summary: a struggling pasty chef finally catches a break when you're given a chance to work at 'The Pitt', a popular restaurant in Pittsburgh. you find it difficult to adjust to the new environment, it will be harder with Jack Abbot around. you make it harder for him too.
tags/description: 18+ MDNI, pastry chef!fem!reader, swearing, NSFW comments, mentions of substances + alcohol, an attempt at slow burn, crack fic, maybe possibly OOC for everyone LOL, me trying to be funny, smut maybe mehehehe, additional tags at the beginning of each chapter
to be added to the taglist; comment on this post! (if ur in my existing taglist, please comment to be tagged in this series.)
It's been a long ten months for Frank Langdon. Rehab, endless meetings to prove he's fit for his job, and losing you.
It's his own fault. He knows that. He couldn't handle the pressure of his entire life going to shit, and combusted, destroying your life in the process. If things had gone to plan, the two of you would've been married by now. Instead, you're near strangers, and Frank doesn't know how long he can watch you date a guy that absolutely doesn't deserve you.
Until you turn up on his doorstep, with nowhere else to go after being kicked out by your ex.
And so, Frank Langdon's second chance begins.
warnings: 18+, mdni! this fic will feature medical gore, a little bit of violence, and explicit sex. more detailed warnings on each chapter individually
summary: when you and langdon get stuck on the roof of the trauma center together, he decides to stir up the ghost of your relationship to pass the time. but you've long moved on, and frank's left haunting the wrong house. (5k)
pairing: frank langdon / ex!fem!reader, jack abbot / wife!reader
contents: enemies to lovers to friends, established past relationship w/ langdon, established relationship w/ jack, unrequited love, unresolved feelings, angst cw for brief mentions of death (r loses a patient), mentions of suicidal ideation, mentions of past toxic relationships
it's starting to hurt, and i know you moved on . . .
★。／｜＼。★
“Why do you think we never worked out?”
That’s the first thing Langdon thinks to ask, after a half hour or more trapped on the roof of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center with you. He’s only up there because you disappeared, to be fair, though it’s not like you were exactly begging anyone to come check on you. You just needed a moment alone — a moment to clear your head, and to breathe through the nagging thoughts of grief that threatened to strangle you.
A patient had died on your table. Sarah Michaels, seven years old, with a nine-millimeter GSW to the neck after getting a hold of her father’s gun. She was not the first patient you’ve lost, nor the first child you’ve seen flat-line, but you feel particularly heavy in your mourning for a reason you can’t quite name. You’re haunted by the tiny ghost of her, doomed to a lifetime of remembering that you could not save her.
You left to get some air a while ago, after Robby had tried to corner you to give you the whole spiel you’re already used to — about how he once lost a young patient too, the same you had today, and that you’ll eventually learn to grow around the grief instead of letting it take root inside you.
Langdon watched you leave with a strange tugging in his chest. He knew that it was never just about getting air with you; he knew that you only went to the roof to talk yourself down from the ledge again, and you hate that he knows that about you.
Almost as much as you hate the question he’s asking you now.
“I mean, I know why,” he adds, gesturing with a pair of strong hands from where his elbows are propped on his bent knees. “I just wanna know if you know why…”
You loll your heavy head to your shoulder to flash the man beside you an unenthusiastic, slow-blinking stare, from where he sits on the left side of the brick threshold. The rusted metal door, now missing a knob and refusing to open, sits between the two of you. Something about it feels like a metaphor.
“Because I knew you’d be a shitty husband,” you confess, perhaps a little more truthful than you need to be. “And, turns out, I was right, so…”
Langdon laughs at your honesty, though it comes out more like a punched-out breath. “Wow…”
With your head tipped back against the brick wall behind you, you turn back to face the golden blue sunset, made of a sea of milky pink and orange clouds. The view is far too pretty for the ugly day you’ve had, and for all the ugly you feel inside of you right now.
The music from the sports bar across the block swells distantly, in an unintelligible humming that blankets the momentary silence between you. The smoky scent of freshly cooked hamburgers fills the air, too, making your empty stomach grumble in a silent plea for a meal you haven’t gotten the chance to eat all day. You feel the early-evening chill down into your tired bones, piercing right through your black scrubs, which do little to cushion you from the cold, unforgiving concrete below.
“Gee, twist the knife, why don’t you…” Langdon hums cynically.
You meet his look of boyish offense — made of squinted blue eyes and a deep furrow between his heavy brows — with a narrowed gaze fixed into a firm glare. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that this was the ever-oblivious asshole you spent four years of your life with, though that feels like a couple thousand light-years ago now.
“You’re selfish, Frank. You’ve always been selfish, even when we were kids. That was practically your whole thing,” you ramble with a lazy shrug. “You’re the kinda guy who thinks buying presents, cooking dinner once a week, and getting the mother of your toddlers the most high-maintenance dog on the planet is gonna make up for you never being home.”
The words of an instinctive argument die on Frank’s tongue when his eyes fall to his left hand, hanging off of his bent knee, and noticeably missing his gold ring. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand migrate to the top of his knuckle, twisting the pale tanline where his wedding band would usually be. The anxious tic is muscle memory to him now.
“Yeah, that was… That was a stupid move on my part,” he murmurs with a heavy sigh, and with his blue-eyed gaze averted to his bare ring finger.
