Summary: I LOST THE ASK but the gist of it was 'Bernard and Tim fighting over who reader fucks first and then reader get's fed up and leaves'.
Warning: Verse characters (Bottom Tim/Top Bernard), Top AMAB no pronouned reader, blowjob, chest job (reader receiving and mention of tit's but in a funny haha way not that reader actually has tits way. Or maybe you do who knows), established relationship. No use of (y/n)
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"It's not my fault I can't always be around hanging off of them, Bern. I should get to go first; don't be greedy."
"Why shouldn't I be? It isn't my fault either. Besides, I know what gets them in the mood way better than you do."
"As if."
"It's true!"
You sigh, somehow totally disinterested in stroking your softening cock as your bratty boyfriends argue amongst one another. Having two verses on your arm is great and all until they both want to bottom for you at the same time.
The mood had been great when it started, with Tim tugging you back into your shallow kiss for more. Somewhere along the way, Bernard latched himself onto your back, and you ended up in the bedroom. Limbs were tangled, and tongues were met in a familiar dance of passion and sweat, readying the body for more. That was until both Tim and Bernard reached for your waistband at the same time. "Hey, I call dibs."
"You can't 'call dibs', it's whatever they want to do first." Tim cocks back, attempting to win by playing the high road. "Sure, I can; I just did." Bernard smiles, shoving his hand the rest of the way down, knocking Tim's out of the way. You hiss slightly, the blonde's grip on your chub not as gentle as it normally should be. "Oh hush, you big baby."
Tim rolls his eyes and instead moves to capture your lips once more. He puts an emphasis on his arch, really presenting himself to you while Bernard does...whatever it is he's doing while trying to steal your attention and Tim's thunder.
The attention is sweet, but it feels as if you're being pulled at by both ends.
Tim manages to get you down against the bed, and he sits over your chest to grind. A tiddy fuck, in a sense. Tim looks way too proud of himself for you to humor him. No flexed muscle to rut against for Tim.
On the other end, Bernard gets his mouth on your cock. "C'mon," He whines, shaking it by its base a bit. "Harden up for me already," Tim smirks against your lips, but you nip at his bottom one to prevent that sass from slipping. Tim lightly swats your shoulder back. All's fair in love and war.
"Mhh! Ahhh, so good!" Bernard obnoxiously moans, licking a long stripe up the side of your cock from the bottom of your balls to the tip. "Can't wait to have this big fat thing inside of me..."
"Dude," Tim grunts, disgruntedly looking back at the blonde. "Babe, you're totally killing the mood."
"The only thing 'killing the mood' is the unshaved asshole I'm being forced to stare at." Bernard snaps back, sucking on the head of your cock.
"Bernard!" Tim gasped, pulling off your chest. "What? You're the one being a jerk."
Both men move away from you, standing to glare at each other from the foot of the bed.
"Bern, seriously, what's up with you? The brat shtick is usually my thing." Tim's arms crossed, a genuine frown of concern bleeding through his weary features.
The blonde shifted, slightly flushed at being called out so straightly. "Well...you know. I'm here too; whenever you're in the mood, you always go to them first. Even though it's been a while between all three of us."
Ah, okay. That made sense.
"It's not...like that, you know that, right?" Tim sighed, reaching out to place his hands on the blonde's shoulders. "I love you guys the same amount. Just...sometimes I want it, and you're more into receiving than giving too."
"I can top! I wanna top, if that's what you want."
Then he'll top, cause clearly they need this way more than you do. Swiftly, you jump off the bed, kiss both men gently, and swipe your pants off the floor. Whatever, maybe you'll just jerk off in the shower and finish that recipe you'd been meaning to. Yeah, that sounds a little better than listening to them whine back and forth.
"Love you!" They both call before you shut the door behind you.
Summary: From my draft list 'dick sucking you off during a gala w makeup on' ♡
Warnings: AMAB but no pronouns are used for reader, blowjob (duh), handjob, public sex (bathroom), established relationship. No use of (y/n).
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Charity galas are pretty nice, actually, especially when they’re sponsored and hosted by Wayne Enterprises. They’re always on theme, raise awareness, and raise even more in donations and checks by the end of it. It’s a good time, an honor to be invited too.
