☾

“if i am killed for simply living, let death be kinder than man.”

[orchidsarchives]

♡₊˚ 🐈‍⬛・₊✧⋆⭒˚｡⋆

(spooky) naz

she/her. twenty-three. south asian. cinephile. overworked journalism major. touch starved romantic. lover of the rain. cherry coke connoisseur. social smoker. x files enthusiast. dc comics enjoyer. free palestine. sideblog.

inbox rules/dni + masterlist (under reconstruction)

currently listening to:

please do not repost my work on other sites or feed it through ai! i absolutely do not consent to my work being published anywhere else… thank you!

[orchidsarchives]

Jason is fond of the rain.

He adores the sweet earthy smell and the soft, rhythmic pitter patter against his living room window, but above all, he loves spending time with you during the heavy monsoon season.

You walk out of the neighborhood cafe, hand in hand, into the gloomy streets of Gotham. The skyline is grey and somber. It’s quiet, peaceful, a juxtaposition to the city’s usual loud and robust atmosphere.

You scan Jason’s face and he looks content, despite the heavy drizzle that’s soaking him through his sweater. It’s poetic really, a man scattered with scars, a man who bears a heavy past, finds peace in the rain. How truly melancholic.

Loud thunder rumbles through the sky as if a large battle was being fought in the distance. You clutch on to Jason’s hand a little bit tighter, while your eyes still admire his calm demeanour.

“I think we should kiss right now,” he says, pulling you out of your thoughts.

“You’re so cliche, you know that right,” you say and he sucks his teeth while rolling his eyes.

His eyes look dark, the usual green colour is almost impossible to see. He stops walking and pulls you into him, his fingers tangling themselves into your wet hair. His lips move in close to yours, but they don’t quite touch.

“I know but can you blame me,” he whispers softly. You try to suppress the small grin on your lips.

“Been reading too much Nicholas Sparks lately,” you inquire, looking up at him through your lashes. Jason lets out a small laugh and the sound touches your heart.

He stares at you in admiration. He often finds himself getting lost in your eyes.

The moment is intimate, it brought his troubled mind to ease. Jason takes the opportunity to close the gap and kisses your lips. The rain dances on your skin. There’s a soft breeze and you pull Jason closer.

He tastes like the cigarette he smoked earlier and the strawberry cheesecake you split at the cafe. You want to savour this moment forever.

He smiles against your lips and you pull back only to cover his face in small pecks.

“I…” kiss, “love…” kiss, kiss, “you…” kiss.

Jason adores the rain, the smell, the sounds, but most importantly he loves kissing you in it.

[patientofarkhamasylum]

something about the sound of you jason todd x reader

summary: falling asleep on facetime with him when he’s away on a mission <3 soft, but a tiny bit angsty because jason is emotionally constipated (affectionate) and reader misses him a lot.

Your phone lights up at 2:47 AM with a FaceTime call. Jason.

You were already awake. You've been awake for hours, lying in the dark with the fan on, doing that thing where your mind won’t settle, but sleep won’t come either. Just existing in the gap between. You haven’t heard from him in days, and your thumb hits accept before the first ring is done.

It takes a second for the call to connect, for the black screen to resolve into a dark room—a safehouse, maybe, or a motel. The only light is the glow of a joint between his fingers, flickering softly against his face. 

His eyes are low and glassy from the smoke. They’re pretty in a way he'd hate you for noticing, lashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.

"Hi,” he says. His voice is rough, scratching raw against your ear through the shitty phone speaker.

“Hey.” You pull the blanket up over your shoulders and tuck yourself against the headboard. You’re mirror images of each other now, propped up in separate beds in separate cities. “You okay?”

It's a stupid question. You know it the second it leaves your mouth. He looks exhausted. It shows in his shoulders, in how stiff he is. Every muscle is locked in place because letting go means maybe not being able to pull himself back together.

Whatever this job is, it’s clearly eating him alive.

His jaw shifts. For a second, it looks like he might say something sharp. Instead, he takes a hit, holds it, then lets it go slow.

"Yeah," he says through the exhale, smoke curling up past his face. “No. I don't know."

