𝓷𝓸 𝓻𝓪𝓲𝓷, 𝓷𝓸 𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓼

A/n: Saw a sad Edit of Jason so I had to do this

Inspired by “Criminal” by Britney Spears

You tell yourself you’re careful.

Careful with knives in the kitchen, careful with passwords and paper cuts, careful with your mother’s voice in your ear — that honeyed warning that sounds like a lullaby and a verdict at the same time, careful your whole life. Gotham is a chorus of don’ts and never, and somehow it always sounds like your mother. Don’t walk alone after dark. Never talk to men with guns. Don’t fall for trouble; trouble doesn’t love you back.

Her rules of course, a mantra she told you throughout your whole life.

You listen. You’re good at listening. You’re good at smiling and being polite and saying you have to go because you left the kettle on. You’re so good at it that people mistake your quiet for obedience.

You're a good girl.

And then you meet him.

It’s the kind of meeting that only happens in this city — fluorescent lights in a corner bodega that hum like insects, rain knifing down outside, a trio of boys with bravado and plastic knives they think are real. You just want milk. They want the register.

He wants them to leave.

He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. The door flings wide and rain walks in on two boots, the kind that have scraped across rooftops and over graves. The helmet is the red of fresh blood; the jacket creaks when he moves, a soft leather whisper. He stands between you and the knives and the boys, and what scares you most is how calm you are.

“Out,” he says, helmet tilted, guns still holstered. “Last chance.”

Two run. One doesn’t. Gunmetal flashes. He takes the knife, bends the kid’s wrist, guides him to the floor like it’s a dance. No blood. Just the clean crack of arrogance breaking.

You’re supposed to be afraid. You just…aren’t. Your heartbeat is steady, like it’s been waiting for this rhythm without knowing why. He looks your way, and you’ve never been so aware of your own breath.

“You good?” The voice is distorted through the modulator, low and rough like gravel under tires.

You nod. He looks away, but he doesn’t miss the way your hands don’t shake. The boy scrambles out; the owner stammers thanks. Red Hood tips two fingers to his helmet and leaves with the rain.

You don’t realize you’ve followed until you’re outside under the awning. It’s late enough for loneliness to dress itself as bravery. He stops, half-turned, like he’s not surprised.

“Careful,” he says. “Gotham bites.”

“So I’ve heard.” Your mouth finds a smile you didn’t know it had. “Thank you.”

His helmet tilts — curiosity, or maybe a warning. “Get home safe.”

You tell yourself you will. You tell yourself a lot of things. But a week later, you’ll be on the back of his bike with the city smearing into neon and thunder around you, your fingers hooked into his jacket like a prayer you never learned how to say.

◂ ❚ ⊱ꕥ⊰ ❚ ▸

You learn his name by accident. The helmet is off, thrown on a scarred workbench in a safehouse that manages to be both temporary and painfully lived-in. He’s bare to the waist and you shouldn’t look but you do. The scars are a constellation that tells a story you don’t know how to read yet, old bullet lines and something worse, something that looks like a hand went into his chest and squeezed until his heart remembered it had to beat.

He notices you tracing with your eyes. He doesn’t flinch.

“I’m Jason,” he says, like it matters that you know. Like he wants you to.

You repeat it. It tastes like a secret. “Jason.” His name comes out breathless, like you were always meant to say it.

“Red Hood’s for when I’m working.” He shrugs into a shirt; you feel unreasonably bereft. “You okay with that?”

You should say no. You should say you’re calling a cab and pretending none of this happened, and you’re going to go back to being careful, to drinking tea and turning on the porch light when you get home, to listening to your mother sing warnings in your head.

Instead you find your self asking him: “Are you?”

He huffs, a laugh that’s half-confession. “Working’s easier than breathing some days.”

You glance at the table — maps, a box of ammunition, a folded photograph with the edges softened by the kind of touch that means grief. You hear the city in his voice. The good in him is a feral thing that doesn’t know how to sit inside a church; you’re not sure your goodness ever did.

You’re careful, you remind yourself, as he comes closer. Careful while you tilt your head back to look at him. Careful when you memorize the ink on his forearms and the way his hair curls damp at his nape. Careful when the distance between you goes electric.

“You shouldn’t,” he says, and you understand what he means. He’s not warning you off. He’s warning himself.

“Tell me to go,” you whisper, and neither of you believe you will.

Because you never would leave.

He doesn’t. He kisses you like falling is a decision and you already made it. His mouth is hot and unforgiving, and you learn the exact weight of his control because he keeps most of himself on a leash and still you shiver. His palms hold your jaw like he’s choosing another kind of violence, the kind that leaves no marks, only a heat under your skin that you’ll feel for days.

You’re not the kind of girl who makes out with vigilantes in safehouses with holes in the drywall. You discover you are.

“Slow,” he murmurs against your mouth. “We do this slow.”

You nod because anything else would be begging. He laughs, breath against your throat, and your brain goes white noise. Your body knows what it wants before you admit it. You feel him hot and solid through denim against your hip; you ache in answer, slick with want, heart hammering at the thought of need to be filled even as his hands keep you exactly where he wants you — not yet.

