kae!!!

When Clark had promised he'd get you a good testimony for your cover about the Justice League's latest world-saving mission, you'd expected him to be the one knocking on your apartment door. He'd usually come in, glasses off and takeout bag in his hand, ready to fully let out the Superman persona and clarify as many of the events as safely possible.

Perhaps you could have expected someone like his Ma or his equally-super-powered cousin, given that they had somehow ended up involved in the whole mess. People who had offered their outlook into the superhero world to you a couple of times before. All under Clark's seal of approval, of course.

What you definitely hadn't expected was this. Making eye contact with a set of —surprisingly well defined, even through the short-sleeved tee— shoulders and luscious dark curls. It was almost in slow motion, the way your head tilted back progressively until your eyes met a pair of awaiting blues. A smile formed on her plushy lips way sooner than you were ready for, her hand extending in greeting. "I am Diana, you must be Clark's friend? For the interview."

You nod your head and shake her warm —and definitely bigger than yours— hand for a little longer than necessary, taking the chance to reboot your brain before you're finally saying your name in return and moving to the side to let her in. "The couch will work just fine," you almost trip over the coffee table as you guide her. "Anything to drink?"

"Oh, so kind of you. Just water will suffice," another one of those smiles that make you feel like your brain has turned off. And it must have, because you're nodding for too long again before letting out a mutter of «Oh, water. Right.» before finally fetching it for her.

Alone in the kitchen, you cease the opportunity to take a couple breaths and splash a bit of cold water on your face. You were a journalist, a damn good one at that, just because you were interviewing a pretty woman —a full on Amazonian warrior princess at that— didn't mean you couldn't stay professional. Right before you made your way back, before you slipped the mask of experience and seriousness back on, you made sure to text Clark cursing him for not telling you in advance so you could tidy the house and dress up a little more.

She was by your bookcase when you returned, accepting the offered glass and complimenting your collection before sitting back on the couch. "Should we start then?"

After that, the interview had gone surprisingly well. Her language had been much more precise and her tone more professional than your usual sessions with Clark tended to be, closer to what you'd imagined their League meetings to be, rather than the explanation they'd give an outsider. Even then, she'd been warm and welcoming the whole time, even when having to refuse certain questions —something you were used to dealing with by now—, Diana would always seem to look for an alternate answer that would give you a little more information without ever getting close to too much.

By the hour mark, your conversation and questions had started to derail, not staying on the mission, but rather encompassing a bigger conversation about duty and meaning behind being a superhero and a journalist. From there you'd just kept on talking, not even realising the way the sun went down behind the city skyline. The tape recorder long turned off by the time you'd ended up on opposite sides of the same couch, anecdotes about the more human side of your lives being shared over a glass of wine that had come out after she'd finished her water.

The ding on your phone —a text from Clark you'd immediately swiped off your screen— had been the thing to pop the bubble that had formed around you two. Only then had you noticed, the way Diana's arm slung over the back of the couch, her hand subtly resting on your shoulder; and the proximity, how there wasn't even a full cushion left between the both of you, your legs almost pressed up to the side of hers.

Her eyes had dropped for a moment, focused on the shiny gloss on your lips, but she had pulled back quickly after, downing the bit of wine left on her glass before she stretched her muscles. "Well, i believe that should be enough information for a magnificent piece."

You nodded a bit, busying yourself with closing your notes and picking up the now-empty glasses before you could look back at her, "No, yeah— Yes. Totally, that was great." You'd gotten up at the same time she had, the quick movement making you momentarily dizzy, the trepidation only seeming to become sharper when her hands held onto your waist to keep you upright.

"I'm okay—" Saying it came out rushed would be an understatement. "I'm fine, just… Might have a bit of low iron, you know?" A nervous little laugh leaves you, but your smile seems to be enough to convince her. "Let me just… I'll walk you to the door."

Leaving the glasses back on the coffee table, you boldly take the chance to put your hand on her lower back as you guide her through the short walk back to the front door. "I just wanted to- Thank you. That was an incredible interview and it'll be an even more amazing cover."

It should be studied, the way a little upturn of her lips could make you feel like a swarm of butterflies had spawned in your stomach. "It was my pleasure. We should extend an invitation to you for our mission debriefs, you come up with really good questions."

A small flustered laugh leaves you, melting into a beautiful melody when it mixes with hers. Unsure of what to say next, you open the door, lingering by it. "I guess I'll see you around, then."

Diana nods, looking towards the elevator before turning her head back to your. "I guess so." There's a little wave shared between you two, and then she's moving to press the down-facing arrow, turning back to see you still at your door.

A couple more seconds go past, and before the elevator door can ding open, she's back at your door. "You know, if you ever need to interview a hero again and you want to ad a new perspective— Or if maybe Clark can't do it, for whatever reason… Well, i was just thinking, we could interchange phone numbers…?"

Her words have a tapered off ending to them, like she'd run out of breath before she could really let them out. Although, if she had been the one to speak, you didn't fully understand why your lungs felt like they were being held tight.

Nodding your head, you reached out to pick up the offered device, mindlessly typing the digits in before returning it. The butterflies returned with her smile, and the lack of air turned into almost passing out when she leaned in to kiss your cheek. "Thank you, pretty girl."

Before you could catch your breath, she was already gone, elevator long forgotten on your floor as she'd fled through the staircase just to the left of it. With a hand reaching up, fingers lightly caressing where you could still feel the press of her lips to your skin, you'd manage to close the door and make your way back to the couch.

Your phone dinged again, a cute greeting sent by Diana so you could add her number to your contact list. However, that wasn't what caught your attention, it was Clark's message that you had chosen to ignore earlier.

«You're welcome for that. How was the date anyway? ;)»

⋆. 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 𐙚˚ || 𓄹 ⊹ . 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬 . 𐐒𐐚₊⋆｡˚

Comments and reblogs are welcome and encouraged <3 Do not copy, repost, plagiarize, translate or feed any of my work into ai // © gothamorphosis 2026 all rights reserved

𓂃 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 — ♡ Let me know if you want to be added!

You pictured the toothbrush in their bathroom, the shampoo you had bought once and never had to replace yourself because Dick noticed when the bottle ran low. You pictured the drawer in Dick’s dresser that had started as a place for an emergency shirt after a rainstorm and somehow become home to leggings, socks, sleep shorts, bras, and enough underwear that Wally had once texted you from the laundry room in a panic to ask if the black lace thing could go in the dryer.

He had followed the message with seven question marks, three sweating emojis, and a separate apology that only said: I’M BEING RESPECTFUL BUT ALSO I AM CONFUSED BY FABRIC.

You had laughed so hard you had almost dropped your phone in the sink.

You lived nearby. You slept over often enough that the doorman barely blinked when you came in. You had your own apartment, your own bills, your own life, but the gravity of Dick and Wally’s place had become familiar. Safe. There were two bedrooms, technically. Wally’s room existed, even if it held more laundry baskets and half-disassembled equipment than any reasonable adult man should own. Dick’s room had the biggest bed, which had become everyone’s argument for ending up there whenever a movie ran late or one of you had a bad day and did not want to sleep alone.

Nothing had ever happened in that bed.

That was not for lack of wanting.

You were not stupid. You knew what attraction felt like when it sat under your ribs and refused to behave. You knew what it meant when Dick came out of the shower with a towel low on his hips and your brain forgot the English language for three to five business days. You knew what it meant when Wally sprawled across the couch in sweatpants and an old Keystone State shirt, hair still damp, one ankle hooked over yours like casual contact was a form of breathing.

You also knew what it meant to be careful.

They were your best friends. They were Nightwing and the Flash. They trusted you with their identities, their schedules, their emergency contacts, and the strange civilian pieces of a life built around impossible work. You knew why Dick disappeared during galas, what comm chatter sounded like through a half-open bedroom door, and which cabinet held the protein bars Wally claimed tasted fine because his standards were a public health crisis.

You were not part of the fight, but you were part of the aftermath. You knew how to leave lights on without making it look like waiting. You knew how to ask if a night had gone badly without using the word dangerous. You knew how to sit beside them afterward and let the room be quiet until one of them came back to himself enough to make a joke.

It made lines strange.

Evan laughed at something on his phone, then remembered you existed and put it face down with a look that was probably meant to seem apologetic. “Sorry. Work.”

“You said that,” you said.

“Yeah. Big project. Everyone wants a piece of me right now.” He smiled as if inviting you to be impressed. “You know how it is.”

You did, unfortunately. You knew exactly how it was to sit across from someone who liked the idea of being observed but had very little interest in looking back. Evan had been charming for the first twenty minutes. He had asked about your job, your favorite restaurants, the neighborhood. Then he had asked about your friends.

Not all your friends.

Just the two men whose names came up too easily because you were too used to mentioning them.

Dick had picked you up from work after your car battery died. Wally had helped you build the shelves in your living room, which mostly meant taking over halfway through and then making you pretend to be impressed when one of them leaned left. Dick knew a place with the best soup dumplings. Wally had an opinion about every ice cream shop within a five-mile radius. Dick said this. Wally did that. Dick and Wally, Wally and Dick, their names folded into your life with the intimacy of muscle memory.

Evan had noticed.

At first, he had teased. Then he had probed. Then he had made a joke about you keeping “two guys on retainer,” and your smile had gone stiff enough that a better man would have noticed.

Evan was not a better man.

“So these friends of yours,” he said, reaching for his drink. “They always this involved?”

“They’re my best friends.”

“Sure.” His mouth curved. “Just sounds intense.”

You looked at him for a long moment. There were a hundred things you could have said, and most of them would have been true enough to hurt. You could have said that intensity was not always a red flag. Sometimes it was two men who carried cities on their backs and still remembered to text you when the sidewalks froze. Sometimes it was remembering to leave your balcony unlocked, because Dick and Wally had both taught you that emergencies rarely cared about front doors. Sometimes it was a hand on the small of your back in a crowd, not to claim you, but to make sure you could leave if you needed to.

Instead, you said, “I don’t think this is working.”

Evan blinked. “What?”

“This.” You reached for your bag and stood before politeness could talk you into another twenty minutes of disappointment. “It was nice meeting you.”

His chair scraped as he stood too. “Wait, seriously? Because I asked about your friends?”

Because you asked like they were a problem, you thought. Because you said my name three times and made it sound less personal each time. Because I have spent years being known by men who notice everything and still pretend not to see the way they look at me, and somehow this is the loneliest I’ve felt all week.

“Take care, Evan.”

“You’re really just leaving?”

“Yes.”

Outside, the night had gone damp and silver with the threat of rain. Gotham did not do gentle weather. Even drizzle felt like it had a grudge. You stood beneath the restaurant awning long enough to order a car, then canceled it when the app told you the driver was twelve minutes away and the walk to Dick and Wally’s was eight.

Your phone buzzed before you reached the end of the block.

Dick: Date going okay?

You looked at the message and snorted despite yourself.

Wally, immediately after: DON’T ANSWER THAT IF YOU’RE MAKING OUT.

A pause, and then instantly another message: Actually answer with a thumbs-up so I know you’re alive but emotionally unavailable.

Dick: Please don’t listen to him.

Wally: Please listen to me specifically.

You typed with one hand as you walked.

You: Date ended. Heading to yours unless you’re both busy saving the world.

Dick answered almost immediately.

Dick: We’re home. Door’s unlocked.

Wally: Which means you are legally obligated to come in, eat something, and not touch the dumplings marked WALLY.

Dick: They’re not marked.

Wally: Emotionally they are.

You smiled down at your phone, and the ache of the evening shifted into something more familiar, which was not the same as easy. That was another problem. They could make you feel less alone from across the city with three stupid texts and a threat about dumplings.

The doorman let you in with a nod. Upstairs, the apartment glowed in the low, warm way it always did when they knew you were coming. The lamp near the couch was on, the kitchen light was dimmed, and the television had been muted on some nature documentary Wally watched with the intense investment of someone who had opinions about whether cheetahs were “respectably fast” or “coasting on branding.”

To anyone else, the apartment probably looked chaotic; to you, it was a map of old landings, bad nights, shared blankets, and quiet recoveries.

The faint scuff near the balcony door was from months ago, when Dick had landed badly enough to pretend the floor had offended him. The patched spot on the wall near the hall was from Wally accidentally vibrating through it after sneezing at superspeed. The blanket over the back of the couch was yours, bought during a cold snap because their apartment ran chilly and both of them had tried to offer you their hoodies at the same time.

Wally was upside down on the couch when you came in, one leg hooked over the back cushions, a takeout container balanced on his stomach with criminal confidence. Dick sat at the far end with his laptop open and one ankle crossed over his knee, looking less like Nightwing than he ever did in public and more like the man who sent you grocery reminders because he knew you forgot to eat when work got bad.

They both looked up.

Wally’s eyes moved over your face and softened at once. “Oh, I hate him.”

You paused with your hand still on the door. “You don’t know what happened.”

“I know your face.”

“You’re upside down.”

“That gives me a fresh perspective.”

Dick closed his laptop but did not ask anything immediately. That was his tell. He watched you lock the door behind yourself, watched you toe off your shoes into the little space beside theirs, watched your hand linger near your coat as if you had forgotten what came next. He knew when to step forward and when to let silence do the gentler work.

“Tea?” he asked.

Your throat tightened. “Please.”

“Drawer clothes first?” Wally offered, still upside down. “Or dumpling first? Choose wisely. One path has elastic waistbands. The other has delicious filling.”

You looked at the takeout container on his stomach. “Those are the emotionally marked dumplings?”

“Emotionally, yes. Legally, they belong to the household.”

“You are the one who threatened me over them five minutes ago.”

“I was a different man five minutes ago.”

Dick stood, taking your coat before you could decide where to put it. “Go change. I’ll make the tea.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

That was the thing about them. They were always making room for you without turning it into a debt.

You went to the bathroom first, because the evening still clung to your skin in the form of expensive restaurant air and Evan’s cologne from when he had leaned too close to show you a photo you had not asked to see. Their bathroom looked less like a bachelor apartment than it had any right to. That was partly because Dick liked order and partly because you had slowly bullied both of them into owning more than one towel. Your toothbrush sat in the cup between theirs. Your cleanser was on the sink. Your hair ties lived in a small ceramic dish Wally had once knocked over, caught, and then bowed to like he had rescued a civilian from certain death.

You washed your face, breathed until your chest stopped feeling tight, and went to Dick’s room because that was where your drawer was.

It should have felt strange. Sometimes it did, but only in moments like this, when you were already raw and tired and too aware of the fact that your underwear sat folded beside one of Dick’s old Gotham Academy shirts.

You peeled yourself out of your date clothes, piece by piece, bra included, and dropped everything into the hamper, as if shedding the evening might make it stop clinging to your skin. Then you dug through the drawer until you found one of Dick’s shirts, soft from too many washes and big enough on you that you didn’t bother with shorts.

It smelled like him in a way that made your chest ache a little: clean citrus, worn leather, cedar cologne, warm skin, and city air after rain. The hem fell halfway down your thighs, familiar enough to loosen something behind your ribs.

Ownership had become a loose concept among the three of you anyway. Half the clothes in this apartment had passed between hands so many times that claiming anything outright felt pointless.

You told yourself not to think about that.

It worked for almost forty seconds.

When you came back out, Dick had made your tea exactly how you liked it and set your mug on the coffee table. Your mug, because of course he knew which one was yours without asking. It sat warm beside the dumplings, filled exactly the way you liked it, and something about that hurt more than the date had.

Wally had righted himself by then, though his hair looked ridiculous from hanging upside down. He patted the cushion between himself and Dick. “Designated recovery spot is open.”

“You’re making it sound dramatic.”

“I’m emotionally preparing to commit crimes against Evan’s router. Let me have my process.”

You picked up your tea instead of sitting. “You don’t even know his last name.”

“I can work with a first name and vibes.”

“That is not reassuring.”

Dick’s mouth curved faintly. “It shouldn’t be.”

You took one of the dumplings.

Wally gasped with theatrical betrayal, then nudged the container closer because he was incapable of committing to the bit if you were actually hungry. Dick shifted on the couch so there was space beside him too, casual enough that it did not look like an invitation you had to accept.

You ate the dumpling standing up because sitting down felt too much like admitting the date had gotten to you. Wally watched you chew with the concerned intensity of someone waiting for a bomb squad report. Dick said nothing at all, which was worse, because Dick knew when silence would get more out of you than pressure.

Eventually, you sighed. “It was just disappointing.”

Wally’s face softened. “That’s worse than hateable.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Hateable gives me something to do. Disappointing just makes me want to feed you and maybe commit a small act of Wi-Fi sabotage.”

“That is not a proportionate response.”

“I said small.”

Dick leaned back against the couch, one arm stretched along the back cushions. He was in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, hair still damp from a shower, bare feet tucked beneath the coffee table, already folded into the quiet rhythm of the apartment. He looked warm and human and untouchably handsome in a way that made you want to be irritated with him on principle.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing dramatic.”

“That’s not an answer.”

You looked at him over the rim of your mug. “He was fine. He asked questions. He laughed at appropriate moments. He checked his phone every time I spoke for more than thirty seconds.”

Wally grimaced. “Immediate jail.”

“He was nice enough.”

“Jail.”

You huffed, but the laugh did not last. “Then he started asking about you two.”

Dick’s expression changed first, not dramatically, but enough for you to notice. Wally sat up straighter, the dumpling container tilting until you steadied it with your knee.

“What kind of asking?” Dick said.

“The kind where curiosity turns into suspicion because I mentioned you too much.”

Wally blinked. “You mentioned us?”

“You built my bookshelf, Wally. It came up.”

“I built it beautifully.”

“One shelf leans.”

“That shelf has character.”

Dick’s gaze stayed on you. “What did he say?”

You shrugged, but it felt thin even to you. “He said it sounded intense.”

Wally’s humor faded.

Dick did not move, but the room seemed to shift around his stillness. “And?”

“And I realized I didn’t want to explain you guys to someone who had already decided you were a problem.”

For a moment, neither of them answered.

The silence was not awkward. It was just full. Full of every late-night call they had answered, every time one of them had walked you home, every takeout order split three ways, every old fear you had swallowed when they were out and the news was bad. Full of your toothbrush in their bathroom and your clothes in Dick’s dresser and the fact that Wally knew your favorite cereal changed its recipe six months ago because you had complained about it once and he had treated it like a civic emergency.

You moved to the couch because standing suddenly felt ridiculous.

Wally shifted at once, making space for you between them. Dick did the same from the other side, both of them adjusting without speaking until your usual place was waiting. You sat down with your tea balanced between your hands and tried not to think about how familiar it felt to have Wally’s knee against yours and Dick’s arm stretched along the cushion behind you.

“Did he make you feel unsafe?” Dick asked.

“No.”

“Good,” Wally said, too quickly.

You glanced at him.

He held up both hands. “Emotionally disappointing men are still on thin ice, but I’m glad he didn’t make it worse.”

“He didn’t make me feel unsafe,” you said. “He just made me feel…observed badly.”

Dick’s brows drew together.

“You and Dick observe people professionally,” Wally said, because of course he knew exactly where your mind had gone. “That’s different.”

“It should be creepy that you know that.”

“I contain multitudes.”

Dick’s thumb moved once against the back of the couch, close enough that you felt the motion near your shoulder. “What do you mean by observed badly?”

“I mean he looked at me like he was trying to figure out what role I could play. Good listener. Pretty enough. Convenient. Available.” You stared into your tea. “And I kept thinking that maybe that’s what dating is now. Figuring out which version of yourself someone wants and deciding if you can tolerate being her for a dinner.”

Wally made a quiet sound under his breath, almost angry.

Dick said your name softly.

You hated that. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because he said it like he knew you. Like there was nothing you had to perform for him to care.

You wrapped both hands around the mug before they could give you away. “Can I ask you something?”

Wally’s knee pressed more firmly against yours. “Always.”

Dick’s attention sharpened. “Of course.”

You should have asked something else. You should have asked whether they wanted to watch a movie, whether Wally had eaten anything other than dumplings, or whether Dick’s laptop meant casework or Wayne Foundation work. There were safer questions in the world. You knew plenty of them.

Instead, you held your mug a little tighter and asked, “How do you know if a man really wants you?”

The apartment went quiet.

It was not the ordinary quiet of late night, when the city hummed beyond the windows and the refrigerator clicked on in the kitchen. It was not even the dangerous quiet you knew from them when a case followed them home and sat heavy in the room. 

This was different. This was the kind of silence that came from two men who had both reached for an answer and found it lodged somewhere too close to the heart.

Wally stopped moving first. That was how you knew you had done something terrible. Wally was motion even when he was still, all restless fingers and bouncing knees and little shifts of energy that made the air around him feel alive. Now he sat frozen, his eyes fixed on you like you had said his name in a language he had not expected you to know.

Dick’s stillness was less obvious but more frightening. His hand paused on the back of the couch, fingers curled loosely into the cushion. His face did not change much. Dick had been trained by too many people, hurt by too many people, loved by too many people he had lost. His control was a beautiful, terrible thing. But you were close enough to notice the small things: the slight dip of his chin, the inhale he did not finish, the way his gaze flicked to Wally before returning to you.

You looked between them.

Then, because your mouth had apparently decided to ruin your life, you said, “Wow. I may have asked the wrong men.”

Wally laughed once, breathless and strange. “Yeah.”

Dick’s voice was quieter. “Maybe not.”

The words landed softly. That made them worse.

You stared at him.

Dick looked away first, which he almost never did. He looked toward the window, toward the city beyond it, toward the version of himself that could leap off rooftops and still not know how to answer one honest question in his own living room.

“What do you mean by wants you?” he asked.

It was such a Dick question. Careful. Precise. A way to create structure when the floor had begun to tilt. You could have let him have it. You could have narrowed the conversation into something clinical and survivable.

You did not.

“I mean me,” you said. “Not just sex. Not just attention. Not someone who likes that I’m available or convenient, or that I listen well. How do you know when he actually wants you?”

Wally dragged a hand down his face. “That is a dangerously sincere question for a room where I was just upside down with dumplings.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He looked at you then, really looked, and the humor in him had gone soft around the edges. “He remembers things.”

You blinked. “What?”

“A man who really wants you remembers things he doesn’t get credit for remembering.” Wally’s fingers flexed against his thigh. “The little stuff. The song you skipped three seconds in because it made your face do that thing. The restaurant you said was overrated even though everyone else likes it. The way your voice changes when you’re about to say you’re fine and you absolutely aren’t.”

Your throat tightened.

Wally shrugged like he could make the answer casual if he moved enough. He could not. “He pays attention when there’s nothing in it for him. That’s a big one, I think.”

You looked at Dick because you had to look away from Wally.

Dick’s expression had changed. Something careful had cracked in it, enough for you to see the want beneath. Not lust, though that was there too, impossible to miss now that you were looking directly at it. This was older. Quieter. It had roots.

“He becomes more careful,” Dick said.

Your chest hurt.

“Careful how?”

“With you.” Dick’s gaze held yours. “With what he asks for. With what he takes for granted. Wanting someone is easy. Most people can do that part. But if he really wants you, he cares what his wanting costs you.”

Wally was watching him now too.

Dick’s mouth tightened, like he had already said more than he meant to and still could not stop. “He doesn’t make you responsible for managing his desire. He doesn’t punish you for not returning it the way he hoped. He doesn’t turn your kindness into permission.”

The room felt too small around you.

You thought of all the times Dick had walked you home without making you feel like you were being escorted. The way he always matched your pace, whether you were in heels after an event or slippers on a late-night corner store run. The way his hand hovered near your back in crowded places but never settled unless you leaned into it first. The way he noticed when men looked at you too long and somehow placed himself between you and them without making a scene.

You thought of Wally texting you pictures of six different cereal boxes from the grocery store because you had mentioned once, weeks earlier, that your childhood favorite had changed its recipe and tasted wrong now. You thought of him showing up with soup before you admitted you were sick. You thought of him lying on your living room floor, assembling your bookshelf at human speed because you had accused him of cheating, laughing every time you handed him the wrong screw.

He remembers things.

He becomes more careful.

You had asked for a hypothetical answer.

They had handed you a mirror.

Your laugh came out too soft. “You both got very serious.”

Wally swallowed. “Yeah. Occupational hazard.”

“Is it?”

“No,” Dick said.

Wally shot him a look, half warning and half relief. Dick ignored him, because of course he did. Courage was easier for him when it looked like stepping off a ledge.

“No?” you asked.

Dick leaned forward, forearms braced loosely on his knees. “It’s not an occupational hazard. It’s you.”

The silence after that was different.

Wally closed his eyes briefly. “Well. Okay. We’re doing this.”

Dick did not look away from you. “Only if she wants to.”

Your heart was beating too hard. You wondered if Wally could hear it. Of course he could hear it. He could probably hear your pulse trying to kick its way out of your throat.

“You’re doing what?” you asked, though you knew.

Wally opened his eyes. There was fear in them, which seemed impossible and then immediately made too much sense. Wally West could run faster than light. He could cross cities between heartbeats. He could laugh in the face of gods and monsters and still sit in front of you terrified because this mattered.

“Answering honestly,” he said.

Dick’s gaze flicked over your face with agonizing care. “We didn’t want to put this on you.”

“This?”

“You know what he means,” Wally said, softer than his usual voice. “Us. How we feel. How long we’ve felt it.”

“How long?”

Dick exhaled. “Long enough that I don’t know how to answer that without incriminating myself.”

Despite everything, a laugh escaped you.

Wally looked almost offended. “Oh, he’s being conservative. I can incriminate us both in detail.”

“Wally.”

“What? She asked.”

“I asked how long,” you said.

Wally looked at you, and for once, he did not rush. “For me, it crept up. One day you were asleep on the couch wearing Dick’s sweatshirt and my socks, and you woke up just enough to tell me I had to stop eating chips directly over your head or you were going to haunt me after death. And I thought, oh. This is probably permanent.”

Your heart did something foolish.

Dick looked down, his thumb moving over his knuckles. “For me, it was after the bridge incident.”

You frowned. “That was two years ago.”

“I know.”

Wally’s expression softened, but he let Dick speak.

Dick’s voice remained steady, though not untouched. “You were furious with us.”

“You both disappeared for eighteen hours.”

“We had comms trouble.”

“There was a collapsed building.”

“Also that.” His mouth curved faintly, then faded. “When we got back, you yelled for fifteen minutes. You had three different news feeds open, a first aid kit on the table, and you were shaking so hard you had to put the kettle down because you almost dropped it.”

“I remember.”

“You told me I didn’t get to treat my life like collateral damage just because I was good at surviving.” Dick looked up. “Most people are relieved when we come back. You were relieved too, but you were angry before you were grateful. You loved us enough to be angry.”

You could not breathe properly.

“Dick.”

“I know.” He gave you a small, helpless smile. “Bad timing.”

“Historically, our brand,” Wally said, but his voice was too gentle to turn it into a joke.

You looked between them. The question you had not asked sat in the room with the rest of you, breathing steadily. It should have been the difficult part, maybe. Two men. Two best friends. Two confessions. But there was something in the way they sat, angled not only toward you but toward each other, that made the answer less impossible than it should have been.

“Both of you?” you asked.

Dick nodded.

“We know,” Wally said.

“And you’re…okay with that?”

Wally’s eyebrows rose. “With Dick having taste? Occasionally.”

Dick huffed despite himself.

You stared at them until Wally’s smile softened.

“We talked about it,” he said. “Badly at first. Then better.”

“When?”

“After the bridge,” Dick said.

“Before that,” Wally corrected.

Dick glanced at him.

Wally lifted a shoulder. “You talked after the bridge. I started talking before that. You just did your emotionally constipated Bat thing and pretended my point had been theoretical.”

“There was nothing theoretical about you eating an entire pizza on my fire escape while telling me I was in love with our best friend.”

“Our best friend was inside making tea and wearing your hoodie.”

“You weren’t subtle.”

“Neither were you. You kept looking at her like she was an answer.”

Something in your chest split cleanly open.

Dick’s expression shifted, embarrassment and affection crossing it too quickly to hide. You realized, suddenly, that they had loved you in the same rooms where you had loved them, all of you careful in different directions, all of you pretending the shape of your life was normal because naming it would change everything.

