be safe, at the beginning–but the situation had, blissfully, not presented itself.

Recently, Dick had barely even opened his Tinder. He hadn’t wanted to. He’d been thinking about deleting the thing entirely, honestly.

He’s not even sure why he’s so adamantly against you seeing his dating apps right now. It’s not like he’s got anything to hide. He hadn’t had a match in months. Maybe that’s what he didn’t want you to see. The lack of notifications, the empty messaging tab, the few chats he left unanswered past a hey. The fact that the only girl he was currently interested in was you. 

“Baby, stop,” he sighs as he relaxes back into the couch. His sudden change in demeanor has you stalling, too. Your hands drop down, your body collapsing into his side. 

His breath catches in his throat, looking at the way you’ve almost curled up under his arm now that you’re done fighting him. His gaze snags on your lips, but he manages to snap it back up to your eyes before he thinks you catch him. 

“What? You’re still seeing other people, aren’t you?” you ask quietly. Ice crawls up his neck. Why? Does he need to be? 

“I mean…” Dick says, tongue darting out to wet his lips. 

You seem to take that answer the wrong way, pulling away from Dick slowly and planting yourself back into your original spot on the couch. You keep your eyes on him, but your face is a lot less smiley than it had been a minute ago, much to his dismay.

“Is it serious?” you ask as you tuck your knees up to your chest. His heart stutters a bit, resisting his initial urge to just pull you right back into him. “What?” he asks with a furrowed brow.

“The girl you’re seeing. It’s serious, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want me to see,” you say. 

“I’m not- What?” he parrots. 

“It’s fine,” you say, even though it says like you’re barely managing the words out. “I mean, I wish you would’ve told me, so that we could stop doing… y’know, but-”

Panic floods through him. He can’t handle it anymore. In the span of a second, he’s bridged the gap between you and locked his lips over yours. You’re seconds away from melting into him the way he knows you will, when you start to push at his chest with the heels of your hands.

“Dick, wait-”

“I’m not seeing anyone else,” he pants out, pained. He needs you to stop talking. To stop thinking and spiraling and throwing this away before he has a chance to explain himself. He needs you to stop your mind from wandering to the idea that he could want anyone but you. 

“You’re not?” you ask, trying to pull back further when Dick drops his forehead against yours. You need to see his eyes right now.

“I’m not,” he exhales. You can see the words forming, but it takes him a while longer to ask, “Are you?”

When you shake your head, Dick shifts. He gently begins to pull your legs down and out to give him space to slot himself better between your thighs. His head ducks down, nose bumping against yours.

“Why wouldn’t you let me see your Tinder?” you ask quietly, bringing a hand up and running your fingers though his hair as he kisses along your cheeks.

“I dunno,” he mumbles into your skin. “We haven’t really talked about this in a while. I didn’t want you to see that I wasn’t, you know… putting myself out there if you were.”

“That’s stupid,” you scoff lightly. 

“I know,” he says, raising up to slant his mouth over yours again. “I don’t exactly think straight when you’re around.”

You let him kiss you for a while. You let him lick along your bottom lip, and eventually part them to slide his tongue into your mouth. Even though his response should’ve eased the pit in your stomach, it hadn’t. It lingered, gnawing at you like it had been for the last couple of weeks. 

You think you wanted to see his Tinder for another reason entirely. No matter what you’d tried telling yourself in the moment, no matter how playful and giggly you’d been, you knew you’d been fighting for his phone to try and quell the thoughts that had been nagging at you. You wanted to see the competition, more or less. You wanted to see who else Dick’s attention was lingering on, see if you were able to compete with them. 

That voice is nagging at you, now, despite the fact that Dick’s attempting to shove his tongue down your throat in a way that would typically have your eyes rolling into the back of your head.

“Why aren’t you seeing other people?” you ask, in spite of yourself. You bite down on your tongue to try and stop any more damning words from spilling out of you. 

He seems to glitch for a moment before exhaling. Reluctantly, he pulls away. Not for long, though, as he’s subsequently pulling you up and bracketing your knees around his hips. Once he’s seated and you’re settled on his lap, he speaks.

“Okay,” he sighs. “I don’t think we can keep dancing around this.”

You chew on the inside of your cheek as he begins to slide his hands down your sides. Slowly up around your hips, around your waist, down your thighs, and back up again. It does little to calm your nerves. 

“You don’t want me dating anyone else, hm?” he asks, brows raised in a way that might’ve looked condescending if you didn’t know him as well as you do. You think the question over for a beat before slowly starting to shake your head.

“No,” you admit solemnly. “I know when we started… fooling around we said we weren’t going to do the whole labels thing.”

“I know what we said,” he hums. 

“And we said that we were free to still… you know, go out and stuff,” you manage out.

“And stuff,” he mimics. “I’m not asking about before. I’m asking about now.”

“But, what we agreed on before matters,” you say.

He shrugs, “Sure, it mattered before.”

He looks down at where your hands are resting on his stomach before grabbing them both in one of his. He brings them up to his chest, maneuvering them so that your palms are flat against him.

“I agreed to all of this because I thought that’s what you wanted,” he says before his eyes flick back up to meet yours. 

“Isn’t that what you wanted, too?” you ask

“I wanted whatever you were willing to give me. I didn’t push for more because I thought you… you know… didn’t want that,” he says. The world stops spinning for a solid minute. Suddenly, every appliance in the apartment has gone inexplicably silent and all you can hear is your own breathing–or, lack thereof–and the blood rushing through your eardrums. He’s calmer than he was a minute ago. Less frantic, now, that he seems to have clicked a few pieces into place.

“What?” you croak out.

“Is it that hard to believe, sweetheart?” he asks. “You think I treat every girl the way I treat you? Talk to any girl that way I talk to you?”

He brings your hands up until they’re just under his jaw.

“Fuck any girl the way I fuck you?”

“You want more?” you ask. You have to blink about twenty times in a row to focus down on him again.

“Yes, I want more,” he says. “But I think the real question is if you want more.”

Your mouth opens and closes with a thousand different ways of saying yes, yes, of course I do dying on your tongue. When you finally decide that words are just apparently not going to work right now, you lean in and slant your lips over his. He meets your mouth eagerly, still holding your hands against him, but lifting his head to match your vigor. 

“You’re so stupid,” you huff once you’ve parted.

“That– okay,” he chuckles, brows furrowed, “Why am I stupid?”

“Because I’m in love with you,” you say. 

“Yeah?” he asks. The smile on his face could rival the sun. He uses the lack of space between you to his advantage and smacks a couple of kisses against your lips. “Why does that make me stupid?”

“Because!” you say, like that’s reason enough.

“Because I’m in love with you, too?” he asks. A comment you’re, unfortunately, quick to breeze past. 

“Because we wasted so much time!” you whine with a weak smack to his chest. The air around you is thick with his confession. 

“We’ll have so much time,” he says as he brings both palms up to the sides of your face. Slowly, he pulls you down until you’re chest to chest with him, but he doesn’t make a move to kiss you again. He seems content to just look at you, now. To let his gaze move over the dips and lines of your face, the slope of your nose. 

“We could’ve had more,” you murmur. 

Dick shrugs, thumbs swiping over your cheeks. “I’ve always been yours.”

“Yeah, but…” you start.

“We’ve basically been dating for months already,” he says. “This doesn’t change anything other than what we call each other.”

Huh. You hadn’t thought of it that way.

“There we go,” he hums. His index finger taps against the center of your forehead. “I can see those gears shutting down.”

You sit there for a while, just letting the weight of it all sink into you. You love Dick, you knew that already, and he loves you. He loves you. You didn’t have to settle for–admittedly, amazing–sex, you could have him. You could have everything. 

“Will you let me fuck you now, baby?” he asks, hands moving back down to hold your hips.

Your lips pull into a thin line. “That feels a little crude after what we just admitted to each other.”

“Oh my-” he laughs, those dimples of his peeking out. “Can I make love to you? Is that better?”

“I could so say no right now- oh,” your giggle sharply turns into a gasp when Dick rolls his hips up into yours. Just once. Just enough to feel his hardening cock pressing against your pussy and punching the breath out of you. His lips find the edge of your jaw.

“Baby?” he prompts.

“Yeah, yes,” you exhale, already melting into his touch. “Please.”

And it’s like a band snaps. The thinly veiled restraint he’d been exerting before is gone when his lips find yours again. He’s inching the hem of your shirt up, the warmth of his hands heating your skin. 

“You’re so pretty,” he whispers, parting from you long enough to slide the shirt up and over your head. “My girl.”

“Dick,” you whine. You roll your hips down against his, trying to ease the building pressure building up between your legs. 

“Hold on, pretty,” he laughs in spite of the way his hips jut up to meet yours instantly. “I wanna do this right.”

“We’ve fucked before,” you huff, pushing down harder against his cock until you feel the head of him catch against your clit. Ah, fuck. 

“So we’re calling it that again?” he teases. He licks along the edge of your bra, down the center of your chest, and for a second you think he’s going to make out with the foam padding but then he unclips the back of it with the dexterous accuracy you’re used to. He latches onto one of your nipples, sucking and swirling his tongue in a way that sends a tingle down your spine. 

“Come on,” you hiss, back arching and pushing your chest further into his mouth. He pops off with a grin. His thumbs swipes over your nipple, breaking the string of spit still connecting him to you.

“So impatient,” he says. “I get you worked up that fast, huh?”

“Shut up. You know you do,” you bite, still trying to grind down on his cock but not getting the relief you need through the layers between you. 

“‘Cause you love me?” he asks. One of his fingers hooks into the waistband of your shorts. The elastic snaps against your skin. 

“Stop teasing.”

“‘M not teasing, baby. Promise,” he says before his hand slips into your shorts. His fingers swipe through the slick building there. One taps your clit with just enough pressure to pull a gasp out of you. He tilts his head as he watches you grind against his hand. He seems entirely too pleased with himself. 

You fist your hands into his shirt in a clumsy attempt to get him to take it off. That request, at least, he concedes to. He grabs it by the back of the neckline, tugging it up and tossing it elsewhere on the floor of his living room. When you think he’s going to go back to his heavy petting, though, he doesn’t. He grabs you back the backs of your thighs before standing, leaving you to flail for a second and grab onto his shoulders with a squeak.

“Dick!” you huff, face scrunched up in mock annoyance. “What the hell?”

He makes sure you’re situated in his arms and not going to fall before starting to walk towards his room. The fact that he can pick you up and carry you around without care like this still heats you up inside, despite the fact that he’d done it countless times before. You think he knows. You think that’s why he keeps doing it.

“It’ll be better in bed,” he murmurs, pecking your lips. “Want you to be comfortable.”

Every part of you feels like it's buzzing. Warm static from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. If Dick set you down, you don’t think you would be standing.

If sex with Dick before was good, this was nirvana. And he had barely started touching you.

He kicks the door closed with his heel then gently lays you out at the end of the bed. You’d told him before how grateful you were for his money, only if for the fact that it meant that his bed felt like heaven. A fluffy comforter and egyptian cotton sheets for you to ease down into as Dick starts shimmying your shorts down your thighs. He groans at the sight of your, admittedly, unsexy panties. 

He kneels down and spreads your legs wide, pinning them open with his shoulders. His arms wrap around your thighs and he tugs you the last couple inches so that your ass is at the edge. 

“So beautiful,” he grins, biting the inside of your thigh. His thumb flicks over the tiny bow on the front of your old cotton panties. Your legs attempt to close, but the conspicuously Dick Grayson shaped object in front of you prevents that from happening. 

“Please,” you whisper as you lean up your forearms to get a better look at him. His eyes flick up to yours as his head dips to press delicate kisses to your still clothed cunt. It’s not nearly enough to alleviate the ache building in you, but it raises the hair at the back of your neck all the same. You dig your heels into his shoulders in an attempt to drive him in closer. “I need you.”

“I know. Poor baby,” he hums, tongue coming out to flick your clit through the cotton. He uses his thumb to push the fabric aside before licking a flat stripe up your heat. 

You wobble a bit, falling back into the sheets as your fingers find purchase in his curls. “Ah, Jesus, Dick.”

He laughs against you, the vibration causing you to clench around nothing. 

“So fucking good,” he groans. The lewd sound of him slurping and sucking mixed with the feel of his tongue prodding at your entrance has to embarrassingly close already. 

“I’m gonna cum,” you moan.

“My girl’s gonna cum for me already?” he hums. “C’mon, baby.”

When he sucks on your clit, the band snaps. Dick hisses when you yank on his hair, nearly pulling him off of you, but he manages to stay put. He eases you through your orgasm with gentle kisses against your pussy, nose bumping your clit every so often. Once he’s satisfied with how twitchy you’ve become, he detaches himself.

Gently, lips following his fingers, he pulls your underwear off to drop them at the end of the bed. He stands up to his full height soon after, pushing his own shorts and boxers down his legs before he leans over your body. You reach out to grab his waist and tug him back between your legs. His head drops to slant his mouth over yours. He’s quick to part your lips with his tongue, the taste of you still lingering as he licks into your mouth.

“Pretty girl,” he grins once he pulls back. “Feel good?”

Nodding, you reach between you to wrap a hand around his cock. Your thumb swipes over the head, smearing the precum down his shaft. He groans, thrusting a bit into your grip. 

“Shit,” he whines when you squeeze the base of him. You lock your ankles around his back and pull him in closer. “Wait, sweetheart. I gotta get a condom.”

“No,” you whine. “I want to feel you.”

“Baby,” he laughs when you squeeze him in tighter. The heat of his bare cock nudging against your pussy has your mouth watering. “Are you sure?”

He may be smiling, but his eyes are serious as they search yours. 

“I’m on birth control,” you say, your cheeks heating at your next admission. “And I haven’t slept with anyone other than you since we started hooking up.”

“Yeah?” he asks, suddenly alight with something new. “You only let me make you feel good?”

He smooths his palms down your sides before wrapping a hand around where yours is gripping his cock. His bottom lip tucks between his teeth.

“I haven’t slept with anyone else, either,” he says as he lines up with your entrance. “If that wasn’t obvious.”

He slides into you slowly, jaw clenched and eyes locked on yours. He doesn’t breathe until his pelvic bone brushes yours, and the exhale he lets out is pitchy and broken. 

“Hah- Holy- f-fuck,” he whines as he drops down over you. His weight is braced on one hand resting beside your head. The first roll of his hips is experimental, but you can see the way he short circuits. His balance wobbles and for a split second you worry that he might headbutt you. Or, you would’ve if the feel of him bare inside you didn’t already have you seeing stars. The second he starts to really move, he can’t help the broken pleas of your name that begin to spill from his lips.

“I love you,” you moan as you link your arms around his shoulders to hold him closer. You manage to get him to focus enough to drop a messy kiss to your lips, but it doesn’t last for long. It quickly devolves into a mix of teeth and spit as you both lose yourselves in the new sensation.

