(To anyone requesting DC, please note that, unless specifically requested otherwise, any requests that involve the Joker in any way, shape, or form will always end with him fucking dying lol)
Yandere Batfamily with trypanophobic trans reader
Yandere Batfamily with reader kidnapped by the Joker
Yandere Alfred Pennyworth
Yandere Batfamily with germaphobic touch starved reader
Yandere Batfamily bickering over whoâs the favorite
Day in the life of kidnapped reader
đŠˇđŚđŠˇ
đŚDrabblesđŚ
AITA for hitting the Joker with my car?
đŠˇđŚđŠˇ
đŚAsksđŚ
Yandere Batfamily with sick/chronically ill reader
⢠Yandere Batfamily with terminally ill/dying reader
Yandere Batfamily with not easily infantilized reader
Yandere Batfamily with reader who has someone they canât live without
Yandere Batfamily on readerâs birthday
Yandere Bruce with reader whose birthday falls on his parentsâ death date
Yandere Batfamily with trans reader
Yandere Batfamily after discovering readerâs favorite family member
What if someone outside of the Batfamily is already obsessed with reader?
Circumstances in which Yandere Batfamily will let reader parent their own damn child (extension of not easily infantilized reader)
Yandere Batfamily with baby reader
Yandere Batfamily with traumatized serial killer reader
Yandere Batfamily with soldier aunt/uncle reader
Yandere Selina Kyle
Yandere Batfamily with Damianâs classmate reader
How far does Yandere Batfamily go with infantilization?
đŠˇđŚđŠˇ
đŚConceptsđŚ
Batfamily with Yandere neglected reader
⢠Batfamily after escaping from Yandere neglected reader
Jokerâs child! reader
Aftermath of Jokerâs death
Jokerâs child! reader x Toy Story crossover
Jokerâs child! reader first concept (kinda Angel Hare crossover)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Something Iâm begging to see in more batfam x batsib stories
Obsession x Batfam
Batsib/Batbro/Batsis
Where batsib reader neglected or not meets the love of their life but due to certain circumstances (whatever that may be) they break up and batsibs lover canât let them go
Where its from a concept from the movie obsession with either an oc or a character as the wisher and reader (batsib/batsis/batbro) is under the spell and how they interact with batfam or just following the premise of the movie
Maybe batsib goes crazy and kills a bunch of people for their love
Like batsib neglected or not was always at the manor or seen around somewhere but now under the spell theyâre never around and if they are theyâre always taking about their lover or glued to their side
Batfam tries to get to the bottom of whatâs happening to batsib and tries to help them by looking for a one wish willow to change the wish or make a new one
Guys please spread this I need someone to write this omgg
Am I crazy cuz I canât stop thinking about this concept đđ
Content warnings: drug use, addiction, overdose, neglect, suicidal ideation, major character death. This is a tragedy. No comfort, no redemption. Please read with care.
---
you are dying in a house full of heroes.
This is not a metaphor. You feel it in the brittle architecture of your bones, in the tremor that lives beneath your skin like a second heartbeat. Your body has become a haunted thing, a repository for all the poisons youâve poured into it, and stillâstillâno one has noticed that you are disappearing right in front of them.
You sit on the floor of your bedroom, back pressed against the foot of an antique four-poster bed that has never felt like yours. The curtains are drawn, heavy brocade that swallows the late-afternoon light and spits it back in shades of amber and rot. Somewhere in the cavernous belly of Wayne Manor, laughter peals like a bell. It echoes through the heating vents, distorted and tinny, a transmission from a world that has no space for you.
Your fingers curl around a prescription bottle. Oxycodone. The label is worn, the name smudgedâsomeone elseâs pain, stolen from the medical bay three weeks ago when Alfred was busy suturing a gash in Jasonâs shoulder and Bruce was already back at the Batcomputer, already lost in the next catastrophe. You remember walking through the cave with the silence of a ghost, barefoot on cold stone, plucking the bottle from a drawer of neatly organized catastrophe supplies. No one turned around. No one said your name.
You dry-swallow two pills and chase them with the flat dregs of a soda you left on the nightstand three days ago. The carbonation has long since died. It tastes like sugar and oblivion.
Downstairs, they laugh again. You can pick out the individual threads: Dickâs bright, easy warmth, the kind of laugh that makes people fall in love with him. Timâs quieter chuckle, a little awkward, as if heâs still surprised heâs allowed to be part of the joke. Even Damian is thereâyou hear the precise, clipped cadence of his voice, less a laugh and more a reluctant acknowledgment that something is amusing. And Bruce. Bruceâs laugh is so rare it cuts you every time, because it is a sound that has never been offered in your direction. It is a relic of a man you do not know.
You tilt your head back against the mattress and let the opioid crawl into your bloodstream with the patience of a lover. The edges of the world soften. The laughter becomes bearable, then beautiful, then nothing at all.
This is how you survive. This is how you die.
...
The first time you realized you were ignored by your family, you were twelve years old.
Youâd been living in Wayne Manor for two years by thenâyour whole life, technically, but the years before Bruceâs return from his training were a blur of boarding schools and nannies who called you miss with the kind of professional distance that made you feel like a piece of expensive furniture. Then Bruce came back, and for one glittering, impossible moment, you thought you might become real.
He was your father. Your biological father. The only child born from his short-lived, ill-fated marriage to a woman whose face you had to reconstruct in your memory from photographs because she died when you were two years old. You had his (.....) hair, his stubborn jaw, and his tendency to withdraw into silence and contemplate. That must have meant something. It must have meant that you definitely belonged there.
But then Dick came, and then Jason, and then the cave opened up beneath the manor like a second heart, and you understood: Bruce did not want a child. He wanted soldiers. He wanted mirrors that reflected his own grief back at him, sharpened into weapons. And youâyou were just a girl who cried when she skinned her knee, who was afraid of thunderstorms, who wanted to be held. You were soft. You were useless.
You remember the night you asked him to train you. You were twelve, small for your age, wearing pajamas with little stars on them. Youâd crept down to the cave after hearing the roar of the Batmobile returning from patrol. Bruce was still in the suit, cowl pulled back, sweat darkening his hair. He looked like a god. He looked like your father.
âI want to help,â you said, and your voice echoed in the cavernous space, thin and reedy. âI want to be like Dick. I want to fight.â
Bruce turned to you, and for one breathless second you thought you saw something soft in his eyes. But then his expression shuttered, became the mask he wore even without the cowl.
âNo.â
âBut I can learn. I can be good. I canââ
âThis isnât a game.â His voice was not cruel, but it was final. It was a door closing. âYouâre my daughter. I wonât lose you. Go back to bed.â
I wonât lose you. What a beautiful lie. Heâd already lost you. He just hadnât noticed yet.
You went back to bed. You didnât cry. You were too hollow for tears. The next morning, Dick taught Jason how to throw a Batarang in the gymnasium, their laughter ringing against the high ceilings. You watched from the doorway for seventeen minutes before anyone noticed you were there, and even then, it was only Alfred, who offered you a cup of tea and a sad, knowing smile that did nothing to fill the chasm opening in your chest.
That was the year you learned that love in this house was a finite resource, and you had been deemed unworthy of it
...
By fourteen, you had stopped trying.
This is what the history books will never record: the slow, quiet erosion of a girl who lived in the margins of a legend. The way you stopped setting a place for yourself at dinner because no one remembered to call you anyway. The way you learned to move through the manorâs hallways without making a sound, a skill born not of training but of the desperate, animal need to avoid the pain of being seen and then ignored. It is worse, you discovered, to be acknowledged and then dismissed than it is to never be acknowledged at all.
You remember the afternoon Damian first arrived at the manor. He was ten, imperious, all sharp angles and sharper words. Bruce introduced him to everyoneâDick, Jason, Tim, Alfred, even Barbara, who had come by to assess the new addition to the chaos. They stood in the grand foyer, a tableau of fractured family, and you watched from the top of the staircase, half-hidden behind the balustrade.
No one introduced you.
Later, you found Damian in the library, examining a first edition of The Art of War with the critical eye of a general. You hovered in the doorway, trying to find the right words. Iâm your sister. I know you donât know me, but Iâm here. Iâve always been here.
Before you could speak, he glanced up and fixed you with a stare that could have cut glass. âYouâre the civilian,â he said. Not a question. A designation.
âIâyes. Iâm yourââ
âTt. Donât get in my way.â
He turned back to his book. You stood there for a long moment, the air pressing in on you from all sides, and then you walked away. You didnât blame him. He was a child raised by assassins, taught that value was measured in utility. In his world, you were useless. He was just the first person to say it out loud.
That night, you stole a bottle of wine from the cellar and drank it alone in your room until the walls stopped closing in. It was the first time you used a substance to mute the noise inside your head. It would not be the last
....
The escalation happened so gradually that even you didnât notice until it was too late.
At fifteen, you broke your wrist falling down the grand staircaseâa genuine accident, not a cry for help, though youâd be lying if you said you hadnât been tempted by those before. Alfred drove you to the emergency room because Bruce was in the middle of a Justice League operation and couldnât be reached. Dick was in BlĂźdhaven. Jason was off on one of his brooding self-exile stints. Tim texted you a single âu ok?â and didnât follow up when you didnât respond. Damian didnât even glance at the cast when you returned home.
The doctor prescribed Vicodin. You remember staring at the bottle in the harsh fluorescent light of the pharmacy, the orange plastic warm in your palm. Youâd never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before. You were scared of it, a little. But the pain in your wrist was a relentless, grinding thing, so you swallowed one pill and waited.
The relief was not just physical. It was existential. The Vicodin didnât just mute the ache in your bonesâit muted the ache in the hollow of your chest where your family was supposed to be. It wrapped you in cotton wool. It made the loneliness feel distant, like a storm on the far side of a thick window. For the first time in years, you felt something that might have been peace.
You finished the prescription in five days. When the bottle was empty, you felt the absence like a physical blow. The noise came backâthe laughter, the silence, the unbearable weight of being invisible. You needed it gone again.
So you went looking.
The medical bay in the Batcave was a treasure trove of chemical solutions. Morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, codeineâa pharmacopeia of battlefield medicine kept stocked for the inevitability of violence. Security was tight, but youâd lived in this house your whole life. You knew the blind spots. You knew that the caveâs motion sensors were calibrated to ignore anyone under a certain height thresholdâa leftover from when Damian was small and prone to wandering where he shouldnât. You had never been a threat, so you had never been a variable worth accounting for.
Stealing became a ritual. Youâd slip down in the small hours of the morning, when patrol was still underway and Alfred was asleep, and youâd take just enough to keep the silence at bay. One pill at a time. Two. Three. You told yourself you could stop whenever you wanted. You told yourself it wasnât a problem because a problem required someone to notice, and no one did.
The first time you ran out before you could steal more, the withdrawal hit you like a freight train. You spent a night curled on the bathroom floor, shivering and sweating, your stomach cramping so violently you thought you might die. You didnât die. You just wished you would.
The next day, you went to school for the first time in a weekâGotham Academy, where you were enrolled under a fake name because Bruce was paranoid about kidnappings but couldnât be bothered to remember which fake name belonged to which child. You moved through the hallways like a wraith, hollow-eyed and trembling, and a boy named Leo found you in the parking lot, leaning against the brick wall, trying to remember how to breathe.
âYou look like shit,â he said, not unkindly.
Leo was seventeen, tall and lanky with nicotine-stained fingers and eyes that had seen too much. He sold weed to the scholarship kids and harder things to the rich ones who wanted to feel dangerous. He didnât ask why a Wayneâbecause he recognized you, despite the fake name, because everyone eventually recognized youâwas shaking like a leaf behind the gymnasium. He just pulled a joint from his pocket and offered it to you.
âThis wonât fix it,â he said. âBut itâll take the edge off.â
You smoked with him behind the bleachers, coughing on the first inhale, and when he asked if you needed something stronger, you said yes without hesitation.
That was the beginning of the end
....
By sixteen, you were no longer a girl who used drugs. You were an addict.
The word sits ugly in your mouth, but youâve learned to swallow it like everything else. You smoke weed to sleep. You take pills to function. On the bad daysâand there are so many bad days nowâyou let Leo inject you with heroin in the dingy back room of his apartment, a place that smells of mildew and old cigarettes and the particular desperation of people who have nothing left to lose.
Leo is not your boyfriend. Heâs not even really your friend. Heâs a transaction in human form, a pair of steady hands and a ready supply, and you pay him in cash and jewelry stolen from rooms in the manor that no one ever enters. Youâve taken a diamond bracelet from a drawer in the master suite that probably belonged to your mother. Youâve taken cufflinks from Bruceâs study, a silver letter opener, a handful of antique coins from a display case in the library. No one has noticed. No one has ever noticed.
Sometimes, when Leoâs pressing the needle into the crook of your arm, you close your eyes and pretend his touch is love. You pretend the warmth spreading through your veins is the warmth of being held, of being wanted. Itâs pathetic. You know itâs pathetic. But itâs all you have.
Youâve stopped going to school. The Academy sends letters home, but Bruce is in the middle of a war with the League of Assassins and Alfred is too busy keeping the household running to follow up. You intercept the letters when you can, forge Bruceâs signature on the responses, and when you canât, you just throw them away. No one asks where you go during the day. No one asks why your eyes are glassy, why your hands shake, why youâve lost so much weight that your clothes hang off you like they belong to a stranger.
Once, Dick corners you in the hallway, his hand gentle on your shoulder. You flinch. He doesnât seem to notice.
âHey, kiddo,â he says, his smile the same easy, practiced thing he gives to the press. âI feel like we havenât talked in a while. Howâs school?â
âFine.â Your voice is a croak. You havenât spoken to another person in three days.
âThatâs great. Listen, Iâm sorry I havenât been around muchâBlĂźdhavenâs a mess and the Titans are running me raggedâbut we should do something soon. Just the two of us. Sound good?â
You nod. You know he wonât follow through. He never does.
He pats your shoulder once and is gone, leaving behind the faint scent of his cologne and the hollow echo of another broken promise. You lean against the wall until the shaking stops, and then you go to your room and crush a pill on the nightstand with the flat of a silver hairbrush that hasnât been used in months.
The powder burns when you inhale it. The burn is the only thing that feels real
....
Your bedroom has become an observation deck, a silent perch from which you watch the family that isnât yours.
Youâve learned the rhythms of the manor the way a prisoner learns the rhythms of a jail: the creak of the third-floor floorboard at 4:37 a.m. when Bruce returns from patrol. The clatter of pans in the kitchen at 5:30 when Alfred begins preparing breakfast. The precise momentâ6:15âwhen Damianâs alarm goes off and he begins his morning training, his footsteps a metronome of discipline in the gymnasium below your window.
You are not part of any of it. You are a ghost haunting the margins, a smudge on the periphery of their vision. But you watch. You canât stop watching.
There is a particular cruelty in the way they orbit each other, a gravitational pull that excludes you with the casual precision of physics. They donât mean to shut you out. Thatâs the worst part. You are not a victim of maliceâyou are a victim of irrelevance. You are the variable that doesnât factor into the equation. The side character in a story that was never about you.
You watch them from the top of the stairs on movie nights, when Dick commandeers the entertainment system and makes everyone watch old musicals that Jason loudly complains about but never actually leaves. You watch Damian pretend to hate the musicals, his small body wedged between Bruce and Tim on the couch, his mouth pressed into a thin line of disapproval even as his eyes track the dancers with reluctant fascination. You watch Bruce, the cowl gone, the weight of the city temporarily set aside, his arm draped over the back of the couch in a gesture of casual affection that makes your chest ache.
You watch and you are not invited.
You tried, once. Months ago. A lifetime ago. Youâd come downstairs in your pajamas, drawn by the sound of laughter, and hovered in the doorway of the media room like a moth at a window. Tim glanced up, saw you, and offered a small, distracted smile before turning back to the screen. No one else acknowledged you. The couch was full. The space was full. There was nowhere for you to sit.
You stood there for five minutes, waiting for someone to make room, to say your name, to do anything. No one did. Eventually, you went back upstairs, and no one noticed you were gone.
Now you donât go downstairs at all. You sit on the floor of your room with your back against the door and you listen to the distorted echoes of their happiness through the vents, and you tell yourself itâs enough. It has to be enough.
The first time you overdose, itâs an accident.
Youâve been using heroin for six months now, but youâve been careful. Careful in the way that addicts are carefulâmeasuring doses, testing potency, telling yourself that you have it under control because the alternative is admitting that you donât. But the supply Leo gives you this week is different, stronger, cut with something that hits your bloodstream like a fist, and suddenly youâre on the bathroom floor with your cheek pressed to the cold tile and your heart stuttering in your chest like a dying bird.
You can feel your body shutting down. Itâs not painful, not really. Itâs like sinking into warm water. Like falling asleep after a lifetime of insomnia. Part of youâthe part thatâs been screaming into the void for five yearsâwhispers that this wouldnât be the worst way to go.
No one finds you. No one comes.
You wake up three hours later, alone, your face crusted with dried vomit and your arms covered in bruises you donât remember getting. The house is silent. No one has noticed you were missing. No one has come looking for you. You lie on the bathroom floor for a long time, staring at the ceiling, and you feel nothing at all.
The next day, you call Leo and ask for more
...
The invitation appears on the kitchen island on a Tuesday morning, written in Alfredâs precise copperplate on heavy cream stationery: Family dinner this evening at 7 p.m. All are expected to attend. RSVP not required.
All are expected. You stare at the word all for a long time, tracing the elegant loops of the script with your fingertip. Itâs been months since you last sat at the dining table. Youâre not sure anyone noticed your absence then, either.
You spend the afternoon in a state of low-grade panic, cycling through the contents of your closet like a woman preparing for battle. Your body is a ruin. You can see it in the mirror: the sharp jut of your collarbones, the hollows beneath your cheekbones, the bruise-dark circles under your eyes that no amount of concealer can fully disguise. Your arms are a roadmap of track marks, some fresh, some faded to silvery scars. You choose a long-sleeved blouse in deep burgundy. You pull your hair back into a neat ponytail. You practice smiling in the mirror until your reflection looks almost human.
You are ready. You are terrified.
At 6:58, you descend the grand staircase and walk toward the dining room. Your heart is a war drum. Your hands are shakingâwithdrawal is starting to creep in, a familiar ache settling into your bonesâbut you clench them into fists at your sides and keep walking.
The dining room glows with candlelight. The table is set with the good china, the crystal goblets, the silverware thatâs been in the Wayne family for six generations. And there they are: Bruce at the head of the table, Dick to his right, Damian to his left. Jason is slouched in his chair, flicking a bread roll at Tim, whoâs trying to explain something about a case while simultaneously defending his plate. Even Barbara is there, seated next to Dick, her wheelchair tucked neatly beside the table. They are laughing. They are beautiful. They are a family.
You step into the doorway.
The laughter falters. Not dramaticallyâitâs not a record-scratch moment. Itâs subtler than that, a brief hiccup in the flow of conversation, a flicker of confusion that crosses Bruceâs face as he registers your presence.
âOh,â Dick says, recovering first, his smile bright but faintly puzzled. âHey, youâre here.â
You donât know what to do with your hands. You shove them into the pockets of your pants. âAlfred said there was a dinner.â
âYes, of course.â Bruceâs voice is neutral, but thereâs something in his expression that you canât read. Surprise, maybe. Or something closer to guilt. âI didnât realize you wereâtake a seat. We saved you a spot.â
There isnât a spot. There are exactly enough chairs for the people already at the table. You watch Tim and Jason exchange a glance, a silent negotiation, and then Jason sighs and scoots over, dragging a chair from the corner of the room and wedging it between himself and the wall. âHere,â he says, not quite meeting your eyes. âSit.â
You sit. The chair is cold. The space is too small. Your elbow knocks against Jasonâs as you reach for your water glass, and he doesnât say anything, but you feel him shift slightly away from you. A small, unconscious recoil. It shouldnât hurt. It still does.
The conversation picks up again, tentatively, like a car engine sputtering before it catches. Dick tells a story about a mission with the Titans that you donât have the context to understand. Tim and Barbara launch into a debate about encryption protocols. Damian insults Jasonâs fashion sense, and Jason fires back with something about Damianâs height, and Bruce chides them both with the weary fondness of a man who has done this a thousand times.
You sit in the middle of it all, silent, invisible even in your visibility. No one asks you about your day. No one asks why youâve lost so much weight, why your eyes are glassy, why you keep scratching at the inside of your wrist beneath the table. You push food around your plate and count the minutes until you can escape.
Halfway through the meal, Bruceâs phone buzzes. He glances at the screen, and his expression shiftsâthe father receding, the vigilante taking over. âWeâve got a situation,â he says, standing. âRiddlerâs left a trail of clues across the financial district. I need everyone suited up in ten.â
The table explodes into motion. Chairs scrape. Plates are abandoned. The family that was laughing together moments ago transforms into a tactical unit, efficient and synchronized. They sweep out of the dining room in a blur of dark hair and determined expressions, and not one of them looks back at you.
Not one.
You sit at the table for a long time after theyâre gone. The candles gutter. Alfred appears silently at your elbow, his face creased with a sadness that you canât bear to look at directly.
