Hi I was wondering if you could do a story about a girly reader with Damian. The reader gets insecure because she thinks Damian would do better with someone like Raven and not her. Since she is not a hero and is the type to put stickers on everything unlike raven-🌹
Stickers
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requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
It starts, as most things do, with something small.
A comment. Not cruel — no one is cruel, that's almost the problem, because cruelty would be easier to dismiss. It's just a moment, just a thing that happens at the Tower during a joint visit that you're present for, and it lodges somewhere it shouldn't and stays.
Raven is helping Damian with something.
A tracking calculation, you think, or maybe something mystical, something that requires her specific knowledge and his specific precision and the shorthand of two people who have fought alongside each other for years. They're at the table with maps and diagrams, and they're talking in the low, efficient way of people who understand each other without having to explain themselves.
You're on the couch.
You're bedazzling your phone case.
This is a true and accurate picture of the situation, and you are aware of how it looks, and you sit with how it looks for longer than you should.
Raven says something. Damian responds. The shorthand continues. At one point, she makes a gesture over a diagram, and he nods with the specific quality he has when he respects something, the real respect, not the performed kind.
You press a rhinestone onto your phone case.
It catches the light.
You look at Raven.
You look at your phone case.
You look at Damian.
You don't say anything for three days.
This is, in retrospect, the problem — you are not the type to say nothing for three days, you are the type to say things immediately and at full volume, and so when you go quiet Damian notices in the way Damian notices everything, which is completely and without announcement.
He doesn't ask immediately.
He waits.
He is, when it matters, patient in a way that surprises people who only know the surface of him.
On the third day he comes to your apartment and sits on your couch — the pink one, the one with the throw pillows you'd made from fabric you found at a market, the one that has a small collection of plushies at one end that he has never once commented on negatively — and he looks at you.
"Tell me," he says.
"Tell you what," you say, from the other end of the couch.
"Whatever you've been not telling me for three days."
You look at your hands.
On the coffee table in front of you is your current project — a journal you've been decorating, floral stickers and washi tape and little star-shaped pieces of gold foil that you press on with a toothpick. It's half-finished. It's very pretty.
It is also, in this moment, extremely visible evidence of who you are.
"It's nothing," you say.
"It's not nothing," he says. "You haven't been yourself. I've been waiting for you to bring it to me, and you haven't, which means it's something you think I won't want to hear."
You look at the journal.
"At the Tower," you say. "The other day. You and Raven."
Damian is quiet. Listening.
"You were — good together," you say, carefully. "Like, working together. You understood each other. The shorthand and the — she knew exactly what you needed, and you knew exactly what she was saying, and it was very — " you stop. "She's like you. She's serious, and she's capable, and she does real things that matter, and I was sitting on the couch putting rhinestones on my phone."
The words are out now.
You wait.
"I see," Damian says.
"I'm not — I know it's stupid — "
"I didn't say it was stupid."
"I'm saying it's stupid." You pick up a star sticker. Put it down. "I put stickers on things, Damian. I have a pink couch. I cried at a dog food commercial last week. I'm not — I'm not like her. I'm not like anyone in your world. And sometimes I wonder if you'd be — if someone like Raven would be better suited to — "
"No," he says.
Just that. Clean and immediate.
"Damian — "
"No," he says again, same quality. Not dismissive. Certain. "The answer is no, and I'd like you to hear it before you finish that sentence."
You look at him.
He looks back with the expression that is fully Damian — direct, no performance, the one that means he's decided something and is stating it as fact.
"Raven is a capable ally and a person I respect," he says. "What you observed was a professional dynamic that has been built over years of combat. It has nothing to do with what I want from my personal life. Those are not competing categories."
"But she's — she's more like you — "
"She is not more like me," he says, with the particular precision of someone who has considered this and knows the answer. "She's more like the version of me that existed before I began to understand what I'd been trained to value and what I actually value." He pauses. "Those are different things."
You're quiet.
"What does that mean?" you say.
Damian looks at the coffee table. In the journal. At the stickers, the washi tape, and the gold foil stars.
"I was raised to believe that the only things worth valuing were capability and strength and precision," he says. "Everything decorative was considered excess. Everything soft was considered a weakness." He says it evenly, like he's recounting a fact he's made peace with. "I spent the first fourteen years of my life in an environment where what you are — the colors and the softness and the — the stickers — would have been considered worthless."
You look at him.
"And then I met people who were none of those things," he says. "Dick. Your family. You." He meets your eyes. "And I began to understand that the things I'd been taught to dismiss were not weaknesses. They were things I didn't know how to access. Things I'd been told not to want."
"Damian — "
"You put stickers on things," he says, and his voice has shifted slightly, the way it shifts when he's saying something that costs him something. "You make everything around you look like it's worth looking at. You cried at the dog food commercial because you feel things fully, and you don't apologize for it. You have a pink couch because you wanted a pink couch, and you don't require external validation to want what you want." He holds your gaze. "Do you understand what it is to be near someone like that when you have spent your entire life being told that softness is a liability?"
You don't answer.
"It's not a deficit," he says. "What you are is not less than what Raven is. It is entirely different from what Raven is. And it is — " he stops, and this is Damian stopping because the word he needs is one that doesn't come easily, one that requires him to reach for it. "It is what I want. Specifically. Not as a consolation for something more serious. As the actual thing."
The apartment is very quiet.
You look at the journal on the table.
"I decorated your sketchbook," you say, after a moment. "The new one. I put a little star in the corner. I wasn't sure if you'd — "
"I know," he says.
"You didn't say anything."
"I didn't want to make you think you'd done something wrong." He pauses. "I kept the star."
You look at him.
"You kept it," you say.
"It's in the corner of the cover. I could remove it if — "
"Don't you dare remove it," you say.
Something in his expression. The thing that happens when he's pleased about something and doesn't know how to hold it conventionally.
"I wasn't going to," he says.
You look at each other for a moment.
Then you reach over to the coffee table and pick up a small sticker — a flower, pink and yellow, the kind you put everywhere without thinking — and you hold it out.
He looks at it.
He looks at you.
"Don't," he says.
"You just said — "
"I said I kept the star in the sketchbook. That doesn't mean you can — "
"One sticker," you say. "Very small."
"Absolutely not."
"Damian."
"I am not — "
"You literally just gave a speech about softness being a thing you value now — "
"A speech that did not include consenting to being stickered — "
"It's a flower," you say. "Very small flower."
He looks at the sticker.
He looks at you.
"If you tell anyone," he says.
"I would never," you say, which is a complete lie, and he knows it.
He holds out his hand.
You press the flower sticker onto the back of his hand with the toothpick, carefully, the way you do all of them. It's small and pink and extremely visible, and Damian looks at it with the expression of someone who has made a choice and is currently experiencing the full consequences of that choice.
"There," you say.
"This is — "
"You look great."
"I look like I've been attacked by a craft store."
"You look like someone who is loved," you say, and then you hear yourself say it, and the air goes slightly different.
Damian looks at his hand.
At the flower.
"Yes," he says, very quietly. "I suppose I do."
He doesn't remove the sticker.
Not that evening. Not when he leaves. You find out later — from Dick, who finds out from Alfred, who says nothing but whose expression said everything — that Damian wore it until it fell off on its own.
Which takes four days.
You put a new one in the front cover of his sketchbook.
heyyyy could i make a request for jason todd based on this insta post? basically the bf grabs her corset and lifts her up and kisses her and it’s got me all UAHDUDNWISNSKHDSUWVEGWUSHSHWKDJDKDHSH ykwim
They always are, which means it's beautiful and expensive and full of people saying important things to other important people, and you've been here for two hours in heels that are starting to have opinions about that and a corset that is doing everything it promised and more.
The corset is the thing.
Black, structured, the kind that gives you a silhouette that makes you stand differently, move differently, feel like a slightly more dramatic version of yourself. You'd found it three weeks ago and bought it without telling Jason because you wanted the reaction, which had been worth every penny — he'd seen you in it before leaving tonight and had gone very still in the doorway and said, after a moment, " We're going to be late, in a voice that was not joking.
You were not late.
But it was close.
Now you're at the edge of the gala, post-necessary-conversations, drink in hand, and you're looking for him. Jason at these events is always findable by process of elimination — he's not at the center of anything, not holding court, not doing the Bruce Wayne social performance. He's at the margins, usually. Watching. Present because he has to be, and making no effort to pretend otherwise.
You find him by a window.
He's in a suit that Alfred had a hand in because Jason left to his own devices gravitates toward things that are technically formal enough and immediately look lived-in, and Alfred has opinions. The suit is good. Jason in a good suit is — a thing. You've been his wife for over a year, and it's still a thing.
He sees you coming, and his expression does the shift — the one that happens specifically when he sees you, that he doesn't fully know he makes, that you've been cataloguing privately because it belongs to you.
You come to stand next to him.
"How are you doing?" you say.
"I've had three conversations about tax incentives," he says.
"I had four."
"I win."
"Nobody wins that," you say.
He makes a sound of agreement. His hand finds the small of your back — automatic, the Jason habit, the way he establishes where you are in a room by touch — and stays there.
You lean slightly into it.
"How much longer?" he says.
"Hour, maybe. Bruce has a speech."
He exhales.
"After the speech," you say.
"After the speech," he confirms, like it's a survival target.
You talk, low and easy, the way you talk when you're in public and performing slightly, and the real conversation exists underneath. He tells you about the tax incentive conversations with the dry specificity that is Jason's version of comedy, and you tell him about the woman who'd asked you three times what you did and each time looked mildly disappointed by the answer.
"She wanted socialite," you say. "I could tell."
"You'd be a terrible socialite."
"I'd be an excellent socialite. I'm charming."
"You're charming in the way that makes people think they're charming," he says. "That's a different skill set."
You look at him.
"That was a compliment," he says.
"I know. I'm just — that was unexpectedly perceptive of you."
"I have depths."
"You have very significant depths," you agree, and something in the way you say it makes him look at you sideways, the look that means he's cataloguing the tone and deciding what to do with it.
You smile into your drink.
Across the room, Bruce is making his way toward the small stage area, which means the speech is imminent, which means the end is in sight.
"Okay," you say, setting your glass down on a nearby table. "Speech time. Twenty minutes and then we can — "
You start to turn toward the stage.
Jason's hand moves.
Not the small of your back anymore.
His hand finds the back of the corset — the structured panel of it, the rigid boning — and he grips it, and then he lifts.
Not dramatically. Not with effort, because it doesn't require effort, because he is Jason Todd, and you weigh what you weigh, and the corset gives him something solid to hold, and he uses it like it's the most natural thing in the world.
You go up.
Just enough. Just the few inches that bring your face level with his, that require you to grab his lapel with one hand to steady yourself, that put you suddenly, completely in his space.
He kisses you.
Not a brief thing. Not a we're in public thing. A real kiss, unhurried, deliberate, his free hand coming up to your jaw, and you are suspended there between the corset and his hand and the solidness of him, and for a moment, the gala and the tax incentive people and Bruce's speech simply do not exist.
He sets you back down.
The whole thing lasts maybe ten seconds.
You look at him.
He looks at you.
He has the expression — the one that is Jason, not performing anything, just Jason, warm and certain and slightly smug in the way he gets when something has gone the way he wanted.
"What," you say, and your voice is not entirely steady.
"Nothing," he says.
"Jason."
"You were talking," he says. "I wanted your attention."
"You had my attention."
"I wanted it differently." He adjusts his lapel where your hand was. Perfectly composed. "Bruce is starting."
You stare at him.
He looks at the stage.
You look at the stage.
Your heart is doing something that is not related to the speech.
"You can't just — " you start.
"The corset has very good structure," he says, conversationally. "Good construction."
"Jason Todd."
"Mm."
"You just — you lifted me by my — in the middle of a gala — "
"Small lift," he says. "Technically."
"There is no technically about this — "
"Bruce is speaking," he says, which is the most hypocritical sentence he has ever said, given that he has expressed zero interest in Bruce's speech for the past twenty minutes.
You close your mouth.
You face forward.
You are very aware of him next to you, of the hand that's returned to the small of your back, of the ten seconds that just happened, and the absolute composure with which he's filed them away.
You last approximately ninety seconds.
"How often," you say, quietly, not looking at him, "have you been thinking about doing that?"
A pause.
"Since the apartment," he says. Same quiet register. "When you put it on."
"That was two hours ago."
"Yes."
"You waited two hours."
"There's a time and place," he says. "I was waiting for the right — "
"The middle of a gala is not the right — "
"It worked," he says.
You look at him.
He is almost smiling.
The almost is somehow more effective than the actual smile, and you know this, and he knows you know this, and he uses it with precision.
"After the speech," you say.
"After the speech," he agrees.
"We're leaving directly after the speech."
"That was already the plan."
"I'm amending the plan to directly after."
"Noted," he says.
Bruce continues his speech.
You stand next to Jason with his hand at your back and your pulse doing what it's doing and the memory of ten seconds that you're going to think about for considerably longer than ten seconds.
The corset, you think, was absolutely worth every penny.
Jason, next to you, is thinking approximately the same thing.
heyyy, I usually don't make requests but I really like your style so could I have a bat boys with a reader who's cynical about Love and doesn't trust men easily? they're not like rude about it but maybe they don't take the boys sweet words as genuine, or also they're surprised when the boys actually apologize when they upset the reader :)
Prove It
requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
Dick Grayson
Dick said "I love you" the way other people said "good morning" — easily, often, like it cost him nothing.
That was the problem.
"You say that to everyone," you told him, the third time he'd said it that week, not unkindly, just stating a fact you'd already made peace with.
"I don't say it to everyone."
"You said it to a barista yesterday."
"She made my coffee perfectly on the first try. That's a love-worthy achievement."
"See, that's exactly my point." You didn't look up from what you were doing. "Words don't mean anything if you spend them on everything. I'm not trying to be difficult. I just don't know how to tell the difference between you meaning it and you being you."
Dick went quiet at that — actually quiet, which was rare enough that you glanced up to check he was still in the room.
"Okay," he said finally. "That's fair. I didn't realize it landed like that."
"It's not a big deal—"
"It is, though. If I've made you feel like the thing I say to you is the same thing I say to a barista, that's on me." He sat down across from you, serious now in a way the easy charm usually covered up. "I'm not going to stop saying it. But I'm going to start showing you the difference, so you don't have to take my word for it."
He did. Not in one grand gesture — Dick wasn't built for grand gestures, not really, not the kind that looked good and meant nothing — but in the small relentless proof of someone who remembered what you'd said and decided to spend the next several months answering it.
He showed up to the things he said he'd show up to. He asked about your day and waited for the actual answer instead of the polite one. He stopped saying it so easily to everyone else, not because you'd asked him to, but because — he told you, somewhat embarrassed about it — he'd noticed how much weight he was supposed to be putting behind the words and didn't want to dilute it anymore.
"You don't have to perform it," you told him, months later, half-laughing, after he'd shown up at your door at midnight with soup because you'd mentioned feeling sick in passing, hours ago, to someone else entirely.
"I'm not performing anything. I just heard you weren't feeling good." He set the soup down like it was nothing. "I told you. Proof, not promises."
"You actually meant that."
"I actually meant that." He sat next to you, easy as always, but steadier now, in the way that mattered. "I know you don't trust this kind of thing easily. I'm not in a hurry. I just want you to know I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not going to get tired of proving it."
You let yourself believe him. Slowly. The way you let yourself believe anything now.
It turned out to be the right call.
Jason Todd
Jason had a temper, and you'd known that going in — it wasn't a secret, wasn't something he hid, it sat right there on the surface of him like a warning label. What you hadn't expected was the night it actually came out at you.
It wasn't even about anything that mattered. A canceled plan, a bad day stacked on a worse one, a comment you'd made that landed wrong on a man who was already carrying too much. He snapped. Said something sharp and unfair and immediately regrettable, the kind of thing said in the heat of a moment that had nothing to do with you and everything to do with whatever he hadn't dealt with that day.
You didn't yell back. You just went quiet, the specific quiet of someone recalibrating — okay, so this is who he actually is when it counts — and started gathering your things.
"Don't," Jason said, voice already different. "Don't do the thing where you leave and decide I'm just another guy who doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt."
"I'm not deciding anything. I'm giving you space."
"You're leaving because I proved a theory you already had." His jaw was tight. "I know that's what this looks like. I know what it looks like when I lose it and someone decides that's the real me and the rest was an act."
"Is it?"
"No." He said it immediately, no hesitation, like the question physically hurt. "And I know I don't get to just say that and have it fix anything. I was out of line. What I said wasn't fair, and it wasn't about you, and I took something out on you that you didn't deserve."
You stopped at the door. Didn't turn around yet.
"People apologize like that all the time," you said. "Doesn't mean it sticks."
"I know." A pause. "So don't take my word for it. Watch what I do instead. I'm not asking you to forgive me right now. I'm asking you to let me show you I meant it."
You turned around. He hadn't moved closer, hadn't tried to close the distance — just stood there, looking like a man bracing for the consequence he thought he'd earned.
"That's the first time anyone's apologized to me like they actually understood what they did," you admitted. "Usually it's just sorry-you're-upset. Not sorry-I-did-it."
"I know the difference." His voice was rough. "I've been on the other end of the fake kind enough times to know exactly how it sounds. I'm not doing that to you."
He didn't fix it that night. He fixed it over the next several weeks — checking in before he let something boil over, telling you when he was having a bad day instead of letting it leak out sideways, actually sitting with the discomfort of being wrong instead of explaining his way out of it.
"You're allowed to still be careful with me," he told you, once, when he caught you watching him a little warily after a tense conversation that hadn't gone anywhere near as badly as it could have. "I earned the caution. I'd rather you trust the pattern than trust a feeling."
"That's a very mature thing to say for a man with as many guns as you own."
"I contain layers."
You believed the pattern, eventually. Not the words — never just the words, not with him, not with anyone. But the pattern didn't lie, and the pattern, slowly, kept saying the same thing: he meant it.
Tim Drake
Tim apologized like he was solving a problem, which made sense, because to Tim, most things were problems with solutions if you were thorough enough about finding them.
The first time he upset you, it was something small — he'd brushed off a concern you'd raised because he was deep in a case and hadn't fully registered you were talking, and you'd gone quiet in the specific way you went quiet when you'd decided not to bother saying it twice.
"You're upset," he said, twenty minutes later, looking up from his laptop like he'd just run the numbers on something and didn't like the result.
"I'm fine."
"You said something fifteen minutes ago and I gave you a one-word answer without looking up. That's not nothing." He closed the laptop, which you noted, because Tim closing the laptop for anything short of an emergency was its own kind of statement. "I wasn't listening. That's on me, not you, and I don't want you deciding it's easier to just stop bringing things to me because I was distracted."
"It's really not that big a deal, Tim."
"It is, though, because if I let it slide now, it becomes a habit, and then in a year you've stopped telling me things because you've learned I won't actually hear them." He said it plainly, no performance to it, just the clear-eyed logic of someone who'd clearly already thought this through before you'd finished being annoyed about it. "So. I'm sorry. Genuinely — not the kind where I say sorry to end the conversation. Tell me again. I'm listening this time."
You told him again. He listened — actually listened, the kind where he asked a follow-up question that proved he'd absorbed it instead of just waited his turn to talk.
"You're surprisingly good at that," you said, after.
"At apologizing?"
"At meaning it instead of just performing it. Most people apologize to get past the moment. You apologize like you're trying to actually fix the thing that caused it."
"That's the only kind of apology that's useful." He shrugged, like it was obvious. "Saying sorry without changing anything is just a more polite way of telling someone their feelings were an inconvenience you'd like to move past quickly. I'd rather actually fix it. Takes longer. Works better."
It became a pattern with him — not flashy, not dramatic, just quietly consistent. He noticed things. He adjusted. When he got something wrong, he didn't get defensive about it; he treated it like data, something to be corrected rather than argued with.
"You really don't get offended when I call you out," you said once, half-testing.
"Being offended doesn't fix anything. It just makes the next conversation harder." He looked at you, steady, a little soft around the edges in the way he only ever was with you. "I'd rather hear it from you than guess wrong and lose you slowly without knowing why."
You hadn't expected to find that kind of safety in someone so methodical about it. But it turned out method was its own kind of devotion, if you paid attention to what it was actually in service of.
Duke Thomas
Duke had a way of making mistakes look like learning opportunities, which should have been annoying and somehow wasn't, because he never used it as an excuse — just as a way of getting somewhere better than where he'd started.
He upset you over something he hadn't realized was sensitive — a joke that landed wrong, brushing past something you'd mentioned once, in passing, that turned out to matter more than he'd registered. You didn't make a thing of it. You'd learned, a long time ago, that making a thing of it rarely got you anywhere good, so you just got quieter, pulled back an inch, the way you always did when something stung more than you wanted to admit.
Duke noticed within the hour.
"I said something," he said. Not a question. "I don't know what, exactly, but I know the look. What'd I get wrong?"
"It's fine."
"It's not, or you wouldn't have that face on." He sat down properly, giving you his full attention in a way that made it hard to keep brushing it off. "I'd rather you just tell me. I can't fix something I didn't know I broke."
So you told him. He listened without interrupting, without getting defensive, without doing the thing some men did where they started building their case for why it wasn't actually that bad before you'd even finished talking.
"Okay," he said, when you were done. "That's on me. I didn't know that mattered to you, but now I do, and I should've been more careful with it regardless. I'm sorry — actually sorry, not sorry-you're-upset sorry."
"You say that like it's a meaningful distinction."
"It is, though. Half the apologies people give are just trying to make the discomfort stop. I want you to actually know I get why it landed wrong, not just that I want the awkward part to be over."
"That's surprisingly self-aware for someone who just stepped on a landmine an hour ago."
"I step on a lot of landmines. Comes with the job of caring about someone who doesn't volunteer information easily." He said it lightly, no judgment in it. "I'd rather learn the hard way than not learn at all. Just means I'll get there eventually. Promise."
He did get there. Not all at once — there were more landmines, more small missteps, the ordinary mess of two people learning each other properly — but every single time, he did the same thing: noticed, asked, listened, adjusted. Never defensive. Never making you do the work of managing his guilt on top of your own hurt.
"You don't flinch when I call you out," you told him, once, genuinely curious about it.
"Why would I? You're not attacking me. You're telling me something true so I can do better. That's a gift, not a problem." He bumped his shoulder against yours. "I know you don't hand out trust easy. I'm not trying to talk you into it. I'm just trying to keep being the kind of person it makes sense to trust, every single time you check."
You checked, often, in the beginning. Quietly, the way you checked everything.
He passed, every time. Eventually, you stopped checking so hard, and just let yourself believe what the pattern had been telling you all along.
Heyyy I was hoping a I could request for a Jason Todd fic🥺
I was literally thinking abt the reader having a dog who is male and Jason is like talking to her but she’s not exactly listening because she’s baby talking to the dog and Jason thinks the reader is talking to him. And when he says smth he he did good that day and coincidentally she says good boy right after(the dog prob did like a trick or smth) and he’s gets all flustered and stuff and once the reader acknowledges him, he realizes that she wasn’t talking to him but to the dog. And the reader teases him and accuses him having a praise kink and he denies but she drags it and maybe you could do a random day where Jason is home and free and they are baking or cooking and when Jason does smth correctly she praises him and he tries to play it off(the reader is a good cook and baker and Jason is not the best)
Good Boy
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requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
The dog's name is Goose.
Goose is a three year old golden retriever mix with the specific energy of a creature who has never once in his life experienced a negative emotion and intends to keep it that way. He weighs thirty eight pounds and operates at approximately four hundred percent capacity at all times and he is, without question, the love of your life.
Jason has accepted this.
He's also, if he's being honest with himself, a little bit in love with Goose too, but that's information he keeps internal.
The afternoon is quiet — a rare thing, a gift from the universe in the form of no active missions, no family emergencies, no Gotham deciding to have a crisis — and Jason is on your couch telling you about his week while you sit on the floor.
Not because you prefer the floor.
Because Goose is on the floor, and where Goose is, you are.
"So then Roy says — and this is the part that gets me — he says I thought you knew about the second exit like I was supposed to intuit that from — "
"Who's a pretty boy," you say. "Who is the prettiest boy. Is it you? It's you."
Jason stops.
He processes this.
He was, he is fairly certain, in the middle of a sentence. A sentence about Roy and a mission exit point. And you have just — interrupted that sentence to call someone a pretty boy.
He glances around.
You're not looking at him. You're looking at Goose, who is on his back getting his belly scratched with the expression of an entity that has achieved everything it ever wanted.
But Jason didn't clock that yet. Jason is still in the half-second where he thought —
He clears his throat.
"Anyway," he says. "Roy didn't — "
"Yes you are," you say, in the voice. The soft, slightly high-pitched, completely unself-conscious voice that people use when they are talking to animals and have forgotten the rest of the world exists. "You're so good. You're so smart."
Jason stops again.
He is, objectively, doing well lately. The mission this week went cleanly. He'd made a call that paid off. Roy had said something complimentary, which from Roy was like receiving an award.
He is also aware, in some part of his brain, that you are sitting on the floor with the dog.
He is not, in this moment, fully connecting those two facts.
"I mean," he says, and something in his voice is different, just slightly. "It wasn't — it was a good call but I don't know if I'd say smart, exactly — "
"Who wants a treat," you say, to the floor. "Do you want a treat? You do, don't you. You did so good."
And then, at the exact moment Jason is opening his mouth —
"Good boy," you say, warm and bright, because Goose has just executed a perfect sit on command, which he has been practicing and which deserves acknowledgement.
Jason closes his mouth.
Something is happening in his face.
Something he is very quickly trying to not let happen in his face.
He looks at the ceiling. Then at the wall. Then at a neutral point somewhere in the middle distance that is definitely not you and definitely not the dog and is in fact a blank section of air that he has chosen because it is safe.
His ears are doing something.
His ears are, specifically, red.
You look up from Goose.
You look at Jason.
You look at his ears.