“What about you two?” you asked.

Their silence lasted half a second too long.

Then Wally said, “Also complicated.”

Dick gave him a look. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“You say that now, but wait until I explain it using a metaphor about nachos.”

“Do not.”

You looked from one to the other. The pieces rearranged themselves with quiet, devastating clarity. The closeness that had always seemed natural because it was Dick and Wally. The way Wally’s hand lingered at Dick’s neck when he thought you were not looking. The way Dick knew Wally’s moods before Wally had done anything louder than breathe. The fact that Wally could steal food off Dick’s plate without losing fingers. The mornings you had walked into their kitchen and found them standing too close, both turning toward you with the same guilty-casual energy that had made you roll your eyes and reach for cereal.

“Oh,” you said.

Wally winced. “Good oh or bad oh?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Fair.”

Dick leaned back carefully, giving you space without leaving. That was the worst part. The best part. The impossible part. Even now, with confession lying open between you, his first instinct was to make sure you did not feel trapped in a room where you had always felt safe.

“You don’t have to know tonight,” he said. “You came here after a bad date, and we are all sitting on a couch pretending this hasn’t been years in the making. This is not exactly a neutral environment for a life-changing conversation.”

Wally nodded solemnly. “Also, I’m still upside-down spiritually from the dumpling betrayal.”

“You offered me one.”

“I contain contradictions.”

You laughed again, and this time it broke something loose. Not the tension, exactly. That remained, but it warmed, softened at the edges by how deeply, absurdly yours they were.

“You were both just going to keep this to yourselves?” you asked.

Dick’s eyes returned to yours. “If that was what kept you comfortable.”

“That’s stupid.”

Wally pointed at Dick. “I said that.”

“Repeatedly,” Dick said.

“Because it’s true.” Wally looked at you with a fragile kind of hope. “But we also weren’t going to make you feel like this place came with strings. You sleep here. You have a key. You know the vigilante stuff. You know where we hide the good bandages and the terrible protein bars. That’s a lot of trust to mess with.”

You understood. That was the terrible thing. You understood too well. This apartment was your soft landing. It was where you came when the world had teeth. If they had said the wrong thing at the wrong time, if they had made you feel observed instead of known, the loss would have been enormous.

But they had not done that.

They had waited until you asked a question they could no longer answer without handing you the truth.

“Wally,” you said.

He sat up straighter. “Yeah?”

“Come here.”

Wally was already close, but he still moved like the distance mattered. His knee shifted against yours, his body turning toward you on the couch, and then he stopped with enough space left between you that it made your chest hurt. He was letting you close the last of it. He smelled like detergent, mint gum, and the clean, electric warmth that always seemed to cling to him.

“You’re shaking,” you said.

Wally huffed a laugh, almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“That’s unusual.”

“Lots of things are unusual right now.” His eyes searched yours. “But I’m here.”

You reached up and touched the side of his face. Wally went very still. He had leaned into you a thousand times before, his head in your lap during movie nights, his shoulder bumping yours in grocery aisles, his legs tangled with yours under Dick’s comforter after long days and worse dreams. This was different because you let it be different. You watched the realization move through him, bright and startled and almost painful.

“Can I kiss you?” you asked.

Wally’s breath caught. “Yes. Please. Very yes.”

You smiled despite the shake in your chest and kissed him.

For a man who could outrun almost everything, Wally did not rush you. His mouth met yours carefully, warmly, a little unsteady at first, like he had imagined this enough times to be shocked by the reality of it. Then your fingers slid into his hair, and he made a sound against you that turned the entire room molten. His hand came to your waist, stopped there, asked without words. When you leaned closer, his grip tightened just enough to make you feel the restraint in it.

He tasted faintly of mint and soy sauce.

He kissed like he had been waiting so long that patience had become its own kind of hunger.

When you pulled back, his eyes stayed closed for a second.

“Okay,” he said faintly. “That happened. I’m normal about it.”

“You are visibly not normal about it.”

“I’m experiencing multiple emotions at speeds previously unknown to science.”

Dick laughed softly from your other side, but when you looked at him, the humor in his face did not disguise the want. It made it worse, actually. Wally was bright with it, nearly vibrating under your hand. Dick was still, but his stillness had become charged, every line of him drawn tight around the effort not to reach for you before you asked.

You turned toward him.

Dick watched you come closer by inches, your knee shifting against his thigh, your hand settling carefully on the couch beside him. He did not move until you were facing him fully. Then his hands lifted, not touching yet, hovering near your hips. There he was again, careful even while looking at you like restraint was costing him something.

“Can I?” he asked.

You nodded.

His hands settled on you, warm through the borrowed shirt. Your breath left you unevenly.

“You’re sure?” Dick asked.

Your mouth curved before you could stop it. “Do you ask everyone that after they kiss someone you’re in love with?”

Wally made an incoherent sound behind you.

Dick’s mouth curved. “No.”

“Then yes.”

The first brush of his lips was soft enough to undo you. Dick kissed differently than Wally. He kissed like falling with control, like every angle mattered, like he could make gentleness as devastating as force if he paid enough attention. One hand slid to your back, the other staying at your hip. He did not pull. He invited, and somehow that was worse. You shifted closer on the couch until your thigh pressed against his, and his fingers flexed against your spine.

The second kiss was deeper.

Dick made a low sound when your hand found his jaw, and you felt it through his chest because you were close enough now, finally, to know what his wanting sounded like. Wally shifted behind you, and Dick’s hand tightened just slightly, as if the reminder that Wally was watching did not cool the heat but changed its direction.

You pulled away only enough to breathe.

Dick’s eyes were dark. “This can stop here.”

“It can,” you said.

Wally’s voice came from behind your shoulder, quieter now. “Does it?”

You looked over your shoulder at him. He was still on the couch, hair messy from your hand, one knee angled toward yours like he had started to move closer and stopped himself from asking for too much. His eyes stayed fixed on you with an openness that made the choice feel less like stepping into the unknown and more like coming home to a room you had somehow never entered.

You thought of your toothbrush in the bathroom. Your mug on the coffee table. Your clothes in Dick’s drawer. Wally’s texts. Dick’s hands. The bed you had slept in between them so many times, waking warm and safe and pretending your heart did not break a little every morning you had to climb out of it.

“No,” you said. “I don’t think it does.”

Wally inhaled so sharply that it was almost a laugh.

Dick’s hands tightened at your hips, and then he kissed you again, catching the small sound that slipped out of you before you could pretend it had not happened. You let yourself lean into him, let yourself feel the steadiness of his body and the warmth of Wally coming up behind you. Wally did not press in immediately. He waited until you reached back, found his wrist, and drew his arm around your waist.

His breath hit your hair.

“Oh,” he said softly.

You smiled against Dick’s mouth. “You keep saying that.”

“I keep learning things.”

Dick’s mouth brushed the corner of yours. “He’s a very committed student.”

“Top of my class,” Wally said.

“You once put Pop-Tarts in a panini press.”

“They were incredible.”

“They caught fire.”

“Briefly.”

You laughed, and Dick kissed the sound from your mouth.

🐦🗝️⚡

The walk to his bedroom should not have felt like crossing a border, but it did. You had walked that hall half-asleep, tipsy, sick, laughing, furious, worried. You had stumbled through it with a blanket around your shoulders after nightmares you blamed on bad movies and they pretended to believe you. You had leaned against the doorframe watching Dick fold laundry while Wally sprawled across the bed claiming moral support. You knew the creak of the floor, the shape of the room in the dark, the side of the mattress that dipped because Wally threw himself onto it with no respect for furniture.

Tonight, when Dick opened the door, you hesitated.

Both of them noticed.

“Hey,” Wally said immediately. “We can go back to the couch. Or stop. Or make tea. Or I can run to Canada and bring back those maple cookies you like, although I feel like that might be an overcorrection.”

You looked at him over your shoulder. “Canada?”

“Panic suggestion.”

Dick’s hand touched your back gently. “Talk to us.”

The words settled you. Not because they fixed the nerves, but because they made room for them.

“I’ve slept in this bed with you both a thousand times,” you said. “It feels strange that this is the first time I’m nervous.”

Dick’s expression softened. “It’s allowed to feel strange.”

“Good strange,” Wally added. “Hopefully. Eventually. Maybe right now it’s weird strange. We can work with weird strange.”

You smiled. “You are so bad at being reassuring.”

“I’m actually fantastic at it. You’re just seeing me under extreme conditions.”

Dick’s thumb moved once against your back. “Nothing happens unless all three of us want it.”

You looked at him. “All three?”

His gaze moved briefly to Wally, and something passed between them that was so familiar and intimate you wondered how you had ever missed it. “All three.”

Wally came closer, slower this time. “For the record, I want it. You. This. Him. Us. But wanting doesn’t mean I need to have it tonight.”

Your heart twisted. “That was almost smooth.”

“I have hidden depths.”

“You just brought up Canada.”

“Some of my depths are geographical.”

Dick’s laugh was quiet, fond, and beautiful. It loosened the last of the fear sitting beneath your ribs.

You stepped into the bedroom.

The room was exactly as you knew it. Dick’s bed stood against the far wall, too large for one person and too often occupied by three. The comforter was rumpled from the morning, because Dick made his bed only when stress turned him into a machine and Wally took personal offense at tucked corners. Your book sat on the nightstand beside Dick’s, a bookmark halfway through the chapter you had been reading three nights ago while Wally slept sideways across the foot of the bed.

There were pieces of you everywhere.

You turned to face them.

“I want you,” you said, and watched the words land. “Both of you. I don’t know exactly how this works yet, but I want to find out.”

Dick’s eyes closed briefly.

Wally’s smile trembled at the edges. “We can do finding out.”

“Slowly,” Dick said.

“Sure,” Wally said quickly. “Slow is great. Love slow. Big fan.”

You gave him a look.

“I can be slow,” he insisted.

Dick’s mouth tilted. “He can.”

The fact that Dick knew that should not have sent heat down your spine, but it did. Both of them saw it happen. Of course they did. Dick’s gaze sharpened; Wally’s breath hitched.

“Oh,” Wally said.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” you said, though your own voice had changed.

“I’m not surprised. I’m delighted. There’s a difference.”

Dick stepped closer, his hand finding your waist again. “Tell us what you want first.”

You swallowed. “I want you to stop looking like you’re waiting for me to vanish.”

That hurt them. You saw it.

Dick touched your cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Wally came up behind you, close enough that his warmth reached your back without trapping you. “Say that again in like five minutes. My brain needs repetition.”

You leaned back into him. His hands settled at your hips, then paused. You covered one with your own and drew it more securely around you.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you said.

Wally exhaled against your hair, and Dick kissed you again.

There was nothing uncertain in it this time. Dick kissed you like he had been given an answer and intended to honor it thoroughly. Wally’s mouth found your shoulder through the thin shirt, his breath warm, his hands careful at your waist. You were suddenly, dizzyingly aware of being between them. Dick in front of you, steady and beautiful, one hand at your jaw and the other at your hip. Wally behind you, restless energy banked into trembling restraint, his lips moving against the side of your neck as if he was learning what made you sigh.

You had been touched before. Wanted, even. But you understood the difference now with brutal clarity. Wanting, from them, did not feel like being consumed. It felt like being attended to. It felt like every breath you took mattered.

Dick drew back first, his fingers catching lightly at the hem of his shirt where it rested against your hips. “Can I take this off?”

It took you a second to understand.

Then you laughed, a little breathless. “It’s yours, I think.”

“It is,” Dick said, and there was something in his voice that made your stomach dip.

Wally’s mouth brushed your neck. “For the record, I fully support its current use.”

Dick’s gaze stayed on you. “And its removal?”

Wally hummed. “Also that.”

You started to lift your arms, but Wally’s hands tightened just slightly at your waist.

“Wait,” he said, then seemed to regret saying it when both you and Dick went still.

You turned your head enough to look at him. “Wait?”

“Not stop,” Wally said quickly. “Definitely not stop. I just—” He huffed a laugh against your shoulder, embarrassed and helpless. “I need to say something before my brain stops working.”

Dick’s expression softened. “That bad?”

“That bad,” Wally said.

You waited.

Wally’s thumb moved once against your hip, brushing the bare skin beneath the hem of Dick’s shirt. “You know we love how comfortable you are here, right?”

Your breath caught at the sudden softness in his voice.

“This is your place too,” he said. “Not officially, maybe, but in all the ways that count. Your mug is in the kitchen. Your toothbrush is in the bathroom. Your clothes are in Dick’s dresser. You come over and change into one of our shirts like it’s nothing, like you trust us so much you don’t even think about it anymore.”

Dick’s hand stilled at your waist.

Wally swallowed. “And we love that. We really, really love that.” His voice dipped, turning rougher. “But sometimes you walk around in one of our shirts and those little sleep shorts, or no shorts, or you reach up for something and we see the edge of your panties, and I swear to God, I have almost died in this apartment more times than I have in the field.”

Your face went hot.

“Wally,” Dick said, but the warning was ruined by the strain in his voice.

“What? We’re being honest tonight.” Wally’s mouth brushed the corner of your jaw. “You bend over to look for something in the fridge. You fall asleep with the shirt riding up your thighs. You sit on the counter in socks and underwear and one of Dick’s old shirts, drinking tea out of that chipped mug, and we both have to stand there acting like our souls didn’t just leave our bodies.”

You looked at Dick. “Both of you?”

Dick’s eyes met yours, dark and steady and helplessly warm. “Both of us.”

Something inside you tightened.

“It was never just the shirt,” Dick said, his fingers smoothing over the hem as if he had wanted to touch it like this for years. “It was that you trusted us enough to stop guarding yourself here.”

That undid you more than Wally’s words had.

“Oh,” you said softly.

Wally let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. That too. I was getting there.”

Dick’s mouth curved, but his gaze stayed on you. “Can I take it off?”

This time, when you lifted your arms, neither of them stopped you.

Dick pulled the shirt over your head slowly, careful not to let the fabric catch. The air touched your skin, and both men went quiet again. Not silent in that fearful way from the living room, but quiet with attention. Wally’s hand spread over your stomach, warm and reverent. Dick’s gaze moved over you with visible effort, not lingering anywhere you had not invited yet and somehow making that restraint feel more intimate than staring would have been.

“You’re beautiful,” Dick said.

It was simple. It should not have undone you.

Wally kissed your shoulder. “So beautiful.”

Your instinct was to deflect. Make a joke. Tell Wally his taste had been damaged by eating cereal out of a saucepan. Tell Dick he was legally obligated to say nice things because he had known you too long. You had a dozen exits ready, all of them familiar.

Dick seemed to know. His thumb touched your lower lip before the joke could leave it.

“Let us say it,” he murmured.

Your chest ached. “Okay.”

Wally’s arms tightened around you for half a second. “Good. Because I’ve got years of material.”

“Wally.”

“What? I’m pacing myself.”

Dick looked at him over your shoulder, and the warmth in his expression made your pulse skip. “Are you?”

“Badly.”

You turned your head and kissed Wally before he could say anything else. He made a pleased sound, hands flexing at your waist, and Dick’s fingers drifted down your side with aching care. The kiss turned messy faster than the first one. Maybe because there was so little between you already. Maybe because Wally’s self-control had limits, and one of them was apparently you turning in his arms to lick into his mouth while wearing only your panties, with Dick close enough to touch you both.

Dick’s hand slid over your ribs and stopped just below your breast, asking without words.

You broke the kiss with Wally, breath unsteady. “You can.”

Dick lifted his eyes to yours. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His hands covered you, palms warm beneath your breasts, thumbs brushing softly until your breath caught. Wally watched over your shoulder, eyes dark and bright at once, then lowered his mouth to yours again as Dick touched you. It was too much and exactly enough. Wally kissed like he wanted to swallow every sound you made; Dick touched like he wanted to discover them one by one.

Your hands found Dick’s chest. He was warm under your palms, solid and familiar in a way that made the moment feel more dangerous than if he had been a stranger. You knew this body in a dozen almost-innocent ways. You knew the weight of his arm thrown across your waist in sleep, the pressure of his shoulder against yours in a crowded booth, the warmth of him behind you when he reached over your head for a cabinet because he enjoyed being obnoxiously tall.

Now your hand slid over his heartbeat, and he went still beneath your touch.

“You okay?” you asked.

Dick caught your wrist and brought your hand to his mouth. “Yes.”

“Will you tell me if that changes?”

That made him pause.

Wally, to his credit, did not make a joke.

Dick’s expression changed, and you saw him understand what you were really asking. You had spent too long loving men who treated their limits like suggestions. You were not asking as someone about to sleep with him. You were asking as the person who knew that care had to go both ways, or it would become another kind of burden.

“I will,” he said. “Tonight, I will.”

You searched his face. Then you nodded.

Wally touched your waist. “Me too. For anything. I know I can be a lot.”

“You are a lot.”

“True.” His mouth curved, but his eyes stayed serious. “I’ll tell you.”

“Good.”

“Hot when you boss us around,” he said, then immediately looked like he had startled himself.

Dick’s eyebrows rose. “Is it?”

Wally pointed at him. “Do not psychoanalyze me while she’s topless.”

You laughed, and the sound turned into a gasp when Dick dipped his head and kissed the curve of your breast. Wally’s humor dissolved at once. His mouth parted against your temple, and his hand slid up your ribs, stopping just below where Dick’s mouth moved. Dick looked up at you through his lashes, checking. You nodded, and then his tongue touched your nipple.

Your knees nearly failed you.

Wally caught you with a soft, reverent curse. “Okay. Bed. Bed is good.”

Dick smiled against your skin. “Slow?”

“Slow can happen horizontally.”

That made you laugh again, but your laugh broke when Dick did it again, warmer this time, lips closing around you before Wally guided you carefully back toward the bed. Dick moved with you, one hand steady at your hip, unwilling to let the contact break until the mattress touched the backs of your legs.

You had climbed into Dick’s bed in every state except this one.

That thought followed you down onto the mattress. It was familiar beneath your back, the comforter soft against your skin, the pillows smelling like Dick’s shampoo and Wally’s habit of stealing them. How many nights had you lain here between them, your body relaxed in sleep while your heart carried secrets your waking self refused to name? How many mornings had you woken with Wally’s arm thrown over your waist and Dick’s hand near yours, all of you pretending it was only comfort?

Now Dick knelt beside you with want written plainly across his face, and Wally settled near your other side, vibrating with the effort to give you time.

You looked at them and felt something in you steady.

“Pants,” you said.

Wally looked down at himself. “Mine?”

“Both.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dick shook his head, smiling as Wally nearly tripped getting out of his sweatpants. Dick moved more deliberately, his gaze never leaving yours as he hooked his fingers in the waistband of his own. He stopped before pushing anything down.

“Still okay?”

“Very okay.”

Wally had his pants off already because of course he did, all lean muscle and restless heat, his confidence lasting approximately one second before he noticed you looking and flushed. “Assessment received.”

Dick laughed, and you smiled despite the heat crawling up your neck.

“You’re both ridiculous,” you said.

“You knew that before you invited us to take our clothes off,” Wally said.

“Some mistakes deserve commitment.”

Dick’s mouth curved. “Is that what this is?”

You looked at him, at the softness under the teasing. “No.”

The answer changed the room again.

Dick pushed his sweatpants down. His underwear followed a moment later, and your breath caught despite yourself.

Dick noticed. Of course he noticed.

His eyes darkened, but he did not touch you. “Still very okay?”

“Yes.”

Wally popped up beside him, naked now and visibly trying to look patient. “Can I also get an assessment? For fairness.”

You looked at him.

Then lower.

Wally’s confidence abandoned him completely. “I am never going to survive this.”

“You run faster than light.”

“Emotionally, I am a Victorian maiden.”

Dick climbed onto the bed and kissed him, slow and familiar enough that your pulse kicked hard. Wally melted into it with a sound that told you more than any explanation could have. They kissed like people who had already crossed some lines privately and were now learning how it felt to let you see. When Dick drew back, Wally’s mouth stayed parted for half a second, his eyes opening slowly.

You stared.

Dick looked at you. “Good oh?”

You realized you had made a sound. “Very good oh.”

Wally beamed. “Excellent. Love to contribute.”

You reached out and touched Wally’s knee. “Come here.”

He came immediately, but the joking faded as soon as your hand slid up his thigh. His skin was warm, almost feverish, muscles tense beneath your touch. He watched you like he could not decide whether to move closer or hold himself perfectly still.

Dick shifted behind you, gathering you with him as he settled back against the headboard and drew you gently between his legs. You leaned against his chest and felt his breath shift near your ear. His hands came to your waist, then lower, stopping at the edge of your panties like even now he was giving you time to change your mind.

“Can I take these off?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Wally’s gaze followed the movement as Dick slid them down your legs. The room went quiet again, not with hesitation this time, but with the weight of both of them finally seeing what they had been careful not to want too openly for years.

You started to close your thighs on instinct.

Wally’s hand touched your knee, not forcing, just there. “Hey. You don’t have to hide from us.”

The words went through you with embarrassing force.

Dick kissed the side of your neck. “He’s right.”

“This is new,” you whispered.

“I know.” Wally’s thumb moved gently over your knee. “We’ll earn it.”

Your eyes stung. You wanted to blame the long night, the bad date, the adrenaline crash, the way Dick’s mouth felt against your skin and Wally’s hand felt warm on your leg. But it was not only that. It was the tenderness. The promise beneath it. The sense that they had already decided your comfort was not a pause before desire but part of it.

You let your thighs relax.

Wally’s eyes dropped, and the breath he took was unsteady enough to make Dick’s hands tighten on you.

“Beautiful,” Wally said, softer this time. “God, sweetheart.”

The pet name slipped out like an accident.

You felt Dick go still behind you.

Wally’s eyes snapped to yours. “Too much?”

“No,” you said quickly, then softer, “No. I liked it.”

His smile came back slowly. “Yeah?”

Dick’s mouth brushed your ear. “She liked it.”

The words sent heat rolling through you.

Wally noticed that too. His pupils widened, and some of the carefulness in him sharpened into hunger. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

“Wally,” Dick warned, but there was no real reprimand in it.

“What? I’m observing.”

“You can observe closer,” you said.

Wally’s gaze flew to your face.

Your pulse pounded. “If you want.”

His laugh was almost disbelieving. “If I want.”

Then he was between your thighs.

Still slow. Still careful. He settled on his stomach with his arms hooked beneath your legs, but he did not put his mouth on you right away. He kissed your inner thigh first, warm and lingering, then the other. His stubble grazed your skin. Your fingers twisted in the comforter, and Dick’s hands slid up to cover yours, lacing your fingers together.

“You can touch him,” Dick murmured. “He likes it.”

Wally’s eyes flicked up. “I like it a lot.”

Your hand found Wally’s hair.

His lashes fluttered.

“Oh,” you whispered.

Wally’s smile turned wicked and soft at once. “Yeah. That.”

Then his mouth touched you.

The first stroke of his tongue made your back arch against Dick’s chest. Dick held you through it, not pinning you, just anchoring you as Wally groaned like he had been the one given pleasure. His mouth was warm and wet, the pace unhurried in a way that made you think of his earlier insistence that he could be slow. Apparently he could, when it mattered. He learned you with devastating focus, licking gently at first, then firmer when your hand tightened in his hair and your breath broke around his name.

Dick’s mouth moved along your throat. “Tell him what feels good.”

“Keep doing that.”

Wally made a muffled sound of approval.

“More specific,” Dick said, and you could feel his smile against your skin.

You would have elbowed him if you had been capable of coordination. “You’re annoying.”

“You’ve said.”

Wally lifted his head just enough to speak, lips wet, eyes bright. “You can pull my hair. For specificity.”

You did.

His eyes closed, and the sound he made was obscene enough that your entire body clenched. Dick inhaled sharply behind you.

“Wally.”

“I’m good,” Wally said, already lowering his mouth again. “I’m so good.”

He proved it.

There was no room left for embarrassment after that. Wally ate you out like attention was devotion, like every reaction mattered, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend it between your thighs. Dick held your hands and whispered praise against your neck, his voice low and rougher than usual. Good. Like that. You’re doing so well. He loves that sound. We both do.

We.

The word sent you over the edge.

You came with Wally’s name in your mouth and Dick’s hands holding yours. Pleasure rolled through you in bright waves, your thighs trembling around Wally’s shoulders as he worked you through it with gentler strokes until you tugged at his hair because it was too much. He stopped immediately, pressing one last kiss to your thigh before lifting his head.

His mouth was shiny. His expression was wrecked.

“Okay,” he said, voice hoarse. “So. That’s my new favorite thing.”

Dick laughed against your shoulder. “You look proud of yourself.”

“I am proud of myself. Did you see that?”

“I was here.”

“You should compliment me.”

“You did very well.”

Wally looked delighted. “Thanks, babe.”

The casual endearment between them hit you almost as hard as the orgasm had. Dick seemed to feel you react, because his fingers stroked over your knuckles.

“Still with us?” he asked.

You nodded, breathing unevenly. “Very much.”

Wally crawled up your body, stopping when his face was near yours. He hesitated, suddenly uncertain. You understood a second later and pulled him down into a kiss. You tasted yourself on his mouth, and the intimacy of it made him shudder.

Dick’s hand slid into Wally’s hair from behind you, drawing him closer. Wally broke from your mouth only to turn toward him, and then they were kissing over your shoulder.

You stopped breathing.

You had seen them touch before. You had seen Wally throw himself onto Dick’s back, Dick catch Wally by the wrist, the two of them lean into each other with the exhausted ease of men who trusted each other down to the bone. But this was not that. This was Wally kissing Dick with your taste on his tongue, Dick’s hand firm at the back of his neck, both of them making quiet sounds they had never let you hear before.

It should have made you feel like an outsider.

It did not.

Dick’s free hand found your waist, drawing you more securely against him even as he kissed Wally. Wally’s hand spread over your thigh. The circle held. The desire moved through all three of you, not divided but multiplied.

When they separated, Wally rested his forehead against Dick’s for a moment.

“Still okay?” Dick asked him.

Wally smiled. “Yeah. You?”

Dick nodded.

Then both of them looked at you.

You swallowed. “I need a second.”

“Of course,” Dick said immediately.

Wally started to move back, but you caught his wrist.

“Not away. Just a second.”

His face softened. “Okay.”

Dick reached for the water bottle on his nightstand and handed it to you. It was yours, actually, one you had left there after a movie night and never taken home. That fact nearly made you laugh. Even during sex, this room kept offering evidence of how long you had belonged here.

You drank, then passed it to Wally. He drank too, then offered it to Dick, who took it with a grateful nod.

The domesticity of it settled your nerves more than anything else could have.

Wally wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then seemed to realize what he had done and reached for the tissues. “Sorry. Not my most suave moment.”

“You had your mouth between my legs thirty seconds ago.”

“Great point. I’m suave again.”

Dick shook his head, but his smile was affectionate enough to make Wally glow.

You shifted carefully and turned between them. “We should talk before anything else.”

Both of them sobered at once.

“Okay,” Dick said.

Wally nodded. “Talking is good. Love informed consent. Big supporter.”

You took a breath. “Birth control is current. You both know that.”

They did. Not because it was erotic. Because they were part of your life in all the inconvenient, practical ways that made intimacy possible long before anyone got naked. Dick had driven you home after an appointment when a medication change made you nauseous. Wally had picked up your pharmacy order once when work trapped you late and then called from the aisle to ask if you wanted the good chocolate or the emergency chocolate, because apparently those were separate categories. They knew because you told them things. They knew because they listened.

Dick’s expression remained careful. “We know.”

“And you both get tested.”

“Regularly,” Dick said. “Last panel was clean.”

“Same,” Wally said. “Two weeks ago. I can show you the results if you want.”

“I trust you.”

Wally looked touched, then immediately tried to hide it. “I mean, I have a very trustworthy face.”

“You have a ridiculous face.”

“And yet.”

Dick’s hand covered yours. “We have condoms. We can use them, or not. Your choice. That choice can change at any point.”

Your throat went tight again. “I don’t want to use them.”

Wally inhaled.

