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{My first ever Jason Todd drabble + my first time writing any kind of fanfic. i hope you enjoy!!}
The sound of the last of the thugs hitting the floor bounces off the walls of the warehouse. Thick red liquid pools around his head, and Jason drops the crowbar he’s holding with an equally loud clang.
He finally did it.
He killed the last man involved in his murder.
Yet he feels no different inside. In fact, the screaming voices he’s been tormented with since his rebirth at the Lazarus Pit have only gotten louder.
He grimaces and clutches the sides of his head as a swirling symphony of dark thoughts berate him. Cool pain shoots against his skull as he repeatedly bashes the side of his head until they stop.
Dazedly, he stares at the countless dead bodies in front of him.
Jason’s shoulders are slumped. He’s beyond defeated. After grisly hours of fighting, blood, dirt, and flesh stain his entire body — including his conscience. The echoes of voices pleading for reprieve won’t leave his head, so he runs.
He runs all the way to your shitty little apartment on the coast of Gotham.
Jason’s eyes catch on the sight of you through your window, bathed in warmth from your reading light as you lay curled on your couch. Jason knows he’s tainting your life.
He’s too selfish to care.
You jump as your window slides open and a familiar dark figure hauls himself through it.
Jason can’t stop himself from groveling. He’s sick, and you’re the cure. He offers all of himself to you, his undying devotion for your attention.
His dirty boots leave marks on your carpet as he clambers to you. Halfway to the couch, he drops to his knees and crawls, legs giving out after too much fighting and the mental burden too much death brings.
The world feels like it’s in slow motion as shallow breaths leave your lungs and the large man clumsily makes his way to you.
You sit there in shock, your body unable to move as he reaches out to you. Trying not to squirm as bloodied hands slide up your thighs, painting two trails of red and staining skin red with sin, you attempt to meet Jason’s gaze.
Your breath catches as sickness rises in your stomach.
He’s too out of it to even realize he’s getting you dirty.
Contact to your skin awakens something in him, and all of a sudden his body is softly shaken with silent sobs. Soft words of prayer leave Jason’s lips as if you’re a deity with the ability to deliver repentance from his transgressions.
You’re stiff as your body shudders before your hands find his hair, unsure and shaking slightly. The thick strands wrapped around your fingers ground you as you tug them to bend his head back, exposing his red-rimmed eyes and bruised face. He’s at your mercy.
The tears keep running, mixing with blood and snot, making him look pathetic.
His eyes are haunted with something you’ll never understand as a civilian. His voice is devastatingly broken when he finally speaks.
“I couldn’t stop, I—”
He breaks off into more pitiful sobs before he can finish his sentence.
Your skin burns where he clutches onto you. The hands in his hair drag down to cup his face as you try to wipe away his tears — a futile attempt, as they just continue to pour.
Like a god forgiving their follower, you whisper:
“I know.”
He leans into your hands, pressing deeper into you. He’s consumed completely by you as he wraps around you entirely, as if attempting to purify himself with your innocence.
The look on his face makes him seem smaller than he is.
Like a child.
The voices haunting his mind don’t stop — they never do — and he buries his face into the plush of your thighs.
Blood drips off of him onto the clean carpet, something that can be cleaned unlike Jason’s hands.
His mind is stuck on the impurity he holds forever, all because of the Joker, and a mix of anger and sorrow bubbles within him. And still you don’t push him away. All-good. All-powerful. All-knowing.
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Summary: Jason has a new neighbor that he can't help but notice.
Warnings: brief mentions of Joker and alludes to wanting Bruce to kill him, mentions of minor injuries, potentially bad writing
WC: 1,211
Fluff!, No use of y/n, reader is very cheerful
—
Jason wasn’t used to letting himself want things. It’s easier if he doesn’t. When he lets himself want things, when he lets himself hope, he’s met with disappointment.
Did he even miss me?
“It’s him or me, you have to decide.”
Why won’t he choose me?
“I’ve never seen you hit Joker that hard, and you hate him.”
He won’t kill the Joker.
“Doing it because… because he took me away from you.”
He won’t kill the man that killed his son.
Sometimes, he comes home with his hands shaking. Mostly on nights where all he sees is a vast expanse of darkness with rows of sharp teeth and all he feels is the hot breath of Gotham on the back of his neck. He squeezes his hands a few times after he’s stripped off his gloves, ignoring the unsteadiness. Thrumming under his skin is a deeply human desire, to be cared for, to matter to someone, to be chosen. Not that he could identify that that was what caused the uneasy ache coursing through him. It’s easier to not identify it, anyway, to pay it no mind as he eats and showers and passes out on top of his covers. It’s easier this way. It’s easier to not want things.
He’s parking his bike when he briefly notices the moving van pulling away from its spot in front of the stoop, something he thinks about when he passes apartment 504, an apartment that he knows has been vacant for a couple of months by now, with a door mat sitting outside of it. He briefly hums in acknowledgement of the new addition to the hall as he makes his way to his own door.
—
His new neighbor is… friendly.
He’s carrying up groceries when he first meets you. You had just locked your door as he rounded the corner and you waved, key ring around your middle finger as your keys swished against your palm with the movement, introducing yourself with an open smile that caused the skin around your eyes to crinkle.
“Hey. Jason.” He smiles, awkwardly, he’s sure of it, slightly lifting the two paper bags he’s carrying from the bottom to keep them from ripping, and the helmet that dangles from two fingers under the brown paper, as a way of waving back.
“Nice to meet you, Jason!” You took a step towards where he had just come from, ready to turn and leave, but not before you shot your hand up in a short wave once more, “Have a great day!”
He eyes you skeptically as you walk away, digging out his keys and half-heartedly grumbling about someone being cheery today.
Little did he know yet, you’re often cheery. Not over the top, and he’s certain you don’t even think twice about it. You smiled and waved and held the elevator open for people, you were just nice. You live in Gotham and you were nice.
—
“Oof, that looks like it hurt.” You grimace when you see him, stepping out of your apartment as he’s walking past the few doors between your two units, his bottom lip having obviously been busted, scabbing over and slightly bruised. The pockets of his jacket hide his matching knuckles. You fall into step with him as you both walk toward the elevator.
He chuckles once, shrugs, “Nothing I can’t handle.” He presses the down arrow through the leather as you look at him with a cocked eyebrow, gaze somewhere between concerned and humored. It was your turn to chuckle.
“Well that’s not ominous.”
“I’m an ominous guy.”
“Yeah, I’m gathering.” You’re smiling as you say it, a somewhat confused mirth in your eyes as the two of you file into the elevator and you press the button for the ground floor.
—
He likes that you talk to him in the hallway. It’s often just pleasantries, “hey, how are you?”s and “any plans this weekend?”s and questions he doesn’t really see the point of, like, “did you see the sun was out for like a whole hour earlier? I hope you were able to enjoy it!” You ask if he’s cooked anything fun recently when you see him carrying groceries. You tell him he should grab a scarf because it’s “colder than hell frozen over out there.” You point to his copy of “Wide Sargasso Sea” that he picked up on the way home and tell him “that’s a good one! You’ll have to tell me what you think,” with the same smile that’s always stretching your cheeks.
He slides into the elevator, past your outstretched arm holding the doors for him, thanking you for doing so.
You tilt your head up towards him, smiling, waving your hand and saying it’s not a problem. He’s standing too close. Your arm brushes his as you drop it back down to your side. He stares ahead. Hard.
“Long day?” You ask, noticing the tension in his shoulders.
He clears his throat, “Uhm, yeah, something like that.”
“Quite the normal answer you got there,” you quip back, slightly laughing, lightening the mood.
“I’m quite the normal guy,” he can’t help it, he feels himself smiling back, stealing a glance at you. He tries to come off cool, charming and sarcastic in the way that comes naturally to him, always having a joke at the tip of his tongue to hide behind. He knows he’s not quite successful, his voice sounding just a fraction too… soft.
“Well, normal guy, what have you got going on tonight?” You ask him so casually, as you grab your keys, sliding your middle finger through the key ring and holding them in the palm of your hand, the way you always do. So casual, normal. Things he was not, could not be.
The elevator dings and you start walking before he does.
“Normal things,” he catches up to you easily.
“Riiiiight, well, good luck with all your normal things” you respond light-heartedly. You’ve stopped in front of your door, your back to it and today, he stopped, too, facing you. “I hope you have a good night, Jason," you’re looking up at him with a close-mouthed, pleased smile stretched across your face.
He’s staring and he knows it. A beat too late he says, “Yeah, you too,” and his head is slightly tilted to the side as he smiles back at you. A smile that has long since stopped being so awkward around you, but also isn’t playing defense with a joke, isn’t asserting any aura of cocky self-assuredness. Instead, there on his face sits a soft smile that’s a touch too vulnerable for his own liking.
You shoot your hand up in a quick wave, keys swishing from side to side. He nods his head as a goodbye and starts walking to his own apartment. When he unlocks his door, he looks back to your own, only to see you already looking at him, key unmoving in your door. You duck your head down quickly, and walk inside your home as he does the same. His hands shake as he takes the key out of his lock, an uneasy ache underneath his skin, sending nervous energy pulsing through his body and thrumming under his skin.
Warnings: explicit sexual content, empathic bond, forced proximity, shared bed, violence, guns, blood/injury, sensory overload, alien tech, mutual pining, emotional vulnerability, references to Roy’s past and recovery, oral sex, vaginal sex
Summary:
The Outlaws are easy enough to handle from behind a screen.
Roy Harper is a different kind of problem: reckless, brilliant, charming, and far too good at finding excuses to text you after midnight.
When a mission drags you out from behind the keyboard and into the field, the line between banter and wanting becomes a lot harder to pretend you cannot see.
Author’s Note:
set loosely during the New-52 Outlaws era. reader is the team’s smart-mouthed tech handler, not a vigilante.
Roy Harper sent you a picture of a smoking circuit board at 2:43 in the morning with the caption, be honest with me, doc. is she gonna make it?
You stared at the message from the dark hollow of your bedroom, phone held inches above your face, one eye open and the other still committed to sleep. The image was grainy, badly lit, and deeply offensive to anyone with even a passing respect for wiring. A ribbon cable had been severed, two contact points were scorched, and the outer casing of what looked like a modified arrowhead had partially melted into a shape that suggested Roy had either dropped it into a furnace or tried to flirt with it.
A second message arrived before you could decide whether to answer.
also before u get mad this was already broken when i touched it
Then a third.
mostly
You typed with your thumb.
you are a public safety hazard
Roy’s reply came almost instantly.
ur awake :)
You closed your eyes and inhaled through your nose.
i am awake because you keep committing crimes against engineering
i thought u liked engineering
i like engineering when it isn’t screaming for help
sweetheart that feels like a limited worldview
You rolled onto your back and dragged the edge of your blanket up to your chin, as if warmth could protect you from Roy Harper and his apparently endless ability to find you through encrypted channels, bad hours, and your own poor decisions. You had been working with the Outlaws for eight months, which was long enough to know better and apparently not long enough to stop answering.
The arrangement had started with Red Hood breaking into your apartment at midnight, helmet tucked beneath one arm, a hard drive in his gloved hand, and a red domino still fixed over his eyes. Oracle’s word had apparently earned you a glimpse of the man beneath the mask, though not his carelessness. Your motion sensors had warned you three minutes earlier, so you did not scream; screaming at strange men with guns gave them too much satisfaction.
He had said, “Oracle said you’re good.”
You had said, “Oracle needs to stop giving my name to strange men with guns.”
“She didn’t. She said you answer to Relay.”
You looked at the hard drive in his hand. Then at him. Then at the open window behind him.
“Is breaking and entering a Red Hood thing, or a you thing?”
His mouth twitched like he had decided not to reward that. “You want a job?”
You had nearly told him to climb back out the window. Then you had taken the drive, decrypted the first layer out of spite, and found three trafficking routes, a shell company tied to a private militia, and enough offshore transactions to make your professional curiosity stronger than your survival instincts.
After that, you became what Jason called support and what Roy called mission control. You ran comms, built surveillance patches, forged clean travel documents, tracked dirty money, scrubbed safehouse feeds, and kept their gear from betraying them at inconvenient moments. You did not go into the field. You did not wear armor. You did not jump off rooftops, exchange fire with mercenaries, or stand close enough to explosions to develop opinions about them.
You were not an Outlaw. You reminded them of this frequently.
Jason respected it because he understood boundaries when they were backed by blackmail-level system access. Koriand’r found it charming because she found many human distinctions charming, especially the ones people pretended were not emotional. Roy ignored it whenever possible.
Roy called when he had a pertinent technical question. Roy called when he had a stupid technical question. Roy called when something was sparking, smoking, blinking, ticking, leaking, or behaving in a manner he described as “ominous but kind of sexy.” Roy also called when missions went too quiet and his voice took on that careful, bright edge that told you he needed noise in his ear until his hands stopped shaking.
You knew the difference. You never said you knew.
Your phone buzzed again.
for legal reasons jay says i need to ask if this could explode
You opened the message, stared at it, and then sat up with a sigh that carried all the ruin of your sleep schedule with it. Your laptop sat on the nightstand because you had learned months ago that Roy’s emergencies were usually easier to solve from a full interface.
You accepted the secure call.
Roy had a way of saying Relay as if he had personally discovered the word and intended to make it everyone else’s problem.
“Relay,” he said into the comm, bright and shameless.
You closed your eyes. “Do not make it sound like a pet name.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“You absolutely were.”
“Little bit,” he admitted. Then, before you could hang up on principle, he added, “Before you say anything, I want you to know I value your expertise.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“See, that is the kind of decisive leadership I respect.”
“Show me the circuit board.”
His video feed came in at a terrible angle. For three seconds, you got an intimate view of his collarbone, the strap of his harness, and a smear of soot on the underside of his jaw. City lights glittered behind him, too high and too distant, which meant rooftop. Gotham, judging by the industrial gloom and the fact that Jason was audibly swearing somewhere off-screen.
“Camera,” you said.
Roy adjusted it. “Better?”
“Marginally. Why is it smoking?”
“In my defense—”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear the defense.”
“I have heard enough of your defenses to know they are usually confessions with better lighting.”
Jason’s voice cut in. “Ask her whether the thing is going to detonate.”
“I did ask,” Roy said.
“You flirted with her and then talked about legal liability.”
“That is asking.”
You pinched the bridge of your nose. “Point the camera at the board.”
Roy obeyed. Mostly. The feed lurched as he moved closer, catching a blur of rooftop gravel, Jason’s boot, and the smoking circuit board balanced on the ledge before settling crookedly over the component. Then Roy leaned in from the side, too close, and the camera caught the line of his cheek, the corner of his mouth, the smile he was failing to suppress because he knew he had woken you and had the nerve to enjoy being scolded for it.
“Roy.”
“Right. Board.”
The feed shifted. You studied the damage, your irritation fading as your brain caught on to the problem. The arrowhead was not one of Roy’s usual designs. The housing had been modified to carry a small but highly unstable cell, likely scavenged from alien tech and forced into a human-made casing by someone either ambitious or stupid. Given the Outlaws’ usual social circle, probably both.
“Do not cut the braided line,” you said.
Roy’s hand froze in frame, wire cutters visible between two fingers.
You stared.
He slowly moved the cutters away. “Wasn’t gonna.”
“You absolutely were.”
“Maybe as a thought experiment.”
Jason made a sound of disgust. “Give it to me.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Your entire life is evidence to the contrary.”
Kori’s voice floated through the line from farther away, calm and warm. “Is our friend awake?”
“She is,” Roy said.
“I am involuntarily conscious,” you corrected.
Kori sounded pleased. “Hello. I am sorry Roy has interrupted your sleeping.”
“Thank you, Kori.”
“He has been watching his phone for twenty minutes, so I believe he was hoping for an excuse.”
The rooftop went silent.
You blinked at the screen.
Jason barked a laugh.
Roy’s face came back into frame too fast. “Okay, that is wildly out of context.”
“Is it?” you asked.
“Yes.”
Kori hummed.
Jason said, “No.”
Roy pointed somewhere off-camera. “Nobody asked either of you.”
You leaned back against your pillows, suddenly much more awake than you wanted to be. “Twenty minutes?”
“I was waiting until it was necessary.”
“You were waiting for a component to smoke so you could text me?”
“Technically, the component made that decision.”
“Fascinating. I hope the two of you are happy together.”
Roy’s grin softened around the edges, just enough to make the room a little warmer than before. “Jealous?”
“You are one bad solder joint away from a memorial service.”
“You’d come?”
“I would make sure Jason disposed of your browser history.”
“That’s love.”
“That’s hazard pay.”
Jason leaned into frame, expression flat. “Are we done?”
“For now,” you said. “Disconnect the cell from the regulator, wrap it in the thermal sleeve, and stop letting Roy hold things that can alter the skyline.”
Roy placed a hand against his chest. “You wound me.”
“Clean the cut on your forehead while you’re being wounded.”
His smile froze for a second.
It was small. Barely anything. But you saw it because you had gotten too good at watching him through screens. The cut was half-hidden near his hairline, a little dark with dried blood. He had not mentioned it. He would not have mentioned it until the mission was done, and then only if it made a good joke.
“Bossy,” he said softly.
“Alive,” you replied.
For a moment, the rooftop noise faded.