You look at the expression he is attempting to have, which is neutral, which is not succeeding, which is in the specific vicinity of a man who has just been caught feeling something he was not expecting to feel and is now engaged in active denial.
You look at this for a moment.
Then, very carefully:
"Jason."
"What."
"Were you — "
"No."
"I didn't finish the — "
"The answer is still no."
You look at him.
He looks at the middle distance.
Goose, having received his treat, wanders over to Jason and puts his head on Jason's knee, because Goose is emotionally intelligent in the way all dogs are and has correctly identified that this human needs support.
"Baby," you say.
"Don't."
"Did you think I was talking to you."
"I think," Jason says, with tremendous dignity, "that you should focus on whatever you were doing with the dog."
"I was praising the dog." You are trying very hard not to smile. You are not succeeding at this any better than he's succeeding at neutral. "He did a sit. I said good boy. For the dog, Jason. The dog did a good sit."
"I know that."
"You didn't know that thirty seconds ago."
"I knew it." A pause. "I was momentarily confused about the context."
"The context was me, on the floor, with my dog."
"I'm aware of what the context was."
"And you thought — "
"I don't want to continue this conversation."
"Jason." You are fully smiling now. You have lost the battle entirely and you’re not sorry. "You thought I was calling you a good boy."
"That's a significant mischaracterization of — "
"Your ears are red."
He puts his hand over one ear. Then removes it because that makes it worse.
"They're not," he says.
"They are extremely." You get up from the floor, because this requires closer range, and you sit on the couch next to him, pulling your knees up, looking at him with the expression that he knows means you've found something and you're keeping it. "Jason Todd. You have a praise kink."
"I don't have a — that's not — "
"You heard good boy and you got flustered."
"I didn't get flustered. I was momentarily — "
"Flustered," you say. "You were flustered. Your ears went red."
"My ears are always — "
"They are not always red, Jason."
He looks at you.
You look at him.
Goose, between you, looks at both of you.
"This is a private moment," Jason tells Goose.
Goose wags his tail.
"This is staying here," Jason tells you.
"Absolutely," you say, in the tone that means the opposite.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." You pat his arm. "Good boy."
"I will leave this apartment," he says.
"No you won't."
He doesn't.
The thing is, you don't bring it up again.
Not immediately. Not for several days. You let it exist in the space between you as a known thing, unnamed, which is almost more effective than naming it because Jason knows you know and you know he knows you know and the whole thing sits there.
He thinks maybe you've let it go.
He has not yet learned.
The Saturday that follows is the specific kind of Saturday that Jason has been looking forward to without quite knowing how to say so — no patrol, no mission, no obligations, just the apartment and you and the approximate shape of a normal day.
You decide to bake.
This happens sometimes. You bake the way some people meditate — methodically, with specific attention, producing results that are unreasonably good for a home kitchen. Jason has opinions about your banana bread that he's never said out loud because they're a little embarrassing.
"You can help," you say, pulling out a mixing bowl.
"I'll watch," Jason says.
"You'll help," you say, in the tone that isn't a discussion. "You can do the dry ingredients."
"I don't know the dry ingredients."
"I'll tell you the dry ingredients." You slide a recipe card across the counter. "It's literally measuring and mixing. You can do measuring and mixing."
"I feel like this is going somewhere," Jason says.
"It's going somewhere delicious. Come here."
He comes to the counter.
You talk him through it — flour, baking powder, salt, the specific order and ratios — and Jason measures with the focused attention of someone who approaches new tasks like they’re mission briefings, which means he measures very precisely and double-checks the card twice.
"Good," you say, when he tips the flour in correctly.
Jason's hands do a thing. A very brief thing. He continues measuring.
You are looking at the butter.
"Okay," you say. "Can you do the sugar? Two cups, white sugar, that jar — "
"Yeah," he says. "I see it."
He measures the sugar. He levels it off with the back of a knife because you'd told him how to do that and he'd retained it. He adds it to the bowl.
"Really good," you say.
Jason stirs the dry ingredients.
"Stop," he says, without looking up.
"Stop what," you say, innocently.
"Whatever you're doing."
"I'm praising your baking technique. It's good technique." You're making an elaborate project of creaming the butter. "Most people don't level off properly."
"You're doing the thing."
"I’m giving you accurate feedback." You glance at him sideways. "You're very good at following instructions, Jason. It's a real strength."
"I will put this flour back."
"You won't. You're too invested now." You nod at the bowl. "Keep stirring. Even strokes."
He keeps stirring with even strokes.
You watch him with the peripheral vision of someone who is absolutely paying attention while appearing to focus on something else.
"Okay," you say, after a moment. "That's perfect. You can set that aside."
He sets it aside.
He's not looking at you.
"You're doing great," you say, casually, reaching past him for the vanilla.
"You're enjoying this," he says.
"I'm enjoying baking with my boyfriend on a Saturday." You uncap the vanilla. "I'm also enjoying that my boyfriend has a praise kink and is trying to pretend he doesn't."
"I don't — "
"Your jaw does a thing," you say. "When I say you did something well. It goes — " you make a small motion with your hand that very accurately represents the way his jaw tightens slightly when he's holding something back. "That."
"That's just my face."
"It's a specific face. It's a pleased face that you're trying to make into a neutral face."
"Those are the same face," he says.
"They're not, baby, and you know it." You pour the vanilla. "You can whisk the eggs. Three eggs, that bowl."
He whisks the eggs.
He does it competently and with more focus than eggs strictly require.
"See," you say, when he's done. "You're a natural."
"I'm a person who can crack eggs," he says. "This isn't a skill set."
"You leveled the sugar without being asked twice. That's a skill set." You take the eggs. "Also you're being very good about doing what I say without complaining, which — "
"Do not," he says.
"Is very mature of you."
"That was close," he says. "That was very close to something I was going to have to leave over."
"But you didn't." You stir. "Because you're — "
"Don't."
"Doing so well," you finish.
Jason puts both hands on the counter.
He looks at the middle distance.
Goose, from his bed in the corner, lifts his head to observe the situation and then puts it back down, satisfied that no intervention is required.
"This," Jason says, "is targeted."
"This is baking," you say.
"This is you finding a thing and using it against me in a kitchen."
"I'm not using it against you. I'm praising your contributions to our baking process." You hand him the wooden spoon. "Here. You can fold in the chocolate chips."
He takes the spoon.
He folds in the chocolate chips.
He does it carefully, the way he does everything, and the batter comes together and he doesn't overmix it because you'd told him once that overmixing is the enemy and he'd filed it away like a mission parameter.
"Perfect," you say.
He exhales.
"That's — " he starts.
"The perfect amount of folding," you say. "I mean it. Some people overmix. You didn't overmix."
"I'm aware of the overmixing issue. You mentioned it."
"And you remembered. And applied it correctly." You take the bowl. "You're genuinely getting good at this."
Jason leans against the counter.
He looks at you.
You look back at him with the expression — the one that is warm and a little bit wicked and entirely sincere all at once, the one he can't do anything about because it contains all of those things simultaneously.
"You did this on purpose," he says.
"I did baking on purpose, yes."
"The whole thing. The praising. You set this up."
"I set up cookies, Jason." You start spooning batter onto the tray. "I'm a simple person with simple goals."
"You are not a simple person."
"No," you agree. "But the goals are simple. Cookies and watching you try to pretend you don't like it when I tell you you're doing well." You spoon another cookie. "Which you do. Like. Very much."
Jason is quiet for a moment.
"It's not a kink," he says.
"Okay."
"It's not. It's just — I don't hear it a lot. Good job. Well done. That kind of thing." He says it like he's stating a fact, which he is, the Jason Todd version of admission that doesn't dress itself up. "So when you say it, it — lands differently than you probably intend."
You stop spooning.
You look at him.
He's looking at the cookie tray, jaw doing the thing, the actual thing, not the baking-praise thing but the real version of it.
"Jason," you say.
"Don't make it a whole thing," he says.
"I'm not." You put the spoon down. You go to stand next to him. "I mean it, by the way. When I say you did something well. I'm not winding you up. You leveled the sugar without being told. You didn't overmix. You follow instructions better than most people I know."
"Most people you know aren't trained — "
"You're also really good at other things," you say, cutting him off gently. "A lot of things. And I don't say it enough probably."
He looks at you sideways.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm being genuine."
"I know you are. That's why I'm telling you to stop because you're going to make me — " He stops. "Just stop."
"Make you what?"
"Nothing. Stop."
You look at him.
The tips of his ears are doing the thing.
"Good boy," you say, very softly, and you mean it, and you're smiling, and it's entirely sincere and entirely wicked simultaneously.
Jason closes his eyes.
"I'm getting the dog," he says.
"Goose is asleep."
"I'm waking the dog up and I'm going to the other room and I'm going to sit with the dog until the cookies are done."
"That's a completely reasonable response," you say.
"Thank you."
"You're doing great," you add.
He points at you.
He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He goes to get the dog.
The cookies are perfect.
Jason eats four of them and pretends he's not pleased about this either, which doesn't work on you at all, which he's aware of, which is fine.
On the couch afterward, Goose between you, he says: "This stays here."
Hey girl! I've been following you for a bit and I love your fics so much, you inspired me to start my own blog ❤️
I just was wondering if you had any advice with plotting stories in general, bc every time I go to write it I can never really put the scenes together and it feels awkwardd. How do you write so much so quickly i envy youu 😩
Hello. That is do kind of you to say. What works for me are a million drafts to be honest I write the scene I want to portray and then rewrite it again and again, until I kinda like it. I write do much because in the year I commute to go to uni for over two hours each day and that is where I write mostly. I have been having a writer's block to be honest for sometime, mostly with ideas, if I have a request I can write it but I haven't had any "original" ideas in a while. Practice helps a lot... like my older stories compared to my recent ones are a huge change. I just say go for it, write and post anything you want and like to be honest, I genuinely believe that there is no bad work or written piece and that we are always our worst critic when it comes to our work.
Hi would you mind doing a fic where damian and the reader have been in the league of assassins and they were supposed to be engaged after many years where damian has been living with his father she shows up with one mission... TO KILL HIM.... BUT it is only because she is being promised the legacy of the league! And so I want it to be a tension filled meeting with also with fighting so well like their bodies being in sync and being actually worthy opponents. But the moment she is defeated and she waits for the final kill he never does that and she escapes in the nights once again... waiting to meet again...
The Space Between Blade and Mercy
navigation , dc navigation
requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
THEN
The League of Assassins, Ra's al Ghul's stronghold — eleven years ago
The first time Damian Wayne sees her she is beating three senior assassins simultaneously.
She is nine years old.
He is eight.
He watches from the upper corridor, which he is technically not supposed to be on during training hours, which he is on anyway because Damian al Ghul does not follow rules that fail to interest him and the restriction of his movements has never successfully been enforced.
Below in the training pit, the three men are trying.
She doesn't let them.
It's not that she's faster — she's not, not yet, not against men with twenty years of League training between them. It's something else. Something that Damian, who has been trained to identify tactical advantage since before he could properly read, clocks immediately.
She doesn't fight where she is.
She fights where she's going to be.
Two steps ahead, always. Constantly moving through a version of the fight that hasn't happened yet, placing herself in positions that seem wrong until suddenly they're exactly right and another man is on the ground.
Damian watches this for a long time.
When the third man goes down and she stands in the center of the pit, breathing hard, blood at her lip from a hit that had landed early and hadn't slowed her at all, she looks up.
She looks directly at the upper corridor.
At him.
He doesn't move. Doesn't retreat. Damian al Ghul does not retreat from a nine year old girl.
She holds his gaze for a long moment.
Then she bends and retrieves her blade from the floor, sheathes it, and walks out of the pit like the three men unconscious behind her are furniture.
Damian thinks about it for the rest of the day.
Her name is a thing the League has given her, which means it is not her name.
This is something Damian understands immediately, because his name is also a thing the League has shaped, and between the two of them this shared understanding exists before any words are exchanged.
She is called Sable.
He calls her that for six months before she tells him it isn't real.
They are sitting on the roof of the eastern training hall — she has found his spot, which she should not have been able to find because he has taken considerable care with that spot, and he resents this and also respects it simultaneously — and it's very late and they are both supposed to be sleeping.
"Sable," he says.
"That's not my name," she says.
He looks at her.
"What is."
She looks at the stars. The desert sky is very clear and very enormous and the League sprawls below them and she looks at all of it with an expression that Damian is beginning to learn — the one she wears when she's calculating, always calculating.
She tells him her name.
Her real one. The one from before the League, from whatever before she has that she doesn't talk about.
He says it once.
She doesn't react, outwardly. But something in her goes slightly still, the way things go still when something matters, and Damian files that.
"Damian," he says, offering the same.
"I know your name," she says.
"Not the real one."
She looks at him.
He tells her his. The one his mother has only mentioned once.
They sit on the roof for another hour and say nothing else, but something has been exchanged that isn't language, and in the morning when they pass each other in the training hall there is a difference in how she looks at him.
Marginal. Invisible to anyone not paying attention.
Damian is always paying attention.
They train together for four years.
This is not a sentimental arrangement. Ra's al Ghul does not make sentimental arrangements. It is tactical — they are the two best students the League has produced in a generation and putting them against each other produces results, produces refinement, produces the specific friction of two extraordinary things meeting and being made sharper by the contact.
What it also produces — and this Ra's also calculates, because Ra's calculates everything — is loyalty.
Not to the League.
To each other.
Damian learns her fighting style the way he learns languages, which is completely and with a particular kind of fluency that goes beyond technical understanding into something more instinctual. He knows her tells before she knows she has them. She knows his before he does.
They stop being able to properly surprise each other within the first year.
What they develop instead is something more interesting — a vocabulary of movement, a shared language of combat that operates below conscious thought. She pivots left and he is already there to cover. He drops to create space and she is already using it. They are not fighting the same fight; they are fighting two halves of one fight, seamlessly, without discussion.
Their trainers find this alarming.
Ra's finds this useful.
The engagement is announced when Damian is twelve.
The League of Assassins — nine years ago
The announcement is not a surprise, technically.
Damian has understood for some time that he is a resource as much as a person, that the choices made about his future are strategic rather than sentimental, that Ra's al Ghul views the continuation of the al Ghul line with the same long-game thinking he applies to everything.
He understands this.
He stands in the great hall while Ra's makes the announcement and he looks at her across the space between them and he does not look surprised because he is not surprised.
She does not look surprised either.
She looks — and Damian knows her face better than he knows almost anything — she looks like she is doing the calculation. Rapidly, behind her eyes, all the variables of this arrangement and what it means and where it places her.
What she does not look is unhappy.
This is the thing Damian returns to afterward.
She does not look unhappy.
Neither does he.
He's not sure what to do with that.
Three months after the announcement
He finds her in the archive room, which is her version of his roof spot — the place she goes when she needs to think, surrounded by histories and maps and the documentation of centuries of League operations.
"You've been avoiding me," he says.
"I've been studying," she says, not looking up from the manuscript.
"You've been avoiding me while studying."
She closes the manuscript. She looks at him.
In the three months since the announcement she has been — not cold, exactly. Not distant. But careful in a way she hasn't been before, maintaining a precise and deliberate amount of space that is exactly enough to make him aware of it.
"Sit down," she says.
He sits.
She looks at him for a moment with the expression she uses for things she's decided to say, which is different from her default expression in a way that only he would notice.
"I've been trying to determine," she says, "whether this is something that was decided about us or something that was allowed to happen and then decided about us."
Damian considers this.
"Does the distinction matter?" he says.
"It matters to me," she says. "I've spent my entire life having things decided about me. I want to know if this is another one."
Damian is quiet for a moment.
"I think," he says, carefully, because he is twelve and doesn't fully have the language for what he's about to say, "that it was decided about us because it was already true. That Ra's looked at what was already there and called it by a useful name."
She looks at him.
"What was already there," she says.
"I don't know the word for it," Damian says, which is honest, which from Damian at twelve is an extraordinary admission. "But it's there."
She is quiet for a long time.
"Yes," she says eventually. "It is."
She picks up the manuscript again.
But she shifts slightly on the bench.
Making room.
He sits next to her.
They sit in the archive room for another two hours and she reads and he reads and their shoulders are touching and neither of them mention it and in the morning it is something they have both filed under the category of true things that don't require discussion.
Two years later — Damian is fourteen
The message comes from Bruce Wayne.
Not in the form of a letter or a call — in the form of Batman, appearing at the League's threshold with the specific energy of a man who has been looking for a long time and has finally stopped looking, who has arrived at a door and is not leaving without what he came for.
Damian watches the confrontation from the shadows, which is where Damian watches most things.
He watches Ra's and Batman — his grandfather and his father, a sentence he has had the facts of for years and the full weight of only recently — conduct the negotiation that isn't a negotiation, the conversation that only has one outcome.
He watches his mother's face.
He watches Ra's.
He thinks about the archive room. The roof. The training pit. Four years of a vocabulary they'd built between them.
He thinks about it's there.
And then he makes a decision.
Her name, the real one — a conversation in the hour before Damian leaves
She knows before he tells her.
She's always two steps ahead, fighting where she's going to be, and she knows.
He finds her on the roof — his spot, their spot, the place that belongs to them in a way that nothing else in the League does — and she's already there, already sitting, already looking at the desert that stretches out to the horizon.
"Batman," she says. Not a question.
"Yes," he says.
"You're going."
"Yes."
She is quiet.
"Ra's will consider it a betrayal," she says.
"I know."
"It will change things between us." Still not looking at him. Still looking at the desert. "Officially. The engagement — "
"I know," he says.
"You know and you're going anyway."
"Yes."
She is quiet for a long time.
Long enough that the desert changes color the way it does just before dawn, the shift from black to deep blue to something that isn't quite either.
"You'll be different," she says, finally. "Gotham will change you."
"Probably," he says. "Hopefully."
"Hopefully," she repeats.
He sits next to her.
They watch the desert go from blue to almost-morning.
"I don't know what the League will do with me now," she says, and it's the most unguarded thing she's said to him in months, maybe ever, the calculation gone and just the thing underneath it. "The arrangement was — I was part of a future that included you. Without that — "
"You're the best student the League has produced," he says. "They know that. They'll use it."
"Use," she says.
"I know," he says, and he means it — he knows what that word means, he's lived it, he's only starting to understand the alternative. "I know. I'm sorry."
She looks at him.
In the almost-morning light, she looks young. Which she is. Which they both are, which the League has spent years making easy to forget.
"Come back," she says. It's quiet. It's not a question and it's not a command and it's not quite a plea. It's something else, something without a category.
"If I can," he says.
"That's not — "
"I know." He meets her eyes. "I'll try."
She nods, once, the way she nods when she's accepted a fact she doesn't like.
He leaves at dawn.
She watches him go from the roof.
She stays there for a long time after he's gone.
NOW
Gotham City — present day
The first sign is the grappling anchor.
Damian finds it on patrol — a League-grade anchor, the specific alloy, embedded in the stone of a building three blocks from the manor. Civilian equipment doesn't use this alloy. Wayne Industries doesn't manufacture it. There are exactly three suppliers in the world and they all answer to Ra's al Ghul.
He doesn't tell Bruce.
He doesn't know why he doesn't tell Bruce except that something about finding it feels private in a way he doesn't want examined yet.
He keeps it.
Starts paying attention differently.
The second sign is a shadow in his peripheral that moves wrong.
Three nights later, rooftop chase across the Diamond District. He's following a Triad operation that's been encroaching on territory he's claimed for protection — the kind of thing that requires Robin's attention because it's smaller than Batman but nastier than the GCPD.
He's three blocks in when he feels it.
Not a threat. Not exactly. Something adjacent to it — the particular quality of being watched by someone who is very good at not being seen, which he recognizes because he is also very good at it and knows what it feels like from this side.
He stops on a rooftop.
Scans.
Nothing.
But the feeling doesn't go away.
"Show yourself," he says, to the dark.
The dark doesn't answer.
He continues the patrol.
The feeling follows him all night.
The third sign is a note.
He finds it on his pillow.
In his room. In the manor. Through four layers of security that should be, technically, impenetrable, and which she has apparently penetrated anyway with the ease of someone for whom impenetrable is a suggestion.
The note contains three words in Arabic, in a handwriting he hasn't seen in four years but recognizes with the immediate totality of something learned young.
I found you.
He sits with it for a long time.
Then he says, to the empty room:
"I know."
One week later
Damian has been waiting for it.
That's the thing he will consider afterward — that he knew, that the three signs were a message and he read it correctly, that he has spent the last seven days in a state of heightened awareness that has nothing to do with Gotham's criminals and everything to do with the specific quality of anticipation that only one person in the world has ever produced in him.
He's on the rooftop of Wayne Tower.
He comes here sometimes, when he needs to think — it's the highest point he can access without the cave's equipment, and from up here Gotham is a map and a map is something he can read and reading things makes him feel like he understands them.
He hears nothing.
That's how he knows she's there.
She used to make sound — subtle, controlled, inaudible to anyone without his training, but there. Four years ago she still made sound. The League's training removes it over time and hers has clearly continued.
"You've improved," he says, to the dark behind him.
"You haven't lost your edge," she says, from somewhere he hasn't located yet. "I'm not sure if that's Robin or just you."
"Both," he says. "Come where I can see you."
A pause.
Then she steps out of the shadow of the access structure.
Four years.
Four years and she is — she is not the girl from the archive room, which he knew she wouldn't be, but the specifics of the difference are something he's taking inventory of in real time. Taller. Older in the way the League makes you older, which is not the same as older in the way Gotham has made him older — she carries it differently, in the posture, in the controlled quality of how she occupies space.
Her face.
Her face is still hers and that's the thing that hits him before anything else — before the League blacks she's wearing, before the weapons he can see and the ones he knows he can't, before any of the implications of why she's here.
Her face is still her.
"Hello, Damian," she says.
"Hello," he says.
They look at each other across the rooftop.
"You're here on League business," he says.
"Yes," she says.
"Ra's sent you."
"Yes."
"To kill me," he says. Because he knows. The grappling anchor and the note and the week of surveillance are not the prelude to a social call.
She doesn't answer immediately.
That tells him everything.
"The legacy," he says. "He's promised you the legacy."
Her jaw does something.
"I've earned it," she says.
"I don't doubt it," he says. "I know what you're capable of."
"Then you know I can do this."
"I know you can try," he says.
Something in her eyes.
"Draw," she says.
"I'd rather not fight you," he says.
"That's not an option you have tonight."
"There are always options," he says. "You taught me that. Two steps ahead, fighting where you're going to be. What's two steps ahead of this?"
"Don't," she says, and her voice is different for one second — the real voice, underneath the League voice — and then it's gone and she moves.
She is faster than he remembered.
That's the first thing, the immediate recalibration — she was fast at thirteen and she's faster now, four years of League training having refined something that was already extraordinary, and Damian gets his staff up in time but barely, the impact jarring up his arms in a way that tells him she's stronger too.
He doesn't let it show.
She lands six feet away, reads his face, and he knows she clocked it anyway.
"You've been training with Batman," she says, circling.
"Yes," he says, circling to match. The roof is large and well-lit by the city below and they are moving around each other with the particular quality of two people who know each other's weight distribution and are accounting for it.
"It shows," she says. "Different style."
"You've been with the League," he says. "It shows too."
"Is that a compliment."
"It's an observation."
She comes at him again — not the same angle, she never uses the same angle twice, this is something she'd had at nine and has refined to an art form — and he goes where she's going to be rather than where she is, which means they meet in the middle of the space with his forearm against hers and her blade a centimeter from his ribs.
They hold.
Face to face. Closer than the rooftop has been. He can see her eyes and she can see his and they are both doing the thing they do — reading, calculating, the fight underneath the fight.
"You knew that," she says, very quiet.
"Two steps ahead," he says.
She breaks the hold and goes low and he vaults over her and they separate and reset and it starts again.
This is the thing about fighting her — about fighting someone you know at this depth — it is not like fighting an opponent. It is like fighting yourself. Every choice he makes she has already accounted for and every choice she makes he has already accounted for and what results is not a fight in any conventional sense but something that looks more like —
A conversation.
That's the word he finds for it, in the part of his mind that runs parallel to the combat. A conversation in the language they built together over four years, the vocabulary of movement, the shorthand that exists below thought.
She knows.
He can see her knowing.
It makes her better. Makes her angrier. She comes harder after she realizes it and he responds in kind and for three minutes the rooftop of Wayne Tower contains something that the training pits of the League would have recognized — two exceptional things meeting and being made sharper by the contact.
His staff catches her knee.
She takes it without slowing and uses the momentum, spinning into an elbow that would have broken his nose if he hadn't already been moving.
He catches her wrist.
She reverses his grip.
He goes with the reversal.
They end up on the ground — him on his back, her above him, blade at his throat. Her knee on his chest. Her breath slightly elevated. Her eyes on his.
He has two options.
Neither of them is staying still.
He executes one of them — the League reversal, the one she taught him, the specific technique that she'd drilled into him at eleven years old on a morning when she was impatient with his footwork and had thrown him down and shown him how to use a ground position rather than escape it.
The irony of using her technique on her is not lost on either of them.
She sees it coming.
She almost — almost — has the counter.
Not quite.
The reversal completes and now he's above her and her blade is in his hand and his staff is at her throat and she's on her back on the rooftop of Wayne Tower looking up at him.
They are both breathing hard.
The city is below them and the night is around them and they are very close and the blade is in his hand and the staff is at her throat.
He looks at her.
She looks at him.
She is waiting.
He knows what she's waiting for. He knows the League's protocol. He knows what this position means in the language they were both taught, the language that says: it's done, finish it.
He looks at her face.
Her real face, underneath the League's training, underneath the mission, underneath the calculation.
The nine year old who looked up from the training pit.
The girl in the archive room who told him her real name.
The almost-morning on the roof when she said come back and he said I'll try.
He steps back.
He takes the blade with him, because he's not reckless, but he steps back and he raises the staff and he gives her the space.
She doesn't move immediately.