He stops before you do. You want to hate him for it; you can’t. His forehead rests against yours, your breath tangled. You think of all the good choices you’ve ever made and how bored they felt next to this.

“Go home,” he says softly. “Before you decide you live here.”

You look around the cracked walls and bullet-scarred floor, then back at him. “Maybe I do.”

◂ ❚ ⊱ꕥ⊰ ❚ ▸

The city knows before your friends do. Someone catches a photo — your cheek turned toward the hard red shine of a helmet, your smile outlawed by streetlights. It’s grainy. It’s enough.

Your phone erupts. Your mother, of course. Friends. A coworker who never liked you much suddenly very invested in your soul. They all say the same thing in different fonts: He is wrong for you. He is danger in a leather jacket. He will ruin your life.

You snort then think, ruin what life? The one where you go to work and come home and sleep and never once feel like your skin fits?

You don’t answer. You turn your phone over and you go somewhere you were told never to go.

Jason is waiting in the Narrows with a bag of stolen antibiotics that someone else stole first from people who needed them more. You don’t understand his moral arithmetic and maybe you don’t have to; you understand the outcomes. He gives. He protects. He terrifies the people who should be terrified and that says something you aren’t brave enough to say out loud.

He’s got blood on his knuckles tonight. It isn’t his. Your stomach still drops.

“Did they deserve it?” you ask, because you’re still yourself in a way that’s tender and inconvenient.

His eyes find yours, glacial and warm at once. “They were selling to kids.”

You nod. You choose. “Okay.” You step forward then place your hand against his cheek.

◂ ❚ ⊱ꕥ⊰ ❚ ▸

The first time you patch him up, your kitchen looks like a crime scene from a cheap TV show. He downplays it because that’s what he does.

“It’s nothing.”

It’s not nothing. It’s a gash along his side that needs stitches and your hands are steady like they were made for this and he watches you with something reverent and terrible in his eyes. He’s a weapon that loves the hands that hold him. You’re a good girl who finally found a use for her carefulness.

“Jason.” You say his name and he relents like a muscle unclenching.

He sits on your counter with his shirt off, blood slick at his waist. You clean, you numb, you thread. He hisses and jokes and you snort and then your mouth is on his because this — this is intimacy you weren’t warned about. Heat blooms low and insistent; your whole body leans toward him like a plant desperate for sun. He tugs you between his knees and his hands curve over your hips, and you think this is what it feels like to get away with something huge.

The kiss turns slow and then it turns into something else, something deliberate. He drags his mouth over your throat like a man tracing the map home. Your fingers get lost in his hair; his breath breaks on your skin. The counter edge bites your thighs and you don’t care; you’d bruise for this. You’d bruise to remember.

◂ ❚ ⊱ꕥ⊰ ❚ ▸

The city escalates. That’s what Gotham does when it senses joy — it tests for structural integrity.

You feel eyes on you. The cops, for show; the Bat, for something more complicated. One night, on your walk home, you think you see a cape vanish into shadow. You tell yourself it’s just Gotham being Gotham, but part of you wonders if Batman is already watching… not to stop you, but to make sure you get home alive.

◂ ❚ ⊱ꕥ⊰ ❚ ▸

It ends the way it began — with rain, and a store that smells like bleach, and a door that flings wide because he chooses to walk through it.

No, that’s wrong.

It doesn’t end.

It changes.

There’s a firefight because of course there is. Sirens smear sound into a scream. Gunshots stitch air into fabric you can’t breathe through. Jason is a blur of red and black and intent, moving like something destined and furious. You are behind a shelf, hands clasped over your head like prayer. You don’t pray; you start now.

When the last body falls, the last gun clatters, the last siren fades, he finds you with hands that shake in the aftermath, adrenaline turning his edges soft. He kneels. He says your name like home.

“You okay?” His thumb catches a streak of grime from your cheekbone. You nod and then you don’t; you fold into him and shake and he holds all of it without flinching.

On the roof, he stops. He looks at you like he can’t believe any of this is real.

“They’re going to hate you for this,” he says, half-stricken, half-wondering.

“They already do.” Your palm finds his chest. “Let them.”

You kiss him like a crime. Lightning breathes across the clouds. And then you see him —

Across the next rooftop, in the rain, a darker silhouette stands still against the skyline. The cape stirs, black armor unmoving. Jason sees him too; you feel it in the way his hand tightens.

They lock eyes. No shouting. No blame. Just the silent language that says I lost you once. I’m not ready to lose you again. Jason braces for a fight. Batman doesn’t move. The cowl dips — not surrender, not approval, but permission.

Jason blinks, a flicker of the boy under the armor, and you catch it. Batman’s gaze shifts to you — unreadable, but protective. Then he steps back into shadow, gone.

Jason exhales, rough. “Guess we’re clear.”

You know the truth: Bruce just protected you both in the only way he knows how — by letting you leave.