“I love you so much, baby,” he whispers. “God, this is a dream. You’re a dream.”

His thrusts start to get sloppy, a mix of jerky pumps and deep grinding. The way you’re clenching around him has his balls tightening at maddening speed.

“Cum in me,” you hum before he can ask when you feel his dick twitching.

“Ah, fuck,” he hisses. He uses the hand not bracing the brunt of his weight to reach between you to start rolling over your clit in tight circles. “Cum with me, sweetheart.”

Your nails dig into his shoulders as the pressure builds tighter in your gut. Your brain goes a little fuzzy once your orgasm hits, a tingle traveling all the way down to your fingertips. Dick follows soon after. He manages to thrust a couple more times before his pace stalls at the hilt. 

“There we go,” he pants. “Jesus, you’re gonna kill me.”

His forehead comes down to rest against yours. The both of you are breathing heavily with sweat beading along your temples, but you don’t think you’ve ever felt better. You’re beneath the man you love–full of him, actually–after having probably the best sex you’d had with him, and he loves you back. He loves you back.

“Are you okay?” he murmurs, gently petting the side of your head. You lean into the touch, face tilting to kiss his thumb. 

“I’m perfect,” you reply. He stays put, only moving to glide his lips along your hairlines, until your breathing goes back to normal. 

Pulling out with a wince, he murmurs, “I know, I know. ‘M sorry.”

You almost want to trap him there, dig your heels into his ass and keep him inside you for the foreseeable future, but you let him pull out with minimal whining.

Dick leaves you for a minute, but returns with a washcloth in one hand and his phone in the other.

“What’re you doing?” you ask as you scoot up a bit on the bed.

“Cleaning you up,” he says easily

“No, why’d you go get your phone?” you chuckle.

“I’m deleting Tinder.”

“You had to do that right now?”

“I don’t need it anymore,” he shrugs before setting his phone down on the side table, apparently already finished with his task, and spreading your legs again to wipe you down with the warm cloth. Once he feels he’s cleaned you up to the best of his ability, he tosses the rag into his hamper and grabs a clean pair of boxers from the drawer. You half-expect him to leave you naked once he’s got the boxers pulled up, but are pleasantly surprised when he grabs another pair and a t-shirt for you to wear. 

He crosses back over to you, sitting you up and lifting your arms up to slide the clean shirt over your head. The underwear is a bit more of a challenge to get on without forcing you to stand, but he does it with surprising grace.

“Hi,” you grin after you’ve both slid under the covers. You’re facing him, now, allowing your eyes to wander over his features.

“Hi, baby,” he says. He grabs one of your hands to press a kiss to the pad of your index finger. It’s all so easy, so familiar. You find it hard to believe that you hadn’t always been like this with him, but then again, maybe you had. Maybe that’s why it felt so right to slip into these roles with each other. To cross that bridge and finally stop pretending you were ever anything close to friends. 

[eyellusionist]

Nothing hurts like realising through a drinking game that your friendship with you best friend of 10 years is weaker than her friendship with a friend you introduced to her personally.

[my-love-all-mine]

Taking your makeup off when you’re too tired to

Wally West x reader

⋆˚࿔ drabble

Warnings: fluff, established relationship, reader wears makeup + has hair, reader has sensitive skin, swearing, Wally lowkey manhandles us, ummm yea

The door clicked shut as you stood in the dark apartment hallway with your bags on the floor. You had just finished your long day of work and were ready to sink into your bed and fall asleep.

Wally must have already gone to bed, you presumed. So you stumbled over to the kitchen to get a glass of water. But with every step you took, your body seemed heavier and heavier. Your sleepiness taking over as you tripped over a pile of clothes.

Your tired brain not comprehending why there was a flash of light around you all of a sudden and why you were now laying on your couch.

The familiar smell of your boyfriend greeted you and you immediately recognised Wally’s red curls in the dark apartment.

“Walls?” You tiredly drawled out.

“Hi baby.” He kneeled down and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

“You have to be more careful, could’ve hurt yourself.” Wally said, pushing a couple of strands of hair out of your face.

“Hm.” You answered, sleepiness catching up to you as you made yourself more comfortable on the couch and tucked yourself into the cushions.

“Hey”, he whispered “you can’t sleep here.”

You grumbled as Wally picked you up and carried you onto your shared mattress, before walking over to your closet and picking out some pyjamas.

He slowly helped you undress, not wanting to use his super speed right now as to not startle you.

Once you were in your night clothes, you thought you were finally free, crawling up towards your pillow.

Suddenly, you felt two hands wrap around your ankles and pull you back towards the edge of the bed.

You groaned in frustration as he turned you around and hovered above you.

“Babe, you’re wearing a full face of makeup.” Wally sighed.

You tried squirming away from him before he softly pinned your arms to the mattress.

“So what?” You rolled your eyes.

“I know your skin gets irritated easily, and I know that mascara isn’t gonna do anything except give you an eye infection tommorow.” He gave you a soft smile, “Do I have to remind you of that time Dick invited us to a gala and you forgot to take your makeup off later? And we had to go to the eye doctor the next day cause you couldn’t open your eyes-”

“Jesus fine.” You groaned again, standing up before once more tripping over your own feet, Wally’s eyes widening again as he slipped his hands under your waist and picked you up bridal-style.

He had a cheeky grin on his face, one that you wanted to smack away at that moment.

“Stop looking at me like that and help me you loser.”

“Sure, angel.” Wally let out a soft laugh as he started carrying you towards the bathroom, setting you down on the white counter.

He let go of you for a second to find cotton pads and some micellar water, leaning down to ruffle through some drawers.

When he found them, Wally carefully took the cotton pad, sprinkling the micellar water on it, before bringing it up to your face.

He stood there, gliding the pad over your skin, your makeup dissolving and the colours of your eyeshadow blending into one.

“It’s really nice.” He muttered

You slowly lifted your head. “Hm?”

He continued wiping away your eye makeup.

“Your makeup. You always make it look so good.”

Despite at how annoyed you were at him at the time, your eyes managed to soften at his comment and your mouth tugged up into a sleepy grin. “Thanks, Walls.”

He chuckled as he wiped away the remaining smudges on your skin and threw the cotton pads away.

Finally, thinking you were done, you wrapped your hands around his neck and tried burying your face into the crook of his neck.

Not long before he grabbed your hands and once again left you to look for something in the bathroom cabinets.

You whined at the loss of contact.

“Seriously Wally?”

He pulled out your moisturiser.

“Can’t have my pretty baby going to bed with dry skin.” The readhead said while opening the lid.

You glared at him, “I swear you’re doing this on purpose.”

Still, you closed your eyes when his fingers gently massaged the cream against your skin, letting yourself relax into his touch.

The second he put the lid back on, you immediately wrapped yourself around him, burying yourself in his arms.

He quietly led both of you towards your bed and plopped you down. Not long after he also made himself comfortable next to you under the covers.

You turned and engulfed him in a big hug, pressing a soft kiss against his cheek.

“Night, Walls.” You yawned.

He reciprocated your kiss by placing a small one on your shoulder.

All that was left now is the soft buzz of the apartment and your guys’ silent breathing.

After a beat, he whispered, “You haven’t brushed your teeth yet, y’kno-“

“Wally. I love you. But shut the fuck up.”

Ty for reading! Hope u enjoyed<3

Likes, reblogs, and comments appreciated!

taglist: @starl1ghtgr4yson

[scissorhvnds]

୭ ˚. vamp!jason drinking your blood during sex

series masterlist

vampire!jason will only drink your blood if he can worship you simultaneously. because this isn't about him — it can't all be about him. it's about you.

you're giving him the very essence of your life so that he can remain strong. you're allowing him access to the the most important part of you. to the thing that you need to survive. he cannot take, and not give anything in return. he cannot drink and not show you how thankful he is. 

he'd spent an hour before this proving to you — to himself — that he can be soft. that he's so much more than the sharp fangs that can take your life. 

he'll lay you on your back. then, he'll explore your ankles, your knees, up your inner thighs with gentle lips and even gentler hands. he can be gentle. jason is gentle. then hungrily — because he can't help himself, your scent had been tempting him from the beginning — up your slit, sinking his tongue as deep inside you as he can. 

one orgasm for sure, maybe two (usually two) if jason is feeling particularly needy. he needs to get you ready, he does. 

he won't stop until your thighs are quivering around his ears, till your fingers are tugging on his hair, till your whines and pleads for him are so insistent that he slowly begins to believe that what he is doing to you is okay. his lips will meet every inch of exposed skin on the side of your neck next. his kisses are soft, barely pressing against you — he's unwilling to risk bruising before his fangs can inflict their violence upon your innocent skin.

he'll prop himself up over you, gazing at your face. your pretty face. eyes lidded and glassy, lips shining and bitten through from your own teeth. beautiful. he loves you so much. so much. he'll kiss you after that, seal his lips over yours. his tongue presses against the wall of your teeth, tasting you again, and allowing you to taste yourself on him. 

just the press of your lips will unlock a ferocity in him, will crumble his restraint so fast it's like he never had it. he'll nudge his tip against your entrance before sliding in halfway in one go. 

your soft gasp, followed by a happy whine, slides down jason's thoat. he's full of you. his entire being is consumed by you. it warms him, allows his hollow body to remember what it felt like to tingle. because your touch emulates that in him. the way your fingers trail his skin — solid and strong — and he can feel it. phantom goosebumps rise across the back of his neck, phantom mechanoreceptors call out to you, kissing your fingertips in return wherever they explore. a thank you for not thinking he disgusting, for not being afraid of him, for loving him enough that he can feel human again. 

he'll slide in the rest of the way, mumbling praising into your mouth. 

"feel so good for me, angel,"

"fuck — need you to stay still, baby, not gonna last," 

"wanna feel you like this forever, want you forever, please—"

it's slow. loving. hard thrusts angled juuuust right. right at the spot that has your eyes fluttering back, your mouth drying up, brain short-circuiting to the point that you forget you're supposed to be kissing jason back. 

only then. only then will jason tilt your head to the side, trailing his nose along your jugular and sinking his fangs as deep into your neck as they'll go. 

your reaction remains the same every time. muscles clenching and fluttering around his cock, squeezing him tight, pulling him impossibly deeper. your hand will always find his, fingers intertwining against the bed, one squeeze, two squeeze, three squeeze, i love you. 

jason drinks as his hips grind into you, no longer thrusting, just feeling, the pleasure you feel from his fangs is enough. it's just as addicting for you as it is for him, you even ask for him to drink from you more often despite jason's chagrin — the thought of causing you even an ounce of pain makes him feel sick. 

his free thumb will meet your clit, rubbing quick swipes around the nub until you come again, with him following right after. the relief is immediate, evident in the tiny whimpers that jason vibrates against your neck. he was already close to blowing his load against the bed when you had come on his tongue the first time. each grind of his hips against yours, each squeeze of his fingers on whatever part of your body they can reach, each lap of his tongue against your neck is a thank you and an apology all in one. 

when he pulls away, when his fangs finally retract from your skin, he'll keep his face buried in your neck. he'll keep his tongue pressed against the two tiny wounds, lapping at them. he tells himself it's to make sure his healing venom sticks, that it covers each crevice of the wound, but jason knows deep down he's being selfish. you almost always come again every time he does it, small shudders jittering up your spin, walls contracting around him still nestled deeeep inside you, chest arching into his. the excess blood from your neck wound explodes on his tongue from where it is pressed flat and he savours it because he believes this is the last time he'll ever get to taste you like this. he thinks the other shoe has to drop soon. 

it should.

you should run. 

but you dont. you never do. you stay. arms wound tightly around him, keeping him close. trusting. loving. you snuggle into him like jason didn't just have your life in his hands, as if he hadn't been that close to taking your life if he didn't have the restraint he does.

you stay afterwards. you always do. 

an: vamp!jason comeback on a random sunday in june??? yup!

taglist: @mollymal , @redhooduwu , @girlmeetsolivia , @athenxt , @nightlights-and-twiklingstars , @silverjaysz , @l0singctrl , @drea18881 , @calicocat-ina-tuxedo , @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger , @mrbusinessman , @starr-jazz , @bat2nsignia , @vianawaits , @indigoscribe , @luviery , @kennlovespink , @jiasfiles , @arfemiz , @darkxwolfsstuff , @soggywhore , @wiishies , @spideyskywalker , @newangelle , @thatluckygirl19 , @givemefinganame , @hyyperfixationstation , @clmntin3 , @djobrat

[starl1ghtgr4yson]

EVERYONE DESERVES SUNSHINE

Dick Grayson x bisexual!reader

Summary: Reader struggles with internalized homophobia, and eventually comes out to Dick.

Warnings: heavy internalized homophobia, angst, comfort.

A/n: Happy Pride month everyone!! I wrote this because I know I struggle with internalized homophobia, and it’s hard to understand myself and my sexuality. The internal dialogue is very similar to mine, and I wrote what I wished someone would’ve told me.

Listen: here and here

Normal.

Everyone wants normalcy right? Normal means comfort. Normal means happiness. Normal means warmth. And you were normal. You’d grown up being normal. You’d lived your entire life being normal. All except for one part of you… the part you tried so hard to suppress, hide and throw away. You tried brainwashing yourself into thinking it was fine. That it was just your brain being weird, that it didn’t mean anything, except, deep down, you knew it did. You were straight, you told yourself — because straight was normal, unlike whatever you felt —, you were straight and the feeling your stomach got when you were around pretty girls was nothing at all.

The normal part of you, the straight part, soon became the only part of you. You told yourself that all it would take for your weirdness to go away was an amazing man who would take whatever thing you had for girls and discard it away into a bin labeled “not normal do not touch.”

It wasn’t that being bisexual, or gay or lesbian was something weird. Or something you looked down upon. When anyone else was gay, it was normal. It was okay. But for some weird reason, when it came down to you, it was a disgusting untouchable thing that changed who you were.

That’s why you had absentmindedly shrunk all your feelings and emotions about this entire topic, and pushed them into an inactive part of your brain— but no matter how hard you attempted, you couldn’t close the window completely.

Then you met Dick Grayson. And everything with him just feels like warmth. It feels like after constantly sinking and drowning, you’ve been pulled back to the shore, and immediately comforted by his presence. Dick Grayson has a way of being present that makes everything feel like summertime and happiness. He doesn’t demand versions of you. He just… stays.

And somewhere along the way, he becomes your sun.

Not in a poetic way you think about consciously, but in the way your body understands light. In the way you notice it more when it’s gone than when it’s there. When he laughs, it feels like something in your chest unclenches without permission. When he looks at you, it feels like you are allowed to exist exactly as you are in that moment, no translation needed. He warms you up and gives you energy. He brightens your day, you go to sleep looking forward to seeing his face in the morning. His smile and warmth fixes everything. The only thing it didn’t fix was, well, the only thing that needed fixing. His warmth melted your heart into a puddle, your messes into puddles (that he dried up)— but it couldn’t melt away your weirdness. It didn’t change the way you felt when you thought about girls.