âShall I clear your plate, miss?â
You nod. You donât trust your voice.
He takes the plateâstill mostly fullâand hesitates. For a moment, you think heâs going to say something, something that might change everything or nothing at all. But the moment passes. He retreats to the kitchen, and you retreat to your room, and the gap between you and the rest of the world widens another inch.
...
That night, you hear them come home. The cave entrance rumbles open around 3 a.m., and voices drift up through the ventsâtired but triumphant. The Riddler is in custody. The city is safe. SomeoneâTim, you thinkâlets out a whoop thatâs half exhaustion and half exhilaration. Bruceâs laugh rumbles like distant thunder.
You lie in your bed, curled on your side, staring at the wall. The withdrawal has become a creature living inside your skin, gnawing at your nerves with tiny, relentless teeth. You need a fix. You need it, with a desperation that eclipses hunger, thirst, even the ache of your loneliness.
But you donât go to the cave. You donât steal more pills. Instead, you reach under your mattress and pull out a small velvet pouchâthe last piece of your motherâs jewelry that you havenât sold. A locket, delicate and gold, with a tiny photograph of her inside. Youâve kept it through everything. Itâs the only thing you have left of her. The only proof that you were ever part of a family that wanted you.
You hold it in your palm, the metal warm from your body heat, and you make a decision.
....
Three days later, you pack a bag.
Itâs not a big bagâjust a worn duffel you found in the back of a closet, stuffed with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and the locket. Youâre not running away, you tell yourself. Youâre just⌠leaving. Leaving implies agency. Leaving implies choice. And after years of being a passive observer in your own life, you need to feel like you have a choice about something.
You write a note. You donât know who youâre writing it for.
Iâm sorry. I tried. It wasnât enough.
You donât sign it. You leave it on your nightstand, tucked beneath an empty pill bottle, and you walk out of your bedroom without looking back.
The manor is quiet at this hourâlate afternoon, the golden light slanting through the tall windows in dusty shafts. Alfred is in the city, running errands. Bruce and the boys are in the cave, prepping for patrol. You can hear the low murmur of their voices as you pass the grandfather clock that conceals the entrance, and for a moment you pause. Your hand hovers over the wood. You could open it. You could go down there, one last time, and say everything youâve never said. You could scream. You could cry. You could make them see you.
But youâve tried that before. Youâve tried it in a hundred small ways, and itâs never worked. So instead, you press your palm flat against the clock face, feel the vibration of their voices through the ancient wood, and you whisper, âGoodbye.â
No one answers. No one ever answers.
You slip out through the kitchen door and into the dying light. The grounds of Wayne Manor stretch before you, impossibly green, impossibly beautiful. A world you have never been allowed to inhabit. You walk down the gravel drive with your duffel slung over your shoulder, and you donât look back.
...
Leoâs apartment is in the Narrows, a part of Gotham that the tourists never see and the newspapers only mention in the context of body counts. The building reeks of damp plaster and stale cigarette smoke and the particular hopelessness of people who have been failed by every system meant to protect them. You fit right in.
Leo opens the door with a cigarette dangling from his lips and raises an eyebrow at the duffel bag. âRunning away, princess?â
âSomething like that.â You push past him into the apartment. Itâs a mess, as alwaysâtakeout containers piled on the coffee table, a mattress on the floor with sheets that havenât been washed in weeks, a needle and spoon on the nightstand that makes your skin itch with anticipation.
âI need a place to crash,â you say. âJust for a while.â
Leo shrugs. âSure. But itâs gonna cost you.â
You pull the locket from your pocket. The gold gleams in the sickly light of the bare bulb overhead. Leoâs eyes flicker with interestâhe knows quality when he sees it. âThis is real,â you say. âTwenty-four karat. Worth a couple thousand at least.â
He takes it from you, turns it over in his fingers. Opens it. Glances at the photo insideâyour motherâs face, younger than you are now, smiling at the camera with a joy youâve never felt. He doesnât ask who she is. He doesnât care.
âYeah, alright,â he says. âI can move this. You can stay.â
He pockets the locket, and something inside you splinters. The last piece of your mother. The last piece of a life where you were loved. Youâve traded it for a filthy mattress and a man who sees you only as a transaction, and you donât even have the strength to mourn.
âI want a hit,â you say. âSomething strong.â
Leo grins. âIâve got some new stuff. Fentanyl-laced. Be careful with itâthis batch is no joke.â
You donât want to be careful. You donât want to be anything.
...
He ties off your arm with a rubber strap. The needle slides in with a familiar sting, and you watch the blood bloom into the syringe before he depresses the plunger. The heroin hits your bloodstream like a wave of light.
This is what youâve been chasing. This is the silence. This is the peace that the manor never gave you, the love that your family never offered, the belonging that was always just out of reach. Your head lolls back against the mattress. The ceiling swims. Your heartbeat slows to a languid, syrupy rhythm.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers that this dose was too strong. That something is wrong. Your breathing is too shallow. Your limbs are too heavy. The warmth that was so comforting moments ago is starting to feel like drowning.
But youâre not scared. Thatâs the strangest part. Youâve been dying for yearsâslowly, invisibly, in a house full of people who were supposed to love you. At least this way, you get to choose the ending.
Your eyes slip closed.
The last thing you think of is the grandfather clock, the vibrations of their laughter humming through the wood. The last thing you feel is the phantom weight of a hand on your shoulder, a touch that was never really there.
And then nothing.
....
Alfred is the one who finds the note.
He returns from his errands at 6:47 p.m., precisely on schedule, and begins his usual routine of preparing the evening meal. It is only when he goes to collect the laundry from the upstairs bedrooms that he notices your door is ajarâa small irregularity, but an irregularity nonetheless. You have kept your door firmly closed for years.
He steps inside. The room is too tidy. The bed is made. The clutter that usually accumulates on your nightstandâbooks, empty soda cans, the detritus of a life lived in isolationâhas been cleared away. All that remains is a single piece of paper, the empty pill bottle serving as a paperweight.
Alfred reads the note. His hands, steady for decades of combat and crisis, tremble.
He descends to the cave.
The family is gathered around the Batcomputer, reviewing satellite footage of Black Maskâs latest operation. Bruce is in the chair, cowl down, his expression the focused intensity of a man who has no room for anything but the mission. Dick is perched on the edge of the console. Tim is typing. Jason is cleaning a gun with methodical precision. Damian is sharpening a knife.
âMaster Bruce,â Alfred says, and something in his voiceâsomething quiet, something brokenâmakes every head in the room snap toward him.
âAlfred?â Bruce is already on his feet. âWhat is it?â
Alfred hands him the note.
The silence that follows is the loudest sound you have ever not heard.
Bruce reads the words once. Twice. His face, that impenetrable mask, cracks open like a fault line. âWhat is this? When did sheâwhere is she?â
âI donât know, sir. Sheâs not in the house. Iâve checked every room.â
âTrack her phone,â Tim says, already typing. His fingers fly across the keyboard, and within seconds a map blooms on the screen, a blinking red dot in the heart of the Narrows. âSheâs there. An apartment building on Kane Street.â
Bruce doesnât wait. He pulls the cowl up, his movements sharp and mechanical, the Batman taking over because the father doesnât know what to do. âLetâs go. Now.â
The drive to the Narrows takes eight minutes. Bruce breaks every traffic law in the city. Dick is in the passenger seat, phone pressed to his ear, trying to call a number that goes straight to voicemail. In the back, Jason and Tim are silent. Damianâs hands are clenched into fists, his expression unreadable.
They burst into the apartment building like a tactical breach, scattering startled residents, climbing the stairs three at a time. The door to Leoâs apartment is flimsy. Bruce kicks it open without breaking stride.
The smell hits them first: sweat, mildew, the metallic tang of old blood. And then the sight.
You are on the mattress, your body curled into a fetal position, your face slack and pale. The rubber strap is still tight around your arm. The needle is still on the floor. Your eyes are closed.
âNo.â Bruceâs voice is not his own. It is a raw, guttural thing, torn from somewhere deep in his chest. He crosses the room in two strides and drops to his knees beside you, his gloved hands pressing against your neck, searching for a pulse that isnât there.
âCall an ambulance,â Dick says, and his voice is shaking. âTim, call an ambulance, now, nowââ
âItâs too late.â Bruceâs words are a death knell. He gathers your body into his arms, cradling you against the armored chest of the Batsuit, and the sound he makes is not a cry. Itâs a howl.
The others stand frozen in the doorway. Jasonâs face has gone white. Tim is on the phone with emergency services, his voice a monotone of shock. Damian takes one step forward, then stops, his gaze fixed on the track marks on your arms, the evidence of monthsâyearsâof suffering that none of them saw.
Dick sinks to the floor. He doesnât say anything. He just stares at you, his little sister, the one he promised to spend time with, the one he never got around to calling back.
The ambulance comes. The paramedics do what they can, which is nothing. You are declared dead at the scene.
...
They find your diary three days later, wedged between your mattress and the box spring. Alfred discovers it while stripping the bed, and he does not read itânot at first. He carries it to Bruce with the solemnity of a man delivering a coffin.
Bruce reads it alone, in his study, with the door locked.
He reads about your first attempt to join the family, your twelve-year-old hope crumbling under the weight of his rejection. He reads about Damianâs dismissal, Dickâs broken promises, Timâs distracted smiles, Jasonâs indifference. He reads about the first pill you stole, the first needle you let a stranger press into your vein, the first time you overdosed and woke up alone on the bathroom floor. He reads about the locketâyour motherâs locketâand how you sold it for a final hit, a final night, a final silence.
He reads the last entry, written the morning you left:
I used to think that if I just tried harder, theyâd see me. I used to think that love was something you earned. But Iâm so tired. Iâm so tired of watching them be a family without me. Iâm so tired of being a ghost in my own home. I donât know if Iâm running away or if Iâm just finally admitting that I was never really here at all. Either way, I donât think it matters. They wonât notice Iâm gone. They never have.
Bruce closes the diary. He sets it down on his desk with the careful precision of a man handling a bomb. And then he does something he has not done since his parents died in a pool of blood and pearls on a rain-slicked Gotham street: he weeps.
....
The funeral is small. The family stands in a tight cluster around the grave, dressed in black, their faces carved from stone. The Gotham sky is a bruised purple, threatening rain but never delivering. Itâs the kind of day you always hated, the kind that made the manor feel like a mausoleum.
Alfred reads a eulogy that he wrote in the small hours of the morning, his voice steady but his eyes rimmed red. He speaks about your kindness, your quiet resilience, the way you used to follow him around the kitchen as a child, begging to help with the cookies. He does not mention the drugs. He does not mention the neglect. He does not need to.
Bruce stands at the front, his head bowed. He has not spoken in three days. The cowl hangs heavy in his mind, a shield he no longer knows how to take off. He keeps replaying momentsâthe night you asked to be trained, the dinner where he didnât save you a seat, the thousand tiny betrayals of absence and inattention that accumulated like snow until they buried you alive. He wonders if there was a single moment when he could have saved you. He knows there was. He knows there were a hundred moments, a thousand, and he missed every single one.
Dick stands to his left, his arm around Barbara, who is crying silently. He is thinking about the hallway conversation, the easy promise he made and then forgot. We should do something soon. Just the two of us. He never did. He never will.
Jason stares at the coffin with a hollow expression. Heâs thinking about the way you flinched when he shifted away from you at the dinner table, the way he never bothered to ask why. Heâs thinking about all the times he brushed past you in the hallways, too caught up in his own ghosts to notice the living one right in front of him.
Tim is running through the data in his head, the missed signs, the pattern of thefts from the medical bay that heâd dismissed as inventory errors. Heâs the detective. Heâs supposed to notice things. He didnât notice you.
Damian says nothing. His face is a mask, but his hands are trembling. He remembers calling you a civilian. He remembers every time he looked through you like you were furniture. He was a child, he tells himself. He didnât know. But he did know. He just didnât care.
The coffin descends into the ground. The first clod of dirt hits the lid with a sound like a door closing.
And the family that was never really yours stands in the silence, and they grieve, and they will carry this grief for the rest of their lives. It will not bring you back. It will not fix what was broken. It is too late for apologies, too late for love, too late for anything but the slow, corrosive knowledge that they failed you in every way that mattered.
You were seventeen years old. You were dying in a house full of heroes. And now you are dead, and they are still heroes, and the world will never know your name.
The rain never comes. The sky just stays purple, bruised and waiting, and somewhere in the distance, the Bat-Signal cuts through the gloom like a razor.
Life goes on. It always does.
But in Wayne Manor, a bedroom door stays closed, and a chair at the dining table stays empty, and the silence you left behind is louder than any scream.
content batfam & alien! Reader, bruce adopts reader, gn! reader, mantis-like powers (guardians of the galaxy), platonic batfamily x reader, fluff, mild hurt/comfort, sunshine reader, starfire-inspired reader, adoption, homesickness, grief/trauma references (mild), jason's death/trauma implied, bruce's childhood trauma implied, mild mentions of violence/crime
characters bruce wayne, dick grayson, jason todd, tim drake, damian wayne, duke thomas, stephanie brown, cassandra cain, clark kent
masterlist
Wc 4k
bruce finds you after a justice league incident where you crash-land in gotham, immediately touch his arm, gasp, and say, âYou are very sad and have not slept since the age of eight.â
you are painfully sincere, extremely emotionally perceptive, and have no idea how earth customs work.
you tell people their âinternal weatherâ is gloomy. you call lying âverbal camouflage.â you think handshakes are strange because humans âbriefly trap each otherâs fingers to prove they are not enemies.â
bruce wayne
Bruce acts calm about adopting an alien child, but internally, he is absolutely spiralling.
He reads every alien biology file the Justice League has. He makes contingency plans, dietary charts, safe-room protocols, emotional support protocols, and probably a binder titled âAlien Child: Unknown Customs, Known Needs.â
You call him âFather Bruceâ very formally at first. Then âBat-Father.â Then âDark Dad.â
Then, after watching him brood on a rooftop, âMy beloved nocturnal tree of sadness.â
Bruce pretends not to like this.
He loves it.
You can sense his emotions, so his whole âIâm fineâ act collapses immediately.
Bruce: âIâm fine.â
You, touching his sleeve: âYou are experiencing grief, guilt, back pain, and the emotional flavour of wet stone.â
Bruce: â...â
You: âAlso hunger.â
Alfred: âAt last. Someone useful.â
Bruce is extremely protective of you because youâre new to Earth, but youâre also weirdly powerful, so half the time heâs protecting Gotham from your enthusiasm.
You once accidentally levitate during a charity gala because someone complimented your outfit, and your joy âbecame too large for gravity.â
Bruce calmly puts a hand on your shoulder and says, âFeet on the floor.â
You beam. âYes, Father Bruce.â
The press loves you because you answer questions too honestly.
Reporter: âWhatâs Bruce Wayne like as a father?â
You: âHe is very loving but pretends to be furniture.â
Bruce nearly chokes.
dick grayson
Dick immediately decides he is your emotional support human.
You adore him because his emotions are bright, warm, and acrobatic.
You call him âBrother of Flips.â
Dick: âThatâs the nicest thing anyoneâs ever called me.â
He teaches you slang. This is a mistake. You start saying things like, âThat villainâs vibes are rancid,â and âFather Bruce, your coping mechanisms are not slay.â
Dick is so proud.
He also teaches you hugs, high-fives, fist bumps, and dramatic entrances.
You love hugs. You become terrifyingly good at them. Like, emotionally healing bear traps.
Dick notices you can sense when people are hiding sadness, so he gently teaches you boundaries.
âSometimes people arenât ready to be read,â he tells you.
You take this very seriously and start asking, âMay I perceive you?â
Dick cries laughing the first time.
You become one of the only people who can get Dick to admit when heâs overwhelmed.
You simply sit beside him and say, âYour smile is doing too much work today.â
That gets him every time.
jason todd
Jason does not trust you at first.
Not because youâre an alien. Gotham has weirder things on Tuesdays. He doesnât trust you because youâre too sweet, too open, and too good at seeing through him.
You touch his hand once by accident and freeze.
Jason immediately pulls away. âWhat?â
You stare at him with huge, sad eyes. âYou are very angry. But underneath it is a small boy holding a crowbar-shaped shadow.â
The room goes silent.
Jason: âDonât do that.â
You: âI am sorry. I did not mean to open your sorrow cabinet.â
He avoids you for three days.
Then you show up at his apartment with soup because you sensed he was âemotionally crunchy.â
He tells you to leave.
You ask if that is âa real leaveâ or âa wounded animal leave.â
Jason hates that youâre know the difference.
Eventually, he becomes one of your fiercest protectors.
He teaches you swear words and then gets offended when you use them incorrectly.
You: âThis soup is bitchinâ with despair.â
Jason: âClose enough.â
You think Jasonâs helmet is wonderful.
You call him âRed Bucket Warrior.â
Jason: âDo not call me that in public.â
You, immediately at a Justice League meeting: âRed Bucket Warrior has arrived!â
Clark loses it. Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose. Jason considers exile.
Secretly, Jason loves that youâre never scared of him.
You once tell him, âYour anger is loud, but it does not make you monstrous. It is only pain wearing armour.â
Jason leaves the room.
Later, he brings you a book and says, âYou might like this.â
Thatâs Jason for I love you, kid.
tim drake
You are fascinated by Tim. You think he is âsmall, fragile, and powered by forbidden bean water.â
Tim says heâs not fragile. Then he passes out standing up.
You scream because you think he has âentered death mode.â
Tim becomes your Earth Culture Tutor, which is deeply ironic because heâs barely functioning as an Earth citizen himself.
He explains memes to you. You misunderstand them constantly.
Tim: âSo âno thoughts, head emptyâ meansââ
You: âAh. Like when Father Bruce attends a social event.â
Tim: âExactly.â
You and Tim become dangerous together because he has plans and you have zero impulse control.
Tim: âWe need a distraction.â
You: âI will scream in seventeen languages.â
Tim: âThat could work.â
Bruce, over comms: âNo.â
You adore Timâs detective brain. You call him âBrother of Many Tabs.â
Tim pretends to hate it, but he changes your contact name to Alien Gremlin and yours for him is Sleep-Deprived Oracle Bird.
You can sense when Tim is anxious before he says anything. Youâll quietly hand him a weighted blanket, coffee, or sit beside him without touching.
He appreciates that you learn not to pry.
One night, Tim asks, âWhat do I feel like?â
You think carefully and say, âLike a candle pretending to be a lighthouse.â
Tim is silent for a long time.
Then he says, âThatâs actually devastating. Thanks.â
damian wayne
Damian declares you suspicious immediately. âYou are not human.â
You gasp. âYou noticed! You are very clever.â
Damian does not know what to do with sincere praise. It disarms him more effectively than any weapon.
At first, he sees you as an intruder.
You see him as âsmall blade brother.â
Damian: âI am not small.â
You: âYou are emotionally small in a way that bites.â
Damian: âTt.â
You adore his animals. Titus loves you instantly. Alfred the cat tolerates you (which is high praise). Bat-Cow accepts you as kin after you solemnly bow and call her âHonoured Milk Beast.â
Damian pretends not to like you, but he starts teaching you about Earth animals.
You take everything literally.
Damian: âThis is a robin.â
You: âLike Brother Dick? Was he once bird-shaped?â
Damian: âUnfortunately, no.â
You are one of the few people who can make Damian laugh accidentally.
You once ask if murder is considered âbad mannersâ or âillegal seasoning.â
Damian laughs so hard he has to leave the room.
Eventually, Damian becomes quietly possessive of you as a sibling. If anyone insults your alien habits, Damian appears like a tiny storm cloud with a sword.
âThey are adapting. You are merely stupid.â
You cry because that is the nicest thing Damian has ever said to you.
He panics. âDo not leak from your face. I defended you adequately.â
duke thomas
Duke is one of the easiest people for you to be around. His energy feels steady, bright, and grounded.
You call him âSun Brother.â
Duke actually loves it.
He helps you adjust to Gotham because he knows what itâs like to enter the Batfamily later and feel like everyone else already knows the choreography.
He tells you, âYou donât have to become like them to belong here.â
That hits you hard.
You ask, âEven if I am strange?â
Duke smiles. âEspecially then. This family runs on strange.â
You and Duke bond over light. Your alien biology reacts to certain kinds of sunlight or starlight, and Dukeâs powers feel comforting to you.
Sometimes when youâre homesick, he sits with you at sunrise.
No big speech. Just warmth.
You tell him his light feels âlike a door remembering it can open.â
Duke gets quiet. Then he says, âThatâs beautiful.â
You grin. âI am very wise before breakfast.â
stephanie brown
Steph adopts you emotionally within five seconds.
She calls you âspace bestie.â You call her âPurple Joy Warrior.â
She teaches you about waffles, glitter, sarcasm, prank wars, and reality TV.
This is catastrophic. You become addicted to makeover shows and start rating villains by âemotional renovation potential.â
Joker: âWhy so serious?â
You: âBecause your aura is mouldy and your outfit lacks narrative cohesion.â
Steph falls over laughing.