He pauses, and all you can hear is his breathing. It’s deliberate, measured. A pattern you’ve come to recognize: him trying to manually override his own nervous system. He does it after nightmares, after patrol, after those long silences that mean he went somewhere in his head that he can’t easily get back from.

“Can’t sleep,” he adds eventually, like a concession. 

You don’t push or ask why. He won’t give you that. Not yet anyway.

The line goes quiet, and usually you can sit with it. But after the last few days, it’s harder, and a quiet me neither slips out before you can swallow it back.

That’s when he really looks at you. His gaze catches on the old shirt you’re wearing, his shirt, then drifts over the rest of you: messy hair, bitten lips, the dullness of your skin.

A frown pulls his brows together, the edge in his voice softening. “What’s going on?”

You hesitate. You didn’t want to tell him this stuff; you tried to tuck it away for a reason. Because how do you tell him you’re having a hard time without him when he’s out there risking his life every day? It feels like adding weight to someone already carrying too much. It feels ridiculous.

But those hazy, steady eyes stay on you, patient, waiting, and they pull the truth right out.

"It's just a lot right now," you finish after a while, sounding more vulnerable than you meant to.

"Yeah." He taps ash off the joint somewhere offscreen. "I know exactly what you mean."

And the knot in your chest finally starts to loosen. You can’t believe you almost didn’t tell him. Of course he didn’t dismiss you or downplay your feelings. He never has. For all his stubbornness, all the pulling away and going quiet, he’s never once made you feel small for needing him, even when you’d convinced yourself he would.

The next drag he takes is slower. Not so desperate.

"That helping?" you ask.

He glances at the joint, then back at you. "Not really."

He holds your gaze for a long moment. You can almost see him deciding whether to say it. When he does, it’s quiet, almost boyish: “Keep talking.”

The weight of that settles beneath your ribs, steady. Jason Todd, who would rather bleed out in an alley than admit he needs someone, is asking you to keep talking because maybe your voice is doing what the smoke can’t.

So you do.

You tell him about the book you've been trying to finish, how you keep rereading the same page because your brain won't hold the sentences. You tell him about the rain earlier, how it smelled. You tell him about the stupid thing that made you laugh three days ago that you saved to tell him and then forgot until right now.

He doesn't interrupt. The joint burns down between his fingers, forgotten, and his blinks start getting longer. He sinks lower against the pillows without seeming to realize it, the camera tilting with him until he's on his side with one hand resting on the mattress. Close to the phone, close to you.

You keep going. You tell him you miss him. You tell him the bed's too big without him.

His eyes flutter closed, and his breathing slows, deepens, losing that tight, controlled edge. He doesn’t open them again.

You smile, small and soft. He’s finally asleep. Truly asleep—the kind that doesn’t come easy, the kind that never seems to stay.

You don't hang up, just turn the brightness down, set the phone on the pillow beside you, and close your eyes to the sound of him breathing. It’s not the same as having him here. Not his weight on the mattress, not his arm heavy across your waist, not his heartbeat under your ear.

But it’s him, alive and still yours, even from miles away.

You fall asleep twenty minutes later, and the call runs until morning.

navi | m.list | © 2026 patientofarkhamasylum. all rights reserved.

[orchidsarchives]

I just had the best ever beef congee and I can physically feel my insides healing omg

[spoiledfemmefatalee]

jason found himself empty, staring into what seemed to be a town filled with love and passion and still he sat there empty. the soft bustle of the cafe that surrounded him and roy only heightened his tension as he glanced outside the window, families and couples everywhere. the smell of roy's chocolate caramel latte filled his nose, reminding him of what he was supposed to be doing why he was here.

this small little town filled with coffee shops & happiness hid a dangerous secret, one that he and roy should have been investigating yet they had found themselves at a dead end and yearning to be home. and yet their ideas of home was so close yet so far apart. roy missed his daughter endlessly, and jason missed you way more than could've ever intended to. you were this small piece of this life that suddenly realized he didn't know if he could live without.