She lies there for a moment and she looks at him and the thing on her face is — complex, is layered, is something he cannot fully read which is unusual, which tells him how much she's feeling because she is very good at her face and it's not doing what she's telling it to.
Then she sits up.
They look at each other.
"Why," she says.
"You know why," he says.
"The League will consider this a failure," she says. "Both of ours."
"I know."
"Ra's will not — "
"I know what Ra's will do," he says. "I've been living with the consequences of Ra's al Ghul's displeasure for four years." He looks at her steadily. "Go. Before I change my mind."
"You won't," she says.
"No," he agrees. "But go anyway."
She stands. She is unhurt — good, he had been precise about what he allowed to land and what he hadn't, the combat had been real but there are calibrations even within real — and she stands and she is looking at him with that expression that he can't fully read.
"The blade," she says.
He looks at it in his hand.
He holds it out.
She takes it.
Their fingers don't touch.
Almost.
"You're still two steps ahead," she says, very quietly.
"So are you," he says. "You let me have that reversal."
A pause.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she says.
"Yes you do."
She looks at him for a long moment.
Then she does something she hasn't done since he was twelve years old and she was thirteen and they were sitting in the archive room.
She tells him her real name.
Not the League name.
The real one.
Like she's reminding him she still has it. Like she's reminding herself.
Then she turns.
She walks to the edge of the rooftop.
She doesn't look back.
She goes over the side and the night swallows her and he is alone on the rooftop of Wayne Tower with the city below him and four years of distance and one night of a conversation conducted in the language of blades.
He stands there for a long time.
In the archive room, the League stronghold — seven years ago
"What happens," she had asked him once, young enough that the question was genuine and not strategic, "if we want different things. From what the League wants."
He had been quiet, considering.
"I suppose," he had said, "we find out what we're made of."
She had looked at him with that expression — the calculating one, the two-steps-ahead one.
"And if what we're made of is the same thing," she had said. "If we want the same thing."
"Then it's simpler," he had said.
"Is it," she had said, not quite asking.
He had thought about it.
"No," he had admitted. "Probably not."
She had almost smiled.
"Probably not," she had agreed.
Wayne Manor — that night, after
He sits in his room.
On the desk is the note. Three words in Arabic in her handwriting.
I found you.
He picks up a pen.
He writes three words back, in Arabic, in his handwriting, on the same paper.
I know. Come back.
He puts it in the drawer.
He doesn't know when she'll find it.
She will find it.
She finds everything.
Somewhere in Gotham — the same night
She finds the highest point she can access — a water tower, three miles from Wayne Tower, the city spread out in every direction.
She sits.
She thinks about the rooftop. About the reversal she'd let him have, which he'd known, which meant he'd been watching for it, which meant he'd been two steps ahead of her in a way she should have anticipated and hadn't because —
Because it's him.
Because it has always been harder to be two steps ahead of him than anyone else and she has spent four years telling herself that was training, that was proximity, that was the natural result of two exceptional things making each other sharper.
The blade is in her hand.
He handed it back.
She thinks about that for a long time.
The League will want a report. Ra's will want to know why the mission failed. She will need an answer that is strategic, that reframes the failure as information gathered, that buys her time.
She is good at answers like that.
But underneath the answer she will give Ra's, in the part that belongs to her and not to the League, is the actual answer.
Which is that she looked up at him on that rooftop and she waited and he stepped back and she had already known he would, which means she had already known she was going to let him.
Which means she made a choice tonight.
She has not decided yet what it means.
She sheathes the blade.
She looks at Gotham — his city, the city that changed him in the ways she'd predicted and some she hadn't — and she looks at it carefully, the way she looks at maps, the way she looks at things she's going to need to understand.
She'll be back.
That decision is already made.
The rest of the decisions are still waiting to be made, which is unusual for her, which tells her something about the situation she is not entirely ready to name.
Hope you are well! Weird question (very), but what's your opinion on college/university? I am struggling in finding and choosing a major and the idea of it being wprtg the years. Which results in asking everyone that might have some knowledge on the subject
I know this question is very of topic to everything you put on your page. I do hope you'd be okay answering it though
Hi. I don't know how your country works for universities, but here in Greece they are free. The way we get into them is not the best to be honest but it works okay. Our degrees aren't that easy, especially those from "higher" universities such as the one I am attending, but they are worth it, because they are ranking among the top 100 of the world and then it is easier to find a job. To be honest, this year has been really hard, because my classes were too theoretical and too much mathematical for my liking. I strongly suggest looking into each majors program, what they teach and when, if you like it give it a shot, it will give you a better understanding of what they actually offer. Also here we can attend any lecture we want from any university, as long as we stay quiet and don't disrupt the lesson. Universities are open and it helps young people choose, the last years actually schools are scheduling to visit universities during lectures just for that reason. In my classes only there has been at least 15 schools! I would be happy to talk about it more if you want. Generally, I am a person that values education a lot, because many people don't have that privilege and I love learning, you just have to find what is right for you.
First, amazing writing, I lose myself (in a very good way) when I read It!
I wanted to ask If you could a Jason one, like, where Reader and he are in a relationship, she already knows his identity and all! And it's like she always hide her problems, because she grew up thinking or actually having to deal with her own feelings, thinkings and stuff alone bcs she didnt want to worry, like, When you try to talk about a problem and someone always frames it as something not so bad compared to other things, yknow?
But like, then she internalizes that a Lot, all the feelings like insecurities, or fears that she learned to consider silly like spiders, needles, even darkness, or when she gets sick, or with really bad cramps
She always stay far, disguising
Buuut then, It all "explodes" bcs all of this ends up on her body, like, weakened immune system, nausea, fainting, flu, burnout and Jason finds out, like, by someone else that something happened
I hope you understood, English is not my first language 😞
But, I would love to read this, for real
Thanks 🩷
The Weight of Small Things
navigation , dc navigation
PAIRINGS: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Wally West, Clark Kent, Hal Jordan, Roy Harper
requests are open
a/n: to cloudybats — your English is wonderful, I understood every word perfectly. Thank you for this request, it's a beautiful one. 💗
DICK GRAYSON
Dick finds out from Wally.
Which is already wrong, is already the thing that sits in his chest the wrong way before he even knows the details, because Dick is your boyfriend and Wally is your friend and the hierarchy of who should know things about you should not place Wally West above Richard Grayson.
Wally texts: hey did you know she fainted at the coffee shop on Morrison? barista called her a cab. she's home. thought you knew
Dick reads it twice.
Then he calls you.
You answer on the third ring, which is longer than usual, and your voice has a quality to it — something careful, something managed.
"Hey," you say.
"Why did Wally know you fainted before I did," he says.
A pause.
"He was nearby," you say. "It wasn't a big deal, the barista was really nice about it — "
"You fainted."
"It was a brief thing. Low blood sugar probably, I hadn’t eaten — "
"When did you last eat a full meal."
The pause is longer this time.
And that's the thing with Dick — he doesn't just hear words, he hears the spaces between them, the hesitations, the things people decide not to say in the half second before they say something else. He's been reading people since he was eight years old standing on a platform watching an audience, learning what performance looked like from both sides.
He knows what you're not saying.
"I'm coming over," he says.
"Dick, you really don't have to — "
"I'm already in the car."
He's not yet. He is within four seconds of being in the car.
You're on the couch when he arrives, wrapped in something, looking smaller than you should, with the particular grey quality of someone whose body has been sending signals for a while and has recently escalated to emergency broadcast.
He sits next to you and he doesn't say anything for a moment. Just looks.
"How long," he says.
"How long what."
"How long have you been running on empty." He says it without accusation. It's not a fight, it's a question, and Dick's questions are always genuine. "And don't say I've been fine. I can see your hands."
You look at your hands.
They have a slight tremor that you've been ignoring for a week.
"I didn't want to make it a thing," you say, and there it is — the shape of it, the architecture of the problem, which Dick has been looking for since Wally's text and has now found. Didn't want to make it a thing. As if your body deciding to shut down is a thing you can choose not to make.
"Tell me," he says. "Everything. Start wherever."
"It's not — they're small things. The cramping's been bad and I haven't been sleeping well and I kept getting that headache that wouldn't — and then I thought I was getting a cold but maybe it's just — it's all small stuff, Dick. Nothing worth — "
"Nothing worth telling me?"
You look at him.
"It felt silly," you say. "You deal with — you deal with actual things. Real things. I felt like I'd be complaining about nothing."
Dick is very still for a moment.
Then he reaches over and takes both your hands, the ones with the slight tremor, and holds them in both of his.
"Here is something I need you to hear," he says, quiet and even. "There is no category called too small for Dick. That category does not exist. I want to know about the headaches and the cramps and the not sleeping. I want to know all of it. Not because it competes with anything else. Because it's yours, and that makes it mine too." He holds your gaze. "You don't have to be a crisis to deserve care. You just have to be you."
You don't say anything.
Your eyes do something.
"Okay," he says, softer now. "When did you last eat something real."
"Yesterday morning."
He stands up.
He makes you food. Real food, not crackers, not whatever was in the back of your cupboard — he finds what's there and he makes it work because Dick Grayson has made do with less in less comfortable circumstances.
He sits with you while you eat.
He doesn't make you talk more. He just stays, which is its own answer to the question of whether you take up too much space — you don't, you take up exactly the right amount, you take up the space he would leave empty if you weren't in it.
Later, when you're on the couch and he's got your feet in his lap and you're both watching something neither of you are paying attention to, you say:
"I didn't think it was worth bothering you."
"I know," he says.
"That was stupid."
"It wasn't stupid. It was learned." His hand on your ankle. "We can unlearn it."
"That sounds like a process."
"Good thing I'm patient," he says.
He is. Famously.
JASON TODD
Jason finds out from Alfred.
Alfred calls him at nine-fifteen PM with the specific quality of calm that Alfred uses when something is wrong and he is choosing not to escalate, which after years of being Alfred's emergency contact for everything Jason has learned to read as more alarming than shouting.
"She's at the manor," Alfred says. "She came by this afternoon and I'm afraid she's not well. She didn't want to call you."
The last sentence lands like it's supposed to.
"I'm on my way," Jason says.
He finds you in one of the guest rooms, which means Alfred had deemed you unfit to go home, which means it was worse than not well. You're in bed and you look terrible in the specific way of someone whose body has been managing something for too long and has recently stopped managing it.
Alfred has given him privacy and a look on his way out that communicated several things, the primary one being: be careful with her.
Jason closes the door.
He pulls the chair from the corner to next to the bed, which is a specific Jason thing — he doesn't perch, doesn't hover, plants himself like he's decided to stay and is establishing that fact architecturally.
"Hey," you say.
"Hey." He looks at you. "Alfred says you came here on your own."
"I was nearby."
"He says you nearly fainted in the entrance hall."
"I was a little dizzy."
"You were a little dizzy," Jason repeats, in the tone he uses when he's translating something from the language of minimization. "And you didn't call me."
"You were on a thing."
"I’m always on a thing."
"Exactly."
He looks at you for a long moment with the look he gets when he's putting something together, when the pieces of a pattern are assembling in real time and he's watching them click.
"How long has it been like this," he says.
"Like what."
"Like — this." He gestures at you, at the entirety of the situation. "Running yourself down to nothing. Not saying anything."
"I'm not — it's not dramatic. I've had bad cramps and I haven't been sleeping great and I picked up something, a cold or whatever, and I just — I didn't want to be annoying about it."
"Annoying," he says.
"You know what I mean."
"I don't, actually. Explain it to me."
You look at the ceiling. "It felt small. Every individual thing felt small. Like, who complains about cramps, or being tired, or a headache — "
"People," Jason says. "People complain about those things. Normal people who have bodies."
"It just — when I was growing up, whenever I'd bring something up it would always turn into well at least it's not, or other people have it worse, and I kind of just — learned that the bar for something being worth saying was higher than what I had." You still aren’t looking at him. "And I know you and your family have dealt with actual things. Real things. I didn’t want to show up next to all of that with my headache."
The room is quiet.
Jason leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
"You know what I've dealt with," he says, carefully. "You know my specific history with pain and what I consider worth registering."
"That's my point — "
"That's not your point. My point is that even I — who has died, who has a higher pain threshold than most people will ever have — even I would tell you about a headache that wouldn't go away. Because that's what you do with someone you trust. You tell them the small things." He meets your eyes. "The small things are not competing with the big things. They're not in the same category. They don't need to pass a threshold." He pauses. "You in any kind of discomfort is worth my attention. Full stop. No comparison required."
You swallow.
"I didn't want to be a burden," you say, which is the actual sentence, the one underneath all the others.
"I know," he says, and his voice is different now, quieter. "I know that's what it is. And I'm telling you — you're not. You're not a burden. You're the person I'm in this with." He sits back. "And you need to eat something and sleep and you're not going home tonight, Alfred's already decided that and I agree with him."
"You agree with Alfred?"
"Don't make it weird."
Despite everything, you almost smile.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay." He settles into the chair with the quality of someone who has made a decision about where he's going to be for the foreseeable future. "Next time something's wrong, you call me. Small thing, big thing, medium thing. All of it."
"Even the cramps?"
"Especially the cramps. I'll complain with you."
"You don't get cramps."
"I'll complain sympathetically. I've got range."
You look at him — at Jason Todd in a guest room chair at nine-thirty at night, having come from whatever he was doing, having parked himself next to you like the decision was already made before he walked through the door.
"Thank you," you say.
"Don’t thank me," he says. "Just call me next time."
"Okay," you say.
You mean it.
He stays until you fall asleep.
He's still there when you wake up, which you knew he would be, which is the thing about Jason Todd that most people don't see — that under everything, under all of it, he stays.
TIM DRAKE
Tim finds out from his own system.
Which is to say: Tim has a habit, developed over years of detective work, of noticing when patterns in people he cares about break. And your pattern has been breaking for three weeks in ways that are individually explicable and collectively significant, and he's been logging them without meaning to.
You've been slower to respond to texts. You've been quieter in the evenings. You've turned down food twice when you'd usually say yes. You've been wearing heavier layers, which means you're cold, which means your circulation is off. You'd cancelled plans twice with explanations that were plausible and true and which he had accepted and had filed and had continued to file.
The file gets a new entry when Bernard texts him.
Is she okay? She kind of collapsed at the library. She said she was fine but she looked really pale. Thought you should know.
Tim reads it once.
He's at yours in eighteen minutes.
You open the door and you look — he does the assessment in the first three seconds because Tim Drake's brain does not have an off switch — tired, pale, slight instability in your stance, the careful quality of someone who is performing okay rather than being it.
"Bernard texted you," you say.
"Yes."
"I told him not to — "
"He was right to." Tim comes in, because you've hesitated and that means you're going to argue and he's going to make that irrelevant by already being inside. "Sit down."
"Tim — "
"You can fight with me while sitting. You don't have to be standing for it." He's already moving toward the kitchen. "When did you eat."
"This morning."
"It's seven PM."
"I wasn't hungry."
"That's not the same as not needing to eat." He opens the fridge. Closes it. Opens a cabinet. "Talk to me. From the beginning. What's been going on."
"Nothing's been going on. I'm just tired."
"You've been just tired for three weeks."
You look at him.
"You noticed," you say, and something in your voice is complicated.
"I always notice." He finds something workable and starts doing something with it. "I just — I was waiting for you to tell me. I thought you would." He says it without accusation, but it lands anyway. "Why didn't you?"
The pause.
"Because it was small," you say. "Each thing individually was small. The cramps were bad but cramps happen. The headaches — I thought it was dehydration. Not sleeping well, that's just — that happens to everyone. I didn't want to make a whole thing out of nothing."
"It's not nothing. The sum of it isn't nothing."
"It felt like it."
Tim turns around. He leans against the counter and looks at you with the specific look, the one that means he's going to say something real and he's chosen his words carefully.
"Can I tell you what I observe?" he says.
"That sounds clinical."
"Humor me." He waits. "I observe that you default to this is too small to matter when it comes to your own experience. I observe that the bar you set for what's worth saying is significantly higher than the bar you'd set for anyone else. I observe that you have been running at a deficit for weeks and have been managing it alone because you'd decided, without asking, that it wasn't worth bringing to me." He pauses. "I'd like to know where that threshold came from. Because I don't recognize it. It didn't come from me."
"No," you say. "It's older than you."
"I know." He comes to sit across from you. "I'm asking because I want to understand it. Not to fix it tonight — I know that's not how it works. But I want to know where it came from so I know what I'm working with."
"Working with," you repeat.
"We're in this together. That means your old patterns are something we work with together." He says it simply, like it isn't an enormous thing to say. "Tell me about the cramps. How bad."
"Bad," you admit, and it's strange how much easier it is to say it now that he's asked directly.
"How long."
"About a week."
"And you just — dealt with it."
"I had a heat pad."
"You had a heat pad," he says, in the Tim voice that means he has opinions. "And you didn’t call me."
"You were busy — "
"I have never once in my life been too busy for you." He says it quietly. "Not for the big things or the small things. Not for cramps or headaches or just not being okay." He looks at you steadily. "I need you to know that. Actually know it."
You nod.
Something in your face that means you're taking it in rather than filing it under things people say.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he says. "We're going to eat something and then you're going to rest and we're going to revisit the conversation about what's worth telling me when you've slept."
"And what conclusion will that conversation reach?"
"That everything is worth telling me," he says. "Everything. Always. We'll revisit it until that's the answer you land on without having to be told."
You look at him for a moment.
"That's going to take a while," you say.
"I have time," Tim says simply.
He does.
He always makes time for you.
DAMIAN WAYNE
Damian finds out from Titus.
Not metaphorically. Literally — Titus has been restless for three days, pacing the sections of the manor that are near the guest quarters, and Damian has tracked this behavior with the same attention he gives everything and has determined it correlates with your visits and the particular energy you’ve been bringing into the building.
Titus, it turns out, knew before Damian did.
Which Damian considers a personal failing.
You'd come to the manor for dinner — a normal visit, a twice-weekly thing that had become part of the rhythm — and you'd been quiet throughout in a way that registered as fine to everyone else at the table and registered as wrong to Damian, who has spent enough time studying you to know that your particular kind of quiet has textures.
He follows you after dinner.
He finds you in the garden, not by design — you'd said you needed air, and the air excuse was real, but Damian has also noticed that the garden is where you go when you need to be somewhere the conversation can't reach you.
He sits next to you on the bench.
He doesn't say anything immediately, because Damian has learned, specifically with you, that the first words matter and that he does better when he chooses them.
"You've been unwell," he says. Not a question.
You look at him.
"I'm fine," you say.
"You are not fine." He says it without heat. "I've been observing. Your coloring is off. You've been favoring your left side throughout dinner, which suggests abdominal discomfort. You've been cold — you kept pulling your sleeve down over your hands. And Titus has been concerned about you for three days."
"Titus," you say faintly.
"He's perceptive." Damian looks at the garden. "What's wrong. The actual answer."
A pause.
Then, because Damian has a specific way of asking that makes deflection feel more exhausting than honesty:
"Bad month," you say. "Cramps that won't quit, and I picked up something — I keep feeling like I'm about to get sick but it never quite — and I haven't been sleeping. And I fainted on Tuesday. Briefly. It was fine."
"You fainted," he says.
"It was brief."
"That is not a modifier that makes fainting acceptable." He turns to look at you fully. "Why didn't you tell me."
"Because it's small."
"Fainting is not small — "
"Each thing is small," you say. "That's the thing. Nothing on its own is worth a conversation. Cramps are normal. Being tired is normal. A little dizziness — that's all just normal human stuff, Damian. I didn't want to turn it into a production."
"Who told you your health was a production."
The question lands strangely. You open your mouth and close it.
"It's not — no one said that specifically — "
"But something made you believe it." He holds your gaze, and Damian's gaze is always direct, always genuinely attentive. "Something made you decide that your body sending distress signals was information you should keep to yourself rather than bring to me."
"I didn't want to worry you."
"I'm worried now," he says. "Retroactively. For every day this has been happening while I didn't know." He looks away briefly, jaw doing the thing. "I would rather be worried alongside you than ignorant behind you. That is always preferable."
You're quiet.
"I didn't think it was worth your concern," you say, finally. The real sentence.
"Everything that affects you is worth my concern," Damian says, in the specific tone he uses when something is not a discussion. "That is not something I require you to earn or justify. You are — " he pauses, and this pause is Damian choosing something he doesn't always say. "You matter to me. Entirely. The things that cause you pain cause me to want to address them. This is not a burden you're placing. This is the natural function of — " another pause — "of what this is."
Damian Wayne does not always have easy access to certain words.
What this is functions well enough.
"Okay," you say quietly.
"You're staying tonight," he says. Not a question.
"Damian — "
"Alfred is already aware. He's prepared a room." He stands, and holds out a hand, which from Damian is the fullest possible expression of what he just said. "You will eat something more than you ate at dinner and you will sleep and I will observe an improvement in your condition or there will be a medical consultation in the morning."
"There will be?"
"I will strongly recommend it," he revises, which is Damian acknowledging that he does not in fact control your medical decisions, which is growth.
You take his hand.
He walks you back inside and Titus follows the whole way, pressed to your other side, and Damian notes this with the specific quality of someone filing Titus was right under things he will not say out loud but will remember.
You were not nothing.
You were never nothing.
He simply needed you to know that he knew.
BRUCE WAYNE
Bruce finds out the way Bruce finds out most things — by being the last person told, and by that fact alone understanding that something has been managed around him.
Alfred mentions it. Carefully, the way Alfred mentions things he knows will land hard.
"She's been under the weather," he says, during a debrief that has nothing to do with you, which is the point — the casualness of it is designed. "I believe it's been some weeks. She mentioned it to me in passing yesterday when she came by."
Bruce is quiet.
"In passing," he says.
"She seemed surprised I'd noticed." Alfred pauses. "She didn't believe she was worth mentioning."
Bruce sits with that for a moment that is longer than it should be.
He drives to your apartment. He doesn't call ahead because calling ahead gives you the opportunity to say I'm fine, you don't have to come, and Bruce has been in enough conversations that contain that sentence to know it is almost never accurate.
You open the door and he looks at you — and Bruce looking at you is a comprehensive thing, thirty-seven years of learning to read what people don't say — and he sees it. The careful performance of okay. The way you're standing that costs you something. The grey around the edges that you've been managing well enough that it hadn't been visible from a distance.
He's been at a distance.
That's on him.
"Alfred told me," he says.
You exhale. "Alfred."
"He was right to." He comes in. "Sit down."
You sit.
He takes the chair across from you, and Bruce sitting across from you is a particular thing — not hovering, not overwhelming, the specific distance of someone who is giving you room while being absolutely present within it.
"How long," he says.
"Bruce — "
"How long."
You look at your hands. "About a month. Maybe five weeks."
"And you didn't say anything."
"It was small," you start, and he watches you find the words you always find, the architecture of the thing, the reasons that made sense when they were built and look different now. "I kept thinking — you deal with things that are actually — the scale of what you handle, Bruce. Every day. Real things, important things. And I had cramps and couldn't sleep and felt run down, and every time I thought about mentioning it I just thought — compared to what you carry — "
"Don't," he says. Quietly. Firmly. "Don't finish that sentence."
You look at him.
"What I carry is not a measuring stick for what you're allowed to bring to me," he says. "That's not how this works. That's not how I want it to work." He looks at you steadily. "Do you know what I was doing five weeks ago while you were not telling me something was wrong?"
"Working, probably."
"I was working," he agrees. "And I came home and you asked me how I was and I told you, and you listened, and I didn't think to ask what you were carrying because you seemed fine." He pauses. "I'm not good at asking. I'm aware of that. That's mine to address. But you not telling me — that's something different. That's you deciding in advance that you didn't deserve the space."
"I didn't want to be a burden."
"I know," he says, and it's very quiet. "I know that's what it is. And I understand where it comes from — I understand the logic of it, the way it gets built, the way it feels true from inside it." He leans forward slightly. "But I need you to hear me: you are not a burden. You are — you are the person I come home to. You are the person I want to come home to. Whatever you're carrying belongs in the same house as what I'm carrying. That's what this is."
You swallow.
"It feels small," you say. "What I have. Compared."
"Nothing about you is small compared," he says. "The comparison doesn't apply."
You're quiet for a moment.
"I fainted," you say. "On Tuesday. I didn't tell you."
Something happens on his face. Controlled, but you see it — the specific quality of someone processing information about a person they love that changes the geometry of the past several days.
"Where," he says.
"At the coffee shop on Fifth."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"And you — "
"The barista was nice. I got a cab home. I was fine."
"You fainted," he says, with the careful precision of someone not letting himself be angry at the wrong thing. "Alone. And you got a cab and went home and didn't say anything."
"You were in a thing that afternoon — "
"I would have left the thing."
"That's why I didn't tell you," you say. "I didn't want you to leave important — "
"You are important," he says, and the words are very simple and very final. "You are important. Not also important. Not important considering. Important. The work exists so that people can be safe. You are people. You are specifically a person I love. The hierarchy should be clear to you."
You look at him.
He holds your gaze.
"Tell me things," he says. "From now on. Small things. Big things. The cramps and the headaches and the nights you can't sleep. Tell me. I'm not too occupied for any of it." A pause. "I'm sorry I didn't ask sooner. I'm going to do better at asking."
"Bruce — "
"That's mine. I'm keeping it." He stands. "Alfred is sending food. You're not going to argue with Alfred."
"Nobody argues with Alfred."
"Correct." He looks at you from standing, and his expression is the one he keeps careful but you know where to find it now, the one underneath the Bruce Wayne of it. "I should have noticed. I'm sorry I didn't."
"You couldn't have known — "
"I should have asked." He says it simply. "I'm going to ask more."
He does.
Starting that night, and every night after.
It's not a perfect system. Bruce Wayne asking how are you will always have a learning curve. But he asks, and you learn to answer, and the small things start taking up the space they were always allowed.
WALLY WEST
Wally finds out because Wally is everywhere.