And because you love him, because he is your sun, you start to think that maybe this part of you is something that makes you less deserving of that light.

So you don’t say it. You don’t even let the idea fully form it into words in your head at first. You just keep it quiet. And in the quiet, it starts to feel like guilt.

You don’t deserve him.

Dick doesn't notice anything. Perhaps he chooses not to. He continues to soak you in rays of love and affection, and you continue to guiltily absorb all his adoration. That’s the part that makes it harder.

You dont tell him because if you do, it becomes real. You don’t tell him because you don’t want to lose the sunshine you don’t even deserve, and you feel terrible about it. He is still there in the same way he always is, still reaching for you like it’s instinct, still smiling at you like you are something uncomplicated and safe. He still talks to you like there is no distance between who you are and who you are allowed to be. Still treating you like you’re fucking normal.

But then, something in you starts to shift around him anyway. You start pausing before answering things that used to be easy. You start choosing silence where you would have spoken not because you are trying to lie to him, but because you failed to successfully lie to yourself. He wouldn’t want to know anyways. Don’t do anything, you’ll ruin everything. You don’t deserve him— he deserves someone normal. Be normal or just stop. You felt guilty for letting him love you. And slowly, without meaning to, you begin stepping away. Not in a dramatic sense, not in a way someone would notice immediately, but in small absences. Shorter conversations. Slightly longer pauses before replying. Moments where you sit beside him and still feel like you are somewhere slightly out of reach.

And Dick starts to notice, because he’s the sun, he notices everything. He notices when his light doesn’t quite touch your soul.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” he says one night, voice soft, almost careful.

“I’m fine,” you answer automatically, because you don’t deserve comfort or warmth.

But even as you say it, you feel it land wrong between you.

He doesn’t argue. He just watches you for a second longer than usual, like he is trying to understand what kind of silence you’re hiding inside of. And that’s when you start realizing something you didn’t want to admit.

The sun is still there. But you’re starting to look away from it. And it already feels undeniably cold and wrong.

It continues to build more and more, until it’s too hard and unusual to ignore. There’s no longer common light and comfort between the two of you. Only the freezing realization that it’s not the same anymore. That you’re not the same anymore.

Dick starts sitting closer in conversations that feel like they are slipping away from him. He stops accepting “I’m fine” as a full answer. Not because he wants to push, but because he is refusing to pretend he doesn’t see what is happening. You’re his moon, his calming shade when he’s forced to constantly bathe in the searing spotlight. The space growing between the two of you has left him feeling a burning pain in his heart. All he needs is for you to cool it.

He sees the pain in your eyes. He sees how cold, miserable and empty you look. He just wants to warm you up.

One night, he doesn’t fill the silence when you don’t speak. He just lets it exist, like he’s waiting for you to choose whether you’re going to stay in it or leave it.

“Talk to me,” he says finally.

And your chest tightens immediately, because there is nowhere safe inside that sentence.

“I am talking to you,” you try.

But it doesn’t sound like truth. And you both know it isn’t.

Dick exhales softly, shaking his head slightly.

“No,” he says. “You’re staying close, but you’re not letting me in.”

And it makes your throat tighten. Because he’s right. You know he’s right and you hate it. You hate that you can’t just take these feelings out of you and throw them away. You hate that you can’t even do that much for Dick, when he’d do anything for you, He leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees, eyes steady on you in a way that feels too kind to run from but too direct to survive. Sometimes the only choice you have is to get burned. That’s what this is. The once warm gaze that comforted you in tough times now feels like it’s burning a hole through your heart.

“I’m not leaving,” he says quietly. “No matter what it is. Just… stop doing this alone.”

That almost breaks you. You flew too far from the sun didn’t you? And now the rays won’t reach you anymore. That burning you felt wasn’t the sun. It was you. It was the crippling shame that you threw away the best thing you had. So you go quiet again.

The silence is no longer quiet. It feels like a yell that's begging to close this distance, and somehow that makes everything worse. If it were quiet, if it were small enough to ignore, maybe you could have continued pretending. Maybe you could have kept carrying it for another week, another month, another year. Maybe you could have gone your entire life without saying it out loud and let it rot somewhere deep inside of you where nobody could see it. But it isn't small anymore. It has grown too large to fit inside your chest. It leaks into conversations, into the spaces between words, into the way you look at Dick and then immediately away again. It follows you everywhere, this ugly little secret that shouldn't even be a secret. It sits between the two of you now, invisible but impossible to miss.

Dick watches you for a long moment, and you can practically see the concern growing behind his eyes. It makes your stomach twist. Concern means he cares. Concern means he hasn't given up. Concern means he still loves you enough to worry, and somehow that hurts worse than anything else because all you can think about is how undeserved it feels. Guilt sends freezing chills all over your body and no words he says can unthaw it. You have spent so long convincing yourself that this thing inside you makes you different, makes you wrong, makes you less than what he deserves, that every ounce of affection he gives you feels borrowed. Like you're walking around wearing clothes that belong to somebody else, waiting for the rightful owner to come take them back.

"You've been carrying something by yourself for a while now."

His voice is so painfully quiet and it kills you. You want him to scream, and shout and do the things you deserve. Not act like you’re still deserving of his love. You hate how easily he sees through you. You hate how badly you want to let him.

Your fingers tighten together in your lap. The pressure hurts, but not enough to drown out the ache sitting beneath your ribs. All you want to do is tell the truth and then hug him, and hold him and soak in all his love. You just want to feel that tenderness again. And you feel guilty for that too.

You feel guilty for everything. Like somehow every terrible thing is because of one thing:

You like girls.

The thought settles heavy in your heart.

"It's nothing."

The lie sounds weak even to your own ears. Dick's expression doesn't change, and it feels like that’s the worst part. He doesn’t look annoyed or roll his eyes. He doesn’t get frustrated or angry. He just… looks sad. Not sad at you, but rather sad for you. Sad because for the first time ever, he doesn’t know how to use his warmth to disintegrate your worries away. Sad like he's watching somebody drown from the shore and can't understand why they keep refusing the hand being offered to them.

"You're miserable."

The statement leaves softly, like all his previous ones. But it lands like a slap against your face.

You look away immediately.

"I'm not."

"You are."

His response comes so quickly that it almost sounds automatic, like he knew what you were gonna say, and he knew your response. The certainty in it makes something twist painfully in your chest.

Because he isn't wrong. You are miserable. You've been miserable for months. Every happy moment comes attached to guilt now. Every kiss is followed by the reminder that you haven't told him. Every laugh feels stolen. Every good day ends with the same thought curling up beside you in bed.

He deserves someone normal. The thought has become so familiar that sometimes it doesn't even sound cruel anymore. It just sounds true.

You stare at the floor.

Dick sighs quietly, and it isn’t dramatic, or with pent up frustration spilling out, it’s just tired.

Because Dick has always carried enough burdens for ten people. He's spent his entire life taking care of everyone around him. He shouldn't have to carry you too.

"You know," he says after a moment, "there was a point where I thought maybe you were mad at me."

Your head snaps up immediately at the ridiculous thought. Mad at him? For what? What could he possibly have done to make you mad at him? Sure he did stuff that mad you mad, just not at him. They made you mad at yourself. Because receiving love from him felt like a crime. Like you were stealing it rather than being given it,

"What?"

His mouth twitches slightly.

"Yeah."

"Dick."

"I didn't know."

The small smile disappears as quickly as it arrived.

"I still don't."

The room feels, if it’s even possible, even colder. You don’t know how that’s possible when the sun is literally sitting right across from you.

"Dick—"

"No, seriously."

His voice still stays gentle, making you want to scream.

"I don't know what's happening. I don't know why you've been pulling away from me. I don't know why you look like you're waiting for something terrible to happen every time I walk into a room."

His eyes meet yours. And then the same unbearable warmth is there again— it’s just unreachable. It’s there along with the horrible kindness and the gut wrenching sympathy.

"I just— I know you're hurting."

He’s right again. He always seems to be right. You are hurting.

And it’s not because you're bisexual, and it’s not because there's anything wrong with being bisexual. You know there isn't. You would never look at somebody else and think the things you've spent years thinking about yourself.

You wouldn't ever tell another girl she was broken.

You wouldn't dream of telling another girl she was weird.

You wouldn't instill the concept that she deserved less love because of who she was within her.

But somehow those rules have never applied to you. The hypocrisy isn't lost on you.

It never has been. You know it doesn't make sense and yiu know it isn't logical, and yet somehow the feeling remains. It’s stubborn and persistent and settles in you like a faint, permanent ache that’s buried so deep inside of you that it feels fused to your bones.

You wonder if Dick would still look at you like this if he knew. The thought arrives before you can stop it.

Would he still smile at you the same way?

Would he still call you beautiful?

Would he still kiss you and say you're the best thing that's ever happened to him?

Would he still be your sunshine?

Or would the light finally disappear?

The possibility terrifies you. Because somewhere along the way, Dick stopped being something you simply wanted. He became something you needed. And not in an unhealthy way. Not in a way that made your happiness dependent on him. But in the way plants need sunlight. In the way flowers instinctively turn toward warmth.

Life had existed before him. But it had been colder.

Darker.

Lonelier.

And now that you knew what warmth felt like, the thought of losing it felt unbearable.

A lump forms in your throat and you swallow against it.It doesn't move.

Dick’s expression softens.

"Hey."

The single word almost breaks you.

"Talk to me."

Your vision starts blurring and you hate that. You hate that you’re crying. You especially hate that you’re crying in front of him. Because Dick always treats your tears like they're important. And you hate it, because he should be disgusted. And that just makes you cry harder.

"I can't."

The words come out as a small, pathetic choked sob. And it’s barely audible, but he hears them immediately. His eyebrows pull together.

"Why not?"

Because if you tell him, everything changes.

Because if you tell him, it becomes real.

Because if you tell him, he'll finally realize he could have done better.

You lower your head.

The tears are coming faster now, and it’s embarrassing. It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic. You’ve been pathetic because you’ve let all your feelings and emotions escalate over the years. And the things you kept buried quietly now turned into stormy messes of guilt and self deprecation. You can't stop them.

"Dick..."

His name cracks apart halfway through.

And instantly, he's moving closer. And it’s somehow, the same amount. It’s not enough to crowd you. It’s just enough to remind you that he's there.

Just enough to remind you that the sun is still trying to reach you.

"Whatever it is," he says softly, "you can tell me."

Your chest hurts. Because he means it. You know he means it.

Dick Grayson has never once made you feel unsafe. Not once. Not ever.

The fear was never that he would scream.

The fear was never that he would mock you.

The fear was never even that he would hate you.

The fear was always simpler than that.

The fear was that he'd look at you differently.

That one day he'd wake up and realize you weren't who he thought you were. That the sunshine you've been standing in all this time would finally belong to somebody else. And suddenly you're so tired. Tired of hiding. Tired of carrying this. Tired of spending every day terrified that the person you love most in the world will stop loving you the moment he sees all of you. Your eyes squeeze shut. The words are right there.

Waiting.

Terrifying.

Simple.

Three words.

Three stupid words that shouldn't matter nearly this much.

You can feel them sitting on your tongue.

And for the first time, you're not sure you can keep them there. Not because you don’t know what they are anymore and it’s not because you’re unsure of the shape of them or the way they’ve been forming in your chest for far too long, but because holding them in now feels more painful than letting them go. It feels like standing on the edge of something you’ve been circling for months, maybe years, pretending you weren’t already halfway over it. Like your body has already decided what’s going to happen and your mind is just trying to delay the moment it becomes irreversible.

Rip the bandage .

Because once you say it, there’s no taking it back into the quiet. No stuffing it back into the old corners of your mind where you kept it folded up and small and manageable. Once it leaves you, it stops being something you can argue with privately. It becomes real in a way that has shape and weight and consequence, something Dick can hear and respond to and misunderstand or understand too well. And that is what makes it feel like your entire body is bracing for impact even though nothing has happened yet.

Rip the bandage .

Dick is still looking at you like he always does when he’s trying to reach you without pushing too hard. That steady kind of attention that used to feel like safety, like being held without being touched. It makes your chest ache now in a different way, because you can see how much of him is still here, how much warmth is still being offered to you so freely, and all you can think about is how unfair it feels that you’re standing in it while carrying something you’ve convinced yourself makes you unworthy of it.

The sun is still there.

That thought hits you again, sharp and unbearable in its simplicity. Dick Grayson is still the same person who pulled you out of all those darker places without even trying to make it sound like effort. He still looks at you like you are someone worth staying for, like you are not complicated in the ways you keep telling yourself you are. He is still your warmth, still the thing you orbit without meaning to, still the light you learned to breathe inside of.

And yet something in you keeps insisting you are not supposed to be this close to it.

That you’ve been standing too long in something you were never meant to deserve.

Rip the goddamn bandage .

Your throat tightens around the words before you can even consciously decide to speak. It feels less like a choice now and more like surrender, like your body is finally overriding everything you’ve been telling it to do for years. The fear doesn’t disappear, it just stops being strong enough to hold the words back.

Just fucking rip the bandage .

“I can’t—” you start, and your voice breaks before it can become anything stable, anything usable, anything that would make this easier.

Dick shifts immediately, like that alone is enough to pull all of his attention fully into you.

“Hey,” he says softly, not interrupting, just anchoring. Just waiting.

And that gentleness is what undoes you a little more.

Because you’ve imagined this moment so many times in your head, and never once has it included him sounding like that. Never once has it included him still being here with you, still soft, still close, still waiting instead of pulling away.

You swallow hard, but it doesn’t help.

“I’ve been trying not to say it,” you manage, and even that feels like too much already, like the sentence is already spilling out faster than you can control it, like you’re watching yourself from somewhere slightly outside your body and realizing there is no longer any way to stop this from becoming real.

Dick doesn’t move away. He doesn’t interrupt. He just listens, like he always does, like he always has. And that makes it worse in the most unbearable way, because you can feel how much he trusts you to finish.

So you do.

You start to pull the bandage off. And it hurts. But it’s too late to close it back up.

You let the words keep forming even though your chest feels like it’s collapsing inward with every syllable.

“It’s just… I don’t think I ever actually stopped feeling it,” you say, and your voice is shaking now in a way you can’t hide anymore, like your control has finally started to slip completely. “And I tried. I really did. I kept telling myself it was nothing, that it didn’t matter, that it would go away if I just ignored it long enough, but it didn’t. It just stayed there, like it was always going to stay there no matter how much I tried to make myself smaller around it.”

You dread the wound that’s underneath bandage .

Your breath stutters, and you hate how loud it sounds in the space between you.