You and Steph prank the entire Manor. Nothing harmful. Mostly glitter, googly eyes, and changing Bruceâs ringtone to dramatic opera.
Bruce: âWho did this?â
You, glowing faintly with pride: âI participated in bonding crime.â
Steph: âSnitches get stitches, bestie.â
You: âI do not want stitches.â
Steph teaches you that sometimes âcrimeâ means âfamily fun with plausible deniability.â
Bruce bans this lesson immediately.
It does not work.
cassandra cain
Cass understands you better than almost anyone.
You read emotions through touch. Cass reads bodies like poetry. The two of you can communicate without words almost immediately.
You sit together often, shoulder to shoulder, watching people move through the Manor.
You call Cass âQuiet Star.â
Cass smiles every time.
She likes that you do not expect her to speak. You like that she understands feelings without needing them explained.
The first time you touch her hand, you feel calm, discipline, grief, love, and a deep, deep loneliness.
You simply squeeze her fingers and say, âYou are not empty. You are full of quiet light.â
Cass hugs you.
Everyone pretends not to cry.
You and Cass become terrifying in combat together. She moves like shadow; you float, dodge, and occasionally knock enemies over by accidentally blasting them with emotional energy.
You once shout, âYour hostile feelings are unpleasant!â before launching a goon into a dumpster.
Cass gives you a thumbs-up.
Thatâs basically a standing ovation from her.
clark kent
Clark is delighted by you.
He gives off such warm, golden energy that you immediately trust him.
You touch his hand once and gasp. âYou are made of kindness and solar explosions.â
Clark blushes.
Bruce: âDonât encourage him.â
Clark becomes your guide to being alien on Earth.
He understands the homesickness, the loneliness, the weirdness of learning human customs while everyone assumes youâre fine because you look mostly okay.
You ask him if he ever feels âtoo not-from-here.â
Clark gets very soft.
âAll the time,â he says. âBut Earth became home anyway.â
You think about that for days.
You also adore his cape.
You ask if it is a âformal blanket of heroism.â
Clark says yes. Bruce says no.
You believe Clark.
You and Clark sometimes float together above the Kent farm and look at the stars. He tells you about Krypton. You tell him about your planet.
Neither of you has to pretend not to miss what you lost.
Clark is also the one who gently explains that Bruce adopting strays is basically his love language.
You ask, âSo he collects wounded beings and gives them bedrooms?â
Clark: âPretty much.â
You: âThat is beautiful and concerning.â
Clark: âThatâs Bruce.â
extra
You struggle with Earth sometimes. The food is strange. The customs are stranger. Gotham is loud and wet and full of fear.
Some nights you sit on the roof of Wayne Manor staring at stars that do not form the constellations you know.
Bruce finds you there.
You tell him, âI am happy here. But I am also sad there is no here that contains everything I miss.â
Bruce sits beside you.
For once, he doesnât try to fix it. He just says, âI know.â
You lean against him.
He lets you.
After a while, you whisper, âYour sadness is quieter tonight.â
Bruce says, âSo is yours.â
That becomes your thing. Sitting together. Saying nothing. Letting the night hold both of you.
Because somehow, impossibly, the alien child with too much heart and the human father with too many ghosts learn how to be family.
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SCREAM
ęŠ OBSESSION: Answering the phone can be a slippery slope when the caller is a killer with an obsession. Be careful who you anger. â˘Part Two â˘Part Three â˘Part Four â˘Part Five â˘Finale
ęŠ TOXIC: AU where Stu and Billy get away with it. Once in college, becoming enthralled with the same person leads to a toxic love triangle none of you are sure you can leave. AFAB reader.
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Yandere Bruce Wayne x Soulmate Reader (Smut warning: Masterbation)
The countdown had never meant much to Bruce Wayne.
As a child, it had simply existed.
A cluster of glowing numbers etched into the skin of his inner wrist, ticking steadily downward with each passing second.
It wasnât unusual. Every person in the world was born with some form of soulmate bond. Some shared pain, some shared dreams, some found words appearing on their skin, written by hands they had never touched. Others heard thoughts not their own, glimpsed flashes of memories, or carried matching marks that mirrored one another across continents.
There were countless variations. Entire scientific fields had been built around studying them.
Bruceâs happened to be a countdown.
Nobody knew exactly why soulmate bonds manifested differently. Decades of research had produced theories but few answers. Genetics and geography didnât determine it. Neither did bloodlines or upbringing. Soulmate bonds simply⌠were.
For Bruce, that meant a simple promise written beneath his skin.
When it reached zero, he would meet the person destined for him.
As a boy, he had imagined it the same way every child did.
His soulmate would appear one day. They would laugh together. Grow old together. Build a life together.
A future.
The sort of future his parents had possessed.
The sort of future that had died alongside them in an alley behind the Monarch Theater.
After that night, the timer became little more than background noise.
The glowing numbers continued their steady descent while Bruce attended funerals, inherited a fortune he never wanted, and watched Gotham consume itself one crime at a time. They ticked downward while Alfred patiently pieced together the shattered remains of a grieving child. They ticked downward while Bruce buried himself in studies, martial arts, criminology, forensics, and every discipline that might one day help him wage war against the city that had taken everything from him.
Years passed.
The timer remained a constant. Unchanging. Always moving. Always counting.
Sometimes he caught himself staring at it during long flights between countries. During sleepless nights spent training until his knuckles split. During lonely evenings in unfamiliar cities where he could almost pretend he was just another wealthy young man wandering the world in search of purpose.
The numbers never stopped.
And despite everything, a small part of him still wondered.
Who were they?
Who was waiting at the end of that countdown?
The thought felt dangerous.
Hope always did.
By the time he returned to Gotham and donned the cowl for the first time, Bruce had long since convinced himself that soulmates were a luxury he could not afford.
Batman had no place for dreams. No room for futures. And he certainly had no room for someone he might one day love.
The city came first.
It always would.
Gotham demanded sacrifice, and Bruce had made his choice years ago.
If his soulmate existed, then they deserved better than what remained of him.
So he stopped thinking about it.
Or at least he tried to.
The timer continued to count.
Days.
Months.
Years.
Seconds.
Its steady descent accompanied him through every chapter of his life.
It was there when Dick Grayson crashed into his world beneath a circus tent, a furious and heartbroken child whose pain mirrored Bruceâs own in ways neither of them fully understood. It remained when Dick became Robin, when he became family, and when Bruce made the selfish decision to love someone enough to let them stay.
The numbers continued falling.
They were there when Jason Todd stole the tires off the Batmobile, and somehow stole a place in Bruceâs heart soon afterward. They ticked downward through every argument, every proud moment, every hard-earned smile.
And theyâd kept counting when Jason died.
Bruce remembered that night with painful clarity.
The rage. The guilt. Helplessness. The suffocating certainty that he had failed.
Even then, amidst grief so profound it threatened to hollow him out completely, the timer continued. As though fate cared little for the tragedies of ordinary men.
Years later came Tim.
Then Damian.
A family assembled from broken pieces and impossible odds. One that Bruce never intended to build and could not imagine living without.
The countdown remained through it all. A quiet presence beneath his skin. Easy to ignore, impossible to forget. Even whilst hidden from sight beneath the bulky steel of his jaeger-lecoultre reverso.
Sometimes, on particularly difficult nights, he found himself fiddling with the watch strap just enough to see the edges of it.
Not because he expected anything or believed he deserved whatever waited at the end, but because the idea lingered. A tiny, stubborn thing buried beneath decades of grief and responsibility.
The possibility that somewhere out there existed a person uniquely his.
Someone who might understand. Who might see every ugly, fractured piece of him and choose to stay.
Someone who might look beyond Batman.
Beyond the billionaire mask. Beyond the failures. And simply see Bruce.
It was a foolish thought. An indulgent one, really. The sort of fantasy he rarely allowed himself to entertain.
Yet it persisted all the same.
Perhaps because he had spent so much of his life alone. Not physically. Never physically. The Manor was full. The Batcave was full. His life overflowed with people he loved.
But loneliness and solitude were not the same thing.
Bruce had learned that lesson long ago.
For most of his life, every meaningful relationship had begun with loss.
Dick had lost his parents. Jason had lost everything. Tim had nearly lost himself trying to save Batman from his own grief. Damian had been raised as a weapon before he was ever allowed to be a child.
Every person Bruce ever loved carried scars.
All because they had stepped into his world.
And if fate truly intended to place another person in his life⌠What then? What kind of future could he possibly offer them?
Late nights spent waiting for him to return home alive? Hospital visits? Funerals? The constant threat of becoming a target simply because they mattered to Bruce Wayne?
No.
His soulmate deserved better.
Deserved normal.
Far away from Gotham and everything it touched.
A sensible conclusion. A logical conclusion. One he repeated to himself countless times.
The problem was that logic had never succeeded in silencing the small traitorous part of him that still watched the countdown.
Nobody truly knew him. Not completely. Not the way a soulmate supposedly could. The way destiny promised.
So the timer remained tucked away in the back of his mind.
A breath caught before it could fully form. A dream he never allowed himself to finish imagining.
And still it counted.
Drawing closer with every passing day to a future Bruce Wayne had stopped believing would ever matter.
Until the day it finally reached zero.
The countdown on your wrist had never inspired the same fascination it seemed to in everyone else.
As a child, you remembered classmates comparing bruises during recess, eagerly conspiring about how old theyâd be when they finally met the person fate had chosen for them. Entire conversations revolved around it. Predictions. Theories. Daydreams.
You had participated, of course.
Mostly because everyone else did.
But even then, you never quite understood the obsession.
Perhaps it was because your bond felt so distant.
Unlike those who shared pain with their soulmates or dreamed through another personâs eyes, your countdown offered nothing tangible. No connection. No glimpses into another life. No indication of who your soulmate might be beyond the vague promise that one day, eventually, you would meet them.
It was difficult to become attached to someone who felt entirely theoretical.
The numbers counted downward. Life continued.
School became university. University became work. Friendships came and went. Apartments changed. Jobs changed. Entire years disappeared before you even noticed them passing.
The timer remained, steadily ticking away in the background.
Yet strangely unimportant.
Not because you disliked the idea of soulmates. Quite the opposite.
You supposed it was comforting to think there was someone out there destined specifically for you. Someone whose life would one day intersect with your own in a way no one elseâs ever could.
But you had never been particularly fond of building your future around things you couldnât control.
If your soulmate appeared tomorrow, wonderful. If they appeared twenty years from now, that was fine too.
Either way, life would continue.
You had plans. Goals. Responsibilities. A future that existed independently of whoever happened to be waiting at the end of that countdown.
Which was probably why you never developed the habit of checking it.
Weeks sometimes passed without you looking at the numbers.
Months, if life became particularly busy.
Your friends found that strange.
Most people tracked their bonds religiously.
You couldnât remember the last time you had cared enough to calculate how much time remained.
Not that it mattered. Fate would arrive whether you watched the clock or not.
The thought made you smile slightly as you adjusted the sleeve of your outfit.
The invitation resting on your kitchen counter immediately drew your attention once more. Embossed gold lettering gleamed beneath the overhead light.
You had considered declining several times already.
Charity galas were not your thing.
Neither were crowds of wealthy socialites, politicians, celebrities, and Gothamâs elite pretending to enjoy one anotherâs company while discussing donations over champagne.
Unfortunately, declining wasnât really an option. Your company had spent the past month preparing for the event.
Attendance was expected. Mandatory, according to your supervisor.
The memory earned a quiet sigh.
Tomorrow evening.
Wayne Foundation Annual Renewal Gala.
You stared at the familiar name printed across the card. Wayne.
One of the most recognisable names in the country. Perhaps even the world.
Bruce Wayneâs name seemed to exist everywhere in Gotham. On buildings, hospitals, scholarships, charities.
A billionaire philanthropist.
A notorious playboy.
A man whose face appeared so frequently in magazines that most of Gotham could probably identify him from memory.
You had never met him. Never expected to. Tomorrow would likely be no different.
You would attend the gala, smile politely, make small talk, and stay for the required amount of time.
Then return home and forget the entire evening ever happened.
The gala was exactly as exhausting as you had expected.
By the end of the first hour, your cheeks already ached from smiling.
The grand ballroom of Wayne Tower glittered beneath enormous crystal chandeliers, every surface polished to a shine so perfect it almost felt artificial. Waiters drifted through the crowd carrying silver trays loaded with champagne flutes and carefully arranged hors dâoeuvres. Laughter rose and fell throughout the room, blending into the soft music drifting from somewhere near the stage.
The entire event felt less like a fundraiser and more like a carefully choreographed performance.
Not that anyone seemed to mind.
Around you, Gothamâs elite mingled effortlessly. Politicians exchanged handshakes. Business executives traded stories. Reporters circulated like sharks scenting blood in the water.
You had spent most of the evening attached to a cluster of coworkers, nodding politely through conversations that ranged from quarterly profits to real estate investments and subjects you suspected nobody genuinely cared about.
You smiled. Shook hands. Made pleasant conversation. Repeated the process.
By the time you escaped toward the refreshment table, you were fairly certain your social battery had died an hour ago.
âNot enjoying yourself?â
You glanced toward the voice. One of your coworkers smirked knowingly.
You laughed. âI think Iâve had enough networking to last the rest of my life.â
âCareful. Thatâs practically blasphemy at events like this.â
âThen pretend I said something about synergy and market growth.â
The resulting laugh eased some of the tension in your shoulders.
Around you, the crowd continued to swell as more guests arrived. And inevitably, conversation shifted toward the man hosting the event.
Bruce Wayne.
The name surfaced repeatedly throughout the evening. Sometimes with admiration. Sometimes amusement. Occasionally frustration.
Everyone seemed to have a story.
A charitable donation. An embarrassing tabloid headline. A disastrous date. A surprise act of generosity.
The more stories you heard, the more curious you became. You had never met Bruce Wayne before.
Nobody in your social circles had.
People like him existed in an entirely different world.
The sort of world most people only glimpsed through magazine covers and news broadcasts.
Yet somehow, despite his wealth, despite his status, despite his reputation for arriving late and disappearing early, people genuinely seemed to like him.
It was strange. Most billionaires inspired resentment. Bruce Wayne inspired affection.
You found yourself wondering what he was actually like. The real version. Not the carefully polished public image. Not the headlines. Just the man.
Your gaze drifted toward the entrance more than once throughout the evening.
The subtle change spread through the crowd like a ripple through water. Conversations paused. Heads turned. Attention redirected.
You didnât need anyone to tell you why.
Bruce Wayne had arrived.
The realisation swept through the ballroom almost instantly.
You found yourself looking too. Just like everyone else.
Oh. For a moment, you understood the fascination.
Photos had never quite captured him properly. Perhaps because photographs couldnât capture presence.
Bruce moved through the crowd with effortless confidence, greeting donors and board members with easy smiles. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Impossibly handsome in a way that felt almost unfair.
The sort of face people built careers around. One that belonged on magazine covers. Yet none of that was what held your attention.
It was the way he carried himself. Comfortable. Natural. As though the attention of hundreds of people barely registered.
You felt oddly nervous.
Which was ridiculous. You werenât even planning on speaking to him.
You simply found yourself watching from across the room.
Then your hand drifted unconsciously toward your wrist. Your thumb brushed the skin hidden beneath your sleeve. The countdown.
A habit more than anything.
You werenât even sure why you checked.
Maybe because events like this always sparked conversations about soulmates. Or because seeing Gothamâs most famous bachelor had stirred old childhood fantasies youâd long since outgrown.
Whatever the reason, your fingers lingered there.
Tracing the familiar shape beneath the fabric. Feeling the steady pulse of your own heartbeat.
You smiled faintly to yourself. Foolish.
Then Bruce Wayne turned, and looked directly at you.
Everything stopped.
Your breath caught. Heart stumbled. Because beneath your fingertips.. The countdown had reached its end. 00:00:00:00.
The familiar sensation disappeared so suddenly that for a terrifying second you thought you had imagined it.
Your eyes widened.
Across the ballroom, Bruce Wayne was still looking in your direction.
No. Not your direction.
At you.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
The countdown had stopped.
Your fingers remained pressed against your wrist, your pulse hammering so violently that you could barely feel the skin beneath them.
And for one impossible, terrifying second, the rest of the gala disappeared.
The music faded. The conversations blurred. Everything narrowed to those blue eyes. To the man standing twenty feet away. To the realization crashing through your chest with enough force to steal the air from your lungs.
Him.
Every second. Every minute. Every year. All of it had led here.
You couldnât stop smiling.
A laugh escaped before you could catch it.
You felt ridiculous.
You felt ecstatic.
You felt fourteen years old again, lying awake at night and wondering who waited at the end of your countdown.
Your soulmate.
Bruce Wayne was your soulmate.
The thought was absurd.
Wonderful.
Terrifying.
And before you could think better of it, your feet were already carrying you forward.
You barely remembered crossing the ballroom. Only that one moment he was across the room.
The next you were standing in front of him. Close enough to speak. Close enough to see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes. Close enough to finally meet the person fate had spent your entire life leading you toward.
âMr Wayne-â You stopped yourself. God, that sounded stupid.
You laughed nervously. âSorry. Bruce. I just-â
The words tangled together. There were too many of them. How exactly were you supposed to tell someone theyâd just become the most important person in your life?
How did anyone start a conversation like this?
âHi. We belong together.â
âHi. Fate says youâre mine.â
âHi. Iâve waited my entire life to meet you.â
The absurdity almost made you laugh again. Instead, you found yourself smiling. A genuine one. The kind that slipped free before you could stop it.
âI think-â
Bruce looked at you. His eyes flickering over your face, your clothes, the event badge hanging around your neck.
Recognition never appeared.
Nothing softened.
Nothing changed.
It was the look people gave strangers who had interrupted them in public. Nothing more.
His gaze shifted immediately beyond your shoulder. Toward someone else.
Someone important.
Someone he actually wanted to speak to.
âIâm sorry.â The words were automatic. Polite. The sort of apology people gave when they werenât sorry at all.
âI donât have time right now.â
For a second you simply stared.
Still smiling.
Still trying to catch up.
âOh.â
Bruce nodded once. Already moving.
Already done.
âIf youâll excuse me.â And then he brushed past you.
There was no cruelty. No emotion whatsoever. You hadnât mattered enough for that.
The crowd swallowed him almost immediately.
One moment he was there and the next he was gone. Laughing with donors. Shaking hands. Moving through the room as though nothing had happened.
As though you had never existed.
As though the most important moment of your life had been a forgettable inconvenience in his evening.
You remained where you were. Frozen. The smile slowly slipping from your face.
Around you, the gala continued.
A waiter passed carrying champagne. Someone laughed nearby. Music drifted through the ballroom. Normal. Everything was painfully, horribly normal.
Your stomach twisted.
The excitement that had filled your chest moments ago curdled into something ugly. Something embarrassing.
Heat crept up your neck.
God. How stupid. How unbelievably fucking stupid.
Your hand rose to your wrist again. To the skin where the countdown had sat for your entire life.
Where it no longer moved.
You stared at it, waiting for the joy to return. For the excitement. For the certainty that this meant something.
Instead you felt sick. Because for one awful moment, youâd believed it.
You had looked at Bruce Wayne and allowed yourself to hope. Allowed yourself to think fate had chosen you.
That maybe all those stories people told were true.
Instead youâd received the same polite dismissal he would have given any stranger who got in his way.
Your throat tightened. Fuck, you felt like you were about to cry.
The hurt wasnât coming from Bruce. Not really.
It was coming from yourself.
From the realisation that some small part of you had still believed after all these years, after all your indifference, all your insistence that fate didnât matter, a part of you had still secretly hoped there would be magic in this moment. Something special. Worth waiting for.
And now that part of you was dying. Right there in the middle of a crowded ballroom.
The countdown had reached zero.
And for the first time in your life, you wished it hadnât.
Two and a half months later.
The night had offered nothing unusual.
The Batcave settled into its familiar rhythm as everyone returned. Dick had claimed a corner of Tim's workstation and was ignoring increasingly pointed requests to move. Jason, having appeared midway through patrol without warning or invitation, was drinking Alfred's coffee. Damian sat nearby with a stack of reports, making notes in the margins.
Bruce stood near the medical station, removing the Batsuit piece by piece. The cowl came first, then the cape. He set the gauntlets aside and reached for the fastening at his wrist.
"Father."
Bruce glanced up.
Damian was looking at him with a faint frown. âYou never informed us that your countdown had ended.â
Heâd barely reacted. âWhat are you talking about?â
Damian looked mildly annoyed, like Bruce had forgotten something obvious.
âYour soulmate.â
Dick straightened immediately. Tim turned away from his monitor. Jason gave a short laugh.
"Wait. Seriously? You found them?â
Their Dad frowned. âWhat?â
Damian pointed.
Bruce followed the gesture to the inside of his wrist. The timer had stopped.
For a second, he simply stared.
Beside him, Dick grinned. âSo thatâs why youâve been weirdly private.â
Jason scoffed. âPlease. Like heâd tell us.â
âI assumed you were waiting until the relationship became serious,â Damian said matter-of-factly.
Tim nodded. âI figured you already had a file on them.â
A few years ago, Bruce might have responded. Might have denied it. Instead, he continued staring at his wrist.