Not in a surveillance way — in the Wally way, the way of someone who moves through the world at a frequency that means he catches things other people miss because they simply weren't there for long enough.
He'd been past your building. A quick thing, between here and there, and he'd caught the sound of you through an open window — not words, just the particular quality of someone who is not okay in their own space, thinking they're alone with it.
He's at your door in the time it takes most people to consider knocking.
You open it and you look at him and something in your face does the thing it does when you've been caught — not guilty, but something adjacent, the look of someone who has been managing something alone and finds themselves suddenly visible.
"Hey," he says.
"Hi," you say. "Were you — "
"I was passing. I heard." He looks at you. "Can I come in?"
You step back.
He comes in and immediately, comprehensively, assesses the situation. The way Wally assesses things is not the same as the way Bruce or Tim assess things — it's not systematic, it's not catalogued. It's immediate and emotional and entirely accurate.
You've been crying, recently or for a while. The apartment has the quality of a place where someone has been alone too long. There's a heat pad on the couch.
"How bad," he says.
"It’s fine — "
"Not asking if it's fine. Asking how bad."
You sit on the couch. He sits next to you, which for Wally means being in immediate physical proximity because Wally's instinct in every situation is toward closeness.
"Bad month," you say. "My body's kind of — it's all catching up at once, I think. Cramps and not sleeping and I keep feeling like I'm about to get sick and I've been so tired, Wally. I've just been so tired and I didn't want to make it anyone's problem — "
"Mine," he says. "Why didn't you want to make it my problem."
"Because it's small — "
"You've been crying by yourself," he says, not unkindly. "That’s not small."
"Each individual thing is small."
"The accumulation isn't small." He takes your hand, both of his around yours, Wally's version of steady which is always warm and always immediate. "And even if it was — even if every single piece of it was the smallest possible thing — you don't have to carry small things alone either. That's not the rule. You don't have to reach a certain size before you're allowed to bring it to me."
"I just — I'm used to managing things."
"I know," he says. "I've noticed that. I should've said something sooner, that's on me." He squeezes your hand. 'But I need you to know — the bar for coming to me is not high. The bar is basically just: is something happening. If yes, tell me. That's it. That's the whole threshold."
"That's a very low bar."
"It's not a bar." He says it with the Wally emphasis, the one that means he needs you to hear this specifically. "It's just — I want to know. When you're okay and when you're not and everywhere in between. I want to know all of it."
You look at him.
He is very sincere. Wally West is always very sincere and somehow it never gets old.
"The cramps are really bad this month," you say, which is the first genuinely undefended sentence you've said since he arrived.
"Okay," he says. "What helps."
"Heat pad."
"You've got one. What else."
"Distraction, mostly."
"I'm excellent at distraction." He shifts so you can lean against him if you want, the Wally shift, the one that offers without requiring. "Tell me when you want to talk and when you want to be distracted and I'll do whichever."
You lean against him.
"Distraction first," you say.
"Distraction first," he agrees, and starts talking — about something funny that happened yesterday, something small and funny and entirely Wally, and his voice is warm and easy and the heat pad is doing its thing and you feel, for the first time in weeks, like you don't have to hold everything yourself.
Wally West makes the world move fast.
But right now, with you, he makes it slow.
That's not an accident.
That's a choice he makes every single time.
ROY HARPER
Roy finds out from Lian.
Lian is seven and perceptive in the way of children who have grown up paying attention to adults, and she'd been on a video call with you when something had happened — you'd gone pale mid-conversation, grabbed the counter, and Lian had called for Roy with the urgency of a child who knows the difference between a normal moment and an abnormal one.
Roy had been there in four seconds.
You'd been fine — you'd recovered, it was brief, you'd said I just stood up too fast and smiled at Lian and the call had ended shortly after.
Roy sat with Lian for a minute after.
"She didn't look good," Lian said, with seven-year-old frankness.
"I know," Roy said.
"She said she was fine."
"I know," Roy said.
He calls you.
You answer with the voice — he knows the voice, he has a history with people who use that voice, who manage and minimize and present fine as a finished product — and he cuts through it cleanly.
"Lian was worried," he says.
"It was nothing — "
"Lian was worried," he says again, which is a Roy move — bringing in a third party not as leverage but as data, as evidence that the moment was visible to someone other than him. "And I watched it on the screen. You went white."
"I stood up too fast."
"How long has this been happening."
A pause. The pause that means more than the words that come after it.
"A while," you admit.
"How long is a while."
"Three, four weeks. I've just been run down. Cramps and not sleeping and I think I'm fighting something off — my immune system's been all over the place."
"And you didn't say anything."
"Roy — "
"I'm not — I'm not coming at you for it." His voice is level, the Roy level that means he's keeping himself from the reactive thing and going for the real thing instead. "I just want to understand why."
"Because it's small."
"Everything is small until your body decides it’s done being small," he says. "I've learned that the hard way. Multiple times. In multiple contexts." A pause. "What were you thinking? Like when you thought about telling me and decided not to. What was the thought."
You consider this seriously, because Roy asked it seriously.
"I thought that you deal with actual hard things," you say. "And that showing up with I'm tired and my cramps are bad next to what you've actually been through felt — embarrassing. Like complaining about a paper cut to someone who's been in surgery."
"That's a false comparison."
"I know. Logically. But it's how it felt."
"It always feels like that," Roy says, and he says it with the weight of someone speaking from experience. "Every time something's wrong it feels like it's not the right size to bring to someone. Like you're imposing." He pauses. "I spent years not saying things because I thought they weren't big enough. You know what happened?"
"They got bigger," you say.
"They got a lot bigger." He exhales. "I'm not you. Your situation isn't mine. But I know what it costs to carry things alone until the cost becomes physical. I know what that looks like." Another pause. "I don't want to watch that happen to you."
You're quiet.
"Can I come over," he says.
"Roy, you don't have to — "
"I know I don't have to. I'm asking if I can." He waits. "Can I?"
"...Yeah," you say. "Yeah, you can."
He comes over.
He brings food because Roy Harper's primary love language is practical and food is practical. He sits with you and he doesn't make the evening a conversation about the problem — he lets it be just an evening, the two of you, the food, something on the television that neither of you are fully watching.
But at the end of it, before he leaves, he says:
"From now on. Small things. You tell me."
"Roy — "
"I'll tell you mine," he says. "You tell me yours. That’s how this works." He looks at you. "Deal?"
You look back at him.
"Deal," you say.
He nods, once, the Roy nod.
It means: good. It means: I'm going to hold you to that. It means: I'm glad you're still here and I want to know when you're not okay so I can do something about it.
Roy Harper speaks mostly in the things underneath the things.
You're fluent now.
HAL JORDAN
Hal finds out from Carol.
Which is a whole thing, because Carol Ferris knowing something about you before Hal does involves a chain of events that Hal has to reconstruct afterward, and the reconstruction goes like this: you'd been at an event that Carol was also at, and Carol — who is perceptive in the way of someone who has spent thirty years watching Hal Jordan not notice things — had clocked something wrong with you and had mentioned it to him with the specific tone she uses when she's covering for his observational failures.
"Your girlfriend looked terrible last night," Carol says, on the phone.
"What? She said she was fine when I talked to her before — "
"She said she was fine because she says she’s fine." Carol's voice has a quality. "She's been saying she's fine for at least a few weeks by the look of it. You should check in."
Hal checks in.
You answer and there's the voice — he knows the voice now that Carol has named it, the specific quality of fine that is managed rather than real — and he does a thing he doesn't always do, which is not accept it at face value.
"Can I come over," he says.
"Hal, I'm fine — "
"Yeah, I want to come over anyway." He says it easily, casually, the Hal Jordan charm deployed in the direction of getting through a door. "I just want to see you."
You let him come.
He arrives and looks at you — and Hal looking at things has been refined by years of having a ring that requires him to see clearly, to see past what's presented to what's there — and he sees it. The running-on-empty of it. The cost of several weeks of managing alone.
"Hey," he says.
"Hi," you say. "Carol called you."
"Carol mentioned." He comes in. "She wasn't wrong to."
"I wasn't — I'm fine, Hal. I've just been tired — "
"How long."
You do the thing, the pause, the calculation, and then something in you seems to decide that the calculation is more exhausting than honesty.
"Month," you say. "Maybe more. I've just been run down. Bad cramps, not sleeping, I think my immune system's tanking — I fainted once, it was brief — "
"You fainted."
"It was brief."
"That doesn't — " he stops, and he does the Hal thing where he catches himself before the reactive response and goes for the real one. "How brief."
"A few seconds. I was fine."
"Okay." He sits across from you. "Why didn’t you tell me."
"Because it's small," you say, and your voice is tired in a way that means you've been arguing this point with yourself for weeks. "Each thing is small. You go to space, Hal. You deal with things on a scale that is literally galactic. I have cramps and I'm tired and I didn’t want to — it felt ridiculous, to bring that to you."
"It's not ridiculous."
"I know that's what you're supposed to say — "
"I'm not saying it because I'm supposed to." He leans forward. "I'm saying it because I've been in situations, out there, where the small stuff was the thing that broke people. Not the big dramatic crisis. The accumulation of small stuff that nobody thought was worth mentioning." He holds your gaze. "Your body is not a problem to be scaled against galactic concerns. Your body is the person I come back to. It matters specifically and independently of anything else."
You look at him.
"I didn't think I had the right to bother you," you say.
"You have every right." He says it simply. "Every right. My attention is not a limited resource that gets allocated by severity. It's yours. That's just — it's yours."
"Hal — "
"I'm serious." He holds your gaze, and Hal Jordan when he's serious is a different thing than Hal Jordan the rest of the time — the performance drops and what's under it is earnest and genuine and completely unguarded. "I know I make it seem like everything's fine and I'm fine and we're all fine. I know I project that. But it doesn't mean I don't want to know when things aren't." He pauses. "I want to know. When you're not okay. Even when it's small. Maybe especially when it's small because if I know when it's small I can do something about it before it becomes what this is."
You're quiet.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay?"
"Okay." You look at him. "I'll tell you."
He nods, once, and some of the tension in his shoulders releases.
"Good," he says. "Now tell me about the cramps because I want to understand what you're dealing with and then we're going to figure out what helps."
"You want to understand the cramps."
"I want to understand everything that's happening with you. Start wherever."
You start.
He listens the whole way through.
Hal Jordan, it turns out, is an excellent listener when the performance is down.
He's going to work harder at keeping it down.
For you, specifically, he's going to work very hard.
CLARK KENT
Clark finds out because Clark can hear everything.
That is both the gift and the specific burden of being Clark Kent, the thing he manages constantly, the endless noise of the world filtered and tuned and mostly kept at a distance except for the things he's calibrated himself to catch.
He's calibrated to catch you.
Not intrusively — it's not surveillance, it's more like the way you tune to a specific frequency without meaning to, the way certain sounds cut through everything else. He catches your heartbeat in crowds. He catches your voice when it's in range.
He catches, one night, the sound of you trying not to cry.
And beneath it, the elevated temperature. The slightly arrhythmic quality of a body running on insufficient rest. The things a doctor's instruments would catch if you went to a doctor, which you haven't, because you've decided it's not worth the fuss.
He's at your door in four minutes.
You open it and the light from the hallway hits your face and he sees it directly — the exhaustion, the weeks of accumulation, the way you've been carrying something until your body decided it was done letting you carry it quietly.
"Clark," you say, surprised.
"Hey," he says. "Can I come in?"
You step back.
He sits with you, and Clark sitting with you is a specific thing — the warmth of him, the unhurried quality, like someone who has all the time in the world and has chosen to use it here.
"You heard something," you say.
"Yes," he says honestly, because Clark is honest. "I heard you, and I heard — I heard that something was wrong. I'm sorry for the intrusion. I just — I needed to see you."
"It's okay," you say.
"Is it?"
"It's you. Yes."
He looks at you.
"How long have you been not okay," he says.
"I'm okay — "
"How long have you been not okay," he says again, gentle and patient, and this is a Clark move — he will ask the same question again, calmly, without escalating, because he knows eventually the real answer comes.
"A few weeks," you say. "A month, maybe. I’ve just been run down. It's been a hard month physically, cramps and not sleeping and I think I'm fighting something off and it all just — it's been a lot. But it's small stuff. Each thing is small."
"The sum isn't small," he says.
"I know. But it didn't seem worth — you're Superman, Clark. You help people every day with actual crises. I have bad cramps and I can't sleep."
Clark is quiet for a moment.
"Can I tell you something I've learned," he says.
"Yeah."
"I've learned, over a long time, that the hardest thing about being — about what I can do — is that it makes the ordinary things feel less visible. Less important." He looks at you. "People stop telling me things because they assume I'm dealing with bigger things. And I lose the ordinary things because they've decided those don't qualify." He pauses. "That's the loneliest part. Not the extraordinary. The way the extraordinary makes the ordinary disappear."
You look at him.
"I don't want that with you," he says. "I don't want you to disappear your ordinary because you've decided it's too small for me. The cramps and the not sleeping and the month that's been hard — those are the things I want to know about. Not instead of the other things I do. Alongside them." He holds your gaze. "You being okay is not a small matter. It is, genuinely, one of the things that matters most to me."
Your eyes are doing something.
"I didn't want to be a burden," you say.
"You're not a burden." He says it the way Clark says things he means completely, simply, without performance. "You are the person I want to know is okay. That’s not a burden. That's just — you."
You look at him for a long moment.
"My immune system's kind of crashed," you say.
"Okay."
"And the cramps have been bad."
"Okay. What helps."
"Heat. Sleep mostly. Having someone around helps."
"I can do all of those," he says. "Starting with the being around part, if that’s okay."
"That's okay," you say.
He stays.
He stays the way Clark stays — quietly, warmly, without agenda, just present in the way that means you're not alone with it anymore.
Idk if you still take the request but can you make Jason Todd x reader who is John Constantine protégé.
They know each other when outlaw had a mission with paranormal things...blah blah blah...(You can do what mission, I don't mind) Jason though they will be bitch as Constantine, but actually had sweet personality and can fit with anyone in outlaw...and they got to know each other deeper blah blah blah... Jason find out reader actually had ability to resurrection herself and had shitty past with that ability, but different from him, they came back with no anger to anyone in they past blah blah blah... Then meet Constantine that why they Constantine protégé blah blah blah... (You can made whatever past they been through)
(P.s sorry with my English, it's suck I know, but I'm lazy to fix it)
Exorcism (And Other Bad First Impressions)
navigation , dc navigation
requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
John Constantine had exactly one rule when it came to taking on a protégé, and that rule was: don't.
He'd broken it for you anyway, four years ago, in a basement in Birmingham that still occasionally showed up in your nightmares. You'd been seventeen, soaked in something that wasn't blood but acted like it, and instead of running — which was the correct response, the response any sane person would have had — you'd looked at the thing curled around the ceiling and said, "okay, that's new," and started reciting wards from memory.
"Anyone who's calm about an Old One is either an idiot or useful," John had told you afterward, lighting a cigarette with hands that weren't quite steady. "Lucky for you, you're useful."
You'd been his for four years since. Not in the way the demons meant when they said it, sneering the word like it was a leash — in the way that mattered. He'd taught you wards and Latin and how to bind a thing that didn't want binding. He'd also taught you how to drink, how to lie to a priest's face, and how to tell the difference between a haunting and a depression, which turned out to be a more useful skill than either of you expected.
He had not taught you anything about the Outlaws, which was how you ended up on a rooftop in Gotham with a girl made of clay, an archer with a god complex, and a man wearing a red helmet who you were fairly sure wanted to shoot you.
"You're the exorcist," the helmet said. Not a question. An accusation.
"I'm an exorcist," you corrected. "Definite article's doing a lot of work there."
"Constantine sent you."
"Constantine's currently three countries over, dealing with something he described as 'not my problem, love, you'll be fine,' which is historically the sentence right before something becomes very much my problem." You crouched down, examining the symbol someone had carved into the rooftop's access door — old, ugly, the kind of thing that wanted blood and wasn't picky about whose. "So. Yes. He sent me. You're welcome, by the way."
"We didn't ask for help."
"You called a hotline that exists specifically for paranormal emergencies and asked for help. That's the literal definition of asking for help."
The helmet was quiet for a second, which you would later learn was Jason Todd's version of being annoyed that you were right.
"Bizarro found a symbol in the sewer that made him cry," Artemis said, by way of introduction. "We don't really do the magic stuff."
"Lucky for you," you said, "I do."
The mission itself was — fine. Messy, the way these things usually were, full of wrong turns and a summoning circle that had clearly been drawn by someone who'd learned Latin from a video game, and a thing in the sewers that turned out to be smaller and angrier than advertised, which was somehow worse. You banished it with salt and a binding John had taught you when you were nineteen and too cocky to be scared, and Jason watched you do it with his arms crossed and his helmet under one arm, looking at you like you were a math problem he hadn't finished solving.
"You're not what I expected," he said afterward, while Bizarro tried to wash sewer water out of his cape and Artemis pretended not to listen.
"What'd you expect?"
"I don't know. Robes. Candles. Someone older."
"Constantine's the one with the trenchcoat aesthetic. I just clean up his mess." You wiped the salt off your hands. "What'd you expect from Outlaws? A guy who shoots people and feels weird about it?"
Something flickered across his face — too fast to name, there and gone.
"Something like that," he said.
You weren't supposed to see them again. That was the whole point of a hotline — you showed up, you fixed the problem, you left a number in case it got worse, you went back to whatever city John had decided needed you next. That was the job. That had always been the job.
Except the Outlaws kept finding paranormal problems, with a frequency that started to feel less like coincidence and more like a pattern, and you kept getting the call, and somewhere around the fourth job — a haunted gun warehouse, of all things, which honestly should have been funnier than it was — you stopped pretending you minded.
"You're here a lot," Artemis observed, the fourth time, watching you draw a containment circle with the bored efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times.
"Gotham's haunted. Sue the city."
"Gotham's haunted because something keeps inviting things in," Jason said, from across the room, not looking up from the gun he was cleaning. "Funny how that lines up with you showing up more."
"Are you accusing me of summoning monsters for the overtime pay?"
"I'm saying it's a pattern."
"The pattern is that your city is built on a hellmouth, Jason, that's not new information."
He looked up at that. You hadn't called him by his name before — always Hood, or helmet, or once, memorably, the angry one — and something about it landed differently than you'd meant it to.
"Jason," he repeated, like he was testing how it sounded in your mouth.
"That's your name."
"Yeah." A pause. "I like it better than the other ones."
You didn't have a response for that, so you went back to your circle, and didn't notice the way Artemis was grinning at both of you until much later.
Here's what you learned about Jason Todd, in the months that followed, mission by mission, conversation by conversation, the way you learn a person — not in one reveal but in a hundred small ones:
He was, against every expectation his armor and his guns and his reputation had set up, kind. Not in a soft, easy way — in a hard-won way, a way that had survived things that should have killed it for good. He gave his jacket to a kid sleeping on a grate without making it a moment. He remembered that Artemis hated the smell of lavender and Bizarro loved trashy reality TV, and adjusted around both facts without comment. He read constantly, paperbacks shoved in jacket pockets, dog-eared and reread.
He was also furious, underneath all of it, in a low banked way that never quite went out. You'd see it sometimes — in the half-second before he pulled a trigger, in the way his jaw set when Bruce's name came up, in nights when he didn't sleep and you didn't ask why.
You understood that fury better than you wanted to.
"You've got a tell," John told you, over a video call you'd answered while sitting on the Outlaws' safehouse roof, three weeks into whatever this had become. "When you talk about the Red Hood boy. Your voice goes soft."
"I don't have a tell."
"You absolutely have a tell, pet, I've known you four years." He took a drag of his cigarette, somewhere in what looked like Prague. "Just be careful. He's got the kind of anger that doesn't always know where to point itself."
"So did I."
"Yeah." John's voice softened, just slightly, just for a second. "And look how that turned out."
It was Jason who found out first. Not because you'd planned to tell him — you hadn't planned anything, that had always been the problem with this — but because the city had a way of forcing the issue, and the issue, on this particular night, was a gun, a warehouse, and a man who'd been more prepared for you than anyone had bothered to warn you about.
You remembered the shot. You remembered the floor coming up to meet you, fast and hard and final in a way that floors usually weren't. You did not remember much else, because there usually wasn't much else to remember — that was the nature of the thing, the gap between before and after that never quite filled in no matter how many times you crossed it.
What you remembered next was waking up. Gasping, raw, every nerve lit up like a struck match, on a warehouse floor that was — for reasons you'd sort out later — somehow less bloody than it should have been.
And Jason. Kneeling over you. Helmet off, face white, hands shaking in a way you'd never seen them shake before, not even in the worst of it.
"You were dead," he said. Flat. Furious. Terrified. "You were — I checked, I checked, there wasn't a pulse, there was no — you were dead."
"I know," you said, because there wasn't really a way to soften it. "I get that a lot."
"You get that a lot." He said it like the words didn't make sense arranged that way. "What does that mean. What the hell does that mean."
You sat up slowly, joints aching with the specific deep-bone ache of having recently not had a pulse. "It means I come back. I don't know why, I don't know how, I've had it checked by people who know more about magic than anyone alive should and none of them have a clean answer. I just — come back."
Jason was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet you'd later learn meant he was somewhere else entirely, somewhere with a crowbar and a warehouse of his own and a version of this exact moment that had gone very differently.
"How long have you had this," he said finally.
"Since I was sixteen."
"Sixteen." His voice cracked, just slightly, just once. "What happened when you were sixteen."
You looked at him — at the helmet on the floor beside him, at the hands that were still shaking, at four years of knowing exactly what it cost to come back wrong, and decided that if anyone in the world had earned the truth, it was this man.
"I died angry," you said. "The first time. Properly angry — the kind that doesn't burn out, the kind that just sits in your chest and waits. I came back and I wanted to make everyone who'd hurt me pay for it. Spent two years like that. Burned through people, burned through myself, did things I'm not — " You stopped. Started again. "John found me at the bottom of that. Pulled me out of it. Not the dying — I'd stopped minding the dying, by then — but the anger. He taught me there was a difference between using what happened to you and letting it use you back."
"And now?"
"Now I come back and it doesn't take anything with it. No rage, no debt, no — nothing chasing me back up. Just me. A little more tired each time, but just me." You held his gaze. "That's not luck, Jason. That's years of work. Years of choosing, every single time, not to let it be the other thing."
Jason's hands had stopped shaking. He reached out — slow, careful, like you were something that might still be fragile despite every available evidence — and pulled you against his chest.
"I came back wrong," he said, into your hair. "I came back so wrong. Took me years to stop wanting to burn the whole world down for what happened to me."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because I watch you, Jason. I've watched you for months." You pulled back enough to look at him. "And I think you've done more of that work than you give yourself credit for. I think you're not who you were when you came back. I think that's worth something."
"You sound like you've had this conversation before."
"I've had this conversation with myself, every day, for four years." You allowed yourself a small smile. "It gets easier. Not easy. Easier."
You met him properly two weeks later — John, trenchcoat and cigarette and an expression that suggested he already had opinions — at a diner that smelled like burnt coffee and bad decisions, because Jason had insisted, in the specific stubborn way he insisted on things that mattered to him, on meeting the man who'd apparently rebuilt you from the inside out.
"So you're the one," John said, looking Jason over with the frank assessment of a man who'd outlived several apocalypses and wasn't easily impressed. "The dead Robin."
"Former dead Robin," Jason said. "Current Red Hood."
"Bit of a downgrade, titles-wise."
"Bit of an upgrade, actual-life-wise."
John's mouth twitched — almost a smile, the closest he came to approving of anyone on a first meeting. "Fair point, that."
"John," you said, in the tone of someone heading off a disaster early.
"I'm being polite."
"You're being you, which is occasionally adjacent to polite but rarely the same thing."
John ignored you entirely, leaning across the table toward Jason with the particular intensity of a man about to ask something he actually cared about the answer to. "You good to her?"
"John—"
"I'm asking him, pet, not you." He didn't look away from Jason. "You good to her? Because I've spent four years making sure she came back from things without the rot setting in, and I'm not about to watch some boy in a leather jacket undo it."
Jason held his gaze, steady, unflinching, in a way that made something in your chest go warm.
"I died and came back wrong," he said. "Took years to claw my way to something close to right. She watched me do it without flinching once. I'm not going anywhere near undoing anything for her. I'm trying to be the reason it stays good."
John studied him for a long moment. Then, finally, leaned back, satisfied in the begrudging way that was the most you ever got out of him.
"Bitchy," he said, gesturing vaguely at Jason. "But sweet, underneath. I can work with that."
"I'm not bitchy."
"You ordered black coffee and made a face about the diner's silverware within ninety seconds of sitting down. You're bitchy. It's not an insult, love, I'm bitchy too. It's a compatible trait."
"He's not wrong," you told Jason, fighting a smile.
"I hate that he's not wrong."
John lit a cigarette, looking entirely too pleased with himself. "Welcome to the family, Red Hood. God help you."
Later — much later, on the Outlaws' rooftop, with the city doing its usual thing below you and Jason's arm warm around your shoulders — he asked the question you'd known was coming.
"Does it scare you? Knowing you'll keep coming back, no matter what?"
You thought about it properly, the way the question deserved.
"No," you said finally. "It used to. Now it just feels like — proof, I guess. That whatever happens, I get another shot at getting it right. Most people don't get that. I get it built in."
"That's a strange kind of lucky."
"The strangest." You leaned into him. "You get it too, technically. Just the hard way."
"Yeah." His voice was quiet. "The very hard way."
"For what it's worth," you said, "I think you're doing a good job with your shot."
Jason pressed a kiss to your temple, unhurried, certain.
"So are you," he said. "So are we."
Below you, Gotham kept being Gotham — haunted, ugly, occasionally on fire, in need of exactly the two of you and the strange, hard-won, secondhand life you'd both fought your way back into.
Some things, you'd learned, were worth dying for more than once.
