(P.S.- If you’ve got any fic recommendations I can gorge on, please send them my way! Drop them in the comments under this post or pop them into my inbox. I’m a fanfic fiend at this point 😭🙏)
Massive shoutout to @cafekitsune for always pulling through with the dividers in all my posts!
Currently Reading🔖:
*Gets updated whenever I find a series I'm actively invested in*
Joel Miller | The Last of Us:
1. The Savage and The Sanctuary by @justagalwhowrites
2. This is Not a Place of Honour | AO3 by @not-cricketing
Clark Kent | Superman 2025:
1. Handle With Care by @kryptidfiles
The Pitt:
1. Remember Me (Jack Abbot) by @at-this-point-i-dont-even-know
2. Keep Up (Jack Abbot) by @deliciousangelfestival
3. Sugar Me Up (Jack Abbot) by @penvisions
4. Acute Adoration (Jack Abbot, Michael Robinavitch) by @/penvisions
5. Hold Me Down (Jack Abbot) by @amnatreal
6. Stay (Michael Robinavitch) by @andrew-codys
7. The Slippage in the System (Michael Robinavitch) by @sweetestcowboy
8. Just Breathe (Michael Robinavitch) by @inkdippedquills
Harry Castillo | The Materialists:
1. Dear Desperado by @damneddamsy
2. Lemonade by @/justagalwhowrites
3. The Art of the Deal | AO3 by @gothicpaperback
4. Material Girl | AO3 by @foxtrology
Monthly Reading List:
Everything I've read monthly! (Monthly updates)
2025
September | October | November | December
2026
January | February | March | April | May | June | July
Masterlist of Fic Lists:
Hall of Fame fics I look back on in times of comfort (Weekly updates)
> Clark Kent | Smallville + Superman (2025):
↳ Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5
> Multiple Pairings | The Pitt:
↳ Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4
> Joel Miller | The Last of Us:
↳ Pt. 1 | Pt. 2
> Din Djarin/Mandalorian | The Mandalorian:
↳ Pt. 1
> Javier Pēna | Narcos:
↳ Pt. 1
> The Punisher | MCU:
↳ Pt. 1
> Batfam | DCU:
↳ Pt. 1
> Poe Dameron | Star Wars Sequel Trilogy:
↳ Pt. 1
> Miguel O'Hara | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse:
↳ Pt. 1
> Cassian Andor | Rogue One, Andor:
↳ Pt. 1
> Bucky Barnes | Marvel (MCU):
↳ Pt. 1
> Frankie Morales | Triple Frontier:
↳ Pt. 1
> Miscellaneous:
↳ Pt. 1
Specific Fic Lists:
Fics that cater to different niches I'm constantly on the lookout for (Weekly updates)
> WOC!Reader Specific Reads
> Chubby!Reader Specific Reads
> Chronic Illness!Reader Specific Reads
> Older!Reader Specific Reads
> Grumpy!Reader Specific Reads
hi!! happy birthday btw!! i saw ur July reads post and i looooove love love loved that idea. i was wondering if u would be okay w me doing that too?? i just didn’t wanna like steal ur idea or anything cuz i love how it supports authors in a new way and gets fics out fresh in the tags on on dashes. i can totes credit u too if u want i have no problem w that!! thanks and have a good rest of ur birthday!!
Thank you so much!! And ofc, I have no problem at all! The more the merrier with folks boosting fics out here 🥰 Honoured you liked the idea and want to take it forward!
I don't really mind being uncredited tbh (lol, cuz this idea is 10000% an amalgamationof the lists I love following out here), but could I be tagged if you do end up making the list? 👀
I'm always looking for recs and would LOVE to go through your list once you're done!
It's 21st July! And I know this is an odd time for me to release this month's list, but it's my birthday today, so I figured I'd share the monthly event a bit early this month as a lil' gift from me to all you lovely folks who've stuck around with this blog for as long as ya'll have! Gonna be treating myself all day, so figured I'd start off with a treat for you guys first! 🥳🎂✨
Welp okay, this time last year, I was desperately job hunting, freelancing on the side to get any and every project under the sun in my hands, and stress that was starting to make my hair go grey and fall out. And I'd just started making my first list on here, thinking "This is gonna be a bank of fics for when I just need to switch off from the world." Fast forward a year later, finally employed, significantly less stressed, and a couple of hundred followers later, my lists have officially gotten out of hand, and now I've got to make a list for my lists, lol. I still revert to being a hermit in times of stress; I still just burrow down with your fics to give me comfort. In that sense, I am nothing but consistent 😌
And while once again, an author's note has gotten away from me, all this is to say: thank you. Thank you for the fics all of you write. Thank you for being my comfort when I couldn't turn to anything else. I don't think I can ever accurately express my gratitude, but my making these kinda list is a tiny attempt at it. Here's a lil token of love from my end, and hope your day is lovely as mine is today!
As always: please like and reblog the fics you love. Tell authors what their work meant to you. Engagement builds community. It genuinely makes a difference.
And if you’ve got recommendations? You already know I’m all ears.
Massive shoutout to @cafekitsune for the insane number of dividers I'm obsessed with.
Key: A - Angst | F - Fluff | S - Smut | C - Comfort | HC - Hurt/Comfort
Other Monthly Lists: 2026 Masterpost
Clark Kent | Superman:
> Rugby Player!Clark by @kryptidfiles
Tags: 18+, MDNI, Headcanon, F + S
Word Count: 1k
Description: Glad I had it saved bc I was proud of coming up with this stuff on the fly?
> Lost in The Fire by @/kryptidfiles
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, S
Word Count: 2.4k
Description: Clark tells you "it's fine" when you cancel on him again for work. Liar, Liar...
> Meant To Be by @onlyasteelmancanbealover
Tags: Chubby!Reader, One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 1.2k
Description: The skirt doesn’t fit!
> Like Father, Like Son by @satellite-evans
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 6.7k+
Description: Clark's world is turned upside down when his father passes away unexpectedly. As he navigates the overwhelming grief of losing him, you remain by his side.
> The Things The Heart Keeps by @purplespiritimagines
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 12.4k+
Description: Clark Kent x Forget-Me-Not!Reader
> "They Said Your Name" by @gwscastle
Tags: One Shot, A
Word Count: 750
Description: After a fight, clark kent comes home terrified--not for himself, but for the person always waiting up for him.
> It's Not What You Think!! by @alrisyl
Tags: Series (Ongoing), A
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2
Description: Clark cancels on you again for ‘work’ but it was a lie...
Multiple Pairings | The Last of Us:
> I Need You To Tell Me That I'm Good (Tommy Miller) by @psychedelic-ink
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, A + HC + S
Series Count: 11k
Description: You love being part of the community of Jackson. But when you try to learn how to defend it, one humiliating accident makes you realize just how useless you feel with a gun in your hands.
> Time in A Bottle (Joel Miller) by @worlds-we-write
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 5.5k
Description: You survive. Barely. After a brutal ambush meant for Joel, he’s the one left picking up the pieces. As you recover, both of you have to learn how to live with the scars—inside and out. Inspired by Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce.
> Steady Hands (Joel Miller) by @millermouth
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, S
Word Count: 11k
Description: You love being part of the community of Jackson. But when you try to learn how to defend it, one humiliating accident makes you realize just how useless you feel with a gun in your hands.
> Force of Nature (Joel Miller) by @skyesdelight
Tags: 18+, MDNI, Series (Ongoing), F + A + S + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ... | Pt. 5
Description: The construction company your neighbors hire to do work on their house are loud, inconsiderate, and quickly get under your skin. One man in particular seems hellbent on driving you crazy until one day, all that tension comes to a head.
> The Savage and The Sanctuary (Joel Miller) by @justagalwhowrites
Tags: 18+, MDNI, Series (Ongoing), 2nd POV, A + HC + F + S
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ... | Pt. 22
Description: The biggest movie star in the world with your newly adopted niece in tow, you throw everything about Joel's life into flux. Is he capable of letting himself feel something again while protecting the only things left in the world that matter?
Multiple Pairings | The Pitt:
> Near The Knuckle (Brendon "the Shark" Park) by @amnatreal
Tags: Series (Ongoing), F
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | ...?
Description: The man in the boxing class is the same Park. Key differences, ones you're not ashamed to say caught your breath at first sight, were the soft frizzy waves of his hair, the gentle lift of his brows while listening to Magnus, and that one specific heel bounce right before the class started. You don't think he's been new to anything in years by the look in his eyes. His gaze swept over your face, then scanned over it again, blinked then nodded, "Brendon Park." Right as your mouth was about to let out the words I know, you realized he doesn't. He couldn't recognize you.
> Take Your Kid to Work Day (Jack Abbot) by @/satellite-evans
Tags: One Shot, HC
Word Count: 4.2k+
Description: Your daughter fakes a stomachache to surprise her parents at work on Take Your Kid to Work Day, never realizing the panic it would cause.
> Just Be Healthy (Jack Abbot) by @marismellow
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 572
Description: Jack isn't a fan of fevers.
> Gossip...Boy? (Jack Abbot) by @voidsagent
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 4k+
Description: After finding out a certain attending likes to gossip, you find yourself having a very unexpected Fourth of July shift.
> Do Not Disturb (Jack Abbot) by @wannabespacesmuggler
Tags: One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 5.5k+
Description: Jack Abbot's relaxing day off takes a turn for the worse when he hears his phone ring. After all, his phone is on do not disturb, and there's only one person that he's allowed to interrupt his peace—you. Even worse, your voice isn't the first thing he hears when he picks up.
> The Night Shift Exchange Program (Jack Abbot) by @rizbert
Tags: One Shot/Series, F + C
Word Count: 15.7k+
Description: Jack doesn't realize how close you are to the day shift residents until they start stealing you from him. But he is definitely not jealous, no matter what the rest of the night shift thinks...or...the 5 times day shift covers nights and the 1 you're asked to cover days
> I'm Always on My Own (Jack Abbot) by @pencil-n-pen
Tags: One Shot, F + A + HC
Word Count: 15.7k
Description: Your family is in town for the annual ‘parents berating their kids for their decisions’ get-together. Jack overhears you talking about how much easier it would be if you had a boyfriend to shove in their face and offers his services. No strings attached, of course.
> Too Much (Jack Abbot) by @moon-child-goddess
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 6k
Description: You talk a lot, you know this. It’s something you have been insecure about your whole life. Jack says something to Robby, and you overhear thinking it’s about you.
> The Birthday Blues (Jack Abbot) by @of-apollo
Tags: One Shot, HC
Word Count: 3.1k
Description: One of the worst days you have ever experienced in the ER happens to fall on your birthday. Nothing goes your way, and seconds after you finish your shift, you are sobbing in the passenger seat of Jack Abbot’s car. Luckily, Jack knows how best to remind you that you are so important and so, so loved.
> His (Jack Abbot) by @butyoudidthis4what
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, S
Word Count: 1.9k
Description: After your true feelings for each other come out, you and Jack finally fall into bed together.
> All The Words We Cannot Say (Jack Abbot) by @redd-blushing-roses
Tags: One Shot, A
Word Count: 1.3k
Description: There are no words to describe the pain of losing someone you love. and for Jack Abbot, a man who's never been good with words, he finds himself unable to tell you just how much he loves you.
> My One Wish (Jack Abbot) by @fangirl-dot-com
Tags: 18+, MDNI, Dark!Jack, One Shot, A
Word Count: 1.3k
Description: Tired of reading fanfics based on your newest obsession, you give in to peer pressure and use a seemingly harmless gimmick from a metaphysical shop. you quickly find out that you should have been careful what you wished for.
> I Am Sorry I Left, But It Was For The Best (Jack Abbot) by @forever--darling
Tags: One Shot, A
Word Count: 1.3k
Description: You thought surgery would give you distance. Distance from the chaos of the emergency department. Distance from the memories. Distance from Jack Abbot, your old attending, your mentor. The man who you left behind with no explanation, but a surgical fellowship application slipped into his locker one day after shift. Ten months later, when a Fourth of July trauma brings you back to the Pitt, one devastating shift forces you to face the truth: you never really left either of them behind.
> Jack in (Jack Abbot) by @lacydear
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 838
Description: You complaining about him losing weight.
> Jack Abbot x Tall!Reader by @/fangirl-dot-com
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 705
Description: As someone who is actually taller than shawn hatosy irl, I needed some tall girl representation (I'm 5'10, but over 6 foot with heels, and google says shawn is 5'9"), this is nothing against shorter people at all! I just think we need a little more tall girl representation, so please enjoy these headcannon/blurb things!
> Jack Abbot x Reader by @fluttervoid
Tags: Drabble, F
Word Count: 889
Description: You and Jack are already running late for your dinner reservation, but after seeing you all dressed up, he quickly decides that being a little more late might not be such a bad thing.
> Jack Abbot x Reader by @ofstarsandvibranium
Tags: Drabble, HC
Word Count: 332
> Keep Up (Jack Abbot) by @deliciousangelfestival
Tags: Series (Ongoing), F + A + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ... | Pt. 7
Description: They spent years saving lives in a war zone and driving each other insane. Now they’re coworkers again.
> Hold Me Down (Jack Abbot) by @/amnatreal
Tags: 18+, MDNI, Series (Ongoing), S + F + A + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ... | Pt. 12
Description: Accidentally finding that D/S app, Dip, felt like having a light bulb moment. Because with all the free time that had been forced upon him, Jack needed something. Badly enough he felt like he was losing his mind. Remembering his experiences caring for a submissive, he felt like perhaps that was what he needed, what was missing. The strength in it, to offer a piece of himself, to reach into someone's psyche when their walls are let down.
> May The Best Man Win (Jack Abbot, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @xreader1989
Tags: One Shot, F + C
Word Count: 6k+
Description: You moved in with Robby and Jack right at the start of your residencies, the three of you became family almost immediately. What happens when they both decide they’re in love with you?
> Paper Planes (Jack Abbot, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @inkdippedquills
Tags: Series, F + C
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4
Description: So what the fuck are you meant to do if you hate one of your soulmates after falling in love with the other? Hate-fucking him was probably not the best call. (Soulmate AU)
> Part That's Mine (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @paigepie213
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 6.2k
Description: so... hurt/comfort wise...how do you feel about any male character and new mama!reader where the baby favors their dad, and she feels unworthy of being called a mom or like she wants at least one thing to be hers bc the baby has everything else of their father (except maybe their nose and skin tone). AND THEN FLUFF AT THE END BECAUSE THEIR FIRST STEPS WERE TOWARDS HER! :)
> Teasing To Love (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @/paigepie213
Tags: One Shot, F + A + HC
Word Count: 6.4k
Description: Do you know what I can't stop thinking about? Pissing off Robby... like nothing serious, just having fun. Just being a bit of a brat and getting him all riled up during the day.
> Clingy Husband (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @/paigepie213
Tags: One Shot, F + C
Word Count: 6.9k
Description: Hilli! If possible, do you think you could do a cute one where maybe they're married and working together, and you keep getting pulled away and kept busy and he's busy too so he barely sees you? I just have this visual in my head of Robby stood there all grumpy like 'where is my wife?' and then becomes a clingy husband till the end of shift?
> Sweetheart (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @80sfilmclub
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1k
Description: Despite you and Robby agreeing to keep your strictly physical relationship under wraps, you self-combust when your attending keeps calling you 'sweetheart'.
> I Just Want You (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @/marismellow
Tags: One Shot, HC
Word Count: 873
Description: If your asks are still open would you do Robby x Reader where reader is in her late 30s and compares herself to the younger women she sees him normally flirting with? Not realizing he’s just desperate for reader?
> I Love You, I Love You, I Love You (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @bluetimeombre
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 6.6k
Description: Robby is known to speak before he thinks sometimes, but when the cost of his words is losing you, he’d rather die
> No Place I'd Rather Be (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @itsalainaz
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1.8k
Description: Soft domestic morning w your newly bf, Robby!!!
> Unethical (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @redsakura101
Tags: One Shot, A
Word Count: 2.5k
Description: You had been pushed to the brink. Wearing your heart on your sleeve, carving out all that had been bottled up inside. It cries out. Desperate to be heard. To be listened to... Even whilst it breaks your heart. It was inevitable.
> Do I? (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @ohitsminnie
Tags: One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 2.3k
Description: When a patient assumes Robby and you are married, you're forced to confront a future neither of you has ever talked about, and wonder if you're really on the same page.
> I Wish You Loved Me Less (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @snoopysupe
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, A + HC + S
Word Count: 9.3k
Description: You put all your efforts during the holiday weekend trying to convince your husband that his three-month sabbatical doesn’t have to end in the unspoken fatality he has been hinting at since it was announced. Whilst Robby puts all his efforts into pushing you away.
> Michael "Robby" Robinavitch x Reader by @deardev0teddelicate
Tags: One Shot, HC
Word Count: 2.1k
Description: Robby w an slp reader, who usually is sweet as sunshine but due to his tendency to be an asshole, he manages to get silent treatment, stink eye and a level of illegal sarcasm no one knew she posessed. And his only way out: grovelling
> Michael "Robby" Robinavitch x Reader by @docrobinavitch
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 1.7k
Description: I wanted to ask if you would have any brainworms about Robby and two of the prompts: “You’re standing too close.” and “Say we’re still just friends. Lie to me.”
> The Slippage in the System (Michael "Robby" Robinavitch) by @sweetestcowboy
Tags: Series (Ongoing), A + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
Description: Needing control was Michael’s biggest flaw. control of his department, especially. when a new psych fellow comes to challenge that control—he’s not intimated—he’s infuriated. He should know better than to go toe-to-toe with Dr. Jefferson’s new protegee.
Batfam | DCU:
> Down, Boy! (Jason Todd) by @ferbaby
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1.8k
Description: Jason woke up and decided chaos was his word of the day.
> Spoiled Rotten (Jason Todd) by @/ferbaby
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1.6k
Description: In which Jason has gotten used to your affection aka he's spoiled.
> Like Mother, Like Daughter (Jason Todd) by @jellyfishsthings
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 2.9k
Description: Jason Todd had been in love exactly once in his life, and it was the worst possible situation imaginable. Not because you were evil. Not because you were dangerous. Not even because you were a criminal—though you were, technically. No, the problem was much simpler and infinitely more complicated: You were Selina Kyle's daughter. And Selina Kyle absolutely, categorically hated his guts.
> A Language Made of Rage (Jason Todd) by @/purplespiritimagines
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 10.5k
Description: Jason Todd x child of Bruce banner/ Hulk, like and they have pretty good control over their Hulk form often being about to shift between the two. They lose control during a routine mission.
> Jason Todd x Reader by @honeysucklewatr
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 740
> Whoop, Whoop (Jason Todd) by @fluentmoviequoter
Tags: Series (Ongoing), Cop!Reader, F
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2
Description: During a routine traffic stop, you meet Jason Todd in your hometown of Blüdhaven. You let him off with a warning, then show him a part of yourself not even Dick Grayson has seen.
> Man vs. Cat (Dick Grayson) by @llovelygood
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 774
Description: Dick and your cat hate each other. Then your cat gets stuck and Dick is the one in charge of getting him out.
> Pillowcase (Dick Grayson) by @plumstatic
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1.2k
Description: You accidentally fall asleep before your plans with Dick. That's embarrassing enough. Getting caught hiding the real reason you refused to let him into your bedroom? Significantly worse.
> Bad Words and Wrong Names (Dick Grayson) by @hannibals-favourite-meal
Tags: One Shot, Chubby!Reader, F
Word Count: 1.4k
Description: You’re a single mom who’s just moved into a new house with your boyfriend, and your 6-year-old has decided that now is the time to give him a new name.
> Where We Lie (Dick Grayson) by @oncasette
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, F + S
Word Count: 4.1k
Description: “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.
> Off Duty (Dick Grayson) by @cherryysunshine
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, F + S
Word Count: 5.5k
Description: Prince Richard “Dick” Grayson has spent years trying to make his solemn knight smile. When he finally finds the woman hidden beneath the armor, he decides one laugh is not nearly enough.
Frank Castle | The Punisher (MCU):
> Take Some Off by @francixoxoxo
Tags: One Shot, Hairdresser!Reader, F + C
Word Count: 1.6k
Description: Some domestic frank fluff 🥹 haircuts and sleepiness
> Period Pains by @hellilovedit
Tags: One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 3.7k
Description: A glimpse at how Frank helps with your period.
> When Life Gives You Lemons by @/hellilovedit
Tags: One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 4k
Description: Your neighbour, Frank Castle, helped you with one thing, one time… and now you’re attached. He’s attached. But are either of you going to admit it?
> Make It Stick by @/hellilovedit
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, S + C
Word Count: 6.8k
Description: Your first morning as the Castiglione’s starts with sex and ends with something new.
> Birthday! by @peterftpercy
Tags: One Shot, Birthday fic!, A + HC
Word Count: 5.3k
Description: It's your birthday… but Frank realizes you don't care. You really don't care.
> Suffer in Silence by @dirtylittlediary
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 5.8k
Description: You hide a life-threatening injury from Frank
> And It's Too Hard to Describe This (In A Way That Feels Honest) by @tuesdayiminlove
Tags: One Shot, Hockey Coach!Frank, Photographer!Reader, F
Word Count: 1.4k
Description: You never eat before morning practice. Someone notices.
> I'll Be Your Saviour by @lottie-sweetheart
Tags: Series, Divorced!Frank, F + A + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ?
Description: Frank has been your neighbour for 7 months now, constantly helping you out whenever you need him. You always repaid him. But tonight, tonight you need him more than ever. And Frank doesn't require any payment for this one...
> Less by @tomhardysluvr888
Tags: Series, A + HC
Chapter Count: Pt. 1 | ...?
Description: Time has passed since your not-so-happy reunion with Frank. You thought that you would find peace after that...so why does the wound still ache?
Bucky Barnes | The Winter Soldier (MCU):
> We Go Way Back by @caeruleusbarnes
Tags: One Shot, A + C
Word Count: 2.6k
Description: After decades of being away from his wife, Bucky Barnes tried to make his way back to her, only to find out that he was too late. Coping with that hurt, but instead of wasting his life mourning what he didn‘t have, Bucky trusted that he would meet you again when the time was right.
> Childhood Cat by @/caeruleusbarnes
Tags: One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 3.6k
Description: After the passing of your childhood cat, you tried to get away from the grief with drowning yourself in work. But when Bucky showed up in the lap one night, in need of your help, you were confronted with a situation that you weren‘t exactly ready for yet.
> Lethal Love by @w1nter-fairy
Tags: One Shot, A
Word Count: 5.2k
Description: After the mission of returning the infinity stones goes wrong, the power stone leaves you with something you can’t get rid of. You survive the exposure, but now Bucky can only survive you in small doses.
> The Prophecy by @/w1nter-fairy
Tags: One Shot, F + HC
Word Count: 11.3k
Description: Every psychic and every tarot deck tells the same story: love isn't meant for you. Every reading ends the same way—until one skeptical customer pulls three cards that were never meant to belong to him. Suddenly, the future you've spent years trying to outrun refuses to leave you alone.
> Fertiliz-Her by @pinksplace
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, Stardew!AU, F + S
Word Count: 6.1k
Description: Bucky gives you free range of his farm and all the plants and wildlife it includes. You give Bucky fertilizer and any scientific insights you find. Tit for tat. Seems simple enough, but as the days pass, you can’t seem to escape each-other’s orbit. It’s like nature is literally pushing you together, but that would be crazy… wouldn’t it?
> To Be Loved Is To Be Changed by @sheriff-bodecker
Tags: One Shot, F + C
Word Count: 4k
Description: After his daughter, Winnie, ripped the arm off her beloved stuffed doggy, Bucky takes the day off to take care him, subsequently figuring some things out while doing so.
Miscellaneous:
> The Long Way Home (Frankie "Catfish" Morales) by @berryispunk
Tags: One Shot, C
Word Count: 1.6k
Description: The only thing worse than a terrible first date is realizing you'd rather have spent the evening with your best friend.
> Wait for Me: I'm Coming (Andrew "Pope" Cody) by @/fangirl-dot-com
Tags: 18+, MDNI, One Shot, A + HC
Word Count: 4.5k
Description: I saw that one Shawn interview where he spoke about how different he'd make Pope's ending, and I couldn't help but want to write it into existence in my own way.
> Paw-some Career Day (Ryland Grace) by @devisedplan
Tags: One Shot, F
Word Count: 1.7k
Description: Your younger sister's school has an upcoming career day where parents of students would usually volunteer to share more of their occupation. Out of everyone in the family, she decided to pester you. Too bad, you had the coolest job after all.
summary: You survive. Barely. After a brutal ambush meant for Joel, he’s the one left picking up the pieces. As you recover, both of you have to learn how to live with the scars—inside and out. Inspired by Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce
WC: 5.5K
Tags: graphic violence, detailed injury descriptions, near-death experience, PTSD and trauma response, panic attacks, nightmares, body image insecurity, physical and emotional recovery, protective Joel Miller, soft and emotionally vulnerable Joel, hurt/comfort, angst with a soft ending, established relationship, no smut (pure emotional intimacy), canon-divergent
My Masterlist
You’re only supposed to be out for another hour.
It’s a familiar path—worn by hooves and boots, trees thin enough to see through, quiet enough to feel safe. You’ve ridden it dozens of times.