00:00:00:00
The timer wasnât moving.
It should have been.
For as long as he could remember, it had always been moving. Always counting. Now it sat completely still.
A strange feeling settled low in his stomach.
âWhen did this happen?â The words escaped before he could stop them.
The cave went silent.
Bruce looked up. Every member of his family was staring at him.
Dickâs smile vanished first.
Tim slowly lowered his tablet.
Jason blinked.
Damian narrowed his eyes.
A long moment passed. Then, âwhat do you mean, when did it happen?â
Bruceâs jaw tightened. His gaze dropped back to the timer. âWhen did it reach zero?â
Nobody answered immediately. Because the question itself was wrong.
Dick stared at him blankly. ââŚYou donât know?â
Tim sat up, picking at the cuticles on his hands. âWhen was the last time you checked it?â
Bruce opened his mouth. The answer should have come easily.
Instead, nothing.
Weeks? Months? Years?
A knot formed in his stomach. He couldnât remember. At some point, the countdown had become part of the scenery. Like a scar. Like an old piece of furniture. Something so familiar that he no longer saw it.
Damian rose from his chair. "How is that possible?"
There wasnât accusation in the question. Only bewilderment.
Bruce understood it.
If anyone else had presented him with a mystery this significant and admitted they had ignored it for years, he would have found it equally incomprehensible.
A soulmate was information.
Information mattered.
Yet somehow he had allowed this particular fact to drift past unnoticed.
Dick dragged a hand through his hair. "Okay. So if it's been at zero for a while..." He trailed off.
Nobody finished the thought. Bruce didn't need them to.
The timer had stopped.
Which meant they had already met.
Somewhere, buried beneath years of galas, investigations, crime scenes, interviews, witnesses, victims, allies, and strangers, there was a person connected to him in a way he had never bothered to investigate.
The thought irritated him immediately. Annoyed by his own oversight.
Bruce Wayne missed very little. Batman missed even less.
And yet he had apparently overlooked something that had been written on his own skin.
His gaze returned to the frozen digits.
Who?
The question settled into place with uncomfortable ease.
Who had it been?
A civilian? A witness? Someone from a charity board? A doctor? A journalist? A stranger he had passed on the street and forgotten by the next morning?
His mind was already moving through possibilities, assembling timelines, searching for patterns.
The investigation had begun before he consciously decided to start it.
And long after the others had gone upstairs, long after the cave had emptied, heâd remained alone before the Batcomputer.
His wrist rested against the desk, the countdown sat motionless beneath the glow of the monitor.
For decades, he had convinced himself the timer didnât matter. That soulmates were irrelevant. That whatever waited at the end of the countdown belonged to a future he would never allow himself to have.
Now, for the first time in his life, the future wasnât theoretical. It was real. It had been real for years. And somehow, impossibly, heâd missed it.
He stared at the timer, jaw clenched. Then opened a new search window and began looking.
Bruce had always believed that every mystery possessed an answer.
The answer might be buried beneath layers of deception. It might require months of investigation, thousands of hours of work, or sacrifices most people would never willingly make. But it existed.
Every crime scene told a story.
Every missing person left traces.
Every lie fractured under enough pressure.
Answers existed. The challenge was finding them.
Which was why the frozen numbers on the inside of his wrist irritated him more than they should have.
A lifetime reduced to eight zeroes.
For decades it had been counting.
Now it wasnât.
Entire criminal organisations had collapsed because of details other people overlooked. Murders had been solved because Bruce noticed a footprint half a millimeter deeper than it should have been. He built contingency plans for gods.
And yet somehow he had allowed this to happen.
Somewhere, at some point, his soulmate had entered his life. And he had failed to notice.
The oversight bothered him in a way he struggled to articulate. Not because he had spent years longing for his soulmate. He hadnât. Or because he suddenly believed fate held some profound importance. He didnât.
But because he had missed something.
Something connected to him. That should have been obvious.
His gaze drifted back toward the timer. A person.
For most of his life, the soulmate waiting at the end of the countdown had existed as an abstraction. A hypothetical future. A distant possibility.
Now they existed beyond the realm of his mind on particularly needy nights.
Living somewhere in Gotham. Or perhaps outside it. Going to work. Paying bills. Existing. Breathing.
Perhaps completely unaware that Bruce Wayne had finally noticed them.
The idea settled heavily in his chest.
Because that wasnât entirely true, was it?
If the countdown had stopped, then they already knew.
The moment one timer reached zero, so did the other. Meaning somewhere out there was a person who had already experienced that moment. A person who had looked at their wrist and realised they had found the person fate intended for them.
Bruceâs fingers stilled against the keyboard. A strange feeling moved through him. Difficult to define.
Because unlike him, that person would have noticed.
Normal people would have probably watched their countdowns. Would have known exactly how much time remained. Anticipated the day it would finally happen.
He imagined someone checking their wrist. Watching the final seconds disappear. Feeling the weight of a lifetimeâs anticipation finally come to an end. And then what?
Had they looked around for him?
Had they searched the crowd?
Had they recognised him immediately?
The questions arrived uninvited. More troublingly, they refused to leave.
Bruce leaned back in his chair. The cave hummed softly around him. Banks of monitors cast pale light across the stone walls.
Above him, thousands of tons of earth separated the cave from the sleeping Manor. None of it held his attention.
For perhaps the first time since Damian had pointed out the frozen timer, Bruce found himself thinking not about the investigation. But about the person.
Who were they? What kind of life did they live? What had they thought when they realised? Had they been happy? Afraid? Disappointed?
The last possibility lingered.
Bruce frowned. Disappointed. The word shouldnât have bothered him. Yet it did.
Because he knew exactly what the public thought of Bruce Wayne. The billionaire. The celebrity. The perpetual tabloid fixture.
To some people, finding out Bruce was their soulmate would be exciting. To others it would be a nightmare.
A lifetime of reporters. Paparazzi. Public scrutiny. Danger. Every enemy Batman had ever made.
Bruce knew better than anyone that proximity to him carried consequences.
The evidence sat framed across the Manor.
The thought darkened his expression. Whoever they were, they deserved better than that.
And then Bruce paused. His eyes slowly narrowed. Because that thought implied something else. Something he hadnât consciously acknowledged until now.
It didn't matter.
That lie was what kept you going after the gala. It wasnât grief. Grief implied loss, implied that you had possessed something to begin with.
You hadn't. Bruce Wayne had never been yours.
And yet, something inside of you had still died that night.
You still went to work. Still paid your bills. Still answered texts. Still laughed when friends made jokes.
From the outside, nothing had changed.
Inside, however, there was a deep hole where something important used to live.
Hope, perhaps.
Or whatever foolish thing had survived all those years beneath your indifference.
You had spent your entire life insisting that the countdown didn't matter. That fate didn't matter. That your soulmate was merely a possibility waiting somewhere in the distance and not the center of your universe.
Then the timer reached zero.
And you discovered exactly how much you had been lying to yourself.
Because if it truly hadn't mattered, then seeing Bruce Wayne across that ballroom wouldn't have hurt the way it did.
If it truly hadn't mattered, then his face wouldn't still appear in your nightmares. The sight of his name wouldn't make your stomach twist like someone had reached into your chest and grabbed hold of your ribs.
Yet it did. Every time, without fail.
Three days after the gala, you stopped in front of a coffee shop on your way to work.
A newspaper sat in the display window.
BRUCE WAYNE ANNOUNCES THE EXPANSION OF FOUNDATION PROGRAMMES.
The headline wasn't even particularly large, just another article among dozens. A perfectly ordinary thing.
Yet the moment your eyes landed on it, nausea rolled through you so violently that you nearly turned aroun and walked home.
You stood frozen on the sidewalk, just staring blankly. You hated yourself for pausing.
Because there he was.
Photographed beneath bright camera flashes. Smiling. Beautiful.
Shit, he was beautiful.
It would have been easier if he wasn't. Easier if fate had chosen some ordinary man. Someone forgettable, whose face wouldn't follow you everywhere.
But Bruce looked like something sculpted rather than born.
Like whoever had created him had started with every impossible standard of beauty and decided they still weren't enough.
Even frozen in grainy newsprint, he seemed unreal.
Dark hair falling perfectly despite the cameras. Strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, those impossible blue eyes. The kind of watercolour people wrote poetry about. The kind that belonged to summer skies and oceans and things too beautiful to touch.
You remembered looking into those eyes across the ballroom. Remembered your heart stopping. Thinking, absurdly, that of course fate had chosen someone beautiful.
Soulmates were supposed to be extraordinary. And Bruce Wayne was sure as hell extraordinary.
Broad shoulders beneath perfectly tailored suits. Strong hands. Easy smiles. A laugh that seemed capable of convincing entire rooms to laugh with him. Not merely attractive. Handsome. Beautiful in the way ancient gods were described. The sort of beauty that made people stare before they realised they were staring.
He carried himself with the effortless confidence of someone who had spent his entire life being admired. Someone who had never needed to wonder if people found him desirable because the answer had always been obvious.
And somehow fate had looked at him, then looked at you, and declared that you belonged together.
You left the coffee shop without buying anything.
After that, you started noticing him everywhere.
It felt cruel. As though the universe had developed a sense of humor specifically to torment you.
Wayne Enterprises logos decorated entire buildings. Wayne Foundation advertisements appeared on buses. Charity campaigns featured his photograph. Magazine covers displayed his face near checkout counters. Televisions in waiting rooms played interviews. Articles appeared online. Photographs surfaced endlessly. Everywhere you looked, Bruce Wayne existed.
You couldn't escape him. Couldn't erase him.
The worst part was that everyone else saw those images and reacted normally.
Nobody understood what you saw. Nobody knew what it felt like.
Your coworkers saw Gotham's favourite billionaire. Your friends saw a celebrity. Strangers saw a philanthropist. You saw your soulmate.
You saw the man whose timer had stopped when yours did. The man who had looked directly at you, then dismissed you.
Sometimes you found yourself staring at the pics longer than you meant to.
Your eyes refused to look away. Despite everything, some awful traitorous primal part of you still recognise d him. Still instinctually saw him as yours.
The slight curve of his smile. The shadows beneath his eyes. The way his expensive suits felt designed to emphasise the width of his shoulders. The way his presence somehow dominated photographs even when surrounded by dozens of other people.
You hated that you noticed. Hated that your heart still reacted. That attraction remained long after hope had died.
Because Bruce Wayne was beautiful. Painfully, unfairly, devastatingly beautiful.
The kind that made the stinging rejection feel worse.
If he had been cruel, you could have hated him. If he had mocked you, anger could have replaced the hurt. But he hadn't done either.
Heâd made living unbearable.
Bruce hadn't rejected you because he disliked you. He hadn't rejected you because you were unworthy. He hadn't even rejected you at all.
To reject someone required acknowledgment.
Bruce Wayne simply hadn't cared enough to notice. You had been forgettable. An interruption. A stranger in a crowded room.
It was fucking humiliating.
To everyone else, your countdown had finally reached zero. A happy occasion. A miracle. A dream-come-true.
People congratulated you. Asked questions. Smiled knowingly.
You learned to lie.
"Oh, I haven't met them yet." "Maybe we crossed paths without realizing." "I'm not really focused on it."
Easy answers. No one ever suspected the truth.
Didnât know that every mention of soulmates felt like someone digging a knife into an already sore bruise.
That fate itself had started feeling so incredibly cruel.
No one knew that your countdown had ended beside crystal chandeliers and champagne glasses and the most beautiful man you'd ever seen.
Hw could you explain to anyone that he had walked away?
How could you describe the experience of finding the person the universe created specifically for you, only to discover that your existence wasnât even important enough to remember?
There weren't words for that.
Every morning you woke up, and every day Bruce Wayne's name appeared somewhere.
On buildings. Headlines. TVscreens. Charity banners. A constant reminder. A monument to something you desperately wished you could forget.
You never admitted how much it affected you. Not even to yourself.
Instead you learned to look away. To change channels. To scroll past articles. To cross the street rather than walk beneath buildings bearing his name.
Small, pathetic things.
Yet necessary.
Because every glimpse felt like reopening a wound that refused to heal.
And somewhere deep down, beneath the humiliation and hurt and anger and disappointment, existed a truth you hated even more.
You still thought he was so disgustingly beautiful. Remembered the moment he looked at you. Could still feel the countdown reaching zero.
And no matter how hard you tried, some part of you still mourned the future that had died before it ever had the chance to begin.
Finding you should have taken longer.
Bruce expected months. Years, maybe. The list of possibilities was absurd.
A countdown bond narrowed the search considerably compared to shared pain or dreams, but it was still thousands of people. Tens of thousands, depending on the timeframe. Every person he'd spoken to. Every person he'd stood beside. Every handshake. Every conversation. Every fleeting interaction that had seemed insignificant at the time.
Ordinarily, that would have made the investigation difficult.
Instead, it became embarrassingly simple.
Because unlike other soul bonds, a countdown created a very specific moment. A beginning.
Bruce only needed to determine when his timer had stopped. Then identify everyone he'd interacted with during that period. The rest was elimination.
He discovered quickly that he had a significant advantage.
Over the past five months, Bruce had only personally interacted with nine people who possessed countdown bonds.
Nine.
One was a long-time business partner whose timer still had three years remaining.
Two were married.
Another had met their soulmate publicly several weeks prior.
The remaining names disappeared one by one beneath scrutiny.
Until only one remained.
You.
The file sat open on the Batcomputer. Bruce stared at it for a long time.
Name.
Age.
Employment history.
Education.
Address.
Nothing remarkable. Nothing that should have caused his pulse to stumble the way it did. Yet it did.
Because beside your photograph sat a timestamp. Wayne Foundation Annual Renewal Gala.
Two and a half months ago.
Bruce went still. The gala.
He couldnât remember you at all.
He remembered the event. The schedule. The donor meetings. The practiced speeches. The endless boring conversations. The uncomfortable sensation that accompanied the recollection made his stomach tighten.
Because if the countdown had ended that night, then you had been there. Somewhere inside that ballroom.
His soulmate had stood within arm's reach, and he hadn't known.
Bruce leaned back slowly.
The photograph remained illuminated on the monitor.
You looked ordinary. Not in a bad way. Just real. A person.
His person.
The thought appeared uninvited.
His gaze lingered longer than necessary. Memorising details.
The shape of your smile in the employee photograph attached to the company website. The slight tilt of your head. The way your eyes seemed brighter in candid images than posed ones.
Ridiculous, meaningless observations.
Yet he continued looking.
Eventually, Bruce opened the gala guest registry. Cross-referenced attendance records.
Security footage. Photographs. Anything.
Everything.
He found you four hours later.
Camera seventeen. Ballroom east entrance. Timestamped twelve minutes before the countdown likely reached zero.
The footage was silent.
You stood speaking with coworkers. Laughing at something. So⌠bright.
Unaware that he even existed beyond headlines and magazine covers.
He watched the clip so many times that domething uncomfortable settled beneath his ribs.
He knew what was about to happen.
Your timer was about to reach zero. His timer was about to reach zero.
You found him.
Youâd crossed the room.
And he walked away.
Hell, he hadnât even properly looked at you.
Bruce stared at the paused frame.
For the first time since beginning the investigation, a deep nausea rolled through him.
He remembered that interaction vaguely now.
A stranger approaching. A voice trying to get his attention. A laugh. An interruption between meetings.
Nothing important or memorable. Nothing-
His jaw clenenched.
No.
Not nothing.
You.
It had been you.
His soulmate.
The person fate had spent decades leading toward him.
The person whose existence he had secretly imagined during sleepless nights and lonely flights and moments of weakness he never admitted to anyone.
Bruce rose from his chair.
The cave remained silent around him. Cold. Empty without his boys.
The monitor focused on your face. He couldnât pull his eyes away.
For two and a half months, you had known.
You'd known exactly who he was.
And if Bruce understood people half as well as he believed he did, then you had probably interpreted that encounter exactly the way anyone would.
You thought he'd rejected you.
Bruce found himself imagining it despite having no desire to.
You walking across that ballroom. Excited. Hopeful. Nervous. Only to be brushed aside.
His stomach twisted.
You had spent your entire life moving toward him. And he'd made you feel unwanted.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. No. Unacceptable.
You belonged to him.
Bruce had spent most of his life convincing himself he could survive without a soulmate.
Now he found himself staring at your photograph at three in the morning, unable to look away. Unable to stop imagining your reaction when you learned the truth. To stop thinking about the hurt he had unknowingly caused. And most concerning of all, unable to stop wanting.
Not merely to meet you.
To keep you close.
Safe.
Where nothing could take you away before he had the chance to make this right.
You were halfway through answering emails when your manager appeared beside your desk.
"Got a minute?"
You looked up. "Sure."
"We've had a request come through."
That wasn't unusual. The company received requests constantly.
You nodded for them to continue.
"They specifically asked for you."
That was unusual.
Your brow furrowed. "Me?"
"Apparently." Your manager sounded just as confused.
You accepted the folder they handed over, then immediately wished you hadn't. The logo printed across the front was impossible to miss.
Wayne Foundation.
Your stomach dropped.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
Your manager misread your expression immediately. "Good news, actually."
Good. Right.
Youâd almost forgotten that normal people didn't feel like they were on the verge of breaking down every time they saw that name.
You forced a smile. "What's the project?"
"A community outreach initiative. They've been reviewing applicants from several companies."
It was like the name seemed determined to follow you everywhere.
"Apparently someone on their end requested you specifically."
The confusion in your manager's voice mirrored your own.
"Have you worked with them before?"
"No." The answer came too quickly. You cleared your throat. "Not personally."
Your manager nodded. "Well, whoever reviewed your profile liked something."
Maybe. Or maybe fate simply wasn't finished laughing at you yet.
You waited until they left before opening the folder.
The proposal itself looked normal. Professional. Routine. Yet a strange feeling settled low in your stomach.
Because your name appeared throughout the documentation.
You stared at the pages for several seconds then shook your head. Paranoia. Nothing more.
Bruce Wayne didn't know who you were. The Wayne Foundation employed thousands of people. This was coincidence. It had to be.
Yet later that evening, as you prepared to leave work, you found yourself looking at the folder again.
Reading your name.
And wondering why the uneasy feeling refused to disappear.
ââââ
The project itself was harmless. Boring, even.
Several meetings. A handful of planning sessions. Far too many emails. Just.. normal stuff.
And yet you found yourself running into the same problem repeatedly.
People always seemed to know who you were.
Not coworkers or clients, it would probably hurt your feelings if they didnât know your name.
But Wayne employees.
The first time it happened, you ignored it. The second time, you thought about it for a bit before shaking it off. The third time, it became impossible not to think about.
A woman stood beside the refreshments table wearing a Wayne Foundation identification badge, smiling like she knew you as she called out your name.
You glanced up from your coffee, offering a polite smile. "Yeah?"
Her expression brightened immediately. "Oh good."
Good?
You waited.
Instead, she simply smiled. "Sorry. I've heard nice things."
Before you could ask from whom, someone called her name from across the room.
The conversation ended there. Leaving you standing alone holding a paper cup and feeling vaguely unsettled.
She'd heard nice things.
From who?
About what?
Then youâd received an email. Then another. And another.
Nothing inappropriate or personal. Just opportunities. Projects. Invitations. Networking events. Requests.
All connected to Wayne Enterprises or one of its countless subsidiaries.
The attention made no sense. You weren't exceptionally qualified. You weren't particularly influential. There were hundreds of people with better resumes. Thousands.
Yet somehow your name kept appearing.
Each coincidence felt harmless on its own.
Together, they felt deliberate.
There was only one explanation your brain kept returning to, and it was ridiculous.
Bruce Wayne didn't know who you were.
Bruce Wayne had never known who you were.
The memory still hurt. Less than before, but enough.
You shoved the thought away and focused on work. Unfortunately, work wasn't cooperating.
"There's a gala next month."
You nearly choked on your drink.
Your coworker blinked. "...You okay?"
"No."
You set the glass down.
"Sorry. What?"
"A gala."
Absolutely not.
The immediate response rose so quickly that you nearly said it aloud.
Your coworker laughed.
"That's about the reaction I expected."
"No."
"That's not even what I asked."
"No anyway."
The laugh grew louder. "It's mandatory."
Of course it was. You dropped your forehead onto the table.
Somewhere above you, your coworker continued speaking.
Words blurred together.
You caught Wayne Foundation. Charity initiative. Attendance expected.
Absolutely wonderful.
You closed your eyes. The universe hated you. That was the only reasonable explanation.
Because apparently surviving one Wayne gala hadn't been enough.
Now fate had scheduled a sequel.
That should have been funny. Instead, dread settled heavily in your chest.
Bruce Wayne probably wouldn't even be there.
And if he was?
He wouldn't recognise you. Wouldn't remember you. You would simply become another face in another crowd. Again.
The familiar ache returned. Duller now. Older, but still present.
You hated that even after everything, some pathetic part of you still cared.
Wondering about what could have happened if things had gone differently.
If he had looked at you. If he'd smiled. If he'd given fate even a single chance.
The thought followed you all the way home. Followed you into the shower. Followed you into bed.