Your eyes run over the sharp edges of his profile, bathed in soft shadows and orange sunlight. His chiseled jaw clenches until his temples shift; his brows raise until his forehead wrinkles; and his pink lips quirk into a cynical half-smile.
“And you know what the craziest part is?” he wonders with an emotionless laugh. “I’m pretty sure that’s the reason Abby left me… It wasn’t that I was never home. It wasn’t that I was working with my ex-girlfriend. It was the goddamn dog… And the sonofabitch doesn’t even like me—”
“It was all of it, Frank,” you tell him in a quiet, sympathetic lilt. “And you not understanding that is exactly why we never worked out.”
Langdon scoffs another half-hearted chuckle in response. He feels the ache of your words somewhere deep in his chest, like he’s feeling the pain of losing you all over again. It feels a little like being torn in two. He can’t recall the last time he felt whole since you left him, but he tries not to think about that.
“And what? You think you were the most innocent girlfriend in the world. Is that it?”
You roll your eyes with a chest-deflating huff and cross your arms over your bent knees. You could’ve seen this coming from a mile away. You learned long ago that Frank never learned how to take criticism without needing to hit someone where it hurt right back.
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“Like you didn’t put me through the fucking ringer, too?”
“Frank—”
“You know what I did the entire time I was with you?” he wonders aloud, with a particular bite in his deep, melodic voice. He shifts on his weight, propping his left hand on the cool concrete as he turns to face you more. The dark strands of hair draping his forehead sway over his brows as he points to you with his free hand. “I worried that every single time I took my eyes off you, that you were gonna throw yourself off the goddamn roof—”
You inhale sharply through your nose, then click your lips against your teeth. “Wow…” you repeat in the same distantly incredulous murmur.
His words pierce you right back. The memories within them, more so.
It was hardly Frank’s fault that you had spent your years together just waiting — waiting to be someone else, waiting to become the person you always thought you were on the verge of becoming, waiting for your life to start finally making sense.
You could never quite shake the constant feeling of abandonment; the nagging thought that the world was constantly gathering in a room that you were not invited in. And Frank’s love for you never felt like enough. You craved affection from him so badly that you began to detest it. And, on the off chance Frank was emotionally available enough to love you, it felt as hard to take as violence.
It took several years of unlearning the filth you had taught yourself — it took finding Jack and realizing that love didn’t always have to be so complicated — to finally feel at home on an Earth that felt like it was constantly leaving you behind. And that thought isn’t lost on either of you.
Frank, particularly, is now forced to live out the rest of his day burdened by the weight of not having been enough to save you — that being with him would’ve killed you; that you would’ve thrown yourself off the roof of the apartment building you used to live in together just to get away from him.
The old memories burn him like a fresh, white-orange flame.
“So, you know what? Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t work out,” Langdon concludes with a slow nod as he settles back into place again, grimacing softly when the brick snags the fabric of his black scrubs. “Because we actually found people who could put up with all our fuckin’— neuroses… Well, you did, I guess…”
He turns to you again, with softer eyes this time, and with a solemn twist to his chiseled face that you don’t see ‘cause you no longer have the strength to meet his gaze.
The thin chain around your neck glitters in the golden hour sun. A gold wedding band hangs at the center of it, usually hidden beneath your scrubs, but now draped at your chest and staring him right in the face.
Jack had given you the ring a few years ago, after three years shy together and a not-quite wedding. You’d eloped quietly, then spent the three days you had off work together on a makeshift honeymoon. No one other than Robby and Heather — your only witnesses at the courthouse the day you got your marriage certificate — even knew you had gotten married until you and Jack showed up to work some days later, with a pair of matching rings hung around your neck.
Frank had a panic attack in the locker room when he found out, which he opted to blame on the unforgiving shift.
The ring feels particularly heavy around your neck now, made leaden under the weight of this unwarranted conversation, of which you know you should not entertain but can’t seem to help yourself otherwise. You pinch the gold band between your thumb and forefinger, dragging it absentmindedly across the thin necklace in a faint swish, swish, swish sound.
“Yeah…” you sigh, blinking away the tears that sting at the backs of your eyes, made perhaps more emotional than usual from the long day. “Because Jack would never say something like that to me…”
He meets your glass-eyed glower with a crooked grin, just like he always used to — back when he was still a starving med student, and all of his problems felt like the end of the world, which only really meant that all of yours couldn’t possibly be as serious in comparison.
Sometimes they weren’t, to be fair. Sometimes, not getting your hair to cooperate in the morning sent you into a spiral the rest of the day. Sometimes, all Frank could do was laugh and hold you tighter and wait for you to put yourself back together again. Other times, you felt unearthly, not at home in the world, and you needed him to really care, but he didn’t know how to.
“Oh, please,” Langdon scoffs. “Fighting is what we’re good at. I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing we ever did right… Other than the sex, obviously—”
“Oh, my god! Frank!” you scold, though a laugh sputters from your lips before you can stop it. “You can’t just say that stuff to me!”
“Hey, I’m not trying to hit on you or anything, alright? I’m just… making an observation,” he shrugs with a quiet smile and with his wide palms splayed in surrender. “We loved each other, we just… didn’t know how to show it—”
“You never loved me, Langdon,” you correct with a sad sort of smile, weighed down with a heavier reminiscence. “You loved the idea of me. You loved the idea of having someone that would’ve stuck around no matter what, even if we fought all the time—”
“That’s not true,” Langdon insists, with his ocean blue eyes narrowed into thin slits.