"I'm gonna go for a smoke"

jason push up from the table and without another word found himself at the nearest alleyway. He dug through his backpack, first grabbing onto your camera and quickly dropping it back down. he hadn't even found any pretty pictures to send home to you and that itself made him search more viscously till he found himself holding a box of virginia slims and for a moment again he felt completely empty. because these weren't his, they were yours and suddenly all those sad feelings finally crushed his poor heart. hot tears rolled down his cheeks and it felt like everything came crashing down at once.

you weren't much of a smoker, hell you probably hated it but there something sweet about going for smoke with jason. the heavy silence that made you feel like you closeset you could be to the man. for a man so closed off, you were really determined to break down those walls. he carefully opened up the box, seeing there was polaroid stuck behind the rows the cigarettes. jason pulled it out, staring at the photo you had taken of him sleeping on your couch. something about that photo made him let out a chuckle and realize that he is coming back to you. jason todd is coming home to you.

no matter how long it took.

[orchidsarchives]

guys my rant post is popping off rn #scared

[thatsbelievable]

Source: The New York Tattler, July 8, 1909.

[orchidsarchives]

i was reading one of those corporate au fics and the op started talking about slack messages and holy man what a jump scare i actually had to put my phone down

[probuccalfat]

Some people had good childhoods

keep that shit to yourself fr

[orchidsarchives]

hear me out Bruce Wayne wearing cufflinks with your initials on them



[orchidsarchives]

oh how i love that that the jason todd fandom is still going strong

KLEO YOURE BACK!!!!!! HOW ARE YOU!!! But omg literally same!! I took almost a year long hiatus from writing and just being active on here but now that life has slowed down I’m ready to feed the masses lolll

[orchidsarchives]

Jason looked pretty when he smoked.

It was a disgusting habit, one that made his clothes reek of stale smoke and left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. But despite the ugliness of this horrible practice, there was a sort of comforting feeling in watching Jason light a cigarette. It was the kind of quiet, mundane, beauty that made your heart stop.

He often smoked at odd hours of the night—shirtless with his elbows propped on your shared balcony. The Gotham breeze gently caressing his messy curls, offering a soft reprieve from the summer heat.

He’d have his cigarette placed between his lips. And to you, Jason looked captivating, a small whisper of heaven in your home. He’d flick his lighter in a swift motion, lighting the stick while illuminating his face in the process. It bathed his bruised skin in a delightful orange hue, highlighting the small scar by his mouth.

Jason’s sublimity could only be described as a firefly. An allure that wasn’t blazing and loud, but a quiet flame that drew you in.

The cigarette looked small in his larger hands. His ring clad fingers only added to his appeal. There was a poetic melancholy about the way his wounded knuckles looked against the stick. It tugged at your chest and despite the beauty of it all, it made you feel mournful.

A mourning for the life he could’ve had, if he hadn’t been subjected to the circumstances that he was. It made you feel grief of the days where he’d pick up a cigarette to suppress his hunger or to ground himself after the misery. It was a hurt that crept up slowly, but left a deep sinking feeling.

Your relationship with Jason’s smoking was complicated. A part of you wished he’d give it up, leave the nasty habit behind for good. And then there was the guilty part, the one that indulged in the simplistic charm of it all.

[mrsjasontodd]

jason todd and the snide little, "'fuck's wrong with you?" that comes out from under his breath if anyone bumps into you in the street, even if just by accident -

i imagine it's a busy day in gotham, an early morning or a late afternoon, sunny. and he's leading to or away from your work, a little bit brisk, too brisk, if only to get through the crowd a tad quicker. someone dings your shoulder, just barely, just enough to slip your rhythm and ripple through jason's hand when you're tugged back a step.

(one of those things that overlaps with being a vigilante -- his sensitivity to pace and proximity no matter the occasion , even in the broad of day, or during the softest moments with you.)

but he’s turning before you can register--first to you, to give you one of those, not-so-secretly-a-bat (nor quick) onceovers to check for any kind of collateral (then to tuck you back into the side of his coat)... then to put those big, new jersey canines on display in a sneer that says much more than he'll ever need to...

before finally pulling you forward again, like the city will move around him before he ever lets it move you, not giving it linger you single second longer.

[orchidsarchives]

just caught up to Absolute Batman. Oh. My. God.