And somewhere across Gotham, entirely unaware of the damage he was causing, Bruce Wayne was doing exactly the same thing.
Thinking about you.
Constantly.
Obsessively.
Unable to stop.
While you lay awake staring at the ceiling, Bruce sat alone in his study surrounded by photographs, reports, schedules, and information he absolutely should not possess.
The file on his desk had grown significantly over the past two weeks.
The silence of the study was suffocating, broken only by the rhythmic, heavy thrum of Bruceâs own heartbeat. It was a sound he usually controlled with meditative precision, but tonight, his pulse was erratic, driven by a hunger that felt less like desire and more like a fever.
His fingers, scarred and calloused from years of a life lived in the shadows, trembled slightly as they hovered over the glossy surface of the most recebt photograph.
In the light of the single desk lamp, your laughter looked almost tactile. He wanted to reach through the paper, to catch the warmth of your skin, to feel the vibration of that laugh against his own chest.
He didn't just want to see you. He wanted to own the air you breathed.
A low, jagged exhale escaped his throat as he reached for the fastening of his trousers. The silk of his shirt felt abrasive against his skin. He wasn't a man of whims, he was a man of purpose.
As he freed himself, his gaze never left your eyes in the photo.
He began to move, his hand wrapping around his length with a grip almost a little too tight, a little too desperate. He wasn't looking for a gentle release, he was looking for a way to drown out the ache of your absence. He hadnât even met you properly yet.
Every slide of his palm was a silent prayer, a demand whispered into the empty room.
You, he thought, his eyes darkening until the blue was almost black. Only you.
He closed his eyes for a second, and the darkness behind his eyelids was filled with the phantom sensation of you. He imagined your hands replacing his own.
He imagined the way you would look at him if you knew. If you knew that he had mapped out your entire existence, that he knew the number of alarms you needed to wake up, the drinks you preferred, the way your eyes crinkled when you were truly happy.
A groan, deep and primal, tore from his throat as he increased the pace. The friction was intense, bordering on a delicious sort of pain. He pictured you in this very room, stripped of your defences, looking at him with that same devastating smile. He imagined pinning you to this very desk, marking you so thoroughly that the world would know you belonged to the Batman, to Bruce, to him.
"Mine," he rasped, the word a vow and a command. "You have to be mine."
He was spiraling, losing his composure to the sheer, unadulterated need to possess the person in the photograph.
As the tension coiled in his gut, he leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the edge of the desk, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. He wasn't just chasing a climax, he was chasing the ghost of you. And as he finally broke, his body shuddering with a violent, lonely release, the only thing he could think about was how much longer he could stand being a stranger to the only person outside of his family who truly mattered.
He stared at the splotches of his own mess, his eyes settling back on your frozen, laughing face.
His patience was running out. And soon, he wouldn't just be looking at pictures. He would be looking at you.
The morning of the gala arrived faster than expected.
You spent most of it trying not to think about where you were going later. Work helped.
Emails needed answering. Reports needed reviewing. Deadlines continued existing regardless of personal problems.
By six o'clock, however, distractions became harder to find.
The Foundation building stood illuminated against Gotham's skyline when your taxi pulled up outside.
For a moment you remained seated. Watching people enter through the front doors. Watching security direct arrivals. Watching expensive cars arrive one after another.
The driver glanced at you through the mirror.
"You getting out?"
You sighed. "Unfortunately."
The lobby was already busy.
Employees moved through the space carrying folders, tablets, and the sort of purposeful expressions people adopted when responsible for coordinating large events.
You followed the signs toward registration.
The man at the desk smiled immediately.
"Good evening."
"Hi."
You offered your name.
Something flickered across his expression. "There you are." The words slipped out so naturally that he didn't seem to realise he'd said them.
Your brow furrowed. "What?"
His smile widened. "Nothing. Sorry."
He handed over your badge.
"Conference hall B. Someone will show you where to go."
The interaction lingered in your mind as you crossed the lobby.
There wasn't anything strange about it.
You reached the elevators just as a man wearing a Foundation lanyard stepped out.
His eyes landed on your badge. Muttering your name under his breath.
You stopped. "Yeah?"
His expression brightened. "Right this way."
You stared at him.
The conference hall was directly ahead. Visible from where you stood. So was the sign. So was every other person entering without assistance. Apparently, you were the only one receiving a personal escort. The thought made you irrationally suspicious.
"Thanks."
The man spent the walk making polite conversation.
The conference hall occupied most of the floor.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked downtown Gotham. Round tables filled the space beneath hanging lights. Staff moved between displays making final adjustments while attendees gradually filtered inside.
You recognise d a few people from previous meetings and wandered over.
Conversation came easily enough.
Work topics. Office gossip. Complaints about deadlines. The familiar rhythm settled some of your nerves.
Eventually, someone handed you a drink. Someone else told a story about the mate documentary they were watching the night before. Laughter spread around the table.
For the first time all evening, you found yourself relaxing.
Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.
You could survive a few hours, shake a few hands, then disappear before anything unpleasant happened.
A movement near the entrance drew your attention.
The change happened gradually. A few heads turned. Then a few more.
You knew who it was before you looked.
For a brief moment, you considered keeping your eyes fixed firmly on the table.
But curiosity won.
It always did.
Bruce Wayne stood near the entrance speaking with several board members.
The sight of him harder than expected.
Four months had passed, yet he remained exactly as you remembered.
Tall. Confident. Effortlessly composed. The kind of person who never seemed out of place regardless of where he happened to be standing.
You watched him laugh at something one of the board members said. Watched him rest a hand briefly against someone's shoulder. Watched him move through the crowd with practiced ease.
The memory arrived before you could stop it.
Crystal chandeliers. Champagne glasses. The countdown reaching zero beneath your fingertips.
Your gaze dropped immediately. Heat crawled uncomfortably up the back of your neck.
This had been a mistake.
All you could think about was how little had changed for him.
Somewhere between the gala and now, Bruce Wayne had probably attended dozens of events just like this one.
Met hundreds of people.
Forgotten hundreds more.
Meanwhile, you still couldn't walk into a Foundation building without remembering the worst conversation of your life.
The thought was embarrassing enough to make you take a long drink.
Across the room, entirely unaware that you had already looked away, Bruce Wayne finally spotted you.
ââââ
You forced yourself to look anywhere else.
The city beyond the windows. The drink in your hand. The conversation happening beside you. Anything except him.
It felt childish.
Embarrassing, honestly.
You were an adult. Bruce Wayne wasn't some ex you were desperately trying to avoid at a party. He was a stranger.
A stranger who happened to be your soulmate.
Someone who happened to have accidentally shattered every stupid childhood fantasy you'd ever had about fate.
"So then the guy spends hours explaining how the patterns along his wrist connected-"
"What?"
Your coworker laughed. "The documentary."
"Oh." You blinked.
Right. The documentary.
Apparently the conversation had continued without you.
You offered what you hoped looked like a convincing smile.
No one seemed to notice.
People drifted between groups. More guests arrived. Staff circulated carrying trays of drinks and appetizers.
The event settled into a comfortable rhythm.
Exactly the sort of evening you'd expected.
Which was probably why it took you a moment to notice something was wrong.
The conversation around your table had started stuttering. Small pauses appearing where they hadn't before. People glancing toward something behind you.
You ignored it initially.
Then someone stopped speaking halfway through a sentence.
"...Oh."
You frowned. "What?"
Nobody answered immediately. Slowly, unease crept up your spine.
You knew that feeling.
The awful certainty that something embarrassing was happening and you simply hadn't caught up yet.
Your grip tightened around the glass.
Please don't be me.
Please don't somehow be me.
Carefully, you turned. And nearly dropped your drink.
Bruce Wayne was walking toward your table.
The room seemed to tilt.
No. That wasn't right. There were other people here. Important people. Board members. Executives. Foundation staff.
Bruce Wayne had absolutely no reason to be approaching you.
Yet each step brought him closer, your pulse hammered painfully. Maybe he wasn't.. Maybe-
Then Bruce smiled. Carefully. Almost hesitant.
"Hi."
ââââ
Your pulse thundered traitorously.
After spotting him near the entrance, you had gone out of your way to avoid him. And apparently, he'd made no effort to stop you.
He talked briefly with the accountant at your table before passing.
You felt stupid all over again.
You knew better than to expect anything.
No shit he wasnât coming over to talk to you.
By the time the evening finally began winding down, your social battery had been thoroughly exhausted. Guests filtered toward the exits in small groups while staff quietly began dismantling displays around the edges of the room.
You offered your goodbyes, accepted a few last-minute business cards you would probably never use, and escaped.
Or tried to.
Halfway down the hallway toward the elevators, you changed direction.
Bathroom first.
Then home.
The corridor was blissfully empty compared to the crowded ballroom behind you. Soft lighting reflected off polished marble floors. The distant murmur of conversation faded with every step.
You were almost done. Almost free.
"Leaving already?"
You stopped so abruptly your feet nearly slipped against the floor.
The voice came from behind you. Low and warm.
Dangerously familiar.
Your stomach dropped.
Slowly, you turned.
Bruce Wayne stood at the opposite end of the hallway. Alone.
For a second, neither of you moved.
Gone was the effortless social charm he'd worn all evening. Without the crowd surrounding him, he seemed larger somehow. Broader. More imposing.
His eyes were fixed entirely on you. Watching. Like he'd finally found something he'd been searching for.
A strange tension settled between your shoulders.
"Mr. Wayne."
His expression tightened immediately.
"Bruce," he corrected softly.
The familiarity felt inappropriate.
You swallowed. "Bruce."
Something in his gaze darkened at the sound of his name on your lips.
Satisfaction.
The hallway suddenly felt much smaller.
You forced a polite smile. "I didn't realise you were still here."
"I was looking for someone."
Your heart stumbled. The answer came too quickly. Too directly. And for one awful second, hope tried to rear its ugly head again.
You crushed it immediately. "You found them then?"
The words were meant as a joke.
Bruce didn't laugh. Instead, his gaze softened.
"Yes."
The answer landed with uncomfortable weight.
The air felt thick.
You shifted your weight, suddenly aware of every inch separating you. Or rather, how little distance there actually was.
"You wanted something?" you asked carefully.
Bruce stared at you.
It was unnerving. Most people glanced away eventually. They blinked. Looked around. Got distracted.
Bruce seemed incapable of doing any of those things.
His eyes moved slowly across your face as if committing every detail to memory.
Four months ago, he couldn't spare you two seconds. Now he was looking at you like he couldn't bear to look away. It didn't make sense.
Nothing about this made sense.
"I owe you an apology." The words caught you completely off guard.
You blinked. "What?"
"The first gala."
Your breath stopped. Every muscle in your body locked.
Bruce's jaw tightened. "You approached me."
The memory flashed through your mind with brutal clarity.
The countdown.
The humiliation.
"I remember." It was a lie.
You knew it was a lie. You could hear it. He hadn't remembered. You'd seen his face that night. Seen the complete absence of recognition.
But he looked genuinely upset now.
"I handled it badly."
A laugh escaped before you could stop it. Small. Bitter.
Bruce's eyes narrowed.
"You don't need to apologize."
"Yes." His answer was immediate. "I do."
Something sharp flickered across his expression. Self-directed anger. Regret. Maybe even guilt.
You didn't understand it at all.
"You didn't know me." Your voice came out quieter than intended. The admission hurt. Even now.
"You didn't owe me anything."
Bruce went completely still. The silence that followed felt wrong. Dangerous.
His gaze dropped briefly to your wrist before returning to your face. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
Then he took a step forward.
Yet your pulse reacted like he'd crossed the entire hallway.
"I should have known you." The words came out rough. Almost painful.
Something shifted beneath the surface of his composure. You could feel it. Like cracks forming beneath ice.
And for the first time all evening, genuine unease curled through your stomach.
Because suddenly it felt less like Bruce Wayne had happened to stop you in a hallway. And more like Bruce Wayne had been waiting there. Waiting specifically for you. Waiting for the moment you would be alone. When there would be no audience. No escape.
A shiver ran down your spine.
Bruce's eyes immediately tracked the movement.
His expression softened. Like even that tiny movement meant something precious to him.
And somehow that frightened you far more than if he'd looked angry.
"Can I walk you to your car?" he asked quietly.
The question sounded harmless. Polite.
But there was something underneath it. Something hungry. Something that made it feel less like a request and more like a man trying very, very hard not to demand.
When you hesitated, Bruce's gaze darkened harshly.
You got the overwhelming impression that Bruce Wayne was not accustomed to hearing no.
And that whatever was looking at you from behind those impossibly blue eyes had already decided how this interaction would end.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. You looked at him, searching for the playboy you had seen on the news, but he wasn't there. In his place stood a man whose very presence felt like a gravitational pull, heavy and inescapable.
Your heart was a frantic thing in your chest, caught between the instinct to run and the soulmate bond that hummed under your skin, screaming that this was where you were supposed to be.
"I... I can manage, Bruce," you said, trying to inject a note of independence into your voice. You didn't want to be another person he was simply 'handling' or 'managing.' You wanted to be seen as an equal, not a charity project or a fleeting interest.
"Itâs a long walk to the valet, and you have guests to attend to."
You made a move to step around him, but you didn't get far.
Before you could even clear his shadow, Bruceâs hand shot out. He didn't grab you roughly, but his fingers curled around your upper arm with a terrifying, singular purpose. It wasn't a casual touch, it was a tether. His palm was hot, even through the fabric of your clothes, and the sheer strength in his grip made your breath hitch.
"The guests are gone," he said. His voice had lost its social lilt. It was now a low, gravelly command that seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of your bones.
"They don't matter. Nothing in that room matters but this."
He stepped into your space, forcing you to tilt your head to maintain eye contact. The hallway felt like it was shrinking, the walls closing in until the only thing left in the universe was the scent of him, like the coming of a storm.
"You think you can just walk away?" he murmured, his eyes searching yours with a desperation that bordered on the frantic.
You frowned, your confusion overriding your unease. "After everything? Bruce, we haven't even spoken for more than five minutes.â
You let out a quiet broken laugh. âYou don't even know me."
A dark, humorless sound escaped his throat, one that sounded more like a growl. "That is where you are wrong."
His grip tightened, making it clear he wasn't letting go.
His gaze dropped to your lips, then back to your eyes, his pupils blown wide until the blue was just a thin, electric ring.
"I know the way you tilt your head when you're thinking," he whispered, leaning so his breath fanned across your cheek.
"I know the exact shade your eyes turn when you're startled. I know the schedule of your life better than you do. I have spent every waking moment since that night trying to find a way to apologise for a sin I didn't even know I had committed."
Your heart hammered against your ribs.
How? How could he know these things? The sheer impossibility of his words should have made you laugh, or call for security, but the soulmate bond was reacting to his intensity, pulling you toward him like a moth to a flame.
It was a terrifying, beautiful pull.
A part of you wanted to demand answers, to push him away for his madness, but another part, the part that had been lonely and aching for months, wanted to collapse into him and let him devour you.
"You... you're obsessed," you breathed, the words slipping out before you could think them through.
Bruce didn't flinch. He didn't deny it. Instead, he leaned closer, his forehead touching yours, his expression one of raw, unadulterated devotion.
"I am," he confessed, the admission sounding like a vow.
"I am completely, utterly undone by you. And if you walk out of this hallway tonight without letting me make it right, I think the world might actually end."
He looked at you then, not as a billionaire looking at a guest, but as a man looking at his entire world, his eyes burning with a terrifying, beautiful hunger.
"Please," he pleaded, the word a jagged edge of vulnerability.
"Don't make me watch you walk away again. Let me take you home. Let me show you that you were never just a face in a crowd. You are the only thing that has ever been real."
He wasn't asking anymore. He was begging, and as he stood there, looming against you with a possessiveness that felt like a honeyed trap, you realised with a jolt of both fear and exhilaration that you didn't want to say no.
In the months that followed that night at the gala, the "coincidences" had stopped being coincidences and had become a reality.
You no longer had to wonder why a certain restaurant always had your favourite table reserved, or why your career seemed to accelerate with a sudden, inexplicable momentum.
You knew. You knew that every promotion, every unexpected gift, and every "chance" encounter was a thread in the web Bruce had woven around you.
And the most frightening part was how easily you had let yourself be caught.
The initial shock of his obsession, the way he looked at you as if you were a miracle he was afraid might vanish if he blinked hard enough, had slowly melted into a deep, intoxicating security. You were no longer a face in the crowd. You were the center of his universe.
You sat on the edge of the massive, silk draped bed in the master suite of Wayne Manor, watching the moonlight spill across the floor.
The room was silent, save for the distant, rhythmic sound of the Gotham rain against the glass.
A door clicked shut. Heavy, purposeful footsteps crossed the rug.
You didn't need to turn around to know it was him. You could feel him. The soulmate bond, once a source of lonely longing, was now a constant, thrumming connection that acted like a second pulse.
Bruce stepped into the light. He had shed the armor of his tuxedo, wearing only a dark shirt left partially unbuttoned.
He looked less like a billionaire and more like the man you had met in the hallway.
He approached you, his presence filling the room until there was no air left that didn't belong to him.
He sank onto the bed behind you, his large, warm hands sliding around your waist to pull you back against his chest. He buried his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling deeply. A low, contented sound vibrating against your skin.
"You're thinking again," he murmured, his voice a deep, velvet caress. "I can feel it."
"Just thinking about how much has changed," you whispered, leaning your head back against his shoulder.
You reached up, lacing your fingers with his. "How much you've changed."
Bruce tightened his hold, his arms circling you like a fortress. "I haven't changed. I've simply finally found the right reason to exist."
He turned you in his arms, forcing you to face him. His eyes were dark, swirling with that familiar, beautiful madness. Devotion so absolute it felt like a physical weight.
"Do you still feel like you're in a trap?"
You looked up at him, searching the face of the man who had studied your every breath, the man who had turned his entire life into a pursuit of you.
You thought of the fear you had felt, the unease at his intensity, and the way he had practically begged for a chance to belong to you.
Then, you thought of the way he held you now as if you were the most precious thing in existence, as if your very survival depended on his touch.
A slow, knowing smile touched your lips. You reached up, cupping his jaw, your thumb tracing the line of his lip.
"No," you admitted softly, the truth settling comfortably in your chest. "It feels like home."
Bruceâs expression broke, a flash of pure, unadulterated relief crossing his features before it was replaced by a hunger that made your breath hitch.
He leaned in, his lips hovering just a fraction from yours.
"Good," he rasped, his gaze dropping to your mouth. "Because there is no going back. You are mine. And I am never, ever letting you go again."
As he pulled you into a kiss that tasted of desperation and promise, you realised that the universe hadn't hated you after all.
It had simply been waiting for the moment that you finally stopped running and let the storm claim you.
Please comment and reblog! :)
11K+ Words, 69K+ Characters, 1K+ Sentences, 900+ Paragraphs, 42 Minute average reading time, 1 hour and 6 minute average speaking time.
Batfam x Serial Killer Neglected!Reader (Hannibal-inspired)
The reader is Bruce Wayne's biological child, raised solely by their single mother outside of Gotham. Intelligent, observant, and deeply interested in art and beauty, the reader grows up isolated from the Wayne family. After their mother's sudden death in an unfortunate accident, they are taken into Bruce's custody and brought to Wayne Manor.
However, settling into the Batfamily proves difficult. Whether due to misunderstandings, emotional distance, suspicion, or simply the family's own unresolved issues, the reader gradually becomes neglected within the household. Despite being physically present, they remain unseen and disconnected from the people who should have become their family.
Beneath their composed exterior, the reader possesses a warped perception of beauty and humanity. As Gotham exposes both the city's ugliness and its hidden elegance, the reader begins expressing themselves through increasingly disturbing means, treating their actions as carefully crafted works of art rather than acts of cruelty.
The story explores themes of isolation, identity, obsession, and the desire to be understood. While the reader's descent and relationships with the Batfamily shape the narrative, the exact nature of their development is left open. Ultimately, the reader views themself as their final masterpiece, ensuring that the last chapter of their story is one authored entirely by their own hand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As usual please tag me if anyone decided to make a story out of this please
PAIRINGS: yandere!batfam x billy loomis!reader | WC: 7.4k
SUMMARY: being the product of bruce's one night stand with a stripper, a small boy had the misfortune of being born in crime alley. with an absent father, absent mother and a criminal environment, how would you think said child would turn out?
WARNINGS: SEMI-UNRELIABLE NARRATOR! the story is from the readers pov, so things will be described how he perceives them to be even if said character, or he himself, didnât want to come across like that or actually didnât feel that way. angst, emotional abuse, lowk only semi-canon, murder, mentions of prostitution, physical abuse, neglect, bullying, mentions of death, blood and violence.