Dick’s hand stilled.

“I want to feel you,” you said, and somehow that was more exposing than being naked between them. “Both of you. But if either of you wants barriers, that’s okay too.”

Wally’s voice was rough. “I don’t. I want what you want.”

Dick’s gaze stayed locked on yours. “Same.”

The word carried weight because Dick never gave agreement he did not mean.

You nodded, heat rising again now that the practicalities had been named. “Okay.”

Wally’s mouth curved. “Okay.”

Dick touched your chin, turning you gently back toward him. “One more thing.”

You smiled a little. “That sounded ominous.”

“It isn’t.” His thumb brushed your lower lip. “If we do this, tomorrow matters.”

Your chest softened.

Wally shifted closer, his hand warm on your thigh. “And the day after. And the day after that.”

“We don’t have to figure out every detail tonight,” Dick said. “But this isn’t just sex for us.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

You looked at him, then at Wally. Their faces were open in different ways, Dick’s fear disciplined into tenderness, Wally’s hope bright enough to hurt.

“Yes,” you said. “I know.”

Dick kissed you then, and the conversation ended because the answer had been given.

You moved with him until he was propped against the pillows and you were straddling his lap. Wally sat beside you, one hand on your back, the other low on Dick’s thigh. The sight of them together beneath you nearly stole your nerve. Dick naked, hard against your stomach, his hair mussed and his mouth soft from kissing you. Wally close enough to touch you both, his mouth still swollen, his body tense with want he was trying very hard not to let run away with him.

You reached between you and wrapped your hand around Dick.

His head tipped back against the headboard.

Wally swore softly. “That’s unfairly pretty.”

Dick’s laugh broke into a groan when your thumb moved over the head of him. He was hot and heavy in your hand, controlled until he was not, hips twitching up before he caught himself.

“You’re going to let me do the work,” you said.

His eyes opened. “Bossy.”

“You like it.”

Wally made a strangled sound. “He does.”

Dick looked at him. “Wally.”

“What? We’re being honest tonight.”

You smiled and lifted your hips.

Dick’s hands came to your waist. “Slow.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—” His breath caught when you rubbed him against you, both of you slick from Wally’s mouth and your own arousal. “God.”

Wally’s hand slid to your hip beside Dick’s, not guiding, just feeling the moment with you. “You okay?”

You nodded, lowering yourself just enough for the head of Dick’s cock to press into you. The stretch made your mouth fall open.

Dick’s hands tightened. “Breathe.”

You did, forehead dropping to his. He kissed you softly, again and again, until your body eased enough to take more of him. Wally’s mouth found your shoulder, his praise spilling warm against your skin.

“That’s it. Take your time. God, you look—fuck, you look so good.”

Dick made a sound like Wally’s words had gone through him too.

You sank down slowly, inch by inch, until Dick was fully inside you.

For a moment, nobody moved.

There were things you had imagined. Late at night, alone in your own bed. In their shower, feeling guilty and helpless and hungry. Half-asleep between them, Wally’s hand accidentally under your shirt and Dick’s thigh warm against yours. You had imagined Dick’s body over yours, Wally’s mouth at your neck, both their hands, both their voices. You had imagined enough to know desire.

Reality was different.

Reality was Dick trembling beneath you because you were wrapped around him and he was trying not to take more than you were giving. Reality was Wally pressing his forehead to your shoulder, breathing hard, as if watching was its own kind of contact. Reality was your own body clenching around Dick while your heart struggled to hold the impossible tenderness of having both of them here, wanting you, waiting for you.

Dick’s voice was nearly gone when he said your name.

You lifted your head. “Yeah?”

His eyes met yours. “I love you.”

The words struck all the air from the room.

Wally went still.

Dick looked like he had not meant to say it there, like the truth had slipped past every careful defense because his body was full of you and his heart had finally stopped obeying orders. For half a second, panic flashed across his face.

You kissed it away.

“I love you too,” you whispered against his mouth.

Dick’s hands shook on your waist.

Behind you, Wally made a small sound.

You reached back for him without looking. He caught your hand immediately, fingers threading through yours with almost painful force.

“You too,” you said, turning your head enough to see him. “I love you too.”

Wally’s face changed.

He had always been expressive, always bright, always too alive to hide much for long. But you had never seen this expression before. It was relief and hunger and disbelief and joy so raw it looked almost wounded.

“You can’t just say that while Dick is inside you,” he said, voice wrecked.

A laugh broke out of you, wet at the edges. “Why not?”

“Because now I’m going to cry while this hard, and I don’t know what to do with that emotionally.”

Dick’s laugh turned into a groan as your body clenched around him.

“Don’t laugh,” he said, strained.

“You started this.”

“I did.”

Wally kissed your hand, then your shoulder. “I love you. Obviously. Embarrassingly. To a degree that has made me annoying at multiple gatherings.”

Dick’s mouth brushed yours. “He was already annoying.”

“True, but love gave me range.”

You rolled your hips experimentally.

The joking shattered.

Dick’s head dropped back, throat exposed, a sound leaving him that you felt everywhere. Wally’s hand slid to your stomach, fingers splayed low as if he could feel where Dick was inside you. The pressure made you gasp.

“Okay?” Wally asked quickly.

“Yes. Don’t stop.”

His eyes darkened.

You moved again, slow because the stretch was still intense, because the softness of the moment had turned every sensation sharp. Dick’s hands helped you find a rhythm, careful but firm, his mouth moving over yours whenever you leaned close enough. Wally touched everywhere you let him. Your breasts, your thighs, your hips, the place where your body took Dick again and again. He watched with awe so naked it made you feel worshipped.

“Wally,” you breathed.

“I’m here.”

“Touch me.”

His fingers found your clit, slick and careful.

You cried out, folding forward into Dick. Dick caught you, one arm around your back, his mouth at your throat. Wally adjusted immediately, reading your body with the same attention he brought to everything that mattered. He touched you in slow circles while Dick moved beneath you in shallow thrusts, all three of you caught in a rhythm that felt less like performance and more like discovery.

Pleasure built differently this time. Deeper. Slower. Dick filled you, Wally’s fingers worked you higher, and both of them kept talking to you in broken, reverent fragments that made heat gather low in your belly.

So good.

There you are.

Beautiful.

We’ve got you.

That last one did it.

Your orgasm tore through you hard enough that your vision blurred. Dick held you while you shook, his own control breaking a second later as you clenched around him. He buried his face against your neck with a low, helpless sound and came inside you, his hands gripping your waist like you were the only solid thing in the world.

Wally’s hand slowed but did not leave you until you stopped trembling.

For several seconds, the room was nothing but breath.

Then Wally said, very quietly, “I think my soul left my body, and I wasn’t even the one inside you.”

You laughed into Dick’s shoulder. “You are such an idiot.”

“An emotionally supportive idiot.”

Dick’s laugh was quiet and wrecked. “He’s right.”

You lifted your head and looked at Wally. He was flushed, painfully hard, and trying very earnestly to look patient. It made your heart ache.

“Come here,” you said.

Wally blinked. “You need a minute.”

“I need you.”

His composure did not stand a chance.

Dick’s hands stroked your sides as you lifted off him carefully, both of you shivering at the loss. Wally vanished and was back almost immediately with tissues and a warm cloth, so fast you barely registered the absence before he was kneeling beside you again. The gesture was so tender, so practiced in its thoughtfulness, that you nearly dragged him down and cried into his shoulder.

He cleaned you gently, checking your face the whole time.

“Too much?” he asked.

“No.” Your voice came out soft. “Thank you.”

Wally kissed your knee. “Anytime. I mean, hopefully many times. But also anytime.”

Dick rested back against the pillows, watching you both with an expression that made you want to crawl back to him and never leave. “Wally.”

“Yeah?”

“Slow.”

Wally looked at him, then at you. His throat moved. “Yeah. I know.”

You reached for him. “I trust you.”

His eyes closed for half a second.

When he opened them, some of the frantic brightness had settled into something steadier. He kissed you as he moved over you, and for all his speed, for all his energy, he lowered you back against the mattress like you were something precious. Dick shifted beside you, one hand coming to your hair, his body warm along your side. He was not removed from this, not watching from a distance. He was with you, with Wally, kissing your temple while Wally settled between your thighs.

Wally pressed into you slowly.

Your breath caught at the new stretch, your body sensitive from Dick and still slick with him. Wally froze instantly.

“Okay?”

“Yes.” You touched his face. “Just slow.”

His laugh shook. “I can do slow.”

“I know.”

He eased in with visible effort, inch by careful inch, jaw clenched, arms trembling beside your shoulders. Dick’s fingers stroked through your hair, grounding you as Wally filled you. He was different from Dick, his body hotter, his restraint more visibly fragile. When he was fully inside, Wally dropped his forehead to yours and shuddered.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

You smiled. “Romantic.”

“I’m sorry. My brain just left my body.”

Dick’s hand slid to the back of Wally’s neck. “Breathe.”

Wally obeyed. The sight of it, the trust in that single word, made you clench around him.

Wally groaned. “That was mean.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Do it again on purpose later.”

Dick laughed, then pressed his mouth to your shoulder. “Move when you’re ready.”

It took a moment. Not because you were unsure, but because you wanted to feel it. Wally inside you, Dick beside you, both of them close enough that every movement belonged to all three of you. Then you lifted your hips.

Wally’s restraint nearly cracked at once.

He moved slowly because he had promised, but slow did not mean gentle in the way you had expected. It meant controlled. It meant every drag of him inside you was deliberate, every thrust measured by your breathing, every kiss pressed to your mouth like he was trying to keep himself tethered. His hand found yours and pinned it loosely to the mattress, fingers intertwined. Dick’s mouth moved over your neck, your shoulder, the curve of your breast, his hand returning to your clit when you started to whine with the need for more.

“You can take it,” Dick murmured. “We’ve got you.”

Wally’s rhythm faltered. “You can’t say things like that.”

“She likes it.”

“I know she likes it. I like it. That’s the problem.”

You laughed, but it turned into a moan when Dick’s fingers circled faster. Wally lowered himself more fully over you, careful not to crush you, his breath hot against your mouth.

“I’ve wanted this so long,” he said, the words rough and unguarded. “Wanted you. Wanted us. God, sweetheart, you have no idea.”

“I have some idea now.”

“Not enough.”

His hips snapped forward a little harder, and your eyes rolled shut.

Dick’s hand paused. “Good?”

“Yes. More. Wally, please.”

Wally made a sound that was almost pained. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got you.”

He gave you more.

Not too much. Never that. But enough that the bed creaked beneath you, enough that Dick’s hand tightened in Wally’s hair and your nails dug into Wally’s shoulder. Enough that the careful, domestic room turned hot and damp and filled with the sounds of skin, breath, praise, the headboard tapping lightly against the wall with each controlled thrust.

Your third orgasm built too quickly. You tried to warn them, but the words dissolved. Dick understood anyway, because of course he did. Wally did too, because his mouth found yours and he swallowed the broken sound you made when you came around him.

He lasted maybe four seconds after that.

Wally buried himself deep and came with your name on his lips, shaking hard enough that Dick had to steady him with a hand at his back. You held him through it, legs wrapped around his hips, one hand in his hair and the other reaching blindly for Dick.

Dick caught it.

For a while, none of you moved.

Then Wally said into your neck, “I think I saw another dimension.”

Dick, exhausted and fond, said, “That was sex.”

“Agree to disagree.”

You laughed weakly. “Get off me before you crush me, speedster.”

Wally moved so fast he almost fell off the bed. “Sorry. Sorry. Are you okay? Did I—”

You caught his hand. “I’m okay.”

Dick looked at you, checking anyway.

You gave him a tired smile. “I’m okay.”

Only then did both of them relax.

🐦🗝️⚡

Aftercare, you discovered, was where their existing habits became almost unbearable.

Wally vanished and returned with warm cloths, water, one of Dick’s soft shirts, your sleep shorts, and a granola bar he seemed to have grabbed in a panic. Dick sat up enough to help you clean up, his touch careful and unselfconscious. There was nothing awkward in it. Or rather, there was awkwardness, but it did not come from shame. It came from the enormity of the change and the fact that Wally kept trying to do six helpful things at once.

“Stop vibrating,” Dick said.

“I’m not vibrating.”

“You’re making the lamp buzz.”

Wally looked at the lamp. It was, in fact, buzzing faintly.

He put both hands on his knees and inhaled. The buzzing stopped.

“Sorry.”

You reached for him. “Come here.”

He came.

Dick opened the shirt and helped you into it. It was one of Wally’s this time, old and soft, the collar stretched from years of use. Wally tucked the blanket around your legs with the solemn concentration of a man disarming a bomb.

“I can do that,” you said.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to fuss.”

Wally looked at you, startled. “Of course I do.”

Dick’s smile was small and helpless.

You looked between them and felt the truth of the night settle over you, quieter now but no less real. They loved you. They had loved you through laundry and takeout and bad dates and grocery lists. They had loved you in all the ordinary spaces where people usually missed the extraordinary. Sex had not created that. It had only opened the door.

Wally handed you the granola bar.

You stared at it. “Why?”

“Blood sugar.”

“I’m not the speedster.”

“No, but you did just have a very athletic evening.”

Dick closed his eyes. “Wally.”

“What? Accurate.”

You took the granola bar and threw it lightly at his chest. He caught it, grinning.

“Fine,” he said. “Water first.”

You drank because he looked like he needed you to. Then Dick drank. Then Wally finished the bottle and zipped out to refill it before either of you could object.

When he came back, you had settled under the blanket with Wally’s shirt falling soft against your thighs.

Wally paused at the edge of the bed, holding the full water bottle like an offering. “I’m still allowed back in, right?”

Your heart squeezed.

Dick’s expression changed too, something tender and pained moving across his face before he reached out and caught Wally by the wrist.

“You’re ridiculous,” Dick said softly. “Come here.”

Wally came.

He climbed into the bed with exaggerated care, like one wrong movement might disturb whatever fragile new thing had settled between you. You pulled him down by the shoulder until he was stretched out on your other side, warm and solid, his face tucked near your neck. Dick shifted closer behind you, his chest against your back, his hand settling over your waist.

The bed that had always fit three people now seemed to understand the difference before you did. Your body recognized them. The warmth, the weight, the steady presence of them on either side.

Tomorrow would require talking. Not the soft, breathless kind between kisses, but the real kind. Logistics. Boundaries. What changed in public, what stayed private, how to handle the fact that your best friends were also heroes with enemies and you were still the civilian with a key. There would be complications. Jealousy, maybe. Fear, certainly. Dick had enough trauma around love to fill a city. Wally felt things with his whole body and then tried to outrun the consequences. You had your own habits, your own defenses, your own fear of needing too much.

But tonight, you were in the bed you had already come home to a hundred times.

Tonight, Wally’s thumb moved slowly over your hip. Dick’s fingers threaded through yours. The rain finally started outside, tapping softly against the windows.

“I have a question,” Wally said.

You opened one eye. “If it’s about nachos, I’m leaving.”

“It’s not about nachos.”

Dick’s voice was dry. “That’s new.”

Wally ignored him. “What happens with the drawer?”

You frowned sleepily. “What?”

“Your drawer. In Dick’s dresser.” Wally’s expression was earnest enough that you almost believed this was a serious concern. “Does it remain your drawer? Does it expand? Do I get partial drawer custody? Because I would like to formally offer space in my dresser, but full disclosure, one drawer is mostly chargers and mystery cables, and one might have Halloween candy from last year.”

“Last year?” Dick asked.

“It’s sealed.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I’m prepared.”

You laughed into the pillow. “My drawer stays where it is.”

Wally clutched his chest. “Favoritism.”

“You can have sock custody.”

His eyes lit up. “I do love your socks.”

“You stretch them out.”

“I have long feet.”

“You have normal feet at high velocity.”

Dick looked at you with a warmth so deep it almost hurt. “You know this is our life now.”

You smiled. “Arguing about drawer custody?”

“Among other things.”

Wally’s joking faded just enough. “Good?”

You looked at him, then at Dick. “Good.”

Dick squeezed your hand.

Wally pressed a kiss to your shoulder. “Say the staying thing again.”

Your chest softened.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Wally exhaled against you like the words had given him somewhere to rest.

Dick’s eyes met yours over the top of your shoulder. In the dim light, with rain on the windows and love finally unhidden between you, he looked younger and older than usual. Less like Nightwing. More like the man who had left the lamp on for you. The man who had given you a drawer before he could give himself permission to say why.

Wally’s arm tightened gently around your waist, his thumb still moving in slow circles against your hip. He looked less like the Flash too, less like motion and lightning and impossible speed. More like the man who remembered your cereal, stole your socks, marked dumplings emotionally instead of legally, and asked you to say you were staying because he needed somewhere safe to put the hope.

Your chest ached with it.

You reached for Dick, and he came willingly, easing down until he could kiss you. Wally shifted with you instead of letting go, his hand staying linked with yours as Dick’s settled over both of them, fingers interlocking there against you.

Three bodies. One bed. The city beyond the glass.

For the first time all night, the silence did not ask anything of you.

It only held.

🐦🗝️⚡

You pictured the toothbrush in their bathroom, the shampoo you had bought once and never had to replace yourself because Dick noticed when the bottle ran low. You pictured the drawer in Dick’s dresser that had started as a place for an emergency shirt after a rainstorm and somehow become home to leggings, socks, sleep shorts, bras, and enough underwear that Wally had once texted you from the laundry room in a panic to ask if the black lace thing could go in the dryer.

He had followed the message with seven question marks, three sweating emojis, and a separate apology that only said: I’M BEING RESPECTFUL BUT ALSO I AM CONFUSED BY FABRIC.

You had laughed so hard you had almost dropped your phone in the sink.

You lived nearby. You slept over often enough that the doorman barely blinked when you came in. You had your own apartment, your own bills, your own life, but the gravity of Dick and Wally’s place had become familiar. Safe. There were two bedrooms, technically. Wally’s room existed, even if it held more laundry baskets and half-disassembled equipment than any reasonable adult man should own. Dick’s room had the biggest bed, which had become everyone’s argument for ending up there whenever a movie ran late or one of you had a bad day and did not want to sleep alone.

Nothing had ever happened in that bed.

That was not for lack of wanting.

You were not stupid. You knew what attraction felt like when it sat under your ribs and refused to behave. You knew what it meant when Dick came out of the shower with a towel low on his hips and your brain forgot the English language for three to five business days. You knew what it meant when Wally sprawled across the couch in sweatpants and an old Keystone State shirt, hair still damp, one ankle hooked over yours like casual contact was a form of breathing.

You also knew what it meant to be careful.

They were your best friends. They were Nightwing and the Flash. They trusted you with their identities, their schedules, their emergency contacts, and the strange civilian pieces of a life built around impossible work. You knew why Dick disappeared during galas, what comm chatter sounded like through a half-open bedroom door, and which cabinet held the protein bars Wally claimed tasted fine because his standards were a public health crisis.

You were not part of the fight, but you were part of the aftermath. You knew how to leave lights on without making it look like waiting. You knew how to ask if a night had gone badly without using the word dangerous. You knew how to sit beside them afterward and let the room be quiet until one of them came back to himself enough to make a joke.

It made lines strange.

Evan laughed at something on his phone, then remembered you existed and put it face down with a look that was probably meant to seem apologetic. “Sorry. Work.”

“You said that,” you said.

“Yeah. Big project. Everyone wants a piece of me right now.” He smiled as if inviting you to be impressed. “You know how it is.”

You did, unfortunately. You knew exactly how it was to sit across from someone who liked the idea of being observed but had very little interest in looking back. Evan had been charming for the first twenty minutes. He had asked about your job, your favorite restaurants, the neighborhood. Then he had asked about your friends.

Not all your friends.

Just the two men whose names came up too easily because you were too used to mentioning them.

Dick had picked you up from work after your car battery died. Wally had helped you build the shelves in your living room, which mostly meant taking over halfway through and then making you pretend to be impressed when one of them leaned left. Dick knew a place with the best soup dumplings. Wally had an opinion about every ice cream shop within a five-mile radius. Dick said this. Wally did that. Dick and Wally, Wally and Dick, their names folded into your life with the intimacy of muscle memory.

Evan had noticed.

At first, he had teased. Then he had probed. Then he had made a joke about you keeping “two guys on retainer,” and your smile had gone stiff enough that a better man would have noticed.

Evan was not a better man.

“So these friends of yours,” he said, reaching for his drink. “They always this involved?”

“They’re my best friends.”

“Sure.” His mouth curved. “Just sounds intense.”

You looked at him for a long moment. There were a hundred things you could have said, and most of them would have been true enough to hurt. You could have said that intensity was not always a red flag. Sometimes it was two men who carried cities on their backs and still remembered to text you when the sidewalks froze. Sometimes it was remembering to leave your balcony unlocked, because Dick and Wally had both taught you that emergencies rarely cared about front doors. Sometimes it was a hand on the small of your back in a crowd, not to claim you, but to make sure you could leave if you needed to.

Instead, you said, “I don’t think this is working.”

Evan blinked. “What?”

“This.” You reached for your bag and stood before politeness could talk you into another twenty minutes of disappointment. “It was nice meeting you.”

His chair scraped as he stood too. “Wait, seriously? Because I asked about your friends?”

Because you asked like they were a problem, you thought. Because you said my name three times and made it sound less personal each time. Because I have spent years being known by men who notice everything and still pretend not to see the way they look at me, and somehow this is the loneliest I’ve felt all week.

“Take care, Evan.”

“You’re really just leaving?”

“Yes.”

Outside, the night had gone damp and silver with the threat of rain. Gotham did not do gentle weather. Even drizzle felt like it had a grudge. You stood beneath the restaurant awning long enough to order a car, then canceled it when the app told you the driver was twelve minutes away and the walk to Dick and Wally’s was eight.

Your phone buzzed before you reached the end of the block.

Dick: Date going okay?

You looked at the message and snorted despite yourself.

Wally, immediately after: DON’T ANSWER THAT IF YOU’RE MAKING OUT.

A pause, and then instantly another message: Actually answer with a thumbs-up so I know you’re alive but emotionally unavailable.

Dick: Please don’t listen to him.

Wally: Please listen to me specifically.

You typed with one hand as you walked.

You: Date ended. Heading to yours unless you’re both busy saving the world.

Dick answered almost immediately.

Dick: We’re home. Door’s unlocked.

Wally: Which means you are legally obligated to come in, eat something, and not touch the dumplings marked WALLY.

Dick: They’re not marked.

Wally: Emotionally they are.

You smiled down at your phone, and the ache of the evening shifted into something more familiar, which was not the same as easy. That was another problem. They could make you feel less alone from across the city with three stupid texts and a threat about dumplings.

The doorman let you in with a nod. Upstairs, the apartment glowed in the low, warm way it always did when they knew you were coming. The lamp near the couch was on, the kitchen light was dimmed, and the television had been muted on some nature documentary Wally watched with the intense investment of someone who had opinions about whether cheetahs were “respectably fast” or “coasting on branding.”

To anyone else, the apartment probably looked chaotic; to you, it was a map of old landings, bad nights, shared blankets, and quiet recoveries.

The faint scuff near the balcony door was from months ago, when Dick had landed badly enough to pretend the floor had offended him. The patched spot on the wall near the hall was from Wally accidentally vibrating through it after sneezing at superspeed. The blanket over the back of the couch was yours, bought during a cold snap because their apartment ran chilly and both of them had tried to offer you their hoodies at the same time.

Wally was upside down on the couch when you came in, one leg hooked over the back cushions, a takeout container balanced on his stomach with criminal confidence. Dick sat at the far end with his laptop open and one ankle crossed over his knee, looking less like Nightwing than he ever did in public and more like the man who sent you grocery reminders because he knew you forgot to eat when work got bad.

They both looked up.

Wally’s eyes moved over your face and softened at once. “Oh, I hate him.”

You paused with your hand still on the door. “You don’t know what happened.”

“I know your face.”

“You’re upside down.”

“That gives me a fresh perspective.”

Dick closed his laptop but did not ask anything immediately. That was his tell. He watched you lock the door behind yourself, watched you toe off your shoes into the little space beside theirs, watched your hand linger near your coat as if you had forgotten what came next. He knew when to step forward and when to let silence do the gentler work.

“Tea?” he asked.

Your throat tightened. “Please.”

“Drawer clothes first?” Wally offered, still upside down. “Or dumpling first? Choose wisely. One path has elastic waistbands. The other has delicious filling.”

You looked at the takeout container on his stomach. “Those are the emotionally marked dumplings?”

“Emotionally, yes. Legally, they belong to the household.”

“You are the one who threatened me over them five minutes ago.”

“I was a different man five minutes ago.”

Dick stood, taking your coat before you could decide where to put it. “Go change. I’ll make the tea.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

That was the thing about them. They were always making room for you without turning it into a debt.

You went to the bathroom first, because the evening still clung to your skin in the form of expensive restaurant air and Evan’s cologne from when he had leaned too close to show you a photo you had not asked to see. Their bathroom looked less like a bachelor apartment than it had any right to. That was partly because Dick liked order and partly because you had slowly bullied both of them into owning more than one towel. Your toothbrush sat in the cup between theirs. Your cleanser was on the sink. Your hair ties lived in a small ceramic dish Wally had once knocked over, caught, and then bowed to like he had rescued a civilian from certain death.

You washed your face, breathed until your chest stopped feeling tight, and went to Dick’s room because that was where your drawer was.

It should have felt strange. Sometimes it did, but only in moments like this, when you were already raw and tired and too aware of the fact that your underwear sat folded beside one of Dick’s old Gotham Academy shirts.

You peeled yourself out of your date clothes, piece by piece, bra included, and dropped everything into the hamper, as if shedding the evening might make it stop clinging to your skin. Then you dug through the drawer until you found one of Dick’s shirts, soft from too many washes and big enough on you that you didn’t bother with shorts.

It smelled like him in a way that made your chest ache a little: clean citrus, worn leather, cedar cologne, warm skin, and city air after rain. The hem fell halfway down your thighs, familiar enough to loosen something behind your ribs.

Ownership had become a loose concept among the three of you anyway. Half the clothes in this apartment had passed between hands so many times that claiming anything outright felt pointless.

You told yourself not to think about that.

It worked for almost forty seconds.

When you came back out, Dick had made your tea exactly how you liked it and set your mug on the coffee table. Your mug, because of course he knew which one was yours without asking. It sat warm beside the dumplings, filled exactly the way you liked it, and something about that hurt more than the date had.

Wally had righted himself by then, though his hair looked ridiculous from hanging upside down. He patted the cushion between himself and Dick. “Designated recovery spot is open.”

“You’re making it sound dramatic.”

“I’m emotionally preparing to commit crimes against Evan’s router. Let me have my process.”

You picked up your tea instead of sitting. “You don’t even know his last name.”

“I can work with a first name and vibes.”

“That is not reassuring.”

Dick’s mouth curved faintly. “It shouldn’t be.”

You took one of the dumplings.

Wally gasped with theatrical betrayal, then nudged the container closer because he was incapable of committing to the bit if you were actually hungry. Dick shifted on the couch so there was space beside him too, casual enough that it did not look like an invitation you had to accept.

You ate the dumpling standing up because sitting down felt too much like admitting the date had gotten to you. Wally watched you chew with the concerned intensity of someone waiting for a bomb squad report. Dick said nothing at all, which was worse, because Dick knew when silence would get more out of you than pressure.

Eventually, you sighed. “It was just disappointing.”

Wally’s face softened. “That’s worse than hateable.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Hateable gives me something to do. Disappointing just makes me want to feed you and maybe commit a small act of Wi-Fi sabotage.”

“That is not a proportionate response.”

“I said small.”

Dick leaned back against the couch, one arm stretched along the back cushions. He was in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, hair still damp from a shower, bare feet tucked beneath the coffee table, already folded into the quiet rhythm of the apartment. He looked warm and human and untouchably handsome in a way that made you want to be irritated with him on principle.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing dramatic.”

“That’s not an answer.”

You looked at him over the rim of your mug. “He was fine. He asked questions. He laughed at appropriate moments. He checked his phone every time I spoke for more than thirty seconds.”