But this time feels off.
You turn your head too late. You barely register the snap of a branch before someone slams into you from behind.
Your forehead cracks against the ground. Pain explodes across your face. Your ears ring. Your mouth fills with dirt.
Boots stomp near your ribs. You try to move, but you’re already being dragged—hands under your arms, your limbs limp, rifle long gone.
They drop you in a clearing like you’re nothing.
You blink past blood.
Three people surround you. One woman crouches in front—built like a tank, arms tense, jaw tight.
You don’t know her.
But she knows you.
“Thought I’d find you eventually,” she says, voice sharp with venom. “Joel always did have a soft spot for strays.”
Your heart stutters.
Joel?
You push up on one elbow. “What… what the hell are you talking about?”
You try to move, but hands hold you down—two of her crew pinning your arms and legs.
“I was hoping for Joel,” she continues, crouching beside you, pulling out a knife. “But you… you’ll do.”
The knife kisses your cheek.
Then slices.
Not deep—but enough to sting. Enough to make you flinch.
Her jaw twitches.
She stands up and kicks you hard in the side. You scream as ribs snap like brittle twigs.
“You don’t get to play dumb,” she snarls. “You’re the girl from Jackson. His… what, girlfriend? Housemate? Fuck-buddy?”
You stare, mouth open, breath stuck. You don’t recognize her, but she’s looking at you like you killed someone she loved.
“I should kill you quick,” she says, pulling a hammer from her belt. “But that wouldn’t hurt him enough.”
You try to crawl backward. The others move to block you.
“I don’t know who you are,” you rasp.
She crouches beside you, grabbing your face roughly. “No, but I know you. And that’s enough. I’m gonna make sure when he sees you, he sees what he did.”
The first hit with the hammer doesn’t come down on your skull—it crashes into your leg. You scream.
She’s not trying to kill you.
She’s trying to destroy you.
Another hit. Another. Your vision blurs. Your shoulder is yanked backward until something tears. You cry out, choking.
She whispers things you can’t make sense of—“My father,” “hospital,” “he didn’t hesitate.”
None of it makes sense.
But all of it hurts.
Eventually, you stop fighting. You just breathe. Try to stay awake.
Then—
Gunfire.
A sharp crack, and one of the men drops.
Another shot—clean through the second’s chest. He collapses.
The woman—though you still don’t know her name—spins too late.
Jesse’s bullet hits her square in the chest.
She gasps, stumbles. Her hammer falls. One more shot and she hits the ground, lifeless.
When it’s over, the world is deathly still.
He rushes to you. You can’t even lift your head.
“Hey. Hey, I got you,” he whispers, falling to his knees, pressing his hands to your bleeding side. “Oh fuck, oh my god…”
You try to speak. Your lips barely move.
He leans in close.
“…Joel,” you breathe, tears mixing with blood. “Don’t let him… blame himself.”
Jesse shakes his head, panicking. “No. No, don’t talk like that. We’re gonna get you home.”
He shrugs off his jacket and wraps it around you, lifting you carefully into his arms. You scream—your shoulder’s dislocated—but he holds you like you’ll break. Because you will.
“Shhh, I know, I know,” Jesse pants, voice shaking. “It’s bad. It’s so bad. Just hold on.”
He starts running.
“I’m getting you back. I swear to God. I swear to God,” he pants, staggering toward the trees, back toward Jackson, covered in blood that isn’t just yours.
Behind you, she lies dead in the dirt.
But her legacy is carved into your skin.
And all you can do is close your eyes and hope he gets you there in time.
You never even got her name.
He hears the shouting before he sees the blood.
Joel’s just outside the stables when the gates open too fast—too loud. His head snaps up.
People are running. Someone yells for help. Maria’s voice barks orders from the tower. Joel drops the shovel in his hand and moves before he can think.
Then he sees Jesse.
And everything stops.
Jesse is soaked in blood. His arms are trembling. And in them, slumped and broken, is you.
Joel doesn’t recognize you at first.
Your head lolls back. Hair matted with blood. Face unrecognizable—swollen, bruised, sliced. There’s something wrong with the way your arm hangs, like it’s not attached right. One of your boots is gone. Your jacket is torn and soaked through.
Joel’s stomach drops. His vision narrows.
“No,” he hears himself whisper.
Jesse pushes through the crowd, shouting— “I need help! She’s still breathing! She’s alive!”
Joel moves to intercept, chest heaving, but Jesse shoves past him, too focused.
“Get outta the fuckin’ way—Maria! Get a goddamn stretcher!”
Joel follows, dazed. “What happened?” he croaks. “Jesse—what the fuck happened?!”
Jesse’s voice breaks. “They jumped her, man. Out past the old checkpoint. One of ‘em—she knew who she was. Said her name. Said your name.”
Joel goes still. The cold wraps around his spine.
“Who?” he demands.
Jesse doesn’t answer.
They reach the clinic. The doors slam open. Jackson’s medics rush forward, shouting over each other, hands everywhere, lifting you from Jesse’s arms and onto a gurney.
Joel sees your blood smear Jesse’s jacket.
“Ribs are broken—she’s lost a lot of blood—”
“Shoulder’s out—maybe punctured lung—”
“She’s going into shock—get the morphine now—”
Joel doesn’t hear the rest.
He’s stuck.
His boots feel nailed to the floor as the doors swing shut behind the gurney.
You’re gone. Out of his reach.
And he wasn’t there.
He always told himself he wouldn’t let it happen again—not to Ellie, not to Tommy, not to you.
But he did.
He let you go.
He let you go out there alone, and now you’re somewhere behind those doors fighting to stay alive because of something he did. Something he caused. A ghost from his past, lashing out in a way he never saw coming.
Jesse is breathing hard, leaning against the wall, blood on his face and hands.
“I shot her,” he mutters. “The woman. Whoever she was. I killed her. Killed the others too. But I—” he swallows. “I wasn’t fast enough.”
Joel can’t even respond. His throat won’t work. His hands are fists at his sides.
All he can do is stare at the closed doors, heart pounding like war drums.
You’re in there.
And he’s out here.
Alone.
Again.
The machines are the only things making noise.
Soft, steady beeps. A faint hiss of oxygen. The occasional rustle of gauze or plastic as the nurse changes your IV bag in silence. Joel barely hears any of it.
He hasn’t moved in hours.
He’s sitting beside your bed—hands clasped tight between his knees, boots planted on the cold floor, head down. Watching your chest rise and fall.
You look… barely human.
Your face is swollen on one side. Purple, green, black. Stitches across your temple. Your arm is bound to your side, shoulder reset. Tubes in your nose. Dried blood crusted beneath it. A faint line of bruises runs along your throat like a cruel necklace.
Joel stares at your hand resting on the sheets. There’s an IV in it. A splint along your wrist. He hasn’t touched it yet. He’s too afraid you’ll be cold.
Or worse, that you won’t squeeze back.
He swallows hard. His eyes sting. But he won’t cry.
Not here.
Not where people can see.
The room clears eventually. Nurses change shifts. Jesse came by once—left you a cup of water and a little stuffed bear someone gave him when he was in the clinic for a busted ankle. Joel didn’t say much.
He just waits. And watches.
And breaks.
He doesn’t talk out loud at first.
For the first few hours, Joel just sits in it. Lets the silence crawl under his skin and stay there. He thinks of everything he could’ve done differently. Should’ve done. Would’ve done—if he’d known.
Shouldn’t’ve let you go out alone.
Should’ve been the one on that route.
Should’ve recognized the signs.
Should’ve told you to stay.
Should’ve told you the fucking truth.
Eventually, the silence gets too loud, and the guilt starts to spill.
“I should’ve been out there,” he says, voice rough and too quiet. “You should’ve never been alone.”
You don’t move.
Joel glances at your face. You’re still far away. Too far.
“I think she was lookin’ for me,” he adds, words slow like he’s choking on each one. “The one Jesse killed. She said my name.”
He runs a hand over his face, jaw tight.
“I don’t know what I did to her. But I’ve done enough to enough people that it don’t matter. It always comes back around.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees. For a second, he looks older than he’s ever felt. Like the weight of the whole damn world is back on his shoulders.
“I told myself I’d never let someone I love get hurt again,” he whispers. “Not like this. Not like Sarah. Not like Ellie. But here I am. Sittin’ in another fuckin’ hospital chair. Watchin’ you fight for your life.”
Joel swallows hard. His hands shake.
“You didn’t even know her name,” he says. “You got all that pain and blood for someone you didn’t even know.”
He finally reaches out and brushes your hand with the back of his fingers.
It’s warm.
Barely.
He’s trying to stay strong. Like he always does.
For Tommy. For Ellie. For Jackson.
For you.
But there’s a crack in him now—and it’s spreading.
He rubs a hand over his face for the fifth time in an hour, like he can scrub the emotions away if he just tries hard enough. But his breath catches when he looks at you again.
You’re so still.
Too still.
And he can’t stop seeing the blood. The way Jesse held your body like it might fall apart in his arms. The way your fingers didn’t move when Joel reached for them. The bruises. The silence. The stillness.
He blinks fast. Looks down. Jaw clenched so tight it hurts.
But then—
A sound slips out of him.
Small.
Involuntary.
Like a wounded animal.
He squeezes his eyes shut, like that’ll hold it in.
It doesn’t.
His chest heaves, and the breath that comes next is a sob.
Low. Broken. Shameful.
“Goddamn it,” he rasps, pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth. “Goddamn it…”
The tears come slow at first—hot and silent. Rolling down his face before he can stop them. He hides behind his hand, hunched over, shoulders shaking.
It’s not loud. Not the kind of crying that screams.
It’s the kind that hurts more because it doesn’t.
He leans forward, elbows on your bed, forehead resting gently near your arm.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, voice thick. “I should’ve been there. Should’ve known. You were just tryin’ to help. And I left you out there…”
Another sob claws its way out of his throat.
“I’m so goddamn tired of losin’ people,” he chokes. “But if I lose you—if you don’t wake up—I swear to God, I don’t think I’ll survive it this time.”
He breaks fully then. Quiet, ugly, aching. Like his soul is caving in on itself.
It’s been years since he cried like this. Since Sarah. Maybe not even then.
Because this time… he let himself love again. He let himself believe he could have something good. That maybe, just maybe, someone could love him back.
And now you’re lying here—broken, because of him.
He stays there, folded in on himself, for a long time.
Holding your hand.
Letting himself fall apart where no one else can see.
It starts with sound.
Dull and warped, like you’re underwater. You can’t tell what’s real—what’s dream or memory. There’s pressure in your head, a deep ache in your chest, and something burning in your shoulder every time you try to breathe too deep.
You want to move.
You can’t.
Everything is wrong.
You try to blink, but your eyelids feel like they’re glued shut. Even thinking is hard. Like someone filled your skull with cement and let it dry.
Voices blur in and out. Someone’s crying, maybe. Or maybe that was just you.
Then—
A voice cuts through the fog.
Rough. Southern. Familiar.
Low like gravel and thunder.
“…can’t do this again…”
You try to move toward it. Just a twitch. Just your fingers.
Nothing.
“…can’t lose her…”
Your heart trips in your chest.
You know that voice.
Joel.
God—Joel.
You try to say his name, but your throat won’t cooperate. It’s raw. Like you swallowed glass.
More words. Barely audible. Like he’s talking to himself.
“…should’ve never let her go alone…”
There’s something about the way he says it—like he’s crumbling. Like he’s been holding himself together by nothing but spit and string and your heartbeat. You can feel it in the air. The weight of him. Heavy. Exhausted.
You blink again.
This time, your eyes open a sliver.
The room is dark. Dim light from a lamp in the corner. The shadows are soft. The world is blurry, like it’s behind a veil.
Joel is sitting beside your bed, hunched over with one hand pressed to his face. Shoulders shaking just slightly.
He doesn’t see you looking.
You try again. Just a whisper. Just his name.
“J…Joel…”
It’s barely sound. More like a breath shaped around a memory.
But he hears it.
His head jerks up. Eyes wild.
“Hey—hey, hey,” he breathes, scrambling to sit forward. “You—you awake? Baby, can you hear me?”
You manage a twitch of your fingers. Barely.
He lets out a noise like relief and agony all tangled together. One hand cups the side of your face, trembling like he can’t believe you’re real.
“You’re alright. You’re here. Jesus Christ…” He sucks in a breath like it hurts.
You blink again. His face is red, tear-streaked. His beard’s thicker than you remember. His eyes look like he hasn’t slept in days.
Your lips part.
“You okay?” you rasp, barely audible.
Joel lets out a sharp exhale that’s half a sob, half a laugh.
“Am I—? No, darlin’. Don’t ask me that,” he says, brushing your hair back from your forehead so, so gently. “You’re the one lyin’ in a goddamn hospital bed lookin’ like you got trampled by a fuckin’ truck. You askin’ me if I’m okay…”
Your eyes flutter. You want to smile, but it hurts.
“Didn’t mean to worry you,” you whisper, a flicker of humor in your broken voice.
Joel closes his eyes like that hurts worse than anything else.
“You didn’t worry me. You near killed me,” he murmurs. “Don’t say sorry. Not to me.”
You shift slightly—just enough to let the pain remind you it’s all real. The weight of your body. The ache in your bones. The bruises singing beneath your skin.
The flashes come in bits and pieces—
The dirt.
The hammer.
Her voice.
You shiver.
Joel notices. He wraps his hand around yours instantly, warm and grounding.
“She’s dead,” he says, like he can read your mind. “Jesse shot her. She won’t hurt you again.”
You blink, slow.
“I didn’t… even know her,” you whisper.
Joel nods, jaw tight. “But she knew you. Knew me. That’s all it took.”
Silence falls again. You can feel your body begging you to sleep—but you don’t want to. Not yet. Not while he’s here.
Joel leans in closer. His voice drops.
“I love you,” he says, rough and low, like it’s been sitting on his tongue for years. “You hear me?”
You blink slowly. Nod once.
“I love you, too,” you rasp, and it hurts—but it’s worth it just to see the way his eyes close like he’s praying.
He presses your hand to his mouth and stays there. Quiet. Breathing with you.
You fall asleep with his fingers laced through yours, the echo of his voice still in your ear.
And this time, you know you’ll wake up again.
Because Joel’s here.
And he’s not letting go.
The days bleed together at first.
Morning and night don’t mean much when your body refuses to do even the simplest things. Breathing hurts. Talking drains you. Moving? Feels impossible.
Still—Joel is always there.
He helps you sit up the first time, cradling your spine like it might splinter in his hands.
You cry. Not from pain—but from the humiliation of it. Of being this weak. This… broken.
“Hey,” he murmurs, brushing tears from your cheeks before they fall. “You ain’t broken. Just healing. There’s a difference.”
You don’t believe him, not yet.
It takes a week before they let you leave the clinic. Joel argues to bring you home earlier, but the nurses insist on waiting until your fever passes and your oxygen holds steady.
When they finally wheel you out in a battered chair, Joel’s already waiting on the porch with a blanket, a flask of weak tea, and that look in his eyes—the one that never left from the moment he saw Jesse carrying you in.
Wrecked. Quiet. Protective.
He carries you inside like he’s afraid the wind might steal you away.
You sleep in his bed.
He insists.
“Only place in the house that don’t creak,” he grumbles.
He sits with you through the worst of it.
The fever sweats hit first—cold and sudden, leaving your body trembling under damp sheets while your teeth chatter like glass. Joel is always there before you even call out. A towel in one hand, a water cup in the other, his voice low and steady as he presses cool cloths to your forehead.
When the spasms start—violent jerks that rip through your legs, your healing ribs—he doesn’t flinch. Just slips his hand beneath your shoulder blades, murmuring your name over and over like it might steady your spine.
“It’s okay,” he whispers, voice like warm gravel. “I got you. I got you, sweetheart.”
Some nights, you wake screaming.
No build-up. No warning.
Just full-body panic, lungs dragging in air like you’re drowning, fingers clawing at invisible restraints. You don’t know where you are. Can’t tell what’s real. You think the hammer’s still coming down. You think the dirt’s still in your mouth. You think you’re still dying.
And Joel—he’s already there.
“Hey, hey—it’s just me,” he says, voice low, hands up like he’s approaching a wounded animal. “You’re home, baby. You’re safe. I got you.”
You sob. You shake. You try to get the words out, but your throat won’t work.
So he climbs into bed behind you, pulls you back against his chest, and just holds you—one hand wrapped around your middle, the other cradling your hand against his heart.
You cry until your body gives out. Until all that’s left is soft hiccups and a shaking breath that finally, finally goes still.
Other nights, it’s worse in its quiet.
You don’t scream.
You just… tremble.
Eyes open, unfocused. Breath shallow. Hands clenched in the sheets so tight your knuckles go white. Frozen in place like your mind’s trapped somewhere your body can’t follow.
Joel notices right away.
He doesn’t speak at first. Just slides into the bed, lays on his side, and touches your back—light and slow, letting you feel the weight of his palm so you remember where you are.
“You with me?” he whispers, after a while.
You nod.
But then the whisper comes, cracked and pitiful, over and over again like a broken record:
“I didn’t know her. I didn’t know why.”
Joel squeezes his eyes shut, face buried in your hair.
Every time you say it, it cuts deeper. Not because you’re admitting something—but because you’re still carrying it. Still shouldering it.
He holds you tighter.
“I know,” he always says. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”
And it’s not just for what happened. Not just for the pain, or the bruises, or the sleepless nights.
He’s sorry for letting you walk out that gate.
He’s sorry for not telling you about his past. About the ghosts that still walk, still kill, still reach for the people he loves.
He’s sorry he wasn’t the one who took that beating.
And if he could take it from you—every scream, every scar, every ounce of fear—you know he would.
You feel it in the way he holds you.
Like you’re something he’s not just afraid to lose—
But something he knows he doesn’t deserve, and still begs the universe to spare.
Recovery isn’t linear.
It’s a jagged, crawling thing—three steps forward, two steps back, and a whole lot of days where it feels like you’re going nowhere at all.
You’re angry. A lot.
At your body, for not doing what it used to. For aching with every movement. For stiff joints and a limp you can’t shake. For how the skin around your shoulder pulls where the sutures were. For how even breathing sometimes feels like a betrayal.
But mostly, you’re angry at your face.
The first time you see it clearly in the mirror, you can’t look for more than a second.
The swelling is down now, but the bruises are stubborn. Deep. Sickly yellow in some places, dark red in others. One scar stretches along your temple in a jagged, cruel arc. Another bisects the curve of your lip.
You touch the stitches near your jaw with shaking fingers.
You barely recognize the reflection.
You drop the mirror on the counter and leave the room. You don’t talk for the rest of the night.
Joel notices. Of course he does.
But he doesn’t push.
He never does.
When you snap at him for standing too close, he just nods and gives you space. When you burst into tears halfway through trying to button a shirt, he wordlessly takes over—finishing each button with patient fingers and no pity in his eyes.
He carries you to the bathroom when you’re too weak to walk. Sits on the floor while you shower with your back to him, hands braced against the tile as the hot water runs over scars you don’t want anyone to see.
But he never stares. Never comments.
When you nearly collapse trying to shave your legs, you snap, “This is fucking pointless, Joel!”
He just gently eases the razor out of your hand and says, “Ain’t nothin’ pointless ‘bout feelin’ like yourself.”
And when you do finally cry into his chest again, fists clenched tight in his shirt, he just holds you and lets you fall apart.
“You don’t have to be okay every second,” he murmurs into your hair. “Just let me carry some of it when you can’t.”
He reads to you at night.
Old books. Short stories. Sometimes old letters he found in a busted file cabinet out near the edge of town—ones he thinks you might like. You fall asleep most nights to the sound of his voice and the weight of his hand resting over yours.
One day, weeks into your recovery, you catch your reflection by accident.
It’s late. You’re in the bathroom, brushing your teeth slowly, shoulders aching from using the cane all day. You glance up—and there you are.
Scarred. Pale. Tired.
Not you.
You stare at your reflection for a long time, toothbrush hanging loose from your hand.
Then you step out into the bedroom, where Joel’s sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing his boots.
“Do I still look like me?” you ask, voice small. Barely audible.
Joel doesn’t even hesitate.
He looks up. Straight at you. And his expression is… soft. But unflinching.
“You look like the woman I was gonna spend the rest of my life with,” he says, steady and sure. “You still do.”
Your breath hitches. Your lips part—but no words come out.
He stands, steps closer, careful like he always is now.
“You think those scars make you look less like you?” he asks gently, brushing your hair behind your ear. “'Cause all I see is you. Braver than anyone I’ve ever known.”
You look away. “You’re just saying that.”
Joel cups your face, thumb brushing just below the old bruise near your cheekbone.
“I ain’t never just said anything to you in my life,” he murmurs. “And I sure as hell ain’t startin’ now.”
Tears burn behind your eyes.
You don’t try to stop them.
He pulls you in close, and you let yourself be held—not because you’re weak. But because you’re strong enough now to know that being held doesn’t mean broken.
You’re healing.
Slowly.
But you’re still you.
And Joel sees all of it.
It’s a few weeks after you come home when Jesse finally stops by.
He knocks once—three quick raps, casual, almost sheepish—then pushes open the front door like he’s done a thousand times before.
You’re sitting at the kitchen table, Joel’s sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder, your cane resting against the chair leg. There’s a blanket around your legs and a mug of tea gone cold beside your hand.
When you see Jesse, you try to smile.
“Hey, hero.”
He raises an eyebrow. “If I’m the hero in this story, we’re all fucked.”
You let out a soft laugh, which still pulls at your side. “Don’t sell yourself short. You saved my life.”
Jesse walks in with a brown paper bag clutched in one hand. “Brought you that soup you like. From the new kitchen down by the stables.”
You blink. “The mushroom one?”
He sets it in front of you. “You think I didn’t memorize your post-patrol cravings after all this time?”
You go quiet. The steam rises between you.
Jesse leans against the counter, arms crossed.
“You look better,” he says finally. “Still a little like a raccoon with PTSD, but you know… cuter.”
You snort. “You always did know how to charm a girl.”
The silence after stretches. Thicker. He doesn’t look at you at first—just stares at the edge of the table.
So you say it.
“I never thanked you.”
His jaw flexes. He shakes his head. “Don’t.”
“I mean it, Jesse. You… you showed up when I thought no one would. You put a bullet in her without hesitating. You carried me back. You—”
“I said don’t.”
You stop.
Jesse finally lifts his eyes to yours. His voice is lower now. Calmer, but shaking just underneath.
“Don’t thank me for doing what anyone who loved you would’ve done,” he says. “That wasn’t brave. That was… reacting. I saw what she was doing to you and I just—” He swallows. “I didn’t even think. I just fired.”
You blink, watching his hands clench into fists against his arms.
He exhales hard through his nose and looks away.
“I’ve never been that scared in my life,” he mutters. “Not even during the outbreak. Not even when the infected rushed us last winter. Nothing’s ever scared me like seeing you lying there, not moving.”
You’re quiet.
“I thought I was too late,” he says.
You shift in your seat. “You weren’t.”
His eyes meet yours again, darker now. “Joel didn’t talk for two days after. Did you know that?”
You shake your head slowly.
“Just sat there. Outside the clinic. Hands covered in your blood.” Jesse’s voice goes rough again. “I brought him water. He didn’t drink it. Brought him food. He didn’t touch it. I think if you had… if you hadn’t woken up—”
He stops. Runs a hand through his hair.
“You’re the only reason Joel didn’t break entirely,” he finishes.
You feel that. In your ribs. In your throat. In the parts of you that are still learning how to beat again.
Jesse looks at you for a long time, then pushes off the counter.
“So yeah. Don’t thank me.”
You nod. “Okay.”
“But…” he adds, more softly now, “you’re welcome anyway.”
He gives you a half-smile, ruffles your hair gently, and starts to head out.
At the door, he pauses and glances over his shoulder.
“You ever wanna talk about it… about her, or anything… I’m around.”
“I know,” you say.
And you do.
The world doesn’t stop hurting.
But it gets softer.
Months pass. Slowly. Some days feel like entire winters packed into the space between breakfast and sleep. But your body grows stronger. The cane becomes more accessory than necessity. The ache in your ribs dulls. You walk without flinching. You sleep without screaming.
You live.
One breath at a time.
Joel never leaves. He gives you space when you need it, patience when you can’t ask for it, and love in the quiet, steady way he does everything — with his whole damn soul, hidden behind a low voice and calloused hands.
You find yourself falling in love with him all over again, this version of him that isn’t trying to be a hero. Just a man.
Your man.
Spring comes early that year.
The snow thaws, the streams swell, and Jackson begins to bloom again — cautious and slow, like it’s remembering how.
That’s when Joel shows it to you.
He doesn’t tell you where you’re going—just helps you onto one of the horses and rides beside you for twenty quiet minutes, down a path behind the eastern fields.
You’re confused at first. Until you reach the end.
A clearing.
A hand-built bench nestled beneath a twisted old tree, branches just beginning to bud green again. A stream runs past it, water glittering in the afternoon light.
The view is breathtaking—wide and open, far from town. It smells like fresh grass and wild mint.
You slide off the horse slowly and limp toward it, one hand bracing against your thigh.