“Face it, Frank,” you laugh with a lazy shrug. “You want someone who will love you and be loyal to you, no matter how many times you hurt them—”
“No, that’s not—”
“Someone that’ll keep on loving you no matter how many times you fuck up—”
“Can you… Can you just let me talk—”
“You don’t want a wife, Langdon, you wanted a fucking dog!”
“No, I want you!” he hears himself shout.
His voice rings across the expanse of the concrete rooftop, forcing him to hear the words that he’d immediately take back if the universe allowed it. It might’ve been easier to take if you didn’t look at him like you were halfway horrified, flinching back like his words had pained you somehow physically. His cobalt-colored eyes widen in a similar look of alarm.
“I mean, I— I wanted you,” he stammers, stumbling over himself to get the words out. His hands flail wildly as he explains, like they always did when he was nervous. “E-Even if I didn’t exactly know how to treat you at the time. I did… I did love you, you know? And I… I think we could’ve been good together. That’s all…”
You open your mouth to speak, but nothing comes out right away.
Your breath hitches in your throat instead, as your mind races a million miles a minute. The knock that comes suddenly at the door beside takes you out of your stupor and makes you flinch — hard. You feel the two hard raps against the locked entrance in your burning chest. The familiar voice that accompanies it melts your heart into specks of ash that you can feel trickling down into your swimming stomach.
“Guys?” your husband calls, half-muffled from within the stairwell. “You up there?”
“Jack?” you call back on bated breath.
You share a wide-eyed look of apprehension at the man beside you, whose ocean-blue stare bores right into yours. Neither of you can shake the feeling that you’ve just been caught doing something horrible — and, in a way, you have.
You scramble to your feet and feel the blood rush back to your tingling legs almost instantly as you stand before the rusted door, resting your palms along the cool metal.
“How long have you guys been out here?”
“Too long,” Frank answers in a huff, still slouched against the concrete.
You scoff a breathy laugh despite the tight feeling in your chest. “How long did it take everyone down there to figure out we were stuck?”
“Yeah, I don’t think they have yet,” Jack chuckles. “I just got here, and Robby said you guys were getting some air, so…”
He trails off.
You can hear the smile in his gritty voice when he asks, “How’d you two idiots manage to get stuck up here, anyway?”
“The universe hates me,” you deadpan in a non-answer.
You hear Jack laughing from behind the heavy door between you, a sound more golden than the setting sun painting everything a flaxen shade of orange. It makes a wavering smile curl at the very edges of your mouth, though it’s weighed down by a more palpable dread that Frank can see from here, with his glittering eyes still trained on your profile.
“I’ll go tell maintenance, alright?” Jack tells you. “Just… don’t do anything else stupid up while I’m gone.”
“Yeah, no promises,” Frank jokes back with his own artificial grin that deflates the moment Jack’s muffled footsteps descend back down the stairwell.
He slouches back against the unforgiving brick with a heavy sigh, feeling the exhaustion settling heavy in his bones — the acknowledgement that, once he’s back inside The Pitt, he’ll never get to be alone with you like this again; and that he’ll have to spend the rest of his life pretending like he isn’t constantly grieving your absence.
You step away from the door with a trembling sigh. You try to turn away before Frank sees the emotion crumpling your face, but he catches it anyway — there’s nothing about you that he wouldn’t immediately notice.
“Hey, I… I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t,” you snap, turning on your heel to face him. You wear a stern glare on your face that makes him falter as he rises from the cold concrete to stand to full height. The golden hour sparkles in your glassy eyes, wetting with unshed tears. “Just… don’t, alright? Because if you make this a whole thing, I’m gonna have to tell Jack—”
“Tell him what?” Frank presses, brows raised to his hairline until three fine lines wrinkle at his forehead.
His shoes scuff the pavement when he goes to take a hesitant step forward. You flinch back again, like he’ll burn you if he gets too close — like he already has burned you and like you refuse to be kissed by that flame again.
He stops short, splays his wide palms before him in surrender, and continues quietly, “That I’m right? ‘Cause I really don’t think this upset if I were wrong—”
“Of course, I’m upset!” you shout, voice cracking and ringing across the empty rooftop. A breeze rolls by, cooler than silk, rippling in your scrubs and billowing in your hair. “But that doesn’t mean that us not being together is the wrong choice! It’s just— Something we’re gonna have to carry!”
“Then why can’t we just have it out—?”
“Because we tried,” you agonize through a stuttering breath. “And it ended up like this! Every single time!”
Frank shakes his head, strong jaw clenched, too stubborn to listen.
“The only reason we were ever together is because we were…” you trail off, gaze darting wildly as you search for the right words. “Pathologically terrified of abandonment—”
“What are you? My shrink?” he scoffs cynically, biceps straining against the sleeves of his scrubs when he crosses his milky white arms across his chest.
“We knew, before we started dating, that we both were incapable of giving each other what we really needed,” you tell him, half-strangled, as you fight back the emotion wrapping itself around your throat. “And we did that because we knew that when we inevitably didn’t work out, neither of us would be at a totally substantial loss! I mean, why do you think we both moved on so quickly?”
