gladys valentine

The first time he raised the lens to capture you, you laughed, embarrassed, brushing your hair out of your face. “Seriously? I’m not much of a subject,” you teased, but Tim only hummed in quiet disagreement. His fingers were steady on the shutter, his eyes sharper than they’d been in a long time. You didn’t know that in that moment you replaced Gotham for him entirely.

After that, it became instinct. Tim doesn’t mean for it to spiral the way it does. At first, it’s innocent—he tells himself it’s just habit, muscle memory clicking the shutter. The candid moments first, your silhouette against the window, the crease of your brow when you read, the way your lips curved mid-smile. He catalogued every one, a collector with a single obsession. And then, when you humoured him and posed, he found himself studying you like a masterpiece: lighting, shadows, angles. Your eyes reflecting the glow of the desk lamp. Your fingers curled delicately around a mug. The smallest details became sacred.

Your image is everywhere. Candid shots where you don’t even notice the lens lingering on you. Posed photographs where he convinces you it’s just “for fun,” but later he pores over them in the dim glow of his laptop, memorizing the subtleties of your expression. Sometimes he records videos too, your laugh, your voice, the little habits you don’t think twice about. They become his comfort on nights when work keeps him in the Cave too long. Gotham doesn’t captivate him anymore, not like you do. You’re his new skyline.

They fill his camera roll quickly, an unstoppable flood. Soon he has whole folders, carefully organized, date-stamped, labelled like case files. Except these aren’t for the team, or for evidence. These are for him.

At night, when the city demanded him, he carried you with him anyway. Not in person, he wouldn’t risk losing you out there, but in the quiet folders hidden beneath encryption on his laptop. Hundreds of images, thousands, sorted and protected. His own museum of you. And though the others might suspect he had taken up photography again, no one would ever see the real subject.

You were for his eyes alone.

Damian did not indulge in childish things. He had been raised to see them as weaknesses, distractions. Comics, toys, trivial entertainments—they were discarded long despite his own dabbling in them during his first years in Gotham. He trained instead. He shed them early, replacing play with training, fantasy with discipline. Or so he thought.

But… you shifted something in him.

He only meant to buy you something thoughtful. He walked into the store intending to leave with a book of substance, something that reflected refinement. Yet his steps slowed when his eyes caught on the sickeningly pink cover of a shoujo manga. Two characters frozen in a moment of clumsy, tender affection, an accidental hand brush, an awkward smile. His gaze focuses on the cover which was drenched in pastel pinks and soft whites: wide-eyed characters leaning close, hearts practically sketched into the negative space between them. It’s embarrassing, childish. He should scoff, walk away. But instead his hand hovered over it, a treacherous pulse in his chest, hesitated, then plucked it from the shelf.

He buys it without admitting to himself why. Later, alone, he reads. It’s saccharine, almost painfully so. But between the lines he finds something he’s never had the chance to imagine: a tender, uncomplicated love. A boy reaching for a girl, devotion without blood or vigilantism hanging in the background. And he begins to see you in every panel. Your expressions, your words, your warmth. He imagines you both inside those glossy pages, recreating every scene, every brush of hands, every quiet promise.

But each scene sank claws into him regardless. The heroine’s every glance, every flutter of feeling—he thought of you. The way the boy on the page vowed quietly, desperately, to never let her go, it made his chest tighten. For the first time, Damian found himself imagining softness. Not just loyalty and possession, but tenderness woven through it. He imagined you, in those panels, turning to him with the same devotion. He imagined you re-enacting each scene, lips against his, fingers interlaced.

The book is hidden now, buried where no one will ever find it. You don’t need to know. It’s his private indulgence, his guilty pleasure. You don’t need to see the ink-stained version of the future he’s already building for you.

It’s childish, perhaps. But he allows himself this one childish thing. Because unlike the boy on the page, Damian won’t wait for chance or fate. He will take it into his hands.

He will make the fantasy real.

And when you smile at him the way the heroine smiles at her love, he’ll know it was never childish at all—it was inevitable.