Roy looked into the camera, and the usual distance of comms felt thinner than it should. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll clean it.”
“Good.”
His mouth lifted. “You worried about me, Relay?”
You should have said no. You always said no. It was part of the rhythm. Roy leaned too close; you pushed him back with sarcasm. He tossed charm into every open channel; you swatted it away before it could land anywhere vulnerable. The system worked because both of you understood it was a game, and because neither of you had ever been stupid enough to ask what would happen if one of you stopped playing.
So you said, “I am worried about your unpaid invoices.”
“There she is,” Roy murmured.
Your stomach did something foolish.
Jason took the damaged arrow out of Roy’s hand and moved out of frame. “I liked her better before you started flirting.”
“You hired me,” you said.
“One of my few regrets.”
Kori said, “I enjoy this. It is like watching a small battle, but affectionate.”
“It is not affectionate,” you and Jason said at the same time.
Roy, traitor that he was, only smiled.
You ended the call before he could see you smiling back.
By noon the next day, Jason had ruined your week.
He arrived through the door this time, which meant either he wanted something difficult or he had finally learned from the countermeasures you had installed on your windows after his first visit. Roy came in behind him, carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees and the expression of a man who knew he was about to enjoy himself. Kori entered last, ducking slightly under the doorframe of your apartment with easy grace, a bright smile, and a paper bag.
“I bought pastries,” she announced.
You pointed at her. “You may stay.”
Roy held up the coffee. “I brought caffeine.”
“You may plead your case.”
Jason set a matte-black case on your worktable. “We have a job.”
“You always have a job.”
“You’re going on this one.”
You looked at him.
Jason looked back.
Roy took one careful step away from your desk, proving he had some survival instincts after all.
“No,” you said.
“You haven’t heard the job.”
“I heard enough. You used the phrase going on this one, which is the wrong phrase to use with someone who works from a chair for several excellent reasons.”
“You’re the only one who can do it.”
“That is often true and rarely requires me to leave my apartment.”
Jason opened the case.
Inside, secured beneath layers of anti-static film and dampening mesh, was a shard of metal about the length of your thumb. Metal was the simplest word for it, though you knew as soon as you looked at it that it was not quite right. The surface shifted from silver to green to a color that slipped away when you tried to focus on it. Fine lines ran through it in repeating geometric curves, too deliberate to be damage and too organic to be standard circuitry.
Your irritation thinned despite yourself.
“What is that?”
“A piece of the problem,” Jason said.
Roy leaned his hip against the edge of your table. “A sexy piece of the problem.”
“Do not flirt with the alien shrapnel.”
“I was flirting with the expert.”
“Also ill-advised.”
Kori’s expression had gone serious. “It is old.”
You glanced at her. “You recognize it?”
“Not fully. I recognize the shape of its energy, but it has been changed. Perhaps Tamaranean. Perhaps Psion. Perhaps both.”
That got your attention. “Both sounds bad.”
“It often is,” Kori said.
Jason tapped the lid of the case. “This shard broke off the main artifact during transport. A private collector named Lucian Crowe bought the larger piece and locked it under his estate near Marseille. The vault is air-gapped, shielded, and running a hybrid system none of our gear can read from the outside.”
You looked at the shard again. The lines along its surface seemed to pulse.
“Crowe has alien tech in a private vault,” you said slowly, “and you want to steal it.”
“Recover it.”
“Steal it before the man who stole it can keep it. I understand branding, Jason.”
Roy grinned. “Crime with ethics.”
“Do not help.”
“I think I helped a little.”
“You did not.”
Jason crossed his arms. “The vault has no wireless access. Drones die within thirty feet of the lower level. The main artifact is tied into the internal security system, and if we pull it wrong, we don’t know what it triggers.”
You closed your eyes.
Roy said, “She’s doing the thing.”
“What thing?” Jason asked.
“The thing where she’s already solving it and hating us for being right.”
“I am hating you for several reasons,” you said.
“But one of them is because I’m right.”
“Do not make me regret saving your face from microfusion shrapnel.”
Kori stepped closer, her voice gentler than the others’. “We would not ask if there were another way. You will not be there to fight. You will be there to understand the machine.”
“I understand machines from behind walls and heavily encrypted distance.”
“The distance is the problem,” Jason said. “We need hands on the system.”
You looked at Roy before you meant to. He had gone quieter. The humor was still there because Roy rarely abandoned a shield while conscious, but it had settled into something less bright. He was watching you with open concern, and that was worse than if he had made another joke. Roy could tease you into doing almost anything because you could tease back. This felt like care, and care made you stupid.
“I’m not a vigilante,” you said.
“We know,” Jason replied.
“I don’t do fieldwork.”
“We know.”
“I am extremely attached to being unshot.”
Roy lifted a hand. “For what it’s worth, I am also attached to you being unshot.”
You stared at him.
His mouth twitched. “That sounded smoother in my head.”
“Did it?”
“No, actually. I panicked halfway through.”
You should not have laughed. Unfortunately, you did.
Jason looked between you with the exhausted resignation of a man who had been trapped in an elevator with jazz. “Roy stays with you the whole time. Kori and I handle security. You get in, interface with the vault, disconnect the artifact, and get out.”
You studied the shard. The sensible answer remained no. It sat in your mouth, clean and ready. Then the lines along the metal flared in response to some unknown input, and your nearest monitor flickered.
Your curiosity stirred.
Roy saw it happen. You knew because his face changed.
“Don’t,” you warned.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You looked smug.”
“I have a naturally smug resting face.”
“You have a naturally punchable resting face.”
“See?” Kori said warmly. “Affectionate battle.”
Jason groaned.
You rubbed a hand over your face. “I want hazard pay.”
Jason nodded. “Done.”
“And I call retreat if I think the system is unstable.”
“Done.”
“And Roy does not touch anything unless I specifically tell him to touch it.”
Roy put the coffee down and raised both hands. “I will be your humble assistant.”
“That sentence has never once described you.”
“I said will be. Personal growth.”
You held his gaze longer than you should have. “I mean it. If I’m on the ground, you listen.”
Roy’s smile softened again, the joking surface giving way to something steadier beneath. “I’ll listen.”
You hated that you believed him.
The estate outside Marseille looked like every criminal billionaire’s idea of subtlety: pale stone walls, manicured cypress, glass balconies, an infinity pool overlooking the sea, and enough concealed security to make the entire cliffside hum with money and paranoia. From the outside, it could have been a vacation home. Through your tablet, it looked like a migraine.
You crouched behind a maintenance structure near the eastern edge of the property, wearing body armor Jason had produced far too quickly and an earpiece you had modified yourself because you trusted your own encryption more than his. The Mediterranean stretched dark and quiet beyond the cliffs. The night smelled like salt, stone, and expensive flowers.
You missed your chair. You missed your monitors. You missed the ability to glare at danger through a screen while wearing pajama pants.
Roy crouched beside you, bow in hand, wearing the serene expression of a man who thought breaking into fortified estates was a reasonable way to spend an evening. He glanced over when you shifted the tablet against your knee.
“You okay?”
“I am reconsidering several life choices.”
“That’s normal.”
“For you.”
“Usually I wait until after the explosion.”
“You are bad at comfort.”
“I can try flirting.”
“I will push you into the ocean.”
He smiled, but his eyes stayed on the perimeter lights. “You’d have to get through my reflexes.”
“I have disabled three of your comm units remotely.”
“Those were innocent.”
“Those were playing music during a stealth op.”
“They were boosting morale.”
“They were playing ABBA.”
“Exactly.”
Jason’s voice cut in through comms. “If you two are done.”
“You are no fun on heists,” Roy said.
“It’s not a heist.”
“It is absolutely a heist,” you said.
Jason ignored you both. “Patrol’s coming around west. Kori, you’re up.”
Above you, Kori crossed the sky like a silent flare, too fast and high for the guards to register before their feed died. Your tablet showed two camera grids that froze, looped, and resumed with edited footage. You tapped three commands into the overlay and opened a six-minute window through the outer perimeter.
“East path is blind,” you said. “Thermal sweep is on a delay. Two guards by the service entrance, one drone on the south balcony. Kori has twelve seconds to make that drone regret existing.”
“I will be swift,” Kori said.
The drone vanished from your feed.
Roy whispered, “I love watching her work.”
“I love when people complete tasks without arguing.”
“That feels pointed.”
“It is.”
He touched your elbow lightly. You looked at his hand before you looked at him. The contact was brief, barely more than a check-in. It should not have steadied you as much as it did.
“Stay behind me once we’re inside,” he said.
“I thought you were my humble assistant.”
“I can be humble in front.”
“That is not how hierarchy works.”
“I’m reinventing it.”
You rolled your eyes, but your pulse had slowed. Roy noticed. His hand fell away before it could become something either of you had to address.
Jason dropped the two guards by the service entrance with the efficiency of a man who had decided the night would go better if no one got to finish a sentence. The door opened on your command, and the four of you slipped inside.
The first floor smelled like polished wood and cold air. Crowe had filled the place with art, or what people with more money than taste considered art: stolen statues, framed weapons, antique maps, fragments of things that belonged in museums and were instead arranged under perfect lighting for one man’s private enjoyment. You kept your attention on your tablet. Objects were easier to pity when you were not trying to stay alive.
The house systems were easy compared to the vault. Too easy, which annoyed you. Crowe had spent millions on hardware and then let human arrogance make the architecture predictable. You looped feeds, delayed door alarms, and walked Jason through a rotating pressure sensor in the hall outside the private elevator.
Roy stayed close. Too close, sometimes. His shoulder nearly brushed yours when you stopped beside a panel. His breath warmed the side of your neck when he leaned in to look at your screen. Once, while you were bypassing a biometric lock, his hand came to rest on the wall beside your head as he watched the corridor behind you. It put him around you without touching. Protective, but not crowding.
You hated how aware you were of him.
“You’re staring at the wrong thing,” you murmured.
Roy’s eyes flicked down. “I’m watching the hall.”
“You were watching my hands.”
“Your hands are doing cool things.”
“My hands are working.”
“That is one of the cool things.”
The lock clicked open.
You refused to look at him as you stepped through. “Your field professionalism is overwhelming.”
“Thank you. I’ve been practicing.”
Jason, several yards ahead, said, “You haven’t.”
“I’ve been thinking about practicing.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s adjacent.”
The private elevator took you below the estate, deep enough that your tablet lost the house network and switched to local mapping. The lower level had been carved into the cliff and reinforced with composite paneling. The air turned colder. The lighting became harsh and clean. Wealth disappeared, replaced by sterile function. You saw lab rooms through narrow windows as you passed. Containment chambers. Scanning equipment. Storage cases. A surgical table with restraints attached.
Your stomach tightened.
Roy noticed immediately. “Hey.”
“I’m fine.”
His voice lowered. “I know you are. Still.”
You glanced at him and found no joke waiting. He had seen the table too. He knew what kind of people used restraints in private labs beneath their homes. The anger in his expression was quiet and sharp.
Jason stopped at the end of the hall. “Vault.”
The door was circular, seamless, and embedded in the wall with no visible handle. A single access port sat beneath a shielded cover at waist height. The readings on your scanner went strange as soon as you lifted it, numbers bending into nonsense before snapping back.
Kori stood very still.
You looked at her. “Bad?”
“Old,” she said again. “And hurt.”
It was not the kind of thing you wanted to hear about alien technology.
Jason glanced at you. “Can you open it?”
“Probably.”
“Comforting.”
“You want honest or comforting?”
He said nothing.
“That’s what I thought.”
You settled in front of the access port and pulled your kit from your bag. Roy crouched beside you, bow resting across his knees, his body angled toward the corridor while his attention kept flicking back to you.
“Don’t hover,” you said.
“I’m guarding.”
“You are hovering with weapons.”
“Very different.”
You plugged into the port. Your tablet flashed white, then black, then filled with symbols that were not part of any language pack you had installed. The translation patch you had built from the shard’s resonance data stuttered, corrected itself, and began offering rough approximations.
Roy heard it in your silence. “What kind of frown is that?”
“The bad kind.”
“I know several bad kinds.”
“The system isn’t just locked by code. It’s reading the room.”
Jason’s hand tightened around his gun. “Reading how?”
“Heat. Electrical output. Brain activity, maybe.” You tapped deeper into the system, watching the symbols reorder themselves. “It’s tied into the artifact. Crowe didn’t build a vault around it. He built the vault through it.”
“That sounds unstable,” Roy said.
“That is because you have pattern recognition.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“It almost was.”
Kori moved closer to the vault door. “Can it be opened without harm?”
“I think so,” you said, which was the most dangerous kind of answer. “I need quiet.”
For once, you got it.
Your world narrowed to the interface. The system resisted blunt commands, so you stopped giving them. You followed its rhythm instead, tracing the places where Crowe’s human security had been forced around something older and stranger. The vault was listening. You disliked the word, but it was the right one. It listened for patterns, for intent, for emotional pressure. It had been designed for something delicate before Crowe turned it into a lock.
You found the seam.
The door opened with a low mechanical groan. Cold air spilled over the threshold. The chamber beyond was round and dark, lit from below by thin white lines in the floor. At the center stood a pedestal. Suspended above it, inside a transparent containment field, was the artifact.
It looked like two interlocked rings around a shard of living light. Metal, crystal, and energy moved together in a slow rotation, too elegant to be weaponry and too precise to be decoration. It gave off no heat on your scanner, but your skin prickled as if you had stepped too close to lightning.
Roy let out a low whistle. “Okay. That is sexy alien tech.”
“Do not flirt with the artifact either.”
“I’m appreciating craftsmanship.”
“It can probably hear you.”
He leaned away slightly. “Then I respect its boundaries.”
Jason entered first, gun raised. Kori followed, eyes fixed on the spinning rings. You stayed near the access port, still connected to the vault system, and began mapping the containment field.
The deeper you went, the less you liked it.
“This was altered,” you said. “Badly.”
Kori nodded. “The Psions did this.”
You glanced up. “You’re sure?”
“I know the cruelty of their work.”
There was a weight in her voice that made Roy’s expression darken and Jason’s mouth flatten. You looked back down, suddenly aware that this was not merely a dangerous machine. It was history in pieces, stolen, modified, sold, locked away under a rich man’s house.
You hated Crowe with surprising clarity.
“What was it originally?” you asked.
“I do not know,” Kori said. “Perhaps a healing instrument. Perhaps a ceremonial bond. Something meant for trust.”
Roy shifted. “And Crowe wired it to his alarm system.”
“Men like Crowe think trust is something they can buy a cage for,” Jason said.
The vault hummed.
Your tablet vibrated against your palm.
You looked down. “That wasn’t me.”
The floor lights shifted from white to amber. The artifact’s rings turned faster, drawing light inward until the center went dark. New symbols spilled across your screen faster than your patch could translate.
Roy stood. “Talk to us, Relay.”
“Secondary command just woke up.”
“Can you stop it?”
“I can if everyone stops asking me questions.”
Jason moved to the vault door. “We have guards coming.”
“Of course we have guards coming.”
Kori lifted off the ground, energy gathering around her hands. “Can I destroy the pedestal?”
“No,” you snapped. “If you hit it while the containment field is inverting, the feedback could—”
The vault door slammed shut. The sound punched through the chamber like a verdict.
For a second, nobody moved.
Then Jason was at the door, knife in hand, tearing into the manual panel. “Open it.”
“I’m trying.”
Roy came to your side. “What do you need?”
You shoved the scanner at him. “Aim this at the artifact and keep it steady. Do not touch anything else.”
His face changed at your tone. All humor gone. “Got it.”
He moved into position.
You cut into the secondary command. The system fought back like a living thing. Crowe had built a trap beneath the trap: if anyone tried to deactivate the field, the artifact would activate instead, using the neurological signatures in the room as a trigger. You saw it one second before the system committed.
“Oh,” you said.
Roy looked over. “Oh good or oh bad?”
“Everyone down.”
The artifact opened. Light tore through the vault.
Roy moved first. He dropped the scanner and lunged for you, one arm catching around your waist as he hauled you backward from the interface. Your tablet hit the floor. His body turned around yours, bracketing you against the nearest console, one hand cradling the back of your head as the room went white.
For one impossible moment, you felt everything. Kori was a star in human shape, fear and anger blazing together with a grief so old it felt like deep space. Jason was a locked door with a burning room behind it, every instinct sharpened toward getting all of you out alive. Beneath them both, the artifact reached through the chamber with desperate, broken purpose, searching for a pattern it recognized.
Then Roy eclipsed all of it. His fear hit you like impact. Your name. Your body under his. His arms locked around you. The violent certainty that the blast would hit him first because he had chosen to be there. Beneath that, a rush of things you were never supposed to feel: affection buried under jokes, wanting buried under habit, the old ache of being too much and never enough, the terror of losing something before he had ever admitted he wanted to keep it.
The light went through him. Then through you.
The world snapped apart.
You came back to the sound of Roy saying your name. At least, you thought he was saying it. The comms were static. Your ears rang. Your cheek was pressed against his chest, and his hand was still cupped around your head. The vault strobed red around you. Somewhere nearby, Jason was cursing at the door.
“Hey,” Roy said. “Come on. Look at me.”
You opened your eyes. His face hovered above yours, too close and too frightened. Blood tracked from a shallow cut near his temple. His hair was mussed, his shoulder smoking where the blast had burned through the outer layer of his jacket.