“You made this?” you ask, turning back.
Joel nods, standing with his thumbs tucked in his belt. “Started workin’ on it when you were still in the clinic.”
“Why?”
He shrugs, looking away like he’s embarrassed.
“Needed a place to talk to you. Where it was quiet.”
You sit down on the bench. It creaks under your weight, but it’s sturdy. Comfortable.
Joel lowers himself beside you and pulls something from his coat pocket.
A leather journal.
Worn edges. Filled thick with pages.
You frown. “What’s that?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Just presses it into your hands.
You open the cover slowly.
The first page is dated the night Jesse brought you home, soaked in blood.
March 4th.
She’s not waking up. I can’t stop thinking about what her last thought was.
Was it me?
Your breath catches.
You flip to the next.
March 5th.
She always hated the silence at night. I’m talking out loud to her anyway. Told her the whole story of how I saw her at the market the first time. I think I talked for an hour. If she can hear me, I hope she knows how beautiful she is, even now.
Page after page. Memories. Guilt. Confessions. Anger. Fear.
He wrote you letters he never planned to send. Pieces of himself you never knew he could give.
There’s a page with lyrics. Half-remembered ones.
"If I could save time in a bottle…"
The ink is darker there. Blotted in places. You realize he was crying when he wrote it.
Your hands tremble.
“Why give me this now?” you whisper.
Joel leans forward, elbows on his knees, voice low and steady.
“‘Cause I spent too long not sayin’ the things that mattered. You damn near died with me never tellin’ you half of ‘em.”
He looks over at you, eyes full of something raw and terrifyingly real.
“I wrote all that down ‘cause I didn’t think I’d get another chance. But I did. And I ain’t gonna waste a second of it.”
You blink back tears and look down at the last page.
Just two lines.
If I could save time in a bottle…
I’d save every second I wasted not telling you how much I love you.
You close the journal and hold it to your chest.
Joel watches you for a moment. Then reaches out and takes your hand.
You let him.
The two of you sit in silence—shoulder to shoulder, fingers laced—listening to the stream and the wind in the trees.
And for the first time in a long time—
You don’t feel haunted.
You feel held.
AN: if you made it all the way here… first of all, I love you. second, I hope your heart is okay. this one meant a lot to me — I wanted to write something that felt like grief and healing holding hands, and Joel just being there in the most Joel way possible. soft hands, steady love, long recovery.
Summary: Your first morning as the Castiglione’s starts with sex and ends with something new.
MASTERLIST
Warnings: explicit, graphic smut — MDNI, 18+ ONLY. cunnilingus (whatever that is), piv, breeding kink, reader tops but that don’t mean Frank ain’t soft dom, breeding kink ummm consequences, pron wit some plot, Frank calls reader "little" but I use this as reader being soft, not in actual size.
w/c: 6851
my first ever requested pic!fic! see the req here. requested pic is the first one in the banner
Frank sleeps like a marine is trained to: stone still, without a sound, and alert at the drop of a pin.
So when the paths of early morning sun spill through the sheer curtains of your bedroom and into your eyes for a gentle rousing to the day, you make no sound, no movement, other than fluttering your lashes open.
It’s as though the world’s softly coaxing you to this rare moment— one where you wake up before Frank.
The heavy knit blankets trap in heat from his bare body molded flush behind you, still trying to complete himself through you.
You must’ve fucked him to remission last night because he sleeps. A deep sleep slows his breathing, shoulders unraveled from their usual tension, a heavy arm draped over your body to keep you there. A natural, placid cadence to his body. The gradual rise of his chest with an inhale, white lace bedspread expanding with it.
The easy, prolonged deflation of an exhale. Your husband, finally—finally—at peace.
He’s heavy in the morning. Heavy limbed. Sleep-warmed. Heavy cock jutting against your ass.
You grin to yourself, sleepy victory. Your thighs squeeze together all over again, thinking about last night. I’m the luckiest woman alive, you think, your naked body snug against cotton sheets and the bulk of muscle behind you.
Still new on your finger, on the pillow beside your head, the morning light catches on your wedding ring.
Today begins the very first day as husband and wife…
Today… the start of a new forever.
Today… feels like The Punisher has finished, and Frank Castle can rest. Grow old with you. Learn to enjoy life. Take things one day at a time and unclench his fists, put down the gun.
Yeah…
Today will be different.
Today is everything—the start of something new.
As Frank sleeps, your eyes track your shared bedroom with a new perspective. Since when does everything look so… soft? Like a hole punched out of heaven and transplanted into your life. Your bedroom… it’s a place of patience where love can only grow, nurtured by the placidity of those who inhabit it. Mahogany wood, delicate sheets. Frank’s teased you relentlessly about the grandma decorations, but the rustic quality now shapes both of your lives.
White wedding gown in a lacy heap on the plush carpet, where, last night, Frank knelt before you as he shed it from you like you’re holy instead of human.
Books on the nightstand, a vase of fresh wildflowers that served as your wedding bouquet yesterday. A framed photo of you two, and a second of Maria and the kids beside it. Gone, never forgotten. You don’t want them to be forgotten or put away. So they have a place on the nightstand, right by you and Frank.
And above you… your eyes strain to lift to the wall, glancing at the photo there too. A pond landscape. Ornate details preserved in paint from decades ago. One of your favorites, the artist of no importance other than the serene grounding you feel looking at it.
In the stillness of morning, you decide to try your luck. How much can you get away with before your husband wakes? And what better way to wake than under your touch, being worshipped and appreciated and rewarded?
You arch your ass back, pushing against his dick. A movement easily disguised as shifting in your sleep.
A grunted breath pushes from his nose. An instinctual press of his hips forward, into the plush of you again. Chasing you, your body, even in sleep.
You bite your bottom lip to contain your grin. And for good measure… you do it again. A soft grind. Another sleep-conflicted breath from Frank. Another push of his erection flat against your ass cheek.
Cause and effect.
You move, he moves.
You tease, he seeks.
Somewhere during your experimental touching, Frank’s breathing shifts. The sound ceases. A reflective flex of his muscles as his eyes open. An intentional relaxing as he registers his surroundings.
Frank sleeps like a marine is trained to.
He wakes like it, all the same: muted sound, bracing for trouble, cataloging the world around him.
When there’s no war to be had, no danger to be found, his body slackens. Does some experimenting of his own as his arm curls in, tightens, hand spanning over your bare stomach.
You feel all of it behind you. Frank waking, remembering yesterday, two seconds into consciousness and he’s making his existence about you.
“Good morning, Mr. Castiglione,” you whisper, sleep hoarse and sweetly innocent, cheeks stifling your grin.
“Mornin’, Mrs. Castiglione,” he rumbles in a groggy breath, halfway distracted, probably wondering if what he felt was a dream.
In all honesty… Frank doesn’t hate it. His true last name. You don’t either. It’s something no other woman besides his mom has ever had. It’s his, and he’s giving all of it to you.
“How long you been up, hm?” he asks, thumb making wide arcs along your rib, just barely skimming the underside of your breast.
“Not too long,” you mumble your musing, exposing yourself as you not so innocently push into his hard-on again.
Grunting, Frank catches your hip with the hand from your tum. “Playin’ games, sweetheart?”
“Only ones I intend to finish.” You turn under his arm, face him.
Sleep heavy lines pull his face, but the light of a new day—a brand new day—deepens his complexion, those ever-assessing dark eyes. Makes him… a different man. A softer one. Someone who chose to leave his war and make a home with you instead. Still looking at you with raised brows nonetheless, a playful inquiry to your intentions.
You lift a hand, fingertips dancing featherlight over the bristles of his stubble, simply… admiring the man you share a bed with, a home, a last name… a life.
The affection, so light it’s heavier than a full hand, drags a breath from his nose. His hand traverses your body, full-palmed, memorizing the full of you as his wife. The arch of your ribcage. His thumb drags down the middle of your stomach. Over the soft curve of your side. The silky plane of your thigh, winding to your back to claim the small of it.
Gentle exploration in the early morning light. Soft breath mingling. The room smells of your leftover perfume, sleepy skin, the heat of the sun burning through the curtains.
Your affinity makes every little touch galvanic. Quiet gravitation pulls you two closer, drawn by something far greater and far older than attraction.
Your knee hooks over his hip.
His hips rut against you, hard cock prodding your stomach.
You tangle a hand in his hair, panting velvety breaths against the mouth you have yet to kiss today.
Rough hands squeeze and smooth your soft skin with reverence reserved for the holy.
A mutual compulsion for one another; a shared longing for surrender, to be undone and vulnerable at the hands of the person of you love, only to be remade by them, renewed in primal union.
The urge—the yearning—to be… complete.
“Frankie…” you whisper, eyes flickering between the intensity of his stare and his mouth. “I need you, please…”
“You got me,” a promise in a rough murmur as he rolls in closer, your mouths a breath apart. “All ‘a me.”
The clash is desperate, but… venerating.
Frank’s mouth slots to yours, swallowing your stifled moan. The kiss is a form of devotion that goes beyond fidelity. It’s a necessary salvation he can only find in you; loyalty the essence of his being.
Your brows knit as you kiss him back, throat closing because of the overwhelming piety he’s only ever shown you. You fucking taste it on him. You feel it in his hands, his fingers clasping into your side, clinging to the idea of forever like this, with you.
Tongues tease and lap outside of your mouths, just the very tips. A slow, sensual chase that has your thighs wet already.
Your hand drops to his dick, but before you can wrap around him, Frank shakes his head. Pulls back from your lips to mutter, “Nah, sweetheart. Ain’t ‘bout me. Want you. Lemme have you, huh?” An open-mouth kiss, quick and needy like he can’t help himself. “Lemme taste you, baby. Sit on my face, hm? Sit on your husband’s face.”
Sit on his face.
Not on your back, Frank between your legs.
No.
He wants you to use his face like a pedestal, giving you a seat to bare your naked body to the air as he weakens your legs, eats your orgasm out of you.
Your cheeks flare hot. “F-Frank…” weak protest, self-consciousness hesitating your hands on his chest.
“C’mon,” he jerks his chins, pupils swallowing his irises. “Up. Up, pretty girl, wanna taste m’ pretty goddamn wife. Wanna taste ‘er. Lemme help you up, hm?”
Shaking legs shift up, Frank’s hands steadying your waist as he lays back flat.
The blankets fall from your body. Frank’s eyes are everywhere, drinking you in with admiration exclusive to you. Your uncertain face, colored dark from his request. The slope of your shoulders, curve of your neck, plane of your stomach. Your full breasts, nipples hard from the cooler air beyond the sheets.
An enraptured look, an idolatry—his brows pitched up, eyes so soft but hungry, lips parted in awe—that look festered in him the day he saw you. Frank licks his lips. Voice dries to a rasp. “Yeah, baby, yeah. C’mere. Gotchu, pretty girl. Won’ let you be cold.”
He guides you into position.
Your body shakes. Knees bracketing his head on the pillow, your thighs trembling, Frank groans as heat pours from your cunt and over his face. Hasn’t even fuckin’ touched you and you’re hot, needy.
His hands—wide and flat—knead your ass, crawl up your sides, your ribs.
Faced with the picture frame on the wall, you white knuckle the headboard, looking down at him with beet-red nerves, flush deepening as he gapes at your pussy above his face, folds spread and glistening.
“Jesus,” he gruffs, jaw popping, nostrils flaring; primal itch burning his skin to take and claim what’s his. “Got the prettiest pussy, baby, fuck, si’down on me. Yeah, yeah, there you go, c’mere, mmph—”
The first lap comes with a slow, fat tongue. Long, indulgent, pushing through your folds to lick the slick from your hole to your puffy clit. Frank groans into your heat, your taste rolling his eyes back.
Face contorted as you watch him taste your cunt, your thighs quake around his head. Your hands fist into the headboard, rattling the frame.
One taste and he looks at you… And the look he gives is… cruel.
Stomach dropping out, heart hammering, your breath stutters at the blackened intensity of his glare. Eyes narrowed, nostrils wide, mouth tugging as he resists the temptation to devour you to oblivion.
“Fuck,” he praises in a ragged breath, the sweet saltiness of you igniting something dangerous. One fucking taste and he’s like this. Frank yanks your hips down.
You gasp his name as your cunt drops flush to his face, face screwing as you’re eaten alive.
He pins you there, mouth latched onto your slick folds, nose smashed against the hood of your cunt.
And he eats. Devours you, lapping eager worship as he spreads you down the middle with his tongue alone. Sucks your clit into his mouth, releasing in a delicate graze of his teeth but never fully, no. He won’t break off your pussy. Tongue works possessed hunger, hooking into your hole.
He eats and eats and eats.
You try climbing up the headboard for escape as the alarming white-hot elation rakes your insides. Terrifying pressure, that uncomfortable, blissful urgency causing you to try to flee.
Try.
“Stay put.” Frank grunts, forearms banding around your waist to drop you back down—and snare you. He traps you there, riding his face. His tongue, teeth and mouth feed in a frenzy.
Tears in your eyes, you stare at the painting in front of your face. Hips jolting. Thighs seizing. Your cunt suffocating your husband as he feasts on your slick and pussy as though it’s his only purpose.
Saliva and intimacy coat your inner thighs as Frank makes a mess of you. Smears his face every which way, kissing, sucking, snarling into you.
Arms hooking the headboard, you cry and huff a litany of moans in his name. Face to face with the painting above your bed, white-hot sparks searing your nerve-endings, you see your reflection in the picture. It’s you, just… a version of you to only exist with Frank. Mouth agape, jaw slack, desperation stinging tears in your eyes as the smell of sweat and sex basks in the heat of the rising sun.
You see this picture every goddamn day but now—right now, with your husband feasting on your cunt, making a mess of his face and your thighs—you see the fine details. A duckling treading water after its family. The cattails blowing in a gentle breeze. A fawn bent for a drink at the water’s edge.
You can’t stand it. The painting, your reflection, the panicked overstimulation of your clit on the verge of implosion into Frank’s mouth.
Escape futile, your legs cinch either sides of his head, stomach flipping as your peak vacuums out your breath, hips involuntarily grinding down, down, after more friction, more of his mouth. You shove against the headboard, knocking dents into the wall to deepen the ones already there. Drywall dust falls behind the bed.
Beneath you, Frank’s in heaven. Pussy drunk, slick disoriented, he ruts his flat tongue straight down your middle mercilessly. Aggressive scoops through your folds, eating your core out of your body, ending in ruthless swipes over your clit.
The wet suction of his spit mixes between your thighs. Obscene noises that have you blushing, flustered, hot and without a goddamn care because you’re close. “Oh, god, Frank, oh god, don’t stop, please don’t fucking stop—”
Grunts vibrate right into your cunt, starved and sloppy as he gnashes his tongue and lips over your engorged clit. “Yeah, fuck my face,” he snarls against your pussy, dick instinctively rutting the blankets over his lap. “Fuckin’ cum on m’face.”
Beyond your control, greedy and possessed, you rock down onto him. His stubble rakes your thighs raw. Slick sticky on your skin, his face, he groans incoherent praise against you. You can’t hear it, blood rushing in your ears, eyes falling back as your head does, lust disorienting—
“Ooooh, Frank! Fuck! I’m—”
Cumming.
With the sweetest fucking sound he’s ever heard, his name laced with a scream far too obscene for the time of day.
Frank eats you through it. Licks straight from the source of your empty cunt as it pulsates and clenches for something, anything, but he won’t give it to you yet. He slows as you come down from it, your head blooming with hazy pressure, relief.
Licking and sucking turns to rewarding kisses. One against your drenched folds. Another to your sensitive clit, jolting you. Last one with a hum against your thigh.
“Tasted so fuckin’ good, sweetheart,” he murmurs, using his hands to move your body for you when you can. “C’mere, Mrs. Castiglione, yeah. Come t’Frankie.”
Limbs reduced to jelly, jostled by the severity of your orgasm, you oblige, head empty, as Frank steers you back down, on top of him.
Curled in on yourself, spine weak so you hunch, straddled on his lap.
Frank tugs the blanket up around your waist, wiping the plaster of your slick from his face onto his shoulder.
“You good?” he asks, smallest smirk pulling the corner of his mouth.
Dumbfounded, forgetting every word in your vocabulary, you nod. Little shaky nods, eyes a thousand yards off, chest heaving.
A chuckle rumbles in his chest. He lifts a hand to beckon you down, come relax, but you stiffen. Shake your head a firm disagreement.
Hand paused mid-reach, Frank quirks a brow.
Exasperated, glowing, you bat his hand off stare down at him like he’s stupid. “I’m not done with you yet, are you kidding me?”
“Yeah?” A brow raises at the attitude, giving you one chance to correct it. “Pretty little wife gonna take this dick?“
“Your wife’s gonna ride your dick, baby.” You straighten on his lap, spine finding strength after the blowout orgasm, reaching behind you and beneath the blankets to pump him. Just to see his reaction.
It’s a jolt, a grunt, his face steeling as he throbs in the wrap of your hand. “Wife’s gonna get thrown on her goddamn knees ‘f she keeps playin’.”
You tut, condescending though you know the threat’s entirely true. Standing tall on your knees, teeth holding your bottom lip, you smear his tip through your sopping wet folds.
You suck in a staggered moan, belly opening and fluttery at the mere thought of having him stuffed so deep inside you.
Frank groans, stomach contracting. His hands plant on your hips, head thrown back on the pillow. Tendons in his neck rope out. Veins thread his forearms. Battling the willpower to not shove you down on his cock, Frank trembles. “Put. It. In.” A low, drawn out demand through clenched teeth. “Playin’ with me all goddamn mornin’. Lemme tell you sumthi— fuckin’ Christ, baby—”
You stop him. Shut him the fuck up. The vise of your cunt splits as you sink on his cock. Walls stretching, burning as the tip carves you out.
“Attagirl, attagirl,” Frank pants, rabid black eyes snapping from your slackened jaw to gawk at how your cunt pulses defiance around the fat inches it has to work desperately to fit. “S’my wife, m’perfect fuckin’ wife.”
Pussy hugging his overwhelming girth, coherent thoughts burn up in your throat, seared dry in your stomach. “Oh god, Frank, oh god, Frank—”
“Yeah? Whatchu prayin’ f’, huh? Prayin’ I’ll go easy? Prayin’ I’ll fill you the fuck up? Fuck you stupid?”
You nod. And nod and nod and nod. Yes, all of it. Yes, to whatever he says.
Feral awe as he stares up at you, Frank eases your hips down. “Last inch, baby, last inch. C’mon, pretty girl, yeah, yeah, there- there she is— fuck.”
His eyes cross, the hard mound of his throat exposed.
Red scrapes rise over his chest as you claw, his blunt tip punching breath out of your lungs.
And you both freeze with his cock bottomed out, head knocked against your cervix.
Cunt flush to his base… you’re fused together.
While you pant and flutter to adjust for his size, Frank marvels over you. His upper lip tugs in a snarl of no sound. Eyes rove. A hand stays planted on your hip to steady you. The other reaches up, pawing your tit, thumbing your perked nipple. “Dirty little wife,” he grits, low, rasped. The sound of complete devotion. “Wakin’ me up jus’ t’sit on my dick, huh? This what you want?“
“Oh, I need it so bad, Frankie. I need- need my husband so bad—” everything else lost to a hum as you start to roll your hips.
“Yeah, baby, c’mon, ride your fuckin’ man.” Head thrown in the pillow, Frank’s face twitches a snarl of pure ecstasy. His thighs jolt under you, animalistic restraint thrumming. “Yeah, ride your fuckin’ husband.”
An angel in slow motion, your head falls back. Mouth slack, slurs of fuck, I love you, Frank, my husband, spilling out in cock-intoxicated freedom. Spine curved in the shape of bliss, your tits bounce on display for your husband, navel taut with your arch.
“Fuck, baby, yeah, s’my beautiful goddamn wife,” Frank grits through his teeth, massive fingers pressed in the meat of your hips, thighs, digging into you for control. Without it? Without binding himself to you? He’ll fuckin’ lose it. Snap. Flip you over and rail you until you’re pumped so full you walk away pregnant.
With every rock of your hips forward, his cock bulges against your stomach. Makes a fucking outline in Frank’s image. Thick and domineering, scorching breath from your throat as he rearranges your insides. Cock so big, crammed to the brim, he hits everywhere you need him to. Tip prodding your cervix. Veined shaft rubbing that perfect spongy spot. Coarse hair at his base grinding your swollen clit.
Self becomes an abstraction. How can you be an independent being when you feel Frank in your stomach? In your throat? Everywhere?
“Pretty pussy’s drivin’ me fuckin’ crazy this mornin’,” his nostrils flare, control collapsing. “Gonna make me bust, that what you want, huh? Want your man t’fill you up?”
“Y-yes, yes, please. Frank, please,” you shudder on his dick, a hand planted in the middle of his chest to steady your grind.
Sweat clings to your bodies. Heat festers in the pursuit of primal release.
“C’mere,” Frank beckons, one hand leaving your thigh to grab your chin, guide you down. “C’mere, princess, yeah, need you closer. Yeahhh, there she is. There’s m’girl.”
Bent over him, bouncing your ass back on his cock, you drop your palms to cage both sides of his head.
“Open,” he orders, eyes fastened to your lips.
You comply. Your mouth opens wide. Wider than necessary, showing him how you’d look with his dick in your mouth. Doe eyed and fucked out.
Frank jams two fingers—middle and ring, left hand—into your mouth.
“Suck.”
You don’t need the order. You already are. Your lips seal around his fingers—his wedding band against your lips—tongue swirling between them, around them, as he finger fucks your mouth.
“Good girl,” Frank coos. “Listen so good f’me, huh? You like that? Bein’ told what t’do?”
The moan you give around his fingers, cheeks full with them, breaks something in Frank.
It starts slow, greedy. He ruts his hips up. Snappy bounces, plunging in so completely your moans punch out and muffle on his fingers. In the span of seconds, he drives faster. Harder. Impaling you on his cock, your ass smacking down.
He’s in your mouth. Your cunt. Your fucking head. You’re stuffed so full of your husband you’ve lost sight of separation. There is no you without him. No him without you.
Your eyes roll around in your head, tits skimming his chest as he pounds you.
The tidal wave builds again. A hot exhilaration rushing through your core, forcing you to writhe above him.
Hooking the two fingers under your tongue, Frank shakes your head. A little sway, keeping you coherent. “Eyes, pretty girl, hm? Lemme see ‘em. You look at me. You do that f’me?”
You wonder how you could be stuffed completely by him, every open, needy hole. Cock-drunk thoughts, but still. Your lashes flutter, perking open at his command.
“You look ‘t your husband when you cum. You hear me?” He draws his fingers from your mouth, licking your spit off them himself.
“Y-yes, Frank. I look at my husband when I cum. I look at my husband when he makes me cum.”
“Gooood girl. You keep bein’ good f’me, hm? Be m’good girl. Cum on your husband’s cock.”
You collapse on top of him. Tits to chest, elbows caging his head, your hands tear into his hair as he fucks you senseless.
“Jesus-fuckin’-Christ, baby, so fuckin’ wet. Drippin’ down my goddamn balls.”
Squelches from your soaked cunt echo in the room as Frank hammers into you. Your thighs are drenched. Your ass is slathered in your juices, his saliva. Everytime you drop down or roll back in time with him, you feel it on his thighs, his balls.
“P-please fill me up, Frank, please,” you whine, words stumbling out as he hammers your cervix. “I want it. All of it. So so so bad. Wanna be filled up, Frankie. Want your cum to stay in. Don’t wanna waste any of it. Please. Please.”
“Fuck.” Snarled temptation. Skin slapping. Greedy, primal inclination to give you what you’re not asking for. Grunted possession as he bands an around the small of your back, hand indented to the flesh of your hip to fuck you down as he spears up into you. “Say what the fuck you mean, hm? Bein’ greedy ‘bout it? Just wanna be filled up with cum, huh? Or you wantin’ somethin’ else?”
“S-something else,” you pant, teeth grazing his jawline in messy bites. “You know what I want.”
“Say it. Fuckin’ say it.”
He fucks up into you. Drags you down in tandem. A filthy grind as he chases your orgasm. Every inch of him driven to please every inch of you. Whatever you want—say it. He’ll fuckin’ give it to you.
Your head spins. Your stomach tightens again, core flaring like a faulty transistor. You’re going to cum again. Cum with your pussy throbbing around Frank’s rigid cock, coat him in it, sucking his out of him.
Sweat sticks your bodies, skin catching friction. Hot, ragged breath shared back and forth. Frank’s grunts into your ear. Your breathless moans into his neck. Not an inch of space to separate you. Sharing breath. Sweat. Hips working an angry pump onto each other.
Heaven.
“Wanna- wanna have a- a baby with you, Frankie, please—”
“Yeah? Wan’ me t’put a baby in you, huh?”
“Y-yes! Yes, Frankie, please.”
“Gonna give you so much fuckin’ load you’ll be spillin’ it out. Give you what you want, baby, yeah, fuck you ‘til you’re full ‘a me.”
“M-make it stick, Frankie.”
“It’ll fuckin’ stick.”
You whine at the idea of being pumped to the brim with his cum, no other choice but to leak what your cunt can’t swallow, using it to make life inside of you.