Wally grimaced. “Immediate jail.”

“He was nice enough.”

“Jail.”

You huffed, but the laugh did not last. “Then he started asking about you two.”

Dick’s expression changed first, not dramatically, but enough for you to notice. Wally sat up straighter, the dumpling container tilting until you steadied it with your knee.

“What kind of asking?” Dick said.

“The kind where curiosity turns into suspicion because I mentioned you too much.”

Wally blinked. “You mentioned us?”

“You built my bookshelf, Wally. It came up.”

“I built it beautifully.”

“One shelf leans.”

“That shelf has character.”

Dick’s gaze stayed on you. “What did he say?”

You shrugged, but it felt thin even to you. “He said it sounded intense.”

Wally’s humor faded.

Dick did not move, but the room seemed to shift around his stillness. “And?”

“And I realized I didn’t want to explain you guys to someone who had already decided you were a problem.”

For a moment, neither of them answered.

The silence was not awkward. It was just full. Full of every late-night call they had answered, every time one of them had walked you home, every takeout order split three ways, every old fear you had swallowed when they were out and the news was bad. Full of your toothbrush in their bathroom and your clothes in Dick’s dresser and the fact that Wally knew your favorite cereal changed its recipe six months ago because you had complained about it once and he had treated it like a civic emergency.

You moved to the couch because standing suddenly felt ridiculous.

Wally shifted at once, making space for you between them. Dick did the same from the other side, both of them adjusting without speaking until your usual place was waiting. You sat down with your tea balanced between your hands and tried not to think about how familiar it felt to have Wally’s knee against yours and Dick’s arm stretched along the cushion behind you.

“Did he make you feel unsafe?” Dick asked.

“No.”

“Good,” Wally said, too quickly.

You glanced at him.

He held up both hands. “Emotionally disappointing men are still on thin ice, but I’m glad he didn’t make it worse.”

“He didn’t make me feel unsafe,” you said. “He just made me feel…observed badly.”

Dick’s brows drew together.

“You and Dick observe people professionally,” Wally said, because of course he knew exactly where your mind had gone. “That’s different.”

“It should be creepy that you know that.”

“I contain multitudes.”

Dick’s thumb moved once against the back of the couch, close enough that you felt the motion near your shoulder. “What do you mean by observed badly?”

“I mean he looked at me like he was trying to figure out what role I could play. Good listener. Pretty enough. Convenient. Available.” You stared into your tea. “And I kept thinking that maybe that’s what dating is now. Figuring out which version of yourself someone wants and deciding if you can tolerate being her for a dinner.”

Wally made a quiet sound under his breath, almost angry.

Dick said your name softly.

You hated that. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because he said it like he knew you. Like there was nothing you had to perform for him to care.

You wrapped both hands around the mug before they could give you away. “Can I ask you something?”

Wally’s knee pressed more firmly against yours. “Always.”

Dick’s attention sharpened. “Of course.”

You should have asked something else. You should have asked whether they wanted to watch a movie, whether Wally had eaten anything other than dumplings, or whether Dick’s laptop meant casework or Wayne Foundation work. There were safer questions in the world. You knew plenty of them.

Instead, you held your mug a little tighter and asked, “How do you know if a man really wants you?”

The apartment went quiet.

It was not the ordinary quiet of late night, when the city hummed beyond the windows and the refrigerator clicked on in the kitchen. It was not even the dangerous quiet you knew from them when a case followed them home and sat heavy in the room. 

This was different. This was the kind of silence that came from two men who had both reached for an answer and found it lodged somewhere too close to the heart.

Wally stopped moving first. That was how you knew you had done something terrible. Wally was motion even when he was still, all restless fingers and bouncing knees and little shifts of energy that made the air around him feel alive. Now he sat frozen, his eyes fixed on you like you had said his name in a language he had not expected you to know.

Dick’s stillness was less obvious but more frightening. His hand paused on the back of the couch, fingers curled loosely into the cushion. His face did not change much. Dick had been trained by too many people, hurt by too many people, loved by too many people he had lost. His control was a beautiful, terrible thing. But you were close enough to notice the small things: the slight dip of his chin, the inhale he did not finish, the way his gaze flicked to Wally before returning to you.

You looked between them.

Then, because your mouth had apparently decided to ruin your life, you said, “Wow. I may have asked the wrong men.”

Wally laughed once, breathless and strange. “Yeah.”

Dick’s voice was quieter. “Maybe not.”

The words landed softly. That made them worse.

You stared at him.

Dick looked away first, which he almost never did. He looked toward the window, toward the city beyond it, toward the version of himself that could leap off rooftops and still not know how to answer one honest question in his own living room.

“What do you mean by wants you?” he asked.

It was such a Dick question. Careful. Precise. A way to create structure when the floor had begun to tilt. You could have let him have it. You could have narrowed the conversation into something clinical and survivable.

You did not.

“I mean me,” you said. “Not just sex. Not just attention. Not someone who likes that I’m available or convenient, or that I listen well. How do you know when he actually wants you?”

Wally dragged a hand down his face. “That is a dangerously sincere question for a room where I was just upside down with dumplings.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He looked at you then, really looked, and the humor in him had gone soft around the edges. “He remembers things.”

You blinked. “What?”

“A man who really wants you remembers things he doesn’t get credit for remembering.” Wally’s fingers flexed against his thigh. “The little stuff. The song you skipped three seconds in because it made your face do that thing. The restaurant you said was overrated even though everyone else likes it. The way your voice changes when you’re about to say you’re fine and you absolutely aren’t.”

Your throat tightened.

Wally shrugged like he could make the answer casual if he moved enough. He could not. “He pays attention when there’s nothing in it for him. That’s a big one, I think.”

You looked at Dick because you had to look away from Wally.

Dick’s expression had changed. Something careful had cracked in it, enough for you to see the want beneath. Not lust, though that was there too, impossible to miss now that you were looking directly at it. This was older. Quieter. It had roots.

“He becomes more careful,” Dick said.

Your chest hurt.

“Careful how?”

“With you.” Dick’s gaze held yours. “With what he asks for. With what he takes for granted. Wanting someone is easy. Most people can do that part. But if he really wants you, he cares what his wanting costs you.”

Wally was watching him now too.

Dick’s mouth tightened, like he had already said more than he meant to and still could not stop. “He doesn’t make you responsible for managing his desire. He doesn’t punish you for not returning it the way he hoped. He doesn’t turn your kindness into permission.”

The room felt too small around you.

You thought of all the times Dick had walked you home without making you feel like you were being escorted. The way he always matched your pace, whether you were in heels after an event or slippers on a late-night corner store run. The way his hand hovered near your back in crowded places but never settled unless you leaned into it first. The way he noticed when men looked at you too long and somehow placed himself between you and them without making a scene.

You thought of Wally texting you pictures of six different cereal boxes from the grocery store because you had mentioned once, weeks earlier, that your childhood favorite had changed its recipe and tasted wrong now. You thought of him showing up with soup before you admitted you were sick. You thought of him lying on your living room floor, assembling your bookshelf at human speed because you had accused him of cheating, laughing every time you handed him the wrong screw.

He remembers things.

He becomes more careful.

You had asked for a hypothetical answer.

They had handed you a mirror.

Your laugh came out too soft. “You both got very serious.”

Wally swallowed. “Yeah. Occupational hazard.”

“Is it?”

“No,” Dick said.

Wally shot him a look, half warning and half relief. Dick ignored him, because of course he did. Courage was easier for him when it looked like stepping off a ledge.

“No?” you asked.

Dick leaned forward, forearms braced loosely on his knees. “It’s not an occupational hazard. It’s you.”

The silence after that was different.

Wally closed his eyes briefly. “Well. Okay. We’re doing this.”

Dick did not look away from you. “Only if she wants to.”

Your heart was beating too hard. You wondered if Wally could hear it. Of course he could hear it. He could probably hear your pulse trying to kick its way out of your throat.

“You’re doing what?” you asked, though you knew.

Wally opened his eyes. There was fear in them, which seemed impossible and then immediately made too much sense. Wally West could run faster than light. He could cross cities between heartbeats. He could laugh in the face of gods and monsters and still sit in front of you terrified because this mattered.

“Answering honestly,” he said.

Dick’s gaze flicked over your face with agonizing care. “We didn’t want to put this on you.”

“This?”

“You know what he means,” Wally said, softer than his usual voice. “Us. How we feel. How long we’ve felt it.”

“How long?”

Dick exhaled. “Long enough that I don’t know how to answer that without incriminating myself.”

Despite everything, a laugh escaped you.

Wally looked almost offended. “Oh, he’s being conservative. I can incriminate us both in detail.”

“Wally.”

“What? She asked.”

“I asked how long,” you said.

Wally looked at you, and for once, he did not rush. “For me, it crept up. One day you were asleep on the couch wearing Dick’s sweatshirt and my socks, and you woke up just enough to tell me I had to stop eating chips directly over your head or you were going to haunt me after death. And I thought, oh. This is probably permanent.”

Your heart did something foolish.

Dick looked down, his thumb moving over his knuckles. “For me, it was after the bridge incident.”

You frowned. “That was two years ago.”

“I know.”

Wally’s expression softened, but he let Dick speak.

Dick’s voice remained steady, though not untouched. “You were furious with us.”

“You both disappeared for eighteen hours.”

“We had comms trouble.”

“There was a collapsed building.”

“Also that.” His mouth curved faintly, then faded. “When we got back, you yelled for fifteen minutes. You had three different news feeds open, a first aid kit on the table, and you were shaking so hard you had to put the kettle down because you almost dropped it.”

“I remember.”

“You told me I didn’t get to treat my life like collateral damage just because I was good at surviving.” Dick looked up. “Most people are relieved when we come back. You were relieved too, but you were angry before you were grateful. You loved us enough to be angry.”

You could not breathe properly.

“Dick.”

“I know.” He gave you a small, helpless smile. “Bad timing.”

“Historically, our brand,” Wally said, but his voice was too gentle to turn it into a joke.

You looked between them. The question you had not asked sat in the room with the rest of you, breathing steadily. It should have been the difficult part, maybe. Two men. Two best friends. Two confessions. But there was something in the way they sat, angled not only toward you but toward each other, that made the answer less impossible than it should have been.

“Both of you?” you asked.

Dick nodded.

“We know,” Wally said.

“And you’re…okay with that?”

Wally’s eyebrows rose. “With Dick having taste? Occasionally.”

Dick huffed despite himself.

You stared at them until Wally’s smile softened.

“We talked about it,” he said. “Badly at first. Then better.”

“When?”

“After the bridge,” Dick said.

“Before that,” Wally corrected.

Dick glanced at him.

Wally lifted a shoulder. “You talked after the bridge. I started talking before that. You just did your emotionally constipated Bat thing and pretended my point had been theoretical.”

“There was nothing theoretical about you eating an entire pizza on my fire escape while telling me I was in love with our best friend.”

“Our best friend was inside making tea and wearing your hoodie.”

“You weren’t subtle.”

“Neither were you. You kept looking at her like she was an answer.”

Something in your chest split cleanly open.

Dick’s expression shifted, embarrassment and affection crossing it too quickly to hide. You realized, suddenly, that they had loved you in the same rooms where you had loved them, all of you careful in different directions, all of you pretending the shape of your life was normal because naming it would change everything.

“What about you two?” you asked.

Their silence lasted half a second too long.

Then Wally said, “Also complicated.”

Dick gave him a look. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“You say that now, but wait until I explain it using a metaphor about nachos.”

“Do not.”

You looked from one to the other. The pieces rearranged themselves with quiet, devastating clarity. The closeness that had always seemed natural because it was Dick and Wally. The way Wally’s hand lingered at Dick’s neck when he thought you were not looking. The way Dick knew Wally’s moods before Wally had done anything louder than breathe. The fact that Wally could steal food off Dick’s plate without losing fingers. The mornings you had walked into their kitchen and found them standing too close, both turning toward you with the same guilty-casual energy that had made you roll your eyes and reach for cereal.

“Oh,” you said.

Wally winced. “Good oh or bad oh?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Fair.”

Dick leaned back carefully, giving you space without leaving. That was the worst part. The best part. The impossible part. Even now, with confession lying open between you, his first instinct was to make sure you did not feel trapped in a room where you had always felt safe.

“You don’t have to know tonight,” he said. “You came here after a bad date, and we are all sitting on a couch pretending this hasn’t been years in the making. This is not exactly a neutral environment for a life-changing conversation.”

Wally nodded solemnly. “Also, I’m still upside-down spiritually from the dumpling betrayal.”

“You offered me one.”

“I contain contradictions.”

You laughed again, and this time it broke something loose. Not the tension, exactly. That remained, but it warmed, softened at the edges by how deeply, absurdly yours they were.

“You were both just going to keep this to yourselves?” you asked.

Dick’s eyes returned to yours. “If that was what kept you comfortable.”

“That’s stupid.”

Wally pointed at Dick. “I said that.”

“Repeatedly,” Dick said.

“Because it’s true.” Wally looked at you with a fragile kind of hope. “But we also weren’t going to make you feel like this place came with strings. You sleep here. You have a key. You know the vigilante stuff. You know where we hide the good bandages and the terrible protein bars. That’s a lot of trust to mess with.”

You understood. That was the terrible thing. You understood too well. This apartment was your soft landing. It was where you came when the world had teeth. If they had said the wrong thing at the wrong time, if they had made you feel observed instead of known, the loss would have been enormous.

But they had not done that.

They had waited until you asked a question they could no longer answer without handing you the truth.

“Wally,” you said.

He sat up straighter. “Yeah?”

“Come here.”

Wally was already close, but he still moved like the distance mattered. His knee shifted against yours, his body turning toward you on the couch, and then he stopped with enough space left between you that it made your chest hurt. He was letting you close the last of it. He smelled like detergent, mint gum, and the clean, electric warmth that always seemed to cling to him.

“You’re shaking,” you said.

Wally huffed a laugh, almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“That’s unusual.”

“Lots of things are unusual right now.” His eyes searched yours. “But I’m here.”

You reached up and touched the side of his face. Wally went very still. He had leaned into you a thousand times before, his head in your lap during movie nights, his shoulder bumping yours in grocery aisles, his legs tangled with yours under Dick’s comforter after long days and worse dreams. This was different because you let it be different. You watched the realization move through him, bright and startled and almost painful.

“Can I kiss you?” you asked.

Wally’s breath caught. “Yes. Please. Very yes.”

You smiled despite the shake in your chest and kissed him.

For a man who could outrun almost everything, Wally did not rush you. His mouth met yours carefully, warmly, a little unsteady at first, like he had imagined this enough times to be shocked by the reality of it. Then your fingers slid into his hair, and he made a sound against you that turned the entire room molten. His hand came to your waist, stopped there, asked without words. When you leaned closer, his grip tightened just enough to make you feel the restraint in it.

He tasted faintly of mint and soy sauce.

He kissed like he had been waiting so long that patience had become its own kind of hunger.

When you pulled back, his eyes stayed closed for a second.

“Okay,” he said faintly. “That happened. I’m normal about it.”

“You are visibly not normal about it.”

“I’m experiencing multiple emotions at speeds previously unknown to science.”

Dick laughed softly from your other side, but when you looked at him, the humor in his face did not disguise the want. It made it worse, actually. Wally was bright with it, nearly vibrating under your hand. Dick was still, but his stillness had become charged, every line of him drawn tight around the effort not to reach for you before you asked.

You turned toward him.

Dick watched you come closer by inches, your knee shifting against his thigh, your hand settling carefully on the couch beside him. He did not move until you were facing him fully. Then his hands lifted, not touching yet, hovering near your hips. There he was again, careful even while looking at you like restraint was costing him something.

“Can I?” he asked.

You nodded.

His hands settled on you, warm through the borrowed shirt. Your breath left you unevenly.

“You’re sure?” Dick asked.

Your mouth curved before you could stop it. “Do you ask everyone that after they kiss someone you’re in love with?”

Wally made an incoherent sound behind you.

Dick’s mouth curved. “No.”

“Then yes.”

The first brush of his lips was soft enough to undo you. Dick kissed differently than Wally. He kissed like falling with control, like every angle mattered, like he could make gentleness as devastating as force if he paid enough attention. One hand slid to your back, the other staying at your hip. He did not pull. He invited, and somehow that was worse. You shifted closer on the couch until your thigh pressed against his, and his fingers flexed against your spine.

The second kiss was deeper.

Dick made a low sound when your hand found his jaw, and you felt it through his chest because you were close enough now, finally, to know what his wanting sounded like. Wally shifted behind you, and Dick’s hand tightened just slightly, as if the reminder that Wally was watching did not cool the heat but changed its direction.

You pulled away only enough to breathe.

Dick’s eyes were dark. “This can stop here.”

“It can,” you said.

Wally’s voice came from behind your shoulder, quieter now. “Does it?”

You looked over your shoulder at him. He was still on the couch, hair messy from your hand, one knee angled toward yours like he had started to move closer and stopped himself from asking for too much. His eyes stayed fixed on you with an openness that made the choice feel less like stepping into the unknown and more like coming home to a room you had somehow never entered.

You thought of your toothbrush in the bathroom. Your mug on the coffee table. Your clothes in Dick’s drawer. Wally’s texts. Dick’s hands. The bed you had slept in between them so many times, waking warm and safe and pretending your heart did not break a little every morning you had to climb out of it.

“No,” you said. “I don’t think it does.”

Wally inhaled so sharply that it was almost a laugh.

Dick’s hands tightened at your hips, and then he kissed you again, catching the small sound that slipped out of you before you could pretend it had not happened. You let yourself lean into him, let yourself feel the steadiness of his body and the warmth of Wally coming up behind you. Wally did not press in immediately. He waited until you reached back, found his wrist, and drew his arm around your waist.

His breath hit your hair.

“Oh,” he said softly.

You smiled against Dick’s mouth. “You keep saying that.”

“I keep learning things.”

Dick’s mouth brushed the corner of yours. “He’s a very committed student.”

“Top of my class,” Wally said.

“You once put Pop-Tarts in a panini press.”

“They were incredible.”

“They caught fire.”

“Briefly.”

You laughed, and Dick kissed the sound from your mouth.

🐦🗝️⚡

The walk to his bedroom should not have felt like crossing a border, but it did. You had walked that hall half-asleep, tipsy, sick, laughing, furious, worried. You had stumbled through it with a blanket around your shoulders after nightmares you blamed on bad movies and they pretended to believe you. You had leaned against the doorframe watching Dick fold laundry while Wally sprawled across the bed claiming moral support. You knew the creak of the floor, the shape of the room in the dark, the side of the mattress that dipped because Wally threw himself onto it with no respect for furniture.

Tonight, when Dick opened the door, you hesitated.

Both of them noticed.

“Hey,” Wally said immediately. “We can go back to the couch. Or stop. Or make tea. Or I can run to Canada and bring back those maple cookies you like, although I feel like that might be an overcorrection.”

You looked at him over your shoulder. “Canada?”

“Panic suggestion.”

Dick’s hand touched your back gently. “Talk to us.”

The words settled you. Not because they fixed the nerves, but because they made room for them.

“I’ve slept in this bed with you both a thousand times,” you said. “It feels strange that this is the first time I’m nervous.”

Dick’s expression softened. “It’s allowed to feel strange.”

“Good strange,” Wally added. “Hopefully. Eventually. Maybe right now it’s weird strange. We can work with weird strange.”

You smiled. “You are so bad at being reassuring.”

“I’m actually fantastic at it. You’re just seeing me under extreme conditions.”

Dick’s thumb moved once against your back. “Nothing happens unless all three of us want it.”

You looked at him. “All three?”

His gaze moved briefly to Wally, and something passed between them that was so familiar and intimate you wondered how you had ever missed it. “All three.”

Wally came closer, slower this time. “For the record, I want it. You. This. Him. Us. But wanting doesn’t mean I need to have it tonight.”

Your heart twisted. “That was almost smooth.”

“I have hidden depths.”

“You just brought up Canada.”

“Some of my depths are geographical.”

Dick’s laugh was quiet, fond, and beautiful. It loosened the last of the fear sitting beneath your ribs.

You stepped into the bedroom.

The room was exactly as you knew it. Dick’s bed stood against the far wall, too large for one person and too often occupied by three. The comforter was rumpled from the morning, because Dick made his bed only when stress turned him into a machine and Wally took personal offense at tucked corners. Your book sat on the nightstand beside Dick’s, a bookmark halfway through the chapter you had been reading three nights ago while Wally slept sideways across the foot of the bed.

There were pieces of you everywhere.

You turned to face them.

“I want you,” you said, and watched the words land. “Both of you. I don’t know exactly how this works yet, but I want to find out.”

Dick’s eyes closed briefly.

Wally’s smile trembled at the edges. “We can do finding out.”

“Slowly,” Dick said.

“Sure,” Wally said quickly. “Slow is great. Love slow. Big fan.”

You gave him a look.

“I can be slow,” he insisted.

Dick’s mouth tilted. “He can.”

The fact that Dick knew that should not have sent heat down your spine, but it did. Both of them saw it happen. Of course they did. Dick’s gaze sharpened; Wally’s breath hitched.

“Oh,” Wally said.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” you said, though your own voice had changed.

“I’m not surprised. I’m delighted. There’s a difference.”

Dick stepped closer, his hand finding your waist again. “Tell us what you want first.”

You swallowed. “I want you to stop looking like you’re waiting for me to vanish.”

That hurt them. You saw it.

Dick touched your cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Wally came up behind you, close enough that his warmth reached your back without trapping you. “Say that again in like five minutes. My brain needs repetition.”

You leaned back into him. His hands settled at your hips, then paused. You covered one with your own and drew it more securely around you.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you said.

Wally exhaled against your hair, and Dick kissed you again.

There was nothing uncertain in it this time. Dick kissed you like he had been given an answer and intended to honor it thoroughly. Wally’s mouth found your shoulder through the thin shirt, his breath warm, his hands careful at your waist. You were suddenly, dizzyingly aware of being between them. Dick in front of you, steady and beautiful, one hand at your jaw and the other at your hip. Wally behind you, restless energy banked into trembling restraint, his lips moving against the side of your neck as if he was learning what made you sigh.

You had been touched before. Wanted, even. But you understood the difference now with brutal clarity. Wanting, from them, did not feel like being consumed. It felt like being attended to. It felt like every breath you took mattered.

Dick drew back first, his fingers catching lightly at the hem of his shirt where it rested against your hips. “Can I take this off?”

It took you a second to understand.

Then you laughed, a little breathless. “It’s yours, I think.”

“It is,” Dick said, and there was something in his voice that made your stomach dip.

Wally’s mouth brushed your neck. “For the record, I fully support its current use.”

Dick’s gaze stayed on you. “And its removal?”

Wally hummed. “Also that.”

You started to lift your arms, but Wally’s hands tightened just slightly at your waist.

“Wait,” he said, then seemed to regret saying it when both you and Dick went still.

You turned your head enough to look at him. “Wait?”

“Not stop,” Wally said quickly. “Definitely not stop. I just—” He huffed a laugh against your shoulder, embarrassed and helpless. “I need to say something before my brain stops working.”

Dick’s expression softened. “That bad?”

“That bad,” Wally said.

You waited.

Wally’s thumb moved once against your hip, brushing the bare skin beneath the hem of Dick’s shirt. “You know we love how comfortable you are here, right?”

Your breath caught at the sudden softness in his voice.

“This is your place too,” he said. “Not officially, maybe, but in all the ways that count. Your mug is in the kitchen. Your toothbrush is in the bathroom. Your clothes are in Dick’s dresser. You come over and change into one of our shirts like it’s nothing, like you trust us so much you don’t even think about it anymore.”

Dick’s hand stilled at your waist.

Wally swallowed. “And we love that. We really, really love that.” His voice dipped, turning rougher. “But sometimes you walk around in one of our shirts and those little sleep shorts, or no shorts, or you reach up for something and we see the edge of your panties, and I swear to God, I have almost died in this apartment more times than I have in the field.”

Your face went hot.

“Wally,” Dick said, but the warning was ruined by the strain in his voice.

“What? We’re being honest tonight.” Wally’s mouth brushed the corner of your jaw. “You bend over to look for something in the fridge. You fall asleep with the shirt riding up your thighs. You sit on the counter in socks and underwear and one of Dick’s old shirts, drinking tea out of that chipped mug, and we both have to stand there acting like our souls didn’t just leave our bodies.”

You looked at Dick. “Both of you?”

Dick’s eyes met yours, dark and steady and helplessly warm. “Both of us.”

Something inside you tightened.

“It was never just the shirt,” Dick said, his fingers smoothing over the hem as if he had wanted to touch it like this for years. “It was that you trusted us enough to stop guarding yourself here.”

That undid you more than Wally’s words had.

“Oh,” you said softly.

Wally let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. That too. I was getting there.”

Dick’s mouth curved, but his gaze stayed on you. “Can I take it off?”

This time, when you lifted your arms, neither of them stopped you.

Dick pulled the shirt over your head slowly, careful not to let the fabric catch. The air touched your skin, and both men went quiet again. Not silent in that fearful way from the living room, but quiet with attention. Wally’s hand spread over your stomach, warm and reverent. Dick’s gaze moved over you with visible effort, not lingering anywhere you had not invited yet and somehow making that restraint feel more intimate than staring would have been.

“You’re beautiful,” Dick said.

It was simple. It should not have undone you.

Wally kissed your shoulder. “So beautiful.”

Your instinct was to deflect. Make a joke. Tell Wally his taste had been damaged by eating cereal out of a saucepan. Tell Dick he was legally obligated to say nice things because he had known you too long. You had a dozen exits ready, all of them familiar.

Dick seemed to know. His thumb touched your lower lip before the joke could leave it.

“Let us say it,” he murmured.

Your chest ached. “Okay.”

Wally’s arms tightened around you for half a second. “Good. Because I’ve got years of material.”

“Wally.”

“What? I’m pacing myself.”

Dick looked at him over your shoulder, and the warmth in his expression made your pulse skip. “Are you?”

“Badly.”

You turned your head and kissed Wally before he could say anything else. He made a pleased sound, hands flexing at your waist, and Dick’s fingers drifted down your side with aching care. The kiss turned messy faster than the first one. Maybe because there was so little between you already. Maybe because Wally’s self-control had limits, and one of them was apparently you turning in his arms to lick into his mouth while wearing only your panties, with Dick close enough to touch you both.

Dick’s hand slid over your ribs and stopped just below your breast, asking without words.

You broke the kiss with Wally, breath unsteady. “You can.”

Dick lifted his eyes to yours. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His hands covered you, palms warm beneath your breasts, thumbs brushing softly until your breath caught. Wally watched over your shoulder, eyes dark and bright at once, then lowered his mouth to yours again as Dick touched you. It was too much and exactly enough. Wally kissed like he wanted to swallow every sound you made; Dick touched like he wanted to discover them one by one.

Your hands found Dick’s chest. He was warm under your palms, solid and familiar in a way that made the moment feel more dangerous than if he had been a stranger. You knew this body in a dozen almost-innocent ways. You knew the weight of his arm thrown across your waist in sleep, the pressure of his shoulder against yours in a crowded booth, the warmth of him behind you when he reached over your head for a cabinet because he enjoyed being obnoxiously tall.

Now your hand slid over his heartbeat, and he went still beneath your touch.

“You okay?” you asked.

Dick caught your wrist and brought your hand to his mouth. “Yes.”

“Will you tell me if that changes?”

That made him pause.

Wally, to his credit, did not make a joke.

Dick’s expression changed, and you saw him understand what you were really asking. You had spent too long loving men who treated their limits like suggestions. You were not asking as someone about to sleep with him. You were asking as the person who knew that care had to go both ways, or it would become another kind of burden.

“I will,” he said. “Tonight, I will.”

You searched his face. Then you nodded.

Wally touched your waist. “Me too. For anything. I know I can be a lot.”

“You are a lot.”

“True.” His mouth curved, but his eyes stayed serious. “I’ll tell you.”

“Good.”

“Hot when you boss us around,” he said, then immediately looked like he had startled himself.