“You’re very dramatic,” you managed.
Relief flooded you so hard you gasped.
It was not yours.
Roy laughed once, shaky and breathless, and then went still because he felt you feel it.
Your eyes met.
“Oh,” you whispered.
The vault door shrieked open behind you.
Jason stepped through the gap with his helmet on, guns drawn. “Move.”
Guards shouted from the corridor. Kori flew past him in a streak of light, and the next several seconds became chaos.
Roy got you upright. The moment his hand left your waist, pain stabbed behind your eyes so sharply your knees buckled. He caught you again, and the pain eased.
Both of you froze.
Jason fired into the corridor. “This is a bad time for whatever that is.”
“Agreed,” you said, grabbing Roy’s hand.
His fingers closed around yours. Relief moved through the contact, warm and immediate, and you hated that you could not tell which one of you felt it first.
The escape came in pieces.
You remembered Roy keeping one hand on you as the four of you fought your way out of the lower level. You remembered Jason taking point with ruthless efficiency. You remembered Kori’s light burning through smoke. You remembered trying to pull up the estate schematic and seeing the lines swim on your screen whenever Roy moved more than a few feet away.
Worse than the pain was the noise.
Roy was in your head, though not exactly in words. He came through as pressure, heat, flashes of thought sharpened by emotion. His shoulder hurt. His ribs ached. He was angry at himself in a way that made your throat tighten. Should’ve pulled her sooner. Should’ve said no. Should’ve kept her out of this. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
“Stop,” you snapped as the group reached the service corridor.
Roy looked at you. “What?”
“Thinking so loudly.”
His eyes widened.
Jason did not turn around. “Do I want to know?”
“No,” you and Roy said together.
That would have been funny if the west stairwell had not exploded.
By the time you reached the van, your hands were shaking badly enough that Roy had to help you inside. He climbed in after you, and you hated the way your body leaned toward him as soon as he sat. Kori got behind the wheel. Jason slammed the back doors shut and pounded the side panel twice. The van tore away from the estate with the kind of speed that suggested Kori had learned to drive from someone who believed roads were merely polite suggestions.
Roy sat beside you, close but not touching. The space between you throbbed.
You clenched your teeth.
He noticed instantly. “Can I?”
He held out his hand.
That was the thing that almost broke you. He was in pain too. You could feel the echo of it. He was worried, confused, and strung tight with adrenaline, but he still asked before touching you.
You nodded.
His hand closed around yours.
The relief was so intense you had to shut your eyes.
Jason turned in the passenger seat. “Explain.”
“The artifact was tied into neurological response,” you said, forcing the words through the haze. “The blast created some kind of feedback loop.”
“That is not an explanation.”
“It’s the only one I have while trying not to vomit.”
Kori glanced at you through the rearview mirror. Her expression softened. “You are bonded.”
Jason’s helmet turned toward her. “Bonded.”
“In feeling. Perhaps in sensation. It may be temporary.”
“May be?”
“The technology was damaged,” Kori said. “And altered. I will need to examine the shard.”
You opened your eyes. “What shard?”
Jason was quiet for half a second too long.
You stared. “Jason.”
He reached into his jacket and withdrew the black case.
“You brought unstable alien tech into the van with the people it just scrambled?”
“I wasn’t leaving it for Crowe.”
“You could have mentioned it.”
“We were being shot at.”
Roy’s thumb moved across the back of your hand, small and unconscious. It steadied you before you could resent it. Then his worry spiked when he realized he had done it.
You turned to him. “Do not apologize.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were about to.”
He looked uncomfortable. “This is going to get weird fast.”
“It already got weird. You’re late.”
Kori pulled onto a dark service road, leaving the estate lights far behind. “Touch will help. Distance may worsen the symptoms until the bond settles.”
Jason leaned back in his seat and said nothing for a long moment.
Then he said, “Of course touch helps.”
The safehouse was ugly, practical, and aggressively Jason.
It sat on the edge of an industrial stretch outside the city, surrounded by shuttered garages and storage units. Inside, it had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen stocked with protein bars and instant coffee, a weapons table, a medical cabinet, and furniture that looked as though Jason had collected it from various places where people had died. It was clean, secure, and devoid of any object chosen for joy.
“You live like a haunted landlord,” you said as Roy helped you through the door.
Jason removed his helmet. “You’re welcome.”
“I did not say thank you.”
“You were about to.”
“I was not.”
Roy’s hand was warm around yours. “She wasn’t.”
Jason looked at him. “You stay out of this.”
“I’m literally attached to this.”
“Temporarily,” you said.
Roy glanced at you, and the flicker of hurt crossed the bond before he could bury it.
Your chest tightened.
You had not meant it like that. Or maybe you had, because the alternative was admitting that something in you had already started to worry about what would happen when it was over.
Jason did triage in the living room. He checked your pupils, cleaned the cut at your temple, asked questions about dizziness and memory, and kept his expression carefully neutral as you and Roy sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch because anything more than a foot of distance made both of you nauseous. When Jason cleaned the burn across Roy’s shoulder, the sting echoed across your own skin.
You flinched.
Roy turned immediately. “You felt that?”
“Yes.”
His guilt rolled through you, hot and awful.
“Stop,” you said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You felt guilty.”
Jason paused with the gauze in hand. “You can feel that?”
“Apparently.”
Roy looked down. “Great.”
You touched his knee before thinking. “I’m fine.”
He went still.
The contact was nothing. Barely anything compared to holding hands, compared to his body over yours in the vault. But the emotion that moved through him in response was enormous. Relief. Desire. Care. All of it slamming into restraint so quickly it almost hurt.
You pulled your hand back.
The headache returned at once.
Roy caught your wrist, not hard, just enough to maintain contact. “Sorry.”
You glared at him. “What did I say?”
“Right. No apologizing for involuntary alien-bond nonsense.”
“Or for wanting things.”
His eyes snapped to yours.
The silence that followed was a problem.
Jason stood. “I’m getting Kori.”
“Coward,” you said.
“Yes,” he replied, and left.
Roy stared at the coffee table like it might offer legal counsel. “For the record, I am trying very hard not to make this your problem.”
“You are doing a terrible job.”
His mouth twitched. “Yeah?”
“You are anxious directly into my brain.”
“That sounds unhealthy.”
“It is.”
He leaned back against the couch, wincing when his shoulder touched the cushion. You felt the pain and turned without thinking.
“Shoulder.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are a liar.”
“You knew that before the bond.”
“Yes, but now I have receipts.”
That startled a laugh out of him. You felt the way it loosened something in his chest, and that was worse than the desire. Desire was easy to categorize, even when inconvenient. Roy’s happiness at making you laugh was soft. Too soft. It slipped under your defenses before you could lock them.
Kori returned with Jason and the shard. She had wrapped it in a square of gold fabric that shimmered strangely under the safehouse lights.
“I spoke briefly with someone who may know more,” she said. “The full answer will take time, but I believe the device was not made to harm. It was a bonding instrument once, perhaps used for healing or shared pain. The Psions damaged it. Crowe made the damage worse.”
You looked at the covered shard on the table. “Of course he did.”
“Can you reverse it?” Jason asked.
“Not safely yet. The bond was formed under distress. It must settle before I can separate them without causing more harm.”
“How long?” Roy asked.
“Hours. Perhaps days.”
Jason’s jaw tightened. “And until then?”
“Proximity,” Kori said. “Touch, when needed. Calm will help.”
Jason looked at your joined hands.
Roy looked at the ceiling.
You said, “Do not.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Jason replied.
“You thought something judgmental.”
“I always think something judgmental.”
Kori sat across from you, expression kind. “The bond does not create what is absent. It reveals and amplifies what is already present.”
The room went still.
Roy’s hand tightened around yours for half a second before he forced it to relax.
Jason closed his eyes.
You looked at Kori. “Is that medically relevant?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a less devastating way to say it?”
She considered. “The machine cannot invent desire, only conduct it.”
“That was worse.”
Roy made a choking sound.
Jason turned toward the kitchen. “I’m leaving before this becomes my problem.”
“It is your safehouse,” you said.
“Then I’m leaving the problem in a room I’m not in.”
Kori watched him go with fond patience. “He is uncomfortable with tender complications.”
Roy’s voice was dry. “Jason? No.”
You tried to laugh, but the movement made your headache worse. Roy noticed, because of course he did.
“Rest,” he said.
You looked at him. “Do not start giving me orders.”
“That was a suggestion.”
“It had tone.”
“My tone is concerned.”
“Your concern is bossy.”
“I’m learning so much about myself tonight.”
Kori smiled. “Rest would help. The bond will be easier to understand if your bodies are not fighting injury and fear.”
You wanted to argue. You also wanted to lie down before your skull split open. Unfortunately, standing without Roy touching you remained a bad idea. The second your hands separated, pain flashed through both of you. He caught your hand again, breathing through his teeth.
“Okay,” he said. “Hands remain.”
Jason’s voice came from the kitchen. “One bedroom has a queen bed. The other has two twins. Kori and I are taking the twins.”
Your entire body went hot. “Excuse me?”
He reappeared with a glass of water and an expression that dared anyone to make him explain further. “You two need touch, or you get migraines. I need at least three hours of sleep before Crowe sends people after us. Kori needs space to figure out the alien soul Velcro. Adults can share a bed without making it weird.”
Roy’s emotions jumped so violently that you almost winced.
Jason pointed at him. “Especially you.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You breathed like an idiot.”
“You heard him breathe?” you asked.
“I heard the intent.”
Kori nodded. “The intent was loud.”
Roy looked betrayed. “I am being persecuted.”
“You are being accommodated,” Jason said. “Try gratitude.”
“I can take the floor,” Roy said quickly.
You turned toward him.
His face was open enough that you forgot your retort. Beneath the humor was the same fear as before: that you would think he wanted the situation, that his wanting made him unsafe, that needing touch because of the bond would make you feel trapped with him.
It was exhausting, realizing how careful Roy was underneath all that recklessness.
It was also inconveniently attractive.
“The floor makes no sense,” you said.
He blinked. “What?”
“The chair makes no sense either. The couch barely fits Jason’s emotional repression, let alone a human body. We can share the bed.”
Roy stared.
“You are going to be normal about it,” you added.
“Absolutely.”
“You are already being weird.”
“I’m being extremely normal in my head.”
“You are not.”
His mouth opened, then closed. “That is unfair.”
“Yes.”
Jason set the water on the table. “Great. Settled.”
“I hate this family meeting,” you said.
“We’re not a family,” Jason said.
Kori smiled. “We are an unconventional support structure.”
“That is worse,” Jason said.
The bedroom was small, plain, and lit by a single lamp with a crooked shade. The bed took up most of the floor space. There was a dresser, a chair, blackout curtains, and no evidence of anyone having ever enjoyed being alive in that room. Jason’s safehouse aesthetic seemed to have been developed by asking a bunker what it feared most.
Changing became a negotiation conducted with military seriousness and no eye contact. Jason had grabbed your emergency bag from the van, which meant you had backup hardware, chargers, field tools, and three different ways to bypass a locked server. What you did not have was clothes, because you had not packed for whatever fresh hell this was. Roy had a spare shirt in his bag, soft from use and big enough that you could pretend it solved more problems than it did.
You changed first, with Roy standing with his back to you and one hand held awkwardly behind him so you could keep two fingers hooked through his. Each brief loss of contact sent pressure blooming behind your eyes before you found his hand again. Fabric dragged. Armor came off in stages. Your dignity followed shortly after. There was no underwear in your bag, and the thought of putting borrowed sweatpants over nothing felt somehow worse than wearing only Roy’s shirt, which at least fell low enough to cover what it needed to cover if you did not move too carelessly.
By the time you looked down at yourself, drowned in Roy Harper’s shirt and partially empathically bonded to him, you had given up on preparing for sharing a bed.
There was no preparation for that.
Then it was his turn, which was somehow worse. You faced the blackout curtains with the focus of someone defusing a bomb while Roy changed behind you, his fingers still loosely linked with yours. A buckle hit the floor. Fabric shifted. Roy swore under his breath when his injured shoulder pulled, and you felt the brief flash of pain through the bond before he could hide it.
“Shoulder,” you said.
“I’m fine.”
“You are very bad at lying for someone who does it professionally.”
“I’m wounded.”
“Yes, that is my point.”
A soft laugh left him, followed by another rustle of fabric. “You know, if you’re going to feel every time you want to look, turning around might be the more honest option.”
You stared harder at the curtains. “I am practicing restraint.”
“Hot.”
“Roy.”
“What? It is.”
“You are making this worse.”
“I am standing half-dressed in a safehouse bedroom while psychically handcuffed. Worse was already here.”
By the time he sat beside you again, Roy was in sweatpants and a clean shirt, his damaged shoulder bandaged beneath the fabric. He had not showered. Neither of you had. There was still a faint smear of soot near his jaw and dried blood near his hairline, but the clean clothes made him look softer in a way you had not prepared for.
He looked at you.
Then he looked at the hem of his shirt, which had fallen low enough to cover you when you were standing still, but now that you were sitting, rode just high enough to make it impossible for either of you to forget what you were not wearing beneath it.
Heat pulsed through the bond.
“Subtle.”
He closed his eyes. “I am trying so hard.”
“I can tell. That makes it funnier.”
“It makes it worse from where I’m sitting.”
“You could stop staring.”
“I did stop staring.”
“After getting caught.”
“I am only human.”
“You are mostly nuisance.”
“Mostly,” he agreed, and his smile was tired but real. Then, after a beat, “For the record, I am aware this is a practical clothing issue.”
“That sounds almost mature.”
“I said almost.”
“You were doing so well.”
“I’m doing heroic work internally,” he said. “You have no idea.”
“Unfortunately, I have some idea.”
The old rhythm helped. You got into bed before you could overthink it, choosing the side closest to the wall because you had tactical instincts and also because it gave you something to do. Roy waited until you settled, then lay down beside you with stiff care, leaving an absurd gap between your bodies.
The gap lasted less than five seconds.
Pain bloomed behind your eyes, slow and sharp. Roy hissed softly beside you.
“This is stupid,” you said.
“I support that assessment.”
“Hand.”
He reached for you under the blanket. Your fingers slid together. The pain eased, though not fully.
Roy looked at the ceiling. “Better?”
“Somewhat.”
“That sounds like a no.”
“It is a partial no.”
“Can I move closer?”
The question was so careful that something in your chest ached.
“Yes.”
He shifted toward you. His shoulder brushed yours. Relief moved through the bond, warm and immediate, followed by awareness. His body close to yours. The hem of his shirt riding high against your thigh. The sound of your breathing in the quiet room. The fact that the two of you were alone now, with Jason and Kori beyond the wall and a bond humming between you like a live wire.
Roy went rigid.
“Breathe,” you said.
He let out a laugh that barely qualified as one. “Working on it.”
“You are panicking.”
“I am in a bed with the woman I’ve been flirting with for eight months while alien tech broadcasts my inside thoughts. I feel like a little panic is fair.”
Your heart gave a stupid little turn.
“The woman you’ve been flirting with?” you asked.
He froze.
You turned your head on the pillow. He was close enough that you could see the uncertainty cross his face, the way he wanted to make a joke and could not quite reach for one fast enough.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “That woman.”
You should have deflected. You were good at deflecting. You had built entire relationships out of deflection, made yourself useful enough to be kept around and sharp enough not to be handled carelessly. With Roy, deflection had always been easy because he was doing it too. Both of you tossed sparks across distance, trusting neither would let the fire catch.
The bond made silence honest.
“I flirted back,” you said.
His breath caught.
You felt that too.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“You cannot possibly be surprised.”
“I’m trying to decide how much of that was real and how much was you keeping me from electrocuting myself.”
“Those can overlap.”
His smile flickered. “Kori would be thrilled to hear you say that.”
“Do not tell Kori anything.”
“She already knows everything.”
“She suspects everything. That is different.”
Roy rolled slightly onto his side, careful with his shoulder, facing you fully now. His hand remained in yours beneath the blanket. “What do you suspect?”
It was the wrong question to ask softly.
You looked at him, at the face you had watched through glitching cameras and rooftop feeds, at the mouth that could make anything sound like a joke until the joke broke and something sincere slipped out. Roy was reckless, yes. Brilliant. Charming. A walking hazard label with a bow and unresolved emotional baggage. He was also kinder than he pretended, more careful than he wanted credit for, and lonelier than most people noticed.
You suspected you were already in trouble.
“I suspect,” you said, “that you call me when things are broken because it gives you an excuse.”
Roy’s expression changed. “Sometimes.”
“I suspect sometimes the broken thing is you.”
His jaw tightened.
You almost regretted saying it, except the bond carried his answer before pride could: yes.
You squeezed his hand. “I don’t mind.”
He looked away. “You should.”
“That is not your decision.”
“Maybe not. But I know what it’s like to be somebody’s bad habit.”
The words landed gently, which made them hurt more.
You knew pieces of Roy’s past because files existed, because Jason had warned you without giving details, and because Roy had mentioned recovery once in a voice that dared you to make it a subject. You knew enough to understand that wanting had not always been safe for him. Need had been complicated. Comfort had been complicated. Shame had teeth, and sometimes Roy smiled like a man keeping them from closing.
You turned onto your side, keeping hold of his hand. “You are not my bad habit.”