[sunnie-angel]

anyway i think you give jason todd a sticker once and he’s doing whatever he can to earn another one.

the first time its because you’re journaling and he’s looking so cosy, sprawled out on the couch. his cheek is practically begging for a sticker. what are you meant to do? not give him one???? he’s befuddled when you stick the paper four leaf clover to his cheek and blushing when you follow it up with a kiss right over it. good luck for your good luck charm. jason saves it, sticks it to a scrap piece of paper and tucks it away. all the stickers you give him get saved.

he brings you flowers more regularly, tried to make it home early from cases, picks up that drink you like from the cafe downtown (the one that’s too far to go regularly) all in the hopes of another sticker. you struggle with choosing where to put your stickers they’re all so cute i don’t want to choose wrong but you hadn’t even hesitated. jason’s pulling out his hair because the same action doesn’t always get him a sticker.

it takes you awhile to catch on. sure you notice he’s been trying to get an even better grade in being boyfriend of the year than usual. you don’t connect it to the stickers until after you’re putting your journaling supplies away and he’s all puppy dog eyed and pouting.

“you know you can just ask if you want one, right?”

“but i want you to want to give me one.”

there’s still your regular stash of journaling stickers. only now there’s also what you call your jason stickers. his stickers get used up quickly, joyfully. he fell asleep halfway through his audio book and woke up to a face cluttered with them once. jason still keeps them though, every single one.

[batwngs]

CALLOUSED HANDS GENTLY

PAIRING: jason todd / reader WARNING(S): depictions of injury, brief mentions of poor medical care, hurt/comfort NOTES: poll winner! inspired by and title quoted from @revelutionize's headcanons

—

Despite the rough exterior, Jason carries with him a presence of softness—especially in his calloused and scarred hands. You noticed it often in the way he held your hand as you both spent the lazy evening absentmindedly watching old Hollywood movies or the way he handed you fresh tomatoes as you laughed and giggled at each other while making early-evening dinners. His roughed-up hands marked by the ever-unkind and changing world so easily contrasted the tender and gentle love that existed so profoundly in his veins.

So, when he finds you bathed in the fluorescent lighting of your shrinking Gotham bathroom, attempting to bandage a graze blooming bruises onto the garden of your skin, his hands rush towards you entirely out of instinct.

Questions of how and when and who flood the cramped airspace of your bathroom, worry increasingly scratching at his voice. Having left you almost distracted by this sudden barrage of questions and onslaught of dizzying worry, Jason’s hands—moving swiftly, easily, tenderly—take the gauze from yours as his eyes rake over your form, checking to make sure the simple yet too-deep-for-comfort cut on your arm was the only proof of crime marking your flesh.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” you say in defense as Jason applies a firm yet gentle pressure to the gauze against your arm, as if hoping his touch alone might stop any more blood from spilling tonight. Your words, however, are a poor attempt to shield Jason from the worry already running the racetrack of his mind. And, in retrospect, this wound wasn’t as bad as the range of scarred possibilities that could have made stories out of your skin. Considering the millions of ways being mugged in Gotham could have gone, you came out the other end relatively unscathed, thanks to a certain Robin. But you weren’t able to tell Jason that little detail: your red-and-green disgruntled angel in disguise, disappearing into the early evening as you turned to grab your fallen work bag, was a secret you were tucking away into the unkempt corners of the day.

“You’re bleeding,” Jason retorts. “You’re hurt.”

He shifts ever so slightly, reaching to grab a clean piece of gauze from the chipping bathroom counter and placing its clean slate onto your arm letting your blood stain its material. You watch him closely through the mirror: his somewhat bent form over yours, doctoring at your wound with careful, attentive eyes. His movement, usually loose and easy despite his frame, now hardened into a mold of rigidity. His shoulders stood straight, his eyes examining sharply, and his hands locked into a fixed hold on you, all as if your wound Medusa. His breathing fell into a quiet trained rhythm of methodical slowness, his nostrils flared ever-so-slightly the more he studied the bloody gauze abandoned in the trash or the hints of redness outlining your fingers and knuckles. You recognize this hymn: the sighs and controlled breathing, the stiffened movement and the shell-like rigidity that consumes his immense stature—the telltales of Jason silently retreating to the far corners of his mind.