Langdon flinches, chin jerking as his pretty face screws in offense. Your words find him like a punch to the stomach — they knock the breath from his lungs, make him feel like the world is swaying below his feet.
“Substantial loss?” he echoes with his brows raised in an incredulous look. He exhales an emotionless laugh and looks away. His tongue darts out to wet his mouth before he clicks his lips against his teeth, waving an accusatory finger in your direction. “No, see… See, that’s the difference between us. Because I was with you, because I actually loved you—”
“Key word here being loved. Past tense,” you snap with a clenched jaw, mirroring his rigid stature with your arms folded over your scrubs. “We were never gonna work out, Langdon. So whether or not we would’ve been good together doesn’t mean anything anymore, alright? It’s too late, so just… Just drop it.”
“So what?” he calls to you when you turn away again. “All those years we put each other through hell and back, that meant nothing to you?”
“It meant everything,” you confess tearily, knuckles blanching around the cold metal railing you lean against. You lack the strength to look over your shoulder at him, lest you see the boy you used to love in the man standing behind you now. “And it’s over now. And it’s been over for a long, long time…”
“Yeah, not for me…” Frank tells you, voice breaking into a fragile whisper. He clears his throat a second later, half-strangled by the words that’ve been stuck in his throat since the day you left.
Your head snaps over your shoulder, delicate features crumpling in a pained look. “You can’t say that to me,” you repeat, voice coated with tears this time instead of laughter. “You can’t just say that, Langdon—”
Your breath hitches as a sob swells in your throat. You hide your face behind your palms before he can see the way it twists at your face. Langdon feels your hurt like it’s his own, a burning somewhere deep inside his sternum, as he rushes to you on instinct.
“Look, okay? I-I know I’m not a perfect guy— I know that I’m not half as good as Abbot, alright? I know that—”
His fingers are long and warm when they curl gently around your wrists, urging your hands away from your face. You’re swaddled immediately in the warmth of his musky cologne, much stronger than Jack’s, but just as familiar to you.
He ducks his head to meet your gaze, navy-blue eyes glittering as they dart between both of yours. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes, which are now clumped together with unshed tears.
“But I-I’m different now. I am,” he tells you, nodding rapidly. “I wouldn’t be the asshole I was before. I’d be different— I’d be good for you this time.”
“You are, okay?” you choke out, pointing a stern finger at his chest, hands still caught in his unwavering hold. “You are a good man, and I am so grateful to you, and I am so proud of you, but we would be miserable together—”
“Don’t say that,” Langdon murmurs, chiseled features screwed together like your words have pierced him somehow physically. “Why— Why are you saying that?”
“Because look at us!” you laugh through the tears clinging to your lashes. “Love isn’t supposed to feel this way, Frank! This isn’t normal! I can’t even remember the last time Jack made me cry— I don’t even know if he ever has!”
Your words take the breath from his lungs. His fingers slip slowly from your wrists. His chin jerks back like he’s flinching. The hair draping his forehead sways as he shakes his head to himself.
“It always goes back to him, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it does…” you sigh, deflating as you watch him walk away again, going blurry from the warm tears gathering at your waterline. “Because that’s what love is, Frank… And even if you and Abby are done for good, you will find someone, okay? And she will worship you, and she will love you in all the ways you need her to. Just because I can’t give that to you, doesn’t mean you can’t love somebody else—”
“That’s exactly what it means…” Langdon concludes with a heavy sigh, slouching back against the brick again.
He drops hard to the ground and rests his arms over his bent knees. His teary gaze, painted a lighter blue, focuses on the golden skyline behind you, slowly dimming to a darker pink color.
You sigh and muster a sad sort of smile. “Self-pity is not a good look on you, Langdon.”
“I’m just being realistic,” he shrugs. “You and… You and Abbot will be together forever, and you’ll have kids, and you’ll move on, and… I’ll watch…”
“Frank—”
“Don’t. It’s— It’s okay,” he interjects with a foreign sort of tenderness about him, as his pink lips curl into a distant half-smile. “Cause I… You know, I’d rather have a piece of you than— than nothing at all, so… You’re right. I’m just too late…”
You exhale a heavy breath and turn away again, bending at the waist to rest your elbows on the metal railing a few feet from the roof’s edge. You prop your forehead in your hands, watching a heavy tear fall from your bottom lashes and splatter hard on the concrete below.
You have to fight back the urge to climb over the barriers keeping you from the ledge, physically shaking the thoughts of doing so out of your head — of how free it would feel to jump, to fall and reach an inevitable darkness. It would feel much easier than being trapped up here, on this roof, and in this life, and in this skin that doesn’t feel like yours.
The train of thought always has a way of finding you, no matter where you are, no matter how happy you are. Sometimes, you find yourself physically startled by your very existence — like it’s some great mystery to discover that you’ve survived at all.
And, like always, Jack’s is the voice that pulls you back from the abyss.
“Alright, losers— As you were!”
His low, melodic voice shatters the heavy tension blanketing the quiet rooftop. But if he notices, he doesn’t show it. And if he heard anything that came before, he doesn’t say so.
You hurry to wipe the warm tears from your cheeks, swiping your middle and ring fingers below your eyes to remove any evidence that you’d been crying. You spin on the heel of your shoe to face him, mustering a tight-lipped smile as the man walks out into the cool, orange-pink evening — biceps straining against the black sleeves of his scrubs as his hands grasp either end of the stethoscope around his neck.