“And I know how it sounds,” you continue, because now that it’s started, it won’t stop, it can’t stop, “I know it sounds like I should’ve dealt with it already, like it should’ve been simple to figure out or fix or whatever, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t make it disappear and I couldn’t make myself stop being scared of it either, because every time I thought about it I just kept thinking that maybe if I was wrong about myself, if I was just overthinking it, then I could still be normal.”

The word lands heavier than the rest.

Normal. Because normal was supposed to be simple. Normal was supposed to mean you didn’t sit here shaking while trying to explain yourself to the person you love most in the world. Normal was supposed to mean you didn’t have to analyze every piece of yourself like it was something dangerous. You finally force yourself to look at him.

And that’s what almost breaks you completely.

Because Dick doesn’t look angry. He doesn’t look disgusted. He doesn’t look his light is about to go out,

He just looks like he’s trying to understand something that hurts because it exists at all, not because it changes how he sees you.

And that realization makes your voice fall apart at the edges when you finally say it.

“I think I’m bisexual.”

You fucking ripped the godforsaken bandage .

You wait for the world to end.

Not dramatically. Not in any cinematic way where everything suddenly falls apart at once. It’s quieter than that, more internal, more familiar. It’s the kind of ending you’ve rehearsed so many times in your head that your body already knows the posture of it. The way your shoulders tense. The way your breathing goes shallow. The way your mind starts cataloguing what comes after, because it’s always assumed there will be an “after,” and it will be colder than what came before. The sun is about to stop shining. That thought doesn’t arrive as metaphor right now. It feels physical. Like something in the room has already begun dimming even though nothing has moved. Like warmth can leave a space before the source of it actually goes. You can almost feel it in advance, that imagined absence of Dick’s presence in your life, the way the world would look if you had just broken something irreversible without meaning to. If you had said too much. If you had revealed too much. If you had finally become too complicated to stay loved in the same way. That’s how your world ends. A cold, numb death.

You don’t even realize your hands are trembling until you try to clench them still.

“I didn’t mean for it to be like this,” you say, and your voice comes out strained, like it’s being pulled through something tight inside your chest. “I didn’t mean to make it weird or heavy or turn it into this whole thing, I just— I couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t know anymore.”

The words keep coming because silence feels worse. Because silence feels like waiting tbe judged. And your mind is already filling in what he hasn’t said yet. He’s confused. He’s overwhelmed. He’s realizing something changed. He’s realizing you changed.

“I know how it sounds,” you continue, and now it’s harder to breathe properly, because you can feel yourself slipping into the part of you that always does this, the part that tries to fix the reaction before it happens. “I know people are supposed to just… figure this out earlier or cleaner or whatever, but I didn’t. I didn’t have words for it for a long time and when I did I kept telling myself it didn’t matter and that it wasn’t true for me, because it was easier than admitting it did.”

You swallow, and it hurts.

“And I know you probably didn’t expect this from me,” you add, quieter now, almost apologetic just for taking up space in the conversation, “and I don’t expect you to just understand it, I just— I needed you to know because it was starting to feel like lying every time I didn’t say it.”

There’s a pause.

A real one. And in that pause your fear grows teeth again.

The silence that follows doesn’t feel empty anymore, not in the way it did before when it used to sound like something breaking. It feels heavier now, fuller, like the air itself has changed shape around what you said, like the room is still adjusting to the fact that something honest finally exists in it. You keep waiting for it to tip into something worse, for the shift you’ve been bracing for your entire life, for the moment where his expression finally turns into something you recognize as rejection.

The sun is about to stop shining.

You look at him then, finally, because not looking feels worse than seeing it happen.

But Dick doesn’t move away.

He just looks at you.

And then, slowly, like he’s making a decision about how to hold something delicate without dropping it, he exhales.

“I need you to listen to me,” he says quietly, not like an order, but like he’s asking for a space where he can make sure you actually hear him without your fear translating everything into something harsher than it is. “Not to respond. Not to explain. Just… listen for a second.”

Your throat tightens, but you nod anyway.

Because you don’t know what else to do with yourself. Because this is the part where things usually end.

Dick shifts slightly closer, not closing distance in a way that traps you, just enough that he’s fully here with you, fully present in a way that makes it impossible to pretend you’re alone in this moment, or tune him out.

“When you told me,” he starts carefully, “that you’re bisexual… I think what I heard you say was something about yourself being wrong. Or confusing. Or like it changes something fundamental about whether you deserve to be loved the way you are.”

He pauses, watching your face, like he’s checking whether he’s close.

And you don’t say anything, because you are.

“I need to tell you something really clearly,” he continues, voice steady but softer now, “that has nothing to do with fixing you or correcting you or anything like that. It’s just… truth. The kind of truth I wish someone had told me earlier in my life when I was trying to figure out who I was without feeling like I was failing at it.”

That makes something in your chest shift. Because you didn’t expect that. You didn’t expect him to include himself in this.

“I’m not straight in the way people assume— no one really is—” he says, and he doesn’t hesitate on the words, doesn’t make them smaller or lighter than they are. “And I’m not anything neatly boxed either. I’ve had feelings I didn’t understand for a long time. I’ve questioned myself more than once. I’ve stood in the middle of things and thought, ‘What does this make me?’ and the honest answer was always… I don’t know yet.”

Your breath catches slightly.

Dick watches that reaction, then continues anyway, grounding you with how normal he makes it sound.

“And what I’ve learned,” he says, “is that most people are like that. Not just in sexuality, but in everything that has to do with love and attraction and connection. We grow up wanting answers that are clean and final because it makes us feel safe, like we can label ourselves and be done with it. But people don’t really work like that. There isn’t a switch that flips where you become ‘fully one thing’ and stay there perfectly forever.”

His gaze doesn’t leave you.

“There’s a spectrum,” he says simply. “Not as a buzzword. Not as something vague. Just… the reality that attraction, love, identity, all of it exists in a wide space. Some people sit in one place on it their whole lives. Some people move. Some people don’t understand where they are until they’re already living it.”

Your throat tightens again, but this time it isn’t panic.

It’s something else.

Something quieter.

Because you’re looking down at the wound that was under your bandage, and there’s nothing. No blood. No scratches. Just… healed skin…

“I need you to hear this part especially,” he adds, and his voice drops just slightly. “There is no version of you that was supposed to be ‘normal’ in the way you’re using that word. There isn’t a checklist you failed. There isn’t a right answer you missed. There’s just you. Figuring yourself out in real time like everyone else is, whether they admit it or not.”

The word “normal” lands differently when he says it.

Not like a standard.

Like something that doesn’t actually exist in the way you’ve been measuring yourself against it.

He leans forward a little more, elbows resting loosely on his knees, hands relaxed, like he’s trying to keep everything about him open instead of overwhelming.

“And love,” he says quietly, “is not something that gets smaller or less real because of who it’s directed toward. It’s not conditional on you fitting into some idea of what you’re supposed to be. It’s not something you have to earn by being uncomplicated.”

Your eyes sting again, but you don’t look away.

“I love you,” he continues, and it’s not dramatic, not sudden, just steady in a way that feels like it’s always been there and will keep being there whether you’re panicking or not. “Not because you’re easy to understand. Not because you fit into something predictable. I love you because you’re you. And that hasn’t changed.”

Your chest tightens so hard it almost hurts. Dick’s voice softens further, like he’s trying to undo years of something in you he didn’t cause but is still choosing to help carry.

“And I need you to stop treating what you just told me like it’s something that puts you outside of being loved,” he says. “Because it doesn’t. It’s just a part of who you are. A real part. A valid part. Not something shameful. Not something you owe anyone an apology for.”

That word—apology—makes your stomach twist automatically.

Because you’ve already apologized in your head a hundred times.

For existing like this. For saying it. For not being simpler.

“And before you even go there,” he adds gently, “there is no guilt here. Not from me. Not from you. Not from this. You didn’t do anything wrong by being who you are. You didn’t do anything wrong by realizing it. And you definitely didn’t do anything wrong by telling me.”

A pause.

His gaze holds yours, steady and unwavering.

“You’re allowed to exist without punishment,” he says quietly. “You’re allowed to be figuring yourself out without it meaning you’ve broken something. And you’re allowed to love who you love, in whatever way that happens for you, without it turning into something you have to be ashamed of.”

Dick’s hand reaches for yours.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says finally, softer again. “Not because I have to prove something, but because there’s nothing about this that makes me want to leave. If anything, it just makes me understand you more. And I love you more honestly for it, not less.”

The words settle in the room differently now.

And for the first time since you spoke, the sun doesn’t feel like it’s about to disappear.

It feels like it’s resparkling your entire life. Like everything finally has color again. That’s what love is, isn’t it? It’s all the shades of you and who you love. No color is normal. They’re all unique. They all fill your life with warmth and joy. And for the first time ever, you understand why Dick is your sunshine. It’s because love is sunshine, no matter who you love.

The next morning, you wake slowly beneath a patch of warm sunlight spilling through the curtains. For a few disoriented moments, you remain tangled in blankets and sleep, suspended between yesterday and today, between the version of yourself that had spent years carrying a secret and the version that had finally spoken it aloud. The memory returns gradually. The confession. The tears. The shaking in your hands. The way your voice had broken around words that had lived inside your chest for so long they almost felt permanent. The fear comes back too, though weaker now, stripped of the power it once held. Yesterday, you had stood in front of Dick convinced honesty would cost you everything. Instead, he had listened. He had stayed. He had taken every horrible thing you believed about yourself and treated it with more kindness than you had ever offered it.

You roll over instinctively, expecting to find him asleep beside you, but his side of the bed is empty. The blankets are still messy from where he had been, the pillow dented beneath the imprint of his head, but he is gone. A faint frown pulls at your eyebrows as you sit up. The apartment is unusually quiet, though not completely silent. Somewhere in the distance, you hear movement. A cabinet door. A muffled thud. The sound of someone trying very hard not to make noise and failing. Then something else catches your attention.

The apartment smells sweet. Not breakfast sweet. Not coffee sweet. Sugar sweet. Vanilla sweet. The kind of smell that belongs in bakeries and birthday parties and childhood afternoons spent licking frosting from mixing spoons. Curiosity pulls you out of bed.

The sunlight follows you into the hallway, warming the hardwood floors beneath your feet. The apartment feels different this morning. Lighter somehow. As though yesterday opened a window you didn't realize had been shut for years. Nothing around you has changed, and yet everything feels brighter. The air feels easier to breathe. The walls feel less confining. Even the sunlight streaming through the apartment seems warmer than usual, spreading itself across every surface in long golden stretches.

As you approach the kitchen, the sweet smell grows stronger. You round the corner and stop immediately.

Dick is standing in the middle of the kitchen with frosting on his face.

There is frosting on his cheek. More frosting on one hand. A suspicious amount of frosting on his shirt. The kitchen itself looks like it survived a small baking-related disaster. There is powdered sugar on the counter. A mixing bowl sits abandoned beside the sink. A spatula has somehow ended up on the opposite side of the room entirely. And directly in front of him, sitting proudly in the center of the counter as though it belongs in a museum, is a cake.

A very homemade cake.

The frosting is uneven. One side leans slightly lower than the other. The piping looks like it fought for its life. Across the top sits a large yellow sun made of icing that is unmistakably supposed to be a sun despite looking only vaguely circular. Around it are several sunflowers, each one slightly different from the last, their petals uneven and imperfect and completely impossible to mistake for anything other than something made with love.

Dick notices you standing there and immediately lights up.

"There you are," he says, sounding absurdly pleased with himself.

You stare at him. Then at the cake. Then at the frosting on his face. Then back at him. His grin widens. The longer you stare, the more satisfied he seems.

"What did you do?" you finally ask.

"I created art," he replies confidently.

Your eyes drift back toward the cake. The sun is crooked. One sunflower appears to have significantly more petals than the others. Another looks slightly concerned about its own existence. The entire thing is so objectively terrible that you can feel laughter threatening before you've even fully processed what you're looking at.

"Dick."

"Yes?"

"The sun is leaning."

"The sun is dynamic."

"It looks drunk."

His offended gasp echoes dramatically through the kitchen.

"You are so unbelievably uncultured."

The laugh escapes before you can stop it. It starts small. Then it grows. Just like flowers when they’re offered sunlight. Then suddenly you're laughing hard enough to have tears gathering in the corners of your eyes.

Dick points triumphantly.

"There it is."

"What?"

"That laugh."

His voice softens slightly.

"I've missed hearing that laugh."

Dick's expression changes as he watches you. The teasing remains, but beneath it sits something gentler. He glances at the cake and then back at you.

"I know yesterday was hard."

The kitchen suddenly feels very still. Sunlight pours through the windows behind him, wrapping itself around his shoulders like gold.

Dick leans against the counter, crossing his arms loosely.

"I know you've probably spent a really long time carrying all of that around by yourself. Longer than I can even understand." His eyes remain fixed on yours. "And I know one conversation doesn't magically make years of guilt disappear. I know it probably doesn't feel fixed."

Dick smiles softly.

"But I wanted you to wake up to something good."

You feel your eyes sting and he notices immediately. His expression softens even more.

"I wanted the first morning after telling somebody to be a happy one."

The tears come then.

And its because you're devastated or overwhelmed. It’s because you’ve never seen it that way before. Not as a burden or a confession but as something deserving of happiness. As something deserving of sunshine.

Dick takes a small step closer.

"I was proud of you yesterday."

The tears spill over. His voice remains gentle.

"I'm still proud of you."

You shake your head automatically, years of insecurity responding before logic can catch up.

Dick immediately notices.

"No."

The word is quiet but firm.

"No, we're not doing that."

A watery laugh escapes you.

His expression remains stubborn.

"You don't get to tell me how I feel."

"Dick—"

"I'm serious."

The morning sunlight catches in his eyes.

"You spent years being scared of something that was never wrong in the first place. You spent years convincing yourself that a part of you made you less deserving of love. Then yesterday you looked me in the eye and told me anyway."

His smile returns.

"That's brave."

Your throat hurts. Everything hurts. But in the way a healing bruise hurts. The kind that reminds you recovery is happening.

Dick gestures dramatically toward the cake.

"Therefore, cake."

You laugh through your tears.

He gestures again.

"And sunflowers."

You look down.

Only now do you notice the bouquet sitting beside the cake. Bright yellow sunflowers. Your favorite.

"I knew those would work."

"You got me flowers?"

"Obviously."

The answer comes as though the alternative would have been absurd.

A smile finally pulls across your face.

Dick relaxes slightly when he sees it, as though that expression alone was worth the entire disaster currently occupying his kitchen.

The sunlight continues spilling through the windows, filling every corner of the room with warmth. It catches on the yellow petals of the sunflowers. It glows against the frosting sun sitting crookedly atop the cake. It wraps around Dick as he stands there smiling at you with icing still smeared across his face.