A/N: pt2 is here yayayayayay. i think i've decided for the batfam to lowk turn yandere around like chapter 3 or 4 after something.. well, specific happens. this may be a bit more boring than ch1 and its also shorter but were building up progress..! writing may be a bit messy its 4am and i am SOO tired. also, should i do a masterlist? my block is kinda messy lmfao
pt 1 <- pt2 (here) -> pt 3
the black water of the gotham docks looks like the shit you expected it to - bubbling oil in the dark. the stench, just like the water, is thick and absolutely foul and smells like dead fish and diesel. the midnight wind is freezing, a biting thing thatâs gnawing straight through your hoodie like teeth, but youâre scarcely feeling it.
you stand there, shoulder pressed flush against the rusted metal of a shipping container, eyes tracking the husk of the old warehouse across the concrete lot.
this is the night. you and louis have been planning this quite a while now.
the guy isnât a mob boss. neither is he some hardened street-rat or a corrupt cop with a snub-nose tucked into his belt.
heâs a goddamned teacher.
an english teacher from the academy who made the fatal mistake of failing louis on his final essay, keeping him in the doghouse with his parents and almost holding him back from graduation.
it was a stupid, petty thing, really. the man thought - actually not even thought, was - doing his job, he was helping a rich kid learn a lesson about consequences for not studying properly.
he had no idea he was writing his own death sentence.
louis whined and begged and pleaded with you to get back at the guy - said he didn't appreciate feeling so stupid, nor getting in trouble with his parents.
it gave you the opportunity to try out that new technique you've seen in that one slasher flick - and the teacher was an eyesore, anyways.
also to maybe teach him a lesson for the dumb assumptions, fucking assumptions, that he could survive gotham at night.
you know naught why ire twists your gut, uncalled and unheralded and oddly righteous. perhaps, it is just the idea of it. how could one be so dull-wittedly oblivious, in not only failing a student as vengeful and grudge-holding as louis - but then to also wander into the dark, pitted and peeled? without finesse, without care.
this educatorâs fingers had dug through red ink and scored so clumsily and acted stupidly in turn when deciding to head out at night - however justified he might have supposed himself.
would you not be ginger? would you not have a fucking plan?
(admittedly, you also know nothing of the man's personal life, other than the fact he canât tell his student's genuine work from an online script and is also, seriously, seriously fucking gullible to think midnight emails about inventory checks are legitimate. still, you don't need to know him well, to know it is a terrible thing, to have let him think he could survive gotham, especially at night. one only has to see it to believe).
louis had handled the lure. a fake email sent from the principalâs account, claiming there was an urgent inventory check on the new rowing equipment down at the docks warehouse before the school summer programs started.
it was simple and easy - the man was so damn gullible, so eager to please the administration, that he didn't even question it - even though it was so damn late at night.
what made it even easier is that you grew up âround the docks - not these ones - they're heavenly and saintly compared to the ones in crime alley, but docks nonetheless.
anyways - as said, most people, you find, are fucking idiots.
âŚ
"bro, iâm for real gonna freeze to death out here," louis whispers from right behind your shoulder. heâs bouncing on his heels, shifting his weight around like his skin doesn't fit him right, a half-eaten bag of sour worms in his hand.
smack. smack.
he isn't even looking at the empty lot. heâs staring at you, a wild, little grin twitching on his face.
you don't look back at him, instead you reach into your front pocket and pull out the signal-scrambler you built down in the cave. or rather, with the things you stole, or as you'd like to put it, permanently borrowed, from the cave.
itâs a neat little plastic box, totally unmarked, with one tiny red light blinking on the side.
"chill," you mutter, your voice flat. "i got it. just keep your fucking mouth shut for like two seconds."
"bet," louis giggles, stuffing three green worms into his mouth at once. "youâre the boss, big man. i'm just the muscle tonight."
you let out a soft huff through your nose, as if. you're only the brain because louis only has his brawn. if you wanted to, you could kill the guy just as damn easily alone.
muscle memory kicks gear before your mind does, and you pull the plastic ghostface mask out from under your arm. the slick, chemical smell of the factory vinyl hits your nose - sharp in your sinuses.
the teacherâs reliable, beat-up sedan pulls into the lot right on time, the headlights cutting through the fog. the engine cuts out, and the man steps out into the damp air, adjusting his glasses, a heavy clipboard clutched to his chest like itâs gonna save him.
at least he has some survival instincts, the fucker is scared.
your fingers twitch inside your pockets. that sickeningly empty, numb feeling settles deep into your ribs, and it feels absolutely great. itâs the only time you ever feel totally awake. you glance at louis, giving him a nod.
right now, the teacher looks like a dove.
frail, fretting feathers - bound to shed - bound to hit the ground, all furled and crumpled-up like a candy wrapper, crunched underfoot.
poor teacher always so windborne over his books, wreathed in his boring little lectures, - absolutely dull to the eye, uninteresting to speak with too. up-close, however, in the dim flicker of the pier-light rather than the eclipsing glare of his classroom - you can see the clip in his wings. it draws you.
"you ready?" you broach, eyes dark and deep as soil six-feet beneath.
"alright," you whisper, pulling the mask down over your face until the plastic nose touches your skin. "letâs go."
âŚ
the warehouse doors are rusty, groaning loud as hell when the teacher shoves them open. he's equipped himself with a little yellow plastic flashlight, the yellow beam bouncing nervously off rows of empty wooden crates. his shoes make this loud, echoey squeak against the dusty concrete.
he looks so goddamned small in the dark.
you slide through the side door behind, your sneakers making absolutely zero noise. the mask is tight against your skin, making your breaths sound loud and hot inside your own ears.
"hello?" the guy calls out, his voice shaking just a fraction. "is anyone here? i got the email about the container."
fucking idiot.
you track him from the shadow of a high shelving unit, your fingers curling around the cold handle of the hunting knife.
suddenly, a loud clatter echoes from the far corner. louis deliberately kicked an empty oil drum, his laughter bubbling out a second later - loud, high-pitched, and completely unhinged.
the teacher snaps his head toward the noise, his flashlight beam whipping around wildly. "whoâs there? look, i'm just here for the audit! if this is a prank-"
"oh, it's not a prank, mister!" louis shouts back from the dark, his modulated voice bouncing off the tin walls. "but it is an audition! and you're doing great!"
the man turns to run, his breath hitching in pure panic, but louis steps right out into the beam of the flashlight. heâs wearing his own ghostface mask, tilted slightly to the side, and heâs holding a heavy iron tire iron. before the teacher can even scream, louis swings. the metal cracks hard against the manâs shoulder, sending him spinning to the concrete floor with a wet yell. the flashlight tumbles away, rolling across the floor and casting long, crazy shadows up the walls.
"boss man, heâs all yours!" louis yells, stepping back and gesturing theatrically toward the floor like a game show host.
the teacher is scrambling on his hands and knees, sobbing, coughing through the dust. "please - please! i have a family-"
you walk right into the dim pool of light, your shadow looming massive over him. you drop your weight, pinning your knee straight into the small of his back. the man lets out a sharp, wet grunt, his face shoved against the dirty concrete. you grab a handful of his hair, yanking his head back to expose his throat, and press the flat of the blade right under his chin.
the man is thrashing like a fish out of water, his fingers clawing desperately at your black hoodie, his breath hitching in primitive terror. you can feel the wild, frantic pulse jumping inside his throat.
"wait, wait, let me say it!" louis whispers loudly, leaning down right next to you, his plastic mask almost touching your shoulder.
you don't say a word, instead holding the guy tight, letting louis have his fun.
louis leans over the teacherâs face, his voice dropping into a creepy, mocking whisper. "shh. don't ruin the ending."
the blade goes in clean. right through the throat, just like you practiced on the meat slabs down in the basement. itâs over in seconds. the wet, choking gasp fades into the quiet sound of the tide outside, and the body in your arms goes completely slack, turning into nothing but heavy, useless meat.
louis steps back, pulling the mask up to his forehead. a flick of his lighter cuts through the dark as he stares down at the shape on the floor. he takes a long breath, then walks over and delivers a harsh, solid kick right into the man's side.
"thatâs what you get," louis spits, a thin, crooked grin stretching his face as he looks down. "trying to fail me on my essay. gettinâ me in trouble n' making my parents believe i'm dumb. hope the failing grade was worth it."
you stand up, your face hidden behind the mask. you reach into your pocket and check the signal-scrambler on the nearby camera junction. the loop you set up is holding; the security feeds won't show a thing.
most people go through life thinking the rules will protect them - they have no idea how damn fragile the world actually is.
"we need to move," you say, your voice low and steady. "clear the scene and get out before the patrol rounds the corner."
"you got it, boss man," louis says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. "let's finish this up and get out of this dump, i'm starving.â
the getaway is clean. by the time the morning fog rolls off the gotham harbor, the teacherâs body is exactly where you and louis wanted it to be, and the digital tracks are completely wiped.
you slept like a baby.
but the peace doesn't last. youâre barely awake when alfred knocks on your door, delivering a rare, formal message: mr. wayne requests your presence at the breakfast table this morning.
bruce never requests your presence for breakfast.
the guy usually handles meals like a ghost, grabbing a coffee on his way out to a board meeting or hiding in the cave until noon. and even when he's having breakfast down with damian - he lets you pick and choose whether you want to join or not. having him actively call you down means something is already brewing.
you pull on a oversized grey sweatshirt, slide your hands into the front pocket, and take your time walking down the grand staircase.
the moment you step into the massive oak-paneled dining room, the air feels like concrete on your throat - itâs suffocating.
the whole circus is already there, huddled around the table like a bunch of nervous birds, whole lot of little robins and well, bats.
you also notice barbara isnât present. well, figures. you took notice how, even during the very damn rare occasion that the family decides to get together, she usually isnât here for breakfast.
bruce is sitting at the head, his face a hard, unreadable stone mask as he stares into a mug of black coffee. tim is frantically tapping away at his tablet, his brow furrowed so deep it looks permanent. damian is glaring at his eggs, while dick leans against the sideboard, looking like he hasn't slept in a week.
well, look at that. nobody is talking the second you come, how sweet!
your boots click against the hardwood, and every single head snaps toward you. itâs the same old routine. six pairs of eyes locking onto you, full of that deep, instinctive discomfort they always have when youâre in the room.
stephanie shifts her weight in her chair, instantly looking down at her napkin, while tim tries to pretend heâs just looking past your shoulder at the window. they look at you like youâre some kind of freak who wandered into their clean, perfect little house.
you have eaten your fair share of filthy stares in your time. hell, itâs practically your breakfast. you get âem everywhere: in classrooms, in back alleys behind school, right before you strike at someone; though every now and then, if luckâs feeling real twisted, you get the kind that linger too long, slick with sleaze. the kind of stares people reserve for boys who know too much and care too little - boys like you.
like right now.
they look pathetic. itâs not like you want to be here either.
you slide into an empty chair across from tim, pulling the bowl of sugary cereal toward you with a slow, scraping sound that makes damianâs jaw twitch.
"morning," you drawl, your voice slightly husky from the early morning.
bruce shifts his gaze to you, his dark eyes heavy and bloodshot. "you're up early," he says, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. he tries to make it sound like a normal father-son greeting, but heâs too awkward, too tightly wound to pull it off.
if he knew you, he would know you usually get up early.
"you called," you say, pouring the milk with a steady hand. "so here i am. what's the occasion?"
dick lets out a dry, breathy laugh from the sideboard, shaking his head. "no occasion, kid. we just thought itâd be nice to have the whole family together for once since we're all staying here."
fucking liars. they aren't looking at you because they want a family moment - theyâre looking at you because of whatever is buzzing on the small kitchen monitor
you look up from your bowl, your eyes drifting to the screen. a local news anchor is droning on, her voice professional but tense. â...a gruesome discovery early this morning at the gotham international docks. gcpd has cordoned off pier four after the body of a local academy instructor was found staged on a shipping crate. authorities are calling it a targeted, highly theatrical execution...â
"it's the fourth one this season," tim mutters, his finger tracing a line on his tablet screen as he speaks to bruce, completely ignoring you but keeping his voice just loud enough for the table to hear. "the lacerations are identical to the others⌠but each victim is different.â he pauses for a second. âi can't figure out a motive.â
"it is the work of an unhinged animal," damian sneers, his fingers curling tightly around his fork. "a degenerate playing a pathetic game in our streets."
you take a slow bite of your cereal, the crunch incredibly loud in the quiet room. you look right across the table at tim.
"maybe he just didn't like the guy's grading system," you say, a lazy smile touching your lips as you lean back in your chair. "gotham's a stressful city. people snap over the dumbest shit."
tim narrows his eyes, sighing as he lays his tablet down. cassandra is silently staring at you - same shit as always.
stephanie on the other hand shifts uncomfortably. âit's still too cruel.â she says quietly. âhe was just trying to help.. if he hadnât gone out there, he'd be alive.â
you take another slow bite of your cereal.
chew. swallow.
the softer you are, the deeper you get cut. the saying comes into mind suddenly and you understand the sentiment, sure, but in your experience, it is always the gentlest people that are railroaded for ruin. jason was that kind of gentle. your mom was too, beneath all her hot-and-cold screaming. youâre loathe to admit it out loud, not now, not when the memory of jasonâs cold hand on the batcave table is still so fresh.
"s'ppose that's why they say kindness kills,â you reply to stephanie. you shrug a shoulder, looking over at damianâs stiff, arrogant posture. âfaster than wickedness."
bruceâs mug freezes halfway to his mouth. dick stops breathing for a split second by the sideboard. thereâs that knack again; that flurried beat of wings between your ears that tells you, too, that everyone sitting at this expensive table is trying to be some version of kind. the kind of kind who drinks in all the worldâs toils despite their glass having spilled over, long ago. concave under all that pressure. flooded down the wrong pipe. they think they can save a city that seems its made home of hell itself.
"it's not a random animal, damian," tim says, his tone dropping into that low, frustrated detective register. he picks his tablet up again and taps the screen of his tablet with a blunt click of his fingernail, his eyes finally darting up to look right at you. "the victim was gerald hayes. he wasn't just some logistics guy. he was an AP english instructor. he teaches at gotham academy."
the air in the room thins out instantly.
damianâs chewing slows down, tim keeps his eyes locked on yours, searching for a flinch, a twitch, anything. "your school," tim adds
you let out a dry, breathy laugh, leaning forward until your chest presses against the edge of the wood. you're reminded suddenly, overwhelmingly so, of tipping a battered jaw forth down in crime alley - your mom's chapped, blueblack lips whispering those twisted, loving apologies. a wordless prayer, that you shall coax and you shall answer.
"never had him," you say, your face completely deadpan as you track a drop of condensation sliding down tim's water glass. "heard he was a hard grader, though. guess someone really hated his essays."
dick finally takes a step toward the table, his fingers curling tightly around his coffee mug. "speaking of last night," he says, his voice trying way too hard to sound light, like heâs trying to tape up a poster to cover a hole in the wall. "where were you anyway? your car wasn't in the garage when i got back around midnight."
"cinema," you say without a single preamble, the lie slipping out easily before the heat of his stare can swallow itself into nothingness. "louis and i went to see that new slasher flick at the plaza. movie was trash, honestly. way too predictable."
"right," dick mutters, his eyes narrowing just a fraction as he tracks the way your fingers trace the rim of your bowl. "louis vance. you guys are practically inseparable."
"he's fun to be around," you say, pushing the chair back with a loud, ugly scrape against the floorboards. you stand up, pulling the sleeves of your grey sweatshirt down over your knuckles.
"i can stay," dick offers suddenly, the words slipping out rough and awkward before you can reach the door. he looks at bruce, then back at you, that old, toxic older-brother routine flaring up because he thinks you're just a lonely, bitter kid. "if you need help with that calculus project later. i'm not on rotation until late."
you don't give him the satisfaction of an immediate answer.
liar.
it's not the first time he's offered it - one time you accepted and he looked baffled out of his mind. he ended up ditching you as you were waiting, only coming the next day to give an half-assed apology about something important coming up.
dickieâs trying so hard to be the savior. kneeling on the clotted drain-tiles of his own guilt.
"don't bother," you tell him, a small smile touching your lips as you step into the hallway. "i've got it handled."
it's raining.
alfredâs hands are steady on the steering wheel, his posture perfectly straight, eyes tracking the wet streets through the rearview mirror.
he doesn't ask how you're doing and he doesn't bring up the teacher.
he simply drives like always - formal and distant just the way you like it. a neat routine.
the car rolls to a smooth stop right in front of the grand stone archway of gotham academy. "have a pleasant day at school, young master," alfred says, his voice crisp and even.
"thanks," you mutter, throwing the strap of your bag over your shoulder and sliding out into the damp morning air.
louis is already loitering by the stone pillars, shifting his weight around like there are bugs in his skin - itching him from the inside. heâs got that frantic, midday look about him - completely untouched by the grey sky, teeth flashing as he shares a lighter with the rest of the group.
chloe and maya, the two girls who usually trail after your group - aka you and louis - the reason you assume to be your parentsâ clout, are huddled under a green canopy, their shoulders bunched up high against their ears. chloeâs holding her breath between words, lips pale and looking almost white where sheâs bitten the skin loose. maya looks worse. sheâs staring at the gravel like itâs about to cave in under her loafers.
"took you long enough, boss man," louis barks, throwing a heavy arm across your neck without asking. his cuff smells like tobacco and cold river air. you track the hem of his denim jacket - the exact same blue one he had on when the teacherâs clipboard went clattering into the dark.
âyou guys are acting like someone dropped a bomb âround bere," you mutter, dropping your chin into the collar of your sweatshirt. your teeth click together.
"they practically did," chloe says, dropping her voice so low it barely carries over the wind. sheâs leaning in, her hazel eyes rimmed red from the damp chill.
"mr. hayes, you know.. that greasy old guy. they found him staged like some sick display down on pier four. the news said his throat was completely split."
"itâs disgusting," maya whispers, her thumbnail digging into her palm. "who even does that? he was literally just an english teacher."
"it's insane," chloe adds in, her shoulders tensing up as she shivers against the wind. "who the fuck even goes down to the docks so late at night? apparently the police think itâs the principal so theyâre all over the main office right now, the vice principal is stepping in."
glassy eyed dolls. to think, that they could get so scared by the mere mention of death - it's gotham. should you pretend you don't notice? the blotchy flush of their cheekbones, the quiver of their fingers - and, god, their *eyes*. hazel rimmed red, the harshness of a mid-july sun drivelling ochre upon reeds - withering, tips looking red-hot to touch.
you shouldnât, really shouldnât. you're not the best comforter anyways.
"guess graduation just got a lot easier," you say smiling.
louis lets out a loud, high-pitched giggle right in your ear, his shoulders bouncing as he sneaks a glance at your eyes. "see? boss man gets it! mr. hayes was a total prick anyway.â
chloe stares at louis, her brow furrowing in a mix of disgust and confusion. "louis, shut the fuck up, that's literally so gross. a man died."
"yeah, yeah, whatever," louis mutters, rolling his eyes and pulling a pack of gum from his pocket with his unoccupied hand, entirely unfazed. he shifts his weight, the hem of that light blue denim jacket brushing against you.
as you feel the brush, you look down, noticing a red spot on his jacket. you sigh, what the fuck did you expect? heâs supposed to know better than to wear the evidence to homeroom - but of course he doesn't. didn't he wear black clothes over his outside clothes anyways? how the hell did he manage to fuck his jacket up anyways?
you look at that red smudge on his sleeve once more and your teeth click together. it's so fucking stupid it makes your head ache. louis stands there, grinning like a dog, completely oblivious to the fact that he's walking around with a piece of gotham academyâs dead faculty on his wrist.
"take it off," you tell him, your voice dropping low.
louis blinks. "huh? what're you on about, boss man?"
"the jacket, louis. give it to me." you don't wait for him to get it. you yank your shoulder back, slipping out from under his weight, and reach out to grab the denim collar yourself. you don't look at chloe or maya. you don't give a fuck what kind of weird looks theyâre giving you right now.
louis finally catches your drift when your hand covers the dark copper smear on his cuff. his eyes go wide, a little oh sliding out of his mouth before he quickly unbuttons the front. "right. yeah. my bad. forgot to give it back to you."
he shucks it off, throwing it to you. you slide your arms into the stiff denim sleeves, the fabric slightly too big on you, hanging loose around your knuckles. you pull the cuffs down, rolling your wrists until the red stain is tucked neatly under the fold, hidden away from the world.
louis is a loose wire, but heâs your loose wire. you gotta keep the leash tight.
just as youâre tugging the collar straight, a low, smooth engine purr cuts through the schoolyard chatter.
huh?
you don't even have to look to know what it is. an expensive-looking black car slides past the heavy iron gates, the tinted windows slick with rain. itâs moving real slow - way too slow for a car just passing through the block.
dickieâs car - or maybe bruceâs. either way, one of those playboy fucks is behind the wheel, tracking the crowd of kids by the entrance.
your mind is suddenly racing. did they decide to look into it? did bruce actually put aside his grand corporate meetings to look at a dead teacher? did tim and dick spend the whole morning analyzing the docks file instead of going to school or sleeping after you left? if they're already hunting for clues this early, they're moving way faster than they usually do for some nobody instructor.
you try not to let it visibly shake you, though. dropping your head slightly, letting your bangs fall over your eyes as you turn your back to the street.
"come on," you mutter, jabbing your elbow into louis's side to get him moving. "the bell rang. let's get inside."