Robby walks out just behind him, brown eyes darting around as if he were surveying the rooftop — undoubtedly searching for dead bodies after being told that you and Langdon were trapped up here together. His brows bounce in silent shock to find that neither of you had killed each other.
The maintenance workers in navy blue coveralls stand just behind the two of them, replacing the broken knob with a newer one less likely to snap in half in record time.
“See?” Jack hums. The golden hour shines in his salt-and-pepper curls as he turns his head to the man beside him. “Told you I wasn’t lyin’, brother.”
“Yeah, thanks for caring about us, Robinavitch,” Frank huffs, grimacing at the ache in his lower back when he rises to full height again.
“Hey, I thought you deserved the break,” Robby says with his calloused palms splayed before him in surrender. “I just didn’t realize you guys had been forced into having one.”
Langdon says nothing in response, just slinks back through the opened threshold to what should feel like freedom, but finds him more like a slaughterhouse.
Robby watches him go, brows pinching in a wordless confusion, before his eyes dart back to you. His dark brown gaze glitters with curiosity as he nods his head towards Langdon’s disappearing figure, scratching at the grey patch in his beard with his left hand.
“What’s his deal?”
“I’ve been asking myself that for years…” you sigh, trudging across the rooftop like your feet are made of nrick. You inhale sharply through your nose and just barely manage to find the strength to joke, “Just please tell me this cuts a half hour off my double?”
“No, it means you gotta work a half hour overtime. Obviously,” Jack scoffs, wrapping his strong arm around your shoulder when you’re close enough to reach.
You stumble hopelessly into his side, immediately blanketed by his innate warmth. You inhale deeply, and let his musky cologne fill your lungs — smelling of home in every sense of the word, and replacing all the remnants of Langdon (also in every sense of the word).
“Don’t worry, honey,” he croons in a low, gritty voice. “I’ll keep you company through the dinner rush, if you don’t mind bein’ stuck with me for the next twelve hours… And the twelve hours after that… And the twelve hours after that—”
“Alright, we get it…” Robby huffs, narrow features twisted in an only halfway playful look of disgust. “Go ahead and get it out of your system, you two. You gotta long night ahead of you…”
He follows Langdon back down the stairwell, footsteps echoing as he hurries back down to the main floor to help the day shift prep the night shift. The weight of his words remains long after he’s gone. You should feel preemptively fatigued by them, and in many ways you are, but just being in Jack’s arms now is enough to reinvigorate you — like a shot of espresso, or like sunshine after days of stormy weather.
You know you should probably be sick of him by now, ‘cause when you’re not working with him, you’re living with him. But even still, on the rare days your schedules don’t align, you find yourself missing him anyway. You’re always missing him. And every day you are with him, you can’t help but wish for a hundred more. A lifetime with Jack Abbot isn’t nearly enough, but you’re glad to have at least gotten this one.
“You know, I never thought that I’d say this, but…” you trail off with a heavy exhale as you melt into his side, smoothing your left hand up his spine. “After a half hour trapped up here, I wouldn’t exactly mind being stuck with you, Dr. Abbot.”
His thin lips curl into a quiet grin, though the expression glitters mostly in his hazel eyes, which crinkle softly at the edges. He can’t help but hold all his love for you there. You’ve never once had to guess where you stand with him, or if he truly cares about you, ‘cause he wears it all in his eyes.
“See, that’s the kinda spirit I’m looking for, my darling wife,” he lilts sarcastically and ducks down to press a chaste kiss to your cheek, before this sort of PDA becomes a strict no-go when you’re back in the trauma center together. His greying scruff scratches at your delicate skin there.
You only pray he doesn’t taste the salt on your cheek, from where your tears are still drying.
𝚟𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚜 is a short collection of valentine's day blurbs featuring jason todd, dick grayson, clark kent, and bruce wayne! sweet, intimate, and a little tender - written with love <3
from: timbits <3
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 - bruce wayne x reader
⤷ summary: valentine's morning with bruce is spent at the breakfast table, with soft giggles and a lot of kisses.
⤷ when: feb 11, 2026
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ 𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 - dick grayson x reader
⤷ summary: dick had to leave in the middle of your valentine's dinner, but don't worry, he always makes it up to you! (nsfw)
⤷ when: feb 12, 2026
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ 𝒃𝒆 𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒆? - jason todd x reader
⤷ summary: in which jason asks you to be his valentine during a picnic under city lights
⤷ when: feb 13, 2026
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ 𝐈 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮! - clark kent x reader
⤷ summary: clark accidentally drinks a love potion. chaos, love confessions, and a whole lotta desperation ensues. (nsfw)
Jason believes distance is mercy. That leaving is kinder than staying. That if he keeps moving, the damage can’t follow. But destiny isn’t kind, especially when the city keeps forcing you two into the same spaces.
Tags/CW: MDNI, angst, hurt/comfort, ex situationship!Jason, civilian reader, exes to ???, unresolved feelings, mutual pining but its miserable, a man who yearns is a man who earns, eventual smut, (part 1 of 3)
Jason could swear on his condemned soul that he isn't weird. Neither a stalker. Your neighbourhood isn't in his patrol routes—it never even was. Your old job isn’t either, avoided like a crime scene. He has no way of seeing you anymore, avoids it at all costs.