For years, you thought sunshine was something fragile. Something you had to earn. Something that would disappear the moment somebody saw all of you.

Instead, it is standing in front of you holding flowers.

It is covered in frosting.

And it spent half the night making a terrible cake just to make you smile.

That’s when you realize, everyone deserves love, no matter what shade it’s in. No matter how they express it. Everyone needs sunshine. Everyone needs love. Everyone deserves sunshine, and so do you

Hi guys! So I just wanted to say sum stuff! First of all, happy pride month! Second of all, I am so proud of every single person who has come out, and every single person who hasn’t. I feel like we’ve really just pressured everyone to stick by a label. I suppose one of the reasons I’m too afraid to admit my sexuality to myself is because of this. Once I admit it, I’m stuck this way. And it’s so hard because we should all be able to accept ourselves. I’ve learned that sexuality isn’t one firm position. We’re all in a vast space, constantly moving and changing. And love, at the end of the day is love! Everyone deserves sunshine.☀️ 💛🧡

Taglist: @leovaldez0924 @newangelle @pxrcyjcksons @rani1028 @maradcrs @purelypersistenttribe @cecillia-stuff @sarahskywalker-amidala @starrydustedwinter @brucewayneisavirgin @idkwhattosaynowsorry @sexy-sadie-6505

[sakunai]

puerto rican [nuyorican] jason ! as your boyfie. pairing ! jason todd x fem!reader wc ! 1.8k warnings ! fluff to smut. sub!jason. handjob. slight orgasm denial. cum eating. based on these requests and ii. 📓 i really yapped alot on this one y’all my apologies 🙏🏾

art creds : @/realstickii

now playing ! bellacoso — residente & bad bunny 🎧

newyorican! bf jason who grew up around noise. his childhood was loud, sometimes a little messy, dodging cops in Crime Alley but always making it back to his block just in time for somebody’s abuela to call out to him from a window with a jace, come! pastelillos! it’s one of the few fond memories he has, that he was never hungry for long and he never ate alone.

newyorican! bf jason who by extension is naturally a good cook. most of his memories are of tightly packed kitchens at somebody’s house where by the sweat of his brow and a million whacks with a wooden spoon in the hands of somebody’s tía that’s now his tía, he learned.

newyorican! bf jason whose love language is food. he’s an absolute monster in the kitchen, makes the best pernil in gotham and will brag about it because that shit falls off the bone, tendernism! if you’re sick, he’s cooking. you’re sad? he’s cooking. sigh a little bit too loud and he’s already grabbing the pots. he doesn’t play about sunday dinners. he will do meal prep the night before if he needs to. he’s usually the one with random cravings in the middle of the night, so you will be woken up and offered food.

newyorican! bf jason whose texts you can expect like clockwork when he’s out on patrol.

Today, 9:54 PM

jacey 💋 :

mamisota

did you eat yet?

love you ❤️

Today, 9:55 PM

you :

yeah, i got something earlier dw

stay safe, love you too ❤️

Today, 9:57 PM

jacey 💋 :

⤷ replied to you : ‘yeah, i got something earlier dw’

real food?

you :

… i mean, it was takeout so, i think?

jacey 💋 :

put some coffee on and wait for me, i’ll come make u something after

newyorican! bf jason whose love for food — the patience when it comes to preparation, the pride when you compliment him or go for seconds — transfers to his relationship with you. he’s attentive, noticing your every need like when he’s frying plantains and has to make sure they don’t burn. he’s devoted, you’re his only one, his girl, the one that feels like home, so he brings you café con leche in the mornings from his favorite spot with a spoon of condensed milk and a splash of vanilla just like he used to do for his mom. he feeds your body, and your soul.

newyorican! bf jason who understands way more spanish than he speaks. his grammar is bad and he forgets words — he’ll switch to spanish halfway in a sentence only when a word clicks or nod along to someone’s fast paced spanish and respond completely in english. he murmurs diablo, puñeta, me jodí, me mamé at every minor inconvenience though. you learn quickly the difference between cabrón and cabrón.

newyorican! bf jason whose spanglish really does kick in when he’s stressed, tired or worse, turned on. he calls you everything from the classic mi amor and mami to mi vida, mi diosa, and bebesota with that low, needy voice. your name is not even uttered after the first few weeks.

newyorican! bf jason who teaches you slang thinking it’ll be a cute little inside joke but you end up unironically using it against him. suddenly you’re calling him a lambe bicho in his own house.

newyorican! bf jason who is sooo easy to ragebait. call him a no sabo kid please. say something exaggerated and pronounced incorrectly i beg you.

“holaaa,” you drawl, sidestepping him where jason stood in the kitchen, back hunched over the stove and tongue peeking out in concentration — that task at hand being : watch the plantains fry in the pot. “bueños días.”

“stop,” he grumbles, side eyeing you then looking back to the pan. “it’s nine in the morning, please.”

“que paso, handsome?” your arms slip around his middle as you curl up into his side. “i’m gonna burn the plantains again, shoo,” jason complained, bumping you with his hip and you whined.

“my pretty boy’s so mean to me....” you sigh dramatically, then press a kiss to the side of his jaw with a mischievous hum. “but so handsome... muy guapo.” the uptick of his mouth into a little smile gives him away before he turns to you and meets your lips in a sweet kiss, melting immediately at the praise.

the smell of the plantains breaks the moment. “puñeta— the fucking things are burning—!”

newyorican! bf jason who hates silence. he grew up around noise, loud laughter, even louder conversations where everybody talks at once, kids screaming so loud you could hear them from the other end of the block. and music, so much music. he’s playing music while he cleans his guns, mouthing along to the lyrics, while he cooks.

newyorican! bf jason who sings. sings in the shower, randomly bursts out into a song for no reason, makes up random lyrics on the spot, serenades you (badly) and who thinks singing is the solution to get your attention, especially when you’re mad at him. you’re giving him the silent treatment after he pissed you off and the moment you come out of the bathroom he’s on his knees singing, “pleaaaseeee, ohh-ohhh, won’t do it agaaiiin, pleaaaaseeee— give me one more chaaance—”

newyorican! bf jason who swears he doesn’t dance, but once there’s any sort of rhythm, he’s twirling you in his arms and pulling you into his chest for a slow dance, murmuring praises in your ear, oh his beautiful girl...

newyorican! bf jason who falls apart under your touch everytime, and you can’t help but love how scatterbrained he gets when it comes to you.

“Thaaat’s it, look at me in my eyes while I fuck you, baby.”

Jason’s head fell back against the couch at your words, his chest heaving. The moonlight made the walls of his apartment glow crimson, lighting the sheen of sweat on his tan skin, dark curls sticking to his forehead.

His thighs were spread wide, shirt unbuttoned at the front where the heatweave hit him the most during tonight’s blackout, and his jeans shoved down just enough for your hand to work him properly.

“Fuck… baby, just like that,” he groaned, voice rough as your fist twisted around the head of his swollen cock on the upstroke, slick with his own spit and precum, stroking him just how you knew he liked it. “God, you feel so good… shit, it’s so fuckin’ sensitive.”

“Mhm?” You grinned wolfishly, your fingertips smearing the stringy mess of arousal all over the tip of him, and he twitched in your hand as you picked up the pace again. “I said look at me,” you demanded, your other hand grasping his jaw and a whimper left his throat.

“Christ— okay, I’m looking—” his eyes, all glazed over and watery, his eyelashes fluttering, threatening to fall closed with ecstasy stared up at where you straddled his lap with ease. “Just keep doing that, baby, please…”

You squeezed his throbbing cock in your fist once, then twice, and started stroking him faster, the slick, wet sounds of flesh on flesh echoing in the room. “You’re so good when you want it this bad,” you giggled.

Jason’s abs flexed hard, his thighs trembling.

“Ah—ay, fuck!” he hissed, eyes squeezing shut, his hips bucking up without meaning to. “Así, así, así… fuuuck—just like that, ma.” Jason’s hand shot down to grip your wrist, his mind dizzy from the stimulation as his hips fucked up into your fist desperately, chasing it. “Jesus— fuck, you have me talkin’ Spanish—”

“Didn’t I tell you to do something?” You leaned in, your lips brushing the side of his jaw. He let out a broken moan as his eyes opened again, and this time you leaned down to kiss him, his shoulders trembling with each moan released against your lips.

“You’re driving me crazy—” His voice cracked, his other hand moving to grip the back of your neck to steady himself, as if he was on the verge of passing out. “Oh fuck— shit, wait, that’s too much—”

“Shh, take it,” You twisted your wrist slower, up then down, then right over the head again, thumb pressing against that sensitive spot underneath that made him see stars, and he let out a wrecked sound that went straight between your legs.

“Don’t do this to me— please, please, I’m so fuckin’ close—”

“Oh, my big man,” you cooed, a glint of amusement in your eyes. “Say it properly.”

“Me estás matando…” Jason laughed breathlessly, the sound turning into a broken moan as you squeezed him tighter. “Do you wanna kill me? Is that it—”

You kissed him soft and sweet, and he melted against your lips, up until you stroked him faster again, and he shivered from the sudden stimulation just before you withdrew your hand completely, his cock slapping against his stomach with neglect.

“Mamisota…” he whined.

You hissed your teeth at him. “Beg, properly.”

“I’ll be good, I’ll be so fuckin’ good, I swear,” he whimpered, the words slipping out shaky and desperate. His hips twitched, trying to fuck up against your palm, but you only barely grazed his leaky cock with your fingertips. “No me hagas esto… I’m so close already. Please, please, I’m begging you. I need to cum so bad—”

You sighed long and low, feigning annoyance as you granted him mercy. “You’re lucky you sound so pretty…” you grumbled, taking him in your fist again, your palm hot and soft around his aching cock and the feel of you made his eyes water.

“Coño… fuck—” He forced his eyes to stay open and locked on you, as he stroked the short hairs at the nape of your neck. “I’m— yeah, like that— I’m right there— let me cum, please…”

“Cum for me…” you whispered against his ear. “You can do it, it’s okay. I want you to, baby.”

Jason’s head snapped back again, eyes squeezing shut momentarily before his eyes went wide followed by a string of guttural groans. “Oh my God— fuck, mami, I’m gonna cum!” He held you tight against his chest as hips stuttered hard, thighs shaking and cock pulsing violently in your hand as he reached his peak.

Thick ropes of cum spilled over your fist, coating your fingers, dripping down the length of his shaft and he buried his face in your hair, cursing under his breath as his body jerked with every pulse until he was completely spent.

When he finally sagged against the couch, chest still rising and falling fast, he looked at you with a lazy, fucked-out grin, seizing your messy hand by the wrist and bringing it to his mouth.

“Yo voy pa’ encimotaaa,” he sang, voice hoarse and you burst out laughing, watching as he took your fingers into his mouth, licking each of them clean. Then he tugged you in for a messy kiss, singing against your lips once more, “Baby, estás buenotaaa—”

“Enough, oh my gosh…” you guffawed, hiding your face in his neck.

Jason huffed a laugh. “Give me three minutes, I’ll deal with you.”

newyorican! bf jason who is utterly whipped for you.

🗒️ tagging : @unicvnthlle who requested . browser & scroll dividers by @/honeyluvsw, chain divider by @/chrisssiren, art by @/realstickii on x

[dictearchive]

[kosmogrl]

nevermind , nevermind, nevermind, I'll forget about it. I'll be good, I'll be fine, I can laugh about it

[glittercupcakeunicornpuppy]

gay person: i’m gay

society: ok

your strange vaguely bisexual friend you try to ignore: hey have you read the secret history yet

[vianawaits]

Lime Sorbet

Summary & CW:  hurt/comfort, angst (minimal), friends w/ benefits, mentions of suggestive content, protective & pining wally, fem!reader, Hal is kinda a dick (sorry), second person, no use of y/n

Pairing: Wally West x Green Lantern!Reader

Word Count: 2.4k

A/N: Another piece out the Kiln! Please just role with this one, I couldn’t think of specifics (and it ran away from me.... again). Thank you to @bloomcissaa for this request I had so much fun with it. I hope you all enjoy :)

The gravel in your boots was about to be your final straw.

The mission, to put it shortly, was a shit show. It actually went so horrifically, that JLA stepped in.

Safe to say, they were less than pleased, especially Hal.

John was still helping with clean up when he approached. Your back leaning on the cold glass pane of one of the few untouched buildings, it was a nice sensation on your sweaty back.

“Kid,” he sighs pinching his nose. “What the hell was that?”

“Save it Hal,” today had been enough of an ass whooping, you didn’t need this too. “I’m not in the mood.”  

That did it.

“Well, get in the mood.” His voice stern. He just flew across the country to find the city half destroyed. When Barry called him, his heart dropped to his stomach, petrified that something happened. As much as he tried not to intervene on Titan’s business, he worried about you. “You think I was ever spared a lecture in the air force? ‘Cause I can assure  you right now that I wasn’t, so lose the attitude.”

Hal was a good mentor, most of the time. At first, he was great. He was kind of like the fun uncle who lets you do stuff behind your mom’s back. But recently, you both were giving Ollie and Roy a run for their money on most unstable mentor-protégé relationship. It was a lot of fighting, not listening to each other, fully lashing out, that always ended with  a screaming fit and not speaking for a few days. Hal always caved first and sent you salt water taffy as an apology.

Someone was going to have to tell him that no one but him liked that shit.

The whole situation was weighing on you more than you let on. Leaving Coastal City put a strain on your relationship. The dynamic was shifting, slowly out growing your role as his protégé and into your own person. He struggled accepting it, whether he wanted to admit it or not. He still thought of you as a kid, his kid more specifically.

Hal couldn’t figure out where all the time went. He doesn’t understand how you went from that thirteen year old kid with big eyes and a ring, to the lady you turned into. He could still picture the way you used to look at him, as if he’d hung the sun in the sky. You rarely pushed back with him, and now it was all you were doing.

Hal was still staring at you, the white lens of the mask narrowing at your frame. Thankfully, your mask hid the eye roll, but it didn’t disguise the scoff.

“Here we go again.” You mutter under your breath, your arms crossing over your chest.

“Oh don’t start,” his finger points at you, right under your chin. “You can say whatever bullshit you want about me, but you have to stay focused when you’re out there.”

“I was.”

“Really? Is that why you decimated three buildings, that ended up shutting down six roads and costing people their jobs.” His voice rose to the point that the rest of the titans and the JLA were slowly turning in your direction.

For the first time all day, it was silent.

Your tongue poked at the inside of your cheek, heat rushing to your face.

“Shit happens okay.” Your voice barely audible.

“I know shit happens, but that- what happened today- can’t. There was absolutely no reason for that to have occurred.”  The worst part? He wasn’t wrong. “You want to bitch and moan at me? Fine, go crazy. But it can’t affect your performance with the team. As pissed off as you make me, it doesn’t affect mine. So do whatever it is you need to do to pull your head out of your ass.”