“Cum.” Frank grits, thrusts slipping pace. A jagged falter as he nears. “Be a good lil’ wife, huh? Cum on my fuckin’ cock.”
You go rigid, muscles locking until they quake, bracing for explosion as his base scrapes your clit, head kisses your cervix, shaft sliding over the sponge of your g-spot. It’s too much. It’s too fucking much.
Panicked bliss peeling your eyes wide, forearms planted by his head, hands ripping into his hair, you plead. “Oh- oh god, Frank. Oh, fuck, you feel so good. Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop, ‘m so close, so close, Frankie—”
His eyes. You’ve never seen something like them before. An innate tenacity twisting his face into a snarl of pure rapture. Eyes lock with yours, tracking every fine detail of your pleasure as he bounces you up and shoves you down on his cock. The warp of your face. Your mouth pulled open in high-pitched moans beyond your control, beyond your comprehension. Brows pinched, your body building up for the demolition at his hand.
And you crumple.
Your hands cage his face, eyes fastened to his while you cum so he can see it—you—all of it, what only he is able to give you. Ecstasy razes you. Shatters your foundation, leaving you crying out for your husband as you fall.
He’s right there to hold you through it. Fuck you through it.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, there she is,” Frank adds to the unbridled fit, his voice raising. “That’s my fuckin’ wife. Fuck, fuck— soakin’ my dick, so fuckin’ tight. Gonna fill you the fuck up, pretty girl, give you a goddamn baby—”
One pump— faltering.
Second pump— faster, chasing, hungry.
Third— final. Buried to the fuckin’ hilt. Frank plunges in balls deep, mouth sealing around yours for a mismatched, groaned kiss as he spews hot, thick ropes deep inside of you.
A percussive silence settles around you. Labored breath, weak limbs. Neither of you kiss properly, but your mouths stay layered, recycling the same shaky breath.
Your hands go lax on his face, and the rest of your body follows. You crumble on top of your husband, cheek smashed over his heart. It beats rapid thunder under your ear, same as yours.
Chest sawing, Frank unravels the binding hold, but thag doesn’t mean he lets you go. No, Frank Castle circles his fingers over your back. Chin tucked to his chest to peer down at you, his other hand smooths hair out of your face. Taking care of you first—always you first—even as his cock flexes aftershocks inside of you.
“Hey,” Frank murmurs, voice spent, rough. His hand tangles in the hair at the back of your head where he holds you. “The Mrs. still alright, hm?”
You manage a weak thumbs up and a croaky, “…never better, Mr. Castiglione.”
Frank actually huffs a laugh. Small, low, but it counts. “Hm. Good.” Two pats to your ass. “Gotta do sumthin’—”
Whoosh. The rustle of blankets. The tossing of limbs.
“Wha– Frank—!” You squeal as he rolls you. Both of you, flipping you onto your back.
Cock still in you, turning your world, you bounce back on the mattress but can’t go far with Frank looming over you.
“S’what you wanted, hm?” Breath heaving from his nostrils, Frank pulls out in a grunt.
You shiver at the loss, but you’re not empty for long.
He uses his middle finger to collect the cream spilling from your cunt. Swipes it up.
Then back in.
Pushes that finger—his cum—back inside, down to the goddamn knuckle.
You gasp in overstimulation, nails digging into his forearm to cease any cruel movements. “Frank, Jesus!”
“Jus’ Frankie, baby,” he teases. “Ain’t gonna do nothin’,” he murmurs sweet assurance, sweeter praise, finger plugging you up. “Jus’ givin’ this pretty pussy what she wants, huh?”
Moan hummed behind your chattering teeth, you nod fervid agreement. You cling to his forearm, his skin torched hot and sticky.
Laid back on the pillows with your legs spread, his finger stopping you up with his load, wisps of hair clinging to your forehead, you’ve never looked so goddamn beautiful.
You’re his. All his.
Name. Pussy. Life.
Mrs. Castiglione, his pretty wife. Leaking his cum. ‘Til the day he fuckin’ dies.
In degrees, your body relaxes around his finger. Your walls flutter, pulsing around him. Shaking, your hands skate up his arms, lying over the slants of his neck.
Frank leans forward. Presses a slow, lingering kiss to your forehead. Then your nose. Then both cheeks. “Tha’s it, baby. I gotchu. Relax, pretty girl. Givin’ what you asked f’, huh? Still want it? Still wantin’ that baby?”
“Yeah,” you whisper, drawing him in close again. That’s all you want. Frank, your husband, as close as possible. You bring him in for a kiss. Passion subdued, but not gone. Lips meet with languid gratitude, still buzzing dormant lust.
A few minutes pass. Soft kisses frequented. Frank’s rumbled whispers, his little crooked grin. Your breathy giggles, face bright with exertion.
After those few minutes, he withdraws his finger from yours. Forehead against yours, he pops his slick-covered finger in his mouth. Sucks it clean. Dips back in, planting a rough kiss to your mouth before he moves off the bed.
Buck naked, standing at full height with a geography of gnarly scars and brutal muscle, Frank takes one step for the door.
One.
“Hey!” You call out, brows pinching as you tuck the blankets over your chest, rising to your knees. “Where’re you going?”
Frank falters. Glances back at you over his shoulder, brows up. “Get you a washcloth, that alright?”
“…no.”
“…No,” he echoes, making sure he heard right.
“Right,” you nod once. “No. I said no.”
“First day married ‘n you’re wantin’ a UTI?”
You roll your eyes. “Nooo, I’m just… not finished with you yet.” A pause. Feigned innocence of your wandering eyes. “Still.”
“Baby… Christ. Permission f’a guy t’ take a piss?”
“Permission de-nied. Get back here.”
Before he can protest, you reach out. Snag his arm. And drag his ass right back to bed.
Four weeks doesn’t change much.
There’s still bills, work, dinner— the mundane routines of everyday life.
Four weeks is certainly plenty of time to forget what you begged your husband for the first day a married couple. He’d forgotten too.
But… it does give time for things to…grow.
As you pile up groceries on the checkout conveyor, you miss the frightened glance the cashier gives your cart.
Two tubs of peanut butter.
Three jars of pickles (bread and butter, dill, and spicy, obviously).
Triple brownie blast ice cream.
Ten pounds of red meat.
Screw vegetables, because yuck.
Mustard, which is for your family-sized bag of potato chips. If Frank gets his paws on these, you’ll have to cut them off. No other option.
Exactly nothing from the list of health-conscious foods you normally buy, because, fuck it, those don’t sound near as good as this assortment.
The cashier, weathered and far too intuitive without a fuck to give, eyes you up and down as you pop in front of the card reader.
“…Expecting?” Donna (according to her nametag) asks, movements mechanical as she scans the items.
Your laugh comes immediately, head shaking as you hover your card over the reader. “Oh, god, no,” you dismiss, humming the last of your laugh.
Expecting. You. No, you’re—
Oh. Oh- shit.
You’re not laughing now.
You’re acutely aware now of how you begged Frank to fuck you to pregnancy. Sound fades to a distant buzz, the register beeps like a distant heartbeat. Everyone goes about their business as you remember.
Make it stick, you begged and panted as he filled you over and over and over.
You gulp. Audibly. Your expression blanks out. Your eyes stare through the total.
Frank promised it would. That bastard. He always keeps his promises.
Donna snorts to knowingly herself, at your reaction, and slaps a box of pregnancy tests over the scanner. “Got three of my own. Crunchy peanut butter’s best with the pickles.” She nods at your wedding wing. “Hope he’s a good one.”
The best, you wanna say, but your mouth’s desert dry.
All you can think about is the possibility that… it stuck.
Your head bobs in time to Shining Star by Earth, Wind & Fire, CD player from the living room booming the fluidity of the disco through the house. One of Frank’s favorites.
Meat sauce bubbles on the stove, fragrant of basil and marinara. Lasagna noodles cool in the sink, cradled by the colander.
Glass bowl of whipped ricotta, chopped parsley, parm, and mozzarella cheese balanced on your hip, you stir the lasagna filling.
Frank will be home from the construction site any minute, and you want this to be… perfect. But also… not a big deal, right? Not… overdone.
You opt to make his favorite dish of yours, the lasagna.
From the oven, fresh rolls swell and carry the scent of dough from the cracked windows.
The pee stick waits on the counter, capped, results down by the calendar. Days change everything. One day, that’s all it takes.
The front door rattles, keys jingling in it.
Your pulse quickens. You stir quicker, like that’ll save you from something.
The heavy, easy prowl of Frank’s boots coming down the hall. You can hear the questions in his gait.
Oh god oh god oh god oh god.
Stirstirstirstir. Like your life depends on it.
Your back stays to Frank as he fills out the doorway, hulking body leaning against the frame. Skeptically amused, lips halfway quirked, eyes narrowed, Frank glances around.
The music. The food. You.
Tongue licking over the corner of his mouth, he nods to himself like yeah, uh-huh, alright.
You’re both aware of each other. You both say nothing. Yet.
He can’t hear your heartbeat, right? It’s not that loud, right? Flush pricks your throat, chest.
“What, uh, whatchu doin’, pretty girl? Hm?” Frank finally asks, head tilted.
“Makin’ dinner,” you shrug a shoulder, flicking a brief glance back at him just to shrug again, lips wriggled in a bashful smile.
“Alright. Whatchu makin’?”
“Lasagna.”
“Occasion?”
“Occasion?” You step to face him, the room’s distance between you. “I don’t need an occasion to make you lasagna.”
That furthers his suspicion. Slits his eyes more, chewing on his bottom lip. He nods at the shove, eyes fixed on you. “Whatchu got in the oven?”
You hesitate, look down at the cheese mix. “…Urmmm… just… buns.”
“Buns.”
“Buns.”
“Buns… with lasagna, sweetheart?”
“Okay, stop analyzing the bread type. I have a bun in the oven, Frank, yes.”
“…Jus’ one? It a big bun ‘r sumthin’?”
Frank pushes off the frame. Ambles for the oven, brushing you as he does. His hand finds your hip, pulling you into his side to trail you along with him.
He stops at the oven, keeping you tucked against him. He bends at the hip to peer in through the glass. Squints a fraction while you’re about to go into cardiac arrest.
“Sweetheart. Those’re rolls,” Frank says, standing upright, pressing a kiss to the middle of your forehead as he mutters, “Ain’t buns.”
Oh my god. You’re dying inside. Your husband. One of the smartest, most capable men you know isn’t getting it. Your shoulders sag. Laughter bubbles up, both over it and genuinely humored. “Frank, please. Give me a break here.”
“What? Jus’ sayin’ they’re rolls, baby.” Frank grabs your chin as he coos at you, evidentially in a very unserious mood. “Teachin’ my girl ‘bout her breads, yeah, can’t have you callin’ rolls buns.”
Normally you’d love it, laugh, slap his chest. Right now you’re about to dump the cheese on him because you’re about to scream with life-altering news.
“Damn it, Frank.” You pivot in. Face to face with him, your expression stone serious and mouth tight. You push the bowl into his chest, yours on the opposite end of the rim of it. “Read between the lines!”
Frank blinks. At you, the bowl. Big, beautiful idiot.
“Frank. Castle. For the love of god. I have a motherfucking bun in my motherfucking oven.”
You watch his wheels turn.
You see the equation solving in his head, his eyes drifting as the answer solidifies.
Bun.
Oven.
You.
Four weeks ago.
“It stuck,” you whisper now, hands shaking, palms sweaty on the glass.
Now he gets it. His eyes jitter, face terrifyingly smooth aside from the line between his brows like the news hurts in the best way.
“You, uh… you sure? Sure it, uh… stuck?” His throat slinks, demeanor ground down to a devastating type of hope. Hope’s a horrifying experience when you’re Frank Castle. His hand hovers by his thigh, fingers reaching for your stomach, stopping short because what if it’s too good to be true? What if he ruins it by touching?
You help him reach. Your fingers curl around his wrist, closing the distance.
Hand splaying wide and possessive over your stomach, Frank blinks a rapid succession as he stares through the glass bowl at your belly. Still not showing, but it’s there. His breath stalls. Words have little meaning compared to the war in his chest.
“It stuck, Frankie,” you whisper, tears streaking down your face the instant you see wet tracks down his cheeks. “It stuck. We did it.”
Shredded and thankful, he huffs a breath. Clears his throat. Fingertips press gently into your skin over your shirt. Red-rimmed eyes flurry to yours, tears exposed and awe on blatant display for you.
“…Thank fuckin’ Christ,” he rasps. “It stuck.”
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request trash4changkyun jason todd x child of bruce banner/ Hulk, like and they have pretty good control over their hulk form often being about to shift between the two. they lose control during a routine mission
content jason todd x hulk!reader, gn!reader, marvelxdc crossover, loss of control, involuntary transformation, canon-typical violence, pursuit/hunting imagery, memory loss, childhood trauma, self-loathing, fear of harming loved ones, medical experimentation, attempted removal/suppression of powers, minor injuries, emotional breakdowns, references to past accidental harm
word count 10.5k
masterlist | jason masterlist
Jason knew anger. He knew the taste of it when it came up copper-bright behind his teeth. He knew how it settled beneath his sternum, dense and burning, like someone had replaced his heart with a coal that never finished dying. He knew the clean anger of seeing cruelty and the ugly anger that came without permission, that arrived snarling from the grave and sank its teeth into whatever happened to be nearest.
He knew the shame after. That was the part no one talked about enough. People liked anger when it was righteous, sharpened into something cinematic and useful. They liked it when Jason pointed it at traffickers and dealers and men who thought Gotham’s shadows belonged to them. They were less fond of the aftermath—of blood trembling in his hands, of pieces of a night missing, of Bruce looking at him as though Jason were a bomb that had learned to wear his dead son’s face.
You had never looked at him that way. Not even the first time you saw his eyes turn green.
It had been subtle. A flash beneath the domino mask after a patrol went wrong, there and gone so quickly that anyone else might have mistaken it for reflected neon. Jason had been standing over a man who had used starving children to move weapons through the Narrows, his fist raised, his breath coming hard through his teeth. Bruce had said his name in that particular tone—warning wrapped in disappointment, disappointment wrapped in fear—and the rage had surged so violently that Jason’s vision had gone white around the edges.
Then your hand had closed around his wrist.
You had been smaller then. Physically, you had always been formidable, even when you were in the shape the world considered human. There was something compact and held about you, though, as if every emotion had been folded into a tiny square and pressed beneath your ribs. You rarely raised your voice. You smiled when people expected you to. You moved through the Cave with the careful courtesy of a guest who had been told the furniture was expensive.
But you had touched Jason without hesitation.
“Don’t listen to him,” you had said quietly.
Bruce had stiffened behind you.
Jason’s fist had remained suspended above the unconscious man’s face. “That’s usually terrible advice.”
“I mean, don’t listen to the part of him you’ve put inside your head.” Your thumb had rested over the frantic beat in Jason’s wrist. “Listen to what he is actually saying.”
Jason had looked past you. Batman stood beneath the flickering warehouse light, cape black against the dirt-streaked walls, jaw locked hard enough to crack teeth.
“He’s saying stop,” you continued. “He isn’t saying you’re evil.”
“You a mind reader now?”
“No.” Your eyes had held his, painfully calm. “I just know what it feels like to hear monster when no one has actually said it.”
Jason had lowered his fist.
Later, he learned that you were Bruce Banner’s child. That explained the green. It explained the way the Justice League watched you whenever your pulse rose. It explained the equipment in the reinforced room beneath the western edge of the Cave, the sensors calibrated to gamma radiation, the emergency shutters capable of dropping in less than two seconds. It explained why Bruce Wayne spoke to you with a careful gentleness Jason had once thought reserved for frightened civilians and injured children.
It did not explain why you seemed to understand him better than anyone else.
You had good control. Everyone said so.
Jason hated the phrase. It was usually delivered with the awed approval people reserved for well-trained animals.
You had very good control. You could shift deliberately, most of the time. You could allow the green to spread beneath your skin in smooth increments, your body lengthening and broadening as muscle and bone remade themselves in a thunderous biological miracle. Your larger form was not identical to your father’s. You were leaner, built with a different geometry, but the similarities were impossible to miss: the green skin, the impossible strength, the eyes that seemed to catch light even where there was none.
You could remain articulate after transforming. You could remember names. Follow strategies. Distinguish threats from allies.
Most of the time. People loved those three words almost as much as they loved good control.
Jason learned to hate them, too.
He started working with you by accident. A weapons-smuggling operation in Gotham had acquired experimental gamma technology, and Bruce Banner had asked the League to investigate. Batman had responded by assigning you to Jason, either because he trusted Jason’s knowledge of Gotham’s criminal routes or because he thought the two of you were disposable in similar ways.
Jason chose to believe it was the former. It was better for everyone’s blood pressure.
The mission had lasted four nights. On the first, you followed his instructions without argument. On the second, you corrected his calculations regarding the blast radius of a stolen gamma core. On the third, you threw a shipping container through a reinforced concrete wall because Jason had been pinned beneath a collapsed gantry.
On the fourth, Jason bought you breakfast.
That became something of a habit.
You fit into his life with alarming ease. You did not complain about his safe houses, though one had a permanent damp patch in the ceiling and another had a neighbour who practised the trumpet exclusively between midnight and four in the morning. You never touched his books without permission. You remembered how he took his coffee, which was more than some of his alleged siblings managed after years of knowing him.
You understood that silence was not always a punishment. Jason understood that calm was not always peace.
He noticed the first time you dug your fingernails into your palms beneath the table because Roy had jokingly asked what it was like to “go green.” He noticed how you counted breaths when someone started shouting. He noticed the way you excused yourself from rooms whenever conversations became heated, even if you had every right to be angry.
You were never merely quiet. You were containment given human form.
“You know you’re allowed to tell me to fuck off,” Jason said one night.
You were sitting on the roof of his Crime Alley apartment, your legs hanging over the edge and a carton of noodles cooling between you. Gotham glittered below, wet and poisonous and strangely beautiful. Red and gold light bled across the rain-dark streets.
You glanced at him. “Why would I tell you to fuck off?”
“Because I ate the last spring roll.”
“You asked whether I wanted it.”
“Yeah, but you did that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you say no because you think wanting something is the first step toward committing a felony.”
Your expression tightened. It was not quite a flinch, but Jason had become an expert in reading all the ways you made yourself smaller without moving.
“I didn’t want it,” you said.
“Liar.”
“Jason.”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“Anger.” He leaned back on his hands, watching you from the corner of his eye. “Little bitty spark of it. World didn’t end.”
You stared out across the rooftops. “You are incredibly irritating.”
“I work at it.”
“And condescending.”
“Natural talent.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The words came sharper than the others. Your eyes flashed green for half a second.
Jason smiled.
You looked at him in horror.
“There you are,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Look pleased.”
“I’m not pleased that I pissed you off.” Jason nudged the noodle carton toward you. “I’m pleased you let yourself be pissed off.”
“My emotions are not a group project.”
“Shame. I’d carry the presentation.”
“You would improvise the presentation after forgetting it was due.”
“And still get a standing ovation.”
You tried not to smile. Jason watched the corner of your mouth betray you and decided not to mention it.
The city hummed below.
After a while, you said, “Anger isn’t safe for me.”
Jason’s humour receded. “It’s not safe for anyone.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
Your shoulders loosened by a fraction. People argued with you when you said things like that. They rushed to reassure you that you were just like everyone else, as though the differences between you were insults that needed softening.
Jason never did.
You could be dangerous. So could he. Pretending otherwise was not kindness.
“When I was thirteen, I broke my father’s arm,” you said.
Jason remained still. You had spoken about Bruce Banner before, but only in safe, polished fragments. He was brilliant. He worried too much. He liked terrible music. He called every Sunday unless he was off-world or trapped in another dimension, which happened with uncomfortable frequency.
You had never spoken about the years when your power first appeared.
“It was an accident,” Jason said.
“That didn’t make his arm less broken.”
“No. Probably made you feel worse, though.”
Your fingers curled around the edge of the rooftop. “I don’t remember doing it.”
There it was. The true wound. Jason knew memory loss, too. He knew waking with blood beneath his fingernails and no clear picture of whose blood it was. He knew years stripped from him by death, resurrection and the green madness of the Pit. He knew how other people could use the things he did not remember as evidence against the person he was trying to become.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
“Before, I remember shouting.” Your gaze lowered to your hands. “I remember Dad telling me to breathe. I remember thinking that he sounded scared. I remember hating him for being scared of me.”
Jason listened.
“Then I remember waking up beneath a containment blanket. There were holes in the walls. Dad’s arm was in a sling. He kept saying it was okay.” Your mouth twisted. “I think that was the worst part. He wouldn’t admit that I had hurt him, so there was nowhere for the truth to exist except inside me.”
Jason looked toward the city. Somewhere below, a siren wailed and faded into the endless noise of Gotham. “He probably thought he was protecting you.”
“I know.”
“Doesn’t mean it worked.”
“No.” You picked up the carton of noodles, though you did not eat. Your thumb pressed against one corner until the cardboard buckled. “I tried to get rid of it after that,” you said.
Jason’s head turned.
“The other form. The gamma mutation. Whatever you want to call it.” You spoke with the flat precision of someone reciting facts from a medical file. “There were inhibitors. Gene therapies. Radiation filtration. A procedure in Switzerland that was supposed to separate the altered cells from the unaffected ones.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I asked for it.”
“You were fourteen.”
“I knew what I wanted.”
“You wanted to stop being terrified.”
Your eyes lifted to his.
Jason’s anger had changed. It was not explosive, not yet. It had gone still and focused, gathering itself around the image of a frightened child strapped to a medical table while adults explained probabilities and consent forms.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It didn’t work.”
“No shit.”
“I lost almost three weeks.”
Jason frowned. “You were unconscious?”
“I was awake for most of it.”
The night seemed to narrow around them.
“You don’t remember,” he said. You shook your head. “Does your dad?”
“Some of it. He doesn’t like talking about it.”
Jason breathed slowly through his nose. “And they still call you the one with good control.”
You laughed, but the sound held no humour. “Compared to Dad, I am.”
“Maybe that’s not a comparison you should have to live inside.”
For a moment, you looked as though he had struck you.
Then your gaze softened.
“You always do that,” you murmured.
“What?”
“Say something kind like you’re trying to start a fight.”
Jason scoffed. “Wasn’t kind.”
“It was.”
“Take it back.”
“No.”
“Now who’s starting shit?”
You smiled properly then, and something in Jason’s chest turned over.
It happened more often than he wanted to admit.
He knew he was in trouble when he started leaving things at his apartment because you might need them. A phone charger compatible with your ancient, indestructible device. Tea that tasted like wet flowers but apparently helped with headaches after a controlled shift. A reinforced sweatshirt made from stretch fabric developed by WayneTech, folded in the bottom drawer of his dresser.
He knew he was doomed when you started doing the same. There was a spare helmet sealant kit in your bathroom. A packet of his preferred painkillers in your kitchen. Two novels on your bedside table that you claimed you intended to read but had clearly bought because he mentioned them once.
Neither of you spoke about it.
Jason had spent too much of his life destroying good things by naming them. You had spent too much of yours believing that loving anything placed it in danger.
So you existed around the truth instead. You trained together. Ate together. Patrolled together whenever your work with the League brought you to Gotham. You learned how to recognise the subtle differences between Jason’s ordinary anger and the rage that came from somewhere deeper, older and greener. He learned that your left hand trembled before an uncontrolled shift, while your right remained perfectly steady.
You could talk him down without making him feel ashamed. He could make you angry without making you feel monstrous. It was, in both directions, dangerously close to love.
The mission that ruined everything was supposed to be routine. Routine was a word heroes used when they wanted the universe to laugh at them.
Oracle had tracked a shipment of stolen S.T.A.R. Labs equipment to an abandoned pharmaceutical facility beside the Gotham River. The building had been condemned after a chemical fire, though the foundations remained stable and the lower research levels were mostly intact. A minor gang called the Burnley Saints had moved in six weeks earlier.
“They’re not smart enough to use the equipment,” Barbara said over comms. “But they’re definitely smart enough to sell it to someone who is.”
Jason crouched on the edge of a neighbouring roof, looking through the scope of his rifle. “Six guards outside. Maybe twelve inside.”
“Eleven,” you corrected beside him. Your eyes shone faintly green as you listened to the vibrations beneath the building. “One of them is alone on the lower level. Heart rate is elevated.”
“Drugs?”
“Possibly. Or fear.”
Jason glanced at you.
You wore a black tactical suit reinforced with flexible gamma-resistant fibres. The material had been designed to adapt during a shift, though Jason had heard you complain that every version still pinched beneath the arms. A small monitor rested against the inside of your wrist, tracking your pulse and radiation output.
Both readings were normal.
“Any unusual energy signatures?” Barbara asked.
You closed your eyes. “The basement is shielded. I can feel something humming, but I can’t identify it from here.”
“Comforting,” Jason muttered.
“Nothing in Gotham is comforting.”
“Me.”
“You threatened a parking meter this morning.”
“It knew what it did.”
Your mouth curved. The sight sent a familiar ache through him.