Hi I read your Plus One fic and I was wondering if you could do a Bruce version... if not that is totally fine 🫣
Uncharted
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requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
Bruce Wayne does not have a plan.
This is, in the context of Bruce Wayne's life, genuinely unprecedented.
He has contingencies for alien invasions. He has protocols for scenarios that have a statistical likelihood of approximately zero, and he has prepared for them anyway because zero is not the same as impossible, and Bruce learned that lesson early and has never unlearned it. He has files. He has backup files. He has backups for the backups, nested in systems that would take a significant portion of the world's intelligence community a significant portion of their careers to find.
He does not have a plan for this.
He's standing in the bathroom doorway — your bathroom, you'd done the test in your bathroom because the manor felt too large for this, too many rooms for something this small and this significant — looking at you sitting on the edge of the tub holding a small piece of plastic that has just rearranged everything.
You look up at him.
"So," you say.
"So," he says.
The test sits between you like a fact, which is what it is. Bruce deals in facts. He respects facts. He has, on multiple occasions, built entire strategies around a single fact that other people missed.
This fact, he does not know what to do with.
"Are you okay?" you ask, which is — and you know this, you know him — the wrong question to ask Bruce Wayne, because Bruce Wayne's answer to " Are you okay is reflexive and automatic and tells you nothing.
"I'm — " he starts.
"Don't say fine."
He closes his mouth.
He tries again.
"I don't know," he says, which from Bruce is an extraordinary sentence. An almost unprecedented one. "I don't — I need a moment."
"Take it," you say.
He takes it.
He's standing in a bathroom doorway and he's Batman and he's the most prepared person he knows how to be and he has never been less prepared for anything in his life, and the thing on his face — the thing you can see because you know where to look, because you've spent enough time learning the geography of Bruce Wayne to find the places he doesn't guard — is not distress exactly.
It's something that doesn't have a clean name.
Something large and overwhelming and not entirely bad.
"I've done this before," he says, finally, carefully.
"I know."
"The boys." He says it like he's checking a fact. "I've — I know how this works. I've raised children."
"You have."
"It's different," he says, and something in his voice shifts. "This is — this wasn't — with the boys, there was always a crisis first. There was always something that had already happened, and I was responding to it. This is — "
"Preemptive," you offer.
"Yes." He looks at the test. "There's no protocol for preemptive."
You look at him for a long moment.
"Bruce," you say.
"Yes."
"Come sit down."
He comes and sits on the edge of the tub next to you, which in any other circumstance would be almost funny — Bruce Wayne, in his own manor's guest bathroom, sitting on a bathtub edge at eight in the morning, looking like someone has removed a load-bearing wall from a building he was standing in.
You take his hand.
He holds on.
"I need to think," he says, not to you exactly. To the middle distance. "I need to — there are things to consider. Logistics. Security concerns — "
"Bruce."
"The manor's security is sufficient, but there are gaps in the residential wing that I've been meaning to address, and this would accelerate that timeline, and the question of whether the mission — whether the boys are — "
"Bruce."
He stops.
"How do you feel?" You say. Not are you okay? Not is this okay. "Right now, in this moment, before the logistics. How do you feel?"
He's quiet for a long time.
A long time, for Bruce Wayne.
"Terrified," he says, eventually.
"Yeah?"
"Profoundly." A pause. "And something else."
"What else?"
He looks at the test.
He looks at you.
"I don't have a word for it," he says, which Bruce Wayne rarely says, because Bruce Wayne has words for everything, has catalogued and categorized and filed the entire observable world. "It's — it's very large. And it's in the same place as the terrified."
You squeeze his hand.
"That sounds about right," you say.
Alfred knows before Bruce tells him.
Alfred, in the way of Alfred, simply knows. You find this out at breakfast two days later when he puts down a cup of tea in front of you and says, quietly, "Congratulations, if I may," and then continues on with breakfast service as though he has said nothing, leaving you sitting there with your tea and the specific warm weight of being known by Alfred Pennyworth.
Bruce, across the table, looks at Alfred's retreating back.
"How," he says.
"Master Bruce," Alfred says, from the kitchen, "I have been in this house for thirty years."
Bruce looks at you.
You look at Bruce.
"He always knows," you say.
"I'm aware. I've never determined the mechanism."
"Maybe there isn't a mechanism. Maybe he just — knows."
Bruce looks profoundly unsettled by this, which is fair because Bruce likes mechanisms.
Alfred reappears with toast and a look of deep, genuine pleasure that he is not bothering to moderate.
"The east residential wing," he says, setting down the toast with perfect composure, "could be refitted within three months if we begin planning now. I've taken the liberty of drafting some preliminary thoughts on the matter."
He produces, from somewhere, a folded piece of paper.
Bruce takes it.
He unfolds it.
It is three pages, dense with Alfred's neat handwriting, covering residential refitting, medical arrangements, staffing considerations, and, at the bottom of page three, a small section titled initial requirements that is the most efficiently organized baby checklist you have ever seen.
"Alfred," Bruce says.
"Yes, sir."
"When did you write this?"
"Yesterday evening." A pause. "I've been waiting for some time for the occasion, if I'm honest. I updated the draft accordingly."
Bruce looks at the three pages.
Something crosses his face that you don't see often.
"Thank you," he says.
"Of course, Master Bruce," Alfred says, and there are thirty years in it, there is every version of Bruce he has known, there is a warmth so deep and established it's become structural. "Of course."
The difference between Bruce Wayne preparing for something and Tim Drake preparing for something is this:
Tim makes documents. Color-coded, cross-referenced, living documents that he updates in real time as new information becomes available.
Bruce makes decisions.
They happen quietly, without announcement. You notice them by their effects — the security consultation that appears on his calendar, the three medical specialists he has apparently spoken to without mentioning it, the morning you come downstairs to find him and Alfred in a room that used to contain archived case equipment, both of them looking at the space with the focused quality of people measuring something.
"Are you converting a room?" you say.
"Assessing the space," Bruce says.
"That's the same thing."
"It's preliminary." He looks at you. "Is the east wing acceptable to you? It's quieter than the main residential wing. Better light in the mornings."
You look at the room.
At Bruce, who has mentally converted it already, you can tell who is standing in the future version of it in his head.
"Yeah," you say. "East wing is good."
He nods, once, and makes a note on his phone, and that's it, that's the entirety of the exchange, but later Alfred will tell you that Bruce stood in that room for twenty minutes after you left and didn't do anything except stand there.
Alfred tells you a lot of things these days. You think he considers it part of his role.
The thing about Bruce and the mission is that it lives in everything.
You'd known that before this. You know the shape of it — how it takes up space, how it makes calculations out of everything, how even love gets filtered through it, whether he means it to or not.
You watch him figure out what to do with that.
It's not a clean process.
There are nights he goes quiet in a way that has a different quality to it now — not the mission quiet, not the grief quiet, the specific ones you've learned, but something new. Something he's working out.
"The boys were in danger," he says one night. Not out of nowhere — you'd been talking, though the conversation had moved somewhere quieter. "Because of me. Because of what I am. Because being close to me makes you a target, and I've always known that and I've always — "
"Bruce."
"It's a real concern," he says. "It's not — I'm not spiraling. It's a real thing to consider."
"I know it's real," you say. "I'm not dismissing it."
"I don't know how to do this without the risk being — without it being — "
"You can't," you say, simply. "You can't make it zero. You know that."
"Yes."
"You made the choice with the boys. Every time."
"That was different. They came to me with danger already present. This is — I'd be choosing it. Choosing it for someone who can't choose."
You look at him.
"That's the thing you're really sitting with," you say.
"Yes." The word is effortful. Honest in the way Bruce is honest when he trusts you enough, which he does, which took time and was worth it. "Yes."
"Then we sit with it," you say. "You don't have to resolve it tonight. You just have to sit with it."
He looks at you.
"You're very calm about this," he says.
"One of us has to be."
Something shifts in him. "That's what you said when — "
"When you told me about the mission, the first time. Three years ago." You remember it clearly. "You laid out all the reasons it was dangerous to be near you, and I said one of us has to be calm, and it's going to have to be me."
"I remember."
"Same principle," you say. "You carry the weight of the risk. I'll carry the calm. We've managed this division of labor before."
Bruce is quiet.
Then, very quietly: "I'm glad you're calm."
"I know you are."
"I couldn't do it otherwise. Any of it." He looks at his hands. "I need someone who isn't frightened of the thing I am."
"I'm not frightened of you," you say. "I'm aware of you. Different thing."
He looks at you with an expression that you've catalogued, over time, as the Bruce Wayne expression for I don't know what I did to deserve this, but I'm not going to examine it too closely in case the answer is nothing.
"Come to bed," you say.
He comes to bed.
The appointment is at ten on a Thursday, and Bruce has rearranged three things to be there, which Alfred informed you of without being asked, and you chose not to tell Bruce that you knew, because Bruce doesn't like it when his efforts are made visible, preferring them to simply exist, unnamed.
In the waiting room, he sits next to you with his hands on his knees and looks at the room with the careful neutrality of Bruce Wayne in public, the mask he doesn't take off because here, in a waiting room full of strangers, he is always in public.
"Are you alright?" you ask, because here you can ask it.
"Yes," he says, and this time you think it might even be true.
In the room, the doctor is professional and warm and does not visibly react to Bruce Wayne sitting in the chair next to you, which you appreciate.
And then the screen.
And then the sound.
Bruce Wayne goes very still.
He goes the kind of still that means something has happened to him that he doesn't have immediate access to, that has bypassed the usual processing, that has gone somewhere deeper and more immediate than thought.
You look at him.
His jaw is doing something. His eyes are fixed on the screen, and they're doing something too, something you've seen before in private moments and never in public, never anywhere someone else might see.
"That's — " he starts.
"Yeah," you say.
"It's — "
"I know."
He doesn't finish the sentence.
He doesn't need to.
He reaches over, not looking away from the screen, and finds your hand.
Holds on.
The doctor talks. You answer. Bruce doesn't say anything for the rest of the appointment, but he doesn't let go of your hand either, not once, not when he shakes the doctor's hand after, a brief release and immediate return, like he's established a base and needs to come back to it.
In the car, he's quiet.
A different kind of quiet from the bathroom doorway. Less like a wall and more like — water, maybe. Like something that has found its level.
"The east wing room," he says, eventually.
"What about it?"
"Alfred has sourced someone to do the refitting. He wanted my approval on the color." A pause. "He suggested something warm. I told him you should choose."
"Smart man, Alfred."
"He's usually right." Bruce looks out the window. "I'd like it to be warm. Whatever you choose. I'd like the room to be — " he stops.
"Warm," you finish.
"Yes," he says. "That."
You drive through Gotham, and Bruce Wayne holds your hand in the back of the car and doesn't perform any of it, doesn't make it anything other than what it is, which is a man who has operated in the dark for so long that warmth has become something he has to remind himself he's allowed.
Reminding himself, apparently, is something he's willing to do.
For this. For you. For whatever is on that screen, that small impossible thing with a heartbeat too fast to count.
He reads.
You discover this by accident — coming into the study to find him with a book that is not case files, not strategy, not anything you've seen him read before. He closes it when he hears you, and that means you only catch the spine for a second.
You say nothing.
Two days later, you find three more in the drawer of his nightstand. Development guides. One attachment theory that has a bookmark in it halfway through.
You say nothing about those either.
But that night, when you're almost asleep, he says, quietly, into the dark:
"The attachment research is interesting."
"Is it," you say, not moving, keeping your voice even.
"There's a consistent finding about — about what children need to feel secure. What are the actual requirements?” A pause. "It's less complicated than I expected. Then I made it, possibly, with the boys."
"What are the requirements?"
"Consistency," he says. "Presence. A reliable person." Another pause, longer. "The research suggests you don't have to be perfect. You have to be there."
You turn your head to look at him.
He's looking at the ceiling.
"You're good at being there," you say.
"I've been better at it some times than others."
"You're getting better."
"I'm trying to." He's quiet. "I want to get it right this time. As right as I can. Which isn't — I know it won't be perfect. I know — "
"Bruce."
"Yes."
"You don't have to be perfect," you say. "The research says so."
A beat.
Something in his face that might be, very quietly, relief.
"The research says so," he repeats.
"Peer reviewed and everything."
He turns his head to look at you.
"You've also been reading," he says.
"I also have a nightstand."
He looks at you for a long moment.
Then he reaches over, the same way he reached for your hand in the car — certain, deliberate, the gesture of someone who has decided — and finds your hand in the dark.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you say.
Outside, Gotham makes its sounds. The cave below the manor is quiet tonight. The mission is there, it's always there, but tonight the study has books with bookmarks and the east wing is being made warm, and Bruce Wayne is in the dark holding your hand and learning, from peer-reviewed sources, that being there is enough.
He's going to be there.
You know it the way you know things about him that he hasn't said — in the marrow of it, in the base fact of who he is underneath everything he's built over himself.
I didn't find any rules, but I was wondering if your alright with doing Jason x Drunk (or Sick) Female Reader? (Sorry, if I violated any rules.)
No rules violated at all, this is a sweet request! I'm going to do all of them, sick AND drunk as separate scenarios per character so you get variety. Fair warning this is going to be a long one given the roster and the word count!
Under the Weather (And Other Disasters)
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PAIRINGS: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Wally West, Clark Kent, Hal Jordan, Roy Harper
requests are open
DICK GRAYSON
Sick
Dick finds out you're sick because you don't text him back for four hours, which for you is essentially a distress signal.
He shows up at your door with three bags. Grocery bags, plural, because Dick Grayson does not do anything by half measures and the concept of just checking in doesn't exist in his vocabulary.
"I'm fine," you say, through the door, because you look terrible and you know you look terrible.
"You haven't texted me back since noon," he says.
"I was sleeping."
"Open the door."
You open the door.
Dick looks at you — blanket around your shoulders, hair doing something creative, the specific grey pallor of someone who has been horizontal for eight hours — and his face does the thing. The Dick Grayson thing, where every feeling he has goes directly to his expression with no filter whatsoever.
"Oh, sweetheart," he says.
"Don't," you say, because if he's too nice about it, you're going to feel pathetic, and you're already feeling pathetic.
He comes in anyway. He puts the bags down in the kitchen and starts unpacking them with the focused energy of someone who has assigned himself a task and will complete it. Soup — two kinds, because apparently he couldn't decide. Crackers. Ginger ale. The specific brand of cold medicine that you'd mentioned once, months ago, in passing, and he had retained.
"Sit," he says, pointing at the couch.
"I was already sitting."
"Sit better."
You sit better. He brings a blanket from the bedroom — the good one, the heavy one — and settles it over you without being asked, and then he goes back to the kitchen, and you hear the sound of a pot going on the stove.
"You don't have to cook," you call.
"The canned soup is backup," he calls back. "I'm making the real kind."
"Dick — "
"I learned from Alfred. It's good. Just sit there."
You sit there.
The apartment smells like soup twenty minutes later, and Dick brings you a bowl with crackers on the side arranged in a way that's almost too neat, like he assembled them carefully, which he definitely did.
"You arranged the crackers," you say.
"Presentation aids recovery," he says, sitting next to you. "I read that somewhere."
"You made that up."
"I absolutely made that up." He tucks the blanket more firmly around you. "How bad is it?"
"Medium. Not terrible. Just annoying."
"Fever?"
"Low. It broke this morning."
"Good." He settles back, close enough that you can lean on him if you want, not so close that he's crowding you. Dick is good at reading the exact amount of space people need. "I'm going to stay."
"You don't have to — "
"I know." He picks up the remote. "What do you want to watch?"
You lean on him.
He puts on something comfortable, something you've both seen before, something that doesn't require attention. His hand finds your hair and stays there, not doing anything, just present.
You fall asleep before the first episode ends.
Dick stays through three more.
Drunk
The call comes at one-fifteen AM, and Dick answers before the second ring because Dick always answers before the second ring.
"Hi," you say, and from one syllable he can tell.
"Where are you?" he says, already sitting up.
"I'm — " a pause, some background noise, what sounds like a very enthusiastic cover band — "I'm at Rosie's. On Fourth. We were doing Steph's birthday, and then everyone left, but the music is really good, Dick, the music is so good — '
"Are you safe?"
"I'm at the bar. Marco, the bartender, is very nice. I told him about you."
"What did you tell him about me?"
"That you're really pretty, and also you do acrobatics, and he didn't believe me about the acrobatics."
"Okay," Dick says, finding his keys. "Stay at the bar. Stay with Marco. I'm coming."
"You don't have to — "
"Stay with Marco," he says. "I'll be fifteen minutes."
He's eleven.
He finds you exactly where you said — at the bar, on a stool, in an animated conversation with Marco, who is indeed very nice and also looks deeply relieved to see a responsible adult arrive.
You see Dick, and your face does the thing that makes his chest hurt in the best way, the involuntary thing, the oh good, you're here thing.
"You came," you say.
"I always come," he says, like it's simple. Because it is.
He gets you water. He sits next to you while you finish it. He thanks Marco genuinely and tips well because Dick Grayson always tips well, and also Marco watched you for forty minutes, so he's earned it.
In the car, you're warm and loose, and you keep looking at him with an expression he can't entirely read.
"You came in like eleven minutes," you say.
"Traffic was light."
"You were worried."
"A little."
"I was fine."
"I know you were. I just — " He glances at you. "I like knowing you're fine from the same room. It's more efficient."
You're quiet for a moment.
"Dick," you say.
"Yeah?"
"I told Marco you were pretty and I meant it."
He stops at a red light. He looks at you. Your eyes are very sincere in the way that only happens when all the filters are off.
"Get some sleep," he says.
"I'm just saying — "
"I know what you're saying." The light changes. He's smiling and trying not to. "Water when we get home. Then sleep."
"You're so responsible."
"One of us has to be."
"I love that about you."
"Yeah," he says quietly. "I know."
He gets you home. He gets you water. He sits on the edge of the bed until your breathing evens out, and then he stays a little longer just because.
JASON TODD
Sick
Jason's version of taking care of someone sick is practical to the point of being almost aggressive about it.
He shows up, he assesses the situation, and he addresses the situation. There is no fussing. There is no cooing. There is just Jason moving through your apartment like he has a list and he's working through it.
"When did you last eat?" he says, from your kitchen.
"This morning."
"What did you eat?"
"Some crackers."
"That's not eating." Cabinet opening. Closing. "You have nothing in here."
"I've been sick. I haven't shopped."
"I can see that." He reappears. Looks at you on the couch in your nest of blankets with the clinical eye of someone doing an assessment. "Fever?"
"Had one yesterday. It's mostly gone."
"Mostly."
"Ninety-nine point two. It's basically nothing."
"It's a fever." He's already getting his keys back out. "I'm going to the store. Don't move."
"I wasn't planning on moving."
"Good." He stops at the door. Something shifts in his expression — just briefly, the practical exterior going slightly soft at the edges. "You should've called me yesterday."
"You were on a thing."
"I'm always on a thing. Call me anyway."
He leaves before you can respond.
He comes back forty minutes later with actual groceries — real ones, not just soup and crackers — and spends an hour in your kitchen making something that smells better than anything has a right to when you're congested.
You eat it on the couch with Jason on the other end, not touching, because Jason Todd's version of consideration is not forcing physical contact on someone who is unwell. But he's there. Solid and present and real.
"This is really good," you say.
"Alfred's recipe." He says it like it's nothing. It isn't nothing.
"You called Alfred?"
"I texted him." A pause. "He sent three follow-up questions about your symptoms and told me to make sure you're drinking enough water."
"Alfred is texting you about my symptoms."
"Alfred texts me about everything. Drink your water."
You drink your water.
Later, when you fall asleep on the couch, Jason doesn't move you to the bedroom because moving you would wake you up, and you need the sleep. He turns the TV volume down to almost nothing and stays.
You wake up at three AM with a blanket over you that wasn't there before.
Jason is in the armchair. Asleep. Still there.
Drunk
Here is what Jason is not: a patient man.
Here is what Jason is, at one AM, when you call him, laughing so hard you can barely form sentences: completely gone for you, which makes the patience a non-issue.
"Say that again," he says. "Slower."
"I'm at — " more laughing — "okay, so you know the bar on Seventh that you said was a front — "
"Please tell me you're not at the bar I said was a front."
"It's actually really nice inside? Like they have a really good cocktail menu — "
"I'm coming to get you," he says.
"Jason, I'm fine — "
"You're at a bar I told you is run by Maroni's people, on a Friday night, alone, drunk." A pause. "I'm coming to get you."
"I'm not alone, I came with — oh, huh." A pause on your end this time. "They left."
"They left."
"Like, a while ago, I think. I was talking to the bartender about — actually, what were we talking about — "
"I'm coming to get you," he says again, for the third time, which, with Jason, means it stopped being a discussion after the first time. "Do not leave that bar."
"Should I be worried that it's a front? Like, do I need to — "
"You're fine. They're not going to do anything to a civilian in their own establishment." He's already in the car. "Just sit there and don't talk to anyone else."
"The bartender is very nice — "
"Anyone else."
He gets there in eight minutes, which requires some choices about traffic laws, but Jason has made worse choices for worse reasons, and this is not a hard call.
You're at the bar, like he said. You see him come in and you get the look — the one you get when you've had enough that all the careful middleground disappears and what's left is just the actual thing, which is that you are very happy to see him.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says. Up close, you look fine — flushed, bright-eyed, the specific kind of present that means you're drunk but not dangerously so. The tension in his shoulders drops about forty percent.
"I found a front," you say.
"You found a front."
"Their dirty martinis are actually really good."
"I'll pass that feedback along to Maroni."
"Don't do that."
"I wasn't going to do that." He puts cash on the bar — enough, he doesn't look at how much — and puts his hand on your back. "Come on."
"Are you mad?"
"No."
"You look a little mad."
"I look concerned. They're different."
"You came really fast," you say, letting him steer you toward the door.
"Yeah."
"You didn't have to — "
"Yes," he says, "I did." And the way he says it closes the subject completely — not harsh, just certain, the particular certainty of someone who has decided some things aren't up for debate. "Watch the step."
You watch the step.
Outside, the air is cold, and you lean into him slightly without thinking about it, and his arm goes around your shoulders automatically, without comment, the way it does when it's just a thing that happens now.
"Jason," you say.
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you came."
"I know," he says. "I know you are."
TIM DRAKE
Sick
Tim Drake's first response to you being sick is to research it.
This is not as impersonal as it sounds. Tim researches things because he loves them, because he wants to understand them completely, because information is how he shows care. By the time he arrives at your apartment, he has read four articles, cross-referenced two of them, and has a working theory about whether it's viral or bacterial based on your symptom description over text.
"It's almost certainly viral," he says, at the door. "The combination of the sore throat and the fatigue without significant fever points away from strep — did you have someone swab you?"
"I didn't go to the doctor, Tim."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a cold."
"You don't know that it's — okay, it's probably a cold." He comes in, carrying a tote bag. "I brought things."
The things are: cold medicine, the correct kind, cross-referenced with your other medications for interactions. Tea. Honey. A novel you'd mentioned wanting to read, because Tim Drake bought you a book for when you were sick, because that's the kind of person he is. And, slightly sheepishly, a printed list of what to eat and when.
"You printed a list," you say.
"It's easier than trying to remember when you're not feeling well." He holds it up. "It's color-coded."
"Of course it is."
"Red is the medicine timing. Green is food and fluids. Blue is — "
"Tim."
"Yeah?"
"Sit down."
He sits down. He's still holding the list. He puts it on the coffee table because he can't quite bring himself to put it away.
You look at him — at his careful hands and his tired eyes and the way he'd clearly come straight here from wherever he was because he's still in his work clothes — and you feel, through the fog of the cold, a very clear and specific thing.
"Thank you for coming," you say.
"Of course I came." He says it like of course is the only possible response, like the alternative didn't occur to him. "How's your head?"
"Pressure-y."
"That's the congestion. There's a thing you can do — " he stops himself. "Do you want me to tell you, or do you want me to just sit here?"
"Just sit here," you say.
"Okay." He sits back. He's quiet for a moment. "Can I put on something in the background? I have a playlist that's good for — I have a playlist."
"Put it on."
He puts it on. Soft, instrumental, unobtrusive. He sits with you while you drift in and out, and when you wake up, he's working quietly on his laptop, but he's moved to be closer to your end of the couch, which he definitely didn't start that way.
"The list is still on the table," you say, sleepily.
"In case you need it."
"Okay, Tim."
"The red section is important, the timing matters for — "
"Tim."
"Yeah?"
"I'll follow the list."
He exhales. "Thank you."
Drunk
The thing about Tim Drake is that he can function on three hours of sleep and a concerning amount of coffee, which means he is awake and operational when you call him at midnight, which is lucky.
"Tim," you say.
"Yeah, I'm here."
"I did a thing."
"What kind of thing?"
"I went to Tam's birthday, and there were shots involved, and I missed the last train, and also I think I'm in New Jersey."
A pause.
"You're in New Jersey," he says.
"I think so. The signs look like New Jersey."
"What signs?"
"The — the road signs. They have a different energy."
"Okay." He’s already finding his keys with one hand, phone with the other, the Tim Drake multi-task. "Are you somewhere safe right now?"
"I'm at a diner. It's very fluorescent."
"Stay in the diner." He's out the door. "What diner? Can you see a name?"
"It says —" a pause, some shuffling — "Patty's. With two T's."
"I'm finding it. Give me two minutes."
"Tim, you don't have to drive to New Jersey — "
"I'm already in the car." Typing sounds — he's running the search one-handed, which he shouldn't be, but Tim's sense of self-preservation is famously flexible. "Got it. I'm twenty-five minutes out. Stay in Patty's."
"You're driving to New Jersey at midnight," you say.
"Yep."
"For me."
"That's generally why people drive places, yeah."
You're quiet for a moment. The fluorescent lights of Patty's Diner with two T's hum pleasantly.
"You're really nice," you say.
"Don't tell anyone."
"I'm going to tell everyone."
"Order something," he says. "Eat something. Water if they have it."
"They have pie."