Dick’s eyebrows rose. “Is it?”

Wally pointed at him. “Do not psychoanalyze me while she’s topless.”

You laughed, and the sound turned into a gasp when Dick dipped his head and kissed the curve of your breast. Wally’s humor dissolved at once. His mouth parted against your temple, and his hand slid up your ribs, stopping just below where Dick’s mouth moved. Dick looked up at you through his lashes, checking. You nodded, and then his tongue touched your nipple.

Your knees nearly failed you.

Wally caught you with a soft, reverent curse. “Okay. Bed. Bed is good.”

Dick smiled against your skin. “Slow?”

“Slow can happen horizontally.”

That made you laugh again, but your laugh broke when Dick did it again, warmer this time, lips closing around you before Wally guided you carefully back toward the bed. Dick moved with you, one hand steady at your hip, unwilling to let the contact break until the mattress touched the backs of your legs.

You had climbed into Dick’s bed in every state except this one.

That thought followed you down onto the mattress. It was familiar beneath your back, the comforter soft against your skin, the pillows smelling like Dick’s shampoo and Wally’s habit of stealing them. How many nights had you lain here between them, your body relaxed in sleep while your heart carried secrets your waking self refused to name? How many mornings had you woken with Wally’s arm thrown over your waist and Dick’s hand near yours, all of you pretending it was only comfort?

Now Dick knelt beside you with want written plainly across his face, and Wally settled near your other side, vibrating with the effort to give you time.

You looked at them and felt something in you steady.

“Pants,” you said.

Wally looked down at himself. “Mine?”

“Both.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dick shook his head, smiling as Wally nearly tripped getting out of his sweatpants. Dick moved more deliberately, his gaze never leaving yours as he hooked his fingers in the waistband of his own. He stopped before pushing anything down.

“Still okay?”

“Very okay.”

Wally had his pants off already because of course he did, all lean muscle and restless heat, his confidence lasting approximately one second before he noticed you looking and flushed. “Assessment received.”

Dick laughed, and you smiled despite the heat crawling up your neck.

“You’re both ridiculous,” you said.

“You knew that before you invited us to take our clothes off,” Wally said.

“Some mistakes deserve commitment.”

Dick’s mouth curved. “Is that what this is?”

You looked at him, at the softness under the teasing. “No.”

The answer changed the room again.

Dick pushed his sweatpants down. His underwear followed a moment later, and your breath caught despite yourself.

Dick noticed. Of course he noticed.

His eyes darkened, but he did not touch you. “Still very okay?”

“Yes.”

Wally popped up beside him, naked now and visibly trying to look patient. “Can I also get an assessment? For fairness.”

You looked at him.

Then lower.

Wally’s confidence abandoned him completely. “I am never going to survive this.”

“You run faster than light.”

“Emotionally, I am a Victorian maiden.”

Dick climbed onto the bed and kissed him, slow and familiar enough that your pulse kicked hard. Wally melted into it with a sound that told you more than any explanation could have. They kissed like people who had already crossed some lines privately and were now learning how it felt to let you see. When Dick drew back, Wally’s mouth stayed parted for half a second, his eyes opening slowly.

You stared.

Dick looked at you. “Good oh?”

You realized you had made a sound. “Very good oh.”

Wally beamed. “Excellent. Love to contribute.”

You reached out and touched Wally’s knee. “Come here.”

He came immediately, but the joking faded as soon as your hand slid up his thigh. His skin was warm, almost feverish, muscles tense beneath your touch. He watched you like he could not decide whether to move closer or hold himself perfectly still.

Dick shifted behind you, gathering you with him as he settled back against the headboard and drew you gently between his legs. You leaned against his chest and felt his breath shift near your ear. His hands came to your waist, then lower, stopping at the edge of your panties like even now he was giving you time to change your mind.

“Can I take these off?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Wally’s gaze followed the movement as Dick slid them down your legs. The room went quiet again, not with hesitation this time, but with the weight of both of them finally seeing what they had been careful not to want too openly for years.

You started to close your thighs on instinct.

Wally’s hand touched your knee, not forcing, just there. “Hey. You don’t have to hide from us.”

The words went through you with embarrassing force.

Dick kissed the side of your neck. “He’s right.”

“This is new,” you whispered.

“I know.” Wally’s thumb moved gently over your knee. “We’ll earn it.”

Your eyes stung. You wanted to blame the long night, the bad date, the adrenaline crash, the way Dick’s mouth felt against your skin and Wally’s hand felt warm on your leg. But it was not only that. It was the tenderness. The promise beneath it. The sense that they had already decided your comfort was not a pause before desire but part of it.

You let your thighs relax.

Wally’s eyes dropped, and the breath he took was unsteady enough to make Dick’s hands tighten on you.

“Beautiful,” Wally said, softer this time. “God, sweetheart.”

The pet name slipped out like an accident.

You felt Dick go still behind you.

Wally’s eyes snapped to yours. “Too much?”

“No,” you said quickly, then softer, “No. I liked it.”

His smile came back slowly. “Yeah?”

Dick’s mouth brushed your ear. “She liked it.”

The words sent heat rolling through you.

Wally noticed that too. His pupils widened, and some of the carefulness in him sharpened into hunger. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

“Wally,” Dick warned, but there was no real reprimand in it.

“What? I’m observing.”

“You can observe closer,” you said.

Wally’s gaze flew to your face.

Your pulse pounded. “If you want.”

His laugh was almost disbelieving. “If I want.”

Then he was between your thighs.

Still slow. Still careful. He settled on his stomach with his arms hooked beneath your legs, but he did not put his mouth on you right away. He kissed your inner thigh first, warm and lingering, then the other. His stubble grazed your skin. Your fingers twisted in the comforter, and Dick’s hands slid up to cover yours, lacing your fingers together.

“You can touch him,” Dick murmured. “He likes it.”

Wally’s eyes flicked up. “I like it a lot.”

Your hand found Wally’s hair.

His lashes fluttered.

“Oh,” you whispered.

Wally’s smile turned wicked and soft at once. “Yeah. That.”

Then his mouth touched you.

The first stroke of his tongue made your back arch against Dick’s chest. Dick held you through it, not pinning you, just anchoring you as Wally groaned like he had been the one given pleasure. His mouth was warm and wet, the pace unhurried in a way that made you think of his earlier insistence that he could be slow. Apparently he could, when it mattered. He learned you with devastating focus, licking gently at first, then firmer when your hand tightened in his hair and your breath broke around his name.

Dick’s mouth moved along your throat. “Tell him what feels good.”

“Keep doing that.”

Wally made a muffled sound of approval.

“More specific,” Dick said, and you could feel his smile against your skin.

You would have elbowed him if you had been capable of coordination. “You’re annoying.”

“You’ve said.”

Wally lifted his head just enough to speak, lips wet, eyes bright. “You can pull my hair. For specificity.”

You did.

His eyes closed, and the sound he made was obscene enough that your entire body clenched. Dick inhaled sharply behind you.

“Wally.”

“I’m good,” Wally said, already lowering his mouth again. “I’m so good.”

He proved it.

There was no room left for embarrassment after that. Wally ate you out like attention was devotion, like every reaction mattered, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend it between your thighs. Dick held your hands and whispered praise against your neck, his voice low and rougher than usual. Good. Like that. You’re doing so well. He loves that sound. We both do.

We.

The word sent you over the edge.

You came with Wally’s name in your mouth and Dick’s hands holding yours. Pleasure rolled through you in bright waves, your thighs trembling around Wally’s shoulders as he worked you through it with gentler strokes until you tugged at his hair because it was too much. He stopped immediately, pressing one last kiss to your thigh before lifting his head.

His mouth was shiny. His expression was wrecked.

“Okay,” he said, voice hoarse. “So. That’s my new favorite thing.”

Dick laughed against your shoulder. “You look proud of yourself.”

“I am proud of myself. Did you see that?”

“I was here.”

“You should compliment me.”

“You did very well.”

Wally looked delighted. “Thanks, babe.”

The casual endearment between them hit you almost as hard as the orgasm had. Dick seemed to feel you react, because his fingers stroked over your knuckles.

“Still with us?” he asked.

You nodded, breathing unevenly. “Very much.”

Wally crawled up your body, stopping when his face was near yours. He hesitated, suddenly uncertain. You understood a second later and pulled him down into a kiss. You tasted yourself on his mouth, and the intimacy of it made him shudder.

Dick’s hand slid into Wally’s hair from behind you, drawing him closer. Wally broke from your mouth only to turn toward him, and then they were kissing over your shoulder.

You stopped breathing.

You had seen them touch before. You had seen Wally throw himself onto Dick’s back, Dick catch Wally by the wrist, the two of them lean into each other with the exhausted ease of men who trusted each other down to the bone. But this was not that. This was Wally kissing Dick with your taste on his tongue, Dick’s hand firm at the back of his neck, both of them making quiet sounds they had never let you hear before.

It should have made you feel like an outsider.

It did not.

Dick’s free hand found your waist, drawing you more securely against him even as he kissed Wally. Wally’s hand spread over your thigh. The circle held. The desire moved through all three of you, not divided but multiplied.

When they separated, Wally rested his forehead against Dick’s for a moment.

“Still okay?” Dick asked him.

Wally smiled. “Yeah. You?”

Dick nodded.

Then both of them looked at you.

You swallowed. “I need a second.”

“Of course,” Dick said immediately.

Wally started to move back, but you caught his wrist.

“Not away. Just a second.”

His face softened. “Okay.”

Dick reached for the water bottle on his nightstand and handed it to you. It was yours, actually, one you had left there after a movie night and never taken home. That fact nearly made you laugh. Even during sex, this room kept offering evidence of how long you had belonged here.

You drank, then passed it to Wally. He drank too, then offered it to Dick, who took it with a grateful nod.

The domesticity of it settled your nerves more than anything else could have.

Wally wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then seemed to realize what he had done and reached for the tissues. “Sorry. Not my most suave moment.”

“You had your mouth between my legs thirty seconds ago.”

“Great point. I’m suave again.”

Dick shook his head, but his smile was affectionate enough to make Wally glow.

You shifted carefully and turned between them. “We should talk before anything else.”

Both of them sobered at once.

“Okay,” Dick said.

Wally nodded. “Talking is good. Love informed consent. Big supporter.”

You took a breath. “Birth control is current. You both know that.”

They did. Not because it was erotic. Because they were part of your life in all the inconvenient, practical ways that made intimacy possible long before anyone got naked. Dick had driven you home after an appointment when a medication change made you nauseous. Wally had picked up your pharmacy order once when work trapped you late and then called from the aisle to ask if you wanted the good chocolate or the emergency chocolate, because apparently those were separate categories. They knew because you told them things. They knew because they listened.

Dick’s expression remained careful. “We know.”

“And you both get tested.”

“Regularly,” Dick said. “Last panel was clean.”

“Same,” Wally said. “Two weeks ago. I can show you the results if you want.”

“I trust you.”

Wally looked touched, then immediately tried to hide it. “I mean, I have a very trustworthy face.”

“You have a ridiculous face.”

“And yet.”

Dick’s hand covered yours. “We have condoms. We can use them, or not. Your choice. That choice can change at any point.”

Your throat went tight again. “I don’t want to use them.”

Wally inhaled.

Dick’s hand stilled.

“I want to feel you,” you said, and somehow that was more exposing than being naked between them. “Both of you. But if either of you wants barriers, that’s okay too.”

Wally’s voice was rough. “I don’t. I want what you want.”

Dick’s gaze stayed locked on yours. “Same.”

The word carried weight because Dick never gave agreement he did not mean.

You nodded, heat rising again now that the practicalities had been named. “Okay.”

Wally’s mouth curved. “Okay.”

Dick touched your chin, turning you gently back toward him. “One more thing.”

You smiled a little. “That sounded ominous.”

“It isn’t.” His thumb brushed your lower lip. “If we do this, tomorrow matters.”

Your chest softened.

Wally shifted closer, his hand warm on your thigh. “And the day after. And the day after that.”

“We don’t have to figure out every detail tonight,” Dick said. “But this isn’t just sex for us.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

You looked at him, then at Wally. Their faces were open in different ways, Dick’s fear disciplined into tenderness, Wally’s hope bright enough to hurt.

“Yes,” you said. “I know.”

Dick kissed you then, and the conversation ended because the answer had been given.

You moved with him until he was propped against the pillows and you were straddling his lap. Wally sat beside you, one hand on your back, the other low on Dick’s thigh. The sight of them together beneath you nearly stole your nerve. Dick naked, hard against your stomach, his hair mussed and his mouth soft from kissing you. Wally close enough to touch you both, his mouth still swollen, his body tense with want he was trying very hard not to let run away with him.

You reached between you and wrapped your hand around Dick.

His head tipped back against the headboard.

Wally swore softly. “That’s unfairly pretty.”

Dick’s laugh broke into a groan when your thumb moved over the head of him. He was hot and heavy in your hand, controlled until he was not, hips twitching up before he caught himself.

“You’re going to let me do the work,” you said.

His eyes opened. “Bossy.”

“You like it.”

Wally made a strangled sound. “He does.”

Dick looked at him. “Wally.”

“What? We’re being honest tonight.”

You smiled and lifted your hips.

Dick’s hands came to your waist. “Slow.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—” His breath caught when you rubbed him against you, both of you slick from Wally’s mouth and your own arousal. “God.”

Wally’s hand slid to your hip beside Dick’s, not guiding, just feeling the moment with you. “You okay?”

You nodded, lowering yourself just enough for the head of Dick’s cock to press into you. The stretch made your mouth fall open.

Dick’s hands tightened. “Breathe.”

You did, forehead dropping to his. He kissed you softly, again and again, until your body eased enough to take more of him. Wally’s mouth found your shoulder, his praise spilling warm against your skin.

“That’s it. Take your time. God, you look—fuck, you look so good.”

Dick made a sound like Wally’s words had gone through him too.

You sank down slowly, inch by inch, until Dick was fully inside you.

For a moment, nobody moved.

There were things you had imagined. Late at night, alone in your own bed. In their shower, feeling guilty and helpless and hungry. Half-asleep between them, Wally’s hand accidentally under your shirt and Dick’s thigh warm against yours. You had imagined Dick’s body over yours, Wally’s mouth at your neck, both their hands, both their voices. You had imagined enough to know desire.

Reality was different.

Reality was Dick trembling beneath you because you were wrapped around him and he was trying not to take more than you were giving. Reality was Wally pressing his forehead to your shoulder, breathing hard, as if watching was its own kind of contact. Reality was your own body clenching around Dick while your heart struggled to hold the impossible tenderness of having both of them here, wanting you, waiting for you.

Dick’s voice was nearly gone when he said your name.

You lifted your head. “Yeah?”

His eyes met yours. “I love you.”

The words struck all the air from the room.

Wally went still.

Dick looked like he had not meant to say it there, like the truth had slipped past every careful defense because his body was full of you and his heart had finally stopped obeying orders. For half a second, panic flashed across his face.

You kissed it away.

“I love you too,” you whispered against his mouth.

Dick’s hands shook on your waist.

Behind you, Wally made a small sound.

You reached back for him without looking. He caught your hand immediately, fingers threading through yours with almost painful force.

“You too,” you said, turning your head enough to see him. “I love you too.”

Wally’s face changed.

He had always been expressive, always bright, always too alive to hide much for long. But you had never seen this expression before. It was relief and hunger and disbelief and joy so raw it looked almost wounded.

“You can’t just say that while Dick is inside you,” he said, voice wrecked.

A laugh broke out of you, wet at the edges. “Why not?”

“Because now I’m going to cry while this hard, and I don’t know what to do with that emotionally.”

Dick’s laugh turned into a groan as your body clenched around him.

“Don’t laugh,” he said, strained.

“You started this.”

“I did.”

Wally kissed your hand, then your shoulder. “I love you. Obviously. Embarrassingly. To a degree that has made me annoying at multiple gatherings.”

Dick’s mouth brushed yours. “He was already annoying.”

“True, but love gave me range.”

You rolled your hips experimentally.

The joking shattered.

Dick’s head dropped back, throat exposed, a sound leaving him that you felt everywhere. Wally’s hand slid to your stomach, fingers splayed low as if he could feel where Dick was inside you. The pressure made you gasp.

“Okay?” Wally asked quickly.

“Yes. Don’t stop.”

His eyes darkened.

You moved again, slow because the stretch was still intense, because the softness of the moment had turned every sensation sharp. Dick’s hands helped you find a rhythm, careful but firm, his mouth moving over yours whenever you leaned close enough. Wally touched everywhere you let him. Your breasts, your thighs, your hips, the place where your body took Dick again and again. He watched with awe so naked it made you feel worshipped.

“Wally,” you breathed.

“I’m here.”

“Touch me.”

His fingers found your clit, slick and careful.

You cried out, folding forward into Dick. Dick caught you, one arm around your back, his mouth at your throat. Wally adjusted immediately, reading your body with the same attention he brought to everything that mattered. He touched you in slow circles while Dick moved beneath you in shallow thrusts, all three of you caught in a rhythm that felt less like performance and more like discovery.

Pleasure built differently this time. Deeper. Slower. Dick filled you, Wally’s fingers worked you higher, and both of them kept talking to you in broken, reverent fragments that made heat gather low in your belly.

So good.

There you are.

Beautiful.

We’ve got you.

That last one did it.

Your orgasm tore through you hard enough that your vision blurred. Dick held you while you shook, his own control breaking a second later as you clenched around him. He buried his face against your neck with a low, helpless sound and came inside you, his hands gripping your waist like you were the only solid thing in the world.

Wally’s hand slowed but did not leave you until you stopped trembling.

For several seconds, the room was nothing but breath.

Then Wally said, very quietly, “I think my soul left my body, and I wasn’t even the one inside you.”

You laughed into Dick’s shoulder. “You are such an idiot.”

“An emotionally supportive idiot.”

Dick’s laugh was quiet and wrecked. “He’s right.”

You lifted your head and looked at Wally. He was flushed, painfully hard, and trying very earnestly to look patient. It made your heart ache.

“Come here,” you said.

Wally blinked. “You need a minute.”

“I need you.”

His composure did not stand a chance.

Dick’s hands stroked your sides as you lifted off him carefully, both of you shivering at the loss. Wally vanished and was back almost immediately with tissues and a warm cloth, so fast you barely registered the absence before he was kneeling beside you again. The gesture was so tender, so practiced in its thoughtfulness, that you nearly dragged him down and cried into his shoulder.

He cleaned you gently, checking your face the whole time.

“Too much?” he asked.

“No.” Your voice came out soft. “Thank you.”

Wally kissed your knee. “Anytime. I mean, hopefully many times. But also anytime.”

Dick rested back against the pillows, watching you both with an expression that made you want to crawl back to him and never leave. “Wally.”

“Yeah?”

“Slow.”

Wally looked at him, then at you. His throat moved. “Yeah. I know.”

You reached for him. “I trust you.”

His eyes closed for half a second.

When he opened them, some of the frantic brightness had settled into something steadier. He kissed you as he moved over you, and for all his speed, for all his energy, he lowered you back against the mattress like you were something precious. Dick shifted beside you, one hand coming to your hair, his body warm along your side. He was not removed from this, not watching from a distance. He was with you, with Wally, kissing your temple while Wally settled between your thighs.

Wally pressed into you slowly.

Your breath caught at the new stretch, your body sensitive from Dick and still slick with him. Wally froze instantly.

“Okay?”

“Yes.” You touched his face. “Just slow.”

His laugh shook. “I can do slow.”

“I know.”

He eased in with visible effort, inch by careful inch, jaw clenched, arms trembling beside your shoulders. Dick’s fingers stroked through your hair, grounding you as Wally filled you. He was different from Dick, his body hotter, his restraint more visibly fragile. When he was fully inside, Wally dropped his forehead to yours and shuddered.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

You smiled. “Romantic.”

“I’m sorry. My brain just left my body.”

Dick’s hand slid to the back of Wally’s neck. “Breathe.”

Wally obeyed. The sight of it, the trust in that single word, made you clench around him.

Wally groaned. “That was mean.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Do it again on purpose later.”

Dick laughed, then pressed his mouth to your shoulder. “Move when you’re ready.”

It took a moment. Not because you were unsure, but because you wanted to feel it. Wally inside you, Dick beside you, both of them close enough that every movement belonged to all three of you. Then you lifted your hips.

Wally’s restraint nearly cracked at once.

He moved slowly because he had promised, but slow did not mean gentle in the way you had expected. It meant controlled. It meant every drag of him inside you was deliberate, every thrust measured by your breathing, every kiss pressed to your mouth like he was trying to keep himself tethered. His hand found yours and pinned it loosely to the mattress, fingers intertwined. Dick’s mouth moved over your neck, your shoulder, the curve of your breast, his hand returning to your clit when you started to whine with the need for more.

“You can take it,” Dick murmured. “We’ve got you.”

Wally’s rhythm faltered. “You can’t say things like that.”

“She likes it.”

“I know she likes it. I like it. That’s the problem.”

You laughed, but it turned into a moan when Dick’s fingers circled faster. Wally lowered himself more fully over you, careful not to crush you, his breath hot against your mouth.

“I’ve wanted this so long,” he said, the words rough and unguarded. “Wanted you. Wanted us. God, sweetheart, you have no idea.”

“I have some idea now.”

“Not enough.”

His hips snapped forward a little harder, and your eyes rolled shut.

Dick’s hand paused. “Good?”

“Yes. More. Wally, please.”

Wally made a sound that was almost pained. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got you.”

He gave you more.

Not too much. Never that. But enough that the bed creaked beneath you, enough that Dick’s hand tightened in Wally’s hair and your nails dug into Wally’s shoulder. Enough that the careful, domestic room turned hot and damp and filled with the sounds of skin, breath, praise, the headboard tapping lightly against the wall with each controlled thrust.

Your third orgasm built too quickly. You tried to warn them, but the words dissolved. Dick understood anyway, because of course he did. Wally did too, because his mouth found yours and he swallowed the broken sound you made when you came around him.

He lasted maybe four seconds after that.

Wally buried himself deep and came with your name on his lips, shaking hard enough that Dick had to steady him with a hand at his back. You held him through it, legs wrapped around his hips, one hand in his hair and the other reaching blindly for Dick.

Dick caught it.

For a while, none of you moved.

Then Wally said into your neck, “I think I saw another dimension.”

Dick, exhausted and fond, said, “That was sex.”

“Agree to disagree.”

You laughed weakly. “Get off me before you crush me, speedster.”

Wally moved so fast he almost fell off the bed. “Sorry. Sorry. Are you okay? Did I—”

You caught his hand. “I’m okay.”

Dick looked at you, checking anyway.

You gave him a tired smile. “I’m okay.”

Only then did both of them relax.

🐦🗝️⚡

Aftercare, you discovered, was where their existing habits became almost unbearable.

Wally vanished and returned with warm cloths, water, one of Dick’s soft shirts, your sleep shorts, and a granola bar he seemed to have grabbed in a panic. Dick sat up enough to help you clean up, his touch careful and unselfconscious. There was nothing awkward in it. Or rather, there was awkwardness, but it did not come from shame. It came from the enormity of the change and the fact that Wally kept trying to do six helpful things at once.

“Stop vibrating,” Dick said.

“I’m not vibrating.”

“You’re making the lamp buzz.”

Wally looked at the lamp. It was, in fact, buzzing faintly.

He put both hands on his knees and inhaled. The buzzing stopped.

“Sorry.”

You reached for him. “Come here.”

He came.

Dick opened the shirt and helped you into it. It was one of Wally’s this time, old and soft, the collar stretched from years of use. Wally tucked the blanket around your legs with the solemn concentration of a man disarming a bomb.

“I can do that,” you said.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to fuss.”

Wally looked at you, startled. “Of course I do.”

Dick’s smile was small and helpless.

You looked between them and felt the truth of the night settle over you, quieter now but no less real. They loved you. They had loved you through laundry and takeout and bad dates and grocery lists. They had loved you in all the ordinary spaces where people usually missed the extraordinary. Sex had not created that. It had only opened the door.

Wally handed you the granola bar.

You stared at it. “Why?”

“Blood sugar.”

“I’m not the speedster.”

“No, but you did just have a very athletic evening.”

Dick closed his eyes. “Wally.”

“What? Accurate.”

You took the granola bar and threw it lightly at his chest. He caught it, grinning.

“Fine,” he said. “Water first.”

You drank because he looked like he needed you to. Then Dick drank. Then Wally finished the bottle and zipped out to refill it before either of you could object.

When he came back, you had settled under the blanket with Wally’s shirt falling soft against your thighs.

Wally paused at the edge of the bed, holding the full water bottle like an offering. “I’m still allowed back in, right?”

Your heart squeezed.

Dick’s expression changed too, something tender and pained moving across his face before he reached out and caught Wally by the wrist.

“You’re ridiculous,” Dick said softly. “Come here.”

Wally came.

He climbed into the bed with exaggerated care, like one wrong movement might disturb whatever fragile new thing had settled between you. You pulled him down by the shoulder until he was stretched out on your other side, warm and solid, his face tucked near your neck. Dick shifted closer behind you, his chest against your back, his hand settling over your waist.

The bed that had always fit three people now seemed to understand the difference before you did. Your body recognized them. The warmth, the weight, the steady presence of them on either side.

Tomorrow would require talking. Not the soft, breathless kind between kisses, but the real kind. Logistics. Boundaries. What changed in public, what stayed private, how to handle the fact that your best friends were also heroes with enemies and you were still the civilian with a key. There would be complications. Jealousy, maybe. Fear, certainly. Dick had enough trauma around love to fill a city. Wally felt things with his whole body and then tried to outrun the consequences. You had your own habits, your own defenses, your own fear of needing too much.

But tonight, you were in the bed you had already come home to a hundred times.

Tonight, Wally’s thumb moved slowly over your hip. Dick’s fingers threaded through yours. The rain finally started outside, tapping softly against the windows.

“I have a question,” Wally said.

You opened one eye. “If it’s about nachos, I’m leaving.”

“It’s not about nachos.”

Dick’s voice was dry. “That’s new.”

Wally ignored him. “What happens with the drawer?”

You frowned sleepily. “What?”

“Your drawer. In Dick’s dresser.” Wally’s expression was earnest enough that you almost believed this was a serious concern. “Does it remain your drawer? Does it expand? Do I get partial drawer custody? Because I would like to formally offer space in my dresser, but full disclosure, one drawer is mostly chargers and mystery cables, and one might have Halloween candy from last year.”

“Last year?” Dick asked.

“It’s sealed.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I’m prepared.”

You laughed into the pillow. “My drawer stays where it is.”

Wally clutched his chest. “Favoritism.”

“You can have sock custody.”

His eyes lit up. “I do love your socks.”

“You stretch them out.”

“I have long feet.”

“You have normal feet at high velocity.”

Dick looked at you with a warmth so deep it almost hurt. “You know this is our life now.”

You smiled. “Arguing about drawer custody?”

“Among other things.”

Wally’s joking faded just enough. “Good?”

You looked at him, then at Dick. “Good.”

Dick squeezed your hand.

Wally pressed a kiss to your shoulder. “Say the staying thing again.”

Your chest softened.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Wally exhaled against you like the words had given him somewhere to rest.

Dick’s eyes met yours over the top of your shoulder. In the dim light, with rain on the windows and love finally unhidden between you, he looked younger and older than usual. Less like Nightwing. More like the man who had left the lamp on for you. The man who had given you a drawer before he could give himself permission to say why.

Wally’s arm tightened gently around your waist, his thumb still moving in slow circles against your hip. He looked less like the Flash too, less like motion and lightning and impossible speed. More like the man who remembered your cereal, stole your socks, marked dumplings emotionally instead of legally, and asked you to say you were staying because he needed somewhere safe to put the hope.

Your chest ached with it.

You reached for Dick, and he came willingly, easing down until he could kiss you. Wally shifted with you instead of letting go, his hand staying linked with yours as Dick’s settled over both of them, fingers interlocking there against you.

Three bodies. One bed. The city beyond the glass.

For the first time all night, the silence did not ask anything of you.

It only held.