"bet," louis says, falling into step right beside you, completely carefree again as you both head through the stone archway with maya and chloe following rambling about something you're not listening to.
the leather steering wheel feels sticky under dickâs palms. the air conditioning in the car blows a buzzing stream of cold air right into his face, but it isn't doing anything to shake the greasy weight sitting at the bottom of his stomach.
breakfast was a total disaster. it's always a disaster these days - everything seems to be - but this morning was a whole ânother level.
the air, or atmosphere or whatever one would prefer to call it, in that dining room was so thick you could have cut it or maybe even ripped it.
and you were sitting there so casually shoving spoonfuls of sugary cereal into your mouth while the news report was literally describing a dead body down at the pier - your teacherâs dead body at that.
s'ppose that's why they say kindness kills faster than wickedness.
god, the way you had said that⌠who says something like that after finding out someone so close, someone you knew, got butchered? it didnât help your case with.. the familyâs thoughts about you either.
dick rubs the back of his neck with one hand, steering with the other. he shouldn't even be on this side of town. the original plan was to drive straight over to timâs school to pick up those encryption files left in a locker (and tim himself eventually. thereâs no way tim would miss an opportunity to get away from school), but the docks report keeps echoing in his ears like a fly flying around his neck and buzzing the same old rythm.
an AP english teacher from gotham academy, his little brother's school. the coincidence is just itching at the back of his brain, a tiny, annoying rope he can't stop pulling on.
heâs just curious! he will take a brief look at the campus, maybe see if the gcpd cruisers are causing a scene for the kids, and then be right on his way!
but then he sees you.
dick slows the car down to a crawl, his eyes automatically doing that quick, tactical sweep of the courtyard through the rain-streaked tinted glass.
you are standing near the stone pillars, huddled up with that vance kid - luis? louis? was that his name? and two other girls he doesnât recognize nor know the name of.
he watches through the glass as you grab the collar of louis's light blue denim jacket, your movements slightly aggressive.
hell, you practically rip the thing off the vance kid's shoulders and shove your own arms into the sleeves. and right there, before you roll the cuffs up to hide it, dick catches the glimpse. a dark, dried red smear right on the fabric near the wrist.
and thoughts he shouldnât think creep into his mind, nasty and intrusive, pressing right up against the back of his eyes.
no. stop it.
he forces a rough exhale through his nose, gripping the leather until his knuckles ache. heâs wrong to think that way. heâs completely out of line. sure, you are an oddball - always so quiet and detached from seemingly everything, and a little very cold around the edges - but youâre not a killer.
youâre just a teenager. a completely, normal teenager.
that stain on the light blue fabric is probably louis's jacket anyway, and the vance kid probably just spilled some acrylic paint or rust from a fence onto the cuff and didnât see it while lending it to you - art classes exist after all. it was stupid to even think it couldâve been blood. dick tries to push down the sickening, logical part of his brain that knows exactly what a hours-old dried bloodstain looks like on fabric, especially denim. itâs just paint. it has to be.
his eyes stay glued to the rear-view mirror as the car rolls past the gate. he remembers when you first came to the manor. honestly? dick hadnât exactly been positive about it.
bruce had just dragged another broken child out of the dark, this time the dark of crime alley, and dick had already been halfway out the door, fighting for his own independence as robin which would eventually lead him to become nightwing.
admittedly, with a sharp, twisting pain in his chest he knows that he wasn't the most active big brother. not like he is now with tim or damian, or even cassandra or even steph. he hadn't been there to tape up any cool posters in your room (which makes him realize he doesnât even know how your room looks like) or go to arcades with you.
but.. he wasn't all bad, right? there were moments. small ones, but they existed. like when dick and you sparred in the batcave or he'd drag you down for video games.
plus you arenât a vigilante, you arenât wrapped up in this insane, caped war, and dick had just been so completely consumed by blĂźdhaven and the titans that he barely had time to breathe. and then... then jason died.
when the crowbar and the bomb took jason, the whole manor felt as if it broke into tiny pieces, like a shattered mirror.
dick had been drowning in his own grief, and when he was okay enough and looked at his little brother, it felt like you were floating on a completely different world - totally unreachable and numb.
dick knows he was⌠slightly negligent. he knows he left a traumatized kid alone in a house haunted by a dead robin and a grieving, emotionally unavailable bruce and batman, especially after everything you went through with your mother.
he didn't mean anything bad by it. he was just a stupid, hurting kid himself, trying to keep his own head above water.
through the rain-streaked glass, dick watches as you finally drop your head, letting your bangs shadow your face as you turn your back to the street and walk through the stone archway. louis follows close behind him, bouncing on his heels as the two unknown girls trail behind. you disappear into the main building.
âŚ
itâs nearly five in the afternoon. the cave feels less like a headquarters and more like a pressure cooker.
barbara sits rigidly in her wheelchair, her fingers flying across her keyboard. her screen reflects a blinding blue light across her face, casting long shadows behind her.
this wasn't even the main mission. the whole reason dick was out in the city was just to tie up some loose ends for their actual tactical assignment, he was supposed to pick up the encryption files alongside tim's spare tech gear (where he of course, ended up taking time with him much to bruceâs displeasure), a couple of completely routine errands before they locked down for the night.
but with the dock victim being an instructor so close to home, so near to someone in the family, bruce had said to just take a brief look.
a few feet away, tim is hunched over a secondary diagnostic terminal, his eyes bloodshot, a half-empty energy drink pooling a ring of condensation onto a stack of printed satellite maps.
her eyes glance at him from the corner of the room. should she pretend she doesn't notice? the heavy drop of his chin, the slow shake of his hands - his breathing. shallow and thin, the harshness of a long night - then school and then relentless work at the computer casting deep blue across his face - fading, looking too tired to move (it's no wonder he was asleep every chance he got).
she shouldn't stay quiet, right? tim is younger, the poor boy deserves to have his fill of sleep - she should be able to do it alone and allow him his rest - he is her family. tim had clearly run out of fuel long ago, obviously (completely ignoring her own tiredness and the fact that she lost count of what number of coffee she was on), it was her own fault for starting the sweep so late. guilt, heavy guilt.
barbara has always been good at sorting through wreckage - finding which voice to pull from the noise. which clue would help and which would leave them lost in the dark.
and yet, she seems slightly stuck here, which is why she had to burden tim with it in the first place.
and then, finally, progress.
"i've finished the deep-filter sweep from the gmail account," barbara says, her voice echoing faintly through the open space. she doesn't look up from her monitors. "it indeed looks like someone hacked into the principals account, the method is usually an easy to strip back one.. but the data it leads to doesnât make sense. the person it leads to doesnât exist so it was a deliberate fake record."
bruce stands behind her, his massive frame clad in his dark tactical trousers and a compression shirt - his heavy brows furrowing as he processes the data.
bruce was so caught up with the actual mission he didnât exactly spare you much of a thought- except for well, when the teacher died.
he really hadn't meant to... pay so little attention to you. he never wanted things to turn out this cold. he just... he didn't want you to be a part of the vigilante life. from the very day he dragged you out of that orphanage, you had always seemed so broken. so entirely distant and sad. it was a look bruce knew intimately - a look he had carried in his own reflection for decades, and he reckons, still sometimes does.
instead of throwing his son, his very first flesh and blood into this endless loop of death, trauma, and horrors - someone he had not intended for this - bruce had genuinely hoped that keeping you away from the mantle would give you a normal life. a chance to finally breathe clean air. so he actively ignored how much more distant you got, pretending the silence was just normal teenage moodiness, because the alternative meant admitting he was failing you in a completely different way.
"the school," bruce rumbles, his deep voice dropping into heavy register, pulling himself away from his own head. "hayes was an instructor there. if the killer is operating from the campus, the vector is localized."
"or it's just a student," jason speaks up from the shadows near the weapon racks. heâs leaning against a steel crate, tossing a combat knife up in the air and catching it by the handle with a lazy, dangerous flick of his wrist. "maybe someone just got tired of homework."
"don't joke about this, jason," stephanie snaps, crossing her arms tightly over her chest as she paces near the sparring mat. "a man had his throat cut and was left like an exhibit. it's sick. it's not some schoolyard prank."
cassandra doesnât add onto the conversation but she is aware. especially aware of you.
dick walks down the stairs now, his movements unusually slow. he doesn't quite look at anyone in the cave and his hands are stuffed deep into his pockets, his fingers curling into tight fists.
heâs been feeling slightly uneasy since he got back, a weird, prickling tension buzzing under his skin that he can't quite shake, but he keeps his mouth shut.
"you got the locks with you?" tim asks, turning his chair to face dick. "i need the ip handshakes from the campus wi-fi during the time of the docks hit."
dick forces his face into a neutral mask. "nothing unusual," he says, his voice steady despite the faint uneasiness humming in his chest. "also, gcpd had a cruiser by the main office, but the campus was mostly clear. just kids heading in and out of school."
tim narrows his eyes, tapping his fingers against the armrest of his chair. he turns back to his screen, his fingers flying across the keys as he pulls up the encrypted sector of the manorâs local network - the private partition bruce lets you use for school.
"i'm running a diagnostic sweep on our own outbound data packets," tim mutters, his teeth clicking together. the numbers don't lie. "the signal-scrambler used at the docks... it didn't just loop the cameras. it used a specific, nested logic tree. it's an exact signature match for the prototype algorithm we used to secure the watchtower relays last winter."
jason stops tossing his knife. his eyes narrow and his gaze shifts slowly toward the elevator shaft that leads up into the heart of the mansion - directly toward your bedroom. "the watchtower code? there are only a handful of people who can even read that string without frying a mainframe."
"bruce, barbara, and me," tim says, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly quiet whisper as he finally looks up, his eyes darting between his family. "and the kid upstairs."
stephanie lets out a breathy gasp, her hand flying to her mouth. "are you... are you seriously suggesting what i think you're suggesting? that's insane! yeah he's odd and creepy, but there's no way he would do that!"
"steph, stop," tim cuts her off, his voice devoid of any heat as he looks up from his screen. "as far as i know, no one here is currently close enough with him to truly judge that."
the words cause an uncomfortable shift.
stephanie goes completely silent, her jaw tightening as she looks away. she hates that he's right.
her mind instantly drifts back to when she first started showing up around the manor. she did try with you! she actually tried to be nice, to be the friendly older girl you could rely on, like a big sister, but she quickly stopped because you were just... so completely off-putting. you never looked her in the eye, you never laughed at her jokes, and you didn't exactly seem fond of her at all. so she just gave up.
she ignored you, only speaking to you when it was absolutely necessary to pass the salt or move out of the way in the hall. she kept doing that even after she found out what you went through from dick and why you are the way you are - and she has felt bad for it slightly, but not enough to truly dwell on it or attempt to change her attitude. not the way she had tried for damian.
but.. just because you're a bit odd and don't want to play happy family doesn't mean you go around murdering people, right? it doesn't make sense.
"tim's right about the code, but we can't just throw accusations around," dick steps up, his voice taking on that protective, big-brother tone as he moves closer to the console. "heâs seventeen. he's a normal kid - no vigilante or villain or whatever. someone could have hacked his partition, or maybe he just left his terminal logged in. he isn't a killer."
"dick, i ran the encryption diagnostics three times just now," barbara joins in, her wheelchair whirring slightly as she turns to face him. "the handshake didn't come from a remote bypass. it came from inside his specific drive sector, the logical sequence matches his coding style exactly. i don't want it to be true either, but the data is right here."
dick looks at the screen, a sick, hollow flutter flaring up in his chest. it's just paint, he tells himself again.
his mind betrays him anyway, dragging him right back to the academy gates, right back to that copper-colored blotch dried fluid on the denim cuff.
it looked so eerily similar to dried blood. he can still see the look in your eyes as you rolled the sleeves to hide it, but he chooses not to mention it. he locks his jaw tight, keeping the secret buried in his throat because admitting it means the floor drops out from under him.
cassandra then finally moves to talk. "he is light on his feet," cassandra says softly, she looks at dick, then down at the floorboards. "he sparred with dick when he was younger, right? he trained here, in the dark. he knows the machines and he is tech savvy. the chances... they are not impossible."
jason, surprisingly, is the one who stays entirely silent through all of it. he doesn't toss his knife anymore; and grips the handle tight, leaning his shoulders against the steel crate as he remembers you.
he knows you two aren't close now. hell, you both barely even talk, let alone exchange glances when you pass each other in the corridors upstairs. heâs been so entirely consumed by his own grudge against bruce - a black, choking fury he still carries with him for its been etched into the deepest part of his soul - and he just didn't have the time to let anyone get in his way. plus, you had changed too.
you weren't the scrawny kid from crime alley who used to watch him with those wide eyes anymore. you mutated into something cold, but that doesn't mean you're a murderer now, right?
jason knows you aren't all good - he knows the dark dirt you came from better than anyone else in this room - but he also knows you weren't all bad.
you were just a kid who got left behind.
bruceâs hands slowly ball into a white-knuckled fists at his sides. the leather of his tactical gloves creaks loud in the sudden quiet of the cave.
"drop it," bruce rumbles. he doesn't look at tim, and he doesn't look at the flashing red anomaly on the screen. his face is completely set, a hard, stubborn line hiding whatever terror is clawing at his gut. "we focus on the original mission. that is our priority tonight."
tim looks like he wants to argue, his mouth opening, but bruce silences him with a single look.
âwe will keep an eye on him," bruce adds, his voice dropping to a low, sounding entirely exhausted under the harsh white lights. "but until we have definitive proof, we do not cross that line. clear the diagnostics, let's get back to work."
A/N: its like 4am and i just finished proof reading so if some things donât add up forgive me lolol. also, what do yâall think about like.. a love interest for the reader? should it be louis or a new character and if yes, what gender? or should he just stay without romance⌠also im so sorry if the technical shit dont make sense i highkey had to look allat up đ
if you didnât get tagged please make sure your tags are on and if you didnât get listed here or i got ur username wrong pls correct me in the comments !! if you want to be added to the taglist comment it pls :)!!
The rain outside the Wrenwood Hotel did not fall in drops; it fell in sheets, heavy and unrelenting, blurring the decayed, neoclassical facade of the building into a gray smear against the jagged treeline. Inside, the air tasted of stagnant water, black mold, and the unmistakable, copper-sour tang of old blood. Leon S. Kennedy adjusted his grip on his custom handgun, the weapon an extension of an arm that had grown heavy with decades of the same recurring nightmare. His flashlight cut a sharp, geometric wedge through the gloom of the grand lobby, illuminating peeling wallpaper, overturned velvet armchairs, and the dark, dried spatters of past violence. This was supposed to be a routine investigation into a localized viral anomalyâa quick sweep of an abandoned tourist trap before the quarantine perimeter was locked down tight. But Leon knew better. Nothing in his life was ever routine, and nothing ever stayed dead.
He stepped over a rotting beam, his tactical boots making almost no sound on the warped hardwood floors. The hotel was silent, save for the rhythmic drumming of the storm against the boarded-up windows and the distant, structural groans of a building dying from the inside out. Leonâs eyes scanned the shadows, his mind automatically calculating entry points, blind spots, and exit strategies. He had been doing this for too long. The faces of Raccoon City, the Spanish villages, the African marshesâthey all bled together into a singular, unending mosaic of horror. He was tired. The weariness was deep in his bones, a permanent ache that no amount of sleep could fix. Yet, his instinct remained razor-sharp, a curse disguised as a survival mechanism.
A faint sound broke through the noise of the rain. It wasn't the wet, dragging scrape of a standard infected, nor was it the heavy, bone-crunching thud of a bioweapon. It was a soft, rhythmic clicking, followed by a wet, tiny sneeze.
Leon froze. His thumb automatically eased the safety off his weapon. He lowered his center of gravity, pivoting toward a collapsed reception desk near the back of the lobby. The sound had come from behind the ruined counter, where the shadows hung thickest. He moved with practiced, lethal grace, keeping his flashlight beamed low to avoid giving away his exact head-height. As he rounded the corner of the mahogany desk, he braced himself for whatever mutated aberration the corporate laboratories had engineered this time.
He did not expect to find a child.
Nestled in a makeshift nest of torn curtains and moldering ledger pages was a babyâno older than a toddler. But it wasn't a normal child. The skin was a pale, translucent gray, mapped with a delicate web of dark, violet veins that pulsed faintly beneath the surface. The eyes that blinked up at Leon through the harsh glare of his flashlight were a milky, clouded yellow, devoid of a normal human pupil but wide with an unsettling, ancient intelligence. The toddlerâs clothes were tattered and stained with dark fluid, and from its tiny mouth protruded a set of sharp, milk-white teeth, wet with dark, viscous saliva. It was infected. It was a zombie, a literal monster in the cradle, a manifestation of the very plague Leon had spent his entire adult life trying to burn off the face of the earth.
The toddler blinked against the light, tilted its head, and let out a soft, gurgling coo, reaching two chubby, gray hands up toward the barrel of Leonâs gun.
Leonâs finger tightened on the trigger. His training, his history, his survival instinctâeverything screamed at him to put a bullet through the center of that small, deformed forehead. It was an anomaly. It was a vector. It was a threat. If left alone, it would grow into something that would tear human throats out. He had killed hundreds of things that used to be human. He had seen the T-virus, the G-virus, Las Plagas, the Megamycete; he knew there was no cure for the dead. The child was gone, replaced by a hollow shell driven by a biological urge to feed.
Yet, his hand trembled. Just a fraction of a millimeter, but enough to make the flashlight beam dance across the gray skin.
The baby didn't cower. Instead, intrigued by the dancing circle of light, it rolled over onto its stomach with a wet plop, dragging its legs behind it with the clumsy, uncoordinated movement of a typical infected. It crawled forward a few inches, its tiny, claw-like fingernails scratching against the floorboards. When it reached the edge of Leonâs boot, it didn't bite. It simply leaned its small, heavy head against the tough leather, letting out a rattling, wheezing sigh of exhaustion.
Leon stared down at it, his heart hammering against his ribs in a way it hadn't in years. This wasn't a feral attack. The creature was weak, starved, and somehow, inexplicably, seeking comfort. Leon looked around the ruined lobby, his mind racing. Where were the parents? Likely among the rotting corpses he had passed on the road leading to the hotel. This child had been left behind, infected during the initial outbreak, and had somehow survived in the dark, eating whatever small vermin crawled into its reach.
"Damn it," Leon muttered, his voice a low, gravelly rasp in the empty room.
He didn't lower his gun, but he didn't shoot either. He knelt down, keeping a safe distance, his flashlight illuminating the toddler's face. The baby looked up again, its milky eyes fixing onto Leonâs face. It didn't have the wild, bloodshot glare of the Ganados or the mindless rage of the Raccoon City zombies. It looked... lonely. It let out another tiny, clicking sound, its small jaw snapping shut on nothing, a phantom feeding reflex that lacked any real malice.
Leon reached out with his gloved left hand, hesitating for a split second before touching the side of the baby's face. The skin was ice-cold, like a refrigeration unit, and slightly tacky to the touch. The baby didn't flinch. It leaned into the warmth of the leather glove, closing its cloudy eyes as if it hadn't felt a gentle touch in an eternity.
A strange, dark shift occurred within Leonâs chest. For twenty-eight years, he had been a protector who arrived too late. He had saved individuals, yes, but he had never been able to save the innocence of the world. He had seen the world rot from the inside out, and he had become a tool used by governments to clean up the ash. But looking at this tiny, monstrous thing, a profound, twisted sense of clarity washed over him. The world outside this hotel was broken, filled with corrupt politicians, bio-terrorists, and a public that lived in perpetual, ignorant fear. They wouldn't understand this child. If the BSAA found it, it would become a specimen in a glass jar, sliced open and analyzed until there was nothing left. If the government found it, it would be terminated without a second thought.
They won't touch you, Leon thought, the realization settling into his mind with the heavy, unyielding weight of an anchor. I won't let them.
He holstered his weapon. The decision was instantaneous, overriding every protocol, every moral code he had ever operated under. This child wasn't a threat to him; it was a clean slate. A creature that belonged entirely to the dark, just like he did. He reached down and scooped the toddler into his arms. The baby was surprisingly heavy, its muscles dense with the strange cellular changes wrought by the virus, but Leon hoisted it easily against his tactical vest. The toddler didn't struggle. It buried its face into the crook of Leonâs neck, its sharp teeth scraping lightly against the tough, ballistic nylon of his collar, tasting the salt of his sweat but making no effort to break the skin.
"You're coming with me," Leon whispered, his arm wrapping securely around the child's small back, locking it against his chest. "No one else is ever going to find you."
The walk back through the Wrenwood Hotel felt different now. The shadows didn't feel like hiding places for monsters anymore; they felt like a protective blanket. Leon checked his tactical radio, twisting the dial until the static cleared and his handlerâs voice cracked through the earpiece.
"Leon, report. Have you cleared the lobby? We're detecting a spike in biological activity near your location."
Leon looked down at the gray head resting against his shoulder. The baby had fallen into a deep, deathly sleep, its breathing so shallow it was almost imperceptible.
"Area is clear," Leon lied, his voice entirely devoid of emotion, a perfect baseline of professional calm. "Just some old residue. The hotel is a dead end. I'm pulling back to the extraction point to regroup. Tell the perimeter team to hold their positions."