Breaking you free from this mirrored trance, Jason takes hold of your hand, moving its tight grip from the counter’s edge to the gauze his calloused hand was keeping in place on your arm, wordlessly asking you to continue his pressured hold.

“I can bandage myself just fine,” you utter softly.

He throws a stern look at you as he washed his hands, as if the very prospect of you bandaging yourself was both an insult to him and an impossibility he would—or rather, could—never allow. You know he’s more than aware that you could do this on your own, having bandaged his range of now-scarred wounds more times than either of you could count; but you also know he would never let you—as if some deep-seated mechanism within him won’t let him even perceive a reality in which you do this alone.

He gestures for you to sit on the toilet seat, wordlessly nodding his head in the direction for you to follow. And without protest, you do.

Jason, following after you like a protective shadow, seats himself at the edge of your bathroom’s tub, letting your knee bracket his as he situates himself closer to you. For some reason you find yourself shy at his gaze, at his proximity, despite the many times his eyes pierced your soul, his hands memorized the terrains of your body, his breath dizzied your airspace. Every time you neared each other like this, the air carried want and love comprised entirely of a pure romanticism only defined by centuries of penned writing, puppyish in the desire you both smiled as your lips met the reliefs of his neck or as his hard-skinned hands mapped your waist.

It is his unwavering attention on you now though, on your bloodied arm, that wells a crashing of nervousness from within you as if your body is borrowing guilt from the future in preparation for Jason’s grievous anger that will unsurely come about tomorrow if not later into the night.

He slightly dampened hand firmly holds your arm in place, keeping you steady as his eyes remain solely trained on the damage caused to the altar of your skin. The bleeding had stopped but the echo of its presence spilt onto your skin, blanketing bright with a rusting red that looked out-of-place along your arm. His other hand approaches, armed with a softly wetted cloth; you hold your breath.

The cloth’s cold—a sharp shock to the warmth emitting from torn skin—rubbed along your wound-site, with Jason dabbing and wiping clean Gotham’s mark on your skin. With every stroke and movement, you can feel the pressure and tension locked in his hands, the veins betraying his outwardly presenting calm to expose the complexities in turmoil at heart.

He knows you’re more than capable of surviving the hell of Gotham, having done it for years before even meeting him, but the way his hand holds your arm in place as his other wipes clean the reddened ridges of your warmed flesh radiates forth a kind of angered doubt, a regretful failing with each deliberate brush of cloth against skin. For the grime of the city to have actually reached you—for its arm once loving to have scrapped you dirty and bloodied, the cold wet concrete of her broken, forgotten corners to have briefly caught you in her web offering you to the shadows Jason has spent lifetimes trying to amend—and for him to not have been there to halt the ribbed knife: it all felt blasphemous, a betrayal against what he swore to defend.

You weren’t exempt from this swelling rage rolling off of him, for you planned not to tell him at all, opting instead to doctor your own wounds poorly, to sheepishly attempt to halt your own blood’s escape, and possibly tell him later if you managed to remember. Your omission surely added fuel to his growing fire.

As this mix of rage and aching guilt clouded his mind, stiffening his breathing, his hands continued on moving with a hesitant grace, the same caution your muscles panicked when Jason first came to you bleeding. Even back then, it was his hands—in their gentle brushing against your arm—that guided you through the mess of bloody gauze on your couch. You remember the way those soft, feather-like brushes of his thumb against the calming terrain of your flesh would occasionally turn into a near-bruising grip along your arm when you were brave enough to dab his torn skin and open, sticky-red wounds with whatever alcohol you had lying around. His hands then, as they always have you learned, spoke a language gestured entirely through their own calloused gentleness. Those feather-like grazes, drunk on pain, murmured sweet nothings of care. His thumb swiping kind circles against your arm as a whispered “don’t worry, doll,” grounding your shaking anxiety over his blood drowning the contours of his skin; his fingers tightening their grip the moment the alcohol-dipped pad grazed his skin, muttering through gritted teeth, “it’s okay, it doesn’t hurt.”