Ever since you parted ways he learned early that distance is the only thing he’s ever been good at maintaining.
He hasn’t seen you in months.
Hasn’t wanted to.
Except..
Except for that red light in November; Late afternoon, sky doing that washed-out orange thing from where it touches the ocean’s horizon, like it’s embarrassed to still be daylight.
He’d been on his bike, cruising the boulevard that crosses Cherry Hill beach. Visor down, brain static-heavy from a job gone sideways. He stopped at the light, drumming his fingers against the handlebar, already halfway gone—and there you were.
Riding in the passenger seat of a car. Laughing at something the driver —someone he instantly recognised as your friend—said, head tipped back, sunlight catching your profile like it had been waiting just for that moment. You hadn’t seen him at first. Couldn't have. Helmet, tinted visor, just another guy on a bike at a red light.
But the way he kept staring made you look.
You had frozen in your very seat for seconds, and he could read your lips as you had told your friend: ‘that’s Jason’. Then she had looked as well, a gaze of shock to match with yours, but he was gone the moment the light turned green.
One harmless coincidence. One ghost sighting. No meaning attached.
He hadn’t followed the car when the light turned green.
He swears.
However that doesn’t mean he hadn’t gone into a spiral that night; checking to see if you had blocked him again on instagram after that instance he accidentally requested to follow you while checking your page after his break uo with Isabel.
Luckily, he remains unblocked to this day.
But Jason doesn’t check.
Jason doesn’t bother with you anymore, because you’ve been apart for almost as long as you two had been involved with each other. Because he had eventually chosen to get a girlfriend, try to see how life would have been if he was with someone who wasn’t equally broken as he is. However vain that must sound, he only ever searched for a piece of normalcy.
A soft pair of hands to place his bleeding heart into.
So Jason doesn’t miss you.
He doesn’t miss your temper. He doesn’t miss the nights you’d send each other texts back and forth until 5am in the morning. It should have never been his place to comfort you anyway.
Your heart is similar in bleeding as his. Not a good match, if you ask him.
He doesn’t miss the way you’d tell him your favorite piece of media is pride and prejudice because he never allowed you the knowledge that he thinks the same of it.
He never wanted you to know how much you have in common.
And he definitely doesn’t miss the way you’d listen to Tchaikovsky in the morning while making breakfast. Although, he did kind of love to watch you fake ballet dancing.
But Jason has erased the image from his head, completely. He swears he doesn’t remember what your face even looks like.
Except…
Except for the way coincidence keeps testing him like it’s got a sick sense of humor.
Jason runs into you again on a Tuesday evening that smells like wet concrete and cheap takeout. He knows because the city always smells like something trying to be forgotten, and tonight it’s lo mein and rain. He’s halfway down the block on the way to a new safehouse, helmet clipped to his belt, jacket unzipped, brain already shifting gears from Red Hood to civilian who absolutely does not spiral over ghosts—
—and then he sees you again.
You’re coming out of a squat little studio wedged between a nail salon and a place that sells nothing but religious candles, rosaries and busted phone chargers. The sign above the door flickers, BEGINNERS BALLET – ALL AGES WELCOME, one letter permanently burnt out like it gave up believing in itself halfway through the decade since it has obviously been constructed in the 80s.
Jason slows before he means to.
You’ve got your hair pulled back, messy but intentional, the kind of bun that says you tried but practice got the best of you. He remembers a time where your hair was too short to be put up in a bun—when you’d complained about it sticking to your neck in the summer and he’d offered, very helpfully, to shave it all off, while laughing at your pouting.
Now, your hair is in a braided bun and there’s a canvas tote slung over your shoulder, ballet shoes dangling from your fingers by their elastic ribbons. You're fumbling with your phone while fixing the strap of the bag every two seconds, eyes flickering in the door of the studio as if you’re waiting for someone to come out but you’re also in a rush.
You stretch slightly and his gaze flickers from your head to your toes repeatedly. A Napapijri jacket is zipped up right onto your neck, black tights, grey leg warmers that disappear into your Nike shoes.
Your cheeks are glowy, eyes bright in that post-exertion way that hits him square in the chest, hard and unfair.
Ballet.
Of course.
Because the universe never does subtle.
There had been endless nights that you’d cry in his arms about childhood trauma. One of them being how your mother told six-year-old you that you were too tall, too thick, too something to start ballet—never admitting it was money, never giving you something tangible to be angry at. Just letting it rot into your bones as shame for the way you were built.
Jason remembers suggesting classes once, carefully casual. How you’d laughed it off, shied away and said it was too late now, you were too old, that ballet only mattered if you started young enough to suffer correctly and professionally. You’d said it like a joke, but your hands had curled tight in his shirt.
Now, he is witnessing you giving yourself a chance.
You don’t see him, of course. Why would you? He’s just another guy on the sidewalk, hood up, scars half-hidden, doing a decent impression of someone who belongs nowhere in particular.
Jason swears he isn’t following you. Hasn’t been.
But when your friend comes outside and says something about going on a dinner date “she’s picking me up right fucking now what the hell I’m so excited!?” He finds himself walking across the sidewalk and two cars behind you as you are heading to the subway, just in case.