Truly, you hated the damn domino mask they made you wear with the whole Green Lantern get up. Right now though, it was a saving grace. Your only vice, was that you cried when Hal got angry. Had it been anyone else, they would have been told to fuck off and you would’ve forgotten about it in an hour. It was different with him. He was one of the most important people in your life, one of the few paternal figures who didn’t let you down.

Hal Jordan for all his flaws, always showed up. He was there when you needed him and when you didn’t. He came to every awards assembly in school, he showed up to graduation, he bought you birthday presents, he taught you how to drive. So when he got upset, you really didn’t know what to do with it.

You did what you did best, you fought back.

“Hey man, lay off.”

Both your heads snap in the direction of the voice. There was no question who it was, your heart recognizing the midwestern accent before you finished turning.

Wally West.

If it wasn’t for the way his jaw clenched and how he was staring daggers at your mentor, you would’ve constructed a cage with your ring and thrown him halfway across the world.

His lips were pressed thin and his throat bobbed when he met Hal’s gaze, not even sparing you a glance. Barry stepped up behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Silently signaling to him to back down.

He didn’t let up.

Wally West was nothing if not loyal.

It was frustrating at times, he got way too involved. Wally was actually the first one to notice when things started going downhill. He didn’t say anything at first, his actions speaking for him. It was subtle, he started cracking more jokes to get a laugh out of you, picking up your favorite food on the way back to the tower, letting you pick the what to watch on movie nights. Things you shouldn’t have noticed, but did.

Eventually, he finally ended up asking you about it. He could only keep his curiosity at bay for so long. You brushed it the first few times, telling him it was nothing. Until one day, he caught you in the wake of a screaming match.

You had just popped the third punching bag of the hour, tears streaming down your face. Then one thing led to another, and well, Wally was helping you let off some steam.

In the shower.

Was sleeping with your teammate the healthiest coping mechanism? Definitely not. Was it your favorite? 100%

Hal looks like he was seconds away from making  a noose for him. Barry’s grip tightened on Wally’s shoulder, Hal noticed and turned away from the young speedster. Both of you engaged in another game of eye contact that was about to implode the city.

“We’ll continue this later,” he grits out. “For now, go back to the tower and think about today.”

“You know you can’t tell me what to do right?”

That’s when John floats down behind him. One look from him shuts you up completely. It was hardly visible, the shake of his head he gave you. He knew where the line was, and always advised you when not to cross it.

Hal, like you, was exhausted. Leaving without a word, he flies back to finish the last tasks for damage control, John closely behind. Alone with nothing but the eyes of your teammates and their mentors, you meet Wally’s gaze.

His cowl didn’t have slits covering his eyes. The bright green was drilling into you fiercely. He didn’t miss the way your mask narrowed, already knowing why you were upset.

He’s already expecting the curses you’re going to bark at him when he’s buried in you later. There was nothing you hated more than people getting involved, fighting your battles for you. One thing Wally did know though, was you hated people seeing you cry. And he knew where this was headed- it was going to blow up, and bad.

He inhales sharply when you shake your head at him, stalking off in the opposite direction of the other Green Lanterns. His eyes land on your fingers, noticing how you used your thumbs to crack your knuckles or how you used it to twist the ring around.

He didn’t know when it happened, when he started picking up on the small fidgets you did when you were upset.

“Let her go, she’s going to need a few minutes.”

Barry’s voice tears him from your frame, a knowing look lingering in his eyes.

Wally never told him anything, but it was obvious to everyone that he was in love with you. You were all he talked about in the early days of the Titans. From the moment you both started doing whatever it was you were doing, Barry noticed the change in his character.

The way he no longer tried to impress you, but protect you instead. How he gravitated to you in every room. How he didn’t laugh with you, but watched the way your eyes crinkled instead. What finally gave him away was the smallest thing. Wally was jumpy, he was always moving, never staying still. It was after a mission that Barry and Batman joined on two months ago. Wally was in the first group to make it back, you were in the last. It wasn’t until he saw you alive and healthy, that for the first time in his life, Wally West sat still.

That’s when Barry noticed that he was always still around you. You brought him a peace that he’d never known, it was as if his mind finally shut up. For how fast he was, there was a deep desire to slow down when he was with you, absorb every moment. Every second with you was a blessing he’d thank the universe for. Every smile, every annoyed look or breathless laugh- every night you spent together, they were all treasured in a corner of his heart that was reserved for you.

It’s why he never backed down,

And why he didn’t now.

He gave you an hour to cool down.

You were sat on the edge of a barrier, staring into the bay. Your legs were kicking in front of you and your arms were parallel at your side, gripping the cement. Feeling the woosh of air you had grown accustomed to this past few month, you peered up from your depressing reflection in the water to the human incarnate of sunshine.

His red hair was curling around his forehead as his chest rose quickly to catch his breath. His smile was almost shy, the dimple on his right cheek amplifying his freckles.

The most damned part of the scene was what he had in his hands.

Strawberry ice cream in one, and lime sorbet in the other.

You huff out a laugh, “you gotta let the green thing go West.”

He shrugs and hands you the melting sorbet. “It fits.”

The plastic spoon pokes at the sorbet for a minute while he drops down next to you. His feet kicking alongside yours as he starts to inhale the strawberry ice cream.

“You didn’t have to do that back there,” your throat bobs as you swallow heavily. “I can handle Hal.”

“I know.” He doesn’t hesitate, his voice light. Licking the spoon clean he stick it back in the cup, resting it on the cement next to him.

“Then why’d you do it.” Your tongue swipes at your lowers lips. The nerves dancing around in your stomach drying them out.

Turning in your direction again, your breath catches in your throat. The sun was starting to set and the pinks hues of the sky were lighting his face so beautifully, it made your heart ache. He truly put every work of art in The Louvre to shame. No DaVinici or Michelangelo could create a piece that can compete with the look Wally West gave you when you had his undivided attention.

“Because I care.” For someone who loved the sound of their voice so much, he summarized his feelings in such little words that it confused you. “I also didn’t think you wanted the rest of the team to watch Hal shit a brick.”

Rolling your eyes, you look back out at the bay. “Hal’s just upset because he and Carol are having problems. He’s horny, frustrated, and annoyed that he can’t boss me around anymore.”

Wally just hums at that. If you wanted to lie to yourself tonight, he’d help. You didn’t have to confront this right away anyway, everyone was exhausted.

“It’s not your fault you know.”

Your eyebrows knit together. Falling into temptation, you spare him another glance. “What?”

“The buildings, it wasn’t your fault.” His eyes are so earnest that you almost fall apart. Your breath comes out rough and uneven.

“It kinda was.”

“Maybe a bit, but collateral always happens.” He takes your spoon, scooping from the cup and eating some of the lime sorbet. “He wasn’t there, don’t let him be too hard on you. You saved that kid and the buildings were already evacuated.”

It frustrated you when he did this- when he became a person to you. He was supposed to be Wally, the funny one, the good fuck, the guy who ate your food. But recently, he turned into your rock. He was the person you leaned on, the one who knew everything before you said it, the one who always knew exactly what you needed.

He double dipped the spoon into your sorbet, and your face contorted in disgust. “Hey- that’s gross Wally.”

He freezes, his nose centimeters from yours with a dropped jaw.

“I was literally inside of you last night, and you’re gonna complain about this?” He deadpans.

You shove his face with your palm and he laughs. The sound is so magical that goosebumps rise on your arm, and a smile pulls at your lips. Before pulling back, he catches your wrist. The pads of his fingers are warm, a nice contrast to the breeze. Bringing your right hand back to his face, he drops a kiss to your pulse point, then the center of your palm, to each finger, and lastly, your ring.

Each time his lips met your skin it was a promise. An oath that he’d always be here, however you wanted him. Whether you wanted to kiss him until he didn’t know his name, or a movie marathon till 3 in the morning, or just someone to have a silent meal with. He was irrevocably and unapologetically yours.

Maybe sleeping with your teammate wasn’t the worst decision you’d made after all.

•───────•°•♡•°•───────•

All: @gglouise23 @demigod-jack-hearth @batslilwhore @t1mbits @princessak @slut4hotppl @bat1nsignia @starr-jazz @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger @mystiquevoid @patientofarkhamasylum @darkxwolfsstuff @starkkat @loserinadress Wally West: @celestialnightwing @clownstheyreeverywhere @currentblasphemy

[sakunai]

DON’T SLAM DOORS, MIRRORS WILL BREAK

jason todd has a thing about doors. pairing ! jason todd x fem!reader wc ! 7.2k warnings ! jason’s childhood is a content warning of its own so yeah, we delve into that. piv unprotected sex + clothed cunnilingus + switch jason if you squint. 🗒️ first fic back kinda nervy ... also my dividers dont work and ive got an exam so enjoy triple em dash dividers im so sorry 😭 now playing ! frankie’s first affair — sade 🎧

“Ma?” Jason’s voice came out meek, hesitant, the words simmering in his throat as the music on the television swelled to a crescendo, a car horn coming from the darkness beyond the grand nothingness that was the little apartment in Crime Alley.

The television was louder than usual, though he didn’t remember being the one to turn it up. He couldn’t remember if he fell asleep on the couch watching cartoons past his bedtime again.

Winter came a little earlier that year with frost caked on the edges of the windows where the newspaper couldn’t quite pad thick enough. The house smelled of cola and leftover lasagna, his favorite, because when Ma made it, it tasted more like heaven than lasagna and went down clean to put him asleep with three bites maximum. He’s never really had much of an appetite, he thought — the nurse at the clinic said that was a bad sign for a boy his age, but he figured what’s the use? Ma had to eat too, and he was the man of the house. He didn’t mind.

The ceiling fan squeaked on its screws and his stubby little-boy fingers curled into shaky fists by his sides as he slipped off the couch, his bare feet flat against chilly hardwood.

The television. Ma never liked it when it was too loud, says it’s impolite and inconsiderate. But from where he was standing in the living room, he could only stare up at the remote on the kitchen counter — the extended half-wall he’d crouch behind during hide and seek — Ma’s favorite game. He was always so good at games. She could never find him there. Sometimes, little Jay would kneel down behind that shabby little counter for hours and Ma still wouldn’t find him.

“My brave boy,” she’d say when she finally scooped him up into her arms. “You’re a winner, Jay. Don’t you forget.” Except now he felt like a loser. What could he do? The counter was just too tall!

It played on still, the cartoon.

That evil Mumm-Ra was messing around with the Thundercats’ dreams, making them all so scared of falling asleep. Jason was scared all of a sudden, and his eyes darted towards the darkened hallway, his lips twitching into something between a frown and a quiver. His stomach felt all kinds of funny but the cartoon kept playing so loud and he still hadn’t heard his mother call out at him to turn it down.

“Ma?” He called again, shoulders trembling from the weakness of his voice. No, he wasn’t some scaredy cat! But he kept looking down the dark hallway that led to Ma’s room, right where the door was shut like a great big iron gate in front of a haunted house. Jason was afraid.

He thought of how frightened Ma must be in there if she hadn’t come out to yell at him about his noisy cartoon. What if Ma had some evil guy like Mumm-Ra messing around with her dreams? He had to do something!

With a gulp, he straightened his shoulders and wiped his hands over his pajama pants. They were sweating, and he was about to do something very important, so he had to prepare.

He imagined he was Lion-O with his powerful Sword of Omens, gearing himself up to save his Thundercats from the evil clutches of Mumm-Ra.

Down the hallway he went, unafraid of the dark because it’s never the dark that hurts you, it’s the power company who makes it dark that’s scary. Nothing’s scarier than those awful, ugly red words in block letters stamped on envelopes and slipped under the door. Overdue and Eviction. Jason wondered if that’s what happened again to make Ma hide from him.

It would be fine though, because he was always good at games. He was a winner. He was brave. He would save his Momma from whatever trapped her in her room.

The doorknob was only a little bit higher than his head. “Ma,” he called, stronger now and nearly fearless. With a tiny fist he rapped against the door, one knock then two and third.

She didn’t answer. Jason’s heart started to beat faster, and he pressed his ear against the solid door, eyebrows scrunching when there was no sound on the other side. All he could hear was Lion-O with his magic sword on the television.

“Momma,” his voice was a whisper, like if he told her a secret she might open the door just for him.

“Ma!” He shouted, cupping the other ear to block out the noise, but no matter how loud he shouted or how hard he listened, with his eyes closed or with them open, with his brows knitted or with the relaxed, there was nothing but silence on the other side.

Jason was afraid. He looked at the doorknob again as if it would bite him.

He knew he wasn’t Lion-O. Worst of all, he knew he wasn’t Batman. ‘That’s it!’ He thought. Batman could save Ma. Batman would knock on the door once and she’d be broken out of that evil spell. Or maybe Batman could just open the door for him, Ma never really liked when strangers came over.

Jason thought how cool it would be if he was Batman instead of Lion-O. He never really liked swords all that much anyway. Batman could open the door. Jason would open the door.

He reached a little hand up and twisted the rusty knob, but it wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, he used two hands, twisting and turning and jiggling the knob as best as he could but it just wouldn’t give.

The boy panicked, his eyes suddenly feeling hot and his breaths too short. “Ma, open the door!” He begged. “Ma! Ma!”

The door wouldn’t open. Batman could’ve opened it. But when has Batman ever come to Crime Alley just for little punks like him?

Jason wanted to cry. “Mommy… I’m scared.”

He pressed his forehead against the door, palms sore over the doorknob that he would not let go of. He thought he could be brave, that he could save his mother.

Then suddenly, the door gave way and a startled Jason came crashing shoulder-first into his mother’s bedroom.

He tried fearfully to break his fall with outstretched palms, but where one of his hands should’ve met more creaky hardwood, there was something sticky and cold like those awful grits they make at the Community Centre during Thanksgiving. He recoiled with a disgusted cry, launching his body in the opposite direction, and his head hit cold, gummy flesh instead of flooring.

Startled, he opened his eyes. He could barely see, the lights were off and there was that smell. It was so familiar, like that yucky white vinegar Ma kept in the top cabinet, pungent and sour as if someone ate raw acid from a chemical vat and threw it up. It was different than the thing on his hands though, that felt like — and smelled like puke.

Suddenly Jason wanted to throw up too, but he raised his head and used his other hand to touch where he had fallen. It was cold and unmoving, and he was too fearful to touch it again.

The sound of an approaching roar came, a familiar metallic screeching sound that took over the whole block at once with its heavy rumble of railcars on aging steel tracks. Jason covered his ears as the El Train squealed on its sharp curves and the blinding lights barrelled through the space between the apartment buildings burning at his tightly shut eyelids.

When he forced his eyes to squint open, he looked down at the stiff, fleshy place he had landed. Strands of blonde tickled at his cheeks and he sighed with relief.