Unfortunately for your boyfriend, he’s already been to one of these three hundred times over and counting. Dick has done it all. From being a mascot entertainer hanging off new dad Bruce Wayne doing somersaults across tables to occasionally being the presentation speaker. You think it’s charming to see your man in a different kind of workspace. In a sleek fitted suit…hair gelled and curled ever so slightly…even the makeup he does for these events is everything.
Ah…maybe he’ll be mad about the makeup later when he realizes how messed up it is. Drooling all over your cock like this.
“Mh…hey, hun?” Dick asked earlier, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “Do you mind?” He nodded towards the corridor where the bathrooms are located. The frown he wore seemed earnest enough. Probably just needed a second opinion on a touch-up or tightening his chest suspenders. Your table paid little mind to your departure, and neither did you…until Dick closed and locked the single stalled bathroom door behind him.
“Ah! Sorry, sorry.” He laughed, coming up to kiss and hug on you. “I couldn’t wait.”
“Mh,” He’s quick to moan, pressing his front all up against you while you palm at his ass. “It’s all so boring, baby. All the same people just ah, just talkin’ and talkin’ and talkin’…what’s a guy gotta do around here to have a little entertainment?”
How obvious.
Dick drops to his knees pretty quick, turning the goo-goo eyes up to eleven. “Don’t you wanna fuck this pretty face, baby?” Dick flips his hair some, batting his lashes. “I look good, right?” Of course he does, or his name wouldn’t be Richard Grayson.
He takes his time undoing your pants, tugging the zipper down with his teeth in an agonizingly slow pull. “Wow…” Dick gasps, feigning surprise as if he's never seen your cock before. “Who knew you were so hung?” Your eyes roll, and he giggles, palming you through your underwear.
“I want a nice…wet kiss before we start, okay? Can you do that for me?” Dick smiles, working your length up against your own pelvis. His breath is warm even through the fabric, but it’s rivaled by the hardening muscle of your cock. “There you are…” Slowly, he peels your boxers down once he considers you ready, biting his lip at the string of pre your tip leaves. The way it glistens under the surprisingly not shitty bathroom light is nothing short of expensively erotic. Such is the way of Wayne.
With one hand, Dick grasps the base of your cock, stroking some. Using the other for balance against your thigh. His fist moves to guide the tip of your cock head just against his puckered lips. “Chu…!” The smeck he makes is audible, and stupid, but it’s kinda cute, so you let him. “Haha, okay, okay. Mh,” Dick again kisses, this time slower, dragging his tongue out and around your slit. “Better?”
Eye contact with Dick is mandatory when he’s giving you head, that is, if...you don’t want straight teeth. His lashes may flutter, and his eyes may water, but never should you look away for long. Even in times like this, he’s performing, and Dick will be damned if you aren’t admiring it.
He starts slow, moving down your cock with his tongue to wet and soak for a better glide later. “Hahh…” Dick will pant, over nothing really, always giving you half the mind to smack him off of you. Once he gets you in his mouth, though, you have nothing to complain about.
It’s not an immediate swallow to the base, but an eventual bob down to it. Lightly staining rings of his matte lipstick in rings around your cock. Similarly, the foundation around his mouth starts to lift. Even the best of what setting spray and powder can offer can’t stop the passion Dick has for you.
All the while he sucks and swallows, he grinds into nothing below. His dress pants are certainly straightened, but Dick isn’t worried all that right now. It’s perverted to admit, but having your length deep in his mouth like this is always grounding. It’s hard for one’s mind to wander when the curve of your length feels like it’s threatening to poke at the underside of his brain.
“Are you…hahh, havin’ a good time ‘t the party, hun?” Dick purrs, drool still connecting his blotchy red lips to your tip even when he momentarily pulls away. “Good food…good music. All that jazz.” You humor him, letting your voice ring as much as it needs to while managing a somewhat casual conversation. The sink behind you is all the support you need, letting your boyfriend take you at his own pace: languid and loving. “Uh-huh?”
“Ah, shit baby, you know I want it…” Dick frowned disappointedly to himself, sighing harder the more telltale signs there were of your approach to release. “Want it bad, but I can’t go out there with a facial now, can I?” You both pout at that. “What to do…what to do? I don’t wanna waste it...”