🐦🗝️⚡

You watched the girl press her fist to her mouth. Her shoulders hitched around a sound she had enough instinct to swallow, and the sight of it lodged beneath your ribs in a place you had spent years hollowing out. There was nothing useful about sympathy. There was nothing productive about remembering the cold marble floor beneath your palms, the owl mask above you, the voice that had said, This one will have to do.

You had been eight years old when you learned that being chosen could still mean being unwanted.

Your orders were simple. Retrieve the candidate. Eliminate loose ends if necessary. Return before dawn.

The Court had become careful since Gotham learned to fear owls in daylight. They no longer took children from circuses in ways that left grief behind like a blood trail. They acquired. They arranged. They moved through guardians, scholarships, private training programs, medical bills, favors owed by frightened men with expensive suits and old family names. A girl disappeared from a regional gymnastics meet, and by morning there would be paperwork proving she had flown to Metropolis with an aunt who did not exist.

You shifted your weight along the beam and listened to the building breathe.

Three men in the main room. Two outside. One driver. The girl behind the crates. A camera network you had already killed. A police patrol four blocks away, too distant to matter. Rain tapping against the skylights in a thin, needling rhythm.

And then, above the rain, a soft scrape of boot against brick.

You turned your head a fraction.

He landed on the opposite beam as though gravity had learned manners for him. Blue-black suit. Escrima sticks. A domino mask that hid almost nothing important if you knew how to look. He crouched with one hand braced against the steel, his body folded into balance with the same loose confidence you had seen in hundreds of hours of stolen footage. Robin on rooftops. Nightwing above Blüdhaven alleys. Dick Grayson under circus lights, smiling before he flew.

For a moment, all the years between you collapsed.

The Gray Son was real.

He looked at you, and his expression shifted before he could stop it. He had expected a monster. You knew what he saw instead, because men had been making that mistake since you were old enough to wear the mask. A woman in black and silver armor, a hood drawn close, knives at your thighs, talons sheathed along your forearms. Alive. Breathing. Watching him from behind an owl’s face.

“Let the girl go,” Nightwing said.

His voice was lower than you had expected. Warmer, too, even with the warning in it.

Below, one of the men cursed. “What was that?”

You moved first.

Nightwing moved with you.

You dropped from the beam as the first gun came up. Your blade caught the man’s wrist, turned the shot into the concrete, and the sound cracked through the warehouse hard enough to make the girl scream. Nightwing hit the floor a breath later, one escrima stick snapping across another man’s knee, the second catching him at the temple before he could aim. Efficient. Controlled. Merciful in a way that would have gotten you punished during training.

The third man went for the child.

You crossed the distance before he took two steps. Your body knew the math of it better than your mind did: push off the crate, twist over the raised arm, hook your knee against his shoulder, blade to throat, pressure enough to stop him from breathing without opening the artery. He froze beneath you, choking, eyes wide.

Nightwing’s gaze flicked to your knife.

“Don’t,” he said.

There were many things in that single word. Command. Plea. Recognition, though he had no right to it. He was not your handler, not your judge, not the voice behind the mask that told you when blood was required. Still, your hand stopped.

The man beneath you shook.

You heard the girl behind you whisper, “Please.”

You did not know whether she was speaking to him, to Nightwing, or to you.

The knife moved from the man’s throat to the hinge of his jaw. One sharp blow put him down. He hit the concrete hard, alive and gasping, and Nightwing’s attention sharpened like a blade.

You should have left then. You had already deviated. The mission was compromised. The candidate had seen your hesitation, and the Gray Son had seen far worse.

Instead, you looked at her.

She stared back through a curtain of tears, her face gone pale beneath warehouse grime. There was a number written on the inside of her wrist in permanent ink. Someone had done it neatly. Someone had held her still.

Your arm hurt suddenly, though no one had touched you there in years.

“Run when he tells you,” you said.

Nightwing went still.

The girl blinked at you.

“Now,” he said, without looking away from your mask.

She ran. Her shoes slapped against the concrete, uneven and frantic, and Nightwing stepped aside just enough to let her pass while keeping himself between you and the exit. It was a good instinct. It was also useless. If you had wanted the girl dead, she would have died before he landed.

“Who are you?” he asked.

You almost laughed. The sound would have come out ugly if you had let it.

The Court had given you many answers to that question. Talon. Daughter. Instrument. Replacement. Failure. Asset. Crowned blade. Consolation prize. Each name had been placed around your neck until the weight of them became indistinguishable from your own bones.

“You know what I am.”

“I know what they call you,” he said. “That isn’t what I asked.”

There it was. The thing you had hated in him before you met him. The impossible gentleness of a boy who had been taken in by a billionaire with a grief-shaped manor instead of men in owl masks. Dick Grayson had fallen and been caught. The Court had spent years teaching you that his escape was theft, that his life had been stolen from them, that every breath you took in service made up for what Gotham’s prince had denied them.

He was supposed to be one of us, your first handler had told you, walking a slow circle around you while you held a handstand on bleeding palms. Cobb’s blood. Haly’s boy. The Gray Son. But Wayne took him. Wayne always did mistake possession for mercy.

Then he had crouched in front of you, lifting your chin with a gloved hand.

You will have to be better.

Nightwing took one careful step closer.

You let him.

It was an error. His eyes changed half a second before his body did, and you saw the moment he realized you had allowed the distance to close. He brought one stick up as your blade flashed toward his ribs. Metal met electricity with a violent blue snap. Pain skittered up your arm, but you rode it, catching his wrist and turning with him. He knew the turn. Of course he knew it. It came from trapeze, from aerial recovery, from bodies learning to trust momentum before fear could ruin the line.

His breath caught.

You drove your elbow into his sternum and sent him back into the crates.

“Who trained you?” he demanded.

You tilted your head. “You did.”

The words landed exactly where you wanted them to. His face went open with confusion for half a second, and that was long enough. You threw a smoke pellet against the concrete, vaulted toward the broken skylight, and climbed into the rain before he could follow.

You did not look back. Looking back was for people who believed something behind them might still want them whole.

The Court did not summon you immediately.

That was worse.

Punishment was clean when it came quickly. You understood pain delivered with purpose. You understood the arithmetic of failure: a mission compromised, a lesson administered, a debt recalculated in bruises and obedience. Silence had always been more dangerous. Silence meant they were deciding how much of you was still worth preserving.

You returned to the old courthouse through the tunnels beneath Drescher Avenue, shedding the rain before you stepped into the lower hall. The city had abandoned the building for twenty-three years. Official records indicated that the upper floors were unstable, which kept restoration committees and curious architecture students away. Beneath the cracked foundation, the Court had built something colder than law.

Marble floors. Brass fixtures. Gaslight turned electric behind frosted glass. Owl emblems carved into the walls with the delicacy of old money and the arrogance of people who believed history was only real when they owned it.

You knelt in the receiving chamber and waited.

Three hours passed before anyone came.

You kept your gaze on the floor. Your right shoulder ached from Nightwing’s strike. Your left wrist was swelling from the electrical backlash. Blood dried beneath your collar where one of the men in the warehouse had managed to graze you with a knife. None of it mattered enough to acknowledge.

A cane tapped once against marble.

“Look at me.”

You obeyed.

Edmund Thurston wore his age like wealth: polished, deliberate, untouched by anything as vulgar as time. His family had sat in Gotham’s hidden rooms since before the city learned to call itself a city. He had never raised his voice in your presence. He had never needed to. Men like Thurston did not believe anger was dignified when ownership would do.

Behind him, two masked attendants stood with their hands folded.

“Where is the candidate?” Thurston asked.

“Gone.”

“To whom?”

You said nothing.

His mouth curved with faint distaste. “The detective’s first son, then.”

Your stomach tightened. It was a small reaction. Too small for most people to notice. Thurston saw it anyway.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I wondered what you would do when faced with him. Our poor substitute, standing in the shadow of what she was made to replace.”

You had heard variations of that sentence for most of your life. It should have lost its edge by now. Instead, each repetition found the original wound and pressed down with patient fingers.

Thurston descended the last step into the chamber. “Do you know why the Court values legacy?”

“Legacy preserves purpose.”

“Legacy preserves quality,” he corrected. “Blood remembers. Lineage carries instruction. William Cobb understood that. Haly understood that. Your circus understood it, even if they lacked the language to name the thing they were breeding.” His cane touched the floor inches from your bent knee. “Dick Grayson was not merely a boy. He was culmination. Cobb’s descendant, born under canvas and applause, shaped by flight before he could understand walking. He was promised to us before Bruce Wayne ever laid a hand on him.”

The old anger stirred. You crushed it before it reached your face.

“I know.”

“Do you?” Thurston asked. “Because tonight you behaved as if you had forgotten your place in that story.”

Your place. The space left over after the better future had been stolen. The child they had taken because she had the right body, the right history, the right absence of anyone powerful enough to object. The girl whose parents had not fallen in front of an audience, whose grief had not moved a billionaire, whose disappearance had been filed away as tragedy by people too poor to make Gotham care.

You remembered every inch of your place.

“The candidate became a liability,” you said.

“The candidate became sentimental.”

You lowered your eyes. “Yes.”

The admission tasted like blood. Thurston studied you for a long time, and when he moved, you braced before the cane struck.

It hit the side of your face hard enough to turn your head.

Pain bloomed white behind your left eye. You let it pass through you. The Court had taken many things, but it had never managed to make you loud.

“You disappoint me,” Thurston said. “Not because you failed. Failure can be corrected. You disappoint me because you saw him and remembered that envy is easier than duty.”

You swallowed. “I have no envy.”

“No?” He crouched with care, his knees creaking beneath the expense of his suit. “You have worn his absence since childhood. Every skill in your body was measured against his ghost. Every meal, every scar, every breath was purchased with the promise that you might become worthy of the investment he squandered.”

His gloved hand touched your cheek, almost tender where the cane had landed.

“And then he looked at you with pity.”

Your teeth came together.

There. That was the part you had not been ready for. Nightwing’s concern had enraged you more than any strike. If he had hated you, you could have met him cleanly. If he had treated you like a monster, you could have sharpened yourself against the judgment and walked away intact. Instead, he had asked who you were as though the answer might matter.

Thurston smiled.

“There she is.”

You hated him for seeing it. You hated Dick Grayson more for causing it.

“What are my orders?” you asked.

Thurston rose. “The Court has indulged Wayne’s theft for long enough. Gotham has seen too much of the Owls to be ruled by mystery alone, and symbols must be reclaimed when they wander. You will bring us the Gray Son.”

Your pulse did one hard, silent beat.

“Alive?”

“Alive,” Thurston said. “Persuaded, if possible. Broken, if necessary.”

You stared at the marble until the veins in the stone blurred.

“And if he refuses?”

“He is a Grayson,” Thurston said, as though that answered anything. “He was born to fly for those above him.”

He left you there with blood in your mouth and the order sitting behind your ribs like a hook.

Bring us the Gray Son.

You had been built to obey.

That was the lie, anyway.

Dick found the girl first.

Her name was Mila Santos. She had been missing for nine hours by the time he got her to Leslie Thompkins, and she spent the first twenty minutes wrapped in a blanket with her hands locked around a paper cup of water she did not drink. Her mother arrived shaking, furious, sobbing, and alive with the kind of terror that still had somewhere to go because her child had been returned to her.

Dick stood outside the clinic room and watched them through the narrow window.

He should have felt relieved.

He did feel relieved.

It did not touch the deeper unease sitting cold beneath his sternum.

Barbara’s voice came through his comm, low and thoughtful. “I found the scholarship program. Gotham Youth Athletic Initiative. Private donors, lots of impressive language, almost no public financials. Three board members are dead, two are shell companies, and one routes through an old Haly’s account that should have been closed in 2008.”

Dick closed his eyes.

“Of course it does.”

“Dick.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do.” Barbara paused. He could hear keys clicking in the background, the quiet hum of the Clock Tower wrapped around her voice. “There’s more. Mila wasn’t the first. She was just the first one we caught before transport. I’m seeing at least six possible disappearances over the last decade, all girls with athletic or performance backgrounds. Gymnastics, aerial silks, ballet, competitive diving. One circus kid, maybe, though the records are messy.”

His hand tightened around the railing.

“How old?”

“When they disappeared? Between seven and fifteen.”

Dick thought of the woman in the owl mask moving across the warehouse like every lesson his body had ever loved had been taught at knifepoint. He thought of the way she had stopped when Mila begged. He thought of her voice, flat and quiet beneath the mask.

You did.

“Send me everything.”

“Already did. There’s one file you need to see now.”

His phone buzzed. Dick opened the image with a kind of dread that had become too familiar in Gotham, where the past never stayed buried unless someone was feeding it bodies.

The photograph was grainy, pulled from an archived newspaper scan. A small traveling circus stood in front of a striped tent, the performers smiling in costumes bright enough to survive the bad resolution. A girl stood near the left edge beside a pair of aerialists, chin lifted, expression solemn despite the glitter painted at her temples. She could not have been older than eight.

Dick did not know her name.

He knew the shape of her stance.

“When?” he asked.

“Seventeen years ago,” Barbara said gently. “The article says the circus closed two months later after a fire. Four casualties, one missing child presumed dead.”

Dick stared at the photograph until the little girl at the edge of the frame blurred into the Talon on the beam. She had been made into a weapon with his movements in her bones. She had known him. The Court had trained her on him.

He had been the blueprint for someone else’s cage.

“Keep digging,” he said.

“I will. And Dick?”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t your fault.”

He almost laughed, because it was such a Barbara thing to say. Accurate, compassionate, and wholly useless against the shape of the guilt already forming. Gotham had taught all of them to inherit crimes they had not committed. Bruce wore his parents’ blood as a mission. Jason wore the crowbar and the grave. Tim wore every silence he had walked into by choice. Damian wore bloodlines like chains he was still learning to loosen.

Dick had spent years thinking the Court’s claim on him was another horror he had escaped.

He had not considered that someone else had been locked inside it in his place.

The comm crackled.

“Dick,” Barbara said, sharper now. “You have company.”

He moved before she finished speaking.

The blade cut through the air where his throat had been. He dropped, rolled, and came up with an escrima stick in each hand as the Talon landed on the clinic roof with rain sliding over the curved white eyes of her mask.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then she said, “You should have stayed away from the girl.”

Dick let out a breath. “I’m hearing that a lot tonight.”

“You do not understand what you interrupted.”

“Then explain it to me.”

Her head tilted. The movement was too birdlike in the mask, too human beneath it. “Is that what he taught you to do?”

“Who?”

“Batman.” She said the name with clinical precision, as if it belonged to a file rather than a man. “Ask questions until someone mistakes interrogation for concern.”

“That isn’t what this is.”

“No?” Her blade shifted in her hand. “Concern is a tool. You use it well.”

The words hit too close to things Dick had thought about himself at three in the morning, after charming information out of criminals who would have guarded themselves against threat and folded under kindness. He had always known warmth could be tactical. That did not make it false.

“What did they tell you about me?” he asked.

“Everything.”

“That’s usually not the same thing as the truth.”

She laughed then, very softly. The sound scraped at something in him. “The truth is that you were promised to them. The truth is that Bruce Wayne took you before the Court could collect. The truth is that I was trained to replace an absence that everyone made certain I understood was superior to me.”

Dick’s throat tightened.

There it was. Said plainly. Brutally. As though she had cut herself open because wounds were easier when made useful.

“You’re not a replacement,” he said.

Her body went still.

He realized his mistake too late.

The attack came fast enough to drive him back across the roof. She fought like a nightmare version of a mirror, all his oldest instincts bent toward killing. He recognized the aerial feints. The recovery steps. The deceptive softness before a sudden strike. She had taken the language of flying and translated it into violence because someone had forced her to speak it that way.

Dick blocked a blade with one stick, twisted away from the second, and caught her wrist before she could drive it beneath his ribs. They locked close enough that he could hear her breathing through the mask.

“I’m not your enemy,” he said.

“You were my standard.”

She slammed her forehead into his face.

Pain burst across his nose. He stumbled, and she kicked him square in the chest. His back hit the rooftop gravel, and she was on him before he could rise, one knee pinning his sternum, blade angled beneath his jaw.

The clinic lights glowed behind her. Rain slid down the planes of her mask like tears it had not earned.

“Say it,” she whispered.

Dick held very still. “Say what?”

Her hand trembled once, almost imperceptibly. “That I am what they made because they could not have you.”

The knife kissed his skin.

He looked up at her and understood, with a clarity that hurt, that she had not come for his surrender. She had come for confirmation. If he gave her cruelty, she could survive it. Cruelty had walls. Cruelty had rules. It would put her back inside a world where pain made sense.

He could not give her that.

“You’re what they hurt because they couldn’t control me,” he said. “That’s not the same thing.”

The trembling stopped.

For one suspended second, he thought she might kill him.

Then gunfire cracked across the roof.

Her body jerked. Dick grabbed her by instinct, rolling them both behind the HVAC unit as a bullet sparked off the metal where her head had been. She cursed for the first time, low and vicious, one hand clamping over her side.

Dick looked toward the adjacent building and saw the silhouettes.

Owls.

Not assassins like her. Men in black tactical gear with white masks and rifles, moving with the confidence of people who believed numbers made them brave. The Court had sent backup. Or cleanup.

The Talon tried to push herself up.

Dick held her down. “You’re hit.”

“It went through.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s polite.”

Her mask turned toward him. Even through the blank white eyes, he felt the force of her disbelief.

“This is not the time.”

“Disagree.”

Another shot punched into the unit. Dick threw a wingding toward the nearest rifleman, then dragged her toward the roof access door. She resisted for three steps before her left leg faltered. Her blood was dark against her armor, too much of it smeared across his glove.

“Stop helping me,” she snapped.

“Stop bleeding on my hand.”

“I was sent to bring you in.”

“I figured.”

“I would have done it.”

Dick got the door open with his shoulder. “You lowered the knife.”

“Temporary lapse.”

“Great. Have another one.”

They stumbled into the stairwell as bullets chewed through the door behind them. Dick jammed a line charge against the frame and caught her around the waist when she nearly went down. She made a sound like pain offended her personally.

“Do not touch me.”

“I can let you fall down three flights of stairs.”

“I can make sure you go first.”

“That’s the spirit.”

She glared at him through the mask, and for one wild second, despite blood and bullets and the Court closing in, Dick felt something in the air between them shift. It was not trust. Trust was too generous a word. It was the first tiny fracture in a script someone else had written for both of them.

Then the door above them blew inward.

The blast took the lights with it.

Dick moved.

He knew Gotham stairwells. He knew darkness, echoes, angles, and the terrible intimacy of fighting where every missed strike found concrete. The Talon knew it too. Injured as she was, she fell into rhythm beside him with a precision so seamless it made his chest ache. He struck low, she struck high. He disarmed, she disabled. He pulled blows; she adjusted hers half a breath later, as if remembering Mila’s frightened face and hating herself for it.

By the time they reached the alley, three Court soldiers were unconscious behind them, and two more were retreating badly enough to pretend it was strategy.

Dick got her onto his bike.

She stiffened. “No.”

“You prefer bleeding out in the alley?”

“I prefer not being taken to Batman.”

“Good,” he said, swinging on in front of her. “I’m not taking you to Batman.”

That, finally, seemed to surprise her.

The engine roared beneath them. She hesitated only a second before her arm locked around his waist, and Dick told himself the heat of her against his back was only adrenaline. Her blood soaked through his suit. Her mask pressed briefly between his shoulder blades as the bike shot out of the alley and into the rain-bright streets of Gotham.

Behind them, the Court vanished into the city that had always known how to hide monsters with money.

Dick did not take you to Batman.

You had expected a cave. An interrogation room. A manor with old grief in the walls and a patriarch waiting in darkness to explain mercy in the voice of a man who kept files on everyone he loved. The Court had taught you about Batman almost as thoroughly as it had taught you about Dick Grayson. You knew his patterns. His contingencies. The way he folded children into his war and called it rescue.

Instead, Nightwing took you across the bridge.

Blüdhaven was uglier than Gotham in ways that almost felt honest. Its rot had less theater. Fewer grotesques. Less marble. The city hunched beneath the rain with neon bleeding into potholes and apartment windows glowing warm above liquor stores and pawn shops. You had been there before, though never long. The Court’s roots did not sink as deep outside Gotham, and you had never been allowed anywhere that might teach you distance.

Nightwing brought you to a safehouse above an old boxing gym. The lower floors smelled like leather, sweat, dust, and disinfectant. The apartment above them had reinforced locks, blackout curtains, a medical kit better stocked than most clinics, and an escape route through the bathroom ceiling.

You noticed that first.

He noticed you noticing.

“Door stays unlocked from your side,” he said, setting the kit on the table. “Window opens. Fire escape is stable. Roof access through the hall if you want it. Bathroom has one exit, bedroom has two. I’ll stay between you and the front door unless you tell me to move.”

You stared at him.

He pulled off his mask, and Dick Grayson looked back at you with blood drying beneath his nose and rain in his hair.

You hated him more without the mask.

It should have been easier if he were only Nightwing. A symbol could be cut down. An enemy could be understood. Dick Grayson had a face you had seen laughing in newspaper archives, bruised in surveillance footage, exhausted beside other vigilantes who looked at him like he was the thing keeping the room upright. He had grown into a man the Court had wanted and failed to own, and somehow that failure had not made him cruel.

He gestured toward your side. “I need to look at the wound.”

“You need nothing from me.”

“That’s probably true.” He leaned back against the counter, giving you space he had no reason to offer. “You’re still bleeding.”

You stood in the middle of the safehouse and measured everything. Distance to the knives hidden beneath your bracers. Distance to his throat. Distance to the window. Distance to the life you would have to return to if you left now.

The last one was the farthest.

Your hand went to the latches on your mask before you let yourself think about it. Dick’s expression changed when you lifted it away.

You did not know what he saw. You had stopped looking at your own face years ago except when the Court required it for disguise work. You knew the scar on your hairline. The faint mark along your jaw from a training blade that had been allowed to heal crooked because vanity was for people with futures. The bruise swelling across your cheek from Thurston’s cane. You knew the shape of your own exhaustion better than any mirror.

Dick’s gaze went to the bruise.

His jaw tightened.

You almost put the mask back on.

“Don’t,” you said.

His eyes lifted to yours. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to feel sorry for me.”

“I was going to ask if the same person who gave you that sent the shooters.”

You looked away first, which was its own kind of defeat.

“Yes.”

Dick absorbed that in silence. It was different from the Court’s silence. Theirs demanded that you fill it with confession. His seemed to be making room for whatever answer you chose to give.

You despised how badly some starved part of you wanted to step into that room.

“The bullet went clean through,” you said. “I can treat it myself.”

“You probably can.”

“I will.”

“Okay.”

The agreement unsettled you more than any argument would have. He nudged the medical kit across the table and turned his back.

You stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Not watching.”

“You think modesty is my concern?”

“I think control might be.”

The words struck with unnerving accuracy. Your fingers tightened around the edge of the table. For a moment, the safehouse folded into another room, white-tiled and cold, where gloved hands had turned your body under bright lights and spoken about muscle development, bone density, hormone levels, healing time, surgical margins, obedience. You had been a child the first time you learned that privacy was something other people had. You had been barely older when you woke with stitches low in your abdomen and a physician telling your handler that the procedure had been successful, as though removing the future from your body was only another maintenance report.

Dick remained facing the wall.

You stripped the armor from your side with hands that only shook when the leather caught the wound. Pain steadied you. It always had. The bullet had passed beneath the ribs, missing anything vital, though not by much. You cleaned it, packed it, and sealed it with practiced efficiency while Dick stared at a framed poster advertising a boxing match from eight years ago as though it deserved deep concentration.

When you finished, you said, “You can turn around.”

He did.

His eyes flicked over your bandage and then away from the bare strip of skin above it with such deliberate care that anger rose in you again, bright and defensive.

“You don’t have to perform decency.”

Something in his face softened. “I know.”

“No,” you said. “You don’t.”

The quiet that followed should have been unbearable. Instead, Dick picked up a towel from the counter and tossed it to you, easy and underhanded. You caught it on instinct.

“For the rain,” he said.

You looked at the towel. It was blue, worn soft at the edges, clean.

No one had handed you something soft without conditions in a very long time.

That realization was dangerous, so you turned it into cruelty.

“Is this the part where you tell me I can be saved?”

Dick exhaled through his nose. “I’ve never had much luck telling people what they can be.”

“But you think it.”

“I think you let Mila run.”

“One girl.”

“One choice.”

“I had orders.”

“You broke them.”

“I hesitated,” you snapped. “Do not make it noble because you need me to be a better person than I am.”

His gaze held yours. “I need you alive. Anything past that is yours.”

Yours.

The word had no place in the room. Nothing had been yours since the Court took you. Your name had been forgotten, your history buried, your body cataloged, your skills sharpened, your loyalty demanded before you were old enough to understand what loyalty meant. Even your hatred of Dick Grayson had been given to you, fed carefully until it learned to breathe on its own.

You sat down before your legs decided for you.

Dick moved toward the stove. “Coffee?”

You almost laughed again. “You’re offering coffee to the assassin sent to kidnap you.”

“I’m offering coffee to the injured woman in my safehouse.”

“You should be more afraid of me.”

He filled the kettle. “Probably.”

The honesty disarmed you. You watched him move around the small kitchen with an ease that made the apartment seem lived in despite its sparse furniture. He knew where the mugs were. He checked the window lock without looking at it. He favored his left side slightly from the kick you had landed on the roof, and he kept his body angled so you could see his hands.

He was adapting to you. Not controlling. Not cornering. Learning.

The difference felt like a bruise being pressed.

“Why Blüdhaven?” you asked.

He glanced over. “Because Gotham belongs to too many ghosts.”

“You are one of them.”

“Sometimes.” He set a mug near you, then stepped back before you could accuse him of crowding. “But less here.”

You did not touch the coffee.

Dick leaned against the counter. “What do I call you?”

The question was gentle enough to be cruel.

You gave him the name the Court used for civilian masks. It sounded false in your own mouth.

His head tilted. “Is that yours?”

“It is one of them.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

You looked at him sharply.

He seemed to realize the echo at the same time you did. In the warehouse. On the beam. His voice asking who you were as though identity were a door you could open if someone knocked politely enough.

Your throat tightened with a rage too old to belong entirely to him.

“My name was buried with a dead child,” you said.

Dick’s expression changed, grief moving through it before restraint could stop him. You wanted to punish him for that, too. For having a face that admitted pain. For looking at you as if the eight-year-old in the newspaper photograph might still be somewhere worth reaching.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

“The people who made it true.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Do you remember it?”

You remembered everything. That was the curse. The Court had trained your memory until it became a locked room full of knives. You remembered your mother sewing crystals onto a costume by lamplight. Your father kissing the top of your head before a show. The smell of popcorn and hay and rain on canvas. The night of the fire. Smoke. Hands. A car trunk. Marble beneath your knees.

Your name, screamed once behind you before the world closed.

You wrapped both hands around the mug. The heat bit into your palms.

“I remember,” you said.

Dick did not ask you to say it.

That was the first mercy you believed from him.

He slept on the floor.

You did not understand that decision. There was a couch. There was a chair. There was enough space in the bedroom for him to stay within reach of the door and still keep a distance. Instead, Dick dragged a blanket near the entrance, set his escrima sticks beside him, and stretched out like a man who had slept in worse places by choice and worse still by necessity.

You sat in the armchair near the window and watched him breathe.

He did not sleep deeply. You recognized the pattern. Vigilantes and assassins had different vocabularies for the same damage. His body rested while some trained part of his mind stayed listening. Twice, noise from the street made his fingers shift toward a weapon. Once, thunder rolled over Blüdhaven, and his breathing changed like memory had reached into his sleep and closed a hand around his heart.

You wondered what the Court would have done with him if they had gotten there first.

The thought arrived uninvited.

You had spent years imagining him as the perfect Talon. The boy you could never equal. The heir whose absence had become the measure of your worth. You had hated him for escaping, hated him for being wanted, hated him for making your life necessary in the eyes of men who had never seen you as anything except a second choice.