His mouth moved like he wanted to argue.
You lifted your eyebrows. “Do you want to fight with the woman currently inside your emotional blast radius?”
That startled a laugh out of him. The bond warmed.
“You’re terrifying,” he said.
“You like that.”
“I really do.”
The words were immediate. Too immediate to hide behind.
You both went quiet.
Desire moved then, slower than before. It did not crash through the bond the way panic had. It spread, intimate and heavy. Roy’s gaze flicked to your mouth, then back up. Your own body responded before you could pretend otherwise. The bond caught that too.
Roy inhaled carefully. “We should sleep.”
“You don’t want to sleep.”
“I am making a noble suggestion.”
“It is a bad suggestion.”
“It is probably the only smart one I’ve had all night.”
“Do you want to stop?” you asked.
His eyes closed briefly. “No.”
“Then stop trying to decide for both of us.”
He opened his eyes. “I am trying to be decent.”
“You are being decent. You asked. I answered.”
“That easy?”
“No. But it can be that clear.”
Roy stared at you for a long moment, and whatever he saw in your face must have reached something the bond could not, because his restraint shifted. It did not vanish. It changed shape, making room for want instead of trying to bury it.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The first kiss was careful.
That surprised you, though perhaps it should not have. Roy did many things quickly, but he kissed you as if he had spent months imagining it and still did not trust the moment not to break under his hands. His mouth touched yours softly, once, then again, and his fingers tightened around yours beneath the blanket.
The bond lit.
It was overwhelming, but not unpleasant. His nerves and yours braided at the edges, doubling sensation until the slide of his lips over yours felt like both giving and receiving. You felt his pulse jump when your free hand touched his jaw. You felt your own pleasure echoed back by the low sound he made when you kissed him harder.
Roy pulled back first, breath uneven. “Okay?”
You blinked at him. “That is an absurd question.”
“I’m going to need more than that.”
You kissed him again.
He accepted that answer with enthusiasm.
The second kiss was less careful. Roy’s hand slid to your waist, warm through your shirt, then stopped there until you shifted closer. The permission broke something loose in him. He drew you in, still mindful of his shoulder, mouth opening under yours with a hunger that made the bond flare hot.
You had expected him to be good with his mouth because Roy was good with it in every way that had annoyed you for months: talking his way past locked doors, flirting over comms while bullets flew, distracting armed men with sheer offensive charm, and making you laugh when you were trying very hard to stay mad at him. Expectation did not help. He kissed like he listened, and that was devastating. Every small sound you made changed him. Every reaction taught him something. His hand moved at your waist, thumb stroking once beneath the hem of your shirt when it rode up.
Skin touched skin.
Both of you gasped.
Roy went still. “Too much?”
“No.” You heard your own voice and barely recognized it. “Again.”
His eyes darkened.
He touched you again, this time deliberately, palm sliding beneath your shirt to settle against your side. The bond carried his reaction with humiliating clarity. Heat. Desire. Awe so intense it nearly embarrassed you. He was not only touching you. He was stunned that he was allowed.
You caught his wrist and guided his hand higher.
Roy exhaled shakily. “Sweetheart.”
The word had always been a weapon in his mouth. Playful. Teasing. Designed to make you threaten him. This time, it sounded wrecked.
You kissed him before he could see what that did to you.
Things moved slowly after that, though not because either of you lacked interest. The bond made rushing impossible. Every sensation needed room. Roy’s hand on your skin, your fingers in his hair, his mouth at your throat, the flex of his stomach beneath your palm when your hand slipped under his shirt. Everything reflected. Everything deepened. If either of you moved too quickly, pleasure sharpened toward something almost painful.
Roy learned the rhythm faster than you expected, and then you remembered that he was always learning. That was part of the problem with him. People saw the jokes first. They saw the reckless grin, the bad impulse control, the quiver full of impossible arrows, and they missed the mind underneath. Roy paid attention. He adapted. He learned where pressure became too much and where you wanted more.
You pushed his shirt up, and he sat back enough to pull it over his head with a wince.
Your hands caught his before he could hide it. “Shoulder.”
“It’s fine.”
“You are incapable of telling the truth about injuries.”
“I tell the truth about injuries all the time. Usually through humor.”
“That does not count.”
“It counts a little.”
You touched the edge of the bandage. The burn was ugly but clean, crossing the upper slope of his shoulder where the blast had hit him first. Your throat tightened.
Roy felt it.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Don’t.”
“You got hurt because of me.”
“I got hurt because Crowe is an asshole with a haunted space artifact.”
“Roy.”
“I pulled you back because I wanted to. I’d do it again.”
The truth of that moved through the bond, steady and immovable.
You hated it. You needed it. You could not decide which feeling scared you more.
“That is exactly the problem,” you said.
His smile was small. “Yeah. I know.”
You touched his chest, just over his heart. “Do you?”
His hand covered yours. For once, the answer took time.
“I know I’m not great at limits when somebody I care about is in trouble,” he said. “I know that’s not fair to the people who have to watch it. I’m working on it.”
The last sentence landed with the weight of something practiced, not because it was false, but because he had said it in other contexts. Recovery was not always about one thing. Sometimes it was about learning how to survive your own instincts in every direction.
You leaned in and kissed him gently.
He accepted it like forgiveness, which made your chest ache.
“This does not get you out of being yelled at later,” you murmured.
His smile touched your mouth. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
You pushed him back against the pillows, careful of his shoulder. He went willingly, watching you climb over him with a look that made the bond go bright and hot again. You settled over his thighs, the hem of his shirt riding higher than either of you could pretend not to notice, and his hands came to your hips before they froze.
You felt the restraint lock down.
“Roy.”
“I’m being respectful.”
“You are being tense.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You can touch me.”
His fingers flexed. “Where?”
The question went straight through you.
“Anywhere.”
His mouth parted like he had several answers and trusted none of them. Then his hands slid up your sides beneath his shirt, slowly enough to change your breathing. He followed the reaction, eyes fixed on your face, palms warm against your ribs. When his thumbs brushed the underside of your breasts, pleasure curled low in your stomach and moved through the bond before you could hide it.
Roy swallowed. “Can I?”
You knew what he meant. The shirt was the only thing you had on, and both of you knew it.
“Yes.”
He lifted it carefully anyway, giving you time to stop him, giving you time to help him. The fabric dragged over your skin and disappeared somewhere beside the bed, leaving you bare above him in the crooked lamplight. Roy looked at you with an expression that made you feel too seen, not because of the bond this time, but because of him.
“You’re doing the thing,” you said, self-consciousness flickering despite the heat between you.
“What thing?”
“Looking at me like that.”
His mouth curved, but his voice came out softer than his expression. “I like looking at you.”
“You are very sincere while concussed.”
“I’m not concussed. Jason checked.”
“Jason’s medical standards include ‘still breathing’ and ‘no visible organ loss.’”
Roy laughed, and the sound eased the tightness in your chest. Then his mouth found your collarbone, and the laughter left both of you.
His kisses moved lower, careful and hungry at once. When his lips closed over your nipple, your hips rocked down against him before you could think. Pleasure flashed through the bond. Roy groaned against your skin, his hands tightening on your waist.
“Do that again,” he said.
You did.
The friction pulled a sound from both of you. He was hard beneath you, and the realization would have been obvious without the bond, but feeling his desire from the inside was something else entirely. It was not simple lust. It was layered with months of almosts. Your voice in his ear. Your name in his phone. Your hand reaching for him in the van. Your face above him now, wanting him back.
You bent and kissed him.
Roy met you with enough heat to make the room tilt. His hands roamed carefully, learning you through skin and sensation, until one slid down over your hip and stopped at the outside of your thigh.
There was nothing beneath his hand except bare skin, and the knowledge moved through the bond like a spark catching dry tinder.
Roy went very still.
You felt him pull himself back from the edge, not away from you, but away from rushing. It was almost unfair how much that restraint affected you.
“Tell me where this stops,” he said.
Your breath caught.
Then you held his gaze and answered clearly, because the bond had already stolen subtlety from both of you. “It doesn’t.”
His fingers flexed once against your thigh.
“Sweetheart.”
“I want this,” you said. “I want you. Keep going.”
The restraint in him shifted. It did not disappear, but it changed shape, becoming focus instead of distance. The smile that crossed his face was small, bright, and gone almost immediately beneath concentration.
He shifted you gently onto your back, moving slowly when the bond tugged at the change in position. For a moment, he hovered above you, braced on one arm, hair falling forward, bandaged shoulder held carefully away. His eyes searched your face once more, and whatever he found there softened something in him.
Then he kissed his way down your body, and coherent conversation became less available.
Roy touched you like he had something to prove and all the time in the world to prove it. He drew your shorts down your legs, pausing when the movement pulled you too far apart and the bond complained in a sharp pulse. He solved the problem by keeping one hand on your thigh, grounding both of you. Then his mouth returned to your skin, kissing your hip, your stomach, the inside of your thigh.
You reached down and caught his hair. “Roy.”
He looked up. “Tell me no, and I stop.”
The clarity of it nearly undid you.
You tightened your fingers gently. “I was going to tell you to keep going.”
His eyes darkened.
The first touch of his mouth made your back arch.
Roy groaned like he felt it almost as strongly as you did, which, given the bond, perhaps he did. His hands held your thighs open with careful pressure, not pinning, only steadying. He learned quickly there, too, which should have been unfair and absolutely was. His tongue moved slowly at first, testing, listening to every breath and every tug of your fingers in his hair. When he found a rhythm that made your hips lift, he stayed there.
The bond turned pleasure into a loop.
Your body reacted; Roy felt it; his hunger spiked; you felt that too. It built on itself until the room seemed to narrow around his mouth and your hands and the low sounds he made against you. The headache, the fear, the vault, the shame of wanting too much—all of it receded beneath the weight of being touched by someone who was paying attention.
“Roy,” you gasped.
He slid one hand up your body and found yours, lacing your fingers together beside your hip. The contact steadied the bond and ruined you at the same time.
You came with his name on your mouth.
Roy did not stop until you tugged at his hair and murmured, “Too much.”
He pulled back immediately, pressing one last soft kiss to your thigh before he climbed up your body. His mouth was warm and wet when he kissed you, and the taste of yourself on him sent a fresh wave of heat through you. He smiled against your lips as he felt it.
“Smug,” you whispered.
“Deeply.”
“You were told to be normal.”
“I have never promised that successfully.”
You laughed, breathless, and his expression changed again, going soft in the dim room.
“I like that,” he said.
“What?”
“You laughing.”
The words sat between you, tender and unexpected.
You touched his face. “You are dangerous when you stop joking.”
His smile wavered. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Good dangerous or bad dangerous?”
You kissed him instead of answering. He seemed to understand.
After that, the rest of his clothes came off with less grace than either of you had hoped for. Roy nearly tangled himself in the blanket trying to remove his sweatpants without moving too far away from you, and you laughed so hard the bond lit with his satisfaction before he even freed one ankle. He accused you of enjoying his suffering. You told him his suffering had excellent comedic timing.
The laughter helped.
It made the room less fragile. It reminded you that this was Roy, not only the bond, not only the desperate press of feelings neither of you had invited. Roy, who made terrible jokes when injured. Roy, who sent you pictures of broken arrowheads after midnight. Roy, who looked at you like you were the most impossible machine he had ever been lucky enough to understand.
He reached for the pocket of his discarded pants and produced a condom with triumphant relief.
You raised an eyebrow. “Prepared?”
“I am an optimist.”
“You brought that on a mission?”
“I brought several things on a mission.”
“Do not make me ask follow-up questions.”
He tore the packet open, then paused. His humor faded, replaced by that careful seriousness again.
“Last check,” he said. “Is this what you want?”
The question settled over you, warm and steady.
You were tired, sore, overwhelmed, and still connected to him in ways you did not fully understand. But the answer was clear. It had been clear before the artifact, before the vault, before Roy shielded you from light meant to tear through anything in its path. It had been there in every late call you answered and every joke you pretended not to enjoy.
“Yes,” you said. “You. This. I want it.”
Roy’s breath left him.
He kissed you slowly, and then he rolled the condom on with hands that were not quite steady.
When he settled between your thighs, the bond went quiet for one suspended moment, like even the alien technology understood that this needed its own space. Roy braced himself above you, careful of his shoulder, his body warm and solid against yours. You wrapped your legs around his hips and drew him closer.
He entered you slowly.
Both of you stopped breathing.
The sensation was intense enough on its own, the stretch of him filling you inch by inch, the heat of his body, the tremble in his arms as he held himself back. The bond made it sharper but not less yours. You felt his restraint, his pleasure, the stunned gratitude moving through him as if being wanted by you was something he had not known how badly he needed until it happened.
When he was fully inside, his forehead dropped to yours.
“Okay?” he asked, voice rough.
You nodded, then realized he needed to hear it. “Yes.”
He kissed you, and then he moved.
Slow at first. Careful. Almost too careful, until you tightened your legs around him and drew him deeper. Roy groaned into your mouth, and the sound snapped the last thread of careful restraint between you. His rhythm shifted, still controlled, but fuller now, each thrust dragging pleasure through both of you.
You held onto him carefully, avoiding his injured shoulder, fingers pressing into the muscles of his back. He kissed your jaw, your throat, your mouth whenever he needed to swallow a sound. The bond carried flashes of him: the way you felt around him, the way your voice saying his name nearly unraveled him, the way he kept thinking that this was real and then fearing it might not be.
You cupped his face, forcing him to look at you. “Real.”
His hips stuttered.
“What?”
“This is real,” you said.
Roy’s expression cracked.
He kissed you hard, and the next thrust punched a sound out of you. He followed it, angling his hips until pleasure sparked bright and deep. Your nails dug into his back. He found that rhythm and stayed there, breath coming rough, eyes fixed on you like he needed to watch you feel it.
“There,” you said.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Roy, please.”
The word “please” did something to him. You felt it ripple through the bond, desire and want and tenderness and a nearly painful need to give you whatever you were asking for. His hand slid between your bodies, fingers finding your clit with the same attention as before.
The pleasure climbed fast.
You clung to him, overwhelmed by the press of his body, the rhythm of him inside you, the touch of his fingers, the bond folding his desire around yours until the room seemed to pulse with it. Roy murmured your name against your mouth, low and unsteady, and that was what pushed you over.
Your orgasm hit in a wave that made you shake beneath him.
Roy followed seconds later, his control finally breaking as he buried his face against your neck and came with a groan that seemed to move through both your bodies at once. The bond flared warm and bright, then softened, carrying the echo of pleasure into something quieter.
For a while, there was only breathing.
Roy shifted carefully, wincing as he moved off his shoulder and onto his side. He dealt with the condom, then came back to you under the blanket with that same hesitation as before, as if he still expected permission to expire without warning.
You moved into his arms before he could ask.
His body relaxed around yours.
The bond had settled to a hum. It no longer hurt. It no longer crowded every thought. It was simply there, a thread between you, warm and strange and temporary.
Roy’s hand moved slowly up and down your back. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Pain?”
“Just sore.”
“Regrets?”
You lifted your head.
He was staring past you, trying to make the question sound casual. It did not work. Even without the bond, you thought you would have known.
“No.”
His throat moved. “If tomorrow you decide this was just the artifact—”
“It wasn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Sweetheart.”
You pushed yourself up enough to look at him properly. “Roy.”
He shut up.
“I wanted you before the artifact. I wanted you before the vault. I wanted you when you sent me pictures of broken equipment at two in the morning and pretended you needed technical support when what you needed was someone to stay on the line.”
His face went still.
You softened. “I stayed on the line because I wanted to.”
His arm tightened around you.
For once, he had nothing quick to say.
Then, very quietly, he said, “I didn’t want to be another thing you had to fix.”
Your chest ached.
“You are not a project,” you said.
“I’m a little bit of a project.”
“You are a person who sometimes needs help.”
“People get tired of that.”
“Some do,” you said. “Some answer the phone.”
He closed his eyes.
You kissed him gently, and when he kissed you back, the bond carried gratitude so raw that you nearly cried. You did not. You let him hold you instead.
Jason knocked on the door six hours later with the emotional delicacy of a police raid.
Roy jerked awake beside you. “Occupied.”
“I hate that I know that,” Jason said through the door. “Kori has a reversal plan. Put clothes on.”
Roy’s face went through several stages of horror and resignation.
You buried your face in his chest and laughed.
Jason added, “I’m going to the kitchen. If I see anything I can’t unsee, I’m shooting both of you.”
“You would miss me,” Roy called.
“I would grieve efficiently.”
Kori’s voice floated from farther down the hall. “I am pleased the night went well.”
“Oh my god,” you whispered.
Roy closed his eyes. “The sea is still an option.”
“You are not leaving me alone with them.”
“Right. Teamwork.”
Getting out of bed was less painful than expected. The bond still tugged when you moved too far away, but it no longer punished you for every inch you moved. You borrowed one of Roy’s hoodies because your shirt had somehow ended up under the bed, and because the second he saw you in it, his entire face did something worth preserving for later mockery. This time, you put on the sweatpants, even if you still had no underwear.
“Do not look so smug,” you said.
“I’m looking respectfully.”
“You are not.”
“I’m looking respectfully smug.”
“That is worse.”