With a shared giggle, he maneuvers you over the toilet instead to jerk you off. Really making sure he gets the right angle to aim your load’s shot at. Over your shoulder, you kiss, and you’re able to taste yourself on him. Gross!
You wait with your back turned to clean up and to tuck yourself back into your pants. Biting your lip until…”Ah, shit! Babe, my makeup!”
“I love you” are very difficult words for BRUCE WAYNE to say.
He’s not good with his words, and he is not good with his actions either, but he tries.
The second Bruce starts taking you as his plus one everywhere, or when you start staying at the Manor some nights, or when you finally get to meet his children formally, you know you have started a relationship with Bruce Wayne.
To have a relationship with Bruce is a big deal. Anyone could end up in his bed, naked and satisfied. But not anyone can say they are formally dating him. That’s your privilege.
Still, he has never said “I love you”. Not once.
You love him, and he knows it—you’ve told him many times. In a lazy, honeyed voice right after you woke up. In an enthusiastic voice, full of affection, every time he gives you a new gift he bought for you for no reason at all. Whispered, like a secret, every time you comfort him. Moaned when he touches you…
You love Bruce Wayne, everything about him, without exceptions.
He knows.
But does he love you?
He cares about you—he cares deeply. Your wellbeing is important to him. He often calls you, or texts you to check up on you. He prioritizes you over anything else, even himself.
He admires you, worships you. He never misses an opportunity to compliment you. How beautiful you are, how your dress enhances your beauty impossibly more. For him you’re ethereal, too good to be true, too good to be his.
And he for sure makes you remember you’re dating the billionaire Bruce Wayne. He showers you with presents. But each one has value, meaning, a story behind them. He’s thought each one through carefully before giving it to you. He also takes you to every gala and stays by your side, making sure you’re comfortable with the place and the people.
He cares for you, admires you, and gives you everything you could ask for.
Then he must love you.
But you’re longing for him to tell you. You want to hear those three words come out of his mouth. You want him to confirm it—for your sake and for his own.
And maybe you think that, after all this time with Bruce, you could guess the moment when he’d finally say it. Maybe one day, whispering it in your ear at a gala. One day, moaning as you make love. One day, with a painful physical effort, while you’re by his side after a tough night as Batman.
But not now. Not like this.
“I love you.” His voice has that normalcy not many have the privilege to know, because they only know the charismatic Bruce, but not the relaxed, off guard Bruce you love.
He had cut you off. You were telling him about your day at work, complaining about the people, about how much your body ached from the exhaustion, and meanwhile you were walking around Bruce’s room. While telling your story you had picked up your nightgown from the closet, then walked towards the bathroom to clean your face, then walked towards your bag to pick up something. You hadn’t stopped moving nor talking.
Meanwhile, Bruce was looking at you, following your every movement and listening to your every word attentively. He even hummed in approval at some of the comments you made. And then he cut you off.
You were at the climax of the story, and then he cut you off.
To say “I love you”.
Everything stopped, and suddenly you felt the room fading. It was only you and Bruce.
He had a small smile on his face and his eyes never moved away from your figure, never hesitated.
Then he said it again.
“I love you.” Followed by your name.
Bruce Wayne loved you, and so did you.
And those three words were complicated for Bruce Wayne, until he met you. He just needed to find the right time to say it, so you would believe him.
After a wild night, you find yourself in a... something with Tim Drake. You can convince yourself it's nothing -- but what if it starts being unavoidable in this NSFW Choose Your Own Adventure?
Tim Drake x Fem!Reader
NSFW Choose Your Own Adventure
🔗 READ/PLAY HERE
🎮interactive fanfic "are you mine?" by redbirdonfire
📖 Episode 1 of ?
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.
A/N: Implied fem! reader. Maybe OOC. Comments and Reblogs appreciated. (Repost from old blog!)
Bruce Wayne loves showering together. Both of you are standing below the showerhead, water droplets paving patterns across your skin. You reach for the shampoo, lathering it over his hair, threading through each strand while he does the same to you moments later. There is a certain level of intimacy when you bare your bodies for nothing sexual but just love and warmth — to let your lover see every crevice, every blemish, every scar that grazes your skin.