As Jason silently withdraws to some distant corner of his mind, you continue to feel the guilt festering within him, filling the creases of his palm with unnumerable what-ifs and fears of wrong ends. Yet, his hands remain true to their gentleness. The fears, worries, and guilt rattling through his mind force forth an even more delicate lightness in each meticulous, near-hesitant touch. He postures a deliberate controlled softness in every move he makes in wiping clean your wound, as if he was afraid any pressured or sudden contact of his hand upon your flesh would only worsen your bloody hurt, blistering new methodologies of ache to the surface of your kind skin. Any anger he held, you felt through his hands, now firmly a guilted grief.

His movement for the antiseptic ointment and dressings on the bathroom counter is entirely full of near-touches and caution. Even as he opens the tube, his fingers work with such gentleness and subtlety as any harsh or hasty shift by him would unravel your wound further, would taint the tools available to ease your injury. His hands, anxious in their application of the ointment, presume his callousness as some sort of enemy to your flesh, a poison that would only infect your bruising abrasion.

“‘S deep,” Jason finally mutters in a hushed sigh, breaking the silence at the falling of words from his lips. His finger lightly dances around your bright-red wound, applying the antiseptic ointment as if painting waves of an imagined oceanic view on the canvas of your skin.

“Yeah,” you whisper back, defeated almost to have brought such a wound home, to have worried Jason with a scar for the coming tomorrows that will always speak of what could’ve gone wrong or of his absence when you needed him most. “I know.”

He falls silent again with a controlled sigh and his thumb tense in its press against your skin before returning to that gentleness you recognize as him.

But your ears know this weighted silence buried at the back of his throat, your muscles know this animated language found at his roughed fingertips—it is as if on some microscopically cosmic or immensely molecular level your skin, muscles, and bones were conjured from the same particles of strayed dust and ideas and arrows that left Babylon bare. His hand moves again to grab the adhesive bandages from the counter, pulling at it before pressing the material in place against your wound’s dressing as his other hand moves rhythmically to wrap your arm. I’m sorry, I wasn’t there, his thumb and pinky finger softly speak in their hold around your arm.

He continues wrapping wordlessly as you watch his gaze attentively, his lashes revealing ever-so-slightly the hidden ciphers of his thoughts. His hand slides quietly down your arm until his grip settles below your bent elbow sitting his thumb at the throne of your beating pulse. His thumb rubs feather-like circles along the junction offering a chaste confession, I wish this didn’t happen to you.

His eyes stayed trained on your arm, the circular movement of his meticulous bandaging. He wouldn’t—perhaps couldn’t—make eye contact with you at this very moment, but you knew the truth of his thoughts, the language that lay buried at his fingertips. I’m here now, his calloused hand, roughed by the world and its horrors, whispers as he moves stray strands of your hair away from your shoulder’s edge, clearing the path to finish wrapping your wound. He tosses a brief glance your way, shy in its contact, before returning his attention to your arm; his brown eyes, a lighthouse in the wave of comforting words expressed and received solely through touch. Even with nothing announced between you two—of fears, worries, anger, guilt, and apologies—his presence and touch dulled the ache, scrubbing clean the danger of the day from your mind.

It was through his touch alone—some brick at the end of Babel—that was language found; and it was, as anthropologists will fail to learn, a language made entirely for your discovery, a grammar made wholly for your senses.

[orchidsarchives]

im scrolling through the x reader tags on here and you guys are so mean to writers if you don’t like something don’t read it like it’s so frustrating to see so many people make memes about “cringey and shitty” writing and im so confused because last i checked you’re not writing any of your own stories so what gives you the right to be so critical the people on here are doing this for fun not everyone is gonna write professional award winning stories and it’s tumblr man like people write smut on here for the giggles its truly never ever that serious ALSO ALSO you’re reading fanfics bro this is as cringe as it gets so you can’t even be like oh you’re cringe for writing that babe we are all in the same place LOL the traction is already so low on this app and it’s so discouraging when every second post you see in the popular tags is about someone complaining and then you guys also complain about having nothing to read like yeah no shit bro no one wants to write when you’re being so mean