When you entered the kitchen, Jason was making coffee with the grim focus of a man trying to survive exposure to other people’s feelings. Kori sat at the table with the shard wrapped in gold fabric before her. She took in Roy’s hoodie and sweats on you, Roy’s hand at the small of your back, and the carefully neutral expression both of you were failing to maintain.
Her smile bloomed.
Jason pointed a spoon at her without turning around. “Don’t.”
“I said nothing.”
“You inhaled.”
“It was a happy inhalation.”
“Don’t do that either.”
You sat at the table, Roy close beside you. “Can we end the bond?”
Kori’s expression sobered. “Yes. It has settled enough. The separation may be uncomfortable, but it should not harm you.”
“And afterward?” Roy asked.
“The forced connection will end. There may be residual sensitivity for a few hours.” She looked between you, not unkindly. “Anything that remains after that is yours.”
Jason muttered, “Great. Science and feelings.”
You looked at Roy. His face was relaxed, but you knew him better now. Even without the bond screaming every emotion across your nerves, you could read the worry in the set of his mouth.
“What?” you asked softly.
He leaned closer, his voice low enough that Jason could pretend not to hear if he wanted to. “What if it feels different when it’s gone?”
“It will.”
His gaze flicked to yours.
“Different does not mean gone,” you said.
He absorbed that. Slowly. Like he wanted to believe you, but did not want to grab too hard in case the belief cracked.
You slid your hand into his under the table. He held on.
The reversal felt like stepping out of a crowded room into silence.
Kori guided your hands and Roy’s around the covered shard. She spoke in a language you did not recognize, soft and rhythmic. The shard warmed beneath your palms. For one last moment, the bond surged open. Roy flooded through you: fear, hope, want, affection, the terrible vulnerability of needing something and choosing to reach for it anyway.
Then the thread snapped.
You gasped.
Roy did too.
The silence inside your own head was immediate and enormous.
You were alone in your body again. No echo of Roy’s pain. No flicker of his desire under your skin. No second heartbeat of concern and care and restless energy. Just you, your breath, your pulse, your hand still touching his over the shard.
You should have felt only relief.
Relief came, yes. But grief came with it.
Roy stared at you across the table. For the first time since the vault, you could not feel him at all.
Then he pushed back his chair just enough to face you properly, cupped your jaw, and kissed you like he meant to make himself understood without supernatural help.
You leaned into him. His hands framed your face, warm and real and chosen. There was no bond to amplify it, no alien resonance making emotion impossible to hide. There was only Roy, kissing you in Jason’s ugly kitchen while Kori made a delighted sound and Jason said something under his breath that would probably ruin the moment if you cared.
You did not care.
Roy broke the kiss just enough to rest his forehead against yours. “Still real?”
You touched his face. “Still real.”
His smile came slowly, bright and relieved enough to make your chest hurt. “Good.”
Jason cleared his throat. “Kitchen.”
Roy did not look away from you. “You have one fork.”
“I eat here emotionally.”
“You do not do anything emotionally.”
“I am about to throw you outside emotionally.”
Kori folded the gold fabric over the shard. “I think this is a successful courtship.”
“It was not courtship,” Jason said automatically.
You glanced at Roy.
His hand found yours.
You smiled despite yourself. “It might be courtship now.”
Roy’s face lit up.
Jason stared at you. “You too?”
“I contain multitudes,” you said.
Roy looked delighted. “That was my line.”
“I improved it.”
“You improve a lot of things.”
The sincerity landed without warning.
You looked at him, and for once, there was no bond to reveal the emotion underneath. You did not need it. Roy was standing in front of you with his hand in yours, bruised, exhausted, warm, and entirely too pleased with himself for someone who had nearly gotten you killed by association.
You squeezed his hand.
Two nights later, Roy sent you a picture of another smoking circuit board.
You were back in your apartment, behind your screens, wearing a shirt you stole from Roy and trying to restore the last pieces of your sleep schedule. The Outlaws were in Prague this time, which you knew because you had routed their travel documents yourself and because Roy had sent you six pictures of street food before Jason confiscated his phone for operational security.
The picture arrived at 12:19 a.m.
terrible news. she’s dead
You zoomed in on the circuit board, then sat back.
that is a capacitor
yeah but she had dreams
You smiled before you could stop yourself.
why are you texting me about a capacitor during a surveillance op?
Roy took fifteen seconds to answer.
because jay said if i asked u out over comms he’d shoot me
Your heart turned over.
Then another message arrived.
dinner when i’m back? not because of alien tech. because i want to see you and ideally not almost die first
You let him wait. Just long enough to preserve your pride.
Then you typed back.
dinner. eight. bring intact technology or don’t come at all.
His reply came almost instantly.
yes ma’am
A second later:
for the record i wanted to ask before the alien overshare
You looked at the message for a long moment, the monitors humming softly around you, the room quiet except for the faint pulse of encrypted channels and the distant city beyond your window.
You answered honestly.
i know
The typing bubble appeared. Vanished. Appeared again.
yeah?
You thought of the first call, the smoking circuit board, the jokes that were not only jokes. You thought of Roy in the vault, pulling you back before the blast hit. Roy in the dark bedroom, asking when he could have taken. Roy in the kitchen after the bond broke, crossing the room because he wanted you without anything alien making the wanting easier to admit.
You typed:
i wanted you to
This time, his answer took longer.
When it came, it was simple.
good. eight.
Your secure comm pinged before you could answer.
Jason’s voice came through a moment later. “Relay.”
“Yes?”
“Tell your boyfriend to stop smiling at his phone during surveillance.”
Roy’s voice protested in the background. “He called me your boyfriend!”
“I heard.”
“You didn’t correct him.”
“I was processing the presumption.”
“You paused.”
“The bond is gone, Harper.”
“I have instincts.”
“You have head trauma.”
“Also instincts.”
Jason made a sound of profound suffering. “I’m muting him.”
Kori’s voice entered the channel, warm and pleased. “I believe this is still courtship.”
“Still not courtship,” Jason said.
Roy laughed, bright and familiar through the line. “Pretty sure it is now.”
You leaned back in your chair, listening to them bicker through the clean channel you had built, the signal steady in your ear. The Outlaws were easy enough when friendship came with protocols. Jason needed routes, Kori needed context, and Roy needed reminders not to touch volatile equipment without supervision.
Roy had become the kind of problem your phone recognized before you did. It buzzed after midnight, and some tired, traitorous part of you already knew it would be him before the screen lit up. Not because he was careless, exactly. Careless people did not send encrypted attachments, blurred circuit diagrams, and three separate angles of a device before asking whether the blinking red light was “a personality thing.” Roy prepared for disaster beautifully. He simply preferred to flirt with it first.
But your phone was in your hand, your smile was already there, and when his voice came through the comm again, softer this time, you did not pretend you had not been waiting for it.
“See you at eight, sweetheart.”
You looked at the monitors, at the open line, at the ridiculous shape your life had taken because Jason Todd had once climbed through the window with a hard drive and Roy Harper had never learned when to leave well enough alone.
“Try not to die before our date, Arsenal.”
His laugh warmed the channel.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
credit to @uzmacchiato for the cherry divider and @toxisyddy for the Robin divider ❤️💛
Warnings: explicit sexual content, blood/injury, time travel/time loop elements, nonlinear timeline, angst, hurt/comfort, grief, future character death mentioned, fear of loss, emotional self-sabotage, mild possessiveness/jealousy, nonlinear romance, idiots in love, plot with porn, happy ending, kinda sorta soulmate au but not really??
Summary:
You meet Wally West for the first time on the worst day of your life.
He already knows your name.
Six months later, Wally West meets you for the first time and has no idea who you are.
You remember a version of him who looked at you like losing you had already happened. He only knows that every time you look at him, it feels like being blamed for a crime he has not committed yet.
Somewhere between future kisses, past arguments, and a love story neither of you is living in the right order, the fastest man alive realizes the one thing speed can’t save him from is wanting you anyway.
Author’s Note:
i fear i am unable to write anything without a plot lmao
forget porn with plot, this is plot with porn (this fic is 13k. only about 3k would be considered porn…)
also besties, i beg of you please don’t let this flop. i gave myself so many headaches writing this one…
Impact
The first time you met Wally West, he kissed your knuckles like he was saying goodbye.
The first time Wally West met you, he spilled coffee all over your shoes.
Both of those things were true, which should have been your first warning.
That was the problem with time, you would realize much later. It did not care about introductions. It did not care about order, or mercy, or whether a heart had been given enough warning before it started breaking. Time moved the way it wanted until something fast enough tore through it, and then it bled.
On the worst day of your life, the sky above Central City split open in red and gold.
You were in the basement archives of the Central City Museum when the alarms started screaming. The storage wing was supposed to be secure against fire, flood, theft, and most ordinary forms of metahuman disaster. That was what the trustees said during fundraisers, anyway, usually while standing near glass cases full of artifacts that had survived wars, dynasties, and colonial looting only to be entrusted to a building with questionable wiring and a gift shop shaped like a lightning bolt.
You had been cataloging damaged objects from the last superhero incident when the lights flickered once.
Then again.
Then the room bent.
There was no better word for it. The walls did not shake. The floor did not crack at first. Reality folded inward like someone had gripped the edges of the world and pulled too hard. The archive shelves stretched long, then snapped back into place. A bronze helmet on your table aged green and copper and green again in the space of a second. Your phone flashed through dates too quickly to read.
You heard yourself breathe in.
You did not hear yourself breathe out.
The air turned electric. Every hair on your arms lifted. Somewhere above you, people shouted. Somewhere much closer, something bright and violent punched through the ceiling.
Lightning hit the floor in front of you.
It should have killed you. You had enough time to know that. You saw the white-gold flare, smelled ozone and burning dust, felt the impossible heat open in the air, and understood in the small, clear part of your mind that survived panic that your body was standing directly in the path of something it could not endure.
Then a hand caught your wrist.
The world stopped.
Not slowed. Not quieted. Stopped.
A shard of ceiling hung in the air six inches from your face. Papers floated around you, frozen mid-whirl. The red emergency lights held between flashes, staining everything in a suspended pulse. Your breath was halfway out of your chest and would not move.
The only thing alive in the room was the man holding your wrist.
He was dressed in red. That was your first thought, stupidly ordinary against the impossible. Red suit, gold lightning, hair like copper under the emergency lights, face smudged with soot and blood at his temple. You knew who he was in the vague way everyone in Central City knew who he was. The Flash. Wally West. Hero, menace, headline, beloved civic hazard.
Except he was looking at you like you were not vague to him at all.
His grip tightened around your wrist. His eyes moved over your face with such raw relief that your fear briefly lost its shape.
“Oh, thank God,” he breathed.
You stared at him.
He said your name.
Not a question. Not a guess. He said it the way someone said a prayer after surviving the answer.
Your stomach dropped. “How do you know my name?”
Wally’s expression changed. Grief crossed it so quickly you might have missed it if the whole world had not been holding still around you. He looked older than the photos you had seen of him, not much, maybe a year or two, but exhaustion had carved something sharp into the brightness of his face. There was blood on his mouth. His suit was torn at the shoulder. One of his hands was trembling.
“You’re early,” he said.
“For what?”
His smile broke before it became anything useful. “For me.”
The ceiling moved half an inch.
Wally looked up sharply. The lightning around him flared, throwing gold across the frozen wreckage. You felt the air press against your skin, time straining to resume.
“Listen to me,” he said, too quickly now. “You’re going to get out of here. Captain Singh is going to ask you what happened, and you’re going to tell him the truth.”
“The truth is that the Flash knows my name and the ceiling froze.”
“Yeah.” His mouth twitched with something too wounded to be humor. “Maybe soften the delivery.”
“Wally.”
His eyes snapped back to yours.
You had not meant to say it like that. You had not meant to say it at all. His name came out frightened, intimate, shaped around a future you did not have.
For one impossible second, he looked ruined by the sound.
Then he reached for you.
You should have pulled away. He was a stranger wearing a hero’s face, standing in a broken second, blood on his lips and your name in his mouth. Every reasonable instinct in your body should have rejected his touch. Instead, you stood there as his fingers brushed your cheek with devastating care.
He touched you like he had done it before.
He touched you like he was trying to remember how it felt.
“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.
Your throat tightened. “What does that mean?”
The ceiling gave another inch. Sound rushed back in at the edges of the room, a low roar dragging the world toward motion.
Wally caught your hand, lifted it, and pressed his mouth to your knuckles.
It was not a flirtation. It was not charming. It was the saddest kiss you had ever received, and it lasted barely long enough to become real.
Then he pushed you behind him, and the world exploded.
You remembered speed after that. A blur of red. Gold lightning. His arm around your waist. Heat, then cold, then the brutal slap of the evening air as you landed on the sidewalk outside the museum, sirens wailing around you. People screamed. Glass rained down behind police barricades. Someone wrapped a blanket around your shoulders. Someone else asked if you were hurt.
You looked down at your hand.
Your knuckles still tingled.
By the time you looked up, Wally West was gone.
Displacement
Six months after the museum basement, Wally West ran into you again by accident.
For him, that was all it was.
For you, it was the second time the fastest man alive had ruined your day.
It was good coffee, too. It was a splurge for you, from the place that was twice as expensive as every other coffee shop in the area. That was the part you resented most in the first three seconds before you looked up and saw him standing in front of you with two empty cups, one horrified expression, and the kind of face that made women with coffee spilled on them forgive the spill as a reflex.
“Oh my God,” he said. “I am so sorry. I swear I usually have better hand-eye coordination. Like, professionally better. Historically better. Statistically, this is an outlier.”
You stared at the brown stain spreading across the tops of your shoes.
He continued, “I can buy you new ones. Or pay for cleaning. Do people clean shoes? That sounds fake. I can Google it. I can also stop talking, which is probably the strongest option on the table right now.”
You looked at his face.
The effect was immediate and deeply inconvenient.
You knew him.
You knew the slope of his nose, the line of his mouth, the warm copper of his hair. You knew the way his eyes went soft around your name before he said it. You knew what his hand felt like around your wrist. You knew what his mouth felt like on your knuckles.
Except this Wally was not wrecked. He was not bleeding, older-eyed, or standing in a frozen disaster with lightning tearing apart the world. He was bright and sheepish and painfully alive under the warm lights of a Central City coffee shop. His hoodie was yellow. His sneakers were red. He had whipped cream on one knuckle and no idea who you were.
Your heart forgot how time worked before you knew what kind of lightning could split a life in two.
“Are you okay?” he asked, smile dimming. “Did I burn you?”
“No,” you said.
“Okay. Good. Good, that’s good. Your shoes may never forgive me, but skin is the priority.”
You should have laughed. He was trying for it. Everything about him seemed designed to pull humor from disaster before anyone could panic. His mouth tilted hopefully, as if he had spent his whole life learning that a grin was useful armor.
Instead, you said, “Do I know you?”
Wally blinked. “I feel like I’d remember that.”
Your throat felt tight. “Would you?”
Something flickered across his face. It was small, almost nothing, but for the first time since he had crashed into you, he looked less like a man apologizing over coffee and more like a hero who had heard the wrong note in a familiar room.
“I’m Wally,” he said carefully.
“I know.”
His eyebrows rose. “Cool. Usually flattering. Slightly ominous in context.”
You gave him your name.
Nothing happened.
That was the cruel part. No lightning. No recognition. No break in the air. He only smiled, warm and easy, and repeated it once as if he were testing the shape of it.
It sounded nothing like the way he had said it with blood on his mouth and the world falling apart around you.
You hated him a little for that.
“Well,” he said, recovering with a speed that felt unfairly on-brand, “since I ruined your shoes and possibly your morning, can I replace the coffee I also ruined? I promise the second attempt comes with at least forty percent less property damage.”
You looked down at your shoes again because his face was too much.
“I’m late for work.”
“Right. Museum, yeah?”
Your gaze snapped up.
Wally froze.
For half a second, neither of you spoke.
Then he pointed weakly at the lanyard around your neck. “Badge. Your badge says Central City Museum. I am observant in a normal, non-creepy way.”
You looked down. Your badge was turned outward, your name and department visible under the museum logo.
For him, it was an explanation.
For you, it was a warning shot.
“Right,” you said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“No, totally fair. I did just attack you with coffee.”
You stepped around him, careful not to brush his shoulder. “Have a nice day, Wally.”
“You too,” he called after you. Then, because apparently he was incapable of letting a moment end gracefully, “And seriously, about the shoes. I’m good for it. I have a job. Several, depending on how you define tax fraud.”
You did laugh then, unwillingly, once, and hated him more for making it happen.
When you glanced back through the window, he was still watching you with his head tilted, as if trying to figure out why a stranger’s almost-smile felt like something he had been waiting for.
Afterimage
The next time Wally West entered your life, he was two months ahead and bleeding on your fire escape.
You were not proud of the noise you made.
To be fair, it was two in the morning. You were asleep. There was a thunderstorm shaking rain against the glass, and your apartment was on the fifth floor. A person appearing on your fire escape under those conditions deserved whatever unflattering sound came out of your mouth when you woke to knuckles tapping against the pane.
Wally waved weakly through the window.
He was bleeding.
You sat upright so fast your blanket tangled around your legs. For one disorienting second, your mind tried to reconcile too many versions of him at once. Coffee-shop Wally, grinning and careless. Museum Wally, bloody and heartbroken. This Wally, soaked to the skin, one hand pressed to his ribs, looking almost embarrassed to be dying outside your apartment.