Bruce Wayne loves slow dancing. No, not the ones he does at Galas — Genuine but glazed with calculation, a little performative courtesy to the audience — but the ones he does at home. His hands are on your waist, yours looped around his neck while the soft dim lights illuminate the room accentuating the curve of your smile as your head tips back in a laugh at something he said. Oh, how he loves your laugh. You both are in your pajamas, ready to embrace the sleep slithering at the edges. He loves dancing, he thinks, planting a kiss on your forehead, sweeping you towards the bed.
Bruce Wayne loves solving puzzles with you. Both of you are sitting on the floor of the manor library, cross-legged with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered yet cohesive — coming together to paint the full picture. There are two bowls — chocolate-covered strawberries and popcorn on either side of you, along with glasses of dark red wine. Your hair tickles his forehead as you lean in while trying to fit the pieces, unaware of the blue warm eyes fixed on you, momentarily stunned. This was one of the reasons he loved solving puzzles in the company of you — seeing you all focused, eyes squinting with your lips pursed. You looked really sexy too.
Bruce Wayne loves going on dates — not the extravagant or planned ones (he likes them too), but the spontaneous ones — like going to the ice cream parlor or walking ace at the local park. He liked the mundane moments where he could forget about everything else. Right then, it was only you and him.
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Stubborn and spoiled pregnant dick grayson who will use it to get whatever he wants... because he's fragile now, give him the glass of water which is 1 inch far, it doesn't matter, he's holding a child!! And reader does it anyway bc he knows its true... happy wife, happy life, right? *Sigh*
🐰 Bun In The Oven 🐇
Warnings: Pregnant character (no description of sex), no pronouned reader, established relationship. No use of y/n.
Note: Prob the last of the preg stuff on my blog for a while; babbling about being knocked up can be fun, the rest not so much (personally). Still hope you enjoy though!! And things get better for you, kisses.
!!------------------------------------!!
Pregnancy is arguably one of the hardest processes a human being can go through, yet, on the other hand, it can be immeasurably euphoric. To know that you are so loved, so wanted, so desired, so...comfortable and stable with a partner that you're able to handle conceiving and supporting a child is everything to some people. Reaffirming, that is.
Dick has always loved attention, even though he's grown up under the cape of shadows for most of his life. Performing, impressing, charming such is the legacy of the Grayson name. And now...a future he gets to share with you. His sweetie darling, his snookums, light of his life-!
"Babbbbeyyyy, don't make me crane my neck when you're talking to me! I can't hear you." Dick tsks from his place on the couch, barely turning his head as you shuffle around the kitchen. Seriously, does this guy want you to finish dinner in the next millennium?
With a sigh, you once again traverse the hall to gauge your husband's opinion on the meal that you're so graciously preparing for him. "Mhm, oh, it's that recipe you're using? Ah...I don't know..."
It was all he raged about last month! Whatever...
Situations like that are hardly the worst of Dicks flip-floppiness, though. He still works out and enjoys you being there with him, but only when he's lifting weights and doing gymnastics! No longer is your company appreciated when he's doing cardio or similar things. Lots of gas. You're going to eventually watch birth, but you digress for the sake of his dignity, confidence, and pure preference. You're not the pregnant one.
Which is also why you aren't sure if it's your place or not to call your husband out about his sudden case of, well, for lack of a better word, feigned daintiness. The same man who can manage a hot yoga flow whilst eating ice cream with his off-hand can't kneel down low enough to pick his phone out from under the bed. The same man who still argues with is vigilante careered family about dividing Bludhaven's protection amongst themselves can't go to the grocery store himself.
You have no issue pampering Dick; it's just funny, is all. That the man who's always struggled to ask for help and display vulnerability is now never not puckering his lips and batting his lashes your way. It's a good look for him. Being needy.
"Rub my feet?" He'll sometimes have the decency to ask, though it remains an expectation of your nightly ritual. They're always swollen, from his toes up to his ankles. You've read horror stories on the depths of the internet about what happens during pregnancy if not taken care of. Though your head reasons he's clearly fine, a slim chance is still too likely for your heart. "Mh...higher, no, left of the arch, hun, lower...ah!"