Jason offers his hand. You take it. The rain slides down your neck and you laugh because this is happiness, and you weren’t sure you’d ever survive it.

the words “i love you” are always on the tip of your tongue when you’re about to cum, but he always swallows them before you can let them out. plausible deniability he tells himself. if he never heard the words then he can pretend he knows you don’t have feelings for him. just like he pretends he doesn’t have feelings for you…and it really is all pretending. he says there’s nothing serious between y’all, but he leaves trail of destruction in his path everytime you’re together.

it’s “nothing serious” but he wants any man who sees you naked to know that he was there first. that he pleased you so good that no one else will hold a candle to him. that for every hickey he left on your body, there were more than a few scratches on his back to show for it. that for every night he spent with you, there was a dirty sheet that harbored a mix of your bodily fluids. no matter how many times you washed them you’d never be able to get the memories of the way his cum pooled in your cunt, spilling out onto already damp sheets. it’s “nothing serious” but he thinks about your hands in his hair and your tits in his mouth every chance he gets.

warning. gun kink

“off. take it all off.”

his voice came from the corner of the room, he sat in the arm chair watching you. he didn’t do much else other than that most days, sometimes he’d hold you but it seems he’d finally ran out of patience trying to make you comfortable around him.

your cheeks flushed as you complied, nervously peeling each layer off before you’re standing in front off him bare and open to him. he just keeps watching, his breathing static behind his helmet before you hear a hiss and see him placing his helmet to the side.

“sit,” he commands, standing from his seat to let you take his place, you waste no time following his order before he’s kneeling in front of you pretty face resting against your knee.

he sighs as if this is the only time he can relax. you watch curiously — still very naked much to your embarrassment — as he hands you his gun from his holster, its unloaded, you know that. he’d never put a load weapon in the hands of someone as sweet as you.

he chuckles when you fumble on holding the piece, adjusting your fingers so you can comfortably hold it before pressing the nozzle to his head. he lets out a shaky breath as he stares up at you, icy blue eyes give away the affection he feels for you and he seems to enjoy the thought of being at your mercy.

“that’s it, pretty girl. hold it there f’me.”

his hands move to your thighs, spreading you open. “keep your legs open doll, i’m hungry.

★・・・★・・・★・・・★

it’s an unusually quiet night in blüdhaven, meaning dick grayson has some time to kill. he doesn’t think that stopping by your apartment during his patrol will lead to much more than a brief conversation and a be safe, see you tonight kiss, which is how his pit stops usually go. that being said, tonight is the first time he’s shown up to see you in the full nightwing getup—escrima sticks and mask included.

it takes you one glance at his muscular body clad in the tight black and blue material to send a surge of heat between your legs, and before either of you can think clearly, you’re on top of him on your sofa, entangled in a sloppy kiss with your hands running through his hair. his fingers dig into your hips as you rock against his hard length, grinding your core against the textured material of his suit.

no bc i have been thinking about this and IEDJFHNEIJF i have opinions. There is only ONE (1) correct way to do fwb w jason and it is ANGST.

You're both hopelessly in love with each other. You both know it, but you can't be everything you want to be. You can't have the one thing you want most, but this will just have to be enough.

His eyes always linger on you. No matter what you're doing. It's like he gets drunk on just watching you move. He'll sit on your couch after he swore he'd stop coming over. He watches you wash dishes and wipe down the counters. He twitches every time you move as if he wants to stop you, as if he wants to do it for or with you, anything for you to not do it by yourself, but he doesn't get up, only watches. Watches you like you're a deity and he is your most devout follower. Watches you with so much adoration that you swear he's in love with you, but he'll be gone before you wake up, and you'll fall asleep to him saying "we can't do this again," but he'll come back. He'd come back in a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, anything to see your face. You swear he's in love with you, but then he'll say he doesn't want to see you again, even if you know he'll come back. You tell yourself that wanting and needing are different things. He doesn't want to need you. You try and tell yourself he loves you, but he makes sure to tell you he doesn't.

You take him back every time. You take him back like he didn't leave you in the middle of the night. Take him back like he didn't say that it was the last time. You take him back like you actually want him. He'll let himself believe it, because he wants you so bad, but he can never let you know that. He needs you like a drowning man needs air, but he cannot have you. He cannot keep you, but how is he supposed to tell you that? Sometimes when he slips in through your window soaked with rainwater and you wrap his towel snug around his shoulders and run your fingers through his hair, and he swears you love him too, but it's better if you don't so he lets himself believe it. He lets himself believe you don't love him the way he loves you, so he can pretend he isn't killing you when he leaves before dawn. He knows he has to leave. He has to keep you safe. Safe from the world. Safe from him. He'll only break your heart if you let him keep it, but he breaks it every time he puts it down to leave.

warnings: sex pollen but it’s a dick grayson solo special 💫

★・・・★・・・★・・・★

he’s not sure how he made it home in one piece, but the second he’s through the front door of his apartment, dick grayson is wrestling his way out of his nightwing suit, his ears ringing as he stumbles through his room and into his bathroom. his skin feels hot, too hot, and his breathing is ragged; ivy, he thinks hazily, discarding his suit on the floor. those fucking plants—it’s that goddamn pollen.