It’s because you’re wearing headphones while walking at night in Gotham, he tells himself. He’s going to stop dead on his tracks when you enter the station, for sure.
But when you turn toward the subway entrance, he turns too.
The station breathes up heat and metal, stale air curling around you both. You swipe your card, hop the turnstile with tired familiarity—oh, you finally got a subway car instead of using tickets—Jason hangs back just long enough to make it feel like a choice, not a compulsion.
He tells himself, if you look back and see him, it’s fine. Coincidence. Same line, same time. Gotham runs on overlapping lives; this is just math.
The train roars in, wind whipping your hair loose at the edges of your bun. You step inside, grabbing a pole, until you find a seat to tuck yourself in, shifting your bag higher on your shoulder. Jason boards two doors down.
He doesn’t look at you all the time.
He looks at the floor, at the ad peeling off the wall, at your worn copy of pride and prejudice that you’ve shoved your face into, at the reflection in the window that fractures everyone into blurry ghosts anyway.
Still, he knows when you sit down and he knows where you get off.
He knows when you slip your pointe shoes into your tote after making a face of surprise as you realise you’re still holding them. It’s the subtle way your shoulders sag now that the adrenaline’s gone. He knows because he always knew the way your body carried exhaustion—like you fought it politely until it won.
The train lurches forward.
Jason tells himself he’ll get off at the next stop. Or the one after that. He tells himself this means nothing, that people are allowed to exist in the same spaces without it becoming a sin.
But then you glance up.
Your eyes meet his reflection in the glass.
Just for a second.
Not recognition—yet. Just that quiet, instinctive awareness you always had, like some part of you clocked him before your brain caught up. Jason’s chest tightens, breath stalling halfway in.
You look away first, like you don’t recognise him. Because neither of you look the same as you did when you first met. Or maybe like he’s a ghost too.
Then, when you look again, actually focusing your gaze at him and realise he’s real— you do a double take.
Jason sees it land all at once—the way your eyes sharpen, the way your spine goes rigid like someone pulled a wire straight through you. The double take is almost imperceptible, but he clocks it anyway. He always clocked you. And then there it is, unmistakable, blooming fast and ugly across your face.
Fear.
Not the startled kind. Not the oh shit, stranger on the train that’s following you kind.
The old kind.
The kind that remembers.
Jason’s stomach drops.
Because somewhere in there, he knows you’re right. Even if he’s never given you a reason to be afraid of him. Not once. He was the one you fell asleep against during bad movies. The one who stood between you and the world when it got loud. The one who learned which nightmares to wake you from and which ones to let you ride out.
So why now?
The answer hits him a second later, sharp and merciless.
You don’t see Jason.
You see what comes after him.
You see what loving him cost.
It costs him running away, with his mind already set on an escape route away from you. For there hasn't been an instance where Jason has ever felt he deserved the unconditional love you wanted to give him despite not knowing a second thing about him.
It took you two and half years to muster the courage to tell him you love —loved— him and he ran off the same instance.
It makes sense that you’re upset to see him so close to you.
But is your heart beating as fast as his is right now? He wonders if the feeling’s still there in you, no matter the egotistical unfairness of the thought.
Your gaze flicks down nervously—his jacket, the bulk of him, the scars he never managed to sand down enough to look normal. You’re cataloguing exits, distances, threat vectors. He recognizes the math because he taught it to you without ever meaning to. Nights you waited up. Sirens outside the window. Blood you pretended not to notice.
You aren’t afraid he’ll hurt you.
You’re afraid he’ll pull you back in even by greeting him.
Jason doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach.
Doesn’t even breathe right for a second, like if he stays perfectly still you won’t spook. He just raises his brows slightly, praying his expression is softer to your eyes.
The train rattles on, metal screaming against metal, the city doing its best to drown out everything important.
You look away again, this time deliberately. Shoulders drawn in. Chin down. Your book is still open but you aren’t reading—it’s just a shield now, something to put between you and the past walking around in a worn leather jacket.
That hurts worse than the fear did.
Jason gulp.
He tells himself, for the thousandth time, to get off. Right now. Next stop, no hesitation. This was never supposed to be a reunion, never supposed to be anything at all. He was just making sure you got to the subway safe. That’s it. Mission accomplished. End scene.
But then the train slows twice as many times.
Your stop, at last.
He knows it the way he knows the weight of a gun in his hand, the way he knows when a fight’s about to turn. You stand too quickly, bag slipping, ballet shoes nearly tumbling out again. Your hands shake just enough to piss him off—not at you, never at you, but at the world that taught you to be afraid of shadows shaped like him.
You step toward the doors in his direction, obviously set on trying to prove to him you can and will ignore him.
Jason’s body moves before his brain clears it.
“Hey,” he says quietly.
Not loud enough for the whole car. Not sharp. Just—Jason. The same voice that used to say your name like it mattered through late nights.
You freeze.
Slowly, you turn.
Up close, the fear falters. Not gone—but confused now, clashing with recognition, with memory, with the inconvenient fact that he’s looking at you like you’re real and not a mistake.
Your eyes glimmer, watery and void of anything. You scrunch your nose along with your upper lip —Jason knows your face feels hot— as your mind screams in past embarrassment.
Both of you remember your last exchange of texts, like a stuttering breath in freezing air or underwater.