"Copy that, Agent Kennedy. Secure the perimeter and return."
Leon clicked the radio off, then pulled the battery out entirely, dropping the small plastic block into the dark water pooling on the floor. He didn't need the agency anymore. He didn't need their missions, their wars, or their endless, futile attempts to fix a world that was already dead. He had a purpose now. A real one.
He carried the child through the back exits of the hotel, avoiding the main roads where the automated military drones might be scanning for thermal signatures. The baby, being cold-blooded due to its necrotic state, didn't register on standard thermal imaging anywayâa perfect ghost. Leon navigated the muddy, rain-slicked woods with the ease of a apex predator, his focus entirely consumed by the small bundle in his arms. Every snap of a twig, every rustle of the wind through the pines made his muscles tense, his hand moving toward his knife. If anyoneâfriend or foeâstepped into his path now, he wouldn't hesitate. He would clear a path through flesh and bone to keep this child safe.
By the time the storm began to break, revealing the pale, sickly light of dawn, Leon had reached his safehouseâa hidden, reinforced cabin buried deep within the Appalachian ridges, miles outside the quarantine zone. It was a place he kept off the grid, stocked with rations, weapons, and medical supplies for a rainy day. He had never intended to use it for this, but as he kicked the heavy oak door shut and slid the three deadbolts into place, he knew he was never leaving this life behind.
He laid the baby down on a clean, woolen blanket on the cabin's sofa. In the clear light of day, the child's condition was more apparent. The gray skin had a faint, iridescent sheen, and the dark veins around its throat throbbed with a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Leon knelt beside the sofa, removing his gloves and tactical vest. He reached out with a bare hand, running his thumb over the child's smooth, cool forehead. The baby stirred, its yellow eyes opening slowly, fixing onto Leon with that same eerie, absolute focus.
"You're safe here," Leon said, his voice softer than it had been in decades, though an underlying current of absolute possession ran through every syllable. "No scientists. No soldiers. Just us."
The baby let out a tiny, rasping chirp, its small fingers reaching up to catch Leonâs thumb. Its grip was incredibly strong, tight enough to turn Leonâs skin white, but he didn't pull away. He smiled, a dark, small movement of his lips. The baby opened its mouth, showing those sharp, needle-like teeth, a clear sign of hunger.
Leon didn't flinch. He stood up, walked over to the freezer, and pulled out a package of raw, vacuum-sealed meat he kept for emergency protein. He sliced off a small, thin strip of red flesh, then walked back to the sofa. He held the meat out to the child. The baby didn't hesitate; it snatched the flesh with its tiny hands and shoved it into its mouth, tearing it apart with its sharp teeth with a feral, terrifying efficiency.
Leon watched the display with a sense of profound satisfaction. The world would call this a monster. They would want to destroy it. But Leon looked at the child and saw the only thing in the world that belonged entirely to him, free from the rot of human civilization. He would feed it. He would protect it. He would kill for it. And as the baby finished its meal, looking up at him with dark, bloody lips and cloudy, devoted eyes, Leon knew that no one would ever take his child away from him. Not the government, not the virus, not God himself.
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I have an idea for Neglected!Reader for the BatFam.
I fell into the rabbit hole, and now I made my own idea⌠although is a bit more OC instead of reader, I guess? Never really saw what was the difference.
Anyways, my idea is honestly more on the not angst side, with Reader being neglected but her⌠not really giving a fuck.
Let me explain.
She is an orphan that for whatever reason ends up being adopted by Bruce, but has absolutely no interest on being a vigilante, which makes Bruce actually really happy⌠but ends up with her being sidelined a bit because he was taking care of Jason as Robin⌠then he spirals until Tim appears⌠then is CassandraâŚ. Then Damian⌠Jason came back⌠then Duke⌠and suddenly he realized that it has been years since he had an actual conversation with reader.
Heâs devastated and angry at himself, so scared to apologize to her, but when he opens the door of her room she⌠just says hi⌠as he hadnât basically ignored her for years, she even ask him how his patrol was that night, and when she received the short answer of âgoodâ she just told him that now she had plans to play with some friends online and asked him to close the door.
That not only happened to him, but to almost everyone in the family had a similar experience, and when they finally decided to talk to her about it⌠Reader was just confused:
âWait⌠you guys were ignoring me?â
if youâre interested in the idea, let me know so I keep writing it
I'm in a yandere batfam x neglected reader fics right now and I have an idea which I hope would inspire someone to write about it cause I suck at it and needs someone to supplement this hunger
(â â>â â˝ â<â â)
So here it goes, I want a reader who is Bruce Wayneâs biological child, raised by a single mother who knew early on that they struggled to emotionally connect with others. (because reader is sociopathic and apathetic combined) To help them navigate social situations, she created flashcards filled with instructions on how to respond to people, mimic normal interactions, and understand basic emotional cues. The reader relied heavily on these cards growing up, learning how to âact humanâ rather than naturally understanding others.
After the mother dies in an accident, the reader is brought into Wayne Manor and introduced to a family theyâve never known. However, adjusting proves difficult. The readerâs detached demeanor, delayed reactions, and unsettling honesty make the rest of the family uncomfortable, while the reader themselves struggles to understand the unspoken emotional dynamics of the household. Some members avoid them, some misunderstand them, and others unintentionally neglect them while dealing with their own problems and trauma.
Rather than focusing on becoming violent or evil, the story centers on someone trying to survive inside a family built around broken people, while slowly learning what connection, trust, and belonging actually mean.
The flashcards can become SUCH a painful/emotional motif in Batfam stories too. Especially if one of the siblings accidentally finds them and realizes:
the reader wasnât mocking emotions â
they literally learned social interaction from handwritten instructions their mother made for them.
That kind of reveal is peak Batfam angst honestly. (ËĚŁĚŁĚĽâËĚŁĚŁĚĽ ) They can be yandere or not, male or female or gender neutral, up to you.
°Ëâ§â(â°âżâ°)ââ§Ë°
Edit: If someone do write this, please tag me
Before he was committed, Yandere!AsylumPatient was a walking urban legend. He wasn't a calculated mastermind; he was completely, terrifyingly chaotic, the kind of monster who would end up on the news for destroying a public space or going after completely random people for reasons only his warped mind understood. The entire city breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally locked away in the high-security wing of the asylum. He is notoriously violent, and even the beefiest, most hardened guards refuse to enter his cell without a full riot squad and tranquilizers on standby.
You, on the other hand, are the absolute polar opposite. You are a deeply anxious, fragile, and heavily medicated patient who was completely eaten alive by the brutal reality of the asylum. The constant echoing screams down the hallways, the loud slamming of heavy iron doors, and the cold, clinical apathy of the staff keep your nervous system in a state of permanent panic. You spend most of your days huddled in the corners of the recreation yard, trembling, staring at the floor, and trying to make yourself as invisible as possible.
Yandere!AsylumPatient noticed you on your very first day in the yard. While the other patients kept their distance from him out of pure survival instinct, you were too dazed by your sedative cocktail to realize who he was. When a group of aggressive, larger patients tried to corner you to steal your ration card, he didn't just step in, he turned the entire recreation yard into a bloodbath. He dismantled them within seconds, his face twisted into a maniacal, joyful grin as he broke bones just to hear them snap. But the moment he turned around to look at you, the wild, crazed light in his eyes instantly softened.
From that exact moment, he appointed himself as your absolute, immovable shield. He treats the entire asylum like his personal playground, and you are his most prized, delicate treasure. When he is around you, his terrifying, bloodthirsty persona completely melts away into an affectionate, playful tease. He loves leaning his head on your shoulder, poking your cheeks, and whispering ridiculous jokes in your ear just to see if he can get you to crack a small smile through your anxiety. "Hey, little bird... look what I got for you. Don't tell the doctors, or I'll have to bite them again."
Yandere!AsylumPatient is a master at stealing things from the staff and other wards just to spoil you. Despite being heavily monitored, he always manages to slip into your hands things that are strictly forbidden or impossible for a patient to get: a soft, smuggled contraband blanket that doesn't scratch your skin, a handful of sweet candies he swiped from a nurse's desk, or a colorful drawing he made using stolen crayons. He will literally sit at your feet in the dayroom, shielding your body from the view of the guards, hand-feeding you treats like you're a pampered royal rather than a prisoner.
The asylum administration is absolutely terrified of the codependency developing between you two, so they try to separate you constantly. But every single attempt results in absolute catastrophe. The second a guard puts a hand on your arm to lead you to a different wing, he flips the switch back to his "batshit insane" self. He will scream, spit, and fight with the strength of ten men, throwing his body against the concrete walls and threatening to rip the throats out of every doctor on the board. He makes it completely impossible for the facility to function.
During his worst, most violent episodes when he is strapped to a gurney in a straitjacket, foaming at the mouth and laughing hysterically while doctors try to pump him full of sedatives, the only thing that can calm him down is you. The staff eventually learned that the fastest way to stop a full-scale riot is to just wheel his gurney right back into your room. The second he sees your face, his frantic breathing slows down. Heâll look up at you through his restraints, his bloody teeth bared in a soft, goofy grin, and whine like a puppy. "See? I told them I'd behave if they brought me back to my favorite person. Come untie me, sweetie."
Yandere!AsylumPatient has effectively turned your shared corner of the asylum into an untouchable sanctuary. The other patients are too terrified to even look in your direction, and the doctors have completely given up on separating you out of fear for their own lives. You are still trapped in a cold, terrifying asylum, but as long as his heavy, protective arm is draped around your shoulders, pulling your anxious frame tight against his chest, the rest of the world can't hurt you anymore. He will keep you safe in his madness forever.
Yandere!AsylumPatient has a literal, physical dependency on touching you. The doctors call it a "pathological hyper-fixation," but to him, itâs just breathing. Whether you two are sitting in the cold dayroom, walking the bleak corridors, or eating in the cafeteria, he must have some part of his body connected to yours. Heâll walk right behind you with a large, heavy hand resting firmly on the small of your back, or heâll constantly play with your fingers, tracing the lines of your palm. Even if heâs in the middle of a manic, high-energy rant to himself, his other hand will be gently, rhythmically patting your head, treating you like the only grounding wire in his chaotic mind.
This constant touch is actually the only thing that keeps his violent impulses at bay. The guards have noticed a terrifying pattern: if he is touching you, his heart rate is stable, and he just acts like a teasing, overly affectionate boyfriend. But the exact millimeter his skin loses contact with yours, like if a nurse forces you to step away for a blood pressure check, his entire body goes completely rigid. His jaw tics up, his eyes go dead, and he begins to growl. He will literally glare at the staff like a rabid dog on a short leash until your hand is safely back in his.
Yandere!AsylumPatient treats your high levels of anxiety as an invitation to smother you. Whenever the alarms go off, or another patient has a loud, screaming episode that makes you cover your ears and shake, he gets this dark, intensely satisfied look in his eyes. He will instantly pull your fragile frame into his lap, wrapping his long arms around you like a human straitjacket, burying his face in your neck. Heâll rock you back and forth, whispering playful, sweet nonsense against your skin while shielding your view of the room. "Let them scream, little bird. Just listen to me. I'm right here. Breathe me in."
The nighttime routine is the absolute bane of the asylumâs security staff. Because they are kept in separate wards at night, he is supposed to be locked behind a reinforced steel door. He isn't. Nobody actually knows how he does it whether he steals a hairpin, blackmails a night-shift guard, or literally forces the hinges out of the frame but every single night, without fail, he breaks out of his cell. He sneaks through the dark, sterile hallways like a ghost, completely ignoring the security cameras, with only one destination in mind: your room.
Youâll be lying in your cot, staring at the ceiling in a state of deeply anxious insomnia, when you suddenly hear the soft, familiar click of your door unlocking. Heâll slip into your room with a huge, boyish grin, completely untroubled by the fact that heâs breaking maximum-security protocols. Before you can even whisper his name, heâs already sliding under your thin, scratchy white blanket. He will pull you flush against his chest, tucking your head securely under his chin, and let out a deep, contented sigh, finally falling asleep the second he can feel your heartbeat against his ribs.
The middle of the night always ends in a chaotic, exhausting circus. Around 3:00 AM, the night-guard patrol will inevitably shine a flashlight through your window, spot the massive, notorious killer sleeping peacefully in the fragile patient's bed, and sound the red alarm. A squad of six to eight heavily armored guards will burst into the room with batons and shields. He doesn't even wake up angry; he just groans, holding onto you even tighter, wrapping his legs around yours like a stubborn child throwing a tantrum.
As the guards literally grab his arms and try to pry him out of your bed, heâll start screaming and cursing, tossing his head back and snapping his teeth at them. Heâll rip the sheets, kick the bedframe, and fight with terrifying, supernatural strength just to keep one hand wrapped around your wrist. "Let go of me, you corporate pigs! I'm sleeping! They were having a nightmare. I'm helping them! I'll skin you alive if you pull me away from them!" He will drag the entire weight of the guard squad across the floorboards just to maintain a grip on your fingertips for three more seconds.
The second his grip finally slips and they successfully drag him backward out into the hallway, he flips completely into his chaotic, batshit-insane persona laughing maniacally, threatening the night supervisor's family, and kicking the walls until they lock him in solitary. But itâs completely pointless. The staff knows that within three hours, the sun will come up, the recreation yard will open, and he will walk right back out of his cell, completely fine, covered in new bruises, and immediately seek you out to place a warm, possessive hand right back on your shoulder as if nothing ever happened.
I'm getting another idea and I got it from those tiktok videos where GF suddenly says she is pregnant whilst getting out of the car and BF was left inside BUT with the Batboys.
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Reader have no idea that they're dating the batboys for a quite some time already, although reader does hope for it, they just thought that the batboys being so nice to them, while the batboys waiting for reader to be ready to do couple stuff, they just thought reader is shy đ
I been thinking this for a while now
Reader: what you mean we're dating?!?!
Batboys: we've been dating for a while now???
âI like you so much, and you donât even know it.â
Sorry lowkey disappeared again.Im having my daughter next month,scared asfđđ.My fanny is gonna be DESTROYED.also random does anyone else hate podfics.Like it will have the perfect plot and then sayâ podficâ like turn that shit off omg.
Batboys x Reader: clueless Reader
Bruce Wayne
The âexclusive relationshipâ was IMPLIED, apparently
â˘Bruce thought things were very clear.
⢠In his defense:
â˘you spend most nights at the manor
⢠he takes you to galas
â˘Alfred refers to you as âMr. Wayneâs partnerâ
â˘Bruce literally kisses you goodbye before meetings
â˘So naturally he assumes:
yes, this is my significant other.
â˘Meanwhile youâre spiraling internally every day.
â˘Because Bruce Wayne is:
â˘holding your hand
â˘buying you things
â˘resting his forehead against yours when tired
â˘But heâs never technically said:
âWill you be my partner?â
â˘So your brain goes:
Maybe heâs just emotionally confusing.
â˘The realization happens because someone at a gala says:
âYou and your boyfriend make a lovely couple.â
â˘You laugh awkwardly.
âOh..weâre not-â
â˘Bruce looks over immediately.
ââŚNot what?â
â˘You stare at him.
âDating?â
â˘Silence.
â˘Bruce blinks once.
â..Weâve been exclusive for eight months.â
âEIGHT??!â
â˘You almost choke on your drink.
â˘Bruce is now deeply confused.
*âYou sleep in my bed.â
âAS A FRIEND.â
âI kissed you.â
âPEOPLE KISS CASUALLY SOMETIMES-â
â˘Bruce just stares at you like your operating system is corrupted.
⢠Then realization slowly dawns on him.
ââŚYou genuinely didnât know.â
⢠You hide your face immediately.
âI thought you were being nice because you liked me as a person.â
â˘Bruce physically has to sit down.
â˘Because somehow this is more stressful than fighting Bane.
⸝
Dick Grayson
Actually devastated you didnât know
â˘Dick is the MOST affectionate naturally.
â˘So this misunderstanding gets BAD.
â˘This man:
⢠calls you baby
â˘kisses your forehead
â˘cuddles you constantly
⢠takes you on dates
â˘says âmissed youâ
â˘introduced you to the Titans
â˘And you STILL think:
Heâs probably just emotionally open.
â˘Dick genuinely thinks youâre just shy about labels.
â˘One day he casually says:
âMy girlfriendâs coming over later.â
â˘You:
âOh? Who?â
⢠Dick laughs.
â˘Then stops laughing.
ââŚYou.â
â˘You stare at him.
âWait.â
â˘He stares back.
âWAIT.â
âYou didnât know we were dating?!â
âI THOUGHT YOU WERE JUST REALLY FRIENDLY.â
â˘Dick falls backwards onto the couch dramatically.
âI HELD YOUR FACE AND TOLD YOU I ADORED YOU.â
âYEAH BUT YOUâRE DICK GRAYSON. YOU SAY THINGS.â
â˘Heâs losing his mind now.
âI TOOK YOU ON ROMANTIC ROOFTOP DINNERS.â
⢠âI THOUGHT YOU WERE TESTING LOCATIONS.â
â˘He actually laughs so hard he canât breathe.
â˘Then immediately crawls across the couch to grab your face.
âOkay,â he says, still laughing,
âjust so weâre SUPER clear now-â
â˘Kisses you directly on the mouth.
âBoyfriend. Dating. Romantic. In love with you.â
â˘Youâre bright red.
â˘Dick thinks this is the funniest thing thatâs ever happened to him.
⸝
Jason Todd
⢠Jason absolutely assumed you knew.
â˘Because from his perspective:
â˘you wear his hoodies
â˘you sleep at his place
â˘he threatens people for disrespecting you
â˘youâve made out multiple times
â˘Clearly:
Relationship.
⢠But youâre an overthinker.
â˘So every time something romantic happens you internally go:
Donât assume. Donât ruin the vibe. Stay calm.
â˘The realization happens when Roy casually says:
âSo how long have you two been together now?â
â˘You immediately answer:
âOh weâre not together-â
â˘Jason:
ââŚWhat.â
â˘Roy:
ââŚWHAT.â
â˘You panic immediately.
âI MEAN-unless-â
â˘Jason is staring at you like his soul just left his body.
âBaby.â
âDONâT BABY ME RIGHT NOW.â
âI literally told a guy at a bar you were my girl.â
âI thought that was⌠metaphorical.â
â˘Jason actually puts his hands over his face.
âHow are you alive.â
â˘Then he starts laughing.
HARD.
âOh my god,â he says between laughs,
âyou really thought I was just casually obsessed with you.â
â˘You hide in your hoodie immediately.
His hoodie.
â˘Jason notices. Smirks.
âYou know normal friends donât share apartments keys either, right?â
Silence.
ââŚoh my god.â
⸝
Tim Drake
â˘Tim honestly canât blame you because he ALSO never formally asked.
⢠But he thought the relationship progression was obvious.
â˘You:
â˘have toothbrushes at each otherâs places
⢠share passwords
⢠nap together
â˘hold hands constantly
â˘went to a wedding together
⢠Tim categorized this as:
Relationship Acquired.
â˘You categorized it as:
Extremely emotionally intimate friendship.
â˘The moment happens because Kon asks:
âWait, did you never ask them out officially?â
â˘Tim pauses.
â..I thought I did.â
⢠You immediately look over.
âYou WHAT.â
â˘Tim starts mentally replaying every interaction youâve ever had.
âI said âyouâre my favorite person.ââ
âTHAT ISNâT A CONFESSION.â
âI BOUGHT YOU FLOWERS.â
âAS A FRIEND???â
â˘Tim puts his head in his hands.
âThis explains SO MUCH.â
âLIKE WHAT?â
âWHY YOU LOOKED PANICKED EVERY TIME I HELD YOUR HAND.â
â˘You whisper:
âI thought I was imagining thingsâŚâ
⢠Tim looks up immediately.
ââŚWait, you LIKE liked me?â
âYES???â
⸝
Damian Wayne
Actually offended you thought he behaved this way platonically
â˘Damian is NOT naturally affectionate.
â˘Which means from his perspective, this should have been EXTREMELY obvious.
⢠He:
â˘seeks you out voluntarily
â˘touches you first
â˘allows prolonged physical affection
â˘lets you hold Titus
⢠says âbelovedâ
â˘In Damian Language this is basically a marriage certificate.
â˘Meanwhile you:
Heâs just⌠intense.
⢠The realization happens when you say:
âYouâll make someone really happy one day.â
â˘Damian stops walking.
⢠Slowly turns around.
ââŚExcuse me?â
âWhat?ââWhat do you mean âsomeoneâ?â
â˘You blink.
âYour future partner?â
â˘Damian stares at you in complete disbelief.
âBeloved. We are together.â
You laugh nervously.
âWait, seriously?â
He looks genuinely disturbed now.
âYou believed I was behaving this way PLATONICALLY?â
âYOU NEVER ASKED.â
âI ALLOWED YOU IN MY PERSONAL SPACE.â
ââŚthatâs fair actually.â
â˘Damian pinches the bridge of his nose.
âI have called you âmy loveâ repeatedly.â
âI thought you were being poetic.â
Long silence.
Then:
ââŚFather was correct. You are catastrophically oblivious.â