“I won,” the boy said. “I found you, Ma.” The lifeless body of Catherine Todd did not reply.

———

Jason Todd has a thing about doors. Bruce Wayne also has a thing about doors. Alfred Pennyworth has failed to find an alternative that suits them both.

When the boy with the tire iron made the Dark Knight erupt into laughter in Crime Alley on the day the latter dreaded the most, the doors of the Batmobile were the third set of doors opened to Jason in his life. The first was foster home — he ran away, and the second was juvie — he also ran away.

What he did not run away from were hamburgers with Gotham’s finest.

And when the doors of Wayne Manor were opened to him with a bedroom bigger than all the shabby apartments and reformed halfway houses he’s lived in, and the doors of Gotham Prep with its pristine uniforms and that Advanced Placement Literature course that he was fast tracked for and the doors of the Batcave where the suit he would wear was already staring back at him from a glass case — Jason Todd did not run away from those doors in fear of what lay on the other side. He was inside and he was Robin.

But Bruce was also on the other side of those doors, which is to say that so was Batman, and it does get awfully crowded sometimes.

“We don’t slam doors here, Jason.” Bruce stated plainly.

It was springtime and he still wore a turtleneck, free of any sort of lint or crease and his hair was gelled to perfection. It was irritating. The more Jason looked at him, the more he saw a caricature of a man. Alfred had turned his head away and disappeared in the opposite direction when the slam of the front doors reverberated throughout the halls.

“It’s not fair and you know it!”

Every two steps down the hallway there was the sound of self struggle, a huff and then the rustle of fabric being pulled away and bundled together.

Fuck the suit, he thought. Fuck all of this.

He was a teenager now, well and capable of making his own decisions but somehow he was slighted at every turn. Wayne Manor was big, but it never seemed to be big enough for him and Bruce to coexist, not even with the flowers Alfred changes every week or the galas or worse the patrols where the nights drone on an on, because Jason—

“You’re not ready yet,” the bat said like clockwork. Jason wasn’t ready yet. He had no malice, even as he followed the boy past the winding halls and up the grand staircase with leisurely steps. Bruce is well aware of the boy-who-would-be-brave in front of him. “Give it some time.”

And time had been gracious. The boy had filled out his clothes, was nearly as tall as Dick Grayson was when he was Jason’s age, and would surely grow taller once his growth spurt has ended. He eats twice his weight and expels the energy with every swing of his fist with claims that his appetite has always been big, and his ambitions even bigger. He’s hungry to prove himself, to take the reins and make something of himself in hopes of getting that little gold star of approval like a teacher’s pet.

Bruce knew all this. The-Boy-Who-Would-Be-Brave is brave, and always has been. But he is as stubborn as he is talented and as reckless as he is tall.

“Until when?” Jason’s body whipped around.

Even from where he stood near the top of the great staircase suited for Gatsby, Bruce still seemed to tower over him so many steps below. “Until you die of old age?” He exclaimed.

“We also try not to raise our voices—”

“Fuck you!” He turned away again. “It’s impossible to talk to you, you’re like… I don’t know, like a wall, or something! Like a door!”

Bruce’s hands twitched at his sides.

“Just forget it.” Jason’s steps were hurried with the disassembled top half of the humiliation ritual that was Robin haphazardly rolled into a ball under one arm.

The slam of the door came seconds later.

When hours had passed, and Alfred rang the bell, there was no Jason bouncing into the kitchen. Instead, he would find him asleep in his room with the door half open.

———

“He can’t be serious,” Jason laughed dryly.

He and Shakespeare had been staring at each other for well over five minutes. Which is, Shakespeare the odd looking bronze bust of the poet that sat in Bruce’s home office on the third highest row of the bookshelf. “He really can’t be serious, right now.”

He lifted the bust and clicked the little red button waiting under it, listening out for the familiar click akin to springlocks being released, an indicator that the entrance to the Batcave down the stairwall past the grandfather clock would be opened. But to no avail. The teen shook his head in utter disbelief.

His backpack was still slung over one of his shoulders and his sneakers hot from all the faux parkour he did on the way back from tutoring some kid in his Spanish class.

He’d fought with Bruce yesterday, slammed two doors and said a curse word, sure, but Jason had never met the brunt of Bruce’s discipline in a way other than being flung around on a training mat or being forced to spend patrol at the cave as ‘eyes on the inside’.

He was perplexed. So perplexed that he found himself out in the hall, staring at the old grandfather clock as it ticked along, a continuous reminder of where he should be — the door that he should be on the other side of.

“Master Jason.”

Jason looked up to where Alfred had joined him in the hallway, posture straight and face a symmetrical structure of pretend indifference.

“Master Wayne says there will be no patrol tonight.”

Jason laughed. “He benched me?” A bellyful, disbelieving laugh.

Gone was the absolute certainty of his position, his title. He was Robin, for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t just get locked out of the Batcave because of some petty disagreement. He’s not optional. He’s a fundamental piece of Batman’s operations, and they were supposed to go out tonight, together, like they always do, regardless of whether Jason messed up or not. What happened to earning his place?

“I’m sorry, Master Jason,” Alfred responded.

He exhaled briefly and motioned in the direction of the kitchen but Jason only shook his head at the offer. He was no longer a starving boy from the gutters of Crime Alley who could be placated with warm lasagna and chocolatey cookies whenever Bruce put both feet down instead of one. He was not an animal in need of babying towards domesticity.

Alfred understood and left him alone.

Meanwhile, Jason stood unmoving outside that secret door, a thing he felt so warm and lightheaded to be a part of, now taken from him as if he was a child denied wonder. He imagined it so vividly, Bruce inside suiting up and leaving without him, every cog in the perfect system that he taught him operating like clockwork as if Jason hadn’t been there at all.

He exhaled sharply through his nose, his knuckles going white around the drawstring of his hoodie. His lungs burned and so did his eyes. With shaky hands he moved the grandfather clock to the side and labored down the steps into the icy air that led to the entrance of the Batcave.

Beyond the intimidating iron door at the end of the stairwell, he was unsure if he would find forgiveness. Stupidly, he tried the code again and it didn’t work. The button is a bust. The code is a bust. What a drag.

“Hey,” he called, immediately clearing his throat afterwards. “I… uh, I can help.” Jason said. His palm hovered over the cool metal surface of the door and he mustered the courage to knock weakly, just once. “I didn’t mean to slam the doors yesterday, honest.”

Jason leaned his forehead to rest against the door, listening as even the faintest of sounds made it to his ears.

A chair scraping the floor. A utility belt being unraveled. Water dripping from the ceiling in a symphony of little pit-pats. He knew Bruce heard him, he had to have. He knocked again, harder, a little louder and more desperate than before.

“I’m sorry, okay?” He croaked out. “I’m… I’m sorry I’m a fuck-up, I know I don’t listen. But just, can you…” He paused, inhaled sharply, lifted his head only to slam it back down in frustration. “I won’t mess anything up, I promise.”

No answer came.

“Bruce,” he whispered. Not B. Not Batman.

Was he wrong to do that, he wondered? Was Bruce not the one on the other side of the door, the man who took him in and said he was the best, that he was the bravest? Inside, the sound of shuffling footsteps carried through the air and for a millisecond there was nothing but a hungry boy with a tire iron and a man who hadn’t laughed like the boy he had forgotten so long ago that he was.

Jason stared at the line where the door met the frame, at the space where there was barely a sliver of light but from there even colder air leaked out into the stairwell. He stared at the space where the door should have opened but did not, letting the shuffling sounds continue to surround him before he murmured, “Yeah,” under his breath. “I understand.”

That night, he bounded up the stairs and lay in his bed with the door open only a crack.

He thought of Dick and what he might be doing. Of the woman who was his mother. He had a nightmare about being trapped in a hallway that kept closing in on itself and the door at the end of that terrifying hallway that would not open.

He could hear screams. He didn’t know if they were his.

Bruce’s one-time punishment was effective though. No more doors were slammed in Wayne Manor. And Jason’s door was no longer kept open halfway.

———

“He used to come into my room at night and just… sit at the door,” Dick Grayson laughed, swirling the glass of milk in his hand like expensive browned liqueur on the rocks.

With a pointed nudge of his head he turned to Jason. “You did it to Bats too, far as I remember.”

“Aww, how cute!” Roy Harper exclaimed with an exaggerated pout from his spot spread-eagle on the rug in front of the television.

“Fuck you,” Jason grumbled. “And you too,” he glared in Dick’s direction as he rose from the tiny kitchen table. “I don’t even remember any of that happening.”

It felt like a hundred years have gone by since his youth. Between The Pit, his training, more training, and even more minor inconveniences that add up to big incidents in the great grand scheme of vigilantism, if you asked Jason Todd his favorite memory, he would say that pizza he had at Luigi’s two years ago in the middle of some off-brand Bat-sanctioned stakeout.

No, that would be a lie. His favorite memory would be, you. In all your grandness, much more exciting and worthwhile than a perfect slice of pizza he can never replicate. You, and this apartment he got in The Village to prove to you that he was indeed the settling down type and that he’s mad for you.

So mad, that he allows Roy and Dick to be over at the same time.

“You were a really cute kid, Jaybird, truly.” Dick knocked his milk back and beckoned Roy over to another round of Jenga, to which the redhead obliged happily. “You joining?”

Jason’s phone vibrated in his pocket before much else could come after. He shook his head and sidestepped towards the balcony. The balcony that belonged to you two. He unlocked his phone and swiped accept on your caller ID.

“Hi, you,” came your voice through the speaker, all lilted and sweet like honey on a cold night. He missed you, missed this. The nights were long, and he wanted you home now.

“Hey yourself,” he laughed into the line. “How’s it going in the Dreamhouse?” He asked, elbows settling leisurely over the railing. “Missin’ me?”

“In your dreams, Ken,” you snickered. There was a short pause, breaths almost syncing even so far apart. “No, I… I don’t know. Guess I wanted to see how boys’ night was treating you, maybe.”

Jason smiled wide, tilting his head to the side to ease the pressure it put on his jaw. “I’m fuckin’ miserable over here, doll.”

Your laugh echoed through the static. “Bein’ dead serious right now and you’re laughing. Dick’s been telling ‘happy family’ stories all night and you’re laughing. Woe is me.”

“Oh nooo,” you chuckled with a coo. “Is he telling those stories about the door again?”

“What stories about the door?”

Jason heard the sound of someone calling your name, maybe Barbara. “C’mon, you know,” you continued, the sound of shuffling catching the phone line’s static. “You sleepwalking as a kid into Bruce’s room and him waking up to you asleep by the door—”

“Again,” Jason interjected. “I do not recall any of that ever happening.”

“And, that bad habit you had about slamming doors all the time and then leaving them open again.”

He scoffed, humorously appalled. “I do not—”

“Uh huh, whatever you say,” you hummed. “Just don’t wreck the place. I love you.”

He absolutely melted. Talks of doors were forgotten.

“Yeah?” Jason whispered, his palm cupping the phone as if he could pull you right out of it. “Love you.”

A disgruntled noise came from your end. “Right, my fault— I love you, I love you, so much.”

“Who wants to play Pin The Tail on The Pussycat?” Roy’s voice came as a shout from inside and Jason cursed, his posture shooting straight before abruptly hanging up.

“What is wrong with you, you freak?”

———

The apartment appeared completely dark, a near carbon copy of the others around it at this hour of night — or before light out — but Jason found it like an umbilical cord pulling him home. He descended to the balcony like he always does, shrugging his jacket and hood off then slipping quietly through the curtained sliding doors.

Inside, he was unpleasantly surprised by the glow of lamplight.

It smelled of incense and fruity lotion, something tangy and sweet with a tinge of spice that ambushes your senses like a slap to the face.

It reminded him of the way he had dived in front of Tim tonight for something that was just a false alarm, compromised the formation and somehow managed to get an earful from B. Which, he could admit he deserved. He figured maybe his senses were askew, something to do with fatigue.

“Hey,” Jason murmured as he kicked his boots off by the doors.

You were sitting there on the couch in your sleep clothes, eyes heavy but nose pointed and jaw set tight with determination. He was exhausted, his ribs ached and he wanted nothing more than to just strip out of the last pieces of armor he had on and call it a night.

“You’re kidding,” you scoffed with a shake of your head. You were waiting for him, he knew that now, but not in the way you usually do.

“I didn’t think you’d still be up,” he said, journeying further into the living room, his hands going for his chest as he began to unzip and rid himself of the heavy breastplate first. His eyes raked over your face and you looked away almost immediately.

“Clearly,” you huffed and rose from your seat. Turning towards him, you began to speak. “I don’t even—”

“It ran late,” he interrupted you softly, rolling his armor free shoulders mid-saunter to the bookshelf with the secret compartment to put his guns away.

You walked around him in the direction of the kitchen, not as much as a brush of fingers between you two. “It always runs late.”

He glanced behind him to where you had gone, an undercurrent of defense itching at his skin.

“We both know that’s not exactly something I can control,” he said, with extra effort to say your name at the end, as if to emphasize that this was not the time and that he was not in the mood.

“No, but what you can control is picking up your phone so I know if you’re dead in a ditch or not.”

The pistols were clicked into safety and slotted back in their hiding place with two soft thuds. “I didn’t have time, a lot was going on—”

Laughter left your lips at that, all disbelieving and in awe. “You didn’t have ten seconds?”

“You know it’s not like that.”

A shake of your head followed suit. “Then please tell me what it’s like, Jason.” Finally, he turned around fully, only to find you across the way, leaned against the kitchen counter staring back at him. “Because I’m having trouble understanding and this is the second night in a row—”

“I said I was sorry about yesterday,” he argued. “Which you said we were okay, and things were fine between us.”

You squinted at him, your lips forming a soft line of disappointment. God, he just wanted to kiss you. “And tonight? Are you sorry too?”

“I’m here now,” he said. The moment the words left his mouth and your brows began to scrunch up in the middle, he knew he said the wrong thing. Desperate to backtrack, he said, “I tried, okay?” But it only made it worse.

“Wow.” That was all you said in response, crossing your arms over your chest.

He thought then he would have preferred to get shot. “Wait, that’s not what I meant—” he tried to interject.

“No, I think that’s exactly what you meant to say,” you turned away from him, walking back over to where you were sitting on the couch previously. “I’m glad you think you can just show up eventually and—”

“That’s not what I said,” he followed behind with just enough distance to not crowd you.

“And it’s all okay because you tried, right?” You reaffirmed. “So, no, Jason. You didn’t have to say it at all, I got the picture.” From one of the couch cushions you retrieved your phone, a breathy scoff leaving his chest.

“What do you want me to do? Tell me, truly,” his exhaustion bled into irritation as he came over to you, fingers carding through his hair. “Do you want me to drop you a pin every time we’re about to get shot at? Or, I don’t know, just drop everything and check in with [name] headquarters just because you can’t trust me to be away from you?”