"Get pie too."
He stays on the phone with you for most of the drive, which he'll say is so he knows you're okay, and which is also just Tim not quite being ready to hang up. You talk about nothing — the diner decor, a case he's working on, something funny that happened at Tam's party before the shots became a factor.
He arrives at twenty-three minutes, not twenty-five, which you clock.
"You sped," you say, when he walks in.
"I made good time," he says, which is not a denial.
He sits across from you in the booth and looks at you — bright-eyed, slightly pink, mostly fine — and something in him settles.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi." He steals a piece of your pie. "How's New Jersey?"
"Fluorescent," you say. "You didn't have to come all this way."
"You missed your train."
"I could have gotten an Uber — "
"At midnight. To Gotham. Alone." He gives you the Tim look, the one that means he's run the scenarios and found them wanting. "No."
"Tim — "
"Eat your pie," he says. "We'll get back together."
You eat your pie.
He watches you with the particular quality of someone who is going to remember this specific diner, this specific booth, this fluorescent New Jersey midnight, for a very long time.
DAMIAN WAYNE
Sick
Damian Wayne's approach to you being sick is to deny it is happening for approximately one day, and then, when it becomes undeniable, to address it with the efficiency of a field medic and the emotional openness of a closed door.
"You should not have gone out on Thursday," he says, standing in the doorway of your bedroom.
"I didn't know I was getting sick on Thursday."
"The weather dropped twelve degrees. You were wearing insufficient layers."
"I was fine on Thursday — "
"You're not fine now." He comes in. He looks at your bedside table — empty water glass, cold medicine, tissues — and his expression does the thing where it goes very neutral, which means he's feeling something he doesn't intend to show you. "You haven't been hydrating."
"The glass is empty because I drank it."
"When."
"This morning."
"It's afternoon." He takes the glass. He comes back with it full, and with a plate that has crackers and some cut apple on it, arranged with the precise neatness of someone who can't help making things correct even when they're trying to appear casual.
"You cut fruit," you say.
"You need to eat."
"Damian, you cut fruit for me."
"It's not — I was in the kitchen. It required minimal effort." He sets it down. He does not make eye contact. "Eat."
You eat. He sits in the chair by the window, not on the bed, maintaining a careful distance that is very Damian — present but not hovering, there but not making it a thing.
"I looked up your symptoms," he says, after a while.
"What did you find?"
"Most likely rhinovirus. Common cold. The standard progression is seven to ten days with supportive care. You're on day two." A pause. "I've confirmed the medication you're taking is appropriate for the presentation."
"You confirmed my cold medicine."
"I confirmed it's the correct choice given your specific — " he stops. "It's the right one. Yes."
You look at him.
He is looking at the window.
"Thank you," you say. "For the apple."
"It's basic nutritional support."
"Damian."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
A pause. Something in his jaw does a thing.
"Rest," he says. "I'll be here."
He stays in the chair.
At some point, you fall asleep, and when you wake up, he's reading, and the water glass has been refilled, and there's a second blanket on the bed that wasn't there before.
You don't mention the blanket.
He doesn't mention that he put it there.
Some things don't need to be said.
Drunk
Damian finds out you're drunk not because you call him but because he calls you, which you answer with the particular delayed reaction of someone whose phone surprised them.
"Hi," you say, with the careful enunciation of someone managing their enunciation.
Damian can tell in one syllable. He has an extremely accurate internal calibration for you specifically.
"Where are you?" he says.
"I'm at — I'm out. With some people from work. It's a work thing. A birthday."
"Are you drinking?"
"It's a birthday, Damian."
"That's a yes."
"It's a yes," you agree.
He makes a sound. Not quite a sigh. The Damian version of a sigh, which is more of a controlled exhale that communicates extensive feelings through the medium of breath.
"When are you leaving?" he says.
"Soon? We were going to get food, but I think the plan changed. It's fine, I'll get a car — "
"Don't get a car."
"Damian — "
"The car services in this area are inconsistent at this hour, and you are not currently in a position to evaluate the adequacy of the driver." He says this like it's purely logistical. "I'm coming."
"You really don't — "
"Text me the address."
He hangs up.
You text him the address.
He arrives in fourteen minutes in civilian clothes, which is notable because Damian Wayne in civilian clothes without preparation is rare, which means he left quickly, which means — well. You don't say what it means. You file it.
He walks in, finds you at the table with the remnants of your work colleagues who are in various states, looks at you once, and comes to stand next to you with the particular quality of someone planting a flag.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says.
"You didn't have to — "
"I was available," he says, which is a Damian sentence for something else entirely. "Are you ready to go?"
"I think so." You look at the table. "Should I say goodbye — "
"You've said goodbye. Come on."
Outside, the air is cool, and you walk beside him, and he is very slightly closer than he needs to be, which is his version of making sure you're steady without making it a production.
"How was your evening?" you say.
"Uneventful." A pause. "Until you called."
"You called me."
"You answered like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you do," he says, which is not an explanation and is somehow a complete one.
You walk half a block in silence.
"Damian," you say.
"Yes."
"Thanks for coming."
He doesn't say of course or it was nothing. He says: "Yes," again, which, from Damian Wayne, is the whole thing. The entire thing.
BRUCE WAYNE
Sick
Bruce Wayne's first instinct in any situation is to solve it.
Sickness presents a problem in that it cannot be solved in the way Bruce prefers to solve things, which is immediately and through direct application of will. You cannot willpower a rhinovirus. You cannot strategize a fever into submission. These are facts Bruce is aware of and finds mildly unreasonable.
What he can do is resource the situation comprehensively, which he does.
Alfred is involved. Alfred is always involved when Bruce reaches the edges of his practical capability, which is more often than Bruce admits.
"She needs rest, Master Bruce," Alfred says, on the phone, with the patience of someone who has had this conversation in various forms for twenty years. "Not a specialist. Rest."
"Her temperature was — "
"Within the range of a common cold. Which is not a crisis." A pause. "Go and sit with her. Bring the soup I've sent. Do not attempt to fix it."
"I'm not — "
"You are. You always do. Go and sit with her."
Bruce goes and sits with you.
He's not natural at it — at just sitting, at being present without an agenda. You know this about him. So when he comes in and puts the soup down and takes the chair near your bed, you don't comment on the slight stiffness of it, the quality of a person practicing a skill they haven't fully acquired.
"Alfred sent soup," he says.
"I figured." You look at him. "You called Alfred."
"I wanted to make sure I had the right — I wanted to make sure."
He is Bruce Wayne. He has faced things in the dark that would break most people. He is sitting in a bedroom chair next to you because you have a cold, and he called Alfred to make sure he handled it correctly.
You love him an embarrassing amount.
"I'm okay," you say.
"I know."
"It's just a cold."
"Alfred said." He looks at your hands, folded on the blanket. "Does anything help. Specifically."
"Sitting here is good," you say.
"That's — that's it?"
"That's it."
He sits back. He's quiet for a moment, working out what to do with his hands, with the lack of a problem to solve.
"I can read to you," he says, finally.
"...You want to read to me?"
"Alfred used to — when the boys were sick — " He stops. Restarts. "If you want. Or not. I can simply sit here."
"Read to me," you say.
He reads to you.
His voice is low and even and more careful than it needs to be, like he's giving the words appropriate weight. You fall asleep before the end of the chapter.
He marks the page.
He stays.
Drunk
The charity event has an open bar and an extremely boring speaker series, and your friends have abandoned you for a more interesting table, which is how you end up, over the course of four hours, more than adequately champagned.
Bruce finds you at the end of the night at a table near the back, having what appears to be a heartfelt conversation with the centerpiece.
He stops.
He takes in the champagne flutes. The centerpiece conversation. The way you look up at him with an expression that is extremely genuine in a way that champagne tends to produce.
"Hi," you say. "Your charity event is very long."
"It is," he agrees, sitting down next to you.
"The second speaker talked for forty minutes."
"I know."
"About tax incentives."
"I'm aware."
"Bruce. Forty minutes."
"I know." His mouth does the thing, the almost-smile, the one that most people don't see because he keeps it very controlled. "How much champagne?"
"A reasonable amount."
He looks at the flutes.
"A contextually reasonable amount," you revise.
"How are you feeling?"
"Honestly? Pretty good." You look at him. "You're very handsome, you know that? Like it's a lot. You walk into a room, and it's a lot for people."
"You've mentioned."
"I'm mentioning again." You rest your chin on your hand. "Why are you so handsome. That seems like an unfair amount to give one person."
"I'll take it up with the relevant parties," he says.
"You should." A pause. "I had a good time tonight, actually. The centerpiece has a lot going on. Very layered."
"I'm glad you two connected."
"Don't make fun of me."
"I'm not making fun of you." He takes your hand, his thumb over your knuckles, easy and certain. "I'd never make fun of you."
He gets the car, and he walks you out with a hand at your back that keeps you steady without drawing attention to the steadying, which is a very Bruce skill. In the car, you're warm and comfortable, and you lean against him in a way that you'll be slightly embarrassed about tomorrow and he'll never mention.
"Bruce," you say, against his shoulder.
"Yes."
"The second speaker really did go very long."
"He did."
"Next time, can we leave at the second speaker?"
"Yes," he says, immediately.
"You can just say yes. You're Bruce Wayne. You can leave wherever you want."
"Next time we leave at the second speaker," he says again, and his arm settles around you, and the Gotham night goes past the window, and he says nothing else because nothing else needs saying.
CLARK KENT
Sick
Clark's approach to you being sick is to be quietly, comprehensively wonderful about it in a way that makes it almost hard to be sick.
He shows up with groceries and the particular warmth of someone who runs hot even by human standards, which in winter is something close to a superpower. He sits next to you, and you're immediately warmer.
"You should be resting," he says.
"I am resting. I'm sitting here."
"You were trying to answer emails when I came in."
"I was managing my inbox — "
"You were not resting." He takes the laptop gently, closes it, and puts it on the coffee table with the patient firmness of Clark Kent, who is patient enough to handle anything. "Rest."
You rest.
He makes soup from scratch. You watch him do it from the couch, and there's something both domestic and slightly surreal about watching Superman dice vegetables in your kitchen, though you don't say this because Clark doesn't love the Superman observations in the apartment.
"You don't have to make soup from scratch," you say.
"I know."
"There's canned — "
"I know." He stirs something. "My mom used to make this when I was sick. She'd be horrified by the canned version."
"You didn't get sick," you say. "You're — "
"I know. But she made it anyway. Just in case." He glances at you. "And because she liked taking care of me. She said the soup was for her as much as me."
You're quiet for a moment.
"That's really sweet," you say.
"She's a really sweet person." A pause. "She'd like you, you know. She's asked about you."
"Martha Kent has asked about me."
"She asks about everyone I mention more than once." He says it like it's ordinary. Martha Kent asking after you is extremely not ordinary, and you are going to think about it later. "How's your head?"
"Better than this morning."
"Good." He brings you a bowl and sits close, warm and solid, and you eat, and he talks about small things — Smallville, the paper, something Perry did this week — and his voice is even and comfortable, and you feel better in a way that isn't just the soup.
"Clark," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for coming."
He looks at you with that Clark expression, the open one, the one that exists before the Superman one, just a man from Kansas who means every single thing he says.
"Always," he says, simply.
Drunk
Clark can hear your heartbeat from across Metropolis.
This is relevant because he knows, from the sound of it, before you call, that something is off about your evening.
When you call, he picks up immediately.
"Hi," you say. "So funny story."
"Tell me."
"Lois had a work thing which became a going away thing for Marcus from Sports which became a whole night thing, and I lost track of — I lost track of a thing."
"The thing being?"
"How many I'd had." A pause. "I'm fine! I'm with Lois. But she's getting a car, and I said I'd call you because you're closer to where we are and — "
"Where are you?"
You tell him. He's there in a way that isn't flying, because he's Clark Kent right now, not Superman, which means he took a cab at a speed that the cab driver will probably think about later.
You and Lois are outside the bar when he arrives. Lois looks fully sober and deeply entertained, which is a Lois Lane combination you've encountered before.
"Kent," she says.
"Lois," he says.
"She's fine," Lois says. "Slightly finer than expected, honestly. She held up pretty well."
"That's high praise from you," you say.
"It is," Lois agrees. She squeezes your arm. "Car's here. Text me." She gives Clark a look that contains several complete sentences, and then she gets in her car.
You look at Clark.
Clark looks at you.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi." He does the assessment — the Clark version, which involves senses most people don't have — and his shoulders relax incrementally. "You doing okay?"
"Really good, actually. It was a fun night." You look at him. "You didn't have to come all this way."
"I was close," he says, which isn't entirely true but is kind.
"Clark."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
He smiles. The Clark smile, the real one, not the Superman one or the mild-mannered Clark Kent one, just the one underneath. "Come on. Let's get you home."
He keeps a hand at your elbow on the uneven sidewalk, and you lean into him slightly, and he's warm, always warm, like standing next to something quietly extraordinary, which you are.
He gets you home.
He makes sure you have water.
He stays until you're asleep, which you know because you wake up once in the night and the apartment has that particular quality of someone recently present, and there's an extra blanket, and your water glass has been refilled.
Clark Kent, you think, falling back asleep.
Genuinely.
WALLY WEST
Sick
The thing about Wally being the fastest man alive is that the moment you text him, I think I'm getting sick, he is at your door before you've put your phone down.
This is both wonderful and slightly startling.
"Wally — "
"I got things," he says, holding up approximately seven bags. "I wasn't sure what kind of sick, so I got options."
The options include: four different cold medicines, two different flu medicines, ginger ale, Sprite, orange juice, chicken soup, vegetable soup, tomato soup, three kinds of crackers, two different types of tea, cough drops in multiple flavors, a thermometer, a heating pad, and — for reasons you don't fully understand — a puzzle.
"The puzzle is if you're bored," he says. "But not too sick to do a puzzle. There's a range of sick where puzzles are good, and I didn't know where on the range you were."
"That's — Wally, this is a lot — "
"I also wasn't sure if you had everything you needed because you don't always tell me when you need things, and I'd rather have too much than — " He stops. Looks at you. Really looks at you. "Hi. You look rough."
"Thank you, Wally."
"Not in a bad way — in a you're sick and I'm worried way." He puts the bags down and comes to you and puts his hand on your forehead with the automatic ease of someone who does this without thinking. "You're warm."
"Mild fever."
"Yeah." He steers you back to the couch with the gentle irresistibility of someone who is technically strong enough to bench press a small building. "Sit. I'm making tea. Which kind do you want?"
"Surprise me."
He brings you the right one.
You don't know how he knew. You don't ask.
Wally with a sick person is Wally at approximately sixty percent of his usual speed, which he maintains through visible effort — you can see him calibrating, choosing to stay, choosing not to vibrate out of his skin at the forced stillness. For you, he does this.
"You can put something on," you say. "You don't have to just sit — "
"I'm fine sitting."
"Wally, I've never seen you sit still for more than — "
"I can sit still," he says, in the tone of someone who is currently proving this through sheer determination. "I'm sitting. Look. Sitting."
"You're vibrating slightly."
"That's just my resting state."
You put your head on his shoulder.
He goes completely still.
"Is this okay?" you say.
"Yeah," he says, and his voice is different, softer. "This is really okay."
He stays still.
For you, Wally West stays perfectly, completely still.
Drunk
You text him instead of calling because typing feels manageable and talking feels like a lot.
hey, so hypothetically if someone was maybe a little bit out at a bar and maybe needed a way home
The response is instantaneous.
WHERE
Wally, I'm fine
WHERE
You send the location.
He is there in a time that is not physically possible for someone who took normal transportation, and you choose not to examine this.
He finds you at the bar, not in bad shape, honestly, just past the point where Gotham at night seems like a good navigation challenge.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi." He does the scan — up down, quick assessment, Wally's version of making sure. Then he grins, the full Wally grin, the one that takes up his whole face. "How was your night?"
"Really good, actually. Jimmy's birthday was — Jimmy is great. Jimmy gave a speech."
"Was it a good speech?"
"It made me cry a little."
"Yeah?" He's already steering you, easy and warm, toward the door. "What did he say?"
You tell him about the speech. You tell him about the whole night, actually, in the way you do when the filters are down, and everything just comes out — the funny parts and the sweet parts and the part where someone spilled a whole drink, and the recovery was impressive.
Wally listens to all of it with genuine attention, asking questions, laughing at the right parts, because Wally West is more present in a conversation than almost anyone you've ever met.
Outside, he keeps pace with you, which for him is a deliberate choice, a constant gentle choosing.
"Wally," you say.
"Yeah?"
"You came really fast."
"I was close," he says.
"You're always close when I need you."
He's quiet for half a step. Then: "Yeah," he says, in a different voice than before. "I try to be."
The city goes past, and you walk beside the fastest man alive, who is choosing to walk, and that's the whole thing, that's the entirety of it — the choosing, the staying, the deliberate pace.
ROY HARPER
Sick
Roy's approach to you being sick is first to check it's not serious, second to make dark jokes about it, and third — when the jokes land flat because you're too tired for jokes — to drop everything and be exactly what you need.
"Is it bad?" he says, on the phone.
"No. I'm just gross and tired."
"Gross and tired is manageable." A pause. "You eaten?"
"Not much."
"I'm coming over."
"Roy, you don't have to — "
"I know I don't have to." He says it like don't have to is an irrelevant category. "I'm coming. Do you need anything specific, or should I just grab stuff?"
"Just grab stuff," you say, because you don't have the energy to be specific.
Roy grabbing stuff is an experience. He arrives with the specific grocery selection of someone who knows you well — the soup you actually like, not the generic kind. The specific crackers. A Gatorade in the flavor you always go for, even though you never explicitly told him that.
"You know my Gatorade flavor," you say.
"I pay attention." He puts things away with the efficiency of someone who's spent time in places where efficiency was survival-level necessary. "I also got the good tissues. The ones with the lotion, not the ones that make your nose raw."
"Roy."
"Yeah?"
"You got the good tissues."
"Your nose gets raw. It's a thing." He comes to sit near you, not too close. Roy's version of consideration is not crowding, not suffocating, just available. "You want the soup now or later?"
"Now, I think."
He heats it up. He brings it with the crackers and sits back with the easy looseness of someone who knows how to wait, who has learned the hard way that sometimes you just have to be in a room with someone and that's enough.
"You look terrible," he says.
"Thank you."
"Like a sad burrito."
"I'm in a blanket."
"A sad burrito blanket." He glances at you sideways, and there's something in it, underneath the jokes. "You need anything else?"
"This is good," you say. "Being here is good."
He nods, something settling in him. "Okay."
He stays. He watches something with you, doesn't pick it, lets you pick, and makes no comment about what you pick. At some point, he ends up closer than he started, and neither of you marks the exact moment it happened.
"Roy," you say, half-asleep.
"Yeah."
"Thanks."
"Any time," he says. And he means it the way Roy means things, which is practically and completely.
Drunk
Roy finds out you're drunk because he's at the same bar.
Different part of it — he'd been meeting someone about something, the vague category of thing Roy's life is full of that you don't always ask about — and he spots you across the room in the way he spots things, which is automatically and with full tactical detail.
He clocks the group you're with. He sets the glasses on the table. He clocks you laughing at something with your head back and your eyes bright, and he stays where he is for a minute just watching because there's a version of you that only comes out when you're relaxed and unguarded, and he's not going to pretend he doesn't like seeing it.
Then someone in your group who you clearly don't know well enough puts a hand somewhere they shouldn't.
Roy is there in about four steps.
He doesn't make a production of it. He just appears at your shoulder and says 'hey' and the hand disappears, and the someone finds somewhere else to be with the efficiency of a person who has correctly read Roy Harper and made a smart decision.
You look at him.
"Hi," you say, surprised.
"Hi." He looks at you. "You good?"
"Yeah. Yeah, thanks." You look at where the someone was. "You didn't have to — "
"I was here already." He says it like it's nothing. "You having fun?"
"I was." You look at him more carefully. "Were you following me?"
"I was at the bar first, actually. You can check the timestamps."
"I'm not checking timestamps."
"Then you'll have to take my word for it." He nods toward the bar. "You want water?"
"I'm fine — "
"Not a commentary on your state. Just water." He raises an eyebrow. "I'm getting water. You want some?"
"...Sure."
He gets water. He comes back. He leans against the wall next to you in the specific Roy way, comfortable in his own skin in any situation, and hands you the glass.
"Thank you," you say. "For the — for earlier."
"Forget it."
"Roy — "
"Genuinely, forget it. Drink your water." He looks at the room. "You need a ride later?"
"I was going to get a car."
"I'll take you."
"You were here for something — "
"I'm done." He glances at you sideways. "I'll take you home. Not a big deal."
It is, you both know, at least a medium deal.
But Roy doesn't make it one, and you don't make it one, and that's the thing about Roy — he takes care of things without making you feel taken care of, which is a skill that's rarer than it sounds.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he says.
He stays in your orbit for the rest of the night, not attached, not hovering, just — there. The way Roy is there. Solidly, quietly, practically.
He takes you home.
He makes sure the door is locked.
He says text me when you're up and means it.
You text him in the morning.
He responds in under a minute.
HAL JORDAN
Sick
Hal Jordan's primary response to most situations is confidence, which works extremely well in space and somewhat less well in a domestic context involving someone else's illness.
He arrives at your apartment with the bearing of a man who has this handled.
He does not fully have this handled.
"I got soup," he says, holding up the can.
"That's a can of beans," you say.
He looks at the can.
"I grabbed the wrong one," he says.
"Hal."
"I'll go back out — "
"It's fine, I have soup, I just — why did you bring a can of beans to someone who is sick?"
"The store was laid out badly." He puts the beans down with dignity. "I also got — " he checks the bag — "this is medicine. This part I did correctly."
"That's a good sign."
"Thank you." He comes and looks at you with the Hal Jordan look, the one that has crossed sectors of the universe and come back slightly changed by it, but still, underneath, just Hal. "You look rough."
"You're the second person to say that to me today."
"I'm saying it with love."
"Sure."
He gets the actual soup — you have some, he just hadn't known to look — and he heats it up with the determination of someone completing a mission objective, and he brings it to you and sits down.
"I'm not good at this," he says, which is the most Hal sentence possible. The acknowledgement without apology.
"You're doing okay."
"I grabbed beans instead of soup."
"You caught it immediately and course-corrected. That's fine crisis management."
He laughs, surprised. "Crisis management for getting soup."
"Everything's a mission." You look at him. "How'd yours go? You were out yesterday."
"Routine. Distant sector." He says it in the way he says things; he's minimizing, which you've learned to read. "Nothing interesting."
"You're minimizing."
"A little." He settles back. "Nothing I couldn't handle."
"That's not the same thing."
"No," he agrees. "It's not." He looks at you. "How long have you been sick?"
"Two days."
"Why didn't you call me yesterday?"
"You were in a distant sector doing nothing interesting."
He makes a face. "You could've called."
"I know." You look at him. "I didn't want to be the thing you worried about on top of everything else."
Hal is quiet for a moment.
"You're never the thing on top of everything else," he says. "You're the thing I come back for. There's a difference."
The soup is warm, and Hal Jordan is sitting on your couch, battered by whatever the distant sector was that he's minimizing, and he's here, which means he chose here when he could have gone anywhere.
"Hal," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for coming."
"I brought beans by mistake."
"I don't care about the beans."
He looks at you.
"I know," he says quietly. "Me either."
Drunk
There's a Green Lantern Corps event, which sounds official, and is, mostly, but there is also an open bar, and Hal Jordan at an open bar at an event where he is technically off-duty is a known quantity.
The known quantity is: he matches you drink for drink, and you both end up significantly more relaxed than the event intended.
He finds this extremely funny.
"We're the worst people here," he says, at some point, leaning against a pillar.
"We're not the worst — "
"We're comfortably in the bottom ten percent." He looks around the room at various serious cosmic entities and human officials. "Everyone here is very earnest."
"They're doing important work."
"They are. We are also doing important work." He gestures at his drink. "Morale maintenance."
"Is that what this is?"
"I'm a senior officer. I know what I'm doing."
"Hal, you just knocked over a decorative — "
"That was the pillar's fault." He looks at you, the Hal look, the one that has too much warmth in it for someone who spends so much time being the most confident person in any room. "You're having fun."
"I am," you say, surprised to realize it's true.
"Good." He takes your hand, casual, easy, like it's just a thing he's doing and not a decision. “The events are usually boring. I'm glad this one's not.”
'It's the morale maintenance," you say.
"See? Senior officer. I know things."
Later, navigating out, both of you slightly more careful about the steps than usual, the kind of careful that confirms something — he keeps your hand.
"Hal," you say, outside in the air.
"Yeah?"
"You're not exactly sober either."
"I'm aware of that, yes."
"So who's navigating?"
He considers this. "We navigate together," he says, with the confidence of a man who has crossed the galaxy and can handle one city. "It'll be fine."
"That's very on-brand for you."
"It usually works out."
"Usually," you say.
"Ninety percent of the time," he says. "Good odds."
You navigate together.
It works out.
It usually does, with Hal, which is either statistical evidence or optimism or just the particular shape of the two of you — probably all three.
could I ask for a completely civilian reader x Jason T who gets injured trying to protect Jason?
Thank you!!!
Stupid Brave
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dividers by @cafekitsune
Here is what you know about Jason Todd.
You know he's Red Hood. You know what that means in terms of the specific arithmetic of his life — the danger, the enemies, the nights he comes home wrong and won't say how. You know the safe house has four locks, and you know why. You know the particular sound he makes when something hurts that he's not going to mention, and you know the difference between the nightmares and the regular not-sleeping, and you know that he takes his coffee black except when he's had a very bad week, and then it's two sugars, and he won't acknowledge the two sugars.
You know him.
What you don't know — what you have no framework for, no training for, no version of yourself that has ever needed to know — is what to do when you're in the wrong place, and someone points a gun at the back of his head.
It turns out your body knows before you do.
It's not supposed to be a thing.