You opened the window.
Rain blew in immediately.
“What the hell?” you demanded.
“Hi,” he said. “Funny story.”
“You’re bleeding on my fire escape.”
“Yeah, that’s the less funny part.”
You grabbed his arm and pulled. He could have made it easy. You knew that even if you did not yet understand the full physics of him. He could have been inside before your hand closed around his wrist. Instead, he let you haul him awkwardly through the window like a normal person, all long limbs and wet fabric and a pained hiss when his side hit the sill.
He landed on your bedroom floor and looked around.
“Huh,” he said.
You stood over him as he dripped rainwater onto your rug. “Huh?”
“Your room is different.”
Your blood went cold.
Not nice. Not small. Not messy. Different.
As if he had seen it before.
As if he had seen another version of it before.
Wally seemed to realize what he had said at the same time you did. His eyes lifted to yours, and the boyishness drained out of his face.
“You know this room,” you said.
His mouth parted.
“You know me.”
He did not deny it.
Not coffee-shop knew you. Not flirted-over-ruined-shoes knew you. This Wally knew where you kept your books. This Wally had seen your bedroom before. This Wally looked at you and forgot, for half a second, that you might not be the same you who had let him in last time.
“When are you from?” you asked.
The question should have sounded insane. Instead, after the museum basement, after the frozen ceiling, after his mouth on your knuckles and your name in his mouth, it felt like the only one left.
Wally pushed himself up against the side of your bed, one hand still pressed to his ribs. “What’s the date?”
You told him.
He closed his eyes. “Damn it.”
“Wally.”
“Two months ahead,” he said. “For me. I’m two months ahead of you.”
Your apartment seemed too small around the answer. Rain tapped hard against the window. The yellow light from your bedside lamp made him look almost human, except for the faint static crawling over his skin and the way the air shimmered around him like heat over pavement.
You grabbed the first-aid kit from your bathroom with hands that shook only after you turned away.
When you came back, he had managed to unzip the top half of his suit. There was a long, ugly cut along his ribs, already healing too quickly at the edges. You crouched beside him, opened the kit, and tried not to think about the fact that his body knew how to recover from things that would have put anyone else in an ambulance.
“You should go to a hospital.”
“Speedster metabolism.” He gave you a strained smile. “By the time they get a doctor in, I’d be healed and starving enough to eat the tongue depressors.”
“Do not try to be charming while bleeding.”
“That wasn’t trying. That was medical trivia with charm.”
You pressed gauze to his side.
He inhaled sharply. His hand shot out and caught your wrist, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to stop you. The contact flashed through you: his hand in the museum, his mouth on your knuckles, his voice telling you not to let him run.
Wally’s gaze dropped to where he was touching you.
He let go immediately.
“Sorry,” he said.
You kept the gauze in place. “What happens?”
His face tightened.
“With us,” you clarified, because apparently you had reached a point in your life where that was the simpler question. “What happens with us that you know my apartment?”
Wally leaned his head back against the bed. For once, he did not have a joke ready. The absence of one felt worse.
“We become friends,” he said.
You waited.
His smile was faint and pained. “You learn when I’m lying by omission.”
“That fast?”
“You’re really annoying about it.”
You pressed harder against the wound. “You broke into my apartment bleeding from the future.”
“Technically, I knocked.”
“Wally.”
His eyes found yours.
There was too much in them. That was the recurring problem with him. Present-day Wally had too little history with you. Future-Wally had too much. Neither version seemed capable of standing in front of you without making your chest ache.
“We don’t have the whole story,” he said softly. “Either of us. I remember things you haven’t done yet. You know things about me I haven’t told you yet. The Speed Force is…it’s looping something around us, and I don’t know why.”
“Can you fix it?”
Wally looked away.
That was answer enough.
You taped the gauze down in silence. His breathing steadied under your hands, but the room did not feel calmer. If anything, the quiet made him more dangerous. Wally West moving was a spectacle. Wally West not moving was intimate in a way you did not know how to defend against.
When you finished, he looked down at the bandage, then back at you.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For bleeding on my rug?”
“For all of it.” His voice thinned. “For whatever version of me you met first.”
You thought of lightning. His hand on your cheek. The unbearable tenderness of his mouth against your hand.
“He was sad,” you said.
Wally swallowed. “Yeah?”
“He looked at me like losing me had already happened.”
For a moment, the only sound was rain.
Then Wally said, very quietly, “That sounds like me.”
You did not know what to do with that.
So you set the bloody gauze aside, sat back on your heels, and made the first rule before time could take anything else from you.
“No using things I haven’t told you yet.”
Wally’s eyes sharpened.
You held his gaze. “If you remember things we do later, that doesn’t mean this version of me has agreed to them now. You don’t get to assume I want something because another version of me wanted it. You don’t get to skip ahead.”
His expression shifted with every sentence, the charm falling away piece by piece until only the man underneath remained.
“That sounds fair,” he said.
“No,” you said. “It’s necessary.”
Wally nodded once.
The air between you changed. It did not get less charged. If anything, the boundary made the charge worse because he understood it, because he did not argue, because he looked at you as if the rule hurt and relieved him at the same time.
“Okay,” he said. “No skipping ahead.”
You believed him because some part of you already knew that trusting Wally West would hurt, and that it might be worth it anyway.
Echo
The first time future-Wally appeared in your apartment without bleeding on anything, he was standing in your living room at dawn.
You found him because you had woken to the sound of your kettle turning on.
For a few seconds, your half-asleep mind tried to make the noise ordinary. Pipes, maybe. A neighbor. The old radiator knocking awake even though it was barely cold outside. Then you remembered you did not own a kettle with an automatic setting, and your body went still beneath the blankets.
You reached for the baseball bat beside your bed.
By the time you stepped into the hallway, future-Wally was already looking at you.
He stood in the dim blue-gray light near your kitchen counter, hair damp from rain that had not fallen in your timeline yet. His suit was scuffed but intact, mask pushed back, one hand braced beside the stove as if he had needed the counter to keep himself upright. The kettle clicked off behind him.
He looked at the bat in your hand.
His mouth twitched. “That’s new.”
You tightened your grip. “For me, or for you?”
The almost-smile vanished.
“For me,” he said.
That should have comforted you. It did not. Every time he knew something, the room tilted. Every time he did not, it hurt in a different direction.
He looked away from you and toward the mug sitting beside the stove. It was one of yours, chipped along the rim, a museum gift shop mug with a faded print of an ancient coin on the side. You had bought it years ago because it had been mispriced and ugly enough to make you laugh. Wally touched the handle with one finger, then drew his hand back before he could pick it up.
You noticed.
“You know that mug,” you said.
His eyes closed.
“Wally.”
“I know where you keep the tea,” he said, and his voice was too rough for something so small. “I know which mug you use when you can’t sleep. I know you hate when people leave spoons in the sink, but you do it all the time when you’re upset. I know there’s a blanket in the bottom drawer of your TV stand because you always say the couch is colder than it looks.”
Your hand lowered slightly around the bat.
He laughed once, without humor. “I also know I’m not supposed to know any of that yet.”
The apartment felt suddenly too full. Too lived-in. As if another version of you had already walked through it with him, already made room for him, already let him learn the quiet things nobody learned by accident.
“Are we together where you’re from?” you asked.
Wally’s face changed.
The answer was there before he refused to give it.
“I’m not allowed to answer that,” he said.
“You’re not allowed?”
“You made rules.”
“I made one rule.”
“You make more.” His mouth softened around the words, fondness slipping through before he could stop it. “You get very specific when you’re angry.”
You should not have liked knowing that. You should not have wanted the shape of those future arguments, the proof that you knew him well enough someday to be furious with precision. Instead, you stood in your own hallway with a baseball bat in your hand and felt jealousy move through you for a version of yourself who had already survived his closeness.
Wally looked at the bat again. “You should put that down before I say something stupid and deserve it.”
“You usually deserve it?”
“More often than I’d like.”
You leaned the bat against the wall, but you did not move closer. He watched the choice as if he understood every inch of distance between you and hated himself for recognizing it.
“What are you doing here?” you asked.
“I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward the window, where early morning pressed pale and thin against the glass. “That’s a bad answer. I was running, and then I was here.”
“Running from what?”
He smiled faintly. “You’re going to hate the pattern.”
“Wally.”
“Consequences,” he said.
The word landed heavily.
He rubbed a hand over his face. For the first time, you saw how tired he really was. Not sleepy. Not bruised from one fight. Tired in a way that looked worn into him, like his body had healed too many times around the same wound.
“You need to listen to me,” he said.
You folded your arms. “Historically, that has not gone well.”
“I know.” His gaze came back to yours, sharp with urgency now. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If I show up and tell you not to go somewhere, don’t listen unless I tell you why.”
You stared at him.
He took one step toward you, then stopped himself. The restraint looked physical.
“Don’t let me turn fear into instructions,” he said. “Don’t let me make your choices and call it protection. I promised you I’d stop doing that.”
Your throat tightened.
“When?”
His face twisted.
“Later,” he said.
“That is a terrible answer.”
“It’s the only one I can give without making it worse.”
You almost laughed at that because the damage was already impossible to measure. Your kitchen smelled like hot water and ozone. Your mug sat untouched on the counter. Wally West stood in front of you like a man haunting a home he had not yet been invited into.
“Did you keep the promise?” you asked.
He looked at you for a long moment.
Then his expression broke.
“I’m trying,” he said.
That was when you understood that trying was not the same as succeeding.
Lightning crawled over his shoulders. He looked down at himself, jaw tightening, and you knew he was about to vanish because every version of him left before you could ask the question that mattered most.
You said his name anyway.
He looked up.
For half a second, the grief on his face became unbearable.
“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.
Then he was gone.
The kettle sat cooling on the counter. The mug stayed empty beside it.
You stood in the hallway until the dawn had finished brightening your apartment, thinking about promises made in a future you had not reached and broken by a man who still looked at you as if he were trying to save you from loving him.
Friction
Wally West was jealous of himself.
He tried to hide it, which was funny for about five minutes and then awful for much longer.
You saw it the first time future-Wally appeared in your kitchen while present-Wally was standing three feet away, eating cereal from a mug because you had not done the dishes that week. One second, present-Wally was talking too quickly about a fight with Mirror Master that had somehow involved a duck boat, three confused tourists, and a churro stand. The next, lightning snapped across your kitchen tile, and another Wally was there.
This one looked exhausted.
He was wearing the suit, mask gone, hair damp with sweat. There was ash on his cheek. His gaze swept the room, found you, and softened so intensely that present-Wally stopped mid-sentence.
“Oh,” future-Wally said.
Present-Wally’s spoon lowered. “Oh?”
Future-Wally glanced at him, then winced. “This is a bad one.”
“You think?” present-Wally asked.
You gripped the edge of the counter. “When are you from?”
Future-Wally looked back at you. “Two months after the fire escape.”
“I hate that that made sense to me,” you said.
He smiled, and the familiarity of it hurt.
Then he stepped toward you.
Present-Wally moved first.
It was barely a movement, more instinct than decision. A blur of red-gold, and he was between you and himself, shoulders tense. Future-Wally stopped immediately. Something passed between them that you could not read, except that both of them looked wounded by it.
“Relax,” future-Wally said softly. “I’m not here for that.”
“Then what?” present-Wally demanded.
Future-Wally’s eyes flicked to yours.
You knew before he said anything that the answer belonged to a version of you who had already lived something this kitchen had not reached.
Present-Wally knew it too.
His jaw tightened. “Right.”
“Wally,” you said.
Both of them looked at you.
You closed your eyes. “That is horrible.”
Future-Wally laughed once, tired and fond. Present-Wally looked like he wanted to punch him, which would have been more satisfying if the logistics had made any sense.
The future version did not stay long. He never did. That was another cruelty you started cataloging without meaning to. Future-Wally appeared like grief given a body, dropped an impossible warning, looked at you as if the sight of you were water in a desert, and vanished before you could decide whether you were angry or relieved.
This one was worse than the version of him who had stood in your kitchen at dawn and told you not to trust warnings without explanations. That Wally had still been trying to warn you against himself. This one looked like something had snapped between then and now. Like fear had finally taught him to ignore his own warning.
This time, he only said, “Don’t go to the museum gala next week.”
You stared at him. “Why?”
“Because I asked you to.”
Present-Wally made a sharp sound. “Absolutely not.”
Future-Wally’s face twisted. “You don’t know what happens.”
“No, I don’t, because you’re doing the dramatic, cryptic time-traveler thing instead of using your words like someone who has met another person before.”
“You think I haven’t tried?”
“I think you’re scaring her.”
Future-Wally flinched.
The kitchen went quiet.
He looked at you again, and the grief was back, older than the rest of him. “Please,” he said.
You hated that most. Not the warning. Not the fear. The please.
Then lightning crawled over his body. He looked at present-Wally. “Don’t make the choice for her.”
Present-Wally’s anger faltered.
Future-Wally vanished.
The cereal mug cracked in present-Wally’s hand.
Neither of you moved for a long moment. Then Wally looked down, cursed, and set the broken mug in the sink.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said.
“You say that a lot.”
“I break a lot of things.”
You leaned back against the counter. “I’m going to the gala.”
Wally nodded immediately. “I know.”
“You don’t get to tell me not to.”
“I know that too.”
“Even if he is you.”
“Especially if he’s me.”
That made something in your chest loosen, which was unfair because you were still angry. Wally looked at you with his hands braced on the sink, eyes too bright, mouth pressed into a line as if he was physically holding back every terrified thing he wanted to say.
Then, because he was Wally, he ruined the solemnity of the moment.
“For the record,” he said, “I hate future me.”
You blinked.
“He’s got this whole tragic cheekbone thing going on. Very annoying. Very effective. I feel manipulated by my own bone structure.”
You laughed before you could stop yourself.
Wally’s face changed at the sound. He looked hungry for it, then immediately guilty for wanting anything from you while the air still smelled like lightning.
You crossed your arms. “Are you actually jealous of yourself?”
“Yes,” he said at once. “Deeply. In a way I’m not proud of but am choosing to be honest about for personal growth reasons.”
“Wally.”
“He knows things,” Wally said, the humor thinning into something true. “He looks at you like he knows what it feels like when you let him stay.”
Your breath caught.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. The man could probably count your heartbeats. He looked away anyway, giving you the mercy of pretending he had not.
“Do I?” he asked.
Your voice came out softer than you intended. “Do you what?”
“Make you happy?”
The question hurt because he was trying to sound casual. He was very bad at it.
“Sometimes,” you said.
Wally nodded. He absorbed that like it was more precious than a yes.
Then he asked, “Do I hurt you?”
You did not answer quickly enough.
His face fell in careful increments, hope withdrawing before he could embarrass either of you with how much it mattered.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“Wally, I don’t know what happens.”
“Neither do I.” He looked at his hands. “But I know myself.”
The memory hit him twenty minutes after the other Wally vanished.
One second, Wally was standing in your kitchen with his hand wrapped in a towel because he had managed to cut himself cleaning up the mug he had broken. The next, his face went blank. Not empty. Elsewhere.
You watched his fingers loosen around the towel.
“Wally?”
He blinked once. Lightning crawled over his knuckles and died there, trapped under his skin.
“I remember this,” he said.
Your stomach tightened. “The mug?”
“No.” His eyes lifted to yours, and whatever he saw made him look away again too quickly. “You. Standing there. Asking me if I’m going to keep punishing myself for choices I haven’t made yet.”
“I haven’t said that.”
“I know.”
The silence after that felt worse than the words. You could see him trying to put the memory down carefully, like something sharp he had found in the dark. He did not tell you what came before it. He did not tell you what came after. He only pressed the towel harder against his palm and breathed through whatever future had just crossed his face.
You hated that he was trying to protect you from it.
You hated more that he was probably trying to protect himself.
The gala happened three days later.
You went because you were stubborn, because future-Wally had warned instead of trusted, and because you refused to let any version of the man you were falling for start making your choices for you.
Present-Wally went with you because he was stubborn too, and because he had taken to hovering near your life with the restless restraint of someone trying very hard not to become a cage.
He wore a suit.
That felt important in a way you did not want to unpack. You had seen him in the Flash suit, in hoodies, in your apartment with blood on his skin and rain in his hair. You had never seen him like this, dressed in dark red with a gold tie and his hair combed back until it gave up halfway through the evening.
He looked handsome enough to be irritating, which you told him as soon as he arrived.
His grin flashed. “I’ll take it.”
“You would take anything as a compliment.”
“From you? Mostly.”
His eyes dropped, not quickly enough to be subtle, taking in the deep burgundy dress you had chosen because it almost matched his suit, and the gold at your ears that echoed his tie. The grin softened into something less practiced. “You look beautiful.”
Your mouth forgot what it had been about to do.
Wally noticed. Of course he noticed. His smile tilted, gentler now, a little nervous around the edges. “Sorry. Was that too much?”
“No,” you said, and hated how honest it sounded.
His gaze flicked once more over the line of your dress, then came back to your face like he had made himself return there. “Good,” he said, smile going crooked. “Because I’ve been trying not to say it since you opened your door.”
You rolled your eyes and turned away before he could see too much.