Jason adjusted the rifle strap across his chest. “We go quiet. Disable the exterior guards, enter from the roof, locate the equipment and tag it for retrieval. No green unless we need it.”
You looked at him. “You’re giving me orders now?”
“Someone’s gotta compensate for your reckless lack of discipline.”
“I once watched you jump from a moving train onto a helicopter.”
“Calculated risk.”
“You missed.”
“Still caught the landing.”
“You went through a greenhouse.”
“Plants broke my fall.”
“You had a cactus embedded in your thigh.”
Jason pointed toward the building. “Mission.”
You smiled as you pulled your mask into place.
It should have been routine.
The exterior guards went down without raising an alarm. Jason disabled the roof sensors while you peeled open a maintenance hatch with careful, human-shaped strength. The upper floor was empty except for rotting desks and abandoned laboratory equipment. Rain drummed against the cracked windows, muffling your movement.
The first three Saints never saw either of you coming. The fourth fired wildly and hit a sprinkler pipe. The fifth tried to run.
Jason caught him at the stairwell and introduced his face to the wall.
“Subtle,” you remarked.
“He slipped.”
“Repeatedly?”
“Floor’s wet.”
Barbara sighed over comms. “Nine heat signatures remaining. Two moving toward you from the east corridor.”
Jason drew his pistols. “Copy.”
The mission unfolded smoothly after that, right up until it did not.
You found the stolen equipment in the basement. The shielded room had once been used for experimental drug trials. Its walls were lined with dense composite panels, each one scorched along the bottom from the old fire. Metal crates filled the centre of the chamber, marked with the logos of S.T.A.R. Labs, Kord Industries and three organisations Jason suspected did not officially exist.
One crate stood open. Inside rested a circular device about the size of a dinner plate. The centre pulsed with sickly yellow-green light.
You stopped in the doorway.
Jason nearly walked into your back. “What?”
Your left hand had begun to tremble.
“Oracle,” you said. “Run a visual analysis.”
Jason’s lenses scanned the device.
Barbara was silent for a few seconds. “I’m not finding an exact match. The internal structure resembles a sonic regulator, but the power core is emitting low-level gamma radiation.”
“How low-level?” Jason asked.
“Too low to affect either of you under normal circumstances.”
Your breathing had changed.
Jason holstered one pistol. “Hey.”
“I know that design.”
“You’ve seen it before?”
“No.” Your fingers pressed against your temple. “I don’t think so.”
Jason stepped in front of you, blocking your view of the device. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t—”
A burst of gunfire exploded from the corridor.
Jason turned instinctively, drawing both pistols as bullets struck the reinforced doorway. You moved at the same moment, shoving him aside and taking the shots against your armoured shoulder.
“Contact!” Jason barked.
He fired twice. One attacker dropped. Another ducked behind the wall.
The man alone on the lower level, Jason realised. The one with the elevated heart rate.
He had not been afraid. He had been waiting.
The attacker emerged again, but he was not aiming at either of you.
He aimed at the device.
Jason saw his finger tighten on the trigger. “No—”
The bullet struck the central core.
The room became light.
There was no explosion. No fire. Only a deep, resonant pulse that moved through Jason’s bones like a second heartbeat. His helmet systems shrieked and died. The lights overhead shattered in a wave, plunging the basement into darkness.
Something hit Jason hard enough to throw him across the room. He struck a crate, rolled and came up on one knee.
He called your name in the darkness.
The emergency lights flickered red.
You stood beside the ruined device, both hands clamped over your ears. Your monitor emitted a continuous alarm.
Jason could see the change beginning beneath your skin. Green spread from your throat in branching veins. Your shoulders jerked wider. The armour stretched around your arms as muscle built beneath it in violent surges. Your spine bowed with an audible series of cracks.
Jason had watched you transform dozens of times. This was different. Controlled shifts moved like a wave. This tore through you like an animal trying to escape a trap.
“Oracle, we have a problem.”
Only static answered. The pulse had killed communications.
You dropped to one knee. Your fingers struck the floor hard enough to fracture concrete.
Jason moved toward you.
Your head snapped up. Your eyes were green, but there was no recognition in them.
“Easy,” Jason said.
Your body surged upward. The ceiling suddenly seemed much lower.
The tactical suit expanded with you, dark fabric stretched across green skin. You dragged in a breath, and the sound was enormous in the shielded chamber. Dust trembled from the walls.
Jason stopped several feet away.
You stared at him. He watched confusion move across your face, followed by fear. Then your gaze shifted to the dead attacker sprawled in the corridor.
Blood pooled beneath the man’s head.
You made a sound Jason had never heard from you before. It began low, almost too deep to register. It grew until the metal crates vibrated across the floor.
Rage. Not anger as Jason knew it. Not even the Pit’s blind green violence. This was terror with nowhere else to go.
You looked down at your hands as though they belonged to someone who had murdered you.
Jason took another step. “Hey. Look at me.”
You swung. Jason ducked beneath your fist. The impact struck the wall behind him, caving in the composite panels.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Not feeling conversational.”
You turned toward him.
Jason had seconds to make a decision. The building contained unconscious criminals, two restrained guards and at least one injured man on the upper floors. Beyond the facility stood apartment blocks, a twenty-four-hour petrol station and a shelter that housed almost sixty people.
He could not let you reach the street. He also could not fight you here.
Jason fired a grappling line into the corridor ceiling and launched himself through the doorway as you charged.
The floor shook beneath your weight.
He sprinted deeper into the basement. You followed.
Jason knew what he was doing. That was the lie he told himself as he vaulted over a collapsed support beam and felt your fist strike the floor where his legs had been half a second earlier. He was drawing you away from the stairs. Away from the exterior walls. The lower facility connected to a network of old service tunnels leading beneath the riverfront, most of them sealed but structurally reinforced.
Jason could keep ahead of you. Probably.
A metal door appeared at the end of the corridor. Jason fired twice at the lock, kicked it open and threw himself through.
You hit the door without slowing. Steel ripped from concrete.
Jason ran.
Red emergency lights flashed through the tunnels. Water dripped from overhead pipes. His boots struck the ground in a rapid rhythm that was almost drowned beneath the thunder of your pursuit.
He glanced back once. You were too large for the passage, shoulders scraping both walls, but nothing in the world had prepared the old concrete to stop you. You tore through pipes and wiring as you came. Steam burst into the corridor behind you.
Your face was twisted with fury.
Jason’s chest tightened.
You were looking at him, but you did not know him. That hurt more than it should have.
He reached a junction and turned left. The tunnel narrowed ahead, ending at an old freight lift that had long ago collapsed into its shaft. Jason fired his grapple upward and caught the maintenance platform three floors above.
He rose just as you reached the shaft. Your hand closed around his ankle.
“Shit.”
You yanked.
The grapple line snapped taut. Jason’s shoulder nearly dislocated as he slammed against the wall. His pistol fell into the darkness below.
You dragged him downward.
Jason released the line before his arm tore from its socket, twisted in the air and landed against your forearm. He used your momentum to vault over your shoulder, boots striking the back of your neck as he flipped onto the opposite platform.
You roared.
Jason staggered, one hand clutching his shoulder.
“That’s gonna bruise,” he muttered.
You leapt.
The platform collapsed beneath your landing. Jason barely cleared the shaft before several tonnes of metal plunged into the dark. The impact shook the facility.
He lay on his stomach at the edge, staring down. Dust churned through the darkness.
For one dangerous second, everything went quiet.
Then green fingers gripped the wall below him.
Jason rolled aside as you climbed out.
Your eyes found him immediately.
“You really are stubborn,” he panted.
You lunged.
Jason fired his remaining grapple through a ventilation grate and let it pull him into the adjacent corridor. Your hand closed around empty air inches behind his boot.
The vent was too small for you. That bought him approximately four seconds.
You punched through the wall.
Jason hit the ground running.
He could have called for backup if his comms were functioning. He could have activated the emergency beacon in his belt, but the pulse had fried half his systems. He had weapons designed for metahumans, sonic grenades and electrical charges powerful enough to drop Killer Croc.
He did not use them.
Partly because he suspected the sonic pulse had triggered this. Mostly because it was you.
You had sat beside him through nights when the Pit seemed to boil beneath his skin. You had allowed him to pace, curse, break old furniture and hate every person who had ever loved him poorly. You had never once treated his anger as a problem that needed to be beaten unconscious.
Jason would not offer you less.
The tunnel ended in a circular maintenance chamber. Thick water pipes curved along the walls, and a rusted ladder led upward to a sealed hatch.
Dead end.
“Of course,” Jason said.
You entered behind him.
The chamber was too small for evasion. Too reinforced for an easy escape. Jason looked up at the hatch, judged the distance and knew he would never reach it before you reached him.
He drew his pistol.
You stopped. Your eyes fixed on the weapon.
Jason could see your chest rising and falling. Each breath scraped from your throat like stone dragged over stone.
He slowly ejected the magazine. It hit the floor. Then he removed the round from the chamber and tossed the empty pistol aside.
Your head tilted.
“Yeah,” Jason said. “I’m not doing this.”
You stepped closer.
Jason removed his helmet. Cold, damp air touched his face. Blood ran from a cut near his hairline and slipped along his cheek.
Your nostrils flared.
“Look at me.” Jason set the helmet on the floor. “You know me.”
You growled.
“Not a compelling argument, I’ll admit.” He kept his hands visible. “But I’m the idiot who buys that disgusting tea you like. I’m the one who knows you steal my blankets and then blame it on shifting during your sleep.”
Your expression did not change.
Jason’s pulse hammered. He had faced men with guns, monsters with teeth longer than his fingers and gods who could burn cities from the sky. None of them frightened him as much as the absence in your eyes.
“You hate olives,” he continued. “You pretend you don’t because you think it’s childish. You read the endings of books first when you’re anxious. You call your dad every Sunday, and you never tell him when you’re hurt because you think he already has enough to worry about.”
You came closer. The floor cracked beneath your feet.
Jason stood his ground. “You got mad at me because I ate the last spring roll.” His voice roughened. “You were right to be mad. I knew you wanted it.”
A flicker. So small Jason might have imagined it.
Your brow tightened.
“There you are,” he whispered.
You roared and struck him.
Jason flew across the chamber. His back slammed into a pipe. Pain exploded through his ribs, bright and immediate. He dropped to the floor, unable to breathe for several seconds.
You stood over him. Jason tasted blood.
“That,” he wheezed, “felt personal.”
Your hand closed around the front of his armour and lifted him.
His boots left the ground. Up close, you were terrifying. Green skin stretched over impossible muscle. Your pupils were blown wide. Anger shook through you so violently that Jason could feel it through your grip.
Beneath it, he saw fear.
“Why?” you demanded.
The word was distorted by the size of your jaw, but it was yours.
Jason’s heart lurched. “Why what?”
“Why stay?”
Your fingers tightened.
Armour plates creaked over his ribs. Jason reached up slowly and put one hand against your wrist.
“Because you would.”
Your face twisted. “Liar.”
“You have stayed for me every damn time.”
“Not safe.”
“No,” Jason said. “You’re not.” Pain burned through his side with every breath. He did not look away. “Neither am I.”
Your grip trembled. “Hurting.”
“I’ve been hurt before.”
“By me.”
“Yeah.”
The word struck harder than reassurance would have.
Your expression crumpled with sudden, unbearable horror.
Jason tightened his hand around your wrist.
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” he said. “You hit me. It hurts. I’m probably gonna complain about it for weeks because I’m a vindictive bastard.”
A broken sound dragged itself from your throat.
“But you’re still in there,” he continued. “You’re scared. You’re confused. Something got inside your head and tore every locked door off its hinges.”
“Monster.”
“No.”
“Monster!”
The roar shook the chamber. Pipes burst behind Jason, spraying freezing water across the floor.
He flinched, but his grip remained steady.
“No,” he repeated.
You slammed him against the wall. Jason’s vision blurred.
“You don’t get to decide,” you snarled.
“Neither do you.”
Your face stilled.
Jason’s ribs screamed. Blood ran into his eye. He could hear the pulse in your wrist beneath his hand, fast and thunderous.
“You think I don’t know this?” he demanded. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to wake up and find out your body did something while you were gone? You think I don’t know what it’s like to see fear on somebody’s face and wonder whether you put it there?”
Your grip loosened by a fraction.
“I’ve hurt people I love,” Jason said. “I’ve gone after Bruce. Dick. Tim. I’ve had the Pit in my head telling me everything I ever loved was a threat. I’ve lost time. I’ve lost control. I’ve tried to carve pieces out of myself because I thought everyone would be safer if there was less of me left.”
The fury in your face wavered.
Jason swallowed blood. “It didn’t make me safer. It made me alone.”
Your arm began to shake.
Jason let his forehead fall against yours. The movement was absurd. Your head was massive compared to his, your skin fever-hot despite the cold water raining over them.
“I’m not leaving you alone in this,” he whispered.
“Jason.”
His name broke from you like something surfacing after drowning.
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. “That’s me.”
Your grip opened.
Jason fell.
You caught him before he hit the ground.
For one suspended moment, you stared at him in your enormous hands.
Recognition returned slowly, then all at once. You looked at the bruising already forming along his face. The blood on his mouth. The damaged armour around his ribs.
“No,” you whispered.
Your body contracted. The transformation reversed with brutal speed. Muscle folded in on itself. Bones shifted beneath green skin, each movement accompanied by a stifled cry. Jason slid from your shrinking hands and managed to catch you against his chest despite the pain in his ribs.
By the time the green receded completely, you were trembling violently.
“I’ve got you,” Jason said.
You stared at him without comprehension.
Then your eyes rolled back.
Jason held you as the emergency lights continued to flash red around them.
The first thing you remembered was shouting.
Not your own. Jason’s voice. It came through darkness in broken pieces, sometimes furious, sometimes frightened. You could not understand the words. Every time you tried, your mind slipped sideways and showed you something else: green hands, red lights, a pistol on the floor, blood on Jason’s face.
Then nothing.
You woke in the Cave.
The medical bay lights were dim. A blanket covered you from chest to foot, weighted along the edges to give your body something firm to recognise. Sensors clung to your temples, wrists and ribs.
Your father sat beside the bed.
Bruce Banner looked older than he had on Sunday. His curls had gone wild around his head, and the sleeves of his purple shirt were rolled to the elbows. He was holding a tablet but not reading it. When your eyes opened, relief moved through his face so nakedly that you wanted to close them again.
“Hey,” he said.
Your throat felt flayed. “Hey.”
“How do you feel?”
You searched your body. Sore. Heavy. Empty in places that should have contained memories. “Where’s Jason?”
Your father looked toward the far side of the medical bay.
Jason sat in a chair beside the diagnostic station. His chest was wrapped beneath a black shirt. Butterfly strips crossed the cut near his hairline, and purple bruising spread along his jaw. One arm rested in a sling.
He was awake. He did not smile.
The sight of him opened something beneath your ribs.
You remembered lifting him. You remembered the sound his body made when it struck the wall.
The monitor beside your bed began to beep more quickly.
Your father set the tablet aside. “Your pulse is rising.”
“Get him out.”
Jason’s eyes narrowed. “Sweetheart—”
“Get him out.” Your fingers gripped the blanket. “Get everyone out.”
The green beneath your skin stirred.
Your father stood immediately, hands open and visible. “Okay. We can give you space.”
“No,” Jason said.
“Jason,” Banner warned.
“They’re scared.”
“I am aware.”
“Then don’t leave them alone with it.”
Your breathing shortened. “I hurt you.”
Jason rose from the chair. He moved stiffly, one arm secured against his chest. Every sign of pain made the room tilt.
“Stay back,” you said. He kept walking. “Jason.”
“Your monitor says you’re stable.”
“Jason, stop.”
He stopped beside the bed. You could see every injury now. The shadow beneath one eye. The split in his lower lip. The careful way he held his torso.
“You should be afraid of me,” you whispered.
His expression hardened.
Bruce Banner stepped toward the door. “I’m going to speak with Batman about the device. I’ll be directly outside.”
You looked at him in disbelief.
Your father gave Jason a long, unreadable look. Then he left. The door closed behind him.
“Traitor,” you murmured.
“Smart guy,” Jason said. You looked away. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“Do that.”
“I’m lying in bed.”
“You’re trying to disappear while I’m looking right at you.”
The words struck with surgical accuracy.
You stared at the far wall. “I don’t remember most of it.”
“I figured.”
“I remember the pulse. I remember thinking I knew the machine. Then I remember chasing you.”
Jason was silent.
“I remember wanting to catch you,” you continued. “I don’t remember why.”
“You thought I was a threat.”
“How do you know?”
“You called me one.”
Your stomach turned.
The monitor quickened again.
Jason reached over and switched off the sound. “Better.”
“No.”
“No?”
“It shouldn’t be quiet.” Your voice shook. “There should be alarms.”
“There were plenty. Got annoying.”
“Jason.”
“You want the entire Cave screaming because you feel guilty?”
“I nearly killed you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I saw your scans.”
“One cracked rib.”
“Two.”
“One full crack. One fracture. We’re splitting hairs.”
“Your shoulder was dislocated.”
“Technically, it was almost dislocated.”
“You have a concussion.”
“I’ve had worse concussions from getting out of bed.”
You turned toward him sharply. “Stop making jokes.”
Anger flashed through you. The room remained standing.
Jason leaned closer. “There you are.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t that night on the roof. This isn’t a spring roll. I hunted you.”
“Yeah.”
“I hurt you.”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to—” Your voice broke. “I don’t know what I wanted.”
Jason pulled the chair closer and sat. “That’s the part messing with you.”
“All of it is messing with me.”
“No. The injuries are something you can point at. You can count them. Catalogue them. Use them to build a case against yourself.” His gaze held yours. “The missing pieces are worse.”
You closed your eyes.
Jason knew. Of course he knew.
“I saw things,” you whispered. “When I was unconscious.”
“Memories?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
The pulse had torn through old scar tissue in your mind. It had pulled images from whatever place held the years you had lost: white medical lights, straps around your wrists, your father shouting at someone behind a glass wall. A machine filling the air with a vibration that made every cell in your body feel as though it were screaming.
“I think the device was based on the treatment,” you said. Jason went very still. “The one in Switzerland.”
“You said you’d never seen it.”
“I didn’t remember seeing it.” You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes. “That’s different.”
Jason’s good hand curled into a fist.
“The pulse wasn’t just sonic. It was designed to agitate gamma-altered cells and force them into a separate state. They thought if they could trigger the transformation while suppressing higher brain function, they could isolate the mutation.”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your dad does.”
“Maybe.”
“Then I’ll ask him.”
“No.”
Jason stared at you.
You lowered your hands. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t.”
“The treatment failed years ago.”
“And now somebody’s building the technology in Gotham.”
“Then destroy it.”
“We will.”
“That’s enough.”
“No, it isn’t.”
You looked toward the medical bay door. “I need to leave.”
Jason’s expression changed. It was subtle, but you knew him. You knew every degree of his anger, from the bright surface irritation he wore like a leather jacket to the deep, cold fury that meant someone had touched a wound they would not survive.
“What?” he asked.
“I can’t stay in Gotham.”
“Bullshit.”
“The device was aimed at me.”
“It was activated by some idiot firing at it.”
“They knew I was coming. The man in the basement was waiting.”
Jason said nothing. You saw confirmation in his silence.
“They used me to turn a routine mission into a disaster,” you continued. “They knew exactly what would happen.”
“Which means we find them.”
“Which means I leave before they try again.”
Jason stood too quickly and winced.
You reached for him without thinking.
He saw.
You pulled your hand back. Something in his face tightened.
“You packed already,” he said.
You did not answer.
Jason laughed once, sharp and joyless. “Unbelievable.”
“I have supplies at the Hall.”
“No. You packed before the mission.”
Your stomach dropped. He knew about the bag beneath your bed.
It had been there for months. Clothes, cash, forged identification, emergency medication and a satellite phone registered under a name that had never existed. You maintained one wherever you stayed.
“You went through my room?”
“I was looking for the stabiliser tea your dad wanted.”
“You had no right.”
“Probably not.”
“You can’t use that to—”
“How long?” You stared at him. “How long have you been ready to run?” Jason demanded.
“It isn’t running.”
“What do you call it?”
“Risk management.”
“Of course you do.”
You sat up despite the ache in your spine. “You keep weapons hidden in every room.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I use them to stay.”
The answer silenced you.
Jason’s anger filled the medical bay, hot and raw. Yet he did not shout. The restraint made it worse.
“You keep an escape plan because you’ve already decided how this ends,” he said. “You lose control, hurt somebody and vanish before anyone gets the chance to tell you whether they still want you around.”
“You’re injured because of me.”
“And I’m still here.”
“This time.”
His face went blank.
You hated yourself the moment the words left you.
Jason stepped back. “Right.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did.”
“I meant you won’t always be able to forgive me.”
“You haven’t asked.”
“I shouldn’t have to ask you to forgive something like this.”
“Why? Because you’ve already convicted yourself?”
Your pulse rose again.
Jason gestured toward your hands. “Go on. Get angry.”
“Stop.”
“You think I’m gonna run because you raise your voice?”
“I said stop.”
“And I said I’m still here.”
Green flickered along your knuckles. Jason did not move.
“Don’t make me prove your point,” you warned.
“You’re proving mine.”
The transformation pressed against your skin, not wild this time but awake. Listening. Your body felt too small to contain the pressure building inside it.
“You don’t understand,” you said.
Jason’s laugh was quiet and vicious. “Don’t I?”
“No. The Pit is not your fault, it is not your body. It was done to you.”
“And the gamma mutation was your choice?”
“I inherited it.”
“As a kid.”
“It’s still mine.”
“So’s the Pit now.”
Your mouth opened.
Jason stepped closer. “I’ve spent years trying to decide which parts of me count,” he said. “The kid Bruce adopted. The Robin who died. The thing that crawled out of the ground. The man Talia trained. The Hood. The murderer. The brother. The son no one knew what to do with.” His voice roughened. “Every time I did something I hated, I tried to cut that version off. Pretend he wasn’t me. Pretend the anger came from somewhere else.”
You watched him, unable to breathe.
“It didn’t help,” Jason said. “I still had to live in the body that did it.”
“That’s what I’m trying to prevent.”
“No. You’re trying to punish yourself first, so nobody else gets the chance.”
The green reached your wrists.
Jason glanced down at it. His expression did not change.
“I have hurt people,” you said. “Not hypothetically. Not in some nightmare I’ve created because I hate myself. I broke my father’s arm. I injured three doctors during the procedure. I put a teammate in hospital when I was seventeen.”
“Did you mean to?”
“Does intention repair bones?”
“No.”
“Then stop asking.”
“I’m not asking because I think it erases what happened.” Jason leaned over the bed, his face close to yours. “I’m asking because it matters.”
“To you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The word escaped before you could stop it. Jason froze.
The green beneath your skin dimmed.
You had wanted to ask for months. Years, perhaps. Through late-night meals and rooftop conversations, through missions and injuries and mornings when you woke on his sofa beneath a blanket he claimed he had not placed over you.
Why did he care? Why did he stay? Why did he look at you as though the parts you hated were not invisible, but worth knowing?
Jason swallowed. “You know why,” he said.
“No.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“I know you understand me.” Your voice was barely audible. “I know we work well together. I know you trust me more than most people, although that may have changed.”
“It hasn’t.”
“It should.”
“Stop telling me what I should feel.”
“Then tell me.”
Jason looked away. For all his fury, he seemed suddenly terrified. The sight frightened you more than anger ever could.
“I love you,” he said.
The room became very quiet.
You stared at him.
Jason’s jaw clenched as though the words had physically injured him. “There. Happy?”
“No.”
“Great.”
“No, I mean—” Your thoughts scattered. “You can’t.”
His eyebrows rose. “Pretty sure I just did.”
“You can’t love me.”
“That’s your response?”
“You’re hurt.”
“I noticed.”
“You have a concussion.”
“Minor.”
“You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I was thinking clearly before you threw me through a wall.” You flinched. Jason immediately closed his eyes. “Shit.”
“No. You’re right.”
“That was cheap.”
“It was true.”
“Both can happen at once.”
You pulled the blanket tighter around your waist. The transformation had receded entirely, leaving you cold.
Jason exhaled and lowered himself back into the chair. “I shouldn’t have said it like that,” he muttered.
“How long?” He glanced at you. “How long have you…” You could not make yourself repeat the word.
Jason’s mouth twisted. “Long enough to know a head injury isn’t responsible.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you?”
Your heartbeat skipped.
Jason gave you a tired, crooked smile. “Yeah. Thought so.”
You looked at his bruised face and remembered his forehead against yours in the maintenance chamber. His voice moving through the rage when everything else had become noise.
“Do you remember what you said to me?” you asked.
“Down there?” You nodded. “Most of it.”
“I don’t.”
Jason’s expression softened.
“I remember your voice,” you continued. “I remember thinking that I had to make you leave. I thought if I scared you enough, you would go.”
“You’re not that scary.”
“I threw you through a wall.”
“Wall was flimsy.”
“It was reinforced concrete.”
“Gotham contractors. Can’t trust ’em.”
Despite everything, a laugh broke from you. It hurt. The sound scraped through a throat still raw from roaring, but once it began, you could not stop it. The laugh collapsed into something wetter, sharper, and you covered your face before Jason could see.