That's what makes it — that's the part that Jason will turn over later, in the specific way he processes failures, looking for every point where it went wrong. It's not supposed to be a thing. You're picking him up. That's it. He'd texted — can you come get me, 4th and Morrison, don't ask — which is a Jason text, which you've received variations of before, which means something went sideways with transport and he needs a quiet exit, and your car is the quiet exit.
You'd parked on Morrison.
You'd waited.
He'd come out of the alley in the civilian clothes he keeps for exactly this purpose — the ones that make him look like a large man who has been somewhere, which is true, rather than Red Hood, which is what he's been — and you'd seen him and gotten out of the car because it was a nice night and you'd been sitting for twenty minutes and your legs wanted the air.
That's the variable.
You getting out of the car is the variable.
Because if you'd stayed in the car you'd have seen it but not been close enough, and the man who comes out of the shadows behind Jason with the gun already raised would have had his moment and then Jason's training would have kicked in and Jason would have handled it, probably, would have turned at the last second or dropped or done something that you don't have the vocabulary for but that he does.
But you're out of the car.
And you're closer than the car.
And Jason is looking at you and not behind him.
And your body moves.
Later, you won't be able to reconstruct the decision.
Because it isn't one. A decision implies a moment of choosing, a pros and cons, a moment where you weigh the variables and select an outcome. What happens is not that.
What happens is: you see it, and then you're moving, and then you're between Jason and the gun, and then there's a sound, and then there's a pain in your side that is so immediate and total that it whites out everything else for a second.
Then the ground.
Then Jason's voice, which is a sound you've never heard from him before, which is outside the entire vocabulary of Jason Todd sounds you've catalogued over the time you've known him.
Then his hands.
He catches you before the ground does, which is something which he will be grateful for later, but cannot access right now because right now he is — he is not okay, Jason Todd is not okay, the armor is off, the mask is off, and there's blood on his hand,s and it's yours.
The man with the gun is not a concern anymore.
He'd been a concern for approximately four seconds after the shot, and then he was not, because Jason had dealt with him with the focused efficiency of someone who has a much more immediate priority and needs this particular variable removed.
He's on the ground with you now.
His hands on your side, the wound, applying pressure with the practiced certainty of someone who has done field medicine in worse conditions and is currently finding that knowing what to do and being able to do it clearly are two different things when it's you.
"Hey," he says. His voice is doing something he can't control. "Hey, look at me."
You look at him.
Your face is doing the thing faces do when the body is processing something large — very present and very far away simultaneously.
"Hi," you say.
"Don't hi me," he says, which doesn't make sense, which is what comes out. "I need you to stay with me. Can you do that?"
"I'm here," you say. "I'm —" you make a sound that you're trying to make smaller than it is. "That really hurts."
"I know. I know it does." His hands are steady. His hands are always steady. "I've got you. I've got pressure on it. You're going to be okay."
"Is the guy — "
"Don't worry about the guy."
"Jason — "
"He's handled. Don't worry about the guy." He looks at your face, doing the assessment, the field assessment, cataloguing everything he can see. "I'm going to call — I need to call this in. I'm going to keep pressure, okay? I need you to hold this." He takes your hand and puts it over his. "Press. Like this. Don't let up."
You press.
He makes the call one-handed, fast, the terse, efficient language of someone reporting a situation, coordinates, injury type, and then he hangs up, and his other hand comes back to yours, and he's looking at you with an expression you haven't seen on him.
Not one you have a name for.
"Four minutes," he says. "They're four minutes out."
"Okay," you say.
"Talk to me," he says.
"About what?"
"Anything. Talk to me about anything."
You look at him.
His jaw is doing the thing. The thing where he's holding something back through sheer structural force of will, where the thing that wants to come out is too large and too immediate, and he's keeping it contained because right now, contained is what's needed.
"You didn't hear him," you say.
"No," Jason says. "I didn't."
"He was behind you."
"I know."
"I saw him and I just — I didn't think, I just — "
"I know," Jason says, and his voice cracks slightly on it, just at the edge, just enough. "I know you did. We're going to — we can talk about that later. Right now, I need you to keep talking."
"My car's in a tow zone probably," you say.
Something happens on his face. Not quite a laugh. The shape of one, without any of the air in it. “Yeah, it probably is.”
"You're going to have to deal with that."
"I'll deal with it."
"The fine's going to be — "
"I'll deal with it," he says again, firmer, the firmness of someone who needs you to understand that every single thing that is not you right now is completely irrelevant. "I'll deal with everything. Just keep talking."
"Okay," you say.
You keep talking.
You tell him about your day, which is a strange thing to tell someone while you're bleeding on the street, but he asked for anything, and your day is what you have. The meeting that went long. The lunch that was good. The drive over, the radio station you'd had on, the song that had been playing when he texted.
He listens to all of it.
His hands don't move.
Four minutes is four minutes, and then there are people and noise and Jason's hands are replaced by other hands, and someone is talking to you, and Jason is still there, right there, not moving, and the last thing you see before they load you is his face —
Still doing the thing you don't have a name for.
Still doing it.
The hospital is the hospital.
Jason knows hospitals. He has a complicated relationship with hospitals that involves a significant amount of personal history and a general preference for avoiding them, but he knows how they work, and right now, how they work is: he sits in a chair, and he waits.
Roy arrives twenty minutes in.
He sits in the chair next to Jason without asking if Jason wants company, which is the correct call, and he looks at Jason's hands, which still have blood on them, and he doesn't say anything about that either.
"She moved," Jason says.
"I know," Roy says.
"She's a civilian. She has no training. She doesn't — she's never — " He stops. "She just moved. Like it was obvious. Like there was no other option."
"She could have — if it had been six inches to the left, she could have — " Jason stops again. His hands are on his knees, and they're not steady now, not anymore. The field is over, and the steadiness has gone with it. "She could have died."
"She didn't," Roy says.
"This time."
"This time is the one that happened." Roy looks at him steadily. "She's in there, and she's going to be okay, and that's what's true right now."
"She did it for me," Jason says, and the words are bare, just the bones of them. "She threw herself in front of — for me. She got shot for me."
Roy doesn't say anything.
"I don't — " Jason looks at his hands. "I've had people get hurt because of me. Because of what I am, because of proximity, because I exist, and existing makes the people near me targets. I know that. I've always known that." He exhales. "This is different. She chose it. She saw it, and she chose."
"Yeah," Roy says. "She did."
"That's — " He can't finish it.
Roy puts a hand on his shoulder.
They sit.
She's out of surgery in two hours.
The doctor says through and through, clean exit, no organ involvement, she's going to be sore for a while, but she's going to be fine, and Jason stands there receiving this information and nods and says thank you in a voice that is mostly functional.
Then he sits back down.
Roy brings him coffee from the machine down the hall. It's bad coffee. Jason drinks it.
'You can go see her,' Roy says, eventually.
"In a minute."
"Jay — "
"In a minute," he says again.
He needs the minute because he knows what's going to happen when he walks into that room — he knows his own face, knows what it's going to do when he sees her, and he needs a minute to find the version of himself that can walk in there and be present rather than the version that's been sitting in this chair for two hours with blood on his hands.
He takes the minute.
Then he goes.
You're awake.
That's the first thing. You're awake, and you turn your head when he comes through the door, and your face does — your face does the thing, the specific thing, the one that's just for him, and something in Jason's chest that has been locked for two hours releases without permission.
He comes and sits in the chair by the bed.
He looks at you.
You look at him.
"Hi," you say, for the second time tonight, and this time he doesn't tell you not to hi him, he just exhales.
"Hi," he says.
"I'm okay," you say.
"I know. They told me."
"You look terrible," you say.
"You're the one who got shot."
"And you look worse than me," you say, which isn't true and is also exactly true, and something in his jaw does the thing.
"You scared me," he says.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't — " he stops. "Don't apologize. I'm not — " He looks at your hands, folded on the blanket, and he reaches over and puts his over them. "You shouldn't have done that."
"He was going to shoot you," you say.
"I know."
"In the back of the head, Jason. He had it — "
"I know," he says, quieter. "I know what he had. I know what would have happened. I know." His hand tightens over yours. "And I know why you did it. I'm just — I need a minute to be terrified before I can get to grateful."
"Okay," you say.
"You're a civilian," he says. "You have no — you didn't — there was no reason that should have been your instinct — "
"You're the person I love," you say, simply. "That was my reason."
Jason looks at you.
The thing on his face — the one you didn't have a name for on the street — is still there, and you can see it clearly now, in the hospital light, without the field and the blood and the four minutes.
It's something that looks like grief and looks like gratitude and looks like a man who has been certain for a long time that he is someone things happen to and not someone things are chosen for, looking at evidence to the contrary and not knowing what to do with it.
"That can't be enough of a reason," he says.
"It was," you say.
"You could have — "
"I know what I could have. I know the math, Jason, I'm not — I knew what I was doing." You look at him steadily. "I'd do it again."
"Don't," he says. "Don't say that."
"It's true."
"I know it's true. That's why I'm asking you not to say it." His hand over yours, both of his now, the way he holds things he's afraid of losing. "I need you to not be — I need you to be alive. That's the only thing I need. Whatever I am, whatever this costs, the one non-negotiable is you being alive."
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he repeats, like he's checking that the word means what he needs it to mean.
"But Jason," you say.
"Yeah."
"Same goes," you say. "You being alive. That's the thing. That's why I moved." You hold his gaze. "So we're even on the non-negotiable."
He looks at you for a long time.
"We're not even," he says. "You got shot."
"Minor," you say.
"Through and through is not — "
"The doctor said clean exit. That's basically a graze."
"It is categorically not a graze — "
"Jason."
"What?"
"Come here," you say.
He looks at the chair. At the bed. At you, shifting slightly to make room, which makes you wince, which makes him immediately say don't move, stop moving, and stand up.
"Carefully," you say.
"I'm not — "
"Carefully," you say again, and he carefully sits on the edge of the bed and carefully doesn't jostle you, and you put your head against his shoulder, and he puts his arm around you with the specific gentleness of someone handling something precious.
"You scared me," he says again, into your hair.
"I know," you say. "I'm sorry about that part."
"Just that part?"
"Just that part," you confirm.
He exhales.
You sit in the hospital room, and he holds you carefully, and somewhere down the hall, Roy is being told he can't have more than one person in the room and is arguing about this with the specific Roy Harper energy that means he's going to win eventually.
"The car's in a tow zone," you say, after a while.
"I know."
"You said you'd deal with it."
"I'll deal with it tomorrow."
"The fine is going to be — "
“I'll deal with it,” he says, for the third time, which this time means something slightly different, which is: I will deal with every fine, and every logistics problem, and everything that is not you being okay, because you being okay is the only variable that matters, and everything else is administrative.
You understand this.
You lean a little more into his shoulder.
He holds on.
He doesn't leave the hospital.
Roy brings him food at some point, bad vending machine food, which Jason eats without comment. A nurse tells him visiting hours are technically over, and he looks at her with a look, and she decides the policy has some flexibility.
You sleep.
He watches you sleep the way he watches things that matter to him — precisely, completely, as if he looks away, something might change.
You don't.
You're there when you wake up, and he's still in the chair, and the sun is coming through the hospital blinds, and his hands are on his knees, and he's watching you with that expression.
"You stayed," you say.
"Obviously," he says.
"You should have slept — "
"I'm fine."
"Jason — "
"I'm fine," he says, and it's the rare version, the one that's actually true. "I'm fine. You're here. I'm fine."
You look at him.
He looks at you.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he says.
Outside, Gotham is doing what Gotham does.
In here, you're here, and he's here, and the thing that almost happened didn't happen, and that's the whole of it, that's the entire thing.
could you do where the reader is dating jason todd and it is kind of like carloyn bessett and jfk jr like where they are always getting followed by the preess and paprizzie and are always in the news and news paper and news about them is always all over the internet and they do have a really good relatinship and love each other a lot it is just hard to be dating jason todd becasue of how well know his family is and they are always getting photos and videos taken of them weather they are out together and having a nice time or they are having a argument out in public together and it is put all over the internet
I love this concept so much ... the Carolyn Bessette energy is PERFECT for a Jason Todd relationship. Glamorous but real, deeply in love but constantly observed. Here we go!
Flashbulb
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dividers by @cafekitsune
The first photo runs in the Gotham Gazette on a Wednesday.
Page six. Below the fold. Small enough that you almost miss it, except that Jason's assistant texts you before you've had your first coffee, and the message is just a link and a string of question marks.
You open it.
The photo is from Saturday — the farmers market on Fifth, the one you'd gone to because Jason had wanted the good bread from the Slovenian vendor, and you'd wanted to walk somewhere that wasn't a charity event or a restaurant with a dress code. You're laughing at something. He's looking at you instead of the camera, which no one had told you was pointed at you, and his hand is at your back, and he looks — he looks like Jason, which is to say he looks like a man who has forgotten, temporarily, that the world exists outside of one specific person.
The caption reads: Wayne heir Jason Todd spotted with mystery companion. Who is she?
You put your phone down.
You pick it up again.
You read mystery companion three more times.
Then you text Jason: saw the photo
He calls instead of texting back, which means he's been awake for a while already and has already had the conversation with Alfred about damage management and is now doing the thing where he moves straight to you.
"I'm sorry," he says, before you say anything.
"You didn't do anything."
"I took you to a public farmers' market."
"Jason, normal people go to farmers' markets."
"We're not — " He stops. "I'm not a normal person. I keep forgetting to remember that."
"That's not a bad thing," you say. "That you forget."
A pause. "Are you okay?"
You look at the photo again. At his face in it. At the way he's looking at you like you're the only thing in the frame.
"Yeah," you say. "I'm okay."
You're okay.
That's true. You're just not sure how long okay is a place you can live.
Here is what they don't tell you about dating a Wayne.
They tell you about the money — everyone tells you about the money, in various tones ranging from impressed to suspicious to the particular kind of searching that means they want to know if that's why. They tell you about the galas and the Foundation events and the charity circuit and what to wear and how to stand and that the Gotham society press will absolutely have opinions about your hair.
Nobody tells you about the other kind of press.
The photographers who wait outside restaurants. Who idle on motorcycles half a block from the apartment building. Who have telephoto lenses that are frankly impressive as a piece of technology and deeply invasive as a use of one. Who have learned your schedule — not from you, not from Jason, but from sheer persistence, from being everywhere long enough that your patterns reveal themselves.
You start to notice the tells. The particular kind of person standing near a lamppost who isn't quite looking at anything. The car that's been parked across the street for two hours. The click that happens in the half-second after Jason opens a door for you because he always opens doors, that's just Jason, and every time he does it, someone gets a picture of it and writes something breathless about chivalry or wealth or whether you've moved in together.
You develop a face for it. Not a fake smile — you'd tried a fake smile early on, and it photographed badly, and more importantly, it felt wrong, like wearing someone else's skin. Just a particular kind of composition. Present but not performing. Available but not giving anything away.
Jason hates the face.
"You don't have to do that," he says, once, in the back of a car after a Foundation dinner.
"Do what?"
"Go somewhere else behind your eyes. When they're watching."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"You go very still," he says. "You stop being you, and you become the version of you that's okay with being looked at."
You think about this.
"That's not — I'm not performing. I'm just not reacting."
"I know." He looks out the window. "I hate that you've had to learn that."
The first argument that gets photographed is in October.
It's not even a real argument. It's the kind of argument that happens when two people are tired and have been at an event for three hours longer than intended and one of them — Jason — had a conversation with a journalist who recognized him and couldn't disengage gracefully and the other one — you — had been standing slightly to the left making conversation with a woman who'd asked three times whether you were the girlfriend or just a girlfriend and by the time you're outside in the cold air waiting for the car you are both just worn through.
"I didn't invite him to talk to me," Jason says.
"I know that."
"Then why are you — "
"I'm not anything. I'm tired."
"You're doing the face."
"Jason, I'm doing the tired face. They're different."
"They look the same from here."
"Then maybe stand closer," you say, which comes out sharper than intended, and the car arrives, and you both get in and spend four blocks not talking.
The photo appears online at eleven that night.
It's from outside the venue — the waiting, the four seconds of visible tension before the car arrived. You're not touching. Jason's jaw is doing the thing it does. Your arms are crossed, which you weren't aware of doing, which means you'd been more upset than you'd registered.
The headline: Trouble in paradise? Jason Todd and girlfriend in heated exchange outside Wayne Foundation event.
The comments. You don't read the comments. You've learned not to read the comments.
Jason texts you a screenshot at eleven-fifteen. Just the headline. No message.
You call him.
"It wasn't heated," you say, when he picks up.
"I know."
"We were tired."
"I know."
"I hate that they turned it into — "
"I know." A pause. "I'm sorry. About tonight. I should have extracted faster from the journalist, I should have — "
"Jason. Stop apologizing for things you can't control."
"Then what do I do?" he says, and it comes out quieter than the rest. "Because I want to take you places. Normal places. Farmers markets and restaurants, and the park because you like the park, and every time I do, someone photographs it and puts it somewhere, and you have to — you have to deal with the version of your life that other people write."
You sit with that for a moment.
"I knew what I was getting into," you say.
"Did you?"
"Not entirely," you admit. "But Jason — I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere."
A long pause.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you say back.
The article gets seventeen thousand shares. You don't look at it again.
There's a particular taxonomy to the coverage, which you've mapped without meaning to.
Wayne heir Jason Todd and companion at Gotham Park— these are the neutral ones. The sightings. The ones that appear on gossip sites with a gallery of four to six photos and a paragraph of speculation about where you were going and whether Bruce approves.
Jason Todd's girlfriend … something — these are rarer but more pointed. The ones where something is stunning in a Prada suit or keeps a low profile or, once, memorably, sparks debate because you'd been photographed leaving a coffee shop looking tired and the internet had significant opinions about this.
Wayne family Gala: Jason Todd and partner attend — these are the formal ones. The galas and openings and Foundation dinners. The ones where someone is paid to photograph you and the photographs are actually good, and you look like a couple who exists in a magazine, which is both true and completely disconnected from what being a couple actually feels like.
And then there's the fourth category, which doesn't have a clean label.
The ones that catch something real.
The farmers' market photo had been one. There's a second one from a Tuesday in November — you're walking, Jason has your coffee because you'd been fumbling with your bag, and he'd just taken it without being asked and is holding it out at exactly the right height for you to take back, and neither of you is looking at each other because it's too habitual to require attention. The photo is slightly blurry. It's from a significant distance.
It gets reposted more than anything else.
The way he just — someone writes, and doesn't finish the sentence.
You screenshot that one. The photo and the unfinished sentence.
You don't tell Jason. You just keep it.
His family has opinions.
Not bad opinions, mostly. Dick thinks it's romantic in the way Dick thinks everything is romantic, which is completely and with full conviction. Tim has read every article and filed them somewhere useful because Tim cannot help himself. Damian has expressed precisely zero interest in media coverage and significant interest in whether you can keep up with his training schedule when you visit the manor, which you cannot, which he respects you for attempting.
Bruce is the complicated one.
Not unkind. Never unkind. But there's a particular look Bruce Wayne has perfected over decades of being photographed and followed and written about, and when he looks at you, sometimes you can see him recognizing something. Calculating whether you know what you've walked into. Whether you're staying.
Alfred is the simplest one.
Alfred brings you tea when you're at the manor and asks about your week and acts, comprehensively, like you are simply a person he is glad to know. Which, given everything, is the greatest gift anyone in that building has ever given you.
"Does it get easier?" you ask him, once.
Alfred considers the question properly, which you've learned means it's going to get a real answer.
"You develop a kind of indifference," he says. "Not to the coverage itself. But to the weight of it. It stops being something that happens to you and becomes simply something that happens. The distinction matters." He pauses. "Though I'll be honest with you. Some photographs I have never quite made peace with."
"Which ones?"
"The ones that are true," he says, simply. "The ones that catch something real. Those are the ones that feel like a small theft."
You think about the farmers' market photo. About Jason's face in it.
"Yeah," you say. "Those ones."
The worst night is in February.
It's not dramatic. There's no single terrible thing. It's the accumulation of it — a week of coverage that had been heavier than usual because of something Bruce had done that was newsworthy and Jason was adjacent to it and you were adjacent to Jason and the photographer outside the apartment building had been there every morning for five days and you'd stopped leaving through the front entrance and were using the car park instead and it is February and you are tired.
Jason comes home, and you're sitting on the kitchen floor. Not crying. Just sitting.
He doesn't ask. He sits down next to you.
"I don't want to be the mystery companion anymore," you say to the cabinet across from you. "I've been mystery companion and girlfriend and partner and the woman with Jason Todd, and I don't — " You stop. "I don't know who I am in the story they're telling. And it's starting to make me forget who I am in the actual story."
Jason is quiet.
"The actual story," he says, after a moment.
"Our story. The real one." You gesture vaguely. "Not the photo from outside the Foundation dinner where we look like we're fighting. Not the farmers market photo where we look like a lifestyle piece. The actual — the Tuesday night version. The kitchen floor version."
"The kitchen floor version," he repeats, and there's something in his voice.
"Yeah."
"Okay." He leans back against the cabinet next to you. His shoulder against yours. "The kitchen floor version. What's that look like?"
"Like this," you say.
He nods slowly.
"No cameras in here," he says.
"No cameras."
"Just us."
"Just us."
He reaches over and takes your hand. Doesn't look at you — just looks at the same cabinet you're looking at, like you're watching something together.
"I want to tell you that it gets easier," he says. "I've been in this since I was a kid. I should have better advice than I do." A pause. "The truth is, I don't. The cameras are there. The coverage is there. People are going to take photos of us fighting and photos of us being happy and publish both of them and write things about our relationship that they have no information to support."
"Yeah," you say.
"And I can't fix that." He exhales. "I'd change it if I could. I would. But I can't, and I — " He stops. Tries again. "I need you to know that everything they're photographing, every version of us they're selling — none of it is the version that matters. The version that matters is the one where I know how you take your coffee, and you know when not to talk to me, and we argue about things that are stupid and make up about things that are real."
"Kitchen floor version," you say quietly.
"Kitchen floor version." He squeezes your hand. "That one's ours. They don't have it. They can take every photo they want, and they still don't have that one."
You sit on the kitchen floor for a while longer.
The photographer is probably still outside.
In here, it doesn't matter.
The photo that runs the following spring is taken at the harbor.
You'd gone on a Sunday — no event, no reason, just a walk because it was finally warm and Jason had been inside too long and was getting that look where the walls were starting to feel closer than they were. You'd walked along the waterfront and gotten terrible tourist food from a stand and watched boats and not talked about anything that mattered.
Someone had photographed you from a bridge.
Long lens. You're small in the frame — two people against the harbor, the city at your backs. Jason's arm is around your shoulders, and you're facing the water, and neither of you could have known the camera was there. You look like you're just standing somewhere together.
The article is short. No drama to report. No event, no argument, no outfit to dissect.
Jason Todd and girlfriend spotted at Gotham Harbor, Sunday afternoon.
That's it. That's all it says.
The photo, though.
The photo is the distance and the harbor and the two of you, small against the city, just standing. And something about the distance of it — the way neither of you knew — makes it look like what it actually is, which is two people who have figured out how to be somewhere together when everything else is noise.
It gets shared widely. The comments are different from usual. Less dissection, less speculation.
Mostly people just saying: oh.
You see it. You screenshot it, the same as the farmers market photo, the same as the unfinished sentence.
You show Jason this time.
He looks at it for a long time.
"We look normal," he says, like he's surprised.
"We are normal," you say. "We're the kitchen floor version."
He looks at the photo a moment longer.
"Yeah," he says. "We are."
They keep taking photos.
You keep living the version they can't get to.
Both things are true. Both things continue.
And in the end, that's the whole of it —
The flashbulbs, and the harbor, and Jason's hand in yours,
Angsty Request: DC characters(Roll the dice if you wanna do multi or just choose a random) reacting to Reader’s insecurity about being average. Like surrounded by so many people who are amazing at so many things, they don’t have anything that makes them “stand out” or “special”
Ordinary
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PAIRINGS: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Wally West, Clark Kent, Hal Jordan, Roy Harper
requests are open
It starts, like most things do, small.
A comment at a party. Someone saying oh, you're with him? What do you do? And you'd answered, and watched their face do the thing — the polite thing, the oh, that's nice thing — before they turned back to the person next to you who cured diseases or broke land speed records or could benchpress a building.
You don't say anything about it. It's fine. It's always fine.
It's just that fine has been accumulating for a while.
DICK
Dick finds out the way Dick finds out everything, which is by paying attention when you think he isn't.
You're at one of Bruce's Foundation galas, standing slightly to the left of where the conversation is happening, and Dick is watching you from across the room the way he watches things that matter to him — not obviously, not intrusively, just present in the specific way of someone who has made you his business.
He sees the moment. The woman is talking about her research. The colleague is talking about his company. The way you smile and contribute, and then go slightly, barely, quiet when someone asks the table what everyone does.
He's next to you before you've finished your answer.
His hand finds the small of your back. Not drawing attention. Just there.
Later, in the car, he doesn't say anything immediately. Dick knows when to wait.
"I'm boring," you say, to the window. You hadn't planned to say it. It just came out.
"You're not boring," he says.
"I'm not interesting. Not like — not like them. Not like any of you."
Dick is quiet for a moment.
"Can I tell you something?" he says.
"Don't."
"I'm going to anyway." He glances at you. "I grew up performing. Literally. I was on a trapeze before I could read properly. And then I was Robin, and then I was Nightwing, and my whole life has been about being something extraordinary in front of other people." He pauses. "You know what I wanted, for years, more than anything?"
You don't answer.
"Someone who was just there," he says. "Not performing. Not proving something. Just — present. Real." He takes your hand. "You are the only person in my life who makes me feel like I don't have to be anything other than Richard Grayson. Do you understand how rare that is? Do you understand what that's worth?"
You don't say anything.
"You're not boring," Dick says. "You're the only real thing I've got. That's not nothing. That's everything."