You
it’s my fault I put up with all of this then, just because I love you and I don’t want to lose you
Jason
you’re on your own on this one
“Hi” you mutter. Inaudible and just under your breath.
Jason feels it hit him square in the ribs, like something small and fragile thrown with shaking hands. He doesn’t move closer. Doesn’t smile. He just… takes it, like he deserves the impact more than any bullet.
Your face does that thing again like it always does when you were trying not to cry—nose scrunched repeatedly, upper lip tight, eyes shutting for a beat but stubbornly empty when you open them. He knows that heat in your cheeks because he’s seen it bloom before, in bathrooms and kitchens and hallways and wrinkly bedsheets where apologies went to die.
God.
That last exchange flashes between the two of you again and again like muscle memory.
He could apologise. But he won’t. He doesn’t deserve it anymore.
He’d typed it cold. Defensive. Already half gone. He’d convinced himself distance would hurt less than staying and bleeding slow. He hadn’t accounted for the way words fossilize.
Because apologies don’t get to be reflexes. Not now. Not when you look like this.
The doors to your stop slam shut and the train hums around you, indifferent. Someone coughs. Someone laughs too loud. Despite you missing your stop the city keeps moving on like it always does when something important is trying to happen.
“I didn’t expect this,” he says instead. “To.. uh.. see you.”
You try to speak his name. It doesn’t come out. What comes out is “yeah… I’m sorry”
But there’s nothing you need to apologise for.
Jason knows it the second the words leave your mouth—thin, automatic, like you’re still trained to take the blame just to keep the peace. It makes something ugly twist in his chest.
“Hey,” he says, firmer this time. Not sharp. Just enough to stop you from shrinking. “No. Don’t.”
You blink at him, confused, like you’re waiting for the rest of the sentence. Like you expect him to explain what ‘don’t’ means in a way that somehow still makes this your fault.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he adds, quieter. More careful. “You don’t have to be sorry.”
The train keeps rattling forward, dragging you both past the point of easy exits. You can feel it now—that subtle wrongness in your gut as the realization settles. You missed your stop. You were supposed to be waking home by now, warming water for a shower, hair down, thinking about dinner, not standing under fluorescent lights with the person who knows how to break you open by accident.
“That was my stop,” you murmur, more to yourself than him.
Jason nods. “Yeah. I know.”
He hesitates, jaw tightening like he’s bracing for impact. “Next one’s not bad. I’ll—” he gestures vaguely. “I can walk you back.”
There it is. The offer.
Not a demand. Not a claim. Just Jason, defaulting to protection because it’s the only language he’s ever been fluent in.
You study him again. Carefully. He looks… tired. Not in the physical way—somewhat deeper. Hollow eyes and chapped lips.
“You don’t have to,” you say automatically, shaking your head.
“I know,” he replies. “I—uhm, I’d want to.”
That lands differently.
Silence stretches between you, thick with all the things you never said. The last fight. The last text. The way you’d stared at your phone afterward, waiting for the three dots to come back like a heartbeat restarting, before you blocked him.
You've obsessively wished for a moment like this for the last two years. Over and over again. In shooting starts, dandelions, birthday candles, lashes fallen on your cheeks, the moon, your pillow every night.
Until you stopped believing he’d come back.
The thought settles heavy in your chest, a quiet kind of devastation. Not sharp. Not loud. Just the ache of something you buried carefully so it wouldn’t rot you from the inside out.
The train rocks, slowing as it pulls into the next station. The announcement crackles overhead, distorted and late, like it doesn’t even know where it is. Jason shifts his weight, hands flexing at his sides like he’s holding himself together by habit alone.
You realize, dimly, that this is the closest you’ve been to him in two years.
Two years of learning how to sleep without the weight of his arm across your ribs. Two years of unlearning the sound of his boots in the hallway, the way your name used to feel safe in his mouth. Two years of telling yourself that wanting him back didn’t make you weak—just human.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Jason says suddenly.
You stiffen. Of course.
The train lurches forward again, carrying you both deeper into the neon of a city that doesn’t care about almosts or maybes.
“Which part?” you ask, because humor is safer than hope.
“All of it,” he answers. No hesitation. No qualifiers. “I was scared and I took it out on you. That wasn’t fair.”
Jason exhales, long and shaky. “I don’t expect anything from you,” he says. “I don’t get to. But if walking you back is all I can do—just tonight—I’d like to do that right.”
You look at him for a long moment and sigh like you've already made up your mind with a choice.
It’s not a full apology. Not yet. But it’s the truth, stripped down and bleeding at the edges.
The train slows again.
Next stop.
Jason glances toward the doors, then back to you. “If you want me to get off here and pretend this didn’t happen, I will.”
He means it. That’s the worst part.
“But,” he continues, voice low, “if you want to talk—just walk, not fix anything—I can do that too.”
~All rights reserved: @/strawberry-nugget, 2026. Please do not copy, over write or steal my work.
A/N: hi, this was so self ship coded and based on true events that it makes me want to disappear. But alas, I really hoped you like it since it’s the first part of a miniseries hehehe
Remember to reblog and comment if you like this. My responses will be slow until Monday but I’ll be back to reply to everyone then!
well 🧍♀️ as a reminder this blog is NOT a safe space for trump supporters but it IS a safe place for women, queers, trans ppl, people of color, undocumented people, and any marginalized group.
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