The bed shifted. His good arm came around you.
You stiffened. “Jason.”
“I know.”
“I could—”
“I know.”
You could feel the brace around his ribs. You could feel how carefully he held his injured shoulder away from you. Every fragile part of him seemed pressed against every dangerous part of you.
Yet he remained.
Your hands hovered near his waist, terrified to touch.
Jason rested his cheek against your hair. “You’re allowed.”
“To do what?”
“Hold on.”
Your fingers closed in the back of his shirt. The fabric crumpled beneath them.
Jason breathed out. You pressed your face against his neck, and the first sob tore free. It was ugly. There was no graceful release, no cinematic tear sliding silently down one cheek. Your body shook hard enough to disturb the sensors. You cried for the missing hours in the basement, for the three weeks stolen from your childhood and every memory that might still be buried beneath them. You cried for your father’s broken arm and the doctors whose names you no longer knew. You cried because Jason was injured and holding you anyway.
He did not tell you it was fine. He did not say you had done nothing wrong. He held you and allowed the truth to remain complicated.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered.
“I know.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I know.”
You pulled back enough to look at him. “How can you keep saying that?”
“Because I believe you.”
“What if believing me isn’t enough?”
“It isn’t.”
The answer startled you.
Jason brushed his thumb beneath your eye. “We need plans. Training. Better comms and actual fail-safes that don’t involve somebody shooting you with a sonic cannon.”
“You should have used one.”
“No.”
“You could have stopped me faster.”
“Or made it worse.”
“You didn’t know that.”
“No,” he admitted. “I made a choice.”
“You could have died.”
“So could the people upstairs if I’d driven you into a bigger frenzy.”
“You stayed because of the civilians.”
Jason stared at you.
“Partly,” he said.
The honesty hurt and healed in equal measure.
“What was the other part?” you asked.
“You.”
Your grip tightened in his shirt.
“I wasn’t gonna let the worst moment of your life end with you waking up alone,” Jason said.
You looked at him, really looked. Jason did not love gently. He loved like he fought—with his whole body, with every scar exposed, with the expectation that it might kill him and the stubborn decision to do it anyway.
You had known. That was the terrible thing. You had known for months in the instinctive way you knew a shift was coming before the monitor sounded. You had felt it in the books beside your bed and the tea in his kitchen, in the way he always positioned himself between you and unfamiliar machinery. You had felt it every time his rage eased beneath your hand.
You had simply refused to name it, because unnamed things could not be lost.
“I love you too,” you whispered.
Jason went motionless.
“You don’t have to say it because I did,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“You’re emotionally compromised.”
“So are you.”
“Baseline condition.”
Your hand rose toward his face. You stopped before touching the bruise along his jaw.
Jason saw the hesitation. He took your wrist and placed your palm against his cheek. His skin was warm. Stubble rasped beneath your fingers. His eyes never left yours.
“You don’t get to be afraid of touching me forever,” he said.
“I’m afraid of breaking you.”
“Good luck.”
“Jason.”
“I’m serious. People have been trying for years.”
“Some of them succeeded.”
The humour left his face. “Yeah,” he said. “They did.”
Your thumb moved gently beneath the edge of the bruise. Jason leaned into your hand.
“But I’m not asking you to love some version of me nobody managed to damage,” he continued. “That guy doesn’t exist.”
You swallowed.
“And I don’t need you cured,” he said. “I don’t need you calm every second. I don’t need you easy.”
“What do you need?”
“You here.”
It was almost unbearable in its simplicity.
You leaned forward. Jason met you halfway.
The kiss was soft, not because either of you were soft people but because there were injuries between you, and fear, and years of treating desire like another dangerous thing that needed containment. His good hand cupped the back of your neck. Your palm remained against his cheek.
He tasted faintly of blood and the terrible Cave coffee he had apparently been drinking while waiting for you to wake. You kissed him again anyway.
Jason’s mouth curved against yours.
“You’re smiling,” you murmured.
“Shut up.”
“Are you pleased?”
“Actively reconsidering this.”
“You confessed first.”
“Under duress.”
“You were standing beside a hospital bed.”
“Terrifying environment.”
You kissed the uninjured corner of his mouth.
Jason’s breath caught. Something bright and fragile opened inside your chest. Not happiness exactly. Happiness seemed too small and tidy for it.
Hope, perhaps. Hope was terrifying too.
The medical bay door opened.
Bruce Banner stood in the doorway. Bruce Wayne loomed behind him, doing an admirable impression of a gargoyle who had recently received several troubling scan results.
Your father looked at your hand on Jason’s face. Then at Jason’s hand behind your neck.
“Oh,” Banner said.
Jason did not move away. “Knock.”
“It’s a medical bay.”
“Still rude.”
Bruce Wayne’s gaze settled on Jason’s ribs. “You are supposed to be resting.”
“I am sitting down.”
“You dislocated your shoulder.”
“Almost.”
Banner’s mouth twitched despite his exhaustion. “That appears to be a point of contention.”
You reluctantly released Jason. He kept hold of your wrist.
“We identified the device,” Banner said. “Or part of it.”
Your stomach tightened.
Jason’s thumb pressed once against your pulse.
“It was built using stolen research from the Zürich trials,” your father continued. “The original data should have been destroyed.”
“Should have?” Jason asked.
Banner glanced toward Batman. Bruce’s expression darkened. “A private defence contractor obtained copies before the facility closed. The company dissolved twelve years ago, but several researchers continued working under different organisations.”
“Who hired the Saints?” you asked.
“We’re tracing the payment,” Bruce said. “The attack appears targeted.”
Jason rose.
“Sit down,” three voices said simultaneously.
He looked offended. You almost smiled.
“We’ll find them,” Bruce continued. His gaze moved from Jason to you. “After both of you recover.”
“I should be contained until then,” you said.
Jason’s hand tightened. Your father’s face fell.
Bruce Wayne remained unreadable. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” you admitted. “It’s what is safe.”
“Those are not always the same thing,” Banner said quietly. You looked at him. Your father stepped farther into the room. “I agreed to containment too quickly when you were young.”
“Dad.”
“I was afraid.”
“You had a broken arm.”
“I wasn’t afraid of you.”
“You should have been.”
“No.” Banner’s voice sharpened. The sound startled all of you. “I was afraid for you. There is a difference, and I failed to make you understand it.”
Your throat tightened.
He pulled the nearby stool closer but did not sit until you nodded. “When you asked me to remove the mutation, I knew the procedure was experimental,” he said. “I told myself that you understood the risks because you were brilliant and because you spoke like an adult.”
“I did understand.”
“You were fourteen.” His eyes shone behind his glasses. “You understood the science. You could not understand what it meant to hate yourself that young because I had taught you to.”
“You didn’t.”
“I called my other form a curse. A monster. A disease I needed to cure.” Banner looked down at his hands. “You heard every word.”
Silence settled over the medical bay.
Jason’s hand slipped from your wrist to your fingers. Your father noticed but said nothing.
“The procedure was not only intended to separate the gamma cells,” Banner continued. “They believed they could suppress the emotional response associated with transformation. Fear. Anger. Survival instincts.”
“Emotions,” you said.
“Yes.”
Jason’s expression became dangerous. “They tried to cut emotions out of a kid.”
Banner’s jaw tightened. “I stopped the trial when I realised what they were doing.”
“After three weeks,” you whispered.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t I remember?”
“They induced repeated transformations. Your brain protected itself in the only way it could.”
The room blurred.
Jason’s fingers laced through yours. You gripped them carefully.
“The device in the basement recreated part of the process,” Banner said. “It disrupted the connection between your conscious memory and the transformation response. You didn’t simply lose control. Someone removed your ability to recognise that control belonged to you.”
The distinction should have comforted you. Instead, it made you furious.
The lights flickered.
Bruce Wayne glanced toward the gamma monitor.
Jason remained beside you. You looked down at your joined hands.
“I’m angry,” you said.
“Yeah,” Jason replied.
The word contained no fear. Your skin warmed beneath his. Green moved delicately across your knuckles, not erupting but blooming.
Banner watched. Bruce watched. Jason lifted your hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it.
You stared at him.
“What?” he said. “Still your hand.”
The green deepened.
Your fingers grew slightly beneath his, nails darkening at the tips. Jason adjusted his grip without hesitation.
The transformation stopped at your wrist.
You breathed. Nothing broke. No alarms sounded. The world did not end.
Bruce Wayne cleared his throat. “The reinforced training room will be available when you are medically cleared.”
You looked at him.
“No containment,” he said. “Training.”
Something in your chest loosened.
Banner smiled faintly. “I would like to stay and help, if that’s all right.”
You nodded.
Jason leaned toward you. “Family therapy in the gamma bunker. Cute.”
“You’ll be there too,” you said.
“Absolutely not.”
“You’re half the reason I shifted back.”
“Natural talent.”
“You’re going.”
“I’m injured.”
“Bruce said after we’re medically cleared.”
Jason looked betrayed. “You used Batman against me.”
“You taught me risk management.”
Bruce Banner laughed. Even Batman’s mouth moved at one corner, though Jason would deny it under oath.
Recovery was not linear.
Jason’s ribs healed before the fear did. For weeks after the mission, you woke with the memory of his body striking concrete. Sometimes you dreamed of chasing him through the tunnel, though the details changed. In some dreams, you caught him. In others, you reached the maintenance chamber and found only his helmet on the floor, empty and streaked with blood.
Jason never told you to stop apologising. He told you to be specific. When you woke from nightmares, shaking and green-eyed, he asked what you were sorry for. The injury? The fear? The fact that he had chosen to stay?
Sometimes you had an answer. Sometimes you did not. He listened either way.
You trained in the reinforced room beneath the Cave. Your father recalibrated the sensors and removed every piece of equipment related to the Zürich research. Batman developed new emergency protocols built around communication rather than immediate suppression. Oracle designed comms that could withstand the disruptive pulse, then made Jason carry three backups because, in her words, he treated safety equipment like optional side quests.
Jason complained constantly. He attended every session.
At first, you only practised controlled shifts. Human to green and back again, monitoring your memory after each transition. Then your father introduced stressors: loud noises, flashing lights, raised voices.
Jason handled the anger exercises. He was exceptionally qualified.
“You’re being annoying on purpose,” you accused during one session.
He leaned against the reinforced wall, arms folded. “Can’t prove that.”
“You have spent twenty minutes mispronouncing Dostoevsky.”
“Dosta-whiskey.” Your eye twitched. “Dusty-eff-ski.”
“Stop.”
“Doss-toy-jet-ski.”
Green rippled over your skin. Jason grinned.
“You are the worst person I know.”
“Feel it.”
“I feel homicidal.”
“Great. Don’t repress it.”
You grew several inches. The monitor chimed steadily.
Jason moved closer. “What do you want to do?”
“Throw you through another wall.”
“Valid. Alternative?”
“Tell you that you’re an uncultured idiot.”
“Good.”
“You’re an uncultured idiot.”
“Excellent control.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
The confidence in his voice disrupted the transformation more effectively than any breathing exercise. Your body settled into the familiar shape between forms—green skin, increased height, enough strength to bend steel, but your face and voice still recognisably yours.
Jason reached up to rest his hands on your waist.
You looked down at him. He had healed, though a faint yellow shadow remained along one rib. You still checked without meaning to.
Jason noticed. He always noticed.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I’m learning.”
His expression softened.
You placed both hands against his face. They seemed enormous now, capable of covering his skull completely. Jason did not flinch.
“Still your hands,” he reminded you.
You bent and kissed him. He rose onto his toes, which he would later deny, one arm sliding around your neck.
The gamma monitor beeped faster.
Jason pulled back. “Your pulse is up.”
“You’re very distracting.”
“Another natural talent.”
You smiled.
Being together did not solve either of you. Jason still had nights when anger arrived without a clear target. He still sometimes woke with the Pit glowing in his eyes and his hands locked around a weapon he did not remember reaching for. You still swallowed irritation until it became nausea. You still kept a bag packed beneath the bed.
For a while.
Three months after the mission, Jason found you kneeling beside it.
The safe house was quiet. Rain tapped against the windows, and a pot of your terrible tea steamed on the kitchen counter. Jason paused in the bedroom doorway.
You looked at the open bag between your knees. Clothes. Cash. Medication. False identification.
His expression closed.
“I’m not leaving,” you said.
“Wasn’t gonna ask.”
“You were.”
“I was gonna ask why you pack socks like a psychopath.”
“They’re rolled.”
“They’re suffering.”
You pulled one of the shirts from the bag.
Jason remained in the doorway, watching.
“I don’t think I can throw it away,” you admitted.
“You don’t have to.”
You glanced up.
He shrugged. “Emergency bags make sense. Our lives are ridiculous.”
“This one isn’t for emergencies.”
“I know.”
“It’s for running.”
“I know that too.”
You folded the shirt and placed it in the dresser.
Jason came closer.
One by one, you removed the contents. The clothes went into the drawers. The medication went into the bathroom cabinet beside his painkillers. The cash remained in a smaller emergency kit near the window.
You held the false identification last. The name belonged to no one.
Jason sat beside you on the floor.
“You could keep it,” he said.
“Why?”
“Maybe we’ll need to disappear someday.”
“We?”
He took the identification, studied it, then grimaced. “Terrible surname.”
“Tim chose it.”
“No taste.”
“What would you choose?”
Jason considered. “Something dramatic.”
“You already have a dramatic surname.”
“Todd is one syllable.”
“You’re called the Red Hood.”
“Branding isn’t the same as drama.”
You laughed and leaned against his shoulder.
Jason turned the card over in his fingers.
“Could make one for me,” he said.
“You want a fake identity?”
“I have twelve.”
“Of course you do.”
“But if you need an exit plan”—he placed the card back in your palm—“make room for two.”
Your chest ached. “You shouldn’t have to run because of me.”
“I won’t.”
“Then why would you come?”
Jason kissed your temple. “Because sometimes leaving is strategy.”
You looked at him.
“And sometimes staying is,” he added.
You tore the card in half. Then again.
Jason helped you carry the empty bag to the kitchen. You did not burn it or destroy it. You folded it and placed it beside the proper emergency kits.
A tool rather than a promise. Something you could use without allowing it to decide your future.
Later, you sat together on the roof. Gotham glittered below, wet and poisonous and beautiful in the particular way broken things often were. Jason had brought noodles from the same restaurant as that first night. He set the carton between you and passed you the final spring roll without comment.
You looked at it. He looked away with exaggerated innocence.
“You want half?” you asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“Liar.”
“Prove it.”
You split it anyway. Jason accepted his half.
Your shoulder rested against his, human skin warm beneath the sleeve of your sweatshirt. The city growled in the distance, full of anger and hunger and people trying to survive both.
“Do you ever wish it was gone?” you asked.
Jason chewed thoughtfully. “The Pit?”
“The anger.”
He considered longer this time.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not all of it.” You nodded. “Some of it’s mine,” he continued. “Some of it keeps me moving. Lets me know when something’s wrong.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest is damage.”
The word sat between you without judgement.
“Damage can heal,” you said.
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes it scars.”
“Scars are still healing.”
You smiled faintly. “You rehearsed that.”
“Shut up.”
“Did you read it in one of my therapy books?”
“They were lying around.”
“They were on my bedside table.”
“Public domain.”
“That isn’t what that means.”
Jason stole the remainder of your spring roll. You shoved his shoulder.
He gasped with theatrical betrayal, hand flying to his chest. “Violence.”
“I barely touched you.”
“Formerly injured man.”
“You’ve been medically cleared for two months.”
“Emotionally, I’ll never recover.”
Green flashed across your fingers.
Jason looked down. Then he laced his hand through yours.
The colour remained. You did not pull away.
“You know,” he said, “I’m still right.”
“About what?”
“You’re hot when you’re green.”
You stared at him. Jason’s grin widened.
“You have terrible survival instincts,” you said.
“Yeah.”
Your skin shifted slowly beneath his hand, green spreading up your wrist. You let yourself feel the irritation, the affection beneath it and the deeper, more frightening love that bound them together. Jason watched without fear.
“World’s still here,” he murmured.
Below, Gotham breathed through rain and sirens.
Inside you, anger moved. It did not vanish. It did not become harmless. It remained vast, complicated and alive, carrying every wound you had survived and every boundary you had been taught to erase. But it was not the only thing inside you.
Jason’s thumb moved across your green knuckles. You leaned against him, holding his hand with enough strength to crush bone and enough care not to.
⭑.ᐟ I WISH YOU LOVED ME LESS ── Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch
summary: you put all your efforts during the holiday weekend trying to convince your husband that his three-month sabbatical doesn’t have to end in the unspoken fatality he has been hinting at since it was announced. whilst robby puts all his efforts into pushing you away. (wc: 9.3k)
pairing: michael ‘robby’ robinavitch / f!reader
content: angst with a happy ending. fluffy parts. established relationship. wife!reader. an argument that happens the whole shift. s2 spoilers (the timeline of the show is jumbled for the plot) jealous!robby & jealous!reader? mean!robby. mental health struggles, hints to suicidal intentions, tension in a marriage, death and medical inaccuracies. beating a dead horse with this trope! 18+ suggestive content + smut (fingering and cunnilingus—f. receiving. minor breeding kink. robby is a little delayed in getting it up. unprotected p in v, dirty talk, light dom!robby & creampie)
Dana approaches you somewhere in the hour of 12PM. She looks at you over the rim of her glasses, all blonde strands of hair and each wrinkle in her forehead lined with concern for someone, more or less, adjacent to you. It makes you sink in your seat. You had been residing at the main workstation with three of the residents painfully assorting patient files since the CEO in his Fourth of July garb had made the announcement of preemptively shutting off all computer systems; leaving the ED without electronic health records, connected charting etc.
(You know, all the stuff that makes the department chug on like a semi-well-oiled machine.)
Being somewhat of a specialist in the art of expressions and the silence that comes with it, you were able to conclude that Dana Evans—the guardian of the PTMC—was not approaching you for a long-overdue chinwag.
Quite the opposite, actually.
“You need to talk to him.” Dana commands in her usual gravel tone.
It makes you nervously scratch at your brow-bone. “I know. I’m getting round to it. Just after—”
“Now.” Dana interjects. She leans her whole body into the workstation, her voice drops down to barely a whisper, “He’s acting up. Being a real Fourth of July spectacle. All this before he hops on that godforsaken motorcycle for three months. You’ve got the most Robby jargon out of all of us. Put it to use.”
You let out a deep exhale. “Fine.”
You stand at full height and Dana gives you a half smile that was a tamer version of amusement.
Things were not fine. In fact, things were so far out of the ballpark of fine, that you would never put Robby and the definition of ‘fine’, or ‘okay’ or, overall just ‘good’ in one sentence. He was a man on the precipice of a life-altering decision that those around him would suffer the consequences that he had made; much longer after his three-month sabbatical on the road came to a screeching halt.
The signs had been there. Ever since you had begun at the PTMC as a fresh-faced attending with a basket full of naivety. It just took a couple of years for the signs to start catching up to you. And by then, your efforts to salvage the good pieces of Michael Robinavitch, had fallen through the cracks of a prepaid tombstone.
For the most part, colleagues would acknowledge the mental health problems that trickle down from behavioural changes from their peers, and then they’d be able to go home without the additional weight of it upon their shoulders. No skin off of their noses if they weren’t the ones paying for the extensive therapy sessions.
However, for you, that wasn’t the case. Since—
“He’s your husband.” Dana calls after you.
You throw a hand up in retaliation, the sizeable rock on your ring finger catching the hazy overhead light. “Thank you, Dana.”
The reminder wasn’t needed. Everyone—including the one who married him—was well aware that Dr. Michael Robinavtich had managed to be tied down. Motorcycle and all.
You had fallen in love prior to the catastrophic events from COVID, that had been the pipeline to Robby's mental health downfall. It had been exhilarating, and sometimes still was, at the beginning of the inner workings of a relationship that was blossoming beneath Gloria Underwood’s watchful eye. All the sneaking around, keycards slid beneath clipboards, kissing on company time. The pair of you felt like giddy teenagers copping a feel.
He proposed to you within two years. Now, you were waltzing around the PTMC with a double barrel surname that was seemingly quite the tongue twister for those who took the time to read it. (This including Dennis Whitaker who went beet red when you had corrected his feeble attempt of reciting it back to you.)
You peer into Pedes to find him as predicted—coddling Baby Jane Doe.
Robby’s head turns as you speak, “Hi,” you tilt your head and smile softly at the infant lazily dozing on your husband’s shoulder. “How is she doing?”
“Oh, just lonely.” he lilts.
You nod, smoothing a finger back and forth against her cheek, “She likes you.”
“Well…she’d be the only one.” Robby mumbles as he places the infant back into the hospital cot. You smother the growing frown on your face when he straightens to full height. “You need me for something?” he asks quietly.
I need you to come back to me.
You settle for, “Just making sure you’re okay. You know—After how we left things this morning.” you say, deciding to take the brunt of whatever force you may be hit with—taking Dana out of the collateral damage.
Things had been left on a sour note in the apartment you both shared in the downtown area of Pittsburgh. The looming presence of Robby’s three-month sabbatical with his cognitive well-being balancing on the line of a fraying thread had made quite the topic of conversation over his black coffee and your nourishing choice of breakfast. Therapy was always at the centre of your tedious endeavours to ensure Robby came back to you in one piece during the early hours before work; and getting him to listen was no easy feat.
Your last ditch attempt to undertake your husband’s reluctance to get help was thrown back at you beneath venom and animosity. It had almost given you whiplash. Robby escaped the confines of the apartment with a slam of the door after insisting that if you put more of your efforts into ‘minding your own business’, you’d be able to resolve whatever unearthed issues you had rolling about in your mind—such as your unrelenting desire to help those who don’t want it.
The motorcycle ride without the helmet must’ve given his head a good shake, because when you entered the sliding doors of the PTMC; Robby began loitering around you enough to make it obvious he felt a little guilty on how he had left things.
(Never go to bed angry. Never hop on a death trap after searing your wife with the hot iron rod of your pent up anger. Or, something like that.)
Robby takes a deep inhale, there’s a sort of playful glint in his eye as he speaks, “You know, when you continue to ask someone if they’re okay, it starts to get a little repetitive.”
“Marriage is repetition.” you don’t miss a beat, the lightheartedness that swoops the conversation feels a little foreign; considering the circumstances. “Sue me for taking my vows seriously.”
“Hm.” Robby hums, the blue latex gloves snapping off his hands, “Is this a welfare check?”
He shrouds your personal space for a moment. Not enough to seem intentional, but you knew his actions were the end result of your magnetic presence—hence why he married you. You watch him cock his head in a roguishly handsome way, crows feet beside brown eyes exposed when he scrunches on eye shut. Michael Robinavitch was many things; but dense was not one.
His flirtations were consciously placed.
The room fills with the bustle from the central area of the ED when Robby pushes the door open, wedging it open with one foot to allow you to depart from Pedes. He looks down the slope of his nose at you, a faint smile catches at the corner of his lips when you size him up in passing.
“Are you open to one?” you bump your elbow into the softness of his stomach, habitually holding your hand beneath the sanitiser. It takes all your efforts to not look up at him.
You begin to walk together.
“Uh…nope.”
His answer takes a subtle jab at your heart. “Then consider it as me just being nosy about how you’re feeling.”
“That—” Robby halts you both, his fingers ghosting your elbow to allow a gurney to roll past. His eyes follow it as he continues, “—Is just a less fancier way of dressing this up as a welfare check. Have you seen Dana?”
She’s the one that sent me, is what you want to say.
“She’s talking with Emma.” you reply nonchalantly, “Robby, can you just…talk to me? Please? You’re deflecting.”
“No, I’m running an Emergency Department.” Robby retorts, placing a hand on your back to keep you with him as he wades through the chaos of going analog. His eyes flit to you for a second and he softens at the melancholy you carry in your expression. “Sweetheart, I’m fine and sort of in the middle of something. Pin this conversation for later, okay?”
“Sure.” you murmur when he walks away. Dana takes up the rear-end of the conversation, slotting herself shoulder to shoulder with you—an iPad balancing in the crook of her elbow. You don’t look at her when you say, “That went well.”
“Plenty of time, honey.” Dana grits, patting your back, “You’ll get through to him. As for now, I’ve got a case in South 15. Right up your alley. Lookin’ real pretty for a distraction, hm? Come on.”
Robby is distracted when he returns to the central hub. The patient chart is a mere prop in his hands. The information untouched by his plethora of clinical knowledge, because all he can hear is you laughing at something that the handsome Radiologist—Dr. Barker—has said. It hadn’t bothered him when his staff members, Princess and Javadi, had been stood gawping at the man from afar. Was it a little inconvenient considering the circumstances the ED were squashed under? Yes.
Until it became a hinderance to their performance; it wasn’t his problem.
As for you…it was different.
There was no overt behaviour that would lead anyone to believe that you were doing anything but being friendly until the wet reads came through for your patient in South 15. At an arms length from the guy, but still conversing in a way that shows off two of Robby’s favourite things about you: your genuine toothy-grin and the nose scrunch do when you find something funny.