“Fuck you,” you spat. He physically twitches at the curse but you can’t take it back no matter how much you want to. “I trust you, I do. But what I want is for you to talk to me,” you tried softer. “A call. A text. Something, anything that lets me know ‘Hey, I’m not gonna make it’ or ‘Hey, I’m okay’, instead of you just—” you gestured vaguely in the air, frustrated. “—disappearing on me.”

“I don’t disappear.”

“You don’t show up either,” you shrugged. “So, what is this? Are we playing hide and seek now?”

He wiped his hands over his pants, sweating. “You know why,” he whispered. “Doll— jesus, fuck, you know exactly why.”

Your hands shook. You knew why, you did, you do.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t matter, Jay.” He hung his head with a long exhale, shaking it slow before looking up at you — really looking — as if he’s trying to understand how exactly you got to that part, how all of this turned into that. “That’s not fair.”

“Neither is this!” You shouted, throwing your hands up in defeat. You tossed your phone back to the couch because what’s the point in going through the unanswered calls and texts? “Do you know how stupid I felt sitting there tonight? Waiting for you, again? Except at least tonight it wasn’t a table at Le Cirque where I was even more humiliated.”

“I told you how things are, they’re unpredictable and I can’t control that.”

“And I told you I can handle that,” you said, your eyes nearly watering, the anger having long faded. “What I can’t handle is being left in the dark like I don’t even cross your mind when it’s time for Gotham to have Red Hood.”

All that’s left is vulnerability and exhaustion.

“That’s not true,” Jason reached for you, one of his hands taking your wrist in a calloused palm. “You know that’s not true. That’s seriously some bullshit [name].”

“Then prove it to me,” your eyes found his, trusting but still so unsure. “I want you to show me because all I’ve had is your word.” You paused, hesitant. “I’m on your side, baby.”

He nearly faltered on his feet. But a silence came from him that said more than his words could have expressed to you.

He didn’t have a quick fix to this or something that would’ve sounded good enough to convince you that yes, you can put your faith in him every time. “I’m trying,” he said instead, his voice quiet, almost shaky.

“I know you are,” you replied just as quiet, not nearly as shaky. “But it’s not the same as showing up. I… I don’t know, I just want you to be, instead of always trying to be.” You shifted your hand in his to reach for his fingers.

“Yeah,” he looked away, dropping your hand at your side. “I really am just fucking everything up tonight, aren’t I?”

“That’s not what I said…”

“I know,” he whispered. “But don’t you think I wanna be here? With you?” He looked back to you, his jaw clenching and unclenching, tired but unrelenting. “You think I’d rather be out there, what, getting my ass handed to me on a fucking platter by everybody else when I could be here with you, watching a movie or whatever?”

“I’m not saying you don’t want to, Jay, I’m just saying that—”

“No, I know what it sounds like,” he shook his head, a bitter smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Like no matter what I do, it’s never enough.”

Your expression faltered for several seconds. “Why would you say that?”

“Really?” He laughs. “Because that’s exactly what it feels like right now.”

“I don’t know why you always do that.” You turned away from him again, grabbing your phone. “You always twist everything into something worse than it is, like I’m against you, when I’m not! You just keep doing that thing— that thing, where it’s like talking to a closed door, like you’re not even here!”

Jason let out a harsh breath, stepping back as he watched you walk away. “I’m here right now, aren’t I?”

You looked at him over your shoulder once. Then smiled sadly. “Yeah,” you said. “You are,” sounding more like resignation than relief. Then you shook your head.

His hands curled into balls at his sides. “I’m gonna shower,” he said.

You nodded and he walked past you then down the hall. With a hand over your mouth and eyes watering, you heard the sharp bang of the bathroom door slamming, the force shaking the walls.

“Don’t slam the door, you’ll break the mirrors!” You yelled at him, bitter.

———

You have four new voicemails…To listen to your voicemails... Please Press—

Hi, Jay. I… I figured you’d be a little busier tonight, what with Bruce calling everybody in and everything, but I just wanted to let you know that I love you, stay safe. Call me when—

“Great,” he murmured under his breath. The bathroom was still warm and filled with steam, the mirror in front of him all cloudy from the heat.

His chest felt tight, it made him uneasy and restless, he needed to do something. He’d already spent five minutes scrolling through your voicemails, all the ones he never listened to, not because he didn’t want to, but because, well… he had no excuse.

He got dressed unhurriedly, his fingers hesitating over the bathroom doorknob as if it might burn him.

Jason knew plenty of things to be self-evident truths, first of those many things being that you were the best thing to ever happen to him and if you hadn’t kept him grounded, he’d be somewhere in the Caribbean getting shot at by crooked drug cartels or worse, dead, again.

The second of these truths being that he was a catastrophic fuck-up. He thought to himself that he’d been like that since the day he was born maybe. But he knew he could be better. He tried to be better. He wasn’t some stupid kid anymore.

Jason pressed his ear to the surface of the door, one palm hovering over the doorknob. All he heard on the other side was silence. There was no television, there were no footsteps shuffling.

He exhaled heavily, twisting the handle and stepping out, his hair still damp at the ends and cold in the middle. The hallway was dim and lonely, it didn’t smell like you in the way the living room did before and he hated it.

When he reached the living room there was no you there waiting for him. Instead there were only the shut balcony doors and the open curtains.

The lamplight was soft and the apartment was dead silent, and he hated every second of it. Jason wanted nothing more than to ask you to come back, if just for a moment, just to shout at him again, just so he could say he understood and that he was sorry and that his word was worth nothing more than his actions were. But he couldn’t summon you.

“Just fucking great,” he grumbled to himself. He stared at the couch and with a scowl, resigned himself to the fact that it was most definitely his sleeping quarters for the night. He felt like an idiot. Yet, the apartment was quieter than it ought to have been and he couldn’t shake it. The silence was so loud that it felt as if it were a being onto itself, an unforgiving, lonely thing.

You never liked when it was this quiet. No, you preferred to have the radio on just playing softly throughout the night. It’s the only way he ends up beating Damian at the Gazette’s daily crossword, because the host of some obnoxious morning talk show always gives the answers away on air.

But if he’s being fair, he’s never really been very good at games. Bruce said as a kid that’s all he used to talk about, games, games, games but somehow he always got beat. Jason didn’t remember a time he won anything as a kid except for the Spelling Bee.

He was anxious. He felt like he was losing a game nobody told him the rules of.

Within the silence he called your name once, a whisper, and the echo of it frightened him because suddenly the prospect of you leaving him scared him. He was afraid. Jason, who put his life on the line every night, was afraid of the shadows in his own house that took up the space where you ought to have been.

His feet moved before his brain could catch up.

He called your name a little bit louder this time as he bounded in the direction of your shared bedroom.

Once he turned the corner and came upon the wooden door his heart stuttered in his chest and he froze in his spot. The door was ajar.

It was open, not only a sliver but halfway. The soft glow of the moonlight beyond the windows spilled into the hall from the doorway. It was something so familiar to him but so distant.

The doors of the Batmobile were the third set of doors opened to Jason Todd in his life. The first was foster home — he ran away, and the second was juvie — he also ran away.

The fourth was the door in your home, the one you both shared. He did not run away.

———

Jason didn’t know how long he stood by the door watching you sleep, nearly breathing in sync with you with each draw and release of breath.

The sun was almost rising when you stirred, your bleary eyes catching on his looming figure slouched in the doorway, as if he was attempting to make himself smaller.

“Jay?” You called out to him, hoarse.

“Hey…” he whispered, not daring to move, his pulse spiking like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “Hi,” he repeated.

You shifted to sit up halfway in the bed, blankets drooping to your waist and brows pinching together as you blinked the sleep away from your eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he murmured, dragging a hand along the back of his neck. “Go back to sleep, baby.”

Ignoring him, you shook your head. “You okay?”

The tension melted away from his shoulders and from his lips came an immediate high pitched, “Yeah,” that he struggled not to choke on.

You outstretched your arms to him and his lips quivered with the word again, like he was reassuring you, or him, or maybe both.

He climbed onto the bed, having practically collapsed into your arms with a breath leaving him that sounded like it must’ve been utter exhaustion to hold onto. He dipped his head to your chest, leaving a trail of light pecks along the skin then up to your neck where he burrowed his nose deep in the space that always fit him so well.

You brushed the hair away from his eyes and when he inevitably looked up at you, your heart seized from the watery blues staring back at you.

Momentarily ashamed, his arms wrapped around your waist, pulling you into him and you hugged him tight — so tight that your forearms ached — and he whispered against your hair, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” you said back to him, your lips ghosting over the skin of his cheeks where the scars are star shaped and even more beautiful than the last time. “I missed you.”

His forehead pressed against yours and you two met in an open mouthed kiss. He made a sound that to anyone else might have sounded like pain but to you sounds like relief, like redemption. You ate it whole and accepted his tongue, greeting it with yours.

“You’re too good to me,” he said, breathless against your lips. His hands cradled your sides while he slipped down, lower and lower, bringing with him a thousand little kisses hotter than the rest.

You squirmed when his head slipped under your shirt and his lips found your stomach. He didn’t tease you or make you wait. When his tongue licked at your waistband you swatted him away with a giggle.

He took the giggle back from you with a guttural groan, slotting his body further between your legs to nuzzle his head between your thighs.

Over the fabric of your clothes he kissed your heat, his fingers interlocked with yours and your thighs closed around his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, as the wet patch darkened through your clothes and his hips grew restless.

He lapped at you through the thin fabric, moving from swirling his tongue over the outline of your folds to nudging the curve of his nose against where you needed him most.

“Jay,” you called for him but he didn’t answer, the strain of his cock bucked forward against the blanket and you moaned desperately when he released one of your hands to free you of your clothes. “I need…”

“I know, I know,” he sighed against your bare skin, his mouth finding your cunt slick and open.

With a shrill sound, you grasped onto his hair and he grunted. “No, wait,” you tugged at him and he surrendered. Your hand found where he was painfully hard and drooling pre, slipping him back and forth in your palm. “I need you.”

“Yeah?” he asked, eyes heavy lidded with pleasure and you kissed him, your bodies melding as you moved to lay on top of him, the swollen tip of him dragging across your weeping folds.

With a single breath, you rocked your hips down, his tip slipping in between your puffy folds and popping in with a wet schlick!

“Fuuuck me,” He moaned, grinding his hips up until he was buried to the hilt, his cock swelling up inside you still. “So good— ‘s just like the first time...”

“Baby—” You gasped, feeling every inch of him inside you as you moved in slow rocks and languid grinds.

The sound was filthy, permeating the darkness of the apartment and Jason’s thick arms wrapped around your middle, using the grip to aid you up and down and up and down.

“I know, doll... fuck, squeezing me so tight—”

Your mouth opened in a scream and he captured it with his lips in a sloppy kiss. Your nails scratched at his shoulders and his arms squeezed you closer, his balls slapping firm against your ass and the soft cries from your mouths melting together indistinguishably.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” you cried, the coil in your core wound too tight and teetering at the edge, but Jason relented with the same pace, slow and soft, his cock molding your gummy walls like a deep kiss where he would bury himself impossibly deep and fuck upwards against your most sensitive spots.

“Ride it out,” he whispered, taking your index and middle finger into his mouth then guiding it to your clit, his larger hand dwarfing your own while he made you see stars by his own doing. “C’mon, jus’ a little longer… let me take care of you... that’s it, sweet girl...”

“Wanna cum, Jay— please!”

“Shh, I’ve got you…” He pressed his mouth against yours in a dazed kiss, moaning into your mouth as your walls convulsed around him, his cock twitching and swelling inside you. “Cum on my cock, doll… you’ve got it.”

Your hips moved on their own, bucking onto him with soft cries as you chased your high. It crashed into you like a wave of heat as you writhed against him, gushing slick and seeing white.

“T-tight, fuck, gonna fill you up—” He breathed, burying himself to the hilt. In an instant, you felt the hot, thick pulses flooding you so full it leaked out around his cock in creamy white rings.

Jason heaved as if he’d been shot, hugging you tight against his body. His lips made it to your hair, your nose, your cheeks, planting wet kisses wherever there was more of you to kiss.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you, I love you.”

———

“Jay.”

“Hm?” His answer came muffled from where he stood in front of the mirror, bright red toothbrush half hanging out of his mouth.

“Thank you,” you eased into the bathroom, your arms snaking around his middle from behind. “You left the door open.”

He spat out the toothpaste in the sink and cleared his throat before turning to you. Then to the open bathroom door. Then back to you. “I’m working on not slamming ‘em.”

[solisstars]

thinking about living with jason todd.

your morning's are quiet; neither of you say much, if anything at all, until you've had breakfast. sometimes jason showers first in the morning, other times you do. you'll find him halfway through making coffee, he'll find you simultaneously popping toast into the toaster and drying your hair.

you do the grocery shopping of the week hand in hand–always holding his at that awkward angle he complains about, just so you can feel his pulse in case. you argue about popsicle flavors too loud and buy two tubs of ice cream because one of you can't stand vanilla and the other strictly eats vanilla. jason gets a bad case of baby fever when you take a side quest through the park on the way home.

lunch blinks by the two of you, mainly consisting of you nagging jason about how he always stains his shirts and surfaces. it's with sauce in the context of lunch, but with blood typically.

you sit in the balcony together. you work on the small chair he moved outside for you while he smokes at a distance, trying not to trigger another monologue. or another of your attempts at getting him to quit smoking through sheer annoyance. replacing his cigarettes with lipglosses hadn't worked, yet he feared what you would try next.

jason gets a sock to the face while he reads at the table. he places the photobooth strip of the two of you–four monochrome pictures of you two undeniably in love, each photo mushier than the last–into his book to mark the page. he laughs when you go off about the socks he leaves lying around and the shirts he randomly throws around and never picks up.

he listens to your playlists while he's out for patrol to bring him a semblance of peace. a reminder of the sanctuary and warm arms he gets to return to after a long day of crime fighting and beating ass. you stay up to make sure he gets home safely, even on the days when you're fighting. sometimes he'll find you've fallen asleep on the couch while waiting. he joins you wordlessly.

most nights, jason gets home with shoulders slumped lower than usual. on those days, you work your fingers against the mechanics of his helmet in that way he finds weirdly intimate; the way you know all the intricate buttons and every little piece to undo his mask. the literal and figurative one. you ask about his hobbies because patrol is always the last thing he wants to talk about. he tells you about the hidden meanings and foreshadowings in his most recent read. you debate him on characters and analysis just because it gives him something else to focus on. his answers shift from passionate to slow, half-hearted. you know by the lull of his head against your chest when he's fallen asleep. you tuck the both of you in under a single blanket, despite knowing he'll end up hogging it all. you kiss his forehead with the same small smile you wake up to and all the tenderness the world has robbed him of. "goodnight, jason."