But looking at him on the floor, with dried blood still beneath his nose and a blanket bunched beneath his shoulder, you could suddenly picture a different child kneeling on marble.

Dick Grayson, eight years old, grieving and bright and beautiful, made to hold a blade while owls watched from above.

Your stomach turned.

The Court had not been wrong because they chose you instead.

They had been wrong because they chose anyone.

Dick opened his eyes.

You went still.

He blinked once, then focused on you without alarm. “Can’t sleep?”

“I do not sleep on assignment.”

“Are you still on assignment?”

The answer should have come easily.

Yes. Always. Until released. Until death. Until the Court decides what remains of me is less useful than what can be harvested from my corpse.

Instead, you said nothing.

Dick pushed himself up slowly, careful of his bruises. “Nightmares?”

You could have lied. You were very good at lying. The Court had taught you how to become whatever a room wanted to see, and survival had taught you the rest. Yet the safehouse was dim, and Dick’s voice was rough with sleep, and for once, no one was asking because they had the tools ready to punish the answer.

“Memories,” you said. “Nightmares are less accurate.”

His face did something complicated in the dark.

You looked out the window before you could be trapped by it. “They used to tell me stories about you.”

He was quiet enough that you knew he understood this was not an invitation to interrupt.

“When I was small, I thought you were dead,” you continued. “Not physically. I knew you were alive. There were pictures, reports, sightings. But the version of you they talked about was dead, because he had never existed. The perfect Gray Son. The heir. The Talon who would have made the Court proud.” Your mouth twisted. “It was easier when I believed you were a myth.”

“What changed?”

“I met you.”

Dick’s gaze stayed on you, steady and sad.

You hated the sadness less in the dark.

“You were disappointing,” you said.

That startled a laugh out of him, soft and brief.

The sound did something terrible inside your chest.

“You were supposed to be arrogant,” you said. “Cold. Powerful. Someone who escaped because he was better than the rest of us. Instead, you were kind to a crying girl and stupid enough to offer coffee to someone who had a knife to your throat.”

“Very disappointing,” he agreed.

“You should not joke.”

“Probably not.”

“Why do you do that?”

“Joke?”

“Make things lighter than they are.”

Dick leaned back against the wall. The city lights caught in his hair, turning the edges silver. “Because sometimes things are heavy enough without my help.”

The answer was too simple to argue with.

Your fingers found the edge of the blanket he had given you. It smelled faintly like laundry detergent and the safehouse itself, like old wood and rain and him. You should have put it down. You should have left through the fire escape while his injuries slowed him and returned to the Court before they sent someone worse.

Instead, you asked, “Did you know?”

His face stilled. “About the Court wanting me?”

“Yes,” you said.

“Not when I was a kid.”

“Later?”

“Yes.”

“And you stayed free anyway.”

Something in his eyes sharpened at the word. “I stayed out of their hands. Freedom is trickier.”

You looked at him then.

Dick’s smile was small and humorless. “Bruce took me in, and I love him for it. That doesn’t mean I always knew how to tell the difference between being saved and being recruited. I got a family, but I also got a mask, a mission, a war, and a lot of bruises I called purpose because purpose sounded better than pain.”

You had no answer for that.

It did not make you the same. You knew that. Bruce Wayne was not the Court, and Robin was not a Talon, and Dick Grayson had been given choices where you had been given commands. Still, the line between rescue and use was thinner than people wanted to admit, and the fact that he could name it made something inside you loosen against your will.

“Why did you leave Gotham?” you asked.

“Because I needed to find out who I was when I wasn’t standing in Batman’s shadow.”

“And did you?”

“I’m still working on it.”

The honesty settled between you.

You almost told him your name.

The impulse frightened you so badly that you stood. Pain flared through your side, and Dick rose with you, stopping himself before he took a step.

“I’m leaving,” you said.

His expression closed around fear and did not let it reach his voice. “The Court will be waiting.”

“The Court is always waiting.”

“They’ll hurt you.”

You looked at him. “They already have.”

This time, he did move. One step, then another, slow enough that you could stop him. “You don’t have to go back.”

“You don’t get to say that.”

“I know.”

“You don’t,” you said, sharper. “You think leaving is movement. A door opens, and you walk through it. That is not what they made me. The Court is in my training, my records, my bloodwork, my safehouses, my scars. They are in every instinct I have. I hear orders in my sleep. I know how to kill a man with the mug you gave me, and when you turned your back, I counted seven ways to break your spine before you reached the kettle.”

Dick’s face did not change with fear. That made your anger worse.

“I am not free because you unlocked a door.”

“No,” he said. “You’re free because you let Mila run, and because you’re still standing here arguing with me instead of obeying them.”

Your breath caught.

He saw too much. That was the danger. Not that he wanted to save you, but that he could look at the wreckage and find the living thing inside it without permission.

“I hate you,” you whispered.

His expression softened in a way that made your eyes burn. “I know.”

“No, you don’t.” Your voice broke, and you despised it. “I hated you before I knew your face. I hated your name. I hated your files. I hated every time they told me you would have done it better. I hated that they wanted you first. I hated that your parents died in front of everyone and the world cared enough to remember, because mine died in the dark and the Court made sure even their graves forgot me.”

Dick went very still.

The room blurred. You blinked hard, but it did nothing. Tears had always felt like betrayal. Your body had been trained for pain, hunger, cold, endurance, seduction, assassination, escape, and silence. It had never been trained to survive kindness.

“I hated you,” you said again, quieter now, “because if they had taken you, maybe they would have left me alone.”

Dick crossed the rest of the distance.

You should have stopped him. You could have. Injured or not, you knew a dozen ways to make him regret coming within reach.

When his arms went around you, your whole body locked.

He did not tighten his hold. He did not trap your wrists or press your face to his chest or tell you to calm down. He simply stood there, warm and solid and shaking a little with the force of whatever he was holding back, and gave you room to decide whether being touched was something you could bear.

The first breath hurt.

The second was worse.

By the third, something cracked.

You made no sound at first. Then one slipped out, small and strangled, and Dick’s hand settled between your shoulder blades with careful pressure. That was all. A hand. A point of contact. A reminder that you were standing in a room above a boxing gym in Blüdhaven, not kneeling on marble beneath the eyes of the Court.

You gripped the front of his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice rough.

You hated apologies. They were useless things, too small to hold the damage people tried to pour into them.

This one hurt anyway.

“Don’t,” you said, but you did not let go.

Dick rested his cheek against the top of your head for one brief second, so light you could pretend it had not happened if you needed to. “Okay.”

You stayed like that until the city outside began to pale toward morning.

When you finally stepped back, he let you.

He looked wrecked.

You suspected you did, too.

“They will use me against you,” you said.

Dick’s mouth tightened. “They can try.”

“You don’t understand. There are commands. Phrases. Triggers. Some are psychological. Some are chemical. Some are old training paths cut so deep I don’t always know I am following them until I have already moved.”

“Then we find them.”

“There is no we.”

“Sure there is,” he said gently. “You just hate it.”

A laugh broke out of you. It sounded almost like a sob, which was unacceptable, but Dick smiled as if you had given him something precious.

Then your comm implant activated.

The sound was too soft for anyone else to hear. A thin vibration behind your right ear, buried under skin and old scar tissue, followed by three tones only the Court used.

Your spine straightened.

Dick saw it happen.

“What is it?”

The voice came through the implant like a needle sliding beneath a nail.

Talon. Crowned in shadow. Kneel before the nest.

Your breath stopped.

Dick said your borrowed name, but it reached you from very far away.

The world narrowed. Safehouse. Window. Door. Target. Gray Son. Alive if possible. Broken if necessary. Your hand moved toward the blade at your thigh.

Dick’s eyes sharpened.

“Hey,” he said. “Stay with me.”

The implant pulsed again.

Bring him home.

Your body turned.

Dick did not reach for you. That was smart. Touch would have become threat, and threat would have become permission. Instead, he stepped into your line of sight with both hands visible, palms open.

“You’re in Blüdhaven,” he said. “You’re in my safehouse. You’re injured. You let Mila run.”

Your fingers closed around the knife.

His voice steadied. “You told me I was disappointing.”

The blade cleared its sheath.

“You cried on my shirt,” he said, softer. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

Your hand shook.

The command pressed harder, dragging through pathways carved by years of repetition. Kneel. Obey. Retrieve. Correct. Your vision spotted at the edges. Dick was in front of you, and the Court wanted him, and wanting was the closest thing to law you had ever been given.

Then he said your name.

Your real name.

The one you had not told him.

You froze.

Dick’s eyes were bright with fear and apology. “Barbara found it,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry. I know I should have asked. I know.”

The name struck deeper than the command.

For a second, you were eight years old beneath a burning tent, and your mother was screaming, and your father’s hand was gone from yours, and the world had not yet learned to call you Talon.

Dick said it again.

Gently.

Like it belonged to someone alive.

The knife fell from your hand.

You dropped with it.

Dick caught you before your knees hit the floor, and this time you did make a sound. The implant shrieked behind your ear, pain lancing down your neck, but your hands found Dick’s shoulders and held on with a desperation no training could make graceful.

“They know where I am,” you gasped.

“I know.”

“They will come.”

“I know.”

“You should run.”

Dick’s arms tightened around you. “I’m done running from them.”

By noon, the Court had surrounded the block.

By sunset, they learned why Gotham’s old ghosts had failed to keep Dick Grayson.

Oracle killed the street cameras first. Red Robin jammed police dispatch just enough to keep curious officers away without leaving a pattern obvious enough to invite questions. Red Hood took the south alley with the kind of enthusiasm that made Dick mutter, “Non-lethal,” into the comm every three minutes until Red Hood told him to stop flirting with death and focus. Robin, despite being explicitly ordered to stay out of it by at least three people, appeared on the neighboring rooftop with a sword and an expression of profound offense at the Court’s continued existence.

Batman did not come.

You knew that was Dick’s choice.

The absence mattered.

It made the fight smaller, stranger, more yours. This was not the Bat descending into an old Gotham war to reclaim a stolen piece from another predator. This was Nightwing in the city he had chosen, standing beside the weapon made in his image and refusing to let either of you be written by men in masks.

“You can still leave,” Dick said as the first Court vehicle rolled into position below.

You flexed your injured side and checked the line of your blade. “I know.”

The words surprised both of you.

Dick smiled a little. “Yeah?”

You looked at the men gathering beneath the streetlights. Thurston would not be among them. He liked distance. He liked clean hands. But his orders would be there in every masked face, every weapon, every command waiting to crawl through the implant still throbbing beneath your skin.

“I’m staying,” you said.

Dick’s expression softened, but he was wise enough not to make too much of it.

“Then stay behind me if the trigger hits again.”

You glanced at him. “You say things like that and expect me not to be offended.”

“I live in hope.”

“You live because many people have chosen not to kill you.”

“I like to think my personality helps.”

“Your personality is a tactical liability.”

His grin flashed, sudden and bright, and for a moment, you understood why people followed him into impossible fights. It was not because he made danger seem small. It was because he made survival seem imaginable.

Then the first shot shattered the window.

The Court came in waves.

They expected you compromised. They expected injury, confusion, and emotional instability. They expected Dick to protect you at the cost of himself, which meant they did understand one thing about him, if nothing else. They did not expect you to know their formations from the inside out. They did not expect you to cut through the first assault team’s confidence before you cut through their weapons. They did not expect Nightwing to trust you at his back.

Trust was a strange weapon.

You had been feared before. Obeyed. Desired by people who mistook danger for intimacy. Valued by men who measured your worth in completed missions and bodies left behind. You had never been trusted in a fight by someone who knew exactly what you were capable of and still turned away to handle the threat in front of him.

Dick did.

Every time he gave you his blind spot, something in you broke and rebuilt itself incorrectly.

The implant triggered twice. The first time, you dropped to one knee with a hand clamped behind your ear while Dick took a blow meant for your skull. The second, you nearly opened his throat before he caught your wrist and said your name against the edge of your blade.

You came back shaking.

He looked more frightened by that than by the knife.

“I’m here,” you said, though you were not sure which of you needed to hear it.

“I know,” he answered.

The final team breached from the roof.

Thurston came with them.

Seeing him in Blüdhaven felt obscene. Gotham’s Court should not have crossed the bridge into this uglier, freer city. He stepped through the broken rooftop access door with two guards at his back and his cane in hand, dressed as though he had come from dinner rather than a failed abduction.

His owl mask was porcelain.

You had never seen him fight. Men like Thurston rarely needed to. Violence was something they purchased, inherited, commissioned, and admired from far enough away to keep blood off their cuffs.

“Talon,” he said.

The implant burned.

Your body stopped.

Dick took half a step toward you.

Thurston’s head turned slightly. “Richard Grayson. Even now, you stand where better men placed you. Between property and its owner.”

Dick’s escrima sticks hummed blue in his hands. “You don’t own her.”

“How sentimental. Wayne did cultivate that in you, didn’t he?” Thurston stepped forward. “A pity. You were meant for higher things than this little city and its little loyalties.”

Dick’s smile was cold enough to be unfamiliar. “I’ve met your higher things. They keep ending up underground.”

Thurston ignored that and looked at you.

You could not move. The command held your muscles in place, old obedience locking each joint with invisible wire. Your breath came shallowly through your teeth.

“Kneel,” he said.

Your knees bent.

Dick said your name.

Thurston’s cane struck the roof. “Kneel.”

You hit the ground hard enough to send pain through your wounded side. Shame flooded after it, immediate and poisonous. Around you, the fight faltered for half a second. Dick did not look away from Thurston, but you saw the tremor that passed through his shoulders.

“There,” Thurston said. “Do you see? This is what purpose looks like when it has not been diluted by Wayne charity. She knows what she is.”

Dick’s voice was very quiet. “She knows what you did.”

“What we made,” Thurston corrected. “From scraps. From disappointment. From the poor remains of a bloodline and discipline enough to shape what nature left unfinished.” He looked down at you. “Tell him.”

Your throat worked.

The command dragged the words out by their roots.

“I was made to replace you,” you said.

Dick looked at you then, and the pain on his face nearly undid you.

Thurston smiled. “Again.”

You shook. Every muscle fought itself. Your hands curled against the rooftop gravel until your nails tore.

“I was made,” you said, voice splintering, “to replace you.”

“Again.”

Dick moved.

The guards moved faster than Thurston had any right to expect, but Nightwing had been trained by Batman and raised by grief, and there were moments when mercy became very precise violence. He took the first guard down with a strike to the throat, dropped beneath the second’s shot, and drove an escrima stick into the man’s knee hard enough to end the fight. Thurston stepped back, cane lifting, and something silver flashed from its tip.

A blade.

Of course.

You forced one hand flat against the roof.

The command crushed down.

Kneel.

Dick fought Thurston like a man fighting history. He was faster, younger, stronger, but Thurston knew where to cut because the Court had spent generations studying Graysons like prized animals. The cane blade caught Dick across the ribs. Another slash opened his forearm. Thurston moved with old fencing discipline and the obscene calm of a man who believed the world had already agreed he would win.

“Cobb would weep to see what became of you,” Thurston said.

Dick caught the cane on crossed sticks. “Then he can take it up with me in hell.”

Thurston twisted, and the blade slipped through, carving red across Dick’s shoulder.

Your breath tore.

Kneel, the implant demanded.

Dick staggered.

Thurston raised the blade toward his heart.

And you thought, with sudden perfect clarity, of Mila Santos running.

One choice.

Your body had been trained to obey commands, but training was only repetition. The Court had repeated pain until pain became language. They had repeated shame until it became identity. They had repeated Dick Grayson’s name until you mistook his absence for the shape of your failure.

But before all of that, someone had repeated your real name with love.

Your mother’s voice. Your father’s laugh. A life the Court had buried because dead children were easier to own than living daughters.

Dick had said your name like it still had a pulse.

You moved.

It was ugly. Nothing about it belonged to training. You dragged yourself out of the command with a sound that scraped your throat raw and threw your blade with enough force to bury it through Thurston’s wrist before his strike landed.

He screamed.

The sound was shockingly human.

Dick disarmed him before the scream ended. The cane blade clattered across the roof. Thurston fell to his knees, clutching his ruined wrist, and for one breathless moment the shape of the world reversed itself.

You stood over him.

The implant shrieked, then sparked with sudden heat. Something wet slid behind your ear. You swayed, vision going white at the edges.

Dick caught you.

This time, you let him.

Thurston looked up at you through the owl mask. “You ungrateful little—”

You kicked the mask hard enough to crack porcelain.

He went down.

Dick stared.

You leaned heavily against him. “I have wanted to do that since I was nine.”

His laugh came out broken with relief. “I’m proud of you.”

The words should not have mattered. They were too simple. Too late. Too small against years of being measured and found wanting.

They mattered anyway.

Your eyes burned, but you kept them open as the others secured the roof. Red Hood zip-tied Thurston with unnecessary force. Robin looked at you with narrowed eyes and said, “Adequate strike,” which Dick seemed to interpret as high praise. Someone on comms who had to be Oracle said your name softly, checking whether you were still with them.

You were.

For the first time in years, you were.

The implant came out in a clinic outside Blüdhaven.

Leslie Thompkins did the work herself because Dick trusted her and because you refused to let Batman’s doctors near you. It took three hours, local anesthetic, and enough restraint not to claw through the examination table when the old scar behind your ear was opened. Dick stayed beside you the whole time. He did not hold you down. He held your hand because you asked him to, though the asking nearly killed you.

When the implant finally came free, Leslie dropped it into a metal tray with a sound too small for the thing that had lived inside your head for half your life.

“There,” she said, voice steady. “It’s out.”

You stared at it.

A bit of metal. Wire. Cruelty made technical.

Your hand tightened around Dick’s.

He bent close enough that only you could hear him. “Still here?”

You turned your face toward him. “Still here.”

His eyes closed for one second.

The Court cell fell over the next week. Not all of it. You knew better than to believe the Court of Owls could be destroyed by one rooftop fight and a handful of seized servers. Gotham’s oldest monsters survived by molting, shedding names and rooms and families whenever the light got too close. But Thurston talked. Men like him always did when pain became personal and loyalty stopped being theoretical. He gave names to save himself, and Oracle took those names apart thread by thread.

The Gotham Youth Athletic Initiative collapsed first. Then three shell foundations. Two judges. One private security firm. A boarding school outside Bristol. A medical supplier. The old courthouse burned in a fire that the news called “electrical.”

You knew better.

Dick did not ask where you had been that night.

He only opened the safehouse window when you came back smelling faintly of smoke, then set a mug of tea on the table and said, “Shower’s free.”

You stood in the doorway for a long moment. You weren’t sure when he noticed that you preferred tea over coffee.

Blüdhaven rain tapped against the fire escape. The safehouse looked the same as it had the first night, except now there were more blankets, more groceries, a second toothbrush still in its package by the sink because Dick had placed it there without comment and waited for you to decide whether its existence was a threat.

You had left three times that week.

You had come back three times, too.

Dick never called it a pattern. You appreciated that more than you wanted to.

“I don’t know how to do this,” you said.

He looked up from the table. There were stitches along his shoulder and bruising beneath one eye. He had been pretending not to favor his ribs for days.

“Do what?”

You gestured vaguely at the apartment, the window, him, yourself. “This.”

“Me neither.”

“You have done this with strays before.”

His mouth twitched. “Is that what you are?”

“I am trying to insult you.”

“I noticed.”

“It is less satisfying when you refuse to be insulted.”

“I can pretend.”

The absurdity of it settled through the room like warmth. You looked away before your face could betray you, but Dick smiled as though he had seen enough.

“I don’t want to be another project,” you said.

His expression sobered at once. “You’re not.”

“I don’t want to be watched like I might break.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t want the manor.”

“You don’t have to go there.”

You looked back at him. “Everyone expects me to.”

“I don’t.”

The answer came too quickly to be strategy.

Dick leaned back in his chair, careful of his side. “I love my family. I trust them with my life. That doesn’t mean Wayne Manor is the right place for someone who just got out from under a secret society obsessed with bloodlines, legacy, and old houses full of rich people making decisions in the dark.”

A laugh caught in your throat before you could stop it.

Dick’s smile softened. “Yeah. Bruce didn’t love hearing it phrased that way either.”

“You told him?”

“I told him enough.”

“And he allowed it?”

The look Dick gave you then was dry enough to feel almost normal. “Bruce doesn’t control my life.”

You lifted an eyebrow.

“He tries,” Dick amended. “It’s a whole thing.”

You walked to the table slowly. Your side was healing. The scar behind your ear still ached. The silence where the implant had been felt enormous, a missing tooth your mind kept worrying at in the dark. Sometimes you woke expecting the tones. Sometimes you reached for orders and found only your own thoughts waiting, which should have been a relief, but instead felt like standing on a wire without knowing whether anyone had ever taught you balance.

Dick pushed the mug toward you.

You took it.

“I want to stay in Blüdhaven,” you said.

His face changed before he could control it. Hope was too bright on him. Too dangerous.

You looked into the tea. “Not because of you.”

“Okay.”

“Partly because of you,” you corrected, annoyed by your own honesty.

His smile flickered. “Okay.”

“I need work. Papers. Somewhere that isn’t this safehouse forever. I need to know which names are still attached to my face. I need to learn how to sleep without exits mapped in advance, or perhaps with them mapped but without shame. I don’t know yet.”

“We can do that.”

You glanced at him.

He raised both hands slightly. “Sorry. You can do that. I can help if you want.”

If you want.

The words had become his habit around you. A doorway left open. A key placed on the table. A hand offered, never closed until you reached for it first.

You set the mug down.

“I want,” you said, and stopped because the rest of the sentence had no training to support it.

Dick went very still.

You hated that he understood before you finished. You hated the care that entered his face, the restraint, the way he held himself as if one wrong movement might send you back behind walls he could not follow.

“I want you,” you said.

The words came out steadier the second time.

Dick’s breath changed.

He did not move closer. “You don’t have to prove anything.”

Anger flared, then faded when you saw that he meant it. Not rejection. Not doubt. Care, again, infuriating and precise.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

You considered lying. Then you sat across from him, close enough that your knees nearly touched his, and gave him the truth because he had been reckless enough to keep giving it to you.

“No,” you said. “Not entirely. But I know I am tired of letting them own every place someone might touch me. I know I have wanted you since before I trusted you, which was inconvenient and offensive, and I know wanting something no one ordered me to want feels terrifying enough that it must belong to me.”

Dick’s eyes darkened.

Your pulse moved under your skin in a rhythm no command had set.

“I need you to be sure,” he said.

“I am not sure of anything.” You reached across the narrow distance and touched the back of his hand. His fingers flexed but did not close around yours. “I am choosing anyway.”

That was what undid him.

Dick turned his hand beneath yours and laced your fingers together with exquisite care. His thumb brushed once over your knuckles, and the simplicity of it nearly hurt more than hunger would have. You expected him to stand. Expected charm, perhaps, or the sudden confidence he wore so easily in the field.

Instead, he brought your hand to his mouth and kissed the inside of your wrist.

The place where the Court had once written numbers on children.

Your breath left you.

Dick looked up immediately. “Too much?”

“No.” Your voice was barely there. “Again.”

He did.

Mouth warm. Pressure gentle. Eyes on yours as though the looking mattered as much as the touch. He kissed your wrist, your palm, the first knuckle of each finger, and by the time he stood, your whole body felt like a room with lights being turned on one by one.

You rose with him.

For a second, neither of you moved.

Then you stepped into him, and Dick kissed you.

He tasted like tea and rain and restraint. His hands settled at your waist, careful of the healing wound, and you gripped his shirt because the first press of his mouth was so much softer than you had expected. You had been kissed before for missions, for covers, for manipulation, for practice under watchful eyes. You had learned how to make your body convincing while your mind stood somewhere else.

This was different.

Dick kissed like he was listening.

Every shift of your breath mattered. Every small tension made him slow down, every answering movement drew him closer. When his tongue brushed yours, heat rolled through you so suddenly that your fingers tightened in his shirt and pulled a quiet sound from him. He broke the kiss with his forehead against yours, breathing hard.

“You okay?”

“If you ask me that every time, I will bite you.”

His laugh was rough. “That might not discourage me.”

Desire sparked through the words, bright enough to make you dizzy. You tilted your face and kissed him again, less carefully this time. Dick answered with a low sound that went straight through you, one hand sliding to your back while the other rose to cradle the side of your face. His thumb brushed near the bruise that had faded from Thurston’s cane, and the tenderness of it made something ache beneath the wanting.

You pushed his jacket from his shoulders.

He let you. More than that, he understood. He stood still while you undressed him piece by piece, giving you time to see each scar and decide what to do with the knowledge of him. There were many scars. Some old, some newer, some thin and pale, others rougher where healing had been rushed by necessity. You touched the edge of the bandage near his shoulder, and his breath hitched.

“Does it hurt?” you asked.

“A little.”

You drew your hand back at once.

He caught it gently. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“I have.”

“Not now.”

The distinction landed softly.

You leaned forward and kissed the skin beside the bandage.

Dick went still beneath your mouth. You felt the control in him, the careful leash on his own need, and for the first time, it did not feel like distance. It felt like respect. It felt like he was holding a door open and refusing to pull you through it.

You pressed another kiss to his chest, then another lower, learning him by warmth and scar tissue and the way his breathing changed when your teeth grazed skin. His hand found the back of your neck, not holding, simply resting there. When you sank to your knees, his fingers tightened once.

“You don’t have to,” he said, voice strained.

You looked up at him. “I know.”

His eyes searched yours.

Whatever he found there made him curse softly under his breath.

You undid his belt with hands steadier than you felt. He was hard beneath your palm, and the sound he made when you touched him was so openly affected that heat gathered low in your stomach. You had expected to feel exposed on your knees. Instead, looking up at Dick Grayson while he trembled because you wanted him felt like power with no blood on it.

You took him into your mouth slowly, watching his face as his head tipped back. His restraint frayed by degrees: a parted mouth, a hand braced against the table, your name dragged rough from his throat when you hollowed your cheeks and took him deeper. He never pushed. Never took more than you offered. The absence of force became its own kind of intimacy, and you found yourself chasing the sounds he tried to swallow.

When his hand tightened in your hair, he froze. “Sorry.”

You pulled back just enough to speak. “Did I tell you to stop?”

His pupils blew wide.

“No.”

“Then don’t.”

The groan that left him was wrecked and beautiful. He touched your hair again, more carefully this time, fingers threading through without guiding. You set the rhythm yourself, slow until he shook, then deeper until his hips jerked with the effort of staying still. He warned you before he came, voice unsteady, and you drew back because you wanted to watch him fall apart.

He looked at you afterward as though you had taken him apart and handed him back better.

Then he pulled you up and kissed you with none of the earlier restraint, mouth hungry, hands careful but certain. You gasped against him when he backed you toward the bedroom, and he stopped at once.

“Still okay?”

This time, you did bite him.

Not hard. Just enough at the edge of his jaw to make him laugh and shudder at the same time. “I warned you.”

“You did.”

The bedroom was small and dim, the window cracked open to the sound of rain. Dick sat on the edge of the bed and let you choose whether to come closer. You did. You stood between his knees and removed your shirt with the strange, deliberate courage of someone disarming a bomb. His gaze moved over you with such naked desire that you almost reached to cover yourself.

He caught the movement in his face, not with his hands.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

The words hurt.

You shook your head once.

Dick leaned forward and kissed the scar beneath your ribs. Then the one near your hip. Then the edge of the bandage that still covered the healing bullet wound. He kissed you like he had all the time in the world to argue with every cruel thing ever said about your body, and by the time his mouth reached the center of you, your knees had gone weak enough that he had to guide you onto the bed.

“Tell me if anything feels wrong,” he said.

You nodded.

“I need words, sweetheart.”

The endearment slipped out softly. You felt it hit him after it hit you, his expression shifting like he was ready to apologize.

You touched his face. “I will.”

He kissed the inside of your thigh.

Your breath caught.