When Dana throws him a look in passing, he reverts back to the patient chart. Then your laughter carries across the room a minute after, and Robby decides that’s enough time spent with the pretty boy from upstairs that has set up camp in the middle of the ED.
He idles up next to you with all the curiosity of a Chief Attending and not a husband that reeks of jealous intrigue.
(Professional before personal. The walls of the PTMC were a shield to the outside noise.)
“Dr. Robby.” Barker greets.
You turn your head to see Robby practically flush with your back. “Oh—Hi.”
“Dr. Barker.” Robby glances at you from his peripheral and chooses to ignore the mild perplexity that sits in the crease between your brows. His hands clutch his elbows when he crosses his arms across his chest, head tilting at the Radiologist. “How long on this patient’s imaging?”
“Another fifteen minutes. Tops.” Barker answers after checking the process.
“Then I assume you can circle back on the jokes in fifteen minutes.” your head whips to glare at the Chief Attending-gone-rogue on being tactful around his professional peers, “Catalogue of patients on that whiteboard. They won’t treat themselves.” he chides.
You give Dr. Barker an apologetic look and walk by Robby who follows like a dog on a leash. Once the Radiologist is out of ear shot, you speak freely, “Are you seriously time-keeping my conversations?”
“No.” Robby drawls, “Just making sure one of my best Attending still has her head in the game.”
“That’s rich.” you scoff with minimal malice, “Dr. Barker is a good guy. The way you spoke to him back there—”
Robby interjects. “Ho-ho, sounds like you like him.”
“I do.”
“More than me?” he angles his body into yours to make room for an oncoming nurse. (He doesn’t miss the small but wicked smile on your face.)
You mull it over when you reach the board. “Only time will tell. You’re still on probation from your morning tantrum.”
Robby lets out a rare cackle that spreads the amusement across his weathered features and you beam up at the sight of his crows feet making an appearance under the circumstances of lighthearted humour. The palm of his hand rubs the span of your back as you stare at the whiteboard, making it a sight to behold for the forthcoming med students.
“I—Uh,” Robby starts, removing his glasses and scratching the skin behind his ear, “I want to apologise for how this morning went.”
“Mhm.” you only look at him when you feel his eyes bore into your side-profile, “I forgive you. Doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to be mad at you, Robinavitch.” you remark setting the base layer tone as nothing short of sarcastic.
Robby inhales and speaks on the exhale, his voice only just audible to you, “Would…a five minute break in an on-call room make up for any of it?”
He looks hopeful.
You pray he shares the same sentiment on his three-month sabbatical. Unlikely, but negativity didn’t pay the bills.
The insinuation is clearer than glass. On-call rooms were meant for a sole purpose of providing the staff at the PTMC a safe space to rest in privacy. It required a keycard to gain access to.
It was also the same space that Robby and you took advantage of for displays of affection that were crossing the boundaries classified in the Human Resources pamphlet you were both given on how to navigate an appropriate workplace relationship; and the power imbalances that could come with it.
Gloria Underwood would turn in her ivory white tower if she knew what the pair of you got up to behind that particular closed door on the company dime.
Robby’s offer was tempting. His handsome face and optimistic eyes were even more.
“I’m happy where I am.” you advise him, without sounding too pained at the sacrifice.
Robby surrenders. “Happy wife, happy life.” he states with his hands up, then deciding to give Ogilvie and Joy a show by pulling you in by your shoulder and pressing a chaste kiss to your temple. It was the least he could do, if the on-call room was off the menu. “Shout if you need me.”
“Shout.” you whisper when he trails off, leaving you with the ambient hospital noises. (And, Joy and Ogilvie.) You point at them, “You two. With me.”
Eventually you return to the middle of the Pitt, swiping two patients off of the white board with two fingers—too lazy to find the eraser. You weren’t sure what part had soured your mood. Either from the med-student Ogilvie’s unwavering need to put his foot in his mouth in front of patients and plummet those all important patient satisfaction scores, Louie’s passing, the foreboding presence of your husband’s three-month sabbatical; or catching the loose ends of Noelle Hastings and Robby’s conversation.
He catches sight of you in passing—your face providing nothing but the word: hypocrite—whilst he absentmindedly bobs his head along to Hastings sugary rambling over McKay’s patient case. His forehead creases as she speaks, scratching at the nape of his neck nervously. Robby’s eyes flit over to you in the hopes that just this once, you may be a figment of his own imagination.
Despite jealously being relatively beneath you in your marriage to one of the PTMC’s eligible bachelors, without being too presumptuous, Robby feared that seeing him converse with his non-committal ex, may be the cherry on the cake for how your day was going.
(Hastings always had a habit of lingering. Which made it look even worse.)
Perlah comes up beside you, patient charts in abundance in her grasp.
“Not bothering you?” she asks with a subtle jerk of her head in Robby and Noelle’s direction.
You shuffle through some results, “Give it a couple of minutes.” you murmur.
Perlah lets out a laugh that catches both Noelle and Robby’s attention nearby. Their heads turn at the abrupt sound, which in turn breaks up their train of thought over the long winded discussion. Noelle squeezes Robby’s bicep before they go their separate ways, and suddenly your patient’s results need to be read millimetres from your face; when Noelle strolls into the workstation with a content expression on her pretty face.
“You did that on purpose.” you whisper to Perlah behind your clipboard.
Perlah shrugs innocently and departs to ask Robby for a second-opinion.
The case manager perches at the edge of the workstation you happen to sit at, happily tapping at the surface of the workstation.
The thing about Noelle Hastings was, that she was neither a friend nor a foe to you. She was simply an extension of Robby’s history of avoidant attachment that extended the length of seven-weeks. There was zero animosity toward her as some would anticipate you to have. She was kind, assisted you in insurance cases on the best outcome for the patient and even when she stepped over the invisible boundary that separated a fleeting situation from a marriage, with nostalgic remarks over her shared time with Robby; Noelle Hastings well-manicured nails were always far from digging into your husband.
She was aware of this. Respectful. Part of you assumes she was trying to find a middle ground to bond over with you. Understandably, it could get a little awkward when your previous sexual endeavours’ wife is waltzing around the workplace.
Even more awkward when she catches herself going all gooey whenever she was within close proximity to his charm. (Worked on her for years. It wasn’t going to stop now. Even if it wasn’t intentional on his part.)
She speaks in the direction of Dana, “You know what Motorcycle Mike’s sabbatical is really about?”
Dana remains unbothered, “I never try to guess what’s going on in that head of his.”
You shift in your seat, and it highlights yourself to Noelle.
“You’re not going with him?” Noelle tosses the net with a polite smile and you’re suddenly pulled into the conversation, no longer a bystander pretending to be busy.
“Uh, no.” you shift, rubbing the palms of your hands against your thighs.
Dana also responds, “You kiddin’? We’d go cuckoo bananas if we lost her to a three-month sabbatical too.” she peers over the brim of her glasses at Noelle, “Behind every great man, is a greater woman.” she proclaims.
“I don’t doubt it.” Noelle laughs. There’s a thought that churns over in her head and you’re left surrendering yourself to yet another boundary crossed when she decides to vocalise it. “It’s just…That’d drive me crazy. You know? Him being off the radar for three whole months. The man couldn’t sleep without the TV on in the bedroom. How is he going to survive all that silence?”
You take the comment in your stride, shutting the monitor off and standing. Dana throws you an empathetic look as a woman has been in the game for thirty years. Someone like that learns to become observational when being patient-facing means the little expressions matter.
And with the rise and fall of your chest; Dana can come to the conclusion that you’re upset by Hastings throwaway comment.
So, she defends where you won’t.
“Little respect, Hastings.” Dana is casual in her directness. She glances at the pretty woman, “It goes a long way.”
Noelle looks mortified. “Oh—No. I’m sorry. I overstepped.”
“It’s fine.” you reassure her, gulping at the tightness in your throat, “You made an observation that has stood the test of time. Robby is a big boy. Three months to reflect, alone, is healthy. TV on or not.”
Now, you’re irritated.
It’s enough for the conversation to not chase you when you depart the workstation—Dana left to lowly chuckle in amusement at the underlying sharpness in your tone. You weave through bodies on autopilot, ears ringing from the seed of doubt planted by Hastings over Robby’s time away. It made you think that perhaps you had been too enthusiastic over the idea of a three-month sabbatical with little to no contact with a man on the brink of catastrophe. Too laidback in putting the power in the hands of his mind that had nothing but malicious intent over his body.
It had sounded like a good idea at the time. Neither you or Robby could recall an official vacation that he had partaken in—aside from your honeymoon. Now? You weren’t so sure.
Everyone else had told you otherwise ever since it had been announced.
“Everything okay?” by some hideous trick of fate, Robby matches the strides in the walk you were taking around the parameters of the department.
He had spotted you from the window of South 22 and excused himself with the reassurance from Dr. Al-Hashimi that she could hold down the fort. Being married to you came with unlimited perks, one being that Robby was able pinpoint your tells that signalled a combative mood. Not necessary toward him; but the idea wouldn’t be so far fetched.
(It was all in the downturn of your lips. And the tightness in your jawline.)
“You tell me. Does having to listen to your ex question my decision to not saddle up on a three-month sabbatical with my flight risk husband, whilst also sorely reminding me that she also knows you leave the TV on through the night, make a good case for everything to be going okay?” you quip, narrowly avoiding Ahmed’s call to the betting pool.
Robby blows out hot air. “Could’ve said devoted husband.” he jokes. It crashes and burns when you spare him a stern glance. “Okay. How about we take in some fresh air in the Ambulance Bay?”
“Lead the way.”
It doesn’t take much further and the summer air of Pittsburgh clings to your bodies in all the wrong places. It preemptively sets the tone as you scuff your feet against the ground, arms tightly bound across your chest in an effort to translate your hardened exterior from the events of the day.
Honestly, it felt close to dogpiling once Hastings became—unintentionally—involved.
Robby takes in the scenes of the empty Ambulance Bay, his eyes find his beloved motorcycle still in tact at the side of the building. He takes a step forward in order to block it from your line of vision.
After a moment, an arm wraps around your shoulder and you’re suddenly curled into your husband’s side. His lips find your temple and they stay pressed against your skin to resolve some of the bad feelings running about in your chest.
You close your eyes as Robby repetitively presses chaste kisses to the same spot, relishing in the physical affection that you will be deprived off for three months. Or further; depending on how far Michael Robinavitch was willing to go.
The thought alone makes you recoil out of his touch.
Robby’s brows quirk in confusion. “Too hot?” he asks naively. Unprepared.
“We—” you sigh, “—We need to continue the conversation from this morning.”
“No…we don’t.” Robby informs, his expression still unwavering in adoration, “It’s water under the bridge. I apologised.”
“I’m talking about the part where you accept the therapy sessions on this sabbatical.” you start, feeling the prompt shift in the atmosphere, “Jack has given me all the information for his therapist—”
“Sweetheart. I am begging you not to start this shit again.” Robby has the palms of his hands flush against each other in a begging motion that’s sent in your direction. “I don’t need a therapist on this trip.”
“Throw me a bone here, Robby.” you exasperate, “You’re obviously not well. Is it really so bad that I’m making sure I get you back by the end of this?” you feel your patience chip, the skin of your neck prickling with frustration.
Robby chuckles. “Oh, you’ll get me back. I’ll make sure of it.”
The morbidity of his answer makes you pause.
You blink at him, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means…stop telling me how to feel.” Robby narrows his eyes, throwing a sarcastic smile your way.
“Then what are you feeling, Robby?” you snap at him, the humid summer air clinging to your skin.
He chuckles lowly, “I really don’t need you to be my shrink.”
You shake your head, “This isn’t what a shrink does. You would know that if you just see one for two days of the week whilst you’re away. Jack’s therapist does virtual appointments—”
“I already gave you my answer to that.”
“Holy shit.” you clench your fists and tap them against your forehead to relieve your frustrations, “I’m not asking you to lobotomise yourself on this sabbatical, Robby. It’s fucking therapy.”
Robby sneers, “No? This—” he gestures to the space between you in circles, “—feels an awful lot like a lobotomy. Cut it out.”
“Cut it out?” you repeat, “I’m not a child.”
“Are you sure about that, sweetheart?” Robby crosses his arms, the argument was beginning to feel like being inside a pressure cooker, “You’re upset over this morning. Over the sabbatical, clearly over whatever bullshit Hastings said to you. About Louie. You can’t regulate your own emotions at work and you have the nerve to tell me I need fucking help? That is fucking hypocrisy.”
“Oh, quit projecting.” you look around for a minute to take a break from the intense stare down.
“Why…are you doing this right now?”
You watch Robby rub at his temples. “Why? Because you’re lashing out. You’ve been doing it to Mohan, Dana and Al-Hashimi all fucking day. You’re upset that Langdon is back and you’re punishing him for your own feeling of failure.”
“Mohan is tough love.” Robby cherrypicks.
“Cut the shit, Robby. You’ve been wearing her down and you know it.” you gesture to the ED just beyond the sliding doors, “She had a panic attack and you belittled her over the same shit you did last year in Pedes!”
Robby shakes his head in disbelief, “You’re really bringing that up right now?”
“Yes. I am.” you retort plainly, “Robby. Can’t you see this is all happening because I love you?” you collect your voice beneath a whisper when an EMT strolls by you.
Robby waits until they vacate the premises to speak as he drags his fingers along creases in his forehead. “Yeah. I do. And, right now…I need you to love me less.” he conveys cruelly.
Your worry ebbs into hurt. Fingers curling tight enough that your nails are pressing crescent moons into the palm of your hands. His words lay flat against your chest like wet cement. Any further rebuttals you had lined up dissipate and you’re left with a blank slate, jaw slack as you try to make sense of it all.
The Ambulance Bay plunges into icy waters. Robby nervously drags his thumbnail across the top of his brow bone as he cranes his neck to look inside the building. It wasn’t evident to you at the time, but his inner turmoil flares at the sight of your broken expression.
Even when you gather yourself up with watery eyes and a wobbling bottom lip, Robby does nothing. He allows you the action of brushing past him to escape the jaws of his verbal brutality, throwing yourself back into the chaos of a holiday weekend.
He’s left with the whir of ambulances in the distance.
Robby watches you leave, mumbling a ‘shit’ under his breath. He drops his head back to take in the humid air through his nostrils; the brief solitude condemned when Baran Al-Hashimi appears.
“Robby?” Baran calls from the doors, offering a hesitant smile, “Perlah has notified me that Ms. Kovalenko—the burn patient—is ready to be seen again.”
Robby swings his hands around his body, releasing the tension by smacking his palm against his other hand that was curled up into a fist. He strains a smile, “I’ll be right there.”
Robby takes a shot at a breath to exhale any leftover poison on his tongue from your spat—being wise to the fact that patient satisfaction scores would increase without personal baggage. The dispenser spits the sanitiser into his hand and he chooses to open the door with his back; checking for any sign of you amongst the sea of people marching about.
The pit in his stomach grows when he can spot you in the middle discussing a case with McKay. Your back is turned, but Robby has been with you long enough to see the tension taught across your shoulder blades from the deep laceration he had caused by projecting his frustrations for a second time that day.
He takes a mental note to make amends by any means possible. And promptly too.
He enters the room with one last look at you. “Hello. How’s it going in here?”
“We were just discussing your wife.” Perlah informs with a friendly smile, fingers busy with the task at hand. When Robby looks inquisitive about how the topic turned to you in his absence, Perlah adds, “She just came to find me for a patient. Said hello. Ms. Kovalenko was curious about the double-barrel surname on her badge. It got us talking. All good things.”
Robby hums warmly. “A conversation I’m always happy to partake in.” he perches himself on the nearby stool—both Perlah and Ms. Kovalenko watching as he fixes his posture.
“Beautiful.” Ms. Kovalenko states.
“Very.” Robby concurs earnestly—he wants to say that you are the eighth wonder of the world.
(The argument puts that sort of compliment on hold for the time being.)
“Too good for you.” The red-haired woman quips.
“Ooh. I’ll have to agree there too.” he lilts, the pang of guilt smothered behind a professional glaze. He pats the tops of his thighs, “Did I miss all the gross stuff?”
“Timed it perfectly.” Perlah replies.
“Excellent. My job is all about delegation and time management.” Robby chides with a brave face; hoping his emotions weren’t too raw on his face over the mention of you.
Perlah and him get into a lighthearted back and forth over his imminent departure at the end of the twelve-hour shift, which piques Ms. Kovalenko’s interest over the finer details.
“He’s leaving us for three-months. On a motorcycle.” Perlah shifts in her chair, happy to invite Ms. Kovalenko further behind closed doors.
Kovalenko’s brows raise to her hairline. “Motorcyle? You’re joking.” she whips her head round to stare at Robby, “Why would you do this?” she asks sternly.
“Why? Why? Because…uh—”
“You’re a middle aged man. Don’t be stupid.” she spits back, “What about your wife? Is she happy about this decision?”
“She is…moderately humble about it.” Robby rolls closer to the sharp-tongued patient, narrowly averting his gaze to the injury concealed beneath a thin cloth.
“Moderately humble.” Kovalenko repeats sardonically with a few nods of her head. “Forgive me for being blunt but, do you think that is the equivalent to being happy, Dr. Robinavitch? I pity your wife. Very sad.”
Robby hangs his head and huffs out a laugh, “We cannot stop the world from spinning just because one person doesn’t like the way it goes round, Ms. Kovalenko—How about we focus on your care?”
There’s a significant pause.
“Us women are what make the world go round,” her lips quirk in satisfaction when Robby’s brown eyes drift from her burn site, “Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Robinavitch?”
Once the elderly, fiery-haired patient with a nasty burn on her thigh is discharged from Robby’s care—not without a stern lecture and some wonderful insight about his lack of appreciation for women in general—it’s evident that all signs are pointing to resolving the conflict that had transpired between you two.
If there was one person Robby was not willing to part with on a sour note for three whole months…it was you.
The better half of him. The center of his gravity. The only person strong enough to flip the heavy hourglass in time before he drains himself entirely.
Also, the woman that was apparently hard to track down in a department he knew like the back of his hand.
(He worries you left. But that wasn’t in your nature. Hurt feelings or not.)
“Where—“ he pauses, “—is my Attending?” Robby checks the surrounding areas as he speaks directly to Dana who was standing at the workstation with Monica Peters—the Pitt’s once renowned cynical clerk until things went south over technology.
Dana lets out an amused scoff, looking down at the clipboard pressed against her stomach; strands of blonde hair loose around her face.
“She’s been demoted to just Attending? What’d she do?” she quips in her usual tone that has Robby flaring his nostrils, “She’s writing up the death note for Javadi. McKay’s cancer patient—Roxie—she passed away.”
Robby frowns, “Where’s McKay?”
“MIA.” Dana drawls, now fiddling with the prescribed box of nicotine gum, “She seemed pretty upset coming from the Ambulance Bay. Anything you want to tell me?”
“It’s been a long day.” he calls flippantly, already parting through the sea of pandemonium.
He puts the plethora of questions about McKay’s whereabouts on the back burner for the time being.
Dana raises her voice over the hospital buzz, “Make amends, Cap.”
He gives the charge nurse a two-finger salute.
For once, he makes it to his destination uninterrupted by an emergency that requires his presence in the trauma room. The door to the room that had been dimly lit aside from the salt lamp glow, clicks open as Robby arrives; finding you slipping out the gap and closing the door quietly behind you.
You haven’t seen him yet.
For observational purposes, the Chief Attending watches you press your forehead against the cool glass of the narrow window of the door. His stomach sinks when he can see your shoulders shudder as you take a deep breath to fill your lungs with air that kept evading you.
He doesn’t feel like there’s ever going to be an appropriate time to speak to you in order to rescind his previous declarations. Even more so now, as you conceal the notion of silently weeping in the middle of the ED.
“You need a coffee?” Robby’s voice makes you jolt. For once, he shrinks in confidence under your unsteady gaze. His tired eyes take in the vision of your watery ones and his expression melts into tenderised sympathy. He nods, “Come on.”
The staff room is empty when you enter, aside from the manikin that Nurse Jesse took great pleasure in decorating, before he was wrongfully detained by ICE agents for intervening with patient care at the core of his interests—just another reason to confirm that the holiday weekend had been nothing short of twenty car pile-up that you were being forced to look at.
The box of donuts from upstairs is empty, the clock above is ticking closed to the end of the day shift; even when the job wasn’t truthfully done at the stroke of 7PM. You take the seat closest to the wall, muscles sighing from the imminent relief of pressure.
Robby stands at the coffee machine—if you can even call it that. It sputters a watery version of coffee into a styrofoam cup, and he dumps two packets of sugar into the liquid in order to salvage some sweetness amidst the bitter tone of the room.
He slides the cup over to you and fishes a protein bar from his pocket, patting it to emphasise the notion that dinner had been served.
Your stubbornness prevails as you push the bar away from you, despite having not eaten for almost seven hours.
Robby sighs at that. The refusal doesn’t surprise him. You were always prone to a petty hunger strike when it came to Robby providing you with food to nourish your body after an argument. It was sort of his way to build up to an apology.
He drags the spare seat across the flooring and plants it in front of you.
The fabric of your scrubs brush against his when his knees bumps yours as he sits. The close proximity invites his scent into your bubble, the undertones of his aftershave prominent enough for you to recognise the fragrance as the one he wore on your wedding day.
Robby rests his elbows on the tops of his thighs as he lean into your space.
As the words form on his lips into a coherent icebreaker that he was easing into, the door to the staff room whips open to reveal Trinity Santos.
You look up at her. Robby doesn’t.
“I need an Attending.”
Robby answers for the both of you.
“Go find Dr. Al-Hashimi.” he sings.
Santos mutters under her breath, rolling her eyes as she shuts the door behind her. You give Robby a certain look—one he’s been given before—that tells him you weren’t in favour of brushing off the RS2 in favour of squashing the hostility that he brought upon the both of you.
He gives you a meek but crooked smile. Crows feet prominent as he tries to warm the atmosphere.
“I need you…to understand something here.” Robby starts, his hands falling to the sides of your kneecaps. He can barely look at you when he talks, “If I don’t go on this sabbatical, I am not so sure it’ll stop me from…” he trails off.
The room falls silent.
He can barely say it himself because verbalising it would make that little more of a tangible thing.
You can’t conjure up the fight to protest; so you hang your head.
“What upset you about Roxie’s case?” Robby takes a different approach. He tilts his head like a curious dog when you look back up from your lap.
You mull it over. “Do you ever stand in a room with a wife and a husband, one of them is dying in front of the other’s eyes. And they just have to watch it happen at their bedside?”
Robby gives a curt nod.
“Do you ever put yourself in their shoes, Robby?” you question, “How that would feel? To have the most meaningful part of you slip through your fingers and you don’t have the control to stop it. This—” gesture with your finger between your bodies, “—Is how that feels for me.”
“Yeah—”
“No.” you shake your head, “You don’t get to sit there and tell me you know how it feels from my perspective. I love you in ways that you aren’t reciprocating. You know why?”
“Why?” Robby whispers.
You continue, “Because, if we loved each other equally, there wouldn’t be a shadow of a doubt to get the help that you fucking need.” your voice trembles, “I cannot keep pushing through this fog around you, Robby.”
“I know.” Robby’s expression melts. Brown eyes softer than ever. “I know.”
“Then get help. Please.”
Robby cups the back of your head when tears begin to shed from your eyes. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it.” he presses his lips to your forehead, “I’ll do it. I’m sorry.”
The moment is held sacred against your hearts. There’s a particular weight that lifts off of your shoulders when Robby gives in, but even then…your heart was still heavy from the outcome of your previous argument in the Ambulance Bay.
Maybe three months apart would mend those open wounds. (Absence made the heart grow fonder. Apparently.)
Robby finally pulls back with a pained expression on his face; as he memorises your features close-up. “What I said before—I didn’t mean it. I’m not sure how I’d do in life if I didn’t have you up my ass about everything.”
“I hear Montana has a lot of fresh oxygen. You can use all of that up with consistent apologies during your sabbatical.” you grouse, wiping at the wetness that Robby misses when he drags his thumb across your cheekbone—ridding you of a lash that had latched onto your skin. “You know, people divorce for less.” you say.
Genuine laughter ripples from Robby’s chest, the moment of reconciliation solidified in your acerbic intonation. (Part of him wonders how many lives he has left before the reality of divorce comes to life.)
Instead of answering back, Robby forgoes professional protocol by pressing a kiss to the corner of your mouth. It takes a few swallows to dislodge the lump in his throat, smothering his own upset when you pull away to meet his gaze.
The door opens for a second time.
Dana holds onto the handle, staring at the scenes before her over the rim of her glasses. “Would you look at that. It’s a Fourth of July miracle. Can this wrap up so we can do rounds and get the hell out of this godforsaken place? Two more minutes, lovebirds.”
Robby stands at the foot of the bed. It’s well after midnight and whilst you have shed into the comforts of your sleepwear, Robby is clad in a thick Carhartt jacket and dark jeans with his bag slung lazily over one shoulder. He is looking like the epitome of a reckless motorcyclist about to venture on the open road after a gruelling twelve—and some additional hours—shift at the Emergency Department.
You are sat with your legs dangling off the edge of the bed. Ready to bid your husband goodbye; praying it’s rather a ‘see you soon’ sort of farewell.