JASON
Jason is the wrong person to be subtle with, and you know it, which is why you don't try.
You say it flat, one night, while he's cleaning his helmet and you're sitting on the kitchen counter: "I don't know what I bring to the table. With you. In general."
He stops.
Puts the helmet down.
Turns to look at you with the expression he gets when he's deciding how to handle something he wasn't expecting.
"Where is this coming from," he says. Not a question.
"Everywhere." You look at your hands. "You're — you're you. And everyone around us is extraordinary. And I'm just — I'm here. I'm regular. I have nothing that — "
"Stop," he says.
"Jason — "
"I said stop." He crosses to where you're sitting, and he's close now, and his voice isn't angry, but it's firm in the way that means he means it. "You want to know what you bring to the table?"
You look at him.
"You don't flinch," he says. "You know what I am. You know everything — the pit, the Joker, the kill list, all of it — and you don't flinch. You don't look at me like I'm a problem to be managed or a tragedy to be fixed." His jaw is tight. "Do you have any idea how many people have looked at me like that? Every single person who matters to me. Everyone." He exhales. "Not you. Never you."
'That's just — that's just me not being scared of you — "
"That's not just anything," he says. "That's everything. You being unafraid of me is the thing that let me stop being afraid of myself."
He doesn't say things like that often. When he does, he means them the way buildings mean their foundations.
"You're not average," Jason says. "You're the bravest person I know. You just don't have a costume for it."
TIM
Tim approaches it like Tim approaches everything, which is logically, and initially, this is the wrong approach.
"There's no objective metric for being extraordinary," he says when you tell him. "The concept is relative and largely socially constructed — "
"Tim."
"I'm just saying that the framing of the question is — "
"Tim, I don't want a philosophical deconstruction. I feel like I'm not special. I feel like I don't belong in this world you all live in."
He stops.
He looks at you.
Tim Drake, to his credit, knows when he's made an error and corrects it fast.
"You're right," he says. "I'm sorry. That was — I went analytical because I don't know how to handle thinking about you feeling like that.' He sits down next to you. 'Can I try again?"
"Yeah," you say.
"You are the most perceptive person I have ever met," he says. "And I live with people who solve crimes for fun. You understand people — actually understand them, not just analyze them — in a way I've spent years trying to learn and still can't." He looks at you seriously. "You understood me. In like three weeks. That took Alfred years. That took Dick decades. You did it in three weeks."
"That's just — paying attention — "
"So is detective work," Tim says. "You just use it differently. You use it to make people feel known." He pauses. "I have never felt as known by anyone as I do by you. That is not a small thing. For me specifically, that is the largest possible thing."
You're quiet.
"You belong here," Tim says. "You belong with me. Those are the same thing, and they're both completely true."
DAMIAN
Damian doesn't find out because you tell him.
Damian finds out because he's Damian, and Damian notices everything, and files it, and brings it up at a time of his choosing, which is never the time you'd choose.
It's three weeks after a League of Assassins gala, of all things, where you'd spent an evening surrounded by people who could kill with seventeen different household objects, and you'd smiled and made conversation and felt comprehensively unremarkable.
You've mostly moved on. You think.
"You've been doing the thing," Damian says, out of nowhere, not looking up from his sketchbook.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you're present but you've decided you're not significant."
You stare at him.
He looks up. His expression is its usual composed, unimpressed default, but his eyes are doing something different. Something that, on anyone else, you'd call careful.
"I don't do a — "
"You've done it consistently since the Al-Ghul event," he says. "Which I should have addressed sooner. I was determining the correct approach."
"And what approach did you determine?"
Damian puts down the sketchbook. He turns to face you fully, which means this is serious.
"I was raised to believe that worth is determined by ability," he says. "By skill. By measurable superiority." A pause. "I was raised incorrectly."
You blink.
"You have no combat training. No powers. No particular strategic credentials." He says this without cruelty, just precision. "And yet you are the only person whose opinion I seek. The only person in whose presence I do not feel the need to perform capability." He holds your gaze. "You make me want to be better. Not because you've demanded it. Simply by existing as you are. By being decent, and kind, and entirely without artifice."
"Damian — "
"That is not average," he says. "That is exceptionally rare. I have met very few people who could survive my family's world and emerge kinder for it." He picks the sketchbook back up. "You are not ordinary. You are precisely the kind of person the extraordinary cannot manufacture, no matter how hard they try."
He goes back to sketching.
The subject is closed.
Except: you notice, later, that what he's drawing is you.
WALLY
Wally West has a lot of feelings and very little ability to not immediately express all of them at top volume, which is usually either the best or worst quality in a person, depending on the situation.
In this situation, it's the best.
"Okay, no," he says when you finish talking. "Nope. Absolutely not. We're not doing this."
"Wally — "
"You feel average? You? You feel average?" He is already pacing, which at Wally speed means he's basically vibrating in place. "You know what average looks like? I am surrounded by people who move at the speed of light and punch satellites, and I still think you're the most impressive person in any room you walk into. Do you know why?"
"Because you love me and you're biased — "
"Yes, and also because it's true." He stops pacing. He comes to stand in front of you with that Wally energy that's always slightly too big for indoor spaces, warm and earnest and completely unguarded. "You know what I think about when everything gets too fast? When it's too loud and too much, and the speed is more curse than gift?"
You don't answer.
"You," he says. "The way you move through a room like you've got all the time in the world. The way nothing seems to panic you. The way you slow everything down just by being there." He takes your hands. "I need you to understand that I run at the speed of sound and you are the only thing that makes me want to stop."
You look at him.
"You're not average," he says, serious for once, fully serious, the Barry Allen seriousness underneath all the Wally West noise. "You are the stillness I can't make myself. That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing."
ROY
Roy doesn't do speeches. Roy does honesty, which is sometimes messier but always lands harder.
"Yeah, I get it," he says when you tell him.
Which is not what you expected.
"You get it," you repeat.
"I've spent half my life next to Oliver Queen, who is generationally talented and also happens to be a superhero. And then Ollie's best friend is literally the fastest man alive." He leans back. "I know what it feels like to be the regular one. Trust me, I have a PhD in it."
"Then you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," he says. "And I also know it's wrong." He looks at you levelly. "You know what nobody ever talks about? How hard it is to love people like us. People who disappear at two in the morning. Who comes back banged up and won't explain why. Who carries things they can't put down and take it out sideways?" His voice is even. "Most people leave. They can't handle it. And I don't blame them, it's a lot."
'Roy — "
"You stayed," he says. "That's not average. Staying with someone like me — staying with any of us — takes something most people don't have." He meets your eyes. "You want to know what you bring to the table? You make a life possible. An actual life. Not just a mission. Not just a cover identity." He exhales. "I didn't know I needed that. Turns out it's the only thing I actually needed."
You're quiet for a long time.
"You're not the regular one," Roy says. "You're the one who makes the rest of it worth it. There's a difference."
HAL
Hal Jordan's entire personality is confidence, which he sometimes actually has, which means he knows exactly how it sounds when someone's running low on it.
He hears it in you before you finish the sentence.
"Hey," he says, cutting you off gently. "Come back."
"I'm here."
"You're here, but you're doing the thing where you've already decided something, and you're just telling me the conclusion." He sits down across from you. "Start from the beginning."
So you do. You tell him about the feeling — the accumulation of it, the galas and the team-ups and the moments of standing next to someone extraordinary and being, by comparison, just there.
Hal listens. Hal is better at listening than anyone would guess, given everything else about him.
"You know what I've learned," he says, when you're done, "from having a ring that runs on willpower?"
"What?"
"Will isn't about being extraordinary. It's about deciding something matters and not letting go of that decision." He looks at you. "That's it. That's the whole thing. There's no talent component. There's no special gene. It's just — you decide, and you hold on."
"What does that have to do with me?"
"Because you have that," he says simply. "You have it more than most people I know, and I've literally flown through space with some of the most willful beings in the universe." He tilts his head. "You decided this relationship was worth it. You decided to stay in this world, with all of its chaos and its danger and its complete inability to function normally. You decided, and you held on."
"That's not — that's not the same as — "
"It's exactly the same." His voice is quiet and certain in the way that Hal Jordan rarely is, the way underneath all the bravado. "The ring would choose you. I know it would. It picks the ones who don't quit." He reaches over. "You've never quit. Not on me, not on any of us. That's extraordinary. You've just never called it that."
CLARK
Clark is the hardest to tell, because Clark is Clark, and you spend three weeks not saying it.
He notices at week two. He waits until you're ready.
When you finally say it — quietly, sitting on the apartment floor because you'd slid down the wall and hadn't bothered moving — you say: I just don't see what I am to all of this. What I contribute. What makes me matter in a world full of people who change things?
Clark sits down on the floor next to you.
He doesn't say anything immediately.
Clark is the most powerful being on the planet, and he uses that silence like it's something gentle.
"Can I tell you something?" he says, finally.
"If it's about how everyone is valuable in their own way, I'm going to — "
"It's not," he says. "It's about Smallville."
You wait.
"I grew up knowing what I was," he says. "Knowing I was different. And I spent a long time thinking that the power was the point — that what made me matter was what I could do that no one else could." He looks at the middle distance. "And then I got older, and I met people — journalists, farmers, teachers, ordinary people living ordinary lives — who were good in a way that had nothing to do with ability. Who showed up, every day, for the people around them. Who made things better not by being extraordinary but by being decent."
"Clark — "
"Those people changed my life more than the ability ever did," he says. "Being good is not a small thing. Being kind is not a small thing. Being the person who shows up, who stays, who loves without needing to be exceptional — " He looks at you. "That is the hardest thing I have ever encountered. Harder than anything I can lift."
He takes your hand.
"I have never once looked at you and seen someone who doesn't matter," he says. "I have looked at you and seen the kind of person I try to be. The kind of person I'm not sure I've managed yet." A pause. "You are not less than us. You are, in many ways, the thing we're trying to become."
The floor is still the floor. Nothing has changed technically.
But Clark is sitting on it with you, and somehow that makes the distance between ordinary and everything else feel much, much smaller.
WARNINGS: ceiling mirror (it has its own warning obv), satoru's back muscles (again, a separate, specific warning), loving his ass in many ways ifuwim... just kinky sex once again. Art credits: @_3aem on X (full drawing at the end of the fic)
The mirror had been his idea, of course. Satoru Gojo didn't do anything halfway, and when he'd renovated the bedroom, he'd installed a ceiling-to-wall sheet of polished glass directly above the bed, framed in matte black steel. "I want to watch," he'd said, like it was simple. Like watching himself fuck you wasn't the most obscene thing he'd ever suggested—and he'd suggested many obscene things.
Tonight, it was everything.
He had you on your back, sheets tangled around your ankles, your legs spread wide and hooked over his elbows. He was deep inside you, thick and hard, moving with that slow, devastating rhythm that made your vision blur at the edges. But you weren't looking at the place where you joined. You were looking up.
In the mirror, his back was a work of art. The muscles of his shoulders bunched and released with every thrust, the elegant line of his spine flexing, the powerful sweep of his lats tapering down to a waist that was criminal on a man that strong. His ass—God, his ass—tightened and released with each snap of his hips, two perfect handfuls of muscle that you suddenly, desperately needed to touch.
"Eyes on me," he growled, but you couldn't. You were transfixed.
He was beautiful. No—beautiful was too soft a word. He was devastating. The way his abdominal muscles contracted when he bottomed out, the shift of his obliques, the sheen of sweat making his pale skin glow in the low light. You'd seen him fight cursed spirits, seen him destroy special grades with a flick of his wrist, but this—watching his body work, watching the physical effort of pleasuring you—was more powerful than any technique.
Your hand moved before you consciously decided it. Traced down the hard plane of his stomach, felt the muscles jump beneath your touch, kept going.
"Don't," he gasped, but it was a lie. You could hear the plea beneath the command.
You palmed his ass, squeezed, and he groaned, his rhythm faltering. In the mirror, you watched your own fingers dig into that perfect flesh, watched him shudder, his back muscles rippling in response.
"Fuck," he breathed. "Fuck, your hands—"
You didn't stop. You traced the cleft, found him hot and sensitive, and pressed one fingertip against his rim.
His head dropped to your shoulder, his hips stuttering to a halt. "You're going to kill me."
"Don't stop," you whispered, and he didn't. He resumed moving, slower now, grinding deep instead of thrusting, and you pushed your finger inside.
The sound he made was inhuman. A growl, a whine, something broken and desperate. In the mirror, you watched his face contort—mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, that perfect composure shattered. You worked your finger deeper, found the angle that made him sob, and started to fuck him with it in time with his thrusts into you.
"Look," you commanded, and he did. His head lifted, blue eyes finding yours in the reflection, then traveling up to watch what you were doing to him.
He looked ruined. His hair was a mess, his chest heaving, and your hand was between his legs, moving steadily, making his ass clench around your finger. You added a second one, stretching him, and he cried out, his hips snapping forward hard enough to drive the air from your lungs.
"There," he gasped. "Right there—fuck—don't stop—"
You didn't. You couldn't. Watching him in the mirror—watching his muscles tense and release, watching the powerful sorcerer reduced to a trembling mess because of your fingers inside him—was the most erotic thing you'd ever seen. You scissored your fingers, pressed against his prostate, and felt him swell even thicker inside you.
"Going to come," he warned, his voice ragged. "Can't—can't hold it—"
"Come," you ordered, working him harder, deeper. "I want to watch."
He shattered. You felt it happen—the sudden tension in his thighs, the way his back arched, the muscles of his shoulders standing out in sharp relief as he threw his head back and screamed. He pulsed inside you, hot and endless, his body clamping down on your fingers, his hips jerking through the aftershocks.
When he collapsed, he buried his face in your neck, still trembling. You withdrew your fingers slowly, and he whimpered, oversensitive, his cock still twitching inside you.
"Mirror," he managed, his voice wrecked. "Wanted to watch you. Didn't—didn't think about watching myself."
You carded your fingers through his hair, held him close. "You were beautiful," you whispered. "Look up."
He did. In the reflection, you could see yourselves—entwined, messy, his body still draped over yours. He stared for a long moment, then laughed, breathless and raw.
"Again," he said. "In ten minutes. I want to watch you do that to me from the beginning."
You smiled against his temple. "Ten minutes?"
"Five," he corrected, already hardening again inside you. "Definitely five."
Hey girl I love your workkk like LOVE IT and can I ask another Nicole/ Jecka like reader but like more… cannon accurate? Like don’t get me wrong I LOVE the independent reader but if you play the game you know that reader would rather sell crack then get a job on a dinner lol and they would more then gladly accept Damian’s money, hell, shamelessly ask for more, or go and try to blackmail Bruce with what they think faux information (him being Batman) only to be right at the end and then being like… oh shit. We can make a bank out of this. Like those girls would be jorking (badly mind you) for a villain if the pays good enough lol like those girls are UNHINGED. And while I do adore that fic you did it’s a bit OoC. Please please do not take this badly. I’m being genuine when I say i love your fics.
Okay I am CACKLING because you are so right and I love you for this correction. Nicole/Jeka coded reader is a completely different beast and I was writing her too soft.
Net Positive
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requests are open
dividers by @cafekitsune
You meet Damian Wayne because he throws a birdarang at someone two feet from your head, and you drop your groceries.
Specifically, you drop the eggs.
Six dollars and forty cents, gone. Splattered on the Crime Alley pavement like a tiny yellow tragedy.
The guy he was aiming at — some low-level something, you don't ask questions in this neighborhood, it's a survival trait — runs. Damian lands from wherever he came from with the particular energy of a very small person who has been trained to kill since before he could read, looks at the egg situation, and then looks at you.
"You were not supposed to be there," he says.
"I live here," you say.
"Crime Alley is an active patrol zone."
"Crime Alley is where I buy my groceries because the bodega on Fifth doesn't have the good hot sauce." You look at the eggs. You look at him. "That's six forty."
He stares at you.
"My eggs," you clarify. "You owe me six forty. And actually, the bag ripped when I dropped it, so let's call it an even ten because there was bread in there too, and now it's on the ground."
Damian Wayne, aged seventeen, heir to one of the largest fortunes in the continental United States, looks at you for a long moment with an expression you will come to recognize as his recalibrating face.
He reaches into his utility belt.
He produces a hundred-dollar bill.
You take it immediately.
"Keep the change," he says, like he's read that line somewhere and is trying it out.
"Obviously," you say, already picking up the non-destroyed groceries. "Same time next week if you want to make it a regular thing."
You walk home.
Behind you, you are almost certain Robin is standing in the middle of Crime Alley, having some kind of experience.
He comes back.
Not next week — three days later, which you note but don't comment on. He lands on your fire escape at ten PM like this is a normal thing people do, and you open the window because your apartment has no air conditioning and it's August and the window was already open.
"You live here alone," he says, looking at the apartment with the expression of someone who has never seen water damage before.
"Congratulations on your detective skills."
"It's not safe."
"Yeah, Crime Alley's rough. I've noticed." You're making ramen because it's Tuesday and Tuesday is ramen night, not because you can't afford other things, mostly, but because you like ramen. "Did you come back to tell me that, or did you want something?"
He looks at you.
"I don't want anything," he says, in the tone of someone who wants something.
"Okay." You stir the ramen. "Fire escape's yours then."
He stays for two hours.
You don't ask him to leave because, honestly, the company is fine, and he's seventeen and clearly has some kind of rich kid socialization issue, and also at one point he fixes the latch on your window that's been broken since March, and you weren't going to turn down free labor.
He leaves at midnight.
He comes back on Thursday.
The blackmail attempt happens at the three-month mark.
In your defense, you'd been putting pieces together for a while. The Robin visits. The Wayne name. The way Damian moved, the way he talked about his family, the very specific comment he'd made once about his father's crusade, like it was a real thing and not a metaphor.
You'd done some research.
Publicly available research. You hadn't hacked anything. Technically.
You present your findings on a Tuesday over ramen because the timing feels right.
"I know your dad is Batman," you say.
Damian's chopsticks stop moving.
"That's a significant accusation," he says, carefully.
"I have a whole thing." You gesture at the folder on the table. "Timeline of Batman sightings versus Wayne family public appearances. Photo analysis — your dad's jaw is very distinctive; someone should tell him about that. Plus, you literally showed up here in a Robin costume, and your last name is Wayne, so."
Damian looks at the folder.
He looks at you.
"What do you want?" he says, flatly.
And here is where a normal person might say nothing, I just wanted you to know that I know, we can trust each other now, something emotionally intelligent and relationship-forward.
"Forty thousand dollars," you say.
Damian blinks.
"That's — "
"I've done the math. That covers my rent for two years, gets me out of this apartment, pays off my remaining debt, and leaves me a cushion." You fold your hands on the table. "I'm not greedy. I'm not asking for a million. Forty thousand is reasonable."
"You're blackmailing me," Damian says, slowly, like he's testing the word.
"I'm presenting you with a mutually beneficial arrangement. I keep your family secret. You compensate me for the service."
"That's blackmail."
"It's a service fee."
He stares at you.
You wait.
Damian Wayne, who has been trained by the League of Assassins and the Batman, and arguably Alfred Pennyworth, who is scarier than both, looks at you across a bowl of ramen in a Crime Alley apartment with water damage on the ceiling and says, slowly:
"You're serious."
"As a heart attack."
"You could be arrested."
"For what, having a folder? This is all public information." You tap it. "I haven't hacked anything. I've done journalism."
"This is not journalism."
"It's investigative."
Another silence.
"I need to make a call," Damian says.
Bruce Wayne arrives at your apartment at eleven-thirty PM in civilian clothes with the particular energy of a man who has heard something unbelievable and come to assess it personally.
He looks at you.
He looks at the folder on the table.
He looks at Damian, who is sitting on your couch, eating the rest of your ramen with the expression of someone who has decided this is no longer his problem.
"You," Bruce Wayne says to you, "put together a dossier on my identity from public information."
"Folder," you correct. "Dossier sounds like I work for someone. I'm freelance."
"And you attempted to blackmail my son."
"Attempted implies failure. I'm still at the table."
Bruce Wayne looks at you for a very long time with an expression you genuinely cannot read, which doesn't happen to you often and is mildly alarming.
Then he pulls out a chair and sits down.
"Walk me through the timeline analysis," he says.
"...Sorry?"
"The sighting timeline." He nods at the folder. "Walk me through it. I want to know where the gaps are."
You stare at him.
Damian, from the couch, says, "I told you" to no one in particular.
You walk him through it.
Bruce Wayne listens. He asks three questions, all of them specific, all of them smart. At one point, he takes out a pen and makes a note, which means you've correctly identified an actual pattern gap in their public appearance management, and Bruce Wayne is taking notes from your ramen table research.
"The charity gala cross-reference is good," he says, almost to himself. "We've been sloppy about the October window."
"November too," you say. "There's a cluster."
"Mm." He looks up. "You have good instincts."
"I know."
"The blackmail attempt was stupid."
"The blackmail attempt was financially motivated, and I stand by the reasoning even if the execution needed work."
Bruce Wayne almost smiles. It's very brief. You clock it, though.
"Here's what I'm going to do," he says. "I'm going to write you a check."
You sit up straighter.
"Not forty thousand," he says.
You sit back down.
"Sixty," he says. "Because the November cluster is genuinely concerning and you found it from a Crime Alley apartment with no resources, which means you're either very good or we're very bad, and I prefer to believe the former." He looks at you steadily. "In exchange, the folder goes away, you sign an NDA, and you never do this again."
"Define this."
"Blackmail. My family specifically."
"What about consulting?" you say.
A pause.
"What?"
"If I found this much from public information in three months," you say, "imagine what I could find if I was actually trying. For you. Paid." You look at him. "I'm just saying there's a version of this conversation where you walk away with an asset instead of just a liability management situation."
Bruce Wayne looks at you.
Damian, from the couch, says "she has a point" in a tone that implies he's been thinking this for a while.
"You tried to blackmail me," Bruce says.
"And now I'm pitching you. It's called a pivot."
The silence stretches.
"The NDA covers everything," Bruce says finally. "What you know, what you find, what you're paid. Everything."
"Understood."
"You report to Alfred for administrative matters. To me for assignments."
"What about Damian?"
They both look at you.
"He's here every Tuesday and Thursday," you say. "That's just a fact we should probably acknowledge."
Damian looks at the ceiling.
Bruce looks at Damian.
"Alfred will contact you tomorrow," Bruce says, standing. He picks up the folder. "This comes with me."
"I made copies," you say.
"I assumed." He tucks it under his arm. "Burn them."
"After the check clears."
He stops.
Turns.
Looks at you with the Batman face, which he is technically not wearing but is absolutely making.
"After the check clears," you say again, pleasantly.
Bruce Wayne leaves your apartment.
Damian stands up, puts the empty ramen bowl in your sink, and says: "I told him you'd do that."
"Told him I'd do what?"
"Hold the copies over him. He thought I was underestimating you." He picks up his helmet. "I wasn't."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"It's a statement of fact."
"Still counts."
He leaves through the fire escape.
You sit at your ramen table in your Crime Alley apartment and look at the space where Bruce Wayne just was.
Sixty thousand dollars, you think.
Plus a salary, presumably.
You pick up your phone.
The check clears on Thursday.
You burn the copies on Friday.
You keep one. Obviously. But that's just good practice and also insurance, and also you're not entirely sure you trust a billionaire vigilante whose son you technically blackmailed, so.
It lives in a safety deposit box at a bank that is not in Gotham.
Just in case.
Alfred calls Saturday morning at nine sharp, which tells you something about Alfred before you've even met him.
"Miss," he says, "I understand we'll be working together."
"Looks like it."
"I've prepared the necessary paperwork. There are a few items I'd like to discuss regarding professional conduct expectations." A pause, perfectly timed. "And I understand you're in the market for a new apartment."
You sit up. "I am."
"I've taken the liberty of identifying several options in a slightly less — " another pause, gracious this time — "dynamic neighborhood. If you'd like to review them."
"Alfred," you say.
"Yes?"
"I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"Indeed," Alfred says, with the warmth of someone who has decided something. "I rather think it might be."
Three months later, Damian is on your new couch — nicer building, no water damage, the good hot sauce from the bodega on Fifth is a twenty-minute walk but worth it — and you're showing him what you've found on an Intergang cell that Bruce had assigned you last week.
"This connection is circumstantial," he says, pointing at your laptop screen.
"It's not circumstantial, it's triangulated."
"Those are different things."
"They can be both."
"They — " He stops. "No. They cannot be both."
"I'm going to need you to trust my process."
"Your process found my father's identity from a ramen table."
"And got me sixty thousand dollars, so."
He makes the face. The recalibrating face. You know all his faces now.
"The connection is interesting," he allows, which, from Damian Wayne, is basically a standing ovation.
"Thank you."
"Don't be smug."
"I'm always smug when I'm right."
"You're always smug."
"I'm right a lot."
He looks at the screen. At your notes. At the work, which is good, genuinely good, the kind of work that has made Bruce Wayne say hm and good catch twice in the past month, which Alfred has informed you is high praise.
"You're useful," Damian says.
"To the Wayne family crime-fighting operation."
"Yes."
"For a salary."
"Obviously."
"This is the best job I've ever had," you say.
"You tried to blackmail us into giving it to you."
"And it worked." You pick up your coffee. "That's just good initiative."
Damian is quiet for a moment.
"Don't tell anyone how you got this position," he says.
"I'll tell anyone who pays me more to keep quiet about it."
"That's — that's blackmail again — "
"It's a service fee." You smile at him. "You should know the difference by now."
He steals your coffee.
You let him, because you've found, over time, that Damian Wayne's version of you're my favorite person in a given room is expressed entirely through property theft and mild insults, and you have apparently become fluent in it without meaning to.
Outside, Gotham does what Gotham does.
Inside, you find a second Intergang connection that isn't circumstantial or triangulated, but is both, and send it to Bruce with a note that says you're welcome before he's even asked.
He sends back: good work.
You send back: annual review is next month. Just a reminder.