The Central City Museum gala was exactly as unbearable as you expected. Donors smiled beside exhibits they did not understand. Champagne moved through the room on silver trays. Half the city’s wealthy philanthropists pretended not to stare at Wally, whose identity was public enough that people felt entitled to his attention and famous enough that they lowered their voices when he turned away.
For the first hour, nothing happened.
For the second, you almost relaxed.
That was when the ancient clock in the west gallery began ticking backward.
Wally heard it first.
You knew because his entire body changed before the room did — smile gone, shoulders tense, hand already finding your elbow. Then the lights flickered, and everyone else finally looked up.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
You gave him a look.
His mouth tightened. “Sorry. Stand wherever you want, preferably somewhere that puts my body between yours and the explosion.”
“Better.”
The glass cases rattled. Somewhere, someone screamed. Above the east hall, the clock began to chime and forgot when to stop.
Then every reflective surface in the gallery filled with lightning.
Wally pushed civilians toward the exits faster than human panic could understand. He was motion and command, red-gold arcs flickering under the cuffs of his suit because he had not changed, because there was no time, because there was never enough time with him.
You were halfway to the staff corridor when the rupture opened.
It did not look like the one from the museum basement. This one was narrower, almost beautiful, a vertical wound of white light splitting the air beside the ancient clock. You felt it pull at you. Not your body exactly. Something deeper. Memory, maybe. Possibility. The parts of you that had already touched Wally out of order.
You reached for the wall.
Wally shouted your name.
The world lurched.
A hand closed around yours.
For one dizzy second, you thought it was present-Wally. Then you looked up and saw the older eyes.
Future-Wally.
His grip was desperate. “I told you not to come.”
You should have been afraid.
Instead, anger hit first.
You slapped him.
The sound cracked through the gallery, sharp enough that even the rupture seemed to pause.
Future-Wally’s head turned with it. He froze, one hand still wrapped around yours, red blooming faintly on his cheek.
Across the room, present-Wally stared.
You pointed at the future version of him. “You do not get to appear in my kitchen, ask me to obey you without explanation, and then look betrayed when I don’t.”
Future-Wally’s jaw worked.
“You promised,” you said, and you did not know where the words came from until they were already out. “You promised you’d stop doing this.”
Both Wallys went still.
You felt the sentence settle into the wrong place in the timeline.
Future-Wally looked devastated.
Present-Wally looked like he had been shot.
The rupture screamed.
Future-Wally released your hand and shoved you toward his younger self. Present-Wally caught you immediately, one arm around your waist, his body braced between you and the white light.
“Get her out,” future-Wally said.
Present-Wally’s eyes burned. “What did you do?”
Future-Wally smiled without humor. “Loved her badly, apparently.”
Then the rupture swallowed him.
Heat Lightning
After the gala, Wally disappeared for four days.
Present-Wally. Your Wally, though you had not let yourself think of him that way until he was gone long enough for fear to make language honest.
You told yourself he was busy. Central City had disasters the way other cities had weather. You told yourself he was working with Barry, or the Titans, or the League, or whatever impossible network of people handled a Speed Force rupture when it started aiming itself at one woman’s life.
By the second day, you were angry.
By the third, you were scared.
By the fourth, you opened your apartment door and found him sitting in the hallway with his back against the opposite wall, knees drawn up, hair a mess, a paper bag from your favorite takeout place beside him.
He looked up at you.
“I didn’t want to knock if you were sleeping,” he said.
Your heart hurt so violently you almost closed the door in his face.
Instead, you stepped into the hallway. “You have superspeed.”
“Yeah.”
“You could have checked.”
“That felt creepy.”
“You have come through my window bleeding.”
“That was emergency creepy. Different category.”
You stared at him until his attempt at a smile collapsed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For which part?”
“All the parts currently available to me.”
That was such a Wally answer that it made you furious all over again.
You crossed your arms. “You disappeared.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to do that because a future version of you scared you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to decide I’m safer if you’re gone.”
His eyes lifted to yours. “I know.”
The hallway went quiet. Somewhere behind a neighboring door, a television laugh track rose and faded. Wally looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He looked young, too, painfully young compared to the version of him who had stood in the gala rupture and taken your slap like he believed he deserved it.
You hated that you understood him.
You hated more that understanding did not make the hurt vanish.
“I needed to know,” he said. “If staying away fixed anything.”
Your throat tightened. “Did it?”
“No.” He huffed a laugh and rubbed both hands over his face. “It made me useless and annoying. Barry threatened to sedate me with a sandwich.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It was a big sandwich.”
You did not want to smile. Your mouth did it anyway, traitorous and small.
Wally saw. The relief on his face was immediate and too much.
You opened the door wider. “Come in before my neighbors start enjoying this.”
He stood, grabbed the bag, and followed you inside.
For a while, you ate dinner on the floor because your coffee table was covered in museum paperwork and Wally seemed more comfortable there anyway. He finally told you what he knew. The rupture had attached itself to both of you during the basement incident from your past and his future. Or maybe his past and your past. The language kept failing.
The important part was that the Speed Force was folding moments around an emotional anchor.
You looked at him over your noodles. “An emotional anchor.”
Wally winced. “That’s the term Barry used.”
“That sounds fake.”
“Most of my life sounds fake.”
“And I’m the anchor?”
“Maybe.” He looked down at his food. “Maybe we both are.”
You absorbed that slowly.
The apartment felt warm around you. Rain tapped softly against the windows, less violent than before. Wally sat across from you in sweatpants and an old Keystone City hoodie, socked feet stretched under your table, chopsticks held too carefully in hands that could break the sound barrier.
He was trying so hard to be still.
The realization moved through you like heat.
You set your food aside. “Do you remember things?”
He froze. “What?”
“From later.”
He did not answer immediately. You watched the rule pass behind his eyes, followed by something worse than guilt.
Recognition.
That was answer enough.
You looked down at his hands, curled carefully against his own knees like he did not trust them to reach for you. “Is that what you’re doing?”
His voice came out quieter. “Doing what?”
“Waiting for me to become someone you have memories of.”
Wally looked away.
“I don’t mean to.”
“I know.”
“I’m trying to keep it clean.”
“It isn’t clean, Wally.”
His laugh came out rough. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”
The silence between you stretched thin.
“Some,” he said at last.
You looked back at him.
“I remember some things,” Wally said. “Not all the time. It’s not like watching a movie. It’s worse than that. It’s little things. I’ll know where you keep the spare blanket before I’ve ever seen you take it out. I’ll reach for a mug you haven’t bought yet. Sometimes you’ll say something, and I’ll remember missing it before you finish the sentence.”
Your throat tightened.
He laughed once, without humor. “There are jokes I know I’ve heard from you, but I don’t know when you tell them. There are arguments where I only remember my own side, which is probably exactly as useless as it sounds.”
His fingers flexed against his knees.
“Sometimes I remember your hand in mine,” he said. “Sometimes I remember letting go.”
“Wally.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes. “That’s the problem. I know too much and not enough, and none of it belongs to me yet.”
The last word did something awful to you.
Yet.
He opened his eyes again, and the restraint in them looked almost painful. “That’s why I can’t answer you the way part of me wants to. Because I remember wanting you before I earned it.”
Wally looked at you then. Really looked. The air between you tightened, not with lightning this time, but with all the ordinary danger of wanting someone who was trying to be good.
“You can ask me to leave,” he said.
“I know.”
“I probably should.”
“Probably.”
He swallowed. “I don’t want to kiss you because future me already got to.”
Despite yourself, your mouth twitched. “Got to?”
“Bad phrasing,” he said immediately. “Terrible phrasing. I mean—” He exhaled, the joke falling away. “I want to kiss you because I want to. Right now. And because you want me to. Not because time already filled in the blank.”
You moved closer before fear could talk you out of it. Wally went very still.
“I’m not kissing you because someday I might love you,” you said.
Something flickered across his face, too quick to name and too honest to miss.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m not asking you to know the ending,” you said. “I’m asking you to stay in this part with me.”
For once, Wally West did not have a quip ready in a heartbeat.
You leaned in slowly enough that he could move away. He did not. He watched you like every inch was a choice he refused to steal. When your mouth touched his, he exhaled so softly it almost sounded like pain.
Wally kissed you and, for once, did not try to beat the moment to the finish line.
It was almost funny, how careful he was. Wally West, who could outrun time, holding himself still with one hand braced beside your head and the other curled loosely at your waist, as if touching you too quickly might send both of you into another century.
When he pulled back, his smile was crooked and ruined around the edges.
His hands did not tighten. That somehow made it worse. They hovered near your waist, fingers flexing with all the things he was not letting himself take, restraint trembling through him while his eyes dropped to your mouth.
You closed the distance this time.
He let you.
You tasted takeout sauce and mint and the faint electric edge that always seemed to cling to his skin. You kissed him harder, and Wally made himself stay with you second by second, letting you set the pace until your hand slid into his hair and pulled.
He groaned.
The sound went straight through you.
His hands found your waist then, careful even with the urgency in them.
“Tell me if I’m moving too fast,” he said.
You laughed breathlessly against his mouth. “That is a terrible thing for you to say.”
“I know.” His forehead tipped against yours, smile flickering helplessly back to life. “I realized it after I said it.”
You kissed him again because he was ridiculous and because you wanted him so badly your body felt bright with it. Wally’s hands tightened. In the next second, he lifted you into his lap like it cost him nothing. Then he froze beneath you, eyes wide, like he had surprised himself more than you.
“Was that okay?”
You looked down at him, at the flush high on his cheeks, at the effort written into every line of his body.
“Yes,” you said. “That was okay.”
Relief flickered across his face. Then you rolled your hips once, and relief became something much less composed.
“Jesus,” he breathed.
You smiled despite yourself. “Still jealous of future you?”
“Currently trying very hard not to think about that guy.”
“Good.”
You kissed him again, deeper this time, and felt him give under you in increments. The fastest man alive, and he let you slow him down with your hands in his hair and your body settling warm over his. His fingers slipped beneath the hem of your shirt, then stopped against your skin.
You pulled back. “Wally.”
His eyes lifted to yours.
“You can touch me.”
The words hit him hard. You saw it in his face, in the way desire moved through him and dragged reverence with it. His hands spread against your waist, warm and broad, thumbs stroking once over your skin like he was learning you for the first time because he was.
He did not say, I know.
He did not say, I remember.
He said, “Like this?”
Your chest tightened.
“Yes.”
His hands moved with aching care, up your sides, over your ribs, pausing when your breath caught. He watched your face for every answer you gave him, the spoken ones and the ones your body offered before language. When he drew your shirt up, he waited until you lifted your arms. When his mouth found your throat, he went slow enough that the scrape of his teeth made your thighs tighten around him.
“Wally,” you whispered.
His breath shuddered against your skin. “Yeah?”
“Bedroom.”
For half a second, you thought he might short-circuit.
Then he stood with you in his arms.
The world blurred.
Your back hit the mattress before you finished gasping. Wally was over you, one hand braced beside your head, already apologizing.
“Sorry. Sorry, that was—”
You caught his face and kissed him quiet.
He melted.
There was no other word for it. Wally West, all lightning and restless motion, softened over you when you kissed him like you wanted him there. His weight settled carefully between your thighs, and the hard line of him pressed against you through layers of clothing. Your body answered before you could think, hips lifting, friction dragging a gasp out of both of you.
Wally dropped his forehead to your shoulder. “I’m trying to be respectful.”
“You are.”
“I am also having several disrespectful thoughts.”
You laughed, breathless and wanting. “Good.”
His mouth found yours again, and after that, the room became touch.
He undressed you slowly because you asked him to. He kissed each inch of skin as it appeared, not with polished confidence, but with attention that made your hands shake. His mouth moved over your collarbone, the swell of your breast, the soft skin beneath. When he took your nipple into his mouth, your back arched, and his hand flattened against your spine to hold you without trapping you.
“Tell me,” he murmured against your skin.
You tangled your fingers in his hair. “Don’t stop.”
He obeyed like the words mattered.
By the time his hand slid between your thighs, you were slick and aching, your breath uneven in the quiet room. Wally looked up at you from where he had kissed a path down your stomach, hair mussed, eyes dark, mouth swollen from yours.
“I want to taste you,” he said.
Heat rushed through you.
He pressed a kiss to the inside of your thigh. “Present tense. Right now. Because I want to. Because you want me to, if you do.”
Your heart twisted so hard it almost hurt.
“Yes,” you said. “I want you to.”
Wally’s eyes closed for a moment, like he needed the words to settle.
Then he lowered his mouth to you.
The first slow drag of his tongue made you gasp.
He paused immediately, arms looped beneath your thighs and palms spread over your hips, holding you open against his broad shoulders while his eyes flicked up to check your face.
You nodded, and he did it again, slower this time, learning your pleasure with a focus that made your entire body burn.
He was good. Of course he was good; he was responsive and eager and almost unbearably patient once he understood that patience made you shake.
Your thighs tightened around his shoulders. Wally groaned against you, the vibration dragging a broken sound from your throat.
“Please,” you managed.
He did it again.
The pleasure built with devastating precision, not rushed, not taken from memory, each stroke chosen because of the way you reacted beneath him. When he slid one finger inside you, he watched your face. When he added another, he waited for the soft yes you gave him before curling them just right.
Your orgasm hit slowly and then all at once, a wave of heat and release that made your hands clutch at his hair. Wally held you through it, mouth gentle as you came down, his hand easing away only when your body stopped trembling.
He kissed the inside of your thigh.
Then your hip.
Then your stomach.
When he climbed back up to you, his mouth was wet, his eyes bright, and something in his expression looked dangerously close to awe.
You pulled him down and kissed him.
He made a sound into your mouth that told you exactly how close he was to losing the last of his restraint.
“Condom?” you asked.
Wally nodded too quickly. “Wallet.”
“Your wallet is in the living room.”
He vanished.
A gust of air hit your bare skin.
He reappeared beside the bed with his wallet in hand and his hair even worse than before. “Sorry. Practical use of powers. Very sexy. Extremely romantic.”
You laughed so hard you covered your face.
Wally’s smile broke open, helpless and bright, and for one second, there he was. Your Wally. Young and nervous and trying, not future grief, not Speed Force omen, not a superhero, just a man standing half-undressed beside your bed with a condom wrapper in his hand and hope all over his face.
“Come here,” you said.
He did.
You pushed his hoodie up, and he let you pull it over his head. His body was lean and warm under your hands, muscle shifting beneath freckled skin, old scars silvering faintly across his chest and ribs. Your fingers drifted over his side, casual and curious.
Wally went still.
Not tense. Not exactly. More like something in him had skipped ahead without the rest of him.
You drew your hand back. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” he said too quickly, then softer, “No. You didn’t.”
But his eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point over your shoulder, as if he were listening to an echo you couldn’t hear.
You covered your hand with his.
“Stay here,” you whispered.
His gaze lifted.
“With me,” you said.
His throat moved. “I’m here.”
When he pushed into you, he did it slowly, jaw clenched with the effort of restraint. You felt every inch, the stretch, the heat, the way his breath broke when your body took him. He stopped once he was fully inside, trembling above you.
“Okay?” he asked.
You wrapped your legs around his waist. “Okay.”
He kissed you before he moved.
Maybe that was what undid you most. Not the speed. Not the strength. The kiss. The fact that he stayed close, forehead brushing yours, mouth finding yours again and again as his hips began to move. He built the rhythm carefully, letting you pull him deeper, letting your hands guide him, letting the present teach him what the future had no right to give.
The bed creaked softly beneath you. Rain whispered against the windows. Wally’s breathing roughened as he drove into you, still controlled, still careful, but losing the battle by degrees.
You wanted him to lose it a little. You wanted to see what wanting looked like when he stopped being afraid of arriving too soon.
“Wally,” you gasped. “Harder.”
His eyes searched yours. Whatever he saw there broke something open.
He gave you harder.
The shift stole the breath from your lungs. His hips snapped into yours with more force, one hand locked around your thigh, holding you open for him while the other braced beside your head. Pleasure sparked hot and bright through your body. You clung to him, nails dragging down his back, and he groaned your name like it belonged to him only because you had handed it over.
Your second orgasm rose faster, pulled tight by the angle of his hips and the desperate sound of his voice against your throat.
“That’s it,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m right here.”
You came with his name in your mouth.
Wally followed seconds later, shuddering hard above you, his face buried in your neck as he held himself still and let the pleasure take him.
You felt the last, helpless rhythm of him, the way his body went taut and then loose, the way his breath broke warm against your skin. His hand found yours beside your head and held on like he needed the anchor.
For a long moment, neither of you moved. His heartbeat hammered against yours. His skin was damp and hot. The room smelled like rain and sex and lightning.
Then Wally lifted his head, eyes hazy and dark, his mouth soft from yours. “Don’t move,” he murmured, then immediately winced. “Not in a weird way. In a responsible-condom-disposal way.”
A laugh slipped out of you, breathless and wrecked. “You are unbelievable.”
“I know. I’m devastatingly practical.”
He pulled away carefully, jaw tightening like even that was too much sensation, and tied off the condom before dropping it into the trash by your bed. When he came back, he did not rush. He stretched out beside you slowly, one hand finding your waist like he was asking permission to return.
You answered by turning into him.