His confirmation in the Staff Room didn’t sit all that well in your stomach.
“You have got everything?” you ask, twiddling with the hem of his jacket, “Wallet? Phone? Cash? The list of phone numbers I wrote down for you?” Robby nods along as you list it off, “Toothbrush? Phone charger? The little First Aid Kit I bought?”
“Check.” Robby affirms.
There’s an unfamiliar feeling rolling about in the air of your bedroom. Robby and you had rarely spent time apart—as unhealthy as it may sound to other couples, it just works for you. Nothing more than a week, when you decided to take a well-earned break from the seventh layer of hell named the Pitt.
Three months would feel like a lifetime.
You sigh deeply, “Call me. Or text me when you arrive at the first hotel. I love you. Kind of.”
“I love you too, sweetheart.” Robby leans down to kiss you sweetly. His hand captures your jawline to deepen the kiss to gratify his needs. He barely pulls back to look at you, “I’ll miss you.”
“I’d hope so.” you kiss him again. Your hands rest against the broad-line of his shoulders, whilst his free hand clutches your back to press your body into him. You whisper against his feverish kiss, “You’re running late to get on the road.”
“I’ve got time.” Robby answers back.
The change in pace happens abruptly. One minute you’re exchanging a bittersweet goodbye, and the next, your t-shirt has been yanked over your head, leaving your chest exposed; nipples hardening from the cool air.
Robby bends to capture a nipple into his mouth, his beard creating a sweet fiction alongside his tongue swiping at your bud. He groans against your tit, and you take the opportunity to slide his bag from his shoulder—his jacket coming off quickly after.
Once he pays attention to your neglected nipple by repeating the same actions, he pulls back with his hair sticking up in all directions as a result of you tugging at it.
His pupils are blown wide.
“You want me to take care of you before I leave, hm?” Robby asks, his tone dripping in saccharine.
You nod, breathless.
He dips his head to press wet kisses down your navel whilst you instinctively lift your hips when his fingers hook at the sides of your flimsy excuse for underwear; which he stuffs into the back pocket of his jeans for later. The air thickens, the silence filling with lewd groans from Robby’s mouth as he lifts and parts your thighs, pressing them up to your chest to expose your slick core.
His callus palms smooth across the length of the backs of your thighs, creating goosebumps in his wake. Brown eyes drift from your aching pussy, up to your face to observe your reaction when he drags two fingers from your seeping hole and upward to your sensitive clit.
You jolt and whimper from the sensation and Robby clicks his tongue, shushing you as he repeats the same action.
Once he gathers enough of your juices on his two fingers, he applies pressure to your clit and begins to rubbing in slow circles. You whine, legs making effort to drop down to relieve the pressure; only for Robby’s free hand to pin them against your chest again.
“Robby…” you manage to say.
Robby cocks his head to the side to watch your hole clench around empty air. “That feel good?”
Your brows pinch with your eyes fluttering shut. Instead of answering his question, you bring a hand to bite down on—which Robby promptly swats away.
“Talk to me, sweetheart. Let me know.”
You nod, “Uh-huh.”
“Good. Fuck, look at you.” Robby drags his fingers down to your hole and eases them in with little resistance. He groans when your walls clench tightly around his digits, “How can I leave this?”
Unable to respond again, your hips tilt when Robby curls his fingers upward into you, enough to make your jaw clench. He presses his thumb-pad against your clit, rubbing at a pace that he’s well aware that you appreciate.
Long-term commitment does wonders to mapping out the hot spots of your anatomy.
The room fills with a schlicking sound with Robby pumping his fingers in and out of you at a gentle pace.
“I’ve got you.” Robby mumbles, jaw slack at the sight of you arching your back off of the mattress. He takes his free hand that had your legs pinned and applies weight to your lower stomach, picking up the pace with his fingers. “Ooh. There it is.” he says as your walls fit snug against his fingers.
“I’m—Fuck.” you whinge, spots lining your vision. “Robby, please.”
Robby bobs his head a handful of times, arm beginning to ache from the relentless back and forth motion. His restraint is minimal, quick to shift himself halfway off the bed so his eyes are level with your swollen lips. You’re soaked. He can see at the base of his fingers collects your cream, which allows his thought process is thrown out the window.
Suddenly, Robby has all the time in the world before he has to leave.
When his mouths latches onto your clit, that’s when things become a little more desperate. His moans vibrate against you, sending you squirming; stomach tensing as he sucks at your swollen nerves—if anything, he wants to leave a lasting impression upon his departure.
Robby swaps between kitten licks and suckling at your clit—his tongue occasionally dipping to taste the closeness at your hole. His thick fingers work at your insides. Eyes flit up to see your mouth open, bare chest panting from the coil in your stomach on the precipice of snapping.
It is Robby’s favourite things; watching you come undone.
His own hips find friction against the mattress as you let out a guttural moan from the back of your throat, body curling into the orgasm that your husband pulls from you.
You push at Robby’s head when he sucks at your clit out of greed. Too sensitive, you slump into the mattress with the palm of your hand lying flat against your forehead.
Robby straightens up at the end of the bed with a smug smile, eyes twinkling. “You okay?”
You wordlessly give him a thumbs up, whining when he pulls his two fingers from your vagina.
After a minute, you rest on your elbows to watch your husband fiddle with his belt. “Let me help.” you advise, moving onto your knees to assist him.
You’re brought into a bruising kiss as you tug the belt from the belt loops, tossing it to the ground with a ‘thunk.’ It’s light work—removing Robby’s jeans and boxers in one swoop—as you had been in this very position several times throughout your relationship; able to visualise the steps in which Robby matches your nudity.
As you look down, Robby huffs, “Give it a second, sweetheart.”
His cock still semi-soft, he wraps a hand around the hardened base and gives himself a few pumps so the rest of his shaft could catch up.
He sheepishly chuckles, “If I was a few years younger—”
“I don’t care.” you kiss him to halt the self-deprecation, “Means I get to steal more time off of your sabbatical.”
It had always been an explanation during sex. The first time it had happened, Robby insisted his level of attractions toward you hadn’t depleted, rather it was just his age showing at the worst possible time—something he’d take more gray hairs and wrinkles over any day.
Never stunting his performance, nor was it a deal breaking factor for you, every time since Robby’s delay in stiffening; you had to remind him there was nothing wrong with it.
Slow and steady wins the race.
You lick your lips, watching Robby work his shaft in his hand, his wedding band catching the warmth of the salt lamp at your bedside. He lifts his free hand whilst you watch, the two fingers that had been deep inside you now edging their way into your mouth.
His fingers leave your mouth with a faint ‘pop’ and it seems to do the trick as Robby’s tip is flushed red, his slit beginning to bead with precum.
You lower yourself back down onto the mattress with Robby following you. His callus palms come to the plushness of your hips, and he turns you over so your front is lying flush against the tousled sheets.
He dips to press a kiss between your shoulder blades before hiking your hips upward so you are resting on all fours.
Robby hums as he drags his cock through your wetness, “I’m going to miss you.”
Your fingers curl into the cotton sheets, goosebumps trailing up the length of your spine. Robby kisses your back again, the tip of his cock nudging at your hole. He gives you both a minute before sinking himself in inch by inch; his lips pressing to your skin to smother the groan eliciting from his throat.
There’s no rush in his movement. There’s around thirty seconds of adjusting before he sinks further into your pussy, his head dropping back when he is to the hilt.
Robby stays in your warmth without moving for a minute.
After a minute or so, his hips begin to shift, the softest part of his stomach pressing to your ass when he buries himself deep. Stabilising himself by grasping onto your ass cheeks, fingers digging into your flesh; Robby’s brows furrow from the searing pleasure as he looks down to see his shaft already coated in your arousal.
You hang your head, letting out a whimper from feeling so full.
“Jesus—You feel good.” Robby grits behind you. He watches your back muscles tense when he slides his cock out slowly, “Are you going to miss this, baby?”
You can’t answer. The tip of Robby’s cock plunges into a spongy part, and your vision is lined with white spots.
Robby gives you a second and repeats the motion until his desire to hear you reaffirm his question takes over. He frees a hand from grappling at your backside, his fingers curling around your throat to tilt your head back to look him in the eye.
“Tell me.”
You almost cry, “Yes—fuck—yes, I’ll miss this.”
“Uh-huh.” Robby grins, “You will.”
The hand being used to force eye contact is removed and you whine when Robby fully pulls out of you. He flips you back over onto your back with ease, folding your legs up to your chest again before sinking back into you without warning.
Your back arches as much as it can from being pinned; Robby dips to smother it with a sloppy kiss.
Your hands curl around his neck, whimpering when you feel him pulse inside you. Well aware that it wasn’t going to last long.
His thrusts are shallow and restricted to contain his own climax for a little while longer. The tip of his cock brushes against a sensitive part, and he’s left breathlessly chuckling when you tighten yourself around him.
“You’ll make me cum doing that.” Robby lifts his head, eyes squeezing shut. He drags himself out of you until the tip of his cock is at your opening. You clench to suck the majority of his shaft back in. “Shit baby. Fuck it. Keep squeezing me like that. Just like that.”
“Fuck, Robby.” is all you can muster, hands clawing at his back when he picks up his pace.
Robby folds your legs back up to your chest for a third time that night. His thumb catches your clit—unsure if he can drag another orgasm out of you with little recovery time. “Let me fuck you right there. You feel it? You’re so fucking tight.”
“Robby—” you babble.
“Hm? What is it, sweetheart?” Robby pants, the slapping sounds echoing in the room.
You free your legs from his grasp and wrap them around his middle. “I want—I need you to cum inside me.”
“Fuck. Don’t say shit like that.” Robby laughs, his pace faltering. He looks at your expression and realises you’re being serious. “Is that what you want? For me to cum inside you? What if you get pregnant?”
“I don’t care, I don’t care.” you plead.
Robby shakes his head, “Okay, okay. I’ll cum inside you.” his thrust start to get sloppy at the thought, “Are you going to lay here, long after I’m gone, with my cum leaking out of you? Is that what you’re going to do?”
You nod vigorously.
“Fuck. Ask me nicely.” he commands.
“Please, Robby.” you breathe out, “Please.”
Robby nods, sweat beading his hairline from the exertion. He dips his head to bring you into a searing kiss, “I love you.” he mumbles against your lips.
There’s fewer words spoken after that. The bed creaks as Robby begins to pound into your pussy with one goal in mind. His soft stomach brushes against your pubes as he barely pulls out of you, hungry with need to stay deep within your walls.
Your legs lock around his middle and Robby lifts your hips, his fingers digging into the flesh of your backside as he brings your lower half up; fucking into you with desperation.
You babble his name, “I’m going to cum again.” you repeat over and over with the hot feeling returning in your stomach.
“You can do it, sweetheart.” Robby encourages, thumb applying pressure to your already sensitive clit. “Give me one last one before I leave. Let me feel it around my cock.”
The climax ripples through you for a second time at his words. Walls clenching around him so tightly, it made thrusting into you near impossible. Robby continues as best as he can, watching your face twist in painful pleasure.
It’s enough to send him over the edge with you.
“Fuck, fuck!” Robby grits out before his words are smothered beneath deep groans as he shoots hot ropes deep inside you. His body weight slumps on top of you, skin slick with sweat as he ruts into you a few more times for good measure.
You can feel his cum seep out at your opening, around his shaft that was still tucked deep in your pussy. Robby twitches inside of you, moving deeper a few times to ensure you’re stuffed to the brim.
He kisses the side of your face as he pants out, “I have no idea what I’ll do without you for three months.”
The familiar melancholy returns to your stomach at the realisation that this was the conclusion before three months without him.
“…Just come back to me, Robinavitch.”
A/N: thank u to my sweet @novatheory for listening to my rambling over this fic and reading the snippets of drafts i would send at random times. mwah!!!!
Dear gooooodddd, talk about an epic run of a fic 🤌💘 the hurt, the angst, the push and pull--just so so gorgeously written and paced out, it had my heart LURCHING in pain and comfort and idk what I’m even saying right now or whether I'm even being coherant-
But this was absolutely a PHENOMENAL FKN RED. Hands. Down.
You’re a single mom who’s just moved into a new house with your boyfriend, and your 6 year old has decided that now is the time to give him a new name
Warnings: mom!reader, f!reader, fluff, bit of crack humour, plus size reader, established relationship
WC: 1.4k
Minors DNI
Library- @hannibals-favourite-meal-library
Dating a single parent had its challenges, sure, but Dick had been ready for them the moment you laughed so hard you snorted in the fancy restaurant where you had your first date. It had been a blind date courtesy of Alfred who frequented your tea shop cafe. There was something about you that had his heart pounding and his mind buzzing with ideas of a future he never thought he could have. And the news that you had a little boy waiting for you at home did little to shake him from the haze of infatuation that settled over his soul.
He took it slow, a hell of a lot slower than he was used to, but it was worth it. After two years of Friday night date nights at the arcade or your apartment, emergency pickups from kindergarten when your tyrant of a boss kept you late, and family cuddle piles on your bed, you were finally moving in together.
“Dink!” Dick looked back over his shoulder as he placed the last box into the kitchen. Sean stood in the empty dining room across from him, dinosaur shirt pulled tight across his chubby belly with the way his arms were crossed. Dick fought the urge to coo at how adorable he was, that had earned him a solid 10 minutes of being ignored the last time.
“Yeah chum, what’s up?” His frown deepened at that.
“I’m not chum.” Dick raised a dark eyebrow at him. Outside, he could hear the moving van start up before puttering down the quiet street, you should be back inside soon.
“And I’m not Dink.” He retorted as he stepped around the kitchen island to face this 6 year old head on. Sean was scowling, whatever it was, his original request now forgotten. It was almost funny how much he looked like you when he was mad; bottom lip jutting out, nose scrunched up and eyes narrowed. His heart flipped at the sight and Dick so desperately wanted to scoop him up and kiss away his frown almost the same way he did with you.
“You’re Dink.” Sean stomped his chunky leg, making his whole body shake with the force. He had been a lot more opinionated in the last couple of weeks as he started kindergarten and realised that he was not the only adorably tiny person in the world.
Dick just smiled at him. “No I’m not, sweetheart, you know that.” Two thuds against the front door, you had kicked off your shoes like you did every time you walked into your home. Sean looked over his shoulder, waiting for you to appear and defend him.
You creeped around the corner, your shoulders rolling back as you put yourself back together for your son. Your tired smile widened at the sight of the pair.
“We’re moved in!” You cheered, perhaps overly happy but Sean’s glare didn’t waver. You raised an eyebrow at Dick. “Why are we so grumpy?”
Dick slid around the kitchen island and to your side, winding his arms around your plush waist. Your body relaxed into him just like he wanted, your smile now dulling to something so soft he wanted to bottle it up and keep it as close as he could to his heart. Dried sweat lined your hairline, your skin burned with being out in the sun all day, and your eyes had that haze of exhaustion over them that meant as soon as your boy finally went down to sleep, you were not going to leave bed for at least 18 hours. And as Dick’s gaze flicked down to your chapped lips, he could only think that you were the most beautiful creature he’d ever laid eyes on.
“Dink!” Sean screeched and launched himself at your legs. Ever the mummy’s boy, he refused to be out of your attention for even a nanosecond. You grunted in pain, but caught him all the same, scooping him into your arms like he wasn’t a bowling ball with jabby limbs.
“Dink? Baby, that’s Dick.” You cooed, brushing your thumb over the apple of his perfectly chubby cheek. Sean melted into your soft arms, a smile finally making an appearance for the first time that day.
Dick’s heart leapt to his throat at the sight. This was everything he didn’t know he wanted, needed, right there in his arms. Unable to help himself, he pressed his lips to the crown of your head, inhaling the addicting smell of you.
Apparently that was Sean’s final straw.
“No! He Dink! Dick bad word! Dink! Dink! Dink!” He thrashed in your hold as he tried to push Dick away from you for the sole reason his name happened to also be a ’no-no’ word.
You noblely bit back a laugh but your chest heaved with the effort, further jostling your little boy who very certainly did not appreciate the mockery.
“My name isn’t a bad word.” He grumbled.
“Yes it is! My teacher said so!” Sean whipped his head around to glare at Dick with all the might he could muster. And despite his man-ovaries trembling with the cuteness of it, Dick refused to relent. If this little creature started permanently calling him ‘Dink’ he would never live it down. It would be the end of any reputation he had with you and the rest of his family.
“Well sometimes it is but-“ You snorted and their collective glares turned to you.
“Sorry, continue.” You squeaked out.
“It can be a bad word but not when it’s someone’s name.” Sean’s eyebrows pinched together.
“Dats dumb. You’re dumb.”
“Hey.” You took a step back from Dick to make eye contact with your boy. “That’s not a nice thing to say baby. We don’t call people or their names dumb because we don’t understand. Can you say sorry to Dick? You’ve been really hurting his feelings today.” Your hand cupped the back of his head, your thumb smoothing down the length of his small neck as Sean took a deep, shaky breath.
He went still in your arms and let his head fall to the crook of your neck. You continued to hold him close, patiently waiting for him to go through all those big feelings.
Dick just stood there, in awe of the woman you were (and perhaps wishing a little bit that it was him in your arms).
Sean’s eyes, an exact copy of your own, met his through his thick lashes. Dick could now plainly see the exhaustion all over his little face and nearly punched himself for being so blind to the fact that this little boy probably just needed a big cuddle and a long nap before he would be back to his usual cheery self.
“But my teacher said it was a bad word. That-that the right word was something else.” He heaved.
“I know baby but that doesn’t mean that we yell and call people other bad names.” Sean hiccuped but didn’t protest any further.
“‘M sorry.” He wiggled closer to the warmth of your body, his voice now having lost all its fire. “You’re not dumb.” He reached out for Dick, giving him a small grin when the man stepped close enough for him to reach. His dimbled fist curled into the material of his t-shirt as he let out a pleased grumble.
“It’s ok chum. I know you didn’t mean it, you’re just a bit tired from helping us so much with the move aren’t you?”
Sean nodded but muttered quietly under his breath. “Not tired.”
“I know, baby.” You kissed his temple as your body began to sway, rocking him gently into the nap he needed.
“Love mom.” He grumbled, fist tightening to keep Dick close to you both. Sean wiped his nose along the length of your shoulder as he gristled. “G’night Penis.”
Dick startled back, your swaying stopped but Sean was out like a light, his little body completely slumped against you in a dead weight.
“Where the fudge did he get that from?”
“At least he isn’t calling you Dink?” You giggled and pressed your lips to his.
“You are not helping.” He rolled his eyes but kissed you all the same, cradling you both in his arms as the sunset washed over you. Despite the gravely condescending nicknames his near-step-son was giving him and your apparent amusement with the whole situation, Dick refused to trade this moment for anything. Just maybe something less demeaning than ‘Penis’ would be nice.
Contains: Fluff. Thrifting, body insecurity, reassurance, sassy!Clark, kissing.
A/N: Just a tidbit tonight. I love it when Clarkie gets all snarky… woof... this reminds me of the first ever work I posted on here :) cute. Enjoy anon !!!
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Clark was fairly certain that one skirt did not take ten whole minutes to try on. And while ten minutes did not sound like much in theory, when you were waiting outside a door and watching the seconds tick by on a distant store clock, you easily understood the reality of such a statement.
“Bunny,” he called, resting his temple on the door and knocking with two knuckles. “Is everything okay in there?”
Silence.
Clark sighed, not with exasperation, but something decidedly… similar.
These moments always happened at the thrift store. You would drag him out on a weekend to sift through mothy old clothes with tags from the 2000s skinny crisis, and then you would get upset when they didn’t fit. If it were up to you, you would buy them all and try it on at home– it took all of Clark’s power to even convince you to get in a dressing room most times. And while he didn’t lack empathy for the feeling of something not fitting, he just couldn’t seem to understand why you would do something like that to yourself. Part of you knew that used clothes were a risk for a girl of your body type, and you insisted on it anyway, being green or money-smart or what have you. It was a mystery to him. Clothes shopping for girls just seemed like a torture ritual to him, and he wished you were a little kinder to yourself.
He knocked again. “Bunny, come on. Answer me.”
He had a feeling this would happen. You had been eyeing a skirt since you walked in– it was on an end-cap display. Some long, flowing thing, a deep emerald tie-dye wash with little green beads stitched into spiral designs. It had that reminiscent style he would have seen on Buffy or some 90s television show; some whimsical, witchy number that was very you to want. But it was a large. When you first checked the tag, you gave that tilted little frown of thought, and walked away– the maybe frown. Clark knew then that you would keep your eye on it as you traipsed through every aisle, wondering if you could squeeze into it, or if you should just move on and hope to find something else you liked better. Something less of a gamble. You of course shimmied it off the mannequin and insisted on trying it after making a loop. Clark had no doubt you would look beautiful in it, but he just felt that gut-tugging feeling that the whole situation would not end well. Clearly, he was right.
“Baby, please? Open up the door.”
He heard a small sniffle before the lock clicked, and you cracked the door, peeking out. Your eyes were watery as crystals, and he gave you a sympathetic little smile. “Open a little more.”
You pouted and pulled the door wide enough for him to slide past, then shut it behind you quietly. “Don’t say anything, okay? I already know.”
Clark tried to be nice and hide the growing smirk on his lips. As he let his eyes trail over you, he saw the abundance of your thighs straining the skirt thin, and the zipper hung open on the side of your round tummy like wilted leaves. It was too small, for sure, but you were just so cute when you looked dejected. “Know what?”
You crossed your arms and looked at your feet, nudging the floor with the toe of your boots. “You’re giving me the look.”
“I don’t have a look.”
“Yes you do,” you glared, “that… I told you so look. Like you think I’m stupid for trying stuff on.”
Clark’s smile fell instantly and he wrapped his hands around the meat of your arms, rubbing up and down the skin gently. “Hey, no! I don’t think you’re stupid for anything, bun, why would you think that?”
“I… it’s just… you know how– well–”
Clark stepped a hair closer and cupped your cheeks, guiding you in to press a chaste kiss on your wrinkling forehead. “Take a second. String the words together.”
You released a breathy grumble and let your forehead fall into the dip of his chest, closing your eyes. “I don't think you think that. I’m sorry. I just– I knew it wouldn’t fit, and you even told me it wouldn’t, and you weren’t being mean, you were right, and I did it anyway and… now I’m just disappointed.”
Clark rested his chin atop the crown of your head, sighing in understanding. He raked his fingers through your hair out of habit. “Don’t be. You don’t have to feel bad because your body doesn’t work for something, things should work for you, remember? They’re only clothes.”
“I know, but sometimes I just feel so–”
“Do not say fat,” Clark squinted at you, nudging your head up. “We’re past that. Or do I have to make a scene in this store to remind you?”
Your cheeks flooded, and to his pleasure, a reluctant little smile graced your lips. Shyly, you mumbled, “No…” as a handful of moments came rushing back– moments where Clark showed you exactly how fat was never a bad word in his house, and how much use there was for that warm, soft body of yours…
Clark chuckled low at the dreaminess which crossed your face, and he traced his thumbs just below your eyes. “See? Don’t get in your head. You know you’re just right.”
“Mhm,” you nodded, burrowing into his hands. It only took a second to slip your arms around his broad back and squeeze, inhaling the fresh-laundry scent on his sweatshirt.
Clark hugged you tighter and spoke into the warmth of your temple. “Screw the skirt. You’ve got plenty.”
“I know, but I liked it.”
“I’ll find you a better one.”
“You don’t know the first thing about–”
“I’m sorry, what was that?” He pulled back with a sarcastic little grin, poking at your cheek.
You laughed and swatted him away, but he refused to release you from his arms. “Clark– hey, stop it!”
He jostled you until you yelped quietly, and he paused to see your hands shoot down. The unfastened skirt slipped right off your legs and pooled at your feet, and you were stuck in your panties, flushing red in the face. Clark burst into laughter and wrangled you back, even as you whined about how embarrassing the whole thing was.
“It’s not embarrassing,” Clark snickered, tickling the dips of your waist, fingers pressing into the rolling flesh. “I’ve seen you naked a million times!”
You gasped for air and fought between laughter and frustration. “Shut up! I– ah– let go!”
Clark only relented when you began to hiccup, because those only came once you really couldn’t breathe. He smoothed his palms over the abused skin and grinned, dipping to kiss your jaw. “Do you feel better? Did you forget?”
You rolled your eyes. “Well, that makes me remember.”
“Remember what?” Clark hummed, as if his joke had all the intelligence in the world. “Come on. Get dressed. I’ll take you to the mall.”
“But–”
“I’ll pay for it,” Clark promised, cradling your skull and tipping you back. He slotted his lips against yours in a slow dance, and he kept it up until you stopped protesting. Only then did he whisper, “We’ll find you something pretty. It’ll be like Cinderella, all… perfect fit, meant-to-be-like.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You shush. Don’t lock me out of the dressing room next time.”
I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
"only 90s kids remember-" wrong, if you're poor and/or rural enough, old tech and fashion doesn't just disappear when it stops being trendy. We had dial-up until 2012
the original got flagged with no way to appeal it when every contributor is deactivated but I will never let this post die. it's monday and we are getting on it cunts