Dick took his time. He pressed his mouth to your skin until anticipation became a living thing, then looked up at you before he licked into you with a slow, devastating heat that made your spine arch off the bed. Pleasure arrived like a language you had known only in translation. Your hands twisted in the sheets. His arms hooked around your thighs, steadying without trapping, and when you gasped his name, he answered with a sound that vibrated through your body.

It was too much and not enough. It was terrifying to want more.

Dick noticed the moment your breathing turned sharp. He lifted his head immediately, mouth wet, eyes dark. “Stop?”

You shook your head, then remembered. “No. Just—slow.”

He kissed your thigh. “I can do slow.”

He did.

Slow became unbearable. Slow became his tongue moving with patient attention until you stopped bracing for pain that did not come. Slow became his fingers sliding into yours above the sheets while his mouth worked between your thighs, grounding you even as pleasure built and built until there was nowhere left for it to go. When you came, it broke through you with a force that dragged his name out of your throat like a confession.

Dick held you through it.

Afterward, he climbed up beside you and kissed your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. You could taste yourself on him, and the intimacy should have made you turn away. Instead, you pulled him closer, one hand sliding into his hair as though you could anchor yourself there while the room slowly came back around you.

“I want you inside me,” you said.

Dick’s breath caught. His hand went still against your hip, warm and careful above the place where old scars cut low across your abdomen.

“You’re sure?”

You gave him a look, more offended by the question than the caution behind it.

He huffed a quiet laugh and leaned down to kiss you. “Okay. Sorry. Last time for at least five minutes.”

“You are incapable of silence.”

“People find it charming.”

“People are wrong.”

He smiled against your mouth as he kissed you, and the smile stayed there until his hand shifted toward the nightstand. It was an ordinary movement. Practical. Considerate. A habit formed by a man who knew enough to be careful, who had probably reached for that drawer a dozen times with other people and never once had the gesture turn the air cold.

Your body went still beneath him.

Dick stopped immediately.

His hand did not reach the drawer. It did not return to you either. He held himself above you with sudden, absolute attention, giving you space without pulling so far away that the absence became another kind of alarm.

“Hey,” he said softly. “We can stop.”

“No.” Your voice sounded distant to your own ears. “It isn’t that.”

He waited.

That almost made it worse. If he had pushed, if he had asked too quickly, if he had tried to smooth over the silence with reassurance, you could have sharpened yourself against him. Instead, he only watched you with that careful grief in his eyes, and the patience made the words feel larger than they were.

“I can’t get pregnant,” you said.

Dick said nothing, but his expression changed. You saw the moment he understood that you had not offered reassurance. You had opened a wound.

“The Court saw to it,” you continued. “They took my ovaries when I was young enough that the doctor had to explain the rest to my handler in terms of dosage schedules and bone density. Hormones. Maintenance. Efficiency. Talons could not be compromised by pregnancy. Talons could not have loyalties that began in their own bodies.”

His face went pale with anger.

You hated that the anger was for you. You hated more that some broken part of you wanted to lean toward it, as though fury on your behalf could warm places the Court had left cold.

“They took that too,” you said, quieter now. “Before I knew whether I wanted it.”

Dick did not touch you. His hands curled once against the sheets, like he needed somewhere to put the violence of what he felt and refused to place any of it on your skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

You swallowed. “Don’t make it sound like grief.”

“It is grief.”

The answer was so immediate that your throat tightened.

You looked at him then, and the softness in his face nearly undid you. There was no disgust. No pity in the way the Court had taught you to recognize it, no distant sympathy that made you feel like a broken thing being studied from across a room. Only sorrow and fury held carefully away from you, and Dick understanding that the Court had not merely used your body. They had edited it. Carved absence into it. Called the theft preventative because preventative sounded cleaner than control.

“I don’t know how to want you without bringing them with me,” you admitted.

Dick’s voice went rough. “Then we go slow enough that they don’t get to keep up.”

The words struck somewhere deep.

You reached for his wrist and brought his hand back to you, pressing his palm over the scar low on your stomach. His touch was warm there, achingly gentle, and for a moment, you could hardly breathe around the strangeness of choosing a hand in a place where choice had once been taken from you.

“I want to feel you,” you said.

His eyes closed for a second. When they opened again, the want in them was still there, darker now, but held with so much care that it hurt. “Tell me if anything changes.”

“I will.”

Dick bent and kissed you, slow and aching, as if the promise deserved reverence.

You guided him down.

The first press of him inside you made both of you go still. He watched your face, every muscle in his body held taut above yours, and you wrapped your legs around his hips because you wanted the weight of him. Because you wanted the choice. Because the Court had taken a future from your body and called it useful, but this moment belonged to no one in a mask, no physician with gloved hands, no old man with a cane speaking of bloodlines as though children were investments.

Dick sank in slowly, inch by inch, giving you time to adjust until the stretch turned from ache to heat. His hand stayed over your scar because you had put it there, and the pressure of his palm felt like an answer to a question you had never learned how to ask.

Your hands found his back.

“Move,” you whispered.

Dick obeyed you.

The thought nearly shattered you.

He moved like he fought, like he flew, with rhythm and grace and attention so complete it made the world narrow to his body over yours and his breath against your cheek. There was nothing performative in it, nothing polished for anyone watching. He lost composure by degrees, and you loved each loss fiercely: the catch in his throat when you tightened around him, the way his hips stuttered when your nails dragged down his back, the broken sound of your real name against your mouth.

Your real name.

Not Talon. Not substitute. Not consolation. Not a blade, not a legacy, not a debt.

Yours.

Tears slipped free before you could stop them.

Dick froze. “Did I hurt you?”

You pulled him down before panic could take root in his face. “No.”

“Then what—”

“I’m here,” you said, because it was the only answer that held enough truth.

His expression broke open.

Then he kissed you, and the gentleness of it ruined you more completely than hunger ever could. He moved again, deeper and slower, one hand cradling your face as though he could keep you tethered to the room by touch alone. Pleasure rose again, tangled with grief, with want, with the terrible fragile knowledge that your body could be more than something the Court had trained and used and punished.

Your climax took you softer this time, no less powerful for the quiet. Dick followed after, burying his face against your neck with a shudder that ran through both of you. For a while, the only sound was rain and breathing.

When he moved to pull away, you held him tighter.

“Stay.”

Dick stilled above you.

Then he carefully shifted his weight so he would not crush your side and stayed.

Much later, under blankets that smelled like him, with the window open and Blüdhaven rain whispering against the fire escape, you woke from a dream of marble.

Your hand went first to the space behind your ear.

Smooth bandage. Tender skin. Silence.

Dick woke when you moved, because of course he did. He did not grab for a weapon. He did not ask what was wrong. He only turned toward you, sleep-soft and bruised, and opened his arms.

You stared at him through the dim.

The Court had built you a cage and called it a crown. It had taught you that obedience was honor, that pain was proof, that being chosen was the closest thing to being loved. It had dressed ownership in silk and legacy and old blood until you could not tell the difference between a throne and a prison.

Dick Grayson had been the boy they wanted.

You had been what they made instead.

But he was here now, warm and alive in a city the Court did not own, looking at you as if the future were not a command but a question.

You moved into his arms.

He held you carefully, one hand settling between your shoulder blades. His heartbeat was steady beneath your ear. You listened to it until the dream receded, until the room became only a room, until the open window meant air instead of escape.

“You okay?” he murmured.

You considered threatening to bite him again.

Instead, you said, “I think I will be.”

Dick pressed a kiss to your hair. “Yeah?”

You closed your eyes.

For once, there was no voice in your head telling you to kneel. No Court waiting behind your thoughts. No ghost of the Gray Son standing in judgment over all the ways you had failed to become him.

There was only Dick, and the rain, and your own name resting inside you like something returned.

“Yes,” you said. “Not tonight. Not all at once. But someday.”

Dick’s arms tightened around you, careful and sure.

“Someday works,” he said.

Outside, Blüdhaven kept rotting and living in equal measure. Gotham waited across the water with its owls, its ghosts, its old houses full of men who still believed cages could be mistaken for crowns if they were built high enough.

Let them wait.

You had spent your whole life being shaped into someone else’s replacement.

In the dark, beside the boy who had escaped and come back for you anyway, you finally began to become yourself.

“Thank you. For being here.” You murmur into his chest, focusing on the steady beat of his heart.

“It’s what I’m here for.”

“I doubt that’s what the guardians had in mind.” The two of you giggling at the thought of Guardian-sponsored cuddles. Truthfully, you doubt anyone had realised the reality of the Guardians actions, least of all themselves. Whatever their manipulations, you and Kyle had been eternally bound, souls irrevocably chained. Kyle knows you better than anyone ever has or ever will.

You’re one of the last blue lanterns in the galaxy, and as such, a precious resource. One to be guarded, protected, nothing more than a commodity. Initially, you’d been furious, bitter, intent on making the life of whatever man you were given to a living hell. But then you’d met Kyle, felt his soul brush against yours, learned his dreams, hopes, feelings, without even needing words, and decided you could never hate him.

You did everything together, went everywhere together, something Guy Gardner teased you both relentlessly for. It used to bother you, in the beginning, but now you know him better, not as well as Kyle obviously, but the redhead had managed to endear himself to you, and you saw the teasing for what it really was.

That didn’t mean he still wasn’t one of the most annoying pricks you’d ever met. You trusted Guy to have your back; you might not be bonded in the same way, but your presence was still enough to boost his capabilities well beyond the norm, and Guy was an excellent Green Lantern.

Still, you’d much rather it were Kyle with you now, the two of you having been separated in the chaos of your latest mission. Practically the moment you’d entered the planet’s atmosphere, you’d been attacked, forced to split up.

“Kyle’s a big boy; he can look after himself.” You know that, but Guy’s attempted reassurance doesn’t make you worry any less. Not when Kyle’s absence is a physical ache in your side.

“I know, but I—” Something akin to a crack echoes through the air, and you stumble back into Guy’s arms from the sudden force of something hitting you in the chest. Looking down in confusion, the sharp, searing pain hits the moment you spot the rapidly growing pool of red staining the blue of your lantern suit.

“Guy?” You mumble, as he swears, loud and panicked, pulling you back into the safety of cover whilst forming a protective green bubble.

The shock and pain have rendered you essentially useless, dying as you are, because it's with distant acceptance that you realise, you’re about to die, you’re going to die, and all you can think of in this moment is Kyle.

He’s the last thing on your mind as you succumb to the darkness, a picture of his beautiful smile flashing behind behind your eyelids as you mumble out an apology he’ll never get to hear.

A few streets over, the man in question stumbles, rapidly gasping as a concerned Hal catches him by the arm. “Kyle, man, what’s—” He’s cut off when the younger man suddenly lets out an agonised, gut-wrenching wail before taking off faster than Hal can blink.

“Shit.” He hisses, hurrying to catch up to the blazing green wrecking ball, wreaking havoc through the district.

Kyle’s never felt such intense agony in his entire existence; his heart feels as if it's been ripped from his chest, his very soul torn in half as he blindly flies toward where he senses your rapidly fading presence. Later, he won’t recall the seismic rage that had overcome his being, nor the way he’d mowed through the enemies without mercy, uncaring of potentially fatal injuries.

Kyle drops to his knees beside your already cooling body, gathering you in his arms with a messy wail, fruitlessly begging you to come back to him as a shellshocked Guy watches on, unsure what to do.

“Kyle buddy…” He puts a hand on his friends shoulder, only to gasp when a large green hand grabs him, throwing him against the nearest wall.

“Don’t touch me!” Kyle snarls like a cornered dog, tugging your body even tighter to his chest. “Don’t touch…Just leave us be! Just…” His words trail off, swallowed by the deep heaving sobs. Tears slid down his cheeks rapidly, falling on your peaceful face and if it weren’t for the fact your chest no longer rose and fell, Kyle might have been able to trick himself into believing you were just sleeping.

He’s dazed, helplessly lost without you, a gaping black hole in chest where his heart is supposed to be, the heart he no longer has, for you’ve taken it with you into the darkness he’s sure to quickly follow.

You were his blue, his to love, his to protect and he’s failed you. Failed in his one duty, that had long since stopped feeling as such.

Kyle doesn’t notice Hal’s arrival either, not until hands try to pull him away from you and he’s lashing out like a rabid dog once more. Words of comfort and reason are lost on him, for truthfully, Kyle’s no longer there.

He’s a shell, a case with his insides scooped out, never to be a person again. Nothing more than a ghost living on borrowed time.

Through some miracle, Hal and Guy manage to pry his exhausted form off of you, but it’s only by knocking him out do they manage to make the journey back to OA.

His friends try their best to support him, but none of them realise it’s already too late, there’s nothing left of him to save.

Kyle wakes for the last time on the day of your funeral, having to be practically dragged into attendance, and when the night falls and he finally closes his eyes, they never open again.

The screen of your phone is a blur through your tears, the bright light making your eyes ache. You clumsily wipe at your eyes with the back of your hand but more tears bloom in their place. You settle on your bed next to your half-packed suitcase.

What am I going to do now?

You swipe through your contacts, fingers stilling over Bruce’s photo. You should call him, let him know Chad just broke up with you and his ticket for the cruise is going to waste. Your thumb hovers open the call button but you just can’t bring yourself to press it.

Instead, you scroll down to the only person who really gets you: Kyle.

“Hey, sugar.” He picks up on the first ring, sounding a little breathless, “what’s up?” “Kyle—” Your voice shakes, thick with tears. There’s a pause, some of the noise in the background dies down.

“What’s going on? Are you crying?” “He–he broke up with me.”

Kyle mumbles a string of unintelligible words, mashed together with curses you’re not sure you’ve ever heard before. All you manage to make out is, “asshole—never deserved you.”

“I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Nothing, sweetheart. He’s a jerk.” A sigh and then, “do you need anything?”

“I don’t know…” You blink, “are you busy? I miss you.” “I’m—” There’s a loud smacking sound followed by a crash, “I’m not busy. How about I stop and get some takeout, come and see you?”

“That would be great.”

“Alright, see you soon. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Judging by the fresh bruise on his cheek when he shows up at your door, Kyle was busy when you called. He brandishes the bag of chinese food like a trophy.

“Kyle,” you gape, standing on your toes to cup his cheek. “What—you got hurt?”

He flushes under your touch. “Hm? Oh, that’s nothing.”

You frown. “You didn’t have to come if you were busy.”

He steps into your apartment, dropping the bag of takeout on your counter. He assesses you, taking in the tear stains on your cheeks and the redness to your eyes. His arms open for a hug, pulling you into his chest.

“You needed me,” he says simply. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

Your shoulders shake, your tears returning. He strokes your back, mumbling soothing words into your ear. Kyle’s never been one to shy away from his feelings, always been so sensitive and sweet to you. 

“Thank you for coming.”

Kyle holds you a moment longer before finally releasing you. He gets to work unpacking the takeout while you pull out the dishes. He ducks under you to grab some cutlery, and you find yourself breathless at how easy it is with Kyle. How routine.

Settled on the couch and munching on chicken fried rice, Kyle grabs your remote and turns on your TV.

“What are you putting on?” 

He grins, “you’ll see.”

You watch as he navigates your abundance of streaming services—gifted to you by Bruce, of course—and turns on your favorite movie. Your eyes light up, your back suddenly straighter.

“I love this movie!”

“I know.”

And he does, because of all your boyfriends, all of your friends, nobody pays more attention to you than Kyle Rayner. Nobody knows you like he does.

“So,” he says casually, “are you guys still going on that cruise this weekend?” Your face blanks, all of the blood draining away. You sniffle, the weight of your recent breakup weighing on your shoulders once more. Kyle watches you carefully, notes every emotion that passes over your face.

“Oh, god. I forgot about the cruise.” Hot tears pool in your eyes, your nose burning. You try to blink them away, taking deep breaths to guide yourself through it. It doesn’t help, a fat tear slipping from the corner of your eye and rolling down your cheek.

Kyle’s resting his plate on the coffee table, leaning in to wipe your tears before you can even react. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

“No, it’s fine it’s just—” You look to your lap, fiddling with a loose thread on your pants, “they were going to be meeting him for the first time and now I just—I feel silly telling them my relationship only lasted three months.”

“It’s not silly at all, it wasn’t your fault.” He rests a hand over yours, stilling the nervous motion, “they’ll understand.”

“I know, but…it’s so embarrassing, Kyle.”

He pauses to think for a moment. “Did they know what he looked like?” “...no?”

“You’re sure? Tim and Dick didn’t run a background check on him already?”

“Yeah, I didn’t….they didn’t even know his name.”

He nods, considering it. Silence blankets the room, cut only by the sounds coming from your tv. You risk a glance up at Kyle, deep in thought.

“So bring someone else.”

You blink, confused.

“If you’re not ready to tell them, just bring someone else. It’s only four days, right?” He smiles gently when you nod, “then you don’t have to be alone, and you don’t have to tell them.”

You think about it. Really, actually think about it. You’re sure someone—maybe Cass or Tim—has already stalked you and found out who you were dating. But you’re sure they wouldn’t dare admit it if you did, and wouldn't bother to correct you if they knew it would upset you.

Plus, you really don’t want to be alone right now.

“Come with me.”

His mouth falls open in shock. “Me?”

“Please? It was your idea and you’re the only one who knows and…I know Bruce at least likes you.”

“I—” His face pales, “Dick will kill me. And if he doesn’t, there’s about ten other people down the line who will.”

You clasp your hand around his, “please?”

And god, he wants to say no. He wants to say no so badly. A week with you, sharing a room, pretending to be a boyfriend and dealing with your family of feral Bats sounds like torture. But it’s the way you’re looking at him, eyes still wet with tears and lips drawn into a pout, shimmering like he’s your only hope in the entire world.

“Okay,” he says finally, “I’ll do it.”

You practically lunge at him across the couch, wrapping your arms around him and nuzzling your head into his neck. “You’re the best friend I could ever ask for, Kyle.” The breath stills in his body from your touch, heart sinking at the word ‘friend’.

Kyle’s heart is in his throat. Waiting on the dock, the smell of salty sea water and the gentle breeze in his hair, he can’t get his nerves to settle. It only gets worse when he catches sight of your father—immaculately dressed in khakis and a Hawaiian print shirt.

You press yourself into his side, lacing your fingers through his. The rest of your family pops into view, the dorky straw hat on Tim’s head sticking out like a sore thumb.

Bruce smiles when he sees you, only for it to falter slightly when he sees the man next to you. Just as quickly as it happens, it stops, that famous Bruce Wayne smile back in full swing.

He opens his arms to greet you in a hug, an awkward gesture with him patting you on the back. “Good to see you.”

By the time you pull away, the rest of your siblings have caught up to the two of you. You feel their eyes assessing you, taking the two of you in. 

You reach for Kyle’s hand again, tugging him forward to present him to your family. “Guys, this is my boyfriend.”

Kyle tenses, feeling oddly exposed. He manages a weak wave with his free hand, “hey.”

It’s Dick that steps up first, flashing that perfect shiny smile. “Good to see you, man.”

And when Kyle offers his hand, Dick squeezes it almost tight enough to crack the bones in his fingers. He sucks in a breath, forcing his face to remain neutral as your brother all but breaks his hand. 

You swat Dick’s hand away, glaring at him. “Really?” “What?” Ever the gaslighter, he plays innocent, “just welcoming him.”

“Yeah, real welcoming.” He pulls you into a hug, tighter and less awkward than Bruce’s. His voice drops so only you can hear him, “you didn’t mention you were dating Kyle of all people, is this why he’s always over?”

“How do you even know that? Are you watching me?”

“...no.”

The rest of the welcomes go smoother, though Cass regards you and Kyle with confusion and narrowed eyes. You wonder if she knows something the rest of them don’t, if she somehow knows you’re lying.

With everyone having thoroughly sized up Kyle in their own way, you’re free to actually board the cruise and be shown to your rooms.

It’s only when the door to your joint room is closing that Kyle feels like he can breathe again. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he settles on the bed.

“Why did I let you talk me into this?”

“Because you love me?”

He sighs. He does, he really really does. More than you could possibly know.

“If I die, do not let Guy use my death to pick up women.”

You fall onto the bed next to him, resting your head on his shoulder. His heart rate evens at your touch, all of his tension melting away. He’s not sure how he’s going to spend four nights sharing a bed with you, not when being so close to you has him forgetting how to breathe.

“You’re not gonna die, Kyle.” You look at him through your lashes, “I’ll protect you.”

And he’s tempted to remind you he’s seen your oldest brother go toe to toe with Gods and monsters with nothing but two sticks and his bare hands, but he doesn’t. He just lets himself be lulled by your touch and the gentle rocking of the ship.

Dinner with your family feels like a minefield.

Kyle does his best to answer their prying questions, looking them in the eyes and lying through his teeth. He’d feel bad about it if it weren’t for your hand on his thigh and how close you’re sitting to him.

“And you guys have been dating for three months?”

Kyle hums in agreement through a bite of food. “Yep.” Tim pipes up next, “but you guys were friends for a long time.” “Yes.”

“And you only started dating now?”

Bruce jumps into the conversation and you brace yourself for the worst. For either the protective father or the over-analytical detective to come into play.

Instead, he smiles gracefully. “Kyle, how are things on Oa?”

Kyle’s grateful for the break in conversation, getting to talk about something other than your fake relationship. He jumps into a semi-detailed conversation with Bruce about Lantern business, the older man nodding along.

Damian nudges your side. “I thought your standards would be higher than a Green Lantern. But if you had to choose one, Rayner is acceptable.”

You laugh, shaking your head at his antics. “Kyle’s sweet.”

“Is that the standard now?” Jason says, and you’re wondering when he started listening in to your conversation.

“You’re one to talk.”

“What? I’m not sweet enough for you?”

You squeeze Kyle’s thigh. This dinner can’t end soon enough.

“I’m sorry.” Those are the first words out of your mouth when you’re closing the door to your cabin. Kyle smiles thinly, dizzied from the borderline interrogation he’d just gone through.

“Of everyone I thought would be weird about it,” he says slowly, “Tim was not the person I expected.”

You cringe. “He can be a lot. I’m sorry.”

Kyle rifles through his swiftly packed suitcase, grabbing out a pair of sweats and a t-shirt you’d gifted him for his birthday. “I’m gonna get changed.”

You watch him retreat to the bathroom, grabbing out your own pyjamas and changing into them. You’re just pulling on your shirt, your back bare and facing the bathroom door, when you hear it click open.

“Shit, sorry!” Kyle covers his eyes, backing up into the wall.

You turn to look at him, tugging your shirt over your head in the process. His cheeks are flushed bright red, a hand clamped over his eyes. You cross the room to him, grabbing at his wrist.

Kyle’s forgotten how to breathe, your gaze on him making his heart swell. His hand drops limply to his side, eyes wide and taking in the sight of you in your pyjamas. Thin shorts and a tanktop, your attempt to keep cool in the warm room of your cabin.

He’s supposed to sleep next to you while you’re wearing those?

“I didn’t realize you were changing,” he rubs the back of his neck, giving you an awkward grin. “Sorry.”

“Huh? I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

And if his face wasn’t an inferno before, it is now. 

You simply turn and settle back into your side of the bed, burying yourself under the sheets. You’ve slept with Kyle before, cuddled up on your couch after falling asleep during a movie or crashing in his bed after a bad night. It’s not much to you, but it’s everything to him.

Kyle follows suit, footsteps slow and even and awkward. He pulls the sheet aside and climbs under it, the warmth coming off of your body falling over him.

This is going to be a long night.

You wake up to sunlight and warmth, Kyle’s arms around your waist and his head in your shoulder. Heat rises to your face, butterflies swarming your stomach. You try to untangle yourself from him without waking him up, but then his eyes are fluttering open.

“Morning,” he rasps, eyes barely open. “How’d you sleep?”

You frown when he pulls himself away from you, so nonchalant about how he was holding you. You miss his warmth. “N-not bad. You?”

He sits up, stretching his limbs. The muscles in his shoulders bulge, and though you’ve seen his arms countless times, you’d be lying if you said you didn’t savour the sight. 

“Mm, good.”

You try to pretend like the moan from his stretch didn’t send heat straight to your stomach. “G-good.”

You go about your morning, Kyle brushing his teeth while you fix your hair, the two of you fighting over the mirror. Kyle yields to you, of course, tall enough to see around you. 

“Stop, you’re gonna drip toothpaste on me!”

“Hm?” He says, toothbrush still stuffed in his mouth, “I never drip.”

As he says that, a trail of toothpaste leaks out of the side of his mouth.

You elbow him in the ribs, ducking your head out of the way. “Gross!”

You retreat back to the room, satisfied with how your hair looks. You hear the sound of him spitting in the sink followed by running water, and then he’s following you into the room. 

He frowns. “Why’re you running from me?” “Because you almost spat on me!”

“You hate me.”

“I—”

You’re cut off from your impending rant about how you absolutely do not hate him when Kyle starts laughing at your expense. He shakes his head, mess of dark hair falling into his face.

“You fall for that every time.”

“You suck.”

The days spent on the cruise seem to tick by, you and Kyle falling into your fake relationship a little too easily. Casual touches are second nature, one of you always having your hand on the other. The pet names come easily, too. Babe here, sweetheart there, sunshine when Kyle’s in a particularly foul mood (usually put there by one of your brothers.) 

The last day of the cruise comes too quickly, disappointment building up at the thought you’ll be going home tomorrow and your ‘relationship’ with Kyle coming to an end. You cling to the fleeting moments the two of you have left.

To celebrate the last day of the cruise, a dance is arranged. The dance hall is decorated in bright coloured florals and twinkling lights, a band on the stage playing music just loud enough to drown out the voices of everyone else.

You sit with Dick at the bar, nursing your drink. 

“Kyle doesn’t want to dance with you?” He gestures to the Lantern, currently sitting at the table with the rest of your family and doodling something on a napkin. 

“Uh—”

“I know you two aren’t really dating.”

Your heart pangs in your chest, your mouth suddenly dry. “What?”

“You and Kyle. I know you’re just friends,” he frowns. “I just don’t get why you felt the need to lie.”

A thousand possibilities cross your mind. Lie, play dumb, double down, come clean. You blank, suddenly wishing Kyle was here. He’s a lot better at coming up with things on the fly than you are.

“Why do you think that?”

And as if he could hear your thoughts, Kyle is suddenly at your side, an arm falling around your shoulders. “Hey, sweetheart.”

He kisses your cheek and you lean into him instinctively. Kyle looks from you to Dick, back to you and then back at Dick.

“What’re you guys talking about?” He plucks your drink from your hand, sipping on it, not even bothering to drink from a different side of the glass than you.

Dick’s eyes narrow, looking between the two of you. “That I know you’re not really dating.”

Kyle nearly chokes on his drink. 

You nudge him, your own face a perfect mask of calm. “Dick was just about to tell me why he thinks that and why he’s so invested in my personal life.”

Your brother’s eyes roll at the sarcasm in your tone. “I’m just looking out for you.” 

“Please, Kyle is the last person you need to worry about.”

“Maybe,” he shrugs, looking at Kyle. “What do you think?” “Me?” Dick nods.

“I think—” You hold your breath, worried that what he’s going to say next will ruin your facade. 

“I think I’ve never loved somebody so much in my entire life,” he says quietly. “I think I’m the luckiest man alive, getting to date my best friend. And I think there’s no one else I’d rather be with.”

Tears burn the backs of your eyes, the world around you having stopped spinning sometime during his speech. Dick looks as shocked as you feel, confusion marring his features. 

“Kyle…”

Dick slides away, “I’m just gonna go.” With Dick gone, Kyle’s attention is fully on you now. You try to blink away your tears, steadying yourself against the bar counter.

“I-I meant every word,” he admits, and his eyes drift away from yours. “I really do love you.”

You’re not sure who leans in first, if your hands found the back of his neck or his found your waist, but all of a sudden his lips are on yours and the world falls away from around you. You taste your drink on his lips, feel the softness of them and the need behind his kiss.

His hands slip from your waist to the small of your back, tugging you flush against him. You let him pull you in, let his body absorb yours, hold you close. 

“Well,” he says, mouth resting on the corner of yours, “I guess we don’t have to fake it anymore.” You laugh, wet and filled with joy, “yeah, I guess we don’t.”

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