Wally softened all at once, a quiet exhale leaving him as he gathered you closer with a care that made your chest ache, as if the shape of you against him were something he wanted to learn in the right order. His arm settled around your back, his palm warm between your shoulder blades, and your cheek found the damp curve of his chest.
For a while, there was only the rain against the window and the uneven slowing of his breath. His fingers moved absently over your spine, tracing nothing you could name. You felt his mouth press once to your hairline, then linger there.
Eventually, he lifted his head.
His expression was open in a way that scared you more than any rupture ever could.
“Don’t look at me like that,” you whispered.
His thumb brushed your cheek. “Like what?”
“Like losing me already happened.”
Pain flickered through his eyes.
Then he kissed you, soft and present.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll look at you like you’re here.”
Static
You woke to the smell of lightning.
For one soft, disoriented moment, you thought it came from the Wally beside you. Present-Wally. Your Wally. His arm was still heavy across your waist, his chest warm against your back, his breathing slow and even in a way you had not known he was capable of. Morning light filtered through the curtains in pale strips, touching the rumpled sheets, the clothes abandoned near the foot of the bed, the faint red marks his mouth had left at your shoulder, and the scratches you left along his back.
Then the air snapped.
Wally woke instantly.
His body went from sleep-warm to alert in less than a second, arm tightening around you before he seemed to remember himself. He loosened his grip, but he did not move away.
You knew before he said anything.
“It’s him?” you asked.
Wally’s jaw brushed your shoulder when he nodded.
Lightning flickered again, not in the bedroom, but somewhere beyond it. The hallway. Close enough to hear. Far enough that the other Wally had chosen not to come in.
That choice made the room feel colder.
Present-Wally sat up slowly. The sheet slipped to his waist, and for one painful second, he looked exactly like what he was: young, half-dressed, frightened, and still trying not to let fear tell him what to do. He reached for his clothes.
“You don’t have to go out there,” you said.
His mouth curved without humor. “Yeah, I do.”
You caught his wrist before he could stand.
He looked down at your hand, then back at you.
“Don’t let him make you hate yourself,” you said.
Wally’s face softened.
“I’ll try.”
You almost told him that trying had not saved the future version from anything. Instead, you let him go.
He pulled on his sweatpants and left the bedroom without turning on the light. You sat up, sheet held against your chest, and listened through the half-open door.
The hallway outside your bedroom was quiet for a moment.
Then, present-Wally said, “You’re getting worse.”
Future-Wally laughed softly.
It was a terrible sound.
“Good morning to you too.”
“You can’t keep doing this.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I know that too.”
You slipped out of bed and found Wally’s discarded hoodie tangled near the foot of the mattress. It was soft, warm from being trapped beneath the blanket, and it smelled like him. You pulled it on before stepping carefully toward the doorway.
From the shadows at the end of the hall, you could see them.
Present-Wally stood near the living room, barefoot and tense, shoulders squared like he could physically block the rest of the apartment from himself. Future-Wally stood by the front door. He had not crossed into the hall. His suit was torn worse than before, the red darkened in places you did not want to identify. There was a bruise along his jaw and blood at his hairline, but it was his expression that made your stomach twist.
He looked at the bedroom door as if it were both a holy ground and a crime scene.
Then his eyes found you.
The future version of Wally West went very still.
You suddenly felt aware of everything: the hoodie hanging loose around your thighs, your bare legs, your sleep-warmed skin, the tender aches in your body from the night before. Nothing about you was indecent, not really, but the intimacy of being seen like this by a version of him who looked as if he had already lost you made your throat tighten.
Future-Wally looked away first.
“Sorry,” he said.
Present-Wally’s hands curled into fists. “Don’t.”
“I said sorry.”
“No, you said it like you were apologizing for remembering.”
Future-Wally’s mouth tightened.
The room held its breath around them.
“You shouldn’t be here,” present-Wally said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you?”
Future-Wally’s gaze dragged back to him. “Because this is where I always lose.”
The words moved through the apartment like a draft.
Present-Wally stared at him. “What does that mean?”
Future-Wally looked past him, not at your body this time, but at your face. His expression changed again, and you hated how much of it you were beginning to understand. The hunger to reach for you. The fear of what reaching had done. The grief of standing outside a room where he had once been happy and knowing happiness had become part of the evidence.
“It means this is the part I keep trying to save,” he said.
Present-Wally’s voice dropped. “Or the part you keep trying to erase.”
Future-Wally flinched as if he had been struck.
You stepped fully into the hall.
Both of them looked at you.
You kept one hand curled in the hem of the hoodie because you needed something to hold on to. “Tell us what happens.”
Future-Wally’s face shut down.
“No.”
“Wally.”
“No.” His voice cracked on it, then steadied badly. “I tell you, and it changes how you walk into a room. It changes how he looks at every door. It changes the choice before you even get to make it.”
Present-Wally moved closer. “You don’t get to decide that.”
Future-Wally laughed once, sharp and broken. “I am the only one here who knows what happens when I don’t.”
“Then say it.”
The older Wally’s eyes went bright.
For a second, you thought he might.
Instead, he looked at present-Wally with something close to pity.
“You think restraint makes you different from me,” he said. “You think because you asked, because you waited, because you let her choose, you can’t still be the reason she ends up in that basement.”
Present-Wally went pale.
“That’s enough,” you said.
Future-Wally closed his eyes at the sound of your voice.
“I know,” he whispered.
“No, I don’t think you do.” You stepped closer despite the way present-Wally shifted, as if every instinct in his body wanted to stop you. “You keep coming here to warn us, but all you’re doing is turning yourself into proof that everything goes wrong.”
Future-Wally opened his eyes.
There was so much pain in them that your anger almost failed you.
Almost.
“You told me not to let you run from me,” you said. “This is you running, Wally. You’re just doing it in circles.”
His mouth parted.
Lightning sparked beneath his skin, wild and unstable.
Present-Wally glanced at it. “You need to leave before the rupture pulls you again.”
Future-Wally did not seem to hear him. He was still looking at you.
“You said that to me before,” he murmured.
“When?”
His smile broke. “After.”
The word hit the hallway strangely.
After what?
You knew he would not answer.
He stepped back toward the door, body already starting to blur at the edges. Present-Wally reached for him, but future-Wally shook his head.
“Don’t come after me.”
“You know I will,” present-Wally said.
“Yeah.” Future-Wally looked at him then, and for the first time, you saw the resemblance clearly. Not the face. The fear. “That’s the problem.”
Lightning gathered around him.
You moved before you thought better of it.
“Wally.”
He looked at you one last time.
You wanted to ask if he had loved you. You wanted to ask if you had loved him. You wanted to ask what kind of future could turn the man from your bed into the ghost at your door.
Instead, you said, “I’m still here.”
Future-Wally’s expression crumpled.
“I know,” he said.
Then he vanished.
The silence after him was worse than the lightning.
Present-Wally stood in the middle of your living room with his back to you, head bowed, shoulders shaking once with a breath he could not quite control. You crossed the space slowly and touched his arm.
He turned into you immediately.
For a while, neither of you spoke. He held you carefully, almost too carefully, his face buried against your hair. You felt his heartbeat racing against yours, too fast to be normal, too human to be frightening.
“I’m scared,” he said.
You closed your eyes.
“I know.”
His arms tightened. “I don’t want to become him.”
You thought of future-Wally’s face when he looked at your bedroom door. You thought of promises made later and broken earlier. You thought of the way every version of him kept trying to save you by taking choices out of your hands.
“Then don’t,” you said.
Wally laughed once, soft and miserable. “Just like that?”
“No.” You pulled back enough to look at him. “But start there.”
His eyes searched yours.
You touched his cheek. “Start by staying.”
So he did.
Threshold
The rupture peaked under the museum two days later.
Some part of you had known it would end where it began, beneath the storage wing where the air still smelled faintly of smoke and ozone no matter how many cleaning companies the museum hired. The basement had been closed for repairs since the incident six months ago. That was the official version, anyway. Time had made the truth harder to file.
You stopped trying to conjugate it.
By then, neither of you was pretending the future could be avoided by looking away from it. Wally had spent the last forty-eight hours with Barry, with sensors, with maps of temporal fractures spread across your kitchen table, with three empty pizza boxes stacked beside a notebook full of equations you could not read. He had slept for ninety minutes on your couch and woken with lightning under his skin, one hand reaching for you before his eyes opened.
He did not apologize for it.
You did not ask him to.
Wally’s Titan comm lit up on your kitchen table, a temporal-fracture warning flashing across the screen. He was on his feet before the first pulse finished.
“Museum,” he said.
You were already standing by the door.
“You don’t have to come,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
He looked like he wanted to argue.
He didn’t.
That told you how bad it was.
He got you there fast enough that the city smeared into light and sirens. By the time your feet touched pavement again, police had already blocked off the street outside the museum. Wally did not slow until he had carried you past the barricade and through the broken service entrance, stopping only when the stairwell down to the archive cracked open ahead of you.
Faint gold light pulsed below the floor like a heartbeat. The lower archive was almost unrecognizable. Shelving units had twisted into impossible shapes. Artifacts flickered through different states of decay, bronze shining new and then ancient, paper turning to dust and back again. In the center of the room, the rupture spun open, white-gold and hungry.
Future-Wally stood in front of it.
He looked worse than the last time you had seen him.
The blood and bruising were almost familiar by now. It was the rest of him that made your stomach drop: the scorched tear in his suit, the broken arcs of lightning crawling over his skin, the way his edges blurred every few seconds, as if the room were struggling to hold him in place.
He turned when present-Wally entered, and relief crossed his face before he saw you beside him.
Then the relief curdled.
“You brought her,” he said.
“She insisted,” present-Wally answered.
Future-Wally laughed, bitter and exhausted. “Yeah. She does that.”
You stepped forward. “Tell us how to close it.”
Future-Wally looked at you for a long moment.
Then he said, “I can reset it.”
Present-Wally went still beside you.
“What does that mean?” you asked.
Future-Wally’s mouth tightened. “I can go back to the first rupture and stop the tether from forming. You never get pulled in. The timeline stabilizes. You won’t remember any of this.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Present-Wally said, “And neither will I.”
Future-Wally did not answer.
That was answer enough.
Lightning cracked overhead. You felt Wally’s hand brush yours, then stop, waiting for permission even now. You took his hand and held it in yours.
Future-Wally watched the movement like it hurt him.
“You don’t know what happens if we don’t,” he said.
“You keep saying that,” you replied. “You keep warning me about pain like I haven’t already chosen any of this.”
His face twisted. “I watched you die.”
The words slammed into the room.
Present-Wally’s grip tightened around your hand.
Future-Wally looked at him. “That’s the part you don’t remember yet. That’s the part I’ve been trying to outrun. The rupture takes her because it’s attached to us. At least, that’s what I thought. Every time we chose each other, it got stronger, and I thought if I could make her hate me early enough, maybe it would let go.”
Your chest ached.
“You idiot,” you whispered.
He flinched.
“You absolute fucking idiot.”
Present-Wally let out a strangled laugh that had no humor in it. “Yeah. That tracks.”
Future-Wally looked between you both, frantic now. “You think this is romantic because you don’t remember holding her body.”
“No,” present-Wally said, voice shaking. “I think it’s wrong because you do.”
The rupture screamed louder. Wind tore through the archive. Papers flew around you in a cyclone of half-burned records and impossible dates. Future-Wally staggered toward the light.
“I can fix it,” he said.
Present-Wally moved.
For a second, the room filled with nothing but speed. Red and gold crashed against white. The two versions of him blurred together, then apart, lightning striking lightning. You shielded your face as they fought, not with hatred, but with the horror of two griefs trying to occupy the same body.
Then present-Wally broke through.
He grabbed future-Wally by the front of his torn suit and slammed him back against a warped shelving unit.
“You don’t get to call erasing her a rescue,” he said.
Future-Wally’s face crumpled.
“I can’t lose her,” he whispered.
Present-Wally’s voice broke. “Then stop making the choice for her.”
The rupture pulsed.
You felt it then. Not as science. Not as something Barry could name on a whiteboard or Wally could outrun if he found the right angle. You felt it in the pull beneath your ribs, in the way every impossible thread in the room stretched toward the same terrified center.
Wally.
Not just the one holding your hand. All of him. Every version that had reached backward. Every version that had tried to turn grief into strategy. Every version that had seen the ending and decided the only way to love you was to get there first and tear it apart before you could choose him.
The rupture was not feeding on the two of you loving each other.
It was feeding on him trying to undo it.
The light split open.
Possibility poured through in pieces: the loop, the museum basement, Wally’s hand on your wrist, his mouth on your knuckles, coffee on your shoes, blood on your bedroom floor, his mouth between your thighs, his voice saying he was here. Future-Wally crying over a version of you who had died because he tried to hold the timeline together with his bare hands.
And under it, through it, around it, an opening in the lightning.
Not a reset.
A release.
“Wally,” you said.
Both of them looked at you.
You held out your hand to the younger one.
Present-Wally came to you instantly, but not too fast. Even then, he remembered. Even with the world ending, he let you see him choose to cross the distance.
“The tether is not the problem,” you said.
Future-Wally stared. “What?”
“You’re pulling it tight.” You looked at the rupture, at the light bending toward every version of him that had tried to outrun grief. “You keep trying to control where it ends.”
Present-Wally’s hand slid into yours.
You squeezed once. “Let the moment finish.”
Present-Wally’s eyes met yours.
For one breath, the world narrowed to the warmth of his hand and the terror in his face. He did not understand all of it yet. Maybe neither of you did. But he trusted you anyway.
Across the rupture, Future-Wally went very still. Understanding, slowly and terribly, spread across his face, as if he had finally heard the thing he had been running from.
“You want me to let go,” he said.
You shook your head. “I want you to stop holding on so hard that it breaks.”
His mouth trembled around something too damaged to be a laugh. “If you’re wrong—”
“She might be,” present-Wally said.
The answer stunned him into silence.
Present-Wally looked at you. His face was pale. Afraid. Honest.
“We might be wrong,” he said. “But I’m not erasing you to make myself feel brave.”
The rupture opened wider.
For a terrible second, you thought that meant failure.
Then Future-Wally lowered his hand.
The lightning around him faltered.
All at once, you understood: the rupture had never been a wound trying to swallow you. It had never been trying to pull him apart. He had been holding it open, a fist clenched around the timeline, refusing to let the moment finish.
Future-Wally looked at you one last time, grief-stricken and impossibly young beneath all that ruin.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he stepped into the light.
For one second, everything happened.
You saw him as the light took him: Wally laughing too loudly with coffee splashed over his hand; Wally bleeding on your bedroom floor; Wally standing in your kitchen like he already knew where every mug belonged; Wally kissing you with rain still damp in his hair; Wally watching you sleep like the sight of you breathing was something he did not trust to last.
Then, the memories broke darker.
Wally running through lightning with your name caught in his throat. Wally reaching the museum too late. Wally holding a version of you who did not move. Wally tearing the timeline open with his bare hands because grief had convinced him that love was something he could fix if he only ran fast enough.
At the center of it all, Future-Wally stopped running.
The light collapsed.
Still
One week later, Wally West knocked on your door.
You knew it was your Wally before you opened it. You did not know how. Maybe you had learned the shape of his presence without lightning around it. Maybe you had learned the difference between a haunting and a homecoming. Maybe you had spent a week listening for footsteps that never came, and hope had finally learned his rhythm.
When you opened the door, he was standing in the hallway with flowers in one hand and a paper bag in the other.
His hair was a mess. His jacket was half-zipped. There was a faint bruise on his jaw, already yellowing at the edges. He looked nervous enough to run and stubborn enough to stay.
No lightning.
No future grief.
No borrowed intimacy.
Just Wally.
“Hi,” he said.
You looked at him for a long moment. “Hi, Wally.”
His shoulders dropped like your voice had unmade the end of the world.
“I brought replacement coffee,” he said, lifting the bag slightly. “And flowers, because apparently when you want to ask someone if you can start over, those are recommended. These are not apology flowers, though. Or they are. Actually, they might be. I panicked at the florist.”
You leaned against the doorframe. “You panicked?”
“The florist was very intense. She asked what message I wanted to send, and I said, ‘Sorry about the time shenanigans. And about my alternate self,’ which, in hindsight, was not helpful.”
You laughed.
Wally’s mouth softened.
For once, he did not rush to fill the silence after. He stood there and let the sound settle between you.
“Do you still remember too much?” you asked.
His fingers tightened around the flowers.
“Some,” he said. “Less every day. Barry says that’s probably good. The timeline is correcting around him letting go, apparently, which is a very Barry way to say my future-self finally stopped making everything worse.”
“And what do you say?”
Wally looked at you, open and scared and so careful it made your chest ache.
“I say I remember enough to know I don’t want to use any of it to skip ahead.”
Your throat tightened.
He held your gaze. “I’d like to know you in order, if you’ll let me.”
Outside, somewhere far off, thunder rolled over Central City. For once, it sounded only like weather.
You stepped aside.
“Yes,” you said.
Wally exhaled shakily.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Wally.”
He smiled then, slow and bright and disbelieving, as if every version of him had been waiting at the edge of this moment and only this one had been allowed to enter it.
“You can come in,” you said, and this time there was no future hidden inside the invitation.
He crossed the threshold like he had all the time in the world.
credit to @uzmacchiato for the cherry divider and @toxisyddy for the Flash divider ❤️💛
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